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Episode Transcript:

00:02:06 – Eric Zimmer
Hi Ruth, welcome to the show.

00:02:08 – Ruth Whippman
Thanks so much for having me on.

00:02:09 – Eric Zimmer
It’s nice to have you back on. We had you on maybe four or five years ago and I remember really enjoying the conversation, so I’m glad we’re getting to do it again. We’re going to be discussing your latest book, which is called Boy Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity. But before we get into that, we’ll start like we always do with the parable. And in the parable there’s a grandparent who’s talking with her grandchildren and they say in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear and the grandchild stops. Think about it for a Second, they look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

00:03:03 – Ruth Whippman
First, thanks for having me back on the show. And so this parable, I think it speaks to the fact that we are all complex beings. We are all both good and bad. These qualities exist within all of us. And there’s no point denying that. There’s no point pretending that we’re all virtue and there’s nothing wrong or that we’re sort of better than everybody else. But I think it also points to the fact that we have some agency in our lives, that we don’t have full control and the other wolf will always be there, but we have some choices around how we live and what our values are.

00:03:37 – Eric Zimmer
I love that, you know, these things are in everyone. And I think that’s relevant to your book because it’s a book about masculinity, but you can’t really talk about masculinity without talking about femininity. Right. They exist on a pole. And as I walked away from your book, the one thing that sort of landed on me, and it’s something I’ve thought about a lot over the years, is that the ideal person really has a blend of those characteristics. They’re not all masculine, they’re not all feminine. And to force ourselves into being all one way is damaging to us.

00:04:13 – Ruth Whippman
I agree. And I think also I’d rather see us moving away from labeling qualities and traits with a gender. So whether we’re talking about bravery or courage or strength or physical toughness, which are associated with masculinity traditionally, or nurturing, caregiving, empathy, emotionality, which are traditionally feminine coded traits, in a way, I’d rather see a world where we’re all able to embrace all of those things. They don’t have a gender. Exactly.

00:04:41 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. That’s an interesting way to think of it. It’s so deeply conditioned to think of things that way. And obviously those didn’t get made up in a vacuum. Right. Over the millennia that there have been humans, there’s been observations made, and it said, hey, more men seem to have this and women have that. But I agree with you that maybe taking them out of a gendered context makes them more applicable to everybody.

00:05:05 – Ruth Whippman
Yeah. And more accessible to everybody. Because I think, and I just want to state here, there’s nothing bad about masculinity and there’s nothing bad about Femininity. They’re both associated with all kinds of wonderful things. It’s just that when we use that as a framework for, you know, a standard that we have to meet in order to be worthy, I think that’s where the problems come in. Whether that’s. If you’re growing up as a boy and you feel you have to be, you know, tough and strong and invulnerable and not show your feelings and not be like a woman, you know, that’s quite an exhausting and kind of debilitating, an unhealthy standard, really, to try to meet, or whether you’re a woman who has to feels they have to be demure and submissive and not have agency or pretty or, you know, like an ornamental kind of object, and that is the standard you feel you have to meet. I’d rather that we just allowed everybody to embrace whatever sides of themselves they would like to.

00:05:58 – Eric Zimmer
Right, right. So the book is a deeply personal book because you are sort of trying to balance a couple things inside yourself, Right? One is your deeply held feminist values, and the other is the fact that when you start the book, you have two boys and you’re pregnant with your third boy. So there’s this moment trying to embrace these feminine ideals. I’ve got boys. The culture is changing in such a way that some of the problems with masculinity around me too, movement and all that sort of coming out, and you’re trying to figure out, like, how do you raise boys in all of this? So it’s a deeply personal book. As you walk through it, it’s also deeply personal in the chap that you’re having with your boys.

00:06:42 – Ruth Whippman
The book is a mixture of memoir and reporting and analysis. But the memoir part of it opens in 2017, when I am eight and a half, nearly nine months pregnant with my third boy. And the MeToo movement is just, like, exploding all around us. So, you know, Weinstein’s been exposed, and it kind of, you know, as I write in the book, it seems to go within, like, a few days from Harvey Weinstein as a sex offender to every man on the planet is a sex offender. You know, it’s just like one after another after another, this, like, horror show of bad news about men and, like, the whole conversation about men and masculinity and the kind of harm that men have inflicted on the world takes on this, like, very new and very different flavor and kind of a scary flavor and especially a scary flavor if you’re about to give birth to your third boy.

00:07:34 – Eric Zimmer
Right.

00:07:34 – Ruth Whippman
Yeah. And so it was this very conflicted moment for me, both politically and personally. You know, personally, I’m there going, how do I raise a good son? Are men just hopeless? You know, is it just that whatever I do, you know, it’s inevitable that he’s going to end up as being either some kind of predator or a school shooter or a, you know, rapist or something like that? You know, that’s the kind of angsty state of mind that I was in. But then, like, politically, I’m like, I’m a feminist. I believe that so much of this is socialized and we can do something differently. But there’s part of me that’s, like, very exhilarated and happy about the me too conversation. It’s like, finally, women have a voice. We can call out this bad behavior. We can finally speak to it, and people are listening for the first time ever. You know, I feel like pretty much every woman feels like they’ve been saying this stuff for millennia, and nobody, nobody has been listening. So finally, people are listening. Finally, women have a voice. But at the same time, you know, the mother part of me is like, I’m raising boys. I feel defensively. I don’t want to think of them as being toxic or terrible or inevitably going to cause harm. So it was this very conflicted, very defensive, very complicated moment that the book opens and it carries on. You know, the memoir part of the book lasts for the next five years until my youngest son goes off to kindergarten. And the whole time, we’re in the kind of shadow of this wider cultural conversation about masculinity, toxic masculinity. What is it? How do we do differently? How do we do better? And where are we going with men and boys?

00:09:07 – Eric Zimmer
Yep. And I think that what you do such a great job of in this book is you said it’s complicated. Right. You keep the complicated in it because this becomes sort of a political issue. Right. And each side, I often think, lacks the nuance to have conversations that are actually useful. And that’s as true of the way that I lean politically and the other side. And you do a very nice job of keeping that in there and the struggles with it. I thought maybe we could move into asking you about the title. Right. Reimagining Boyhood. But it’s the last part of the title I’d like to get you to say something about, which is impossible. Masculinity. What do you mean by that?

00:09:55 – Ruth Whippman
So this was a really interesting process coming up with that title, because what are we saying here? And Actually, the British version of this book, they chose to replace the word impossible with the word toxic. And I didn’t like that choice. I preferred the impossible masculinity framing of this rather than toxic, because I feel like masculinity has become impossible from all sides. So on the one hand, like all of the old pressures of masculinity, you know, the man up, be tough, be strong, don’t express your emotions, don’t be vulnerable, don’t be a wuss, don’t be a pussy. You know, those pressures are still very much in circulation for boys. They still have to subscribe to that. They still are living in fear of, as I think many men are of, like being exposed as feminine or as not a real man. You know, there’s this standard that they feel they have to live up to. But now there’s this sort of voice from the left or a sort of newer voice which is, you know, boys, you’re toxic, you’re harmful. You know, your very being is. You know, you’re just kind of like a predator in waiting. Whatever you do, you’re wrong. And it’s also, it’s time for you to shut up. It’s everybody else’s turn. Don’t speak to your pain, don’t speak to your experiences, because men have been listened to for so long and it’s time for everybody else to have a go. So I think many men and boys are in this moment of just feeling like this is impossible, you know, from all sides. You know, where do we go with this? You know, on the one hand, we’re supposed to be so privileged and powerful, but we don’t feel that way. We still have all of these old problems that nobody’s really addressing or seeing, and nobody really has any empathy. Like, it feels like we have run out of goodwill for men and boys completely. We’re done. And so I think what I wanted to capture with the idea of impossible masculinity was just, it’s kind of impossible from everywhere. We’re in this moment in the culture wars where things are very complex and boys and men just don’t really know how to be. And I prefer that to toxic masculinity. I think there’s something about the phrase toxic masculinity, and I believe it was a really important phrase in its moment. I think it really spoke to a very specific phenomenon which is really important to call out. But I think for this generation of boys who weren’t the ones doing this stuff, I think they just see it as so shaming and so shutting down of conversations rather than opening them up, that I kind of didn’t want to perpetuate. That.

00:12:21 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, the book resonated with me in a lot of ways as a man, because I don’t think the pressures you’re describing are new. And what I mean is I believe that. And my generation might be the generation that first, I think, started to really face this a little bit more, my dad’s generation, a little bit, but not as much where, if you were paying attention, you started to realize that the Be a man story that was the traditional one, was problematic. There was a lot of encouragement from. And again, I think this does start a lot on the liberal side and in communities that are more psychologically informed, spiritually informed. And I don’t mean maybe not Christianity, but alternative spirituality, this idea that that way of being a man isn’t right, and it’s problematic, so you should be different. And so that tension I have felt my whole life. Right. I grew up, in a sense, my father was very angry, very manly, and I grew up with a I will not be like that. But that’s a reaction to the standard. Right. And it’s still a way of, like, being in the box, so to speak. Right. It’s just a slightly different box. So I just really resonated with a lot of that. I was surprised by how much I resonated with some of the incels. We’ll get to that in a second. A really powerful book because I think I have wrestled for a long, long time with what does it mean to be a man and what do I do with these characteristics that, again, maybe we get to a day where we don’t gender them, but that are traditionally thought of as male, Those are in me, I feel them. Those energies are there. To shove them away is problematic, but to let them just run wild is also, you know, can be very problematic.

00:14:22 – Ruth Whippman
Right. You know, one thing that I found when I was reporting and researching this book and talking to a lot of boys is one thing that I think is really hard for men and boys is that they don’t have a very good vocabulary or sort of, you know, just a good language and a good framework to really talk about this stuff. And I think that there’s all these ways in which men are sort of subtly socialized, not to really talk about their pain in different ways or not to really talk about their issues. And so it’s like, I think a lot of boys are feeling like, I don’t know how to be. I hope everything feels wrong. But I don’t really have the framework to talk about it. And I think that we have done as a society a pretty good job over the last few decades of giving women and girls a vocabulary to talk about the issues that face them. So it’s not that those issues have gone away, but I think, like, pretty much any fifth grade girl, say, has the ability to, like, look through a book or look through a magazine and be like, that’s sexist. You know, to call it out. This is wrong. This is oppressing me. You know, I think these girls are so savvy to this stuff, and I think we’ve done a good job of giving them that framework to think about it and to call it out. Whereas I think with boys and men, it’s just they feel something’s wrong, they don’t feel like they have permission to talk about it, and they don’t really have the tools to talk about it or the language. And so this is what I was trying to do in the book, was just give it a framework, give it a name. Name the problem.

00:15:44 – Eric Zimmer
Yep. So let’s start with a core idea that is in the middle of all this, which is sort of gender essentialism, meaning boys have certain traits, girls have other traits. And in the book, you say very clearly that it’s possible to read the same research and come to two different conclusions, that there are characteristics that are, you know, built into boys and there are characteristics that are built into girls. And you can find the research and read research and walk away completely convinced that that’s true. And you can come to the exact opposite conclusion. And even if you’re actually trying to get to the tRuth, which a lot of people just want to be confirmed of what they believe. But even when you’re open to finding the tRuth, good Lord, it’s confusing.

00:16:33 – Ruth Whippman
It’s really confusing. And I think also, as I write in the book, I think that the whole thing becomes a kind of proxy for a different fight, which is like, you know, when we’re talking about, is it nature or is it nurture? You know, are we really trying to find out about that, or are we using this research to further an agenda that we already have?

00:16:51 – Eric Zimmer
Right.

00:16:51 – Ruth Whippman
And that happens on both sides. I think there are people with very traditional gender beliefs who go through that research, and they’re like, look, it’s all innate. It’s natural. There’s nothing we can do about it. Women are like this, men are like that, and women should stay in their place, you know, and men should stay in their place. And you know, it’s a way to justify sort of regressive things. And on the other side of things, you have feminists who are like, this stuff is all socialized. It’s all just, you know, the only reason why that men and boys behave the way they do is because we socialize them into that, and if we socialize them differently, we’d have a totally different outcome. And I think, you know, I read through this body of research many times, and I feel like, honestly, anyone who’s really approaching it in good faith would say that this is a mix. You know, it is a mix of nature and nurture. We will never know in exactly what proportions. And these are. Are always group level differences. You know, they don’t necessarily apply to any one individual. So, you know, it’s like height. You know, most men are taller than most women, but you will find women who are six foot tall and you will find men who are five feet tall. And that’s true. But at a group level, there are differences, I think. And also, nature and nurture sort of aren’t really distinct. You know, there’s the field of epigenetics. So what genes get turned on and off by how we socialize people. But what I ended up feeling was that, yes, there are some elements of this which are hardwired biologically or tendencies which are biologically hardwired. But actually we use that. We use the idea that, you know, boys will be boys or that, you know, boys are just wired this way as an excuse to kind of not do anything about it, you know, to do less parenting, when actually those traits should encourage us to do more, you know, to step in more to help boys find and girls, you know, to help everybody find new ways to be.

00:18:41 – Eric Zimmer
You tell a really compelling story near the end of the book about something you observed when you took Abe to his first day of kindergarten.

00:18:51 – Ruth Whippman
Yeah.

00:18:51 – Eric Zimmer
You want to tell that story?

00:18:52 – Ruth Whippman
Yeah. So this is like a very, very tiny story. And I think, you know, I’m always slightly hesitant to tell it because it’s the kind of thing that people dismiss and be like, so minor, so nothing. But I think what I was trying to convey is that these kinds of very minor things add up. You know, it’s a million, million examples of the same thing. So what I noticed, I took him to K kindergarten. He’s this tiny little kid. He’s very anxious. It’s his first day of school, and we’re going through the gate and there’s this, like, big guy there. I think he might be a Teacher or a volunteer? I’m not sure, but so right in front of my son in line, there’s these two girls. And the guy says to the first girl, hi, sweetheart. You know, this little sweet voice. And then the next girl, hi, sweetheart. And then my son walks through and his voice goes down an entire octave. And he’s like, hey, buddy. And gives him a high five.

00:19:43 – Eric Zimmer
Yep.

00:19:43 – Ruth Whippman
And it’s like he has communicated in this tiny way that these girls are vulnerable, they’re in need of protection and nurture, and that they have a right to be scared, they have a right to be anxious, and that adults are going to respond to that. And he’s communicated to my son that he must toughen up, that he’s a man now, that he’s in the system of masculinity. It’s not really okay that he’s scared and vulnerable and he has to kind of toughen up and get through it. And it’s this tiny little moment and it’s very well meaning. And the guy was a lovely person. He’s not trying to do anything wrong. But it’s just having boys, you notice that, like right from birth. And there’s a lot of research to support this, that we kind of masculinize them in all these subtle ways that we project these masculine qualities. We see them as sturdier, we see them as tougher, we see them as less in need of nurture and protection, and we give them less nurture and protection as a result.

00:20:36 – Eric Zimmer
And I think that’s what the process of conditioning is. It’s little things that add up. It’s a thousand little experiences that grow into something bigger. So I found this, you know. Yeah, it’s very little. And I think your point is important. The guy there was a kind, good person doing the best he could.

00:20:54 – Ruth Whippman
Right? Yeah.

00:20:55 – Eric Zimmer
And yet there is a message encoded in that. And it’s interesting because we tend to think of boys as being stronger. But you say that boys are by almost every measure more sensitive, fragile and emotionally vulnerable. Explain that, because I think it’s easy for us to see. The boys could be more aggressive or rambunctious. Right. Those boy things. But in what ways are they also sensitive, fragile and emotionally vulnerable?

00:21:25 – Ruth Whippman
Yeah. This was one of the biggest surprises to me. And it’s actually really well established in the literature. It’s not like some controversial thing that I’ve plucked out of nowhere. What is really surprising is that a baby boy is born with his brain. And when I’m talking about the right hemisphere of his brain, which is the part that deals with emotions, emotional self regulation, attachments, relationships. He’s born with that part of his brain about a month behind a baby girl in development. So a baby girl is born naturally, more emotionally resilient and independent and with less need for a caregiver. And so you see that boys at birth are, like, a little fussier, like, they find it harder to calm down. They’re more stressed by difficult events like being separated from their mothers. And you can see that actually any sort of bad thing that can happen to a baby, like any adverse event, like, you know, that the mom has postpartum depression and doesn’t bond properly, or that, you know, he’s neglected, or that he’s abused, or he grows up in poverty. All of those things have been shown in the data to have a bigger effect on boys than they do on girls. Boys brains are just naturally more vulnerable to disruption in those early years. And that carries on. But I think what happens. So boys actually need a little more care and a little more support right from birth. But because of our stories about masculinity, we believe that a boy is tougher and sturdier, and he needs less care. And you see all this research about how parents, like, handle baby boys differently. They roughhouse with them, they jiggle them, whereas they tend to give girls more of this kind of caretaking touch, you know, and they talk to girls more about their emotions. They use more words, they use more language, and, you know, they just treat them in a slightly more nurturing and emotive way. And so I think this, like, combination, boys need more, but they get less, really leads to some problems down the line.

00:23:41 – Eric Zimmer
You quote somebody who works in this space as saying, you know, we have an epidemic of uncared for boys. No wonder we’re seeing all this toxic masculinity when they grow up. The other thing that we’re seeing is, and again, this is not controversial, this is very clear in the data. Boys are not thriving in the world today. Young men are struggling in many ways. Tell me about some of those ways.

00:24:05 – Ruth Whippman
So young men are struggling in education. They’re falling behind girls in pretty much every measure from kindergarten to college through postgraduate degrees. They’re enrolling in college in fewer numbers than girls. They’re much more likely to drop out of college. Unemployment rates amongst young men are rising faster than in any other group. Boys and young men are not socializing as much as young women are. They’re spending far more time on screens and far less time socializing in person. So the Suicide rate for young men is about close to four times the rate for young women. Even though we see in the data that young women are more likely to report that they’re depressed. So boys and men are like holding this stuff inside until it’s way too late. They’re not seeking help. There’s a serious mental health problem with young men at the moment, but they’re not getting help for it and they’re not able to articulate it. So all these different ways, boys are not doing well.

00:25:06 – Eric Zimmer
And so I know there are a lot of theories about why this is, and you probably don’t have an answer, but what are the theories that make most sense to you?

00:25:16 – Ruth Whippman
Yeah, it’s a really interesting question. I think, you know, there’s this voice from the. Mainly from the right, which is like, boys don’t have enough masculinity. They just need to toughen up what we need to sort of toughen them up more. And back in the good old days, they were tougher and stronger and they were doing better. But I think that is a misreading of everything that’s going on. Personally, I think that what’s going on with boys at the moment is a combination of an old problem and a new problem. So the old problem is the old story that we’ve had for generations and generations, which is, you know, the toughen up that boys are under cared for in those sort of emotional and nurturing way that they’re meant to squash their emotions. And these things can lead to quite a psychologically unhealthy mind. So all of those old pressures of masculinity, I think are really unhealthy for boys and men. Men used to rise just because they had privilege. You know, it used to be that they would rise to the top just because everybody else was kept down. But now we’re taking away the barriers for everybody else. We’re starting to see that the way that we’re raising boys is actually really unhealthy and that, you know, without privilege they’re just kind of crumbling. Also, I think there are sort of more modern pressures which are like things like screens have given boys a real kind of option to avoid the real world in a way that they never really had before. And so I think that it’s easier. For example, you know, it’s never been a more fraught time to have sex and relationships as a boy or young man. And it’s never been easier to get your phone and just watch porn, for example. And it’s very fraught for boys Socializing in the real world, they don’t know how to be. It’s never been easier to just get on a video game and, like, live out your heroic, masculine fantasy. You know, one expert that I spoke to in the book characterized it as a kind of combination of fear and ease. So it’s like fearful being in the real world, and it’s easeful being on a screen.

00:27:12 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:27:12 – Ruth Whippman
So that’s one part of it. And, you know, there are also economic reasons. I think that the types of jobs that boys used to go into are in decline, you know, all of those kind of manufacturing roles. So I think it’s a combination of all different kinds of things that are all coming together in this cultural moment that we’re at.

00:27:30 – Eric Zimmer
And when we talk about this, you know, you can’t talk about it without talking about privilege. Right. That men have had over time. There was something in the book, though, that genuinely shocked me, and it was that black girls, by many measures, are doing better than white boys.

00:27:48 – Ruth Whippman
Yes. And that was really surprising to me as well. This was in the chapter about education specifically. So when it comes to success in high school, rates of going to college, rates of postgraduate degrees, on most of these measures, black girls are doing better than white boys. And so all of our understanding of systems of privilege, you know, of race and gender, are being turned on their head. You know, if privilege leads to success, then you would think that white boys would be doing better than anyone because they’ve had every type of privilege, you know, racial and gender privilege. And black girls, you know, you have to hand it to them. You know, it’s amazing. They have the same limitations, the same structural obstacles, the same underfunded schools, the same lack of opportunities as black boys, but they’ve managed to overcome all of those and, you know, overtake white boys. And so I think what we’re seeing is that something about the way we are socializing boys, and particularly when it comes to education, is really harmful. One thing that I would say about this sort of modern moment that we’re in is that, you know, we’ve got all the old pressures of masculinity that all our fathers lived with and our grandfathers, but also, like, this kind of flavor of masculinity is changing as well. So it used to be this kind of. We had this model which was like, be a tough guy, suppress your emotions, but also be a family man, be a breadwinner, be a provider. And those stories were also, like, really part of masculinity. But our kind of model for masculinity is becoming like more of a kind of cartoon action hero kind of masculinity, you know, a kind of muscle man. You see, these kinds of masculinity influences are all kind of doubling down on this model. So it’s like taking all the seeds of the old model, but just turning it into a cartoon. It’s basically, you know, muscles and guns and cage fighting all the way down. And so that is creating even more pressures around masculinity for boys in this moment. I think, you know, it’s even more ridiculous and even more hyped up than it ever was in many ways.

00:29:50 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. And it’s interesting. My son and I have talked about this. My son is 26, so he’s a young man. And we’ve talked about how there is lots of resources for men right out there, but they are overwhelmingly right wing and. Or very, very Christian, which, again, that’s not necessarily bad. Unless you’re neither of those things.

00:30:16 – Ruth Whippman
Right. And then where do you go?

00:30:17 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, yeah. And that is the question him and I’ve talked about is it just doesn’t seem that there’s places to go to talk about what being a man is or masculinity is in a time where the social pressures around that are changing very rapidly.

00:30:33 – Ruth Whippman
And I think boys are very fearful to talk about it, and rightly so, for being called out, for being over privileged or being entitled or mansplaining or taking up too much space, you know?

00:30:43 – Eric Zimmer
Exactly. And yet it’s critical. Right. You talk about this idea. You say we don’t experience our lives or emotions as part of a political class, but as individuals. So the fact that men, for as long as we can go back, have been privileged and have had power is all true. And some of that trickles down to young men of today. Right. It’s not that there’s not some inherited benefit there, but I know that around young people today, in a lot of spaces, I think being a straight white man is possibly the lowest social category. It is just a category that nobody, like you said, nobody wants to hear from. Shut up. Right. We’ve heard from you for long enough.

00:31:26 – Ruth Whippman
Right.

00:31:27 – Eric Zimmer
And that’s not tenable as an individual.

00:31:29 – Ruth Whippman
Right. And these boys who are growing up now, they haven’t lived that context, you know, and that context is real and it’s important. And we have to remind boys and men of it. And so it’s really complicated. My friend was telling me this story the other day about how her son, who’s I think eleven was at school and they had an affinity group for every sort of identity category. So it was like the black students affinity group, the lgbtq, the girls affinity group. And the one that they didn’t have was for boys. And it’s like, well, boys have already had power, you know, and this is meaningless to an 11 year old boy. They don’t feel powerful in their own life. They have nowhere to process it. And the thing that kind of compounds it is that, yes, it is true that patriarchy has given boys and men access to power. That is a very real thing. But even in that system, boys and men have been deprived of some really important things, which is emotionality, intimacy, human connection. So as I say in the book, you know, under patriarchy, boys and men have everything except the thing that’s most worth having, which is human connection, access to human intimacy. And so even under patriarchy, it’s not that men had all benefit and no harm. Patriarchy harms men and boys.

00:32:47 – Eric Zimmer
Precisely.

00:32:48 – Ruth Whippman
And so there’s no way to talk about that. We’ve focused because so heavily, particularly, there is a rich tradition within feminism of recognizing that patriarchy harms men and boys. But it’s like we’ve forgotten it all, you know, in this moment post. Me too. It’s just like, you’re privileged. You get everything. You’re lucky. Shut up. And that is not a healthy way for any young person to live or to grow.

00:33:10 – Eric Zimmer
Right. And there’s a couple different points in the book that you make this point that, you know, what we’re doing is, or trying to sort of push men down instead of sort of get everybody to the same level. That doesn’t really work. And you say, you talk about this because what we’re talking about, and you put it in one sentence, it’s hard to square male privilege with male vulnerability. You have both those things happening at the same time. Men have had privilege, do have privilege to a certain extent. And yet men as a whole, younger ones in particular, are extraordinarily vulnerable right now to many different problems. And so I think you do a great job of walking through this. I wanted to turn a little bit now to something that I didn’t really know about. I had heard the term incel, but I didn’t honestly even know what that really meant.

00:34:05 – Ruth Whippman
Yeah.

00:34:05 – Eric Zimmer
Before we go into it, share with me what that is.

00:34:08 – Ruth Whippman
Okay, so the word incel stands for involuntary celibate. So it’s a group of generally pretty young men on the Internet and often adolescent boys as well, but pretty young men who believe that they have been Excluded from sex and relationships. They can’t have sex, they can’t find a girlfriend or a partner. And they’re extremely lonely and usually profoundly depressed and often have pretty toxic politics. Not always, but often have pretty toxic politics. So they are misogynistic. There’s sort of links between incels and like white supremacy and all kinds of like really repulsive ways of being in the world. Not all incels are like that, but. And they have all these theories about, you know, they believe that it’s a kind of genetic inevitability that they will never find women. They believe that women are terrible and they’re shallow and they’re only interested in men for their looks. And they congregate in these online communities. And at their most extreme, they have this kind of violent fringe. So the incels and sort of incel adjacent men have been associated with. With several acts of mass violence, including mass shootings. Some of the very prominent school shootings have been traced back to men who have been associated with this movement. And it’s a really complicated and scary and also fascinating and sad phenomenon. And in the book I spend some time digging into this community. So I spend a lot of time in their spaces online, in their communities and forums. And I go pretty deep interviewing a few of them. Two of them end up in the book. Two of these interviews that are really quite lengthy and detailed with these two guys. Yeah, it was really quite an eye opening experience in a lot of different ways.

00:35:56 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. What I find interesting about it is there are many people who believe that you shouldn’t even give these people any air time, that they’re not lonely, sad men, that they’re toxic, dangerous people. So that you’ve got that view of the world Now. I tend to be of the view that generally that, you know, that phrase hurt people. Hurt people, Meaning that like if you’re hurting somebody, it’s because you are damaged. Right. In many ways. And looking at the incel community was difficult for me because a lot of these men are feeling like they’re not attractive enough, they’re not tall enough, they’re not strong enough for any women to desire them. I was a scrawny child and a short child, and it took me really till high school before I was able to really have sort of any success with women. Is that even a useful phrase anymore? Did I just say something that people are gonna be like? You can’t say that.

00:36:51 – Ruth Whippman
But I don’t know, I mean, it didn’t like for me, but you know, who knows? It’s all moving up probably before I.

00:36:56 – Eric Zimmer
Could have any relationships and go on any dates. Right, okay. So a lot of reading them with their complete belief that because of their physical looks they would never find a relationship was really saddening. And the thing that was most sad about the community, to me and you talk about it, is just the deepest hopelessness in the whole thing. It’s this belief that nothing could get better for them.

