The Tim Ferriss Show - #583: Susan Cain on Transforming Pain, Building Your Emotional Resilience, Exploring Sufi Wisdom, Tapping into Bittersweet Songs, and Seeking the Shards of Light

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Starting point is 00:04:45 This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss Show. Welcome, friends. My guest today is Susan Cain. That's C-A-I-N. You can find her on Twitter at Susan Cain. Susan is the author of Quiet Journal, Quiet Power, The Secret Strength of Introverts, and Quiet, The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, which spent eight years on the New York Times bestseller list and has been translated into 40 languages. Susan's TED Talk has been viewed more than 40 million times and was named by Bill Gates as one of his all-time favorite talks. LinkedIn named her the top sixth influencer in the world, just behind Richard Branson and Melinda Gates. Susan partners with Malcolm Gladwell, Adam Grant, and Dan Pink, all good people, to curate the Next Big Idea Book Club.

Starting point is 00:05:27 They donate all of their proceeds to children's literacy programs. For my first conversation with Susan on the podcast, you can go to Tim.blog forward slash Susan Cain. Her newest book, which she's been working on for some time, and I know because we talked about it last time, bittersweet subtitle, How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole. And I am very

Starting point is 00:05:48 excited to dig into this. We'll provide links to all the social in the show notes, but you can find everything Susan Cain at, you guessed it, susancain.net. Susan, welcome back to the show. Nice to see you. It is so great to see you, Tim. Thanks for having me. And I thought I would start with this title, Bittersweet, which is interesting and also funny to me on a couple of levels. Am I making it up or was there a point in your life that you had dark chocolate at least once a day? Am I inventing that? Am I just making that up whole cloth? No, the funny thing is that you're casting that in the past tense when in fact it's just like a constant ongoing present. I don't think there's ever been a day in my life that I haven't had dark chocolate. What's your daily driver and then what are your indulgences when it comes to chocolate? Do you have any favorites or go-tos?

Starting point is 00:06:37 I like luxury chocolates and all that stuff, but I don't even really need that. I just really love little semi-sweet chocolate chips that I stick in my yogurt and I'm happy as a clam. It's the little things. It is the little things. I'd like to start on the creative process side with respect to the new book because I enjoy chatting about that stuff and I'm thinking a lot about creative process these days for myself. So where I thought we could go, and I'm going to do a little retrospective, just like you said, you're treating things in past tense,

Starting point is 00:07:12 but maybe they are present tense. That's going to be really my first question. If we look back at Quiet, took seven years to write, if I'm remembering correctly. You had two kids during that time. And your philosophy about writing is that it's deep love that has to be protected at all costs. By the way, you can reserve the right to revise any of these. This is from the last conversation. Because of that, I don't care how much time it takes. And then asking about how

Starting point is 00:07:39 you're writing, this is what I remember slash am reading from the last time. So you take whatever thesis you're working on, then you spend a year or two just walking around the world, looking at everything through the lens of that thesis. And then, and I want to know what has changed, if anything, asking how you organize your notes. So you stick everything in this monstrous Word doc. It's like 700, 800 pages by the time you're done. Then you separate out things by topic, putting them into eight or nine loose leaf binders. Then you organize them and try to take advantage of emotional states as they come up during the organization. So all of this is super cool to me. If we apply this to the new project, just as like a rough scattering of concepts, how did you come up with the thesis for the new book? And then what did

Starting point is 00:08:21 the creative process look like after that? So those are two really different questions. So let's do one at a time. How did I come up with a thesis for the new book? I feel like the only point of writing really, at least to me, is telling the truth of what it's like to be alive. Telling truths that people don't really talk about in everyday life. Because if they talked about it in everyday life, you could just get it just from chatting with your friends or your colleagues or whomever. But there's something about writing and art in general where people are just really digging deep.

Starting point is 00:08:56 And to me, the best moments in life are also when I'm reading a book or hearing music or whatever, where I feel like, oh my gosh, that person just articulated something that I have experienced and I never really thought about it that way. And I know exactly that person's heart and mind. I know them. And maybe they lived 2000 years ago and I still know them. With this book, Bittersweet, I have been feeling for my entire life. And there was an event that happened 25 or 30 years ago where I really felt it. I've been feeling my whole life when I would hear bittersweet minor key music, you know, music that expresses a kind of longing for some state that is forever elusive to us. I'd hear music like that and it's supposedly sad, right? Minor key music is sad music, but I didn't feel sad.

Starting point is 00:09:46 I love that kind of music. And what I felt when I heard it, what I still feel when I hear it is joy and uplift and goosebumps and a kind of love and communion and like a gratitude to the musician that they were able to transform pain that all of us have in one way or another to transform pain into beauty. And what happened is like 25 years ago, I used to be a lawyer. That was a whole detour in my life. Oh, I remember. I remember. Yeah. And so I was in law school and I was listening to music like this in my dorm and some friends came to my dorm and I was like blasting it out on my stereo speakers, you know, and the friends came to pick me up for class and they thought it was the weirdest thing. And one of them was like, why are you listening to

Starting point is 00:10:32 this funeral music? And I had that reaction like you, I thought it was really funny. And then I went to class and that was the end of the story, except I could not stop thinking about it. Why am I so drawn to this music? And then I started looking and finding that it turns out that people listen to the happy songs on their playlist 175 times, and they listen to the sad songs 800 times. And it's the sad songs that give them chills and make us feel connected and sublime. And this might sound at first blush like a kind of small question. You know, what is it about sad music that could be so moving? But it became a much bigger quest for me.

Starting point is 00:11:14 I went off into this five or six or seven year quest of reading art and literature and exploring all the wisdom traditions, talking to psychologists and neuroscientists to figure out what is this power of a bittersweet and even melancholic way of being. And what I've learned is that this bittersweet tradition, it's been with us for centuries. And what it teaches us is that we are creatures who are born to transform pain into beauty. And that's something our culture will never tell us. I, as expected, have a number of follow-up questions. Of course you do. So the first, you might hate this because it's like, Jesus, Ferris, can we get away from the

Starting point is 00:11:55 nitty-gritty prescriptive autobiographical stuff? As far as minor key music goes or music or musicians who utilize minor key well, Do you have any suggestions for people who might want to do a taste test? Gosh, yes. In fact, I put together a bittersweet playlist. You'll be able to find it. But I've been obsessed my whole life. I've had this deep and crazy love my whole life for the music of Leonard Cohen. I mean, I love him. And I had never actually really paid attention before to why I love him so much. I just loved him. But when I was researching this book, I came to understand exactly what it was because it's like his whole life philosophy that's embodied in all his music is exactly what I have believed viscerally before I had words to articulate it. I can tell you now

Starting point is 00:12:40 what it is or we could save it. Let's jump in. I'll bookmark and come back to some other questions that I have, but take it away. This is Freeform. He has so many different songs, but there's one line that people quote again and again for a good reason. And the line is, there is a crack in everything. That's where the light gets in. And it's like this idea, everything's broken, everything's beautiful simultaneously. That's the nature gets in. And it's like this idea, everything's broken, everything's beautiful simultaneously. That's the nature of life. And there's such a truth and there's such a relief in being able to express that this is actually what life is. And he, in turn, I found out was drawing from this tradition of the mystical side of Judaism, the Kabbalah. And the idea there is that all of creation, all of being was originally one vessel of divine light that then shattered. And we're living now in the world after

Starting point is 00:13:34 the shattering, but the divine shards of light are still all around us. And so, like, they're buried all around us. And the goal is to just be discovering the shards and picking them up wherever we can. And the amazing thing is that you are going to pick up and notice completely different ones from the ones I would notice. To me, it would look like a lump of coal and you're going to see this gleaming thing. The Leonard Cohen line also makes me think of, and I think I'm getting the attribution right, but poetry from Rumi, in fact. I don't know if it's the crack, it may be the wound where the light enters us. And I want to come back to that in an adjacent way a little bit later, because I want to ask you about Sufism specifically, because I believe you had some exposure in the process of doing

Starting point is 00:14:23 research for this book. And I want to ask why that's the case. But before we get there— Very much so. And I'm just going to interrupt to say, like, so much so that I actually have a Rumi poem, like, sitting within hand's length. So here it is. Yeah. So we can talk about that. Wait, wait, wait.

Starting point is 00:14:36 Okay. So now I have to—I'll snap at the fly lure on the water. Can you read the quote, please? Would you be willing to share the poem that you have? Absolutely. The quote is like an excerpt from a poem. So, I just want to set up the story of the poem because it's this poem called Love Dogs. And it's about a man who is praying to Allah. And then a cynical person comes along and says to him, why are you bothering to do this? Have you ever gotten an answer back? And the guy is like, no. He thinks about it. I have never gotten the answer back. did you stop praying? And he says, well, I never got the answer. I never heard anything back. So, it's pointless.

