0:00:04 This episode is brought to you by Element, spelled L-M-N-T.
0:00:05 What on earth is Element?
0:00:09 It is a delicious, sugar-free electrolyte drink mix.
0:00:12 I’ve stocked up on boxes and boxes of this.
0:00:13 It was one of the first things that I bought
0:00:16 when I saw COVID coming down the pike.
0:00:18 And I usually use one to two per day.
0:00:21 Element is formulated to help anyone with their electrolyte needs
0:00:25 and perfectly suited to folks following a keto, low carb, or paleo diet.
0:00:29 Or if you drink a ton of water and you might not have the right balance,
0:00:30 that’s often when I drink it.
0:00:33 Or if you’re doing any type of endurance exercise, mountain biking, et cetera,
0:00:34 another application.
0:00:38 If you’ve ever struggled to feel good on keto, low carb, or paleo,
0:00:42 it’s most likely because even if you’re consciously consuming electrolytes,
0:00:43 you’re just not getting enough.
0:00:47 And it relates to a bunch of stuff like a hormone called aldosterone,
0:00:48 blah, blah, blah, when insulin is low.
0:00:53 But suffice to say, this is where Element against spelled L-M-N-T can help.
0:00:58 My favorite flavor by far is citrus salt, which is a side note
0:01:01 you can also use to make a kick-ass, no sugar margarita.
0:01:05 But for special occasions, obviously, you’re probably already familiar
0:01:09 with one of the names behind it, Rob Wolf, R-O-B-B, Rob Wolf,
0:01:13 who is a former research biochemist and two-time New York Times bestselling
0:01:15 author of The Paleo Solution and Wired to Eat.
0:01:19 Rob created Element by scratching his own itch.
0:01:20 That’s how it got started.
0:01:23 His Brazilian jiu-jitsu coaches turned him on to electrolytes
0:01:24 as a performance enhancer.
0:01:27 Things clicked and bam, company was born.
0:01:32 So if you’re on a low carb diet or fasting, electrolytes play a key role
0:01:35 in relieving hunger, cramps, headaches, tiredness and dizziness.
0:01:39 Sugar, artificial ingredients, coloring, all that’s garbage,
0:01:41 unneeded, there’s none of that in Element.
0:01:45 And a lot of names you might recognize are already using Element.
0:01:48 It was recommended to be by one of my favorite athlete friends.
0:01:51 Three Navy SEAL teams as prescribed by their Master Chief, Marine Units,
0:01:55 FBI Sniper teams, at least five NFL teams who have subscriptions.
0:02:00 They are the exclusive hydration partner to TeamUSA weightlifting and on and on.
0:02:01 You can try it risk-free.
0:02:03 If you don’t like it, Element will give you your money back.
0:02:04 No questions asked.
0:02:06 They have extremely low return rates.
0:02:10 Get your free Element sample pack with any drink mix purchase at
0:02:13 drinkelement.com/tim.
0:02:17 That’s drinklmnt.com/tim.
0:02:21 And if you’re an Element insider, one of their most loyal customers,
0:02:25 you have first access to Element sparkling, a bold 16 ounce can
0:02:27 of sparkling electrolyte water.
0:02:29 Again, check it all out.
0:02:32 Drinkelement.com/tim.
0:02:35 Drinklmnt.com/tim.
0:02:41 This episode is brought to you by Helix Sleep.
0:02:45 Helix Sleep is a premium mattress brand that provides tailored mattresses based
0:02:46 on your sleep preferences.
0:02:51 Their lineup includes 14 unique mattresses, including a collection of luxury models,
0:02:52 a mattress for big and tall sleepers.
0:02:53 That’s not me.
0:02:56 And even a mattress made specifically for kids.
0:02:59 They have models with memory foam layers to provide optimal pressure relief if you
0:03:03 sleep on your side, as I often do and did last night on one of their beds.
0:03:07 Models with more responsive foam to cradle your body for essential support in stomach
0:03:10 and back sleeping positions and on and on.
0:03:10 They have you covered.
0:03:14 So how will you know which Helix mattress works best for you and your body?
0:03:19 Take the Helix sleep quiz at helixsleep.com/tim and find your perfect
0:03:21 mattress in less than two minutes.
0:03:26 Personally, for the last few years, I’ve been sleeping on a Helix midnight lux
0:03:26 mattress.
0:03:30 I also have one of those in the guest bedroom and feedback from friends has
0:03:32 always been fantastic.
0:03:35 They frequently say it’s the best night of sleep they’ve had in ages.
0:03:38 It’s something they comment on without any prompting from me whatsoever.
0:03:42 Helix mattresses are American made and come with a 10 or 15 year warranty,
0:03:43 depending on the model.
0:03:46 Your mattress will be shipped straight to your door free of charge.
0:03:50 And there’s no better way to test out a new mattress than by sleeping on it in
0:03:51 your own home.
0:03:53 That’s why they offer a 100 night risk free trial.
0:03:57 If you decide it’s not the best fit, you’re welcome to return it for a full
0:03:57 refund.
0:04:02 Helix has been awarded number one mattress by both GQ and wired magazines.
0:04:06 And now Helix has harnessed years of extensive mattress expertise to bring
0:04:09 you a truly elevated sleep experience.
0:04:13 Their newest collection of mattresses called Helix Elite includes six different
0:04:18 mattress models each tailored for specific sleep positions and firmness
0:04:21 preferences. So you can get exactly what your body needs.
0:04:24 Each Helix Elite mattress comes with an extra layer of foam for pressure
0:04:28 relief and thousands of extra microcoils for best in class support and
0:04:29 durability.
0:04:33 Every Helix Elite mattress also comes with a 15 year manufacturers
0:04:37 warranty and the same 100 night trial as the rest of Helix’s mattresses.
0:04:43 And you my dear listeners can get between 25 and 30% off plus two free pillows
0:04:44 on all mattress orders.
0:04:49 So go to helixsleep.com/tim to check it out.
0:04:55 That’s helixsleep.com/tim with Helix Better Sleep starts now.
0:05:01 At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.
0:05:21 Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs.
0:05:22 This is Tim Ferriss.
0:05:25 Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show where it is my
0:05:29 job to sit down with world-class performers from every field imaginable
0:05:32 to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books and so on that you
0:05:35 can apply and test in your own lives.
0:05:39 This episode is a two for one and that’s because the podcast recently
0:05:44 hit its 10th year anniversary, which is insane to think about and past one
0:05:46 billion downloads to celebrate.
0:05:51 I’ve curated some of the best of the best some of my favorites from
0:05:53 more than 700 episodes over the last decade.
0:05:57 I could not be more excited to give you these super combo episodes
0:06:00 and internally we’ve been calling these the super combo episodes
0:06:04 because my goal is to encourage you to yes, enjoy the household names
0:06:08 the super famous folks, but to also introduce you to lesser known
0:06:10 people I consider stars.
0:06:14 These are people who have transformed my life and I feel like they can
0:06:16 do the same for many of you.
0:06:19 Perhaps they got lost in a busy news cycle.
0:06:20 Perhaps you missed an episode.
0:06:22 Just trust me on this one.
0:06:26 We went to great pains to put these pairings together and for
0:06:32 the bios of all guests, you can find that and more at tim.log/combo.
0:06:37 And now without further ado, please enjoy and thank you for listening.
0:06:43 First up, Elizabeth Gilbert, the number one New York Times bestselling
0:06:49 author of 10 books, including Eat Pray Love and Big Magic, creative
0:06:54 living beyond fear, which together have sold more than 25 million
0:06:58 copies worldwide and her latest book, City of Girls.
0:07:02 You can find Elizabeth on Twitter at Gilbert Liz.
0:07:07 I thought I would begin with the alpha wolf.
0:07:12 If you don’t mind for those who don’t know, this is a moth talk
0:07:18 slash presentation story slash tear jerker slash laugh out loud at
0:07:20 moments tale.
0:07:29 And I saw that Ray’s birthday, her 60th birthday was just a few
0:07:29 days ago.
0:07:35 Could you speak to who Ray was a little bit of context and then
0:07:38 how to how you prepared for that?
0:07:41 There’s quite literally nothing I would rather talk about than
0:07:42 Reyes.
0:07:45 So you started in a good place for me.
0:07:50 So Reya Elias was quite simply the love of my life.
0:07:56 She and I were friends for 17 years.
0:08:01 I was married for most of that and just very slowly and very
0:08:04 quietly over the years fell in love with her.
0:08:12 She was a lesbian Syrian Detroit raised rock and roll hairdresser,
0:08:19 filmmaker, author, musician who had always wanted to live just
0:08:20 right on the edge of life.
0:08:23 She had been a speedball heroin junkie on the Lower East Side
0:08:28 New York City in the 1980s was in Rikers Island was in Bellevue
0:08:31 was in various rehabs and rehabilitations.
0:08:34 This homeless was Oh God, she’d had such a storied life.
0:08:39 And then she finally put it all down and she spent 19 years clean
0:08:39 and sober.
0:08:42 And when I met her, she was on the other side of that recovery
0:08:46 and she was the strongest most extraordinary person I ever met.
0:08:50 And as I said in that speech that I gave in that talk that I gave
0:08:53 at the moth about her, which I shared a year after she died.
0:08:56 She was the most powerful person in every room that she ever
0:08:59 walked into and I adored her.
0:09:00 She was my guide.
0:09:01 She was my teacher.
0:09:04 She was the rock, the ground underneath my feet.
0:09:08 She was the one person in the world who always made me feel safe
0:09:10 and she didn’t just make me feel safe.
0:09:14 The feeling that everyone had when Ray walked into the room was
0:09:16 Oh, thank God Ray is here.
0:09:17 Everybody is safe.
0:09:20 You know, that’s what the alpha is, right?
0:09:23 The alpha is the person who keeps the entire pack safe.
0:09:26 And because she was the most powerful person in the room.
0:09:30 What I always knew when she walked in was not only would she make
0:09:31 sure I was okay.
0:09:36 If anybody was praying on me in any way, she would make sure
0:09:37 the predator was okay too.
0:09:41 Like she had everybody under her wing to make sure that people
0:09:42 were all right.
0:09:46 You know, she just had this way of handling humans like nothing
0:09:47 I’ve ever seen in my entire life.
0:09:52 And I absolutely adored her and I was a loyal wife and I loved
0:09:55 my husband and the three of us were really good friends.
0:09:58 And there was no way in the world that I was ever going to cross
0:09:58 that line.
0:10:02 I just kept that love very quietly in my heart and we all
0:10:05 just had a beautiful life together until the day that she
0:10:08 was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic and liver cancer.
0:10:11 And I got a phone call from her saying that she’d gotten this
0:10:14 diagnosis and that they said she had six months to live.
0:10:17 And from that point forward, it was no longer possible for me
0:10:21 to keep that love hidden and very swiftly after that, I had a
0:10:24 conversation with my husband and said, I need to go and be with
0:10:27 Rhea and no one was surprised with this.
0:10:29 He wasn’t surprised by it.
0:10:32 He’d seen it for years and he very in one of the greatest
0:10:36 acts of courage and dignity I’ve ever seen anybody do.
0:10:41 He very graciously stepped out of the way and we separated and
0:10:43 I went to be with her and I was with her until the end of her
0:10:43 life.
0:10:47 So that’s who Rhea was and that’s who she was to me.
0:10:51 As for that speech that I gave at the moth that talk, what I
0:10:56 was challenged to do in 12 minutes was to try to get over
0:10:59 the net who that person was, the most epic human being I’d
0:11:00 ever met.
0:11:04 And I decided the way to do that was to tell a few stories
0:11:07 about the experience of her death and dying, which were mostly
0:11:11 based on ideas that I had about how she was going to become
0:11:15 very helpless and I was going to have to be her hero and protect
0:11:19 her versus the reality of the situation, which is that she
0:11:21 never became helpless.
0:11:24 She remained the alpha in the entire situation.
0:11:27 She was a really hard patient to take care of for that reason.
0:11:31 She absolutely refused to cooperate with my version of some
0:11:35 airy fairy soft hippie dab that I wanted to give to her.
0:11:39 And instead she died the way she lived like the badass, the
0:11:43 year’s unrelenting warrior that she was and it was brutal and
0:11:47 it was beautiful and she never stopped taking us by surprise
0:11:48 right even up till the last second.
0:11:51 And the point is going to come where that truth is going to
0:11:55 become bigger than your plans and that extended into the way
0:11:56 that I tried to manage.
0:12:00 I’m using air quotes now, managed Rea’s death.
0:12:02 I also went into her death with a plan.
0:12:03 We’re going to have an enlightened death.
0:12:05 We’re going to have a real hospice death.
0:12:09 We’re going to bring grief bereavement experts in here to talk.
0:12:12 I mean, I laugh now because it’s like, you know, just Rea like
0:12:13 who’s such a biker chick.
0:12:16 It’s like you’re going to bring a fucking grief bereavement
0:12:20 expert in here like to talk to me, you know, like give me a
0:12:20 break.
0:12:23 I’m going to go down watching football, eating chicken wings
0:12:24 and smoking.
0:12:26 You know, like this is like of no interest in that.
0:12:30 So she just way laid that plan completely and died on her
0:12:30 own terms.
0:12:33 I’m just thinking of something that a hospice nurse said to
0:12:35 me because we were cracking up one day.
0:12:38 I can’t remember what it was about, but there’s a lot of
0:12:39 anybody who’s ever been by it.
0:12:43 You know, there’s a lot of humor that shows up and it is
0:12:44 literally gallows humor.
0:12:48 You know, it really is like, I’ve got a picture of me and Rea’s
0:12:51 ex-wife and Rea’s ex-girlfriend who were the two women who
0:12:54 showed up like champions at the end of her life to help to
0:12:57 take care of me and help to take care of her because they they
0:12:58 loved her so much.
0:13:01 It was also just such a factor of what a boss Mac Daddy Rea
0:13:04 was that she had like every woman who’d ever loved her came
0:13:07 back to take care of her when she was dying, you know, and to
0:13:08 take care of each other.
0:13:10 And there was a lot of laughter between the three of us about
0:13:14 just like handling this force of nature as she was dying.
0:13:15 Like, can we survive it?
0:13:16 Right.
0:13:18 She’s the opposite of a good patient, you know, and so there
0:13:20 was a lot of humor in there and the hospice nurse was laughing
0:13:23 with this one day and I said to her, it’s amazing that you can
0:13:25 laugh given the line of work that you’re in.
0:13:28 She spends her life working with people at the worst, most
0:13:30 painful parts of their lives at the end of their lives.
0:13:32 And she said, we have a little motto.
0:13:35 We say, if you can’t laugh at death, get out of show business.
0:13:38 You shouldn’t be a hospice nurse.
0:13:40 If you can’t let you won’t survive.
0:13:42 And I’m sure that’s what you and I are talking right now in
0:13:43 the midst of the COVID crisis.
0:13:44 And I’ve been thinking about that.
0:13:47 I’ve been thinking about the nurses that I know and I’m
0:13:51 imagining that you know, there’s some dark ass humor happening
0:13:53 in those hospitals right now.
0:13:56 There has to be in the same way that soldiers would tell you
0:13:59 about the humor that happens when you’re under fire.
0:14:03 Like, there absolutely has to be or you simply won’t be able
0:14:03 to survive it.
0:14:06 So I will say that the humor is there in those moments.
0:14:09 I mean, right after Rhea died.
0:14:13 I mean, we had been through such hell with her and her death
0:14:15 was not as I say, it was it was brutal.
0:14:18 You know, one minute after she took her last breath, her last
0:14:23 horrible breath, Gigi, her ex-wife, stood up, brushed off
0:14:25 her hands and goes, okay, so that’s done.
0:14:27 I’m going to be on the next flight out of here like at 2 o’clock.
0:14:30 You know, we just, it was hilarious, but it was also
0:14:32 just like what Rhea would have done, you know.
0:14:33 Okay, you guys good?
0:14:33 We good?
0:14:34 We done here?
0:14:39 You know, we just all like rolled over laughing in the middle
0:14:42 of our tears, you know, and I feel like that humor has to
0:14:45 be shot through the entirety of your life or else you really
0:14:47 are not going to make it through Earth School because Earth
0:14:50 School is a hard, hard school and it’s a hard assignment.
0:14:53 And I think the humor is quite literally grace.
0:14:58 Let’s pair stillness with awe for a moment.
0:15:03 I’ve also read that there are times when you’ll love a
0:15:08 sentence so much that you read that you’ll start clapping by
0:15:12 yourself where you happen to be reading.
0:15:18 And I would love to know what type of writing what writers
0:15:19 have done that for you.
0:15:23 If you could name even a few of them and what it is, what are
0:15:27 the ingredients that lead to that one woman standing ovation?
0:15:28 Often in the backups.
0:15:32 Well, they say that great art has to contain two features.
0:15:36 It has to be both surprising and inevitable.
0:15:37 So that’s the great thing.
0:15:38 That’s good.
0:15:39 That’s good.
0:15:39 Right.
0:15:39 Yeah.
0:15:42 That’s paradox is that you have to go.
0:15:44 Oh my God, I didn’t see that coming.
0:15:46 And that is the only way that could go.
0:15:51 I’m thinking of the ending of Breaking Bad, that whole show,
0:15:52 but like the last moments of Breaking Bad.
0:15:53 Spoiler alert.
0:15:56 You’ve had many years to watch it now, people.
0:15:57 I won’t tell you the ending.
0:16:00 I will just tell you that I also stood up and applauded at
0:16:03 that because it felt both surprising and inevitable.
0:16:06 So that’s the feeling you want your whole nervous system to
0:16:09 kind of be like, oh my God, I didn’t know that could be.
0:16:13 And yes, of course, you know, it had to be.
0:16:16 And now it’s rearranged my DNA in a certain way where I can’t
0:16:17 be the same now.
0:16:19 Poetry tends to do it.
0:16:24 The poets have this amazing ability to put that into such a
0:16:28 tiny space where it’s like the encapsulation of inevitability
0:16:29 and surprise.
0:16:34 So I’ll give you an example of one piece that I love, which
0:16:39 is a poem by TS Eliot called East Coker that has gotten me
0:16:41 through some of the darkest times in my life.
0:16:44 Some of those moments in your life where you don’t know what
0:16:44 to do, right?
0:16:47 Where a human being, and this is where I think human life
0:16:48 gets really interesting.
0:16:51 What happens to people when they reach the end of their power?
0:16:53 Because especially in this culture where we live in it, in
0:16:56 a culture that says you should be able to power through anything,
0:16:59 life will very generously remind you that you cannot.
0:17:03 And it will very generously break you at times and very
0:17:05 generously show you as we’re seeing right now in the COVID
0:17:05 virus.
0:17:08 We’re like, oh, actually, there’s a limit to our powers
0:17:10 here and it’s very humbling.
0:17:12 And what do you do when you’re at the end of your power?
0:17:15 So the poem East Coker is one and it gets me every little
0:17:16 time.
0:17:17 How do you spell Coker?
0:17:19 C-O-K-E-R.
0:17:22 C-K-E-R, yeah, East Coker.
0:17:26 And there’s a part of the poem where TS Eliot writes, weight
0:17:28 without hope for hope would be hope of the wrong thing.
0:17:32 Weight without love for love would be love of the wrong thing.
0:17:36 There is yet faith, but the faith and the hope and the love
0:17:37 are all in the waiting.
0:17:41 Weight without thought for you are not ready for thought.
0:17:44 And so the darkness shall be light and the stillness,
0:17:45 the dancing.
0:17:47 That’s a stand up and applause moment.
0:17:49 Yeah, that is a stand up and applause moment.
0:17:54 And sometimes when people I know are grieving or they’re stuck
0:17:57 or they’re broken or everything has been taken away,
0:18:00 I will give them that poem because that says what I don’t
0:18:04 know how to say better than that, which is right now you’re
0:18:08 being asked to weight without hope for anything that you hope
0:18:09 for would be the wrong thing.
0:18:12 And weight without love, anybody who’s been going through a
0:18:14 horrible breakup, I’ll give them that poem.
0:18:17 Like you’re being asked to weight without love right now
0:18:19 because love would be love of the wrong thing.
0:18:22 And anybody who’s a beginning meditator, I give them that
0:18:25 poem because of the line weight without thought for you are
0:18:26 not ready for thought.
0:18:31 You don’t have the wisdom right now to have the correct
0:18:31 thoughts.
0:18:36 So you need to weight without thought and then you will see
0:18:37 if you do that.
0:18:41 And there’s still faith, but the faith is in the waiting.
0:18:44 The faith is in waiting without hope, waiting without love,
0:18:45 waiting without thought.
0:18:49 That’s the definition of faith sitting in the darkness in that
0:18:49 waiting.
0:18:52 And then you will see how the darkness becomes light and the
0:18:55 stillness becomes dancing, but only every time in order to
0:18:57 have it, you’ve got to give up hope and you’ve got to give up
0:19:00 love and you’ve got to have faith only in the waiting.
0:19:02 So that’s a line that makes me applaud.
0:19:06 Another author who gets me is another poet who gets me is
0:19:10 Walt Whitman and Walt Whitman saying describing himself in
0:19:14 a song of myself, describing himself as standing both in
0:19:17 and out of the game, watching and wondering at it and also
0:19:18 being involved in it.
0:19:24 That description of he watching himself walk through life both
0:19:27 in and out of the game is again something that I think of as
0:19:29 the highest point of enlightenment.
0:19:32 Can you engage with your life?
0:19:34 Can you be involved with your life?
0:19:36 Can you feel all of the feelings?
0:19:37 Can you fall in love?
0:19:38 Can you lose?
0:19:39 Can you fail?
0:19:39 Can you grow?
0:19:40 Can you succeed?
0:19:41 Can you fuck up?
0:19:45 And also watch it from a little bit of a detached distance
0:19:47 and marvel at the game itself.
0:19:49 So that line gets me.
0:19:52 And then as far as fiction writers go, I’m so in love with
0:19:57 Hilary Mantell who wrote the Wolf Hall trilogy about Henry
0:20:00 the Eighth and won the Booker Prize for the first two
0:20:00 installments of it.
0:20:03 And then the third one just came out and the way that I’ve
0:20:07 been describing it to people is imagine if all three Godfather
0:20:09 movies were as good as the first two.
0:20:12 Imagine if Godfather Part Three was just as good as one
0:20:13 and two.
0:20:16 That’s how good Hilary Mantell is that the third installment
0:20:19 and I’m reading that right now and I’m just it’s just a bowdown
0:20:19 moment.
0:20:22 You know, as an artist, there are a lot of writers who
0:20:26 I look at their work and I admire them, but I see how they did
0:20:29 it because it’s almost like a carpenter looking at another
0:20:31 carpenter’s work and being like, oh, okay, see how you did the
0:20:34 joints there and you hid that hinge there.
0:20:34 And that’s cool.
0:20:36 I see it well done, you know.
0:20:38 And then there are people I look at their work and I’m like,
0:20:41 I literally don’t believe that you’re human.
0:20:47 I don’t understand how you can even do this.
0:20:49 And that’s how I feel about Hilary Mantell writing about
0:20:54 16th century England in a way that is so intimate and so you
0:20:57 cannot read that book without thinking, this is exactly how
0:20:59 it happened and I don’t know how she does it.
0:21:02 I’m happy to never be able to do that.
0:21:04 I’m just lucky to live on earth at the same time as somebody
0:21:05 who can.
0:21:10 I would push back a little bit and I would say that you have
0:21:17 a rare ability to blend readability with wordsmithing
0:21:22 sentences that are very memorable and really strike a chord.
0:21:23 I don’t think that is easy to do.
0:21:29 And I would say Kurt Vonnegut is one who comes to mind, but
0:21:32 it’s not easy to combine those two things.
0:21:36 And it made me crack a smile when I was reading about you
0:21:38 appreciating sentences.
0:21:42 The quote from you at the end of this portion of the interview
0:21:45 was it’s part of the reason that the arts are around to remind
0:21:47 us that we’re not just here to pay bills and die that we’re
0:21:50 also here to get excited and feel wonder and to feel awe.
0:21:54 That’s easy to read, but it is something that makes me go fuck.
0:21:56 God damn, you’re totally right.
0:21:59 It’s like I need more wonder and awe.
0:22:01 I’m paying too many bills.
0:22:07 So I do want to applaud that ability and I’d love for you to
0:22:12 speak to what else you’ve learned from Martha Beck and what
0:22:15 are some of the other things that have really stuck for you.
0:22:17 I’ll give you one more Martha Beck line that I love.
0:22:20 She says, there are certain moments of your life where you’re
0:22:23 standing in front of a bonfire and you have to jump.
0:22:27 You just have to jump into it and you have to be willing to
0:22:31 burn away everything that you’ve been taught and everything
0:22:32 that you’re afraid of and just do it.
0:22:35 And she said, and I remember her telling me this was such
0:22:35 glee.
0:22:38 She goes, it’s such a cool moment that you’re in.
0:22:41 And she said this to me as I was leaving my marriage and going
0:22:41 to be with Rayette.
0:22:45 She said that these bonfire moments are so fantastic
0:22:48 because there’s only two things that can happen when you jump
0:22:49 into a bonfire.
0:22:52 One of them is that you find out that it wasn’t actually a
0:22:55 bonfire that you were afraid that it was going to burn you
0:22:56 to pieces and it actually didn’t.
0:22:59 It wasn’t as scary as you thought you did it.
0:22:59 You took the weep.
0:23:03 It turned out to be kind of like warm and soft and easy.
0:23:04 So it was no big deal.
0:23:08 The other thing that can happen is that it is a bonfire and
0:23:13 you are incinerated and your entire life is incinerated by
0:23:16 it. And that’s even better because then you get to be
0:23:18 reborn as a Phoenix on the other side completely new.
0:23:19 So either way you win.
0:23:22 So there’s no reason not to either jump in and find out it
0:23:24 was nothing or you’ll jump in and you’ll be destroyed and
0:23:25 that’s awesome too.
0:23:28 When I say Martha doesn’t play by the game.
0:23:29 That’s what I mean.
0:23:30 Like that’s what I mean about.
0:23:34 She’s not even in the arena that we would call any sort of
0:23:35 normal way of living.
0:23:39 And that reason she’s then one of the top three most influential
0:23:40 people in my entire life.
0:23:44 You’re like Martha do we go left left right or straight.
0:23:45 She’s like we go up.
0:23:47 You’re like what’s how do we do that?
0:23:49 That’s incredible.
0:23:55 Let’s talk about the integrity check that sternum to naval
0:24:00 area will have to come up with some sort of premium like label
0:24:02 that makes it a little easier to their expense.
0:24:04 I think is it the inner compass.
0:24:05 There we go.
0:24:06 That’s where it’s located.
0:24:06 Yeah.
0:24:10 When you do say an integrity check and I had read that
0:24:12 when Ray was sick.
0:24:15 For instance, you began deleting or archiving emails without
0:24:20 responding as a bit of a treat to yourself and not having to
0:24:20 okay.
0:24:22 Deleting goodbye.
0:24:31 And when you say now check in with yourself and decide to
0:24:32 say no to something.
0:24:35 Let’s just to make it easy or make it concrete via email.
0:24:38 You get an invitation from a friend.
0:24:41 You do actually really like with something that could plausibly
0:24:44 advance your career or be fun, but you check in with yourself
0:24:46 and it’s like, no, this isn’t a yes.
0:24:50 How do you phrase your nose or declines?
0:24:54 Do you have any particular go to language that you like to use?
0:24:56 I just want to make sure everybody knows that this is not
0:24:57 easy.
0:25:00 I don’t want to have any illusions for anybody that this is
0:25:03 simple and the closer the relationship, the harder it is
0:25:06 the closer and more intimately I’m involved with somebody.
0:25:10 The more stakes there are for me and the harder it is for me
0:25:11 to tell the truth.
0:25:15 And that feels like it should be, you know, there’s a paradox.
0:25:17 The people you love the most should be the people that you
0:25:19 are able to be the most honest with.
0:25:21 Well, no, because they’re the people who you want to hurt
0:25:22 the least.
0:25:24 That’s where it’s really, really hard.
0:25:25 There’s a couple layers of it.
0:25:29 I now treat my inbox like it’s my home because I think it’s
0:25:30 an extension of my home.
0:25:34 So if somebody walks into my home uninvited and announces
0:25:37 themselves and doesn’t say how they got a key and asks for
0:25:39 something, I delete that email.
0:25:41 I’m just like, I didn’t invite you in.
0:25:43 There are proper channels, you know what they are.
0:25:46 I don’t know how you got my personal email and I just delete
0:25:46 it.
0:25:51 And if I feel a sense in my sternum of a fence of feeling
0:25:54 like this person has taken the liberty, I don’t believe that
0:25:55 I owe them anything.
0:25:58 I don’t believe that I owe them anything anymore than if I came
0:26:01 down to my kitchen and saw people sitting at my table who
0:26:03 I didn’t know eating breakfast.
0:26:06 I wouldn’t believe that I owed them to make them a cup of
0:26:10 coffee. I’d be like, get out of my house.
0:26:13 I don’t even think I owe them a polite response.
0:26:15 I owe them nothing.
0:26:16 I didn’t ask you to come into my house.
0:26:17 I don’t owe you anything.
0:26:18 So that’s the easiest.
0:26:19 Those are ones are easy.
0:26:21 And I now treat myself to doing that.
0:26:22 I mean, I do that every day.
0:26:25 I clear my inbox out very quickly now.
0:26:27 And then it’s very, I’m entertained when they come back
0:26:29 later and they’re like just circling back and I’m like,
0:26:31 yeah, just deleting you again.
0:26:32 Circle back as many times as you want.
0:26:33 You are not coming in.
0:26:34 So that’s simple.
0:26:36 If it’s just bumping this up.
0:26:37 Pixar, are you?
0:26:39 Yeah, I’m just bumping you back.
0:26:41 And I’m just, it’s like whack-a-moles.
0:26:42 It’s like, I can do this all day.
0:26:43 Delete, delete, delete.
0:26:47 If it’s somebody who I care about.
0:26:50 If it’s something that I’m interested in, but I’m just
0:26:53 not going to do it because I don’t want to.
0:26:56 I will write back and say, thank you so much.
0:26:59 And I’m really honored that you invited me to this, but
0:27:01 I’m not going to be able to do this at this time.
0:27:03 And I don’t feel any to give a reason.
0:27:07 I think a simple no is really, really good.
0:27:10 And the reason sometimes the reason it’s good not to give
0:27:14 an explanation is that if that person is an expert manipulator
0:27:18 as many of us are, that explanation will not suffice.
0:27:22 So it won’t matter what you give as an explanation because
0:27:24 they can come back and be like, well, we can do it by audio.
0:27:27 You know, we can do, oh, if you’re, oh, well, we can do it
0:27:28 a different weekend.
0:27:30 Just no.
0:27:32 And I learned a lot about this from my teacher, Byron
0:27:35 Katie, who, who teaches an amazing thing called the school
0:27:35 for the work.
0:27:39 She’s a whole another, another being who’s not, not at all
0:27:40 living by the rules.
0:27:42 Extra terrestrial for sure.
0:27:43 Extra terrestrial.
0:27:47 She is not, she is the only fully enlightened human being
0:27:48 I can, I believe I have ever met.
0:27:52 And as such, she does not have any trouble saying an honest
0:27:53 yes and no to people.
0:27:56 Just to underscore that, cause I did a, an in-person training
0:27:57 with her.
0:28:07 I mean, literally no hesitation, no struggle, no conflict.
0:28:11 It’s bizarre and mesmerizing to watch.
0:28:12 And she loves you.
0:28:13 And she loves her.
0:28:14 There’s also no hostility.
0:28:18 So no offense, no hostility to her.
0:28:20 Somebody came up to her to an event, handed her a book that
0:28:23 they’d written, which people do to me all the time too.
0:28:24 So I really marveled at this.
0:28:26 They said, I wrote this and I want to share it with you.
0:28:28 And she said, oh sweetheart, I’m never going to read that.
0:28:31 She said, true, it’s just true.
0:28:31 I’m never going to read that.
0:28:34 And I’m like, oh my God, I didn’t know you could say that.
0:28:36 So that’s amazing.
0:28:39 And she said it so lovingly, like, oh, oh no, I’m no
0:28:39 interested in reading that.
0:28:42 So she teaches, I don’t know if you did, when you took her
0:28:45 training, did you do where she teaches a simple no?
0:28:49 And she does training on how to give a simple no.
0:28:52 I don’t think we actually spent much time on that.
0:28:54 So I would love to hear you say more.
0:28:58 We worked on the emotional one-pages and the turnarounds.
0:29:01 We did a lot on the turnarounds, which is probably it.
0:29:03 We could do a whole episode just on that.
0:29:06 Everybody look up Byron Katie for this amazing, but and if
0:29:08 you have the means and if you have the chance to ever take
0:29:11 her nine day school for the work, it’s the most important
0:29:12 thing I’ve ever done for myself.
0:29:15 So I would say that quite simply, but she has a whole day
0:29:18 in the nine day school for work, which is about the simple
0:29:21 no and the simple no is ways to say no.
0:29:26 And it always begins with thank you and there’s never a but
0:29:30 because she feels that the word but is very cruel and it’s
0:29:33 just an and so it’s thank you and no.
0:29:34 And that’s it.
0:29:35 That’s a simple no.
0:29:37 And then if they come back, you can say, well, hold on.
0:29:38 Just to pause for a second.
0:29:41 Is that literally the phrasing or is it just?
0:29:41 Yeah.
0:29:42 Okay.
0:29:43 No, yeah, that’s it.
0:29:44 That’s it.
0:29:46 And it just it still makes my stomach it because I’m like,
0:29:47 Oh my God, you can’t just do that.
0:29:49 You’ve got to give you’ve got to like do the dance and she’s
0:29:51 like, you don’t have to do the dance.
0:29:53 And she’s the one who taught me if the person is a good
0:29:55 enough manipulator, it doesn’t matter what you bring.
0:29:57 They’re going to manipulate it.
0:30:00 And the beautiful thing about a simple no is that it gives in
0:30:03 the jujitsu game, it gives somebody no weapon that they can
0:30:04 take and bring back to you.
0:30:08 They can say you’re being incredibly selfish and you can
0:30:11 say, I hear that and you might be right about that.
0:30:12 That’s another one.
0:30:14 She always says you might be right about that.
0:30:16 You might be right about that and no.
0:30:21 And you just keep adding and no after the statement.
0:30:24 So then there’s, but you know, I really, I need you to do
0:30:24 this.
0:30:26 I’m desperate and you say, I see that.
0:30:28 I see your desperation and no.
0:30:32 And one other thing she’ll add is you can say, if I change
0:30:34 my mind about this, I’ll let you know and no.
0:30:37 And that’s been a game changer for me.
0:30:42 So I just did one last week, somebody who I have a professional
0:30:45 relationship said, I want you to do this one hour video interview
0:30:48 to promote this thing that I’m doing.
0:30:52 And old Liz would have thought I owe her that because she
0:30:54 did this other thing for me that time.
0:30:59 And I checked in with my inter compass and I was like,
0:31:01 nothing in me wants to do this.
0:31:02 And so I just wrote back to her.
0:31:03 I said, I’m so sorry.
0:31:05 And I’m not going to be able to do this at this time.
0:31:09 And she wrote back and pushed in and said, oh, let me clarify.
0:31:11 I wasn’t clear about why we need it.
0:31:14 We really need it because right now it’s really hard for us
0:31:16 to sell things because of COVID-19.
0:31:17 And that’s why we need it.
0:31:20 And I wrote back and said, I hear you and I understand you and
0:31:22 no, and it goes away.
0:31:25 They don’t tend to come back a third time.
