The One You Feed - Why Friendship Matters in the Face of Suffering | John Kaag & Clancy Martin

Episode Date: May 19, 2026

In this episode, John Kaag and Clancy Martin discuss why friendship matters in the face of suffering and what helps us through the hardest parts of being human. They explore questions of selfishness, human nature, and our capacity for love and connection. Clancy speaks candidly about suicidal ideation and why isolation can be so dangerous, while emphasizing that even small moments of human contact can help keep us alive. The conversation also explores how philosophy, spirituality, and wisdom traditions can offer companionship in difficult times, along with their work at Rebind, where they’re helping bring classic texts into conversation with modern readers through AI-guided commentary and dialogue. Feeling overwhelmed in your life?Check out Overwhelm is Optional — a 4-week email course that helps you feel calmer and more grounded without needing to do less. In under 10 minutes a day, you’ll learn simple mindset shifts (called “Still Points”) you can use right inside the life you already have. Sign up here for only $29! Exciting News!!! ⁠⁠How a Little Becomes a Lot: The Art of Small Changes for a More Meaningful Life is out NOW! Order today!⁠⁠ Key Takeaways: Philosophy as a means of navigating life’s difficulties and suffering. The nature of relationships and their role in shaping identity and meaning. The “good wolf” and “bad wolf” parable and its implications for human behavior. The default human tendencies towards selfishness and goodness. The impact of isolation on mental health and suicidal ideation. The exploration of whether life is worth living and the factors influencing this perspective. The influence of classic philosophical texts and their relevance in contemporary life. The integration of AI in enhancing the understanding of philosophical and spiritual texts. The importance of companionship and shared suffering in the human experience. The role of hope and possibility in overcoming life’s challenges. For full show notes:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠click here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ f you enjoyed this episode with John Kaag and Clancy Martin, check out these other episodes: How to Simplify Your Life and Find More Fulfillment in Your Work with John Kaag How to Find Zest in Life with John KaagThe Greatest Lessons in Philosophy, Parenting, and Kindness with Scott Hershovitz By purchasing products and/or services from our sponsors, you are helping to support The One You Feed, and we greatly appreciate it. Thank you! This episode is sponsored by: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Aura Frames⁠⁠⁠⁠: Named #1 by Wirecutter, you can save on the gifts moms love by visiting AuraFrames.com. For a limited time, listeners can get 25 dollars off their best-selling Carver Mat frame with code FEED. Support the show by mentioning us at checkout! ⁠⁠⁠⁠Rocket Money⁠⁠⁠⁠ Let Rocket Money help you reach your financial goals faster. Join at ⁠⁠⁠⁠rocketmoney.com/feed⁠⁠⁠⁠. ⁠⁠⁠⁠Taskrabbit:⁠⁠⁠⁠ When life happens, your to-do list grows. Get ahead of it now and get fifteen dollars off your first task at ⁠⁠⁠⁠Taskrabbit.com⁠⁠⁠⁠ or on the Taskrabbit app using promo code FEED. Taskers book up fast, especially for same-day tasks, so book trusted home help today. ⁠⁠⁠⁠Hello Fresh⁠⁠⁠⁠ – Get 10 free meals + a FREE Zwilling Knife (a $144.99 value) on your third box. Offer valid while supplies last. ⁠⁠⁠⁠Alma⁠⁠⁠⁠ has a directory of 20,000 therapists with different specialities, life experiences, and identities, and 99% of them take insurance. Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠helloalma.com⁠⁠⁠⁠ to learn more! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Living life actually is the network of relationships that we have. So, for example, I don't really think that the concept of dying as we normally talk about it makes too, too much sense because I think that who I am as being at all is constituted by this network of relationships that I have. Like, I don't think there really is a Clancy, independent of all these Clancy's exchanged with all these other people. 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. There's a line from the philosopher Schopenhauer that came up in this conversation.

He says, we're companions in misery. And at first, that sounds kind of bleak. But the more I've thought about it, I think it's really comforting. And maybe none of us fully understand each other's suffering, but we all know what it's like to suffer. In this conversation, John Kag and Clancy Martin and I talk about philosophy not as a set of answers, but as a way of being with each other in the hard parts of life, through friendship, through conversation, through the simple act of not being alone in it. I'm Eric Zimmer, and this is the one you feed. The world feels pretty chaotic these days, and there's only so much we can do. do about that. But what we can focus on is our own little world. Our marriages, our kids, and the people

we love most. This is where the Dr. Laura podcast comes in, where every day you can listen to my morning monologue, plus a powerful call of the day offering practical advice and real life lessons. Listen free at Dr.lora.com, the SiriusXM app, or wherever you get your podcasts. And remember to subscribe so you never miss an episode. This episode is brought to you by FedEx. These days, the Power Move isn't having a big metallic credit card to drop on the check at a corporate lunch. The real Power Move is leveling up your business with FedEx intelligence and accessing one of the biggest data networks powered by one of the biggest delivery networks. Level up your business with FedEx, the new Power Move.

John Clancy, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having us. Thanks for having us. John, you've been on twice before, so this is number three. You're entering into rare company of three-time guests. Clancy, this is your first time, and I'm really happy to have you here. We're going to be discussing all sorts of things. We've all worked together on a project at a company called Rebind,

where I created an AI-enhanced version of the Dow-Dai Ching, and you've helped create AI versions of the Bible, the Baga-Davita, selections from Buddhism, all sorts of classic works. And so we'll talk about all that. And I think we're just going to talk about philosophy too, because that's two key areas. You guys are both philosophers, and we'll just kind of wander around and see where things take us. But we start like we always do with the parable. 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. 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 guys each how that parable applies to you in your life and in the work that you do. It's a great question. I've thought a lot about this, not just on this show, but just generally. Lately, I've come to think that, let's call it the bad wolf, the wolf that is associated with greed, hatred. I think that this wolf gets fed whether we like it or not.

