People whose favorite songs are their happy songs play it on their playlist about 175 times.
The people who love sad music play them about 800 times.
And they say that they feel connected to the sublime when they're listening to that music.
The longing for what you lack is the very thing that gives you what you're longing for.
So the longing is the cure.
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, Bitter Sweet, How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole.
This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. Support it.
Please check out our sponsors in the description.
And now, dear friends, here's Susan Cain.
You've written on your website that, quote,
I prefer listening to talking, reading to socializing,
and cozy chats to group settings.
So I think this conversation in the podcast is going to be fun.
What's a good definition of an introvert?
Is something like those three things a good start?
It is a good start in terms of how introverts experience day-to-day life.
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?
And for some people, they get their energy more from quieter settings,
and for other people, they get it more from being out there.
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.
An extrovert in a setting like that is going to feel charged up,
and they're going to be looking for the after-party.
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.
Yeah, and at the time before the start of the party to the time when that moment happens,
it's different for different people.
So like the shorter that is, the more of an inch where you are, is that that kind of thing?
The shorter the moment until you get to the moment
when you get to the place where you've got to teleport home.
Yeah, and then for extroverts, it's the opposite, right?
Like they're going to feel, maybe they're working on, I don't know,
focused on producing a memo that's really intensely interesting to them.
But if they're in that state of the solitary mode of really focusing,
they might get stir crazy a lot faster than an introvert would.
And so it doesn't have so much to do with what you're good at as how you get your energy.
And so for an introvert, the source of energy is what?
Silence, solitude, and for an extrovert, it's interaction with other people.
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.
And so for an introvert, you're feeling in a great state of equilibrium
when there are fewer inputs coming at you.
So they could be social inputs, but that's why an introvert in general would rather
like hang out with one close friend at a time as opposed to big party full of strangers,
because that's too many inputs for the nervous system.
And for an extrovert, the nervous system needs more stimulants.
So if they're not getting enough, they get that listless and sluggish feeling.
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?
Like, how do you empirically start to determine if you are in large part an introvert?
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.
Yeah, like I imagine, 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.
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
and no social obligations, who would you spend it with?
How many people?
What would you be doing?
And, and what is that picture that you're painting start to look like?
Yeah, so there's nuance to this though, because I'm sure for extroverts to get energized by
stimulation, whether that stimulation with other people, like it depends what that stimulation
is, right? Like maybe you're not surrounded by the kind of people that you enjoy being around.
So, you know, maybe that has to do less with whether some characteristics is your personality,
more has to do with the fact what like what your environment is like.
That's always kind of the question.
Do you want to be alone because everybody around you is an asshole?
Or do you want to be alone because you get energized from being?
Well, I would hold the variables constant, I guess, I would say, you know.
Keep the assholes constant and see.
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, like people are exhausting to them or
something like that.
But at the same time, when you see them at a party, they seem like the life of the party.
I know.
And I hear from those people all the time.
There's so many people like that.
What would you classify them as exactly?
Is it ultimately as the source of energy?
Is the most important thing?
Or like, how the heck are they the life of the party?
It's a bunch of different things, you know.
So first of all, just to say like a big caveat to all of this is humans are just amazingly
complex.
So you can't like explain every individual human through these parameters, even though
I think the parameters are really valuable.
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.
That's, it basically means someone who's not extremely introverted or extremely extroverted.
They're kind of in the middle.
So maybe at a party, they're more extroverted side comes out 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.
So they've learned how to fake it.
Yeah.
Oh, there's a lot of people like that.
And I know this because like, I think out of all the people on this planet, you could
be talking to you, I've heard from the most number of those people, like they all come
and tell me about their experience out in the world presenting a face that's different
from what they feel.
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.
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.
And so there's a lot of incentive for faking it.
Yeah, exactly.
If you want to be successful, you got to be able to fake it, to sort of hang with the
rest of the team, you have to be able to be outgoing and all those kinds of things and
not be drained by the interaction.
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.
They're more just figuring out ways to do it their own way.
You see a lot of people like that.
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?
Yeah, it's kind of like a mantra of figuring out what your own strengths are and how to
draw on them.
I think of a guy I know, Doug Conant, who had been the CEO of Campbell Soup for many
years.
He's very introverted.
He's quite shy also by his own description and he really cares about people.
And so when he started at Campbell, the employee engagement ratings of the company were all
the way at the bottom of the Fortune 500.
And by the time he stepped down 10 years later, they were all the way at the top.
And it wasn't that he was going out there and shmoozing people, but he really did care.
So he would find out who were the people who had really been contributing and he would
write to them personal letters of thanks and these letters meant so much to people.
They would carry them around with them.
And during his time, the 10 years there, he wrote 30,000 of those letters.
So that was his way of doing it.
That was his way of drawing on his own strengths.
And he did that together with, of course, you sometimes have to go outside your comfort
zone no matter who you are.
So he was doing plenty of that too.
It's a kind of combination.
Yeah, the writing process and focusing on the one-on-one interaction, I can definitely
relate.
It's deeply draining, which concerns me about Zoom meetings because it's some weird brain
manipulation.
Same word.
Well, because you're not really engaged, but it wears on you the same way that it does
a party.
It feels like you're emptying that bucket for the introverts, even though they're not
participating at all in the meeting.
I mean, I suppose that's true for physical meetings too, but with Zoom meetings or 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.
And I'm probably extrovert too, but the introvert definitely, there's, I mean, it's interesting.
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.
I just anecdotally have heard from that, 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.
I think people are starting to realize, but I would say one reason that Zoom is so draining
is because you can see your own self-presentation the whole time if you choose to.
And when you go into in person, you can't, so you're kind of freed of thinking about
that.
Oh, that's brilliant.
So it's like an extra cognitive load that you're bearing the whole time.
Oh, yeah.
That's brilliant.
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.
And then that alone is the decision that you're making.
Yeah, there's probably studies on this now happening, either half-happen or half-happen
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.
Yeah, you can't be in the moment as much, but I mean, for you, you make the decision
to do all your podcast interviews in person, right?
And so...
And that's even when it's very costly.
If there's any kind of chemistry that contributes at all to the conversation, which I think
most conversations have chemistry, even the boring work meanings, there's something there.
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.
And honestly, people also have told me about this, why they enjoyed the Zoom meetings during
the pandemic is like, they're lonely.
Yeah, yeah.
Like they, you know, 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.
And that, I mean, there's a deep connection there with other people, and that is especially
true when they're there in person, which is a huge concern for me for like more and more
offices from a capitalist perspective, realizing, hey, why do we have these large office spaces?
Why do we have to get people together?
But I think in some deep sounds we do.
And then you also talk about that once we do, we want to protect the introverts.
Like you don't want the open space, which office space, which was a big fad for a while.
I don't know where people stand on that at this point.
Yeah, I think people are figuring it out in a post pandemic context.
But I mean, I know what you mean.
So before I became a writer, I was a corporate lawyer for like seven years and literally
the only thing I miss from those years is hanging out with people at the office.
Like, I don't know, just some of the funniest moments I've had in my life came from being
at the office until midnight with the other people I was working with.
So I know exactly what you're talking about.
So I will say the office is there at that firm and at most firms in those days, everybody
had their own office.
So it was like a dorm room, you know, where it was like a long hallway with everybody
in their own little dorm room.
So you had tons of privacy, but you would also come out and hang out with people.
You could just kind of roam whenever you want.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And whenever you roam, that means you're kind of open.
You're looking for trouble.
Yeah.
You're open for interaction.
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, those were all signals.
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?
Do you think of it like that as a bucket that gets emptied and needs to be refilled?
I think of it, yeah, more or less, because I use the metaphor of a battery that gets
recharged or not.
It's basically the same thing, different metaphor.
But yeah, but just to add on that, that there is a layer of complexity to that, because
you could be somebody who doesn't want the kind of social life, let's say, where you
have to be like on and presenting and interacting with tons of people all the time, but you'd
get really lonely if you were just by yourself, you know.
So what you want is to maybe be in the company of a couple of people you know really well.
Like for me, the pandemic was not actually that hard for me personally.
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.
So I knew it was hard on the kids and I felt badly for them.
