Speaker 1: You can almost recognize truth by its simplicity. If something
Speaker 1: is almost like overly complicated around systems or around you know, minutia,
Speaker 1: it's obscuring something. I think the reason fairy tales are
Speaker 1: so powerful, and certain children's stories are so powerful is
Speaker 1: because if it's wise and true, perennially true, we get
Speaker 1: it intuitively. We don't have to do any calculations, you know,
Speaker 1: to get it. It's just evident.
Speaker 2: Welcome to the one you feed.
Speaker 3: Throughout time, great tinkers have recognized the importance of the
Speaker 3: thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or
Speaker 3: you are what you think, ring true. And yet for
Speaker 3: many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us.
Speaker 3: We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We
Speaker 3: see what we don't have instead of what we do.
Speaker 3: We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit.
Speaker 3: But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It
Speaker 3: takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life
Speaker 3: worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep
Speaker 3: themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their
Speaker 3: good wolf.
Speaker 4: We often imagine that once we have it all the
Speaker 4: inner struggles will disappear. But, as Josh Radner reminds us today,
Speaker 4: even outward success, fame, acclaim creative fulfillment isn't enough to
Speaker 4: quiet the deeper battles within. In this conversation, Josh shares
Speaker 4: how real freedom comes not from achieving perfection, but from
Speaker 4: making peace with the messy, unfinished parts of ourselves. From
Speaker 4: navigating identity and public image to sitting in deep discomfort,
Speaker 4: Josh offers a powerful reminder that a meaningful life isn't
Speaker 4: built on external measures. It's shaped from the inside out.
Speaker 4: I'm Eric Zimmer and this is the one you've feed. Hi, Josh,
Speaker 4: Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2: Thanks for having me.
Speaker 4: I am really excited to have you on and talk
Speaker 4: with you about your new podcast, sub Stack. Your life
Speaker 4: is a musician, and obviously your life is an actor.
Speaker 4: But before we get to that, we'll start like we
Speaker 4: always do, with the Parable. And in the Parable, there's
Speaker 4: a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say,
Speaker 4: in life, there are two wolves inside of us that
Speaker 4: are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which
Speaker 4: represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the
Speaker 4: other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed
Speaker 4: and hatred and fear, and the grandchild stops, they think
Speaker 4: about it for a second, they look up at their grandparent,
Speaker 4: they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says,
Speaker 4: the one you feed. So I'd like to start off
Speaker 4: by asking you what that parable means to you in
Speaker 4: your life and in the work that you do.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's one of the greats.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's a you built the entire show around it,
Speaker 1: and I understand why. I think it's about free will
Speaker 1: at some core level. But I also am very suspicious
Speaker 1: of people who say they're all good, and I'm also
Speaker 1: suspicious of people who say someone is all bad. I
Speaker 1: think that we have worlds inside us, we have the
Speaker 1: whole world inside us, and so I just think it's
Speaker 1: an honoring of the fact that there is that dark wolf.
Speaker 1: But it's also an acknowledgment that where we put our
Speaker 1: attention is what we grow. So I sometimes think about
Speaker 1: it like I have like fifty one percent of like
Speaker 1: the light wolf in me and forty nine percent, like
Speaker 1: there is a slight majority of the wolf of kindness
Speaker 1: and virtue and all that, but there's this other part
Speaker 1: of me, and I think we're in a shadow denying society.
Speaker 1: That's why there's so much blame and shame and accusation
Speaker 1: and finger pointing and scapegoating. So I think it's a
Speaker 1: sign of great mental health to acknowledge the dark wolf
Speaker 1: inside you, to at least say it's there, and then
Speaker 1: you might be much less trigger happy at pointing the
Speaker 1: finger at other people.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: In one of your s is on Substeck, you actually
Speaker 4: talk a little bit about this. You talk about internal
Speaker 4: family systems and Richard Schwartz. We've had Richard on the
Speaker 4: show to talk about eternal family systems. And I think
Speaker 4: the thing when I hear the parable today, right, I've
Speaker 4: been reading it for a decade now, is that like,
Speaker 4: there's not two wolves inside me, there's a whole bunch
Speaker 4: of them, right, I Mean, there's a lot going on
Speaker 4: in there when I pay close attention. And but I
Speaker 4: think ultimately you sort of put your finger on it
Speaker 4: when you said it's about where do I put my attention?
Speaker 4: And I think putting our loving attention on the parts
Speaker 4: of ourselves that might seem like the dark wolf, that's
Speaker 4: the way you do.
Speaker 2: It, right, you know, right, right? Right?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think Richard Schwartz really cracked something there. This
Speaker 1: kind of search for some sort of solitary identity feels
Speaker 1: like folly. Yes, Like you just have to kind of
Speaker 1: acknowledge that there's like a chorus of voices, wounded parts
Speaker 1: of ourselves, even you know, ancestors are you know, higher
Speaker 1: kind of voices that are wiser than our maybe our itself,
Speaker 1: Like those are all in there too, and they're all accessible,
Speaker 1: I think if we get quiet enough or skilled enough
Speaker 1: at kind of just asking to be contacted with them.
Speaker 4: Yep, you've got a new podcast out which is a
Speaker 4: rewatching of the show that I guess we would say
Speaker 4: made you famous, which is called How I Met Your Mother. Yeah,
Speaker 4: And in that show there's the character who's I don't know,
Speaker 4: in his late twenties early thirties, and there's also the
Speaker 4: character as a fifty year old sort of the narrating.
Speaker 4: And I think what you just said there sort of
Speaker 4: ties to this idea that we can access wiser parts
Speaker 4: of ourselves. And one of the ways to do that, actually,
Speaker 4: I think, and lots of different traditions have talked about
Speaker 4: this is to imagine your fifty year old self, or
Speaker 4: your seventy year old self, or your eighty year old self.
Speaker 4: So the show Way Back When was kind of onto
Speaker 4: an idea that I see recur in psychology and various
Speaker 4: indigenous traditions about trying to contact that part of you
Speaker 4: that's act already wise.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it's true, and it is something we're unpacking
Speaker 1: on how we made Your Mother, the podcast that Craig
Speaker 1: Thompins and I are doing. My wife is a clinical
Speaker 1: psychologist and one of the things she will sometimes ask
Speaker 1: patients to do that she's told me that I think
Speaker 1: is so wonderful is if they're tied in knots about
Speaker 1: something and really confused about an issue, she'll say, without thinking,
Speaker 1: what does your eighty five year old self say?
Speaker 2: You know?
Speaker 1: And the eighty five year old self is there, it's
Speaker 1: ready to communicate. Most of the time it's this is
Speaker 1: not a big deal, or don't let's not worry. Let's
Speaker 1: not worry about that, you know. But I've asked Craig
Speaker 1: and Carter, the other co creator, about this notion of
Speaker 1: an older, wiser narrator character looking back on his life.
