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Susan Cain: The Power of Introverts and Loneliness | Lex Fridman Podcast #298


small model | large model

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People whose favorite songs are their happy songs,
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play it on their playlist about 175 times.
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The people who love sad music, play them about 800 times.
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And they say that they feel connected to the sublime
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when they're listening to that music.
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The longing for what you lack is the very thing
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that gives you what you're longing for.
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So the longing is the cure.
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The following is a conversation with Susan Cain,
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author of Quiet, The Power of Introverts in the World
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That Can't Stop Talking,
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and her most recent book, Bittersweet,
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How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole.
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This is the Lex Readman podcast, support it.
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Please check out our sponsors in the description.
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And now, dear friends, here's Susan Cain.
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You've written on your website that, quote,
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I prefer listening to talking, reading to socializing,
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and cozy chats to group settings.
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So I think this conversation and the podcast
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is gonna be fun.
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What's a good definition of an introvert?
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Is something like those three things a good start?
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It is a good start in terms of how introverts
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experience day to day life.
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I think a good definition is one that some of your listeners
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will have heard many times before,
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the idea of where do you get your energy?
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And for some people, they get their energy more
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from quieter settings, and for other people,
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they get it more from being out there.
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So a good rule of thumb is to imagine that you're
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at a party that you're really enjoying,
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and you've been there for about two hours or so,
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and it's with people you really like,
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and it's in your favorite place, so it's all good.
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An extrovert in a setting like that
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is gonna feel charged up,
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and they're gonna be looking for the after party.
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And an introvert, no matter how good a time they're having
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and how socially skilled they are,
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there's this moment where you just wish
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that you could teleport and be back at home.
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Yeah, and at the time before the start of the party
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to the time when that moment happens
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is different for different people.
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So the shorter that is, the more of an inch where you are?
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Is that that kind of thing?
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The shorter the moment until you get to the place
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where you've gotta teleport home.
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You gotta teleport home.
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Yeah, and then for extroverts, it's the opposite.
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They're gonna feel, maybe they're working on,
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I don't know, focused on producing a memo
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that's really intensely interesting to them,
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but if they're in that state of solitary,
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the solitary mode of really focusing,
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they might get stir crazy a lot faster
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than an introvert would.
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And so it doesn't have so much to do
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with what you're good at as how you get your energy.
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And so for an introvert, the source of energy
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is what?
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Silence, solitude, and for an extrovert,
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it's interaction with other people?
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What I'd really say is that,
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and this is neurobiological as well,
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is that it has to do with how your nervous system
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reacts to stimulation.
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So for an introvert, you're feeling
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in a great state of equilibrium
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when there are fewer inputs coming at you.
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So they could be social inputs,
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but that's why an introvert in general
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would rather hang out with one close friend at a time
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as opposed to a big party full of strangers
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because that's too many inputs for the nervous system.
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And for an extrovert, the nervous system
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needs more stimulants, so if they're not getting enough,
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they get that listless and sluggish feeling.
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So if you're just walking through the world,
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like people listening to this, but in general,
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how do you know if you're an introvert?
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Like how do you empirically start to determine
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if you are in large part an introvert?
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Well, I would start by just asking that question
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of what happens to you at around the two hour mark
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where you're having a good time.
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Go to parties, just go to parties every day.
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But I also find, I'm curious if you have
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a different experience from this,
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but from all the years that I've been out there
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talking about this topic, I found that most people
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really seem to know once they're being honest
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with themselves, and maybe that's the question to ask
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is like if you imagine that you have a Saturday
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or a whole weekend where you can spend your time
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exactly the way you want to with no professional obligations
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and no social obligations, who would you spend it with?
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How many people, what would you be doing?
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And what does that picture that you're painting
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start to look like?
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Yeah, so there's nuance to this though
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because I'm sure for extroverts to get energized
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by stimulation, whether that's stimulation
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with other people, like it depends
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what that stimulation is, right?
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Like maybe you're not surrounded
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by the kind of people that you enjoy being around.
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So, you know, maybe that has to do less
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with whether some characteristics of your personality
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more has to do with the fact, like what your environment
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is like, that's always kind of the question.
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Do you want to be alone because everybody around you
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is an asshole, or do you want to be alone
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because you get energized from being?
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Well, I would hold the variables constant, I guess.
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I would say.
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You know.
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Keep the assholes constant and see.
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And then there's the other thing you kind of observe
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that there's a lot of people that will say
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they get energized from being alone.
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Like people are exhausting to them or something like that.
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But at the same time, when you see them at a party,
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they seem like the life of the party.
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I know.
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And I hear from those people all the time.
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There's so many people like that.
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What would you classify them as exactly?
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Is it ultimately as the source of energy?
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Is it the most important thing?
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Or like how the heck are they the life of the party?
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It's a bunch of different things, you know.
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So first of all, just to say like a big caveat
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to all of this is humans are just amazingly complex.
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So you can't explain every individual human
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through these parameters,
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even though I think the parameters are really valuable.
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But that person at the party,
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it could be that they're more of an ambivert.
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So they kind of are more in the middle of the spectrum.
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It basically means someone who's not extremely introverted
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or extremely extroverted, they're kind of in the middle.
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So maybe at a party, their more extroverted side comes out.
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Or it could be an introvert who's gotten really good
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at the skills of acting more like a pseudo extrovert.
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And they pull that up at the moments that they need it.
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So they learn how to fake it.
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Yeah.
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Oh, there's a lot of people like that.
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And I know this because like,
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I think out of all the people on this planet
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you could be talking to,
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I've heard from the most number of those people.
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Like they all come and tell me about their experience
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out in the world presenting a face that's different
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from what they feel.
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So one of the things you talk about is,
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at least in the West, we've constructed
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a picture of success.
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And that picture is usually one of an extrovert.
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Like when you imagine somebody who's a leader,
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who's a successful person,
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that person has some of the qualities
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you would associate with an extrovert.
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And so there's a lot of incentive for faking it.
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Yeah, exactly.
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If you want to be successful,
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you gotta be able to fake it,
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to sort of hang with the rest of the team.
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You have to be able to be outgoing
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and all those kinds of things
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and not be drained by the interaction.
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Yeah, but I mean, there are also a lot of introverts
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who figure out ways to draw on their own strengths
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and they're incredibly connecting and successful
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and they're great leaders and they're not actually faking it.
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They're more just figuring out ways to do it their own way.
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You see a lot of people like that.
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Is there advice, is there lessons you can draw from that,
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from just observing how you can be an introvert
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and be in a leadership position?
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Yeah, it's kind of like a mantra,
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figuring out what your own strengths are
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and how to draw on them.
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I think of a guy I know, Doug Conant,
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who had been the CEO of Campbell Soup for many years.
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He's very introverted.
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He's quite shy also by his own description.
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And he really cares about people.
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And so when he started at Campbell,
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the employee engagement ratings of the company
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were all the way at the bottom of the Fortune 500.
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And by the time he stepped down 10 years later,
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they were all the way at the top.
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And it wasn't that he was going out there
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and schmoozing people, but he really did care.
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So he would find out who were the people
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who had really been contributing
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and he would write to them personal letters of thanks.
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And these letters meant so much to people.
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They would carry them around with them.
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And during his time, the 10 years there,
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he wrote 30,000 of those letters.
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So that was his way of doing it.
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That was his way of drawing on his own strengths.
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And he did that together with, of course,
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you sometimes have to go outside your comfort zone,
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no matter who you are.
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So he was doing plenty of that too.
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It's a kind of combination.
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Yeah, the writing process
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and focusing on the one on one interaction,
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I can definitely relate.
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There's something deeply draining,
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which concerns me about Zoom meetings
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because it's some weird brain manipulation.
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Same here.
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Well, because you're not really engaged,
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but it wears on you the same way that it does a party.
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It feels like you're emptying that bucket
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for the introverts, even though they're not participating
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at all in the meeting.
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I mean, I suppose that's true for physical meetings too,
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but with Zoom meetings, remote meetings,
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it's so much easier to invite a larger number of people
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into the meeting.
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So you're draining more and more of the introvert energy.
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And probably extrovert too, but the introvert definitely.
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I mean, it's interesting.
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I would love to understand that more
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because there's more and more push towards remote work
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without, I think, a deep understanding
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of why these meetings are so draining on people.
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I just anecdotally have heard from that.
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But maybe that's because the managers,
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the people who arrange the meetings,
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are just not sufficiently yet aware
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of the draining nature of them
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so that they pull in too many people,
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they schedule them too regularly,
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so they need to adjust, that kind of thing probably.
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I think people are starting to realize,
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but I would say one reason that Zoom is so draining
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is because you can see your own self presentation
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the whole time if you choose to.
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And when you go into in person, you can't.
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So you're kind of freed of thinking about that.
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So it's like an extra cognitive load
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that you're bearing the whole time.
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And you might want to turn off the camera
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so you can't see yourself, but then you feel like,
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well, I have the ability to,
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so I probably should be doing it.
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And then that alone is a decision that you're making.
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Yeah, there's probably studies on this now happening,
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either have happened or are happening,
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the effect of seeing your own face on camera.
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Because it's reminding you
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that you're supposed to be acting a certain way.
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And that is especially a stressful thing.
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Yeah, you can't be in the moment as much.
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But I mean, for you, you make the decision
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to do all your podcast interviews in person, right?
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And that's even when it's very costly.
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If there's any kind of chemistry
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that contributes at all to the conversation,
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which I think most conversations have chemistry,
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even the boring work meetings, there's something there.
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Because yes, you're trying to solve a particular problem
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at this particular time.
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But underneath it, there's a team building that's happening.
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And honestly, people also have told me about this,
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why they enjoyed the Zoom meetings during the pandemic.
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It's like, they're lonely.
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Yeah, yeah.
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Like they, you know, it's annoying to have to sit
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and listen to folks talk about nothing and so on.
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But they tune in anyway,
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because it's kind of lonely to sit there by yourself.
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And that, I mean, there's a deep connection there
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when you're with other people.
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And that is especially true when they're in person.
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Which is a huge concern for me
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for like more and more offices
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from a capitalist perspective, realizing,
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hey, why are we, why do we have these large office spaces?
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Why do we have to get people together?
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But I think in some deep sense we do.
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But then you also talk about that once we do,
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we wanna protect the introverts.
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Like you don't want the open space, office space,
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which was a big fad for a while.
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I don't know where people stand on that at this point.
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Yeah, I think people are figuring it out in a post pandemic
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context, but I mean, I know what you mean.
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So before I became a writer,
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I was a corporate lawyer for like seven years.
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And literally the only thing I miss from those years
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is hanging out with people at the office.
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Like, I don't know, just some of the funniest moments
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I've had in my life came from being at the office
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until midnight with the other people I was working with.
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So I know exactly what you're talking about.
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Though I will say the office is there at that firm
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and at most firms in those days,
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everybody had their own office.
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So it was like a dorm room,
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where it was like a long hallway
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with everybody in their own little dorm room.
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So you had tons of privacy,
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but you would also come out and hang out with people.
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You could just kind of roam whenever you want.
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Yeah, yeah.
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And whenever you roam, that means you're kind of open.
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You're looking for trouble.
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You're open for interaction.
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And the extent to which you would keep your door open,
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was it wide open or was it half a jar or just a little bit?
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Those were all signals.
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So is there, cause you said reenergize,
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is there, do you like to think,
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and again, the human mind is complicated,
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but do you like to think of it as like a bucket
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that gets refilled for introverts
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in terms of energy of social interaction
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that they're able to handle?
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Do you think of it like that,
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as a bucket that gets emptied and needs to be refilled?
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I think of it, yeah, more or less,
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cause I use the metaphor of a battery
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that gets recharged or not.
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It's basically the same thing, different metaphor.
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But yeah, but just to add on that,
link |
00:14:21.440
that there is a layer of complexity to that
link |
00:14:24.040
because you could be somebody who
link |
00:14:29.400
doesn't want the kind of social life, let's say,
link |
00:14:32.320
where you have to be like on and presenting
link |
00:14:35.120
and interacting with tons of people all the time,
link |
00:14:37.160
but you'd get really lonely if you were just by yourself.
link |
00:14:40.080
So what you want is to maybe be in the company
link |
00:14:42.400
of a couple of people you know really well.
link |
00:14:44.760
Like for me, the pandemic was not actually that hard
link |
00:14:47.640
for me personally.
link |
00:14:48.560
I mean, I lost family, but I mean,
link |
00:14:50.600
from the point of view of what we're talking about,
link |
00:14:52.720
it wasn't that hard because I live with my husband
link |
00:14:55.480
and my kids.
link |
00:14:57.080
So I knew it was hard on the kids
link |
00:14:58.280
and I felt badly for them.
link |
00:15:00.160
But for me, I was like, you know what?
link |
00:15:02.920
I have a lot of social life right here in the house.
link |
00:15:05.880
And I can focus and do my work.
link |
00:15:07.520
Yeah, like yeah.
link |
00:15:09.800
That's the cool thing about the pandemic, I think,
link |
00:15:12.320
it helped people figure out how much they love their family.
link |
00:15:14.920
I think that's true.
link |
00:15:16.280
And while you give you a chance
link |
00:15:17.720
to really reconnect with kids,
link |
00:15:19.920
with your kids, like really spend time with them,
link |
00:15:22.200
it's just fascinating to watch.
link |
00:15:23.400
Like people actually, it did strengthen the family unit
link |
00:15:26.960
in an often beautiful way,
link |
00:15:31.000
which just sucks to have to leave behind at this point.
link |
00:15:34.600
Yeah, and I think that's part of what people
link |
00:15:36.360
are not gonna wanna go back to that we need to solve for,
link |
00:15:40.720
to the extent that work becomes non remote again.
link |
00:15:44.120
I think people have just realized
link |
00:15:45.200
how precious those aspects of their lives are.
link |
00:15:47.400
And for somebody who's in a conventional office job
link |
00:15:51.880
where you're going home and seeing your kids
link |
00:15:53.800
for an hour before bedtime,
link |
00:15:56.080
and that's your interaction with them,
link |
00:15:58.040
that's kind of a ridiculous way to set things up.
link |
00:16:01.440
It's cool that you can get,
link |
00:16:02.680
I think a lot of places give you the option now,
link |
00:16:05.000
which is interesting.
link |
00:16:05.920
You get to optimize that element of your life.
link |
00:16:08.400
Do you take the commute and the office work
link |
00:16:10.080
and then the social interaction there?
link |
00:16:11.360
Do you focus on the work at home?
link |
00:16:13.760
It's also lonely at home,
link |
00:16:15.120
but then you get to see your kids if you have kids.
link |
00:16:17.640
That's part of the optimization is like,
link |
00:16:20.240
I have some options now and I'm gonna try to optimize
link |
00:16:25.120
solitude, loneliness, happiness, productivity,
link |
00:16:30.280
seeing family, seeing coworkers,
link |
00:16:34.840
the chemistry with the team building with the coworkers
link |
00:16:36.760
versus just the raw exchange of information
link |
00:16:40.360
with the coworkers.
link |
00:16:41.320
It's fascinating to see how that kind of evolves.
link |
00:16:44.640
Yeah, and then there's the big,
link |
00:16:46.400
the third space idea of the spaces
link |
00:16:49.680
where you're in a coworking space
link |
00:16:52.640
or a cafe or something like that.
link |
00:16:54.240
You've got other people around you,
link |
00:16:55.640
but you're not exactly interacting with them,
link |
00:16:58.320
but they're very much there.
link |
00:17:00.440
And that's huge too.
link |
00:17:02.160
I don't think we think about that enough.
link |
00:17:04.360
Yeah, that energy's there.
link |
00:17:06.320
Yeah, yeah.
link |
00:17:07.360
I lived in Manhattan for 17 years before we had kids
link |
00:17:11.800
and I absolutely loved it.
link |
00:17:15.520
I loved it, the feeling of all that energy all around you,
link |
00:17:18.680
but you could be anonymous within it.
link |
00:17:21.200
To me, it was perfect.
link |
00:17:22.280
Yeah, it was beautiful.
link |
00:17:23.120
I worked this morning for a few hours,
link |
00:17:26.240
programmed for a few hours at a Starbucks.
link |
00:17:28.560
And first of all, wearing suits,
link |
00:17:31.920
like Manhattan is the one place
link |
00:17:33.880
you can kind of fit into that
link |
00:17:35.320
because everyone's wearing suits.
link |
00:17:36.680
You wear suits every day?
link |
00:17:38.680
Well, these days, unfortunately,
link |
00:17:39.880
because I get recognized,
link |
00:17:41.320
I wear usually not suits on my own life.
link |
00:17:45.440
But yeah, I love it.
link |
00:17:46.680
I love the way it feels, I don't know.
link |
00:17:48.800
And the way I think about the world when I wear a suit,
link |
00:17:51.280
I take it seriously as if my life is gonna end today.
link |
00:17:54.760
This is what I would want to wear,
link |
00:17:56.880
not for physical appearance,
link |
00:17:58.720
but for some reason, it makes me feel focused.
link |
00:18:02.840
I don't know.
link |
00:18:03.680
So even if you're not gonna see anyone,
link |
00:18:05.120
you would still put the suit on when you're doing your work?
