#732: Martha Beck - The Amazing and Brutal Results of Zero Lies for 365 Days, How to Do a Beginner "Integrity Cleanse," Lessons from Lion Trackers, and Novel Tactics for Reducing Anxiety

Tim Ferriss

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Livemomentous.com tim and code Tim for 20% off. Optimal minimal. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now?

Boyd Varty

What is the perfect time? What if I did the Alphabet? I'm a cybernetic organism. Living tissue over a metal endoskeleton.

Tim Ferriss

Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show. And if you hear noises in the background, it's because I am in the attic of a barn in Europe. So if you hear birds or insects.

Martha Beck

That'S what that is. My job this episode, as in every episode, is to deconstruct world class performers from different disciplines and to tease out the habits, routines, frameworks, inputs and so on that you can apply and test in your own lives. And my guest today is doctor Martha Beck. I've wanted to have her on for a very long time. She has been called the best known life coach in America by NPR and USA Today.

Tim Ferriss

She holds three Harvard degrees in social science and has published nine nonfiction books, one novel and more than 200 magazine articles. The Guardian and other media have described her as Oprah's life coach. Her recent book, the way of finding. The path to your true self, was. An instant New York Times bestseller and an Oprah's book club selection.

Her next book, beyond Anxiety, curiosity, creativity and finding your life's purpose, is expected in early 2025. You can find Martha online@marthabeck.com. That's marthabeck.com. And on Facebook and Instagram, the Martha Beck and she and I were introduced by Boyd Vardy, lion tracker and author himself. He's been on this show.

He was one of my most popular guests the year that he came out. And we have a lot of stories. A lot of takeaways and a lot of laughs in this conversation. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Without further Ado, Doctor Martha Beck.

Martha Beck

Martha, it is so nice to finally connect and to see your face, and. I really appreciate you taking the time. So thank you. It's my honor. I gave your four hour work week to my then teenage children.

Boyd Varty

I said, I want you to learn the way this man thinks. Whatever you do, just study his mind. It is your new Bible. Thank you for that. Hopefully it didn't turn them to the dark side.

Martha Beck

Oh, atrocious. Yes. That was the beginning of the end. So thank you. Thank you, Tim.

Derailing the development of my children. Well, let's talk about a mutual friend briefly, because our connecting point, the way we directly connected, even though I had observed you from afar for quite some time, is Boyd Vardy. And for people who don't know Boyd, he is the author of the Lion Tracker's Guide to Life. He has been there. It is right behind you.

Beautiful little book, which I've read multiple times. And he is one hell of a guy. He's one of a kind. He really is. And I wanted to ask you to perhaps begin with describing how the two of you connected.

Boyd Varty

It was such a strange thing. I mean, he's told me the story from his side since. All I knew was that I was in a weird period of my own life, written a book about leaving Mormonism, and a lot of people didn't like it. And I was getting death threats and legal threats, and I sort of ran away to do a book tour in South Africa. And I went to my favorite place there, which is a game preserve called Londolozzi, where I'd been once before.

And it was like the thing I had saved up for. And the thing I'd been looking forward to, and I felt safer there with the lions and the rhinoceroses and whatnot, than I did anywhere among people. I was terrified of people at the time, still sort of am, but I was really terrified at that time. So all I knew is that I had a certain ranger who was supposed to be taking me out on safari, and the guy who showed up was a different guy, all right. I didn't really care.

But we got talking as we drove around, and here I am like, he's 23, I'm 43, I think. So we start talking housewife to about game Ranger, just like a heart to heart would be. I don't know how within five minutes, we were in such an intense conversation, and we were laughing at each other's jokes, and we were having this amazing time, and we went back to the game preserve place, to the camp, and we had tea together. And he told me, my family's been going through some difficult times. They've had really strange legal things happening.

And it kind of paralleled what I was going through in some ways. So I felt really understood. But I also thought, oh, my gosh, he doesn't understand, really what the dynamics of what's going on. And I'm a sociologist. I study psychology as my trade.

So I started talking to him about it, and he says, you have to meet my family. I didn't know that his family was the family that owned the game preserve and had started it and reforested it and everything. Before I knew it, I was at their house with his sister, Bronwyn, and his parents, Dave and Shan. And I was talking to them as fast as I could about how to deal with attacks from psychopaths. They can handle attacks from almost anything, but psychopaths were new to them, and I was supposed to leave on this small plane.

They held the plane for an hour so we could keep talking. And I got on the plane, and I had a copy of Dave's book. Dave is Boyd's father, and he'd written a memoir. And I got on the plane, and they shouted after me, next time you come back, you can stay with us. And I got on the plane with my head spinning, and I thought, I just met my best friends.

And I read Dave's book on the plane, and there's a place where Boyd, his sister Bronwyn, and his mother and their teacher were all at home together. And there was a break in, and Boyd woke up with a gun in his mouth. The guy had shoved the barrel of a gun in his mouth and woke him up that way, and they were tied up for 5 hours. They were threatened with death. So I'm on the plane, and I'm sobbing hysterically because this is happening to my best friends.

And I was like, you could have been killed. You know what, Tim? It's a good thing that flight was really long, because I was out of my mind. I felt so close to Boyd and his family, and I have ever since. It's been like 20 years, and I've gone back and gone back, and we've done things together, and he's become this incredible coach, and I taught him what I could teach him.

He's learned so much more from other people, but it was just this incredible bond that formed between the most unlikely pair of friends. And, yeah, he's one of the best people in the world, in my humble opinion. Yeah, he's amazing. Also an incredible storyteller, and, as you mentioned, well adapted to dealing with certain types of threats. And I suppose this will probably segue into other things that we talk about, but he almost was eaten alive by a crocodile.

Martha Beck

Right. His leg still bears incredible scars from that. He's had a gun barrel in his mouth. And yet there are certain things we are not particularly well evolved to handle, like modern day psychopaths as one example. Psychopaths of any era, really, of any era.

And there are a few things that I took from Boyd just to continue to give a kind of hats off bow to Boyd, who is also one of the best storytellers I've ever heard in my life. So for those of you, he's magnificent. I think he might be the best storyteller in the world. So, for those who haven't heard my podcast with Boyd, I encourage you to check that out. There's a line from his book, from the line tracker's Guide to life, which has stuck with me ever since.

And I think of it often, which is a line from Renius, this master tracker, who says, I don't know where we're going, but I know exactly how to get there. I think that's resonated with a lot of people. There's another line which I'm less familiar with, but in the process of doing homework for this conversation, I came across this on your website, actually, and it's referencing Boyd. I know we all have a lot on our websites, so you can't reference. With Boyd, and we just need to accept it.

Yeah, exactly. We'll have to to come up with a custody plan. So he has a name for the experience of getting lost. The path of not here. Now, I have not heard him say that.

What does that mean, the path of not here? Well, we're out wandering around, trying to track. I remember once tracking a porcupine with Boyd, and it was easy on the road because the quill drags are easy to see. And then the porcupine left the road, and it was just scrub and rocks and everything. And I didn't know what he was looking at, but he kept walking.

Boyd Varty

And I said, I haven't seen anything for a long time, and I'm completely lost. And he said, no, you're never lost. What you're getting is the information that the place you are now and the way you're going isn't the way you want to end up. And that is an incredibly important place called the path of not here. And every time you realize you're in it, you have the option of shifting, of going somewhere else without recognizing that this is the path of not here.

You can't shift. So when I coach people, they're almost always way into the path of not here. You know, they hate their job, their marriage is awful, whatever. And they've just kept going and going and going and going, and they haven't woken up and seen that. There's not been a footprint for a very long time.

And then, by the way, Boyd found the damn porcupine den in the middle of, like, how he track this thing over a rock. I don't know how, but he was quite pleased. I'm sure he was pleased. Watching these expert trackers track is akin to having some type of ethereal experience on a different plane. But for them, it's very scientific.

Martha Beck

There's nothing mystical or very little mystical about it. It's very much deductive Sherlock Holmes type. I call it the technology of magic, because it looks like magic to us. If you showed someone from an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon an iPhone, they would say, oh, magic. And we'd say, no, no technology.

Boyd Varty

When people from are using these ancient forms of wisdom that we don't have, it looks like magic. And we say, magic, and they say, no, no technology. And I remember the first tracking lesson I ever had with Ranius, who was. I couldn't believe he would be so generous, especially to a female, because they don't usually train women as trackers. We're just walking along.

He's not saying anything. He picks up a stick and makes a circle in the sand, and then he just stands there, doesn't say a word. And I look down, and there's a huge paw print, and it's obviously a lion. So I'm like, it's a lion. And he was like.

And he just stood there and I kept looking at it. And then he held up his hand and he did this. He just shifted it, like a quarter inch to one side. And I looked down and I saw that the print had been disturbed in exactly that way. And suddenly I felt myself as if I was down on all fours, and I shifted that left paw, that left hand, just that little bit.

And I realized the lion had looked over his left shoulder, and that had made a slight. A little swish in the track. And so the lion was either looking at something, one of his pride mates, or one of his potential prey, and he was going to go around to that spot so we could cut over there, because the lion had looked at that significantly. And I remember it's like learning to read for the second time, even when you only know a couple of words. It's magic.

Martha Beck

Yeah, totally. Rhenius is something else. There are levels and then there are levels. And as you were talking, I thought of a quote that I really enjoy from the very much storied science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke.

Boyd Varty

One of my faves. All right, so, yeah, I bet I know the quote. You have read a lot of books, and the quote, you know, is, any sufficiently advanced technologies indistinguishable from magic. From magic. Exactly.

Martha Beck

So let's talk about the path of not here. If we could talk about a practical example, because in the email introduction, Boyd credits you with, in a way, rescuing him or helping him rescue himself from a period of great difficulty. It was mutual, and I would love to know what that intervention looked like. Or maybe, to be more specific, what are some of the questions, cues, things that you did with Boyd that might be instructive in terms of helping someone get off the path of. Not here.

Boyd Varty

Okay. So the first thing is for me, and I want to be delicate about this, because people get worried when we talk about it. But I watched your TED talk doing homework for this. I watched it again. And you start out very courageously in one of your TED talks, talking about being in a depressive period and thinking you might want to end your life.

I was so surprised to hear that there are people who haven't been there. I just thought that was how you spend a Thursday. So I remember sitting in the Lamont library at Harvard when I was 17. I call it the lament library, because all these people had carved their woes into the carols. It was a freshman library.

Martha Beck

Not surprising. Yeah. And I was like, why stick around? We're all getting off the bus. We're all going to die, so why not get off the bus now?

Boyd Varty

And I remember sitting there and thinking, the only possible reason for sticking around. I remembered Emerson's statement that beauty is its own excuse for being. And I thought, joy is its own excuse for being. That is the one thing I can experience that makes it worth sticking around for the suffering this life entails. So I shifted my entire life toward a sort of very simple test.

Does it bring me joy or does it not? And Joy became the track I was following. So, Boyd had learned to track animals, but he'd lost the track of his joy a long time before. And I remember feeling, well, jumping ahead, taking some people out in a seminar, and having him turn and tell the group, you track your life the way you track an animal, but the track you're looking for is joy in the body. And it's so simple to put it that way.

And I think that's the first thing we really. Where we really connected. And I said, boy, you have to find joy in your body. He'd been through so much trauma. I mean, good God.

It wasn't just the break in. I mean, he tried to rescue a man from a hot spring. A guy had fallen in. The guy died. He was basically boiled alive, almost eaten by a crocodile.

He's been attacked by more deadly animals and snakes and all kinds of things than you can even imagine. So here was this guy. He was tough and strong and brave, and he had long ago gone numb. And the funny thing is that there are a lot of people who haven't had such a wild life, who are sitting under fluorescent lights somewhere, and they're just as far off their track as he was. They're almost as miserable.

If you can't find joy, you can't find joy. It's like oxygen. You need it. It doesn't matter how you lose it or what it looks like to you. You need it.

So I remember when Boyd and his sister came to Phoenix to visit me shortly after we met, and I put them through a kind of american therapy, which was, I made them lie down on the living room floor and watch Eddie Izzard routines on tv while I brought them ice cream for about three days. And they had just worked like mules their entire lives, physically worked, psychologically worked. And they were like, when do we start working? And I just say, sit, eat, laugh. And at the end of the three days, I saw them start to be able to access relaxation, which is the first step toward joy in the body.

And our culture is so cerebral, and we think that thinking is superior to the physical being. But our thinking process is very late in evolution. Our cognitive minds process about 40 bits of information per second. The nervous system of our entire bodies is processing about 11 million bits of information per second. The body is smarter than the mind.

That is a very long answer to a very good question. But if you haven't found joy in. The world, that's why this is a long podcast. We have time. He did say he wanted me to tell stories.

So, yeah, I think when I could see him relax and I saw his shoulders open and I saw him smile spontaneously, instead of to be polite, I said, there you go. That's the track. That's what we're tracking, and that's what we've done ever since in years and years of wonderful conversations. So I'm going to come back to Boyd probably just as an instructive case study, and we'll probably come back to Boyd. But I would love to ask you about re attuning the body to the nervous system.