0:31:30 You know, it really does just stop and let it sit at the no.
0:31:35 The more words you add after that, the more entangled you get.
0:31:36 But again, I want to make clear.
0:31:40 It’s hardest closest to home and it’s hardest with family.
0:31:43 And with family, I find if I anticipate that I’m going to be
0:31:45 asked something, I really have to practice.
0:31:49 I really, because it’s scary and I have to really practice and be
0:31:53 like, and just practice saying, I’m not doing that right now.
0:31:54 I’m not coming this year.
0:31:57 And I’ll say a thousand times, just go for a long walk and
0:31:59 I’ll just practice it and practice it and practice it.
0:32:01 Because as I say, the closer the people are to you, the more
0:32:02 difficult it is.
0:32:05 It has a bit of personal digression here.
0:32:09 I was working on a book, an entire book about saying no this
0:32:12 past summer and the great irony of course is that I came up
0:32:14 with all the reasons why I shouldn’t write the book in the
0:32:16 process of putting it together.
0:32:21 But what I noticed as I was practicing different ways of
0:32:28 saying no is that it’s an incredibly clarifying exercise
0:32:34 because it in a sense, it kind of brings to surface the true
0:32:37 character of many people, you know, or people who are attempting
0:32:38 to reach you.
0:32:41 And what I found surprising and maybe I shouldn’t have found
0:32:46 surprising is that many of my close friends who I anticipated
0:32:51 might be upset would respond with, dude, good for you for
0:32:52 respecting your boundaries.
0:32:53 That’s a great line.
0:32:53 Right.
0:32:55 Rock on.
0:32:59 And they got it and they were just like, oh, I wish, you know,
0:33:01 I could say that more myself like good for you.
0:33:05 And it was the bonfire that wasn’t a bonfire in those cases.
0:33:09 Did you ever run into a bonfire that was one?
0:33:10 Oh, for sure.
0:33:11 Absolutely.
0:33:15 And then I’m like, oh, wow, because if you, what I like about
0:33:21 what you said about the or the sort of jiu-jitsu analogy is
0:33:25 that if you provide really specific reasons for why you
0:33:29 can’t do it and you elaborate, you’ve just created a potential
0:33:30 negotiation.
0:33:30 Right.
0:33:37 But if you don’t provide that grip, that toll hold, then one
0:33:40 of the few responses someone can give you if they’re upset
0:33:44 and still want to push is some type of personal ad hominem
0:33:46 attack or an accusation.
0:33:48 And then you’re like, oh, wow.
0:33:48 Okay.
0:33:50 Now it’s that kind of party.
0:33:51 Okay.
0:33:55 This is good to know before we’re on stage having a public tiff
0:33:55 at God knows what.
0:33:57 I mean, this is valuable information.
0:34:01 So there were definitely some bonfires and basically people
0:34:05 just self-immolated because I was like, oh, wow, you’ve just
0:34:08 proved my internal compass to be extremely accurate.
0:34:09 And right.
0:34:10 This is the reason.
0:34:14 And here is the reason I’m not working with you, but you don’t
0:34:15 even just say that.
0:34:20 You just know it because the body knows first, the body knows
0:34:23 first, but only always, only always.
0:34:25 One of the things that Martha says that I love is she’s like
0:34:29 because culture and civilization have overwritten the software
0:34:32 system of the body so much and told you that you don’t trust
0:34:37 that what you trust are the rules and the mores and the fear
0:34:40 based scarcity based grasping.
0:34:41 This is how you have to act.
0:34:43 This is what you have to be in order to be safe.
0:34:50 And meanwhile, our body’s like, ew, you know, gross or on
0:34:51 the opposite side, like yummy.
0:34:54 Like that’s that I want to be over there.
0:34:55 I want to be with those people.
0:34:57 You know, I don’t want to be with these people.
0:35:00 And if you think about it, the wisdom of the body is so
0:35:01 incredible.
0:35:05 How many people do you know who said I knew the night before
0:35:07 my wedding that this was a mistake?
0:35:08 How many people do you know say that?
0:35:10 And yet why did you do it?
0:35:13 Because you were 29 and it was time to get married because
0:35:15 you’d been raised in a culture that said this is what you do
0:35:18 now because the invitations had been sent out because 300
0:35:22 people had gathered because your family spent $30,000 on
0:35:26 the wedding, like whatever the reasons were, you knew somewhere
0:35:29 in that sternum area, you knew and how much you had to drink
0:35:33 that day in order to override that.
0:35:36 Whatever you had to do in order to shut down that compass
0:35:38 that was saying, uh-uh, it’s brutal.
0:35:41 That’s the work of the second half of my life.
0:35:43 I can say that now, but I’m 50.
0:35:48 That the only thing I’m interested anymore is that.
0:35:54 Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we’ll be right
0:35:54 back to the show.
0:35:59 This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational
0:36:02 nutritional supplement that supports whole body health.
0:36:05 I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take
0:36:08 one supplement and the true answer is invariably AG1.
0:36:10 It simply covers a ton of bases.
0:36:13 I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take
0:36:15 their travel packs with me on the road.
0:36:16 So what is AG1?
0:36:19 AG1 is a science driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics
0:36:22 and whole food source nutrients in a single scoop.
0:36:26 AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut and immune system.
0:36:29 So take ownership of your health and try AG1 today.
0:36:33 You will get a free one-year supply of vitamin D and five
0:36:37 free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase.
0:36:38 So learn more, check it out.
0:36:42 Go to drinkag1.com/tim.
0:36:45 That’s drink AG1, the number one.
0:36:47 Drinkag1.com/tim.
0:36:51 Last time, drinkag1.com/tim.
0:36:52 Check it out.
0:37:01 And now Jack Cornfield, one of the key teachers to introduce
0:37:05 mindfulness practice to the West, author of 16 books,
0:37:09 including Bringing Home the Dharma and Seeking the Heart
0:37:13 of Wisdom and a founding teacher of the Insight Meditation
0:37:17 Society in Massachusetts and Spirit Rock Meditation Center
0:37:18 in California.
0:37:23 You can find Jack on Instagram @jack_cornfield.
0:37:26 Jack, welcome to the show.
0:37:28 Oh, thank you, Tim.
0:37:29 Pleasure to reconnect.
0:37:33 I have wanted to have you on the show for some time now.
0:37:38 And you’ve had certainly a tremendous impact on my life,
0:37:42 both through your writing and through first-hand in-person
0:37:44 interaction, which I think we’ll touch upon.
0:37:49 But first, I wanted to ask you a complete non sequitur from
0:37:53 that, which is something that our mutual friend, Adam Gazali,
0:37:54 suggested I ask you about.
0:37:59 And Adam, for people who don’t know him, is an incredible PhD
0:38:03 MD neuroscientist based at UCSF.
0:38:08 And he suggested that I ask you about hang gliding.
0:38:11 And I have no idea why he suggested that.
0:38:13 But I’m going to start there.
0:38:16 And if it doesn’t go anywhere, we can change direction.
0:38:17 But I figured we would just start with that.
0:38:19 And then we’re going to rewind the clock.
0:38:22 But why did he suggest I ask you about hang gliding?
0:38:27 Well, it started many years ago when I crossed country with
0:38:31 a friend who had a hang glider and we would stop periodically
0:38:33 and go off different hills.
0:38:34 And it was fantastic.
0:38:38 And then I wanted to do paragliding and started to learn
0:38:41 it now because everything is developed.
0:38:43 And paragliding is a lot more official.
0:38:44 You need a license, which I don’t have.
0:38:50 But one of my favorite things is to tandem paraglide and go
0:38:55 off the top of places like Grindelwald in Switzerland where
0:38:59 you can take the ski lift up to 9,000 feet and then jump off
0:39:05 and float silently like you’re a bird among the clouds.
0:39:08 The birds actually do come by sometimes and like check out
0:39:09 what’s this big bird flying up here.
0:39:13 You can catch thermals and go way up above the glaciers.
0:39:17 It’s one of the most thrilling and delicious experiences that
0:39:18 I know.
0:39:20 That’s incredible.
0:39:23 So you first experienced that at what age?
0:39:27 Probably in my, you know, late 20s and did some and then
0:39:31 sort of put it aside and then I was traveling and teaching
0:39:34 in Europe and I saw a sign for paragliding and I said, oh,
0:39:38 gosh, I really want to do it and started and now each time
0:39:41 I go where there’s high mountains and paragliding.
0:39:44 That’s one of my things that I love doing.
0:39:46 Most people have these dreams once in a while.
0:39:49 If you’re lucky a dream of flying or maybe in your
0:39:52 meditation, you have this sense of not being limited to your
0:39:56 body and this is the closest thing that I know because it’s
0:39:59 absolutely silent and you’re floating there.
0:40:00 It’s quite fantastic.
0:40:02 And this is something you still do.
0:40:06 I hope to do it next summer when I’m back in the Alps.
0:40:08 And how old are you now?
0:40:09 72.
0:40:10 72, good man.
0:40:16 Well, we’re going to then go back a bit in chronology and ask
0:40:18 about childhood.
0:40:22 I would love to hear you describe your childhood.
0:40:24 What were you like as a child?
0:40:25 What was your upbringing like?
0:40:30 Well, first thing to say is I remember when I got to Dartmouth
0:40:36 College in 1963 and I called my mom from the pay phone in the
0:40:38 dorm sometime in that fall.
0:40:41 I didn’t call very often, but you know how it is.
0:40:44 And I said, mom, I said, guess what?
0:40:48 There are a lot of other really fucked up families beside
0:40:49 ours.
0:40:53 So that’s kind of where we start.
0:41:02 So I had three brothers and my father was a mixture of a tyrant
0:41:05 and a really abusive person and a brilliant guy.
0:41:08 I was born on the Marine base toward the end of World War
0:41:13 II and they didn’t send him overseas to do they put him in
0:41:17 the medical part of the Marines because he tested so high on
0:41:20 their tests that they, you know, okay, we’re going to use him
0:41:21 for something.
0:41:22 So he was brilliant in certain ways.
0:41:26 He was a biophysicist who helped design some of the first
0:41:29 artificial hearts and lungs worked on the space program,
0:41:35 but also did other kinds of weird stuff like work for the army
0:41:39 biological weapons people not making biological weapons,
0:41:43 but trying to design things that were kind of computer
0:41:46 biological interfaces, all kinds of creative stuff.
0:41:51 But he was, he had mental problems and so we didn’t know
0:41:53 when the car pulled in whether we were going to get Dr.
0:41:54 Jekyll or Mr.
0:41:59 Hyde, he would come in and you know, either he could shout
0:42:03 be abusive, throw my mother down the stairs, rant, chase
0:42:06 after us, try to hit us, whatever, or we’d get this
0:42:09 interesting creative person, but we hardly ever had people
0:42:12 come over when he was around during the daytime is the way
0:42:15 we would because he never knew what you would get.
0:42:19 And so our family life in my family life in some way was
0:42:23 also there were great parts of it because I had my brothers
0:42:24 and we were like our own gang.
0:42:28 We moved all the time, but we had each other and because he
0:42:30 was wacky as well as smart.
0:42:34 My father either quit or got fired every year or two and then
0:42:36 we would go from one place to another.
0:42:40 I went to, I don’t know, eight schools by the time I finished
0:42:40 high school.
0:42:44 So my childhood, partly it was the happy things of rough
0:42:48 housing and being a boy with three other boys and adventures.
0:42:52 And then in the basement, my father had all kinds of scientific
0:42:53 equipment.
0:42:57 He had all this stuff from World War II, this huge radio
0:43:01 from a battleship that you could tune into a thousand
0:43:05 different shortwave stations around the world and projects.
0:43:06 He was trying to design stuff.
0:43:08 And so we learned from him, you could pretty much take or
0:43:11 design or do anything in the physical world.
0:43:18 And at the same time, I felt like my whole childhood was also
0:43:25 colored with the fear of his violence and his unpredictability.
0:43:28 And I became kind of a peacemaker in the family.
0:43:32 We all sort of had our roles and now I do it as a profession,
0:43:34 right, trying to kind of make it a little smoother between
0:43:35 my parents.
0:43:37 So they’d kill each other.
0:43:39 And each of my brothers had their own strategy.
0:43:43 My twin brother, who was a lot bigger and much more outgoing,
0:43:45 played football, which I certainly didn’t.
0:43:49 I was skinnier and, you know, I was in the orchestra and he
0:43:50 was the football player.
0:43:55 I remember when he first got in a fist fight with my dad because
0:43:58 my father was abusing our mom.
0:44:01 My twin brother had been as young men sometimes too.
0:44:06 It was probably 13, 14 and he was pretty big and he was looking
0:44:09 in the mirror, making muscles in the mirror to see how strong
0:44:10 he’d become.
0:44:14 Anyway, he just got into a fist fight with my father and I
0:44:19 was both thrilled and terrified, but it worked in some way
0:44:22 because of the abuse settled down quite a lot after that.
0:44:26 So that was his strategy was just to get angry and then later
0:44:29 kind of to go his own way somewhat more although we’re
0:44:32 all of all have been very close as brothers.
0:44:34 So there was that at the same time.
0:44:37 There was a lot of interest, intellectual interest.
0:44:40 So we read and learned about all kinds of things.
0:44:44 Both my parents were really interested in the world around
0:44:44 us.
0:44:49 So it was sort of this next thing of the gift of being together
0:44:52 with my brothers and a mom who was basically pretty nurturing
0:44:57 although she kept trying to believe him and never got it
0:44:57 together.
0:45:01 I think it was too scary in the 50s to have four boys, you
0:45:02 know, no job.
0:45:05 And so we were in the middle of this and the kind of healing
0:45:09 that it took, it took a long time to do the inner healing
0:45:12 work from the pain of my family.
0:45:17 And I remember when I became a Buddhist monk and I was sitting
0:45:22 these first years with my teacher Ajahn Chah in the
0:45:26 forest monasteries of Thailand on the border of Thailand
0:45:30 in Laos and I’ve been sitting quietly and then some of these
0:45:34 memories or energy would come where I remember one monk who
0:45:38 had a pot near mine and the forest did something that annoyed
0:45:41 me and I just got enraged inside.
0:45:45 And I said when I went to the teacher and I said, I’m really
0:45:49 getting angry here and he smiled.
0:45:51 He said, yeah, where do you think that comes from or
0:45:52 something like that?
0:45:54 And I said, well, I don’t know.
0:45:56 I said, I thought I was a peaceful guy.
0:45:58 I was never going to be like my father.
0:46:00 I won’t, you know, I’ll be peaceful.
0:46:03 But it turned out I just stuffed all that stuff.
0:46:06 And so when I told it, my teacher about it, he said, good.
0:46:07 She’d go back in your hut.
0:46:08 It’s the hot season.
0:46:11 You get a little tin roof and close the doors and windows
0:46:13 and put all your robes on.
0:46:14 And if you’re going to be angry, do it right.
0:46:17 Sit in the middle of that, you know, and sit in the middle
0:46:20 of the fire and don’t be so afraid of it because you’re
0:46:21 afraid of it.
0:46:22 You’re just going to keep stuffing it.
0:46:25 And on the other hand, or if you’re afraid of it, it’ll
0:46:26 just explode.
0:46:27 There’s another way to be with it.
0:46:31 And so that was the beginning of some healing just to realize
0:46:36 that I could actually tolerate the suffering and the energy
0:46:39 that was in my still carried from trauma in my body and heart.
0:46:43 So we’re going to absolutely come back to Ajahn Shabbi
0:46:48 because I have many questions on that chapter in your life.
0:46:50 But just so that I can create the proper visual in my
0:46:54 own head. So you sat there in your hut in the sweltering heat
0:46:55 with all of your robes on.
0:46:58 Were you were you angry in silence?
0:46:59 Were you yelling?
0:47:02 Well, what I was I was pretty much angry in silence.
0:47:03 And that’s an interesting question.
0:47:07 You know, in the monastery, the culture was not much that
0:47:07 you would yell.
0:47:10 You could go somewhere out in the forest and yell.
0:47:12 It wasn’t decorous or something.
0:47:14 People with the hell’s wrong with that monk.
0:47:18 So mostly I was sitting in silence and then scenes would
0:47:23 come and I would realize, wow, I thought I was peaceful in
0:47:24 every cell of my body.
0:47:28 I also carry both the pain and anger of my childhood and my
0:47:31 father and just the anger that comes with being a human being
0:47:33 and human incarnation.
0:47:35 And I was never going to have that.
0:47:37 But of course there was and it lasted.
0:47:42 You know, this was I had days of and actually much longer
0:47:46 weeks or months of waves of this coming and learning how
0:47:49 to be present for it and not get overwhelmed by it.
0:47:52 So I want to backtrack and then connect those dots.
0:47:58 So between childhood and ending up in Thailand, you mentioned
0:48:02 Dartmouth earlier and from what I’ve read at least you were
0:48:05 initially pre-med and then ended up Asian studies.
0:48:10 Could you describe that experience in Dartmouth or how
0:48:13 you went from pre-med to Asian studies?
0:48:18 Well, you know, we all get turned in these mysterious ways
0:48:19 in our life.
0:48:23 We think we’re going in one direction and then something
0:48:27 happens unexpectedly and a gateway opens.
0:48:33 So I was coming from an organic chemistry class to the class
0:48:38 that I’d signed up for out of interest on Asian studies or
0:48:40 Asian philosophy or something.
0:48:44 And it was an old professor and Dr. Wingsit Chan who’d come
0:48:45 up from Harvard.
0:48:51 He was kind of emeritus there and even set cross-legged
0:48:54 sometimes, you know, on the front of the room and would talk
0:48:58 about Lao Tzu and Taoism and they talk about Buddhist
0:49:04 teachings and how the Buddha taught suffering and its causes
0:49:05 and its end.
0:49:09 And that really all of a sudden I sat up and there’s an end
0:49:12 to suffering and he said, “Oh, there’s all these teachings
0:49:15 and practices where you can transform your heart and mind.”
0:49:19 And I became thrilled about it and realized that whatever
0:49:23 impulse I had to go to medical school, probably part of it
0:49:25 came from wanting to heal myself.
0:49:28 And so I started to take more and more courses and then it
0:49:33 was the 60s and I became a card-carrying hippie, a card-carrying
0:49:37 LSD taking hippie as a matter of fact.
0:49:41 And at the end of when I was getting ready to graduate,
0:49:43 there was still the draft and I thought, “Well, I definitely
0:49:47 don’t want to go over and kill people in a war that I’ve been
0:49:48 protesting against.”
0:49:52 So I decided to go into the Peace Corps instead and ask them
0:49:55 to send me to a Buddhist country where maybe I could find
0:49:59 one of those old Zen masters that you read about and got
0:50:00 assigned to Thailand.
0:50:05 And when I got there, you could kind of request where you went
0:50:08 and I said, “Send me to the most remote place you can.”
0:50:11 I wanted adventure, but I also wanted to kind of reading
0:50:12 all those old Zen stories.
0:50:15 I wanted to see if that still existed.
0:50:18 You know, and there were little detours like being in
0:50:20 Hadeshpuri in the Summer of Love and things like that,
0:50:25 that definitely it changed my life also in a very deep way
0:50:29 because for at least for a time there was a window when people
0:50:30 were just giving things away.
0:50:34 There was such a sense that the world could be transformed.
0:50:37 Some of it, as we know, very, very naive.
0:50:42 But in the other hand, it also felt like a greater sense of
0:50:46 brotherhood and sisterhood than I had ever known except with
0:50:48 my own brothers who I love a lot and we’ve done a lot of
0:50:51 things together and I started to feel like there are other ways
0:50:55 for me and for the world to be and live and that was also
0:50:57 very wonderful.
0:50:59 You mentioned a three-letter acronym that we’re probably
0:51:02 not going to spend too, too much time on, but you and I
0:51:04 have had quite a number of conversations where I’ve wanted
0:51:08 to ask you about some of your experiences with psychedelics,
0:51:10 including LSD, but we’ve never really gotten into it.
0:51:12 So I figure why not do it in front of a few million people?
0:51:16 The LSD at that point, your experiences with that, did that
0:51:20 inform your decisions at all to then go into the Peace Corps
0:51:24 and end up in a remote area?
0:51:28 It did and I’ve written a little bit about it in a couple
0:51:31 different of my books, chapters and books I’ve written because
0:51:36 most Buddhist teachers and Hindu teachers of my generation
0:51:40 also started psychedelics, you know, myself and almost all
0:51:44 my colleagues, you know, in the spiritual industry that I’m
0:51:49 in, that was a beginning and for me, it showed an incredible
0:51:52 possibility that all is created out of consciousness and the
0:51:56 possibilities of inner freedom and basically I was able, at
0:52:01 the best of it, to see my body and my personality and my
0:52:06 history and realize that that’s not who I am, to become much
0:52:11 more of the conscious witness of it all, to see yes, birth
0:52:14 and death and to go through those kind of death rebirth
0:52:17 experiences that can happen at times in a deep session with
0:52:22 LSD or death of ego or sense of self or removing and realizing
0:52:26 wow, there’s a freedom and a life force that’s what we’re
0:52:30 made of and that profoundly influenced my interest in
0:52:34 spirituality and also interested in what the world can be.
0:52:40 Now, just a few days ago, I was on Maui with my beloved wife
0:52:44 Trudy and we were visiting, spending time with Ramdas who
0:52:47 for listeners that don’t know was the author of this best
0:52:50 seller in the sixties called Be Here Now and now he’s in the
0:52:55 eighty six in a wheelchair but Ramdas who had been at Harvard
0:52:58 University and one of the early explorers of LSD before
0:53:03 he went to India and became a spiritual teacher in the living
0:53:07 room while we were there two days ago, Roland Fisher who is
0:53:11 one of the senior professors in psychopharmacologists at
0:53:14 Johns Hopkins University Medical School.
0:53:16 Oh, Roland Griffiths.
0:53:19 Roland Griffiths rather and Roland excuse me Roland Griffiths
0:53:24 and Roland laid out all the research that’s happening now
0:53:29 on the psilocybin that he’s been doing and its success for
0:53:34 people, turtle cancer patients, all of, losing a great deal
0:53:38 of their, the fears that they had working with people with
0:53:43 severe depression and it was a beautiful session because you
0:53:46 could hear how these sacred substances and these mind
0:53:50 altering substances when they’re used in the right context
0:53:55 and really transform human beings and NYU, Johns Hopkins,
0:53:58 there’s a whole series of studies that are happening now
0:54:02 that are finally bringing it back into the mainstream.
0:54:05 So I’d love to underscore just a few things that you mentioned.
0:54:10 Number one, Ramdas for those people who want to do additional
0:54:13 reading, formerly known as Richard Alpert if I’m getting
0:54:18 that right, also has a fascinating story coming full
0:54:23 circle with psychedelic research beginning I guess at Harvard
0:54:24 in some respects.
0:54:27 So it makes sense to me why Roland’s research would be so
0:54:31 meaningful to him and a number of other just quick comments
0:54:32 for people.
0:54:35 Number one is if you’re interested in looking into these
0:54:40 psilocybin which is considered the active psychoactive ingredient
0:54:43 in magic mushrooms at Johns Hopkins and elsewhere.
0:54:47 I’ve actually been involved with crowdfunding and funding
0:54:51 myself some of the research related to treatment resistant
0:54:54 depression at Johns Hopkins with Roland Griffith says the
0:54:57 senior investigator and I’ll be posting some updates to that
0:55:00 but fascinating work looking at everything from and this is
0:55:04 also as you mentioned NYU and at other very well regarded
0:55:10 universities, alcohol addiction, nicotine slash tobacco addiction
0:55:14 as you mentioned end of life anxiety in cancer patients.
0:55:17 The implications are really profound and the data very
0:55:18 very promising.
0:55:22 And I wanted to also mention to folks who are perhaps saying
0:55:25 to themselves while I’m not interested in taking psychedelics
0:55:29 myself that there are people I know good friends of mine who
0:55:34 do not currently use psychedelics but had the ego
0:55:39 dissolving experience of a non-ordinary reality through
0:55:42 psychedelics that then led them to become or contributed to
0:55:46 them becoming very very diligent meditators and Sam Harris
0:55:50 who’s a PhD in neuroscience and thought of are very well known
0:55:54 as an atheist or you know one of the four horsemen of the
0:55:59 atheist apocalypse along with Richard Dawkins and others is
0:56:02 a very close friend and extremely diligent meditator
0:56:05 and he’s he’s written about how his psychedelic experiences
0:56:09 which were in some respects very some of them uncontrolled
0:56:12 and you really have a coin flip there is in terms of which
0:56:16 direction you can go but showed him possibilities within his
0:56:19 own mind that then led to a very very I’m not going to call
0:56:22 it devout although I should just to bother me.
0:56:27 Illigent practice so I don’t want to take us too far off
0:56:31 the rails but you go to Southeast Asia.
0:56:35 Well I want to say one more sure we move on because we are
0:56:36 talking about this.
0:56:40 It turns out for those who are listening that set and setting
0:56:44 an intention are extremely important if one uses these
0:56:48 psychedelics like psilocybin or something to set the intention
0:56:51 to learn to open to have a quiet it’s not as a party
0:56:56 experience absolutely brings your attention inward and then
0:57:00 all the kind of discoveries become right in front of you
0:57:04 but the other thing is that whether it’s right for somebody
0:57:08 to use psychedelics or to use meditation these are all
0:57:14 invitations to step back and see the mystery of your wife
0:57:18 because we tend to live in the daily minutiae and checking
0:57:22 off our list of tasks that we have to do in completing them
0:57:25 our worker or you know or eating or all the kind of things
0:57:30 that make up a day and we go on to automatic and whether
0:57:34 it’s meditation and difference or other spiritual disciplines
0:57:38 or for some people it also can just be that they have what
0:57:42 in Greek is called a cut the boss a blow you know somebody
0:57:47 close to them gets cancer or or is dying or they have some
0:57:49 accident or something and all of a sudden you step back and
0:57:53 you realize whoa life is uncertain the way I’ve been
0:57:57 taking it it’s not just checking off the list it is a mystery
0:58:00 human incarnation and what am I going to do with it and wow
0:58:04 look at this how did I get in this body look at plants and
0:58:09 trees and language the air coming out of your mouth that you
0:58:12 shape it different ways and it vibrates a little drum in the
0:58:14 ear of someone else and I can say Golden Gate Bridge and they
0:58:17 can envision it and you start to realize that all of it is
0:58:22 alive and made of consciousness and then the whole sense of
0:58:26 who you are and what matters begins to shift and you start
0:58:30 to realize that life is not just getting through the hoops
0:58:35 but it actually also can be a celebration of the heart of
0:58:39 something that you have to bring to the world that you come
0:58:43 out of life and my friend Maladoma so may who’s a West
0:58:48 African shaman and medicine man also true PhD is a kind of
0:58:52 remarkable guy he says with the dog or a people in West Africa
0:58:56 that he’s from that they say that every child comes into the
0:59:01 world with a certain cargo is their metaphor like the cargo
0:59:05 ships that ply the rivers of West Africa and that they’re
0:59:11 given gifts to bring into the world and that we have gifts
0:59:15 to bring to this mystery which include opening to it and as
0:59:20 we do love grows connection grows and a whole different way
0:59:24 of being in the world happens that we need so much at this
0:59:28 time so that’s a little interlude there before we move on to
0:59:32 your next question I welcome as many interludes as you would
0:59:36 like to interject and I wanted to just ask you to say one more
0:59:40 time that it was I believe Greek word for Gothenbos which
0:59:44 means a blow it’s like something comes and it just sets your
0:59:46 life spinning in an entirely different direction right like
0:59:50 a catalyzing event and that’s exactly I’ve had a few of those
0:59:53 recently that I’d like to selfishly ask you about later but
0:59:58 so I can bookmark just so I can bookmark this name Stanislaus
1:00:02 gruff if I’m saying that yes that’s correct when just when did
1:00:07 you meet him roughly what age or what date just so I can come
1:00:09 back to it because this is another thing I’ve been meaning
1:00:11 to ask you about for a long time and get into but I haven’t had
1:00:16 the chance there’s two things to say when I came back from the
1:00:21 monastery and now it’s you know I guess the year that I can
1:00:25 echo the Stanislaus maybe 1973 I made two really important
1:00:29 connections I came back and start a psychology and graduate
1:00:32 school was in Boston and first really important connection
1:00:36 happened when I went to a meeting of the Massachusetts
1:00:41 psychological association and there was this guy who looked
1:00:45 like he didn’t look just like the straight psychologist and
1:00:47 in turn that he’d just come back from India not long before
1:00:51 named Dan Goldman who is a graduate student at Harvard and
1:00:55 he’d projected on the screen this Tibetan wheel of birth and
1:00:59 death that you see in the Tibetan Tonkas that normally would
1:01:04 be taken as some kind of primitive iconic symbol and he
1:01:07 said no this is a psychological diagram the Buddha was actually
1:01:12 more than anything else he was a scientist of the mind and a
1:01:17 profound psychologist and here is how craving turns into
1:01:20 contentment and here’s how aggression can be transformed
1:01:25 into powerful energy to heal yourself and others and he was
1:01:28 going through this diagram and I went and I talked to him and
1:01:31 he said oh you you come back from monastery you got to come
1:01:35 over and so he took me to David McClellan who had been the
1:01:40 chairman of the social science and psychology department at
1:01:44 Harvard at that time the one who hired Tim Leary and Ramdas
1:01:49 and then later had to fire them for their LSD work and his
1:01:54 house he and his wife Mary were Quakers his home was a kind
1:02:00 of Suare where Ramdas and Tibetan Lamas like Chobium Trumba
1:02:03 and I think Krishna Murdy and various spiritual figures would
1:02:07 come people were going to India and coming back and I connected
1:02:12 with this whole group of folks who now been friends for 45
1:02:15 years. Richie Davidson was another that I met there who’s now
1:02:19 one of the preeminent neuroscientists in the world on
1:02:23 studying contemplative neuroscience and affective emotional
1:02:26 neuroscience. It was a whole collective of people Dan Goldman
1:02:31 who wrote emotional intelligence that sold 10 million copies
1:02:36 and many others and then I got a job working for an excellent
1:02:39 like growth center in Boston at that time because I was excited
1:02:42 and all the new gestalt bioenergetics what are the
1:02:45 things that are transformative here and they asked me to help
1:02:48 set up programs and I thought well who do I want to meet.
1:02:52 So I set up a program with John Lilly and I set up a program
1:02:57 with Stan Groff who was still at Johns Hopkins and married at
1:03:01 that time just married to Joan Halifax, Joan Groff and we
1:03:05 became friends and so we have Stan and I have now worked
1:03:10 together for 45 years. I went out to join him that excellent
1:03:14 for many many years spending many months together helping
1:03:16 during his development of the whole tropic breath work that
1:03:21 said this powerful breath transformation and he has been
1:03:25 a partner in a in a heart friend for exploration and we’ve
1:03:30 traveled or we’ve taught in Russia and in places in Europe
1:03:35 and various places around the world so this is definitely a
1:03:41 path that we’re going to come down and dig further into but
1:03:46 I’m going to steer us to a job because I want to know how do
1:03:49 you land with the Peace Corps in remote well what most people
1:03:53 would consider remote corner of the world and end up finding
1:03:56 a living master. How does that actually happen? I don’t know
1:03:58 but I assume you didn’t speak Thai at the time.
1:04:04 I did actually because the Peace Corps and then I had to
1:04:09 learn Lao I did because the Peace Corps at that time it was
1:04:11 a very early in the Peace Corps had really good language
1:04:14 training they borrowed it from the Monterey Language Institute.
1:04:19 So you know initially I didn’t speak that well but because
1:04:23 I’d also studied Chinese at Dartmouth it came more easily
1:04:26 and I was there working in these in the health rural health
1:04:31 department on tropical medicine teams mostly malaria but also
1:04:34 typhoid and teams going out to different villages and taking
1:04:38 drawing blood and giving out medicine and things like that
1:04:41 and then somebody said there’s a Western Monk in this province
1:04:44 we heard about you want to meet and I said of course I do.
1:04:49 So I went to this little mountain and walked up 2,000
1:04:52 steps to the old Cambodian Temple ruin at the top and there
1:04:56 was this very interesting guy who had just finished a couple
1:05:00 years before the first Peace Corps I think in Borneo and then
1:05:04 got interested in Buddhism and common ordained as a monk and
1:05:08 I talked with him he’s now he’s named Ajahn Sumedo is his
1:05:11 monk’s name because he’s still a monk and he became quite famous
1:05:16 in Thailand and then became the abbot of a temple in England
1:05:20 and I became friends with him and he said oh I found a really
1:05:23 fine teacher he said you know a lot of them they kind of take
1:05:25 you you’re a Western and they treat you special he said this
1:05:28 guy doesn’t treat you any differently than anyone else
1:05:31 he just wants you to do the work you know and learn the
1:05:36 deepest way you can and he’s in this forest jungle and I said
1:05:37 I’m going there.
1:05:42 So having heard that I went like visited Ajahn Chah and he
1:05:47 was a little bit like the Dalai Lama he was funny and wise
1:05:51 and very warm hearted but also very strict and very demanding
1:05:55 but he did it in this loving way and I thought okay this is
1:05:58 the real deal this guy looks like what I was reading about
1:05:59 in all those and stories.
1:06:05 I read that he said to you and I’d love for you to tell us
1:06:07 when he said this to you.
1:06:11 I hope you’re not afraid to suffer if that’s true.
1:06:15 When did he say that and why did he say that so I visited him
1:06:18 a number of times and told him I was going to become a monk
1:06:22 and then I ordained in the village where I was living in
1:06:26 Peace Corps people wanted me to do that was a beautiful ritual
1:06:31 and then after some days made my way down to his temple that
1:06:32 was his opening gamut.
1:06:37 I’m walking in into the gates and I see him right now as I’m
1:06:43 here and he looks at me you know kind of leans back a little
1:06:45 little skeptic they said all right I hope you’re not afraid
1:06:46 to suffer welcome.
1:06:50 It was like you know you didn’t come here just to kind of do
1:06:54 some interesting cool anthropological experiment or
1:06:57 something like that if you’re going to do it we’re going to
1:07:00 put you through the training and he did but you know there
1:07:04 was like this little smile as he said it like okay are you up
1:07:09 for it all right dude come on in and what did the training
1:07:11 consist of what were some of the first things that you had
1:07:14 to do and then what was the suffering that he alluded to
1:07:16 what were some examples maybe some examples.
1:07:20 Okay so of course the first training was just how to walk
1:07:24 around and not have my robe you know fall on the ground and
1:07:27 embarrass me and everyone so they all loved it oh yeah right
1:07:31 look at the western he’s he can’t even chew gum and wear his
1:07:35 robes right or whatever so part of it was just the unfamiliarity
1:07:39 of it culturally and otherwise there were the two kinds of
1:07:42 suffering the big suffering of course was being alone with my
1:07:47 own mind I mean there you go you know having to do hours of
1:07:51 meditation when I didn’t know what the hell I was doing and
1:07:55 then as I talked about with anger or fear or confusion or
1:07:59 you know all those kind of states learning to deal in a
1:08:03 very conscious and mindful way and then more importantly in
1:08:08 a compassionate way in a kind and loving way with all the
1:08:12 energies that make up my humanity in our humanity and that
1:08:16 means when you sit and you get quiet anything unfinished in
1:08:19 your heart will also come up all the unfinished business.
