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Samin Nosrat — Master Creative, Master Teacher (#339)

Photo by Adam Rose

“Things that caused me so much pain and confusion as a kid ended up being really wonderful tools in my work.” — Samin Nosrat

Samin Nosrat (@ciaosamin) is a writer, chef, and teacher who is masterful at turning complexity into simplicity. Her first book, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking, is a New York Times bestseller, a James Beard Award winner for Best General Cookbook, was named as Cookbook of the Year by the International Association of Culinary Professionals, and is soon to be a Netflix original documentary series produced by Jigsaw Productions.

Samin has been called “The next Julia Child” by NPR’s “All Things Considered,” and she has been cooking professionally since 2000.

This episode is about much more than cooking. It’s about the creative process, creative highs and lows (and how to push through those lows), rejection, vulnerability, and much more. If you liked the Brandon Stanton episode, you’re going to love this one. Please enjoy!

Want to hear another podcast with a world-class chef and writer? — Listen to my conversation with Eric Ripert in which we discuss daily routines, mindfulness, conquering anger, and more! (Stream below or right-click here to download):

This podcast is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time, “If you could only use one supplement, what would it be?” My answer is, inevitably, Athletic Greens. It is my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body and did not get paid to do so. As a listener of The Tim Ferriss Show, you will receive a one-off supply of 20 free Athletic Greens Travel Packs, valued at $99.95. To order yours, visit AthleticGreens.com/Tim.

This podcast is also brought to you by FreshBooks. FreshBooks is the #1 cloud bookkeeping software, which is used by a ton of the start-ups I advise and many of the contractors I work with. It is the easiest way to send invoices, get paid, track your time, and track your clients.

FreshBooks tells you when your clients have viewed your invoices, helps you customize your invoices, track your hours, automatically organize your receipts, have late payment reminders sent automatically and much more.

Right now you can get a free month of complete and unrestricted use. You do not need a credit card for the trial. To claim your free month and see how the brand new Freshbooks can change your business, go to FreshBooks.com/Tim and enter “Tim Ferriss” in the “how did you hear about us” section.

QUESTION(S) OF THE DAY: What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.

Scroll below for links and show notes…

SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE

  • Connect with Samin Nosrat:

Website | Twitter | Instagram | Facebook

SHOW NOTES

  • How do you pronounce “Samin,” anyway? [05:32]
  • Samin tells us about her manifestation journal: how it originated, how often she’s used it since then, what happens when it gets lost, what it helps her put in perspective, and how it’s formatted. [06:07]
  • Samin shares some of her earlier goals from the journal and explains what a bay leaf piñata is. [12:02]
  • How does Samin follow the goals put forth in her journal, and is she ever embarrassed by what she’s written there? [13:00]
  • What does Samin do to dig her way out when she finds herself at the rock bottom of the creative process? [15:44]
  • As a perfectionist, how did Samin get over the fear that her book might not be received well? What has she done to overcome a lifetime need for external validation? [19:24]
  • We discuss the pain we’ve shared from mistakes making it to first printing — from the resulting hate mail to learning to forgive ourselves. [23:34]
  • What kind of therapy has been most helpful for Samin? [31:10]
  • How does Samin’s therapy increase her somatic awareness and allow her to reconnect with her own body? How does this enhance her gut intuition? [33:53]
  • Honest feedback from Samin’s friend made her cry for two hours — this is why it was a good thing. [36:11]
  • When did Samin first fall in love with food? [42:33]
  • Samin talks about growing up as the daughter of Iranian immigrants in San Diego with a foot in each world — and how it instilled what she considers one of her superpowers. [45:34]
  • Samin shares a Marco Pierre White quote about people who have suffered tragedy early in life. [49:44]
  • Samin never forgets what it was like to be an absolute beginner in the kitchen, which helps her reach people experiencing cooking for the first time. [51:39]
  • How Michael Pollan helped Samin find her teaching voice. [54:03]
  • Samin’s first exposure to fine dining and Alice Waters, and how she started working at Chez Panisse. [56:52]
  • Samin talks about the first letters she wrote reaching out to Alice Waters and Michael Pollan. [1:01:19]
  • How overcoming her fear of asking got Samin into Michael Pollan’s exclusive class, which led to collaboration and entry into a community of journalists and writers she wouldn’t otherwise have known. [1:06:31]
  • Books that have had a tremendous influence on Samin. [1:13:14]
  • What apparent failures have set Samin up for success? [1:20:34]
  • How might an editor deliver criticism to Samin in a constructive way that builds trust? [1:24:57]
  • The two biggest culinary failures of Samin’s career. [1:29:27]
  • Why Samin opened what became a successful food market and the internal conflicts she faced when she made the decision to close it. [1:31:44]
  • How this experience attuned Samin to understand when doing things she doesn’t want to do interferes with lifelong ambitions. [1:39:02]
  • Samin talks about teaching Michael Pollan to cook, throwing around potential book ideas, and how she settled on writing Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. [1:46:21]
  • Why Samin’s writing residency early in the process didn’t give her the results she was seeking. [1:51:52]
  • Even Samin the artisan bread hoarder frequently goes through imposter syndrome when writing. Then she’s reminded why her writing is valued. [1:53:19]
  • Should you write a book? [1:55:27]
  • Why did Samin decide to do a television show, and what surprised her about the process? [1:57:12]
  • What can viewers expect from the series? [2:06:55]
  • Samin’s kitchen stocking recommendations. [2:08:47]
  • Parting thoughts. [2:16:14]

PEOPLE MENTIONED

Posted on: October 1, 2018.

Please check out Tribe of Mentors, my newest book, which shares short, tactical life advice from 100+ world-class performers. Many of the world’s most famous entrepreneurs, athletes, investors, poker players, and artists are part of the book. The tips and strategies in Tribe of Mentors have already changed my life, and I hope the same for you. Click here for a sample chapter and full details. Roughly 90% of the guests have never appeared on my podcast.

Who was interviewed? Here’s a very partial list: tech icons (founders of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Craigslist, Pinterest, Spotify, Salesforce, Dropbox, and more), Jimmy Fallon, Arianna Huffington, Brandon Stanton (Humans of New York), Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Ben Stiller, Maurice Ashley (first African-American Grandmaster of chess), Brené Brown (researcher and bestselling author), Rick Rubin (legendary music producer), Temple Grandin (animal behavior expert and autism activist), Franklin Leonard (The Black List), Dara Torres (12-time Olympic medalist in swimming), David Lynch (director), Kelly Slater (surfing legend), Bozoma Saint John (Beats/Apple/Uber), Lewis Cantley (famed cancer researcher), Maria Sharapova, Chris Anderson (curator of TED), Terry Crews, Greg Norman (golf icon), Vitalik Buterin (creator of Ethereum), and nearly 100 more. Check it all out by clicking here.

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Paul Stamets — How Mushrooms Can Save You and (Perhaps) the World (#340)

“The war against nature is a war against your own biology.”
— Paul Stamets

Paul Stamets (@PaulStamets) is an intellectual and industry leader in the habitat, medicinal use, and production of fungi. Part of his mission is to deepen our understanding and respect for the organisms that literally exist under every footstep taken on this path of life. Paul is the author of a new study in Nature’s Scientific Reports, which details how mushroom extracts—specifically extracts from woodland polypore mushrooms—can greatly reduce viruses that contribute to bee colony collapse.

Paul is the author of six books, including Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World, Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms, and Psilocybin Mushrooms of the World: An Identification Guide, and he has discovered and named numerous species of psilocybin mushrooms. Paul is also the founder and owner of Fungi Perfecti, makers of the Host Defense mushroom supplement line, and it is something I’ve been using since Samin Nosrat recommended it in my last book, Tribe of Mentors.

Paul has received numerous awards, including Invention Ambassador (2014-2015) for the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the National Mycologist Award (2014) from the North American Mycological Association (NAMA), and the Gordon & Tina Wasson Award (2015) from the Mycological Society of America (MSA).

The implications, applications, and medicinal uses of what we discuss in this interview are truly mind-boggling, and we get into some of my favorite subjects, including psychedelics and other aspects of bending reality. If you’re interested in contributing to psychedelic science and research, you can do so at MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies), or if you’ve got $100,000 or more to spare, visit me at tim.blog/science.

I hope you enjoy this entire interview, but if you only have time to listen to one part, I recommend checking in at the [56:24] mark to hear how Paul’s first experience with psilocybin mushrooms affected his lifelong stutter. Enjoy!

Want to hear another podcast that explores science and psychedelics? — Listen to my conversation with Hamilton Morris, host of Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia, in which we investigate the mythology of Alexander Shulgin and the difference between poison and a dose. Stream below or right-click here to download.

