#732: Martha Beck — The Amazing and Brutal Results of Zero Lies for 365 Days, How to Do a Beginner “Integrity Cleanse,” Lessons from Lion Trackers, and Novel Tactics for Reducing Anxiety

26:38And I remember I said, I've heard that people with Down syndrome can experience joy. And he said, I wouldn't know about that. And I was like, yeah, no, I think they can. And right then, everything changed for me. I waddled around Harvard, pregnant out to here. Everybody knew. And I would go into my professor's offices and they'd be like, you've got to put this child in an institution. You're throwing away your career. And I'd look at their little offices and their little piles of books. And I'd just, I'd look at them and think, are you in joy? Do you live in joy? Because if you don't, you can't tell me where it is.

27:17And I lost the obsession with intellect that I had learned, not only at Harvard, but in all of Western culture. That's when it really shifted for me. I mean, that's a powerful story, and I'm sure we'll come back to pieces of it. How do you then elicit that realization or teach people to re-engage with sensitivities that they've perhaps neglected or accidentally put offline or deliberately put offline? How do you cultivate that in some way? I can't teach it. I can't cultivate it. I can't do it. But I have an unfailing ally, and its name is suffering. because when we lose the track of our joy, we suffer.

28:03And that's the only thing that gets our attention enough to make us stop and say, maybe, just maybe, I need to find another path here. You've had it yourself, I'm sure. Oh, for sure. I mean, I promised I would bookmark this and come back to it just to give Boyd a little sloppy kiss on the cheek again. Something else that I'm pretty sure was in that book, It certainly was in the curriculum when I've spent more time there with Reneas and Alex and other incredible trackers. Losing the track is part of tracking. That is always part of tracking. You are almost never going to A to Z track something perfectly.

28:43You always lose the track. So part of good tracking is finding the track again or finding a proper track. In the case of Boyd, he's on the path of not here, unsure of what to do with himself. I'm sort of imposing a narrative that I don't want to... He's not here. He can't defend himself. Let's just do this. Yeah, he can't defend himself. So you're welcome, Boyd. And just using him as a stand-in for the audience, right? No, because we love him so much. And we love him so much. What are some of the things, once you'd fed him ice cream and had him relax, you see the shoulders open, what happens then?

29:21What do you do with, once you see that opening, that change, what do you do? You know, the first thing that happened for me when Boyd took me tracking, we went to look for a rhinoceros. They're fairly easy to track. Surprisingly difficult, though, at the same time. The first thing they do is they show you what a rhinoceros track looks like. Clear, plain, and simple, and really good terrain. Now you know what a rhinoceros' whole foot looks like. And you're going to go out through grass and rocks and trees and everything. and sometimes you'll just see the side of one toe or an imprint where the palm has pressed a leaf down or a bit of mud on a stick.

29:58But until you've seen that first track, you don't know what you're looking for. So that's why I fed him ice cream for three days. And when I saw the relaxation, I could say, that's your track. Now, let's look at the things you're doing in your life. His mom was telling him, she thought you should get a PhD. And I said, okay, hold that thought. More joy, less joy, less. Okay, don't go there. So take over Londolozi for the rest of your life. More joy, less joy. I don't know. It's not clear. Okay, we don't go there yet. It's like going to the optometrist at that point. You know suffering and you know joy.

30:34And if it's more like suffering, it's the path of not there. And there are a million ways to suffer. And if it's joy, you know it's the path of yes. And there's actually only one path that takes you straight along the line of joy. And it's your individual destiny. I believe in that stuff. All right. I'm going to be keeping track of a lot of bookmarks. I knew I would. So I came prepared, pen in hand. For those of you who can't see us, I cheat. I use a pen. The pen is, I know the weakest ink is stronger than the strongest memories. Therefore, blue pen. So individual destiny, that's my note I'm taking.

31:09And I didn't even add a question mark because I I probably agree with you on some levels. Let's talk about your own chronology a bit. And I believe it was at 29, correct me if I'm wrong, you decide to not tell any lies for an entire year. Now, my understanding is that led to losing your family of origin, your religion, your job, your marriage. So it was an eventful year. My home, my career, my entire industry. Yeah, it was quite a brisk year. It was brisk. So it was like the flamethrower approach to personal development. Why did you do this? And what did you take away from it that other people can use?

31:51Why did I do it? Yeah. Suffering. I'd like to say I had noble intentions. I was unhappy. I was very physically ill. I'd been sick at that point for 12 years. So in chronic pain for 12 years. And I had this baby with Down syndrome. And I thought, nobody at Harvard is going to. I just didn't want them all staring at me. So to finish my dissertation, I went back to Utah, where I knew that everybody would be thrilled with me not having an abortion, which they were. But then they assumed that I was super Mormon, and I tried to fit in just out of respect for my culture of origin. Can you just say a quick, quick sidebar on your father and who your father was?

32:32I think this is useful context. Not just any run-of-the-mill Mormon. No, he was not. My father was an apologist, which is a word for somebody who defends the principles of a religion. So Mormonism makes a lot of truth claims about things like the American Indians are descended from a group of Israelites that came over in a ship in 600 BC and lots of like real archaeological, anthropological truth claims. They don't stand up well under modern science. And my father, he was asked to be an apologist for the church. He was a professor at Berkeley. and they brought him back to BYU, Brigham Young University, and he started defending Mormonism against all attacks.

33:14And he became very well known in the church, and he is the foremost apologist of Mormonism, I think, in the church's history. So, I was considered Mormon royalty. They have a whole structure there. So, I went back to Utah and tried to be a good Mormon. At the time, they came out and said there was a lot of unrest. People were just learning too much, and the internet wasn't a thing yet, but there were just too many scientists doing too much research and finding out too much stuff that was disproving Mormonism's claims. So, the church got very, very upset and came out and said the three greatest threats to God's kingdom in the latter days were feminists, intellectuals, and gay people.

34:04So, turned out I was all three. I didn't identify as gay at the time. I was married with children, so I was closeted to myself. That involves a lot of suffering that you don't understand when you're going through it. I had sexual abuse issues from my father when I was a child. Those were bashing their way to the surface and coming out in flashbacks. And it was gnarly. And the one thing I knew is that when I heard the statement, the truth will set you free, it brought me a sense of joy, a sense of peace. So I thought, I don't know exactly what to do or what the truth is. So I'm just not going to lie for a year and we'll see what happens.

34:45We'll find out what the truth is. And I found out that mostly what I was lying about, I didn't tell lies like about my taxes or anything, or in my personal life even, I was telling lies about how I felt. I feel fine. I wouldn't say that anymore. People would say, how are you? And I'd say, not well. And you start to do that, try it for a couple of days. Don't tell a single lie, not to anyone for any reason. And pretty soon, every relationship you have, professional or personal, where there's any level of secrecy or untruth begins to fall apart. And then it starts to explode. And that's what happened to me.

35:28I just kept seeing what I believed until I realized I'm not Mormon. I don't believe in it at all. So I actually committed the one sin worse than murder. I left. I said, please take my name off the church records. I am not Mormon. So everyone thought I was going to outer darkness. They probably still do. So my family They stopped speaking to me, and yeah, then I realized I was gay. So was my husband. That was sort of convenient. So it was very amicable. But I also realized that I loved to learn, but I hated being caught up in academic politics. So I left my job. Everything went away when I stopped lying, and everything that was left was the path of joy.

36:13No, this may not be the right question, but what gave you the courage to risk burning it all to the ground? Or was it not courage at all? It was just, this is suffering and I want something other than this suffering. And so you were just kind of rolling the dice on door number two. The suffering was bad, but it wasn't bad enough to make me endure the suffering of losing my family. I mean, seven siblings, all their wives and husbands and my nieces and nephews and like everyone. For every friend I'd made growing up, I couldn't have done that. But right, I think I made that pledge the day after I came out of an emergency surgery.

36:56And I've been told that you are willing to entertain woo-woo things. It's Wednesday, right? Yeah, every Wednesday. Yes, with a skeptic's eye. Woo-woo Wednesday. It's woo-woo Wednesday. So I'm rushed in for surgery. Actually, I was teaching a psychology class, and I was behind a one-way mirror, and the students started to talk about, it was a free discussion I was observing, and they started to talk about a number of the women had been raped. and I suddenly got really hot and feverish and I ran into the hall and passed out cold. I like fell down. I looked up, all the students were around me. I got rushed to the hospital and they thought I had a tumor in a very intimate place.

37:39They immediately put me in surgery and while I was lying there, I sort of woke up and looked at the surgical lights, which was odd because my eyes were taped closed. And then I thought, this is odd that I can see. And I sat up, which was strange because my body was on the table. And I looked around and I watched them operating on me. And they said, there's no tumor, it's just blood. This is scar tissue from old trauma. And then I lay back and I thought, I don't know what's happening to me. And between the surgical lights, another light appeared. and it was about the size of a golf ball when I first saw it.

38:20And, you know, they say we can only see about a trillionth of the available light spectrum. And I think this light had all of it. You can't describe it. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. It was absolutely captivating. And as I looked at it, it grew and it seemed to sort of penetrate things instead of bouncing off them. And when it touched me, this incredible warmth. I mean, talk about going from 12 years of chronic pain, a lot of psychological suffering, to no suffering, zero, absolute joy, beauty, warmth, physical, emotional, every kind of warmth you can imagine, and laughter. There was so much joy in this light.

39:06And I was laughing with it, and I heard the surgeons say to the anesthesiologist, she's crying. And I'd started crying from happiness. And they could see tears coming out, and they thought that I could feel the pain. So the anesthesiologist was going to give me more medication, and I talked to him the next day to make sure it wasn't a drug event. And he said that a voice had told him, don't increase the anesthesia. She's crying because she's happy. And he said, did I do the wrong thing? That never happened to me before. So that was odd. Anyway, basically, the light was saying to me, you totally bought this whole thing about you're just a physical thing and then you die.

39:50And I was like, I know. I said I wasn't going to forget. And then I totally forgot. We were laughing and laughing and laughing. And then it said, look, you're going to go through something really horrible. But I'm always here. I'm right here. I've always been here. I always will be. And I woke up in the recovery room, and there was this guy who was there from the prison on some sort of work detail. And he was mopping the floor in this room where I woke up. And I looked at him, and I said, I love you so much. He's like, I'm not even getting paid for this. He went to get the nurses.

40:30yeah and I was just I was like ah do people cry and they said yes surgery is traumatic and I'm like no do they cry because they're happy and they were like uh no really so yeah the next day the big thing was I'm never doing anything that makes me feel separated from that light not ever. And lying was the first thing to go. There's still, to this day, one of the weird things about experiences like that is they don't fade. It's always right there with you in every choice you make. And that's what gave me the ability to do everything else.

41:11Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors, and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take one supplement, and the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road. So what is AG1? AG1 is a science-driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food sourced nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut, and immune system.

41:46So take ownership of your health and try AG1 today. You will get a free one-year supply of vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase. So learn more, check it out. Go to drinkag1.com slash Tim. That's drink AG1, the number one, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Last time, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Check it out.

42:15All right, I have quite a few follow-up questions. Thank you for sharing that. The broadest question is, what do you make of that experience? The other, and you can tackle these in whichever order, but did you talk to the surgeon and other personnel about what you observed them saying? Yeah, the surgeon came in and was oddly tender with me. I mean, really, really tender. And I think the reason was that what had happened was I was bleeding internally from a lot of scar tissue that had happened when I was sexually abused very young. And they knew that some kind of violence must have caused that.