And I think actually we have to actively and consciously starve that wolf and feed the other one. because I think that our natural default setting is to be afraid and to be a little bit self-centered and to be a little bit greedy. And I think it takes a lot of conscious attention to cut the appetite down or cut the, you know, the food train off for that wolf and concentrate on feeding the other. That struck me. Clancy, what do you think? Well, I agree with most of what John said, and I want to elaborate on it a little. I disagree with one thing. I don't think the default setting is the feeding of the bad wolf. I think that the sort of the default setting, actually, I'm with Menchus on this one.

I think the default setting is the feeding of the good wolf. But I think that these wolves, you know, they're going to fight. And you can feed them a lot or you can feed them a little. You might decide you don't want to feed them at all. and they try to eat each other up. But I actually have come around to the view. I sort of disagree with the grandfather. I don't know if I'm really in charge of feeding those wolves.

Who dislikes grandparents, Clancy? This is a profoundly shocking statement. Yeah. I know, particularly an indigenous American grandfather who is always who I picture when I hear that parable. But, yeah, I think I disagree with him. I'm not sure I'm in charge of feeding those wolves. I have six feral cats living in my backyard right now.

We had a cat who was coming around, and my wife's writer, Amy Barredale, she said, that cat looks hungry, we need to feed her. So we started feeding her. And then one day she said, I think her name, my seven-year-old son named her Dorymon. And my wife said, I think Dorymon is pregnant. And I said, no, no, no, you've just been feeding her too much. Well, lo and behold, a few weeks went by. suddenly we have five little kittens peeking out from underneath our deck.

So we're feeding all of them, and then you can imagine what happens next. There's this white cat is hanging around, and we're both, my wife and I are both like, oh, he's coming to check on his children. No. Much more time comes by, and Dorymont is pregnant again. She's since out her second litter. Now we've got to get all these cats vaccinated and other things so that we don't wind up with a thousand cats back there.

But as I've been feeding these cats and I was thinking, knowing that you were going to pose this question to us, I was thinking, you know, I think those wolves, those wolves just roam around inside me and they eat what they please. And they're probably going to keep on fighting, you know, until I die and still eating. I don't think, I don't know if I'm in charge of feeding them

and I don't know if I'm in charge of starving them either. So we have a new sponsor on this show, Smalls cat food. Perhaps I need to ask them to put together a sampler pack Clancy to send your way because if you do have that sponsor and you're not kidding with me, Eric, by God, please, please. I'm not kidding. It's good stuff. My sister, I sent her the first sampler pack. I'll see if we can get more. Yeah, please send me a sampler pack. So I'm going to go back to this idea of our default setting because John, you've worked recently, Rebind's latest really big project is a rebind version of the Bible that you can have a conversation.

with. And so I know that part of your role is in the content of those things, like really getting into the content. And the Bible certainly comes from a, at least certain interpretations of the Bible certainly come from a, we are flawed place, right? That's the default setting. Your default flawed, right? Clancy, you practice Buddhism pretty heavily. And in general, Buddhism takes a slightly different take. They tend to say, what's actually underneath it is all good. It's like a diamond, but it's clouded over for all of us. And, I mean, I don't know which one is right. What I do think is both of those things are speaking towards some degree of cultivation, right? Some degree of cultivation, and the parable speaks to it, some degree of cultivating the good sides of us,

some degree of cultivating or working skillfully with, you know, those darker voices. I'd be curious, John, has anything changed in your spiritual life or the way you view the world? doing this work on the Bible, because that's a big undertaking and a really beautiful book, and I don't think it's your default orientation either. Yeah, that's very interesting, and I hadn't really thought about that. When I say the default setting of human beings is to be greedy and fearful and hateful, I think I perhaps am misspeaking a little bit. What I mean by that is more akin to what David Foster Wallace says, and this is water,

which is that our natural default setting is a sort of innate self-centeredness, to think that we are the center of the universe or, you know, kings of our own skull-sized kingdoms, I think. And that leads, I think, for us to feel insecure, it leads us to feel anxious, It leads us to feel greedy at certain times. It leads us to be fearful, which I think is the sister to hateful. And I think that that's the default setting that I think we have to consciously be aware of that we can fall back into and break out of. When I think about what DFW is, I think, trying to say in that,

he says we all worship something. It's just natural to worship something. as human beings, it's really up to us to choose what to worship and how to worship on our own time with the lives that we have. And I think that he observes that if we worship fame and wealth, and I take that to be sort of greed or fear, if we worship those totems or those icons, we tend to be unhappy a lot of the time. And we also tend not to notice that there are other possibilities that we can attend to, namely the concerns of others, the artistic possibilities out in the world. And those possibilities are also things that we can worship. But it takes attention because we get continually

sucked back into this sort of innate self-centeredness, which I take to be like the sort of root of this default setting. And I'm happy to talk about the Bible, too, but I'm going to throw it to Clancy and see what he thinks. Yeah, I have been spending so much time with the Bible in the past year because of the Rebine Study Bible. So I had been thinking about it in ways that I hadn't thought about it since I was an undergraduate at Baylor University. One of the best classes I took as an undergraduate. Maybe the single best class was a year-long class that we had at that time at the university on the letters at Paul. It was an incredibly popular class.

There was a wait list for it. It was one of these classes where you had to submit a little writing sample to get into it. And it was, yeah, I think it's the best class I ever took in my life. And I hadn't thought about, and we read all kinds.