00:37:23 – Ruth Whippman
Yeah. And this sort of is in contrast to a lot of what we have come to call their manosphere, which is like the, you know, all of these sort of masculinity people online, the masculinity influencers, the Andrew Tate’s, the sort of quasi self help masculinity groups on the Internet. Because most of that sort of manosphere is predicated on this idea that there is a thing called an alpha male and that if you work hard at it, you can become that. So they sell this like they sort of prey on these vulnerable boys by saying, we know that you already feel insecure about your masculinity. Yes, there is an alpha male. Yes, this person is going to get all the women and all the success and all the status. And I can sell you exactly the model to get so pump iron. And. And the difference between those guys and the incels is that the incels, they believe all this stuff. They believe there’s an alpha male, they believe there’s a hierarchy, they believe in this system, but they’ve given up hope of ever climbing that ladder themselves. And what’s so interesting about them is that so on the one hand, there’s some of the most like it is toxic masculinity central over there. You go on those boards, there is misogyny that you just wouldn’t believe. There’s talking about raping and torturing women. There’s like some of the most repulsive views that you could ever imagine on those boards. But what there also is is this like deep sense of vulnerability, belonging and connection, like brotherhood. It’s almost that because they’ve kind of given up on ever climbing the masculinity ladder that they’re freed from all of its pressures as well, so they don’t have to man up and be tough and strong and invulnerable. And they can actually express their emotions and their sort of love for one another in a way that, that most men can’t. So it’s like both the worst of masculinity and this kind of freedom from masculinity there, which is really interesting.

00:39:35 – Eric Zimmer
You say that the Irony hit me hard. I’d spent all this time searching for a space in which boys and young men felt they could disregard masculine norms. And I thought I might find it in some kind of feminist affinity circle or a therapy group run by a soft spoken vegan. But instead I’d found it right here at the heart of manosphere in toxic masculinity central. It’s fascinating. You say incels are generally deeply preoccupied with their appearance. And I think this is interesting because the narrative that has been going on most of my adult life is that we have a culture in which women are body shamed and women are held up to these impossible standards and 100% true. I also believe that men have been.

00:40:20 – Ruth Whippman
Too, and it’s more socially acceptable.

00:40:22 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. I mean, when I was reading comic books as a kid, right. One of the ads was the Charles Atlas ads. And in the Charles Atlas ads, he was a weightlifter. There was a little scrawny kid on the beach who was getting sand kicked on him and none of the girls would look at him. He orders the Charles Atlas stuff, does the weightlifting and comes back and takes over the beach. Right. I mean, that was being marketed to young boys 50 years ago and it only ramped up.

00:40:47 – Ruth Whippman
That pressure has been exponentially worse on boys.

00:40:50 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. And so I think that that is an important part of the story that often isn’t told. Right. Or another way in which men suffer that isn’t talked about often. Because. Because if I were to sort of say that sort of thing generally to females, they would be like, yeah, but nothing like we were not to the degree we were. And I don’t know whether that’s true or not. Right. I think measuring degree doesn’t matter because the level of suffering was great for me.

00:41:17 – Ruth Whippman
Yeah, absolutely. And I think those pressures on boys. So it’s like the muscle man, you know, the online fitness influencers. You know, you can see it. The sort of ideal body shape for men has like ramped to this like ridiculous proportions in the same way that the ideal body shape for women has kind of shrunk to the part where, you know, if Barbie was sized up to a real person, she’d have a feeding tube and not be able to walk. You know, there is no human that can look like the CGI superheroes and you know, the online fitness influences. And that culture has really changed. But yeah, I mean, one of the incels was talking to me about short shaming of men, for example. And you know, yes, body image pressures on women are terrible. You know, I grew up with diet culture. It’s a generation of women have been damaged by that or several generations of women. But it’s like at this point I feel like I would never talk about somebody as having like a fat girl complex, you know, it would just be unthinkable. But like to talk about somebody as having a short man complex is completely fine, you know, and, and this incel, who was very short was telling me that, you know, online there are women telling short men to kill themselves that they would never have a short boyfriend, that they were shaming boys for being short. It’s something they can’t do anything about. And it’s like, you know, somehow we’ve got this notion that if we shame boys and men, you know, that we’re kind of punching up with a joke. We have this idea that it’s like okay to punch up and it’s okay to rib somebody who’s powerful and you know, whereas punching down is not acceptable. But at what point do we need to stop and say is this really punching up to like body shame? Like whatever he was at the time, 18, 19 year old boy, you know, who has serious mental health problems, no financial or social capital, you know, these incels are like profoundly depressed, marginalized, you know, is it really punching up to call him short to shame him for that? I believe not. You know, and I think we really need to look at that. You know, it’s a blind spot. And I think we need to stop body shaming. Boys and men.

00:43:25 – Eric Zimmer
Agree. I mean, we shouldn’t body shame anybody, right?

00:43:27 – Ruth Whippman
Anybody, of course.

00:43:28 – Eric Zimmer
But I mean, I remember clearly an incident in middle school of like girls laughing at me because I was too skinny. And again, these things aren’t new. I’m not a young person. Right. So I just think there’s this sense that you’re not punching up to that. You know, anytime you’re shaming anybody or making fun of anybody’s appearance, you’re being mean.

00:43:50 – Ruth Whippman
You’re being mean and you’re harming that person.

00:43:52 – Eric Zimmer
Yes.

00:43:52 – Ruth Whippman
There’s no punching up in there. And I think again, this starts to get back to the thing we were talking about, which is like, do you experience your life as part of a political class or as an individual? You know, yes, men have had power, but that makes no difference when you’re body shaming somebody who’s, you know, anybody for anything.

00:44:10 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. And you say this might be inching us closer to equality, but it doesn’t feel like progress right in the. That like now men are being shamed at A level that women are. That’s not progress, right?

00:44:21 – Ruth Whippman
Exactly. We’re not doing things better, and we should be learning from what we did with women, what we got wrong. And I think also because things have historically been so bad for women in that area, we have now, like, a really robust, like, body positivity movement. We have, like, language to describe it. We know how to talk about body shaming. We know how to call it out. We know how to, like, fight back. And I think the boys and men just didn’t know how to even start to fight back. And they felt that when they did, they were shamed for, you know, well, back in your box, you’ve got too much privilege. You know, women have suffered worse from you. Don’t. You don’t call it out. And this insult was telling me, you know, he wanted to go to therapy and to find a therapist. I mean, partly he couldn’t afford it, which is a huge problem, but also he was scared because he felt that if he articulated his problems to a therapist, they would shame him and say, you know, well, women have had it far worse than you. Now, I believe that a good therapist would never do that. But at the same time, the fact that he’s fearful of that speaks to something very real.

00:45:22 – Eric Zimmer
It speaks to something very real. And it also speaks to the cultural messaging that he’s getting from other men. Right. I mean, as I was reading about the incels, the layer upon layer of mistRuth or misunderstanding was painful to read. And one of the things I was thinking about is, like, there’s a mistake that’s being made there. And there’s often something in psychological literature called the three Ps, and it has to do with how you explain things. Right. You take things to be permanent. You think they’re personal and you think they’re pervasive. Right. And what these poor boys are doing is they’re taking the fact that some women only want tall men. And that is true. That is true to mean all women only want tall men. They’re taking these things to be pervasive. And that’s the big mistake, I think that’s happening. There is. It’s not that they’re not right some of the time. They’re not right all the time, though. I mean, and that’s just a general thing I think we do across the board is we just take an incident of a person on the left acting badly and we say, that’s the left. It’s pervasive, or somebody on the right doing that, and it just doesn’t do any of.

00:46:31 – Ruth Whippman
I think that’s true. And I think we’ve just got to the point where we’ve just lost empathy for anybody. You know, it’s just like, yes, I was talking to these incels and there was just layer upon layer of pain and trauma and terrible messaging and half tRuths and, you know, all of these things and these people are really suffering. And I think the more we say we’re not going to talk to them, we don’t want to humanize them. You know, this is a whole thing, you know, we don’t want to humanize these people because. And there’s this argument which is like, if an Arab Muslim commits an act of violence, we call him a terrorist. But if a sort of white man, we say he has mental health problems. And there’s tRuth in that.

00:47:13 – Eric Zimmer
For sure there is.

00:47:14 – Ruth Whippman
But what we’ve decided is that we’re gonna do about that is this race to the bottom. So it’s like, okay, let’s dehumanize everyone rather than trying to humanize the Arab Muslim and see, well, what’s going on for him and how did he get to this place and why does he want to. And he’s a real person who probably got into terrorism through poverty and terrible messaging and terrible ideas about masculinity as well. Actually, let’s just dehumanize the white guy as well to like, you know, And I think that is just this terrible mistake. It’s a race to the bottom.

00:47:45 – Eric Zimmer
Yep. The other thing that you mentioned, I thought was very interesting was that you say a wide body of research shows that it’s not masculinity itself that makes men violent, but the sense of shame that they are masculine enough.

00:47:57 – Ruth Whippman
Oh, yes.

00:47:58 – Eric Zimmer
And wow. And I actually resonate with that personally also. Not that I’m violent, but I can share a little bit about that in a minute, but say a little bit more.

00:48:06 – Ruth Whippman
Yeah, this was really fascinating to me. And it’s one of those things that you see in the research and it feels so profoundly true when you hear it. You’re like, yes, of course. Because there’s this impossible standard for masculinity that boys and men feel that they have to meet. And there is always going to be inadequacy built into that. No human man can be the kind of superhero, you know, the model that they’re expected to be. So they will always fall short, but some fall more short than others, you know, and some people are more successful in this system than others, but it comes in with built in Shame. And the research shows it’s this measure called masculine discrepancy stress, which means that when a man believes that he falls short of the standard for manhood, he is far more likely, you know, when he feels shame about his inability to live up to masculinity standards, then he’s more likely to commit pretty much all kinds of violence. Sexual violence, domestic violence, you know, what they call intimate partner violence, assault with a weapon, assault of all kinds. And you can see it. It’s that anger, it’s that shame. It’s this shame cycle that just keeps going and going and going. It rang so true. And this is why, you know, we talk about all these extremes, you know, the incels, the manosphere, you know, the sex offender and everything. But I think this is so built into the culture at every level. We give boys, right from the beginning, this kind of superhero myth about who they’re supposed to be. So all boys are operating with this impossible pressure, this impossible standard. And so I think, you know, we really need to look at what we’re asking of men and boys. And that’s why I don’t like this masculinity framework. You know, even when it’s positive, even when we’re talking about positive masculinity, we just keep on reinforcing this idea that the most important thing is to be masculine.

00:49:56 – Eric Zimmer
I just am very nonviolent by nature, so I’m lucky in that way. But I resonated with this because again, this is mostly stuff as a young man, you know, I wasn’t, you know, quote unquote, masculine enough, right, that what I just did was I just got in lots of trouble. That was my way of being tough, is I’m in trouble, right? I’m not afraid of the law, you know. And again, it wasn’t violent, but it certainly wasn’t, wasn’t pro social behavior. You know, it didn’t help me or society. And it was this, I can see it now, this semi conscious attempt to be like, but I am tough to compensate, right?

00:50:33 – Ruth Whippman
And so that’s a sort of very minor and, you know, relatively healthy example of the same thing that you see with, say, school shooters. You know, when you read the manifestos written by these guys, it’s this, like, utter shame. They’ve internalized this message that they’re supposed to be this kind of glorious masculine hero. And then the shame of, like, falling short and then something like a school shooting. It’s like this very obvious, splashy trope of masculinity. You know, you get a gun and you shoot a bunch of people. It’s like a way of reclaiming this masculine status. And that’s like the most tragic and awful example of it. But you see it, you know, you see lesser versions of it everywhere.

00:51:14 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. Well, I think this is a good place for us to wrap up. You and I are going to continue talking in the post show conversation because we just didn’t get to at all what ways this has caused you to parent your boys differently. And so I’d love to take this into some actual practical examples. Listeners, if you would like to hear this post show conversation and many other post show conversations, which some people tell me are the best conversations, as well as ad free episodes and to support podcasts that you care about, you could go to oneyoufeed.net join and become part of our community. Ruth, thank you so much for coming on. I thought the book was so well done. I mean your last book was too. You’re just. You’re great.

00:51:58 – Ruth Whippman
Oh, thank you. It’s been such a pleasure to get to talk to you again. So thank you.

Episode Transcript:

00:01:56 – Eric Zimmer
Hi Peter, welcome to the show.

00:01:58 – Peter Kim
Thank you, Eric. It’s great to be here with you.

00:02:00 – Eric Zimmer
We’re going to be discussing your book, which is called How Trust the Science of How Relationships are Built, Broken, and Repaired. But before we get into that, we’ll start like we always do with the parable. In the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild, and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops. They think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

00:02:46 – Peter Kim
I think the parable speaks to a fundamental truth about human nature. And it’s interesting how well that parable sums it up, because this duality that we have in us is something that has been shown in neuroscience that we have a primitive brain that’s very instinctual and then, you know, a higher order area of the brain that can override those instincts. Different areas of psychology talk about the same thing. If you get to Freud, you know, he talks about the ID superego and ego, and the ego regulates those two. Battling wolves. Evolutionary psychology talks about what is morality. And there’s a view that morality is about overriding our genetic predisposition. And for me and the book, there too is a duality which is that we have a choice in how we view the world and how we view others and ourselves. And there’s one choice that is very automatic and very easy to make. And then there’s a different kind of choice we can make that leads to a more deliberative process that can hopefully lead to a better assessment of others than ourselves.

00:04:00 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, I agree with everything you just said there. And your book really does get into some of the defaults we have when it comes to trust and some of the common mistakes that we might make when it comes to trust. But before we get into all that, let’s start off with why is trust important to ourselves, to our society? Why care?

00:04:22 – Peter Kim
Trust is the fundamental ingredient in society that makes it work. Our ability to interact and work with others depends on the expectation that others are worth it, that we can make ourselves vulnerable to them and do things with the expectation that they will follow through on their end of the bargain and that that expectation will be fulfilled. And if we don’t have that, then everything falls apart. How can we even walk out the door if we don’t trust others to follow the law, to not take advantage of us? The level of trust is so important for society that it’s even been shown to have an implication for national gross Domestic Product. Right. The success of nations has been correlated to the level of trust in that nation. It really is the Greece that makes all the wheels turn in society. It really allows us to work with one another, to cooperate. Cooperate and to work for things that are beyond our immediate self interest.

00:05:26 – Eric Zimmer
One of the things that you start the book with, and it’s a little bit counterintuitive, is that we tend to actually have a high level of initial trust in people. There’s that phrase like, you know, you have to earn trust. Some of your research shows. Not necessarily.

00:05:42 – Peter Kim
That’s right. The default assumption for ages has been trust starts at zero and only builds gradually over time as we get to know one another. There is an element of truth in the sense that the more we know others, the more we Have a sense of how much to trust and so on. But it turns out that when we first meet other people in the world, we also rely on a host of cues that tell us whether or not someone should be trusted. Things like, did we live in the same town, go to the same school, share the same interests, and have the same affiliations more generally. So all of that can tell us whether or not someone. Someone is like us. And we tend to trust people that are more similar to ourselves. And then things like, you know, reputations, credentials. There are all sorts of cues that are out there that give us an indication of whether someone else is trustworthy. And all that helps us to work with others and interact with others right off the bat and essentially make ourselves more vulnerable than we would have if trust really did start at zero. Because if it did start at zero, all the wheels would stop turning.

00:06:53 – Eric Zimmer
Right? Right. You say there’s a problem because that high initial trust that we’re talking about is also very fragile. What do you mean by that?

00:07:02 – Peter Kim
It’s precisely because that trust is based on these superficial cues that we get into trouble. We presume someone might be trustworthy simply because of how they look, what they’re wearing, where they’re from, and that may not necessarily be a good indication of how trustworthy they will be. And so that’s where we are often in a situation where our evaluations of others are very fragile. Yeah, they can be changed dramatically based on the additional cues we get within the first few minutes of that interaction, a day later, and so on. And so it really is about how we hone that trust, that initial provisional trust over time, as more information comes our way about the other side and about the situation. So that’s the journey that we’re all on. How do we navigate the start where trust is high, to a sustained level of trust in someone as we get to know them further.

00:08:06 – Eric Zimmer
Are some of us more naturally trusting than others?

00:08:10 – Peter Kim
There is a predisposition to trust. So some of us are more psychologically inclined to trust others. That has been reported in the scientific literature. And, you know, the nice thing about that is that we’d like to think, you know, based on the assumption that that might be foolish. You know, we’d like to think that they’d be taken advantage of by others quite readily, but it turns out that that’s not the case. Those who are inclined to trust wind up better off, according to the evidence. They wind up happier. They are sought after by others as desirable partners. And so it turns out that when we trust Others, that tends to be an expectation that’s fulfilled and that we wind up in a much better place.

00:08:58 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. I’ve often thought about that basic idea around an orientation to whether we trust others generally or not. And I think we all know people, some of whom are far more trusting, and other people who are just far more suspicious of everybody kind of right out of the gate. And I agree. I think some of it’s probably inborn. And then like anything else, it’s conditioned by countless experiences. And I also think there’s an element of agency in it, too, which is, what orientation do we want to take? And I’ve often thought I would much rather think the best of everybody and occasionally be disappointed than think bad about everyone and very occasionally protect myself from some downside. And I think it gets to kind of what you were just saying there, that people with a higher trust orientation tend to have a better level of happiness.

00:09:49 – Peter Kim
Yeah. Also, it gives us those who are more trusting have more opportunities. They have more opportunities to build relationships. They have more opportunities to have fruitful collaborations and a host of other possibilities open up. And that’s where, yes, there will be a subset of those opportunities that will turn out well. But on the whole, the evidence indicates that you are going to be better off as compared to someone who is not trusting, who is always suspicious and forecloses those opportunities and they’re safe. They’ve mitigated the upside. But what they’re not aware of is that they’ve mitigated a lot of upside, too. And part of that upside is created merely by the decision to trust, because it turns out that when we trust others, they don’t see this as an opportunity for exploitation in general. In general, what they see it as is they see it as a precious resource to preserve for the future. They want to prove you right. So if you trust me, I don’t want to say, well, you are a fool. I’m really actually an untrustworthy person. I think I’m trustworthy, and I want to fulfill that expectation that you have in me. And that’s the general tendency that people have. And so that’s part of the reason why trusting others can be a good strategy.

00:11:13 – Eric Zimmer
You talk about two really powerful determinants of trust that are different, the first being competence, and then the second being integrity. Can you explain what you mean by each of those and maybe give us an example of what we’re talking about here?

00:11:30 – Peter Kim
Competence concerns the sense that others will have the skills and knowledge to fulfill a task. So it’s a Very straightforward, you know, consideration that we have when we work with others or rely on someone to do something for us. Integrity is the sense that others will adhere to principles you consider acceptable. So that gets to, you know, do they share the same values? Will they, you know, prioritize the same things as you in life, for example? And so those are the two basic dimensions that have been found to be consistently the most important in determining trust. Trust in others across all sorts of situations, whether you’re evaluating peers, leaders or subordinates, and so on. So it’s been a pretty robust finding across all sorts of contexts.

00:12:24 – Eric Zimmer
So can you give me an example of a violation of trust and whether we would see it as a matter of competence or integrity?

00:12:35 – Peter Kim
Sure. So some of the studies that I’ve conducted with a bunch of collaborators has essentially given a different explanation for the exact same event. So in these studies, we would have someone interviewing for a job at an accounting firm, and it turns out that this person had misfiled a tax return at that job. And then as that’s being discussed, the candidate either explains it as a matter of not knowing the tax code that was relevant to that situation, so that would be a competence related issue. She just lacked that knowledge, or she had misfiled that tax return intentionally in order to please an important client. So that was a deliberate choice to fudge the numbers or do something a little bit shady for the sake of making someone happy. And so that would be one way of making that distinction. Another way of thinking about the distinction is to think about it as a difference of intent. So if you had done something unknowingly or you just screwed up somehow, that would be a competence related violation. If you did something knowingly, intentionally, then that would be more a matter of integrity. It would be a reflection of them not sharing the same values as you and committing the violation as a result. And so that’s the high level distinction between those two ideas. But one of the things I delve into further in the book is what does integrity even mean? Because on the one hand, we can say integrity is about whether others will do things like we would do them. Right? They adhere to principles we consider important. But in the real world, things get really messy on that front. And that’s where what integrity means is far more complicated than most of us presume.

00:14:34 – Eric Zimmer
Right. I mean, I think it gets to intention to some degree in conversation about harm. These days we talk about intention and impact. And I think your book argues that both those things matter, that both those things are actually important.

00:14:50 – Peter Kim
Right. So I think the impact element gets to whether or not harm was created, whether a violation occurred. And then there’s this element of intention which gets to why, why did this happen? And that’s the part that, well, it gets to the two wolves parable that you brought up at the start of the podcast. We are inclined to believe that when something goes wrong, the other side had done this intentionally, they meant to do it, or they were intentionally negligent and so on. But there is this alternative explanation which was they didn’t know, they didn’t have enough information about what would be appropriate in the situation, or they lacked the perspective necessary to make the right choice. And that too can be just as legitimate an explanation for what happened. And the choice we make about that attribution can lead to very different reactions in the eyes of the perceiver.

00:15:52 – Eric Zimmer
Makes me think of a phrase I’ve heard somewhere, don’t attribute to malice. What could be explained by incompetence. Basically sort of saying exactly what you’re saying here, which is, first assume like that somebody was trying to do the right thing and just didn’t know how or made a mistake. And then, you know, from there you can kind of move on to where they are. You keep using the word attribution. And one of my favorite, I think it’s considered a cognitive bias is called the fundamental attribution error, which states that when I make a mistake, I look at all the circumstances around it. You know, if I kick the vending machine, it’s because I didn’t get enough sleep last night and I’m under a lot of pressure. But if you kick the vending machine, it’s because you’re an angry person. And so you’re talking about attribution a lot in this book. Say more about it.

00:16:40 – Peter Kim
Yes. So that is part of what affects our inclination to make this decision, that the act was intentional. Due to a lack of moral principles, we often lack insight into all the forces that might be at play that might explain why something happen. So an example that comes to mind is the Wells Fargo scandal that occurred a few years ago where, you know, the bank was accused of opening these fraudulent accounts for their clients. A number of workers at Wells Fargo had been involved in doing this. And our initial explanation for why this has happened is that these bank employees were, you know, just trying to get ahead by, you know, doing a fast one, taking liberties with the power that they had to create these accounts on behalf of these clients. So that was very much an integrity based attribution. It turned out related to the fundamental attribution error that what they were doing was largely due to a system of incentives and pressures that were created by Wells Fargo as a whole. They created a pressure cooker where if you did not open enough accounts, you were essentially fired or Passover for promotion. There were all these consequences. And so here was a situation where they didn’t have full control over their actions. They were being induced to behave in a certain way. And so that provided a very different lens onto the same situation. Maybe we wouldn’t necessarily put it into competence 100% as an attribution, but it gets closer to that. It’s not necessarily something they would have done on their own if given the choice.

00:18:51 – Eric Zimmer
And you say that we are more willing to forgive competence based breaches of trust versus integrity based breaches of trust.

00:19:01 – Peter Kim
Yes. And it gets to some odd asymmetries we have in our mental basement. So we are predisposed to view negative information about competence as less informative than positive information about competence. So if you were a baseball player and you hit a home run, you’re considered a home run hitter, even though you might strike out afterwards. That one instance of positive information is considered very diagnostic in our minds. And it’s because we believe that only people who are super competent can perform at that level. And that’s the bias that we have in all sorts of domains when it comes to matters of competence. You can only really be successful at something if you’re truly competent. And even successful people might fail sometimes, or not do well because, for example, you might have an injury, or you might be really distracted, or you may lack the motivation to perform well. So the negative information about competence is just not considered very informative because there are lots of explanations for why that might happen. But when it comes to matters of integrity, that bias is reversed. We consider negative information about integrity much more diagnostic than positive information about integrity. So if you get caught cheating on your spouse once and you say, well, I didn’t cheat on you yesterday, that’s not going to work so well. Right. Because that negative information is considered so diagnostic. And why is this? It’s because we believe that only people who lack integrity would do something like that. Whereas there are lots of occasions where unethical people won’t behave badly, for example, if they think they’ll get caught, or if the incentives aren’t high enough for them to break the rules, or so on. So that’s where that asymmetry arises. We just don’t see that positive information about integrity to be very helpful because bad people can avoid doing bad things on a given moment for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with their values or ethicality.

00:21:12 – Eric Zimmer
So let’s talk about apology a little bit. And I think it’s important to make a distinction about what we’re talking about in this book because we’re talking about trust and the repair of trust, not necessarily forgiveness, for example. Say in what ways those are different.

00:21:30 – Peter Kim
They’re different in the sense that forgiveness can occur even if you don’t intend to ever interact with that person again. So there are many instances when real harm was done and people who have been harmed choose eventually to forgive the harm doer as a way of getting past what happened so they no longer ruminate over what happened. They are able to move on as a result of that forgiveness. So forgiveness, it’s a one sided action that can be very beneficial. You can forgive as a way of letting go and moving forward. Trust, on the other hand, is always a two sided decision because it involves the decision to make yourself vulnerable to that person again. And so that becomes a thornier issue. It requires the expectation that the other side will redeem themselves if they’ve done something bad. And that is not necessarily something that people will believe depending on the attribution that they make. And this gets to your point about apologies. Apologies are, well, they’ve been considered sort of the gold standard for addressing these kinds of incidents. And in many situations they can be quite helpful. But the problem with apologies is that they’re double edged in nature. They are helpful in the sense that they signal a desire to do better. It signals regret and remorse. And so by extension it indicates that they won’t do this again. But apologies also do something else which is not so great. And that’s. It confirms guilt. You apologize when you’ve done something wrong. So you’re saying, yes, I did something wrong and then I’m going to fix this in the future. It really conveys these two signals and the question becomes, well, which signal becomes more important? Do we focus on these positive signals of redemption or do we focus on these negative signals of guilt? And it turns out that that’s where the biases that we’ve been just talking about with regard to competence and integrity play a huge role. So for matters of competence, we’ll focus on the signals of redemption rather than the confirmation of guilt. Because we don’t consider that negative information about competence very diagnostic. We consider positive information about competence much more informative. But if we see the same violation as a matter of integrity. We’re going to focus on the confirmation of guilt, that negative information of integrity that’s been confirmed by the apology. And we’re going to dismiss the positive signals that the person is going to fix this in the future. So that’s where the choice of attribution can make a huge difference in whether or not you’re willing to trust the other person. Again, after the exact same response, they have the same apology.

00:24:31 – Eric Zimmer
And so what could we take from this when it comes to making apologies in our own life? Right, because you said apologies are a double edged sword. On one hand they express a desire to do better in the future or a desire to repair the situation. And yet they also admit guilt. How is that different in maybe a corporate setting where a company by apologizing is sort of admitting to to guilt versus in an individual setting.

00:25:02 – Peter Kim
One of the important lessons of this distinction is that we as apologizers need to be aware of what attribution the others, the perceivers are making. So most of the conversation that occurs after a violation has occurred is about whether or not someone is going to apologize or not. Right. So it’s the type of response that’s the focus and what we ignore. Something that’s as if not more important is the attribution we’re making for why the incident happened. So one of the problems that occurs when you know, someone might commit a violation and they are being pressured to apologize is that they might do so based on a self serving view that this was a competence related issue. Right. In their view, in their own world, they would not have done this. Again, this was a mistake in their minds. But they’re not taking the other side’s perspective. If the other side is framing this exact same incident differently, then that same apology that they think will be very successful will turn out to be very ineffective. And so that’s where the, in a way a different discussion has to occur simultaneously. In addition to whether you apologize or not, it is about what is the interpretation of this incident. And that is something that needs to be addressed as much if not more so than this issue of how you respond.

00:27:10 – Eric Zimmer
Let’s take an example here and see if we can sort of bring all these things together in an example. So let’s just say that there is a couple and person A in the relationship is unfaithful. So we’re talking now about attribution, which is why did person A act that way? And I think what you’re saying is person A is going to want to interpret it as the person who did the thing as a one time mistake. I did it because. And I would have my reasons for it and they would be more sort of competence based, but that their partner, person B is thinking it’s because they’re a bad person or they’re fundamentally untrustworthy person, and so they’re attributing it to integrity, not sort of a competence based situation. And I think what you’re saying is that while person A who was unfaithful, can and should apologize in this case, that if they don’t find some way to have a conversation about the perceived lack of integrity on their side, that apology may be ineffective.

00:28:24 – Peter Kim
Yes, I think that’s true. With a caveat.

00:28:26 – Eric Zimmer
Okay, please. Yeah, correct me where I get it wrong. I’m just trying to sort of put it into an actual example here.

