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The following is a conversation with Susan Cain, author of Quiet, The Power of Introverts in the World that Can t Stop Talking, and her most recent book, Bittersweet, How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole.
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And now, dear friends, here s Susan Cain.
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You ve written on your website that, quote, I prefer listening to talking, reading to socializing, and cozy chats to group settings.
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So I think this conversation on the podcast 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 experience day-to-day life.
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I think a good definition is one that some of your listeners will have heard many times before, you know, the idea of where do you get your energy?
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And for some people, they get their energy more from quieter settings, and for other people, they get it more from being out there.
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So a good rule of thumb is to imagine that you re at a party that you re really enjoying, and you ve been there for about two hours or so, and it s with people you really like, and it s in your favorite place, so it s all good.
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An extrovert in a setting like that is gonna feel charged up, 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, and how socially skilled they are, there s this moment where you just wish that you could teleport and be back at home.
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Yeah, and that the time before the start of the party to the time when that moment happens is different for different people.
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So like 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 where you ve got to teleport home.
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Yeah, and then for extroverts, it s the opposite, right?
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Like they re gonna feel, you know, maybe they re working on, I don t know, like focused on producing a memo that s really intensely interesting to them.
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But if they re in that state of like solitary, the solitary mode of really focusing, they might get stir crazy a lot faster than an introvert would.
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And so it doesn t have so much to do 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 is what?
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Silence, solitude, and for an extrovert, it s interaction with other people?
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What I d really say is that, and this is neurobiological as well, is that it has to do with how your nervous system reacts to stimulation.
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So for an introvert, you re feeling in a great state of equilibrium when there are fewer inputs coming at you.
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So they could be social inputs, but that s why an introvert in general would rather hang out with one close friend at a time as opposed to a big party full of strangers, because that s just too many inputs for the nervous system.
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And for an extrovert, the nervous system needs more stimulants, so if they re not getting enough, they get that listless and sluggish feeling.
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So if you re just walking through the world, like people listening to this, but in general, how do you know if you re an introvert?
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Like, how do you empirically start to determine if you are, in large part, an introvert?
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Well, I would start by just asking that question of what happens to you, you know, at around the two hour mark where you re having a good time.
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But I also find, I m curious if you have a different experience from this, but from all the years that I ve been out there talking about this topic, I found that most people really seem to know once they re being honest with themselves.
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And maybe that s the question to ask, is like, if you imagine that you have a Saturday or a whole weekend where you can spend your time exactly the way you want to, with no professional obligations, no social obligations, who would you spend it with?
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How many people?
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What would you be doing?
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And what does that picture that you re painting start to look like?
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Yeah, so there s nuance to this, though, because I m sure for extroverts to get energized by stimulation, whether that s stimulation with other people, it depends what that stimulation is, right?
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Maybe you re not surrounded by the kind of people that you enjoy being around.
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So maybe that has to do less with whether some characteristics of your personality, more has to do with the fact what your environment is like.
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That s always kind of the question.
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Do you want to be alone because everybody around you is an asshole or do you want to be alone because
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You get energized from being.
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Well, I would hold the variables constant, I guess, I would say.
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Keep the assholes constant and see.
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And then there s the other thing you kind of observed that there s a lot of people that will say 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, they seem like the life of the party.
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I know, and I hear from those people all the time.
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There are 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 how the heck are they the life of the party?
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It s a bunch of different things.
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So first of all, just to say a big caveat to all of this is humans are just amazingly complex, so you can t explain every individual human through these parameters, even though I think the parameters are really valuable.
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But that person at the party, it could be that they re more of an ambivert, 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 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 at the skills of acting more like a pseudo-extrovert, and they pull that up at the moments that they need it.
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So they ve learned how to fake it.
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Yeah, oh, there s a lot of people like that.
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And I know this because I think out of all the people on this planet you could be talking to, I ve heard from the most number of those people.
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They all come and tell me about their experience out in the world presenting a face that s different from what they feel.
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So one of the things you talk about is, at least in the West, we ve constructed a picture of success, and that picture is usually one of an extrovert.
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Like when you imagine somebody who s a leader, who s a successful person, that person has some of the qualities 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, you got to be able to fake it, to sort of hang with the rest of the team.
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You have to be able to be outgoing and all those kinds of things and not be drained by the interaction.
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Yeah, but I mean, there are also a lot of introverts who figure out ways to draw on their own strengths, and they re incredibly connecting and successful, 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, from just observing how you can be an introvert and be in a leadership position?
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Yeah, it s kind of like a mantra of figuring out what your own strengths are and how to draw on them.
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I think of a guy I know, Doug Conant, 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
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At Campbell, the employee engagement ratings of the company 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, they were all the way at the top.
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And it wasn t that he was going out there and schmoozing people, but he really did care.
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So he would find out who were the people who had really been contributing, 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, 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, you sometimes have to go outside your comfort zone 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 and focusing on the one-on-one interaction, I can definitely relate.
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There s something deeply draining, which concerns me about Zoom meetings, because it s some weird brain manipulation.
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Wait, say more.
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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 for the introverts, even though they re not participating at all in the meeting.
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I mean, I suppose that s true for physical meetings too, but with Zoom meetings, remote meetings, it s so much easier to invite a larger number of people into the meeting, 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 because there s more and more push towards remote work without, I think, a deep understanding of why these meetings are so draining on people.
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I just anecdotally have heard,
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But maybe that s because the managers, the people who arrange the meetings, are just not sufficiently yet aware of the draining nature of them, so that they pull in too many people, they schedule them too regularly, so they need to adjust, that kind of thing probably.
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I think people are starting to realize, but I would say one reason that Zoom is so draining is because
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you can see your own self-presentation 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 that you re bearing the whole time.
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And like, you might want to, you know, turn off the camera so you can t see yourself, but then you feel like, well, I have the ability to, 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, either have happened or are happening, of the effect of seeing your own face on camera, because it s reminding you that you re supposed to be acting a certain way, 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 to do all your podcast interviews in person, right?
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Yeah.
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And that s even when it s very costly.
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if there s any kind of chemistry that contributes at all to the
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conversation, which I think most conversations have come to, even the boring work meetings, there s something there.
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Because yes, you re trying to solve a particular problem at this particular time, but underneath it, there s a team building that s happening.
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And honestly, people also have told me about this, why they enjoyed the Zoom meetings during the pandemic, is like they re lonely.
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Like they,
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It s annoying to have to sit and listen to folks talk about nothing and so on, but they tune in anyway because it s kind of lonely to sit there by yourself.
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I mean, there s a deep connection there with other people, and that is especially true when they re in person, which is a huge concern for me for more and more offices from a capitalist perspective.
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realizing, hey, 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, we want to protect the introverts.
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Like you don t want the open space, office space, 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 context.
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I mean, I know what you mean.
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So before I became a writer, I was a corporate lawyer for like seven years.
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And literally the only thing I miss from those years is hanging out with people at the office.
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Like, I don t know, just some of the funniest moments I ve had in my life came from
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being at the office 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 offices there at that firm and at most firms in those days, everybody had their own office.
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So it was like a dorm room, you know, where it was like a long hallway with everybody in their own little dorm room.
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So you had tons of privacy, but you would also come out and hang out with people.
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And I think that- 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, you know, 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, because you said re-energize, is there, do you like to think, and again, the human mind is complicated, but do you like to think of it as like a bucket that gets refilled for introverts in terms of energy, of social interaction that they re able to handle?
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Do you think of it like that, as a bucket that gets emptied and needs to be refilled?
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I think of it, yeah, more or less, because I use the metaphor of a battery 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, that there is a layer of complexity to that because you could be somebody who,
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doesn t want the kind of social life, let s say, where you have to be on and presenting and interacting with tons of people all the time, but you d get really lonely if you were just by yourself.
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So what you want is to maybe be in the company of a couple people you know really well.
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Like for me, the pandemic was not actually that hard for me personally.
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I mean, I lost family, but I mean, from the point of view of what we re talking about, it wasn t that hard because I live with my husband and my kids.
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So I knew it was hard on the kids and I felt badly for them.
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But for me, I was like, you know what?
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I have a lot of social life right here in the house.
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And I can focus and do my work.
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Yeah.
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That s the cool thing about the pandemic.
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I think it helped people figure out how much they love their family.
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I think that s true.
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And a lot of you give you a chance to really reconnect with kids, with your kids, like really spend time with them, which is fascinating to watch.
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Like people actually, it did strengthen the family unit in an often beautiful way, which just sucks to have to leave behind at this point.
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Yeah, and I think that s part of what people are not gonna wanna go back to that we need to solve for to the extent that work becomes non-remote again.
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I think people have just realized how precious those aspects of their lives are.
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And for somebody who s in a conventional office job where you re going home and seeing your kids for an hour before bedtime, and that s your interaction with them, that s,
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That s kind of a ridiculous way to set things up.
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Yeah, it s cool that you can get, I think a lot of places give you the option now, which is interesting.
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You get to optimize that element of your life.
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You take the commute and the office work and then the social interaction there.
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Do you focus on the work at home?
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It s also lonely at home, but then you get to see your kids.
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If you have kids, that s part of the optimization is like, I have some options now and I m gonna try to optimize solitude,
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loneliness, happiness, productivity, seeing family, seeing coworkers, the chemistry with the team building with the coworkers versus just the raw exchange of information with the coworkers.
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It s fascinating to see how that kind of evolves.
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Yeah, and then there s the third space idea of, you know, the spaces where you re in a co-working space or a cafe or something like that.
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You ve got other people around you, but you re not exactly interacting with them, but they re very much there.
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And that s huge too.
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I don t think we think about that enough.
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Yeah, that energy s there.
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Yeah, yeah.
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I lived in Manhattan for 17 years before we had kids, and I absolutely loved it.
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I loved it, the feeling of all that energy all around you, but you could be anonymous within it.
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To me, it was perfect.
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Yeah, it s beautiful, like I worked this morning for a few hours, programmed for a few hours at a Starbucks, and first of all, like wearing suits, like Manhattan is the one place you can kind of fit into, because everyone s wearing suits.
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Do you wear suits every day?
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Well, these days, unfortunately, because I get recognized, I wear usually not suits when I just on my own life.
1
SPEAKER_01
But yeah, I love it.
1
SPEAKER_01
I love the way it feels.
1
SPEAKER_01
And the way I think about the world when I wear a suit, I take it seriously as if my life is going to end today.
1
SPEAKER_01
Like this is what I would want to wear.
1
SPEAKER_01
Not for physical appearance, but just for some reason, it makes me feel like focused.
1
SPEAKER_01
I don t know.
1
SPEAKER_00
So even if you re not gonna see anyone, you would still put the suit on when you re doing your work?
1
SPEAKER_01
Especially then.
1
SPEAKER_00
Really?
1
SPEAKER_01
Especially then, yeah.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I really love doing that.
1
SPEAKER_00
So it like tells you seriousness of purpose, something like that?
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, yeah.
1
SPEAKER_00
Like everything s elevated now?
1
SPEAKER_01
I don t know what it is, I don t know what I imagine exactly, but it s some kind of platonic form of like a mixture of James Bond,
1
SPEAKER_01
And like, I don t know who else, Richard Feynman.
1
SPEAKER_01
What can I think about when I think about a suit?
1
SPEAKER_00
You know, I think of Leonard Cohen, but he was always wearing suits too, but you know.
1
SPEAKER_01
Leonard Cohen is definitely one of my, is a tragic human, is a beautiful human being.
1
SPEAKER_01
Through his words, through his own private life.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yes, I definitely would think about Leonard Cohen.
1
SPEAKER_01
So,
1
SPEAKER_01
Small talk, that s another thing.
1
SPEAKER_01
Is that part of the equation of introvert versus extrovert?
1
SPEAKER_01
How much people enjoy small talk?
1
SPEAKER_00
I kind of went into this whole thing thinking that it was, but from what I ve seen most people have studied is that most people don t like small talk.
1
SPEAKER_00
I think that s why people like your podcasts, because you re like, forget the small talk, I m going deep into it from the very beginning.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, so it s actually, the picture you re painting is like, the way you started, like with your, with the book Quiet, and the way you are today is you realize the picture may be more complicated.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, everything s more complicated.
1
SPEAKER_00
I will say with the small talk thing that, I m curious if you have this experience, but I find it fantastic to have a career where
1
SPEAKER_00
I m known for anti-small talk kinds of topics because it means that anywhere I go, like if I show up at a conference or something like that, no one does small talk with me.
