Good Life Project - Tim Ferriss | On Love, Loss & Meaning [Best Of]

Episode Date: November 15, 2021

If you LOVED this episode:You’ll also love the conversations we had with Kamal Ravikant about reimagining life and learning to love himself.You can find Tim Ferriss at: Website | Instagram | The Tim Ferris Show podcastTim Ferriss has been a man on a mission, driven to deconstruct mastery and excellence, then share what he's learned. It began with his own relentless experimentation and documentation, which yielded #1 New York Times bestsellers The 4-Hour Workweek, The 4-Hour Body, The 4-Hour Chef along with a series of other books. In more recent years, this yearning has led him to sit down with hundreds of elite performers, from a vast array of domains, on a quest to reveal what made them them. These conversations are shared weekly on Tim's award-winning podcast, The Tim Ferris Show. In today's Best Of conversation, we cover very different ground, and get very personal. Tim actually lost a number of people in the year before we sat down in the studio, turned 40 and found himself in a deeply contemplative and emotional space, thinking about who he is, how he wants to create the next 40 years of his life and what matters. When I sat down with Tim, he'd recently returned from an intensive 10-day silent meditation retreat. While gone, he lost yet another close friend. He was, in his own words, in an incredibly "porous" place, leading more from the heart than the head, which was a bit of a major turnaround for him.We spent time deconstructing Tim's 10-day silent meditation experience, his struggles and awakenings, how it compared to psychedelic experiences and how, barring one major saving grace, his retreat may have sent him spiraling into a very bad place. We also talked about his experience with death, his decision to append audio of his departed friend, Terry Laughlin, which was recorded by Terry's daughters in the hospital during his final days of life to the end of Tim's recent podcast interview with Terry. Tim also shared his decision to take the TED stage, switching last minute to talk about something deeply painful and personal, and what that meant to him, his lens on legacy work (and how it landed with his family, who didn't know what he'd be talking about). And, we explored Tim's awakening to a "softer" set of metrics to measure a life well-lived and his evolving definition of what it truly means to live a good life.My new book Sparked.-------------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.

If you want to love other people fully, you actually have to figure out how to love yourself on some level. Like, there is no mental Cirque du Soleil trick that you can pull off to really get around that. Tim Ferriss has been a man on a mission, driven to deconstruct mastery and excellence, and then share what he's learned for his entire adult life. It began with his own relentless experimentation and documentation, which yielded number one New York Times bestsellers like The 4-Hour Workweek, The 4-Hour Body, The 4-Hour Chef, and a series of other books. In more recent years, this yearning has led him to sit down with hundreds of elite performers from a vast array of domains on a

quest to reveal what made them them. And these conversations are shared weekly on Tim's award winning podcast, The Tim Ferriss Show. In today's best of conversation, we cover very different ground and get really personal. While I first sat down with Tim in 2017 to record this conversation, the things we talk about, the topics, the ideas, the experiences, the insights, they're more relevant now than ever before. Tim actually lost a number of people in the year before we sat down in the studio where he also had just turned 40 and found himself in this deeply contemplative and emotional

space, thinking about who he is, how he wants to create the next 40 years of his life, and what really matters. And when I sat down with him, he had recently returned from an intensive 10-day silent meditation retreat. And while gone, he had actually lost yet another close friend. He was, in his own words, in an incredibly porous place, leading more from the heart than the head, which was a bit of a major turnaround for him. And we spent time deconstructing Tim's 10-day silent meditation experience, his struggles and awakenings, how it compared to psychedelic experiences, and how barring one major saving

grace, this retreat may have sent him spiraling into a very dark place. We also talk about his experience with death, his decision to append audio of his departed friend, Terry Laughlin, which was recorded by Terry's daughters in the hospital during his final days of life, to the end of a podcast interview with Terry. Tim also shared his decision to take the TED stage, switching last minute to talk about something deeply painful and personal, and what that meant to him, to his lens on legacy work, and how it landed with his family,

who also didn't know what he would be talking about. And we explored Tim's awakening with a softer set of metrics in mind to measure a life well-lived and his evolving definition of what it truly means to live a good life. So excited to share this best of conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. We'll be right back. The Apple Watch Series X is here. It has the biggest 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 X. 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. Good to be hanging out.

I was kind of thinking, it's been a hell of a year in your life. Yeah, it really has been. I mean, it's been a great year in many respects. Turned 40, spoke at TED on the 10th anniversary to the day of the publication of 4-Hour Workweek, which was trippy. Although, rather than a celebratory talk of sorts, I mean, I was going into a very, very dark subject of this near brush with suicide in college. And in the same 12 month period, I've had a lot of friends die unexpectedly, including one just a few weeks ago. And since it's been a year of memories, thinking back to experiences I've had and also of pausing and reassessing for maybe the next 40. And just to think like 40 didn't hit me as a number in a big way. Maybe it's delayed onset. I don't know,

maybe like six months from now I'll be overwhelmed, but it's not like I didn't see it coming. And in a sense, so the, the number 40 didn't cause me me to run out and buy a Corvette or something. But as a sort of mathematical switch of sorts, I was like, you know, let's just assume if we're looking at actuarial tables that maybe this is 50%. Right? that. And that idea that I just went from not to the halfway point to passing the halfway point has led me to also really want to go a few layers deeper on my own behaviors, my own motivations, my own fears, maybe just asking why a few more times so that I can get to some of the underlying sort of tectonic plates of who I want to be or who I am, what's holding me back as opposed to all the surface level stuff, right? Because that's shiny and distracting and appealing in the sense that it's so transient and lightweight,

but it's like, no, maybe you need to go a few or many layers deeper. Yeah. I mean, it's so interesting too. 40 did nothing to me. I'm 52. Yeah. 50 for me was the number where I was like, oh. Yeah. Half century is legit.

Yeah. Yeah. And I didn't see it coming at all either completely. I was like, huh? Like I got really reflective and start to really think about looking back and seeing what I've learned. And also like, okay, so how do I want to be? I think the word that kept popping into my mind was intentional.

Am I being intentional? Yeah. How much am I being steered by forces I'm not even aware exist versus maybe not steering, but like you said, how much of what I do has a clear intention behind it or an underlying theme even, right? Yeah. And your intention versus like a bazillion other agendas and intentions. Right, right.

So that sends you on this quest. But seriously, my question around that though, you've always struck me as being somebody who is very much in your head. I don't think that's mistaken perception. I mean, in my head, certainly not all the time, but I spend a lot of time kind of playing like racquetball in my own head with ideas, for sure. I mean, there's a lot of cognitive load.

Yeah. Yeah. All right. So a lot of time playing around in your head, a lot of cognitive load. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So a lot of time playing around your head, a lot of cognitive load, a lot of time also in the physical body in terms of how do we optimize around it? It feels to me like the place you're going now and tell me if this is like

from the outside looking in is surely the thing in the middle of the heart. I would say so. Yeah. I mean, I think that by necessity in the middle, the heart. I would say so. Yeah, I mean, I think that by necessity in some respects, and I don't want to necessarily get into a bunch of this right now, but I had some really dark, bad things happen in my childhood. And I viewed, I think, emotion as a liability or emotional vulnerability as a weakness, as a liability,

which at the time, I think quite frankly, it might've been. And to compensate for that, decided to befriend pain, get very well acquainted with pain in the form of sports like wrestling and all these other things. And to sort of compartmentalize certain areas of myself and build armor so that I could just be a formidable instrument of competition, right? Getting the A pluses, pinning 30 people in a row, whatever it was to to find worth in honing this sort of blade of the self as an instrument. And that was it. I mean, there's certainly there, not to make it sound like I had a terrible, terrible, terrible childhood, 360.