Speaker 1: There's that great Curecreguard quote. Life can only be understood backward,
Speaker 1: but it has to be lived forward. So you have
Speaker 1: this narrator, wiser voice who's looking back and he can
Speaker 1: be a little more lighthearted about things because he knows
Speaker 1: how things worked out, whereas the character I was playing
Speaker 1: was much more stumbling through one foot in front of
Speaker 1: the other, you know. I asked them they were in
Speaker 1: their late twenties early thirties when they were writing the show.
Speaker 1: I mean it lasted for a decade, but like it
Speaker 1: was a kind of chutzba you know, to say like,
Speaker 1: oh no, here, we're going to write this older us voice,
Speaker 1: this older wiser voice. But they were also the age
Speaker 1: of the protagonists. Yeah, and they said it was almost
Speaker 1: like a hope. It was like a hope that there
Speaker 1: was some voice out there that could be guiding and benevolent.
Speaker 1: I think ultimately it's a very sweet part of that
Speaker 1: show that there's this narrator that knew that he landed
Speaker 1: on his feet so he can tell all these embarrassing
Speaker 1: stories about himself.
Speaker 4: Absolutely. Yeah, I think that again, that idea is that
Speaker 4: wisdom is actually not that complicated, Like we can keep
Speaker 4: reading about it. And I've been making podcasts for a
Speaker 4: decade on the general ideas of what it means to
Speaker 4: live a good life. They're not that complicated. The problem
Speaker 4: is that A we forget them constantly and B we
Speaker 4: don't know how to live them right right.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think that you can almost recognize truth
Speaker 1: by its simplicity. If something is almost like overly complicated
Speaker 1: around systems or around you know, minutia, it's obscuring something.
Speaker 1: I think the reason fairy tales are so powerful, and
Speaker 1: certain children's stories are so powerful is because if it's
Speaker 1: wise and true, perennially true, we get it intuitively. We
Speaker 1: don't have to do any calculations, you know, to get it.
Speaker 1: It's just evident. Yeah, But I agree with you that
Speaker 1: we have the kind of built in forgetter. I always
Speaker 1: think of that movie Memento where he had to tattoo,
Speaker 1: you know, he would have amnesia every day and he
Speaker 1: had to remind himself what happened. I feel like wisdom
Speaker 1: is like that, Like you have to look at the
Speaker 1: word like change or like this too shall pass, like
Speaker 1: like perennially wise sayings like yeah, sometimes when you're struggling
Speaker 1: and a friend says, you know, it won't be like
Speaker 1: this forever, it's like the simplest, most true thing you
Speaker 1: could ever say. But sometimes it comes to you as
Speaker 1: if it's like Moses on the mountaintop. You know, it's
Speaker 1: like it's divine revelation, like, oh, I won't be feeling
Speaker 1: this way forever. That's unbelievable. I know that intellectually, but
Speaker 1: sometimes when we're going through it, it's tough to remember.
Speaker 4: Absolutely. I've talked about this on the show a bunch
Speaker 4: of times, and I'm bringing it up because you reference
Speaker 4: King Solomon in one of your substack posts. But there's
Speaker 4: something known as Solomon's wisdom, and what it means is
Speaker 4: that King Solomon was really wise when it came to
Speaker 4: everybody else's life, but apparently his own life not so much.
Speaker 4: And so it's called Solomon's paradox, right, And it means
Speaker 4: that idea that I could be really wise about your
Speaker 4: life or my friend's life, but when it's myself, I
Speaker 4: have a hard time seeing it. It's just this paradox
Speaker 4: of being human.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I think sometimes people I'm not speaking
Speaker 1: about my wife here, by the way, but sometimes I
Speaker 1: think people in the helping professions often have a genius
Speaker 1: for seeing other people's stuff. I don't know if it's easier,
Speaker 1: but it's sometimes very difficult to apply your own guidance
Speaker 1: to yourself. I mean, I've sometimes like a friend has
Speaker 1: reached out for advice and I like you that when
Speaker 1: I think that's one of the great things about friendship
Speaker 1: is you're all kind of trading off being each other's
Speaker 1: mentor and cheerleader and confidant. But when a friend comes
Speaker 1: to me and they'll ask me some advice and I'll
Speaker 1: I'll say something to them, and then I'll hear it
Speaker 1: back and I'll go, I should do that, that's.
Speaker 2: Really like, that's really good.
Speaker 1: You know, sometimes we have to displace the advice to
Speaker 1: have it come back to us.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So let's talk a little bit about the idea
Speaker 4: of well, actually you and I did not bond over
Speaker 4: something that we should have bonded over first, which is
Speaker 4: that I live in Columbus, Ohio. You live there now,
Speaker 4: grew up there, I live there now. I'm in Denver today, Okay,
Speaker 4: but I now live in Columbus, Ohio.
Speaker 2: Yes, wow, whereabouts? Where do you live?
Speaker 4: I'm near good Ale and three point fifteen, sort of
Speaker 4: grand View Ish Okay.
Speaker 1: Yeah, my sister lived in grand View for a years.
Speaker 1: She's back in Bexley, where I lived.
Speaker 2: Is that where you grew up?
Speaker 1: That's where I grew up. Yeah, okay, yeah, oh no,
Speaker 1: she lived in Grandville. Oh that's different. But grand View, Yes,
Speaker 1: I know Grandview very well.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Oh how cool. And is that where you
Speaker 2: grew up?
Speaker 4: It is, Yeah, I grew up in Worthington.
Speaker 2: Oh, in Worthington, okay, cool. Yeah. I did a theater
Speaker 2: with a lot of people from Worthington. Yeah.
Speaker 4: So I just when I saw that, I thought that
Speaker 4: was cool and nice. Okay, back to what I wanted
Speaker 4: to talk about next, which is identity. One of the
Speaker 4: things that I think you've talked publicly about this, both
Speaker 4: on the podcast and on your sub stack, is that
Speaker 4: you got to be known really well and beloved by
Speaker 4: a whole lot of people for a particular character. Right,
Speaker 4: talk to me about that experience and how it has
Speaker 4: been for you and how it has evolved over time.
Speaker 1: God, it's been twenty years of navigating that, right, So
Speaker 1: I think it's like it would take me a long
Speaker 1: time to unpack each phase. I guess no one prepares you,
Speaker 1: certainly in drama school, for you're going to be playing
Speaker 1: one role for nine years, Like that's not something they
Speaker 1: think you're going to do a role for three months,
Speaker 1: or like, you know, like do a check off play
Speaker 1: for you know, four months. So I had to figure
Speaker 1: it out on my own, and sometimes I did that
Speaker 1: rather inelegantly, and other times I was able to have
Speaker 1: some more grace around it. But I just found it
Speaker 1: to be an incredibly strange disorienting thing. I mean, first
Speaker 1: of all, your anonymity getting eroded and strangers knowing who
Speaker 1: you are when you don't know who they are.
Speaker 2: Is a very strange disorienting experience.
Speaker 1: Anyway, famous strange being visible is strange people having ideas
Speaker 1: about you, projections about you. They read a quote of
Speaker 1: yours that was taken out of context, and then I
Speaker 1: don't know, they don't like you, or you remind them
Speaker 1: of someone like you feel a little bit in your
Speaker 1: more vulnerable moments, like you got a dartboard on your chest.