link |
00:18:07.080
Especially then.
link |
00:18:07.920
Really?
link |
00:18:08.760
Especially then, yeah.
link |
00:18:10.480
Yeah, I really love doing that.
link |
00:18:12.640
So it tells you seriousness of purpose,
link |
00:18:14.920
something like that?
link |
00:18:15.760
Yeah, yeah.
link |
00:18:16.600
Like everything elevated now?
link |
00:18:17.760
I don't know what it is.
link |
00:18:18.600
I don't know what I imagine exactly,
link |
00:18:20.040
but it's some kind of platonic form
link |
00:18:23.640
of a mixture of James Bond
link |
00:18:26.480
and like, I don't know who else,
link |
00:18:29.040
Richard Feynman, what can I think about
link |
00:18:31.200
when I think about a suit?
link |
00:18:32.280
You know, I think of Leonard Cohen,
link |
00:18:33.640
but he was always wearing suits too, but you know.
link |
00:18:37.040
Leonard Cohen is definitely one of my,
link |
00:18:38.720
is a tragic human, is a beautiful human being.
link |
00:18:41.400
Yeah, yeah.
link |
00:18:42.240
Through his words, through his own private life,
link |
00:18:44.520
yes, I definitely would think about Leonard Cohen.
link |
00:18:49.560
So small talk, that's another thing.
link |
00:18:53.920
Is that part of the equation
link |
00:18:57.040
of introvert versus extrovert?
link |
00:18:58.800
Well.
link |
00:18:59.640
How much people enjoy small talk?
link |
00:19:01.080
I kind of went into this whole thing
link |
00:19:03.080
thinking that it was,
link |
00:19:04.800
but from what I've seen, most people have studied,
link |
00:19:07.840
is that most people don't like small talk.
link |
00:19:11.000
I think that's why people like your podcasts,
link |
00:19:12.800
because you're like, forget the small talk,
link |
00:19:14.840
I'm going deep into it from the very beginning.
link |
00:19:17.440
Yeah, so it's actually, the picture you're painting
link |
00:19:19.560
is like the way you started,
link |
00:19:21.640
like with your, with the book Quiet,
link |
00:19:25.480
and the way you are today is you realize
link |
00:19:27.840
the picture may be more complicated.
link |
00:19:30.640
Yeah, everything's more complicated.
link |
00:19:33.960
I will say with the small talk thing,
link |
00:19:37.240
that I'm curious if you have this experience,
link |
00:19:41.040
but I find it fantastic to have a career
link |
00:19:44.720
where I'm known for anti small talk kinds of topics,
link |
00:19:49.720
because it means that anywhere I go,
link |
00:19:51.840
like if I show up at a conference or something like that,
link |
00:19:54.280
no one does small talk with me.
link |
00:19:55.960
They're like telling me about the deep truth of their lives
link |
00:19:59.360
from the first hello, and I love that.
link |
00:20:02.440
And in normal life, you have to like wade through a lot
link |
00:20:05.160
before you know if people are ready to go there.
link |
00:20:08.600
Yeah.
link |
00:20:09.440
Do you have that experience too?
link |
00:20:10.280
No, definitely, definitely,
link |
00:20:11.520
with people that know me for sure.
link |
00:20:13.520
But you forget how many people feel like they know you
link |
00:20:16.200
because of your podcasts.
link |
00:20:17.480
Oh, that's what, no, that counts.
link |
00:20:18.960
Because I'm a huge fan of podcasts,
link |
00:20:21.080
and I feel like before I ever became friends
link |
00:20:24.640
with Joe Rogan, I felt like I was friends with him,
link |
00:20:27.800
because I was a fan of his podcast.
link |
00:20:30.160
So like it was, I feel like it's a friendship.
link |
00:20:33.160
I know it's a one way friendship
link |
00:20:34.600
with all the people I listen to in podcasts,
link |
00:20:37.080
and even people who are no longer with us, like writers.
link |
00:20:40.960
I feel like I have a relationship with them.
link |
00:20:42.360
Maybe I'm insane.
link |
00:20:43.320
No, I totally feel that way.
link |
00:20:45.080
That's the whole reason I became a writer.
link |
00:20:46.760
Like I'm friends with Leonard Cohen.
link |
00:20:48.400
Yeah.
link |
00:20:50.760
And he's not aware of it.
link |
00:20:53.040
No, but I think that's the whole reason
link |
00:20:56.400
for writing or making music or whatever people do.
link |
00:20:59.760
It's to be able to have those kinds of connections
link |
00:21:02.880
that don't require having to be in a room together,
link |
00:21:06.120
because there's only so many people
link |
00:21:07.560
you can be in a room with in your lifetime.
link |
00:21:10.760
The hard thing is, unfortunately,
link |
00:21:15.040
because I value human connection so much,
link |
00:21:19.600
and I only have, just like you mentioned,
link |
00:21:21.960
sort of a small circle of people
link |
00:21:23.840
I'm really close with by design.
link |
00:21:26.520
It always hurts me a lot to say goodbye to people.
link |
00:21:30.280
Like you meet people,
link |
00:21:31.280
and you can tell they're beautiful people.
link |
00:21:32.720
They're amazing.
link |
00:21:33.560
There's something so fascinating about them.
link |
00:21:35.480
They're, they've had a complicated life.
link |
00:21:40.160
Like you could see in their eyes
link |
00:21:41.500
in the way they tell their story in just a few sentences.
link |
00:21:44.760
They've gone through some shit,
link |
00:21:45.920
but they've also found some elements of beauty,
link |
00:21:49.040
and then you get to realize,
link |
00:21:50.760
okay, well, there's a fascinating human here,
link |
00:21:52.960
and all you get to say is a few words here and there.
link |
00:21:55.440
Like a funny little joke,
link |
00:21:58.640
maybe a dark joke here and there,
link |
00:22:00.160
and then you just say goodbye, maybe hug it out,
link |
00:22:03.200
and you go on your way.
link |
00:22:04.360
So like that's a hello and a goodbye,
link |
00:22:06.120
and your paths will never cross again.
link |
00:22:08.040
That makes me like a sad walk, walk away.
link |
00:22:13.000
But I guess I wouldn't have it any other way,
link |
00:22:14.840
I suppose, is the reality is.
link |
00:22:16.760
In your book, you talk about that sorrow,
link |
00:22:20.520
that sadness not being such a bad thing.
link |
00:22:22.960
Yeah, and when you just said that,
link |
00:22:26.000
I just thought of this one moment in my life
link |
00:22:29.040
that I haven't thought of for 20, 30 years or something,
link |
00:22:32.560
but it was when I was in law school,
link |
00:22:34.120
and a classmate of mine had his friend
link |
00:22:38.280
come to visit for the weekend,
link |
00:22:39.580
and the three of us hung out a lot,
link |
00:22:41.000
and we just had an amazing time.
link |
00:22:44.440
And then this other guy who wasn't gonna be coming back
link |
00:22:47.680
anytime soon, if at all, sent a postcard to me.
link |
00:22:52.000
And the only thing written on the postcard
link |
00:22:54.080
was this quote from Oscar Wilde.
link |
00:22:55.840
And I don't remember the exact words,
link |
00:22:57.160
but it basically said that there's no pain as intense
link |
00:23:00.320
as the sorrow of parting from someone
link |
00:23:03.600
to whom you've just been introduced.
link |
00:23:05.920
Yeah.
link |
00:23:06.880
And there was something so intense about that, and so true.
link |
00:23:10.680
I think partly also because when you've just been introduced
link |
00:23:13.040
to somebody, you don't yet know their difficulties.
link |
00:23:18.400
So you're seeing the most sparkling version of them.
link |
00:23:22.200
You're seeing a platonic version of love and friendship.
link |
00:23:26.560
And your imagination fills in the rest
link |
00:23:28.400
in some beautiful way that matches perfectly
link |
00:23:31.040
the kind of thing you're interested in.
link |
00:23:33.000
That's how I feel about one spoonful of ice cream,
link |
00:23:37.000
and that's why you always finish the whole tub,
link |
00:23:39.880
and then you regret all of it.
link |
00:23:42.400
You do cite, where did you write this?
link |
00:23:45.400
I think this is on your website,
link |
00:23:47.000
that one of the best things in the world
link |
00:23:48.560
is that sublime moment when a writer, artist, or musician
link |
00:23:52.160
manages to express something you've always felt,
link |
00:23:54.960
but never articulated, or at least never quite so beautifully.
link |
00:23:58.480
So that's the Oscar Wilde line is one line like that,
link |
00:24:01.320
but just a line from a song or maybe a piece of art
link |
00:24:06.760
that just grabs you.
link |
00:24:07.600
Is there something that jumps out into memory
link |
00:24:09.960
like that for you?
link |
00:24:11.840
I don't know if I have an exact line, though.
link |
00:24:14.040
I mean, that feeling that you just quoted
link |
00:24:16.000
happens to me all the time.
link |
00:24:17.480
I'm just bad at recalling exact instances, but.
link |
00:24:19.960
Yeah, me too, on the spot.
link |
00:24:22.760
But the writer Alain de Botton
link |
00:24:25.040
regularly makes me feel that way.
link |
00:24:27.520
He's just this beautiful essayist
link |
00:24:29.980
and observer of human nature,
link |
00:24:31.920
and he's just constantly expressing things
link |
00:24:34.160
in this gorgeous way that you've experienced yourself.
link |
00:24:37.600
And you feel like, I don't know,
link |
00:24:39.720
it's just this grand act of generosity.
link |
00:24:41.840
You feel less lonely.
link |
00:24:43.120
You feel this deep sense of communion.
link |
00:24:45.600
It's such an elevating experience.
link |
00:24:47.320
Even when it's like a melancholy line.
link |
00:24:50.520
Maybe especially when it is.
link |
00:24:52.280
Yeah, what is that?
link |
00:24:56.880
So the Jack Kerouac on the road
link |
00:24:59.240
definitely makes me feel that way,
link |
00:25:01.200
like every other line in there, forlorn rags of growing old.
link |
00:25:05.760
Do you know, I never read that book.
link |
00:25:06.900
So what was it about that book
link |
00:25:09.120
that made you feel that way?
link |
00:25:11.040
Well, okay, well, since you asked.
link |
00:25:13.440
I do, I do. I'm going to linger.
link |
00:25:14.440
I'm going to linger on this.
link |
00:25:17.560
So this story is kind of the book,
link |
00:25:21.320
the kind of defining book of the Beats,
link |
00:25:24.920
of the Beats generation.
link |
00:25:26.400
And it's basically a story of a writer
link |
00:25:29.440
who takes a road trip across the United States
link |
00:25:32.840
a couple of times and experiences a few close friends
link |
00:25:37.060
and a few strangers along the way.
link |
00:25:39.220
And there's a lot of just those melancholy goodbyes
link |
00:25:42.080
along the way.
link |
00:25:43.240
You meet all these people with interesting lives.
link |
00:25:46.120
Some of them are defined by struggle.
link |
00:25:47.640
Some of them are defined by drugs, drinking, women,
link |
00:25:50.720
all that kind of stuff.
link |
00:25:52.120
And still he just kind of dances around all of that
link |
00:25:55.160
and is defined by the goodbyes and the passing of time.
link |
00:25:58.960
So a lot of the really powerful lines are basically like,
link |
00:26:03.440
there's one on there, again, I don't remember exactly,
link |
00:26:05.600
but he meets a beautiful girl at a rest stop.
link |
00:26:10.960
And the girl is getting,
link |
00:26:14.680
or a woman is getting on a different bus
link |
00:26:17.160
than he's getting on.
link |
00:26:18.520
And it's that feeling of falling in love for a second
link |
00:26:23.520
and realizing that fate is just ripping that out,
link |
00:26:28.520
which is similar to this idea of it sucks to say goodbye
link |
00:26:33.520
just when you met, but it's especially true
link |
00:26:35.200
when you fall in love just a little bit with that stranger
link |
00:26:37.600
with all the possibilities that could lay there.
link |
00:26:41.600
So there's a few lines of written down.
link |
00:26:45.800
I went down this whole rabbit hole of thinking,
link |
00:26:47.560
what are the lines that grabbed me?
link |
00:26:49.840
A couple of lines from on the road trip.
link |
00:26:51.960
A couple of lines from on the road.
link |
00:26:53.760
So one is, what is that feeling
link |
00:26:56.120
when you're driving away from people
link |
00:26:58.200
and they recede on the plane
link |
00:26:59.560
till you see their specks dispersing?
link |
00:27:01.920
It's the two huge world vaulting us and it's goodbye,
link |
00:27:05.240
but we lean forward to the next crazy venture
link |
00:27:07.440
beneath the skies.
link |
00:27:08.600
So this is him talking about leaving a particular city.
link |
00:27:11.560
The spoiler alert towards the end of the book,
link |
00:27:14.680
rather the end of the book line I return to often,
link |
00:27:18.120
it's more poetry, but it's a feeling
link |
00:27:21.480
that captures the book I would say.
link |
00:27:25.120
The evening star must be drooping
link |
00:27:27.360
and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie,
link |
00:27:30.640
which is just before the coming of complete night
link |
00:27:32.760
that blesses the earth, darkens all the rivers,
link |
00:27:36.040
cups the peaks and folds the final shore in.
link |
00:27:38.840
And nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody
link |
00:27:42.640
besides the forlorn rags of growing old.
link |
00:27:45.200
And it just captures this kind of
link |
00:27:49.640
in the moment appreciation of the beauty of the world
link |
00:27:53.720
and a sadness over the fact that time passes
link |
00:27:56.640
and you leave the people you love behind,
link |
00:27:58.560
you leave the places you love behind,
link |
00:28:01.480
or at least the way they were
link |
00:28:03.320
at the time that you really enjoyed them.
link |
00:28:04.800
And you just leave that, all that,
link |
00:28:06.520
just the sadness you feel when you,
link |
00:28:08.600
something about it, like looking at a picture,
link |
00:28:10.960
looking at your kids grow up,
link |
00:28:12.760
looking at old friends getting old,
link |
00:28:15.120
something makes you realize that time passes.
link |
00:28:18.440
And somewhere deep in there
link |
00:28:19.840
is probably a realization of your mortality.
link |
00:28:22.160
And then it just makes you somehow first sad
link |
00:28:25.160
that everything comes to an end.
link |
00:28:28.480
And then that's immediately followed
link |
00:28:33.280
by sort of an appreciation of the moment,
link |
00:28:35.120
like a gratitude that you get to experience this moment.
link |
00:28:37.760
Yeah, I know it exactly.
link |
00:28:39.120
I mean, that's the whole reason that I wrote Bitter Sweet.
link |
00:28:42.400
It's all about that.
link |
00:28:43.360
And so I know intensely what you're talking about.
link |
00:28:46.760
And by the way, my husband loves the book
link |
00:28:49.040
A Movable Feast by Ernest Hemingway,
link |
00:28:51.000
which I also haven't read,
link |
00:28:52.120
but it talks about that same thing,
link |
00:28:54.120
groups of people traveling around together
link |
00:28:56.600
and the group coalesces into some magical formation.
link |
00:29:00.280
And then one person leaves the group
link |
00:29:01.760
and it's never gonna be the same again.
link |
00:29:03.800
And then they move on to the next one.
link |
00:29:06.240
Yeah, I mean, I think that's the deepest essence
link |
00:29:09.840
of human nature, the feeling of longing
link |
00:29:15.840
for some kind of state of perfect completeness, completion,
link |
00:29:20.360
perfect love, the Garden of Eden, all of it.
link |
00:29:23.920
And the feeling that you're never gonna quite attain it,
link |
00:29:28.000
but you get glimpses of it here and there.
link |
00:29:30.200
And that those glimpses are some of the best things
link |
00:29:32.280
that ever happened to us.
link |
00:29:33.440
And they're suffused with sadness
link |
00:29:34.960
because they're not the real thing
link |
00:29:36.680
or they're not the full thing.
link |
00:29:37.840
They're just a glimpse.
link |
00:29:39.560
It's a glimpse of what we long for.
link |
00:29:42.280
So the sadness that we might feel
link |
00:29:47.000
is always connected to the ways in which we fall short
link |
00:29:50.040
from the perfect thing that we're,
link |
00:29:52.400
like there's always a thing you're longing for.
link |
00:29:55.920
And the sadness has to do with getting a glimpse of it,
link |
00:29:59.680
but not quite getting a hold of it.
link |
00:30:01.840
Yeah, yeah.
link |
00:30:03.160
So it's always losing.
link |
00:30:04.880
It's always losing, but it's also always,
link |
00:30:07.360
but it's not, that sounds really depressing,
link |
00:30:09.320
but it's not, you know it's not depressing
link |
00:30:11.760
because you experience this all the time.
link |
00:30:13.200
It's also, those are the most beautiful moments
link |
00:30:16.560
I think life offers.
link |
00:30:18.400
I mean, it's intense, intense beauty in those moments
link |
00:30:22.400
because it's getting closer to the real thing
link |
00:30:25.000
that we long for.
link |
00:30:26.880
So what about like loss, losing love?
link |
00:30:31.440
Is that also a beautiful thing?
