The Tim Ferriss Show - #415: Lori Gottlieb — The Power of Getting to Unknow Yourself

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Starting point is 00:06:53 Five Bullet Friday is only available if you subscribe via email. I do not publish the content on the blog or anywhere else. Also, if I'm doing small in-person meetups, offering early access to startups, beta testing, special deals, or anything else that's very limited, I share it first with Five Bullet Friday subscribers. So check it out, tim.blog forward slash Friday. If you listen to this podcast, it's very likely that you'd dig it a lot and you can, of course, easily subscribe any time. So easy peasy. Again, that's tim.blog forward slash Friday. And thanks for checking it out. If the spirit moves you. Well, hello, boys and girls. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss Show. And my guest today is Lori Gottlieb. Lori is a psychotherapist and author of the New

Starting point is 00:07:47 York Times bestseller, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, which is being adapted as a television series by Eva Longoria and the creators of the Emmy and Golden Globe winning series, The Americans, which I've watched many, many hours of. In addition to her clinical practice, she writes the Atlantic's weekly Dear Therapist advice column and contributes regularly to the New York Times and many other publications. Her recent TED Talk is one of the top 10 most watched of this year, and she is a sought-after expert in media such as the Today Show, Good Morning America, the CBS Early Show, CNN, and NPR's Fresh Air. Her new iHeart podcast, Dear Therapists, in the plural, produced by Katie Couric, will premiere this year.

Starting point is 00:08:29 So you can find her and learn more at laurigotlieb.com. That's L-O-R-I-G-O-T-T-L-I-E-B.com. You can also say hello on social, on Twitter, at laurigotlieb1, the number one. On Instagram, laurigotlieb1, the number one. On Instagram, laurigotlieb underscore author. And on Facebook, at gotlieblaurie. So without further ado, please enjoy a wide-ranging conversation with Laurie Gottlieb. Laurie, welcome to the show.

Starting point is 00:09:03 Well, thank you. I'm thrilled to connect. I've been looking forward to connecting. I'm sad we couldn't do it in person, but also somewhat happy that we are both safe and sound in our respective domiciles. And we're bringing quarantine verite to the masses, as we mentioned before hitting record. And I thought we could start with a talk of yours that you gave, which in all honesty, I have not yet had a chance to listen to, but someone on my staff said you have to ask her about the story she told at The Moth in, I believe it was 2014. Can you describe what you ended up sharing at The Moth and why you decided to share that? Sure. So the story that I told at the moth was about how I became a parent. And it was about the process of being in my late 30s, not having found the person that I wanted to spend my life with and knowing that I wanted to be a mom and what I had to go

Starting point is 00:10:07 through in terms of finding a sperm donor and kind of how surreal that was to think about how do you choose the genetic material for this person who's going to be your child? And what are you even looking for? And so it brought up a lot of sort of existential questions about, you know, nature versus nurture and what this means for this human being who would be this person who would know who this, you know, maybe not ever meet this donor, but have limited information about this person. You know, it brought up so many sort of philosophical and ethical questions. And so that's what I talked about. How did you decide to share that versus other stories that you might share? You have a life full of interesting stories.

Starting point is 00:10:58 How did it come to pass that you ended up on the stage sharing that at the Moth? I think that that was probably the most, I would say the biggest risk in life that I ever took. And it was also the best decision that I ever made in my life. And so I think there were those two pieces of it. There was the making a decision to do something with so much uncertainty. And then knowing in that deep place of knowing that we all have, that it was absolutely a decision I had to make. That I could not go through life and not have done what I did.

Starting point is 00:11:44 And knowing that there were all kinds of risks and all kinds of downsides, and still going through and saying, but I know, I know in every cell of my body that this is the right thing to do. And by right thing to do, you're referring to having a child, not getting on the stage at the moth, just to be clear. Just to be clear. Yes, absolutely. I'm referring to having the child. Yeah, getting on the stage was, you know, it was, I will say something about getting on the stage. I will say that I really believe that so many of us are carrying around really fascinating stories that we don't think are that fascinating. We think our lives are pretty ordinary. But as a therapist, I can tell you that the most

Starting point is 00:12:28 extraordinary stories come out of people that are grounded in the ordinary. And so maybe there was something extraordinary about, yes, I'm going to go use a sperm donor to have a child. Back then, it was very unusual. Now it's much more common. But I also think that sharing our stories, we realize that we are all so similar, that we all have, even if the story, the content of the story is completely foreign to somebody, that the emotions, the feelings, the questions, those are so universal. And so when I got up on that stage and I told the story, the audience reaction was profound to me because I felt so unique in my experience and kind of so different for what I had done. And so many people related to different aspects of the story and it helped them to feel more connected as well. Which I think is a huge service to not just the audience in front of the stage, but of course, the wider audience who then has a greater feeling of connectedness or

Starting point is 00:13:32 less a feeling of isolation and hearing these stories. Could you elaborate on a term I came across a number of times in preparing for this conversation, which is the hierarchy of pain? What is the hierarchy of pain? What does that refer to? So that's something that I think is really crucial when we talk about suffering and struggle, that so many times we tend to not pay attention to what we're feeling because we immediately want to minimize it because we feel like, well, I have a roof over my head and food on the table. So, you know, this sadness that I'm experiencing, this anxiety, this grief, whatever it is, insomnia, whatever it is, we think, well, you know, really, it's nothing. I'll just power through it, stiff upper lip. But we don't do that with our physical health, right? So if something feels off in our bodies, we're going to go get it checked out.

Starting point is 00:14:30 Let's say you're having like something, you feel like a little something in your chest. You know, you might go to the cardiologist and say like, what's going on before you have a massive heart attack? But what we do with our emotional health is we feel like it's not worth pursuing. It's not worth talking about because other people have such bigger problems. So I'm not going to do anything about it. And then what happens is people land in my office when they're in a crisis. It's like the equivalent of an emotional heart attack. And at that point, first of all, they've suffered unnecessarily for a long time. And also it's harder to treat because now they're in a crisis. And so I feel like, you know, there isn't a hierarchy of pain, pain is pain and suffering is suffering. And so that's why I remember when I was training,

Starting point is 00:15:14 in fact, as an intern, I was like, how will I go from somebody who, for instance, has cancer, right. To somebody who's like, you know, the babysitter's dealing for me, or, you know, why do I always have to initiate sex? Or, you know, one of those kinds of issues. And what I found is that underneath the content are the same kinds of universal questions. How do I trust? What does it feel like to be betrayed? How do I deal with uncertainty? And when we don't talk about these things, our behaviors, our feelings come out in behaviors. They come out in different ways. They come out in an inability to sit still, in a short-temperedness, in procrastination, in self-sabotage,

Starting point is 00:16:00 in what my colleague likes to call of the internet, she says, it's the most effective short-term non-prescription painkiller out there. So you just sit there and you're like numbing your feelings by just scrolling through things, going down the internet rabbit hole. They'll come out, those feelings won't go away. And so I think that we really need to get rid of this idea of this hierarchy of pain that you have to meet a certain threshold of pain for it to be dealt with or taken seriously. Now, as we're absorbing that and thinking about pain, our individual pain, our collective pain, collective anxiety, personal anxiety, etc., sometimes those pains are self-evident. Sometimes the sources or contributing causes to those pains are more obvious than at wise compassion. And I'm just going to read

Starting point is 00:17:06 something really quickly here. Idiot passion is where you want to make someone feel better. And so you don't necessarily tell them the truth. Wise compassion is where you really hold up the mirror to them in a compassionate way, but you also deliver a very important truth bomb. And my question about this is one related to real world examples, because at least in this piece, which is from last year, I'm not sure if you still go to Wendell, but how does your therapist or the person you have seen deliver that truth to you? How does one do that skillfully? And more specifically, how have your therapists done it skillfully? Right.

