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

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No seem. cybernetic organism living issue of a metal end of cellar No Hello, boys and girls, ladies and gyms. This is Tim Ferris and welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show. Welcome, friends. My guest today is Susan Kane. That's C A I N. You can find her on Twitter at Susan Kane. Susan is the author of Quiet Journal, Quiet Power. The secret strength of introverts and quiet the power of introverts in a world that can't stop talking. We've spent eight years.

On the New York Times bestseller list and has been translated into 40 languages. Susan's TED Talk has been viewed more than 40 million times and was named by Bill Gates as one of his all time favorite talks. LinkedIn named her the top sixth influencer in the world, just behind Richard Branson and Melinda Gates. Susan partners with Malcolm Gladwell, Adam Grant, and Dan Pink, all good people. to curate the next big idea book club. They donate all of their proceeds to children's literacy programs. For my first conversation with Susan on the podcast, you can go to Tim.blog forward slash Susan Kane, her newest book Which she's been working on for some time and I know because we talked about it last time. Bittersweet. Subtitle How Sorrow and Longing Make us whole.

And I am very excited to dig into this. We'll provide links to all the social in the show notes, but you can find everything Susan Kane at you guessed it susancane at Dot. Nett. Susan, welcome back to the show. Nice to see you. It is so great to see you, Tim. Thanks for having me. And I thought I would start with This

Title. Which is interesting and also funny to me on a couple of levels. Am I making it up, or was there a point in your life that you had dark chocolate At least once a day. Am I inventing that? Am I just making that up whole cloth? No, the funny thing is that you're you're casting that in the past tense when in fact it's just a like a constant ongoing present. I don't think there's ever been a day in my life that I haven't had dark chocolate. What's your daily driver and then what are your indulgences when it comes to chocolate? Do you have any favorites or go to's?

I like luxury chocolates and all that stuff, but I don't even really need that. I just Really love little Semi sweet. chocolate chips that I stick in my yogurt and I'm happy as a clam. Ha ha ha.

I'd like to start On the Creative process side. with respect to the new book, because I enjoy chatting about that stuff and I'm thinking a lot about creative process these days for myself. So where I thought we could go, and I'm gonna do a little retrospective, just like you said, you're treating things in past tests, but maybe

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

And then Asking about how you're writing. This is what I Remember slash M reading from the last time. So you take whatever thesis you're working on, then you spend a year or two just walking around the world looking at everything through the lens of that thesis. And then

And I want to know what what has changed, if anything, asking how you organize your notes. So you stick everything in this monstrous word doc. It's like seven hundred, eight hundred pages by the time you're done. Then you separate out things by topic, putting them into eight or nine loose leaf binders, then you organize them and try to take advantage of emotional states as they come up during the organization. So all of this is super cool to me. If we apply this to the new project, just as like a rough scattering of concepts. How did you come up with the thesis for the new book? And then what did the creative process look like after that? So those are two really different questions. So

Let's do one at a time. How did I come up with a thesis for the new book? I feel like the only point of writing, really, at least to me, is Telling the truth of what it's like to be alive. Telling truths that people don't really talk about in everyday life. Because if they talked about it in everyday life, you could just get it. Just from chatting with your friends or your colleagues or whomever. But there's something about Writing and art in general where

People are just Really digging deep. And to me the best moments in life are also when I'm reading a book or hearing music or whatever where I feel like, Oh my gosh, you know. that I have experienced and I never really thought about it that way.

And I know Exactly that person's heart and mind. I know them. And maybe they lived two thousand years ago. I still know them. With this book bitter sweet. I have been feeling for my entire life.

And there was an event that happened twenty five or thirty years ago where I really felt it. I've been feeling my whole life When I would hear Bitter sweet. Minor key music, you know, music that expresses a kind of longing for some state that is forever elusive to us.

I'd hear music like that, and it's supposedly sad, right? Minor key music is Sad music. But I didn't feel sad. I love that kind of music and what I felt when I heard it, what I still feel when I hear it, is joy. And

Uplift. And Goosebumps. And a kind of love and communion and like a gratitude to the musician that they were able to transform pain that all of us have in one way or another to transform pain into beauty.

And what happened is like twenty five years ago, I I you know, I used to be a lawyer. That was Oh. detour in my life. Oh, I remember. I remember and so I was in law school and I was listening to music like this in my dorm and some friends came came to my dorm and I was like blasting it out on my stereo speakers, you know, and the friends came to pick me up for class. And they thought it was the weirdest thing and one of them was like, Why are you listening to this funeral music? And I had that reaction like you. I thought it was really funny.

And then I went to class and that was the end of the story. Except I could not stop thinking about it. Why am I so drawn to this music? And then I started looking and finding that. Turns out that People listen to the happy songs on their playlist. Hundred seventy five times.

And they listen to the sad songs eight hundred times. And it's the sad songs that give them chills. And make us feel Connected in Sublime and This might sound at first blush like a kind of small question, you know, what is it about sad music that could be so

Moving. But It became a much bigger quest for me. Like I went off into this Five or six or seven years.

Quest of Reading art and literature and exploring all the wisdom traditions, talking to psychologists and neuroscientists. To figure out What is this power of a bitter sweet and even melancholic Way of being.

And what I've learned is that this bittersweet tradition It's been with us for centuries. And what it teaches us is that we are creatures who are born To transform Pain into beauty.

And it's something our culture will never tell us. I is expected to have a number of follow questions. So the So the first you might hate this'cause it's like Jesus, Ferris could get away from the nitty gritty prescriptive autobiographical stuff. As far as minor key music goes, or music or musicians Who Utilize minor key well.

Do you have any suggestions for people who might want to do a taste test? Gosh, yes. Um in fact I put together a bittersweet playlist and you'll be able to find it. But I've been obsessed my whole life. I've had this deep and crazy love my whole life for the music of Leonard Cohn. I mean, I love him. And I had never actually really paid attention before to why I love him so much. I just loved him. But When I was researching this book, I came to understand exactly what it was,'cause it's like his whole

Life philosophy. That's embodied in all his music. is exactly what I have believed viscerally before I had words to articulate it. I could tell you now what it is, or we could save it. Let's jump in. I'll bookmark and come back to some other questions that I have, but take it away. This is free for them.

He has so many different songs, but there's one line that people quote again and again for a good reason, and the line is There is a crack. In everything. That's where the light gets in. And it's like this idea, everything's broken, everything's beautiful simultaneously. That's the nature of life.

And there's such a truth and there's such a relief in being able to express that this is actually what life is. And he in turn, I found out, was drawing from this tradition of the mystical side of Judaism, the Kabbalah. And the idea there is that all of creation, all of being was originally one vessel of divine light.

that then shattered. And we're living now In the world after the shattering. But the divine shards of light are still all around us. And so like they're buried all around us and and the goal is to just be

discovering the shards and picking them up wherever we can and And the amazing thing is that you are gonna pick up compl and notice completely different ones from the ones I would notice. To me it would look like a lump of coal and you're gonna see like this gleaming thing. You know the the Leonard Cohen line also

makes me think of, and I think I'm getting the attribution right, but poetry from Rumi. In fact. I don't know if it's the crack, it may be the wound where the light enters us. And I want to Come back to that. In an adjacent way. A little bit later'cause I want to ask you about Sufism specifically, because I believe you had some exposure

In the process of doing research for this book, and I wanna ask why that's the case, but before we get there very much so. And I'm just gonna interrupt to say, like so much so that I actually have a roomy poem like sitting within hand's length. So here it is. Yeah. So we can talk about it. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Okay, so we so now I I have to I'm I'll snap at the fly lure on the water. Can you read the quote, please? Would you be willing to share the poem that you have? Absolutely. The quote is like an excerpt from a poem, so I just want to set up the story of the poem. 'Cause it it's this poem called Love Dogs.

And it's about a man who is praying to Allah. And then A cynical person comes along and says to him Wh why are you bothering to do this? Have you ever gotten an answer back?

And the guy is like no, he thinks about it. I have never gotten the answer back. And he stops praying. And he falls asleep. Into a kind of fitful sleep. And then Hitter, who is the guide of souls, comes along while he's sleeping and says Why did you stop praying?

And he says, Well I never got the answer. I never I never heard anything back. So it's pointless. This is what Fitter says to him. And this is the part I have. Inches away from me, every day when I work. It says

This longing you express is Is the return message. The grief you cry out from draws you toward union. Your pure sadness that wants help.