1
SPEAKER_00
They re telling me about the deep truth of their lives from the first hello, and I love that.
1
SPEAKER_00
And in normal life, you have to wade through a lot before you know if people are ready to go there.
1
SPEAKER_00
Do you have that experience too?
1
SPEAKER_01
No, definitely, definitely, with people that know me for sure.
1
SPEAKER_00
but you forget how many people feel like they know you because of your podcast.
1
SPEAKER_01
Oh, that s what, no, that counts.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
1
SPEAKER_01
Because I m a huge fan of podcasts and I feel like before I ever became friends with Joe Rogan, I felt like I was friends with him because I was a fan of his podcast.
1
SPEAKER_01
And so like it was, I don t, I feel like it s a friendship.
1
SPEAKER_01
I know it s a one way friendship with all the people I listened to in podcasts and even people who are no longer with us, like writers.
1
SPEAKER_01
I feel like I have a relationship with them.
1
SPEAKER_01
Maybe I m insane.
1
SPEAKER_00
No, I totally feel that way.
1
SPEAKER_00
That s the whole reason I became a writer.
1
SPEAKER_01
Like I m friends with Leonard Cohen.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
1
SPEAKER_01
And he s not aware of it.
1
SPEAKER_00
No, but I think that s the whole reason for writing or making music or whatever people do.
1
SPEAKER_00
It s to be able to have those kinds of connections that don t require having to be in a room together, because there s only so many people you can be in a room with in your lifetime.
1
SPEAKER_01
The hard thing is, unfortunately, because I value human connection so much, and I only have, just like you mentioned, sort of a small circle of people I m really close with by design, it always hurts me a lot to say goodbye to people.
1
SPEAKER_01
You meet people and you can tell they re beautiful people, they re amazing, there s something so fascinating about them.
1
SPEAKER_01
They ve had a complicated life, like you could see in their eyes and the way they tell their story in just a few sentences.
1
SPEAKER_01
They ve gone through some shit, but they also found some elements of beauty, and then you get to realize, okay, well there s a fascinating human here, and all you get to say is a few words here and there, like a funny little joke, maybe a dark joke here and there, and then you just say goodbye, maybe hug it out.
1
SPEAKER_01
and you go on your way, so that s a hello and a goodbye, and your paths will never cross again.
1
SPEAKER_01
That makes me a sad walk away.
1
SPEAKER_01
But I guess I wouldn t have it any other way, I suppose, is the reality is.
1
SPEAKER_01
In your book, you talk about that sorrow, that sadness not being such a bad thing.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, and when you just said that, I just thought of this one moment in my life that I haven t thought of for 20, 30 years or something, but it was when I was in law school.
1
SPEAKER_00
And a classmate of mine had his friend come to visit for the weekend, and the three of us hung out a lot, and we just had an amazing time.
1
SPEAKER_00
And then this other guy, who wasn t going to be coming back anytime soon, if at all, sent a postcard to me.
1
SPEAKER_00
And the only thing written on the postcard was this quote from Oscar Wilde.
1
SPEAKER_00
And I don t remember the exact words, but it basically said that there s no pain as intense as the sorrow of parting from someone to whom you ve just been introduced.
1
SPEAKER_00
And there s something so intense about that and so true.
1
SPEAKER_00
I think partly also because when you ve just been introduced to somebody, you don t yet know their difficulties.
1
SPEAKER_00
So you re seeing the most sparkling version of them.
1
SPEAKER_00
You re seeing a platonic version of love and friendship.
1
SPEAKER_01
And your imagination fills in the rest in some beautiful way that matches perfectly the kind of thing you re interested in.
1
SPEAKER_01
That s how I feel about one spoon full of ice cream.
1
SPEAKER_01
And that s why you always finish the whole tub.
1
SPEAKER_01
And you regret all of it.
1
SPEAKER_01
What did you write this?
1
SPEAKER_01
I think this is on your website, that one of the best things in the world is that sublime moment when a writer, artist, or musician manages to express something you ve always felt but never articulated, or at least never quite so beautifully.
1
SPEAKER_01
So that s the Oscar Wilde line is one line like that, but just a line from a song or maybe a piece of art that just grabs you.
1
SPEAKER_01
Is there something that jumps out into memory like that for you?
1
SPEAKER_00
I don t know if I have an exact line, though.
1
SPEAKER_00
I mean, that feeling that you just quoted happens to me all the time.
1
SPEAKER_00
I m just bad at recalling exact instances.
1
SPEAKER_00
I am too.
1
SPEAKER_01
on the spot.
1
SPEAKER_00
But the writer Alain de Botton regularly makes me feel that way.
1
SPEAKER_00
He s just this beautiful essayist and observer of human nature, and he s just constantly expressing things in this gorgeous way that you ve experienced yourself.
1
SPEAKER_00
And you feel like, it s just this grand act of generosity.
1
SPEAKER_00
You feel less lonely, you feel this deep sense of communion.
1
SPEAKER_00
It s such an elevating experience.
1
SPEAKER_01
Even when it s like a melancholy line,
1
SPEAKER_00
Maybe especially when it is.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, what is that?
1
SPEAKER_01
So Jack Kerouac, On the Road, definitely makes me feel that way, like every other line in there.
1
SPEAKER_01
Forlorn rags of growing old.
1
SPEAKER_00
You know, I never read that book.
1
SPEAKER_00
So what was it about that book that made you feel that way?
1
SPEAKER_01
Well, okay, well, and since you asked, I m going to linger on this.
1
SPEAKER_01
So this story is kind of the book, the kind of defining book of the beats, of the beat generation.
1
SPEAKER_01
And it s basically a story of a writer who takes a road trip across the United States a couple of times and experiences a few close friends and a few strangers along the way.
1
SPEAKER_01
And there s a lot of just those melancholy goodbyes along the way.
1
SPEAKER_01
You meet all these people with interesting lives.
1
SPEAKER_01
Some of them are defined by struggle, some of them are defined by drugs, drinking, women, all that kind of stuff.
1
SPEAKER_01
And still he just kind of dances around all of that and is defined by the goodbyes and the passing of time.
1
SPEAKER_01
So a lot of the really powerful lines are basically like, there s one on there, again, I don t remember exactly, but he meets,
1
SPEAKER_01
a beautiful girl at a rest stop, and the girl is getting, or a woman is getting on a different bus than he s getting on, and it s just, it s that like,
1
SPEAKER_01
feeling of falling in love for like a second and realizing that fate is just ripping that out, which is similar to this idea of it sucks to say goodbye just when you met, but it s especially true when you fall in love just a little bit with that stranger, with all the possibilities that could lay there.
1
SPEAKER_01
So there s a few lines I ve written down.
1
SPEAKER_01
I went down this whole rabbit hole of thinking, what are the lines that grab me?
1
SPEAKER_01
a couple of lines from On the Road.
1
SPEAKER_01
So one is, what is that feeling when you re driving away from people and they recede on the plane till you see their specks dispersing?
1
SPEAKER_01
It s the two huge world vaulting us and it s goodbye, but we ll lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.
1
SPEAKER_01
So this is him talking about leaving a particular city.
1
SPEAKER_01
The spoiler alert towards the end of the book, rather the end of the book,
1
SPEAKER_01
Lie never turned too often.
1
SPEAKER_01
It s more poetry, but it s a feeling that captures the book, I would say.
1
SPEAKER_01
The evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all the rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in.
1
SPEAKER_01
And nobody, nobody knows what s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old.
1
SPEAKER_01
And it just captures this kind of in-the-moment appreciation of the beauty of the world and the sadness over the fact that time passes and you leave the people you love behind, you leave the places you love behind, or at least the way they were at the time that you really enjoyed them.
1
SPEAKER_01
And you just leave all that, just the sadness you feel when you, something about it, like looking at a picture, looking at your kids grow up, looking at old friends getting old,
1
SPEAKER_01
something makes you realize that time passes, and somewhere deep in there is probably a realization of your mortality, and it just makes you somehow first sad that everything comes to an end, and then that s immediately followed by sort of an appreciation of the moment, like a gratitude that you get to experience this moment.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I know it exactly.
1
SPEAKER_00
I mean, that s the whole reason that I wrote Bittersweet.
1
SPEAKER_00
It s all about that.
1
SPEAKER_00
So I know intensely what you re talking about.
1
SPEAKER_00
And by the way, my husband loves the book A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway, which I also haven t read, but it talks
2
SPEAKER_01
about that same thing, you know, groups of people traveling around together and the group coalesces into some magical formation and then one person leaves the group and it s never going to be the same again and then they move on to the next one.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I mean, I think that s the deepest essence of human nature.
2
SPEAKER_01
The feeling of longing for some kind of state of perfect completeness, completion, perfect love, the Garden of Eden, all of it.
2
SPEAKER_01
And the feeling that
2
SPEAKER_01
you re never gonna quite attain it, but you get glimpses of it here and there, and those glimpses are some of the best things that ever happened to us.
2
SPEAKER_01
And they re suffused with sadness because they re not the real thing, or they re not the full thing, they re just a glimpse.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s a glimpse of what we long for.
2
SPEAKER_00
So the sadness that we might feel is always connected to the ways in which we fall short from the perfect thing.
2
SPEAKER_00
There s always a thing you re longing for,
2
SPEAKER_00
And the sadness has to do with getting a glimpse of it, but not quite getting a hold of it.
2
SPEAKER_00
So it s always losing.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s always losing, but it s also always, but it s not, that sounds really depressing, but it s not, you know it s not depressing because you experience this all the time.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s also, those are the most beautiful moments I think life offers.
2
SPEAKER_01
I mean, it s intense, intense beauty in those moments.
2
SPEAKER_01
Because it s getting closer to the real thing that we long for.
2
SPEAKER_00
So what about like loss, losing love?
2
SPEAKER_00
Is that also a beautiful thing?
2
SPEAKER_01
Well, the moments you re talking about, I think it s easier to appreciate the beauty of it all in the moment because you re experiencing
2
SPEAKER_01
you re kind of experiencing the loss and the love all at the same time.
2
SPEAKER_01
Whereas if you re talking about straight up loss, like a betrayal or a bereavement or whatever it is, that s, it s different, it s quite overwhelming.
2
SPEAKER_00
So losing a loved one kind of thing.
2
SPEAKER_01
Losing a loved one.
2
SPEAKER_01
I mean, I will say that the truth that I think that we can come to after a lot of time on this earth is the idea that
2
SPEAKER_01
love exists not only in its particular forms, so not only in the form of the one person, you know, that one person we love or that other person we love, but love itself is a state that we have access to.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so over time, the loss of person A can heal and you can tap into a kind of bigger river of love.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I mean, I had this, it comes from Louis, Louis C.K., he had a show.
2
SPEAKER_00
Damn, I love that line.
2
SPEAKER_00
I mean, there s, he talks to an older gentleman, and Louis is all sad about losing a loved one, or like getting rejected, essentially, like a breakup.
2
SPEAKER_00
And then the older gentleman gives him advice saying like,
2
SPEAKER_00
Basically criticizes Louis for saying why are you moping around because this is the most this is the best part Like losing love is the best part because it that s the real loss is when you forget Like feeling shitty about having gone through a breakup
2
SPEAKER_00
is when you most intensely appreciate what that person meant to you.
2
SPEAKER_00
Like you most intensely feel love in some strange way by realizing that you ve lost it, by missing it, wishing, at this moment, I wish I had that.
2
SPEAKER_00
Like that feeling, that s when you feel that love the most, the absence of it.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so the older gentleman gives advice that that s the best part.
2
SPEAKER_00
And if you re good with it, it can last for the longest.
2
SPEAKER_00
It could be the most sort of prolonged experience of deep appreciation and emotion and so on.
2
SPEAKER_00
So that s kind of a, that s a nice way to look at loss.
2
SPEAKER_00
which is a reminder of how much somebody meant to us.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I mean, I think there s a lot of truth in that.
2
SPEAKER_01
Because, yeah, you wouldn t care so much if it weren t something that mattered to you.
2
SPEAKER_01
So it s always a signpost to the direction you really want to go to.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s always what it is.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, and it s interesting to see the way that the mystical versions of
2
SPEAKER_01
many of the great religions all point in this direction.
