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Episode Transcript:

Manoush Zomorodi 00:00:00  When this research started to come out that a workout in the morning didn’t make much of a difference. If you then sat for the rest of the day, he like decided, well, that can’t be right. I’m going to disprove it. And he couldn’t study after study. Since then has shown that even if you like, kill it at boot camp in the morning. If you then go on to sit for the rest of the day, you face the exact harms.

Chris Forbes 00:00:31  Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts. We have quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:15  There’s an idea most of us have been taught for a long time that being productive means sitting down, focusing, and just pushing through. But what if that’s actually working against us? In this conversation, Manu Samadi, author of The Body Electric, shares research showing that the way we structure our days hours of sitting, staring at screens isn’t just tiring. It’s fundamentally at odds with how our bodies work. At one point, she describes the body like a kinked garden hose where everything starts to back up, and once I had that image in my mind, I can’t get rid of it. But the solution isn’t extreme. It’s small, repeated Interruptions, moving, listening to signals that we’ve learned to ignore. We talk about why that’s so hard to do, and how even a little bit of change can shift how we feel. Think and show up. I’m Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:12  Hi, Manoush, welcome to the show.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:02:14  Eric, I’m so excited to be back. It’s been a while.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:16  It has been a while and we are going to be discussing your new book, which is called Body Electric The Hidden Health Costs of the Digital Age and the New Science to Reclaim Your Well-Being. Yeah, but before we get into that, we will start, like we always do with a parable. And in the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking to their grandchild, and they say, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and they think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:03:07  Well, right now, I guess it’s on two levels. One is like putting out a book into the world. The thing that I’m trying not to get overwhelmed with feeding is what the algorithm wants and, you know, outrage to try and get people to pay attention to my book. But, you know, that’s also how publishing works, which is exhausting. So really, I’m trying to feed the wolf. The one where I remember why I was obsessed with finding the answer to the question I had that really is at the heart of the book, and connecting with the material that I think other people really need to hear, not because I think it will sell, but because I found it so life changing Myself. So I actually wrote myself a note to remind myself every day. Like the core purpose of the book, and that as long as I feel like I can connect with that on a daily basis. The other wolf sort of hangs out and lurks in the background.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:09  Yeah, we were talking about that before we started, how I had a book that came out, boy, a month and a half ago, almost something like that.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:16  You’ve got a book coming out and just kind of how crazy a time it is, and how easy it is to get lost in all sorts of things. Like I, for one, have not asked for any sales numbers because I’m like, I don’t really. Yeah, I’m like, if they’re not good, I don’t know what to do that I’m not doing. And if they are good, my brain will probably be like, but they could be better. And I’m like, I’m just I generally am like, well, I just don’t need information that I, that I’m not going to do anything constructive with. And so I just haven’t asked and I’ve instead tried to, like you say, focus on what’s important about the book. Focus on the kind words that I’m getting, the people that it’s helping. Yeah, it’s a more difficult time. So for you, what was the thing you wrote down that you wanted to come back to and remember about why you wrote the book?

Manoush Zomorodi 00:05:03  Yeah, it really actually reminds me of the title of your book, this idea and the parable that you talk about, this idea that little by little becomes a lot.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:05:12  And in my case, I really felt like something very human had been drained out of me, which was that I was spending day after day on my laptop, and I would end the day feeling like I had just enough energy to crawl over to the couch, to then scroll on my phone or watch a show, or both. And it just didn’t feel like the life that I wanted to lead. And I felt so tired and drained and exhausted and like I couldn’t focus. And like a lot of people are talking about just feeling like crap. Yeah. And, you know, I think combine that with the headlines and with the feeling that the economy is beyond your control and all of these things, and you just sort of it makes you want to give up, right? Just think, well, I’m on this ride. I have no agency. There’s nothing I can do about it. And when I found what is a very small, not hugely groundbreaking answer that actually felt very extraordinary to me and brought me back some optimism and made me feel like I had energy again in the smallest possible way in my little world.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:06:26  That parable makes sense because it was changing a habit that, little by little, made me feel like I got back my energy, that I could focus again, that I was more optimistic, that maybe I could, you know, talk to the school board about making that change. Maybe I could reschedule a meeting just because I needed time. So this idea that just teeny little things you do to change your life, which we can get into what that teeny thing is that made such a big difference.

Eric Zimmer 00:06:53  Yeah, and you’re right that that is right in line with the you know, the core idea of my book is that little by little, a little becomes a lot both in the positive and the negative. And so let’s get into kind of what you found. And I want to start where you talk about early in the book. You said you were afraid to write this book.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:07:16  Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:07:17  So obviously you’re not afraid of the powers that be coming to lock you up. Why were you afraid to write the book?

Manoush Zomorodi 00:07:23  Thank you for that reminder.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:07:25  I was not afraid to be censored. Or that as a woman, I couldn’t express myself. So that is a good reminder. I was afraid because I would have to sit on my ass for hours, weeks, months, years, even to write a book. And the entire premise of the book was that we needed to get more movement into our lives in order for our brains to function properly, and to feel good about ourselves and good in our bodies, and not hurt our mental and physical health. And so the very thought that I was about to commit myself to sitting and working on a laptop, while also writing how I shouldn’t be sitting and writing on a laptop felt like kind of like a meta mind screwy thing. So that was what terrified me. But I decided to walk the talk, as it were, or and talk the walk. So the entire premise of the book is about trying to not feel like crap and trying to understand what happens in our bodies when we are on our screens for hours and hours on end.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:08:30  And it’s based on research that I came across and a guy named Keith Diaz, he is a physiologist at Columbia University Medical Center, and this is a guy who has dedicated his life to figuring out what is the minimum amount of movement that the human body needs, so that all the sedentary screen time we indulge in doesn’t send us to an early grave. And I when I heard this research, it kind of shocked me because what he had found was that five minutes of gentle movement every half hour during those long periods of sitting had outsized results. It slashed people’s blood sugar, their blood pressure. It regained their focus, it steadied their mood. And it seemed to me like, well, it’s free. It doesn’t sound that hard to do five minutes of like, not burpees or sprints. Like, it just seemed like, oh, what you’re saying is that the human body craves movement throughout the day and that our tools, our innovations, have engineered what we need biologically out of the way. We construct our lives and this world that is built around sitting and looking at screens.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:09:47  And so I actually called him up and I was like, this is fascinating. Does it really work? Because I’m pretty healthy. And he said, well, you know, come and join the study. So I went up to Columbia and one day I sat on my butt on my laptop and worked for eight hours. I had a lunch break, went to the bathroom as they monitored, like all my vitals, my glucose, my heart rate, blood pressure, quick checks on my mood, ability to focus, fatigue levels, etc. and then I did another day where every half hour, his assistant kind of tapped me on the shoulder and led me over to a treadmill, where I walked for two miles per hour. So that’s pretty slow. It’s a stroll. And I again, I thought I was like, I noticed that I definitely felt more positive and my mood was so much better, and I actually had energy at the end of the day. So that was a huge like. I could feel that.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:10:42  But then when I got the actual results back, my blood sugar had dropped nearly in half, my blood pressure dropped by five points, and my fatigue levels, like as I measured them were like also essentially cut in half. So like the results were so amazing for something that felt kind of stupid, you know what I mean? So I was like, Keith, why aren’t we all doing this? And he’s like, well, we have created a life where we are told that from the minute we go to kindergarten, sitting in a chair and looking ahead is what a good, diligent worker does. This is how we’ve been taught that butts in chairs. And you know, I’m actually with you right now from San Francisco, the place where they’re developing surveillance technology to mate, you know, to see how long fingers are on keyboards and how long a cursor is in a dock without moving. So like, this is how we measure efficiency and good work is butts in chairs, eyes on screens. He’s like, I don’t think people can actually accept that.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:11:45  These interruptions not only will they save your health, but they will also make you a more productive worker. It’s very counterintuitive to how we think. I said, well, well, let’s just ask them, because it seems ridiculous to me not to try when you have found the answer. So we did a study together, NPR and Columbia University Medical Center, where we reached out to NPR listeners and said, Will you join a clinical trial to see if you can intersperse these movement breaks into your day, and you can try it every half hour, every hour or every two hours, five minutes of movement. And people could like, walk and talk on the phone. They could walk around the house and collect all the dirty dishes to put in the dishwasher. They could march in place. If walking wasn’t an option. They could also use their arms. Just the idea to build up circulation and get things moving. And we had over 20,000 people sign up. And at the end of the three week period, we found that 80% of the people who’d committed to doing movement breaks stuck with it.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:12:50  82% actually liked them. Fatigue was down by up to 28%. And interestingly enough, productivity slightly rose. All those interruptions did not make people feel like they got less work done or worse quality work done, which was kind of amazing. But we also just heard from people who were like, I feel like I’m connected to my body again. I can think straight. My back doesn’t hurt as much as it used to. My eyes don’t sting. At the end of the day, I am more positive. I’m around for my kids, you know, and can go outside and play with them after a day of work. And so it really seemed like just this idea of explaining to people the biology and how it is not compatible with the technology, and that, you know, your computer can be upgraded all the time, and all you have to do is plug it in to power it up. Unfortunately, your body is a little more finicky and works on ancient operating systems as opposed to 5G. So it was an extraordinary experience, and I’ve spent the last few years looking beyond the data and more into the stories to understand how did people do it? How did they change the structure of their days? What did they have to tell themselves to convince themselves, or their boss, or their kids, or their elderly parents? That movement needed to be part of their lives, and that it was something that wasn’t what they had to do, but what they got to do that it brought back this sort of sense of joy.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:14:28  That’s simply.

Eric Zimmer 00:14:47  So I would love to get into some of the how this happens, how people have done it, what has worked for them, what hasn’t worked for them. But before we do that, I want to go a little bit more into the science of it.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:15:00  So yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:15:01  The first thing is that we’ve heard a lot about how sitting is like the new smoking. Yeah. And it sounds like this gentleman, Keith Diaz, had done a lot of research that showed that it didn’t matter if you even had a very vigorous, once a day exercise routine. That’s good. Very valuable. But it did not offset the dangers of sitting for so long. Say a little bit more about that.

Speaker 4 00:15:29  Yeah. So Keith, as a physiologist.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:15:32  When he was getting his PhD, that research came out, the idea that sitting was the new smoking. So this was like over a decade ago, 12 years ago. And he didn’t believe it because he’d been taught that exercise was golden. It was the ticket to health that anything could be fixed with exercise.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:15:53  And so when this research started to come out, that a workout in the morning didn’t make much of a difference. If you then sat for the rest of the day, he like decided he’s like, well, that can’t be right. I’m going to disprove it. And he couldn’t study after study since then has shown that even if you like, kill it at boot camp in the morning. If you then go on to sit for the rest of the day, you face the exact harms. So first of all, we should say don’t stop working out like you obviously increase muscle mass and cardiovascular capacity and all those wonderful things that happen. However, what then happens if you then sit for the rest of the day, is pretty fascinating. So you have to think of your body as like, this is Keith’s metaphor a garden hose that’s kinked.

Eric Zimmer 00:16:43  That metaphor has really sunk in around this house.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:16:46  Like, can’t unsee it.

Eric Zimmer 00:16:48  Can’t unsee it. Nope.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:16:49  Totally.

Speaker 4 00:16:50  So your body is.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:16:51  Kinked like a garden hose when you sit at your waist and at your knees.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:16:56  And if you think of like a garden hose, that’s king like, the water starts to back up and pressure begins to build. Okay, so that’s blood pressure building. Blood flow doesn’t go through muscles. The leg muscles need to be stimulated in order to pull fat and sugars out of the blood and process them. If you don’t do that, where you start to see people who don’t move a lot, they over weeks, months, years become pre-diabetic or they build up plaques in their arteries. The other thing that happens is that the muscles need to stimulate in order to push oxygen up to the brain. Right. So when the brain is, you know, firing like switching from email to over to Instagram and should I answer that email? And I’m going to go over into this document. And over there, every time you switch you’re using glucose. You’re using oxygen to burn glucose. If you burn through all of that, you start to get CO2 buildup in your brain. That’s when you start to feel foggy.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:17:56  You get tired. You can’t think straight. What is the thing that gets more oxygen up there and refreshes it? Movement. I can keep going. The other thing is, when you sit for a long period, you are like kind of curled, like a boiled shrimp, is how I think of myself. Yeah. Sorry. Yep. There we go. And when you do that, your diaphragm is constricted and you can’t get again those full, deep breaths up into your body to oxygenate your brain. And then the final thing. And this is really where screens create insult injury is there’s a sense that it’s relatively new sort of thing that people are studying called interception. So this is what the body tells the brain you need. So the body might say, okay, you need to take another breath. It doesn’t usually you don’t really register that right. You just kind of do it automatically. Maybe you need a snack or maybe, you know, you need to go to the bathroom, right? These are the signals.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:18:55  This is your introspective sense telling you, your body saying, this is what I need to feel better. But what do we do when we’re on screens? We’re so externally focused. We’re so enthralled by what we’re doing. We’re so captivated by the work we do that we start to ignore what our body is telling us. So your body could be begging for a break. I’m anxious. I’m uncomfortable. My back hurts. My shoulders are curved. I can’t focus anyway. Can we please have a break? And we just ignore it and we power through. Or we tell ourselves, no, I’m just gonna, you know, answer five more emails and then I deserve a break. When really all we’re doing is like, making it less possible to actually write good emails and get our work done anyway. So, like all of these reasons together, if we combine them, it makes you wonder, like, what the hell are we doing? Why or why are we sitting and telling ourselves that we can just grind through, get it done? Because that’s what you know.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:19:55  That’s what a good worker does biologically. That is just incorrect. So once I learned all that and once I also explained a lot of that to listeners. I think that’s why people were willing to experiment with their behavior, because once you understand those things, you’re like, well, I don’t want that. Let’s try the alternative.

Eric Zimmer 00:20:15  Yeah, I’m stretching my legs out right now to try can at least.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:20:19  If at least two.

Eric Zimmer 00:20:20  We should. Well, we’re at the 230 mark. We’re at 30 minutes of sitting, so. But we could.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:20:25  Hang out at eight and keep talking.