Starting point is 00:15:29 And this is what Hiddur says to him. And this is the part I have inches away from me every day when I work. It says, this longing you express is the return message. The grief you cry out from draws you toward union. Your pure sadness that wants help is the secret cup oh that's good yeah and i've been a deep agnostic slash atheist my whole life and one of the biggest things i learned from this whole bittersweet project is that it's such a false dichotomy this difference between atheists and believers and And we all feel this longing. And the longing we feel is the return message for everyone. Yeah, for sure. And also, a lot of the rational materialists

Starting point is 00:16:12 might abhor faith as it manifests in what they consider religion, but almost all of our lives and many of our beliefs and a lot of our behaviors are completely predicated on faith. That's a broader topic that is probably for another conversation. But let's talk about music for a second. kind of vibrations of sound in different organizations can have different effects on animals and humans and plants is mind-boggling to begin with. But why is it, do you think, that minor key music elicits what some would consider sadness? Is it just social conditioning

Starting point is 00:17:01 because we are taught early on by other people that that is the case, or is there more to it neurologically or otherwise? So people debate this question. I do not believe it's the product of social conditioning. I believe it's the structure of the music itself. The nature of minor key music is that you don't have resolution. And I think that's the nature of being. It's actually hard to get away from the religion question because what I really think is that— Oh, I'm open to the religion question. I'm not—yeah, my views have become much more, not flexible, but accepting of many facets of religion in the last five to ten years. So, I'm completely sensed that in you. I mean, heard it from you and sensed it also. I believe that the fundamental heart of humanity, of being alive, is the sense that there is a perfect and beautiful world out there somewhere, and we're not in it, Western culture is the banishment from the Garden of Eden. But you see this kind of longing for a different world or the longing for the beloved of the soul in the Sufi tradition.

Starting point is 00:18:12 You see manifestations of this in any tradition that you look at. And what minor key music is really doing is expressing that. That's really all it's doing. It's saying, we love beauty, we love truth, we love love, and we can't completely have it right now. But there's something about the fact that we're all stuck in this condition together of not having it, but also united in the desire to reach for it. And these beautiful acts that very deeply flawed humans sometimes take in order to try to get closer

Starting point is 00:18:46 to that garden. That's the best part of humanity. And that's what the music is saying. Yeah, I've been very fascinated in exploring music that historically I've had almost no exposure to for the emotions and the gradation of emotions that they can elicit. And specifically, and I'm no musician, so people feel free to correct me on the internet afterwards, I'm sure you will. But unequal temperament music. music, Persian music, what we might consider Arab or Arabic music, have a range and a level of resolution in a sense. Not resolution in the sense of finality or answers, but of fidelity that is unlike anything I've ever heard. So it's produced in me emotions that are very hard to trigger using, let's just call it modern equal temperament music. So not to dwell on the music side, but I do think that it is

Starting point is 00:19:55 such a simple way to get root access to the brain or to the emotional self. It's really incredible. I will say though, on the minor key side, so there is minor key music I love. And for the life of me, I can't figure out why minor key piano music specifically is just, generally speaking, punishing to me. Whereas what we might consider stringed instruments, cello Cello, et cetera, I find more nourishing in some sense. I have no idea why that's the case, but that is the case for me. I get sad and I want to ask you to sort of talk about the definition of terms, right? Because I would imagine there are people who feel grief, say, with the death of a loved one. Then there are people who feel depressed or despondent. And these are distinct.

Starting point is 00:20:51 They seem to be distinct things. Perhaps we could just start there. Would you like to just define or put a microscope on what you were aiming to explore emotionally in Bittersweet? Bittersweetness itself, I define as the state in which you know, you accept, and you truly inhabit the idea that life is always simultaneously joy and sorrow. It's light and dark. There's an amazing Arabic expression, days of honey, days of onions. Yeah, it's not good. And it's also the sense of like a deep awareness of the impermanence of this life.

Starting point is 00:21:33 It's also a kind of curiously piercing joy at the beauty of things. So it's all of this. And I think of bittersweetness as a state of mind that some of us, just by the nature of our temperaments, are drawn to from the get-go. And other people arrive there, whether through life experiences or just as they get older or whatever it is. And in the book, you know, like you can't really explore this idea of bittersweetness without then talking also about sorrow and longing and grief and everything that you were just getting at. And so we can talk about all of that. But I started with this nature of bittersweetness and what it is. And we actually, we did some preliminary studies. I say we,

Starting point is 00:22:13 I did them with the psychologists, Scott Barry Kaufman and a cognitive scientist, and also David Yadin, who you may know, he's at Johns Hopkins and he does a lot of amazing research with psychedelics and spirituality. So he's like right up your alley. And the three of us designed together a bittersweet quiz and did some preliminary testing with it. And we found that people who are in a bittersweet state of mind are also in a state of mind that predisposes them to creativity and to states of awe and spirituality and kind of wonder and all those kinds of states. So it was really that whole suite of human experiences that I've just been deeply attracted to and that I feel like we do not have a language for talking about it. And if you look at psychology, psychology makes, right now, it makes no distinction between melancholy and depression. And you can think

Starting point is 00:23:12 of melancholy as being kind of a synonym for bittersweetness, but you won't find it in psychology. You find it in all the wisdom traditions and the artists and the poets, they've been talking about it for thousands of years but in psychology no it's just depression that's all there is so let me get personal for a second uh that's sort of directing the arrow back and then i would love to to your thoughts so as someone personally who has struggled with depression throughout my entire life i think i have conflated those two myself. And if I see the onset or feel the onset of anything resembling melancholy, with the exception of this unequal temperament music, which is interesting, I tend to have a panic response. So I'm like, okay, I'm walking along a narrow path on the edge of, I wouldn't say a cliff,

Starting point is 00:24:07 but a very steep incline. And if I start to slip, there's the potential that I fall and then tumble and then off I go. So I have this panic response. So the question then is, what is the value? I'm just going to stand in for the listener, right? Like, why should someone explore this? So first of all, I hear you. And it may be, I don't know that we really know, but it may be that these states are a difference of degree as opposed to a difference in kind. And I feel like your reaction is suggesting that it's a difference in degree. I'm not saying it's a rational response. It's just a kind of knee-jerk fear reaction. Yeah, it makes total sense. But the value in these states of being, and I'm sure you've experienced it when you hear that music that

Starting point is 00:24:54 happens to speak to you, we all have different triggers, but the value is it's the root of our creative impulse. The word longing, we think of it in our culture as being a kind of passive and helpless state. Like, you know, you're like mired in longing, you would think. But the etymology of that word is to reach for something. You know, you're like longing. You're literally getting longer as you reach for something. So that's what creative people are doing. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:25:23 I mean, creative people, what's motivating them, they may not be conscious of it. They're like, they know that there's something more shining and beautiful over there and they want to bring it over here by bringing something into being. So one thing that's in it for you, you could say, is creativity. What's the payoff, Susan? God damn it. Sorry, I'm kidding. No, it's good. It's good. It's good for, Susan? God damn it. Sorry, I'm kidding. Kidding. No, it's good. It's good.

Starting point is 00:25:46 It's good for you to ask the questions that people are skeptically thinking to themselves. And then another one is, it's one of the best pathways that we have towards love and connection, especially now when everything is so divisive. To shut ourselves off from one of the strongest pathways we have, I think is a real mistake. But I talk about this in the book, and I don't know, I don't want to go in too much of a detour, but... Detour away. Detour away? Okay. Three-tour, if you must, yeah. Okay. So, Darwin, he's known for survival of the fittest, right?

Starting point is 00:26:22 I did not see that coming. Didn't see Darwin coming. Yes, please proceed. Okay, wait, how do I say this? Maybe I won't start with Darwin. Oh, no, I like Darwin. I like Darwin. I'm just giving you a hard time. I love Darwin. No, no, no, it's cool.