It would have learned all about Martin Luther and Erickson. You know, he took Paul everywhere. And that's definitely what we've been trying to do with Rebind generally and especially with the Rebine Bible, was to show like the vast network of connections in the world's greatest wisdom literature.

Anyway, so I've been immersed in the Bible, and I've been thinking about it a lot, and John's co-founder in the company, a guy named John Dubuque, who you know, sent me an interview in the New York Times recently with Marilynne Robinson, someone who we'd love to have commenting on the Book of Genesis for us.

And in that interview, she's talking about what John Keg was just talking about, which is, and you were talking about with the diamond and kind of getting rid of the clouds, you know, the sun and the moon are always there, but the clouds sometimes obscure them. And that way of thinking about devotion and religious experience and that way of thinking about Genesis,

that, like, look, when we're talking about, estrangement from paradise, getting kicked out of the Garden of Eden. We're not talking about original sin in the way, say, that maybe Augustine thought of it, where, you know, we all were boys and we're visiting an orchard and one of us steals an apple and he doesn't even eat the apple. He just throws it away and you think, oh, there's proof of original sin because he didn't even want the apple. He was just stealing it for the fun of it. No, that's not what we're talking about. What we're talking about is a kind of possible purity of experience, like actually seeing reality the way that it is,

and then losing that purity of experience, that's what we're talking about in Genesis. And that's what, according to Marilynne Robinson in this interview, we can start to appreciate through devotion, through kind of a religious attitude towards life. Like we have a bad habit right now of thinking that, you know, a religious attitude towards life is equivalent with a dogmatic attitude toward life in a certain way of understanding social relationships, political relationships, all those things. But if you actually go back to the Bible, that's not at all the way that it reads, you know. And the more time I've spent on this project, the more I've realized from my reading that actually the Bible, The Tao, my very, very limited understanding of Buddhist texts is an awful lot of similarity in the ways that they're approaching this question of just trying to get to what John Keg was

talking about, which is like somewhat less selfish way of experiencing things. That's it. Nothing more complicated than that. It's just a somewhat less selfish way of experiencing being a human being among other human beings. Yeah, I think that that selfishness is a, is a theme. I mean, I got sober in a 12-step program and the AA big book, I mean, basically says pretty clearly that selfishness, self-centeredness is the root of the alcoholic problem, right? And I would say it's the root of all kinds of problems. If we want to think of a diamond or a sun shining, the clouds or the dirt are almost always,

in my experience some form of this selfishness that we're talking about. Now, it's natural and normal. You can't get away from it. I don't think you can be a self and not have some of it. But this idea of, you know, I think it also talks about the bondage of self. And that's how I feel it. The stronger I feel it, the more imprisoned I actually feel in experience. And the smaller my experience gets. Well, well, that's exactly right. I mean, I actually want to disagree with you a little bit there, Eric, because I'm not sure, like, I'm a little bit with Rousseau on this one. I'm not sure it's as natural as we like to kind of conveniently say. I actually find, like, my friendship with you, say, or my friendship with John Keg to be much more natural to me

than having a kind of exaggerated focus on my own concerns. Now, I have a habit that has been reinforced by all kinds of, who knows what, probably social things. And like I say, Rousseau, I think kind of got this right. The way, the habits we have of living might have a tendency to narrow my concerns. But naturally, actually, I just want to sort of, you know, if I'm speaking totally candidly, I actually just kind of want to hug the people around me. If I'm being totally natural, I don't because I've learned not to. But it's much more natural for me to love John than it is not to. It's much more natural for me to love you than to not to. I mean, friendship just occurs to me naturally. Well, I want to let John talk here. I just want to say one thing. When we talk about Rousseau and his view of that we're natural, the society is sort of what tends to corrupt us. I'm oversimplifying. But the work we did together on the Dow, that is the Dow to a large degree too, right? The Tao is really pointing to this. If you get, if you get society and all its constrictions and all its things out of the way, we naturally revert to a state of ease and goodness. To go back to the Bible work that we've done recently, I came into philosophy through Frederick Nietzsche and his very, very strident criticism of Christianity and slave morality and the idea that selflessness led to a type of self-abnegation

and, you know, a type of forgetfulness and a tendency toward mediocrity that we see in the modern era. This is Nietzsche's sort of like snapshot of Nietzsche's criticism of slave morality. And as I've worked through this Bible project has 41 different scholars that you get to interact with as you work your way through the Bible. Through each of the chapters of the Bible, you get to sort of interact with their commentary on the chapters.

And what I'm struck by is all 41 of them are trying to explain why this selflessness is actually a very healthy way to carry oneself through life and to approach questions of suffering and anxiety. And they routinely point out from the Old Testament, from the prophets or even Abraham, straight through to Jesus in the New Testament, is that this selflessness is also a willingness to separate oneself off from the social constraints

and the social expectations and the social expectations. of a culture that is almost obsessed with the self in its sort of material trappings or fame and fortune. And so, like, what is divine is the ability to put our own social conventions in a particular type of context to step away from them and have the courage to step away from them and understand oneself in the face of something so much greater, which is, nature for the transcendentalists or the romantics or God, God, if you're Christian. And you only get that ability if you're willing to get a little critical distance on those beliefs and fundamental rules that you've taken to be sort of necessary for conventional moral life.

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Go to helloalma.com slash feed. That's hello-al-ma.com slash feed and find a therapist who fits you. That's awesome. I think we're all sort of narrowing in on a pretty clear idea here. I want to change directions a little bit for a second because John, you talked about William James. You wrote a whole book kind of about William James. And in that book, there's a lot of times where the question he raised was maybe life is worth living. And Clancy, certainly your latest book is all about suicide and your repeated suicidal ideation for much of your life, for the fact that you tried many different times.

