Susan Cain On The Great Ache That Binds Us

Are you one of those people that finds solace and comfort in rainy days or melancholy music? It’s not quite sadness. It's more like longing. A beautiful ache that makes you feel more connected to the human experience. What is that specifically? And why does it compel us so? Former corporate lawyer turned author Susan Cain wondered the same—a query that launched a 7-year journey to better understand the complex and nuanced nature of all things melancholic. The result of Susan’s adventure is Bittersweet, her #1 New York Times bestselling book that ponders this quiet state of being and why embracing it paves a true path to creativity, connection, and transcendence. Bluntly put, quiet states of being are Susan Cain’s jam. Today we go delightfully deep on Susan’s transition from attorney to writer and how she came to write about introversion. We discuss the irony of being a public introvert, the power of honoring your inner introvert, and how to support introverted kids and co-workers. We also go deep on bittersweetness—and the how and whys behind cultivating it as a means of giving our lives more resonance and meaning and appreciation. If you protect your quiet like I do, this one's for you. Watch: YouTube. Read: Show notes. Both introversion and bittersweetness are states that society doesn’t do a great job of encouraging, but Susan really encouraged my acceptance and embrace of these ideas as an introvert myself (and someone who scored pretty high on the bittersweetness scale) as powerful when nourished. My hope is that you will find this conversation equally nourishing. Peace + Plants, Rich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:06Speaker 01

  Bittersweetness is a view of the world and a way of being in the world. It's a way to connection. It's a way to transcendence. You're very attuned to the gap between the world as it is and the world as we would wish it to be. But somehow, what comes with that knowledge, there comes a kind of deep joy at the beauty of the world. So it's like a real blend of all these deep instincts. You can take those pains and sit with them somehow, and then make meaning out of them.

• 1:55Rich Roll?

  Are you one of those people that finds solace, comfort in things like rainy days or melancholy music? It's not a feeling of sadness, really, if you know what I'm talking about. It's more like this feeling of longing, like this ache, this beautiful ache, an ache that actually makes you feel more connected to the human experience. So what is that exactly? Well, today's guest, a former corporate lawyer turned author, wondered the same. She went on like a seven-year journey to actually better understand it, the result of which is Bittersweet, her number one New York Times bestselling book

• 2:38Rich Roll?

  that ponders this quiet state of being and why embracing it paves a true path to creativity, to connection, and even transcendence. You could say that quiet states of being are Susan Cain's specialty. Her first book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, spent eight years on the New York Times Bestseller List and was named the number one best book of the year by Fast Company Magazine, which also named Susan one of its most creative people in business. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. And her TED Talks on the power of introverts and the hidden power

• 3:22Rich Roll?

  of sad songs in rainy days have been viewed over 40 million times. So today, we go deep on both bittersweetness and introversion, and it's coming right up. But first.

• 3:44Rich Roll?

  Okay, Susan Cain. So I got to admit, the prospect of interviewing this literary lion intimidated me just a little bit.

• 3:53Rich Roll?

  Susan, of course, was brilliant, but I think I was a little bit nervous and anxious on this one, so I hope I did OK. In any event, we covered a lot of ground. We talked about her transition from attorney to writer, how she came to write about introversion in the first place, and the irony of being a public introvert, how to support introverted kids and coworkers. And then we discussed this idea of bittersweetness, the hows and the whys behind cultivating it as a means of giving our lives more resonance and more meaning and appreciation. Both these states, interestingly, introversion and bittersweetness,

• 4:33Rich Roll?

  are states, I think we can agree, that culture does not do a great job of encouraging. But Susan really encouraged my acceptance and embrace of these ideas, as an introvert myself and somebody who also scored pretty high on the bittersweetness scale, as states of being to be nourished, and states that are really powerful when properly embraced and leveraged. And my hope is that you will find this conversation equally nourishing. So please enjoy me in conversation with Susan Cain.

• 5:10Speaker 01

  I was thinking about how I had this moment about halfway into my seven-year legal thing, where my grandfather died, and he'd been a rabbi, and he'd been practicing up until the very end. He died at 94.

• 5:24Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 5:24Speaker 01

  And I had this moment of like, oh, my gosh, you know, I would never want to be doing this when I'm 94. Like, I don't even really want to be doing this right now. So something must be wrong, you know, because he was still so like engaged in everything he was doing all the way through. So I just kept having those kinds of moments.

• 5:40Rich Roll?

  Right. But on some level, you needed an intervening event or a catalyst, right? Or somebody like Ken giving you permission with that email, like, you need to write, like, you needed a little bit of wind in your sails to kind of boost you out of that, you know, mentality of this is my world, and yet my world could be something greater.

• 5:57Speaker 01

  I think it's also that, like, when you're in that world, it's so all-consuming, and it's so 24/7, and so like hermetically sealed. That you can't really imagine what else you could do. You know what I mean? So it was really very sudden, like the minute I left. It was like my whole life turned upside down instantly.

• 6:17Rich Roll?

  And then it only took you seven years to write the book.

• 6:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, something like that.

• 6:22Rich Roll?

  Which is kind of like the amount of time you're meant to be on the partnership track.

• 6:27Rich Roll?

  To give birth to this, you know, work of beauty that we're going to get into today. I was thinking about you the other day because I got invited to attend this conference down in San Diego. And I was looking forward to it like, oh, I get to actually just relax and be an attendee as opposed to getting on stage. Which is very, to this day, anxiety producing in me. And then at the last minute, it was being put on by Sanjay Gupta at CNN. And he texts me and he's like, oh, by the way, I think it'd be great if you did like a fireside chat with Lance Armstrong, like on Thursday or whatever. And I immediately went from like, thinking this was a little bit of a mini vacation.

• 7:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:03Rich Roll?

  Suddenly like, oh, my God, how am I going to do this? Like tormenting myself and being tortured over the whole thing. Because no matter how many times I've graced a stage, it still feels very unnatural to me and is still very anxiety producing.

• 7:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about. You probably know I used to have this huge public speaking phobia. So for me, it used to be like, you know, a completely destabilizing event. So I'm totally past that now, like that's overcome. But I still completely relate to what you just said. Like if I'm in the audience and going to the conference, like la la. But waking up in the morning when I have to be the one on stage, it's just like, that's not a chill morning.

• 7:43Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 7:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:45Rich Roll?

  Well, the occasion of this conversation is your latest book, Bittersweet. But I do want to spend a little bit of time on the introversion subject matter.

• 7:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:53Rich Roll?

  Because I relate to it so deeply as somebody who has come into an awareness of being. An introvert or on the introversion side of that spectrum.

• 8:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 8:04Rich Roll?

  But somebody who can emulate the extrovert for short bursts or periods of time, but always has to retreat to charge the battery back up.

• 8:13Speaker 01

  Right, yeah, we should definitely talk about that.

• 8:15Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 8:15Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, no, I get it completely.

• 8:17Rich Roll?

  You know, it's so interwoven with the public speaking thing, too, which is fascinating.

• 8:21Speaker 01

  It is so interwoven. There are introverts who are totally comfortable with public speaking. It's like some small subset of them feel that way. But for most people, they more describe what you just did.

• 8:31Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but even extroverts probably fear it on some level. Is that the case?

• 8:36Speaker 01

  Oh, lots of extroverts fear it. Yeah, I mean, it's like the number one fear. So there's tons of extroverts who are terrified of speaking.

• 8:43Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and you know, what's interesting about your work, you know, when we talk about quiet and introversion, which is a subset of the population, albeit a larger one than I think we previously realized, Bittersweet speaks to something that's universal in all of us, not just to that subset, but on some level to everybody. But I think what unites these books, or one thing that unites them, is that they both are this call to elevate something that society undervalues or doesn't quite understand, and often, to our detriment, squashes out of us.

• 9:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:19Rich Roll?

  And so that's kind of, you know, this universality theme that permeates your books. Like, what is that sensibility? Like, how did you come into that? I'm interested in like, how you chose this subject matter and why this has become, you know, your calling.

• 9:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. We can talk about that. It's exactly what you just said, like, hidden superpowers. And it's also about a different way of being in the world from the one that is celebrated, you know, in the media, in celebrity culture and all of it, in our work culture. I would say both of the books are about a different way of being in the world.

• 9:53Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, start with introversion. Like, I think the sense of the introvert is that he or she is always out of step with expectations, or there's a feeling of less than, or a pressure, a social pressure, to be other than who you are.

• 10:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, I don't know where this comes from in me, but I would say... When I wrote Quiet and when I wrote Bittersweet, I thought that I was writing two really different books. But now, when I look at them, they both have to do with the way in which culture has such a specific and really rather narrow expectation of the way that we're supposed to be in the world. And so both books are talking about a different way of being and one that is quite powerful or ways that are quite powerful in their own right, but that don't get celebrated. And kids from a very young age, like in the case of introversion, are taught you should be out there, you should be dominant, you should be loud, you should take charge, this whole constellation of qualities, which are wonderful.

• 10:55Speaker 01

  But there's another way of being that describes a third to a half of the population and that brings with it delights and powers of its own. And it just felt to me like a colossal waste of talent and energy and happiness to be telling up to half the population that who you are isn't okay and you should be turning yourself into a pretzel to be some other way.

• 11:19Rich Roll?

  Right. And so how do you define that? Like, what is your definition of introversion? And I suppose the follow up question to that is, like, how does that differentiate from someone who is shy or somebody who is insecure or has some kind of social anxiety?

• 11:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there's a kind of popular definition, which I think works really well, of like, where do you get your energy from? And a really easy way to think of it is to imagine that you're at a party and you've been there for about two hours and it's with company you're truly enjoying and you're having a good time. But still, the extrovert at the party, their battery is charging up and now they want more. Whereas an introvert's battery is probably draining, no matter how good a time they're having. So there comes that moment where you just wish you could beam yourself home and be someplace else. And so it really is this question of like, how much stimulation do you need in order to feel in a state of peace and equilibrium? And for introverts,

• 12:17Speaker 01

  they get very quickly to a place of too much. And for an extrovert, you get very quickly to a place of too little. Like, if things are too quiet, not enough is happening, you feel like, I better call a friend, I better do something.

• 12:29Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 12:30Speaker 01

  And all of that is quite different from shyness, which is more about the fear of social judgment. You know, and like... A shy person has an interaction with someone who might have a neutral expression on their face, and they'll tend to read disapproval into the neutrality and then be very upset about the disapproval. So it's a quite different state, like you could be an introvert and not be shy, or vice versa. But my work, I would say, focuses on both, both ways of being, because both ways of being show up very similarly in terms of behavior, and so they get judged in similar ways.

• 13:02Rich Roll?

  Right, right.

• 13:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:04Rich Roll?

  And shyness being something that is mutable, but perhaps introversion or extroversion is more fundamental or constitution, like, is there a mutability to it?

• 13:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know if I'd say that one is more immutable than the other. I would say, in both cases, there are temperaments that people are born with that predispose you in one direction or another. You know, and then layered over the temperament, you have all kinds of life experiences and skills that you gain, and, you know, it's all a big mishmash. But there are babies who are born into this world, and from the day they're born, you can test their nervous systems and see that they're more reactive to all different kinds of stimulation. Like, they'll salivate more if you give them sugar water, put it in their mouths. So the babies who salivate more, when they're two years old, and you put them into a play group of kids they've never met before, those are the babies who are going to tense up

• 13:55Speaker 01

  and take longer to integrate into the group, because they basically have a nervous system that is just reacting more to new inputs, and it makes you want to, like, slow things down and pause and check it all out before you're ready.

• 14:07Rich Roll?

  When I think about that, the word that comes to mind is sensitivity, right? Which is applicable to bittersweetness, too. Like, I took your quiz.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:14Rich Roll?