Starting point is 00:26:33 I'm just trying to figure out what's the best way in. We are designed physically, viscerally, deep in our makeup to respond to the sorrow of other beings. And we think of Darwin as being all about the survival of the fittest. And Darwin himself was this incredibly gentle and melancholic soul who was extremely horrified by the cruelty that people and animals are capable of. But what he also noticed is that both animals and people seem to have a kind of visceral response to the distress of other beings. And the great psychologist at Berkeley, his name is Dacher Keltner, kind of followed this line,

Starting point is 00:27:13 and he started exploring all of this. And he did all these amazing studies. I'll give you just one example. He found that we all have a vagus nerve. This is like the biggest bundle of nerves in our body. And the vagus nerve, it's very ancient. It's evolutionarily ancient as a part of us. It controls our breathing, our digestion, our sex drive. It's like really fundamental. And also, our vagus nerve responds when we see other beings in distress. Your vagus nerve is reacting. So this gigantic collection of nerves in our bodies that does all our most fundamental things is also reacting to the sorrow of others. And I think that's huge. At a time when everything is divisive politics, I feel like if we could just get into a mode where it's like, just everybody gets to tell their stories, no action required for a while, just tell the stories, tell what you feel. And that's it. And that's a way of tapping into one of the best and most started listening to this music, right? Because you might ask,

Starting point is 00:28:27 well, if you're so afraid of slipping, why are you listening to this music? Yeah, that is a good question. And the answer is, I feel like having had some exposure to it and having not slipped, that, and this is not going to be the best comparison or phrasing to use, but there's this expression, you know, the more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in combat. And I also feel that in this instance, if you're afraid of slipping, if you're going to have a panic response when you encounter certain emotions, for me at least, I am trying to almost like Iocane powder and the Princess Bride, to expose myself little by little so that when it happens, and of course it's going to happen, you're human. People are going to die,

Starting point is 00:29:11 tragedies will occur, love will be lost, things will happen, that I'll be more resilient in the face of those inevitable times by inoculating myself in a sense. And then pursuing it in that way, I ended up enjoying a lot of this music, which I did not expect. And that's kind of how I ended up where I am. I would love to talk about or have you describe the research a bit and explain where Sufism comes into it. And my understanding, which is very, very minimal, or I should say my attraction to Sufism and other, let's just call it mystic or mystical traditions,

Starting point is 00:29:57 is that for me at least, it describes more of a direct experience of what they might term the divine as opposed to an intermediated religious structure that is predicated on certain power dynamics within like a human organization, right? So the direct experience. And I just would love to know how on earth Sufism came into the picture and what other things came into the picture. I like your description of mystical traditions in general. I think they appeal to people who, for whatever reason, are allergic to dogma or tend to be skeptics or whatever it is. People who aren't just going to accept something because it's written down.

Starting point is 00:30:38 You want to think for yourself, you want to experience it for yourself. So there's that aspect of Sufism, and I am that type of person. I drive my husband crazy sometimes, as I say, because I'm the person where if you say X, I'm thinking, well, what about Y? That's just how my brain goes. That aspect really did get me interested in mysticism in general. But Sufism in particular, I guess what happened was, first I met some Sufis, and then as I started to learn about it, this one Sufi teacher, his name is Llewellyn Von Lee, whose videos you can find all over the internet. It's an amazing name. It's an amazing name. And he speaks in just the gentlest, most lilting Welsh inflected accent.

Starting point is 00:31:22 He's just mesmerizing to listen to. And somehow I found his videos because when I met these Sufis, I got really interested in this question of Sufism and longing. And longing is the thing that I've been feeling all my life that I couldn't explain. And anyway, he says, Sufism was at first heartache. Only later was it something to talk about. Say more about that, please. And just for those people wondering, Llewellyn, I'm not even going to try to spell, just throw two L's, E-W. The Von Lee is, I thought it was V-O-N, it's V-A-U-G-H-A-N hyphen L-E-E. So could you say more about what you just said, just to expand on that a bit? You find the following idea in all the mystical traditions, that longing carries you closer to the divine. So the heartache that you feel, Llewellyn von Lee would say, we often mistake as depression. We mistake our sorrows sometimes as depression

Starting point is 00:32:26 when what it really is, is a longing for whatever you want to call it. He would call it the beloved of the soul, but I call it the perfect and beautiful world. Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz calls it somewhere over the rainbow, but we all have that. And there are a thousand different words for it. In every culture you find it, and I talk about a lot of them in the book, but we all come in with this kind of fundamental heartache that we mistake. I don't mean to say that people who are experiencing depression, that it's not real. I'm not saying that at all. I'm just saying there's this other dimension of our experience.

Starting point is 00:33:02 I was also just thinking that what you're saying could be general in the sense of somewhere over the rainbow or longing for the beloved of the soul. And we mistakenly label that as depression, which can have many causes. Depression, biochemical, could be event-based, any number of things. But also you could have a longing for, I was just thinking, connection with close friends and feel the symptoms of that deficit and then mistakenly label it as this internally generated isolated depression. Whereas in fact, you're just longing for something that is deeply treasured or nourishing to you, whether you realize it or not. I think that's right. And I think because our culture doesn't really, we don't have a language

Starting point is 00:33:52 for longing, even though in the Christian tradition, the most quoted line from St. Augustine is, our heart is restless till it rests in thee. So as I say, you find this in every single tradition. This is a deep aspect of being human, but because we just have no language or concept for it in contemporary culture, it actually ends up causing a problem in our love relationships because the same longing that we have for perfect and unconditional love from our loved ones and our friends, that's just a different manifestation of this fundamental longing that all humans come into the world with. And so, when we get frustrated with our partners or our friends because they have this foible or that one,

Starting point is 00:34:37 or they're not understanding this thing about us or that thing, yes, there's concrete issues to work through, but sort of underneath it, there's also this feeling of, I thought you were going to be the Garden of Eden and you're not. And so understanding this aspect of ourselves can be very illuminating for our daily lives too. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. These days, it can be hard to find and hire the and we'll be right questions to get your role in front of only the most qualified within your network and far beyond. Then use the simple tools on LinkedIn Jobs to quickly filter and prioritize who you'd like to interview and hire. It's why small businesses rate LinkedIn Jobs number one in delivering quality hires versus leading competitors. LinkedIn Jobs helps you find the candidates

Starting point is 00:35:42 you want to talk to faster. Did you know every week nearly 40 million job seekers visit LinkedIn? Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash tim. That's linkedin.com slash tim to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. You mentioned earlier in this conversation the relationship between this longing or even sorrow and creativity. Could you elaborate on that? Just flesh out why you believe that to be the case. Any examples that come to mind. Just speak a little bit more about how creativity could be the product or byproduct of these things.

Starting point is 00:36:32 With creativity, there's a long kind of intellectual tradition of thinking about, of sort of noticing the association between creativity and a kind of sorrow. There have been studies done that have shown that many highly creative people, like a wildly disproportionate number of creative people were once orphans, were orphaned when they were children. And then there's another study where they took a group of volunteers and they had these volunteers give speeches and half the people gave speeches to audiences who were told in advance that they should smile and clap and applaud. And then the other half gave speeches to frowning audiences who seemed incredibly disapproving.

Starting point is 00:37:15 And after it was done, just as you would predict, the people who had given the speeches to the disapproving audience, they said they were in a bad mood. And the other ones were feeling kind of pumped up. And then they asked these people who had given the speeches to make collages, which they had professional artists rate for creativity later on. And they found that the people who had given the speeches to the disapproving audiences created more creative, better-rated collages. And that this was especially true for people who came in with a kind of hormonal profile that seemed to predispose them to emotionally vulnerable states. There's a lot of these different kinds of studies that we can look at. And at the same time, there's also data showing

Starting point is 00:38:04 if you're truly depressed, you're actually much less likely to be creative because depression is such an emotional black hole that sucks up everything. But I think there's something about that in-between state where you're not depressed, so you're functional, but you're acutely aware of the gap between the desired world and the one that we inhabit. And the desire to fill that gap, that's really the creative impulse. And if you look at my favorite Leonard Cohen, he would talk explicitly about that being what drove him. And his son, Adam Cohen, talks about how his whole idea was that this world is beautiful and it's broken. And what he was doing with all his songs, that they were a kind of transcendence delivery machine. Cigarettes are a way of delivering nicotine. In this case, it's music delivering transcendence to people who are inherently broken and beautiful. So I am going to ask you, not yet, but I'm going to let this gestate for a minute or two. So I'm going to ask you about what methods or tools or resources people can use if they want to explore some of those in-between states. And since you mentioned

Starting point is 00:39:20 music, I want to bring up a specific piece of music, and I'd like to ask you about it. And probably the first thing I'm going to need to ask is how on earth you pronounce these names. But you're going to love this butchering, and then I'll let you fix it. If I know how. So the song is called Hinach Yaffa by Aydin Reichel. Aydin Reichel. Aydin Reichel. Okay. So there we go.

Starting point is 00:39:49 So I want to know how you found this. I want to know why it had an impact and how it had an impact. And then use that as a segue into approaches people can take, tools, experiments, anything at all for exploring some of these in-between states. Okay. That was a whole lot of questions, so I'll do one by one. It was. So the first part is- How did I find it? This particular song, just tell me all about it. And then after that, what might people do if they want to explore these states?

Starting point is 00:40:20 Sure. Okay. So this particular song, I'm in my I'm in my fifties. So I was living in New York City back in the day when there was still, you know, those virgin mega store music places and you would go into them and I've always loved what they called world music, music from all over the place. And it was always at the back of the store and I would go to the back of the store and they had these listening stations and I would just go from one to the other and find stuff. And I found him that way. I found Idan that way. And somehow- Idan. Idan. How do you say the last name? Do you know? I believe it's Reichel.