Starting point is 00:17:47 So that's something that both my therapist did with me and that I do with my patients. And I think a lot of it has to do with timing and dosage. So that's why it's hard for friends. And friends often end up falling into that idiot compassion bucket because a friend will come to you and say, oh my God, you know, this, this, my partner did this. And, you know, and we immediately take our friend's side. We immediately say, yeah, that's terrible. Or my boss did this, or I didn't get this promotion. And we say, yeah, they don't see your talent or whatever it is. And in the moment, that's not the time to deliver

Starting point is 00:18:25 wise compassion because they're smarting from the injury. But I think that you can ask certain questions. What you're trying to get at is if a fight breaks out in every bar you're going to, maybe it's you. So we see that with our friends all the time. They keep ending up in the same situation, different people, different characters, but similar situations. And so maybe they're the common denominator. And so you can ask questions about, well, what do you think happened? And, you know, our instinct as humans, we all do this, is to blame something out there. And the reason that it's so much easier to say that the problem is out there is because if we say that there's

Starting point is 00:19:05 something going on with us, we have so much shame around that. And shame is the reason that we have trouble taking responsibility for our role in a story. So if your role in the story is you're not getting the promotion because you actually don't get along well with that coworker, right? The one who did get promoted. Or your role in the story is the reason people keep leaving you is because you're very needy and you're very suspicious or you don't trust or whatever it is. There's certain behaviors that you have, certain patterns. We don't want to look at that because we feel like if we acknowledge that there is something we're doing, that that's a criticism, that that says something is wrong with us. And it doesn't mean something's wrong with you. It means you're just not aware of a behavior. And so there's a big difference between something is like wrong with

Starting point is 00:19:57 you as a person or something is problematic about a behavior that you're engaging in. Could you give another example or examples of approaches or language that can be used to sort of lead a horse to water? That might sound too insulting, but in the sense that I have blind spots, we all have blind spots, and sometimes you need friends to point them out to you, but it's easy if it's delivered in the wrong way or at the wrong time to become defensive. So what are some tools that can be used to sort of open the door to that type of self-reflection? I think the first thing is that people need to feel understood before they're going to be able to self-reflect. And so when I talked about timing and dosage, what I meant was that first, you need to let the person know that you understand the story that they're telling from their perspective. And I keep using the word story because everybody's coming in with a story and we're all,

Starting point is 00:21:02 to some extent, unreliable narrators. And so you don't have to agree with their version of the story, but you have to understand how they feel about the story and they have to feel felt. They have to feel that you understand them, even if you might not agree with all of the details of, of, you know, how they're telling the story. And once they feel understood, and then they feel accepted for how they feel. So you don't try to talk them out of their feelings with logic. So many of us try to do that, especially with our partners, right? We try to talk them out of their feelings. Well, you shouldn't feel that way because X, right? And a lot of us experienced that as kids, right? So we don't know

Starting point is 00:21:46 how to access our feelings. So a lot of us as kids, we might've said like, you know, I'm sad and your very well-meaning parent might've said like, don't be sad. Hey, look, a balloon, right? Hey, let's go to Disneyland. Or, you know, when you were young, you might've said like, I'm angry. And they would have said like, really? You're so sensitive. You know, those kinds of things. So I think that when somebody is telling you something and you're thinking in your head, wow, they're making a big deal about this, or they shouldn't feel this way because here's this other perspective on it. There's no shoulds about how you feel. That's just actually how they feel. And so if you can have compassion for how they feel, if you can imagine it and even have empathy, they will be more able then to, their shame will kind of diminish and they will feel more able then to self-reflect.

Starting point is 00:22:35 And that's when you can start asking questions like, what do you think the other person in this, if they were telling the story, what do you think they might be saying? What do you think their version would be, right? Can you try to imagine, you know, can you broaden the story for these people? And once they start to broaden the story, they allow other perspectives to come into the narrative, and then they start rewriting their own narrative a little bit. There's some movement there. And it doesn't happen all at once. This isn't one conversation. This is many conversations. And if this is in the context of, say, your significant other, and a lot of people are going to be spending more time in close quarters for at least the next few weeks, and I would imagine that there will be some strife, some disagreement. And I would love to hear what type of language might be used in those circumstances where you're not referring to a third party.

Starting point is 00:23:33 So as an example of what not to do, I have a friend whose version of apologizing is always something along the following lines. Well, I'm so sorry that you took that so personally. That's the non-apology apology. Yeah, the headbutt disguised as apology, which doesn't lend itself to much conflict resolution. So what types of approaches or language might be useful when things are escalating between two people? Yeah. So I see a lot of couples in my practice. And one of the things that I see so often is

Starting point is 00:24:12 something like somebody's trying to be heard by the other person. And that person says something like, you never listened to me. And I always say to the person who says you never listened to me, to the partner, how well do you listen to him or her? Right? Because when we're screaming, you never listened to me. Usually that person who says that is not a very good listener. And so I think that when you are hearing something, when someone is trying to tell you something, are you truly listening or are you constructing your defense? As they're talking, are you thinking about how you are going to defend yourself against their perceived complaint?

Starting point is 00:24:56 Because then you're not hearing them at all. And also part of listening isn't just hearing the content of what they're trying to tell you, but are you reading their body language? Are you reading their facial expressions? This isn't something that just happens in a therapy room. This is how we need to be able to communicate better with one another. And it doesn't take a lot of effort. It's more of a reframing of what it means to have a conversation with someone. Thank you for that. And if we zoom out just to define some terms that we'll no doubt be using more, how do you think of therapy?

Starting point is 00:25:33 And I suppose on one hand, therapy is a broad term like medicine. So it may not be a good question, but if people listening have tried certain types of therapy and it's worked or it hasn't worked, or perhaps they've never engaged in what is called, certainly in the West or Western psychotherapy, therapy, what is therapy and what are some common myths about it? So I think that therapy can be defined, you know, people will define therapy in a lot of different ways. I can tell you how I define therapy. Perfect. So I define therapy as something taking place in the same room, in the same space, one-on-one on a consistent basis. So usually that's weekly. And it's a

Starting point is 00:26:20 process of really trying to understand oneself better in the sense of understanding what are this person's blind spots? How does one navigate through the world more smoothly? What are some of the ways that we're carrying things from the past and we don't realize that it's like wearing clothes that don't fit anymore, that somehow we're walking around with these clothes that don't fit and they're affecting the way that we manifest in the world, the way we present, the way we behave. So, um, you know, and I think this part of getting to know yourself is, is also getting to unknow yourself. And that refers to the old clothing

Starting point is 00:26:59 that I was just talking about, that, that part of getting to know yourself is to let go of these ideas that you've been carrying around about yourself that just aren't accurate. I want to underscore something you just said, which I love so much, and that is getting to unknow yourself. That's a very helpful way to phrase it. I don't mean to interrupt, but I've never heard anyone say that before. And I just wanted to mention it in part so that I remember it. So sorry to interrupt. But we all have our stories, right? As you said, and we're very unreliable narrators, and our recollection is often recreation, and we're attached to those stories. So getting to unknow yourself is a hell of a way to put it.

Starting point is 00:27:45 Thank you. Well, that's right. I mean, I think that we carry around these stories like, you know, I'm unlovable or, you know, whatever it might be that people have these stories that they think about that define them. And they think that a lot of what therapy is, is to really examine the accuracy of those stories and whether they really are serving them at this point in their lives. So getting to unknow yourself is to let go of these very limiting stories that you've been carrying around so that you can live your life and not the story that you've been telling yourself about your life. So many of us are walking around living some story that we're telling ourselves about our lives that doesn't reflect reality at all.

