The Tim Ferriss Show - #732: Martha Beck — The Amazing and Brutal Results of Zero Lies for 365 Days, How to Do a Beginner “Integrity Cleanse,” Lessons from Lion Trackers, and Novel Tactics for Reducing Anxiety

Episode Date: April 16, 2024

Dr. Martha Beck has been called “the best-known life coach in America” by NPR and USA Today. She holds three Harvard degrees in social science and has published nine non-fiction books, one novel, and more than 200 magazine articles. Her recent book, The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self, was an instant New York Times Best Seller.Timestamps for this episode are available below.Sponsors:Momentous high-quality supplements: https://livemomentous.com/tim (code TIM for 20% off)Eight Sleep’s Pod Cover sleeping solution for dynamic cooling and heating: https://eightsleep.com/tim (save $200 on the Pod Cover)AG1 all-in-one nutritional supplement: https://drinkag1.com/tim (1-year supply of Vitamin D (and 5 free AG1 travel packs) with your first subscription purchase.)Timestamps:[00:00] Start[06:06] My contribution to teen atrociousness.[06:40] Connecting with Boyd Varty.[12:27] The path of not here.[16:38] Finding joy in the body can save your life.[21:17] The pregnant pause that ended Martha's obsession with intellect.[26:51] Sensitivity and suffering.[30:14] The year of living lie-lessly.[35:36] An illuminating change of perspective.[46:14] The path to taking a black belt integrity cleanse.[49:42] Owning your right to say "No."[53:45] Alternatives to "No" that remain honest.[57:11] The language of candor.[59:30] Ending relationships that have run their course.[01:00:37] The Asian influence.[01:04:26] Sweet or savory?[01:05:36] Are you comfortable?[01:07:29] Want vs. yearning and jumping the track.[01:20:36] Rhino ruminations.[01:22:06] The Tao Te Ching, Stephen Mitchell, and Byron Katie.[01:33:19] America's Goethe?[01:36:20] Weighing kryptonite against superpowers.[01:44:50] Exploring the opposite of anxiety.[01:56:38] Dick Schwartz and Internal Family Systems.[02:01:57] Compassion even for the self's unwanted pieces.[02:04:20] Favorite animal.[02:08:58] Equine therapy.[02:15:06] Selling the ranch.[02:18:05] The monkey whisperer.[02:20:05] Parting thoughts.*For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast.For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsorsSign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissYouTube: youtube.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, Margaret Atwood, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Dr. Gabor Maté, Anne Lamott, Sarah Silverman, Dr. Andrew Huberman, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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And trust me, as someone who knows the sports nutrition and supplement world very well, that is a differentiator that you want in anything that you consume in this entire sector. So, good news. For my non-US listeners, more good news, not to worry. Momentous ships internationally, so you have the same access that I do. So check it out. Visit livemomentous.com slash Tim and use code Tim at checkout for 20% off. That's livemomentous, L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S dot com slash Tim and code Tim for 20% off. Living this year over a metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss.

Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. And if you hear noises in the background, it's because I am in the attic of a barn in Europe. So if you hear birds or insects, that's what that is. My job this episode, as in every episode, is to deconstruct world-class performers from different disciplines and to tease out the habits, routines, frameworks, inputs, and so on that you can apply and test in your own lives. And my guest today is Dr. Martha Beck. I've wanted to have her on for a very long time. She has been called the best known life coach in America by NPR and USA Today. She holds three Harvard degrees in social science and has

published nine nonfiction books, one novel, and more than 200 magazine articles. The Guardian and other media have described her as Oprah's life coach. Her recent book, The Way of Integrity, Finding the Path to Your True Self, was an instant New York Times bestseller and an Oprah's Book Club selection. Her next book, Beyond Anxiety, Curiosity, Creativity, and Finding Your Life's Purpose, is expected in early 2025. You can find Martha online at marthabeck.com. That's M-A-R-T-H-A-B-E-C-K dot com. And on Facebook and Instagram, The Martha Beck. And she and I were introduced by Boyd Vardy, lion tracker and author himself. He's been on this show. He was one of my most popular guests the year that he came out. And we have a lot of stories, a lot of takeaways, and a lot of laughs in this conversation. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Without further ado, Dr. Martha Beck.

Martha, it is so nice to finally connect and to see your face. Finally. And I really appreciate you taking the time. So, thank you. It's my honor. I gave your four-hour work week to my then-teenage children. I said, I want you to learn the way this man thinks. Whatever you do, just study his mind. It is your new Bible. Pete Thank you for that. Hopefully, it didn't turn them to the dark side. Mary Oh, they're atrocious. Pete That was the beginning of the end, so thank you.

Thank you, Tim, for derailing the development of my children. Well, let's talk about a mutual friend briefly, because our connecting point, the way we directly connected, even though I had observed you from afar for quite some time, is Boyd Vardian. For people who don't know Boyd, he is the author of The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life. He has been, there it is right behind you, beautiful little book, which I've read multiple times. And he is one hell of a guy. He's one of a kind. He really is. times. And he is one hell of a guy. He's one of a kind. And I wanted to ask you to perhaps begin with describing how the two of you connected. It was such a strange thing. I mean, he's told me the

story from his side since. All I knew was that I was in a weird period of my own life. I'd written a book about leaving Mormonism, and a lot of people didn't like it. And I was getting death threats and legal threats. And I sort of ran away to do a book tour in South Africa. And I went to my favorite place there, which was a game preserve called Londolozi, where I'd been once before. And it was like the thing I had saved up for and the thing I'd been looking forward to. And I felt safer there with the lions and the rhinoceroses and whatnot than I did anywhere among people. I was terrified of people at the time. Still sort of am, but I was really terrified at that time. So, all I knew is that I had a certain ranger who was supposed to be taking me out on safari

and the guy who showed up was a different guy. All right, I didn't really care, but we got talking as we drove around, and here I am, like, he's 23, I'm 43, I think. So, we start talking housewife to game ranger, just like a heart-to-heart would be, and I don't know how, within five minutes, we were in such an intense conversation, and we were laughing at each other's jokes, and we were having this amazing time. And we went back to the game preserve place, to the camp, and we had tea together. And he told me, you know, my family's been going through some difficult times. They've had really strange legal things happening, and it kind of paralleled what I was going through in some ways. So I felt really understood, but I also thought, oh my gosh,

he doesn't understand really what the dynamics of what's going on. And I'm a sociologist. I study psychology as my trade. So I started talking to him about it and he says, you have to meet my family. I didn't know that his family was the family that owned the game preserve and had started it and like reforested it and everything. Before I knew it, I was at their house with his sister Bronwyn and his parents, Dave and Shan. And I was talking to them as fast as I could about how to deal with attacks from psychopaths. They can handle attacks from almost anything, but psychopaths were new to them. And I was supposed to leave on this small plane. They held the plane for an hour so we could keep talking. And I got on the plane, and I had a copy of Dave's book. Dave is Boyd's father,

and he'd written a memoir. And I got on the plane, and they shouted after me, next time you come back, you can stay with us. And I got on the plane with my head spinning, and I thought, I just met my best friends. And I read Dave's book on the plane, and there's a place where Boyd, his sister Bronwyn and his mother and their teacher were all at home together, and there was a break-in, and Boyd woke up with a gun in his mouth. The guy had shoved the barrel of a gun in his mouth and woke him up that way. And they were tied up for five hours. They were threatened with death. So I'm on the plane, and I'm sobbing hysterically because this is happening to my best friends. And I was like, you could have been killed. You know what, Tim? It's a good thing that flight was really long because I was out of my mind.

I felt so close to Boyd and his family, and I have ever since. It's been like 20 years. And I've gone back and gone back, and've done things together and he's become this incredible coach and I taught him what I could teach him. He's learned so much more from other people, but it was just this incredible bond that formed between the most unlikely pair of friends. And yeah, he's one of the best people in the world, in my humble opinion. Yeah, he's amazing. Also an incredible storyteller. And as you mentioned, well-adapt adapted to dealing with certain types of threats and i suppose this will probably segue into other things that we talk

about but he almost was eaten alive by a crocodile right and he's his leg still bears incredible scars from that he's got a gun barrel in his mouth and yet there are certain things we are not particularly well-evolved to handle, like modern-day psychopaths as one example. Psychopaths of any era, really. Of any era. And there are a few things that I took from Boyd just to continue to give a kind of hats-off bow to Boyd, who is also one of the best storytellers I've ever heard in my life. He's magnificent. I think he might be the best storyteller in the world. So for those who haven't heard my podcast with Boyd, I encourage you to check that out. There's a line from his book, from The Line Tracker's Guide to Life, which has stuck with me

ever since. And I think of it often, which is a line from Rennius, this master tracker who says, I don't know where we're going, but I know exactly how to get there. And I think that's resonated with a lot of people. There's another line which I'm less familiar with, but in the process of doing homework for this conversation, I came across this on your website, actually. And it's referencing Boyd, I know. We all have a lot on our websites. So you can't believe everything you read. We're both obsessed with Boyd, and we just need to accept it. Yeah, exactly. We'll have to come up with a custody plan. So he has a name for the experience of getting lost, the path of not here. Now, I have not heard him say that.

What does that mean, the path of not here? Well, we're out wandering around trying to track. I remember once tracking a porcupine with Void, and it was easy on the road because the quill drags are easy to see. And then the porcupine left the road, and it was just scrub and rocks and everything. And I didn't know what he was looking at, but he kept walking. And I said, I haven't seen anything for a long time and I'm completely lost. And he said, no, you're never lost. What you're getting is the information that the place you are now and the What you're getting is the information that the place

you are now and the way you're going isn't the way you want to end up. And that is an incredibly important place called the path of not here. And every time you realize you're in it, you have the option of shifting, of going somewhere else without recognizing that this is the path of not here. You can't shift. So when I coach people, they're almost always way is the path of not here. You can't shift. So when I coach people, they're almost always way into the path of not here. You know, they hate their job, their marriage is awful, whatever, and they've just kept going and going and going and going. And they haven't woken up and seen that there's not been a footprint for a very long time. And then, by the way, Boyd found the damn porcupine den in the middle of, like, how he tracked this thing over a rock.

I don't know how. But he was quite pleased. I'm sure he was pleased. Watching these expert trackers track is akin to having some type of ethereal experience on a different plane. But for them, it's very scientific, right? There's nothing mystical or very little mystical about it. It's very much deductive Sherlock Holmes type work. I call it the technology of magic because it looks like magic to us. If you showed

someone from an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon an iPhone, they would say, oh, magic. And we'd say, no, no, technology. When people are using these ancient forms of wisdom that we don't have, it looks like magic. And we say, magic. And they say, no, no, technology. And I remember the first tracking lesson I ever had with Ranius, who I couldn't believe he would be so generous, especially to a female, because they don't usually train women as trackers. We're just walking along. He's not saying anything. He picks up a stick and makes a circle in the sand. And then he just stands there, doesn't say a word. And I look down and there's a huge paw print. And it's obviously a lion. So I'm like, it's a lion. And he was like, and he just stood there and I kept looking at it.

And then he held up his hand and he did this. He just shifted it like a quarter inch to one side. And I looked down and I saw that the print had been disturbed in exactly that way. And suddenly I felt myself as if I was down on all fours and I shifted that left paw, that left hand, just that little bit, and I realized the lion had looked over his left shoulder and that had made a slight, a little swish in the track. And so the lion was either looking at something, one of his pride mates or one of his potential prey, and he was going to go around to that spot so we could cut over there because the lion had looked at that significantly. And I remember, it's like learning to read for

the second time, even when you only know a couple of words, it's magic. Yeah, totally. Rheneas is something else. There are levels and then there are levels. And as you were talking, I thought of a quote that I really enjoy from the very much storied science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke. One of my faves. All right. So yeah. I bet I know the quote. You have read a lot of books, and the quote you know is, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Exactly. So let's talk about the path of not here. If we could talk about a practical example, because in the email introduction, Boyd credits you with, in a way, rescuing him or helping him rescue himself from a period of great difficulty. It was mutual. love to know what that intervention looked like, or maybe to be more specific, what are some of the questions, cues, things that you did with Boyd that might be instructive in terms of helping

someone get off the path of not here? Okay, so the first thing is, for me, and I want to be delicate about this because people get worried when we talk about it, but I watched your TED Talk doing homework for this. I watched it again. And you start out very courageously in one of your TED Talks talking about being in a depressive period and thinking you might want to end your life. I was so surprised to hear that there are people who haven't been there. I just thought that was how you spend a Thursday. So, I remember sitting in the Lamont

Library at Harvard when I was 17. I call it the Lament Library because all these people had carved their woes into the heralds. It was a freshman library. Pete Not surprising. Yeah, not surprising. And I was like, why stick around? We're all getting off the bus. We're all going to die, so why not get off the bus now? And I remember sitting there and thinking, the only possible reason for sticking around, and I remembered Emerson's statement that beauty is its own excuse for being. And I thought, joy is its own excuse for being. That is the one thing I can experience that makes it worth sticking around for the

suffering this life entails. So, I shifted my entire life toward a sort of very simple test, does it bring me joy or does it not? And joy became the track I was following. So, Boyd had learned to track animals, but he'd lost the track of his joy a long time before. And I remember feeling, well, jumping ahead, taking some people out in a seminar and having him turn and tell the group, you track your life the way you track an animal, but the track you're looking for is joy in the body. And it's so simple to put it that way. And I think that's the first thing where we really connected. And I said, boy, you have to find joy in your body. He'd been through so much trauma. I mean, good God, it wasn't just the break-in. I mean, he tried to rescue a man from a hot spring,

a guy had fallen in, the guy died. He was basically boiled alive. He was almost eaten by a crocodile. He's been attacked by more deadly animals and snakes and all kinds of things than you can even imagine. So, here was this guy. He was tough and strong and brave, and he had long ago gone numb. And the funny thing is that there are a lot of people who haven't had such a wild life who are sitting under fluorescent lights somewhere, and they're just as far off their track as he was. They're almost as miserable. If you can't find joy, you can't find joy.

