The One You Feed - Navigating the Messy Parts of Life: Embracing Imperfection and Growth with Josh Radnor
Episode Date: May 13, 2025In this episode, Josh Radnor discusses the messy parts of life and embracing imperfection and growth. Josh Radnor explains how, even outward success, fame, acclaim, creative fulfillment isn’t en...ough to quiet the deeper battles within. He shares how real freedom comes not from achieving perfection, but from making peace with the messy, unfinished parts of ourselves. From navigating identity and public image to sitting in deep discomfort. Josh offers a powerful reminder that a meaningful life isn’t built on external measures. It’s shaped from the inside out. Key Takeaways: Discussion on the duality of human nature and the internal struggle between positive and negative traits. The significance of thoughts and actions in shaping a meaningful life. The role of time in personal growth and self-perception. The complexities of self-image and public persona. The importance of embracing imperfections and the “messy” aspects of life. Reflection on the wisdom gained from aging and life experiences. The negotiation between acceptance and action in facing life’s challenges. Insights on meditation and the emotional challenges it can provoke. The value of community and shared experiences in personal growth and healing. If you enjoyed this conversation with Josh Radnor, check out these other episodes: A Soul Boom Discussion on Mental Health, Spirituality, and Connection with Rainn Wilson Spiritual Journeys with Rainn Wilson & Reza Aslan For full show notes, click here! Connect with the show: Follow us on YouTube: @TheOneYouFeedPod Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify Follow us on Instagram See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Discussion (0)
You can almost recognize truth by its simplicity.
If something is almost like overly complicated
around systems or around minutia, it's obscuring something.
I think the reason fairy tales are so powerful
and certain children's stories are so powerful
is because if it's wise and true, perennially true,
we get it intuitively.
We don't have to do any calculations to get it.
It's just evident.
Welcome to The One You Feed.
Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have.
Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true.
And yet, for many of us our
thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity,
jealousy or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think
things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.
Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative
effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves
moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.
We often imagine that once we have it all, the inner struggles will disappear. But as
Josh Radner reminds us today, even outward success,
fame, acclaim, creative fulfillment isn't enough to quiet the deeper battles within.
In this conversation, Josh shares how real freedom comes not from achieving perfection,
but from making peace with the messy, unfinished parts of ourselves. From navigating identity and public image to sitting in deep discomfort, Josh offers
a powerful reminder that a meaningful life isn't built on external measures, it's shaped
from the inside out.
I'm Eric Zimmer, and this is The One You Feed.
You're listening to an iHeart Podcast.
Hi, I'm Kristin Davis, host of the podcast, Are You a Charlotte?
Sarah Jessica Parker is here and she is sharing stories from the very beginning, like the
time she forgot we filmed the pilot episode.
I remember some things about shooting the pilot.
Right.
I have some memories I can fill you in.
That you're going to fill me in.
Yes. But then you forgot about it. I completely forgot about it. Listen to Are You a Charlotte
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi, I'm Bob Pippman, Chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia. On this week's episode of Math and
Magic, I'm sitting down with the one and only Bobby Bones. We're exploring the power of audio.
Yeah, I don't fit into one specific hole.
I think that is what endeared me to listeners.
That's why I'm here now because I talk to people that grew up like me, have sensibilities
like me, and have loyalties like me.
Listen to Math and Magic, stories from the frontiers of marketing on the iHeartRadio
app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
I want you to ask yourself right now, how am I actually doing?
Because it's a question that we rarely ask ourselves.
All of May is actually Mental Health Awareness Month, and on the psychology of your 20s,
we are taking a vulnerable look at why mental health is so hard to talk about. Prepare for our conversations to go deep.
I spent majority of my teenage years, my twenties, just feeling absolutely terrified.
I had a panic attack on a conference call.
Knowing that she had six months to live, I was no longer pretending that this was my
best friend.
So this Mental Health Awareness Month, take that extra bit of care of your well-being.
Listen to the psychology of your twenties on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi, Josh. Welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me.
I am really excited to have you on and talk with you about your new podcast, Substack,
Your Life as a Musician, and obviously, Your Life as an Actor. But before we get to that,
we'll start like we always do with the parable. And in the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say,
in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf,
which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf,
which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops, they think about
it for a second, they look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which and fear. And the grandchild stops. They think about it for a second.
They look up at their grandparent and they say,
well, which one wins?
And the grandparent says, the one you feed.
So I'd like to start off by asking you
what that parable means to you in your life
and in the work that you do.
Yeah, it's one of the greats.
I mean, it's a, you built the entire show around it.
And I understand why.
I think it's about free will at some core level.
But I also am very suspicious of people
who say they're all good.
And I'm also suspicious of people
who say someone is all bad.
I think that we have worlds inside us.
We have the whole world inside us.
And so I just think it's an honoring of the fact that there is that dark wolf,
but it's also an acknowledgement that where we put our attention is what we grow.
So I sometimes think about it like I have like 51% of like the light wolf in me and 49%.
Like there is a slight majority of like the wolf of kindness and virtue and all that,
but there's this other part of me and I think we're in a shadow denying society.
That's why there's so much blame and shame and accusation and finger pointing and scapegoating.
So I think it's a sign of great mental health to acknowledge the dark wolf inside you, to
at least say it's there.
And then you might be much less trigger happy at pointing the finger at other people.
Yeah. In one of your essays on Substack, you actually talk a little bit about this. You
talk about internal family systems and Richard Schwartz. We've had Richard on the show to
talk about internal family systems. And I think the thing when I hear the parable today,
right, I've been reading it for a decade now, is that like, there's not two wolves inside me. There's a whole bunch of them, right? I mean, there's a lot going on in there when I
pay close attention. But I think ultimately you sort of put your finger on it when you said it's
about where do I put my attention? And I think putting our loving attention on the parts of
ourselves that might seem like the dark wolf. That's the
way you do it. Right. Right, right, right. Yeah, I think Richard Schwartz really cracked something
there. This kind of search for some sort of solitary identity feels like folly.