  I scored a 7.3, so I guess I'm prone to some level of bittersweetness. But I've always thought of myself as maybe just a little bit more sensitive than certain other people, and sensitivity could be a word that you could apply to introversion as well. Like, they're just more sensitized to their environment. Is that a completely different way of thinking about this, or how does that?

• 14:35Speaker 01

  No, it's more like these are all really overlapping categories. They don't lay totally on top of each other, but they overlap. So with bittersweetness, which, by the way, I define as a kind of a state of mind where you're very attuned to the way in which joy and sorrow in this world are forever paired. You know, you don't get one without the other in this life. And the way in which everyone and everything we love will not be here forever, but that's somehow what comes with that. Knowledge, there comes a kind of deep joy at the beauty of the world. So it's like a real blend of all these deep instincts. And what we found, we have a bittersweet quiz. I say we because I developed it with Scott Barry Kaufman.

• 15:20Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 15:20Speaker 01

  I know you know.

• 15:21Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm seeing him on Friday night.

• 15:23Speaker 01

  Oh, that's right. I know, I know. He actually was inviting me to come, but I'll be back home by then. So Scott Barry Kaufman and I, and David Yaden, who's at Johns Hopkins, we developed this quiz to measure how bittersweet you are. And what we found is that the people who score high on the quiz, like you, also score high on this trait of high sensitivity that you're talking about, kind of instinctively. And that trait is basically like the kind of person who just reacts much more intensely to everything. You know, like if you see the beauty of these canyons out here, like you're going to really love it. And if there were suddenly a loud and terrible noise, it would probably bother you that much more.

• 16:06Speaker 01

  And so many introverts are highly sensitive, but not all of them. So we actually didn't find that there's any correlation between bittersweetness and introversion.

• 16:16Rich Roll?

  That's fascinating.

• 16:16Speaker 01

  The correlation is with sensitivity.

• 16:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's really interesting.

• 16:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:19Rich Roll?

  Because you would think that they would toggle together.

• 16:21Speaker 01

  Well, it's like about 80% of highly sensitive people are introverts. But you could be highly sensitive and be extroverted also.

• 16:29Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  And then you can be introverted and not be sensitive. So that's why I say these are like overlapping categories.

• 16:35Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm interested in how we arrived at this moment in our culture, and you've written about this, where I wouldn't say we pathologize introversion, but we certainly don't socially select for it, right? Introverts are sort of thought of as the people who are going to have a harder time in the workplace achieving. They tend to have more difficulty getting their ideas across because of the constructs that we've created around education and professional careers. And you've written extensively about like how we've gotten to this point and how we might rethink these cultural mores or priorities to better understand not just this dynamic between introversion and extroversion,

• 17:19Rich Roll?

  but also like how to leverage the beautiful talents of the introvert so that they can thrive. Because just like extroverts, they can become leaders and they're often the people with the most interesting, creative, forward-thinking ideas.

• 17:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, and so there's this real mismatch. I mean, when you look at who have been many of the most creative people over time, I mean, like psychologists have studied this, and you usually find people who are quite introverted, or at least to some degree introverted, because solitude is such a key ingredient of creativity, which is not something that ever gets talked about, but it's true. Yeah, and for me, you know, I think I was just aware of this mismatch from a really early age, because I come from a family of introverts. Like, I don't think we have a single extrovert in my family of origin. And it was just really plain to me that the different things that my family members were doing in the world, things that I admired, were so related to their kind of quiet

• 18:18Speaker 01

  and cerebral way of being. You know, like, I had a father who, he was a doctor in a medical school professor, and he was amazing at what he did. And he was the one you'd go to if you couldn't figure out the diagnosis. He might be able to figure it out. And he was also somebody who would go to work these long hours, and then he would come home after work and pore over medical journals, and go to the medical conferences, and sit in the front row, and tape everything, and listen to it over and over again till he'd figured it out. It was things like this that I kept seeing in real life. And then many of the artists I admired, and writers I admired, so just like people out in the world, were so clearly contributing, not in spite of, but because of their quieter way of being.

• 19:00Speaker 01

  And yet, as you're saying, in our schools and in our workplaces, it's not thought of that way.

• 19:06Rich Roll?

  Right. And so what is the solution for that? I know you've done a lot of work around like reorienting the workplace and trying to find ways where we can, you know, foster, you know, that type of energy and bring it to the surface in a way where it is respected better.

• 19:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I do think, as with everything, that raising awareness is the hugest step of all. And it's actually been amazing to see how, over the last 10 years, how much more awareness there is, and how much of a shift in orientation there is. You know, so there are lots of workplaces that are like thinking about this in really conscious terms, and they have working groups formed around it, and, you know... They're thinking through different ways of hiring and promotion and that kind of thing. And you also see schools doing things like rethinking the way kids are given feedback. You know, because so many kids are told, you know, like Sophie is doing great academically, but she must learn to speak up more in class.

• 20:04Speaker 01

  And getting that feedback compared to Sophie is a deep thinker. And when she contributes, everybody turns around to listen because she has so many interesting insights to add.

• 20:17Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 20:17Speaker 01

  That feels completely different to Sophie. And I've gotten a lot of letters from the Sofies of the world telling me of how painful it is to them when they get the first type of feedback.

• 20:26Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 20:27Speaker 01

  They feel like their teachers don't respect them at all. So I am seeing those kinds of changes. We are seeing those kinds of changes. And that's really gratifying, even though I think we have a long way to go.

• 20:38Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm. I just know for myself, when I think about open plan, open floor plan workplaces or, you know, co-working play, like that just, that sounds terrible to me. Like, I want a womb. I want to shut the door.

• 20:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:52Rich Roll?

  I don't want any windows. I don't want anybody to ever knock on that door or for the phone to ring. Like, my great ambition is to be left alone. And when I can inhabit that place, I then can do the work that I feel compelled to do, my best work.

• 21:07Rich Roll?

  But anything that involves collisions or like, is like, just sounds like a nightmare to me. And when I see that trend of like, these open floor plans, that doesn't seem conducive to the introvert being able to express themselves optimally.

• 21:23Speaker 01

  Oh, my God, yes. And in fact, I discovered this because, well, you know, like you, I used to be a corporate lawyer. So I had come from this world, I assume your firm was like this, where, you know, everyone had their own little office.

• 21:34Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 21:35Speaker 01

  It was almost like a dormitory with everybody in their office. So I kind of thought that's what work looked like. And then I started researching Quiet. So I decided I was gonna like plop down in Silicon Valley for a while because I figured there would be many introverts there. And I was expecting this kind of introvert nirvana. And I got there and all these people who I was interviewing, they're all coming up to me and kind of whispering. This open office plan that I'm in is a disaster. I can't concentrate. Everything that you just said.

• 22:04Rich Roll?

  Everything's overwhelming.

• 22:05Speaker 01

  Everything's overwhelming. And they were like, I can't tell my boss. This is why they're whispering. They're like, I can't tell my boss because if my boss heard me saying this, they would think I'm not a team player. They think I don't like my colleagues. And it's not that. It's just everything you just said about the best way that they would focus and be in a state of equilibrium would be in private environments. So they started asking me, is there research that I could show my boss to just let them rethink this a little bit? And I started looking. And this was already, this was like a long time ago. But even by then, there was a lot of research. There was a mountain of research showing all the problems with these open office plans, specifically for introverts, but really for everyone.

• 22:47Speaker 01

  You know, focus goes down, people get more sick, all this stuff. So, fast forward, I would say now people are starting to understand how problematic that kind of floor plan is. And especially now, in the wake of the pandemic, there is a kind of rethinking going on.

• 23:05Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 23:05Speaker 01

  Where we end up remains to be seen because it's also much more cost efficient to have everybody crammed into one big space.

• 23:12Rich Roll?

  Sure, of course. The pandemic must have provided you with a lot of data on this. Like, on one level, it's sort of nirvana for the introvert, who now can be ensconced in their own home and can sort of control their environments a little bit better. But then, over time, maybe not so good. Like, what have you learned about the pandemic in terms of the introversion, extroversion thing in the workplace, et cetera?

• 23:36Speaker 01

  It's a little bit of a mixed bag because, you know, as you're suggesting, there's a way in which, especially during kind of peak lockdown, there's a way in which it was much easier for your typical introvert than for your typical extrovert. But all the uncertainty that was involved and the disruption isn't easy for anyone. And introverts in general are less comfortable with uncertainty than extroverts are. So I would say it took a toll in different kinds of ways. But what I really saw is that Especially at that moment, it was really a fantastic time, regardless of who you were, to take stock, or regardless of your temperament, to take stock of whether your previous life had been working for you or not, you know, because I, I knew many extroverts who were

• 24:19Speaker 01

  telling me, you know what, even for me, I was going to 24/7, and now I realize that I want to pull this back. And then there were introverts who were saying, this is fantastic, and I love not having to go to the office all the time, and I have to rework my life to, to preserve some of this.

• 24:38Rich Roll?

  Hmm. Yeah, I think we're going to be learning about this for years to come. Like, we're still kind of in it, and we don't necessarily have the 10,000-foot view on the long-term impact of this. But, you know, it's been hard for everybody. It's been very hard on you and your family. I know that. It must have been excruciating for you while writing this book on bittersweetness to, you know, kind of endure loss in your own family.

• 25:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was an interesting thing, because people assume that I wrote "bittersweet" like in response to the disruptions and the losses of the pandemic. But, you know, because as you say, I lost my brother first, and then my father to COVID. But I was actually working on this book for years before that. That is my way. I work on things for a really long time. So, I don't know. What's interesting to me about that is I, I see the world as bittersweet all the time, regardless of what's going on. You know, so when it's a pandemic,

• 25:51Speaker 01

  it's not surprising to me. And the epigraph of the book comes from the Leonard Cohen quote of, "There's a crack in everything, and that's where the light gets in." So, because of seeing the world that way, it means when, when we're in difficult times,

• 26:09Speaker 01

  I'm also more apt to be looking for what the light side is. Just as when we're in good times, I'm like, come on, you guys, don't you realize everything's not as perfect as you think?

• 26:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 26:19Speaker 01

  There's also all this loss and fragility going on at every moment. It's a kind of worldview where you're seeing it all constantly.

• 26:27Rich Roll?

  Well, it's a non-binary, non-dualistic approach, right? It's a very holistic approach to how emotions operate. And you can't have one without the other. And this is a soup. And the more that we can appreciate that one doesn't happen without the other, the more kind of space there is for healing and kind of understanding the beauty and the power of leaning into these emotions rather than avoiding them because we're constantly being signaled to just be happy or pursue happiness at all times, at all costs.

• 27:01Speaker 01

  Right, right. Yeah, and in fact, I gave a talk about bittersweetness at TED the summer before the pandemic hit. So it was the summer of 2019. And it was really interesting because I felt like there were half the people, like when I came offstage and I knew a whole bunch of people in the audience, and half of them were like, oh, my gosh, this is totally me and I totally understand what you're talking about. And then some of them were like, oh, I didn't know that you were depressive. And I was like, no, that's actually not what I'm saying at all. And that's part of what the problem, I think, with that our culture, part of the problem that our culture has is that we don't have a way

• 27:45Speaker 01

  of distinguishing between clinical depression, which I would never recommend to anybody, versus this way of being that takes it all in, the good and the bad, and is just aware of it all.

• 27:58Rich Roll?

  Right, it's very telling that somebody would just leap to that and associate those two things as being the same and pathologizing it, right? Oh, my, I'm sorry, something's wrong with you, as opposed to this is life. And of course, we aspire to live happy lives. But that happiness is informed by the inevitable obstacles and painful moments that descend upon all of us. And the manner in which we're able to kind of embrace those moments, learn from them, lean into them. I think enriches the happier moments because that's truly how you appreciate life, rather than running away from those other things and repressing them and trying to dodge them.