But for me, I was like, you know what, I kind of, I have a lot of social life right here
in the house.
That's how you love your house.
And I can focus and do my work.
Yeah.
That's the cool thing about the pandemic, I think it helped people figure out how much
they love their family.
I think that's true.
And then while you give you a chance to really reconnect with kids, with your kids, like really
spend time with them, it's just fascinating to watch.
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.
Yeah.
And I think that's part of what people are not going to want to go back to that we need
to solve for to the extent that work becomes non-remote again.
I think people have just realized how precious those aspects of their lives are.
And, you know, for somebody who's in a sort of 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 kind of a ridiculous way to set things up.
Yeah.
It's cool that you can get, I think a lot of places give you the option now, which is
interesting.
You get to optimize that element of your life.
Do you take the commute and the office work and then the social interaction there?
Do you focus on the work at home?
It's also lonely at home, but then you get to see your kids.
If you have kids, that's part of the optimization is like, I have some options now and I'm going
to try to optimize solitude, 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, it's fascinating to see how that kind of evolves.
Yeah.
And then there's the big, the third space idea of, you know, the spaces where you are
in a coworking space or a cafe or something like that.
You've got other people around you, but you're not exactly interacting with them, but they're
very much there.
And that's huge too.
I don't think we think about that enough.
Yeah.
That energy is there.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I've been in Manhattan for 17 years before we had kids and I absolutely loved it.
Like I loved it, the feeling of all that energy all around you, but you could be anonymous
within it.
To me, it was perfect.
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 that because everyone's wearing suits.
Do you wear suits every day?
Well, these days, unfortunately, because I get recognized, I wear usually not suits
when I just, on my own life.
But yeah, I love it.
I love the way it feels.
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.
Like this is what I would want to wear, not for physical appearance, but just for some
reason it makes me feel like focused, I don't know.
So even if you're not going to see anyone, you would still put the suit on when you're
doing your work.
Especially then.
Really?
Especially then, yeah.
Yeah, I really, I've really loved doing that.
So it tells you seriousness of purpose, something like that?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like everything elevated now.
Makes me feel, 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 and like, I don't know who else, Richard Feynman, gonna think about when
I think about a suit.
You know, I think of Leonard Cohen, but he was always wearing suits too, but you know.
Leonard Cohen is definitely one of my, is a tragic human, is a beautiful human being.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Through his words, through his own private life.
Yes, I definitely would think about Leonard Cohen.
So small talk, that's another thing.
Is that part of the equation of introvert versus extrovert?
Well.
How much people enjoy small talk?
I kind of went into this whole thing thinking that it was, but from what I've seen, most
people have studies that most people don't like small talk.
I think that's why people like your podcasts, cause you're like, get the small talk, I'm
going deep into it from the very beginning.
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.
Yeah, everything's more complicated.
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 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.
You're like telling me about the deep truth of their lives from the first hello, and I
love that.
And in normal life, you have to like wade through a lot before, you know, if people are ready
to go there.
Yeah.
Do you have that experience too?
No, definitely, definitely with people that know me for sure.
But you forgot how many people feel like they know you because of your podcasts.
Well, that's what, no, that counts cause I'm a huge fan of podcasts and I feel it 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.
So like it was, I don't, I feel like it's a friendship.
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 all writers, I feel like I have a relationship
with them.
Maybe I'm insane.
No, I totally feel that way.
That's the whole reason I became a writer.
Like I'm friends with Leonard Cohen.
Yeah.
And he's not aware of it.
No, I, but I think that's the whole reason for writing or making music or whatever people
do.
It's to be able to have those kinds of connections that don't require having to be in a room
together cause there's only so many people you can be in a room with in your lifetime.
And the hard thing is, 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 like you meet people and you can tell
they're beautiful people.
They're amazing.
There's something so fascinating about them.
They're, 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.
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 and you go on your way.
So like that's a hello and a goodbye and your past will never cross again.
That makes me like a sad walk away, but I guess I wouldn't have it any other way I suppose
is the reality is in your book you talk about that sorrow, that sadness not being such a
bad thing.
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 and, 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, you know, like an amazing time.
And then this other guy who wasn't going to be coming back anytime soon, if at all, sent
a postcard to me.
And the only thing written on the postcard was this quote from Oscar Wilde.
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.
Yeah.
And there was something so intense about that and so true.
I think partly also, because when you've just been introduced to somebody, you don't yet
know their difficulties.
So you're seeing, you're seeing the most sparkling version of them.
You're seeing like a platonic version of love and friendship.
And your imagination fills in the rest and some, some beautiful way that matches perfectly
the kind of thing you're interested in.
That's how I feel about one scoop, like one spoonful of ice cream.
And that's why you always finished in a whole tub and you regret all of it.
Um, do you do, you do site, what did you write this?
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.
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.
Is there something that jumps out into memory like that for you?
I don't know if I have an exact line though.
I mean, that feeling that you just quoted happens to me all the time.
I'm just bad at recalling exact instance.
On the spot.
But the writer Alain de Botton regularly makes me feel that way.
He's just this beautiful essayist and like observer of human nature and he's just constantly
expressing things in this gorgeous way that you've experienced yourself.
And you feel like, I don't know, it's just this grand act of generosity.
You know, you feel less lonely, you feel like this deep sense of communion.
It's such an elevating experience.
Even when it's like a melancholy line.
Maybe especially when it is.
Yeah.
What is that?
There's a, so Jack Kerak on the road definitely makes me feel that way.
Like every other line in there, following rags of growing old.
You know, I never read that book.
So what, what, what was it about that book that made you feel that way?
Well, okay.
Well, and since you asked, I'm going to linger on this.
Uh, so this is stories, he's kind of the book, the, the kind of defining book of the, of
the beats of the beat generation.
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.
And there's a lot of just those melancholy goodbyes along the way.
You meet all these people with interesting lives, some of them are defined by struggles,
some of them are defined by drugs, drinking, women, all that kind of stuff.
And still he just kind of dances around all of that and is defined by the goodbyes and
the passing of time.
So a lot of the really powerful lines are basically like, uh, there's one on there again.
I don't remember exactly, but he meets a beautiful girl at, at rest stop.
And, uh, the girl is getting her or a woman is getting on a, on a different bus than he's
getting on.
And so it's, it's that like feeling of falling in love for like a second and realizing that
like fate is just ripping that out, which is similar, uh, 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 the, with the, with all the possibilities that could lay there.
Um, so there's a few lines of, of, uh, written down, it's just, I went down this whole rabbit
hole of thinking, what are the lines that grabbed me, uh, a couple of lines from on
the road.
So one is, what is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on
the plane till you see their respects dispersing.
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.
So this is him talking about leaving a particular city, the spoiler alert towards the end of
the book, rather the end of the book, line of return too often.
It's more poetry, but it's a feeling that captures the book, I would say 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 showroom and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody
besides the forlorn rags of growing old and it just captures this kind of in the moment
appreciation of the beauty of the world and a 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 and you just leave that all that
just, 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, something makes you realize
that time passes and somewhere deep in there is probably a realization of your mortality
and then 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.
Yeah, I know it exactly.
I mean, that's, that's the whole reason that I wrote Bitter Sweet.
It's all about that.
So I know intensely what you're talking about.
And by the way, my husband loves the book A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway, which
I also haven't read, but it talks 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.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I think that's the deepest essence of human nature, the feeling of longing for
some kind of state of perfect completeness, completion, perfect love, the Garden of Eden,
all of it and the feeling that you're never going to quite attain it, but you get glimpses
of it here and there and that those glimpses are some of the best things that ever happened
to us.
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, it's a glimpse of what we long for.
So the sadness that we might feel is always connected to the ways in which we fall short
from the perfect thing that we're like, there's always a thing you're longing for.
And the sadness has to do with the getting a glimpse of it, but not quite getting a hold
of it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it's always losing.
It's always losing, but it's also always that, but it's not, that sounds really depressing,
but it's, it's not, you know, it's not pressing because you experience this all the time.
It's also, those are the most beautiful moments I think life offers.
I mean, it's intense, intense beauty in those moments because it's getting closer to the
real thing that we long for.