Eric Zimmer 00:20:27  We could. But first let’s talk about standing, because just standing won’t solve the problem. Correct.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:20:33  That is correct. A standing desk is stillness just in a different form. You still don’t get that muscle stimulation. So if a standing desk is a way of sort of urging yourself to get more movement, a reminder to get more movement, then great, like stand up and do the shuffle, the zoom and shuffle, as I like to call it, where you just go back and forth while you’re on a zoom or march in place, while you’re talking on the phone.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:21:01  Like, that’s fine, but a standing desk actually meta analysis. And it’s been shown that if you stand for over two hours a day, you actually start to increase the chances of having cardiovascular issues, blood clots and varicose veins. So that’s fun too,

Eric Zimmer 00:21:18  So yes, I tried. My life has been kind of chaos. You and I were on a crazy boat recently. Life has been very interesting. Yes. You know, I mentioned my mother passed. So yesterday was like the first kind of day. Like normal day. Back to work. I’ve had in a while where I was like, okay, I’m about to do what I normally do, which is sit down and be in front of a computer most of the day. And so I tried to try. I tried to try. I tried. There is no try. There’s only do I tried to do every 30 minutes. And I did generally good except for a two hour spot right in the middle where just went right but didn’t happen.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:04  Didn’t happen. And so I’ve observed a couple things from this.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:22:08  Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:09  Tell me some of what I’ve observed ties right in with what I talk about and write about in the book, which is that first I need to be reminded. If I’m not reminded, it simply doesn’t occur. Now, maybe over time I will begin to. I’ll start to tune into the signals. But right now, being reminded is really critical. So if I sit back down and I don’t set my next 30 minute alarm, that’s how the two hour block happened.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:22:37  Yeah. So things that you’re starting to observe in yourself, we saw across the board with our people. So first of all, that’s totally great that you skipped a movement break. I’m actually really proud of you.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:51  I skipped two of them.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:22:52  That’s totally fine. What we found was people saw the mental health benefits with even just 4 or 5 breaks per day. And the people that were able to keep up the movement breaks showed themselves some grace. If you’re in flow, if you don’t feel like it.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:23:10  Guess what? It’s okay to skip a break. The point here is not to be perfect. The point is to just do something. Once in a while we are setting the bar incredibly low. It’s to feel good in your body, not to punish yourself in some way. So if that means taking two breaks today, great. That’s two more than nothing. Great. Good job. Yay! You can’t lose it. This, right? Yep. The second thing that you talked about with a timer. Absolutely. The number one way people were able to kickstart their interaction, getting movement into their lives. Their move break habit was by setting a timer. However, what we did here was that by the end of the two weeks, that sense of interruption was developed to the point where many people said, I actually don’t need my timer anymore. My body tells me when it’s time to get up so I can see that in myself. Right now. When we hit the 45 minute mark, I’m going to turn into like a squirmy eight year old boy, essentially, because that’s my rhythm.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:24:14  About 45 minutes to an hour is when I need a break. If I had health issues and, you know, for now, I don’t. But if I did, I think I would try to stick to that five minutes every half hour. Like, for example, we had a woman, amazing woman, who works in HR at a big hotel company who had major health issues, and she just she was doing her morning walk that her doctor had recommended. The numbers just weren’t changing. So she went to her doctor and she’s like, I think I want to try this experiment, this body electric thing. She did it. And within two weeks, her blood pressure dropped by 40 points and she went back down to tapering her insulin. And what ended up happening is it sort of kickstarted a sense that she and her body were not at odds with each other. She started. She did great. She saw results quickly. She felt more positive. She ended up paying more attention to her sleep. She started doing meditation, she changed her diet and she texted me last week.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:25:18  She actually got certified as an official health coach. So over her three year journey, she just she is a happier person. She feels better in herself and in her body. And she just decided that this is and well, and also she doesn’t need to. She’s off all of the medications she needed to be on to manage her biomarkers. So huge result for her. For me, it’s not that dramatic, but it’s enough that I don’t feel like I want to cry and throw my phone into Walden Pond. every day. You know that, like, I can do this. I can work and not hate it. And on the day, there are still days where I’m like.

Speaker 5 00:25:58  Oh, I don’t feel like getting up. And I’m like.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:26:01  But you know how you know you’re going to be back in love with the world after five minutes? So just do it. Just do it. Come on and I’ll do it. And I’ll.

Speaker 5 00:26:09  Be like, oh.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:26:10  Yeah, it works.

Speaker 5 00:26:11  It’s easy.

Speaker 5 00:26:11  It’s free.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:12  Hey, friend, before we dive back in, I want you to take a second and think about what you’ve been listening to. What’s one thing that really landed, and what’s one tiny action you could take today to live it out? Those little moments of reflection. That’s exactly why I started good wolf reminders. Short, free text messages that land in your phone once or twice a week. Nearly 5000 people already get them and say the quick bursts of insight helped them shift out of autopilot and stay intentional in their lives. If that sounds like your kind of thing, head to one. You feed, SMS and sign up. It’s free. No spam and easy to opt out of any time. Again, that’s one you feed. Tiny nudges, real change. All right, back to the show that all or nothing thing is so pernicious. I’ve seen it again and again over the years with coaching clients. I’ve seen it with so many different people that if we can’t do something exactly right, we often just conclude we shouldn’t do it.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:27:19  Is that a particular like personality thing, do you think, or cultural thing, or is it like, what have you observed?

Eric Zimmer 00:27:26  I really don’t know. I mean, I know that, you know, as far back as say, you know, Aristotle was talking about the golden mean right about, you know, right. Don’t go too far this way or that way. You know, the Buddha was talking about the middle way. That’s just one of the permutations of the middle way that I’ve seen. Somebody sent me an email the other day and they said, you know, I’ve gotten a lot out of your book. The thing I’ve gotten the most is that I can show up and do part. You know, I don’t have to do a perfect workout. And this is a person who is a personal trainer. And she said her thing is that if she doesn’t feel like she can really do it right, she just doesn’t do it. Yeah, and I think there’s a lot of that. I noticed this in myself.

Eric Zimmer 00:28:11  I’ve been really trying to spend a little time in somewhere like Colorado, where there’s so little water, you become even more conscious. I mean, I’m always a little bit conscious of become even more conscious, like, okay, how can I use less water? And I notice this in myself. I will forget for a second. Let’s say I didn’t turn the tap off while I was scrubbing something. I noticed it was running, and there’s just this little part of my mind that’s a little bit like why you screwed up, but doesn’t matter. And then I’m like, hang on a second. Like, every little bit matters, you know? It all adds up. So that I think is a real thing to watch for is if I can’t do it right, I don’t do it at all. And yeah. And it sounds like that’s a lot of what you were working with people to understand.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:28:52  Yeah. And I think I’ve seen it in myself for certain, like go big or go home. Right.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:28:58  And it’s taken me a long time to think like moderation. Maybe not as sexy.

Speaker 5 00:29:05  But probably.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:29:06  More effective. And honestly, like this is I want to find things that I can do for the rest of my life. I think as I’ve gotten older, you know, there’s this moment in your 40s where you’re like, this workout is not getting easier. I am just working to maintain at this point. And then you’re just as the years go on, you’re working to not lose what you have built. And so I think that’s like actually a really helpful mind shift for me that like, I’m in a point in my life where I want to maintain and continue to feel good, as opposed to learn how to windsurf and bench press. However many pounds like those are all great goals. But for me right now I’m about feeling good in my body, feeling connected to the world, feeling, like I can think straight and feel positive and stay healthy for as long as I can, and that feels more reasonable and manageable and, and less punishing of myself.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:30:12  Like, I went through my bootcamp phase, Eric, where I was like killing it at the gym. And, and I was really tired the rest of the day. It did not give me energy. That is for sure.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:24  I was I took up surfing in my 50s. Not windsurfing. Did not windsurfing, but regular surfing. So.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:30:30  Wow.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:31  Okay, but I live in Ohio, so I don’t get to do it all that often. But just in case anybody out there is like it’s too late for me to take up windsurfing, I’m like, no, no.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:30:39  Good point.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:40  There was something else I was going to say about what you just said there. Oh, we had a woman on years ago and I’ve kept in touch with her. Her name’s Michelle Seager, and I want to say she’s a researcher at the University of Michigan. I’m not sure, but she said something that I just took to heart all those years ago and continue, which she just basically said, move in whatever way you can as often as you can.

Eric Zimmer 00:31:02  Like that’s the whole game. Just move in whatever way you can as often as you can. And I was like, that’s that’s just solid advice.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:31:11  It’s solid advice. And then of course, my warped mind will be like, well, then I should just be moving all the time because I can move all the time. And so that is actually what Keith would say said was that there’s a fine line. Right? Like people want a dose prescription. Yeah. That they want to feel like there’s some sort of structure that’s scientifically verified, that they can sort of hang their hat on and used to guide themselves. And once you have that, though, that’s where the customization has to come in. Right. And that depends on your schedule, your genes, your setup at home, what feels good to you, what doesn’t feel good to you. There’s so many variables. And I think on the one hand, you know, we always talk about averages in science and talk about the best for you, but we kind of are all special little snowflakes.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:32:05  Yes, we are. And we need to experiment and find out what works for us, because it’s not going to be the same for each of us. I’ve had two children, and my diagnosis means there’s no way I could get myself up on a surfboard, so I got to work on that. I would love to, but that’s okay, I can pretend.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:43  I do think that the five minutes every 30 minutes is a nice thing to aim for. Now, as I’m looking at my life like, right now, I’m like, okay, well, we are at 45 minutes. Ideally, we would have moved 13 minutes ago and being precise and I’m like, if I stand up, then I’m going to be too far from the microphone.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:33:01  And yeah. Right, right, right. It’s the whole thing.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:04  Now I’m suddenly like, oh, maybe I need to be wearing a headset. But the the point being, when you and I wrap up here, I will have time. I will go out now and.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:13  Yeah. And I’m like, do I go outside because my allergies are so bad? I’m gonna walk. I’m gonna walk somewhere some way for five minutes. And I’ve found that helpful. I’ve been doing it on planes because I’ve been traveling.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:33:25  Oh. Nice. It’s addictive. Right? Like, don’t people sort of look at you or, like or not addictive? It’s a contagious. That’s what I meant to say, that people see you moving and they start to, like, crack their neck and, like, roll their shoulders. And maybe a couple more people get up, too. And like, because I can’t sit now in airports to wait for my flight. So I just walk with my luggage in circles. And I’ve noticed that a lot of other people sort of stand are watching me and then start moving around too.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:51  I’ve mostly just noticed people watching me. Like what? And I’ve just interpreted like, why is this guy going in circles? Why is this guy going up and down this aisle for the fourth time? You know, like but perhaps it is contagious.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:34:07  I love.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:08  It. Yeah, I like traveling with Ginny because one of us can sit with all the luggage, and the other can just move, and then we switch, and then they switch.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:34:17  Yeah. Perfect, I love that. I mean, that I think we saw a couple things too, which is like. So, for example, like people who are in a power position, if you’re the boss and you say walking meetings are acceptable, then you set the tone for everyone. Or if you say, we’re going to change our Google Calendar settings so that all meetings are 55 minutes instead of 60. You know, that’s a power move, right? And I think it’s a good one because it actually shows your team. Like I understand that we are asking a lot of you, the average, you know, information worker uses between 11 and 13 different software tools and platforms every day. And like the way I’m going to use them is going to be different than you. But we all need breaks.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:34:59  Yeah. And then we also saw other people who are like, well, I don’t know what my boss would think about this, but if I see that I’ve got 16 minutes until my next meeting, that’s all fit in a quick movement break and then come to the meeting or I’ll say, like, I’m going to turn off my camera just because I’m not feeling well, and I’ll move around like people just found ways to sort of integrate it into their day as well. I mean, I’m a big fan. Video podcasts make this difficult, but I’m a really big fan of can we not do a zoom call? Can we do a phone call?

Eric Zimmer 00:35:31  Yes.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:35:31  And walking and.

Eric Zimmer 00:35:32  Talking me to and back when I used to work in an office, I used to do as many of the meetings as I could. I’d be like, let’s go for a walk. Let’s go for a walk.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:35:41  Oh, nice. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I actually, you know, we also know that when you walk side by side and your bodies sync up, that actually sinks up your brainwaves, which is fascinating to me.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:35:52  So, you know, you’re not having eye contact, so there’s not a confrontational feeling to it. Your bodies are sinking up. You might find some breakthroughs that you wouldn’t necessarily have if you’re both staring at each other, sort of staring at each other on zoom, which, by the way, has been shown to increase your cognitive load and wear you down even faster.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:11  Have you heard anything about. And I don’t know what it’s called, but it’s essentially the a disorder that comes from staring at yourself all the time.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:36:21  Oh, like body dysmorphia or more just distraction.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:25  It’s not quite body dysmorphia, but it’s something about the fact that, like, right now I’ve maximised you. But yes, at least on Riverside, I can’t get rid of me. So I see myself all, all the time. Some people have theorized that’s not good for us in some way, but I can’t quite. I can’t quite remember where I read it or what it.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:36:45  Was like Narcissa or something like that, but like, I don’t know about the mental health effects, but I can tell you, there’s a guy that I spoke to for the book who’s an Austrian researcher, where they studied the effects.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:36:57  So like how we talk about zoom fatigue. And they were like, well, what? It really is fatiguing and is that real? So they actually did a study where they measured it. And he said that what they saw was even just the slightest mismatch of timing. Like we wouldn’t notice it consciously, but our brain registers a slight change and it’s constantly adjusting for that change that also when you’re in person, you’re getting so much ambient data from someone, from their body language, you know, a furrow of the brow, the tone in their voice, and you’re not getting those over zoom. So you’re you’re constantly scanning, looking for other indications of what someone is thinking and feeling that you wouldn’t get just sort of very quickly if you were in person. And the third thing he mentioned was being distracted and seeing yourself because you’re then having I mean, I don’t know about you, but the conversation I’m having is like, Do I really look that tired in real life? My hair. I love the idea that the researchers studying zoom fatigue.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:38:03  How do they take their zoom meetings? He says that they get on their zoom, they keep their cameras on, and they say hello, just so they, you know, have a minute. And then they all shut their cameras off and they limit their meetings to they try to stick to ten minutes.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:19  The zoom fatigue piece makes sense to me because I do video interviews all the time, and I have found it hard to banter in the same way that I can in person, because there’s the slightest delay. We don’t notice it, but it’s there. It makes it just hard to interrupt you to say something clever Without interrupting you. Whereas in person, somehow we would read that between us and it and it would work. And it’s it’s one of my, one of my frustrations with this format is exactly that.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:38:55  So you and I actually had this experiment because we were on a panel together in person, and I remember looking across to you and having like, the slightest flicker of eye contact about whether I should answer the next question or the other guy on the panel should.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:39:18  And I wouldn’t have noticed if we didn’t then have zoom to compare it to in some ways, like, you know, the things that you just don’t even realize are things until you realize you don’t have them. And there was this philosopher, Tobias Reese, on the boat talking about how nobody talked about the need to get out into nature Until the middle of the 1800s and the Industrial Revolution. And then there was an alternative. People were living in cities and suddenly you realize, oh, nature is a thing. Or like, you know, David Foster Wallace, that story where the fish says to the other fish, how’s the water? And they’re like water. What do you mean, what’s water? And I think it’s the same thing that’s kind of happened for movements. Nobody said like a hundred years ago. Like, did you get enough movement in today? They were like, what are you talking about? But now, since we’re using technology to the point that we barely need our bodies, we’ve gotten so efficient at not needing the human body to do labor or to entertain or connect or get our information.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:40:26  We now have to talk about it. It’s something we have to be intentional and have language for which I find absurd. But, you know, this is where we are, and I. I’m not a Luddite. Like, I love my tech. I love the fact that you are in Ohio and I’m in San Francisco and we’re on a freaking call and people are gonna listen and hopefully they get something out of this. And we’re also dealing with real life and this crazy fire alarm and all the rest of it. Like, it’s kind of awesome. So totally not to be different about it.

Eric Zimmer 00:40:56  Yeah. You mentioned that you discovered a book. I don’t know how old the book was, but a book that essentially talked about a lot of the science that you’re talking about now and the actual remedy for it, but it was not a recent book.

Speaker 6 00:41:13  Oh, yeah. This was really quite funny.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:41:16  Strange. So I was going for a movement break on my block where I live in Brooklyn, and it’s great in my neighborhood, everybody puts books out on their stoops when they’re done with them, you know, take a book.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:41:27  And this book was from 1995, which didn’t feel like that long ago to me. But it is. It’s a that’s a long time ago now, 30 years ago. And it was about repetitive stress syndrome. So, you know, RSI and people. So my whole thing that I had concluded was like, we need to be treating ourselves even if we are, you know, laptops are our football or our violin or our jumbo jet. We have to be treating ourselves like people who use a tool to express themselves, a professional musician or an athlete or an airline pilot. We have to be treating ourselves like information athletes because our brain is our tool, and we’re not treating our brain right when we don’t give our bodies what it needs. And I was like, we gotta be information athletes. And then I came across this book on a stoop, and it had the same concept from 30 years ago, and it didn’t have the studies, but it said, based on what we now know, we think taking a break every half hour is probably a good idea.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:42:35  And I was like, how many times do we need to be told that our bodies need breaks and we just don’t listen? And I think what’s dangerous now is there are some people peddling this idea that AI will set us free, right? That, you know, it will take over all the drudgery and all the annoying stuff we have to do on our devices, and that will give us back our free time, and that this will mean that we can be fully self-actualized humans who can go frolic in fields and write poetry and watercolor and, you know, back to the land sort of movement. And as we know throughout history. And I chronicled this in the book, like going through every time there is an efficiency or an innovation that comes along. If anything, we just move less, you know, from the Threshers that you could sit on to call to. I don’t even know how to speak. Agriculture, to harvesting the wheat to drive through movie theaters and escalators and remote control monitors. And now even less so.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:43:47  The human body has been taught over evolution to save energy, to save calories. And so we just tried to move as little as possible. But we’re at this point where we need to, sort of defy the way that we’ve been. We need to do it on purpose in many ways.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:07  I came across a study. I’ll send it to you, afterwards. That debunks everything. You know, I’m just kidding.