My parents were very supportive. It wasn't from that. But in the last few years, certainly in the last, I'd say three years, but particularly acutely in the last year, realizing that I feel that perhaps the key realization has been, if you want to love other people fully, you actually have to figure out how to love yourself on some level. Like there is no mental Cirque du Soleil trick that you can pull off to really get around that. And so if you've spent a lot of your life, as I have, deeply hating or disliking parts of yourself or tolerating yourself, but viewing

some type of mission as more important and you're just a vehicle for that, there comes a time when you need to, or you should, reckon with that and try to unpack it. And I'll just state in advance for anybody who may be in a similar place or has been in a similar place that that unlayering process is not always a trip through Magic Mountain, Disney World. It gets, at least for me, it was, and it's continuing, but certainly in the last six months has been particularly powerful and difficult in some ways. And we can certainly talk about some of the catalysts for that, including the 10-day silent meditation retreat, which was a whole separate can of worms that I didn't really fully anticipate.

Yeah, I feel renewed. I know we're bouncing around a lot, but this is not a subject that I've spoken much about because I've, I've always viewed like when people talk about the heart and I'll be honest, even now, sometimes when the heart comes up in like a thousand different ways, I'm like, okay, look, I get it. Buddha nature, meta, loving kindness. All right. But like, can we not use heart 27 times a paragraph, please? You know? And just, so there's a part of me that has felt a, a, a great resistance to that. Some of which I think is founded, right? Like every field has

its words that are kind of sloppily thrown around and heart is sometimes one of those words. And having also spent 17 years in the Bay area, I think that allergy was made a little more acute where I'm like, okay, I get it. But still, like, let's use some more words, please. Just as such a stickler for language myself. All of that having been said, I've lived so much of my life cerebrally and in an attempted hyper-rational logical way. And I did not look at, I remember this one incident, this is 2004 maybe, so some time ago,

back when I had more hair on my head and less hair on my chin. For those of you who cannot see me, I'd be impressed if you could, some type of sensory substitution. I look a little bit like Ming the Merciless right now. I have some funky 1970s kung fu movie facial hair. In any case, at the time, I had this girlfriend who was very much a feeler. She did almost everything on feel, which was anathema to me, but I found it appealing. It was a very soothing compliment to my left brain dominant. Hyperlogical. Yeah.

At the best of times, right times right i mean let's just assume it's logical to get some yeah some redeeming quality and i was i was looking at this perspective business deal and i was going back and forth and back and forth on it and pro and con list and excel spreadsheets and calculations and all this stuff and it wasn't clearly a yes but there were all these opportunities i associated with it so i felt like it could be a no because of all these various 27 other factors. And it went back and forth for like two weeks thinking about this hours on hours on end. And then the, this girlfriend at the time, Katie just said to me, she goes, do you trust this guy or not? And I go, not really. She goes, then why

don't you just not do the deal? And I remember thinking, huh? Like, it doesn't matter how good the deal on paper is if you don't trust the person behind it. Like they can always break the promise. And I was like, huh, maybe this doesn't have to be so hard or complicated. And in the last few years, I've really tried to regain, because I had it certainly when I was a really young kid, the ability to listen to how I feel. So that's a very roundabout way of saying. think about going with the heart among others is like paying attention to how your body's responding, paying attention to how you feel in a very gestalt type of fashion. Like just like in your, is it in your skin? Is it the tightness in your chest? Is it just some weird spider sense heebie-jeebies that you get when like somebody walks into the room and it seems like Darth

Vader with a wake of like darkness behind them, which is an experience I had. And I think most people have had where you meet someone and you're just like, yeah, something's not right. Like something's not right about that person. And instead of overriding that with like, well, but data point, you know, exhibit A through Z, it's like, no, maybe you should pay attention to that. And it's served me really well in the last couple of years. So, yes. Doing a lot more thinking outside of the typical, ordinary, sort of rational realms as we would think of them, at least.

Yeah. And I mean, it's interesting. It feels like you, to a certain extent, equate intuition with feelings slash emotions slash heart slash... Yeah. I would view, I guess in my mind, just looking at them as labels for concepts that are probably not quite as cleanly contained. I think that emotion and intuition I would view as somewhat different things. Intuition is a catch-all term that I'm using for a lot of stuff that I don't think we understand very well,

which is just like, okay, great. So after we have like Descartes and Cartesian duality, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and all these different frameworks, and we go from like Ptolemaic astronomy to Copernican and all this fancy stuff. Great. So we've got a couple hundred years and we have like getting things done in the last 50 years or whatever. And that's all great. But then we have millions of years of evolution since we like crawled out of the water that serve ostensibly serve quite a few important functions so the if a and b then c conclusions that you can reach and i suppose kahneman talks a bit about this and thinking

fast thinking slow although he would use different words. I'm trying to value, or I've recognized the value of that side of things more than I've given it credit for historically. I mean, to me, it feels like that's the why behind all the other stuff. I mean, you do A plus B plus C because you want to feel D. I mean, you can pretty much answer every D when you keep going down deeper. To me, at least in my process, is because I want to feel this way.

Yeah, because you want to feel X. I certainly think that's, I think you me, for a lot of my life, that just, that was a dangerous place to go. And then it just became a discarded place. So I would end, let's say you're asking why six times, I would just ask why five times. And I'd be like, no, I know if I wanted to push it, I might come to a feel X. But like that is, if I get to that point, that's when I'm driving around at a hundred miles an hour without a seatbelt on. And I'm not willing to assume that risk. So I'm 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 if we need them. Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk. 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, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging 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 eight 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 What was it about the last year? Because it seems like you're starting to ask the sixth why. Oh, yeah.

Was it all these things that you just talked about, turning 40, the loss of friends? There's been a lot that's gone into it, so it becomes difficult to parse out any single causal factor, right? Which I think would be helpful if that could be figured out. It would make it a lot easier for me to try to help people who are sort of self-imposed emotional cripples as I was. Your default is always how can I deconstruct so that this can serve other people? And there comes a time, I feel like, where you've got to deconstruct to serve you. Oh, totally. No, no, no. And I think that the realization, and this is borrowing, I think from Sharon Salzberg, but the importance of putting on your oxygen mask first before helping others.

At this point, I think has indicated for me, my rate limiter, right? Like I've been able to help a lot of people. I mean, I've been able to help millions of people, but there are deeper, deeper levels of the psyche and deeper levels of human experience that with the toolkit I've developed, I cannot really touch properly and impart to other people without taking off all sorts of armor that i've built over decades and and so i'm going there now yeah and the triggers i would say include uh deeper meditative practice include being surrounded by mortality with the death of not one, not two, but like several friends, including one, like I mentioned in the last few weeks, in several cases in very unexpected circumstances. It wasn't like it was seen coming from years away or anything like that.

The continued deep exploration, and this is one of the don't try this at home kids topics, but the deep, serious exploration of psychedelics or entheogens certainly has been a very important component in controlled circumstances with supervision. I mean, you want to talk about non-ordinary states of reality. Yeah, that's certainly one tool in the toolkit. And on top of that, through those experiences and some other means of perhaps ascetic practices or renunciation that allows, that creates more space for other things to come in, whatever those other things might be, like fasting, for instance. I mean, I've, I continue to do fasting as a practice, both for, for health and potentially medical reasons, but secondarily, just for the act of renunciation and experiencing the subtraction of that and to see what else flows in

once that space is created. So I'll do the three-day fasts once every month, but those don't provoke the profoundly different states of consciousness that say a five or seven or ten day fast, certainly done with medical supervision, people listening, this is not thing you just decide to do because you hear it on a podcast. And combining that with these other practices, then suddenly, you know,

one plus one plus one is not three. Suddenly, yeah, there's a lot more to it. So it's been some circumstantial, you know, the world just exposing me to death. And then the also, you know what, if I really look at the last year or so, getting on stage at TED was a really, the subject matter was a difficult decision for me. So for those people who don't have the context, I'd never spoken on the main stage at TED. I was invited to do so in the opening session, which is broadcast to hundreds or thousands of movie theaters. So the good news, you get to reach a lot of people. Bad news, if you flub it, there's no fixing it in post, really. I mean, they do then, they can afterwards polish the video.