link |
00:30:36.440
Well, the moments you're talking about,
link |
00:30:40.440
I think it's easier to appreciate the beauty of it all
link |
00:30:44.480
in the moment because you're experiencing,
link |
00:30:49.080
you're kind of experiencing the loss and the love
link |
00:30:51.080
all at the same time.
link |
00:30:53.360
Whereas if you're talking about straight up loss,
link |
00:30:55.480
like a betrayal or a bereavement or whatever it is,
link |
00:31:00.160
that's, it's different, it's quite overwhelming.
link |
00:31:03.720
So losing a loved one kind of thing.
link |
00:31:05.680
Losing a loved one.
link |
00:31:06.680
I mean, I will say that the truth that I think
link |
00:31:11.200
that we can come to after a lot of time on this earth
link |
00:31:15.560
is the idea that love exists not only in its particular
link |
00:31:20.560
forms, so not only in the form of the one person,
link |
00:31:25.560
that one person we love or that other person we love,
link |
00:31:28.400
but love itself is a state that we have access to.
link |
00:31:32.040
And so over time, the loss of person A can heal
link |
00:31:37.520
and you can tap into a kind of bigger river of love.
link |
00:31:42.520
Yeah, I mean, I had this, it comes from Louis C.K.
link |
00:31:46.560
in a show, damn I love that line.
link |
00:31:49.400
I mean, there's a, he talks to an older gentleman
link |
00:31:53.600
and Louis is all like sad about losing a loved one
link |
00:31:58.600
or like getting rejected essentially, like a breakup.
link |
00:32:05.600
And then the older gentleman gives him advice saying,
link |
00:32:09.080
like basically criticizes Louis for saying,
link |
00:32:13.360
why are you moping around?
link |
00:32:15.240
Because this is the most, this is the best part.
link |
00:32:18.000
Like losing love is the best part because that's,
link |
00:32:21.480
the real loss is when you forget.
link |
00:32:23.460
Like feeling shitty about having gone through a breakup
link |
00:32:29.740
is when you most intensely appreciate
link |
00:32:32.860
what that person meant to you.
link |
00:32:35.620
Like you most intensely feel love in some strange way
link |
00:32:40.340
by realizing that you've lost it, by missing it,
link |
00:32:43.360
wishing at this moment, I wish I had that.
link |
00:32:46.660
Like that feeling, that's when you feel that love the most,
link |
00:32:50.820
the absence of it, and so the older gentleman
link |
00:32:54.300
gives advice that that's the best part.
link |
00:32:56.980
And it can, if you're good with it,
link |
00:32:58.740
it can last for the longest.
link |
00:33:01.400
It could be the most sort of prolonged experience
link |
00:33:05.540
of deep appreciation and emotion and so on.
link |
00:33:09.400
So that's kind of a, that's a nice way to look at loss,
link |
00:33:14.900
which is a reminder of how much somebody meant to us.
link |
00:33:18.540
Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of truth in that
link |
00:33:23.680
because yeah, you wouldn't care so much
link |
00:33:26.180
if it weren't something that mattered to you.
link |
00:33:27.700
So it's always a signpost to the direction
link |
00:33:30.260
you really wanna go to.
link |
00:33:32.420
That's always what it is.
link |
00:33:34.880
Yeah, and it's interesting to see the way
link |
00:33:37.140
that the mystical versions of many of the great religions
link |
00:33:43.620
all point in this direction.
link |
00:33:45.700
Whether you're looking at Sufism or the Kabbalah
link |
00:33:49.100
or in Christian mysticism, you see this idea
link |
00:33:51.760
that the longing for what you lack is the very thing
link |
00:33:56.000
that gives you what you're longing for.
link |
00:33:58.340
So the longing is the cure.
link |
00:33:59.820
I mean, that's the way the Sufi poet Rumi puts it.
link |
00:34:02.820
The longing is the cure.
link |
00:34:04.780
And he says, be thirsty.
link |
00:34:05.860
Like be as thirsty as you possibly can.
link |
00:34:08.500
That's what you wanna be.
link |
00:34:09.940
The good stuff is the wanting, not the having.
link |
00:34:12.360
Yeah, yeah, of course, tell that to a person
link |
00:34:16.800
that just broke up and they'll be like,
link |
00:34:18.440
shut up, asshole, advice sucks.
link |
00:34:21.640
I wish I had her and back.
link |
00:34:24.760
Yeah, no, absolutely.
link |
00:34:26.300
Those are the kinds of life lessons that only work
link |
00:34:29.680
when you kind of step away for a while.
link |
00:34:31.600
They don't work in the moment of excruciation.
link |
00:34:35.280
There is something about the fact of knowing
link |
00:34:39.200
that all humans are in that experience together
link |
00:34:42.480
that is also incredibly uplifting.
link |
00:34:46.700
Well, that takes time for people to realize.
link |
00:34:49.540
Like heartbreak in your early teenage years
link |
00:34:54.360
or something like that could feel like this is completely
link |
00:34:57.380
the most novel and the most dramatic pain
link |
00:35:02.380
that any human has ever felt, right?
link |
00:35:04.840
Or maybe even when you're younger.
link |
00:35:07.000
And then one of the things you realize
link |
00:35:10.600
is that everybody goes through this.
link |
00:35:13.020
That can be an awakening to the fact
link |
00:35:14.920
that we're all in this together.
link |
00:35:16.480
This human condition is not just a personal experience.
link |
00:35:19.760
It's an experience we all share.
link |
00:35:21.560
And that's a kind of love, the unity of it.
link |
00:35:25.000
Yeah, that's a really deep kind of love.
link |
00:35:27.600
And I feel like we are prevented from perceiving that love
link |
00:35:33.560
as it's actually like the most obvious kind of love
link |
00:35:36.280
and it's right there and it happens all the time.
link |
00:35:38.480
But we're prevented from perceiving it
link |
00:35:40.160
because we're not really supposed to talk
link |
00:35:41.620
about things like that.
link |
00:35:42.660
It's like there's something unseemly about it.
link |
00:35:45.360
Well, it's also in the West is this individualist society.
link |
00:35:49.040
So like there's a pressure to sort of see the individual
link |
00:35:53.880
as a distinct sovereign entity that experiences things.
link |
00:35:59.560
The unity between people is not obviously sort of
link |
00:36:03.160
communicated or talked about as part of the culture.
link |
00:36:06.580
Yeah, it's not part of the culture.
link |
00:36:08.080
And yet, you see it in our behaviors because we're humans.
link |
00:36:12.360
So, why do people listen to sad music?
link |
00:36:15.480
I mean, one reason is they're hearing expressed for them.
link |
00:36:19.120
Like the musician is basically saying to them,
link |
00:36:21.460
this thing that you have experienced,
link |
00:36:24.720
I've experienced it too, so have lots of other people.
link |
00:36:28.440
But they're saying it all without words
link |
00:36:29.720
and it's transformed into something beautiful.
link |
00:36:33.000
And there's something about that
link |
00:36:34.360
that's just incredibly elevating.
link |
00:36:37.460
And people don't know it,
link |
00:36:38.440
but like there's one study that I have in Bittersweet
link |
00:36:43.240
that found that people whose favorite songs
link |
00:36:45.960
are their happy songs, play it on their playlist
link |
00:36:48.280
about 175 times, but the people who love sad music
link |
00:36:51.500
play them about 800 times.
link |
00:36:55.300
And they say that they feel connected to the sublime
link |
00:36:58.520
when they're listening to that music.
link |
00:37:00.840
What do you think that is?
link |
00:37:03.280
So, what is it in music that connects us
link |
00:37:08.180
to the sublime through sadness?
link |
00:37:11.840
I mean, I have a bunch of different theories.
link |
00:37:13.960
Like the whole reason I started writing this book
link |
00:37:19.280
is because I kept having this reaction reliably
link |
00:37:22.480
to sad music.
link |
00:37:24.440
And I realized that for people who I knew
link |
00:37:27.580
who were religious believers,
link |
00:37:29.160
the way they described their experience of God
link |
00:37:32.040
was what I was experiencing when I would hear that music.
link |
00:37:36.920
Like all the time.
link |
00:37:38.080
It happens over and over again.
link |
00:37:39.680
So, you wonder what that is?
link |
00:37:42.280
Yeah, so I started wondering what that is.
link |
00:37:44.600
And lots of people have tried to figure out
link |
00:37:48.320
what that's all about.
link |
00:37:51.160
And there are different theories that it's expressing,
link |
00:37:53.560
it's like a kind of catharsis for our difficult emotions,
link |
00:37:57.460
that it's, as we were saying, a sense of being in it together.
link |
00:38:02.860
We don't react in that sort of uplifted way
link |
00:38:06.160
when you just see like a slideshow of sad faces,
link |
00:38:10.160
which is something researchers have actually tested.
link |
00:38:12.640
No one really cares when they're seeing the sad faces.
link |
00:38:15.360
But the sad music, they're really reacting.
link |
00:38:17.440
And also, they don't really react
link |
00:38:18.920
when they're hearing music expressing
link |
00:38:20.520
other negative emotions,
link |
00:38:21.940
like Marshall music or something like that.
link |
00:38:24.000
It's just the sad music that gives people
link |
00:38:25.680
this elevated sense of wonder.
link |
00:38:28.320
So, I think it's the combination of the sadness
link |
00:38:31.680
and the beauty.
link |
00:38:33.320
And I think it's just tapping into the essence
link |
00:38:37.480
of the human source code,
link |
00:38:38.800
which is a kind of spiritual longing,
link |
00:38:40.920
whether we're atheists or believers.
link |
00:38:43.340
There's this feeling of longing for a state
link |
00:38:46.680
and a place of perfect love and perfect unity
link |
00:38:49.560
and perfect truth and all of it.
link |
00:38:51.680
And like an acute awareness that we're not there
link |
00:38:54.240
in this world.
link |
00:38:56.160
In religions, we express that through the longing
link |
00:38:58.240
for Mecca or Eden or Zion.
link |
00:39:02.680
And artistically, we express it with
link |
00:39:05.320
Dorothy longing for somewhere over the rainbow
link |
00:39:07.680
or Harry Potter enters the story at the precise moment
link |
00:39:12.040
that he's become an orphan.
link |
00:39:14.760
So, he's now gonna spend the rest of his life
link |
00:39:16.840
longing for these parents who he can never remember.
link |
00:39:19.800
And there's something about that state
link |
00:39:23.400
that's at our very core.
link |
00:39:24.840
And I think that's why we love it so much.
link |
00:39:26.800
Well, it could be, you know, you could have
link |
00:39:28.440
the Ernest Becker theory of denial of death,
link |
00:39:31.360
where at the core of that, the warm at the core,
link |
00:39:35.160
as Jung said, is the fear of death.
link |
00:39:38.020
So, where the longing for the perfect thing
link |
00:39:42.040
has to do with sort of becoming immortal,
link |
00:39:46.040
is reaching beyond the absurdity, the cruelty of life,
link |
00:39:53.720
that all things come to an end
link |
00:39:56.120
for no particularly good reason whatsoever.
link |
00:40:01.280
One we can rationally explain.
link |
00:40:03.240
I know, you know, I wonder about that all the time.
link |
00:40:05.960
Like, I know obviously there's that idea from Becker
link |
00:40:09.840
and throughout philosophy and the tale of Gilgamesh
link |
00:40:12.360
about the idea that the thing we're longing for
link |
00:40:14.400
most of all is immortality.
link |
00:40:17.000
But I feel like it's not only that.
link |
00:40:20.320
I think it's more so or also, let's say,
link |
00:40:26.200
a longing for the lions to lay down with the lambs finally.
link |
00:40:30.840
You know, for like the fundamental calculus of the universe
link |
00:40:34.480
to just be different, where life doesn't have to eat life
link |
00:40:37.520
in order to survive.
link |
00:40:38.760
And yeah, just a completely different situation.
link |
00:40:42.100
I wonder.
link |
00:40:42.940
What immortality would not solve?
link |
00:40:45.600
I wonder.
link |
00:40:46.840
That could be a very kind of modern thing,
link |
00:40:53.280
because surely so much of human history
link |
00:40:56.000
is defined by violence and glorified violence
link |
00:40:59.160
that doesn't give inklings of this lions and the lambs.
link |
00:41:03.560
So much of.
link |
00:41:04.400
It's in the Bible.
link |
00:41:06.980
I mean, I know all the other stuff is in the Bible too.
link |
00:41:09.080
There's other stuff in the Bible,
link |
00:41:10.400
and the Bible, that particular aspect
link |
00:41:12.760
doesn't necessarily reveal the fundamental motivation
link |
00:41:15.920
of human nature.
link |
00:41:17.240
That could be deeper stuff, you know?
link |
00:41:19.780
But yeah, that is a beautiful picture,
link |
00:41:23.400
but is it just about humans or is it all about all of life?
link |
00:41:28.440
And you have to think about what does the perfect world
link |
00:41:33.960
look like?
link |
00:41:34.800
It's not just the lions and the lambs laying together.
link |
00:41:37.960
It's, you know, how many lions and how many lambs?
link |
00:41:41.400
And, you know, what, having just had a few
link |
00:41:46.760
very technical conversations about Marxian economics
link |
00:41:49.840
versus Keynesian economics versus neoclassical economics,
link |
00:41:53.560
what does the economic and the government system
link |
00:41:55.600
look like for the lions and the lambs
link |
00:41:57.640
that we're longing for?
link |
00:41:59.200
So then you start to build society
link |
00:42:01.400
on top of all those things, but you still,
link |
00:42:04.420
you return to this, what are we longing for?
link |
00:42:08.340
And what's the role of love in that?
link |
00:42:10.000
What's the role of that sad melancholy feeling,
link |
00:42:13.520
the feeling of loneliness?
link |
00:42:14.800
Is the feeling of loneliness fundamental
link |
00:42:17.400
to the human condition?
link |
00:42:18.600
Like, are we always striving to sort of channel
link |
00:42:22.760
that feeling of loneliness to connect with others?
link |
00:42:27.120
Like, we want that feeling of loneliness,
link |
00:42:28.720
otherwise we wouldn't be connecting.
link |
00:42:30.640
Is that fundamental, that feeling like you're alone in this
link |
00:42:35.200
even when you're with other people, sort of alone together?
link |
00:42:37.640
You're born alone, you die alone.
link |
00:42:39.640
Maybe loneliness is fundamental.
link |
00:42:41.280
I think the longing for union is fundamental.
link |
00:42:44.440
It's just that it looks so different for different people.
link |
00:42:47.600
Right, yeah.
link |
00:42:49.080
And coming back to what we were talking about
link |
00:42:51.560
at the beginning, union looks incredibly social
link |
00:42:55.100
for a lot of people and hardly social at all for others,
link |
00:42:58.360
but everybody needs some version of union.
link |
00:43:01.280
Yeah, people have been telling me recently
link |
00:43:02.940
about polyamory and all those kinds of things.
link |
00:43:04.800
So having probably grown up in a certain part of the world,
link |
00:43:08.240
I'm very, I think I'm very monogamy centric,
link |
00:43:12.880
not in a judgmental way, just for me,
link |
00:43:14.600
what makes me happy is one person.
link |
00:43:16.000
So for my whole life, basically just dedication.
link |
00:43:20.880
Because I've just seen through relationships
link |
00:43:23.520
with people and objects in my life,
link |
00:43:27.680
the longer we stay together, the deeper the tie.
link |
00:43:32.720
So that's just the empirical thing.
link |
00:43:36.260
And yes, that probably is a personalized thing.
link |
00:43:40.200
That's just true for me.
link |
00:43:41.200
It could be very different for others.
link |
00:43:43.100
Maybe it's connected to the introverted thing, maybe not.
link |
00:43:49.040
Who knows?
link |
00:43:49.880
Before I leave, because you mentioned songs, sad songs.
link |
00:43:53.360
What are we talking about?
link |
00:43:55.100
What's a good, what song do you remember last crying to?
link |
00:43:59.460
Oh gosh, well, I mean, I literally dedicated my book
link |
00:44:07.320
to Leonard Cohen.
link |
00:44:08.160
He's played such a huge role in my life.
link |
00:44:10.680
I love him.
link |
00:44:11.640
I love him.
link |
00:44:14.000
And I've loved him with this crazy love
link |
00:44:15.840
that I've never been able to understand for decades.
link |
00:44:19.040
I think I understand it a little better now, but.
link |
00:44:21.940
So you're better friends with him than me, I'm jealous.
link |
00:44:25.120
So does it make you, is it the musician or the human too?
link |
00:44:30.360
Because the human is a tortuous soul in a way.
link |
00:44:34.380
I'd say it's the musician.
link |
00:44:36.340
It's the musician.
link |
00:44:37.180
And I actually was thinking about this the other day.
link |
00:44:38.680
I mean, obviously he's not alive anymore,
link |
00:44:41.160
but I was kind of running the thought experiment.
link |
00:44:44.020
If he were alive still and I had the chance
link |
00:44:46.660
to meet him in person, would I wanna do that?
link |
00:44:50.880
And I'm not really sure that I would
link |
00:44:53.200
because he represents for me symbolically everything,
link |
00:45:01.120
well, everything, I'll end the sentence right there.
link |
00:45:04.200
And so, and I think that's okay.
