0:00:04 Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode
0:00:08 of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to interview world-class performers from all
0:00:12 different disciplines to deconstruct how they do what they do. Now, in this case, I wouldn’t
0:00:19 recommend replicating or attempting to replicate what some of the subjects’ patient’s case studies
0:00:24 have experienced, which is namely dying and then being revived in some capacity. So don’t do that.
0:00:30 But my guest today is Bruce Grayson M.D. He is the Chester F. Carlson Professor Emeritus of
0:00:35 Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences and Director Emeritus of the Division of Perceptual
0:00:39 Studies at the University of Virginia, where he has practiced and taught psychiatry and carried
0:00:45 out research since 1995. He’s also a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association,
0:00:50 and his most recent book is After a Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal
0:00:56 About Life and Beyond. He has studied, documented more than a thousand near-death experiences,
0:01:03 and what made him appealing to me as a guest with this incredibly unusual terrain is that he was
0:01:09 raised with a secular, what we could call rational, materialist worldview. So with that
0:01:15 introduction, I hope you enjoy this very wide-ranging and unusual conversation. But first, just a few
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0:05:58 Dr. Grayson, thank you for making the time today. It’s very nice to meet you.
0:06:00 Thank you, Tom, to let it to be here with you today.
0:06:05 So I thought we would start more or less at the beginning in terms of chronology of your life,
0:06:11 and we’re not going to do an ABCD linear recap of your whole life because that would be an epic
0:06:19 multi-day affair. But perhaps you could tell us as a setting of the table a bit about your childhood.
0:06:26 How were you raised? What did the environment foster in terms of thinking in you frameworks for
0:06:31 understanding the world, that type of thing? Sure, Tim. Well, I was raised in a scientific,
0:06:35 non-religious household. My father was a chemist, and as far as she was concerned,
0:06:40 what you see is what you get. There’s nothing beyond the physical. So that’s how I was raised.
0:06:45 Being a scientist, he stimulated me. I desired to gather information,
0:06:49 and I often participated in some of his experiments. He had a lab set up in his basement.
0:06:55 He also taught me, though, that if you study things that we pretty much understand already,
0:06:59 you can make little inroads here and there about fine points. If you really want to make some
0:07:04 impact, easy to study things we don’t understand at all. And he gave me examples of that. So I
0:07:10 grew up with that idea that I wanted to be a scientist and discover new data and try to
0:07:18 figure out what’s going on with it. Did you have at that point an innate fear of death?
0:07:24 These seem like some questions that might be important to touch upon before we get into the
0:07:29 meat and potatoes of what we’ll dive into shortly. Was that inbuilt or experienced by you?
0:07:35 Actually, the answer is no. I didn’t have any fear of death. We certainly had family relatives
0:07:40 that died. And as far as I could tell, when you died, that’s the end. What’s to be afraid of there?
0:07:41 Lights out.
0:07:43 Lights out.
0:07:51 What attracted you to psychiatry? What was your path to psychiatry from the experiments
0:07:53 in the basement? What led you there?
0:07:58 Well, when I went through medical school, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I kind of
0:08:04 thought I’d be a family doctor. But I found that when I did my psychiatry rotations,
0:08:09 there were so many more unanswered questions, so many things that we had no idea how to explain.
0:08:13 Much more though, with the brain than with the kidneys or the heart or the lungs,
0:08:18 I thought, this is where I need to go to look at what’s going on in the brain to have these
0:08:21 thoughts and ideas and feelings. So I went in that direction.
0:08:30 Were there any particular conditions that fascinated you? This is predating the NDE
0:08:34 investigations. But were there any particular conditions?
0:08:42 I found myself really drawn towards psychoses, people who had hallucinations and delusions
0:08:47 and just didn’t think the way the rest of us do. Most of the things that psychiatrists deal with
0:08:52 are common, everyday things like anxiety, depression, which everyone has to some extent.
0:08:58 But I really was fascinated by the more extreme conditions, schizophrenia and manic depressiveness.
0:09:02 People who just had totally different views of the world than I did.
0:09:12 So I suppose this is as good a time as any to segue into some of the what many would consider,
0:09:17 I think what most would consider stranger terrain, even beyond psychoses, although that’s
0:09:25 a Pandora’s box we could certainly get into quite separately. And I suppose that the stain on the
0:09:30 tie and the story surrounding that may make some sense to tell, would you mind sharing that with
0:09:35 the audience? Sure. I went through college and med at the school with this strict materialistic
0:09:41 mindset that the physical world is all there is. And in one of my first weeks as a psychiatric
0:09:47 intern, I was asked to see a patient who was in the emergency room with an apparent overdose.
0:09:52 I was in the cafeteria half of my dinner when this call came through. And being a green intern,
0:09:57 I was startled by the beeper going off. I dropped my fork and spilled some spaghetti sauce on my tie.
0:10:03 So again, being a new intern, I didn’t want to embarrass myself. So I put on a white lab coat
0:10:08 and buttoned it up so you nobody could see it. And I went down to see the patient. And she was
0:10:13 totally unconscious. I could not revive her. But there was a roommate who had brought her in,
0:10:18 who was in another room about 50 yards down the hall. So I left the patient. There was a sitter
0:10:23 there with her as it happens with all suicidal patients. And I went down to see the roommate.
0:10:28 I spent about 20 minutes talking to the roommate, trying to understand what was going on with the
0:10:33 patient. What stresses does she have? What drugs she might have taken for an overdose and so forth.
0:10:40 It was a very hot Virginia late summer night, and I was starting to sweat in that room.
0:10:44 There’s no air conditioning back in the 70s. So I unbuttoned my coat so I wouldn’t sweat so much,
0:10:48 inadvertently exposing the stain on my tie. When I finished talking to the roommate,
0:10:51 I stood up to leave and then saw that it was open. So I quickly buttoned it up again,
0:10:57 said goodbye, and sent her on her way. Then I went back to see the patient. And she was still
0:11:03 unconscious. I confirmed with the sitter who was with her that she had not awakened at all
0:11:08 during the time I was gone. She was admitted to the intensive care unit because she did have some
0:11:13 cardiac instability because of the overdose. And when I saw her the next morning, when she
0:11:20 had awakened, she was just barely awake. I went into her room. I said, so-and-so, I’m Dr. Grayson
0:11:26 from psychiatry. And she opened one eye and said, I know who you are. I’m in view from last night.
0:11:31 And that just blew me away because I knew she was asleep at best and unconscious that it would
0:11:36 worse. So I don’t know how she could have known that. So I said to her, and yeah, I’m surprised.
0:11:42 I thought you were out cold when I saw you last night. Then she opened her eye again and said,
0:11:45 not in my room. I saw you talking to Susan down the hall.
0:11:51 That made no sense to me at all. She was lying there in the gurney. The only way she could have
0:11:55 done that is if she had left her body and come down. And that made no sense. You are your body.
0:11:59 How can you leave it? So I didn’t know what to do. I thought, is she pulling my leg? What’s
0:12:04 going on here? She saw that I was confused. And then she started telling me about the conversation
0:12:10 I had with her roommate, what questions I asked, what Susan’s answers were. And then finally said,
0:12:15 and you had a red stain on your tie. That just blew me away. I didn’t know what to make of this.
0:12:19 I was really getting flustered at this point. I thought, were the nurses somehow colluding with
0:12:25 her to trick this poor intern? But no one knew about the stain except the roommate.
0:12:32 So I realized that I was having trouble keeping my composure then. But my job was to deal with
0:12:37 her mental status, not mine. So I pushed things into the back and just dealt with her about
0:12:42 what made you take the overdose? What are you thinking about suicide now and so forth.
0:12:48 I thought, well, I’ll think about this other stuff later on. So she was admitted to the psychiatric
0:12:54 unit and I was a busy intern. I didn’t have time to think about this stuff. I didn’t dare tell
0:12:59 anybody. They think I was crazy. So I pushed her on the side and just didn’t think about it for a
0:13:04 while. But it was very, very emotionally upsetting to me to think this bizarre thing happened,
0:13:10 but it can’t happen. It can’t have happened. There must be some other answer to it. It just sat
0:13:15 there in the back of my mind for about five years until I was up now on the faculty at the
0:13:21 University of Virginia. And we had a young intern join us, Raymond Moody, who wrote a book called
0:13:26 Life After Life in which he gave us the term near death experiences and described what they were.
0:13:30 I had never heard of this type of thing before. And when he described it to me,
0:13:36 I realized that’s what this patient was talking about. She was talking about in a near death
0:13:42 situation, leaving her body, seeing things accurately from another location. And I thought,
0:13:47 well, I need to understand this. So I started collecting cases and it wasn’t hard to do.
0:13:51 These are very, very common phenomena where nobody talks about them. But if you start
0:13:55 asking patients who have been close to death, they will tell you about them.
0:13:59 And here I am 50 years later still trying to understand them.
0:14:03 Did you expect it was going to last five decades or did you think this was going to be a
0:14:05 short project of collecting case studies?
0:14:11 I assumed to him that in a couple of years, I have a simple physiological explanation for this.
0:14:16 And that would make me satisfied and be the end of it. But the more I learned about them,
0:14:22 the harder they seemed to understand. So I think I’m more comfortable with not knowing all the
0:14:30 answers. So just a clarifying question on the case study of this particular woman who had overdosed,
0:14:38 attempted suicide, was that, I guess, based on all you know now, or what people would consider
0:14:45 a near death experience in NDE, or was it some close cousin? Because presumably she was not
0:14:52 intubated and flatlined at the point that you were talking to her roommate. She was
0:14:58 alive, but either comatose or sleep or otherwise cognitively offline.
0:15:00 Right. How do you think about that?
0:15:05 Well, they were measuring her heart function, her EKG, and her heart had not stopped.
0:15:11 She was having erratic arrhythmias, erratic forms of her heart beat. So I don’t know
0:15:15 how close to death she was. I mean, it’s always hard to tell how close to death someone is.
0:15:20 Whether she had a real near death experience or not. I don’t know because I didn’t
0:15:23 investigate it. At that time, I didn’t know anything about near death experience. I didn’t
0:15:28 know what questions to ask. So I just wanted to get out of my life and push out of the way.
0:15:34 So looking back on it, it’s certainly not proof of anything except how unnerving this was to me
0:15:44 emotionally to have this happen. So I suppose that as part of sort of investigating the overall
0:15:52 context for thinking about these things, it might be useful to talk about, this is I’m sure out of
0:15:57 order in terms of the questions you might usually get asked, but the NDE scale and the reason I want
0:16:02 to ask about the NDE scale that I believe you developed, maybe it was in collaboration with
0:16:09 colleagues, is the high internal consistency. And maybe you can just describe these things,
0:16:14 split half reliability, that one I’m actually not familiar with, and then test retest reliability,
0:16:18 which is seemingly a critical component of this. And the reason I bring all this up,
0:16:24 as the crow flies, doesn’t really need to fly hops, but 20 feet away, I have an encyclopedia
0:16:31 Britannicus set that was bought by Richard Feynman when he was, I believe 42. And I’m going to butcher
0:16:37 this paraphrase of a quote of his, but in effect, it is most important not to fool yourself and you’re
0:16:42 the easiest person to fool, I believe is one of his quotes, right? Hence, we have the scientific
0:16:46 method, the structured way of investigating and testing hypotheses. So, could you speak to the
0:16:55 scale? And we’re going to get to other questions around the perhaps common criticisms or forms of
0:17:00 skepticism, speaking to the biological underpinnings. But let’s talk about the scale first, because
0:17:03 I’m sure a lot of people listening would think to themselves, well, number one,
0:17:08 there have to be a lot of people who just make up stories, and they want to sell books, and they
0:17:12 do this, this, and this, not in your case. I’m just saying those who’ve experienced or claimed
0:17:19 to have experienced NDEs and seen X, Y, or Z. And then there are people who would love to misrepresent
0:17:24 and become a messiah of this, that, and the other thing. So, how do you make sure you’re not fooling
0:17:30 yourself or being fooled? Could you just perhaps describe the NDE scale or speak to that in whatever
0:17:36 way makes sense to you? Well, back in the late 1970s, after people had read Raymond Mody’s book,
0:17:43 several psychologists and physicians started getting interested in studying this phenomenon.
0:17:47 So, we assembled a meeting at the University of Virginia with about two dozen of these people,
0:17:54 the researchers, who wanted to study it and try to agree on how to do that. And it turned out that
0:17:58 everybody had a different idea about what a near-death experience was. Depending on their
0:18:05 background, some thought it was an out-of-body experience. Some thought it was a sense of
0:18:10 feeling of bliss. Some thought it was a communion with God, all sorts of different interpretations
0:18:15 people had. And they didn’t agree on what should be included as part of a near-death experience.
0:18:21 So, I surveyed a large number of researchers who had published about this and asked them to give me
0:18:26 a list of the most common features you see in a near-death experience.
0:18:35 I had some 80 features, which is ridiculous. So, I took that list and I gave the list to a bunch
0:18:41 of near-death experiencers and said, “Which ones of these do you think are really important in
0:18:46 defining a near-death experience?” And they whittled it down a bit. And I took the whittle down
0:18:50 list and gave it back to the researchers and said, “Which ones of these do you think are really
0:18:55 important ones?” And they whittled it down again, back and forth between the researchers and the
0:19:01 experiencers until I had a consistent list of 16 features that they all agreed were the important
0:19:07 parts of a near-death experience. And they included changes in your thought processes,
0:19:14 taking faster and clearer than ever before, having your past flash before you, straw feelings of
0:19:21 emotions, usually joy and bliss and a sense of being unconditionally loved by a brilliant light.
0:19:28 Not only, sometimes there’s fear also. So, we developed the scale of these 16 items. And if you
0:19:34 use that for the standard of deciding which ones of these phenomena are near-death experiences,
0:19:40 which ones are not, has been now translated into more than 20 different languages, has been used
0:19:45 in thousands of studies around the world. There have been attempts to refine it, to improve it.
0:19:49 There are things we know now that I didn’t know back then and people have tried to add things to
0:19:53 it. But basically, all the additions don’t make much of a difference. You still identify the same
0:19:58 experiences as being NDE’s with or without them. So, that’s where it was. That’s where the scale
0:20:05 came from. Can you speak to some of the elements that might help you separate out, for lack of a
0:20:11 better way to phrase it, true experiencers versus people who have false positives or who want to
0:20:17 tell a story? Well, I actually published a paper about false positives where we had people who
0:20:22 claimed to have a near-death experience but did not score very highly on that scale. And we wanted
0:20:27 to look at why they think they have near-death experiences. And you were right when you said
0:20:31 before that some people are making things up. Do they want the publicity? Do they want to be
0:20:37 held as messiahs? That’s true. But I think there was a small minority of people who claimed to have
0:20:43 near-death experiences. And they’re usually very easy to identify by what they do with the experience.
0:20:48 If you immediately go on the talk circuit and talk to Tim Ferrish and other people like that and
0:20:53 want to brag about how enlightened you are now, we say, “Well, let someone else study those. I’m
0:20:59 going to deal with those.” But the majority of people who I think were false positives are people
0:21:04 who had some less intense form of mental illness. If people are blatantly psychotic, we don’t include
0:21:09 them in the studies. But there are people who have personality disorders who seem on the surface to
0:21:16 be perfectly fine but have exaggerations of our traits that make them function differently in the
0:21:23 world. And some do have this incredible need to get confirmation of what’s happening to them.
0:21:28 They feel different and they don’t know why. So they hear about near-death experience of things
0:21:31 and think, “Maybe that’s why I’m different. Maybe I had a near-death experience.”
0:21:36 What we’re going to do in this conversation, and I’m just scratching my own edge from a curiosity
0:21:41 perspective, but we’re going to bounce all over the place. I like to frame that as a feature,
0:21:48 not a bug, but it’s going to be pretty non-linear. So I want to zoom in and out from the clinical,
0:21:55 skeptical side to hopefully, and I think we’ll get to quite a few of these, but examples that could
0:22:01 be corroborated in some fashion. And those may overlap with those that are described as out-of-body
0:22:07 experiences. They might not, and we’ll probably come back to that term as well. But could you
0:22:13 tell the story of the, tell me if this is enough of a cue, the red MGB?
0:22:20 Many people in the near-death experience say that they encountered deceased loved ones in the
0:22:26 experience. And that can easily be explained as wishful thinking, expectation. You think you’re
0:22:31 dying, and you would love to see your grandmother once more, so she comes to you, and there’s no
0:22:38 way to prove or disprove that. However, in some cases, the person having the near-death experience
0:22:44 encounters someone who had died, but nobody yet knew they had died. So that can’t be dismissed as
0:22:49 expectation and wishful thinking. This is not a new phenomenon. Plenty of the elder wrote about
0:22:52 a case like this in the first century AD, but we’re hearing about a lot of them now.
0:22:59 About 12 years ago, I wrote a paper that had 30 different cases from recent years. Jack was one
0:23:05 of those. He had an experience, actually he was in South Africa back in the 70s, and he was a young
0:23:10 technician at that time and had very serious pneumonia, and he would usually stop breathing,
0:23:15 have to be resuscitated. So he was admitted to the hospital with a severe pneumonia. And he had
0:23:21 one nurse who was constantly working with him as his primary nurse, a young pretty girl about his age.
0:23:26 He flirted a lot with her where he could, and one day she told him she’s going to be taking a
0:23:32 long weekend off, and there’d be other nurses substituting for her. So he wished her well,
0:23:39 and she went off. And over the weekend while she was gone, he had another respiratory arrest where
0:23:44 he couldn’t breathe. He had to be resuscitated, and during that time he had a near-death experience.
0:23:51 And he told me that he was in this beautiful pastoral scene, and there out of the woods came
0:23:56 his nurse Anita walking towards him. And he was stunned because he was in this different world,
0:24:01 what’s she doing there? So he said, “What are you doing here?” And she said, “Jack,
0:24:06 you can’t stay here with me. I want you to go back, and I want you to find my parents,
0:24:10 and tell them that I love them very much, and I’m sorry I wrecked the red MGB.”
0:24:14 He didn’t know what to make of that, but she turned around and went back into the woods,
0:24:20 and then he woke up later in his hospital bed. Now he tells me that back in the 70s,
0:24:24 there were very few MGBs in South Africa, and he had never seen one.
0:24:28 When the first nurse came into his room, he started to tell her about his experience,
0:24:33 and seeing his nurse Anita, she got very upset and ran out of the room.
0:24:38 It turned out that she had taken the weekend off to celebrate her 21st birthday,
0:24:44 and her parents had surprised her with a gift of a red MGB. She got very excited,
0:24:50 hopped in the car and took off for a test drive, and crashed into a telephone pole and died instantly,
0:24:56 just a few hours before his near-death experience. I don’t see any way he could have known or
0:25:02 wanted or expected her to have an accident and die. It’s certainly no way he could have known
0:25:07 how she died, and yet he did. And we’ve got lots of other cases like this. They’re called
0:25:12 “Peek and Daryan” cases, based on a book that was published in the 1800s with cases like these,
0:25:18 where people encounter deceased individuals who were not known to be dead. I don’t know how to
0:25:25 explain those. Now, just to put my skeptics hat on, I could say, well, if I were Jack,
0:25:30 was it Jack? Let’s just say it’s Jack. That would make one hell of a story if there wasn’t a third
0:25:36 party to independently verify it with. Right. But there are other cases, and for people listening,
0:25:42 we’re going to come back to some of the common questions, I would say, forms of discussion
0:25:46 around these related to possible biological mechanisms or lack thereof. We’re going to come
0:25:53 back to that in a second. But there are then cases that are seemingly characteristically quite different,
0:25:59 and perhaps can be going to be curious to know if this has been done or not, but verified with
0:26:08 third parties. And one that comes to mind that I’ve heard you discuss is related to the surgeon
0:26:16 flapping like a bird. And I was hoping that you could give a description of that particular case
0:26:24 study before we get to that. How many near-death experiences have you documented, studied, or
0:26:30 otherwise read about, put into the archives yourself? How many instances would you say you
0:26:35 have encountered in one way or another? I’ve got slightly more than a thousand in my database
0:26:40 at the University of Virginia, where we have validated as much as we can that they were,
0:26:44 in fact, close to death, and this is what happened to them. I’ve talked to many more people about
0:26:47 their near-death experience that I haven’t included because I wasn’t confident that they
0:26:51 really fit the criteria for being in the study. But it’s really much more common than you might
0:26:56 think it was because people don’t talk about these things. You mentioned people wanting the
0:27:02 publicity of this. That is actually maybe more true now, but back in the 70s and 80s, nobody
0:27:08 wanted to talk about these things. If you talk about things, you got ridiculed, you got referred
0:27:14 to a psychiatrist, you were called crazy, you were shunned by people you knew, both materialists
0:27:19 and religious folks. They didn’t want to hear about these things. So people did not talk about
0:27:26 these events. And what of this surgeon flapping like a bird? This was a fellow Al in his mid-50s
0:27:35 who was a van driver. He was out on his rounds one day, and he had chest pain. He had to do enough
0:27:40 to stop his rounds and drive to the emergency room. They did some evaluations and found that
0:27:46 he had four arteries to his heart that were blocked. They rushed him to the emergency room for
0:27:53 urgent quadruple bypass surgery. So he’s lying on the table, fully unconscious,
0:27:58 the drapes over and so forth. And he tells me that in the middle of the operation,
0:28:05 he rose up out of his body and looked down and saw the surgeons operating on. And he saw the chief
0:28:11 surgeon who he hadn’t met before flapping his arms like he was trying to fly. And he demonstrated
0:28:18 for me. At that point, I laughed. So I thought, this is obviously hallucination. Doctors don’t do
0:28:22 that. But he insisted that I check with the doctor. He said, this really happened. Ask him.
0:28:26 So he told me lots of other things about his new death experience, but that’s the one that
0:28:34 I was able to verify. So I talked to a surgeon who actually had been trained in Japan. And he said,
0:28:41 well, yes, I did do that. I have a habit of letting my assistants start the procedure
0:28:44 while I put on my sterile gown and gloves and wash my hands and so forth.
0:28:49 Then I go into the operating room and watch them for a while. Because I don’t want to risk
0:28:53 touching anything with my sterile hands now. I point things out to them with my elbows.
0:28:59 And he pointed things out just the way Al was saying he was trying to fly. I don’t know any
0:29:04 other doctor that’s done that. I’ve been a doctor for more than 50 years now. I’ve never seen anyone
0:29:10 do that. So it’s kind of an idiosyncratic thing. Is there any way Al could have seen that? Well,
0:29:14 he was totally anesthetized. He had his heart was open. I don’t think there’s any way he could
0:29:22 have seen that. And yet he did. Alright, so so many questions. And let’s start with the question of
0:29:31 how rational materialist skeptics, and that’s not meant as a criticism of those people at all,
0:29:37 might try to explain this. They might say it is a lack of oxygen or a diminishing amount of oxygen.
0:29:43 It might be a cascade of neurotransmitters that are released when A, B, or C happens.
0:29:47 It might be the introduction of drugs. I certainly know when I’ve had surgeries,
0:29:52 never had versed or God knows what else introduced to my bloodstream. So very strange things happen.
0:29:57 Although I haven’t experienced the type of thing you’re describing when I’ve been anesthetized.
0:30:02 How do you respond to those? Or how do you think about those explanations?
0:30:06 I’m sympathetic with them. I start out as a materialist skeptic.
0:30:11 After 50 years, I’m still skeptical. But I’m no longer a materialist, I think.
0:30:15 That’s it. That’s kind of a dead end when it comes to explaining near-death experiences.
0:30:18 Another phenomenon like this. When I started out, I assumed, okay, we’ll look at
0:30:26 things like heart rate, oxygen level, drugs given and so forth. And each thing we tried to study
0:30:30 turned out not to explain anything. For example, the most obvious thing was the lack of oxygen,
0:30:34 because no matter how you come close to death, that’s the last common denominator,
0:30:39 you’re going to lose oxygen to the brain. When you actually study this, what you find is that
0:30:45 people who have near-death experiences actually have a higher oxygen concentration
0:30:48 than people in similar situations who don’t have a near-death experience.
0:30:53 Could you say more about that? How do we know this? Or how do we surmise that?
0:30:57 They don’t measure what’s going on in the brain, but they measure in the peripheral blood system
0:30:58 how much oxygen is flowing through.
0:31:01 With a pulse oximeter or something like that?
0:31:01 Yes.
0:31:02 In a hospital setting.
0:31:02 Okay.
0:31:06 They also can draw blood and measure it more directly than at the pulse oximeter.
0:31:10 But what they find is that when they draw blood from people who are in a near-death situation,
0:31:15 those who have a near-death experience have a higher oxygen level than those who don’t.
0:31:19 So what that means is that lack of oxygen is not causing the experience.
0:31:25 In fact, it seems to be inhibiting it in some way. And what that mean may be that many people
0:31:30 have a near-death experience, but if you’re lacking oxygen, you can’t remember it later on.
0:31:34 And then only if you have good enough oxygen do you remember it later on.
0:31:37 So it may be related more to the memory of the experience than the experience itself.
0:31:41 Likewise, with people given drugs as they’re approaching death,
0:31:46 the more drugs you’re given, the less likely you are to report a near-death experience later.
0:31:50 Now, there are some drugs that can mimic parts of a near-death experience.
0:31:54 They’re not drugs that are given to dying patients, but things like ketamine,
0:31:57 various psychedelic drugs, people using psilocybin now.
0:32:02 And they can produce things that mimic, in some ways, some features of near-death experiences.
0:32:05 They don’t produce the whole phenomenon. They don’t, for example,
0:32:10 reliably have the blissful feelings, and they certainly don’t have the accurate
0:32:14 out-of-body perceptions that many near-death experiences have.
0:32:20 I should say that Jan Holden at the University of North Texas studied about 100 cases of people
0:32:24 who claimed to be out of their bodies and seeing things. And what she found when she
0:32:30 sought third-party corroboration was that in 92 of the 100, they were completely accurate.
0:32:34 In six cases, they were partly accurate and partly inaccurate.
0:32:41 Only one or two were completely wrong. So the vast majority were actually corroborated by other
0:32:47 people. What are some other examples of hospital setting? And part of the reason I mention that
0:32:54 specifically is that you have multiple credible witnesses in some cases, I would imagine.
0:32:58 Which makes it interesting, because you could independently, at least in theory,
0:33:06 verify, confirm various occurrences while a patient was sedated, suffering from cardiac arrest,
0:33:12 or otherwise. What are some examples that come to mind that you think are the most
0:33:18 defensible in those environments or otherwise, but where you have the ability to independently
0:33:26 confirm or have denied X, Y, or Z that happen? The ones that come to mind are the ones where
0:33:32 people see deceased individuals who no one in the way had died yet. I can give you more examples
0:33:37 of that, and they’re often corroborated by other people. And also people who claim to leave their
0:33:40 bodies and see things from an out-of-body perspective that they shouldn’t have known about.
0:33:45 And we’re not talking about seeing things like “Oh, I saw the doctor in green scrubs,
0:33:47 or I saw a dust on the lap.” Something you would expect.
0:33:51 Talk about really unusual things like “The nurse had mismatched shoelaces,”
0:33:55 you know, things that you wouldn’t expect, or “The doctor flapping his wings.”
0:33:58 We have corroboration for a lot of these cases.
0:34:03 What is the most fertile ground from a pathology perspective for near-death experiences? For
0:34:09 instance, cardiac arrest. Are cardiologists those most likely to hear reports of NDEs?
0:34:18 And then the secondary question is, does the manner of death influence the nature of the NDE
0:34:22 reported? Let me take the second one first, because these are just ones to answer.
0:34:26 The manner of death by and large does not affect whether you’re going to have any
0:34:30 a death experience or what kind you’re going to have. Now, there are some exceptions to that.
0:34:35 For example, if you are intoxicated at the time, you’re less likely to have an experience.
0:34:39 And if you do have one, it’s going to be fuzzier and harder to remember.
0:34:45 Most of the research has been done with cardiac arrest patients, and that’s done because,
0:34:50 number one, you’ve got a large population of people who we can document were close to death.
0:34:58 And number two, many of those people have no or very few complicating physiological problems
0:35:03 with them. If you study people who were on dialysis, they got many other problems going on
0:35:06 that can complicate what’s going on in the brain. But there were a lot of people who have a sudden
0:35:11 cardiac arrest who are otherwise fairly healthy, so they’re kind of a clean population to work with.
0:35:16 So for that reason, most of the research has been done with cardiac arrest patients,
0:35:21 but the vast majority of people who spontaneously come to me and say, “Let me tell you about my
0:35:27 experience,” did not have cardiac arrests. I say maybe 20 or 30% have had a cardiac arrest
0:35:33 and a heart stop. A lot of them are accidents or injuries or so forth. We have a large
0:35:36 collection of people who were injured in combat who have new death experiences.
0:35:40 People who fell from great heights, this sort of thing. People who drowned.
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0:37:06 Has the nature of reported NDEs changed over time, or does it vary widely across cultures? And the
0:37:13 reason I ask is that, for instance, the observation of the placebo effect and how it manifests has
0:37:17 changed quite a lot over time. There’s actually a great piece in Wired Magazine about this,
0:37:26 depending on culture, depending on how widespread readings and reporting about the placebo effect
0:37:32 is in terms of strengthening or decreasing the strength of placebo effect. And you see examples
0:37:39 of this also in reports of, say, in some cases, alien abduction or UFO encounters, et cetera.
0:37:44 And there’s sort of a homogenizing of the experience or reporting of it in some cases
0:37:49 that one could attribute to mass media coverage discussions on podcasts and so on.
0:37:54 So how does that apply or not apply to reports of NDEs?
0:37:59 In terms of knowledge about near-death experience, whether it affects what you’d like to say,
0:38:05 we’ve done some research looking at people who reported their near-death experiences to us
0:38:12 before Raymond Moody published his book in 1975, when nobody knew what these things were.
0:38:16 Working at the University of Virginia, I had access to the files of Ian Stevenson,
0:38:21 who’d been there for many, many years collecting unusual phenomena. And he had maybe 50 of these
0:38:26 cases. They weren’t called near-death experiences. Some were called deathbed visions. Some were
0:38:32 called out-of-body experiences. Some were called apparitions. When you look at them, they were
0:38:37 just like the near-death experiences we call today. So I collected 20 of those that we had
0:38:44 enough information about and then matched them on age, sex, religious belief, so forth, with 20
0:38:49 recent cases that I studied. We compared what phenomena they reported and what things they
0:38:54 didn’t. And what we found is that before Moody told us what a near-death experience was like,
0:38:58 when no one had heard of these things, people reported the same things they report now.
0:39:04 So knowing about a near-death experience does not affect whether you’re going to have one or report
0:39:10 it. Now, he also asked about culture, and that’s an interesting point, because most near-death
0:39:14 experiences start by saying, “Well, there aren’t any words to describe it. There aren’t any words
0:39:19 in this I can’t tell you about.” And I say, “Great, tell me about it.” They use metaphors,
0:39:23 often will say, “Well, then I saw this god-like figure.” I’m saying, “God,” because I don’t know
0:39:26 what else to call it, but it’s nothing that I was taught about in church. It was much different
0:39:33 than that with this all-loving, all-knowing entity, whatever it was. And what you hear from people
0:39:39 in different cultures is based on what cultural or religious metaphors they have available to them.
0:39:48 For example, people in Christian cultures will say that they may have seen God or Jesus. People
0:39:53 from Hindu and Buddhist countries don’t use those words. They may say they met a Yandu,
0:39:59 the messenger from Rama, or they may say they just saw this white light. Also, the tunnel,
0:40:04 you know, we have tunnels in the U.S. So when people say, “I went through this long,
0:40:09 dark, enclosed space,” they will say, “Tunnel.” Well, people in third-world countries don’t use
0:40:16 that word. They may talk about going into a well or into a cave. I interviewed one fellow who here
0:40:22 was a truck driver who said, “Then I got sucked into this long tailpipe.” So whatever the metaphor
0:40:26 comes readily to them is what they use to describe the phenomena. If you look at the
0:40:32 actual phenomena they’re reporting, it’s the same all around the world. And in fact, we can find cases
0:40:37 from back in ancient Egypt and Rome or in Greece that have the same phenomena we talk about today.
0:40:41 But the metaphors they use to describe them are different from culture to culture.
0:40:50 When you’re sitting at, say, dinner or you meet a scientist outside of your field of study
0:40:56 who’s well-intentioned, they’re not coming at you in some type of malicious or cynical way.
0:41:02 They’re genuinely curious because I think really good scientists are open-minded, but they also
0:41:08 ask for proof or they look to demonstrate proof or disprove hypotheses. What are some of the…
0:41:17 If you had to steal man against a non-materialist explanation for NDE’s, are there any,
0:41:24 if you had to pick them, compelling ways to interrogate this experience from a materialist
0:41:29 perspective? I myself as a skeptic and I tend to doubt everything I think as well as everything
0:41:34 else that you think. I’m not happy with the lack of evidence we have for some of these things.
0:41:37 I’m still looking for it. I went into this thinking there’s going to be a simple physiological
0:41:43 explanation. We haven’t found it. It’s been 50 years and we haven’t found any explanation yet.
0:41:47 That doesn’t mean we won’t. So we’re still looking. We have some technologies now that can
0:41:53 study the brain in ways we didn’t have before. We have very sophisticated neuroimaging. We have
0:41:59 much better computer algorithms for analyzing EEGs and we have a wider range of psychedelic
0:42:05 drugs to use to try to replicate parts of the experience in some ways. There’s a lot going on
0:42:13 in physiological research now that was not available 50 years ago and we may someday have
0:42:18 a physiological answer to explain near-death experiences. But let me give you two questions.
0:42:24 One is that if you find something that is always correlated with the near-death experience,
0:42:29 brain wave activity or a chemical, that doesn’t mean it’s causing the experience.
0:42:36 For example, right now, people are listening to us and there’s electrical activity in
0:42:41 parts of their brain that process hearing. It always happens when they’re hearing us.
0:42:45 This part of the brain always lights up. That doesn’t mean that electrical activity
0:42:50 is causing our voices. It’s just a reflection of it. So when you find these physiological
0:42:55 incompetence of a near-death experience, you’re finding perhaps the mechanism for it,
0:43:01 but not the cause of it. The second question was that even though I’m a skeptic and part of
0:43:06 me still wishes we could find a physiological explanation, I’m still looking. I need to remember
0:43:13 that this is what has been called promissory materialism. We don’t have the answer yet,
0:43:18 but we will someday. That’s a perfectly fine philosophical position. It is not a scientific
0:43:22 position because it can never be disproven. You can always say, “Well, we haven’t got it yet,
0:43:27 but we’ll get it in 50 years. We’ll get it in 100 years.” So you can never disprove it. So it’s not
0:43:31 scientific. So saying that that’s a scientific way of dealing with things, promissory materialism
0:43:35 is not the way to go. We need to deal with what we have right now and how we interpret what we
0:43:40 have right now. And I think most people who study near-death experiences, whether they’re
0:43:47 spiritualists or materialists or neurophysiologists or philosophers, they agree on the phenomena.
0:43:52 They don’t agree on the interpretation of it, of what’s causing it and what its ultimate meaning is.
0:43:58 I think that’s fine. That’s not where I am. I’m not a philosopher. I’m interested in the
0:44:04 ultimate cause or the meaning of it. I’m actually a clinician. So what interests me most about
0:44:10 near-death experiences is how they affect people’s lives and what people do with the experience.
0:44:16 That’s the same regardless of what’s causing it, whether it’s a hallucination or a spiritual
0:44:21 experience. It affects people in the same way. That’s, I think, what interests me most.
0:44:29 We’ll probably come back to this, but I’ll just maybe as a teaser for folks. Please fact-check
0:44:35 me if I get any of this wrong. But it seems like some of the common after-effects for those who
0:44:43 experience NDEs are increased altruism, a feeling of connectedness. If they had a profession involving
0:44:48 some degree of violence, for instance, not necessarily ill-intentioned, but law enforcement.
0:44:55 If they were in the mafia, I know there’s a case of this, specifically. They’re no longer capable
0:45:01 or willing to perform those jobs. Those who have attempted suicide and have the experience
0:45:08 of an NDA counter-intuitively are less suicidal after the fact. So I’ll provide those as teasers,
0:45:12 but just to scratch my own itch, I’m going to pick up on a thread from
0:45:20 quite a few minutes ago where I was asking about possible differences in reported NDEs.
0:45:25 Do children and adults report the same phenomenon, obviously, using different metaphor
0:45:33 for trying to convey the ineffable, perhaps? Do they differ in any notable way?
0:45:38 They don’t really differ. The one difference is that children don’t have the elaborate life
0:45:46 review that most adults do. They also tend to have as many deceased relatives that they might
0:45:52 encounter. They have some. But you’re more likely to hear from children encountering a deceased pet,
0:45:58 a dog or a cat. But by and large, people who have studied children’s near-death experiences
0:46:03 find the same phenomenon. They often have difficulty, even more than adults do, in putting
0:46:09 into words. So they will often ask the children to draw what happened, and they produce artwork
0:46:14 to explain the near-death experience. You’re mentioning new tooling, new equipment,
0:46:20 and technological capabilities that we have, whether that be fMRI or some type of advanced
0:46:28 brain imaging, the use of computers, algorithms, certainly AI at some point, if not already,
0:46:38 to analyze EEG, KG data, and so on. How might you use something like brain imaging if you could
0:46:43 design a study? Because presumably, if someone’s about to flatline, you’re not going to slide them
0:46:49 into an fMRI machine because the clinicians would not be able to get to them. So would that mean
0:46:57 you would be putting someone into, say, an fMRI and then doing your best to simulate an NDE with
0:47:03 exogenous compounds such as psychedelics or otherwise? How might you use the brain imaging?