00:28:32 – Peter Kim
Sure. So I would just temper it a bit in the sense that there are probably some violations that are clearly matters of integrity, and there are certain violations that are clearly matters of competence, and then there are violations that are in a gray area. And so to the extent that you’ve done something that’s clearly a matter of integrity, I don’t know how much you can do to resolve that situation.

00:28:59 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:28:59 – Peter Kim
You know, the person who committed the violation may still see it as a matter of competence. Just because we’re so good at, you know, construing the world in a way that will make us feel favors us.

00:29:11 – Eric Zimmer
Yep, yep.

00:29:12 – Peter Kim
So this matter of an affair, people will have different views about this. You know, I’m sure the person who commits the affair. Well, maybe I shouldn’t say. I’m sure, I’m sure they’re. There’s times when someone who commits an affair will see it as a mistake. Right. And you’re right there. Like the person who might be affected by that affair, the spouse will more likely see it as a matter of integrity. And that will be a major disconnect. It will be a reason why the apology won’t be so successful in that instance. I will also reaffirm your point that, that in that kind of instance it is still important to apologize. Because if you’re caught red handed, if you’re really guilty, I mean, the counterpart knows that it doesn’t really help to deny this. Right.

00:30:03 – Eric Zimmer
Right.

00:30:03 – Peter Kim
Yeah. So if your hand is caught in the cookie jar, this matter of guilt is not in question. The only real question becomes, will you redeem yourself in the future? And I think there, what I’m reminded of is a response that I find really interesting that people use sometimes, which is it was an error in judgment. What does that response entail? It entails that you had intentionally done it at the time, but now you know better. Right. So you are in a way recasting that same incident as a matter of competence. You have more knowledge about the repercussions of your actions now, and as a result you would not do that again. And so that kind of framing can be helpful as a way of giving the other side the view that no, it’s not a matter of you lacking moral principles, of you being a bad person, it’s because you just didn’t know any better at the time. And so to the extent that you can make that change in attribution, you’ll be better off. But with that said, there is another problem, and it’s that perceivers are not blank slates. They won’t just buy whatever story you tell them, especially since they know that you as a violator, have an incentive to tell them something that will get them off the hook. Right?

00:31:30 – Eric Zimmer
Right.

00:31:30 – Peter Kim
So there is going to be pushback by the perceiver because they will have a vested interest in their own worldview and maintaining it. And so that becomes the battleground. How do you shape these worldviews? To a degree that it helps the violator address the incident and repair trust that is easier in some contexts than others. And this is where motivation comes into play. So this choice between competence and integrity, there is this element of these integrity attributions being easier and more automatic. But there’s also a motivation that we have to make one kind of attribution or another. So if someone commits a violation and that person is a dear friend, and we want to maintain a relationship with that person, we are going to try much harder to see this as a matter of competence. But if that same violation occurs, it’s done by a stranger or someone in an out group, someone we see as sort of like the enemy, we will clearly see that as an integrity based violation. So we have a vested interest in making one attribution or another. And so that’s another thing that affects the choice.

00:32:46 – Eric Zimmer
So, for example, what you’re saying is if a politician is accused of sexual impropriety, if that politician is the side that we root for, we’re going to want to believe it was an error in judgment or a temporary mistake or whatever it is, Right? But if that person is in the other political party, we’re going to want to attribute it to just they’re a bad person and they’re another example of what people like that are absolutely.

00:33:19 – Peter Kim
And you have just explained a large part of our political divide that we have in the world.

00:33:25 – Eric Zimmer
Right. Well, it gets back to this fundamental attribution error a little bit that I was talking about, which is, what do we attribute the reasons that somebody did something? I always think it’s one of the places that as humans we get into the most trouble is when we think we know other people’s motivations or reasons.

00:33:47 – Peter Kim
Right, right.

00:33:48 – Eric Zimmer
I see this in relationships over and over and over. It’s like, you didn’t take out the trash. And so thus what that means is you don’t care about me. And that’s the attribution I’m making. Right. Whereas it could just be something completely different. It could just be that somebody’s very forgetful. As soon as we start attributing reasons to things, we can be on slippery ground, I think is where we get into trouble. And yet we can’t not do it. We are always trying to make meaning out of what occurs.

00:34:21 – Peter Kim
Right. So the fundamental attribution error provides additional nuance to the story because that’s really about whether you consider the person responsible for what happened versus the situation. And then the choice between competence and integrity. You know, the person is still responsible, but was it because they just forgot or was it because they just didn’t see this as important enough to do? Right. And so in your example about the trash, the fundamental attribution error could be, well, they didn’t do it and it’s because they either decided not to do it or forgot. A third explanation could be there was an emergency that pulled them out of the house and they just couldn’t because they had to attend to some work emergency or, you know, the child at school, you know, had some sort of incident and so you had to rush there. So all of that can be involved in the attribution process. And the more we attend to those things, the better off we are in really coming up with a comprehensive understanding of that situation. And I think one of the points of the book is that we never really put much time into understanding all those forces, all those possibilities. We make the automatic knee jerk interpretation, which is quite often wrong.

00:35:44 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, you talk about four guiding lessons that we can take from your work here. And I thought maybe we could walk through those and you could explain them. The first is most of us want to be good. Say more about that.

00:35:57 – Peter Kim
This is based on the fact that the evidence indicates that when people are trusted, they don’t see this as an opportunity for exploitation. And so it is A challenge to the prevailing assumption that’s been out there that, yeah, you make yourself vulnerable, then they’ll try to exploit that vulnerability. And there’s certainly people who will try to do that. But for the most part, people in the world, they don’t want to say, you’re a sucker for trusting me. They want to say, you are right in trusting me. I am a good person. And what it speaks to is that a lot of the violations that occur in the world isn’t because someone is deciding to be bad. It’s often because of almost a miscommunication about what constitutes goodness in a particular situation. And so it really speaks to the need to clarify what would be good in the situation and help people get there. So an example that relates to my own line of work is as a faculty member at a university. You know, I have to give assignments all the time and, you know, there’s always the temptation to cheat. Well, part of what I have to do, my responsibility based on this guiding principle, is to clarify expectations about what’s acceptable and what’s not. The use of AI, for example, in assignments, you know, so that’s a big question mark. So what is my stance? How should they navigate the situation? So to provide clarification based on the expectation that people want to be good and I just need to help them get there, help them maintain that desire and that reputation in this very messy world that we have.

00:37:46 – Eric Zimmer
Excellent. And then the next is the complexity of truth, which I think we’ve kind of been talking about this idea that the reasons people do things is usually far more multifaceted than we think.

00:37:59 – Peter Kim
I think that’s a really important point that I try to stress throughout the book. You’re right. And I think what it gets to is that we’re not predisposed to look at that complexity. We want simple stories and we want to have these very quick determinations about what happened. And we need to be aware that we as perceivers have a responsibility to put in the time to really understand why things happen. Because honestly, we will all be in positions where we’re accused of something at some point, and we will want others to engage in that same kind of thoughtful deliberation about us rather than have those knee-jerk reactions.

00:38:43 – Eric Zimmer
The third guiding lesson is you call the upside of intent. What do you mean by that?

00:38:49 – Peter Kim
So much of the book sort of underscores the problems when people make these attributions of low integrity. The idea that you will try to pull a fast one on them, that you will be opportunistic that guiding lesson is really about. Well, we shouldn’t necessarily be so defeatist about that bias that we have in our heads, because what it tells us is that one of the things we should be striving for is to make that attribution less likely. And how do we do that? We can work harder to convey the sense that we are doing our very best to do the right thing for the people around us, for the people who might be judging us. And the more we do that, the less likely people will be to make that automatic attribution that we have low integrity. And in fact, the more it seems like we’re looking out for them, the more invested they’ll be in the relationship and the more motivated they will be to see any failing as a matter of competence rather than integrity. Because they won’t want to make that negative attribution of integrity that can be so destructive to that relationship.

00:40:09 – Eric Zimmer
And then the last lesson is the need to walk through doors. What does that mean?

00:40:15 – Peter Kim
This was something that came out of an interview of someone that I write about in the book. His name’s father, Greg, and he started this organization called Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles. And it is an organization meant to help former gang members rehabilitate and reenter society. And one of the lessons he learned was that he can’t impose this program on people. They have to make the decision that they want to rehabilitate, otherwise it doesn’t work. The program that is very successful, it won’t work in that kind of instance where it’s not a choice by the person who might be enrolled. That speaks to this distinction between forgiveness and trust that we talked about earlier. We can forgive people. That can be a one sided action. Another thing that the book talks about is we can try to do things that reduce our vulnerability. So we can implement all these protective mechanisms and enforcement mechanisms to keep people from doing bad things. But that actually doesn’t improve trust because, you know, if they’re behaving well afterwards, we are inclined to see this as the result of the laws and enforcement mechanisms we put in place, rather than because they were trustworthy. So the need to walk through the doors really gets to the idea that it’s not a one sided action. We have to depend on the other side to do their part, regardless of whether we’re the perceiver or the violator. Right. We each need to do our part to help navigate this quagmire, the complexity of truth, to really get at a view that would give a person the opportunity to redeem themselves.

00:42:04 – Eric Zimmer
Excellent. Well Peter, this is a good place for us to wrap up. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I’ve really enjoyed talking with you and really enjoyed the book.

00:42:13 – Peter Kim
Likewise Eric. It’s been a real pleasure.

Episode Transcript:

Eric Zimmer  01:57

Hi, Kathryn. Welcome to the show.

Kathryn Mannix  02:00

Eric. Hi. Thanks for inviting me.

Eric Zimmer  02:02

I’m really excited to talk to you today. We’re going to be talking about a subject that is heavier than most, but not maybe as heavy as we make it out to be. I’m hoping as we go through this conversation, because we’re going to be talking about death and we’re going to be discussing your book, which is called with the end in mind. But before we do that, we’ll start like we always do with the parable. In the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild, and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear, and the grandchild stops. They think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, Well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. I

Kathryn Mannix  02:59

love this parable, and I’m struck by it often in my work. So in my life, I think it’s easy for us to catch ourselves out feeding the needier Wolf, and often that’s the bad wolf. That’s the wolf that comes from pesters. So sometimes it’s really important to notice that this thing that I’m doing to make myself feel better is actually feeding my fear. Is feeding my worry and concern, and it’s moving me away from being confident that taking courage and feeling the fear and doing it anyway, will, in the end, prevail, and I think if we do that cycle often enough, I hope what we do is we start to wear the footsteps past the bad world store and towards courage and towards healing and moments and holding life in a way that’s trusting, that’s

Eric Zimmer  04:00

beautiful. It makes me think of the idea of avoidance, right? When you avoid what you fear, you strengthen it. You’re subtly sending the message to yourself. I can’t handle this.

Kathryn Mannix  04:12

Yeah, right. And so in my work, of course, I meet lots of people who are maintaining their peace of mind about the fact that their death is approaching by using the really, really helpful, or is helpful technique of complete denial. So if you don’t believe the thing is true, you don’t have to feel any of the difficult emotions. And it’s almost a point of equipoise, I suppose, between the wolves, because it’s so easy to slip sideways into fear and despair in one direction, and yet, if you’re able to open the little denial just enough to say if there were little bit of this that I could deal with today, then you’re stepping up in courage and you. Are stepping out, perhaps, towards the arms of other people who are prepared to help, to hold you and to help you to face the difficult place. And so maybe one of the other things to think about with the metaphorical rules is that wolves work impacts and that we live in community, and the people who are facing years of their lives, sometimes tragically, are alone, but that’s really ran mostly. There’s a small group to an army of well wishers and supporters who confronted by the person’s denial don’t know how to be by enabling them to start a conversation that requires courage but requires tenderness, and I’ve written separately about that. Then we move them into a place where the pack is surrounding the wolf and moving them in the direction of their good wolf, their courage, they’re facing their fear. They’re having more information, because information, in the end, is the light, isn’t it, that shines into the dark place and says, Okay, that’s what it looks like, right? Okay, how do we do this?

Eric Zimmer  06:12

So you have a wonderful story in the book about denial, but I don’t want to go there just yet. I kind of want to start at the beginning a little bit. You say that we all bring our own ideas and expectations with us in any encounter with the big questions, whether that’s birth, death, love, loss or transformation, we frame things through the lens that we see it. We see it mirrored to us, and we think that’s what it’s like, and you say that death has sort of fallen out of the big questions, right? You said it’s become increasingly taboo. Yeah, I

Kathryn Mannix  06:48

think this is really interesting, because it’s not that we don’t think about it, it’s that we didn’t talk about it. And the taboo is almost the thought police that if there were a third person with us now, we might now be worrying that they might be uncomfortable if we pursue this conversation, or we might be watching really carefully in case this is going to be triggering for them. So often it’s a kindness that we’re being careful with each other, and sometimes it’s an overridingness. So I remember our colleague coming back to work after the death of her father, and I bumped into her in the little hospital kitchen where we used to go to sneak a little tea break in between really busy clinics or whatever. And it was tiny. You could only fit three people in at a time when we had to move very carefully around each other to get to the hot water boiler or the cupboard at the mugs in or whatever. So I’m welcoming my colleague back and saying I was really, really sorry to hear that your dad died, and it’s great to have you back at work. And you know we’re here if you want backup, you tell us, don’t let us push it. And she said, thanks. And she left her kitchen area, and there was a third colleague hovering at the edge, somebody who worked in a slightly different discipline from us. And as our bereaved colleague left, she came into the kitchen, she hissed me, I cannot believe you said the word dead to her when her father has just died, and I’m thinking, hang on, it’s the thought police here. My bereaved colleague and I have just had a perfectly okay conversation. We’ve acknowledged her loss. We’ve used a word about the loss. I didn’t say he passed or passed away. I acknowledged that he died. She acknowledged receipted the message that she can call on us if she wants support, but we’re not going to, you know, crowd her. We’re done here. But a different person is now policing my language, a person who wasn’t engaged in that conversation. And I think we see this all the time, and we see it also in the media, so on the news, if you look out for it, in print media, in TV news, very often the announcement that somebody has passed that somebody has passed away. Now, in certain parts of society, there’s a deeper transcendental and spiritual meaning to the language of passing of passing away and passing on. But largely, we’ve grabbed onto that language to be euphemistic and gentler, but it also avoids using the language of the end of life, of the approach of death, of the doing the dying, of the being dead, of enduring, being bereaved. And so we lonely, find people by not having the courage to mention the most obvious, most difficult thing that they’re currently dealing with, and it’s partly because with the UK, with the language, and it’s partly because we powerful eyes dying itself. The understood, it recognized it, saw it frequently three generations. Years ago, I’m going to say now it’s something that we don’t see. It’s being medicalized, as you can, kidnapped into hospital, into escalating and increasingly futile medical care. So I don’t see ordinary dying happening with any regularity. We certainly don’t see it often enough to recognize that it’s a pattern. To recognize that it is recognizable that the patterns of paces are similar from person to person, that they can pace our way through it. They can realize what’s happening to the person who accompany you. Good symptom control, which isn’t rocket science, by the way, with good symptom control. The process of dying can be incredibly peaceful and comfortable enough to be bearable. And frankly, you can’t always say that about the process of giving birth, which often is, you know, it’s parallel in having recognized more phases than stages. And we can, you know, name it and accompany it. But giving birth, unless you really well, anesthetize is not a comfortable process, and dying with proper symptom management is not an uncomfortable process.

Eric Zimmer  11:12

Yeah, it goes back to what I said earlier about avoidance, right? If we avoid a topic, we can’t say death, we empower it and make it harder to say it. You also make the point that we end up saying things like, you know, you mentioned that they’ve passed, or you’ve lost someone, instead of saying died or dead, and that we’ve started to talk about the dying process in terms of warfare, saying somebody lost their battle, right? Which is a defeatist way of talking about this. Say a little bit more about that. I think

Kathryn Mannix  11:47

that’s a really interesting thing. And I think it might be Ronald Reagan who was culpable in the first place saying it, you know, declaring a war on cancer. And it was about cancer, and it’s largely cancer that the battle metaphor is used about and for some people who are having treatment for cancer, battle actually is quite helpful. So we mustn’t throw the baby out with the baffle water here, right? But for a lot of people, they are not battling cancer. They are living with cancer. Their life is not cancer. They’ve got some cancer in their body. It’s affecting their life, but it becomes everything about them, for some people in their key relationships. And the truth is that we will all die. And I know you interview that I really enjoyed listening to. You interview them, the wonderful ala wa Arthur talking about exactly this, that the fact that we’re going to die is given. We can pretend for most of our lives, and we do pretend for most of our lives, that it isn’t so. But at the end of our lives, we will not have lost in battle. We will simply have finished our lives, and we have to die something. It’s interesting that the battle metaphor isn’t used so much for the other things we die from. So communist cause of death in older people now in in high level income countries, in older people with dementia, right? Okay, and we don’t talk about losing your battle with dementia or losing your battle with heart disease, and it’s offensive to dying people to be criticized for not fighting hard enough to win the battle for what? For immortality. Did anybody win that battle yet? So we need to be more cognizant that there is language that is helpful and there’s language that is hurtful, and a really good rule of thumb is to ask people how they like to talk about it. They’ll look a little bit surprised to be asked, but also they’ll appreciate it.

Eric Zimmer  13:53

And you mentioned that many times the elderly, the people who are closer to death, want to talk about death. They want to talk about their preparations. They want to get their affairs in order. But very often, the younger people, quite often their children, don’t they say, No, Oh, Mom, you’re fine. You’re fine, mom, or you know, that’s a long time down the road. Dad, yeah, we’ll talk about that later. And you say that you’ve seen again and again people see death in a sense, almost sneak up on them, meaning they thought they had time to do that. They thought they had time to have the meaningful conversations. They thought that there was more they would be able to do, and once the person starts entering a dying window, they are less. I don’t know if this is how you would say it less, here with us, there’s

Kathryn Mannix  14:43

an interesting thing. So the trajectory of dying is it’s slightly different in different conditions, but for most of us in our lives, there’s a period in our lives when we’re well and we’re healthy, and our life expectancy is measurable in decades. And even though I am now in my. Haven’t Bucha. You know, I still go out running slower. I don’t go as far. My times get worse, gradually, gradually. But it’s showing me that my body is slowing down at a rate of decade to decade, rather than year to year. There’ll come a phase, perhaps when the illness or the illnesses that will eventually end our life declare themselves, when we start to notice that the trouble with my heart, all my lungs, or the cancer I’ve been having treatment for, or whatever it is, is starting to limit me now, and I can notice the difference from one year to the next. And so now we’re measuring life expectancy, probably still in years, but not probably in decades. And as time goes by, that kind of failure of energy and difficulty doing things is noticeable within one year. It’s a noticeable month by month. We’re measuring now in months, perhaps in a month to make a year or so, and gradually that trajectory changes. And always, people think there’s more time than there is. So given that we’re all mortal, I think it’s really, really helpful to start talking about dying long before we need to, because our families generally are not upset that our death is imminent if we start the conversation earlier, so my family know what kind of funeral I’d like and what kind of language I’d like, and much more importantly than my funeral preferences, my living while I’m Dying, preferences, where and who the important people are, and what are the important things to have completed by then, what the noises around me should be. Some people may end up my playlists. I’m a fan of thoughtful silence. A lot of times I don’t want nursing staff that I don’t know to play their radio tunes at me while I’m in that important time of my life, you know? So these are the sorts of things for people to start to think about when they gather for a family gathering, and there’s a really lovely game. And I wish I could remember, and if I can remember us, then it’s even the show notes I came for somebody in the USA, which was a Thanksgiving dinner, to ask the people around the table three questions, and it was their desert island probably not. Doesn’t translate across the Atlantic. We have a show called Desert Island Discs, the

Eric Zimmer  17:31

seven. No, it does. Yeah, it’s an American

Kathryn Mannix  17:34

desert desert island, right? So their desert island books or discs, or whatever, they’re absolutely favorite dinner and their favorite pizza topping. Yeah, and everybody, this is the gathering of the people who are closest to us in families. They get each other’s answers, and they never get each other’s answers right. And then you turn the questions over, and the questions are those ends of my care questions? And you think, if people don’t even know each other’s paper at Pizza toppings, how are they possibly going to guess the answers to these questions? And so it’s an invitation when the family is gathered. And because it’s a little bit funny that we’ve all got this question so wrong, to just maybe take two or three of those questions and have a think about the answers, not because we need to, but because we actually, right now, thank goodness don’t need to, but it’s a gift to each other that we have. It’s interesting,

Eric Zimmer  18:33

because when I think about death, the question to me would be, well, you want to be buried, you want to be cremated. You want, and I usually say like I could care less. However, you make the point that there’s a lot of time up towards death that I may care a lot about. So for example, in my case, since I have misophonia, aversion to sounds, no one should be allowed to chew in the room where I’m dying. Eat your food in the hallway, I can’t move, and I’m just, you know, I’m tormented by by sounds like that. You say in the book that there’s usually little to fear about death and much to prepare for.

Kathryn Mannix  19:15

I think that we fear it so much that we don’t start the preparations. And it’s absolutely the other way around that, actually. So first of all, the intention of the book is to de catastrophize dying and re familiarize people with its predictable and relatively gentle processes. And then to start to think about, well, if that’s what’s going to happen. Now you know that it’s likely to be like that. Let’s think about where might that be able to happen. Doesn’t have to happen in the hospital. It doesn’t have to happen in an intensive care unit. You might no longer be able to manage the stairs in your home, but you might really love snuggling down in your big sofa. Or you might envisage that actually, when I get to the end of my life, I’m going to go and be careful. I’m. My daughter, really, have you discussed that with your daughter? Because the last time I looked your daughter had three dogs, two cats and five children under the age of 10. How’s that going to work for you? Or where’s the bathroom in your daughter’s house relative to the bedroom that you would use? Which of the kids won’t be able to use their own bedroom for the duration of the time that you’re living in their home? Yeah, and it’s just meant to stop people from making assumptions and instead to help us conversations. And if you know the process, then you can work out, okay, how much of that process could I actually live, just in the place that I normally enjoy living, have control over my life? What extra help might I need? Where could I get that help? Is it going to be from friends and Vegas? Can I afford come from services I hate? From what will the state privilege for me? Lots and lots of things to think about. And then that particular thing that you’ve said about the soundscape around us, or about the way we touch, or the way that we’re held, there are people for whom touch is really triggering, that they’ve had experiences in their lives that have been terrible for them, and they’ve perhaps spent a lifetime mending as best they can from that other people they have the ability to understand that and how they are to be touched, people who obviously this is an absolutely Great example of something you would never guess from having conversations with a person, although, if you’ve lived with them for long enough, though,

Eric Zimmer  21:26

people in my life know your guys really know Yeah, and so do hundreds of 1000s of podcast listeners. But

Kathryn Mannix  21:33

you see, because I didn’t know I was drinking tea with the microphone open, that’s fine, but it didn’t occur to me, and it would have occurred to me had I known so these things aren’t they? Of thinking about, what do I need to know about this person is that there’s a psychiatrist in Winnipeg in Canada, Harvey chocchinov, internationally famous for his work in palliative and ends of my care for Dignity Therapy, and he has this question, what do I need to know about you as a person? Can or does that I can give you the very best care that matches your needs? And that’s the conversation in which each of us would discuss some things that would be very, very similar for a person to person. And then those individual things with it. Oh, right, okay. I was gonna unwrap my cheese sandwich and sit next to Eric so that he didn’t feel lonely while he was waiting to go in for that scan. That’s not a good plan. I’m not going to do that now. Or, you know, for a Kathryn lying in that room and it’s completely silence like the grave. I must be terrified there. I’m going to put some cheerful music on know, what do You need? Not? What do I think you need? You?

Eric Zimmer  23:00

Hair. One of the things that I think is hard about this planning is it seems relatively straightforward to decide what you want to happen once you die. My partner, Jenny’s mother passed coming up on two years now, amazingly, from Alzheimer’s, and we took care of her for about six years, and one of the kindest things she did for us was when she was diagnosed, she took me to the funeral home, and we did all of it. It was just done. You know, we just said to the funeral home, come get her and do what she said. You know, we had like, two decisions to make. So that seems straightforward to me. What does not seem straightforward. And I’ve got an aging mother, 81 years old. And what makes the planning hard, I think, is I don’t know what’s going to happen. I understand what’s going to happen in the last weeks of her life. I understand that we’ve had Barbara Carnes on who does the sort of thing you do here. I think she’s here in the US, and so I recognize the patterns of the dying process. It’s that time before that. Is she going to have a stroke and need to be in a nursing care? Is she going to get dementia and that’s going to be a different thing? Is she going to just, I don’t know what it means to die of old age when they say that. I’m like, What does that even mean? But that’s the planning that’s hard.

Kathryn Mannix  24:21

You’re absolutely right. And I think that if we think about planning as a list with tick boxes, the list would be open, it wouldn’t it. So I think we can turn the conversation a different way. We can say, at this stage in all of our lives, what matters most to us? Where do we get our joy? What brings us peace of mind? What are the conditions that help us to feel satisfied and calm and at peace during and by the end goal each day, what matters most? And we can have those conversations. And actually, there’s delightful conversations to have, because they’re about the things that bring us joy. They’re often about the people. Whom we love, whom we’re thrilled to see or to hear, their voices if they’re far away. And that means that in the future, there’s some kind of medical event that makes it difficult for the person there to express their wishes, like they have a stroke. For example, instead of, I’m your mother’s doctor and she’s had a stroke, heaven, COVID, instead of saying to you, what did your mother say she would want to do about sheep feeding, having a ventilator, living in a rehabilitation facility? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I can say she explain to me what math isn’t seen, because then I can talk with you about all the treatment options we have, and what we can do is we can wrap the treatment options that are most likely to match what matters most to her. We can wrap those around the care that we give her. So it might be, for example, I have I looked after a lovely, very elderly lady with terrible respiratory disease. It was on oxygen at home, and part of my work was to be a cognitive behavior therapist. And originally, I’d seen her because she used to get para systems of panic when she lost her breath. She always thought this was the time going to die, and she learned to use cognitive therapy skills to manage her panic. She was gorgeous, and I loved her, and she came to my clinic one day, and she always had this attitude that doesn’t really matter how long I live now and I’m aged, it’s the quality of my living what matters most to me. And that’s an important question. Is it quality or is it length of time? What would you be prepared to put up with, to eke out extra time compared with what you wouldn’t be prepared to put up with, because it’s the quality of living the most. And she said, you know, what a wonderful thing is going to happen. My granddaughter in Australia is going to get married, and I want to go to the wedding. And I knew that this woman who was using oxygen just soon, helped her to walk from her living room to her bathroom at home, on the level, she is never going to, you know, to tolerate flying at 32,000 feet that that is not a possibility. So how are we going to bring the joy of the wedding into her life when she can’t be in Australia for the wedding? But the important part for our discussion here is she’s changed the parameters of what she wanted. It’s not a once and for all decision. She was wanting quality of quantity. Now she wants quantity. She put up with any treatments to be still alive when the wedding happens. So she is still alive when the wedding happens. And this is, I can’t remember now, the 20 early teens, long before COVID, wrong. Skype was the thing we all used to talk to each other. So she Skyped into this wedding. It’s stupid. O’clock in the morning in England. She’s got her lovely clothes on. She’s got her grandma’s and wedding hat on. You know? It’s fantastic. So she comes in the next time I see her, and she’s gone back to had the wedding. I’m going back now to it doesn’t matter how long I survive. I just want good quality of life. And so it’s flipped. And then the next time I see her, and she’s noticeably more frail, the granddaughter is pregnant. So now, right? I want to, I want to see this baby born now, actually, she clearly now she’s deteriorating month by month, we can see that she isn’t going to live long enough to meet this baby. But again, what can we do to bring the joy of that and the knowledge of that and the grannying of that, or the great granny of that, into her heart and soul of life and into her family’s life? So she gets knitting, and she’s knitting Fast and Furious for the time that she’s still able to so there’s this bunch of baby clothes going to be posted halfway around the world to this great grandchild that she’s never going to meet. But every time her granddaughter takes out, you know, pair of mittens or middle cardigan or whatever. She’s getting her grandmother’s love out of the draw at the same time, her grandmother’s investment in her and in her child who she’s never going to meet. So if we’re honest about the conversations, and if we focus the conversations on what matters most, we can use those as the stepping stones for the incidents that actually happen that we can’t prepare for in detail. But once they happen, once an illness declares itself, once there’s a critical treatment decision about, do we do this or do we do that? And the person’s not well enough to say, the information you need isn’t it checklist or pay would definitely want this, or them definitely not want that. It’s which of the decisions that we can make best matches what matters most to

Eric Zimmer  29:50

this person. That makes a lot of sense. And can I request you to be my palliative care doctor? Now? Can I make that request? I. Oh,

Kathryn Mannix  30:00

Eric, you’re very sweet. And sadly, I stopped work to do this work, I took early retirement some time ago now, to do something about public understanding of dying. There was a particular incident. I talked about it in the book of meeting a family with a very, very elderly dad with masses of medical notes for people who are listening to us. My hands are maybe 12 inches apart. Just so many things wrong with him in his 90s. Had they had none of these conversations, and he was blue lighted into hospital having CPR almost dead, and we had to have that conversation, and they had no preparatory conversations at all, and I don’t know how many dozens or more times I’ve met families like that, but this was the family that broke me. This was the family where afterwards, I mean, we gathered things together, and that dad was looked at beautifully, and he died very gently, but they stay with me. Somebody’s got to do something about public understanding of dying. Somebody’s need to do something about the way Hollywood portray thing. Somebody needs to do something about the fact that the newspapers pick up the rare, the unusual, the difficult. They’re true, but they’re the exceptions. And now, because we don’t understand dying, we grasp those exceptions and think that’s the normal and gradually over the course, I would say, probably six or eight months, it dawned on me that I have many, many stories to tell about ordinary lying. Storytelling is our ancient way of giving each other insights and I knew that it had to be stories, and I knew I wasn’t going to be able to tell stories without even some discernment time. So I stepped out of medical practice to make the space to think about how that could happen. And I miss being heart of my fantastic team, and I miss meeting those fantastic families at that really poignant time in people’s lives. And yet this has been such a rewarding new way of working.