It's like oxygen. You need it. It doesn't matter how you lose it or what it looks like to you. You need it. So I remember when Boyd and his sister came to Phoenix to visit me shortly after we met, and I put them through a kind of American therapy, which was I made them lie down on the living room floor and watch Eddie Izzard routines on TV while I brought them ice cream for about three days. And they had just worked like mules their entire lives, physically worked, psychologically worked.

And they were like, when do we start working? And I just say, sit, eat, laugh. And at the end of the three days, I saw them start to be able to access relaxation, which is the first step toward joy in the body. And our culture is so cerebral when we think that thinking is superior to the physical being. But our thinking process is very late in evolution. Our cognitive minds process about 40 bits of information per second. The nervous system of our entire bodies is processing about 11 million bits of information per second. The body is smarter than the mind. That is a very long answer to a very good question. But if you haven't found joy in the body… That's why this is a long podcast. We have time.

You did say you wanted me to tell stories. So, yeah, I think when I could see him relax, and I saw his shoulders open open and I saw him smile spontaneously instead of to be polite, I said, there you go. That's the track. That's what we're tracking. And that's what we've done ever since in years and years of wonderful conversations. So I'm going to come back to Boyd probably just as an instructive case study. And we'll probably come back to Boyd.

But I would love to ask you about reattuning the body to the nervous system. And specifically, I'm asking because as I've done research for this conversation and listened to interviews and read so much, I've noticed that you have a prodigious ability to recall quotes as one example. You mentioned Harvard and 17, which is not an age that most people associate with Harvard. So you seem to have a lot of horsepower between the ears. Generally, now I don't know this about you, but generally when I encounter that, and to maybe a lesser extent, I encounter that myself, you get rewarded for using this analytical workhorse, and you end up perhaps a little less attuned to the physical

body. So I'm curious how you have reconnected with that intelligence. And specifically, this may or may not be related, but I would love for you to discuss equine therapy or interactions with animals and if that is related. The first place I'll go, I learned to brutalize my body. That year at Harvard, I was running 100 miles a week and trying to eat less than 1,000 calories a day. I did not have any regard for my body at all. I got sick. I got very sick with a multitude of autoimmune diseases. My body correctly figured out that I was the greatest threat to my own health.

So I was actually on crutches and a back brace. I was in a lot of pain for a long time. Went back to Harvard after a year off for this issue and got engaged to another. I'm an ex-Mormon. We get engaged very young. So I got engaged and married another guy from my hometown, and I stayed at Harvard for my master's and my PhD, and we had a daughter, and then my second child was conceived when I was halfway through my PhD. And I was caught in an apartment fire right in the middle of the pregnancy, and because of that, they ran a bunch of tests. And they was caught in an apartment fire right in the middle of the pregnancy. And because of that, they ran a bunch of tests. And they came back and told me that the fetus had Down syndrome, and I had two weeks to terminate. I was like six months along. So, I don't know if you've

ever been pregnant, Tim. Not that I'm aware of. Yeah, I have suspected, though, at points. People say I'm glowing recently. I don't know. Maybe. You do look really flush. Yeah. I had the one baby already, and I had bonded so strongly with the second one that even though I'm very pro-choice, saying, you know, he's got to go, he was already my child.

I'd seen him sucking his finger on the ultrasound and everything. And I couldn't do it. I've advised other people. I've helped other people go and terminate their pregnancies in similar situations. I just couldn't do it. And I remember the head of gynecology and obstetrics at Harvard at the time, because I was part of that university system, there were five of them. They all thought that I was part of that university system. There were five of them. They all thought that I was making a huge mistake to not terminate. And the head honcho came in and told me, this is like having a malignant tumor and not letting me remove it. And I remember looking at him and I was being rehydrated because I couldn't stop vomiting and stuff. Oh, it was such fun how I laughed. I was looking at this guy and he's saying, you need to do this. You're going to ruin your life.

He said, you're throwing your life away. And I looked at him and suddenly it appeared he had two faces. And I was really curious. And it was as if there was a face that he was presenting that was a Stern Harbor doctor. And then right behind it was this terrified face, terrified. And I'd been sort of terrified myself, but when I saw this, I was like fascinated. I just watched him. And I said, do you know anyone with Down syndrome? He was very flustered. He was like, no, I wouldn't bother with that. And I just watched him and I thought, oh, he's not telling me to do this because he thinks I'm making a mistake to keep the stupid little boy inside of me. He thinks that there's a stupid little boy inside him and he's trying to kill that. And I thought, oh, he didn't end up at

Harvard because he knew he was smart. He ended up there for the same reason I did. He thought he was stupid. He wanted to prove he wasn't. And at that moment, I looked at him and I thought, you know, the reason for my life is joy. I don't see joy on either of this man's faces. And I don't think he understands his own path to joy at all. And I remember I said, I've heard that people with Down syndrome can experience joy. And he said, I wouldn't know about that. And I was like, yeah, no, I think they can. And right then, everything changed for me. I waddled around Harvard, pregnant out to here,

everybody knew. And I would go into my professor's offices and they'd be like, you've got to put this child in an institution, you're throwing away your career. And I'd look at their little offices and their little piles of books and I'd just, I'd look at them and think, are you in joy? Do you live in joy? Because if you don't, you can't tell me where it is. And I lost the obsession with intellect that I had learned not only at Harvard, but in all of Western culture. That's when it really shifted for me. or teach people to re-engage with sensitivities that they've perhaps neglected or accidentally put offline or deliberately put offline? How do you cultivate that in someone? I can't teach it. I can't cultivate it. I can't do it. But I have an unfailing ally, and its name is suffering. Because when we lose the track of our joy, we suffer. And that's the only thing

that gets our attention enough to make us stop and say, maybe, just maybe, I need to find another path here. You've had it yourself, I'm sure. Oh, for sure. I mean, I promised I would bookmark this and come back to it, just to give Boyd a little sloppy kiss on the cheek again. Something else that I'm pretty sure was in that book, it certainly was in the curriculum when I've spent more time there with Renyes and Alex and other incredible trackers. Losing the track is part of tracking. That is always part of tracking. You are almost never going to A to Z track something perfectly. You always lose the track.

So part of good tracking is finding the track again or finding a proper track. In the case of Boyd, he's on the path of not here, unsure of what to do with himself. I'm sort of imposing a narrative that I don't want to... He's not here. He can't defend himself. Let's just do this. Yeah, he can't defend himself. So you're welcome, boy. And just using him as a stand-in for the audience, right? But since you've worked with him, and we love him so much, what are some of the things, once you'd fed him ice cream and had him relax, you see the shoulders open, what happens then? What do you do with, once you see that opening, that change, what do you do?

You know, the first thing that happened for me when Boyd took me tracking, we went to look for a rhinoceros. They're fairly easy to track. Surprisingly difficult, though, at the same time. The first thing they do is they show you what a rhinoceros track looks like. Clear, plain, and simple, and really good terrain. Now you know what a rhinoceros track looks like, clear, plain, and simple, and really good terrain. Now you know what a rhinoceros's whole foot looks like. And you're going to go out through grass, and rocks, and trees, and everything. And sometimes you'll just see the side of one toe, or an imprint where the palm has pressed a leaf down, or a bit of mud on a stick. But until you've seen that first track, you don't know what you're looking for.

So that's why I fed him ice cream for three days. And when I saw the relaxation, I could say, that's your track. Now let's look at the things you're doing in your life. His mom was telling him she thought he should get a PhD. And I said, okay, hold that thought. More joy, less joy, less. Okay, don't go there. So take over Londolozy for the rest of your life. More joy, less joy. I don't know. It's not clear. Okay, we don't go there yet. It's like going to the optometrist at that point. You know suffering and you know joy. And if it's more like suffering, it's the path of not there. And there are a million ways to suffer. And if it's joy, you know it's the path

of yes. And there's actually only one path that takes you straight along the line of joy. And it's your individual destiny. I believe in that stuff. All right. I'm going to be keeping track of a lot of bookmarks. I knew I would. So, I came prepared, pen in hand. For those of you who can't see us, I cheat. I use a pen. The pen is, I know, the weakest ink is stronger than the strongest memory. Therefore, blue pen. So, individual destiny. That's my note I'm taking.

And I didn't even add a question mark because I probably agree with you on some levels. Let's talk about your own chronology a bit. And I believe this is at 29. Correct me if I'm wrong. You decide to not tell any lies for an entire year. Now my understanding is that led to losing your family of origin, your religion, your job, your marriage. So it was an eventful year. My home, my career, my entire industry. Yeah, it was quite a brisk year.

It was brisk, right? So it was like the flamethrower approach to personal development. Why did you do this? And what did you take away from it that other people can use? Why did I do it? Yeah. Suffering. I'd like to say I had noble intentions. I was unhappy.

I was very physically ill. I'd been sick at that point for 12 years. So in chronic pain for 12 years. And I had this baby with Down syndrome, and I thought, nobody at Harvard is going to, I just didn't want them all staring at me. So to finish my dissertation, I went back to Utah, where I knew that everybody would be thrilled with me not having an abortion, which they were. But then they assumed that I was super Mormon, and I tried to fit in just out of respect for my culture of origin. Can you just say a quick sidebar on your father

and who your father was? I think this is useful context. Not just any run-of-the-mill Mormon. No, he was not. My father was an apologist, which is a word for somebody who defends the principles of a religion. So Mormonism makes a lot of truth claims about things like the American Indians are descended from a group of Israelites that came over in a ship in 600 BC and lots of like real archaeological, anthropological truth claims. They don't stand up well under modern science. And my father, he was asked to be an apologist for the church. He was a professor at Berkeley, and they brought him back to BYU, Brigham Young University, and he started defending Mormonism against all attacks. And he became very well-known in the church, and he was the foremost apologist of Mormonism, I think, in the church's history. So, I was considered Mormon royalty. They have a whole structure there. So, I went

back to Utah and tried to be a good Mormon. At the time, they came out and said there was a lot of unrest. People were just learning too much, and the internet wasn't a thing yet, but there were just too many scientists doing too much research and finding out too much stuff that was disproving Mormonism's claims. So, the church got very, very upset and came out and said the three greatest threats to God's kingdom in the latter days were feminists, intellectuals, and gay people. So, turned out I was all three. I didn't identify as gay at the time. I was married with children, so I was closeted to myself. That involves a lot of suffering that you don't understand when you're going through it. I had sexual abuse issues from my father when I was a child.

Those were bashing their way to the surface and coming out in flashbacks, and it was gnarly. And the one thing I knew is that when I heard the statement, the truth will set you free, it brought me a sense of joy, a sense of peace. So I thought, I don't know exactly what to do or what the truth is, so I'm just not going to lie for a year, and we'll see what know exactly what to do or what the truth is. So I'm just not going to lie for a year and we'll see what happens. We'll find out what the truth is. And I found out that mostly what I was lying about, I didn't tell lies like about my taxes or anything, or in my personal life even, I was telling lies about how I felt. I feel fine. I wouldn't say

that anymore. People would say, how are you? And I'd say, not well. And you start to do that. Try it for a couple of days. Don't tell a single lie not to anyone for any reason. you have, professional or personal, where there's any level of secrecy or untruth, begins to fall apart. And then it starts to explode. And that's what happened to me. I just kept seeing what I believed until I realized I'm not Mormon. I don't believe in it at all. So I actually committed the one sin worse than murder. I left. I said, please take my name off the church records. I am not Mormon. So, everyone thought I was going to outer darkness. They probably still do. So, my family stopped speaking to me, and yeah, then I realized I was gay. So was my husband. That was sort of convenient. So, it was very amicable. But I also realized that I loved to learn, but I hated being caught up in academic politics.