But in the meantime, everyone in these movie theaters certainly gets to see any live mistakes. And I had a really safe talk prepared. And Ted, as they should, take rehearsals and so on really seriously i mean you spend months working on this stuff and literally i'm not making this up the day before my final rehearsal which is done via video conference with all the head staffers i scrapped my entire talk and decided to talk about this near brush with suicide and the tools of stoicism, how I've helped myself to stay within the lanes a little bit and certainly stay a few more steps away from the precipice, even with continued encounters with say manic depression, which I suffer from and runs in my family to an almost comically high degree. I mean,

just if you look at the, the, the full genome sequencing and the predictive ability there. So the day before I scrap it, pull it all nighter, put this talk together. And, uh, I remember finishing it and, and I told Chris Anderson of TED, the head curator, I mentioned to him, but just before I did the rehearsal, I said, Chris, you know, I understand if this is really rocky, I can help find another speaker if necessary and totally get it. And I was actually deep down, I think, hoping that they'd be like, yeah, no, it's too late. And that they would swap me out. And so I remember at the very end of the rehearsal, it was a little rough around the edges. And he said, well, I've got some bad news. I don't think you can wiggle out of this one. And I was like, oh, fuck. So I got up and I mean, within the first few minutes for people who haven't seen the talk,

I show this picture of me looking really joyous. This photograph from college. And I said, well, this is two weeks before. I remember a really important moment. It was like sitting in this minivan in a parking lot when I decided I was going to kill myself. And I walked through that entire experience. And I'd forgotten a number of things came out of that. Number one, I very rarely, very, very, very, very rarely ever felt proud of anything.

And I'm sure we could unpack that for a while, but suffice to say, that's just been the case. Like I've always viewed it as my job to get an A plus. And if you don't get an A plus, then let's focus on the two things that you screwed up. And because your job is to get a hundred, like that is minimal acceptable job. So feeling proud of anything is very alien to me. But when I, when I finally gave that talk, I was really proud of having done that, which was a new kind of a new feeling for me and felt like I'd, I'd done something that could be recorded and help a lot of people. And I just, I'd finally gotten it out. The second thing was I forgot to, oops, forgot to mention, I had somewhat lapsed on the possibility that my family could go to

the movies and see this talk. So I'd forgotten to tell anyone in my family and give them a heads up about the subject matter. So they're sitting in the crowd expecting me to talk about who knows what. And then boom, holy shit, like emotional, I punched the chest and that created some conversations that I didn't anticipate, which ended up being good. Not pleasant necessarily at the time, but valuable and necessary.

Third is I was very intimidated by the TED audience, understandably. I mean, good God, if you're going to be intimidated by any audience, that's certainly one. And I was really moved by how many people came up to me who either, I mean, these are, as you know, I mean, just titans of every industry, leaders of every scientific field imaginable. How many of them came up and confessed that they had had similar near brushes with suicide or that they had kids who attempted to commit suicide. And it seemed to me, and perhaps it was just my perception, but I really don't think it was because I did a book signing the day after and Ted seems like this huge, huge thing. And it is, but in the room itself, I want to say there may be 1500 people. There were hundreds of people who came up and wanted to say thank you and talk about these deep wounds or these incredibly painful experiences or decades that they'd gone through.

And it made me feel good in the sense that I realized I really, even though I conceptually knew this, I wasn't alone. This was not a unique flaw of mine. B, holy shit, there's a lot of pain. Like there's so much suffering. There's so much suffering out there. And another feeling that has been new for me in the last year, I would say is, I'm not going to use the word compassion because it's too loaded, but I think it probably applies. I'll just, I'll use the word empathy, but in a very visceral way, just like walking around and noticing people and just feeling that there are deep scars and traumatic experiences in that person. And I'm really feeling it, which is not something I was searching for, certainly.

But, you know, when you like see someone who's, certainly in San Francisco, like someone who's say like mentally ill and homeless or someone who is like yelling at their kids. And my first instinct for like most of my life would be like, what a fucking dick. Like I should go over and smack that guy around, like yelling at his kid. What the fuck's wrong with you? Sorry. Hopefully the cursing's okay. But like, I would get angry. I would just be like, you know what? Like somebody needs to correct that guy. And I would be really angry. And there's still a piece of that, but there's also now the emotional version of me that looks at him and goes, wow, what happened to that guy? What's the pain?

Yeah, what happened to that guy? Maybe his dad used to beat him with a freaking broom handle. Who knows? What happened to that guy that makes him in a place like Noe Valley where everyone is successful, certainly by almost any conventional measure. It's safe. It's beautiful. And the guy has a sweet, gorgeous wife.

And he's yelling at his kid in public. Like, what happened to that guy? There's got to be something. And that's not a question that would have immediately come to mind two years ago. And it feels like you're also, you're asking it less on a cognitive empathy level and more on an emotional empathy level. Like you're actually not just asking the question, but you're kind of feeling like there's. Yeah. Yeah, there definitely is.

And I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to make it seem like they're mutually exclusive, right? I think that another unfortunate false dichotomy that I created in my own head, as we all do, was that emotion would always detract from the intellectual apparatus. And that if you wanted to optimize the sort of analytical machine, you had to completely disregard emotion. And I no longer think that's the case. It certainly can be the case, right? You can get all wound up and thrown into a tizzy and then make terrible decisions. Yes, that can happen.

You can become Spock and then hurt a lot of feelings. That can also happen. But I've had these experiences where the questions, I think a lot about questions as you know, and so the questions that, the ability to ask questions that I've developed over a lot of time spent rereading transcripts of interviews I've done

or other people's interviews and looking at the analysis, right? That toolkit has then helped me now. I mean, I've, I've remembered these experiences just in the last few weeks, for instance, where I've met people and sort of looked into them instead of looking at them and ask them a few questions and then they just start bawling. And it's not the intention. Well, actually I should take it back.

The goal, because it is the intention isn't the goal isn't to make them cry, but like the intention, like I'm so locked into them on a level that I haven't been historically that it just access is something that I haven't been able to access. And I'm not quite sure what to do with that. Honestly, like it's relatively new and certainly not all the time. But it's like, to me, a part of that when I hear that is we so rarely pause to truly see another human being.