This podcast is brought to you by Peloton, which has become a staple of my daily routine. I picked up this bike after seeing the success of my friend Kevin Rose, and I’ve been enjoying it more than I ever imagined. Peloton is an indoor cycling bike that brings live studio classes right to your home. No worrying about fitting classes into your busy schedule or making it to a studio with a crazy commute.

New classes are added every day, and this includes options led by elite NYC instructors in your own living room. You can even live stream studio classes taught by the world’s best instructors, or find your favorite class on demand.

Peloton is offering listeners to this show a special offer. Visit onepeloton.com and enter the code TIM at checkout to receive $100 off accessories with your Peloton bike purchase. This is a great way to get in your workouts, or an incredible gift. Again, that’s onepeloton.com and enter the code TIM.

This podcast is brought to you by Audible. I have used Audible for years, and I love audiobooks. I have a few to recommend:

  1. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
  2. The Tao of Seneca by Seneca
  3. The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

All you need to do to get your free 30-day Audible trial is visit Audible.com/Tim. Choose one of the above books, or choose any of the endless options they offer. That could be a book, a newspaper, a magazine, or even a class. It’s that easy. Go to Audible.com/Tim or text TIM to 500500 to get started today.

QUESTION(S) OF THE DAY: What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.

Scroll below for links and show notes…

SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE

  • Connect with Paul Stamets:

Fungi Perfecti | Host Defense | Twitter | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube

SHOW NOTES

  • How do you pronounce and define fungi and mycelium? [10:05]
  • What makes the immunological resilience of mycelium all the more impressive? [11:07]
  • In what way is a mushroom like a fish? [13:13]
  • From a genetic or an evolutionary perspective, how should people think about mycelium? Is mycology more closely related to botany or zoology? [14:48]
  • Why do antifungal drugs have the potential to be extremely dangerous to humans? [18:14]
  • Paul describes a Kafkaesque childhood in Columbiana, Ohio after his family’s business collapsed in the wake of WWII — bringing much of the town with it. [19:16]
  • How living in a carpenter ant-infested house made from military surplus scraps combined with Paul’s affinity for vacuuming and curiosity about mycelium to create a natural pest remedy. [22:26]
  • If proven so successful, why hasn’t this natural pest remedy been brought to market yet? [34:30]
  • Fighting viruses with mycelium in a post-9/11 world. [35:47]
  • At what point in the research cycle is agarikon being tested against viruses today? [41:47]
  • What happened when top secret test results intended for other eyes only were misdelivered to Paul? [44:08]
  • What’s the upside to the United States Department of Defense taking your patent for reasons of national security, or having naysayers argue against your patent’s effectiveness? [46:57]
  • As Paul’s mycelium solution for fending off carpenter ants isn’t yet on the market, what does he suggest to people who want to try it today? [50:12]
  • As a 10-year solution that only costs about 25 cents to produce, is Paul’s mycelium pest fix perhaps too effective for the liking of those who profit from current, toxic remedies? [51:49]
  • When a sincere attempt at disrupting the status quo can’t make it past a boardroom only concerned with “greenwashing” its corporate image. [53:34]
  • Paul takes us on the epic “superhero’s journey” that relieved him of his lifelong stutter as a teenager — with the assistance of “about 20 grams of” psilocybin cubensis. [56:24]
  • Has Paul had any stuttering relapses since that day? [1:09:47]
  • Paul relays a story about what psilocybin did for an aging friend with failing senses. [1:10:14]
  • Why does Paul think his superhero’s journey was instrumental in helping him overcome his stutter, and what effects has he witnessed in others on similar journeys? [1:14:35]
  • Paul touches on why profit-driven pharmaceutical companies might frown at the therapeutic efficacy of magic mushrooms — in parallel to chemical companies rejecting natural pesticides. [1:16:43]
  • Mushrooms are just the tip of the mycelium. Paul elaborates on how fungal biomes operate and why it might be that humans often fear the ephemeral nature of mycelium. [1:18:10]
  • Paul talks about the neuroregenerative benefits of lion’s mane and soul’s eye in mycelium over mushroom form. [1:21:40]
  • At nearly 93 years of age, Paul’s mother can still beat his brothers at Scrabble — could it be thanks in part to her daily intake of lion’s mane? [1:22:54]
  • Paul ponders the effects of stacking microdoses of psilocybin with lion’s mane and what might be used to treat neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. [1:23:44]
  • How might such microdosing be administered and supervised in a research setting? Paul explains why this question is timely and shares his reasons for a strategy of filing what he calls “blocking patents” under certain circumstances. [1:27:08]
  • Is microdosing sexy — or at least more attractive to people who might otherwise be afraid to try a full dose of psilocybin? [1:29:48]
  • What does Paul Stamets believe makes Paul Stamets Paul Stamets? [1:33:50]
  • Paul tells us about that time he (politely) used his black belt prowess to change the life of an angry biker. [1:37:08]
  • A reminder that kind acts, even in small increments, can move mountains. [1:40:54]
  • You are beautiful. [1:42:10]
  • In the network of everything, Paul is an astromycologist now. [1:42:59]
  • A wide variety of ways in which fungi could help solve human problems — from environmental cleanup to famine relief to space travel. Bonus: the proper way to pronounce mycorrhizal. [1:44:24]
  • How a Syrian refugee is teaching others to cultivate mushrooms for food — a skill set that can be passed along and lay the foundation for sustainable biosecurity. [1:47:42]
  • Fantastic Fungi and the Wood Wide Web. [1:49:19]
  • Why colony collapse disorder is really just a euphemism for a serious problem — though surprisingly the one issue that bridges liberals and conservatives. [1:50:20]
  • “Failure is the price of the tuition I pay to learn a new lesson.” [1:56:51]
  • Paul’s epiphany for how to save the bees came to him in a dream. Really! Why this might be good news in the midst of the sixth Great Extinction. [2:02:25]
  • What can people listening who are not mycologists nor future mycologists do to help save the world? [2:09:51]
  • Parting thoughts. [1:15:37]

PEOPLE MENTIONED

Posted on: October 11, 2018.

Please check out Tribe of Mentors, my newest book, which shares short, tactical life advice from 100+ world-class performers. Many of the world’s most famous entrepreneurs, athletes, investors, poker players, and artists are part of the book. The tips and strategies in Tribe of Mentors have already changed my life, and I hope the same for you. Click here for a sample chapter and full details. Roughly 90% of the guests have never appeared on my podcast.

Who was interviewed? Here’s a very partial list: tech icons (founders of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Craigslist, Pinterest, Spotify, Salesforce, Dropbox, and more), Jimmy Fallon, Arianna Huffington, Brandon Stanton (Humans of New York), Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Ben Stiller, Maurice Ashley (first African-American Grandmaster of chess), Brené Brown (researcher and bestselling author), Rick Rubin (legendary music producer), Temple Grandin (animal behavior expert and autism activist), Franklin Leonard (The Black List), Dara Torres (12-time Olympic medalist in swimming), David Lynch (director), Kelly Slater (surfing legend), Bozoma Saint John (Beats/Apple/Uber), Lewis Cantley (famed cancer researcher), Maria Sharapova, Chris Anderson (curator of TED), Terry Crews, Greg Norman (golf icon), Vitalik Buterin (creator of Ethereum), and nearly 100 more. Check it all out by clicking here.

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Nick Kokonas — How to Apply World-Class Creativity to Business, Art, and Life (#341)

“I just look at some things and go, ‘Why is that? Why does it work that way?’ Oftentimes, the people most entrenched in a system have no idea why.”
— Nick Kokonas

Nick Kokonas (IG: @nkokonas, TW: @NickKokonas) is the co-owner and co-founder of The Alinea Group of restaurants, which includes Alinea, Next, The Aviary, Roister, and The Aviary NYC. He is also the founder and CEO of Tock, Inc, a reservations and CRM system for restaurants with more than 2.5M diners and clients in more than 20 countries.

Alinea has been named the Best Restaurant in America and Best Restaurant in The World by organizations and lists as diverse as The James Beard Foundation, World’s 50 Best, TripAdvisor, Yelp, Gourmet Magazine, and Elite Traveler. His restaurants have won nearly every accolade afforded to them.

Nick has been a subversive entrepreneur and angel investor since 1996. He spent a decade as a derivatives trader, has co-written three books, and believes in radical transparency in markets and business. His latest effort is The Aviary Cocktail Book, which is perhaps the most gorgeous book I’ve ever seen. It is self-published, has already pre-sold nearly $1M in copies, and is being released and shipped in October of 2018.