42:53So they said, yeah, we don't really understand why you suddenly started bleeding internally. But it was putting pressure and we just had to drain the wound and leave it open. And so that's what I said. Do you know anything about the anesthesia? I went and got the anesthesiologist and he came back and I started just quizzing him. So what did you give me? What are the effects? What do people report? What are the side effects? Can I have some more? Finally, he just said, look, just tell me what happened in there because this thing happened to me. And that's when he told me about the voice telling him, don't give her more anesthesia.

43:30And I said, yeah, you did the right thing. And he said, you know how many times this has happened to me in 33 years of medical practice? I said, no. And he said, once. And then he kissed me on the forehead and left and wrote me a letter later about it. He said it was not a drug effect. Plus, he had a woo-woo experience as well. So, take that. Got it. So, what do you make of that experience? I have been making of it. You know, I started meditating and thinking about it, and I think about it every single day, and it's been many years since then. And what I make of it right now, Well, first of all, I love, it's kind of like the path of not there, don't know mind.

44:10I believe in the Zen or any Buddhist concept of don't know mind that in the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few, and that none of us really knows anything. And in particular, we have no idea what consciousness is. I've studied physics, I've studied philosophy, theology, nobody has a clue what consciousness is. One neurologist said nobody even knows what it would be like to have an idea about what consciousness is. So what I make of it now is that consciousness is the primary reality of the universe. And I do believe in the Copenhagen version of quantum mechanics that the observation of consciousness is making what is merely energetic appear physical.

44:55and I believe that everything is full of consciousness and that that light was a representation of consciousness. But I also believe that this glass is a representation of consciousness and that you are and that a tree is and that a rock is. Everything is brimming with that light. My son, actually, 19 years after they told me he was going to ruin my life, we were going home from the funeral of his friend's mother, his best friend's mother. She died. And it was horrible. And he said, Mom, I didn't cry at the funeral. And I said, Yeah, but you can cry. Strong men cry when things are sad, and this is sad.

45:38And this is a kid who barely talks. He said, Well, it's not so bad once the light comes and opens your heart. And I said, What? A light came and opened your heart? He said, mm-hmm. I said, well, when did this happen? He said, May 10th. This was in February. And I was like, so what happened? So he told me he was in his room. He was having a struggle. He was 13 years old. This was years before. And a light appeared in his room and touched him. And he said, it told him, you can do this. And I said, well, I've seen that light too. And he looked at me like, wow, I didn't think you had it in you. And I said, and it told me that it's always with us, even though we can't see it.

46:22And he said, oh, I can see it. And I said, you can? He said, yeah. I said, like right now? Of course. He was like, yes. I said, well, where is it? Is it like up there? Is it down here? Is it in your heart? And he just shook his head at me and he I said, Mom, it's everywhere. That's the world I live in. All right. So, yeah, I feel like you and I are probably going to have quite a few conversations. Ooh, I hope so. On and off records. So to be continued, I'm going to maybe just take a slight sidestep to integrity cleanse. If somebody wanted to do an integrity cleanse or attempt what you did, but with the lessons learned, maybe they are not willing to go kind of full throttle.

47:10How would you suggest they do that? Because most people listening, myself included, have never attempted something like this. And just as a quick humorous sidebar, I'll say if people want to read something very funny, there's an article, it's an old article from Esquire called, I Think You're Fat by a friend of mine, AJ Jacobs. And it's about his experiments with radical candor. And his wife was like, how do I look at this? And he's like, I think you're fat. And you can imagine it didn't go super well. He learned a lot, but ultimately it was pretty tough experiment. So what would you suggest to people?

47:45And what is an integrity cleanse? And what's the kind of like white belt, blue belt, black belt version, or however you would like to answer that? Let's do the white belt first. Take a smaller time period. I said a year, take three days a week and you don't have to say everything you think, but you do have to be aware when you're saying something that you don't believe. So have a little journal or something so that you can, when you lie to someone else, and most lies are told to smooth social interactions, and nobody says you look fat. So just note in a little book, okay, I said this, but what was I actually thinking?

48:30So somebody said to me, oh, we'd love you to come out and visit. And I said, sure, sometime. But you write down, okay, that was a lie. I would rather die a thousand times than go to stay with these people. Whatever. Write the truth down in your little notebook book for yourself. That's the path of the truth. Everything else is the path of not there. It's just mushy. I wrote a whole book on this based on the Divine Comedy because Dante starts that book just saying, in the middle of my life, I found myself just wandering through this horrible dark wilderness, and I had no idea how I got there or where to go because I'd lost the true path.

49:07And then he shows how you find the true path. So, most of us are doing that, and the way you find the true path is to start writing down the things that are true after you've said the things that are not true. Just do that for three days. That's the white belt. Blue belt, take a month and have a friend where you speak the whole truth to another person, even if it's a therapist or a 12-step group or something. You want to go black belt, all in. This is what I try to do. No lying ever. But you don't have to say much. Like, consider if what you have to say is an improvement upon silence. You can be mute for a month.

49:46Right. No, you end up finding out that you say it if it's true, kind, and useful. And not very few things are, all three. But don't lie even with your actions or with your facial expression or anything. Don't eat a bite of food you don't want. That's a lie. I like to be tough on these things. Like I used to run 100 miles a week. Now I will be like, I will never do anything false. And it's fun and rigorous. It is rigorous, I would imagine. All right. So quick tactical question for people who want to maybe get somewhere between the blue and black. They're going to make an attempt at fewer lies, more truth.

50:30So not just becoming aware of it, but actually changing some behavior. You mentioned offensive. You mentioned rigorous. Somebody who is being truthful is going to say no in some form a lot more than someone who's being untruthful. What are some of your go-to phrases or the language that you like to use that is, Linda, I think you're fat. There you go. in terms of saying no to the many things that would otherwise consume your time and your life. Most people, when they want to say no and they don't know how to say it, will try to become victim-y and say, I can't because of this, this, and this, which is horrible because the person always thinks of a way out of those things.

51:16I love this quote from Julius Caesar, Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, where his wife says, don't go to the Senate. I had a horrible nightmare. You're going to get stabbed. So the guy comes to get him and he says, go tell the council, Caesar will not come. That I cannot is false, that I dare not, false or still. No, go tell the council, Caesar will not come. Boom! Like that is my model. And there have been really good studies that show that to get out of depression, one study had control group, a group that had therapy, a group that had meds, and a group that did nothing but eliminate the words, I can't and I have to from their responses.

51:56Instead, they had to say, I choose not to, I choose to, I will, I won't. And they came out of their depression faster than any of the other groups. Every verbal thing we say that is not true hurts our bodies, hurts our psyches, and leads us to anxiety and depression. So in that case, keep a book that says you'll have to deal with the people who don't like you saying, no, I've lost a lot of friends this way, friends that perhaps needed losing. But I always say, just think, know what you really know about something. Okay. Feel what you really feel. Say what you really mean, at least to yourself in your notebook, and then do what you really want.

52:38And that sounds so self-serving, but in fact, it's quite stoical. I know you follow the Stoics and the Hedonists, they were weirdly similar. They'll do what is true because it's more felicitous to them in every way. So have a notebook where you write down what you would do if you were being really honest. And then after a while, once you know what you're dealing with, start to become that person in the way you actually conduct your life. And as you make mistakes and as you don't keep your commitments, forgive yourself. is one of the things I've found is that it's never true to hate yourself or to condemn yourself.

53:22It's never true. What do you mean by that? We are such little monkeys, you know? I just got back from Costa Rica, and we had a fabulous monkey encounter. And they had this fear expression. And they were afraid of so many things. And I just thought, we are this far from them. All we've got is shoes to differentiate us from them. and we're terrified of everything all the time and most of us are really doing our best and we have all kinds of socialization, weirdness. Our brains get reconditioned and rewired for fear. If you're not in integrity and you didn't manage to pull it off and be honest in a hard situation, kindness and gentleness are the truth.

54:03I actually wrote a book that's coming out next year after I wrote The Way of Integrity because I was so tough on myself in the integrity thing and it was making people anxious. And there's a level beyond just telling the truth and it is called compassion. And it's truer. So forgive me while I get really nitty gritty with maybe a mundane question, but it's building on what we were just talking about. And I'll give an example. So we were first corresponding via email and I was exploring the potential for maybe doing something in person. which is not to say you didn't want to do that, but the logistics weren't going to work out.

54:45And you had a line that was something along the lines of, I would love to do in person, but I can't do to life Tetris, something like that. And I was like, life Tetris, do to life Tetris. That is a good phrase I'm going to steal. And so I'm wondering - You can't steal it because I give it to you freely. Oh, thank you. I will gratefully receive then this phrase. I'm wondering if, let's just say, hypothetical example. really close friend of yours. And his wife, so male friend, his wife invites you to a costume party on a Thursday night. And in your mind, you're like, I would rather throw myself face first through a plate glass window than go to a costume party on a Thursday night for any number of reasons, right?

55:31Like perfectly nice person. You do not want to go to this thing, but you know it would be meaningful to her. You know it would therefore be meaningful to the husband. who might have to deal with some flack, who knows, like back channel, if you say yada, yada, yada, but you really don't want to go. What do you say? I would say something like, what else could we do together? This actually is a really effective thing when you're raising a child. If you just say no, it leaves them with no options. They don't know what to do with their feelings and none of us ever really grows up. So when somebody says that, you say, ah, what else could we do together?

56:07If you love them and you care about them, you want to do something with them. It's just not that. If you don't want to be around them at all, it's time to say no to the costume party and get rid of those people. Not get rid of them, but cut them loose. So when I started asking people to do things with me that I wanted to do, everybody's life got better. I had so much fun and I didn't have all the awful things where I I was pretending to have fun when I wasn't. Could you give an example of just what that looks like? Somebody comes to you and they're like, let's do A. Or please do A. And you're like, in your mind, body, I don't really want to do A.

56:46What might be an example? Could be made up. No, it doesn't have to be made up. I've been actually working this through. Have you interviewed Liz Gilbert? I have. Yeah, it's been a few years. We're going to talk again. She's so much fun. Anyway, we've been trying to figure out how to do live events. and our schedules haven't jived very much. And we had the same speaking agent and there was some conflict over that. And I finally had to just go to her and say, I don't think it works for us to have the same speaking agent when we go and we're creating events together. And it was kind of hard to say that because we both really love this agent, but Liz and she are really, really close.

57:24So I thought it might upset her and maybe it did, but the fact is it was true. and so she didn't bat an eye. She just said, whatever makes it more fun and gives us more ease when we're together. Great. We want our friendship to be as much fun, as joyful as it can be. So that was the track. And it was a little awkward, but it worked. Last time, I won't beat this dead horse any further, but any other language that you find helpful? For people who have trouble saying no, is there any starter language where you're like, try this on for size? For some reason, when you said any other language, I literally thought of Chinese.

58:03Yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Just respond in a different language. Right. I don't speak language. I remember saying the most awkward, Oh, Tim, when I was freaking out about my family and my, oh, the sexual abuse and everything, my mother called me and said, we hadn't seen you for a while. We'd really, we miss you. And I had just taken this pledge. And I said to her, I miss the concept of having parents. Oh, wow. Because it was the truest thing I could say. Whoa. Return volley strong. Yeah, but I didn't want to hurt her. I just, I had to tell the truth because that light was still like right there.