• 28:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, and there's this whole, like, if you look at all our wisdom traditions and our literary and artistic heritage, heritages across the world, across the centuries, like, they have been teaching all this time that this is a way in, that appreciating this side of existence, you know, the bittersweet side of existence is a way to creativity, it's a way to connection, it's a way to transcendence.

• 29:09Speaker 01

  And the way that I got into this whole inquiry in the first place is because all my life I had had this really intense reaction to sad music. But by intense, I don't mean intensely sad, I mean, like, I'd hear this music and feel completely uplifted.

• 29:27Speaker 01

  So there's this one moment, I was in law school, and some friends were picking me up in my law school dorm on the way to class, and I was blasting Leonard Cohen or something, as I want to do. And my friends came by and they thought it was hilarious, and they were like, why are you listening to this funeral music? And at the time, I just laughed and went to class, and that was the end of the story. But I couldn't stop thinking about it, because it was like, well, what is it in our culture that makes it so odd to listen to this music? But even more, what is it that the music is telling us? There's something in it.

• 30:10Speaker 01

  I mean, we know that sad music is much more likely to produce like goosebumps and chills in listeners. People listen to the happy songs on their playlist 175 times, but they listen to the sad songs 800 times. And there's something, there's somewhere that that music is pulling us, of like, that the musician is telling you that thing that you felt, you know, that pain that you've sometimes felt, I, the musician, have been there too, and everybody listening to this has been there too, and we are all connected in this same strange state of being human. And that's where the feelings of uplift and love come from.

• 30:47Rich Roll?

  Right, and connection, of course. And connection. You feel like you're seen and you're being heard. There is somebody else there through a musical note can identify very specifically an emotion that you're experiencing and suddenly you don't feel alone anymore.

• 31:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 31:01Rich Roll?

  And that's a joyful experience, even if it's one that also is kind of about sorrow and pain and grief.

• 31:10Speaker 01

  Right, because I think the ultimate human desire is for connection. And that's what it's doing. And so, like, you look at our culture now and there's so much divisiveness and so on. And I don't think that's unrelated to the way in which we're supposed to present so cheerfully and so successfully all the time. That means we're not really able to connect with each other.

• 31:35Rich Roll?

  Right, right, because we're fronting and we're wearing that mask.

• 31:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:39Rich Roll?

  And we're trying to, you know, appear or present in a certain way to be approved of or to be received in a manner that, you know, we would desire. And that ultimately just alienates us from one another.

• 31:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly, exactly.

• 31:55Rich Roll?

  I tend to look at these things, and I've said this many times before, like, as somebody who's been sober for a long time, like, through the lens of recovery. And, you know, the more that I was reading your book, the more I couldn't help but think about how this operates in the 12-step context. Because you're part of this community that has a, you know, kind of a shared narrative about the pain that they've endured and the struggles that they've, you know, sort of overcome to be in this place. But then, you know, somebody has the courage to get up in front of a group of people and share their pain and their grief and their sorrow, but do it with a level of levity and also a level of specificity.

• 32:39Rich Roll?

  And I've found the more specific it is, the more universal it is. Like, when somebody, I may not relate to the facts of that person's experience, but I can relate to the emotional experience that they've had. And you can't help but feel incredibly bonded to this person and to the group through the courage and the pain and the grief and the levity that makes it all this, you know, soupy mess of emotions that just make you feel more human.

• 33:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, as you were describing that, what came into my mind is Darwin, actually. Because Darwin was actually, he was a really kind of gentle and melancholic type of person. So he's known for survival of the fittest, but he was actually this guy who like, he couldn't stand the sight of blood. His father wanted him to be a doctor and he took one look at what surgery looked like and, you know, fled to the jungles of the Galapagos to look at beetles.

• 33:47Speaker 01

  And he noticed from very early on, I mean, he was very aware of how cruel and violent animals and humans could be with each other, but he also noticed at the same time that there is this impulse that mammals and humans have, that when they see another being in distress, that they feel the distress themselves, you know, it just gets mirrored and it's happening at a really like quick and pre-conscious level. And he thought that that was the strongest impulse of all in humans. So people talk about how he's known for survival of the fittest, but you could equally talk about survival of the kindest. And now we're seeing

• 34:31Speaker 01

  the fruits of that, like 150 years later in the research, like there's a guy named Dacher Keltner at Berkeley, who does all this amazing research and he's found, for example, that we all have a vagus nerve, which is the most important, biggest bundle of nerves in our bodies, regulates breathing and digestion. And your vagus nerve becomes activated when you see, like when you were in your AA group and seeing somebody talk about their troubles, if you felt that sense of like your heart opening up or, you know, your throat closing or whatever it is, that's partly your vagus nerve is becoming activated almost against your will, you know, it just happens. And

• 35:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, and so to cut that off from each other, you know, the ability to relate to each other that way is cutting off one of our most basic ways of bonding.

• 35:27Rich Roll?

  Right, so there is this implicit evolutionary advantage, right, to indulging in this kind of emotional landscape.

• 35:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I wouldn't call, I mean, even the word indulging, like, I wouldn't think of it.

• 35:44Rich Roll?

  Or just allowing, maybe.

• 35:44Speaker 01

  Allowing, yeah, yeah, to allowing, exactly. I mean, it actually comes from our need as mammals to be able to take care of our young, you know, like, you have to take care of a baby who's crying, and that's how they let you know that they need something. Because we're primed to be able to do that, that kind of radiates outward to our ability to react to each other in general in that way. And we don't always get it right, but that is one deep aspect of being human.

• 36:09Rich Roll?

  And then neurochemistry tracks to the vagus nerve.

• 36:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 36:13Rich Roll?

  Which makes me think this is deeply primal, dating all the way back.

• 36:18Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. And the vagus nerve is like one of the most ancient parts of the human body.

• 36:23Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 36:23Speaker 01

  So it's really fascinating.

• 36:33Rich Roll?

  So this idea of bittersweetness, I think most people think of it as an experience, but you talk about it as like a state of being. So distinguish those two things and how you arrived at that point of view.

• 36:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, I mean, it is an experience in the sense of, you know, like the moment where you're walking your child down the aisle or something, that is a quintessential bittersweet experience. But there's also a view of the world and a way of being in the world that's quite bittersweet. You could call it melancholic, except that word in our culture is associated with clinical depression, and that's not really what it means, or it's not the way I'm using it.

• 37:15Speaker 01

  So the bittersweet state of being is much more about like this sense of, it's a sense of that awareness of joy and sorrow and of fragility. Aristotle, 2,000 years ago, asked the question of like, he has this question of why is it that so many of our great poets, philosophers and politicians all have a melancholic temperament? Like, what is that? So it's something about being attuned to the gap between the world as it is and the world as we would wish it to be. You know, there's like, it's like the emotional DNA of humans is like, we come into this world

• 37:59Speaker 01

  with a sense that there is a more perfect and beautiful world that's out there somewhere to which we belong, but we somehow find ourselves here instead.

• 38:07Rich Roll?

  Right. So it's not, it's the yearning and the longing, like the idea that things could be better. It's not a despairing per se, but it's a, it's a sense that like, we're in a certain place, it could be better. And, and the melancholic impulse is built out of like, how to get from one to the other.

• 38:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it's like, it's the heart of our creative impulse. You know, it's like a feeling of like, how do you get closer to that perfect and beautiful world for which you are yearning? You know, so that the word longing, like it literally means to grow longer and to reach for. So there is a sense in which we are all reaching to get to this other place. And that's what, that's what propels us forward. And like historically, we've always known this. It's really only recently that we've forgotten it. So like with The Odyssey, Homer, that, that whole adventure, it starts with Homer, who's on a beach weeping for his homeland because he's so, he's so homesick.

• 39:11Speaker 01

  And because he's so homesick, he goes out into the water and has this adventure.

• 39:17Speaker 01

  It's the same thing with all our religions, you know, like we're longing for the Garden of Eden, we're longing for Mecca, we're longing for Zion. And all the religions, like the teaching is that it's through the longing that you get closer to the divine itself. So it's an incredibly generative state.

• 39:35Rich Roll?

  Right. And it's also tempor- it's about temporality as well, right? This idea of fragility and nothing lasts forever. And we're only here for a short period of time. And that ticking clock, you know, kind of à la memento mori is sort of a driver behind this state as well.

• 39:55Speaker 01

  Absolutely, absolutely. I actually tried practicing memento mori while I was writing the book. So like memento mori, it basically means remembering death, you know, as a way of like, understanding how precious life is. And that idea comes to us from many different traditions. So I tried it and I actually found it to be so incredibly helpful. And the place I really noticed it is like, my kids at the time were pretty little and we had this bedtime ritual that we were doing. And it was an amazing time of day. And it was like reliably the time that they would open up about whatever was on their minds. It was just great.

• 40:36Speaker 01

  And I also was bringing my cellphone into the room while I did that, you know, while we would do bedtime. But I started doing this memento mori. And I would say to myself, you know, like, they may not be here tomorrow. You may not be here tomorrow. You have no idea. And just that thought would completely extinguish any desire I had to look at the cellphone. It was like it was gone and I stopped bringing it into the room completely. And it didn't feel... It didn't feel sad, it didn't feel depressing, it was just a reminder.

• 41:13Rich Roll?

  Right. That, for me, you know, connects to gratitude. Like, if I can be present, that's what I'm trying to cultivate. It's not necessarily a bittersweetness, other than like, oh my goodness, if this is the last time that I'm able to do this, there's a dusting of sadness on that, I suppose. It's complicated.

• 41:34Speaker 01

  It's complicated.

• 41:35Rich Roll?

  Like, having to tease all this stuff out. No wonder it took you so long to write this book, you know? Just trying to wrap my head around like, what it is and what it isn't, how you cultivate it, you know, how to channel it appropriately.

• 41:49Speaker 01

  Well, do you know the feeling I'm talking about when you listen? I don't know what kind of music you love. I mean, we all like many different kinds.

• 41:54Rich Roll?

  I mean, I love Leonard Cohen, and I know he's your spirit animal, so, you know.

• 41:58Speaker 01

  He's my spirit animal, that's true. Yeah, no, I mean, it's just like, I started out with that question of why sad music? Like, what's so great about it? And that seemed like a kind of narrow question. I didn't really realize it was going to become a whole book. It was more that that was a gateway question into this whole state.

• 42:17Rich Roll?

  Right, but if you look at the musicians, the great poets, the writers, all of the, you know, painters, the ones that seem to resonate the most are the ones who are, have the facility to, the capacity to kind of take these seemingly conflicting emotional states, or the polarities of them, and weave them in some way that makes sense to us as humans, but perhaps transcends our ability to like, articulate. And I think, when you see it, it's sort of like, when you hear it, you know it, when you see it, you know it.

• 42:49Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 42:49Rich Roll?

  You're not sure why. Like, why is it that the minor key, or these certain songs, and the way that they're constructed,

• 42:56Rich Roll?

  cultivate that in ourselves? I don't know if there's neurochemistry on that, or any science on that, but it really is like, I know what that is, I don't know why I know what that is, it makes me feel this certain way that is, you know, perhaps, you know, seemingly off my optimal state, and yet, there's a comfort. Like, you talk about rainy days and things like that, like, you kind of want to languish in it.

• 43:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a comfort and there's a transcendence in it. Like, with Leonard Cohen, the very first artistic act that he took was when he was nine years old and his father died.