Starting point is 00:28:31 I don't know if you're willing to delve into the personal a bit on this and feel no pressure, but could you tell a story about, I suppose that's kind of not intended to be ironic use, but to share a story or describe one or more of the ways that have been important for you personally to get to unknow yourself? Are there any particular stories that you've had that were disabling in some way that you've had to work on and have worked on? Well, I think one of the stories that, it's the story that I open with in the book, which is that the person that I was planning to marry, my boyfriend at the time, told me one night that all of a sudden he said, I've decided that I don't think I can live with a kid under my roof

Starting point is 00:29:24 for the next 10 years. And that kid at the time was my eight-year-old who had not been hiding in the closet the whole time we were dating. So my version of this story was what my friend said, the idiot compassion, he's a sociopath or he's a jerk or who does that? And the story that I brought to my therapist was I was so attached to that story that this was all him. And I think that through the process of going through therapy, it became very clear that I had a role in this story. And the role that I was taking on was like this happened to me and I didn't see it and I was blindsided by this. And it was a very old story for me. It was like a story from my childhood.

Starting point is 00:30:13 It was a story that, you know, this idea that, you know, things were happening to me and I had very little control over that. And it bled into this adult relationship. And so it became very clear in my therapy that there were clues that he was not a kid person. There were clues all along. We weren't talking about it. But we were both responsible for him for not telling me and me for ignoring the times that it did come up and not really pursuing it. Because in some ways, even if our stories are not stories we want to live, we somehow orchestrate our lives to keep the storyline going. So someone might have that story of, you know, I'm a victim, and they don't want to be a victim. But what happens is they orchestrate things so that they will be a victim in those stories.

Starting point is 00:31:10 Why do they do that? I agree with you that that happens. Why does that happen? It happens because we cling to the familiar. So it feels like home. So even if home was unpleasant or miserable, at least it's something that we know. If we go and we say, oh, wait, what if I'm not a victim? What if I'm not trapped, right? My therapist told me about, this was so life-changing for me. It was a cartoon he told me about. At one point, I was talking about all the ways that I was trapped and there was no way out of any of these situations that I was talking about. And he said, you remind me of this cartoon and it's of a prisoner shaking the bars, desperately trying to get out. But on the right and the left, the bars are open. The prisoner's free, right? But so many of us don't walk around those bars. So the question is, why don't we? Why don't we walk around the bars? And the reason is because we want to be free, but with freedom comes responsibility. And so if we

Starting point is 00:32:10 walk around those bars, we're not the victim anymore. And now we have to take responsibility for our choices. Now we have to be proactive and make things happen for ourselves. Now we can't say the world is limiting me. The world is holding me back. I can't have this dream of mine because, you know, something out there is preventing me from having it. Now it's on us. So that was a story when I had to unknow myself. I had to unknow that part of myself that tended to go into that place of everything out there is limiting me and life is unfair.

Starting point is 00:32:45 Right? So I had to really examine that story. And I didn't even know that I was still carrying around that story. Thank you for sharing that. And what distinguishes, in your mind, a good therapist from a great therapist? What are some of the differences that you would observe? If you reflect back on the people you consider great therapists, what do some of the differences that you would observe? If you reflect back on the people you consider great therapists, what do they have in common that separates them from good therapists? Yeah. I think Wendell, the therapist that I write about in the book,

Starting point is 00:33:16 is a great therapist. And I think what makes him a great therapist is that he's so himself in the room. He brings his full humanity into the room. He's not, um, I think there's this stereotype of therapists as being very much like a tabula rasa. And it's not that Wendell was disclosing things about his life. I knew very little about his life until of course, the night that I Google stalked him. That's another story. But, you know, we didn't talk about him in the room, but he, as a human, it was clear that he was the same person in the therapy room that he might be out in the world, that there was not a persona that he was bringing into the room. And so he was very spontaneous in the room. And I think it's almost like as a musician, right? If you are a pianist, let's say, and you have to learn your scales and they have to be very precise

Starting point is 00:34:17 and you have to know them so well and you just drill them and drill them and drill them. That's what we get in graduate school. We drill the precision of being a therapist, but we don't drill the art, right? The art is something that comes out from experience. And so I think that once you know those skills, then you can improvise. But you can't really improvise as well if you don't have the foundational stuff down. So the same thing, I think, with Wendell was he had the foundational stuff down, but man, could he improvise. How did that manifest? What did good improv or what does it or can it look like? Well, one of the things he did that really surprised me was, you know,

Starting point is 00:34:58 at one point I was sort of going on and on about the breakup and, um, you know, and I, and, and I was looking on social media and I was looking at, you know, this imaginary wonderful life that my ex was now having. Um, and, and he just, he, he stood up, Wendell stood up and he came over and he kicked me and he didn't hurt me. It was like, it was, and I was like, what was that? And he said, well, you seem to really enjoy suffering. And what he meant was he explained that there's a difference between pain and suffering. We all experience pain at different points in our lives, but we sometimes don't have

Starting point is 00:35:41 to suffer so much that sometimes we are the cause of our suffering. And I was the cause of my suffering by spending all of this emotional real estate on what was going on with my ex-boyfriend's life. And it was creating all this suffering. I didn't have to be doing that. There were other ways that I could manage my grief, that I could move through my grief, that didn't involve kind of re-traumatizing myself all the time. And that was so effective, like that kick, right? Because I always remember that, the difference between pain and suffering. So let's segue. This feels like a perfect window to segue into, I believe, what would still be one of your favorite maxims that I highlighted for myself, and that is, insight is the booby prize of therapy.

Starting point is 00:36:33 Can you explain what that means? I love that too, because I think a lot of people believe that when they come to therapy, they're going for insight. Why do I do this? Why is it like this? Why do I keep getting into these arguments with my partner? Why am I stuck in my job? You know, the why. And you can have all the insight in the world, but if you don't actually make changes out in the world, the insight is useless. So I like to say that when you come to therapy, you have to be both vulnerable and accountable. The vulnerability is you have to actually let me see you. You can't do the whole like, look over here, look over here, look over here and try to distract me with all these different stories. Because if I can't see the truth of who you are, I won't be able to

Starting point is 00:37:19 connect with you. I won't be able to help you connect with yourself and we won't be able to get that insight. So that's the insight piece. But then there's the accountable part, right? Which is, okay, now that you understand why these arguments keep escalating in your marriage, right? Somebody might come back the next week and they'll say, yeah, so I got in this fight with my wife and I understand now exactly, I understood it as it was happening, exactly why this was happening. And I said, well, did you do something different? Well, no, but I understood why it was happening, right? It's like, that's not helpful.

Starting point is 00:37:53 I mean, it's helpful to some extent, but what you need to do then is you need to do something different because of this insight. So maybe you understand now that when you react in a certain way to what your wife is saying, that that's going to escalate things. So just because you understand the why and what it brings up in you, what are you going to do differently now? So once people start changing their behavior, that's when they start to see real change in their lives. How did you, for instance, take the pain is unavoidable, suffering is optional, just to paraphrase, how did you take that insight after Wendell kicked you, if you did,

Starting point is 00:38:35 and translate it into behavior modification? Yeah, well, the first behavior was I stopped the whole online searching for the ex-boyfriend because it just wasn't serving me. I think also changing my behavior in terms of making up these stories about if he posted like a salad in a restaurant, I'd be like, well, how can he even eat? He didn't miss me at all. I mean, you go to a very young place. I think when we experience the end of a relationship, no matter how old we are, we often go to this very primal place because as a species, we need to connect. And I think that when we experience sort of the shock of disconnection, it can really be discombobulating. So there was a lot of really focusing more on grieving than on what was going on with his life.

Starting point is 00:39:30 Could I sit with my grief? Could I sit with the sadness? Could I sit with the loss? And that was so much more helpful for me, even though it was a lot more painful. Yeah, I can empathize. It is one of, I feel, at least for me, one of my main challenges has been identifying what I am unwilling to feel, right? Historically, and trying to practice allowing those things and being kind to myself when I am experiencing them them instead of beating the living shit out of myself for opening the door to any of those feelings.

Starting point is 00:40:11 It's work in progress. I'm so glad you said the thing about beating the shit out of yourself because I think so many of us self-flagellate. And we think that if we self-flagellate, that will help us feel better. It's very paradoxical. That if I kick the shit out of myself, that I'm going to whip myself into shape and I'm going to make these changes. Self-flagellation never leads to long-term change.