We’ve been trying to get this interview going ever since Nick was of immense help to me for The 4-Hour Chef, so I hope you enjoy this as much as I did. We talk about much more than the restaurant business, including philosophy, derivatives trading, favorite books, and how Nick tends to break every industry he enters in the most productive way possible! Enjoy!

Want to hear another episode with someone else who understands that the most interesting way to do something isn’t always the easiest? — Listen to this episode with Astro Teller, CEO of X on moonshot thinking, mutilated checkerboards, “safety third,” and much more. (Stream below or right-click here to download.):

This episode is brought to you by 99designs, the global creative platform that makes it easy for designers and clients to work together. From logos to apps and packaging to books, 99designs is the go-to design resource for any budget.

Right now, my listeners can get 50 dollars off a logo and brand identity package from 99designs, plus a free upgrade that lets you promote your project on the platform (an additional 99 dollar value), by visiting 99designs.com/Tim50.

This episode is also brought to you by Charlotte’s Web, which makes a CBD oil, a hemp extract, that has become one of my go-to tools. Charlotte’s Web won’t get you high, but it does have some pretty powerful benefits, and it works with your body’s existing endocannabinoid system. Some of the most common uses are for relief from everyday stressors, help in supporting restful sleep, and to bring about a sense of calm and focus.

Visit cwhemp.com/tim to take a quick quiz, which will determine the best product for your lifestyle. Charlotte’s Web is also offering listeners of this podcast 10% off with discount code TIM.

QUESTION(S) OF THE DAY: What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.

Scroll below for links and show notes…

SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE

  • Connect with Nick Kokonas:

The Alinea Group | Tock | Twitter | Instagram | Facebook

SHOW NOTES

  • Is pressure Nick’s default setting, or are the risks the world perceives he takes somewhat of an illusion? [09:35]
  • How do behavioral economics and Nobel Prize-winning investor Richard Thaler fit into Nick’s way of doing things? [12:35]
  • How did Nick make the transit from philosophy to finance, and does he feel philosophy was an asset to what came later? [14:55]
  • Why did a legendary philosophy professor at Colgate give Nick’s classmates 15-page assignments while capping his limit at three pages? [16:21]
  • What was Nick’s introduction to the world of trading at a time when his future father-in-law was predicting he’d become an intellectual bum, and why did he have to dumb down the academics on his rÈsumÈ to get a clerk job on the Merc floor? [18:12]
  • Why is it common for philosophy majors to become traders? [21:03]
  • Why Nick is glad he didn’t pursue an MBA in 1992. [22:00]
  • Going back to Nick’s professor at Colgate, why does he think he was singled out from his peers? [23:48]
  • Books and other resources Nick recommends for aspiring entrepreneurs who don’t have the benefit of a philosophy background (or a tough professor to keep them grounded). [28:15]
  • Did Nick find that being a clerk on the floor of the Merc was everything he dreamed it could be? [33:48]
  • How Nick followed his entrepreneurial father’s model for owning his own situation when entering the world of trading, and found someone who was doing business in a way no one else was doing it. [36:10]
  • Why did Nick leave his mentor after a year and start his own company? [40:53]
  • How did Nick and his employees train to quicken their mental agility required for trading? [42:34]
  • The formative moment when Nick realized he could thrive in the trading environment. [45:31]
  • Resources and books Nick recommends to anyone who wants to learn to become a better investor. [46:21]
  • When it comes to taking investment risks these days, Nick seeks out the “high, small hoops.” [48:22]
  • Averages can be misleading. Do so many businesses fail because the model is difficult, or because too few do enough due diligence before diving into the fray? [52:00]
  • At what point did Nick decide to leave trading and get into the restaurant business — in spite of being warned of the high failure rate to be found there? [55:15]
  • The dinner and conversation that led to Nick teaming up with Grant Achatz — even though they didn’t really know each other very well by that point — and the decisions they made together along the way. [1:00:18]
  • Out of so many equally risky and exciting options, why did Nick pick opening a restaurant as his next “thing?” [1:07:17]
  • How does Nick spot talent early in others that most people are late to notice? [1:10:23]
  • Why do restaurants have candles, why do fancy restaurants have white tablecloths, and other questions that Nick and Grant have pondered. [1:14:22]
  • Incidentally, a now-famous chef was Alinea’s first customer. [1:17:25]
  • Nick and Grant would never let an architect or designer shoot down their ideas just because the way things have always been done happen to be practical. [1:18:39]
  • As someone who had never run a restaurant before, how did Nick contribute to the business effectively without simply falling into the role of financial donor dilettante? [1:19:29]
  • Why was Nick “horrified” when Alinea won Best Restaurant in America from Gourmet magazine in 2006? [1:23:24]
  • Grant was diagnosed with stage IV cancer and given six months to live — so of course he and Nick wrote a book and worked on revolutionizing the way their industry handled reservations while supervising a dwindling staff. [1:24:51]
  • Sometimes a PoS really is a PoS. Nick explains how reservations have been traditionally booked in the restaurant industry and what he’s done to improve upon this in ways that go beyond holding a table. [1:29:29]
  • Partner bickering at a time-traveling press dinner and using austere minimalism to avoid Next becoming the Disneyland of cuisine. [1:39:51]
  • Dealing with reservation software problems seven hours before the first dinner and the novelty of variable price points based on the day of the week. [1:44:58]
  • The moment a bearded, unwashed, and somewhat slightly dazed Nick was able to say “This is the best thing I’ve ever built.” [1:47:44]
  • Why the rewards of such a reservation system were worth their asymmetric risks on several levels. [1:51:02]
  • Marimekko charts can be used to instantly see anything from how much your restaurant’s sending to the fishmonger every month to what the ROI of sponsoring a podcast might be. [1:55:15]
  • The next industry Nick wants to disrupt? Truffles. Here’s why. [2:00:41]
  • How does Nick choose the black boxes worth trying to illuminate and examine, and what role do his more ambitious employees play in bringing them to light? [2:04:24]
  • On the confining self-selection of roles many people fall into on the job (for better or for worse), and how Nick’s hiring process is different today than it was 20 years ago. [2:10:31]
  • Nick deals with a lot of email. What systems does he have in place to help him cope? [2:16:41]
  • Social media can be hard to keep up with, but we both agree it’s important to demonstrate that we’re paying attention by engaging when possible — even if we can’t respond to it all. [2:22:49]
  • What “puzzle” filters and other mini-hurdles in correspondence accomplish. [2:24:06]
  • We compare notes about the somewhat slimy similarities between the music and publishing industries. [2:26:02]
  • Another black box: the agency problem. [2:35:25]
  • On the Hembergers and The Alinea Project, and the upcoming Aviary Book being released independently. [2:41:23]
  • A little cocktail talk. [2:48:37]
  • Books Nick has gifted most, and how he personalizes the gifts he gives. [2:53:47]
  • What would Nick’s billboard say? [2:55:44]
  • Parting thoughts. [2:57:34]

PEOPLE MENTIONED

Posted on: October 18, 2018.

Please check out Tribe of Mentors, my newest book, which shares short, tactical life advice from 100+ world-class performers. Many of the world’s most famous entrepreneurs, athletes, investors, poker players, and artists are part of the book. The tips and strategies in Tribe of Mentors have already changed my life, and I hope the same for you. Click here for a sample chapter and full details. Roughly 90% of the guests have never appeared on my podcast.

Who was interviewed? Here’s a very partial list: tech icons (founders of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Craigslist, Pinterest, Spotify, Salesforce, Dropbox, and more), Jimmy Fallon, Arianna Huffington, Brandon Stanton (Humans of New York), Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Ben Stiller, Maurice Ashley (first African-American Grandmaster of chess), Brené Brown (researcher and bestselling author), Rick Rubin (legendary music producer), Temple Grandin (animal behavior expert and autism activist), Franklin Leonard (The Black List), Dara Torres (12-time Olympic medalist in swimming), David Lynch (director), Kelly Slater (surfing legend), Bozoma Saint John (Beats/Apple/Uber), Lewis Cantley (famed cancer researcher), Maria Sharapova, Chris Anderson (curator of TED), Terry Crews, Greg Norman (golf icon), Vitalik Buterin (creator of Ethereum), and nearly 100 more. Check it all out by clicking here.