1:08:24 So you know relationships that I’ve had that ended badly in
1:08:29 college or certainly stuff from my childhood and family dreams
1:08:32 that I carry things fulfilled and not all that comes up it’s
1:08:37 yeah my friend Annie the Mott humorist and writer says my
1:08:40 mind is like a bad neighborhood I try not to go there alone
1:08:44 and there’s some way in which in community sitting together
1:08:47 with others in meditation and then sitting in my hot it was
1:08:52 really facing myself and my full humanity that was probably
1:08:56 the most difficult thing because then you get insanely bored
1:08:59 or insanely restless or and then how do you deal with all
1:09:01 those energies normally when we’re restless or bored what
1:09:05 do we do we open the refrigerator or you know go online or
1:09:08 something because we can’t be with our own loneliness or
1:09:11 our own fear so that was the inner and then there’s the
1:09:15 outer ones water in the outer one yeah the other ones were
1:09:21 things like getting up the bell would ring at 3 30 in the
1:09:24 morning and I’m not an early riser by nature I go oh God here
1:09:28 we go and we walk through it was actually very beautiful then
1:09:32 we’d walk through the forest at night either by moonlight or
1:09:36 sometimes you’d have a tiny little flashlight and one of
1:09:38 the forest monasteries where there were a lot of cobras we’d
1:09:42 have a little stick and you’d tap the path so that the snakes
1:09:45 would know you were feel you coming and move out of the
1:09:49 way wouldn’t step on them and then we would sit silently for
1:09:53 a couple of hours and then do an hour of chanting on a hard
1:09:56 stone floor mind you or everybody else seemed comfortable
1:10:00 and my body was killing me and then at least once a week we
1:10:03 would sit up all night with the teacher and he would sit there
1:10:07 comfortably meditating maybe talking with another colleague
1:10:10 that it would come and we’d just be sitting and meditating
1:10:13 and he would kind of peak over at us like how are you doing
1:10:15 I go oh God it’s been for four hours when is he going to let
1:10:19 us go back to sleep and he didn’t you know so sitting up
1:10:24 all night it got very cold in the cold season and it got
1:10:31 insanely hot in the hot season and somehow learning to live
1:10:35 extremely simply with a set of sandals and a set of robes
1:10:39 and an alms bowl and then you would eat what you got offered
1:10:42 in the village and we would share it in that monastery
1:10:46 with others around us and sometimes you’d get nice food
1:10:51 and a lot of times in the dry season you’d get really really
1:10:55 sleepy food and there wasn’t that much to eat and so picture
1:10:58 a day where you get up at 330 in the morning you sit for a
1:11:02 couple of hours in meditation and do long than an hour long
1:11:06 chanting on a stone floor then it’s getting dawn and you walk
1:11:10 barefoot three miles five miles 10 miles with a alms bowl and
1:11:13 a handful of other monks and get your food and come back
1:11:16 whatever you’ve been offered and that’s the food for the day
1:11:20 and then you go back to your meditation or to the work of
1:11:23 the monastery of serving robes or drawing water from the
1:11:30 well and it’s muggy and 105 degrees hot season then you go
1:11:33 back and you join in the community for more meditation
1:11:36 and then the teacher smiles and say how are you doing you
1:11:39 know and then other kinds of practices for example we had a
1:11:43 charnel ground there and so sorry on what ground a charnel
1:11:47 ground which is where a cremation ground where people
1:11:52 bodies would be burned and so on occasion would go to a
1:11:56 cremation and then sit up all night and contemplate death
1:12:00 look at the body and then watch as it burned and then do
1:12:03 these meditations where you would reflect on well this is
1:12:05 going to happen to the body that you’re inhabiting as well
1:12:08 who do you think you are do you think you’re this physical
1:12:12 body made of hamburgers or you know lettuce or whatever you
1:12:15 happen to eat is that you are you hamburgers and lettuce you
1:12:20 know or or are you your feelings or are you your thoughts
1:12:26 who are you really born into this body like go on so anyways
1:12:32 and the alms bowl so you would be did you eat whatever you
1:12:37 gathered in one meal was it spread throughout one meal one
1:12:40 meal you eat one meal a day which makes you very easy to
1:12:43 makes your life easy and it’s the same that that monastery
1:12:46 things were shared there was other monasteries I stayed in
1:12:49 where you would just eat what was put in your own bowl and
1:12:51 you didn’t have to eat everything that was given to you
1:12:55 there were some things that were you know in the dry poor
1:13:00 season there would be curries that were too hot for me to eat
1:13:03 because they use the chilies to kind of preserve the preserve
1:13:07 preserve the food but you know when it was a really poor
1:13:09 village or something you know they would have to make curries
1:13:14 out of field mice or field or bat or bats or you know I
1:13:17 remember eating there was a curry that was made out of
1:13:22 basically grasshoppers that had come swept through and there
1:13:26 was this whole big insect wave of insects that were eating
1:13:29 the crops and they they collected them all made a curry out
1:13:32 of them so you know okay this is this is where you get for
1:13:35 your food today dude I think I might take the grasshoppers
1:13:40 over the over the bats but yeah yeah when it’s really highly
1:13:43 spice you can’t tell what is mystery that’s true we all have
1:13:46 mystery meat in middle school anyway this was like mystery
1:13:51 meat on steroids exotic mystery mean what was the longest
1:13:54 period of time that you spent in silence during that time in
1:13:57 Thailand well then I went to a Burmese monastery because I
1:14:02 wanted to do this very intense meditative training and I
1:14:06 spent about 500 days so less than a year and a half in
1:14:09 silence with the exception that I would talk to the teacher
1:14:13 every couple days I’d have a little 10 minute conversation
1:14:16 about what was happening my meditation and the rest I was
1:14:21 just sitting and walking 18 hours a day when I could or
1:14:27 or so sleeping a little bit and I remember at one point it
1:14:30 was relatively early on I’ve been sitting and walking and
1:14:33 pushing it this young men do you know I’m going to get
1:14:37 enlightened and all of that not moving sitting with a lot of
1:14:41 pain which is also part of what happened at the forest monastery
1:14:46 sitting on a stone floor for hours without moving really had
1:14:49 to learn how to deal with your own physical pain and I was
1:14:53 exhausted from sitting and walking in my little hot that I
1:14:58 had for that long retreat and after a couple months I thought
1:15:02 I’m really tired I got to lie down but then I thought well
1:15:05 but I’m not going to nap for very long because I’m I’m on
1:15:08 my way to enlightenment whenever I’m going to do this
1:15:10 right so I said all right I’ll lie down on the wooden floor
1:15:13 rather than on the little map that I had and that way I won’t
1:15:19 sleep so long and I’m lying there and then I wake up and I
1:15:23 get up and I walk very slowly doing this mindful slow walking
1:15:27 to the end of the hot and look out the window toward where
1:15:31 some of the other monks and the teachers live some way down
1:15:34 through the trees and then I turn around and I start walking
1:15:38 the other direction in this meditation hot that I had that
1:15:42 you could walk probably it was maybe 15 18 feet long was long
1:15:49 and narrow and I see this body lying on the floor and all
1:15:54 of a sudden I go oh that’s me and I realized that I’m having
1:15:57 it out of the body experience and what had happened is that I
1:16:01 was so intent I’m not going to sleep long I’ll get up very
1:16:04 soon that intention was really strong but my body didn’t want
1:16:09 to get up so I got up but it was it wasn’t in my body and I
1:16:12 walk very slowly and I peered down on my body and I turned
1:16:14 around walk the other walk back and then the second time I
1:16:18 walk back I got closer and then I fell into my body and I woke
1:16:22 up and I said oh wow that’s interesting but what I saw out
1:16:26 the window wasn’t just like a dream because I was watching
1:16:29 you know my teacher and talking to these other monks and then
1:16:32 I got up again and that’s exactly what was happening and
1:16:36 that was the first of a series of all kinds of very interesting
1:16:39 experiences that happen. What would other examples of those
1:16:44 types of unusual experiences be and was it your time in
1:16:47 Burma that found you experiencing these for the
1:16:50 first time. First of all the first experiences even though
1:16:55 I had experiment with meditation back in college and so forth
1:16:58 were experiences again that came through psychedelics and
1:17:04 so I was familiar with all kinds of weird and powerful and
1:17:07 mysterious or mystical kind of experiences but there’s something
1:17:12 about learning how to navigate it without taking a substance
1:17:16 and learning that your own consciousness is the field that
1:17:22 you can learn to navigate first all the personality and emotions
1:17:24 and history and so forth but then you start to realize that
1:17:28 you’re bigger than that that who you are is not just your
1:17:31 thoughts and feelings in your mind and so whether it’s out of
1:17:35 body experience or the experience of vastness of becoming
1:17:39 the sky within which everything arises and passes or the
1:17:44 experience of profound silence or of the void where you enter
1:17:49 the best stillness before experience even arises or the
1:17:52 experience of luminosity where my body would dissolve into
1:17:56 light their time sitting as you get concentrated and somebody
1:18:00 or concentration builds that your whole body in mind open up
1:18:03 and you know first you get the elements your body can feel
1:18:08 heavy like a stone the earth element or can feel so light
1:18:10 that you have to open your eyes and make sure you’re not
1:18:13 floating because it feels like you’re floating in the air or
1:18:15 can be filled with fire and you feel like you’re in the middle
1:18:20 of a raging fire or can get icy cold you know or all kinds
1:18:23 of vibrations and Kundalini energies and chakras start to
1:18:27 open and sometimes it’s pleasant sometimes it’s not you
1:18:31 know as deep energies start to move through your body they
1:18:35 also kind of push open the places that are held closed so
1:18:40 that when your heart starts to open in deep meditation sometimes
1:18:43 it feels like you’re having a heart attack the physically
1:18:46 painful because all the things that you’ve held around your
1:18:50 heart to protect yourself start to loosen or when the energy
1:18:54 hits your throat and it starts to open weird sounds come out
1:18:58 you know and then you get to visions that come in the brow
1:19:02 chakra and you start to see all kinds of colors and visions
1:19:06 and hear things that all possibilities of the play of
1:19:11 consciousness can start to open after both period of silence
1:19:15 but also really deeply training attention and concentration
1:19:20 these experiences just to put them in or at least part of
1:19:24 what you said in context for people listening there are a
1:19:28 number of things you mentioned but one in particular that
1:19:32 opening in the chest that I experienced in the ten day
1:19:37 retreat done it spirit rock for which you are one of the
1:19:41 the instructors of the lead instructor and it was an
1:19:45 incredibly powerful experience and listening to your
1:19:49 description of some of the feelings it makes me want to
1:19:52 go to the jungle and spend time doing this type of training
1:19:55 however the ten day retreat as you know from firsthand
1:19:58 observation and interacting with me was incredibly difficult
1:20:01 for me and terrifying it a number of points where I felt
1:20:06 like I had crossed a boundary into maybe even madness right
1:20:10 I was fearful I wouldn’t be able to return from so I’m
1:20:15 curious to know during that period of time in Thailand and
1:20:19 Burma could be afterwards as well but when you were in the
1:20:22 jungle and doing this very intense work were there any
1:20:25 particular points when you wanted to quit to go home how
1:20:30 do I have a salute Lee and then I remember I got what I think
1:20:33 was malaria really high fever and I was sick as a dog and
1:20:38 I’m lying in the bottom of my little hut there high fever
1:20:42 and shivering and Ajahn Chah came to visit me and in the
1:20:45 Lao language and he was also funny and quite blunt and the
1:20:49 Lao language is a very straightforward kind of the
1:20:52 sentence structures are really simple so he looked at me and
1:20:57 he said sick huh and I said yeah and he said hurts all over
1:21:01 huh I said it’s your test he said hot and cold yeah he said
1:21:04 makes you afraid I not he said makes you want to go home and
1:21:08 see your mother doesn’t it and I’m nodding there and then he
1:21:11 looked at me and he said you know this is the jungle fever
1:21:15 this is malaria we’ve all had it but now there’s some good
1:21:17 medicine I’ll send the medicine month over and in a couple
1:21:20 days you’ll be fine and then he looked at me and he said you
1:21:24 can do this you know you can do this so I mean that was an
1:21:29 example of wanting to show him what am I doing what kept you
1:21:32 going I mean I don’t want to interrupt but like what kept
1:21:35 you going I’m imagining 500 days of silence I could barely
1:21:40 handle 10 days you know Tim I mean what’s kept you going
1:21:43 what keeps any of us going about things that we care about
1:21:48 I had somehow I don’t know kind of wacky but I think also
1:21:53 important kind of passion to say I want to understand
1:21:56 or I’ve started down this road and I want to see where it
1:22:00 goes and I think all of us find at a certain point in our
1:22:03 life that they’re or if we’re lucky that something really
1:22:06 matters and you’ve done it in your work and your travel you
1:22:10 want to explore what your human capacity is and I’ve read
1:22:13 these old Zen stories and I want to see if this is true I
1:22:16 want to find out and then as I started things started to
1:22:19 happen like that out of the body experience and rapture and
1:22:23 changes and openings and I realized there’s really something
1:22:26 to learn here but there are a couple of the things that I
1:22:31 want to add to this one of them that’s the most important is
1:22:35 that it turns out that it wasn’t and it isn’t so much about
1:22:41 the actual experiences so Jen Cha my teacher talked about
1:22:45 how in his own training for the first eight years in the
1:22:49 jungle he had been a very ardent meditator and had all kinds
1:22:52 of insights and dissolving and some body and John experiences
1:22:57 all kinds of some body is awakening some body is yeah or
1:23:01 it’s how would you found some bodies it has a lot of meanings
1:23:04 as a word but it it can mean profound states of
1:23:09 concentration in which the mind dissolves into light or into
1:23:13 joy or bliss or becomes absorbed with any one of all kinds
1:23:17 of states so we went to the most famous teacher of that time
1:23:21 another adjun adjunman and told him about all these experiences
1:23:24 in the the master looked back and said Cha you missed the
1:23:28 point these are just experiences you know it’s like going to
1:23:30 the movies and you have a romantic comedy and you have a
1:23:35 war movie and you have a documentary and you have you
1:23:38 know a Disney movies and they’re just movies on the screen
1:23:43 some pleasant some unpleasant the only question is to whom do
1:23:50 they happen turn your attention back and ask look to see who
1:23:54 is the witness of these what is the consciousness that is
1:23:58 knowing these ever changing experiences this is where your
1:24:03 liberation will come he said become his language if I
1:24:07 translate it is the one who knows become the knowing rather
1:24:10 than the experiences and then you can tolerate anything and
1:24:15 you can respond with love and understanding because you rest
1:24:19 in the timeless consciousness which is your true nature so
1:24:24 part of what I also learned in meditation and teach is that
1:24:27 it’s not so much about the experiences oh I want to have
1:24:31 this or that experience but it’s this profound turning back
1:24:36 to ask who am I what is this consciousness itself and that
1:24:39 was born into this body that will leave it we can talk about
1:24:43 death at some point if you want what is this mysterious
1:24:48 consciousness itself so there is that and then then I’ve also
1:24:53 had the opportunity of being with a few other teachers and
1:24:58 one of the people that I was very close to and inspired me
1:25:02 profoundly was a Cambodian monk named maha go Senanda who
1:25:06 was the Gandhi of Cambodia and when I met him we were living
1:25:09 and training together in a forest monastery in Thailand
1:25:12 and it was during the time that Khmer Rouge came to power
1:25:17 and eventually killed two million Cambodians in a kind of
1:25:22 genocide he survived because he wasn’t in country but all 19
1:25:26 of his family members were killed his temple burned all the
1:25:30 Buddhist texts and so forth were destroyed and when he was
1:25:34 able to he went to the refugee camps refugees were pouring
1:25:38 out of Cambodia by the hundreds of thousands and he went to
1:25:41 the refugee camps on the border of Thailand and Cambodia
1:25:46 and I was able to go with him at a certain point and he decided
1:25:50 to open a temple in the middle of one of the biggest refugee
1:25:54 camps here’s 50 or 100,000 people these tiny little bamboo
1:25:59 huts and got permission from the UN HCR high commissioner
1:26:03 of refugees and built a platform with a little roof over it
1:26:07 and put an altar with the traditional Cambodian Buddha
1:26:10 on it and so forth but it was a camp with the Khmer Rouge
1:26:14 underground lots of them and so they put the word out that
1:26:19 if anyone went to be with this monk when they got out of the
1:26:23 camp back to Cambodia they would all be shot so we wondered
1:26:28 who would if anyone would come and went through the camp the
1:26:32 day the opening day with a big kind of temple gong ringing it
1:26:38 and 25,000 people poured into the central square around this
1:26:42 little temple my god and he my go send on this out there and
1:26:47 he was a scholar he spoke 15 languages and he was a you
1:26:52 know extremely kind hearted human being who had suffered
1:26:56 enormously and had transformed it into the kind of compassion
1:26:59 that we think of with the Dalai Lama or something like that
1:27:02 in fact they became friends and go send on to became the head
1:27:06 of all Cambodian booze and but there he was at this point
1:27:12 she looking out at 25,000 people who had suffered immense
1:27:16 traumas and you could see there was a grandmother and the only
1:27:20 two surviving grandchildren that she had or an uncle and one
1:27:25 niece and their faces were the faces of trauma and of survivors
1:27:28 and I thought alright what is he going to say to them and he
1:27:34 sat very quietly for a long time just in their presence and
1:27:39 then he put his hands together in this kind of modest way and
1:27:43 began to chant in the microphone yet a sound system in
1:27:48 Cambodian and in Sanskrit or Pali the Buddhist language one
1:27:53 of the first verses from the Buddhist texts that goes hatred
1:27:59 never ceases by hatred but by love alone is healed this is
1:28:04 the ancient and eternal law and he chanted it over and over
1:28:10 in Cambodian and in Sanskrit Pali and pretty soon the chant
1:28:16 was picked up and in a little while 25,000 people were chanting
1:28:20 this verse with him and I looked out and they were weeping
1:28:24 many of them because they hadn’t heard their sacred chants
1:28:30 for years but also because he was offering them a truth that
1:28:35 was even bigger than their sorrows that hatred never ends by
1:28:39 hatred but by love alone is healed this is the ancient and
1:28:43 eternal law and they were sitting in the middle of the
1:28:47 the healing energy of the Dharma of the teachings of the heart
1:28:52 that can liberate us later on go Sonanda who is nominated for
1:28:58 the Nobel Peace Prize a number of times spent 15 years walking
1:29:02 through the killing fields and the mind areas and so forth
1:29:06 leading people on foot back to their village and he said to
1:29:11 the refugees you can’t go back in a bus or the back of a truck
1:29:14 or something like that you have to reclaim your land with
1:29:18 love and so he would lead a thousand people and he’d be in
1:29:23 the front with a bell and a gong and a few other monks and
1:29:26 the whole way back they would be chanting the chants of loving
1:29:31 kindness so that by the time they got to their village whatever
1:29:34 had been destroyed there was a sense that they were reclaiming
1:29:39 not just the land but they were reclaiming their own hearts
1:29:43 that’s a beautiful really beautiful story and it prompts
1:29:48 me to ask a question that I struggle with answering myself
1:29:52 and it’s also a question many of my friends have asked themselves
1:29:58 and I’ll take a stab at it how do you decide when to do deep
1:30:04 inner work and take an extended period to do that versus being
1:30:10 in the world and trying to impact others and the world and to
1:30:14 just provide a little bit of background on that I have friends
1:30:18 who are building businesses or building careers of some type
1:30:23 or families and I at this point do not have wife kids or
1:30:26 company to build at least with a large organization and I’ve
1:30:31 come back from various experiments sojourns experiences
1:30:34 over weeks or months and shared these with them and they’ve
1:30:38 expressed this longing this deep yearning to do something
1:30:42 similar and then they ask this question like how do I how do
1:30:48 I best decide if and when to do the deep extended work versus
1:30:50 being in the world and I know it might be a false dichotomy
1:30:54 you might not have to choose but I’ll talk a little bit more
1:30:56 just to fill the space but I had this experience personally
1:30:59 not long ago when I was in South America and had someone
1:31:02 telling me in Spanish which was not their native language
1:31:06 this is an indigenous tribe but this apple this mayor
1:31:09 effectively who worked a lot with different plant medicines
1:31:14 and he said that he recommended one 15 month diet very very
1:31:19 strict 15 month period with many different restrictions no sex
1:31:24 no alcohol no pork etc to develop certain capacities and to
1:31:28 practice in effect I mean at certain types of meditative
1:31:31 practices so I struggle with this myself as well how do you
1:31:35 suggest someone think through so did you give up sex and pork
1:31:39 I’ve done it for short periods of time I’m not a year and a
1:31:42 half I’ve done it for weeks at a time but not for 15 months
1:31:46 but what appealed to me about that definitely not the lack
1:31:49 of sex and pork I like both of those things it was he said
1:31:51 that’s something you only have to do once in your life and it
1:31:56 opens doors and creates opportunities that are difficult
1:32:00 if not impossible to achieve otherwise so of course that’s
1:32:04 very tantalizing but 15 months is a really really long time to
1:32:06 opt out of everything else and I’m not saying it has to be
1:32:10 15 months for some people as you know setting aside even 10
1:32:13 days to do a silent tree is hard and I know there are things
1:32:16 that they can do on an ongoing basis like morning meditation
1:32:20 and so on but for those who are really drawn to this extended
1:32:23 deeper work how do you think about and that’s why it goes
1:32:25 and under brought it up for me because he spent so much time
1:32:28 outside of his country and then went back and was really on
1:32:31 the ground doing work with locals how do you think about
1:32:35 that or suggest someone think about it first my answer is
1:32:39 yes because all of the things that you say are true that yes
1:32:43 most cultures encourage at some point even beings most wise
1:32:47 cultures even beings to step out of their ordinary roles and
1:32:50 their ordinary routine whether you go to the mountains or the
1:32:54 ocean you know or a temple or a change how you’re living so
1:32:58 that you can open up to the mystery and so that you also
1:33:01 can open up to love because what I saw with my teachers and
1:33:05 also Nanda was one on Chincha another is that they were able
1:33:09 to love no matter what it was really because they inhabited
1:33:13 consciousness in a very different way than just a small
1:33:17 sense of self there was something a possibility that we
1:33:20 could live with forgiveness and love and be really effective
1:33:24 in the world at the same time so they’re not separate and
1:33:26 that’s sort of what your question is how do we live in the
1:33:29 world and at the same time you know what trainings and how
1:33:33 do we connect with something deeper and part of it is just
1:33:38 intuitive you know Tim if you have no more you know or young
1:33:41 children and so forth it’s not the time to go on a longer
1:33:45 treat your kids are your practice and in fact you can’t
1:33:50 get a Zen master who’s going to be more demanding than you
1:33:55 know an infant with colic right where you or you know or a
1:33:58 teenage you know certain teenage kids but with the young
1:34:01 ones you know your Zen master might say you got to get up
1:34:03 early in the morning and you know once in a while you might
1:34:07 roll over the kid is crying and sick you have to get up your
1:34:12 family needs tending and you know if you’re even vaguely a
1:34:18 responsible and caring parent as you that becomes your practice
1:34:21 and if you think well if only I could be in the great Zen
1:34:25 temple of Kyoto or an ashram and India or down in the Amazon
1:34:29 with Tim taking ayahuasca or whatever the plant medicine
1:34:34 they give you know your kid can be like ayahuasca on steroids
1:34:38 okay you want to face yourself and your own limitations and
1:34:42 your own you know you want to look at the small sense of
1:34:46 self and find out how to live with a freer and bigger spirit
1:34:49 here we’ve just hired someone to live with you and train you
1:34:53 full so it’s really and that’s an important thing but but what
1:34:59 makes it work is that you have that intention not just to
1:35:04 soldier through it but to say let this be a place where I
1:35:08 awaken graciousness and inner sense of freedom and peace as
1:35:12 things come and go where I awaken the possibility of
1:35:16 presence in pleasure and pain and joy and sorrow and gain and
1:35:20 loss and all that changes that I find an inviolable or a
1:35:25 timeless place of becoming the loving witness of it all
1:35:29 becoming the loving awareness that says yeah now I’m having
1:35:33 a family experience and this is the place to find freedom
1:35:37 because freedom is not in the Himalayas or in the Amazon
1:35:41 the only place it’s found is in your own heart exactly where
1:35:44 you are and that’s what goes in on the Todd and wonder what
1:35:48 Ajahn Chah that’s really what they wanted to communicate
1:35:51 now that being said if you have an opportunity and you’re
1:35:55 drawn to it like somebody you might do you know Jack Dorsey
1:35:59 I do I do know Jack. Yeah. So Jack just did his first 10
1:36:03 day meditation retreat. Good for him and he tweeted about I
1:36:07 wouldn’t say it otherwise but he tweeted about it and it was
1:36:10 you know one of the top transformative experiences of
1:36:13 his life and it’s not to say 10 day retreats are the be all
1:36:16 and end all day they’re very powerful and compelling even if
1:36:20 you have a company or even if you have a family there might
1:36:25 be a period of a week or some days where you can in fact get
1:36:30 away and step out of those roles and turn inward and that can
1:36:33 be tremendously valuable. So I think both are important you
1:36:36 just have to listen what when the time is right. There are
1:36:39 so many things that this brings up the first though is just
1:36:42 a housekeeping for people who may not recognize the name
1:36:47 Jack Dorsey. That’s Jack at Jack. I believe it is on Twitter
1:36:50 of you might then wonder how did he get that user handle.
1:36:54 Well he is one of the people behind Twitter. So he is of
1:36:57 Twitter and Square fame among many others. Fascinating
1:37:03 fascinating guy so people can check him out the comment on
1:37:07 the infant being the full time trainer working with you 24/7
1:37:10 reminded me also since you mentioned Ram Dass earlier of
1:37:14 a quote of his that I like and I’m going to paraphrase I’m
1:37:16 sure but if you think you’re enlightened to go spend a week
1:37:22 with your family. Which I think is a fantastic one and that’s
1:37:25 part of the reason and you know some of the backstory but we
1:37:28 all have I would imagine we all have tough things that happen
1:37:32 to us experience traumatic experiences as children have a
1:37:36 lot of triggers related to family members typically and for
1:37:40 me the force to break takes a number of different forms but
1:37:43 that includes a trip every six months and extended trip of
1:37:46 two to four weeks with my parents and my brother when he
1:37:51 can make it. So that’s only after being introduced to
1:37:54 meditation something that I would even consider as a practice
1:37:57 and the last point I’ll mention just out of my personal
1:38:00 experience is there’s a piece of paper I have in my wallet
1:38:02 and I’ve had my wallet for a few years now it’s getting bit
1:38:07 worn down. It’s a piece of construction paper and ex-girlfriend
1:38:10 gave it to me who knew me very well and it says the task
1:38:16 that hinders your task is your task beautiful beautiful and
1:38:20 that’s a good reminder for me. I wanted to ask you two
1:38:25 questions that are personally important but also may apply to
1:38:28 other people. The first is the question that I believe you
1:38:31 mentioned Ajahn Chah perhaps others have indicated is the
1:38:37 question versus the experiences or movies of these say out of
1:38:40 body experiences and so on to whom do they happen right to
1:38:44 whom do they happen is this a co on like what is the sound of
1:38:47 one hand clapping where there isn’t really an answer you’re
1:38:50 expected to arrive at is the value in contemplating the
1:38:57 question more than any answer. Yes both. No because yes both
1:39:02 and no. Yeah because it is it’s a profound contemplation for
1:39:07 us one of the great questions of human incarnation who are we
1:39:10 how do we get into that you get in this body with the wiggly
1:39:14 things on the end of your limbs you know and little bits of
1:39:18 claws that you have left you know his nails and a vestigial
1:39:21 tail and a hole at one end into which you stuff dead plants
1:39:24 and animals and glug them down through the tube. I mean the
1:39:28 whole incarnation thing is really pretty wild so who are we
1:39:31 and then what are what how do we make meaning of this is a
1:39:35 lifetime question in that way that it’s a co on but in another
1:39:39 way it also actually does have an answer and the answer of
1:39:43 course has to be found by each person. The answer to point
1:39:48 toward it it’s very clear that you’re not just your salad
1:39:51 and vegetables and hamburger body and you’re not just your
1:39:54 emotions I hope because they’re always changing and your
1:39:58 thoughts good God I hope you’re not your thoughts. So you start
1:40:03 to realize alright what is there then what is this self who
1:40:08 am I in neuroscience you know there was a time magazine issue
1:40:11 on modern neuroscience where it said neuroscience of search
1:40:15 throughout the brain over many decades now and come to the
1:40:19 conclusion that they cannot find the self located anywhere in
1:40:22 the neural mechanisms of the brain and that it simply does
1:40:27 not exist but what does exist is a sense of self that’s built
1:40:31 out of a sense of identification with our thoughts and body
1:40:35 and so forth it’s all wise and appropriate we should be but
1:40:41 we also know that it’s not the end of the story and you know
1:40:45 it from walking in the high mountains or listening to an
1:40:48 extraordinary piece of music or making love or taking some
1:40:53 sacred medicine you know we’re sitting at the bedside of someone
1:40:56 when they die that mysterious moment when spirit leaves the
1:41:01 body or when a child is born we have these moments where we
1:41:05 open to mystery and realize that who we are is not just our
1:41:10 personal history or our body and emotions that we become the
1:41:14 consciousness itself the witnessing awareness that we
1:41:18 are the loving awareness that was born into this body and
1:41:23 that becomes actually a direct knowing a direct experience so
1:41:28 there’s a way in which we also can come home to ourselves and
1:41:33 it brings a tremendous sense of freedom and well-being as all
1:41:38 the movies of ever changing life happen to us so that’s why
1:41:42 I said yes and no and both and there’s just a little aside
1:41:45 thinking about you going back to your family as a practice
1:41:49 and twice a year as you’re doing I just want to remind you
1:41:52 and the listeners that Buddha and Jesus both had a hard time
1:41:55 when they went back to their family so you know and don’t
1:41:59 think that you know there’s something wrong with you it’s
1:42:02 just part of it’s that’s why they call it nuclear family I
1:42:07 think I’m anyway there’s another I guess it’s a word more
1:42:10 than a question that I’d love to ask you to define and that
1:42:14 is compassion or compassionate when you use that word or
1:42:17 those words what do you mean exactly or what would you like
1:42:22 it to mean for people I would like to distinguish
1:42:28 compassion from empathy and I’ll use a simple illustration
1:42:32 if you’re on the playground and you see a kid being bullied
1:42:36 and you feel oh that must feel terrible that hurts right
1:42:41 that’s an empathy and empathy can be useful it also can be
1:42:43 you can get overwhelmed by empathy if you don’t know what
1:42:47 to do with it but there’s some way in which you start to feel
1:42:51 resonating you because we are not limited to these bodies
1:42:56 we are actually an interconnected system of consciousness
1:43:00 and I’ll talk about that a little bit more in a minute
1:43:04 but we all know whether it’s mirror neurons from neuroscience
1:43:09 or the field of presences you know scientists like Dan
1:43:13 Siegel talk about extended presence that we can feel empathy
1:43:16 with one another with someone sad someone’s angry someone’s
1:43:21 hurting compassion is the next step you see or recognize you
1:43:26 feel and then you care you care about it and you want to if
1:43:30 you can do something that helps so that you see the kid being
1:43:33 bullied and you realize I want to tell the teacher or the
1:43:36 principal or want to just walk over there and say something
1:43:41 or intervene to help stop it and so compassion it’s called
1:43:46 the quivering of the heart when it wants to move to alleviate
1:43:49 the suffering of yourself because you can self compassion
1:43:53 it’s very important or those around you and it’s born into
1:43:57 the earliest studies of the infants you know at Yale and
1:44:02 various places like that show that even very very very small
1:44:06 children have this resonance and this kind of care and so it’s
1:44:10 not shut down in us we’re a species that’s interconnected
1:44:13 and we care for one another and this is your birthright this
1:44:18 natural natural compassion and through practice and meditation
1:44:22 you can reawaken it you can extend it and it can become
1:44:27 your way of living and moving in the world as a little aside
1:44:31 and I’ll just bookmark this one just got back from a conference
1:44:35 with our dear friend Adam Bizali our mutual friend Richie
1:44:39 Davidson who’s another of the most famous neuroscientists
1:44:44 especially in this area and a number of other some contemplatives
1:44:48 and neuroscientists and some technologists from the valley
1:44:53 in VC talking about how to build compassion into our interface
1:44:57 with the technological world compassion tech starting from
1:45:00 the very simplest things of projects like can you build a fit
1:45:04 bit for compassion where instead of your body where you can
1:45:09 either note moments of care around you or in yourself or be
1:45:13 prompted to care for yourself you know or when you say to Siri
1:45:18 or Alexa you know I’m feeling lonely or and so forth what kind
1:45:22 of response do you get from the algorithms and all of that
1:45:27 because the UK England just pointed their first minister
1:45:30 of loneliness for the country like you think it was a joke
1:45:35 but it’s not like an old Beatles song on the lonely people
1:45:38 there are 10 million lonely people in England they’ve estimated
1:45:42 and it’s you know it’s for isolation and loss of capacity
1:45:45 and health and all kinds of reasons that loneliness makes
1:45:50 things way worse but there’s some way in which compassion is
1:45:53 that which connects us and it’s a beautiful thing even if you
1:45:56 walked on the street and you see someone you know who’s
1:45:59 struggling and so forth doesn’t mean you have to fix the whole
1:46:03 world that’s not your job that would be egotistical but you
1:46:06 can reach your hand out and mend the things that you can and
1:46:10 you can tend the things that you can and you can do it not
1:46:13 because oh you pity them those four people but because they’re
1:46:18 your family you recognize that we are common humanity we’re
1:46:23 in this together I’d like to build on that and preface it
1:46:26 with a comment on the text he mentioned collaborating with
1:46:30 Adam and he’s discussing the potential of combining or
1:46:35 utilizing technology to help people to develop and harness
1:46:38 compassion and some folks listening might be like oh come on
1:46:41 that’s so pie in the sky but I’d like to point out that you
1:46:45 have already collaborated successfully with Adam on software
1:46:51 like Metatrain, M-E-D-I-T-R-A-I-N which was one of the tools
1:46:57 Adam has used in his N of 1 or N of 2 experiments in rejuvenating
1:47:01 his mental capacity to I want to say in his 20s and Adam’s
1:47:05 one of those guys you can’t tell if he’s 28 or 45 he’s just
1:47:07 a silver fox who always looks young so I don’t know how
1:47:11 old he is but he’s not 22 but the Metatrain was one of the
1:47:14 tools that he utilized I don’t remember the name that he used
1:47:17 for this run of experiments you might know the training that
1:47:21 he did Neuroman or something like that was very very successful
1:47:24 so that you already have a track record of collaborating
1:47:27 successfully with neuroscientists and technologists on the
1:47:33 compassion front I’d love to use that as a segue to loving
1:47:40 kindness and by way of personal example I failed well failed
1:47:45 as a strong word I quit I stopped meditating after many many
1:47:49 attempts had a very absurdly high number of false starts over
1:47:54 many years and it really stuck after a number of experiments
1:47:58 and experiences I had doing three or four day trainings with
1:48:00 say transnational meditation and having the social accountability
1:48:03 being accountable to someone else is very helpful but another
1:48:08 turning point was experimenting with loving kindness meditation
1:48:11 and I think in part it succeeded because it took the focus
1:48:17 off of me me me I I and allowed me to focus on others but I’d
1:48:24 like to read a brief paragraph from a profile of you in the
1:48:28 New York Times is from 2014 and feel free to correct anything
1:48:32 that is incorrect but I’ll give it a read first and I quote in
1:48:35 the West cornfield says quote we encounter a lot of intense
1:48:38 striving ambition and a lot of self criticism self judgment
1:48:42 and self hatred and quote concerned he initially turned to
1:48:44 the Dalai Lama for advice but self hatred was such a foreign
1:48:47 concept to the Tibetan Buddhist that he wasn’t able to offer
1:48:50 any real insight over time cornfield and his colleagues began
1:48:53 to believe that Americans need particular meditation practice
1:48:56 closely linked to the concepts of self forgiveness and loving
1:48:59 kindness a training in the unconditional acceptance of
1:49:02 imperfection without such a foundation says cornfield
1:49:04 meditation can easily become and this is the part that I
1:49:07 underlined and start without this foundation says cornfield
1:49:10 meditation can easily become yet another form of striving
1:49:13 quote another thing you do to make yourself better and quote
1:49:17 instead of a path to true contentment could you please
1:49:21 describe for folks what loving kindness meditation practice
1:49:24 looks like and elaborate in any way that you feel might be
1:49:28 useful or helpful for folks. Yeah that meeting which was some
1:49:32 decades ago with the Dalai Lama yeah he didn’t understand
1:49:34 when we talked about self hatred he couldn’t there’s no word
1:49:38 for it in the back and forth with this insider what does this
1:49:42 mean finally looked up he said but this is a mistake why would
1:49:45 anyone do this but then he asked how many of you there’s a
1:49:48 group of us who were teachers that experienced this and
1:49:52 almost everyone raised their hand so we see that when people
1:49:58 begin in our culture and in the West to meditate or to turn
1:50:04 inward really that it’s very common to encounter a lot of
1:50:09 self criticism self judgment or even self hatred and you know
1:50:12 they’re all the causes from our these are all kind of
1:50:15 conditioning that we got from from our childhood our
1:50:19 education and so forth but what it means is that you’re
1:50:21 sitting there saying I’m not doing it right I’m no good
1:50:24 you turn the meditation into one other one of the thing that
1:50:27 you don’t do right because you can’t control your mind the
1:50:30 truth is that you can’t control your mind easily that’s not
1:50:34 the point there’s a different way of approaching your mind
1:50:38 which gives you tremendous capacities but it’s not oh I
1:50:39 have to stop my thinking or I don’t want to have these
1:50:42 feelings and I hate having all these judgments I don’t want
1:50:46 to be so judgmental I was I hate this judging mind what is
1:50:51 it’s just more judgment so instead as you become first able
1:50:55 to become the loving witness the mindful loving awareness
1:50:59 that says oh this is the judging mind and it’s been trying
1:51:02 to protect me thank you for trying to protect me I don’t
1:51:05 need you now thank you all of a sudden there’s a distance
1:51:11 from the painful or destructive or self critical thoughts
1:51:14 simply by witnessing them with loving awareness and
1:51:18 acknowledging them this becomes a gateway to the practice
1:51:22 of loving kindness and self compassion and very often
1:51:25 people can’t do it for themselves they feel that’s too
1:51:29 much of a stretch like why would I wish myself well it
1:51:36 feels egotistical and so the way that this practice begins
1:51:41 in skillfully for such folks is instead to think of someone
1:51:45 that you really care about a lot and to picture them
1:51:48 remember them put them in your mind’s eye and feel the
1:51:51 kind of well-wishing you would want for them you know may
1:51:57 they be protected and safe from difficulty may they be held
1:52:03 in loving kindness may they be well healthy strong and you
1:52:07 wish them that may they be happy and you do this for a time
1:52:12 a kind of inner well-wishing and also maybe you feel as you
1:52:16 think of this person that you care about you let yourself
1:52:20 also turn into the measure of sorrows they have the struggles
1:52:24 that every human being has you know and it tenderizes your
1:52:27 heart as you think of them because you don’t want them
1:52:31 to suffer you feel a kind of rising of compassion and care
1:52:35 so may they hold themselves in compassion may they be safe
1:52:38 and protected and well you do that with one or two people
1:52:42 that you care about for a time and then you can imagine
1:52:46 even as I’m describing this and you following your own heart
1:52:51 you can imagine these two loved ones looking back at you
1:52:56 with the same kindness and saying just as you wish us
1:53:00 protection and safety and happiness and well-being
1:53:03 and you know and compassion they gaze at you and they say
1:53:09 you too may you be safe and protected and may you be filled
1:53:14 with tender compassion for yourself and kindness may you
1:53:20 to be healthy and well and may you be happy they want you
1:53:24 to be happy I think about when I’m doing this and visualizing
1:53:28 some loved ones I know that as I do it I can feel they want
1:53:33 that for me and then finally as you feel that from these
1:53:37 loved ones you can put your hand on your body or your heart
1:53:41 even if you like and take it in and then begin to realize
1:53:45 that you can wish this for yourself may I hold all of the
1:53:49 joys and sorrows of my life with tenderness and kindness may
1:53:53 I hold my struggles with compassion may I be filled with
1:53:58 loving kindness and loving awareness may I be safe and
1:54:05 protected may I be well strong or healed and as you repeat
1:54:08 these simple intentions that have been done for thousands
1:54:12 of years it’s as if your cells are listening and this is
1:54:16 the research of people like Liz Blackburn and the list
1:54:20 of Apple who Liz Blackburn got the Nobel Prize for discovering
1:54:24 the telomerase and the telomeres at the end of the caps and
1:54:29 the DNA it turns out that your cells listen to your heart
1:54:32 and that to your intention that consciousness of tax your
1:54:36 body and little by little even though it can bring up its
1:54:39 opposite I hate myself I’ve never been good enough and you
1:54:42 see all those and you say thank you for trying to protect
1:54:46 me I appreciate that may I be well may I be safe may I be
1:54:49 held in love and little by little like water on a stone it
1:54:55 starts to soften the places that are holding your lack of
1:54:59 self-forgiveness your lack of care and loving kindness starts
1:55:02 to grow in you and it’s a very beautiful practice there’s
1:55:06 lots of places you can find it on my in my work and teachers
1:55:10 like Sharon Salzburg and Emma Children and Tara Brock and
1:55:15 so forth do you have any guided loving kindness meditations
1:55:19 or audio that you can recommend people listen to I do they
1:55:22 are going by website Jack cornfield dot com I think they
1:55:26 will be on there I do know for sure have a whole series of
1:55:30 great programs with sounds true sounds true dot com that
1:55:35 include meditations on the mind vast as the sky meditations
1:55:38 on compassion and loving kindness and I did a book one of
1:55:42 the books I’ve done is called a lamp in the darkness and it
1:55:47 contains I think eight or nine different guided practices
1:55:50 that you can get either with it on a CD but if you can get
1:55:53 it to download basically and sounds true also has that and
1:55:58 has a compassion practice in a grounding practice in a vast
1:56:01 sky like mine practice and so forth so you can look for all
1:56:05 of those the beauty thing is that you can learn this and I
1:56:08 was a couple of years ago invited to be part of the first
1:56:12 White House Buddhist leadership gathering there were a hundred
1:56:15 and twenty Buddhist leaders from around the country from
1:56:17 different communities I don’t think that’s going to happen
1:56:23 again very soon but there it was one good hope and most of
1:56:26 the communities did beautiful things that were involved
1:56:30 in soup kitchens and tending the homeless and projects to
1:56:34 support healing for whether it was malaria or other other
1:56:37 diseases in different other parts of the world and so for
1:56:42 all kinds of great stuff and certainly meditation and when
1:56:46 I got to talk which was kind of a summary talk toward the end
1:56:51 of it I mentioned that in this historical record whether it’s
1:56:54 true or not the text and so forth described the Buddha meeting
1:56:57 with kings and princes and ministers and so forth and
1:57:00 probably if the Buddha were or around now you go to the
1:57:02 White House if you were invited he certainly would have met
1:57:06 with Obama and who knows now and he had advice about why
1:57:10 society which he would give to leaders and he’d say if you
1:57:15 can train your people to meet one another with respect to
1:57:19 listen with respect to differences and to come together
1:57:22 peacefully listening to one other then your society will
1:57:27 prosper and not decline and if your society tends the vulnerable
1:57:30 among them the the young people the old people those who are
1:57:33 sick it will prosper and not decline and if your society
1:57:37 tends to the environment around it in a healthy way it will
1:57:41 prosper and not decline these are principles of compassion
1:57:45 and why society that you could read perhaps in a number of
1:57:47 great traditions from the Iroquois nation or from the
1:57:53 Taoist sages but here’s the beautiful piece yes these are
1:57:56 good things meeting in harmony and discussing in harmony and
1:58:00 being respectful for one another and so forth there are
1:58:05 practices that you can teach and learn that develop this
1:58:10 capacity so that in our elementary schools now you
1:58:13 know through organizations like castle which is a consortium
1:58:17 for social emotional learning that’s worked in you know
1:58:21 ten thousand schools kids learn social and emotional
1:58:25 learning they learn compassion and it changes their lives
1:58:28 they’re better academically and all these kids carry the
1:58:32 troubles of our times they hear the news they see the trouble
1:58:35 even in their own family to teach you how to steward your own
1:58:39 heart from when you’re young and then these capacities are
1:58:42 now being incorporated as we know mindfulness based stress
1:58:45 reduction in clinics and hospitals and businesses and
1:58:50 there’s the mindfulness teachers when the Seattle Seahawks
1:58:53 won the championship or the Chicago Bulls in the L.A.