• 43:34Speaker 01

  And he, he took one of his father's bow ties and he wrote a poem. And he buried the bow tie and the poem in the garden, in the backyard garden of their family house. And that was his first artistic act. And it was like, he was kind of repeating that act again and again throughout his career. There's a kind of like, taking something painful and then turning it into something else. And I think that's like the real, in terms of how to live, that's the real insight that this whole, that this tradition gives us, because it's kind of saying to us, these moments are going to come, these pains are going to come, and you have two choices of what to do with them.

• 44:16Speaker 01

  You know, you can suppress it in some way, and inevitably, you're going to take it out on yourself, in the form of depression, or addiction, or whatever it is, or you're going to take it out on someone else, abuse, passive aggression. Or you can take those pains and sit with them somehow, and then make meaning out of them and transform them. And that's something that we do so naturally. You know, like, like after nine 11, you suddenly see all these people signing up to be firefighters, you know, like the spike of applications that goes way up. After the pandemic, lots of medical school and nursing school applications.

• 44:57Speaker 01

  So people are like running, you, you would think they might be running away from those things.

• 45:02Rich Roll?

  Towards the thing that is creating the pain.

• 45:04Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. But it's a way of, of making sense out of it, and of making meaning of it, and turning it into something better. And I think that's one of our fundamental impulses.

• 45:15Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 45:15Speaker 01

  When we're at our best.

• 45:16Rich Roll?

  Right, like, take your pain and, and transmute it, turn it into a creative offering.

• 45:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 45:22Rich Roll?

  And that's an act of service to the self and others.

• 45:25Speaker 01

  And I use the word creative, I mean in a very, in a very broad way.

• 45:27Rich Roll?

  It doesn't mean quit your law firm job and spend seven years writing a book. It can be anything, right?

• 45:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 45:32Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and that's, that's really powerful, and I've thought, you know, like, that made me reflect on my own life and realize that without being consciously aware of it, like, I've done that. So there is something instinctual in us that's drawn to that practice.

• 45:47Speaker 01

  And before, when you were still, like, before you were in recovery, do you think you were taking the other path, or?

• 45:55Rich Roll?

  Oh, I mean, before I, when I was indulging in my addiction, no, I was running away from everything and repressing all of those challenging emotions and medicating myself, essentially, because those emotions were too painful, or I wasn't mature enough to really, you know, excavate them. And I was, you know, at the behest of a powerful substance, you know, that had hijacked me. So, and I think most recovering addicts, you know, will be able to relate to that. And I think there's something interesting about the recovery community. And what you kind of learn is that there's, there's something aspirational there, even in the attic, like they're, they're looking for a higher experience of self and

• 46:39Rich Roll?

  consciousness. And they're doing it in a very self-destructive and unhealthy way. But at the very core of it is like, there, there should be something better, or I'm in pain and I'm reaching for something else.

• 46:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:53Rich Roll?

  You know, and, and then when you get sober and you can continue to reach in a healthier direction, people in recovery, like I know so many people who are just, they're just amazing human beings, because they've learned to take that pain and turn it into some form of creative offering that is healing for not only themselves, but for a lot of other people.

• 47:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, that, that makes complete sense to me.

• 47:26Speaker 01

  I, I wrote most of Quiet in this cafe called DOMA in Greenwich Village, which no longer exists tragically, because it was, it was my place.

• 47:39Rich Roll?

  Oh.

• 47:40Speaker 01

  It was such a great place. It was like, it, it just had this amazing creative energy and people would come from all over and, and. And work on their stuff there and get to know each other. And one or two nights a week, it would happen that this group of people would come in. And I always noticed them because they always had like this special light about them. There was a kind of charisma in them. And then I found out that they were all coming from an AA meeting.

• 48:06Rich Roll?

  They were coming for their, going for their coffee after the meeting.

• 48:08Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. Yeah, they had been meeting like right down the street. There was something about this group that you could feel their reaching, you know, for transcendence or reaching for the more perfect and beautiful world. You could just feel it in their very being. And I think they were probably at a moment in their lives where they were making the transition from doing that in an unhealthy way to doing it in a meaning-making way.

• 48:36Rich Roll?

  Right. Yeah, and one of the, one of the more powerful aspects of that is like making peace with that pain and, and kind of transcending the shame that's associated with that. And when you can kind of own it because you've unpacked it and looked at it and shared it and worked through it, that becomes a really powerful tool for continual growth. But it requires like taking the blinders off and, and dealing with it. And really, the subtext of bittersweet is, is for all of us to do that and appreciate, you know, all the colors of life and to really challenge ourselves to embrace these difficult emotions rather than run away from them. And the larger, you know, the larger question that I'd, I'd love to hear from you on is

• 49:20Rich Roll?

  like, how did we get to a culture that so forcibly, you know, pushes us in the direction of, of, you know, repressing so much? I mean, start with the Calvinists and like walk us through like how we got to here and how we can kind of grow and mature as a society to have a healthier relationship with the nuance and complexity of the human psyche.

• 49:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay. I'll start with like a glimpse of where we are right now, and then I'm going to go back in time. So where we are right now, our problem is that we look at ourselves and each other in terms of are we winners or are we losers? You know, it's like this great binary and it's a kind of harsh binary. And, you know, the, the word loser literally has gone up astronomically in usage over the past decades. Going back in time. So we started out as...

• 50:14Speaker 01

  With Calvinism as the dominant religion. And Calvinism, the idea was that everybody was bound for either heaven or hell. And you really had no choice of which direction you were going in. But what you could do was kind of demonstrate to yourself and others that you were heaven bound. And the way that you demonstrated that was by being a really hard worker. So everything was about labor and hard work. But then, like, in the 19th century, that started to transform as we became more of a business culture. It became more about like, how success, not so much how hard a worker are you, but how successful are you at business or how much do you fail in business? And then the question starts getting asked, well, when you succeed or fail, what is the reason?

• 50:59Speaker 01

  And with these echoes of Calvinism, and Barbara Ehrenreich talks about this in her book really brilliantly, with these echoes of Calvinism, we answer the question by saying, you succeeded or failed because of something inside you. You know, it's like, you're heaven bound, you're hell bound. You're either a born success or a born failure. And the more you start looking at things that way and really believing that, the more you need to develop the emotional affect, you know, the emotional self-presentation of somebody who's a success. So you don't want to talk about anything that suggests an acquaintance with longing or loss or fragility or memento mori, like any of that.

• 51:44Speaker 01

  You're not going to talk about anything like that. You're going to be presenting in a really cheerful way. And over the course of the 19th century, that became really explicit so that people stopped wanting even to talk about bad weather. Like, that was seen as not cool, not appropriate to notice that there were clouds in the sky, literally. And that's kind of increased over time. So then you get to the Great Depression in 1929, and you have all these people who are losing all their money because of external forces, and some of them are committing suicide, and they're described as losers in the journalism. They're described as losers. And that's the heritage that we're still living with now.

• 52:27Speaker 01

  There's, I think, a deep fear that people have of being a loser, you know, and a deep need to be a winner, instead of like...

• 52:37Speaker 01

  Instead of seeing the actual truth of the situation is, which is that in all lives, there are successes and failures and wins and losses. And that's just how it is.

• 52:48Rich Roll?

  Right. It's so interesting that it emanated out of this heaven, hell, binary.

• 52:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:55Rich Roll?

  Winners, losers, heaven, hell, rich, poor. These binaries that put us in buckets and allow us to judge each other.

• 53:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, and to judge ourselves.

• 53:05Rich Roll?

  And our, yeah, ourselves probably more detrimentally, right?

• 53:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, the fear, when people start feeling like they're getting closer to the loser's side of that divide, I think the fear and the shame in that is overwhelming.

• 53:19Rich Roll?

  But has that not even expanded? Because now, as we have moved even more towards this self-help obsessed culture, it's a, it's a happy sad thing or a, you know, depressed happy thing. And we're afraid of people who are demonstrating challenging emotions. And we're sort of repelled by them. Like, we move away from the person who's grieving or the person who is depressed because we don't have a comfort level or a vocabulary for how to communicate with them. And there's this sense that it's contagious, right? Like, we can't be associated with that. That's got to go over there. And even our relationship with death to bring Memento Mori up, like, it's in a hidden corner and we don't talk about it.

• 54:04Rich Roll?

  And we pretend it's not going to happen to us. And we've sort of stripped it from our, our kind of daily experience of life, despite its inevitability. And there is something pathological about that.

• 54:17Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. And we, you know, we allow people to grieve for a certain amount of time. But then after that, there's something.

• 54:24Rich Roll?

  Get over it, yeah.

• 54:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's really socially unacceptable.

• 54:26Rich Roll?

  And that's because it's making me uncomfortable that you're still grieving. Like, I don't really want to be around that.

• 54:31Speaker 01

  You know, I think it's that. And I also think there's something, there's a way in which we judge it. You know, it's, there's something distasteful about it.

• 54:38Rich Roll?

  There's weakness.

• 54:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, think of the admiration that we have for people who, you know, they're like moving forward in a healthy, supposedly healthy way. Like, even in the, the most recent version of the DSM manual for, in psychology.

• 54:56Speaker 01

  They've now limited the amount of time for grieving. I'm forgetting now the exact amount, but it's like a very short amount of time. And then after that, you're considered to have a diagnosis if you're still in a state of grief for a loved one.

• 55:08Rich Roll?

  Right, that's so weird.

• 55:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, and like in Bittersweet, I tell the story of, do you know Susan David?

• 55:16Rich Roll?

  I do.

• 55:17Speaker 01

  Who I love?

• 55:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 55:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, so she's a dear friend of mine. She's a great psychologist. And her work came out of her experience when she was 14 and she lost her father to cancer. Okay, and Susan is a really cheerful person by temperament. That's like who she is.

• 55:37Speaker 01

  So because of that, she felt all this cultural pressure and because she's so cheerful, she put on a big show. For the whole year after her father died, she like went to school, acted as if nothing was wrong. Everyone would say, are you okay? She was like, sure, I'm fine. But in the meantime, she's off in the bathroom vomiting up her lunch every day. So that's how it was coming out for her. And she would have kept going on that way until in her English class, she had a teacher who had also lost a parent at a young age. And the teacher hands out blank notebooks to the class and says, and she looks Susan straight in the eyes. And she says, I want you to write down what you're truly feeling.

• 56:20Speaker 01

  And no one else is going to read it except me, and I'm hardly going to comment at all. But just write the truth, write the truth of your experiences. And Susan said that moment for her, it was like a revolution in a notebook. So it was like the only time she had been invited to actually tell the truth. And that was her healing.

• 56:44Speaker 01

  And like, that's what, that's what we don't do.

• 56:47Rich Roll?

  Right. And that's what leads to this whole. Life of exploring emotional resilience and how to develop it, right? And certainly by repressing or running away from these difficult experiences and emotions is to undercut our ability to develop that level of resilience to weather the difficult times that we all inevitably face.

• 57:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah, and that the more, I mean, there's really interesting data on it, you know, that the more we have a sense of the fragility of existence, the more of a sense of gratitude we have, the less angry we feel, the more we invest in meaningful relationships.

• 57:26Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 57:33Rich Roll?

  What I was fascinated by in the book was you dipping your toe into the life extension world, like, you know, the sort of, we're gonna live forever crowd?

• 57:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:45Rich Roll?

  And I know some of those people and I'm familiar with that kind of scene, so walk me through that, because there is some, there's so many profound philosophical questions that come up.

• 57:56Speaker 01

  So many.

• 57:57Rich Roll?

  And psychological profiles that you could render about the people who are obsessed with this, that I think are not getting an appropriate amount of attention or discussion.

• 58:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I agree with you, and in fact, when I went to one of these conferences, I was just assuming that there was gonna be all kinds of philosophical discussion about whether this was a good idea or not, or like what the downsides were.