2
SPEAKER_01
You know, whether you re looking at Sufism or the Kabbalah or in Christian mysticism, you see this idea that the longing for what you lack is the very thing that gives you what you re longing for.
2
SPEAKER_01
So the longing is the cure.
2
SPEAKER_01
I mean, that s the way the Sufi poet Rumi puts it, the longing is the cure.
2
SPEAKER_01
You know, and he says, be thirsty, like be as thirsty as you possibly can.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s what you want to be.
2
SPEAKER_00
The good stuff is the wanting, not the having.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, yeah.
2
SPEAKER_00
Of course, tell that to a person that just broke up, and they ll be like, shut up, asshole.
2
SPEAKER_00
Your advice sucks.
2
SPEAKER_00
I wish I had her or him back.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, no, absolutely.
2
SPEAKER_01
Those are the kinds of life lessons that only work when you kind of step away for a while.
2
SPEAKER_01
They don t work in the moment of excruciation.
2
SPEAKER_01
There is something about the fact of knowing that all humans are in that experience together that is also incredibly uplifting.
2
SPEAKER_00
That takes time for people to realize.
2
SPEAKER_00
like heartbreak in your early teenage years or something like that, could feel like this is completely the most novel and the most dramatic pain that any human has ever felt, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
Or maybe even when you re younger.
2
SPEAKER_00
And then one of the things you realize is that everybody goes through this.
2
SPEAKER_00
that can be an awakening to the fact that we re all in this together.
2
SPEAKER_00
This human condition is not just a personal experience, it s an experience we all share.
2
SPEAKER_00
And that s a kind of love, the unity of it.
2
SPEAKER_00
That you can get to experience.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, that s a really deep kind of love.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I feel like, you know, we re prevented from perceiving that love as, you know,
2
SPEAKER_01
It s actually like the most obvious kind of love and it s right there and it happens all the time, but we re prevented from perceiving it because we re not really supposed to talk about things like that.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s like there s something unseemly about it.
2
SPEAKER_00
Well, it s also, in the West, it s an individualist society, so there s a pressure to sort of see the individual as a distinct sovereign entity that experiences things, and the unity between people is not obviously sort of communicated or talked about or is part of the culture.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it s not part of the culture and yet, you know, you see it in our behaviors because we re humans.
2
SPEAKER_01
So, you know, why do people listen to sad music?
2
SPEAKER_01
I mean, one reason is they re hearing expressed for them.
2
SPEAKER_01
Like the musician is basically saying to them, this thing that you have experienced, I ve experienced it too, so have lots of other people.
2
SPEAKER_01
But they re saying it all without words and it s transformed into something beautiful.
2
SPEAKER_01
And there s something about that that s,
2
SPEAKER_01
just incredibly elevating.
2
SPEAKER_01
And people don t know it, but there s one study that I have in Bittersweet that found that people whose favorite songs are their happy songs play it on their playlist about 175 times.
2
SPEAKER_01
The people who love sad music play them about 800 times.
2
SPEAKER_01
And they say that they feel connected to the sublime when they re listening to that music.
2
SPEAKER_00
What do you think that is?
2
SPEAKER_00
So what is that?
2
SPEAKER_00
What is it in music that connects us to the sublime through sadness?
2
SPEAKER_01
I mean, I have a bunch of different theories.
2
SPEAKER_01
The whole reason I started writing this book is because I kept having this reaction, reliably, to sad music.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I realized that for people who I knew who were religious believers, the way they described their experience of God was what I was experiencing when I would hear that music all the time.
2
SPEAKER_01
It happens over and over again.
2
SPEAKER_00
So you wonder what that is.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, so I started wondering what that is.
2
SPEAKER_01
And lots of people have tried to figure out what that s all about.
2
SPEAKER_01
And there are different theories that it s expressing, it s like a kind of catharsis for our difficult emotions, that it s, as we were saying, a sense of being in it together.
2
SPEAKER_01
We don t react in that sort of uplifted way when you just see like a slideshow of sad faces, which is something researchers have actually tested.
2
SPEAKER_01
No one really cares when they re seeing the slide of the sad faces, but the sad music, they re really reacting.
2
SPEAKER_01
And also they don t really react when they re hearing music expressing other negative emotions, like martial music or something like that.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s just the sad music that gives people this elevated sense of wonder.
2
SPEAKER_01
So I think it s the combination of the sadness and the beauty, and I think it s just tapping into the essence of the human source code, which is a kind of spiritual longing.
2
SPEAKER_01
Whether we re atheists or believers, there s this feeling of longing for a state and a place of perfect love and perfect unity and perfect truth and all of it, and like an acute awareness that we re not there in this world.
2
SPEAKER_01
You know, in religions, we express that through the longing for Mecca or Eden or Zion.
2
SPEAKER_01
And artistically, we express it with Dorothy longing for somewhere over the rainbow or, you know, Harry Potter enters the story at the precise moment that he s become an orphan.
2
SPEAKER_01
So he s now gonna spend the rest of his life longing for these parents who he can never remember.
2
SPEAKER_01
And that s, there s something about that state that s at our very core.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I think that s why we love it so much.
2
SPEAKER_00
Well, it could be, you know, you could have the Ernest Becker theory of denial of death, where at the core of that, the worm at the core, as Jung said, is the fear of death.
2
SPEAKER_00
So where the longing for the perfect thing has to do with sort of becoming immortal.
2
SPEAKER_00
reaching beyond the absurdity, the cruelty of life that all things come to an end for no particularly good reason whatsoever.
2
SPEAKER_00
One we can rationally explain.
2
SPEAKER_01
I know, you know, I wonder about that all the time.
2
SPEAKER_01
Like, I know obviously there s that idea from Becker and throughout philosophy and the tale of Gilgamesh about the idea that the thing we re longing for most of all is immortality.
2
SPEAKER_01
But I feel like it s not only that.
2
SPEAKER_01
I think it s more so or also, let s say, a longing for the lions to lay down with the lambs, finally.
2
SPEAKER_01
You know, for like the fundamental calculus of the universe to just be different, where life doesn t have to eat life in order to survive.
2
SPEAKER_01
And yeah, just a completely different situation.
2
SPEAKER_00
I wonder.
2
SPEAKER_01
That immortality would not solve.
2
SPEAKER_00
I wonder, that could be a very kind of modern thing, because surely so much of human history is defined by violence and glorified violence that doesn t give inklings of this lions and the lambs.
2
SPEAKER_00
So much of-
2
SPEAKER_01
I mean, I know all the other stuff is in the Bible, too.
2
SPEAKER_00
There s other stuff in the Bible, and the Bible, that particular aspect doesn t necessarily reveal the fundamental motivation of human nature.
2
SPEAKER_00
There could be deeper stuff, you know?
2
SPEAKER_00
But yeah, that is a beautiful, that is a beautiful picture, but is it just about humans, or is it about all of life, and you have to think about,
2
SPEAKER_00
what is the perfect world look like?
2
SPEAKER_00
It s not just the lions and the lambs laying together.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s, you know, how many lions and how many lambs?
2
SPEAKER_00
And, you know, what, having just had a few very technical conversations about Marxian economics versus Keynesian economics versus neoclassical economics, what does the economic and the government system look like for the lions and the lambs that we re longing for?
2
SPEAKER_00
So then you start to build society on top of all those things, but still you return to this, what are we longing for?
2
SPEAKER_00
And what s the role of love in that?
2
SPEAKER_00
What s the role of that sad melancholy feeling, the feeling of loneliness?
2
SPEAKER_00
Is the feeling of loneliness fundamental to the human condition?
2
SPEAKER_00
Are we always striving to channel that feeling of loneliness?
2
SPEAKER_00
to connect with others, like we want that feeling of loneliness, otherwise we wouldn t be connecting.
2
SPEAKER_00
Is that fundamental, that feeling like you re alone in this, even when you re with other people, sort of alone together.
2
SPEAKER_00
You re born alone, you die alone.
2
SPEAKER_00
Maybe loneliness is fundamental.
2
SPEAKER_01
I think the longing for union is fundamental.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s just that it looks so different for different people, you know.
2
SPEAKER_01
And coming back to where we were, what we were talking about at the beginning, you know, union looks incredibly social for a lot of people and hardly social at all for others, but everybody needs some version of union.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, people have been telling me recently about polyamory and all those kinds of things.
2
SPEAKER_00
Having probably grown up in a certain part of the world, I m very monogamy-centric.
2
SPEAKER_00
Not in a judgmental way, just for me, what makes me happy as one person for my whole life, basically just dedication.
2
SPEAKER_00
Because I ve just seen through relationships with people and objects in my life,
2
SPEAKER_00
the longer we stay together, the deeper the tie.
2
SPEAKER_00
So that s just an empirical thing, and yes, that probably is a personalized thing.
2
SPEAKER_00
That s just true for me.
2
SPEAKER_00
It could be very different for others.
2
SPEAKER_00
Maybe it s connected to the introverted thing, maybe not.
2
SPEAKER_00
Who knows?
2
SPEAKER_00
Before I leave, because you mentioned songs, sad songs.
2
SPEAKER_00
What are we talking about?
2
SPEAKER_00
What s a good, what song do you remember last crying to?
2
SPEAKER_01
Oh, gosh.
2
SPEAKER_01
Well, I mean, I literally dedicated my book to Leonard Cohen.
2
SPEAKER_01
He s played such a huge role in my life.
2
SPEAKER_01
I love him.
2
SPEAKER_01
I love him.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I ve loved him with this crazy love that I ve never been able to understand for decades.
2
SPEAKER_01
I think I understand it a little better now.
2
SPEAKER_00
So you re better friends with him than me, I m jealous.
2
SPEAKER_00
So does it make you, is it the musician or the human too?
2
SPEAKER_00
Because the human is a tortuous soul in a way.
2
SPEAKER_01
I d say it s the musician.
2
SPEAKER_01
musician, and I actually was thinking about this the other day.
2
SPEAKER_01
I mean, obviously he s not alive anymore, but I was kind of running the thought experiment, you know, if he were alive still and I had the chance to meet him in person, would I want to do that?
2
SPEAKER_01
And I m not really sure that I would, because he represents for me symbolically everything
2
SPEAKER_01
Well, everything.
2
SPEAKER_01
I ll end the sentence right there.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I think that s okay.
2
SPEAKER_01
I think people can express something through their art that they might or might not express if you were just hanging out with them and having a coffee.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I m happy to know him that way.
2
SPEAKER_00
he can express himself, I m sure, in the way that you know him as over coffee, too.
2
SPEAKER_00
It just requires a focus of remembering, like a deep focus of connection.
2
SPEAKER_00
That s why when I interact with folks,
2
SPEAKER_00
it s so draining for me because I m putting all my whatever weapons I got in terms of like deeply trying to understand the person in front of me.
2
SPEAKER_00
And doing that dance of human interaction, the humor, the intense kind of delving into who they are.
2
SPEAKER_00
which requires navigating around small talk type of stuff and just compliments and so on.
2
SPEAKER_00
In general, people, depending on the culture, depending on the place, they ll sometimes flower stuff with smiling and compliments like, oh, I love you, this is great, blah, blah, blah.
3
SPEAKER_00
I guess that s all great, but you want to get to the core of like, what are the demons in the closet?
3
SPEAKER_00
Let s talk about it.
3
SPEAKER_00
And that can be exhausting.
3
SPEAKER_00
That can be really exhausting.
3
SPEAKER_00
So from a Leonard Coe perspective, you get more and more famous.
3
SPEAKER_00
It can be hard sometimes because he probably is also an introvert.
3
SPEAKER_01
Oh yeah, I know he was an introvert because he actually tweeted about my book when it came out.
3
SPEAKER_01
So that was a precious moment for me.
3
SPEAKER_01
Something that we should all be listening to the quiet.
3
SPEAKER_01
I can t remember exactly what he said.
3
SPEAKER_01
But yeah, yeah, no, he definitely was.
3
SPEAKER_00
He struggled with depression, which I wonder if that s something that s also connected to introversion.
3
SPEAKER_00
But perhaps not, actually.
3
SPEAKER_00
Perhaps they re very disjoint.
3
SPEAKER_01
And also- It s connected to sensitivity, and many sensitive people are introverts.
3
SPEAKER_01
So it s kind of like a Venn diagram.
3
SPEAKER_01
About 80% of highly sensitive people are introverted, but then some are extroverts.