Speaker 1: You're just walking through the world and you feel like
Speaker 1: people are kind of sizing you up or having opinions
Speaker 1: about you, and some of them are often quite lovely,
Speaker 1: but that also feels suspect, like you feel like these
Speaker 1: people don't really know me, they know they have this
Speaker 1: idea of me. I went through some crisis with it,
Speaker 1: and I used various forms of kind of healing, and
Speaker 1: I was just on the hunt for something that felt
Speaker 1: more authentic in the midst of all that, and it
Speaker 1: drove me much deeper on a spiritual path weirdly, I
Speaker 1: mean maybe not weirdly, like as understandable. And then I
Speaker 1: got off the show, and as an actor, I was
Speaker 1: only looking for roles that felt very far from the
Speaker 1: role that I had played. Anything that reminded me of
Speaker 1: the DNA of the part I wouldn't do. But I
Speaker 1: also became a musician and I've written in directed films,
Speaker 1: and so I was really just trying to diversify. But
Speaker 1: what I realized I was actually doing was running. I
Speaker 1: was running away from it.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: I said in that sub stect that you referenced that
Speaker 1: this character I played Ted was a part of me,
Speaker 1: like in the ifs sense, like he is a part
Speaker 1: of me in that he was literally a part that
Speaker 1: I played. But there's also I can feel I revealed
Speaker 1: something to the world of myself through that character. I
Speaker 1: got married a little over a year ago and my
Speaker 1: wife had never seen the show, and she said, look,
Speaker 1: I'm curious, And that was a good thing for us
Speaker 1: for our relationship that she had never seen the show,
Speaker 1: but she said, I'm curious about this time in your
Speaker 1: life that I missed.
Speaker 2: I want to see it.
Speaker 1: So I decided it was time to re watch it,
Speaker 1: and we just decided to formalize it. Craig and I
Speaker 1: are doing this rewatch and we're having a great time
Speaker 1: talking about it. But there's been something wonderful about having
Speaker 1: much like this show itself, having this older, wiser perspective
Speaker 1: on it rather than being the person inside of it,
Speaker 1: but actually looking back on it and seeing, oh, I
Speaker 1: wasn't half bad on that show, and the show itself
Speaker 1: is delightful and I'm so much kinder to myself watching
Speaker 1: it now. So I'm having like a very meta, very
Speaker 1: interesting experience re engaging with the show. But in terms
Speaker 1: of identity issues, it was both shattering and also opened
Speaker 1: up all these avenues of my life for which I'm
Speaker 1: incredibly grateful.
Speaker 4: I love how you talk about it in such a
Speaker 4: nuanced way, and you referenced nuance in the beginning, right,
Speaker 4: we're not all bad, We're not all good. I think
Speaker 4: nuance is kind of the secret sauce to wisdom to
Speaker 4: a certain degree, but you talk about it in the
Speaker 4: sense like, imagine that you were in high school. We
Speaker 4: were all in high school, and twenty years later, all
Speaker 4: anybody ever wants to talk about is who you were
Speaker 4: in high school, not anything you had done since all
Speaker 4: of that, and how that might get to be tiresome
Speaker 4: or confusing. And yet at the same time you're also
Speaker 4: recognizing this profound gift that you got, right, I mean,
Speaker 4: that changed the trajectory of your life in a positive way.
Speaker 4: And I like seeing you kind of come back and
Speaker 4: revisit it from a more holistic place. And I think
Speaker 4: the lesson for all of us is around identity, and
Speaker 4: that identity is ideally, in my mind, fluid, meaning I
Speaker 4: can play this part of me, I can play this
Speaker 4: part of me, I can see this, I can see that.
Speaker 4: But we tend to get fixed in this idea of
Speaker 4: who we are, you know, we just get locked into
Speaker 4: I am this way, And as somebody who studies change
Speaker 4: and has written a book that'll come out next year
Speaker 4: about change, what I know is that we are all
Speaker 4: capable of change. But if we believe we're not, we're
Speaker 4: really stuck.
Speaker 1: Right, And it kind of goes back to what we
Speaker 1: were talking about before, Like I had an acting teacher
Speaker 1: at NYU named Ron Van Lewin. One of the first
Speaker 1: things he said to us was, you need to expand
Speaker 1: your definition of yourself. You're here to expand your definition
Speaker 1: of yourself. That you're not this thing, you're all these things.
Speaker 1: And when you're more things, and when you know yourself
Speaker 1: to be more things, you can play more things. Truthfully,
Speaker 1: you can access more of yourself to play a wider
Speaker 1: array of characters in a larger sense. Like my brother
Speaker 1: in law, Gideon Jacobs. I saw him in this one
Speaker 1: man show that he created last night, and it's this
Speaker 1: blind preacher character and it was really fascinating. But he's
Speaker 1: obsessed with the second commandment in the Torah, which says
Speaker 1: thou shalt not make any graven images, right, and his
Speaker 1: whole thing, you know, going back to the Garden of
Speaker 1: Eden again, not speaking literally, but allegorically, this notion that
Speaker 1: humanity in its primordial state was unself conscious and connected
Speaker 1: to all that was, there was no separation, and then
Speaker 1: there's this bite of this apple, this kind of primordial wound,
Speaker 1: and suddenly it's oh my god, I'm naked, Oh my god,
Speaker 1: you're separate.
Speaker 2: From me, Oh my god, God is elsewhere.
Speaker 1: It's actually like a horror story if you think about
Speaker 1: it from an existential.
Speaker 2: Point of view. Totally right.
Speaker 1: And his thing is that the commandment against images is
Speaker 1: actually quite profound, that what happened to Adam and Eve
Speaker 1: allegorically in the garden was that they suddenly got a
Speaker 1: self image, which is grievous to our psyche because we're
Speaker 1: watching ourselves and now image is everything, and it's proliferated
Speaker 1: to the point where I even think about like the iPhone,
Speaker 1: you know, I mean one he points out the apple, right,
Speaker 1: like we all have these devices in our in our
Speaker 1: pockets that are these apples with a bite out of them,
Speaker 1: and then the iPhone, the iMac, the iPad, the you know,
Speaker 1: there's this kind of IIII and this recursive kind of
Speaker 1: loop of images, images, self images. What does the say
Speaker 1: about me? What does the say me? And I am
Speaker 1: as hooked by this stuff as anyone. I'm not hovering
Speaker 1: over this as some sort of like angry profit. I'm
Speaker 1: in the midst of this negotiation, and as I think
Speaker 1: we all are with image and identity, I think that
Speaker 1: everyone is dealing with it on some level.
Speaker 2: It's not just famous people.
Speaker 1: Everyone has some persona or a yes, maybe a private self,
Speaker 1: and then there's like a public self. I don't like
Speaker 1: to create that much of a distinction between the two.