0:47:09 Well, people have studied brain imaging with psychedelic drugs. We used to think that
0:47:14 psychedelics work by stimulating the brain to hallucinate, and what these studies have shown
0:47:21 is that the psychedelic trips that are associated with more elaborate mystical experiences
0:47:26 are associated with less brain activity and less coordination among different parts of the brain,
0:47:33 as if the brain is getting pushed out of the way by these drugs, allowing whatever it is to
0:47:40 come in, all this mystical experience. People have tried to look at brain function during a
0:47:46 cardiac arrest. It is not easy. Several papers have been published in leading neuroscience journals,
0:47:52 claiming they have done this, but they have not done that. For example, once they was published of
0:47:58 people who were comatose and on life support, and they said it was happening in the brain
0:48:03 when they stopped the artificial ventilation. And what they found was that there was a change in the
0:48:09 brain function when they did that. It was reported as an increase in gamma activity. It was actually
0:48:16 not. All the brain waves were decreased when they stopped the ventilation, but the gamma waves were
0:48:21 decreased less than the alpha, beta, and delta. So it looked like it was more, relatively speaking,
0:48:27 of the gamma. It was actually less than it was before. But these people were not dead. They also
0:48:34 reported heart function during this time. And when they were reporting these changes in brain waves,
0:48:38 the people’s hearts were still beating. They were still having a normal sinus rhythm, normal,
0:48:43 normal heartbeat. When the heart did stop, they didn’t continue doing the EEG. So you couldn’t
0:48:48 continue to see what’s going on in the brain after they actually died. But they reported it as
0:48:54 electromagnetic activity in the brain in dying patients. Well, they weren’t dying. The artificial
0:48:59 aspiration was stopped, but their hearts were still beating. Similarly, there were other studies
0:49:04 like this where they claimed to be reporting on dying patients. They really were not dying
0:49:08 patients. They were people who were approaching death. There was a study done in Michigan where
0:49:15 they sacrificed rats and measured what’s going on in the brains when they do that. And they reported
0:49:21 a 30-second burst of activity after their hearts stopped. That’s what they said they found. It
0:49:28 actually wasn’t a burst. If you look at the traces they gave you, it was a slight increase,
0:49:32 but far less than the brains were showing before they sacrificed them. So it was a tiny
0:49:38 blip. It wasn’t a surge, like they said it was. Furthermore, if they anesthetized the rats,
0:49:43 they didn’t show this at all. Obviously, people have NDE’s Neurotethic Experiences under deep
0:49:48 anesthesia. So that’s not the same phenomena. There were several other things that weren’t
0:49:53 untypical of Neurotethic Experiences. For example, every single one of the rats they tested
0:49:58 had this burst of activity. But if you ask people who come close to death, only about 10 or 20%
0:50:02 have Neurotethic Experiences. And probably most significant, they didn’t bother to interview
0:50:10 the rats to see what they were experiencing. I will mention one researcher who has actually
0:50:17 measured EEG’s brainwaves during cardiac arrest. And this is Sam Parnia at NYU. But when you’re
0:50:24 persisting somebody, you press on the heart, you compress the heart, heart compressions for a while,
0:50:28 and then you stop and give them a break to see whether they spontaneously breathe or not. And
0:50:33 then you continue it again. Or they’re shocking them with electricity. And then you stop and see
0:50:38 what’s happened. And he measured the brainwaves during that period when they stopped, thinking,
0:50:43 this is going to tell us what’s going on. Well, I’m not sure it is because it’s only for a few
0:50:48 seconds that you’re stopping. And the body is still suffering from the shock of the electricity
0:50:53 or the chest compressions. Furthermore, he reported some increase in several different
0:50:59 wavelengths of brain activity in about half the patients. He also reported that there were some
0:51:03 six patients who reported Neurotethic Experiences. And he said, well, obviously the
0:51:09 increased brain activity is causing the Neurotethic Experiences. But if you look at his data,
0:51:13 the six who had the Neurotethic Experiences did not have the increase in brainwaves.
0:51:18 And those who had the Neurotethic Increasing Brainwaves did not report Neurotethic Experiences.
0:51:20 So I’m not sure if we learned anything from that.
0:51:27 All right. So I’m going to ask you to make some sort of theoretical
0:51:33 leaps to answer the next few questions. But first, because I have to ask this,
0:51:40 when people see or claim to have seen deceased relatives, how, and I don’t know if you have
0:51:45 this level of granularity in the reports, how old are those deceased relatives? Are they
0:51:51 last they saw them? Because presumably some of these people who died would have had a slow decline
0:51:58 with neurodegenerative disease and so on. So do they appear much younger? Is there any
0:52:04 pattern in the reports whatsoever in terms of the age that these people seem to be
0:52:10 when they are observed? There was a pattern. But again, I need to follow back on the fact that
0:52:14 most people say there aren’t any words to describe it. So when you ask them to describe what they
0:52:20 saw, you’re describing what the brain interpreted of what they saw. And most people say that they
0:52:25 saw the deceased loved one at the prime with their lives when they were young and healthy,
0:52:32 not when they were dying. I have found some people say I didn’t really see a human figure.
0:52:35 I just saw my grandmother. Well, how did you know it was your grandmother?
0:52:41 I felt her vibrations. I knew it was her. It was had her essence. So they may have just seen this
0:52:46 blob of light and knew that by the way it felt to them, this is grandma. There’s no way of
0:52:51 validating this type of thing. It’s just their impression. All right, let me ask a sort of
0:52:56 tactical, practical question and then we’ll get into the stranger stuff. Sure. If you had,
0:52:59 let’s say there’s someone listening and they’re like, okay, I’m not sure I want my name on it,
0:53:08 but as an anonymous donor, I’m willing to give Dr. Grayson some sum of money or maybe some secret
0:53:13 agent at the NIH is like, you know what, I know it’ll liberate some funds. Right.
0:53:19 What studies would you like to design and see done? I mean, they don’t need to be specifically
0:53:24 related to NDEs, but if they are, I suppose that’d be more germane to the conversation.
0:53:29 Any types of studies that you would love to see performed related to this?
0:53:35 I can answer that from my personal perspective, which is not what I’d like to see the field do.
0:53:39 Sure. What I’d like to see the field do is what they’re doing right now,
0:53:43 looking at all of the different possibilities, looking at cross-cultural comparisons,
0:53:46 looking at neurophysiological changes, all the types of things they’re doing now,
0:53:51 looking at other phenomena that seem to mimic parts of the NDE like psychedelic drugs,
0:53:54 but that’s not where I am right now. I’m nearing the end of my career.
0:54:03 I’m falling back on, what does it all mean? For me, what that means is it has it affect people’s
0:54:11 lives. I would like to see more research into the practical applications of new-death experiences.
0:54:17 We’ve done some studies now with new-death experiences that say they needed help
0:54:23 readjusting to a “normal life” after a new-death experience, and we’ve surveyed them about
0:54:28 what did they need help with? What was so disturbing about the experience or its after-effects?
0:54:34 What type of help did you seek? What type of help did you receive? What type of
0:54:41 practitioner did you go to? Is a chiodrist, a doctor, a spiritual healer, a pastoral counselor?
0:54:44 And what types of help were actually helpful and which ones were not helpful?
0:54:48 And we’re finding some interesting findings from that. We’re also surveying physicians
0:54:54 about their attitudes towards new-death experiences, and we posted the question,
0:54:58 “If a patient comes to you and says, ‘I had this experience that I want to tell you about,’
0:55:03 would you feel comfortable talking with them about it, and what are the barriers you feel
0:55:10 to open up and talking about them?” And we had a list of some 25 possible barriers we thought might be
0:55:15 things they said, and we were very pleased to find that almost none of them said,
0:55:20 “I don’t think it’s worth talking about. It’s not important.” Or, “Is just a neurological
0:55:24 artifact? Does it mean anything?” Or, “It’s just a type of psychosis.”
0:55:31 By far, the most common response doctors gave was, “The barrier is I don’t know enough about
0:55:36 the experience to talk to patients about it.” And the second most common was, “I don’t have time
0:55:40 to talk about this with my patients. I’m just too busy.” Now, those are both things that we can
0:55:45 correct. We can certainly give more training to physicians, and we can restructure the schedule
0:55:52 so they do have time to talk to patients. What are the most, if any, reliable ways to simulate
0:56:00 an NDE or NDE-like experience? And it makes me think back to a movie. It may not age well,
0:56:06 but I enjoyed it at the time with Kiefer Sutherland 2000. No, it was prior to that 1990
0:56:11 something called Flatliners. I believe there were medical students who would take turns putting
0:56:18 themselves right to a brief period of death, and then they get into this arms race of competing
0:56:22 with one another and pushing it further and further and further. But my understanding,
0:56:28 based on some of what I’ve read, you do have familiarity with some of the psychedelic-related
0:56:35 science is that these NDE’s seem to produce more what have been described as out-of-body
0:56:41 experiences, perhaps more, I don’t want to say reliably, more frequently than psychedelic experiences.
0:56:46 But are there any, we’ll come back to that point, but are there any ways to simulate it in such a
0:56:53 way to make it more studiable, even if it’s not the exact phenomenon since I’m sure the IRB
0:56:58 would have a tough time accepting temporarily killing patients or subjects that are recruited
0:57:04 for a study? Is there anything that approximates it or any thoughts on how we might do that?
0:57:10 Keeping in mind, and this is an imperfect example, but long ago, decades ago, psychedelics reviewed
0:57:17 as psychotomimetics so they could be used as a tool for effectively eliciting a psychotic
0:57:22 episode so it could be better studied. Now, that ends up not being quite right. But how would you
0:57:29 think about approximating an NDE? I don’t think there’s a good way. I think the tool we have that
0:57:36 comes closest to our certain psychedelic drugs in a very supportive environment. I don’t think
0:57:41 people just taking drugs on their own can necessarily replicate a new death experience,
0:57:46 but in a supportive environment in the lab with low lighting and good music and someone there to
0:57:52 help you with it, you can replicate some of the features of a new death experience, not all of
0:57:57 them. And you tend not to have all the after effects. And I think that’s understandable
0:58:01 because if you have an experience under drugs, you can say, “Oh, that’s just the drugs. It wasn’t
0:58:06 real.” Whereas if it happens spontaneously, it’s hard to dismiss. One of the issues with the drugs
0:58:12 is that we can find out what’s going on in the brain when people are given these drugs.
0:58:16 And that’s fine. But then you make the leap to saying, “Well, this is the same
0:58:21 change in the brain that occurs during a new death experience.” That’s an assumption. We don’t
0:58:27 have the evidence for that yet. It tells us how we might look for places in the brain,
0:58:31 where we might look, and what types of changes. But that work hasn’t been done yet,
0:58:38 so it’s all speculative. And certainly, the drug-induced experiences are not identical to
0:58:43 new death experiences. Many new death experiences have tried drugs afterwards to try to replicate
0:58:49 the experience. And they universally tell me it’s not the same thing. One person told me,
0:58:55 “When I was on psilocybin, I saw heaven. When I was in my new death experience, I was in heaven.”
0:59:00 That was what he explained it. But they had not to have the same after effects. And one question
0:59:07 of that I will say is that the recent work done at Johns Hopkins with psilocybin has found a marked
0:59:14 decrease in fear of death after a short experience with psilocybin. And it doesn’t follow, but at
0:59:18 least a year after the experience, they still have that decreased fear of death and it’s very
0:59:25 encouraging. Yeah, it’s surprisingly durable. It directly correlated with the strength of the
0:59:33 mystical experience, which is measured using an assessment much like your scale for NDEs.
0:59:42 What other characteristics seem to be hard to replicate with drugs or
0:59:49 less frequent in occurrence? And perhaps this is an opportunity to speak to what exactly
0:59:55 an out-of-body experience is, as you would define it. And I think we already gave perhaps
0:59:59 an example of this with the wings flapping. But can you say more about that?
1:00:04 It’s tricky to define an out-of-body experience. There’s a large body of evidence
1:00:10 looking at people who have their temporal lobe or their brains stimulate electrically.
1:00:13 And it is worth claiming they produce out-of-body experiences. They do not.
1:00:17 They may produce a sense of not being aware of your body anymore,
1:00:21 but they don’t produce a sense of leaving your body and being able to turn around and look at
1:00:25 your body and seeing it from an out-of-body perspective. They often say that with the
1:00:30 stimulation, you can see a double of yourself, but you’re seeing it from inside the body. You’re
1:00:36 not outside the body. And the WC is static. It’s not moving around. Whereas people who have real
1:00:41 out-of-body experiences talk about moving around the room, won’t get distant places.
1:00:47 People who have out-of-body experiences sometimes can report things accurately. They can be
1:00:51 corroborated later on. That doesn’t happen with stimulation of the temporal lobe.
1:00:56 So they’ll have differences between these artifacts that are produced by temporal lobe
1:01:01 stimulation and real out-of-body experiences. When you read some of the papers that have been
1:01:07 published about temporal lobe stimulation, they say things like, “Well, my legs were getting
1:01:11 shorter. I felt like I was falling off the gurney.” And they’re called these out-of-body
1:01:16 experiences. They’re not. They’re somatic hallucinations, but they’re not out-of-body
1:01:21 experiences. You can get out-of-body experiences with other types of mystical experience and with
1:01:29 psychedelic drugs. Whether the same or not is kind of open to question right now. We don’t have
1:01:35 examples of people having drug-induced out-of-body experiences having accurate perceptions of what’s
1:01:41 going on around them. Whereas you do with near-death experiences. Now, that may be because we haven’t
1:01:45 looked deep enough yet and we may find them. But this one, we don’t have that.
1:01:51 I’ll share a strange experience and then we’ll get into the, as promised, to the listeners,
1:01:58 some of the stranger stuff. But not that this is just a plain vanilla walk through the DSM.
1:02:03 So, I have a fair amount of flight time with different psychedelic compounds. And the
1:02:12 one time, I would say, I consistently experienced what you would describe or might describe as an
1:02:20 out-of-body experience was in using, and I highly discourage anyone to use this, a terpenoid
1:02:25 called salvanorinae, which is found in salvia divinorum, otherwise known as diviner sage,
1:02:30 used by the Mazatecs in Mexico for centuries, probably millennia. And part of the reason I
1:02:37 don’t recommend it, well, first of all, you can go on YouTube and just search salvia freakout and
1:02:41 you’ll get lots of video footage for why you should probably steer clear of it. But it’s a
1:02:50 as I recall a Kappa opioid agonist. And that is consuming an agonist of the Kappa opioid receptors
1:02:56 typically is described as acutely dysphoric. So, what is dysphoria? Well, it’s the opposite
1:03:00 of euphoria. It’s horrible, terrible, terrifying experience for most people. So, I don’t recommend
1:03:05 using it. But these experiences are notable for two reasons. Number one, I had no expectancy,
1:03:14 no, I didn’t know anyone who had consumed a purified salvanorinae. And secondly, I was
1:03:21 observed by clinicians. And in one case was inside an fMRI machine. So, I could not see anything
1:03:28 outside of the machine. But in both cases, the experience was effectively a flattened,
1:03:34 abstract experience, devoid of time, space, a sense of self. Nonetheless, there was an observer,
1:03:41 but incredibly bizarre experience even compared to, say, a psilocybin or an NDMT or something else.
1:03:50 And in each instance, I had two experiences at some point, mid abstraction, I effectively
1:03:56 had the view of a CCTV camera in the upper corner of each room. And I was able to see
1:04:02 what all the scientists were doing, all the clinicians, and was able to corroborate those
1:04:07 after the fact. Now, in the first instance, I was not in an fMRI machine. So, people might say,
1:04:11 well, you could have had one eye open and you could have been watching. Now, I would challenge
1:04:17 anyone in the depth of this experience to attempt to report anything visual with their eyes open.
1:04:24 But the fact that I was literally strapped down inside an fMRI machine would preclude
1:04:31 any ability, as we currently understand it, to use my eyes to see anything. And that raises
1:04:37 some questions for me, because I do have a reasonably broad palette of experience with
1:04:43 different molecules. But that was two for two. And I haven’t experienced that in anything else.
1:04:48 This is slowly meandering into the stranger territory. So, it seems to be the case that
1:04:57 certainly we can occasion very strange experiences with the ingestion or inhalation of different
1:05:05 compounds. So, the brain has some role as a mediator of experience in the world.
1:05:17 But then you seem to document in your experience these phenomena that seem to reflect a mind beyond
1:05:21 brain for lack of a better descriptor. And I don’t want to put words in your mouth.
1:05:28 How do you begin to even think about this? And is the brain, I suppose we could make an argument
1:05:35 for this on a whole lot of levels, a reducing valve, as Aldous Huxley might put it, that is
1:05:46 filtering for information that is optimized for survival and procreation. And when you do something
1:05:51 that, I suppose, opens the aperture of that reducing valve, then suddenly you have these
1:05:59 experiences. Is the brain acting like a receiver of some type? Now, the argument against that would
1:06:06 be, well, if you damage the brain, you can observe all of these effects on perception and
1:06:12 cognition and so on. How at this point, given all of your documentation, discussions with colleagues
1:06:19 in and outside of this area of expertise, think about mind versus brain. With the understanding
1:06:24 that there’s a lot more we don’t know than what we know. But how do you think about this?
1:06:27 I was taught in college in medical school that the mind is what the brain does.
1:06:32 And all our thoughts and feelings and perceptions are all created by the brain.
1:06:38 And I cannot believe that anymore. I’ve seen people whose brains were either offline or
1:06:43 severely impaired telling me they had the most elaborate experience they’ve ever had.
1:06:48 So I’m inclined to think that the mind is something else and the brain kind of filters it,
1:06:55 as you said. This is not a new idea. 2000 years ago, the Abakortes said this, that the brain is a
1:07:01 messenger of the mind. And this is not surprising because we know that the brain has these filters.
1:07:06 It’s the default boat network and the thermo cortical network. If people are listening to us now,
1:07:09 they don’t really care what we look like. They want to hear what we’re saying.
1:07:17 So their thermo cortical circuit tamps down the visual input and focuses on the auditory input.
1:07:22 And likewise, we’re not hearing the train go by outside or the traffic outside because you’re
1:07:26 focusing on this. And that’s your brain doing that. It’s filtering out what stimuli you’re
1:07:30 going to pay attention to. And it starts even beyond the brain that our sense organs.
1:07:36 You don’t see all the visual light that’s out there. You just see this small portion that is in
1:07:41 our visual spectrum. We don’t see infrared and ultraviolet. And likewise, we only hear
1:07:46 a small fraction of the frequencies of sound available. We don’t hear the sounds that dogs
1:07:52 and bats hear or elephants and dolphins. So our brain and the associated sensory systems that we
1:07:57 have with that filters out things that are not important to our survival. Now we think about
1:08:02 the things that happen in near-death experience, seeing deceased loved ones leaving the body.
1:08:06 That’s not essential for survival. You can get food and shelter in a mate and avoid predators
1:08:11 without all that. So it makes sense that the brain would normally filter that stuff out
1:08:16 and not pay attention to it. And if in a near-death experience or similar experiences,
1:08:23 the brain is shutting down selectively so that that filtering mechanism is put on hold
1:08:28 or being weakened, then you have access to this other consciousness. Now it raises the question
1:08:33 of what is this other consciousness? Where is it? In a way, that’s a bogus question because
1:08:39 if it’s a non-physical entity, how can I have a where? It can’t be any place. But I’m not a
1:08:45 philosopher. I’m an empiricist. And when see people say to me, as many do, if you have this
1:08:53 non-physical mind, how does it interact with the physical brain? I have no idea. On the other hand,
1:08:59 if you take a materialistic perspective and say, how does the brain, the chemical and electrical
1:09:07 changes in the brain create an abstract thought? We have no idea about that either. So whether you’re
1:09:13 an empiricist, a materialist or not, we can’t explain how thoughts arise and how they get
1:09:19 processed to us. What we do know is that all our experiences are filtered to us through the brain.
1:09:23 You can have the most elaborate, mystical experience in the world. But to tell me about it,
1:09:29 you have to be back in your body with words created by your brain and filtered through concepts that
1:09:38 your brain puts on it. So obviously, the brain is evolved in perceiving and processing and relating
1:09:41 the near-death experience. You can’t get around that. It doesn’t mean it’s creating it.
1:09:47 And also, I just wanted to add, and I’ve heard you discuss this, just because something is currently
1:09:53 unexplainable does not mean it is fundamentally unexplainable. If we look back at the history of
1:09:59 science, and certainly, this will continue to be the case, we would laugh at some of the
1:10:05 presuppositions of 200 years ago. And there’s no reason to think that 100, 200 years from now,
1:10:10 certainly with the rate of technological change, maybe five, 10 years from now,
1:10:16 almost with certainty, we will look back at many of the things we took to be true now and laugh at
1:10:23 them similarly. And that in science, everything is provisional in a sense, right? It is until proven
1:10:29 otherwise, which it almost inevitably is. At least there’s something that’s added to it. It would
1:10:37 seem to me that studying this field, documenting these cases, doing your best to make sense
1:10:46 of these things, is not without career cost. It would seem to me, and certainly this was the case
1:10:51 with psychedelics, say, a few decades ago, to try to scientifically study psychedelics, putting
1:10:57 aside all of the nightmares of logistics with dealing with the FDA and handling schedule one
1:11:06 compounds and so on, to take that path was viewed as career suicide. And I don’t know if that’s a
1:11:14 fair label to apply to your field of study with respect to NDE’s, but what have the cost been,
1:11:22 if any, and why have you persisted despite those costs? It’s less of a problem now than it was
1:11:29 back in the 1980s. When no one knew about these things, most academic centers assumed this was
1:11:36 just a few crazy patients telling the stories and they weren’t worth investigating. And I was told
1:11:42 in one university that if I continued to study these things, I would not get tenure. So I ended
1:11:46 up leaving that place and go to a different university before I came up for tenure. I wasn’t
1:11:51 willing to risk that. But I did now get tenure at two subsequent universities where it’s become more
1:11:56 acceptable to study unusual phenomena as long as you’re doing it in a scientifically respectable
1:12:01 way and publishing your material in mainstream medical journals. So I think it’s less of an
1:12:08 issue now, but you still see a lot of, I wouldn’t say it’s professional suicide, but certainly
1:12:14 professional barriers being raised to people who study these things. I think why people do it,
1:12:18 partly because they’re intellectually curious about it. There’s a challenge here. I don’t
1:12:24 understand it and I want to. And probably more importantly for me is these experiences have
1:12:29 profound effects on the people who have them. As a psychiatrist, I want to understand that
1:12:34 and help them deal with those effects if they need help with it. So I think it’s irresponsible to
1:12:40 just ignore it and say it doesn’t exist. Let’s talk about some of your other interests,
1:12:46 research interests. And I have a note here, genomic study of extraordinary twin communication.
1:12:52 Could you elaborate on this? This actually was not my project originally. The Israeli psychologist
1:12:58 Borough-Fishman contacted me and said, “I’ve got this great study I’d like to do. And I found a
1:13:03 twin genomic database in England where they’ve got 15,000 pairs of twins and they have the entire
1:13:11 genomic platform all laid out. So we can survey these twins they have, but they’ve had some type
1:13:16 of communication when they’re at distant locations. You call it telepathy, you can call it extracensory,
1:13:20 you can call it coincidental, but they have reliable communication with each other when
1:13:26 they’re far away from each other. Can we find out from the genomic analysis what genes are
1:13:30 associated with disability?” And I thought, “That sounds interesting.” It wasn’t something I would
1:13:36 pick, but sure, I came to try that. So we did apply for a grant and we got the approval of the group
1:13:41 in England. The study hasn’t actually started yet, but it makes me wonder about the genetics that goes
1:13:47 into having a new death experience. Now we’ve been studying what’s going on in the brain,
1:13:51 what’s going on in the heart, and lungs. We have to scratch the surface of what’s going on in your
1:13:57 genes that they make you more likely to have a new death experience or a certain type of experience.
1:14:03 Now we know that when their hearts stop, between 10 and 20 percent of people will have a new death
1:14:06 experience. And we haven’t found any way of predicting who’s going to have one or not,
1:14:11 but maybe the answer is in the genes. So I think it’s worth doing a genetic study of people who
1:14:19 have new death experiences and those who don’t. I’ve had a handful of guests on this show who have
1:14:27 identical twins and they have all maybe off the record, I think in some cases on the record
1:14:34 in conversation, shared with me stories that certainly defy any current conventional explanation
1:14:39 of communication with their twins. And it’s 100 percent at this point. And I’ve only had a handful
1:14:47 of individuals with identical twins, but in several cases, these are scientists, these are
1:14:54 people who are otherwise as kind of rational materialists as you could be, but they are not
1:14:58 going to refute their own direct experience, continue direct experience with their identical
1:15:02 twin. It does raise a lot of questions. And if we wanted to get really sci-fi, you think about
1:15:08 genetic engineering, you think of CRISPR, you think of gene therapies. If we were to, in some
1:15:15 capacity, determine which code is responsible, which light switches are responsible, would it
1:15:20 be possible to increase someone’s ability to express those capabilities in the same way that we might
1:15:30 say toy with myostatin inhibition or something like that to catalyze increased muscle growth
1:15:37 in the sense that we might see in bully whippets or in Belgian blue cattle, as an example. It certainly
1:15:42 seems like a study worth doing. Why not? I mean, worst case, you’d find no correlation.
1:15:44 There’s a lot of ifs in that question. If we could do this, if we could do that.
1:15:45 Lots of ifs.
1:15:51 Lots of ifs. And frankly, I’m not encouraged by what I’ve seen so far with genetic engineering.
1:15:56 When we can make tomatoes with a thick skin that can travel better across country,
1:16:00 but they don’t have the flavor that a normal tomato does. So you’re always paying a price
1:16:04 when you genetically modify something. You may gain something you’re looking for,
1:16:09 but you may lose something else. When you try messing with human genes, you don’t know what
1:16:14 you’re going to come up with. Oh, for sure. How much funding are you seeking for this particular
1:16:20 twin communication study, the genomics study? That’s a small one, just $50,000 or so.
1:16:27 And the role of science, that is very inexpensive. What other studies outside of NDEs would you like
1:16:33 to see done? Are there any that are kind of shovel-ready, so to speak, or close to shovel-ready?
1:16:38 We’ve mentioned people who claim to leave their bodies and see things accurately from an adipotic
1:16:44 perspective. I would like to get a more controlled version of that. And people who tried that,
1:16:49 Sampornia NYU has tried it a couple of times. I’ve done it try it once. There have been a total
1:16:54 of six published studies of attempts to do this. And none of them have been successful. Usually,
1:16:59 you’ll study things for a year or two and find no near-death experiences in your sample, or people
1:17:04 who have an NDE but didn’t describe seeing things from an adipotic perspective. So there really
1:17:09 hasn’t been any tests of this yet. A determined skeptic could say, “Well, that shows that it
1:17:13 doesn’t really happen.” And that people who spontaneously have this experience and tell you
1:17:18 about it are misinterpreting what’s happened to them or just making it up. And I would desperately
1:17:23 like to find some objective way of measuring this, but we haven’t had that yet. So it would be nice to
1:17:29 try to hone down that and then try to find a good way of studying this in a mess. The stuff
1:17:34 that Sampornia has done, I was participating in one of his studies that had 2,000 patients in it
1:17:39 from a variety of hospitals. And we found nothing in that room. So you need a huge study to do this.
1:17:44 This was related to out-of-body experiences specifically. Yeah.
1:17:50 Yeah. I think there’s a lot to be learned from the neurophysiological research that’s going on now.
1:17:54 There’s a very active group at the University of Liege in Belgium that’s making headway with this.
1:17:58 There are other people around the world who are studying it. There’s a group at University College
1:18:02 in London, but I think we’re a long way from having an answer yet. We’re just starting this
1:18:07 type of research. And it may be certainly not in my lifetime before we find a good answer.
1:18:18 Is there a study design that you think would be a more intelligent way or a better way to approach
1:18:25 controlled study or assessment of out-of-body experiences? And part of the reason I ask is that
1:18:34 if you look back at, for instance, I could give a famous example, the amazing Randy who had this
1:18:39 outstanding prize. I think it was a million dollars or a hundred thousand dollars for anyone
1:18:45 who could demonstrate psi abilities or extrasensory perception or fill in the blank under controlled
1:18:52 conditions. And to my knowledge, no one ever claimed that prize. Now, at the same time, if you
1:18:59 look at a documentary like, for instance, I believe it’s called Project NIMM, which looked at the,
1:19:03 in retrospect, ill-advised idea to try to raise a chimpanzee as you would a human child.
1:19:12 The chimpanzee demonstrated all sorts of learning behaviors and so on that could not be replicated
1:19:17 in the lab simply because the chimpanzee would shut down, would not demonstrate those behaviors
1:19:24 in a laboratory setting. That doesn’t mean they didn’t exist. But there were challenges in studying
1:19:31 it in a controlled environment. What is your best explanation? Again, understanding that
1:19:37 for a lot of people, if you can’t verify it under double blind, placebo-controlled conditions
1:19:42 or the equivalent in this setting, then it doesn’t exist. With extreme claims comes the
1:19:48 requirement of extreme levels of proof. But how would you, based on everything that you’ve
1:19:54 studied, colleagues you’ve spoken with, explain why it is so difficult to
1:19:58 produce or replicate or study these things in controlled settings? Why is that?
1:20:04 It’s essentially a spontaneous experience that does not happen under controlled conditions.
1:20:08 When you put someone in a lab, they’re not the same as they were when they’re out on the street.
1:20:14 And we’ve learned this with sleep studies. When you bring someone into the lab to have them to
1:20:18 measure their brain waves during sleep, it takes their day or two usually to have them adapt to
1:20:22 the situation before you can actually do it. You get something that’s at least a bit like
1:20:26 what their normal sleep is. So I think you have to take that into account that people have these
1:20:32 experiences out in the wild, so to speak. And it’s hard to tame it without clamping down on the
1:20:36 controls to their brain that would shut it off, maybe. So I don’t know whether you can do that,
1:20:40 whether you can have a really controlled search engine. We have this experience that you can
1:20:46 certainly do it with mimics that mimic part of the experience. For example, with drugs or with
1:20:52 brain stimulation that can mimic a part of it. And then, by implication, develop metaphors what
1:20:57 might be going on in the brain during your death experience. It’s not the experience itself.
1:21:04 What are some of the, for you personally, open questions that you would love to
1:21:13 see answered for lights out onto the next adventure after death if there is a next adventure?
1:21:20 What are some of the open questions in this field or in other fields that for you,
1:21:24 you would most like to see answered? Are there any burning questions that come to mind?
1:21:29 Well, the big question of questions is how their mind and brain interact. And
1:21:35 that certainly, you get some hints of that from a near-death experience. But there are other phenomena
1:21:42 that also address the mind and brain seeming to separate. And one of these is the term “lucidity
1:21:48 phenomenon” where people who have had dementia for a while and cannot communicate or recognize family
1:21:54 suddenly become completely lucid again and carry on coherent conversations
1:21:59 and express appropriate emotions, and then they die. Usually within minutes or hours,
1:22:05 and we don’t have any explanation for this. I have a few friends, not just one, few friends who’ve
1:22:11 directly seen observe this phenomenon. And I do not have any way to explain that. If you believe
1:22:17 the brain as filter mechanism, that could play a role in this. When the brain is shutting down
1:22:24 in the last hours before death, it releases this filter that allows the consciousness to
1:22:31 fully flourish. Now, a big problem with that is the person is still able to speak and communicate.
1:22:36 So obviously, parts of the brain are still functioning just fine. So if you have this
1:22:41 experience of heightened lucidity at death, how do you let people know that unless your brain is
1:22:48 still functioning? It is a dilemma because we don’t have a medical explanation for how someone
1:22:53 with a debilitating disease that is irreversible, like Alzheimer’s disease, can suddenly regain
1:22:58 function again. There are speculative theories about this, but none of them really make a whole
1:23:03 lot of sense and none of them have been corroborated by evidence. Now, there are other facets of some
1:23:10 of the reported NDEs, past life review, as an example. You might also have, as I understand
1:23:17 from listening to a number of your presentations, recall or re-experiencing an event through the
1:23:23 perspective of someone other than yourself. When you consider all of these reports,
1:23:32 how is that affected, if at all, how you think about time? And I ask that it might seem
1:23:38 credibly broad, but I think most of us tend to think of time as this fundamental constant. But
1:23:44 if you talk to the Carlo Revelli’s of the world from pronouncing his name correctly, if you start
1:23:53 really digging under the hood, it’s difficult to automatically take that as a static known fact.
1:24:00 And I’m wondering how you think about time, if these reports and your research and experiences
1:24:06 have changed that at all. Most new-geth experiences say there was no time
1:24:12 in this other realm, either that time stopped or just time ceased to exist.
1:24:17 And when they say that, I reflect on what they’ve told me about the experience. I say, “Well,
1:24:22 let you tell me that this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened.” But that
1:24:27 applies all in your time. So how can there be no time if you’ve got things happening in sequence?
1:24:33 And they just shrug and say, “Well, when I tell you about it now, in this body, in this world,
1:24:39 it’s a paradox.” Over there, it wasn’t. Everything was happening all at once, and there wasn’t any
1:24:44 linear flow. That’s just the way it is. I can understand that as an abstract concept. I can’t
1:24:50 relate to it in my real life. I don’t know what that means to not have time, but so much of our
1:24:55 life is controlled by it. What we think of as the linear passage of time. This is the pre-one
1:25:02 this time thing, when you have some of these non-ordinary experiences. Let me ask about another,
1:25:07 perhaps, non-ordinary experience. This is something I found in the footnotes of a footnote of a
1:25:15 footnote. You may have some ability to explain this. Auditory hallucinations after NDEs. I only
1:25:21 read the very top abstract in a PDF, so I did not dig into it. But what does this refer to?
1:25:27 A psychiatrist in Colorado, Mitch Leaster, and I did this study. We surveyed a large sample of
1:25:32 near-death experiences about what seemed to be hearing voices long after the near-death experience,
1:25:38 and we also looked at schizophrenics who were hearing voices and compared the experience
1:25:43 of those two groups. They were quite different. The near-death experiences who claimed to still
1:25:50 be hearing voices almost universally said these were helpful guiding voices. They enjoyed hearing
1:25:55 them, and they found them making their lives richer. They gave them some guidance, and they
1:26:00 were reassuring to them. On the other hand, these schizophrenics almost universally said
1:26:07 these are terrifying hallucinations. I wish I didn’t have them. They made my life much harder.
1:26:11 I don’t like them at all. I wish that we just go away. It’s not experienced in the same way.
1:26:18 Is it the same phenomenon? I don’t know. Among the people who reported the auditory hallucinations,
1:26:27 was there any degree of overlap in terms of structural brain damage or otherwise,
1:26:31 in the indie group? We don’t have the measures of brain function to answer that.
1:26:38 To know, “I could keep going for many, many, many hours.” Let me ask you this,
1:26:44 just as a way of branching out a little bit. In terms of researchers who, in your mind,
1:26:53 demonstrate a compelling combination of both open-mindedness but rigorous skepticism,
1:27:01 who would you not ask you to pick among favorites, but who are a few names that come to mind?
1:27:06 Sam Parnia at NYU. How do you spell his last name?
1:27:13 The A-R-N-I-A. Got it. There are retired physicians who are still involved in this field.
1:27:21 Peter Fennec in England and Tim Van Lommel in the Netherlands. There’s a brilliant psychologist
1:27:27 in New Zealand, Natasha Tassel-Madamua, who’s doing a lot of interesting research in this area.
1:27:33 She is part Maori, and she’s doing work with cross-cultural comparison of Maori versus English
1:27:38 near-death experiences. We’re also looking at a lot of the after-effects. There’s that large group
1:27:41 at the age that I mentioned to you before that’s doing a lot of research into this.
1:27:48 This is Belgium. Yeah. Many of them are quite confirmed materialists. That’s fine. They’re
1:27:53 still doing good research. The head of that lab, though, Steve Loris, is much more open-minded.
1:27:56 He still is a materialist, but he’s more open-minded about what these things might mean.
1:28:00 And he’s certainly compassionate about how it affects the people who have these,
1:28:03 which is probably more important to me than what they think is causing it.
1:28:07 So there are a number of people around the world who are doing good research with this area.
1:28:14 You have written a number of books and co-authored, co-edited others.
1:28:20 One of them is Irreducible Mind Toward the Psychology for the 21st Century. What does
1:28:28 the Irreducible Mind refer to? That basically means a mind that’s not reducible to chemical
1:28:33 processes, electrical processes in the brain. It’s a mind that can be independent of the brain.
1:28:39 And that book, without ever mentioning anything paranormal or parapsychological,
1:28:46 goes through a series of phenomena in everyday life that point to mind and brain not being the
1:28:51 same thing. And it does include near-death experiences and other experiences near-death.
1:28:57 It includes exceptional genius. It includes psychosomatic phenomena, a variety of things
1:29:03 that have occurred to perfectly normal people over the centuries. It had been well-documented and
1:29:08 almost seemed to be compatible with either the brain creates all our thoughts and feelings.
1:29:13 Which of your books, whether solely authored, co-authored, or co-edited,
1:29:18 would you suggest people start with if they wanted to dive deeper?
1:29:25 I would suggest my most recent book, After, because that’s really geared towards the average person,
1:29:31 the layman. And it’s written in language that we’re talking about right now. I tried to minimize
1:29:36 jargon, whereas the other books I’ve written are primarily for academicians, which are much
1:29:40 harder to read, much denser, still excellent books, but not for the average person.
1:29:45 And that is after subtitle, a doctor explores what near-death experiences reveal about life and
1:29:51 beyond. All right, so that’s where people should start. Well, Dr. Grayson, this has been a very
1:29:57 wide-ranging conversation. Is there anything that you would like to discuss, mention,
1:30:00 or request you’d like to make in my audience, something you’d like to point them to,
1:30:05 anything at all that I’d like to say before we start to wind to a close?
1:30:09 I think that things I want people to know about near-death experiences are, number one,
1:30:14 that they’re very common. About 5% of the general population, or one every 20 people,
1:30:19 has had a near-death experience. And secondly, that they are not associated,
1:30:25 anyway, with mental illness. People who are perfectly normal have these NDEs in abnormal
1:30:31 situations, but can happen to anybody. And they’re that they lead to sometimes profound,
1:30:37 long-lasting after-effects, both positive and negative, that never seem to go away over decades.
1:30:42 People can find all things Bruce Grayson. It would seem at brucegrayson.com,
1:30:50 if I’m not mistaken. So brucegrayson, g-r-e-y-s-o-n.com. And you have quite a few books to your credit,
1:30:54 but the one to start with would be after subtitle, a doctor explores what near-death
1:30:59 experiences reveal about life and beyond. Is there anything else?
1:31:02 I think that’s it. You covered it pretty well, Tim.