Eric Zimmer  32:10

So I have a couple questions of curiosity, I think, maybe more than anything else, but I’m going to indulge myself here. When we say someone dies of old age? What do we mean? Just something critical gave out, but it didn’t have a diagnosed disease before it gave out. That’s such a great

Kathryn Mannix  32:29

question. And around the world, I don’t know, it’s not always legal for a doctor to say that a person died of old age. Sometimes they’re required to give a medical diagnosis. In Britain, it is legal in England and Wales, which is our area of jurisdiction, to give a diverse old age, provided it’s given by a doctor who’s known the person for a considerable amount of time. And so the queen, Queen Elizabeth, the second death certificate, is given by her general practitioner insult them as old age. So old age is a death from a condition called frailty. Now they use the word frail in common parts. It has a particular meaning in this and it’s usually that this person who may be aged or who may be young and just unfortunate, has collected enough mini diagnoses, enough things, not long enough with them to kill them, but the accumulation of those things now is a burden on their energy and on their well being. And I have a colleague who describes this a little bit like paper boats. You get a piece of paper and you do those special Origami Folds that we can all do to amuse a small child, and you end up with a tiny little paper boat, and it’s got crisp folds, and it’s got flat paper, and it sits up, and you can stick it on a bathtub, or you stick it on the river nearby, and it sits up and it’s crisp and it’s clean, and it looks great as soon as it touches the water. As soon as our little bit of water gets over the lip into it, it’s weakened. And gradually the weakness spreads through it, and maybe there’s a big ripple. Maybe you put it on the sea on a calm day, and then somebody throws a pebble in nearby, and a big splash lands on it, and it disintegrates. So it has a sense of looking whole, looking complete, and looking strong. If you try to tear an origami folded paper boat, it’s really hard to tear it, but when it’s on the water, it’s completely vulnerable, and the water is life, and it’s the next thing that comes along is the pebble that throws the water onto the little paper boat, and whichever is the weakest link now disintegrates and allows the other. Things all is sequenced to unravel. And if it had only been one thing wrong, that would have been recoverable. Had only been two maybe three things wrong, it could have been recoverable. But there are so many little bits of us not quite working well anymore that we’re not well enough to recover. And so it’s interesting to notice that over the age of 80, if a person falls over and breaks their hip, their life expectancy on the day they break their hip is shorter than if they’d been diagnosed with lung cancer on that day. And it’s not because they’ve broken their hip, it’s because they fell and they couldn’t write themselves and they couldn’t catch themselves as they went down, and it’s because of the way they landed. And that’s all about the muscle strength and their bone strength and their coordination. And once they’ve suffered the injury, it’s about the way their blood clots or doesn’t clot. It’s about whether their lungs are strong enough to be able to sustain them for the anesthetic they’ll need for the operation to correct the fracture or replace the hip joint. It’s all of those tiny little things that mitigate against them. So if a person is striding out across the road in the hip like a car when they break their hip, that’s different, because they didn’t have the fall. But there’s something about the cumulative effects of aging in the body, where the whole thing holds together until there’s something that happens, and then it just can’t work any longer. So it’s really interesting. There are photographs of the Queen at Balmoral seeing off the old Prime Minister and welcoming the new prime minister. And when it was announced that she was going to accept the resignation and receive the new prime minister at Balmoral, when that was announced, I said to my husband, she’s going to do 10th in six weeks because she can’t risk going back to London. She hasn’t got the energy to go to London and get back again. This is an absolute sea change in her behavior, and we’d seen a change in her behavior for some time. She’d been gradually delegating, always predictably started walking with a sick had the massive hit of her husband of out of Illinois, 60 something years they’ve been married, but then she started to delegate at the last minute to send apologies for things that she was actually fully expected at. So you can see that the rate of change in the predictability is starting to shift. And then she didn’t go back to London for the change of Prime Ministers. And for those of us who’d been watching, the queen had been dying in clear site for about two years, but newspapers covered it as though the death was a Surprise and was quite sudden it wasn’t at all you

Eric Zimmer  38:17

that leads us into The idea that there is a predictable pattern. We’ve talked about it a little bit, but I’m wondering if you could walk us through in just a little bit more detail what the predictable pattern of dying looks like. I found this really helpful when Jenny’s mom passed from Alzheimer’s. Even though Alzheimer’s is different than other things, the actual dying process was exactly as people sort of laid it out to be. And it was really helpful to know, oh, here’s what’s happening, and then this is going to happen. And so I’d love to give listeners that information. Okay,

Kathryn Mannix  38:54

so what we’re talking about now is that very last part of living, the variety of roots, of getting to there. Maybe the frail person whose paper boat just unfolds over the previous week after looking okayish for a long time, maybe somebody who’s been gradually struggling more and more with heart problems, lung problems, a cancer diagnosis that seemed really well held by treatment until relatively recently, that has now escaped whatever it is, but we’re now talking about the end game. I suppose this is the equivalent of giving birth rather than what the pregnancy was like beforehand. So when we’re down to the last few weeks and days of life, there are some consistent things that we see. We see that people lose interest in the outside world. They become more and more focused on the people investing those to them, the state of their own selves, and often the kind of retrospect about their lives and what it’s all been about and have they are doing the reckoning how. They live their lives according to their standards, and that might be the standards of a faith or religious legal environmentalism, whatever the thing that matters to them, the things that matter to them, we see people losing interest in food, and that’s really hard for families, because we show people we love them by feeding them. All around the world, we do this. People who really have no appetite left because their gut is starting to feed just slow down. It’s not doing digestion effectively anymore. So if they try and eat that meal that their daughter has laid for now to make it’s just going to sit like a lump, and they kind of feel uncomfortable and so hard, but we see families trying to sway people to eat.

Eric Zimmer  40:47

Can I ask a question about that part of it? Yeah, because that stopping eating is kind of a common thing, and the worry that I’ve had when I’ve been around somebody dying is that they’re starving. And I mean the psychological condition of feeling like you’re starving, yeah, and it sounds like you’re saying that’s not really the experience that it seems like they’re having no

Kathryn Mannix  41:10

it’s fascinating. What seems to happen is that they have a failure of hunger, and they no longer desire to eat. And when you face them with a meal, they can look at it. They can see it’s beautifully presented, and maybe it smells delicious, but just I already feel as I’ve eaten, I just don’t want that. So the wisdom that I give to families is go for the volume of a teaspoon, tiny tastes that are just for pleasure, because people don’t in the main die because they’re not eating. They’re not eating because they’re dying. And it’s one of the signs that the process is evolving. So very often, their taste buds will still appreciate just tiny taste of things that they’ve all those loved. So just in case you happen to be in town when it’s my turn, it’s going to be baked rhubarb, please, no ginger on it, but lots of sugar or elder flour, cordial and vanilla custard, proper, vanilla custard. Okay, that’s my teaspoon. That’s my tiny taste. Something for pleasure.

Eric Zimmer  42:17

I think I want Mikey’s late night, sliced pizza with a little bit of crushed red pepper on it and Ginny’s banana cream pie.

Kathryn Mannix  42:24

Okay, so that’s clear. So you’re allowed two teaspoons then, because that’s very specific, and they’re not going to taste together on the same spoon, very good. No, those

Eric Zimmer  42:31

are going to be different events. So

Kathryn Mannix  42:33

gradually, the body is showing us that it’s changing less appetite, less energy, and the energy failure is the really interesting bit, because the bit that replenishes lost energy now isn’t eating and drinking, it’s sleep. Fascinating. Who knew? So you will see that the person will drop off to sleep. Now, for people who are listening to us, who like their afternoon nap, mine one of those. I’m not talking about the nap that you’ve planned and you’re looking forward to. This is a kind of nodding off in the middle of a conversation that is just irresistible. And the person will sleep for a while, they’ll wake up, they will recharge their batteries, they’ll have a bit of energy to do something for a while, and then they’ll fall back to sleep again, so that it’s almost like, you know, a mobile phone with one of those old batteries that didn’t used to hold its charge of it like that. And as time goes by, the periods of time spent sleeping last longer, and the periods of time awake that they buy last shorter. And also, it’s important for people not to be frightened by a thing that isn’t uncommon, which is people getting a little bit stuck between sleep and awake, which has happened to all of us really deeply asleep, and your alarm goes to waiting you can work time, or particularly, it happens when you know you only got an early flight, and you set your alarm so you don’t miss it, so you’re waking at a different time from usual, and in your dream, the noise, that’s real, that’s the alarm, becomes a feature of the dream. So you start to dream about fire engines, and there’s a fire somewhere. And then as you wake in, you realize, oh, I was dreaming, but there’s a fire. Where’s the fire engine? What’s going on here? There’s a fire engine in my room, and then you waken in there to say, No, this is my alarm. I can turn it off. But there’s that moment of being trapped between the things that are real in the room, the noise and the things that are not really in your head, which is the dream about the fire engines. And we call this muddledness dindirium, and there are lots of causes for it towards the end of life, but very commonly it’s just being a bit stuck between sleep and wake. And if it frightens the family and they start to be agitated, then the agitation communicates itself to the person, so they then think there’s something to be frightened about. So they then become agitated. Too. So being able to say, Oh, Dad, you’re kind of talking to people in your dreams here. That’s okay. It’s fine. It’s lovely to see them, isn’t it. We’ll have another cup of tea. Your voice stays calm. Your de Nina stays calm. It doesn’t wind his father. So as time goes by, we find the person is sleeping more. They’re awake less, and very often that might mean now that they can’t wake up at times when they would have been taking medications for you know, some people have symptoms like pain or breathlessness. A lot of people towards the very end of their lives have no symptoms at all. And it’s really important to say that dying doesn’t cause discomfort. The illness that they’re dying from might cause discomfort. Towards the very end of somebody’s life, they’re not just asleep anymore. They’re actually dipping in and out of unconsciousness. They don’t know they’ve been unconscious, but we might notice it because a visitor came, or it was medicine time, and we couldn’t waken them. And when they wake up later on, they come back up from deep unconsciousness through sleep, back to being awake again. And we say, Oh, we couldn’t awaken you at all. And they say, Oh, you listen to tried hard enough. So being unconscious is not something that we realize is happening to us, which is the clues in the name, I suppose, isn’t it? So towards the very end of people’s lives, they’re not awake, that they’re not asleep, they are unconscious, and it’s really important people understand that, because otherwise they’re afraid to go to sleep a time, and sleep is your most important ally for keeping you as well as you can be under the circumstances when the brain lapses into complete unconsciousness, there are only two things instantly. One is it can still hear sound. I don’t think whether it still responds to it. With misophonia, that’s an interesting thing to speculate about, but we know that people do still hear sound. How we observe that people often look more rested when the right voices of the room, or get a little bit agitated when the wrong voice is in the room, and we’ve seen people synchronizing their breathing to deliver the music being played in the room. So that’s really interesting, that in this state of deep unconsciousness, hearing is probably still connected to our emotion system and our sense of calm. So you will see nurses talking to people dying people, people who have head injuries or strokes and Deep Field cultures, and the nurses are still talking to them. That’s why. And then the other part of the brain that’s still working is part that controls our breathing, and it’s now doing something that we’d normally never see, which is, instead of kind of breathing that you and I are doing, where we’re not really thinking about start reading, except now we’re talking about, of course, we are now thinking about our breathing. We’re managing our breathing so we’re both thinking into microphones, so we’re being aware of not taking big, hissy, sucky breaths as we do that, we’re taking sufficient breath to speak a particular length of praise before we pause, take a breath and say the next phrase, and people who are listening to us are properly managing their breathing so their breath sounds aren’t obscuring our voices coming into their ears. So during normal life, we take breathing for granted. We don’t really think about it, but we do manage it. Now in deep unconsciousness, the brain does primitive reflex breathing cycles, and they look and sound peculiar. They go backwards and falls between very deep breathing, that can be sighing, it can be coming out through the vocal cords, so there’s room noise, and faster but shallower breathing, which can look as though the person is breathless. So if you’ve never seen that before, then you need somebody who has seen it before to say to you, you know this breathing is completely normal, your dear person is deeply unconscious. This breathing tells me that they’re beyond feeling distress from symptoms in their body. They’re completely safe. They’re dying, but they’re safe, and that this is hard of ordinary dying, and it’s the last part. So once the breathing is changing like this, then we might be down to the final hours. Sometimes it’s days, sometimes it’s really short. So this is the time if you want to be alongside the person to sit down. Bring yourself a book. Bring yourself a newspaper. Bring your slippers with you. Be a good visitor. So at home in our houses, we don’t normally sit locked tight next to the person, eyeball to eyeball, looking at them, stroking them. Not in my house, we kind of ignore each other in a loving kind of way most of the time. So. How do you help families to feel peaceful around the death as you remind them that actually here we are, they can hear you. So why not chat to each other? Think about some of the funny things that have happened in the past. Think of some of the important things that happened in the past. Just tell them they’re safe, that they’re loved. They’re doing okay. You’re doing a great job of creating the safe space that this person can leave their life from. What’s really fascinating is how often, despite the fact that this family’s had a Rota, there’d be two or three people in the room the whole time. It’s the 1/32 interval where everybody got called away at once that the person stops breathing. Why does that happen? We just don’t understand it. But it does seem to happen more often than can happen by chance. Sometimes the person carries on doing this terminal breathing for a very long time, and then the person they’ve been waiting to arrive from around the world. They arrive, their voices in the room, and within minutes, everything is just very gently, slow, because there’s nothing special about the last breath. It’s not Hollywood. During one of the periods of slow breathing, usually shallow breathing, there’ll be a breath out just now, another breath in afterwards. So people don’t suddenly sit up and, you know, tend the family secrets or whatever. It’s much, much more gentle than that. There are occasional times when a person will rally unexpectedly for a few hours to a day, very closely before death that again, let’s not leave those important conversations waiting for that time. That’s called the rally, because it doesn’t happen to most people. Let’s have the important conversations first. So we seem to have a little bit more control than we can understand about the moment of dynasty. It seems to be possible to wait for the morning. It seems to be possible to wait till the room is empty, to be able to wait until the important news is broken, until the right person has arrived. But not everybody can wait. And sometimes you’ve dashed around the world only to arrive and it’s just a few minutes too late, but usually the family have said, you know, Susie’s on her way, dad, and just knowing that Susie’s on her way has been a helpful part of the consolation at that time. So there isn’t a right way or a wrong way of doing this. I’ve seen families sitting around beds, telling jokes, ribbing each other the way they always have, reminding each other of childhood fights that their dad told them off about while dad’s peacefully dying. I’ve seen families singing souls. I’ve seen families using whatever other sacred scriptures of their tradition because that’s the way their dad would have wanted it, or that’s what their family tradition is. I’ve seen families who just sit in silence, maybe with her favorite show tunes in the background. There isn’t a right and wrong way of doing it, but always, there’s a sense of something very powerful is happening in that room, that there’s a huge amount of love in that room. Also, of course, the difficult things are also in that room. No family is perfect. Every family’s got those times that were difficult. They haven’t gone away either. And so coming back to our wolves, we can feed that anger into the Bad Wolf, or we can say, Okay, this has lasted long enough. We can let that anger go and we can feed the Good Wolf even the SED Well,

Eric Zimmer  53:36

I think that is a beautiful place to wrap up. That was a very nice ending on your part, you and I are going to continue to talk a little bit in the post show conversation. I want to talk about palliative care, because palliative care is more than just hospice care, and I want to explore that. I think this is a really useful thing for people to know about. Listeners, if you’d like access to the post show conversation, ad free episodes and the chance to support something that matters to you. Go to one you feed.net/join Kathryn. Thank you so much for coming on. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. Heavy as it is, it’s been a treat. Thanks so much for inviting me. You

Episode Transcript:

Eric Zimmer  03:10

Hi Yoni, welcome to the show.

Yoni Ashar  03:12

It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Eric Zimmer  03:14

I’m really excited to have you on we’re talking about some really important work that you have been a researcher on and involved in. It’s detailed in a book called The Way out a revolutionary scientifically proven approach to healing chronic pain. And I’m particularly interested in this one because obviously, I know a lot of people who have chronic pain, but one in particular is my mother. And so I’m really excited to share this episode with her when we get done. The book is written by Alan Gordon. However, I think I got the better end of the deal here because he describes you in the book as the man who ran the show, a 32 year old wunderkind with the mind of Aristotle and the effortless cool of James Dean,

Yoni Ashar  03:56

don’t believe him mature.

Eric Zimmer  04:00

Alright, we will get into pain reprocessing therapy here in a moment. But let’s start like we always do with the parable. There is a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild and they say in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always in battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks about it second, and looks up at their grandparents as well which one wins, and the grandparents says the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

Yoni Ashar  04:36

Now, I love that parable. And I think it’s very relevant to the work we’re doing with chronic pain here. There really are two worlds that can feed chronic pain. There’s a fear Wolf and the more that wolf is active and hungry and feeding, then the bigger and the bigger the pain will get any of the wolf of Something like safety or ease that eventually, you know, can lead to the large reductions, or even elimination of chronic pain, which you may not believe me quite yet. But hopefully at the end of that conversation, I’ll make a case for that. Yeah,

Eric Zimmer  05:16

you guys actually use the parable in the book. And there’s a funny line at the end, which says, you know, we might call it The Tale of Two neural pathways, but it doesn’t quite have the same ring to it. You know, I used to say, when I was talking about this early on, I would say, you know, in Buddhism, we talk less about good and bad, and we might say, skillful and unskillful. But I was like, you know, a skillful and unskillful. Wolf is in a very good story, right? It just doesn’t, doesn’t capture the imagination. Right? So let’s talk about the core of your work. It’s really around recognizing that I guess, correct anything I say it’s incorrect. It’s certain types, or even maybe a lot of chronic pain is what you guys would call neuro plastic pain. Can you describe what neuro plastic pain is?

Yoni Ashar  06:03

Yeah, you got it, right. So there has been a revolution in our understanding of chronic pain that’s been unfolding over the past several decades, due to advances in medicine, in neuroscience and in psychology and other fields. And what we now know is that a person could get injured, of course, they’ll have pain, you know, surrounding the injury, but then the injury can heal, and the pain can persist for years, or decades beyond that, and at that point, the pain is no longer caused by the injury because the injury is long since healed. And there are other factors, particularly, you know, factor processes in the brain that are causing the pain to persist. And this is called neuro plastic. Pain actually goes by many names. It’s also called primary pain, and no sit plastic pain. But that the main idea here is that the pain is not due to physical, structural biomechanical factors. It’s not due to like tissue damage. And we think that, you know, this might be a really large portion of chronic pain, actually,

Eric Zimmer  07:19

now, what you’re seeing here, I think there’s nuance to this, it’s important, because, you know, we’ve all heard the, it’s all in your head thing, right, which is a way of sort of dismissing something, it’s all in your head. And what you guys are saying is the pain is absolutely 100% real, it is there. It’s just that what’s causing it is loops in the brain, not signals from the body.

Yoni Ashar  07:45

That’s exactly right. And it’s so important to emphasize the pain is real pain is always real. And this view of You’re making it up or you’re exaggerating, really upsets me, I find that really offensive, you know, to all of us who have had any kind of chronic pain. It’s especially been used to marginalize people like groups like women or other groups that have been written off as hysterical or exaggerating. And it’s not true at that level now, from the total flip perspective, while the brain is in the head, and we now know that all kinds of brain processes that can amplify or inhibit pain, that those are very important, and they’re no less real in any way.

Eric Zimmer  08:30

Yep. What are some of the things that have happened, neuroscience wise, that have caused us to start to uncover this? And for us to be able to start to tell the difference between say, what is neuropathic pain versus other types of pain, you talk in the book about short term versus chronic pain and how that’s in different parts of the brain share some of that science with us? Sure,

Yoni Ashar  08:53

there’s been a lot of research in both animal models of chronic pain, particularly in rodents, where they kind of create chronic pain conditions. And in people who have chronic pain, there’s one study that comes to mind in particular, that was, at least for me, a kind of lightning bolt moment, like, Whoa, this is really a big deal. So this is a study from the aperion lab at Northwestern that came out five or 10 years ago, and they recruited people who have recently injured their back. And these people had back pain because they have recently injured their back, and they scan their brains. And what they saw was that the pain lived exactly where you would expect it to be. That pain processing parts of the brain. This includes somatosensory cortex, cingulate insula, these are brain regions that any neuroscientists would say yep, that’s where the pain belongs. That’s the part of the brain that does pain processing. Then they follow these people for a year out and then half of them the pain resolved, right the injury healed they went back live as normal, it’s kind of like typical course yeah, you pulled your back now everything’s better. And the other half, the pain persisted. And now this is a year after injury and the back still hurts. And when they scan their brains, they found that the pain was now associated with a totally different set of brain regions, it was associated with medial prefrontal cortex, and with the amygdala. And those are brain regions that have a lot to do with learning, and memory, and emotion and meaning. And what they basically did in the study was they caught on camera, they using the brain scanner, they caught on camera, this transition of pain, to moving to these different brain circuits where it can now, as you said, like live on loop in a way relatively independent of any injuries in the body.

Eric Zimmer  10:55

That is absolutely fascinating. That really is amazing to be able to show that transition and what those different parts of the brain tend to be more involved in.

Yoni Ashar  11:06

And there’s been Eric, this other kind of surge of research that’s also been looking at not clinical research, I would say, but it’s trying to understand what is pain, fundamentally, because the old view of pain was that pain was a direct readout of problems in the body. So this is like, you know, you stub your toe and your toe hurts, because that’s letting me know that something happened in your toe, that’s true pain can be that. And we now know that pain is much, much more complex. And one of my favorite ways of thinking about pain is as a learning signal for guiding behavior. So the job of pain is to keep us safe and healthy, keep our bodies intact. Now, in order to do that job, well, the paint system has to be predictive, it has to be always thinking ahead about how damaging some action or activity might be, that way you can keep us safe, the paint system are always just reactive, but I’ll be dead if the One Step Ahead of the lion. And once you know, we understand that pain is predictive, that opens up a whole host of thorny problems, because prediction is really challenging. Like, it’s really hard to, you know, to tell the future. And there can be mispredictions. So for example, a person injures their back, they’re bending over, that’s not good, that’s for the injury. So So pain is created. But now the brain, you know, will start to predict pain when bending over and even if the injury is healed, there’s a prediction that’s present in the nervous system, not consciously in any way, just kind of in the brain is prediction is there and that pain will be generated, because it’s been associated with that motion in the past, and it can be a misprediction

Eric Zimmer  12:47

you guys also reference another study, which I think is also Northwestern about researchers ability to predict pain, you know, like who’s going to have pain, and apparently, they were accurate 85% of the time. So what was going on there?

Yoni Ashar  13:01

That was actually the same group of subjects and what they did, they said like, Okay, so these are the changes that happened with people, as the pain went from, you know, post injury, pain to chronic pain. Now, let’s look at the brain scan from right after the injury and see if we can predict who’s going to get better and who’s going to develop chronic back pain. And what they found was that patterns of brain activity in the medial prefrontal cortex and the nucleus accumbens was able to predict who would develop chronic pain and who would resolve and that’s really important for at least two reasons. First, those two brain regions are very involved in learning processes. So it suggests that there’s a learning about the pain that’s happening in the brain and once the pain becomes learned, it can basically become a habit can become a pain habit. Again, not an intentional habit, no one’s choosing to be in pain. No one’s like, you know, wanting that but it can recruit the same circuitry. The nucleus accumbens is actually really involved in you know, so like addiction. I was just listening to your last episode. Yep. Yeah. The second reason that’s really important is because when you look at like a scans and MRIs of the back, you know, if someone injures their back, those are completely non predictive of who’s going to recover and who is going to get worse. So it’s really striking that a brain scan but not a back scan can tell who will get better and who will not.

Eric Zimmer  14:24

Yeah, that is just amazing that the brain is more predictive than the back. Even though we’re the pain is in the back. The injury is in the back. What I love about what you guys have done here, and the way you’ve brought this together is I mean, this is not a brand new idea, right? There’s a guy Dr. John Sarno, who’s been around a long time who’s advocated similar ideas, but there’s way more actual science here. And there are differences. I’m not trying to tie your work to his I’m just saying that there are similarities, which is saying that there is a clear mental element to this and I would even say Based on your work and others, there’s a clear mental and emotional element to what we have with chronic pain. So yeah, I mean, I guess one of the big questions would be how does somebody know? Is my pain neuro plastic? Or is it still real signals from the body? Yeah,

Yoni Ashar  15:18

so there are some indicators that can really be helpful in sussing this out. And I want to give credit here to my friend and colleague, Dr. Howard Shubin, er who in my mind has really helped develop these methods, as well as you know, many others in the field. But I must have learned from him. So he’s my guru when it comes to assessment. So two components of figuring this out first is the rule out, you can see a doctor see a relevant specialist try to, you know, get clarity, is there anything clear and physical in the body, that’s no a clear cause to the pain, I note of caution there is not to go overboard. If you see enough specialists, one of them will find something wrong, I guarantee it. So but you know, do basic due diligence to rule out any obvious medical problems. The second component is the rule. And And here’s where I think there’s actually a lot of value in juice for a lot of people to try to figure out what kind of pain is this. So if any of the following are present, these are indicators of neuroplastic pain, one spatial spread of pain, pain started on my shoulder, and now it’s spread down my arm injuries don’t travel. But right, but sensations spread. And we actually now know, thanks to the work of Bob Coghill, and others, some of the neurobiological mechanisms of this, they’re these neurons called dynamic wide range of neurons in the dorsal horn of the spinal cord that sensitize each other and cause spatial spread of pain. Just something that that, you know, happens in our nervous system, if one area hurts, it’ll sensitize neighboring neurons and cause other signals coming will sensitize neighboring areas and cause spread of pain. Okay, second indicator, spatial variability. So like sometimes the person the left leg, the hurts on the right, again, that really suggests the brains involved here, because the brains are really good at kind of moving things around in the body. Three temporal variability, no, some days, the pain is 10 out of 10, you know, the next day zero out of 10, that, again, does not sound characteristic of like an injury, if you have a broken foot, it’s not gonna, it’ll hurt every time you step on it, you’re not gonna have 10 out of 10, one day zero out of 10, the next day, it doesn’t have to be quite as dramatic as 10 to zero, it can be not eight to a three, and that’s still quite large swings for presence of multiple chronic pain or no somatosensory syndromes, you know, in the person’s history. If you have a history of headaches, and stomach aches, and sound and light sensitivity, and you know, now your hip is hurting. So it’s possible that you have a stomach problem and the hip problem and the head problem. But it’s also, you know, even more likely, that there might be something in how the brain is processing input from the body that is causing this gain of signal, this volume, inflammation. And that can be an explanation for these multiple symptoms. Oh, another one that’s really important here is when the pain is really contextually sensitive. And so what they mean is they have pain in some context, but not in others. And it doesn’t make any like sense from a kind of biomechanical perspective. So for example, when I had, you know, years of chronic back pain, my back would always hurt when I stood, but it never hurt when I ran, and I could run for, you know, miles and my back felt great. And then I would think I’ll stop at the end of the run, and my back would start hurting. And it just like, what’s going on this? That’s kind of something’s a little fishy here. Like, why would that be and I later understood when I got into all this research that I had developed a conditioned response, that my brain, you know, had paired, standing still with pain. And so whenever I started, that was started to create pain, just like Pavlov’s dog has learned to link a bell to food, you know, we can link a certain position to pain, even though that position isn’t objectively more dangerous, or putting our body at risk than like running or some other position is,

Eric Zimmer  19:25

is it possible that you would have both that you might have say, you’re an older person, and you have some arthritis, which you know, is probably actually causing some pain. So you might also have neuroplastic pain. Is there a place where it’s not one or the other?