Speaker 7 00:44:17  I’m kidding. I would’ve been like, oh.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:19  I’m kidding.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:44:20  You didn’t tell me that sooner.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:21  Yeah, exactly. I set you up, I let you lay out your case, and now I’m about to take it apart. No, it it’s, it’s in mice. It’s interesting in that it says here’s what it says.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:44:33  Is this mice or rats?

Eric Zimmer 00:44:34  Is it I don’t distinguish rodents. Yeah.

Speaker 6 00:44:37  Okay.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:38  Scientists found that abdominal muscle contractions compress blood vessels connected to the spine and brain, pushing fluid that gently moves the brain within the skull. This physical swaying provides evidence for how exercise might benefit brain health by washing away cellular waste.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:44:56  That is fascinating. Yeah, I would love to learn more about that, I think. To your point, there is so much we are learning about the interconnectedness of our organs. I’ll give you another example. Doctor Peter Strick at the University of Pittsburgh, his who’s this curmudgeonly guy whose kids were like, dad, you got to do Pilates. You got to do yoga to manage your stress. And he was like, why? There is no scientific evidence that shows that that actually reduces stress. It’s all woo woo.

Speaker 6 00:45:27  And then he was like, wait a minute. Is could we find biological proof that this actually.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:45:33  So this happens to be what he studies, which is the connection between the different organs and the brain. And so he mapped what happens when there is muscle contraction in the torso, abdominal region, how that affects the adrenal glands, which squirt, you know, cortisone up to the brain and tell us, you know, fight or flight sort of thing. And he found that there was a conversation going on between these abdominal muscles, the adrenal gland and motor cortex in the brain.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:46:02  So they actually are all talking. And there is a very good biological reason why you feel more relaxed and calm. Or as my Pilates teacher calls it, the Pilates high. After you’ve done it, they these things are all connected. And he says, you know, even if you just stand up and move, you can feel a bigger sense of relief. Now, there’s many reasons why you’re getting more oxygen, all of those things. But there is a conversation happening. So another, one that they’re starting to map over in Pittsburgh is the connection between, leg muscles and the colon and the brain, because we know that, if you are sedentary for too long, you know, you don’t have to go constipation, which can also be a contributing factor to colon cancer, actually. So not the factor, but a factor. You know, it’s just really exciting times in terms of mapping the conversation that’s going on between all the different organs and areas of the brain and muscles. And I think, you know, somebody said to me, he’s like, yeah, I think that we need to rethink it.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:47:12  It’s not a conversation between the body and the brain. It’s just one thing. And they’re all talking to each other all the time.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:19  I agree, I mean, that seems to be, at least to me, that like to talk about a body brain connection is to kind of separate them. I often think this way also about thoughts and emotions. I’m like, I’m not sure we talk about them as other separate. I’m not sure they are. Do you ever get one without the other? Like they tend to travel together? I mean, there are at least, you know, very good friends. There was another fascinating article in the New York Times this weekend about certain researchers think they found a third system in our body. There’s the circulatory system, there’s the lymphatic system. They’ve begun to think that there’s another system. They’re calling it the interstitial system that is passing fluid through the body. And it is an explanation for why acupuncture works.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:48:07  So like facial.

Eric Zimmer 00:48:08  Yeah. But but fluid passing through the fascia.

Eric Zimmer 00:48:13  Yeah. or or between the fascia and the muscles. I haven’t read it fully.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:48:18  Oh, okay.

Eric Zimmer 00:48:19  And I’m like, how do we miss an entire other.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:48:22  I mean, this is where, you know, it gets blurry, right? Like, on the one hand, like, my Pilates instructor is all about the fascia and melting it and soothing it and how that, like, releases tension throughout the body. And for the longest time, there wasn’t any research. And then the last few years there started to be research that says like, yeah, actually that is pretty important. But then we also have other people peddling all sorts of other names that are not scientifically proven in the slightest. And so.

Eric Zimmer 00:48:54  It’s.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:48:54  Tricky. It’s tricky. And it’s like, you know, something ancient wisdom. Maybe we don’t have the scientific proof, but we have centuries of, of of trying things out. And then we have other things where it’s actually very dangerous. Like it, it worries me like, you know, because maybe the people who can give raw milk as an example, I was talking to someone who was saying, you just need to try raw milk.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:49:20  It’s the way to go. And I was like, yeah, but what about the bacteria? And he said to me, well, you need clean cows. I’m like, okay, guess what? I don’t have any clean cows. And maybe the people who do and whatever fancy people can pay for their extra special clean milk. But when we’re talking about the majority of people who do not have access to even basic health care, I think we have to be looking out for the most vulnerable and the people who could use the most help. there’s always going to be people who can take crazy peptide shots and see their gurus, and they’ll probably be okay, even if they do some of these less scientifically convincing things, because their basic health is cared for majority of the time. So that was my little soapbox there, Eric.

Eric Zimmer 00:50:11  Well, I agree, I think this is part of what’s so challenging about science and and trying to sort of base your life on. What science is sort of saying is that I feel like it’s always incomplete, meaning something we know today to be absolutely sure.

Eric Zimmer 00:50:30  I don’t know what thing that we believe. To be absolutely sure today that science is telling us is wrong. But some of them are. Yeah. You know, I wish we knew which ones they were because you’d be like, discard that. But some of the scientific consensus around something is wrong. We just don’t know what it is. It’s why I always have been like, I kind of love it when, like, multiple things verify something for me. Yeah. So for example, I’m like, okay, well, oh, you know, Buddhists have been saying this for a long time. That’s interesting. Okay. That’s that’s one source of information. Okay. Oh, and now science is coming along and sort of saying like, yeah, a lot of that I think is true. Oh, and then the third sort, you know, the third source is like, oh, I seem to get benefit from when I do it and when, when I get that, it’s sort of like ding, ding, ding.

Eric Zimmer 00:51:17  Then I’m like, okay, this I feel like I can sort of trust. So like this 30 minute movement break, like there’s good science to show it. I think it’s common sense. And I’m going to try it and see for myself. Like, do I feel better if I do it, you know, on a regular basis? And I think that’s kind of what we all have to figure out is what science do we trust him because it is just so hard to know.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:51:41  Yeah. Be skeptical, then verify and then experiment. And I think.

Eric Zimmer 00:51:45  That’s a good way to say.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:51:46  It. Yeah, it reminds me that I love this high school teacher who took the body electric study and decided that she was going to use it in her classroom. She didn’t want to be like kids. We’re all moving now because they would have told her to f off, right? But she decided to use it as a way to teach data journalism, and health and wellness claims to question things. So they did it in sort of a meta way.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:52:15  They were like, okay, if we take part in this experiment, what is the data collection? How is the data? Good data. What does it mean to do an experiment over two weeks? What’s a baseline establishing week that they’re talking about. How does that work. How do we collect our data. How do we process it at the end? What are the claims that they’re making and why are they making those claims. Can we trust them? And then also where does the placebo effect fit into all of this? Like you feel better. Is that because you’re being asked like whether you feel better? Is like, you know, where does that fit into it? So I said to her, I was like, do you think that you change their habits in the end? She’s like, I think I taught them to be better consumers of health journalism. I think I taught them that they don’t have to be passive consumers. They can question these things themselves. And also if they’re like, oh no, my chargers upstairs and they’re like, Actually, it’s a chance to get in a flight of stairs if they think that once that is a win as well.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:53:20  And I love that idea that like media literacy, it is health literacy these days.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:27  As we wrap up, take one thing from today and ask yourself, how will I practice this before the end of the day? For another gentle nudge, join good Wolf Reminders text list. It’s a short message or two each week, packed with guest wisdom and a soft push towards action. Nearly 5000 listeners are already loving it. Sign up free at once. You feed us. No noise, no spam, just steady encouragement to feed your good wolf. That is a great story, and I think that is a great place for us to wrap up. Thank you so much much. I really enjoyed the book a lot. As I said, I cannot get the garden hose kinked garden hose metaphor. Both Jenny and I are like kindergarten.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:54:13  And you’re welcome.

Eric Zimmer 00:54:14  Yeah, exactly, exactly. It’s a good one. But the book is really good, and I learned a lot from it. And I always love talking with you.

Eric Zimmer 00:54:22  So thank you so much, Eric.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:54:23  You know, I’m such a big fan of you and your work and your book and the community that you have grown and tended like a beautiful garden over the last decade. Really.

Eric Zimmer 00:54:34  Thank you. Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking. I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Share it from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity, but we have something even better. And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the one You Feed community.

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Episode Transcript:

Manoush Zomorodi 00:00:00  When this research started to come out that a workout in the morning didn’t make much of a difference. If you then sat for the rest of the day, he like decided, well, that can’t be right. I’m going to disprove it. And he couldn’t study after study. Since then has shown that even if you like, kill it at boot camp in the morning. If you then go on to sit for the rest of the day, you face the exact harms.

Chris Forbes 00:00:31  Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts. We have quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:15  There’s an idea most of us have been taught for a long time that being productive means sitting down, focusing, and just pushing through. But what if that’s actually working against us? In this conversation, Manu Samadi, author of The Body Electric, shares research showing that the way we structure our days hours of sitting, staring at screens isn’t just tiring. It’s fundamentally at odds with how our bodies work. At one point, she describes the body like a kinked garden hose where everything starts to back up, and once I had that image in my mind, I can’t get rid of it. But the solution isn’t extreme. It’s small, repeated Interruptions, moving, listening to signals that we’ve learned to ignore. We talk about why that’s so hard to do, and how even a little bit of change can shift how we feel. Think and show up. I’m Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:12  Hi, Manoush, welcome to the show.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:02:14  Eric, I’m so excited to be back. It’s been a while.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:16  It has been a while and we are going to be discussing your new book, which is called Body Electric The Hidden Health Costs of the Digital Age and the New Science to Reclaim Your Well-Being. Yeah, but before we get into that, we will start, like we always do with a parable. And in the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking to their grandchild, and they say, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and they think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:03:07  Well, right now, I guess it’s on two levels. One is like putting out a book into the world. The thing that I’m trying not to get overwhelmed with feeding is what the algorithm wants and, you know, outrage to try and get people to pay attention to my book. But, you know, that’s also how publishing works, which is exhausting. So really, I’m trying to feed the wolf. The one where I remember why I was obsessed with finding the answer to the question I had that really is at the heart of the book, and connecting with the material that I think other people really need to hear, not because I think it will sell, but because I found it so life changing Myself. So I actually wrote myself a note to remind myself every day. Like the core purpose of the book, and that as long as I feel like I can connect with that on a daily basis. The other wolf sort of hangs out and lurks in the background.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:09  Yeah, we were talking about that before we started, how I had a book that came out, boy, a month and a half ago, almost something like that.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:16  You’ve got a book coming out and just kind of how crazy a time it is, and how easy it is to get lost in all sorts of things. Like I, for one, have not asked for any sales numbers because I’m like, I don’t really. Yeah, I’m like, if they’re not good, I don’t know what to do that I’m not doing. And if they are good, my brain will probably be like, but they could be better. And I’m like, I’m just I generally am like, well, I just don’t need information that I, that I’m not going to do anything constructive with. And so I just haven’t asked and I’ve instead tried to, like you say, focus on what’s important about the book. Focus on the kind words that I’m getting, the people that it’s helping. Yeah, it’s a more difficult time. So for you, what was the thing you wrote down that you wanted to come back to and remember about why you wrote the book?

Manoush Zomorodi 00:05:03  Yeah, it really actually reminds me of the title of your book, this idea and the parable that you talk about, this idea that little by little becomes a lot.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:05:12  And in my case, I really felt like something very human had been drained out of me, which was that I was spending day after day on my laptop, and I would end the day feeling like I had just enough energy to crawl over to the couch, to then scroll on my phone or watch a show, or both. And it just didn’t feel like the life that I wanted to lead. And I felt so tired and drained and exhausted and like I couldn’t focus. And like a lot of people are talking about just feeling like crap. Yeah. And, you know, I think combine that with the headlines and with the feeling that the economy is beyond your control and all of these things, and you just sort of it makes you want to give up, right? Just think, well, I’m on this ride. I have no agency. There’s nothing I can do about it. And when I found what is a very small, not hugely groundbreaking answer that actually felt very extraordinary to me and brought me back some optimism and made me feel like I had energy again in the smallest possible way in my little world.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:06:26  That parable makes sense because it was changing a habit that, little by little, made me feel like I got back my energy, that I could focus again, that I was more optimistic, that maybe I could, you know, talk to the school board about making that change. Maybe I could reschedule a meeting just because I needed time. So this idea that just teeny little things you do to change your life, which we can get into what that teeny thing is that made such a big difference.

Eric Zimmer 00:06:53  Yeah, and you’re right that that is right in line with the you know, the core idea of my book is that little by little, a little becomes a lot both in the positive and the negative. And so let’s get into kind of what you found. And I want to start where you talk about early in the book. You said you were afraid to write this book.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:07:16  Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:07:17  So obviously you’re not afraid of the powers that be coming to lock you up. Why were you afraid to write the book?