3
SPEAKER_01
And then not all introverts are sensitive, so it s complicated.
3
SPEAKER_01
But he was definitely a sensitive type.
3
SPEAKER_00
Well, there s on top of that, you see like the percent of artists relative to the average that suffer from depression.
3
SPEAKER_00
So creative people is very high.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s crazy.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, and then the number of artists and successful artists who were orphaned when they were young, who lost one parent or both parents, it s like an astronomical number.
3
SPEAKER_01
I have it in the book.
3
SPEAKER_01
I don t remember the percentage, but huge.
3
SPEAKER_01
And he was one of them.
3
SPEAKER_01
He lost his father when he was nine.
3
SPEAKER_01
And his first act of poetry was
3
SPEAKER_01
was he took, his father made suits.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s why I thought of him when we were talking about you and your suit.
3
SPEAKER_01
And he took one of his father s bow ties and wrote a poem in his honor and buried the poem and the bow tie in the backyard.
3
SPEAKER_01
And that was like his first creative act.
3
SPEAKER_00
You know that song, Chelsea Little Number Two?
3
SPEAKER_00
Sure.
3
SPEAKER_00
Where he met, I guess it s about Janis Joplin.
3
SPEAKER_01
Janis Joplin, yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
What a fun, intense, and cruel person she is.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_01
So I guess- Have you ever seen, I m sorry to interrupt you, but have you ever seen his son Adam Cohn and Lana Del Rey perform that song together?
3
SPEAKER_00
Oh wow, no.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s incredible.
3
SPEAKER_01
I have to send it to you.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
So that for people who don t know, I don t, I mean, maybe I don t know.
3
SPEAKER_00
It goes, I remember you well in the Chelsea hotel.
3
SPEAKER_00
You were talking so brave and so sweet, giving me head on the unmade bed while the limousines wait in the street.
3
SPEAKER_00
There s a good line in there about, about being ugly.
3
SPEAKER_01
Oh yeah.
3
SPEAKER_01
We are ugly, but we have the music.
3
SPEAKER_00
No, before that, from a guy s perspective, it was.
3
SPEAKER_01
Oh, you told me again, you preferred handsome men, but for me, you would make an exception.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so good, so good.
3
SPEAKER_00
Well, she continued that thread in later because I think she said that he was lousy in bed.
3
SPEAKER_00
Oh, is that right?
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, she publicly said that, which is like, oh man, just, okay, for people that don t know, I think this is a true story about them interacting and being together for a very brief time, I don t know, dating, but just connecting, falling in love in this very particular way that I think famous musicians, poets can, which is like, it s impossible for that kind of thing to last.
3
SPEAKER_00
but they did it for a brief moment.
3
SPEAKER_00
There s like a sadness to it because it s so momentarily, but it s so epic.
3
SPEAKER_00
These two paths cross and then you just look at it.
3
SPEAKER_00
We know these famous people and it s interesting to watch.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, and you don t even have the impression that they re thinking it s gonna last.
3
SPEAKER_01
They more know that it s like a blaze of an intersection, and the limousine s already waiting while they re in the middle of it, and then it s done.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_01
And he s talked about how his music, he said something like, some people are more inclined to say hello with their music, but I m rather more valedictory.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s what he said.
3
SPEAKER_01
What does valedictory mean?
3
SPEAKER_01
Like saying goodbye, like the valedictorian s address.
3
SPEAKER_00
Interesting.
3
SPEAKER_01
You know, so many of his songs really are about some form of parting or goodbye or an imperfection or something, or like the broken hallelujah.
3
SPEAKER_01
But the thing that s so incredible about him is
3
SPEAKER_01
is the way that he s taking all of that and pointing it in the direction of transcendence.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s not just pure sadness, it s sadness and beauty, and that s the thing.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, there is a feeling of transcendence in a lot of the songs.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s like sadness and transcendence, you re right.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s a goodbye, but you re moving on to some bigger thing, but in a sort of ethereal way, not like a proud, arrogant way.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_01
So his favorite poet was Garcia Lorca.
3
SPEAKER_01
He actually named his daughter after him.
3
SPEAKER_01
His daughter s name is Lorca.
3
SPEAKER_01
And he talks about how there s some poem that Lorca had written that made him realize that the universe itself was aching, but the ache was okay because that s the way you embrace the sun and the moon.
3
SPEAKER_01
And that s what I think is
3
SPEAKER_01
That s why I think there s this whole rich vein in this bittersweet tradition that he embodies that s like the essence of beauty.
3
SPEAKER_01
You know, it s the way you embrace the sun and the moon.
3
SPEAKER_00
The song Hallelujah, I return to that often.
3
SPEAKER_00
have been meaning to play it.
3
SPEAKER_00
I have now a friend who wants to sing it with me.
3
SPEAKER_01
Are you a singer?
3
SPEAKER_00
When somebody says they re a singer, do they have to be good?
3
SPEAKER_00
Because then no.
3
SPEAKER_00
But I would say yes.
3
SPEAKER_00
I was in a band for a while.
3
SPEAKER_00
I sang for a while.
3
SPEAKER_00
I was always bad, but I enjoy it.
3
SPEAKER_00
I enjoy it.
3
SPEAKER_00
I enjoy lyrics.
3
SPEAKER_00
I enjoy words.
3
SPEAKER_00
When sung or spoken, they capture something.
3
SPEAKER_00
Again, that moment.
3
SPEAKER_00
Tom Waits is a huge favorite of mine for that reason.
3
SPEAKER_00
Although he often, his lyrics are often not that simple.
3
SPEAKER_00
I d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.
3
SPEAKER_00
He s always playing with just like these weird...
3
SPEAKER_00
Especially in the English language, it s trickier to do.
3
SPEAKER_00
I m fortunate enough to know another language, which is Russian, so I get to understand that certain languages allow for more wordplay than others.
3
SPEAKER_00
English, for that reason, I don t think has a...
3
SPEAKER_00
like a culture of, you know what, I need to push back on what I m about to say, but there was no culture of wordplay until hip hop came along.
3
SPEAKER_00
So like distorting words in interesting ways for there to be a rhythm, a rhyme, and at the same time you re capturing some really powerful message.
3
SPEAKER_00
plus humor, all of that mixed in.
3
SPEAKER_00
Actually, hip hop does a really good job of this.
3
SPEAKER_00
But there wasn t a tradition, if you look at poetry in the 20th century, there wasn t really a tradition of that in the United States, but there was in other parts of the world, and certainly in Russia.
3
SPEAKER_00
Empowered also, not just by the language, by the fact that you go through a world war where tens of millions of people die.
3
SPEAKER_00
Something about mass death of civilians that inspires great literature and music and art.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, absolutely.
3
SPEAKER_01
Because you start telling the real truth, I think.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
3
SPEAKER_00
There s no more reason for small talk.
3
SPEAKER_00
That s funny.
3
SPEAKER_01
I always have thought that if I could choose any other medium besides writing, it would be singing.
3
SPEAKER_01
Are you a singer?
3
SPEAKER_01
No, I mean, like, I m really not.
3
SPEAKER_01
I just love the idea of it.
3
SPEAKER_01
But then I also think, you know, I m fundamentally a shy person.
3
SPEAKER_01
So I think it s much better that my medium is writing instead of singing.
3
SPEAKER_01
So, like, it all worked out.
3
SPEAKER_00
That said, you re also an exceptionally good public speaker, and you re not supposed to be, mathematically speaking.
3
SPEAKER_01
Mathematically speaking?
3
SPEAKER_00
You re not supposed to be a good public speaker.
3
SPEAKER_01
Oh, you mean because of shyness, or?
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, because of shyness, because of introversion, because of all those kinds of things.
3
SPEAKER_01
Oh, yeah, but lots of introverts are public speakers, actually.
3
SPEAKER_01
I knew this from the studies, but then also when I started going out on the lecture circuit, I realized that all my fellow speakers at all these conferences I was going to, they re all introverts, because they re all people who spent years figuring out some idea, and now they re out there talking about it.
3
SPEAKER_00
Oh, they re in their head figuring out the idea?
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
So how do you explain that the public speakers, would you say the good public speakers are usually introverts?
3
SPEAKER_01
No, I think there s just different styles of it.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I think that we just have, when we hear the word public speaker, we have a really limited idea of who that person would be.
3
SPEAKER_01
So for me, I used to be very phobic about public speaking.
3
SPEAKER_01
And part of the reason for it was because I thought that being the kind of person I was didn t equal being able to be a good public speaker.
3
SPEAKER_01
Because you re only imagining, you know, like the,
3
SPEAKER_01
the super kind of out there showman.
3
SPEAKER_01
But I think there s another style of public speaking that s more reflective and thoughtful and conveying ideas and people like that too.
3
SPEAKER_00
Is there advice you can give on how to overcome that?
3
SPEAKER_00
Like if you re a shy person, how to be a public speaker?
3
SPEAKER_01
I can totally give that advice because I used to, before I would give speeches, you know, if I had to do it in law school, if I knew like,
3
SPEAKER_01
Today was the day when I was gonna get called on in a law school class.
3
SPEAKER_01
I literally one time vomited on my way to class.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s how nervous I used to be.
3
SPEAKER_01
And yeah, the way to do it is through desensitization.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s been figured out.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s the way to overcome any fear.
3
SPEAKER_01
You have to expose yourself to the thing you fear, but in very small doses.
3
SPEAKER_01
So you can t start by giving the TED Talk.
3
SPEAKER_01
You have to start, I started by going to this class for people with public speaking anxiety.
3
SPEAKER_01
where on the first day, all we had to do was stand up and say our name and sit down, and that s the victory.
3
SPEAKER_00
That s fun to watch, all those people with anxiety.
3
SPEAKER_00
Okay, that s the first step, and then one step at a time.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, and then like with this class, you go back the next week and he would have us come to the front of the room and stand up with other people standing next to us so that you didn t have the feeling of being all alone in the spotlight through others sharing it with you.
3
SPEAKER_01
And you would answer some questions about where do you grow up, you know, where do you go to school?
3
SPEAKER_01
And you declare victory and you re done.
3
SPEAKER_01
And then little by little by little, you keep ratcheting up the exercises until you get to the point where you can do it.
3
SPEAKER_01
And then you start having successes and you realize, oh, you know, actually I can do this.
3
SPEAKER_00
What about like writing versus improvising?
3
SPEAKER_00
Because I knew a few people, sort of the colleagues of mine that were working on TED Talks and it feels like you re supposed to like write the thing like way ahead of time and you practice it and they help you and all that kind of stuff.
3
SPEAKER_00
I don t think I ve ever practiced a speech once in my life or a lecture or any of that.
3
SPEAKER_00
I know it s really good to do, but do you find that relieves some of your anxiety preparing well, or are you now able to do not preparing well at all?
3
SPEAKER_01
I definitely like to prepare before, but the kind of preparation that I ve done for my TED Talks is completely different from what I ve done for everything else.
3
SPEAKER_01
Because TED Talks are more like a theatrical event where it s like a one-person show.
3
SPEAKER_01
And of course, if you were going to go on Broadway with a monologue, you would know every word.
3
SPEAKER_01
So it s kind of like that.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so I would rehearse it over and over the way you would do that.
3
SPEAKER_00
Isn t that more anxiety, like knowing every single word?
3
SPEAKER_01
It s so much anxiety because, yeah, you re not even so freaked out about being on stage so much as, what if I forget something?
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, absolutely.
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, they do things like the last TED Talk I gave, I actually did forget something halfway through.
3
SPEAKER_01
I just couldn t remember the next line.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so I had to walk over, like over there were my notes.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so I did that and the audience like very kindly clapped while I did that.
3
SPEAKER_01
And then I came back to the spotlight and kept going and they edit that out.
3
SPEAKER_00
Nice.
3
SPEAKER_00
So there s a failure mode.
3
SPEAKER_00
But still, it seems really, it seems really stressful.
3
SPEAKER_00
Like I m now, I m not sure if I ll ever publish it, but
3
SPEAKER_00
I ve been, mostly this is for a personal journey, but I ve been working on a series on, wait for it, Hitler and the Third Reich, sort of looking at the historical context of everything, because my family was so much affected by that whole part of history, so for me to rigorously, I ve read a lot about Stalin and Hitler, and for me to force myself, one of the best ways
3
SPEAKER_00
force yourself to really consider material is to have to talk about it.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so that s why I m doing it, but I m playing with ideas of some of it, maybe like 20% is written down on paper, but the rest of it is my thoughts in the moment.
