Good Life Project - Life Beyond Exile | Liz Phair

Episode Date: October 24, 2019

Liz Phair took the music world by storm (https://www.lizphairofficial.com/) in the early 90s with the release of her iconic album Exile in Guyville. That, along with her self-produced Girly Sound tapes, landed her on the cover of Rolling Stone and launched a decades-long career in music. Now, a multi-Grammy-winning singer, songwriter, guitarist, and composer, mom and mentor to so many, Phair’s new memoir, Horror Stories (https://amzn.to/2MY7ulD), gives a glimpse into so many of the hidden moments that shaped her journey. In today's conversation, we touch down on these, and also explore how Liz's lens on life, meaning, music, creativity, quitting, complexity and spirituality has evolved over time.-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

So when Liz Phair was a kid, she thought she was going to be an artist, a visual artist. And she played and wrote music, but only on the side and only for her. She ended up in Oberlin studying visual art and continuing to write and record her own music, but never really did anything with it and was incredibly stage fright. And when she got out, she was challenged by a friend who was in a band to create some tapes of her work. So she set about doing that. And she made these tapes, gave them to another friend, who then sent them out to all of these different people and started a buzz. That landed her with a record deal that eventually created a record

that was released in 1993 called Exile in Guyville, which exploded onto the music scene. Liz quickly found herself on stages of all sizes and being spotlighted on the cover of Rolling Stone. And that launched her career in music. That career has gone through so many different ups and downs and crazy twists. Her life has changed in profound ways. And as I sat here in the studio recording a conversation with her today, a lot of moments, flashes, vignettes from that, that really reveal the essence of who she is, are also

shared in a beautiful new memoir called Horror Stories. And we dive into some of that. We dive into critical points along the journey and also the deeper drivers and values and beliefs and things that she wants to say and do and how she sees the world. Really amazing, eye-opening, powerful conversation. So excited to share it with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. Mayday, mayday, we've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. January 24th. Tell me how compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun.

On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk.

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available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. In the early days for you, it sounds like it started out in Ohio, Cincinnati area. Yes. And then Winnetka. Beautiful suburb, north of Chicago. How old were you actually when you did the jump from Cincinnati to?

Fourth grade. Fourth grade. Do you remember it being? Oh yeah. I remember it very clearly because the year before that we were back in Cincinnati, but before that we lived in England, which was the first real like, whoa, we moved somewhere totally different. Like when I was seven, we spent a year in England. And so that was like the wake up life is not just what you think in your backyard. It's actually much, much bigger. And so every move since then has been very impactful to me. Do you have strong memories, vivid memories of your time in England? Very much so.

What really stood out from that? Oh God, mom dragged us to every castle, every museum, every cathedral, every ruin, everything. Like if there was a site to be seen on the British Isles, we saw it on one weekend. Yeah. I think it's amazing though, when you go there, you realize, because you kind of think we have history in this country. Yeah, no. And then you go there and you're like, oh, this goes back like a zillion years where we're like fairly, I mean, yes, actually, we do have history, Native American history, which is a whole different topic. But yeah, I think when you finally see that, you're like, wow, there is. It's a significant jump in your perspective. And I think you never forget it.

Yeah. So it sounds like a lot of that was, did you actually move there for your dad's work at the time? He took a sabbatical. He wanted to work with Dr. Beatty. I don't know what study it was, but it was a fascinating study to my father. And he wanted to go work for this man, this leading light. And so we found ourselves in Sheffield, England, like of all places. And I went to like a little school and I played PE in my knickers and we did all the stuff. All the things. Your mom was an art teacher also. Actually, interestingly enough, and this is going to be in the next book,

I spoke with an English accent the entire year. Really? And I don't recall for such a significant thing. My brother hated me. Stop it. Stop it. You're not English. Stop it. People are going to think we kidnapped an English girl. It was just an absolute, it speaks to horror stories, the book, because it, as you can see from the chapters, I'm concerned with shame and self-consciousness. There's a lot of that inside me. And I remember when we first got off the plane in England, I think we took a boat ride because we landed in daytime. We couldn't just go to bed.

And I heard everyone speaking in an English accent, and I didn't want to stand out. I wanted to fit in. I desperately needed to not be sticking out. And so I just started speaking the day that I landed in an English accent all of the time, like at home. I never stopped for the whole year. I started on the first day and I never stopped. And so they got used to it and they just forgot about it. So at first they're probably like, oh, just she's having fun with it. Right. And then it was really irritating. And then it was probably concerning. And then

they forgot about it. And we just went on with the year and we came back to Cincinnati and we got off the plane and I dropped it. Just like that? Like that. And no one was waiting for it. No one expected it. They were like, I mean, really all it shows is that I have a mimics ear, but it is a very strange thing for a seven-year-old to do. And I don't remember it being, I was not theatrical. I was not dramatic as a person. I was not anything. I just did it. But it shows like a really, an interesting level of self-awareness. Self-consciousness. Yeah.

And not wanting to feel other at a very young age. Mm-hmm. Hmm. So when you get back from there, immediately you flip back to the U.S. When you're gone for a year, especially as an adult, very often you come back to like a different culture, even if it's your own culture, and there's reverse culture shock. Do you have any recollection of experiencing any of that? I don't because I was only eight. I do remember feeling really happy to be home, you know, to have all.

I remember the vividness of like, oh, this is my old this and here's my old that. And really like touching and cherishing everything in a new way. You know, like I'd found a newfound appreciation and just in time for us to pick up and move to Chicago. So that's how that went down. Guess what? So then you land in Chicago or suburb of Chicago, making all new friends, settling into a whole new place. It sounds like you were sort of like the fairly typical, hardworking, like academically oriented kid for the better part of your years up until sort of like the tail end of high school. But also there was art running in your veins.

Where does that start to show up? Very early, before England, before anything. Like I just, as soon as I had a pencil in my hand, I wanted to draw. And I guess I was pretty good at it from a young age. I have creative talents. I don't necessarily know how to make the most of them, but I can't stop doing it. What was your sort of a palette or tool of choice when you were younger? Always drawing. I mean, in college I ended up doing large scale charcoal drawings, which is very messy. I destroyed a studio in one of the off-campus houses. I remember I left it.

I left it for the cleaner-uppers to clean up. I did that. I did this horrible thing. I should have put that in that book. I know, right? Oops, I just remembered that. It's going in the next one, right? I did a very, very bad thing.