Yes. Like you just have to kind of acknowledge that there's like a chorus of voices, wounded
parts of ourselves, even, you know, ancestors or, you know, higher kind of voices that wounded parts of ourselves. Even ancestors are higher kind of voices
that are wiser than maybe our current self.
Like those are all in there too.
And they're all accessible, I think,
if we get quiet enough or skilled enough
at kind of just asking to be contacted with them.
Yep.
You've got a new podcast out,
which is a re-watching of the show
that I guess we would say made you famous,
which is called How I Met Your Mother.
Yeah.
And in that show, there's the character who's, I don't know, in his late 20s, early 30s,
and there's also the character as a 50-year-old sort of the narrating.
Right.
And I think what you just said there sort of ties to this idea that we can access wiser parts of ourselves.
And one of the ways to do that,
actually, I think, and lots of different traditions have talked about this, is to imagine your
50-year-old self or your 70-year-old self or your 80-year-old self. So the show way
back when was kind of on to an idea that I see recur in psychology and various indigenous
traditions about trying to contact
that part of you that's actually already wise.
Yeah, yeah. It's true. And it is something we're unpacking on how we made your mother
the podcast that Craig Thomas and I are doing. My wife is a clinical psychologist. And one
of the things she will sometimes ask patients to do that she's told me that I think is so
wonderful is if they're tied in knots about something and really confused about an issue, she'll say without thinking,
what does your 85-year-old self say?
And the 85-year-old self is there.
It's ready to communicate.
Most of the time, this is not a big deal.
Or let's not worry about that.
But I've asked Craig and Carter, the other co-creator, about this notion of an older,
wiser, narrator character looking back on his life. There's that great Kierkegaard quote,
life can only be understood backward, but it has to be lived forward. So you have this narrator,
wiser voice who's looking back. And he can be a little more lighthearted about things because he
knows how things worked out. Whereas the character I was playing was much more stumbling through one foot in front of the other.
You know, I asked them, they were in their late 20s,
early 30s when they were writing the show.
I mean, it lasted for a decade, but like,
it was a kind of chutzpah, you know, to say like,
oh no, here we're gonna write this older us voice,
this older wiser voice, but they were also
the age of the protagonists.
Yeah.
And they said, it was almost like a hope. It was like a hope that there
was some voice out there that could be guiding and benevolent. I think ultimately it's a very sweet
part of that show that there's this narrator that knew that he landed on his feet so he can tell
all these embarrassing stories about himself. Absolutely. Yeah, I think that, again, that idea is that wisdom is actually not that complicated.
We can keep reading about it, and I've been making podcasts for a decade on the general
ideas of what it means to live a good life.
They're not that complicated.
The problem is that, A, we forget them constantly, and B, we don't know how to live them.
Right.
Right.
I mean, I think that you can almost recognize truth by its simplicity.
If something is almost like overly complicated around systems or around, you know, minutiae,
it's obscuring something.
I think the reason fairy tales are so powerful and certain children's stories are so powerful
is because if it's wise and true
Perennially true we get it intuitively. We don't have to do any calculations, you know to get it. It's just evident
Yeah, but I agree with you that we have the kind of built-in forgetter
I always think of that movie memento where he had to tattoo
You know, you would have amnesia every day and he had to remind himself what happened
I feel like wisdom is like that like
You have to look at the word like change is like that. Like you have to look
at the word like change or like this too shall pass like like correnially wise sayings like
you know sometimes when you're struggling and a friend says you know it won't be like
this forever. It's like the simplest most true thing you could ever say but sometimes
it comes to you as if it's like Moses on the mountaintop you know it's like it's divine
revelation like oh I won't be feeling this way forever. That's unbelievable. It's like Moses on the mountaintop, you know, it's like it's divine revelation. Like, oh, I won't be feeling this way forever. That's unbelievable. It's like I know that intellectually.
But sometimes when we're going through it, it's tough to remember.
Absolutely. I've talked about this on the show a bunch of times, and I'm bringing it
up because you reference King Solomon in one of your substack posts. But there's something
known as Solomon's wisdom. And what it means is that King Solomon was really
wise when it came to everybody else's life,
but apparently his own life not so much.
And so it's called Solomon's paradox.
And it means that idea that I could
be really wise about your life or my friend's life,
but when it's myself, I have a hard time seeing it.
It's just this paradox of being human.
Yeah.
I mean, I think sometimes people, I'm not speaking about my wife here, by the way, but
sometimes I think people in the helping professions often have a genius for seeing other people's
stuff.
I don't know if it's easier, but it's sometimes very difficult to apply your own guidance
to yourself. I mean, I've sometimes
like a friend has reached out for advice and I like that one. I think that's one of the
great things about friendship is you're all kind of trading off being each other's mentor
and cheerleader and confidant. But when a friend comes to me and they'll ask me some
advice and I'll say something to them and then I'll hear it back and I'll go, I should
do that. That's really good, you know? Sometimes we have to displace then I'll hear it back and I'll go, I should do that. That's really
good. You know, sometimes we have to displace the advice to have it come back to us.
Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about the idea of, well, actually you and I did not
bond over something that we should have bonded over first, which is that I live in Columbus,
Ohio. You live there now?
I grew up there. I live there now. I'm in Denver today. Okay. But I now live in Columbus, Ohio. You live there now? I grew up there. I live there now. I'm in Denver today.
Okay.
But I now live in Columbus, Ohio, yes.
Wow, whereabouts?
Where do you live?
I'm near Goodale and 315, sort of Grandview-ish.
Okay, yeah, my sister lived in Grandview for years.
She's back in Bexley, where I lived.
Is that where you grew up?
That's where I grew up, yeah.
Okay, yep.
Oh no, she lived in Granville.
Okay. That's different.
But Grandview, yes, I know Grandview very well. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, how cool. And is that where you grew up?
It is. Yeah, I grew up in Worthington. Oh, in Worthington. Okay, cool. Yeah,
I did theater with a lot of people from Worthington. Yeah. So I just, when I saw that,
I thought that was cool. Oh, nice. Okay, back to what I wanted to talk about next,
which is identity. One of the things that I think you've talked publicly about this, both on the podcast
and on your substack is that you got to be known really well and beloved by a whole lot
of people for a particular character. Right. Talk to me about that experience and how it
has been for you and how it has evolved over time.