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Sam Harris, Ph.D. — How to Master Your Mind (#342)

Photo by Christopher Michel

“The goal of meditation is to uncover a form of wellbeing that is inherent to the nature of our minds.” — Sam Harris

Sam Harris (@SamHarrisOrg) received a degree in philosophy from Stanford University and a Ph.D in neuroscience from UCLA. Sam is the host of the Waking Up podcast, and he is the author of multiple books including The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, The Moral Landscape, Free Will, Lying, Waking Up, and Islam and the Future of Tolerance (with Maajid Nawaz).

This experimental episode came about because a few months back Sam asked me to be a beta tester for his Waking Up meditation app that he was creating at the time. It was recently released, and I highly recommend it. I anticipated it would be good because Sam’s work is always good, and he’s one of those rare humans who seems to think and speak in finished prose, and he has a voice that can very easily lull you into a semi-psychedelic state while you are completely sober. You’ll hear what I mean soon.

Sam has a unique combination of experiences and areas of expertise, and his approach is that of a logical progression of layering on different types of training for learning the skill of meditation. In this episode, Sam will discuss his experiences with MDMA, his spiritual exploration, contact with so-called gurus, duality versus non-duality, and lots more. If you want to dive right into a beginner level guided meditation, skip to [52:32].

Make sure to check out the bonus episode (also found on this page) if you enjoy what you find here and want to jump straight to the guided meditations. The bonus episode also features additional content from Sam not found in the longer episode. Enjoy!

Here is the companion episode if you want to jump directly to the guided meditations from Sam:

This episode is brought to you by LegalZoom. I’ve used this service for many of my businesses, as have quite a few of the icons on this podcast including Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg of WordPress fame.

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QUESTION(S) OF THE DAY: What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.

Scroll below for links and show notes…

SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE

Website | Waking Up (app) | Waking Up (podcast) | Twitter | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube

SHOW NOTES

  • What you can expect from this episode (and why you probably shouldn’t listen to it while you’re driving a car). [07:21]
  • The Waking Up course app differs from other meditation apps. [08:39]
  • Sam’s background, and the journey his first foray into psychedelics would set in motion. [09:22]
  • Sam explains his views on religion and profound experiences some would call “spiritual” — which he set out to explore after that first experience with MDMA. [19:46]
  • Gradual versus sudden notions of realization or awakening, enlightenment versus cessation, and the distinction between meditation and psychedelics as tools. [22:09]
  • The meeting that led to a switch in Sam’s perspective on meditation after lengthy attempts for enlightenment proved unsuccessful. [31:05]
  • The dangers of guru Poonjaji’s “all or nothing” approach, the main difference between Advaita and Dzogchen teachings, and what it took to unravel one fellow student’s apparently confirmed enlightenment. [37:12]
  • Exploring Dzogchen and the context behind Sam’s current view of meditation. [42:32]
  • Perceiving the optic blind spot: the difference between being utterly misled by false information, being nudged in the general direction, and being precisely guided by an expert. [45:42]
  • One does not simply drop out of Stanford: Sam returns to college after 11 years away and finds himself uniquely qualified to unite his philosophical, scientific, and secular perspective with meditation. [50:24]
  • Why Sam believes the Waking Up course app and its guided meditations will benefit beginning and veteran meditators alike. [51:38]
  • Sam shares a 10-minute guided meditation from the course designed for a relative beginner to the practice of mindfulness. [52:32]
  • Sam shares a lesson from the course on the topic of death. [1:03:24]
  • Sam shares a lesson on the mystery of being. [1:10:33]
  • A 12-minute guided meditation from a little later in the course. [1:19:54]
  • Parting thoughts. [1:33:49]

BONUS EPISODE NOTES

  • Day 2 guided meditation. [00:56]
  • Day 17 guided meditation. [11:23]
  • Day 31 guided meditation. [25:13]
  • Why does Sam think you should meditate? [35:17]

PEOPLE MENTIONED

Posted on: October 29, 2018.

Please check out Tribe of Mentors, my newest book, which shares short, tactical life advice from 100+ world-class performers. Many of the world’s most famous entrepreneurs, athletes, investors, poker players, and artists are part of the book. The tips and strategies in Tribe of Mentors have already changed my life, and I hope the same for you. Click here for a sample chapter and full details. Roughly 90% of the guests have never appeared on my podcast.

Who was interviewed? Here’s a very partial list: tech icons (founders of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Craigslist, Pinterest, Spotify, Salesforce, Dropbox, and more), Jimmy Fallon, Arianna Huffington, Brandon Stanton (Humans of New York), Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Ben Stiller, Maurice Ashley (first African-American Grandmaster of chess), Brené Brown (researcher and bestselling author), Rick Rubin (legendary music producer), Temple Grandin (animal behavior expert and autism activist), Franklin Leonard (The Black List), Dara Torres (12-time Olympic medalist in swimming), David Lynch (director), Kelly Slater (surfing legend), Bozoma Saint John (Beats/Apple/Uber), Lewis Cantley (famed cancer researcher), Maria Sharapova, Chris Anderson (curator of TED), Terry Crews, Greg Norman (golf icon), Vitalik Buterin (creator of Ethereum), and nearly 100 more. Check it all out by clicking here.

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The Dalai Lama on Science and Spirituality

The Dalai Lama on Science and Spirituality

“The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both,” Carl Sagan wrote in his final book nearly four centuries after Galileo made the same point in his famous letter defending his life.

A recent Pioneer Works conversation about science and spirituality with physicist Alan Lightman, based on his immensely insightful and poetic book on the subject, reminded me of a different, older conversation contemplating the relationship between these two hallmarks of the human experience.

In the early 1990s, shortly after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, the Dalai Lama sat down for a five-day dialogue with a group of ten Western scientists and one philosopher of mind, seeking a scientific perspective on what Buddhism calls the Three Poisons: greed, hatred, and delusion — the primary classes of emotion that cause us to harm ourselves and those around us. The wide-ranging conversation, the synthesis of which was later published as Destructive Emotions: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama (public library), aimed to bridge ancient spiritual practices and modern findings in biology, cognitive science, psychology, and neuroscience in an effort to reveal the human mind’s capacity to transcend its own fundamental flaws.

His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet (Photograph: Tenzin Choejor)

With an eye to the complementarity between Buddhism, which has been exploring the human mind for millennia, and Western science, whose neuroscience and psychology are barely a century and a half old, the Dalai Lama writes in the preface to the book:

Buddhism and science are not conflicting perspectives on the world, but rather differing approaches to the same end: seeking the truth. In Buddhist training, it is essential to investigate reality, and science offers its own ways to go about this investigation. While the purposes of science may differ from those of Buddhism, both ways of searching for truth expand our knowledge and understanding.

Art by Oliver Jeffers for Love Letter America

Four millennia after the Buddha laid down his tenets of critical thinking, known as The Charter of Free Inquiry, the Dalai Lama points to the scientific method as our mightiest tool in the pursuit of truth, but also insists on applying it to science itself:

I have often said that if science proves facts that conflict with Buddhist understanding, Buddhism must change accordingly. We should always adopt a view that accords with the facts. If upon investigation we find that there is reason and proof for a point, then we should accept it. However, a clear distinction should be made between what is not found by science and what is found to be nonexistent by science. What science finds to be nonexistent we should all accept as nonexistent, but what science merely does not find is a completely different matter. An example is consciousness itself. Although sentient beings, including humans, have experienced consciousness for centuries, we still do not know what consciousness actually is: its complete nature and how it functions.

Calyces of Held — synapses made by axons carrying auditory information and contacting neurons in a brainstem structure called the trapezoid body. One of neuroscience founding father Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s stunning drawings of the brain.

The purpose of spirituality in a secular world, he argues, is that of a moral compass that tempers the destructive emotions that so often accompany our modern materialism. In consonance with Adam Gopnik’s insight into the essential nonreligious value of the Bible, the Dalai Lama echoes Martin Luther King’s assertion that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere [for] whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly,” and writes:

The more we pursue material improvement, ignoring the contentment that comes of inner growth, the faster ethical values will disappear from our communities. Then we will all experience unhappiness in the long run, for when there is no place for justice and honesty in people’s hearts, the weak are the first to suffer. And the resentments resulting from such inequity ultimately affect everyone adversely.

With the ever-growing impact of science on our lives, religion and spirituality have a greater role to play in reminding us of our humanity. What we must do is balance scientific and material progress with the sense of responsibility that comes of inner development. That is why I believe this dialogue between religion and science is important, for from it may come developments that can be of great benefit to mankind.