• 58:18Rich Roll?

  No, it's totally Pollyanna on that.

• 58:19Speaker 01

  Oh, my God, no, no, no, it's, yeah, I mean, it's much more like, thank goodness, everybody here is beyond all those questions, we don't have to talk about that, we know it's a good idea. That's really the vibe.

• 58:30Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I had, I've had a couple people on the podcast who are from that world, and I can't help but think, like, philosophically, like, what is your relationship to life if you could live for 300 years? Like, how does that change the choices that you make, the risks that you're willing to incur, and, you know, the kind of relationships that you're gonna have with people?

• 58:53Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 58:54Rich Roll?

  But that doesn't really seem to be of interest to the people that are...

• 59:00Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, they talk about it, but they talk about it in a way that resolves it very neatly. Like, they talk about terror management theory, which is basically...

• 59:13Speaker 01

  Okay, that's the idea that when we are, there are all these studies that show that when we're reminded of our mortality, that in the immediate aftermath of being reminded of it, we become much more like focused on our in-groups and hostile to out-groups. So there's like studies where they'll remind people of their mortality and then ask them how much hot sauce they want to put on the food that they're going to give to people in the opposing political party, and people will put on too much hot sauce because they get into this sort of anti-out-group mode.

• 59:46Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 59:47Speaker 01

  So, okay, so they take that and they say, "Well, this means that when we solve the problem of mortality, we're also going to be solving all our other problems of conflict and war and everything else because it's like if we could solve this, we'll solve everything else." And that's where I feel like, I meant, there's ways in which I'm actually really sympathetic to the Life Extension Project, but I do feel like it's kind of missing the larger point that our problems are not only about the fact of mortality, you know, the problems are much deeper than that, you know, they have to do with, with just all the longings

• 1:00:30Speaker 01

  of existence that would be here whether or not we lived forever.

• 1:00:33Rich Roll?

  Depending upon, yeah, like they're still, they're still there, we're not going to sidestep that. And I think, of course, there's something aspirational about tackling this problem, and it's fascinating to learn about it, and there have been these amazing breakthroughs in science, et cetera. But I can't help but think whether or not it's being driven by just a deep-seated fear of death that's so desperate that we must solve this problem because I don't want to have to face that myself.

• 1:01:01Speaker 01

  Well, I think they would actually, in some ways, agree with that. I mean, part of the reason I went to

• 1:01:09Speaker 01

  When I went to see them and to study them is because I was interested just in this culture that we live in, you know, that wants everything to be like winning and sunshine all the time. And I thought this would be a really interesting example of that. But what I actually found is all the scientists would get up on stage and present their thing. They would begin their scientific presentation usually by telling a really heartrending story of a person that they had lost in their lives, you know, and of how harrowing and how terrible the bereavement had been. And so they were like quite explicitly saying, they were like, this is so terrible, you know, we just as a society should not be tolerating this, this deep pain. We should be doing something about it. So there was a way in which I was like

• 1:01:54Speaker 01

  really moved because I felt like they, they were doing their own version of taking a pain and trying to transform it into something else. And their, their something else is immortality itself.

• 1:02:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. And what they would say, I think to your point is, well, the, the idea that we have that there's a way in which death or mortality gives us meaning to life, that that's like a nice story that we tell ourselves because we have no choice. But if we really did have a choice, then we might not be telling that story anymore.

• 1:02:32Rich Roll?

  Right, right, right.

• 1:02:36Speaker 01

  And I'm not so sure about that.

• 1:02:38Rich Roll?

  Time will tell.

• 1:02:40Speaker 01

  But it's funny that you say 300 years because I feel like, you know, 300 years, that kind of sounds sort of plausible to me. Because if you think about it, we used to only, we would have life expectancies of 35 or 40, you know, now it's 70 or 80 or whatever it is. And we're totally comfortable with having doubled it. So

• 1:02:58Rich Roll?

  But that's different from the achieving life, what is it called, life expectancy velocity or escape velocity?

• 1:03:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. What is that longevity philosophy?

• 1:03:08Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:03:09Speaker 01

  Something like that.

• 1:03:10Rich Roll?

  Where just basically every year you live, like the science is extends the ability to extend the life.

• 1:03:16Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 1:03:17Rich Roll?

  Proportionately more or whatever. So that by, by definition, that means you could potentially live forever.

• 1:03:24Speaker 01

  Right, theoretically.

• 1:03:27Rich Roll?

  We'll see, I don't know. But on that subject, that's not a distant cousin from this idea of transcendence. And so I'm interested in how this dovetails into a discussion around spirituality and religion, these traditions of religion that relate to bittersweetness that kind of percolate across all these different variations of practice, I guess. Because that's super interesting, right? There is something elegiac about all of this.

• 1:04:00Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, absolutely. And I had no idea when I started off on this path that I was going to end up writing and thinking so much about religion. But I started realizing this whole subject is intricately bound up with that. Because almost every religion that I see, especially the mystical sides of our religions, they're all talking about this state of longing that all beings have for union with the divine, essentially. And the idea that the state of longing is actually healthy in that way. Like Rumi, the 12th century Sufi poet, he says, "Be thirsty." The longing you express...

• 1:04:44Speaker 01

  Well, he has this one poem where he's talking about a man who's praying to God, to Allah, and he doesn't get an answer back. And so he becomes bitter and disappointed, and he stops praying. And then he falls into a sleep, and he's not sleeping well. And Khider, who's the guide of souls, comes along to him and says, "Why did you stop praying?" And the man says, "Because I never got an answer." And the guide of souls says to him, "The longing that you express, that is the return message. And the grief that you cry out from is exactly what draws you towards union."

• 1:05:28Speaker 01

  And so, this is the message that we get again and again from these traditions. Like, the grief is what draws you towards the ultimate love that you seek.

• 1:05:36Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. And the yearning, it's like, it's almost like a spiritual Ouroboros, though, because these things are a circle, they're a cycle, right? Like, the yearning, the answer that you seek is in the yearning itself.

• 1:05:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:05:54Rich Roll?

  It's really beautiful.

• 1:05:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I don't think, well, I don't know. I mean, maybe someone does, I wouldn't know. But I don't know that we ever, like, actually get there on this earth. But there's something about the act of

• 1:06:05Rich Roll?

  The striving.

• 1:06:06Speaker 01

  of drawing closer that is intensely satisfying.

• 1:06:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And how did that exploration land for you as somebody who kind of identifies as agnostic? But you had this grandfather, who was this beautiful rabbi. Where did this lead you?

• 1:06:23Speaker 01

  Well, it was really interesting for me, because I grew, yeah, my grandfather was an Orthodox rabbi. And like, I really adored him, everybody did. And he was like such a huge figure in my life. And at the same time, I've always been deeply agnostic.

• 1:06:40Speaker 01

  And didn't really honestly think that much about religion once I became an adult. You know, I was kind of dismissive of it, if anything.

• 1:06:50Speaker 01

  But, I don't know, I started to realize that

• 1:06:57Speaker 01

  the

• 1:07:00Speaker 01

  the thing that I feel when I listen to sad music and what someone else might feel, and I do to some extent when I'm in nature or something like that. The way I see it is that they're all manifestations of the same experience. And for some people, they have that experience through the language of the divine and religion. And for others, they have it through music, or art, or sports, or whatever it is. But we're all kind of reaching for that same state. And in fact, there's this Hasidic parable that I came across that talks about, that there's a rabbi, and he has a man in his congregation who he notices is paying no attention at all.

• 1:07:41Speaker 01

  And isn't really buying what the rabbi's saying. And then the rabbi hums for the man, a yearning melody, a bittersweet melody. And the man listens and he says, now I understand what you've been trying to tell me all this time, because I'm feeling this intense longing to be united with God.

• 1:07:59Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:08:00Speaker 01

  And I read that, I was like, oh my God, you know, I'm that old man.

• 1:08:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's you, that's Leonard Cohen for you.

• 1:08:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:08Rich Roll?

  Right?

• 1:08:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:09Rich Roll?

  And what is it about that minor key? Or that musical sensibility that elevates the soul? And can't help but leave you wondering whether there is something more beyond the senses?

• 1:08:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's because it's touching that, that sense that we all have of there being some other place that we're reaching for. You know, you see it in like The Wizard of Oz, right? It's like Dorothy's longing for somewhere over the rainbow. You look at all our children's stories, there's always the protagonist who enters the scene, you know, at the moment they become an orphan. That's when the whole adventure begins, like the moment they're thrust into a state of primal longing. So, so I think that's just tapping into a DNA that we all share, although it manifests differently.

• 1:09:02Rich Roll?

  Right, as, you know, there's a, there's this idea that, you know, this shared proclivity towards bittersweetness allows us to understand that we are one super organism. But perhaps it extends beyond the vagus nerve, right?

• 1:09:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:19Rich Roll?

  You know?

• 1:09:20Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 1:09:20Rich Roll?

  And you who like, you're exploring Judaism and Sufism and these various religions and mystical traditions. And there are similarities that they're, they're very different in many ways, but there are these similarities that unite them. And from that, you know, can one extrapolate, you know, something, some truth about the beyond or our relationship with something more ethereal and non-material?

• 1:09:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I, it's not like I, I don't know that exploring all this gives, you know, definitive answers to any of these lifelong questions, but for me, it gave, it offers a kind of roadmap of how to live, you know, because.

• 1:10:08Speaker 01

  What it does is it makes you notice how incredibly miraculous everything around us actually is, you know, how sacred it really is. Whether you're an atheist or believer, I'm just using those words, like the wonder of it all. And you can enter into a relationship with that kind of wonder.

• 1:10:26Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:27Speaker 01

  That really, it's a complete enhancement, a really transformation of what life is like.

• 1:10:33Rich Roll?

  It's a better way to live.

• 1:10:35Speaker 01

  It's a much better way to live.

• 1:10:36Rich Roll?

  And it can be, the good news is, you can cultivate it in whatever tradition suits you.

• 1:10:41Speaker 01

  Absolutely, absolutely.

• 1:10:42Rich Roll?

  There are so many paths towards that.

• 1:10:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, we actually found, you know, in that bittersweet quiz that we did, that people who score high in bittersweetness also score high in states of awe and wonder and spirituality.

• 1:10:56Rich Roll?

  It's not surprising, of course.

• 1:10:58Speaker 01

  It's not surprising.

• 1:10:59Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:11:00Rich Roll?

  What is the relationship between bittersweetness and awe and wonder? They're like two sides of a similar coin. Are they not?

• 1:11:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, they are, because they basically, they're both born of a receptivity and a noticing of everything that is. So you're not only noticing one side of what is, you know, you're like looking for the truth of everything.

• 1:11:30Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:11:31Speaker 01

  And that's what gets you into that state.

• 1:11:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think, when I think of awe and wonder, I think of being present. Like, if you're present enough and you just see the leaf on the tree, you know, that could inspire awe and wonder, but it requires like a level of attention that kind of eludes, you know, the way that we live our lives, right? Like, you have to really, really be practiced in that, or habitual in it.

• 1:11:56Speaker 01

  There's another parable that I came across that I found incredibly useful as a way to live. And this one also came from the Kabbalah, and it's the idea that... All of creation was originally this intact divine vessel. It was all intact. And then it broke, the vessel broke. And the world that we're living in now is the world after the breakage. And yet, the shards of this vessel are scattered everywhere around us. And so what we can do, we're still living in the broken world, but we're living in a world where you can bend down and pick up these shards of light.

• 1:12:35Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 1:12:37Speaker 01

  And I love this as a way to live because it's like a way of making sense of the tragedies that are still and always part of this world, but yet being able to turn in the direction of joy and beauty. Because you're not denying the tragedies. You're not believing that a utopia is going to come, but you're still able to bend down and pick up the shards of light that you personally notice. And we're all going to notice different ones. But they're yours for the taking, yours to pick up.