And so you both have talked a fair amount about this sort of question of, is life worth living? you know, maybe. And I would love to hear both of you from where you are today. I know where you were in your books, but I'd love to hear from where you are today how you relate to that question. And whether it occurred to you guys that you both have been asking that same question so clearly, maybe that's part of the basis of the friendship. I'm not sure. But it was very evident to me as I started looking at both of your work. Clancy, you want to go first? Sure. Yeah, well, I mean, it's certainly part of the friendship. I mean, to continue. on the theme that we were talking about.

The intimacy of, I mean, I have had conversations with John Kegg about things that I would, I don't know if I would speak with anyone else about, anyone else may be on the planet. And that intimacy comes from a comfort with shared experiences that I know both from having been friends for many years now, but also from having read his work. And, you know, just having had a lot of really, important times together. This relates to this question directly to this question of whether or not life is worth living. I mean, and to the question we were talking about earlier about what is natural, whether or not selfishness is natural. To me, you know, life, I don't know, whether life is

worth living is maybe not even quite right, quite the right question for me. To me, living life actually is the network of relationships that we have. So, for example, I don't really think that the concept of dying as we normally talk about it makes too, too much sense. Because I think that who I am as being at all is constituted by this network of relationships that I have. I don't think there really is a Clancy, independent of all these clansies exchanged with all these other people. And consequently, I mean, yes, as I die, that Clancy is going to change in various ways.

But there's still going to be that Clancy hanging around. You know what I mean? Because John's not going to instantly forget about me when I die and neither is Eric and neither are my children and et cetera. There's still going to be plenty of Clancy floating around. And maybe slowly, but surely he'll diminish it. way, I suppose, but it's going to be kind of a slow process. And I don't think there's any more to him now than Matt Clancy either. So I don't think it's a worth living. It's like I am living, you know, I am living. That's what I can say to that question. To come at it, I think, in a complimentary

way, but maybe a little bit more to the point of is life worth living? And then William James' responses, maybe it depends on the liver. I think that that response for me still rings pretty much true. I think that he's gesturing to the fact that every single life is so different, that it really does depend on who you are. And he's not foreclosing the possibility of there being certain cases where life is too difficult. So he doesn't want to shut down that possibility either. But I think what gives me continual hope is that this may be, I think, is actually a very good direction for life. What I mean by that is if you think about the things that are most meaningful to you, love, art, maybe you love painting or, you know, playing guitar, or playing soccer, or parenting, or kissing someone,

or falling in love, or reading, all of those experiences. that make life worth living at the core of them have a maybe at their heart. In other words, would the soccer game be meaningful if you knew what the outcome was? No, it's a maybe. If you knew how the kiss was going to be before it was kissed, would it be interesting? No, it's because of the maybe. Maybe it'll work out this way. Maybe it'll work out that way.

And I think that that attention to possibility and the way that possibility functions in meaning-making for humans like us or beings like us is what James is really pushing us to think through. And that's been guidance for me all the time. I mean, I have a very sort of depressive nature. There's no competition here, probably not as suicidal as glancy, but pretty darn dark. And those moments when I can't see any way forward, James's maybe is there to say, look a little harder, look into the darkness to see if you can find just a little bit of possibility there. Or go to sleep and wake up the next day.

And then in that case, if you do that, like maybe you'll discover something. Maybe, maybe, maybe you'll discover something out there. And I think that that's given me a lot of hope over the years. And frankly, when we called you to do the Dow, it was because you have that quality to you that, like, if you wake up the next day, maybe there's something there. You know, maybe there's something they're worth living for. I agree with everything, I think, that John just said, but I'd like to take hope out of it if we could. Because one of the really nice things about maybe is that sort of insistence on the fundamental. Maybe ambiguity change.

These things are all different metaphors for the same experience that we're all having. And I did want to point out just because John cut himself off before he finished his thought that that James also, just in case listeners aren't familiar with the passage, you know, we all have different natures, we all have different attitudes that come with these natures, we all have different physiognomy that disposes us in different ways. And this is part of the flux, part of the mayabiness. And yeah, I was also going to agree with John that, Eric, as I was editing your Dow, I was so happy to see how comfortable you are with the concept of change and how good you were at enacting it in your in your commentary, how you, how reluctant you were to try to make anything static, to try to fix anything. I thought that was really nice.

Well, I think that's the big part of the Dow's fundamental message, right? And I want to go back for a second, Clancy, to what you said when we were talking about suicide. by the way, I love ranking our depressive tendencies as a little bit of a contest. I think that's super. Clancy's very happy because he knows he's winning. I want to go back to what you said, though, because when I asked you about life worth living, when we looked at suicide, right, and you're very open about this, the multiple attempts you've made, you talked about relationship. And I'm curious if in those times when you were much more actively suicidal or had suicidal

ideation, was a part of that because you were cut off from relationship of different sorts, that you were not available to relationship of different sorts? How would you put into context what I'm saying here? Yeah, I mean, it does go back to what John was saying at the outset about selfishness, I think. First of all, I think we should say for people who are listening, look, you may have thought because you lost someone to suicide, a loved one, or just because you thought about suicide, you might have thought, oh, suicide would a horribly selfish thing. It's okay to think that. Yes, it's okay for us to say it. Suicide is a selfish thing. It involves self-destruction, but it's okay for it to be selfish. That's the first thing I want to say.