Martha Beck

And specifically, I'm asking because as I've done research for this conversation and listened to interviews and read so much, I've noticed that you have a prodigious ability to recall quotes. As one example, you mentioned Harvard and 17, which is not an age that most people associate with Harvard. So you seem to have a lot of horsepower between the ears, generally. Now, I don't know this about you, but generally, when I encounter that, and to maybe a lesser extent, I encounter that myself, you get rewarded for using this analytical workhorse, and you end up perhaps a little less attuned to the physical body. So I'm curious how you have reconnected with that intelligence.

And specifically, this may or may not be related, but I would love for you to discuss equine therapy or interactions with animals, and if that is related. The first place I'll go. I learned to brutalize my body that year at Harvard. I was running 100 miles a week and trying to eat less than 1000 calories a day. I did not have any regard for my body at all.

Boyd Varty

I got sick. I got very sick with a multitude of autoimmune diseases. My body correctly figured out that I was the greatest threat to my own health. So I was actually on crutches in a back brace. I was in a lot of pain for a long time, went back to Harvard after a year off for this issue, and got engaged to another Ivanax Mormon.

We got engaged very young, so I got engaged and married another guy from my hometown, and I stayed at Harvard for my master's and my PhD, and we had a daughter. And then my second child was conceived when I was halfway through my PhD, younger, and I was caught in an apartment fire right in the middle of the pregnancy. And because of that, they ran a bunch of tests, and they came back and told me that the fetus had down syndrome, and I had two weeks to terminate. I was, like, six months along. So I don't know if you've ever been pregnant, Tim, but not that I'm aware of.

Martha Beck

Yeah, I have suspected, though. At points, people say I'm glowing recently. I don't know. Maybe. You do look really flush.

Boyd Varty

Yeah. I had the one baby already, and I had bonded so strongly with the second one that even though I'm very pro choice, saying, you know, he's got to go, he was already my child. I'd seen him sucking his finger on the ultrasound and everything, and I couldn't do it. I've advised other people. I've helped other people go on and terminate their pregnancies in similar situations.

I just couldn't do it. And I remember the head of gynecology and obstetrics at Harvard at the time, because I was part of that university system. There were five of them. They all thought that I was making a huge mistake to not terminate. And the head honcho came in and told me, this is like having a malignant tumor and not letting me remove it.

And I remember looking at him, and I was being rehydrated because I couldn't stop vomiting and stuff. Oh, it was such fun how I laughed. I was looking at this guy, and he's saying, you need to do this. You're going to ruin your life. He said, you're throwing your life away.

And I looked at him, and suddenly it appeared he had two faces. And I was really curious. And it was as if there was a face that he was presenting that was his stern Harvard doctor, and then right behind it was this terrified face. Terrified. And I'd been sort of terrified myself, but when I saw this, I was, like, fascinated.

I just watched him and I said, do you know anyone with down syndrome? He was very flustered. He was like, no, I wouldn't bother with that. And I just watched him, and I thought, oh, he's not telling me to do this because he thinks I'm making a mistake to keep the stupid little boy inside of me. He thinks that there's a stupid little boy inside him, and he's trying to kill that.

And I thought, oh, he didn't end up at Harvard because he knew he was smart. He ended up there for the same reason I did. He thought he was stupid. He wanted to prove he wasn't. And at that moment, I looked at him, and I thought, you know, the reason for my life is joy.

I don't see Joy on either of this man's faces, and I don't think he understands his own path to joy at all. And I remember I said, I've heard that people with down syndrome can experience joy. And he said, I wouldn't know about that. And I was like, yeah, no, I think they can. And right then, everything changed for me.

I waddled around Harvard, pregnant, out to here. Everybody knew. And I would go into my professor's offices, and they'd be like, you've got to put this child in an institution. You're throwing away your career. And I'd look at their little offices and their little piles of books, and I'd just.

I look at them and think, are you in joy? Do you live in joy? Because if you don't, you can't tell me where it is. And I lost the obsession with intellect that I had learned, not only at Harvard, but in all of western culture. That's when it really shifted for me.

Martha Beck

I mean, that's a powerful story, and I'm sure we'll come back to pieces of it. How do you then elicit that realization or teach people to reengage with sensitivities that they've perhaps neglected or accidentally put offline or deliberately put offline? How do you cultivate that in some way? I can't teach it. I can't cultivate it.

Boyd Varty

I can't do it. But I have an unfailing ally, and its name is suffering. Because when we lose the track of our joy, we suffer. And that's the only thing gets our attention enough to make us stop and say, maybe, just maybe, I need to find another path here. You've had it yourself, I'm sure.

Martha Beck

Oh, for sure. I promised I would bookmark this and come back to it just to give Boyd a little sloppy kiss on the cheek. Again, something else that I'm pretty sure was in that book, it certainly was in the curriculum. When I've spent more time there with Renyes and Alex and other incredible trackers. Losing the track is part of tracking.

That is always part of tracking. You are almost never going to a to Z track. Something perfectly. You always lose the track. So part of good tracking is finding the track again or finding a proper track.

In the case of Boyd, hes on the path of not here, unsure of what to do with himself, sort of imposing a narrative that I don't want to. He's not here. He can't defend himself. Let's just do this. Yeah, he can't defend himself.

So you're welcome, Boyd. And just using him as a stand in for the audience. Right? But you've worked so much, and we love him so much. What are some of the things?

Once you'd fed him ice cream and had him relax, you see the shoulders open. What happens then? What do you do with. Once you see that opening, that change? What do you do?

Boyd Varty

You know, the first thing that happened for me when Boyd took me tracking? We went to look for a rhinoceros. They're fairly easy to track, surprisingly difficult, though, at the same time, the first thing they do is they show you what a rhinoceros track looks like. Clear, plain and simple, and really good terrain. Now, you know what a rhinoceros's whole foot looks like.

And you're going to go out through grass and rocks and trees and everything. And sometimes you'll just see the side of one toe or an imprint where the palm has pressed a leaf down or a bit of mud on a stick. But until you've seen that first track, you don't know what you're looking for. So that's why I fed him ice cream for three days. And when I saw the relaxation, I could say, that's your track.

Now let's look at the things you're doing in your life. His mom was telling him she thought he should get a PhD, and I said, okay, hold that thought. More joy, less joy. Less. Okay.

Don't go there. So take over Landalozzi for the rest of your life. More joy, less joy. I don't know. It's not clear, okay?

We don't go there yet. It's like going to the optometrist at that point, you know, suffering and you know joy. And if it's more like suffering, it's the path of not there. And there are a million ways to suffer. And if it's joy, you know, it's the path of yes, and there's actually only one path that takes you straight along the line of joy, and it's your individual destiny.

I believe in that stuff. All right. I'm going to be keeping track of a lot of bookmarks. I knew I would. So I came prepared, pen in hand, for those of you who can't see us, I cheat.

Martha Beck

I use a pen. The pen is. I know. The weakest ink is stronger than the strongest memories, therefore, blue pen. So individual destiny.

That's my note I'm taking. And I didn't even add a question mark because I probably agree with you on some levels. Let's talk about your own chronology a bit. And I believe it was at 29. Correct me if I'm wrong, you decided to not tell any lies for an entire year.

Now, my understanding is that led to losing your family of origin, your religion, your job, your marriage. So it was an eventful year. My home, my career, my entire industry. Yeah, it was quite a brisk year. It was brisk.

So it was like the flamethrower approach to personal development. Why did you do this? And what did you take away from it that other people can use? Why did I do it? Yeah.

Boyd Varty

Suffering. I'd like to say I had noble intentions. I was unhappy. I was very physically ill. I'd been sick at that point for twelve years.

So in chronic pain for twelve years. And I had this baby with down syndrome. And I thought, nobody at Harvard's gonna. I just didn't want them all staring at me. So to finish my dissertation, I went back to Utah, where I knew that everybody would be thrilled with me not having an abortion, which they were.

But then they assumed that I was super Mormon. And I tried to fit in just out of respect for my, you know, culture of origin. Can you just say a quick, quick sidebar on your father and who your father was? I think this is useful context, not just any run of the mill. No, he was not.

My father was an apologist, which is a word for somebody who defends the principles of a religion. So mormonism makes a lot of truth claims about things like, the American Indians are descended from a group of Israelites that came over in a ship in 600 bc, and lots of, like, real archaeological, anthropological truth claims. They don't stand up well under modern science. And my father, he was asked to be an apologist for the church. He was a professor at Berkeley, and they brought him back to BYU, Brigham Young University, university, and he started defending Mormonism against all attacks.

And he became very well known in the church. And he is the foremost apologist of Mormonism, I think, in the church's history. So I was considered Mormon royalty. They have a whole structure there. So I went back to Utah and tried to be a good Mormon at the time.

They came out and said there was a lot of unrest. People were just learning too much. And the Internet wasn't a thing yet, but there were just too many scientists doing too much research and finding out too much stuff that was disproving Mormonism's claims. So the church got very, very upset and came out and said the three greatest threats to God's kingdom in the latter days were feminists, intellectuals, and gay people. So turned out I was all three.

I didn't identify as gay at the time. I was married with children, so I was closeted to myself. That involves a lot of suffering that you don't understand when you're going through it. I had sexual abuse issues from my father when I was a child. Those were bashing their way to the surface and coming out in flashbacks, and it was gnarly.

And the one thing I knew is that when I heard the statement the truth will set you free, it brought me a sense of joy, a sense of peace. So I thought, I don't know exactly what to do or what the truth is, so I'm just not going to lie for a year and we'll see what happens, we'll find out what the truth is. And I found out that mostly what I was lying about. I didn't tell lies about my taxes or anything, or in my personal life even. I was telling lies about how I felt.

I feel fine. I wouldnt say that anymore. People would say, how are you? And id say, not well. And you start to do that.

Try it for a couple of days. Dont tell a single line out to anyone for any reason. And pretty soon every relationship you have, professional or personal, where theres any level of secrecy or untruth, begins to fall apart and then it starts to explode. And that's what happened to me. I just kept seeing what I believed until I realized I'm not Mormon.

I don't believe in it at all. Also, I actually committed the one sin worse than murder. I left. I said, please take my name off the church records, I am not Mormon. So everyone thought I was going to outer darkness.

They probably still do. So my family stopped speaking to me and yeah, then I realized I was gay. So was my husband. That was sort of convenient. So it was very amicable.

But I also realized that I loved to learn, but I hated being caught up in academic politics. So I left my job. Everything went away when I stopped lying, and everything that was left was the path of joy. Now this may not be the right question, but what gave you the courage to risk burning it all to the ground or was it not courage at all? It was just, this is suffering, and I want something other than this suffering.

Martha Beck

And so you were just kind of rolling the dice on door number two. The suffering was bad, but it wasn't bad enough to make me endure the suffering of losing my family. I mean, seven siblings, all their wives and husbands, and my nieces and nephews, and like everyone, for every friend I'd made growing up, I couldn't have done that, but. Right. I think I made that pledge the day after I came out of an emergency surgery.

Boyd Varty

And I've been told that you are willing to entertain woo woo things. It's Wednesday, right? Yeah, every Wednesday. Woo woo Wednesday. It's woo woo Wednesday.

So I'm rushed in for surgery. Actually, I was teaching a psychology class, and I was behind a one way mirror, and the students started to talk about. It was a free discussion. I was observing, and they started to talk about a number of the women had been raped. And I suddenly got really hot and feverish, and I ran into the hall and passed out cold.

I, like, fell down. I looked up. All the students were around me. I got rushed to the hospital, and they thought I had a tumor in a very intimate place. They immediately put me in surgery.

And while I was lying there, I sort of woke up and looked at the surgical lights, which was odd because my eyes were taped closed. And then I thought, this is odd that I can see. And I sat up, which was strange because my body was on the table. And I looked around and I watched them operating on me, and they said, there's no tumor. It's just blood.

This is scar tissue from old trauma. And then I lay back and I thought, I don't know what's happening to me. And between the surgical lights, another light appeared, and it was about the size of a golf ball when I first saw it. And, you know, they say we can only see about a trillionth of the available light spectrum. And I think this light had all of it.

Like, you can't describe it. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever, ever seen. It was absolutely captivating. And as I looked at it, it grew, and it seemed to sort of penetrate things instead of bouncing off them. And when it touched me, this incredible warmth.

I mean, talk about going from twelve years of chronic pain, a lot of psychological suffering, to no suffering, zero absolute joy. Beauty, warmth, physical, emotional, every kind of warmth you can imagine. And laughter. There was so much joy in this life, and I was laughing with it. And I heard the surgeon say to the anesthesiologist she's crying.

And I started crying from happiness, and they could see tears coming out, and they thought that I could feel the pain. So the anesthesiologist was going to give me more medication, and I talked to him the next day to make sure it wasn't a drug event. And he said that a voice had told him, don't increase the anesthesia. She's crying because she's happy. And he said, did I do the wrong thing?