58:43and I hadn't gotten any experience being skillful. Here's another bit of language. Know what you really know and feel what you really feel. So for me, it might be something like, oh, you know what? Lunch sounds great. Breakfast is just too early for me. I'd be miserable. That's just the truth. I'm not being a victim. I'm just telling them the truth. I'm not a morning person. So you sort of claim your right to joy and you make it really clear that you want them to have joy and you expect yourself to have joy and no one has to keep secrets or cross boundaries that are hurtful in order to make the other person feel good.

59:21It's not true. And a relationship built on that, it isn't a real relationship, it'll fall apart. There's so much manipulation going on where people are pretending to do things that each other like and both of them are miserable. Yeah, there was a piece and I think it was McSweeney's, well there was a tweet and then there was an actual written piece that resembled this but it said being an adult this was a tweet i wish i had the attribution being an adult is saying so sorry for getting back to you so late over and over again until both of you die something like that and sorry for the delayed response i like the cartoon where the guy is holding the phone and going what about never does never work for you yeah the new yorker that's amazing piece so When there is someone where you're like, you know what?

1:00:09This is just not a relationship I want in my life. How do you break up with those people? You do what you really want to do. I remember I had one friend. She wanted to come stay with me. I didn't want her to come. And I remember saying, let me think about it. And then we had a conversation later. She was very, very upset. And she said, you paused and you had to think about it. And we were friends. And I said, yeah, sometimes I have to think about it. And she said, well, is it that you had something else going on or did you really not want me there? And I was like pinned to the wall. And it was physically painful to speak the truth.

1:00:49But it would have been more painful not to. So I said, yeah, I really wasn't in a place where our energies were going to work well together. I just did not feel like it would be good for either one of us. After a while, a few of those, and they'll break up with you, I promise. You just tell the truth and people go away.

1:01:11That's joy. All right. So I am going to ask you about anxiety. I want to ask quite a few questions about that. Before we get to that, so you had some Mandarin pop up. I feel like we should give people a little bit of context. So you've lived in Asia. You've studied not just East Asian languages, but also philosophies. This is just a sidebar that I thought you might find entertaining, which is I was in Greece many, many, many years ago. And when something is completely foreign, alien, unintelligible in English, you say, wow, it's all Greek to me. And then I realized, well, if you're a Greek person, in Greek, you see something you don't understand.

1:01:53You can't say it's all Greek to me because that's your native language. So what do you guys say? And they're like, oh, yeah, good question. which is, it's all Chinese to me. So if you're Greek, it's all Chinese to me, which I thought was great. That's fabulous. How has your experience with Asia, Asian languages, philosophies influenced who you are, what you do, let's just say in a coaching capacity? Yeah, this was before I had kids or any of the other stuff happened. I went over and spent a year studying Chinese at a research center in Singapore. And then I worked in Japan and studied that for a while.

1:02:35And I wasn't particularly interested at the time in the philosophy and the deeper wisdom of the Asian cultures. I just saw people offering oranges at little stands on the road and thought, oh, that's weird. And I went back to Harvard. So I did my junior year in Singapore, and I went back to Harvard, and I remember sitting in classes and thinking, why do people assume so much? You just assume so much. Like, there's this edifice of stuff you believe that I see no evidence for. And as I went on studying the languages and philosophies of Asia, they have a reverse idea of perfection. So, in the monotheistic Western and religions.

1:03:22You are born imperfect. You're an imperfect, original sinning mess, and your job is to get better and better and more godlike until you can be godlike. You have to get better and better and learn more and more. In Asia, the idea is you're formed completely perfect, and you accrue illusions as you grow up. So a baby comes in completely innocent and sees that people react nicely when the baby smiles and they don't like it when the baby cries, and suddenly they start betraying themselves by smiling when they want to cry. That's the dawn of the loss of integrity, and everyone does it. We're a social species.

1:04:02But in Asia, when you set out to be free from suffering, you drop your illusions. So like the illusion, I should be cheerful all the time. If it causes suffering, it has to go. In The Tao Te Ching, my very favorite book, It says, in the pursuit of knowledge, every day something is added. In the pursuit of enlightenment, or the Tao, every day something is dropped. So you know less and less until you arrive at non-action. And when nothing is done, nothing remains undone. I remember thinking, that is so cool, but I don't know why. And yeah, that was even before the white lion and everything. I was already sort of on that path.

1:04:45and now everything appears to me to be illusion. All my thoughts are illusion. And truth is something that I can feel or participate in as consciousness, but I've just been dropping and dropping and dropping my illusions and I try to do that every day. So we've been jointly baking a nice conversational cake. I just want to put a little icing on top and then we're going to segue to anxiety. And then we're going to make, who knows, we'll make a meringue pie or a key lime pie, maybe a carrot cake, perhaps out of anxiety. You would probably go on the great British baking show and out bake everyone in Britain.

1:05:25Well, you know, sometimes when kids go through or people go through culinary school, they're trying to decide on the sweet or the savory path. So do you become a chef or are you going to become a pastry chef, sweet or savory? And for people who are having a tough time deciding. I remember hearing when I was working on The 4-Hour Chef, someone who was involved in one of these very, very well-known schools said, well, one question we sometimes ask these students is, do you fold your socks? Do you have them in neat rows in a shelf? If so, maybe sweet and baking is for you because it's so OCD-friendly and precision-oriented.

1:06:02So yes, based on that at least, I think I would really enjoy, I would find baking very satisfying. I love that. I want to eat what you bake. You know, there may be a day. So the first is a story that I would love you to tell and tell me if this is enough of a prompt. So it's a story of an audience. You're on stage. Are you comfortable? This is the question. Could you tell this, please? I do this over and over. I speak in various places, ballrooms and theaters and places. And I'll be talking about how to do better at work, whatever I've been hired to talk about. And right in the middle, I'll stop and say, wait, wait, is everyone comfortable?

1:06:42And they all look at me as if I'm crazy. And I say, no, seriously, are you really comfortable? And they start to say, yes, we're fine. Go on. I'm like, no, I mean it. Are you really comfortable? And the whole audience will get quite angry. Yes, we're comfortable. Just talk. And then I ask them, okay, so now I'll answer this question. If you were home alone in your bedroom right now, how many of you would be sitting in exactly the position you're in at this moment. And maybe one hand goes up in a room full of hundreds of people. And then I say to them, why would you be in a different position? And they literally have to think.

1:07:21And then it comes to them after about five seconds, this isn't comfortable. And then I say, it's okay that you're not comfortable because we're tough. We're a tough species. We're tolerating discomfort so we can be together in this way. But I do have a problem with the fact that you all just looked me in the eye in clear daylight and repeatedly lied to me. And you thought you were telling the truth, but you knew you were lying. And they're like, what? What? And like your body is telling you the truth. That's how cut off we are from our bodies. And that's the first thing you ask yourself when you need to know the truth is, am I comfortable That'll give you everything else.

1:08:06The next, that would be the icing. Then there's the cherry on top. I'd love for you to expand on a question because these words will be words people recognize, but I think the context, I would like to hear more about the context. What do you want versus what do you yearn for? And that may not be the exact wording that you use. Okay. What is the significance of that question? It's interesting that you made the comment about, is it the exact language? That's one of the few places where I'm very exacting about language because somehow we divide that conceptually when we use language. Ask people what they want.

1:08:42They make me a list of things, a better job, better relationship, a better car, whatever. And then I say, when you wake up at night and it's dark and there's no one around, what do you yearn for? And the list is completely different. And it's very short. And almost everyone lists the same things. Peace, belonging, freedom, love, happiness. It's kind of it. Everybody wants them. And all the lists of things they want, those are all, I call it the difference between your social self and your essential self. The essential self yearns. The social self wants. You've gotten a lot of stuff you wanted.

1:09:26It doesn't make you happy. Nice. It's true. But if you get what you yearn for, it actually does make you happy. I can't resist the bait here. So when you have something like a car, right? Okay. So-and-so wants, you know, the newest Tesla model. So-and-so wants the XYZ car. It's very cleanly discreet in the sense that it costs$88 ,000. I can finance it for this much a month. Therefore, I know how much I need to work to earn a bonus, to get this, to do that. It's actionable in a convenient way, kind of like the drunk guy looking for his keys under the lamp at night, even though he knows it's in the bar somewhere because that's where the light is.

1:10:14How do you help people, and this might not be the right way to phrase it, but to actualize something like peace or belonging, which at least at face value is much more amorphous. I mean, it's a thing that people know, but it's not as easy to slice and dice and then maybe work backwards from like the new Tesla. It's not as cognitive. It's not analytical because it's not physical. So it's not measurable. Our particular science doesn't believe that it exists, even though we all want it. So a couple of things. The first thing, it's something I call jumping the tracks. and it's jumping the tracks between seeing your life in purely physical terms and then opening your mind to the possibility of all non-physical realities.

1:11:04And as we know from physics, all physical things are ultimately not physical. So that's the first thing is to say, I live in a world that is not just made up of objects. I live in a world where I deal in energies. When you track the joy through your body. It is a physical sensation, but it's also an energy. So then you start looking for the energies that bring you the essence of what you yearn for. And I've found the simplest exercise, and I've been doing it with people since the pandemic to calm people down, speaking of anxiety. I'd love to do it just a little bit. Let's do it. I would love to.

1:11:41So simple. So I have you write down whatever your concerns are. Then tell me, honest to goodness, Three things you love to taste. Okay. You want me to go for it? Or I guess, should I write down? I should write down. No, no, just tell me. I mean, you can write them if you want. Cheesecake with really thick frosting, for sure. I would say barbecue brisket would be there. And then I would say really cold, slightly sweetened iced tea on a really hot day. Ooh, okay. Okay, so as you say that, can you remember the sensation of tasting those three things? So focus your attention on the actual experience of the taste.

1:12:26Now, tell me three things you love to hear. Definitely not leaf blowers. Those fucking things are everywhere. I hate leaf blowers. They're everywhere in Texas. I don't know what it is with the compulsive leaf blowing. All right, so that's just a bit of a mini rant based on this morning. You and I are very much alike in this way. I was just like, what are these people doing? It's like, I think there's a racket where they like, it's like Tuesday, they blow the leaves to one side. And then Wednesday, they blow the leaves back to the other side. It doesn't make any sense. It blows. It blows, right.

1:12:57It blows, exactly. All right, so three sounds. Yeah, three things you love to hear. I would say acoustic guitar. So instrumental, say like classical guitar. Like Segovia. Yeah, that type of guitar I find really soothing. I find, what else do I like to hear? I'm thinking of all sorts of obscene things. Go for it. Yeah, very responsive female partner, let's call it. Certainly would be high on the list. And then the sound of my dog, Molly, when I get home and she's so happy to see me. She's just doing corpus calls and happiness whines left and right. I'd say those are three that come to mind. Okay, so the task here is you're going to try to hold all these sensations in your memory.

1:13:50You're going to activate them all at once. So you've got cheesecake, you've got the tea, you've got the brisket, you've got the dog, you've got the female. If you have a drug that can help me to get all of these things felt at the same time, I will be first in line. All right, so I'm trying to hold all of these things. That's the challenge. The left side of the brain, I'll give you a hint, can't do it. So it's forcing you to use the right side of your brain more than you usually do. So maybe you can't remember all of them, but like cheesecake, a guitar, whatever it is. Now we're going to go through the other senses.