The concrete manifestations of and path to that civilizational benefit is what the remainder of Destructive Emotions explores — questions of whether these destructive emotions are an elemental part of human nature, what lends them their formidable power, and how much plasticity there is in the brain to allow for outgrowing them. Complement this excerpt with Nobel-winning physicist Niels Bohr on subjective vs. objective reality and the uses of religion in a secular world, pioneering astronomer Maria Mitchell on mathematics, divinity, and the human search for truth, and Albert Einstein’s 1931 conversation about science and spirituality with the Nobel-winning Indian poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore.

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Elizabeth Gilbert on Love, Loss, and How to Move Through Grief as Grief Moves Through You

“All your sorrows have been wasted on you if you have not yet learned how to be wretched,” Seneca told his mother in his extraordinary letter on resilience in the face of loss. One need not be a dry materialist to bow before the recognition that no heart goes through life unplundered by loss — all love presupposes it, be it in death or in heartbreak. Whether what is lost are feelings or atoms, grief comes, unforgiving and unpredictable in its myriad manifestations. Joan Didion observed this disorienting fact in her classic memoir of loss: “Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.” And when it does come, it unweaves the very fabric of our being. When love is lost, we lose the part of ourselves that did the loving — a part that, depending on the magnitude of the love, can come to approximate the whole of who we are. We lose what artist Anne Truitt so poetically termed “the lovely entire confidence that comes only from innumerable mutual confidences entrusted and examined… woven by four hands, now trembling, now intent, over and under into a pattern that can surprise both [partners].”

But we also gain something — out of the burning embers of the loss arises an ashen humility, true to its shared Latin root with the word humus. We are made “of the earth” — we bow down low, we become crust, and each breath seems to draw from the magmatic center of the planet that is our being. It is only when we give ourselves over to it completely that we can begin to take ourselves back, to rise, to live again.

How to move through this barely survivable experience is what author and altogether glorious human being Elizabeth Gilbert examines with uncommon insight and tenderness of heart in her conversation with TED curator Chris Anderson on the inaugural episode of the TED Interviews podcast.

Rayya Elias and Elizabeth Gilbert (Photograph by Elizabeth Gilbert)

Gilbert reflects on the death of her partner, Rayya Elias — her longtime best friend, whose sudden terminal cancer diagnosis unlatched a trapdoor, as Gilbert put it, into the realization that Rayya was the love of her life:

Grief… happens upon you, it’s bigger than you. There is a humility that you have to step into, where you surrender to being moved through the landscape of grief by grief itself. And it has its own timeframe, it has its own itinerary with you, it has its own power over you, and it will come when it comes. And when it comes, it’s a bow-down. It’s a carve-out. And it comes when it wants to, and it carves you out — it comes in the middle of the night, comes in the middle of the day, comes in the middle of a meeting, comes in the middle of a meal. It arrives — it’s this tremendously forceful arrival and it cannot be resisted without you suffering more… The posture that you take is you hit your knees in absolute humility and you let it rock you until it is done with you. And it will be done with you, eventually. And when it is done, it will leave. But to stiffen, to resist, and to fight it is to hurt yourself.

With an eye to the intimate biological connection between the body and the mind (which is, of course, the seedbed of feeling), Gilbert adds:

There’s this tremendous psychological and spiritual challenge to relax in the awesome power of it until it has gone through you. Grief is a full-body experience. It takes over your entire body — it’s not a disease of the mind. It’s something that impacts you at the physical level… I feel that it has a tremendous relationship to love: First of all, as they say, it’s the price you pay for love. But, secondly, in the moments of my life when I have fallen in love, I have just as little power over it as I do in grief. There are certain things that happen to you as a human being that you cannot control or command, that will come to you at really inconvenient times, and where you have to bow in the human humility to the fact that there’s something running through you that’s bigger than you.

Illustration from Cry, Heart, But Never Break, a Danish meditation on love and loss

Gilbert goes on to read a short, stunning reflection on love and loss she had originally published on Instagram:

People keep asking me how I’m doing, and I’m not always sure how to answer that. It depends on the day. It depends on the minute. Right this moment, I’m OK. Yesterday, not so good. Tomorrow, we’ll see.

Here is what I have learned about Grief, though.

I have learned that Grief is a force of energy that cannot be controlled or predicted. It comes and goes on its own schedule. Grief does not obey your plans, or your wishes. Grief will do whatever it wants to you, whenever it wants to. In that regard, Grief has a lot in common with Love.

The only way that I can “handle” Grief, then, is the same way that I “handle” Love — by not “handling” it. By bowing down before its power, in complete humility.

When Grief comes to visit me, it’s like being visited by a tsunami. I am given just enough warning to say, “Oh my god, this is happening RIGHT NOW,” and then I drop to the floor on my knees and let it rock me. How do you survive the tsunami of Grief? By being willing to experience it, without resistance.

The conversation of Grief, then, is one of prayer-and-response.

Grief says to me: “You will never love anyone the way you loved Rayya.” And I reply: “I am willing for that to be true.” Grief says: “She’s gone, and she’s never coming back.” I reply: “I am willing for that to be true.” Grief says: “You will never hear that laugh again.” I say: “I am willing.” Grief says, “You will never smell her skin again.” I get down on the floor on my fucking knees, and — and through my sheets of tears — I say, “I AM WILLING.” This is the job of the living — to be willing to bow down before EVERYTHING that is bigger than you. And nearly everything in this world is bigger than you.

I don’t know where Rayya is now. It’s not mine to know. I only know that I will love her forever. And that I am willing.

Onward.

Gilbert adds in the interview:

It’s an honor to be in grief. It’s an honor to feel that much, to have loved that much.

Rayya Elias and Elizabeth Gilbert (Photograph courtesy of Elizabeth Gilbert)

Complement with life-earned wisdom on how to live with loss from other great artists, writers, and scientists — including Alan Turing, Albert Einstein, Abraham Lincoln, Rachel Carson, Charles Darwin, Johannes Brahms, and Charles Dickens — and the Stoic cure for heartbreak from Epictetus, then revisit Gilbert on creative bravery and the art of living in a state of uninterrupted marvel.

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An Illustrated Field Guide to the Art, Science, and Joy of Tea

An Illustrated Field Guide to the Art, Science, and Joy of Tea

“The first sip is joy, the second is gladness, the third is serenity, the fourth is madness, the fifth is ecstasy,” Jack Kerouac wrote of tea in his 1958 novel The Dharma Bums. Late one night that year, he walked five miles with an enormous tape recorder strapped to his back to keep the woman he loved from taking her own life.

Lois Beckwith didn’t die that night. She and Jack soon parted ways as lovers, but remained friends. Eventually, he introduced her to the man who would become her husband. Their son would go on to devote his life to tea.

In Pursuit of Tea founder Sebastian Beckwith fell in love with tea while working as a trekking guide in Bhutan and northern India in the 1980s, and has spent the years since procuring and advocating for the planet’s finest, most sustainably grown and ethically harvested teas. Traveling to and working with small farms in Asia’s most historic tea-growing regions, he sources teas that grace the menus of some of New York City’s finest restaurants and have powered much of my own writing over the years. In his workshops, seminars, and lectures, he has brought the art-science of tea to the American Museum of Natural History, the French Culinary Institute, and Columbia University.

Now, Beckwith harvests the wisdom of his life’s work in A Little Tea Book: All the Essentials from Leaf to Cup (public library) — part practical field guide to choosing, preparing, and enjoying tea, part love letter, co-written with his childhood friend, former firefighter, and Gutsy Girl author Caroline Paul, and splendidly illustrated by Caroline’s wife and my dear friend Wendy MacNaughton.

Radiating from the pages are deep knowledge, good-natured humor, and a largehearted love of tea — the plant, the experience, the ecosystem of botany and labor and ritual, which George Orwell considered “one of the main stays of civilization.” What emerges is an encyclopedia of fact and joy, delving into the cultural and political histories of tea alongside its practical science and daily delights, bridging the sensorial and the spiritual dimensions of this ancient tradition turned modern staple.

Punctuating the book are various curiosities from the history of tea, emanating broader insight into human culture, the nature of creativity, and the serendipitous, often haphazard ways in which new ideas take root. Take, for instance, the story of the tea bag:

Tea bags were invented in the late 1800s but became wildly popular only after a New York tea purveyor named Thomas Sullivan sent samples of tea in silk bags. These were intended to be opened, the tea emptied out and then brewed, but customers instead dropped the bags straight into the water — and then complained that the material did not allow for the tea to steep. Sullivan turned to a more porous cloth and the tea bag was quickly embraced in America (though most of Britain turned up its nose, using loose tea until the mid-1970s.)