That never happened to me before, so that was odd. Anyway, basically the light was saying to me, you totally bought this whole thing about, you're just a physical thing, and then you die. And I was like, I know. I said I wasn't going to forget, and then I totally forgot. We were laughing and laughing and laughing, and then it said, look, you're going to go through something really horrible, that I'm always here.

I'm right here. I've always been here. I always will be. And I woke up in the recovery room, and there was this guy who was there from the prison on some sort of work detail, and he was mopping the floor in this room where I woke up, and I looked at him and I said, I love you so much.

Martha Beck

He's like, I'm not even getting paid for this. He went to get the nurses.

Yeah. And I was just, I was like, do people cry? And they said, yes, sir, traumatic. And I'm like, no. Do they cry because they're happy?

Boyd Varty

And they were like, not really. So, yeah, the next day, the big thing was, I'm never doing anything that makes me feel separated from that light, not ever. And lying was the first thing to go. There's still to this day. One of the weird things about experiences like that is they don't fade is always right there with you in every choice you make.

And that's what gave me the ability to do everything else.

Tim Ferriss

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Martha Beck

All right, I have quite a few follow up questions. Thank you for sharing that. The broadest question is, what do you make of that experience? The other, you can tackle these in whichever order. But did you talk to the surgeon and other personnel about what you observed them saying?

Boyd Varty

Yeah, the surgeon came in and was oddly tender with me. I mean, really, really tender. And I think the reason was that what had happened was I was bleeding internally from a lot of scar tissue that had happened when I was sexually abused very young. And they knew that some kind of violence must have caused that. So they said, yeah, we don't really understand why you suddenly started bleeding internally.

But it was putting pressure in. We just had to drain the wound and leave it open. And so that's what I said. Do you know anything about the anesthesia? I went and got the anesthesiologist, and he came back, and I started just quizzing him.

So what did you give me? What are the effects? What do people report? What are the side effects? Can I have some more?

Finally, he just said, look, just tell me what happened in there, because this thing happened to me. And that's when he told me about the voice telling him, don't give her more anesthesia. And I said, yeah, you did the right thing. And he said, you know how many times this has happened to me in 33 years of medical practice? I said, no.

And he said, once. And then he kissed me on the forehead and left and wrote me a letter later about it. He said it was not a drug effect. Plus, he had a woo woo experience as well. So take that.

Martha Beck

Got it. So what do you make of that experience? I have been making of it. You know, I started meditating and thinking about it, and I think about it every single day, and it's been many years since then. And what I make of it right now, first of all, I love.

Boyd Varty

It's kind of like the path of not there, don't know mind. I believe in the Zen or any buddhist concept of don't know mind, that in the beginner's mind, there are many possibilities. In the expert's mind, there are few. And that none of us really knows anything. And in particular, we have no idea what consciousness is.

I've studied physics. I've studied philosophy, theology. Nobody has a clue what consciousness is. One neurologist said, nobody even knows what it would be like to have an idea about what consciousness is. So what I make of it now is that consciousness is the primary reality of the universe.

And I do believe in the Copenhagen version of quantum mechanics, that the observation of consciousness is making what is merely energetic appear physical. And I believe that everything is full of consciousness and that light was a representation of consciousness. But I also believe that this glass is a representation of consciousness and that you are. And that a tree is, and that a rock is. Everything is brimming with that light.

My son, actually, 19 years after they told me he was going to ruin my life, we were going home from the funeral of his friend's mother, his best friend's mother, she died, and it was horrible. And he said, mom, I didn't cry at the funeral. And I said, yeah, but you can cry. Strong men cry when things are sad, and this is sad, and this is a kid who barely talks. He said, well, it's not so bad once the light comes and opens your heart.

And I said, what? A light came and opened your heart? And he said, mm hmm. I said, well, when did this happen? He said, may 10.

This was in February. And I was like, so what happened? So he told me he was in his room. He was having a struggle. He was 13 years old.

This was years before. And a light appeared in his room and touched him. And he said, it told him, you can do this. And I said, well, I've seen that light, too. And he looked at me like, wow, I didn't think you had it in you.

And I said, and it told me that it's always with us, even though we can't see it. And he said, oh, I can see it. And I said, you can? He said, yeah. I said, like, right now?

Of course. He was like, yes. I said, well, where is it? Is it, like, up there? Is it down here?

Is it in your heart? And he just shook his head at me, and he said, mom, it's everywhere. That's the world I live in. All right, so, yeah, I feel like you and I are probably going to have quite a few conversations. I hope so.

Martha Beck

On and off records. To be continued. I'm going to maybe just take a slight sidestep to integrity cleanse. If somebody wanted to do an integrity cleanse or attempt what you did, but with the lessons learned, maybe they are not willing to go full throttle how would you suggest they do that? Because most people listening, myself included, have never attempted something like this.

And just as a quick, humorous sidebar, I will say, if people want to read something very funny. There's an article, it's an old article from Esquire called I think you're fat by a friend of mine, AJ Jacobs, and it's about his experiments with radical candor. His wife was like, how do I look at this? And he's like, I think you're fat. And you can imagine it didn't go super well.

Boyd Varty

Oh, goodness. He learned a lot, but ultimately it was a pretty tough experiment. So what would you suggest to people? And what is an integrity cleanse? And what's the kind of, like white belt, blue belt, black belt version?

Martha Beck

Or however you would like to answer that? Let's do the white belt first. Take a smaller time period. I said a year. Take three days a week.

Boyd Varty

And you don't have to say everything you think, but you do have to be aware when you're saying something that you don't believe. So have a little journal or something so that you can. When you lie to someone else, and most lies are told to smooth social interactions, nobody says you look fat.

So just note in a little book, okay, I said this, but what was I actually thinking? So somebody said to me, oh, we'd love you to come out and visit. And I said, sure, sometime. But you write down, okay, that was a lie. I would rather die a thousand times than go to stay with these people.

Whatever. Write the truth down in your little notebook for yourself. That's the path of the truth. Everything else is the path of not there. It's just mushy.

I wrote a whole book on this based on the divine comedy, because Dante starts that book just saying. In the middle of my life, I found myself just wandering through this horrible, dark wilderness, and I had no idea how I got there or where to go because I'd lost the true path. And then he shows how you find the true path. So most of us are doing that. And the way you find the true path is to start writing down the things that are true.

After you've said the things that are not true. Just do that for three days. That's the white milk blue belt. Take a month and have a friend where you speak the whole truth to another person, even if it's a therapist or a twelve step group or something. You want to go black belt all in.

This is what I try to do. No lying, ever. But you don't have to say much like, consider if what you have to say is an improvement upon no. You end up finding out that you say it. If it's true, kind and useful, and not very few things are all three.

But don't lie. Even with your actions or with your facial expression or anything. Don't eat a bite of food you don't want. That's a lie. I like to be tough on these things.

Like, I used to run 100 miles a week. Now I will be like, I will never do anything false. And it's fun and rigorous. It is rigorous, I would imagine.

Martha Beck

All right, but quick tactical question for people who want to maybe get somewhere between the blue and black, they're going to make an attempt at fewer lies, more truth. So not just becoming aware of it, but actually changing some behavior. You mentioned defensive. You mentioned rigorous. Somebody who is being truthful is going to say no in some form a lot more than somebody who's being untruthful.

Boyd Varty

Yeah. What are some of your go to phrases or language that you like to use? That is, I think you're fat? Maybe it is in terms of saying no to the many things that would otherwise consume your time in your life. Most people, not the equivalent, when they want to say no and they don't know how to say it, will try to become victimy and say, I can't because of this, this and this, which is horrible because the person always thinks of a way out of those things.

I love this quote from Julius Caesar, Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, where his wife says, don't go to the Senate. I had a horrible nightmare. You're going to get stabbed. So the guy comes to get him, and he says, go tell the council Caesar will not come. That I cannot is false.

That I dare not. Falser. Still no. Go tell the council Caesar will not come. Boom.

Like, that is my model. And there have been really good studies that show that to get out of depression, one study had control group, a group that had therapy, a group that had meds, and a group that did nothing but eliminate the words I can't, and I have to from their responses. Instead, they had to say, I choose not to. I choose to. I will.

I won't. And they came out of their depression faster than any of the other groups. Every verbal thing we say that is not true hurts our bodies, hurts our psyches, and leads us to anxiety and depression. So, in that case, keep a book that says, you'll have to deal with the people who don't like you saying no. I've lost a lot of friends this way, friends that perhaps needed losing.

But I always say, just think, know what you really know about something, okay? Feel what you really feel. Say what you really mean, at least to yourself in your notebook, and then do what you really want. And that sounds so self serving, but in fact, it's quite stoical. I know you follow the stoics and the hedonists.

They were weirdly similar. Like, they'll do what is true because it's more felicitous to them in every way. So have a notebook where you write down what you would do if you were being really honest. And then after a while, once you know what you're dealing with, start to become that person in the way you actually conduct your life. And as you make mistakes and as you don't keep your commitments, forgive yourself.

Because one of the things I found is that it's never true to hate yourself or to condemn yourself. It's never true. What do you mean by that? We are such little monkeys. You know, I just got back from Costa Rica, and we had a fabulous monkey encounter, and they had this fear expression, and they were afraid of so many things.

And I just thought, we are this far from them. All we've got is shoes to differentiate us from them. And we're terrified of everything all the time. And most of us are really doing our best. And we have all kinds of socialization, weirdness.

Our brains get reconditioned and rewired for fear. If you're not in integrity and you didn't manage to pull it off and be honest in a hard situation, kindness and gentleness are the truth. I actually wrote a book that's coming out next year after I wrote the way of integrity, because I was so tough on myself in the integrity thing, and it was making people anxious. And there's a level beyond just telling the truth, and it is called compassion, and it's truer. So forgive me while I get really nitty gritty with maybe a mundane question, but it's building on what we were just talking about, and I'll give an example.

Martha Beck

So we were first corresponding via email, and I was exploring the potential for maybe doing something in person, which is not to say you didn't want to do that, but the logistics weren't going to work out, and you had a line that was something along the lines of, I would love to do in person, but I can't do to life Tetris, something like that. And I was like, life Tetris due to life Tetris, that is a good phrase. I'm going to steal.

Boyd Varty

You can't steal it because I give it to you freely. Oh, thank you. I will gratefully receive then this phrase. I'm wondering if, let's just say hypothetical example, really close friend of yours and his wife. So male friend, his wife invites you to a costume party on a Thursday night, and in your mind you're like, I would rather throw myself face first through a play class window than go to a custom party on a Thursday night for any number of reasons, right?

Martha Beck

Like, perfectly nice person. You do not want to go to this thing, but you know, it would be meaningful to her. You know, it would therefore be meaningful to the husband who might have to deal with some flak. Who knows? Like back channel.

If you say yada, yada, yada, but you really don't want to go, what do you say? I would say something like, what else could we do together? This actually is a really effective thing when you're raising a child. If you just say no, it leaves them with no options. They don't know what to do with their feelings, and none of us ever really grows up.

Boyd Varty

So when somebody says that, you say, ah, what else could we do together? If you love them and you care about them, you want to do something with them. It's just not that. If you don't want to be around them at all, it's time to say no to the costume party and get rid of those people. Not get rid of them, but, you know, cut them loose.

So when I started asking people to do things with me that I wanted to do, everybody's life got better. I had so much fun, and I didn't have all the awful things where I was pretending to have fun when I wasn't. Could you give an example of just what that looks like? Somebody comes to you and they're like, let's do a, or please do a. And you're like, in your mind and body, I don't really want to do a.

Martha Beck

What might be an example could be made up. No, it doesn't have to be made up. I've been actually working this through. Have you interviewed Liz Gilbert? I have.

It's been a few years. We're going to talk again. It's so much fun. Anyway, we've been trying to figure out how to do live events, and our schedules haven't jived very much. And we had the same speaking agent, and there was some conflict over that, and I finally had to just go to her and say, I don't think it works for us to have the same speaking agent when we go and we're creating events together, it was kind of hard to say that because we both really love this agent, but Liz and she are really, really close, so I thought it might upset her, and maybe it did, but the fact is, it was true.

Boyd Varty

And so she didn't bat an eye. She just said, whatever makes it more fun and gives us more ease when we're together. Great. We want our friendship to be as much fun, as joyful as it can be. So that was the track, and it was a little awkward, but it worked last time.

Martha Beck

I won't beat this dead horse any further, but any other language that you find helpful for people who have trouble saying no. Is there any starter language where you're like, try this on for size? For some reason, when you said any other language, I literally thought of Chinese. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly.

Just respond in a different language. Right? I don't speak language.

Boyd Varty

I remember the most awkward. Oh, Tim. When I was freaking out about my family and my sexual abuse and everything, my mother called me and said, we hadn't seen you for a while. We'd really like. We miss you.

And I had just taken this pledge, and I said to her, I miss the concept of having parents. Oh, wow. Because it was the truest thing I could say. Whoa. Return volley strong.

Martha Beck

Yeah. But I didn't want to hurt her. I just. I was. I had to tell the truth because that light was still, like, right there, and I hadn't gotten any experience being skillful.