Starting point is 00:40:54 Okay. I-D-A-N, last name R-A-I-C-H-E-L. R-A-I-C-H-E-L. Yeah. For people wondering. Yes, for people wondering. And he's just this amazing guy who I've gotten to know. And he collaborates with musicians from all over the world. And he always places himself very much on the margins and in the background and showcases all these other musicians who he's collaborating with. It's just this really generous soul. But this particular song, I don't know if there's a way to play it, actually, as part podcast maybe we could man well if you know him i do i do yeah yeah yeah so why don't we do

Starting point is 00:41:29 this yeah please if just make a note to email him and see we'd have to probably get some release or something but if he's open to having us play the song that'd be that'd be amazing i would love to do that okay okay i bet he would be open i'm guessing he would be open to it. And I really hope you all can hear it because it's so stirring. And it's basically, hinar hefa means here comes my bride, here comes my beautiful one, here comes the person I'm longing for. And it's basically, I believe- And that's Hebrew? Also, part of the song is sung in Amharic, if I'm pronouncing that language correctly. Oh, wow. Amharic? Really? Yeah. Wow. Okay. Yeah. As I say, he's like all over the world. So is it Aramaic or Amharic? Amharic is Egypt, I think.

Starting point is 00:42:14 I think it's Ethiopian, though I may be totally wrong. Yeah, yeah. Ethiopia. Yeah. Okay. No. Amharic is, yeah, the written language is amazing. And it should be Ethiopia, Afro-Asiatic language of the Southwest Semitic group. And on it goes. Yeah, very, here comes my beloved, she's coming to me across the desert, and it's a love song. It's a really interesting thing about this, and I hope we can get the music, because you'll hear it in the music. במיטתי כבר שבוע פיקשתי את שאהבה נפשי ולא מצאתי חיפשתי בין כל רחובות העיר העמוס השקרים הזאת ולא מצאתי בצהרוני השומרים מסובבים בעיר החרובי כמעט ולא מצאתי אותו So this comes back to our Sufism discussion, because also according to Llewellyn Bonn-Lee,

Starting point is 00:43:38 the Sufi teacher I was talking about, what happened is that the Sufis had always used the metaphor of the love of a woman as a metaphor for the love of God. And then what happened is that the Crusaders came east and heard these expressions, and then they brought them back into the tradition of the troubadours, who then used that way of speaking and singing to serenade maidens underneath moonlit windows. And I love that because it's telling us that that impulse to fall passionately in love with another human is actually the same impulse as falling passionately in love with whatever you consider the divine to be. There's no real difference between them, and you're going to hear all of that in this song. And all of it is expressed through longing. And once you become

Starting point is 00:44:28 aware of your longing, I'm telling you, you won't be able to listen to 75% of your playlist without hearing it, because that's what's driving most music. Oh, I'm excited to dig into this. I'm also excited to hear more Amharic. I've spent some time in Ethiopia, but I haven't heard much spoken in the last 10. I've certainly heard very little music. And you know how I was mentioning earlier, I've been listening to a lot of music from the Middle East, including Persia, Q, Hafez, and other poets, right? I don't think it's a mistake that the longing we're talking about is so well represented in these places

Starting point is 00:45:16 where we're finding poets who are citing, but also the exact locations or origins of the music that I'm listening to. And I wonder how much of it comes down to the language itself on some level, because Amharic is a Semitic language like Arabic, so it has similar structure, similar prefixes, suffixes. I wonder how much of that longing is, or lack of longing, is a sufficiency or failure of language because you for instance and this is not an example that translates to these other examples but if you go to brazil they may have the same word in portugal but saudade yeah sure yeah so saudade or you know japanese they have natsukashi

Starting point is 00:46:02 which is is quite different. And mono no aware, too. Ah, mono no aware. Which I may be mispronouncing. No, yeah, yeah. So mono no aware is a totally, that is a really cool one. I recently put this in Five Bullet Friday, in my newsletter, because someone had brought it to mind. Do you mind if I take it? We'll just like a little sidebar on Mono no Aware.

Starting point is 00:46:28 I love Mono no Aware. Yeah, I think I talk about it in the book. And I think I saw it in your newsletter and I was like, oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, go for it. Go for it. No, no, no. I don't remember what you said in the newsletter, but I remember it speaking to me.

Starting point is 00:46:40 I probably just grabbed, I thought entry did it did a good job so the mono no aware mono is thing so mono no aware is the pathos of things exactly but it's also translated as an empathy towards things or a sensitivity to ephemera which by the way cue shintoism if you want to really pay attention to shintoism. And if you're like, Shintoism, what the hell is that? If you ever have read any of Marie Kondo's stuff, her name is actually Marie, but Marie Kondo's stuff on talking to your objects and thanking your belongings and so on, this is actually a good example of what we're talking about. Sensitivity to ephemera is a Japanese idiom for the awareness of impermanence, which is called mujo in Japanese. It's also, by the way, could mean non-ordinary, mujo, or transients of things, and both a transient gentle sadness, or wistfulness at their passing, which is very similar to saudade, as well as a longer, deeper, gentle sadness about the state being the reality of life. All of that is encapsulated into mono no awaru.

Starting point is 00:47:56 And when we have those cherry blossom festivals, and the whole reason that, as I understand it, that the Japanese love cherry blossoms the way they do, they're very beautiful, but it's not that they're the most beautiful flower. It's that they're beautiful and they're ephemeral. So gazing upon them brings up the state that Tim was just describing, like the gentle sadness of impermanence. Perfect example. That is a perfect example. Yeah. So the sakura or the cherry blossom viewing, which is hanami, is for a very short period of time, very, very short period of time in Japan. And that's exactly right. Yeah, this impermanence is something that, in my experience, is very heavily present in Japanese culture, mythology,

Starting point is 00:48:42 and to a lesser extent, the language. I feel like you might be suggesting, you know, like, I'm seeing this a lot in Japanese culture, mythology, and to a lesser extent, the language. I feel like you might be suggesting, you know, like I'm seeing this a lot in Japanese culture, and I'm seeing it a lot in certain Middle Eastern cultures. I would say from what I've been, you know, my walk around the world that I've done for the last few years, that it's in all cultures, and it's just expressed differently. And in our culture, it's there, and it's just kind of buried. But for example, the ancient Greeks had this word potos, which I may be mispronouncing, but it's P-O-T-H-O-S. And it basically meant the longing for that which is beautiful and unattainable. And for the ancient Greeks, they understood that that state of being

Starting point is 00:49:21 was active and not passive. So Odysseus, at the beginning of the Odyssey, of Homer's Odyssey, that poem basically starts with him weeping on a beach with homesickness for his native land. So he's in a state of potos. He's described that way. And that's the state that then ignites this whole epic adventure that Western literature is premised upon. And Alexander the Great was said to be seized by Potos when he looked out at a riverbank or something and thought of all the lands that he wanted to conquer. So it's not my favorite example, but there you go. Takes all kinds. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:50:10 So there's really no culture that you look at that doesn't have a way of expressing this idea. I agree with you, some more elegantly than others, perhaps. But I think the feeling exists whether we like it or not. So given that we have thousands of years of creatives and artists, it would make sense that likely being attuned or at the very least interested in these things, there would have been expressions of it in these many disparate cultures. My question, just to bring it back to the second part of my very long 17-part question, for people who may feel like they don't have access to this or haven't experimented with it, what can they do? What are some options? So there's a few things that you can do. If you think about the way that looking at the cherry blossoms or really looking at anything that's

Starting point is 00:50:57 beautiful can make you cry from a sense of being moved, the reason that we're crying usually is because deep down it's triggering in us this sense of like, oh my God, this thing is so beautiful, but this world that we live in actually is not really that except for brief moments. So just the state of being immersed in beauty is one of the best things that you can do. I will tell you, I actually had an experience like this myself during the pandemic. So at the start of the pandemic, I was very much in the habit of waking up and doom scrolling on Twitter. And I also, I lost my father and my brother to COVID. I'm so sorry. I didn't know that. Quite early on in the pandemic. So all this stuff was happening. And I don't know why I did this.

Starting point is 00:51:46 It wasn't like I had a programmatic reason to do it. But all of a sudden, I decided I was going to start following art accounts on Twitter. And I just tweeted and said, what should I follow? And the next thing I knew, my whole feed was full of art. And then from there, I started posting art almost every day now on my social media. I start my day by posting favorite art together with an idea that I'm thinking about or a quote or whatever. And it's become an amazing daily practice that I'm sharing with people all over the world, which is so cool. Which is all a long way of saying one thing you can do is immerse yourself consciously into a state of beauty. Haven't you done that also when writing, finding locations that are beautiful or attractive?