There are also invaluable antidotes to various oft-repeated myths, misconceptions, and half-truths — from the elemental fact that the six basic types of tea (white, green, yellow, oolong, black, and dark) all come from a single plant, Camellia sinensis, to the complex matter of caffeine. Beckwith and Paul offer a scientific corrective:

Many of us drink tea to wake up at the beginning of our day. You may even have heard that Camellia sinensis contains more caffeine than coffee beans. This is true, but misleading. We use much less tea than coffee by weight for a serving, so your cup of tea actually has at most one half the amount of caffeine as a cup of coffee. The relative level varies depending on the leaf used (the buds have higher concentrations), the cultivar, the leaf shape (a larger leaf results in a slower infusion because there is less surface area than, say, a fanning tea grade in your cup), and the brew time and technique (since caffeine is water-soluble, the longer tea steeps, the more caffeine is extracted; powdered tea like matcha has more caffeine because the leaves are consumed, not infused). It is important to note that caffeine does not correspond with tea type, so one cannot categorically say that black tea has more than green, or yellow tea has more than white.

Tea also contains the unique calming and relaxing — but not sedative — amino acid theanine, which has been found only in Camellia sinensis and one mushroom, Boletus badius. Theanine has been shown to improve mood and increase focus when combined with caffeine. This may be why tea drinkers often avoid the anxiety and jitters of those who imbibe coffee (known to some of us tea lovers as “devil juice.”)

Complement the lovely Little Tea Book with Orwell’s eleven golden rules for making the perfect cup of tea and the MacNaughton-illustrated field guide to wine, then revisit the touching, improbable story of how Kerouac saved Beckwith’s mother’s life.

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‘Frankenstein’ Author Mary Shelley on Nature and the Meaning of Happiness

‘Frankenstein’ Author Mary Shelley on Nature and the Meaning of Happiness

In the early summer of 1816, weeks before her nineteenth birthday, Mary Shelley (August 30, 1797–February 1, 1851) — then still Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin — dreamt up Frankenstein on the shores of Lake Geneva in a creative challenge she and her companions, her stepsister Claire and the twenty-something poets Lord Byron and Percy Shelley, devised to pass the time. Her book would go on to influence generations of writers and presage pressing questions of science and social responsibility.

Like most Romantic writers, Shelley saw no divide between her literary art for the public and the private prose of her diaries and letters — rather, the latter served as a sandbox for developing and refining the former. In fact, it was during her difficult journey to Switzerland, after her elopement with Percy Shelley, that she first began composing letters of exquisite literary splendor. While her early love letters to the poet exude a teenage girl’s exuberant steam-of-consciousness outpouring, her letters to friends and family from this self-elected exile take on the tone of a literary travelogue, made all the more dramatic by the unusual state of nature at the time. The eruption of Indonesia’s Mount Tambora the previous spring — to this day the largest eruption in recorded history — sent a cloud of volcanic ash around the globe, enveloping the northern hemisphere in a cool sheath of gloom. While the summer of 1816 became the summer of love for the four young people traveling together, the world came to know it as “the year without a summer.”

Mary Shelley. Art from Literary Witches — an illustrated celebration of trailblazing women writers who have enchanted and transformed the world.

In a particularly beautiful letter to her sister Fanny from the spring of 1816, included in Selected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (public library), Shelley describes the perilous but almost unbearably breathtaking journey from France to Lake Geneva in Switzerland — the largest and deepest of the Swiss lakes, where she would soon compose Frankenstein. What emerges is a lyrical travelogue of both body and spirit — describing nature’s striking costume changes in exquisite detail, Shelley chronicles her journey toward her destination across microclimates and terrains, not only toward her physical destination but toward a new psychic summit of happiness, harmony, and self-actualization.

More than a century before trailblazing Scottish mountaineer and poet Nan Shepherd gave her stunning account of the living mountain, Shelley writes:

The road was serpentine and exceedingly steep, and was overhung on the side by half distinguished precipices, whilst the other was a gulf, filled by the darkness of the driving clouds. The dashing of the invisible mountain streams announced to us that we had quitted the plains of France, as we slowly ascended, amidst a violent storm of wind and rain, to Champagnolles, where we arrived at twelve o’clock, the fourth night after our departure from Paris.

The next morning we proceeded, still ascending among the ravines and valleys of the mountain. The scenery perpetually grows more wonderful and sublime: pine forests of impenetrable thickness, and untrodden, nay, inaccessible expanse spread on every side. Sometimes the dark woods descending, follow the route into the valleys, the distorted trees struggling which knotted roots between the most barren clefts; sometimes the road winds high into the regions of frost, and then the forests become scattered, and the branches of the trees are loaded with snow, and and half of the enormous pines themselves buried in the wavy drifts. The spring, as the inhabitants informed us, was unusually late, and indeed the cold was excessive; as we ascended the mountains, the same clouds which rained on us in the valleys poured forth large flakes of snow thick and fast. The sun occasionally shone through these showers, and illuminated the magnificent ravines of the mountains, whose gigantic pines were some laden with snow, some wreathed round by the lines of scattered and lingering vapour; others darting their dark spires into the sunny sky, brilliantly clear azure.

As the evening advanced, and we ascended higher, the snow, which we had beheld whitening the overhanging rocks, now encroached upon our road, and it snowed fast as we entered the village of Les Rousses, where we were threatened by the apparent necessity of passing the night in a bad inn and dirty beds. For from that place there are two roads to Geneva; one by Nion, in the Swiss territory, where the mountain route is shorter, and comparatively easy at that time of the year, when the road is for several leagues covered with snow of an enormous depth; the other road lay through Gex, and was too circuitous and dangerous to be attempted at so late an hour in the day. Our passport, however, was for Gex, and we were told that we could not change its destination; but all these police laws, so severe in themselves, are to be softened by bribery, and this difficulty was at length overcome. We hired four horses, and ten men to support the carriage, and departed from Les Rousses at six in the evening, when the sun had already far descended, and the snow pelting against the windows of our carriage, assisted the coming darkness to deprive us of the view of the lake of Geneva and the far-distant Alps.

With an eye to “the natural silence of that uninhabited desert,” she adds:

Never was [a] scene more awfully desolate. The trees in these regions are incredibly large, and stand in scattered clumps over the white wilderness; the vast expanse of snow was chequered only by these gigantic pines, and the poles that marked our road: no river or rock-encircled lawn relieved the eye, by adding the picturesque to the sublime.

“Mont Blanc after sunset from the Secheron” by Thomas Henry Graham (1793–1881), New York Public Library

Upon finally arriving at Lake Geneva — the waters of which she would laud as “blue as the heavens which it reflects,” adding to the chromatic canon of literature’s most beautiful celebrations of blue — Shelley finds a wholly different manifestation of nature:

We arrived… to the warm sunshine and to the humming of sun-loving insects. From the windows of our hotel we see the lovely lake, blue as the heavens which it reflects, and sparkling with golden beams. The opposite shore is sloping and covered with vines, which however do not so early in the season add to the beauty of the prospect. Gentlemen’s seats are scattered over these banks, behind which rise the various ridges of black mountains, and towering far above, in the midst of its snowy Alps, the majestic Mont Blanc, the highest and queen of all. Such is the view reflected by the lake; it is a bright summer scene without any of that sacred solitude and deep seclusion that delighted us at Lucerne.

Against this backdrop of ecstatic serenity, Shelley arrives at a state of contentment that calls to mind Walt Whitman’s most direct articulation of happiness. She writes:

Twilight here is of short duration, but we at present enjoy the benefit of an increasing moon, and seldom return until ten o’clock, when, as we approach the shore, we are saluted by the delightful scent of flowers and new mown grass, the chirp of the grasshoppers, and the song of the evening birds… Coming to this delightful spot during this divine weather, I feel as happy as a new-fledged bird, and hardly care what twig I fly to, so that I may try my new-found wings.

A year later, now married to Percy and working on completing her manuscript of Frankenstein, she would adapt her letters and the joint travel journal the couple kept into a slim book titled History of a Six Weeks’ Tour Through a Part of France, Switzerland, Germany and Holland (public library), modeled on the popular Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark by her mother — the pioneering feminist and political philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, who had died of childbed fever after giving birth to her.

“The Child Mary Shelley (at her Mother’s Death)” by William Blake

Shelley published her travelogue under her new husband’s name, hoping that his nascent prominence as a poet would lend it more credibility than exposing the author as a woman. (Three months later, she would publish Frankenstein anonymously.)

Complement with Vita Sackville-West’s beautiful letter to Virginia Woolf about rock climbing and the meaning of life and an arresting account of climbing Mount Vesuvius during an eruption by Shelley’s contemporary Hans Christian Andersen, then revisit Shelley on creativity.