1:58:56 Lakers when there were championship teams they had a
1:58:59 meditation coach a mindfulness coach George Mumford a good
1:59:03 friend and that these capacities can be learned wherever we
1:59:07 are and they transform our life it’s not just by accident
1:59:09 or that you have this beautiful experience on the mountains
1:59:14 or making love but you can make that alive for you through
1:59:18 these trainings every day every part of your life Jack
1:59:21 there is a question I was planning on asking at some point
1:59:25 anyway and I think this is a good segue which is how can you
1:59:28 get a busy person hooked on mindfulness practice you know
1:59:31 what would be a first step or how to start and since we’re
1:59:34 talking about loving kindness I would like to give a bit of
1:59:37 a hard sell for loving kindness meditation is one option
1:59:42 because I recall perhaps it was two years ago I was really
1:59:45 beating myself up and for people who don’t know this about
1:59:49 me I’ve spent the majority of my life being my own worst enemy
1:59:53 in terms of inner dialogue extremely brutal and hyper
1:59:57 critical and load some of myself in so many different
2:00:00 respects and I was going through a particularly intense and
2:00:05 difficult time with that inner critic just ruthlessly beating
2:00:09 myself up and at that point another friend of mine Chad
2:00:14 Manktan who created the search inside yourself classic Google
2:00:18 he was a very early on engineer which became the most
2:00:21 over subscribed class for employees at Google recommended
2:00:24 that I take a look at loving kindness meditation and I didn’t
2:00:28 have any particularly sophisticated approach to it but I
2:00:31 decided with nothing to lose and that I was having so much
2:00:34 trouble during that period sitting still and trying to focus
2:00:38 on say the breath or anything like that that at night this
2:00:42 was happened to coincide with book deadline probably not pure
2:00:46 coincidence that my beating myself up was exacerbated during
2:00:50 that time that was a few years ago and I began at night in
2:00:54 my case when I would take a shower at night or sit in a sauna
2:00:58 I very often go to hotels to write which is something Maya Angelou
2:01:01 and a few others that convinced me might be a good idea that
2:01:04 I would consider two people just like you had mentioned two
2:01:08 people I really cared for and wish them well that’s all I did
2:01:11 and Chad had said to me man is usually what I would call him
2:01:15 that at one point a woman in one of his classes had done this
2:01:20 for one day at work every hour on the hour she would just look
2:01:23 out of her office and wish someone well that she could see
2:01:26 in her mind’s eye for 60 seconds or so and she said it was her
2:01:29 best day of work in seven years and I found that unbelievable
2:01:33 so I decided to try it myself and that week of just spending
2:01:37 maybe two to four minutes at night before going to bed
2:01:42 ended up being one of the most blissful weeks in memory
2:01:46 but certainly at that point in several years it was really profound
2:01:49 and I couldn’t pick out any other variable that had changed
2:01:52 so for me I just want to for people who are listening and saying
2:01:55 ah you know what I’m type A driven super hyper competitor
2:02:00 this doesn’t apply to me that it very well could apply to you
2:02:05 and that by taking a little bit of the harmful edge off
2:02:08 you don’t automatically remove your competitive edge
2:02:11 and in fact I would argue just as you mentioned that the bowls
2:02:16 that you used to have or still do it used to have a mindfulness coach
2:02:20 for competitive advantage that it can be another tool in your toolkit
2:02:23 and doesn’t take you out of the game so to speak
2:02:26 it just makes you more aware of the games that you’re playing
2:02:30 so that’s a long sort of infomercial sales pitch
2:02:34 that I wanted to just make sure I got in because I discounted
2:02:37 a lot of these practices for a very long time because I thought
2:02:41 it would at best be a waste of time and at worse take away
2:02:46 some of my skills or tendencies that allowed me to get to where I am
2:02:49 so that is more of a confessional than a question
2:02:52 but I would love to hear your thoughts any additional thoughts
2:02:55 on loving kindness meditation but also any additional thoughts
2:03:00 on how if you wanted to get a busy maybe even impatient person
2:03:06 hooked on mindfulness practice what first steps or approaches you might suggest
2:03:10 so a lot of different questions sort of woven into what you said
2:03:13 and the first is that there’s a kind of misunderstanding
2:03:17 in our culture that love is a weakness and it’s not
2:03:22 there is a way in which it’s the force that can
2:03:26 probably the only force that can meet the level of aggression
2:03:31 or violence and other such things that are happening in the world
2:03:35 it’s the power that lets mothers lift cars off their children
2:03:38 or lets somebody like Dr. Martin Luther King
2:03:42 stand after his church was bombed and children were killed
2:03:46 and say we will meet your physical violence with soul force
2:03:50 we will not harm you but we will love you so deeply
2:03:54 that we will not only transform ourselves but we will transform you
2:03:58 in the process and so the notion that love is somehow a weakness
2:04:01 I think we do everything out of love we want to be loved
2:04:05 even in our ambition and our desire for success
2:04:09 underneath it is you know we want to be well
2:04:13 we want to be fine to our happiness and that’s part of love
2:04:17 so it’s actually a power and my colleague and friend
2:04:21 Wes Nisker went to interview Gary Snyder a couple of years ago
2:04:26 Gary is a Pulitzer Prize winning poet and environmentalist
2:04:30 for 50 years been writing about bioregionalism and one of our great
2:04:34 kind of elders in this environmental movement
2:04:38 he said Gary what do you have to say to us now that oceans are rising
2:04:42 the world climate is changing hotter and hotter
2:04:46 the species extinction and Gary looked back and he said don’t feel guilty
2:04:50 if you’re going to save it don’t save it out of guilt
2:04:55 or anger or fear those are the very things that are actually making the world worse
2:04:59 save it because you love it because it’s part of you
2:05:03 because it and that is the power whether you’re starting a company
2:05:07 but also it’s not just that you you know some vision okay
2:05:11 now I’m going to become this wealthy playboy or whatever
2:05:15 you know zillionaire then what is your life mean for you
2:05:19 and what do you really want and when you listen there is something
2:05:23 in you and it’s part of your birthright to both be able to
2:05:27 give your gifts but also to love and be loved in return and it turns
2:05:31 out that it’s a power so then what you talk about is that
2:05:35 it doesn’t take much to begin the training and you’re you know two minutes
2:05:39 or four minutes in the evening or this woman at her work taking
2:05:43 once an hour 30 seconds or a minute to look
2:05:47 at somebody there and offer a well-wishing
2:05:51 can transform everything for people who want the
2:05:55 practical support because it is hard to do on your own if you go
2:05:59 to sounds true dot com and look up the programs that I have
2:06:03 first there’s a 40 day program called mindfulness daily
2:06:07 which is 15 minutes a day or 12 minutes a day depend on the
2:06:11 segment that both gives instructions in mindfulness loving awareness
2:06:15 and loving kindness practice and it’s 12 or 15
2:06:19 minutes a day and by the end of those 40 days you really have learned the
2:06:23 inner skills and then it builds up there’s then a deeper training called
2:06:27 power of awareness and for those who are interested we’re about to open an online
2:06:31 teacher training for people interested in mindful passing along mindfulness
2:06:35 and loving kindness to others jet just interject for one second for people listening
2:06:39 I will also link to all of these resources in the show notes
2:06:43 which you can find at tim dot blog forward slash podcast so
2:06:47 you don’t necessarily have to remember all these things you can go to the URL and
2:06:51 have direct links to these resources sorry to interrupt Jack just wanted to mention
2:06:55 people listening and with it then there is also the programs
2:06:59 there there’s one called guided meditations that’s you know a download
2:07:03 it’s like ten bucks or something and it has a loving kindness practice
2:07:07 compassion practice a forgiveness practice I think it may even have a joy
2:07:11 practice and it’s really helpful to have guided meditations at first
2:07:15 because otherwise your attention we have a very short attention
2:07:19 span in modern society Albert Einstein at least according to scientific
2:07:23 American said if you can drive safely while kissing
2:07:27 a girl you’re simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves
2:07:31 and we are in this kind of multitasking
2:07:35 world with our devices and we’ve forgotten how to
2:07:39 tend our own hearts we’ve forgotten how in some ways to really be present
2:07:43 for one another and more importantly for our
2:07:47 own life and so getting guided meditations
2:07:51 is tremendously helpful and doing these little mini practices that
2:07:55 you talk about one minute two minutes several times a day
2:07:59 can transform you I was just going to mention to people also if you look at
2:08:03 behavioral change if you look at BJ fog formerly the persuasion laboratory
2:08:07 at Stanford you look at dietary change any of these things doing
2:08:11 less than you think you’re capable of doing is a really good long term
2:08:15 strategy in terms of starting off rigging
2:08:19 the game so that you can win in the beginning so that your past fail mark in your mind
2:08:23 is a really really low hurdle so I just wanted to reiterate guided
2:08:27 meditation don’t white knuckle in the beginning make it beautiful as easy as possible
2:08:31 the same principle from ancient you know texts
2:08:35 say that you start in the easiest way for some people
2:08:39 kindness for themselves seems impossible but then you pick a child you care about
2:08:43 someone else or even when you do go to yourself you think of yourself when you were
2:08:47 an innocent child and wish yourself well the game is to do
2:08:51 whatever naturally opens the gateway whatever is the
2:08:55 easiest for some people as their dog you come home and the most non judgmental
2:08:59 being in their life wags its tail and loves you and it doesn’t care you know
2:09:03 what’s going on in your head so you take the avenue that most naturally
2:09:07 opens your heart and then you do this just a little at a time
2:09:11 as you said and it doesn’t take long but the other thing that’s important
2:09:15 is that sometimes as you do it it can actually
2:09:19 display or show you the hypercritical nature of your mind
2:09:23 the shame that you carry the self judgment or
2:09:27 self loathing and so then you say well what do you do then
2:09:31 or it brings up its opposite is that’s the place that you just breathe
2:09:35 and hold all that stuff with kindness because this is our humanity
2:09:39 and we all have some of that and the point isn’t to get rid of it
2:09:43 or judge yourself for having it or try to fix it it’s almost as if you put your
2:09:47 hand on your heart and you say you know this is like mindful self compassion
2:09:51 or deep training this is part of the measure
2:09:55 of struggles that I’ve been given like every human being
2:09:59 these things have tried to protect me and now I can hold them with tenderness
2:10:03 and say alright you know thank you but I don’t need your help anymore I can
2:10:07 find to myself and in that way you’re not trying to fix yourself
2:10:11 or perfect yourself if anything you’re trying to perfect your love
2:10:15 Jack I wanted to give you a credit
2:10:19 for help that you gave me and also tactical advice that you gave me
2:10:23 during the 10 day silent retreat you gave me a lot but I want to highlight
2:10:27 one that’s related to what you just said I was going through a very very
2:10:31 difficult time particularly days 7, 8, 9
2:10:35 and you gave me the advice that you just mentioned
2:10:39 and there’s one component I want to really underscore for people and that is
2:10:43 when you’re for instance trying to do loving kindness
2:10:47 meditation and instead you get the opposite or you get this
2:10:51 self ridicule who are you to try to meditate
2:10:55 in this self indulgent way this is ridiculous or this voice starts to pop up
2:10:59 that is angry or hateful whatever it might be
2:11:03 the process of not simply dismissing it
2:11:07 or fighting against it but recognizing
2:11:11 it as a coping strategy that helped you in the past in some way
2:11:15 that you developed because in my case you know the rage
2:11:19 was a fuel that without which I probably would never have
2:11:23 left Long Island where I had friends who later overdosed on opiates and so on
2:11:27 so it was a gift in a way and a tool
2:11:31 and as you said you can thank that
2:11:35 response or that part of yourself and then
2:11:39 put it and I remember you recommended even visualizing
2:11:43 and please correct me if I’m wrong or elaborate but visualized taking that part
2:11:47 of you that is a coping strategy thanking it and then putting it say on a shelf
2:11:51 where you can use it later if needed be along with say
2:11:55 other icons or figures who whether it’s Buddha
2:11:59 that you recognize as wise and then continuing with the meditation
2:12:03 so that thanking that part of yourself for the function that it once served
2:12:07 even if it is not serving you now was such a key insight
2:12:11 for me that then helped me to manage
2:12:15 my internal states or observe and appreciate my internal
2:12:19 states for the next several days where I really felt like I was lost at that point
2:12:23 so that was a really direct tool that helped me tremendously
2:12:27 yeah thank you for bringing it up because it’s so important for people
2:12:31 when we come to that hypercritical shame place
2:12:35 we feel very vulnerable and we’ve been identified with it
2:12:39 and because you needed it I needed these things for survival
2:12:43 and if you try to get rid of this stuff you just end up in a fruitless battle
2:12:47 against yourself and it’s just more judgment so what you described it saying
2:12:51 thank you for helping me survive I appreciate it let me put it on the shelf
2:12:55 I’ll put it in the lap of the Buddha or whoever you know the
2:12:59 goddess of infinite compassion you hold it for me if I need it I’ll pull it back
2:13:03 and that sense that this isn’t who you are
2:13:07 it doesn’t describe who you are it isn’t who you are it was a strategy
2:13:11 because we’re vulnerable beings and you were tender as a child
2:13:15 and you had to make sure you could survive thank you for that and now
2:13:19 I have a different capacity and let me just talk about that capacity
2:13:23 a little bit because the capacity for presence
2:13:27 and the great heart of compassion that’s said to be your birthright
2:13:31 is a really mysterious thing talk about identity
2:13:35 and when my youngest brother’s wife Esta was dying of
2:13:39 cancer and she’s just a beautiful being
2:13:43 and I spent quite a bit of time with her and with my brother
2:13:47 she was close to dying I’ve gone home to sleep and I wanted to get up early and hurry back
2:13:51 so I was very close and I got my car
2:13:55 I had to stop the drugstore to pick up a prescription
2:13:59 hurriedly running dashing through the aisles and so forth and I’m at the checkout counter
2:14:03 and all of a sudden my whole body relaxed
2:14:07 and I thought oh Esta died and I got out to the car
2:14:11 and I called my brother I said how’s it going he said oh
2:14:15 Esta died a few minutes ago and I said I know
2:14:19 I’ll be there shortly we’ve all had these experiences if I ask
2:14:23 in a room how many have had this particular kind where you knew someone
2:14:27 died when they died you know a quarter of the hands will go up
2:14:31 why is this it’s because who we are is not
2:14:35 this body we are the consciousness itself and so
2:14:39 with all these practices what they allow us to do is
2:14:43 to step out of what’s called the small sense of self or the body of
2:14:47 fear and reconnect with the field of
2:14:51 connection and interdependence of compassion and to take our history
2:14:55 and to honor it but not be bound by it one of my favorite
2:14:59 stories is a Ram Das again this wonderful
2:15:03 spiritual teacher in the early years when he came back from
2:15:07 being with his guru in India he was sitting
2:15:11 up there and teaching you know
2:15:15 devotional practices and meditation practices and he had a beard
2:15:19 and white robes and beads and he was sort of in the guru
2:15:23 outfit and a woman in the front row raised her hand and said Ram Das Ram Das
2:15:27 aren’t you Jewish what’s with this Hindu stuff and Ram Das said well yes I am
2:15:31 actually I was bar mitzvahed as I was too and there are many things
2:15:35 I love about the Jewish spiritual tradition the generosity
2:15:39 of it the Kabbalah all the great teachings on the many
2:15:43 stages and states of consciousness the Hasidic masters who are like
2:15:47 Zen masters and then he paused and looked at and he said but remember
2:15:51 I’m only Jewish on my parent’s side
2:15:55 and there is something both witty which he was but also profound
2:15:59 about it because we are not just
2:16:03 our parental history or the historical
2:16:07 circumstances of this place and body that we were born into and something
2:16:11 less knows this so that when you look at the there’s a wonderful
2:16:15 book that came out last year the year before called the Book of Joy
2:16:19 which was a conversation between the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Tutu
2:16:23 and both of them have marvelous laughs I think people go to
2:16:27 hear the Dalai Lama by the tens of thousands not just for the
2:16:31 Tibetan teachings some of which are actually hard to understand
2:16:35 or even the fact that he’s this Nobel Prize winning world figure
2:16:39 I think people go to hear him laugh that somebody who’s
2:16:43 carried so much suffering from the loss of his
2:16:47 country where he can’t return and the burning of temples
2:16:51 and texts and all those things and he and Tutu had a week together when they
2:16:55 were asked and this created this book how can you be joyful
2:16:59 how can you laugh like this when you live through apartheid and the death
2:17:03 of so many people around you and Dalai Lama
2:17:07 they banter back and forth and like brothers and Dalai Lama says
2:17:11 so much has been taken from me you know they’ve taken our sacred texts
2:17:15 they’ve taken our ability to make prayers in public they’ve
2:17:19 taken so much of our culture why should I let them take my
2:17:23 happiness and then Tutu starts to laugh and giggle and say
2:17:27 you know I’ve been through so much but I am not going to let myself live in
2:17:31 that place I’m gonna let myself live in that which affirms life
2:17:35 and in a kind of profound joy that we made it
2:17:39 we’re still alive that we can contribute that we can be here in this beautiful
2:17:43 earth and this shift of consciousness is what’s needed
2:17:47 for the world because if we look honestly no amount
2:17:51 of technology alone is going to save us
2:17:55 nanotechnology and space technology and biotechnology and worldwide
2:17:59 web internet computer or super computer technology is going to stop
2:18:03 continuing warfare and racism and
2:18:07 tribalism and environmental destruction those
2:18:11 are happening based on consciousness of the human heart
2:18:15 and so we are now you know these we’ve made these enormous
2:18:19 developments outwardly where you have the great library of Alexandria and your
2:18:23 smartphone in your pocket along with a million you know cat
2:18:27 YouTube’s or whatever but there it is it’s all in there
2:18:31 and then what we need is collectively
2:18:35 to develop a transformation inwardly
2:18:39 our inner life that is parallel to this enormous outer transformation
2:18:43 the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff some years ago said we are
2:18:47 a nation of nuclear giants and ethical
2:18:51 you know or you know I don’t know how old humanity is
2:18:55 but it’s time to grow up so that this work that we’re talking about
2:18:59 is both individual but as you learn to meet
2:19:03 your own life with greater understanding and compassion
2:19:07 it empowers you to move through the world in a different way
2:19:11 and to help others do the same and then you get the kind of joy
2:19:15 of tutu and the Dalai Lama that you’re somehow part of an awakening
2:19:19 that humanity now needs more than ever. Jack I’d love to
2:19:23 ask you these interviews are always
2:19:27 by some self interest I always have some issue or challenge or problem that I’m trying
2:19:31 to figure out so I reach out to someone like you to help me do it but I record the conversation
2:19:35 as we chatted about before we hit record and you know this already but the last
2:19:39 several years have been very very important for me in terms of
2:19:43 addressing certain traumas and the last eight weeks in particular
2:19:47 have been transformative in a lot of beautiful ways
2:19:51 and the duration of periods within which I don’t berate
2:19:55 or attack myself have become longer but
2:19:59 there are still times when the wheels fly off the car
2:20:03 and this last week has been one such example and I tend to
2:20:07 when I make a mistake or feel like I’m backsliding or relapsing
2:20:11 to compound the problem by beating myself up then I beat myself
2:20:15 up about beating myself up and you know where that goes so let me paint a picture
2:20:19 so I found out recently that my Japanese
2:20:23 host father and I’ve been in touch with this family since I was 15 I’m very
2:20:27 very close to them 40 now and I found out that he just
2:20:31 was admitted because the host mother sent me an email to the hospital
2:20:35 with liver cancer they don’t have the details yet I just sent a follow
2:20:39 up email they don’t know what the prognosis is exactly but
2:20:43 needless to say the worst case scenarios are certainly being conjured in my mind or the potential
2:20:47 of those and then simultaneously
2:20:51 have been contending with and I believe you have some experience with this
2:20:55 contending with a what should be a very
2:20:59 simple construction project of a cabin
2:21:03 up in the mountains and it has been delayed and delayed and delayed
2:21:07 and there have been cost overruns and cost overruns and cost overruns and promises made
2:21:11 promises broken expectations set expectations missed
2:21:15 and a friend of mine called with a whole new slew of problems yesterday related to this
2:21:19 place and I lost my shit for lack of a better term I mean there are many
2:21:23 other things going on simultaneously but I got really pissed and I was like you know what
2:21:27 this extending the olive branch being understanding can’t gambit is
2:21:31 not working with these people like I need to take out the baseball bat
2:21:35 and like pull old Tim off the shelf who is just this like juggernaut head through
2:21:39 brick walls and be like listen fuckface like if you don’t do ABCD&E
2:21:43 here well these are going to be the consequences and then I’m like well wait
2:21:47 I’m supposed to be compassionate but how do I not be a pushover
2:21:51 and it turns into this big dramatic play inside my
2:21:55 head and then I wait this is going to end soon I’m not going to keep going but what I then
2:21:59 often do is self medicate with caffeine
2:22:03 and I think it’s a way of feeling productive without
2:22:07 actually being productive and it also creates so much volume on the
2:22:11 noise I think I use it to tune out a lot of feelings
2:22:15 so when someone relapses or has
2:22:19 this kind of experience what do you suggest to them I mean is there
2:22:23 particular pattern interrupt or approach that you
2:22:27 found helpful for regaining footing oh so there’s a number of things
2:22:31 to say first of all you could call it relapsing or you could
2:22:35 just call it yeah being human
2:22:39 the most beloved poet in Japan was a Zen master named
2:22:43 Ryo Khan and there’s a two line verse of his
2:22:47 that I particularly find fitting for this where he wrote
2:22:51 last year a foolish monk this year no change
2:22:55 you know and you can sort of feel the humor
2:22:59 and the tenderness in it and there’s a way in which you see your personality
2:23:03 the point you know you have a body you have this particular body you’re born with and you can
2:23:07 transform it in certain ways within the limits of the body that you were given
2:23:11 and similarly you have a personality and anybody who has a number of
2:23:15 kids realizes that you don’t come in Tamblarasa that you actually this kid
2:23:19 is born and has this kind of temperament so you have a personality and just like you
2:23:23 don’t want to look too closely to the body sometimes you don’t want to look back closely
2:23:27 to personality either you know it has its foibles and its fears and all of
2:23:31 that and so you start to kind of look at and say oh now there’s
2:23:35 a really good example of how neurotic I can get thank you
2:23:39 for reminding me you know and then you get a little
2:23:43 like the keeper of the zoo a little more tender with those kind of creatures
2:23:47 it’s bringing in the non-judgment or the loving kindness for the
2:23:51 way that you actually are and not your ideal or bringing
2:23:55 compassion you could say yeah this is a tough one and this triggered I got triggered
2:23:59 so what now the other thing is that I have the same experience where we had
2:24:03 a big remodel of our house when I was some years ago
2:24:07 raising my daughter and in my first marriage and
2:24:11 we were supposed to go and teach and travel in Europe and this guy who was a good
2:24:15 contractor but you know everything of course gets more expensive and you have to do this
2:24:19 and it kept getting slowed down and I said you are going to get this done so we could make
2:24:23 these decisions forward to Europe and it’s not happening you’ve got to hurry up
2:24:27 I do that like three or four different times and it doesn’t happen finally I go
2:24:31 in I get pissed and I say listen you
2:24:35 said this in our contract it was going to be done by and if you don’t fucking get this done
2:24:39 by the time I’m going to pull your ass in court and sue you because I need this
2:24:43 done and I’m not going to pay you the goddamn money oh no no no
2:24:47 he looked at me and he said oh you really want this done don’t you I said yes
2:24:51 next day there’s a huge crew it starts to get done and I realized okay
2:24:55 what I had been sort of talking meditation speak yeah nice
2:24:59 get it done he was a fucking contractor and I just had to
2:25:03 I had to speak contract or ease get the goddamn job done
2:25:07 or I’ll haul your ass in court okay I got it yeah I’ll send the team over
2:25:11 and that’s all it took so there’s something playful about that as well
2:25:15 it’s not that you can’t I’ve seen the dialogue I get angry at people
2:25:19 it’s not that you can’t use that power and that
2:25:23 understanding when it’s necessary to get to be very
2:25:27 strong or forceful and you don’t have to judge yourself unless you hurt people
2:25:31 and then of course that’s the misuse of it but it’s just it’s part of being human
2:25:35 is there something you say to yourself I don’t know you are
2:25:39 certainly in person and any with any contact I’ve had
2:25:43 with you one of the most compassionate
2:25:47 people I’ve ever met and I don’t use that word very much but your
2:25:51 presence of listening and being with someone is really
2:25:55 incredible I don’t know how much of that is intrinsic versus trained
2:25:59 but for better or for worse coming out of the womb I’ve been
2:26:03 very impatient since day one
2:26:07 so I worry about I can get it seems like my
2:26:11 default is speaking contract or ease to more than just
2:26:15 the way word contractor
2:26:19 who’s putting off work is there some
2:26:23 when I feel that the sensations of
2:26:27 anger beginning to bubble up is there something
2:26:31 that you would suggest as self talk or just a temporary
2:26:35 pumping of the breaks to make it an informed decision versus
2:26:39 just a lashing out well I could give you an answer but in a minute I’m
2:26:43 going to guide you in a little practice perfect so that you can find the better answer
2:26:47 first I just want to say that that anger
2:26:51 you know yes it’s your habit or maybe your temperament that’s energy
2:26:55 and there’s nothing wrong with energy you know it’s the power to let you do all the
2:26:59 kind of things you’ve done in your life that are tremendously creative or resourceful
2:27:03 or daring or whatever kinds of things so you want to respect
2:27:07 okay I’m getting filled with energy and you know it might be then you want to
2:27:11 lash out but first you want to respect that energy wow let me feel
2:27:15 this in my body whoo anger how big is it whoo okay then
2:27:19 your question is then your question is what can I do to modulate it
2:27:23 I could give you you know okay take some breaths ground yourself
2:27:27 look at that other person but instead as we’re talking
2:27:31 let yourself picture a circumstance
2:27:35 recently it might have been with your you know the contractor is doing your cabin
2:27:39 or something else you know that uprising of the
2:27:43 injustice of it and how right you are and how you’re going to get this
2:27:47 goddamn thing done and how you have to be hard and strong you feel
2:27:51 all that and feel the energy in your body first thing is just to remember what it felt
2:27:55 like and now you’re becoming the kind of mindful
2:27:59 loving witness of it and saying wow this is a lot of energy
2:28:03 can you feel that and remember that oh yeah okay
2:28:07 now next step is that the wisest
2:28:11 figure you can imagine maybe it’s the Buddha or
2:28:15 doesn’t matter some great master or martial arts master you know
2:28:19 who’s mastered themselves as well as there are comes to you
2:28:23 and let yourself imagine somebody’s going to teach you how to
2:28:27 manage this powerful energy and see who appears
2:28:31 somebody appears to you and first
2:28:35 they look at you and they smile and they say yeah this is the big energy
2:28:39 and they appreciate you so instead of saying oh you’re a doofus
2:28:43 you know they say oh yeah you actually carry some powerful energy and they acknowledge
2:28:47 that they bow to you yeah and you got it all right and then you say
2:28:51 yeah but how do I manage this when it takes me over and so this
2:28:55 master or whoever comes reaches under their robe and
2:28:59 pulls out a gift for you which is a clear
2:29:03 symbol of exactly what you need in that moment
2:29:07 to help you regulate it so that you can keep the energy but do it
2:29:11 in a way that doesn’t cause harm to you or another and this clear symbol
2:29:15 to be able to see it’s just what you need so let yourself picture the gifts
2:29:19 that they put in your hand and let yourself imagine see and
2:29:23 vision picture what it is and if you can’t see it
2:29:27 clearly hold it up to the sunlight you’ll be able to and then let me know what you get
2:29:31 you want me to tell you what it is yeah yeah all right
2:29:35 so the person who came to mind for me I went through a few
2:29:39 was the creator of judo fascinating guy named
2:29:43 Jigoro Kano really small guy who
2:29:47 yes who could throw all the big guys and smile at the same time
2:29:51 right exactly changed a lot also in Japanese government fascinating guy
2:29:55 the symbol I don’t know why this is to be honest but
2:29:59 it’s a pyramid the size with
2:30:03 straight edges about a little too big to hold in your palm
2:30:07 that is blue it’s like almost a
2:30:11 mixture of pure sky blue like blue bird blue
2:30:15 with a bit of electric blue mixed in and it’s
2:30:19 sort of a smoky vapor that’s floating around inside this
2:30:23 glass pyramid I have no idea why that’s the case but that’s what came up
2:30:27 all right so we’ll stay with it and then there’s one more little piece so he gives you this
2:30:31 pyramid free associate a little bit on what it
2:30:35 might possibly mean because these symbols are like dream images and they come from
2:30:39 a deep place in your side key and this pyramid has a message
2:30:43 for you this blue pyramid just guess what it might be
2:30:47 I think it’s very very stable it’s an extremely stable
2:30:51 structure and for me it also
2:30:55 I could imagine it representing power also it seems like a very powerful
2:30:59 symbol in many different cultures certainly
2:31:03 the blue is a little easier for me it’s a very cooling
2:31:07 soothing color where certainly red
2:31:11 is the color I would associate with a fire with the
2:31:15 high resonance, anger, energy would be more
2:31:19 of a red fire element so the blue would be a cooling
2:31:23 or countering balancing force for that
2:31:27 all right so now what I want you to do is imagine taking this
2:31:31 blue pyramid gift which represents
2:31:35 kind of extreme stability and also a kind of power
2:31:39 and cooling that’s given to you by Jigaro Kano and taking this
2:31:43 into your body so that there you are filled with this energy and anger
2:31:47 you know this huge wave of you let that be there
2:31:51 and you take this pyramid in and you let that energy
2:31:55 be inside this stable grounded
2:31:59 place of power and feel what it’s like to be inside
2:32:03 this blue pyramid with this energy and feel how it affects it
2:32:07 just notice as if there you’re in that circumstance and now I’m remembering
2:32:11 I am the blue pyramid and what does it feel like?