link |
00:45:06.600
I think people can express something through their art
link |
00:45:10.080
that they might or might not express
link |
00:45:12.260
if you were just hanging out with them and having a coffee.
link |
00:45:15.680
And I'm happy to know him that way.
link |
00:45:17.600
He can express himself, I'm sure,
link |
00:45:19.640
in the way that you know him as over coffee too.
link |
00:45:23.480
It just requires like a focus of remembering,
link |
00:45:30.440
of like a deep focus of connection.
link |
00:45:31.960
That's why like when I interact with folks,
link |
00:45:38.120
it's so draining for me because I'm putting all my,
link |
00:45:42.400
whatever weapons I got in terms of like deeply
link |
00:45:45.960
trying to understand the person in front of me
link |
00:45:48.480
and doing that dance of human interaction,
link |
00:45:50.560
the humor, the intense kind of delving into who they are.
link |
00:45:57.400
Which requires like navigating around
link |
00:46:00.960
like small talk type of stuff
link |
00:46:02.560
and just like compliments and so on.
link |
00:46:05.560
In general, like people, depending on the culture,
link |
00:46:07.880
depending on the place, they'll sometimes flower stuff
link |
00:46:10.640
with smiling and like compliments like,
link |
00:46:12.520
oh, yeah, I love you, this is great.
link |
00:46:15.080
I guess that's all great, but you wanna get to the core
link |
00:46:17.280
of like, what are the demons in the closet?
link |
00:46:20.640
Let's talk about it.
link |
00:46:22.320
And that can be exhausting.
link |
00:46:24.560
That can be really exhausting.
link |
00:46:25.740
So from a Leonard Cohen perspective,
link |
00:46:27.160
you get more and more famous.
link |
00:46:29.360
It can be hard sometimes
link |
00:46:31.120
because he probably is also an introvert.
link |
00:46:33.540
I'm guessing.
link |
00:46:34.380
Oh, yeah, I know he was an introvert
link |
00:46:35.440
because he actually tweeted about my book when it came out.
link |
00:46:39.300
So that was a precious moment for me.
link |
00:46:41.080
Something that we should all be listening to the quiet.
link |
00:46:43.120
I can't remember exactly what he said.
link |
00:46:45.840
But yeah, yeah, no, he definitely was.
link |
00:46:48.680
He struggled with depression,
link |
00:46:50.960
which I wonder if that's something
link |
00:46:53.320
that's also connected to introversion.
link |
00:46:56.840
Well, perhaps not actually.
link |
00:46:58.160
Perhaps they're very disjoint and also.
link |
00:47:00.360
It's connected to sensitivity
link |
00:47:01.800
and many sensitive people are introverts.
link |
00:47:04.040
So it's kind of like a Venn diagram.
link |
00:47:06.360
About 80% of highly sensitive people are introverted,
link |
00:47:09.360
but then some are extroverts.
link |
00:47:11.080
And then not all introverts are sensitive.
link |
00:47:13.280
So it's complicated.
link |
00:47:14.720
But he was definitely a sensitive type.
link |
00:47:17.200
Well, there's on top of that,
link |
00:47:18.240
you see like the percent of artists
link |
00:47:21.520
relative to the average that suffer from depression.
link |
00:47:23.620
So creative people is very high.
link |
00:47:26.180
Very, very high. It's crazy.
link |
00:47:27.400
Yeah, and then the number of artists
link |
00:47:29.120
and successful artists who were orphaned
link |
00:47:31.820
when they were young,
link |
00:47:32.660
who lost one parent or both parents,
link |
00:47:34.520
it's like an astronomical number.
link |
00:47:36.080
I have it in the book.
link |
00:47:37.240
I don't remember the percentage, but huge.
link |
00:47:39.440
And he was one of them.
link |
00:47:40.360
He lost his father when he was nine.
link |
00:47:43.040
And his first act of poetry was he took,
link |
00:47:47.440
his father made suits.
link |
00:47:49.160
That's why I thought of him
link |
00:47:50.040
when we were talking about you in your suit.
link |
00:47:51.960
And he took one of his father's bow ties
link |
00:47:54.680
and wrote a poem in his honor
link |
00:47:57.240
and buried the poem and the bow tie in the backyard.
link |
00:48:01.440
And that was like his first creative act.
link |
00:48:04.240
You know that song, Chelsea Hotel No. 2?
link |
00:48:07.120
Sure.
link |
00:48:07.960
Where he met, I guess it's about Janis Joplin.
link |
00:48:10.320
Joplin, yeah.
link |
00:48:13.080
What a fun, intense, and cruel person she is.
link |
00:48:18.160
Yeah.
link |
00:48:20.080
So I guess.
link |
00:48:22.000
Have you ever seen, I'm sorry to interrupt you,
link |
00:48:24.020
but have you ever seen his son Adam Cohn
link |
00:48:26.560
and Lana Del Rey perform that song together?
link |
00:48:29.040
Oh wow, no.
link |
00:48:29.880
It's incredible.
link |
00:48:30.960
I have to send it to you.
link |
00:48:31.960
Yeah.
link |
00:48:32.800
So that for people who don't know,
link |
00:48:34.280
I don't, I mean, maybe I don't know.
link |
00:48:36.680
It goes, I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel.
link |
00:48:39.400
You're talking so brave and so sweet.
link |
00:48:42.600
Giving me head on the unmade bed
link |
00:48:46.160
while the limousines wait in the street.
link |
00:48:48.400
There's a good line in there about being ugly.
link |
00:48:53.920
Oh yeah, we are ugly, but we have the music.
link |
00:48:56.560
No, before that, from a guy's perspective, it was.
link |
00:48:59.880
Oh, you told me again you preferred handsome men.
link |
00:49:03.240
But for me, you would make an exception.
link |
00:49:05.160
Yeah, so good.
link |
00:49:07.160
Well, she continued that thread in later
link |
00:49:09.960
because I think she said that he was lousy in bed.
link |
00:49:13.600
Oh, is that right?
link |
00:49:14.440
Yeah, she publicly said that.
link |
00:49:16.200
Which is like, oh man, did there.
link |
00:49:20.540
Just, okay, for people who don't know,
link |
00:49:23.040
I think this is a true story about them interacting
link |
00:49:26.280
and being together for a very brief time.
link |
00:49:29.600
I don't know, dating, but just connecting.
link |
00:49:31.200
Falling in love or in this very particular way
link |
00:49:35.580
that I think famous musicians, poets can,
link |
00:49:39.440
which is like, it's impossible
link |
00:49:40.640
for that kind of thing to last.
link |
00:49:42.800
But they did for a brief moment.
link |
00:49:47.040
There's like a sadness to it because it's so momentarily,
link |
00:49:52.200
but it's so epic that these two paths cross
link |
00:49:55.960
and then you just look at it, we know these famous people
link |
00:49:58.520
and it's interesting to watch.
link |
00:50:01.100
Yeah, and you don't even have the impression
link |
00:50:02.480
that they're thinking it's gonna last.
link |
00:50:04.400
They more know that it's like a blaze of an intersection
link |
00:50:07.560
and the limousine's already waiting
link |
00:50:09.700
while they're in the middle of it and then it's done.
link |
00:50:14.520
Yeah, and he's talked about how his music,
link |
00:50:19.200
he said something like, some people are more inclined
link |
00:50:22.340
to say hello with their music,
link |
00:50:23.800
but I'm rather more valedictory.
link |
00:50:26.760
That's what he said.
link |
00:50:27.580
What does valedictory mean?
link |
00:50:28.420
Like saying goodbye, like the valedictorian's address.
link |
00:50:31.180
Interesting.
link |
00:50:33.500
You know, so many of his songs really are
link |
00:50:36.380
about some form of parting or goodbye
link |
00:50:40.020
or an imperfection or something,
link |
00:50:41.980
or like the broken hallelujah.
link |
00:50:45.260
Yeah, that's songs.
link |
00:50:46.100
But the thing that's so incredible about him
link |
00:50:50.180
is the way that he's taking all of that
link |
00:50:54.740
and pointing it in the direction of transcendence.
link |
00:50:57.620
Like, it's not just pure sadness.
link |
00:51:00.860
It's sadness and beauty, and that's the thing.
link |
00:51:03.960
Yeah, there is a feeling of transcendence
link |
00:51:05.700
in a lot of the songs.
link |
00:51:07.740
It's like sadness and transcendence, you're right.
link |
00:51:10.620
It's a goodbye, but you're moving on to some bigger thing,
link |
00:51:17.180
but in a sort of ethereal way,
link |
00:51:20.180
not like a proud, arrogant way.
link |
00:51:23.460
Yeah, so his favorite poet was Garcia Lorca.
link |
00:51:28.020
He actually named his daughter after him.
link |
00:51:30.060
His daughter's name is Lorca.
link |
00:51:31.460
And he talks about how there's some poem
link |
00:51:37.060
that Lorca had written that made him realize
link |
00:51:40.420
that the universe itself was aching,
link |
00:51:44.180
but the ache was okay because that's the way
link |
00:51:46.340
you embrace the sun and the moon.
link |
00:51:48.280
And that's what I think is,
link |
00:51:52.940
that's why I think there's this whole rich vein
link |
00:51:55.940
in this bittersweet tradition that he embodies
link |
00:52:00.380
that's like the essence of beauty.
link |
00:52:02.060
You know, it's the way you embrace the sun and the moon.
link |
00:52:05.260
The song Hallelujah, I return to that often,
link |
00:52:08.660
have been meaning to play it.
link |
00:52:11.820
I have now a friend who wants to sing it with me.
link |
00:52:15.180
Are you a singer?
link |
00:52:16.020
Mm.
link |
00:52:20.860
When somebody says they're a singer,
link |
00:52:22.540
do they have to be good?
link |
00:52:23.740
Because then no, but I would say yes.
link |
00:52:27.540
I was in a band for a while.
link |
00:52:28.900
I sang for a while.
link |
00:52:29.740
I was always bad, but I enjoy it.
link |
00:52:33.940
I enjoy it.
link |
00:52:34.780
I enjoy lyrics.
link |
00:52:35.660
I enjoy words.
link |
00:52:37.180
When sung or spoken, they capture something.
link |
00:52:40.620
Like again, that moment.
link |
00:52:42.840
Tom Waits is a huge favorite of mine for that reason.
link |
00:52:46.660
Although he often, his lyrics are often not that simple.
link |
00:52:51.660
I'd rather have a bottle in front of me
link |
00:52:54.940
than a frontal lobotomy.
link |
00:52:56.420
He's always playing with just like these weird word play
link |
00:53:02.180
that's, especially in the English language,
link |
00:53:04.260
just trickier to do.
link |
00:53:06.260
I'm fortunate enough to know another language,
link |
00:53:08.060
which is Russian, so I get to understand
link |
00:53:10.700
that certain languages allow for more word play than others.
link |
00:53:15.780
English, for that reason, I don't think has a,
link |
00:53:18.220
like a culture of, you know what,
link |
00:53:23.420
I need to push back on what I'm about to say,
link |
00:53:25.300
but there was no culture of word play
link |
00:53:30.220
until hip hop came along.
link |
00:53:33.020
So like distorting words in interesting ways
link |
00:53:37.100
for there to be a rhythm, a rhyme,
link |
00:53:40.720
and at the same time you're capturing
link |
00:53:42.320
some really powerful message plus humor.
link |
00:53:46.780
All of that mixed in.
link |
00:53:47.660
Actually hip hop does a really good job of this,
link |
00:53:49.700
but there wasn't a tradition,
link |
00:53:50.980
if you look at poetry in the 20th century,
link |
00:53:53.140
there wasn't really a tradition of that
link |
00:53:54.580
in the United States, but there was in other parts
link |
00:53:57.580
of the world and certainly in Russia.
link |
00:53:59.600
Interesting.
link |
00:54:00.440
Empowered also not just by the language,
link |
00:54:02.320
by the fact that you go through a world war
link |
00:54:03.960
where tens of millions of people die.
link |
00:54:05.860
Something about mass death of civilians
link |
00:54:09.740
that inspires great literature and music and art.
link |
00:54:12.840
Yeah, absolutely, because you start telling
link |
00:54:14.740
the real truth, I think.
link |
00:54:16.060
Yes, there's no more reason for small talk.
link |
00:54:21.620
That's funny, I always have thought that
link |
00:54:24.860
if I could choose any other medium besides writing,
link |
00:54:27.300
it would be singing.
link |
00:54:29.900
But then.
link |
00:54:30.740
Are you a singer?
link |
00:54:31.560
No, I mean like I'm really not,
link |
00:54:32.540
I just love the idea of it.
link |
00:54:34.480
But then I also think, you know,
link |
00:54:35.620
I'm fundamentally a shy person,
link |
00:54:37.260
so I think it's much better that my medium is writing
link |
00:54:39.940
instead of singing, so like it all worked out.
link |
00:54:42.540
That said, you're also an exceptionally good public speaker
link |
00:54:46.540
and you're not supposed to be, mathematically speaking.
link |
00:54:51.380
Mathematically speaking.
link |
00:54:52.580
You're not supposed to be a good public speaker.
link |
00:54:54.580
Oh, you mean because of shyness?
link |
00:54:56.340
Yeah, because of shyness, because of introversion,
link |
00:54:58.300
because of all those kinds of things.
link |
00:54:59.700
Oh yeah, but lots of introverts are public speakers,
link |
00:55:02.540
actually, like this is one of,
link |
00:55:04.060
I knew this from the studies, but then also
link |
00:55:06.780
when I started going out on the lecture circuit,
link |
00:55:08.860
I realized that all my fellow speakers
link |
00:55:10.600
at all these conferences I was going to,
link |
00:55:12.500
they're all introverts, because they're all people
link |
00:55:15.340
who spent years figuring out some idea
link |
00:55:18.420
and now they're out there talking about it.
link |
00:55:19.820
Oh, they're in their head figuring out the idea?
link |
00:55:22.140
Yeah.
link |
00:55:22.980
So how do you explain that the public speakers,
link |
00:55:26.700
would you say the good public speakers
link |
00:55:28.220
are usually introverts?
link |
00:55:29.860
No, I think there's just different styles of it
link |
00:55:32.100
and I think that we just have,
link |
00:55:34.500
when we hear the word public speaker,
link |
00:55:36.220
we have a really limited idea of who that person would be.
link |
00:55:40.900
So for me, I used to be very phobic about public speaking
link |
00:55:44.940
and part of the reason for it was because
link |
00:55:47.460
I thought that being the kind of person I was,
link |
00:55:51.180
didn't equal being able to be a good public speaker,
link |
00:55:54.140
because you're only imagining,
link |
00:55:56.020
like the super kind of out there showman.
link |
00:56:00.260
But I think there's another style of public speaking
link |
00:56:02.260
that's more reflective and thoughtful
link |
00:56:05.660
and conveying ideas and people like that too.
link |
00:56:08.380
Is there advice you can give on how to overcome that?
link |
00:56:10.860
Like if you're a shy person, how to be a public speaker.
link |
00:56:15.300
I can totally give that advice because I used to,
link |
00:56:18.700
before I would give speeches,
link |
00:56:20.580
if I had to do it in law school,
link |
00:56:22.200
if I knew like today was the day
link |
00:56:24.000
when I was gonna get called on in a law school class,
link |
00:56:26.540
I literally one time vomited on my way to class.
link |
00:56:29.100
Like that's how nervous I used to be.
link |
00:56:30.900
And yeah, the way to do it is through desensitization.
link |
00:56:37.020
It's like been figured out.
link |
00:56:38.300
It's the way to overcome any fear.
link |
00:56:39.860
You have to expose yourself to the thing you fear,
link |
00:56:43.080
but in very small doses.
link |
00:56:45.180
So you can't start by giving the TED talk.
link |
00:56:48.020
You have to start.
link |
00:56:49.020
I started by going to this class
link |
00:56:50.820
for people with public speaking anxiety,
link |
00:56:52.980
where on the first day,
link |
00:56:54.820
all we had to do was stand up and say our name
link |
00:56:57.940
and sit down and like that's the victory.
link |
00:57:01.020
That's fun to watch all those people with anxiety.
link |
00:57:05.540
Okay, that's the first step and the step,
link |
00:57:07.500
one step at a time.
link |
00:57:08.760
Yeah, and then like with this class,
link |
00:57:10.380
you go back the next week
link |
00:57:11.540
and he would have us come to the front of the room
link |
00:57:15.340
and stand up with other people standing next to us
link |
00:57:18.860
so that you didn't have the feeling
link |
00:57:20.800
of being all alone in the spotlight
link |
00:57:22.500
through others sharing it with you.
link |
00:57:24.380
And you would answer some questions
link |
00:57:25.740
about where do you grow up?
link |
00:57:27.520
Where do you go to school?
link |
00:57:29.100
And you declare victory and you're done.
link |
00:57:31.580
And then little by little by little,
link |
00:57:33.420
you keep ratcheting up the exercises
link |
00:57:35.580
until you get to the point where you can do it.
link |
00:57:37.940
And then you start having successes
link |
00:57:39.380
and you realize, oh, you know, actually I can do this.
link |
00:57:43.580
What about like writing versus improvising?