So I left my job. Everything went away when I stopped lying and everything that was left was the path of joy. Now, this may not be the right question, but what gave you the courage to risk burning it all to the ground? Or was it not courage at all? It was just, this is suffering and I want something other than this suffering. And so you were just kind of rolling the dice on door number two. The suffering was bad, but it wasn't bad enough to make me endure the suffering of losing my family. I mean, seven siblings, all their wives and husbands and my nieces and nephews and like

everyone, every friend I'd made growing up. I couldn't have done that. But right, I think I made that pledge the day after I came out of an emergency surgery. And I've been told that you are willing to entertain woo-woo things. It's Wednesday, right? Yeah, every Wednesday. Yes, with a skeptic's eye. Woo-woo Wednesday willing to entertain woo-woo things. It's Wednesday, right? Yeah, every Wednesday. Yes, with a skeptic's eye. Woo-woo Wednesday.

It's woo-woo Wednesday. So, I'm rushed in for surgery. Actually, I was teaching a psychology class, and I was behind a one-way mirror, and the students started to talk about, it was a free discussion I was observing, and they started to talk about a number of the women had been raped. And I suddenly got really hot and feverish and I ran into the hall and passed out cold. I like fell down. I looked up, all the students were around me. I got rushed to the hospital and they thought I had a tumor in a very intimate place. They immediately put me in surgery. And while I was lying there, I sort of woke up and looked at the surgical lights, which is odd because my eyes were taped

closed. And then I thought, this is odd that I can see. And I sat up, which was strange because my body was on the table. And I looked around and I watched them operating on me and they said, there's no tumor, it's just blood. This is scar tissue from old trauma. And then I lay back and I thought, I don't know what's happening to me. And between the surgical lights, another light appeared. And it was about the size of a golf ball when I first saw it. And, you know, they say we can only see about a trillionth of the available light spectrum. And I think this light had all of it. You can't describe it. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. It was absolutely captivating.

And as I looked at it, it grew and it seemed to sort of penetrate things instead of bouncing off them. And when it touched me, this incredible warmth. I mean, talk about going from 12 years of chronic pain, a lot of psychological suffering to no suffering, zero, absolute joy, beauty, warmth, physical, emotional, every kind of warmth you can imagine. And laughter, there was so much joy in this light, and I was laughing with it. And I heard the surgeon say to the anesthesiologist, she's crying. And I started crying from happiness. And they could

see tears coming out, and they thought that I could feel the pain. So the anesthesiologist was going to give me more medication, and I talked to him the next day to make sure it wasn't a drug event. And he said that a voice had told him, don't increase the anesthesia. She's crying because she's happy. And he said, did I do the wrong thing? That never happened to me before. So that was odd. Anyway, basically, the light was saying to me, you totally bought this whole thing about you're just a physical thing, and then you die. And I was like, I know. I said I wasn't going to forget,

and then I totally forgot. We were laughing and laughing and laughing. And then it said, look, you're going to go through something really horrible, but I'm always here, I'm right here. I've always been here, I always will be. And I woke up in the recovery room and there was this guy who was there from the prison on some sort of work detail and he was mopping the floor in this room where I woke up and I looked at him and I said, I love you so much. He's like, I'm not even getting paid for this. He went to get the nurses. Yeah.

And I was just, I was like, do people cry? And they said, yes, surgery is traumatic. And I'm like, no, do they cry because they're happy? And they were like, no, really? So, yeah, the next day, the big thing was I'm never doing anything that makes me feel separated from that light, not ever. And lying was the first thing to go. There's still, to this day, one of the weird things about experiences like that is they don't fade. It's always right there with you in every choice you make. And that's what gave me the ability to do everything else. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show.

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drinkag1.com slash Tim. Last time, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Check it out. All right, I have quite a few follow-up questions. So thank you for sharing that. The broadest question is, what do you make of that experience? The other, and you can tackle these in whichever order, but did you talk to the surgeon and other personnel about what you observed them saying?

Yeah, the surgeon came in and was oddly tender with me. I mean, really, really tender. And I think the reason was that what had happened was I was bleeding internally from a lot of scar tissue that had happened when I was sexually abused very young. And they knew that some kind of violence must have caused that. So they said, yeah, we don't really understand why you suddenly started bleeding internally, but it was putting pressure and we just had to drain the wound and leave it open. And so that's what I said, do you know anything about the anesthesia? I went and got the anesthesiologist and he came back and I started just quizzing him. So what did you give me?

What are the effects? What do people report? What are the side effects? Can I have some more? Finally, he just said, look, just tell me what happened in there because this thing happened to me. And that's when he told me about the voice telling him, don't give her more anesthesia. And I said, yeah, you did the right thing. And he said, you know how many times this has happened to me in 33 years of medical practice? I said, no. And he said, once. And then he kissed me on the forehead and left and wrote me a letter later about it. He said it was not a drug effect. Plus, he had a woo-woo experience as well. So, take that. Got it. So, what do you make of that experience?

I have been making of it. I started meditating and thinking about it, and I think about it every single day, and it's been many years since then. And what I make of it right now, first of all, I love, it's kind of like the path of not there, don't know mind. I believe in the Zen or any Buddhist concept of don't know mind, that in the beginner's mind, there are many possibilities. In the expert's mind, there are few, and that none of us really knows anything. And in particular, we have no idea what consciousness is. possibilities in the expert's mind, there are few, and that none of us really knows anything.

And in particular, we have no idea what consciousness is. I've studied physics, I've studied philosophy, theology, nobody has a clue what consciousness is. One neurologist said nobody even knows what it would be like to have an idea about what consciousness is. So, what I make of it now is that consciousness is the primary reality of the universe. And I do believe in the Copenhagen version of quantum mechanics that the observation of consciousness is making that light was a representation of consciousness. But I also believe that this glass is a representation of consciousness, and that you are, and that a tree is, and that a rock is. Everything is brimming with that light. My son, actually, 19 years after they told me he was going to ruin my life. We were going home from the funeral of his friend's mother, his best friend's mother. She died, and it was horrible. And he said, Mom, I didn't cry at the funeral. And I said, yeah, but you can cry. Strong men cry when things are sad, and this is sad. And this is a kid who barely talks. He said, well, it's not so bad once the

light comes and opens your heart. And I said, what? A light came and opened your heart? And he said, mm-hmm. I said, well, when did this happen? He said, May 10th. This was in February. And I was like, so what happened? So he told me he was in his room. He was having a struggle. He was 13 years old. This was years before. And a light appeared in his room and touched him. And he said, it told him, you can do this. And I said, well, I've seen that light too. And he looked at me like, wow, I didn't think you had it in you. And it told me that it's always with us, even though we can't see it. And he said, oh, I can see it. And I said, you can? He said, yeah.

I said, like right now? Of course. He was like, yes. I said, well, where is it? Is it like up there? Is it down here? Is it in your heart? And he just shook his head at me and he said, mom, it's everywhere.

That's the world I live in. All right. So yeah, I feel like you and I are probably going to have quite a few conversations. I hope so. On and off records. So to be continued, I'm going to maybe just take a slight sidestep to integrity cleanse. If somebody wanted to do an integrity cleanse or attempt what you did, but with the lessons learned, maybe they are not willing to go kind of full throttle, how would you suggest they do that? Because most people listening, myself included, have never attempted something like this. And just as a quick humorous sidebar, I'll say if people want to read something very funny, there's an article, it's an old article from Esquire called, I Think You're Fat by a friend of mine, A.J. Jacobs.

And it's about his experiments with radical candor. And his wife was like, how do I look at this? And he's like, I think you're fat. And you can imagine it didn't go super well. Oh, goodness. He learned a lot, but ultimately it was a pretty tough experiment. So what would you suggest to people? And what is an integrity cleanse?

And what's the kind of like white belt, blue belt, black belt version, or however you would like to answer that? Let's do the white belt first. Take a smaller time period. I said a year. Take three days a week. And you don't have to say everything you think, but you do have to be aware when you're saying something that you don't believe. So, have a little journal or

something so that you can, when you lie to someone else, and most lies are told to smooth social interactions. Nobody says you look fat. So, just note in a little book, okay, I said this, but what was I actually thinking? So, somebody said to me, oh, we'd love you to come out and visit. And I said, sure, sometime. But you write down, okay, that was a lie. I would rather die a thousand times than go to stay with these people. Whatever. Write the truth down in your little notebook for yourself. That's the path of the truth. Everything else is the path of not there. It's just mushy. I wrote a whole book on this based on the divine comedy because Dante starts that book just saying, in the middle of my life, I found myself just wandering through this horrible, dark

wilderness, and I had no idea how I got there or where to go because I'd lost the true path. And then he shows how you find the true path. So most of us are doing that, and the way you find the true path is to start writing down the things that are true after you've said the things that are not true. Just do that for three days. That's the white belt. Blue belt, take a month and have a friend where you speak the whole truth to another person, even if it's a therapist or a 12-step group or something. You want to go black belt, all in. This is what I try to do. No lying ever, but you don't have to say much. Consider if what you have to say is an improvement upon silence. You can be mute for a month.

No, you end up finding out that you say it if it's true, kind, and useful, and not very few things are all three. But don't lie even with your actions or with your facial expression or anything. Don't eat a bite of food you don't want. That's a lie. I like to be tough on these things. Like I used to run 100 miles a week. Now I will be like, I will never do anything false. And it's fun and rigorous. It is rigorous, I would imagine. All right. So, quick tactical question for people who want to maybe get somewhere between the blue

and black they're going to make an attempt at fewer lies more truth so not just becoming aware of it but actually changing some behavior you mentioned offensive you mentioned rigorous somebody who is being truthful is going to say no in some form a lot more than someone who's being untruthful. What are some of your go-to phrases or the language that you like to use that is not as excellent if I think you're fat? Maybe it is. In terms of saying no to the many things that would otherwise consume your time and your life. Most people, when they want to say no and they don't know how to say it, will try to become victim-y and say, I can't because of this, this, and this, which is horrible because the person

always thinks of a way out of those things. I love this quote from Julius Caesar, Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, where his wife says, don't go to the Senate. I had a horrible nightmare. You're going to get stabbed. So the guy comes to get him and he says, go tell the council Caesar will not come. That I cannot is false, that I dare not, falser still. No, go tell the council Caesar will not come. Boom! Like that is my model. And there have been really good studies that show that to get out of depression, one study had control group, a group that had therapy, a group that had meds, and a group that did nothing but eliminate the words I can't and I have to from their responses. Instead, they had to say, I choose not to, I choose to,

I will, I won't. And they came out of their depression faster than any of the other groups. Every verbal thing we say that is not true hurts our bodies, hurts our psyches, and leads us to anxiety and depression. So, in that case, keep a book that says, you'll have to deal with the people who don't like you saying, no, I've lost a lot of friends this way. Friends that perhaps needed losing. But I always say just think, know what you really know about something. Okay. Feel what you really feel. Say what you really mean, at least to yourself in your notebook, and then do what you really want. And that sounds so self-serving, but in fact, it's quite stoical. I know you follow the Stoics and the Hedonists, they were weirdly similar. They'll do what is

true because it's more felicitous to them in every way. So have a notebook where you write down what you would do if you were being really honest. And then after a while, once you know what you're dealing with, start to become that person in the way you actually conduct your life. And as you make mistakes and as you don't keep your commitments, forgive yourself. Because one of the things I've found is that it's never true to hate yourself or to condemn yourself. It's never true. What do you mean by that? We are such little monkeys, you know? I just got back from Costa Rica and we had

a fabulous monkey encounter. And they had this fear expression. Oh! And they were afraid of so many things. And I just thought, we are this far from them. All we've got is shoes to differentiate us from them. And we're terrified of everything all the time. And most of us are really doing our best. And we have all kinds of socialization weirdness. Our brains get reconditioned and rewired for fear. If you're not in integrity and you didn't manage to pull it off and be honest in a hard situation, kindness and gentleness are the truth. I actually wrote a book that's coming out next year after I wrote The Way of Integrity because I was so tough on

myself in the integrity thing, and it was making people anxious. And there's a level beyond just telling the truth, and it is called compassion, and it's truer. So forgive me while I get really nitty-gritty with maybe a mundane question, but it's building on what we were just talking about. And I'll give an example. So we were first corresponding via email and I was exploring the potential for maybe doing something in person, which is not to say you didn't want to do that, but the logistics weren't going to work out. And you had a line that was something along the lines of, I would love to do in person, but I can't due to life Tetris, something like that. And I was like, life Tetris, due to life Tetris, that is a good phrase I'm going to steal. And so I am wondering- You can't steal it because I give it to you freely.

Oh, thank you. I will gratefully receive them, this phrase. I'm wondering if, let's just say, hypothetical example, really close friend of yours and his wife, so male friend, his wife invites you to a costume party on a Thursday night. And in your mind, you're like, I would rather throw myself face first through a play class window than go to a costume party on a Thursday night for any number of reasons, right? Like perfectly nice person, you do not want to go to this thing. But do you know it would be meaningful to her? You know it would therefore be meaningful to the husband who might have to deal with some flack, who knows, like back channel if you say, you know, yada, yada, yada, but you really don't want to go. What do you say? I would say something like, what else could we do together?