1:31:06 All right. Well, thank you very much for the time. And for everybody listening,
1:31:12 we will link to everything that we discussed in the show notes as per usual at timdoplog/podcast.
1:31:17 And you just search Bruce, probably, and he’ll pop right up. And as always, until next time,
1:31:22 be just a bit kinder than is necessary, not only to others, but to yourself.
1:31:28 And thank you for tuning in. Hey, guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take
1:31:33 off. And that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday
1:31:38 that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people
1:31:43 subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to
1:31:49 sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to
1:31:54 share the coolest things I’ve found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It’s
1:31:59 kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I’m reading, books I’m reading,
1:32:05 albums, perhaps gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me
1:32:11 by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests and these strange esoteric things end up in my
1:32:17 field. And then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again,
1:32:21 it’s very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend,
1:32:26 something to think about. If you’d like to try it out, just go to tim.vlog/friday,
1:32:32 type that into your browser, tim.vlog/friday, drop in your email and you’ll get the very next one.
1:32:38 Thanks for listening. As many of you know, for the last few years I’ve been sleeping on a midnight
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0:00:04 Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of
0:00:10 the Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers or deconstruct
0:00:15 those who deconstruct world-class performers. In the case of today’s guest, who is Andrew Roberts.
0:00:21 Andrew Roberts has written 20 books, which have been translated into 28 languages and have won
0:00:27 13 literary prizes. These include Masters and Commanders, The Storm of War, a new history
0:00:33 of the Second World War, Napoleon, A Life, Churchill, Walking with Destiny, George III,
0:00:39 The Life and Rain of Britain’s Most Misunderstood Monarch, and most recently Conflict, The Evolution
0:00:46 of Warfare from 1945 to Gaza, which he co-authored with General David Petraeus. Lord Roberts is a
0:00:51 Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Historical Society, the Bonnie and Tom
0:00:56 McCloskey Distinguished Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, and a visiting professor
0:01:02 at the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. He is also a member of the House
0:01:09 of Lords. You can find all things Andrew at andrew-roberts.net online, and he is also on X,
0:01:16 the artist formerly known as Twitter, at x.com/aroberts_andrew. And we’re going to get to the interview,
0:01:21 but quickly, before that, just a few words about our sponsors who make this show possible.
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0:04:06 This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Shopify is the all-in-one
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0:05:52 “At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.”
0:05:56 “Can I answer your personal question?” “No, I would have seen it in a bloodbath time.”
0:06:02 “I’m a cyber-nerdic organism living this year over a method of endoskeleton.”
0:06:12 Pleasure to meet you. Thank you for taking the time.
0:06:15 Thanks so much, Tim, for having me on this show.
0:06:19 I thought we would start with Cranley after your A-levels.
0:06:20 Did you now?
0:06:23 What happened? What on earth happened?
0:06:27 That’s the way we’re going to make friends and get on with each other.
0:06:29 Roll up the sleeves and just get into it.
0:06:32 You’re going to mention the reason that I was expelled from school. Or at least,
0:06:34 I’m going to mention the reason because you don’t know.
0:06:35 I don’t know the reason.
0:06:41 Absolutely good. Okay. I don’t think I’m the first person ever as a young man to get drunk
0:06:44 and climb up buildings. Absolutely not.
0:06:45 Thank you. Time-honored tradition, I know.
0:06:48 Hallelujah that I’m not the only person this happened to.
0:06:55 But quite understandably, the school chucked me out before I fell off one of them and they’d
0:06:59 got blamed. It led to actually one of my wife’s most brilliant witticism.
0:07:04 She’s a very funny woman with my wife and she said, “Yes, and all Andrew’s done since in life
0:07:11 is to get drunk and social climb.” That is clever.
0:07:12 It’s not bad, is it?
0:07:14 All right. We might come back to that.
0:07:18 It seems like also, maybe it’s hard for me to tell given the British school system,
0:07:22 although I did go to St. Paul’s in New Hampshire where they do have the third,
0:07:25 fourth, fifth, sixth form and so on. So that much, I know.
0:07:29 But I think in the same piece where I found the crannily bit in doing the research,
0:07:36 also found note that you’re approached as a possible candidate for MI6 a bit later on.
0:07:38 No, that was when I was at Cambridge.
0:07:38 Cambridge.
0:07:43 Yes, absolutely. That’s the right time to be approached for MI6 is because Cambridge and MI6
0:07:50 have had a long and fairly disastrous career, needless to say. All of the worst spies in the
0:07:57 1930s, traitors of the 1930s, went to Cambridge. But yeah, it was a fascinating thing. I was
0:08:02 just going down from university and somebody in my college, one of the dons there who’s still there
0:08:07 actually, I don’t think of it, approached me and said, “How about it? Would you be interested in
0:08:13 becoming a spy?” And so automatically, needless to say, you just think of yourself as James Bond
0:08:17 immediately. That sort of dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun.
0:08:18 The soundtrack kicks off.
0:08:21 And the soundtrack in the back of your brain, you’re automatically there with your barretto
0:08:27 and the beautiful women and all of that kind of thing. But I then had to actually do the process
0:08:33 of where you need to join, which I did get through. And it was completely hilarious. I mean, it was,
0:08:38 you couldn’t satirise it, basically. They asked you things like there were hundreds of questions
0:08:42 and you had to answer them very, very quickly. And some of them were things you’d expect like,
0:08:47 you know, what are the five longest rivers in the world kind of thing? Put them in order and all
0:08:54 that. There were also things like place in order of social precedent, Prince Duke, Viscount,
0:08:56 Marquis, Baronet.
0:08:57 Oh, I’m out.
0:08:58 Well, exactly.
0:09:00 I would have thrown in Cookie Monster.
0:09:00 I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere.
0:09:05 You’re American. You’re allowed to. They’re not going to ask that in the CIA. But for some reason,
0:09:11 in MI6 back, this was, I hasten to add, back in the sort of mid-1980s. That was one of the questions.
0:09:17 What did the Don think made you a potential candidate?
0:09:23 Well, that also was a little bit annoying, really, because he told me later about how he had been
0:09:30 interviewed by MI6. And one of the things that he’d been asked is, “Is Andrew a kind person?”
0:09:35 And this person said, “No, not really.” And he saw the person interviewing him
0:09:38 put a tick in the margin next to the question.
0:09:41 Wonder if that made you more or less desirable?
0:09:43 Much more desirable, as far as they were concerned.
0:09:51 I can answer that. Well, James Bond, you’re not a kind person, is he, really?
0:09:56 No, no, no. We view them as disposable pleasures. Well, perhaps.
0:10:02 So let’s see if we can take off the initial layers of the onion with respect to history.
0:10:05 Christopher Perry. Mr. Christopher Perry. Who’s that?
0:10:09 He was my first history teacher when I was at prep school.
0:10:13 Which in the English version means when you’re sort of 10 to 13.
0:10:19 He’s dead now, but he was a inspirational history master. He taught history in the way that I
0:10:25 think it should be taught in a narrative way of explaining really, you know, what happened next
0:10:30 and why. He believed in the great events, the great sort of wars and battles and things like that.
0:10:36 And he was a kind man. He wouldn’t have made it into MI6.
0:10:41 That he was a sort of old school history master of the best possible kind.
0:10:48 What characterized that? You said narrative, but maybe would you be able to contrast the status
0:10:53 quo as it goes in terms of teaching history and then how his style most differed from that?
0:10:58 He taught it as the most exciting story you’re ever going to hear,
0:11:03 basically, which has the extraordinary added advantage of being completely true.
0:11:10 He sort of sit cross-legged on the table and give you the voice of Charles I and then the voice of
0:11:15 Oliver Cromwell, you know, Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots. He would entrance you
0:11:21 with the excitement of the unfolding story. Every word of which would be true.
0:11:26 It would have loads of dates in it. At the end of the term, each of the terms, the semester,
0:11:33 you’d be tested on 300 dates and not a child in that class didn’t get at least 298 of them right.
0:11:37 Extraordinary way of teaching. He did it entirely through inspiration,
0:11:41 rather than through just sort of standing there on the blackboard, ordering people to
0:11:47 remember what happened in 1356 or 1415. Did he have any theatre background?
0:11:49 You’d have thought. You would have thought.
0:11:53 Just sitting cross-legged on the desk is going to get a requisite
0:11:56 minimal amount of attention from the students, which is brilliant.
0:12:02 Automatically, of course, exactly. No, I mean, now I come to think of it, of course,
0:12:08 he was overacting from day one, but he didn’t seem to be at the time, at least as far as the
0:12:14 10-year-old Andrew Roberts was concerned. We have a sort of rental library behind us
0:12:18 in this room that I’ve rented. And one of the books sitting over there, The Power Broker,
0:12:23 does an amazing job of end-of-chapter cliffhangers. That’s, I think, Robert Carrow over there.
0:12:28 And he managed to make Urban Development, essentially that book’s about Urban Development,
0:12:32 isn’t it? And he managed to make that interesting. But you’ve got a few other ones. You’ve got a
0:12:38 great friend of mine there, Neil Ferguson, writing about his book Colossus. You’ve got
0:12:44 some pretty interesting people, a few people that I’ve met. And yeah, so you might have rented it,
0:12:50 but it’s a pretty good bunch of books. It worked out. And it’s also quite surreal that
0:12:55 Neil has featured here since he is, I’d say, partially responsible for his meeting in the
0:12:58 first place. Yeah, he told me definitely to go on your show. He said, “Lays of people, watch it,
0:13:02 and you’ve got a good sense of humor.” We’ll see. We’ll see about the sense of humor.
0:13:04 We’ll see later. Yeah, the jury is out. The jury is out.
0:13:11 I found in writing history, and I’m paraphrasing here, but I believe you’ve said before that
0:13:20 you’re cautious around the words, perhaps maybe possibly, especially probably, could you explain
0:13:24 why? Don’t use them. Don’t use them. They’re cheat words. What they’re saying to the reader is,
0:13:29 “I haven’t worked hard enough on this. I don’t know. I’m going to just come up with some kind of
0:13:34 theory here. Bear with me.” You shouldn’t do that. If the person’s paid $40 for your book,
0:13:37 he or she is going to want to think you know what you’re talking about.
0:13:46 So if something is a great story, and you’re not sure it’s true, but nonetheless, it’s funny,
0:13:50 or it shines a light onto personality, or for some reason, there’s a great reason
0:13:56 why you need to put it in the book. There are loads of ways that you can hint to the reader.
0:14:02 You can say, “It is said that,” or, “The story is told that,” or, “Anecdotally,
0:14:08 people stated that,” and that’s the signal to the reader. This is probably not true at all.
0:14:11 Someone’s hedging the bet. Yeah, but it’s too good to leave out.
0:14:17 But perhaps probably a maybe and so on. There you really are hedging your bets.
0:14:20 And I think it breaks the bond of trust that you need to have with your reader.
0:14:28 Would you mind speaking to the importance of steady nerves or self-control in crisis? It seems
0:14:36 that that’s something that recurs. And the reason I’m asking about it is, this would be, I suppose,
0:14:41 a sub-question. How much of it do you think is nature versus nurture also? But feel free to take
0:14:48 that in any direction you like. Both Napoleon and Churchill were educated in war.
0:14:54 You know, they both went to military colleges. So as their level of command grew, as they grew
0:14:59 older, the sense of responsibilities they had, the number of men, essentially, that they were
0:15:06 controlling increased exponentially. So they had the intellectual background.
0:15:13 They had the training as well. And as young men in both cases, they thought a lot about war,
0:15:20 about Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great and so on. They had a egotism to look at it in the
0:15:26 negative way, but a self-confidence to look at it in a positive way that gave them the ability to
0:15:33 take these shatteringly important decisions. So I think it’s much more nurture than the nature.
0:15:39 And, you know, in both cases, as far as they were concerned, there was a sort of holy fire
0:15:43 that they both had. There was a, not only in a religious sense, obviously, because neither of
0:15:49 them were at all religious, but in a sort of deeper spiritual sense, a belief that what they were
0:15:57 doing was so good and right and proper and had to be done that they were not kept up awake at night
0:16:04 over even the death of friends. Death of friends that they were responsible for.
0:16:08 They were responsible for. In the cases of Churchill and Napoleon, we could bring up other
0:16:11 names, or I suppose when you’re doing the Royal Weir, you could bring up other names.
0:16:18 Were there particular philosophers or writers that they found particularly instructive,
0:16:23 who they leaned on in some sense, that they found solace in, were there particular minds?
0:16:28 Well, certainly Churchill did because he was a huge reader. He was a massive
0:16:33 autodidact. He never went to university. And so, therefore, when he was a young
0:16:40 Subbleton in India in his early twenties, he sat down and read the great philosophers as well as
0:16:49 writers. And he was particularly influenced by Gibbon and Macaulay, the two great 19th century
0:16:55 historians, English historians, and that affected his writing style and, of course, later his
0:17:01 oratorical style, but also his outlook on life, philosophical outlook on life.
0:17:06 With regard to Napoleon, he was even more literary, really, because he also wrote short stories and
0:17:15 books and so on. And so, he was very much affected by what he read again as a young man.
0:17:22 And in both cases, it’s slightly, they were reading so much that it’s slightly cut them off
0:17:30 from their contemporaries. And Napoleon didn’t have many friends when he was in his early twenties.
0:17:37 And Churchill, when the other people were off sleeping in the midday heat of India,
0:17:43 his colleagues and comrades, he’d be sitting there reading Chopin and Gibbon and Macaulay and so on.
0:17:47 How did Gibbon and Macaulay inform his philosophical leanings?
0:17:54 They made him into what was called, at the time, a wig. We don’t have them today,
0:18:00 obviously, but they were, in modern sense, I suppose, liberal conservatives who believed in
0:18:03 noblesse oblige in the importance. What is that? I’m sorry.
0:18:10 Noblesse oblige. It’s almost a medieval concept where your duty, if you have privilege,
0:18:17 is to work for the great good of the community to protect widows and orphans. It’s sort of like
0:18:24 the nightly chivalric concept that you get from the Middle Ages. And they very much believed in
0:18:29 that. And so did Churchill. Let me ask about Napoleon. So I know shockingly little about
0:18:33 Napoleon. I’m embarrassed to admit, and I do want to ask more about Churchill as well. But
0:18:38 you’ve described him as the prime exemplar of war leadership. Why do you say that?
0:18:45 There are lots of military leaders who can do a lot of things, but he was the only one that I
0:18:50 can think of who could do all of them. Of course, it helps if you’re winning. In the last three years
0:18:58 of his military career, he was losing. But even then, even when he had far fewer troops, when he
0:19:04 was retreating, when he was defending Paris in the 1814 campaign, for example, he was still able
0:19:10 to win five victories in seven days. In the 1814 campaign, that’s two years after the retreat from
0:19:17 Moscow. It’s quite extraordinary capacity. And he was able to win whether he was advancing or
0:19:22 retreating, whether he was defending a town or attacking it, whether he was attacking on the
0:19:28 right or left flank or sometimes straight through the center, as at Austerlitz. He had that capacity,
0:19:35 that mind for military conquest, but also, of course, the greatness that was required
0:19:41 completely to revolutionize French society. People think that the French Revolution revolutionized
0:19:47 society. The clues in the name, as it were. But in fact, the long lasting things that actually
0:19:55 dragged France into the 19th century were things like the Code Napoleon, which were not a revolutionary
0:20:01 concept. They were a Napoleonic concept. This may seem like a lazy question, but since I’m
0:20:07 operating from a deficit here with respect to knowledge of Napoleon, what do you think it was
0:20:13 that allowed him to be a decathlete of war, as it were, being good at all of these different facets?
0:20:19 And I think of how we might analyze different athletes and what allows them to exercise the
0:20:24 capabilities we see, sort of breaking it down into its component parts. But how would you describe
0:20:27 what enabled him to do that where others were unable?
0:20:34 It was inspiration, but also perspiration. He really did put in the time, thinking about it
0:20:41 and reading about it by it, I mean warfare. And of course, he’d been educated in it.
0:20:49 He read the key books. There’s a guy called the Comte de Giver, who in 1772 wrote a book about
0:20:58 strategy and tactics. And he, 30 years later, put these into operation. And so he was able to spot
0:21:04 the sort of best of the best when it came to a modern thinking and to, or in this case, 30 year
0:21:09 old thinking, in fact, that didn’t matter because the weapons of war hadn’t changed in the intervening
0:21:18 period. And he was able to put those thoughts and ideas into practical use, the classic example
0:21:21 being the core system. And when he- What was it called?
0:21:32 It’s called the core system. It’s basically CORPS. And what he did with them was to create
0:21:38 mini armies, essentially, which were able to march separately, but converge and concentrate
0:21:44 for the battle. And so one of your core would engage the enemy, and then he would use the other
0:21:50 cores to outmaneuver and envelop the enemy, sometimes double envelop the enemy. It was a
0:21:56 brilliant concept. And actually, the allies didn’t start beating Napoleon until they had also adopted
0:22:03 the core system. He was always at the cutting edge of thinking of the new concepts. And at the same
0:22:12 time, he had very old fashioned views about how to excite the men. And he, I mean, victory, obviously,
0:22:18 is the best thing when it comes to excite the men. Exactly. Nothing much works better than that.
0:22:23 But as I say, he was still winning at the end of his career. But he had this belief that
0:22:31 to appeal to the soul was the way to electrify the men. And so he was able to do that. And some
0:22:35 people who he was against, Duke of Wellington, the British general, being the classic example,
0:22:40 who won the Battle of Waterloo against him, it wasn’t interesting electrifying the soul of the
0:22:46 men at all. He despised his ordinary soldiers. But nonetheless, you’re talking about Wellington?
0:22:53 Duke of Wellington, he had some sort of choice negative remarks about his own soldiers. And he
0:23:00 was a rather sort of stuffy aristocrat. But they loved him because he cared about how many of them
0:23:06 died in battle. And he never lost the battle as well, which is a very useful thing in a commander
0:23:12 needless to say. But he didn’t try. He didn’t go out. He would think it beneath him to go out and
0:23:19 try to inspire the men. Whereas Napoleon, his choice of hats and his great coats and his way
0:23:25 of taking off medals, his own medals and giving them to soldiers on the battlefield and his orders
0:23:32 of the day, his proclamations before the Battle of the Pyramids in 1799, he said, 40 centuries look
0:23:36 down upon you. And this is an extraordinary thing for a soldier, you know, in Egypt far away from
0:23:43 home. He looks up at the pyramids and thinks, yeah, he’s placing the events of that day in the long
0:23:49 historical parabola. And Churchill did that too, by the way, of course, to a great degree. In about
0:23:56 10% of all of the speeches that Churchill gave in 1940, there’s some reference to history all the
0:24:03 past. He too would summon up the idea that yes, Britain is on its own, Britain and the British
0:24:07 Commonwealth are on their own. And this of course was in the period before America and Russia were
0:24:13 in the war. But we’ve been in terrible straits before. Look at Sir Francis Drake, look at Admiral
0:24:19 Nelson, and so on. And we came through those and won. He also brought up the First World War a lot.
0:24:26 So yes, he too drew on history. And people knew that because he’d written history books and written
0:24:31 biographies, including the biography of his great ancestor, the First Duke of Marlborough,
0:24:36 he was with Wellington, the best soldier that Britain ever produced. People trusted his view
0:24:42 of history. So instead of biographies, I’d like to ask about autobiography. It’s my impression
0:24:48 that you recommend that young people read my early life. And that there are life lessons contained
0:24:55 within it that perhaps might help young people. What types of good advice or life lessons
0:25:00 can people expect to find in that book? Or does anything stand out to you?
0:25:06 Oh, yes. Well, loads of them. I mean, resilience is the classic one. Although he doesn’t go in
0:25:13 this book into criticising his parents, even between the lines, Churchill was tremendously
0:25:19 resilient because his father despised him and his mother ignored him, essentially. But in the actual
0:25:25 book itself, he talks about how wonderful it is to be young, 20 to 25, those are the years,
0:25:30 he says people will forgive you for mistakes you make in that period. It’s not until you’re 30
0:25:35 that people judge you on what you’ve achieved rather than your promise and so on. So it’s a,
0:25:40 he writes about his time, his escape from prison, for example, which, let’s face it,
0:25:46 there is no young man or woman who hasn’t at some stage dreamt about the idea of a successful
0:25:51 prison escape. He took part in the last Great Cavalry Charge of the British Empire. And so he
0:25:58 writes about what it’s like to charge in with Lancers in, he himself had a pistol in a Great
0:26:04 Cavalry Charge. You know, these are, it’s just the most exciting book. And it draws you along
0:26:11 with life lessons that are very good, I think, even for today at a time when you’re, frankly,
0:26:14 unlikely to have to escape from prison or take part in a Cavalry Charge.
0:26:19 Or it’ll just be very unsuccessful at attempting to escape prison.
0:26:26 Modern lockdown. I can’t let this go. It’s sticking in my mind, the core strategy,
0:26:30 I’m not sure strategy is the right modifier for that, but that Napoleon used, it seems like that
0:26:37 was waiting to be used. But it took him to be in the position, of course, of Emperor France,
0:26:42 whereby he could impose it. But equally, there are other things like the Code Napoleon that
0:26:48 were not really waiting to be used. He had to sort of work them up into a body of laws that
0:26:54 are completely revolutionized at France. Now, when he took the writing from 30 years prior
0:27:01 and applied it, is it the position that enabled him to do it? Or did he think about risk differently
0:27:05 than other people? And that is part of what allowed him to implement it.
0:27:13 He’d taken huge risks. He was 26 years old. And according to the Churchill view of life,
0:27:17 you can take risks when you’re 26 years old because people will forgive you. Actually,
0:27:22 the French Revolution, government would not have forgiven Napoleon if he’d lost the army of Italy
0:27:30 in 1796. But nonetheless, he was a huge risk taker. He would attack when normal generals would have
0:27:35 fallen back. He was very lucky in that he was fighting, he was 26, he was fighting generals
0:27:43 who were Austrian generals who were in their 70s. He used to hit the hinge of enemy forces. If you
0:27:49 have in an Austrian Sardinian army, for example, he would hit the point between the Austrians and
0:27:55 the Sardinians, pushing them both back along their own supply lines and so on. He used psychology,
0:28:01 a great deal trying to get into the minds of the generals he was opposed to. He was a great
0:28:07 chooser of lieutenants, of divisional commanders and people who he felt he could trust. Superb sense
0:28:14 of timing as well in a battle. He was, as I say, the sort of exemplar of so many of the
0:28:20 leadership tropes. Do you think he would have viewed his decisions from the outside that look
0:28:27 risky as risky? If someone takes uncalculated risks over and over again, then you could call
0:28:33 them reckless. But at least to face value, that’s not maybe the adjective I would use.
0:28:38 They came off. This is the thing. In the Italian campaign, this first great campaign of his,
0:28:48 he hardly lost a battle. He fought 20 and 119 of them. If you do that, even though you have taken
0:28:53 risks, it’s a sort of force multiplier in a sense. You wind up thinking that they aren’t as risky.
0:28:58 He did believe in luck, which was very important. He famously said that he wanted his marshals to
0:29:04 be lucky. He would promote people if he thought they were lucky. That, of course, runs against
0:29:11 everything that we 21st century rationalists can possibly believe in, but it worked for him.
0:29:19 Yeah, it seems to have worked. Until it doesn’t. Until it doesn’t promote the unlucky guy.
0:29:26 The decision in 1812 to march on Moscow was hugely risky and, of course, it didn’t pay off.
0:29:29 Is it true that you have a signed letter from Albus Huxley?
0:29:32 I do. All right. Now, Albus Huxley, I believe.
0:29:34 Oh, so sweet English. Albus.
0:29:40 You know, I’ve realized the longer I spend in England, I really need to, I think I should take
0:29:45 TOEFL classes. Test of English is a foreign language. Need to brush up on the mother tongue,
0:29:51 as it were. He died if I’m not wrong the year you were born. I think it was.
0:29:54 Why do you have that letter? And what does the letter say?
0:30:01 The letter actually was written from Los Angeles, where he was living in the 1950s. It was in 1959.
0:30:06 Somebody just wrote to him asking for his autograph. Obviously, he also asked,
0:30:10 “I don’t have the letter from the autograph hunter.” But he obviously asked for some
0:30:18 sort of deep, meaningful thought. And the deep, meaningful thought that Huxley gave him.
0:30:23 And I’m a huge admirer of Huxley, Eilish and Gaza, and obviously Brave New Worlds,
0:30:28 and so on, wonderful works. And he said in this letter that men do not learn
0:30:34 much from the lessons of history is one of the most important of all the lessons that history
0:30:40 has to teach us. And that is so true, isn’t it? I mean, there’s not a book that I’ve written.
0:30:43 I’ve written 20 books. There’s not a book that I’ve written when I haven’t looked
0:30:49 across that frame letter in my study and thought, “Wow, that is just so perceptive.”
0:30:55 So, I have a question about the subtitle of your biography on Churchill, which you believe
0:31:00 is “Walking With Destiny.” You mentioned this holy fire, I think, is the term you used earlier.
0:31:07 But do many of the leaders you’ve studied have this belief, and I may not be wording
0:31:11 this the best way, but of being chosen by destiny in some fashion?
0:31:21 The phrase comes from his remark in the last chapter of the last few pages of his war memoirs,
0:31:24 the first volume of his war memoirs, “The Gathering Storm,” wonderful book.
0:31:30 And he’s referring to the day that he became Prime Minister, the day he was appointed by
0:31:35 the King as Prime Minister, which happened to be coincidentally, as it turned out, because Hitler
0:31:40 didn’t know he was going to become Prime Minister, on the same day that Hitler invaded in the West,
0:31:45 invaded Belgium and Luxembourg and Holland shortly afterwards, of course, to invade France.
0:31:50 And he said, “I felt as if I were walking with destiny and that all my past life had been
0:31:58 but a preparation for this hour and for this trial.” And he had a profound sense of personal
0:32:04 destiny. Now, you and I might think as 21st-century rationalists that this is a bit sort of mad
0:32:11 to think that you’re preordained to save, in this case, Britain and civilization. If you
0:32:16 said that to me, that that was your belief about yourself, I would think that you were clinically
0:32:23 insane. But enough things had happened to Churchill in his life. He had had so many close brushes
0:32:29 with death that it’s not insane to think that. But it’s not by any means just… And Napoleon
0:32:35 also felt that he had a star to guide him. And he had the luck that we spoke about earlier,
0:32:42 but that luck, who was a woman in his case, was somebody he needed to woo and to try to seduce.
0:32:49 And of course, in 1812, she turns her back on him and he speaks of her in that sense.
0:32:55 Which is also a pretty insane way to look at life, isn’t it? But they were both, as I mentioned
0:33:01 earlier, devotees of the ancients, of Caesar and Alexander the Great, both of whom also of course
0:33:07 had this driving sense of personal destiny. And so it does exist in people.
0:33:13 If you could, I’ll give you two options. Stand in, meaning take the place of one of the people you’ve
0:33:20 studied in depth, or just simply witness them in a given moment or day or period in their lives.
0:33:26 What might you choose? Well, first of all, I wouldn’t want to stand in their place at all.
0:33:32 I know that I don’t have the intestinal fortitude of these extraordinary people,
0:33:37 but it would be the day that I just mentioned. It would be the 10th of May, 1940, the day that
0:33:43 Hitler’s invading the cabinet meets and recognizes that Neville Chamberlain is
0:33:50 not the man to continue on the war now that it’s turned to the West. And the meetings that took
0:33:57 place the previous day and that day, whereby Neville Chamberlain goes to the king and suggests
0:34:02 Churchill. And the king wasn’t terribly excited about Churchill either because they’d fallen
0:34:06 out over the abdication crisis and he thought Churchill was a bit of a loose cannon. But
0:34:11 nonetheless, he’s willing to call Churchill. Churchill then goes to Buckingham Palace and
0:34:17 becomes prime minister and comes back and starts to organize his government as the news is coming
0:34:23 in of the German success and victories on the Western front. I mean, this is what a day,
0:34:28 what a day in history that must have been. So if I could be a fly on the wall any day in history,
0:34:35 that’s the day that I would choose. Can we just go back though to this concept of a sense of
0:34:43 destiny because of course, it isn’t just great men as in good men, positive forces in history
0:34:49 that has this. Adolf Hitler also had a sense of destiny when he was in providence and luck and
0:34:55 being watched over by bigger forces and so on. When he survived his assassination attempt on the 20th
0:35:02 of July 1944, when you remember Staufenberg moves the briefcase with a bomb in it to a point in the
0:35:08 table that just shreds Hitler’s trousers when it goes off and doesn’t kill him. He also put it down
0:35:14 to providence that he had been allowed to survive and therefore to stay in charge and the Fuhrer
0:35:19 was going to save the Fatherland and the Reich. So it’s not something I don’t want your viewers
0:35:25 and listeners to come away thinking that it’s a really good thing to think that you’re being
0:35:30 watched over by a more powerful force who’s saving you to become the world-saving figure.
0:35:38 You can cut a lot of different ways. I think of David Curesh and cult leaders and Jim Jones down
0:35:43 in Ghana where he was. All of these fruits and crooks and corn men use it as well.
0:35:50 Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we’ll be right back to the show.
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0:37:22 Are there any particular weaknesses or pathologies or failures that come to mind
0:37:28 in, say, Churchill and Napoleon or others who helped to make them ultimately great in the
0:37:32 ways that they were great? Oh, definitely. Definitely. The key thing is learning from mistakes,
0:37:39 which not all politicians do, I need to scarcely point out. But Churchill certainly did. He made
0:37:44 mistake after mistake. He got female suffrage wrong. The abdication crisis that I mentioned
0:37:51 earlier, he joined the gold standard at the wrong time at the wrong level. The blackened hands in
0:37:57 Ireland was a disaster. Primarily, of course, the Dardanelles crisis of 1915 to early 1916,
0:38:04 where over 100,000 Allied troops were killed, wounded or captured. This was a series of mistakes.
0:38:11 In every single one of them, he learned from those mistakes. How did he do that? Because
0:38:15 there’s probably, I would think, maybe some method behind the madness. Maybe it’s just
0:38:19 more self-awareness or reflection. But did he have a process for learning?
0:38:25 He wasn’t hubristic. That was the key thing. I think it probably helps also, of course,
0:38:31 to do is in the democratic system, unlike Napoleon or Hitler, whereby he was criticised
0:38:35 the entire time in the House of Commons for all of those things, and he had to defend them,
0:38:41 and therefore had to, in a logical and rational point. I mean, democracy worked very well at
0:38:47 pricking the pomposity and hubris of people if it’s working properly. And Napoleon also learned
0:38:53 from mistakes in his military career. And I don’t believe that the decision to march on Moscow itself
0:39:01 was hubristic. I’m slightly aside from a lot of military historians about this. But just to
0:39:08 explain, he’d beaten the Russians twice before. He had an army twice the size of the Russians.
0:39:12 He knew perfectly well that the winter was going to come. He’d stayed too long in Moscow. But if
0:39:18 he’d gone to Moscow and then come back again immediately, he would not have had the climactic
0:39:24 disasters that overcame him with the blizzards in the October and November of 1812. And so
0:39:31 you have this sense that, yes, it was a appalling strategic error, but it wasn’t done out of a
0:39:37 drive because he thought he was a sort of demigod. That, I think, is a misunderstanding of his
0:39:44 personality. So I’m going to ask something that Neil Ferguson of Colossus on the Shelf
0:39:49 put in an email. I would ask Andrew about the diary he keeps, which is a source of intense
0:39:54 anxiety. He’s obsessed with this. Okay, finish the rest of it. Which is a source of intense
0:39:58 anxiety to all of his friends and even more to his enemies. Best wishes, Neil.
0:40:05 Neil doesn’t care about any of that. He’s only cares about what I say about him. He is the friend
0:40:13 who is obsessed with the diary. Yes, I keep a diary. For God’s sake, is it such a crime?
0:40:21 We went on the skiing holiday this year and it’s all he talked about. He’s obsessed.
0:40:25 Is it the forbidden fruit? What is the story here?
0:40:30 I think he’s kicking himself that he didn’t keep on. You think of all these extraordinary
0:40:37 people he meets. Every time I see him, he’s just been talking to President G or Bibi Netanyahu
0:40:42 or President of America. And he doesn’t write down and keep it all in the diary. So I think
0:40:49 there’s an element of envy going on here, frankly. But I find it very relaxing and calming
0:40:56 to think that my life isn’t just going to be a complete waste of time.
0:41:03 And one of the only ways that I can… I can see that. Thank you. Well, that’s kind of you. Thank you.
0:41:11 One of the only ways that I can justify this concept that it’s all not just a sort of, you know,
0:41:17 nihilistic sort of maelstrom. Boondoggle. Boondoggle, exactly. Is by writing books,
0:41:22 obviously, which I hope will survive me, but also noting down what I’ve done in the day. But
0:41:28 nihil is convinced that every time he says anything embarrassing or something, I’m going
0:41:33 to be… You’re just loading the ammo into your diary. Exactly. And then when we’re sort of 80,
0:41:42 he’s going to go to the bookshop, buy the diary, flick to Ferguson, Neil, and see sort of 40 entries,
0:41:48 each of which is going to make his face go red at the following charges. Exactly. Which it’s not
0:41:53 going to be like that at all. What he’s actually going to do is to immediately go to the diary and
0:41:58 look up Ferguson, Neil. But see all the amusing, charming, intelligent remarks he’s made, the
0:42:02 witchisms, you know, and all that kind of thing. And not just him, obviously, everybody I’ve ever
0:42:09 met over the last 40 plus years. And how do you keep your diary? You’re on your metal now. You’re
0:42:15 going to have to, I’m going to say, went on to be on best behavior. Exactly. What an idiot.
0:42:22 Note to self, send chocolates to Andrew. Don’t forget his birthday.
0:42:29 Now, there are many, many people who keep a diary. How do you keep your diary? Is it
0:42:36 nightly exercise? Is it typed out as a pen, as a quill pen? You mustn’t do it nightly because,
0:42:41 or at least you might be able to, but I drink. And so, I like drinking to it.
0:42:46 Yeah. And so there’s nothing worse than trying to write. If you’ve been drinking also,
0:42:51 writing down the witch-isms, sometimes there’s a bit of a problem, to the fact that I can’t
0:42:56 read my writing that morning. But no, it has to be done pretty much the next morning. You can’t
0:43:01 leave it for two weeks or so. Do you do it with what’s your frequency? I used to write it every
0:43:06 day. I used to write it. Oh, no, but if nothing interesting has happened, then I won’t put anything
0:43:14 down. Nothing to report. Yeah, no. It’s all like Louis XVI on the 14th of July, 1789,
0:43:18 the day of the fall of the Bastille. All he writes is, “Rian, nothing.”
0:43:25 So I hope I’m not going to be quite as moronic as that. It’s not really intended for publication,
0:43:29 which is another thing that Neil doesn’t understand. He’s going to latch on to the really
0:43:34 part of that sentence. He’s going to be like, “You see? You see?” Yeah. No, of course he is.
0:43:38 But nonetheless, I do find it, well, you mentioned earlier about how many words I write. It’s never
0:43:44 more than about 500 words maximum. And it picks the most interesting part of the day.
0:43:49 And if somebody has said or done something interesting, I’ll stick it in.
0:43:52 Do you do that before your book writing? Let’s say you’re on YouTube.
0:43:54 Yes, first thing in the morning.
0:43:57 All right. And is that just like pajama slippers and a cup of coffee or…?
0:43:59 Yeah, so I see that. Yeah, all right, great. Exactly.
0:44:07 And do you take…? This seems like such a ridiculous question, but how do you think about
0:44:10 taking breaks when you’re writing? I mean, obviously, you might have a bathroom break or
0:44:14 something like that. Do you build in breaks? Do you write the flow as long as you have it?
0:44:16 What does it look like? The flow as long as you have it. Absolutely. Yeah,
0:44:23 yeah, yeah. Because it might not come back if you deliberately have a break sometimes.
0:44:30 And I’m slightly loath to admit this public, but unless sometimes, if you are really flowing,
0:44:37 I can go without washing for three days. I can be in my dressing gown and slippers. My wife finds
0:44:42 it extremely unhygienic and I’m not allowed to sleep in the same bed. But I will, if I’m running
0:44:50 hard at a really difficult chapter and I need to keep my thoughts in order, I will not waste
0:44:56 time doing anything. I’ll get some breakfast and so on, but that will just be a dash to the kitchen
0:45:01 and back again. Because you’ve got to get… If something’s complicated, and there are lots of
0:45:07 occasions, another classic as well, we go back to the 10th of May, 1940, that in my Churchill book,
0:45:12 you have to get it right because every minute, not just every hour, every minute something is
0:45:18 happening, they’re getting news from what the love father’s attacking and he’s then having to
0:45:21 create his government. He then goes off to the House of Commons and so on.
0:45:29 It’s just relentless. And unless you encapsulate in your mind successfully what is important
0:45:34 about that day, you’ll never get it over to the reader. And if you’re constantly going off and
0:45:38 going for a walk or going to the gym or showering or whatever, there’s a danger that you’re going
0:45:45 to fall out of the rhythm of creativity. How do you think about that flow when you have the flow?
0:45:49 I mean, there is… A hastened ride is never more than three days I’ve ever gone without a shower.
0:45:54 I wouldn’t judge. I was just on a hiking trip. I went 10 days without showering,
0:46:00 so I don’t judge. I won’t throw stones in my glasshouse. It’s only when I’m right in the book.
0:46:06 I hastened to add that as well, God. I don’t want people to come up and show off their nose and go,
0:46:12 “Hello, Andrew.” How do you think about that flow with writing? So there’s one reason not to interrupt
0:46:19 the writing. If you have a hard task ahead of you and you have 47 balls in the air and if you drop
0:46:23 them, you’re going to have to start the juggling process all over again. The boot up sequence
0:46:32 takes a long time. How do you think about the flow of writing or that feeling that things are coming
0:46:38 to you more easily or moving on to the page more easily? Sometimes it’s a very bad thing. Of course,
0:46:44 Dr. Johnson did say when you have written your most brilliant purple paragraph,
0:46:48 read it again and rip it up. Tell him more about that.
0:46:52 Oh, yeah. Well, if you think that you’ve just written something completely brilliant,
0:46:58 there’s a very good chance that it’s rubbish. It has to be somebody else. It has to be your
0:47:04 publisher or some other person who can read it and have a completely objective eye,
0:47:08 because there’s a very good chance that you’re hugging yourself with glee about something that
0:47:12 actually you think sounds wonderful. But in fact, it’s complete. It’s complete.