God, it's been 20 years of navigating that, right?
So I think it's like, it would take me a long time
to unpack each phase.
I guess no one prepares you, certainly in drama school,
for you're gonna be playing one role for nine years.
Like, that's not something they think you're gonna do a role
for three months or, like, you know,
like do a checkoff play for, you know, four months.
So I had to figure it out on my own and sometimes I did that rather inelegantly
and other times I was able to have some more grace around it.
But I just found it to be an incredibly strange, disorienting thing.
I mean, first of all, your anonymity getting eroded and strangers knowing who you are
when you don't know who they are is a very strange, disorienting experience anyway.
Fame is strange, being visible is strange.
People having ideas about you, projections about you,
they read a quote of yours that was taken out of context
and then, I don't know, they don't like you
or you remind them of someone.
Like, you feel a little bit in your more vulnerable moments
like you got a dart board on your chest,
you're just walking through the world
and you feel like people are kind of sizing you up or having opinions about you and some of them are often
quite lovely but that also feels suspect. Like you feel like these people don't really know me,
they know they have this idea of me. I went through some crisis with it and I used various
forms of kind of healing and I was just on the hunt for something that felt more authentic
in the midst of all that.
And it drove me much deeper on a spiritual path, weirdly.
I mean, maybe not weirdly, but it was understandable.
And then I got off the show and as an actor,
I was only looking for roles that felt very far
from the role that I had played.
Anything that reminded me of the DNA of the part,
I wouldn't do.
But I also became a musician
and I've written and directed films.
So I was really just trying to diversify, but what I realized I was actually doing was
running.
I was running away from it.
You know, I said in that sub stack that you referenced that this character I played, Ted,
was a part of me, like in the IFS sense.
Like he is a part of me in that he was literally a part that I played
But there's also I can feel I revealed something to the world of myself through that character
I got married a little over a year ago and my wife had never seen the show and she said look
I'm curious and that was a good thing for us for our relationship that she had never seen the show
But she said I'm curious about this time in your life that I missed, I wanna see it.
So I decided it was time to rewatch it
and we just decided to formalize it.
Craig and I are doing this rewatch
and we're having a great time talking about it.
But there's been something wonderful
about having much like this show itself,
having this older wiser perspective on it
rather than being the person inside of it,
but actually looking back on it and seeing,
oh, I wasn't half bad on that show,
and the show itself is delightful,
and I'm so much kinder to myself watching it now.
So I'm having like a very meta,
very interesting experience re-engaging with the show.
But in terms of identity issues,
it was both shattering and also opened up
all these avenues of my life
for which I'm incredibly
grateful.
I love how you talk about it in such a nuanced way and you referenced nuance in the beginning,
right?
We're not all bad.
We're not all good.
I think nuance is kind of the secret sauce to wisdom to a certain degree.
But you talk about it in the sense like imagine that you were in high school, we were all
in high school and 20 years later, all anybody ever wants to talk about is who you were in high school, we were all in high school, and 20 years later, all anybody
ever wants to talk about is who you were in high school, not anything you had done since all of
that and how that might get to be tiresome or confusing. And yet at the same time, you're also
recognizing this profound gift that you got, right? I mean, that changed the trajectory of your life
in a positive way. And I like seeing you kind of come back and revisit it from a more holistic
place. And I think the lesson for all of us is around
identity.
And that identity is ideally in my mind,
fluid, meaning I can play this part of me, I can play this part of me,
I can, I can see this, I can
see that.
But we tend to get fixed in this idea of who we are.
We just get locked into, I am this way.
And as somebody who studies change and has written a book that'll come out next year
about change, what I know is that we are all capable of change.
But if we believe we're not, we're really stuck.
Right.
And it kind of goes back to what we were talking about before.
I had an acting teacher at NYU named Ron Van Lew.
And one of the first things he said to us was,
you need to expand your definition of yourself.
You're here to expand your definition of yourself,
that you're not this thing.
You're all these things.
And when you're more things, and when you know yourself to be more things, you can play
more things truthfully.
You can access more of yourself to play a wider array of characters.
In a larger sense, like my brother-in-law, Gideon Jacobs, I saw him in this one-man show
that he created last night.
And it's this blind preacher character.
And it was really fascinating, but he's obsessed with the second commandment in the Torah,
which says thou shalt not make any graven images, right?
And his whole thing, you know,
going back to the Garden of Eden,
again, not speaking literally, but allegorically,
this notion that humanity in its primordial state
was unselfconscious and connected to all that was.
There was no separation.
And then there's this bite of this apple,
this kind of primordial wound,
and suddenly it's, oh my God, I'm naked.
Oh my God, you're separate from me.
Oh my God, God is elsewhere.
It's actually like a horror story,
if you think about it from an existential point of view.
Totally. Right?
And his thing is that the commandment against images is actually quite profound.
That what happened to Adam and Eve allegorically in the garden was that they suddenly got a
self-image, which is grievous to our psyche because we're watching ourselves.
And now image is everything and it's proliferated to the point where I even think about like
the iPhone, you know, I mean, one, he points out the Apple, right?
Like we all have these devices in our, in our pockets that are these apples with a bite
out of them.
And then the iPhone, the iMac, the iPad, the, you know, there's this kind of eye, eye, eye,
and this recursive kind of loop of images, images, self-images,
what does this say about me? What does this say about me? And I am as hooked by this stuff
as anyone. I'm not hovering over this as some sort of like angry prophet. I'm in the midst
of this negotiation and as I think we all are with image and identity. I think that
everyone is dealing with it on some level. It's not just famous people. Everyone has
some persona or maybe a private self,
and then there's like a public self.
I don't like to create that much of a distinction
between the two.
Like, I don't wanna have a persona,
even though I'm gonna be different with my wife
than I am on a post on Instagram or something.
But I also don't wanna feel like I have this
Jekyll and Hyde split in myself.