It's going in the part two. Let me get on the computer and write the demon out of me. I mean, it's interesting. What was the draw to scale for you? I wanted you to get, at that point at Oberlin, I was doing a very particular series. I thought I was going to be a visual artist. I had no idea that I would ever do anything in music.

I wrote songs. I played them privately, but I had terrible stage fright. Like I would not be the person who would jump up on stage ever. So I was doing this visual series about disease, actually, because my father was an infectious disease specialist. And when AIDS hit in the eighties, like I really got a front row seat for that. Like before they knew if it was contagious, before they knew what was happening to these people, like the terror of my father, not being able to help someone. Like they come in with like multiple problems because the immune system is compromised.

And it just really did a number on my head. It made me wary of being sexually promiscuous. It also made me think about, and this is what I did the art about, if your body betrays you, if your body suddenly becomes almost like the enemy, where are you? Like if your body isn't you, where are you? And where is the humanity in these people who are being overcome and ravaged by illness? And I thought about it and I really decided like that the eyes would be a great symbol to anchor you looking at a piece of art. If I had big, realistic, soulful eyes, then whatever was going on with the skin and the face and whatever, you would connect to that person and see that person as like you, even while we have that. And I think it's natural

human reaction to sort of recoil from anything that looks too different or feels like threatening. And I wanted to kind of bring the humanity out in people that were pictured in medical textbooks, even back in the day in Victorian times, you know, they're sort of like held up next to a yardstick or measured, or they were put in these weird positions where they were like scrutinized by the medical community. And it looked so isolating and dehumanizing and these poor haunted eyes of people that are like, can someone help me? They're like, no, we're going to study you. You know, like, and I just started thinking about- We're going to use you to help other people. Yeah, exactly.

But you're gone. You're gone. That's so interesting, right? Because where my mind goes with that is that if you start to certainly draw this gateway, you know, through the eyes, but if it's the eyes of somebody who's in a deep suffering, there's gotta be this really weird tension of not wanting to identify. Exactly. You know, because then you might have to feel what you're, what's being depicted, they're feeling. And that it could happen to you. Yeah. That's the problem, is that the fear of the other is really a fear of the self being betrayed. Yeah.

Was that what you were trying to get at with that word? Yeah. So you go from there, being focused largely visual arts. Did you feel like that was, was this the thing this, was this the thing that you were doing at Oberlin because it was interesting to you or in your mind, is this actually, this is what I'm going to do after this? Career path, absolute career path. And I was very serious about it. Like I got myself an internship with Nancy Spiro and Leanne Golub. New York, right? Right near Washington Square Park. And I also interned for the artist,

the Chicago artist, Ed Paschke. And then a printmaker here and an archivist and a painter. So I started interning for what I considered great artists to try to learn from them. You're doing all the things that you would do to start to build a career in that space. Yeah. And as you said, you're writing music, playing music, I'm guessing also, but only for yourself.

Yes. Friends are really just for you. What was it for you? Was it a creative outlet? Was it just like, what job was that? It was a hobby. It was fun. It was just fun.

It was just a hobby. It was like a diary. Yeah. It served the purpose of a diary, except kind of a fictionalized one. I don't know why or how I learned to write my own songs. They just came because I didn't want to practice. I played piano, and I didn't like reading music, and I wasn't interested in the pieces that I was learning. I just started making up songs because my mother would hear that I was on the piano doing something. So she'd be in

cooking dinner or talking on the phone and she'd hear that I was working. So it constituted practice time, but I was making up my own music and I did the same thing on guitar. As you're saying, it constituted practice time, like the mandatory. If we're paying for lessons, we're going to practice. That's exactly right. Oh, my God. I had this flashback to when I was in sixth grade. The exact same thing, but back in the day where we had the cassette recorders. I literally remember recording myself playing scales on a guitar and then just sitting in my room with the door closed, looping the tape, like rewinding.

So you didn't have to practice. Oh my God. So you didn't have to practice. That is hilarious. If you listened to the door, you would hear. Ferris Bueller, where have you been? It's crazy. Crazy.

And meanwhile, I think it's so far forward. I'm like, man, I wish I had actually put in the practice. But yeah. So you're doing this and it's really just for you. Starting on piano, it sounds like. Mm-hmm. When do you start to pick up the guitar? Eighth grade.

Why? What makes you? My best friend, Ann, switched from piano to guitar, and I thought that was cooler. Yeah. Whatever Ann had, if she had like the latest clogs, I wanted that too. Or if she had like four Fair Isle sweaters, I wanted at least three. Not that there was a competition. No, not at all. We're still close friends. She's like my sister still. That's awesome.

And you're writing also at the same time. Writing music? Yeah. And lyrics. Yeah, absolutely. Were you a writer or a journaler before that? No. I fancied myself a poet. And honestly, I can honestly say they were bad poems. They were bad. I wasn't a good lyricist, I think, until I went to Oberlin, until I went to college. Something about the music conservatory

being a part of that school took music. And everyone who went who was in the liberal arts program and not the conservatory being a part of that school took music and and everyone who went who was in the liberal arts program and not the conservatory was still very musical and there were bands everywhere everybody was in a band you know everybody was jumping up on stage at parties and singing and performing and they weren't all very good but it gave me that sense that I could do that and should do that. Yeah. But stage fright. Yeah, that was a problem.

It's so interesting to me, though, because it's almost like when you finally do actually start to step up in front of people and share your you, what you share is bold and it's real. And it's, it's got a lot of similarities to what you described you were doing as a visual artist, which is like, you wanted to, you didn't want to, you wanted to make big statements and provoke and make people think and make people feel as visual artists. And it sounds like that just transferred right into music right away. Yeah, it did and i i would probably credit my mother and all those museum visits and all those cathedrals and all those castles like i had been she was a she was a docent at the art institute in cincinnati and then in chicago for 40 years, 50 years. So I had been dragged around being shown art and having it explained as this is a provocative statement. The artist wants you to

feel this. So when I thought of being an artist, I would hear my mother's language about it. You know, they're making a statement and it was provocative. And so I guess I had a framework that no matter how big what my statements were, they were nothing compared to the great works of mankind, you know? So it didn't seem so daunting to me because my bar was pretty high. Yeah. Which is interesting. So it's like your mom plays a really pivotal role in your willingness to quote, go there with the work that you're creating. That poor woman never intended for me to do that. But this is my curiosity because when you come out

and your lyrics and your music is so raw and so bare and so powerful and just hitting straight at so many of the things that so many people are feeling but not willing to put words to, but also provocative and things that maybe in, quote, polite culture, especially at that time, you didn't talk about. Curious how that landed with your mom.