0:47:16 Be the name of my memoir, Hugging Yourself with Glee. I’ll write that down. Give you your
0:47:22 customary 5%. That’s fine. If you had to choose, maybe you don’t want to choose from your darlings
0:47:26 here, but if this question has an answer, you don’t even need to name them, but you keep a
0:47:31 person in mind. If you had to choose one person to act as your proofreader for your work, to be
0:47:36 that sanity check. He’s called Stuart Prophet. He’s the most brilliant publisher in London.
0:47:41 He’s known by everybody to be the most brilliant. He’s also the most irritating,
0:47:48 he, oh my God, for my Napoleon book. He’s going to listen to this, so I’m going to have to be as
0:47:55 nice as possible. But he’s Professor Perfect is my nickname for it, because he’s a total professorial
0:48:02 kind of figure. And for my Napoleon book, I remember a series of marginalia. And again,
0:48:06 this is the thing where you think you’ve done something rather good. And he writes,
0:48:10 well, one of the things he wrote in the moment, are you sure this joke is funny?
0:48:16 Nothing more crushing than to have that. He also wrote…
0:48:22 Strangely, he’s very British also. Exactly. Question mark, you know. And you read it again,
0:48:30 you chortle to yourself, and you go, yes, it is funny. And you go, damn it. But he wrote,
0:48:34 there were a whole series of them in the, well, we were talking earlier about the 1796 campaign
0:48:41 of Napoleon. He said, how wide was the River Poe in 1796? There was another one, did Napoleon
0:48:48 take Herodotus to Egypt? I don’t know, I’m going to have to find out, you know. He’s a genius,
0:48:55 but also a very irritating person. Could you say more about what makes him so good?
0:49:00 I’ll buy some time just by saying, if I can’t find a writer friend of mine, let’s just say,
0:49:06 or an editor who can proofread my work, I’ll very often give, and I write a particular type of thing,
0:49:11 but I would give my chapter, let’s just say, to a friend who’s a really good lawyer. And part
0:49:17 of the reason for that is that they’re very good at trimming out excess. And if anything is ambiguous,
0:49:22 they’re good. Or contradictory. Or contradictory. They’re very good at surgically excising that.
0:49:26 What makes this particular gentleman, what was his name again, Stuart?
0:49:32 Stuart Prophet. Great man. What makes Stuart so good at giving feedback?
0:49:44 Does he see things differently? He’s a profoundly committed to history. He loves history. So he has
0:49:50 a sort of higher purpose to try to flood the world with great history books, which is, as far as I’m
0:49:53 concerned, the greatest purpose that you can have. I mean, he doesn’t get better than that.
0:50:02 He has a very logical brain. He’s very good on syntax. So anything that doesn’t sound right
0:50:09 in a sentence, he will point out. Sometimes to have sound right from a poetic perspective.
0:50:16 If there’s a rhythm that isn’t right, or if something rhymes as well, sometimes you can
0:50:21 use two words that have a rhyme in them, and he will cut that automatically because it just
0:50:26 doesn’t feel right. Sit well with his sensibilities. Precisely. And mine, I hasten to add, because I very
0:50:33 rarely actually disagree with him. I did on the joke, by the way. And whenever anybody tells me
0:50:38 that that particular joke is funny, I forward it to him. I forward it to him. I ping the email
0:50:46 straight on to Stuart. Of course I do. I’d be mad not to, wouldn’t I? But no, there’s a, I mean,
0:50:50 and he’s been doing it for 40 years. And he’s at the top of his trade. So you would expect him to
0:50:55 be really good, but boy is he. So those two examples you gave, the width of the river and
0:51:03 Herodotus, why did he ask those two? Because he is always trying to put himself into the
0:51:10 mind of the reader and wondering what the reader would be thinking. And he thought, rightly or
0:51:14 wrongly in this case, that the reader would be interested in the width of the river and whether
0:51:19 or not Herodotus went with him. But there are loads more examples like that. I will send him
0:51:25 100 pages and he’ll send me back 100 pages of questions and criticisms and remarks. I almost
0:51:30 sometimes think that I ought to put his name on the front cover of the book. He phoned me up,
0:51:36 actually, about the Napoleon book. And the original of Napoleon just had a huge N on it
0:51:42 and lots of Bs. And he phoned me up and he said, “I’ve got this idea for the front cover of the
0:51:48 book. Your name isn’t going to be on it.” And he said, “And neither is Napoleon.” And I thought,
0:51:54 over the phone, I thought, okay, he’s finally gone completely mad. Yeah, exactly. That’s right.
0:51:58 Poor man. How long can he stay in his job if he’s going to come up with ideas?
0:52:02 Hope he can fake it for a while. Yeah, exactly. But it can’t be long now.
0:52:08 And it turned out to be a totally brilliant concept because if you see a gigantic N with Bs,
0:52:13 you think of Napoleon. And that’s what… Bs as an absolute idiot.
0:52:18 Bs, like honeybees. Honeybees, yeah. That was his symbol. It was a Napoleon symbol
0:52:22 because they could sting but they could also give honey, you know, that was the idea.
0:52:27 And it just captured people’s imagination and sold an awful lot of copies, which was really great.
0:52:29 That’s sold half a million copies that book now. That’s incredible.
0:52:33 That is incredible. Sounds like such a gift to have a steward. I need a steward.
0:52:36 Yeah, everyone needs a steward. Everyone needs a steward. Don’t take mine.
0:52:43 No, I don’t… I don’t… I think you might find… You might spend his entire
0:52:47 first month on just the syntax errors in my first chapter.
0:52:49 You do want to strangle him, by the way, because…
0:52:52 This is the sign of a very good proofreader often.
0:53:00 Why do you think it is that some historical figures take on these mythic proportions where
0:53:08 some who have huge impacts seem to fall into obscurity over time? Are there particular characteristics?
0:53:16 Is it self-made, in a sense, where people create that myth of themselves while they’re still alive?
0:53:20 How do you think about that? I haven’t thought about that before. That’s a really good question.
0:53:27 I think that it’s a bit like… There are some things that are very difficult to get over to people
0:53:32 on the printed page. Charisma is one of them. Charm is another one. Sexy-ness.
0:53:38 These are things that we all know from our own lives matter enormously. If somebody is charismatic,
0:53:43 charming and sexy, you’re going to want to be interested in them, follow them much more than
0:53:50 somebody who isn’t, and yet explaining how they are, any of those things, very famously hard to
0:53:59 explain. I think the same is true with historical characters. How can it be that this unprepossessing,
0:54:05 looking American president who happens to, with his strange beard but not moustache,
0:54:12 who happens to be president at the time that the country is falling apart, manages to save
0:54:16 the country through this terrible, see it through this terrible civil war and then is
0:54:20 assassinated right at the end of the civil war? The story is so extraordinary, isn’t it?
0:54:25 Yet to explain the Charisma and Charm, not sexiness, I don’t think, you know,
0:54:30 Ram, Lincoln’s case, but many of your listeners or readers might disagree with me or none the
0:54:38 less. Just imagining him popping up on a dating app. Which he swiped right to the left for Abe,
0:54:43 Lincoln. Exactly. Might ride a fixed-gear bike, make expensive cappuccino. That’s kind of the
0:54:51 hipster look. Anyway, I digress. It is difficult to explain how some people just grab the headlines
0:54:57 and others don’t. I mean, of course, it does help to be a leader in a war. That’s true of Lincoln
0:55:04 and Churchill and Napoleon and so on. The chance of coming a world historical figure if you are
0:55:10 Prime Minister of Luxembourg in a time of peace is going to be much more difficult, of course.
0:55:14 But, yeah, there doesn’t seem to be a hard and fast rule, does there?
0:55:20 Hard and fast recipe. And I can follow. I’m just kidding. Well, don’t take us to war on the back
0:55:26 if you’re wanting to be memorable. I don’t think I’m capable. Certainly not eager. Makes me think
0:55:34 of, “What is the title of that poem? Ozymandias, Look Upon My Works in Despair.” I’ll leave that
0:55:39 alone. I met a traveler from an antique land who said, “Two vast and chunkless legs of stone stand
0:55:44 in the desert, and near them on the sand half shrunk and shattered visage lies, whose wrinkled
0:55:50 lip and snare of coal command tells that its sculpture well those passions read, which yet
0:55:56 survive. My name is Ozymandias. King of kings, look upon my works, almighty in despair. Nothing
0:56:03 besides remains round that eternal wreck, long and bare, the lone and level sand stretch far away.”
0:56:08 Hot damn. There you go, listeners. Can you point out to the listeners that
0:56:13 you didn’t tell me that this was going to happen? I did not. I did not send a memo in advance.
0:56:21 And I suppose the preface to that is that there are these ruins sticking out of the sands.
0:56:26 They’re the feet. The feet, that’s right. The trunks of the legs. So there was obviously
0:56:35 a huge, magnificent pyramid high, glorious statue to Ozymandias. And now there’s nothing.
0:56:38 And it goes back to what I was saying earlier about not being remembered.
0:56:43 Did you remember the… Now I’m going to, I feel like I’m cross examining, but asking too much.
0:56:47 But who is the author of that poem? P.S. B. Shelly.
0:56:55 I saw the one of, maybe the original, or certainly a first draft in Oxford,
0:56:59 because I was going through a program at Wadham College and there’s an exhibit on right now,
0:57:06 which is something like cut, paste, rewrite. And it shows the hand edited works of Mary Shelly,
0:57:10 Frankenstein, and all these others. And I came across that.
0:57:14 If anybody wants to see a first edition of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein,
0:57:21 it’s just gone on exhibition at the, I was there this morning, Lambeth Palace Library.
0:57:27 There’s a thing called Her Book. It’s about early female writers. It’s a brilliant exhibition.
0:57:33 And so if there’s anyone in London who’s interested in seeing that book, it’s there today.
0:57:38 Beautiful. And if you’re near Oxford, Western Library has the exhibit that I was mentioning,
0:57:43 a lot of gems, a lot of gems. You have some really fun old stuff in the UK, it turns out.
0:57:48 I’m not going to take that personally. No, no, no, no. That’s a compliment.
0:57:55 Yeah. Old in the US is like 1970, you know, it’s smaller. I thought you were talking about me.
0:58:08 How do you think about legacy? Because I, along the lines of Anya the Ozymandias piece, I’m like,
0:58:13 is it just sort of hubris to believe in the first place that that’s something worth aspiring to,
0:58:18 having something last and stand the test of time? I mean, how do you personally think about this?
0:58:20 Well, especially as someone who studies history.
0:58:26 Yes. And I obviously do want people to read my books long after I’ve died.
0:58:32 Now, I’m not going to know whether they are or not. So why on earth, it just seems so illogical to
0:58:38 even think that, doesn’t it? That it should matter to me that anything happens the second
0:58:46 after I’ve died. But I know that I do. And it is one of the drives for being a writer because words
0:58:53 always live forever. And they’re virtually the only thing that does. Ozymandias’ statue
0:58:57 is just two trunkless legs of stone. Whereas actually, his words, you know,
0:59:02 look upon my works, he mighty in despair, that goes to the heart of the human condition.
0:59:08 And Shelly’s poetry still survives in a way that Ozymandias’ statue doesn’t. So there is something
0:59:16 about words that are immortal. And we’re all sort of grasping for immortality in one way or another.
0:59:23 Oh, yeah. Same as true. Do you read fiction? Yes. Yes, I do. When I go on holiday, which is usually
0:59:31 hiking, actually, with my wife, she loves going to places that involve mountains. And in order to
0:59:38 get history completely out of my system for the two weeks or so that we’re hiking, I do read fiction.
0:59:45 Sometimes if I want to completely clear my brain, I’ll have a detective novel. And I’ve chosen the
0:59:50 most complicated of all of the detective novelists, a chap called Robert Goddard. Have you ever heard
0:59:56 of Robert Goddard? I have not. So complicated to work out who done it or what groups of people
1:00:04 done it. It’s very rarely just one person and why. And I try and make notes in the back of the book
1:00:09 connecting each person to everybody else. And so by the end of it, it looks like one of those
1:00:14 really complicated sort of management things. Oh, it’s like an order chart. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
1:00:20 With hundreds of people connecting to everybody else to try and work out who done it. And he
1:00:27 always, always beats me. Yeah, that sounds fun. Yeah, I’ve been getting… But as far as sort of
1:00:34 high culture writing is knowledge concerns, I will occasionally do that. I’m president of the
1:00:40 Clifton Literary Festival. And so we have lots of novelists come to that. And so if you’ve got
1:00:44 William Boyd or Salman Rushdie or somebody who you know you’re going to be bumping into at the
1:00:49 festival, it’s always a good idea to read their latest novel. We had Robert Harris recently. And
1:00:56 so that’s always well worth doing. And then there are a few writers like Michel Wellbeck who is
1:01:01 just so great that you have to sort of read whatever he brings out.
1:01:05 Is there… I don’t recognize the name. I’m embarrassed to say.
1:01:11 He’s a French writer. It’s pronounced hella beck. And he’s a genius, a very controversial and
1:01:17 quite unpopular in France. And the latest one I’m reading is where it features his own murder.
1:01:23 It’s a great satire. It’s very, very funny.
1:01:27 Is there a book you might suggest starting with or we’re going to start with one?
1:01:33 The Map and the Territory. The Map and the Territory of Michel Wellbeck.
1:01:40 The name starts H-E-L-L-E-B. And yeah, it’s a sort of satire on French
1:01:44 intellectual customs and… I can see them loving that.
1:01:45 It’s very funny. It’s very funny.
1:01:47 Why is he controversial?
1:01:49 Oh, because he’s been deeply politically incorrect as well.
1:01:55 Oh, he just doesn’t care. He just doesn’t care what he writes.
1:01:57 He’s a honey badger in that sense. Do you know what I mean?
1:01:59 I do. I do. I do.
1:02:02 He’s a literary honey badger as Wellbeck.
1:02:07 Very honey badger. All right, so it’s being politically incorrect.
1:02:14 How should we, in your mind, write about imperial history?
1:02:21 We should try as far as possible to be genuinely objective.
1:02:26 We shouldn’t take the assumption that all white people, whenever they went abroad,
1:02:30 did so solely in order to rape, murder, massacre, and exploit.
1:02:35 Because certainly in the latter parts, we were talking earlier about Winston Churchill
1:02:41 and the Noblesse Ablige, the concept that it was part of your duty as a privileged person
1:02:46 to try to make the world a better place for other less privileged people.
1:02:51 And that was, especially in the last part of the British Empire,
1:02:55 a driving force for a lot of people, especially, obviously, missionaries and Christians,
1:03:02 but also other people, explorers and people who are involved in agriculture and so on.
1:03:06 You know, they actually were not driven by rapacity and greed
1:03:11 in the way that essentially the Marxist analysis of imperialism has made out.
1:03:14 So be objective. Some of those people were like that.
1:03:20 Undoubtedly, of course, they were, you know, especially some of the people in Southern Africa
1:03:25 and elsewhere. But for a long period of the story of the British Empire,
1:03:31 for much of that empire, it actually was a force for human good rather than evil.
1:03:40 What do you see as the challenges moving forward for the capturing of history?
1:03:44 And/or how do you see it changing as we move forward?
1:03:50 I am quite worried about it in Britain because, first of all, fewer and fewer people seem to be
1:03:54 taking it as a subject at a university level.
1:03:57 Secondly, we have this thing, it’s nicknamed Henry to Hitler,
1:04:03 where we jump from the Tudors to the Second World War, and we don’t do the very important
1:04:09 intervening stages of the stewards, the Civil War, the Hanoverians, the loss of America,
1:04:12 the really anything up to the outbreak of the First World War.
1:04:18 And there’s so much of really important history in that period
1:04:24 that we seem to jump from one to the next. There was a survey quite recently of British
1:04:28 teenagers, quite a big survey, over a thousand of them. And 20% of them
1:04:36 thought, like 23% of them, thought that the American War of Independence was won by Denzel
1:04:40 Washington. You know, and the Americans get a bad round.
1:04:42 Yeah, I know, I know, exactly.
1:04:43 It’s not just us.
1:04:48 And also, there were 20% of these kids, these are British school kids,
1:04:52 who also thought that Winston Churchill was a fictional character.
1:04:55 And that Sherlock Holmes and Eleanor Rigby were real people.
1:05:02 So whatever’s going on in British history teaching, I think there’s still a lot to be desired.
1:05:08 If you had never been able to write any books in that alternate reality,
1:05:14 what have you personally, or what would you have gained personally from studying history?
1:05:18 It’s a lot of things, isn’t it, history? It can be a bit of a quicksand.
1:05:19 In what sense?
1:05:27 Well, as soon as you think you understand a period, all it takes is one new set of
1:05:34 papers or a new book written by somebody else, the friends especially, that can make you look
1:05:40 again at the same period and completely change your mind about it. And that’s a little unnerving
1:05:46 at the age of 61, I have to say. I’m just reading Ronald Hutton’s second volume of his life of
1:05:53 Oliver Cromwell, which has just been published. And I’d always thought of Cromwell as somebody who
1:06:02 had a set of principles that he moulded his times around in order to see through.
1:06:08 And Ronald Hutton has completely exploded that thesis for me. And I realised that he was,
1:06:14 like most politicians, just sort of grabbing the coattails of history and hanging on as much as he
1:06:21 could. And yes, he was a good soldier and so on. But he was, in terms of his politics, he was
1:06:25 constantly trying to create alliances, of course, like all politicians do,
1:06:29 and when opportunities came, he grabbed them. But he was at the mercy of events much more than
1:06:35 creating them. Whereas I had for years had the sort of image of Oliver Cromwell like that statue
1:06:40 outside Parliament of this incredibly solid figure. He wasn’t like that at all.
1:06:45 What are other things that attracted you to history?
1:06:51 It wasn’t just Christopher Perry. My dad read history at Oxford. And he used to take me around
1:06:57 castles. We go on holiday to Wales and see the great Edward the First Castles.
1:07:03 And he would chat to on journeys we’d chat about history and what ifs, the counterfactuals and
1:07:11 things like that. And so I grew up feeling very comfortable with it and recognising that it’s a
1:07:18 beautiful and fascinating thing. Whereas I think sometimes some people can be not scared of history,
1:07:24 but they can be put off history because they weren’t taught it very well at school, or they
1:07:28 just thought it was a succession of dates, or they can’t see any relevance to their daily
1:07:35 lives and so on. And I’ve never been one of those people. So if you were doing a presentation,
1:07:43 could be anywhere, on why people, aside from conflating Denzel Washington with other historical
1:07:52 figures, why they should read history or engage with history, what would the thrust of the
1:07:58 presentation be? I suppose it does come back to that all this Huxley quotes about trying to learn
1:08:05 some of the lessons. There’s a marvellous moment when in 1953, June 1953, at the time of the
1:08:11 late Queen’s coronation, Winston Churchill is walking across Westminster Hall, this fabulous,
1:08:17 great hall that was when it was built in the late 13th century, the largest room in Europe.
1:08:22 And it’s fused with history. It’s where, of course, where Churchill himself was to be
1:08:28 to Lion State, but also where the Monarchs Lion State, where Warren Hastings went on trial and
1:08:34 Charles I went on trial and people like Mandela and Zelensky have given speeches and things like
1:08:40 that. It’s compounded, Thomas Moore went on trial there, the Earl of Stratford. I just mentioned
1:08:45 a whole load of people who were all decapitated actually, William Wallace as well, he was decapitated
1:08:51 as well. And so you’ve got this sense of all of British history, it sums up in a room essentially.
1:08:56 And a young American student stops Churchill and asks essentially for a piece of life advice.
1:09:02 And Churchill replies, “Study history, study history, for therein lies all the secrets of
1:09:08 statecraft.” And that would be one of the reasons that I would tell people, you know, that if you
1:09:13 want to understand what’s going on in the world, you do have to look and see what has happened
1:09:18 before. And there’s no person who doesn’t want to have a better understanding of what’s going on
1:09:25 in the world or try to work out for themselves, the great forces in our planet today. So that I
1:09:31 suppose would be the answer. That’s why I’ve chosen study history as my motto of my coat of arms,
1:09:36 for example, and why I’ve got a podcast too, and I call it secrets of statecraft. I think that’s a
1:09:43 sort of motivating factor. Secrets of statecraft, that is. It’s the Hoover Institution’s podcast,
1:09:49 but it’s great fun to do. Must have Neil Ferguson on at some stage, and I can tease him about not
1:09:57 keeping a diary. What is statecraft? I think I know, but I want it very often. I think I know
1:10:03 something, and it is in fact not true at all. So it’s the ability to run a country. So you’ve got
1:10:09 to juggle the diplomatic, the military, the economic, the cultural, all of these things,
1:10:16 the religious, all of these things together to create the kind of country that you want it to be,
1:10:21 and that is statecraft. And so it’s been going on as long as human history has, and always will.
1:10:28 Looking forward, let’s see, you’ve studied many great figures from history. You’ve looked at these
1:10:35 different chapters of your late king, your last king, George III. I wrote a biography of him
1:10:40 a few years ago, which was great fun to do. Sorry, carry on. No, that’s all right. I was
1:10:44 just going to ask you, looking forward, given how much you’ve reflected backwards,
1:10:51 where do you think things are going for the UK and/or for the US? If you were a betting man,
1:10:58 there’s a good chance it’s not a certainty, but if the dominoes continue to fall the way they’re
1:11:06 falling, A, B, or C. I’m afraid I’m a bit of a pessimist. Yeah. Not so much for the United States,
1:11:14 because you’re still such a rich and innovative country. But I’m wondering in Britain, whether
1:11:19 or not, and history plays an important part of this, especially the way in which history is
1:11:24 used politically, to wonder whether or not we still believe in ourselves,
1:11:30 certainly in the way that we did when I was growing up. In 20, I’m going to try and get the
1:11:40 statistics right. I think it’s 2015. As recent as 2015, maybe it’s 2010, 86% of people were proud
1:11:48 of British history. That has now fallen down to 56%. And I’m sure that the reason for this is the
1:11:55 sustained attack on the British Empire that we were discussing earlier, and people forgetting the
1:12:01 part that we played in the abolition of slavery and concentrating just on the horrors and the
1:12:08 monstrous things that happened. And therefore, if you’re not proud of your past, you’re not proud
1:12:14 of your ancestors, you’re not proud of the things that they produced, and Britain has produced some
1:12:21 pretty extraordinary and wonderful things for the world. Then it’s difficult to see why anyone
1:12:27 would want to be proud of the future of the country as well. And so I’m pretty pessimistic.
1:12:33 And when I feel pessimism for America, it’s for things like taking Thomas Jefferson’s statue
1:12:40 down from the New York City Hall. It’s a form of cultural suicide. It strikes me not to
1:12:46 admire the founders of your nation. And yes, of course, he owned slaves,
1:12:51 but he also wrote a constitution that has survived for a quarter of a millennium.
1:12:57 And he was brave enough, and Washington and all the others, brave enough to stand up against
1:13:03 the most powerful empire in the world. These things, you deserve your statue, it seems to me.
1:13:10 And if you go around pulling these things down, I think you’re breaking a kind of living link with
1:13:16 the past that makes you a great country. And that’s certainly happening in this country as well.
1:13:21 I mean, I’m a bit of a pessimist anyway, because I’m a Tory. And pessimism is an essential part
1:13:28 of the Toryism. But not as big a pessimist I hasten to add as Neil Ferguson, who I like to say
1:13:34 it’s never terribly difficult to tell the, it’s a quote from PG Woodhouse, never terribly difficult
1:13:41 to tell the difference between a ray of sunshine and a Scotsman with a grievance. And Neil always
1:13:46 tells you that it’s all doom and gloom and everything’s going to be utterly disastrous.
1:13:51 I wonder whether or not he truly believes it, because he’s actually himself, a very, you know,
1:13:56 upbeat and personally sort of positive individual who does lots of things that imply
1:14:00 that actually he does think the world’s going to get better. But boy, oh boy.
1:14:07 How do you personally, if you do, I mean, it seems like you examine or you have a fascination with
1:14:15 counterfactuals, the what ifs, you read books that have the potential for upending long held
1:14:22 theses, which can be uncomfortable, I would imagine. Do you have people around you or who you
1:14:29 deliberately expose yourself to who offset perhaps some of your pessimistic tendencies with
1:14:36 forms of optimism that they can defend? Yes, my wife is the classic example. She’s
1:14:40 optimistic about the future. She’s in business. She’s a very successful business woman. So she
1:14:46 actually sees a lot of the innovations that are taking place, the drugs that are coming online,
1:14:52 that are saving lives and taking on defeating pain and so on, you know, she’s great at
1:14:58 believing in the innate capacity of capitalism to reinvent itself in a positive way for more and
1:15:03 more people than take people out of poverty and all of those positive things. It’s an invigorating
1:15:10 thing to talk about the world with her, because it makes me much less sort of eore-like and
1:15:20 furgoth sonness. I feel like any other inside scoop that people should know about Neil,
1:15:29 what is his secret optimistic voice memos that he sends you, you can annotate, add to your diary.
1:15:37 Please see audio reference 47. Andrew, this has been great fun. You have many books
1:15:42 that people can read certainly and they’ll all be in the show notes, but is it most recent conflict?
1:15:50 Yes, that’s a book I wrote with David Petraeus. And of course, him being a general who’s commanded
1:15:57 armies of over 160,000 in both Iraq and Afghanistan has been so fascinating intellectually for me,
1:16:01 because of course, I’m a military historian, I’ve never worn a uniform for one minute,
1:16:06 so that was great. And the subtitle for folks just so they have that, The Evolution of Warfare
1:16:16 from 1945 to Ukraine. Well, it’s now actually Gaza, the paper that takes us up to Gaza as well,
1:16:21 about halfway through that campaign in Gaza. It was after the Russian invasion of Ukraine
1:16:26 that I came up with the idea of writing the book and I got on to David, who I knew,
1:16:32 and said, why don’t we write this as a military history? There are going to be lots of political
1:16:38 histories about this, but just the military side of it and put it into the context of all the wars
1:16:43 that have happened since 1945. So we go through not all of them, there are 400 of them, but all
1:16:50 the key ones, you know, the 40 or so key ones that you’ve heard of and that show how war has
1:16:55 evolved and developed. And sometimes it leaps forward and other times it goes into sort of
1:17:00 side shows. But we went to the publishers and they quite unsteadily said, well, how are you
1:17:04 going to divvy up the chapters? And I said, well, David’s going to write about all the
1:17:11 countries he’s invaded. And I’ll, you know, fill in the rest. And he also did the Vietnam
1:17:16 chapter as well, actually. And then we sent hundreds and maybe thousands of emails to one
1:17:22 another over the course of the year or so that we were writing it. That’s very fast. It is fast.
1:17:27 It is fast. But the thing was, well, because the situation in Ukraine was moving so quickly.
1:17:32 And then the Gaza war broke out on the day of the publication of the hardback. So that was
1:17:38 literally the 7th of October that we were bringing that out. So we then needed to get on with writing
1:17:43 about that as well. And as you know, I tend to write quickly. And so does he. He’s a soldier
1:17:50 scholar. He went to your old university. He was at Princeton doing a post-grad on military history.
1:17:55 So he was very much able to keep sending back those emails.
1:18:04 Yeah, I suppose he’s not lacking discipline would be my guess. What did you find were
1:18:09 key ingredients to that successful collaboration? What made it work, especially with that type of
1:18:15 pressure under deadline? Well, I think there was, I know there was mutual respect, which is very
1:18:19 important. I’d never written a book with anybody before. And I was in the midst of doing that right
1:18:23 now, which is probably the reason I’m asking. Yeah. No, well, it’s like nerve wracking,
1:18:29 isn’t it? Because one can get very sort of preparatorial about one’s work. But that wasn’t
1:18:36 the case with David, because the insights that he gave about what it was like to be a commander into
1:18:43 wars at the absolute apex of command meant that he could then look back on wars like the Korean
1:18:50 War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War to sort of place himself in the position of Matthew Ridgway,
1:18:58 in Korea, for example. And that was so fascinating that I knew that there was nothing that I could
1:19:05 add to that. I just knew that the combination of the soldier and the historian would produce
1:19:12 something that was really intellectually stimulating for me. And that’s, in the end, life is a constant
1:19:20 battle against boredom, isn’t it? It’s a constant rearguard action against not being stimulated.
1:19:25 Do you think you will do more collaborations? How are you thinking about your writing moving
1:19:30 forward? No, my next two books are just going to be written by me. I’ve got Napoleon and his
1:19:37 marshals about how the emperor interacted with his marshals and how the marshals interacted with
1:19:42 each other. They fortunately all hated each other, so that’s much easier for a historian to write
1:19:47 something interesting. And hated each other in very imaginative ways. The greatest reality TV
1:19:55 should have ever seen. Exactly. And then after that, I’m doing Disraeli. And he’s an extraordinary
1:20:02 character who was a complete outsider as a Jew, of course. Didn’t go to one of the British public
1:20:08 schools or Oxford and Cambridge or any university and through his own brilliance. And he was a
1:20:14 novelist, of course, also his own wit. He wound up becoming the most powerful man in the world.
1:20:19 Yeah, I look forward to reading that one. Good. Thank you. Let me back on the show in 2030,
1:20:25 which is when it’s being published. I hope I’ll still be around. We’ll see. I’ve been here for a
1:20:29 decade. We’ll see how it goes. Andrew, this has been great. I really appreciate you taking the
1:20:34 time. People can find you. Correct me if I get any of this wrong. Andrew-roberts.net.
1:20:38 Would that be the main website? That’s what I have here. Can’t remember, but yes, I hope so.
1:20:42 Let’s just say that’s right. And if it’s not, I will put correct version and show notes.
1:20:49 And then is Twitter or X as it stands now a good place for people to follow you as well?
1:20:55 Yeah, that has things like my podcast and so on. Perfect. So that’s as I have it here,
1:21:04 @aroberts_andrew. Is it good? Perfect. We’ll fact check off that. But we do have that. Is there
1:21:09 anything else that you would like to add? Any requests of my audience? Anything at all that
1:21:14 you’d like to mention? Just thank you so much, Tim, for being on the show. I’ve really enjoyed
1:21:19 it. Yeah, thank you so much for taking the time. This has really been great. And for people who are
1:21:25 listening, as always, you can find the show notes at tim.blog/podcast. We will include links to everything
1:21:31 we discussed. And also, as always, until next time, just be a little kinder than is necessary
1:21:35 to others, but also to yourself. Thanks for tuning in.
1:21:42 Hey guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off. And that is Five Bullet Friday.
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0:00:05 This episode is brought to you by Five Bullet Friday, my very own email newsletter.
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0:02:10 Hello, boys and girls. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show.
0:02:14 Where does my job to deconstruct world-class performers of all different types
0:02:18 to tease out the routines, habits, and so on that you can apply to your own life?
0:02:24 This is a special in-between episode, which serves as a recap of the episodes from the last month.
0:02:29 Features a short clip from each conversation in one place, so you can jump around, get a feel for
0:02:34 both the episode and the guest. And then you can always dig deeper by going to one of those episodes.
0:02:38 View this episode as a buffet to wait your appetite. It’s a lot of fun. We had fun putting
0:02:42 it together. And for the full list of the guests featured today, see the episode’s description,
0:02:48 probably right below wherever you press play in your podcast app. Or, as usual, you can head
0:02:57 to tim.blog/podcast and find all the details there. Please enjoy. First up, Elizabeth Gilbert,
0:03:04 number one New York Times bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love, Big Magic, and City of Girls,
0:03:09 and the creative voice behind the Letters from Love with Elizabeth Gilbert newsletter.
0:03:19 You can find Elizabeth on Instagram at Elizabeth_Gilbert_Writer, and you can find her
0:03:28 sub-stack at Elizabeth Gilbert dot sub-stack dot com. And when I was in my going through my first
0:03:39 divorce was 30 and the well laid out planned life that I had created very obediently,
0:03:47 like I had done just what my culture had told me to do. I got married at 24 and worked hard and
0:03:52 bought a house and made a plan to have a family. And then instead of having a family, I had a
0:03:58 nervous breakdown, like quite literally, everybody was moving in this one direction and my entire
0:04:05 intellectual, spiritual, and physical system collapsed, which I now know, I now see that
0:04:10 as an act of God. I now see that there was sort of the dow, you know, that there was a force
0:04:16 that was trying to communicate to me, this is not your path. I will kill you before I let you
0:04:22 do this. I will kill you before I let you be a suburban housewife. I’m not allowing it. I will
0:04:26 make you put you in so much physical pain that you’re going to have to notice that this is not
0:04:34 the life for you. But I was also in so much shame of failure and letting people down and like,
0:04:39 we just bought this house. I just felt like the biggest asshole in the world. I don’t know why
0:04:44 I can’t just get in line and do this thing that everybody’s saying to do. Anyway, that marriage
0:04:50 ended, and then I threw myself into another relationship and that ended, and I was like,
0:04:55 I don’t know how to orchestrate my life at all. And nothing, here I am 30 years old and nothing
0:04:59 is what I had planned it to be five years ago. And I was in the deepest depression of my life,
0:05:05 and I didn’t have much of spiritual life at that point. But I remember waking up one night and
0:05:11 just shame and getting an instruction. I mean, that’s the only way I can explain it. And I
0:05:15 was comfortable with that language because I often have that happen in my creative life
0:05:20 where I’m told what to do. This is what you’re going to focus on. Here’s what you need to do
0:05:25 now. And I was given this instruction, and it came in as clearly as I’m talking to you, and it said,
0:05:31 get up, get a notebook, and write to yourself the words that you most wish that somebody would
0:05:35 say to you. Because there was a great loneliness that I was feeling too, as well as the shame.
0:05:44 And that letter began, what that letter said was, I’ve got you, I’m with you. I’m not going
0:05:51 anywhere. I love you exactly the way you are. You can’t fail at this. You can’t do this wrong.
0:05:58 I don’t need anything from you. This is a huge thing to hear. I don’t need anything. Talk about
0:06:04 no cherished outcome. I don’t need anything from you. You don’t have to improve. You don’t have to
0:06:09 do life better. You don’t have to win. You don’t have to get out of this depression. You don’t
0:06:17 have to ever uplift your spirits. You could end up living in a box under a bridge in a garbage bag,
0:06:23 spitting at people. And I would love you just as much as I do now. The love that I have for you
0:06:31 cannot be lost because it’s innate. It’s yours. I have no requirements for it. And if you need to
0:06:36 stay up all night crying, I’ll be here with you. And if tomorrow you have a garbage day again,
0:06:40 because you’ve been up all night crying, I’ll be there for that too. I’ll be here for every minute
0:06:45 of it. Just ask me to come and I’ll be here with you. And the astonishing thing was that it,
0:06:51 like even talking about it now, I can feel the impact that it has on my nervous system to hear
0:06:57 those words, even in my own voice. And it was the first experience I’d ever had with unconditional
0:07:03 love. I’d never heard anybody say like, “I don’t need you to be anything. You don’t have to do
0:07:09 better.” This is fine. This is great. You on the bathroom floor and a pile of tears, it’s not. It’s
0:07:15 great. It’s great. That’s fine. We love you just like that. And that’s so nourishing because it’s
0:07:21 so the opposite of every message that I’ve ever heard. And so I started doing that practice,
0:07:26 and it’s taken me through. I’ve had difficult times in the last 20 years, but I’ve never gone
0:07:34 as low again as I went at that time because this is the net that catches me routinely before I can
0:07:46 get that low. And that voice doesn’t change. Next up, another unpredictable and entertaining
0:07:53 edition of The Random Show with technologist and serial entrepreneur Kevin Rose. You can find
0:08:01 Kevin on Twitter and Instagram @KevinRose, and you can find his sub-stack at KevinRose.com.
0:08:07 Like the one thing that struck me about today, and I just like, let’s have a little real talk
0:08:12 for a second. Oh, wow. Oh, God. Coming to Jesus’ moment. There we go. But like, you went on this
0:08:18 sabbatical, and yet you had to write a book. I didn’t have to write a book. Hold on. Hold on.
0:08:25 Our mutual friend, who shall not be named, pointed this out as well, where it’s like,
0:08:34 “Can you sit and just be you, or would that be too hard?” Okay, let’s do it. All right. So,
0:08:44 yeah, this is good. Let’s get into the fucking chewy bits. So, I routinely every year spend
0:08:50 at least a month off the grid, right? Like last October, I was gone. I was in, I was off the
0:08:56 grid. Yeah, but you were doing shit. I was doing stuff, but here’s my question, right? And this
0:09:02 was in our shared text thread. I basically said, “Okay, look, so the accusation is that Tim doesn’t
0:09:07 know how to chill out.” I’m like, “Okay, fine. Let’s take that as true.” If Tim were to chill out,
0:09:13 what does that look like on a daily and weekly basis? And one of my challenges was humans are
0:09:18 built to be social. You have a family. Our mutual friend has a family. There’s an inbuilt
0:09:27 social network in that family. I don’t have that, right? So my… I mean, you’re a brother to me,
0:09:31 so you always have a family. Yeah, I appreciate that. And like on a day-to-day basis, when I wake
0:09:36 up in the morning, like, you know, my hotel room, my house is empty, right? Yeah. So, I need to go
0:09:41 externally. I need to travel outside of the confines of my house to find that human interaction.
0:09:49 So the question is, like, okay, well, if you could write the script, what would Tim Ferris
0:09:53 chilling out look like? I don’t know what that would look like. What would it look like? Oh,
0:09:59 it’s very simple. All right. I got the best answer for you ever. Oh, boy. No script. That sounds
0:10:02 like some fucking fortune cookie stuff that I can’t make sense of, though. What does that mean?
0:10:08 I know you can’t make sense of it, but that’s the point. It’s no script. When have you done that?
0:10:14 When I did my meditation retreats. No, but you had a schedule for each day.
0:10:17 Sure, but like, I think– That was like an intensive–
0:10:19 The silent retreat where you’re meditating in hours a day.
0:10:24 Okay, I suffer from the same thing you do. I suffer from the same thing you do,
0:10:27 and that is that we can’t– Like, there’s a reason we’re all friends, right?