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Rebecca Solnit on Rewriting the World’s Broken Stories and the Paradigm-Shifting Power of Calling Things by Their True Names

Rebecca Solnit on Rewriting the World’s Broken Stories and the Paradigm-Shifting Power of Calling Things by Their True Names

“Finding the words is another step in learning to see,” bryologist Robin Wall Kimmerer wrote in reflecting on what her Native American tradition and her training as a scientist taught her about how naming confers dignity upon life. If to name is to see and reveal — to remove the veil of blindness, willful or manipulated, and expose things as they really are — then it is in turn another step in remaking the world, another form of resistance to the damaging dominant narratives that go unquestioned. Walt Whitman knew this when he contemplated our greatest civic might: “I can conceive of no better service… than boldly exposing the weakness, liabilities and infinite corruptions of democracy.”

A century and a half after Whitman, Rebecca Solnit — one of our own era’s boldest public defenders of democracy, and one of the most poetic — explores this crucial causal link between the stories we tell and the world we build in Call Them by Their True Names (public library) — a collection of her essays at the nexus of politics, philosophy, and the selective record of personal and political choices we call history. Composed in response to more than a decade’s worth of cultural crises and triumphs, the pieces in the book furnish an extraordinarily lucid yet hopeful lens on the present and a boldly uncynical telescopic perspective on the future.

Rebecca Solnit (Photograph: Sallie Dean Shatz)
Rebecca Solnit (Photograph: Sallie Dean Shatz)

Solnit writes in the preface:

One of the folktale archetypes, according to the Aarne-Thompson classification of these stories, tells of how “a mysterious or threatening helper is defeated when the hero or heroine discovers his name.” In the deep past, people knew names had power. Some still do. Calling things by their true names cuts through the lies that excuse, buffer, muddle, disguise, avoid, or encourage inaction, indifference, obliviousness. It’s not all there is to changing the world, but it’s a key step.

When the subject is grim, I think of the act of naming as diagnosis. Though not all diagnosed diseases are curable, once you know what you’re facing, you’re far better equipped to know what you can do about it. Research, support, and effective treatment, as well as possibly redefining the disease and what it means, can proceed from this first step. Once you name a disorder, you may be able to connect to the community afflicted with it, or build one. And sometimes what’s diagnosed can be cured.

That, indeed, is what the philosopher and Trappist monk Thomas Merton celebrated in his beautiful fan letter to Rachel Carson after she catalyzed the modern environmental movement by speaking inconvenient truth to power in exposing the truth about pesticides, marketed at the time as harmless helpers to humanity — an act Merton considered “contributing a most valuable and essential piece of evidence for the diagnosis of the ills of our civilization.” Such naming of wrongs, betrayals, and corruptions unweaves the very fabric of the status quo. It is, Solnit argues, “the first step in the process of liberation” and often leads to shifts in the power system itself. In the age of “alternative facts,” when language is used as a weapon of oppression and manipulation, her words reverberate with the irrepressible, unsilenceable urgency of truth:

To name something truly is to lay bare what may be brutal or corrupt — or important or possible — and key to the work of changing the world is changing the story.

More than a century after Nietzsche contemplated truth, lies, and the power of language to both conceal and reveal reality, Solnit writes:

There are so many ways to tell a lie. You can lie by ignoring whole regions of impact, omitting crucial information, or unhitching cause and effect; by falsifying information by distortion and disproportion, or by using names that are euphemisms for violence or slander for legitimate activities, so that the white kids are “hanging out” but the Black kids are “loitering” or “lurking.” Language can erase, distort, point in the wrong direction, throw out decoys and distractions. It can bury the bodies or uncover them.

Illustration from The Little Golden Book of Words

What, then, can we do as namers and storytellers, as part of the truth-telling brigade that stands as warden of reality? Solnit offers:

Precision, accuracy, and clarity matter, as gestures of respect toward those to whom you speak; toward the subject, whether it’s an individual or the earth itself; and toward the historical record. It’s also a kind of self-respect… The search for meaning is in how you live your life but also in how you describe it and what else is around you.

The precision and respect of our words add up to the precision and respect of our stories — something Virginia Woolf implicitly recognized when she asserted that “words belong to each other” in the only surviving recording of her voice. When James Baldwin insisted that “we made the world we’re living in and we have to make it over,” he did so with an eye to storytelling as worldbuilding. Solnit addresses this — the remaking of stories as a remodeling of the world — in another piece in the book, exploring the responsibility of those tasked with telling the world’s truths: the writers, journalists, and storytellers whose words shape our understanding of reality. She writes:

Stories surround us like air; we breathe them in, we breathe them out. The art of being fully conscious in personal life means seeing the stories and becoming their teller, rather than letting them be the unseen forces that tell you what to do. Being a public storyteller requires the same skills with larger consequences and responsibilities, because your story becomes part of that water, undermining or reinforcing the existing stories. Your job is to report on the story on the surface, the contained story, the one that happened yesterday. It’s also to see and sometimes to break open or break apart the ambient stories, the stories that are already written, and to understand the relationship between the two.

In a testament to the crucial importance — and difficulty — of breaking out of our presentism bias and taking a telescopic perspective of the past, she adds:

There are stories beneath the stories and around the stories. The recent event on the surface is often merely the hood ornament on the mighty social engine that is a story driving the culture. We call those “dominant narratives” or “paradigms” or “memes” or “metaphors we live by” or “frameworks.” However we describe them, they are immensely powerful forces. And the dominant culture mostly goes about reinforcing the stories that are the pillars propping it up and that, too often, are also the bars of someone else’s cage. They are too often stories that should be broken, or are already broken and ruined and ruinous and way past their expiration date. They sit atop mountains of unexamined assumptions.

[…]

Part of the job of a great storyteller is to examine the stories that underlie the story you’re assigned, maybe to make them visible, and sometimes to break us free of them. Break the story. Breaking is a creative act as much as making, in this kind of writing.

In a sense, what Solnit is advocating for is the opposite of revisionist history — the opposite of the convenient erasure of wrongdoings and betrayals over which the lulling stories of the status quo are written. I think of it as revisionist future — the act of courage and creativity required for changing the terrain of reality by imagining alternative landscapes and new pathways of possibility. “We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice,” Ursula K. Le Guin observed in her poignant reflection on how imaginative storytelling expands the scope of the possible. “We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom.”

Illustration of the Trojan horse from Alice and Martin Provensen’s vintage adaptation of Homer for young readers

But the most powerful and transformative imagination, Solnit reminds us, is the informed imagination:

The writer’s job is not to look through the window someone else built, but to step outside, to question the framework, or to dismantle the house and free what’s inside, all in service of making visible what was locked out of the view. News journalism focuses on what changed yesterday rather than asking what are the underlying forces and who are the unseen beneficiaries of this moment’s status quo… This is why you need to know your history, even if you’re a journalist rather than a historian. You need to know the patterns to see how people are fitting the jumble of facts into what they already have: selecting, misreading, distorting, excluding, embroidering, distributing empathy here but not there, remembering this echo or forgetting that precedent.

Some of the stories we need to break are not exceptional events, they’re the ugly wallpaper of our everyday lives. For example, there’s a widespread belief that women lie about being raped, not a few women, not an anomalous woman, but women in general. This framework comes from the assumption that reliability and credibility are as natural to men as mendacity and vindictiveness are to women. In other words, feminists just made it all up, because otherwise we’d have to question a really big story whose nickname is patriarchy. But the data confirms that people who come forward about being raped are, overall, telling the truth (and that rapists tend to lie, a lot). Many people have gotten on board with the data, many have not, and so behind every report on a sexual assault is a battle over the terms in which we tell, in what we believe about gender and violence.

Fitcher's Bird: "He hurried away with long strides."
One of Arthur Rackham’s revolutionary 1907 illustrations for the Brothers Grimm fairy tales

She considers the only antidote to these age-old stories:

Journalists are the story-breakers whose work often changes the belief systems that then drive legislative and institutional change. It’s powerful, honorable, profoundly necessary work when it’s done with passion and independence and guts.

Building on her previous history-informed insistence that “the grounds for hope are in the shadows, in the people who are inventing the world while no one looks, who themselves don’t know yet whether they will have any effect,” she highlights our warped weighing of which stories matter. Exactly half a century after Hannah Arendt — another of our civilization’s great political minds — considered the power of outsiderdom and asserted that “we humanize what is going on in the world and in ourselves only by speaking of it, and in the course of speaking of it we learn to be human,” Solnit writes:

We tend to treat people on the fringe as ideologues and those in the center as neutral, as though the decision not to own a car is political and the decision to own one is not, as though to support a war is neutral and to oppose it is not. There is no apolitical, no sidelines, no neutral ground; we’re all engaged.