So what about like loss, losing love?
Is that also a beautiful thing?
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, you're kind of experiencing the loss and the
love all at the same time.
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.
So losing loved one kind of thing.
Losing a loved one.
And 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 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.
And so over time, the loss of person A can heal and you can tap into a kind of bigger
river of love.
Yeah.
I mean, I had this, it comes from Louie, Louie C.K. at a show, damn, I love that line.
I mean, there's a, he's talks to an older gentleman and Louie is all like sad about
losing a loved one or like getting rejected essentially, like a breakup.
And then the older gentleman gives him advice saying like, basically criticizes Louie for
saying, why are you moping around?
Cause this is the most, this is the best part.
Like losing love is the best part cause that's, the real loss is when you forget, like feeling
shitty about having gone through a breakup is when you most intensely appreciate what
that person meant to you.
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, like that feeling that that's
when you feel that love the most, the absence of it.
So the older gentleman gives advice that, that that's the best part and it can, if you're
good with it, it can last for the longest.
It could be the most sort of prolonged experience of deep appreciation and emotion and so on.
So that's kind of a, that's a nice way to look at loss, which is a reminder of how much
somebody meant to us.
Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of truth in that because, yeah, you wouldn't care so
much if it weren't something that mattered to you.
So it's always a signpost to the direction you really want to go to, that's always what
it is.
Yeah, and it's interesting to see the way that the mystical versions of many of the
great religions all point in this direction, you know, whether you're looking at Sufism
or, 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.
So the longing is the cure.
I mean, that's, that's the way the Sufi poet, Rumi puts it, the longing is the cure.
You know, and he says, be thirsty, like be as thirsty as you possibly can.
That's what you want to be.
The good stuff is the wanting, not the having.
Yeah, yeah, of course, tell it to a person that just broke up and they'll be like, shut
up asshole.
I don't know if your advice sucks, I wish I had her him back.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
Those are the kinds of life lessons that only work when you kind of step away for a while.
They don't work in the moment, in the moment of excruciation.
There is something about the fact of knowing that all humans are in that experience together
that is also incredibly uplifting.
Well, that takes time for people to realize, like, you know, 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, or maybe even when you're
younger.
And one of the things you realize is that everybody goes through this.
That can be an awakening to the fact that we're all in this together.
This human condition is not just a personal experience, it's an experience we all share.
And that's a kind of love and the unity of it that you can get to experience.
Yeah, that's a really deep kind of love.
And I feel like, you know, we're prevented from perceiving that love as, 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.
It's like, there's something unseemly about it.
Oh, it's also in the West is the individualist society.
So like, 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 as part of the culture.
Yeah, it's not part of the culture.
And yet, you know, you see it in our behaviors because we're humans.
So, you know, why do people listen to sad music?
I mean, one reason is they're hearing expressed for them, 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 and that they're saying it all without words and it's transformed into something
beautiful and there's something about that that's just incredibly elevating.
And people don't know it, but like, there's one study that I have in Bittersweet that
found that people whose favorite songs are their happy songs play it on their playlists
about 175 times with people who love sad music play them about 800 times.
And they say that they feel connected to the sublime when they're listening to that music.
What do you think that is?
So, what is that?
What is it in music that connects us to the sublime through sadness?
I mean, I have a bunch of different theories.
Like, the whole reason I started writing this book is because I kept having this reaction
reliably to sad music and I realized that for people who I knew who are religious believers,
the way they describe their experience of God was what I was experiencing when I would
hear that music like all the time, it happens over and over again.
So, you wonder what that is?
Yeah, so I started wondering what that is and lots of people have tried to figure out
what that's all about 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.
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.
No one really cares when they're seeing the slide to the sad faces, but the sad music,
they're really reacting.
And also, they don't really react when they're hearing music expressing other negative emotions
like martial music or something like that.
It's just the sad music that gives people this elevated sense of wonder.
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, 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 truths and all of it and like an acute awareness
that we're not there in this world.
And in religions, we express that through the longing for Mecca or Eden or Zion.
And artistically, we express it with Dorothy longing for somewhere over the rainbow or Harry
Potter enters the story at the precise moment that he's become an orphan.
So he's now going to spend the rest of his life longing for these parents who he can
never remember.
And there's something about that state that's at our very core and I think that's why we
love it so much.
Well, it could be, you know, you can have the Ernest Becker theory of denial of death
where at the core of that, the warm of the core, as Jung said, is the fear of death.
So where the longing for the perfect thing is has to do with sort of becoming immortal
is reaching beyond the absurdity, the cruelty of life that all things come to an end for
no particularly good reason whatsoever or one we can rationally explain.
I know.
You know, I wonder about that all the time.
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.
But I feel like it's not only that, I think it's more so or also, let's say, a longing
for the lions to lay down with the lambs finally, 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 and yeah, just a completely different situation that immortality would not solve.
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.
So much.
Bible.
I mean, I know all the other stuff is in the Bible too.
There's other stuff in the Bible and the Bible is that particular aspect doesn't necessarily
reveal the fundamental motivation of human nature that could be deeper stuff, you know.
But yeah, that is a beautiful picture.
But is it just about humans or is it all about all of life and you have to think about
what is the perfect world look like?
It's not just the lions and the lambs laying together is, you know, how many lions and
how many lambs and what, having just had a few very technical conversation about Marxian
economics versus Kenzian 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?
So then you start to build society on top of all those things, but you still, you return
to this, what are we longing for?
And what's the role of love in that?
What's the role of that sad melancholy feeling, the feeling of loneliness?
Is the feeling of loneliness fundamental to the human condition?
Like are we always striving to sort of channel that feeling of loneliness to connect with
others?
Like we want that feeling of loneliness, otherwise we wouldn't be connecting.
Is that fundamental, that feeling like you're alone in this even when you're with other
people sort of alone together, you're born alone, you die alone?
Maybe loneliness is fundamental.
I think the longing for union is fundamental.
It's just that it looks so different for different people and coming back to where we were, what
we were talking about at the beginning, union looks incredibly social for a lot of people
and hardly social at all for others, but everybody needs some version of union.
Yeah.
People have been telling me recently about polyamory and all those kinds of things, having
probably grown up in a certain part of the world, I'm very monogamy centric, not in a
judgmental way, just for me, what makes me happy is one person for my whole life, basically
just dedication.
Yeah.
Because I've just seen through relationships with people and objects in my life, the longer
we stay together, the deeper the tie.
So that's just an empirical thing and yes, that probably is a personalized thing.
That's just true for me.
It could be very different for others.
Maybe it's connected to the introverted thing, maybe not.
Who knows?
Before I leave, because you mentioned songs, sad songs.
What are we talking about?
What's a good, what song do you remember last crying to?
Oh gosh, well, I mean, as you know, I literally dedicated my book to Leonard Cohen.
He's played such a huge role in my life.
I love him, I love him, and I've loved him with this crazy love that I've never been
able to understand for decades.
I think I understand it a little better now, but.
So you guys, so you're better friends with him than me, I'm just, so does it make you,
is it the musician or the human too?
Because the human is a tortuous soul in a way.
I'd say it's the musician.
It's the musician.
I actually was thinking about this the other day.
I mean, obviously he's not alive anymore, but I was kind of running the thought experiment.
If he were alive still, and I had the chance to meet him in person, would I want to do
that?
And I'm not really sure that I would, because he represents for me symbolically everything,
well, everything, I'll end the sentence right there.
And I think that's okay.
I think people can express something through their art that they might or might not express
if you were just like hanging out with them and having a coffee.
And I'm happy to know him that way.
He can express himself, I'm sure, in the way that you know him as over-coffee too.
Yeah, maybe you would.
It just requires like a focus of remembering, of like a deep focus of connection.
That's why like when I interact with folks, 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 and doing that dance of human interaction.
The humor, the intense kind of delving into who they are, which requires like navigating
around like small talk type of stuff and just like compliments and so on.
In general, like people, depending on the culture, depending on the place, they'll sometimes
flower stuff with smiling and like compliments like, oh, yeah, I love you.
This is great.
Like this, that's all great, but you want to get to the core of like, what are the demons
in the closet?