Manoush Zomorodi 00:07:23  Thank you for that reminder.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:07:25  I was not afraid to be censored. Or that as a woman, I couldn’t express myself. So that is a good reminder. I was afraid because I would have to sit on my ass for hours, weeks, months, years, even to write a book. And the entire premise of the book was that we needed to get more movement into our lives in order for our brains to function properly, and to feel good about ourselves and good in our bodies, and not hurt our mental and physical health. And so the very thought that I was about to commit myself to sitting and working on a laptop, while also writing how I shouldn’t be sitting and writing on a laptop felt like kind of like a meta mind screwy thing. So that was what terrified me. But I decided to walk the talk, as it were, or and talk the walk. So the entire premise of the book is about trying to not feel like crap and trying to understand what happens in our bodies when we are on our screens for hours and hours on end.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:08:30  And it’s based on research that I came across and a guy named Keith Diaz, he is a physiologist at Columbia University Medical Center, and this is a guy who has dedicated his life to figuring out what is the minimum amount of movement that the human body needs, so that all the sedentary screen time we indulge in doesn’t send us to an early grave. And I when I heard this research, it kind of shocked me because what he had found was that five minutes of gentle movement every half hour during those long periods of sitting had outsized results. It slashed people’s blood sugar, their blood pressure. It regained their focus, it steadied their mood. And it seemed to me like, well, it’s free. It doesn’t sound that hard to do five minutes of like, not burpees or sprints. Like, it just seemed like, oh, what you’re saying is that the human body craves movement throughout the day and that our tools, our innovations, have engineered what we need biologically out of the way. We construct our lives and this world that is built around sitting and looking at screens.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:09:47  And so I actually called him up and I was like, this is fascinating. Does it really work? Because I’m pretty healthy. And he said, well, you know, come and join the study. So I went up to Columbia and one day I sat on my butt on my laptop and worked for eight hours. I had a lunch break, went to the bathroom as they monitored, like all my vitals, my glucose, my heart rate, blood pressure, quick checks on my mood, ability to focus, fatigue levels, etc. and then I did another day where every half hour, his assistant kind of tapped me on the shoulder and led me over to a treadmill, where I walked for two miles per hour. So that’s pretty slow. It’s a stroll. And I again, I thought I was like, I noticed that I definitely felt more positive and my mood was so much better, and I actually had energy at the end of the day. So that was a huge like. I could feel that.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:10:42  But then when I got the actual results back, my blood sugar had dropped nearly in half, my blood pressure dropped by five points, and my fatigue levels, like as I measured them were like also essentially cut in half. So like the results were so amazing for something that felt kind of stupid, you know what I mean? So I was like, Keith, why aren’t we all doing this? And he’s like, well, we have created a life where we are told that from the minute we go to kindergarten, sitting in a chair and looking ahead is what a good, diligent worker does. This is how we’ve been taught that butts in chairs. And you know, I’m actually with you right now from San Francisco, the place where they’re developing surveillance technology to mate, you know, to see how long fingers are on keyboards and how long a cursor is in a dock without moving. So like, this is how we measure efficiency and good work is butts in chairs, eyes on screens. He’s like, I don’t think people can actually accept that.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:11:45  These interruptions not only will they save your health, but they will also make you a more productive worker. It’s very counterintuitive to how we think. I said, well, well, let’s just ask them, because it seems ridiculous to me not to try when you have found the answer. So we did a study together, NPR and Columbia University Medical Center, where we reached out to NPR listeners and said, Will you join a clinical trial to see if you can intersperse these movement breaks into your day, and you can try it every half hour, every hour or every two hours, five minutes of movement. And people could like, walk and talk on the phone. They could walk around the house and collect all the dirty dishes to put in the dishwasher. They could march in place. If walking wasn’t an option. They could also use their arms. Just the idea to build up circulation and get things moving. And we had over 20,000 people sign up. And at the end of the three week period, we found that 80% of the people who’d committed to doing movement breaks stuck with it.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:12:50  82% actually liked them. Fatigue was down by up to 28%. And interestingly enough, productivity slightly rose. All those interruptions did not make people feel like they got less work done or worse quality work done, which was kind of amazing. But we also just heard from people who were like, I feel like I’m connected to my body again. I can think straight. My back doesn’t hurt as much as it used to. My eyes don’t sting. At the end of the day, I am more positive. I’m around for my kids, you know, and can go outside and play with them after a day of work. And so it really seemed like just this idea of explaining to people the biology and how it is not compatible with the technology, and that, you know, your computer can be upgraded all the time, and all you have to do is plug it in to power it up. Unfortunately, your body is a little more finicky and works on ancient operating systems as opposed to 5G. So it was an extraordinary experience, and I’ve spent the last few years looking beyond the data and more into the stories to understand how did people do it? How did they change the structure of their days? What did they have to tell themselves to convince themselves, or their boss, or their kids, or their elderly parents? That movement needed to be part of their lives, and that it was something that wasn’t what they had to do, but what they got to do that it brought back this sort of sense of joy.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:14:28  That’s simply.

Eric Zimmer 00:14:47  So I would love to get into some of the how this happens, how people have done it, what has worked for them, what hasn’t worked for them. But before we do that, I want to go a little bit more into the science of it.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:15:00  So yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:15:01  The first thing is that we’ve heard a lot about how sitting is like the new smoking. Yeah. And it sounds like this gentleman, Keith Diaz, had done a lot of research that showed that it didn’t matter if you even had a very vigorous, once a day exercise routine. That’s good. Very valuable. But it did not offset the dangers of sitting for so long. Say a little bit more about that.

Speaker 4 00:15:29  Yeah. So Keith, as a physiologist.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:15:32  When he was getting his PhD, that research came out, the idea that sitting was the new smoking. So this was like over a decade ago, 12 years ago. And he didn’t believe it because he’d been taught that exercise was golden. It was the ticket to health that anything could be fixed with exercise.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:15:53  And so when this research started to come out, that a workout in the morning didn’t make much of a difference. If you then sat for the rest of the day, he like decided he’s like, well, that can’t be right. I’m going to disprove it. And he couldn’t study after study since then has shown that even if you like, kill it at boot camp in the morning. If you then go on to sit for the rest of the day, you face the exact harms. So first of all, we should say don’t stop working out like you obviously increase muscle mass and cardiovascular capacity and all those wonderful things that happen. However, what then happens if you then sit for the rest of the day, is pretty fascinating. So you have to think of your body as like, this is Keith’s metaphor a garden hose that’s kinked.

Eric Zimmer 00:16:43  That metaphor has really sunk in around this house.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:16:46  Like, can’t unsee it.

Eric Zimmer 00:16:48  Can’t unsee it. Nope.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:16:49  Totally.

Speaker 4 00:16:50  So your body is.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:16:51  Kinked like a garden hose when you sit at your waist and at your knees.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:16:56  And if you think of like a garden hose, that’s king like, the water starts to back up and pressure begins to build. Okay, so that’s blood pressure building. Blood flow doesn’t go through muscles. The leg muscles need to be stimulated in order to pull fat and sugars out of the blood and process them. If you don’t do that, where you start to see people who don’t move a lot, they over weeks, months, years become pre-diabetic or they build up plaques in their arteries. The other thing that happens is that the muscles need to stimulate in order to push oxygen up to the brain. Right. So when the brain is, you know, firing like switching from email to over to Instagram and should I answer that email? And I’m going to go over into this document. And over there, every time you switch you’re using glucose. You’re using oxygen to burn glucose. If you burn through all of that, you start to get CO2 buildup in your brain. That’s when you start to feel foggy.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:17:56  You get tired. You can’t think straight. What is the thing that gets more oxygen up there and refreshes it? Movement. I can keep going. The other thing is, when you sit for a long period, you are like kind of curled, like a boiled shrimp, is how I think of myself. Yeah. Sorry. Yep. There we go. And when you do that, your diaphragm is constricted and you can’t get again those full, deep breaths up into your body to oxygenate your brain. And then the final thing. And this is really where screens create insult injury is there’s a sense that it’s relatively new sort of thing that people are studying called interception. So this is what the body tells the brain you need. So the body might say, okay, you need to take another breath. It doesn’t usually you don’t really register that right. You just kind of do it automatically. Maybe you need a snack or maybe, you know, you need to go to the bathroom, right? These are the signals.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:18:55  This is your introspective sense telling you, your body saying, this is what I need to feel better. But what do we do when we’re on screens? We’re so externally focused. We’re so enthralled by what we’re doing. We’re so captivated by the work we do that we start to ignore what our body is telling us. So your body could be begging for a break. I’m anxious. I’m uncomfortable. My back hurts. My shoulders are curved. I can’t focus anyway. Can we please have a break? And we just ignore it and we power through. Or we tell ourselves, no, I’m just gonna, you know, answer five more emails and then I deserve a break. When really all we’re doing is like, making it less possible to actually write good emails and get our work done anyway. So, like all of these reasons together, if we combine them, it makes you wonder, like, what the hell are we doing? Why or why are we sitting and telling ourselves that we can just grind through, get it done? Because that’s what you know.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:19:55  That’s what a good worker does biologically. That is just incorrect. So once I learned all that and once I also explained a lot of that to listeners. I think that’s why people were willing to experiment with their behavior, because once you understand those things, you’re like, well, I don’t want that. Let’s try the alternative.

Eric Zimmer 00:20:15  Yeah, I’m stretching my legs out right now to try can at least.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:20:19  If at least two.

Eric Zimmer 00:20:20  We should. Well, we’re at the 230 mark. We’re at 30 minutes of sitting, so. But we could.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:20:25  Hang out at eight and keep talking.

Eric Zimmer 00:20:27  We could. But first let’s talk about standing, because just standing won’t solve the problem. Correct.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:20:33  That is correct. A standing desk is stillness just in a different form. You still don’t get that muscle stimulation. So if a standing desk is a way of sort of urging yourself to get more movement, a reminder to get more movement, then great, like stand up and do the shuffle, the zoom and shuffle, as I like to call it, where you just go back and forth while you’re on a zoom or march in place, while you’re talking on the phone.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:21:01  Like, that’s fine, but a standing desk actually meta analysis. And it’s been shown that if you stand for over two hours a day, you actually start to increase the chances of having cardiovascular issues, blood clots and varicose veins. So that’s fun too,

Eric Zimmer 00:21:18  So yes, I tried. My life has been kind of chaos. You and I were on a crazy boat recently. Life has been very interesting. Yes. You know, I mentioned my mother passed. So yesterday was like the first kind of day. Like normal day. Back to work. I’ve had in a while where I was like, okay, I’m about to do what I normally do, which is sit down and be in front of a computer most of the day. And so I tried to try. I tried to try. I tried. There is no try. There’s only do I tried to do every 30 minutes. And I did generally good except for a two hour spot right in the middle where just went right but didn’t happen.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:04  Didn’t happen. And so I’ve observed a couple things from this.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:22:08  Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:09  Tell me some of what I’ve observed ties right in with what I talk about and write about in the book, which is that first I need to be reminded. If I’m not reminded, it simply doesn’t occur. Now, maybe over time I will begin to. I’ll start to tune into the signals. But right now, being reminded is really critical. So if I sit back down and I don’t set my next 30 minute alarm, that’s how the two hour block happened.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:22:37  Yeah. So things that you’re starting to observe in yourself, we saw across the board with our people. So first of all, that’s totally great that you skipped a movement break. I’m actually really proud of you.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:51  I skipped two of them.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:22:52  That’s totally fine. What we found was people saw the mental health benefits with even just 4 or 5 breaks per day. And the people that were able to keep up the movement breaks showed themselves some grace. If you’re in flow, if you don’t feel like it.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:23:10  Guess what? It’s okay to skip a break. The point here is not to be perfect. The point is to just do something. Once in a while we are setting the bar incredibly low. It’s to feel good in your body, not to punish yourself in some way. So if that means taking two breaks today, great. That’s two more than nothing. Great. Good job. Yay! You can’t lose it. This, right? Yep. The second thing that you talked about with a timer. Absolutely. The number one way people were able to kickstart their interaction, getting movement into their lives. Their move break habit was by setting a timer. However, what we did here was that by the end of the two weeks, that sense of interruption was developed to the point where many people said, I actually don’t need my timer anymore. My body tells me when it’s time to get up so I can see that in myself. Right now. When we hit the 45 minute mark, I’m going to turn into like a squirmy eight year old boy, essentially, because that’s my rhythm.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:24:14  About 45 minutes to an hour is when I need a break. If I had health issues and, you know, for now, I don’t. But if I did, I think I would try to stick to that five minutes every half hour. Like, for example, we had a woman, amazing woman, who works in HR at a big hotel company who had major health issues, and she just she was doing her morning walk that her doctor had recommended. The numbers just weren’t changing. So she went to her doctor and she’s like, I think I want to try this experiment, this body electric thing. She did it. And within two weeks, her blood pressure dropped by 40 points and she went back down to tapering her insulin. And what ended up happening is it sort of kickstarted a sense that she and her body were not at odds with each other. She started. She did great. She saw results quickly. She felt more positive. She ended up paying more attention to her sleep. She started doing meditation, she changed her diet and she texted me last week.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:25:18  She actually got certified as an official health coach. So over her three year journey, she just she is a happier person. She feels better in herself and in her body. And she just decided that this is and well, and also she doesn’t need to. She’s off all of the medications she needed to be on to manage her biomarkers. So huge result for her. For me, it’s not that dramatic, but it’s enough that I don’t feel like I want to cry and throw my phone into Walden Pond. every day. You know that, like, I can do this. I can work and not hate it. And on the day, there are still days where I’m like.

Speaker 5 00:25:58  Oh, I don’t feel like getting up. And I’m like.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:26:01  But you know how you know you’re going to be back in love with the world after five minutes? So just do it. Just do it. Come on and I’ll do it. And I’ll.

Speaker 5 00:26:09  Be like, oh.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:26:10  Yeah, it works.

Speaker 5 00:26:11  It’s easy.

Speaker 5 00:26:11  It’s free.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:12  Hey, friend, before we dive back in, I want you to take a second and think about what you’ve been listening to. What’s one thing that really landed, and what’s one tiny action you could take today to live it out? Those little moments of reflection. That’s exactly why I started good wolf reminders. Short, free text messages that land in your phone once or twice a week. Nearly 5000 people already get them and say the quick bursts of insight helped them shift out of autopilot and stay intentional in their lives. If that sounds like your kind of thing, head to one. You feed, SMS and sign up. It’s free. No spam and easy to opt out of any time. Again, that’s one you feed. Tiny nudges, real change. All right, back to the show that all or nothing thing is so pernicious. I’ve seen it again and again over the years with coaching clients. I’ve seen it with so many different people that if we can’t do something exactly right, we often just conclude we shouldn’t do it.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:27:19  Is that a particular like personality thing, do you think, or cultural thing, or is it like, what have you observed?

Eric Zimmer 00:27:26  I really don’t know. I mean, I know that, you know, as far back as say, you know, Aristotle was talking about the golden mean right about, you know, right. Don’t go too far this way or that way. You know, the Buddha was talking about the middle way. That’s just one of the permutations of the middle way that I’ve seen. Somebody sent me an email the other day and they said, you know, I’ve gotten a lot out of your book. The thing I’ve gotten the most is that I can show up and do part. You know, I don’t have to do a perfect workout. And this is a person who is a personal trainer. And she said her thing is that if she doesn’t feel like she can really do it right, she just doesn’t do it. Yeah, and I think there’s a lot of that. I noticed this in myself.

Eric Zimmer 00:28:11  I’ve been really trying to spend a little time in somewhere like Colorado, where there’s so little water, you become even more conscious. I mean, I’m always a little bit conscious of become even more conscious, like, okay, how can I use less water? And I notice this in myself. I will forget for a second. Let’s say I didn’t turn the tap off while I was scrubbing something. I noticed it was running, and there’s just this little part of my mind that’s a little bit like why you screwed up, but doesn’t matter. And then I’m like, hang on a second. Like, every little bit matters, you know? It all adds up. So that I think is a real thing to watch for is if I can’t do it right, I don’t do it at all. And yeah. And it sounds like that’s a lot of what you were working with people to understand.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:28:52  Yeah. And I think I’ve seen it in myself for certain, like go big or go home. Right.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:28:58  And it’s taken me a long time to think like moderation. Maybe not as sexy.

Speaker 5 00:29:05  But probably.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:29:06  More effective. And honestly, like this is I want to find things that I can do for the rest of my life. I think as I’ve gotten older, you know, there’s this moment in your 40s where you’re like, this workout is not getting easier. I am just working to maintain at this point. And then you’re just as the years go on, you’re working to not lose what you have built. And so I think that’s like actually a really helpful mind shift for me that like, I’m in a point in my life where I want to maintain and continue to feel good, as opposed to learn how to windsurf and bench press. However many pounds like those are all great goals. But for me right now I’m about feeling good in my body, feeling connected to the world, feeling, like I can think straight and feel positive and stay healthy for as long as I can, and that feels more reasonable and manageable and, and less punishing of myself.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:30:12  Like, I went through my bootcamp phase, Eric, where I was like killing it at the gym. And, and I was really tired the rest of the day. It did not give me energy. That is for sure.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:24  I was I took up surfing in my 50s. Not windsurfing. Did not windsurfing, but regular surfing. So.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:30:30  Wow.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:31  Okay, but I live in Ohio, so I don’t get to do it all that often. But just in case anybody out there is like it’s too late for me to take up windsurfing, I’m like, no, no.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:30:39  Good point.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:40  There was something else I was going to say about what you just said there. Oh, we had a woman on years ago and I’ve kept in touch with her. Her name’s Michelle Seager, and I want to say she’s a researcher at the University of Michigan. I’m not sure, but she said something that I just took to heart all those years ago and continue, which she just basically said, move in whatever way you can as often as you can.