But I think identity is really tricky,
and when you become famous, and you become famous for a particular role, it just pours fertilizer all
over the many things that can be troubling about it. Yep. What you just shared about your brother
in law is fascinating. I had never heard that take on the second commandment. I'm a long time
Zen practitioner, right? And one of the things that we do in Zen is we're trying to see through this illusion
that we are this separate thing, right?
So I've always seen the Garden of Eden story as,
like I've been able to see the parallel there,
that separateness, but I'd never thought
about the second commandment in images that we create.
Yeah, a friend recommended this book by a Sufi mystic that's all about music.
And in the first paragraph, he says, music is the only form of art that's not idolatry
because there's no form.
It's from a transcendent kind of realm.
You can't draw music, you know, you can't capture it.
Yeah.
You know, I love painting and dance and theater, obviously.
I mean, I'm not an anti-image person.
But I think sometimes when we have an image of ourselves
and we are constantly critiquing it
and looking at it from all different angles,
it takes up a lot of time and energy.
But it's also psychically quite draining.
When someone has a peak experience,
one of the ways that one defines that is a loss of self.
Absolutely.
Right?
That you go away.
Yes.
And Jordana, my wife has pointed out that
often after those peak experiences,
we say, I could die now.
Right?
Like you're resolved enough to the point
where you feel like your life has achieved
some sort of meaning that you wouldn't be haunted by regret,
that you've seen through it in a Zen sense.
Let's change directions a little bit. There was a line that you used. I don't know if
it's a line you've used before or if you just tossed it off and it's during the How I Made
Your Mother podcast. But you referred to how you view that show and your relationship with
that character and you use the phrase the with that character. And you use the phrase
the mercy of time. And I just loved that. Did you just kind of toss that off?
I think maybe I've said that before. I don't know if it's like a catchphrase of mine.
Yeah. Yeah.
But I do think that there is a merciful quality to time. I mean, often we look at time as a bully or a grim reaper kind of,
you know, after us. But at the same time, if you've aged, say, and you have a different
perspective on your life, if you have more forgiveness for your life or people in your
life, if you find yourself less self-conscious, less obsessed with the opinion of other people,
that's all time doing its work.
If you've ever had grief, if you've ever had loss, relationships ending, innumerable kinds
of heartbreaks, to feel not the same way you felt in the aftermath of that and the shrapnel
of that, that is the mercy of time.
That time, it is a healer in some profound way.
So I don't know. I'm glad I was able to say that.
Yes, you can look at this as a goofy sitcom,
but it also had some quite deep existential things
it was chewing on at the same time.
["Sweet Home Alone"]
Hi, I'm Kristin Davis, host of the podcast Are You a Charlotte? What we have all been waiting for.
Sarah Jessica Parker is here and she is sharing stories from the very beginning, like the
time she forgot we filmed the pilot episode.
I remember some things about shooting the pilot.
Right. I have some memories I can fill you in.
And that you're going to fill me in.
Yes.
But then you forgot about it in the very long time
they took to pick us up.
I completely forgot about it.
And she reveals what she thought when she read the script
for Sex and the City the very first time.
He said he wrote this like I was in his head in some way,
which I found really interesting.
And does she think Carrie is too good for Mr. Big?
She had inexplicable feelings.
It is the human being that can't explain to her friends
why somebody that might be beneath her is dictating the hunt.
You can't miss this.
Listen to Are You a Charlotte?
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi, I'm Bob Pipman, Chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia. On this week's episode of Math and Magic,
I'm sitting down with the one and only Bobby Bones. We're exploring the power of audio.
The word on the street then was, he's too country for pop. But then once I got to country it was he's too pop
for country.
So I kind of never really had a place to fit in, but that's exactly how and why I fit.
I just embraced that.
Like yeah, I don't fit into one specific hole.
I think that is what endeared me to listeners.
That's why I'm here now because I talk to people that grew up like me, have sensibilities
like me, and have loyalties like me.
Listen to Math and Magic, stories from the frontiers
of marketing on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts.
I have a question for you,
and I want you to be honest with me.
How are you?
It's a really hard question to ask. It's a harder one to answer, but
taking care of our mental wellbeing has never been more important. All of May is mental
health awareness month and on the psychology of your 20s podcast, we are taking a vulnerable
look at why mental health is so hard to talk about and all the science and psychology behind
some of life's hardest moments and transitions. Prepare for
our conversations to go deep. Everything from grief to heartbreak, career burnout, anxiety,
all of the things that you would only talk about with your closest friends.
I spent the majority of my teenage years and my twenties just feeling absolutely terrified.
I had a panic attack on a conference call.
Knowing that she had six months to live, I was no longer pretending that this was my best friend. So this Mental Health Awareness Month,
take that extra bit of care of yourself and your brain. Listen to the psychology of your 20s on
the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I think time is so interesting. I'm here in Denver this week, spending time with my mother,
who's 80, who I spent the last decade of my life with her in Denver this week spending time with my mother, who's 80,
who I spent the last decade of my life with her in Columbus with me, but we moved her out here about a year ago to be near my sister.
And she's in a senior community. So I have been there a lot this week.
And you can't be around old people that much without starting to think about time and the obvious downsides to it,
the decaying body and the challenges that come with
that. And I do think time is a healer and I also think it's necessary but not sufficient for certain
types of healing, right? Like I do think time will take the sting out of a lot of things,
but I don't think time necessarily gives wisdom. But I often look at myself and I think about,
you know, I was a homeless heroin addict at 25. I've been on a path of recovery since and all this
stuff I've done. And I look at myself and kind of where I'm at. And I sometimes think to myself,
how much of how I feel now is all that work that I put in? And how much of it is just the fact that
I'm, you know, much older now.
And time has sort of done its thing to a certain degree.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's a really interesting question.
I also don't think time confers wisdom.
I mean, I think that you have to accept wisdom.
It's almost like it's on offer.
It's almost like the library is there.
There's free books with all the great wisdom,
all the greatest stories, all the greatest everything.
You can go there.
You can go there, you can get a library card
and you can read it.
And I feel like wisdom is kind of like that.
It's floating out there.
I think you have to volunteer for it.