• 1:13:07Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:08Speaker 01

  I find that very helpful.

• 1:13:10Rich Roll?

  That's really beautiful. But there's also packed into that a little bit of a lament of what once was or could have been, had it not shattered.

• 1:13:17Speaker 01

  That's true. But I don't know, I don't know a way to live without that lament. When you look at the tragedies in the world, like you have to make space for the lament also.

• 1:13:28Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 1:13:28Speaker 01

  Otherwise, you're just living with blinders, I think.

• 1:13:30Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah. Is this attunement to bittersweetness trainable? Like, you can take the bittersweet test and see where you score on it. And certain people are obviously more attuned or receptive to this than others. But to the extent that appreciating bittersweetness or cultivating it or kind of synthesizing all the different colors of your experience into some kind of creative offering and making sense of it for yourself, seems to be something that anybody can do. And even if they score lower on that test,

• 1:14:12Rich Roll?

  they could increase their score and perhaps like, you know, elevate the richness of their life experience in so doing.

• 1:14:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, so. There are going to be some people who are born into the world with that high sensitivity trait, and they're probably going to tend in this bittersweet direction from the beginning. Then there's going to be a lot of people who, just by virtue of life experience, come to more of a bittersweet awareness over time.

• 1:14:41Rich Roll?

  Right. Things happen in their life.

• 1:14:44Speaker 01

  Things happen.

• 1:14:44Rich Roll?

  Jar them out of their lack of empathy, or whatever it is, right?

• 1:14:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. And for people who aren't there yet, but would want to be, I think it's just a matter of turning your awareness and your direction, I'm sorry, turning your awareness in certain directions.

• 1:15:02Rich Roll?

  That's scary, though.

• 1:15:04Speaker 01

  Well, it's scary if you think that by doing that, you'll never come out again. And that's what I hear from a lot of people. They're like, you know, I'm afraid if I go there, I won't be able to come out. And

• 1:15:19Speaker 01

  and yet, there's no reason that that should be so, because these two states are always paired, right? It's joy and sorrow. So there's no reason you have to stay in one state. It's more just a sense of being able to tell the truth about everything that's happening, or everything you observe.

• 1:15:34Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:36Speaker 01

  So why do you think it's scary?

• 1:15:37Rich Roll?

  I mean, I just think you're asking people to confront painful past emotions, or to look objectively at stuff that they've kind of worked hard to build walls around, right? So that prospect of deconstructing those walls, and really grappling with some past trauma, or some, something that occurred, or whatever, that you've kind of really tried hard to like, move away from, requires a certain level of courage. And I think it is frightening for a lot of people. Like, I know a lot of people who have built walls around certain, you know, certain pains in their life, and by dint of that, are able to kind of safely navigate through their life, but they want to stay in that lane.

• 1:16:19Rich Roll?

  And if you say, listen, you're missing a huge growth opportunity, or a certain level of enriching life experience by ignoring that, you should look at it, and if you work through it, like, your life is going to open up in ways you can't possibly imagine. Intellectually, they may understand that, and I can kind of see that arc. Awaiting that person, but for a lot of people, it's like, that's fine, I hear you, but I'm not going to do that.

• 1:16:44Speaker 01

  Mm hmm, mm hmm.

• 1:16:45Rich Roll?

  And you've had that, I mean, your story about your mom in, on a certain level, like illustrates this for me, like I, what I read in that was, you know, a certain um, uh, kind of affect in your mother, like she had, she had her own, you know, painful experiences growing up and that very much informed how she interrelated with you at times in very unhealthy ways, but could you have been able to get your mother to kind of confront her past traumas so that you could have had a healthier relationship with her? That, that seems like a very steep mountain to climb.

• 1:17:20Speaker 01

  Mm hmm, mm hmm. Yeah, no, I think people are at different points along where they are in their lives and sometimes you're not ready at a certain moment and you are 10 years later. And I guess another thing. Yeah, but sorry, just to go back, that's an interesting question with my mom, because I've often thought, you know, would there have been a way to have her be open to that if I had thought about how to get there to do that?

• 1:17:55Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:17:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:56Rich Roll?

  I mean, explain a little bit, like tell a little bit of that story.

• 1:17:59Speaker 01

  The story, yeah, so, um, so I had a really intensely close relationship with my mother growing up. It was a kind of Garden of Eden type of childhood. She was incredibly loving, devoted, warm, you know, amazing company. We really loved each other's company. Um, yeah, it was really quite wondrous. But, but my mother had past traumas of her own and this made it so that when I became an adolescent, she had a really terrible time, especially because I was the youngest child. She had a really terrible time with my growing up and becoming independent and having different

• 1:18:44Speaker 01

  ideas and different life experiences and, um,

• 1:18:48Speaker 01

  And her reaction to that was incredibly difficult, to say the least. And I had a lot of trouble with it, too. Like, I felt like I didn't use these words in those days, but it was a kind of like casting out of the Garden of Eden. Like, suddenly, the mother that I had known all my life had transformed into a hostile person, where there was kind of a choice. I could either still be with her and still be a child and be loved, or I could grow up and develop and be myself and be cast out. Right. And I don't think I ever really questioned the choice, so I went and moved in a separate direction.

• 1:19:31Speaker 01

  But the casting out part was incredibly, incredibly painful. And my way of dealing with it, because I'm a writer and I'd loved writing since I was four years old, I wrote everything down into these diaries that I kept and went off to college. And at the end of freshman year, for some reason, I had to stay on campus for a few extra days and my parents came to take my stuff home. And just as they were getting ready to leave, and they're like leaving with all my suitcases, I take my diaries and I hand them to my mother. And I thought at the time, like, I truly, on a conscious level, I thought I was just giving them to her for safekeeping.

• 1:20:16Speaker 01

  You know, I didn't have a place to store them at school. And I never thought that she would read them on a conscious level. But of course, she did. And whatever I had written there, and I say whatever because I've never read them again since, but whatever I had written there, you know, kind of like put the final nail in the coffin of our relationship. And so, we still, for the decades after, we were still, you know, seeing each other at holidays and doing all the regular family stuff. But the relationship really was never the same again. And it was like, it was a loss for me that I couldn't,

• 1:20:58Speaker 01

  for years, I couldn't even talk about my mother without crying. I couldn't mention her name. But I will say, there's been this amazing rapprochement. Now, my mother has Alzheimer's. And...

• 1:21:15Speaker 01

  She still, she, she only has a few conversational lanes that she can travel. But when she's on those lanes, she still feels like herself. And she has completely forgotten all the difficult years we, we had. She's forgotten them. And so all this time through my adulthood, I had always been asking myself, you know, that childhood that you remember as being so wonderful, like, maybe it wasn't really true, you know, maybe that was just like a child's misperception. But now the mother of that childhood has come back like, and I realize like we still,

• 1:21:53Speaker 01

  we still are that way, you know, the, the relationship we have now is the same relationship we had when I was a kid.

• 1:22:00Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:22:01Speaker 01

  So that's been, that's been a kind of amazing.

• 1:22:05Rich Roll?

  Such an interesting story. And there, it's certainly, there's bittersweetness in it, of course.

• 1:22:10Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:22:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah, so much. But the idea that you were faced with this choice of either reverting into a childlike state or just becoming the person that your mother actually wanted you to be, put you in an impossible situation without her being consciously aware of the kind of psychic toll that that would place on you. And then the bittersweetness of never really fully reconciling that later, right? I mean, I, I read it as somebody who, because of her past traumas and pain that she hadn't adequately worked through, there's this transference, like she wants you to be safe. She wants you to be upwardly mobile and all of these things.

• 1:22:53Rich Roll?

  And she, she lovingly drives you on this kind of ambitious journey to achieving all these amazing things. But as you achieve them, of course, separation occurs. And that's a threat to this bond that she has that is so meaningful for her, that is in part driven by the pain of her past, right? That creates this unhealthy soup where she's transferring so much of her identity onto you and you're, as a young person, having to shoulder that burden.

• 1:23:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And.

• 1:23:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's funny, I'm actually gonna amend something I said before because I think I said a minute ago that I had never really considered doing anything other than growing into a separate person, but actually, I'm not sure that's quite right, because I do remember many times saying to myself, you know, like, I loved her so much, all I wanted was for her to be happy, so I felt like, well, maybe I should do some of these things that she's asking, you know, so that she can still be happy, which is a very difficult thing.

• 1:24:00Rich Roll?

  Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And did you have a sense of her self-awareness around any of this, or just no?

• 1:24:07Speaker 01

  I don't think so. Yeah, I don't really know. I don't think there was so much of it. But what I will say happened over the years, and especially during the time I wrote this book, you know, as I told you, like, it used to be that I couldn't talk about her at all without crying. And I wrote her story, I wrote the story in the book. And I was like, really worried about what was gonna happen when I would go out and do interviews about the book. I thought, I won't be able to speak about this without breaking down. And despite everything I'm saying in the book about being comfortable with all our emotions, I didn't really want to do that.

• 1:24:45Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:24:46Speaker 01

  So I didn't know what would happen. But I remember talking to somebody about this dilemma, and he said to me, you know, "Talk to me when you're done writing the book, because you might actually resolve some of these issues." And at the time he said that, I thought, oh, my gosh, that's never gonna happen. But in fact, that's exactly what happened. There's just a sense of peace that I now have with everything that happened. And I don't know, just so much love for her and understanding of it all. And wishing that it had been different, but I don't know. It's just a complete reconciliation.

• 1:25:28Rich Roll?

  Well, that's the beauty and the gift of reckoning with your bittersweetness, right? Like, you can have some kinship with Leonard Cohen, who I'm sure similarly was having conflicting emotions and was in some sort of pain, and he was trying to work through it. So what does he do? He writes a song about it, right? You write a book about it, and in the process of writing this book, you find a way to heal and make peace with yourself and your loved ones and come out the other side like a more complete human. And that goes to the very thesis of the book, which is channeling your pain and turning it into a creative offering. So it's like a meta exam. Like, it's all very meta in that regard, right?

• 1:26:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, that's true. And I do want to be careful to say, like, for anybody listening, again, that we use that word creative in a really general way. So it's not like you have to go and write a book or write a song or be a Grammy Award winner or something. It has nothing to do with that. It's more just about going through a kind of transformation of taking the pain and transforming it into something of meaning.

• 1:26:38Rich Roll?

  Yeah, well, just confronting it and walking with it and finding a way to come to the other side through whatever modality suits you.

• 1:26:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's funny. I've been trying to write this story for so many years. Like, I said this in the book. I first started writing about it when I was in college. And my creative writing teacher said, "You're way too close to the story. You should put it in a drawer and not take it out again for 30 years." So it's been a long time. And now it's 30 years later.

• 1:27:09Rich Roll?

  You're too close to it. But you're still so close to it, you know? But you're distant enough from it that you could write about it with some level of objectivity. But the fact that it creates so much emotion in you, you know, it's still very present with you.

• 1:27:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's still very present, but like...

• 1:27:31Speaker 01

  With a lot less turmoil than there used to be. Like, I experience very little turmoil now, talking about it, because I really do feel such a sense of resolution between us and between like my relationship to my mother in my heart is very different from what it had been.

• 1:27:48Rich Roll?

  Yeah, beautiful.

• 1:27:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:51Rich Roll?