Speaker 1: Like I don't want to have a persona even though
Speaker 1: I'm going to be different with my wife than I
Speaker 1: am on a post on Instagram or something. But yeah,
Speaker 1: I also don't want to feel like I have this
Speaker 1: jackal and height split in myself. But I think identity
Speaker 1: is really tricky, and when you become famous, and you
Speaker 1: become famous for a particular role, it just pours fertilizer
Speaker 1: all over the many things that can be troubling about it.
Speaker 4: Yeap, what you just shared about your brother in law
Speaker 4: is fascinating. I had never heard that take on the
Speaker 4: Second Commandment. I'm a longtime Zen practitioner, right, and one
Speaker 4: of the things that we do in Zen is we're
Speaker 4: trying to see through this usion that we are this
Speaker 4: separate thing, right, right, So I've always seen the Garden
Speaker 4: of Eden's story as like I've been able to see
Speaker 4: the parallel there, right, that's separateness. But I never thought
Speaker 4: about the Second Commandment in images that we create.
Speaker 1: Yeah, A friend recommended this book by a Sufi mystic
Speaker 1: that's all about music, And in the first paragraph he
Speaker 1: says music is the only form of art that's not
Speaker 1: idolatry because there's no form. It's from a transcendent kind
Speaker 1: of realnd you can't draw music, you know, you can't
Speaker 1: capture it.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: I love painting and dance in theater obviously. I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm not an anti image person, but I think sometimes
Speaker 1: when we have an image of ourselves and we are
Speaker 1: constantly critiquing it and looking at it from all different angles,
Speaker 1: it takes up a lot of time and energy, Yes,
Speaker 1: but it's also psychically quite draining. When someone has a
Speaker 1: peak experience. One of the ways that one defines that
Speaker 1: is a loss of self absolutely right, that you go away, Yes,
Speaker 1: And Jordana and my wife has pointed out that like
Speaker 1: often after those peak experiences, as we say, I could
Speaker 1: die now, right, like you're resolved enough to the point
Speaker 1: where you feel like your life has achieved some sort
Speaker 1: of meaning that you wouldn't be haunted by regret that
Speaker 1: you've seen through it in a zen sense.
Speaker 4: Let's change directions a little bit. There was a line
Speaker 4: that you used. I don't know if it's a line
Speaker 4: you've used before, or if you just tossed it off,
Speaker 4: and it's during the How I Made Your Mother podcast,
Speaker 4: but you referred to how you view that show and
Speaker 4: you know your relationship with that character, and you use
Speaker 4: the phrase the mercy of time, and I just loved that.
Speaker 4: Did you just kind of toss that off?
Speaker 1: I think maybe I've said that before. I don't know
Speaker 1: if it's like a catch hraise of mind. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: I do think that there is a merciful quality to time.
Speaker 1: I mean, often we look at time as a bully
Speaker 1: or a grim reaper kind of, you know, after us.
Speaker 1: The same time, if you've aged, say, and you have
Speaker 1: a different perspective on your life, if you have more
Speaker 1: forgiveness for your life or people in your life, if
Speaker 1: you find yourself less, self conscious less obsessed with the
Speaker 1: opinion of other people, that's all time doing its work.
Speaker 1: If you've ever had grief, if you've ever had loss,
Speaker 1: relationships ending innumerable kinds of heartbreaks, to feel not the
Speaker 1: same way you felt in the aftermath of that, in
Speaker 1: the shrapnel of that, that is the mercy of time.
Speaker 1: That time, it is a healer in some profound way.
Speaker 2: So I don't know.
Speaker 1: I'm glad I was able to say that, yes, you
Speaker 1: can look at this as a goofy sitcom, but it
Speaker 1: also had some quite deep existential things that was chewing
Speaker 1: on at the same time.
Speaker 4: I think time is so interesting. I'm here in Denver
Speaker 4: this week spending time with my mother, who's eighty who
Speaker 4: I spent the last decade of my life with her
Speaker 4: in Columbus with me, but we moved her out here
Speaker 4: about a year ago to be near my sister, and
Speaker 4: she's in a senior community. So I have been there
Speaker 4: a lot this week. And you can't be around old
Speaker 4: people that much without starting to think about time and
Speaker 4: the obvious downsides to it, the decaying body and the
Speaker 4: challenges that come with that. And I do think time
Speaker 4: is a healer, and I also think it's necessary but
Speaker 4: not sufficient for certain types of healing, right Like I
Speaker 4: do think time will take the sting out of a
Speaker 4: lot of things, but I don't think time necessarily gives wisdom.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 4: But I often look at myself and I think about,
Speaker 4: you know, I was a homeless heroin addict at twenty five.
Speaker 4: I've been on a path of recovery since and all
Speaker 4: this stuff I've done, and I look at myself and
Speaker 4: kind of where I'm at, and I sometimes think to myself,
Speaker 4: how much of how I feel now is all that
Speaker 4: work that I've put in, and how much of it
Speaker 4: is just the fact that I'm much older now, right,
Speaker 4: and time has sort of done its thing to a
Speaker 4: certain degree.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Yeah, it's a really interesting question. I also don't
Speaker 1: think time confers wisdom. I mean, I think that you
Speaker 1: have to accept wisdom. It's almost like it's on offer.
Speaker 1: It's almost like the library is there. There's free books, yes,
Speaker 1: with all the great wisdom, all the greatest stories, all
Speaker 1: the greatest everything. You can go there. You can go there,
Speaker 1: you can get a library card and you can read it.
Speaker 1: And I feel like wisdom is kind of like that,
Speaker 1: it's floating out there. I think you have to volunteer
Speaker 1: for it. You have to kind of say I would
Speaker 1: like to receive this, and then it almost like picks
Speaker 1: your antenna up in a different way so you're more attuned.
Speaker 1: We just met, But you strike me as someone like
Speaker 1: me who loves a good quote, who's always on the
Speaker 1: hunt for some new thing that you can kind of
Speaker 1: throw in the wisdom backpack and kind of carry along
Speaker 1: with you, right, It's always been really interesting to me.
Speaker 1: I also think when we're younger and you're interested, or
Speaker 1: when you get the sense, okay, I understand that I'm
Speaker 1: not going to be young forever, like I'm going to age,
Speaker 1: and you know, a lot of young people simply don't
Speaker 1: believe this, and it's again, maybe that's the mercy of youth,
Speaker 1: is that you you don't know that you're going to age.
Speaker 2: You think you'll be the.
Speaker 1: Center of culture forever, and it's like, no, you won't.
Speaker 1: There'll be another generation come along and your slang's not
Speaker 1: going to work anymore. It's going to be like okay, boomer,
Speaker 1: everyone gets okay boomered.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: But I think if you're looking, because I was always
Speaker 1: scared of aging, but I always was like, well, how
Speaker 1: do you do it well? Like who are the people
Speaker 1: that I think are doing it well? I love this
Speaker 1: Franciscan priest, Richard Ror very much. Do you know Richard Ror?
Speaker 2: Sure?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I've had Richard on several times and visited him and.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I listened to yours with Richard. I do
Speaker 2: remember that. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So I've gotten to spend some time with Richard, and
Speaker 1: I got to sit with Ramdas a few times and nice.