This actually is a really effective thing when you're raising a child. If you just say no, it leaves them with no options. They don't know what to do with their feelings and none of us ever really grows up. So, when somebody says that, you say, ah, what else could we do together? If you love them and you care about them, you want to do something with them. It's just not that. If you don't want to be around them at all, it's time to say no to the costume party and get rid of those people. Not get rid of them, but cut them loose. So when I started asking people to do things with me that I wanted to do, everybody's life got better. I had so much fun, and I didn't have all the awful things where I was pretending to have fun when I wasn't.

Could you give an example of just what that looks like? Somebody comes to you and they're like, let's do A, or please do A. And you're like, in your mind, in body, I don't really want to do A. What might be an example? It could be made up. No, it doesn't have to be made up. I've been actually working this through. Have you interviewed Liz Gilbert? I have. Yeah, it's been a few years. We're going to talk again. She's so much fun. Anyway, we've been trying to figure out how to do live events and our schedules haven't jived very much. And we had the same speaking agent and there was some conflict over that.

And I finally had to just go to her and say, I don't think it works for us to have the same speaking agent when we go and we're creating events together. And it was kind of hard to say that because we both really love this agent, but Liz and she are really, really close. So I thought it might upset her and maybe it did, but the fact is it was true. And so she didn't bat an eye. She just said, whatever makes it more fun and gives us more ease when we're together, great. We want our friendship to be as much fun, as joyful as it can be. So that was the track. And it was a little awkward, but it worked. Last time, I won't beat this dead horse any further, but any other language that you find

helpful for people who have trouble saying no? Is there any like starter language where you're like, try this on for size? For some reason, when you said any other language, I literally thought of Chinese. Yeah, yeah. yeah yeah yeah exactly just respond in a different language i don't i don't speak i remember the most awkward oh tim when i was freaking out about my family and my oh the sexual abuse and everything my mother called and said, we hadn't seen you for a while. We miss you. And I had just taken this pledge and I said to her, I miss the concept of having parents. Because it was the truest thing I could say. Return volley strong. Yeah, but I didn't want to hurt her. I had to tell the truth because that light was still

like right there and I hadn't gotten any experience being skillful. Here's another bit of language, know what you really know and feel what you really feel. So, for me, it might be something like, oh, you know what? Lunch sounds great. Breakfast is just too early for me. I'd be miserable. That's just the truth. I'm not being a victim. I'm just telling them the truth. I'm not a mourning person. So you sort of claim your right to joy, and you make it really clear that you want them to have joy, and you expect yourself to have joy, and no one has to keep secrets or cross boundaries that are hurtful in order to make the other person feel good. It's not true.

And a relationship built on that, it isn't a real relationship. It'll fall apart. There's so much manipulation going on where people are pretending to do things that each other like, and both of them are miserable. Yeah, there was a piece, and I think it was McSweeney's. Well, there was a tweet, and then there was an actual written piece that resembled this. But it said, being an adult, this was a tweet, I wish I had the attribution. Being an adult is saying, so sorry for getting back to you so late over and over again until both of you die. Something like that.

And sorry for the delayed response. I like the cartoon where the guy is holding the phone and going, what about never? Does never work for you? Yeah, the New Yorker. That's amazing. So when there is someone where you're like, you know what? This is just not a relationship I want in my life.

How do you break up with those people? You do what you really want to do. I remember I had one friend. She wanted to come stay with me. I didn't want her to come. And I remember saying, let me think about it. And then we had a conversation later, she was very, very upset. And she said, you paused and you had to think about it. And we were friends and like, and I said, yeah, that's sometimes I have to think about it. And she said, well, is it that you had something else going on or did you really not want me there?

And I was like pinned to the wall and it was physically painful to speak the truth, but it would have been more painful not to. So I said, yeah, I really, I wasn't in a place where our energies were going to work well together. I just did not feel like it would be good for either one of us. After a while, a few of those, and they'll break up with you, I promise. You just tell the truth and people go away. That's joy. All right. So, I am going to ask you about anxiety. I want to ask quite a few questions about that. Before we get to that, so you had some Mandarin pop up. I feel like we should give people a little bit of context. So you've lived in Asia.

You've studied not just East Asian languages, but also philosophies. This is just a sidebar that I thought you might find entertaining, which is I was in Greece many, many, many years ago. And when something is completely foreign, alien, unintelligible in English, you say, wow, it's all Greek to me. And then I realized, well, if you're a Greek person, in Greek, you see something you don't understand, you can't say it's all Greek to me because that's your native language. So what do you guys say? And they're like, oh, yeah, good question. It's all Chinese to me. So if you're

Greek, it's all Chinese to me, which I thought was great. That's fabulous. How has your experience with Asia, Asian languages, philosophies influenced who you are, what you do? Let's just say in a coaching capacity? Yeah, this was before I had kids or any of the other stuff happened. I went over and spent a year studying Chinese at a research center in Singapore, and then I worked in Japan and studied that for a while. And I wasn't particularly interested at the time in the philosophy, in the deeper wisdom of the Asian cultures. I just saw people offering oranges at little stands on the road and thought, oh, that's weird. And I went back to Harvard.

So I did my junior year in Singapore, and I went back to Harvard. And I remember sitting in classes and thinking, why do people assume so much? You just assume so much. Like there's this edifice of stuff you believe that I see no evidence for. And as I went on studying the languages and philosophies of Asia, they have a reverse idea of perfection. So in the monotheistic Western religions, you are born imperfect. You're an imperfect, original sinning mess, and your job is to get

better and better and more godlike until you can be godlike. You have to get better and better and learn more and more. In Asia, the idea is you're formed completely perfect and you accrue illusions as you grow up. So a baby comes in completely innocent and sees that people react nicely when the baby smiles and they don't like it when the baby cries and suddenly they start betraying themselves by smiling when they want to cry. That's the dawn of the loss of integrity and everyone does it. We're a social species. But in Asia, when you set out to be free from suffering, you drop your illusions. So like the

illusion, I should be cheerful all the time. If it causes suffering, it has to go. In the Tao of Jing, my very favorite book, it says, in the pursuit of knowledge, every day something is added. In the pursuit of enlightenment or the Tao, every day something is dropped. So, you know less and less until you arrive at non-action. And when nothing is done, nothing remains undone. I remember thinking, that is so cool, but I don't know why. And yeah, that was even before the white lion and everything. I was already sort of on that path. And now everything appears to me to be illusion. All my thoughts are illusion. And truth is something that I can feel or participate in as consciousness, but I've just been dropping and dropping and dropping my illusions and I try to do that every

day. So we've been jointly baking a nice conversational cake. I just want to put a little icing on top and then we're going to segue to anxiety. And then we're going to make, who knows, we'll make a meringue pie or a key lime pie, maybe a carrot cake, perhaps out of anxiety. You would probably go on the Great British B baking show and outbake everyone in britain well you know sometimes when kids go through or people go through culinary school they're trying to decide on the sweet or the savory path so do you become a chef or are you going to become a pastry chef sweet or savory and for people who are having a tough time deciding i remember hearing when i was working on

4-Hour Chef, someone who was involved in one of these very, very well-known schools said, well, one question we sometimes ask these students is, do you fold your socks? Do you have them in neat rows in a shelf? If so, maybe sweet and baking is for you because it's so OCD friendly and precision oriented. So yes, based on that, at least, I think I would really enjoy, I would find baking very satisfying. I love that. I want to eat what you bake. You know, there may be a day. So the first is a story that I would love you to tell and tell me if this is enough of a prompt. So it's a story of an audience. You're on stage, are you comfortable? This is a question. Could you tell this, please?

I do this over and over. I speak in various places, ballrooms and theaters and places. And I'll be talking about how to do better at work, whatever I've been hired to talk about. And right in the middle, I'll stop and say, wait, wait, is everyone comfortable? And they all look at me as if I'm crazy. I say, no, seriously, are you really comfortable? And they start to say, yes, we're fine. Go on. I'm like, no, I mean it. Are you really comfortable? And the whole audience will get quite angry. Yes, we're comfortable. Just talk. And then I ask them, okay, so now answer this question. If you were home alone in your bedroom right now, how many of you would be sitting in exactly the position you're in at this moment? And maybe one hand goes up in a room full of hundreds of people. And then I say to them,

why would you be in a different position? And they literally have to think. And then it comes to them after about five seconds, this isn't comfortable. And then I say, it's okay that you're not comfortable because we can handle, we're tough. We're a tough species. We're tolerating discomfort so we can be together in this way. But I do have a problem with the fact that you all just looked me in the eye in clear daylight and repeatedly lied to me. And you thought you were telling the truth, but you knew you were lying. And they're like, what? What? And like your body is telling you the truth. That's how cut off we are from our bodies. And that's the first thing you ask yourself when you need to know the truth is, am I comfortable?

That'll give you everything else. The next, that would be the icing. And there's the cherry on top. I'd love for you to expand on a question because these words will be words people recognize, but I think the context, I would like to hear more about the context. What do you want versus what do you yearn for? And that may not be the exact wording that you use. Okay.

What is the significance of that question? It's interesting that you made the comment about, is it the exact language? That's one of the few places where I'm very exacting about language because somehow we divide that conceptually when we use language. I ask people what they want. They make me a list of things, a better job, better relationship, a better car, whatever. And then I say, when you wake up at night and it's dark and there's no one around, what do you yearn for? And the list is completely different. And it's very short. and almost everyone lists the same things. Peace, belonging, freedom, love, happiness. That's kind of it. Everybody wants them. And all the lists of things they

want, those are all, I call it the difference between your social self and your essential self. The essential self yearns, the social self wants. You've gotten a lot of stuff you wanted. It doesn't make you happy. Nice. It's true. But if you get what you yearn for, it actually does make you happy. I can't resist the bait here. So, when you have something like a car, right? Okay. So-and-so wants the newest Tesla model. So-and-so wants the XYZ car.

It's very cleanly discreet in the sense that it costs $88,000. I can finance it for this much a month. Therefore, I know how much I need to work to earn a bonus, to get this, to do that. It's actionable in a convenient way, kind of like the drunk guy looking for his keys under the lamp at night, even though he knows it's in the bar somewhere because that's where the light is. How do you help people, and this might not be the right way to phrase it, but to actualize something like peace or belonging, which at least at face value is much more amorphous. I mean, it's a thing that people know, but it's not as easy to slice and dice and then maybe work backwards from like the new Tesla.

It's not as cognitive. It's not analytical because it's not physical. So it's not measurable. Our particular science doesn't believe that it exists, even though we all want it. So a couple of things. The first thing, it's something I call jumping the tracks. And it's jumping the tracks between seeing your life in purely physical terms and then opening your mind to the possibility of all non-physical realities. And as we know from physics, all physical things are ultimately not physical. So that's the first thing is to say, I live in a world that is not just made up of objects. I live in a world where I deal in energies. When you track the joy through your body, it is a physical sensation, but it's also an energy. So then you start looking for the energies that you track the joy through your body. It is a physical sensation, but it's also an energy. So, then you start looking for the energies that bring you the essence of what you yearn for. And I've found the simplest exercise, and I've been doing it with people since the pandemic to calm people down, speaking of anxiety. I'd love to do it just a little bit. Let's do it. I would love to do it just a little bit. Let's do it. I would love to. So simple.

So I have you write down whatever your concerns are. Then tell me, honest to goodness, three things you love to taste. Okay. You don't want to go for it? Or I guess should I write down? I should write down. No, no, just tell me. I mean, you can write them if you want.

Cheesecake. It's really thick frosting. For sure. I would say barbecue brisket would be there. And then I would say really cold, slightly sweetened iced tea on a really hot day. Ooh, okay. So as you say that, can you remember the sensation of tasting those three things? So focus your attention on the actual experience of the taste. Now, tell me three things you love to hear. Definitely not leaf blowers. Those fucking things are everywhere.

I hate leaf blowers more than anything. They're everywhere in Texas. I don't know what it is with the compulsive leaf blowing. All right, so that's just a bit of a mini rant based on this morning. You and I are very much alike in this way. I was just like, what are these people doing? I think there's a racket where it's like Tuesday they blow the leaves to one side

and then Wednesday they blow the leaves back to the other side. It doesn't make any sense. It blows. It blows, right. It blows, exactly. Alright, so three sounds. Yeah, three things you love to hear i would say acoustic guitar so instrumental say like classical guitar like segovia that type of guitar i find really soothing i find uh what else do I like to hear? I'm thinking of all sorts of obscene things.

Go for it. Very responsive female partner, let's call it. Certainly would be high on the list. And then the sound of my dog, Molly, when I get home and she's so happy to see me. She's just doing corpus calls and happiness know happiness wines left and right i'd say those are three that come to mind okay so the task here is you're going to try to hold all these sensations in your memory you're going to activate them all at once so you've got cheesecake you've got the tea you've got the brisket you've got the dog you've got if you have a drug that can help me to get all of these things felt at the same time. I do. I'll be first in line. All

right. So I'm trying to hold all of these things. That's the challenge. And the left side of the brain, I'll give you a hint, can't do it. So it's forcing you to use the right side of your brain more than you usually do. So maybe you can't remember all of them, but like cheesecake, a guitar, whatever it is. Now we're going to go through the other senses. You know we are. What are three things you love to feel with your skin? Feel with my skin? Or with, you know, your... Can you feel anything with...