You have to kind of say, I would like to receive this.
And then it almost like picks your antenna up
in a different way.
So you're more attuned.
We just met, but you strike me as someone like me
who loves a good quote,
who's always on the hunt for some new thing
that you can kind of throw in the wisdom backpack
and kind of carry along with you, right?
That's always been really interesting to me.
I also think when we're younger and you're interested,
or when you get the sense, okay,
I understand that I'm not gonna be young forever.
Like I'm going to age.
And a lot of young people simply don't believe this.
And it's, again, maybe that's the mercy of youth,
is that you don't know that you're going to age.
You think you'll be at the center of culture forever.
And it's like, no, you won't.
There'll be another generation that'll come along,
and your slang's not going to work anymore.
It's going to be like, OK, boomer.
Everyone gets OK boomered, you know?
But I think if you're looking, because I was always
scared of aging, but I always was like, well,
how do you do it well?
Yeah.
Who are the people that I think are doing it well?
I love this Franciscan
priest Richard Rohr very much. Do you know Richard Rohr?
Sure. I've had Richard on several times and visited him.
Yeah, I listened to yours with Richard. I do remember that. Yeah, so I've gotten to
spend some time with Richard and I got to sit with Ram Dass a few times. There are just
these characters that I just say their bodies are betraying them. Ram Dass is no longer
with us, but he had a stroke
that really immobilized him in certain ways,
and Richard's had his health challenges.
So the body stuff feels non-negotiable.
I mean, you can try to keep the wheels on as long as you can,
but there is a kind of sparkle in the eye of someone who knows something.
They've gotten to an age and they know something,
and they're not bitter about
roads not taken and regrets and they just seem to have called a truce with the world. I think
Richard calls it like, you know, I've heard it said like dropping the war with reality, right?
Like I'm no longer at war with reality. And I want to be a person who ages with some grace.
And I don't just mean, you know, looking good,
although that would be terrific.
But I really mean being the kind of person
that a young person would look at and say,
they look like they know something
or they look like they're doing it right.
Or I'd like to get advice from that person.
That person seems like they maybe know something.
When I meet old people and interact with old people,
it's always instructive to me because I see like, okay, that's where I want to go.
And I see like, that's definitely where I don't want to go. Right. Yeah. And so like,
in the way that my partner's mother when she had Alzheimer's, that was a huge wake up call to us,
like, okay, health, like Like we can't prevent it,
but there's a lot of stuff we can do
that's gonna make it less likely
that we get Alzheimer's or other things.
So I think about it in a health sense.
I think about it in a sort of old people
sort of start to fossilize.
So like pushing myself towards new experiences,
which gets harder, I think, as you age.
I just feel it already at 55.
And then also, like you said, I think about it emotionally
or spiritually in that way.
Life is gonna get hard from here in some ways.
Like, I know what's coming.
So I need to be training now to the best of my ability
so that I'm able to be one of those people
that is able to do it with a certain degree of grace,
because I can see how easy it would be
to not do it gracefully.
Yeah, it's also like wisdom is on offer,
but so is cynicism.
Yeah.
You know, that's also like an option.
You know, there's, again, these are wolves, right?
They're all wolves.
But I always thought it would be such a tragedy
to live one of these lives, which I consider a gift.
I mean, I'd rather, as I say in one of my songs,
I'd rather be here than not be here.
I always thought it would be such a tragedy
to get to the end of it and be filled with resentment
and bitterness and grievance.
And, you know, like I want to get to a place
where I am more forgiving, more compassionate, more generous, but you know, like, I want to get to a place where I am more forgiving, more compassionate, more
generous.
But, you know, I also don't want to undersell that life is tough.
You know?
Yeah.
It puts up a real fight.
You can make a very strong and compelling argument that the world is meaningless and
that bad people triumph and good people suffer and you could
compile a lot of data around that. You could make as equally a compelling case about the
opposite, right? Again, these are all wolves. But I always thought it's so much more heartening
and it makes the universe for me so much more inhabitable to choose the latter. To say,
I believe there's meaning, I believe
there's a purpose to this thing, I believe that what undergirds this is something benevolent.
That doesn't mean that death isn't real, it doesn't mean pain isn't real, it doesn't mean
that we're not going to struggle in myriad ways. But I just have to get my mind sharpened.
And it's a daily practice because I have the forgetter. You know, I have that thing that forgets. But you know conversations like this help.
Before we dive back into the conversation, let me ask you something.
What's one thing that has been holding you back lately? You know that it's there.
You've tried to push past it but somehow it keeps getting in the way. You're not
alone in this and I've identified six major saboteurs of self-control
things like autopilot behavior, self-doubt, emotional escapism that quietly derail our best
intentions. But here's the good news you can outsmart them and I've put together a free guide to
help you spot these hidden obstacles and give you simple, actionable strategies that you can use to regain control.
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getting back on track.
I'm a little bit more existentially turned in that I'm not a believer in any sort of
ultimate meaning.
But I don't think that makes life meaningless. I just think it means we need to discover our own meaning and imbue it into
our life. But I agree with you 100% about there are different ways to view the world. I mean,
you know, the old way of calling it was optimism and pessimism, and that's oversimplification.
Those are binaries. But there is a view that
orients towards the goodness that is in the world, the kindness that is in the world,
the beauty that is in the world, the connectivity that is in the world. And if both are true,
which I think they are, and we're making it up, we're making up the meaning we want to
give it because that is what I think we are largely doing, then a really good question
is like, which is the most useful view? Right? Which view is going to be better for me and
the people around me in this world? And for me, it's the view that is not cynical. It's
not Pollyanna ish either. And that's where I'd kind of like to take the conversation
because you have a great article on Substack that I really loved because you got into perhaps my
most pressing question that I think about these days. And it's this idea that, as you said earlier,
dropping the war with reality makes a lot of sense, right? Because reality wins.
And we also have a view of ourselves and the world that could be better. Mm-hmm. And those things sometimes are at odds with each other.
And I think a lot about how do you know
which of those levers to pull?
The, I should change this lever, I should accept this lever,
and I'd just love to hear you think through that question.