Eric Zimmer 00:31:02  Like that’s the whole game. Just move in whatever way you can as often as you can. And I was like, that’s that’s just solid advice.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:31:11  It’s solid advice. And then of course, my warped mind will be like, well, then I should just be moving all the time because I can move all the time. And so that is actually what Keith would say said was that there’s a fine line. Right? Like people want a dose prescription. Yeah. That they want to feel like there’s some sort of structure that’s scientifically verified, that they can sort of hang their hat on and used to guide themselves. And once you have that, though, that’s where the customization has to come in. Right. And that depends on your schedule, your genes, your setup at home, what feels good to you, what doesn’t feel good to you. There’s so many variables. And I think on the one hand, you know, we always talk about averages in science and talk about the best for you, but we kind of are all special little snowflakes.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:32:05  Yes, we are. And we need to experiment and find out what works for us, because it’s not going to be the same for each of us. I’ve had two children, and my diagnosis means there’s no way I could get myself up on a surfboard, so I got to work on that. I would love to, but that’s okay, I can pretend.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:43  I do think that the five minutes every 30 minutes is a nice thing to aim for. Now, as I’m looking at my life like, right now, I’m like, okay, well, we are at 45 minutes. Ideally, we would have moved 13 minutes ago and being precise and I’m like, if I stand up, then I’m going to be too far from the microphone.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:33:01  And yeah. Right, right, right. It’s the whole thing.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:04  Now I’m suddenly like, oh, maybe I need to be wearing a headset. But the the point being, when you and I wrap up here, I will have time. I will go out now and.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:13  Yeah. And I’m like, do I go outside because my allergies are so bad? I’m gonna walk. I’m gonna walk somewhere some way for five minutes. And I’ve found that helpful. I’ve been doing it on planes because I’ve been traveling.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:33:25  Oh. Nice. It’s addictive. Right? Like, don’t people sort of look at you or, like or not addictive? It’s a contagious. That’s what I meant to say, that people see you moving and they start to, like, crack their neck and, like, roll their shoulders. And maybe a couple more people get up, too. And like, because I can’t sit now in airports to wait for my flight. So I just walk with my luggage in circles. And I’ve noticed that a lot of other people sort of stand are watching me and then start moving around too.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:51  I’ve mostly just noticed people watching me. Like what? And I’ve just interpreted like, why is this guy going in circles? Why is this guy going up and down this aisle for the fourth time? You know, like but perhaps it is contagious.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:34:07  I love.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:08  It. Yeah, I like traveling with Ginny because one of us can sit with all the luggage, and the other can just move, and then we switch, and then they switch.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:34:17  Yeah. Perfect, I love that. I mean, that I think we saw a couple things too, which is like. So, for example, like people who are in a power position, if you’re the boss and you say walking meetings are acceptable, then you set the tone for everyone. Or if you say, we’re going to change our Google Calendar settings so that all meetings are 55 minutes instead of 60. You know, that’s a power move, right? And I think it’s a good one because it actually shows your team. Like I understand that we are asking a lot of you, the average, you know, information worker uses between 11 and 13 different software tools and platforms every day. And like the way I’m going to use them is going to be different than you. But we all need breaks.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:34:59  Yeah. And then we also saw other people who are like, well, I don’t know what my boss would think about this, but if I see that I’ve got 16 minutes until my next meeting, that’s all fit in a quick movement break and then come to the meeting or I’ll say, like, I’m going to turn off my camera just because I’m not feeling well, and I’ll move around like people just found ways to sort of integrate it into their day as well. I mean, I’m a big fan. Video podcasts make this difficult, but I’m a really big fan of can we not do a zoom call? Can we do a phone call?

Eric Zimmer 00:35:31  Yes.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:35:31  And walking and.

Eric Zimmer 00:35:32  Talking me to and back when I used to work in an office, I used to do as many of the meetings as I could. I’d be like, let’s go for a walk. Let’s go for a walk.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:35:41  Oh, nice. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I actually, you know, we also know that when you walk side by side and your bodies sync up, that actually sinks up your brainwaves, which is fascinating to me.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:35:52  So, you know, you’re not having eye contact, so there’s not a confrontational feeling to it. Your bodies are sinking up. You might find some breakthroughs that you wouldn’t necessarily have if you’re both staring at each other, sort of staring at each other on zoom, which, by the way, has been shown to increase your cognitive load and wear you down even faster.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:11  Have you heard anything about. And I don’t know what it’s called, but it’s essentially the a disorder that comes from staring at yourself all the time.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:36:21  Oh, like body dysmorphia or more just distraction.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:25  It’s not quite body dysmorphia, but it’s something about the fact that, like, right now I’ve maximised you. But yes, at least on Riverside, I can’t get rid of me. So I see myself all, all the time. Some people have theorized that’s not good for us in some way, but I can’t quite. I can’t quite remember where I read it or what it.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:36:45  Was like Narcissa or something like that, but like, I don’t know about the mental health effects, but I can tell you, there’s a guy that I spoke to for the book who’s an Austrian researcher, where they studied the effects.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:36:57  So like how we talk about zoom fatigue. And they were like, well, what? It really is fatiguing and is that real? So they actually did a study where they measured it. And he said that what they saw was even just the slightest mismatch of timing. Like we wouldn’t notice it consciously, but our brain registers a slight change and it’s constantly adjusting for that change that also when you’re in person, you’re getting so much ambient data from someone, from their body language, you know, a furrow of the brow, the tone in their voice, and you’re not getting those over zoom. So you’re you’re constantly scanning, looking for other indications of what someone is thinking and feeling that you wouldn’t get just sort of very quickly if you were in person. And the third thing he mentioned was being distracted and seeing yourself because you’re then having I mean, I don’t know about you, but the conversation I’m having is like, Do I really look that tired in real life? My hair. I love the idea that the researchers studying zoom fatigue.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:38:03  How do they take their zoom meetings? He says that they get on their zoom, they keep their cameras on, and they say hello, just so they, you know, have a minute. And then they all shut their cameras off and they limit their meetings to they try to stick to ten minutes.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:19  The zoom fatigue piece makes sense to me because I do video interviews all the time, and I have found it hard to banter in the same way that I can in person, because there’s the slightest delay. We don’t notice it, but it’s there. It makes it just hard to interrupt you to say something clever Without interrupting you. Whereas in person, somehow we would read that between us and it and it would work. And it’s it’s one of my, one of my frustrations with this format is exactly that.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:38:55  So you and I actually had this experiment because we were on a panel together in person, and I remember looking across to you and having like, the slightest flicker of eye contact about whether I should answer the next question or the other guy on the panel should.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:39:18  And I wouldn’t have noticed if we didn’t then have zoom to compare it to in some ways, like, you know, the things that you just don’t even realize are things until you realize you don’t have them. And there was this philosopher, Tobias Reese, on the boat talking about how nobody talked about the need to get out into nature Until the middle of the 1800s and the Industrial Revolution. And then there was an alternative. People were living in cities and suddenly you realize, oh, nature is a thing. Or like, you know, David Foster Wallace, that story where the fish says to the other fish, how’s the water? And they’re like water. What do you mean, what’s water? And I think it’s the same thing that’s kind of happened for movements. Nobody said like a hundred years ago. Like, did you get enough movement in today? They were like, what are you talking about? But now, since we’re using technology to the point that we barely need our bodies, we’ve gotten so efficient at not needing the human body to do labor or to entertain or connect or get our information.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:40:26  We now have to talk about it. It’s something we have to be intentional and have language for which I find absurd. But, you know, this is where we are, and I. I’m not a Luddite. Like, I love my tech. I love the fact that you are in Ohio and I’m in San Francisco and we’re on a freaking call and people are gonna listen and hopefully they get something out of this. And we’re also dealing with real life and this crazy fire alarm and all the rest of it. Like, it’s kind of awesome. So totally not to be different about it.

Eric Zimmer 00:40:56  Yeah. You mentioned that you discovered a book. I don’t know how old the book was, but a book that essentially talked about a lot of the science that you’re talking about now and the actual remedy for it, but it was not a recent book.

Speaker 6 00:41:13  Oh, yeah. This was really quite funny.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:41:16  Strange. So I was going for a movement break on my block where I live in Brooklyn, and it’s great in my neighborhood, everybody puts books out on their stoops when they’re done with them, you know, take a book.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:41:27  And this book was from 1995, which didn’t feel like that long ago to me. But it is. It’s a that’s a long time ago now, 30 years ago. And it was about repetitive stress syndrome. So, you know, RSI and people. So my whole thing that I had concluded was like, we need to be treating ourselves even if we are, you know, laptops are our football or our violin or our jumbo jet. We have to be treating ourselves like people who use a tool to express themselves, a professional musician or an athlete or an airline pilot. We have to be treating ourselves like information athletes because our brain is our tool, and we’re not treating our brain right when we don’t give our bodies what it needs. And I was like, we gotta be information athletes. And then I came across this book on a stoop, and it had the same concept from 30 years ago, and it didn’t have the studies, but it said, based on what we now know, we think taking a break every half hour is probably a good idea.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:42:35  And I was like, how many times do we need to be told that our bodies need breaks and we just don’t listen? And I think what’s dangerous now is there are some people peddling this idea that AI will set us free, right? That, you know, it will take over all the drudgery and all the annoying stuff we have to do on our devices, and that will give us back our free time, and that this will mean that we can be fully self-actualized humans who can go frolic in fields and write poetry and watercolor and, you know, back to the land sort of movement. And as we know throughout history. And I chronicled this in the book, like going through every time there is an efficiency or an innovation that comes along. If anything, we just move less, you know, from the Threshers that you could sit on to call to. I don’t even know how to speak. Agriculture, to harvesting the wheat to drive through movie theaters and escalators and remote control monitors. And now even less so.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:43:47  The human body has been taught over evolution to save energy, to save calories. And so we just tried to move as little as possible. But we’re at this point where we need to, sort of defy the way that we’ve been. We need to do it on purpose in many ways.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:07  I came across a study. I’ll send it to you, afterwards. That debunks everything. You know, I’m just kidding.

Speaker 7 00:44:17  I’m kidding. I would’ve been like, oh.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:19  I’m kidding.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:44:20  You didn’t tell me that sooner.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:21  Yeah, exactly. I set you up, I let you lay out your case, and now I’m about to take it apart. No, it it’s, it’s in mice. It’s interesting in that it says here’s what it says.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:44:33  Is this mice or rats?

Eric Zimmer 00:44:34  Is it I don’t distinguish rodents. Yeah.

Speaker 6 00:44:37  Okay.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:38  Scientists found that abdominal muscle contractions compress blood vessels connected to the spine and brain, pushing fluid that gently moves the brain within the skull. This physical swaying provides evidence for how exercise might benefit brain health by washing away cellular waste.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:44:56  That is fascinating. Yeah, I would love to learn more about that, I think. To your point, there is so much we are learning about the interconnectedness of our organs. I’ll give you another example. Doctor Peter Strick at the University of Pittsburgh, his who’s this curmudgeonly guy whose kids were like, dad, you got to do Pilates. You got to do yoga to manage your stress. And he was like, why? There is no scientific evidence that shows that that actually reduces stress. It’s all woo woo.

Speaker 6 00:45:27  And then he was like, wait a minute. Is could we find biological proof that this actually.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:45:33  So this happens to be what he studies, which is the connection between the different organs and the brain. And so he mapped what happens when there is muscle contraction in the torso, abdominal region, how that affects the adrenal glands, which squirt, you know, cortisone up to the brain and tell us, you know, fight or flight sort of thing. And he found that there was a conversation going on between these abdominal muscles, the adrenal gland and motor cortex in the brain.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:46:02  So they actually are all talking. And there is a very good biological reason why you feel more relaxed and calm. Or as my Pilates teacher calls it, the Pilates high. After you’ve done it, they these things are all connected. And he says, you know, even if you just stand up and move, you can feel a bigger sense of relief. Now, there’s many reasons why you’re getting more oxygen, all of those things. But there is a conversation happening. So another, one that they’re starting to map over in Pittsburgh is the connection between, leg muscles and the colon and the brain, because we know that, if you are sedentary for too long, you know, you don’t have to go constipation, which can also be a contributing factor to colon cancer, actually. So not the factor, but a factor. You know, it’s just really exciting times in terms of mapping the conversation that’s going on between all the different organs and areas of the brain and muscles. And I think, you know, somebody said to me, he’s like, yeah, I think that we need to rethink it.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:47:12  It’s not a conversation between the body and the brain. It’s just one thing. And they’re all talking to each other all the time.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:19  I agree, I mean, that seems to be, at least to me, that like to talk about a body brain connection is to kind of separate them. I often think this way also about thoughts and emotions. I’m like, I’m not sure we talk about them as other separate. I’m not sure they are. Do you ever get one without the other? Like they tend to travel together? I mean, there are at least, you know, very good friends. There was another fascinating article in the New York Times this weekend about certain researchers think they found a third system in our body. There’s the circulatory system, there’s the lymphatic system. They’ve begun to think that there’s another system. They’re calling it the interstitial system that is passing fluid through the body. And it is an explanation for why acupuncture works.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:48:07  So like facial.

Eric Zimmer 00:48:08  Yeah. But but fluid passing through the fascia.

Eric Zimmer 00:48:13  Yeah. or or between the fascia and the muscles. I haven’t read it fully.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:48:18  Oh, okay.

Eric Zimmer 00:48:19  And I’m like, how do we miss an entire other.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:48:22  I mean, this is where, you know, it gets blurry, right? Like, on the one hand, like, my Pilates instructor is all about the fascia and melting it and soothing it and how that, like, releases tension throughout the body. And for the longest time, there wasn’t any research. And then the last few years there started to be research that says like, yeah, actually that is pretty important. But then we also have other people peddling all sorts of other names that are not scientifically proven in the slightest. And so.

Eric Zimmer 00:48:54  It’s.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:48:54  Tricky. It’s tricky. And it’s like, you know, something ancient wisdom. Maybe we don’t have the scientific proof, but we have centuries of, of of trying things out. And then we have other things where it’s actually very dangerous. Like it, it worries me like, you know, because maybe the people who can give raw milk as an example, I was talking to someone who was saying, you just need to try raw milk.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:49:20  It’s the way to go. And I was like, yeah, but what about the bacteria? And he said to me, well, you need clean cows. I’m like, okay, guess what? I don’t have any clean cows. And maybe the people who do and whatever fancy people can pay for their extra special clean milk. But when we’re talking about the majority of people who do not have access to even basic health care, I think we have to be looking out for the most vulnerable and the people who could use the most help. there’s always going to be people who can take crazy peptide shots and see their gurus, and they’ll probably be okay, even if they do some of these less scientifically convincing things, because their basic health is cared for majority of the time. So that was my little soapbox there, Eric.

Eric Zimmer 00:50:11  Well, I agree, I think this is part of what’s so challenging about science and and trying to sort of base your life on. What science is sort of saying is that I feel like it’s always incomplete, meaning something we know today to be absolutely sure.

Eric Zimmer 00:50:30  I don’t know what thing that we believe. To be absolutely sure today that science is telling us is wrong. But some of them are. Yeah. You know, I wish we knew which ones they were because you’d be like, discard that. But some of the scientific consensus around something is wrong. We just don’t know what it is. It’s why I always have been like, I kind of love it when, like, multiple things verify something for me. Yeah. So for example, I’m like, okay, well, oh, you know, Buddhists have been saying this for a long time. That’s interesting. Okay. That’s that’s one source of information. Okay. Oh, and now science is coming along and sort of saying like, yeah, a lot of that I think is true. Oh, and then the third sort, you know, the third source is like, oh, I seem to get benefit from when I do it and when, when I get that, it’s sort of like ding, ding, ding.

Eric Zimmer 00:51:17  Then I’m like, okay, this I feel like I can sort of trust. So like this 30 minute movement break, like there’s good science to show it. I think it’s common sense. And I’m going to try it and see for myself. Like, do I feel better if I do it, you know, on a regular basis? And I think that’s kind of what we all have to figure out is what science do we trust him because it is just so hard to know.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:51:41  Yeah. Be skeptical, then verify and then experiment. And I think.