Let's talk about it.
And that could be exhausting.
That could be really exhausting.
So from a Leonard Cole perspective, you get more and more famous, it can be hard sometimes
because he probably is also an introvert.
Oh, yeah, I know he was an introvert because he actually tweeted about my book when it
came out.
So that was a precious moment for me, something that we should all be listening to the quiet.
I can't remember exactly what he said, but yeah, yeah, no, he definitely was.
He struggled with depression, which I wonder if that's something that's also connected
to introversion, but perhaps not actually, perhaps that they're very disjoint and also
connected to sensitivity and many sensitive people are introverts.
So it's kind of like a Venn diagram, what about 80% of highly sensitive people are introverted,
but then some are extroverts and then not all introverts are sensitive.
So it's complicated, but he was definitely a sensitive type.
Well, there's on top of that, you see like the percent of artists relative to the average
that suffer from depression, so creative people is very high, it's crazy.
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.
I have it in the book and remember the percentage, but huge.
And he was one of them.
He lost his father when he was nine and his first act of poetry was his father made suits.
That's why I thought of him when we were talking about your suit.
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.
And that was like his first creative act.
You know that song Chelsea with all number two, where he met, I guess it's about Janice
Joplin.
Janice Joplin.
Yeah.
What a fun, intense and cruel person she is.
Yeah.
So I guess- Have you ever seen, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but have you ever seen his
son Adam Kohn and Lana Del Rey perform that song together?
Oh, wow.
No.
It's incredible.
I have to send it to you.
Yeah.
So that for people who don't know, I don't, I mean, maybe I don't know, it goes, I remember
you well in the Chelsea Hotel, you're talking so brave and so sweet, giving me head on the
unmade bed while the limousines wait in the street, there's a good line in there about
about being ugly.
Oh yeah, we are ugly, but we have the music.
No, before that, from a guy's perspective, it was-
Okay.
Oh, you told me again, you preferred handsome men, but for me, you would make an exception.
Yeah.
So good.
So good.
Well, she continued that thread in later because I think she said that he was lousy in bed.
Oh, was that right?
Yeah, she publicly said that, which is like, oh man, did there, just, okay, for people
who 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 or in this only, 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.
But they did for a brief moment, there's like a sadness to it because it's so momentarily,
but it's so epic.
Yeah.
And that these two paths cross and then you just look at it, we know these famous people
and it's interesting to watch.
Yeah, and you don't even have the impression that they're thinking it's going to last.
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.
Yeah.
But 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, that's what he said.
What is valedictory?
Like saying goodbye, like the valedictorian's address.
Interesting.
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, but the thing that's so incredible
about him is the way that he's taking all of that and pointing it in the direction of
transcendence.
Like it's not just pure sadness, it's sadness and beauty.
And that's the thing.
Yeah, there is a feeling of transcendence in a lot of the songs.
It's like sadness and transcendence, you're right.
It's a goodbye, but you're moving on to some bigger thing, but in a sort of ethereal way,
like not like a proud, arrogant way.
Yeah.
So his favorite poet was Garcia Lorca.
He actually named his daughter after him, his daughter's name is Lorca.
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.
And that's what I think is, 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.
It's the way you embrace the sun and the moon.
The song, Hallelujah, I return to that often have been me to play it, I have now a friend
who wants to sing it with me.
Are you a singer?
When somebody says they're a singer, do they have to be good?
Because then no.
But I would say yes, I was in a band for a while, I sang for a while, I was always bad,
but I enjoy it.
I enjoy it.
I enjoy lyrics.
I enjoy words.
Yeah.
When sung or spoken, they capture something.
Like again, that moment, Tom Waits is a huge favorite of mine for that reason, although
he often, his lyrics are often not that simple, I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than
a frontal lobotomy.
He's always playing with just like these weird word play that's especially in the English
language is trickier to do.
I'm fortunate enough to know another language, which is Russian, so I get to understand that
certain languages allow for more word play than others.
English for that reason, I don't think has 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 word play until hip hop
came along.
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 plus humor, all of that mixed in.
Actually, hip hop does a really good job of this, 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, in certain in Russia.
Interesting.
Empowered also, not just by the language, by the fact that you go through a world war
where tens of millions of people die, something about mass death of civilians that inspires
great literature and music and art.
Yeah, absolutely, because you start telling the real truth, I think.
Yes.
There's no more reason for small talk.
That's funny.
I always have thought that if I could choose any other medium besides writing, it would
be singing.
Are you a singer?
No, I mean, like I'm really not.
I just love the idea of it, but then I also think, you know, I'm fundamentally a shy person,
so I think it's much better that my medium is writing instead of singing, so like it
all worked out.
That said, you're also an exceptionally good public speaker and you're not supposed to
be mathematically speaking.
Mathematically speaking.
You're not supposed to be a good public speaker.
Oh, you mean because of shyness?
Yeah, because of shyness, because of introversion, because of all those kinds of things.
Oh, yeah, but lots of introverts are public speakers, actually.
Like this is one of... 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.
Oh, they're in their head figuring out the idea, so how do you explain that the public
speakers, would you say the good public speakers are usually introverts?
No, I think there's just different styles of it, 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.
For me, I used to be very phobic about public speaking, 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, because you're only imagining the super kind of out there showman.
But I think there's another style of public speaking that's more reflective and thoughtful
and conveying ideas, and people like that too.
Is there advice you can give on how to overcome that?
If you're a shy person, how to be a public speaker?
I can totally give that advice, because I used to, before I would give a speech, if
I had to do it in law school, if I knew today was the day when I was going to get called
on in a law school class, I literally one time vomited on my way to class.
That's how nervous I used to be.
Yeah, the way to do it is through desensitization.
It's been figured out.
It's the way to overcome any fear.
You have to expose yourself to the thing you fear, but in very small doses.
So you can't start by giving the TED Talk.
You have to start.
I started by going to this class for people with public speaking anxiety, where the first
day all we had to do was stand up and say our name and sit down, and that's the victory.
That's fun to watch all those people with anxiety.
Okay, that's the first step in the step, one step at a time.
Yeah, and then 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,
and you would answer some questions about where do you grow up, where do you go to school,
and you declare victory, and you're done.
And then little by little by little, you keep ratcheting up the exercises until you get
to the point where you can do it.
And then you start having successes, and you realize, oh, actually, I can do this.
What about writing versus improvising?
Because I knew a few people, the colleagues of mine that were working on TED Talks, and
it feels like you're supposed to write the thing way ahead of time, and you practice
it.
And all that kind of stuff, I don't think I've ever practiced a speech once in my life
or a lecture or any of that.
I know it's really good to do, but do you find that relief some of your anxiety preparing
well, or are you now able to do not preparing well at all?
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, because TED
Talks are more like a theatrical event where it's like a one-person show.
And of course, if you were going to go on Broadway with a monologue, you would know every word.
So it's kind of like that.
And so I would rehearse it over and over the way you do that.
Isn't that more anxiety, like knowing every single word?
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?
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, if they do things like the last TED Talk I gave, I actually did forget something
halfway through.
Like I just couldn't remember the next line.
And so I had to walk over, like over there were my notes.
And so I did that and the audience like very kindly clapped while I did that.
And then I came back to the spotlight and kept going and they edit that out.
Nice.
So there's a failure mode.
It's okay.
But still, it seems really, it seems really stressful.
Like I'm now, I'm not sure if I'll ever publish it, but I've been, mostly it's 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 of 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 to force yourself to really consider material is to have to
talk about it.
Totally.
Yeah.
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.
That'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.
The silences won't be correct or the silences between the words won't capture 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.
Like basically, even though the script is fully written, you improvise between the word,
between the lines.
Yeah.
But that's a scale.
Well, it also takes so much time.
I mean, I experienced that with the TED Talks.
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.
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.
And you're really speaking it from the heart, but you have to know it so well before you
can do that.
I would never recommend it because it's just like, it's so time consuming.
It's an inch.
Well, in your case, it works out beautifully.
Like when it all comes together, it is a theatrical thing, it's like a musical or whatever.
I'm going to, I think I'm going to come out with a one-man show on Broadway singing now.