Speaker 1: There are just these characters that I just say their
Speaker 1: bodies are betraying them. Or Rondas is no longer with us,
Speaker 1: but you know, he had a stroke that really immobilized
Speaker 1: him in certain ways, and Richard's had his health challenges,
Speaker 1: so the body stuff feels non negotiable. I mean, you
Speaker 1: can try to keep the wheels on as long as
Speaker 1: you can, but there is a kind of sparkle in
Speaker 1: the eye of someone who knows something. They've gotten to
Speaker 1: an age and they know something, and they're not bitter
Speaker 1: about roads not taken and regrets, and they just seem
Speaker 1: to have called a truce with the world.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: I think Richard calls it like you know, I've heard
Speaker 1: it said, like dropping the war with reality, right, Like
Speaker 1: I'm no longer at war with reality. And I want
Speaker 1: to be a person who ages with some grace. And
Speaker 1: I don't just mean, you know, looking good, although that
Speaker 1: would be terrific, but I really mean being the kind
Speaker 1: of person that a young person would look at and
Speaker 1: say they look like they know something, or they look
Speaker 1: like they're doing it right, or I'd like to get
Speaker 1: advice from that person.
Speaker 2: That person seems like they maybe know something.
Speaker 4: When I meet old people and interact with old people,
Speaker 4: it's always instructive to me because I see like, Okay,
Speaker 4: that's where I want to go, and I see like,
Speaker 4: that's definitely where I don't want to go, right And
Speaker 4: so like in the way that my partner's mother when
Speaker 4: she had Alzheimer's, that was a huge wake up call
Speaker 4: to us, like, okay, health, like we can't prevent it,
Speaker 4: but there's a lot of stuff we can do that's
Speaker 4: going to make it less likely that we get Alzheimer's
Speaker 4: or other things. So I think about it in a
Speaker 4: health sense. I think about it in a sort of
Speaker 4: old people sort of start to fossilize, so like pushing
Speaker 4: myself towards new experiences, which gets harder, I think as
Speaker 4: you age. I just feel it already at fifty five.
Speaker 4: And then also, like you said, I think about it
Speaker 4: emotionally or spiritually in that way. Life is going to
Speaker 4: get hard from here in some ways, like I know
Speaker 4: what's coming, So I need to be training now to
Speaker 4: the best of my ability so that I'm able to
Speaker 4: be one of those people that is able to do
Speaker 4: it with a certain degree of grace because I can
Speaker 4: see how easy it would be to not do it gracefully.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's also like wisdom is on offer, but so
Speaker 1: is cynicism. Yeah, you know that's also like an option.
Speaker 1: You know, you there's again these are wolves, right, They're
Speaker 1: all wolves. But I always thought it would be such
Speaker 1: a tragedy to live one of these lives, which I
Speaker 1: consider a gift. I mean, I'd rather say in one
Speaker 1: of my songs, I'd rather be here than not be here.
Speaker 1: I always thought it would be such a tragedy to
Speaker 1: get to the end of it and be filled with
Speaker 1: resentment and bitterness and grievance.
Speaker 2: And you know, like I want to get to.
Speaker 1: A place where I am more forgiving, more compassionate, more generous.
Speaker 1: But you know, I also don't want to under sell
Speaker 1: that life is tough. You know, it puts up a
Speaker 1: real fight. You can make a very strong and compelling
Speaker 1: argument that the world is meaningless and that bad people
Speaker 1: triumph and good people suffer, and you could compile a
Speaker 1: lot of data around that. You could make as equally
Speaker 1: a compelling case about the opposite. Right, again, well, these
Speaker 1: are all wolves, But I always thought it's so much
Speaker 1: more heartening and it makes the universe for me so
Speaker 1: much more inhabitable. To choose the latter, Yeah, to say,
Speaker 1: I believe there's meaning. I believe there's a purpose to
Speaker 1: this thing. I believe that what undergirds this is something benevolent.
Speaker 1: You know, that doesn't mean that death isn't real, It
Speaker 1: doesn't mean pain isn't real, it doesn't mean that. You know,
Speaker 1: we're not going to struggle in myriad ways. But I
Speaker 1: just have to get my mind sharpened. And it's a
Speaker 1: daily practice because I have the forgetter, you know, I
Speaker 1: have that thing that forgets.
Speaker 2: But you know, conversations like this help.
Speaker 4: Before we dive back into the conversation, let me ask
Speaker 4: you something. What's one thing that has been holding you
Speaker 4: back lately? You know that it's there, You've tried to
Speaker 4: push past it, but somehow it keeps getting in the way.
Speaker 4: You're not alone in this, and I've identified six major
Speaker 4: saboteurs of self control, things like autopilot behavior, self doubt,
Speaker 4: emotional escapism that quietly derail our best intentions. But here's
Speaker 4: the good news. You can outsmart them. And I've put
Speaker 4: together a free guide to help you spot these hidden
Speaker 4: obstacles and give you simple, actionable strategies that you can
Speaker 4: use to regain control. Download the free guide now at
Speaker 4: oneufeed dot net slash ebook and take the first step
Speaker 4: towards getting back on track. I'm a little bit more
Speaker 4: existentially turned in that I'm not a believer in any
Speaker 4: sort of ultimate meaning. But I don't think that makes
Speaker 4: life meaningless. I just think it means we need to
Speaker 4: discover our own meaning and imbue it into our life.
Speaker 4: But I agree with you one hundred percent about there
Speaker 4: are different ways to view the world. I mean, you know,
Speaker 4: the old way of calling it was op and pessimism,
Speaker 4: and that's an oversimplification. Those are binaries. But there is
Speaker 4: a view that orients towards the goodness that is in
Speaker 4: the world, the kindness that is in the world, the
Speaker 4: beauty that is in the world, the connectivity that is
Speaker 4: in the world. And if both are true, which I
Speaker 4: think they are, and we're making it up, we're making
Speaker 4: up the meaning we want to give it, because that
Speaker 4: is what I think we are largely doing. Then a
Speaker 4: really a good question is like, which is the most
Speaker 4: useful view?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 4: Which view is going to be better for me and
Speaker 4: the people around me in this world, and for me,
Speaker 4: it's the view that is not cynical. It's not pollyannish either,
Speaker 4: And that's where I'd kind of like to take the conversation,
Speaker 4: because you have a great article on Substack that I
Speaker 4: really loved, because you got into perhaps my most pressing
Speaker 4: question that I think about these days, and it's this
Speaker 4: idea that, as you said earlier, dropping the war with
Speaker 4: reality makes a lot of sense, right because reality wins,
Speaker 4: and we also have a view of ourselves and the
Speaker 4: world that could be better, and those things sometimes are
Speaker 4: at odds with each other. And I think a lot
Speaker 4: about how do you know which of those levers to
Speaker 4: pull the I should change this lever, I should accept
Speaker 4: this lever. And I'd just love to hear you think
Speaker 4: through that question.