link |
00:57:46.580
Because I knew a few people,
link |
00:57:47.980
sort of the colleagues of mine
link |
00:57:49.500
that were working on TED talks
link |
00:57:50.940
and it feels like you're supposed to like
link |
00:57:54.440
write the thing like way ahead of time
link |
00:57:56.860
and you practice it and they help you
link |
00:57:58.820
and all that kind of stuff.
link |
00:58:00.300
I don't think I've ever practiced the speech
link |
00:58:02.500
once in my life or a lecture or any of that.
link |
00:58:04.900
Like I know it's really good to do,
link |
00:58:06.580
but do you find that relieves
link |
00:58:10.060
some of your anxiety preparing well
link |
00:58:11.940
or are you now able to do not preparing well at all?
link |
00:58:15.860
I definitely like to prepare before,
link |
00:58:19.880
but the kind of preparation that I've done for my TED talks
link |
00:58:23.260
is completely different
link |
00:58:24.700
from what I've done for everything else.
link |
00:58:26.260
Because TED talks are more like a theatrical event
link |
00:58:29.460
where it's like a one person show.
link |
00:58:31.500
And of course, if you were going to go on Broadway
link |
00:58:34.100
with a monologue, you'd know every word.
link |
00:58:36.680
So it's kind of like that.
link |
00:58:37.900
And so I would rehearse it over and over
link |
00:58:40.420
the way you would do that.
link |
00:58:41.700
Isn't that more anxiety, knowing every single word?
link |
00:58:44.940
It's so much anxiety because yeah,
link |
00:58:47.300
you're not even so freaked out about being on stage
link |
00:58:49.380
so much as what if I forget something?
link |
00:58:51.620
Yeah, absolutely.
link |
00:58:52.780
I mean, they do things like the last TED talk I gave,
link |
00:58:57.020
I actually did forget something halfway through.
link |
00:58:59.100
Like I just couldn't remember the next line.
link |
00:59:02.260
And so I had to walk over, like over there were my notes.
link |
00:59:05.620
And so I did that and the audience like very kindly clapped
link |
00:59:10.620
while I did that.
link |
00:59:11.540
And then I came back to the spotlight and kept going
link |
00:59:13.940
and they edit that out.
link |
00:59:15.100
Nice, so there's a failure mode.
link |
00:59:16.860
It's okay.
link |
00:59:18.900
It seems really, it seems really stressful.
link |
00:59:21.980
Like I'm now, I'm not sure if I'll ever publish it,
link |
00:59:24.940
but I've been, mostly it's for a personal journey,
link |
00:59:30.700
but I've been working on a series on, wait for it,
link |
00:59:35.620
Hitler and the Third Reich.
link |
00:59:37.740
Sort of looking at the historical context of everything
link |
00:59:40.580
because my family was so much affected
link |
00:59:42.700
by that whole part of history.
link |
00:59:44.460
So for me to rigorously, I've read a lot
link |
00:59:47.780
about Stalin and Hitler, and for me to force myself,
link |
00:59:51.340
one of the best ways to force yourself
link |
00:59:53.380
to really consider material is to have to talk about it.
link |
00:59:56.940
And so that's why I'm doing it,
link |
00:59:59.460
but I'm playing with ideas of some of it,
link |
01:00:04.180
maybe like 20% is written down on paper,
link |
01:00:08.540
but the rest of it is my thoughts in the moment.
link |
01:00:12.180
That's a difficult balance to strike
link |
01:00:15.220
because if you write a lot, you're going to be more precise,
link |
01:00:17.620
you're going to be more accurate,
link |
01:00:20.340
but you're going to miss some of the deep, honest emotion.
link |
01:00:25.420
The silences won't be correct,
link |
01:00:29.060
or the silences between the words
link |
01:00:32.340
won't capture the depth of feeling.
link |
01:00:36.400
Unless, if you're somebody like me,
link |
01:00:38.300
if you're like, I guess that's what actors
link |
01:00:40.720
and actresses have to do.
link |
01:00:44.420
Basically, even though the script is fully written,
link |
01:00:46.620
you improvise between the words, between the lines.
link |
01:00:50.940
But that's a skill.
link |
01:00:52.860
Well, it also takes so much time.
link |
01:00:54.700
I mean, I experienced that with the TED Talks.
link |
01:00:57.180
It's like you get to a stage,
link |
01:00:59.540
so you're memorizing everything word for word,
link |
01:01:01.940
and at first, in that process,
link |
01:01:04.580
it comes out in a really wooden way, the way you're saying,
link |
01:01:07.060
like the emotion's gone.
link |
01:01:08.620
But once you really know it,
link |
01:01:10.060
so you've internalized the words,
link |
01:01:11.780
then all the emotion comes back,
link |
01:01:13.820
and you can say them in a completely different way.
link |
01:01:16.020
And you're really speaking it from the heart.
link |
01:01:17.780
But you have to know it so well before you can do that.
link |
01:01:21.860
I would never recommend it,
link |
01:01:23.420
because it's just like, it's so time consuming.
link |
01:01:25.540
It's an inch, well, in your case, it works out beautifully.
link |
01:01:28.340
Like when it all comes together,
link |
01:01:30.420
it is a theatrical thing.
link |
01:01:32.900
It's like a musical or whatever.
link |
01:01:37.740
I think I'm gonna come out with a one man show on Broadway,
link |
01:01:41.120
singing now, I'm inspired.
link |
01:01:43.540
For real, where are you gonna talk about Hitler and Stalin
link |
01:01:47.300
and everything you're learning?
link |
01:01:48.140
Me too.
link |
01:01:49.020
Have you ever thought of using the medium
link |
01:01:52.500
of just speaking into a microphone, but without the video?
link |
01:01:57.880
I'm curious about this,
link |
01:01:58.720
because I fell in love with podcasts originally,
link |
01:02:02.960
before there was ever this whole video component to it.
link |
01:02:05.900
And I realized there's something so primal and magical
link |
01:02:09.280
about having someone's voice in your ear.
link |
01:02:12.380
And my favorite kinds of interviews still,
link |
01:02:14.620
very few people do it this way nowadays,
link |
01:02:16.600
but my favorite kind are when you're just talking
link |
01:02:19.780
into the microphone.
link |
01:02:20.980
So it's not over Zoom, it's not in person,
link |
01:02:23.780
it's just you in the microphone
link |
01:02:25.620
and the other person in the microphone
link |
01:02:26.940
and they're in your ear.
link |
01:02:28.340
It's like the ultimate in intimacy.
link |
01:02:30.820
Oh, you mean from the interviewer perspective,
link |
01:02:32.540
that's still your favorite.
link |
01:02:33.580
Yeah, but it would be interesting also
link |
01:02:36.700
with the kind of thing you were talking about
link |
01:02:38.220
of just speaking, like just you and the mic.
link |
01:02:40.660
I would love to be in person,
link |
01:02:42.140
but you can't see the person.
link |
01:02:43.420
I wonder what that's like.
link |
01:02:44.580
What do you mean, like they're all there,
link |
01:02:46.300
but behind a curtain?
link |
01:02:47.140
No, you just have your eyes closed.
link |
01:02:48.800
You're just talking, you have your eyes closed
link |
01:02:50.480
or whatever you have,
link |
01:02:51.920
because I think you still have to get
link |
01:02:53.620
the same kind of chemistry,
link |
01:02:54.580
because it's not just the visual.
link |
01:02:56.700
I don't even know that,
link |
01:02:58.100
because obviously I have trouble making eye contact.
link |
01:03:01.140
But I don't know if the visual stimulation
link |
01:03:03.060
is the necessary thing.
link |
01:03:04.660
There's something about the way audio travels
link |
01:03:07.400
that captures the intimacy,
link |
01:03:08.900
where some people actually have headphones on,
link |
01:03:11.660
like Joe does this, have headphones on.
link |
01:03:13.300
That's really intimate.
link |
01:03:14.960
Like there's something about that sound
link |
01:03:16.660
going directly into your ear.
link |
01:03:18.460
Yeah, there is something primal there.
link |
01:03:20.500
Yeah, for sure.
link |
01:03:23.840
I've thought about it, definitely.
link |
01:03:25.380
And some of my favorite podcasts are like that,
link |
01:03:28.040
WTF with Marc Maron, that's audio only.
link |
01:03:31.420
There's a few audio only podcasts that I just love.
link |
01:03:34.740
What is that?
link |
01:03:35.580
I still go on Clubhouse, that was a social media platform
link |
01:03:40.420
where it's audio only.
link |
01:03:41.900
And it's so interesting that people,
link |
01:03:44.260
the interesting thing about Clubhouse in particular
link |
01:03:46.300
is people from all walks of life can tune in,
link |
01:03:48.500
and they just have,
link |
01:03:50.740
it's something you need to do some research
link |
01:03:53.480
in terms of introversion on that one,
link |
01:03:55.020
because I don't feel any of my introvert
link |
01:04:00.540
like triggers happening.
link |
01:04:03.060
Because nobody can see you, it's just audio,
link |
01:04:06.220
and nobody is offended if you're just sitting there
link |
01:04:10.340
quietly just listening.
link |
01:04:12.700
So you can participate whenever you want or not.
link |
01:04:16.140
Yeah, it's like the ultimate social freedom.
link |
01:04:18.180
You can listen as much as you'd like,
link |
01:04:19.820
you can participate if you want,
link |
01:04:21.140
but you don't have to, it's no big deal.
link |
01:04:22.740
Yeah, if I'm actually at a physical party,
link |
01:04:25.980
somebody's gonna look at me and be like why,
link |
01:04:29.300
there'll be that pressure to speak,
link |
01:04:30.740
but you don't have to in that kind of audio setting.
link |
01:04:34.380
And there's that intimacy.
link |
01:04:36.100
Like you can, when it's audio only,
link |
01:04:38.300
it feels like you can reveal a lot more of yourself
link |
01:04:40.620
in some kind of honest way.
link |
01:04:43.700
I don't know what that is.
link |
01:04:44.740
What is that?
link |
01:04:45.580
What is that?
link |
01:04:46.400
I don't know, but I assume it's tapping into something
link |
01:04:49.140
really ancient.
link |
01:04:49.980
Like we used to tell stories around the fire,
link |
01:04:51.880
like our whole storytelling tradition was oral originally.
link |
01:04:56.620
So maybe it's that.
link |
01:04:57.700
But we used visual stuff, like.
link |
01:05:00.460
That's true, you could actually see the person
link |
01:05:01.940
on the other side of the campfire.
link |
01:05:03.780
It seems like the visual element's so fundamental
link |
01:05:06.260
to the social interaction,
link |
01:05:07.520
but there's something primal about audio.
link |
01:05:11.820
I wonder what that is.
link |
01:05:12.660
And still, that's why, I mean,
link |
01:05:14.140
most people listen to podcasts, I think, audio only.
link |
01:05:17.360
They have it in their ears while they're doing stuff.
link |
01:05:19.460
Yeah, that's how I do it.
link |
01:05:21.020
And then there's, yeah, that's how I do it too.
link |
01:05:22.660
And that's where the friendship, like, is formed.
link |
01:05:26.780
It's weird, that deep connection with other humans.
link |
01:05:30.240
It's formed because they're in your ear.
link |
01:05:34.820
And you get to see them grow.
link |
01:05:35.820
You get to see them be bored, experience excitement,
link |
01:05:39.420
and anger, and fear, and all those kinds of things.
link |
01:05:42.420
It's fascinating, it's fascinating.
link |
01:05:45.100
The world of podcasting is fascinating
link |
01:05:46.900
because we're in this world of essentially radio,
link |
01:05:51.280
even though we all have all this high definition content,
link |
01:05:55.060
all this, like, TikTok style fast stuff and still podcasting.
link |
01:05:59.020
I know, and we still choose to do this.
link |
01:06:01.240
It's weird.
link |
01:06:02.080
Because at the end of the day,
link |
01:06:02.900
I think that's really what people want most,
link |
01:06:04.520
is just to talk to each other
link |
01:06:06.260
and to know what people really think.
link |
01:06:07.740
And podcasting of all the media that I've ever seen
link |
01:06:10.780
is the one where people come closest
link |
01:06:12.540
to telling you the truth.
link |
01:06:15.500
And, you know, just telling you, like,
link |
01:06:17.620
the good and the bad and the bitter and the sweet
link |
01:06:19.440
and all of it.
link |
01:06:20.280
Especially long form, there's not enough time.
link |
01:06:21.900
Yeah, exactly.
link |
01:06:23.020
I had to explain this to people.
link |
01:06:24.840
Like, you talk to CEOs and stuff.
link |
01:06:27.400
They don't understand,
link |
01:06:29.940
they're starting to understand much better.
link |
01:06:31.980
Now, as a hard requirement with, like, CEOs and stuff,
link |
01:06:35.980
it has to be three hours.
link |
01:06:37.260
I say, like, this is...
link |
01:06:39.340
Wow.
link |
01:06:40.180
Because there's something,
link |
01:06:42.680
they can't be doing marketing stuff for three hours.
link |
01:06:46.500
They break.
link |
01:06:47.700
They start being human, they start joking,
link |
01:06:49.380
they start relaxing.
link |
01:06:50.460
And if they can't, that also tells a kind of story.
link |
01:06:53.420
But I do that kind of torture for CEOs only.
link |
01:06:56.140
Anyway.
link |
01:06:56.980
Yeah, when I was getting,
link |
01:06:58.780
my publishing house did media training with me
link |
01:07:01.360
before Bittersweet came out.
link |
01:07:02.980
And they were preparing me for, like,
link |
01:07:07.140
the five to seven minute interview that you might have,
link |
01:07:10.300
you know, if you go on some quick TV thing
link |
01:07:12.020
or something like that.
link |
01:07:13.340
And God, I hate that.
link |
01:07:14.580
It's like, it feels like you're basically having
link |
01:07:19.060
to not tell the full truth somehow
link |
01:07:21.260
because you can't tell it in such a short amount of time.
link |
01:07:24.660
Well, the other...
link |
01:07:25.500
So to me, podcasting is just the best thing
link |
01:07:27.180
that's ever happened.
link |
01:07:28.340
The other downside of the seven minute interview
link |
01:07:33.040
is I think you could do a really good job with that,
link |
01:07:35.140
but the dance partner has to be very good.
link |
01:07:37.840
It's actually challenging for everybody involved.
link |
01:07:39.860
It's much harder for everybody involved.
link |
01:07:43.620
Because if you can do, you know,
link |
01:07:45.460
I can imagine like a Christopher Hitchens type character
link |
01:07:48.300
who's just super witty,
link |
01:07:50.980
then you could do a seven minute thing.
link |
01:07:52.900
You can get to the core of Bittersweet.
link |
01:07:55.340
You can get to the core of the book
link |
01:07:57.100
without asking those generic small talk questions.
link |
01:07:59.300
Because too many people in that short form interview
link |
01:08:03.780
are just asking very generic questions.
link |
01:08:05.780
They're doing small talk for seven minutes.
link |
01:08:07.900
It's like, all right, you only get seven minutes.
link |
01:08:11.020
You only get one interesting question.
link |
01:08:13.540
Go ask the weirdest, the deepest question
link |
01:08:16.540
that also energizes the other person.
link |
01:08:20.740
It's an art form that people don't take seriously.
link |
01:08:25.020
I think the seven minute thing, five minute or even less.
link |
01:08:29.140
And then the commercials, which I...
link |
01:08:31.860
Yeah, and I've noticed that many of the best podcasters
link |
01:08:37.080
are ones where when you're on my side of the table,
link |
01:08:39.940
you feel like it's more of a conversation
link |
01:08:42.060
and less like an interview
link |
01:08:43.700
where you're answering all the same questions
link |
01:08:45.220
you've answered a million times before.
link |
01:08:47.780
It's really interesting how different the experience is.
link |
01:08:51.020
And you're right, the audio thing,
link |
01:08:52.920
if you can lose yourself in that, the intimacy of that.
link |
01:08:57.840
And you don't even remember what stupid stuff you said.
link |
01:09:00.520
People, I've seen that, I mean,
link |
01:09:03.160
people don't give them enough credit as...
link |
01:09:05.160
You might not be aware, might not be a fan,
link |
01:09:08.880
but Joe Rogan is an incredible conversationalist
link |
01:09:12.520
in that he makes you forget that anything's being recorded,
link |
01:09:18.400
that you're talking at all.
link |
01:09:20.560
He makes you forget time and you just enjoy yourself.
link |
01:09:23.860
And that's whatever that is.
link |
01:09:28.040
And then you plug into that primal connection
link |
01:09:30.920
to other humans.
link |
01:09:34.520
What's your favorite Leonard Cohen song?
link |
01:09:36.180
Famous Blue Raincoat.
link |
01:09:37.480
Do you know that one?
link |
01:09:38.320
Yeah, maybe I'll play it.
link |
01:09:40.040
Yeah, for people who don't know Leonard Cohen
link |
01:09:43.640
and this is your first introduction to him,
link |
01:09:45.760
it's gonna sound so gloomy, but it's so good.
link |
01:09:49.520
He's got this deep, rich voice.
link |
01:09:52.960
Tony Amos covering Famous Blue Raincoat, yeah, yeah.
link |
01:09:55.480
No, we want the original.
link |
01:09:58.680
Just like Hallelujah, Jeff Buckley covered Leonard Cohen.