0:10:32 We’re all fucking border collies chewing on the couch. We can’t turn it off,
0:10:37 you know? And it’s like, honestly, I think the healthiest thing, though, would be to wake up with
0:10:45 no agenda for a month, with no friends for a month, with the fact that you just wake up saying,
0:10:49 “What is today going to bring?” And that is damn fucking hard for people that are driven like you
0:10:52 and me are. So I did that for almost a month last October.
0:10:55 But do you do some psychedelics during that time and shit? Come on, you do some shit.
0:11:01 Towards the end, but in that particular case, I mean, I’ll just say that I don’t think humans are
0:11:09 built for isolation. And there is a fetishizing of self-sufficiency and independence in the U.S.
0:11:15 that I think is unhealthy. It exists in other places, for sure. But if you look at our evolutionary
0:11:20 biological– Like, our biological programming completely refutes that. To be exiled, to be
0:11:26 excluded from the group is effectively– 100%. And I’m not arguing that, but I’m arguing it’s like,
0:11:32 what if you couldn’t touch a pen or a computer for a month? They shoot arrows. Or bow.
0:11:39 I mean, I do think, and I can’t remember the particular attribution of this. Man,
0:11:46 I wish I could really remember it. Ron Jeremy? The hedgehog? No. It was someone else. But it was
0:11:53 basically like, man finds leisure through the switching from one activity to another,
0:11:59 like one compelling activity to another, something along those lines. And I wish I had the exact
0:12:03 quote and the attribution, but I don’t. And this applies, obviously, cross-gender. But the point
0:12:15 being that I’m not convinced that being idle is a fruitful goal to have. If you can’t sit with
0:12:21 yourself for five minutes, that’s a problem, right? But different people have different
0:12:26 constitutions. And for me, for instance, right, if you look at the four-hour work week, okay, so
0:12:31 I get rid of, not get rid of, but I automate my whole business, blah, blah, blah. What do I do?
0:12:37 I end up doing tangos, like six to eight hours a day. Right. But that was not done from a
0:12:48 position of obligation or fear. It was done from a place of like enthusiasm and excitement and love.
0:12:57 That’s different. And that, I think, is good medicine, right? So as long as I have the
0:13:04 self-awareness to distinguish between something that is done from a place of fear or guilt
0:13:11 or prestige, hunger or responsibility or some nebulous obligation versus the things that enliven
0:13:17 me, I think being active is fine as long as I land in the latter category. Right? Like, for
0:13:25 instance, like, I’m doing a lot of archery right now. And I fucking love it. Like, I am so fed by
0:13:31 it. And I’m not saying I’m the world’s best, I certainly am not, but I just find it so meditative.
0:13:38 And, but can I ask you one question? One of the things I’m really curious about is, like, Tim,
0:13:46 like, I respect you so much because of how I’ve watched you dissect and, you know, assimilate,
0:13:50 like, information like no other human I’ve ever seen on earth. And you are able to
0:13:57 learn and pick up and go deep on any topic within a matter of minutes or hours or weeks,
0:14:03 you know, like, you do that quite well. The one thing that is the rounding out of the holistic
0:14:13 picture of Tim that I’m curious if you could ever tap into is the Tim that says, I can just be
0:14:20 without having to go for those things or having to engage in that type of thinking, you know,
0:14:27 that type of like pursuit, that type of analyzing, you know, I, Daria, my wife is, she’s a PhD in
0:14:33 neuroscience. And, and I oftentimes get engaged in intense debates with her about this, where I’m
0:14:42 just like, chill the fuck out. No, I’m just, Daria, don’t listen this far. So, but I’m just like,
0:14:48 you know, I’m like, I’m like, I wish, I wish with all my friends balance. And I think that where
0:14:56 our mutual friend was trying to get to is like, might you find, might you find a little bit more
0:15:00 of that side of the house? Because you have the other in spades. Yeah, yeah. It’s a good question.
0:15:04 I mean, I’ll sit with it. I think that balance can come in a lot of different forms. Right. So,
0:15:10 the balance is time bound, right, in the sense that is it balanced on a daily basis? Is it on a
0:15:15 weekly basis? Is it analyzing at the moment? No, hold on. Hold on. No, it’s not. It’s, it’s finding
0:15:21 the right conceptual framework through us to think about it. And I don’t think that’s a mistake. I
0:15:26 think it’s actually very helpful. Depends on how your mind works, right? For me, though, it’s like,
0:15:31 if I’m super intense for a month, and I’m going 10 out of 10, and then I’m zero out of 10 for a
0:15:39 month, like that equates to kind of a five, five, right? That’s, for me, a certain degree of balance,
0:15:43 but it’s not, if you looked at it on the minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day,
0:15:48 it would look very lopsided. I know a fantastic app that I would love to build for you,
0:15:52 which would be like the Tim Tim random app. And like, you open it up every morning and it tells
0:15:56 you what to do for a month. And it’d be like, today, it’s like, what the fuck is this? And
0:16:01 you’d be like, oh, I have to buy a slip and slide and go down it 20 times. Like, just like,
0:16:05 something where it’s just like throwing you completely out of your life. And you’re like,
0:16:10 wow, I didn’t have to think about it. I didn’t have to overanalyze it. It’s just a fucking thing
0:16:15 I’m going to do. Well, this is, this is part of the curse of the entrepreneur. But it’s also,
0:16:19 but it’s all saying, like, 100%, you know, exactly what I’m talking about. We’ve talked about this,
0:16:25 but also, but also at the same time, these are your mics. I know. But also at the same time,
0:16:30 I will say that like, when you introduce another partner, it’s the dance that’s fucking hard,
0:16:36 right? Because Daria is very much about like structure and shit where I’m just Daria and I
0:16:41 are very similar. Very similar. Super similar. Yeah. Love you Daria. She’s you with hair. You’re
0:16:49 the best. Yeah. But Kevin does nobody do it. She’s a better body. I mean, you look at my AI,
0:16:57 her ass is bad. I’m sorry. Okay, thank you everyone for tuning in to the show.
0:17:11 Good to see you, buddy. Next up, Jerry Colonna, co-founder and CEO of reboot.io,
0:17:17 an executive coaching and leadership development firm, and the author of Reboot,
0:17:23 Leadership and the Art of Growing Up, and Reunion, Leadership and the Longing to Belong.
0:17:32 You can find Jerry on Twitter @JerryColonna. You know, if we go back in time to my mid-30s,
0:17:40 when I was a Prince of New York and a former VC and totally fucked up as an individual,
0:17:46 I was knee deep in the first decade. I’m now my fourth decade of psychoanalysis.
0:17:59 And I had a very tough as nails, nice Jewish lady, psychoanalyst named Dr. Sayers. And what she taught
0:18:08 me repeatedly, endlessly boxing my ears when she’d say this is, “How have you been complicit
0:18:15 in creating these conditions you complain so much about?” And you have to picture it, right?
0:18:21 I’m lying on the couch. There’s this, you know, old Jewish lady who’s 30 years older than me,
0:18:29 who’s just basically had it with me complaining. And so the roots of the question are really
0:18:38 a kind of an exasperation, not just from my analyst to me, but eventually with me about me.
0:18:45 And it was really only by taking that question, “How have I been complicit in
0:18:54 creating the conditions I say I don’t want?” That there was a massive unlock for me. Now,
0:18:59 you asked about the misinterpretation. The first level of misinterpretation that people go through
0:19:08 is that they assume I’m saying, “How have I been responsible?” And I am very, very particular.
0:19:16 I get very, very angry when people misinterpret the word complicit for responsible. And it’s not
0:19:22 because I want to let people off the hook, but quite the opposite. I want people to understand
0:19:28 that they’ve been an accomplice. Here’s the thing, Tim, when we get into our mindset that says,
0:19:35 “I am responsible for all the shit in my life,” we’re actually walking away from doing the hard
0:19:41 work. Could you expand on that? Yeah, sure. Because guilt is a defense mechanism.
0:19:46 Right. Because some people might say, “Well, that’s extreme ownership,” as I say. I’m responsible
0:19:51 for all the shit. Exactly. That’s the beginning of the solution, but where do they take a wrong turn?
0:19:58 So I like the kind of ownership. I like the word ownership. I don’t like the word responsibility.
0:20:04 And the reason for that is because, and the reason I think it can be a defense mechanism,
0:20:10 is because it can be an old structure. So many people that I encounter, myself included,
0:20:18 spend our childhood pendulating between grandiosity and a sense of worthlessness.
0:20:24 I’m either shit or I am the best. You got rid of that in your childhood? Man, good for you.
0:20:33 Well, I got rid of it in my adulthood. This is the point. I got rid of it by actually
0:20:40 asking the right questions of myself. If the word complicit is replaced with the words
0:20:48 even extreme ownership, the danger is that I tip over into misunderstanding what actually has been
0:20:56 going on, and I end up in this zone of being responsible for everything. And the truth is,
0:21:02 it’s much more complex than that. I was just thinking that you’re referring to a pendulum,
0:21:10 and that not taking any responsibility for anything is one example, sort of absolving
0:21:16 yourself of the hard work. But I never thought of the opposite if you’re accepting that anything
0:21:24 and everything bad that happens is your responsibility/fault. It puts you in a similar position,
0:21:31 it seems. Exactly. The position it puts you in is unable to actually, with discernment,
0:21:39 diagnose what’s really going on. And you know what? You don’t get to transform stuff
0:21:46 if you don’t really know what’s going on. And so to understand what’s really happening for you,
0:21:50 you have to understand what your role is and what it isn’t.
0:21:57 So how do you walk, say, a client through answering that question well? How are you
0:22:02 complicit in creating the conditions that you say you don’t want or the conditions of your
0:22:08 lives in your lives that you say you don’t want? How do you walk them through their rough draft
0:22:14 of trying to answer that? Okay, so the unlock on the question is the second half of the question
0:22:21 which people skip. You say you don’t want. So give me an example from your own lifetime.
0:22:25 What do you say you don’t want? Oh, man, how much time do we have?
0:22:33 I have become better at this, so I’m not dodging the question, but I would say
0:22:41 probably some form of busyness. I’ve got this and I’m over-scheduled and I’ve got this and that
0:22:48 and the other thing that is imposing on what maybe I say I want, which is more locked out
0:22:55 space for writing or making. Right. So you say, “Mr. Four-Hour Workweek,
0:23:00 I don’t want to work more than four hours a week.” Nice turn. Nice turn. I think you said that to me.
0:23:10 Right. So you say you want to be so efficient and so productive that you get everything done,
0:23:18 that you want to get done, so that you have time to play, take care of yourself,
0:23:24 wear breathe-right strips as you talk to you. Right. This is kind of thinking. Right. Okay.
0:23:31 Just a quick sidebar. Breathe-right. This one’s on me. Next time, you’ve got to sponsor the podcast.
0:23:38 I could recognize them because I’m a breathe-right user. I use them to sleep at night, so.
0:23:41 Oh, my God.
0:23:49 We were both like a lifetime supply, so feel free. Okay. So you say you don’t want to be so busy.
0:23:55 Right. And you were asking, “How do I walk a client through to understand the role of
0:24:03 complicity?” Right, in this regard. So how does it feel when you’re not busy?
0:24:10 I would say, and I don’t want to steal your thunder here, but since I’m cheating with a cheat sheet,
0:24:15 right, this is. It’s your show. So it’s your thunder.
0:24:23 And action. So, segwaying to a compliment or maybe a necessary component of the first question,
0:24:26 “How are you complicit in creating conditions that you don’t want?” Which is,
0:24:31 “In what ways does that complicity serve you?” Okay. So to answer your question and that at the
0:24:39 same time, I would say probably, and this is almost a certainty, looking back at some of the
0:24:44 scariest depressive episodes in my life. It’s when I had a lot of empty space.
0:24:53 And there’s an underlying fear. Even though I haven’t experienced anything close to that magnitude
0:25:01 of desperation and darkness in a very long time, there is a fear that if I create a void,
0:25:07 that is the voice that is the narrative that is going to come to dominate my thoughts. I would say
0:25:16 that therefore, my complicity serves me by avoiding that. Right. And so, if you really want to
0:25:24 transform, when will you be comfortable with the void? That’s a good question. And in my defense,
0:25:31 Your Honor, I will say that I’m about to go off the grid for a week starting this Friday.
0:25:37 So in a few days, I’ll be going completely off the grid, no phone, no nothing for a period of time.
0:25:44 So I have injected these periods. But let’s get into the messy stuff for a second, since life is
0:25:51 rarely as much of a randomized control trial as you would like. I’ve had an ongoing number of chats
0:25:59 with friends and WhatsApp and different messaging platforms. And it’s been around taking breaks,
0:26:07 creating space, chilling out. So a lot of these friends of mine have passed every hurdle and
0:26:12 objective they could have had. And goalposts keep moving, right? They want to make a million and
0:26:19 then it was 10 and then it was 20. And then once it gets indefensible, then it’s like,
0:26:23 what’s your annual compounded growth rate? And this then turns into percentages because they
0:26:29 can’t even with a straight face defend the rest of it. But what they claim to want and what
0:26:38 they believe I need is to chill out, take a break, create all this space. My experience is as social
0:26:45 animals, or at least as a person who benefits from social interaction, I do best around other
0:26:53 people. I just do. And there are, it’s not 100%, but it’s not 0%. There’s a risk that I do return
0:27:00 to some of those dark places or dark narratives. It’s not 0. So I struggle to answer the question
0:27:05 of like, when can I allow space? Because I do it in small doses, sometimes larger doses. I took
0:27:12 almost all of October last year off the grid. So perhaps you can help me to find my way to
0:27:18 answering the question you posed. You know, look, Tim, I feel like Uncle Jerry and that we speak
0:27:25 every few years, and every few years, my hell you’ve grown. I know you don’t feel that way
0:27:31 because you’re in your body. But when we first started talking, which was years and years ago,
0:27:37 this was a big struggle for you. This was a tremendous struggle. And there was a sense that
0:27:43 you might miss out. There was a sense of like you being falling behind in some sort of weird little
0:27:51 race, a race to the top. And I think the speed with which you’re able to go right to the fear of
0:27:59 the void, what Blais Pascal identified when he said that all of man’s problems stem from their
0:28:06 inability to sit alone in a room. I think you’ve got, like a lot of us, you’ve got a component of
0:28:17 that. And I also want to say I’m watching you letting go of the need to turn that void time
0:28:23 into productivity time, right? When I first started promoting the notion of sabbatical,
0:28:27 which we’ve talked about in the past, I remember dealing with a client who would say, “Well,
0:28:32 I’m going to learn Portuguese.” It’s like, “No, you’re not. You’re not going to learn Portuguese
0:28:41 in four weeks. You’re going to learn to breathe without breathe-right strips. You’re just going
0:28:48 to learn to enjoy yourself.” Now, what I hear you doing is learning to enjoy yourself,
0:28:59 which is a really powerful skill. Yeah. Yeah, it’s going to be a lifelong project,
0:29:04 which is okay. A lot of things are lifelong projects. That’s right. We got here because
0:29:11 you were asking about that process, and this is the process, right? This is the process. So,
0:29:18 for you, when you’re off the grid starting Friday, what will that experience be like for you?
0:29:24 At what point might you be anxious, and at what point might you start to relax? Because
0:29:32 are you going to be with friends this trip too? This particular example may not fit the exercise,
0:29:38 but what I’ve done for the last handful of years is every year I do a past year review,
0:29:44 rather than setting, let’s just say, blind, semi-uninformed, overly optimistic New Year’s
0:29:48 resolutions. I look back at the past year and figure out what the highs and lows looked like
0:29:55 if I were to do an 80/20 analysis. Places, people, activities, the most life-giving and the most
0:30:03 life-draining, and then I schedule time as soon as possible in blocks of one week, two weeks,
0:30:09 depending on availability, to spend time with energy and people doing energy and things, right?
0:30:16 And this particular week off the grid is going to be Alpine Alcant, which I do once every two
0:30:23 years or so, with Bo at probably between 10 and 12,000 feet for the most of it. It’s going to get
0:30:29 cold. We’re going to be eating a lot of shitty freeze-dried fruit, hopefully a bunch of trout
0:30:38 on route to finding elk. And I have just found that particular experience and the time dilation
0:30:46 that it allows to feel like a month off or two months off, it is just so regenerative for me
0:30:53 that it’s become a core piece of my annual planning, not necessarily a hunt, but that type of
0:30:58 shared experience with a small, very small group of people. So that’s what that will look like.
0:31:06 And I, in a sense, I don’t want to say I’m disallowing myself from feeling discomfort,
0:31:11 because there’s going to be incredible discomfort physically. Sleep is probably not going to be
0:31:20 fantastic. And we will be very, very, very active, but it’s not the same as doing a silent retreat
0:31:29 and sitting there watching your monkey brain just contort itself for 16 hours a day.
0:31:36 It’s the kind of retreat where like layers of your skin are stripped away because you’re so raw
0:31:41 and rugged out in the world. And that’s just going to drop you into your body
0:31:49 and drop you more and more into the land. And that’s a place of nourishment for you, for sure.
0:32:00 Finally, a special podcast on what happens when Israelis and Palestinians drink ayahuasca
0:32:06 together, featuring an episode from the new psychedelics-focused podcast Altered States,
0:32:12 made possible in part by the theorist UC Berkeley Psychedelic Journalism Fellowship.
0:32:19 You can find Altered States on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite
0:32:27 podcasts. Welcome to Altered States. I’m Ariel Zumaross. This week, we are traveling thousands
0:32:33 of miles away from where I am in Oregon to the Middle East to hear about another kind of psychedelic
0:32:39 experiment. This one involves ayahuasca. Producer Shayna Shealy brings us this story.
0:32:46 So, Shayna, welcome. First off, I know some folks might be familiar with ayahuasca,
0:32:51 but others have probably never heard of it. Tell me, what exactly is ayahuasca?
0:32:58 Yeah, so ayahuasca, people typically drink it as a sort of tea, and it’s made out of a vine from
0:33:04 South America, which is often brewed together with another plant. It’s a type of shrub. And that
0:33:10 shrub contains something called DMT, or dimethyltryptamine. So what do we know about what ayahuasca
0:33:16 does to the brain? So usually about 30 minutes after drinking it, some people start having these
0:33:23 hallucinations. Others have out-of-body experiences or euphoric feelings. There’s often vomiting
0:33:29 involved. For some people, there are visions. Researchers have found that ayahuasca can promote
0:33:35 what’s called neuroplasticity, which is the brain’s ability to adapt and build new connections.
0:33:40 In this case, increased adaptability is thought to be able to help people heal from traumatic
0:33:49 experiences. A few years ago, you came across these peace activists who were using ayahuasca
0:33:55 to heal, and eventually you started reporting on that story. So can you tell me more?
0:34:00 So these activists are Israeli and Palestinian, and they gather to drink ayahuasca and attempt to
0:34:06 heal trauma, both personal trauma and collective trauma. And I knew a bunch of them from previous
0:34:12 reporting in the region, and I was really interested just in the links that these people went to to
0:34:24 build empathy. And then October 7th happened. Suddenly, the work of healing was interrupted by
0:34:31 this massive shockwave, and these activists sort of looked to the group and to one person in particular
0:34:37 to help them navigate it all. That person was Palestinian peace and justice activist, Sammy
0:34:44 Awad. And that’s why your story starts with Sammy in his home in late summer 2023.
0:35:02 In Sammy Awad’s kitchen near the Palestinian city of Bethlehem,
0:35:08 a small group of people are gathered around a table. A handful of Israelis, a woman from
0:35:14 Brazil, one guy from Ramallah. They’re all sitting there around plates of eggs and zatar,
0:35:20 watermelon, balls of cured labna and olive oil. They were laughing, eating breakfast.
0:35:27 Sammy describes his home as sort of an oasis for Israeli and Palestinian activists from all over,
0:35:32 it’s where they can be together and find refuge from the harsh reality of living under forced
0:35:39 separation. Sammy’s home office is filled with hundreds of books on meditation,
0:35:45 yoga, psychedelic medicine, healing. He’s in his 50s, and he’s been working in the world of
0:35:55 peace building for over 25 years. Sammy’s peace work started when he was 12 years old. He was
0:36:01 with his uncle, an influential nonviolent peace activist. They were planting trees on a Palestinian
0:36:06 farmer’s land that was under threat of confiscation by Jewish settlers. I remember Mark was saying,
0:36:11 no matter what happens, you’re here to plant trees. The group of activists was mixed,
0:36:17 Palestinian and Israeli. They were hours into planting when a group of Israeli soldiers approached
0:36:21 them. The soldier coming, pulling the tree out of the ground that I was planting and throwing it
0:36:28 on some rocks. And in that moment, there was this split decision, what do I do? Because as a 12-year-old,
0:36:35 you know, what options I could run away, I could hide, run to my uncle crying, you know, like a
0:36:40 12-year-old, you know, I was like, you’re here to plant the trees. And I decided I’m going to go back
0:36:47 and bring the tree and plant it. And I did that, that sense of feeling, wow, empowerment and losing the fear.
0:36:55 That action changed my life. It made me actually want to commit my life to this work.
0:36:59 The work of peace building through nonviolence.
0:37:05 Days after Sammy went with his uncle to plant trees, he learned that the land had been confiscated
0:37:12 by Israeli settlers, that all the trees they had planted were uprooted. Still, Sammy would go on
0:37:17 to plant even more trees. By the time he was in his 20s, he was organizing boycotts and peace
0:37:25 demonstrations, sometimes alongside Israeli peace activists. But his actions kept getting shut down.
0:37:33 He was beaten, imprisoned, put on lockdown. And then, in 1993, came the Oslo Accords,
0:37:37 a deal between Israeli and Palestinian leadership that was supposed to kick off a
0:37:43 peace process in the region, including limited Palestinian self-governance in parts of the
0:37:49 West Bank in Gaza Strip. Then President Bill Clinton served as a diplomatic broker.
0:37:56 Let us today pay tribute to the leaders who had the courage to lead their people toward peace,
0:38:03 away from the scars of battle, the wounds and the losses of the past toward a brighter tomorrow.
0:38:10 The world today thanks Prime Minister Rabin, Foreign Minister Perez and Chairman Arafat.
0:38:21 Sammy was optimistic. There was billions of dollars of funds coming to create and sustain
0:38:27 that peace that was being created. And all of a sudden, you started seeing NGOs begin to emerge,
0:38:33 begin to rise, money pumping in like crazy. He built his own organization, Holy Land Trust.
0:38:40 It became well known for nonviolent activism trainings. But even with this tireless dedication
0:38:45 to peace, the world around Sammy became more and more violent.
0:38:51 Both sides committed to negotiating an end to the conflict and charting a path to Palestinian
0:38:58 self-rule in the West Bank in Gaza. It triggered a violent backlash from religious extremists
0:39:04 among both Israelis and Palestinians, including Hamas. We’re beginning to see this continuous
0:39:10 loop of failures in the peace process. And in 1995, a right-wing Jewish extremist
0:39:18 assassinated Israeli Prime Minister, Itzhak Rabin. This big plan towards peace began to unravel
0:39:24 almost immediately. Over the next decade, there was the expansion of Israeli settlements in the
0:39:30 West Bank. Deadly attacks in Israel and the Palestinian territories. During that time,
0:39:34 we began to understand the need to heal collective trauma as part of peacemaking,
0:39:37 as well, understanding how much the past influences us.
0:39:45 It was 2007. Sammy was in his mid-30s and had begun to take an interest in reading up on trauma
0:39:51 when he was invited to go on a pretty unconventional trip to the death camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau.
0:39:57 He spent eight days there, sleeping at the camp, eating all his meals there.
0:40:02 So we were there every day, doing our own ceremony and prayer and visuals,
0:40:07 remembering the people that died. I had, like, lists of names of people that we were all given
0:40:12 to recite continuously. So, like, eight hour meditations we were doing. I began to really see
0:40:19 that, “Wow, this is something that is not an incident that just happened in the past. This is
0:40:29 something that continues until this day.” Pre-COVID, around 40,000 Israeli students visited concentration
0:40:35 camps as part of their school curriculum each year. The trips are sponsored by Israel’s Education
0:40:41 Ministry, typically right before mandatory military service. While Sammy was there,
0:40:47 he kept seeing school group after school group. “Israeli kids with Israeli flags wrapped around
0:40:54 them, big flags and they’re walking in and singing. I heard Israeli teachers tell these kids the
0:41:00 Holocaust is not over. As Jews, we are always threatened, we’re always attacked. Many people
0:41:04 want to destroy us. And, of course, then it’s followed by, this is why we have to be strong,
0:41:08 this is why we have to be resilient, this is why security above everything, and this is why we
0:41:14 never trust anybody. What the hell is happening here? Like, how can you be even talking about peace
0:41:22 with somebody when the foundation is we don’t trust them?” That night, Sammy slept in Birkenau
0:41:28 in the barracks where children were imprisoned. He was there with a Jewish person from Israel
0:41:36 and a Muslim person from Bosnia. “We just had candles and our very thick coats and sleeping bags
0:41:43 and just remembering. I like being in that place where these children were there and were dying.”
0:41:47 But also having these discussions about this issue of inherited trauma.
0:41:54 I began to realize that this whole peace process that we were in, that I was in,
0:42:02 that I was even supporting and advocating for, was embedded from a space of existential fear
0:42:08 and threat. The Palestinians, we have a similar narrative that our existence is on the line. We
0:42:12 need to do something about it. If we don’t do something about it, we will cease to be as a people.
0:42:19 What happened to us is too shameful, too painful. We don’t talk about it.
0:42:26 Sammy says a lot of Palestinians don’t really acknowledge the full scope of pain that their
0:42:33 families have endured. Like the 1948 Nakba, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were driven
0:42:40 from their homes, are really any other traumatic events. We have a generation growing up not knowing
0:42:45 what happened and listening to propaganda. And the propaganda is we are resilient, we are strong,
0:42:50 we will return, we will defeat them. Not acknowledging, like, there is grief that needs to happen.
0:42:54 There is pain that needs to be expressed to what happened to us as a people. There’s a healing.
0:42:58 But to not address these issues makes us unhealthy in how we’re dealing with things.
0:43:07 When he got back to Bethlehem, this is what Sammy wanted to focus on.
0:43:14 Healing. To address the trauma that gets passed down from generation to generation.
0:43:22 He read books on this intergenerational trauma. He studied the Rwandan genocide and the healing
0:43:28 journey that followed. He also met with Israeli-studying trauma, including faculty at Hebrew Union
0:43:34 College. They developed tools for Israelis and Palestinians to work through their pain together.
0:43:40 At the same time, foreign governments were pouring billions of dollars into the region to advance
0:43:47 these peaceful coexistence programs between Israelis and Palestinians. There were summer camps,
0:43:52 organizations that raised up the voices of parents who had lost children, theater troops,
0:44:00 art projects. And still, around two decades after Oslo, Sammy felt things were worse than ever.
0:44:05 You see the wars in Gaza, you see settler violence towards Palestinians, you see how
0:44:09 Palestinians are treating each other. What do all of this money, all of this investment,
0:44:16 where is it all? All of this peace process is 25 years of negotiating. The reality is as messed up
0:44:22 as it’s ever been. Things now are worse than any time before. All of the peace work, all of the money
0:44:27 that was spent. And so for me, I was in this place, we need something new. We need something new.
0:44:33 That’s when he got a phone call. It was from an Israeli couple around 2012.
0:44:38 When they say we have a peace project that we want to involve you with.
0:44:45 Sammy rolled his eyes. More Israelis who think they have the answers. He almost hung up.
0:44:49 And the woman like started yelling at me. No, we have to come and we have to meet you.
0:44:52 And it’s very important that don’t bring anybody and it’s just you.
0:44:59 His interest was peaked. He went to meet them. I said, three things came to my mind.
0:45:04 Other, this is some money laundering scheme, something to do with drugs or something to do
0:45:10 with weird sex. And she just started laughing, laughing. I said, it has to do with the second one.
0:45:13 And then the guy looked at me. He looked at me straight in the eyes and he said,
0:45:19 have you done medicine before? He was talking about the psychedelic brew Ayahuasca.
0:45:23 As a man explained his vision, all Sammy could think about were the dangers.
0:45:27 Sammy says drugs are kind of taboo in Palestinian society.
0:45:34 It’s not just illegal. It’s immoral. It’s legitimate. It goes against religion.
0:45:40 It goes against social values. People who drink Ayahuasca have described emotional breakthroughs,
0:45:47 conversations with anthropomorphic spirits, catharsis of traumatic events, and connections
0:45:53 with ancestors. So even though Sammy was terrified, he thought it might be worth trying.
0:45:59 He traveled through checkpoints into Israel to join the couple for an Ayahuasca ceremony.
0:46:05 He downed a cup full of the sludgy tea and soon he was vomiting.
0:46:12 And now here are the bios for all the guests.
0:46:18 My guest today, one of my favorites, Elizabeth Gilbert. She is the number one New York Times
0:46:24 bestselling author of Big Magic and Eat Pray Love, as well as several other international bestsellers.
0:46:29 She has been a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award,
0:46:34 and the Penn Hemingway Award. Her latest novel, City of Girls, was named an instant New York Times
0:46:40 bestseller, a rollicking, sexy tale of the New York City theater world during the 1940s.
0:46:45 You can go to elizabethgilbert.substack.com to subscribe to Letters from Love with Elizabeth
0:46:50 Gilbert. Her newsletter, which has more than 120,000 subscribers, you can find her
0:46:54 on Instagram @elizabeth_gilbert_writer.
0:47:05 This time we have a very special episode. This is always a listener favorite,
0:47:09 a recording with my close friend Kevin Rose. Kevin Rose, for those who don’t know,
0:47:15 at Kevin Rose, everywhere. He is indeed a world-class entrepreneur, serial founder,
0:47:22 investor in the smallest of seed rounds up to the largest of companies. He is a full spectrum,
0:47:29 full stack capitalist. I don’t know what the hell I’m saying. But we did this interview in person
0:47:34 at his house in the format of The Random Show. And what we always do, and we’ve done this for
0:47:41 10 years, I suppose now. We trade our latest discoveries, our latest findings, what our
0:47:47 friends have sent to us. And I think it is one of our best. There’s tons of actionable takeaways,
0:47:54 lots of laughing fits, and that might have something to do with the fact that Kevin invited
0:47:59 his friend and bartender to serve us cocktails. We cover dozens of topics, new projects, what I’ve
0:48:05 done on my recent sabbatical, Kevin’s latest findings and shenanigans, real vampire protocols.
0:48:10 Apparently, that’s a thing. And much, much more. It even includes some incredibly bizarre footage
0:48:18 of Kevin having his face assaulted by experimental technology. We videotaped that live together,
0:48:24 and video is not at all required to enjoy this episode whatsoever. Audio is great.
0:48:27 But for some extra hilarity, if you want to see that video I mentioned,
0:48:33 and more, simply go to youtube.com/timferis, F-E-R-R-I-S-S.
0:48:43 Sometimes I get not just a two for one, but a hundred for one when I interview someone
0:48:50 who also helps world-class performers, in addition to being such themselves, to get past
0:48:55 sticking points, to redefine themselves, to reinvent themselves, to chart new paths forward.
0:49:00 And my guest today, Jerry Kelowna, is such a person. He is the CEO and co-founder of Reboot.io,
0:49:05 an executive coaching and leadership development firm dedicated to the notion that better humans
0:49:10 make better leaders. But prior to that, he was an operator in many different ways.
0:49:14 Prior to being a coach, he was a partner with J.P. Morgan Partners, the private equity arm of J.P.
0:49:21 Morgan Chase. He also led New York City-based Flatiron Partners, which he founded in 1996
0:49:25 with partner Fred Wilson. Flatiron went on to become one of the nation’s most successful
0:49:30 early-stage investment programs. At age 25, he was editor-in-chief of Information Week Magazine.
0:49:35 He’s written a bunch of books. We’ll mention them at the end of the conversation. But one is Reboot.
0:49:41 The other is Reunion, both highly recommended. You can find his company, Reboot, at Reboot.io,
0:49:48 and Jerry on Twitter and Instagram @JerryKelowna, C-O-L-O-N-N-A. And he has been on the podcast
0:49:54 twice before. He is a fan favorite. People always take a ton away from our conversations.
0:50:00 And I recap some of my favorite aspects of those in this episode. And we cover a lot of ground.
0:50:04 There are a lot of stories I’ve never heard. We have a lot of laughs,
0:50:12 almost a few cries on my side. We dig into his toolkit. The questions that he uses with himself
0:50:19 and with clients that I have adopted is some of my favorites. There is a lot to learn. And it was a
0:50:25 hell of an enjoyable conversation. It was a walk and talk. And I have done this before where I am
0:50:31 out in nature today. It is a beautiful bluebird sky day in the mountains and to sit in a dark room,
0:50:38 staring at a screen seemed like an insult to nature, complete travesty, totally unnecessary. So I have
0:50:43 high fidelity recording equipment. That is what I’m using right now. It is a headset. I am sitting
0:50:51 10 feet from a beautiful river where I’m watching the eddies swirl around rocks. So why not? Get out
0:50:55 and move. If you can listen to this while you’re moving, I encourage you to do so. Audio is a
0:51:01 secondary activity. So if you can walk and talk or walk and listen while I’m walking and talking,
0:51:05 all the better for you, me, everybody involved.
0:51:14 For this episode, I am doing something very different. I’m actually featuring
0:51:20 a special episode from a brand new podcast called Altered States. And I listened to a lot of podcasts.
0:51:26 I test out a lot of podcasts. I found this one to be particularly impressive. It’s very well
0:51:31 reported, very well researched, very well produced. Here’s the teaser for the episode that you’re
0:51:37 about to hear. It’s not a long one, but it is a very nuanced one, a very powerful one. Quote,
0:51:42 “For the last couple of years, producer Shayna Shealy has been following Israeli and Palestinian
0:51:47 peace activists who have been coming together to drink the psychedelic brew ayahuasca in an effort
0:51:52 to heal their collective intergenerational trauma. It seemed to be helping them when suddenly the
0:51:58 region erupts into chaos and violence.” Shayna Shealy as background was a fellow from the Ferris
0:52:03 UC Berkeley Psychedelic Journalism Fellowship. That’s how I actually heard about the podcast.
0:52:09 And the fellowship offers $10,000 reporting grants per year to journalists reporting in-depth
0:52:14 print and audio stories on the science, policy, business, and culture of this new era of psychedelics.
0:52:19 It’s been going for a few years now, and a lot of amazing pieces have come out of it. The fellowship
0:52:24 is supported by my foundation, the Saise Foundation. You can find that s-a-i-s-e-i,
0:52:28 foundation.org, if you want to see what types of projects and grants and so on we’ve made.
0:52:34 And it is made possible in collaboration with Michael Pollan, Mali Awalin, and others at UC
0:52:40 Berkeley. So thanks to the entire team over there. Altered States, the podcast, looks at how people
0:52:44 are taking psychedelics, who has access to them. They actually have an amazing episode where they
0:52:49 walk through in real time, someone’s first experience with psilocybin, how they’re regulated,
0:52:55 who stands to profit, and what these substances might offer us as individuals and as a society.
0:53:00 It’s hosted by journalist Aril Dumras, and you can find it wherever you find your podcasts.
0:53:05 Hey guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take
0:53:10 off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday
0:53:15 that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people
0:53:20 subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday.
0:53:26 Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share
0:53:31 the coolest things I’ve found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It’s kind
0:53:36 of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I’m reading, books I’m reading, albums
0:53:42 perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends,
0:53:48 including a lot of podcast guests and these strange esoteric things end up in my field.
0:53:55 And then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it’s very short,
0:54:00 a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about.
0:54:04 If you’d like to try it out, just go to tim.blog/friday, type that into your browser,
0:54:15 tim.blog/friday, drop in your email and you’ll get the very next one. Thanks for listening.

0:00:04 Well, this is Tim Ferriss recording from the UK, where I’m trying to blend in.
0:00:10 Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where my usual job is to sit down with
0:00:14 world-class performers of all different types, to interview them and tease out habits, routines,
0:00:20 favorite books, etc. There are 700 plus of those interviews in the back catalog, and we’ll get back
0:00:25 to that shortly. But this time around, we have a different format. In this short and very tactical
0:00:29 episode, I share some of my personal approaches, my personal methods for how to get out of a
0:00:36 rut, get unstuck, re-aim yourself at big outcomes, reset and refocus, and make progress on a daily
0:00:43 basis. Despite the self-defeating tendencies and inner voices that we all have, and that applies to
0:00:49 everyone I’ve met, the top of the top in any given field, we all have those days.
0:00:54 The first story I tell is of a three to four-week period when I was beset by all sorts of personal
0:00:59 challenges, and ultimately the approach that saved my sanity. It does not require any heroic
0:01:05 efforts, any differential calculus. It is beautifully simple. But first, before we get to that,
0:01:10 just a few quick words from today’s sponsors who make this podcast possible. If you want to
0:01:15 support the show, please check them out. I use all of these on a daily or weekly basis, and
0:01:19 given that I’m able to test everything under the sun, I think that is saying something.
0:01:25 Regular listeners probably know I’ve been taking momentous products consistently and testing them
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0:02:01 Visit livemomentous.com/tim and use Tim at checkout for 20% off of my performance stack.
0:02:09 I’ll spell it out. It’s a long one, livemomentos.com/tim. So, livemomentous.com/tim for 20% off.
0:02:15 This episode is brought to you by 8Sleep. 8Sleep recently launched their newest generation of the
0:02:20 pod, and I’m excited to test it out. Pod 4 Ultra. Pod 4 Ultra can cool down each side of the bed
0:02:25 as much as 20 degrees Fahrenheit below room temperature. Pod 4 Ultra also introduces an
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0:02:39 detect your snoring and automatically lift your head by a few degrees to improve airflow and stop
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0:02:48 the nightstand because these types of metrics are integrated into the Pod 4 Ultra itself.
0:02:56 So, get your best night’s sleep. Head to 8Sleep.com/tim and use Code Tim to get $350 off of the Pod
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0:03:31 A few years ago, a creature died in the walls of my home. It was disgusting.