Okay, so I have written quite a bit about this
in terms of we want to accept,
there's a negotiation that has to take place
between acceptance and action.
Yes, that's exactly what I'm talking about.
Okay, okay, yeah.
So yeah, I mean, the way I think through this is
if I throw a temper tantrum about something in my life
or something happening in politics or the world,
do you know Anne Lamott?
Yeah, I think she has some great salty kind of wisdom
and I just, I really like her quite a bit.
But she says there's three types of problems in the world.
There's me problems, you problems and God problems.
She calls God problems, wars, hurricanes, you know, natural disasters,
things that are so outside of her ability to actually control and influence. And then
you problems are obviously you problems and me problems are me problems. And she says
she gets into suffering when she tries to fix God problems and you problems, right?
So that makes a lot of sense to me. That just clarifies things for me.
It's a bit of a serenity prayer kind of breakdown.
What can I control?
What can I not control?
I try to avoid having temper tantrums around things
as they are, because like you said, reality wins.
But I think we have a much better chance of at least
getting called on to participate
if we start with acceptance.
Like just a blanket acceptance like this is how it is right now.
And then we look at what we might be able to change in effect and what we can't.
And sometimes you're going to try to twist some knobs and it's not going to work and
other times something will move the needle. But I think starting with like a kind of radical acceptance, it takes me out of some pain,
right? Because the pain is in the resistance. It shouldn't be this way. And then you're
really at war with reality and you're really in a losing position. You're just this speck
shouting in the Grand Canyon or something for something to be different.
I love what you said there, the negotiation between acceptance and action.
That's really good because that's what I think it is.
I think often about one of the first guests on the show is a gentleman named Andrew Solomon
and he wrote a book called The Noonday Demon about depression.
Oh, I read The Noonday Demon.
He's very brilliant, Andrew Solomon.
Yeah.
He's brilliant. He wrote another book called Far From the Tree.
I read that too.
Yeah, an amazing book.
But what stuck with me through all the years,
and this is a decade ago that we first talked about this,
was he was talking about parents whose children are autistic.
And he talked about how hard it is for them
because there are some group of people saying,
you can change this, you can fix this. Some of that might be snake oil, some of it might be real,
some of it, but you can do something. And then there's the, you can't do anything about this,
right? And you accept it. And if you accept your child for the way they are, maybe that's just an
all around easier case. And what I love that he said is if you know you can't change something, it's easy to
go about the business of accepting it.
If you know you can change something, it's easy to go about the business of changing
it.
And most of us live in this very difficult middle part.
But I think the way you just said it is a really elegant, almost poetic way of saying it's the negotiation
between acceptance and action and that that negotiation in certain situations never gets
settled.
It's not like you all reach an agreement and it's done.
You live in the negotiation.
I think so and live in the question, but also I think nature is useful to kind of pay attention
to. I mean,
I lived in California where it was less visible, but I'm back on the East Coast and just watching
the seasons happen and watching, you know, the flowers bloom and then fade away in the
fall and the leaves fall off the trees and then the barren and then snow and the, and
you know, a farmer knows that there's a time to sow and a time to reap.
I think in America especially or in the West we have this idea that we should always be
growing growing growing doing doing doing.
It's almost like disobeying the laws of nature in some fundamental way because there is a
time for rest.
I mean true rest you know really gathering another round of information, not more energy.
And I try to remember that this might not be a season of change.
This might be a season of acceptance.
You know, this, I didn't grow up Christian, but a lot of my friends who grew up like in
more evangelical circles, they always say, you know, I'm in a real season of doubt, or
this is a real season of abundance, you know, I'm in a real season of doubt or this is a real season
of abundance, you know, and I always like that language.
I always thought it was like useful language because it implies that it's not forever.
And again, that You a Charlotte?
What we have all been waiting for.
Sarah Jessica Parker is here and she is sharing stories from the very beginning, like the
time she forgot we filmed the pilot episode.
I remember some things about shooting the pilot.
Right.
I have some memories I can fill you in.
And that you're going to fill me in.
Yes.
But then you forgot about it in the very long time
they took to pick us up.
I completely forgot about it.
And she reveals what she thought when she read the script
for Sex and the City the very first time.
He said he wrote this like I was in his head in some way, which I found really interesting.
And does she think Carrie is too good for Mr. Big?
She had inexplicable feelings.
Got it.
It is the human being that can't explain to her friends why somebody that might be
beneath her is dictating the hunt.
You can't miss this.
Listen to Are You a Charlotte? on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your
podcasts.
Hi, I'm Bob Pippman, Chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia.
On this week's episode of Math and Magic, I'm sitting down with the one and only Bobby
Bones.
We're exploring the power of audio.
The word on the street then was he's to country for pop
But then once I got to country it was he's to pop for country
So I kind of never really had a place to fit in but that's exactly how and why fit
I just embraced that like yeah, I don't fit into one specific hole
I think that is what endeared me to listeners
That's why I'm here now because I talk to people that grew up like me,
have sensibilities like me, and have loyalties like me.
Listen to Math and Magic, stories from the frontiers of marketing
on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
I have a question for you, and I want you to be honest with me.
How are you?
It's a really hard question to ask, it's a harder one to answer, but taking care of
our mental wellbeing has never been more important.
All of May is Mental Health Awareness Month and on the Psychology of Your 20s podcast
we are taking a vulnerable look at why mental health is so hard to talk about and all the
science and psychology behind some of life's
hardest moments and transitions. Prepare for our conversations to go deep. Everything from grief
to heartbreak, career burnout, anxiety, all of the things that you would only talk about with your
closest friends. I spent the majority of my teenage years and my twenties just feeling
absolutely terrified. I had a panic attack on a conference call.
Knowing that she had six months to live,
I was no longer pretending that this was my best friend.
So this Mental Health Awareness Month,
take that extra bit of care of yourself and your brain.
Listen to the psychology of your 20s
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts.
We've referenced suffering a little bit and you talk about
discomfort is the doorway is the name of one of your sub stack posts and in it you did something
where you put a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon and I was struck by that because I've taught this
program for years called wise habits and I use a lot of Calvin and Hop strips to teach because I just think there's so much
wisdom in them.