link |
01:10:02.160
That was a really good one.
link |
01:10:03.160
That was a really good one, yeah.
link |
01:10:04.760
And I also really like Rufus Wainwright's cover.
link |
01:10:07.980
But Famous Blue Raincoat, for people who don't know it,
link |
01:10:10.120
it's basically about a love triangle
link |
01:10:13.880
and it's told from the perspective of a man
link |
01:10:17.100
whose wife has just been with another guy
link |
01:10:20.680
who is also his friend.
link |
01:10:23.380
And he's writing a letter to that other guy
link |
01:10:26.200
and he's reflecting on the way
link |
01:10:28.740
that all their relationships have changed
link |
01:10:30.480
in the wake of this event.
link |
01:10:34.920
So they're still friends.
link |
01:10:36.080
So they're still, well, he refers to him
link |
01:10:38.180
as my brother, my killer,
link |
01:10:40.220
which is such a Leonard Cohen thing to do
link |
01:10:42.040
because it's always like, you know,
link |
01:10:44.040
it's light and it's dark, all at once.
link |
01:10:48.480
Nothing is ever all one thing.
link |
01:10:59.920
Yeah, I love this song.
link |
01:11:02.040
Yeah, right?
link |
01:11:02.880
I mean.
link |
01:11:03.700
He just speaks in it.
link |
01:11:05.700
It's four in the morning, the end of December.
link |
01:11:12.700
And the fact that it's four in the morning
link |
01:11:14.900
and it's the end of December,
link |
01:11:16.220
like those are transitional moments, you know?
link |
01:11:18.700
It's night going into day
link |
01:11:20.700
and it's December going into the new year.
link |
01:11:23.700
And it's the end of December and it's the end of December.
link |
01:11:27.700
And it's the end of December and it's the end of December.
link |
01:11:31.700
And it's December going into the new year.
link |
01:11:34.700
It's not an accident.
link |
01:11:39.700
There is something about December.
link |
01:11:41.700
Whatever, there's certain scenes you can paint in your mind.
link |
01:11:46.700
There's a poem by Charles Bukowski called Nirvana.
link |
01:11:50.700
It's a young man traveling through the middle of nowhere
link |
01:11:53.700
in the snow.
link |
01:11:54.700
There's something about the snow,
link |
01:11:55.700
either the rain or the snow
link |
01:11:57.700
can put you in a certain kind of mood
link |
01:11:59.700
that just, what is it, James Joyce?
link |
01:12:02.700
The dead, the snow is falling on Dublin.
link |
01:12:06.700
Yeah, it can put you in a place.
link |
01:12:08.700
I mean, David Yaden,
link |
01:12:10.700
he's a researcher in psychedelics and consciousness
link |
01:12:13.700
at Johns Hopkins.
link |
01:12:15.700
He's a great guy.
link |
01:12:16.700
And he's done research that has found
link |
01:12:18.700
that when people are in their transitional moments of life,
link |
01:12:22.700
and it could be a career change,
link |
01:12:24.700
it could be a divorce,
link |
01:12:25.700
it could be that they're nearing the end of their life,
link |
01:12:28.700
that they very often will say,
link |
01:12:30.700
those are their most meaningful moments
link |
01:12:32.700
and their most spiritual moments.
link |
01:12:34.700
And so I feel like that's what Leonard Cohen
link |
01:12:36.700
knows how to tap into instinctively.
link |
01:12:38.700
The year after he died, his son, Adam Cohen,
link |
01:12:42.700
made a memorial concert for him
link |
01:12:44.700
where all these famous musicians came to Montreal
link |
01:12:46.700
where they had lived and performed his music.
link |
01:12:50.700
And my husband, who's not a Leonard Cohen fan
link |
01:12:53.700
and he's not a bittersweet type at all,
link |
01:12:55.700
but he knows how I feel about him,
link |
01:12:56.700
he's like, you should really go to that concert.
link |
01:12:59.700
And I felt so ridiculous.
link |
01:13:01.700
The whole family went all the way to Montreal on a Monday.
link |
01:13:05.700
On a Monday.
link |
01:13:06.700
On a Monday.
link |
01:13:07.700
It was just like a random Monday.
link |
01:13:09.700
And we got on the plane.
link |
01:13:10.700
So everyone's out of school,
link |
01:13:13.700
just so I can go to this concert.
link |
01:13:17.700
And I got there and at the beginning,
link |
01:13:20.700
I was feeling like, this was all a terrible mistake
link |
01:13:23.700
because it's all these other musicians playing this music
link |
01:13:27.700
and I don't actually really want to hear them.
link |
01:13:29.700
I'd rather listen to him on YouTube.
link |
01:13:31.700
And then a musician named Damien Rice came
link |
01:13:37.700
and played Famous Blue Raincoat and he sang it.
link |
01:13:40.700
And he did the most amazing thing at the end.
link |
01:13:44.700
The whole thing was amazing.
link |
01:13:45.700
But then at the end, he sang this musical riff
link |
01:13:48.700
that was like, all I could say is that it was like a musical lamentation of the ages.
link |
01:13:55.700
And the whole audience just rose silently to its feet.
link |
01:14:00.700
And it was one of the greatest moments that I've ever had.
link |
01:14:04.700
There's sometimes certain artists in a cover can capture
link |
01:14:07.700
in some kind of deeper way,
link |
01:14:09.700
like carrying the thread of the power of the song.
link |
01:14:13.700
So I've been listening a lot to Johnny Cash Heart, which is a Nine Inch Nails Trent Reznor song.
link |
01:14:20.700
You talked about it on your podcast with Rick Rubin,
link |
01:14:22.700
which is when I reached out to you.
link |
01:14:24.700
I love that interview and I love that song also.
link |
01:14:27.700
Yeah, so there's that.
link |
01:14:30.700
There's the Kennedy Center Honors where they celebrated certain artists.
link |
01:14:33.700
They did that for Led Zeppelin and I forgot what her name is,
link |
01:14:36.700
but the lead singer of Heart performs There We're To Heaven.
link |
01:14:41.700
And it's like, if you're like, all right,
link |
01:14:44.700
you take one of the great sort of rock songs of all time, what do you do?
link |
01:14:48.700
Oh, the cool thing is you get to perform this in front of the artist
link |
01:14:53.700
while they're still there, you know, they're still alive.
link |
01:14:55.700
So you get to watch you sort of perform,
link |
01:14:58.700
and in that case, the president and President Obama's there
link |
01:15:00.700
and she's just knocked it out of the park.
link |
01:15:03.700
But at the same time, without outdoing the original,
link |
01:15:10.700
somehow you're just making it your own.
link |
01:15:12.700
You're making it your own, but not departing completely,
link |
01:15:16.700
not departing from the spirit of the original.
link |
01:15:19.700
It's tough because the original Halu by Leonard Cohen,
link |
01:15:24.700
it's just not, it's so powerful,
link |
01:15:27.700
but it's just not as good as some of these covers.
link |
01:15:31.700
Well, I think it's the words and the melody
link |
01:15:34.700
and then the covers take it to a different place.
link |
01:15:37.700
The thing that Leonard Cohen seems to do well,
link |
01:15:39.700
I don't think he did it on Hallelujah
link |
01:15:44.700
because he was almost being playful on Hallelujah.
link |
01:15:47.700
Like, I don't know, as opposed to that deep melancholy,
link |
01:15:52.700
like painful longing thing that Jeff Buckley did and others do too.
link |
01:15:58.700
I wonder if it's because in a way he, I don't mean that he over edited it,
link |
01:16:03.700
but he apparently worked on that song for years
link |
01:16:05.700
and went through gazillions of verses and checked most of them out.
link |
01:16:08.700
Yeah.
link |
01:16:09.700
So I wonder if we're hearing his version
link |
01:16:11.700
after he's like a little tired with that process.
link |
01:16:15.700
Yeah. Well, that's the other thing is like maybe from a book tour, you know,
link |
01:16:21.700
it's like you get tired of saying the same thing over and over and over and over.
link |
01:16:24.700
You forget, you forget the...
link |
01:16:26.700
You forgot like the initial, like the heart of it.
link |
01:16:29.700
Yeah. But I actually got a chance to hang out with Dan Reynolds,
link |
01:16:34.700
who's the lead singer of Imagine Dragons, this incredible band, Super Pop.
link |
01:16:42.700
Yeah.
link |
01:16:43.700
The most played band on like Spotify or something.
link |
01:16:45.700
Is that right?
link |
01:16:46.700
His kids went through a huge Imagine Dragons phase,
link |
01:16:48.700
so we were listening to their music a lot.
link |
01:16:50.700
It was so surreal to be hanging out with him and he's such a good,
link |
01:16:54.700
like very few people I've met in my life are just as good of a human being.
link |
01:16:59.700
And that has to do with the fact that he struggles.
link |
01:17:01.700
He struggles, he still I think struggles, but he struggled for a long time with depression.
link |
01:17:06.700
And so out of that pain, you see born this really good human being,
link |
01:17:12.700
this really good relationship with his wife.
link |
01:17:15.700
Like when times are good, they lean on each other for like,
link |
01:17:20.700
they're deeply grateful for those precious moments.
link |
01:17:23.700
So it's beautiful to watch.
link |
01:17:25.700
But he said that it's really important to feel the song every time.
link |
01:17:33.700
Otherwise people know.
link |
01:17:35.700
People are really good at detecting your bullshit.
link |
01:17:38.700
You can't fake it.
link |
01:17:39.700
Yeah.
link |
01:17:40.700
You really have to feel it every time.
link |
01:17:41.700
You have to feel the emotion of it, whatever the emotion is,
link |
01:17:44.700
of the original time you wrote it.
link |
01:17:48.700
Yeah.
link |
01:17:49.700
So it's just interesting because it put, I thought you could maybe fake it,
link |
01:17:54.700
but he believes personally because he played in front of the gigantic crowds
link |
01:17:58.700
and over and over and over and over and over.
link |
01:18:00.700
He's like, no, every time you have to be there.
link |
01:18:03.700
But there's got to be times when he's about to go out and he's not feeling it
link |
01:18:07.700
and he has to figure out some way of getting himself into that heart space.
link |
01:18:10.700
Well, that's what he's saying.
link |
01:18:11.700
You have to, otherwise you're just, that's the job.
link |
01:18:15.700
Don't take the job then.
link |
01:18:18.700
And he loves it.
link |
01:18:20.700
He says the biggest struggle, in fact, is the come down from that,
link |
01:18:24.700
which is like you have such a beautiful experience of connecting with this large number of people,
link |
01:18:30.700
sharing a song that you love, and then it's just a rush of connection.
link |
01:18:36.700
And then you have to, you know, when you get off stage, you're now back to normal life.
link |
01:18:43.700
And that's why a lot of musicians get into heavy drugs and all that kind of stuff
link |
01:18:46.700
because you're looking for that rush again.
link |
01:18:49.700
It's very tough to like then go into this, speaking of introvert,
link |
01:18:53.700
because he probably is an introvert, is like you have to find that calmness.
link |
01:18:58.700
And how do you find the calmness when you were just playing in front of tens of thousands of people
link |
01:19:03.700
or hundreds of thousands, whatever that number is, that rush of connecting.
link |
01:19:07.700
And everybody, there's love in the air.
link |
01:19:09.700
And you still have to find that like inner peace and calm.
link |
01:19:12.700
That's interesting.
link |
01:19:13.700
So I don't know if this is the introvert in me talking and the writer in me talking,
link |
01:19:18.700
but I don't know.
link |
01:19:21.700
Like I love most the moments where let's say I'll get a letter from a reader
link |
01:19:26.700
who will tell me what something I wrote meant to them.
link |
01:19:29.700
And they'll talk about having had that kind of moment of, you know,
link |
01:19:32.700
the communion between the writer and the reader.
link |
01:19:34.700
And obviously I wasn't there physically when it happened,
link |
01:19:36.700
so I wasn't getting that kind of rush that a musician would get in a concert.
link |
01:19:40.700
But just the knowledge of that having happened out there in the world
link |
01:19:45.700
to do just something that I added to it is the most amazing thing.
link |
01:19:49.700
You love it.
link |
01:19:50.700
But imagine reading like thousands of those letters,
link |
01:19:54.700
and then it's such a strong rush and everything else doesn't.
link |
01:19:59.700
It could be overwhelming I guess.
link |
01:20:01.700
But like anything else, you have to come down and find a calm place.
link |
01:20:06.700
Like for example, the danger with getting letters like that,
link |
01:20:09.700
you start taking yourself too seriously.
link |
01:20:11.700
You think like you are a special person somehow.
link |
01:20:14.700
But you really want to avoid that feeling too.
link |
01:20:19.700
Yeah, I don't actually experience it as that much different
link |
01:20:22.700
from when I'm on the other side of it.
link |
01:20:24.700
Like if I'm the reader and some other writer has made me feel that way,
link |
01:20:28.700
to me it's the same thing.
link |
01:20:29.700
Yeah, me too.
link |
01:20:30.700
Yeah, it's a cool, it's a virtual hug.
link |
01:20:34.700
I think it's like I was just listening to something
link |
01:20:36.700
about the different Russian writers.
link |
01:20:42.700
I was mentioning him to you, this academic.
link |
01:20:44.700
His name is Gary Salmorson, and he studies Russian literature.
link |
01:20:48.700
And he was talking about, I don't know if I'll be able to get this right,
link |
01:20:51.700
but basically that the people misunderstand a work like Anna Karenina
link |
01:20:55.700
and that we think of it as telling us that you're supposed to live,
link |
01:21:02.700
you're supposed to have like these grand, tempestuous romances
link |
01:21:08.700
that might end in death or despair or whatever it is,
link |
01:21:12.700
but you should be in it for the intensity of the emotion.
link |
01:21:15.700
And he's saying actually that's exactly not what Tolstoy was saying,
link |
01:21:22.700
that actually it was the opposite,
link |
01:21:24.700
that he was really advocating for everyday life.
link |
01:21:27.700
He was saying it's scenes from everyday life.
link |
01:21:29.700
He was juxtaposing Anna Karenina with all these other couples
link |
01:21:32.700
who were just living happily and quietly day by day.
link |
01:21:36.700
And that was what he believed was the ideal,
link |
01:21:41.700
as opposed to the grand rush and as opposed to the intensity.
link |
01:21:45.700
I wonder if he, is there a romance just at day to day?
link |
01:21:52.700
I think there is a romance to the day to day, absolutely.
link |
01:21:55.700
Don't get distracted by the dopamine rollercoaster ride
link |
01:21:58.700
of the grand romantic notions.
link |
01:22:00.700
Yeah, and enjoy it while it's happening,
link |
01:22:02.700
because those are real life experiences also,
link |
01:22:04.700
but not to mistake those for being everything.
link |
01:22:07.700
Where is he from?
link |
01:22:09.700
He's a professor at Northwestern.
link |
01:22:11.700
At Northwestern.
link |
01:22:12.700
And apparently his lectures are like the most popular on campus.
link |
01:22:15.700
Wow, people love him.
link |
01:22:17.700
Gary Saul Morrison is an American literary critic and slobist.
link |
01:22:21.700
He's particularly known for his scholarly work
link |
01:22:23.700
on the great Russian novelists Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
link |
01:22:28.700
Morrison is Lawrence D. Professor in the Arts and Humanities
link |
01:22:31.700
at Northwestern University.
link |
01:22:32.700
Yeah.
link |
01:22:33.700
Wow, and there's a lot of incredible work.
link |
01:22:35.700
And then I'm sure looking through the lens of Russian literature
link |
01:22:38.700
and the romance of all of that, he's looking at the modern world.
link |
01:22:41.700
Yeah.
link |
01:22:42.700
I think you should have him on your podcast.
link |
01:22:44.700
And Quiet Flows the Vodka or When Pushkin Comes to Shove
link |
01:22:48.700
the curmudgeon's guide to Russian literature and culture.
link |
01:22:51.700
This is one of the silly books he has on the list.
link |
01:22:54.700
Okay, cool.
link |
01:22:55.700
What were you saying?
link |
01:22:56.700
I'm sorry.
link |
01:22:57.700
Oh, no, I was just saying, yeah, like I find that when I take photos
link |
01:23:01.700
on my phone, I hardly ever take photos at the moment you're supposed to.
link |
01:23:05.700
Like everybody's gathered for some event.
link |
01:23:07.700
I'll forget to take the photo.
link |
01:23:09.700
But I take a lot of like scenes from everyday life
link |
01:23:11.700
because that's what I actually want to remember in the end.
link |
01:23:15.700
Yeah, yeah, I'm the same.
link |
01:23:18.700
The same.
link |
01:23:19.700
It's actually concerning because it's bad for productivity
link |
01:23:23.700
because I love everyday life so much.
link |
01:23:26.700
Then why do any ambitious big thing?
link |
01:23:29.700
Your productivity is pretty good.
link |
01:23:31.700
I don't know that you have to worry about it.
link |
01:23:33.700
I do.
link |
01:23:34.700
So I want to launch a business.
link |
01:23:36.700
I have a dream outside.
link |
01:23:38.700
This is like a fun side thing that there's been a lifelong passion.
link |
01:23:45.700
Anyway, I like building.