You're not saying anything bad about yourself or anyone else if you say that suicide is selfish. It's totally okay to say that. First thing I want to say. Second thing I want to say about that is most people when they make an attempt on their own lives or when they die, by suicide are at such a depth of self-loathing that the only appropriate response, of course, we're going to be angry when a loved one kills herself or kills themselves, but in time, we will see that the only appropriate response was a sense of loving grief and sympathy for that person. And if you can have, if you're someone who suffers from suicidal ideation, if you can try to have just the tiniest bit of that sympathy for yourself that you,

you know your loved ones have for you, what a favor you'll be doing all of us. Try, try to feel, don't you, you worry that you feel too sorry for yourself. Let me tell you, you don't feel sorry enough for yourself. Feel more sorry for yourself. I want to say that too. Now, on your question,

we know, I know from my own personal experience and we know from the literature on suicide that, yes, isolation is the number one cause of suicidal ideation, suicide attempts, and death by suicide. Without exception. It's why all of us talking to each other are at the highest risk category in America for suicide. Actually, you guys aren't yet because you're about 10 years younger than I am, but starting around 55 as a white male, you just start getting more and more at risk for death by suicide, not at highest risk for making an attempt, but highest risk for death by suicide. And that's why. We know why. Because you're becoming

more and more isolated, more and more withdrawn from your social relationships. Now, your question, when I made an attempt, let me tell you about this very briefly, Eric, when you are making an attempt, you know that you have loved ones and that your loved ones are going to miss you. And this is how you think. You think the fact that I am willing to inflict that suffering on my loved ones by I'm making a suicide attempt is further proof that they would be better off without me. Because I am such a loathsome person who would be willing to inflict that pain upon them. That's the circular paradoxical, terrible, terrible nature of suicidal ideation. And yes, it is absolutely an isolating thing.

And yes, the best thing you can do if you have someone in your life who is struggling or if you yourself are struggling is to reach out to someone and to try. speaking to people who may be listening who struggle with suicidal ideation, it doesn't matter how you reach out. Just the last time I was really struggling, I sent my roofer a text. My roofer. Yeah, he just seemed like an okay guy. And I texted and I said, I'm having kind of a bad day. How are you doing?

And he wrote back and he said, hey, I'm glad you texted me, man. Yeah, I'm actually having a really lousy day too. And we wound up texting and I got past that. Another time when I was going through a really rough time, I got a text from John Keg. And he said, hey, man, just checking in on you. How's it going? This was before Rebind.

And I said, I'm glad you texted. I'm having a really lousy time. We went back and forth. He asked me some really good questions. And then we actually got to the source of it, and he totally turned it around for me. And I have people I text with all the time, including a vet who first emailed me

sitting on the floor of his apartment with his rifle in his mouth and Googling, how to kill yourself. You know, he already had the means at his disposal. But anyway, that's how he found. me. So text in any way. And if you know someone is struggling or you're worried they might be struggling a little bit, it doesn't matter what you say, really. You know, you should not try to solve their problems. But anyway, text them, send them an email anything. It's called the

motto method. Any kind of human contact at all will reduce their likelihood of suicide and will help them with their suicidal ideation. So yeah, the answer to your question is, yes, if you're feeling suicidal, you're feeling cut off. And yes, that means there's an easy solution. We talk about it. We get rid of stigma. We reach out to people or they reach out to us. We become deep listeners. We don't try to solve people's problems. We let people know that we're suffering and we're a person they can talk to when they are suffering. Obviously, I can go on on this subject, but anyway. To reference David Foster Wallace again, Clancy, I heard you on an interview describe suicide as is that you are standing in a burning building and you end up jumping off the ledge, right?

But that's a testament to, you know, the question is, do I just burn up by the flames or I jump off this ledge? Neither is a solution that feels particularly good. And that just struck me in the fact that we've already talked about, David Foster Wallace, just came back up. Yes. And of course, David Foster Wallace died by suicide, as we know. Yeah.

And made several attempts. and a beautiful thing written by his wife shortly before the attempt which killed him. She said on Monday, you know, he was still planning on going to the chiropractor. And then on Tuesday, he started lying to me. And I think it was not Friday, Thursday or Friday, that he died. You know, someone who wrote a book that John was referencing earlier that I would like to recommend to all of you, everyone listening, This is Water, obviously a reference to the Tao. David Foster Wallace was deeply influenced by the Tao and by Buddhism, and it's our loss as a civilization,

that he didn't get more exposure to the Tao and to Buddhism than he did, because I think it would have saved him. But a guy who writes a book like, This is Water, his famous speech, was it Kenyon, John, that he gave that speech? Yeah. It's down the street. and dies by suicide is just really a lesson to us all. I think that, look, we are all going to die. That's going to happen. And you're going to come a point at which we're like,

we make this change, whatever it is. I've called the existence of it into question. But it's going to happen. For me, the question becomes, do you want your life to end in a way when you are frightened, lonely, violently afraid, you know,

or can you stick around a little bit longer to see if there might be some nice surprises coming your way, you know? And I tell people all the time, look, you don't know this because right now you're in so much pain and you're so unhappy, but you deserve

a good death. You deserve a good death, not a bad death. And if you can just be willing to give yourself that much, you could probably also find out to your happy surprise that you deserve a good life, which I know you don't feel like you deserve. But, yeah, David Foster Wallace, he's just a warning to us all. You can be the most sensitive, the most intelligent, the most kind and perceptive person around. And he seemed to be all

those things and die by suicide, you know. And always watch out for the cheerful ones. Those ones who are cheerful all the time, keep a close eye on those characters because they may be running darker than you suppose. I'll admit I'm a little spoiled. Ginny does a lot of the cooking and she's great at it. However, she has been traveling a lot lately and I am really busy

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Go to one you feed.net slash overwhelm. That's one you feed.net slash overwhelm. Thank you, Clancy, for sharing all that. I always hear this happen, so I guess maybe I should do it. I don't know, but anytime I hear suicide brought up, I hear somebody say, hey, if you're struggling with suicidal thoughts, dial 988, there's a suicide hotline that people can get right to, so I want to at least offer that. You guys are both philosophers, which I don't know.