Boyd Varty

Here's another bit of language. Know what you really know and feel what you really feel. So for me, it might be something like, ugh, you know what? Lunch sounds great. Breakfast is just too early for me.

I'd be miserable. That's just the truth. I'm not being a victim. I'm just telling them the truth. I'm not a morning person.

So you sort of claim your right to joy, and you make it really clear that you want them to have joy, and you expect yourself to have joy. And no one has to keep secrets or cross boundaries that are hurtful in order to make the other person feel good. It's not true. And a relationship built on that, it isn't a real relationship. It'll fall apart.

There's so much manipulation going on where people are pretending to do things that each other like, and both of them are miserable.

Martha Beck

Yeah, there was a piece, and I think it was McSweeney's. Well, there was a tweet, and then there was an actual written piece that resembled this. But it said, being an adult. This was a tweet. I wish I had the attribution.

Being an adult is saying, so sorry for getting back to you so late, over and over again until both of you die. Something like that. And sorry for the delayed response. I like the cartoon where the guy is holding the phone and going, what about never does never work for you? Yeah, the New Yorker.

That's amazing piece. So when there is someone where you're like, you know what? This is just not a relationship I want in my life. How do you break up with those people? You do what you really want to do.

Boyd Varty

Like, I remember I had one friend, she wanted to come stay with me. I didn't want her to come. And I remember saying, let me think about it. And then we had a conversation later. She was very, very upset.

And she said, you paused and you had to think about it. And we were friends. And like. And I said, yeah, that's. Sometimes I have to think about it.

And she said, well, is it that you had something else going on or did you really not want me there? And I was, like, pinned to the wall. And it was physically painful, to speak the truth, but it would have been more painful not to. So I said, yeah, I really, I wasn't in a place where our energies were going to work well together. I just did not.

I feel like it would be good for either one of us after a while, a few of those, and they'll break up with you, I promise you. Just tell the truth and people go away.

That's joy. All right, so I am going to ask you about anxiety. I want to ask quite a few questions about that before we get to that. So you had some Mandarin pop up. I feel like we should give people a little bit of context.

Martha Beck

So you've lived in Asia, you've studied not just east asian languages, but also philosophies. This is just a sidebar that I thought you might find entertaining, which is, I was in Greece many, many, many years ago, and when something is completely foreign, alien, unintelligible in English, you say, wow, it's all Greek to me. And then I realized, well, if you're a greek person, in Greek, you see something you don't understand. You can't say, it's all Greek to me because that's your native language. So what do you guys say?

And they're like, oh, yeah, good question. Which is, it's all Chinese to me. So if you're Greek, it's all Chinese to me. Which I thought was great. That's fabulous.

How has your experience with Asia, asian languages philosophies influenced who you are, what you do, let's just say in a coaching capacity. Yeah, this was before I had kids or any of the other stuff happened. I went over and spent a year studying Chinese at a research center in Singapore. And then I worked in Japan and studied that for a while. And I wasn't particularly interested at the time in the philosophy, in the deeper wisdom of the asian cultures.

Boyd Varty

I just saw people offering oranges at little stands on the road and thought, oh, that's weird. I went back to Harvard. So I did my junior year in Singapore and I went back to Harvard. And I remember sitting in classes and thinking, why do people assume so much? You just assume so much.

Like there's this edifice of stuff you believe that I see no evidence for. And as I went on studying the languages and philosophies of Asia, they have a reverse idea of perfection. So in the monotheistic western religions, you are born imperfect. You're an imperfect, original, sinning mess. And your job is to get better and better and more godlike.

Until you can be godlike, you have to get better and better and learn more and more. In Asia, the idea is you're formed completely perfect, and you accrue illusions as you grow up. So a baby comes in completely innocent and sees that people react nicely when the baby smiles, and they don't like it when the baby cries. And suddenly they start betraying themselves by smiling when they want to cry. That's the dawn of the loss of integrity, and everyone does it.

We're a social species. But in Asia, when you set out to be free from suffering, you drop your illusions. So like the illusion, I should be cheerful all the time. If it causes suffering, it has to go in the Tao Te ching, my very favorite book. It says, in the pursuit of knowledge, every day something is added.

In the pursuit of enlightenment of a Tao, every day something is dropped, so you know less and less until you arrive at non action. And when nothing is done, nothing remains undone. I remember thinking, that is so cool, but I don't know why. And yeah, that was even before the white light and everything. I was already sort of on that path, and now everything appears to me to be illusion.

All my thoughts are illusion, and truth is something that I can feel or participate in as consciousness. But I've just been dropping and dropping and dropping my illusions, and I try to do that every day. So we've been jointly baking a nice conversational cake. I just want to put a little icing on top, and then we're going to segue to anxiety, and then we're going to make, who knows, meringue pie or a key lime pie, maybe a carrot cake. Perhaps out of anxiety.

You would probably go on the great british baking show and out bake everyone in Britain. Well, you know, sometimes when kids go through, or people go through culinary school and they're trying to decide on the sweet or the savory path. So do you become a chef, or are you going to become a pastry chef? Sweet or savory? And for people who are having a tough time deciding, I remember hearing when I was working on four hour chef, someone who was involved in one of these very, very well known schools said, well, one question we sometimes ask these students is, do you fold your socks?

Martha Beck

Do you have them in neat rows in a shelf? If so, maybe sweet and baking is for you because it's so OCD friendly and precision oriented. So, yes, based on that, at least, I think I would really enjoy. I would find baking very satisfying. I love that.

Boyd Varty

I want to eat what you bake. You know, there may be a day. So the first is a story that I would love you to tell. And tell me if this is enough of a prompt. So it's a story of an audience.

Martha Beck

You're on stage. Are you comfortable? This is a question. Could you tell this, please? I do this over and over.

Boyd Varty

I speak in various places, ballrooms and theaters and places. And I'll be talking about how to do better at work, whatever I've been hired to talk about. And right in the middle, I'll stop and say, wait, wait, is everyone comfortable? And they all look at me as if I'm crazy. I say, no, seriously, are you really comfortable?

And they start to say, yes, we're fine. Go on. I'm like, no, I mean it. Are you really comfortable? And the whole audience will get quite angry.

Yes, we're comfortable. Just talk. And then I ask them, okay, so now answer this question. If you were home alone in your bedroom right now, how many of you would be sitting in exactly the position you're in at this moment? And maybe one hand goes up in a room full of hundreds of people.

And then I say to them, why would you be in a different position? And they literally have to think. And then it comes to them after about 5 seconds, this isn't comfortable. And then I say, it's okay that you're not comfortable, because we can handle, we're tough, we're a tough species. We're tolerating discomfort so we can be together in this way.

But I do have a problem with the fact that you all just looked me in the eye in clear daylight and repeatedly lied to me. And you thought you were telling the truth, but you knew you were lying. And they're like, what? What? And like, your body is telling you the truth.

That's how cut off we are from our bodies. And that's the first thing you ask yourself when you need to know the truth is, am I comfortable? That'll give you everything else the next. That would be the icing. And there's the cherry on top.

Martha Beck

I'd love for you to expand on a question, because these words will be words people recognize, but I think the context. I would like to hear more about the context. What do you want versus what do you yearn for? And that may not be the exact wording that you use. No, it is.

Okay. What is the significance of that question? It's interesting that you made the comment about, is it the exact language? That's one of the few places where I'm very exacting about language, because somehow we divide that conceptually when we use language. I ask people what they want.

Boyd Varty

They make me a list of things. A better job, better relationship, a better car, whatever. And then I say, when you wake up at night and it's dark and there's no one around, what do you yearn for? And the list is completely different, and it's very short. And almost everyone lists the same.

Peace, belonging, freedom, love, happiness. It's kind of it. Everybody wants them. And all the lists of things they want, those are all. I call it the difference between your social self and your essential self.

The essential self yearns. The social self wants. You've gotten a lot of stuff you wanted. It doesn't make you happy. Yeah.

Nice. It's true. But if you get what you yearn for, it actually does make you happy. I can't resist the bait here. So when you have something like a car.

Martha Beck

Right. Okay. So and so wants, you know, the newest Tesla model. So and so wants the XYz car. It's very cleanly discreet in the sense that it costs $88,000.

I can finance it for this much a month. Therefore, I know how much I need to work to earn a bonus to get this, to do that. It's actionable in a convenient way. Kind of like the drunk guy looking for his keys under the lamp at night, even though he knows it's in the bar somewhere. Because that's where the light is.

How do you help people? And this might not be the right way to phrase it, but to actualize something like peace or belonging, which, at least at face value, is much more amorphous. I mean, it's a thing that people know, but it's not as easy to slice and dice and then maybe work backwards from, like, the new Tesla. It's not as cognitive, it's not analytical, because it's not physical, so it's not measurable. Our particular science doesn't believe that it exists, even though we all want it.

Boyd Varty

So, a couple of things. The first thing, it's something I call jumping the tracks. And it's jumping the tracks between seeing your life in purely physical terms and then opening your mind to the possibility of all non physical realities. And as we know from physics, all physical things are ultimately not physical. So that's the first thing, is to say, I live in a world that is not just made up of objects.

I live in a world where I deal in energies. When you track the joy through your body, it is a physical sensation, but it's also an energy. So then you start looking for the energies that bring you the essence of what you yearn for. And I've found the simplest exercise, and I've been doing it with people since the pandemic to calm people down. Speaking of anxiety, I'd love to do it just a little bit.

Martha Beck

Yes, I would love to. For sure. Simple. So, I have you write down whatever your concerns are, then tell me, honest to goodness, three things you love to taste. Okay.

You only go for it, or I guess, should I write down. I should just tell me. I mean, you can write them if you want. Cheesecake, really thick frosting, for sure. I would say barbecue brisket would be there.

And then I would say really cold, slightly sweetened iced tea on a really hot day. Ooh. Okay, so, as you say that, can you remember the sensation of tasting those three things? So focus your attention on the actual experience of the taste. Now, tell me three things you love to hear.

Definitely not leaf blowers. Those fucking things are everywhere here. They're everywhere in Texas. I don't know what it is with the compulsive of leaf blowing. All right, so that's.

That's just a bit of a mini rant. Based on this morning. You and I are very much like. What are these people doing? It's like, I think there's a racket where they, like.

It's like Tuesday, they blow the leaves to one side and then Wednesday, they blow the leaves back to the other side. It doesn't make any sense, but it blows. It blows, right? It blows. Exactly.

All right, so three sounds. Yeah. Three things to hear. I would say acoustic guitar. So instrumental, say, like classical guitar, like Segovia, that type of guitar I find really soothing.

I find. What else do I like to hear? I'm thinking of all sorts of obscene things. Go for it. Very responsive.

Female partner, let's call it. Certainly would be high on the list. And then the sound of my dog, Molly, when I get home and she's so happy to see me, she's just doing porpoise calls and happiness whines left and right. I'd say those are three that come to mind. Okay, so the task here is you're going to try to hold all these sensations in your memory.

Boyd Varty

You're going to activate them all at once. So you've got cheesecake, you've got the tea, you've got the brisket, you've got the dog, you've got the. If you have a drug that can help me to get all of these things felt at the same time I do, I will be first in line. All right, so I'm trying to hold all of these things. That's the challenge.

And the left side of the brain, I'll give you a hint. Can't do it. So it's forcing you to use the right side of your brain more than you usually do. So maybe you can't remember all of them, but, like cheesecake, the guitar, whatever it is, now we're going to go through the other senses. You know, we are.

What are three things you love to feel with your skin? Feel with my skin or with, you know, your. Can you feel anything without me? Yeah, I did. Didn't foresee this conversation going here this morning, but I'm into it.

Martha Beck

Yeah. Got it, got it. All right, so I would say my skin textures. Yeah, for sure. A very, very saturated epsom salt bath where there's almost like a silky residue when you move around.

That would be one another. I'll try to keep this family friendly for the moment. Another would be definitely dog kisses, for sure. That's super high. And then I would say hot stone massage with a small amount of oil.

Fantastic. So those would be three. Okay, so now we're going to do three things. Non food that you love to smell. Non food.

I would say there's a tree. I don't know how to pronounce this word, actually. It's called kananga in Spanish. Sometimes but alangalang, the y l a n g or whatever, however that's pronounced, that particular tree. The scent of the flowers on that tree.

Second would be, I'm really on a dog kick. I think partially because I'm getting a second dog this summer. Just that puppy smell. Yeah, yeah, yeah. True.

With babies too. A lot of people tell me the smell of dogs feet is one of their favorite things. Oh, weird. I've never tried. I know, right?

Boyd Varty

I've never even smelled a dog's. I haven't gone for the feet, but I think we need to try. We need to go take that step. Yeah, yeah. I'm more of, like, a softier smelling guy with the pups, but then there's, like, puppy breath thing.

Martha Beck

So let's just say puppies more in general. So it's two. Is that two? And. Yeah.

And then I would say non food number three would be the smell of cedar saunas. Nice cedar. Okay. One sense to go. Three things you love to see.