  On this idea of binaries, heaven, hell, rich, poor, and the like, there is this undercurrent in our society around the pursuit of happiness, right? It's in the Declaration of Independence, like the pursuit of happiness. And now we're in a happiness-obsessed culture. I think we're getting to a point where we're maturely grappling with what happiness means and trying to create a healthier relationship with how to build that into our lives. But in reading your book, I couldn't help but think, what would happen if

• 1:28:32Rich Roll?

  that phrase in the Declaration of Independence said something like, you know, "May you pursue longing," or something like that. "May you grapple with your own bittersweetness." Like, if we had created a cultural priority around a more nuanced relationship with the conflicting emotions about what it means to be human, how would that percolate into our culture and change our relationship with the darker side of things that make the brighter things so much brighter?

• 1:29:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's an interesting question. I've thought about that with the Declaration of Independence, because I actually, I mean, I enjoy being happy as much as the next person. So it's not, so I don't think happiness is the problem, but maybe it's just how we define happy. Maybe meaning would have been it.

• 1:29:19Rich Roll?

  Happiness at the cost of everything else.

• 1:29:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think we end up interpreting happiness as a kind of hedonic type of happiness, as opposed to a happiness where you feel a deep sense of meaning in your life.

• 1:29:34Speaker 01

  And I also think part of the problem is that we have such a separation of church and state, which is great in most ways, but it means that all these questions that religion naturally grapples with, like this existential longing that we all have, we tend to relegate that to what you experience, you know, at church on Sundays, as opposed to just thinking of that as part of everyday life.

• 1:30:05Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but as we become more agnostic as a culture, are we not adequately, you know, in constructs where we are actively confronted with grappling with these philosophical questions?

• 1:30:24Speaker 01

  Wait, say the question again.

• 1:30:25Rich Roll?

  Meaning like, you're saying that the purview of that kind of inquiry would be in the church or whatever spiritual tradition. But as we've become kind of more, we've become a culture that's, that seems, at least from my perspective, like, less interested in those types of, you know, outlets. And so where does that leave us in terms of, you know, how we're dealing with those bigger spiritual and philosophical questions?

• 1:30:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the problem because we've always relegated it just to that. So it was already bad enough when it was relegated.

• 1:31:02Rich Roll?

  But if we're not going there anymore.

• 1:31:02Speaker 01

  But now we don't even go there. So now it's kind of nowhere.

• 1:31:05Rich Roll?

  Because, you know, Dancing with the Stars is on.

• 1:31:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. So I think we need to find ways of introducing this into part of everyday discourse. And you could see how much we long for it because, you know, you look at Leonard Cohen, like, there's a reason that his song "Hallelujah" was making people cry for years on end. You know, it's like the most covered song, I think, in history or something like that. People are relating to that. As soon as they hear it, they open up to it. So we need to be finding different ways of introducing this into everyday life. And I think part of that would actually be just... I don't proactively engaging with beauty more in everyday life.

• 1:31:50Speaker 01

  You know, like at work, at school, like actively encouraging people to bring in things that they find beautiful or meaningful and be sharing those. You don't even have to talk about bittersweetness so much. It's like through engaging with beauty, all of that comes out.

• 1:32:06Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm. How do you feel about Jeff Buckley's rendition of "Hollow Pile"? Is that sacrilege?

• 1:32:12Speaker 01

  It's not sacrilege at all. I like it. It's not one of my favorites, but I do really like it. But no, I'm all for covers.

• 1:32:20Rich Roll?

  But he captures the bittersweetness in his music beautifully.

• 1:32:24Speaker 01

  He really does.

• 1:32:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:25Speaker 01

  I like the Rufus Wainwright one.

• 1:32:27Rich Roll?

  Oh, yes. Very good. Yeah. That's right, I'd forgotten about that one. I think a good story to tell would be the story of Beethoven that you share around that performance, because that so kind of captures this idea of, you know, channeling, channeling that emotional experience into something shared. That breeds that community piece, right?

• 1:32:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, so Beethoven, you know, one of his, maybe his most famous work is "Ode to Joy", which everybody loves so much. Maybe we could even play it somehow into the episode. Yeah, drop it in. And "Ode to Joy" actually started out as a poem by Frederick Schiller. And Beethoven loved this poem because it expressed like all these ideals of love and brotherhood that were really important to him. So he labored for years, I want to say it was 30 years, maybe getting that wrong, but like forever, to set this poem to music. During the time that he's working on it, he starts to lose his hearing and he has all these other personal troubles. And by the time...

• 1:33:43Speaker 01

  By the time of the debut performance, after all these years of creating Ode to Joy, he is now totally deaf. And yet, he's desperate for this music to be performed the way he hears it in his head. And so, he stands on stage with the orchestra, with his back turned to the audience, and he's facing the orchestra, and he's throwing his body around, trying to direct them to play the music the way he sees it in his mind. He's standing next to the conductor. And because he can't hear any of it, he doesn't even realize when the music is actually over, when they're done playing. But when it's finished,

• 1:34:27Speaker 01

  there's a 20-year-old soprano, and she turns him around to face the audience, who are so overwhelmed, they're standing up in their seats with tears streaming down their faces and raising their hands in tribute to this man who's given them this experience of longing, which you listen to that music, and it's an ode to joy. It's literally about joy. And yet, you can't help but hear the longing and the sorrow that's echoing in its notes. It's just the most incredible. That's what makes the music so incredible. And in fact, there is an economist at MIT, whose name I'm forgetting right now, but he did this fascinating study where he looked at Mozart, Beethoven, and Liszt, at their music,

• 1:35:12Speaker 01

  and he read all the different letters they had written over their lifetimes, and he coded the letters for emotions. And he found that during the periods when their letters had a lot of emotions expressed, like sorrow, and longing, and grief, and like that, that was when they were composing their most profound, best works of art. Yeah, yeah. There's just this incredible confluence there. And I feel like we know it instinctively.

• 1:35:38Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:39Speaker 01

  But we're not sure what to do with it.

• 1:35:42Rich Roll?

  And it's hard to

• 1:35:43Speaker 01

  And we don't want to go deaf.

• 1:35:43Rich Roll?

  It's hard to like canonize it, like, oh, this note and this note. It's more than that, right? Like, it's the performance of the music as well. You have the story of the violinist, right? Like, when you are carrying a certain emotional resonance, it gets translated into those notes in a certain way that we immediately recognize, but you can't quite define. And in telling that story about Beethoven, it's very cinematic. Like, I imagine, like, he's just, you know, like, doing his thing with such, you know, dramatic physicality, but because he can't hear, he's completely detached with how it's being received. And perhaps even thinking, like, is this even working at all? Or am I able to kind of get out of these musicians,

• 1:36:27Rich Roll?

  the performance that I hear in my mind, only to find out that it is united and really just, you know, uplifted and connected, this huge group of people? And I think it's really profound example of the power of, you know, sharing those types of emotions and figuring out a way to create a container for it that people can consume, that really is this antidote to what is dividing us. And it's like, I don't have to tell you, like, it does feel so divided out there. And I often despair of our ability to kind of mend that division. And it used to be, when a tragic event befell the country or the world, we would feel like one. We would feel like that super organism.

• 1:37:11Rich Roll?

  And now, it feels like when that happens, everybody retreats to their corner and figures out how to blame the other side for it. And like, how do we move forward as a functional, healthy society with this sort of rift and dynamic that doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon?

• 1:37:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know. And I mean, I don't have answers any more than anybody has the answer. But I do think that one thing that we could and should be doing is creating spaces for people to truly be telling their stories. But to have the stories not be attached to policy prescriptions or politics or anything like that, just tell each other the stories. You know, like, just get to know each other on that elemental level.

• 1:37:58Speaker 01

  Obviously, like, our social media platforms right now are designed to do the exact opposite of that, but sometimes, like, if we could have a social media platform that would give people space to just share it all, maybe it needs to be done anonymously.

• 1:38:14Rich Roll?

  Like the moth.

• 1:38:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, something like that.

• 1:38:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it is. Sorry, go ahead.

• 1:38:18Speaker 01

  No, I was just gonna say, not everybody wants to tell their story with a name attached the way you do with the moth, but you know how that...

• 1:38:23Rich Roll?

  Maybe there's a way to anonymize it.

• 1:38:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, or have that option.

• 1:38:27Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I think there's something about storytelling, like, honest, open, vulnerable storytelling that is akin to this notion of bittersweetness, and perhaps it emanates from the vagus nerve as well. Like, when we hear somebody share a story, and we have the sense that that story is true to that person and honest and authentically rendered, that also breeds connection, right? Like, whether it's bittersweet or not, like, just the storytelling as a vehicle for connection and also learning. Like, it doesn't have to be prescriptive, but it's more effective than a prescription

• 1:39:09Rich Roll?

  when whatever that notion is is kind of wed into the narrative. Like, we as human beings are able to kind of synthesize that, and then ultimately kind of hold on to it and perhaps even practice it in our lives in a way that is very different than if somebody said, "Here's the five things that you need to do today." We remember the story, we forget the listicle, and I think there's something really profound about that as well, that perhaps, you know, can be traced back evolutionarily, you know, back to the campfires of yore and the like.

• 1:39:45Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I mean, I actually think podcasts play a huge role in that. I think part of the reason that podcasts have become the amazing medium that they are is that they're touching into that campfire impulse that we have. You know, there's something about the voice in your ear as you're listening, where you feel like you're bonded with all the other listeners sitting around a campfire. It's connection. Exactly. Exactly.

• 1:40:09Rich Roll?

  Yeah. So, there you go. There's your next book. What are you working on now? Are you on another seven-year jaunt to the next one?

• 1:40:17Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I probably will be at some point. I have two different book ideas that I'm playing with, but I actually want to start a podcast also. So I'm probably going to be doing that in the next year. And that's going to be my next big project.

• 1:40:29Rich Roll?

  That's exciting. Can you say more about that? Or is that under wraps right now?

• 1:40:32Speaker 01

  It's under wraps right now, but I'll definitely let you know when it's ready. It probably won't be until 2023.

• 1:40:39Rich Roll?

  So what is it that you want people to get out of Bittersweet the most? Like if they're to take away, you know, one core idea?

• 1:40:54Speaker 01

  I mean, I guess I'd say the idea of that whatever pain you can't get rid of to make that your creative offering. And then another large idea I would say, and this applies to Quiet as well as to Bittersweet, is the idea of there being ways of being in this world that are not talked about, that are actually kind of hidden superpowers. Because I hear now from so many people, like the letters that I'm getting from people who have read Bittersweet are so similar to the letters I've gotten all these years from Quiet readers. Like it's all these people saying, you know, I've felt this all my life. And either I never had words for it or I never felt like it was okay to talk about

• 1:41:37Speaker 01

  because it's not seen as the right way to be. And yet, and yet there is a sense of it being a superpower once you understand it as such.

• 1:41:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I think it would be helpful to also share some words for perhaps the extroverts out there that have introverts in their lives. Like maybe they have a kid who's introverted and they're struggling to understand.

• 1:42:03Rich Roll?

  Why this person, you know, wants to be in their room and doesn't want to go to the party or, you know, I think from a parenting perspective, I have an introverted child. A child is very introverted and it's been an education and a learning experience to like, like even though I have introverted proclivities, I still have some extra, you know, it's sort of like, I don't want to judge my child because this is my child's choice, or this is what, you know, this person needs to, you know, recharge the battery in terms of like how we parent and how we think about supporting the introverts in our life.

• 1:42:35Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I mean, there's so much to say there, but, I mean, the first thing, as you're saying, is to just really understand like where your child or spouse or whomever it is, is coming from and what do they need to be happy.

• 1:42:50Speaker 01

  With children, I think the fear often is that if they're not kind of out there socializing enough, that they're not going to like get enough of the bounties that life has to offer. So one thing to know is that the, the research shows that if your child has one or two close friends, that's what they need. Like if your kid has no friends at all, that's when you should be concerned. But if they have just a few friends and if they're happy with that, then that's fine.