2:32:15 The most noticeable thing, I wonder of course how much of this
2:32:19 is the actual visualization versus the time out
2:32:23 that I permit myself to have but there’s very often
2:32:27 a tightness on the left side of my chest right by the sternum
2:32:31 and I feel when I start getting wound up
2:32:35 and that is absent after
2:32:39 taking this gift and then visualizing it being incorporated
2:32:43 that dissipates what you’re practicing and you know and then you know this very well in athletics
2:32:47 that yes you practice things but other times you also practice envisioning
2:32:51 whether it’s playing piano or whether it’s you know some
2:32:55 Olympic training that some of the times you just do it through visualization
2:32:59 that activates a lot of the same neural circuitry. So here you’re starting
2:33:03 to get the feeling of what it’s like to be in the middle of this
2:33:07 upwelling of anger and so forth and then taking
2:33:11 a couple of breaths and feeling the blue pyramid and the
2:33:15 connection with the earth and the stability of it and the power then
2:33:19 of that presence that cools you and allows
2:33:23 the anger to be there but not in the same uncontrolled way
2:33:27 Now there’s one more thing and that is if you imagine again
2:33:31 Jigoro Kano, I believe you said his name is, he comes
2:33:35 up to you after giving you this gift and he touches
2:33:39 you kindly on the shoulder and he has a few words of advice
2:33:43 of how to handle this powerful energy that comes up in you
2:33:47 because he knows all about it and what does he whisper into your
2:33:51 ear kindly? Well he whispers this came to
2:33:55 mind immediately. He says Zenyoko Zenyo, which is
2:33:59 you know, I still have this actually. There are two
2:34:03 he has many famous quotes but he has what you might consider
2:34:07 proverbs, short aphorisms that I’ve actually carried with me
2:34:11 since I was 15 but they’re packed away somewhere. I have two of them. They’re on cloth
2:34:15 and the first is
2:34:19 It means basically if you work hard
2:34:23 you will achieve, you will reach your target. It’s not the best translation but
2:34:27 that’s the idea. The other one is Zenyoko Zenyo, which is effectively
2:34:31 the most efficient use of energy
2:34:35 but it could also be the best/most benevolent use of energy
2:34:39 It’s a principle of Judo but it’s something that he applied to everything
2:34:43 including education. So it would be that
2:34:47 very short bite-sized aphorism which is, and I’m sure some scholars
2:34:51 probably disagree with me, but roughly translated here, at least as I
2:34:55 take it, is the maximum or most efficient
2:34:59 use of energy. So take that in, take
2:35:03 his intentions, Zenyoko Zenyo, the benevolent and efficient use
2:35:07 of it, seal the pyramid and now your assignment is
2:35:11 that the next five times that this comes, which
2:35:15 you will, maybe tomorrow or next week or so forth, bring in the blue pyramids,
2:35:19 stable, powerful, cooling, so the energy is still there
2:35:23 and then you hear his voice say Zenyoko Zenyo and you go, oh yeah, I can
2:35:27 use this but I can use it in a benevolent way. And try it
2:35:31 five times, then text me, let me know what happened
2:35:35 because now we’re closing the loop. If you do it and see
2:35:39 now you’re responsible, if you agree that you’re going to do it, it sort of
2:35:43 gooses the game a little bit and you go, okay, now I better do it because I have to let Jack know
2:35:47 what happened. Let me know what happens. Well, I’ll be able to use it this week
2:35:51 because I’m flying out to the site of this cabin to meet with everybody
2:35:55 and see what’s going on. So I’ll have at least five opportunities
2:35:59 to do that. You have your Zen training ahead. I mean, the other thing
2:36:03 that’s great and then that you can hear in this rather than by giving
2:36:07 you a cookie cutter answer is that we actually
2:36:11 have the wisdom that we’re
2:36:15 seeking or that’s available. We have it in ourselves.
2:36:19 I mean, you didn’t have to fly to Kyoto and get in your time machine to
2:36:23 go back and see Jigaro Kano or whoever it happens to be
2:36:27 the Dalai Lama or whoever happens to come to you, the Buddha or some other
2:36:31 great figure that actually the goddess of compassion
2:36:35 that we carry that wisdom in our own heart and part of
2:36:39 what these contemplative trainings do is they give us access
2:36:43 just by taking a little pause. It didn’t take you 30 seconds.
2:36:47 Okay, he appears. What do I do? Ah, here’s how my body would feel.
2:36:51 What perspective should I bring? Ah, here’s efficient and benevolent use
2:36:55 of energy. Okay, now I remember. So these
2:36:59 answers for the questions of the psyche and the heart
2:37:03 don’t require going somewhere. They
2:37:07 ask us to quiet and begin to listen. And as you do
2:37:11 you discover your own inherent wisdom and your own
2:37:15 compassion as well because the benevolent use that he offers
2:37:19 to you, where does that live? It lives in
2:37:23 Tim. It lives in you. One of the reasons I’ve wanted to have you
2:37:27 on the podcast for so long is that for me you represent
2:37:31 a very wide spectrum of tools. You have
2:37:35 developed a toolkit that has enabled you to work with
2:37:39 everyone from the seekers of say the Buddhist, along the lines
2:37:43 of the Buddhist traditions to say adolescents or cutters to
2:37:47 war vets with PTSD, missing limbs and so on. You’ve worked with a very
2:37:51 diverse set of students and
2:37:55 patients maybe even. And that leads me to my next question, which is
2:37:59 after these experiences abroad, why did you decide to come back to the US
2:38:03 period? And then why did you decide to go back
2:38:07 to school and study clinical psychology? So after
2:38:11 the first five years in Asia, there were two other westerners who
2:38:15 would become monks. It was a handful. And some were going to stay
2:38:19 for the rest of their lives. I’d learned a lot and so that was kind of a
2:38:23 choice. Am I just going to stay? And I realized no, I
2:38:27 want a family. I want a lover. I was a young man
2:38:31 after all and just the celibacy for those years was actually pretty hard.
2:38:35 I want to see if what I have learned really
2:38:39 translates into the life back home. I don’t want to
2:38:43 just leave it. And so it was some wrestling, but it became very clear to me
2:38:47 that I wasn’t fit for the monastery for the rest of my life.
2:38:51 I had other, not only other desires, but also and longings,
2:38:55 but also were real interested to say, does this work elsewhere? So I came back and
2:38:59 thought, well, what can I do? I got a couple jobs and right away.
2:39:03 Of course, what I knew how to do would be a student, but I was now a student of the mind
2:39:07 and the heart. And I thought, well, how do I learn more about what happened
2:39:11 to me in the monastery? Oh, I’ll study western psychology.
2:39:15 And so that started me on that particular
2:39:19 path. And I learned a lot of complimentary things. There’s some very good trauma
2:39:23 work in the West that I’ve learned about that really enhances
2:39:27 the compassion and loving kindness and mindfulness things that I learned
2:39:31 in the temple. And now I’ve done a lot
2:39:35 of years of teaching eastern western psychology together. These principles that I’ve
2:39:39 learned are spreading so widely in western psychology. I went to the largest
2:39:43 therapy conference in the country in December
2:39:47 and down in Anaheim and gave a talk, you know, here’s the room full of
2:39:51 3,000 or 5,000 people. And I asked how many of you have
2:39:55 some experience of meditation or mindfulness practice? And the
2:39:59 majority of the hands went up. And that would not have happened, you know,
2:40:03 20 or 30 years ago. So eastern psychology is now
2:40:07 becoming more invisibly woven into the understandings
2:40:11 of clinical psychology in the West and it’s beautiful. Now, I want to
2:40:15 say something else, you know, when you talk about working with a variety
2:40:19 of population, yes, people in prisons,
2:40:23 yes, that’s our kids coming out of gangs, but also
2:40:27 CEOs. And there’s a dialogue that Bill Ford and I did. He was
2:40:31 at that time the chairman of Ford voters. He was actually
2:40:35 the CEO, perhaps, before that, but then he was the chairman of Ford
2:40:39 voters. And he talks about it too. It was in
2:40:43 2008, I guess, when the auto
2:40:47 industry was just about to melt down. He called
2:40:51 we’d had some contact. He’s a meditator and he said, you know, I’m going to
2:40:55 lose my grandfather’s company and maybe the whole industry on my watch
2:40:59 and it’s hard to sleep. What can I do? And we did loving kindness
2:41:03 practices and mindfulness practices together and so forth. And I gave him some
2:41:07 practices that he could use. And it turns out that at whatever
2:41:11 level you’re on, whether you’re incarcerated or whether you’re
2:41:15 a CEO or whether you’re a returning vet, that these
2:41:19 inner capacities that we have to be present
2:41:23 without getting lost to bring an understanding
2:41:27 attention to these energies, just as you were doing with anger in ourselves
2:41:31 are really, really liberating. And sometimes
2:41:35 what’s needed, like for the vets or the people coming back from the war,
2:41:39 is also a kind of forgiveness practice and trauma work.
2:41:43 And we’ll come together and, you know, they’ll say things like, I can’t tell you
2:41:47 what I saw. Because in fact, people don’t want to hear the
2:41:51 stories of war. They can’t tell the story. And if they do often, they retraumatize
2:41:55 themselves. And the people around them couldn’t bear
2:41:59 it. But there is something worse because they’ll say
2:42:03 I can’t tell you what I had to do. And so it’s locked up in their hearts,
2:42:07 you know, and then whether they have, they can drink or they can distract
2:42:11 themselves or get in blind rages periodically. But if
2:42:15 you get a room of returning combat vets and hold
2:42:19 it with a proper space of understanding and
2:42:23 compassion, not only can they tell their stories,
2:42:27 which they’ve never told, but they can listen to one another and say
2:42:31 oh yeah, I’ve been there. And all of a sudden they’re not so alone anymore.
2:42:35 And that release of the weight on their heart.
2:42:39 So there’s a social dimension to trauma where we need to tell the story.
2:42:43 Helps them release also what’s carried in their nervous system and in their body.
2:42:47 And there’s some correlation between those two together
2:42:51 that becomes very powerful. And we need that. We need, I do a lot
2:42:55 of teaching of forgiveness practice and self-forgiveness. Those are also
2:42:59 on those guided meditations that I teach. And for a lot of us, self-forgiveness
2:43:03 like self-compassion becomes a very, very important
2:43:07 way to liberate ourselves from what we had to do to survive
2:43:11 in the past so that we’re actually free in our life.
2:43:15 How do you set the stage, for instance, with those vets?
2:43:19 What do you say to them or what exercise might you do
2:43:23 that opens the door for them to share these stories?
2:43:27 So a couple of images. One with gang kids and then one with vets.
2:43:31 For gang kids who come in or these kids who are trying to get out of gangs
2:43:35 and might come with a mentor or something like that to some events we’ve had.
2:43:39 You can get these guys and their, you know, their hoods are up and their hats are
2:43:43 backward and they’re leaning back and saying, like, come on, man, you’re going to teach us meditation.
2:43:47 You’re going to teach us, give us some poem, stories or vets. Listen, we’re
2:43:51 out on the street. People got nine millimeters. You do, you got to give us something better than that.
2:43:55 So we try to make a setting
2:43:59 that honors who they are from the very beginning
2:44:03 and say, well, we can’t talk yet about the real things that we came here
2:44:07 to do because there are too many people in this room who have not been acknowledged
2:44:11 and not been respected. So would you go out
2:44:15 in the parking lot and pick up a stone for every young person you know
2:44:19 who’s been killed? And we light one candle and put it in the center of a table
2:44:23 and say, bring it back in and say their name and put their stone
2:44:27 by this candle. The simplest possible ritual.
2:44:31 And these guys and sometimes gals will come in and their hands are full of stones.
2:44:35 No young people should know that many dead people.
2:44:39 And they’ll say, this is for Tito and this is for RJ and this is for
2:44:43 Homegirl. And pretty soon there’s a mound
2:44:47 of stones and the names of people they’ve lost
2:44:51 were put into the fabric of the air
2:44:55 of that room and their hoods are no longer over their heads. They’re sitting up like
2:44:59 okay, this is the place where we can talk about what’s really going on.
2:45:03 So there’s something about making, whether it’s through the simplest ritual
2:45:07 or making a container in which people realize
2:45:11 that this is a safe place to talk about what we’ve never done before.
2:45:15 With the vets, one of the things that Michael Mead, Luis Rodriguez, these guys from
2:45:19 Mosaic Multicultural Foundation that I’ve worked with for years and are
2:45:23 really wonderful. Michael, who’s a great
2:45:27 drummer and a storyteller and mythologist who’s also been working in prisons
2:45:31 and with vets and gang kids for years, he’ll say, let me tell you
2:45:35 an ancient story of returning warriors. And he has a
2:45:39 handful of stories from Africa or Tibet or the Mayan tradition
2:45:43 about warriors coming back with their hands covered with blood
2:45:47 and their eyes filled with the
2:45:51 martial energy that they can’t stop the violence because it’s
2:45:55 taken them over. And here’s a myth or a story
2:45:59 that tells about how ancient warriors were brought back into their community.
2:46:03 I’ll tell you the myth if you want to hear one of them. Oh, yes, please.
2:46:07 So here we are, you know, and there’s these vets and already stories have started
2:46:11 to pour out about, I can’t tell you what I saw, I can’t tell you what I had to do.
2:46:15 And Michael stood up and he said, let me tell you an old
2:46:19 Irish story of an Irish warrior named
2:46:23 Cochulain, or I’m not sure how his name is pronounced, something like that.
2:46:27 Then he was the most fierce and famous of all Irish warriors.
2:46:31 The Irish warriors were mad men because they would go out, they’d paint
2:46:35 their bodies and they’d go out naked and sometimes you’d just see them coming and run the other way.
2:46:39 But anyway, there was some rotting king and army
2:46:43 that had come to threaten their area and so Cochulain went out
2:46:47 and almost single-handedly chased them and defeated them.
2:46:51 But then he was coming back to his own town in a chariot
2:46:55 covered with blood and his eyes blazing
2:46:59 bearing down on his own town still possessed with the violence
2:47:03 of war with the God Mars. And they were all terrified
2:47:07 he would come and do violence there too. And so they were like, what can we do?
2:47:11 What can we do? And they went to ask the old wise
2:47:15 woman in the village and she said three things.
2:47:19 And so the first thing, they lined up all the women in the village who bared their breasts
2:47:23 and this slowed him down as if it reminded
2:47:27 him of his mother’s milk or something. And because he would slow down
2:47:31 then the second thing they did was take a rope and tie it around
2:47:35 him and put him in a huge cauldron of cold water
2:47:39 which hissed off his body and then they filled it three times with
2:47:43 cold water and finally his body cooled down. And then the third
2:47:47 thing they did is they took him at Stillbound
2:47:51 and they lay him on a carpet in the court of the local king
2:47:55 and they sang to him the stories and myths
2:47:59 and songs of warriors who had protected
2:48:03 the kingdom and then come back and released
2:48:07 the violence and the fears that they carried
2:48:11 and planted their crops again and loved their families
2:48:15 and resumed living in harmony with the community
2:48:19 from which they came. And they told the ancient stories and sang the songs
2:48:23 for three days and nights and when it was over
2:48:27 eyes opened they let his, they untied him and he was back as a normal
2:48:31 human being again. And after Michael told this
2:48:35 story to vets who’d been telling terrible accounts
2:48:39 of things that happened, in this room a hundred men
2:48:43 stood up and we’d been working with a simple African chant, a song
2:48:47 that was really an African chant of a prayer
2:48:51 “Earth, hold me for this living is hard.” We all sang to the vets
2:48:55 together for a long time as if
2:48:59 we could sing them back into their bodies from this as if they were
2:49:03 lying there in the court of the king. So this is, you ask
2:49:07 the question, how do you make a setting that allows people
2:49:11 to truly feel that they can tell their stories and be held in
2:49:15 compassion, whether it’s the grief of these gang kids
2:49:19 that no one’s really given a place to give voice to, you know
2:49:23 or that who says I can’t tell you what I had to do. That’s very
2:49:27 powerful and it makes me
2:49:31 also think back to conversations I’ve had with
2:49:35 Sebastian Junger who is a war time
2:49:39 journalist has co-produced
2:49:43 and shot a number of really harrowing documentary films
2:49:47 including “Restrepo” and most recently wrote a book called “Tribe”
2:49:51 that touches on some similar topic area
2:49:55 and leads me to ask you, are there any rites of passages
2:49:59 or rituals that you feel would be useful
2:50:03 for every man or woman to experience? And this is something that I’ve
2:50:07 felt a longing for and a lack of since
2:50:11 my teenage years. I’m not Jewish, did not have a bat mitzvah, bar mitzvah
2:50:15 I don’t know if that serves that purpose in the Jewish tradition
2:50:19 necessarily, but are there any rituals or rites of
2:50:23 passage that you think we could use in let’s just say the United States
2:50:27 that would be helpful to whether it’s a
2:50:31 specific population, specific group or anyone?
2:50:35 So what you’re talking about is a really big subject, it’s a subject of
2:50:39 initiation and unfortunately bar mitzvah is at least when I was
2:50:43 a relatively lightweight and meaningless thing, you get up there
2:50:47 and you recite your Hebrew portion of the Bible and
2:50:51 now you’re a man and they give you a bunch of presents and there wasn’t a lot of meaning in it
2:50:55 the problem that you raise is that of the lack of initiation
2:50:59 and what’s true is that it’s been forgotten in our culture
2:51:03 one of the few places you get initiation is going into the military
2:51:07 that’s an initiation, but a lot of these gang kids for example
2:51:11 they’re trying to initiate themselves which can’t really happen
2:51:15 you need elders and you need it in a ritualized way, but they’ll go on
2:51:19 if you’re in the Masai tradition in East Africa
2:51:23 the Masai people, as everybody’s heard
2:51:27 a young man at a certain age of 14 or something will go out
2:51:31 and kill a lion to prove that they’re now an adult member of the society
2:51:35 and that they’re brave and that’s part of their initiation
2:51:39 for young women as well and it’s not just in Africa the Mayans had
2:51:43 initiations and in Thailand when I lived there back
2:51:47 starting in the 1960s at that point almost every
2:51:51 young man and many young women when they reached
2:51:55 the age of 1920 they became a monk for
2:51:59 three months or for a year and lived in an austere way and it was part of their
2:52:03 initiation to learn both the inner life of themselves
2:52:07 and also a kind of discipline, we don’t have it and because of it
2:52:11 kids are trying to initiate themselves on the streets by shooting somebody
2:52:15 or doing something that shows that they’re brave but it’s not a lion
2:52:19 it’s another person or it’s trying to get the attention of the others
2:52:23 and say prove how powerful or strong they are
2:52:27 so we desperately need these and we need them built into our education
2:52:31 and to our psychology and I can’t give you a simple answer
2:52:35 but one of the people who has the most intelligence about this
2:52:39 is a man, a colleague of mine named Michael Mead
2:52:43 and if you look at Mosaic Multicultural Foundation
2:52:47 his writings on initiation and what’s possible here
2:52:51 and the things he’s led are very very inspiring
2:52:55 so that’s a place that I would look. That’s a good starting point, wonderful
2:52:59 I will definitely find that. Well Jack I think we could go for hours and hours
2:53:03 chatting with you and I’d love to perhaps even consider doing a part two sometime
2:53:07 but given that we’ve already gone for two plus hours I want to ask just
2:53:11 a few more questions and I’ll actually start
2:53:15 with just reading something very short which is from your 2017
2:53:19 year end message. I think this is just to
2:53:23 inject some more optimism into our
2:53:27 conversation which we’ve already had plenty of but this is just a
2:53:31 little portion of your year end message. Martin Luther King Jr. describes our collective journey
2:53:35 with hope quote “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends
2:53:39 towards justice” end quote and Pablo Neruda explains further
2:53:43 “you can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep spring from coming” renewal is happening
2:53:47 this is back to your voice “take quiet time to listen to your heart to meditate
2:53:51 and to rest amidst the great turnings. Feel the renewal of spring that can be born
2:53:55 in you. Align yourself with goodness. Let yourself blossom like a lotus
2:53:59 or whatever unique flower you are shining in the world offering tiny seeds
2:54:03 of love amidst it all” blessings to you in 2018 Jack
2:54:07 and I want this note to then
2:54:11 lead into and certainly welcome to comment on that but
2:54:15 which book you would recommend of yours people start with or where they start
2:54:19 with all of the many materials recordings readings that you produce because
2:54:23 you’re a fantastic writer and a prolific writer
2:54:27 you have some of my favorite book titles I’ve ever heard by the way including
2:54:31 After the Ecstasy The Laundry which maybe we could touch on but where would you suggest
2:54:35 people start of the many things that you’ve written and shared
2:54:39 with the world and if you have any comments on that year end message
2:54:43 you’re welcome to share that as well. So for books if you want
2:54:47 something simple I have books like you know an introduction
2:54:51 to meditation that sounds true publishes or I have
2:54:55 a little book called the art of forgiveness loving kindness and peace which is very simple
2:54:59 stories and practices if you want something that’s
2:55:03 richer and fuller then you could look at one of my bigger books like A Path
2:55:07 with Heart or The Wise Heart the guide to the principles of Buddhist psychology
2:55:11 and again I think lots of stuff online and sounds true
2:55:15 particularly a good place to go along with my website then
2:55:19 and that 40 day mindfulness, mindfulness daily which is like 30 bucks
2:55:23 or something is a really wonderful way to start.
2:55:27 In terms of what I had written about the trusting heart
2:55:31 one of the greatest Zen texts from a thousand years ago says
2:55:35 to be awakened or enlightened is one with the trusting
2:55:39 heart and mind and it doesn’t mean that we won’t go through hard times
2:55:43 we always have and we will again and we are now in many ways
2:55:47 but that we also have born within us the capacity
2:55:51 to meet these difficulties with understanding
2:55:55 with courage, with compassion and to transform them
2:55:59 and in that way one of my favorite recent books is called
2:56:03 The Better Angels of Our Nature by Stephen Pinker and he’s a remarkable
2:56:07 professor at Harvard anthropologist historian talking about
2:56:11 the growing consciousness of humanity in spite of the kind
2:56:15 of wars and conflict and environmental things there are so many good things
2:56:19 that have happened that he charts over the last few centuries of the development
2:56:23 of certain abilities for peacemaking there’s actually less war than
2:56:27 there’d been respect for women, the reduction in
2:56:31 child labor all kinds of things and in that same regard
2:56:35 there’s a wonderful book called Berry the Chains which is about the ending
2:56:39 of slavery in the British Empire starting with this handful of
2:56:43 men who met in a British tea shop or printing shop
2:56:47 and spent 30 years riding around the country bringing
2:56:51 ex-slaves who were well spoken to talk about the middle passage
2:56:55 the horrors of slavery and so forth and even though the British
2:56:59 Empire’s economic engine was built around slavery and
2:57:03 sugar by the end of their work 30 years
2:57:07 the British Parliament outlawed slavery and the British Empire
2:57:11 decades before it happened in the US and the Quakers
2:57:15 were a big part of this and the Quakers famously wouldn’t take their hats off
2:57:19 for the king but when what is his name
2:57:23 Thomas Clarkson who was the center of this group
2:57:27 trying to end slavery and going everywhere to do it, when Thomas Clarkson
2:57:31 died all the Quakers of the England took their hats off
2:57:35 because he’d freed so many spirits and so many lives
2:57:39 we have these amazing possibilities as human beings and we’re just
2:57:43 growing into them now culturally and it’s about time
2:57:47 they are possible and we each have a contribution to make
2:57:51 Jack I’m going to ask you one more question before we
2:57:55 wrap up with just letting people know where they can find you
2:57:59 on social media and elsewhere on the website and so on but last question is one I like to ask
2:58:03 this is a metaphor but
2:58:07 if you could have a short message on a billboard in other words
2:58:11 and a message out to millions or billions of people could be a few words
2:58:15 one word, a phrase, a quote of yours, a quote of someone else’s
2:58:19 what might you put on that billboard? Well the two things come to mind
2:58:23 one is a question that when I sat with people many times at the end of their life
2:58:27 that they then ask of themselves silently or outlawed is
2:58:31 did I love well because in the end what matters really
2:58:35 the billboard would have a question rather than a statement
2:58:39 and it would have a question something like how could I love myself
2:58:43 better so that it actually it’s not that I’m going to tell
2:58:47 them something they already know this but I’m going to remind
2:58:51 those who read that there is something that’s asking
2:58:55 to be awakened in them how could I love myself and this
2:58:59 world better then you go well it gets in the way of that and how could I love that too
2:59:03 how could I love myself in this world better well Jack I
2:59:07 want to of course thank you for your time today but
2:59:11 beyond that I want to thank you and this is very
2:59:15 much from deep in my heart thank you for helping me
2:59:19 to learn to love myself better and quite frankly to see something
2:59:23 in the first place that is worth loving
2:59:27 that’s not where I’ve spent most of my life so it’s turned into
2:59:31 if not my I hesitate to say my top priority because I’m
2:59:35 sorry about sounding self indulgent but it’s become
2:59:39 one of the most important and fruitful tasks in my life
2:59:43 is asking that question how could I love myself better
2:59:47 or how could I learn to love myself better so thank you very very sincerely
2:59:51 for that and the words don’t do it justice but that’s the best I can do right now
2:59:55 remotely is to put it into words so thank you for that thank you
2:59:59 Tim this was a pleasure to do and what I feel and I know
3:00:03 is that as you tend your own heart in a wise way
3:00:07 then it makes you available to bring the gifts the many
3:00:11 gifts you have to the world you personally and others but to do it
3:00:15 in a way that’s on the carrier wave of connection and love and it transforms everything
3:00:19 so thank you too well Jack I am looking at a texture of ours
3:00:23 and I’m feeling the necklace around my neck which is really a thread
3:00:27 a red thread that was used to close the one of the elements
3:00:31 of the closing of the ten day silent retreat and I shot you
3:00:35 a text not too long ago asking what the three knots
3:00:39 meant because I had forgotten and this is what you wrote back
3:00:43 first knot equals refuge in whatever you hold is most inspiring and sacred
3:00:47 second commitment to compassion for self and others
3:00:51 third following your highest intention and the
3:00:55 intention that I’ve said at the end of that ten day retreat was to
3:00:59 learn to love myself so I could love others more fully
3:01:03 but I’ve realized that maybe what it is is learning to
3:01:07 love myself so I can help others learn to do the same and you’ve
3:01:11 been an integral piece of that and I just love
3:01:15 that I have the opportunity to introduce you and your work
3:01:19 and these traditions to more people and I will certainly be linking to
3:01:23 where everyone can find you online but are there any particular best
3:01:27 places just to reiterate where people can find you and I’ll link to these in the show notes
3:01:31 jackcornfield.com and also look up jackcornfield
3:01:35 on sounds true.com for those programs that I talked about and then
3:01:39 spiritrock.org which is our great meditation center in
3:01:43 the San Francisco Bay area absolutely stunning
3:01:47 beautiful location worth visiting just to bathe
3:01:51 in the scenery but many more reasons to visit as well
3:01:55 Jack thank you again and thank you thank you Tim it’s a pleasure
3:01:59 and to everybody listening you can find show notes links to all the resources
3:02:03 books and everything that we discussed at tim.blog/podcast
3:02:07 and until next time thank you so much for listening
3:02:11 Hey guys this is Tim again just one more thing before you take
3:02:15 off and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a
3:02:19 short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend
3:02:23 between one and a half and two million people subscribed to my free newsletter
3:02:27 my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday easy to sign up
3:02:31 easy to cancel it is basically a half page that I send
3:02:35 out every Friday to share the coolest things I’ve found or discovered
3:02:39 or have started exploring over that week it’s kind of like my diary of cool things
3:02:43 it often includes articles I’m reading books I’m reading albums perhaps
3:02:47 gadgets gizmos all sorts of tech tricks and so on
3:02:51 it’s sent to me by my friends including a lot of podcast guests
3:02:55 and these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then
3:02:59 I test them and then I share them with you so if that sounds fun
3:03:03 again it’s very short a little tiny bite of goodness before you
3:03:07 head off for the weekend something to think about if you’d like to try it out
3:03:11 just go to tim.blog/friday type that into your browser tim.blog/friday
3:03:15 drop in your email and you’ll get the very next one
3:03:19 Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Helix Sleep
3:03:23 Helix Sleep is a premium mattress brand that provides tailored mattresses based
3:03:27 on your sleep preferences. Their lineup includes 14 unique mattresses
3:03:31 including a collection of luxury models, a mattress for big and tall sleepers that’s not me
3:03:35 and even a mattress made specifically for kids they have models with memory foam
3:03:39 layers to provide optimal pressure relief if you sleep on your side as I often do
3:03:43 and did last night on one of their beds models with more responsive
3:03:47 foam to cradle your body for essential support in stomach and back sleeping positions and
3:03:51 on and on they have you covered. So how will you know which Helix mattress works
3:03:55 best for you and your body? Take the Helix Sleep Quiz at helixsleep.com/tim
3:03:59 and find your perfect mattress in less than two minutes
3:04:03 Personally for the last few years I’ve been sleeping on a Helix Midnight
3:04:07 Luxe mattress. I also have one of those in the guest bedroom
3:04:11 and feedback from friends has always been fantastic. They frequently say
3:04:15 the best night of sleep they’ve had in ages. It’s something they comment on without any
3:04:19 prompting from me whatsoever. Helix mattresses are American made and come with a
3:04:23 10 or 15 year warranty depending on the model. Your mattress will be shipped straight to your
3:04:27 door free of charge and there’s no better way to test out a new mattress than by
3:04:31 sleeping on it in your own home. That’s why they offer a 100 night risk free
3:04:35 trial. If you decide it’s not the best fit you’re welcome to return it for a full refund.
3:04:39 Helix has been awarded number one mattress by both GQ and Wired
3:04:43 magazines. And now Helix has harnessed years of extensive mattress
3:04:47 expertise to bring you a truly elevated sleep experience. Their newest
3:04:51 collection of mattresses called Helix Elite includes six different
3:04:55 mattress models each tailored for specific sleep positions and
3:04:59 firmness references so you can get exactly what your body needs.
3:05:03 Each Helix Elite mattress comes with an extra layer of foam for pressure relief and
3:05:07 thousands of extra microcoils for best in class or in durability.
3:05:11 Every Helix Elite mattress also comes with a 15 year manufacturers warranty
3:05:15 and the same 100 night trial as the rest of Helix’s mattresses.
3:05:19 And you my dear listeners can get between 25 and 30%
3:05:23 off plus two free pillows on all mattress orders. So
3:05:27 go to helixsleep.com/tim to check it out.
3:05:31 That’s helixsleep.com/tim. With Helix
3:05:35 Better Sleep starts now. This episode is brought to you by
3:05:39 Element spelled L-M-N-T. What on earth
3:05:43 is Element? It is a delicious sugar free electrolyte drink mix.
3:05:47 I’ve stocked up on boxes and boxes of this. It was one of the first things
3:05:51 that I bought when I saw COVID coming down the pike and I usually use
3:05:55 one to two per day. Element is formulated to help anyone with their
3:05:59 electrolyte needs and perfectly suited to folks following a keto, low carb, or paleo diet.
3:06:03 Or if you drink a ton of water and you might not have the right balance
3:06:07 that’s often when I drink it or if you’re doing any type of endurance exercise, mountain biking,
3:06:11 etc. Another application. If you’ve ever struggled to feel good on keto,
3:06:15 low carb, or paleo, it’s most likely because even if you’re consciously consuming
3:06:19 electrolytes, you’re just not getting enough. And it relates to a bunch of stuff
3:06:23 like a hormone called aldosterone, blah, blah, blah, when insulin is low, but suffice to say
3:06:27 this is where Element, again spelled L-M-N-T, can help.
3:06:31 My favorite flavor by far is citrus salt, which
3:06:35 is a side note you can also use to make a kick-ass no sugar margarita.
3:06:39 But for special occasions, obviously, you’re probably already familiar
3:06:43 with one of the names behind it, Rob Wolf, ROBB, Rob Wolf,
3:06:47 who is a former research biochemist and two-time New York Times bestselling
3:06:51 author of The Paleo Solution and Wired to Eat. Rob created
3:06:55 Element by scratching his own itch. That’s how it got started. His Brazilian
3:06:59 jujitsu coaches turned him on to electrolytes as a performance enhancer. Things clicked
3:07:03 and bam, company was born. So if you’re on a low-carb diet
3:07:07 or fasting, electrolytes play a key role in relieving hunger,
3:07:11 cramps, headaches, tiredness, and dizziness. Sugar, artificial ingredients,
3:07:15 coloring, all that’s garbage, unneeded, there’s none of that in Element.