Three things I love to see. Snow covered mountains dotted with trees. I would say babies laughing, kids laughing. Just got a nice dose of that with my friend's family over the last few days. And then just to showcase my OCD, when things are just, like, really lined up nicely, say, like a bookshelf or stacks of things, perfectly parallel, if there's a certain uniformity or symmetry, maybe if I want to give it a highfalutin label and sound fancy, I'll say symmetry.

Different types of symmetry. Okay, so now your job, and as you've been thinking of these things, because there are so many of them, and they're activating the parts of your brain that are sensory, and that's taking you away from the analytical, cognitive part that's so overdeveloped in most people these days, because everything we do develops it more and more. So now your job to learn to be happy is vividly imagine a scene with as many of these components as you can put together. So imagine sitting in a perfectly symmetrical, gorgeous cedar sauna on a snowy mountain, looking out. You've got your dog on one side, you've got a response.

Female, responsive, female on the other. You've got cheesecake. You've got, like, someone's playing the guitar. I have a guitar player with a blindfold playing spanish guitar. Just pretend it's not here.

Boyd Varty

And you start to drop in to a space that you've created in your mind, but not the part of your mind that we talk about as mind. It's the sensory experience of being human. Right? The sensory over spreadsheet. And in.

Yes. As you start to go into that, what you're doing is you're accessing the part of you that is capable of feeling the things you yearn for, because everything we actually yearn for is a feeling state. And you can start with these very simple, small things. When I have somebody do this, I have people do this on Zoom calls and put it in the chat, and hundreds of words are going by of different beautiful things. And I'll start by saying, how nervous, anxious, and depressed are you?

They give me a number from one to ten. Everybody's nervous and depressed. After they do this for a while, and everybody's looking at everyone else's delights, everybody is in a completely different energy state. And that is how you get to the things you yearn for. You jump the tracks from the way we're taught to think to a sensory based, experiential way of thinking, which is, for me, more real.

Martha Beck

And so jumping the tracks, does that refer to doing this exercise as an example, establishing this emotional landmark? Like, okay, remember this feeling? You're in the sauna, the snowcapped peaks, the dog, this, the that. Remember this? And this is now your sort of homing direction from a sensory perspective.

Boyd Varty

It's a track. Yeah. And it may just be the side of the rhinoceros's toe. It's very likely you've been on the path of not there for so long, you don't know what the real, for me, that white light thing was. The whole track.

Bam. I could not miss it after that experience. But what you just did is an experience of moving into that territory and seeing, sort of, you feel the shape of it or that I end up having difficulty describing it in words because it's not a verbal experience. And the fact that it's not a verbal experience is part of the reason it can fulfill your yearning, and it's also part of the reason you've never gone there. Stephen Hayes, who founded act therapy, he set out to figure out why humans commit suicide, and no other animal seems to deliberately do that.

And his answer is language. We're the only species that can create a reality with words in our minds that is so terrifying that an unknown future is worse than the fear of death. If you stop thinking in terms of language and logic, which we call that thinking intelligence. It's just, it's like a pair of scissors. It's good for certain tasks.

It's not great when you need to stay warm, right, when you jump the tracks into your entire nervous system, which is all part of it's not disconnected from the brain. Then you're in the territory where you can actually experience joy. I want to go to two places. One is going to be a complete non sequitur, but. But just for purposes of trivia, I want to tell people something about rhinos.

Martha Beck

So you mentioned rhinos in the toe of the rhino. Part of the reason, as you alluded to, rhinos are a good starter animal for tracking, at least in South Africa, where you and I were in the Sabi sands reserve at different times with landolozzi, which, coincidentally, means the protector of all things. I believe it's in Zulu, but it has this large front toe you can imagine, like the edge of your big toe toenail, and then there are these two side toes. And, I mean, it just goes back to Pangea, and it raises all sorts of great questions, but it's so weird. So there is an order called perissodactyla, which is an order of ungulates, so you could think elk, deer, etcetera.

The order includes about 17 living species divided into three families. You have equidae, which comes back to the equine therapy, maybe at some point, horses, asses and zebras, rhinos and tapirs, which you find in South America. So those are all related, which is pretty wild to think about. Rhinos, tapirs, and, say, zebras or horses. But if you look at the tracks, I mean, there are some similarities.

So I just wanted to mention that briefly, because it was just. I needed to get out of my head. And then the second is related to book you mentioned earlier, the Taota ching. And I was wondering if you could speak to Stephen Mitchell and Byron Cady in what you have learned from them. It could be related to integrity.

It could be related to other things, but what have you modeled from them. Or learned from them? Speaking of the concept of having parents, I mean, they're friends more than parents, but I really do feel like they've kind of reparented me with their books. I read Steven's version of the Tao te Ching right around the time I had the white light experience. That's when it was first published.

Boyd Varty

And it was such an intense. It was like my nervous system caught fire when I read that version. And I'd read other versions, and they weren't. They didn't float my boat as much, but there was so much energy in my body that I felt like I was going to literally physically explode. And I drove to a place where I knew I could hike to a waterfall.

Martha Beck

Oh, they're going to say, safely explode. Got to hike to. I literally ran along this mountain path to this large ish waterfall. Ran under the waterfall and just stood there. And then the cold water beating down on the equaled the sort of heat that was rising.

Boyd Varty

I mean, my connection to that book was so overwhelming, and I know it's been powerful for a lot of people. So I memorized it, took it around, gave it to everyone I knew. Then I was on a book tour, and I saw this book by a woman named Byron Cady. And it said, with a foreword by Stephen Mitchell, never would have looked at it if I hadn't seen that. And then I found out on the leaf, on the book leaf, that they were married.

And I was like, wow, okay, now I'm interested. So I bought the book, got on a plane, read the book, and she had a series of four questions, which are very simple. Think of a thought that makes you upset. Is it true? Can you know that it's true?

What happens when you think it? Who would you be without it? It seemed very, very simple. And I applied it. I started applying it, and there on the plane, I had an injury on my knee.

And my thought was, I'm mad at my knee because it won't let me work out. And Katie has this way of reversing everything that's causing you suffering. After reading her stuff and doing her work forever, I actually believe that the direct verbal opposite of your worst fear is your next step toward enlightenment. I truly believe that. Okay, can you say that one more time?

Martha Beck

So, I have some familiarity with your workshops and worksheets. And just for people who want to find this, they can find the work. By Byron Katie online of Byron Katie. And you can go online and download free things. She's very generous with it.

Could you say that one more time? Because this seems like an. It can sound odd if you haven't been doing the work for a long time, but this is what I've realized. The exact verbal opposite of my worst fear. So, the opposite.

Boyd Varty

Take your worst fear. Find the direct opposite of that. That is your next step toward enlightenment. So, for example, when I wrote my book about Mormons, and I said to the publisher, don't tell anyone until it's published. And they said, you're afraid of the Mormons.

How cute. Then the galleys went out, and I started getting calls from New York. Why didn't you tell us? These people are insane. We're all gonna die.

You mess with a religion, you get some weird responses. So I'm on this. This is a different time. I'm on this plane again, and I'm thinking, something terrible is gonna happen to me because I wrote that book. Something terrible is gonna happen to me because I wrote that book.

And this thought just dogged me. So I did Byron Cady's work on it, and she picks it apart for you, and then you get the reverse. And the reverse of my worst fear here was, I'm going to happen to something terrible because I wrote that book, instead of something terrible is going to happen to me, it became, I'm going to happen to something terrible. And something in my psyche just went click, click, click, click. And I was no longer afraid.

I thought I might get killed for sure. I just. I knew I was doing what was right for me, period. I never went into a welter over it again. That was just true for me.

So that gives you a little, tiny, weird, backwards taste of the way Byron Cady's work affects you when you do it. And she was doing her work, and some people who were into it said to Stephen Mitchell, a great translator and writer, you've got to write a book about this woman. And he said, no. And they said, no. You really, really have to.

And he's like, I hate gurus. I don't like, oh, my gosh, she lives in California. Stephen is very picky. Very picky. He said, all right, I'll go to Barstow, where she lives.

She wasn't living in Barstow anymore. She just had lived there. She was living in LA. But he said, she will meet me in Barstow, and we will sit down on the floor, and we will look into each other's eyes for an hour, and then I will tell you whether I will write her book or not. So the way I tell the story, which is not far off the truth, but it's my story, not theirs.

But they went to Barstow. And Katie was thinking, why does he want to go to Barstow? And they sat in a hotel, I believe they sat on the floor, knee to knee, and they looked into each other's eyes without speaking for an hour. And then they got married. That's not quite right.

But he said to Katie, I've got to go back to New York now. And she just said, why would you go back to New York? He said, because I live there. And she was like, so? And he said, well, I have to go deal with my affairs.

And she said, but you're the only person I've ever met who's of my species.

And they talk about two kids in love in their eighties, they are in love with life, in love with each other, in love with the world, in love with death itself, like in love with everything. And their work has just mothered and fathered me through my life, and they've done it themselves as people now. So I love them dearly. I encourage people to check out the work, for sure. And I have a, I guess, technical question about the opposite that you landed on.

Martha Beck

So I am going to happen to something terrible because of my book. Is that an example of a turnaround and could you have ended up on a different version? For instance, something wonderful is going to happen to me because of my book, or some alternate. There could have been a number of varieties. Did that happen to be the one that of several resonated with you?

Boyd Varty

Yeah, that was the one that really hit the gong in my mind. But I did have several, and very often you can come up with a bunch of them, and some of them are just plain wrong. They don't feel right at all. Some of them are okay, but it's not changing my life. Like, nothing terrible is going to happen to me.

Because I wrote this book, I thought, I don't believe that. And actually, terrible things did happen to me. Death wasn't one of them, but some things are going to happen to me for sure. So maybe if I hadn't believed it, it wouldn't have happened, but it did. So that one didn't work.

Wonderful things are going to happen to me because I wrote that book. I did think that one seemed truer, and it ended up being truer. I just couldn't know what was going to happen. And then I got often, for me, it's the one that's strange and not grammatically normal that will break the construct in my mind, because I think of the strange verbiage and it sort of breaks open an assumption, and I'm in that space of don't know, mind. It's a little satori, right.

And it's really fun to take your fears, put them through Byron Cady's questions, and then look at the turnarounds, and it can really, really change your life just sitting in a chair. I have seen people in 15 minutes doing this exercise, live with Katie, reframe 20 years of resentment towards a parent because of x, y and z, and they do a 180, and seemingly it just evaporates or transforms into something completely different with at least some durability. And I expect for some folks, a lot of durability. I've been really impressed, and it's not that this happens to everyone every time. That's not the case.

Martha Beck

But you do see some really remarkable changes. But I'll tell you something, the work itself is incredibly powerful. But the reason people had these massive shifts with Katie in person. This one guy was in a house that was bombed to smithereens in Poland, I think it was in world War two, and his whole family died and a roof beam fell on him, and it was winter. And so he gets up and he's haunted by this moment.

Boyd Varty

And, you know, for 50 years, he's carried this. And she says, can you find the nine year old boy in that scenario with that roof beam on his head, who was just fine? And he thinks for, like, literally 2 seconds and goes, oh, yeah. And things like this happened around Katie all the time. And the reason is that she has jumped the tracks.

And to understand why it's so powerful to do the work with her, you have to jump the tracks. You have to start believing that there's an energetic field that is connecting all of us, and you can feel people's energy. I know I start to sound all new age and Steven wants to slap me in the face. He doesn't. He never would.

But he gets very grumpy with me. I don't believe any of that stuff. He would stare at you for an hour very intensely. He's like, I don't believe any of that stuff. It's just phony.

And I'm like, explain this, Stephen. And I show him something Katie's done. He just laughs and says, all right, I can't explain that, but it's really nice. He's such a super hardcore analytical. He doesn't believe anything because everything can be disproven.

And she is a field of transformation. She just is. She really is a different species. It's just a different thing. And I'm not making any claims.

Martha Beck

I'm not deifying her. She just, she's a very. And I mean this in the most complimentary way, but very. I have met a lot of people who claim to be gurus and self helpers and everything, and she's the only one. I've spent quite a lot of time around her.

Boyd Varty

I have never seen any reason to disbelieve what she says about the fact that she lives in perpetual joy. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's pretty wild to see her in action. And I have not spent a lot of time with her, but I spent a few days in a workshop with her.

Martha Beck

And you're just like, is this an act? Does she? Or did she go home and just, like, yell on the phone and you just. At least I was not able to see any deviation. I did not see any deviation.

I've never seen it. And I've been around her when she's exhausted, when she's sick, when she's jet lagged. She's never in psychological suffering ever, as far as I've seen. So let's chat about another. Great.

For a second, Goethe. So the german writer, innovator, polymath of every possible variety. I'm wondering what you find most striking about gutta, but there are a couple of quotes that popped up that I think may resonate with you, that I think you've mentioned in conversations before. But when you trust yourself, you will know how to live. That's one another.

Never hurry, never cease. That's one I've heard permutations of in Buddhism as well. Right? No hurry, no pause. All these things which I quite like, any others that come to mind or any aspects from Goethe himself or anything.