0:03:36 Now, to be precise, it gave up the ghost in the heating system, so the death fumes were conveniently
0:03:42 pushed directly into my bedroom. My ex-girlfriend and I discovered this around 11pm as we tucked
0:03:48 into bed hoping for a good night’s sleep. We could turn off the heat and freeze, that was one option,
0:03:53 or we could bathe in the stench of what I assumed was a raccoon carcass. And the whole thing
0:03:58 made my eyes itch. It was horrible. I imagined it downing its last meal, pig entrails, moldy socks,
0:04:05 fermented beans, who knows, before defiantly jamming its bloated body into my HVAC. Don’t worry,
0:04:10 we are getting to some kind of lesson here. But the kamikaze raccoon was just the first
0:04:16 surprise guest. The opening act, in short order, my dog then got horribly sick unrelated to raccoon.
0:04:21 Overdue paperwork started piling up, popping out of nowhere, and onboarding a bunch of new
0:04:26 contractors ran into trouble. Then I pulled out of a parking spot and scraped the entire
0:04:31 side of my car, and the car next to me. Later that same afternoon, all these Christmas presents
0:04:36 I had ordered somehow had run out of stock and were auto cancelled, so I was sent scrambling.
0:04:43 And on and on it went more and more clowns piling into the clown car for a shit show that lasted
0:04:51 three to four weeks. It was just a 15 car pile up of nonsense. There are the rare times when I
0:04:56 feel like I’m in the zone. Those are great. Those are fantastic. Then there are times when I ask
0:05:01 myself, how in holy hell have I become the janitor of a mountain of bullshit? That happens more
0:05:06 than you might think. Put another way, sometimes you’re the boxer and sometimes you are the punching
0:05:11 bag. We all get our turn as the punching bag. It doesn’t matter who you are. As far as I can tell,
0:05:16 it doesn’t matter how successful you become, you’ve always grabbed a number at the daily counter of
0:05:22 just wait, eventually you’re going to get your ass kicked by the universe. Now during these periods
0:05:27 of firefighting, let’s just call it when stuff is popping up, this whack-a-mole, I get fidgety
0:05:32 and frustrated. I feel like I’m treading water and patience wears very thin has never been my
0:05:38 strong suit. That’s true, especially with myself. And my instinct is to try to fix things as quickly
0:05:44 as possible. And that’s all well and good. But I’ve realized that from a place of what the fuck,
0:05:50 I often rush and create more problems. This is particularly bad, catastrophic sometimes when
0:05:57 I try to sprint immediately upon waking up. The mantra that has saved me and saved me during
0:06:03 that three to four week period I mentioned was very simple and it’s this. Make before you manage.
0:06:09 Make before you manage, that’s it. What this means is each morning, before plugging holes,
0:06:14 fixing things, calling vets, answering text messages, delegating or yanking out dead raccoons,
0:06:20 answering a million text messages, this mantra was a reminder to make something.
0:06:25 You should read Paul Graham’s essays and listen to Neil Gaiman’s Make Good Art commencement speech
0:06:31 for more on all of this. But back to any given day and make before you manage. Even the most
0:06:38 time sensitive items can usually wait 60 minutes. And by make something, I mean anything. It could
0:06:43 be anything at all. You just need to feel like you’ve pushed a millimeter ahead in some creative
0:06:49 direction. For me personally, even a 90 second video of calligraphy could set a better emotional
0:06:55 tone for the entire day, helping me to be more calm as I handle problems, as I execute all the
0:07:00 rest of the stuff later. Or maybe I attempt to jumpstart my writing with an Instagram caption,
0:07:05 right, or an email to a friend to take the pressure off. It’s practically nothing, but it’s
0:07:12 enough. Even token efforts allow me to reassure myself with, hey pal, don’t worry, you did produce
0:07:18 something today. And the psychological difference between zero acts of creation and one act of
0:07:24 creation, no matter how small, is really impossible to overstate. It’s binary, right? Zero to a little
0:07:29 bit. Those are two different worlds. If you’re lucky, sometimes that one idea, that one sense,
0:07:34 or one shitty first draft can turn into something bigger. And that happens when you catch the wave.
0:07:39 But the point is to be able to say to yourself, even for five minutes, “Hark, I am a creator,
0:07:44 not just a janitor of bullshit. Here’s proof that I can and will do more than just manage
0:07:50 the minutiae of life.” And I think, at least personally, I do need that reinforcement.
0:07:55 We all spend time on the struggle bus, happens to everybody. At the very least,
0:08:00 this mantra has helped me to find a window seat when it’s my turn. So, as a reminder,
0:08:04 when in doubt, try it out, make before you manage.
0:08:13 Okay folks, I’ll be back shortly with another story this time from a birthday crisis. Fun,
0:08:19 fun, fun. Ultimately, it has a happy ending. So, stay tuned. But first, just a few quick words
0:08:25 from one of today’s sponsors. I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take
0:08:30 one supplement. And the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually
0:08:35 drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road. So,
0:08:40 what is AG1? AG1 is a science-driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food-sourced
0:08:46 nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut, and immune system.
0:08:51 So, take ownership of your health and try AG1 today. You will get a free one-year supply of
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0:09:07 So, learn more. Go to drinkag1.com/tim. That’s drinkag1, the number one. Drinkag1.com/tim. Check it out.
0:09:15 The moment that you feel that just possibly you’re walking down the street naked,
0:09:19 exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside,
0:09:24 showing too much of yourself, that’s the moment you may be starting to get it right.
0:09:27 This is a quote from Neil Gaiman, one of my favorite fiction writers. It’s from his
0:09:33 University of the Arts commencement speech. But let’s bring it back to my story. A few months ago,
0:09:39 I had a birthday party. It was great. Dozen friends and I gathered for a few days of sun,
0:09:45 beach, barbecue, catching up. We do it every year. And then on the last day, I didn’t get up until
0:09:51 1130. That’s late even for me, knowing full well that the last few remaining friends were leaving
0:09:57 about 30 minutes later, around 12 noon. And the sad reality is I was afraid of being alone.
0:10:03 I was afraid of being lonely. So, like a child, I hid my head under the covers, that’s literally,
0:10:08 and hit snooze until I just couldn’t postpone reality any further. But why am I telling you
0:10:13 this? Why am I being so self-indulgent in telling you this ridiculous story? It’s because we all
0:10:20 like to appear successful, a nebulous term at best, and the media like to portray certain standouts as
0:10:24 superheroes, these people on the magazine covers and so on. And yes, sometimes these dramatic stories
0:10:31 of overcoming the odds are super inspiring. But often, just as often, they lead to an unhealthy
0:10:35 conclusion, maybe an inner monologue, which is something like, well, maybe they, whoever they
0:10:40 happen to be, maybe they can do it because they’re incredible. They have no faults. They’re just
0:10:45 karate chopping the day and winning at all moments. But I’m just a normal person. I can’t do that.
0:10:51 The reality is most superheroes, these superheroes are nothing of the sort. They’re just as weird
0:10:57 and neurotic as we are. They’re strange creatures who do big things, despite lots of self-defeating
0:11:03 habits and self-talk. So, to personalize this, let’s bring it home. I am definitely no superhero.
0:11:08 I’m not even a consistent normal, whatever that is. So, let me give you a little laundry list.
0:11:15 Not too long ago, I cried while watching Rudy on an airplane, and that was cause for concern for a
0:11:20 lot of people around me. I repeatedly hit snooze for one to three hours past my planned wake time
0:11:26 because I simply didn’t want to face the day. I considered giving everything away, moving to
0:11:32 Montreal, Seville, or Iceland. Location kind of depends on what I’m trying to escape. I’ve used
0:11:39 gentlemanly websites to relax during the day when clearly having other urgent and important
0:11:45 shit to do. I wore the same pair of jeans for a week straight, just to have a constant during
0:11:51 weeks of chaos. So, listening to all that, you might think it seems pretty dysfunctional, right?
0:11:58 I assume so. I certainly hear it that way. But, around the same time, especially so the later
0:12:04 few weeks of that, I also was able to increase my passive income 20%, bought my dream house,
0:12:09 got to the point where I was once again meditating twice per day for 20 minutes per session without
0:12:15 fail, so not winning any gold medals in meditation, but incredibly helpful and stabilizing. I cut my
0:12:19 caffeine intake to next to nothing. That usually means poor tea in the morning and maybe a green
0:12:25 tea in the afternoon. I’ve had no more than one cup of really strong coffee per week. There’s a lot
0:12:30 to that, but it’s suffice to say, much improved sleep. Signed one of the most exciting business
0:12:36 deals of the last decade, including working on a collaboration that is first of its kind for me.
0:12:40 Completely transformed my blood work, including a few biomarkers I’ve been working on for years,
0:12:47 and I realized, as the next point, once again, that let’s just call it manic depressive symptoms
0:12:52 are just part of entrepreneurship. And last but not least, I have come to feel closer to all of
0:12:59 my immediate family members. So, where does that leave us? So, personally, I suck at efficiency,
0:13:05 which is doing things quickly or doing things super well, but I have a few tricks. So, here is
0:13:10 my coping mechanism. It is an eight step process for maximizing efficacy, which is doing the right
0:13:16 thing. Number one, wake up at least an hour before you have to be at a computer screen. Email is the
0:13:22 mind-killer, so don’t go immediately into reactive mode. Number two, make a cup of tea. I like puer tea
0:13:28 and sit down with a pen or pencil and paper. I like to do it analog. Number three, write down
0:13:33 three to five things and no more that are making you most anxious or uncomfortable.
0:13:37 They’re often the things that have been punted from one day’s to-do list to the next,
0:13:42 to the next, to the next, and so on. And most important usually means most uncomfortable or
0:13:47 very frequently it does with some chance of rejection or conflict. To find those important,
0:13:51 you can often just look for the most uncomfortable with some chance of rejection or conflict. So,
0:13:56 write down those three to five things. Step four, for each item, ask yourself, if this were the
0:14:01 only thing I accomplished today, would I be satisfied with my day? Also ask, will moving this
0:14:07 forward make all the other to-dos unimportant or easier to knock off later? That’s a nod to Gary
0:14:12 Keller, the one thing. So, thank you for that, Gary. Step number five, look only at the items
0:14:17 you’ve answered yes to for at least one of those. Those are the high-leverage items, if removed.
0:14:23 Number six, block out at least two to three hours to focus on one of them for today. One,
0:14:27 let the rest of the urgent but less important stuff slide. They’ll still be there tomorrow.
0:14:32 Step number seven, and I’m repeating, to be clear, block out at least two to three hours to
0:14:37 focus on one of them for today. This is one block of time, uninterrupted, no distractions,
0:14:43 no social media. Cobbling together, 10 minutes here and there to add up to 120 minutes does not
0:14:48 work. Step number eight, if you get distracted or start procrastinating, have us to everybody,
0:14:53 don’t freak out and downward spiral, just gently come back to your one to-do.
0:15:00 Congratulations. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. This is practically the only way I can
0:15:05 create big outcomes despite my never-ending impulse to procrastinate, nap, otherwise,
0:15:11 fritter away my days with all sorts of bullshit. And it works. Work really, really well. And I’ve
0:15:16 come to learn if I have 10 important things to do in a day, it’s 100% certain that nothing
0:15:20 important will get done that day. So, you got to pick one thing. On the other hand, I can usually
0:15:26 handle one must-do item and block out my lesser behaviors for two to three hours a day in the
0:15:32 beginning of the day. That’s what works for me. It does not take much to seem superhuman and appear
0:15:38 successful to nearly everyone around you if you learn to single-task. Single, single, single,
0:15:45 single task, one. In fact, you just need a simple rule. What you do is more important than how you
0:15:51 do everything else. And doing something well does not make it important. So, material over method,
0:15:56 the what over the how. And if you consistently feel the counterproductive need for volume and
0:16:00 doing tons of stuff, maybe you should put a few things on post-it notes. Put them in your bathroom.
0:16:08 And the first that you can add is being busy is a form of laziness. Lazy thinking and indiscriminate
0:16:14 action does not mean that more equals more in the positive sense. Being busy is most often
0:16:19 used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions you need to
0:16:24 take. And when, despite your best efforts, you feel like you’re losing at the game of life,
0:16:29 just remember, even the best of the best, feel this way sometimes. It happens to everybody.
0:16:34 And when I’m personally in the pit of despair, I recall what iconic writer Kurt Vonnegut said
0:16:38 about his process, highly recommend his books, amazing guy. And here’s the quote,
0:16:45 “When I write, I feel like an armless legless man with a crayon in his mouth.” So, don’t overestimate
0:16:51 the world and underestimate yourself. You’re better than you think and you’re definitely not alone.
0:16:55 We’re all in this together and everyone is fighting a battle that you know nothing about.
0:17:01 Hey guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off. And that is Five
0:17:05 Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little
0:17:11 fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter,
0:17:17 my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is
0:17:22 basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I’ve found
0:17:27 or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It’s kind of like my diary of cool things.
0:17:33 It often includes articles I’m reading, books I’m reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos,
0:17:38 all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast
0:17:45 guests and these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share
0:17:51 them with you. So, if that sounds fun, again, it’s very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before
0:17:55 you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you’d like to try it out, just go to
0:18:02 tim.vlog/friday, type that into your browser, tim.vlog/friday, drop in your email and you’ll
0:18:07 get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep.
0:18:12 Eight Sleep recently launched their newest generation of the pod and I’m excited to test it out,
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0:19:49 (upbeat music)
0:19:58 [BLANK_AUDIO]

0:00:03 Hello, boys and girls. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss
0:00:07 Show, where it is my job to interview people from all different disciplines, all different
0:00:10 walks of life to tease out the habits, routines, thoughts, lessons learned, and so on that
0:00:16 you can apply to your own lives. My guest today, one of my favorites, Elizabeth Gilbert.
0:00:20 She is the number one New York Times bestselling author of Big Magic and Eat, Pray, Love, as
0:00:24 well as several other international bestsellers. She has been a finalist for the National
0:00:29 Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Penn Hemingway Award. Her latest
0:00:34 novel, City of Girls, was named an instant New York Times bestseller, a rollicking, sexy
0:00:41 tale of the New York City theater world during the 1940s. You can go to elizabethgilbert.substack.com
0:00:45 to subscribe to Letters from Love with Elizabeth Gilbert. Her newsletter, which has more than
0:00:53 120,000 subscribers, you can find her on Instagram @Elizabeth_Gilbert_Writer.
0:00:59 But first, a few quick words from our lovely podcast sponsors who make products and services
0:01:06 that I use every day or every week. I personally vet everything. And that means that probably
0:01:12 less than 20% of the podcast sponsors who wish to sponsor the show end up sponsoring.
0:01:16 But I’m fine with that. And here are the few that made the cut.
0:01:22 If you ever use public Wi-Fi, say at a hotel or a coffee shop, which is where I often work,
0:01:26 I’m doing it right now. And as many of you, my listeners do, you’re likely sending data
0:01:29 over an open network, meaning there’s no encryption at all.
0:01:34 A great way to ensure that all of your data are encrypted and can’t be easily read by
0:01:39 hackers or captured by websites is to use this episode’s sponsor, ExpressVPN. It is
0:01:45 so simple. It is one click. It is the easiest thing in the world. I use it overseas. I use
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0:02:04 your network traffic through secure servers. So even though your data is still physically
0:02:08 passing through your internet provider, they can’t inspect it and they have no record of
0:02:12 your browsing history. By the way, this is true even if you’re at home. Your ISP can
0:02:17 snoop on all sorts of stuff. And I’ve seen that personally. It’s very, very spooky. Don’t
0:02:23 like it. So ExpressVPN. ExpressVPN is the number one rated VPN by CNET, The Verge and
0:02:28 tons of other tech reviewers. I’ve been using ExpressVPN for years. And I love that it gives
0:02:32 me that extra piece of mind knowing that no one else is looking over my shoulder or even
0:02:37 if they’re trying to, it’s going to be very, very, very hard. And as a bonus, I’ve also
0:02:42 used it many times to unblock content from around the world. If you’re traveling and
0:02:46 there’s a particular media website, there’s a particular say version of Amazon or whatever
0:02:51 that’s blocked or Netflix, whatever. With ExpressVPN, I can connect to servers outside
0:02:56 the US or inside the US, depending on what you want to do, easily gaining access to thousands
0:02:59 of shows and movies I wouldn’t be able to see otherwise. That’s been true for stuff
0:03:03 I’ve wanted to watch in Japan. It’s been true for stuff I’ve wanted to watch in the
0:03:08 UK, for instance, from the US that I haven’t been able to access. It’s super, super, super
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0:03:35 Way back in the day, in 2010, I published a book called The Four Hour Body, which I
0:03:43 probably started writing in 2008. And in that book, I recommended many, many, many things.
0:03:50 First generation continuous glucose monitor, and cold exposure, and all sorts of things
0:03:55 that have been tested by people from NASA and all over the place. And one thing in that
0:04:00 book was athletic greens. I did not get paid to include it. I was using it. That’s how
0:04:06 long I’ve been using what is now known as AG1. AG1 is my all-in-one nutritional insurance,
0:04:12 and I just packed up, for instance, to go off the grid for a while. And the last thing
0:04:16 I left out on my countertop to remember to take, I’m not making this up, I’m looking
0:04:22 right in front of me, is travel packets of AG1. So rather than taking multiple pills
0:04:25 or products to cover your mental clarity, gut health, immune, health, energy, and so
0:04:31 on, you can support these areas through one daily scoop of AG1, which tastes great, even
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0:04:39 and it takes me less than two minutes in total. Honestly, it takes me less than a minute.
0:04:44 I just put in a shaker bottle, shake it up, and I’m done. AG1 bolsters my digestion and
0:04:49 nutrient absorption by including ingredients optimized to support a healthy gut in every
0:04:55 scoop. AG1 in single-serve travel packs, which I mentioned earlier, also makes for the perfect
0:05:00 travel companion. I’ll actually be going totally off the grid, but these things are incredibly,
0:05:03 incredibly space-efficient. You could even put them into book, frankly. I mean, they’re
0:05:08 kind of like bookmarks. After consuming this product for more than a decade, I chose to
0:05:13 invest in AG1 in 2021 as I trust their no-compromise approach to ingredient sourcing and appreciate
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0:05:25 for 950 or so contaminants and impurities compared to the industry standard of 10. AG1 is also
0:05:31 tested for heavy metals and 500 various pesticides and herbicides. I’ve started paying a lot
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0:06:34 At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.
0:06:36 Can I ask you a personal question?
0:06:39 No, I would have seen it in a perfect time.
0:06:40 What if I could be out of this?
0:06:44 I’m a cyber-netic organism living this year over a metal endoskeleton.
0:06:48 Me, Tim, and Ferris, show.
0:06:55 Liz, it’s so nice to see you. Thanks for taking the time.
0:06:59 It’s so nice to see you. It’s so nice to be back talking to you. I love it.
0:07:04 We both did something quite similar. You went back and listened to our last conversation,
0:07:11 which I just had a blast recording with you. And I went back and I read all of the summary
0:07:17 notes that I had from that last conversation. And before we started recording, you mentioned
0:07:24 a few things. One, that the very last thing that you mentioned in that conversation will
0:07:27 dovetail nicely into some of what we’ll talk about today. And that’ll be just a bit of
0:07:30 foreshadowing for folks. We won’t go into that first.
0:07:38 But secondly, I asked if you had any particular hopes for this recording and asked what would
0:07:45 make it a homerun or time well-spent. And one of the things that you said, and I suppose
0:07:51 broadly what you said too, is you had no cherished outcome. And I like that phrasing, and I was
0:07:58 hoping to hear you expand on that a bit because I think it might be good medicine for a lot
0:08:03 of what ails me. Oh, God. I mean, it’s already a homerun, just
0:08:08 getting to sit here and talk to you. And I know it hasn’t been easy for our schedules
0:08:13 to figure out when we can do this. So I’m just happy and relaxed to be here. And I’m
0:08:17 also not concerned that you and I will ever have any trouble finding things to talk about.
0:08:22 So that was part of it. But the no cherished outcome is actually a line from a translation
0:08:29 of a Celtic poem. And it’s called The Celtic Poem of Approach. And as well as I understand
0:08:35 it, these are lines that were spoken when you’re meeting new people and when you’re
0:08:40 moving out of one area into another tribe’s area or you’re going to be interacting with
0:08:45 people in a new way, this beautiful poem of approach that I really love. And I’m probably
0:08:49 not going to get the whole thing right, but it says something like, “I will honor your
0:08:55 gods. I will drink from your well. I bring an undefended heart to our meeting place.
0:09:01 I will not negotiate by withholding. I am not subject to disappointment. I have no cherished
0:09:05 outcome.” And how do you apply that then to your own
0:09:09 lives? What led you to hold on to that particular piece?
0:09:18 It’s my highest aspiration that that poem and that spirit is the foundational agreement
0:09:23 of all my friendships. And I say those words, “I have no cherished outcome,” a lot to
0:09:31 my friends. And I hope that I mean it. And when I start feeling hurt or resentful or
0:09:36 excluded or misunderstood, I’m like, “Sometimes the only way you can find out that you had
0:09:41 a cherished outcome is when you didn’t get it.” Sometimes I discover that where I’m
0:09:45 like, “I think I’m just easy breezy and I’m just hanging out.” And then I’m like, “Oh,
0:09:50 I had a secret hidden cherished outcome because something didn’t happen that I wanted and
0:09:57 now I’m all bent about it.” So now I get to examine my resentment and ask myself whether
0:10:02 I really want to honor I have no cherished outcome or whether I want to sulk. I seem
0:10:07 to be better at no cherished outcome in friendships than I am in romantic relationships. Almost
0:10:13 the minute a relationship becomes a romantic relationship, I have a list as long as my
0:10:18 arm of cherished outcomes and all of a sudden I can be disappointed and all of a sudden
0:10:23 I don’t bring an undefended heart to our meeting place. But with friendships which I have over
0:10:29 time discovered to be actually the true loves of my life, I seem to be a little bit better
0:10:33 at taking responsibility for myself and trying not to put outcomes on people.
0:10:40 Why do you think that is that there is such a difference for you between the number of
0:10:46 cherished outcomes you might hold in romantic relationships versus friendships? Is it because
0:10:54 at least culturally speaking, here in the US, there aren’t as many stories or scripts
0:11:02 related to friendships versus romantic partners? Or would you explain it a different way?
0:11:08 I think that my thing has always been, and this is why it’s been so interesting for me,
0:11:13 being single and celibate by choice over the last five years. There’s nobody to blame,
0:11:19 which is so great. And I think that it’s that the minute somebody is attached to me as my
0:11:26 partner, I do this weird outer body thing where I hold them responsible for whatever
0:11:30 mood I’m in. And so if I’m feeling great, it’s because they are the greatest. And if
0:11:36 I’m feeling terrible, it’s because they are the worst. And it’s so unfair. And one of
0:11:39 the really beautiful and educational things about spending a lot of time alone is like,
0:11:45 “Oh, these mood cycles and these depressions and these euphoria’s are happening. This is
0:11:50 like a weather system that’s happening that isn’t related to anybody.” And it turns out
0:11:55 all those years when I was analyzing those poor people in my relationships and holding
0:12:00 them account to account for the fact that I felt kind of not right. It was like, “Oh,
0:12:04 I haven’t been with anybody in five years and I felt not right when I woke up this morning
0:12:09 and there’s no one to pin it on. It’s so great. I love it. It’s like, I love not having anyone
0:12:14 to pin it on. I hate pinning things on people, but I don’t seem to know how to not do it
0:12:18 once we’re in a romantic relationship.” She come with a warning.
0:12:20 Yeah, a lot in life. She come with a warning.
0:12:21 I know.
0:12:24 I have quite a few follow-ups, but I’m going to try to put them in some semblance of a
0:12:30 coherent order. So my first question related to that is, how do you think about responsibility
0:12:34 or ownership for yourself in the sense that, or I should say rather what prompts that question
0:12:40 is I was having a conversation with an executive coach recently, Jerry Kelowna, actually, who’s
0:12:46 I think very good at what he does, former, very top tier investor who has a lot of questions
0:12:50 I returned to, one of which is how are we complicit in creating the conditions we say
0:12:51 we don’t want?
0:12:52 It’s such a good question.
0:12:57 It’s a really good one. It’s a really good one. But the one I wanted to apply here was
0:13:01 more a comment he made to me because I was talking about taking a radical ownership of
0:13:09 things and seeing my role in just about everything. And he said, “Well, taking responsibility for
0:13:13 everything can be as bad as taking responsibility for nothing.” And so I’m wondering when you
0:13:19 wake up and the weather system is dark and stormy, how do you work on yourself without
0:13:21 picking on yourself, if that makes any sense?
0:13:26 Oh, it’s such a good question. God, I love that question. How are you complicit in what
0:13:27 can you say it again?
0:13:31 Yeah. How are you complicit in creating the conditions you say you don’t want?
0:13:37 Wow. Another word for that is, who are you blaming your life on today?
0:13:41 Well, I think the only honest and humble answer that I can give to that question is, I don’t
0:13:49 know. And I don’t know where that line is. But it’s easier for me when I’m not in a relationship.
0:13:56 And it’s simpler for me to say, okay, I can take some accountability for my own weather
0:14:00 system. But as you say, I don’t want to beat myself up about having weather. And I have
0:14:06 to constantly remind myself that, I mean, I think the most compassionate thing that
0:14:12 I say to myself or I hear said to myself all the time from a more loving presence is it
0:14:18 is a very difficult thing to have a human incarnation. This is not an easy ride. Even
0:14:28 a good life is a hard life. And it’s so weird, it’s so profoundly weird to be a consciousness
0:14:35 dropped into a particular body, dropped into a particular family, arriving at a particular
0:14:46 moment in history. It’s so strange. I think I’m sure a lot of you want to project this
0:14:50 on you, but maybe you had this experience as a kid. I haven’t remembered as a kid looking
0:14:56 at myself in the mirror and being like, I’m in here. It’s so weird. What am I doing in
0:15:02 here? And all of that is out there and I’m in here. Something’s inside of this experience.
0:15:07 And it’s really hard. So I think you have to start with that. Who told you you were
0:15:11 supposed to get it right straight out of the gate? Who told you you were supposed to get
0:15:16 it right seven out of seven days or that you’re constantly supposed to be improving like a
0:15:21 Fortune 500 company constantly going in this upward angle direction a certain percentage
0:15:28 every quarter. There’s billions of systems operating within your body alone, hormonal
0:15:34 systems and chemical systems and viruses and bacterias like we’re such a complex mechanism.
0:15:38 So hard to figure how to operate one of these things. And then just when like I do really
0:15:42 well in solitude, like I can get this thing humming, like I can get this machine and this
0:15:48 mind and this heart where it is like we are at a beautiful hum. But the instant you throw
0:15:55 another complex human mechanism into my field, you know, then I’ve got to like adapt to
0:16:00 their chemistry and to their like it’s hard. I don’t know. And I think it’s hard is a really
0:16:07 good way to start with self-compassion. So that it’s hard. You you did a retake a few
0:16:12 moments ago where you said one of the things that I say to myself and then you corrected
0:16:19 then said one of the things that I hear. Why did you change that? Because I believe that
0:16:27 I am loved beyond measure by magnificent, complex, amused God who has given me power
0:16:40 over practically nothing really like very little that I have control over. But what tiny
0:16:44 amount I have control over is extremely important. It reminds me of something a friend of mine
0:16:50 was a physicist said one time that very little of the universe is matter, very little. But
0:16:55 what there is is very important. And it’s it’s like that, I think with control and power,
0:16:59 like I have very little control, have very little power, even over my own mechanism and
0:17:05 my own being. But what little agency I have, I think it’s important to use it well. But
0:17:12 anyway, I talk to that presence all the time. And I am in a nearly constant dialogue with
0:17:20 it and I hear it talking to me. So that’s why I say I hear a loving presence saying,
0:17:24 it’s really hard. It’s really hard. Like I’m not telling you this should be easy.
0:17:29 How long is up in the case? Is that development in the last handful of years, decade? Has
0:17:34 it been true since you were a kid? It’s deepened. I think one of the things I’m so lucky about
0:17:38 my friend, Rob Bell once said to me, you’re so lucky you didn’t grow up with an enforced
0:17:44 religion. And I’m so fortunate about that. I went to church, like a nice little mellow
0:17:50 New England church most Sundays as a kid. But I don’t recall anybody talking about God
0:17:56 that much. Like it was more of a social gathering. Like, I think New Englanders are a little
0:18:02 bit reticent in terms of being too heavy on the message. You know, like we sang songs
0:18:09 and made crafts. And I don’t remember it having very much to do with God. But I had a God awareness
0:18:14 that was very powerful in me. And I remember going to the National Cathedral on a school
0:18:20 trip when I was 10 in Washington D.C. And I grew up on a farm. So I grew up with very
0:18:25 rustic architecture. And to go from, I mean, that cathedral did what cathedrals are meant
0:18:31 to do to medieval peasants to me, you know, like, like I was put me into an awestruck state.
0:18:36 And I remember going, coming home and wanting to replicate that state and trying to figure
0:18:41 out if I could build a cathedral in my bedroom with like stuff for my dad’s woodshed and
0:18:45 my mom’s sewing kit. Like I really did try to, I’m like, how do you make that? How do
0:18:50 you make something that feels like that? And I think writing for me and my pursuit of writing
0:18:54 and the arts was always driven by this sense of awe and wonder and mystery that something
0:18:58 was moving through me. That was probably my first direct communication method. But for
0:19:07 the last 20 years, I’ve had a practice nearly every single day of writing myself a letter
0:19:12 every morning from unconditional love, which is kind of a God presence. It’s a bit more
0:19:16 specific, the unconditional love thing, because I think God is more than that. But that’s
0:19:23 where I also hear direction and guidance and humor. Yeah, I need a very funny God. I’m
0:19:30 not going to do well with a God that’s too serious. I need a God who thinks I’m funny,
0:19:35 like who thinks I’m adorable and funny. Like I need that. I can’t be too beaten up by a
0:19:36 higher power.
0:19:41 How did you start that practice? When did it start or even begin germinating?
0:19:48 It started in desperation when I was in my, going through my first divorce was 30. And
0:19:56 the well laid out planned life that I had created very obediently, like I had done
0:20:03 just what my culture had told me to do. I got married at 24 and worked hard and bought
0:20:09 a house and made a plan to have a family. And then instead of having a family, I had
0:20:13 a nervous breakdown, like quite literally, everybody was moving in this one direction
0:20:21 and my entire intellectual, spiritual and physical system collapsed, which I now know,
0:20:25 I now see that as an act of God. I now see that there was sort of the Dow, you know,
0:20:31 that there was a force that was trying to communicate to me, this is not your path.
0:20:35 I will kill you before I let you do this. I will kill you before I let you be a suburban
0:20:41 housewife. I’m not allowing it. I will make you put you in so much physical pain that
0:20:45 you’re going to have to notice that this is not the life for you. But I was also in
0:20:52 so much shame of failure and letting people down and like, we just bought this house.
0:20:56 Like I just felt like the biggest asshole in the world. I don’t know why I can’t just
0:21:01 get in line and do this thing that everybody’s saying to do. Anyway, that marriage ended.
0:21:06 And then I threw myself into another relationship and that ended. And I was like, I don’t know
0:21:12 how to orchestrate my life at all. And nothing, here I am 30 years old and nothing is what
0:21:16 I had planned it to be five years ago. And I was in the deepest depression of my life
0:21:21 and I didn’t have much of spiritual life at that point. But I remember waking up one night
0:21:27 and just shame and getting an instruction. I mean, that’s the only way I can explain
0:21:30 it. And I’m comfortable with that language because I often have that happen in my creative
0:21:35 life where I’m told what to do. This is what you’re going to focus on. Here’s what you
0:21:40 need to do now. And I was given this instruction and it came in as clearly as I’m talking to
0:21:46 you and it said, “Get up, get a notebook and write to yourself the words that you most
0:21:50 wish that somebody would say to you.” Because there was a great loneliness that I was feeling
0:21:58 to as well as the shame. And that letter began, what that letter said was, “I’ve got you,
0:22:04 I’m with you, I’m not going anywhere. I love you exactly the way you are. You can’t fail
0:22:11 at this. Like you can’t do this wrong. I don’t need anything from you. This is a huge thing
0:22:17 to hear. I don’t need anything.” Talk about no cherished outcome. I don’t need anything
0:22:24 from you. You don’t have to improve. You don’t have to do life better. You don’t have to win.
0:22:29 You don’t have to get out of this depression. You don’t have to ever uplift your spirits.
0:22:36 You could end up living in a box under a bridge in a garbage bag spitting at people. And I
0:22:41 would love you just as much as I do now. The love that I have for you cannot be lost because
0:22:48 it’s innate. It’s yours. I have no requirements for it. And if you need to stay up all night
0:22:52 crying, I’ll be here with you. And if tomorrow you have a garbage day again because you’ve
0:22:56 been up all night crying, I’ll be there for that too. I’ll be here for every minute of
0:23:02 it. Just ask me to come and I’ll be here with you. And the astonishing thing was that even
0:23:08 talking about it now, I can feel the impact that it has on my nervous system to hear those
0:23:13 words even in my own voice. And it was the first experience I’d ever had with unconditional
0:23:19 love. I’d never heard anybody say, “I don’t need you to be anything. You don’t have to
0:23:25 do better.” Like this is fine. This is great. You on the bathroom floor and a pile of tears
0:23:31 and stuff. It’s great. That’s fine. We love you just like that. And that’s so nourishing
0:23:36 because it’s so the opposite of every message that I’ve ever heard. And so I started doing
0:23:41 that practice and it’s taken me through. I’ve never… I’ve had difficult times in the last
0:23:47 20 years, but I’ve never gone as low again as I went at that time because this is the
0:23:54 net that catches me routinely before I can get that low. And that voice doesn’t change.
0:24:02 All right. This is getting into the juicy bits that I love to wait around. And so to
0:24:10 follow up, you’ve helped a lot of people now draft or attempt to write similar letters.
0:24:14 And I’m wondering a few things. You can answer these in any order you want or you can take
0:24:19 it in a different direction. One is if there are ingredients that seem to work better than
0:24:24 others. Because everything seems to take practice. Maybe these letters are no exception. The
0:24:33 second is do you find that people with some religious orientation or spiritual orientation
0:24:39 towards a greater power have an easier time writing this? In other words, if the letter
0:24:46 is from this power to yourself almost versus being from another version of yourself to
0:24:54 yourself, does it differ in impact? I found out that what I was doing, there’s a name
0:24:59 for it. And it’s actually a long spiritual tradition for people to do things like this.
0:25:05 But it’s a practice that’s very common in 12-step recovery and it’s called two-way prayer.
0:25:11 So it’s essentially two-way prayer. So I call it love, but sometimes I call it God for a
0:25:17 lot of people that word God is a weapon. I mean, especially people who grew up in what
0:25:23 are called high-demand religions or who grew up in really oppressive religious cultures
0:25:28 or abusive religious cultures or for whom they simply cannot stomach that word. Like
0:25:33 obviously don’t use that word. But two-way prayer. So one-way prayer is what most people
0:25:39 are taught as prayer, which is a supplication. Get down on your knees. And I had done that
0:25:45 in my life and like beg for help. But sometimes you spend so much time begging for help, you’re
0:25:50 not actually listening. Yeah, too busy saying Marco to hear the polo.
0:25:58 Yeah. I was like, Marco, Marco, Marco, Marco, God’s like, can I just, can I just, there’s
0:26:03 something I want to say. And so I would suggest if people are interested in this, you can
0:26:08 look up two-way prayer because there are a lot of people teaching it and they have made
0:26:14 a sort of, what were you saying? Is there like a practice or like instructions? Like
0:26:19 they have found that certain things work really well. So I’m sort of quoting from kind of two-way
0:26:27 prayer theory on this. The first one is that you can open up the channel by reading something.
0:26:31 So go to a quiet place, although at this point I’ve done it so long, like I can do it in
0:26:39 an Uber, you know? But like go to a quiet place and read something that to you feels
0:26:45 holy. So it doesn’t have to be any official religious text. Poetry works for me better
0:26:52 than scripture. So the poems of Hafiz or Rumi or Mary Oliver or Walt Whitman, you know,
0:26:57 I kept like letters, song of myself from Walt Whitman, which is essentially just a big letter
0:27:01 from love. You can just open that up to any page and you read some of it. And I feel like
0:27:07 those writers had direct access to the divine and they left the door open when they died, right?
0:27:13 So you can just draft in on the sense that they create. So you read something that opens your
0:27:18 heart in some way. And then you ask one question and one question only, it’s not a deposition.
0:27:27 And it’s not a dialogue because the ego always wants a dialogue. Like the ego always wants,
0:27:32 I feel like if I could reduce my ego down to two words, it would be, yeah, but
0:27:38 it’s always got a follow up question. It’s like, well, yeah, but you say, yeah, but you say that
0:27:42 you love me, but yeah, but you know, and it’s like part of the reason that two way prayer is so
0:27:47 beautiful is that you ask the question and then you stop talking. You give your opening statement.
0:27:52 Right. And your opening statement is, dear love, what would you have me know today?
0:27:57 And then the other thing that I’ve seen suggested in two way prayer practice, and this kind of came
0:28:02 intuitively to me, but I see that it’s taught this way when people teach it is the first line
0:28:11 back to you from the divine should be an endearment, an affectionate nickname, my love, my child,
0:28:19 my sweetheart, my little one. I hear little one a lot, my little one, my angel, honey head. I’ve
0:28:25 seen some of my friends have like tiny turtle, penguin cheeks, you know, like some sort of like
0:28:31 endearment stuck imagining with penguin cheeks. They’re adorable, you know, and that’s very
0:28:38 hard for some people because the idea of turning towards yourself as though you are worthy of
0:28:45 endearment can be really hard for especially perfectionists and the most driven among us.
0:28:51 Like you didn’t earn, how did you earn sweet love? You didn’t earn that, but this is a kind of love
0:28:56 that doesn’t have to be earned. So you start with that. And then so the way I did it, the first
0:29:03 night I did it was I literally just wrote what I wish somebody would say to me. And that’s pretty
0:29:07 straightforward as an instruction because you know what you wish somebody would say to you.
