Beyond the Talk: Pico Iyer on silence and stillness

0:07You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas and conversations to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. Those who know author Pico Iyer may know he doesn't have a cell phone, a rare feat for anyone in today's day and age. I sat down with Pico after he gave his moving talk at TED 2025 to learn more about why not being able to connect with people quickly actually helps him connect with the world more deeply. We discuss his journey, how Ted has transformed the way he looks at ideas, the lessons he's learned from slowing down in a world that's intent on speeding up, and what home, silence, beauty, and ping pong all have in common.

0:53Pico, congrats on your fifth TED Talk. Thank you. So you have explored many ideas over the years, home, stillness, finding beauty in the unknown, even ping pong, I believe. And this year, of course, silence. Would you say there is a through line besides you being the author and the speaker behind the talks? Such an interesting question. Of course, nobody's ever asked me that before. I don't. I think for me, the excitement of TED is to try and take myself in constantly different directions. And, you know, I'm always a little embarrassed when I'm at TED because there's so many specialists who are sitting on remarkable knowledge and they've devoted 40 years to studying one thing.

1:33Right. And I'm the opposite, as maybe you are as a journalist. I feel the same way. Yes. For me, the fun of it is to go in different directions every time. Of course, talking about silence overlaps quite a bit with talking about stillness. And that made me think, oh, I don't want to repeat myself. But something like ping pong was a happy diversion. From your first talk that you gave, I believe in 2013. Yes. How would you say things have grown and how have you grown since? TED has changed my life in all kinds of ways and opened so many doors and made me think much more about how to shape an argument and how to talk to an audience.

2:09I think that first talk was about how so many of us have many homes. And of course, that is intensifying with every passing moment. And I think that's a really happy development because I think the big change since 2013 is that so many larger institutions and governments are trying to push back at that. And I feel nationalism is on the rise partly because it's on the run. So although people are trying to push us back into the past more and more furiously, I think what I was talking about is only intensifying and black and white divisions are dissolving, actually. Yeah. How do you explain this moment then?

2:44Is it a backlash, would you say? this nationalistic or authoritarian rises that we've seen in various parts of the world, and not just the United States, like, would you say it's a backlash to more and more migration and more immigration that's happening globally? Exactly. People are unsettled because all the clear lines of the past are dissolved. It's as if everything used to be in nice boxes, and now it's a Jackson Pollock canvas, and we don't know what to make of anyone or anything. And so it is disconcerting. But I think it's a lost cause to try to move it back. Got it. Got it. What is the difference between your talk about stillness versus silence this time around?

3:22They arise from the same feeling that the world is moving at the furious rate and that humans were never designed to live at a pace determined by machines. And we're all longing just to clear out some space in our heads and our days. But my talk on silence, as you know, was very much rooted on one particular experience and practical tip I've crafted for myself of going to this silent retreat place again and again more than 100 times over 34 years. And so the stillness one was almost like describing the predicament that we're all facing. And this is perhaps an attempt to offer an answer. And I don't expect anyone to do what I have done.

4:03But my hope is in mentioning one thing that I found useful, others will find their equivalence. So for me, the first was almost like a diagnosis. And this one is more like offering some medicine. The way if I find Tylenol extra strength really works well for me, I'll tell my friends, oh, you should try it if you've got a headache. This is equivalent. And just to be clear, silence doesn't mean no sound completely. Obviously, the noise of the world continues around us. So how do you determine noise that's actually appropriate or helpful and useful versus noise that kind of gets in the way? I love that question because it hadn't struck me until you asked it that you're absolutely right.

4:44It's about choosing what we want to listen to and what we sleepwalk past. So as you say, when I'm on silent retreat, actually I'm hearing the water pounding around the rocks below and I'm hearing the birds singing and I'm hearing the bells turning. Actually, what I don't hear when I'm usually listening to the chatter in my head and updates are coming in and the radio is reporting some breaking development. And most of that makes me feel powerless and hopeless. And yet when I'm on a silence retreat and I'm hearing these much more enduring, ageless sounds of the world around me, I'm freed from my head and my own little plans and anxieties.

5:23And I'm also released into a kind of sound that actually fills me with hope and possibility and puts me in place. I suppose it's the difference between being stuck inside your head and being released to the beauty of the larger world. You mentioned in your talk that silence helps you connect or feel more connected with the world around you. Others might hear this idea and consider it kind of a retreat or isolating. So in a time where we do feel atomized and disconnected, how might silence or stillness, the idea before it, be tools for connection? Can you draw the line between not speaking and listening and feeling connected?