1:14:21You know we are. What are three things you love to feel with your skin? Feel with my skin? Or with, you know, can you feel anything without? Yeah. I didn't foresee this conversation going here this morning, but I'm into it. Any specific part of your skin. Yeah, got it. Got it. All right. So I would say, what's my skin? Textures. Yeah, for sure. A very, very saturated Epsom salt bath where there's almost like a silky residue when you move around. That would be one. Another, I'll try to keep this family friendly for the moment. Another would be definitely dog kisses for sure. Yeah. That's super high.

1:15:06And then I would say hot stone massage with a small amount of oil. Fantastic. So those would be three. Okay. So now we're going to do three things, non-food, that you love to smell. Non-food. I would say there's a tree. I don't know how to pronounce this word, actually. It's called cananga in Spanish sometimes, but a lang lang, the Y-L-A-N-G. Yang or whatever. However that's pronounced. That particular tree, the scent of the flowers on that tree. Second would be really on a dog kick. I think partially because I'm getting a second dog this summer. Just that poppy smell. Yeah, yeah, yeah. True with babies too.

1:15:54A lot of people tell me the smell of dogs' feet is one of their favorite things. Oh, weird. I've never tried that. I know, right? I've never even smelled a dog's foot. I haven't gone for the feet. I think we need to try. we need to go take that step yeah yeah I'm more of like a softier smelling guy with the pups but then there's like puppy breath thing so let's just say puppies more in general so that's two is that two and yeah and then I would say non-food number three would be the smell of cedar saunas nice cedar okay one sense to go three things you love to see three things I love to see snow-covered mountains dotted with trees I would say babies laughing kids laughing just got a nice dose of that with my friend's family over the last few days and then just to showcase my my OCD when things are just like really lined up nicely.

1:17:01Say like a bookshelf or stacks of things perfectly parallel. Like if there's like a certain uniformity or symmetry, maybe if I want to give it a highfalutin label and sound fancy, I'll say symmetry, different types of symmetry. Okay. So now your job. And as you've been thinking of these things, because there are so many of them and they're activating the parts of your brain that are sensory, and that's taking you away from the analytical cognitive part that's so overdeveloped in most people these days, because everything we do develops it more and more. So now your job to learn to be happy is vividly imagine a scene with as many of these components as you can put together.

1:17:45So imagine sitting in a perfectly symmetrical, gorgeous cedar sauna on a snowy mountain, looking out, you've got your dog on one side, you've got a responsive female on the other. you've got cheesecake, you've got like, somebody's playing the guitar. I have a guitar player with a blindfold playing Spanish guitar. Just pretend he's not here. And you start to drop in to a space that you've created in your mind, but not the part of your mind that we talk about as mind. It's the sensory experience of being human. Right, the sensory overspreadsheet. And as you start to go into that, what you're doing is you're accessing the part of you that is capable of feeling the things you yearn for.

1:18:35Because everything we actually yearn for is a feeling state. And you can start with these very simple, small things. When I have somebody do this, I have people do this on Zoom calls and put it in the chat, and hundreds of words are going by of different beautiful things. And I'll start by saying, how nervous, anxious, and depressed are you? They give me a number from 1 to 10. Everybody's nervous and depressed. After they do this for a while and everybody's looking at everyone else's delights, everybody is in a completely different energy state. And that is how you get to the things you yearn for.

1:19:11You jump the tracks from the way we're taught to think to a sensory-based experiential way of thinking, which is, for me, more real. And so jumping the tracks, does that refer to doing this exercise as an example, establishing this like emotional landmark? Like, okay, remember this feeling. You're in the sauna, the snowcat peaks, the dog, the this, the that. Remember this. And this is now your sort of homing direction from a sensory perspective. It's a track. Yeah. And it may just be the side of the rhinoceros' toe. It's very likely. You've been on the path of not there for so long, you don't know what the real— For me, that white light thing was the whole track.

1:19:57Bam! I could not miss it after that experience. But what you just did is an experience of moving into that territory and seeing sort of— You feel the shape of it or the— I end up having difficulty describing it in words because it's not a verbal experience. And the fact that it's not a verbal experience is part of the reason it can fulfill your yearning. And it's also part of the reason you've never gone there. Stephen Hayes, who founded ACT Therapy, he set out to figure out why humans commit suicide, and no other animal seems to deliberately do that. And his answer is language. We're the only species that can create a reality with words in our minds that is so terrifying that an unknown future is worse than the fear of death.

1:20:47If you stop thinking in terms of language and logic, which we call that thinking intelligence, it's just, it's like a pair of scissors. It's good for certain tasks. It's not great when you need to stay warm, right? When you jump the tracks into your entire nervous system, which is all part of, it's not disconnected from the brain, then you're in the territory where you can actually experience joy. I want to go to two places. One is going to be a complete non sequitur, but just for purposes of trivia, I want to tell people something about rhinos. So you mentioned rhinos and the toe of the rhino.

1:21:29Part of the reason, as you alluded to, rhinos are a good starter animal for tracking, at least in South Africa, where you and I were in the Sabi Sands Reserve at different times with Landalozzi, which coincidentally means the protector of all things. I believe it's in Zulu. But it has this large front toe. You can imagine it like the edge of your big toe toenail. And then there are these two side toes. And I mean, it just goes back to Pangaea and it raises all sorts of great questions. But it's so weird. So there is an order called parasodactyla, which is an order of ungulates. So you could think elk, deer, et cetera.

1:22:15The order includes about 17 living species divided into three families. You have equidae, which comes back to the equine therapy maybe at some point. That's horses, asses, and zebras, rhinos, and tap ears, which you find in South America. So those are all related, which is pretty wild to think about. Rhinos, tapirs, and say zebras or horses. But if you look at the tracks, I mean, there are some similarities. So I just wanted to mention that briefly because it was just, it needed to get out of my head. And then the second is related to a book you mentioned earlier, the Tao Te Ching. and I was wondering if you could speak to Stephen Mitchell and Byron Katie in what you have learned from them.

1:23:00It could be related to integrity, it could be related to other things, but what have you modeled from them or learned from them? Speaking of the concept of having parents, I mean, they're friends more than parents, but I really do feel like they've kind of reparented me with their books. I read Stephen's version of the Tao Te Ching right around the time I had the White Light Experience. That's when it was first published. And it was such an intense, it was like my nervous system caught fire when I read that version. And I'd read other versions and they didn't float in my boat as much. But there was so much energy in my body that I felt like I was going to literally physically explode.

1:23:39And I drove to a place where I knew I could hike to a waterfall. Oh, they're going to say safely explode. Got to hike to a waterfall. I literally ran along this mountain path to this large-ish waterfall, ran under the waterfall and just stood there. And then the cold water beating down on me equaled the sort of heat that was rising. I mean, my connection to that book was so overwhelming. And I know it's been powerful for a lot of people. So I memorized it, took it around, gave it to everyone I knew. Then I was on a book tour and I saw this book by a woman named Byron Katie. And it said, with a foreword by Stephen Mitchell.

1:24:20Never would have looked at it if I hadn't seen that. And then I found out on the leaf, on the book leaf, that they were married. And I was like, wow, okay, now I'm interested. So I bought the book, got on a plane, read the book. And she had a series of four questions, which are very simple. Think of a thought that makes you upset. Is it true? Can you know that it's true? what happens when you think it, who would you be without it? It seemed very, very simple. And I applied it. I started applying it. And there on the plane, I had an injury on my knee. And my thought was, I'm mad at my knee because it won't let me work out.

1:24:55And Katie has this way of reversing everything that's causing you suffering. After reading her stuff and doing her work forever, I actually believe that the direct verbal opposite of your worst fear is your next step toward enlightenment. I truly believe that. Okay, can you say that one more time? So I have some familiarity with your workshops and worksheets. And just for people who want to find this, they can find The Work by Byron Katie online. Yeah, it's called The Work of Byron Katie, and you can go online and download free things, and she's very generous with it. Could you say that one more time?

1:25:28Because this seems like an important part. It will sound odd if you haven't been doing the work for a long time, but this is what I've realized the exact verbal opposite of my worst fear. So the opposite, take your worst fear, find the direct opposite of that. That is your next step toward enlightenment. So for example, when I wrote my book about Mormons and I said to the publisher, don't tell anyone until it's published. And they said, you're afraid of the Mormons, how cute. Then the galleys went out and I started getting calls from New York. Why didn't you tell us these people are insane? and we're all going to die.

1:26:04You mess with a religion, you get some weird responses. So I'm on this, this is a different time, I'm on this plane again, and I'm thinking, something terrible is going to happen to me because I wrote that book. Something terrible is going to happen to me because I wrote that book. And this thought just dogged me, so I did Byron Katie's work on it, and she picks it apart for you, and then you get the reverse. and the reverse of my worst fear here was, I'm going to happen to something terrible because I wrote that book. Instead of something terrible is going to happen to me, it became, I'm going to happen to something terrible.

1:26:42And something in my psyche just went click, click, click, click, and I was no longer afraid. I thought I might get killed for sure. I just, I know I was doing what was right for me, period. I never went into a welter over it again. That was just true for me. So that gives you a little tiny weird backwards taste of the way Byron Katie's work affects you when you do it. And she was doing her work and some people who were into it said to Stephen Mitchell, a great translator and writer, you've got to write a book about this woman. And he said, no. And they said, no, you really, really have to. And he's like, I hate gurus.

1:27:23I don't like, oh my gosh. She's living in California. Steven is very picky, very picky. He said, all right, I'll go to Barstow where she lives. But she wasn't living in Barstow anymore. She just had lived there. She was living in LA. But he said, she will meet me in Barstow and we will sit down on the floor and we will look into each other's eyes for an hour. And then I will tell you whether I will write her book or not. So, the way I tell the story, which is not far off the truth, but it's my story, not theirs. But they went to Barstow, and Katie was thinking, why does he want to go to Barstow?

1:28:02And they sat in a hotel, I believe they sat on the floor, knee to knee, and they looked into each other's eyes without speaking for an hour, and then they got married. That's not quite right. But he said to Katie, I've got to go back to New York now. And she just said, why would you go back to New York? He said, because I live there. And she was like, so? And he said, well, I have to go deal with my affairs. And she said, but you're the only person I've ever met who's of my species. And they talk about two kids in love in their 80s. They are in love with life, in love with each other, in love with the world, in love with death itself, like in love with everything.

1:28:49And their work has just mothered and fathered me through my life. And they've done it themselves as people now. So I love them dearly. I encourage people to check out the work for sure. And I have a, I guess, technical question about the opposite that you landed on. So I am going to happen to something terrible because of my book. Is that an example of a turnaround? And could you have ended up on a different version? For instance, something wonderful is going to happen to me because of my book or some alternate. There could have been a number of varieties. Did that happen to be the one that of several resonated with you?

1:29:26Yeah, that was the one that really hit the gong in my mind, but I did have several. And very often you can come up with a bunch of them. And some of them are just plain wrong. They don't feel right at all. Some of them are okay, but it's not changing my life. Like nothing terrible is going to happen to me because I wrote this book. I thought, I don't believe that. And actually terrible things did happen to me. Death wasn't one of them, but some things are going to happen to me for sure. So maybe if I hadn't believed it, it wouldn't have happened, but it did. So that one didn't work. Wonderful things are going to happen to me because I wrote that book.