0:29:13 Like you know how you want to be loved. You know how you want to be loved. It’s right there. Like
0:29:18 you know what you’re dying for. We all know what we’re dying for, whether it’s mother love or the
0:29:25 missing father or the partner or the like somebody who’s just like, I’ve got you. I see you. I see
0:29:31 you. I love you. You’re amazing to me. I see that you’re suffering. I’m with you and you’re
0:29:37 suffering. And then you just, you just write that. But over time, what I think people will find,
0:29:42 one of the biggest questions people have is like, well, it just feels like it’s just me writing to
0:29:47 me. It feels super artificial. I don’t feel like I’m hearing God’s voice. I don’t feel like I’m
0:29:51 believing that there’s this eternal source in the universe that’s completely loving and
0:29:58 unconditionally adores me. I just feel like I’m doing this exercise of just writing words to
0:30:03 myself. And that doesn’t feel spiritual and it doesn’t feel rich and it doesn’t feel real.
0:30:10 And the question I have heard is, what’s so bad about that? What if it is just you? What if all
0:30:17 it is is just you writing to yourself from a kinder voice within you? Wouldn’t that be worthy
0:30:22 enough to be slightly life-changing besides the terrorist who lives inside your head constantly
0:30:28 telling you how you failed? Like, why not change the channel in your own head? And if that’s all
0:30:34 it is, and what if God is just the most loving voice inside your own head? This makes me actually
0:30:42 flashback to our last conversation because we have some proof for this in a different form,
0:30:48 which is mourning pages from The Artist’s Way and Julia Cameron. Just getting your monkey
0:30:56 mind on paper, even if it’s actually the terrorist, can be incredibly powerful. And one of my friends,
0:31:00 I remember he tried it for the first time for a week and he said he’s very high-functioning,
0:31:05 works with a lot of household names I won’t mention, but he said this is the closest thing
0:31:12 to a magic trick, a real-world magic trick that I’ve ever come across. So that question, what if
0:31:21 it is just the kindest voice in your head, I think, helps to diffuse maybe the pressure that
0:31:26 people would apply to themselves when trying this for the first time. And as you were talking about
0:31:30 the very first example you gave, I was thinking, and I think this might have been Chip Conley,
0:31:34 could have been someone else who said this to me, but that happiness is reality minus expectations.
0:31:39 And I was like, there are a lot of ways to play with that collection of variables,
0:31:45 one of which is saying, hey, you’ve already passed the grade. You could be under an overpass,
0:31:50 and that’s acceptable. That’s okay. You don’t have to be the Fortune 500 company compounding it,
0:31:59 X percent per quarter. Thank God. Because you know those people, and I know those people, and I
0:32:04 don’t know that it’s such a gentle, loving life that they’re leading.
0:32:13 Yeah, I think I know one of them intimately. At least somebody who kind of assumes that’s the
0:32:20 baseline minimal acceptable outcome, right, is life just doesn’t seem to work that way. It’s
0:32:28 not linear. Even if you are improving over time, but applying that pressure, sometimes handicaps
0:32:33 improvement in the first place. So question for you, this occurred to me, and it may be a dead end,
0:32:42 but I’m wondering, have you seen any difference in how men approach this or have challenges with it
0:32:48 versus women or no difference? Is it kind of the ubiquitous set of challenges when you look at the
0:32:54 number of friends, listeners, readers, et cetera, who have attempted this?
0:32:59 It’s hard to know because women tend to follow me more than they do, but I’ve invited a number of
0:33:05 men. So every week, so on my sub-stack, I share a letter from love that I’ve written,
0:33:09 and then I invite a special guest to do it. And I’ve invited a number of men.
0:33:15 I’m thinking right now about my friend, Arshay Cooper, who’s such an extraordinary guy. He grew
0:33:24 up on the south side of Chicago in an absolutely bullet and drug-ridden ghetto, black, underprivileged,
0:33:31 underserved. He’s the subject and the producer of a gorgeous documentary called A Beautiful Thing,
0:33:36 and he wrote a book by the same title. And when he was in high school with no future,
0:33:42 some guy showed up in his high school hallway with a rowing machine and was like,
0:33:48 I want to start like a first black rowing team or the first black crew. Do any of you guys want
0:33:54 to do it? And he was like, yes, I absolutely want to do it. And he now has become this ambassador
0:33:59 teaching rowing all over the world in South Africa. And his letter from love that he shared
0:34:07 is one of my favorite ones that I’ve ever seen. His letter was addressed to that little boy who
0:34:14 he was, who saw more violence before he was eight years old than most people on tours of duty in
0:34:22 Afghanistan had seen and how tenderly that child needed to be treated. And watching him, you know,
0:34:31 this athlete, this motivational speaker, this great leader turned toward himself or have love
0:34:36 turned toward him in such a tender and intimate way was so moving, but he was open to it.
0:34:38 He allowed that vulnerability to come through.
0:34:45 Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we’ll be right back to the show.
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0:36:04 There’s something that I’ve learned in IFS, internal family systems therapy.
0:36:07 I was just going to bring that up. The hive mind is working.
0:36:12 It all works within IFS too, but there’s one of the things they say in IFS a lot is a prepositional
0:36:17 change. How do you feel towards yourself versus how do you feel about yourself?
0:36:22 May I just give a little bit of context for folks? So IFS for people who don’t know, it’s
0:36:29 somewhat strangely named. So internal family systems can be thought of as and please
0:36:33 fact check me. I did an episode with Dick Schwartz for people who are interested, but
0:36:39 parts work in the context of different parts of yourself. So you might have protectors,
0:36:44 you may have exiles, these aspects of yourself that you have pushed away or compartmentalized in
0:36:53 some way. And you facilitate dialogue between and among these different parts for the purposes of
0:36:56 therapy and it can be very, very powerful. So I just wanted to give people a little bit of context.
0:36:59 Beautifully described. Yeah, I’ve heard it described as group therapy for one.
0:37:06 And he actually Dick Schwartz who founded it started off as a group therapist. And when he
0:37:10 started doing individual therapy, he was like, Oh, this is just like group therapy. We’ve got
0:37:15 voices yelling at each other inside this person who don’t know how to communicate with each other.
0:37:21 So yeah, that’s a really beautiful subnation of what it is. But the difference between
0:37:26 even I mean, try it, Tim, actually, can you feel the difference physically between if I ask you
0:37:29 how you feel about yourself, and how you feel toward yourself?
0:37:35 They’re totally different, right? Because toward yourself, I’m taking a friendly observer
0:37:41 perspective. There’s an empathy. Right. And how do you feel about yourself also is so
0:37:50 familiar linguistically that it overlaps with a lot of the negative tracks that I already have had
0:37:54 in my head. Whereas how do I feel towards myself? That’s not a construction I use. So it
0:37:59 benevolently hijacks the whole thought process instantly, you know, you ask me how I feel about
0:38:03 myself, I’ll show you a list of everything that needs improvement. You know, and I’m wired to
0:38:08 constantly be self improving. And I’m sure you are too. How do I feel toward myself? I’m like,
0:38:14 Oh, man, you’re tired. Like you’ve got this chest cold you’ve had for seven weeks. You’re finishing
0:38:21 this project. That’s huge. You got a lot on you like honey. Yeah, it’s hard. You’re having a hard
0:38:25 like it’s hard. Suddenly, it’s like I’m a very different person toward myself.
0:38:30 Let’s actually hop from that. I’ll mention one thing that I want to hop to something related
0:38:35 with just self friendliness. And how you think about it, how others might think about it. I just
0:38:41 want to say in connection with IFS and also a number of other workshops and seminars that I’ve
0:38:48 done, I have not written a letter from love in the way that you describe it. Exactly. But I did
0:38:53 write a version of it that sounds actually very similar to the last example you gave.
0:38:58 And this is done in a fair amount of parts work is, you know, what would you say to X, which could
0:39:03 be I’m making this up, but like fear of inadequacy at what age, right? How old are you five year
0:39:09 old Tim? Okay, what would you say to five year old Tim? So I have written letters to a younger
0:39:16 version of myself and found it to be incredibly powerful. I mean, this was years ago that I did
0:39:19 it. And it still sticks in my mind. And I remember a lot of the language that I used.
0:39:25 But the question of self friendliness sort of broadens and includes a lot of what we’ve been
0:39:31 talking about already. Could you speak to self friendliness in whatever way makes sense to you?
0:39:37 Yeah, I mean, we always talk about self love, but that’s kind of lofty. And I think you could
0:39:42 just start by being a little friendlier. You know what I mean? Like, just how about the common
0:39:45 courtesy you would show to a stranger on the subway? Like, let’s start with that. Like,
0:39:52 just common human decency. So there’s a story that I’m so moved and disturbed by it. So Sharon
0:39:57 Salzburg, do you know Sharon Salzburg meditation teacher? So she met the Dalai Lama, and she’s
0:40:03 written about this, she met the Dalai Lama on his first visit to the West. And she was in a group
0:40:09 of people who were the first Americans, North Americans to meet him. And it was at a time when
0:40:14 nobody really knew who he was. He wasn’t like the rock star who he became. He’s the obscure Tibetan
0:40:19 monk. And of course, it took place somewhere in California, and there were some academics in the
0:40:25 room and some spiritual writers and teachers and meditators and this sort of elect group of people
0:40:28 who were coming to meet him. And he was speaking through translator, because he didn’t speak much
0:40:35 English at the time. And somebody in the room asked him, what Tibetan Buddhism and his teachings
0:40:44 have to say about self-hatred and how to combat self-hatred. And don’t you know that man had to
0:40:51 talk to his translator for like 15 minutes and kept asking for the question to be repeated.
0:40:57 He didn’t understand the question. He kept thinking that he was mishearing the question,
0:41:01 because he kept saying, wait, who’s the enemy? Who’s the person that you’re having trouble with?
0:41:07 And of course, being like Calvinistic Westerners in the room, raised on scarcity,
0:41:13 and you’re never enoughness and original sin, everybody in the room was like,
0:41:19 no, I’m the one I hate. And he was like, this doesn’t even make sense.
0:41:25 Like what you’re saying doesn’t even make sense. And when he finally grasped not only that he
0:41:29 understood that person’s question and what they were talking about, but that everyone in the room
0:41:36 shared this problem, he was so devastated. And he said, I used to think that I had
0:41:42 a really good understanding of the workings of the human mind, but this is new to me. And this is
0:41:48 very disturbing. Like this is not okay. And essentially after that, he said, this is where
0:41:54 we’re going to start. And then that’s basically what he became his mission in the Western world.
0:41:58 And it’s interesting, I was talking about it with Sharon Salzburg the other day. And she was saying,
0:42:02 in Buddhism, they say, you know, that one of the things that if you want to evolve is that you
0:42:07 have to be less precious to yourself. You have to think of yourself as being less precious. But
0:42:12 she said, in the West, we have to we haven’t even gotten to the point where we think we’re precious
0:42:17 yet to let go of it. Like first, she’s like, I think we first have to find our preciousness.
0:42:23 And then we can let go of it. And then we can evolve. But if we don’t even know that any of us,
0:42:28 anything about us is precious, that’s already a problem. And when the Dalai Lama started teaching
0:42:32 people how to love themselves, he would say, talk to yourself the way your mother would talk to
0:42:37 you. And then he found out about some of our moms. And he was like, okay, grandmother, like he was
0:42:43 just scratch that he was like, has anybody ever said a kind word to you? You know, like it was,
0:42:49 you know, it really spotlights this sort of terrible dysfunction that we all kind of collectively
0:42:55 have grown up in. Have you found other ways to counteract that outside of the
0:43:03 letter writing? Are there any other practices or recommendations for people who are experiencing
0:43:11 this? Many of whom are experiencing it secularly, right? They may experience it in the absence of
0:43:16 a religious upbringing, as would be the case for me. Any other recommendations or thoughts?
0:43:21 You just made me realize I didn’t answer your second question about whether people who
0:43:26 have some sort of religious or spiritual basis find this easier. Not necessarily, because some
0:43:31 people still are praying to what James Joyce called the hangman God. And you’re not going to get a
0:43:36 letter of unconditional love from the hangman God, you’re going to get a list of complaints about
0:43:40 things that you need to do better. So sometimes those people have a really hard time doing it.
0:43:46 There’s one man I asked to do this, to write a letter from love, and he’s a very well known
0:43:51 figure in the world that I’m trying to think how to not identify. I’m not even going to say more
0:43:57 than that, but he’s somebody who’s very admired and is very good. And he had the most surprising
0:44:01 response of people who have said no. Most people say no because they’re either afraid that they’re
0:44:05 going to ask love to show up and love isn’t going to show up. And that would be more painful than
0:44:12 not asking. Or they feel like it’s too vulnerable to expose themselves like this. He said no,
0:44:16 because he said, I have a feeling I know what unconditional love is going to say to me. It’s
0:44:21 going to say you’re trying too hard and you’re doing too much and you don’t have to try this hard
0:44:27 and do too much. But I don’t want to be let off the hook because I want to keep aspiring to go
0:44:31 further and higher. And I don’t want to hear a voice that tells me that I’m okay just the way I am.
0:44:39 I’m afraid that will make me stop. And I was like, oh, honey, who hurt you? Oh, dear,
0:44:44 you can still do things, but might it not be nice to also hear that something
0:44:49 loves you even as you’re aspiring? Anyway, it was just, that was interesting.
0:44:56 Sorry, but you had a second question. Yeah, the question was, I suppose, related. And that is
0:45:02 outside of writing this letter you’ve described. What other approaches or habits,
0:45:08 anything at all, have you found helpful or seen helpful for others in counteracting
0:45:13 self-antagonism, right? So fostering self-friendliness, in other words.
0:45:22 Boundaries is what comes to mind. And some really hardcore ones. Makes me think of our mutual
0:45:29 friend, Martha Beck, who is not a lot longer than I have. Tell me what made you think of her for that.
0:45:34 Well, the integrity cleanse and just checking in. I know we discussed it last time, but setting a
0:45:39 timer to check in every 30 minutes to see if you’re lying and if you want to even be in this
0:45:43 conversation. Right. If your sister’s like, yeah, you’re coming over for the baby shower and you’re
0:45:47 like, I’d love to beep, beep, beep. Like, no, actually, I really have zero interest.
0:45:56 There are people who I am not skilled. This is how I word it, because I want to keep it
0:46:01 on me. I’m not skilled enough to be able to hold my serenity when I’m around them.
0:46:08 I lose the hard-earned peace that I try to generate every day through meditation and through
0:46:14 two-way prayer and through the way that I live. Like, I’m constantly trying to bring myself
0:46:20 to a level of kind of humming nicely along. And there are certain people who I just can’t do it.
0:46:25 And I think my younger self was spiritually ambitious enough that I was like, if you were
0:46:30 a better human being, then you would be able to jujitsu your way through this, or you would
0:46:35 compassion your way through this, or you would accept your way through this. And I’m at an age
0:46:42 now at 55 where I’m like, no, I just can’t do, I can’t. Like, I come home sick when I’m around
0:46:49 those people. Like, I lose my attainments when I’m around those people. And it’s not friendly for me
0:46:55 to be around people who are cruel. And when I’m around people who are cruel,
0:47:04 I become unwell. And I also then have to use something to, like, I get so disregulated.
0:47:09 Disregulated. Yeah. Like, I get, like, there’s certain people I’m around them and it’s like,
0:47:13 I want to have a drink. Like, I want to have, I want to have a drink, call a phone number,
0:47:19 I shouldn’t dial, like, start smoking and driving fast, you know? Like, this disregulates me so much.
0:47:24 And it’s just, it’s not kind to myself to put myself in those situations again and again.
0:47:33 So how do you, or how have you, created boundaries or put those relationships on probation or
0:47:37 otherwise? I’m trying to, you know, trying to think how to describe it that doesn’t get too,
0:47:45 revealing too much personal stuff. I’m not here to say it’s easy, but I do feel a sense of stewardship
0:47:52 toward myself. And, you know, I mean, it’s hard. I’ll tell you this, I did an event with Rachel
0:47:57 Cargill, the great writer and civil rights activist a couple years ago. And somebody in the audience
0:48:01 asked us, you guys both seem so calm and chilled, you have difficult people in your life. And I
0:48:08 started laughing so hard, I rolled, literally rolled off my chair. And I was like, yeah, yeah.
0:48:14 And she said, no, I don’t. And I was like, wait, what? And I was like, leaning in, I’m like,
0:48:18 wait a minute, break that down. And she said, no, I don’t have anybody in my life currently who’s
0:48:24 difficult, because I won’t do that to myself anymore. And here’s the zinger. This is somebody
0:48:30 with a tremendous sense of self value and self friendliness. She said, the follow up question
0:48:34 in the audience was somebody said, what about people who you have to deal with?
0:48:38 And you have to have them in your life, because like they’re in your family. And she said,
0:48:43 I’m thinking as hard as I can, and I cannot come up with a single name of anybody who is entitled
0:48:50 to be in my life, no matter what their biological relationship is to me. And that’s a radical
0:48:57 position to take. And Rachel Cargill lives a radical life. And that’s somebody who is really
0:49:03 prioritizing her own wellbeing. And she was like, I’ve blocked my mother for several years at a
0:49:09 time, because she was too destructive. She’s like, I’ve got siblings I haven’t spoken to in years,
0:49:15 because they’re too disruptive. And they’re not entitled to have me in their life just because
0:49:20 we were born into the same family. That’s intense boundaries. So I will say only that I’ve done
0:49:26 stuff like that. I’ve decided that not everybody’s entitled to have me in their life.
0:49:30 Just a practical tactical question, since that’s where my brain sometimes goes.
0:49:37 Do you slow fade that person? You just start like first you respond after 24 hours, then it’s a week,
0:49:41 then it’s two months, then it’s never. Or do you have a conversation? Do you text them and you’re
0:49:47 like, Hey, love you, but or is there some approach? I’m going through a list in my head. I’m like,
0:49:51 how did I do that one? How did I do that one? Some have been done, I would say, elegantly,
0:49:59 which to me means honestly. But I think again, you can keep it on the eye and just say like,
0:50:08 I noticed that I become so dysregulated after these encounters that I can’t do this anymore.
0:50:17 This is too dysregulating for me. I can’t do it. I’m out. And at times where I’m super dysregulated,
0:50:22 I will say, I’m not well and I need to go get well. And I’m going to go take some privacy,
0:50:26 because that’s also true. Like I can get so dysregulated that I become unwell.
0:50:33 I’m thinking of a couple other people where I very honestly said like, I’m in a place in my life
0:50:38 right now where I need a lot of solitude and a lot of silence. And if that changes, I’ll let you know.
0:50:44 And then there’s some people who I just stopped responding to, because their being,
0:50:49 I kept running through the scenarios of like, how would an open and honest conversation about this
0:50:55 go and it would be like, not good. I don’t have any reason to think that this would go well.
0:51:02 Like this is going to be a firestorm. And I think I’m just going to leave. But it isn’t easy,
0:51:07 but I’m a lot healthier since I’ve done that. I think it’s easier when you’re older too,
0:51:11 because I think you get used to like, you don’t keep everybody in life, you know?
0:51:16 You think as a young person, you can’t. You can’t, right? There’s an ebb and flow,
0:51:21 even if you wanted to, you couldn’t. And it makes me think of maybe bonsai is not the right example,
0:51:28 because I do think of them kind of as little torture trees, but pruning as opposed to accumulating,
0:51:35 right? Curating as opposed to collecting. And I think as you get older, you just realize,
0:51:41 okay, there is at least as far as we know, in this corporeal body, an end to the story.
0:51:47 Not generating more time. And some people just consume more life energy than they contribute.
0:51:51 I mean, I always say some people are medicine. Like when you’re with them,
0:51:54 when you come away from them, you feel like you’ve gotten a dose of medicine.
0:52:00 And some people need medicine. And when you’re with them, you feel like they raided your pharmacy.
0:52:10 And some people need to be institutionalized. It’s beyond that. It’s just like, I can’t do anything
0:52:17 with this year. You know, one thing I have noticed is that I don’t like holidays. I don’t like the
0:52:24 ritual of big holiday gatherings. And I’ve let my family know that. That I’m like, I love you guys.
0:52:30 And I’m going to come and see you any day of the year, except these days.
0:52:34 So I’ll come and see you in early December. I’ll spend a week. We’ll have a great time.
0:52:38 Like, well, I want to have one on one time with you. I want to sit at the table with you. I want
0:52:43 to go for walks with you. I want to go for bike rides with you. I’m not coming for Christmas.
0:52:48 Why is that? I’m so curious. Just as someone who you picked my one and favorite holiday.
0:52:53 Oh, that’s so wonderful. Which is fine. And great. But I’m curious,
0:52:56 what is it about the gathering? Cherished outcomes.
0:53:00 Cherished outcomes. Meaning that you feel like you need to perform.
0:53:07 Oh, man, I feel like there’s so much on the table. And it’s like the meal. Even as a kid,
0:53:15 I found it so stressful. And like everyone’s so tense. And it’s like, why do we have to do this?
0:53:22 And the answer is, you don’t have to. But the people who love it should do it.
0:53:30 Yeah, for sure. I just sit by the fire with my dog and drink hot chocolate.
0:53:33 That sounds fantastic. It’s not very stressful in my case.
0:53:39 No, I actually like spending holidays alone because they’re quiet days. When you’re alone,
0:53:42 the phone’s not ringing and working emails aren’t coming in. Like some of my happiest
0:53:47 days have been holidays that I spent alone. I enjoy it.
0:53:51 Have you always been comfortable with solitude or extended periods of being alone?
0:53:57 Has that always been the case? To mix. But I love my own company, except for when I’m
0:54:04 in some sort of super disrupted mental state. And then it’s very painful to be with myself.
0:54:10 But lately, like in the last 10 years, it’s my favorite person to hang out with.
0:54:18 And I live alone and I love living alone. And I love waking up and being like, here’s our day.
0:54:22 Like, what do we want to do? How do we want to spend this?
0:54:27 And I’m a writer. I chose to be a writer. It’s a very solitary time. And I love that.
0:54:35 Like my most joyful moments of my life have been alone with my work. And I remember hearing
0:54:40 Michael Sheban one time say, and I’m super social too. Like I have a lot of friends and
0:54:46 a lot of people who I love and care about, but I’m always happy to go back to being alone.
0:54:50 Anyway, I heard him say one time, and he’s got four kids, I think. But he said,
0:54:55 you can love your books, but they can’t love you back. And I thought, oh, my books love me back.
0:55:02 Like, my work loves me. Like, it is a love story in two directions. Like,
0:55:07 it is a beautiful love story writing those books. And I feel that there’s something very alive and
0:55:13 connected in that that isn’t just me. So for people who can’t see, and even for people who can,
0:55:20 see video, your hairstyle has changed since we last spoke. How did that come to be? What is,
0:55:27 is there a significance there? I buzzed off my hair, gosh, about nine months ago. And I have been
0:55:35 wanting to do this for 20 years and dreaming about doing this for 20 years. And I can’t tell you
0:55:39 how many times I’ve sat in my hairdresser’s chair and been like, just take those clippers and just
0:55:45 buzz it off. Just like, just take it off. Just take it off. Like, I just want to be free. I want to
0:55:50 be free. And I never had the courage to do it. And I had a lot of reasons for why I couldn’t do that
0:55:56 as a woman. What if my head has a weird shape? What if I mean, I’m a public figure? What if I’m
0:56:00 out there with a bald head? I just, I always was like, when I get older, I’ll do it. When I get
0:56:07 older, I’ll do it. And then I had this amazing awakening. And it was last year, I went to an
0:56:13 event in New York and there are a bunch of people there who were in their 40s, 50s, and 60s. And
0:56:17 this is New York City. So it’s like one of the most progressive places in the world. And I looked
0:56:27 around the room and all the men, all of the men had clipped, like shaved or buzzed hair. And they
0:56:32 all looked great, like yours. Like they all looked great. Like there’s a bunch of like silver foxes.
0:56:39 They all had lines in their faces. They looked fantastic. And all the women had long or longish
0:56:47 versions of some sort of complicated hair that I, you know, I know hair. So I know what it costs
0:56:52 to have that hair. I know the keratin treatment you had to have for that hair to look silky. I know
0:56:56 the dye job that you had to pay for. I know how much those highlights cost. I know that only
0:57:02 2% of women in the world are blonde and that 45% of the women in that room were blonde,
0:57:06 including me. You know, and I was like, thinking about Dolly Parton’s line where somebody said
0:57:10 to her one time, do you ever get offended at dumb blonde jokes? And she said, no, because I know I
0:57:16 ain’t dumb. And I know I hit blonde. And it’s like, I am blonde and I am dumb, but I’m spending a lot
0:57:23 of money to, and I just had this really reckoning moment where I thought, why are we doing this?
0:57:29 Why do I have to do this? And so many of the most amazing reckoning and liberation moments of my
0:57:35 life have been these moments where I was like, oh, I don’t have to buy into this anymore,
0:57:40 just because I’ve been trained and taught and conditioned my entire life that I have to buy
0:57:45 into this. I’m opting out. I’m out. I’m taking my toys and I’m leaving. And I thought I can just,
0:57:50 like, get mad about the patriarchy and say that there’s an unfair beauty standard for men and
0:57:55 women, or I can just claim the entitlement that these men have and just get some buzzers at
0:58:00 CVS and clip my own hair and never think about my hair again. And that’s what I did.
0:58:02 So you did it yourself?
0:58:06 I did it myself. Yeah. And I do it myself every week. And it’s like, this is the last money I’m
0:58:07 ever spending on my hair. It’s like these clippers.
0:58:10 I was gonna say, now we can trade tips.
0:58:15 I know. It’s so great. And I was like, oh my God, the freedom. I wake up every morning. I’m like,
0:58:20 my hair is perfect. Like I jump in a river, jump in a lake, jump in an ocean, get off, get off a
0:58:27 plane. It’s never not perfect. It’s amazing. And I can’t imagine any reason to ever have hair again.
0:58:33 And it’s part of, I don’t know, I just think it’s part of this amazing thing about becoming a free
0:58:42 woman and a middle-aged. I am culture’s nightmare. I’m a middle-aged, childless, husbandless woman.
0:58:50 Like I’m basically a bog witch, like just like living, rattling around in a house by myself,
0:58:58 talking to myself, watering my plants, shaving my head. And it’s so cool. It’s so exciting because I
0:59:03 never saw a woman like this when I was growing up. And I never heard of a woman like this.
0:59:11 I only heard cautionary tales about how tragic and sad, unmarried, divorced or widowed women were.
0:59:16 And I’m all of those. I’m unmarried, divorced and widowed. So I’m like the trifecta.
0:59:24 And these have been the most creative, spiritual and wild years of my life.
0:59:32 We were exchanging various ideas, potential topics before this conversation in shorthand,
0:59:39 because of course, I want to talk about things fresh without knowing the answers I’m going to get.
0:59:45 Relaxed woman, a relaxed woman, as a radical concept. What is this?
0:59:48 How many have you ever met? Oh boy, in the hot seat.
0:59:56 No, I haven’t met that many relaxed men either. But I think it would be a truly revolutionary thing.
1:00:01 What are the characteristics of a relaxed woman? What does that look like?
1:00:06 Well, first of all, I want to say that this is why I think it would be revolutionary.
1:00:15 So let me start with why. When I think of the words that are commonly used to describe
1:00:22 the women who we all admire, bad-ass, fierce, tough, resilient, brave, strong,
1:00:30 or in the Brene Brown realm, vulnerable, open-hearted. I aspire to be all of those things,
1:00:33 and I admire all those women who are all those things. But none of that feels revolutionary to
1:00:37 me because women have always been all those things. You have to be all those things.
1:00:40 As a woman in the world, you have to be resilient. You have to be strong.
1:00:44 You have to be bad-ass. You have to be fierce to survive as a woman.
1:00:48 My ancestors were all that. Your ancestors were that, or we wouldn’t exist.
1:00:55 So it’s not a revolution. It’s not a revolution. What would be a revolution would be a relaxed
1:01:04 woman because I never saw one growing up. I saw angry, tired women, and I saw some relaxed men,
1:01:10 but I saw angry, tired women. And I was on the pathway to becoming an angry, tired woman.
1:01:13 And that’s when my body revolted and was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
1:01:16 we’re not doing this. We’re going in a completely different direction.
1:01:22 So how do you not be an angry, tired woman? That’s a really big question.
1:01:25 And I think when I talk about this with groups of women, I always say,
1:01:30 I think we have to be careful because there’s some part of us that thinks it would be irresponsible
1:01:38 not to be angry. And it would be irresponsible not to be tired because, I mean, just look at the
1:01:43 world and how much it needs us on the personal level and on the political level and how much
1:01:48 there is to be angry about and how many of us were violated in our bodies at various times.
1:01:53 I mean, there’s a million reasons to not be relaxed. And yet the question I have is if you
1:01:58 were to step in, and this is a question I always ask to women, if you were to think of the biggest
1:02:03 shit tornado going on in your life right now, whatever it is, the hardest thing you’re doing,
1:02:09 whether it’s your activism or your family or your work or a medical issue or a bankruptcy
1:02:13 or an addiction issue, like whatever it is, or a problematic family member.
1:02:20 And if you were to go into that same exact shit tornado tomorrow and not one external thing
1:02:27 changed, but you were relaxed, would you be more or less effective at handling it?
1:02:32 Martial artists know that the most relaxed person in the room wins the fight.
1:02:39 Like actors know this, artists know this, this is where the flow happens, athletes know this.
1:02:47 And so I think for me, I’ve narrowed it down to three things that I need for me, for my system,
1:02:56 to be relaxed. And it’s boundaries, priorities, and mysticism. And if I don’t have those three
1:03:01 things, I’m super stressed. And I would say that the mysticism is the most important,
1:03:04 but the boundaries protect that. So boundaries, what was number two?
1:03:08 Priorities. Yeah, priorities and then mysticism.
1:03:12 And women are not taught that they’re allowed to have priorities. Men are taught that they’re
1:03:17 allowed to have priorities, but women are supposed to prioritize everybody and everything.
1:03:21 And you feel really guilty if you’re not prioritizing everybody and everything.
1:03:27 And I always suggest that you should maybe have like four priorities, like four or five.
1:03:31 And there’s nothing like tragedy to kind of make it clear what your priorities are too.
1:03:36 Like when my partner, Rayo, was diagnosed with terminal cancer, it became very clear to me very
1:03:41 quickly who I cared about and what I wanted to be doing with my time. And I remember opening my
1:03:47 inbox the day I found out that she had six months to live and seeing like this huge list of emails.
1:03:50 And I just deleted them all without responding to them because I was like,
1:03:58 the reason that these emails have been sitting in my inbox for months is not because I’m too busy.
1:04:04 It’s because I don’t care. I don’t care. And those are the three words that women are never allowed
1:04:09 to say. Like a woman is never allowed to say, I don’t care. Okay, you’re not too busy. You just
1:04:13 don’t care. I don’t care. If like, look, if I care, I’ll get back to you immediately. Like this
1:04:20 is what I’ve learned about my inbox. Like same with my text messages, like you will hear from me
1:04:24 immediately if I care. Like if I don’t, it’s because I don’t care. And it’s okay. You can’t
1:04:29 care about everything. Or you just don’t care enough in the hierarchy of your priorities.
1:04:34 Priorities. Priorities, right? So like, who are your priorities? What are your priorities? What
1:04:39 do you actually care about? Do you have the courage to say like, no. So boundaries, priorities, and
1:04:44 then mysticism is the only thing that will actually relax my nervous system. And that is
1:04:50 getting really quiet and connecting through two-way prayer, through a letter from love and
1:04:55 through deep meditation. Because I can’t just live on this plane or I will lose my shit.
1:05:03 The plane of the apparent and the real and the material and the Newtonian physics,
1:05:11 it’s like too stressful. And I need to have access to a deeper perspective to be able to be relaxed
1:05:15 enough to actually say and mean I have no cherished outcome.
1:05:20 Like right to the point of saying like, whether I live or die, I have no cherished outcome.
1:05:25 Can I be that relaxed? Can I be relaxed of not to know what’s going to happen?
1:05:31 Can I believe that some other thing is orchestrating this? And my involvement might not be necessary
1:05:34 in every single moment. This is a hard thing for women to believe.
1:05:39 Is that the key ingredient of the mysticism for you? Because there are different forms for sure
1:05:45 that mysticism can take. I mean, you mentioned Hafez, you mentioned Rumi. You have different,
1:05:49 let’s just call it, subsections of various religions that are associated with mysticism,
1:05:55 like Sufis in that particular case. Is that potential of a larger power orchestrating things
1:06:01 so that you don’t need to be involved in all the details, the key component of this third leg
1:06:05 of the stool, the mysticism? Or are there other aspects to that?
1:06:10 Well, there’s love. So we have to then go back to, you don’t have to win this,
1:06:18 right? You’re not going to be graded. A thing I often hear in those prayers and meditations is,
1:06:22 we’ve got all the time in the world. And that’s the exact opposite of the stress
1:06:27 that I was raised under, the vice grip that I was raised under. Short amount of time,
1:06:33 extremely important to win. No errors can be allowed. So got all the time in the world.
1:06:38 We got all the time in the universe. What’s time? Plenty of time. It’ll happen or it won’t,
1:06:41 like whatever the thing is. And that actually also happens to be true,
1:06:46 that it will happen or it won’t. Like even we know that our best laid plans sometimes,
1:06:50 it’s like, I guess this wasn’t the thing that was supposed to happen. But then there’s also
1:06:56 where my body goes into a deep hum that I used to only be able to get from substances or
1:07:03 love of another person settling me that deep, deep, like, okay, everything is okay here.
1:07:10 The thing that always works for me is a voice saying to me, you don’t even know what you’re
1:07:17 looking at. You don’t even know what you’re looking at. And it just pierces my certainty,
1:07:22 because my certainty is one of the things that makes me so anxious. And this is a very convincing
1:07:28 virtual reality that we live in. You know, it’s very, very, very convincing.
1:07:34 But the mystics and the physicists seem to agree that it might really not be what we see
1:07:39 and what we’re perceiving. I went to an event in Brooklyn a couple years ago and heard two
1:07:44 Nobel Prize winning physicists talk about the nature of reality. And it was so wonderful to
1:07:51 hear this Nobel Prize winning scientists say, the more I look at reality, the less I understand it.
1:07:57 And all I can say after all these years of studying the nature of reality is that nothing
1:08:03 is what it appears. And that what we used to think was natural law is at best some very local
1:08:09 ordinances. We really were like five Einstein’s away from even having the right questions to
1:08:13 ask to even know what we’re looking at here. And just because billions and billions and billions
1:08:19 of people have the same senses and look at the world and come to the same conclusion about
1:08:24 what they’re seeing and agree doesn’t make it true. And that settles me. And it shouldn’t.
1:08:28 It’s kind of like the rugs and the floor and the ground are being pulled out from under you
1:08:34 completely. And that shouldn’t be relaxing. But I find it deeply relaxing. Because then the stakes
1:08:40 suddenly become a lot lower. And it’s like, all right, well, since I don’t even know what this
1:08:50 game is that I’m in, let me do what I can and let the rest of it go. And it doesn’t mean quit the
1:08:57 game. You’re still in the virtual reality game. Play it nicely. But play it knowing that you don’t
1:09:03 even know what you’re looking at. Yeah, I’m still thinking of your correlation that you drew between
1:09:11 certainty and anxiety, which seems very astute, and that most people would steer away from. They
1:09:17 would rather be unhappy than uncertain because uncertainty equals in a lot of minds. And this
1:09:23 is true for me at times too, hidden risks. But it also, depending on how you kind of play the game
1:09:30 and which poetry you read, and so on, it also opens the door to the possibility of
1:09:37 unexpected surprises, good surprises, good things. Make sense to me. I’ve had a similar
1:09:43 settling experience. I mean, it’s sometimes enhanced, so I can’t recommend that to a broad audience.
1:09:49 Well, no, no, no, no, I get it. And that’s why people get enhanced. Because there’s that sense
1:09:55 of like, oh, wait a minute, this is bigger and more complicated. And I’m part of this. But I,
1:10:02 wow, you know, like Steve Jobs’ last words, wow, wow, wow, like whatever he saw in those last
1:10:07 moments, wow, wow, wow. I’m thinking of a relative of mine who I said one time, would you rather
1:10:14 be happy or right? And they said, how in the world could I be happy if I wasn’t right? And I think
1:10:18 that it’s actually quite the opposite for me, like, probably wrong.
1:10:27 Human history in a nutshell. Book title. I mean, just look at my life. I have a long history of
1:10:31 making decisions that are very bad for getting what I wanted and then finding out this is another
1:10:37 thing that I find is really wonderful about middle age. Like, I’ve gotten what I wanted a lot in life,
1:10:44 and it almost killed me. So I’m not so interested anymore in what I want. I’m good at manifesting
1:10:50 what I want, and I’m good at almost dying for what I want. You know, so maybe there’s a better
1:10:56 question to be asking, then what do I want? Have you any thoughts on candidates for that
1:11:02 better question? What would you have me know? What would you have me know? I mean, that’s
1:11:08 a really good one. This makes me wonder how you choose, and I’ve wanted to ask you this for a
1:11:13 while, and I don’t think we got into it in our prior conversation, which is how do you choose
1:11:20 projects? How to spend your time? Where to allocate your limited life force? Because there’s what do
1:11:26 you want, which is where a lot of people would start. Although that’s a pretty, it can be nebulous
1:11:31 in a handicapping way because that could take you in all sorts of different directions. But how do
1:11:37 you choose your projects? Things to spend time on? I’m kind of a hard ass about it. Yeah, great.