3:07:19 And a lot of names you might recognize are already using Element. It was
3:07:23 recommended to be by one of my favorite athlete friends. Three Navy SEAL teams
3:07:27 as prescribed by their Master Chief, Marine Units, FBI Sniper teams, at least
3:07:31 five NFL teams who have subscriptions. They are the exclusive
3:07:35 hydration partner to team you, say weightlifting and on and on. You can try it risk-free.
3:07:39 If you don’t like it, Element will give you your money back, no questions asked. They have
3:07:43 extremely low return rates. Get your free Element sample pack with
3:07:47 any drink mix purchase at www.drinkelement.com/tim.
3:07:51 That’s www.drinklmnt.com/tim.
3:07:55 And if you’re an Element insider, one of their most loyal customers,
3:07:59 you have first access to Element Sparkling, a bold
3:08:03 16-ounce can of sparkling electrolyte water. Again, check it all out.
3:08:07 www.drinkelement.com/tim. www.drinklmnt.com/tim.
3:08:11 www.drinklmnt.com/tim.
3:08:21 [BLANK_AUDIO]

0:00:05 This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports
0:00:11 whole body health. I view AG1 as comprehensive nutritional insurance and that is nothing new.
0:00:18 I actually recommended AG1 in my 2010 best seller more than a decade ago, the 4-hour body,
0:00:24 and I did not get paid to do so. I simply loved the product and felt like it was the ultimate
0:00:29 nutritionally dense supplement that you could use conveniently while on the run, which is,
0:00:34 for me, a lot of the time. I have been using it a very, very long time indeed, and I do get asked
0:00:40 a lot what I would take if I could only take one supplement, and the true answer is invariably AG1.
0:00:45 It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel
0:00:52 packs with me on the road. So what is AG1? What is this stuff? AG1 is a science-driven formulation
0:00:57 of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food-sourced nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you
0:01:04 support for the brain, gut, and immune system. Since 2010, they have improved the formula 52 times
0:01:09 in pursuit of making the best foundational nutrition supplement possible using rigorous
0:01:15 standards and high-quality ingredients. How many ingredients? 75, and you would be hard-pressed
0:01:20 to find a more nutrient-dense formula on the market. It has a multivitamin, multi-mineral
0:01:26 superfood complex, probiotics and prebiotics for gut health, and antioxidant immune support formula
0:01:32 digestive enzymes and adaptogens to help manage stress. Now, I do my best, always, to eat nutrient
0:01:39 dense meals. That is the basic, basic, basic requirement. That is why things are called supplements.
0:01:44 Of course, that’s what I focus on, but it is not always possible. It is not always easy,
0:01:51 so part of my routine is using AG1 daily. If I’m on the road, on the run, it just makes it easy to
0:01:56 get a lot of nutrients at once and to sleep easy knowing that I am checking a lot of important
0:02:02 boxes. So, each morning, AG1. That’s just like brushing my teeth part of the routine. It’s also
0:02:08 NSF-certified for sports, so professional athletes trust it to be safe. And each pouch of AG1 contains
0:02:14 exactly what is on the label, does not contain harmful levels of microbes or heavy metals,
0:02:20 and is free of 280 band substances. It’s the ultimate nutritional supplement in one easy scoop.
0:02:25 So, take ownership of your health and try AG1 today. You will get a free one-year supply of
0:02:31 vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase. So, learn more,
0:02:41 check it out. Go to drinkag1.com/tim. That’s drinkag1, the number one. Drinkag1.com/tim.
0:02:46 Last time, drinkag1.com/tim. Check it out.
0:02:54 This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. I have been using Eight Sleep pod cover for years
0:02:59 now. Why? Well, by simply adding it to your existing mattress on top like a fitted sheet,
0:03:05 you can automatically cool down or warm up each side of your bed. Eight Sleep recently launched
0:03:10 their newest generation of the pod, and I’m excited to test it out, Pod 4 Ultra. It cools,
0:03:16 it heats, and now it elevates automatically, more on that in a second. First, Pod 4 Ultra can cool down
0:03:21 each side of the bed as much as 20 degrees Fahrenheit below room temperature, keeping you and your
0:03:26 partner cool, even in a heatwave. Or you can switch it up depending on which of you is heat sensitive.
0:03:31 I am always more heat sensitive pulling the sheets off, closing the windows, trying to
0:03:36 crank the AC down. This solves all of that. Pod 4 Ultra also introduces an adjustable base that
0:03:40 fits between your mattress and your bed frame and adds reading and sleeping positions for the best
0:03:45 unwinding experience. And for those snore heavy nights, the pod can detect your snoring and
0:03:50 automatically lift your head by a few degrees to improve airflow and stop you or your partner from
0:03:55 snoring. Plus, with the Pod 4 Ultra, you can leave your wearables on the nightstand. You won’t need
0:04:00 them because these types of metrics are integrated into the Pod 4 Ultra itself. They have imperceptible
0:04:05 sensors which track your sleep time, sleep bases, and HRV. Their heart rate tracking is just one
0:04:13 example is at 99% accuracy. So, get your best night’s sleep. Head to 8sleep.com/tim and use
0:04:20 Code Tim to get $350 off of the Pod 4 Ultra. That’s 8sleep, all spelled out, 8sleep.com/tim
0:04:27 and Code Tim to get $350 off the Pod 4 Ultra. They currently ship to the United States, Canada,
0:04:30 the United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia.
0:04:59 Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode
0:05:04 of The Tim Ferris Show where it is my job to sit down with world-class performers from every
0:05:09 field imaginable to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books, and so on that you can apply and
0:05:15 test in your own lives. This episode is a two-for-one and that’s because the podcast recently hit its
0:05:22 10th year anniversary, which is insane to think about, and past one billion downloads. To celebrate,
0:05:28 I’ve curated some of the best of the best, some of my favorites from more than 700 episodes over
0:05:34 the last decade. I could not be more excited to give you these super combo episodes and internally
0:05:39 we’ve been calling these the super combo episodes because my goal is to encourage you to, yes,
0:05:45 enjoy the household names, the super famous folks, but to also introduce you to lesser known people
0:05:50 I consider stars. These are people who have transformed my life and I feel like they can do
0:05:57 the same for many of you. Perhaps they got lost in a busy news cycle, perhaps you missed an episode,
0:06:02 just trust me on this one, we went to great pains to put these pairings together.
0:06:09 And for the bios of all guests, you can find that and more at tim.log/combo.
0:06:13 And now, without further ado, please enjoy and thank you for listening.
0:06:22 First up, Neil Gaiman, bestselling author and creator of books, graphic novels, short stories,
0:06:30 film and television for all ages, including Neverwhere, Coraline, The Graveyard Book,
0:06:35 The Ocean at the End of the Lane, The View from the Cheap Seats,
0:06:42 and the Sandman series of graphic novels. You can find Neil on Instagram at NeilHimself.
0:06:54 Back in about 1997, I read an article by Ian Fleming, who wrote the James Bond books,
0:07:00 about how he wrote the James Bond books. And you read this article and you realize something,
0:07:05 which is Ian Fleming did not enjoy the process of writing. I was always fascinated by the fact that
0:07:12 several of Roald Dahl’s most famous short stories were plotted by Ian Fleming. Ian Fleming would
0:07:15 really… Yeah, he gave Dahl… No idea.
0:07:23 The two best short story twists, which are a lamb to the slaughter where the woman kills her husband
0:07:29 with a leg of lamb and then cooks it and feeds it to the detective who is going,
0:07:34 “I cannot figure out what he was hit with,” is an Ian Fleming plot. And so is the one about the
0:07:42 evil antique dealer who finds this amazing antique on some farm and decides to cheat the farmers.
0:07:47 And explains that, “Well, the thing isn’t worth any money, but the legs. The legs are worth some
0:07:55 money, so I’ll give you 20 quid for the legs.” And is about to take away this million-pound
0:08:01 antique thing, and the farmers helpfully rip off the legs and throw the rest of it away.
0:08:02 They make this easier for you.
0:08:08 And those plots were both Ian Fleming’s. And you start realizing, “You really don’t like writing,”
0:08:13 and you read his thing on how he wrote James Bond books. You write a James Bond book in two weeks,
0:08:21 you check into a hotel, you have to check into a hotel somewhere that you don’t want to be,
0:08:26 otherwise you might go out and walk around and become a tourist. You have to check into a not
0:08:32 terribly nice hotel room, otherwise you might luxuriate and enjoy it. And instead, what you
0:08:42 want to be is focused on getting out. And then you having nothing else to do in this town,
0:08:49 in this place, you settle down and you write like a fiend, and you get your James Bond book written
0:08:55 in two weeks and you leave this horrible hotel room. And that was how he did it. And I have tried
0:09:00 it a couple of times. I did it with the American draft of Neverwhere. That was the first one I
0:09:08 ever tried. And I did the entire sort of American draft, which was a big second draft. The book
0:09:15 had already been published in the UK, but my American editor wanted stuff done because she
0:09:23 pointed out that the book, as it existed, was written for people who knew that Oxford Street was
0:09:29 a big street with lots of shops on it or whatever. It was written for Brits and Londoners. And she
0:09:40 wanted something expanded. So I expanded it. And I was in a room with, as far as I remember,
0:09:49 no windows, in the, I think it was a Marriott in the World Trade Center, which is no longer there.
0:09:54 But writing in that hotel room, you just wanted to be out.
0:09:59 And it seems to me, and you can’t believe everything you read on the internet, so
0:10:06 I want you to certainly fact check me as needed, but that you also have or have had some internal
0:10:13 rules. So you can use your external environment to assist. But I read that, and again, feel free
0:10:18 to correct, but making rules, the importance of making rules, rules like you can sit here and
0:10:21 write or you can sit here and do nothing, but you can’t sit here and do anything else.
0:10:26 That was always and still is when I go off to write. That’s my biggest rule.
0:10:31 Could you speak to that? Yeah, because I would go down to my lovely little gazebo,
0:10:39 the bottom of the garden, sit down, and I’m absolutely allowed not to do anything. I’m
0:10:45 allowed to sit at my desk. I’m allowed to stare out at the world. I’m allowed to do anything I like.
0:10:51 As long as it isn’t anything, not allowed to do a crossword, not allowed to read a book,
0:10:59 not allowed to phone a friend, not allowed to make a claim model of something. All I’m allowed
0:11:05 to do is absolutely nothing or write. And what I love about that is I’m giving myself permission
0:11:12 to write or not write, but writing is actually more interesting than doing nothing after a while.
0:11:16 You sort of sit there and you’ve been staring out the window now for five minutes
0:11:22 and it kind of loses its charm. You’re going, “Well, actually, might as well write something.”
0:11:31 And it’s hard. As a writer, I’m more easily, I’m distractible. I have a three-year-old son.
0:11:38 He is the epitome of cuteness and charm. It’s more fun playing with him than it is writing,
0:11:42 which means if I’m going to be writing, I need to do it somewhere where I don’t have
0:11:50 a three-year-old son singing to me, asking me to read to him, demanding my attention.
0:11:56 I think it’s a really just a solid rule for writers. It’s like, yeah, you don’t have to write.
0:12:02 You have permission to not write, but you don’t have permission to do anything else.
0:12:08 And it reminds me of another one of my favorite writers, you being the one who’s sitting in front
0:12:15 of me, John McPhee, nonfiction writer who has spent much of his life in Princeton, New Jersey,
0:12:20 but has written some incredible Pulitzer Prize-winning nonfiction. And I was lucky enough to take class
0:12:26 with him a thousand years ago. And his rule was very similar. He didn’t state it explicitly.
0:12:31 He would sit in front of his first as a young man typewriter. He could sit in front of the blank
0:12:37 page and from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. with the exception of a break for lunch and swimming. It was the
0:12:42 blank page you’re writing. It was disallowed from doing anything else. Are there any other
0:12:49 rules or practices that you also hold sacred or important for your writing process?
0:13:00 Some of them are just things for me. For example, most of the time, not always, I will do
0:13:09 my first draft in fountain pen, because I actually enjoy the process of writing with a fountain pen.
0:13:16 I like filling a fountain pen. I like uncapping it. I like the weight of it in my hand. I like that
0:13:24 thing. So I’ll have a notebook. I’ll have a fountain pen. And I’ll write. If I’m doing anything long,
0:13:29 if I’m working on a novel, for example, I will always have two fountain pens on the go,
0:13:38 at least with two different colored inks, at least, because that way I can see at a glance
0:13:44 how much work I did that day. I can just look down and go, look at that, five pages in brown. I
0:13:50 wrote that. Half a page in black. That was not a good day. Nine pages in blue. Come on, that was
0:13:56 what a great day. And you can just sort of get a sense of, okay, are you working? Are you making
0:14:03 forward progress? What’s actually happening? And I also love that because it emphasizes for me that
0:14:10 nobody is ever meant to read your first draft. Your first draft can go way off the rails. Your
0:14:20 first draft can absolutely go up in flames. You can change the age, gender, number of a character.
0:14:25 You can bring somebody dead back to life. Nobody ever needs to know anything that happens in your
0:14:33 first draft is you telling the story to yourself. And then I’ll sit down and type and I’ll put it
0:14:38 onto a computer. As far as I’m concerned, the second draft is where I try and make it look
0:14:45 like I knew what I was doing all along. Do you edit then as you’re looking or translating from
0:14:53 the first draft on the page to the computer? Or do you get it all down as is in the computer
0:14:58 and then edit? No, I definitely that’s my editing process. I think that’s my second draft is typing
0:15:08 into the computer. And also, I love so backing up a bit here. When I was 27, 28, in the days when
0:15:14 we were still in typewriters, and there were just a handful of people with word processors,
0:15:18 which were clunky things with disks, which didn’t hold very much and stuff,
0:15:24 I edited an anthology and enjoyed editing my anthology. And most of the stories that came in
0:15:33 were about 3000 words long. Move forward in time, not much, five, six, seven years,
0:15:43 mid 90s. Everybody is now on computer. And I edited another short story anthology.
0:15:47 And the stories that were coming in tended to be somewhere between six and 9000 words long.
0:15:54 And they didn’t really have much more story than the 3000 words ones. And I realized that
0:16:05 what was happening is, it’s a sort of a computer thing is if you’re typing, putting stuff down is
0:16:15 work. If you’ve got a computer, adding stuff is not work, choosing is work. So it sort of expands
0:16:22 a bit like a gas. If you have two things you could say, you say both of them. If you have the
0:16:28 stuff you want to add, you add it. And I thought, okay, I have to not do that because otherwise
0:16:36 my stuff is going to balloon and it will become gaseous and thin. So what I love, if I’ve written
0:16:43 something on a computer and I decide to lose a chunk, it feels like I’ve lost work. If I delete
0:16:49 a page and a half, I feel like there’s a page and a half that just went away. That’s a page and a
0:16:56 half worth of work I’ve just lost. If I’ve been writing in a notebook and I’m typing it up and
0:17:02 I can look at something and go, I don’t need this page and a half. And I leave it out. I’ve just
0:17:12 saved myself work and it feels kind of like I’m treating myself. So I’m just trying to always
0:17:20 have in my head the idea that maybe I’m somehow on some cosmic level paying somebody by the word
0:17:25 in order to be allowed to write. If they’re there, they should matter. They should mean
0:17:31 something. It’s always important to me. This might seem like a very, very mundane question,
0:17:35 but what type of notebooks do you prefer? Are they large, like legal pens? Are they
0:17:42 leather-bound? What type of notebooks? When they came out, I’ve used a whole bunch of
0:17:47 different ones. I bought big drawing ones which actually turned out to be a bit too big. Well,
0:17:52 I kind of liked how much I could see on the page. Those were the ones I wrote Stardust
0:18:00 and American Gods in sort of big size, but they weren’t terribly portable. I went over to the
0:18:06 Moleskins and I loved them when they first came out and then they dropped their paper quality.
0:18:14 And dropping paper quality doesn’t matter unless you’re writing in fountain pen because all of a
0:18:21 sudden it’s bleeding through and all of a sudden you’re writing on one page, leaving a page blank
0:18:28 because it’s bled through and writing on the next page. And Joe Hill about six or seven years ago,
0:18:36 Joe Hill, the wonderful horror fantasy writer, suggested the Leuchtturm to me. So my usual
0:18:43 notebook right now is a Leuchtturm because I really like the way you can paginate stuff in them
0:18:48 and the thickness of the paper. And they’re just like sort of Moleskins, but the Porsche
0:18:55 of Moleskins. They’re just better. And I also have been writing, I wrote the graveyard book
0:19:06 and I’m writing the current novel in these beautiful books that I bought in a stationary shop
0:19:12 in Venice, built into a bridge. Somewhere in Venice, there’s a little stationary shop on a bridge
0:19:18 and they have these beautiful leather-bound blank books that just look like hardback books,
0:19:25 but they’re blank pages. And I wrote the graveyard book in one of those. I bought four of them.
0:19:35 And now I’m using the next one on the next novel. And it may well go into another one,
0:19:44 I’m not sure. And then at home, I say at home, my house in Wisconsin, which is where my stuff is.
0:19:52 We live in Woodstock, but I have an entire life’s worth of stuff still sitting in my house in
0:19:59 Wisconsin and it’s become archives. It’s actually kind of fabulous having a house that is an archive.
0:20:07 But Waiting For Me In That House is a book that I bought for myself about 25 years ago.
0:20:20 And before I die, I plan to write a novel in it. And it’s an accounts book from the mid-19th century.
0:20:30 It’s 500 pages long. Every page is numbered. It’s lined with accounts lines, but very faint. So
0:20:36 it’ll be nice to write a book in it. And it is engineered so that every single page lies flat.
0:20:44 And it’s huge and it’s heavy. And it just looks like a book that Dickens or somebody would have
0:20:52 written a novel in. And I’ve just been waiting until I have an idea that is huge and weird and
0:20:58 Dickensian enough. And whether or not I actually get to write it in dip pen, I’m not sure. But
0:21:05 I definitely want to write it in a sort of old Victorian, something slightly copper platy,
0:21:10 one of those old flex nib pens that they stopped making when carbon paper came in.
0:21:14 Just so I can get that kind of spidery Victorian handwriting.
0:21:20 I’m just imagining you putting pen to the first page when you finish the first page
0:21:23 and what that will feel like. That’s going to be a good day.
0:21:27 It will be either a good day or an incredibly bad day. So I’ll get to the end of the first page.
0:21:32 It’s, “Oh, no, I have this pristine…” But it is the thing that I tell
0:21:37 young writers. And by young writers, a young writer can be any age. You just have to be
0:21:44 starting out, which is anything you do can be fixed. What you cannot fix is the perfection
0:21:52 of a blank page. What you cannot fix is that pristine, uncelled whiteness of a screen
0:21:55 or a page with nothing on it, because there’s nothing there to fix.
0:22:02 Are there any particular fountain pens or criteria that you would use in picking a good pen?
0:22:10 You know, the biggest criteria I would use in picking, if you have the choice, is go somewhere
0:22:14 like New York’s Fountain Pen Hospital. Is that a real place?
0:22:19 It’s a real place. It’s called the Fountain Pen Hospital. They sell lots of new pens. They
0:22:24 recondition old pens. They look after pens for you and try them out, because the lovely thing
0:22:29 about fountain pens is they are personal. You go, “No, no, no.” And then you find the one.
0:22:38 I tend to suggest to people who are nervously, “I’ve never used a fountain pen. What should I do?”
0:22:46 And I will point them at Lummi, L-A-M-Y, who have some fabulous starter pens. And they’re not very
0:22:52 expensive and they’re good. They do a pen called the Safari, but they have a bunch of good starter
0:22:57 pens. And they’re just nice to get into the idea of, “Do I like doing this?”
0:23:04 So I was doing “Prip” for this conversation and came across an interview in which you said that
0:23:08 for nonfiction, you can kind of write wherever it happens to fall. If it’s a script or something
0:23:13 else, but that for novels, very often you tend to write between, say, one and six PM, where you’ll
0:23:19 handle email, maybe writing a blog post and so on in the morning. And I’d love to chat about that,
0:23:24 because many of the writers I’ve spoken to, and I’m sure it differs person to person, but tend to
0:23:30 write either very late or very early because they feel like they avoid distraction. When I started out,
0:23:40 from the age of about 22, when I was a young journalist, 26, 27, starting out,
0:23:47 comics writer, all through there, I was a late late night writer. Nothing really happened until
0:23:53 the kids were in bed. Nine o’clock, I might have faffed her out a little bit during the day, but
0:24:01 now it’s all done and now I’m getting down to work. And at two or three o’clock in the morning,
0:24:07 and I’m writing in England at this point, I may phone a friend in America just to talk
0:24:14 enough to make sure that I’m awake. So that’s what I did. And I was a smoker and a coffee
0:24:23 drinker, and it was great. I moved to America in ’92, gave up smoking ’93, stopped drinking coffee,
0:24:30 went over to tea, and tried carrying on being a late night writer and gradually realized that I
0:24:35 wasn’t really anymore. What tended to happen was somewhere around one in the morning, I’d be writing
0:24:43 away, and then I would lift my head from the keyboard at four o’clock in the morning and have
0:24:52 3,000 pages of the letter M and just go, okay, this doesn’t really work anymore for me. And then
0:25:01 I started rescheduling, trying different things out. Part of what I discovered particularly
0:25:09 about being a novelist is writing a novel works best if you can do the same day over and over again.
0:25:16 The closer you can come to just Groundhog Day, you just repeat that day. You set up a day that
0:25:25 works for yourself. The last novel that I actually wrote, I was at Torrey Amos’s wonderful house in
0:25:32 Florida. She has this lovely sort of house on the water that she’s lent me many times to go and write
0:25:42 in. And I went down there and I would get up in the morning, I would go for a jog, come back, do my
0:25:51 yoga, get dressed, get in the car, drive down to a little cafe where there were just enough people
0:25:56 around that I knew that other people existed, but nobody that I would ever be tempted to talk to.
0:26:04 And I would order myself a large cup of green tea, sit in the corner and just start writing.
0:26:14 And I would do that day over and over and over and over. And, you know, a couple of months later,
0:26:18 looked up and I had the ocean at the end of the lane, which was only meant to have been a short
0:26:25 story anyway. It just kept going. That I think works really, really well. I also think that the
0:26:34 most important thing for human beings is to be aware of the change. The biggest problem we run
0:26:41 into is going, this is who I am, this is what I’m like, this is how I function, while failing to
0:26:47 notice that you don’t do that anymore. I’m perfectly aware that I may one day become one of those
0:26:55 people who wakes up early in the morning and goes and writes. My friend Gene Wolfe, who is now in
0:27:05 his late 80s and is one of, you know, the finest writers that America has for years, was an editor
0:27:13 of a magazine about factories. I think it was called Plant Engineering. So he’d get up at four
0:27:18 o’clock in the morning and write for an hour before anything else, before the day started,
0:27:24 before he had to leave for work, and before anybody else was up. And that was how he did it.
0:27:31 I cannot imagine getting up in the morning and just writing. That’s not how my head works. I need
0:27:38 a while to get here. But I can absolutely imagine that one day I’ll have become one of those morning
0:27:46 writers from having been a late night writer in my youth and an afternoon writer in my middle age,
0:27:48 in my dotage, I could absolutely become a morning writer.
0:27:54 In your dotage, I think that’s going to take a while. What are the types of things that you
0:28:00 learned from Terry or picked up? The biggest thing looking back on it that I learned from
0:28:10 Terry Pratchett was a willingness to go forward without knowing what happens. You might know
0:28:14 what happens next, but you don’t know what happens after that. But it’s okay because
0:28:25 you’re a grown-up and you will figure it out. There’s lots of metaphors for writing a novel,
0:28:32 and George R. R. Martin, for example, divides writers into architects and gardeners.
0:28:40 And I can be an architect if I have to, but I’d rather be a gardener. I would rather plant the
0:28:47 seeds, water them, and figure out what I’m growing as they grow, and then prune it and trim it and
0:28:53 pleach it, whatever I need to do to make something beautiful that appears intentional.
0:28:58 But at the end of the day, you have to allow for accidents and randomness and just what happens
0:29:08 when things grow. So the joy of Good Omens really, I mean, the best thing about Good Omens was having
0:29:15 Terry Pratchett as an audience, because if I could make Terry laugh, it’s like hitting the
0:29:19 thing in the circus with the hammer. If you bing the bell at the top, that’s what I did when I
0:29:27 could make Terry laugh. Many, many of my fans are your fans, and just as Terry shared his gifts
0:29:31 with the world, you continue to share yours, and it has an impact. It helped me through some very
0:29:37 tough times. He was able to transport me, delight me, shock me, scare me, and take me through a
0:29:43 whole range of emotions I didn’t at the time, even though I had access to. So I want to thank you for
0:29:47 making good art and sharing it with the world. You’ve done a great job.
0:29:50 You are so ridiculously welcome. Thank you.
0:29:57 Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors, and we’ll be right back to the show.
0:30:03 This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. When you’re hiring for your small business, you
0:30:08 want to find quality professionals that are right for the role as soon as possible. That’s why you
0:30:13 have to check out LinkedIn Jobs. LinkedIn Jobs has the tools to help find the right professionals
0:30:19 for your team, faster, and for free. LinkedIn isn’t just a job board. LinkedIn helps you hire
0:30:24 professionals you can’t find anywhere else, even those who aren’t actively searching for a new job,
0:30:30 but who might be open to the perfect role. In any given month, more than 70% of LinkedIn users
0:30:35 don’t visit other job sites. So if you’re not looking on LinkedIn, if you’re not using LinkedIn,
0:30:40 you are in the wrong place. More than 2.5 million small businesses use LinkedIn for hiring,
0:30:45 with 86% getting a qualified candidate within 24 hours. LinkedIn knows that small business
0:30:50 owners, leaders, execs are wearing so many hats, they’re stretched then. They might not have the
0:30:55 time or resources to hire in any drawn out way. So LinkedIn is constantly finding ways to make
0:30:59 the process easier. In fact, they just launched a feature that helps you write job descriptions,
0:31:07 making the entire thing A to Z faster and much simpler. So hire professionals like a professional
0:31:14 on LinkedIn. And now you can post your job for free at LinkedIn.com/Tim. That’s LinkedIn.com/Tim
0:31:17 to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply.
0:31:30 And now Debbie Milman, host of the Design Matters podcast, chair of the SVA Master’s in Branding
0:31:37 Program, editorial director for Print Magazine, and one of Graphic Design USA’s most influential
0:31:44 designers working today. You can find Debbie on Twitter and Instagram @debbiemilman.
0:31:49 Debbie, welcome to the show. Thank you, Tim. It’s really wonderful to be here.
0:31:55 I have wanted to interview you on numerous occasions now over the last few years. So
0:32:00 I’m thrilled that we are finally doing this point number one. And I thought I would start with a
0:32:06 question that someone like yourself who has explored so many different things and so many
0:32:13 different formats, when someone asks you, what do you do? Let’s say you meet someone at a party,
0:32:17 they say, what do you do? What is your answer to that? That’s a tough question.
0:32:26 What do I say? Well, now I say that I’m a designer. And sometimes if I’m feeling
0:32:34 wordy, I’ll say that I’m a designer and a writer and a podcaster. And sometimes people look at me
0:32:41 like, huh? Like, huh? Too many hyphens. What does that mean? Exactly. I found when I was working
0:32:49 at Sterling Brands, which I did for over two decades, I had resolved to just saying when I was
0:32:57 filling out what I did on passport applications and things like that, I used to say executive.
0:33:03 And that made sense. Executive is a great catchall. Executive is a great catchall.
0:33:08 For a long time on Twitter, I had Debbie Milman as a girl, until enough people said,
0:33:10 “Debbie, you’ve really got to change that.” And then I did.
0:33:17 The Internet. Well, you could put anything there. And I think about 10% of the people who come
0:33:22 across will be outraged for one reason or another. Oh, yes. I’ve found that the very things that
0:33:26 delight and excite some people are the same exact things that outrage others. It’s really hard to
0:33:31 please everybody all the time. I think that if you try to please all the people all the time,
0:33:36 you’ll just end up displeasing yourself all the time. That’s the only guaranteed outcome there.
0:33:42 Oh, Tim, I learned that the hard way. Well, I want to talk about so many things, Debbie. But
0:33:50 let’s start with, and for those people wondering, I always ask my guests beforehand, are there any
0:33:56 particular, say, prompts for stories that we could explore that might be fun to dig into?
0:34:02 And one of them was drawing you did when eight years old. And so I know nothing about this.
0:34:07 And I just want to start there since it seems to make sense to begin at the beginning.
0:34:15 Well, I have somewhat of a pack rat mentality. I keep things. I’m a sentimentalist at heart.
0:34:25 And I like to keep things from all different stages of my life. And I have boxes of journals and
0:34:32 drawings and all sorts of report cards. And you name it, I have it. Well, apparently I got this
0:34:39 trait from my mother, who a couple of years ago did what a lot of good old Jews do. She moved
0:34:48 from Queens, New York to Florida. The Great Migration. Yes. And before she moved, she unloaded
0:34:55 several boxes of ephemera of mine that she had kept unbeknownst to me. And I went through everything
0:35:02 quite gingerly. It was all sort of folded up very neatly and very tidally and came across
0:35:09 an illustration that I did when I was about eight years old. And after I admired my handiwork,
0:35:15 because I thought, wow, eight years old, I was like rocking the drawings. I realized that this
0:35:22 particular drawing had predicted my whole life. And so I will try to explain this drawing as best
0:35:29 as I can. And for some backstory, I am a native New Yorker. I was born in Brooklyn when I was
0:35:35 about two years old. My parents took me to Howard Beach, Queens. I moved there before there were
0:35:42 any sidewalks. That will give you a little bit of a sense of how old I am. I lived there until I was
0:35:48 about, I was in the middle of a third grade, and we moved to Staten Island. And I lived on Staten
0:35:53 Island until I was in the fifth grade. End of fifth grade, my parents got divorced. My mom took
0:36:00 my brother and I was two and a half years younger than I am to Long Island. My childhood was spent
0:36:09 in almost all of the boroughs except Manhattan. And for some reason, I had a, I guess, a sense of
0:36:16 what Manhattan looked like and felt like probably from television. And at eight years old, I drew
0:36:22 a picture of the streets of Manhattan. I’m walking, I’m a little girl. I’m walking along with my
0:36:30 mother. My mother, by the way, is wearing a very popular Barbie outfit of the time, an outfit called
0:36:38 Tangerine Dream, which I really loved. I put her in that outfit. And despite not having a lot of
0:36:44 time on the streets or any time on the streets of Manhattan, I drew it in quite good detail. There
0:36:51 were buildings and buses and taxis. And I labeled everything. I labeled the cleaners cleaners. And
0:36:58 I labeled the bank bank. And I labeled the taxi taxi. In the middle of the street, there is a
0:37:10 delivery truck. And I not only labeled the delivery truck, I also drew the sign on the delivery truck.
0:37:20 And the sign was Lays Potato Chips. I drew the logo at eight years old. And when I saw this drawing,
0:37:26 I realized that I had predicted my whole life. I’m a native New Yorker now living in Manhattan.
0:37:32 I’ve been living in Manhattan for 33 years. I go to the bank. I go to the cleaners. I take lots of
0:37:38 taxis, lots of buses. And at the time I found this drawing, I was drawing logos for a living.
0:37:48 And had I known that it would have been that easy just to follow that drawing,
0:37:53 I would have saved decades of experiments in failure and rejection.
0:37:59 This is fascinating to me for a number of reasons. I’ve had a few guests on the podcast.
0:38:05 Chris Sokka would be another example as an investor. And he at some point wrote in a journal. Well,
0:38:10 I think it was one of these composition notebooks with the sort of model black and white zebra slash
0:38:16 camouflage covers. What he would be when he was 40 years old. And he must have done this when he was
0:38:20 10 or 12, something like that. And he found it in his, I think his parents’ garage
0:38:26 later around the age of 42 or something like that. And it also predicted effectively exactly
0:38:35 what he would be doing. But it was lost in the slipstream. And he took this very meandering
0:38:41 in some ways odd, seemingly fractured path to come right back to where he started in a sense.
0:38:49 Did you then, it sounds like you didn’t follow that plan that had was so neatly summarized
0:38:52 in this picture, because there are folks out there say, you know, when I was five, I knew I
0:39:00 always wanted to be X. But what was your, when did you figure out that you wanted to actually
0:39:02 do what was in that drawing on some level that you wanted to be a designer?
0:39:10 I actually never set out to be a designer. I thought that I was going to be a journalist.
0:39:19 The only thing that I knew for sure when I was in college was that when I graduated,
0:39:23 I wanted to live in Manhattan. At that point, I had not ever lived in Manhattan.
0:39:33 And that was my big dream. And I came to Manhattan the summer of 1983. I often
0:39:39 say that that was the summer of David Bowie’s modern love and the police’s synchronicity.
0:39:46 I saw both concerts that summer. I moved into a sublet apartment with a friend that had also
0:39:53 recently graduated. She had found a sublet on the corner of Hudson and Perry streets in the village.
0:39:59 I didn’t know it at the time, but moving into an apartment on the intersection of Hudson and Perry
0:40:09 was almost as if I was entering the movie “Gidget Goes to Manhattan.” I didn’t know where I was
0:40:16 going. It was quite serendipitous. My friend Jay found the apartment for us. Unfortunately,
0:40:22 that wonderful summer turned out rather unfortunate because the woman who Jay and I were subletting
0:40:28 from was rather than paying the rent with the rent money that she was getting from us,
0:40:32 was keeping it and not paying the rent. So at the end of the summer, we all got evicted.
0:40:42 Surprise. Yeah, I ended up appealing to the landlord to please, please help me find some
0:40:46 place else to live because I really didn’t have any place else to go. And he ended up being able
0:40:52 to rent me another one of the apartments he had in another building he owned on 16th Street.
0:40:59 Which was a fourth floor tenement walk-up, a railroad flat that I couldn’t afford on my own
0:41:04 and ended up living with a couple. My roommates were a couple because it was a railroad flat.
0:41:09 I had to walk through the apartment, which meant through their bedroom to get to mine,
0:41:15 which often meant I was stuck on one side or the other depending on their nocturnal habits
0:41:23 or afternoon delight depending on what they were doing and lived there for about five years before
0:41:29 I ended up moving back into the village for a short period of time. So that was the one thing
0:41:35 I knew that I wanted to live in Manhattan. I did not know that I could be a designer,
0:41:41 that I would be a designer, or that design was even a discipline until my senior year of college.