Starting point is 00:52:33 Hasn't that also at some point, maybe it still has been part of your writing process? Yeah. Wow. I can't believe you remember that. Yeah. So yeah, I mean, pre-COVID it used to be in cafes because I love so much cafe energy. It's just like my happiest place in the world. And I don't do it so much now. So now I'm here in my office. It's a pretty good looking office, nonetheless. So I have my candle and that's the first thing I do when I come in in the morning. I like that. I always have my latte because that's magic for me. And then I have this thing.

Starting point is 00:53:09 I will show you. This is a whole story in and of itself. But when I first met my husband, I had just stopped practicing law and I wanted to be a writer. And he had just come from, he had spent the 90s working for the UN, doing peacekeeping and like the world's worst war zones of the 90s. And he had published this memoir about it. It was like amazing. And at the time, all I had really done with my writing, I was writing this memoir in sonnet form. Because that's what I was doing. And I told him about it. I showed up at our second date and I handed him some poems that I was working on.

Starting point is 00:53:57 And then that night he went home and he sent me this email, which I now have printed out in my office. So I'm going to hold it up, but I'll read it in case people are listening. Oh, I hope people are listening. Oh, I mean, like in case people can't see the video. Oh, yeah. Wait, I'm actually thinking this isn't even going to come through on the video that well. Oh, that's funny. I can only see a little bit.

Starting point is 00:54:22 It actually looks great. I can piece it together memento style, but why don't you read it and we'll go from there. It's beautifully framed. And just to be clear, it is not a printed out email. It's actually been formatted with typography and really, really jumps. Or did he actually make that? Well, I mean, the email, like all these gigantic letters in big, bold red that you see, that was what the email looked like. Oh, it was in the email. Wow. Overachiever. Go for it.

Starting point is 00:54:49 Very emphatic, exuberant kind of person. Okay. It's like the crazy Eddie email. All right. Reference for people from Long Island. Yeah, go for it. Yeah, I recognize that. I grew up in Long Island too. So he wrote, this is in response to these poems, he wrote, I want more, give me more. I know you hate to be told what to do, but fuck you. Keep writing, drop everything, write. Write, woman, write. And the write, woman, write, I need one of those. Maybe I can see on Fiverr. Can I hire him to send me an insistent email about writing? I could really use it. He's very motivating. He will do it.

Starting point is 00:55:37 Creating a sanctuary space, you know, where whatever is beautiful to you or moving to you. So pre-COVID, you're in, are you in New York City at the moment? Actually not. I'm outside New York City. Outside New York City. Pre-COVID, were there any favorite spots in or around New York just in terms of beauty for working? Just curious if you have any favorites. Oh my gosh. I mean, I wrote all of Quiet in the world's most magical cafe. And, you know, talk about longing. I just feel like for the rest of my life, I will be searching for a cafe that, you know, it's like my Jerusalem.

Starting point is 00:56:12 What's the name of the cafe? Well, it doesn't exist anymore. That's the problem. This is the thing. And I, you know, I used to travel so much before COVID and every city I went to, I would be looking for a replica of this cafe and I can't find it. It was called Doma, which means home in Czech. It was owned by Czech people. It was beautiful. And it was also frequented by the world's most just creative and thoughtful souls. And you could just feel them as you were there, you know, taping away inside your head.

Starting point is 00:56:41 All right. Somebody, Doma, find it, D-O-M-A, is that right? D-O-M-A. Is that right? D-O-M-A. Yep. All right. You can find photos online, find some video. The world wants it, or at least the two of us do. All right. So exposing yourself to beauty.

Starting point is 00:56:55 Yeah. Creating a sanctuary space. What are other options? Music we've talked about. Yeah. And we'll include a link to your playlist in the show notes. Any other suggestions or even recommendations for how to think about this? If someone has made the leap from, I don't want to feel that to, maybe I should feel that. I wonder what it would be like

Starting point is 00:57:20 to feel these things. Any other suggestions? So another one is captions. And I'll tell you what I mean by that. There was this viral video and it was put out by the Cleveland Clinic Hospital. And it was originally meant to just be a video for its caregivers to teach empathy, but it ended up going viral. And the way this video worked, it took you on a visual tour down the hospital corridors. So you're just passing all these humans. And these are people who you would normally just walk past in the corridor without really thinking that much. But in this case, the video had captions underneath each one telling you what they were experiencing at that moment. And in some cases, they were experiencing something joyful, like just found out he's going to be a father, I think is one of them.

Starting point is 00:58:05 But because it's a hospital, more often the captions are things like a little girl visiting her father for the last time, or just found out that the tumor is malignant, or whatever it is. And maybe we can link to this also in your show notes. Oh, for sure. We'll definitely find it. You can't watch this video without tearing up. But it's more than the tearing up. You can't watch it without having that physical sensation of your heart opening up. It's just opening.

Starting point is 00:58:31 And the lesson for me of that video, and I try to do it now when I just walk around, is think, well, what are people's captions? You know, just random passersby, like the person who's checking out your groceries. What are her captions? And it's just an incredible way of kind of letting sorrows in and normalizing them, which also reminds me like another concrete thing I think people could do in the workplace. So we know one of the studies I talk about in my book was done by two people named Jason Kanoff and Laura Madden, and they looked at people's description of their work lives. And what they found is people would describe to them all these terrible things that

Starting point is 00:59:11 had happened to them at work. And the stories revealed how terrible they were, but when they described their emotions, instead of saying they had felt anxious, they would say they were angry. And instead of saying they had felt sad, they would say they were angry. And instead of saying they'd felt sad, they would say they were frustrated. We need a way of opening up this language because I noticed this the other day. I did a talk about introversion in this case. It was like a Zoom call for a company. And at the beginning of the Zoom call, it started out the way it often does with like a nice chat. And somebody asked the question like, how's everybody feeling this morning? And all the answers were like, pumped, you know, yay, I'm feeling great. I'm energized, happy. And these are all amazing emotions. I'm not trying to take away from them.

Starting point is 00:59:55 It's just, you have to ask, what are the chances that every human responding in that chat box was truly feeling only those emotions? What are the chances of that? They're actually incredibly low. I believe there are ways for workplaces to normalize the expression of all of the different emotions that we have, even by something as simple as in a physical workplace where people are really showing up, having a board up on the wall where people can just write down that morning, what are you actually feeling? What are you actually going through? In schools, they call that a parking lot. And I think we need a parking lot in workplaces too.

Starting point is 01:00:38 I didn't realize, I didn't have one of those growing up. Yeah, exactly. So there are schools where they actually have a blackboard or whiteboard where kids write down how they're feeling. This might be a good segue for talking about sort of kids, what kids are feeling. And then of course, as kids age, they turn into these things called grownups. And sometimes grownups have kids. This is going somewhere. Don't worry. I know you have written about, in some respects, inheriting the grief or griefs of our parents and ancestors. I can go to the gym, but they're always going to be pretty small? Or is there something that we can do with whatever we have accumulated through our bloodline? I went down this whole path of looking at inherited grief and I ended up devoting a whole chapter of the book to it.

Starting point is 01:01:42 Because originally it was just because I went to this seminar for bereavement counselors because I was just curious to learn more about that. And what I found was we were each asked to tell a story of loss that we had experienced. And I really didn't want to tell my story because I felt like it wasn't as bad as some of the other stories that I heard that day. And I felt wrong to be talking about it. But I felt like I had to because it seemed ungenerous, you know, not to tell my story. And then when I did, I found myself crying much more than anybody else had. And the seminar was run by this incredibly skillful guy named Simcha Raphael. It was at the New York Open Center.