Is the secret cup. Ooh, that's good. Yeah, and I I've been a deep agnostic slash atheist my whole life and One of the biggest things I learned from this whole bittersweet project is that It's such a false dichotomy, this difference between atheists and believers, and like we all feel this longing. And the longing we feel is the return message for everyone.

Yeah, for sure. And also the a lot of the Rational materialists. might abhor Faith.

as it manifests in what they consider religion, but Almost all of our lives. and many of our beliefs and a lot of our behaviors are completely predicated on faith. Uh that's a broader topic that is probably for another conversation. But let's talk about music for a second because Just the existence of music. And the fact that

These kind of vibrations of sound in different organization can have different effects on animals and humans and plants is mind boggling to begin with. But Why is it do you think that minor key music

elicits what someone considers sadness. Is it Just social conditioning because we are taught early on by other people that that is the case, or is there more to it, neurologically or otherwise? So people debate this question. I do not believe it's the product of social conditioning. I believe it's the structure of the music itself. You know, like the nature of minor key music is that You don't have resolution.

And I think that's the nature of being. It's actually hard to get away from the religion question because what I really think is that Oh, I'm open to the religion question. I'm not Yeah, my my views have become much more Not flexible, but excepting of many facets of religion in the last five to ten years. So I'm happy to dive right in. Mine too. And I've

completely sense that in you. I mean heard it from you and sensed it also. I believe that the fundamental heart Of humanity, of being alive. Is The sense that there is a perfect and beautiful world out there somewhere.

And we're not in it. And we've been banished from it. I mean that's why the central Myth of Western culture. is, you know, the banishment from the garden of Eden.

But you see this kind of longing for a different world or the longing for the beloved of the soul in the Sufi tradition. You you see uh manifestations of this in any tradition that you look at. and what minor key music is really doing. Is Expressing that. That's really all it's doing. It's saying

We love beauty, we love truth, we love love, and we can't completely have it right now. But there's something about the fact that we're all stuck in this condition together of not having it, but also united in the desire to reach for it and you know, these Beautiful acts that

very deeply flawed hu humans sometimes take in order to try to get closer to that garden. That's the best part of humanity. And that's what the music is saying. Yeah, I've been Very fascinated. in exploring music that historically I've had almost no exposure to For the emotions and the

gradiation of emotions that they can elicit and and specifically And I'm no musician, so People feel free to correct me. On the internet afterwards, I'm sure you will. But unequal temperament. Music.

So let's say as examples, Turkish music, Persian music. What we might consider Arab or Arabic music. Have a A range.

and a level of resolution in a sense. Not resolution in the sense of finality or answers, but of fidelity. that is unlike anything I've ever heard. So it's produced in me Emotions that are very hard. to trigger using

Uh let's just call it modern. equal temperament music. So Not to dwell on the music side, but I do think that it is such A Simple way to get root access to the

brain or to the emotional self. It's it's really incredible. I will say though, on the minor key side, so there is minor key music I love And for the life of me, I can't figure out why minor key piano music specifically is just Generally speaking punishing to me, whereas what we might consider stringed instruments, right? Cello, et cetera. I find

More Nourishing in some sense. I have no idea why that's the case. But that is the case for me. I get Sad and I wanna a sort of talk about the definition of terms, right? Because I I would imagine there are people who feel grief, say with the death of a loved one, and then there are people who feel Depressed or despondent.

And these are distinct. They seem to be distinct things. Perhaps we could just start there. Would you like to just Define or put a microscope on what you were aiming to explore emotionally in Bittersweet. Bitter sweetness itself I define as The state in which

you know, you accept and you truly in inhabit the idea that Life Is Always simultaneously. Joy and sorrow. It's light and dark. There's an amazing Arabic expression. Days of honey, days of onions. Yeah, it's not good. And it's also

The sense of like a deep awareness of The impermanence? Yeah. It's also a kind of Curiously piercing

joy at the beauty of things. So it's all of this. And and I think of bitter sweetness as a state of mind that Did some of us just by the nature of our temperaments or drawn to from the get go. And other people arrive there, whether through life experiences or just as they get older or whatever it is. And in the book, you know, like you can't really explore this idea of bitter sweetness without then talking also about

Sorrow and longing and grief and everything that you were just Getting at it. So we can talk about all of that. But I started with this nature of bitter sweetness. And what it is. And we actually we did some preliminary studies. I say we, I did them with the psychologists Scott Barry Kaufman and uh cognitive scientists, and also David Yaden, who you may know, he's at Johns Hopkins and he does a lot of amazing research with psychedelics and spirituality. So he's like right up your alley.

And uh and the three of us. designed together a bittersweet quiz. And did some preliminary testing with it. And we found that people who Are in a bitter sweet state of mind are also

in a state of mind that predisposes them to Creativity. And to states of awe and spirituality. And kind of wonder and all those kinds of states. So it was really that whole sweep.

of human experiences that I've just been deeply attracted to and that I feel like We do not have a language for talking about it. You know, and if you look at psychology Psychology makes right now. It makes

No distinction between Melancholy and depression. And you could think of melancholy as being kind of a synonym for bitter sweetness, but You won't find it in psychology. You find it in all the wisdom traditions and the artists and the and the poets. They've been talking about it for thousands of years. But

In psychology, no. It's just Depression. That's all there is. So let me get personal for a second. Uh that's d sort of directing the era back at myself, and then I would love to to hear your thoughts. So as someone

personally, who has struggled with depression throughout my entire life. I think I have conflated those two myself. And if I see the onset or feel the onset of anything resembling Melancholy, with the exception of this unequal temperament music, which is interesting. Yeah. I tend to have a panic response.

So I'm like, Okay. I'm walking along a narrow path on the edge of I wouldn't say a cliff, but a very steep incline. And if I start to slip, there's the potential that I fall and then tumble and then Off I go. Right. So I have this panic response. So the question then is What is the

value. Just gonna stand in for the listener, right? Like why should someone Explore this. So first of all I hear you and And it may be, I don't know that we really know, but it may be that these states are a difference of degree as opposed to a difference in kind. And I feel like your your reaction is suggesting that it's a difference in degree. I'm not saying it's a rational response. It's just a

kind of knee jerk fear reaction. Yeah, and it makes total sense. But The value in the estates of being, and I'm sure you've experienced it when you hear that music that happens to speak to you. We all have different triggers, but the value is It's It's the root of our creative impulse.

The word longing, like we think of it in our culture as being a kind of passive and helpless state of like you know, you're like mired in longing, you would think. But the etymology of that word is To reach for something. You know, you're like long, you're literally getting longer as you reach for something. So that's what creative people are doing. Yeah. I mean Creative people.

What's motivating them. They may not be conscious of it. They're like They know that there's something more shining and beautiful over there and they want to bring it over here. By bringing something. into being. So when thing that's in it for you, you could say, is is is his creativity. And the payoffs is God damn it. Sorry, I'm kidding. No, it's good. It's good. It's good for you to ask the questions that people are skeptically thinking to themselves. And then another one is

It's one of the best. Pathways that we have towards love and connection. Especially now when everything is so divisive. to shut ourselves off from one of the strongest pathways we have, I think is a real Mistake.

But I talk about this in the book and I don't know I don't wanna go into much of a Detour, but Detour away. Okay. So So Darwin, he's known for survival of the fittest, right? Didn't see Darwin coming. Yes. Please proceed. Okay, wait. How do I say this? Maybe I won't start with Darwin. Oh no, I like Darwin. I like Darwin. I'm just I'm just giving you a hard time I love Darwin. I I'm just trying to figure out what's the best way in. We are designed physically viscerally deepen our makeup to respond to the sorrow of other beings. And we think of Darwin as being all about the survival of the fittest.

And Darwin himself was this incredibly gentle and melancholic soul who was Extremely horrified by the cruelty that people and animals are capable of. But what he also noticed Is that

Both animals and people. Seem to have a kind of visceral response to To the distress of other beings. And the second the great

psychologist at at Berkeley. His name is Dakar Keltner. kind of followed this line. And he started exploring all of this and he did all these amazing studies. I'll give you just one example. He found that. We all have a vagus nerve. This is like the biggest

Bundle of nerves in our body. And the vagus nerve it it's very ancient. It's evolutionarily ancient. as a part of us. It controls our breathing, our digestion, our sex drive. It's like really fundamental. And also Our vagus nerve responds when we see other beings in distress.

Your vagus nerve is reacting. So This gigantic Collection of nerves in our bodies. That does all our most fundamental things. is also reacting to the sorrow of others.