Starting point is 00:40:38 Self-flagellation might sort of make you do something in the moment, but it won't last. The way that you make long-term change is by having self-compassion. And people are really afraid to allow themselves to feel compassion for themselves because they think that then they won't be accountable. They think that if I am kind to myself, I will not make these changes. I won't be motivated. And the exact opposite is true, that the nicer you are to yourself, the kinder you are to yourself, the more motivated you will be to change. You're having a hard time with that one.

Starting point is 00:41:19 No, well, I'm doing much better. I am trending in the right direction. I'll say that. It's still a task on repeat for me, and there are ways that I do practice that. Typically at mealtimes in a silent grace of sorts, which is not for any religious purpose, but because it conveniently piggybacks on a habit that is going to happen two to three times per day every day. So it's a useful cue in that sense, but it is a work in progress for sure. I view it as one of my most important tasks at the top of the cascade in a sense. I'd love to ask you about helping people in therapy one-on-one, one-on-two, whatever it might be, versus your Dear Therapist column. And I'm asking in part because you have a large audience and

Starting point is 00:42:14 the dynamic is very, at least for me, has been very different. Could you speak to that? And then I'll probably have a bunch of follow-up questions. Sure. So I think in both cases, in the therapy room and in the Dear Therapist column, and then also in the new podcast that we're doing, which is going to be Dear Therapist. And it's a different dynamic because in the therapy room, in all of these, I should say, somebody is coming in with their story. And what you want to do is you want to help them to edit their story. And so in the therapy room, you have week to week, you can go through the editing process with somebody, you help them to

Starting point is 00:42:59 see something. So a lot of times people in all of these, whether it's the podcast, the column, the therapy room, people will come in and usually there's some problem with someone out in the world, right? So, and, you know, and by the way, there's lots of difficult people in the world. When I was training, a supervisor said to us, before diagnosing someone with depression, make sure they're not surrounded by assholes. So, right? So I think, you know, yes, you know, there's a reality to what they're saying. They're difficult people. They're having a difficult situation. I understand that. But what is their role? What is their role in that? And so, in the therapy room, if I am helping them to kind of edit that story,

Starting point is 00:43:41 I have a lot of time to do that. I don't mean that we want to keep people there for years. I mean that I have from week to week, if I forget to say something or I can let something marinate because I can control kind of how much I release it once. I can go back the next week. If I forgot to say something, I can make a note and go back to it. If they're not really open to something that week, I can try to come in a different way another time or, or even in the room in that session with the column, you get one shot. You can't really tell what the reaction is. So you can't sort of say, okay, I'm saying this, here's how they're reacting to it. And now I'm going to, you know, I was a competitive chess player when I was younger and I use

Starting point is 00:44:20 a lot of that in therapy with, which is, you know, I make this move, they make this move. I have to adjust my move in the column. I can't adjust my move. So I think what I'm trying to do in the column is I'm trying to not only answer the question for that person, but I'm trying to answer it for every, I tried to answer something for every person who's reading it, which is how is this going to relate to the way they think about the world? So it's a, it's a more general answer. It's not like, here's specifically what you should say to your mother-in-law, right? Even though it's in a vice column. It's more about, here's a different way to think about this. And here's something that I see going on that maybe is more universal. And this, I think, applies to your situation. And this will help you

Starting point is 00:45:05 come to a place of knowing what you should do. How do you think about, if at all, the risks of public advice? In the sense, I'll speak personally, having written on a blog for more than a decade now, thousands of posts, large audience, there are topics that I have drafted and then not published or published and then removed because I've asked myself the question, what happens if 1% get this wrong? Like 1% don't read the disclaimers or 1% don't read the second half of the article. What are the worst things that could happen? And I scare myself, and I think rightly so in some instances, and it could just be a difference in subject matter. But do you ever worry about writing to the masses? Not that you shouldn't. I think there's tremendous value in doing so, but do you think about that?

Starting point is 00:46:01 You know, I want to go back to the kindness for a second in answering this question, because I think that one of the things that happens is we have these voices in our heads that try to talk us out of things. That often the most authentic place in us is the quiet voice, is the voice that is like, hey, listen to me. And then we get these louder voices that say, oh, but what if this, what if the audience doesn't like this? What if somebody doesn't like this? What if I displease somebody? And I think that we need to give more air to that quieter voice that says, this is important to me and I'm going to say it. And if people don't like it Or if I made a mistake, that's okay. And so I think, you know, even in my book where I'm very, I kind of like let it rip, you know, and there are some people who would say, wow, that's really inappropriate. But it was something that I felt like I had to tell

Starting point is 00:46:58 that story in that way. And so when I write my column, sometimes I'll give advice that I know some people will take issue with. Or there have been lots of times where I've said something in a column. You know, you're on a deadline every week, so you don't have a lot of time to think about it. You write what you write in the space of your production schedule. And maybe later I might think, oh, wow, I wish I had said this.

Starting point is 00:47:21 Or readers will definitely tell you, right? They'll say, you know, oh, wow, that therapist is awful. She didn't say this. And I think people can be so critical in that way. I think it's, I really want to hear from readers what I didn't get right. I learn and grow that way. I would like them to say it in a kind way. But I think that I don't beat myself up if I miss something, if I didn't say something, if I made an outright error where I feel like, wow, that was really misguided. I'll say something on social media like, yeah, I should have said that. That's a really good point. It's like what I say, I always say this about why I decided to write so much about myself, like in my journalism

Starting point is 00:48:03 and my book and in all kinds of places, I will disclose things because I don't want to be the expert up on high. I want to use my expertise to help people. But I always say that my greatest credential is that I'm a card carrying member of the human race. And if I can't model for people, what it's like to make a mistake, what it's like to be kind to yourself when you make a mistake? What is like when people are attacking you and how not to get into like that negative space with them? You know, somebody today, I'll tell you something happened today on Twitter. I had posted something. I said something like, if I, if I can't touch my face soon, I think I might need to go to therapy because of coronavirus. And it was just this, this thing that I posted that I didn't touch my face soon, I think I might need to go to therapy because of coronavirus. And it was just this thing that I posted that I didn't think much about. But I posted it because

Starting point is 00:48:50 I think like we're all trying to cope with this. And this person wrote on there, not funny, right? And what I wrote to them was that some people use humor to cope with really horrible situations. And it might not be this person who does that, but that sometimes we need to, you know, it's kind of both and that this is a horrible situation and sometimes our souls need to breathe. And so I think that it's a, and a lot of people sort of responded to that. I think that, you know, it made me think though, you know, was that insensitive and, and what does that mean? And it made me really do a little bit of soul searching about, you know, how do we use humor

Starting point is 00:49:31 when we're trying to cope with something horrible? So I welcome all of that. I don't overthink what I'm writing or I don't overthink, um, what I should say this. I think very, very much about what I'm writing because I want to put something out there that's valuable to people. But I don't overthink what the reaction is going to be. I don't hide because I'm worried that I might offend somebody. Because by the way, you always will.