Starting point is 01:02:26 And I forget how he came to it, but he basically said to me that I seem to be carrying a grief that was apart from what I personally had experienced, that I was carrying a deeper grief than that. And that it was a kind of grief of the ancestors and I started realizing that I come from this family that's kind of mired in loss really on both sides of my mother's side and my father's side we lost almost all of our relatives in the holocaust and although those weren't people who I knew directly there's kind of a shock wave that reverberates through. When he said that, I realized that I had always had this kind of tendency, even when I was a kid, to cry at any kind of moment where it was like, that which once was will never be again. Even though at that point I had not really experienced any loss in my life and I had a happy life, I still had this intense reaction. And once he opened up that idea, I started researching the whole area of inherited grief. It's absolutely fascinating. There's all

Starting point is 01:03:32 this research that finds that the children of Holocaust survivors have particular biomarkers that you wouldn't find in another control group population. And you can find this in animals too. It's a pretty new area of research, but the results are incredibly compelling. There seems to be this idea, this thing that we can inherit from the people that came before us. And in a way, the question of

Starting point is 01:03:58 whether it comes to us biologically or because of what we learn from our parents, culturally, it almost doesn't matter. We're inheriting it somehow. And then to your question of what can learn from our parents. Culturally, it almost doesn't matter. We're inheriting it somehow. And then to your question of what can you do about it, I have found it incredibly empowering to know this because there's a way in which you can get to the insight of, I'm going to love those ancestors

Starting point is 01:04:21 and I'm going to feel empathy for that which they experienced, at the same time that you're holding the idea that their story is not my story. And I don't think we take the time to realize that you can hold both those truths at the same time. Their story is not my story, and yet I love them, these people I've never met before. Because music has been our theme here. There's this amazing song also by Dara Williams. It's called After All and she is a masterpiece of a song and it describes how she had been beset by a kind of mysterious depression and to come out of it she traveled down what she calls the whispering well of talking to her

Starting point is 01:05:02 parents about her family history and realizing all the different things that she was carrying from the people who had come before her and how that process of excavating all of that and understanding it and loving it, that was what freed her. And then she comes out into a shining light on the other side and it helps her with her depression. So whether we're doing that through some kind of formal therapy or through our own sort of ad hoc process of traveling down the whispering well, there are ways to do it. We don't have to take this right turn because it could really uncork Pandora's box, but this is part of one facet of exploration in looking at psychedelic-assisted therapies is multi-generational trauma or ancestral grief. And I also wanted to mention, lest anyone listening

Starting point is 01:05:57 think, who are these wackadoodles? This sounds like some new-agey bullshit. I did a quick search just to pull it up because I know it exists. Here's an example, and this is in Scientific American. Fearful memories passed down to mouse descendants. Genetic imprint from a traumatic experience carries through at least two generations. This is from Nature magazine, which is also a very respectable STEAM publication. And there are, in in other words animal models and scientific studies and peer-reviewed literature that supports this in various species of animal including rice and the authors suggest a similar phenomenon

Starting point is 01:06:40 could influence anxiety and addiction in humans now there, there's a lot of skepticism. I'm just going to read a little bit of this very quickly. Some researchers are skeptical of the findings because the biological mechanism that explains the phenomenon has not been identified. I'm kind of skeptical of such skeptics because we all use, for instance, microwaves every day, but very few of us understand how microwaves or refrigerators, if you don't like microwaves, how they work. So in the absence of a mechanism, this is also true for a lot of commonly prescribed medications. We still

Starting point is 01:07:08 don't actually understand how they work, but putting that aside. So according to convention, this is going back to the article, the genetic sequences contained in DNA are the only way to transmit biological information across generations. Random DNA mutations, when beneficial, enable organizations to adapt to changing conditions, but this process typically occurs slowly over many generations. Yet, some studies have hinted that environmental factors can influence biology more rapidly through epigenetic modifications, which alter the expression of genes. And it goes into many more examples and so on. But there are a lot of scientists, very credible scientists, including, looks like, many quoted in this Kerry Ressler

Starting point is 01:07:46 a neurobiologist and psychiatrist at Emory University who have studied this in animals and I want to say someone could call BS on this but I want to say that it's even like this biological material can sometimes be transferable from one animal to another, even if they're not direct descendants. So if you use, say, electrical shocks to produce a state of acute anxiety and learned helplessness in mice when you turn off the lights, that there is some way of transferring genetic material from that animal to an unrelated but same species animal that will induce a similar fear of the dark, even though it has not been learned. So there is, in other words, a biological basis. There seems to be a biological basis for exactly what you're talking about,

Starting point is 01:08:38 right? Because Holocaust, in the grand scheme of things, as the example you used, not that long ago. Really just not that long ago. I want to offer two other ideas of ways to cope with that if you feel that, if you're listening and you're thinking, oh, you know, this actually might speak to my experience. One is just kind of a simple reframing that Rachel Yehuda, who was the researcher who first discovered this epigenetic tradition in Holocaust survivors, she talks about how one of the people who she worked with just started to understand this in herself. And she started to reframe when things would happen to her, like she'd have a bad

Starting point is 01:09:15 day of work and kind of overreact. She started saying, oh, well, I now understand that my shock absorbers are a little thinner than somebody else's might be. And so I'm just going to adjust around that. And the simple knowledge and acceptance is an incredible power. To take it even a step further beyond that, I talked to a lot of people who are what you might call wounded healers, which is a kind of archetype in the Western tradition, people who have experienced some kind of wound or pain and then use that to try to heal the same pain that they see other similarly situated people experiencing. And I talked, for example, I write about this in the book with the young woman who I called Farah Khatib. She didn't want

Starting point is 01:10:06 to use her real name. She's from the Middle East. And she felt that she didn't just feel, she came from a family in which all the generations of the women before her had suffered these horrible experiences of rape and bereavement and all kinds of things. And she just found herself called. She had some job for a multinational company doing marketing or something. And as part of that job, they had to do that thing you do where you do lots of focus groups and listen to people's stories. And as she listened to the stories of other women, there was something in those stories that touched this nerve in her of all the generations who had come before her of women in her family. And she found herself leaving that job and flying back to the Middle East and starting to work with women prisoners

Starting point is 01:10:55 and then starting her own not-for-profit to help women refugees. And there's something about that work that she's doing to help heal other people that is simultaneously healing herself. I also want to say at the same time, it's not like that's kind of a grand story. And when we talk about creative people who transform pain into beauty, you know, and they turn out to be Leonard Cohen, that sounds like really grand also. But you don't have to be doing these things on such a grand scale. It's just, you can be doing them on the most minute level and you're still going through that same mechanism of taking pain and turning it into something else. It's the mechanism that matters. Yeah. I've thought, and maybe somebody can get me off my

Starting point is 01:11:41 ass and actually suggest some resources. I have a very close relationship with my dog. She's very well-trained, very calm. And I've often thought about volunteering to take Molly, my dog, through, say, hospice care or senior centers. And I just haven't had the bandwidth to figure out the logistics of doing that and i can understand why you know hospital administrators probably don't want just every rando coming through the hospital with their their dog uh which makes a whole lot of sense but it like it doesn't have to be big and i do think at least for me trying to help other people heal has been a huge part of my own healing.

Starting point is 01:12:26 Yeah, I've really seen that in you. Oh, thank you. It's been quite a fascinating road. And I also want to give Rachel Yehuda credit where credit is due on another level. She is at the forefront of using MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for veterans and is involved in a number of different capacities. So she really is an acute and astute observer of the human condition within the context of trauma, intergenerational trauma. One of the people out there who I think is really doing outstanding work. So I just wanted to give her her credit. Yeah, give her her shout out. So you may have already answered this. I apologize if you have, but it's a lot of work to do a book. It's a lot of work to do any book. And as we've

Starting point is 01:13:18 already covered, you take your time, you really saturate yourself in exploration and travel far and wide. It's a lot to sign up for. Why do that with this book? I do it because I would not rather be doing anything else. I love doing it. That's a very good answer. I love doing it. I'm usually drawn by some question that I'm driven to answer. And I've noticed, I didn't actually set out to do the following thing when I was writing this book, but I realized in the end that there was a similarity to what I had done with Quiet, which is the identification of a hidden superpower that our culture doesn't normally talk about. But the superpower of being in touch with the simultaneous joy and sorrow of life, I believe it's one of the deepest superpowers we have. When do you ever get to talk

Starting point is 01:14:12 about it? So that motivates me. The act of creating something beautiful, whether you pull it off or not, almost doesn't matter. Just the attempt to do it, I don't really know any better state of life than that. Yeah, I hear, hear. And I just want to point it, I don't really know any better state of life than that. Yeah, I hear, hear. And I just want to point out, this happens a lot. You're not going to be able to see it if you're just listening to this, but I just mentioned my dog, Molly. I thought you were petting your dog. She just came down after the mention to say hello. So she's got a good love. She's got a good radar. My external nervous system, as I often joke, although it's not really a joke. We may have

Starting point is 01:14:52 touched on this in the last conversation, but if not, and even if we did, we can always state it again. Books that you have gifted most to other people. Anything come to mind? There's one that I actually gifted to you that I especially love. What the heck was it called? It was like, Art is the Highest Form of Hope. Yes. I love that book. That's exactly right.

Starting point is 01:15:13 That's a Phaidon book, I think, if I'm pronouncing that correctly. I think so. Yeah, beautifully made. I have that on my coffee table in Austin. Yeah, and it's basically, for those listening, it's basically just this book of quotes from various artists. And there's one- Art is the highest form of hope.