And I think that's huge. You know, like at a time when everything is Divisive politics, I feel like. If we could just get into a mode where it's like Just Everybody gets to tell their stories. No action required for a while, just

Tell the stories, tell what you feel. And that's it. And With a way of Tapping into one of the best and most uh robust bridges that we have.

Yeah, I was also thinking as you were talking that Part of the reason I have have started listening to this music, right? Because you might ask, Well if you're so afraid of slipping, why are you listening to this music? Yeah, that is and and the answer is I feel like Having had some exposure to it and having not slipped. That's

And this is not gonna be the best. Comparison or phrasing to use, but there's this expression, you know, the more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in combat. And I also feel that in this instance, if you're afraid of slipping If you're going to have a

panic response when you encounter certain emotions. For me at least, I am trying to almost like Iokane powder in the Princess Bride, like to expose myself little by little so that when it happens, and of course it's gonna happen, you're human. Like people are gonna die, tragedies will occur Love will be lost. Things will happen. That

I will be more resilient in the face of those inevitable. Times. Bye. inoculating myself in a sense. And then Pursuing it in that way, I ended up enjoying a lot of this music, which I did not expect.

And that's kinda how I ended up. where I am. I would love to talk about or have you describe the research a bit. And explain where Sufism.

comes into it. My understanding, which is very, very minimal. Or I should say my attraction. to Sufism and other let's just call it like mystic or mystical traditions is that

For me at least, it describes more of a direct experience of what they might term the divine, as opposed to an intermediated religious structure that is predicated on certain power dynamics within like a human organization, right? So the direct experience. And I just would love to know how on earth Sufism came into the picture and what other things came into the picture. I like your description of mystical traditions in general. I think they

appeal to people who for whatever reason are allergic to dogma. pretend to be skeptics or whatever it is. You know, people who aren't just going to accept Something because it's written down. You want to think for yourself, you want to experience it for yourself. So there's that aspect of and and I am that type of person. Like I'm I I drive my husband crazy sometimes, as I say,'cause like I'm the person where if you say X, I'm thinking, Well, what about Y?

That's just How my brain goes. That aspect really did get me interested in mysticism in general. But Sufism in particular Guess what happened was first I met some Sufis and then as I started to learn about it This one Sufi teacher, his name is Llewellyn Von Lee.

whose videos you can find all over the internet. It's an amazing name and he speaks in just the gentlest, most lilting Welsh inflected accent. He's just mesmerizing to listen to. And somehow I found his videos Because when I met these Sufis I got really interested in this question of Sufism. And logging and you know, and logging is the thing that I've been feeling all my life that I couldn't explain.

And anyway, he he says Sufism was at first heartache. Only later was it something to talk about. Say more about that, please. And just for those people wondering,

Llewellyn, I'm not even gonna try to spell. Just throw W two L's EW. The Vaughn Lee Yeah, I thought it was V O N it's V-A-U-G H A N hyphen L E So could you say more about What you just said, just to expand on that a bit. You find the following idea.

In all the mystical traditions that Longing. carries you closer to the divine. So the heartache that you feel Llewellyn Von Lee would say

We often mistake As depression. We mistake our sorrow sometimes as depression when what it really is is a longing for Whatever. you want to call it. He would call it the beloved of the soul, but

I call it the perfect and beautiful world. Dharot and the Wizard of Oz calls it somewhere over the rainbow. But we all have that and there are a thousand different words for it in every culture you find it and I talk about a lot of them in the book, but we all Come in with this kind of Fundamental heartache that

We Mistake. I don't mean to say that people who are experiencing depression that it's not real. I'm not I'm not saying that at all. I'm just saying there's this other Dimension.

Ever experience. I was also just thinking That's You know, what you're saying could be general in the sense of somewhere over the rainbow or longing for the beloved of the soul. And we

mistakenly label that as Depression, which can have many causes, depression, biochemical, could be event based, any number of things. But also you could have a longing for I was just thinking like connection with close friends. Yes. And feel the symptoms of that deficit. and then mistakenly label it as this internally generated isolated depression, whereas in fact you're just longing for something that is deeply

treasured or nourishing to you. Whether you Realize it or not. I think that's right, and I think because our culture doesn't really We don't have a language for longing, even though

In the Christian tradition. The most quoted line from Saint Augustine is our heart is restless till it rests in thee. So As I say, you find this in every single tradition. This is a deep aspect of being human, but because we Just have no

language or concept for it in contemporary culture. It actually ends up causing a problem in our love relationships because The same longing that we have for perfect and unconditional love. From our loved ones and our friends.

That's just a different manifestation of this fundamental longing that all humans come into the world with. And so when we get frustrated with our partners or our friends because they have this foible or that one or they're not understanding this thing about us or that thing. Yes, there's concrete issues to work through, but sort of underneath it, there's also this feeling of I thought you were gonna be the garden of Eden and you're not. And so

un understanding this aspect of ourselves is can be very illuminating for our daily lives too. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. These days, it can be hard to find and hire the right candidates for your small business. That's why LinkedIn Jobs

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You mentioned earlier in this conversation The relationship. Between This

Longing. Or even sorrow. and creativity. Could you Elaborate on that. Just flesh out why.

You believe that to be the case, any examples that come to mind. Just Speak more. about how creativity could be the product or byproduct of these things. With creativity There's a long kind of

intellectual tradition of thinking about I've sort of noticing the association between creativity and a kind of sorrow. You know, there have been studies done that have shown that many highly creative people, like a a wildly disproportionate number of creative people. We're once orphans.

Were orphaned when they were children. And Then there's another study where they They took a group of volunteers and they had these volunteers give speeches, and half the people gave speeches to audiences who were told in advance that they should. Smile and clap and and applaud.

And then the other half gave speeches to frowning audiences who seemed incredibly disapproving. And after It was done, you know, just as you would predict the people who had given the speeches to The disapproving audience? They said they were in a bad mood. And the other ones the other ones were feeling kind of pumped up. And then

They asked These people who had given the speeches to make collages. Which they had professional artists rate for creativity. Later on. And they found that the people who had given

The speeches to the disapproving audiences created more creative, you know, better rated. Collages. And that this was especially true for people who came in with a kind of hormonal profile that seemed to predispose them. to emotionally vulnerable states. There's a lot of these different kinds of

of studies that we can look at. And at the same time, there's also data showing if you're You're truly depressed, you're actually much less likely to be creative'cause Depression is such an emotional black hole that sucks up everything. But I think there's something about that in between state. Where

You're not depressed, so you're still you're functional. But you're acutely aware. of the gap between the desired world and the one that we inhabit. And the desire to fill that gap.

That's really the creative impulse. You know, and if you look at my my favorite Leonard Cohen, like he would Talk explicitly about that. Being

What drove him and his son Adam Cohn talks about how His whole idea was that This world is It's beautiful and it's broken and what he was doing with all his songs. that they were a kind of transcendence delivery machine. Just the way cigarettes are a way of delivering nicotine.

In this case it it's music delivering transcendence to People who are inherently Broken and beautiful. So I am going to ask you. Not yet. I'm gonna let this gestate for

A minute or two. So I'm gonna ask you About What methods or tools or resources people can use if they want to explore Some of those in between states. And since you mentioned music, I want to bring up

a specific piece of music and I'd like to ask you about it. And probably the first thing I'm gonna need to ask is how on earth you pronounce these names. But let me you're gonna you're gonna love this butchering and then I'll let you fix it. If I know how so the song is called Hinach Yafah. I didn't Right. Eat on Rychel. Uh huh.

Okay. So there we go. So I wanna know how you found this. I wanna know why it had an impact and how it had an impact, and then use that as a segue into Approaches people can take, tools, experiments.

Anything at all for exploring some of these in between states. Okay. Um how did it that was a whole lot of questions, so I'll do one by one. So the first part is how did I find it this particular song Yeah. Tell me all about it. Okay.

After that, what might people do if they want to explore these states? Sure. Okay. So this particular song, um, you know, so I'm in my fifties, so I was living in New York City back in the day when there was still, you know, those virgin megastore music places and you would go into them and I've always loved what they called world music, music from all over the place. And it was always at the back of the store. And I would go to the back of the store and they had these listening stations and I would just go from one to the other. And Fine stuff. And I found him that way.