She kind of knows that she has planted the seed, but all of a sudden, like, oh, oh, that. So that's how that group did it. She was, I mean, I think, I do remember her saying, and she said it over the years, she's always supportive. Never not supportive. She may caution me at various times. She would certainly prefer I did not air publicly any of this stuff. You know, like that was definitely something that was hard for her.

And I think it wasn't until people came up to her over the years and said, your daughter means so much to me. She helped me through this time or that time. And she liked all those women that were coming up, you know, she thought they were smart and nice people. And suddenly that framed it differently. And, but yeah, poor mom jokes a little bit on her, you know, like, I don't think she's particularly thrilled about this either, you know, like I, but she certainly texted this morning saying, go author, go, you know, like she's there really behind me. Yeah, that's right. I mean, it's amazing to, as a parent also, we're both parents right now also, to sort of like be in that role where the one point you want your kid to be

completely and fully alive and expressed. And at the same time, there can be fear wrapped around that, like fear for their safety, fear for how they're going to be perceived in the world, fear for their ability to find belonging and acceptance. So I think it's like you kind of get it from both sides a little bit later in life, I think. You understand so much when you're a parent. Yeah. It finally unlocks so many mysteries about life. You're like, oh, that's that.

Oh, I see. Ah, I get it. You know, it really kind of, for me at least, explained so much. I could forgive. I could kind of just understand what I was seeing when I was younger, why they behaved the way they did, what they cared about. And up until then, I was just self-involved and rebelling against any kind of authority, thought authority in general was bankrupt. And then you realize raising a child is kind of constructing a small piece of the future and that society is really just made up of tiny, small parts of people doing one thing or two

things with each other, and it just becomes this giant colony. And then it looks different to you, and then you think, well, this is just what we've made. It's our best idea at the moment, you know, like this room for improvement. Suddenly history made sense to me. History, we're still writing it. If you write it, you're going to tell a different history than I would tell. And if enough people agree that this was an important thing and this wasn't an important thing, well, suddenly this thing that happened concurrently with this thing is now forgotten and this thing is remembered. And that fascinated me because then I thought, I want to write stories. Yeah. Facts are subject to so much context and memory and power. Power. You know, like history, the history that's told, I think, is in no small part. It's not just

about what happened. It's about who was in power and has maintained in power while it's happened. Yeah. That's absolutely true. Whose history are we telling? Yeah. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist,

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The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. On January 24th... Tell me how to fly this thing. so you end up, Oberlin, when was the first time, I'm curious, you actually step on stage? I know you're writing music when you're at Oberlin, but did you actually perform while you were there or was it not until later? I would never have performed. To this day, if you asked me to play a song for you, I would start stammering and shaking. Okay, so we're not going to pull a guitar down from the wall over here. But something about having gone on stage with a band enough times, I always tell my management, don't keep me off the road too long. Because if I get used to not being on stage, I won't want to go back up on it. But if you keep me like playing enough, then it's like a muscle memory and I can enjoy myself, which it's such a relief not to experience crippling stage fright that, you know, I actually will embrace something that arguably is like the least likely thing for me to do. Yeah. I mean, it's almost like it's exposure therapy. It kind of is.

Once you're doing it and you're out there doing it, it's sort of like it dials down the anxiety. It does. But as soon as you pull away from it, you don't have that repeated exposure. So your mind can spin about what might happen when you step back on without being interrupted by saying like, oh, now it's actually okay.

Yeah, yeah. My mind, my imagination makes it into a bigger and bigger and bigger thing the longer I am away from it and the less I can see myself up there. Yeah. So you end up after Oberlin in San Francisco for a bit. How do you know all this? You know everything. Okay, Merlin. Tell me, what do frogs dream of?

Well, what kind of frogs? Exactly. Poison dart frogs. South African frogs. Yes. Canadian frogs. Colorful ones. Right. And when you're there, it sounds like that's a lot of when you start to really sort of record stuff. Or is that more when you move back home, which I guess was shortly after that? But it was started by Chris Brokaw coming to visit us.

And he's a musician from the band Pay the Man at Oberlin. That was like the best band on campus. And they were really good. And Chris was the lead singer and songwriter of that. I used to go to Oberlin shows. And like of all the bands that were on campus, Bitch Magnet gave it a good run for its money, but it was always Pay the Man.

Pay the Man was like the number one band on campus. It's probably saying a lot considering the music department at that school. That was an incredible experience. That was one of the best things about Oberlin. Besides the art department, that was what I loved the most was how much music was everywhere and how many people did it who were not professional. So in San Francisco, Chris came and it was very awkward with my roommate or my loft mate that he was coming to see. Something went wrong between them. And so I hung out with him for the weekend and he kept sort of, he kept saying like,

play me a song, play me a song. I'm like, no, I cannot play you a song. This is for me, not for other humans. Right. I just couldn't even do it. And then he said, make me a tape, just record them and send them to me. So I went home after San Francisco cause I ran out of money and I didn't want to get a job. So I went home and my parents were like helping me tackle adulting. And all I wanted to do was get out of my parents' house at that point. So I would go to their friends' houses who happened to be out of town and needed someone to water their plants. Yeah. It's like we all had those back in the day. Yeah. The Tascam Vortra. Yeah. Pre-pro tools, like easy to use.

It's like one, add another layer, add another layer. So you're hanging out in random people's houses, bringing your little kit over and just recording tapes. And this adds up to a whole bunch of songs. Because I've been writing for so long, I had them already. And I was making more, but I had a bunch. Right. And so you're just basically, you I was making more, but I had a bunch. Right. So you're just basically laying your own voice, you on guitar also. Any percussion?