Yeah. I didn't foresee this conversation going here this morning, but I'm into it. Any specific part of your skin. Yeah, got it, got it. All right, so I would say my skin. Textures. Yeah yeah for sure a very very saturated epsom salt bath where there's almost like a silky residue when you move around that would be one another i'll try to keep this family friendly for the moment. Another would be definitely dog kisses for sure. That's super

high. And then I would say hot stone massage with a small amount of oil. Fantastic. So those would be three. Okay. So now we're going to do three things non-food that you love to smell. Non-food. I would say there's a tree. I don't know how to pronounce this word, actually. It's called cananga in Spanish sometimes, but a lang-a-lang, the Y-L-A-N-G. Yeah, yeah, that one. Yang-yang or whatever.

However that's pronounced. That particular tree, the scent of the flowers on that tree second would be really on a dog kick i think partially because i'm getting a second dog this summer just that puppy smell yeah yeah true with babies too a lot of people tell me the smell of dog's feet is one of their favorite things oh weird i've never tried that right i've never even smelled it yeah i haven't gone for the feet, but I... I think we need to try. We need to go and take that

step. Yeah, yeah. I'm more of like a soft ear smelling guy with the pups. But then there's like puppy breath thing. So, well, let's just say puppies more in general. So, that's two. Is that two? And yeah. And then I would say non-food number three would be the smell of

cedar saunas nice cedar okay one sense to go three things you love to see three things i love to see snow-covered mountains dotted with trees i would say babies laughing kids laughing just got a nice dose of that with my friend's family over the last few days and then just to showcase my my ocd when things are just like really lined up nicely, say like a bookshelf or stacks of things perfectly parallel, like if there's like a certain uniformity or symmetry, maybe if I want to give it a highfalutin label and sound fancy, I'll say symmetry, different types of symmetry. Okay. So now your job, and as you've been thinking of these things, because scene with as many of these components as you can put together.

So imagine sitting in a perfectly symmetrical, gorgeous cedar sauna on a snowy mountain, looking out, you've got your dog on one side, you've got a responsive female partner on the other. You've got cheesecake, you've got like like someone's playing the guitar i have a guitar player with a blindfold playing spanish guitar my daddy's not here yeah and you start to drop in to a space that you've created in your mind but not the part of your mind that we talk about as mind, it's the sensory experience of being human. Right, the sensory over spreadsheet. And in, yes, as you start to go into that, what you're doing is you're accessing the part of you

that is capable of feeling the things you yearn for. Because everything we actually yearn for is a feeling state. And you can start with these very simple, small things. When I have somebody do this, I have people do this on Zoom calls and put it in the chat, and hundreds of words are going by of different beautiful things. And I'll start by saying, how nervous, anxious, and depressed are you? They give me a number from one to 10. Everybody's nervous and depressed. After they do this for a while and everybody's looking at everyone else's delights, everybody is in a completely different energy state. And that is how you get to the things you yearn for.

You jump the tracks from the way we're taught to think to a sensory-based experiential way of thinking, which is, for me, more real. And so jumping the tracks, does that refer to doing this exercise as an example, establishing this emotional landmark? Like, okay, remember this feeling. You're in the sauna with snow-capped peaks, the dog, the this, the that. Remember this, and this is now your sort of homing direction from a sensory perspective it's a track yeah and it may just be the side of the rhinoceros's toe it's very likely you've been on the path of not there for so long you don't know what the real for me that white light thing was

the whole track bam i could not miss it after that experience. But what you just did is an experience of moving into that territory and seeing sort of, you feel the shape of it or the, I end up having difficulty describing it in words because it's not a verbal experience. And the fact that it's not a verbal experience is part of the reason it can fulfill your yearning. And it's also part of the reason you've never gone there. Stephen Hayes, who founded ACT Therapy, he set out to figure out why humans commit suicide, and no other animal seems to deliberately do that. And his answer is language. We're the only species that can create a reality with words in our minds that is so terrifying that an unknown future is worse than the fear of death. If you stop thinking in terms of language and logic,

which we call that thinking intelligence, it's just like a pair of scissors. It's good for certain tasks. It's not great when you need to stay warm, right? When you jump the tracks into your entire nervous system, which is all part of, it's not disconnected from the brain, then you're in the territory where you can actually experience joy. I want to go to two places. One is going to be a complete non sequitur, but just for purposes of trivia, I want to tell people something about rhinos. So you mentioned rhinos and the toe of the rhino. Part of the reason, as you alluded to, rhinos are a good starter animal for tracking, at least in South Africa, where you and I were in the Sabi Sands Reserve at different times with Lantalozi, which coincidentally means the protector of all things. I believe it's in Zulu. But it has this large front toe. You can imagine it like the edge of your big toe toenail. And then there are these two side toes. And I mean, it just goes back to Pangea and it raises all sorts of great questions.

But it's so weird. So there is an order called the Parasodactyla, which is an order of ungulates. So you could think elk, deer, etc. The order includes about 17 living species divided into three families. You have Equidae, which comes back to the equine therapy maybe at some point. That's horses, asses, and zebras. Rhinos and tapirs, which you find in South America. So those are all related, which is pretty wild to think about. Rhinos, tapirs, and say zebras or horses. But if you look at the tracks, I mean, there are some similarities.

So I just wanted to mention that briefly because it was just, it needed to get out of my head. And then the second is related to a book you mentioned earlier, the Tao Te Ching. And I was wondering if you could speak to Stephen Mitchell and Byron Katie in what you have learned from them. It could be related to integrity, It could be related to other things. But what have you modeled from them or learned from them? Speaking of the concept of having parents, I mean, they're friends more than parents, but I really do feel like they've kind of reparented me with their books.

I read Stephen's version of The Doubted Jing right around the time I had The White Light Experience. That's when it was first published. And it was such an intense, it was like my nervous system caught fire when I read that version. And I'd read other versions and they weren't, they didn't float my boat as much. But there was so much energy in my body that I felt like I was going to literally physically explode. And I drove to a place where I knew I could hike to a waterfall. Oh, they're going to say safely explode. And I drove to a place where I knew I could hike to a waterfall. Oh, they're going to say safely explode. I literally ran along this mountain path to this large-ish waterfall, ran under the waterfall and

just stood there. And then the cold water beating down on me equaled the sort of heat that was rising. I mean, my connection to that book was so overwhelming, and I know it's been powerful for a lot of people. So I memorized it, took it around, gave it to everyone I knew. Then I was on a book tour, and I saw this book by a woman named Byron Katie, and it said, with a foreword by Stephen Mitchell. Never would have looked at it if I hadn't seen that. And then I found out on the leaf, on the book leaf, that they were married. And I was like, wow, okay, now I'm interested.

So I bought the book, got on a plane, read the book. And she had a series of four questions, which are very simple. Think of a thought that makes you upset. Is it true? Can you know that it's true? What happens when you think it? Who would you be without it? It seemed very, very simple. And I applied it. I started applying it. And there on the plane, I had an injury on my knee. And my thought was,

I'm mad at my knee because it won't let me work out. And Katie has this way of reversing everything that's causing you suffering. After reading her stuff and doing her work forever, I actually believe that the direct verbal opposite of your worst fear is your next step toward enlightenment. I truly believe that. Okay, can you say that one more time? So, I have some familiarity with her workshops and worksheets, and just for people who want to find this, they can find the work by Byron Katie online. Yeah, it's called The Work of Byron Katie, and you can go online and download free things, and she's very generous with it.

Could you say that one more time? Because this seems like an important point. It will sound odd if you haven't been doing the work for a long time, but this is what I've realized. The exact verbal opposite of my worst fear. So, the opposite. Take your worst fear, find the direct opposite of that. That is your next step toward enlightenment. So, for example, when I wrote my book about Mormons, and I said to the publisher, don't tell anyone until it's published, and they said, you're afraid of the Mormons, how cute. Then the galleys went out, and I started getting calls from New York, why didn't you tell us? These people are insane, We're all going to die. You mess with a religion, you get some weird responses.

So, I'm on this, this is a different time. I'm on this plane again and I'm thinking something terrible is going to happen to me because I wrote that book. Something terrible is going to happen to me because I wrote that book. And this thought just dogged me. So I did Byron Katie's work on it and she picks it apart for you. And then you get the reverse. And the reverse of my worst fear here was I'm going to happen to something terrible because I wrote that book. Instead of something terrible is going to happen to me, it became, I'm going to happen to something terrible. And something in my psyche just went click, click, click, click. And I was no longer afraid. I thought I might get killed for sure. I just, I know I was doing what was right for me, period. I never went into a welter over it again. That was just true for me. So,

that gives you a little tiny weird backwards taste of the way Byron Katie's work affects you when you do it. And she was doing her work and some people who were into it said to Stephen Mitchell, a great translator and writer, you've got to write a book about this woman. And he said, no. And they said, no, you really, really have to. And he's like, I hate gurus. I don't like, oh my gosh. She's living in California. Ugh, no. And they said, no, you really, really have to. And he's like, I hate gurus. I don't like, oh my gosh, she lives in California. Stephen is very picky, very picky. He said,

all right, I'll go to Barstow where she lives. She wasn't living in Barstow anymore. She just had lived there. She was living in LA. But he said, she will meet me in Barstow and we will sit down on the floor and we will look into each other's eyes for an hour. And then I will tell you whether I will write her book or not. So, the way I tell the story, which is not far off the truth, but it's my story, not theirs. But they went to Barstow and Katie was thinking, why does he want to go to Barstow? And they sat in a hotel. I believe they sat on the floor, knee to knee, and they looked into each other's eyes without speaking for an hour. And then they got married.

That's not quite right. But he said to Katie, I've got to go back to New York now. And she just said, why would you go back to New York? He said, because I live there. And she just said, why would you go back to New York? He said, because I live there. And she was like, so? And he said, well, I have to go deal with my affairs. And she said, but you're the only person I've ever met who's of my species. And they talk about two kids in love in their 80s. They are in love with life, in love with each other, in love with the world, in love with death itself, in love with everything. And their work has just mothered and

fathered me through my life. And they've done it themselves as people now, so I love them dearly. I encourage people to check out the work for sure. And I have a, I guess, technical question about the opposite that you landed on. So I am going to happen to something terrible because of my book. Is that an example of a turnaround? And could you have ended up on a different version? For instance, something wonderful is going to happen to me because of my book or some alternate. There could have been a number of varieties. Did that happen to be the one that of several resonated with you? Yeah, that was the one that really hit the gong in my mind, but I did have several. And very often, you can come up with a bunch of them, and some of them are just plain wrong. They don't feel right at all. Some of them are, okay, but it's not changing my life. Like, nothing terrible is going to happen to me because I wrote this book. I thought, I don't believe that. And actually, terrible things did happen to me. Death wasn't one of them, but some things are going to happen to me for sure. So,

maybe if I hadn't believed it, it wouldn't have happened, but it did. So, that one didn't work. Wonderful things are going to happen to me because I wrote that book. I did think that one seemed truer, and it ended up being truer. I just couldn't know what was going to happen. And then I got, often for me, it's the one that's strange and not grammatically normal that will break the construct in my mind because I think of the strange verbiage. And it sort of breaks open an assumption, and I'm in that space of don't know mind. It's a little Satori, right? And it's really fun to take your fears, put them through Byron Katie's questions, and then look at the turnarounds. And it can really, really change your life just sitting in a chair. I have seen people in 15 minutes doing this exercise live with Katie

reframe 20 years of resentment towards a parent because of X, Y, and Z. And they do a 180 and seemingly it just evaporates or transforms into something completely different with at least some durability. And I expect for some folks, a lot of durability. I've been really impressed. And it's not that this happens to everyone every time. That's not the case. But you do see some really remarkable changes.

But I'll tell you something. The work itself is incredibly powerful. But the reason people have these massive shifts with Katie in person, this one guy, he was in a house that was bombed to smithereens in Poland during, I think it was in World War II, and his whole family died and a roof beam fell on him and it was winter. And so he gets up and he's haunted by this moment. And for 50 years, he's carried this. And she says, can you find the nine-year-old boy in that scenario with that roof beam on his head who was just fine? And he thinks for like literally two seconds and goes, oh yeah. And things like this happened

around Katie all the time. And the reason is that she has jumped the tracks and to understand why it's so powerful to do the work with her, you have to jump the tracks. You have to start believing that there's an energetic field that is connecting all of us and you can feel people's energy. I know I start to sound all new age and Stephen wants to slap me in the face. He doesn't, he never would, but he gets very grumpy with me. I don't believe any of that stuff. He would stare at you for an hour very intensely. He's like, I don't believe any of that stuff, it's just phony. And I'm like, explain this, Stephen. And I show him something Katie's done and he just laughs and says, all right, I can't explain that. But it's really

nice. He's such a super hardcore analytical. He doesn't believe anything because everything can be disproven. And she is a field of transformation. She just is. She really is a different species. It's just a different thing and i'm not making any claims i'm not deifying her is she just she's a very and i mean this in the most complimentary way but very unusual i have met a lot of people who claim to be gurus and self-helpers and everything and she's the only one i've spent quite a lot of time around her i have never seen any reason to disbelieve what she says about the fact that she lives in perpetual joy. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, it's pretty wild to see her in action. And I have not spent a lot of time with her, but I spent a few days in a workshop with her. And you're just like, is this an act? Does she go home and just yell on the phone? And you just, at least I was not able to see any deviation. I did not see any deviation whatsoever. No, I've never seen it. And I've been around her when she's exhausted, when she's sick, when she's jet lagged. She's never in psychological suffering ever, as far as I've seen.