0:41:49 I had worked my way up to be the editor of the arts and features section of the student newspaper
0:41:56 at SUNY Albany where I went to school and realized very quickly that as much as I loved
0:42:03 assigning articles and coming up with themes for this section of the newspaper, I was endlessly
0:42:10 fascinated by putting the paper together, by designing the paper, and thus a baby designer
0:42:17 was born. I took all of one class in design while I was in college and really learned almost
0:42:23 everything I knew at that time working in the newsroom, putting the paper together, everything
0:42:29 was done, old school layout, paste up, computer graphic machines, stat cameras, and then when I
0:42:36 graduated was both doing freelance editorial and freelance layout and paste up for the first couple
0:42:42 years of my career. When did you start at the student newspaper? Was that something you started
0:42:49 at the very beginning and followed throughout your, I guess, undergrad experience? I wanted to
0:42:56 write for the student newspaper. I think the very first issue I saw when I got to SUNY Albany
0:43:02 freshman year and went up to the student newspaper which was on the third floor of the campus center
0:43:11 and approached the editor at the time and asked if I could be a writer or offered my services,
0:43:20 volunteered my services, and he looked at me and asked me if I had any clips, and I was like,
0:43:25 you know, I didn’t say what I was thinking but like hair clips. I didn’t know what I was talking
0:43:31 about and I didn’t have anything and I didn’t know what to do and I was embarrassed and humiliated
0:43:41 and ashamed and sort of scurried away and didn’t go back until my junior year. I was so intimidated
0:43:46 by the talent and the work that was coming out of that newsroom and it was at the time
0:43:51 and very well may still be one of the best student newspapers in the country. It came
0:43:57 twice a week, Tuesdays and Fridays, and I would, I was just enamored with this newspaper
0:44:03 and I fantasized about writing really pithy erudite letters to the editor-in-chief
0:44:08 that would then get published in, you know, the letters to the editor section
0:44:15 and they would realize what a great writer I was and then invite me to be a reporter and I’d sort of
0:44:20 walk around like Rosalind Russell with a pencil behind my ear and my heels click-clacking in the
0:44:26 newsroom and of course that never happened. I never wrote one letter to the editor and
0:44:31 for some reason in I guess an aberrant moment of courage, I went back up to the newsroom my
0:44:40 second semester junior year and there was a women’s uprising and this student went to this
0:44:44 student health food store and they were like, “Could you go cover that?” and I was like, “Yeah,
0:44:50 absolutely.” And I went and did it and that was how I started writing for the paper. I then wrote a
0:44:56 piece about an exhibit in the art center and by the end of my second semester junior year only
0:45:02 because I think no one else would take it. I was offered the job of being editor of the
0:45:10 Arts and Features section and began that summer. That senior year in college was one of the most
0:45:21 exciting and best years of my life in that for the first time ever I felt like I had purpose.
0:45:26 Suddenly working on this paper, I felt like I was participating bigger than myself. I felt like I was
0:45:36 I had some reason for being and I loved learning about design. I loved being able to work with
0:45:42 writers and I felt for the first time in my life really excited about something.
0:45:47 I want to talk about that aberrant moment of courage and dig into that a bit. So you were
0:45:53 rejected from or maybe you’ve rejected yourself or both initially when you approached the paper,
0:45:59 then years later you have this aberrant moment of courage. What precipitated that? Was there a
0:46:06 conversation, a realization, you watched a movie? What triggered that? Do you remember?
0:46:10 I actually don’t. I wish that I did. It would make it for a much better story and certainly a
0:46:17 better interview. What I can tell you is that all these years later I have noticed a pattern in my
0:46:28 life of being very easily hurt by an initial reaction or an initial rejection so much so
0:46:37 that it thwarts any other attempt at making something like that happen for a very long time.
0:46:48 I am extremely sensitive and any rejection sort of takes me off of that path for quite a long
0:46:54 time. It takes me a while to recover. Could you give any examples of that? I would say my entire
0:47:00 life. I can give you 43 examples. Get comfortable, Tim. I’m definitely settling in
0:47:05 with my water. I’m ready to go. Well, there I was rejected that first year of college took me
0:47:10 then three years to go back again. I might have been feeling confident about something else that
0:47:16 had gone well in my life and thought, “What the heck? Why not go back and try?” And then took those
0:47:23 steps up to the campus center and went back up to the third floor and asked again, “I am somebody
0:47:31 that has a very hard time taking no for an answer, but it takes me a long time to recalibrate and get
0:47:41 my courage back to continue to keep trying.” And when I graduated, because I had such a hard time
0:47:51 finding a job initially that I really loved and because I was having so much trouble figuring
0:47:58 out what I wanted to do with my life, I kept bouncing around from opportunity to opportunity.
0:48:05 And every time I would try something new and would ultimately get rejected, I used that first
0:48:12 rejection almost as a permission slip to avoid having to try again. So when I graduated, I started
0:48:17 working at a couple of different magazines. I worked for a cable magazine and I worked for a
0:48:22 rock magazine doing layout and paste up and some editing. And at the time thought, “Oh, I’m really
0:48:27 enjoying this, but I don’t really feel qualified to be doing this. Maybe I should go back to school
0:48:34 and get a master’s degree in journalism.” And I lived in the neighborhood of a very good journalism
0:48:39 school, the Columbia School of Journalism. And my dad had gone to Columbia and studied pharmacy,
0:48:44 and I thought, “Why not apply to the Columbia School of Journalism?” But that was the only school
0:48:48 I applied to. I thought, “You know, I want to consider getting a master’s degree in journalism.”
0:48:52 There are a lot of good journalism schools in New York City, but for some reason I had my heart
0:49:00 set on this one school. I didn’t get in. I got rejected and abandoned my hopes or dream of going
0:49:05 to get a master’s degree in journalism shortly thereafter because I also am a painter. I had
0:49:13 been accepted into a show at Long Island University, the Brooklyn campus, and got some good reviews and
0:49:18 thought, “Hmm, maybe I should become an artist. I love doing this. I’m getting some good response
0:49:23 from it, but I don’t feel qualified or educated enough. Maybe I should get an advanced degree in
0:49:28 art.” And I applied to the Whitney School, the Whitney Museum of Art had an independent study
0:49:33 program that would allow me to continue working during the day. I applied for that. I had really
0:49:39 good references, wonderful clips at that point, some good reviews. And I got rejected to that
0:49:47 and then abandoned that dream. And so it’s been a long history of making an attempt,
0:49:55 getting that early rejection, retreating, and then finally sort of licking my wounds,
0:50:02 re-knitting my confidence or hopes and dreams together and then trying to do something else or
0:50:11 trying again. So a few questions. The first is, what would you have or what would you say to your
0:50:20 college self after that first rejection at the newspaper? Or what advice would you give someone
0:50:27 who had the near identical experience and was hardwired the same way? Well, it’s an interesting
0:50:33 question, Tim, because I have the benefit of hindsight. And looking back on those years,
0:50:46 yes, I certainly could have tried again sooner and maybe had more of a runway to experiment and grow
0:50:57 and learn in that newsroom and in that environment. But I also think that those years in between
0:51:08 learning and growing in other ways contributed to my ability to then when appointed the editor of
0:51:15 the Arts and Features section, I somehow had a lot more to pull from. And maybe this is
0:51:23 my own sort of synthesizing happiness or calibrating to my own set point or looking back
0:51:31 and thinking, well, it all sort of worked out. So why give somebody advice that I wouldn’t have
0:51:39 necessarily taken at that point? What I would say is, don’t accept the first rejection ever.
0:51:49 Give yourself options. The timeliness of those options or the timeliness of those retries. Do at
0:51:57 your own pace. You’re not in competition with anybody but yourself. So if you are rejected to
0:52:04 something that you want, then think about what it is that caused that rejection
0:52:13 and work to better understand how you can present your best possible self when you try again.
0:52:19 Your clips mention where you’re like clips, hair clips reminded me of a story I heard when I was
0:52:21 a student. So you work with a lot of students and we’re going to come back to that.
0:52:25 Oh, Tim, can I add one more thing? Of course.
0:52:27 I’m sorry. This is an interesting…
0:52:28 You can add many things, please.
0:52:35 So one thing that I haven’t shared about this particular story is that the young man that
0:52:43 rejected me that first year is somebody that I then befriended in that experience of working at
0:52:53 the paper that junior year. And I graduated in 1983. It is now 2017. And I have been friends with
0:52:58 that man. His name is Robert Edelstein. I have been friends with him ever since.
0:53:04 So just because somebody rejects you doesn’t mean that they don’t like you. First of all,
0:53:12 he didn’t even reject me. He asked me for a very reasonable… He asked me for something very
0:53:17 reasonable. He asked me for some examples of my writing. I was so intimidated and was so embarrassed
0:53:22 by not knowing exactly what he meant and the fact that I didn’t have anything other than some things
0:53:27 from high school, which I didn’t feel were appropriate, that I was the one that rejected
0:53:32 myself in many ways. One of the interesting things that I have found is… And Rob is not
0:53:38 the only person that I can point to as being somebody that initially provided some sort of
0:53:47 obstacle or roadblock that was a reasonable one. And then ultimately, I befriended and we’ve become…
0:53:54 We are now lifelong friends. He didn’t even remember rejecting me that freshman year and is
0:54:01 mortified now by the notion that he might have done anything to hurt my feelings. So one of the
0:54:07 other things that I would suggest that people consider if they believe they are being rejected
0:54:13 is consider what the perception from the other person doing the rejection or the supposed
0:54:19 rejection might be. And that sense of empathy might be really helpful in understanding where
0:54:25 you’re coming from and what you’re bringing to that specific example or that specific experience.
0:54:31 And I’d like to underscore this because it’s such an important point. And I, in some respects,
0:54:39 like you, have been very sensitive. I still am, in some respects, very sensitive. And my
0:54:47 particular brand of that or my particular type of response is to feel some type of sense of
0:54:54 injustice. And so I’ll get rejected. And looking back at what I see as a rejection, either when I
0:54:58 did this perhaps 10 years ago, I looked at a number of instances where I felt like I’d been
0:55:05 rejected via email and so on, that, A, it wasn’t a rejection for all time. It was a not now. It was a
0:55:13 very temporary impossibility due to logistics. And I took that as a no not ever and felt very hurt
0:55:20 by that and didn’t try a second time in many cases. Yeah, absolutely. So number one, no may
0:55:25 just mean no, not right now. And you can even clarify that, right? You can ask that as a
0:55:30 clarifying question. Number two is that at some point someone said to me, and this doesn’t apply
0:55:35 to your particular instance, but don’t ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence.
0:55:40 And that didn’t cover it all for me, though, but it really made a profound impact on me
0:55:46 when I was told this, because I would read email with inserting, if I were doing an audio book
0:55:53 of the other person’s voice, some type of really angry, upset person, and nine times out of 10,
0:55:58 that wasn’t the tone at all. It was just I was misreading it. So I started to assume for myself,
0:56:03 don’t ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence or just busyness. The person is
0:56:07 busy. If they send you a really short response to your mini novella of an email, it doesn’t mean
0:56:11 that they think you’re worthless or not worth their time. It could just mean that they have 10
0:56:16 times more to do than you do. And it’s sometimes hard to have that perspective when, particularly,
0:56:22 you’re starting out and you’re a bit fragile and you’re on wobbly legs, and you send this huge
0:56:26 outpouring of your emotion to someone you respect. And then they respond with, “Sorry, kid, not right
0:56:30 now.” And you’re like, “Really? That’s it?” And then, you know, I’m not going to name names,
0:56:35 but there’s someone who now I’m very close friends with, extremely well-respected writer.
0:56:42 And I got one of these one line responses in 2005 or 2006 when I sent an early manuscript of the
0:56:48 four hour work week to this person via email. And the response was, “Effectively,
0:56:54 thanks, but sorry, don’t have time to read this right now. No, dear Tim, no signature, just one
0:57:00 line.” And I felt so slighted by this that I held this subconscious grudge for years. And now we’re
0:57:03 really good friends. And the whole thing is ludicrous in retrospect. One thing that I find
0:57:11 about human nature is that ambiguity is always perceived negatively. So there might be nothing
0:57:20 in that one line email that would be in any way disparaging or insulting or anything. But because
0:57:27 we as humans perceive ambiguity negatively, we tend to read into things that aren’t there
0:57:33 in a way that makes us feel bad. But I also think that a lot of that, for me, comes from
0:57:44 having a very sort of fragile center and not necessarily thinking that they are specifically
0:57:51 upset with me because of something that I’ve done, but just because everything that I do is
0:57:57 sort of bad, they’re just cognizant of that. So it’s not something specific, it’s just something
0:58:02 all-encompassing. And so that’s been something I’ve been struggling to overcome over the decades.
0:58:11 So I have a few questions about how you came to find your niche or the first time
0:58:19 you clicked into place, so to speak, doing something that resembles what you ended up doing
0:58:25 up to this point. But before I get to that, just to put a button in the anecdote related to clips,
0:58:29 so you mentioned clips, you got clips, hair clips. I was told this story by a professor in college
0:58:37 about Nantucket Nectars when it was just getting started. And I believe two guys who were really
0:58:42 faking it until they made it in a lot of respects. And at one point, they were meeting with this
0:58:47 distributor because they had been selling these concoctions via boats in Nantucket from boat to
0:58:52 boat to boat. And they wanted to go into retail. And it met with this, it was either a retailer
0:58:57 or distributor, but it was early on. And they were really nervous. And the Mukdi Muk they were
0:59:06 meeting with, at least in their eyes, said, “Do you have a lot of POS materials?” And they looked
0:59:11 at each other like, “Oh, shit.” And they said, “Oh, POS, we’re all about POS.” And he’s like,
0:59:16 “Good, good, good.” And then they walked out, they’re like, “What the hell is POS?” Point of sale,
0:59:23 which of course, you know, plenty about. But I wanted to, before we get to when you sort of
0:59:30 first clicked into your niche and how that happened, you mentioned knowing that you wanted to be in
0:59:36 Manhattan. And I’ve been thinking a lot about the components of, and this is a dangerous word
0:59:43 sometimes, but happiness. And that oftentimes we think of the journalist W’s, right, the
0:59:49 interactive, the why, the what, the where, and so on of happiness. And I think humans tend to at
0:59:55 least put why at the top, then maybe what somewhere lower, and then where is often an afterthought.
1:00:00 But I’ve started to believe that the where is much more critical than we give it credit for,
1:00:04 and that you can actually start there. So I thought about this a lot for myself, but really
1:00:09 the how important the geography can be, because it determines in large measure who you’re surrounded
1:00:14 with all the time, and what you’re surrounded with all the time. But I guess it’s more of an
1:00:19 observation than a question. But if you think about that, how do you think about the components of
1:00:25 happiness or well-being for yourself? Well, there’s sort of two parts to the question,
1:00:33 I think. And the first is this notion of New York sort of being the place that I wanted to be.
1:00:43 And what I told myself at that time, and then ultimately how that leads to happiness or
1:00:52 fulfillment. And one of the things that I struggled with when I first moved to Manhattan or when I
1:00:59 first graduated really was what was I going to be? What was I going to do? I didn’t have
1:01:07 a lot of money. I didn’t have any network. And I certainly didn’t have any type of connection to
1:01:16 any ins for apartments or jobs or anything like that. And I wanted very badly to be in Manhattan.
1:01:22 That was something that I knew for sure. In thinking about what I wanted with my life,
1:01:30 I knew that I wanted to do something creative. One of my big hopes and dreams at that time
1:01:35 was to work at Condé Nast and I did apply and I did get a call back and I got rejected and then
1:01:45 never tried again, another example of that. But one of the more high altitude aspirations was either
1:01:50 being an artist or being a writer. So being more of a fine artist and not a commercial artist.
1:02:02 But at the time, I did not think that my chances of success at that would either be possible,
1:02:09 and certainly if it were possible, not fast. And because I wanted to live in New York City,
1:02:16 because I wanted to live in Manhattan, I felt that I needed to be able to get a job
1:02:22 that would pay my rent because I didn’t want to be a waitress and because I didn’t want to be a
1:02:34 bartender. I needed to make some type of reasonable income in order to pay that rent. And so I have
1:02:44 been telling myself for decades now that I decided that I needed to work as a designer
1:02:52 because I needed to have some sort of income that would give me some sense of self-sufficiency.
1:02:57 Self-sufficiency has been enormously important to me and I’ve said that for years and years
1:03:04 and years and that being safe and secure and being able to manage the course of my own life,
1:03:10 having financial stability was something that was a bit of a lead gene for me in making the
1:03:17 decisions that I did. And back in that summer of David Bowie and the police, I remember coming
1:03:22 home from a club one night and I was on the corner of Bleaker Street and Sixth Avenue,
1:03:28 and it suddenly occurred to me that I had to make a decision. And the decision was,
1:03:37 what was I going to do? And I realized that if I wanted to be an artist or a writer that I would
1:03:45 likely have to take some type of job that would not necessarily be able to safeguard what I
1:03:52 considered to be my financial future and therefore made this little pact with myself in my head
1:04:00 that I would become a designer so that I could make enough money to be able to be secure.
1:04:07 And I’ve been telling myself that for decades, what I realized in the last couple of years
1:04:14 was that I was unbeknownst to my psyche, my consciousness, I was lying to myself. I was
1:04:23 absolutely positively lying to myself because more than the self-sufficiency was the desire
1:04:32 to be in Manhattan. I could have easily become or more easily become an artist or a fine artist
1:04:38 or a writer if I didn’t want to live in the most expensive city in the world. I could have gone
1:04:44 and lived with my mother in Queens. I could have lived with friends in Albany. I could have had
1:04:52 seven roommates in a little commune in Bed-Stuy. There would have been any number of things
1:05:01 that I could have done if my lead gene had been artistic purity. But no, I told myself that it
1:05:07 was because of X, Y, and Z, but really what it was was the most important thing to me at that point
1:05:14 in my life was being in Manhattan. And I lived in a fourth floor tenement walk-up. I had to walk
1:05:20 through somebody else’s bedroom to get to mine. I was living on a floor with people that were
1:05:25 constantly the other tenants in the building were locking each other out. It was an elderly
1:05:30 couple and they were always fighting. There were a whole family of pigeons living on the
1:05:36 fire escape outside of my window in my bedroom, which was so decrepit. I couldn’t even open the
1:05:41 window in the summertime and there was no air conditioning in this apartment. I mean, the
1:05:49 conditions that I lived in were deplorable, but yet that was the most important thing to me.
1:05:54 So when I talk to people now about what do they want to do when they first graduate,
1:06:01 I ask them to think about what is the one most important thing to you? What is the one most
1:06:08 important thing to you? Because if it is truly the one most important thing to you, you will likely
1:06:15 do whatever it takes to get it. And the most important thing to me was not being a writer
1:06:20 and it was not being an artist. It was living in Manhattan and I did whatever it took and lived
1:06:26 in whatever conditions that I needed to in order to make that happen. I think that’s a really
1:06:32 important realization. Oh, definitely. By hook or crook, you’re living in Manhattan.
1:06:41 And that is the outcome in part of all of these decisions and the lead gene, as you put it.
1:06:47 Where does the need for stability, security or the desire for that come from?
1:06:53 I do think that it’s certainly in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs a really important one.
1:07:01 For me, it takes on an extra level of significance in that I grew up in a really,
1:07:09 really challenging environment. So my parents got divorced when I was very young. I was about
1:07:16 eight years old and I had a very, very complicated relationship with my father. My father died last
1:07:26 year unexpectedly. My father sort of in my daughter eyes was brilliant, charismatic. He was an
1:07:37 incredibly well-spoken man. He was also extremely turbulent. He had a lot of anger issues and
1:07:44 over the course of our lives together, I had five different experiences with him where
1:07:52 he rejected me and decided that he didn’t want me in his life. So one of those periods was
1:07:58 about nine years. So we had a very, very turbulent relationship. When my parents got divorced,
1:08:04 I told myself at the time that I was really happy about that because I was so scared of his anger
1:08:12 and so scared of the anger that they had for each other. About a year after my parents got divorced,
1:08:23 my mother married again and she married a man who was physically and sexually abusive to me,
1:08:30 physically abusive to my brother and also sexually abusive to one of his two biological
1:08:37 daughters and severely, severely beat us for four years. During that time, it was one of the times,
1:08:43 the first time actually, that I was estranged from my biological father and so I had a lot of
1:08:52 brutality in my life and after they got divorced, I was 13, my father came back into my life,
1:08:59 my mother then got involved with another man who was 10 years younger than her, so therefore only
1:09:06 10 years older than me and was also, I guess I’ll put it sexually provocative with me and also
1:09:12 emotionally abusive. So for the first like 18 years of my life, I lived in a state of constant
1:09:21 terror and compensated or self-soothed with art, with a lot of extracurricular activities in school.
1:09:28 I was always an overachiever probably in an effort to prove to myself and to my family that I wasn’t
1:09:35 worthy of the abuse that was being inflicted on me. I wanted so much more for my life even back
1:09:44 then and grew up thinking that if I had the resources to take care of myself, that I would
1:09:52 never allow anything bad to happen to me, not quite a realistic expectation, but was something that I
1:09:59 felt was possible to do. Of course, it’s not. That takes decades to also figure out, but at that
1:10:05 time, I wanted very badly to be able to live in my own home, to be able to take care of myself,
1:10:11 and to be in a position where I would never be vulnerable again, sort of Scarlett O’Hara.
1:10:16 I’m never going to go hungry again. Yeah, it doesn’t always work out that way, but it was
1:10:21 definitely the journey that I’ve been on. Well, thank you for sharing that. I had no idea.
1:10:26 It’s not something I talk about a lot, mostly because I’ve had an enormous amount of shame
1:10:31 about it. That’s a very normal thing, and I still do. It’s still very, very hard for me to
1:10:43 share these types of things, but I do think it’s important that people do see that there is hope
1:10:54 for a better life, even when you are the victim of these types of situations. I’ve spent a lot of
1:11:02 time working on better integrating those experiences into my life in a way to not only understand
1:11:14 what happened, why it happened, what the aftermath then caused, but also how I can use that empathy
1:11:22 and that understanding to try to help the world. That’s a lot of the reason that I’ve
1:11:28 started to do the work that I do with Mariska Harkitae and the Joyful Heart Foundation,
1:11:35 which is a foundation that Mariska started after she started working on Law and Order
1:11:40 SVU. Shortly after she started working on that television program, she started to receive a
1:11:47 lot of letters from people that the very victim she was trying to find justice for on the television
1:11:54 show and realized that this is way more than a television show. This is a huge opportunity to
1:11:58 make a difference in our culture. Shortly thereafter, started the Joyful Heart Foundation,
1:12:06 which is an organization to help eradicate domestic violence, sexual assault, and child abuse.
1:12:13 I’ve been working with Mariska and Miley Zambuto, the CEO of the Foundation now for the last five
1:12:18 years. This work, I believe, the branding work that I’ve been able to do with them,
1:12:25 taking into all the expertise I’ve had in repositioning and branding some of the biggest
1:12:34 CPG companies in the world and now dovetailing that with my own background really,
1:12:37 truly makes me feel like my whole life makes sense, Tim.
1:12:46 That’s beautiful. I’m really glad you’re talking about this because I can imagine a very different
1:12:53 experience, but I’ve had my own battles with darkness of different types, and it’s very easy
1:12:59 to believe that you are alone or isolated or that things will never change. I’m sure there are people
1:13:06 listening who have had similar experiences to yours who have never talked about them or
1:13:12 have never found a way to perhaps integrate or reconcile them, and this might be an incredible
1:13:16 catalyst for them. I would love to ask, if you’re open to talking about it for yourself, have you
1:13:24 found any particular avenues or types of work to be particularly helpful to you? Of course,
1:13:29 the work that you’re doing with the Joyful Heart Foundation, but apart from that, are there any
1:13:37 particular types of exercises or work or anything really that has helped you to be more at peace
1:13:48 with your experience? I think that the work that I’ve done in therapy has saved my life. I have
1:14:00 always been really dedicated to my therapy and have been in therapy with the same
1:14:05 analyst now for over two decades. What type of therapy is that? If you don’t mind me asking,
1:14:13 I know very little about it. The person who I work with is a PhD. She was very involved in the
1:14:22 psychoanalytic community in New York City. She’s now living in Santa Fe. I think that it’s a combination
1:14:30 of a number of different philosophies and theories, probably at its foundation, psychoanalysis,
1:14:38 but certainly with quite a lot of variations. It’s talk therapy. I started back in the early 90s,
1:14:44 five days a week, and then moved down to three days, and now I’m usually two to three days.
1:14:52 It is enormously helpful to help me try to make sense of these experiences that I’ve had
1:15:00 for anybody that is either in the midst of experiencing them or experiencing the aftermath.
1:15:07 There are a lot of resources. One of the things that I experienced when I was in the midst of
1:15:14 these experiences was a sense of profound aloneness. The worst experiences I had
1:15:25 were in the 70s. At the time, the topic wasn’t one that was as understood. I didn’t know
1:15:34 what was happening to me. I thought I was the only person in the world that this was happening to,
1:15:44 because it seemed so surreal and unnatural and punishing. It didn’t occur to me that this was
1:15:54 pervasive, that this was a cultural epidemic. I was told at the time by the perpetrator that
1:16:02 if I told anybody that he had the resources to hurt my brother and my mother, that he would kill
1:16:12 them. It’s horrible. I believed that. I was a little girl. I believed that, and I was protecting
1:16:22 them. I didn’t know that I had any other resources, none, and didn’t even tell my mother until after
1:16:29 they got divorced. Tim, I didn’t want to be the reason. I didn’t want to be blamed. I also didn’t
1:16:33 think anybody would believe me, and I didn’t want my mother and my brother to be harmed.
1:16:43 It wasn’t until I was much older that I realized that this was pervasive. For anybody that is
1:16:50 listening, if you feel alone, know that you’re not. You can go to the Joyful Heart Foundation,
1:16:56 thejoyfulheartfoundation.org, and there are resources and phone numbers. You can also go
1:17:03 to nomore.org, which is another organization that I’ve helped. There are resources and people
1:17:08 that are there to help and listen and get you out of the situation that you are in.
1:17:12 Thank you for that. To insert some levity, I’m not sure how to segue from here.
1:17:20 Well, let’s talk about some of the really, really important things that people are doing now to
1:17:26 not only eradicate this type of violence, but also to change the world. One of the other things
1:17:32 that Joyful Heart is doing that I am so proud of is ending the backlog. There are hundreds
1:17:41 of thousands of rape kits that are not being investigated, that are sitting in shelves in
1:17:47 police departments all over the country. The Joyful Heart Foundation, along with Vice President
1:17:55 Joe Biden, has been very involved in getting funding to help analyze those rape kits to be able to
1:18:02 analyze the DNA and get serial rapists off the streets and get justice for the victims of those
1:18:07 crimes. That’s a really, really important thing that they’re doing and something that I feel
1:18:15 can ultimately change not only the rape culture that we’re living in, but also the blaming of
1:18:23 victims so we can change culture by doing this work together. It’s something I’m super proud of.
1:18:28 And to those people listening, all of these resources that are being mentioned throughout
1:18:33 this episode will be in the show notes, so you can certainly find links to no more.org,
1:18:38 the Joyful Heart Foundation, and so on at 4hourworkweek.com/podcast, all spelled out.
1:18:46 Debbie, I’d love to ask you to shift gears just a little bit, or perhaps a lot, to speak up story.
1:18:55 That’s one of my favorite stories. I will let you run with it. I would love for you to share.
1:19:02 Okay, so I want to start this story by letting people know that this was something
1:19:09 that while it was happening, I thought was the worst professional experience of my life.
1:19:17 And it’s turned out to be the most important and life-affirming of my life. So let me tell
1:19:27 you a little bit about the Speak Up story. So the year is 2003, and the time in the world was
1:19:31 quite different than it is now. So we were online, but we weren’t quite online in the way that we
1:19:38 are now. I think YouTube was just, just, just beginning. It was a video sharing site more than
1:19:45 anything. We were online, but we were playing games, and we were ordering from the J. Crew
1:19:50 catalog. I don’t know if people remember when the J. Crew catalog went online. People’s heads
1:19:54 exploded. You could buy things online, and they could be shipped to you, and you don’t have to
1:20:00 leave the house. Oh my God, that’s so amazing. And we were playing games, and we were emailing and
1:20:05 reading the news. And there were forums where people would congregate, but they tended to be
1:20:13 more niche forums and not so much mainstream cultural forums. Prior to that, leading up to that
1:20:22 time in my life, I had joined Sterling Brands in 1995. And this was one of the first moments of that
1:20:29 click that you had mentioned earlier where suddenly, without even realizing it, I had joined a firm
1:20:37 where I was hired to help grow the business via the acquisition of new clients in branding.
1:20:49 And the job was one of the first times in my life where I was almost effortlessly successful.
1:20:56 I think because of my early childhood in my father’s pharmacy, being surrounded by brands,
1:21:01 I had, and my own sort of obsession with things like Lays Potato Ships.
1:21:15 Exactly. I had this almost magical ability to understand why and how people chose the objects
1:21:21 that they did to be part of their lives, mostly the brands that they chose. So I started working
1:21:30 at Sterling Brands and had this heretofore unbelievable level of success financially.
1:21:38 And I really enjoyed it. I am also endlessly fascinated by the choices people make for the
1:21:42 objects in their lives, what they choose to surround themselves with, the kinds of things they
1:21:51 buy and share and eat and wear and so forth. And in as much as I loved what I was doing,
1:21:57 and in as much as I was relishing the level of success that in my early 30s, I was finally,
1:22:05 finally getting, I also was still sort of longing for that artistic, creative sort of
1:22:09 part of my life that I felt was deeply missing.
1:22:12 At that point, what department were you working in?
1:22:18 I was working in marketing and sales, and I wasn’t at that time doing very much design work.
1:22:25 I was doing some work freelance. I had been appointed the off-air creative director at
1:22:32 Hot 97, which is a whole other sort of story to share at some point, but I was working to develop
1:22:38 the identity and the graphics for the first ever hip hop radio station, which happened to be in
1:22:43 New York and was called Hot 97. That was the only thing that I was doing on the side. I started
1:22:50 working at Sterling Brands and was longing for a design community and was longing for a feeling of
1:22:56 being part of something bigger than I was on my own, but something that was much more creative and
1:23:04 had no commercial implications. And I found the AIGA, the American Institute of Graphic Arts,
1:23:10 and they had a special interest group within AIGA called the Brand Experience Center.
1:23:18 And I was so excited. I thought, “Oh my God, this is a Venn diagram of my life. I can do branding.”
1:23:24 And they have designers, and all these famous designers are on the board, and I could meet them,
1:23:29 and I could be part of this great community. And so I went and I volunteered, and I became
1:23:35 a member of AIGA, and I was working with this brand experience group. And I loved it, and I was
1:23:42 appointed to the board, and I felt really, really part of something. And the board term was, I think,
1:23:47 two years. And at the end of the term, if we wanted to be on the board again, we all had to
1:23:54 reapply. And in that two years, I was very active. I went to all the meetings, and we weren’t funded
1:24:01 by AIGA. We had a self-fund, and so I made cupcakes for bake sales, and we had a flea market. And I
1:24:07 was very, very involved in the sort of day-to-day runnings of this little special interest group.
1:24:10 At the end of the two years, we all had to reapply if we wanted to be on the board again,
1:24:15 and every single person reapplied. And every single person was appointed on the board again,
1:24:23 except me. I was rejected. Oh, you set me up with the cupcakes. Oh my God, I know.
1:24:32 Oh, they were really good cupcakes and brownies. And I was devastated. I was just devastated.
1:24:37 And Rick Rafay, who was then the executive director, he had been aware of how much I
1:24:43 wanted to be in AIGA and how much I wanted to do and my aspirations. And I think he felt
1:24:46 really bad for me. He asked me if I wanted to have lunch, and he took me to a very expensive
1:24:53 lunch at 11 Madison and over the course of its lunch. Yeah, it was super wonderful and generous
1:24:57 of him. Over the course of lunch, he said, “Please, please don’t give up on AIGA. We need people
1:25:02 like you and don’t give up. We’ll find a place for you, I promise.” And I guess it’s a bit of a
1:25:10 consolation prize. He asked me if I would be a judge in the upcoming annual competition that
1:25:18 AIGA had called 365. And he asked me if I wanted to be a judge in the package design category.
1:25:23 This, to me, was almost worth being kicked to the curb by this special interest group
1:25:28 of the Brand Experience Center. This was like the biggest honor of my career at that point,
1:25:36 to be a judge in the country’s biggest design competition was unfathomable to me. It felt like
1:25:43 a miracle. And so I went to the judging, and there were two other judges with me. We had 700
1:25:50 entries that we needed to look at in one day. And when I got to the judging at AIGA headquarters,
1:25:57 I met with the other two jurors. One was a very well-known designer who had a bit of a boutique
1:26:04 agency, very posh. She was very stylish. I did not feel nearly as stylish. Another guy was there
1:26:12 from Apple, and this was shortly after the iPod had been released. And he was on his iPod the whole
1:26:16 time, and really didn’t spend a lot of time paying attention to the judging. In any case, this other
1:26:24 juror, the other juror. What a dick. Yeah. Anyway, sorry, I don’t know. The other juror looks at
1:26:28 me when I get there, and she’s like, “Just so you know, I don’t intend to have any mass market
1:26:37 packaging in this competition get an award.” And I was like, “Okay.” And I didn’t agree with that.
1:26:43 I mean, I understandably had come, I was working at a CPG package design firm, and we had recently
1:26:48 designed the Burger King logo, and the Star Wars Episode II Attack of the Clones packaging,
1:26:54 and merchandising, and the Hershey bar. And so, you know, I was coming from a completely different
1:27:00 point of view. We ended up disagreeing so vehemently that at one point, I thought we were going to
1:27:05 actually come to fisticuffs. Was this behind the scenes, or is this while you were on the panel?
1:27:10 While we’re on the panel, and there’s somebody that’s trailing us writing notes for an article
1:27:17 that’s going to appear in the annual, it was mortifying. In any case, we were only able to
1:27:24 agree, I think, on seven things that would go into the competition journal, which is not a way to
1:27:33 encourage future applicants to apply for the competition. So AIGA was not particularly happy
1:27:39 with us. This juror of mine, the fellow juror, hated me, and I felt at the end of that day
1:27:45 that I would never, ever be asked to do anything with AIGA ever again. And I remember walking
1:27:49 back to my office, which was at the Empire State Building at the time, it was sort of dusk, and I
1:27:57 felt like, oh, this is never, ever going to work out, and resigned myself to that. Rick asked for some
1:28:05 work of mine to be included in the journal as evidence of my credentials for being a juror,
1:28:10 and the two biggest projects that I had done at the time were the Burger King Identity
1:28:16 and the Star Wars Identity, and so I sent those in as my credentials. They were printed in the
1:28:27 journal, and that was the end of that. Or so I thought. May 2, 2003. I get a link from a friend
1:28:32 of mine. She sends me an email, and she’s like, “Read this in the privacy of your own home,
1:28:40 preferably with a big drink.” Boy, what a setup. I know, right? And I am not one that likes surprises
1:28:46 or anticipation. I need instant gratification, so I don’t wait to go home. I don’t wait to get a drink.
1:28:52 I click into the link at my desk in my office and come to a letter, an open letter to AIGA,
1:29:00 written by a designer named Felix Sockwell, on this thing called Speak Up, and Speak Up was
1:29:13 one of the first web blogs and the first design blog, and the letter chastises AIGA for including
1:29:20 me, Debbie Milman, as a juror in their annual competition, what is supposed to be the most
1:29:26 prestigious competition in the country, and accused me of not only being a corporate clown,
1:29:35 but also because of the work I do, they called me a she-devil. A she-devil. Wow.
1:29:43 And proceeded to take my entire career down, and it was a pylon. So not only was the open
1:29:48 letter quite harsh, but then there was the pylon of comments that happened in the early days of
1:29:54 blogging. Remember that? Oh, yes. I’m so glad that hateful comments are a thing of the past.
1:30:03 But yes, oh yes, intimately from there. And I’m reading this, and my jaw is a
1:30:16 gape, and I am just in a state of catatonia. I couldn’t move. I was ashamed, embarrassed,
1:30:22 terrified that people in my office would see it, that the reputation of the firm was being sullied
1:30:31 by me. And I didn’t know what to do. I was despondent. I remember walking home from work that day,
1:30:37 crying, thinking that I had to quit, I had to leave the design business, and my career was over.
1:30:41 This career that I had finally found for myself was now officially over.