I'm inspired.
No, but for real, where are you going to talk about Hitler and Stalin and everything you're
learning?
Me too.
Have you ever thought of using the medium of just speaking into a microphone but without
the video?
I'm curious about this because like I fell in love with podcasts originally before there
was ever this whole video component to it and I realized there's something so primal
and magical about having someone's voice in your ear.
My favorite kinds of interviews still, very few people do it this way nowadays, but my
favorite kind are when you're just talking into the microphone.
So it's not over Zoom, it's not in person, it's just you in the microphone and the other
person in the microphone and they're in your ear.
It's like the ultimate in intimacy.
Oh, you mean from the interviewer perspective, that's your favorite.
Yeah, but it would be interesting also with the kind of thing you're talking about of
just speaking, like just you in the mic.
I would love to be in person, but you can't see the person.
I wonder what that's like.
It would mean like they're all there, but behind a curtain?
No, you just have your eyes closed.
You're just talking, you have your eyes closed or whatever.
Because I think you still have to get the same kind of chemistry because it's not just
the visuals.
I don't even know that because obviously I have trouble making eye contact.
But I don't know if the visual stimulation is the necessary thing.
There's something about the way audio travels that captures the intimacy where some people
actually have headphones on, like Joe does this, have headphones on, that's really intimate.
There's something about that sound going directly into your ear.
Yeah.
There is something primal there, yeah, for sure.
I've thought about it, definitely.
And some of my favorite podcasts are like that, WTF with Mark Marin, that's Audio Only.
There's a few Audio Only podcasts that I just love.
What is that?
I still go on Clubhouse, that's a social media platform where it's Audio Only.
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, it's something you need to do some
research in terms of introversion on that one because I don't feel any of my introvert
like triggers happening because, so nobody can see you, it's just audio and nobody is
offended if you're just sitting there quietly, just listening so you can participate whenever
you want or not.
Yeah, it's like the ultimate social freedom.
Yeah.
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.
Yeah.
Yeah.
If I'm actually at a physical party, somebody's going to look at me and be like, there'll
be that pressure to speak, but you don't have to in that kind of audio setting and there's
that intimacy.
Like you can, when it's Audio Only, it feels like you can reveal a lot more of yourself
in some kind of honest way, I don't know what that is.
What is that?
I don't know, but I assume it's tapping into something really ancient, like we used to
tell stories around the fire, like our whole storytelling tradition was oral originally.
So maybe it's that, but we used visual stuff.
That's true.
You could actually see the person.
It seems like the visual element is so fundamental to the social interaction, but there is something
primal about audio.
I wonder what that is.
And still, that's why, I mean, most people listen to podcasts, I think, Audio Only.
They have it in their ears while they're doing stuff.
Yeah.
That's how I do it.
And then there's, yeah, that's how I do it too.
And that's where the friendship, like it's formed, it's weird, the deep connection with
other humans, it's formed because they're in your ear 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.
It's fascinating.
It's fascinating.
The world of podcasting is fascinating because we're in this world of essentially radio,
even though we all have all this high definition content, all this like TikTok style fast stuff
and still podcasting.
I know and we still choose to do this.
It's weird.
It's 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.
And podcasting of all the media that I've ever seen is the one where people come closest
to telling you the truth and to telling you the good and the bad and the bitter and the
sweet and all of it.
Especially long form.
There's not enough time.
Yeah.
Exactly.
I had to explain this to people, like you talk to CEOs and stuff, they don't understand,
they're starting to understand much better.
Now as a hard requirement with like CEOs and stuff, it has to be three hours, I say.
Wow.
There's something, they can't be doing marketing stuff for three hours.
They break.
They start being human.
They start joking.
They start relaxing.
And if they can't, that also tells the kind of story, but I do that kind of torture for
CEOs only.
Anyway.
Yeah.
When I was getting, my publishing house did media training with me before Bitter Sweet
came out 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.
And God, I hate that.
It's like, it feels like they're, 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.
Well, the other.
So to me, podcasting is just the best thing that's ever happened.
The other downside of the seven minute interview is I think you could do a really good job
with that, but the dance partner has to be very good.
It's actually challenging for everybody involved.
It's much harder for everybody involved because you, if you can do, you know, I can imagine
like a Christopher Hitchens type character who's just super witty.
Then that you could do a seven minute thing.
You can get to the core of Bitter Sweet.
You can get to the core of the book without asking those generic small talk questions.
Cause too many people in that short form interview are just asking very generic questions.
They're doing small talk for seven minutes.
Yeah.
That's like, all right.
Like you only get seven minutes.
You only get one interesting question.
Go ask the weirdest, the deepest question that, that also energizes the other person.
It's an art form that people don't take seriously.
I think the seven minute thing, five minutes or even less.
And then the commercials, which I, 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 asked, you've
answered a million times before.
Yeah.
It's really interesting how different the experience is.
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, because people, I've seen that, I mean, people don't
give them enough credit as you might, you know, you might not be aware or might not
be a fan, but Joe Rogan is a incredible conversationalist in that he makes you forget that anything's
being recorded, that you're talking at all, it makes you forget time and you just enjoy
yourself.
And that's whatever that is.
And then you plug into that primal connection to other humans.
What's your favorite Leonard Cohen song?
Famous Blue Raincoat.
Do you know that one?
Yeah.
Maybe I'll play it.
Yeah.
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.
He's got this deep rich voice, Tori Amos covering Famous Blue Raincoat, yeah, yeah, no, we want
the original.
Just like Hallelujah Jeff Buckley covered Leonard Cohen, that was a really good one.
That was a really good one.
Yeah.
And I also really like Rufus Wayne Wright's cover, 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, and he's writing
a letter to that other guy, and he's reflecting on the way that all the relationships have
changed in the wake of this event.
So they're still friends.
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, it's light and it's dark all at once.
Everything is ever all one thing.
Yeah, I love this song.
Yeah, right?
I mean.
He just speaks of it.
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, that's not an accident.
There's something about December, whatever, there's certain scenes you can paint in your
mind.
There's a poem by Charles Bukowski called Nirvana, and it's a young man traveling through
the middle of nowhere in the snow.
There's something about the snow, either the rain or the snow can put you in a certain
kind of mood.
They just, what is it, James Joyce, the dead, the snow is falling on Dublin.
Yeah, it can put you in a place.
I mean, David Yadon, he's a researcher and psychedelics and consciousness at Johns Hopkins.
He's a great guy.
And he's done research that has found that when people are in their transitional moments
of life, you know, 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.
And so I feel like that's what Leonard Cohn knows how to tap into instinctively.
The year after he died, his son, Adam Cohn, made a memorial concert for him where all
these famous musicians came to Montreal, where they had lived and performed his music.
And my husband, who's not a Leonard Cohn 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.
And I felt so ridiculous.
The whole family went all the way to Montreal on a Monday, on a Monday, it was just like
a random Monday.
And we got on the plane, so like everyone's at a school just so I can go to this concert.
And I got there and at the beginning, I was feeling like, 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.
I'd rather listen to him on YouTube.
And then a musician named Damian Rice came and played famous blue raincoat.
And he sang it and he did the most amazing thing at the end, the whole thing was amazing.
But then at the end, he sang this musical riff that was like, all I could say is that
it was like a musical lamentation of the ages.
And the whole audience just rose silently to its feet.
And it was one of the greatest moments that I've ever had.
There's sometimes certain artists in a cover can capture in some kind of deeper way, like
carrying the thread of the power of the song.
So been listening a lot to Johnny Cash Hart, which is a 90's snails, Trent Reznor's song.
You talked about it on your podcast with Rick Rubin, which is when I reached out to you
because I love that interview and I love that song also.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So there's that.
There's the Kennedy Center Honors where they celebrate a certain artist that did that for
Led Zeppelin and I forgot what her name is, but the lead singer of Hart performs there
with Heaven.
And it's like if you're like, all right, you take one of the great sort of rock songs
of all time.
What do you do in front?
Oh, the cool thing is you get to perform this in front of the artist while there's
still there.
You know, they're still alive.
So you get to watch you sort of perform, in that case, the president and president Obama
is there and she's just knocked it out of the park.