1:11:43 So part of the thing I’ve noticed that people tend to get stuck on sometimes is that they get this
1:11:50 inspiration. So inspiration comes first, and inspiration is the breathing in of God. So
1:11:56 something even the most empirical scientific atheist people in the world, when they talk about
1:12:02 where an idea came from, they say an idea came to me. They say that. They don’t even know they’re
1:12:07 saying that, but they’re reporting accurately what the feeling is because that’s what everyone I’ve
1:12:14 ever met who’s had an idea. It’s the eureka moment. It’s like, “Oh, I just heard, saw, felt an inspiration,
1:12:17 and I know the difference between something that comes from me and something that comes to me,
1:12:21 talking about prepositions again.” And I think most creative people do as well. Like, “Oh,
1:12:25 this came to me,” right? And then it can feel like an assignment or it can feel like a challenge. And
1:12:31 it’s like, “Now I want to make this thing.” But a place where I think people get sidetracked and
1:12:37 distracted, it’s very, very, very similar to meditation. Like meditation, spirituality, and
1:12:41 art have so much in common. So this may sound familiar to people who like, maybe you’ve had
1:12:47 this experience. You start working on this thing that was this inspiration and a couple weeks,
1:12:53 couple months into it, a couple days, another idea comes. And that idea seems more interesting
1:12:58 than the one that you’ve already invested some time into. And then you’re like,
1:13:02 “But I want to do this thing. This thing is fresh and exciting. This is the really,
1:13:07 really cool thing.” And then you go and do that one. And then another idea comes. And then you’re
1:13:12 dealing with this melee. So oftentimes, people will say, “To me, I’m working on a book and I’m
1:13:16 halfway through it, but I’ve got this other idea that I think is way better and this book feels
1:13:21 really stale and it doesn’t have any life in it.” And I always say, “Okay, well, I give you permission
1:13:27 to quit working on that first project, but only if you have a proven track record of ever being
1:13:33 able to finish a thing.” That is so smart, yes. Right? Because then it’s legit. It’s like, “No,
1:13:39 I’ve got this better idea.” But do you have 30 unfinished things? Because if you have 30 unfinished
1:13:45 things, now we have a problem. And I have those same things happen to me. I’m a third of a way,
1:13:49 a quarter of a way, fifth of a way in a project. And then something so much more interesting
1:13:54 comes along. And I’m like, “But I know enough to know.” It comes dancing. It’s like a dancing girl.
1:13:57 Like it just comes across the stage. I was just going to say, “The hottest girl at the dance.”
1:14:02 The hottest girl at the dance. Just showed up. Just showed up and you’ve been married for two
1:14:07 months. And you’re like, “Oh, I’ve been married for two months in the hot…” But what I know
1:14:15 is that if I abandon my, let’s call it, wife, this project that I’ve been working on for a few
1:14:19 months to go off with the hot girl in a few months, she’s going to be just as boring and stale.
1:14:24 And then a new hot girl is going to come on. And I’m never going to complete anything.
1:14:28 So, you know, stick with the one you came to the dance with. And if I’ve got multiple ideas,
1:14:33 and I’m not sure which one I’m beginning, I actually have a sort of like a team meeting.
1:14:40 And I make the ideas, make proposals to me about how they want, what do you actually want me to do?
1:14:41 This is like project-based IFS.
1:14:47 Totally. It’s like, I’m the angel investor. And these ideas are like, “We want your time and money
1:14:51 for this.” And I’m like, “What are you? What do you have for me? Why should I invest my money
1:14:56 and time in you?” And a lot of ideas, when I challenge them, like that disappear into the ether
1:15:00 because they’re like, “I don’t know something about birds.” You know, like, they don’t like,
1:15:04 I’m like, “You haven’t thought it out.” You know, and then some other ideas like, “No,
1:15:07 I want to write about this very specific thing and it’s going to take the, you know, I’m like,
1:15:11 okay, so this one’s got their act together.” So when the bird idea is more formed, come back.
1:15:15 Like, come back when you’re ready. Come back when you’re ready to be real and not just to be
1:15:20 tantalizing me with, like, so I’m a real hard-ass about it. I don’t mess around. I don’t let these
1:15:27 ideas push me around. I love it. Are there other ways that you, to quote the late Lord Rabbi,
1:15:32 Jonathan Sacks, he had this amazing line that has stuck with me, which is something along
1:15:37 lines of the key mission is to separate an opportunity to be seized from a temptation to
1:15:45 be resisted. Something along those lines. Wow. And I’m wondering how else you navigate that,
1:15:49 right, with the multiple ideas. Because maybe there are cases because you have a track record
1:15:53 of finishing things. Maybe there are cases where you get three months into something and you’re
1:15:57 like, “You know what? This is not what I hoped it could be. And there’s this other thing and I
1:16:03 want to switch planes midair.” But how would you think about or how do you think about distinguishing
1:16:09 between those two? I’ve never done that. You’ve never done it. I’ve never switched planes midair.
1:16:15 Oh, you haven’t. Okay. So when you start a project, you basically have done the hard-ass due diligence
1:16:21 up front. You’re like, “No, this is high conviction. I never thought of that.” Yeah. I mean, this is
1:16:28 like the mystery of a human brain or a human system because in my personal life, I’m so flaky.
1:16:34 And in my professional life, I’m so clear. It’s amazing. I think the universe gives us
1:16:38 certain things that are easier for us than other things. But yeah, because it takes me so long
1:16:44 to do a project because my projects, whether they’re fiction or nonfiction, are so heavily
1:16:49 research-driven and it can take three or four years to create one of these books.
1:16:55 And so the last novel that I wrote, “City of Girls,” I was thinking about that book for 10 years
1:17:01 before I started it. It was at those meetings for 10 years. And the next novel that I’m planning
1:17:05 to write, I’ve been thinking about for probably 15 years, but it’s coming more into view. So there’s
1:17:09 some that are kind of on the horizon that are coming in, but I’m thinking of air traffic control.
1:17:14 They come in in order. Something is feeding them to me in order. And I don’t know what
1:17:19 that something is, but one at a time. I can’t do two at a time.
1:17:22 What do you think contributes to that certainty in the professional realm as
1:17:28 I’m listening to and thinking about everything you’ve said in this conversation and also the
1:17:33 review of the last conversation? But it strikes me that feeling like you have more than enough time,
1:17:39 a voice has told you there’s more than enough time, relieves you of the perceived obligation to
1:17:45 choose the best thing because you’re running out of time. That’s just pure speculation in my part.
1:17:54 Second is feeling like there’s a source you are hearing from versus having to independently
1:18:01 make an ideal decision may also give weight to the things as they come in, as you put it,
1:18:05 through this air traffic control. I’m just wondering what else might contribute to the
1:18:11 clarity. There may be some interpersonal simplicity compared to dealing with other messy humans.
1:18:16 I don’t know. Anything else that you think contributes to the clarity and the not switching
1:18:25 planes midair? I think part of it is that I enjoy it. I enjoy the work and I never identified as a
1:18:31 tormented artist. I’ve identified as a tormented person, but I’ve never identified as a tormented
1:18:38 artist. Creativity has been the place where torment drops away. The question of course is why,
1:18:44 and I think once again I would probably have to say I don’t know. I’m getting a big smile on my
1:18:49 faces. I’m thinking about this, but I’m thinking why shouldn’t we do the thing that is so pleasurable?
1:18:56 Why shouldn’t that be a clue as to the thing that you’re supposed to be doing? That you’re on the
1:19:03 right track because long before I became a meditator, I had so much trouble meditating for years,
1:19:07 but I would start to write and hours would drop away and I would not be aware of time.
1:19:12 Writing gave me the thing that meditation promised, but I could never have happened in
1:19:17 meditation until very recently where time stops or changes, and I’m here but not here.
1:19:23 That’s just so pleasurable. The other thing is sometimes I feel that it’s a mandate
1:19:28 and I can’t talk about the book that I’ve just finished. It’s coming out next year,
1:19:31 but I can say that it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever written emotionally.
1:19:36 When I was doing my two-way prayers every day in the morning during this, especially the really
1:19:41 hard part of writing it, and I have a really loving higher power. I have a higher power who’s
1:19:47 constantly letting me off hook for lots of stuff that I do not have to do. You do not have to be
1:19:53 involved in this. You don’t have to be part of that chaos thing that’s going on. You don’t have to
1:20:00 be part of this family gathering. You don’t have to rescue this person. I get a lot of you don’t
1:20:05 have to do this. You don’t have to do this. You don’t have to do that. Throughout this entire
1:20:12 process of this book, because I was struggling every morning when I wrote it out on the page,
1:20:17 that voice would say, “I can see how hard this is for you, and I can see what this has cost,
1:20:22 the toll that this is taking on you to tell this story, and I can see that you want to stop
1:20:30 too bad.” I’ve given you 47 hall passes, and this is not going to be the 40 years.
1:20:35 This isn’t one of them, and it sucks to suck. Get back to work. I’ll see you on the page.
1:20:39 I know you’re tired. I know you want to take a day off. You’re not having a day off.
1:20:44 And I think the trust that has built up between me and that higher power over the decades,
1:20:51 largely because of the things that I am let off the hook for, has made me think it goes back to
1:20:55 the original part of the conversation where I said, “I’m loved beyond measure by a God who
1:21:00 has given me control over practically nothing.” The wisdom to know the difference is
1:21:07 one that I cannot find, but I get instructions of like, “This isn’t yours. We don’t need you in
1:21:12 this story. We don’t need you involved in this situation. We don’t need you speaking up about
1:21:15 this thing. We don’t need you doing this. We need you doing this.” However…
1:21:23 Yeah. And the reason I don’t want you up in all this other stuff that’s going on is because
1:21:29 I very much need you in this. And so I want you to bring your full attention to this. And if that
1:21:33 changes, you’ll be notified. You’ll be notified of something that happens a lot on the pages of
1:21:37 Two-Way Prayer for me. I mean, I’ve gone through periods of time where I didn’t have any creative
1:21:43 ideas at all. Early pandemic, I was like, “Wow, this would be a great time to write, but I actually
1:21:47 don’t have anything that’s ready to go.” And I remember writing in Two-Way Prayer and saying,
1:21:52 “Should I be working on something right now?” And instantly came the answer, “When we’ve got
1:21:57 something for you to do, you’ll be notified.” And I was like, “Well, what do I do until then?”
1:22:02 And they were like, “Hang out. Like, hang out. Be present to the world. It’s amazing. Walk around.
1:22:07 Look at stuff.” You don’t have to be on duty at every moment, but when you have to be on duty,
1:22:12 you really have to be on duty. And I think part of the aspiration that I have to both be a relaxed
1:22:19 woman and teach and model that to other women is this is the opposite of what women have been
1:22:24 taught. Wait, what if I’m not on duty all the time? What if I’m only on duty sometimes?
1:22:30 And I have to follow a deep inner voice that tells me when that is and what that is. And
1:22:34 everything else, you all can take care of yourselves. And that’s something that we,
1:22:38 as women, are not taught that we can ever say. Like, “I’ll do it. I’ll do it.”
1:22:47 So, I want to actually ask a question that is following up on something in our last conversation.
1:22:53 And I would say I’ve definitely put it in the category of “me time,” in a sense, which is
1:22:59 related to the artist’s way by Julia Cameron. So, if I remember correctly, I am looking at notes,
1:23:06 so hopefully I’m getting it right, that e-pray love would not exist without the artist’s way.
1:23:10 If that’s a true statement. I’m wondering which pieces of it, because I don’t think we got into
1:23:17 the specifics, but what pieces of it really made that the case? And, for instance, one homework
1:23:20 assignment that I’ve never done from the artist’s way, I’m so embarrassed to say this, but it’s
1:23:25 true, is the artist’s date. I’ve never done that. And so, as an example, I’m wondering,
1:23:28 was that a part of it? You know, is that a part of it for you?
1:23:31 The artist’s day is hard. Yeah.
1:23:36 It’s hard. I still have trouble figuring that out sometimes. So, here, I can tell you exactly
1:23:41 one. I can tell you exactly it. So, one of the things that she does so cleverly in that course
1:23:47 is that she keeps asking you the same question like 90 different ways. So, there are all these
1:23:51 questions each week that you have to answer, and then there’s the morning pages. So,
1:23:54 there are twists and turns on, like, if you could have three talents, what would they be? If there
1:23:59 were three places in the world that you could visit, what would they be? If there was something you
1:24:05 wish you had studied, what would it be? She’s coming at it, like, from 20 different directions.
1:24:09 And then there’s this point that comes late in the process where she instructs you to go back and
1:24:15 read everything that you’ve written and start looking at what keeps showing up. Because I think
1:24:19 one of the mysterious and magical things and weird things about our brain is, like, the secrets we
1:24:25 can keep from ourselves. Where it’s like, I didn’t even know that about me. So, when I went back and
1:24:33 read, Italian was on every page. And I was like, apparently, I really want to fucking learn to
1:24:39 speak Italian. And I would not have said that that was, like, a massive priority of my life.
1:24:46 But apparently, my soul knew that it was an instruction because it was, like, Italian. I kept
1:24:53 seeing Italian, and I was like, “Why Italian?” You know, it’s not useful unless you are in Italy.
1:25:01 It’s not, like, Spanish. Or it’s spoken across the globe. Or why? Why? Why? Why? And why is not a
1:25:06 spiritual question and never brings a spiritual answer? So it’s kind of useless. But I just went
1:25:13 with it. And I was like, “Okay.” And one of my artist states was to sign up for Italian classes
1:25:18 without knowing why, just because it kept showing up on the page. So I did six months of Italian
1:25:25 classes, like night school for divorce ladies at the Y. And I loved it so much. And I started
1:25:29 watching movies in Italian. And I started, I had no plan for anything I was going to do with it.
1:25:35 And then I was like, “Well, wait, I want to use this Italian. Like, I want to go to Italy and
1:25:39 speak this language. But I also have been studying meditation a lot lately. And I want to go to
1:25:45 India. I also want to go back.” And then, like, out of that was born in Aprilov. So it took me by
1:25:49 surprise as much as anything. And maybe you’ve had that experience on your morning pages where
1:25:54 it’s like, I didn’t even know that. Like, I can hide things so far from myself that I can’t even find
1:26:03 them. That’s true for my phone, too. You mentioned that Y is not a spiritual question and doesn’t
1:26:06 give you spiritual answers, something along those lines. Could you elaborate on that?
1:26:15 Okay. Anytime I howl into the void, any question that begins with Y, I do not get an answer.
1:26:21 I will not be answered. I can do two-way prayer from now until God leaves Chicago,
1:26:26 from now until time gets better. And I guess, why, why, why, why, why? And I will not be given an
1:26:32 answer that’s much more satisfying than what an adult would tell the toddler, like, at some point
1:26:37 of just because. Because I said so. Because is. I wrote a poem once called The Shortest
1:26:44 Conversation I Ever Had With God. And it’s God colon, why? Oh, sorry, me. But why? Which is,
1:26:50 again, the ego. And God because is. But there are other questions that I can ask and I do get answers.
1:26:56 So if I ask questions that begin with how instead of why, how do you want me to move through this?
1:27:04 I will be given direct instructions. Who do you want me to serve in this situation? Who do you
1:27:11 want me to be in this moment? Answers, very clear. What do you want me to do next? That’s a really
1:27:15 good one. That’s a big one in AA. What’s the next intuitive action? What’s the next right action?
1:27:20 What would you like me to do right now? Which is often like get a glass of water, you know.
1:27:26 Take a nap. Turn the phone off. But why? And I think that goes back to you don’t even know
1:27:30 what you’re looking at. I think that goes back to we’re five Einstein’s away from even having the
1:27:35 right questions to get the right answers. But why is it, it turns into a black hole that I just
1:27:41 fall into and it’s this great echoing silence. Yeah, I can be stepping into the quicksand of
1:27:47 blame and finger pointing. Even if that’s fingers pointing back at yourself, which it often is.
1:27:52 That makes sense. And I was asking you about choosing projects. I want to ask you about anxiety,
1:28:00 specifically purpose anxiety. What is purpose anxiety? You’re smiling. So I see you already know.
1:28:05 No, I don’t. I don’t. I mean, I kind of right there in the title. Yeah, based on the words,
1:28:09 I can imagine right. You can work it out in context. Yeah, I think I can work it out.
1:28:17 Well, I mean, the story that most of us were taught was some variation of each of you was born
1:28:27 with a one unique offering, a special spark that is only yours and only you can deliver on that thing.
1:28:34 It is your job. It is your job to find out what that thing is that only you can do. Meanwhile,
1:28:39 there’s what almost 8 billion people on the planet. So already here’s some pressure because
1:28:43 it’s got to be something that nobody else can do, which is going to be unlikely because there’s a
1:28:51 lot of us. And you should find out what that is very young. And then you should become the master
1:28:57 of that thing. And you should devote the 10,000 hours way before you’re out of adolescence. You
1:29:02 should already be pouring yourself into this purpose that you are here to serve. And you
1:29:07 should become the very best at that thing. And then it’s not enough to become the best of that
1:29:14 thing. You have to monetize it. And it’s not enough to monetize it. You also have to create
1:29:19 opportunities for others and make sure that they’re also being served by this purpose. And if all of
1:29:25 this sounds exhausting, you are not off the hook even when you die because you must leave a legacy
1:29:31 and you must change the world. So no pressure. But that’s it. That’s it. You must change the world.
1:29:39 And it’s like, I think it’s very male. I think it’s very capitalistic. It’s very self-centered.
1:29:47 It’s very like, yeah, you only must do this thing that only you can do. And the world must be altered
1:29:52 and they must know you were here. You must leave your mark on the world. And I think the world at
1:29:57 this point is like, I wish maybe that you stopped leaving marks on me. Maybe we could use a little
1:30:02 less of that. And I hardly know anyone who doesn’t suffer from purpose anxiety. And I know people
1:30:07 who are living lives that look from the outside like they have achieved tremendous purpose. And
1:30:12 it’s a scarcity anxiety. So they’re up at night wondering if they’ve done enough. Have they done
1:30:16 the right thing? Have they left enough of a legacy? Is this where their energy should have gone? It’s
1:30:23 a theology that is going to leave you unsatisfied because there’s no way to know that you have
1:30:30 achieved it. And you and I both know people who are so admired. And they’re so stressed.
1:30:35 And they’re so unsure about themselves. And they feel like they’ve done it all wrong. And they don’t
1:30:41 know whether there’s a never enoughness to it that feels a lot like capitalism. It’s just how
1:30:47 much it’s up thinking of J.P. Morgan testifying before Congress and them saying how much money is
1:30:52 enough, sir, and him saying a little more. It’s the same with purpose. It’s like, when will you know
1:30:58 that you’ve made a big enough impact a little more? And what would be the opposite of a purpose
1:31:03 driven life would be a, I think, a life of presence. It’s also focused entirely in the future
1:31:10 constantly. And I don’t think there’s any way that you can live a relaxed or really truly rich or
1:31:17 meaningful life if you’re constantly thinking about your fucking legacy. But it’s like,
1:31:22 that’s it. You know, you’re like, how much did I make? How much did I leave? How much did I impact?
1:31:27 Meanwhile, like the world is happening and you’re in it and you’re missing it.
1:31:32 Yeah, I’m reflecting. I can’t recall the exact, you might actually know the attribution here.
1:31:38 And I don’t know if it’s a fictional quote or not, but there’s, I want to say this huge
1:31:44 statue in the desert that has deteriorated over time. And it’s half buried and the inscription
1:31:50 reads something like, “I am Ozzy Medius. Lord, look upon my works in despair.”
1:31:51 “My works in tremble.”
1:32:00 And it’s like, yep, that’s where it’s all headed. On the side of, it’s been along similar lines,
1:32:05 I often think to myself, my hair, I know these guys are talking about legacy and the Gauss too,
1:32:09 but a lot of the guys that I am surrounded by. It’s pretty a lot of guys. Yeah, it’s no.
1:32:13 They’re reading books and so am I about, you know, whether it’s like Alexander the Great or
1:32:19 Genghis Khan or Titan about Rockefeller, whatever it might be, hoping to glean things from these
1:32:24 lives and Alexander the Great. Tell me his last name. Like, what was his full name? Nobody can
1:32:28 tell me. It’s great. Do you know what I mean? His middle name was Thal. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
1:32:33 And it’s like, we’re at the very least thinking about legacy differently. But one thing I am curious
1:32:40 to hear your thoughts on is how do you blend, in your life, do you try to blend presence with
1:32:47 other ingredients for what you deem a life well lived? And I’ll tell you a story. So the story
1:32:51 takes place at Omega Institute. And I love Omega Institute. And I’ve spent time there in upstate
1:32:57 New York. They have amazing classes. The one place that they have consistent Wi-Fi is in the
1:33:03 cafeteria, coffee shop area where people eat their meals or some of them. I can picture it well.
1:33:07 So I would sometimes go because I was spending time in upstate New York, beautiful campus,
1:33:13 amazing groundhogs everywhere. So I would go sit in the cafe and I would write and I remember this
1:33:18 conversation happening next to me. So I wasn’t getting any work done. But I was use dropping on
1:33:22 this conversation. And it was this man and this woman. And the guy asked the woman, “You know,
1:33:26 I know you’ve been looking for a job for a while. Do you find a new gig?” And she’s like, “No,
1:33:33 I’ve been really busy being non-dual.” Oh my God. Oh, that’s like a New Yorker cartoon. That’s so
1:33:41 good. So there is maybe a shadow side of presence, which could be a lot of naval gazing. And maybe
1:33:45 that’s totally fine. And in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t make a difference. But for
1:33:51 yourself personally, recognizing that presence seems to be very additive to one’s life,
1:33:59 are there other ingredients that you weigh? Can I first tell you a story? Yes, please.
1:34:04 Okay. So I want to tell you a counter story about a purpose driven life.
1:34:08 Okay. But I like your question and I think this will lead into it nicely. We’ll see. We’ll see
1:34:13 if this works. So I was in Los Angeles several years ago for a speaking event and I had a free
1:34:19 afternoon and I was wandering around Venice Beach. And I looked across the street and I saw that there
1:34:26 was a guy standing on the top of a ladder painting the awning of his storefront. And I instantly
1:34:32 was able to see that the ladder was not steady. And I have a very severe ladder sensitivity
1:34:37 because I grew up on a farm. And my mom was constantly telling me, “Go hold your father’s
1:34:41 ladder.” Because my dad was always doing Jackass things on the ladder and the farm.
1:34:48 So I had nothing else to do and nowhere else to be. And I was the perfect person for the job to
1:34:53 cross the street and just hold the guy’s ladder. And I probably held his ladder for 45 minutes
1:34:59 that day. And he never saw me because he was doing his thing. But I felt better because
1:35:04 I was like, “Just make sure this guy doesn’t fall today.” And I’m here and it’s a nice afternoon
1:35:10 and it was lovely. And then when he started to come down and I felt like he was at a safe level,
1:35:16 I just peeled off and he never saw me and I never saw his face and we never had any interaction.
1:35:20 But we had this beautiful little exchange. And as I was walking away because I was thinking about
1:35:25 purpose anxiety, and I was thinking, “What if that was the entire purpose of my life?”
1:35:25 Just that moment.
1:35:33 Just that moment. Not things like that, like try to be kind to people, but that particular moment
1:35:39 that they were like, “However this thing works, it’s essential that that guy not fall off his ladder.”
1:35:45 So we’re going to need in like sector seven, you know, block D on this date, we’re going to need
1:35:52 somebody to really be alert and notice that and to send them in. Have the proper farm training.
1:35:55 Put her on a farm, have her like grow up with a father who does Jack. How are we going to get
1:35:59 her to LA? Make her a writer, give her a career, have her have her read. Like every single other
1:36:04 thing I was doing in my life was just killing time until the moment when I was needed. And maybe
1:36:08 I’m not needed again after that. And I would challenge anybody to prove to me that that isn’t
1:36:14 true because nobody can because nobody knows what’s going on and nobody even knows what they’re
1:36:19 looking at. So yes, you could go a little too far into that and you could just
1:36:25 smoke weed all day and be like, “Are we just a paperweight in God’s desk?” You know, or like
1:36:32 ask questions like that. But I think presence is the greatest gift that you can give to yourself
1:36:39 and to the world. And I think that that line that I so often hear in meditation and on the page when
1:36:45 I do two-way prayer of you’ll be notified is the very opposite of a purpose-driven life.
1:36:50 Because a purpose-driven life is some sense that I’m going to forge. I’m going to like
1:36:56 hack through this forest and make this trail. It’s going to be named after me and this is
1:37:01 what I’ll be remembered for. And it’s so self-centered. And you’ll be notified is a much
1:37:10 humbler position to take but it requires a great deal of listening and it requires like also lately
1:37:15 I’ve been doing these one day a week without my phone because I want more moments like that
1:37:20 where I notice somebody on the ladder because I’m not on my phone and I’m super addicted to my phone.
1:37:24 It’s like no, I’m not throwing shade against anyone who’s addicted to their phone. We all are,
1:37:29 you know, like at the front that I don’t stare at my phone 90 million hours a day I do. But like
1:37:34 that’s why I take Thursdays off from it is because I don’t want to miss what’s actually happening and
1:37:41 I want to be present to the notification when it comes. How did you choose Thursday? Is it because
1:37:46 you might be social on Friday in the weekend? Yes. Okay. You know, Monday’s like too much going on.
1:37:49 Thursday just felt like a day that the world could maybe operate without me.
1:37:57 So I’m going to play devil’s advocate and defend folks who may be in the purpose-driven
1:38:03 lane for the moment because I agree that at face value, very self-absorbed, self-centered. However,
1:38:08 do you think it’s possible and this is a leading question so it may go nowhere, but that you’re
1:38:15 more comfortable with death and mortality than a lot of people and that insecurity, uncertainty,
1:38:20 fear of death, maybe that others have to a greater extent leads them to think about these things
1:38:25 more than you? Wow, that’s such a… Did not think that was going to be the second half of the question.
1:38:32 And I also want to say here’s the thing about purpose. If you actually are one of those people
1:38:36 who from forever has known exactly what you’re supposed to be doing and you did become the
1:38:40 master of it and you have monetized it and you are leaving a legacy and you have what I
1:38:46 like to call not a problem. Right? Yeah, keep going. Great. You’re doing great. But if you…
1:38:53 The shallow thing seems to be working for you. But if you’re berating yourself because you feel
1:38:58 like there was something you were supposed to be doing, maybe they just need you to hang out until
1:39:03 you get notified of something that could be as small as holding the ladder, I just want to say.
1:39:06 And that maybe the future of the universe depended on that ladder being held that day,
1:39:12 we don’t know. But your question about death, I don’t want to get cocky about like, “I don’t care
1:39:18 about death.” But it’s not a fear that lives in me and I know it’s a fear that lives in a lot of
1:39:25 people, I’m much, much, much more afraid of people not liking me than I am of dying. And that’s what
1:39:29 I have to suffer with more is like to try to figure out how to disappoint people and say no
1:39:32 to people and set boundaries with people that they can survive it and I can survive it. This is
1:39:38 like my work in this lifetime. But death to me, it doesn’t keep me up at night. It’s not… I’m not
1:39:43 in an argument against it. I went with my partner, Rhea, all the way to her death and I wasn’t afraid
1:39:49 of the death. There were things around it that were scary, but… Has that always been the case?
1:39:57 When did that fear drop away? I’m afraid of pain. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not interested at all in
1:40:02 being in suffering. Maybe that’s why I’m not afraid of death. I’m like, “Well, that seems better than
1:40:09 suffering. So what’s so bad about that?” So I don’t know. I come from like really pragmatic people.
1:40:15 My mom’s a nurse. My dad’s a farmer. I saw a lot of death growing up. My mom worked with
1:40:21 the dying a lot. By the time it came, it seemed like it was such a relief for everybody. There
1:40:27 was grief, but also people were shredded by end of life stuff and she sat in a lot of dying people’s
1:40:37 houses for weeks and months on end and dying and struggling and then there was this exhale of death.
1:40:43 Okay, now that person has safely been delivered into death. That’s the feeling I felt when Rhea
1:40:48 died, like those of us who were taking care of her and she had a pretty raucous death, but those of us
1:40:53 who were taking care of her was like, “We safely got her there. We safely got her dead.” I know
1:40:59 that’s a strange thing to say, but it was hard because she was really willful. It was a difficult
1:41:07 death, but then the moment of the death, the instant after the death, there’s such an incredible
1:41:16 thing. Something happens. It isn’t what it was. Something leaves and then the look that was on
1:41:25 her face after she died of absolute delight. We were all aghast at it. Why is she so happy?
1:41:32 She looks so happy, so peaceful. It feels like going home to me. This place feels a lot weirder
1:41:38 to me than death. This planet’s bananas. Having a body, I mean, that’s why I used to
1:41:42 love to do psychedelics so much before I stopped doing all that stuff. It’s like,
1:41:48 “Who wants a body? Who wants to be incarnated? Oh, God, it’s so awkward.”
1:41:57 So, no, life feels scarier to me than death. How did you choose to create your newsletter?
1:42:00 How did that make the cut for you? How did that come in?
1:42:08 Two things. One is, I’m trying to get off of the nicotine crack pipe booze bottle that is social
1:42:16 media. Yeah. It’s not easy to get off it because I feel like social media is a party drug that
1:42:20 started off as really fun. And now, I hear somebody say so beautifully about social media.
1:42:24 I wish I could remember who said it. Everyone’s now, everyone’s abusing it and no one’s getting
1:42:30 high anymore. Everyone’s addicted to it and the high is gone. And I’m looking for ways. I love
1:42:34 connection. I loved that feeling at the beginning of social media that we can all connect with one
1:42:40 another. Yeah. Before everyone started peeing in the pool. Oh, my God. Before everyone started
1:42:45 propping up Putin, and it’s like, “Wait, what pool party is this? What just happened to democracy?”
1:42:49 We’ve just discovered that this thing is very, very, very dangerous and venomous.
1:42:55 And so I’ve been looking for another place to go to be able to have dialogue with people
1:43:01 and sub-stack so far has been a really good spot for that. It’s like a reverse technology.
1:43:05 So could you explain how that works? Because I think a lot of people thinking of a newsletter,
1:43:10 they’re like, “Well, hold on a second. How does interaction work in that type of format?”
1:43:14 You can comment. So there’s like, so I send out a newsletter once a week. It’s essentially like
1:43:20 a ’90s technology. It’s basically a blog. So it’s like a high-end blog. So people subscribe,
1:43:25 and then a newsletter goes out to them, and there’s video attachments and things,
1:43:29 and then you can comment. And people can comment on each other’s comments. So it’s very similar.
1:43:33 It looks very similar to what social media looks like. But because it’s a subscription,
1:43:41 it keeps the haters out because it’s self-selecting. And I’ve been on this thing for a year and have
1:43:45 had not one problem with anything. That’s incredible. I know it’s incredible. I mean,
1:43:49 it’s also like a self-selecting thing because this is a group of really lovely people who
1:43:53 are doing this beautiful project together. So that’s how I decided to go over there.
1:43:59 What could people expect if they went to ElizabethGilbert.Substack.com to subscribe
1:44:07 to your newsletter? Well, every week I will talk to you and I will talk about this process of
1:44:15 learning how to write and speak to yourself, toward yourself, from a place of friendliness and love
1:44:22 in order to combat this just awful virus of self-hatred that we all seem to be so infected with,
1:44:29 that comes also with perfectionism and lack and just bringing a different voice into the
1:44:33 cacophony of voices in your head. And I’ll read one of the letters that I’ve written to myself
1:44:38 from love, and then there’ll be a special guest. And the special guests are really the best part
1:44:45 because it’s everybody from Act like Tony Collette did one and Glennon Doyle did one and
1:44:53 musicians and poets and artists and writers, but then also like random people who I meet.
1:44:59 And I meet them in my travels and I’m like, you are radiating so much light
1:45:07 that I want to ask you, why are you so lit? Why are you so bright and shiny? And what is that?
1:45:10 And what would love have to say to you if it could speak to you?
1:45:15 And people who I meet and find inspiring, there was a young woman who I met in Denmark this year.
1:45:20 I was on tour and so she had read my book Big Magic and because of that book, she was Japanese
1:45:24 and she was an engineer and she worked on a construction site in Japan, but she’d always
1:45:30 wanted to be an artist. And she started making art again after she read Big Magic and then she
1:45:35 took the leap and she quit her construction job in Japan and saved her money and moved to Denmark
1:45:40 and is going to graphic design school and her art is gorgeous. And I was like, hey, will you do a
1:45:46 letter from love? Because obviously there’s something moving through you that’s really special
1:45:52 and I would love to hear what love has to say to you through you. And so it’s like every week you’ll
1:45:57 get a special guest. I’ve had children do it. My friend’s 11-year-old son who was going through
1:46:03 a really hard time being bullied at school, he wrote one and it was beautiful and love said to him,
1:46:06 “Not everybody has to like you. You don’t have to be everybody’s cup of tea.” That was literally in
1:46:12 this 11-year-old kids, “You don’t have to be everybody’s cup of tea. We love you.” He felt
1:46:15 there was a “we.” It’s really interesting. A lot of people when they write the letters,
1:46:24 the voice that comes to them operates as a “we.” It’s some sort of consortium of ancestors and
1:46:29 spirits and guides and it’s like your team. There’s this feeling that people are getting where
1:46:33 they’re like, “Do I have a team? I seem to have some sort of a team that wants to love me.”
1:46:38 So I’ve had developmentally disabled people do it and access love. There’s this amazing
1:46:43 artist named BJ who in my town in New Jersey there’s this arts collective for developmental
1:46:50 disabled people and he did a song about himself called “I Love BJ Three Different Ways.” That’s
1:46:54 like one of the greatest songs I’ve ever heard. That’s basically just him talking about how lovable
1:46:59 he is. So that’s what you can expect and then if you’re a subscriber you can post your own letters
1:47:04 from love each week. And what’s happening in that community is that people are creating
1:47:10 collectives and friendships with each other. They’re having meetups in cities around the world
1:47:15 and they’re starting to become like it’s the kindest corner of the internet, I truly think.
1:47:20 And slowly I feel like it’s dissolving and breaking down the walls of self-hatred.
1:47:26 That’s what we’re doing over there. I love it. And people can go to elizabethgilbert.substack.com.
1:47:29 We’ll put that in the show notes as well. That’s the best place to direct people?
1:47:31 Yeah, I mean I’m on social media but who cares anymore.
1:47:37 That’s where my heart is. My heart is in the sub-stack newsletter and
1:47:43 after years of doing this privately in my own space and then starting to gradually teach it in
1:47:49 workshops, I finally feel like I’m ready to really bring this to anybody who wants to try it.
1:47:56 I love it. I know I said that but I’ll say it again. It’s a solid cause, solid mission.
1:48:03 It’s my purpose. It’s your purpose. Purpose that follows the presence.
1:48:09 Is there anything else, Lizzy, you’d like to say, any requests you’d like to make in my audience?
1:48:15 Comments, public complaints about my podcasting style, anything at all that you’d like to say
1:48:18 before we land the point? Yes, thank you for giving me the chance to make the public complaints
1:48:24 about your podcasting style. I’ve been crawling out of my skin. I’ll send you a bunch of notes.
1:48:33 No, I just want to say, can you imagine that something might love you? There’s a quote that’s
1:48:38 often misattributed to Einstein. It wasn’t Einstein. It was this 19th century philosopher named
1:48:43 Frederick Myers and his friend asked him if there was one thing that you want to know more than
1:48:49 anything if you could ask the Sphinx one question. What would it be? And Myers said it would be this,
1:48:57 is the universe friendly? And it’s often misattributed to Einstein saying that Einstein said that
1:49:00 the most important question you could ask about your life was, is the universe friendly or not?
1:49:07 He didn’t in fact say that, but he did answer the question in his own way because he was examining
1:49:13 that as well. And he said, subtle is the Lord, but malicious he is not. I hate to gender God,
1:49:19 but anyway, I think it is a really interesting question to live in for your entire life.
1:49:23 And it’s a really interesting question that I ask myself when I’m in moments of great
1:49:28 trial here on earth school, which as you know, I’ve already expressed my belief is a very
1:49:34 difficult curriculum. And it’s like, is this a friendly universe or is this a malicious universe?
1:49:41 And if it’s malicious, then life is pointless suffering. And if it’s friendly, the suffering
1:49:46 might have a point. And if it’s friendly, what might the point be? And where can I find that?
1:49:52 And how do you want me to move through this now? Assuming that it’s friendly? How do you want me
1:49:58 to move through this terrible looking thing? And so the question I think that I’m constantly
1:50:02 bringing to people, especially when they say I tried it and it just feels really weird and
1:50:06 uncomfortable to say kind things to myself, I’m like, yeah, because you’ve got decades of training
1:50:11 of saying garbage things to yourself. And anytime you try to do something new, it’s going to be
1:50:15 hard and it’s going to feel awkward and it’s going to feel, it definitely doesn’t feel normal.
1:50:21 Because normal is your history’s greatest garbage can, you are just a pile of worthless,
1:50:25 you know, like it’s you have never done enough, you’ll never be enough, you should be ashamed of
1:50:31 yourself. Who do you think you are? I mean, that’s the normal dialogue that Annie Lamont calls
1:50:38 radio K fucked, that’s playing in most of our heads at all the times. And what about our negative
1:50:46 bias thinking is always trained toward worst possible outcome, but could it just as likely be
1:50:52 that you are loved and lovable as despicable and somebody who should be ashamed of themselves?
1:50:57 Why not? And why not try it on, try it on like a pair of boots and take it for a walk
1:51:00 and then do it again tomorrow and see what it does to your mind.
1:51:03 Thank you, Liz. I love spending time with you.
1:51:09 I love spending time with you, Tim. You are such a delight. You are just such a delight.
1:51:11 I never know where we’re going to go. Me neither.
1:51:16 And I’m always so happy about where we went. It’s a fun adventure always talking to you,
1:51:20 so thank you. I really appreciate it. I really, really appreciate the time
1:51:24 and the thoughts and the wisdom and the reflections and to everybody listening,
1:51:28 as always, we will have the show notes links to everything including
1:51:35 Liz’s substack at elizabethgilbert.substack.com. You’ll be able to find all that at tim.blog/podcast.
1:51:39 And until next time, be just a little bit kinder than necessary,
1:51:44 not just to others, but to yourself. And as always, thanks for tuning in.
1:51:51 Hey, guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off. And that is Five
1:51:55 Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little
1:52:01 fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter,
1:52:07 my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is
1:52:12 basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I’ve found or
1:52:17 discovered or have started exploring over that week. It’s kind of like my diary of cool things.
1:52:23 It often includes articles I’m reading, books I’m reading, albums, perhaps gadgets, gizmos,
1:52:28 all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcasts,
1:52:35 guests and these strange esoteric things end up in my field. And then I test them and then I share
1:52:41 them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it’s very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before
1:52:45 you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you’d like to try it out, just go to
1:52:52 tim.blog/friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog/friday, drop in your email and you’ll
1:52:59 get the very next one. Thanks for listening. Way back in the day, in 2010, I published a book
1:53:05 called The Four Hour Body, which I probably started writing in 2008. And in that book,
1:53:12 I recommended many, many, many things. First generation continuous glucose monitor and cold
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1:53:24 And one thing in that book was athletic greens. I did not get paid to include it. I was using it.
1:53:30 That’s how long I’ve been using what is now known as AG1. AG1 is my all-in-one nutritional
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