Speaker 1: Okay, So I have written quite a bit about this
Speaker 1: in terms of we want to accept there's a negotiation
Speaker 1: that has to take place between acceptance and action. Yes, right,
Speaker 1: exactly what I'm talking Okay, Okay, yeah, so yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean the way I think through this is if I
Speaker 1: throw a temper tantrum about something in my life or
Speaker 1: something happening in politics or the world, do you know,
Speaker 1: Anne LaMotte, Yeah, I think she has some great salty
Speaker 1: kind of wisdom, and I just I really like her
Speaker 1: quite a bit. But she says, there's three types of
Speaker 1: problems in the world. There's me problems, you problems, and
Speaker 1: God problems. She calls God problems, wars, hurricanes, you know,
Speaker 1: natural disasters, things that are so outside of her ability
Speaker 1: to actually control an influence. And then you problems are
Speaker 1: obviously you problems, and me problems are me problems. And
Speaker 1: she says she gets into suffering when she tries to
Speaker 1: fix God problems and you problems. Right, So that makes
Speaker 1: a lot of sense to me. That just clarifies things
Speaker 1: for me. It's a bit of a serenity prayer kind
Speaker 1: of breakdown. You know, what can I control? What can
Speaker 1: I not control? I try to avoid having temper tantrums
Speaker 1: around things as they are, because, like you said, reality wins.
Speaker 1: But I think we have a much better chance of
Speaker 1: at least getting called on to participate if we start
Speaker 1: with acceptance, like just a blanket acceptance like this is
Speaker 1: how it is right now, and then we look at
Speaker 1: what we might be able to change in effect and
Speaker 1: what we can't. And sometimes you're gonna, you know, try
Speaker 1: to twist them nons and it's not going to work.
Speaker 1: And other times something will move the needle. But I
Speaker 1: think starting with like a kind of radical acceptance, it
Speaker 1: takes me out of some pain, right because the pain
Speaker 1: is in the resistance. It shouldn't be this way. And
Speaker 1: then you're you're really at war with reality and you're
Speaker 1: really in a losing position. You're just this spec shouting
Speaker 1: in the Grand Canyon or something for something to be different.
Speaker 4: I love what you said there, the negotiation between acceptance
Speaker 4: and action. That's really good because that's what I think
Speaker 4: it is. I think often about One of the first
Speaker 4: guests on the show is a gentleman named Andrew Solomon,
Speaker 4: and he wrote a book called The Noonday Deal. Oh.
Speaker 2: I read The Noon Day Demon. He's very brilliant, Andrew Solomon,
Speaker 2: He's brilliant.
Speaker 4: He wrote another book called Far from the Tree.
Speaker 2: I read that too.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Yeah, an amazing book. But what stuck with me
Speaker 4: through all the years, and this is a decade ago
Speaker 4: that we first talked about this was he was talking
Speaker 4: about parents whose children are artistic. Yeah, he talked about
Speaker 4: how hard it is for them because there are some
Speaker 4: group of people saying you can change this, you can
Speaker 4: fix this. Some of that might be snake oil, some
Speaker 4: of it might be real some of it, but you
Speaker 4: can do something. And then there's you can't do anything
Speaker 4: about this, right, and you accept it. And if you
Speaker 4: accept your child for the way they are, maybe that's
Speaker 4: just an all around easier case. And what I love
Speaker 4: that he said is if you know you can't change something,
Speaker 4: it's easy to go about the business of accepting it.
Speaker 4: If you know you can change something, it's easy to
Speaker 4: go about the business of changing it. And most of
Speaker 4: us live in this very difficult middle part. But I
Speaker 4: think the way you just said it is a really elegant,
Speaker 4: almost poetic way of saying. It's the negotiation between acceptance
Speaker 4: and action, and that that negotiation, in certain situations never
Speaker 4: gets settled. It's not like you all reach an agreement
Speaker 4: and it's done. You live in the negotiation.
Speaker 1: I think so, and live in the question. But also
Speaker 1: I think nature is useful to kind of pay attention to.
Speaker 1: I mean, I lived in California where it was less visible,
Speaker 1: but I'm back on the East Coast and just watching
Speaker 1: the seasons happen and watching you know, the flowers bloom
Speaker 1: and then fade away in the fall, and the leaves
Speaker 1: fall off the trees, and then the barren and the
Speaker 1: snow and the and you know, a farmer knows that
Speaker 1: there's a time to sew and a time to reap.
Speaker 1: I think in America, especially or in the West, we
Speaker 1: have this idea that we should always.
Speaker 2: Be growing, growing, growing, doing, doing doing.
Speaker 1: It's almost like disobeying the laws of nature in some
Speaker 1: fundamental way, because there is a time for rest, I
Speaker 1: mean true rest, you know, really gathering another round of information,
Speaker 1: not more energy. And I try to remember that this
Speaker 1: might not be a season of change, This might be
Speaker 1: a season of acceptance.
Speaker 2: You know this.
Speaker 1: I didn't grow up Christian, but a lot of my
Speaker 1: friends who grew up like in more evangelical circles, they
Speaker 1: always say, you know, I'm in a real season of doubt,
Speaker 1: or this is a real season of abundance, you know.
Speaker 2: And I always liked that language.
Speaker 1: I always thought it was like useful language because it
Speaker 1: implies that it's not forever.
Speaker 2: And again that's a mercy.
Speaker 4: We've referenced suffering a little bit, and you talk about discomfort.
Speaker 4: Is the doorway as the name of one of your
Speaker 4: substack posts, And in it you did something where you
Speaker 4: put a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon. And I was struck
Speaker 4: by that because I've taught this program for years called
Speaker 4: Wise Habits, and I use a lot of Calvin and
Speaker 4: hobbstrips to teach because I just think there's so much
Speaker 4: wisdom in them. Are you also a fan?
Speaker 2: A casual fan.
Speaker 1: I had stumbled across that happiness isn't enough for me
Speaker 1: man euphoria. I think that was the exactly that was
Speaker 1: the one. Yeah, I stumbled across it, and I just
Speaker 1: pulled it and I had it in a file of
Speaker 1: things that kind of delighted me. It's also something you know,
Speaker 1: my friend Hal says about addicts. He says, the only
Speaker 1: emotional acceptable to an addict is euphoria. He says, you know,
Speaker 1: it's two pm on a Tuesday. Where's my euphoria?
Speaker 4: Yes, I'm a lot of years sober. And I still
Speaker 4: laugh because I relate with that. And I love that
Speaker 4: Calvin cartoon because where it starts is him enjoying a
Speaker 4: nice day.
Speaker 2: Ah huh.
Speaker 4: He's like, here, I am enjoying this nice day, you know,
Speaker 4: And then he thinks, but I'm not euphoric, right, And
Speaker 4: then the last frame says I can't remember whether he
Speaker 4: said I need to stop my mind while I'm still ahead,
Speaker 4: or my mind's out to get me, or something along
Speaker 4: those lines of, like he's able to see knowing what
Speaker 4: I know about you and your taste from reading your
Speaker 4: substack and looking at a lot of the things you reference.
Speaker 4: Calvin and Hobbes, I think is a deeply, deeply wise
Speaker 4: strip across the board, and I think it's one of
Speaker 4: the more brilliant works of art in humanity?