1:29:59I did think that one seemed truer and it ended up being truer. I just couldn't know what was going to happen. And then I got, often for me, it's the one that's strange and not grammatically normal that will break the construct in my mind because I think of the strange verbiage. And it sort of breaks open an assumption, and I'm in that space of don't know mind. And it's a little Satori, right? And it's really fun to take your fears, put them through Byron Katie's questions and then look at the turnarounds. And it can really, really change your life just sitting in a chair. I have seen people in 15 minutes doing this exercise live with Katie, reframe 20 years of resentment towards a parent because of X, Y, and Z.

1:30:53and they do a 180 and seemingly it just evaporates or transforms into something completely different with at least some durability. And I expect for some folks, a lot of durability. I've been really impressed. And it's not that this happens to everyone every time, that's not the case, but you do see some really remarkable changes. But I'll tell you something. The work itself is incredibly powerful. But the reason people have these massive shifts with Katie in person, this one guy, he was in a house that was bombed to smithereens in Poland during, I think it was, in World War II. And his whole family died, and a roof beam fell on him.

1:31:40And it was winter. And so he gets up and he's haunted by this moment. And, you know, for 50 years, he's carried this. And she says, can you find the nine-year-old boy in that scenario with that roof beam on his head who was just fine? And he thinks for like literally two seconds and goes, oh, yeah. And things like this happened around Katie all the time. And the reason is that she has jumped the tracks. and to understand why it's so powerful to do the work with her. You have to jump the tracks. You have to start believing that there's an energetic field that is connecting all of us. And you can feel people's energy.

1:32:22I know I start to sound all new age, and Stephen wants to slap me in the face. He doesn't. He never would. But he gets very grumpy with me. I don't believe any of that stuff. He would stare at you for an hour very intensely. He's like, I don't believe any of that stuff. It's just phony. And I'm like, explain this, Stephen. and I show him something Katie's done. He just laughs and says, all right, I can't explain that. But it's really nice. He's such a super hardcore analytical, he doesn't believe anything because everything can be disproven. And she is a field of transformation. She just is. She really is a different species.

1:33:01It's just a different thing. And I'm not making any claims. I'm not deifying her. is she just, she's a very, and I mean this in the most complimentary way, but very unusual. I have met a lot of people who claim to be gurus and self-helpers and everything. And she's the only one, I've spent quite a lot of time around her. I have never seen any reason to disbelieve what she says about the fact that she lives in perpetual joy. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's pretty wild to see her in action. And I have not spent a lot of time with her. And you're just like, is this an act? Does she go home and just yell on the phone?

1:33:40And you just, at least I was not able to see any deviation. I did not see any deviation whatsoever. No, I've never seen it. And I've been around her when she's exhausted, when she's sick, when she's jet lagged. She's never in psychological suffering ever, as far as I've seen. So let's chat about another great for a second. Goethe. So the German writer, innovator, polymath of every possible variety. I'm wondering what you find most striking about Goethe. There are a couple of quotes that popped up that I think may resonate with you that I think you've mentioned in conversations before. But when you trust yourself, you will know how to live.

1:34:22That's one. Another, never hurry, never cease. That's one I've heard permutations of in Buddhism as well, right? No hurry, no pause, all these things, which I quite like. Any others that come to mind or any aspects? From Goethe himself? Or anything, I mean, that doesn't need to be specifically to, we can meander as we want to meander. I love the stuff about self-trust. I'm blanking, actually, which I rarely do. All I can think about is Faust now and how he talks about the bargain with the devil. I think we all make a bargain with the devil metaphorically because we're forced to confront the question, will we do what it takes to be admired and approved of by humans or will we follow the soul?

1:35:09Will we trust ourselves or will we trust what other people want us to be. So the Faustian bargain is the only thing that's really coming to mind right now. Is Goethe a particular favorite of yours? I have a collection of aphorisms and lived in Berlin for a period of time, became really infatuated by Goethe just because, and for those wondering what the hell we're talking about, lots of different pronunciations in English, but G-O-E-T-H-E, there's the Goethe Institute, and certainly, I don't know if it'd be fair to call him the the Shakespeare plus of Germany, but that's one way to think about it.

1:35:47I know why you're into him. Tell me. He's just like you. He's just like me. Yeah. I mean, there aren't many people like you. Bald and handsome? There really aren't. And I love the way you're so incredibly generous with all your life hacks and everything, but I'm like, okay, so you can learn 12 sentences and then know a language. Not everybody can. You can learn the tango and be an Argentine champion. Not everybody can. But you are kind of a freak. You got to admit that. Because you don't just pick up hobbies. You pick up hobbies and then become a Japanese translator. It's kind of insane the kind of equipment you were born with.

1:36:30And it must be a heavy burden in some ways, and quite lonely. Because as much as you try to help people be the same, they probably rarely are. and I think Goethe's life might have been similar. You are America's Goethe. Oh, wow. There you go. Thank you. I appreciate that. That is high praise. I would say for a multitude of reasons, definitely feeling lonely. I mean, that's something I'm familiar with for sure. I do have different hardware. I'd say that it manifests in maybe unpredictable ways. I did a bunch of cognitive assessments recently because that's the kind of thing that I do. And for instance, for digit recall, just doing five and six digit recall, when I don't have the ability, I don't have the time to use a crutch of say a mnemonic, I am terrible.

1:37:23I'm like lowest decile in the US for sure, like bottom 10%. But then there are other things like the Stroop test where you're looking at, say, the word red, but it's displayed in green. And you have to either indicate red or green depending on some parameter. And it's very fast. Stroop test, I'm like top 1%. I have no idea why. I don't know what that translates to. And it kind of goes on and on. There are super abilities and super weaknesses. Oh, tell me. This is fascinating. Well, I mean, they're very, in my experience, often right side by side. They're very adjacent, right? So I would say I can, you can see how this would cut both ways.

1:38:11I can walk into a room. I was doing a remodel at one point, for instance, and I had never seen this entire room built. And I walked in and there was a mirror 10 feet away. And I said, it's an eighth of an inch too far to the left. Talking about symmetry. I was like, it's an eighth of an inch too far to the left. And they're like, what? And I was like, yeah, yeah, it's not centered. And they went over and measured it. And lo and behold, within a fraction of a second, I was like, yeah, that's off. Wow. You can see how that would drive me fucking bananas too. That would be hard to live in the world.

1:38:39Very monkish. Beauty is such a, what'd I say? It's so gratifying to me. It's its own excuse for being. It's its own excuse for being. So when there is something that lazily violates beauty, it bugs the shit out of me. And I'm not proud of that. I'm not saying it is enabling. Most of the time, I would say it is distracting. At worst, it would be disabling. But it enables me to do certain things, right? Like I can draw the floor plan of almost any restaurant I've ever been in. Doesn't matter if it's once, twice. if I've only been there for five minutes, that's just something I can do. And then there are a lot of things that normal people can do that I just seem unable to do in terms of, let's just say, on one hand, I have a great creative capacity because I will ruminate.

1:39:39On the other hand, that same rumination can manifest as lifelong onset insomnia. Oh, yes, yes. I'm in treatment for this right now. I just found someone, yeah. Oh, wow. All right. So it goes both ways. And I will say there are examples where I can't teach someone to replicate what I've done. There are thankfully more examples of where I can help someone actually get beyond where I arrived after X point in time, mostly because I would say the vast majority of teaching has a lot of fat on it and logical sequences aren't particularly prevalent and old methods persist for a really long time. So, I mean, the way that we, as an example, teach languages, since you mentioned languages, the way we teach languages in most schools is the equivalent of saying, okay, you want to learn how to ski and you're excited to learn how to ski?

1:40:30Great. We're going to have you take a six-month avalanche course and you're going to memorize meteorological tables and historical weather patterns for the first six months. Who is going to want to do that? Nobody. Everyone's going to drop out. Maybe there are one or two people who survive and then they get called good at languages. That's a failure of the method, not a failure of the student. So if I'm able to suffer through that and then break it down, rearrange it, remove 90 % of it, then I can teach people to go further than I did in a lot of ways. However, then I have an unusual ability to mimic.

1:41:08I just do. And for whatever reason, even though I've done audiological exams because I like to know what I'm dealing with, I do not seem to have any greater range, any greater sensitivity than the average person. But my brain, for whatever reason, interprets these sounds and signals, and I can mimic accents. I can mimic tones. I can do these things. I don't know why, but that does give me an advantage. So have you ever been given a word for your neurodivergence? No. And I'm grateful in the sense that I was not of a generation where, say, overprescription was common or even really existent for things that didn't have labels, constellations of symptoms or characteristics that didn't have labels until later.

1:41:59Because I for sure would have been medicated to the gills. And I'm not saying there is a place for medication, but I would have been given everything under the sun. I mean, I was hyperactive, rambunctious, bouncing all over the place, refused to learn the alphabet for a while. And then I was stupid. And then I was going to be held back. I mean, I would have been just saturated with pharmaceuticals. Oh, my God. So, no, I haven't been given, I have not been given a word. Is there a good word that comes to mind? I don't know. I mean, my oldest child just self-identified as autistic. So, I went in and looked at all the symptoms.

1:42:33And I'm like, oh, that's what's been wrong with me this whole time. I truly believe this thing about destiny, and I remember thinking even as a child, if my destiny is to climb to the top of Everest and someone else's destiny is to dive to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the equipment that I need would actually make them unable to fulfill their mission. Like if I'm climbing, that would not be good in diving, and I couldn't haul an aquatic set of tools up Everest. So I thought, all right, There are things I wish I could do that I can't and things I can do. I don't know. I just can't do them. And it's really easy for me and weirdly easy.

1:43:14And I just thought, well, this must be in some way a description of what I'm meant to do with my life. I remember thinking that when I was eight or nine years old. And I look at you and you've done so many things that what do you do if you're good at dancing? You become a champion. Yay, you can do that. But your brain is so different. and I hope they never medicate it unless it's something that makes you happier. But I am really curious about your brain because it's clearly, I actually think the future of our species depends on people who are neurodivergent in ways that make them unable to fit the culture that Western colonizers created, the weird cultures, right?

1:43:56And that's an oversimplification and there are many, many cultures, but the overall culture that we have of hierarchical capitalism, whatever, is destroying the planet and teaching people languages by putting them in avalanche courses. And then there are people who just will not, because their brains work differently. And you've just got the most unusual brain I've ever seen. Oh, thank you. I think about this a lot, but it's like, I don't know if I want to paint this broadly, but superpowers come with costs. Always. Or just powers. Powers come with weaknesses. It's the two sides of the same coin come in different varieties.

1:44:38And so I think that, for instance, a lot of my abilities almost certainly would not exist without also a propensity towards depression, a propensity towards anxiety and hypervigilance. And there are times certainly when I would trade it all for the ability to get to sleep easily, the ability to look at the glass as half full instead of half empty. I mean, there are times that I'm like, you know what? I'm not sure right now if someone was like, here's your list of abilities and disabilities. And if you strike out one, you have to strike out something from the other column. I might erase a number of things.