Eric Zimmer 00:51:45  That’s a good way to say.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:51:46  It. Yeah, it reminds me that I love this high school teacher who took the body electric study and decided that she was going to use it in her classroom. She didn’t want to be like kids. We’re all moving now because they would have told her to f off, right? But she decided to use it as a way to teach data journalism, and health and wellness claims to question things. So they did it in sort of a meta way.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:52:15  They were like, okay, if we take part in this experiment, what is the data collection? How is the data? Good data. What does it mean to do an experiment over two weeks? What’s a baseline establishing week that they’re talking about. How does that work. How do we collect our data. How do we process it at the end? What are the claims that they’re making and why are they making those claims. Can we trust them? And then also where does the placebo effect fit into all of this? Like you feel better. Is that because you’re being asked like whether you feel better? Is like, you know, where does that fit into it? So I said to her, I was like, do you think that you change their habits in the end? She’s like, I think I taught them to be better consumers of health journalism. I think I taught them that they don’t have to be passive consumers. They can question these things themselves. And also if they’re like, oh no, my chargers upstairs and they’re like, Actually, it’s a chance to get in a flight of stairs if they think that once that is a win as well.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:53:20  And I love that idea that like media literacy, it is health literacy these days.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:27  As we wrap up, take one thing from today and ask yourself, how will I practice this before the end of the day? For another gentle nudge, join good Wolf Reminders text list. It’s a short message or two each week, packed with guest wisdom and a soft push towards action. Nearly 5000 listeners are already loving it. Sign up free at once. You feed us. No noise, no spam, just steady encouragement to feed your good wolf. That is a great story, and I think that is a great place for us to wrap up. Thank you so much much. I really enjoyed the book a lot. As I said, I cannot get the garden hose kinked garden hose metaphor. Both Jenny and I are like kindergarten.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:54:13  And you’re welcome.

Eric Zimmer 00:54:14  Yeah, exactly, exactly. It’s a good one. But the book is really good, and I learned a lot from it. And I always love talking with you.

Eric Zimmer 00:54:22  So thank you so much, Eric.

Manoush Zomorodi 00:54:23  You know, I’m such a big fan of you and your work and your book and the community that you have grown and tended like a beautiful garden over the last decade. Really.

Eric Zimmer 00:54:34  Thank you. Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking. I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Share it from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity, but we have something even better. And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the one You Feed community.

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Episode Transcript:

Clancy Martin 00:00:00  Living life actually is the network of relationships that we have. So, for example, I don’t really think that the concept of dying, as we normally talk about it makes too much sense, because I think that who I am as being at all is constituted by this network of relationships that I have. Like, I don’t think there really is a Clancy independent of all these Clancy’s exchanged with all these other people.

Chris Forbes 00:00:37  Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts. We have quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:22  There’s a line from the philosopher Schopenhauer that came up in this conversation. He says, we’re companions in misery, and at first that sounds kind of bleak, but the more I’ve thought about it, I think it’s really comforting. And maybe none of us fully understand each other’s suffering, but we all know what it’s like to suffer. In this conversation, John Cage and Clancy Martin and I talk about philosophy not as a set of answers, but as a way of being with each other in the hard parts of life, through friendship, through conversation, through the simple act of not being alone in it. I’m Eric Zimmer, and this is the one you feed. John Clancy, welcome to the show.

John Kaag 00:02:04  Thanks so much for having us.

Clancy Martin 00:02:05  Thanks for having us, John.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:06  You’ve been on twice before. So this is number three. You’re entering into rare company of three time guests. Clancy, this is your first time, and I’m really happy to have you here. We’re going to be discussing all sorts of things.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:19  We’ve all worked together on a project at a company called rewind, where I created a AI enhanced version of the Dao teaching, and you’ve helped create AI versions of the Bible, the pagoda vitae, selections from Buddhism, all sorts of classic works. And so we’ll talk about all that. And I think we’re just going to talk about philosophy too, because that’s two key areas. You guys are both philosophers. And we’ll just kind of wander around and see where things take us. But we start like we always do with the parable. And in the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking to their grandchild, and they say, in life there are two roles inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops. Think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed.

Eric Zimmer 00:03:14  So I’d like to start off by asking you guys each how that parable applies to you and your life and in the work that you do.

John Kaag 00:03:24  It’s a great question. I’ve thought a lot about this, not just on this show, but just generally. Lately I’ve come to think that let’s call it the bad wolf, the the wolf that is associated with greed, hatred. I think that this wolf gets fed whether we like it or not. And I think, actually, we have to actively and consciously starve that wolf and feed the other one, because I think that our natural default setting is to to be afraid and to be a little bit self-centered and to be a little bit greedy. And I think it takes a lot of conscious attention to cut the appetite down or cut the, you know, the food train off for that wolf and, concentrate on feeding the other. That struck me. Clancy, what do you think?

Clancy Martin 00:04:16  Well, I agree with most of what John said, and I want to elaborate on it a little.

Clancy Martin 00:04:21  I, I disagree with one thing. I don’t think the default setting is the feeding of the bad wolf. I think that the sort of the default setting. Actually, I’m with Mencius on this one. I think the default setting is the is the feeding of the good wolf. But I think that these wolves, you know, they’re going to fight and, you know, you can feed them a lot or you can feed them a little. You might decide you don’t want to feed them at all now, and they try to eat each other up. But I actually have come around to The View. I sort of disagree with the grandfather. I don’t know if I’m really in charge of feeding those.

Eric Zimmer 00:05:02  Who dislikes grandparents. Clancy, this is a profoundly shocking statement.

Clancy Martin 00:05:07  Yeah, yeah, I know, particularly an Indigenous American grandfather who is always who I picture when I hear that parable. But, yeah, I think I disagree with him. I’m not sure I’m in charge of feeding those wolves. I have six feral cats living in my backyard right now.

Clancy Martin 00:05:25  We had a cat who was coming around and my my wife was a writer, Amy Barrett ale. She she said that cat looks hungry. We need to feed her. So we started feeding her. And then one day she said, I think her name. My seven year old son named her Doraemon. And my wife said, I think Doraemon is pregnant. And I said, no, no, no, she. You’ve just been feeding her too much. Well, lo and behold, a few weeks went by. Suddenly we had five little kittens peeking out from underneath our deck. So we’re feeding all of them. And then you can imagine what happens next. There’s this white cat is hanging around and we’re both my wife and I are both like, oh, he’s coming to check on his children. No, no. Much more time comes by and Doraemon is pregnant again. She’s since had her second litter. Now we’ve got to get all these cabs vaccinated and other things so that we don’t wind up with a thousand cats back there.

Clancy Martin 00:06:15  But, as I’ve been feeding these cats and I was thinking, knowing that you were going to pose this question to us, I was thinking, you know, I think those wolves, those wolves just roam around inside me and they eat what they please, and they’re probably gonna keep on fighting, you know, until I die. And still eating, I don’t think. I don’t know if I’m in charge of feeding them, and I don’t know if I’m in charge of starving them either.

Eric Zimmer 00:06:41  So we have a new sponsor on this show, Small’s Cat food. Perhaps I need to ask them to put together a sampler pack. Clancey, to send your way.

Clancy Martin 00:06:50  Because if you do have that sponsor and you’re not kidding with me. Eric. By God, please, please.

Eric Zimmer 00:06:56  I’m not kidding. It’s. And it’s good stuff. My sister. I sent her the first sampler pack. I’ll see if we can get more.

Clancy Martin 00:07:01  Yeah. Please send me a sampler pack.

Eric Zimmer 00:07:04  So I’m going to go back to this idea of our default setting.

Eric Zimmer 00:07:07  Because, John, you’ve worked recently reminds latest, really big project is a rewind version of the Bible that you can have a conversation with. And so I know that part of your role is in the content of those things, like really getting into the content. And the Bible certainly comes from a at least certain interpretations of the Bible certainly come from a we are flawed place, right? That’s the default setting. Your default. Flawed, right? Clancy, you practice Buddhism pretty heavily, and in general, Buddhism takes a slightly different take. They tend to say what’s actually underneath it is all good. It’s like a diamond, but it’s clouded over for all of us, and I don’t know which one is right. What I do think is both of those things are speaking towards some degree of cultivation, right? Some degree of cultivation. And the parable speaks to it, some degree of cultivating the good sides of a some degree of cultivating or working skillfully with, you know, those darker voices. I’d be curious, Jon, has anything changed in your spiritual life or the way you view the world after doing this work on the Bible? Because that’s a big undertaking and a really beautiful book, and I don’t think it’s your default orientation either.

John Kaag 00:08:26  Yeah. That’s right. That’s a very interesting and I, I hadn’t really thought about that. When I say the default setting of human beings is to be greedy and fearful and hateful. I think I perhaps am speaking a little bit what I, what I mean by that is more akin to what David Foster Wallace says. And this is water, which is that our natural default setting is a sort of innate self-centeredness, to think that we are the center of the universe or, you know, kings of our own skull sized kingdoms, I think. And that leads, I think, for us to feel insecure leads us to feel anxious. It leads us to feel greedy at certain times. It leads us to be fearful, which I think is the sister to hateful. and I think that that’s the default setting that I think we have to consciously be aware of, that we can fall back into and break out of. When I think about what DFW is, I think trying to say in that he says, we all worship something.

John Kaag 00:09:40  It’s just natural to worship something. as human beings, it’s really up to us to choose what to worship and how to worship on our own time with the lives that we have. And I think that he observes that if we worship fame and wealth, and I take that to be sort of greed or fear, if we worship those totems or those icons, we tend to be unhappy. A lot of the time. And we also tend not to notice that there are other possibilities that we can attend to, namely the concerns of others, the possibility of artistic possibilities out in the world. And those possibilities are also things that we can worship. But it takes attention because we get continually sucked back into this sort of innate self-centeredness, which I take to be like the sort of root of this default setting. And I’m happy to talk about the Bible, too, but I’m going to throw it a Clancy and see what he thinks.

Clancy Martin 00:10:42  Yeah, I have been spending so much time with the Bible in the past year because of the Grapevine Study Bible.

Clancy Martin 00:10:49  So I had been thinking about it in ways that I hadn’t thought about it since I was an undergraduate at Baylor University. One of the best classes I took as an undergraduate. Maybe the single best class was a year long class that we had at that time at the university. On the letters of Paul was an incredibly popular class. There was a waitlist for it. It was one of these classes where you had to, you know, submit a little writing sample to get into it. And it was, yeah, I think it’s the best class I ever took in my life. And I hadn’t thought about, and we read all, you know, kinds it we learned all about Martin Luther and Erickson. You know, he went he took Paul everywhere. And that’s definitely what we’ve been trying to do with re bind generally, and especially with the rebound Bible, is to show like the vast network of connections in the the world’s greatest wisdom literature. Anyway. So I’ve been immersed in the Bible and I’ve been thinking about it a lot.

Clancy Martin 00:11:46  And John’s co-founder in the company, a guy named John Dubuque, who, you know, sent me an interview from the New York Times recently with Marilynne Robinson, someone who we’d love to have commenting on the book of Genesis for us. And in that interview, she’s talking about what John Cage was just talking about, which is and what you were talking about with the diamond and kind of getting rid of the clouds. You know, the sun and the moon are always there, but the clouds sometimes obscure them. And that way of thinking about devotion and, religious experience and that way of thinking about Genesis, that like, look, when we’re talking about, it’s estrangement from Paradise getting kicked out of the Garden of Eden. We’re not talking about, original sin in the way. Say that maybe Augustine thought of it. Where, you know, we all were boys, and we’re visiting an orchard, and one of us steals an apple and he doesn’t even eat the apple. He just throws it away and you think, oh, there’s proof of original sin because he didn’t even want the apple.

Clancy Martin 00:12:53  He was just stealing it for the fun of it. No, that’s not what we’re talking about. What we’re talking about is the kind of possible purity of experience, like actually seeing reality the way that it is and then losing that purity of experience. That’s what we’re talking about in Genesis. And that’s what, according to Marilynne Robinson, in this interview, we can start to appreciate through devotion, through, kind of a religious attitude towards life. Like, we have a bad habit right now of thinking that, you know, a religious attitude towards life is equivalent with a dogmatic attitude toward life in a certain way of understanding social relationships, political relationships, all those things. But if you actually go back to the Bible. That’s not at all the way that it reads. You know, and, the more time I’ve spent on this project, the more I’ve realized from from my reading that actually, the Bible, the Dao, my under my very, very limited understanding of Buddhist texts, there’s an awful lot of similarity in the ways that they’re approaching this question of just trying to get to what John Cage was talking about, which is like somewhat less selfish way of experiencing things.

Clancy Martin 00:14:18  That’s it. Nothing more complicated than that, as just a somewhat less selfish way of experiencing, being a human being among other human beings.

Eric Zimmer 00:14:27  Yeah, I think that that selfishness is a is a theme. I mean, I got I got sober in a 12 step program and the AA Big Book, I mean, basically says pretty clearly that selfishness, self-centeredness is the root of the alcoholic problem, right? And I would say it’s the root of all kinds of problems. If we want to think of of a diamond or a sun shining, the clouds or the dirt are almost always, in my experience, some form of this selfishness that we’re talking about now. It’s natural and normal. You can’t get away from it. I don’t think you can be a self and not have some of it, but this idea of, you know, I think it also talks about the bondage of self. And that’s how I feel it. The stronger I feel it, the more imprisoned I actually feel in experience and the smaller my experience gets.

Clancy Martin 00:15:16  Well, well, that’s exactly right. I mean, I actually want to disagree with you a little bit there, Eric, because I’m not sure, like, you know, I’m a little bit with Rousseau on this one. I’m not sure it’s as natural as we like to, to kind of conveniently say, I actually find, like my friendship with you, say, or my friendship with John Craig to be much more natural to me than having a kind of exaggerated focus on my own concerns. Now, I have a habit that has been reinforced by all kinds of who knows what, probably social things. Like I say, Rousseau, I think kind of got this right. The way the habits we have of living might have a tendency to narrow my concerns, but naturally, actually, I just want to sort of, you know, if I’m speaking totally candidly, I actually just kind of want to hug the people around me if I’m being totally natural. I don’t, because I’ve learned not to. But it’s much more natural for me to love John than it is not to.

Clancy Martin 00:16:12  It’s much more natural for me to love you than to not to. I mean, friendship just occurs to me naturally.

Eric Zimmer 00:16:18  Well, I want to let John talk here. I just want to say one thing. When we talk about Rousseau and his view of like that, we’re naturally the society is sort of what tends to corrupt us. I’m oversimplifying, but the work we did together on the Dow, that is the Dow, to a large degree to write the Dow is really pointing to this. If you get if you get society in all its constrictions and all its things out of the way, we naturally revert to a state of ease and goodness.

John Kaag 00:16:48  To go back to the Bible work that we’ve done recently, I came into philosophy through Friedrich Nietzsche and his very, very strident criticism of Christianity and slave morality, and the idea that selflessness led to a type of self-abnegation and, you know, a type of forgetfulness and a tendency toward mediocrity that we see in the modern era. This is Nietzsche’s sort of like snapshot of Nietzsche’s criticism of slave morality.

John Kaag 00:17:21  And as I’ve worked through this Bible project, has 41 different scholars that you get to interact with as you work your way through the Bible. through each of the chapters of the Bible, you get to sort of interact with their commentary on the chapters And what I’m struck by is all 41 of them are trying to explain why this selflessness is actually a very healthy way to carry oneself through life and to approach questions of suffering and anxiety. And they routinely point out from the Old Testament, from the prophets, or even Abraham straight through to Jesus in the New Testament, is that this selflessness is also a willingness to separate oneself off from the social constraints and the social expectations of a culture that is almost obsessed with the self in its sort of material trappings or fame and fortune. And so, like, what is divine is the ability to put our own social conventions in a particular type of context To step away from them and have the courage to step away from them and understand oneself in the face of something so much greater, which is either nature for the Transcendentalists or the Romantics, or God and God.