No percussion. I would speed up the track at the end to make myself sound even more girly, and I called it girly sound because it was sort of like an Oberlin political thing that I think there was a course, intellectual history course, where someone had said something, some professor had said, the young female voice has the least authority in society or something. And I just started thinking about that because I felt like a young female. So I was like, hmm, hmm. And I wanted to see if I could say really provocative provocative shocking things in a little girl voice and would you notice or would you be like oh yes nice dear nice you know so that was sort of the

origin of my style that persists can i be who i am which is essentially a non-threatening person and say really provocative, shocking things. And will people hear it? And they did more than I expected. This is the musical extension of the eyes on the ill person and the chalk drawings. It's the cognitive dissonance. Yeah. Those tapes then end up back with Chris. Chris and Taewon Yoo, who's a printmaker. I think he lives in Brooklyn. And Taewon is like, these aren't just for me. No. Tay makes like a million copies and sends them everywhere. And I had no idea why people kept sending me like $10 bills in the mail. Like, will you make a tape for me?

I'm like, no, but I'll keep your 10. You know, like another bad thing that I've done. I've done so many bad things. But yeah, no, he came to a show last year. And my once matador, once I recorded Exile in Guyville, he really didn't feel that that was for him. He liked the girly sound stuff and he was very honest about it. You know, he was like, it just wasn't for me. I didn't feel that that was, that felt too commercial for him.

Like Exile in Guyville, arguably one of the lo-fi-est records of the 90s. But it just wasn't right. It wasn't for him. And so we stayed in contact with each other, especially in and around the career requests that would come in. And then he finally came to see me perform as a fully grown, you know, woman with a band. Kind of like doing my thing.

Right during the Kavanaugh hearing. So we were like here in New York and everyone came out and they were just like full of like, yes, rock that exile in Guyville. And he saw it and he was like, I get it. It's not about production style. It's about the songs still. They're all just songs to you and the production doesn't matter. And I'm like, yeah, that's just clothes you wear. The song is the song. You can dress it up fancy. You can dress it up casual. You can do whatever you want. You can leave it naked or you can put it in a crown and ermine robes, you know, whatever you'd like. Yeah. I mean, it must've been, when was the last time that you had been in contact with him before

that, or he had even seen you perform? I don't think he'd ever seen me perform. No kidding. Yeah, I don't think he ever saw me. It was just that. So he knew the girly sound tapes, and then he saw the full winged creature that descended upon New York City in the middle of a major tour.

Right, because the tapes end up connecting you to Matador, and then that leads to Exile in Guyville, which comes out in 93, right? Mm-hmm. Right. So literally, since then, the person who played a really, you could argue, a critical role in you becoming known and then moving into this world of music had never seen you perform until last year. And we were hugging each other in the backstage and like everyone was taller than us. We were sort of down in our own little altitude and like it was packed. It was a really good backstage that was like top tier backstage.

And it was just us. And I'm like, Tay, you're responsible for this. And he's like, no, I'm not. You're responsible for this. I'm like, but you're responsible for this. You know, it was really cute. It was a beautiful closure-ish moment of more of a full circle moment, but it was beautiful. Yeah. Let's talk for a moment about this album, Exile. It comes out in 93. It's basically, the mythology is it's your response to the Stones because you perceive them as like the prototypical guy band, but also kind of like the prototypical guys in the industry.

And there needs to be a different lens. Yeah, that's exactly right. I conceived of it as a conversation I was having with that record. And the guy that I had a crush on at the time, who was the lead singer of Urge Overkill, I was mad for him, but I was going to answer that. And if in the song they were talking, if Mick was referencing a woman, I saw myself as the woman character, and I was writing a song from that point of view in the same scene that Mick was in. And then I kind of structured my songs differently to, I was very, because of my mother, I was sophisticated artistically in a way that I

shouldn't have been. I had no right to be as sophisticated artistically as I was because she'd sort of put all the good stuff in my whole life. This is great art. This is why it's great. This is what they were doing. Can you see how they made those brushstrokes? What does that mean to you? Like she talked me through everything. So I knew not to be too on the nose about the arrangements, but to kind of, like, evoke the arrangements and put a nod toward one and then completely go the other way with another. And it really flummoxed everyone in the music industry. Like, it doesn't sound like, you know, Exile on Main Street. And they saw me, they perceived me as this ingenue who could barely play so they thought it was like my best shot that i'd taken at imitating the stones and

i'm like no maybe i can't perform but intellectually i know how to make art i know how to make a convert i know how to make art reference itself and talk to itself. I know how to do that because I was trained to. So sophisticated training, utterly inexperienced doing. And it also, I mean, it comes out in the words. But also there's something I think so powerful about the simplicity of the actual, the instruments. I mean, there were some power riffs and there were some really good stuff and you had other people help out with it. But it was like the focus was really on what is she saying?

You know, yes, it moved you. And yes, there was really, really awesome music. But the words, like just wow, it kind of blew your hair back, back in the day when I had hair. So group of women who are kind of stepping out and saying this it's time it's time pj tori amos courtney love right annie defranco annie defranco right yeah so there's like this emerging movement also and you're and you're a big part of this the the record becomes you know like one of the biggest records, you find yourself, two things happen. Right? One, you end up on the cover of Rolling Stone.

Curious what that felt like to you. And two, now you're on stages. Yeah. Performing in front of a lot of people. Which is a never-ending problem. Right, right. Like, it's the problem of my whole life. The whole deal was, I record tapes.

I don't ever have to go on stage. I draw and somebody else does something with it once it's done. This was not part of the bargain. Right. And now it's my job. It's like the main part of my job. So how does it feel to you when like you're stepping up there and it's like you in front of all these people? It's unnerving. It is still unnerving. Like I said, if I get in the groove, it's nothing. It's like, this is what I do. This is what I do. And I feel very comfortable and I can make other people comfortable. I can be generous with my confidence, if you will, and my security at that point. But personally and privately, I always joke, like if someone said to me, you can reach people and people can feel your music and you don't ever have to go on stage again, I'd be like, fine, cool.

There would probably be a couple times a year when I saw people doing it that my muscles would be like, oh my God. But I'm sure I could get away with just a guest appearance here and there and that would probably satisfy me just fine. So it's a weird thing. Life is a weird thing. It just keeps going and you keep rolling with the punches and climbing toward what you want. And then you get there and you find out it's not what you want. So you head off in another direction and climb that mountain, you know, and roll with the punches and pick yourself up when you fall down. And then you wind up here with you, who knows everything about my life that I don't even really remember about my life. It's the cameras. We've been following you for a long, long time.