1:45:20Arrived at a good place. I feel that a number of recent experiments have been particularly interesting, but I'd love to hear from you. And this stuck out. This is in some prep notes. And I'd like you to take this wherever you would like to take it, but this is a line. I'm just going to use it as a prompt. So the opposite of anxiety isn't calm, it's creativity. I like that. I've never heard it before, but there's part of me that's like, even without dissecting it, it makes some sense to me. Could you elaborate on that, please? I came to this conclusion, I was noticing this huge spike in all my clients of anxiety, and I was reading about this massive, mostly in the pandemic, but anxiety just went bananas, and it didn't come down when things eased a little bit.

1:46:07And at the same time, I got to be friends with Jill Bolte-Taylor, the woman who had the left hemisphere stroke when she was a Harvard neuroanatomist. It was the first TED Talk to go viral, and she lost all language and analytical cognition while her left hemisphere was offline. It took her eight years to rebuild her brain, but she experienced things with only the right hemisphere that she'd never experienced before, this incredible joy, bliss, awe, the feeling of being completely a field of energy, no barriers between physical objects. It was a very different view of the world. If she hadn't been a neuroanatomist, she probably would be sitting in a vegetating somewhere.

1:46:50but fortunately she was among people who knew how to help her rebuild so now she goes around telling people we're overusing the left hemispheres of our brains we need to be able to access the right and so I'd been talking to her about this endlessly I love talking to her and I was reading a lot of brain science always have always will and I noticed that there were tons of studies that showed that the moment someone is even slightly stressed their creativity goes to shit Like they do these creative tests and then they say, we'll pay you$5 if you get the answer. Instead of motivating them, they get that little bit of anxiety, can't do it.

1:47:29All these studies showing that little kids happily create things and adults can't do the same things. Why? It always boils down to social anxiety. So there's this spaghetti and marshmallow test. Have you heard of it? This is a game of height, right? Yeah, you're trying to build the tallest tower possible using uncooked spaghetti, a marshmallow, some string and some tape. And they gave this problem to a whole bunch of engineers, groups of MBA students, groups of lawyers, all these people. They all had similar results. Then they gave it to a group of five-year-olds who won by a country mile. Five-year-olds do better by far at so many creative tests.

1:48:09And why do they stop doing well as they get older? it boils down to socialization and social anxiety. So then I looked at the brain structures and what Jill told me was you basically have two brains. They're symmetrical, but they don't work the same. The left hemisphere has this alarm signal that goes into fear and then immediately the brain starts to, the left hemisphere starts to try to control whatever's going wrong, whatever makes you afraid, and telling verbal stories about it. Problem is the verbal stories that you tell feed back into the amygdala as environmental realities. So if I'm afraid something's going to jump at me from the dark, it's as if something really is going to jump at me from the dark.

1:48:55So when I say I may have a fatal illness, there's no evidence, but I can literally go into a panic over that because of language. The left hemisphere is also unable or unwilling to acknowledge that the right hemisphere's perspective exists at all. Like if people have a right hemisphere stroke and they're only in the left hemisphere and you tell them to draw a clock, they'll draw the side of the clock from 12 to 6 and they'll say, that's finished. And there's nothing wrong with their eyes. They will not acknowledge anything the right brain is observing. When Jill only had her right brain, zero anxiety, zero time, zero physical reality really.

1:49:32On the right side, the amygdala is afraid, ah, but it starts to get curious. So you said something about curiosity really early on in this interview, and I was like, that's the trick. Because if something scares you, if you go to control, you're in anxiety. If you go to curiosity, my mind is open, I have no assumptions, and I want to know what this is about. Instead of anxiety, you get creativity. So it depends which side, and one side shuts off the other. So it toggles. So when I asked you to talk about these things that you were, the things you love with all five senses, you had to go into the right hemisphere of the brain and it had to shut down the part of the brain that produces anxiety.

1:50:18That's just the machinery. So my premise was anxiety kills creativity. Maybe creativity kills anxiety. So I started designing things to test that, and it tests amazingly well. Even though I haven't seen any direct studies on it yet, if you put together the science around it, it's kind of an unavoidable conclusion. And when I try it myself, oh my God, the results are ridiculously powerful. What types of exercises do you do for yourself. Oh, for example, if you were to write your name, Tim, that's cheating because it's Tim Ferriss. Are you right-handed? I'm right-handed. So I would have you write your name, then put your pencil just to the left of your name and write it backwards in mirror writing.

1:51:05So mirror your signature. Then you'd put your pencil under your signature and do it upside down and then upside down and backwards. Leonardo da Vinci used to write in mirror writing. Yeah, that is a wild example. If people go back and look at this extensive backwards writing. I used mirror writing constantly as a kid. It was amazing to me that other people couldn't read it. I totally maxed out this IQ test once when I was five because the guy had the test right in front of him. He was giving it to me orally. And I thought, doesn't he know I can read it upside down? I mean, I'm fine here. I aced that one.

1:51:43anyway, but just because I can read mirror writing, but try doing that and staying anxious at the same time. Can't do it. Then I decided, okay, I'm going to take January 2023. I'm going to give myself an entire month in lockdown because the systems are, the conditions are very controlled. So this is a good time for an experiment, the pandemic. I'm going to get up every morning and do things that are purely right brain function. So I started with drawing and painting and I thought, but I'll just go from there.

1:52:17I drew and painted like a maniac. I didn't want to sleep. I didn't want to eat. I didn't want to talk to anyone. I was in pure heaven. And the problem was at the end of the month, stopping was horrible. It was like some kind of suicide right there. And now, since I finished, I had to get back into my left hemisphere to write the book about it. But as soon as I sent the manuscript away, I just started painting. I get up every morning at like between 4 and 6 and paint until 11. And I'm just like completely blissed out. Yeah. I find drawing to be a real self. And I wanted to be an illustrator for a long time when I was a kid.

1:52:57And paid some of my expenses in college by being an illustrator. I actually illustrated a few books. I did that too. Long time ago. And getting back into that, even just going to... you do not need to be good. It's not about being good. It's about using different circuitry, patterning, a different type of awareness. There are many different ways you could frame it. Gesture drawing, going to live classes where you have nude subjects posing. And just in case there are a bunch of guys who are like, awesome. No, you're going to get some obese naked dudes too. It's not awesome. It's dealer's choice.

1:53:37So just realize you got to be there for the drawing. It's not a singles bar. And the fact, just for people who've never been, the way this works, gesture drawing is so-called because you're intended to capture at least the essence of a pose. The pose automatically changes with a timer. The timer could be one minute initially, and the model will change his or her position every 60 seconds. And then it might go to two minutes and then to say five minutes. But the point I want to make is part of the beauty of this is when things are changing that quickly, I really like gesture drawing live classes as an introduction because you just cannot, you do not have the space to overanalyze what you're doing.

1:54:22Whereas if I'm like, draw this apple on a table and you have two hours to do it, you can scrutinize and tie yourself up in knots every which way from Sunday. But if it's supposed it changes every 60 seconds. You just have to draw. In any case, I find it so deeply therapeutic. I used to put like a silk scarf in front of a fan and try to draw it. That sounds like torture. No, it's heaven. Because I mean, I had this massive depression and anxiety. And you know from experience, and it's when you do it for the joy of it. The moment you're doing it for money is just work. The reason I went so deeply into it this last January is that I'd always been doing it for the result for a long time.

1:55:07I was doing it for money. I was doing it to give to someone, whatever, to teach. And this was just to activate the right side of my brain. That was it. I would be obsessed with a drawing or a painting, and when it was done, I would just throw it in it. I don't even know where they are anymore. They just started littering the floor. I was in pig heaven. And it really does. When I'm anxious, this is what I tell myself, make something. Make something. You can't stay anxious if you're making something. Yeah, for sure. So two quick comments. The first is for people who want a great reinforcement of this, Make Good Art, a commencement speech by Neil Gaiman is unbelievably good.

1:55:51And watch the actual delivery. Watch the video because it's mellifluous, dulcet tones add so much to it. Its delivery is so good. And then the second thing I would say is for those people who are like, what, how am I going to find a naked person in a class and this, that, and the other thing? There are websites, and we'll put some in the show notes, where you have effectively gesture poses that change and you can set the duration. So you can mimic this at home. You don't need to do a class, but the class has so much more to it. You're doing it with other people. You're probably standing. You're actually moving your body and getting away from staring at something 18 inches at a fixed location in front of your face.

1:56:33There's so much more to it. What you just described is the way the right hemisphere moves with people in motion with the body versus the left hemisphere moves fixed, rigid, in space. Got to get this right. And there's just, there's an overemphasis in our entire culture. again, an oversimplification, but there's a huge overemphasis on left hemisphere functions to the point where this, I just, I love this guy, Ian McGill-Christ at Oxford. He says the whole culture functions like someone with a right hemisphere stroke, like we've lost half our brain. And it's the part that includes, that nurtures, that finds meaning, that finds joy.

1:57:12I mean, we have left out the best part. Yeah. Yeah. There are many different ways of knowing different modes of living. So these types of exercises I've just found so important as certainly joy-inducing, but just a critical vitamin. And if you're deficient in this, the consequences psychologically are just as dire as if you were deficient in essential amino acid or something like that. So let me ask you in a slightly different context, as it relates to, It doesn't need to be specific to anxiety, but I'm very curious because Boyd had mentioned this in his long list of potential topics that we could discuss.

1:57:53So I'm wondering if this ties in in any way, or if you could just speak to, he put down IFS, so parts work, internal family systems. How have you used that? What do you find it best for? We don't have to spend a lot of time on it. I'm just wondering if there's an intersection. Oh, yeah. same way there might be an intersection. If thoughts are beliefs we take to be true, something like that, or beliefs or thoughts we take to be true. If the work, Byron Katie's, the work can have such a dramatic impact on people by helping them to reauthor beliefs. I'm wondering if IFS also has a role and if so, what that role is in say the work that you do.

1:58:33I think so. IFS is going bananas because it works so damn well. And I got really curious reading about it. So I signed up. I tried to get a training course, but there's a waiting list. Signed up with my own IFS therapist, ended up meeting Dick Schwartz, who created IFS and having conversations with him about it. And the way he puts it, he was a family therapist. And there were times when he's working with a group of people and say the dad was really aggressive and a child didn't want to talk in front of the dad, he asked the dad to step out of the room and then the child could talk, could speak more freely.

1:59:07And then he was working with just one patient and he heard them using a very critical, angry voice. And he had this odd thing of, could I ask whoever just said that to step out of the body for a minute? Not literally. And to his surprise, the patient said, sure. And then the critical part stepped out and he said, I'd like to talk to whoever is behind this critical voice or whoever disagrees with the critical voice. And different parts of the patient would start to express themselves. It's not a shift in identity. It's not multiple personalities or anything like that. It's just that we all know we have parts.

1:59:45There's a part of us that loves to go out dancing and a part that likes to stay home and go to sleep. There's a part that feels little. There's a part that feels strong, whatever. So the thing is, the Byron Katie work, for example, if you do it, but only one part of you does it, there may be another part that is just not down with it. And that part needs to have its experience. What Dick found was that the parts have their own unique and whole identities. And if you respect them, they come together and they start to integrate with each other and solve the problems that make your life miserable.