Starting point is 00:49:55 Right. Yeah, 10% are always going to find a way to take it personally. And I suppose just for clarity, because I probably didn't convey it clearly, that I'm, on one hand, completely agree. I'm going to paraphrase here, but I think it was Mae West who said, those who are easily shocked should be shocked more often. So I agree with that. And then on the other hand, I'm mostly referring to safety considerations because I'm somewhat appalled by the reckless, I'm not talking about you, I'm talking about some other people with large audiences, I've seen giving what I would consider reckless, say, medical advice regarding prescription medication, and so on, related to coronavirus, where someone who can parse that effectively,

Starting point is 00:50:38 might be able to derive more value than risk, but a lot of people will not, right? So it's more on that end that I try to measure twice and cut once. But I would love to segue here for a second to discuss perhaps the tools that you use to identify the spot blind spots. Now, it sounds like an oxymoron, but if the therapist's job in some respect is to hold up a mirror and have people notice their blind spots, how might you suggest to people listening if they can't afford a therapist or for whatever reason,

Starting point is 00:51:18 just don't have the ability to get into a therapy room, are there any approaches they can take to better spot their own blind spots or have friends help them to identify them? Yeah, that's such a good question. I think that the therapist has the advantage of having the vantage point of not living that person's life. So it's like we ourselves are so zoomed in, we're so close, but a therapist is looking at you from the outside, you know, they're zoomed out, right? They can see the broader perspective. It's so hard for all of us to see ourselves clearly. And so I think that one way that people can identify that something might be up is if something keeps happening over

Starting point is 00:52:06 and over. Um, you know, it's not coincidence. I think that, that so many times we want to attribute something not working to something external. And so I think that it's really important to say like, what are some of these things that are going on that are, that are keeping me stuck, that are not working for me. And, and then to really kind of, kind of try to see the similarities. What are some of the patterns? Another thing is that I think that we're most revealed in the context of our

Starting point is 00:52:37 relationships with others. And if you see something happening over and over in your relate, the way you relate to others and the way that others relate to you, that's something to look at also. But I don't want to be, I'm not proselytizing therapy, but I do think that it's very hard to self-examine without having another objective person to almost get a really good second opinion on your life from. And that's what I kind of think therapy is in a lot of ways. It's like a really good second opinion on what might be going on. Yeah, it'd be really helpful at some point, and I would love to try to assemble this, but sets of questions that people could use to enable their friends to prompt them in ways that help them to identify blind spots, right?

Starting point is 00:53:27 Because I do that in, say, the case of editing writing. If I have a smart friend, I can give them a set of questions like, which 10% would you keep if you could only keep 10%? What 10% would you cut if you could only cut 10%? Et cetera, et cetera. I can enable them to take on the role of good proofreader, even if they're not ostensibly trained for that. So that's a homework assignment for me, I suppose. Well, there's asking the question, then there's being,

Starting point is 00:53:58 there's the openness to hearing what they have to say. I also think you really have to choose your audience for that one. I think that so many times if you ask those questions, the person that you're asking will have a personal agenda. So if you really wanted to know, what do you find most challenging about me? That person will name all the things that they want to change that will make their lives better, right? So it's like they have an agenda. A therapist doesn't have that agenda. A therapist can see in the room, by the way, the relationship in the room is a very, very, it's full of energy. It's full of richness. It's a unique relationship, right? Because it doesn't exist outside of the room, even though you might think about your therapist

Starting point is 00:54:51 during the week and your therapist might think about you. But what happens in the therapy room is a microcosm of how you relate to the other people outside of the therapy room, the other people in your life. So when I'm interacting with someone in the therapy room, I don't need to ask what other people find challenging about them. I'm experiencing it. I'm seeing it. I'm finding them challenging because they're doing with me exactly what they do with people out there. And so if you want to come up with your questions outside, like somebody in your personal life asking those questions, I think that that's really hard because often that person will have their own agenda. They will have their own things that they want to change for their own reasons that aren't necessarily about your own wellbeing. And I want to say one last thing about that, which is that sometimes the person that you're with doesn't want you to change because they want to maintain

Starting point is 00:55:49 sort of the homeostasis in the family unit. So if you're kind of the person who's struggling, they get to be the healthy, sane person. And if you become the healthy, sane person, then all of a sudden they have to look at what's not working in their own lives. This happens a lot. Like when somebody says like, you know what, I'm going to leave my, this job that, that I feel stuck in and I'm going to go and I'm going to try to do this other thing, this dream that I've always had. And the other person is like, oh, that's so risky. Oh, don't do that. That's so risky. You know, or why would you do that? Or that's unrealistic. Um, or they try to sabotage it in a way that's much more subtle, it's because all of a

Starting point is 00:56:25 sudden you're upsetting the homeostasis in the system. Maybe they were the successful one. Maybe they liked it that way. Or somebody decides they're going to get healthy and they're going to lose weight, or they're going to go to the gym. And they're like, oh, you're no fun anymore. You don't want to come out with me. So many times we aren't doing this consciously, but sometimes we feel threatened when other people get healthy, when other people are doing things that maybe we wish we could do. And this is, I say this about envy a lot, right? When people are envious, they're so afraid to feel their envy. And I'm like, feel your envy, use your envy because you want to follow your envy. It tells you what you want.

Starting point is 00:57:03 Don't use your envy to sabotage someone, to say mean things about that person. Use your envy as a catalyst to figure out what you can change in your own life. That's very good advice. And I have seen what you describe often subconsciously in partners where one will begin to change and the other one will act like the crabs in the crab bucket, sort of pulling the one crab down that is trying to get over the edge. It's very common. I've seen this through my audience over the years with weight loss, like you mentioned, with entrepreneurship, quitting a job, starting something, as you mentioned. Not to say that all concerns will be unfounded and self-centered with some ulterior motive, but that is extremely, extremely common.

Starting point is 00:57:58 Let me try a question on you, if I might. And this is going to be the first time I've ever asked this question on a podcast, but Tyler Cowen recently asked me this, and it opened up a fruitful portion of the conversation. So this is just along the, this is an attempt to sort of dig and see where this goes. It might go nowhere. How do you think we, you and I, are most similar or most different or both? I don't know you well enough to really answer that well. Right. Just based on the little that you know or based on this conversation, based on any of it. I think we're both very interested in making change in the world. And I think that, um, you know, we're both, we're both very, I would say proactive about doing that. Um, I think from what little I know

Starting point is 00:59:00 about, you know, you that you've disclosed in publicly. Um, I think that, that we both have gone through some kind of evolution of, um, defining success differently that I think that we both, you know, we both kind of were very, um, you know, we, we grew up in a way where we worked really hard at school and we succeeded academically and we went to, you know, we grew up in a way where we worked really hard at school and we succeeded academically and we went to, you know, prestigious schools. And I think when we got to those schools, both of us started to realize, wait a minute, this is not the secret to happiness. And I think both of us struggled when we were in those schools. I know I did, and I read about the ways that you did. So I think that it made us question a lot of what we had worked for and how we had worked for it.

Starting point is 00:59:54 And I think that both of us put our energy, that kind of energy that we put into our academic lives, I think that we've put it into our professional lives, but I think that our goals are very different than they were when we were trying to get the highest A in the class. I agree. What did your struggles look like? I've written about, as you mentioned, for those people who want to see just how dark the darkness can be, you can look up some practical thoughts on suicide in my name, and you'll find stories about that period. How did you struggle? What did your struggles look like? I think that my struggles were about working really hard to achieve something, achieving it, and then going, now what? Really questioning the meaning and the purpose.

Starting point is 01:00:51 And it took me a long time. I think that, you know, it wasn't until, you know, I switched around a lot in terms of my career. And I think that that was because I, I kept searching for that meaning and purpose in the right way. And so, um, you know, when I, when I was in college, I started doing these internships in, um, the entertainment world because I was really interested in telling good stories and I was really interested in the human condition. I felt like at the time, this was before TV became what it is now, I was like, that's movies, right? So I'd always been really just profoundly changed by certain movies. What were your majors at the time, or what were you focused on in school? Well, I was a French literature major, and I liked that. Of course, you know, the existentialist, right? So,

Starting point is 01:01:37 you know, when you think about like, what was I reading at the time? It was really depressing. Um, but, um, but I was really interested in culture and literature and story. And so I, I think everything, when I, when I look at it in retrospect, everything that I did was about story and the human condition, whether I was working in the entertainment business. Um, I think, you know, that, that I ended up, you know, working in film and then I moved over and I did network know that I ended up working in film, and then I moved over, and I did network television, and I worked at NBC. And that was the year that Friends in ER premiered. So it was like the beginning of this era in must-see TV on Thursday nights on NBC. And ER was a really unique show because it was so realistic.