link |
01:23:47.700
I like building stuff and I haven't been doing that as much as I would like.
link |
01:23:50.700
That's because largely because I like sitting in silence
link |
01:23:55.700
and enjoying the beauty that is just nature and life.
link |
01:23:59.700
When there's people, there's people.
link |
01:24:01.700
I love people.
link |
01:24:02.700
I love everything.
link |
01:24:03.700
So when you love everything, why go through hell to build a company?
link |
01:24:08.700
Yeah, that's a valid question.
link |
01:24:11.700
I mean, I think you have to have a really good reason for wanting to do it.
link |
01:24:14.700
But then your heart calls you for the certain.
link |
01:24:16.700
Sometimes you look out into the mountains and you say,
link |
01:24:19.700
for some reason I long to go there even if it means leaving the tribe
link |
01:24:23.700
and putting yourself in danger and doing stupid shit.
link |
01:24:27.700
That's the human imperative for exploration.
link |
01:24:31.700
Yeah, absolutely.
link |
01:24:32.700
Like when we were talking about this idea of longing being like the source code of humanity,
link |
01:24:38.700
I think that's also the source code of our creativity.
link |
01:24:42.700
It's the same longing for Eden.
link |
01:24:44.700
It's like you're always reaching for something that you want to get to
link |
01:24:48.700
or that you want to build.
link |
01:24:50.700
It's the best of us.
link |
01:24:52.700
What do you think?
link |
01:24:55.700
You write about creativity and sadness.
link |
01:24:59.700
Practically speaking, how should we leverage sadness for creativity?
link |
01:25:05.700
Is that sort of in the artist domain, in the writer's domain,
link |
01:25:09.700
in the engineering domains and so on?
link |
01:25:12.700
It's definitely in those domains, but it's in all domains.
link |
01:25:17.700
We're all going to face pain in this life at some point,
link |
01:25:20.700
and we all have the ability to weather it and withstand it and live with it for a bit
link |
01:25:28.700
and then try to transform it into something that we find beautiful.
link |
01:25:34.700
It's very easy to notice the grandeur of the painting hanging on the gallery wall
link |
01:25:43.700
or the new company that's just been created, but it takes a thousand different forms.
link |
01:25:48.700
You could bake a cake or in the wake of the pandemic,
link |
01:25:53.700
we've had more people applying to medical school and nursing school,
link |
01:25:56.700
and after 9.11, you had people applying for jobs as firefighters and teachers.
link |
01:26:02.700
So there's something in the human spirit that takes pain and turns it into meaning
link |
01:26:07.700
when we're at our best.
link |
01:26:09.700
And when we're not at our best, we deny the pain
link |
01:26:12.700
and then take it out on ourselves and on other people.
link |
01:26:15.700
So there's a kind of fork in the road of what to do with it.
link |
01:26:18.700
But we know, I mean, there's all these studies that I go through in the book.
link |
01:26:22.700
There was one where the researchers had people watch different movies,
link |
01:26:29.700
like happy movies, sad movies, bittersweet movies,
link |
01:26:32.700
and they found when people watched Father of the Bride,
link |
01:26:35.700
which is like the ultimate bittersweet, you're walking your daughter down the aisle kind of feeling,
link |
01:26:41.700
that was, they would give them creativity tasks after watching these different movies,
link |
01:26:46.700
and the people who had been primed for bittersweetness were the most creative.
link |
01:26:50.700
They were like primed to remember finality, you know, like love and finality, basically.
link |
01:26:55.700
Love and impermanence.
link |
01:26:58.700
There's something about that that gets us to our most beautiful state.
link |
01:27:03.700
I wonder if it is, I mean, there's studies like that, there's a,
link |
01:27:06.700
I don't know if you looked into terror management theory.
link |
01:27:09.700
Yeah, that's really interesting stuff.
link |
01:27:11.700
So they, especially intensely, have you focused on not just sad but traumatic, like death,
link |
01:27:19.700
prime you with death and see how that changes your mind.
link |
01:27:23.700
Like both, like, I don't know if there's creativity studies,
link |
01:27:27.700
but they have interesting, I think a little bit tainted by political bias, but maybe not.
link |
01:27:35.700
Psychology is a complicated field, but they study like who are you likely to vote for,
link |
01:27:41.700
if you're primed by existential, like by thinking about death.
link |
01:27:45.700
Like the fear of mortality.
link |
01:27:46.700
Fear of mortality.
link |
01:27:47.700
I forget what the conclusions are, but.
link |
01:27:49.700
I think they find that people become more tribalistic.
link |
01:27:52.700
Yeah.
link |
01:27:53.700
You know, like there was one study where they found that after they primed people that way,
link |
01:27:58.700
that they would then give them the chance to put hot sauce on a meal
link |
01:28:03.700
that their political opponents were going to be eating,
link |
01:28:05.700
and they put way too much hot sauce on after they've been primed to worry about death.
link |
01:28:11.700
I think at the core, we're simple creatures.
link |
01:28:15.700
So I actually, like in the book, I spent a bunch of time with people who are working on
link |
01:28:21.700
radical life extension, you know, or the quest to live forever.
link |
01:28:25.700
And people ask them a lot questions like, you know, the kinds of questions you were talking about earlier.
link |
01:28:30.700
Like how are you going to feed everybody and how is there going to be space for everybody
link |
01:28:33.700
if everyone really could live forever?
link |
01:28:36.700
And what about conflict?
link |
01:28:38.700
Won't we have an intensified conflict?
link |
01:28:40.700
And their answer to that is they point to terror management theory.
link |
01:28:45.700
You know, and they say because it's the fear of death,
link |
01:28:49.700
they're basically saying it's the fear of death that are causing our conflicts in the first place.
link |
01:28:52.700
And that if we remove the fear of death, we'd have less conflict to contend with.
link |
01:28:58.700
And that, I don't really buy that.
link |
01:29:00.700
It's possible that that's true, but are you also, how does the expression go,
link |
01:29:05.700
throwing out the baby with the bathwater?
link |
01:29:07.700
Are you also going to remove basically any source of meaning and happiness in the human condition?
link |
01:29:16.700
Like it's very possible that death is fundamental to the human condition, the finality.
link |
01:29:22.700
Yeah, that's the great philosophical question.
link |
01:29:25.700
And I went to a conference of people who are working on this,
link |
01:29:29.700
and I thought that they were going to be talking about those questions all through the conference.
link |
01:29:33.700
But the MO is much more like we're so happy that we're here with people who have gotten past all those quibbles.
link |
01:29:41.700
You know, we just know there's going to be meaning no matter what.
link |
01:29:44.700
The basic assumption is let's try to extend life indefinitely,
link |
01:29:50.700
and then we'll figure out if that's a good decision.
link |
01:29:53.700
Or more like we're sure it's a good decision.
link |
01:29:55.700
Or at least that was what I felt.
link |
01:29:58.700
It's either we're sure it's a good decision,
link |
01:30:04.700
or we're sure that it's good to believe that it's a good decision.
link |
01:30:08.700
Meaning like there's no downside to that, even if we find out it's wrong.
link |
01:30:14.700
But yes, there's a kind of certainty.
link |
01:30:16.700
Obviously you want to extend human life, that's the kind of assumption.
link |
01:30:19.700
That always seemed, now it could be true,
link |
01:30:25.700
but just like the people who over focus on colonizing other planets,
link |
01:30:33.700
it feels like you neglect the beauty and the struggle of our life here on Earth.
link |
01:30:40.700
I have sort of the same kind of criticism,
link |
01:30:42.700
whether it's thinking about Valhalla or any other afterlife,
link |
01:30:46.700
is you can have, if you're not careful, forget to make this life a great one.
link |
01:30:55.700
Whatever happens afterwards.
link |
01:30:57.700
So yeah, definitely.
link |
01:30:58.700
But from an engineering, from a biology, from a chemistry perspective,
link |
01:31:01.700
it's very interesting to think how do we extend this thing.
link |
01:31:05.700
Because it does seem that nature, the way it designed living organisms,
link |
01:31:09.700
it really wants us to die.
link |
01:31:12.700
Because that's part of the selection mechanism.
link |
01:31:15.700
This part seems to be fundamental to evolution.
link |
01:31:18.700
It gets people young, they need protection.
link |
01:31:23.700
Once they're a young brain, they get to explore a lot,
link |
01:31:26.700
get to figure out the world, they come up with their own novel ideas,
link |
01:31:29.700
how to adapt and how to respond to that world.
link |
01:31:33.700
And then as they get older and older, they get like stubborn and stuck in their ways.
link |
01:31:38.700
So we need them to die so we make room for new life that's able to adapt to the changing environment.
link |
01:31:46.700
If the old doesn't die, then you're going to get stale
link |
01:31:51.700
and not be adaptable to the changing environment.
link |
01:31:55.700
But maybe it doesn't have to happen so soon.
link |
01:31:57.700
Yeah, maybe it doesn't.
link |
01:31:59.700
Listen, I'm a big fan of pressing snooze on the alarm clock in the same way.
link |
01:32:06.700
I'm one of the people that believe it's, or I don't definitely believe,
link |
01:32:13.700
of course, I don't know, but I think death is a fundamental part of life.
link |
01:32:22.700
But yeah, if I'm on my deathbed, I would sure as hell press snooze as many times as possible.
link |
01:32:27.700
Yeah, I know.
link |
01:32:29.700
And it's interesting because in some ways I share your instinct.
link |
01:32:33.700
There was one scientist who I spoke to at that conference, he's one of the leading advocates,
link |
01:32:38.700
and he said, you know, that's a story that we've invented for ourselves because we have no choice.
link |
01:32:45.700
And if you really believe that you have no choice, then it's adaptive to tell that story,
link |
01:32:50.700
that death gives meaning to life.
link |
01:32:52.700
Good point.
link |
01:32:53.700
But if you really think you could triumph over it, would you still be telling that same story?
link |
01:32:59.700
And I've been thinking about that question ever since.
link |
01:33:02.700
Yeah, yeah, no, they got a good point.
link |
01:33:05.700
They got a good point.
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01:33:06.700
No matter what, as an engineer in the scientific pursuits, it's a beautiful one.
link |
01:33:11.700
In your own personal life, if we can go there.
link |
01:33:14.700
Sure.
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01:33:15.700
What have been some dark places you've gone in your own mind?
link |
01:33:19.700
Grief, loss, sad moments, moments of sadness that have made you a better writer,
link |
01:33:30.700
a better creator, a better human being?
link |
01:33:33.700
Well, I mean, I've been through a lot of bereavement just in these last couple of years with COVID,
link |
01:33:39.700
but even before that, I mean, there's all kinds of stuff.
link |
01:33:45.700
I write about it in the book, and in some ways I feel like I can write about those kinds of things
link |
01:33:50.700
better than I can speak them.
link |
01:33:52.700
But I had a really complicated relationship with my mother growing up where we had a kind of Garden of Eden
link |
01:34:01.700
during my childhood.
link |
01:34:02.700
We were intensely, intensely close.
link |
01:34:05.700
And my mother, because of some vulnerabilities that she had, reacted with a lot of trouble to my adolescence
link |
01:34:20.700
and to growing independent from her and starting to have different religious views and different political views
link |
01:34:27.700
and all kinds of things.
link |
01:34:29.700
And we had a pretty intense break that I describe in the book, and it was so intense that even though after that
link |
01:34:41.700
we still would get together for holidays and talk to each other on the phone and all that,
link |
01:34:47.700
there was a sense in which it was over at that point.
link |
01:34:51.700
The relationship was over.
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01:34:53.700
The Garden of Eden was no more.
link |
01:34:55.700
Yeah, yeah.
link |
01:34:56.700
It was like a feeling of like, yeah, I know what Eden was like, and it's not there anymore.
link |
01:35:05.700
And I think it was all the more confusing because if you lose someone to actual bereavement,
link |
01:35:10.700
you go through a mourning process, and people have thought for thousands of years about how to do that.
link |
01:35:15.700
But with something like this, there's no process because you're not even admitting to yourself,
link |
01:35:20.700
especially when you're in your teens and 20s, that you're mourning something.
link |
01:35:27.700
But it was the case that for decades, for decades, I could not answer even the simplest question about my mother,
link |
01:35:34.700
like where did she grow up, without tears in my eyes, or more than tears in my eyes, like embarrassing tears.
link |
01:35:42.700
So I would just try to steer the subject in another place.
link |
01:35:47.700
But I will say two things happened.
link |
01:35:50.700
One is that I've spent the last six, seven years writing this book about joy and sorrow and loss and love and all of it,
link |
01:35:59.700
and I've really come to terms with all of it.
link |
01:36:02.700
And then the second thing that happened is my mother now has Alzheimer's.
link |
01:36:07.700
And in her Alzheimer's, she's still actually the same person, like she's forgotten most things,
link |
01:36:15.700
but she still has these conversational lanes that you can travel down that are like the way she always was.
link |
01:36:20.700
And the way that she was when I was a kid, which was like so incredibly loving and so connected
link |
01:36:28.700
and so warm and sweet and funny and all of it, all the things I remembered, like it's all come back.
link |
01:36:35.700
And for all these decades, I had been wondering whether that Garden of Eden I remembered had actually happened,
link |
01:36:45.700
or whether that was just like the fantasy of a child, and maybe it was always difficult and I had not seen it.
link |
01:36:52.700
But I'm seeing her now, and I realize that it was all true, everything I remember, it was all true.
link |
01:36:59.700
It all happened, because it's happening again.
link |
01:37:04.700
And you return to the Garden of Eden for a time.
link |
01:37:08.700
Yeah.
link |
01:37:09.700
And to childhood. It's always a question of whether you can return to that place.
link |
01:37:14.700
Well, I don't know. I don't even know if I'd say I've returned, because I'm a different person now, and I don't need her.
link |
01:37:21.700
Are you sure?
link |
01:37:22.700
Yeah.
link |
01:37:23.700
So you're different than the 10 year old? You feel different?
link |
01:37:29.700
No, I mean, I'm the same person in terms of my need for love and love of love and all of that, but I don't look,
link |
01:37:38.700
I'm not dependent on my mother for it the way I was then, and that makes the experience really different.
link |
01:37:43.700
Yeah, when you're younger, she's a god figure.
link |
01:37:48.700
What is that, that the roots, the parents, such a funny civilization will live.
link |
01:37:54.700
And there's a depth of connection to parents that's probably more powerful than anything else in terms of its formative effect on who you are.
link |
01:38:02.700
I think it's the most powerful. And in fact, when this started happening, I got to college and I took a class in creative writing,
link |
01:38:10.700
and I tried to write a story, a fictionalized version of what was happening.
link |
01:38:15.700
And I called it The Most Passionate Love, because of what you just said.
link |
01:38:19.700
Yeah.
link |
01:38:20.700
And the teacher actually said to me, she was like, you know, you should put this story in a drawer and not take it out again for 30 years because you're way too close to it.
link |
01:38:28.700
Yeah.
link |
01:38:29.700
So I've now finally written it 30 years later.
link |
01:38:36.700
Yeah, you're probably still too close to it though.
link |
01:38:40.700
I don't know, though. I mean, I do think everybody goes through experiences in this life where you're experiencing a fundamental pain of separation and desire for a union.
link |
01:38:53.700
And it takes so many different forms. And this was my primal form of it.
link |
01:38:58.700
But for someone else, it's a betrayal or a bereavement or an exile from a country of their birth or whatever it is.
link |
01:39:07.700
And then you get to solve that puzzle for the rest of your life.
link |
01:39:11.700
Yeah, the fact of like, I really do believe that the original love that we long for, like that one of the great things that you learn as you grow older is that the love exists in some plane that's more general than the particularized form in which you first knew it.
link |
01:39:29.700
Yeah, I mean, that's why, despite all the creepy interpretations, even though Sigmund Freud is probably wrong in the details, he was the first one to sort of suggest that our experiences...
link |
01:39:42.700
I mean, he said that that was really controversial at the time when young people, they start having sexual thoughts like at age two or something, whatever the hell he said.
link |
01:39:53.700
So you develop this kind of connection to the opposite sex or whatever, to your mother, to your parents.
link |
01:40:00.700
And I think while a lot of that is shown to be probably not true, what is like a deeper truth there is your first early experiences of love or depth of connection are probably somehow strongly formative of your conception of love and your definition of the perfect thing you're reaching for for the rest of your life.
link |
01:40:22.700
Yeah, I think that's right. And you can really see it when you become a parent, too. You know, you can just see like, there's...
link |
01:40:29.700
Don't screw it up.
link |
01:40:31.700
You know, I have to say, like, I mean, knock on wood, I actually feel like, like, we're doing pretty well. Like, my kids are teenagers now. And I really had thought that I wasn't going to repeat the issues that I had been through with my mom. And I can say, I really am not.
link |
01:40:49.700
Yeah, like, my mom, for various reasons, just had a lot of trouble with my independence. And I just don't feel that at all. So...
link |
01:40:58.700
Yeah, there might be other things you're totally blind to.
link |
01:41:03.700
I guess that's possible.
link |
01:41:04.700
Isn't that the way of parenting? You solve the problems of the past.
link |
01:41:08.700
But there's some other new one. I guess I'll find out in 10 or 20 years. But like, so far, so good.