This is the classic question I think about with music, too. Like, did you become slightly darker because you're philosophers, or was your slight darkness already what led you to be a philosopher? I think about that with music, and you're welcome to weigh in on that. But I'm also interested in what ways philosophy is acted as a survival manual for you, right? Like, if you could pick one teaching from any of the philosophers, right? Nietzsche or Kirkegaard or Emerson or the Tao or whatever, you know, what do you return to today? Like, when you're having a dark day, Like, what's something you're turning to from a philosophical tradition that gives you comfort? So I can sort of back my way into that.

I think my approach into philosophy was probably driven by my own psychological and familial background. And probably dealing with my father left when I was three. He wasn't a particularly gentle fellow. And growing up in a sort of like household. where there was no father figure, I probably turned to the fathers of philosophy to give me some sort of guidance. But I also turned to philosophy, Arthur Schopenhauer,

who I guess more than anybody, I turned to for some sort of oddly enough comfort. He was known as the sort of archetype pessimist. But Schopenhauer says that we are companions in misery in the first chapter of studies and pessimism. and I think that when I read the history of philosophy, particularly 19th and 20th century continental philosophy, which is where I started my philosophical training at Penn State, I found people who had been thinking about a lot of the issues that I had been sort of

toying with on my own. So I looked to the canon of philosophy as a type of place where I could find some sort of companionship. And then when I entered class, class was really, it for me. Like philosophy class and a good philosophy class, a class where you talk to other people and connect with other people around these issues that you might be facing are perennial topics. Like what's the nature of the good, the true, the real, and the beautiful? When you really talk deeply about that, I discovered that that was a type of companionship that I had not found anywhere else in life. And that that's what drove me into teaching the types of classes that I teach. which are very personal, we get to know each other very well.

If I could not teach that way, my students say, why do you teach Keg? My answer is, if I wasn't doing this, I probably wouldn't be at all. In other words, like if I didn't have my, if I didn't have classes or students or interactions, like the kind that I have in class, I would have trouble getting up in the morning, period. And that's why I think the philosophy, both in its method and then also in its content, And it has in the past helped me cope with life because of that necessarily the relational character of life. I think philosophy gives you a sense of relationship and connection if you really allow it to. So why do I turn to Schopenhauer?

Yes, it's the companions and misery. But he comes up with a very Buddhist, and Schopenhauer being influenced by Buddhism at the early stages of the 19th century. He says life is suffering. And suffering is caused not only by desire, but also by our little minds. Imagination makes our suffering so much worse. And he takes us, Schopenhauer in that first chapter and studies in pessimism, takes us down a fairly dark road, but he says, if you ignore that road, you're ignoring what is real.

And you're also ignoring the possibilities of companionship. that come with understanding that life is suffering. So in other words, like, I don't understand Clancy's suffer. Like, it's true. Clancy is my best friend, and I do not understand. I don't understand his sufferings. No one understands each other's sufferings because they are so sui generous, so particular,

so absolutely distinct. The weird thing is, is that we all suffer through our little corners of hell in exactly the same way because we're so different. Compassion isn't that I just understand you. It's that I also understand that I can never understand you fully. And that type of like humility and saying like, I'm just going to share a space with you or try to share a space with you. And I'm not going to project my own fears and anxieties on your experience.

I'm just going to try to love you and take care. You know, I'm just going to try to be there with you. That's what Chopinauer, I think, is talking about with companions and misery, and that's why I come back to it. I have a 13-year-old and an 8-year-old and a wife, Kathleen, and three dogs now. So I have lots of beings in my house. And that's what I try to remember these days. It's like when I'm getting down in the dumps or when I'm getting really frustrated because parenting is really frustrating, I just try to think to myself, companions and misery. I just be there with them.

Be there. Thanks. Clancy? I did want to ask you, Eric, I don't know how you came to philosophy, and I'm very interested to hear this story. I guess I would say in a similar way. I'm not a philosopher in the way that you guys are, because I ended up finding a lot of philosophy maybe a little dense for me. Maybe I didn't have the, I mean, my formative years were particularly like the years you'd be in college. I was so effed up on drugs all the time that, you know, I could barely understand Dr. Seuss. let alone, you know, Kierkegaard. I never got to it in quite the same way,

but I think for me the door was Zen Buddhism and the Tao. But driven by a similar thing, I think I had a real understanding, like, I don't know if I would have said life is suffering. I just, I realized there was a lot of it in life for a lot of people. And the little bit I understood about what I was reading of Zen and the Tao and all that was that. It was painting this picture that there was a way to be okay,

without having to change the fact that there was all this suffering. Because I recognized I couldn't. I recognize it was just sort of baked in there to a certain degree, but there was a way to be okay with it. And when Buddhism sort of starts with the first noble truth, right? It's phrased lots of different ways, but the essence of it is some version of there's a whole lot of suffering in life. I finally was like, somebody's telling me the truth.

Like somebody is stating the truth. In the same way I probably felt like Robert Smith-McHour was stating the truth, right? Music was sort of my thing. And I think as I went on and I began to get into recovery and began to read more widely, then I started getting pointed towards philosophers in a different way and starting to see that connection. And I've always had that sense of what we talked about earlier, like that so many of these different people from these different backgrounds, these different philosophical traditions, religious traditions, all this, are honing in on a lot of commonality about the human condition, not solutions necessarily, but some commonality of maybe what it's like

and maybe instead of solutions, I'd say strategies, strategies for working with the human condition. Because again, if we're all so different, you can't give somebody a prescription. But we can offer strategies. And I think that's kind of how I, I got to philosophy and the things I've been interested in. Well, that's a really great story. Thank you. I, too, you know, quote this in a book of mine, which nobody except for John Kegg likes, but I don't care if Monday's blue, Tuesday's gray, and Wednesday, too, Thursday. I don't care about you. It's Friday. I'm in love. You know, pretty much says it all.