So let's chat about another great for a second. Goethe, the German writer, innovator, polymath of every possible variety. I'm wondering what you find most striking about Goethe. There are a couple of quotes that popped up that I think may resonate with you that I think you've mentioned in conversations before. But when you trust yourself, you will know how to live. That's one. Another, never hurry, never cease. That's one I've heard permutations of in Buddhism as well, right? No hurry, no pause, all these things, which I quite like. Any others that come to mind or any aspects?

From Goethe himself? Or anything, I mean, that doesn't need to be specifically. We can meander as we want to meander. I love the stuff about self-trust. I'm blanking, actually, which I rarely do. All I can think about is Faust now and how he talks about the bargain with the devil. I think we all make a bargain with the devil metaphorically because we're forced to confront the question, will we do what it takes to be admired and approved of by humans, or will we follow the soul? Will we trust ourselves, or will we trust what other people want us to be? So, the Faustian bargain is the only thing

that's really coming to mind right now. Is Goethe a particular favorite of yours? I have a collection of aphorisms and lived in Berlin for a period of time, became really infatuated by Goethe just because, and for those wondering what the hell we're talking about, lots of different pronunciations in English, but G-O-E-T-H-E, there's the Goethe Institute and certainly, I don't know if it'd be fair to call him the Shakespeare plus of Germany, but that's one way to think about it. I know why you're into him. Tell me. He's just like you. He's just like me.

Yeah. I mean, there aren't many people like you. Bald and handsome? There really aren't. And I love the way you're so incredibly generous with all your life hacks and everything, but I'm like, okay, so you can learn 12 sentences and then know a language. Not everybody can. You can learn the tango and be an Argentine champion.

Not everybody can. But you are kind of a freak. You got to admit that. Because you don't just pick up hobbies. You pick up hobbies and then become a Japanese translator. Like, it's kind of insane the kind of equipment you were born with. And it must be a heavy burden in some ways and quite lonely. Because as much as you try to help people be the same, they probably rarely are.

And I think Goethe's life might have been similar you are america's goethe no wow there you go thank you i appreciate that that is high praise i would say for a multitude of reasons definitely feeling lonely i mean that's something i'm familiar with for sure i do have hardware. I'd say that it manifests in maybe unpredictable ways. I did a bunch of cognitive assessments recently because that's the kind of thing that I do. And for instance, for digit recall, just doing five and six digit recall, when I don't have the ability, I don't have the time to use a crutch of, say, a mnemonic, I am terrible.

I'm like lowest decile in the US for sure, like bottom 10%. But then there are other things like the Stroop test where you're looking at, say, the word red, but it's displayed in green and you have to either indicate red or green depending on some parameter. And it's very fast. Stroop test, I'm like top 1%. I have have no idea why i don't know what that translates to and it kind of goes on and on there are super abilities and super weaknesses oh tell me this is fascinating well i mean they're very in my experience often right side by side they're very, in my experience, often right side by side. They're very adjacent, right?

So I would say, you can see how this would cut both ways. I can walk into a room. I was doing a remodel at one point, for instance, and I had never seen this entire room built. And I walked in, and there was a mirror 10 feet away. And I said, it's an eighth of an inch too far to the left. I'm talking about symmetry feet away and I said it's an eighth of an inch too far to the left like talking about symmetry I was like it's an eighth of an inch too far to the left and they're like what I was like yeah yeah it's not centered and they went over and measured it and lo and behold within a fraction of a second I was like yeah that's off wow you can see how

that would drive me fucking bananas too that would be hard to live in the world very monkish beauty is such a what i say it's so gratifying to me that it's its own excuse for being it's its own excuse for being so when there is something that lazily violates beauty it bugs the shit out of me. And I'm not proud of that. I'm not saying it is enabling. Most of the time I would say it is distracting. At worst it would be disabling. But it enables me to do certain things, right? Like I can draw the floor plan of almost any restaurant I've ever been in. Doesn't matter if it's once, twice, if I've only been there for five minutes, that's just something I can do. And then there are a lot of things that normal people can do that I just seem unable to do in terms of, let's just say, on one hand, I have a great creative

capacity because I will ruminate. On the other hand, that same rumination can manifest as lifelong onset insomnia. Oh, yes, yes. I'm in treatment for this right now. I just found someone, yeah. Oh, wow. All right. So, it goes both ways. And I will say there are examples where I can't teach someone to replicate what I've done. There are, thankfully, more examples of where I can help someone actually get beyond where I arrived after x point in time. Mostly because I would say the vast majority of teaching has a lot of fat on it and logical sequences aren't particularly prevalent and old methods persist for a really long time. So I mean, the way that we, as an example, teach languages, since you mentioned languages, the way we teach languages in most schools

is the equivalent of saying, okay, you want to learn how to ski and you're excited to learn how to ski? Great. We're going to have you take a six-month avalanche course and you're going to memorize meteorological tables and historical weather patterns for the first six months. Who is going to want to do that? Nobody. Everyone's going to drop out. Maybe there are one or two people who survive and then they get called good at languages. That's a failure of the method, not a failure of the students. 100%, yeah. Right? And then, so if I'm able to suffer through that and then break it down, rearrange it,

remove 90% of it, then I can teach people to go further than I did in a lot of ways. However, then I have an unusual ability to mimic. I just do. And for whatever reason, even though I've done audiological exams, because I like to know what I'm dealing with, I do not seem to have any greater range, any greater sensitivity than the average person, but my brain, for whatever reason, interprets these sounds and signals and I can mimic accents. I can mimic tones. I can do these things. I don't know why, but that does give me an advantage. So have you ever been given a word for your neurodivergence? No. And I'm grateful in the sense that i was not of a generation where say over prescription was common or even really existent for things that didn't have labels

constellations of symptoms or characteristics that didn't have labels until later because i for sure would have been medicated to the gills and And I'm not saying there is a place for medication, but I would have been given everything under the sun. I mean, I was hyperactive, rambunctious, bouncing all over the place, refused to learn the alphabet for a while, and then I was stupid, and then I was going to be held back. I mean, I would have been just saturated with pharmaceuticals. So, no, I haven't been given, I have not been given a word. Is there a good word that comes to mind? I don't know. I mean, my oldest child just self-identified as autistic. So, I went in and looked at all the symptoms and I'm like, oh, that's what's been wrong with me this whole time.

I truly believe, I believe this thing about destiny. And I remember thinking even as a child, if my destiny is to go to the top of, climb to the top of Everest and someone else's destiny is dive to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the equipment that I need would actually make them unable to fulfill their mission. Like if I'm climbing, that would not be good in diving. And I couldn't haul an aquatic set of tools up Everest. So I thought, all right, there are things I wish I could do that I can't. And things I can do, I don't know. I just can't do them. And it's really easy for me and weirdly easy.

And I just thought, well, this must be in some way a description of what I'm meant to do with my life. I remember thinking that when I was eight or nine years old. And I look at you, and you've done so many things that, what do you do if you're good at dancing? You become a champion. Yay, you can do that. But your brain is so different, and I hope they never medicate it unless it's something that makes you happier, but I am really curious about your brain because it's clearly, I actually think the future of our species depends on people who are neurodivergent in ways that make them unable to fit the culture that Western colonizers created, the weird cultures, right? And that's an oversimplification and there are many, many cultures. But the overall culture that we have of hierarchical capitalism, whatever, is destroying the planet and teaching people

languages by putting them in avalanche courses. And then there are people who just will not because their brains work differently. And you've just got the most unusual brain I've ever seen. Oh, thank you. I think about this a lot,, I don't know if I want to paint this broadly, but superpowers come with costs. Always. Or just powers. Like powers come with weaknesses. It's the two sides of the same coin come in many different varieties.

And so I think that, for instance, a lot of my abilities almost certainly would not exist without also a propensity towards depression, a propensity towards anxiety and hypervigilance. And there are times, certainly, when I would trade it all for the ability to get to sleep easily, the ability to look at the glass as half full instead of half empty. I mean, there are times that I'm like, you know what? I'm not sure right now if someone was like, here's your list of abilities and disabilities. And if you strike out one, you have to strike out something from the other column. I might erase a number of things. Arrived at a good place.

I feel that number of recent experiments have been particularly interesting. But I'd love to hear from you. And this stuck out. This is in some prep notes. And I'd like you to take this wherever you would like to take it. But this is a line. I'm just going to use it as a prompt. So the opposite of anxiety isn't calm, it's creativity.

I like that. I've never heard it before, but there's part of me that's like, even without dissecting it, it makes some sense to me. Could you elaborate on that, please? I came to this conclusion, I was noticing this huge spike in all my clients of anxiety, and I was reading about this massive, mostly in the pandemic, but anxiety just went bananas and it didn't come down and things eased a little bit. And at the same time, I got to be friends with Jill Bolte-Taylor, the woman who had the left hemisphere stroke when she was a

Harvard neuroanatomist. It was the first TED talk to go viral. And she lost all language and analytical cognition while her left hemisphere was offline. It took her eight years to rebuild her brain, but she experienced things with only the right hemisphere that she'd never experienced before. This incredible joy, bliss, awe, the feeling of being completely a field of energy, no barriers between physical objects. It was a very different view of the world. If she hadn't been a neuroanatomist, she probably would be sitting in a vegetating somewhere. But fortunately, she was among people who knew how to help her rebuild. So now she goes around telling people, we're overusing the left hemispheres of our brains.

We need to be able to access the right. And so I'd been talking to her about this endlessly. I love talking to her. And I was reading a lot of brain science, always have, always will. And I noticed that there were tons of studies that showed that the moment someone is even slightly stressed, their creativity goes to shit. Like they do these creative tests and then they say, we'll pay you $5 if you get the answer. Instead of motivating them, they get that little bit of anxiety, can't do it. All these studies showing that little kids happily create things and adults can't do the same things. Why? It always boils down to social anxiety. So there's this spaghetti and marshmallow test. Have you heard of it? This is a game of height, right? Yeah. You're trying to build the tallest tower possible using uncooked spaghetti, a marshmallow, some string, and some tape. And they gave this problem to a

whole bunch of engineers, groups of MBA students, groups of lawyers, all these people. They all had similar results. Then they gave it to a group of five-year-olds who won by a country mile. Five-year-olds do better by far at so many creative tests. And why do they stop doing well as they get older? It boils down to socialization and social anxiety. So then I looked at the brain structures and what Jill told me was you basically have two brains. They're symmetrical, but they don't work the same. The left hemisphere has this alarm signal that goes into fear, and then immediately the brain starts to, the left hemisphere starts to try to control whatever's going wrong,

whatever makes you afraid, and telling verbal stories about it. Problem is the verbal stories that you tell feed back into the amygd afraid, and telling verbal stories about it. Problem is the verbal stories that you tell feed back into the amygdala as environmental realities. So if I'm afraid something's going to jump at me from the dark, it's as if something really is going to jump at me from the dark. So when I say I may have a fatal illness, there's no evidence, but I can literally go into a panic over that because of language. The left hemisphere is also unable or unwilling to acknowledge that the right hemisphere's perspective exists at all. Like if people have a right hemisphere stroke and they're only in the left hemisphere and you tell them to draw a clock, they'll draw the side of the clock

from 12 to 6 and they'll say, that's finished. And there's nothing wrong with their eyes. They will not acknowledge anything the right brain is observing. When Jill only had her right brain, zero anxiety, zero time, zero physical reality, really. On the right side, the amygdala is afraid, ah, but it starts to get curious. So you said something about curiosity really early on in this interview, and I was like, that's the trick. Because if something scares you, if you go to control, you're in anxiety. If you go to curiosity, my mind is open, I have no assumptions, and I want to know what this is about. Instead of anxiety, you get creativity. So it depends which side, and one side shuts off the other. So it toggles. So when I asked you to talk about these things that you were, the things you love with all five senses, you had to go into the right hemisphere of the brain,

and it had to shut down the part of the brain that produces anxiety. That's just the machinery. So, my premise was anxiety kills creativity. Maybe creativity kills anxiety. So, I started designing things to test that, and it tests amazingly well, even though I haven't seen any direct studies on it yet. If you put together the science around it, it's kind of an unavoidable conclusion. And when I try it myself, oh my God, the results are ridiculously powerful. What types of exercises do you do for yourself? Oh, for example, if you were to write your name, Tim, that's cheating because it's short, Tim Ferriss. Are you right-handed? I'm right-handed. So, I would have you write your name, then put your pencil just to the left of your name and write it backwards in mirror writing.