But at the same time, without outdoing the original somehow.
Right.
You're just making it your own.
You're making it your own?
It's not overlapping it.
It's not departing completely.
Yeah.
Not departing from the spirit of the original.
It's tough because the original Hollywood by Leonard Cohen, it's just not, it's so powerful,
but it's just not as good as some of these covers.
Well, I think it's the words and the melody and then the covers take it to a different
place.
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 Halloween, like, I don't know, as opposed to that deep
melancholy, like painful longing thing that Jeff Buckley did and others do too.
I wonder if it's because in a way, I don't think 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.
So, I wonder if we're hearing his version after he's a little tired with that process.
Yeah.
Well, that's the other thing is, 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, you forget the...
You forgot the initial, like the heart of it.
Yeah, but I actually got a chance to hang out with Dan Reynolds, who's the lead singer
of Imagine Dragons and this incredible band, Super Pop, the most played band on Spotify
or something.
Is that right?
He just went through a huge Imagine Dragons phase, so we were listening to their music
a lot.
It was so surreal to be hanging out with him and he's such a good...
Like, very few people I've met in my life are just as good of a human being.
And that has to do with the fact that he struggles.
He still, I think, struggles, but he struggled for a long time with depression.
And so, out of that pain, you see, born this really good human being, this really good
relationship with his wife, like that, like, 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 it's really important to feel the song every time, otherwise people
know.
People are really good at detecting your bullshit.
You can't fake it.
Yeah.
You really have to feel it every time.
You have to feel the emotion of it, whatever the emotion is, of the original time you
wrote it.
Yeah.
So, it's just interesting, because I thought you could maybe fake it, but he believes
of course, and he's like, because he played in front of the gigantic crowds and over
and over and over and over and over, he's like, no, every time you have to be there.
But there's got to 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.
Yeah.
Well, that's what he's saying.
You have to, otherwise you're just...
That's the job.
Right.
Don't take the job then.
And he loves it.
He says the biggest struggle, in fact, is the come down from that, which is like, you have
this such a beautiful experience of connected with this large number of people, sharing
a song that you love, and then it's such a rush of connection, and then you have to...
When you get off stage, you're now back to normal life.
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.
It's very tough to then go into this, speaking of introvert, because he probably is an introvert,
as you have to find that calmness, 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 there's love in the air, and you still have
to find that inner peace and calm.
It's interesting, because I don't know if this is the introvert in me talking and the
writer in me talking, but I don't know.
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 they'll talk about having had that kind of
moment of the communion between the writer and the reader, 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, but just the knowledge of that having happened out there in the world due
to something that I added to it, is the most amazing thing.
You love it, but imagine reading thousands of those letters, and then it's such a strong
rush that everything else doesn't... It could be overwhelming, I guess, but like anything
else, you have to come down and find a calm place.
For example, the danger with getting letters like that, you start taking yourself too seriously.
You think you are a special person somehow, but you really want to avoid that feeling,
too.
Yeah.
I don't actually experience it as that much different from when I'm on the other side
of it.
If I'm the reader and some other writer has made me feel that way, to me, it's the same
thing.
Yeah, me too.
It's a virtual hug.
I think it's like, I was just listening to something about the different Russian writers.
I was mentioning to you this academic, his name is Gary Salmorsen, and he studies Russian
literature.
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 telling
us that you're supposed to live, you're supposed to have his grand, tempestuous romances that
might end in death or despair or whatever it is, but you should be in it for the intensity
of the emotion.
He's saying, actually, that's exactly not what Tolstoy was saying, that actually it
was the opposite, that he was really advocating for everyday life.
He was saying it's scenes from everyday life.
He was juxtaposing Anna Karenina with all these other couples who were just living happily
and quietly day by day, and that was what he believed was the ideal, as opposed to the
grand rush and as opposed to the intensity.
I wonder if he, is there a romance at day to day?
I think there is a romance to the day to day.
Absolutely.
He's distracted by the dopamine rollercoaster ride of the grand romantic notions.
Yeah, and enjoy it while it's happening, because those are life experiences also, but not to
mistake those for being everything.
Where is he from?
He's a professor at Northwestern.
At Northwestern.
Apparently, his lectures are the most popular on campus.
People love him.
Gary Saul Morrison is an American literary critic and slobvest.
He's particularly known for his scholarly work on the great Russian novel lists, Leo
Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
Morrison is Lawrence D. Professor in the Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University.
Yeah, wow, and there's a lot of incredible work, 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.
Yeah, I think you should have him on your podcast.
And quiet flows the vodka, or when Pushkin comes to shove the curmudgeon's guide to Russian
literature and culture, this is one of the silly books he has on the list.
Okay, cool.
What were you saying?
I'm sorry.
Oh, no, I was just saying, yeah, I find that when I take photos on my phone, I hardly ever
take photos at the moment you're supposed to.
Everybody's gathered for some event.
I'll forget to take the photo, but I take a lot of scenes from everyday life, because
that's what I actually want to remember in the end.
Yeah, yeah, I'm the same.
I'm the same.
It's actually concerning, because it's bad for productivity, because I love everyday
life so much, then why do any ambitious big thing?
Your productivity is pretty good.
I don't know that you have to worry about it.
I do.
So I want to launch a business.
I have a dream outside.
This is like a fun side thing, that there's been a lifelong passion.
Anyway, I like building.
I like building stuff, and I haven't been doing that as much as I would like.
That's because largely, because I like sitting in silence and enjoying the beauty that is
just nature and life, and when there's people, there's people, I love people.
I love everything.
And so when you love everything, why go through hell to build a company?
Yeah, that's a valid question.
I mean, I think you have to have a really good reason for wanting to do it.
And 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, that's a human imperative for
exploration.
Yeah, absolutely.
Like when we were talking about this idea of longing being like the source code of humanity,
I think that's also the source code of our creativity.
It's the same longing for Eden.
It's like you're always reaching for something that you want to get to or that you want to
build.
Yeah.
It's the best of us.
What do you think, you write about creativity and sadness, practically speaking, how should
we leverage sadness for creativity?
Is that sort of in the artist domain, in the writer's domain, in the engineering domains
and so on?
Yeah, it's definitely in those domains, but it's in all domains.
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.
And it's very easy to notice the grandeur of the painting hanging on the gallery wall
or the new company that's just been created, but it takes a thousand different forms.
You could bake a cake or in the wake of the pandemic, we've had more people applying to
medical school and nursing school.
And after 9-11, you had people applying for jobs as firefighters and teachers.
So there's something in the human spirit that takes pain and turns it into meaning when
we're at our best.
And when we're not at our best, we deny the pain and then take it out on ourselves and
on other people.
So there's a kind of fork in the road of what to do with it.
But we know, I mean, there's all these studies that I go through in the book.
There was one where the researchers had people watch different movies, like happy movies,
sad movies, bittersweet movies.
And they found when people watched Father of the Bride, which is like the ultimate bittersweet,
you're walking your daughter down the aisle kind of feeling, that was, they would give
them creativity tasks after watching these different movies.
And the people who had been primed for bittersweetness were the most creative.
And they were like primed to remember finality, you know, like love and finality, basically,
love and impermanence.
There's something about that that gets us to our most beautiful state.
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.
Yeah, that's really interesting stuff.
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, like both, like, I don't know if
those creativity studies, but they have interesting, I think a little bit tainted by political bias,
but maybe not.
I mean, psychology is a complicated field, but they, they study like who are you likely
to vote for.
Right.
If you're primed by existential, like by thinking about death.
Like the fear of mortality.
The fear of mortality.
I forget what the conclusions are, but.
I think they find that people become more tribalistic.
Yeah.
And like there was one study where they found that after they primed people that way, that
they would get, then give them the chance to put hot sauce on a meal that their political
opponents were going to be eating and they put way too much hot sauce on after they've
been primed to worry about death.
I think at the core were simple creatures.
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.
And people ask them a lot questions like, you know, the kinds of questions you were
talking about earlier.
Well, like how are you going to feed everybody and how is there going to be space for everybody?
If everyone really could live forever.
And what about conflict when we haven't intensified conflict?