We so infrequently feel like we are seen beyond whatever facade we sort of put out into the world. And we desperately want it. We may be terrified of it, but simultaneously, we want that to be part of the human condition is we want people to access us on that level and see us on that level. When somebody does that, I feel like it is so rare these days, especially with the amount of armor

that so many of us are wearing now, that when that happens, it's almost like you've been given permission to dissemble in the face of another human being. And it's hard and it's not necessarily fun, but it's extraordinary at the same time. I completely agree. And I would also say for those people who, you know, and I used to think like, oh, for those people who might, and I'm like, ah, there may be one or two out there. And I just don't think that anymore. Like, I think that a lot of armor for whatever reason, I mean, what I've come to realize for myself is that when you put on a lot of armor, which can be necessary for periods of time, I get it, right? You're not just blocking things out. You're keeping stuff in a lot of stuff

in, and there are certain things that shouldn't stay in that are just fester. And maybe they fester for decades. And when you open yourself in a way that allows you to more deeply empathize and feel other people, which can be a shock to the system, certainly for me, and this happened around day seven of my silent retreat, I was like, oh, joyous day six. We're going to go there in a minute. Joyous day six. And then day seven was just like oh fuck and we'll we'll come back to that um but it was the removal seemingly the removal

of that armor which i hadn't done in 30 years or 35 years so it's been a been a wild year yeah i mean um i want to talk about your 10 day retreat. You brought up something a couple times, which was a recent death. Are you talking about Terry? Yeah. So that's the most recent. Yeah. So for those who don't know, Terry Laughlin was kind of, you, you almost, I think we're partly responsible to bring him a certain amount of notoriety, maybe share who he was. Yeah, sure. Sure. You aired an episode, a conversation with him recently, which ended up being the last interview. But what struck me about that conversation

was not the conversation you had with him, but was the tape that you added in at the end of that conversation. And what I heard in your voice, when you set up that episode, we'll link to that episode, guys, so you can listen to it. You set up the episode and you're like, hey, this is Terry Laughlin.

This is somebody who's, you know, this is why. He's meaningful to me. Here's a conversation. And I've added in these tapes at the end. The level of pleading, you were like, please listen to this. Don't just listen to the, listen to these few minutes at the end. Please, please, this is so important. Like you don't understand,

you have to listen to this. And it was just that set up for you was really, that alone was, was really powerful. Thank you. That was a hard intro to record. Yeah, I can't imagine. And the background, so I'll give a bit of background. In a timeline, another reason that was so hard for me. So Terry Laughlin is the creator of something called Total Immersion Swimming, which completely changed my life. And he changed my life first indirectly through his book. I bought the book, Total Immersion Swimming, which I would encourage anyone who is not comfortable swimming to get. Certainly I was in 31, 32 when I learned to swim, which is humiliating,

but awesome that I managed to flip it around. Now I swim laps to relax. It's crazy. I can't even, it still seems like a dream to me that that would ever happen. And his book was introduced to me by a guy named Chris Saka, who is a very, very well-known investor now. At the time, he was just a dude who grew up in upstate New York and liked to ski and I met him at a barbecue. Now he's a billionaire on the cover of the Midas issue of Forbes, which is crazy. Anyway, great guy. And we were talking about God knows what over wine. And somehow my, my inability to swim came up and he said, I have the answer to your prayers. And so he introduced me to this book that led me to total immersion. In 10 days, I went from not being able to swim even two lengths of a pool to doing

40 or so lengths per workout to relax. That's with a book, man. It's just unbelievable. And I was so transformed by that because this lifelong insecurity had just been fixed like a snap of the fingers. It led me to start examining other impossibles in my life others i can't do x because i'm y uh so it had very far-reaching effects and then i reached out to terry because i was just so blown away by his deconstruction teaching of swimming and also the the deep caring he had for students so he was on a TV show with me where I wanted to showcase his ability, where we took this mother of two who couldn't even put her face underwater and got her to swimming open ocean in Hawaii for like a half a mile in three days or something crazy.

And I got to know Terry over the last number of years. And I want to say, I might be getting the timing slightly off here, but not by very much. I recorded a podcast with him. He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, recorded a podcast with him October 2nd of this year. And then I went on my silent retreat. Unbeknownst to me then, he had getting, I'm probably getting the date slightly off here, but a stroke on the 10th and then died on the 20th. And I came back, turned on my phone and had this flood of texts, which I expected. But the first text that I saw was, did you hear about Terry? And then this like crying emoticon from Sarah,

the woman who he had taught when we did the TV show together. And there are a few things. Number one, the timing couldn't have been more head-on collision. So raw and so exposed and so hypersensitized after the silent retreat to have that be my first re-entry

to digital life was a lot. And then I realized a few things. Number one, Terry's in the new book. So Terry is in this book that my newest book called Tribe of Mentors, which is just coming out right now. And I have to get in touch with the publisher so I can change the dedication so I can add Terry to the dedication. That was thought number one. It's like I need to get in touch with the publisher to modify that.

And then second, I need to re-record the introduction to the podcast we did. Because I had re-recorded, I had recorded the introduction initially and I was like, hey guys, the upbeat Tim Ferriss here. Really, really excited to introduce you to one person who changed my life and dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah.

And now I had to change the past tense and go back and record this intro the night that I got back from the silent retreat. And yeah, it was heart-wrenching. And it's a long interview. He sounded great. He sounded great when we did the interview. Certainly, I think the most in-depth interview he's ever done.

And long story short, I did the intro, but what really just like, oh my God, that hit me in the heart and soul so powerfully. It was not just the fact that I had to rerecord the intro, but his family. So his daughters, because Terry had this book he was working on and he was, he really, really wanted to try to finish it, even if it was finished in the hospital. So his daughters took it upon themselves to interview him in the hospital right after his stroke. I mean, starting with like the day after. And they then sent me the audio of a number of conversations they had with their dad a few days before he died in the hospital. And you hear, you hear beeping, you hear footsteps from staff

walking around, doctors asking questions, clipboards being lifted and put back into some type of casing. And I mean, you hear how off he is in the beginning, right after the stroke, and then he starts to regain strength and they say, oh, you're sounding, you're sounding so much better. And it's just brutal. I mean, it's brutal to listen to. And the pleading, I appended those files to the end of the interview. And in the introduction that I re-recorded, which took me six or seven tries, and finally I just gave up. And I was like, all right, this is not going to be smooth no matter what. This is going to be a rough intro, so fuck it. I'm just going to speak from the heart heart and that's the best I can do. The pleading was, uh, and the imploring was really important to me because I meet so many people and interact with or observe so many people online. And we've all been there, who have something they will do someday, whether it's

a dream trip or telling their dad that they love him, right? And look, dads can be difficult characters. Trust me, I get it. But maybe like, you know, like, at some point, like, I'm going to have X, Y, and Z conversation with my dad, or could be anything. And I'm going to quit that job. I'm going to propose to so-and-so. I'm going to have blah, blah, blah, whatever it might be. And that someday just gets pushed and pushed and pushed and pushed until it's too late. And I've seen it thousands and thousands and thousands of times. And so I want people to listen to this and I said, look, nobody expected, he had pancreatic cancer.

So there was the possibility he would die, but nobody expected it to happen this quickly. And like long life is not guaranteed. So I wanted to make it really clear. I'm like, okay, if my intellectual case for not postponing important things and for avoiding the deferred life plan is not working, let's try a different approach.

Like listen to the fucking pain at the end of this interview and like let the sadness envelop you so completely that maybe that flips a switch that gets you to maybe take a small step towards taking that trip, having that conversation, starting that relationship, ending that relationship, whatever it might be, because it's just, you know, we're not all going to die of old age, which is a misnomer in and of itself.

It's just like... Yeah. I mean, listening to that i got the sense that like like through your words like what i was hearing was if you listen to like a single piece of audio i've ever in some way been able to share with you make it this yeah yeah i think that i think that would be i think that would be close for sure. I mean, if I had to choose two, it would be that and then the TED Talk. Yeah.