3
SPEAKER_00
and it s a difficult balance to strike, because if you write a lot, you re going to be more precise, you re going to be more accurate, but you re going to miss some of the deep, like, honest emotion.
3
SPEAKER_00
The silences won t be correct, or the silences between the words won t capture
3
SPEAKER_00
the depth of feeling, unless, if you re somebody like me, if you re like, I guess that s what actors and actresses have to do.
3
SPEAKER_00
Basically, even though the script is fully written, you improvise between the words, between the lines.
3
SPEAKER_00
But that s a skill.
3
SPEAKER_01
Well, it also takes so much time.
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, I experienced that with the TED Talks.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s like, you get to a stage, so you re memorizing everything word for word, and at first, in that process, it comes out in a really wooden way, the way you re saying, like the emotion s gone.
3
SPEAKER_01
But once you really know it, so you ve internalized the words, then all the emotion comes back, and you can say them in a completely different way, you know, and you re really speaking it from the heart.
3
SPEAKER_01
But you have to know it so well.
3
SPEAKER_01
before you can do that.
3
SPEAKER_01
I would never recommend it because it s just like, it s so time consuming.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s an, well, in your case, it works out beautifully.
3
SPEAKER_00
When it all comes together, it is a theatrical thing.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s like a musical or whatever.
3
SPEAKER_00
I think I m gonna come out with a one-man show on Broadway, singing.
3
SPEAKER_00
No, I m inspired.
3
SPEAKER_01
No, but for real, where are you gonna talk about Hitler and Stalin and everything you re learning?
3
SPEAKER_00
Me too.
3
SPEAKER_01
Have you ever thought of,
3
SPEAKER_01
using the medium of just speaking into a microphone but without the video.
3
SPEAKER_01
I m curious about this because I fell in love with podcasts originally before there was ever this whole video component to it.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I realized there s something so primal and magical about having someone s voice in your ear.
3
SPEAKER_01
And my favorite kinds of interviews still, very few people do it this way nowadays, but my favorite kind are when
3
SPEAKER_01
you re just talking into the microphone.
3
SPEAKER_01
So it s not over Zoom.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s not in person.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s just you and the microphone and the other person in the microphone and they re in your ear.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s like the ultimate in intimacy.
3
SPEAKER_00
Oh, you mean from the interviewer perspective, that s in your favor.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, but it would be interesting also with the kind of thing you were talking about of just speaking, like just you and the mic.
3
SPEAKER_00
I would love to be in person, but you can t see the person.
3
SPEAKER_00
I wonder what that s like.
3
SPEAKER_00
Wait, what do you mean?
3
SPEAKER_01
Like they re all there, but behind a curtain?
3
SPEAKER_00
No, you just have your eyes closed.
3
SPEAKER_00
You re just talking, you have your eyes closed, or whatever.
3
SPEAKER_00
because I think you still have to get the same kind of chemistry, because it s not just the visual.
3
SPEAKER_00
I don t even know that, because obviously I have trouble making eye contact.
3
SPEAKER_00
But I don t know if the visual stimulation is the necessary thing.
3
SPEAKER_00
There s something about the way audio travels that captures the intimacy.
3
SPEAKER_00
Where some people actually have headphones on, like Joe does this, have headphones on, that s really intimate.
3
SPEAKER_00
like there s something about that sound going directly into your ear.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, there is something primal there.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, for sure.
3
SPEAKER_00
I ve thought about it, definitely.
3
SPEAKER_00
Some of my favorite podcasts are like that, WTF with Marc Maron, that s audio only.
3
SPEAKER_00
There s a few audio only podcasts that I just love.
3
SPEAKER_00
What is that?
3
SPEAKER_00
I still go on
4
SPEAKER_02
Clubhouse, that was a social media platform with audio only.
4
SPEAKER_02
It s so interesting that people, the interesting thing about Clubhouse in particular is people from all walks of life can tune in and they just have, somebody needs to do some research in terms of introversion on that one because I don t feel any of my introvert,
4
SPEAKER_02
like triggers happening.
4
SPEAKER_02
Because nobody can see you, it s just audio, and nobody is offended if you re just sitting there quietly just listening.
4
SPEAKER_02
So you can participate whenever you want or not.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it s like the ultimate social freedom.
4
SPEAKER_01
You can listen as much as you d like, you can participate if you want, but you don t have to, it s no big deal.
4
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, because nobody can, like, if I m actually at a physical party, somebody s gonna look at me and be like, why, you know, there ll be that pressure to speak, but you don t have to in that kind of audio setting.
4
SPEAKER_02
And there s that intimacy.
4
SPEAKER_02
Like you can, when it s audio only, it feels like you can reveal a lot more of yourself in some kind of,
4
SPEAKER_02
honest way.
4
SPEAKER_02
I don t know what that is.
4
SPEAKER_01
What is that?
4
SPEAKER_01
I don t know, but I assume it s tapping into something really ancient.
4
SPEAKER_01
We used to tell stories around the fire.
4
SPEAKER_01
Our whole storytelling tradition was oral originally.
4
SPEAKER_02
So maybe it s that, but we used visual stuff like
4
SPEAKER_01
That s true, you could actually see the person on the inside of the campfire.
4
SPEAKER_02
It seems like the visual element s so fundamental to social interaction, but there is something primal about audio.
4
SPEAKER_02
I wonder what that is, and still, that s why, I mean, most people listen to podcasts, I think, audio only.
4
SPEAKER_02
They have it in their ears while they re doing stuff.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, that s how I do it.
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And then there s, yeah, that s how I do it too, and that s where the friendship,
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Like, it s formed, it s weird.
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The deep connection with other humans is formed because they re in your ear.
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And you get to see them grow, you get to see them be bored, experience excitement and anger and fear and all those kinds of things.
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It s fascinating, it s fascinating.
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The world of podcasting is fascinating because we re in this world of essentially radio.
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even though we all have all this high-definition content, all this TikTok-style fast stuff and still podcasting.
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I know, and we still choose to do this.
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It s weird.
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Because at the end of the day, I think that s really what people want most, is just to talk to each other and to know what people really think.
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And podcasting, of all the media that I ve ever seen, is the one where people come closest to telling you the truth.
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and to telling you the good and the bad and the bitter and the sweet and all of it.
4
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Especially long form, there s not enough time.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, exactly.
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I had to explain this to people, you talk to CEOs and stuff, they don t understand, they re starting to understand much better.
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Now as a hard requirement with CEOs and stuff, it has to be three hours, I say.
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Because there s something, they can t be doing marketing stuff for three hours.
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They break.
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They start being human, they start joking, they start relaxing.
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And if they can t, that also tells a kind of story.
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But I do that kind of torture for CEOs only.
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Anyway.
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Yeah, when I was getting, my publishing house did media training with me before Bittersweet came out.
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And they were preparing me for like the five to seven minute interview that you might have, you know, if you go on some quick TV thing or something like that.
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And God, I hate that.
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It s like, it feels like you re basically having to not tell the full truth somehow because you can t, you can t tell it in such a short amount of time.
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So to me, podcasting is just the best thing that s ever happened.
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The other downside of the seven minute interview
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I think you could do a really good job with that, but the dance part has to be very good.
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It s actually challenging for everybody involved.
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It s much harder for everybody involved.
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Because if you can do, I can imagine like a Christopher Hitchens type character.
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who s just super witty, then that you could do a seven minute thing, you can get to the core, a bittersweet, you can get to the core of the book without asking those generic small talk questions, because too many people in that short form interview are just asking very generic questions.
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They re doing small talk for seven minutes.
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That s like, all right.
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Like you only get seven minutes, you only get one interesting question.
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Go ask the weirdest, the deepest question that also energizes the other person.
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It s an art form that people don t take seriously.
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I think the seven minute thing, five minutes or even less.
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And then the commercials, which I,
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Yeah, and I ve noticed that many of the best podcasters are ones where when you re on my side of the table, you feel like it s more of a conversation and less like an interview where you re answering all the same questions you ve answered a million times before.
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It s really interesting how different the experience is.
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And you re right, the audio thing, if you can lose yourself in that, the intimacy of that, and you don t even remember what stupid stuff you said.
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People, I ve seen that, I mean, people don t give him enough credit as, you might not be aware, might not be a fan, but Joe Rogan is an incredible conversationalist in that he makes you forget
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that anything s being recorded, that you re talking at all, it makes you forget time, and you just enjoy yourself.
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And that s, whatever that is.
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And then you plug into that primal connection to other humans.
4
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What s your favorite Leonard Cohen song?
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SPEAKER_01
Famous Blue Raincoat.
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Do you know that one?
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Yeah.
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Maybe I ll play it.
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Yeah.
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For people who don t know Leonard Cohen, and this is your first introduction to him, it s going to sound so gloomy, but it s so good.
4
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He s got this deep, rich voice.
4
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Tori Amos covering Famous Blue in Korea.
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No, we want the original.
4
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Just like Hallelujah, Jeff Buckley covered Leonard Cohen.
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That was a really good one.
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That was a really good one, yeah.
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And I also really like Rufus Wainwright s cover.
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But Famous Blue Raincoat, for people who don t know it, it s basically about a love triangle, and it s told from the perspective of a man whose wife has just been with another guy who is also his friend.
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And he s writing a letter to that other guy, and he s reflecting on the way that all their relationships have changed in the wake of this
4
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this event.
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So they re still friends.
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So they re still, well, he refers to him as my brother, my killer, which is such a Leonard Cohen thing to do because it s always like, you know, it s light and it s dark all at once.
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Nothing is ever all one thing.
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Yeah, I love this song.
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah, right?
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I mean... He just speaks of it.
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And the fact that it s four in the morning and it s the end of December, like those are transitional moments, you know, it s night going into day and it s December going into the new year.
4
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That s not an accident.
4
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There is something about December, whatever.
4
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There s certain scenes you can paint in your mind.
4
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There s a poem by Charles Bukowski called Nirvana.
4
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It s a young man traveling through the middle of nowhere in the snow.
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There s something about the snow.
4
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Either the rain or the snow can put you in a certain kind of mood that just, what is it, James Joyce, the dead, the snow is falling on Dublin.
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SPEAKER_02
Yeah, it can put you in a place.
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I mean, David Yadin, he s a researcher in psychedelics and consciousness at Johns Hopkins.
4
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He s a great guy.
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And he s done research that has found that when people are in their transitional moments of life, and it could be a career change, it could be a divorce, it could be that they re nearing the end of their life, that they very often will say those are their most meaningful moments and their most spiritual moments.
4
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And so I feel like that s what Leonard Cohen knows how to tap into instinctively.
4
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The year after he died, his son, Adam Cohen, made a memorial concert for him, where all these famous musicians came to Montreal, where they had lived, and performed his music.
4
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And my husband, who s not a Leonard Cohen fan, and he s not a bittersweet type at all, but he knows how I feel about him, he s like, you know, you should really go to that concert.
4
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And I felt so ridiculous.
4
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The whole family went all the way to Montreal on a Monday.
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On a Monday.
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On a Monday.
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It was just like a random Monday.
4
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And we got on the plane.
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So everyone s out of school, just so I can go to this concert.
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And
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And I got there, and at the beginning, I was feeling like, oh, this was all a terrible mistake, because it s all these other musicians playing this music, and I don t actually really want to hear them.
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I d rather listen to him on YouTube.
4
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And then a musician named Damien Rice came and played Famous Blue Raincoat, and he sang it.
4
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He did the most amazing thing at the end.
4
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The whole thing was amazing.
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But then at the end, he sang this musical riff that was like, all I could say is it was like a musical lamentation of the ages.
4
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And the whole audience just rose silently to its feet.
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And it was one of the greatest moments that I ve ever had.
4
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There s sometimes certain artists in a cover can capture in some kind of deeper way,
4
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like carrying the thread of the power of the song.
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So I ve been listening a lot to Johnny Cash Hurt, which is a Nine Inch Nails, Trent Reznor song.
4
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I know, you talked about it on your podcast with Rick Rubin.
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it was Rick Rubin.
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SPEAKER_01
Which is when I reached out to you, because I love that interview, and I love that song also.
4
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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Yeah, so there s that.
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There s the Kennedy Center Honors, where they celebrated certain artists.