Speaker 2: Is that Bill Watterson?
Speaker 4: Waterson, Yeah, I think he's.
Speaker 2: A Kenyan grad. I think he went to my college
Speaker 2: where I went.
Speaker 1: Okay, there was a lore, kind of Kenyan lore that
Speaker 1: his senior year he drew.
Speaker 2: Cartoons all over the wall. Uh huh.
Speaker 1: He kind of did like his own Sistine chapel of
Speaker 1: cartoons on the wall, and they painted over it. And
Speaker 1: it's this kind of like lost masterpiece, like somewhere in
Speaker 1: a dorm at Kenyon are all these early cartoons.
Speaker 4: That's amazing.
Speaker 1: But I think he was a philosophy major and that's
Speaker 1: why he called it. Calvin and Hobson. Yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 1: don't know. It just really it really struck me. I
Speaker 1: just thought it was a funny thing, you know, that
Speaker 1: human thing, you know, if a little is good, more
Speaker 1: is better.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Can I ask when did you get sober?
Speaker 4: Well? I got sober from Heroin in nineteen ninety four.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 4: I stayed sober about eight years. Then I started to
Speaker 4: drink again, and I drank for about three years. Yeah,
Speaker 4: and then I've been sober from that for like seventeen years.
Speaker 4: So the vast majority of my adult life has been
Speaker 4: in sobriety, which I'm very grateful for. In many ways,
Speaker 4: I'm grateful that like when I start, I just kind
Speaker 4: of burned the house down pretty quick. Yeah, it's pretty clear, like, Okay,
Speaker 4: something needs to happen versus like the long goodbye kind
Speaker 4: of thing.
Speaker 2: Yep, yep, yep. Absolutely.
Speaker 4: Speaking of Ohio and Bill Watterson, there's a big cartoon
Speaker 4: library at OSU, and they have one of the biggest
Speaker 4: collections of Bill Watterson cartoons in the world, and so
Speaker 4: you can go visit a little bit of a shrine
Speaker 4: for me. We talked a little bit about this idea
Speaker 4: of negotiating acceptance and action, and I think that some
Speaker 4: of the things I pulled for that came from a
Speaker 4: post of yours about not minding what happens, which is
Speaker 4: a Christiana Murdi quote. And I wanted to talk about
Speaker 4: something in particular that you talk about in there, which
Speaker 4: is you on of Apastna retreat. Was that just this
Speaker 4: last December or was it the December before that?
Speaker 2: I know it was last December, like six months ago.
Speaker 4: Okay, so yeah, yeah, you opened a sort of sharing
Speaker 4: your experience.
Speaker 2: Sure.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean it was a real challenge for me.
Speaker 1: Like it, it was much more challenging. Have you ever
Speaker 1: done of apossable?
Speaker 4: I have done long silent retreats, not a specific of
Speaker 4: apostle unless you consider insight meditation society like Jack Cornfield.
Speaker 2: To yeah rock. How long are those like, e eight
Speaker 2: days or nine days?
Speaker 4: Yeah, seven to eight. There's some weekend ones. Yeah, I've
Speaker 4: mostly done Zenchines, which are eight days.
Speaker 2: Okay. Yeah, and that's total silence.
Speaker 4: Total silence. And like you said, no books, you know, Yeah,
Speaker 4: I'm like two days into it, and I'm like, I'll
Speaker 4: give you one hundred dollars for a Cereal box to read.
Speaker 4: I know, like give me a Cereal box to read.
Speaker 2: I know.
Speaker 1: They had these instructions in the room about how you
Speaker 1: were supposed to clean your room when you left, and
Speaker 1: I read those like it was the tall mode or
Speaker 1: something like I was. I went so deep on this
Speaker 1: thing in a fascinating way. It shows you what you're
Speaker 1: addiction to in a broader sense, not just about in
Speaker 1: chemicals or anything, but really about like I'm addicted to words,
Speaker 1: I'm addicted to information, I'm addicted to the news, I'm
Speaker 1: addicted to you know, and I'm also addicted to talking,
Speaker 1: like truly just talking. It was a very fascinating experience
Speaker 1: and an experiment. It was what it felt like on
Speaker 1: my psyche, and largely I was in an enormous amount
Speaker 1: of discomfort for the majority of the time.
Speaker 2: I would say, but I.
Speaker 1: Felt incredibly unmored and kind of confused about even not
Speaker 1: being able to say certain like pleasantries, like in the
Speaker 1: line at the dining hall, like if you felt like
Speaker 1: you cut someone off, you just want to say, oh, sorry,
Speaker 1: were you here?
Speaker 2: Do you want to go?
Speaker 1: Like you couldn't do any of the like little signifiers
Speaker 1: of we're in a society and we're sharing space.
Speaker 2: I just found it really challenging.
Speaker 1: I ended up having to talk to the teacher a
Speaker 1: few times because I was one I was borderline almost
Speaker 1: having a panic attack, and then I found I enjoyed
Speaker 1: these talks and they were only about four or five
Speaker 1: minutes long, but I enjoyed being witnessed. The basics of
Speaker 1: like relational communication are very important to me, and when
Speaker 1: I was supposed to exist in silence without them, I
Speaker 1: felt deep grief. I can't, I don't know. It was
Speaker 1: so much harder than I thought it would be. And
Speaker 1: my meditation practice has been really wonky since.
Speaker 2: I got back.
Speaker 4: Interesting.
Speaker 1: My wife and I were at the Botanic Gardens this
Speaker 1: morning and we meditated and it was so nice, and
Speaker 1: I was like, I really want to get back into
Speaker 1: a practice. But I think I had like a It
Speaker 1: wasn't quite trauma, but it was definitely like something got provoked.
Speaker 1: I had moments of fear. I had moments of grief.
Speaker 1: I know, they say, you know, lots of stuff's going
Speaker 1: to come up, but something about it I found very challenging.
Speaker 1: That said, by the end of it, once you're allowed
Speaker 1: to talk for the last day, like I felt like
Speaker 1: I had been paroled, like I was. I was so excited,
Speaker 1: you know, I do. I went on these long walks
Speaker 1: up and down this road every single day. Like three
Speaker 1: times a day. I just didn't know what to do
Speaker 1: with myself. And I saw my monkey mind really really
Speaker 1: in action. Yeah, and I saw how I'm in a society.
Speaker 1: There's another Christian Murdy quote, it's no measure of health
Speaker 1: to be well adapted to a profoundly six society.
Speaker 2: I don't know if you've come across that one.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I am somewhat adapted to this society. I
Speaker 1: mean it's the one I grew up in. It's like
Speaker 1: I do fairly well navigating it. And then you take
Speaker 1: me out of that society and I don't have my
Speaker 1: whatever op eds to read, or my books to read,
Speaker 1: or my music to listen to. And I realized, oh,
Speaker 1: I'm a little bit insane actually, Like my mind is
Speaker 1: so far from being quiet. Although I will say I
Speaker 1: had a couple of meditations where I had no body,
Speaker 1: no time, you know that I did. I did taste
Speaker 1: that timeless realm, but the getting there it was rough.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they can be rough. I actually do okay with
Speaker 4: the silence in groups of people. I'm a little shy,
Speaker 4: so I actually find it sort of enjoyable to be
Speaker 4: in companionship and not have to figure out what to say.