It's like if, you know, I can't, certainly I'm not qualified to give everyone a recipe for success, but I do feel like I'm pretty qualified for giving people guidelines or a blueprint for avoiding self-destruction. So if I can prevent or mitigate some of that incredibly dark downside, I'm like, all right, well then good stuff will happen. It's got to take care of itself. So if I can provide some guide rails in that, and then an emotional impetus through the power of incredibly just brutal audio at the end of that interview. Great. I'm happy with that. So we talked about this 10 day retreat and like in five different ways so far, we've still like not explaining anything about what you have. I think you're more, I think you're certainly,

you have more mileage on this road. You can, you could probably explain it a lot better than I could. I don't know about that, but you know, the, I know you've been talking about this for years and like, it sounds like this, this was the year you finally committed to doing it, but it's, you know, functionally you went away for 10 days. You went away and you went inside. So take me there

let's see so let me set the the parameters so what is what are the conditions of this retreat it's a 10-day silent meditation retreat and you arrive they give you an orientation and then they announce the beginning of silence. And silence takes a number of different forms. Certainly you're not talking. Next, most people are not going to be making much eye contact. You are not allowed to read. That's a lot bigger than people might realize. You're not allowed to read. And's a lot bigger than people might realize. You're not allowed to read. And you're discouraged for the most part. It's not a hundred percent of the time, but you're discouraged for the most part from writing. And then in all of your silence, the schedule begins

at five 30. So you're waking up, woken, not sure which of those is correct, at 5.30 with nice little chimes. I have to say it is a nice way to wake up. So there's somebody who will walk through the hallway. It's like, tong, tong. And you wake up at 5.30. You walk out. You see the stars. That's relatively new for me.

Not much of an early riser. And then from, from 5.30 to about 9.00 PM or 9.30 at night, with the exception of meals, you are meditating. You have 45 minutes, let's say, of seated meditation, 45 minutes walking, or movement meditation, 45 minutes seated meditation, 45 minutes walking, or movement meditation, And rinse and repeat. Sort of add, we can be ad nauseum. I'm not sure what the Latin is for going fucking nuts, but add whatever that is. And there are a few exceptions to the silence. There is what is called the Dharma talk every night where they'll give you some instruction

you may have noticed that a b and c is happening or you're perseverating on such and such a feeling you could try this this and this so they'll give you some some tool to add to your toolkit while you're sitting there in a loop inside your own head and you also have a short i would say 10 to 20 minute one-on-one or group meeting with one of the teachers every other day i think to assess whether or not you're having a complete psychotic break basically and i do which is actually important because it's so it has happened oh it's so important yeah and just as in case people are whatever, running to see guardians of the galaxy 13 or something, and they're not going to catch the rest of this interview.

I will say that I do not, people have asked me, Oh, like, Oh, should I do it? And I'm like, that's a longer conversation.

I do not think everybody should do this. And I almost left, I would say three times. And the only reason I did not leave was because a true, for lack of a better description, master of the craft, Jack Kornfield was there to help me handle a number of things. But I felt up until the very end that I was a hundred times worse off than when I went in. But you do have this one-on-one or group meeting for 10 to 20 minutes. And the experience for me was a, a lot harder than I anticipated. I've done a lot of hard stuff. And I was like, I think, I think I can do this.

I mean, I meditate once or twice a day, granted short sessions. I'm sure this will be hard. I didn't expect it to be easy. I was like, I'm sure this will be hard. The silence I didn't find hard at all, the not talking, not reading or writing, that's a different story because then you really have no way

to purge thoughts or externalize thoughts or distract yourself from your thoughts. And that was really unexpectedly, I mean, devastating in some ways. And first few days to walk people through my experience, and this is not necessarily typical, but it is, they would call it, or some people have called it an unlayering process. So in the beginning, you're thinking about your to-do list. You're thinking about some stupid email you forgot to answer before you got there. You're thinking about, did I bring enough socks? You're thinking about whatever, some porn that you saw three days before, whatever. And that surface stuff is circulating. So it's just like a snow globe that got shook up and you're like,

okay, I guess I'm just gonna look at the snow for a while. And that's, let's just call it a day or two. And then for many people, day three and four, kind of the hardest because all of this other stuff. Now you've peeled back the layer of current events. You've peeled back maybe the last year. And now, uh-oh, now some old stuff starts coming. Now these old wounds start to show themselves. Now these scenes that you'd forgotten about that had some tremendous imprint on your psyche

are starting to replay, right? Oh, when you caught that girlfriend cheating on you or when this happened, when that happened. now that stuff's starting to come up a little more turbulent. Then for many people, it seems, and man, I'll come back to why I'm laughing. For many people, it seems like four or five, it's like, okay, we're in the heart of the retreat. And when the teachers are giving the Dharma talk, they'll say, you know, it's been so beautiful to talk to many of you and to see how many of you are dropping into stillness and peace. And I'm thinking to myself, what the fuck are you talking about? I feel like I'm strapped to a post, just getting flogged with a cat of nine tails from like every

demon of my past. So I don't know what this, what this piece is that you're talking about. In any case, I I'm good at, and this is not always a good thing, by the way, but keeping pain in. So I was like, okay, I'm just going to two days beforehand and the first five days of the retreat. So I didn't eat anything for seven days. Then I had one session, or I should say two or three sessions for a period of like three hours where my only thoughts, I'm not kidding. The only thoughts were fried calamari, fried chicken, fried calamari, fried chicken, fried calamari, fried chicken. And I thought to myself, you know, I don't know master meditator, but I'm fairly certain that this is unproductive. So I broke my fast. And then on day six,

man, I ate so many crackers with peanut butter when I broke my fast too. But anyway, it was all vegetarian food. So I was like, okay, peanut butter is vegetarian. Let's do that. And then on day six, I decided to meditate outside because I was feeling very claustrophobic just sitting in this meditation room with 80 other people. And that was a real kind of breakthrough for me. I meditated really well outside and would hike up these various paths and find a bench just looking out

over this beautiful mountain vista. This is in, I think it's Woodacre, California. It was held at a place called Spirit Rock, which is very well known. And I had this incredibly profound experience of a number of physical symptoms that I've carried for a long time, tightness in one part of my back,

tightness in a very particular part of my chest, get very, very cold. Like I had ice water on both parts and then start to dissolve. Very unusual. And I had this very joyful, profoundly deep meditative experience up on this hill. I was like, oh, wow, maybe I'm turning a corner. This is great. And oh, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Such gratitude. I felt great. I was like, oh, Jesus, finally, you know, if not day three, at least day six, thank God for that. And in retrospect, what I think happened, and of course, this is going to sound super woo-woo to anyone who is not already drinking the woo-woo Kool-Aid. And for me, even it's like, really, I can't like Tim Ferriss at 20 would be like, you gotta be kidding me. If you were to hear Mike Tim Ferriss now say this, but it seemed like what happened in some respect was the armor. Some of, a lot of the armor got removed or even temporarily removed.

And the, the benefit as temporary as it felt at the time was that, you know, I was, I suddenly felt very deeply emotions that I just had very little familiarity with this like joy and happiness. And I was like, wow, this is a new thing. Huh. And my back doesn't hurt. That's really odd. And then the next day all hell broke loose. And for, for days seven, eight and nine, it was like every worst trauma of my life being replayed in like virtual reality, high def every second of every day to the point where I would be laying in bed trying to go to sleep and my heart would be beating like 160 beats per minute, like sweating through the sheets for like two, three hours a night. And that's after taking like

melatonin and CBD oil, like all these things to try to sleep. Uh, so I ended up having a real heart to heart with, with Jack and gave him a lot of background context that he needed. And he's, he's, he's genuinely one of the more impressive empaths I've ever met in my life and his ability to not only use the tools he acquired through years and years of meditative practice, uh, and aesthetic practice in Burma and other countries. And for those people who might say to themselves, I kind of recognize that name.