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They did that for Led Zeppelin.
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I forgot what her name is, but the lead singer of Heart performs Stairway to Heaven.
4
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And it s like, if you re like, alright, you take one of the great sort of rock songs of all time, what do you do?
4
SPEAKER_02
Oh, the cool thing is you get to perform this in front of the artist while they re still there, you know, they re still alive, so you get to watch you sort of
4
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perform in that case, the President, President Obama s there and she just knocked it out of the park.
4
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But at the same time, without outdoing the original somehow.
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SPEAKER_01
Right, you re just making it your own.
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You re making it your own, but not departing completely, not departing from the spirit of the original.
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SPEAKER_02
It s tough because the original Hollywood by Leonard Cohen,
4
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It s just not.
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SPEAKER_02
It s so powerful, but it s just not as good as some of these covers.
4
SPEAKER_01
Well, I think it s the words and the melody, and then the covers take it to a different place.
4
SPEAKER_02
The thing that Leonard Cohen seems to do well, I don t think he did it on Hallelujah, because he was almost being playful on Hallelujah.
4
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I don t know, as opposed to that deep melancholy, painful longing thing that Jeff Buckley did, and others do too.
4
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I wonder if it s because in a way he, I don t mean that he over edited it, but he apparently worked on that song for years and went through gazillions of verses and checked most of them out.
4
SPEAKER_01
So I wonder if we re hearing his version after he s like a little tired with that process.
4
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
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SPEAKER_02
Well, that s the other thing is like maybe from a book tour, you know, it s like you get tired of saying the same thing over and over and over and over.
4
SPEAKER_02
You forget, you forget the,
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You forgot the initial, the heart of it.
4
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, but I actually got a chance to hang out with Dan Reynolds, who s the lead singer of Imagine Dragons, this incredible band, super popular, the most played band on Spotify or something.
4
SPEAKER_01
Is that right?
4
SPEAKER_01
Kids went through a huge Imagine Dragons phase, so we were listening to their music a lot.
4
SPEAKER_02
It was so surreal to be hanging out with him, and he s such a good, very few people I ve met in my life are just as good of a human being.
4
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And that has to do with the fact that he struggles.
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He still, I think, struggles, but he struggled for a long time with depression.
4
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And so out of that pain, you see born this really good human being, this really good relationship with his wife.
4
SPEAKER_02
when times are good they lean on each other for like they re deeply grateful for those precious moments so it s beautiful to watch but he said that
4
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It s really important to feel the song every time.
4
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Otherwise, people know.
4
SPEAKER_02
People are really good at detecting your bullshit.
4
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You can t fake it.
4
SPEAKER_02
You really have to feel it every time.
4
SPEAKER_02
You have to feel the emotion of it, whatever the emotion is, of the original time you wrote it.
4
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, it s just interesting, because I thought you could maybe fake it,
4
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but he believes personally, because he played in front of gigantic crowds and over and over and over and over and over, he s like, no, every time you have to be there.
4
SPEAKER_01
But there s gotta be times when he s about to go out and he s not feeling it and he has to figure out some way of getting himself into that heart space.
4
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, well that s what he s saying, you have to, otherwise you re just, that s the job.
4
SPEAKER_02
Right, right.
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Don t take the job then.
4
SPEAKER_02
And he loves it.
4
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He says the biggest struggle, in fact, is the come down from that, which is like, you have such a beautiful experience of connecting with this large number of people, sharing a song that you love, and then it s such a rush of connection.
4
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And then you have to, you know, when you get off stage, you re now back to normal life.
4
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And that s why a lot of musicians get into heavy drugs and all that kind of stuff, because you re looking for that rush again.
4
SPEAKER_02
It s very tough to like, then go into this, speaking of introvert, because he probably is an introvert, is like, you have to find that calmness.
4
SPEAKER_02
And how do you find the calmness when you were just playing in front of tens of thousands of people, or hundreds of thousands, whatever that number is, that rush of connection, and everybody, there s love in the air.
4
SPEAKER_02
And you still have to find that like inner peace and calm.
4
SPEAKER_01
interesting because I so I don t know if this is the introvert in me talking and the writer in me talking but um I don t know like I I love most the moments where let s say I ll get a letter from a reader who will tell me what something I wrote meant to them and and they ll talk about having had that kind of moment of you know the communion between the writer and the reader
4
SPEAKER_01
And obviously I wasn t there physically when it happened, so I wasn t getting that kind of rush that a musician would get in a concert.
4
SPEAKER_01
But just the knowledge of that having happened out there in the world is just something that I added to it.
4
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It s the most amazing thing.
4
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You love it.
4
SPEAKER_02
But see, imagine reading thousands of those letters, and then it s such a strong rush, and everything else doesn t...
4
SPEAKER_02
It could be overwhelming, I guess, but like anything else, you have to come down and find a calm place.
4
SPEAKER_02
Like, for example, the danger of getting letters like that, you start taking yourself too seriously.
4
SPEAKER_02
You think like you are a special person somehow, but that s, you really want to avoid that feeling too.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I don t actually experience it as that much different from when I m on the other side of it.
4
SPEAKER_01
Like if I m the reader and some other writer has made me feel that way, to me it s the same thing.
4
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, me too.
4
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, it s a cool, it s a virtual hug.
4
SPEAKER_01
I think it s like, I was just listening to something about the different Russian writers.
4
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I was mentioning him to you, this academic, his name is Gary Saul Morrison, and he studies Russian literature.
4
SPEAKER_01
And he was talking about, I don t know if I ll be able to get this right, but basically that the people misunderstand a work like Anna Karenina, and that we think of it as
5
SPEAKER_01
telling us that you re supposed to live, um, you know, you re supposed to have, like, these grand, tempestuous romances that might end in death or despair or whatever it is, but, you know, you should be in it for the intensity of the emotion.
5
SPEAKER_01
And he s saying, actually, that s not, that s exactly not, um,
5
SPEAKER_01
what Tolstoy was saying, that actually it was the opposite, that he was really making, he was really advocating for everyday life.
5
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He was saying it s scenes from everyday, like he was juxtaposing Anna Karenina with all these other couples who were just living happily and quietly day by day.
5
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And that was what he believed was the ideal.
5
SPEAKER_01
So, as opposed to the grand rush and as opposed to the intensity.
5
SPEAKER_00
I wonder if he, is there a depth to the, is there a romance of just the day-to-day?
5
SPEAKER_01
I think there is a romance to the day-to-day, absolutely.
5
SPEAKER_00
And don t get distracted by the dopamine rollercoaster ride of the grand romantic notions?
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, and enjoy it while it s happening, because those are life experiences also, but not to mistake those for being everything.
5
SPEAKER_00
Where is he from?
5
SPEAKER_01
He s a professor at Northwestern.
5
SPEAKER_01
And apparently his lectures are like the most popular on campus.
5
SPEAKER_00
Wow, people love him.
5
SPEAKER_00
Gary Saul Morrison is an American literary critic and slobbist.
5
SPEAKER_00
He s particularly known for his scholarly work on the great Russian novel lists, Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky.
5
SPEAKER_00
Morrison is Lawrence D. Professor in the Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, wow, and there s a lot of incredible work.
5
SPEAKER_00
And then I m sure looking through the lens of Russian literature and the romance of all of that, he s looking at the modern world.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I think you should have him on your podcast.
5
SPEAKER_00
And Quiet Flows the Vodka or When Pushkin Comes to Shove, the Curmudgeon s Guide to Russian Literature and Culture.
5
SPEAKER_00
That s one of the silly books he has on the list.
5
SPEAKER_00
Okay, cool.
5
SPEAKER_01
What were you saying?
5
SPEAKER_00
I m sorry.
5
SPEAKER_01
Oh, no, I was just saying, yeah, like,
5
SPEAKER_01
I find that when I take photos on my phone, I hardly ever take photos at the moment you re supposed to.
5
SPEAKER_01
Everybody s gathered for some event.
5
SPEAKER_01
I ll forget to take the photo.
5
SPEAKER_01
But I take a lot of scenes from everyday life because that s what I actually want to remember in the end.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, yeah, I m the same, the same.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s actually concerning, because it s bad for productivity.
5
SPEAKER_00
Because I love everyday life so much, then why do any ambitious big thing?
5
SPEAKER_01
Your productivity is pretty good.
5
SPEAKER_01
I don t know that you have to worry about it.
5
SPEAKER_00
I do.
5
SPEAKER_00
So I wanna launch a business.
5
SPEAKER_00
I have a dream outside.
5
SPEAKER_00
This is like a fun side thing.
5
SPEAKER_00
There s been a lifelong passion.
5
SPEAKER_00
Anyway, I like building.
5
SPEAKER_00
I like building stuff.
5
SPEAKER_00
And I haven t been doing that as much as I would like.
5
SPEAKER_00
That s because, largely,
5
SPEAKER_00
Because I like sitting in silence and enjoying the beauty that is just nature and life.
5
SPEAKER_00
And when there s people, there s people.
5
SPEAKER_00
I love people.
5
SPEAKER_00
I love everything.
5
SPEAKER_00
And so when you love everything, why go through hell to build a company?
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, that s a valid question.
5
SPEAKER_01
I mean, I think you have a really good reason for wanting to do it.
5
SPEAKER_00
But then your heart calls you for the certain, sometimes you look out into the mountains and you say, for some reason I long to go there, even if it means leaving the tribe and putting yourself in danger and doing stupid shit.
5
SPEAKER_00
That s the human imperative for exploration.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, absolutely.
5
SPEAKER_01
Like when we were talking about this idea of longing being the source code of humanity, I think that s also the source code of our creativity.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s the same longing for Eden.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s like you re always reaching for something that you want to get to or that you want to build.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s the best of us.
5
SPEAKER_00
What do you think, you write about creativity and sadness.
5
SPEAKER_00
Practically speaking, how should we leverage sadness for creativity?
5
SPEAKER_00
Is that sort of in the artist domain, in the writer s domain, in the engineering domains and so on?
5
SPEAKER_01
It s definitely in those domains, but it s in all domains.
5
SPEAKER_01
We re all going to face pain in this life at some point, and we all have the ability to weather it and withstand it and live with it for a bit and then try to transform it into something that we find beautiful.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s very easy to
5
SPEAKER_01
to notice the grandeur of like the, you know, the painting hanging on the gallery wall or the new company that s just been created, but it takes a thousand different forms, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
You know, you could bake a cake or like in the wake of the pandemic, we ve had more people applying to medical school and nursing school.
5
SPEAKER_01
And after 9-11, you had people applying for jobs as firefighters and teachers.
5
SPEAKER_01
So there s something in the human spirit that takes pain and turns it into meaning when we re at our best.
5
SPEAKER_01
And when we re not at our best, we deny the pain and then take it out on ourselves and on other people.
5
SPEAKER_01
So there s a kind of fork in the road of what to do with it.
5
SPEAKER_01
But we know, I mean, there s all these studies that I go through in the book.
5
SPEAKER_01
There was one where the researchers had people watch different movies, like happy movies, sad movies, bittersweet movies.
5
SPEAKER_01
And they found when people watched Father of the Bride, which is like the ultimate bittersweet, you know, you re walking your daughter down the aisle kind of feeling, that was,
5
SPEAKER_01
They would give them creativity tasks after watching these different movies, and the people who had been primed for bittersweetness were the most creative.
5
SPEAKER_01
And they were primed to remember finality, like love and finality, basically, love and impermanence.
5
SPEAKER_01
There s something about that that gets us to our most beautiful state.
5
SPEAKER_00
I wonder if it is, I mean, there s studies like that, there s a, I don t know if you ve looked into terror management theory,
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, that s really interesting stuff.
5
SPEAKER_00
So they, especially intensely, have you focused on not just sad, but traumatic, like death, prime you with death and see how that changes your mind.
5
SPEAKER_00
Like both, like, I don t know if there s creativity studies, but they have interesting,
5
SPEAKER_00
I think a little bit tainted by political bias, but maybe not.
5
SPEAKER_00
I mean, psychology is a complicated field, but they study like who are you likely to vote for if you re primed by existential, like by thinking about death.
5
SPEAKER_01
Like the fear of mortality.
5
SPEAKER_00
Fear of mortality.
5
SPEAKER_00
I forget what the conclusions are, but.
5
SPEAKER_01
I think they find that people become more tribalistic.