[…]

I think of the mainstream media as having not so much a rightwing or leftwing bias but a status quo bias, a tendency to believe people in authority, to trust institutions and corporations and the rich and powerful and pretty much any self-satisfied white man in a suit; to let people who have been proven to tell lies tell more lies that get reported without questioning; to move forward on cultural assumptions that are readily disproven; and to devalue nearly all outsiders, whether they’re discredited or mocked or just ignored.

Art by Olivier Tallec from Louis I, King of the Sheep
Art from Louis I, King of the Sheep, an illustrated parable of how power corrupts.

Solnit turns to the largest-scale cultural assumption, erected by our civilization’s most unforgiving institutional, corporate, and political power structures — the selfsame assumption Carson had begun to dismantle half a century earlier — from which arises our largest-scale truth-telling responsibility:

For journalists and for human beings generally, the elephant in the room has been there for a long time. It’s not even the elephant: the elephant in the room is the room itself, the biosphere in which all life currently known to exist in the universe is enclosed, and on which it all depends, the biosphere now devastated by climate change, with far more change to come. The scale is not like anything human beings have faced and journalists have reported on, except perhaps the threat of all-out nuclear war — and that was something that might happen, not something that is happening. Climate change is here, and it is changing everything. It is bigger than anything else, because it is everything, for the imaginable future.

[…]

Future generations are going to curse most of us for distracting ourselves with trivialities as the planet burned. Journalists are in a pivotal place when it comes to the possibilities and the responsibilities in this crisis. We, the makers and breakers of stories, are tremendously powerful.

So please, break the story.

Complement this particular portion of Call Them by Their True Names — a super read in its rousing and revelatory totality — with Iris Murdoch on why storytelling is essential for democracy, Ursula K. Le Guin on the power of language to transform and redeem, and Susan Sontag on storytelling and what it means to be a decent human being, then revisit Solnit on breaking silence, living with intelligent hope in dispiriting times, catastrophe as a catalyst for human goodness, the rewards of walking, how maps can oppress and liberate, and why we read.

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Anne Lamott on Love, Despair, and Our Capacity for Change

Anne Lamott on Love, Despair, and Our Capacity for Change

We go through life seeing reality not as it really is, in its unfathomable depths of complexity and contradiction, but as we hope or fear or expect it to be. Too often, we confuse certainty for truth and the strength of our beliefs for the strength of the evidence. When we collide with the unexpected, with the antipode to our hopes, we are plunged into bewildered despair. We rise from the pit only by love. Perhaps Keats had it slightly wrong — perhaps truth is love and love is truth.

That is what Anne Lamott, one of the rare sages of our time, reminds us with equal parts humility, humor, and largehearted wisdom in Almost Everything: Notes on Hope (public library).

Anne Lamott

Lamott writes in the prelude:

In general, it doesn’t feel like the light is making a lot of progress. It feels like death by annoyance. At the same time, the truth is that we are beloved, even in our current condition, by someone; we have loved and been loved. We have also known the abyss of love lost to death or rejection, and that it somehow leads to new life. We have been redeemed and saved by love, even as a few times we have been nearly destroyed, and worse, seen our children nearly destroyed. We are who we love, we are one, and we are autonomous.

She turns to the greatest paradox of the human heart — our parallel capacities for the perpendiculars of immense love and immense despair:

Love has bridged the high-rises of despair we were about to fall between. Love has been a penlight in the blackest, bleakest nights. Love has been a wild animal, a poultice, a dinghy, a coat. Love is why we have hope.

So why have some of us felt like jumping off tall buildings ever since we can remember, even those of us who do not struggle with clinical depression? Why have we repeatedly imagined turning the wheels of our cars into oncoming trucks?

We just do.

To me, this is very natural. It is hard here.

Illustration by Charlotte Pardi from Cry, Heart, But Never Break by Glenn Ringtved

And yet, in the wreckage of this hardship, we find our most redemptive potentialities:

There is the absolute hopelessness we face that everyone we love will die, even our newborn granddaughter, even as we trust and know that love will give rise to growth, miracles, and resurrection. Love and goodness and the world’s beauty and humanity are the reasons we have hope. Yet no matter how much we recycle, believe in our Priuses, and abide by our local laws, we see that our beauty is being destroyed, crushed by greed and cruel stupidity. And we also see love and tender hearts carry the day. Fear, against all odds, leads to community, to bravery and right action, and these give us hope.

In a sentiment that calls to mind what psychologists call “the vampire problem” — the limiting loop by which we fail to imagine transformation because the very faculty doing the imagining can only be informed by the already transformed self — Lamott adds:

We can change. People say we can’t, but we do when the stakes or the pain is high enough. And when we do, life can change. It offers more of itself when we agree to give up our busyness.

Nothing keeps us from changing more than our tendency — our willingness — to remain locked into versions of ourselves, into personae and identities barred in by heavy leaden rods of self-righteousness. Too often, we’d rather be right than understand — ourselves or others or the world — but it is only understanding, which only grows by leaps and bounds of wrong guesses and failed theories, that firms our grasp of reality.

Illustration by Lisbeth Zwerger for a special edition of the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm

Lamott addresses this tragic self-limitation in the opening essay, titled “Puzzles.” With an eye to “the fleecy cloak we’ve made for ourselves, the finery of being right,” she writes:

When we are stuck in our convictions and personas, we enter into the disease of having good ideas and being right… We think we have a lock on truth, with our burnished surfaces and articulation, but the bigger we pump ourselves up, the easier we are to prick with a pin. And the bigger we get, the harder it is to see the earth under our feet.

Half a century after Joan Didion reflected on learning not to mistake self-righteousness for morality, Lamott adds:

We all know the horror of having been Right with a capital R, feeling the surge of a cause, whether in politics or custody disputes. This rightness is so hot and steamy and exciting, until the inevitable rug gets pulled out from under us. Then we get to see that we almost never really know what is true, except what everybody else knows: that sometimes we’re all really lonely, and hollow, and stripped down to our most naked human selves.

It is the worst thing on earth, this truth about how little truth we know. I hate and resent it. And yet it is where new life rises from.

My hand-drawn map based on Nobel-winning Polish poet Wisława Szymborska’s poem “Utopia”

The problem, of course, is that truth remains slippery, making our entire existence a giant slipping slide into what the poet Wisława Szymborska called “unfathomable life.” Still, somehow, we slip and slide and get by. We swim through the world, fragile and disoriented, buoyed only by love, transformed only by love.

Nearly a century and a half after Nietzsche considered truth and lies in a nonmoral sense, Lamott writes:

Scientists say we are made of stars, and I believe them, although my upper arms look like hell. Maybe someday the stars will reabsorb me. Maybe, as fundamentalist Christians have shared with me, I will rot in hell for all eternity, which I would hate, because I am very sensitive. Besides, I have known hell, and I have also known love. Love was bigger.

What comforts us is that, after we make ourselves crazy enough, we can let go inch by inch into just being here; every so often, briefly. There is flow everywhere in nature — glaciers are just rivers that are moving really, really slowly — so how could there not be flow in each of us? Or at least in most of us? When we detach or are detached by tragedy or choice from the tendrils of identity, unexpected elements feed us. There is weird food in the flow, like the wiggly bits that birds watch for in tidal channels. Protein and greens are obvious food, but so is buoyancy, when we don’t feel as mired in the silt of despair.

Echoing philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s beautiful and discomfiting assertion that “to be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control,” Lamott adds:

How can we celebrate paradox, let alone manage at all, knowing how scary the future may be — that the baby brother will grow, and ignore you or hurt you or break your heart? Or that we may die, after an unattractive decline, or bomb North Korea later today? We remember that because truth is paradox, something beautiful is also going on. So while trusting that and waiting for revelation, we do the next right thing. We tell the truth. We march, make dinner, have rummage sales to raise relief funds. Whoever arranges such things keeps distracting us and shifting things around so we don’t get stuck in hopelessness: we can take one loud, sucking, disengaging step back into hope. We remember mustard seeds, that the littlest things will have great results. We do the smallest, realest, most human things. We water that which is dry.

Almost Everything is a buoyant read in its entirety. Complement this particular fragment with Hannah Arendt on the crucial difference between truth and meaning and Zadie Smith on optimism and despair, then revisit Lamott on forgiveness as the root of self-respect, how we find meaning in a crazy-making world, the greatest gift of friendship, how perfectionism kills creativity, and her superb manifesto for handling haters.