Why do I know that name? He's thought of as one of the four or five, I want to say four to six people who are primarily credited with bringing Buddhist meditative practice to the West. Oddly enough, and we don't need to talk about this right now, but I asked him at one point,

because we were going through some really heavy stuff, and I was like, can I ask you a lighter question? He's like, sure. And I was like, why are all the people who brought Buddhist meditative practice to the West Jewish? And he's like, it's like Goldstein, Salzburg. It's true, Salzburg. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Salzburg, Goldstein, Schwartz, and Kornfield. And he's like, yeah, it sounds like a law firm is what he said. And I was like, good God, so funny. And we had a long conversation about it, but, uh, we don't have to get into that. Uh, he had some interesting theories, but Jack also has a clinical psychology PhD and he's dealt with every population you can imagine ranging from veterans who've had their legs blown off and limbs blown off or blinded to adolescents or cutters. He's, he has a lot, he has a very well-developed repertoire for handling just about anything that could come up and found out part of the way through the retreat that I think he's personally interacted with a hundred thousand retreatants, which is just

mind boggling to consider, especially given the attention that you feel, the intense presence that you feel when you're talking to him, like nothing else is happening. He's just taught. He's completely engrossed in talking to you. It's like the energetic cost, not that it couldn't be replenished, but of doing that with a hundred thousand people over 10 days. I mean, it's like, my God, it's so hard for me to even fathom. But Jack walked me through... It's not really doingnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging

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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. 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. Gave me some recommendations for work after the retreat that gave me some feeling of reassurance that I wasn't just completely unwound and that I'd regressed 25, 30 years to a point where I was going to be entirely worse off from having gone to the retreat. Which, if Jack hadn't been there, I think would have been the case, quite frankly. I think I would have come out of that and I would, I wouldn't even be talking to you right now. I would have canceled the book launch. I would have, it would have been bad. It would have been really, really, really bad. So similarly to, in some respects, and my experience through that was in some ways, and this will make sense to some people listening to this and to those for which this is doesn't make any sense or is nonsensical.

You could read or listen to some podcast episodes I've done with James Fadiman and Dan Engel, for instance. But the silent retreat was like a slow motion, deep psychedelic experience in some respects. Like the phases through which, and the layers through which your psyche travels is very, very similar. And along the same lines, using that comparison, the fact that there are so many people right now who are like, yeah, I'm just going to get some ayahuasca from Craigslist and like, go figure it out. Because

my friend who does yoga says she's a shaman and she can cook it in her slow cooker. And to me, that's like finding a neurosurgeon on Craigslist. It's terrifying. It's that dangerous, right? I would put a 10 day silent retreat without a teacher who can really hold space for you in the same category. I really think that if you, for most people now, the difference being, I think that in a silent retreat, the vast majority of people are probably going to be just fine. It's going to be hard, but I think the vast majority are going to be just fine. But if you have any deep trauma from your childhood or any other time, here's the, here's the freaky part is you may, you might think that you don't. And in fact, you just haven't accessed those memories in 20, 30 years. That's the scary part.

It's like, you may not know until you're actually, you don't even know until you're in it. So for me, I was like, good God, like thank you universe for making sure that Jack was there because holy shit, it would have been a complete disaster if he had not been there. And there were other exceptional teachers, but I mean, we, we just match with very specific teacher with very specific teachers. You know what I mean? I mean, it's like, I'm sure there were actually, I know for a fact, there were other people out there retreat because I'm once the silence was broken, I found out that I wasn't the only one going totally crazy. Like there were at least a few

others. And, uh, they had the experience I had with Jack with other teachers, like they loved Jack, but he wasn't, he wasn't the medicine they needed. It was somebody else who had maybe a little more in common with them or whatever it was. So that was my experience, man. And I recall the last day when we finally broke silence. And I mean, look, there's funny stuff too that happened during it. So I don't want to make it all sound super, super, super, super, super heavy. I mean, I remember one point for the first few days, it was kind of like rage, rage,

rage, rage, rage, breath, rage, rage, rage, breath, rage, rage, rage. And I mean, there are all sorts of hysterical things. Like, you know, having done so much meditation, I remember Dharma talk was being given and they said, yeah, how many of you have already have Vipassana vendettas? And I was like, I don't even know what that means. And they're like, yeah, like maybe someone near you is like coughing in a weird way. And you just like, it starts driving you crazy. Like, why are they coughing so loudly?

What's wrong with them? Why don't they go out in the hallway or like someone's like fidgeting on one of their cushions too much. All this silly trivial nonsense like becomes seemingly utterly important, like of paramount importance is like why this person is using two cushions instead of three and whatever. It's so stupid. But on the last day, one of the teachers said, God, your name was Christian. She was very, very adept as well. And she said, your retreat is half done. I was like, what does that mean? That sounds ominous. And she said, your retreat is half done. I was like, what does that mean?

That sounds ominous. And she said, you think you're, you think you're fine. You think you're normal and you're not like it's 10 days. It's been 10 days. It's going to take you another 10 days to probably get back to whatever baseline you think you had before. And that's been true. I've been very hypersensitive since I put a bunch of work that has needed to happen for a very long time on the calendar. So I've made based on Jack's recommendations, a number of other events that have taken place since then. But, yeah, I'm still very porous, for lack of a better word. Yeah, like New York City right now, for me, as someone who's not accustomed to it, this is a lot. It's a lot. And just walking around, I'm i'm like wow there's so many people so angry like that it's a lot but uh look they're also fantastically friendly people in new york city but a lot of stimuli yeah and especially

if you're in a state where you're just picking up on a lot more. Yeah. You know, it's like all of a sudden, you know, one of the most stimulating cities in the planet becomes this place where it's like a cacophony of like, you just kind of running and hiding to a certain extent. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you're just getting waterboarded by noises and lights and yelling and honking. It's a lot.

It's hard to describe it. So yeah, that was my experience. But it sounds like upon reflecting, are you glad you did it? I'm glad I did it, but I very much, I dislike the fact that so much of that outcome was dependent on what I would consider

really, really, really good luck. I mean, really good luck. I mean, really good luck. There were so many ways that the stars aligned and any other combination of factors would have resulted in complete disaster for me. I'm very confident in that. So glad I went, but it strikes me as highly non-replicable. Like if there were Tim and a thousand other alternate universes where the coin flips had gone a different way, I managed to very fortunately land

in the one version of this universe where I got heads like a hundred times in a row, you know, which is, which is freaky. Like I don't, whereas let's just say with, and I don't want to dwell on this, but with a self-contained to the extent that it's self-contained psychedelic experience, I do think that there are ways prescriptively where you can, with the help of, say, a supervising physician, if you can find someone who's able to administer legally, increase the odds quite a bit. Right. Having a positive experience. Yeah. You can nudge the whole of the experience in certain directions and certainly ensure that it's safe, I think, and provide scheduling and buffering

on both sides and so on. Like that's strikes me as a more controlled experiment. But yeah, glad I did it. Don't have any plans to do it again anytime soon. Do you feel like it's created, has it flipped a switch that you feel like will stay on for a long time? Or do you feel like it was like this moment that kind of got you into an interesting, different place, got you thinking, feeling differently? And, you know, that was nice. Well, definitely wasn't nice.