6:04Yes, very much so. Because I think it's only when I separate myself from society and noise and clamor that I can reclaim my humanity and remember what I really care for. So one of the interesting things I find is that, as I say in parts in my talk, when I go into silence, that's when I really remember the people I care about. And that's when I can actually, to some extent, hear them. When we're in the same room, too much is going on, both sides, for us really to attend to each other. So actually, I see the silence I'm describing as a way to step out of the world so it's better to remember connections and community and compassion and then come back into the world with a clearer sense of where to go.

6:45because I find when I'm driving from the bank to the supermarket to the pharmacy, a thousand things are going on in my head, but they're actually keeping me away from what's important and the people I really care about. And so I have to actually separate myself from that noise, partly in my head and partly in the culture, in order to hear my mother, to hear my wife, and to remember what I need to be doing. It's almost like there are a thousand things at any point on a desk or in my head, and so many of them are trivial and some are essential, But in the rush of the world, you can't sift the trivial from the essential.

7:18So you have to step away from the world. And then the essential rises to the top. And you remember, this is what I need to attend to. Is there a point at which you recall you realize this silence practice was making a difference for you? Oddly, the first time I went on a retreat, it was instantaneous. I felt liberated and cleansed. Wow. So right away. Yes. And what's striking about that now is that that was in 1991. So I'd never heard of the internet. There were no social media. There were no smartphones. The world was already much quieter then than now. And already something in me was feeling that as I was going about my daily life, this can't be the whole of the story.

7:57Something is missing. There must be more to my life. There must be more to reality than just going down the freeway to the tax accountant's office and then to the bank. You know, 70 years ago, T.S. Eliot said, where is the life we have lost in living? I think many of us have this sense now as we're moving very, very fast. We're living to some extent, but our life is somewhere else. And how do we begin to reclaim it? And we can only reclaim it, to speak to your previous question, by stepping out of the rush and suddenly remembering this is the hidden treasure that we've been neglecting as we're concentrating on the latest TMZ report.

8:33Right, right. Yeah, it seems like a balm for this time of spiritual malaise. Beautifully said, spiritual malaise. And I think it speaks to a universal longing. I think most of us feel that there's something out there we're not getting, and we don't know how to get it. And I think that's one reason I wanted to share the talk now, because I've been staying in this place, as I say, for 34 years, but I've never seen the world so distracted, so divided, and so despairing as right now. And so for those three reasons, I thought this is the moment I want to share that message. How are you coping with this time of tumult?

9:07All the time I've spent in the silent retreat has changed the way I live. So I live in a little apartment in the middle of Japan. I've never used a cell phone, even though I'm a journalist and I travel a lot. And I've incorporated various practices to try to just clear my head and keep myself close to what really matters. So, for example, instead of killing time, I try to restore time. Sometimes when I'm waiting for my wife to come back from work, just turn off the lights and listen to some music. So it both cleanses me in a way, and it makes me more responsive to my wife when she returns and less distracted, and it makes me sleep better, and I hope makes me physically healthier as well as emotionally and mentally.

9:47And what's your advice for those who can't afford the luxury of going to a retreat regularly? Are there ways to incorporate silence or this practice in our daily lives? Take a walk every Sunday. Go and meet a friend without your cell phone. Put a mail-away message on your email every Saturday or Sunday or both. Or maybe best of all, just sit quietly for 20 minutes every morning in your room, in your home, without your devices to set a tone for the day. And I think just making that little clearing makes the clutter that's on its way much fresher. I noticed my challenge to myself every day is to see how long I can go before going online.

10:30because as soon as I'm online, it's like being in Times Square on New Year's Eve. And before that, I'm quite clear and calm and uncluttered in my thinking. So I try to go as long as I can. But of course, as you say, with little kids and jobs and other things, most people can't afford to go a long time. But I think 20 minutes is a really good investment. And it's what I think of, as I say in my talk, as an inner savings account. And once you make that deposit, that's what you can draw upon when things become really difficult, as they will in every day, probably in every life. All right. Before we wrap, we have some rapid fire questions that we're asking.

11:08All right. What does innovation or a good idea look like to you? Something that draws upon the wisdom of the past. I think we can only see what's new if we have a strong sense of what has happened and what is old. Hmm. What would you say is the merit to distilling big ideas into something like a TED Talk? That they're portable. You can carry them in your head. I can't carry a 300-page book in my head. I can carry a 10-minute talk. That makes sense. On the flip side, are there dangers to breaking something down into something so portable? There are dangers in breaking something down into something so small only if you forget that the 10-minute talk is an opening.