Speaker 1: Yeah, my wife is the same way. She's done two
Speaker 1: or three of a postumism. She always appreciates not having
Speaker 1: to talk.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I like that part. And even when what I've
Speaker 4: learned is when the silence ends, I've learned to take
Speaker 4: myself away because it just is it's overwhelming to me
Speaker 4: all of a sudden. But I do like being with
Speaker 4: the people like that. I mean, it's not that I
Speaker 4: want to be alone. I enjoy the community aspect, I
Speaker 4: think for me. And you said in this post, I
Speaker 4: think you said that boredom and discomfort are the two
Speaker 4: emotions you most can't tolerate. And I think that's very
Speaker 4: much me too. And it's the no reading that just
Speaker 4: kills me. That's probably the hardest for me, because I
Speaker 4: can entertain myself pretty well with a book. Yeah, I've
Speaker 4: gone on a couple with the spiritual teacher Adi Ashanti.
Speaker 4: I don't know if you're familiar with him.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I know, I did chat. Yeah.
Speaker 4: They do something interesting, which is they give you it
Speaker 4: might be two or three paragraphs of his and that's
Speaker 4: all you're allowed to read. So you do what you
Speaker 4: did with the cleaning instructions on the wall, right, you're like,
Speaker 4: I'm reading it, but for me, I descend deep into
Speaker 4: it like a since it's so little to read and
Speaker 4: I want to read so often, it becomes ultimately certainly
Speaker 4: a contemplative act, if not a meditative act.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I also hilariously like I would make my bed as
Speaker 1: if it was going to be inspected by the military, like.
Speaker 2: I would just anything.
Speaker 1: You're trying to give yourself any activity. There were certain
Speaker 1: days where I just unfolded and refolded all my clothes.
Speaker 2: I didn't even have that many clothes there, but I
Speaker 2: just was looking.
Speaker 1: And it also showed me how addicted I am to
Speaker 1: action and doing this. You know, I really I was
Speaker 1: constantly looking for something to actually do. That's why these
Speaker 1: walks outside just became like my lifeline.
Speaker 4: That's interesting. I was just thinking how funny it would
Speaker 4: be if we segued into a commercial for VPASTAA retreats,
Speaker 4: how mad they would be about like Josh Radner says that.
Speaker 1: Well, also, I mean they're free. And I loved the
Speaker 1: Gwenka talks at Night. You know, they have these pre
Speaker 1: recorded talks from Gwenka who are I think they were
Speaker 1: in the earlier mid nineties, these talks and they're fantastic
Speaker 1: and they're really inspiring. And one of the things he
Speaker 1: says is, we give you a taste of what it's
Speaker 1: like to be a monk. For ten days, we take
Speaker 1: away the world from you, We give you all your meals.
Speaker 1: All you're here to do is be contemplative and sink
Speaker 1: into this place. My wife tries to remind me. She says,
Speaker 1: when you came home from that, you were euphoric, but
Speaker 1: like two days later, I went into this like weird,
Speaker 1: kind of down depressive state that didn't lift.
Speaker 2: For a while. So I've been struggling in some ways.
Speaker 1: I wrote that substack piece to try to work through
Speaker 1: what that experience was for me, what it meant, and
Speaker 1: maybe I'm still working through it as I talk even
Speaker 1: I'm kind of like, oh yeah, I need to do
Speaker 1: some more processing of that. You know, it was incredibly rewarding,
Speaker 1: but it was also very hard. And when people say
Speaker 1: would you go back, my answer right now is no.
Speaker 1: You know, I hear wonderful things about like insight and
Speaker 1: all that.
Speaker 4: But before we wrap up, I want you to think
Speaker 4: about this. Have you ever ended the day feeling like
Speaker 4: your choices didn't quite match the person you wanted to be.
Speaker 4: Maybe it was autopilot mode or self doubt that made
Speaker 4: it harder to stick to your goals. And that's exactly
Speaker 4: why I created The Six Saboteurs of Self Control. It's
Speaker 4: a free guide to help you recognize the hidden patterns
Speaker 4: that hold you back and give you simple, effective strategies
Speaker 4: to break through them. If you're ready to take back
Speaker 4: control and start making lasting changes, download your copy now
Speaker 4: at oneufeed dot net slash ebook. Let's make those shifts
Speaker 4: happen starting today one you feed net slash ebook. I
Speaker 4: don't know if Audia Chanti is still doing retreats. It
Speaker 4: turns out that those have been my favorite because they
Speaker 4: don't feel like an endurance contest. You do have to
Speaker 4: be quiet, you can only read this thing, but it
Speaker 4: doesn't feel like meditation battle in like you're meditating for
Speaker 4: like ten hours a day. You know, he gives a
Speaker 4: couple talks, he actually does a guided meditation. There's just
Speaker 4: a little bit more happening. You still meditate a lot,
Speaker 4: don't get me wrong, but it just felt less arduous
Speaker 4: in the bad way. Not that some difficulty isn't good,
Speaker 4: but too much difficulty as you're reflecting can be too much. Well,
Speaker 4: we are at the end of our time for this.
Speaker 4: You and I are going to continue in a post
Speaker 4: show conversation and we're going to talk about a substack
Speaker 4: post that you wrote called locked Doors, but I'm going
Speaker 4: to put a slightly different point on it. This conversation
Speaker 4: is for any of you who wrestle with wanting what
Speaker 4: you can't have, which feels like a story of my
Speaker 4: life up to a certain point. Listeners, if you'd like
Speaker 4: access to that post show conversation, ad free episodes, a
Speaker 4: special episode I do, and to be a supporter of
Speaker 4: the show, you can go to one ufeed dot net,
Speaker 4: slash join And last thing I'll say, Josh, if you
Speaker 4: want a way back into meditation that feels nice. A
Speaker 4: friend of mine and one of the best meditation teachers
Speaker 4: I know, Henry Shukman, has an app called The Way
Speaker 4: and it's really good. It's just very nice. He's got
Speaker 4: a great English accent. It's just very soothing and wonderful.
Speaker 4: So anyway, thank you Josh for joining us. I really
Speaker 4: appreciate it absolutely.
Speaker 2: It is such a pleasure to talk to you.
Speaker 4: Thank you so much for listening to the show. If
Speaker 4: you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I'd
Speaker 4: love for you to share it with a friend. Sharing
Speaker 4: from one person to another is the lifeblood of what
Speaker 4: we do. We don't have a big budget and I'm
Speaker 4: certainly not a celebrity, but we have something even better,
Speaker 4: and that's you. Just at the ship button on your
Speaker 4: podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode
Speaker 4: link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means
Speaker 4: the world, and together we can spread wisdom one episode
Speaker 4: at a time. Thank you for being part of the
Speaker 4: one You Feed community.