Starting point is 01:02:23 It told these very rich human stories. And it was sort of like, it felt like a documentary in a lot of ways, at least in the beginning. And I used to hang out a lot in the ER with the consultant on the show who was an ER doc. And at a certain point, he said to me, I think you like it better here than you like your day job. And it was one of those things where, you know, I had worked so hard, um, in school and then I worked so hard at my job and I worked so hard to get the job at NBC. And he was like, you should go to medical school. That's, that's where your passion is. I see it in you. And I was like, I'm not leaving that job, but I did. Um, But I did. Because I wanted to be immersed in the real stories, right? So I went to medical school.

Starting point is 01:03:10 And then when I went to medical school, I went up to Stanford, where it was the beginning of the, it was actually the end of the first dot-com boom right before the first bust. So this is like 1999, 2000. And when I was there, it was like, everybody was talking about this newfangled thing called managed care. And my whole idea was I'm going to be the family doctor, the person who guides people through their lives. And I'm going to have these rich relationships with my patients. And it just wasn't looking like that was where the medical world was headed. And so I started writing when I was up there and I ended up then leaving to become a journalist

Starting point is 01:03:53 because I thought I want to delve into people's stories and I want to help them tell their stories. And so I did long form journalism, which I still do and I love. And it was later when I had a baby that I was working from home, as long-form journalists do, and I needed adults to talk to. I needed adult conversation. And the UPS guy would come and he would literally, I would detain him and I would say, how about those diapers? And do you have kids? And he would like back away to his big brown truck. And eventually he started just very quietly placing the packages on my doorstep so that

Starting point is 01:04:30 he did not have to interact with me. And I thought, okay, like, and I was really, you know, it was really hard. It was like, you know, you have this new baby. You love this new baby. I wanted this baby so badly. And yet I was like, I need, I need to be out. Again, it's that, that connection and story that when you're doing it remotely, it's not the same. And so I called up the Dean at, at, at Stanford where I had been in medical school. And I said, maybe I should come back

Starting point is 01:04:58 and do psychiatry. And she said, well, first of all, um, you know, you're welcome to come back, but if you become a psychiatrist, you're going to go through all this training and you're probably going to be prescribing medication in 15-minute intervals. And yes, you can do talk therapy, but why don't you get a graduate degree in clinical psychology and you can do the work you want to do and not do residency and try to do all this with a toddler? And so it was amazing. It was the best advice. It was one of those aha moments. That's really good advice from somebody who's taking the time to think it through. That's great. Right. And it seems really obvious in retrospect,

Starting point is 01:05:36 but at the time, you know, you're just like, how do I do this? And so that's what I did. And I feel like I went from, in journalism, I went from telling people stories to, as a therapist, helping people to change their stories. I feel like a lot of what I do as a therapist is a lot of that editing work that I would do when I was interviewing people, when I was writing their stories, really asking a lot of the same kinds of questions. So I feel like when you ask, like, how are we the same and how are we different? I feel like what happened was both of us found meaning and purpose. We both feel like we were doing something that is helping other people. And I feel like that's what I'm doing in all these different pieces of my career. And you also have kind of a hybrid career. And I think you're doing that in the different pieces of your career too. Thank you.

Starting point is 01:06:28 I'm doing, I'm giving it a good old college try. And I think too, we're both, I think like most humans, we're still searching. Yeah. We're still asking. We're still curious. We're still asking. We're still curious. We're still discovering. When you look back at your chapter changes, say from entertainment to med school or med school to journalism, which decision or transition was the hardest? In other words, I'd love to hear more about some of the detail of one of the harder jumps. Were any of these decisions that you agonized over for days or weeks or months, or was it just a flash of insight and decisive action?

Starting point is 01:07:19 Which of these was difficult for you? If any? Leaving the entertainment business wasn't difficult for me because I was so clear that there was something deeper that I wanted to pursue. Not that movies and television can't be incredibly profound, but I think there was something that was more personally resonant for me about working with actual people out there. And, um, which sort of foreshadows, of course, what I do as a therapist. Um, but what was hard about that change was that everybody thought I was crazy. That everybody said, how do you leave, you know, how do you leave this, this place that you're in, in your career? How do you leave that and just go to medical school? Um, I think what was harder was leaving

Starting point is 01:08:12 medical school because I had already made the switch. I went to, I was up at medical school and you know, it takes a lot by the way, you know, you have to take all the, all the classes to take the MCAT and you have to take the MCAT and then you have to, you have to meet all the requirements. And I was, again, not a science major, although I was very kind of mathy and sciencey as a person. Um, you know, I was like on the math team and, you know, those kinds of things, but I wasn't, um, I didn't, I was very much taking humanities courses in college and so, um, and literature. And so I think that doing everything that it took to get to medical school,

Starting point is 01:08:49 getting into a medical school, being at a medical school, and then saying, you know what, I'm going to go be a freelance journalist. And not just any medical school either, right? I mean, you're on Palm Drive or nearby with beautiful Stanford. So I can imagine that that also has a decent bit of weighting in some people's minds.

Starting point is 01:09:12 Well, also financially. I think that we're so worried about talking about money in our culture, but I think it's a very real thing. And I think people need to talk more about it because, you know, there I was, you know, I'd already paid for two years of medical school and I had loans and all of that. And, um, you know, now I'm going to go be a freelance journalist, you know, who does that? Um, and I think what it was is what I was talking about earlier is that voice, that quiet voice where everybody else is saying, just finish medical school, just get, just get the degree and then figure out what you want to do. You know, just, just tough it out for two more years. And I was like, I don't like life is short. And I was very aware of that even back then that, you know, this is a theme that, that, that kind of, um, is you see all over my work, which is this theme of

Starting point is 01:10:02 why thinking about death makes us happier, right? Which is, which is, I don't mean dwelling. I mean, just having, just acknowledging it, just acknowledging that life has a hundred percent mortality rate. And most of us don't know how or when we're going to die. And so I think that even though I was in my thirties then, which sounds young, um, it's not, you know, it's like, why, why should I spend those next two years in medical school when I know that I want to go write when that's what I want to do is I want to go tell other people's stories.

Starting point is 01:10:30 I want to go do this work. That's where the fire in my belly was. And so I just followed the fire in my belly and I said, I'm going to have to make sacrifices. I'm going to have to make a lot of financial sacrifices and I'm going to have to write a lot to make enough money to support myself and to pay off my medical school loans, et cetera. Now I had some money saved up from Hollywood, but not enough to sustain me. So, you know, these are the choices that, that people make. And it was again, a choice where people said, you know, I really suggest you do this, that

Starting point is 01:11:03 or the other thing. And I really listened to myself and, and wanted to do. And becoming a therapist was the easy choice, you know, in the last of the changes. But I feel like every single thing that I did was really just looking at story and the human condition from a different perspective. So I don't feel like I had four different careers. I feel like I had one career, and I'm just kind of experiencing them from different ways of getting in. that you use today, it would seem, right? Looking at it from that lens. How did you develop this awareness of death? When did that develop? How did that develop? Was it the reading all these French philosophers and writers or was it something else? No, it was medical school. It was medical school. I did a rotation uh a pediatric oncology rotation and that sounds brutal

Starting point is 01:12:10 yeah i i actually thought that's what i wanted to do and i didn't even have you know i wasn't a parent then and it was so um eye-opening it it it, it got, it like hit me at my core in a way that I think it, it matured me in a lot of ways. Um, it really made me appreciate so much about life and living and, um, and all of the opportunities that each of us has every day if we're healthy. You know, I think so many times we think about all the things that are going wrong in our lives. And, you know, people will say hashtag first world problems and all of that and going back to the hierarchy of pain. But I think that we take for granted our health. And so that has ever since medical school, um, I've been acutely aware of what a gift it is to be able to do the things that we want to do because we're healthy enough

Starting point is 01:13:14 to do them. And, you know, in the book I write about a health crisis that I had, um, that I, that's ongoing where I have some kind of autoimmune situation going on. And for a very long time, the doctors, um, you know, some of them dismissed me as sort of, you know, what I call, I go back and I trace the history of sort of the wandering uterus and hysteria and the way that sometimes, um, certainly male doctors, especially, um, kind of dismissed me as, oh, it's anxiety or, oh, you need to sleep better when that wasn't the case at all. And so I think now, especially that, you know, I do experience symptoms from, you know, just having a compromised immune system that I'm even more acutely aware of making sure that I appreciate everything that I can do, you know, with the health that I do have.