Not so nice, but- I would say it made it extremely clear to me that there are certain things from my past that I had never associated with certain thought patterns and behaviors that are destructive in my life. And it's not like I'm yelling and screaming at people, but internally it's a different story. It's, uh, I remember hearing or reading actually Gertrude's, I think I want to say it's a quote, not an old or reading actually Gertrude's, I want to say it's a quote, not an old one either, from Gertrude Stein, and I'm paraphrasing here,

but she said, we don't realize sometimes that the golden rule works in reverse. Do unto yourself as you would do unto others. And I certainly, historically, have not followed that. I've been extremely self-abusive in thought patterns. And when I look back at all the things that contribute to that, and then I look at surface details, what I would consider maybe surface details, well, for instance, this is like to give you a really silly, but not so silly example. I'm really good at ignoring most things on the internet, but there are certain types of comments that cause me to obsess over them in a way that's hard for me to explain. And it's so silly. It seems so unnecessary and inexplicable while why specific types of comments will just like stick with me in some cases for weeks. It's like a stranger

and I can ignore, I mean, I get thousands and thousands and thousands of messages a day and I don't read them all certainly. And I'm, I'm, I find it very easy to ignore almost all of it. But then there are like certain breeds of comments. And it just seemed like this silly quirk of my personality that wasted a lot of time, but I had no idea how to address it. And let's just take independent of social media, like 12 behaviors like that, right? Or patterns where it's like, why do I do that? Like, why do I do that weird thing that gets me all wound up over nothing? Like what, what is that? And I realized in silent retreat that almost all of those things just get traced straight back to really old stuff that I haven't ever dealt with. And I didn't have,

I didn't have, I wasn't equipped to deal with it at the time, you know, like as a kid, just like you don't have the guidance or the tools or anything. Even as adults, it's fucking hard. So it makes sense that, that I think a lot of it was compartmentalized until now, but it was very, very, very, very valuable in the sense that it in some ways made me optimistic so i was like oh like these 12 things these 37 things that i that i felt i needed to solve independently they're all the same thing right all traces back they're all the same thing yeah uh so uh yeah i'll i'll i'll give i can give you a more informed perspective on what the sound is. We'll check back in a couple months. Yeah, in a couple months.

I'm still kind of high on my own supply right now. Yeah, but I mean, it's also interesting because I think it's the type of thing where you probably don't think about this in advance, but it's probably good to sort of like, even if you don't tell them sort of like pre-designate a support team coming out of it and choose, okay, so I got a couple of friends who I may need to really lean on. And maybe there's a couple of professionals that I need to actually set up beforehand. Maybe I never call them, but let me just ask around and get a couple of referrals. Yeah. I mean, if I were to do this again, that's exactly what I would do. But I had so little information going into it. That would be my only critique, I would say.

Or one of the only primary critiques of the retreat would be, now, simultaneously, like, had I known, I probably wouldn't have done it. Right, right. That's the whole thing. It's a bunch of binaries. I don't think so. I think that if someone had told me, much like, say, a good guide for entheogens or psychedelics, as you go through this, here are some of the scary things that could happen. And here's how you deal. Here's how you can think about them. If you feel like you need to pull a ripcord, I'll be right here.

And we can talk about A, B, and C. I can get you water. Are you comfortable? Just setting the stage so that someone doesn't feel like they are uniquely going crazy and that there's no path out. It would have been nice to know because then I would have done exactly what you said. I would have designated,

I would have had people ready to pick me up. I would have had people nearby where I could stay with them for a few days afterwards. If maybe I would have looked at my calendar and ensured that I could cancel everything for say a week afterwards. And that would have made things, maybe I could have reached the same realization with one 10th level of panic. Right? And so certainly as someone, and believe me, I'm not gonna be running any silent retreats

anytime soon, I do not want that responsibility. But if I were to do it, I would absolutely do that upfront because it would also pre-qualify. And if people were really afraid of like going, flying off the cliff, then it's like, all right, let's do some pre-work before you get there like let's not shoot you out of a cannon into like the worst trauma of your life where you're 10 miles lost and like terra incognita without a compass and have to find

your way back like let's not do that right off the bat yeah and also like you said you know going into it i think just like psychedelics um have become really vogue these days and ceremonies are being held all over the U.S., even though they're not supposed to be by people who don't have a lineage in training. Yes, it's dangerous. Yeah, it's just like going into it, really understanding it can be incredibly powerful and liberating. And at the same time, who you do it with is set in a in setting for psychedelics, just like, you know, retreat, it matters and who you're with. And, you know, there's a reason that, you know, Buddhism comes not just with the practices,

but also with the ethical teachings and the teacher, you know, it's because the practice creates enough stillness for you to see your own shit. Yeah. It doesn't necessarily help you process it. And then depending on what comes up, you know, that could be like, yay. It could also be devastating. Yeah.

And it's the, the sort of like the ethical, the teachings, the Dharma, and then a really skilled teacher, like you said, Jack Kornfield. I mean, we don't all have access to that, but knowing that like, you know, there's a reason those things all travel together. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And part of the reason that I really, really wanted to do the retreat this year is that it may be Jack's last 10-day retreat. And he's just a treasure.

He's written a lot of books. People can certainly find his writing, which is also very compelling. And just to reiterate something I said in passing earlier with the psychedelics and something to build on a comment you made, which is very in vogue, it's very du jour. And people are like, oh yeah, my buddy did blah, blah, blah.

Like, oh, I'll go smoke five MEO DMT like on a weekend on my way to Woodstock. That'll be cool. Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad idea. These are so powerful. I really encourage you to think of any psychedelic experience as choosing a neurosurgeon to take a cancer out of your brain. The seriousness with which you would vet someone

and qualify someone and make sure it's necessary for you or that you feel a calling to it, that it's not just something cool to do out of convenience. That level of rigor and that level of deep thinking is the same that I would apply to choosing a neurosurgeon for a critical surgery. It's, you can fuck yourself up in some deep ways that you cannot unfuck if you play around with that and treat it lightly. So it's like psychic neurosurgery. It absolutely, it absolutely is psychic neurosurgery

and you should treat it very, very seriously. It makes it sound too somber, but it's the best word that I can come up with right now. It's not something that I recommend for everyone, just as I don't recommend, say, a 10-day silent retreat for everyone. But there are cases in which that's exactly what you need. If you need neurosurgery to remove a cancer or God knows what else. And then, you know, taking a bunch of homeopathic herbs or drinking dandelion tea is not going to do it. Like you need a neurosurgeon. So there are cases where that's warranted. Yes, it's been a trippy, pun intended year in a lot of ways.

And that's what triggered, I had all these questions come into my mind. And that led to this past summer in particular, when I was starting to think about a number of things in particular led to reaching out to everybody, you know, for that ended up becoming the new book, you know, Tribe of Mentors. Because like you said, not everybody has access to a jack, right? So it's like, what do you do? Well, what I realized is, you know, I had a book, for instance,

called Mental Toughness Training for Sports, which really changed my life when I was 15. And God, how old am I now? I guess 25 years later, ended up getting to meet the author. And I was like, wow, I feel like I know you already because I read that book and that's such a huge impact on me at 15. And if you don't have access to a Jack in person, you can still have access to Jack.

You just have to make sure that you're finding the pieces of writing or the recordings that can have that type of impact on you. And so that was're finding the pieces of writing or the recordings that can have that type of impact on you. And so that was kind of the goal was to get all these childhood heroes and demigods in my world, as well as people who are the best of the best at dozens of different disciplines to share their playbooks basically and their belief systems. Yeah.

It's funny. I find the structure, the book we're talking about, by the way, it's called Tribe of Mentors. It's out now. You guys can check it out. It's amazing. And it's funny, like we're in our studio in the corner, there's a little meditation cushion and the book's actually sitting on top of it because I've gotten into the habit of like, oh, you know, I'll do my practice in the morning and just kind of flip open to a random person. And you know, it's a couple of pages. Yeah. The profiles are short.