John Kaag 00:18:50  If you’re Christian and you only get that ability if you’re willing to get a little critical distance on those beliefs and fundamental rules that you’ve taken to be sort of necessary for conventional moral life.

Eric Zimmer 00:19:22  That’s awesome. I think we’re all sort of narrowing in on a pretty clear idea here. I want to change directions a little bit for a second, because, John, you talked about William James. You wrote a whole book kind of about William James. And in that book there’s a lot of times where he the question he raised was, maybe life is worth living. And Clancy, certainly your latest book is all about suicide and your repeated suicidal ideation for much of your life, for the fact that you tried many different times. And so you both have talked a fair amount about this sort of question of is life worth living? You know, maybe and I would love to hear both of you from where you are today. I know where you were in your books, but I’d love to hear from where you are today, how you relate to that question, and whether it occurred to you guys that you both have been asking that same question.

Eric Zimmer 00:20:18  So clearly, maybe that’s part of the basis of the friendship? I’m not sure, but it was very evident to me as I started looking at both of your work.

John Kaag 00:20:25  Clancy, you want to go first?

Clancy Martin 00:20:26  Sure. Yeah. Well, I mean, it’s certainly part of the friendship. I mean, to continue on the theme that we were talking about the intimacy of. I mean, I have had conversations with John Cage about things that I would I don’t know if I would speak with anyone else about or anyone else maybe on the planet. And that intimacy comes from a comfort with shared experiences that I know, both from having been friends for many years now, but also from having read his work and, you know, just having had a lot of really important times together. This relates to this question directly to this question of whether or not life is worth living. I mean, and to the question we were talking about earlier, about what is natural, whether or not selfishness is natural to me.

Clancy Martin 00:21:20  You know, life. I don’t know whether life is worth living is maybe not even quite right. The quite the right question for me. And to me, living life actually is the network of relationships that we have. So, for example, I don’t really think that the concept of dying, as we normally talk about it makes too much sense. because I think that, who I am as being at all is constituted by this network of relationships that I have. Like, I don’t think there really is a Clancy independent of all these Clancy’s exchanged with all these other people. And consequently, I mean, I yes, as I die that Clancy is going to change in various ways, but they’re still going to be that Clancy hanging around, you know what I mean? Because John’s not going to instantly forget about me when I die, and neither is Eric and neither of my children and etc. there’s still going to be plenty of Clancy floating around there. Maybe slowly but surely he’ll diminish away, I suppose.

Clancy Martin 00:22:27  But it’s going to be kind of a slow process, and I don’t think there’s any more to him now than that, Clancy, either, so I don’t think it’s a worth living. It’s like I am living, you know, I am living. That’s what I can say to that question.

John Kaag 00:22:43  To come at it, I think, in a complimentary way, but maybe a little bit more to the point of is life, where is life worth living? And then William James’s responses, maybe it depends on the liver. I think that that response for me still rings pretty much true. I think that he’s gesturing to the fact that every single life is so different that it really does depend on who you are, and he’s not foreclosing the possibility of there being certain cases where life is too difficult. So he doesn’t want to shut down that possibility either. But I think what gives me continual hope is that this may be, I think, is actually a very good direction for life. What I mean by that is, if you think about the things that are most meaningful to you, love art.

John Kaag 00:23:38  Maybe you love painting or, you know, playing guitar, or playing soccer, or parenting or kissing someone, or falling in love, or reading all of those experiences that make life worth living at the core of them have a maybe at their heart, in other words. Would the soccer game be meaningful if you knew what the outcome was? No, it’s a maybe if you knew how the kiss was going to be before it was kissed. Would it be interesting? No, it’s because of the maybe. Maybe it’ll work out this way. Maybe it’ll work out that way. And I think that that attention to possibility and the way that possibility functions in meaning making for humans like us or beings like us, is what James is really pushing us to think through. And that’s been guidance for me all the time. I mean, I have a very sort of depressive nature. There’s no competition here. Probably not as suicidal as Clancy, but pretty, pretty darn dark. And those moments when I can’t see any way forward.

John Kaag 00:24:42  James, maybe is there to say, look a little harder, look into the darkness to see if you can find just a little bit of possibility there, or go to sleep and wake up the next day. And then, in that case, if you do that, like, maybe you’ll discover something. Maybe, maybe, maybe you’ll discover something out there. And I think that that’s given me a lot of hope over the years. And frankly, when we called you to do the Dow, it was because you have that quality to you that like, if you wake up the next day, maybe there’s maybe there’s something there, you know, maybe there’s something there worth living for.

Clancy Martin 00:25:23  I agree with everything. I think that John just said, but I’d like to take hope out of it if we could. Because one of the really nice things about maybe is that sort of insistence on the fundamental, maybe ambiguity change. These things are all different metaphors for the same experience that we’re all having. And I did want to point out, just because John cut himself off before he finished his thought, that, that James.

Clancy Martin 00:25:51  Also, just in case listeners aren’t familiar with the passage, you know, we all have different natures. We all have different attitudes. They come with these natures. We all have different physiognomy that disposes us in different ways. And this is part of the the flux part of the maybe ness. And yeah, I was also going to to agree with John that, Eric, as I was editing your dow, I, I was so happy to see how comfortable you are with the concept of change and how good you were at enacting it. And you’re in, in your commentary how you how reluctant you were to try to make anything static to try to fix anything. I thought that was really nice.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:34  Well, I think that’s the big part of the Dow’s fundamental message. Right. And I want to go back for a second, Clancy, to what you said when we were talking about suicide. By the way, I love ranking our depressive tendencies as a little bit of a contest. I think that’s super that Clancy’s very happy because he’s he knows he’s winning.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:54  I want to go back to what you said, though, because when when I asked you about life worth living when we looked at suicide. Right. And you’re very open about this, the multiple attempts you’ve made, you talked about relationship. And I’m curious if in those times when you were much more actively suicidal or had suicidal ideation was a part of that, because you were cut off from relationship of different sorts, that you were not available to relationship of different sorts, how would you put in the context what I’m saying here?

Clancy Martin 00:27:26  Yeah, I mean, it does go back to what John was saying at the outset about selfishness, I think. First of all, I think we should say for people who are listening, look, you may have thought because you lost someone to suicide, a loved one, or just because you thought about suicide, you might have thought, oh, suicide. What a horribly selfish thing. It’s okay to think that, yes, it’s okay for us to say it. Suicide is a selfish thing.

Clancy Martin 00:27:52  It involves self-destruction, but it’s okay for it to be selfish. That’s the first thing I want to say. You’re not saying anything bad about yourself or anyone else. If you say that suicide is selfish, it’s totally okay to say that. First thing I want to say. Second thing I want to say about that is most people, when they make an attempt on their own lives or when they die by suicide, are at such a depth of self-loathing that the only appropriate response. Of course, we’re going to be angry when a loved one kills herself or kills themselves. But in time we will see that the only appropriate response was a sense of love and grief and sympathy for that person. And if you can have if you’re someone who suffers from suicidal ideation, if you can try to have just.

Speaker 5 00:28:38  The tiniest.

Clancy Martin 00:28:40  Bit of that sympathy for yourself that you know your loved ones have for you, oh, what a favor you’ll be doing. All of us try.

Speaker 5 00:28:48  Try to feel.

Clancy Martin 00:28:48  Don’t you worry that you feel too sorry for yourself.

Clancy Martin 00:28:51  Let me tell you, you don’t feel sorry enough for yourself. Feel more sorry for yourself. I want to say that to now on on your question. We know, I know from my own personal experience, and we know from the literature on suicide that, yes, isolation is the number one cause of suicidal ideation, a suicide attempts and death by suicide, without exception. It’s why all of us talking to each other are at the highest risk category in America for suicide. Actually, you guys aren’t yet because you’re about ten years younger than I am. But starting around 55 as a white male, you just start getting more and more at risk for death by suicide. Not not at highest risk for making an attempt, but highest risk for death by suicide. And that’s why we know why. Because you’re becoming more and more isolated, more and more withdrawn from your social relationships. Now your question when I made an attempt. Let me tell you about this very briefly, Eric, when you were making an attempt, you know that you have loved ones and that your loved ones are going to miss you.

Clancy Martin 00:30:00  And this is how you think. You think. The fact that I am willing to inflict that suffering on my loved ones by making a suicide attempt, is further proof that they would be better off without me, because I am such a loathsome person who would be willing to inflict that pain upon them. That’s the the circular, paradoxical, terrible, terrible nature of of suicidal ideation. And yes, it is absolutely an isolating thing. And yes, the best thing you can do if you have someone in your life who is struggling or if you yourself are struggling, is to reach out to someone and to try speaking to people who may be listening, who struggle with suicidal ideation. It doesn’t matter how you reach out. Just the last time I was really struggling, I sent my roofer a text. My roofer? Yeah, he just seemed like an okay guy. And I texted and I said. I said, I’m having kind of a bad day. How are you doing? And he wrote back and he said, hey, I’m glad you texted me, man.

Clancy Martin 00:30:59  Yeah, I’m actually having a really lousy day, too. And we wound up texting and I got past that another time when I was going through a really rough time, I got a text from John Cage and he said, hey, man, just checking in on you. How’s it going? This was before rewind, and I said, I’m glad you texted. I’m having a really lousy time. We went back and forth. He asked me some really good questions And then we actually got to the source of it. And he totally turned it around for me. And I have people I text with all the time, including a vet who first emailed me sitting on the floor of his apartment with his rifle in his mouth and googling how to kill yourself. You know he already had the means at his disposal. But anyway, that’s how he found me. So text in any way. And if you know someone is struggling or you worried they might be struggling a little bit, it doesn’t matter how what you say really.

Clancy Martin 00:31:46  You know, you should not try to solve their problems. But anyway, text them, send them an email, anything. It’s called the motto method. Any kind of human contact at all will reduce their likelihood of suicide and and will help them with their suicidal ideation. So yeah, the answer to your question is yes. If you’re feeling suicidal, you’re feeling cut off. And yes, that means there’s an easy solution. We talk about it, we get rid of stigma, we reach out to people, or they reach out to us. We become deep listeners. We don’t try to solve people’s problems. We let people know that we’re suffering and we’re a person they can talk to when they are suffering. Obviously I can go on on this subject, but anyway.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:24  To reference David Foster Wallace again, Clancy, I heard you on an interview describe suicide as you are standing in a burning building and you end up jumping off the ledge. Right. But that’s a testament to, you know, the question is, do I just burn up by the flames or I jump off this ledge? Neither is a solution that feels particularly good.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:46  And that just struck me. And the fact that we’ve already talked about David Foster Wallace just came back up.

Clancy Martin 00:32:52  Yes. And of course, David Foster Wallace died by suicide, as we know. And, made several attempts and a beautiful thing written by his wife shortly before the the attempt which killed him. She said on Monday, you know, he was still planning on going to the chiropractor. and then on Tuesday, he started lying to me and I think it was not Friday. Thursday or Friday that he died. You know someone who wrote a book that John was referencing earlier that I would like to recommend to all of you on everyone listening. This is water, obviously, a reference to the Dow. David Foster Wallace was deeply influenced by the Dow and by Buddhism, and it’s our loss as a civilization that he didn’t get more exposure to the Dow and to Buddhism than he did, because I think it would have saved him. But a guy who writes a book like this is water. His famous speech at was it Kenyon John that he gave that speech? Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:54  It’s down the street.

Clancy Martin 00:33:55  And dies by suicide. It’s just really a lesson to us all. I think that, look, we are all going to die. That’s going to happen and are going to come a point at which we’re like, oh, we make this change, whatever it is. I’ve called the existence of it into question, but it’s going to happen. For me, the question becomes, do you want your life to end in a way? When you are frightened, lonely, violently afraid, you know? Or can you stick around a little bit longer to see if there might be some nice surprises coming your way, you know? and I. Yes, I tell people all the time, look, you don’t know this because right now you’re in so much pain and you’re so unhappy. But you deserve a good death. You deserve a good death, not a bad death. And if you can just be willing to give yourself that much, you could probably also find out, to your happy surprise, that you deserve a good life, which I know you don’t feel like you deserve.

Clancy Martin 00:34:59  But yeah, David Foster Wallace, he’s just a warning to us all. You can be the most sensitive, the most intelligent, the most kind and perceptive person around. And he seemed to be all those things and die by suicide, you know, and always watch out for the cheerful ones. Those ones who are cheerful all the time. Keep a close eye on those characters because they they may be running darker than you suppose.

Eric Zimmer 00:35:40  Eight years ago, I was completely overwhelmed. My life was full with good things, a challenging career, two teenage boys, a growing podcast, and a mother who needed care. But I had a persistent feeling of I can’t keep doing this, but I valued everything I was doing and I wasn’t willing to let any of them go. And the advice to do less only made me more overwhelmed. That’s when I stumbled into something I now call this still point method, a way of using small moments throughout my day to change not how much I had to do, but how I felt while I was doing it.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:16  And so I wanted to build something I wish I’d had eight years ago. So you don’t have to stumble towards an answer that something is now here and it’s called overwhelm is optional tools for when you can’t do less. It’s an email course that fits into moments you already have. Taking less than ten minutes total a day. It isn’t about doing less, it’s about relating differently to what you do. I think it’s the most useful tool we’ve ever built. The launch price is $29 if life is too full, but you still need relief from overwhelm, check out overwhelm is optional. Go to one. You feed your overwhelm. That’s one you feed. Net. Thank you Clancy for sharing all that. I always hear this happen, so I guess maybe I should do it, I don’t know, but anytime I hear suicide brought up, I hear somebody say, hey, if you’re struggling with suicidal thoughts, dial 988. There’s a suicide hotline that people can get right to. So I want to I want to at least offer that you guys are both philosophers, which I don’t know.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:21  This is the classic question I think about with music, too. Like, did you become slightly darker because you’re your philosophers, or was your slight darkness already? What led you to be a philosopher? I think about that with music, and you’re welcome to weigh in on that. But I’m also interested in what ways philosophy is acted as a survival manual for you. Right? Like, if you could pick one teaching from any of the philosophers, right. Nietzsche or Kierkegaard or Emerson or the Dow or whatever, you know, what do you return to today, like when you’re having a dark day? Like what’s something you’re turning to from a philosophical tradition that gives you comfort?

John Kaag 00:37:58  So I can sort of back my way into that. I think my approach into philosophy was probably driven by my own psychological and familial Background. and probably dealing with my. My father left when I was three. He was he wasn’t a particularly gentle fellow. And growing up in a sort of like household where there was no father figure, I probably turned to the fathers of philosophy to give me some sort of guidance.

John Kaag 00:38:31  But I also turned to philosophy. Arthur Schopenhauer, who I guess more than anybody, I turned to for some sort of, oddly enough, comfort. He was known as the sort of archetypal pessimist. But Schopenhauer says that we are companions in misery in the first chapter of Studies in Pessimism. And I think that when I read the history of philosophy, particularly in 19th and 20th century continental philosophy, which is where I started my philosophical training at Penn State, I found people who had been thinking about a lot of the issues that I had been sort of toying with on my own, so I looked to the canon of philosophy as a type of place where I could find some sort of companionship. And then when I entered class, class was really it for me, like philosophy class and a good philosophy class, a class where you talk to other people and connect with other people around these issues that you might be facing, or perennial topics like what’s the nature of the the good, the true, the real and the beautiful.

John Kaag 00:39:39  When you really talk deeply about that, I discovered that that was the type of companionship that I had not found anywhere else in life, and that that’s what drove me into teaching the types of classes that I teach, which are very personal. We get to know each other very well. If if I could not teach that way, my students say, why do you teach Keg? My answer is, if I wasn’t doing this, I probably wouldn’t be at all. In other words, like if I didn’t have my if I didn’t have classes or students or interactions like the kind that I have in class, I would have trouble getting up in the morning period. And that’s why I think the philosophy, both in its method and then also in its content. It has in the past helped me cope with life because of that necessarily relational character of life. I think philosophy gives you a sense of relationship and connection if you really allow it to. So why do I turn to Schopenhauer? Yes, as the companions in misery.