Starting point is 01:14:07 What a, I suppose, testament, at least in your case, to the price of admission for medical school possibly being worth it in just putting you on that rotation so that you have this vivid imagery and autobiographical experience that keeps you aware of how valuable your health is that is so easy to take for granted if you haven't seen firsthand those who are robbed of health or who will soon die i mean that's uh in a way i'm worth worth the MCAT and the prep and all that put together. Not to say that people should go to medical school just for that, but in your case, very valuable. And I would say some people, you know, there was something that really shocked me when I was in medical school, which is we were doing our dissection unit. So you have these cadavers and you're learning, you know, anatomy and physiology. And, um, and, uh, one of the, you have to figure out why your cadaver died,

Starting point is 01:15:12 why that person died. Um, so that they don't tell you, you have to like figure it out by what you notice when you're dissecting that person. And one of them had died of lung cancer and it became very clear that the person had been a smoker and you could even see like nicotine stains in the person's nails. And the person, one of the medical students who was working on that cadaver would go outside at the breaks and smoke. Wow. a smoker and that didn't stop him from smoking. So I think there's this idea, you know, some people have this idea that they're, you know, immortal, you know, they're not, they're not vulnerable to the vicissitudes of, of, you know, just being a living organism. Um, and that, that was so striking to me. And that image too, from medical school stays with me, like the idea of how strong denial can be. And as a therapist, when I see people in me, like the idea of how strong denial can be. Right.

Starting point is 01:16:05 And as a therapist, when I see people in denial, I always think of that fellow student of mine who would just be dissecting this person who died of lung cancer and then go outside and smoke. Wow. That's how much sometimes denial serves us. Denial is a way of staving off these really uncomfortable feelings that we don't want to acknowledge. And my job as a therapist is to really get under that denial and to be able to help somebody to see that dealing with the feelings is going to be a lot easier than staying in denial. I know this is going to sound like a terrible question because I'm sure it could be a 15-volume set of books, but how do you do that? There's denial everywhere. I've experienced denial.

Starting point is 01:16:51 Most people have experienced some form of denial. How do you help someone get past denial? Or what are some of the approaches or tools that you might use? Well, I think it's a way of helping to communicate to them that our fear of our feelings is often scarier than the feelings themselves. Right. And so I help them to feel a little bit at a time. And I help to contain them so that they'll feel something and they realize it's not going to kill them. And then they're kind of like, oh, that, that, like I gave my, you know, I gave my, myself some room to breathe. And then I think that they, you know,

Starting point is 01:17:42 that helps them to say, okay, I can feel a little bit more and I can feel a little bit more. And also just that what they discover when the more that they feel is that feelings are like weather systems. They blow in, they blow out. It's not like because you feel something, the storm is going to stay there indefinitely. The sun's going to come in and then it's going to get windy and then maybe a little rain will blow in again. And so, you know, it moves. You know, it's, it's again, what I was talking about earlier, that both and, that you can feel something that is hard, that is difficult, right? That causes you pain. And you can also have joy in, in, in the book, there's somebody who's dealing with a really, really tragic death. And the person was

Starting point is 01:18:25 saying that like after the child died, after his child died, that he was with his other child and they laughed, you know, they were like, they laughed and they were like playing a game and they laughed. And he was like, how could I laugh? My child just died a week ago. And he felt like the worst person in the world for feeling that. But it's like, that's the weather system. Doesn't mean that you aren't in excruciating pain, but we can also laugh, both and. Yeah, both and. I'm just taking a second to think about that. I mean, I could see. Yeah, it's wild. I mean, I've been thinking about pain and the experience of pain and the metabolizing of pain and the persistence for some people of various types of physical or psycho-emotional pain and what we are about to go through in the sense that we're recording this on Friday the 13th, March 13th, and we are about to have, I think, some very challenging weeks ahead of us that will probably exacerbate or magnify some of the tendencies that we all have

Starting point is 01:19:36 that we might not notice as much when we are not under duress. So it's something that I'm thinking about a lot. How are you yourself? We don't have to speak to the virus and the disease and so on itself and get into COVID-19, but for your own sort of psychological health, how are you thinking about practices for yourself over the next handful of weeks or months, if you have? Yeah. So I will speak about COVID just because it's right here in front of us. So my son is now doing remote learning. His school has closed. And one of the things that I noticed is how happy I am to see him. Um, that, you know, every time I walk by and I see him, it's like,

Starting point is 01:20:30 wow, you know, in, in a few years he's going to be in college and I'm not going to get to see him. And I, I'm just sort of relishing the time that I have with him so that I'm not just watching the news every second. I'm not just focusing on here's this update, here's this other update. I think that that can be really anxiety provoking and we need to be anxious, right? And there's a lot of Viktor Frankl in my book, you know, right? And so, you know, one of the things he said very famously was that, you know, there's a, I'm going to paraphrase here, but there's a freedom that nobody can take away from, there's one thing that nobody can take away from us. And that's the freedom to choose our attitude in any given situation. And he was talking about being in a concentration camp. That he was saying, even in the midst of this horror of the concentration camp, I get to choose where my mind goes. Like only I get to choose that. And I think it's very relevant to what's going on with COVID

Starting point is 01:21:48 in the sense of, um, we can have a dance party in our living room because we happen to be home, right? Which doesn't mean that we don't feel the horror of everything else that's going on and the anxiety and, and, and, and don't feel for all the families that are losing their loved ones and don't feel for all the people who are in ICUs right now. Um, and don't feel for all the families that are losing their loved ones and don't feel for all the people who are in ICUs right now and don't feel the terror of what's going to happen when many more of us get it and there are no beds. All of that is very real. You and I were supposed to be talking in person right now

Starting point is 01:22:19 at South by Southwest, and here we are doing our remote. And thank God that we are, that we're able to connect with people, which I think is really important in this time, is using technology to connect with people when you can't physically be in the same space. Definitely. And I've been recognizing more and more so

Starting point is 01:22:43 since I've been in self-quarantine effectively for the last two weeks because of pre-existing pulmonary issues and am taking extra precaution that fortunately I have my girlfriend and my dog here, so I'm not isolated and I can see the challenges that would be magnified, certainly, if that were the case. But just seeing other faces, like we used video for a few minutes before we went to audio only to record this episode, using FaceTime when possible to see human faces of friends, of loved ones, and so on. That in and of itself I've found to really, on some evolutionary level or evolved basis, to be very helpful for staving off feelings of isolation. Just something that simple and fortunately simple, given the technology that most of us,

Starting point is 01:23:44 if you're listening to this podcast, chances are you have technology that would allow that. Well, yeah, that's true. And I think that in therapy, you know, a lot of people will say, well, can I do like a phone session or can I do like text therapy? And I don't even know how that would go. But apparently people do that. And I don't even like doing Skype therapy. A colleague of mine said that Skype therapy is like doing therapy with a condom on. Because, you know, it's like there's something about the energy in the room where you're both, you can hear the other person breathe. There's the same kind of smells and sounds in the room. And there's something about just the physicality of being in the same space. And so often in our

Starting point is 01:24:32 lives, when we get together with people, we have like a phone on the table or a text comes in, and we're not actually spending an hour face-to-face with no distractions. And I think especially now in this time where we have to isolate, um, yeah, the next best thing would be to FaceTime or Skype or do something where you can see someone's face. Um, but when we're not in this time, I really, really recommend that people go spend time in person, right? After we're not worried about coronavirus. It's so important to physically be in the same space with somebody and not be interrupted by your device. We all will survive just fine if you spend an hour with somebody and not check your phone. Agreed. Very much agreed. I have just a handful of additional questions for you. One is,