Yeah. And just, you know, I'll kind of Yeah. The profiles are short. Yeah. And just, you know, I'll kind of, and many of them I know, some of them I know personally, but a lot of them I've never even heard of. And they're not just a, you know,

duplications of who's been on your podcast. No, no. It's like 95% or so haven't been on the podcast. Yeah. So it's, it's, it's been great for me because I kind of,

it's part of, part of my morning practice. So it's probably gonna take me a year to actually get through it. Cause I'm just like, I'll flip open. I'm like, it just plants a seed of like, oh, this is an interesting lens or this is an interesting idea.

This is an interesting thing to think about. I just read Susan Cain's, who's a friend of both of ours. And she reminded me of a word that kept coming up to me for some reason over the last year, which is, I'm sure I'm not pronouncing it right. Portuguese word is saudade. Oh, saudade.

Yeah, yeah, saudade. It's such a good word. Such a beautiful, I guess it's really hard to really translate. Yeah, saudade is, Brazilians also love to talk about this word because they're very, they think it's beautiful that it's hard to translate into other languages. So, which like tells you a lot about Brazil in and of itself. I freaking love Brazil. So, saudaji is this like nostalgic longing for something and it's it's kind of one part reverie one part sadness one part happy recollection there's actually a word in japanese it's kind of close which is natukashi ah natukashi na natukashi so that's

kind of close because there isn't really a word and yeah english this is sort of like i remember at one point there was uh nostalgic is kind of getting there but that sounds so like grandma's house. It's like Norman Rockwell. It's like, oh. Isn't that nice? It's too sort of sterile a word for saudade. Just listen to like saudade. Listen to that. Oh my God, Brazilian Portuguese too. What a language. Oof.

Yeah. But yeah, yeah, saudade. So that's, yeah. Yeah, I love it. Cause it just like every day I'm like, oh, this is like a cool little nugget. It's like a plant to see in the morning. And it gives you a lens, right?

It gives you a lens. And what I did, and this is kind of what I do with all my books. I mean, the books that I put together, certainly the last two books and Tribe of Mentor is probably the best example, is a book that I want to use as my own reference. Because it's not my stuff. It's not like I'm going to sit down and read my own writing. I mean, I'm sure there are people who do that, but like that's too self-indulgent even for me. But these profiles, you know, 130 profiles. And I took say the poll quotes that I used for each of those

were cues for me for stuff that I want to work on. So the poll quotes I used, which are in some cases, the guest or the interviewee quoting someone else. So for instance, like Max Levchin, who's one of the co-founders of PayPal, incredible serial entrepreneur, also very impressive athlete as a cyclist, mega methodical. And he, at one point in his profile, I was talking about the movie Ronin, and I think it's David Mamet, I want to say, who is a screenwriter. And there's this quote from the movie, which is, when there is any doubt, there is no doubt. And I was like, oh, that's so good. That's so good. And just as a general rule, right? It's like, if your spider

sense is tingling and you know, my ex-girlfriend would be like, do you entrust this guy? The answer is no. Like you do not use your left brain to convince yourself to do that. Like whenever there is doubt, there is no doubt. And I was like, oh man, that's so good. Or for instance, I mean, little stuff too, like right now, right Like right now, I'm running around New York City. I'm super sensitized because this is silent retreat. Talk about the most non-silent place on the planet. And- As of course we have like the sirens.

The sirens on cue. Yeah, I know. Man, yeah, we could, yeah. Anyway, so like, of course, thank you, sirens. And I always worry about my immune system when I'm in New York City during winter. It's like you're on the subway. Half the people are coughing and I have to be on, right?

I cannot be off right now. And Samin Nosran, who's a chef, worked at Chez Panisse with Alice Waters and is an incredibly gifted teacher also. He's had many successes and failures. And, you know, one of the questions I always ask is about favorite failures. So each person has one of those. But her answer to the what is the purchase of less than $100 that has most improved your life in the last few years was this mushroom supplement called Host Defense.

And I picked it up and I have just, I mean, knock on wood, right? But I've been surrounded by so many sick people and have just felt bulletproof for like the last eight weeks since traveling and taking this stuff. So it could be something like that. Or I'll give you another one that's sort of a mental heuristic. Kyle Maynard.

I don't know if you've met Kyle. A couple people have actually tried to connect just a few times. He's so... Seems like an incredible guy. Such a stud. So yeah, so Kyle Maynard, for people who don't know, congenital quad amputee. So he's born effectively without arms and legs. And if you were to look at, say, his arms are effectively end right before the elbow at the upper arm, and then his legs maybe mid-thigh or closer to the hip.

So despite his born physical condition, he is a member of the National Wrestling Hall of Fame. And, you know, it's kind of hilariously there. The same parents who in the beginning were calling it child abuse that his parents would let him try to wrestle, which he ended up being very, very good at. As soon as he started winning, and then winning, because he lost every match his first season. And then as soon as he started winning, they started calling the fact that he was a congenital quad amputee an unfair advantage. He is the first person to climb Mount Kilimanjaro without any prosthetics. So, I mean, imagine military crawling. I mean, try to military crawl 30 feet,

and then imagine doing that up all of Mount Kilimanjaro. It's just staggering. And he's had an opportunity to interact with a lot of people in, say, special forces and the world of business. Many people at very high levels. And one CEO taught him this guideline that said CEO uses for hiring. When he brings in prospective hires, he'll have all of the employees who interview them rate them from 1 to 10. That's not that interesting.

But here's the wrinkle. They're not allowed to use a 7. So rate them from the wrinkle. They're not allowed to use a seven. So rate them from one to 10. You're not allowed to use a seven. And this ends up being really, really valuable. And what Kyle realized, for instance, is that when he was considering a speaking engagement or traveling or coffee date or whatever,

if he took out seven and had to rank it from one to 10, six is barely passing, right? That's a no. And then eight is I'm pretty stoked. So you create a binary decision and a clear decision where it could be confusing or ambiguous otherwise. So I've been using this for everything.

Like rate it from one to 10, no seven. You could use it for restaurants. You could use it for dates. You could use it for saying yes or no to, to invitations. You could use it for just about anything or how stoked you are on a given idea. It's like, how many ideas have you run with? But there are seven. They're like, yeah, no, it's pretty cool. Like that. Once you've had a little bit of momentum in your life, just even a small taste of success, I mean, what buries you is not a bunch of bad ideas. It's saying yes to a bunch of kind of cool seven ideas.

It's all the sevens, yeah. So anyway, yeah, it's been a fun journey. Yeah, no, it's great. And I love, it's fun to just be able to flip open to any random page and be like, huh, interesting frame for the day. Yeah. Let's go in full circle.

You and I could just jam for a long time. So I'm curious too, because last time we were hanging out, I always end with the same question. And the question is, you know, when they offer the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? You've been through a year of- A lot. A lot.

Yeah. If I offer that out now, if I ask you, what does it mean to you to live a good life? What comes up? I'll answer it personally because I think it'll apply to a lot of people, not everybody. For me,

it means learning to love myself so I can love other people more fully. Full stop. That's it. Thank you. Thank you. Hey, before you leave, if you love this conversation, Full stop. That's it, if you haven't already done so, go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app. And if you appreciate the work that we've been doing here on Good Life Project, go check out my new book, Sparked. It'll reveal some incredibly eye-opening things about maybe one of your favorite subjects, you, and then show you how to tap these insights

to reimagine and reinvent work as a source of meaning, purpose, and joy. You'll find a link in the show notes, or you can also find it at your favorite bookseller now. Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project. 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, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes.

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