1:30:50 And I honestly did not know what to do, Tim. I felt like if I wrote in that it would seem defensive,
1:30:56 that it would bring more attention to this story. I felt that if I didn’t write in that I would be
1:31:03 missing an opportunity to at least contribute to the conversation with a point of view that
1:31:08 might be different than theirs, I didn’t know what to do. And looking back on it now, I’m actually
1:31:13 really ashamed of what I did, because it was disingenuous, but at the time it was the only
1:31:21 thing that I felt I could do. And so a few days after the story broke and the comments piled in,
1:31:26 I contributed, and my first comment was, you’re not going to approve of this.
1:31:39 I wrote, “What a cool discussion. I love it.” I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. You know, the book “Cool Girl”
1:31:44 had not come out at that time, but had it been out, I would have said, “That’s what I was trying
1:31:49 to be. I was trying to be the cool girl. Nothing matters. I can eat five chili dogs and I don’t
1:31:57 gain weight.” I’m quoting the book. So yeah, I came in and that’s what I said, but I ended up
1:32:06 having the best possible back and forth I could muster. I tried to talk about how we had constructed
1:32:11 the Burger King logo and the amount of testing we had done around the world and how consumers
1:32:18 really seemed to like it and who were they to sort of declare that it wasn’t worthy. And I
1:32:29 tried to be as open and as defenseless as possible. And ultimately, they continued to pile on some
1:32:35 more insults and made fun of the practice that I had. And then a couple of people weighed in
1:32:42 otherwise. And the final comment was from a man named David Weinberg, who I’ve since become friends
1:32:48 with as well, who at the time worked at Landor and wrote it. Landor is one of the world’s
1:32:55 biggest and most respected brand consultancies. I started by Walter Landor about 80 or 90 years ago
1:33:00 and he wrote in, “Let’s see what Felix could do with that Burger King logo and great work
1:33:05 over there at Sterling.” And that was sort of the end of that conversation. Nobody else came in
1:33:12 with another comment. And what I thought was over really wasn’t because he was the original writer
1:33:18 of this open letter, Felix Ackwild, the illustrator and designer. And then I thought it was over.
1:33:27 I thought it had ended with some sort of a compromise and viewpoints. But to my chagrin,
1:33:34 the writers at Speak Up kept writing about me. And the next article was called, “Is the dark side
1:33:41 prevailing?” So subtle, so subtle. Very subtle. At that point, Tim, I was obsessed. I was going to
1:33:47 the site 15, 20 times a day, constantly refreshing, seeing what they were writing about me and finally
1:33:52 gave up and went to my IT person and said, “Put parental controls on my computer at work. I don’t
1:34:00 want to be able to see this site.” And he did. Sometimes you need a helpful pair of handcuffs,
1:34:09 yeah. Well said. But I’d go home and look, but whatever. A couple of weeks later, the founder
1:34:17 of Speak Up, a young man about 23 years old named Armin Witt, reached out to me. He wrote me an
1:34:23 email and he apologized. He didn’t apologize for calling my work a pair of turds, which is what
1:34:27 it is. I didn’t realize turds came in pairs. It shows what I know.
1:34:36 But he said he apologized for the bullying and for the unprofessional way in which the conversation
1:34:42 ensued as opposed to he made it very clear that he still thought my work was a pair of turds,
1:34:47 but he didn’t feel that it was right the way that I had been spoken to.
1:34:51 And I took a lot of care in responding to him. I accepted his apology,
1:34:59 but at the time, I was really fascinated by this whole blogging thing. It was really interesting
1:35:04 to me, this sort of real-time communication, holding people accountable. And I wrote him
1:35:10 this sort of diet tribe about it. And he responded and said, “Well, would you like to write for the
1:35:16 site?” And I was like, “Whoa, didn’t expect that one.” So I said, “Yes.” And I started writing for
1:35:22 Speak Up. The Darth Vader column. Well, what was so interesting about the experience, Tim, was that
1:35:28 what the Speak Upers were calling the precious design world, the AIGA world, they had already
1:35:35 rejected me. And now the renegades, the anti-AIGA contingent, they were rejecting me. So at that
1:35:39 moment, I actually felt like the most hated woman in graphic design.
1:35:47 Masterless samurai. Where to? Exactly. So what happened after that was, it was really surreal.
1:35:53 And this is why I say that what felt like at the time in May of 2003 to be the lowest point
1:35:58 of my professional career actually became the catalyst upon which everything else has been
1:36:05 built. And so I started writing for Speak Up. And all of a sudden, I started to have that sense of
1:36:10 what I had been originally searching for in my efforts with Speak Up. I felt like I was part
1:36:15 of something bigger than myself. I felt like I was part of this sort of renegade group of misfits
1:36:21 that were trying to change the world through graphic design criticism and online conversations.
1:36:27 We all decided that year in the fall of 2003 that we were going to go as a group of sort of
1:36:35 guerrilla Speak Up writers to the upcoming AIGA annual conference in Vancouver. And we were
1:36:40 going to give out this little brochure that Armin had put together called Stop Being Sheep, which
1:36:47 was a riff on the great typographer Eric Speakerman’s book, Stop Stealing Sheep, which is about
1:36:55 letter spacing. You know, thin slicing here to the very best of our ability. And so
1:37:02 we went with this little brochure en route to the conference. So these people then ended up
1:37:07 accepting you? The people who had previously vilified you? The people that had previously
1:37:14 vilified me not only accepted me, but over the years Armin and his wife, Bryony, and I
1:37:21 become such good friends that I am now the godmother to their oldest daughter.
1:37:27 Wow. So sort of similar to that Robert Edelstein story back when I was in college where he rejected
1:37:33 me or what I thought was a rejection of me, then ultimately became one of my lifelong friendships.
1:37:39 And now Armin and Bryony are also family at this point, family. Amazing. So I interrupted
1:37:45 you. So you’re en route with this group of heretics and a pile of brochures or pamphlets.
1:37:51 Right, because brochures change the world, you know that. And I’m sitting next to people that are
1:37:57 also, it was at that time, one direct flight from New York to Vancouver. The flight is filled with
1:38:03 design luminaries, Michael Bay Rood and Paula Cher. And I’m sitting next to a woman who is
1:38:10 beautiful and elegant. And I’m wearing sweatpants and carrying a bag of McDonald’s breakfast,
1:38:14 you know, and the only people that like the way McDonald’s breakfast smell are the people eating
1:38:23 it, not the people smelling it. True fact. I don’t know why I didn’t think that I would
1:38:28 see people that I knew on this flight. I was, well, in any case. So I start talking to this
1:38:33 woman next to me and turns out she’s going to the conference as well. I ask her what she does.
1:38:37 She says she’s a writer at Print Magazine. I tell her about Speak Up. She’s all interested
1:38:42 in what we’re doing. She gives me, I tell her that we’re having this get together, this party over
1:38:47 the course of the conference. She’s, I’d like to invite her. She gives me a card without looking
1:38:52 at it. I put it into my bag. We talk through a couple of hours and then we go off into our own
1:38:57 thing with whatever else we were doing on the flight. When I get to my room in Vancouver,
1:39:02 I take her card out of my bag and I see that she’s the editor-in-chief, Joyce Rutter Kay.
1:39:10 I invite her to the party. She comes and we start a correspondence. I had,
1:39:17 I harbored this hope that maybe I could write for Print Magazine one day. And a couple of months
1:39:21 later, she writes me and asks me if I want to participate in something she’s putting together
1:39:28 for the upcoming HAL conference the next year in San Diego. And at the time reality TV had just
1:39:36 sort of burgeoned into culture. And there was a very popular TV show called Iron Chef about cooking
1:39:42 in real time in the audience voting. And she wanted to do a riff on that called ironic chef,
1:39:47 where three designers would create work on stage in real time and the audience would vote.
1:39:50 This to me sounded like the definition of HAL.
1:39:58 And just to clarify for people, Print Magazine is actually called Print.
1:40:03 It is called Print Magazine. It is called Print Magazine. It’s the oldest graphic design magazine
1:40:10 in the country. It’s 75 years old. It has won, I think, five magazine awards, which is the highest
1:40:17 honor and effy, I believe it’s called, that a magazine can win. And it’s a remarkable magazine.
1:40:21 And I had this dream of someday writing something for it.
1:40:23 So ironic chef.
1:40:24 Yes, ironic chef.
1:40:26 Debbie Millman’s personal version of HAL.
1:40:30 Yeah. And I’m afraid to say no. I feel like if I say no, I’m never going to be offered an
1:40:35 opportunity to do anything with Joyce again. So I say yes. And I’m further humiliated when
1:40:40 I get to San Diego, when I realize that I have to wear a chef’s outfit on stage.
1:40:49 There are pictures of this, by the way. I’m not lying or exaggerating. So I go through with this.
1:40:56 I am on stage with the emcee Steve Heller, who I’d never met. Steve Heller is one of the world’s
1:41:02 foremost design critics. He was the art director of the New York Times Book Review for 30 years.
1:41:05 He started numerous programs at school of visual arts, graduate programs,
1:41:11 and he’s written about 170 books about design and graphic designers.
1:41:16 He is the judge. I am terribly intimidated because he is Steve Heller, one of the greatest
1:41:23 people that has ever lived. And there are three of us. I come in second, which is not terrible.
1:41:29 I don’t win, but I don’t lose. And another aberrant moment of courage. I asked Steve,
1:41:33 because he was nice to me that day. If he’d want to have lunch in New York City when we were back,
1:41:39 he lived in New York City as well. He agrees. We go to lunch. I was so intimidated. I had a
1:41:46 cheat sheet that I’d prepared of topics in which I could discuss with Steve. I wrote it on a paper
1:41:53 napkin, put it in my lap, and I could refer to it if I choked and knew not what to say next.
1:41:58 In any case, I had some book ideas. Steve told me they were both bad.
1:42:05 I went away a little bit discouraged, but still happy that I had met him. And he told me that I’d
1:42:11 get a book just to be patient. Four months later, a publisher calls at the recommendation of Stephen
1:42:17 Heller with a book that he had turned down. They had wanted him to write with the horrific title,
1:42:23 “How to Think Like a Great Graphic Designer.” Once again, I think if I don’t say yes to this,
1:42:29 I’m never going to be asked for anything again. And I take on this book, but I ask them if I could
1:42:34 do it in a different way because I didn’t believe that there was just one way for a great graphic
1:42:39 designer to think. There were myriad ways. And could I interview great graphic designers
1:42:44 and reveal how they think they agreed? And that became my first book. In the meantime,
1:42:50 Joyce, writer Kay, the editor of Print Magazine, reaches out and asks me if I’d like to write
1:42:58 a review about Wally Olin’s then upcoming book on branding. I agree. I write my first piece for
1:43:06 Print Magazine that year, and I’ve written for every single issue since. 13 years later,
1:43:10 two years ago, I was appointed the editorial and creative director of Print Magazine.
1:43:13 Well, it seems like those brochures did play a role.
1:43:18 And that’s just the start of it, Tim. If it weren’t for Speak Up and that story,
1:43:26 I was then contacted by a fledgling internet radio network called Voice America in 2004,
1:43:31 shortly after a piece that Mark Kingsley and I wrote about election graphics that kind of went
1:43:39 viral. And they wanted me to host a show about branding. I was worried that if I said no,
1:43:43 I’d never get another opportunity again and asked if I could sort of do it about branding,
1:43:51 but maybe do it more about design and pitch this idea to them about design matters radio network
1:43:57 show. They said yes. Just when I was beginning to think, ooh, I might get rich from this,
1:44:00 they told me that I needed to pay them for the airtime.
1:44:07 Surprise, another surprise. But I was really excited about this. And at that time,
1:44:13 everything I was doing was very commercially driven and felt that this would be a way for
1:44:19 me to talk about graphic design and engage with people in a way that had no commercial value
1:44:25 whatsoever. It was just all about how to satisfy sort of our souls, our creative souls. And that’s
1:44:31 how design matters was born. My podcast was born on this sort of Wayne’s World-esque
1:44:36 internet radio network called Voice America. I did the show for four years on Voice America,
1:44:43 paid them for four years to do it, and then brought the show to Design Observer, Bill Drentel,
1:44:49 the late great Bill Drentel, the founder of Design Observer, invited me to bring the show over
1:44:55 to Design Observer in 2009 with the proviso that I improved my sound quality.
1:45:01 I was doing my show with two handsets. You ever have a conversation with two people on the same
1:45:05 phone line in your house and you’re on different handsets in different parts of the house and
1:45:11 the echo and all of that? Those were my early shows. But I had no idea what I was doing. There
1:45:16 was no podcast when I started. I started to upload my show to iTunes just for the kick of it,
1:45:23 just to be able to share it. And now 12 years later, three weeks, I’m going to have
1:45:29 my 12th anniversary of Design Matters. We won a Cooper Hewitt National Design Award in 2009,
1:45:33 the end of 2015 iTunes. And you know this because you’re always on the list. But
1:45:39 after 11 years, iTunes designated it one of the best podcasts on iTunes. And I’ve transitioned the
1:45:46 show from a show about why design matters to a show about how creative people design their
1:45:52 lives and the trajectory that people take. Even from this conversation, you can probably tell how
1:45:59 interested I am in how people make their lives, the choices that they make and how they live and
1:46:05 what they dream about and what they become. And so that’s the direction that the show has taken.
1:46:12 And I’m about to approach my 300th episode. Congratulations. That’s a huge milestone. And
1:46:19 you being interested in the way that you are and with the intensity that you are interested,
1:46:26 I think is very well reflected in the episodes themselves. And we’ve spent some time in your
1:46:35 studio. It is one of the most lovely and engaging conversations I’ve ever had in interview format.
1:46:44 It was such a relaxed and fun experience for me, which is not the norm, as you know. So
1:46:49 I certainly recommend everyone check out Design Matters. But I want to talk about some of
1:46:57 your decisions. And specifically, we could talk for 20 hours, but I want to talk about a name that
1:47:05 I had not heard in my life until very recently, Milton Glaser. And as you’d mentioned,
1:47:13 you’d done, I guess, brand makeovers or branding for Burger King, Star Wars, I think you, Hershey’s
1:47:17 Tropicana, I think was correct. Yes, yes. And tell me if I’m getting this wrong. But at one point,
1:47:23 if you walked in any grocery store, supermarket, etc., you had a hand and say 20% of everything
1:47:27 that you saw, something like that. Isn’t that crazy? Yes. It’s nuts. I mean, that’s mind blowing
1:47:32 when you consider the number of different products, right? The SKUs. And for people who are wondering
1:47:38 what CPG is, consumer packaged goods. And at some point, your hand was involved in
1:47:44 just an incredible array and plentitude of different products. How did Milton Glaser enter
1:47:51 the scene? And could you describe for people who he is? Milton Glaser is the elder statesman
1:48:00 of the design world and is the world’s one of, certainly one of, if not the greatest living
1:48:07 graphic designer. He’s in his 80s. He is responsible for the iHeart New York logo.
1:48:15 He did that iconic Bob Dylan poster of Bob Dylan in profile with the streams of colorful hair.
1:48:22 He is one of the founders of New York Magazine. The list goes on and on. He’s had more impact and
1:48:30 created some of the most memorable, well-known and iconic brands and identities in the world.
1:48:36 My relationship with Milton really began when I took a class of his at the School of Visual
1:48:43 Arts, a summer intensive in the summer of 2005. I had already interviewed him for Design Matters,
1:48:49 but it was over the phone. And while I cherished that interview, it was one of my very, very early
1:48:55 interviews. So I’m somewhat gun shy to send people to listen to that one because it’s so early in
1:49:01 my journey as a podcaster. But in any case, I took this class with him. And that class,
1:49:07 you know, it’s interesting about how we started the show talking about my eight-year-old drawing and
1:49:14 you talking about your friend who had written this essay that then predicted his life. Milton
1:49:19 taught this summer intensive, I think, for about 40 or 50 years. And he used to say that it was one
1:49:25 of the most important things that he did. He’s not teaching it anymore. He had us do an exercise
1:49:34 in that class where we had to envision the life that we could have if we pursued everything that
1:49:41 we wanted with the certainty that whatever it is that we wanted, we would succeed. I wrote an essay
1:49:51 in July of 2005. It was supposed to be a five-year plan. And he asked us to dream big and not to
1:49:58 edit and said that it had a bit of a magical quality that he experienced with his students
1:50:06 over and over. So to be careful what we wished for. And I created this essay with these long-ranging,
1:50:15 far-fetched goals that I can tell you now 12 years later have almost all come true. It is spooky,
1:50:20 spooky. And so that’s an exercise I do now with my students. Milton has had one of the most profound
1:50:26 impacts on my life, aside from, you know, the profound impact he’s had on the world. I feel
1:50:32 really, really lucky that I have been a student of his and have gotten to interview him now numerous
1:50:38 times and feel that my relationship with him is certainly one of the luckiest things that’s ever
1:50:45 happened to me. Can you describe the exercise as you do it with your students now? Well, I teach
1:50:50 undergrad and graduate classes at the School of Visual Arts. I run a masters in branding program
1:50:57 at the School of Visual Arts, which I was given this opportunity via Steve Heller, who I again
1:51:02 would not have met had that whole speak-up experience not happened. So yet another thing,
1:51:07 every single thing that I’m doing now in my life, Tim, stems from that experience.
1:51:16 So just to underscore another theme, he had in some sense you could interpret it as rejected
1:51:21 two of your book ideas, even though he was nice to you and went out to lunch with you,
1:51:28 but now later on down the line, you kept that relationship and lands you at SVA.
1:51:36 Absolutely. I mean, Steve is one of the most generous and engaging people I have had the
1:51:42 privilege of knowing. And I often tease Steve and say that he’s my fairy godfather because
1:51:48 he’s the only person in my life, or maybe one of two people in my life now that I could say
1:51:58 has just been, he has this sort of generosity that is all about here. Take this, do that,
1:52:05 make this happen. This is for you. With no strings, no ties, no obligations, it’s just
1:52:10 pure generosity. And he has done that over and over and over and over again for me
1:52:18 since meeting him back in 2004. So the exercise that I do now with my students, because they’re
1:52:24 quite a bit younger than I was when I was doing this five-year essay or five-year plan,
1:52:30 I asked them to do a 10-year plan. And so this gives them a chance to really mature into who
1:52:36 they are in their 20s and into their early 30s. And it’s this 10-year plan for what I call a
1:52:42 remarkable life. And it’s about imagining what your life could be if you could do anything you
1:52:53 wanted without any fear of failure. And they are the most life-affirming essays. They are so full
1:53:04 of hope and optimism and well-being and goodness that it gives me a sense that humanity can be saved.
1:53:12 And so I’ve borrowed that exercise from Milton and now use that both in my graduate program
1:53:18 and the undergraduate classes that I teach. This is going to seem nerdy, but I’m a nerd,
1:53:26 so I’ll run with it. And that is, do you have any parameters for people at home who might want to
1:53:31 try this or recommendations, ways to start? Is it bullets or is it prose in full paragraphs?
1:53:35 So it’s all paragraphs. How does it end? Any recommendations for people who would like to
1:53:44 give this a stab? So let’s say it is winter 2027. What does your life look like? What are you doing?
1:53:51 Where are you living? Who are you living with? Do you have pets? What kind of house are you in?
1:53:55 Is it an apartment? Are you in the city or are you in the country? What does your furniture look
1:53:59 like? What is your bed like? What are your sheets like? What kind of clothes do you wear? What kind
1:54:05 of hair do you have? Tell me about your pets. Tell me about your significant other. Do you have
1:54:10 children? Do you have a car? Do you have a boat? Do you have talk about your career? What do you
1:54:17 want? What are you reading? What are you making? What excites you? What is your health like?
1:54:26 And write this day, this one day, 10 years from now. So one day in the winter of 2027,
1:54:32 what does your whole day look like? Start from the minute you wake up, brush your teeth,
1:54:37 have your coffee or tea, all the way through till when you tuck yourself in at night.
1:54:45 What is that day like for you? Dream big. Dream without any fear. Write it all down. You don’t
1:54:54 have to share it with anyone other than yourself. Put your whole heart into it and write like there’s
1:55:03 no tomorrow. Your life depends on it because it does. And then read it once a year and see what
1:55:10 happens. It’s magic. I love this exercise. I need to do this. I’m not asking for some hypothetical
1:55:17 listener. Listeners, I love you guys, but this is also for me. It is astounding and I do this now
1:55:24 with all of my students. And I can’t begin to tell you how many letters I get from students
1:55:32 from 10 years ago that are like, Debbie, it all came true. How did this happen? And I am so thrilled
1:55:39 that these things can make a difference. And this goes back to the earlier part of our conversation
1:55:47 about my own fears about what I could or would or should become. And the idea that at that same
1:55:52 time in my life, that intersection on Bleecker Street and 6th Avenue, peering deep into my future
1:55:58 and not knowing that anything was possible for me, to give somebody at that same stage in their life
1:56:04 or any stage really, but particularly at that vulnerable stage when you are so worried about
1:56:11 what you can or can’t become, to give somebody that sliver of a dream of a hope that this could
1:56:18 happen and have them declare what they want, I think is a remarkable exercise. That’s why I
1:56:25 call it your 10-year plan for a remarkable life. How long was your essay? Is there any
1:56:31 consistency to lengthen their guidelines or is it as long as it takes? And some are two pages,
1:56:37 some are 20 pages. Some are two pages, some are 20 pages. I think the longer it is, the more likely
1:56:44 it is to be affirmed for some reason. I find the more care you put into it, the more care and detail
1:56:51 you put in. Oh, doggie. That’s doggie. That’s my Molly. Sorry, she’s excited about this exercise.
1:56:57 Please give me. Clearly. I think that the more care you put into it, the likely, the more success
1:57:02 you’ll have coming out of it. Mine was, I wrote it in a journal that I was keeping at the time,
1:57:08 so it was about five by seven, and it was probably about 10 handwritten, big handwriting. I had big
1:57:15 handwriting, 10 big handwriting pages, and it was the whole day. And then, because I was really
1:57:20 excited about it and because I love lists, I made a list of everything that I wanted to come true.
1:57:29 Well, I tell you, I think that might be a good place to wrap up this part one, which I think we
1:57:35 may have more conversations than us. I have so many questions I’d still like to ask, but
1:57:44 I think that is, given people have a primacy and recency bias, I want them to remember this exercise
1:57:50 as one of the actionable recommendations that they can certainly explore from this interview.
1:57:57 And there’s so much. But let me ask, before I let you go, and I’ll ask where people can find you
1:58:04 and so on, learn more about your work. But before that, is there any parting piece of advice or
1:58:11 recommendation question, anything that you’d like listeners to carry with them when they
1:58:20 stop listening to this? I recently went through a pretty major transition in my life. And
1:58:30 it was something that I had to make a pretty big decision about. And it was a somewhat prolonged,
1:58:38 agonizing decision so much so that my friends and loved ones were no longer listening to
1:58:44 my sort of machinations and making the decision because I thought I never was going to actually
1:58:49 make the decision. And so I can share that because I do think on the other side of that
1:58:55 decision now is an important realization that I think can help people. I was working, I’ve had a
1:59:02 full-time job since I graduated college. And for the last 22 years, I was working at a branding
1:59:11 consultancy, as I mentioned, called Sterling Brands, and had been very lucky to be able to
1:59:20 sell the company that I was a part of and ultimately a partner in after about 13 years of working there.
1:59:25 So in 2008, the two partners that I had, the man that had originally hired me, Simon Williams,
1:59:32 and then Austin McGee, who was the third partner to come in after me, we sold our company to Omnicom.
1:59:37 And at the time, I had been offered this opportunity with Steve Heller to start the masters
1:59:43 in branding program at the School of Visual Arts and organized my time so that my day job at Sterling
1:59:49 Brands wouldn’t be impacted by what I was going to be doing at SVA, which was made possible by
1:59:55 starting my branding program as an evening program. So I had two full-time jobs, a day job at Sterling
2:00:01 and my night job at SVA. And most people thought that I would go through my earn out at Sterling
2:00:07 and then leave and transition to working at SVA and doing all of the personal projects that
2:00:13 I had been talking for so long about doing. So the five years happened and we had a really
2:00:19 wonderful successful earn out. So there was no excuse to him for me to continue on the same path.
2:00:26 And it was time to make that change. And the last thing I wanted was to end up like the
2:00:30 characters in Revolutionary Road, that remarkable book where people talk about making these changes
2:00:36 their whole lives and then never ever do. But I became terrified. I became terrified that if I
2:00:46 made this change that I would not have financial stability anymore, that I would not be able to
2:00:50 fulfill all of the dreams that I had and would have to confront that. And so five years turned into
2:00:56 six years and six years turned into seven years. And just at a point where I was starting to think
2:01:03 about really doing it, sort of like Al Pacino and Godfather III, I was offered an opportunity to
2:01:09 take over as CEO of the company. Simon Williams, the then CEO, was looking to become chairman and
2:01:15 needed to appoint a new CEO. And he came to me and asked me if I wanted the job. And here it was,
2:01:22 this is the big decision of a life. Do I become the CEO and have this amazing continuation of
2:01:30 money and career and security and everything else that is conventionally approved of?
2:01:39 Or do I say no? Actually, I am not going to double down. I’m going to live the way in which I have
2:01:45 been saying I wanted to with more freedom and more opportunity to do personal projects and pro bono
2:01:51 projects and give back. And I had to decide. And it took me four months to decide. Simon Williams
2:01:55 finally said to me, Debbie, anything that takes you four months to decide probably means you don’t
2:02:02 want to do it. And it was the hardest decision of my life. But I turned it down. I turned the CEO
2:02:08 job down. And then two things happened. First of all, one of the things that I realized was that
2:02:18 I was in this trapeze. And rather than just let go of the trapeze and do something else,
2:02:26 I had every single crook of my body holding on to some other trapeze. And that there was this
2:02:34 sense of if I am not doing enough, I am not worthy. If I am not making enough, I am not worthy. If I am
2:02:40 not producing enough, I am not worthy. And suddenly I had to not just let go of the trapeze, but let
2:02:50 go of the entire apparatus. And I have realized now two things. One, most people live in a world
2:02:55 of scarcity. We think that all we have now is all we ever have. And if we give something up, we will
2:03:02 just have less. What ends up happening is that we don’t think about all the possibilities of things
2:03:08 that could come up if we give ourselves openings to receive them. And so now, as opposed to having
2:03:12 less than what I thought, I have way more because I have all these new things that I’m doing that I
2:03:19 never would have thought possible. Second, that hard decisions are only hard when you’re in the
2:03:27 process of making them. Once you make them, they’re not hard anymore. Then it’s just life and freedom.
2:03:32 And it’s an extraordinary experience that I really would like to share with your listeners,
2:03:42 with our listeners. It’s such an important discussion on many levels. It’s worth repeating
2:03:49 a few things. And certainly this echoes in my experience as well. One, that agonizing over
2:03:56 the decision is often harder than whatever the outcome of the decision will be. And for that
2:04:00 matter, if you make in many cases, not all, but in many cases, if you make a decision
2:04:06 and you decide that it’s not the right decision for you, you can quit. You can do something else.
2:04:13 It’s not a permanent sentence necessarily. And also, this is something that I’ve had to learn
2:04:18 and relearn many times in my life, which is if it’s taken you that long to make a decision,
2:04:25 you probably don’t and shouldn’t. Don’t want to and shouldn’t do whatever it is that you’re
2:04:32 agonizing over with pro and con lists trying to justify in some fashion. It’s in both of those
2:04:37 points, I think, are so, so important. I also think that if you’re waiting for something to feel
2:04:44 right before you do it, if you’re waiting for a sense of security or confidence, that those things
2:04:49 are sort of like being on a hedonistic treadmill. If you think you need enough of this before you
2:04:54 do that, when you achieve whatever that is you think you need, you’re gonna then up the ante and
2:05:02 you’re never, ever going to be satisfied with whatever it is you think you need before you do
2:05:08 something if it’s not something that is real. If you think, oh, I need this much money before I do
2:05:12 this, when you get that much money, then you’re gonna realize, oh, I actually think I need this
2:05:17 much more and it’s just gonna be this carrot in front of you that you’re agonizing over trying to
2:05:21 reach. And then the other thing is I’m gonna quote Danny Shapiro here, the great writer,
2:05:27 Danny Shapiro, if you’re waiting for confidence and she, I asked her once about confidence and she
2:05:34 said that confidence is highly, highly overrated and that most confident people or overly confident
2:05:39 people tend to be kind of annoying. And she said what she felt was more important than confidence
2:05:45 was courage. And I fully, fully agree taking that first step. Confidence really only comes from
2:05:51 repeated attempts at doing something successfully. But in order to take that first step, you need
2:05:56 courage and that’s much more important than confidence over anybody that’s waiting for the
2:06:01 confidence to show up, take the first step in a moment of courage, even if it’s aberrant courage
2:06:07 to come full circle in this conversation. Such good advice. It reminds me of something that
2:06:14 the brother Kamal Ravikant of another friend of mine, Naval Ravikant told me, and Naval is a very,
2:06:20 very successful entrepreneur and investor, among other things, very, very good writer as well as
2:06:25 his brother Kamal. He just had a novel come out. But Naval said to his brother, if I always did
2:06:33 what I was qualified to do, I’d be pushing a broom somewhere. Well said. And I thought that was
2:06:40 very, very encouraging. Touche. Debbie, I have so much fun every time we get to spend time together.
2:06:46 Where can people find out more about you? Where can they learn more about your work? Where would
2:06:50 you like people to say hello on social, if that, and I’ll put all of this in the show notes for
2:06:55 everybody. Sure. Absolutely. I’m Debbie Milliman on Twitter and Instagram. You can see more about
2:07:02 my program at the School of Visual Arts at sva.edu. And DebbieMilliman.com, where you can
2:07:07 listen to all my podcasts and see my visual essays and my books and so on and so forth.
2:07:13 For people who would be novices or new entrants into the world of, say, graphic design,
2:07:18 recognizing that your podcast is about a lot more than that, which episode or episodes would you
2:07:26 suggest they start with? I would suggest that they start with Chris Ware. He is an extraordinary
2:07:32 graphic novelist. It’s one of the most favorite episodes that I’ve ever conducted.
2:07:39 How do you spell his last name? W-A-R-E. And from there, some of my favorite episodes over
2:07:46 the last year, aside from my episode with you, which I cherish, my episodes with Amanda Palmer,
2:07:52 my episode with Alan de Bottin, my episode with Krista Tippett, Niko Mouli, the great composer.
2:07:56 Those are all episodes in the last year that I’m most proud of.
2:07:59 Debbie, you’re a rock star. Thank you so much for the time.
2:08:03 Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I really appreciate it. And to everybody listening,
2:08:09 as always, you can find show notes, links to resources, all sorts of things that we talked
2:08:16 about and maybe more at fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. And until next time, thank you for listening.
2:08:23 Hey, guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off. And that is Five Bullet
2:08:28 Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun
2:08:33 before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter,
2:08:38 my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is
2:08:44 basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I’ve found
2:08:48 or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It’s kind of like my diary of cool things.
2:08:54 It often includes articles I’m reading, books I’m reading, albums, perhaps gadgets, gizmos,
2:09:00 all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast
2:09:06 guests and these strange esoteric things end up in my field. And then I test them and then I share
2:09:12 them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it’s very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before
2:09:17 you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you’d like to try it out, just go to
2:09:23 tim.blog/friday. Type that into your browser, tim.blog/friday. Drop in your email and you’ll
2:09:30 get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by 8Sleep. I have been
2:09:35 using 8Sleep Pod Cover for years now. Why? Well, by simply adding it to your existing mattress on
2:09:41 top like a fitted sheet, you can automatically cool down or warm up each side of your bed.
2:09:45 8Sleep recently launched their newest generation of the pod and I’m excited to test it out,
2:09:52 Pod 4 Ultra. It cools, it heats, and now it elevates automatically. More on that in a second.
2:09:57 First, Pod 4 Ultra can cool down each side of the bed as much as 20 degrees Fahrenheit below
2:10:02 room temperature, keeping you and your partner cool, even in a heatwave. Or you can switch it up
2:10:07 depending on which of you is heat sensitive. I am always more heat sensitive, pulling the sheets
2:10:12 off, closing the windows, trying to crank the AC down. This solves all of that. Pod 4 Ultra also
2:10:16 introduces an adjustable base that fits between your mattress and your bed frame and adds reading
2:10:21 and sleeping positions for the best unwinding experience. And for those snore heavy nights,
2:10:25 the pod can detect your snoring and automatically lift your head by a few degrees to improve air
2:10:31 flow and stop you or your partner from snoring. Plus, with Pod 4 Ultra, you can leave your wearables
2:10:35 on the nightstand. You won’t need them because these types of mattress are integrated into
2:10:40 the Pod 4 Ultra itself. They have imperceptible sensors which track your sleep time, sleep phases,
2:10:47 and HRV. Their heart rate tracking is just one example is at 99% accuracy. So get your best night
2:10:54 sleep. Head to 8sleep.com/tim and use Code Tim to get $350 off of the Pod 4 Ultra.
2:11:03 That’s 8sleep, all spelled out, 8sleep.com/tim and Code Tim TIM to get $350 off the Pod 4 Ultra.
2:11:07 They currently ship to the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia.
2:11:14 This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports
2:11:20 whole body health. I view AG1 as comprehensive nutritional insurance and that is nothing new.
2:11:27 I actually recommended AG1 in my 2010 best seller more than a decade ago, the 4-hour body,
2:11:33 and I did not get paid to do so. I simply loved the product and felt like it was the ultimate
2:11:39 nutritionally dense supplement that you could use conveniently while on run, which is, for me,
2:11:44 a lot of the time. I have been using it a very, very long time indeed and I do get asked a lot
2:11:49 what I would take if I could only take one supplement and the true answer is invariably AG1.
2:11:54 It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take
2:12:00 their travel packs with me on the road. So what is AG1? What is this stuff? AG1 is a science-driven
2:12:06 formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food source nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1
2:12:12 gives you support for the brain, gut, and immune system. Since 2010, they have improved the formula
2:12:17 52 times in pursuit of making the best foundational nutrition supplement possible
2:12:24 using rigorous standards and high quality ingredients. How many ingredients? 75 and you would
2:12:29 be hard-pressed to find a more nutrient-dense formula on the market. It has a multibitamin,
2:12:34 multi-mineral superfood complex, probiotics and prebiotics for gut health, an antioxidant immune
2:12:40 support formula that adjusts to enzymes and adaptogens to help manage stress. Now, I do my best
2:12:47 always to eat nutrient-dense meals. That is the basic, basic, basic requirement. That is why
2:12:51 things are called supplements. Of course, that’s what I focus on, but it is not always possible.
2:12:59 It is not always easy. So part of my routine is using AG1 daily. If I’m on the road, on the run,
2:13:04 it just makes it easy to get a lot of nutrients at once and to sleep easy knowing that I am
2:13:10 checking a lot of important boxes. So each morning, AG1. That’s just like brushing my teeth part of
2:13:16 the routine. It’s also NSF certified for sport, so professional athletes trust it to be safe.
2:13:21 And each pouch of AG1 contains exactly what is on the label, does not contain harmful levels
2:13:27 of microbes or heavy metals, and is free of 280 band substances. It’s the ultimate nutritional
2:13:33 supplement in one easy scoop. So take ownership of your health and try AG1 today. You will get a
2:13:39 free one-year supply of vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription
2:13:48 purchase. So learn more, check it out. Go to drinkag1.com/tim. That’s drinkag1, the number one.
2:14:00 Drinkag1.com/tim. Last time, drinkag1.com/tim. Check it out.