But it feels like something. When you say it back to me, it feels, I mean, I feel prouder of myself when you say it back like that, because it does feel like something. Like I've done remarkable things in my life, but the day-to-day living of it still feels like, oh God, when do I have to be in the New Yorker stage? You know, like I'm sort of like T minus how long before I start fretting? Do I remember how to play songs? Why do they want me out there? Am I good at this? You know, like it all comes tumbling back in are you somebody who is in your head totally yeah but i'm also here's the real hat trick of me yeah this is what i think is the essential like why her because i'm equal parts in my body and my head tell me more most people pick one or the other most people prefer the life of the mind and they're not very physical or they're very physical and they don't really want to, you know.

Yeah, I'll buy that. because you're getting the full, you're getting like, they're putting all their stuff out there. They're not holding back. They're not, someone is having a really interesting conversation with you, but they're not actually freaking you out physically or, you know, but people that do both, I think it just, it freaks people out.

And it's, I think it's magnetic because I'm drawn to people like that. And I think that that's my secret sauce if I had one. Yeah. I mean, just thinking about it now, I think I agree. I wonder if the reason that's so magnetic also is because it's so uncommon. Maybe, probably. And especially in women.

Women don't. They do now, but they didn't back then. They would stifle themselves to fit in better. I did it too. But I felt like the highest aim Iish. You can feel that. You can tell that you could leave me in this room for a couple hours and I would find something to do with myself and be perfectly happy. At the same time, if you said we're going to go run out wilding tonight and go dance our ass off and, you know, make out with someone we don't know, I'm right there with you. Like, I'm right there. Yeah. I almost wonder if it's a if it's a feeling of permission you know because so many people will see we'll see in you or seeing people who have this instead of duality or instead of choosing one or the other like oh so you can be that and that at the same time

and still be okay and still feel good about yourself and still feel a sense of belonging and still feel loved and still be quote successful in life and flourish and it's like it gives somebody permission to say like maybe me too we live in the era of lizzo like it is we have awesome we have arrived in the era of you can be yes and instead of either or and that's why I think when people are like, oh God, this Me Too movement or the feminism or like, stop, it's a better world. It's a better life for everybody. And I think it's mishandled in the wrong hands or misspoken in the wrong tongue, but it's envisioning a better world. Like if women are freer and safer, men will be freer and safer from their own role responsibilities to a certain extent. I mean, going to war does not sound like fun. And yet that's something every male has to grow up knowing is a possibility.

And that blows my mind. As we're talking about what women need, what about men? What about not growing up feeling like you have to toughen yourself because you might have to kill or be killed at some point? That's something that guys grow up living with, however they approach that, however they decide I don't participate, or I'm just going to throw myself into a fight so I'm not scared of it or whatever it is. Yeah. I mean, women and men are socialized entirely differently, at least in the US. I think it's different culturally in different places, but in the US and probably just a lot of sort of developed Western countries, it's really similar in that. And that's why when so much of what you're talking about so

much of the way that you've developed your your art and your craft and your presence it just keeps constantly challenging that and showing that there is another way and it feels like you were doing that in the early 90s and you've done that in various different ways over the last couple of decades and now in the last five years, the world is starting, like that ideal is starting to kind of just like really expand in a pretty profound way, which I agree, it's disruptive. It's shaking a lot of branches and trees, and it's really good, you know, because we need that. Like we need it on an individual level, but we also need it on a societal level like the benefit that happens beyond just the individual but wide scale we need right now

it's a it's a it's an evolutionary success story it's saying we can conceive of a time when we're going to move past sort of these old paradigms where we had to kill or be killed or, you know, like it's, what do they call it? Problems of success. To be able to consider these things as a society shows how wealthy we are. And this is, I guess, what everyone's feeling. Like if we've got this situation that we're in right now and we suddenly realize it can be taken away, what is the best way we could be within this situation? And suddenly, yeah. I don't know what it was. Was it Obama? Like was that enough of a paradigm shift to wake people up and say like limits are in your head? I don't know. Yeah, I don't know if there's one thing, but I also- I do think that was a part of it though.

I think that was a part of it for sure. I think the political landscape of last decade in different ways has played a role in it, but also like it couldn't have happened without there's an energy that's been building. There's a tension that is partly about a desire to a reclamation type of energy that's been building and a willingness to step out and say,

like the pressure's too much. Yeah. Like the release valve like has to happen and not so everyone can just feel okay by blowing off a little steam, but no, legitimate, organic grassroots change. Yes. At the end of the day.

Yes. That's awesome. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing.

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display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results So jumping back into your journey, you explode onto the scene, become a big part of the scene also.

A couple years into that, Lil' Affair starts also. You become involved in that, which is amazing to see for the first time completely women created and run and on the stage and in the festival scene and in the music scene, which kind of just changes everything, it felt like, at least from my perspective. From the inside out, being a part of that, did it feel like that to you also? It absolutely did. And when you were talking about people sort of starting, those female artists around the same time that I broke out in the 90s, you know, early 90s, felt like it culminated with Lilith Fair. Yeah, that would be late 90s, right?

Yeah. All these strong women came together and the industry absolutely separated us. They did it intentionally because they thought people didn't want to hear female music. So they would, and this has been absolutely like validated by people who were there and knew what the programmers were doing. And I don't think it was like, ha ha, let's keep women down. They just didn't, they didn't want to alienate their male audience. So you couldn't play a woman back to back with another female artist and you couldn't have more than one every half an hour or something like that.

At other festivals. No, it just, at radio stations and on bills and in bands. Like you could have one female, but you shouldn't have like a bunch of them. And it was really hard baked in. And so it made women threatened by each other and it made them competitive because we were competing. We were competing for very small slots. And if one of us got it, the other one didn't. And none of this was based on anything except conjecture by a bunch of programmers that their audience wouldn't like it. But they had no basis for that. They just decided it. And so when Lilith happened to be supportive of each other, all different kinds of artists, all different genres, to just back to back to back, woman, woman, woman, woman, woman, and have everybody coming to see it and loving the music and having the festival run so beautifully. It was like a

window to a future world. It was like, hello, that's a new landscape. And I could thrive in that. And up until that point, it was a couple of things. It was having my child, but also Lilith Fair. I don't think I would have stayed in the industry without it. If I hadn't seen those women and gotten to know them and saw a vision of what life could be like, like it is in 2019, when I go out and I see tons of female artists everywhere and they're all doing their own thing. And the young women have like totally unique expressions and they're in command of their careers and saying how they want to do things. That was in its nascent stage in Lilith Fair. Like, that's what I saw.