Are you also a fan?
A casual fan.
I had stumbled across that happiness isn't enough for me.
I demand euphoria.
I think that was the one.
I stumbled across it and I just pulled it and I had it in a file of things that kind
of delighted me.
It's also something, you know, my friend Hal says about addicts.
He says the only emotional acceptable to an addict is euphoria.
He says, you know, it's 2 p.m. on a Tuesday.
Where's my euphoria?
Yes, I'm a lot of years sober and I still laugh because I relate with that.
And I love that Calvin cartoon because where it starts is him enjoying a nice day.
He's like, here I am enjoying this nice day, you know?
And then he thinks, but I'm not euphoric.
And then the last frame says, I can't remember
whether he said, I need to stop my mind
while I'm still ahead or my mind's out to get me
or something along those lines of like, he's able to see.
Knowing what I know about you and your taste
from reading your substack
and looking at a lot of the things you reference. Calvin and Hobbes, I think, is a deeply, deeply
wise strip across the board. And I think it's one of the more brilliant works of our inhumanity.
Is that Bill Watterson?
Watterson.
Yeah. I think he's a Kenyan grad. I think he went to my college where I went.
Okay. I think he's a Kenyan grad. I think he went to my college where I went. There was a lore,
kind of Kenyan lore that his senior year, he drew cartoons all over the wall. He kind of did like
his own Sistine Chapel of cartoons on the wall and they painted over it. And it's this kind of like
lost masterpiece, like somewhere in a dorm at Kenyan are all these early cartoons.
That's amazing. But I think he was a philosophy major and that's why he
called it Calvin and Hobson. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know it just really it really
struck me. I just thought it was a funny thing you know that human thing you know
if a little is good more is better. Yep. Can I ask when did you get sober? Well I
got sober from heroin in 1994. Okay. I stayed sober about eight years.
Then I started to drink again, and I
drank for about three years.
And then I've been sober from that for like 17 years.
So the vast majority of my adult life has been in sobriety,
which I'm very grateful for.
In many ways, I'm grateful that when I start,
I just kind of burn the house down pretty quick.
It's pretty clear, like, okay, something needs to happen.
Right.
Versus like the long goodbye kind of thing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely.
Speaking of Ohio and Bill Watterson, there's a big cartoon library at OSU and they have
one of the biggest collections of Bill Watterson cartoons in the world. And so you can go visit.
A little bit of a shrine for me.
We talked a little bit about this idea of negotiating acceptance and action.
And I think that some of the things I pulled for that came from a post of yours about not
minding what happens, which is a Krishnamurti quote.
And I wanted to talk about something in particular that you talk about in there,
which is you on of a Pasana retreat. Was that just this last December or was it December
before that? No, no, it was last December, like six months ago. Okay. Yeah. You open
to sort of sharing your experience. Sure. Yeah. I mean, it was a real challenge for
me. Like it was, it was much more challenging.
Have you ever done a Vipassana?
I have done long silent retreats,
not a specific Vipassana,
unless you consider Insight Meditation Society
like Jack Kornfield, Tara Brock.
How long are those, like eight days or nine days?
Yeah, seven to eight.
There's some weekend ones.
I've mostly done Zen Shashines, which are eight days.
Okay, yeah.
And that's total silence.
Total silence.
And like you said, no books.
I'm like two days into it and I'm like,
I'll give you $100 for a cereal box to read.
I know.
Like give me a cereal box to read.
I know.
They had these instructions in the room
about how you were supposed to clean your room
when you left.
And I read those like it was the Talmud or something.
Like I was, I went so deep on this thing.
In a fascinating way, it shows you what you're addicted to
in a broader sense, not just about chemicals or anything,
but really about, like I'm addicted to words.
I'm addicted to information.
I'm addicted to the news.
I'm addicted to, you know, and
I'm also addicted to talking, like truly just talking. It was a very fascinating experience
and an experiment, it was what it felt like on my psyche. And largely I was in an enormous
amount of discomfort for the majority of the time, I would say. But I felt incredibly unmoored and kind of confused about even not being
able to say certain like pleasantries like in the line at the dining hall. Like if you
felt like you cut someone off, you just want to say, Oh, sorry, were you here? Do you want
to go like you couldn't do any of the like little signifiers of we're in a society and we're sharing space. I just
found it really challenging. I ended up having to talk to the teacher a few times because
I was one night I was borderline almost having a panic attack and then I found I enjoyed
these talks and they were only about four or five minutes long. But I enjoyed being witnessed.
The basics of like relational communication are very
important to me. And when I was supposed to exist in silence without them, I felt deep
grief. I can't, I don't know. It was so much harder than I thought it would be. And my
meditation practice has been really wonky since I got back.
My wife and I were at the Botanic Gardens this morning
and we meditated and it was so nice
and I was like, I really wanna get back into a practice.
But I think I had like a, it wasn't quite trauma
but it was definitely like something got provoked.
I had moments of fear, I had moments of grief.
I know they say, you know, lots of stuff's gonna come up
but something about it I found very challenging.
That said, by the end of it, once you're
allowed to talk for the last day,
I felt like I had been paroled.
I was so excited.
I went on these long walks up and down this road
every single day, like three times a day.
I just didn't know what to do with myself.
And I saw my monkey mind really, really in action.
And I saw how I'm in a society,
there's another Krishnamurti quote,
it's no measure of health to be well adapted
to a profoundly sick society.
I don't know if you've come across that one.
Yeah.
And I am somewhat adapted to this society.
I mean, it's the one I grew up in.
It's like, I do fairly well navigating it.
And then you take me out of that society and I don't have my whatever
op-eds to read or my books to read or my music to listen to. And I realized, oh, I'm a little
bit insane actually. Like my mind is so far from being quiet. Although I will say I had
a couple of meditations where I had no body, no time, you know,
that I did taste that timeless realm,
but the getting there, whew, it was rough.
Yeah, they can be rough.
I actually do okay with the silence.