Yoni Ashar  19:41

Yes, so it’s a spectrum. And it could be anywhere along the spectrum. For more, say peripheral tissue causes there’s something in the body that’s really driving it to centralized central nervous system brain causes. So people can be you know, what we call mixed pain, or there’s both of those That being said, I think some of us suspect more and more that a fairly large portion is centralized or primary pain, neuroplastic pain, for example, Eric, like arthritis is not necessarily painful, no severe arthritis is painful, but mild to moderate arthritis is often not painful. So if you have arthritis, you can have arthritis, and you could have pain. But the arthritis might not be the cause of the pain, for example, exact numbers alluding to something like 80% of pain free next have a bulging disc in them. So tons of people who have no pain at all have all kinds of anatomical finding, if you go and take 100, healthy pain, free people off the street and scan their bodies, you will see a wonderful symphony of bulging discs and herniations and protruding this and tears on this tendon and this ligament, and they’re typically not painful, or they’re often not painful. And so knowing that you might have one of these findings in your body is, is you know, great. Now, is that the cause of pain? Yeah. Does that explain you know, if there’s spatial variability if the pain is moving around? Well, gosh, that’s not so consistent with like, you know, this one injury this one site, or if the pains are variable, I mean, is the injury moving? You know, from day to day? Is the disc bulging one day and not the next? Right, there’s probably something else going on.

Eric Zimmer  21:50

Pain has multiple components to it, right? If I were to think of my back pain right now, right? Okay, I’ve got a physical sensation that I would ascribe to it. Right? And then there are a couple other elements, right, that are very obvious, if you sort of watch your mind element one is just my overall resistance to it. No, no, no, I don’t want it. My resistance, my amplification, my all that. And then the third is all the stories I start saying about what this pain might mean. Yeah, you know, mine is if my back hurts like this at 50, what will I be like it at? Will I be able to do this. So there’s all this stuff that goes on. And so I’ve talked about that with various people on the show. And when I was reading your work, you lead into the primary thing that drives the neuroplastic pain engine is fear.

Yoni Ashar  22:40

Yeah, this is really important, Eric. And it also gets to a way that our work is potentially different than some, you know, current framework. So everyone agrees that there is this whole layer of resistance, and storytelling and unhelpful narratives that can be on top of the pain that can make us miserable and make things worse, and everyone would agree that limiting that or reducing that will be helpful. What I think is really provocative about our work, is suggesting that mind brain processes could really be at the root of the pain. And by changing some of these processes, you can eliminate the pain, it’s not an added layer on top that you can remove, and now you’re left with no pain still there but not as bad. You can actually eliminate the pain by changing some of these mind brain pathways, put it slightly differently. If the pain is due to mind brain processes, then the solution might lay there as well. And we could eliminate the pain by changing those pathways.

Eric Zimmer  23:45

Yeah, I think that’s an important point. And using my analogy, you’re saying not only can you take away element two and three in what I just described, you actually might take away element one, the sensations themselves that are there, bingo. And what’s interesting, though, is that, and I want to get into your method, it seems to me that these approaches, even if you start by targeting two and three, you may very well just by that very nature of doing it be working on one also because targeting two and three is the same mechanism you’re talking about, which is basically becoming a little bit more present to the pain and a little bit less afraid around it. So let’s move into your method. Well, actually, before I do that, I want to hit a couple other quick things. One is in the book, it says this shows up over and over again that there are sort of three habits that are seen again and again in patients that trigger fear and aggravate neuroplastic pain. They’re worrying, putting pressure on yourself and criticism or self criticism.

Yoni Ashar  24:46

So I think of two broad categories of fear, pain related fear and a general kind of fear or threat and when I say fear, I’m thinking You know, threat or a sense of there’s something threatening. So there’s fear and sense of threat about the pain of the cost, like you were saying, element two and three, the pain so bad, and you know, it’s going to get worse. And then there’s these other general patterns of putting our brains on high alert mode of thread, this worry and pressure on ourselves and self criticism that could be completely unrelated to the pain, it can be about how we’re performing work, or it could be about you know, beliefs we have that we have to keep everyone else around us happy. And if someone’s unhappy with us, then that’s the problem. Or that, you know, uncertainty about the future is dangerous and have to eliminate all uncertainty. So there could be all these habits and these driver rain into high alert mode. And that will take the whole pain system and just turn up the volume, you know, any sense of threat. So, pain is the appraisal of threat or danger. Pain is our brains way of saying this, something dangerous here. And if there’s a more global sense of threat, or danger, like no, like, some kind of pressure on themselves, like I’m not good enough, whatever the flavor is, then that’s gonna, you know, add that sense of danger, and amplify the pain.

Eric Zimmer  26:16

Yeah, you describe a one point neuroplastic pain being a false alarm, in essence, right? Yeah. Which I think speaks to that. As I’m hearing you say all this, you know, in my brain, I’m thinking, Man, that sucks, right? Like, it sucks that if you’ve got excessive amounts of self criticism, worry, and you know, put an extra pressure on yourself. That’s miserable mentally and emotionally. And now on top of it, I’m driving a physical pain engine potentially, that doesn’t

Yoni Ashar  26:45

matter. Boy, I’ve a lot of compassion that comes up. Yeah, yeah. It seems to me like it’s kind of like a culturally like, contagious thing going around right now. Like, you know, I just saw this, there was a survey that went out, you know, were you in a lot of stress yesterday, a Gallup poll, and over half of Americans said yesterday that they’re in a lot of stress yesterday, and like, that’s, that’s very Son.

Eric Zimmer  27:10

Yeah, it is. I want to get to the method. There’s a couple other places I could go. But let’s let’s go into, you know, the broad strokes of how you work with somebody, we think it’s neuroplastic. Right? We think that’s what’s going on here.

Yoni Ashar  27:23

So that’s step one. And that’s actually I don’t want to glide over that because it’s really important, because this is a huge mental shift. For many people, I need to like, emphasize like, yeah, and I research, I just did a study where I asked people tell me, in your own words, what do you think is the cause of your pain, this was back pain, because that’s the most prevalent pain condition. So it’s the easiest to study. And what people said, 90 to 95% of people were saying, old age, an injury, herniated disc, so by and large, many, many people are thinking that the cause of their pain is something on the structural biomechanical level. And so shifting from that to saying, Oh, the cause of my pain is neural pathways, and fear is a major shift that happened. So step one is kind of assessing that, you know, you know, as a clinician, you would assess that. And then step two is getting that the person in pain on board with that assessment. And for that, it really helps to have evidence, actually, this is not any leap of faith or asking anyone to take this is a scientifically grounded, evidence based process where you can look through your life. And if, you know, when I was earlier, listing the indicators of neuropathic pain, if you’re sitting there going Check, check, check. That’s a list of evidence right there. You know, and on the flip side, what’s the evidence that there’s actually something wrong in your body? And don’t say, Well, my back hurts? Because we know that’s not evidence that there’s nothing wrong in the back. Yep. That’s just, that’s what the sensations are felt in the moment. But how do you know that something actually wrong there? You know, what’s the evidence for that? Maybe there’s strong evidence, maybe there isn’t. And what’s the evidence that? No, it’s neuro plastic pain. And in the book, the appendix has a more detailed elaboration of all these factors I was mentioning earlier. So we call it building the case. So building the case that this is really what’s going on. For me, there’s a really major first step.

Eric Zimmer  29:21

Yeah. And you talk about different barriers in the book to overcoming that. And one of them, you know, is indeed medical diagnoses, right? And, you know, I know from being involved with people who had chronic pain, taking them to doctors, you could see a doctor and you’re like, I’m in an incredible amount of pain. There’s a lot of pressure on that doctor to go well, this. Yeah, like to come up with something, right? I know, in those experiences, it’s been like, you know, you start to go when one doctor is like, it’s this and the next doctor is like, it’s this which is a different thing. And then they both disagree on the way you treatment. You should do physical therapy. No, you shouldn’t do it at all. I mean, You start to go wait a second. Yes. Nobody really knows why I hurt this bad. Yes.

Yoni Ashar  30:05

And that is another great positive indicator for neuroplastic pain, getting different or contradictory stories from multiple different providers. I mean, they don’t know. Yet even if they sound confidence, is it possible

Eric Zimmer  30:17

to have neuroplastic pain in one part of your body and go through a normal healing process with pain and another part of your body. So for example, you have, let’s make the assumption we’ve gone through the process, we’ve done assessment, we go, you know, your lower back pain neuroplastic. That same person breaks their arm, they’re in pain, but then the arm heals and the pain goes away. So in that case, they went through a normal pain cycle, right body was hurt, body healed, pain went away. There, I’ve still got neuro plastic elsewhere, is that possible?

Yoni Ashar  30:55

You can have that. And you can also have what we call secondary pain, or like structural biomedical like this, the pain is secondary to some injury. You could have that in one body site and neuro plastic and another body site. Got it, you know, it’s really based on evidence and really hold any explanation you might get from a provider, including from what I’m saying, like, hold it up to the evidence, does this hold water? This doctor says, Oh, I’m having this pain because this is pushing on that nerve. And like, alright, well, you know, what’s the evidence for that being the cause of pain?

Eric Zimmer  31:28

Yep. Okay, we’ve gone through the work of really sort of gathering the evidence trying to determine is this what I have? If I arrive at the conclusion, by myself or by working with a clinician, I arrive at the conclusion that at least some portion of what’s going on here is neuroplastic pain? Where do I start in unwinding this?

Yoni Ashar  31:49

So we view neuro plastic pain as the brain’s no misperception of threat to the body, so that we want to start to unwind this misperception of threat and the way that you unwind, misperceptions of threat is with no perceptions of safety, actually, that this kind of antidote, there’s a particular technique that we have developed that seems to be quite, you know, to our knowledge, one of the most effective techniques for changing this perception, we call it somatic tracking. And it’s a particular way of paying attention to the sensations. And it has three components. The first is this element of mindfulness. So becoming a bit, you know, like interested in curious about the sensations are watching them the way you might watch clouds fly through the sky, oh, the sensations, you know, kind of tingly and moving a bit, you know, towards the center of my body. Second component is safety reappraisal, and this is as you’re paying attention, telling yourself, there is nothing wrong in my head, while I’m watching sensations, my hip is healthy, my hip is safe, my hip is intact. These sensations are being caused by my brain, basically, literally saying those things to yourself while you’re watching the sensations, you know, being genuine about it seemed like oh, there really is nothing wrong, because I’ve done this assessment. And then the third piece of somatic tracking is bringing some fun and some playfulness, we call it positive effect induction in the science world. Because this sense of fun and playfulness, and humor will cut the threat appraisal, right when you’re having fun when you’re being playful, and you know you’re in a good mood, it’s much harder to feel afraid. So that can really pull the rug out from under this feeling of threat,

Eric Zimmer  33:51

and is somatic tracking, it’s got these three components, it sounds a little bit like the sort of thing that might be helpful to be guided through is that some of the work that a clinician will do is guide someone through that are there guided quote, unquote, meditations for it, it strikes me as the sort of thing like a lot of types of mindfulness that you can get really lost in and having somebody to sort of guide you through and bring you back and do all that can be really helpful.

Yoni Ashar  34:20

Exactly having a guide. You could Google it, and you’ll find some examples. And there’s clinicians and apps that can also, you know, guide people through it’s very important for me to emphasize that somatic tracking is not mindfulness. Mindfulness is one piece of it. Yep, mindfulness can help with pain. Actually, one of the first if not the first study, like scientific study of mindfulness was in chronic pain with Jon Kabat Zinn back in the 70s. Yep. But mindfulness alone is not likely from from the data. We see. Mindfulness alone is pretty unlikely to get someone out of pain. It’s just one piece of the puzzle. For unlearning vain, or if you think you have a mindfulness practice, and that’s like all you need. There’s more to it. Yeah, that’s probably not quite enough. Yep.

Eric Zimmer  35:08

Right, because the other two components that you mentioned are this creation of safety. Right? Yeah. And then you know, the positive effect. Exactly, yep. You talk about a couple of mindsets that can help with doing somatic tracking more effectively.

Yoni Ashar  35:27

Yeah. So this is like a light and useful state of mind, that can be really helpful, there is a strong tendency that makes so much sense to like, when we pay attention to the pain to tighten around it to clench around it, like you said earlier, to resist it, to fight it, or to be like laser focused on it, like, oh, no, what’s it going to do next? Is it gonna get worse. So the mindset of like, you know, ease and safety, and mindfulness and relaxation and doing it because it feels good? What’s really amazing to me, and what I’m super interested in as a scientist is that, you know, sometimes, I would even say many times during somatic tracking, as people start doing this practice and paying attention without fear, the sensations start to shift, and often to diminish, and sometimes even disappear. We’ve even had, you know, sessions with clients where they’ll do somatic tracking, and then the pains gone 10 minutes later, and they’re like, oh, my gosh, it’s the first time in 18 years, I haven’t felt any pain, we just did a little exercise, you know, 10 minute exercise. So that’s a really good sign that you have neuroplastic pain, you know, if you change how you’re paying attention to the pain and the pain goes down, guess what, your brain is playing a big role we just proved that.

Eric Zimmer  37:16

You guys talk about when you’re doing this, you know, turning down the intensity and trying to be outcome independent, which is really hard to do, right, when what you’re trying to do is get rid of pain. But Alan described several times in the book, when he’s talking about specific clients, you know, that there’s a natural tendency to be like, alright, this is going to fix me, and I’m going after it, right? Like, you know, there’s a mindset that says, like, Okay, I’m going to do somatic tracking, like, 100%, I’m going to nail it, right. And that is the clenching and tensing around it. And so it strikes me a little bit, as we talked about in Zen, you know, trying not to try exactly, you know, which is a little bit of an art

Yoni Ashar  37:57

total art as really hesitating, whether it’s even mentioned that sometimes the pain goes down during somatic tracking, because then people will listen and be like, Oh, I’m gonna go do this thing to get rid of my pain. And that, unfortunately, is going to backfire. Because as soon as you’re trying to get rid of your pain, you’re reinforcing the idea that pain is a dangerous problem and a threat that needs to be gotten rid of. Yep, and actually, so that just gonna, you know, add fuel to the fire. Really, what we’re trying to build is this attitude of pain is something we can be curious about and be unafraid of. And so we can somatic track, to kind of get to know it a bit better and to welcome it in because it’s not dangerous.

Eric Zimmer  38:33

Yeah, we talked about this mindfulness communities, meditation communities, but Zen talks a lot about this, and I’m a Zen practitioner. And you know, one of the ideas that I found really helpful in that regard is that outcome oriented focus is sort of necessary for you to do the practice at all, like otherwise, why are you going to do it? Right? Nobody’s gonna do somatic work. So you want to get rid of the pain. So you’re going to do somatic tracking. But then, and a spiritual teacher said this to me why he said, your wills good for getting you to the meditation cushion. Yeah, at that point, you have to shift. And you have to let go of that. And that’s kind of like we’re saying here, like, okay, yeah, of course, you want the pain to go away, that’s gonna get you to the front door of the symmetric tracking session. At that point, we have to try and let go and become more outcome independent. That’s exactly. It’s kind of knowing which tool to apply when you know which mindset to apply when

Yoni Ashar  39:31

that’s very helpful. Thanks for that. I’m gonna use that with my clients.

Eric Zimmer  39:35

So we’re doing somatic tracking, it’s got these benefits. You say at another point, if you want to overcome any fear, and we’re saying that the fear is kind of the engine of this thing. Exposure to the thing you’re afraid of. Yeah. Is important curves. So say more about the role of that in this process,

Yoni Ashar  39:52

super important. So this is starting to engage in the things we’ve been afraid to do because of the pain if It’s sitting down, starting to set effects, biking, starting to bike, so starting to do these activities, but definitely not overdoing it. And what’s really important is the quality which we bring to the exposures. So something we call white knuckling. This is when you’re doing exposure, but you’re white knuckling your way through it, you’re like intensely gripping and holding on. And internally, you’re tight and constant, terrified. That’s unlikely to be a helpful exposure, it’s unlikely to be something that you learn something helpful from, we want to do exposures, where we can learn that our bodies are stronger and healthier than then we believed. And so doing somatic tracking during an exposure is a important piece of this approach. So using the same tools to bring attention to the sensations, while you are doing the thing that’s been feared, remembering a client I worked with who, you know, we must have we stood up, we probably did, like 100 times in a row, just bend over, stand up and over, stand up, just watching the sensations like you’re the watch, no water flowing down the waterfall, because, you know, as we were bending over that was kind of the image and just watching the sensations and like, oh, look what happened. When you bend over, look what happened when you get up, you know that bending over is totally safe. There’s nothing dangerous, bending over is great for your back, it’s not the interest for your back in any way. It’s actually really good for your back to bend and, and cracking some jokes. And, you know, she had a lot of pain that the you know, first few times we bend over and buy a number 100, it would didn’t hurt at all.

Eric Zimmer  41:36

Yeah. And you guys talk in the book very well about not doing this, as you’re saying, like, when you have a high level of pain. That’s right, if you’re in a high level of pain is not the time to be doing somatic tracking and exposure, it reminds me of my coaching work with people. And we talk about some of these skills that we practice to deal with difficult thoughts or emotions. You don’t want to practice those on the hardest thing in your life, it’s not the time to do it, you know, you want to start practicing at a place that’s manageable. You know, you can’t practice if there’s none. So as you guys say, you can’t really do this if you don’t have any pain. But you want to look for those medium to low level times as the time that this exposure and somatic tracking can be most effective

Yoni Ashar  42:24

100%, that’s so important to emphasize to, you know, start using these sorts of skills when the pain is in the low to medium range. Yeah. And

Eric Zimmer  42:33

what I really like is you say, you know, if your pain is really high, then don’t try somatic tracking, use your avoidance behaviors. And so I love how it’s not saying like, avoidance behavior, bad somatic tracking, good. Yes, depending on the scenario, avoidance behaviors are perfectly good thing to do. If your pain level is really high, it’s when it’s at a lower level, that’s the time to work on somatic tracking and exposure.

Yoni Ashar  42:58

Exactly, because we want the exposures to be corrective learning. So an exposure from which you you learn that the pain is not dangerous. And when the pain is super high, it’s gonna be very hard to get that takeaway, if you encounter it, when the pain is raging, you know, it’ll be very tough. And so at that moment, just anything that’s kind of can help bring it down, you know, ice packs, cold packs, laying down for a bit, until it becomes more than a manageable range, and then get back on the horse and do the exposures, the somatic tracking, which is an internal exposure, really to the sensation,

Eric Zimmer  43:31

and is that the primary tool in the method by doing somatic tracking, by having exposure to the pain, which causes what you guys are calling a corrective experience, describe corrective experience for us, so that I can tie all this together,

Yoni Ashar  43:47

a corrective experience is learning that the sensation is not as dangerous and threatening as you thought.

Eric Zimmer  43:55

So this strikes me as similar in ways to exposure therapy in other domains, right? Where the idea is expose yourself to the feared stimulus and a manageable dose, you learn that it’s not so frightening. And you’re able to handle more and more. So there’s a corrective experience here. I want to talk a little bit about some of what this path looks like if you get on it. And you start to have some healing because there’s like any path, there’s some ups and downs that can occur. And I’d like to hit a couple of those. But I definitely want to hit also the study that you guys recently published. So tell me about that.

Yoni Ashar  44:33

So this was the first trial testing PRT, we took 151 people and we randomized them to one of three groups course of PRT, which was nine sessions over the course of a month, or there was a placebo control. They got this placebo injection to their back, and then the usual care control group of people who kept doing whatever they usually did to care for their back whether it was acupuncture higher. After medication, and we asked people to tell us how much pain they were in before and after, and how much fear of pain they had and what they thought was the cause of their pain. And we also scan their brains before and after. And what we found was very large reductions in in back pain for people in the PRT group as compared to the control. So people in the control groups, seven came in, on average, about four out of 10 pain. And in the controllers, people left with about three out of 10 pain by in the peer teager people have one out of 10 pain on average. And it was a really large reduction. And what was especially striking was that a number of people were pain free. At the end of the study, they had zero pain, you have to put some numbers on it, we found that two thirds of people were paying for your nearly so at the end of PRT as compared to 20% in the placebo group and 10% in the usual care group. And this is really striking cuz you just don’t really see psychological treatments, making people pain free. So this is part of what this kind of conceptual framework that PRT is coming from that that is different than some of the existing psychological approaches to pain where, like we said earlier, they target mostly elements two and three, but it really goes after element one, the pain itself.

Eric Zimmer  46:32

And PRT is pain reprocessing therapy, which is your guy’s method. I just think it’s a case any listener didn’t didn’t catch that

Yoni Ashar  46:38

side for that. Okay, yeah. And we followed people for one year after no treatment ended. And the gains were largely maintained. So one year out, half the people are pain free or nearly so even though they had received no treatment in that intervening time. And when we looked at the mechanisms to try to understand well, how does PRT work, what we found is that people who had the biggest reductions and fear of pain had the largest pain intensity decreases, and that people had the biggest shift and how they think about the causes of their pain shifts from you know, structural mechanical causes to mind brain causes. They have the biggest reductions in pain as well. And we also saw is really interesting changes and how people’s brains are processing pain when we put them in the brain scanner, as well.

Eric Zimmer  47:31

Tell me about that last piece a little bit what shifted? Yeah, so

Yoni Ashar  47:34

we saw reduced activity for purity versus control in these three brain regions as people were processing or experiencing back pain. So we put people in the brain scanner with this back pain. evocation device is basically this inflatable pillow that went under people’s backs while scanning. And when we inflated it, it causes back pain, it might sound nice to have a pillow under under your back. But this was not the way we positioned it in a way rather than flat and people did not like it, it was hurting. And what we saw was, when we expose people to the same stimulus, post treatment and the PRT group, there was less activity in the anterior insula, the mid cingulate, and the anterior prefrontal cortex. And these are bringing regions that do many things. But one of the things they do is track, threatening stimuli. And the more threatening stimulus is the more activity you’ll see in those brain regions. And so the reduced activity we observed in those regions is consistent with this idea that treatment helped people see the sensations as less threatening.

Eric Zimmer  48:42

Did you screen people before the study to see if you thought they had neuroplastic pain? Or did you just take a bunch of people as back hurts?

Yoni Ashar  48:50

Yeah, we had some criteria for trying to get neuro plastic pain, we excluded people with leg pain worse than back pain, because that’s a sign that there might be radiculopathy, there might be a disc as bulging onto a nerve pushing onto a nerve that’s causing leg pain. Leg pain is not necessarily neuro plastic or not necessarily structural or mechanical adjust diagnosis can be a little more involved there. So we screened that out. And there was a couple other criteria. But on the whole, we aim for pretty broad inclusion criteria. Now if someone has scoliosis, and no problem, history of back surgeries, no problem 10 herniated discs, no problem, that those are all welcome. Got it. Got it, because those are often just not the cause of the pain like scoliosis. Not necessarily painful. It could be painful, but you need to do a thorough assessment to see, you know, you might have painful scoliosis, or you might have pain and scoliosis, but the two aren’t connected.

Eric Zimmer  49:48

And is it possible that with a lot of these conditions, there was an initial burst of pain from that condition, and then the body adjusts to it and heals and Stop sending the pain sensations. But at this point, we’ve learned, you know, to use the term used earlier, we’ve learned the pain. Yeah,

Yoni Ashar  50:07

it reminds me so much of, you know, PTSD or a person will go, you know, seems like a classic example of like military PTSD, personal being a very dangerous context or loud noises could mean you’re being attacked. And they’ll come home, and they’ll still respond to the same noise as if there’s a threat. But actually, the threat resolved long ago, once you you know, left your deployment, the threat is not there anymore, but you’re still responding as if the threats present complete parallel to this injury healing model where the threat was there, but there’s no longer a threat, but your brain responding as if it’s still there.

Eric Zimmer  50:43

I’m curious in this maybe extrapolating out multiple steps from where you are, but is there a thought of trying to measure psychological well being as well as pain reduction? Do you think that you perhaps kill two birds with one stone so to speak,

Yoni Ashar  51:00

that chronic pain can be a really like, shitty, you know, snowball of depression, anxiety, insomnia, pain, it’s the pressure faced with anxiety, which leads to insomnia is the payment against like cycle. And if you can take out one component of that cycle, and everything else can also start to come down as well, you start sleeping better, you start feeling better, you start getting more active over exercising more Well, that’s good for depression. So it’s all interconnected. And conversely, we know that, you know, depression, anxiety and insomnia, they’ll amplify pain as well. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer  51:35

And if the method brings down these three types of thoughts that you guys say, really trigger fear, worry, pressure and criticism, if your method is actually helping with a reduction in those areas, you know, the benefit continues and continues. Yeah, what

Yoni Ashar  51:50

you know, people in our study told us was that, you know, beyond bringing down pain, people are saying, like, oh, I learned to listen to my feelings. For the first time I got in touch with myself, I’ve realized that was such a bully to myself. So me, I’m putting so much pressure on myself, and I’ve stopped doing that

Eric Zimmer  52:08

that’s really important and meaningful really is. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come on. I’ve really enjoyed the conversation, I really enjoyed the book, I think the work you guys are doing is incredibly important. I get a lot of requests for people to be on the show, I get a lot of pain stuff. And a lot of it to me looks really like that seems a little sketchy. But when I saw the work that you guys were doing, I saw the studies that were behind it, I felt like this is a really important thing to try and put out there. So thank you for the work you’re doing.

Yoni Ashar  52:41

Thanks, Eric, there is a big shift happening in the field. And yeah, the way a lot of us are thinking about chronic pain is shifting to really appreciate everything we’ve been talking about our mind and brain processes can play a bigger role and just narrowly looking at you know, problems below the neck are unlikely to really work as an approach for most forms of chronic pain.

Eric Zimmer  53:04

Yeah, I mean, I think anything that sort of tries to divide the mind from the body, you know, we talk about the mind body division as if it’s a thing and in my case, it’s not I mean, like they’re, they’re pretty clearly connected in any anatomical diagram I have seen like, like, I’m not sure where we got the idea they were separate.

Yoni Ashar  53:24

But nonetheless, thanks so much for having me on.

Eric Zimmer  53:27

Yeah, thank you so much.

Episode Transcript:

Seth Godin  00:00

The problem with holding a grudge is your hands are too full to hug somebody. And what I found is that carrying around a narrative of insufficiency or anger or revenge doesn’t hurt the other person. It hurts us.

Chris Forbes  00:21

Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy or fear, we see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Seth Godin, the author of 21 international bestsellers that have changed the way people think about work and art. They’ve been translated into 38 languages. His breakthrough books include unleashing the idea of virus, permission, marketing, Purple Cow tribes, the dip linchpin, the practice, and this is marketing. He writes one of the most popular daily blogs in the world, and has given five TED Talks. Seth is also the founder of the pioneering online startup yo yodine. Today, Eric and Seth discuss his new book. This is strategy, make better plans, and don’t forget, the one you feed podcast is now on YouTube, so you can also watch interviews at the one you feed pod on YouTube.

Eric Zimmer  02:07

Hi, Seth, welcome to the show.

Seth Godin  02:09

Well, thank you for having me. It’s really a pleasure.