I found Edan that way. And somehow Edan. E Don How do you say the last name, do you know? I believe it's Rahel. Okay, I D A N last name R A I C H E L C H E L For people Wonder. Got it. And and he's He's just this amazing guy who I've gotten to know and he collaborates with musicians from all over the world and he always like places himself very much on the margins and in the background and showcases

All these other musicians who he's collaborating with. really generous. So But this particular song I don't know if there's a way to play it actually as part of This podcast maybe we could mail him. I do. I do. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So why don't we do this? Yeah, please if just make a note to email him and see. We'd have to probably get some release or something, but

If he's open to having us play the song, that'd be That'd be amazing. I would love to do that. Okay. Okay. I bet he would be open. I'm guessing he would be open to it and I really hope You all can hear it because

It's so stirring. And it's basically Hinal Hya Fa means here comes My bride, here comes my beautiful one. Here comes the person I'm longing for. And it's basically I believe Hebrew? It's in Hebrew, yeah.

But also part of the song is sung in Amharic, if I'm pronouncing that language correctly. Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Okay. Yeah, as I say, he's like all over the world.

So is it Aramaic or Amharic? Amharic is Egypt, I think. I think it's Ethiopian, though I may be totally wrong. Yeah, yeah, Ethiopia. Yeah, okay, no. No Mho Amharic is uh yeah, the the written language is amazing. And it should be Ethiopia, Afroasiatic language of the Southwest Semitic group.

And on it goes. Yeah. Very cool. That's awesome.

Okay, cool. So it's Hebrew and Hamaric, yeah. And this song, it's basically like a version of the song of Solomon, you know, it's basically saying like Here comes my beloved, she's coming to me across the desert and and it's a love song. But the really interesting thing about this and I'm I hope we can get the music'cause you'll hear it in the music. No

Show. Sache que les autres veulent So this comes back to our Sufism discussion because Also, according to Llean Von Lee, the C fee teacher I was talking about, what happened is

That The Sufis had always used The metaphor of the love of A woman. As a metaphor for the love of God.

And then what happened is that the crusaders came East and heard these expressions, and then they brought them back into the tradition of the Troubadours, who then used that way of Speaking and singing to serenade. Maidens underneath moonlit windows. And I love that'cause it's telling us that that impulse to

fall passionately in love with another human is actually the same impulse as Falling passionately in love with whatever you consider the divine to be. There's no real difference between them. And you're gonna hear all of that. in this song. And all of it is expressed through longing. And once you become aware of your longing, I'm telling you, like you won't be able to listen to seventy five percent of your playlist without hearing it.

'Cause that's What's driving most of music? Oh, that's I I'm excited to dig into this. I'm also excited to To hear. More Umharak. I've spent some time.

in Ethiopia, but I haven't heard much spoken in the last ten. I've certainly heard very little music and You know how I was mentioning earlier. I've been listening to a lot of music from the Middle East. Including Persia.

Q, Hoffes, and other poets, right? I don't think it's a mistake. that the longing we're talking about is so Well represented. In These

Places where we're finding poets who were citing, but also the exact locations or origins of the music that I'm listening to. And I wonder how much of it comes down to the language itself. on some level. Because Amharic is Semitic language. Like Arabic.

So it has similar structure. Mm-hmm. Similar prefixes, suffixes. I wonder how much of that longing is Or lack of longing is a sufficiency or failure. of language because you for instance, and this is not an example that translates to these

other examples, but if you go to Brazil, they may have the same word in Portugal, but saudadje. Yeah. So saudade or you know in Japanese they have Natsugachi, which is Is quite different. And Mano No Aware too. Ah, Monoware. Yeah. Which I may be mispronouncing. No, yeah, yeah. So Mononoare is uh totally that is a really cool one. You know, I recently put this in Five Friday.

I mean my newsletter because uh someone had had brought it to mind. So do you mind if I take we'll just do like a little sidebar on Mono Aware. I love Monoware. Yeah, I think I talk about it in the book. It's I and I think I saw it in your newsletter and it's like oh yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, go for it. Go for it. Yeah, if you want to. I don't remember what you said in the newsletter, but I remember it speaking to me. I I probably just grabbed uh I thought the Wikipedia entry did it did a good job. So the mono no aware mono is thing. So Monoare is the pathos of things. Exactly.

But it's also translated as an empathy towards things or a sensitivity to ephemera. Which, by the way, Q Shintoism, if you wanna Really. pay attention to Shintoism and if you're like Shintoism, what the hell is that? If you ever have Red.

Any of Marie Condo's stuff. Her name is actually Marier, but Marie Condo's stuff on talking to your objects. And thanking your belongings and so on. This is actually a good example of what we're talking about. Sensitivity to ephemera is a Japanese idiom for the awareness of impermanence, which is called Mujo. In Japanese. It's also By the way, could mean

non ordinary. Mujer. Or transients of things, and both a transient gentle sadness, this is or wistfulness at their passing. Which is very similar to Soldaji. As well as a longer, deeper, gentle sadness about the state being the reality of life. So all of that is encapsulated into Monon.

And when we have those cherry blossom festivals and the whole reason that as I understand it, that the Japanese love cherry blossoms the way they do They're very beautiful, but it's not That they're the most beautiful flower. It's that they're beautiful and they're ephemeral. So gazing upon them.

Brings up the state. That Tim was just describing of like the gentle sadness of of him. Perfect example. That is a perfect example. Yeah, so the Sakura or the cherry blossom viewing which is Hanami. is for a very short period of time. very, very short periods of time in Japan. And that's exactly right. Yeah, this this impermanence is something that

my experience is very heavily present in Japanese culture mythology. And to a lesser extent the language. I feel like you might be suggesting

You know, like I'm seeing this a lot in Japanese culture and I'm seeing it a lot in certain Middle Eastern cultures. I would say from what I've been You know, my walk around the world that I've done for the last few years, that it's in all cultures and it's just expressed differently. And in our culture it's there and it's just kind of buried.

But for example, the the ancient Greeks had this word potos. Which I may be mispronouncing, but it's P-O-T-H-O-S. And it basically meant the longing for that which is beautiful and unattainable. And for the ancient Greeks, they understood that that state of being was active and not passive. So Odysseus at the beginning of the Odyssey of Homer's Odyssey.

That poem basically starts with him. Weeping on a beach with homesickness for his native land. So he's in a state of potos. He's described that way. And that's the state that then ignites this whole epic adventure. Yeah.

Western literature is premised upon. And Alexander the Great was said to be seized by Potos when he like looked out at a riverbank or something and and thought of all the lands that he wanted to to conquer. So it's not my favorite example, but there you go. Takes all kinds. Yeah. Yeah, and so there there's really no culture that you look at that doesn't have a way of expressing this idea.

I agree with you, some more elegantly than others, perhaps, but I think the feeling exists whether we like it or not. So given that we have thousands of years Uh creatives and artists, it would make sense that likely being attuned or at the very least interested in these things.

there would have been expressions of it in these many disparate cultures. My question Just to bring it back to the second part of my very long Like seventeen part question. For people who may feel like they don't have access to this or haven't experimented with it.

What can they do? What are some options? So there's a few things that you can do. If you think about the way that looking at the cherry blossoms or really looking at anything that's beautiful can

Make you cry from a sense of being moved. The reason that we're crying usually is Because deep down It's triggering in us this sense of like, Oh my God, this thing is so beautiful. But this world that we live in actually

It's not. really that except for brief moments. So Just the state of being immersed in beauty. is one of the best things that you can do. I will tell you, I actually had an experience like this myself during the pandemic. So at the at the start of the pandemic I was very much

In the habit of waking up and doom scrolling. On Twitter. And and I also I lost my father and my brother to Covid. I'm so sorry. I didn't know that. Quite early on. In the pandemic. So all this stuff was happening.

And I don't know why I did this. It wasn't like I had a programmatic reason to do it, but all of a sudden I decided I was gonna start Following art accounts on Twitter and I just like tweeted and said, What should I follow? And the next thing I knew, like my whole feed was full of art.

And then from there I started posting art. Almost every day now on my social media, I start my day by posting favorite art and Together with like An idea that I'm thinking about or a quote or whatever. And it's become a just amazing daily practice.

That I'm sharing with people all over the world, which is so cool. Which is all? Like A long way of saying one thing you can do is Immerse yourself consciously into a state of beauty. Haven't you done that also when writing?

Finding locations. That are Beautiful. Or attractive, have hasn't that also at some point, maybe it still has been part of your writing process? Yeah. Wow, I can't believe you remember that.