In groups of people, I'm a little shy,
so I actually find it sort of enjoyable
to be in companionship and not
have to figure out what to say.
Yeah, my wife is the same way.
She's done two or three vipassanas and she always appreciates not having to talk.
Yeah, I like that part.
And even when I've what I've learned is when the silence ends, I've learned to take myself
away because it just is it's overwhelming to me all of a sudden.
But I do like being with the
people. Like that. I mean, it's not that I want to be alone. I enjoy the community aspect. I think
for me, and you said in this post, I think you said that boredom and discomfort are the two emotions
you most can't tolerate. And I think that's very much me too. And it's the no reading that just
kills me. That's probably the hardest for me,
because I can entertain myself pretty well with a book.
I've gone on a couple with a spiritual teacher,
Adyashanti, I don't know if you're familiar with him.
Oh yeah, I know Adyashanti, yeah.
They do something interesting,
which is they give you,
it might be two or three paragraphs of his,
and that's all you're allowed to read.
So you do what you did with the cleaning instructions on the wall
Right, you're like I'm reading it
But for me I descend deep into it like it since it's so little to read and I want to read so often
Yeah, it becomes ultimately certainly a contemplative act if not a meditative act. Yeah, I also
Hilariously like I would make my bed
as if it was gonna be inspected by the military.
Like, I would just.
Anything to do.
You're trying to give yourself any activity.
There were certain days where I just unfolded
and refolded all my clothes.
I didn't even have that many clothes there,
but I just was looking.
And it also showed me how addicted I am to action
and doing this, you know?
I really, I was constantly looking for something to actually do.
That's why these walks outside just became like my lifeline.
That's interesting.
I was just thinking how funny it would be if we segue into a commercial for Vipassana
retreats, how mad they would be about like, Josh Radner says that.
Well, also, I mean, they're free,
and I loved the Gwanka talks at night.
You know, they have these pre-recorded talks from Gwanka,
who I think they were in the earlier mid-'90s, these talks,
and they're fantastic, and they're really inspiring.
And one of the things he says is,
we give you a taste of what it's like to be a monk for 10 days.
We take away the world from you.
We give you all your meals.
All you're here to do is be contemplative and sink into this place.
My wife tries to remind me, she says, when you came home from that, you were euphoric.
But like two days later, I went into this like weird kind of down depressive state that that didn't lift for a while
So I've been struggling in some ways
I wrote that
Substack piece to try to work through what that experience was for me what it meant
And maybe I'm still working through it as I talk even I'm kind of like oh, yeah
I need to do some more processing of that, you know
It was incredibly rewarding but it was also very hard.
And when people say, would you go back?
My answer right now is no.
You know, I hear wonderful things about like insight
and all that, but.
Before we wrap up, I want you to think about this.
Have you ever ended the day feeling like your choices
didn't quite match the person you wanted to be?
Maybe it was autopilot mode or self doubt
that made it harder to stick
to your goals. And that's exactly why I created the six saboteurs of self-control.
It's a free guide to help you recognize the hidden patterns that hold you back
and give you simple effective strategies to break through them. If you're ready
to take back control and start making lasting changes, download your copy now at oneufeed.net slash ebook.
Let's make those shifts happen starting today.
Oneufeed.net slash ebook.
I don't know if Adi Ashanti is still doing retreats.
It turns out that those have been my favorite because they don't feel like an endurance
contest. Right. You do have to be quiet, you can only read this
thing. But it doesn't feel like meditation battle in like you're
meditating for like 10 hours a day. You know, he gives a couple
talks, he actually does a guided meditation, there's just a
little bit more happening, you still meditate a lot, don't get
me wrong. But it just felt less arduous in the bad way. Yeah,
not that some difficulty isn't good. But too much difficulty,
as you're reflecting can be too much. Well, we are at the end of
our time for this, you and I are going to continue in a post show
conversation. And we're going to talk about a sub stack post that
you wrote called locked doors. But I'm going to put a slightly different point on it.
This conversation is for any of you who wrestle with wanting what you can't have,
which feels like a story of my life up to a certain point. Listeners,
if you'd like access to that post show conversation, add free episodes,
a special episode I do. And to be a supporter of the show,
you can go to when youeed.net slash join.
And last thing I'll say Josh,
if you want a way back into meditation that feels nice,
a friend of mine and one of the best meditation teachers
I know, Henry Shookman has an app called The Way
and it's really good.
It's just very nice.
He's got a great English accent.
It's just very soothing and wonderful.
So anyway, thank you, Josh, for joining us.
I really appreciate it.
Absolutely.
It was such a pleasure to talk to you.
Thank you so much for listening to the show.
If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I'd love for you to
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Hi, I'm Kristin Davis, host of the podcast,
Are You a Charlotte?
Sarah Jessica Parker is here,
and she is sharing stories from the very beginning,
like the time she forgot we filmed the pilot episode.
I remember some things about shooting the pilot.
Right. I have some memories I can fill you in.
And that you're going to fill me in.
Yes, but then you forgot about it in the And that you're going to fill me in.
Yes. But then you forgot about it.
I completely forgot about it.
Listen to Are You a Charlotte? on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On this week's episode of Math and Magic, I'm sitting down with the one and only Bobby Bones.
We're exploring the power of audio.
Yeah, I don't fit into one specific hole.
I think that is what endeared me to listeners.
That's why I'm here now, because I talk to people
that grew up like me, have sensibilities like me,
and have loyalties like me.
Listen to Math and Magic, stories from the frontiers
of marketing on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I want you to ask yourself right now, how am I actually doing?
Because it's a question that we rarely ask ourselves.
All of May is actually Mental Health Awareness Month, and on the psychology of your 20s,
we are taking a vulnerable look at why mental health is so hard to talk about.
Prepare for our conversations to go deep. I spent the majority of my teenagers and my 20s
just feeling absolutely terrified. I had a panic attack on a conference call. Knowing that she had
six months to live, I was no longer pretending that this was my best friend. So this Mental Health
Awareness Month, take that extra bit of care of your wellbeing. Listen to The Psychology of Your
20s on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You're listening to an iHeart Podcast.