And their answer to that is they point to terror management theory, you know, when 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 removed the fear of death, we'd have
less conflict to contend with.
And that I don't really buy that.
It's possible that that's true, but are you also, how does the expression go throwing
out the baby with the bathwater?
Are you also going to remove basically any source of meaning and happiness in the human
condition?
Like it's very possible that death is fundamental to the human condition, the finality.
Yeah.
And that's the great philosophical question.
And I went to a conference of people who are working on this and I thought that they
were going to be talking about those questions all through the conference, but the MO is
much more like, we're so happy that we're here with people who have gotten past all
those quibbles.
Yeah.
You know, and we just know there's going to be meaning no matter what.
The basic assumption is, let's try to extend life indefinitely and then we'll figure out
if that's a good decision.
Or more like, we're sure it's a good decision or at least that was what I felt.
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, meaning like there's no downside to that even if we find out it's
wrong.
But there's a kind of certainty.
Obviously, you want to extend human life.
That's the kind of assumption that always seemed, now, it could be true, 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.
I have sort of the same kind of criticism, whether it's thinking about Valhalla or any
other afterlife is you can have, if you're not careful, forget to make this life a great
one, whatever happens afterwards.
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 because it does seem then nature, the way it designed
living organisms.
It really wants us to die because that's part of the selection mechanism, this part seems
to be fundamental to evolution.
It gets people young, they need protection.
Once they're young brain, they get to explore a lot, get to figure out the world, they come
up with their own novel ideas, how to adapt and how to respond to that world.
And then get older and older, they get like stubborn and stuck in their ways.
And so we need them to die, so we make room for new life that's able to adapt to the changing
environment.
If the old doesn't die, then you're not, you're going to get stale and not be adaptable to
the changing environment.
But maybe it doesn't have to happen so soon.
Yeah, maybe it doesn't.
It's like pressing, listen, I'm a big fan of pressing snooze.
On the alarm clock, I'm in the same way.
I do, 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.
But yeah, if I'm on my deathbed, I would share as much snooze as many times as possible.
Yeah, I know.
And it's interesting because in some ways I really, I share your instinct.
There was one scientist I spoke to at that conference, he's one of the leading advocates,
and he said, you know, that's a story that we've invented for ourselves because we have
no choice.
And if you really believe that you have no choice, then you're, then it's adaptive to
tell that story that death gives meaning to life.
Good point.
But if you really think you don't, if you really think you could triumph over it, would
you still be telling that same story?
And I've been thinking about that question ever since.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, they got a good point.
They got a good point.
No matter what, as an engineering and the scientific pursuits, it's a beautiful one.
In your own personal life, if you can go there.
Sure.
What's have been some dark places you've gone in your own mind?
Grief, loss, sad moments, moments of sadness that have made you a better writer, a better
creator, a better human being?
Well, I mean, I've been through a lot of bereavement just in these last couple of years with COVID,
but even before that, I mean, there's all kinds of stuff.
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.
But I had a really complicated relationship with my mother growing up, where we had a
kind of garden of Eden during my childhood, like we were intensely, intensely close.
And my mother, because of 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.
And we had a pretty intense break that I described in the book.
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 it was over
at that point, the relationship was over.
The garden of Eden was no more.
Yeah, it was like a feeling of, yeah, I know what Eden was like, and it's not there anymore.
And I think it was all the more confusing, because 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.
But with something like this, there's no process, because you're not even admitting
to yourself, especially when you're in your teens and 20s, that you're mourning something.
So, 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, or more
than tears in my eyes, like embarrassing tears.
So I would just try to steer the subject in another place.
But I will say, two things happened.
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.
And I've really come to terms with all of it.
And then the second thing that happened is my mother now has Alzheimer's.
And in her Alzheimer's, she's still actually the same person.
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.
And the way that she was when I was a kid, which was 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.
And for all these decades, 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.
But I'm seeing her now and I realized that it was all true, everything I remember, it
was all true.
It all happened because it's happening again.
And you returned to the Garden of Eden for a time and to childhood.
It's always a question of whether you can return to that place.
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.
Are you sure?
Are you sure?
Yeah.
Are you sure you're different than the 10-year-old?
Well, okay.
You feel different?
No, I mean, I'm the same person in terms of my need for love and love of love and all
of that.
I'm not dependent on my mother for it the way I was then and that makes the experience
really different.
Yeah.
When you're younger, she's a God figure.
What is that?
The roots, the parents, such a funny civilization will live and there's a depth of connection
to parents that's probably more powerful than anything else in terms of its formative
effect on who you are.
I think it's the most powerful.
And in fact, when this started happening, I got to college and I took a class in creative
writing and I tried to write a story, a fictional story, a fictionalized version of what was
happening.
And I called it the most passionate love because of what you just said.
And the teacher actually said to me, she was like, 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.
So I've now finally written it 30 years later.
You're probably still too close to it though.
I don't know though.
I do think everybody goes through experiences in this life where you're experiencing a fundamental
pain of separation and desire for a union and it takes so many different forms.
And this was my primal form of it, but for someone else, it's a betrayal or a bereavement
or an exile from a country of their birth or whatever it is.
And then you get to solve that puzzle for the rest of your life.
Yeah, the fact of like, I really do believe that the original love that we long for, like
that one of the great things that you learn as you grow older is that the love exists
in some plane that's more general than the particularized form in which you first knew
it.
Yeah.
I mean, that's why despite all the creepy interpretations with 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 like age two or something, whatever
the hell he said.
So you develop this kind of connection to the opposite sex or whatever it did to your
mother, to your parents.
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.
Yeah.
I think that's right.
And you can really see it when you become a parent too, you know, you can just see,
like there's
Don't screw it up.
You know, I have to say it like, I mean, knock on wood, I actually feel like, like we're
doing pretty well.
Like my kids are teenagers now.
And I really had thought that I wasn't going to repeat the issues that I had been through
with my mom.
And I can say, I really am not.
Um, yeah, like my mom for various reasons, just had a lot of trouble with my independence
and I just don't feel that at all.
So yeah, there might, there might be other things you're totally blind to there.
I guess that's possible.
It's not the way of parenting is here.
You solve the problems of the past, but there's some other new one, I guess I'll find out
in 120 years, but like so far, so good.
What wisdom about parenting?
Can you, can you give from your own experience and from your writing?
Yeah, well, oh my God, there's a lot to say.
So on the bittersweet side of things, the wisdom that I would give is that especially
for kids who are growing up in relative comfort with everything going pretty well, um, 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.
Um, and I, I tell this story in the book of this time that we went on this family vacation
where we rented a house in the countryside and the house was next to this field where
it, where live two donkeys that our kids fell in love with and they were like really little
at the time, two boys and they're spending all this time feeding carrots to the donkeys
and it's all beautiful.
And then comes the day where they realized that we're leaving in like two days and they're
never going to see these donkeys again and they start crying themselves to sleep.
And the usual things that parents might say at a moment like that of like, you know, maybe
we'll come back or another family will feed them, we'll feed these donkeys, none of that
made any difference.
But when we said to them, you know, goodbye is part of life and this feeling you're having
everybody has it.
You've had it before, you're going to have it again.
You'll feel better in a couple of days, um, but this is the way it's supposed to be.
This is natural.
That's when they stopped crying because I think that's when they stopped resisting.
Yeah.
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.
It's the resistance part of this isn't supposed to be happening that makes life really difficult.
Yeah.
As opposed to a more clear eyed view of what it really is.
This is indeed supposed to be happening.
There's a show called Yellowstone as recently started watching.
Yeah.
No, I've heard of it.
I started watching it, but only a few minutes and didn't get into it.
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, you know, to shoot their first buck.
And the son is getting really sad because he pulls the trigger and he took a life.
And the father says that everybody gets killed in this life.
That's the way of nature.
That's the way each one of us is going to get killed.
And it's interesting because I didn't really think of it that way because you think you
die, but he really framed it as killed because he's like, there's no such thing as dying
of old age.
Let's medically, let's discuss that a bit, but basically there's something, whether it's
a truck or a bacteria, something's going to kill you in the end.