Eric Zimmer  02:12

We are going to be discussing your latest book, which is called this is strategy. Make better plans. But before we do that, we’ll start like we always do with the parable. In the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking to their grandchild, and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents kindness, bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops. They think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, Well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

Seth Godin  02:54

Well, of course, it reminds me of Zig Zigler. And Zig showed up in my life with that story just in time to change it when I was in my early 20s, and he expanded it by talking about the bank. And if you’re constantly making deposits into your savings account, it’s going to grow. And we don’t think it’s odd that someone takes a shower every day or eats lunch every day. Why don’t we feed our good wolf every day. And I have found through the years that every time I focus my attention and offer sustenance to the Good Wolf, it makes my life better. It’s not something I have to do, it’s something I want to do, and I’m glad to do it. Yeah,

Eric Zimmer  03:38

it really is this sense. Oftentimes with things like this, we think we’re going to do something that’s going to be the last thing we have to do towards our well being. And again, we recognize it with things like showers or exercise like That’s preposterous. Like you’re not going to take one shower that’s going to last forever. But when it comes to our inner lives, we often believe in some end state that we arrive at, yeah,

Seth Godin  04:02

and the Buddhist haven’t done us any favors by talking about achieving nirvana. The problem with holding a grudge is your hands are too full to hug somebody. And what I found is that carrying around a narrative of insufficiency or anger or revenge doesn’t hurt the other person. It hurts us. And so, you know, zig took it really far. He refused to call that thing at the traffic intersection a stoplight. Said its only purpose is to kept the traffic go. So it’s go light. But the absurdity of that is, part of it is that if we find ourselves constantly adopting hygiene about who we want to become, it happens. Yep.

Eric Zimmer  04:41

So let’s talk about your new book. This is strategy. Make better plans. I said to you before we started, we’re not generally a business podcast, but your book makes pretty clear that strategies aren’t just for business. They are for us. They are for our families. Talk a little. Little bit about the role strategy plays in our personal lives or our family lives. Well,

Seth Godin  05:06

isn’t that where it begins? I mean, most of us don’t spend all of our days thinking about business. We spend thinking about the change we seek to make, who we seek to become the influence we want to have on other people, and so you need a strategy to talk your way out of a parking ticket. You need a strategy to figure out how to have a family life that sustains you. You need a strategy for how you’re going to use your limited resources to build the life you want to have. All of these things are simply what choices do we make today to build the assets that lead to tomorrow being what we hope for. And they should not be reserved for Microsoft or some other giant corporation. They’re for anyone who has to deal with anybody else or anything else in the world. If you’re stranded on a desert island, you’re still going to need a strategy to survive.

Eric Zimmer  05:59

So how do we start to go about thinking about strategy on these smaller levels? What are the main components of a strategy?

Seth Godin  06:10

So for something that we talk about all the time, we hardly ever talk about it. And what I found is there are almost no good books about strategy, which attracted me to writing one. And I am arguing that there are four components, systems, games, empathy and time. So let’s start with time. Nobody says I need to have a full grown apple tree in my backyard today. What they do is they plant seeds, they water them, they fertilize them. It’s understood that trees grow over time. Well, we have a strategy of going through the educational system. We have a strategy for developing lifestyle over time. So the first question I ask is, why will this be better tomorrow if you do something today? That’s the first part. The second one is empathy, which is when we deal with anything in the outside world, that thing, that person has power. They can make choices. Why will they choose to do what we need them to do? Why will they choose to hire us as a freelancer instead of going on Fiverr and paying half as much? Why will they choose to come to our dinner party instead of you get the idea when we have the empathy to grant people power, we don’t get disappointed and surprised when they make a choice. Third one is games, not board games, because most board games aren’t very good, but the concept of games, which have rules, boundaries and outcomes, and if you view what you’re doing as a game, it’s much easier to not take yourself so seriously and to realize it’s not personal. They’re making moves. You’re making moves. Where does that get us? And the last one, which we could talk about for 17 hours, is systems. You know, there are lakes and there are rivers, and I live near the Hudson the Hudson River looks a little bit like a lake, but it’s not because it has a current. And currents are the invisible, or non invisible forces that push us in a given direction. Fighting a current, fighting a system, might be worthwhile, but you better do it on purpose. So a lot of the things we’re going to talk about today are, yeah, but what system are you in? And how is the system pushing you to act in a way you don’t want to act.

Eric Zimmer  08:22

So let’s talk about you said we could use strategy for improving our family, using that as the example. Let’s talk through those four components. So time. Okay, so

Seth Godin  08:36

if we’re going to focus on family, let’s say you have a seven year old kid. Your seven year old kid is going to be eight next year. The effort that you’re putting into developing your relationship and this person is not so that they will be the perfect seven year old. It’s so that they will go on a path to become an adult who is self sustained, satisfied, confident, etc. When we think about this seven year old, what do they want? Well, empathy teaches us that what they want is status, affiliation and the freedom for fear, those are the three things everybody wants. So what do they mean? Well, if a seven year old is being oppositional, and you say, time to go to bed, and they say no, they might be tired, but they’re saying no, because their status goes up if they defeat you, right? And affiliation is people’s desire to be connected, to fit in, to be part of something. So when we alienate someone in our family because we want to get something right now, we have sacrificed our connection, our affiliation, and the last one is freedom from fear. So if a kid’s at summer camp, and I helped run a summer camp for 43 years, is homesick. Homesickness isn’t a real thing. It is fear of a real thing, right? That a kid is safe, surrounded by friendly kids, but they’re homesick. Because they’re afraid of what might happen. We don’t deny the fear. We acknowledge the fear. We name the fear. We talk through the fear, and then offer affiliation, and then over time, that person can get to where they hope to go. So all of these things, they’re not manipulations. They’re the empathy of having strategy to intentionally make relationships and people better, and as soon as you do that and depersonalize it and realize it’s a game, when your seven year old swears at you, you don’t take it personally, and you don’t yell back, because you see what they’re doing and you understand it with empathy. What are

Eric Zimmer  10:40

the systems at play in a family. So there

Seth Godin  10:44

are therapists who are trained in this, and I am not, but let me tell you some of the systems that are going on. First of all, that seven year old wants a smartphone. Why? Because their peers have a smartphone, because the smartphone has a network effect. Because if they don’t have one, their status is going to go down, their affiliation will be broken, and the system just keeps reinforcing that we have to push against that if we’re going to have a different outcome. There is the system within families of people wanting to fit in all the way but stand up, wanting to be part of something, but separate from something. There is the college industrial complex, which is a huge, powerful system that pushes people from a very early age to think that they have to go to a famous College, and that has created the conditions for parents to think they are failures if their kids don’t get into a famous college and to go into quarter million dollars into debt. These are systems. So, you know, I coached a kid down the street who just went to college, and the application process feels like you’re being judged. You’re not being judged. Your application is being judged. You’re playing a game. Once you see the system, once you realize that 50% of the people who get into Harvard get in because of sports, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and play a different game and not take it so personally, and end up achieving what you want to achieve by helping them achieve what they want to achieve. So there are games within games. Systems within systems. None of us are doing this all by ourselves. You

Eric Zimmer  12:14

talk about there being a couple of myths with systems. One is that we have unlimited power, which is basically to ignore that systems are at work, right, right? More or less like I could just do whatever I want. You know, it’s all up to me. And then the other myth is that we have no power when you say that the power lies somewhere between infinity and zero. And I think that question of understanding what things we can change and what things we cannot change is a really difficult one. We often set up straw men to make it seem easy. You can’t change the weather, but you can’t change your clothes, you know, something dumb like that. But this is really hard. And when you start talking about complex systems, it gets even harder. Yeah,

Seth Godin  13:00

yeah. This is brilliant. And gets right back to which Wolf are you feeding? Because left to our own devices, none of us would feed the bad wolf. It’s systems and pressure and fear that causes us to do that, and the easiest thing to do is become a victim. I’m just doing my job. I just gotta feed the family. I just gotta pay the bills, and the next thing we know, we’re been working for a cigarette company for 10 years, and we have a drinking problem because we let the system win. But the alternative is to believe that the system doesn’t affect us whatsoever, and that we can just do exactly what we want to do. So the dance in between them acknowledging our privilege but also acknowledging that we don’t have complete control forces us to do the adult thing, which is to see the system, name the system, and pick our shots. As a parent, you got to think really hard about are you going to tell the school system I’m not participating? Are you going to tell the school system I’m participating, but my kid’s gonna say whatever they feel like saying, and we don’t care about grades. Are you gonna tell the school system? I will do exactly what you say all the time, right? Clearly, there’s something in between those that makes you a great parent. And there’s no map, there’s no easy checklist, there’s just a compass, and the compass is, can I define, describe what this kid is going to be like when they’re 22 Can I tell you the stories that they’re going to tell about their childhood? Now, how do I create the conditions for that to happen?

Eric Zimmer  14:30

And so, you know, I think on one level, it’s easy to distinguish strategy from tactics. Strategy being the overall plan, the tactics being, what do I do next? I think you say somewhere that a strategy is just like all the tactics after each other, and yet you can’t define all that completely in advance. So how do we think about strategy changing? Over time. I guess these are generalized questions, and I’m trying to maybe anchor us on something a little bit more specific. Yeah, but how do we think about when our strategy is either we had the wrong goal or we’ve got the wrong plan to get there, right? So

Seth Godin  15:17

strategies are hard to come up with and worth sticking with. Tactics change all the time. You can have secret tactics, but you shouldn’t have a secret strategy. So if we can keep talking about this child rearing thing, if your vision of the 22 year old is that they’re going to be self assured and independent, that’s a strategy you can stick with for a very long time. What might be a tactic? A tactic might be that when they’re seven, they build a website to post their poetry on, not because it’s a sign, but because they can. When they’re eight, you encourage them to run a lemonade stand to raise money for charity. You have them do projects, not just get an A you create the conditions for them to be able to point to things they did that weren’t just complying. Now, some of them, you’re going to discover. My kid’s terrible at that. They hate that. There’s too much fear. So your tactics change, but your compass is still the same. I want to raise an independent, confident kid. That’s strategy, and you can ask for help on which tactics. But if someone says no, don’t do that. Raise a kid who is compliant, obedient and afraid. You’re gonna say no, I’m not gonna do that. Not allowed. I’m not changing my strategy. You

Eric Zimmer  16:58

I want to raise a confident, self assured child is a strategy, but it’s sort of a goal, right? The strategy is going to be more than that, yes. So there’s something between stating a goal and stating a tactic that you’re pointing at here, right? The

Seth Godin  17:13

strategy in that case would be, I will create the conditions for them to encounter a parent risk and when they survive things that have apparent risk, they will realize that their narrative about risk can be expanded. I will create the conditions where there isn’t a lot of reassurance, but there is the ability for them to succeed, not by pandering to them, but by building scaffolding so that they can get better at what they do, that is a strategy with meat on it. So for example, there’s a school called the Acton Academy. I don’t know if you’ve talked about it on the show. So it’s 120 kids in one building, and there’s only two adults. One adult is the custodian, whose job is to keep things clean and to keep the other adult from doing anything. That’s it. So these kids, starting from the time they’re five, every week, they have to announce what they want to learn. They get a report card twice a week, and they have to learn anything they want, and they learn it from each other or by doing research, and they do that for 12 years, and when they’re done, these kids outperform on every metric of mental health and performance because they’re enrolled in the journey. Now, if your strategy is, I need to show I’m a good parent by fitting in to the dominant system, you will never send your kid to an active Academy. It’s bad tactic for your strategy, because you have to explain over and over again to your peers what crazy thing you’re doing. On the other hand, if your strategy is the one we just described, you’re going to think seriously about this, because it’s a tactic that aligns with your strategy. So that’s a big, global thing, but the smaller things are the ones that matter. So I produced the fourth grade musical years ago at a local school. It was the Wizard of Oz, and my strategy was, these 60 kids are going to grow as a result of this event by me creating the conditions for growth, my strategy was not I will look good by putting on the best performance of The Wizard of Oz that anyone has ever seen, because that’s what most directors seek to do. So for example, we had four Dorothy’s, four tin men, four whatever, and we kept swapping them in and out as the play went on. So 16 kids got to be the star, not four, and we spent the first two weeks of rehearsals with no script whatsoever, just teaching kids to be loud, just teaching them to stand up and speak loud, and on and on, all of these tactics so that 15 years later, kids would say to me, I still remember being in the Wizard of. Last when I was 10 years old. And that’s a choice, that’s a strategy of what we seek to do, the change we seek to make.

Eric Zimmer  20:08

So that’s a great example. So let’s explore systems through that lens. What were the systems in that case that you were interacting with? Okay, so

Seth Godin  20:19

the biggest system, for sure, was the parent industrial complex. So for example, I had been a soccer coach when the kids were much younger. I got kicked out of coaching because my team didn’t win one game and the parents acted like there was a trophy shortage. These kids were six. There isn’t a trophy shortage. There is a confidence shortage. There’s a competence shortage. So every single kid got to play, and I taught them the things they needed to learn, as opposed to figuring out how to beat other six year olds with soccer, which isn’t the point. So I knew when I was doing this musical that parents were going to say, but it’s not a good version of The Wizard of Oz. I prepared for that early and often. And there was also the system of the school because they’re giving me the space and blah, blah, blah. So how do I make it so that the principal’s status with the community goes up when she lets me do this? How do I give her stories to tell, ideas and pictures to share so that parents say to her, you’re doing a good job, because there’s a system in place. I’m not by myself, and if I got the parents on my team and the principal on my team, then I can pull it off, but first I had to acknowledge the dominant system,

Eric Zimmer  21:35

and you brought empathy in thinking about how to make what the principles challenges were, and I assume you also did the same with the parents, right? You had empathy for what they’re after. I

Seth Godin  21:47

got to say to 16 sets of parents, your kids the star of the show, right? That was a huge win that gave me like a month of cover, because the last thing that we did was we had six dress rehearsals and one performance, because I wanted the kids to feel like it was show time without the hassle of parents putting pressure on them, so that by the time we got to the last one, they were totally grooved. They were like, fine. We didn’t make drama around the last one for the kids, because the dress rehearsals in private was what made them excited. So by the time there was the one and only performance, it didn’t matter that it wasn’t a great version of The Wizard of Oz. What mattered was they saw their kids light up beaming, and there was no time to then come back to me with notes about how to make the Wizard of Oz better. Just

Eric Zimmer  22:35

how bad was it in the I’m really curious to have seen it now. Well,

Seth Godin  22:43

okay, so here’s one of the things that you can do, if you have some spare time, go on YouTube and look up bad performances of middle school orchestras, because they’re really, really bad, really bad. And the reason they’re bad is that the people who are conducting the orchestras care very much about repertoire and music, and they give kids music that’s just a little too difficult for them, and so their desire for status is associated with the canon that they’re approaching. What they should do is play the same three songs every year because they don’t need to do new songs, and they should pick songs that are totally in the realm of delight for kids, that would sound good to the kids, but again, when the status and the systems collide, we end up with stuff that we don’t like. So my answer is, it was fantastic, but Judy Garland was not in it.

Eric Zimmer  23:43

Yeah, well, interestingly, I saw a middle school choir concert sometime in the last six months, and it was really bad. But I think hearing you talk now, I think part of what made it really bad was how good the music teachers wanted it to be. They were very serious people. I could tell that they were very serious people, and what made it so bad was just how dead it was. It would be hard pressed to get a bunch of middle schoolers to have less energy than this thing had, Right

Seth Godin  24:17

exactly. So I think what we’ve uncovered here is that strategy is misunderstood, and strategy is everywhere. It’s not just, how do I get people to, you know, buy more of my whatever item it is. And the thing that we haven’t talked about is how we change systems, systems that we care about, systems of oppression, systems that are getting in the way. And the thing is that a lot of self motivation is internal, but systems change is always external, and that comes from community action when we find the others, when we feed their better wolves. Yes, then the system begins to change. So the opportunity we have is to build circles, circles of people that reinforce choices, because we’re going together. And when that happens, when you’re standing next to the others, you end up with more resilience, because they’re feeding your Wolf and you’re feeding theirs.

Eric Zimmer  25:22

You mentioned self improvement as an internal thing, right? But even in that case, sort of an internal thing, right? You referenced the famous marshmallow test, which is a measure of self control. It was a Stanford experiment where you gave kids one marshmallow, and said, If you don’t eat this one marshmallow, I’ll come back in a little while and give you two. And it appeared that this was all about kids self control and that it predicted future outcomes. But it was more complicated than that, because it was part of a system.

Seth Godin  25:55

Yeah. So this experiment, the data is fascinating. They’ve covered these people for more than 20 years, and we’re talking about kids who are three and four years old. The experimenter leaves the room with a three year old and a marshmallow, and comes back, and if the kid hasn’t eaten the marshmallow, that kid’s gonna get into a more famous college, that kid’s gonna make more money, that kid’s gonna report more happiness, etc, etc. So the takeaway, as you said is grit and self control is the key to thriving in western civilization. And my argument is it’s not controlled because poor kids, kids from broken homes, kids who haven’t had privilege, are used to people breaking their promises, adults breaking their promises, adults saying there’ll be dinner and there is no dinner. And if that’s the way you grow up, when an adult says, Don’t eat the marshmallow and you’ll get a bonus, you’re like, hey, you know what? I need to eat the marshmallow because I don’t know if you’re coming back. And we can do something about this by building communities that support kids who end up believing in themselves enough that they can wait for the second marshmallow. And it’s not something we’re born with, it’s something we can learn absolutely,

Eric Zimmer  27:12

yeah. I mean, I agree. I find that that experiment fascinating, because at first glance, it almost seems to be a well, if I didn’t have good self control at three, I’m doomed, right? I’m not going to be any good at things. The other thing that they did find in that experiment was they could teach those children how to delay to the second Marshmallow, so even then, they could see ways of teaching the child. But I think that the thing that you illustrated is the second fascinating piece, which is, yeah, depending on what a child believes about adults, trustworthiness, grabbing the marshmallow, might be absolutely the smartest thing you could do, you know, and it didn’t control for that, and it didn’t understand those factors. And when I was 18, I formed a nonprofit program to tutor disadvantaged children from, you know, generally, very poor schools. And it was so evident then that what children of an affluent school and children of a school like this, how different the circumstances were if you sent a child home in an upper middle class background with homework, there was a reasonable chance somebody might say, Hey, how about the homework? You’re working on the homework. You sent a child home with homework in these other systems that wasn’t even on the radar. It was just chaos.

Seth Godin  28:29

So this shifts into the next thing, which is the idea of false proxies, which is so important, false proxies are things that are easy to measure, but not helpful. So if you’re hiring a programmer, knowing how many words per minute they type isn’t helpful, because it’s easy to measure how many words per minute someone types, but it’s not relevant to whether they’re going to do a good job. And you know, if you’ve got one of these things on your wrist, and it’s measuring things? Is it measuring things that help you address the things that you’re trying to change that align with your strategy? Or is it simply measuring things that are easy and one of the things that we have the opportunity to do is walk away from false proxies. So in my case, I don’t use Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, any of them, because I would be under pressure to make those numbers go up. But those numbers are not related to the change I seek to make in the world. I know that I have some one star reviews on Amazon. I have not read one in 10 years, and that means I can’t read five star reviews either. So I don’t read any of the reviews because I’ve never met an author who said, Oh yeah, I read all my one star reviews and now I’m better at writing. Doesn’t make us better at writing. It just feeds the wrong Wolf. It persuades us that we’re no good when it really means I didn’t like your stuff because it wasn’t for me, right? Right? So you. We need to seek out, actively seek out, useful proxies, right? If I am good at this, it is likely that I’m getting closer to the thing I seek to do. I’ll give you one specific example. Years ago, I did the swim across Long Island Sound, because I I like to swim, and I thought this would be a fun challenge. And they put you in a boat, and they take you miles out into the ocean. You have to swim home. And the boat totally freaked me out, because there were all these people on the boat in their fancy suits with their oils and their lotions and trash talking each other, hyping themselves up to get a good time on the swim. And I got in the water and I swam too fast for the first half mile, and then I wiped myself out? Right? Because I was using the proxy of, how do I please these people? How do I fit in here and earn their status? Instead of saying, swimming is a lonely sport, I’m gonna swim by myself. It doesn’t matter what the people on the boat think, and we spend too much time on the wrong boats thinking about what people think, as opposed to getting back to our strategy of what is the change we seek to make? Who are we here to change? Who are we here to help? How do I bring tactics to bear to do that?

Eric Zimmer  31:22

You This is such a difficult thing to do, because when we start to think about wanting to make change, I don’t know how much of it is natural human thing, and how much of it is cultural imposed, but there’s always it’s got to be more. If I’m helping 10 people, I really should be helping 10,000 and once I do that, I need to help a million. And once I help, and it just goes on, and you’re right, you can start to pay attention to all the wrong things. I’ve talked about this a lot with the show, right? Like there’s intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, right? Yeah. On one hand, I pay attention to downloads because downloads are part of how we make a living, so I can’t ignore it. But if I give it too much attention, I end up very unhappy, right? Both I’m unhappy and I’m not, probably doing a great job. When I turn my focus to what am I trying to do? Why am I doing it? Things get better. To me, it feels like it’s sort of a consistent redirection, bad wolf over there. I don’t even know if I want to call it bad wolf, but not useful wolf over there and over here is the Good Wolf that’s going to help me. And it’s this consistent redirection, particularly given that we swim in systems that are trying to measure all these things right? Well, you bring

Seth Godin  32:46

up two points. Let’s do the old one and then shift to the new the old one is you’re got a false proxy right in front of you downloads. It’s not a useful proxy for the importance and impact of this podcast. It’s just not and you need to find a better proxy and measure that relentlessly, because it will make the podcast better. But you must ignore the other one, because you can’t do anything to make your downloads go up, so it’s not worth you knowing, yeah, and then the second one about this idea of more, it is directly related to industrialism and Western culture. So I’ve spent time in little villages that had no electricity. And the spiritual leader there, I just bought a solar lantern, and I said to him, What are you doing with the solar lantern? And he sat me down. He said, we sit on my front lawn. I have 24 people in my congregation, and we just wait for it to break. It’s something to talk about. And he’s not saying, How am I going to get 50 people to come here? He’s got 24 people he needs to take care of. That’s it. And when you have a farm, you’re not going to get any more acres. You grow it. You grow if you can make a tree more productive, that’s fine, but it’s unlikely. Once you have a factory and you’re leveraged and you’ve borrowed the money, and your competitors have borrowed the money, and there’s another machine for you to buy. All of a sudden, more becomes the nature of it. And the thing is, people who are very successful get hooked on that. And you know, we think about the richest people on earth, they are working harder than you and me. Why? What game are they playing, and why are they playing that game, right? Yep. And so the opportunity is to say, how do I do better, not how do I do more? And the lovely silver lining is, if you do better, you get more.

Eric Zimmer  34:37

Yeah, let’s change direction a little bit here. This probably isn’t even the right thing to talk about in the podcast, but I can’t help it. I can’t help it because you talk about flipping a coin 10 times, and there’s a slim chance you’ll get 10 heads in a row. And I talk about this idea that when you roll a die, it’s not more likely that the next roll is going to. Be a six again, because there was just a six, because the dice doesn’t know what it rolled before, correct? You then went on to say something that explains something that I’ve seen fancy mathematical formulas never do, which is that the coin doesn’t know what it did yesterday. Each flip is an independent event, but time knows right. Time keeps score over the long run, right?

Seth Godin  35:22

So let’s assert for a minute that the system we’re in is actually fair, that the system we’re in doesn’t judge us or know about our personality. That’s coin flipping, right? We know that if you flip a coin enough times, it’s going to come out, even give or take. There’s some, you know, physics involved, yeah, give or take. So that means that over time, it has to even out. That doesn’t increase the chances that you’re going to get a tail next time if you got six heads in a row, but it does mean that if we do 20 more, it’s probably going to regress to the mean. Now, the danger of knowing this is you then apply it to applying for a job. You say to yourself, I’ve applied for 20 jobs. I’ve been rejected every time. So the odds are, if I keep going, it’s going to work out. What’s missing from that is the system isn’t fair, and the system is already judging you somehow, something about your background or your resume or what job you’re applying for, whatever needs to change because repeating what you did yesterday. This is someone who got 800 book rejections in a row my first year in the business. Doesn’t work. What Works is learning from something, not just the rejection, but going deeper and improving what you do to make it a better fit for what you’re trying to accomplish. And so we have to balance both those things, understand how probability works, but also understand we don’t live in a fair world,

Eric Zimmer  36:53

right? And I think talking about things that are really hard to know. One of them being like, what can I control? And what can i The other is, is what I’m doing not going to work, meaning, then I need to change it, or is what I’m doing hasn’t worked yet, right? The I mean, I think you have a book about this, right?

Seth Godin  37:12

Exactly. It’s such a challenge in our fast moving western world to navigate this. But the thing is, almost everything rhymes with what came before. Someone is going to win the lottery, it’s probably not going to be you. Somebody is going to be the first x to do something, it’s probably not going to be you. So the opportunity we have is to pattern match. So my first book proposals were idiosyncratic. They were delightful to me. They were unique and original. And nobody in book publishing could find the confidence to say yes to that, because who was I? But as soon as I said, this is just like this, but with a little twist, oh, we can match that pattern. And then I was off to the races, and only 20 years later was I able to come up with that are original that no one had ever done before, like a book about quitting, but I couldn’t do that the first day because I didn’t have the ability, the right to do it in their eyes, and to the empathy that I got from John Boswell, who wasn’t very nice to me about it, but I learned so much was, Oh, I am being self absorbed and arrogant by insisting my books are better. Instead of saying You have good taste, this rhymes with what you like.

Eric Zimmer  38:28

You just mentioned the lottery, and that leads me to something else that you talk about in the book that I really like, which is the difference between a good decision and a good outcome. So share with me the difference well, for

Seth Godin  38:40

the people who have made it this far in the podcast, this is a gem. It’s from my friend Andy Duke. This will change your life. Here we go. We’ll do a little telepathy right now, think hard about a decision, a good decision you made in the last six months. A really good decision got it got in mind? Yeah, yeah.

38:58

Okay.

Seth Godin  39:00

Did it turn out? Well, everyone says, Yes, that’s what made it a good decision. They say it turned out well, they’re unrelated. Buying a lottery ticket, even if you win, is a bad decision, because the math is against you. The odds are against you. It doesn’t make sense. It’s not a good way to increase your money if you start congratulating yourself for decision making because it worked, you don’t understand how decision making works. If you make the right decision and it doesn’t work, that’s okay. You still made the right decision. Good for you, and we need to let go of our attachment to the outcome, because that’s not how you make a good decision. Make a good decision by knowing what you know now, understanding what came before and making a choice. And if you did that with rigor, it was a good decision no matter what happens. Yeah,

Eric Zimmer  39:52

for example, I for some reason, we seem to be talking about coin flips and dice, and I went to the casino recently and I won. Money. It was still, from a financial perspective, not a good decision, right? Going to the casino with the goal of having more money is a bad decision, correct? Now, from the perspective of having a good time and spending time with my friends, maybe good decision in that regard. But from a financial perspective, the fact that I won money that night does not it just was a happened to be a good outcome. But yes, playing a game in a casino is a bad decision if you’re just caring about finances. And so, you know, it’s really being able to separate those two things is such a useful idea.

Seth Godin  40:32

Yeah, I mean, I’ve done more projects than most people, and I have failed way more than most people, and people point to my successes, and they say, I’m really good at this. Now, what I’m really good at is launching projects in a way that if they don’t work, I’m still in the game. I never put all my chips into a project because I know it might not work, but I still did it like a professional. If it doesn’t work, that’s okay, because I get to do it again tomorrow.

Eric Zimmer  40:57

So last thing here, I’m just going to read something you wrote and let you just say a couple words about it as a way to go out here you say, when the person you could have been meets the person you are becoming, is it going to be a cause for celebration or heartbreak? And I’ll let you finish us any way you want with that prompt.

Seth Godin  41:15

I can’t believe I wrote that, because when I read it, it choked me up. It doesn’t happen to me very often when I’m writing the person you could have been, the one you’re dreaming to become, the one with high aspirations and who wants to make a difference, that person a year from now and five years from now is going to meet the person you are going to become. And if those two people get along, thank you and congratulations. But if they don’t, because the other one didn’t have a strategy, the other one got buffeted by systems, the other one made bad decisions. That’s where heartbreak comes in, because we know we could have and what I’m trying to help people do is not lower their expectations, but instead raise them and meet them by deciding it’s worth it to have a strategy, because the work is worth doing.

Eric Zimmer  42:05

Beautiful Seth, thank you so much for coming on. It’s been such a pleasure to talk with you.

Seth Godin  42:10

Thank you, Eric. Keep making this because it matters.