Yeah. So so yeah, I mean pre-Covid it used to be in cafes because I love so much cafe energy. It's just like my Happiest place in the world. And I don't do it so much now, so now I'm here in my office. I think you could like an office, nonetheless. Yeah, and so I've created this other thing. Like I have um So I have my candle and that's the first thing I do.

When I come in in the morning, I like that. I always have my latte'cause that's magic for me. And then I have this thing I will show you. This is a whole story in and of itself, but when I first met my husband I had just Stopped.

practicing law. And I wanted to be a writer, and he had just come from He had spent the nineties working for the UN, doing peace keeping and Like the world's worst war zones of the nineties. And he had published this memoir about it.

It was like amazing. And at the time, all I had really done with my writing, I I was writing this memoir in sonnet form. 'Cause that's what I was doing. Wow, that's hard. And um I show and I told him about it. I showed up at our second date and I handed him some poems.

That I was working on. And then that night He went home. And he sent me this email.

So I'm gonna hold it up and I'll Read it in case people are listening. Yeah. I hope people are listening. Wait, I'm actually thinking this isn't even gonna come through in the video that well. So that's funny. I can only I can only see a little bit. It actually looks great. I can piece it together memento style, but why don't you read it?

And we'll go from there. It's beautifully framed. And just to be clear, it is not a printed out email. It's actually been formatted with typography. And really really jumps. Or did he actually make that? He actually well, I mean the email like all these gigantic letters in big bold red that you see, that was what the email looked like. Oh, it was in the email. Wow. Over at Shiver. Go for it. Go for that. Exuberant kind of person. Okay. It's like the Crazy Eddie email. All right. Love reference for people from Long Island. Yeah, go ahead, go for it. Yeah, I recognize that. I grew up in Long Island too. So he wrote this is in response to these poems, he wrote, I want more, give me more.

I know you hate to be told what to do, but fuck you. Keep writing, drop everything. Right. Right woman right. And the right woman, right? That's like in the big red letters.

Oh God. I need one of those. Maybe I can this this is he on Fiverr. Can I hire him to send me an insistent email about writing? I could really use it. He's very motivating. creating a sanctuary space, you know, where whatever is beautiful to you or moving to you. So pre Covid, you're in uh are you in New York City at the at the moment? Actually not, I'm outside New York City. Outside New York City. Uhhuh. Pre Covid, were there any favorite spots In or around New York, just in terms of beauty for working.

Just curious if you have any favorites. Oh my gosh. I mean, I wrote all of Quiet in the World. most magical cafe. And you know, talk about longing. I just feel like for the rest of my life I will be Searching for a cafe that You know, it's like a cafe. Well, it doesn't exist anymore. That's the problem. This is the thing. And and I I you know I used to travel so much before Covid and Every city I went to I would be looking for a replica of this cafe and I can't find it. It was called Doma, which means home in Czech. It w it was owned by Czech people.

It was beautiful and it was also frequented by the world's most just creative and thoughtful souls. And you could just feel them as you were there, you know, dipping away inside your head. All right. Somebody Doma find it on D O M A, is that right? D O M A, yep. All right. You can find photos online, find some video. The world wants it. Or at least the two of us. Do. Uh so exposing yourself to beauty.

Yeah. Creating a sanctuary space. What are other options music we've talked about. Yeah. And uh we'll we'll include a link to your playlist In the show notes.

Any other suggestions or Even recommendations for that, I think. About this. If someone has made the leap from I don't want to feel that too.

Maybe I should feel that. I wonder what it would be like to feel these things. Any other suggestions? So another one is captions, and I'll tell you what I mean by that. There is this

Viral video. And it was put out by the Cleveland Clinic hospital. And it was originally meant to just be a video for its caregivers to teach empathy. But it ended up going viral. And the way this video worked. It took you on a visual tour down the hospital corridors.

So you're just passing All these humans. And these are people who you would normally just walk past in the corridor without really thinking that much. But in this case. The video had captions underneath each one.

telling you what they were experiencing at that moment. And in some cases they were experiencing something joyful, like just found out he's gonna be a father, I think is one of them. But Because it's a hospital, more often the captions are things like A little girl visiting her father for the last time.

Or, you know, just found out that the tumor is malignant or whatever it is. And maybe we can link to this also in your show notes. I for sure. We'll definitely we'll find it. You can't watch this video without Tearing up. But it's more than the tearing up. You can't watch it without

Having that physical sensation of your heart opening up. It's just opening. And the lesson for me of that video, and I I try to do it now. When I just walk around. is think, well, what are people's captions? You know, just random passers by, like the, you know, the person who's checking out your groceries, what are her captions?

And it's just a Incredible way of kind of Letting sorrows in and normalizing them. Which also reminds me like another concrete thing I think people could do In the workplace.

So we know uh uh one of the studies I talk about in my book was done by two people named Jason Kanhoff and Laura Madden, and they looked at people's description of their work lives. And What they found is people would describe to them All these Terrible things that had happened to them at work.

And the stories revealed how terrible they were, but when they described their emotions Instead of saying they had felt anxious, they would say they were angry. And instead of saying they'd felt sad They would say they were frustrated. We need a way of opening up this language'cause

I noticed this the other day. I I did a a talk about introversion in this case. It was like a Zoom call. For a company. And at the beginning of the Zoom call It started out the way it often does with like a nice chat. And somebody asked the question, like how's everybody feeling this morning?

And all the answers were like Pumped, you know, yay, I'm feeling great, I'm energized. Happy. And these are all amazing emotions. I'm not trying to take away from them. It's just

You have to ask. What are the chances that every human Responding. In that chat. Fox was truly feeling

Only those emotions. What are the chances of that? They're actually incredibly low. I believe there are ways for workplaces to normalize the expression of all of the different emotions that we have.

You know, even by something as simple as in a physical workplace where people are really showing up. having a board up on the wall where people can just write down that morning, what are you actually feeling? What are you actually going through? In schools, they call that a parking lot. And I think we need a parking lot in workplaces too. Yeah.

I didn't I didn't realize I didn't have one of those growing up. So that's it's so there are schools where they actually have a blackboard or whiteboard where kids write down how they're feeling. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Uh. This might be a good segue for talking about sort of kids, what kids are feeling. And then of course as kids age they turn into these things called grown ups. And sometimes grown ups have kids.

This is going somewhere. Don't worry. I know you have written about In some respects inheriting the grief Or griefs. of our parents and ancestors. Could you speak to that? And

Also mention if there's anything to be done. Is it just like having a Like small calves and you're like, Well I mean, I go to the gym, but they're always gonna be pretty small. Or is there something that we can do with whatever we have

accumulated through our bloodline. I went down this whole path of looking at inherited grief and I ended up devoting a whole chapter of the book to it because Originally it was just because I went to this seminar for bereavement counselors.'Cause I was just

Curious to learn more about that. And what I found was We were each asked to tell a story of loss that we Had experienced. And I

I really didn't want to tell my story'cause I felt like It wasn't as bad as some of the other stories that I I heard that day and I Fell. wrong to be talking about it. But I felt like I had to,'cause it seemed ungenerous, you know, not to tell my story. And then when I did, I found myself

Crying much more than anybody else had. And the seminar was run by this incredibly skillful guy named Simcha Raphael. Was at the New York Open Center. And I forget how he came to it, but he basically said to me

That I seem to be Carrying. a grief that was apart from what I personally had experienced that I was carrying a deeper grief than that. And then it was a kind of grief of the ancestors. And I started realizing that I come from this family that's kind of

Mired. In loss, really. on both sides, on my mother's side and my father's side, we lost almost all of our Relatives in the Holocaust. And although those weren't people who I knew

Directly. There's kind of a a shockwave that Reverberates through. When he said that, I realized that I had always had this kind of tendency

Even when I was a kid, to cry at any kind of moment where it was like That which once was will never be again. Even though at that point I had not really experienced any loss in my life and I had a happy life. I still had this intense reaction. And once he opened up that idea, I started

researching the whole area of inherited grief. It's absolutely fascinating. There's all this research that finds that That the children of Holocaust survivors have particular Biomarkers. Yeah. you wouldn't find in a another control group population. I mean you can find this in animals too. It's a pretty new area of research, but the results are incredibly compelling.

There seems to be this This idea, this thing that we can Inherit from the people that came before us. And you know, in a way the question of whether it comes to us biologically or because of what we learn from our parents.

Culturally, it almost doesn't matter, we're inheriting it somehow. And then to your question of what can you do about it. I have found it incredibly empowering to know this because There's a way in which you can Get to the inside of

I'm gonna love those ancestors and I'm gonna feel Empathy for that which they experienced. At the same time that you're holding the idea that Their story is not my story.