I mean, it doesn't need to be specifically to. We can meander as we want to meander. I love the stuff about self trust. I'm blanking, actually, which I rarely do. All I can think about is Faust now, and you know how he talks about the bargain with the devil?

Boyd Varty

I think we all make a bargain with the devil metaphorically, because we're forced to confront the question, will we do what it takes to be admired and approved of by humans, or will we follow the soul? Will we trust ourselves, or will we trust what other people want us to be? So the Faustian bargain is the only thing that's really coming to mind right now. Is goethe a particular favorite of yours? I have a collection of aphorisms.

Martha Beck

And lived in Berlin for a period of time, became really infatuated by Goethe just because. And for those wondering what the hell we're talking about, lots of different pronunciations in English, but g o e t h e, there's the Goethe institute. And certainly, I don't know if it'd be fair to call him the Shakespeare plus of Germany, but that's one way to think about. I know why you're into him. Tell me.

Boyd Varty

He's just like you. He's just like me? Yeah. I mean, there aren't many people bald and handsome. There really aren't.

And I love the way you're so incredibly generous with all your life, hacks and everything, but I'm like, okay, so you can learn twelve sentences and then know a language. Not everybody can. You can learn the tango and be an argentine champion. Not everybody can. But you are kind of a freak, you gotta admit that, because you don't just pick up hobbies, you pick up hobbies and then become a japanese translator.

Like, it's kind of insane, the kind of equipment you were born with. And it must be a heavy burden in some ways, and quite lonely, because as much as you try to help people be the same, they probably rarely are. And I think Goethe's life might have been similar. You are America's Goethe. Oh, wow.

There you go. Thank you. I appreciate that. That is high praise, I would say, for a multitude of reasons. Definitely feeling lonely.

Martha Beck

I mean, that's something I'm familiar with for sure. I do have different hardware. Id say that it manifests in maybe unpredictable ways. I did a bunch of cognitive assessments recently, because thats the kind of thing that I do. And for instance, for digit recall, just doing five and six digit recall, when I dont have the ability, I dont have the time to use a crutch of, say, a mnemonic.

I am terrible. Im like lowest decile in the US for sure. Like bottom 10%. But then there are other things like the Stroop test, where you're looking at say the word red, but it's displayed in green, and you have to either indicate red or green, depending on some parameter. And it's very fast.

Stroop test. I'm like, top 1%. I have no idea why. I don't know what that translates to. And it kind of goes on and on.

There are super abilities and super weaknesses. Oh, tell me, this is fascinating. Well, I mean, they're very, in my experience, often right side by side. They're very adjacent, right. So I would say I can.

You can see how this would cut both ways. I can walk into a room. I was doing a remodel at one point, for instance, and I'd never seen this entire room built. And I walked in and there was a mirror 10ft away, and I said, it's an 8th of an inch too far to the left. Talking about symmetry, I was like, it's an 8th of an inch too far to the left.

And they're like, what? I was like, yeah, yeah. It's not centered. And they went over and measured it, and lo and behold, within a fraction of a second, I was like, yeah, that's off. Wow.

You can see how that would drive me fucking bananas too. It would be hard to live in the world. Very monkish. Beauty is such a what'd I say? It's so gratifying to me that it's.

Boyd Varty

Its own excuse for being. It's its own excuse for being. So when there is something that lazily violates beauty, it bugs the shit out of me, and I'm not proud of that. I'm not saying it is enabling. Most of the time, I would say it is distracting.

Martha Beck

At worst, it would be disabling. Yeah. But it enables me to do certain things. Right. Like, I can draw the floor plan of almost any restaurant I've ever been in.

Doesn't matter if it's once, twice, if I've only been there for five minutes, that's just something I can do. And then there are a lot of things that normal people can do that I just seem unable to do in terms of. Let's just say on one hand, I have great creative capacity because I will ruminate. On the other hand, that same rumination can manifest as lifelong onset insomnia. Oh, yes.

Boyd Varty

Yes. I'm in treatment for this right now. I just found someone. Yeah. Oh, wow.

Martha Beck

All right, so it goes both ways. And I will say there are examples where I can't teach someone to replicate what I've done. There are, thankfully, more examples of where I can help someone actually get beyond where I arrived after x point in time. Mostly because I would say the vast majority of teaching has a lot of fat on it, and logical sequences aren't particularly prevalent, and old methods persist for a really long time. So, I mean, the way that we, as an example, teach languages, since you mentioned languages, the way we teach languages in most schools is the equivalent of saying, okay, you want to learn how to ski and you're excited to learn how to ski.

Great. We're going to have you take a six month avalanche course, and they're going to memorize meteorological tapes and historical weather patterns for the first six months. Who is going to want to do that? Nobody. Everyone's going to drop out.

Tim Ferriss

Maybe there are one or two people. Who survive, and then they get called good at languages. That's a failure of the method, not a failure of the student. Hundred percent. Right.

And then. So if I'm able to suffer through that and then break it down, rearrange it, remove 90% of it, then I can teach people to go further than I did in a lot of ways. However, then I have an unusual ability to mimic. I just do. And for whatever reason, even though I've done audiological exams, because I like to know what I'm dealing with, I do not seem to have any greater range, any greater sensitivity than the average person.

Martha Beck

But my brain, for whatever reason, interprets these sounds and signals. And I can mimic accents, I can mimic tones, I can do these things. I don't know why, but that does give me an advantage. So have you ever been given a word for your neurodivergence? No.

And I'm grateful in the sense that I was not of a generation where, say, overprescription was common or even really existent for things that didn't have labels, constellations of symptoms or characteristics that didn't have labels until later. Because I forgot. Sure would have been medicated to the gills. And I'm not saying there is a place for medication, but I would have been given everything under the sun. I mean, I was hyperactive, rambunctious, bouncing all over the place, refused to learn the Alphabet for a while, and then I was stupid, and then I was going to be held back.

And, I mean, I would have been just saturated with pharmaceuticals. Oh, my God. So, no, I haven't been given. I have not been given a word. Is there a good word that comes to mind?

Boyd Varty

I don't know. I mean, my oldest child just self identified as autistic. So I went in and looked at all the symptoms and I'm like, oh, that's what's been wrong with me this whole time. I truly believe. I believe this thing about destiny.

And I remember thinking, even as a child, if my destiny is to go to the top of, climb to the top of Everest and someone else's destiny is dive to the bottom of the Mariana trench, the equipment that I need would actually make them unable to. To fulfill their mission. Like, if I'm climbing, that would not be good in diving. And I couldn't haul an aquatic set of tools up Everest. So I thought, all right, there are things I wish I could do that I can't and things I can do, I don't know, I just can do them.

And it's really easy for me and weirdly easy. And I just thought, well, this must be in some way a description of what I'm meant to do with my life. I remember thinking that when I was eight or nine years old, and I look at you and you've done so many things that what do you do if you're good at dancing? You become a champion. Yay.

You can do that. But your brain is so different, and I hope they never medicate it unless it's something that makes you happier. But I am really curious about your brain because it's clearly, I actually think the future of our species depends on people who are neurodivergent in ways that make them unable to fit the culture that western colonizers created. The weird cultures. Right?

And that's an oversimplification. And there are many, many cultures, but the overall culture that we have of hierarchical capitalism, whatever, is destroying the planet and teaching people languages by putting them in avalanche courses. And then there are people who just will not, because their brains work differently. And you've just got the most unusual brain I've ever seen. Oh, thank you.

Martha Beck

I think about this a lot, but it's like, I don't know if I want to paint this broadly, but superpowers come with costs always, or just powers. Powers come with weaknesses. It's the two sides of the same coin come in many different varieties. And so I think that, for instance, a lot of my abilities almost certainly would not exist without also a propensity towards depression, a propensity towards anxiety and hypervigilance. And there are times, certainly, when I would trade at all for the ability to get to sleep easily, the ability to look at the glass as half full instead of half empty.

I mean, there are times that I'm like, you know what? I'm not sure right now. If someone was like, here's your list of abilities and disabilities. And if you strike out one, you have to strike out something from the other column. Erase a number of things arrived at a good place.

I feel that a number of recent experiments have been particularly interesting, but I'd love to hear from you. And this stuck out. This is in some prep notes, and I'd like you to take this wherever you would like to take it. But this is a line. I'm just going to use it as a prompt.

So the opposite of anxiety isn't calm, it's creativity. I like that. I've never heard it before, but there's part of me that's like, even without dissecting it, it makes some sense to me. Could you elaborate on that, please? I came to this conclusion.

Boyd Varty

I was noticing this huge spike in all my clients of anxiety, and I was reading about this massive. Mostly in the pandemic, but anxiety just went bananas, and it didn't come down when things eased a little bit. And at the same time, I got to be friends with Jill Bolte Taylor, the woman who had the left hemisphere stroke when she was a Harvard neuroanatomist. It was the first Ted talk to go viral, and she lost all language and analytical cognition while her left hemisphere was offline. It took her eight years to rebuild her brain, but she experienced things with only the right hemisphere that she'd never experienced before.

This incredible joy, bliss, awe, the feeling of being completely a field of energy, no barriers between physical objects. It was a very different view of the world. If she hadn't been a neuroanatomist, she probably would be sitting in a vegetating somewhere. But fortunately, she was among people who knew how to help her rebuild. So now she goes around telling people, we're overusing the left hemispheres of our brains.

We need to be able to access the right. And so I'd been talking to her about this endlessly. I love talking to her. And I was reading a lot of brain science. Always have, always will.

And I noticed that there were tons of studies that showed that the moment someone is even slightly stressed, their creativity goes to shit. Like, they do these creative tests, and then they say, we'll pay you $5 if you get the answer. Instead of motivating them, they get that little bit of anxiety. Can't do it. All these studies showing that little kids happily create things and adults can't do the same things, why?

It always boils down to social anxiety. So there's this spaghetti and marshmallow test. Have you heard of it? This is a game of height, right? Yeah.

You're trying to build the tallest tower possible using uncooked spaghetti, a marshmallow, some string, and some tape. And they gave this problem to a whole bunch of engineers, groups of MBA students, groups of lawyers. All these people, they all had similar results. Then they gave it to a group of five year olds who won by a country mile. Five year olds do better by far at so many creative tests.

And why do they stop doing well as they get older? It boils down to socialization and social anxiety. So then I looked at the brain structures, and what Jill told me was, you basically have two brains. They're symmetrical, but they don't work the same. The left hemisphere has this alarm signal that goes into fear, and then immediately, the brain starts to.

The left hemisphere starts to try to control whatever's going wrong, whatever makes you afraid, and telling verbal stories about it. Problem is, the verbal stories that you tell feed back into the amygdala and as environmental realities. So if I'm afraid something's going to jump at me from the dark, it's as if something really is going to jump at me from the dark. So when I say I may have a fatal illness, there's no evidence, but I can literally go into a panic over that. Because of language, the left hemisphere is also unable or unwilling to acknowledge that the right hemisphere's perspective exists at all.

Like if people have a right hemisphere stroke and they're only in the left hemisphere, and you tell them to draw a clock, they'll draw the side of the clock from twelve to six and they'll say, that's finished. And there's nothing wrong with their eyes. They will not acknowledge anything the right brain is observing. When Jill only had a right brain, zero anxiety, zero time, zero physical reality, really? On the right side, the amygdala is afraid.

Ah, but it starts to get curious. So you said something about curiosity really early on in this interview, and I was like, that's the trick. Because if something scares you, if you go to control, you're in anxiety. If you go to curiosity, my mind is open. I have no pre assumptions and I want to know what this is about.

Instead of anxiety, you get creativity. So it depends which side and one side shuts off the other, so it toggles. So when I asked you to talk about these things that you were sensing, the things you love, with all five senses, you had to go into the right hemisphere of the brain and it had to shut down the part of the brain that produces anxiety. That's just the machinery. My premise was anxiety kills creativity.

Maybe creativity kills anxiety. So I started designing things to test that, and it tests amazingly well, even though I haven't seen any direct studies on it yet. If you put together the science around it, it's kind of an unavoidable conclusion. And when I try it myself, oh, my God, the results are ridiculously powerful. What types of exercises do you do for yourself?

Oh, for example, if you were to write your name, Tim, that's cheating because it's short. Tim Ferriss. Are you right handed? I'm right handed. So I would have you write your name, then put your pencil just to the left of your name and write it backwards in mirror writing.

So mirror your signature. Then you put your pencil under your signature and do it upside down. And then upside down and backwards. Leonardo da Vinci used to write in mirror writing. Yeah.

Martha Beck

That is a wild example. If people go back and look at this extensive backwards writing. I used mirror writing constantly as a kid. It was amazing to me that other people couldn't read it. I totally maxed out this IQ test once when I was five because the guy had the test right in front of him and he was giving it to me orally.

Boyd Varty

And I thought, doesn't he know I can read it upside down. I'm fine here. I aced that one anyway. But just because I can read mirror writing. But try doing that and staying anxious at the same time.

Can't do it. Then I decided, okay, I'm going to take January 2023. I'm going to give myself an entire month in lockdown because the systems are. The conditions are very controlled. So this is a good time for an experiment.