5
SPEAKER_01
You know, like there was one study where they found that after they primed people that way,
5
SPEAKER_01
that they would then give them the chance to put hot sauce on a meal that their political opponents were gonna be eating and they put way too much hot sauce on after they ve been primed to worry about death.
5
SPEAKER_00
I think at the core, we re simple creatures.
5
SPEAKER_01
So I actually, like, in the book, I spent a bunch of time with people who are working on radical life extension, you know, or the quest to live forever.
5
SPEAKER_01
And people ask them a lot, questions like, you know, the kinds of questions you were talking about earlier.
5
SPEAKER_01
Well, like, how are you gonna feed everybody?
5
SPEAKER_01
And how is there gonna be space for everybody if everyone really could live forever?
5
SPEAKER_01
And what about conflict?
5
SPEAKER_01
Won t we have an intensified conflict?
5
SPEAKER_01
And their answer to that is,
5
SPEAKER_01
they point to terror management theory, you know, and they say, because it s the fear of death, they re basically saying it s the fear of death that are causing our conflicts in the first place, and that if we remove the fear of death, we d have less conflict to contend with.
5
SPEAKER_01
And that, I don t really buy that.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s possible that that s true, but are you also, how does the expression go, throwing out the baby with the bathwater?
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SPEAKER_00
Are you also going to remove basically any source of meaning and happiness in the human condition?
5
SPEAKER_00
Like it s very possible that death is fundamental to the human condition, the finality.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, that s the great philosophical question.
5
SPEAKER_01
And I went to a conference of people who are working on this, and I thought that they were gonna be talking about those questions all through the conference.
5
SPEAKER_01
But the MO is much more like, we re so happy that we re here with people who have gotten past all those quibbles.
5
SPEAKER_01
And we just know there s gonna be meaning no matter what.
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SPEAKER_00
The basic assumption is let s try to extend life indefinitely and then we ll figure out if that s a good decision.
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SPEAKER_01
Or more like we re sure it s a good decision.
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SPEAKER_00
We re sure, it s a mix.
5
SPEAKER_01
That was what I felt.
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SPEAKER_00
It s either we re sure it s a good decision or we re sure that it s good to believe that it s a good decision.
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SPEAKER_00
Meaning like there s no downside to that, even if we find out it s wrong.
5
SPEAKER_00
But yes, there s a kind of certainty.
5
SPEAKER_00
Obviously, you want to extend human life.
5
SPEAKER_00
That s the kind of assumption that always seemed... Now, it could be true.
5
SPEAKER_00
But just like the people who over-focus on colonizing other planets, it feels like you neglect the beauty and the struggle of our life here on Earth.
5
SPEAKER_00
I have sort of the same kind of criticism, whether it s thinking about Valhalla or any other afterlife, is you have, if you re not careful,
5
SPEAKER_00
forget to make this life a great one, whatever happens afterwards.
5
SPEAKER_00
So yeah, definitely, but from an engineering, from a biology, from a chemistry perspective, it s very interesting to think, how do we extend this thing?
5
SPEAKER_00
Because it does seem that nature, the way it designed living organisms, it really wants us to die.
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SPEAKER_00
because that s part of the selection mechanism, that s part, it seems to be fundamental to evolution.
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SPEAKER_00
It gets people young, they need protection.
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SPEAKER_00
Once they re a young brain, they get to explore a lot, get to figure out the world, they come up with their own novel ideas how to.
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adapt and how to respond to that world.
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SPEAKER_00
And then as they get older and older, they get stubborn and stuck in their ways.
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And so we need them to die so we make room for new life that s able to adapt to the changing environment.
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SPEAKER_00
If the old doesn t die, then you re going to get stale and not be adaptable to the changing environment.
5
SPEAKER_01
But maybe it doesn t have to happen so soon.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, maybe it doesn t.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s like pressing, listen, I m a big fan of pressing snooze on the alarm clock.
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SPEAKER_00
In the same way, I m one of the people that believe it s, or I don t definitely believe, of course, I don t know, but I think death is a fundamental part of life.
5
SPEAKER_00
But yeah, if I m on my deathbed, I would sure as hell press snooze as many times as possible.
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SPEAKER_01
I really don t want to die.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I know.
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SPEAKER_01
And it s interesting because in some ways I really, I share your instinct.
5
SPEAKER_01
There was one scientist who I spoke to at that conference, he s one of the leading advocates, and he said,
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SPEAKER_01
You know, that s a story that we ve invented for ourselves because we have no choice.
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SPEAKER_01
And if you really believe that you have no choice, then it s adaptive to tell that story, that death gives meaning to life.
5
SPEAKER_01
That s a good point.
5
SPEAKER_01
But if you really think you could triumph over it, would you still be telling that same story?
5
SPEAKER_01
And I ve been thinking about that question ever since.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, yeah, no, they got a good point.
5
SPEAKER_00
They got a good point.
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SPEAKER_00
No matter what, as in engineering and the scientific pursuits, it s a beautiful one.
5
SPEAKER_00
In your own personal life, if we can go there.
5
SPEAKER_00
Sure.
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SPEAKER_00
What s have been some dark places you ve gone in your own mind?
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SPEAKER_00
Grief, loss, sad moments, moments of sadness that have made you a better writer, a better creator, a better human being?
5
SPEAKER_01
Well, I mean, I ve been through a lot of bereavement just in these last couple of years with COVID, but even before that,
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SPEAKER_01
mean, there s all kinds of stuff.
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SPEAKER_01
I write about it in the book, and in some ways I feel like I can write about those kinds of things better than I can speak them.
5
SPEAKER_01
But I had a really complicated relationship with my mother growing up, where we had a kind of Garden of Eden during my childhood.
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SPEAKER_01
We were intensely, intensely close.
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SPEAKER_01
And my mother, because of
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SPEAKER_01
some vulnerabilities that she had reacted with a lot of trouble to my adolescence and to growing independent from her and starting to have different religious views and different political views and all kinds of things.
5
SPEAKER_01
And we had a pretty intense break that I describe in the book.
5
SPEAKER_01
And it was so intense that even though after that we still would get together for holidays and talk to each other on the phone and all that, there was a sense in which like it was over at that point, the relationship was over.
5
SPEAKER_00
The Garden of Eden was no more.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, yeah, it was like a feeling of like, yeah, like I know what Eden was like, and it s not there anymore.
5
SPEAKER_01
And I think it was all the more confusing because like, if you lose someone to actual bereavement, you go through a mourning process and people have thought for thousands of years about how to do that.
5
SPEAKER_01
But with something like this, there s no process because you re not even admitting to yourself, especially when you re like in your teens and 20s, that you re mourning something.
5
SPEAKER_01
But it was the case that for decades, for decades, I could not answer even the simplest question about my mother, like where did she grow up, without tears in my eyes.
5
SPEAKER_01
Or more than tears in my eyes, like embarrassing tears.
5
SPEAKER_01
So I would just try to steer the subject in another place.
5
SPEAKER_01
But I will say, you know, two things happened.
5
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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.
5
SPEAKER_01
And I ve really come to terms with all of it.
5
SPEAKER_01
And then the second thing that happened is my mother now has Alzheimer s.
5
SPEAKER_01
And
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SPEAKER_01
in her Alzheimer s, she s still actually the same person.
5
SPEAKER_01
Like she s forgotten most things, but she still has these conversational lanes that you can travel down that are like the way she always was.
5
SPEAKER_01
And the way that she was when I was a kid, which was like so incredibly loving and so connected and so warm and sweet and funny and all of it, all the things I remembered, like it s all come back.
5
SPEAKER_01
And for all these decades,
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SPEAKER_01
I had been wondering whether that Garden of Eden I remembered had actually happened or whether that was just like the fantasy of a child and maybe it was always difficult and I had not seen it.
5
SPEAKER_01
But I m seeing her now and I realized that it was all true.
5
SPEAKER_01
Everything I remember, it was all true.
5
SPEAKER_01
It all happened because it s happening again.
5
SPEAKER_00
And you return to the Garden of Eden for a time.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
5
SPEAKER_00
And to childhood.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s always a question of whether you can return to that place.
5
SPEAKER_01
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.
5
SPEAKER_01
Are you sure?
5
SPEAKER_00
Are you sure?
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
5
SPEAKER_00
You say you re different than the 10-year-old?
5
SPEAKER_01
Well, okay.
5
SPEAKER_00
You feel different?
5
SPEAKER_01
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, I m not dependent on my mother for it the way I was then, and that makes the experience really different.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, when you re younger, she s a god figure.
5
SPEAKER_00
What is that?
5
SPEAKER_00
The roots, the parents, such a funny civilization we live in.
5
SPEAKER_00
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.
5
SPEAKER_01
I think it s the most powerful.
5
SPEAKER_01
And in fact, when this started happening, I got to college and I took a class in creative writing, and I tried to write a story, a fictionalized version of what was happening.
5
SPEAKER_01
And I called it The Most Passionate Love because of what you just said.
6
SPEAKER_01
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.
6
SPEAKER_01
So I ve now finally written it 30 years later.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, you re probably still too close to it though.
6
SPEAKER_01
I don t know though, I mean.
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SPEAKER_01
I do think like, I think everybody goes through experiences in this life where you re experiencing like a fundamental pain of separation and desire for a union.
6
SPEAKER_01
And it takes so many different forms.
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SPEAKER_01
And this was my primal form of it.
6
SPEAKER_01
But you know, for someone else it s a betrayal or a bereavement or an exile from a country of their birth or whatever it is.
6
SPEAKER_00
But- And then you get to solve that puzzle for the rest of your life.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, the fact of like, I really do believe that, you know, 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.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I mean, that s why, despite all the creepy interpretations, why, even though Sigmund Freud is probably wrong in the details, he was the first one to sort of suggest that our experiences, 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.
6
SPEAKER_00
So you develop this kind of connection to the opposite sex or whatever, to your mother, to your parents.
6
SPEAKER_00
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.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I think that s right.
6
SPEAKER_01
And you can really see it when you become a parent, too.
6
SPEAKER_01
You know, you can just see, like, there s... Don t screw it up.
6
SPEAKER_01
You know, I have to say, like, I mean, knock on wood, I actually feel like we re doing pretty well.
6
SPEAKER_01
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.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, my mom, for various reasons, just had a lot of trouble with my independence, and I just don t feel that at all, so.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, there might be other things you re totally blind to.
6
SPEAKER_01
I guess that s possible.
6
SPEAKER_00
Isn t that the way of parenting?
6
SPEAKER_00
You solve the problems of the past, but there s always gonna be a new one.
6
SPEAKER_00
But there s some other new one.
6
SPEAKER_01
I guess I ll find out in 10 or 20 years, but so far, so good.
6
SPEAKER_00
What wisdom about parenting can you give from your own experience and from your writing?
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, well, oh my god, there s a lot to say.
6
SPEAKER_01
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,
6
SPEAKER_01
They get the idea that real life is when things are going well, 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.
6
SPEAKER_01
And I tell this story in the book of
6
SPEAKER_01
this time that we went on this family vacation where we rented a house in the countryside.
6
SPEAKER_01
And the house was next to this field where lived two donkeys that our kids fell in love with.
6
SPEAKER_01
They were like really little at the time, two boys.
6
SPEAKER_01
And they re spending all this time feeding carrots to the donkeys and it s all beautiful.
6
SPEAKER_01
And then comes the day where they realize that we re leaving in like two days and they re never gonna see these donkeys again.
6
SPEAKER_01
And they start crying themselves to sleep.
6
SPEAKER_01
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, we ll feed these donkeys, none of that made any difference.
6
SPEAKER_01
But when we said to them, you know, goodbye is part of life.
6
SPEAKER_01
And this feeling you re having, everybody has it.
6
SPEAKER_01
You ve had it before.
6
SPEAKER_01
You re going to have it again.
6
SPEAKER_01
You ll feel better in a couple days.
6
SPEAKER_01
But this is the way it s supposed to be.
6
SPEAKER_01
This is natural.
6
SPEAKER_01
That s when they stopped crying because I think that s when they stopped resisting.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
6
SPEAKER_01
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.
6
SPEAKER_01
It s the resistance part of this isn t supposed to be happening that makes life really difficult.
6
SPEAKER_01
As opposed to a more clear-eyed view of what it really is.
6
SPEAKER_00
This is indeed supposed to be happening.
6
SPEAKER_00
There s a show called Yellowstone that I recently started watching.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, no, I ve heard of it.