So mirror your signature. Then you'd put your pencil under your signature and do it upside down, and then upside down and backwards. Leonardo da Vinci used to write in mirror writing. Yeah, that is a wild example of people go back and look at this extensive backwards writing. I used mirror writing constantly as a kid. It was amazing to me that other people couldn't read it. I totally maxed out this IQ test once when I was five because the guy had the test right in front of him and he was giving it to me orally. And I thought, doesn't he know I can read it upside down? I'm fine here. I aced that one. Anyway, but just

because I can read mirror writing, but try doing that and staying anxious at the same time. Can't do it. Then I decided, okay, I'm going to take January, 2023. I'm going to give myself an entire month in lockdown because the systems are, the conditions are very controlled. So this is a good time for an experiment in the pandemic. I get up every morning and do things that are purely right brain function. So I started with drawing and painting, and I thought, I'll just go from there. I drew and painted like a maniac. I didn't want to sleep. I didn't want to eat. I didn't want to talk to anyone.

I just, I was in pure heaven. And the problem was at the end of the month, stopping was horrible. It was like some kind of suicide right there. And now, since I finished writing, I had to get back into my left hemisphere to write the book about it. But as soon as I sent the manuscript away, I just started painting. I get up every morning at like between 4 and 6 and paint until 11. And I'm just like completely blissed out.

Yeah, I find drawing to be a real self. And I wanted to be an illustrator for a long time when I was a kid. And paid some of my expenses in college by being an illustrator. Actually, I illustrated a few books. I did that too. Long time ago. And getting back into that, even just going to,

you do not need to be good. It's not about being good. It's about using different circuitry, patterning, a different type of awareness. There are many different ways you could frame it. Gesture drawing, going to live classes where you have nude subjects posing. And just in case there are a bunch of guys who are like, awesome. No, you're going to get some obese naked dudes too. Yeah, it's not awesome.

It's dealer's choice. So just realize you got to be there for the drawing. Yes. It's not a singles bar. And the fact just for people who've never been the way this works, gesture drawing is so-called because you're intended to capture at least the essence of a pose. The pose automatically changes with a timer. The timer could be one minute initially, and the model will change his or her position every 60 seconds. And then it might go to two minutes and then to say five minutes. But the point I want to make is part of the beauty of this is when things are changing that quickly, I really like gesture drawing live classes as an introduction

because you just cannot, you do not have the space to overanalyze what you're doing. Yes. Whereas if I'm like, draw this apple on a table and you have two hours to do it, you can scrutinize and tie yourself up in knots every which way from Sunday. But if it's opposed to changes every 60 seconds, you just have to draw. In any case, I find it so deeply therapeutic. I used to put like a silk scarf in front of a fan and try to draw it. That sounds like torture potentially. No, it's heaven.

Because, I mean, I had this massive depression and anxiety. And you know from experience, and it's when you do it for the joy of it. The moment you're doing it for money is just work. The reason I went so deeply into it this last January is that The moment you're doing it for money is just work. The reason I went so deeply into it this last January is that I'd always been doing it for the result for a long time. I was doing it for money. I was doing it to give to someone, whatever, to teach. And this was just to activate the right side of my brain. That was it. I would be obsessed with a drawing or a painting. And when it was done, I would just throw it in. I don't even know where they are anymore. They just started littering the floor. I was in pig

heaven. And it really does. When I'm anxious, this is what I tell myself, make something. Make something. You can't stay anxious if you're making something. Yeah, for sure. So, two quick comments. The first is for people who want a great reinforcement of this, Make Good Art, a commencement speech by Neil Gaiman is- Oh, I love that. Unbelievably good. And watch the actual delivery. Watch the video because his mellifluous dulcet tones add so much to it. His delivery is so good. And then the second thing I would say is, for those people who are like, what? How am I going to find a naked person in a class and

this, that, and the other thing? There are websites, and we'll put some in the show notes, where you have effectively gesture poses that change and you can set the duration. So you can mimic this at home. You don't need to do a class, but the class has so much more to it. You're doing it with other people. You're probably standing. You're actually moving your body and getting away from staring at something 18 inches at a fixed location in front of your face. There's so much more to it.

What you just described is the way the right hemisphere moves with people in motion with the body versus the left hemisphere moves, fixed, rigid, in space, got to get this right. And there's an overemphasis in our entire culture, again, an oversimplification, but there's a huge overemphasis on left hemisphere functions to the point where this, I love this guy, Ian McGill-Christ at Oxford. He says the whole culture functions like someone with a right hemisphere stroke. Like we've lost half our brain, and it's the part that includes, that nurtures, that finds meaning, that finds joy. I mean, we have left out the best part.

Yeah, there are many different ways of knowing different modes of living. So these types of exercises I've just found so important as certainly joy-inducing, but just a critical vitamin. And if you're deficient in this, the consequences psychologically are just as dire as if you were deficient in essential amino acid or something like that. So let me ask you in a slightly different context, as it relates to, it doesn't need to be specific to anxiety, but I'm very curious because Boyd had

mentioned this in his long list of potential topics that we could discuss. So I'm wondering if this ties in in any way, or if you could just speak to, he put down IFS, so parts work, internal family systems. How have you used that? What do you find it best for? We don't have to spend a lot of time on it. I'm just wondering if there's an intersection in the same way there might be an intersection. If thoughts are beliefs we take to be true, something like that, or beliefs or thoughts we take to be true, if the work, Byron Katie's work, can have such a dramatic impact on people by helping them to reauthor. So I signed up. I tried to get a training course, but there's a waiting list. Signed up with my own IFS therapist, ended up

meeting Dick Schwartz, who created IFS, and having conversations with him about it. And the way he puts it, he was a family therapist. And there were times when he's working with a group of people and say the dad was really aggressive and a child didn't want to talk in front of the dad, he'd ask the dad to step out of the room and then the child could talk, could speak more freely. And then he was working with just one patient and he heard them using a very critical, angry voice. And he had this odd thing of, could I ask whoever just said that to step out of the body for a minute? Not literally. And to his surprise, the patient said, sure. And then the critical part stepped out and he said, I'd like to talk to whoever is behind

this critical voice or whoever disagrees with the critical voice. And different parts of the patient would start to express themselves. It's not a shift in identity. It's not multiple personalities or anything like that. It's just that we all know we have parts. There's not a shift in identity. It's not multiple personalities or anything like that. It's just that we all know we have parts. There's a part of us that loves to go out dancing and a part that likes to stay home and go to sleep. There's a part that feels little. There's a part that feels strong, whatever. So, the thing is, the Byron Katie work, for example, if you do it, but only one part of you does it, there may be another part that is just not down with it. And that part needs to have its experience. What Dick found was that the parts have their own

unique and whole identities. And if you respect them, they come together and they start to integrate with each other and solve the problems that make your life miserable. And it works really, really well. Do you use that with clients? Yeah, I'm not trained, but he's also very generous with his theory. And there are books out there, one is called Self-Therapy by Jay Early, with little illustrations and everything to tell you how to use it. And the biggest thing I found, especially to relate to anxiety, so there's a part of you that gets anxious and depressed, yeah? Or maybe there are two different parts, one anxious,

one depressed, I don't know. So, when you think about your anxiety or your depression or your insomnia, how do you think about it? Like, what are the thoughts you think? What are the thoughts I think what are the thoughts i think when you're thinking about insomnia yeah i mean remarkably i've seemingly fixed a lot of that for the first time in 30 years but i would say if we're talking about anxiety or depression i'd say the most common type of thought pattern and i did do a live i had dick on the podcast dick schwartz and we did a live kind of demo okay or he he asked me if i would be willing to do it so we did do a live walkthrough but i'd say to answer your question the most common thoughts that i have

are even related to depression fear-based so for instance if I don't get sleep for one or two days, I'm like catastrophizing, right? Like I can feel myself slipping. I don't want to go into this state. I need to do everything to avoid it because if I end up in the spiral, A, B, C, D, E, F, and G, and all these catastrophe scenarios might ensue. So there's a lot of fear around slipping into a persistent depressive or anxious state, especially depressive state, because the anxious state I've brute-forced through so many thousands of times that I have a greater degree of confidence in my ability to, just by sheer will and overpowering my psyche, I can compensate. Whereas the depressive stuff is more handicapping. But there's a lot of fear around it, I would say.

Yeah. So there's fear, there's avoidance, there's dread, there's catastrophizing. Now, what I've found is that when people talk to me about anxiety, they're like, I hate it. I want to get rid of it. I'd do anything to be rid of it. So I had this theory that the part that holds the insomnia or the part that holds the anxiety or depression is a part that wants to be included. Everything wants to belong, right? So when you're saying, get away, I don't want you, the part of you that does insomnia and depression goes into a kind of panic because it's now being told it can't belong. You don't want it. You've rejected it. And so it ups the ante and all it knows how to do is keep you awake and make you depressed. So it starts to spiral upwards. I had this huge breakthrough when I was meditating. And sometimes when I have a negative thing that won't seem to leave, I just use this little let go, let go mantra, and it wasn't letting go. And I thought, okay, how would Byron Katie do this? And I said, let's stay. So I said to my anxiety at the time, stay, don't go anywhere. Please come and sit down,

stay here. I want you exactly the way you are. I accept you exactly the time. Stay. Don't go anywhere. Please come and sit down. Stay here. I want you exactly the way you are. I accept you exactly the way you are. I want you with me. I care about you. I care about your welfare. I want to know all about you. I want to know everything about you. Come sit by the fire with me. And in a way, it's what I do with every client. It's what I did with Boyd when we were getting to know each other. Sit by the fire with me and tell me your worst fears, your worst stories, because I have room enough in my heart for all of them. And I said being creative is the opposite of anxiety, but you can't get to creativity if you don't start with acceptance and compassion and simple kindness toward the self, toward the parts of the self that are doing the things you can't stand.

And that was a really dramatic shift for me in my insomnia, for one thing, but in all the negatives when I started saying, stay. I love that. You know what it also makes me think? But in all the negatives, when I started saying, stay. I love that. You know what it also makes me think? Man, oh man, is it time for me to go back and reread Radical Acceptance by Tara Brock. Yeah, that's a great book. Probably.

It's probably time for me to get back on that horse too. I love that. At a left field, do you have a favorite animal? Is there a small set of animals, birds, or otherwise where yeah i do i particularly like or find these animals interesting i do cheetahs cheetahs all right yes i love big cats anyway but i had it cheetahs are delicate and scared and skittish because they're built for speed. They have those long legs and stuff. And if a lion or a leopard or a hyena gets to them, they're toast. So I had a chance to meet an orphan cheetah, an adult cheetah. And you know how animals have

energy? Like dogs have this energy that is just dog, like genius energy. And horses have this energy, which is like, I'm about this far away from wild and I'm scared of everything. And lions have this energy like serial killers because they are, you know. But cheetahs, I once came upon a cheetah that was throttling an impala and it held on until the animal had suffocated. And then it looked up at me and it said, Eww. So, I met this adult cheetah. The energy.

Tim, you've got to meet cheetahs. They have like dog energy if you put a ton of sugar in it. They are the sweetest animals. Wait, what do you mean by putting a ton of sugar into it? They are sweet. Just throwing donuts out of the car? Not in the rot your teeth way, but just like how dogs love you. She does love you twice that much. They love each other twice that much.

And it started licking my arm, and it was taking off a layer of skin with every lick because they have these really raspy tongues. I literally had a scar for months, and I don't care. It could have eaten my arm. As far as scar stories go, that's up there with the grades. What happened to your arm? Oh, nothing. Just a cheetah licked my skin off. You never know. Yeah. Okay. Cheetahs. Yeah. I have not been that close to a cheetah, but I was really overjoyed. I think it was my last outing at Londolozie in the trackers and rangers and with the whole kit and caboodle where they could actually use the radio. So we weren't on foot, at least not initially initially i really wanted to see a cheetah and as it happens you probably can identify with this maybe but i i was so jet lagged at one point i skipped one morning drive so of course they see all these cheetahs right and they're like you missed the cheetahs oh and i'm like oh you gotta be kidding me and then luckily because these just the technical

abilities of these rangers and trackers is so otherworldly we're able to find a cheetah who's just killed nimpala and was resting in the shade and it just eaten a bunch so it wasn't going anywhere they're like yeah don't worry about it and we're able to get probably within 30 or 40 feet and just lock eyes. And for those people who haven't done this, which I'm guessing is a pretty large percentage, they have very different eyes from lions or leopards. They have this, at least the cheetah eyes saw this, deep kind of amber orange eyes and a very square brow, like a very straight brow line. And it's so distinct. And they're, as you pointed out, so delicate.