And I said, okay, I'll work in this industry and maybe it's not here yet, but I'll keep working until it is here. Yeah. So that ran, Lilith was 97 to 99 or something like that, 96 to 99, something like that. 98 to 2000. Right, maybe right around there. When that ends and you're like, okay, but I still have a career. And I, which means I kind of need to go back into the industry, which means to a certain extent, the way things were outside of this incredible experience. Is that jarring for you? It was very jarring. And I had some of my most upsetting incidents post Lilith Fair.

It got definitely very gross and ugly for a while there, especially in the pop world. Because that was, Matador was the indie label that I was signed to, but they were interested at that point. A lot of major labels were buying up indie labels or partnering with them. So at first they went to Atlantic and then that didn't work. And so they took us all to Capital and I did White Chocolate Space Egg with Matador and Capital. And then they decided that wasn't a good fruitful partnership. So Matador left Capital, the major label, but Capital retained me as a valuable asset that they had worked on that they didn't want to give up. And so that was part of the parting. I was like, you know, given in the deal. Right. It's like you're being traded. Kind of. Yeah. Like a baseball player or something. And I found myself on a major label, having never signed to a major label. And I felt like it was sink or swim. Like everything was turning pop. That was like the boy band era in the aughts. I didn't know anyone at Capitol. I had to make all new connections and figure out how to matter to them and how to matter to them at that

point was to do pop work so I recorded all these different pieces of music like with my touring band and then with Michael Penn and then finally the Matrix until we got something that had enough material I'm really proud of that record there's a lot of great songwriting on that record. And part of it is the pop stuff. There's like one or two pop songs that I'm not so fond of playing. But that was what I did based on the circumstances that I found myself in. Yeah. And you're also at that point, I mean, because you had sort of built your reputation

and your fan base on kind of being the edgy, indie, almost like you're the revolutionary, like you're the counter to the big label. So when you go to a big label, I almost wonder if it almost didn't matter what you put out with them. It was simply the association that would cause it. It was like Lindsey Graham suddenly like, you know, like John McCain's out of the picture and he's like, hi Trump, how are you doing? You know what I mean? Like, I'm sure that's what it looked like. I could, I know that's what it looked like to them. And to some extent that's true. But to another extent, if you go back to the girly sound and you go back to my suburban lifestyle, I really wasn't faking it. I wasn't reaching for something that wasn't in my wheelhouse. I was just going toward a different aspect of myself that was authentic.

It just was, I used to listen to radio and pop and go to big concerts when I was young and I liked it. Yeah. But I think music is also this really interesting domain where, and we've all heard this term, stay in your lane, right? But I think in music, almost more than any other, especially performing art to art, people want to label you. They want to, this is the Liz Phair style, right? Like this is what you do.

I remember when Mumford and Son switched over and did an electronic album, it was like all of a sudden everyone was like, what? And it's like when you do that, people, they don't want to change. I mean, and if it's not what they have in your mind, like, you do this thing, this is you forever because that's how I want you to stay in my mind. And you're like thing. This is you forever. Cause that's how I want you to stay in my mind. And you're like, no, I got to do me. But if it means I'm going to evolve and change and leave my lane and build five other ones, people don't want that. But I'm curious for you because you're in a window in your life when you're doing that, right? At that point, you're a

mom also. Single at that point too. So part of you, is gotta be saying, okay, I'm in this really brutal business and I also have to take care of my family. It's like, was there an inner dialogue with you at all? That's saying, okay, didn't feel the line until I had to sing the words, oh baby, you know what you're like? You're like my favorite underwear. And that was my line. I was like, I hate that. I'm not saying that. And Lauren took me out, the other songwriter that popped from the Matrix, walked me around the block and kind of convinced me to sing it. She was wrong, I think, in the end. But my line was pretty far from what people would want it to be. And I think that's because they gravely underestimated what was driving my output, that I was way more of an artist artist than they realized. They mistook me for a musician, which I am. But first and foremost, before anything else, I'm an artist. Forget the medium. Forget any of that stuff that you know about like,

you know, Liz Phair's sound is this way because Liz Phair is this way. No, Liz Phair is an artist and Liz Phair will don any kind of way to be. If it's a memoir and it's personal, you better believe I'm going to be real. I'm going to be authentic. I'm going to tell you stuff that most people don't tell each other. But if I'm going to be a pop sensation, I'm going to like think about how to be a pop sensation. And I'm going to do that. Like the artist rules everything and the genre or the medium is a second step. That's the secondary like choice, but it's a choice rather than the artist, which is not a choice. Yeah. It feels almost like the genre is sort of like, oh, so this is an interesting new creative constraint within which I can work to express my art, which kind of raises the game. As the artist, well, what can I do within this constraint?

Yeah. I didn't think, oh, I feel like going pop now. I found myself on Capitol Records and pop was the thing. And I had no allies. I was like by myself in this major label. And I decided I wanted to matter. I wanted to be cared about and I wanted to do something. So I adapted to that. Like, I mean, I don't think that's so weird.

You know, like it might be offensive at the time because of a misunderstanding, but I just don't think it was. I think that's what I was trying to say in all those interviews. Like, it's just music. It's okay. Like, I'm still me. I didn't hurt anyone. I just made different kind of music.

Yeah. Expressing a different side of myself because that's where I found myself and I just I'm more of a if you're sinking and swimming I'm swimming people don't always want to hear that it's like they layer their expectations about what you should or shouldn't do

onto you especially when you're held in a certain esteem as representing a moment and an ideal in their life. And so when you start to change and evolve, it makes them question. I wonder if the thing that really bothers people about that is it makes them question their own identity and their own sense of values and their own almost unwillingness to define their own lives and move forward and run their own experiments rather than sort of like always follow somebody else's

lead and let somebody else voice what's unvoiced by them. I think they felt a great sense of betrayal because they had vouched for me in a way. They had said, we're going to put our full weight, which isn't true. In the beginning, they were completely awful about Guyville. Like, this is what no one remembers. Now it's like this shining example of the best art she ever made and everybody loved it. Why would you do anything else? That's not at all how it went down. It was ugly in the beginning. People were not just immediately saying what a brilliant person I was. It was hugely controversial. Half the people were saying

it was a complete fraud. I couldn't play. I couldn't sing. It's because I'm blonde and I'm talking about sex. And that's the only thing that, you know, that's why I'm successful. So Guyville has been burnished over time into this perfect thing. But no, they were maybe not quite. When the pop controversy happened, I kind of looked at everyone and I'm like, I've been through this before. I did that for Gaival.