link |
01:41:14.700
What wisdom about parenting can you give from your own experience and from your writing?
link |
01:41:20.700
Yeah, well, oh my god, there's a lot to say. So, on the bittersweet side of things, the wisdom that I would give is that, especially for kids who are growing up in relative comfort with everything going pretty well, they get the idea that real life is when things are going well.
link |
01:41:47.700
And when things don't go well, it's like a detour from the main road, as opposed to understanding that it's all the main road.
link |
01:41:55.700
And I tell this story in the book of this time that we went on this family vacation where we rented a house in the countryside.
link |
01:42:03.700
And the house was next to this field where lived two donkeys that our kids fell in love with.
link |
01:42:10.700
They were like really little at the time, two boys. And they're spending all this time feeding carrots to the donkeys and it's all beautiful.
link |
01:42:18.700
And then comes the day where they realize that we're leaving in like two days and they're never going to see these donkeys again.
link |
01:42:24.700
And they start crying themselves to sleep. And the usual things that parents might say at a moment like that of like, you know, maybe we'll come back or another family will feed them, will feed these donkeys.
link |
01:42:36.700
None of that made any difference. But when we said to them, you know, goodbye is part of life and this feeling you're having, everybody has it.
link |
01:42:48.700
You've had it before. You're going to have it again. You'll feel better in a couple of days. But this is the way it's supposed to be. This is natural.
link |
01:42:57.700
That's when they stopped crying because I think that's when they stopped resisting.
link |
01:43:03.700
Like it's one thing to feel the pain of goodbye and it's another thing to be feeling like this isn't supposed to be happening.
link |
01:43:10.700
It's the resistance part of this isn't supposed to be happening that makes life really difficult as opposed to a more clear eyed view of what it really is.
link |
01:43:19.700
This is indeed supposed to be happening. There's a show called Yellowstone that I recently started watching.
link |
01:43:24.700
Yeah, no, I've heard of it. We actually started watching it, but only a few minutes and didn't get into it.
link |
01:43:29.700
So there's just a quick, it's not a spoiler of any kind, but there's a father taking out the son for the first time to go hunting and to shoot their first buck.
link |
01:43:39.700
And the son is getting really sad because he pulls the trigger and he took a life.
link |
01:43:45.700
And the father says that everybody gets killed in this life. That's the way of nature. That's the way each one of us is going to get killed.
link |
01:43:56.700
And it's interesting because I didn't really think of it that way because you think you die, but he really framed it as killed because he's like, there's no such thing as dying of old age.
link |
01:44:11.700
Let's medically, let's discuss that a bit, but basically there's something, whether it's a truck or a bacteria, something's going to kill you in the end.
link |
01:44:25.700
And that was an interesting way to look at it because we tend to think of humans aren't supposed to be killed.
link |
01:44:33.700
We think of murder as one of the sins, sort of one of the things that you don't do in society.
link |
01:44:38.700
But you know what? We do, that's a more technical discussion, whether we ultimately get killed by something in the end.
link |
01:44:45.700
But to some degree that's true, at least for most of us, that there's something that gets us, whether it's cancer, those kinds of things. It's interesting.
link |
01:44:53.700
But yeah, it's that reframing of it's not, it's supposed to be, this is the way of the world.
link |
01:44:59.700
Yeah. So it's funny. I mean, you know, at the same time that I just wrote a whole book about the fact that this is the way it is, like I really do believe this is the way it is.
link |
01:45:07.700
And with this reality, there's an intense beauty that comes along with it.
link |
01:45:12.700
So we have to accept the reality to get to the beauty. I believe that.
link |
01:45:16.700
And at the same time, there's a part of me that's just like, yeah, but give me the magic wand to make the world different.
link |
01:45:23.700
Yeah. Yeah.
link |
01:45:26.700
I don't know. I don't know how much of this is a female thing, too.
link |
01:45:29.700
Like I was watching with my son, my 12 year old the other day, we were watching this show about the battle of Thermopylae.
link |
01:45:37.700
And it was like all about, you know, valor and glory on the battlefield.
link |
01:45:42.700
And I said to him something like, gosh, don't you just wish we lived in a world where you didn't have to do all this in order for everyone just to live their lives?
link |
01:45:54.700
And he just looked at me completely puzzled.
link |
01:45:57.700
Like, no, you know, like to him, it all just seemed self evident that the world would be structured that way.
link |
01:46:03.700
You know, and he had like the 12 year old admiration for the valor of it all.
link |
01:46:09.700
But you wonder if that's nature or nurture.
link |
01:46:16.700
I wonder what that world looks like.
link |
01:46:20.700
We do live in a world where murder is seen as bad, but you look at a lot of the human history.
link |
01:46:26.700
I don't know if they had the same kind of conception of that.
link |
01:46:30.700
In terms of, you have to ask what kind of murder, you know, for what purpose, you know, war was a way of life.
link |
01:46:41.700
It's interesting.
link |
01:46:42.700
It's interesting if we can imagine properly a future that is different than ours in terms of operating under different moral systems.
link |
01:46:53.700
I'd like the same with living indefinitely or living in a society with no war.
link |
01:47:01.700
Like how fundamental is war?
link |
01:47:03.700
How fundamental is death?
link |
01:47:05.700
I mean, I think it's so fundamental to our source code.
link |
01:47:08.700
I just wish that our source code were different, basically.
link |
01:47:11.700
Like I can't get past that wish.
link |
01:47:14.700
There's brain computer interfaces that try to merge.
link |
01:47:18.700
We have smartphones, we're already kind of cyborgs, but greater and greater merger of computational power.
link |
01:47:26.700
So literally adding source code to our original source code.
link |
01:47:30.700
There's the mushy biology that runs source code, and then there's more cold electrical systems, and then they integrate together.
link |
01:47:41.700
And eventually, one day we offload the magic that is human consciousness also into the machine, and then we'll get to see.
link |
01:47:51.700
Maybe they'll be a little bit less assholish about the whole war thing.
link |
01:47:55.700
That'd be more.
link |
01:47:57.700
But there is, I think, even when I think about engineering human intelligence or superhuman intelligence systems, I feel like they also need to have the yin and yang of life.
link |
01:48:09.700
They have to be able to be afraid and to be sad and all those kinds of things.
link |
01:48:14.700
But maybe it's because I'm a product in this particular environment.
link |
01:48:19.700
Maybe sadness is a useful human invention, but not a universal one.
link |
01:48:25.700
This is what I don't know, because this is where I come back to, as I told you, the original reason that I wrote my whole book was the feeling that somehow in the expression of sad music is what other people see when they talk about God.
link |
01:48:40.700
Like there's something so, there's like an ultimate beauty there that I don't know if we have access to without that.
link |
01:48:48.700
But maybe we do.
link |
01:48:50.700
But I can say in this world, that's a great way to get access to that state.
link |
01:48:54.700
Is it within the reach of science to deeply understand this, you think?
link |
01:48:58.700
To understand why you feel sad when you're listening to a song?
link |
01:49:01.700
Or why you feel so much love when you're listening to a sad song.
link |
01:49:04.700
To a sad song, right.
link |
01:49:06.700
Why the sad song opens up some kind of deep connection to something you can call divine or something, whatever the heck that is.
link |
01:49:16.700
Yeah, I do think.
link |
01:49:18.700
I mean, we have like really early signs of it from the research, and I'm sure we're just at the scratching the surface stage.
link |
01:49:26.700
But I mean, like we know, for example, that the vagus nerve, which is so fundamental that it governs our breathing and our digestion,
link |
01:49:35.700
our vagus nerve also activates when we see another being in distress.
link |
01:49:40.700
There's like an instinctive impulse to want to make it stop.
link |
01:49:45.700
And the theory is that that's an evolutionary design because we had to be able to respond to the cries of our infants.
link |
01:49:53.700
You know, and from that ability grows the greater ability to respond to other people's cries too.
link |
01:49:59.700
So that's probably just, you know, like the very first step in being able to understand what all that is.
link |
01:50:08.700
You've already given plenty of advice, but broadly, what advice would you give to young folks today about career, about life?
link |
01:50:17.700
Whether they want to be writers, lawyers, scientists, musicians and artists, whatever the heck they want to be.
link |
01:50:24.700
How can they live a life they can be proud of?
link |
01:50:27.700
Okay, here's what I think.
link |
01:50:32.700
You should absolutely do that thing that you're dying to do, but you should always have a plan B,
link |
01:50:42.700
like a backup plan and a way of earning a living no matter what happens.
link |
01:50:47.700
Because I feel like people, we have this narrative in our culture of like the glamorous thing is to figure out the thing you love and then risk everything to achieve that.
link |
01:51:01.700
But first of all, a lot of people aren't comfortable with that level of risk.
link |
01:51:05.700
And second, when you're living with that level of risk, that's a cognitive load too.
link |
01:51:10.700
And so you don't have the full emotion and heart to be able to focus on the thing that you actually really love because you're like stressed out about it.
link |
01:51:18.700
So I'd say like, get the backup plan in place and then do the thing.
link |
01:51:23.700
My advice would be the opposite.
link |
01:51:25.700
Okay, tell me why.
link |
01:51:27.700
Well, I think the best, the truth is be aware of the cost not having a plan B has.
link |
01:51:37.700
So do it deliberately if you don't.
link |
01:51:39.700
But I'm with Bukowski on find what you love and let it kill you.
link |
01:51:44.700
I think you have to actually know your personality.
link |
01:51:47.700
I know if I have a plan B, I will not try as hard on plan A and I would likely take plan B.
link |
01:51:56.700
Because if plan A is the risky thing, I just work much better when in the state of desperation.
link |
01:52:04.700
So with my back against the wall and you have to know that about yourself, I think that has to do with...
link |
01:52:08.700
So I think we can refine it to say you actually have to really know yourself and how you respond to different kinds of risk.
link |
01:52:14.700
Like I would not do well in that kind of situation.
link |
01:52:17.700
I'd be like up at two in the morning worrying about it.
link |
01:52:20.700
Whereas if I have some, like it doesn't have to be paying the rent in some grand way, but if there's some basic way of paying the rent, then my heart's free to do the thing I really love.
link |
01:52:31.700
That's hilarious.
link |
01:52:32.700
For me, the only way I'm free is when I don't know how I'm going to pay the rent.
link |
01:52:39.700
Huh.
link |
01:52:40.700
Yeah, because otherwise I'll find a way to pay the rent that's not at all a source of deep fulfillment for me.
link |
01:52:49.700
I see.
link |
01:52:50.700
So it's like if you don't have like the, what's the expression?
link |
01:52:53.700
I don't know, something like the dog at your back.
link |
01:52:55.700
Yeah, deadlines.
link |
01:52:56.700
Then you won't actually do it.
link |
01:52:57.700
I create real or artificial deadlines, anxiety and so on.
link |
01:53:01.700
So yeah, you have to know yourself.
link |
01:53:04.700
Yeah, so really the advice is know your triggers.
link |
01:53:06.700
But we're still saying the same basic thing of like do the thing you really love, but just set up the rest of your life.
link |
01:53:14.700
Strategize appropriately to your personality and triggers.
link |
01:53:16.700
Exactly, exactly.
link |
01:53:18.700
What do you think is the meaning of life?
link |
01:53:21.700
The meaning of this whole thing probably has something to do with whatever we feel when we listen to a sad song.
link |
01:53:30.700
Yeah, because two things come simultaneously to my mind when you ask that question, and I've been asking it since I was four.
link |
01:53:39.700
I remember the first time I did.
link |
01:53:42.700
The question is more important than the answer probably.
link |
01:53:44.700
Yeah.
link |
01:53:45.700
Just keep asking.
link |
01:53:46.700
I don't know, the first one is beauty and I don't know why beauty is so important, but I just know that it is.
link |
01:53:51.700
And impossible to define perhaps.
link |
01:53:54.700
Is it definable?
link |
01:53:55.700
Yeah.
link |
01:53:57.700
Other than you know it when you see it.
link |
01:53:59.700
I don't know, I mean just.
link |
01:54:02.700
It has to do with that line that you feel something when you just see it or you hear it.
link |
01:54:08.700
Yeah, you just see it and it's like whatever can deliver you to that mode of transcendence where you're no longer purely in your own self and you're in something higher.
link |
01:54:22.700
And when you're in those states of mind, you know it because you have the temporary sensation that you could die at that moment, that the people you love could die and it will all be okay because there's something else.
link |
01:54:39.700
So that's my first answer.
link |
01:54:41.700
And then my second answer is the need to relieve psychic pain, like other people's psychic pain.
link |
01:54:48.700
I don't know why that's just like an impulse that I have.
link |
01:54:51.700
Psychic pain is more like suffering of any form.
link |
01:54:55.700
Yeah, but I mean.
link |
01:54:58.700
Is there a particular.
link |
01:54:59.700
Yeah, just making the world better and less pain, less pain to go around in general.
link |
01:55:09.700
Hence your sort of optimistic desire and longing for a world without sort of destruction, without malevolent destruction.
link |
01:55:19.700
A world where that wouldn't be necessary.
link |
01:55:21.700
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
link |
01:55:23.700
But yeah, like I so I had this moment.
link |
01:55:27.700
It wasn't so long ago I was doing some interview and somebody asked me, like, what are you longing for right now?
link |
01:55:33.700
And my answer at that moment was like, you know what?
link |
01:55:37.700
I'm actually at this moment in life where I'm not longing for anything.
link |
01:55:41.700
I'm at this particular way station where everything is the way I want it to be.
link |
01:55:46.700
And of course, the minute you say something like that, you know, you're going to be proven wrong.
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01:55:52.700
Because like an hour later, I get a letter from a reader who I've been in touch with over the years.
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01:55:58.700
And he was telling me about like a psychic struggle that he's going through.
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01:56:03.700
And I just felt like, oh, my gosh, if there were anything I could do to make it that his life wouldn't have been such that he would be in this position in the first place.
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01:56:13.700
And the struggles had to do with a long life history.
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01:56:18.700
So I don't know why I feel that so intensely, but I do.
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01:56:21.700
It's funny, those moments when you're just at peace, there's nothing else you want.
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You feel like that's like a temporary repose, like a pause.
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01:56:30.700
Exactly.
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01:56:32.700
You bet your ass a desire follows that at some point, but you get to enjoy those little moments.
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01:56:39.700
Yeah, and even when he asked me and I answered that way, I said, this is a way station.
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01:56:43.700
Like I knew it was temporary, but I didn't realize it would be disrupted like an hour later.
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01:56:49.700
And sort of to give you pushback to your statement about the possibility of beauty and basically alleviating suffering,
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01:57:02.700
there's a quote I really like from Hunter S. Thompson that pushes back against that,
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01:57:06.700
which is for every moment of triumph, for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled.
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01:57:14.700
But that's a very Hunter S. Thompson, and you know how he ended up.
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01:57:19.700
He's not the greatest philosopher of all times, but he's certainly a beautiful, a chaotic human being.
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01:57:26.700
Well, that's true.
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01:57:27.700
And I will tell you that my nickname for my husband is Gonzo, kind of because of him.
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01:57:32.700
He invented that form of Gonzo journalism where the writer is totally in the story.
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01:57:39.700
And my husband, that's his personality.
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01:57:41.700
He's in everything that he does.
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01:57:43.700
He's really in it.
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01:57:44.700
He's really present.
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01:57:45.700
He just lives that way.
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01:57:47.700
So his name is Ken, but I call him Gonzo like 90% of the time.
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01:57:52.700
Well, then that's a beautiful way to end the season.
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01:57:55.700
Thank you for your work.
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01:57:56.700
Thank you for being who you are.
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01:57:58.700
Thank you for initially at least making me feel okay about being an introvert and educating
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01:58:03.700
and making the rest of us feel great about being introverts.
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01:58:06.700
It's like half the world or whatever the heck it is.
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01:58:08.700
It's a lot of people.
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01:58:11.700
Thank you for being you.
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01:58:13.700
Thank you for talking today.
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01:58:14.700
It was just awesome.
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01:58:15.700
This was fun.
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01:58:16.700
Thank you so much.
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01:58:17.700
It was so great to talk to you.
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01:58:18.700
And I think it was the, what I said to you when we first got connected is thank you for your way of being in the world.
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01:58:23.700
I really, really love it.
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01:58:26.700
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Susan Cain.
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01:58:29.700
To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
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01:58:33.700
And now let me leave you with some words from Susan Cain herself.
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01:58:37.700
The highly sensitive introvert tends to be philosophical or spiritual in their orientation,
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01:58:44.700
rather than materialistic or hedonistic.
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01:58:48.700
They dislike small talk.
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01:58:50.700
They often describe themselves as creative or intuitive.
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01:58:54.700
They dream vividly and can often recall their dreams the next day.
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01:58:58.700
They love music, nature, art, and physical beauty.
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01:59:03.700
They feel exceptionally strong emotions, sometimes acute bouts of joy, but also sorrow, melancholy, and fear.
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01:59:12.700
Highly sensitive people also process information about their environments, both physical and emotional, unusually deeply.
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01:59:20.700
They tend to notice subtleties that others miss.
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01:59:23.700
One other person's shifted mood, or a light bulb burning a touch too brightly.
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01:59:30.700
Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.