The pandemic. I'm going to get up every morning and do things that are purely right. Brain function. So I started with drawing and painting, and I thought, I'll just go from there.

I drew and painted like a maniac. I didn't want to sleep, I didn't want to eat, I didn't want to talk to anyone. I just. I was in pure heaven. And the problem was, at the end of the month, stopping was horrible.

It was like some kind of suicide right there. And now, since I finished writing, I had to get back into my left hemisphere to write the book about it. But as soon as I sent the manuscript away, I just started painting. I get up every morning at like between four and six and paint until eleven, and I'm just like, completely blissed out. Yeah, I find drawing to be a real self.

Martha Beck

And I wanted to be an illustrator for a long time when I was a kid and paid some of my expenses in college by being an illustrator actually illustrated. I did that too, long time ago. And getting back into that, even just going to, you do not need to be good. It's not about being good. It's about using different circuitry, patterning, a different type of awareness.

There are many different ways you could frame it. Gesture drawing, going to live classes where you have nude subjects, posing. And just in case there are a bunch of guys who are like, awesome. No, you're going to get some obese naked dudes, too. Awesome.

So it's dealer's choice. So just realize you got to be there for the drawing. Yes. It's not a singles bar. And the fact, just for people who've never been the way this works, gesture drawing is so called because you're intended to capture at least the essence of a pose.

The pose automatically changes with a timer. The timer could be 1 minute initially, and the model will change his or her position every 60 seconds. And then it might go to two minutes and then to, say, five minutes. But the point I want to make is, part of the beauty of this is when things are changing that quickly. I really like gesture drawing.

Live classes as an introduction because you just cannot. You do not have the space to overanalyze what you're doing. Yes. Whereas if I'm like, draw this apple on a table and you have 2 hours to do it, you can scrutinize and tie yourself up in knots every which way from Sunday. But if it's a pose that changes every 60 seconds, you just have to draw.

In any case, I find it so deeply therapeutic. I used to put Like a silk scarf in front of a fan and TRY to draw it. That sounds like torture. Potential. No, it's heaven.

Boyd Varty

Because I mean, I had this massive depression and anxiety and, you know, from experience, and it's when you do it for the joy of it, the moment you're doing it for money is just work. The reason I went so deeply into it this last January is that I'd always been doing it for the result. For a long time. I was doing it for money. I was doing it to give to someone whatever to teach.

And this was just to activate the right side of my brain. That was it. I would be obsessed with a drawing or a painting. And when it was done, I would just throw it in it. I don't even know where they are anymore.

They just started littering the floor. I was in pig heaven. And it really does. When I'm anxious, this is what I tell myself. Make something.

Make something. You can't stay anxious if you're making something. Yeah, for sure. So two quick comments. The first is for people who want a great reinforcement of this make good art.

Martha Beck

A commencement speech by Neil Gaiman is. I love that. Unbelievably good. And watch the actual delivery. Watch the video.

Because as mellifluous dulcet tones add so much to it, its delivery is so good. And then the second thing I would say is, for those people who are like, what? How am I going to find a naked person in a class? And this, that and the other thing. There are websites and, well, put some in the show notes where you have effectively gesture poses that change and you can set the duration so you can mimic this at home.

You dont need to do a class, but the class asks so much more to it. You're doing it with other people. You're probably standing, you're actually moving your body and getting away from staring at something 18 inches at a fixed location in front of your face. There's so much more to it. What you just described is the way the right hemisphere moves with people in motion, with the body versus the left hemisphere moves, fixed, rigid in space.

Boyd Varty

Got to get this right. And there's just, there's an overemphasis in our entire culture, again, an oversimplification, but there's a huge overemphasis on left hemisphere functions to the point where this. I just, I love this guy, Ian McGill, Christ at Oxford. He says the whole culture functions like someone with a right hemisphere stroke, like we've lost half our brain. And it's the part that includes that nurtures, that finds meaning, that finds joy.

I mean, we have left out the best part. Yeah. Yeah. There are many different ways of knowing, different modes of living. So these types of exercises I've just found so important as certainly joy inducing, but just a critical vitamin.

Martha Beck

And if you're deficient in this, the consequences psychologically are just as dire as if you were deficient in essential amino acid or something like that. So let me ask you in a slightly different context as it relates to. It doesnt need to be specific to anxiety, but im very curious because Boyd had mentioned this in his long list of potential topics that we could discuss. So im wondering if this ties in in any way or if you could just speak to. He put down ifs.

So parts work, internal family systems. Yeah. How have you used that? What is it? What do you find it best for?

We dont have to spend a lot of time on it. Im just wondering if theres an intersection in the same way there might be an intersection. If thoughts are beliefs we take to be true. Something like that, or beliefs or thoughts we take to be true. If the work, Byron Cady's the work can have such a dramatic impact on people by helping them to re author beliefs.

I'm wondering if ifs also has a role and if so, what that role is in, say, the work that you do. I think so. Ifs is going bananas because it, it really works so damn well. And I got really curious reading about it. So I signed up.

Boyd Varty

I tried to get a training course, but there's a waiting list. Signed up with my own ifs therapist. Ended up meeting Dick Schwartz, who created ifs and having conversations with him about it. And the way he puts it, he was a family therapist, and there were times when he's working with a group of people and say the dad was really aggressive and a child didn't want to talk in front of the dad. He asked the dad to step out of the room and then the child could talk, could speak more freely.

And then he was working with just one patient and he heard them using a very critical, angry voice and he had this odd thing of, could I ask whoever just said that to step out of the body for a minute? Not literally. And to his surprise, the patient said, sure. And then the critical part stepped out, and he said, I'd like to talk to whoever is behind this critical voice, or whoever disagrees with the critical voice. And different parts of the patient would start to express themselves.

It's not a shift in identity. It's not multiple personalities or anything like that. It's just that we all know we have parts. There's a part of us that loves to go out dancing in a part that likes to stay home and go to sleep. There's a part that feels little.

There's a part that feels strong, whatever. So the thing is, because the Byron Katie work, for example, if you do it, but only one part of you does it, there may be another part that is just not down with it. And that part needs to have its experience. What Dick found was that the parts have their own unique and whole identities. And if you respect them, they come together and they start to integrate with each other and solve the problems that make your life miserable.

And it works really, really well. Do you use that with clients? Yeah, I'm not trained. But he's also very generous with his theory, and there are books out there. One is called self therapy by Jay early, with little illustrations and everything to tell you how to use it.

And the biggest thing I found especially to relate to anxiety. So there's a part of you that gets anxious and depressed? Yeah. Or maybe there are two different parts. One anxious, one depressed.

I don't know. So when you think about your anxiety or your depression or your insomnia, how do you think about it? Like, what are the thoughts you think? What are the thoughts I think when. You'Re thinking about insomnia?

Martha Beck

Yeah. I mean, remarkably, I've seemingly fixed a lot of that for the first time in 30 years. But I would say if we're talking about anxiety or depression, I'd say the most common type of thought pattern. And I did do a live. I had Dick on the podcast, Dick Schwartz, and we did a live kind of demo, or he asked me if I would be willing to do it.

So we did do a live walkthrough. But I'd say, to answer your question, the most common thoughts that I have are even related to depression, fear based. So, for instance, if I don't get sleep for one or two days, I'm, like, catastrophizing. Right? Like, I can feel myself slipping.

I dont want to go into this state, I need to do everything to avoid it, because if I end up in this spiral, ABCDEF and G and all these catastrophe scenarios might ensue. So theres a lot of fear around slipping into a persistent depressive or anxious state, especially depressive state, because the anxious state ive brute forced through so many thousands of times that I have a greater degree of confidence in my ability to just by sheer will and overpowering my psyche, I can compensate, whereas the depressive stuff is more handicapping. But there's a lot of fear around. It, I would say, yeah, so there's fear, there's avoidance, there's dread, there's catastrophizing. Now, what I've found is that when people talk to me about anxiety, they're like, I hate it.

Boyd Varty

I want to get rid of it. I'd do anything to be rid of it. So I had this theory that the part that holds the insomnia or the part that holds the anxiety or depression is a part that wants to be included. Everything wants to belong, right? So when you're saying, get away, I don't want you.

The part of you that does insomnia and depression goes into a kind of panic because it's now being told it can't belong. You don't want it, you've rejected it. And so it ups the ante and all it knows how to do is keep you awake and make you depressed. So it starts to spiral upwards. I had this huge breakthrough when I was meditating, and sometimes when I have a negative thing that won't seem to leave, I just use this little let go, let go mantra.

And it wasn't letting go. And I thought, okay, how would Byron, Katie do this? And I said, let's stay. So I said to my anxiety at the time, stay. Don't go anywhere, please come and sit down.

Stay here. I want you exactly the way you are. I accept you exactly the way you are. I want you with me. I care about you.

I care about your welfare. I want to know all about you. I want to know everything about you. Come sit by the fire with me. And in a way, it kind of, it's what I do with every client.

It's what I did with Boyd when we were getting to know each other. Sit by the fire with me and tell me your worst fears, your worst stories, because I have room enough in my heart for all of them. And I said, being creative is the opposite of anxiety, but you can't get to creativity if you don't start with acceptance and compassion and simple kindness toward the self, toward the parts of the self that are doing the things you can't stand. And that was a really dramatic shift for me in my insomnia, for one thing. But in all the negatives, when I started saying stay, I love that.

Martha Beck

You know what? It also makes me think, man, oh, man. Is it time for me to go back and reread radical acceptance by Tara Brock? Probably. Probably.

It's probably time for me to get back on that horse too. I love that. Attala Field. Do you have a favorite animal? Is there a small set of animals, birds or otherwise?

We're like, you know what? Yeah, I do. I particularly like or find these animals interesting. I do. Cheetahs.

Cheetahs, all right. Yes. I love big cats anyway. But I had it. Cheetahs are delicate and scared and skittish because they're built for speed.

Boyd Varty

They have those long legs and stuff. And if it's a lion or a leopard or a hyena gets to them, they're toast. So I had a chance to meet an orphan cheetah, an adult cheetah. And you know how animals have energy? Like, dogs have this energy that is just dog like genius.

And horses have this energy, which is like, I'm about this far away from wild, and I'm scared of everything. And lions have this energy, like serial killers, because they are, you know. But cheetahs. I came upon a cheetah that was throttling an impala, and it held on until the animal had suffocated. And then it looked up at me and it said, ew.

So I met this adult cheetah. The energy. Tim, you've got to meet cheetahs. They have, like, dog energy. If you put a ton of sugar in it, they are the sweetest animals.

And. Wait, what do you mean by putting a ton of sugar into it? Just throwing donuts out of the car. Not in the rot your teeth way, but just like how dogs love you. She doesn't love you twice that much.

They love each other twice that much. And it started licking my arm, and it was taking off a layer of skin with every lick because they have these really raspy tongues. I literally had a scar for months, and I. I don't care. It could have eaten my.

Martha Beck

As far as scar stories go, that's up there with the greats. What happened to your arm? Oh, nothing. Just a cheetah licked my cheetah. Licked my skin off.

Boyd Varty

You never know. Yeah. Okay. Cheetahs. Yeah.

Martha Beck

I have not been that close to a cheetah. But I was really overjoyed. I think it was my last, last outing at Londolozzi, like in the trackers and rangers and with the whole kitten caboodle where they could actually use the radio. So we weren't on foot, at least not initially. I really wanted to see a cheetah and as it happens, you probably can identify with this maybe, but I was so jet lagged at one point and I skipped one morning drive.

So of course they see all these cheetahs and they're like, you missed the cheetahs. You gotta be kidding me. And then luckily, because just the technical abilities of these rangers and trackers is so otherworldly, we're able to find cheetah who's just killed Nympala and was resting in the shade and had just eaten a bunch, so it wasn't going anywhere. They're like, yeah, don't worry about it. And we're able to get probably within 30 or 40ft and just lock eyes.

And for those people who haven't done this, which I'm guessing is a pretty large percentage, they have very different eyes from lions or leopards. They have this. At least the cheetah eyes saw this deep kind of amber orange eyes and a very square brow, like a very straight brow line and it's so distinct and they're, as you pointed out, so delicate. I mean, certainly if push came to shove they could rip your face off. Oh, they can kill you six foot.

But they're very, very skittish. Right. Like they are going to run away from everything because every other cat can steal prey from them or kill them. So they are built for speed. They've made a lot of compromises in optimizing for speed.

Quick side note for people who may not realize this, if you look at, say, a leopard's tail, its kind of like a squirrel tail, right? Its built for balancing at height, so its very round, its very bushy. And a cheetah tail is actually very rectangular. Its almost like a rudder or a beaver tail turned 90 degrees on its side because they use it for maneuvering aerodynamically when theyre traveling at high speed. Its so wild.

But I dont have a cheetah licking scar. Im actually very, very. It really goes. What you said about every superpower has its cost, though. And I think you would identify with cheetahs.

Yeah, I mean I love cheetahs. I love, love, love cheetahs. I've only seen them that close that one time. But what a wonderful experience. Let's hop to.