Like suddenly the people that I thought were my friends kind of turned on me. The whole neighborhood had an opinion and it was a strong one. And it was definitely at best 50-50, whether what I'd done was the worst thing ever or brilliant. Yeah. When you're in that moment, and that moment for you lasted a long time. It did. I was like a two-year moment with Gaivel, like not sure what I'd done. So as you're evolving from that, you're moving further into your career and people are resisting

you evolving as an artist and being the person you need to be and evolving as a human being also. You know, it's like you're getting older, you're growing up, you have a family, the way you view the world and the way you want to be in it is changing too. And you have to let that happen as well as letting your art evolve. When you're moving through all of that, was there a moment and you're getting pushback along the way. And like you said, you've gotten it from the very beginning. Being the person who never really made a decision early on that said, Ooh, I want to be front and center. I want to be on stage. Were there moments along that way where you're like, I'm out? Oh my God, I've quit the music business so many times. I do nothing but

quit the music business. Yeah. I'm terribly haunted by the notion that if I just not fucked off senior year of high school, I would have gone to a different college and been a totally different person and probably be at home cooking dinner for my kids right now. Like there's a wistfulness I feel for a life that would probably not make me happy at all. But like, it's definitely, it has a looming presence in my psyche, this like unlived lives. Yeah. But it's interesting also that you mentioned that because in, so in my psyche, this like unlived lives. Yeah. But it's interesting also that you mentioned that because in, so in your memoir, in Horror Stories, you write about this moment where you're married, you have a young kid and life starts to kind of become that, like it kind of moves into more of like the white picket fence mode and it's not working for you, right? It's like, no, that other alternative reality,

you actually had started living. And the moment you got a bit deep into it, like, you're like, nope, nope, this isn't it. Yeah. I feel like I kind of went mad for a little minute of time as I have over the course of my life at different points. I go nuts when it comes to cognitive dissonance. I have to say the thing out loud, just like I did for this apartment. I was like,

I'm seeing this. I have to say it out loud. Like the emperor has no clothes. I'm that kid for sure. I'm the one going like, did anyone notice that the emperor has no clothes? Like I really have compulsively have to call it out and say, and it just blew my mind how quickly upon marriage people come in and say like, well, now you'll join the couple's, you know, dinner party circuit. Now can you volunteer for the community? And, you know, it just becomes, you get swept into this and it's the stuff that makes the world go round. It's all the houses and all the families. And I don't really want society to completely change, but I can't do it. Does that make sense? Like I can love and be committed and I love being at home and I love doing, my mom calls it my hearth

and home phase. I'm like, let's roast chestnuts. I'm all in on that. But again, the artist is the most fundamental. The artist cannot abide by the rules as they get more numerous and more constricting. I can't do it. The artist always wins. And sometimes it makes me sad because it comes at the expense of the care I should give some of my friendships or relationships, but the artist always wins.

So I don't argue with her anymore. I just, I make as much art as I can. Yeah, it is what it is. Your career continues to move forward. You end up also, it kind of feels like withdrawing for a while and starting to also write and compose, I guess, for TV, which is a way for you to do the art to a certain extent and not be so forward-facing. We're sitting here in this studio today and sitting across from both of us is a copy of your brand spanking new memoir. And we've kind of touched down on some of the moments in there, but I'm really curious why we're similar age, right? You've had this really powerful career in music. Bridge the gap to the decision to say it's time for a memoir? I was writing almost 10 years

before I was writing fiction, quietly and privately, kind of like the way I was doing my songs early on in my bedroom. I was working with my agent, Jennifer Gates, who is like basically the wind beneath my wings. She's like basically my everything. And she was encouraging me and she would read the pages and they were bad, you know, and I was trying to grapple with fiction, which is a little too much for me as I was learning to write. But I mean, I put in the time, I put in hours and hours. I did years and years of writing. And finally, with the 2016 election, 2015 campaign, when I was seeing things that horrified me going on in this country and rhetoric that horrified me and points of view that horrified me. And it was sweeping across the country at the same time that we were losing Bowie and we lost Prince and we lost.

One year was just. Yeah, no, it was just, it was like the rapture had taken like the best baseball team up to heaven. And I did not know how important these artists were to me until they were gone. And I felt this sense of my God, I thought they'd always be here. I thought they'd always be here. And my manager called me. I was on tour with the Smashing Pumpkins. The day Prince died, he called me about some other business and we started talking and he goes, you know what, Liz, you know, none of us knows how much we have, how much time we have here. Like, we don't know if we're going to be here tomorrow. Nobody knows. Is what you're making right now, what you would want to leave behind

if it was your last. If that's the last thing you ever did on this earth, is that your legacy that you want to leave behind, what you're doing right now? And no, it wasn't. Like the record I was making that time was not what I wanted to do. And it wasn't anywhere near. And I felt this thing in me roar up and say like, there's a whole other person besides Liz Phair. Like, Liz Phair is a part of a whole person. If it's the event horizon that's coming closer, I'm damned if I'm going out without expressing who I truly am, like my real full self. Whether anyone cares about that or not, and that's why I didn't write this memoir. Thank you for doing this comprehensive memoir, because I can refer people to your, to your podcast to say like, if you want to know how we

got it, here's the history. That's for someone like you, who's really good at it. Like, that's not how my mind thinks at all. I don't even keep present in my mind that I'm even a rock star. Like that isn't even in my mind, 97% of the time. And so I wanted to write like a fresh artist, like a book that would be about being personal and having character and being judged and all the things that I was doing, looking at the television, yelling at it. How can you lie? How can you say that? How can you be so cruel? Blah, blah, blah, blah. What about the times that I've been cruel? What about the times that I've lied? What about the times that I've said things I should never, didn't mean to? What about the times that I've acted outside of my character? And this was sort of my way, this story just started flooding out of me. And when I sent

them to my agent, Jennifer, she's like, what is this? These are amazing. And that was my response basically to Trump and that whole Trump nation. No character matters. Honesty matters. Personal contact and how you treat other human beings matters, but none of us are perfect. And if we could just get past, like, do we have the right to yell at people and say, not that way, my way is better? Do we have the right to say that if we can't also accept that we are flawed just like we think they are? Just this, this is my picking up the sword that was there at hand to try to do battle on a very personal front about what I think is important about living and being human. Yeah. I mean, it was really interesting reading also, because like you mentioned, this isn't a, you know, like this is a story of my life.