And I don't think we take the time to realize that you can do you can hold both those truths at the same time. Their story is not my story, and yet I love them. These people I've never met before. 'Cause music has been our theme here. There's this amazing song also by

Dar Williams, it's called After All and she it's a masterpiece of a song, and it describes how she had been beset by a kind of mysterious depression, and to come out of it she Travel down what she calls the whispering well. Of Talking about Her family history.

And realizing all the different things that she was carrying from the people who had come before her. And how that process of excavating all of that and understanding it. And loving it. That was what freed her. And then she comes out into a shining light on the other side. And it

It helps her with her depression. So whether we're doing that through some kind of formal therapy Or through Her own sort of ad hoc process of travelling down the whispering well. There are ways to do it. We don't have to

Take this right turn because it could really uncork. Pandora's box, but this is part of one facet of exploration in looking at psychedelic assisted therapies. Mm-hmm.

Is multi-generational Trauma or Ancestral grief. And

I also wanted to mention Lest anyone listening. Think. Who are these wackadoodles? This sounds like some new agey bullshit. Right. I did a quick search just to pull it up because I know it exists. Here's an example, and this is in Scientific American. Fearful memories passed down to mouse descendants. Genetic imprint from a traumatic experiences carries through at least two generations. This is from Nature magazine.

which is also a very respectable Steam publication. And There are, in other words, animal models and Scientific studies and peer reviewed literature. That supports this. In

various species of animal, including rice. And the authors suggest a similar phenomenon could influence anxiety and addiction in humans. Now there there's a lot of skepticism. I'm just gonna just gonna read a little bit of this very quickly. Some researchers are skeptical of the findings because a biological mechanism that explains the phenomenon has has not been identified. I'm kinda skeptical of such skeptics because We all use, for instance, microwaves every day, but very few of us understand how microwaves or refrigerators, if you don't like microwaves, how they work. Right. So in the absence of a mechanism. This is also true for a lot of commonly prescribed medications. We still don't actually understand how they work. But putting that aside, So according to convention, this is going back to the article, the genetic sequences contained in DNA are the only way to transmit biological information across generations. Random DNA mutations, when beneficial, enable organizations to adapt to changing conditions, but this process typically occurs slowly over many generations.

Yet some studies have hinted that environmental factors can influence biology more rapidly through epigenetic modifications, which alter the expression of genes. And it goes into many more examples and so on. But there are a lot of scientists, very credible scientists, including Looks like it's a little bit more. Many quoted in this, Carrie Ressler, a neurobiologist and psychiatrist at Emory University. who have studied this in

animals and I want to say someone could call B S on this, but I want to say that It's even tr like this biological material can sometimes be transferable from one animal to another. Even if they're not direct descendants. So if you use, say, electrical shocks, Two produce a state of acute anxiety and learned helplessness in mice when you turn off the lights. That there is some way of transferring

Genetic material from that animal to an unrelated but same species animal that will induce A similar Fear of the dark, even though it has not been learned. There is, in other words, a biological basis. There seems to be.

Right? Because Holocaust In the grand scheme of things, as as the example used, not that long ago. Really just not that long ago. I wanna offer two other ideas of ways to cope with that if you feel that If you're if you're listening and you're thinking, Oh, you know

This actually might speak to. My experience. One is just kind of a simple reframing that Rachel Yehuda, who was the the researcher who first discovered This epigenetic tradition in Holocaust survivors. She talks about how one of the people who she worked with

Just started to understand. this in herself and she started to reframe when things would happen to her, like she'd have a bad day of work and kind of overreact. She started saying, Oh, well, I now understand that my shock absorbers are are a little thinner. than somebody else's might be. And so I'm just gonna adjust around that. And the simple knowledge and acceptance is an incredible power.

To take it even a step further beyond that. I talk to a lot of people who Are what you might call wounded healers. Which is a kind of archetype. In the Western tradition, people who have experienced some kind

of a wound or pain and then use that to try to heal the same pain that they see other similarly situated people. Experiencing. And I talked, for example, I I write about this in the book with uh

Of the young woman who I called Farah Katib. She didn't want to use her real name. She's from the Middle East. And she felt that She didn't just feel she she came from a family in which all the generations of the women before her had suffer these horrible experiences.

Of rape and bereavement and all all kinds of things. And she just found herself like Called. job for a multinational company doing marketing or something. And as part of that job

They had to do that thing you do where you do lots of focus groups and listen to people's stories. And as she listened to the stories of other women There was something in those stories that touched this nerve in her of all the generations who had come before her of women in her family. And she found herself leaving that job. And flying back to the Middle East.

And starting to work with women prisoners. And then starting her own not for profit to help women refugees. And there's something about that Work that she's doing to help Heal other people.

That is simultaneously healing. Herself. I also want to say at the same time, it's not like That's kind of a grand story. And when when we talk about creative people who transform pain into beauty, you know, and they turn out to be Leonard Cohn. That sounds like really grand also. But

You don't have to Be doing these things on such a grand scale. It's just You can be doing them on the most minute level and you're still going through that same mechanism of taking pain and turning it into something else. It's the mechanism that matters.

Yeah. I've you know, I've thought I and up maybe somebody can get me off my ass and actually Yeah, suggest some resources. I've I've a very close relationship with my dog. She's very well trained, very calm, and I've I've often thought about volunteering to take Molly, my dog, through, say Hospice care or senior centers. And I just haven't had the

of doing that. And I can understand why. Yeah, hospital administrators probably don't want just every rando coming through the hospital with their their dog. Uh, which makes a whole lot of sense. But It like it doesn't have to be big. And I do think, at least for me

Trying to help other people heal. has been a huge part of my own. Healing. And

Yeah, I've really seen that in you. Oh, thank you. It's been quite a fascinating road. And I also want to give Rachel Yehuda credit where credit is due on another level. She is at the forefront Uh using MDMA assisted psychotherapy.

For veterans. And is involved in a a number of different capacities. So she really is An acute And astute.

observer of the human condition within the context of Trauma, intergenerational trauma. one of the people out there who I think is really doing Outstanding work. So I just want to.

Give her. Yeah. Yeah, give her her shout out. So You may have already answered this, I apologize if you have, but It's a lot of work to do a book. It's a lot of work to do any book.

And as we've already covered, you take your time, you really Saturate yourself in exploration. And travel far and wide. It's a lot. To sign up for.

Why do that with this book? I do it because I would Not rather be doing anything else. I love doing it. I love doing it. I you know, I'm usually like Drawn by

Some question that I'm driven to answer. And I've noticed I I didn't actually set out to do the following thing when I was writing this book, but I realized In the end that There was a similarity to what I had done with Quiet, which is the identification of a hidden superpower.

That our culture. Doesn't normally talk about. But The superpower of being in touch with

The simultaneous Joy and sorrow of life. I believe it's one of the deepest superpowers we have. When do you ever get to talk about it? So that motivates me.

The act of creating something beautiful, whether you pull it off or not. Almost doesn't matter, just the attempt to do it. I don't really know any better state of life. Than that. Yeah. Yeah, here, here. And I just want to point out this happens a lot. You're not going to be able to see it if you're just listening to this, but I just mentioned my dog Molly. I thought you were petting your dog.

After the mention to say hello. So She's got a good thing. She's got a good radar. My external nervous system, as I often

Joke, although it's not really a joke. We may have touched on this in the last conversation, but if not, and even if we did, we can always State it again. Books that you have gift most to other people. Anything come to mind? There's one that I actually gifted to you. That I especially love. What the heck was it called?

Art is the highest form of hope. Yes. I love that book. That's exactly right. That's a Phaedon book, I think, if I'm pronouncing that correctly. It's yeah, beautifully made. I have that on my coffee table in Austin. Yeah, and it's basically for those listening, it's basically just this book of of quotes from various artists. And there's one is the highest form of hope. Yeah. Exactly. I don't know if there's any quote that sticks in your mind.

From that book. I don't want to put you on the spot. Well, I mean I'm just looking at um in the title itself is A first line expressed by the German painter Gerhard Richter in nineteen eighty two. I quite like the marquee lights and You very kindly gifted this to me probably what? It would have been a few years ago. I think so. And I went through and I've

highlighted all of my favorites, but I don't have them in front of me at the moment. Do you do you have any favorites that come to mind? I do. And I think I even quoted this one in Bittersweet. It was a quote by Mark Rothko, and he said The people who Weep in front of my paintings.