Starting point is 01:25:29 you mentioned Viktor Frankl. Are there books that you have reread many times or a handful of times or given often as gifts besides your own? Are there books that come to mind for you that you have particularly reread or gifted oh yeah um i love giving books as gifts they're they're my favorite gift to receive and uh i love to give them because i feel like i'm giving an experience to somebody it's not just an object but it's an it's a an experience that they will have as they read something. So books to me are the best gift. And one book that I give a lot is a book called The Tennis Partner by Abraham Verghese. I don't know if you know who he is. He's a doctor. He's now at Stanford, but he was in El Paso for a long time. Um, he's, he wrote,

Starting point is 01:26:26 um, cutting for stone, which I think got made into a movie. Um, but this book was about when it's about his relation. We never really hear about male friendship. And this is a book about his relationship when he was getting out of his marriage and he was supervising interns in El Paso. And an intern came to him who had an addiction. And this person, it was this intern's last chance to not get kicked out of an internship program and get sober. And it's about their friendship. And they really bonded on the tennis court, of all things. They're both serious tennis players. And it's an incredibly moving story about, you know, the limits of what we can do to help another person,

Starting point is 01:27:20 the attachment that we can feel to a complete stranger, the ways that other people are mirrors for us and help us to see our own issues in a different way. It's just a beautiful, beautiful meditation on not just male friendship, but I think just human connection. So I give that one a lot. By the way, to men, to women, people of all ages, it's a book that people really respond to. Beautiful. Thank you for that. I have just

Starting point is 01:27:47 written that down and will be checking on that myself. And you have an incredible number of projects, it seems. Your book, maybe you should talk to someone who's being adapted as a television series. You have a new podcast, as you mentioned, Dear Therapists, which is being produced by Katie Couric. Why these two projects? I'm sure you have more in the hopper, but how did you end emotional health and normalizing it to just a greater audience. You know, I mean, the book has been very widely read. But I think that TV reaches people in a way that really nothing else can. Um, I mean, podcasts, of course, your podcast, look at what your podcast is doing. You know,

Starting point is 01:28:51 it's rating better than many television shows, I guess. But, um, but I feel like also just seeing, seeing other people's dilemmas, seeing other people's struggles, see other people kind of the ridiculousness of the human condition, you know, we're all ridiculous and we take ourselves so seriously. And I think that when you can see yourself through the lens of another person's story, it's kind of like this, Tim. It's like, if I said to you, Tim, you do this all the time. You're like this. You'd be like, no, I don't.

Starting point is 01:29:18 I'm not like that. Or you might feel offended even if you recognized it and you said, yeah, I kind of am. But you might feel like it was critical. But if you see somebody else doing the very thing that you do, you're like, oh yeah, I do that. It's so much easier to see ourselves through other people and what they do as mirrors for us. And so I think in the television show, what I'm really excited about is it's not a show about therapists. It's a show about people who happen to be therapists. And there's a distinction. And the distinction is one would be like, oh, let's do all that sort of stereotypical stuff that people think about therapy, which is every single trope that you've seen on television about therapists.

Starting point is 01:30:00 Or we can do something about human beings, and this happens to be their career. And so I'm really excited. And I think the guys from the Americans who, you know, I think write with a lot of nuance and, you know, I think they're so smart. And they're also able to infuse it with that kind of real authentic humor, not jokey humor, but humor of like, yes, I see myself in that. And that's funny. So I'm really excited to, to kind of bring that to more people. Um, and I think with the podcast, it's the same thing.

Starting point is 01:30:32 It's about, you know, one thing that we're doing on the podcast is I have a cohost who's Guy Winch. Um, Guy and I have both done Ted talks and, and we met through sort of the Ted world and he is a psychotherapist in New York. And we really want people to, it's one thing in the column to be able to say, you know, let me examine your situation on paper. But it's another thing to just be able to have a conversation with someone and hear what they're saying and ask them those questions. And so not only are we going to have people come on and talk about, you know, like what's their dilemma, but then Guy and I are going to have a private conversation, which the listener

Starting point is 01:31:09 will hear, but the person who wrote the letter will not, which is how do therapists talk about this? How do we think about their problem? And then how do we go back to them? And kind of what you were asking earlier, how do you say to them the thing that you want to say in a way that they'll be able to hear it, which might be different from the way Guy and I discussed it with each other. So you get to hear that difference. And then we give them our suggestions. And then what's interesting is in the column, you never get to hear what happened. I get to hear because sometimes people will write to me and say, I tried your advice and here's what happened. But the reader doesn't get to hear. In our podcast, we bring them on a few weeks later and they tell us what happened.

Starting point is 01:31:50 Oh, that's excellent. And I think that's so interesting because people can learn so much from that. We really want people to learn from this podcast. We want them to see something about their own lives from this podcast. And so, you know, what worked and what didn't and why? I think that's always so helpful. And Guy Winch is one of the most amazing names I've ever heard in my life. That is a great name. He's great. He's really great. You need to listen to his TED Talks.

Starting point is 01:32:11 I'll check it out. Where can people learn more about both the television show, the podcast, and so on? If they want to find either or both of them, of course, you have your website, laurigotlieb.com, which I'll link to in the show notes as well. Are there other places they should look? I will be posting about these on social media, so they can always follow me on Twitter at laurigotlieb1. They can follow me on Instagram, which I'm still trying to figure out how to use, at laurigotlieb underscore author. I'm on Facebook at Gottlieb Laurie. iHeart will be – actually, the promos are going up right now for the podcast, just as we're getting our inbox full of letters.

Starting point is 01:32:57 And we've been taping a few of the episodes. And the TV show, I'm sure you will hear about through normal media channels. Wow, that's when you know you have the right partners. Right. If you say, don't worry, you'll hear about it. And what a pleasure this conversation has been. On the socials, are you most fluent with use of Twitter or is another option best if people want to wave and say hello?

Starting point is 01:33:28 Twitter is probably the one that my, as a not tech savvy person, that's the one that's easiest for me to use. But I'm on all of them. They can say hi to me on any of them. Great. And that is at Laurie Gottlieb one with the number one at the end of your full name. This has been such a pleasure. I'm really

Starting point is 01:33:45 happy that we were able to carve out the time and that you're willing to carve out the time to have this conversation. I have pages and pages of notes. And I also appreciate you being so open to discuss the personal stories. I really, really appreciate it. This has been also therapeutic for me just to have the conversation. Oh, thank you so much, Tim. I'm such a fan of your blog, your podcast. I really admire how much you've been willing to share with everybody. And I was so excited to have this conversation with you. So thank you for having me on. My pleasure entirely. Hopefully not the last conversation that we have. And for everybody listening,

Starting point is 01:34:31 I will link to everything we've talked about in the show notes, including all of the new projects that Lori is working on, as well as the website, lorigotlieb.com in the show notes, which can always be found at tim.blog forward slash podcast. And until next time, thanks for listening. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one,

Starting point is 01:34:55 this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? And would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun for the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness

Starting point is 01:35:36 before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. Hiring can be hard, really hard, and it can also be super, super expensive and painful if you get it wrong. I certainly have had that experience firsthand multiple times, and I am not eager to repeat it. So I certainly have had that experience firsthand multiple times,

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Starting point is 01:37:38 In the mornings, I regularly start with their mushroom coffee instead of regular coffee, and it doesn't taste like mushroom. Let me explain this. First of all, zero sugar, zero calories, half the caffeine of regular coffee. It's easy on my stomach, tastes amazing. And all you have to do is add hot water. I use travel packets. I've been to probably a dozen countries with various products from Four Sigmatic, and their mushroom coffee is top of the list. That's number one. I travel with it. I recommend it. I give it to my employees. I give it to house guests. So if you're one of the 60% of Americans or more who drink coffee daily, consider switching it up. This stuff is amazing. That's part one. That is the cognitive enhancement side,

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #415: Lori Gottlieb — The Power of Getting to Unknow Yourself

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #415: Lori Gottlieb — The Power of Getting to *Unknow* Yourself

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #415: Lori Gottlieb — The Power of Getting to Unknow Yourself