I bizarrely came to Western philosophy by way of Emmanuel Kant. I read, the prologomena to any future metaphysics when I was 19 and I was like, I can't believe anyone can think so clearly. I mean, I just thought it was, I don't feel that way about the prologomena now, but my little 19-year-old brain thought it was so beautiful, so rigorous and logical. But what actually probably seduced me was a guy who, while quoting from fear and trembling, picked up a desk in the classroom and shouted at the top of his lungs, Bob Perkins was his name, the lion of Judah is no lap kitten and threw the desk across the room. Today you'd get fired for it.

Sounds like a Zen master. I was like, wow, you know. And then I did discover these existentialists and because my father, who also like John Keggs, was far away. And also like John Keggs was a very complicated and could be violent man. He'd raised me on the Vedanta, basically. but I thought that was all of philosophy. And then when I discovered existentialism, I realized, oh my, there's this whole other way

of coming at these same questions that I've been sort of educated on my books since I was about six years old, probably the first time I read the Bhagavad Gita, which, as you say, is coming out shortly from Rebind and not to bring it back to Rebind, but, you know, what we're talking about, like these encounters with wisdom literature

that is mediated by a personality, that is what, as I'm sure he did when he approached you, that is what John Kegg brought to me when he was talking about Rebind is like, we don't want to just bring the book, we want to bring the book, and we want to bring somebody who's really thought about the book. You know, we want to bring Eric Zimmer, we want to bring Bob Perkins, basically, into your reading experience so you too can hear about Kierkegaur

with a guy throwing the chair across the room saying the lion of Judah is no lap kitten. And that was what appealed to me so much about the project was that it's like, I love reading alone. But then when I think about, say, the first noble truth, which for me is so fundamental to the way I think about reality now, you know, I'd wrestled with it for years. And there's that song by the Sunday's desire, desire is a terrible thing, the worst that I can find. Yes, I know desire is a terrible thing, but I rely. on mine. Great song. And I struggled with that. But like, what about the first noble truth, you know, but I do rely on my desire back and forth and then hearing you talk about it and hearing John talk about it and thinking about my wife talk about it who taught me basically everything

I know about Buddhism? And she says, look, the first noble truth, you're totally misunderstanding it. It's not saying that there isn't happiness or desire isn't important. It's saying that there is no velvet rope, you know. That is to say there's no fixing it. Everybody is stuck on this side of the velvet rope. There is no other side of the velvet rope. We all suffer together. So stop trying to fix it. Stop trying to get to the other side of it, you know. But listening to you talk about it and John Keg talk about it, I'm thinking about my wife talking about it. That's when you really start to learn this stuff, you know. You can read these books all by yourself for as long as you want. You won't really start to learn them until you have the opportunity to talk with other people about them. And that for me is the

great beauty of rebind, honestly. End of the day is just that it becomes an exchange of ideas and you get that joy of learning, which there's nothing like it. You know, it's why you always want to go back to colleges since there's just nothing like that joy. Yeah. That's so beautifully said. And I think that's probably we all share that vision of Rebind, which is you take a great

book, a lot of them were, as I mentioned, very hard for me to understand. Now, I might have gotten a lot further into a philosophical tradition and known the philosophers better if I'd had something like that then, because I didn't have the college experience, right? I didn't get to take the book and then go have a conversation with a great teacher and other students, right? I was just off with myself with these books going, I don't know, what the heck does that mean? Right. Whereas with Rebind, I can actually ask questions and get answers and that person can give, I mean, I just think it's such an exciting way of not throwing books away, which is what a lot of modern technology does, but keeping books as this beautiful thing that they are, the precious things that they are. But it allowing you to be in real conversation with people who know a lot about that book is really, it's such a great thing.

Yeah, and in a way, it helps you connect with a person who wrote the book, you know, because you're getting these different perspectives on what that person had to say, which is just, you know, you know as a writer now, and I really want to hear about your new book, but as a writer, you don't really in a way even understand your own book until you start hearing from the readers of your book, you know, and then you start seeing things. I was talking with this reporter in Bulgaria this morning about a book of mine, and she saw all these things that I didn't know were there. And that's what makes the best books, the greatest books, is so many people have interacted with them and thought about them and are arguing about them. And yeah, that was totally. what excited me about rebind.

And I think it's the possibility with AI, if we use it smart, can open up these vast realms of wisdom to people and make it more engaging, especially to young people, because I really do worry, you know, that I have five children, and I worry about all of them.

And I want all of them to be exposed to like the deep spiritual reservoirs of humanity that are in books, but it needs to be in a way that will be, interesting to them, you know? Yeah. And I do think that's part of the opportunity with rebind and with AI more generally and with work like yours, with podcasts. You know, my 30, 30-year-old is a professor now. I would say if probably 80% of the intellectual knowledge, the knowledge she consumes, other than specifically her professional stuff, comes to her from

podcasts. The issue for me is you can learn so much from a podcast that what, What if you could have a podcast in your book, basically? And that is what the Rebine Study Biable basically is. It's an interleaved. You can listen to the scripture, and then at the end of every listening experience with the scripture, then you have the commentary. Then it's back to scripture. Then it's back to commentary. And it's stitched together and curated by an AI assistant.