Are having the same religious experience that I had while I was making them. I may have gotten that a little wrong, but that was the idea. To our theme that we've been exploring. Yeah. About art and religion. So here so here's a question.

Mm-hmm. Alright, so bittersweet comes out. What Do you think people might gloss over or underappreciate in the book? Cause I know if I look back at

My various books. And maybe it's only possible to know that in hindsight, but I'm like, God, I should have really emphasized X more. Because people didn't pay enough attention to it or it wasn't sexy enough. And I have examples of those.

Sure. what do you think is valuable It were important, but at risk of perhaps Not being a

given appropriate attention. Anything come to mind? Just the way With Quiet, the book I wrote about the power of introverts, the danger was that people would think that I was talking about a kind of misanthropy, you know, like not liking people at all, or like a kind of down with extroverts or something, which n none of that was my intention or message. With this book, I think the danger is

Of people thinking it's a kind of advocating for a depressive state. And that's really not what I'm talking about at all. It's more like Tell The truth. about what it is like to be alive and

Life is both of these states simultaneously. And it always will be. And I think there's a Tremendous freedom in that. And that

We are basically taught one way or another that When things are going well and the company's doing well and the family's happy and everything, that's the main road. And when things go wrong. It's the detour from the main road. And

Adopting The frame of mind or Accepting the truth. that both of these things are the main road because that's what life is.

It's incredibly liberating. It's incredibly liberating'cause you're no longer like fighting against it. And so much of the The stress that we have is fighting against what's actually true and feeling like we're alone in it. As opposed to feeling like wow, we're all actually together in this.

What you just said about the The frame or the lens. Of looking at The challenges as detours makes me think of a a quote.

that I think about a lot actually to try and I think Like Build my equanimity. to the extent that I can. I think I'm pretty impatient and run pretty hot, but Not that I yell and scream, I don't, but

I can get knocked off balance by certain events, which is true for everybody, but the quote that I was going to mention is from Jenna Levin, who's an astrophysicist who's been on this podcast. And the quote is I used to resent obstacles along the path thinking, If only that hadn't happened, life would be so good. Then I suddenly realized life is the obstacles, there is no underlying path. And I have found that very freeing to Exactly.

revisit and try and embrace You have The Roomy poem, you've got your husband's email. You sent me a book of quotes.

You seem to like And sort of condensed wisdom. Or encouragement in the case of the email. Do you have any other

quotes that you think of often or that you've put elsewhere in your house or anywhere as reminders. Do any do any come to mind? Well, I don't have to have them come to mind'cause they're like taped up all over the place over here. You want me to pull some down just at random. Yes, please. This one is C. S. Lewis. I don't know if you ever read him, but I mean talk about longing heat.

He kind of spent his whole life in this state of What he called the in inconsolable longing for we know not what. It's interesting'cause in in his case He ended up concluding The way he put it was

If we have this Thirsts that can't be satisfied in this world. It must be that we were made for another Divine. world. And so for him, like he ended up concluding that Christianity

was the answer. Two This insatiable longing that we all have. And I end up I love his work so much. I just end up in a completely different place. Like to me

When I hear music, I'm like, Oh, that's what people are talking about when they talk about God. It like it is the same thing to me. So you don't have to Anyway. C. Lewis I I I need to read more. C. S. Lewis. I I remember and I don't self identify as a Christian at all. Uh but I read

I've read a lot of his work inc including the screw tape letters. I don't know if you I haven't read that one. Oh yeah, it's I'll let people investigate, but Please continue. I'm I'm excited to hear. He wrote.

Our lifelong nostalgia. Our longing to be reunited with something in the universe was From which we now feel cut off. To be on the inside of some drawer which we have always seen from the outside. is no mere neurotic fancy.

But the truest index of our real situation. And to be at last summoned inside would be Both glory and honor beyond all our merits. And also the healing of that old ache. Oh, so good. Man, I forgot how good CS Lewis is. Oh.

He's the best. Can I ask you a question, which is Yes. Okay. So I feel like you over the last I don't know how long it's been since I've been following your work. I mean, really from the very beginning, when you first published the four hour work week.

Um I feel like you've really been. on a pathway and over the last Five or more years You've really been doing this thing of

Turning pain into beauty and being willing to be really Open about it. And I guess I'm curious what made you Shift gears that way.

'Cause you kind of start it out as like I'm gonna teach you how to be successful. So it it's a very different mode. Yeah, you know. Yeah, it's very very different. Well, thank you for the kind words first. Oh that's Very meaningful. I'm not very

Yeah, I've realized about myself that I I don't actually What? Historically I've never let positive feedback land. I think that goes back a long way. So just wanted to take a second to say that. And as far as the why, I mean I think that

I'm sure. Th with the caveat that I'm sure I have many blind spots. In terms of Self awareness and observation. But I I think uh I think there are a whole lot of things. First is

Being surrounded by Reminders of mortality. I've I've lost A lot of relatives and close friends to things like opiate addiction or alcohol. Yeah.

induced cardiomyopathy in the case of my uncle most recently and I think that reminder of impermanence has led me to explore other things. Second would be recognizing Especially after the success of the four hour work week and

beginning to meet people I couldn't have imagined meeting prior to that. I mean people who have hundreds of millions, billions, tens of billions of dollars. That's Well realized. Many things. Number one is that

Being pulled towards something. and being driven towards something by some demon whipping your back are very different things. Mm-hmm and that many people who are from Any objective external measure the most successful in the world. Got there because they were

In some sense running away from something, not running towards something. many of the best entrepreneurs I've met who are also wonderful people. And if I'm if I'm going to an invest in an entrepreneur, I'm also gonna on some level look for this. Like they build And

Scale and so on. As a compulsion. It's not a want. It's not a want. Mm-hmm. People who are just like, I think I maybe want to be an entrepreneur for a smaller side gig that that might work, but If we're looking at people who are building multi billion dollar companies

They are compulsively. very often compulsively building. And that is very helpful from from the standpoint of building a huge company. But I think the origins of a lot of those compulsions

are the same as you would find in O C D or an eating disorder, or treatment resistant depression, where the compulsive behavior in that case is a repetitive thought or or set of thoughts. So I've I've just I think become a more nuanced observer of suffering and pain. And trauma.

Then I would say having observed that in myself and then through various types of therapy, but pr primarily through psychedelic Assisted therapies.

recognized, say, past sexual abuse, which which I published a an episode on. Some time ago. What If people want to listen to that, it's not easy listening, but I do think it might be helpful for people with shared experiences, Tim.blog slash trauma, which took me years to get to, and I was not planning on doing anything. I was planning on writing a book after my parents passed away.

Yeah. Having that experience And can learning to contend or trying to contend with that. I think has also made me realise

That The full spectrum of feeling is necessary, at least for me and my own personal If you want any hope of reconciliation or finding peace. with some of these these things. Not necessarily making meaning of, although one way to make meaning of that

is to as one facilitator. said to me, you know, make it part of your medicine. Take that pain. take those wounds and make it part of your medicine. So I do think that that translation has been

Very healing for me personally. And very hard, quite frankly, right? Because I get stories and sometimes very graphic stories and calls for help and emails and so on. Constantly because of talking about these things publicly. But

It's no coincidence that I support psychedelic related science and have for quite a few years now. I mean it's gotta be millions of dollars a year at this point through my foundation, the sise foundation, because it literally saved my life and I've seen it save so many other lives. It's not a panacea. There are risks, but for the right indications, I think they're incredibly powerful. So to just add on to that a little bit, and uh no one's Asked me this publicly, so

Sorry for the long answer, but When you have these quintessential psychedelic experiences. which humans have been having for thousands of years, and one could argue that in fact Eric.

early hominid ancestors. Almost certainly. Consumed. Consciousness altering. plants and fungi, as do animals, by the way.