I'm this far from wild and I'm afraid of everything. Horses. Yeah. Yeah. I want to say did at one point you own a ranch?

Am I making that up? North Star ranch? Yeah. Do you still own the ranch? Pennsylvania.

Okay. But you did. This was in San Luis Obispo, slow for six years. For six years. It actually was in a national park.

Boyd Varty

I mean, the nearest grocery store was an hour's drive, and there was no road going past it. There was us and a national park. Okay. I tracked a lot of bears, a lot of mountain lions. I bet you had a lot.

Martha Beck

So equine therapy was. Now, I don't know how much time you've spent in that context. The reason I'm asking about it, I spent one afternoon here in Texas on a farm that specializes in equine therapy for people with PTSD, kids with different neurodivergent conditions, including autism. And I wanted to have the experience of interacting with horses and ive ridden horses before, but being in a pen, interacting without any objective to ride a horse is foreign to me. Could you describe what this is?

And if im kind of barking up the wrong tree, please stop me. But im just curious. The broad question is what you gain from interacting with animals writ large? But since horses will not are less inclined to eat your face than, say, big cats, it's a little more approachable for folks. That is a huge avalanche of word salad of a non question, but would you like to take on the challenge of doing something with it?

Boyd Varty

Oh, I love it. Yeah, I got that ranch because I got the chance to work with some equine therapists, and I made a sort of amalgamation of the way I coach people with what they were doing. And we ran seminars and put like, work teams through it and everything. And the reason it's so amazing is that I talk about people exuding an energy, or cheetahs exuding an energy. Horses are responding to that energy, and they respond in a way that is undeniable.

So we'd have a team of people and their boss would go into the pen. They were all too frightened to tell the boss that he was terrifying. The horse would just start to gallop and gallop and gallop and rear, and the guy would be, I'm being nice to him. You could correct for posture and you could correct for. There's a way to speak hoarse and you speak it with your physical body, and you basically have to learn to stop acting like a predator, which we are, and start moving more like a prey animal.

So gentle energy, eyes down, eyes soft, these sort of wishy washy sounding things. But when you're in there in the pen with the horse and your eyes aren't soft, the horse is afraid. And then you learn how to soften your eyes, and the horse goes, ugh. And, like, physically drops its tension. And if you get to a place where you are in really calm, really connected state of being so calm, but also open, the horse will make you the leader of the herd.

And I had a few experiences with that where I was taught to act like a herd leader. In this one time, some horse whisperers took me to a herd, and they said, we want you to join up with this one little palomino mare. And there were, like, 20 horses in this pasture, and this one was the most skittish, the hardest to get close to. It worked. I had to get my energy so soft and do everything just right.

But eventually, I got to the place. There's something called, we used to call a join up, where you walk past the horse and you sort of brush past it with your shoulder and walk away, and it. It follows you, and you are now its leader. I've done this with individual horses. I finally got this little palomino to join up with me, and I walked past her, and she came with me.

And then you walk for a while together just to establish the connection. And she was walking with me, but I heard something weird behind me. And so after we'd walked a while, I looked back, and I just looked down and over, not over my shoulder, sort of under my shoulder, because you don't want your eyes to be up and staring. And she was the herd matriarch. And when she joined up with me, the whole herd did, and they were all walking with me.

Holy shit. That's amazing. That's why I bought a ranch in California. I'm like, I'm bought a ranch. And what happens is you start to realize that these horses are just more sensitive to stuff that people are seeing in you all the time.

And we'd put people in with horses, and the horses would force them to tell the truth. And then the other people, the boss would say, am I really that scary? And everybody, everybody would go, all five horses are afraid of you, and we are, too, you know? And it's a very, very quick way to learn to tell the truth. There was this one woman who kept trying to do it.

She was having no success at all. The horse just kept bumping up against her, and she hated it. She said she was getting nothing out of the seminar, I was panicking inside. And finally she said, after three days of this, she said, all right, I've been working on all these stupid little things, but the real thing is, I'm getting a divorce, and I haven't told anybody. And she started to cry, and it was obvious that was her real issue.

So we said, just go in with the horse and do whatever, but be honest. So she went into the pen, and she just stood there and started to cry. And the horse came up and walked up and touched her with his shoulder and then wrapped his head back around so that his nose was touching his flank and just held her. And it was a genuine hug. This is not me anthropomorphizing.

When you realize that nature is available to you as a companion, if you just tell the truth, it really is worth giving everything else up. So why did you sell the ranch? Because I felt like it was time. Like, I'm following this energy through the world. And I had written a novel about a woman who goes into the forest of California and has all these experiences.

And then I was going to write a sequel that happens in the eastern forest, the little piece of the eastern ancient forests that still survive. It was going to be about a plague that affected New York City. So I moved to a little patch of the ancient eastern forest in Pennsylvania, and then there was a plague that affected New York City. And I'm writing the sequel now. But I go through life tracking and saying, I have a ranch now.

I'm a rancher. No, I don't know. I could sell this house and move tomorrow if I felt like I should, and I would. Okay, so what was the view? If you flashback to the day or the week or the conversation or the walk in which you're like, I'm done.

Martha Beck

No more rich. What did that look like? Oh, it was much more gentle than that. It was like a death. It was like an animal dying.

Boyd Varty

Have you ever had to put down a dog? Yeah, unfortunately. Yes, unfortunately. And yet it's such a clean pain, right? Death in nature is not the horror we make it.

Death in nature is this deep gratitude for physical experience and then this profound release of the physical form of what you loved. And it teaches you how to die. And when you really know how to die, then you can live without any fear. And I felt the ranch dying for me and something else coming to life, and I grieved. How did that.

Martha Beck

Just because I think that might sound hard to grasp for. Yeah, it is. Yeah. So, like, what does that feel like? It was.

Boyd Varty

This was exactly the place I was supposed to be. And now, well, Liz said it in eat, pray, love. Now it is time for something that is beautiful to change into something else that is beautiful. And I knew that if I stayed there, the beauty of it would decay, because the real beauty. It's like I said to myself in that month of my right hemisphere stuff, it's not about the picture I'm painting.

It's not about the painting. It's about painting. It's about the process of being in continuous creative response to whatever is present that state of mind. And it said, buy a ranch. So I bought.

I literally, on my 50th birthday, spent every penny I had on a ranch, and six years later, I sold it. And, you know, something great. We had a wonderful massage therapist who used to come out and work on people there, and, you know, she'd have her massage table in her car, but I'm sure she was living kind of paycheck to paycheck or hand to mouth. When we decided to leave, she inherited a whole bunch of money and bought the ranch. That's wild.

And Boyd loves her. We all love her. That's amazing. Yeah. And then this place.

There were wild turkeys and deer and everything in the place we came here. First thing that happened when I saw this house was a whole flock of wild turkeys walked out of the forest, and I've never seen them since. It was just like I was being welcomed. You know how Londolozzi is. Nature is like that everywhere.

And that's why it's worth it to tell the truth and let people hate you, because nature loves you when you tell the truth, and it tells you to go places and have adventures. I just went to Costa Rica. We didn't see any monkeys for six days, so I went and I energetically called monkeys. I know. It's stupid.

We got mobbed by monkeys. They were everywhere. Until my son got scared of them and I had to ask them to leave with my mind.

Martha Beck

The monkey whisperer. I don't see that in your bio. It was just last week. Oh, wait. No, here it is on your LinkedIn.

Boyd Varty

That's right. Okay. Yeah. I mean, life is full of wildness. 2020 to present.

Martha Beck

Monkey whispering ink. I like it. Monkeys also. Look, I mean, all of the fables about monkeys. There's something to it.

Those beautiful creatures can also be mischievous rat bastards. Scary animals. They are scary. Oh, my God. Boyd's stories about baboons are the most hilarious.

Baboons are. Are especially terrifying. Yeah. Oh, boy. I was listening.

You know, it's funny you mentioned Bob oats. I was literally listening to recordings from Lauda Lozzi two days ago. I shouldn't have done it right before bed because I had some terrifying dreams, but I was listening to baboon alarm calls. Yeah, don't listen to baboon. Don't listen to baboon alarm calls right before you go to bed.

Novice mistake. Don't do that. But, yeah. Costa Rica. Were they spider monkeys?

Howlers? No, they were capuchins. Oh, nice. They're cute. Yeah.

Yeah. And scary. Just a little. And they can get a little scary. Well, Martha, we've covered a lot of ground.

Is there anything else that you would like to chat about before we land the plane? For this first conversation, this might sound. So yarfy, but I just. I'm really grateful for you and for the life you've lived and for your differences and how you've pushed them, and then you've given them to the world just so generously and completely. And you've given me so much time today, and I feel an enormous joy.

Boyd Varty

And, okay. I love your presence, your energy, your being. I am awash in wonder the way I am when I'm in nature and I meet a really interesting creature. Thank you. Thank you so much.

Martha Beck

I've been a fan from afar for a long time, so it's really nice to finally connect. And Boyd has been sort of patiently waiting, I guess, for me to make the connection I've wanted to for quite a while. And the story is certainly that he tells now. We've gotten to pay him back with stories about Boyd that he can't defend himself. And we should, like, we should all hang out and make some more stories because I will tell you one thing.

Boyd Varty

If you go wherever you feel you're supposed to go to maximize your joy, your adventures just increase. Yeah. I feel like I'm in a liminal phase right now between one thing and the next, and there's probably quite a bit running in parallel, but I'm excited. I have no idea what that next big thing is. In some traditional cultures, in, like, Europe, for example.

Tribal Europe before civilization, the threshold is the place of magic because it's not one place or another. And when you're on it, you're not anyone anywhere. Your liminal phase is the place where you're completely informed, but that's why it's a place you can do magic. So maybe you should just stay in the liminal phase. Hang out in the waiting room for a little bit.

Martha Beck

Yeah. The customs office between territories.

Yeah, the boundary walking. I enjoy just walking on it as opposed to crossing over it. So maybe I'll hang out here for a bit. That's where the shamans live. Trixie.

Trixie. Shamans? Yes. The monkeys of the human race. Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah. That's for sure. When you're like, why did so many come cultures murder so many shamans? You're like, well, you know, they can be rascals. They can be very tricksy.

There is a really fun book just, you may have already come across this, but Trickster makes this world, or made this world by Lewis Hyde. Fascinating, really fun book if people want to get into Trickster mythology. And of course it's tricky and of course, how these archetypes are present in all of us and some more so than others. But I've been spending more and more time with mythology. There's a lot there.

Boyd Varty

If you stay in the liminal phase and tell the truth all the time, instead of being tricksy, if you learn the magic and tell the truth, you have to use it in ways that are for good and not evil. Yeah. Yeah. And that is like, I think maybe that's what we're supposed to, we're all humans are supposed to do that. I don't know, Byron.

Katie does it. And by Trixie, I don't mean necessarily bad, I just mean Trixie, really tricksy. It probably doesn't help very much, but I mean, if you look at like Coyote or raven or any number of exactly these trickster deities, it's like, usually they are incredible creators. They've stolen something from the gods and bestowed it to humans. They've done a lot of good.

Martha Beck

They're constantly getting themselves into trouble. Constantly. Oh, it's just a nightmare. Yeah. So I'm going to try to avoid some of the trouble.

But I do like, I think there's some liminal mischief that might be right on the doorstep that could be fun to explore. So we'll see where that goes. I want to hear about that. Yeah, that might be a show don't tell kind of situation. So that'll be my show and tell.

We'll see where it goes. But it's been such a pleasure to spend time with you today. Thank you again for taking the time. And your recent book is the way of integrity, finding the path to your true self, New York Times bestseller, Oprah's book club selection. And I found your thinking on integrity and your writing on integrity incredibly powerful.

Your upcoming book is beyond anxiety, curiosity, creativity, and finding your life's purpose that is forthcoming so people have that to look forward to and they can find you in all things Martha Beck, I would imagine@marthabeck.com. And the Martha Beck is your account on Facebook, Instagram, etcetera. And we'll link to all these things in the show notes for everybody at Tim Dot blog podcast. So we'll put everything in one place, including everything we talked about. And I'm very grateful to have this opportunity to bake some conversational cake with you today.

Boyd Varty

I love the cakes you make. Let's make more someday. Yeah, let's make more. Thank you. Thank you for this opportunity to get to know you and also to be on the podcast, in that order.

Martha Beck

Yeah, for sure. Absolutely. My pleasure entirely. And for everybody listening. As usual, I mentioned where you can find the show notes.

And until next time, be just a bit kinder than is necessary to others and to yourself. Don't forget the last part. And thanks for tuning tuning in in. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is five bullet Friday.

Tim Ferriss

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#732: Martha Beck - The Amazing and Brutal Results of Zero Lies for 365 Days, How to Do a Beginner "Integrity Cleanse," Lessons from Lion Trackers, and Novel Tactics for Reducing Anxiety

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1: Introduction

2: The Challenge of Zero Lies

3: Lessons from Lion Trackers

4: Strategies for Reducing Anxiety

5: Closing Thoughts

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