11:51It's not the first word and the last word, it's a chance for you to take this idea and expand on it or elaborate upon it. So remember that the 10-minute talk is like a suggestion rather than the entire portrait. Yeah, it could be a starting point. Exactly. And for a lot of our speakers, it's a starting point to what then becomes a 300-page book, right? Yes, yes. Okay. What is something new that you brought into your life in 2025 that wasn't in existence before, that you didn't do before? Through most of my life, as you know, I've traveled a huge amount. And that's been my way of looking around the corner.

12:24Now I travel less. So I try and challenge myself by doing things I never would have done before. So in recent months, including 2025, I acted in a big movie, which is so something I'm qualified to do. I thought if nothing else, it'll make me see movies differently, which it has. And then I drove across the West to a place in a New Mexican desert to engage in a very intense, intimate psychological workshop, which exactly the kind of thing I ran away from. And so I thought that's the reason I should run towards it. In both cases, it was like traveling to a foreign country. Okay, fantastic. Did you play yourself or did you have to play a different role?

13:01I did have to play a different role. And now it hadn't occurred to me until this very moment, why did a major director suddenly cast me? And I have no acting experience. He'd seen a TED Talk of mine. No way. And so he cast me on the basis of the person he imagined from the TED Talk. and I hope that what he imagined was very different from the real me because he cast me as a very, very stuffy kind of English guy from the 1950s. So I hope that's not entirely typecasting. So TED speakers don't even realize that their TED Talks could be audition videos. Yes. I mean, to go back to your very first question, I've been amazed at the things that have come to my life through my TED Talks.

13:43Never in a million years would I imagine, not just invitations to speaking, But people who want to use sentences for my TED Talk in an ad or suddenly getting a call to be in a big movie. It sounds like quite an adventure. Quite an adventure. This conference is going to, as it has the last couple of years, focus a lot on AI. For you, is there anything about the conversation about AI that's missing? Or is there something kind of a dimension of it that we're not talking about? I speak from a position of huge ignorance, and I know less than probably everybody at this conference about AI. But I'm glad when many of us stress the many things that humans can do that it will be very, very hard for machines to replicate, such as surprise ourselves and go off book or offline or whatever.

14:32So I am less worried about AI's threats, at least to what I do, in terms of reading and writing than some people might be. because I feel they can always catch the letter, but not so easily the spirit. And so people have sent me AI versions of a Picoaya essay. And of course, it's a very, very good copy. But I feel that any reader could sense something that's missing. The humanity of it. Or some indefinable quality. You know, they could get all the words, but they couldn't get that. And if they don't have that, they don't really have me. Yeah. Is there a regret you have or a mistake that you've made that's really taught you something?

15:10every mistake I feel that way too has taught me something and therefore I don't have a regret because I was always doing the best trying to do the best at the time and I would usually get things wrong but for that reason I don't regret any mistake because without the mistakes I wouldn't have evolved beyond those mistakes if we metabolize those past struggles or mistakes they become great lessons right yes yes yes Pico Iyer thank you so much Such a delight to talk to you again. Thank you.

15:45That was Pico Iyer in conversation with me, Elise Hugh, at TED 2025. You can check out Pico's talk on the TED Talks Daily feed and at TED.com. And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced by Lucy Little and edited by Alejandra Salazar. This episode was recorded by Rich Amies and Dave Pulmer of Field Trip, production support from Daniela Ballarezzo and Shu Han Hu. The TED Talks Daily team includes Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, and Tansika Sangmarnivang. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed.

16:23Thanks for listening.

16:31I once did an interview with Oprah. Oh, no big deal. Oh, just her. She had unbelievably kind producers, of course, and really, really nice people. They told me there are going to be some lightning questions at the end, so we'll tell you what they are so you're not completely surprised by them. This was just before I was going out there. And then I went out, and the lightning questions she gave me were completely different from the ones they were. Oh, interesting. Yes, I think they mixed up the guests. Oh, okay. Because she had a series of guests. Why prep you at all? And so I went out there. She said, what's your definition of God?

17:01It was the first one. Wow. I'll never forget that when I haven't done lightning round questions very often, but that's the one I always remember. What's your definition of God? Yeah. A hard one. Yours would be much nicer.