But it's actual commentary from real-life people who have spent their lives thinking about these chapters and verses and books. And honestly, that's where we're going to go with your Dow and all the books in Rebind, where at the beginning of each chapter, at the beginning of each section, you get to listen to a podcast. And it's like a podcast about the book, interleaved, with the book, with commentary. My students said to me, they're like, I've never read a very long book, but I listen to really long podcasts. And I'm like, yep, I bet you do. Yeah, not to turn this into a Rebine commercial. That's part of the genius of it, though.

is that it's not just the book, it's the person that's with the book, you know, and, you know, there's people like me, and then there's people like, you know, Solomon Roosty and Margaret Atwood. And, I mean, like, it's pretty amazing the opportunities. I am really excited for Candide to get released, by the way. That's the one that I've got my eye on. I've really been wanting to reread that book, and I've known that it's coming from you guys, and I'm like, wait,

I'm going to wait so that I can reread it in this format, because I think I'll get so much more out of it. So hurry up for crying out loud. And Rushdie was so amazing on Candide. It was unbelievable. Yeah, he's so funny. But it's not out yet, is it? It's not out yet.

Okay. All right. So hurry up. All right. We are near the end of our time. But I would love to, since we've been on Rebind, I would love for you guys, if you could just pick one little piece of wisdom that you've gotten out of one of the books that you've worked on that we could just end. with. It could be from any of them. You know, it could be from the Bible. It could be from the

Dow. It could be from Dubliners. I mean, it could be, you know, it could be wherever. Do you want to go first, class? Sure, yeah. I mean, honestly, the book for me, where I was having the most moments when I was wanting to go back and read over the commentary and think about it some more and then read the original source some more and then go back and read the commentary some more was really truly in your Tao. You know, I've taught the Tao many times. I've included the Tao in philosophy textbooks that I've, you know, co-written with people. And I first read the Tao when I don't know how old I was. My dad gave it to me when I was very young. Certainly, I wasn't in double digits yet, you know, seven, eight or nine when I first was given the Tao by him. And he gave me a lot of that kind of

thing is mandatory reading that I had to read and discuss with him, one of the blessings from my dad. But I learned so much while going over your commentary and also thinking about your translations, you know, and comparing them with other translations. I'm trying to think of one of the remarks that you made that stayed with me the most. But I think I've already mentioned what I took away that was most valuable to me is I have a really bad habit of trying to fix things. in place, not fix things like fix something that's broken, which is a separate bad habit that I have, but trying to make things into a thing. Like, okay, now I understand this concept and I wanted to stay where it is because now I've got

this concept figured out sort of. And I just noticed how you resisted that all the way through. Like you were always willing to allow a concept to change. You were always resisting, setting the balance. or the borders of what was being said. And I think that was the most refreshing thing for me was seeing how someone could make their style really match the content so that the philosophical,

you know, I had a real eagerness to learn from you after I finished editing that book because I saw, okay, this is coming through in his way, not just in what he's saying, but in the way that he's saying it. So I think that was my biggest take, truly my biggest takeaway. I also had a nice thing from Chopra.

Chopra said in his commentary on Buddhism, he said, Clancy, the story is the suffering. And that will always stay with me. The story is the suffering. I think that's exactly right, you know. It's possible that the fact that I didn't land in a fixed position is because I don't know what the hell I'm talking about, right?

I mean, it's entirely possible. You've misinterpreted the entire thing. No, no, no. I'm kidding. that's even better. If that were the case, that's even better. Exactly, exactly. I think I'd probably pick for the piece of wisdom or the experience that I had out of some of these books. We did James Joyce's Dubliners, and it's a collection of short stories by Joyce. If you're intimidated by Ulysses, you should definitely read Dubliners. It's more manageable. It's a lovely collection. And we gathered commentary from John Banville.

We actually went to Ireland and the films in the book are shot on site in some of the places where Joyce was writing about. But there's a story that it's probably one of the best short stories or period. It's called The Dead. It's the last collection. It's the last story in this collection in Dubliners. And Banville said something that at the beginning of that commentary, he said, every Irish writer or every writer reads the dead and they are incredibly intimidated and inspired at the same time. And he called it the mountain, we all have to climb. And we measure ourselves against.

And that piece of wisdom about that book, I think, generalizes over all classics. or all great works, all great works of art, all great works of literature, all great works of philosophy. And oh my gosh, is that a moment that you don't for it. You should not forget. Like what it is to be human and what it is to read is to be given a mountain to climb and to be inspired by the mountain.

And no, my dog Seymour and my dog Ellen does not have that experience of, I'm sorry I love them to death, but they do not have the experience of reading the dead and thinking, oh my God, this is almost perfect and feeling it. And I think that that's what great literature should do for us. A lot of my students do say they're like, I have trouble reading, period.

And I just think about what sort of trouble we're in when it comes to our culture or the moment that we're in if students have trouble or if anyone has trouble getting through a short story that might make them quake in their boots and also aspire for something else. So that was the word of wisdom from Banville. I absolutely adore that. He is his own mountain to climb as far as I'm concerned with his writing for crying out loud. I've been rereading him recently and I'm just like, it's unbelievable. I think that's a beautiful place for us to wrap up, John. I think I loved what you said there about that, both intimidated and inspired. I think there's something in that that we can all think about. So, guys, thank you so much

for coming on. It's always a pleasure to talk with you guys, and I'm sure we'll do it again. Thanks so much for having us. Thanks, Eric, very much. It was a really therapeutic conversation. 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 share it with a friend. Sharing from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don't have a big budget, and I'm certainly not a celebrity, but we have something even better, and that's you. Just hit the share button on your podcast app or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time.

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