2:00:25And it works really, really well. Do you use that with clients? Yeah, I'm not trained, but he's also very generous with his theory. And there are books out there. One is called Self Therapy by Jay Early with little illustrations and everything to tell you how to use it. And the biggest thing I've found, especially to relate to anxiety, so there's a part of you that gets anxious and depressed, yeah? Or maybe there are two different parts, one anxious, one depressed. I don't know. So when you think about your anxiety or your depression or your insomnia, how do you think about it? Like, what are the thoughts you think?

2:01:00What are the thoughts I think? Yeah, when you're thinking about insomnia. Yeah. I mean, remarkably, I've seemingly fixed a lot of that for the first time in 30 years. But I would say if we're talking about anxiety or depression, I'd say the most common type of thought pattern. And I did do a live, I had Dick on the podcast, Dick Schwartz, and we did a live kind of demo. Or he asked me if I'd be willing to do it. So we did do a live walkthrough. But I'd say to answer your question, the most common thoughts that I have are even related to depression, fear-based. So for instance, if I don't get sleep for one or two days, I'm like, catastrophizing, right?

2:01:43Like, I can feel myself slipping. I don't want to go into this state. I need to do everything to avoid it. Because if I end up in the spiral, A, B, C, D, E, F, and G, and all these catastrophe scenarios might ensue. So there's a lot of fear around slipping into a persistent depressive or anxious state, especially depressive state, because the anxious state I've brute forced through so many thousands of times that I have a greater degree of confidence in my ability to just by sheer will and overpowering my psyche, I can compensate. Whereas the depressive stuff is more handicapping, but there's a lot of fear around it, I would say.

2:02:29Yeah. So there's fear, there's avoidance, there's dread, there's catastrophizing. Now, what I've found is that when people talk to me about anxiety, they're like, I hate it. I want to get rid of it. I'd do anything to be rid of it. So I had this theory that the part that holds the insomnia or the part that holds the anxiety or depression is a part that wants to be included. Everything wants to belong, right? So when you're saying, get away, I don't want you, the part of you that does insomnia and depression goes into a kind of panic because it's now being told it can't belong. You don't want it.

2:03:11You've rejected it. And so it ups the ante and all it knows how to do is keep you awake and make you depressed. So it starts to spiral upwards. I had this huge breakthrough when I was meditating. And sometimes when I have a negative thing that won't seem to leave, I just use a little let go, let go mantra. And it wasn't letting go. And I thought, okay, how would Byron Katie do this? And I said, let's stay. So I said to my anxiety at the time, stay. Don't go anywhere. Please come and sit down. Stay here. I want you exactly the way you are. I accept you exactly the way you are. I want you with me.

2:03:49I care about you. I care about your welfare. I want to know all about you. I want to know everything about you. Come sit by the fire with me. And in a way, it's what I do with every client. It's what I did with Boyd when we were getting to know each other. Sit by the fire with me and tell me your worst fears, your worst stories, because I have room enough in my heart for all of them. And I said being creative is the opposite of anxiety, but you can't get to creativity if you don't start with acceptance and compassion and simple kindness toward the self, toward the parts of the self that are doing the things you can't stand.

2:04:30And that was a really dramatic shift for me in my insomnia, for one thing, but in all the negatives, when I started saying, stay. I love that. You know what it also makes me think? Man, oh man, is it time for me to go back and reread Radical Acceptance by Tara Brock? Yeah, that's a great book. Probably. It's probably time for me to get back on that horse too. I love that. Adela Field, do you have a favorite animal? Is there a small set of animals, birds, or otherwise where you're like, you know what? Yeah, I do. I particularly like or find these animals interesting. I do. Cheetahs. Cheetahs. All right.

2:05:13Yes. I love big cats anyway, but cheetahs are delicate and scared and skittish because they're built for speed. They have those long legs and stuff. And if a lion or a leopard or a hyena gets to them, they're toast. So I had a chance to meet an orphan cheetah, an adult cheetah. And you know how animals have energy, like dogs have this energy that is just dog, like genius energy. And horses have this energy, which is like, I'm about this far away from wild, and I'm scared of everything. And lions have this energy like serial killers because they are, you know. But cheetahs, I came upon a cheetah that was throttling an impala, and it held on until the animal had suffocated.

2:06:00And then it looked up at me and it said, meow. So I met this adult cheetah. the energy tim you've got to meet cheetahs they have like dog energy if you put a ton of sugar in it they are the sweetest animals and what do you mean by putting a ton of sugar into it just throwing donuts out of the car not in the rot your teeth way but just like how dogs love you she does love you twice that much they love each other twice that much and it started licking my arm and it was taking off a layer of skin with every lick because they have these really raspy tongues. I literally had a scar for months and I don't care.

2:06:43It could have eaten my arm. As far as scar stories go, that's up there with the grades. What happened to your arm? Oh, nothing. Just a cheetah licked my skin off. You never know. Yeah. Okay. Cheetahs. Yeah. I have not been that close to a cheetah, but I was really overjoyed, I think it was my last, last outing at Londozi, like in the trackers and rangers and with the whole kit and caboodle where they can actually use the radio. So we weren't on foot, at least not initially. I really wanted to see a cheetah. And as it happens, you probably can identify with this maybe, but I was so jet lagged at one point and I skipped one morning drive.

2:07:29So of course they see all these cheetahs and they're like, you missed the cheetahs. I'm like, oh, you got to be kidding me. And then luckily, because these, just the technical abilities of these rangers and trackers is so otherworldly, we're able to find a cheetah who's just killed an impala and was resting in the shade and had just eaten a bunch. So it wasn't going anywhere. They're like, yeah, don't worry about it. And we're able to get probably within 30 or 40 feet and just lock eyes. And for those people who haven't done this, which I'm guessing is a pretty large percentage, they have very different eyes from lions or leopards.

2:08:13They have this, at least the cheetah eyes saw, this deep kind of amber-orange eyes and a very square brow, like a very straight brow line. And it's so distinct. And they're, as you pointed out, so delicate. I mean, certainly if push came to shove, they could rip your face off. Oh, they can kill you six ways from Sunday. But they're very, very skittish, right? Like they are going to run away from everything because every other cat can steal prey from them or kill them. So they are built for speed. They've made a lot of compromises in optimizing for speed. Quick side note for people who may not realize this.

2:08:49If you look at, say, a leopard's tail, it's kind of like a squirrel tail, right? It's built for balancing at height. So it's very round. It's very bushy. And a cheetah tail is actually very rectangular. It's almost like a rudder or a beaver tail turned 90 degrees on its side because they use it for maneuvering aerodynamically when they're traveling at high speed. It's so wild. But I don't have a cheetah licking scar. I'm actually very, very... It really goes to what you said about every superpower has its cost, though. And I think you would identify with cheetahs. Yeah, I mean, I love cheetahs.

2:09:27I love, love, love cheetahs. I've only seen them that close that one time. But what a wonderful experience. Let's hop to this far from wild, and I'm afraid of everything, horses. Yeah, yeah. I want to say, did at one point you own a ranch? Am I making that up? North Star Ranch. Yeah. Do you still own the ranch? Okay, but you did. Okay, but you did. This was in San Luis Obispo. Slow. For six years. And for six years. It actually was in a national park. I mean, the nearest grocery store was an hour's drive. Wow. There was no road going past it. There was us and a national park. Okay. I trapped a lot of bears and a lot of mountain lion.

2:10:16I bet you had a lot. So equine therapy was, now I don't know how much time you've spent in that context. The reason I'm asking about it, I spent one afternoon here in Texas on a farm that specializes in equine therapy for people with PTSD, kids with different neurodiversion conditions, including autism. And I wanted to have the experience of interacting with horses. and I've ridden horses before, but being in a pen, interacting without any objective to ride a horse is foreign to me. Could you describe what this is? And if I'm kind of barking up the wrong tree, please stop me. But I'm just curious what your, the broad question is kind of what you gain from interacting with animals writ large, but since horses will not, are less inclined to eat your face than say big cats.

2:11:12It's a little more approachable for folks. That is a huge avalanche of word salad of a non-question, but would you like to take on the challenge of doing something like that? I love it. Yeah. I got that ranch because I got the chance to work with some equine therapists and I made a sort of amalgamation of the way I coach people with what they were doing. And we ran seminars and put like work teams through it and everything. And the reason it's so amazing is that I talk about people exuding an energy or cheetahs exuding an energy. Horses are responding to that energy, and they respond in a way that is undeniable.

2:11:49So we'd have a team of people and their boss would go into the pen. They were all too frightened to tell the boss that he was terrifying. The horse would just start to gallop and gallop and gallop and rear, and the Like, I'm being nice to him. And you could correct for posture and you could correct for, there's a way to speak hoarse and you speak it with your physical body. And you basically have to learn to stop acting like a predator, which we are, and start moving more like a prey animal. So gentle energy, eyes down, eyes soft, these sort of wishy-washy sounding things. But when you're in there in the pen with the horse and your eyes aren't soft, the horse is afraid.

2:12:30And then you learn how to soften your eyes and the horse goes, oh, and like physically drops its tension. And if you get to a place where you are in really calm, really connected state of being, so calm but also open, the horse will make you the leader of the herd. And I had a few experiences with that where I was taught to act like a herd leader. And this one time, some horse whispers took me to a herd, and they said, we want you to join up with this one little palomino mare. And there were like 20 horses in this pasture. And this one was the most skittish, the hardest to get close to. At work, I had to get my energy so soft and do everything just right.

2:13:17But eventually, I got to the place. There's something we used to call a join-up, where you walk past the horse, and you sort of brush past it with your shoulder and walk away, and it follows you. And you are now its leader. I'd done this with individual horses. I finally got this little palomino to join up with me, and I walked past her, and she came with me. And then you walk for a while together just to establish the connection. And she was walking with me, but I heard something weird behind me. And so after we'd walked a while, I looked back, and I just looked down and over, not over my shoulder, sort of under my shoulder, because you don't want your eyes to be up and staring.

2:13:56And she was the herd matriarch. And when she joined up with me, the whole herd did. And they were all walking with me. Holy shit. That's amazing. That's why I bought a ranch in California. I'm like, I'm buying a ranch. And what happens is you start to realize that these horses are just more sensitive to stuff that people are seeing in you all the time. And we'd put people in with horses, and the horses would force them to tell the truth. And then the other people, the boss would say, am I really that scary? and everybody would go, all five horses are afraid of you, and we are too. And it's a very, very quick way to learn to tell the truth.

2:14:39There was this one woman who kept trying to do it. She was having no success at all. The horse just kept bopping up against her, and she hated it. She said she was getting nothing out of the seminar. I was panicking inside. And finally, she said, after three days of this, she said, all right, I've been working on all these stupid little things, but the real thing is I'm getting a divorce and I haven't told anybody. And she started to cry and it was obvious that was her real issue. So he said, just go in with the horse and do whatever, but be honest. So she went into the pen and she just stood there and started to cry.

2:15:13And the horse came up and walked up and touched her with his shoulder and then wrapped his head back around so that his nose was touching his flank and just held her. And, It was a genuine hug. This is not me anthropomorphizing. When you realize that nature is available to you as a companion, if you just tell the truth, it really is worth giving everything else up. So why did you sell the ranch? Because I felt like it was time. Like I'm following this energy through the world. And I had written a novel about a woman who goes into the forest of California and has all these experiences. And then I was going to write a sequel that happens in the eastern forest, the little piece of the eastern ancient forests that still survive.