I mean, certainly if push came to shove, they could rip your face off. Oh, they can kill you six ways from Sunday. But they're very, very skittish, right? They are going to run away from everything because every other cat can steal prey from them or kill them. So they are built for speed. They've made a lot of compromises in optimizing for speed.

Quick side note for people who may not realize this. If you look at, say, a leopard's tail, it's kind of like a squirrel tail. It's built for balancing at height. So it's very round. It's very bushy. And a cheetah tail is actually very rectangular. It's almost like a rudder or a beaver tail turned 90 degrees on its side because they use it for maneuvering aerodynamically when

they're traveling at high speed. It's so wild. But I don't have a cheetah licking scar. I'm actually very, very envious of this. It really goes what you said about every superpower has its cost, though. And I think you would identify with cheetahs. Yeah, I mean, I love cheetahs. I love, love, love cheetahs. I've only seen them that close that one time. But what a wonderful experience. Let's hop to this far from wild and I'm afraid of everything. Horses.

Yeah, yeah. I want to say, did at one point you own a ranch? Am I making that up? North Star Ranch. Yeah. Do you still own the ranch? No, moved out to Pennsylvania. Okay, but you did.

This was in San Luis Obispo. Yeah. Slow. For six years. And for six years. It actually was in a national park. I mean, the nearest grocery store was an hour's drive. Wow. There was no road going past it. There was us and a national park.

Okay. I tracked a lot of bears and a lot of mountain lion. I bet you had a lot. So, equine therapy was... Now now I don't know how much time you've spent in that context. The reason I'm asking about it, I spent one afternoon here in Texas on a farm that specializes in equine therapy for people with PTSD, kids with different neurodivergent conditions, including autism. And I wanted to have the experience of interacting with horses. And I've ridden horses before, but being in a pen, interacting without any objective to ride a horse is foreign to me. Could you describe what this is? And if I'm kind of barking up the

wrong tree, please stop me. But I'm just curious what your, the broad question is kind of what you gain from interacting with animals writ large, but since horses will not, are less inclined to eat your face than say big cats, it's a little more approachable for folks. That is a huge avalanche of word salad of a non-question, but would you like to take on the challenge of doing something like that? I love it. Yeah, I got that ranch because I got the chance to work with some equine therapists, and I made a sort of amalgamation of the way I coach people with what they were doing. And we ran seminars and put work teams through it and everything. And the reason it's so amazing is that I talk about people exuding an energy or cheetahs exuding an energy. Horses are responding to that energy, and they respond in a way that is undeniable. So, we'd have a team of

people and their boss would go into the pen. They were all too frightened to tell the boss that he was terrifying. The horse would just start to gallop and gallop and gallop and rear and the guy would be, I'm being nice to him. And you could correct for posture and you correct for, there's a way to speak horse and you speak it with your physical body. And you basically have to learn to stop acting like a predator, which we are, and start moving more like a prey animal. So gentle energy, eyes down, eyes soft, these sort of wishy-washy sounding things, but when you're in there in the pen with the horse and your eyes aren't soft, the horse is afraid. And then you learn how to soften your eyes and

the horse goes, oh, and like physically drops its tension. And if you get to a place where you are in really calm, really connected state of being, so calm but also open, the horse will make you the leader of the herd. And I had a few experiences with that where I was taught to act like a herd leader. And this one time, some horse whispers took me to a herd, and they said, we want you to join up with this one little Palomino mare. And there were like 20 horses in this pasture, and this one was the most skittish, the hardest to get close to. I had to get my energy so soft and do everything just right. But eventually, I got to the place, there's something we used to call a join up, where you walk past the horse and you sort of brush past it with your shoulder and walk away and it follows you and you are now its leader.

I've done this with individual horses. I finally got this little Palomino to join up with me. And I walked past her and she came with me. And then you walk for a while together just to establish the connection. And she was walking with me, but I heard something weird behind me. And so, after we'd walked a while, I looked back, and I just looked down and over, not over my shoulder, sort of under my shoulder, because you don't want your eyes to be up and staring. And she was the herd matriarch, and when she joined up with me, the whole herd did. And they were all walking with me. Holy shit.

That's amazing. That's why I bought a ranch in California. I'm like, I'm buying a ranch. And what happens is you start to realize that these horses are just more sensitive to stuff that people are saying and you all the time. And we'd put people in with horses and the horses would force them to tell the truth. And then the other people, the boss would say, am I really that scary? And everybody would go, all five horses are afraid of you.

And we are too. And it's a very, very quick way to learn to tell the truth. There was this one woman who kept trying to do it. She was having no success at all. The horse just kept was this one woman who kept trying to do it. She was having no success at all. The horse just kept bumping up against her and she hated it. She said she was getting nothing out of the seminar. I was panicking inside. And finally, she said, after three days of this, she said, all right, I've been working on all these stupid little things, but the real thing is I'm getting a divorce and I haven't told anybody. And

she started to cry and it was obvious that was her real issue. So, he said, just go in with the horse and do whatever, but be honest. So, she went into the pen and she just stood there and started to cry and the horse came up and walked up and touched her with his shoulder and then wrapped his head back around so that his nose was touching his flank and just held her. And it was a genuine hug. This is not me anthropomorphizing. When you realize that nature is available to you as a companion, if you just tell the truth, it really is worth giving everything else up.

So why did you sell the ranch? Because I felt like it was time. I'm following this energy through the world. And I had written a novel about a woman who goes into the forest of California and has all these experiences. And then I was going to write a sequel that happens in the eastern forest, the little piece of the eastern ancient forest that still survive. It was going to write a sequel that happens in the Eastern Forest, the little piece of the Eastern ancient forests that still survive. It was going to be about a plague that affected New York City. So I moved to a little patch of the ancient Eastern Forest in Pennsylvania, and then there was a plague that affected New York City.

And I'm writing the sequel now. I go through life tracking and saying, I have a ranch now, I'm a rancher. No, I don't know. I could sell this house and move tomorrow if I felt like I should, and I would. Okay. So, what was the view, if you flashback to the day or the week or the conversation or the walk in which you're like, I'm done. No more ranch. What did that look like? Oh, it was much more gentle than that. It was like a death. It was like an animal dying. Have you ever had to put down a dog?

Yeah, unfortunately, yes. Unfortunately, and yet it's such a clean pain, right? Death in nature is not the horror we make it. Death in nature is this deep gratitude for physical experience and then this profound release of the physical form of what you loved. And it teaches you how to die. And when you really know how to die, then you can live without any fear. And I felt the ranch dying for me and something else coming to life. And I grieved.

How did that feel? Just because I think that might sound hard to grasp for some folks. Yeah, it is. I know. Yeah. So what does that feel like? This was exactly the place I was supposed to be. And now, well, Liz said it in Eat, Pray, Love, now it is time for something that is beautiful

to change into something else that is beautiful. And I knew that if I stayed there, the beauty of it would decay. Because the real beauty, it's like I said to myself in that month of my right hemisphere stuff, it's not about the picture I'm painting. It's not about the painting. It's about painting. It's about the process of being in continuous creative response to whatever is present, that state of mind. And it said, buy a ranch. So I bought, I literally on my 50th birthday spent every penny I had on a ranch. And six years later, I sold it. And you know something great? We had a wonderful massage therapist who used to come out and work on people there. And she'd have her massage table

in her car, but I'm sure she was living kind of paycheck to paycheck or hand to mouth. When we decided to leave, she inherited a whole bunch of money and bought the ranch. That's wild. And Boyd loves her. We all love her. That's wild. And Boyd loves her. We all love her. That's amazing. Yeah. And then this place, there were wild turkeys and deer and everything in the place we came here. First thing that happened when I saw this house was a whole flock of wild turkeys walked out of the forest.

And I've never seen them since. It was just like I was being welcomed. You know how Londa Losey is. Nature is like that everywhere. And that's why it's worth it to tell the truth and let people hate you. Because nature loves you when you tell the truth. And it tells you to go places and have adventures. I just went to Costa Rica.

We didn't see any monkeys for six days. So I went and I energetically called monkeys. I know it's stupid. We got mobbed by monkeys. They were everywhere until my son got scared of them and I had to ask them to leave with my mind. The monkey whisperer. I don't see that in your bio. I haven't gotten around to it. It was just last week. Oh, wait. No, here it is on your LinkedIn. That's right. Okay. Yeah. I mean, life is full of wildness.

2020 to present. Monkey whispering ink. I like it. Monkeys also, look, I mean, all of the fables about monkeys, there's something to it. Those beautiful creatures can also be mischievous rat bastards. Scary animals. They are scary. Oh Oh my God. Boyd's stories about baboons are the most hilarious. Oh, baboons are especially terrifying. Yeah. Oh boy. I was listening. It's funny you mentioned baboons. I was literally listening to recordings from Lotta Losey two days ago. I shouldn't have done it right before bed because I had some terrifying dreams. But I was listening to baboon alarm calls. Yeah,

don't listen to baboon. Don't listen to baboon alarm calls right before you go to bed. Novice mistake. Don't do that. But yeah, Costa Rica. Were they spider monkeys? Howlers? No, they were capuchins. Oh, nice. They're cute. Yeah. And scary. Just a little. And they can get a little scary well martha we've covered a lot of ground is there anything else that you would like to chat about before we land the plane for this first conversation this might sound so

yarfy but i just i'm really grateful for you and for the life you've lived and for your differences and how you've pushed them. And then you've given them to the world just so generously and completely. And you've given me so much time today, and I feel an enormous joy. And, okay, I love your presence your energy your being i am awash in wonder the way i am when i'm in nature and i meet a really interesting creature thank you thank you so much i've been a fan from afar for a long time. So it's really nice to finally connect. And Boyd has been sort of patiently waiting, I guess, for me to make the connection I've wanted to do for quite a while. And the story is certainly that he tells. Now we've gotten to pay him back with stories about

Boyd. He can't defend himself. That's right. And we should all hang out and make some more stories. Because I will tell you one thing. if you go wherever you feel you're supposed to go to maximize your joy your adventures just increase yeah i feel like i'm in a liminal phase right now between one thing and the next and there's probably quite a bit running in parallel but i'm excited i have no idea what that next big thing is in some traditional cultures and like europe for example parable europe before civilization the threshold is the place of magic because it's not one place or another and when you're on it you're not anyone anywhere you're a liminal phase is the place where you're completely unformed but that's why it's a place you can do magic so maybe you should just stay in the liminal phase.

Hang out in the waiting room for a little bit. Do some, learn some magic. The custom, yeah, the customs office between territories. Yeah, the boundary walking. I enjoy just walking on it as opposed to crossing over it. So maybe I'll hang out here for a bit. That's where the shamans live. Trixie, Trixie shamans, yes.

The monkeys of the human race. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. That's for sure. When you're like, why did so many cultures murder so many shamans? You're like, well, you know, they can be rascals. They can be very Trixie. There is a really fun book.

You may have already come across this, but Trickster Makes This World or Made This World by Lewis Hyde. Fascinating. Really fun book if people want to get into trickster mythology. It's tricky. It's tricky. And of course, how these archetypes are present in all of us and some more so than others but i've been spending more and more time with mythology there's a lot there if you stay in

the liminal phase and tell the truth all the time instead of being tricksy if you learn the magic and tell the truth you have to use it in ways that are for good and not evil yeah yeah and that is like i think maybe that's what we're supposed to we're all humans are supposed to do that i don't know firing katie does it and by tricksy i don't mean necessarily bad i just mean tricksy really tricksy probably doesn't help very much but i mean if you look at like coyote or raven or any number of exactly these trickster deities it's like usually they are incredible creators they've stolen something from the gods and bestowed it to humans they've done a lot of good and they're constantly getting themselves into trouble oh it's just a nightmare. Yeah. So I'm going to try to avoid some of the trouble, but I do like,

I think there's some liminal mischief that might be right on the doorstep that could be fun to explore. So we'll see where that goes. I want to hear about that. Yeah. That might be a show don't tell kind of situation. So that'll be my show and tell. We'll see where it goes. But it's been such a pleasure to spend time with you today. Thank you again for taking the time. And your recent book is The Way of Integrity, Finding the Path to Your True Self. New York Times bestseller, Oprah's Book Club Selection.

And I found your thinking on integrity and your writing on integrity incredibly powerful. Your upcoming book is Beyond Anxiety, Curiosity, Creativity, and Finding Your Life's Purpose. That is forthcoming. So people have that to look forward to. And they can find you in all things Martha Beck, I would imagine, at marthabeck.com. And the Martha Beck is your account on Facebook, Instagram, etc. And we'll link to all these things in the show notes for everybody at Tim.blogs.podcast. So we'll put everything in one place, including everything we talked about. And I'm very grateful to have this opportunity to bake some conversational

cake with you today. I love the cakes you make. Let's make more someday. Yeah, let's make more. Thank you. Thank you for this opportunity to get to know you and also to be on the podcast in that order yeah for sure absolutely my pleasure entirely and for everybody listening as usual i mentioned where you can find the show notes and until next time be just a bit kinder than is necessary to others and to yourself. Don't forget the last part.

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