6
SPEAKER_01
We actually started watching it, but only a few minutes and didn t get into it.
6
SPEAKER_00
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.
6
SPEAKER_00
The son is really sad because he pulls the trigger and he took a life.
6
SPEAKER_00
And the father says that everybody gets killed in this life.
6
SPEAKER_00
That s the way of nature.
6
SPEAKER_00
That s the way each one of us is going to get killed.
6
SPEAKER_00
And it s interesting because I didn t really think of it that way.
6
SPEAKER_00
Because you think you die, but he really framed it as killed.
6
SPEAKER_00
Because he s like, there s no such thing as dying of old age.
6
SPEAKER_00
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.
6
SPEAKER_00
And that was an interesting way to look at it, because we tend to think of,
6
SPEAKER_00
humans aren t supposed to be killed.
6
SPEAKER_00
We think of murder as one of the sins, sort of one of the things that you don t do in society.
6
SPEAKER_00
But you know what?
6
SPEAKER_00
We do, that s a more technical discussion, whether we ultimately get killed by something in the end.
6
SPEAKER_00
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.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s interesting.
6
SPEAKER_00
But yeah, that reframing of it s not, it s supposed to be, this is the way of the world.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
6
SPEAKER_01
Though 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.
6
SPEAKER_01
Like, I really do believe this is the way it is.
6
SPEAKER_01
And with this reality, there s an intense beauty that comes along with it.
6
SPEAKER_01
So we have to accept the reality to get to the beauty.
6
SPEAKER_01
I believe that.
6
SPEAKER_01
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.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
6
SPEAKER_01
I don t know how much of this is a female thing, too.
6
SPEAKER_01
I was watching with my son, my 12-year-old, the other day.
6
SPEAKER_01
We were watching this show about the Battle of Thermopylae, and it was all about valor and glory on the battlefield.
6
SPEAKER_01
And I said to him something like, gosh, don t you just wish we lived in a world where
6
SPEAKER_01
you didn t have to do all this in order for everyone just to live their lives.
6
SPEAKER_01
And he just looked at me completely puzzled.
6
SPEAKER_01
He was like, no.
6
SPEAKER_01
To him it all just seemed self-evident that the world would be structured that way.
6
SPEAKER_01
And he had the 12-year-old s admiration for the valor of it all.
6
SPEAKER_00
But you wonder if that s nature or nurture.
6
SPEAKER_00
I wonder what that world looks like.
6
SPEAKER_00
We do live in a world where murder is seen as bad, but you look at a lot of the human history, I don t know if they had the same kind of conception of that in terms of, you have to ask, what kind of murder?
6
SPEAKER_00
For what purpose?
6
SPEAKER_00
War was a way of life.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s interesting, it s interesting if we can imagine
6
SPEAKER_00
properly a future that is different than ours in terms of operating under different moral systems.
6
SPEAKER_00
I d like the same with living indefinitely or living in a society with no war.
6
SPEAKER_00
Like how fundamental is war?
6
SPEAKER_00
How fundamental is death to humanity?
6
SPEAKER_01
I mean, I think it s so fundamental to our source code.
6
SPEAKER_01
I just wish that our source code were different, basically.
6
SPEAKER_00
Like I can t get past that wish.
6
SPEAKER_00
There s people working on that, right?
6
SPEAKER_00
There s brain-computer interfaces that try to merge.
6
SPEAKER_00
So greater and greater, with smartphones, we re already kind of cyborgs, but greater and greater merger of computational power.
6
SPEAKER_00
So literally adding source code to our original source code, just in a different,
6
SPEAKER_00
there s the mushy biology that runs source code and then there s more cold electrical systems and then they integrate together and potentially one day we offload
6
SPEAKER_00
the magic that is human consciousness also into the machine, and then we ll get to see.
6
SPEAKER_00
Maybe they ll be a little bit less asshole-ish about the whole war thing.
6
SPEAKER_00
There d be more.
6
SPEAKER_00
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.
6
SPEAKER_00
they have to be able to be afraid and to be sad and all those kinds of things.
6
SPEAKER_00
But maybe it s because I m a product in this particular environment.
6
SPEAKER_00
Maybe sadness is a useful human invention, but not a universal one.
6
SPEAKER_01
This is what I don t know, because this is where I come back to the, as I told you, like 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.
6
SPEAKER_01
Like there s something so, there s like an ultimate beauty there that I don t know if we have access to without that, but maybe we do.
6
SPEAKER_01
But I can say in this world, it s a great way to get access to that state.
6
SPEAKER_00
Is it within the reach of science to deeply understand this, you think?
6
SPEAKER_00
To understand why you feel sad when you re listening to a song?
6
SPEAKER_01
Or why you feel so much love when you re listening to a sad song.
6
SPEAKER_00
To a sad song, right.
6
SPEAKER_00
Why the sad song opens up some kind of deep connection to something you can call divine or something, whatever the heck that is.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I do think.
6
SPEAKER_01
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.
6
SPEAKER_01
But I mean like we know, for example, that the vagus nerve, which is so fundamental that it governs our breathing and our digestion,
6
SPEAKER_01
Our vagus nerve also activates when we see another being in distress.
6
SPEAKER_01
There s like an instinctive impulse to want to make it stop.
6
SPEAKER_01
And the theory is that that s an evolutionary design because we had to be able to respond to the cries of our infants, you know, and from that ability grows the greater ability to respond to other people s cries too.
6
SPEAKER_01
So that s probably just, you know,
6
SPEAKER_01
like the very first step in being able to understand what all that is.
6
SPEAKER_00
We ve already given plenty of advice, but broadly, what advice would you give to young folks today about career, about life, whether they want to be writers, lawyers, scientists, musicians, and artists, whatever the heck they want to be, how can they live a life they can be proud of?
6
SPEAKER_01
Okay, here s what I think.
6
SPEAKER_01
You should absolutely do that thing that you re dying to do, but you should always have a plan B, like a backup plan and a way of earning a living, no matter what happens.
6
SPEAKER_01
Because I feel like people, we have this narrative in our culture of like, that the glamorous thing is to, you know,
6
SPEAKER_01
figure out the thing you love and then risk everything to achieve that.
6
SPEAKER_01
But first of all, a lot of people aren t comfortable with that level of risk.
6
SPEAKER_01
And second, when you re living with that level of risk, that s a cognitive load too.
6
SPEAKER_01
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.
6
SPEAKER_01
So I d say like, get the backup plan in place and then do the thing.
6
SPEAKER_00
My advice would be the opposite.
6
SPEAKER_00
I m moving to the romantic.
6
SPEAKER_00
Well, I think the best, the truth is be aware of the cost not having a plan B has, so do it deliberately if you don t.
6
SPEAKER_00
But I m with Bukowski on find what you love and let it kill you.
6
SPEAKER_00
I think, you have to actually know your personality.
6
SPEAKER_00
I know if I have a plan B,
6
SPEAKER_00
I will not try as hard on plan A, and I would likely take plan B. Because if plan A is the risky thing, I just work way much better when in the state of desperation.
6
SPEAKER_00
So with my back against the wall.
6
SPEAKER_00
And you have to know that about yourself.
6
SPEAKER_01
I think that has to do with- So I think we can refine it to say you actually have to really know yourself and how you respond to different kinds of risks.
6
SPEAKER_01
I would not do well in that kind of situation.
6
SPEAKER_01
I d be up at two in the morning worrying about it, whereas if I have some... 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.
6
SPEAKER_00
That s hilarious.
6
SPEAKER_00
For me, the only way I m free is when I don t know how I m going to pay the rent.
6
SPEAKER_01
Huh.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, because otherwise I ll find a way to pay the rent.
6
SPEAKER_00
That s not at all a source of deep fulfillment for me, so.
6
SPEAKER_01
I see, so it s like if you don t have like the, what s the expression?
6
SPEAKER_01
I don t know, something like the dog at your back.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, deadlines.
6
SPEAKER_00
Then you won t actually do it.
6
SPEAKER_00
I create real or artificial deadlines, anxiety and so on, so.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, you have to.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, so really the advice is know your triggers.
6
SPEAKER_01
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.
6
SPEAKER_00
Strategize appropriately to your personality and triggers.
6
SPEAKER_01
Exactly, exactly.
6
SPEAKER_00
What do you think is the meaning of life?
6
SPEAKER_00
The meaning of this whole thing probably has something to do with whatever we feel when we listen to a sad song.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
6
SPEAKER_01
Because two things come simultaneously to my mind when you ask that question, and I ve been asking it since I was four.
6
SPEAKER_01
I remember the first time I did.
6
SPEAKER_00
The question is more important than the answer, probably.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
6
SPEAKER_00
Just keep asking.
6
SPEAKER_01
I don t know.
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The first one is beauty, and I don t know why beauty s so important, but I just know that it is.
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And possible to define, perhaps.
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Is it definable?
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Yeah.
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Other than you know it when you see it.
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I don t know.
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has to do with that line that you feel something when you just see it or you hear it.
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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.
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And when you re in those states of mind, you know it because you have the temporary sensation that
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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.
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So that s my first answer.
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And then my second answer is the need to relieve psychic pain, like other people s psychic pain.
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I don t know why, that s just like an impulse that I have.
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Psychic pain is more like suffering of any form.
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What is psychic pain?
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Yeah, but I mean.
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Is there a particular?
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Yeah, just making the world
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better and less pain, less pain to go around in general.
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Hence your sort of optimistic desire and longing for a world without sort of destruction, without malevolent destruction.
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Yeah, a world where that wouldn t be necessary.
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Yeah, exactly, exactly.
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But yeah, so I had this moment.
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It wasn t so long ago, I was doing some interview and somebody asked me, like, what are you longing for right now?
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And my answer at that moment was like, you know what, I m actually at this moment in life where I m not longing for anything.
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I m at this particular wasteland.
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station where everything is the way I want it to be.
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And of course, the minute you say something like that, you know you re going to be proven wrong.
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Because like an hour later, I get a letter from a reader who I ve been in touch with over the years, and he was telling me about like a psychic struggle that he s going through.
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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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Like his struggles had to do with a long life history.
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So I don t know why I feel that so intensely, but I do.
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Those moments when you are just at peace, there s nothing else you want, feel like that s like a temporary repose, like a pause.
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Yes, exactly.
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You bet your ass, a desire follows that at some point, but you get to enjoy those little moments.
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Yeah, and even when he asked me and I answered that way, I said, this is a way station.
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Like I knew it was temporary, but I didn t realize it would be disrupted like an hour later.
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And sort of to give you pushback to your statement about the possibility of beauty and basically alleviating suffering, there s a quote I really like from Hunter S. Thompson that pushes back against that, which is, for every moment of triumph, for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled.
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But that s a very Hunter S. Thompson, and you know how he ended up.
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He s not the greatest philosopher of all times, but he s certainly a beautiful and chaotic human being.
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Well, that s true.
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And I will tell you that my nickname for my husband is Gonzo, kind of because of him.
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You know, he invented that form of Gonzo journalism where the writer is totally in the story.
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And my husband, that s his personality.
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He s in everything that he does.
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He s really in it.
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He s really present.
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He just lives that way.
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So his name is Ken, but I call him Gonzo like 90% of the time.
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Well then that s a beautiful way to end this season.
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Thank you for your work, thank you for being who you are.
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Thank you for initially at least making me feel okay about being an introvert and educating and making the rest of us feel great about being introverts.
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It s like half the world or whatever the heck it is.
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It s a lot of people.
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Thank you for being you and thank you for talking today.
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This was awesome, this was fun.
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Thank you so much.
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It was so great to talk to you.
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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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I really, really love it.
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Thanks for listening to this conversation with Susan Cain.
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To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
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And now let me leave you with some words from Susan Cain herself.
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The highly sensitive introvert tends to be philosophical or spiritual in their orientation, rather than materialistic or hedonistic.
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They dislike small talk.
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They often describe themselves as creative or intuitive.
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They dream vividly and can often recall their dreams the next day.
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They love music, nature, art, and physical beauty.
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They feel exceptionally strong emotions, sometimes acute bouts of joy, but also sorrow, melancholy, and fear.
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Highly sensitive people also process information about their environments, both physical and emotional, unusually deeply.
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They tend to notice subtleties that others miss, another person s shift in mood, or a light bulb burning a touch too brightly.
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Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.