And that was an interesting way to look at it because we tend to think of humans aren't
supposed to be killed.
We think of murder as one of the sins, sort of one of the things that you don't do in
society.
But you know what?
We do, that's a more technical discussion whether we ultimately get killed by something
in the end, but to some degree that's true, at least for most of us, that there's something
that gets us, whether it's cancer or those kinds of things.
It's interesting.
But yeah, it's that reframing of it's supposed to be this is the way of the world.
Yeah.
Though it's funny.
I mean, at the same time, then I just wrote a whole book about the fact that this is the
way it is.
I really do believe this is the way it is.
And with this reality, there's an intense beauty that comes along with it, so we have
to accept the reality to get to the beauty.
I believe that.
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.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I don't know how much of this is a female thing too.
I was watching with my son, my 12-year-old the other day, we were watching this show
about the battle of Thermopylae, and it was all about valor and glory on the battlefield.
And I said to him, something like, gosh, don't you just wish we lived in a world where you
didn't have to do all this in order for everyone just to live their lives?
And he just looked at me completely puzzled, like, no, to him, it all just seemed self-evident
that the world would be structured that way.
And he had the 12-year-old admiration for the valor of it all.
But you wonder if that's nature or nurture.
I wonder what that world looks like.
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 for what purpose?
War was a way of life.
It's interesting.
It's interesting if we can imagine properly a future that is different than ours in terms
of operating under the different moral systems, but I'd like the same with living indefinitely
or living in a society with no war, like how fundamental is war, how fundamental is death
to humanity.
It's so fundamental to our source code.
I just wish that our source code were different, basically, like I can't get past that wish.
There's brain-computer interfaces that try to merge.
So greater and greater with smartphones, we're already kind of cyborgs, but greater
and greater merger of computational power.
So literally adding source code to our original source code, just the different, 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 the magic that is human consciousness also into the
machine, and then we'll get to see.
Maybe there'll be a little bit less asshole-ish about the whole war thing, there'd be more.
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.
They have to be able to be afraid and to be sad and all those kinds of things.
But maybe it's because I'm a product in this particular environment.
Maybe sadness is a useful human invention, but not a universal one.
This is what I don't know, because this is where I come back to the, as I told you, the
original reason that I wrote my whole book was the feeling that somehow in the expression
of sad music is what other people see when they talk about God.
There's something so, there's an ultimate beauty there that I don't know if we have
access to without that.
But maybe we do.
But I can say in this world, it's a great way to get access to that state.
Is it within the reach of science to deeply understand this, you think, to understand
that why you feel sad when you're listening to a song?
Or why you feel so much love when you're listening to a sad song.
To a sad song.
Right.
Yeah.
Why the sad song opens up some kind of deep connection to something you can call divine
or something, whatever the heck that is.
Yeah.
I do think.
I mean, we have really early signs of it from the research, and I'm sure we're just
at the scratching the surface stage.
But I mean, like we know, for example, that the vagus nerve, which is so fundamental that
it governs our breathing and our digestion, our vagus nerve also activates when we see
another being in distress.
There's like an instinctive impulse to want to make it stop.
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.
So that's probably just, you know, the very first step in being able to understand what
all that is.
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?
Okay.
Here's what I think.
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.
Because I feel like people, we have this narrative in our culture of like that the glamorous
thing is to figure out the thing you love and then risk everything to achieve that.
But first of all, a lot of people aren't comfortable with that level of risk.
And second, when you're living with that level of risk, that's a cognitive load too.
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.
So I'd say like get the backup plan in place and then do the thing.
My advice would be the opposite.
Okay.
Tell me why.
I'm moving the romantic.
I think the best, the truth is be aware of the costs not having a plan B has, so do it
deliberately if you don't, but I, you know, I'm with Bukowski on find what you love and
let it kill you.
I think you have to actually know your personality.
I know if I have a plan B, 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.
Okay.
So with my back against the wall and you have to know that about yourself.
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.
Like I would not do well in that kind of situation.
I'd be like up at two in the morning worrying about it.
Because if I have some, like it doesn't have to be paying the rent in some grand way, but
if there's some basic way of paying the rent, then my heart's free to do the thing I really
love.
That's hilarious.
I, for me, the only way I'm free is when I don't know how I'm going to pay the rent.
Huh.
Yeah.
Because otherwise I'll find a way to pay the rent.
That's not at all a source of deep fulfillment for me.
So I see.
It's like if you don't have like the, what's the expression?
I don't know.
Something like the dog at your back.
Yeah.
Deadlines.
Then you won't actually do it.
I create real or artificial deadlines, anxiety, and so on.
So yeah, you have to...
Yeah.
So really the advice is know your triggers, 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.
Strategize the rest of your life.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Exactly.
That's life.
The meaning of this whole thing.
Probably has something to do with whatever we feel when we listen to a sad song.
Yeah.
I...
Because two things come simultaneously to my mind when you ask that question, and I've
been asking it since I was four, I remember the first time I did.
The question is more important than the answer probably.
Yeah.
Just keep asking.
I don't know.
I don't know why beauty, and I don't know why beauty is so important, but I just know
that it is.
And impossible to define perhaps.
Is it definable?
Yeah.
Other than you know it when you see it.
I don't know.
I mean, just...
It has to do with that line that you feel something when you just see it, when you hear it.
Yeah.
You just see it, and it's like some...
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.
And when you're in those states of mind, you know it because you have the temporary sensation
that you could die at that moment, that the people you love could die, and it will all
be okay because there's something else.
So that's my first answer, and then my second answer is the need to relieve psychic pain.
Other people's psychic pain.
I don't know why.
That's just like an impulse that I have.
Psychic pain is more like suffering of any form.
Yeah, but I mean...
What is there particular...
Yeah, just making the world better and less pain to go around in general.
Hence your sort of optimistic desire and longing for a world without sort of destruction.
Yeah, a world where that wouldn't be necessary.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
But yeah, so I had this moment.
It wasn't so long ago.
I was doing some interview, and somebody asked me, what are you longing for right now?
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.
I'm at this particular way station where everything is the way I want it to be.
Of course, the minute you say something like that, you know, you're going to be proven wrong
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.
And I just feel 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, like
his struggles had to do with a long life history.
So I don't know why I feel that so intensely, but I do.
Those moments when you are just at peace, there's nothing else you want.
I feel like that's like a temporary repose, like a pause.
Exactly.
You could, you bet your ass a desire follows that at some point, but you get to enjoy those
little moments.
Yeah.
And even when I said, even when he asked me and I answered that way, I said, this is
a way station.
Like I knew it was temporary, but I didn't realize it would be disrupted like an hour later.
And so to give you pushback to your statement about the possibility of, you could say 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.
But that's a very Hunter S. Thompson and you know how he ended up, he's not the greatest
philosopher of all times, but he's certainly a beautiful, a chaotic human being.
Well, that's true.
And I will tell you that my nickname for my husband is Gonzo, kind of because of him,
you know, he invented that form of Gonzo journalism where like the, the writer is totally in
the story and my husband, like that's his personality.
He's like in everything that he does.
He's really in it.
He's really present.
He just lives that way.
So, so his name is Ken, but I call him Gonzo like 90% of the time.
Well, then that's a beautiful way to end this season.
This is, thank you for your work.
Thank you for being who you are.
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.
It's like half the world or whatever the heck it is, it's a lot of people.
Thank you for being you.
Well, thank you for talking today.
It was awesome.
This was fun.
Thank you so much.
It was so great to talk to you.
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.
I really, really love it.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Susan Kane.
To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
And now let me leave you with some words from Susan Kane herself.
The highly sensitive introvert tends to be philosophical or spiritual in their orientation
rather than materialistic or hedonistic.
They dislike small talk.
They often describe themselves as creative or intuitive.
They dream vividly and can often recall their dreams the next day.
They love music, nature, art and physical beauty.
They feel exceptionally strong emotions, sometimes acute bouts of joy, but also sorrow, melancholy
and fear.
Highly sensitive people also process information about their environments, both physical and
emotional, unusually deeply.
They tend to notice subtleties that others miss, another person's shifted mood or a light
bulb burning a touch too brightly.
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.