John Kaag 00:40:44  But he comes up with a very Buddhist and Schopenhauer being influenced by Buddhism at the early stages of the 19th century. He said his life is suffering, and suffering is caused not only by desire but also by our little minds. The imagination makes our suffering so much worse, and he takes us. Schopenhauer, in that first chapter, and Studies in Pessimism, takes us down a fairly dark road. But he says, if you ignore that road, you’re ignoring what is real, and you’re also ignoring the possibilities of companionship that come with understanding that life is suffering. So in other words, like, I don’t understand Clancy’s suffering like it’s true. The Clancy is my best friend and I do not understand. I don’t understand his sufferings. No one understands each other’s sufferings because they are so sui generous, so particular, so absolutely distinct. The weird thing is, is that we all suffer through our little corners of hell in exactly the same way, because we’re so different. Compassion. Isn’t that. I just understand you.

John Kaag 00:42:01  It’s that I also understand that I can never understand you fully. And that type of like humility and saying, like, I’m just going to share a space with you or try to share a space with you. And I’m not going to project my own fears and anxieties on your experience. I’m just going to try to love you and take care. You know? I’m just going to try to be there with you. That’s what Schopenhauer, I think, is talking about with companions and misery. And that’s why I come back to it. I have a 13 year old and an eight year old and a wife, Kathleen, and three dogs now. So I have a lot, lots of beings in my house, and that’s what I try to remember these days. It’s like when I’m getting down in the dumps or when I’m getting really frustrated because parenting is really frustrating. I just try to think to myself, companions in misery, like, just be there with them. Be that, be there.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:50  Thanks, Clancy.

Clancy Martin 00:42:52  I did want to ask you, Eric, I don’t know how you came to philosophy, and I’m very interested to hear this story.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:58  I guess I would say in a similar way, I’m not a I’m not a philosopher in the way that you guys are, because I ended up finding a lot of philosophy, maybe a little dense for me. Maybe I didn’t have the I mean, my formative years were particularly like the years you be in college. I was so effed up on drugs all the time that, you know, I could barely understand Doctor Seuss, let alone, you know, Kierkegaard. I never got to it in quite the same way. But I think for me the door was Zen Buddhism in the Dao, but driven by a similar thing. I think I had a real understanding, like, I don’t know if I would have said life is suffering. I just I realized there was a lot of it in life for a lot of people, and the little bit I understood about what I was reading of of Zen and the Dao and all that, was that it was painting this picture that there was a way to be okay without having to change the fact that there was all this suffering because I recognized I couldn’t write.

Eric Zimmer 00:43:56  I recognized it was just sort of baked in there to a certain degree, but there was a way to be okay with it. And when Buddhism sort of starts with the first noble truth, right? It’s phrased lots of different ways, but the essence of it is some version of there’s a whole lot of suffering in life. I finally it was like somebody telling me the truth, like somebody is stating the truth in the same way, I probably felt like Robert Smith from The Cure was stating the truth, right? Music was sort of my thing. And I think as I went on and I began to get into recovery and began to read more widely, then I started getting pointed towards philosophers in a different way and starting to see that connection. And I’ve always had that sense of what we talked about earlier like that. So many of these different people from these different backgrounds, these different philosophical traditions, religious traditions, all this are honing in on a lot of commonality about the human condition. Not solutions necessarily, but some commonality of maybe what it’s like And maybe instead of solutions, I’d say strategies.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:04  Strategies for working with the human condition. Because again, if we’re also different, you can’t give somebody a prescription. But we can offer strategies. And I think that’s kind of how I got to philosophy and the things I’ve been interested in.

Clancy Martin 00:45:19  Well, that’s a really great story. Thank you. I too, you know, quote this in a book of mine which nobody except for John Cage likes. But I don’t care if Mondays blue, Tuesdays grey, and Wednesday to Thursday. I don’t care about you. It’s Friday. I’m in love, you know? Yeah, pretty much says it all. I bizarrely came to Western philosophy by way of Immanuel Kant. I read the Prolegomena to any future metaphysics when I was 19, and I was like, I can’t believe anyone can think so clearly. I mean, I just thought it was. I don’t feel that way about the Prolegomena now, but my little 19 year old brain thought it was so beautiful, so rigorous and logical. But what actually probably seduced me was a guy who, while quoting from Fear and Trembling, picked up a desk in the classroom and shouted at the top of his lungs.

Clancy Martin 00:46:13  Bob Perkins was his name. The Lion of Judah is no lap kitten and threw the desk across the room. Today you’d get fired for it.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:21  Sounds like a.

Clancy Martin 00:46:21  Kind of like, wow, you know? And then I did discover these existentialists and, because my father, who also like John Kegs, was far away and also like John Cage’s, was a very complicated and could be violent man. He’d raised me on the Vedanta, basically, but I thought that was all of philosophy. And then when I discovered existentialism, I realized, oh my, there’s there’s this whole other way of coming out, these same questions that I’ve been sort of educated on my books since I was about six years old, probably the first time I read the Bhagavad Gita, which, as you say, is coming out shortly from rewind and not to bring it back to rewind, but you know what we’re talking about. Like these encounters with wisdom literature that is mediated by a personality. That is what, as I’m sure he did when he approached you.

Clancy Martin 00:47:14  That is what John Cage brought to me when he was talking about rewind is like, we don’t want to just bring the book, we want to bring the book.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:22  And.

Clancy Martin 00:47:23  We want to bring somebody who’s really thought about the book. You know, we want to bring Erich Zimmer. We brought we want to bring Bob Perkins basically into into your reading experience. So you too can hear about Kierkegaard with a guy throwing the chair across the room saying, The Lion of Judah is no lap kitten. And that was what appealed to me so much about the project was that it’s like I love reading alone. But then when I think about, say, the first noble truth, which for me is so fundamental to the way I think about reality now. you know, I wrestled with it for years, and there was that that song by the Sundays, desire. Desire is a terrible thing. The worst that I can find. Yes, I know desire is a terrible thing, but I rely on my great song, and I struggled with that.

Clancy Martin 00:48:12  But, like, what about the first noble truth, you know? But I do rely on my desire back and forth. And then hearing you talk about it and hearing John talk about it and thinking about my wife talk about it, who taught me basically everything I know about Buddhism. And she says, look, the first noble truth, you totally misunderstanding it. It’s not saying that there isn’t happiness or desire isn’t important. It’s saying that there is no velvet rope. You know, that is to say, there’s no there’s no fixing it. Everybody is stuck on this side of the velvet rope. There is no other side to the velvet rope. We all suffer together. So stop trying to fix it. Stop trying to get to the other side of it, you know? But listening to you talk about it and John Cage talk about it, I’m thinking about my life, talking about it. That’s when you really start to learn this stuff. You know, you can read these books all by yourself for as long as you want.

Clancy Martin 00:49:00  You won’t really start to learn them until you have the opportunity to talk with other people about them. And that, for me, is the great beauty of rebound. Honestly, at the end of the day is just that. It becomes an exchange of ideas and you get that joy of learning, which there’s nothing like it, you know? It’s why you always want to go back to college. There’s just nothing like that. Joy.

Eric Zimmer 00:49:27  Yeah, that’s so beautifully said. And I think that’s probably we all share that vision of rewind, which is you take a great book. A lot of them were, as I mentioned, very hard for me to understand. Now, I might have gotten a lot further into a philosophical tradition and known the philosophers better. If I’d had something like that, then because I didn’t have the college experience right, I didn’t get to take the book and then go have a conversation with a great teacher and other students. Right. I was just off with myself with these books going, I don’t I don’t know what the heck does that mean? Right.

Eric Zimmer 00:49:59  Whereas with rewind, I can actually ask questions and get answers and that person can give. I mean, I just think it’s such an exciting way of not throwing books away, which is what a lot of modern technology does. But keeping books is this beautiful thing that they are the precious things that they are, but allowing you to be in real conversation with people who know a lot about that book is really it’s such a great thing.

Clancy Martin 00:50:26  Yeah. And in a way, it helps you connect with the person who wrote the book, you know, because you’re getting these different perspectives on what that person had to say, which is just, you know, you know, as a writer now, and I really want to hear about your new book, but as a writer, you don’t really, in a way, even understand your own book until you start hearing from the readers of your book, you know, and then you start seeing things. I was talking with this reporter in Bulgaria this morning about a book of mine, and she saw all these things that I didn’t know were there.

Clancy Martin 00:50:54  And that’s what makes the best books. The greatest books is so many people have interacted with them and thought about them and are arguing about them. And yeah, that that was totally what excited me about rewind. And I think it’s the the possibility with AI if we use it, smart can open up these like vast realms of wisdom to people and make it more engaging, especially to young people. Because I really do worry, you know, that, I have five children and I worry about all of them, and I want all of them to be exposed to, like, the deep spiritual reservoirs of humanity that are in books. But it needs to be in a way that will be interesting to them, you know? Yeah. And I do think that’s part of the opportunity with rewind and with AI more generally and with work like yours, with podcasts. You know, my 3030 year old is a professor now, I would say probably 80% of the intellectual knowledge, the knowledge she consumes, other than specifically her professional stuff comes to her from podcasts.

John Kaag 00:51:57  The issue for me is you can learn so much from a podcast that what if you could have a podcast in your book, basically. And that is what the Reading Study Bible basically is. It’s an interleaved. You can listen to the Scripture and then at the end of every listening experience with the scripture, then you have the commentary, then it’s back to Scripture, then it’s back to commentary, and it’s stitched together and curated by an AI assistant. But it’s actual commentary from real life people who have spent their lives thinking about these chapters and verses and books. And honestly, that’s where we’re going to go with your Dao and all the books in rewind, where at the beginning of each chapter, at the beginning of each section, you get to listen to a podcast, and it’s like a podcast about the book interleaved with the book with the commentary. My students say, it said to me, they’re like, I’ve never read a very long book, but I listened to really long podcasts and I’m like, yep, I bet you do.

Eric Zimmer 00:52:59  Yeah. Not to turn this into a rewind commercial. That’s part of the genius of it, though, is that it’s not just the book, it’s the person that’s with the book, you know. And, you know, there’s people like me, and then there’s people like, you know, Salman Rushdie and Margaret Atwood. And I mean, like, it’s it’s it’s pretty amazing the opportunities. I am really excited for Kandi to get released, by the way. That’s the one that I’ve got my eye on. I’ve really been wanting to reread that book, and I’ve known that it’s coming from you guys, and I’m like, wait, I’m gonna wait so that I can reread it in this format, because I think I’ll get so much more out of it. So hurry up, for crying out loud.

John Kaag 00:53:36  And Rushdie was so amazing on candid. It was. It was unbelievable.

Clancy Martin 00:53:41  Yeah, he’s so funny, but.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:42  He’s not out.

Clancy Martin 00:53:43  Of it.

John Kaag 00:53:44  It’s not yet.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:45  Okay. All right, so hurry up.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:47  All right. We are near the end of our time, but I would love to since we’ve been on rewind. I would love for you guys if you could just pick one little piece of wisdom that you’ve gotten out of one of the books that you’ve worked on that we could just end with. It could be from any of them, you know, it could be from the Bible. It could be from the Dao, it could be from Dubliners. I mean, it could be, you know, it could be wherever.

John Kaag 00:54:13  You want to go. First class.

Clancy Martin 00:54:15  Sure. Yeah. I mean, honestly, the book for me, where I was having the most moments when I was wanting to go back and read over the commentary and think about it some more and then read the original source some more, and then go back and read the commentary some more was really, truly in your Dao. You know, I’ve taught the Dao many times. I’ve included the Dao in philosophy textbooks that I’ve, you know, co-written with people.

Clancy Martin 00:54:46  And I first read the Dao when I don’t know how old I was. My dad gave it to me when I was very young. certainly I wasn’t in double digits yet. You know, I was seven, 8 or 9 when I first was given the Dow by him, and he gave me a lot of that kind of thing of mandatory reading that I had to read and discuss with him one of the blessings from my dad. But I learned so much while going over your commentary and also thinking about your translations, you know, and comparing them with other translations. I’m trying to think of one of the remarks that you made that stayed with me the most, but I think I’ve already mentioned what I took away that was most valuable to me is I have a really bad habit of trying to fix things in place, not fix things like fix something that’s broken, which is a separate bad habit that I have. But trying to make things into a thing like, okay, now I understand this concept and I wanted to stay where it is because I now I’ve got this concept figured out.

Clancy Martin 00:55:48  Sort of. And I just noticed how you resisted that all the way through. Like you were always willing to allow a concept to change. You’re always resisting setting the boundaries or the borders of what was being said. And I think that was the most refreshing thing for me, was seeing how someone could make their style really match the content so that the philosophical, you know, I had a real eagerness to learn from you after I finished editing that book because I saw, okay, this is coming through in his way, not just in what he’s saying, but in the way that he’s saying it. So I think that was my biggest takeaway, truly my biggest takeaway. I also had a nice thing from Chopra, Chopra said in his commentary on Buddhism. He said the Clancy, the story is the suffering and that will always stay with me. The story is the suffering. I think that’s exactly right, You know.

Eric Zimmer 00:56:46  It’s possible that the fact that I didn’t land in any fixed position is because I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, right? I mean, it’s entirely possible you’ve misinterpreted the entire thing.

Eric Zimmer 00:56:57  No. I’m kidding.

Clancy Martin 00:56:58  No, no. Well, then you’re misinterpreting. That’s even better. If that were the case, that’s even better.

Eric Zimmer 00:57:03  Exactly, exactly.

John Kaag 00:57:05  I think I’d probably pick for the piece of wisdom or the experience that I had out of some of these books. We did James Joyce’s Dubliners, and it’s a collection of short stories by Joyce. If you’re intimidated by Ulysses, you should definitely read Dubliners. It’s more manageable. It’s it’s a lovely collection. And we gathered commentary from John Banville. We actually went to Ireland, and the films in the book are shot on sight in some of the places where Joyce was writing about. But there’s a story that it’s probably one of the best short stories or period. It’s it’s called the Dead. It’s the last collection. It’s the last, story in this collection in Dubliners. And Banville said something that, at the beginning of that commentary, he said, every Irish writer or every writer reads the dead, and they are incredibly intimidated and inspired at the same time.

John Kaag 00:58:10  And he called it the mountain. We all have to climb. And we and we measure ourselves against. And that piece of wisdom about that book, I think, generalizes over all classics or all great works, all great works of art, all great works of literature, all great works of philosophy. And oh my gosh, is that a moment that you don’t forget? You should not forget like what it is to be human. And what it is to read is to be given a mountain to climb and and to be inspired by the Mountain and Know My Dog See More. And my dog Ellen does not have that experience of I’m sorry. I love them to death, but they do not have the experience of reading the dead and thinking, oh my God, this is almost perfect and feeling it. And I think that that’s what great literature should do for us. A lot of my students do say that they’re like, I have trouble reading, period. And I just think about what sort of trouble we’re in when it comes to our culture or the moment that we’re in.

John Kaag 00:59:18  If students have trouble or if anyone has trouble getting through a short story that might make them quake in their boots and also aspire for something else. So that was the word of wisdom from Banville. I absolutely adore that.

Eric Zimmer 00:59:35  He is his own mountain to climb, as far as I’m concerned with his writing, for crying out loud. I’ve been rereading him recently and I’m just like, it’s it’s unbelievable. I think that’s a beautiful place for us to wrap up. John, I think I loved what you said there about that, both intimidated and inspired. I think there’s something in that that we can all think about. So guys, thank you so much for coming on. It’s always a pleasure to talk with you guys and I’m sure we’ll do it again.

John Kaag 01:00:01  Thanks so much for having us.

Clancy Martin 01:00:03  Thanks, Eric very much. It was a really therapeutic conversation.

Eric Zimmer 01:00:07  Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend.

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