2:16:04It was going to be about a plague that affected New York City. So I moved to a little patch of the ancient eastern forest in Pennsylvania, and then there was a plague that affected New York City. And I'm writing the sequel now. But I go through life tracking and saying, I have a ranch now, I'm a rancher. No, I don't know. I could sell this house and move tomorrow if I felt like I should. And I would. Okay. So what was the, if you flashback to the day or the week or the conversation or the walk in which you're like, I'm done, no more ranch. What did that look like? Oh, it was much more gentle than that.

2:16:48It was like a death. It was like an animal dying. Have You ever had to put down a dog? Yeah, unfortunately, yes. Unfortunately, and yet it's such a clean pain, right? Death in nature is not the horror we make it. Death in nature is this deep gratitude for physical experience and then this profound release of the physical form of what you loved. And it teaches you how to die. And when you really know how to die, then you can live without any fear. and I felt the ranch dying for me and something else coming to life. And I grieved. How did that feel? Just because I think that might sound hard to grasp for some folks.

2:17:36Yeah, it is. I know. Yeah. So what does that feel like? This was exactly the place I was supposed to be. And now, well, Liz said it in Eat, Pray, Love. Now it is time for something that is beautiful to change into something else that is beautiful. And I knew that if I stayed there, the beauty of it would decay because the real beauty, it's like I said to myself in that month of my right hemisphere stuff, it's not about the picture I'm painting. It's not about the painting. It's about painting. It's about the process of being in continuous creative response to whatever is present, that state of mind.

2:18:12And it said buy a ranch. So I bought, I literally on my 50th birthday spent every penny I had on a ranch and six years later I sold it. And you know something great. We had a wonderful massage therapist who used to come out and work on people there. And she'd have her massage table in her car, but I'm sure she was living kind of paycheck to paycheck or hand to mouth. When we decided to leave, she inherited a whole bunch of money and bought the ranch. That's wild. And Boyd loves her. We all love her. That's amazing. Yeah. And then this place, there were wild turkeys and deer and everything in the place.

2:18:48we came here, first thing that happened when I saw this house was a whole flock of wild turkeys walked out of the forest, and I've never seen them since. It was just like I was being welcomed. You know how Londolos is. Nature is like that everywhere, and that's why it's worth it to tell the truth and let people hate you, because nature loves you when you tell the truth, and it tells you to go places and have adventures. I just went to Costa Rica. We didn't see any monkeys for six days. So I went and I energetically called monkeys. I know it's stupid. We got mobbed by monkeys. They were everywhere until my son got scared of them and I had to ask them to leave with my mind.

2:19:34The monkey whisperer. I don't see that in your bio. I haven't gotten around to it. It was just last week. Oh, wait, no, here it is on your LinkedIn. That's right. Okay. Yeah, I mean, life is full of wildness. 2020 to present, monkey whispering ink. I like it. Monkeys also, look, I mean, all of the fables about monkeys, there's something to it. Those beautiful creatures can also be mischievous rat bastards. Scary animals. They are scary. Oh my God. Boyd's stories about baboons are the most hilarious. Oh, baboons are especially terrifying. Yeah. Oh boy. I was listening. You know, it's funny I mentioned baboons.

2:20:11I was literally listening to recordings from La Telozzi two days ago. I shouldn't have done it right before bed because I had some terrifying dreams. But listening to baboon alarm calls. Yeah, don't listen to baboon. Don't listen to baboon alarm calls right before you go to bed. Novice mistake. Don't do that. But yeah, Costa Rica. Were they spider monkeys? Howlers? No, they were capuchins. Oh, nice. They're cute. Yeah. Yeah. And scary. Just a little. And they can get a little scary. Well, Martha, we've covered a lot of ground. Is there anything else that you would like to chat about before we land the plan for this first conversation?

2:20:54This might sound so Yarf-y, but I'm really grateful for you and for the life you've lived. And for your differences and how you've pushed them. and then you've given them to the world just so generously and completely and you've given me so much time today and I feel an enormous joy and okay I love your presence your energy your being I am awash in wonder the way I am when I'm in nature and I meet a really interesting creature thank you thank you so much i've been a fan from afar for a long time so it's really nice to finally connect and boyd has been sort of patiently waiting i guess for me to make the connection i've wanted to do for quite a while and the story is certainly that he tells now we've gotten to pay him back with stories about boyd that's right himself and we should like we should all hang out and make some more stories because i will tell you one thing if you go wherever you feel you're supposed to go to maximize your joy, your adventures just increase.

2:22:07Yeah. I feel like I'm in a liminal phase right now between one thing and the next. And there's probably quite a bit running in parallel, but I'm excited. I have no idea what that next big thing is. In some traditional cultures, in Europe, for example, tribal Europe before civilization, The threshold is the place of magic because it's not one place or another. And when you're on it, you're not anyone anywhere. Your liminal phase is the place where you're completely unformed, but that's why it's a place you can do magic. So maybe you should just stay in the liminal phase. Hang out here. Hang out in the waiting room for a little bit.

2:22:48Learn some magic. Yeah, the customs office between territories. yeah the boundary walking i enjoy just walking on it as opposed to crossing over it so maybe i'll hang out here for a bit that's where the shamans live tricksy tricksy shamans yes the monkeys of the human race oh yeah oh yeah that's for sure when you're like why did why did so many cultures murder so many shamans you're like well Well, you know, they can be rascals. They can be very tricksy. There is a really fun book. You may have already come across this, but Trickster Makes This World, or Made This World, by Lewis Hyde. Fascinating.

2:23:31Really fun book. If people want to get into trickster mythology. It's tricky. It's tricky. And of course, how these archetypes are present in all of us, and some more so than others. But I've been spending more and more time with mythology. There's a lot there. If you stay in the liminal phase and tell the truth all the time, instead of being Trixie, if you learn the magic and tell the truth, you have to use it in ways that are for good and not evil. Yeah, yeah. And that is like, I think maybe that's what we're supposed to, we're all humans are supposed to do that. I don't know. Byron Katie does it.

2:24:08And by Trixie, I don't mean necessarily bad. I just mean Trixie. Really Trixie. Probably doesn't help very much. But I mean, if you look at like coyote or raven or any number of, exactly, these trickster deities, it's like usually they are incredible creators. They've stolen something from the gods and bestowed it to humans. They've done a lot of good and they're constantly getting themselves into trouble. Oh, it's just a nightmare. Yeah. So I'm going to try to avoid some of the trouble, but I do like, I think there's some liminal mischief that might be right on the doorstep that could be fun to explore.

2:24:51So we'll see where that goes. I want to hear about that. Yeah. That might be a show don't tell kind of situation. So that'll be my show don't tell. We'll see where it goes. But it's been such a pleasure to spend time with you today. Thank you again for taking the time. And your recent book is The Way of Integrity, Finding the Path to Your True Self. New York Times bestseller, Oprah's book club selection. And I found your thinking on integrity and your writing on integrity incredibly powerful. Your upcoming book is Beyond Anxiety, Curiosity, Creativity, and Finding Your Life's Purpose. That is forthcoming.

2:25:26So people have that to look forward to. And they can find you in all things Martha Beck, I would imagine, at marthabeck.com. and the Martha Beck is your account on Facebook, Instagram, etc. And we'll link to all these things in the show notes for everybody at tim.blog.com slash podcast. So we'll put everything in one place, including everything we talked about. And I'm very grateful to have this opportunity to bake some conversational cake with you today. I love the cakes you make. Let's make more someday. Yeah, let's make more. Thank you. Thank you for this opportunity to get to know you and also to be on the podcast in that order.

2:26:09Yeah, for sure. Absolutely. My pleasure entirely. And for everybody listening, as usual, I mentioned where you can find the show notes. And until next time, be just a bit kinder than is necessary to others and to yourself. Don't forget the last part. And thanks for tuning in. Hey, guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off. And that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday.

2:26:43Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums, perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about.

2:27:23If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog slash Friday. Type that into your browser, tim.blog slash Friday. Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Momentus. Momentus offers high-quality supplements and products across a broad spectrum of categories, including sports performance, sleep, cognitive health, hormone support, and more. I've been testing their products for months now. and I have a few that I use constantly. One of the things I love about Momentus is that they offer many single ingredient and third-party tested formulations.

2:27:59I'll come back to the latter part of that a little bit later. Personally, I've been using Momentus Mag3n8, L-theanine, and Apigenin, all of which have helped me to improve the onset quality and duration of my sleep. Now, the Momentus Sleep Pack conveniently delivers single servings of all three of these ingredients. I've also been using Momentus Creatine which doesn't just help for physical performance, but also for cognitive performance. In fact, I've been taking it daily, typically before podcast recording, as there are various studies and reviews and meta-analyses pointing to improvements in short-term memory and performance under stress.

2:28:35So those are some of the products that I've been using very consistently. And to give you an idea, I'm packing right now for an international trip. I tend to be very minimalist, and I'm taking these with me nonetheless. Now back to the bigger picture. Olympians, Tour de France winners, Tour de France winners, the US military and more than 175 college and professional sports teams rely on Momentus and their products. Momentus also partners with some of the best minds in human performance to bring world-class products to market, including a few you will recognize from this podcast, like Dr. Andrew Huberman and Dr.

2:29:08Kelly Starrett. They also work with Dr. Stacey Sims, who assist Momentus in developing products specifically for women. Their products contain high-quality ingredients that are third-party tested, which in this case means informed sport and or NSF certified, so you can trust that what is on the label is in the bottle and nothing else. And trust me, as someone who knows the sports nutrition and supplement world very well, that is a differentiator that you want in anything that you consume in this entire sector. So, good news. For my non-U.S. listeners, more good news, not to worry. Momentous ships internationally so you have the same access that I do.

2:29:43So check it out. Visit livemomentous.com slash Tim and use code Tim at checkout for 20 % off. That's livemomentous, L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S dot com slash Tim and code Tim for 20 % off. This episode is brought to you by 8sleep. Temperature is one of the main causes of poor sleep and heat is my personal nemesis. I've suffered for decades tossing and turning, throwing blankets off, pulling the back on, putting one leg on top and repeating all of that ad nauseam. But now I am falling asleep in record time. Why? Because I'm using a device that was recommended to me by friends called the PodCover by 8 Sleep.

2:30:22The PodCover fits on any mattress and allows you to adjust the temperature of your sleeping environment, providing the optimal temperature that gets you the best night's sleep. With the PodCover's dual zone temperature control, you and your partner can set your sides of the bed to as cool as 55 degrees or as hot as 110 degrees. I think generally in my experience, my partners prefer the high side and I like to sleep. Very, very cool. So stop fighting. This helps. Based on your biometrics, environment, and sleep stages, the pod cover makes temperature adjustments throughout the night that limit wake-ups and increase your percentage of deep sleep.

2:30:58In addition to its best-in-class temperature regulation, the pod cover sensors also track your health and sleep metrics without the need to use a wearable. Conquer this winter season with the best in sleep tech and sleep at your perfect temperature. Many of my listeners in colder areas, sometimes that's me, enjoy warming up their bed after a freezing day. And if you have a partner, great, you can split the zones and you can sleep at your own ideal temperatures. It's easy. So go to 8sleep.com slash Tim spelled out 8sleep.com slash Tim and save$200 on the pod cover by Eight Sleep this winter. Eight Sleep currently ships within the US, Canada, the UK, select countries in the EU and Australia.