• 1:43:18Speaker 01

  And to,

• 1:43:22Speaker 01

  I mean, for all introverts, there's the question of if, if a person wants to like stay home from a party or something, is that because of a true preference of how they want to spend their time? Or is it out of a sense of fear or discomfort?

• 1:43:34Rich Roll?

  Sure, right.

• 1:43:35Speaker 01

  And like with, with a child, if you think it's fear or discomfort, then that's when you can be a really helpful parent in helping them to develop strategies and work through that. But if it's just preference of how they want to spend their time, then you want to make sure they don't become too isolated, but you also want to honor their preference.

• 1:43:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that becomes very nuanced and difficult because is it a preference or is it just you're afraid of trying something new? Like you need to get pushed a little bit out into the world and, and learn new things and try things and fail and all of that to Susan David's point of emotional resilience. Like you can't procure that in a vacuum.

• 1:44:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. And the answer to that, like if you sense that it's fear or discomfort that's standing in the way? The answer to that for parenting, but also for our own selves, is to expose your child or yourself to the thing that you fear, but to do it in very small steps so that it's manageable and that your, so your child has small wins as they go. So like a lot of introverted kids, just for example, are a little iffy about swimming when they're first introduced. And the answer is not to like throw them in the water. It's more to say, okay, let's go to the pool on a day when it's super quiet. We'll go like late on a Tuesday evening. And you're going to dip your toe in the water and that's it. And then we're going to celebrate and we're going to go home.

• 1:44:57Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:44:58Speaker 01

  And then you go back the next day and you do a little more and a little more and a little more and little by little, they come to love it. And then you can't tell the difference between them and the kid who just jumped in from the beginning. But it's like, a lot of times introverted kids need a longer runway that they travel down before they take off and fly. And they need to know that you're with them on the runway and admiring them and respecting them as they travel that runway.

• 1:45:25Rich Roll?

  Right. Yeah, that's really good advice. I like that. The final thing I wanted to ask you about is this idea of, of getting, being so good in your particular role professionally as an introvert, but inevitably getting promoted into a role that requires extroversion, which is the story of your life, right? Like to write this book about introversion, to be an introvert, and then to become the public facing, you know, persona behind this idea and this movement have foisted you onto the public stage where now it's kind of your job to like be extroverted in public, right?

• 1:46:08Rich Roll?

  And having to kind of learn a new set of skills. And I think it's common probably in, in, you know, less extreme examples of people who excel at their job and then suddenly they get promoted into a role that requires a completely different skillset that, that is at odds with who they want to be or what they're good at.

• 1:46:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. Okay. So, I mean, the first thing I would say is that.

• 1:46:33Speaker 01

  When that happens, that's really the moment when you know whether you love and care about your work or not, because it's one thing to have to go outside your comfort zone in the service of work that you love. And it's another thing to have to do it for a job that you don't actually care about that much. So like, I'm really like, I care so much about what I'm doing and I love writing so much and these ideas that it's like worth it to me to go through the the parts that are more of a stretch. So in some ways, introverts can see that as an advantage, that they're less likely to get stuck in the wrong job, because it's just going to be too painful at the end of the day when they get promoted.

• 1:47:18Speaker 01

  But also, so the psychologist Brian Little talks about this a lot, the idea that

• 1:47:26Speaker 01

  in this service of work or people we care about, we can and do and should sometimes step out of character. But you have to do it in a way that honors your own self and you have to give yourself lots of restorative niches to come back. So like, I do that all the time. Like, when I go out on trips and I'm giving talks or interviews or whatever, I spend so much time afterwards ordering room service and just like chilling in a hotel.

• 1:47:55Rich Roll?

  I feel you on that, yeah.

• 1:47:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:47:57Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's like you can't wait to get back to the hotel room and be alone.

• 1:48:02Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:48:02Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I really like honor that time and I guard it really carefully. And then I also, you know, I feel like I'm lucky because I also get to spend a lot of time doing my work is just like sitting at a cafe writing.

• 1:48:16Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:48:17Speaker 01

  So I do think it's worth asking oneself, like, if you get to a point where your work is having you constantly doing things that are outside your comfort zone, it might be the wrong place for you. But if you can get it to a manageable place and it's in the service of something you care about, then it's okay.

• 1:48:35Rich Roll?

  Yeah, if you're, if you being like this public facing person on the subject of bittersweetness or introversion meant that you couldn't write anymore because now you're running a large organization that's trying to foster these ideas, that probably would not be something you would want. That would be too high of a cost.

• 1:48:58Speaker 01

  Way too high of a cost.

• 1:48:59Rich Roll?

  Even if it would make you super successful and push these initiatives through and change the world, it's not within your constitution to do so.

• 1:49:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:49:08Rich Roll?

  And having that self-awareness to recognize that.

• 1:49:10Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. Yeah, not your constitution. I feel like it's not my constitution, it's not my calling, it's not what I feel like I should be doing. Yeah, but no, I am super careful about that when I, when I go and do these public facing things.

• 1:49:27Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And is it, is it non-anxiety producing for you now because you're so practiced at it?

• 1:49:33Speaker 01

  So it's not like extremely anxiety producing anymore the way it used to be for me. Really not at all. I feel like I've overcome that. But I would still say that, you know, a morning in which I am looking at a day full of publicity versus a morning where I'm looking at a day full of writing with my laptop, those are completely different mornings.

• 1:49:56Rich Roll?

  Two different experiences, yeah, of course.

• 1:49:57Speaker 01

  Two different experiences. Yeah. I don't know, maybe everybody feels that way. But I feel like it's probably more intense. The difference between those two is probably more intense for me.

• 1:50:05Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:50:06Speaker 01

  Like, I think I read actually that you, am I right about this? That you spend your mornings doing exercise and writing and contemplative things.

• 1:50:16Rich Roll?

  I'm very protective of the first part of the day.

• 1:50:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then you do podcast interviews and things like that later.

• 1:50:20Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:50:21Speaker 01

  And when I read that, I thought, that's really interesting. I don't think that would work for me because if I knew that I had the public facing side happening later in the day, I don't know that I would be able to enjoy as much the writing and contemplative stuff.

• 1:50:38Rich Roll?

  It spoils the other stuff earlier in the day.

• 1:50:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:50:41Rich Roll?

  That makes sense.

• 1:50:42Speaker 01

  But it sounds like you don't experience that.

• 1:50:46Rich Roll?

  No, it definitely, like, public speaking creates a lot of anxiety for me. But like, doing podcasts, less so. And it's something I, you know, I could do it in the morning, too, but I just, I need that time for, that's a recharge the battery time, right? Like, if I don't recharge the battery, then when I come in to do this other stuff, like, I'm just not at my best. So I have to protect that time for self-care. And that doesn't mean that I always do it perfectly, or that I don't make exceptions because life intervenes and all of that. But I try really hard to like, that's how I preserve, you know, who I am, I think, and the whole thing. And it's a privilege, not everybody can have that, you know?

• 1:51:29Speaker 01

  Right, absolutely.

• 1:51:30Rich Roll?

  And I recognize that. But it's pretty fundamental to kind of how I do things.

• 1:51:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, that makes sense.

• 1:51:37Rich Roll?

  And I have my, you'll appreciate this, like, my home office is a shipping container that we kitted out into like, an office. So it's just like a writing office with bookshelves and things like that. And that's where I kind of can work at home. So it's customized on the inside and, you know, has a air conditioner and all that kind of stuff. But it's literally a shipping container, right? And when, and when we were kind of figuring out how to tweak it and customize it, the kind of contractor that we hired to like, help us with this, he's like, well, you're gonna want a big window and you should do, and it should be like this, let all the sunlight in. I was like, no, I don't want any window. Like, I want it to be, like, I literally want to have the experience of being in the womb.

• 1:52:22Rich Roll?

  Like, to feel like, on some level, on a primal level, like, that's what makes me feel safe and protected.

• 1:52:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I totally understand.

• 1:52:29Rich Roll?

  And then he still put a little window in, and then I hung a shade over it, and so I could black it out. Anyway.

• 1:52:35Speaker 01

  I hope that office designers are listening to that.

• 1:52:38Rich Roll?

  Because they're all like, you're crazy, you're gonna want this. And I'm like, I'm telling you, I'm not gonna want it. Anyway. Any last thoughts for the introverts out there grappling with bittersweetness?

• 1:52:52Rich Roll?

  Or we wrap it up.

• 1:52:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think we can wrap it up. Really, just to understand.

• 1:53:01Speaker 01

  I don't know, just that my view of life, I don't know if I've said this already, so edit this out if I have, but.

• 1:53:06Rich Roll?

  Lay down the truth.

• 1:53:08Speaker 01

  My life philosophy is that there are different kinds of superpowers that exist in this world, and usually we're each only granted one or two of them, you know, and like, we know this from all the movies, right? There's like, lightsabers, and then there's like Spider-Man, and Incredible Hulks, and all these different ways of being powerful in the world. And so for people who are born with more of a bittersweet way of being, or an introverted way of being, and a sensitive way of being, these are, these are superpowers that, where you're like, in the stage of the movie, you're like Luke Skywalker before he knows that he has the Force, basically, because your culture isn't teaching you about the superpower

• 1:53:50Speaker 01

  that you naturally possess, but it's there, it's just yours to discover.

• 1:53:56Rich Roll?

  I think there's something really powerful, too, about that quiet person who is really grounded. There's a center of gravity and kind of an anchor to that person who knows who he or she is.

• 1:54:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:54:09Rich Roll?

  And is really comfortable in that quiet space, that is perhaps exponentially more powerful than the boisterous person who's, you know, really loud and perhaps charismatic, but unable to kind of have the resonance that, you know, that, that quiet, powerful person can embody.

• 1:54:33Speaker 01

  I think that's right, and like, I often tell people, you know, because people are always, quieter people are always concerned about how do you show up at a meeting and still have presence, especially when everybody's, you know, talking, being very dominant.

• 1:54:48Speaker 01

  But there's a way where if you're speaking from a sense of conviction, people know it, like they feel it right away and that's what carries the power. So the answer is not to try to become a louder, more dominant person. The answer is more to get in the habit of understanding what you truly believe and speak what you truly believe, and then people feel that. That's where the power comes from.

• 1:55:12Rich Roll?

  There you go. Beautiful. Thank you.

• 1:55:17Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:55:18Rich Roll?

  No, I appreciate it. The work that you do and the wisdom that you share with the world is really powerful and it's obviously changing millions and millions of people's lives. And I think these are really important topics and subjects that previously perhaps we were too afraid to talk about and you've made it a thing. And I just wanted to publicly thank you for that. And can't wait to see what you do next.

• 1:55:44Speaker 01

  Well, thank you so much and such a treat to get to meet you in person. I just love the work you do, so thank you.

• 1:55:50Rich Roll?

  Thank you. The pleasure and the honor is mine. So come and talk to me again sometime.

• 1:55:55Speaker 01

  I would love it.

• 1:55:55Rich Roll?

  Cool. Peace.

• 1:56:01Rich Roll?

  That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guests, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change and The Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify and on YouTube and leave a review and/or comment.

• 1:56:46Rich Roll?

  Supporting the sponsors who support the show is also important and appreciated. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is of course awesome and very helpful. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, the meal planner, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo, with additional audio engineering by Cale Curtis. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis, with assistance by our creative director, Dan Drake. Portraits by Davy Greenberg and Grayson Wilder.

• 1:57:26Rich Roll?

  Graphic and social media assets courtesy of Jessica Miranda, Daniel Solis, Dan Drake, and A.J. Akpodiette. Thank you Georgia Whaley for copywriting and website management. And of course, our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support, see you back here soon. Peace. Plants. Namaste. [music]