It's a series of vignettes. And sometimes they're like more expansive, but sometimes they're just moments where I think a lot of us have moments like that all the time, but we don't examine them. We don't reflect on them and we don't kind of think, well, what actually just happened there? And what does it actually say about me, about my values, about the way that I interact with the world? And maybe how might it inform the way that I want those things to be moving forward. I thought it was really interesting how you chose, because that's a very conscious decision, just that structure where you can literally touch down into any of these moments.

And they're not being momentous. Well, some of them are. Some are very small. Right. And you're kind of like, it just, it plants a seed that makes you inquire into yourself. Well, huh. Like, and maybe I've seen a part of myself in that moment, different fact pattern, different circumstance, but sure, I've been there. I've been that person. to start to awaken us to the fact that we've all got stuff that we like and don't like within us. And it's real easy to point it out in other people, but we have to own those parts of ourselves as well. We do, or we're not anchored strongly. We're not planting our feet as solidly We have to own the bad. Yeah. You also share one chapter.

Well, just people can read the book to dive into a lot of these different moments. One thing I thought was kind of fun. You have premonitions or omens. Tell me a bit more about this. Nobody in my personal life likes it when i talk about this you know who liked it joe rogan really liked it he and i totally i think he even started using my phrase future science which i'm reclaiming joe i'm reclaiming it um i think this stuff is real it's just not understood yet. I take the long view of history and say that like stuff that seems magical and, you know, is actually just science. We just don't understand it yet. And

yeah, throughout my life, I've had weird, I left a lot of it out of the book because the editor was like, nope. Too much. Too much. Not relatable. It's like, what is the most believable? Undermines your credibility. Yeah, like, I'm not allowed. And I don't get any other answer. My son hates it when I talk about stuff like that. My parents roll their eyes. There's not a person in my life that's like, yeah, tell me more. But it's very real to me. I don't know what's going on or why it happens, but I'm fascinated. I feel like I'm actually looking ahead to the time 200 years from now. We know exactly what's going on in this completely normal mechanism of the physical world that we say, yeah, that.

It doesn't strike me as so beyond the pale that if we were a predator animal at some point in our evolutionary history, we would develop a sixth sense to tell us when something was looking at us. I can imagine that. I can imagine you really would want eyes in the back of your head. And does that translate into some brain function where telepathy is happening? I kind of think it does. I think that's going on. I don't know what it is. Maybe it's electromagnetism. I have no idea, but like I'm way open to all the exciting mystical stuff, paranormal, way open, but I take a scientist's view of it. Yeah. I mean, you also, you write about in one chapter, an experience you have in Shanghai

and I was trying to figure out where you, and you write about driving and seeing the word you use is a ghost. I was trying to figure out, were you using that literally, or were you using it just sort of, you know, like as a metaphor? I used it as a metaphor. I used it as like a sense of a person from the past, sort of an archetype from a former time that was still in this modern context, doing exactly the same thing he would have been doing, maybe even consciously, deliberately being old world in a modern context. And I saw him as like a ghost, but I didn't mean it literally, although I could have written many chapters about the ghost.

It's like, no, no, no. Fascinating for you, Liz, but maybe not as relatable. Let's do that as a different book under a pen name. Yeah, right. There's one other curiosity I have, which is that, and you write about this in the book, but I've also heard you talk about it. And just through the conversation, it seems like a lot of people, when they think about life, they're trying to simplify.

They're trying to distill. They're trying to because they view complexity as stress. I almost feel like you move in the, your inclination is to move in the opposite direction, to like run towards complexity. You're weirding me out very much right now because you're too good. You're too good. Like, that's exactly what, if I had to boost for one side. I think the human animal needs to evolve quickly and efficiently into thinking in complex terms. I think if we don't understand how systems work and we don't start framing our world in a systems type context, we're going to miss how globalization happens. We're going to be behind the times. Complexity

is the most important thing we can grow comfortable with. I think more than anything else on earth right now, we need to be able to think in complex terms, not be, not boil things down to binary terms. I think we're deluding ourselves by not recognizing the complexity around us and trying to stretch our brain. And I think we're doing it already. Like, have you ever left a tab open on your laptop and been listening to music while checking out maybe a politician's thing while reading and skimming and seeing what messages are coming in? You're already functioning in complexity. It's just a matter of thinking about things a lot of people don't want to think about. And I love to think about that stuff.

I love to take a problem or something that happened and sort of worry it in my mind until I get a sense of the whole thing. I try to see other people's points of view on it. I try to, I let it be complex. That cognitive dissonance that I'm so severely allergic to, I think we're living in an extremely complex world. And I don't mean that in the obvious sense that the universe is complex. I mean, we have created a complex society. We have gorged ourselves on complex media. And yet we're still resisting. We're still living in the man-woman. You know, it's good or bad.

You know, like that kind of thing. It's done. It's over. It's not real. It's a delusion. You must move to complexity, whether you like it or not. I honestly feel like that's the clarion call. Yeah. It's such an interesting approach too, because I think we experience complexity as stress. So in order to minimize the stress in

our lives, we try and make things binary where your approach is, let me actually see if I can increase my capacity for complexity as a way to actually reduce the stress and just learn how to be okay with it and move into it and just map it and work with it. You're amazing. Like that is like right to the heart of me right there. That is it. You just completely, I feel like you should go do my interviews for me because that's it. I mean, what happens is the death of the ego. If you're going to embrace the system, you're going to have to acknowledge you're a very small part of it and really kind of meaningless. And that doesn't feel good. But it should feel great because in another sense, we still haven't found any other life in the universe with all of our very deep, vast telescopes that is like us.

We're incredibly special and incredibly powerful and incredibly important. We're also nothing. Yeah, that duality. So good place for us to come full circle. So we're sitting here in this container of the Good Life Project. So if I offer out this phrase to live a good life, what comes up? Love and be loved. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening. And thanks also to our fantastic sponsors who help make this show possible. You can check them out in the links we have included in today's show notes. And while

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