Yeah. to unclear motives, right, or or reasons, but many animals consume hallucinogens. When you have a classical psychedelic experience, there is very often and I'm not recommending anyone do this recreationally because there are severe risks, especially if you have a history, family history of schizophrenia. You very often have the experience

Uh, and I don't know who first said this to me. I may have read it. in Rumi or Has, which is why I'm also drawn to a lot of Poetry. related to mysticism, the feeling of a drop returning to the ocean.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. So when you have this experience of ego dissolution. And

in retrospect after the experience you imagine that could have been your experience putting your in quotation marks. of this kind of non-localized free floating consciousness before you were born or after you die, and we get into some very Cuckoo Bananas territory as we go out there. But when you start getting into the realm of kind of panpsychism and These types of things. When you've had these first hand experiences A number of things can happen and at least have happened to me. Number one, you get back here and you're like

Why am I taking some of this stuff so fucking seriously? Why am I taking myself so seriously and this fucking email so seriously, like It's a joke on some level. Which can be demotivating. I'm not gonna lie. It can be hard to like Strap down and Bang out. A bunch of email in your inbox when you're just like

This doesn't matter at all. However, I think I've tempered that reasonably well. And For all of those reasons And I'm trying to actually correct this, but on some level my moral obligation to

Share what I have learned. As Trivial as it might be. Over the last, say, ten years. There are many essential parts of me that are the same, but I've also changed a lot.

And I was recently I've been sharing a rental with a friend of mine who's known me since nineteen ninety eight or nineteen ninety nine. And He would say having seen like the longitudinal

long term Tim Ferris changes, right? Because we don't automatically evolve for the better, but the changes he's like, You're pretty much unrecognizable. And there's certain like Fundamental building blocks that are still there. But I know how people who are experiencing pain or suffering or who have gone through Horrific trauma. I will say it bothers me that that word is so overused. I think it's I agree.

Becoming meaningless and when someone's like Oh, someone expressed microaggression on the internet and I'm so traumatized. I get really upset by that. So I do think certain terms should be reserved for special cases. Like the word sacred is another one. So that they retain some semblance of

Power and meaning. But let's just say someone has been sexually abused or has experienced death There are many different ways to experience trauma. I do think there's a tendency to view these things as permanent scars.

That you cannot circumvent. Mm-hmm. That's like psychoemotional scar tissue. That is just part of you from this point forward, and if that causes problems, too bad.

And you have an excuse You have a reason you can compartmentalize it, lock it away in this tight little box in the basement of your soul. And do your best. To not knock it over with your foot in the middle of the night. And

I don't find that Works very well. And These

end up squeezing out of the cracks of that box we thought it was so tightly locked inside of If not doing damage to other people, just doing a tremendous amount of damage to us personally. So any tools That help.

Me. to not do that, to metabolize these things, to maybe even befriend them and use them. In some way. I feel compelled to share You know, not excessively. I still do the business interviews and I still do talk about NFTs or whatever. I still have other interests, but

At the end of the day. I think. For a lot of people, they climb the mountain They realize that That

It doesn't solve all their problems, whether that's like prestige in academia, whatever your currency Happens to be. Lots of money. You may get to a point if you win the game you're playing where you realize, for fuck's sake, this actually doesn't fix anything, or fixes very few things. And so you're gonna have to deal with it sooner or later.

And I'll just stop because this has turned into a TED talk. I apologize. That I think very often about something Tara Brock. Said to me. at one point she shared this apocryphal story of a sage and the sage said

There's only one question that really matters. And that is, what are you unwilling to feel? Hm. And I think about that all the time. I think about that all the time because I think it it applies to so many people in so many contexts.

Including myself. So Thank you. insert God of Choice or universe or coincidence and just blind luck that I've happened to come across certain tools that I think Well probably

In conjunction with other things. completely Change how we view The mind, nature of mind, consciousness. And certainly.

psychiatry in the treatment of what we consider intractable. psychiatric conditions. Mm-hmm. Because the results. that we're seeing in some of these studies, including phase three studies. These are well constructed studies. really defy any conventional

explanation that psychiatry can currently offer. Right. When you have people with say treatment resistant PTSD from war from rape, etcetera, who Have you I'm gonna get the numbers slightly wrong, but they're not that far off.

Who have something like a median Duration of Diagnosed with PTSD of like seventeen plus years. So they've had complex PTSD for seventeen point two or however many years on average. They've been taking medication, treatment resistant generally in this case means it's failed at least two different interventions.

And they have Two or three sessions of MDMA assisted psychotherapy. And Even Say six months later.

They have sixty plus percent of them have no longer meet the criteria for diagnosis of PTSD. Is that Is

Staggering. I know. I've seen some of that research. It's you just can't believe it. Which means I think many of the assumptions that Gerd and underlie. our beliefs about Psychiatry.

And Even On a neurological level, I mean just Neuroplasticity and the ability to use compounds.

Whether they are. Or soul cybin more interest. the actual effects that they have on neurogenesis. Some of the effects Maybe.

Conferred by the actual structural changes, dendrite growth as an example. But then a lot of them seem to be determined by content and rewriting the narratives that govern our perception and navigation of the world. And shit gets really Exciting and wild when you start pulling on that thread.

In any case, and for people interested in the MDMA C psychotherapy, there's a documentary called Trip of Compassion. Oh my gosh, I keep I I've had that on my list to do ever since you started recommending. Oh yeah. It's intense, but it's very gratifying and unlike in the US

This documentary because it was filmed overseas. has actual client footage with client permission. Mm-hmm. what would be very difficult to get approval for. Dude to HIPAA and so on in other places.

And um That's my TED Talk. Thank you for listening. Ha ha. Well, I mean, oh my gosh. So thank you so much. For

Sharing all that. If I could say two things that I I mean, there were so many things that one could say after everything that you just shared. One is That it's really interesting.

That you went to that place of like all the different people who you've met. Along the way, who Are so successful on the outside and then You find what's really driving them. And I actually thought about this this morning.

as I was going through that list of questions that you ask of like what would you tell yourself, your thirty year old self, or whatever. And I had a few things, but one of them was To understand that all these people who you meet who seem like They have it so together, they're so successful. That they're all just

humans. And I feel like one of the one of the great privileges of having Written. A book that turned into a bestseller. Is that you get to meet all these people And especially if it's a book like the kind

That I right. People tell you the truth about what they really feel. So now I've heard all these stories and have just become aware of all these dynamics. That you're describing.

And the second thing I was struck by is when you talk about that kind of moral obligation. Cause I have to say, like I, you know, we don't get to talk to each other that much, but I have a sense of what you're doing through the things you put into the world and It really feels like you're driven by that. And one of the things I talk about in the book is how we go through pain and then there's kind of like a Crossroads of what are you gonna Do with it.

If you don't acknowledge it and turn it into something else, you're invariably gonna take it out, as you said, on yourself or on other people. Or there's this other Crossroads that you can walk down. turning it into something else. And I feel like that's what I've been watching you do. For years.

Oh thank you. I really appreciate that. I mean I feel like In a lot of respects. You're doing

similar work. I mean uh through your books, I mean your Conveying truth of human experience. In a way. That resonates with people who might struggle otherwise to

Identify. Let alone. express and describe what their internal experience is. And by doing that, I think you are Not just providing a salve. Two people.

that they don't know they needed. But you're providing language. Which is incredibly powerful. I'll say that for another podcast, but you're providing language kinda like I guess like Wichenstein, right? Like the limits of my language are the limits of my world. I mean, I really believe that. So giving someone language is no small thing. Two.

Label. and interact with and convey And On some level integrate. their experience and then you're giving them also

Empathy. through the stories that tell them they are not alone. You're doing a lot of things with your books that I I respect tremendously and it's I respect it not just because it is valuable in the world and sorely needed, but because it is fucking difficult to do. So

Uh I really appreciate the work that you do and that you put out in the world. Also. Thank you so much. Susan, is there anything else that you would like to To add.

Before we Come to a close. Anything you'd like to ask of my audience anything else? moved by what we are talking about or feels like, Oh, this is me I guess I just hope that You will connect with me one way or another on social or through

My book or whatever. So that We can stay in touch. That's all I would say. Perfect. And I will just say again, the new book is bittersweet.

How sorrow and longing. Make us whole Yeah. Where you will get to revisit Mono No Aware and all sorts of good things. And I really really believe in

The building of one's emotional vocabulary and range. I think it's not only gives you a richer experience of life, but it It creates a certain anti fragility, I think. That's

To life's inevitable ups and downs. So I I do think this is an important book. So bittersweet is the book. People can find you. Susan Kane C A I N dot net. SusanKain dot net on Twitter at Susan Kane. Facebook.

Author Susan Kane, LinkedIn, Susan Kane, Instagram Susan Kane author. We'll link to everything, including This amazing playlist that I must get my hands on. So we will also put the playlist In the show notes, Tim Dot Blog slash Podcasts and just search Susan and it will pop.

Right up. And I would say to everyone listening Till next time. Be a little kinder than you think necessary. Yourself.

And to others. And thank you so much for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool folks.

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