Starting point is 01:15:30 Yeah. I don't know if there's any quote that sticks in your mind from that book. I don't want to put you on the spot. Well, I mean, I'm just looking at, in the title itself is a first line expressed by the German painter Gerhard Richter in 1982. I quite like the Marquis Leitz title quote. You very kindly gifted this to me probably, what, it would have been a few years ago. I think so. And I went through and I've highlighted all of my favorites, but I don't have them in front of me. Do you have any favorites that come to mind? I do. And I think I even quoted this one in Bittersweet.

Starting point is 01:16:07 It was a quote by Mark Rothko. And he said, the people who weep in front of my paintings are having the same religious experience that I had while I was making them. I may have gotten that a little wrong, but that was the idea to our theme that we've been exploring. Yeah. About art and religion. So here's a question. All right, so Bittersweet comes out. What do you think people might gloss over or underappreciate in the book? Because I know if I look back at my various books, and maybe it's only possible to know that in hindsight, but I'm like, God, I should have

Starting point is 01:16:46 really emphasized X more because people didn't pay enough attention to it or it wasn't sexy enough. And I have examples of those for many of my books. What do you think is valuable or important, but at risk of perhaps not being given appropriate attention. Anything come to mind? Just the way with Quiet, the book I wrote about the power of introverts, the danger was that people would think that I was talking about a kind of misanthropy, you know, like not liking people at all, or like a kind of down with extroverts or something, which none of that was my intention or message. With this book, I think the danger is of people thinking it's a kind of advocating for a depressive state. And that's really not what I'm talking about at all.

Starting point is 01:17:37 It's more like tell the truth about what it is like to be alive. And life is both of these states simultaneously, and it always will be. And I think there's a tremendous freedom in that. And that we are basically taught one way or another that when things are going well and the company's doing well, the family's happy and everything,

Starting point is 01:17:59 that's the main road. And when things go wrong, it's the detour from the main road. And adopting the frame of mind, or to my mind, just accepting the truth that both of these things are the main road, because that's what life is, it's incredibly liberating. It's incredibly liberating because you're no longer fighting against it. And so much of the stress that we have is fighting against what's actually true and feeling like we're alone in it, as opposed to feeling like, wow, we're all actually together

Starting point is 01:18:29 in this. What you just said about the frame or the lens of looking at the challenges as detours makes me think of a quote that I think about a lot, actually, to try and, I think, build my equanimity to the extent that I can. I think I'm pretty impatient and run pretty hot, but not that I yell and scream, I don't. But I can get knocked off balance by certain events, which is true for everybody. But the quote that I was going to mention is from Jan 11, who's an astrophysicist who's been on this podcast. And the quote is, I used to resent obstacles along the path thinking if only that hadn't happened, life would be so good. Then I suddenly realized life is the obstacles. There is no underlying path.

Starting point is 01:19:21 And I have found that very freeing to revisit and try and embrace. You have the Rumi poem, you've got your husband's email, you sent me a book of quotes, you seem to like quotes and sort of condensed wisdom or encouragement in the case of the email. Do you have any other quotes that you think of often or that you've put elsewhere in your house or anywhere as reminders? Do any come to mind? Well, I don't have to have them come to mind because they're like taped up all over the place over here. You want me to pull some down just at random? Yes, please. This one is C.S. Lewis. I don't know if you ever read him, but I mean, talk about longing. He

Starting point is 01:20:08 kind of spent his whole life in this state of what he called the inconsolable longing for we know not what. It's interesting because in his case, he ended up concluding, the way he put it was, if we have this thirst that can't be satisfied in this world, it must be that we were made for another divine world. And so for him, he ended up concluding that Christianity was the answer to this insatiable longing that we all have. And I end up, I love his work so much, I just end up in a completely different place. Like to me, when I hear music, I'm like, oh, that's what people are talking about when they talk about God. Like it is the same thing to me. So you don't have to.

Starting point is 01:20:54 Anyway, this is his quote that he has. C.S. Lewis. I need to read more C.S. Lewis. I remember, and I don't self-identify as a Christian at all, but I've read a lot of his work, including the Screwtape Letters. I don't know if you have ever read this. I haven't read that one. Oh, yeah.

Starting point is 01:21:11 I'll let people investigate, but please continue. I'm excited to hear. He wrote, apparently then, our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside, is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation. And to be at last summoned inside would be both glory and honor beyond all our merits, and also the healing of that old ache. Oh, so good.

Starting point is 01:21:48 Man, I forgot how good C.S. Lewis is. He's the best. Can I ask you a question? Yes. Okay. So I feel like you over the last, I don't know how long it's been since I've been following your work. I mean, really from the very beginning when you first published the four hour work week.

Starting point is 01:22:08 And I feel like you've really been on a pathway and over the last five or more years, you've really been doing this thing of turning pain into beauty and being willing to be really open about it. And I guess I'm curious what made you shift gears that way? Because you kind of started out as like, I'm going to teach you how to be successful. So it's a very different mode, you know? Yeah, it's very, very different. Well, thank you for the kind words first. That's very meaningful. I've realized about myself that I don't actually let, historically, I've never let positive feedback land. I think that goes back a long way. So I just wanted to take a second to say that. And as far as the why, I mean, I think that I'm sure with the caveat that I'm sure I have many blind spots in terms of self-awareness and observation, but I think there are a whole lot of mortality. I've lost a lot of relatives and close friends to things like

Starting point is 01:23:26 opiate addiction or alcohol-induced cardiomyopathy in the case of my uncle most recently. And I think that reminder of impermanence has led me to explore other things. Second would be recognizing, especially after the success of the four-hour workweek and beginning to meet people I couldn't have imagined meeting prior to that. I mean, people who have hundreds of millions, billions, tens of billions of dollars that well realized many things number one is that being pulled towards something and being driven towards something by some demon whipping your back are very different things and that many people who are from any objective external measure, the most successful in the world got there because they were, in some sense, running away from something, not running towards something.

Starting point is 01:24:34 Many of the best entrepreneurs I've met, who are also wonderful people, and if I'm going to invest in an entrepreneur, I'm also going to on some level look for this like they build and scale and so on as a compulsion it's not a want it's not a want people are just like i think i maybe want to be an entrepreneur for a smaller side gig that that might work but if we're looking at people who are building multi-billion dollar companies, they are compulsively, very often compulsively building. And that is very helpful from the standpoint of building a huge company. same as you would find in OCD or an eating disorder or treatment-resistant depression, where the compulsive behavior in that case is a repetitive thought loop or a set of thought loops. So I've just, I think, become a more nuanced observer of suffering and pain and trauma then I would say having observed that in myself

Starting point is 01:25:48 and then through various types of therapy but primarily through psychedelic assisted therapies recognized say past sexual abuse which which I published an episode on some time ago, which if people want to listen to that, it's not easy listening, but I do think it might be helpful for people with shared experiences, tim.blogs.trauma, which took me years to get to. And I was not planning on doing anything. I was planning on writing a book after my parents passed away. Having that experience and learning to contend or trying to contend with that, I think has also made me realize that the full spectrum of feeling is necessary, at least for me and my own personal path thus far, if you want any hope of reconciliation or finding peace with some of these things. Not necessarily making meaning of, although one way to make meaning of that is to, as one facilitator said to me, make it part of your medicine. Take that pain,

Starting point is 01:27:01 take those wounds, and make it part of your medicine. So I do think that that translation has been very healing for me personally, and very hard, quite frankly, right? Because I get stories, and sometimes very graphic stories, and calls for help, and emails, and so on, constantly, because of talking about these things publicly. But it's no coincidence that I support psychedelic-related science and have for quite a few years now. I mean, it's got to be millions of dollars a year at this point through my foundation, the SciSafe Foundation, because it literally saved my life and I've seen it save so many other lives. It's not a panacea. There

Starting point is 01:27:42 are risks, but for the right indications, I think they're incredibly powerful. So to just add on to that a little bit, and no one's asked me this publicly, so sorry for thousands of years. And one could argue that, in fact, our early hominid ancestors almost certainly consumed consciousness-altering plants and fungi, as do animals, by the way, to unclear motives or reasons. But many animals consume hallucinogens. When you have a classical psychedelic experience, there is very often, and I'm not recommending anyone do this recreationally because there are severe risks, especially if you have a family history of schizophrenia. You very often have the experience of, and I don't know who first said this to me, I may have read it in Rumi or Hafez, which is why I'm also drawn to a lot of poetry related to mysticism, the feeling of a drop returning to the ocean. Yeah. have this experience of ego dissolution and in retrospect after the experience you imagine that could have been your experience putting your in quotation marks of this kind of non-localized

Starting point is 01:29:14 free-floating consciousness before you were born or after you die and we get into some very cuckoo bananas territory as we go out there. But when you start getting into the realm of kind of panpsychism and these types of things, when you've had these firsthand experiences, a number of things can happen and at least have happened to me. Number one, you get back here and you're like, why am I taking some of this stuff so fucking seriously? Why am I taking myself so seriously and this fucking email so seriously? It's a joke on some level, which can be demotivating. I'm not going to lie. It can be hard to strap down and bang out a bunch of email in your inbox when you're just like, this doesn't matter at all. However, I think I've tempered that reasonably well. And for all of