Episode Transcript:

00:01:44 – Eric Zimmer
Hi Douglas, welcome to the show.

00:01:46 – Douglas Westerbeke
Hi, how are you? It’s good to be here.

00:01:48 – Eric Zimmer
I am very happy to have you on. We are sitting together in a studio in Columbus, Ohio. It’s very rare that I get to do interviews in person in Columbus, so this is a real treat. You live in Cleveland for people who don’t know, 2 hours away from here. So thank you for coming down. We’re going to be discussing your novel, which is a great adventure story called a short walk through a wide world. But before we get into that, we’ll start like we always do, with the parable. In the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild, and they say in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops. Think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

00:02:51 – Douglas Westerbeke
So my first thought goes to Carl Jung, because he always used to talk about, he had these twelve archetypes, and one of them was the shadow. And this is the first thing I thought when I hear this is, so the shadow is this part of you that you bury. You just bury it your whole life, like, way down there, because it’s really the darkest side of you. And a lot of people just don’t even realize it’s there and live in denial of it, so on and so forth. Everybody ignores this, and most people aren’t even aware of it. Although every once in a while, you know, you catch yourself thinking something or you lose your temper or whatever, and you. It’s there, and we all kind of know it’s there, but you bury it, so you never know. But what Jung used to say was that you really want to know it. You really want to be familiar with it. You really want to make friends with it. So, like, the impulse is say, yeah, you want to feed the good wolf, and you should. Because I remember, you know, for a long time, my writing wasn’t getting me anywhere. And I was just on the sidelines and I was living, you know, whatever, my domesticated life. And I would see even friends of mine who had all this success, and I could have been really embittered. And I remember making the conscious choice, I’m not going to be that person. I don’t want. I’m going to be very happy when someone else, like, gets wherever they get to because they’re living the life they want to live. And that’s great for them, and I want them success. But on the other hand, the other wolf, the one that you impulsively don’t want to feed, might not be the best idea because you think about even the best people out there, like, you can imagine. Like Mother Teresa, right? She goes down to Calcutta and she wants to feed the poor. And I think a lot of people picture this, like, this kind old lady handing out treats to the kids. And it’s not the way it was. This is a huge undertaking, right? It’s like running a corporation or something. It’s huge. And from what I understand, Mother Teresa was tough. She was not easy to work for. She was really demanding. She did not put up with fools, all that kind of stuff, because she had to do this incredible job. So it takes a certain amount of ruthlessness and relentlessness to get that done. And if she hadn’t tapped into that, maybe she would not have been able to do the incredible, miraculous things that she did.

00:05:05 – Eric Zimmer
She was an inveterate gambler too, I heard.

00:05:07 – Douglas Westerbeke
I did not.

00:05:08 – Eric Zimmer
No, no, I’m making that up.

00:05:10 – Douglas Westerbeke
I was like, what?

00:05:11 – Eric Zimmer
I was trying to think of what insult I could lob at Mother Teresa that wouldn’t get me, like, permanent, wouldn’t infuriate the entire audience and not, the gambling’s not serious. But, no, that’s not true. Go on. Sorry. I couldn’t resist.

00:05:24 – Douglas Westerbeke
That’s a good one. But, yeah, I think that was my whole point. This darkness in you kind of helps propel you forward. It kind of helps you get your task done. It kind of makes you focus. It kind of, like, cuts out the distractions around you. It can do a lot of good for you. So you don’t want to starve it to death, but you want to be aware of it, and you want to use it where it’s applicable, I suppose, is how I guess you’d say it. That’s the first thing I thought of.

00:05:49 – Eric Zimmer
Anyway, interestingly enough, I was having a conversation. Just. Was it yesterday, day before, with another novelist? I don’t talk to novelists often, but a friend of mine, Matthew quick, and we were talking about this very idea, the jungian idea of the shadow.

00:06:05 – Douglas Westerbeke
Oh, really?

00:06:06 – Eric Zimmer
And we were talking about it in the context of that as particular type of men in the eras in which we’ve been raised. And by type, I mean maybe more liberal. And recognizing the overreaches that men often have had a. That there was a certain amount of trying to be the good boy. And that what that did for both of us was the thing that we couldn’t face in ourselves was anger. It was the thing that got shoved way down. My father was a very angry man all the time. And so I spent my whole early, like, adolescence through early adult years going, I’m not gonna be like that. I’m not gonna be like that. Shove it down. Shove it down. Right. And I think there’s been a cost to me for that. And it’s not that I’m even conscious of it anymore. Cause I think I’ve shoved it down for so long that it really is deep down there. But you see occasional flashes of it.

00:07:05 – Douglas Westerbeke
Yeah. Yeah. I’m the same way. You know, I love my dad and all that, but he was really short tempered.

00:07:10 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:07:11 – Douglas Westerbeke
And it made it really tense to be around him. It was like. It’s like living next to a volcano because you never know when he’s gonna go explode and all that kind of stuff. And so I mean, I was kind of raised to be angry. And I feel. I mean, like, sometimes I’m an angry driver, and sometimes, you know, I get. And I remember every time I’ve been angry, though, it has never helped me. And so I learned really quickly not to be so angry. I’m trying to think, actually, is there ever a time where it’s helped me? And I’m trying to think of one and I really can’t, but I remember really well the times where it just totally undermined what I was trying to do.

00:07:45 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. Yeah. And I think this gets back to talking about the two wolves, which is making a distinction between an emotion and the behavior that that emotion causes or pushes you to. So to try not to be angry. Like, the emotion of anger, I think, is probably destructive. Do not recognize, like, I’m angry. Like, shove that down. Don’t. You can’t feel that. You can’t feel that.

00:08:12 – Douglas Westerbeke
Right. Right.

00:08:13 – Eric Zimmer
However, it does seem perfectly reasonable to me. And part of being a good person in the world of then not letting that emotion go to whatever it wants to do. And I think that’s an interesting thing. When we think about emotions, there’s almost always an urge with them. Like, the emotion is causing us to want to do something. And that’s often the place for me where I’ve tried to learn to separate. Don’t repress the emotion, but don’t indulge the action either. That’s sort of the ideal. Now.

00:08:47 – Douglas Westerbeke
It’s not the actual emotion of anger. I mean, you should be angry about certain things. You should be angry about whatever slavery, the holocaust, whatever it is. How you manifest that anger, though, is something you can control, and you’ve got to do it wisely. You’ve got to do it so it’s actually a productive thing as opposed to something that undermines you.

00:09:04 – Eric Zimmer
Right. Yeah, it’s the whole respond rather than react idea.

00:09:08 – Douglas Westerbeke
Yeah.

00:09:09 – Eric Zimmer
So let’s turn to your book. I’m going to let you maybe tell us for a minute or two your description of what the book is about, just to give listeners a sense of the type of book we’re discussing.

00:09:21 – Douglas Westerbeke
Well, I mean, I can give you my elevator picture for people who don’t know. So it starts off with Aubrey Torvell. She is a nine year old girl in 1880s Paris, and she gets really sick at the dinner table one night. So all her parents are all freaked out, her family’s freaked out. They rush her to the doctor, and the doctor tries to fix her, but gets to the doctor, and she’s totally fine. And the doctor’s like, I don’t see anything wrong there. And so she goes back home and she can’t even get inside the house, she’s so sick this time. And they take her back to the doctor, and now she’s even sicker. And the doctor has no idea what’s wrong with her. And he’s poking and prodding her, trying to figure it out, and she gets so frustrated, she just runs off into the streets of Paris at night and she feels fine. And she realizes that it’s this active exploration of being somewhere she’s never been before that cures her. And so she spends the rest of her life wandering around and around the world, constantly on the run from this disease. And so it’s an epic adventure. She’s going to climb the himalayas and cross the Sahara and raft down the Amazon. All these amazing things. And so that’s the exciting part. It’s a huge, epic adventure. That’s the fun part to read. But on the flip side, I mean, this is a girl who has lost her family, has nowhere to call home. She can’t fall in love because they’re all doomed. She just lives this life that seems to have no meaning. So how do you find a meaning in a life that feels like an eternal punishment? And that’s the dilemma that she’s facing here. It seems like it would be a great adventure. Terrific excuse to get out of there. A lot of people admire her and are envious of her because they see this woman who’s having this grand adventure, perfect excuse to do it, can’t hold it against her. But really, you know, it’s not so easy if you’re there. And I love to travel. Most people do love to travel. But I remember I was traveling. My wife is from China. We were traveling through China. I think we spent, like, three weeks there, maybe four. And we started in the south, moved our way north. By the time we got to Beijing, me and my kids were exhausted. And we didn’t, you know, there was no forbidden city, no great wall. We just slept for three days, you know, so, I mean, that was only four weeks. Imagine doing this for a lifetime. So it can be brutal. My dad used to travel all the time for his work, you know, so he hates to travel now. My wife is kind of similar. She’s a musician with the Cleveland orchestra, and they’re very much traveling or touring orchestra, and you get tired of it. You just want to stay home with your kids and enjoy your life and stuff like that. But so there’s a flip side. There’s the adventure of travel, which is why we go on vacations. But, I mean, most people don’t take a vacation. That’s more than, you know, a week, ten days, something like that. Then they come back home. If that goes on forever, it’s a whole different story.

00:11:57 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. It’s ironic that we’re having this conversation, because in about ten days, I’m about to embark on a three month trip.

00:12:04 – Douglas Westerbeke
Oh, my God.

00:12:04 – Eric Zimmer
To Europe. Now, it’s not a vacation.

00:12:07 – Douglas Westerbeke
I didn’t mean to spoil. I don’t interrupt you.

00:12:08 – Eric Zimmer
No, no, it’s not a vacation. I mean, parts of it will be vacation, but I will be working while I’m there. I’m working on a book myself, so I’ll be writing, I’ll be doing interviews. So it’s not a vacation, but it is three months of us moving our way, you know, covering a fair amount of ground over that time. And as we were planning the trip, I had sort of been reading your book a little bit. Not in preparation for the trip, but just they sort of aligned. But certainly thinking about that, like, how long do we want to stay in one place versus how many different places do we want to see and what’s the pace that you’re on? Right. Because to your point, like, when you’re always moving, that gets to be exhausting.

00:12:46 – Douglas Westerbeke
Yeah. I planned some vacations where it was like, okay, we’ll spend one or two days there, one or two days there. And that’s never the best way, really, the best way do it is to pick a spot, stay for a while, so at least you feel like you’ve gotten the feel of the place and so on. And because otherwise it’s hectic, it’s constant moving, you never get a break, and you need a break and just to enjoy the place, really. I mean, it’s not enough to just stop and see.

00:13:09 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, we’ve interspersed a week here, a couple weeks there, but then there’s a couple weeks where, you know, we’re seeing multiple places where there’s a lot more movement. So I’m so fortunate that my work allows me to work from anywhere and get a chance to go do this. But it’s ironic that we’re talking about an epic journey when I feel like I’m going on. For me, what is an epic journey?

00:13:28 – Douglas Westerbeke
That is an epic journey.

00:13:29 – Eric Zimmer
Right. So you refer to the book as an adventure story. You’ve also referred to it as a spiritual journey. That’s a term that means all sorts of things. To all sorts of people. When you use it, what are you referring to? What do you mean?

00:13:45 – Douglas Westerbeke
I think I mean it actually pretty literary. So this has a backstory to it. So when I was a kid, tell you the whole story, it doesn’t make me look good, but when I was like, I don’t even remember how old I was, like seven, eight years old, maybe, maybe not even. And I remember getting into a big fight with my little brother. I had four brothers. I had one little one. And it was over something stupid, too. It was like, what are we going to watch on tv? Or I wanted to watch a Godzilla movie and he wanted to watch. Knowing him, it was like 60 minutes or something. And I’m like, no, I want to watch Godzilla. And he got his way, and I went out into the backyard and I sulked. And I remember sitting under the tree in the backyard thinking, God, if you’re out there, just wreak total, unabashed revenge on my little brother. And weeks went by and nothing happened. And I was like, and because of that, I became an avowed atheist from like the age of like seven. I was like, you know, you really let me down. I’m not believing in you anymore. That’s my revenge, you know, my petty revenge. As I got older and I stuck to this, you know, my arguments got a lot more sophisticated than that. But as I got older, I started noticing that all the stories I was writing, not all of them, but a lot of the stories I was writing were about these characters who were either very atheistic or they didn’t like God, but God loved them anyway. And I was like, why am I writing these stories? I’m not that person. And then, of course, cursed me. Well, geez, maybe I’m not nearly as atheistic as I thought I was, and maybe there’s a lot more going. So these are the types of characters I write now. And because of that, I started studying the religions. I started studying all of them. But the Old Testament had these great stories that I loved. A great one would be Jonah, because Jonah’s given this task, he has to go down and convert Nineveh, right? And which is an insane thing for, you know, this guy who’s just minding his own business, and God comes down, says, go to Nineveh and convert him. And he’s like, I don’t want to go to Nineveh. I want to stay home. I was enjoying myself. I was perfectly happy before you came along. And he does everything he can to get out of that situation. And I’m thinking, well, you know, if you just do it, he says, your life’s going to be a lot easier. But he refuses. And in retrospect, because we all know how the story ends, he would have just been smarter just going along and doing as he was told. But you got to admire the guy who, like, butts head with God and says, no, not going to do it. Like, you’re going to lose this battle. You have no chance of winning this one. But he fights it anyway. And there’s something kind of admirable about that, even if he’s wrong. And I know, like, the bigger moral of the story is that it’s trying to show that if you turn your head away when evils are happening in the world, you’re not helping the world. So I get that. But at the same time, there’s something really admirable about a guy who’s fighting a completely futile war against something bigger, impossibly bigger, than he’ll ever be. He cannot comprehend how big this thing he’s up against is, and he fights it anyway. And I always thought that was admirable. And I think Aubrey Torvell is going through the exact same adventure because she’s stuck with this disease. She’s traveling around the world. She has no idea why she’s been singled out for this. She’s the only one in the world that has this thing and maybe the only one ever will, and she doesn’t know why, and it makes her miserable, where if she kind of embraced her fate, she would have been a lot happier. But people come up to me all the time. I love that character of Aubrey Torivell. She’s a great character. It’s because she’s making this futile fight. She’s very feisty, she’s very single minded. And there’s something about that that people admire. I think. I think that’s what it is. I’m off on a tangent there, but that was my idea, is that she’s up against this. It’s not until she kind of learns to look back on her life and say, you know what? That wasn’t so bad. And I saw things no one else gets to see. And there is something to that. She kind of comes around. This idea kind of manifests through a story. I don’t kind of say it outrightly, but there’s a voice in her head. There’s all kinds of other things happening, going on. And what does that mean? I don’t spell it out, but in my mind, I knew what it was, and I hope the readers get that this is also a story about enlightenment. There’s a lot of discussion between her and the prince in the middle of the story, and they’re talking about what it means to be enlightened, and how do you know? And it’s, you know, the idea is it’s kind of like waking up from a dream, from a dream life to your waking life. And enlightenment is when you’re waking up in your waking life into something even higher than that, and you see her go through that process, by the end, you’re there. So it’s a story of enlightenment as well. And to me, that’s all the way through the book, and that’s where the spiritual element comes in.

00:18:17 – Eric Zimmer
Right. Because it’s not a book about God in a direct way. Right. There’s no divine being. There’s no her taking on. But what you’re saying is this person fighting their fate being sort of one of the core themes there. And I always think it’s so interesting, and I think it’s one of the fundamental dilemmas that we face, particularly in today’s day and age, where choices are unlimited and every view of the world and every way to live is shown to you. You can actually see it all, is this question of what do I accept about my life being the way that it is, and what do I change? Because that’s the first question. Like, if you’re going to fight your fate, on one hand you look at that and go, well, it’s admirable. And on the other hand, you go, well, it’s a completely losing battle. Like, why? It’s obvious that if there’s something we can’t change, then accepting it is the reasonable course of action. And I think most people are wise.

00:19:19 – Douglas Westerbeke
Enough to know that that’s a very taoist take. You don’t fight the universe.

00:19:23 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, but that even shows up in, like, if you look at, like, parents who have children who have disabilities, if there’s just no chance of fixing it, in many ways their life is easier because they don’t have to try and figure out whether to fix it, how much time and energy to put into fixing it. They just accept. They get on with the business of, like, all right, how do we build a life with this thing that we’ve been given that we can’t do anything about? Andrew Solomon, who’s a great writer, wrote the noonday Demon, which is called the Atlas of depression. He also wrote a book called Far from the Tree, and it’s about children who are different than their parents. Maybe they’re blind, they’re autistic, but they’re different. And it was one of the main points I really took away from that book was this idea of these parents whose children, there might be a way to make them better, and they are caught in this pull. Like part of them is going just, all right, this is what we have. Let’s deal with it. But then there’s another part of them that’s going, it could be different. It could be different if you just did this. What if you tried this? So I think most of us in the modern world are closer to that ladder thing I was describing, which is we look at our lives, and if we just knew there were things that couldn’t change, like, I know my height isn’t going to change, right? I mean, I could do some crazy surgery that breaks all my bones and. But all intents and purposes, I’m the height. I am. And so you go about accepting that. I go, well, I’m not going to dunk a basketball. I just kind of move on.

00:20:47 – Douglas Westerbeke
Right. If you’re raising kids, you’re dealing with this dilemma daily, right? Because you want your kids to be as perfect and ready for the world when it comes to them and all that. So you want them to be perfect at everything thing, and there’s just certain things they’re going to be good at and certain things they’re not going to be good at. And it takes time to, like, figure, maybe not time, patience and understanding to realize this is what they’re like. And the more you try to push them into being this ideal, the less of a credit they’re going to be to you. If you want your kids to turn out well, let them be them, and they’ll figure out their own way, and they’ll figure out their pluses and minuses. Yeah, it’s a lot like that.

00:21:26 – Eric Zimmer
There’s a line in the book where you’re talking about. Aubrey once believed it was possible to control the world, to make it bend to her personal sense of justice. What a child she was, how foolish she’d been, how haughty, and then goes on to say, without a doubt, she knew she did not command the world, but was at the mercy of it. It’s a lesson most people learn at some point in their lives, that the world is a bigger and more powerful thing than you.

00:21:53 – Douglas Westerbeke
Yeah, that was a lesson I learned. It’s a lesson I see a lot of people learn. You start off young, you’re idealistic, and then you realize, I remember my dad telling me when I was a kid. You know what? You’re young, you’re full of energy. You’re idealistic. This is the time to try to do the things you want to do because when you’re older, you’re going to be crushed.

00:22:13 – Eric Zimmer
Wise. Wise, right.

00:22:15 – Douglas Westerbeke
That’s true. Right.

00:22:16 – Eric Zimmer
I mean, I think that is wise and generous. Right. Instead of telling you not to be idealistic and not try that stuff, it’s like, go. That’s appropriate for this phase in your life of where you’re at.

00:22:30 – Douglas Westerbeke
I remember thinking of me when I was a kid because I was very idealistic. I have lots of other friends who are like that. And eventually life gets to you because I had already been planning to write books and make movies and do all this stuff by the time I was 20. It didn’t work out that way.

00:22:47 – Eric Zimmer
And yet here you are. I don’t know how old you are with a novel.

00:22:50 – Douglas Westerbeke
I ain’t 20.

00:22:51 – Eric Zimmer
You’re not 20? You’re not 60 either?

00:22:54 – Douglas Westerbeke
No, no. But this is my next stop, though.

00:22:57 – Eric Zimmer
It’s your next stop. Really?

00:22:58 – Douglas Westerbeke
Yeah.

00:22:59 – Eric Zimmer
So you’re older than 55?

00:23:00 – Douglas Westerbeke
I don’t know, actually.

00:23:01 – Eric Zimmer
I’m 54.

00:23:02 – Douglas Westerbeke
You must think I might be 54. No, I don’t. I forget these things.

00:23:06 – Eric Zimmer
All right, all right.

00:23:07 – Douglas Westerbeke
Genuinely forget.

00:23:08 – Eric Zimmer
I forget, too. But my birth year was 1970, so it’s always easy to figure out because I can just go, oh, well, what year is it? 2024. Add 30 to it. Okay, I’m there. Oh, crap.

00:23:17 – Douglas Westerbeke
So then I’m. No, no, I’m older than you. I didn’t even realize. I really, genuinely forgot.

00:23:22 – Eric Zimmer
Well, you look very young, by the way. You look very young. But my point with that was not to compliment you on your age. My point was to say you had this idealism of all these things you were going to do when you were young, and they didn’t happen.

00:23:36 – Douglas Westerbeke
Right, right.

00:23:37 – Eric Zimmer
And yet here you are with a novel that has done. I mean, I don’t know how you gauge how well a book does, but it’s been in windows of Barnes and noble. That’s good enough, right? I mean, that’s something. So, tie together this early disillusionment with creating art and lack of success with where you are today, how did that happen? How did you stay with it to get to the point where you were able to do it? How did you keep creating art in that period?

00:24:06 – Douglas Westerbeke
Well, so, I mean, I’ve been doing it since I was little. I mean, I started writing stories when I was in, like, third grade. Maybe even before that. I remember, me and my friends in third grade would get together, we would all write stories together, and we had all these imaginary characters and stuff like that. And mine was a blue raccoon. I think my friend had these family of pickles around, talking and stuff like that.

00:24:28 – Eric Zimmer
And the raccoons and the pickles get together, they did.

00:24:30 – Douglas Westerbeke
So we have all these joint stories. It was like Marvel’s universe, and they would all, like, intersect and stuff like that. They would rob banks and stuff like that together. They’re always getting into these. Well, doesn’t matter. Point is, I kept writing these stories after they had stopped, and I couldn’t stop. So I was totally writing for pleasure. But I think around 6th grade, I was like, okay, this is what I want to do. And so I just started writing stories and more and more. And, see, I went to school for it. Afterwards, I would submit screenplays to competitions, and they did really well, and it would just always be enough to keep me going. Like, enough, like, encouragement. But it never happened. So I was optioned, like, you know, four times, I think, in Hollywood, but none of them ever got produced. And, you know, which is crushing after a while. Then you had kids and you take a break. But even when I had kids, I was like, oh, my God, I have to find time to write. You get the shakes when you don’t write. I mean, it’s like a physical reaction to not writing. And I’ve always had that. And so, I mean, I just constantly wrote. I probably have, like, 50 screenplays and five or six novels already, just because just yesterday, I’m working on a novel that I know is unpublishable. It’ll never be published. It’s insane. It’s a total vanity project is what they call it. But in between books, I’ll take off a month, and I’ll work on this thing just for fun. And all that time, I wasn’t doing it because I thought it would have, like, this tremendous, incredible payoff or anything. I’m doing it because I can’t stop. I don’t know any other way to live. Right.

00:25:52 – Eric Zimmer
It’s just an obsession, Aubrey.

00:25:54 – Douglas Westerbeke
Am I.

00:25:55 – Eric Zimmer
Well, in the sense of, she can’t stop moving, or she gets worse than the shakes. You just described your inability to stop writing.

00:26:02 – Douglas Westerbeke
Yeah, I guess so.

00:26:03 – Eric Zimmer
Without getting some sort of.

00:26:05 – Douglas Westerbeke
I never made that analogy. This is going in my next story.

00:26:10 – Eric Zimmer
There’s another Aubrey connection that I picked up, which I don’t know. You may or may not know, but one of the things that appears to potentially be an inciting. Incident for her is when she’s young, she fails to take a certain act towards God.

00:26:29 – Douglas Westerbeke
Right. A selfless act.

00:26:31 – Eric Zimmer
Right. It was sort of a battle with God. And you describe being a young child having a revenge fantasy and swearing off God because he didn’t take out your little brother. That’s another sim. I don’t know if you’ve connected that dot either to an extent. Okay. Okay.

00:26:48 – Douglas Westerbeke
Maybe not quite so consciously, but I mean, that one I totally feel.

00:26:53 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, yeah.

00:26:54 – Douglas Westerbeke
Like, I can get that one right away. So it’s also a setup, like you get from, you know, the Garden of Eden set up. Right. Don’t eat that apple. Yeah, of course they’re gonna get it. Yeah.

00:27:03 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:27:04 – Douglas Westerbeke
So, yeah, throw out the puzzle ball. Of course she’s not gonna throw it out at that point. Oh, no. I’ve got to see what’s inside it so she doesn’t.

00:27:09 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:27:10 – Douglas Westerbeke
And that’s what sets her off in her journey. And it’s like she was set.

00:27:31 – Eric Zimmer
So there’s another line in the book that says, the best way to survive some things thought Aubrey was not to understand. Do you believe that?

00:27:40 – Douglas Westerbeke
So I read this great book called deep Survival. Lawrence Gonzalez, I think, wrote it because I love to write survival stories. So he was writing all about how people survive, what they survive. There are some situations people just can’t survive, but in certain situations, it is a kind of a personality that gets you through it. And I remember so many aspects of it. One was to just act, and the other one was, people who tend to survive tend to admire their situation. Like, there was a story about a plane crash, and the plane broke open in midair, and this girl strapped to her seat was literally tumbling through the air into the jungle. And, you know, because there was a jungle, she landed in the trees and actually survived this fall from an airplane. A bunch of them did. The airplane was low, I guess, but she describes it as, oh, look at these trees. They look like broccoli. She remembers this incident, and when she’s on the ground, she’s like, this is a beautiful jungle. And she’s admiring this like everyone else is. A lot of other people are looking at this like this is their grave. You know, this is. This is the worst thing that could happen to me. This is miserable. She’s actually admiring the place she’s in. She’s the only one that survived because everyone just froze, sat still, and she’s like, you know what? I’m just going to follow this river. I’m going to walk, because if I stay here. They’re not going to find us with all that. And so she just did something, whereas everyone else said, no, no, wait, they’ll find us here. She’s like, I don’t know, she took off. No one else will go with her. And she is the only one that lived. She eventually was picked up, and there’s a, I don’t remember where I heard this, a soldier saying it was a combat soldier, and he says, look, if you’re ever lost in the woods, just walk, because it’ll take you somewhere. I mean, you can stand there and freeze out of fear, and you can just sit there and not do anything, or you can take some steps and maybe it won’t help, maybe it will, but at least you’ll know more than you did before because you’re starting to see the place you’re at, and maybe you’ll come across something. Maybe you get a little lucky. Maybe you’ll find some food, maybe you’ll find a river you can follow, so on and so forth. But if you just stay in one place, you’re not improving your situation. So when Aubrey is saying that, I mean, Aubrey is not necessarily a great intellect. She’s an action oriented person. For her, you got to keep moving. First of all, she has to keep moving anyway. If she thinks about her plight too much, it’s going to make her miserable. And that’s what one of her flaws is, right? I mean, I hate to advocate mindlessness because I don’t think it’s quite there, but sometimes if you just do something, it’s the best antidote there is. And so instead of just sitting there feeling sorry for yourself, just get out there and walk. And maybe things, maybe they won’t improve. Maybe they will, and it’s certainly going to improve a lot more than just sitting there, you know, doing nothing.

00:30:17 – Eric Zimmer
Yep. I feel obligated to tell listeners we do not offer survival advice on this show. So the other amazing thing about that book, just if you’re in the. The show has no opinion on whether you should stay put or walk. Just.

00:30:32 – Douglas Westerbeke
But the other thing was, like, he actually broke it down by demographics. Kids under the age of six were more likely to survive than kids between the age of 17 and, like, 13, because the kids between 17 and 13, you know, teenagers, these young teenagers who don’t know how to control their emotions yet tend to get really panicky or they tend to get really depressed. Their emotions get ahead of them and take them over, and they tend to curl up and die, whereas under six, they’re like, oh, I’ll just look for food. And they go off and just do the things they have to do. They’re very practical. They don’t get hung up on emotions at all because they just don’t have that life experience, and it doesn’t mean much to them yet. They just do what they have to do. That’s why you hear, like, little kids being raised by wolves and monkeys and things like that, because they just let it happen, whereas these older group of kids, they’ll be freaked out. They’ll have self doubt. All these kind of things just undermine them. And then as you get older, the chances get better. Then you get to a certain age, and your chances drop off, and it’s all in the mind, and it’s because of where your mind is at that age. It was really fascinating, though.

00:31:37 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, that’s wild. That is adventure novels or survival novels. I may not get this right. The author, Lauren Groff. Is that Lauren Groff?

00:31:48 – Douglas Westerbeke
Yeah.

00:31:48 – Eric Zimmer
She has a new book. Her latest book is sort of a survival story about a woman who wanders off from, I’m gonna say, a medieval village where it’s just a bad place to be. And so, anyway, she’s an amazing writer. Her prose is incredible. And so you might really enjoy that.

00:32:05 – Douglas Westerbeke
I’m gonna look for that now. Yeah.

00:32:06 – Eric Zimmer
Back to this idea of Aubrey’s life as being both a blessing and a curse in that she has to keep moving. And we talked about how sometimes that may not be ideal. You make an analogy in the book between imprisonment and exile. Right. Somebody’s making the point that, like, punishment is to be imprisoned.

00:32:29 – Douglas Westerbeke
Right.

00:32:30 – Eric Zimmer
He can’t move. And she makes the point, well, people are often exiled. Also another type of punishment. And as I was thinking about this idea, it seems that either of those things or really any condition in the extreme, becomes really difficult. Right. Like, if you’re imprisoned in a prison cell, that’s awful. Horrible, right. You can’t go anywhere. You can’t, I mean, like, nothing. And to be forced to move to a new place you’ve never been every three days, as Aubrey is, is also a form of torture in its own way. So it seems like there’s this. And I don’t know if you think about this, but there’s a case being made for sort of a middle way here, that the middle way is ideal.

00:33:20 – Douglas Westerbeke
Yeah. I love Taoism, and that’s the philosophy there.

00:33:23 – Eric Zimmer
Yep. For sure.

00:33:24 – Douglas Westerbeke
But I have to admit, and this isn’t true for everybody, but I know for me, I would prefer exile, because at least you’re out there and you’re moving.

00:33:31 – Eric Zimmer
Agreed.

00:33:31 – Douglas Westerbeke
And then there are. But there are people I know, and I’ve met them, who would prefer to be in the prison because they can relax and they can just, you know, people are taking care of them, feeding them, and they just have to sit there.

00:33:40 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. To make it a little bit more realistic, because I think almost anybody would choose exile over prison cell because that’s so extreme. But we might.

00:33:49 – Douglas Westerbeke
One guy who didn’t.

00:33:50 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. Okay, well, and it’s interesting, some people who are out of prison, or I have a friend who was in prison, he just got out in the last six months. He was in prison for 20 years.

00:34:00 – Douglas Westerbeke
Yeah. That’s a tough adjustment.

00:34:01 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. I mean, all of a sudden your life is completely structured in to a degree you would never want your life to be structured. And then suddenly there is nothing as far as structure goes. Anyway, I was sort of making the middle way point there a little bit. For most of us, somewhere in between those two things is going to be the ideal.

00:34:22 – Douglas Westerbeke
Yeah. Well, that’s how most of us live our lives. Right. Because we’re not sitting at home all day doing nothing. We’re out and about. We go on vacations once in a while and so on, so on and so forth. And most of us don’t cloister ourselves inside a room all the rest of our lives. And most of us aren’t wandering the world forever and ever either. There are people now, you know, hearing about these, what, digital nomads? And they do it for like a couple years, and then you go on YouTube and you read, well, what are they up to now? I was like, I broke down. I couldn’t do it anymore.

00:34:49 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. I’ve known a couple people who’ve tried the digital nomad lifestyle, and it a seems to like you’re saying to be great for a while until all of a sudden it’s not.

00:34:59 – Douglas Westerbeke
One guy said something really interesting to me because he was going around the world seeing all these beautiful things. They stopped becoming beautiful to him. And he missed that. He missed the idea of going somewhere and being stunned by the landscape or the culture, whatever it is he was after. Or he missed being stunned and knocked bowled over by that because it was becoming routine for him. And that’s something that, it didn’t actually occur to me.

00:35:24 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, we habituate to almost anything, right? We habituate to almost anything.

00:35:28 – Douglas Westerbeke
Imagine habituating. Imagine habituating to, like, natural beauty. I can’t even imagine that, but I guess it would happen.

00:35:35 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. Well, I think that raises a question that I think is at the heart of a lot of spiritual journeys or spiritual work, which is, how do you continue to see the extraordinary in what has become very ordinary? How do you continue to enliven your life even though it’s not changing much?

00:35:58 – Douglas Westerbeke
Yeah. Oh, my God. It’s like you want an answer from me.

00:36:00 – Eric Zimmer
No, no, no. I’m not looking for an answer so much as yes. I’ve been hoping.

00:36:07 – Douglas Westerbeke
How do you do that?

00:36:08 – Eric Zimmer
600 episodes in. I figured you were the guy was going to solve this problem.

00:36:13 – Douglas Westerbeke
The other theme of the book is that our happiness, our sense of wonder, whatever it is that makes us happy, depends on the stories we write for ourselves, because we’re always writing a story. You have this internal monologue in your head all the time, right? You’re talking to yourself constantly. Although I’ve heard there are people who don’t have this internal monologue, and I never knew that was even possible.

00:36:34 – Eric Zimmer
I’ve heard that also, and I remain skeptical.

00:36:37 – Douglas Westerbeke
I can’t.

00:36:37 – Chris Forbes
I can’t.

00:36:38 – Douglas Westerbeke
How do you even think creative?

00:36:41 – Eric Zimmer
Exactly. Anyway, I’ve heard the same thing, and I’m like, obviously, that’s self reported, because we can’t hear inside anyone else’s head.

00:36:49 – Douglas Westerbeke
Yeah. I mean, do they just walk in this kind of, like, vacant void? I don’t get it.

00:36:53 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. A little thought experiment I like to do sometimes, though, to this end, and it’s pretty much impossible to do, but it’s a little bit like a zen co op, is to try and process the world without language. Like, just imagine you don’t have language. I mean, I can’t turn language off it, because, again, I think in language. In words.

00:37:15 – Douglas Westerbeke
Right.

00:37:16 – Eric Zimmer
But it is an interesting sort of way of trying to put your brain on tilt, so to speak. Right.

00:37:21 – Douglas Westerbeke
I’ve wondered the same thing. I do like our way, way early ancestors. You know, the trove magnum. And how do they. How do they do it? How do they play? Put everything together? I mean, they were slowly getting there. I mean, is it visual? Is it. I have no idea how they do it. Frankly. It’s hard to imagine. It’s like trying to get inside the head of your cat.

00:37:36 – Eric Zimmer
100%. If there was any one thing that I like, if there was a God, and I could get to ask God a question, I think my question would be something like, can you put me inside the head of a dog for a few days? Or an octopus? Or pick your creature? What is consciousness like for a creature that doesn’t have language in the way that we do? I look at my dog all the time. And just what must that experience be like? Yeah, it’s just mind blowing, but it would be great to know.

00:38:08 – Douglas Westerbeke
Yeah. So. But what I was saying before I got onto that was so everybody tells them their own stories, and they’re constantly building this in their head. They talk to themselves. They imagine their futures. They rewrite their past. I mean, you can do all kinds of stuff to yourself in the book. There are these libraries that Aubrey comes upon. They’re scattered all throughout the book, and it’s a recurring place that she visits these books. They’re not in a language, so she can read them anywhere in the world. They’re all in pictures, and they’re people’s stories. So she’s reading all these people’s stories. It becomes a major theme in that. Well, what’s her story? And what story is she telling herself? Because, like we were saying, she comes off, she’s miserable in the beginning, and what she’s got to do is she’s got to learn to change her story, or she’s going to be miserable till the day she dies. And so people can find their happiness by finding the right story. And a lot of people can get that story wrong. They will tell themselves the wrong story. I’m thinking of, what’s that movie, zone of interest where they run? Auschwitz. But to them, it’s just a day job, right, and a way to promote themselves and further their career, and they are totally telling themselves the wrong story. I don’t want to give away the ending, but at the end, that staircase scene, it manifests itself. This is not a guy who’s, well, right, and that’s because they’ve completely told themselves the wrong story, as long as you can make it. And this isn’t my idea, by the way. I’m not an intellect by any stretch of the imagination. But Viktor Frankl came up with this because he survived Auschwitz and he saw it happening firsthand. He would see people sitting there saying, you know what? I have a feeling we’re going to be liberated by the end of March. And then it wouldn’t happen, and that person would die. They would just curl up and give up hope and just die. And he saw this again and again. People telling themselves the wrong story, and sometimes it costs them their life. His. I shouldn’t say philosophy. He was a psychologist. His theory was that, look, you’ve got to tell yourself the right story. That story can change. It can adjust over time. If you get it wrong, it can have disastrous results. If you get it. Right. You can really make a meaningful life for yourself.

00:40:15 – Eric Zimmer
Fascinating. I have a bunch of responses to that. I mean, one is. I mean, there’s a type of therapy called narrative therapy, and the whole point of it is to do exactly what you’re saying. You rewrite your life experiences to tell a different story. Right. Because we’re making up the story. We’re making up the meaning. Right, right. In most cases. Right. There’s a fact, and then there’s interpretation. We’re making it up. And if you’re going to make it up, why not make it up in a way that leads to you being happier, healthier, and of more service to other people in the world. Right. Like, I mean, I think about this all the time. Like, I’m telling myself stories all the time. Most of them are about how something is going to turn out, and I don’t know how something’s going to turn out. If I did, I would be an inveterate gambler. Right? Like, I would take after mother Teresa, and I would be gambling all the time because I would know what was going to happen. But I don’t. And yet, predominantly, my stories, when I’m not careful, are ones of impending failure. And so I just try and remind myself, you don’t know the future, so if you’re going to make up a story, why not make up one that is a little bit more useful?

00:41:30 – Douglas Westerbeke
So I was almost the opposite. I mean, you have everything can end in failure kind of thing going on. And I had a, like, everything is going to be great. I can’t wait. You know, that’s a bad story to tell yourself, too, because you’re divorcing yourself from reality, right?

00:41:44 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, I guess I have my versions of those, too, where everything’s going to be fine. Everything’s going to be fine. Which I think is like, a cognitive bias, where you just believe what you want to believe, and you’re right, that is an equally damaging story. If you have an infection and you just say to yourself, well, sure, it’s going to be fine. It’s going to be fine.

00:42:02 – Douglas Westerbeke
Right, right.

00:42:02 – Eric Zimmer
And next thing you know, you have sepsis. Right?

00:42:04 – Douglas Westerbeke
Yeah, yeah, exactly. I know people have gone through, like, terrible divorces, and then that reshapes their narrative, and now they’re, like, depressed all the time because, you know. Cause that’s the ultimate betrayal right there. And how do you survive something like that?

00:42:17 – Eric Zimmer
Absolutely.

00:42:18 – Douglas Westerbeke
Rewrite your whole world right there and then. And you could either, like, say, okay, I’m gonna survive this, or this is gonna kill me?

00:42:25 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:42:25 – Douglas Westerbeke
And you choose it?

00:42:26 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. I mean, as a recovering addict and alcoholic, that’s a pivotal point for people who I think get better. Much, much better. There’s a rewriting of that story that happens very often with people when they’re able to help someone else with the thing they’ve gone through, because all of a sudden, it goes from this thing I endured to now this gift that I can give to others.

00:42:50 – Douglas Westerbeke
The story becomes the gift.

00:42:51 – Eric Zimmer
No. Well, in a way, in a sense. So my alcoholism or my addiction went from being this terrible thing to when I realized that now I had that power to help other alcoholics and addicts. Now this thing that was a curse or a burden, this addiction is now. I mean, a gift is a strong word for it, but is now it has a purpose and a use.

00:43:15 – Douglas Westerbeke
No, I don’t think that’s a stronger word. I think that’s exactly right.

00:43:18 – Eric Zimmer
Oh, I know where I wanted to go with this. I kind of just ended up there in a roundabout way. But we’re talking about this idea of rewriting your own story and how Aubrey has to do that. And what’s interesting is that the way that she’s able to do that is very often by other people helping her see her story differently. Right.

00:43:38 – Douglas Westerbeke
Yeah. Well, we get an example of someone who tells the wrong story to himself and who’s there. One of the setups of the book is that I was thinking, okay, well, here’s a woman who can’t actually settle down and marry anybody. She’s going to go through a series of lovers just because that’s the situation she’s in. Nobody can hold it against her. So I just went for it. So she’s going to have, you know, she’s going to fall in love with a very possessive man, and then she’s gonna have a very romantic affair, and then she’s gonna have a very platonic relationship, one relationship without words. One’s just unreciprocated, all kinds, one in old age. But one of them is the guy who’s telling himself, and they actually say this, he’s telling himself the wrong story. He thinks he can cure Aubrey. He can’t. He’s telling himself the wrong thing for the wrong reasons, too, because he’s very possessive and wants to hold onto her. And later on, we get people who are telling themselves various versions of themselves, and they have it in their head, and so we see that manifest through a lot of other characters. Yeah, I think the prince really helps her along because he kind of, like, opens her up to other possibilities. Vicente, at the end, very patient. He’s very much a curmudgeon, but he’s actually very patient and very, really good hearted guy, and he helps, good listener, too, and he helps get her through. You were saying the gift, you’re describing it as you’ve rewritten your story and that you can help others, and that’s exactly what ends up with Aubrey at the end. Because I was thinking at the end, because she goes through this whole enlightenment thing, she sees the world in a whole different way. But how do you explain that to other people, and how do you make them see it, too? And towards the end, it’s very much intimated that she’s going to help these kids, that she’s taken care of. She’s going to lead them through life, and she’s going to help them try to get there as well. So she’s kind of the same way. She’s been there. She’s seen enlightenment. She’s going to help others try to get there, too. And, like, you’re saying, it’s kind of like her gift to them, too. She has rewritten her story now, and that’s what she’s gonna. I just gave away the ending of the book, but that’s what’s gonna happen.

00:45:32 – Eric Zimmer
Well, not exactly.

00:45:33 – Douglas Westerbeke
Not exactly. There’s a whole lot to get there.

00:45:53 – Eric Zimmer
So you’ve alluded to Aubrey finding enlightenment or experiencing enlightenment a couple times. Describe that a little bit more in whatever way you want. What is it that she sees?

00:46:06 – Douglas Westerbeke
So it’s hard to articulate because I’ve never been enlightened, and I don’t know anybody who has. I’m using a lot of creative license here. I’m using it in a way that I don’t think is actually representative of what is typically what people will call enlightenment. I don’t think enlightenment is a state of being, for starters. I think it’s just like you have a moment of clarity, and then it passes, and you have to go back to washing the dishes and raising your kids and everything else. It’s kind of like an epiphany. You have an epiphany, and that’s your moment. I’ve done it differently in the book. It’s a fictional book. It’s magical realism or speculative fiction, whatever you want to call it. So what I did in the book is that she actually had a moment. It’s in one of the libraries, and she has decided she’s not reading anymore. And there’s one last book sitting there. She has this moment where that book has been left out for her and she knows it, so she looks at it, and I wanted to get that feeling of the prince described it as enlightenment, as waking up from your dream world into your actual world, and then enlightenment will be a wake up. Further then. So she reads a story about a blind kid. It’s all black and white, just pencil drawings. And then he goes blind, and it’s page after page of just blank pages. And then all of a sudden, she flips to one. It’s all in color. And that’s what I was getting at there. And then she has a moment where the prose itself becomes scattered across the page because it’s really hard to articulate. You don’t articulate enlightenment, right? You just kind of, like, create this impression. After that, she’s a different woman. She’s terrified. Because I’m thinking if you have a moment where it’s so clear and so precise that you think you see the whole universe in a nutshell type of thing or the face of God or whatever it is, that must be terrifying. So she is terrified and she can’t look people in the face. And she’s this terrified little old lady walking through the woods and scared of everything. And she has to get over this. And she gets over this because she has to take care of these children at the end. So she has no choice. She gets over it, but it lingers there. She knows she has seen something that no one else ever gets to see. And it a worldview that no one else ever has because she was one on one with whatever it was, whatever you want to call it, that’s been pushing her through the world and showing her all these wonderful things, things that she doesn’t necessarily think are all that wonderful. But now, in retrospect, now that she’s older, she can look back on it and say, you know what? That was pretty freaking amazing. And she’s been rewarded by it with this book or this moment, this beyond articulation. So to her, she’s gone through all that, and she doesn’t know what to do with it at first until she realizes, well, here I am. I’ve gotten what I always wanted. I have kind of a bit of a home here in the jungle, and I’ve got all these children to take care of, and I’ve got to somehow figure out a way to pass this on. And it’s a bit like there’s a branch of Buddhism. There’s several. One is, you know, you try to reach Nirvana, and then Nirvana is a kind of heaven. And then the other one is, you know, you reach nirvana. You see it. It’s beautiful. Now you go back to earth, try to help others get there. And that’s Audrey’s approach at that point on. Yeah. So, yeah, that’s where I was going with that.

00:49:15 – Eric Zimmer
It’s interesting that you describe her enlightenment in that sense of seeing, you know, with the mind of God or because I was reading very arcane thing the other day about what the different schools of Buddhism believe about omniscience and enlightenment. Is enlightenment a type of omniscience where you know everything, you see everything, or is that not what was meant in the book?

00:49:47 – Douglas Westerbeke
I think I was hinting at that. I don’t think that’s actually how it works.

00:49:50 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. Yeah.

00:49:51 – Douglas Westerbeke
So I was taking a lot of dramatic license.

00:49:53 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:49:53 – Douglas Westerbeke
For me, enlightenment is a moment of epiphany about anything. It doesn’t have to be, like, world shattering or anything like that. You know, you have an epiphany about, you know, your kids or your marriage or, oh, that’s what a cat thinks. Like, something like that. All of a sudden you figure it out. Oh. Or something occurs to you and you have that moment and you can glide off that moment for a while because, you know, but then there’s reality, and you have to deal with reality and you have to cook dinner and you have to do this and that, and it’s gone. But you can remember it. You remember what you thought, but you don’t necessarily have the same feeling. And it’s not necessarily this gigantic worldview or anything. It’s not like you have stepped outside the universe and can see it all. Maybe if you’ve taken certain mushrooms, you can do that. I don’t know.

00:50:34 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. Well, as someone who studied and practiced really diligently in Zen Buddhism, which is very focused on enlightenment, I mean, Zen’s sort of considered like the direct train. And so I’ve had a couple of those experiences, and I would say that I agree in that they were like waking up and yet they were very ordinary in another way. It was just sort of a like, oh, of course, they were what would be described as sort of oneness or unitive experiences. Right. Where, like, I truly felt like I was connected to everything else. And my personal sense of me as this limited individual was just kind of gone. I ran my life into the ground chasing heroin. And, you know, it was better than that. And I do think there’s a lot of debate in spiritual communities about does somebody become permanently awakened? What does that even mean? You know, let me be clear. I’m making no claim to that in my case at all. And for me, it was this really dramatic experience that really shook up my psychic landscape. I’ve had a few of them, but I really shook it up in ways that never went back to the way it was before. But then ordinary life and ordinary consciousness does very much reassert itself.

00:52:00 – Douglas Westerbeke
It’s like an infusion of love for everyone, I would suppose. Is that.

00:52:04 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, yeah.

00:52:05 – Douglas Westerbeke
That’s what it feels like.

00:52:06 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. As you’ve read enough about them to know and what you did in your book, I love the way you had the words scatter across the page, because that is the nature of these experiences. They call them ineffable. Right. Meaning you can’t. Anything you say about them is trivial compared to the experience. So it was a oneness experience. The great Zen teacher Suzuki said, and I love this, he said, not two, but not one describing this experience. So, like, it’s not like I thought I was you exactly. I could tell the difference between you and me, but on some deeper level, there was no difference.

00:52:42 – Douglas Westerbeke
Right.

00:52:42 – Eric Zimmer
It went from being something I intellectually sort of think about, like interdependence and interconnection, and know to like the experience of it. But yeah, it was one of amazing amount of love and freedom and just, ah, shit. Like all that stuff I’ve been worried about really makes no difference. I think a lot about these things. Having had a couple of them and study them. It’s interesting. In the Zen tradition, they describe this, as they call it Kensho, which means a moment or satori, a moment of awakening. Boom. This flash, like you’re describing. There’s one Zen teacher who makes this description of, it’s like you’re in a room that’s all enclosed, and you have this moment and it’s like, boom, somebody punches a hole in the wall and now there’s light coming through there. And over time. And this is what Koan practice in Zen is intended to do. Do is that it keeps punching more holes in that wall until eventually the whole, finally, one day, the whole structure completely crumbles.

00:53:42 – Douglas Westerbeke
Does that happen for people?

00:53:43 – Eric Zimmer
I think to the degree that it is ongoing is hard to know. But I do think people can have pretty radical fundamental changes in the way they experience the world. But again, I also do believe we habituate to anything. I don’t think that you get out of that. I often think of enlightenment as a sudden jump in consciousness, meaning you’re here and then all of a sudden you’re way up here and it happens like that, and you’re like, whoa, whoa. Because it’s so different versus a gradual thing where you change a little bit. A little bit. A little bit. A little bit. I’ve joked before that if you put the 23 year old homeless heroin addict version of me in my brain today, he might think he was enlightened. And again, I’m not saying I’m enlightened. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying the difference between the level of psychic torment of where I was then and now would have seemed completely revolutionary to that poor kid. But it’s totally normal to me, right? Because I’ve gotten here little steps, I mean, with a couple what felt like sort of big jumps, but it’s been much more incremental.

00:54:55 – Douglas Westerbeke
So the wall coming down, would that be because you’re punching holes a few at a time until the whole thing comes down? Would that be the same as kind of, like, habituating to this sense of oneness?

00:55:05 – Eric Zimmer
That’s a good question. I think what they’re trying to get to there is that you have these flashes where you see the world in a certain way, and then ordinary consciousness reasserts itself. And then you have another flash, and then ordinary consciousness reasserts itself, actually. And then eventually the thing crumbles and ordinary consciousness isn’t there. But I think there’s an element of consciousness that things become ordinary. But I do think there is a degree of psychic freedom that is available that some people achieve in a pretty ongoing way. But what the experience is like for them, ongoing, I don’t know. Meaning if you or I were to suddenly drop into that head, we would be like, holy. But I don’t know what it’s like to them.

00:55:55 – Douglas Westerbeke
Right.

00:55:55 – Eric Zimmer
And then you get into the whole question of people who are in the business of selling. You could become enlightened. And so thus they have snake oil. And I don’t even necessarily mean snake oil, but I do mean, I don’t know. Enlightenment seems like it sometimes can turn into a contest with people like I am and you’re not. I don’t just mean straight out charlatans, either. I mean, people have had some degree of insight.

00:56:18 – Douglas Westerbeke
Right. I was thinking that if you ever do habituate to that, like, this is your normal state of being now, then does it become really difficult to fit in society? And are you in danger because you’re kind of disconnected? I don’t know.

00:56:31 – Eric Zimmer
I’m just wondering, what’s the nature of that phrase? Chop would carry water.

00:56:35 – Douglas Westerbeke
I’ve never heard this really, really chopped would carry water. What?

00:56:38 – Eric Zimmer
It’s funny because you alluded to, like, doing. Going back to just doing the laundry and doing things like that.

00:56:44 – Douglas Westerbeke
Right, okay, right, right.

00:56:46 – Eric Zimmer
The zen phrase, you know, before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. Meaning you just do the basic same things.

00:56:53 – Douglas Westerbeke
Right, right.

00:56:53 – Eric Zimmer
I don’t think so, because again, to me, it wasn’t. I mean, I’ve done hallucinogens, right. I know what it’s like to be in an altered state where you’re like, whoa, I can’t function.

00:57:05 – Douglas Westerbeke
Right.

00:57:05 – Eric Zimmer
This was not that at all. It was. It felt.

00:57:09 – Douglas Westerbeke
No, I wouldn’t think it would be quite that bad.

00:57:10 – Eric Zimmer
But I’m thinking I’m at danger here of pretending that I know what enlightenment is about. So that’s. I want to. I want to just caveat the question, just really careful. But I’ve talked to a lot of spiritual teachers who seem to have some degree of that, but, you know, you wonder what any of that is worth or mean when you find these, you know, so called enlightened teachers that are sexually abusing their students.

00:57:32 – Douglas Westerbeke
Right.

00:57:33 – Eric Zimmer
Anyway, let’s change directions and end this. This. Libraries. You’re a librarian or were a librarian. I don’t know.

00:57:40 – Douglas Westerbeke
I was. Yeah.

00:57:40 – Eric Zimmer
Okay. I love libraries.

00:57:42 – Douglas Westerbeke
It was awesome being at one.

00:57:44 – Eric Zimmer
Nicole, who works with the one you feed, who’s a producer of the show and helps us do some other things, was a librarian. She actually left a job at the library to come work for us. So libraries are near and dear to our hearts. In the book, libraries play a big role, and they seem to be the one place that Aubrey can stay.

00:58:03 – Douglas Westerbeke
Right, right.

00:58:04 – Eric Zimmer
So they seem like a sanctuary to her. Was that the intention of her being able to stay without having to move?

00:58:11 – Douglas Westerbeke
Yeah. It’s the only place where she can go where she doesn’t have to worry about rushing off to the next place. Although she actually travels through the libraries, too, so she doesn’t actually notice this for a while. But if the idea is that, look, you’re set off on this journey, you’re wandering around and around the world. If the idea is that something out there wants to show you the world, and particularly these libraries, because the whole history of everything is in these libraries, and he’s showing off. He wants somebody to know, right. This is a very old testament idea of a divine being where he’s kind of proud of what he’s done. He’s got his own mood swings and so on and so forth, and he wants, like to show off his creation is the idea or not his. But whatever it is, I never specify. I’m very open about it. So there are these libraries, and the idea is, well, look, this is what the end goal is, to get into these places and see what’s in there. Why would he chase her out? Or whatever it is. Why would the world chase her? If the world wants you to see what’s in these libraries, why would the world chase you out again? So the idea is to take that away. It made no sense to have her finally find these places and then get sick and have to leave them because this would was the whole endpoint of her journey, really. And really, that kind of is where the whole journey kind of ends. And then there’s an epilogue in the Amazon. Just logically speaking, that’s where it would go. And why chase her out once you’re in, you know, this is the part that you were meant to see.

00:59:38 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. It’s interesting, in a sense, to say that on one hand, assuming there’s some force that is directing things in this novel, on one hand, I’m gonna force you to keep going around the world to see places like, I’m not gonna let you stop. You’re gonna just have to keep going. And at the same time, also then saying, but you can also get everything that you need to see from a book is an interesting juxtaposition there. Right?

01:00:09 – Douglas Westerbeke
It is. And I bring that up. She has a near death experience where she’s thinking this stuff through while she’s dying, and she’s realizing, you know, I’ve spent all this time, I spent, like, the past, you know, so many years of my life just reading books when, you know, there’s a whole library out here in the actual world.

01:00:25 – Eric Zimmer
Right.

01:00:25 – Douglas Westerbeke
I think about this often because, you know, I love to read books and stuff like that, but it’s a very solitary existence.

01:00:30 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

01:00:31 – Douglas Westerbeke
It’s not like going to the. You can go to the movies with your friends or the theater or concert. But a book, reading a book is something you just do by yourself. You can’t share it. It’s an antisocial behavior, actually. I hate to say it about, you know, the thing I’m in, but it’s true, is there’s no way around it. And so I often think about that because there’s a kind of a. Not a disconnect, a kind of conflict.

01:00:50 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. Yeah.

01:00:51 – Douglas Westerbeke
I’m a bit both. I can be very introverted. I can be very extroverted. And I suppose a lot of us can, which is why we do these things. We can be very sociable but then take time out for ourselves to read these books. So I’m not knocking it, but I am saying it is inherently an antisocial behavior. And so she does the deep dive and she doesn’t see anybody for years and she’s just doing this and she learns a lot and she sees everything else, but she misses a lot at the same time. You got to have a foot in both places and she doesn’t for the longest time. And then when she’s out in the world, she has to readjust to it and she has to learn how to talk to people again. She’s coming out like a hermit and she has to totally get used to the world all over again. Those are the thoughts that she’s having. And she realizes, you know what? I’m reading the stories of all these individuals around the world, but I’m a story too, and I think I make a pretty good book. As at the end, that’s where that was going.

01:01:43 – Eric Zimmer
Wonderful. Well, Douglas, thank you so much for coming down. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. I really enjoyed the book. We’ll have links in the show notes to where people can get the book, and it’s a real treat. I hope listeners will talk.

01:01:55 – Douglas Westerbeke
Thank you very much. You know, you do these interviews all the time, so you’re used to it. But I never get to talk like this to anybody, so I enjoy this way more than you, I think.