Starting point is 01:30:08 those reasons, and I'm trying to actually correct this, but on some level, my moral obligation to share what I have learned, as trivial as it might be, over the last, say, 10 years, there are many essential parts of me that are the same but i've also changed a lot and i was recently i've been sharing a rental with a friend of mine who's known me since 1998 or 1999 and he would say having seen like the longitudinal long-term tim ferris changes right because we don't automatically evolve for the better, but the changes, he's like, you're pretty much unrecognizable. And there's certain fundamental building blocks that are still there. But I know how people who are experiencing pain or suffering or who have gone through horrific trauma,

Starting point is 01:31:07 I will say it bothers me that that word is so overused. Yeah, I agree. Becoming meaningless. And when someone's like, oh, someone expressed microaggression on the internet and I'm so traumatized, I get really upset by that. So I do think certain terms should be reserved for special cases. Like the word sacred is another one, so that they retain some semblance of power and meaning. But let's just say someone has been sexually abused or has experienced death. There are many different ways to experience trauma, I do think there's a tendency to view these things as permanent scars

Starting point is 01:31:47 that you cannot circumvent. That's like psycho-emotional scar tissue that is just part of you from this point forward. And if that causes problems, too bad. And you have an excuse, you have a reason, you can compartmentalize it, lock it away in this tight little box in the basement of your soul, and do your best to not knock it over with your foot in the middle of the night. And I don't find that works very well. And these experiences that we try to suppress, or these feelings that we try to suppress end up squeezing out of the cracks of that box we thought it was so tightly locked inside of. And it ends up, if not doing damage to other people, just doing a tremendous amount of damage to us personally. So any tools

Starting point is 01:32:37 that help me to not do that, to metabolize these things, to maybe even befriend them and use them in some way. I feel compelled to share, not excessively. I still do the business interviews and I still do talk about NFTs or whatever. I still have other interests. But at the end of the day, I think for a lot of people, they climb the mountain, they realize that it doesn't solve all their problems, whether that's prestige and academia, whatever your currency happens to be, lots of money. You may get to a point, if you win the game you're playing, where you realize, for fuck's sake, this actually doesn't fix anything, or it fixes very few things. And so you're going to have to deal with it sooner or later. And I'll just stop because

Starting point is 01:33:29 this has turned into a TED Talk. I apologize. I think very often about something Tara Brock said to me at one point. She shared this apocryphal story of a sage. And the sage said, there's only one question that really matters. And that is, what are you unwilling to feel? And I think about that all the time. I think about that all the time because I think it applies to so many people in so many contexts, including myself. So thank, insert God of choice or universe or coincidence and just blind luck that i've happened to come across certain tools that i think will probably in conjunction with other things completely change how we view the mind nature of mind, consciousness, and certainly psychiatry and the treatment of what

Starting point is 01:34:27 we consider intractable psychiatric conditions. Because the results that we're seeing in some of these studies, including phase three studies, these are well-constructed studies, really defy any conventional explanation that psychiatry can currently offer, right? When you have people with, say, treatment-resistant PTSD from war, from rape, etc., who have, and I'm going to get the numbers slightly wrong, but they're not that far off, who have something like a median duration of diagnosed with PTSD of like 17 plus years. So they've had complex PTSD for 17.2 or however many years on average. They've been taking medication, treatment resistant generally, in this case means it's failed at least two different interventions. And they have two or three sessions of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy, and even, say, six months later,

Starting point is 01:35:29 they have 60-plus percent of them have no longer meet the criteria for a diagnosis of PTSD. That is staggering. I know. I've seen some of that research. You just can't believe it. compounds, whether they are ketamine, which I have some interest in, but not great interest, or psilocybin, more interest, the actual effects that they have on neurogenesis. Some of the effects may be conferred by actual structural changes, dendrite growth as an example. But then a lot of them seem to be determined by content and rewriting the narratives that govern our perception and navigation of the world. And shit gets really exciting and wild when you start pulling on that thread. In any case, and for people interested in the MDMA

Starting point is 01:36:37 psychotherapy, there's a documentary called Trip of Compassion. Oh my gosh, I've had that on my list to do ever since you started recommending that. Oh yeah. It's intense, but it's very gratifying. And unlike in the US, this documentary, because it was filmed overseas, has actual client footage with client permission. So you get to see what would be very difficult to get approval for due to HIPAA and so on in other places. And that's my TED Talk. Thank you for listening. Well, I mean, oh my gosh.

Starting point is 01:37:14 So thank you so much for sharing all that. If I could say two things that I, I mean, there are so many things that one could say after everything that you just shared. One is that it's really interesting that you went to that place of all the different people who you've met along the way who are so successful on the outside, and then you find what's really driving them. And I actually thought about this this morning as I was going through that list of questions that you ask of like, what would you tell yourself, your 30-year-old self or whatever? And I had a few things, but one of them was to understand that all these people who you meet who seem like they have it so together, they're so successful, that they're all just humans. And I feel like one of the great privileges of having written a book that turned into a bestseller is that you get to meet all these people. And especially if it's a book like the kind that I write, people tell you the truth about what they really feel. So now I've heard all these stories and I've just become aware of all these dynamics that you're describing. And the second thing I was struck by is when you talk about that kind of moral obligation, because I have to say, we don't get to talk to each other that much,

Starting point is 01:38:28 but I have a sense of what you're doing through the things you put into the world. And it really feels like you're driven by that. And one of the things I talk about in the book is how we go through pain, and then there's kind of like a crossroads of what are you going to do with it? If you don't acknowledge it and turn it into something else, you're invariably going to take it out, as you said, on yourself or on other people, or there's this other crossroads that you can walk down of turning it into something else. And I feel like that's what I've been watching you do for years. Oh, thank you. I really appreciate that. I mean, I feel like in a lot of respects, you're doing similar work. I mean, through your books, you're conveying truth of human experience in a way that resonates with people who might struggle otherwise to identify, let alone express and describe what their internal experience is. And by doing that,

Starting point is 01:39:28 I think you are not just providing a salve to people that they don't know they needed, but you're providing language, which is incredibly powerful. I'll save that for another podcast, but you're providing language, kind of like, I guess, like Wittgenstein, right? Like the limits of my language are the limits of my world. I mean, I really believe that. So giving someone language is no small thing. To label and interact with and convey and on some level integrate their experience. And then you're giving them also empathy through the stories that tell them they are not alone. You're doing a lot of things with your books that I respect tremendously.

Starting point is 01:40:16 And I respect it not just because it is valuable in the world and sorely needed, but because it is fucking difficult to do. So I really appreciate the work that you do and that you put out in the world also. Thank you so much. Susan, is there anything else that you would like to add before we come to a close? Anything you'd like to ask of my audience? Anything else? For anybody who is listening today who feels moved by what we were talking about or feels like, oh, this is me, I guess I just hope that you will connect with me one way or another on social or through my book or whatever,

Starting point is 01:40:55 so that we can stay in touch. That's all I would say. Perfect. And I will just say again, the new book is Bittersweet, How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole, where you will get to revisit Mono no Aware and all sorts of good things. And I really, really believe in the building of one's emotional vocabulary and range. I think it not only gives you a richer experience of life, but it creates a certain anti-fragility, I think, to life's inevitable ups and downs. So I do think this is an important book. So Bittersweet is the book. People can find you, Susan Cain, C-A-I-N.net, SusanCain.net, on Twitter, at Susan Cain. Facebook, author Susan Cain. LinkedIn, Susan Cain, C-A-I-N.net, SusanCain.net, on Twitter, at Susan Cain.

Starting point is 01:41:45 Facebook, author Susan Cain. LinkedIn, Susan Cain. Instagram, Susan Cain author. We'll link to everything, including this amazing playlist that I must get my hands on. So we will also put the playlist in the show notes, Tim.blogs slash podcast. Just search Susan and it will pop right up. And I would say to everyone listening, until next time, be a little kinder than you think necessary, both to yourself and to others. And thank you so much for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off and that is

Starting point is 01:42:26 five bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend between one and a half and 2 million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called five bullet Friday, easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them

Starting point is 01:43:10 and then I share them with you so if that sounds fun again it's very short a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend something to think about if you'd like to try it out just go to Tim dot blog slash Friday type that into your browser Tim Tim.blog slash Friday. Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time what I would take if I could only take one supplement.

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #583: Susan Cain on Transforming Pain, Building Your Emotional Resilience, Exploring Sufi Wisdom, Tapping into Bittersweet Songs, and Seeking the Shards of Light

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