#772: In Case You Missed It: September 2024 Recap of "The Tim Ferriss Show"

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/39659dde7f5f57d4

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If the spirit moves ya.
Optimal minimal.
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No it is.
A cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoscopy.
Hello, boys and girls, this is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world class performers of all different types, to tease out the routines, habits, and so on that you can apply to your own life.
This is a special in between episode which serves as a recap.
of the episodes from the last month. Features a short clip from each conversation in one place, so you can jump around, get a feel for both the episode and
the guest and then you can always dig deeper by going to one of those episodes. View this episode as a buffet to whet your appetite.
It's a lot of fun. We had fun putting it together and for the full list of the guests featured today, see the episode's description probably right below where we
Press play in your podcast app, or as usual, you can head to Tim.blog slash podcast and find all the details there.
Please enjoy.
First up.
Elizabeth Gilbert
Number one New York Times bestselling author of Eat Pray Love.
Big magic.
And City of Girls.
And the creative voice behind the
Letters from Love with Elizabeth Gilbert Newsletter.
You can find Elizabeth on Instagram at
At Elizabeth underscore Gilbert.
Underscore writer.
And you can find her sub stack at
Elizabeth Gilbert.
Dot sub stack.
Dom
When I was in my going through my first divorce
It was thirty and
The
Well
Laid out.
planned life that I had
Created very obediently.
Like I had done just what
My culture had told me to do.
I got
Married at twenty four.
And
worked hard and bought a house and
made a plan to have a family and then instead of
having a family I had a nervous breakdown. Like quite literally. Everybody was moving in this one direction and my entire
Intellectual
spiritual and physical system collapsed.
Which I now know.
I now see that as an act of God.
I now see that there is sort of the Dao, you know, that there is a force.
that was trying to communicate to me, this is not your path.
I will kill you before I let you do this.
I will kill you before I let you
be a suburban housewife. I'm not allowing it. Like I will make you
puts you in so much physical pain that you're gonna have to notice that this is not
the life for you, but I was also in so much shame.
Of failure and
letting people down and like, we just bought this house. Like I just felt like
biggest asshole in the world. Like I don't know why I can't just get in line and do this thing that everybody's saying to do.
Anyway that marriage ended.
And then I
threw myself into another relationship and that ended
And I was like, I don't know how to orchestrate my life at all.
And
Nothing.
Here I am thirty years old and nothing is what I had planned it to be five years ago.
And I was in the deepest depression of my life and I didn't have much of a spiritual life at that point.
But I remember waking up one night and
Just shame.
And getting an instruction. I mean that's the only way I can explain it. And I
comfortable with that language because I often have that happen in my creative life.
Where I'm
Told what to do.
This is what you're gonna focus on. Here's what you need to do now.
And I was given this instruction and it it came in as clearly as I'm talking to you and it said
Get up, get a notebook, and write to yourself.
The words that you most wish that somebody would say to you.
Because there was a great loneliness that I was feeling too, as well as the shame.
And
That letter began
You know, what that letter said was
I've got you, I'm with you.
I'm not going anywhere.
I love you exactly the way you are. You can't fail at this.
Like you can't do this wrong.
I don't need anything from you. This is a huge thing.
To hear.
I don't need
Anything from talk about no cherished outcome.
I don't need anything from you. You don't have to improve.
You don't have to do life better. You don't have to
When
You don't have to get out of this depression. You don't have to ever
Uplift your spirits.
You could end up
Living in a box under a bridge in a garbage bag.
Spitting at people.
And I would love you just as much as I do now.
The love that I have for you cannot be lost.
Because it's innate. It's yours.
I have no requirements for it.
And if you need to stay up all night crying, I'll be here with you.
And if tomorrow you have a garbage day again because you've been up all night crying, I'll be there for that too.
I'll be here for every minute of it. Just
Ask me to come and I'll be here with you. And the astonishing thing was that it
Like even talking about it now, I can feel the impact that it has.
On my nervous system to hear
Those words even in my own voice.
And it was the first experience I'd ever had with unconditional love.
I'd never heard anybody say like you don't need I don't need you to be anything.
You don't have to do better.
Like this is fine.
This is great. You on the bathroom floor in a pile of tears and snuff it's great.
It's great.
That's fine. We love you just like that. And that's so nourishing because it's so the opposite of
every message that I've ever heard. And so I started doing that.
practice and it's taken me through. I've never
Had difficult times in the last twenty years.
But I've I've never gone as low.
Again as I went.

This is the net that catches me.
Routinely.
Before I can get that low.
And that voice doesn't change.

Next up
Another unpredictable and entertaining edition of
The Random Show
With technologist and serial entrepreneur.
Kevin Rose.
You can find Kevin on Twitter and Instagram.
At
Kevin Rose.
And you can find his sub stack.
at kevinrose.com
Like the the one thing that that struck me about today
And I and I just like let's have a little real talk for a second with it. Oh God, coming to Jesus moment. Like you went on this sabbatical. Yeah.
And yet
You had to write a book.
I didn't I didn't have to hold on, hold on. Our fr our mutual friend who shall not be named
Pointed this out as well. Yeah. Where it's like
Can you sit?
And just be you.
Or would that be too hard?
Okay. Let's do it. All right. So
Yeah, this is this is good. Let's let's get into the fucking chewy bits. So
I routinely every year.
spend at least a month off the grid.
Right, like last October. I was gone. I was in
I was off the grid. Yeah, but you were doing shit.
I was doing stuff, but here here's my question, right? And this was in our shared text thread.
I basically said, Okay, look, so the accusation is that Tim doesn't know how to chill out.
I'm like, okay.
Fine. Let's take that as true.
If Tim were to chill out, what does that look like on a daily and weekly basis? And one of my challenges was
Humans are built to be social.
You have a family.
Our mutual friend as a family. There's an inbuilt
social network.
In that family.
I don't have that.
Right. So my
You're a brother to me, so you always have a family. Yeah, I appreciate that. And like on a day to day basis when I wake up in the morning, like you know, my hotel room, my house is empty.
Right. Yeah. So I need to go externally. I need to travel outside of the confines of my house to find
That human interaction.
So the question is like okay.
Well
If you could write the script
What would Tim Ferris chilling out look like?
I know what that would look like. What would it look like? Oh it's very simple.
I got the best answer for you ever. Oh boy.
No script.
Uh that sounds like some fucking fortune cookie stuff that I can't make sense of though. What does that mean? I know you can't make sense of it, but that's the point.
It's no script. When have you done that?
When I do my meditation retreats, when I do there's there's no but you had a you had a schedule for the for each day.
Sure, but like
I think an intensive the silent retreat where you're meditating hours of that bitch.
Okay, I suffer from the same thing you do.
I suffer the same thing you do. And that is that
We can't there's a there's a reason we're all friends, right? We're all fucking border collies. Chewing on the couch. We can't turn it off.
You know, and it's like
Honestly, I think the healthiest thing though would be to wake up with no agenda.
For a month.
Yeah. With no friends for a month with the fact that you just wake up saying
What is today gonna bring?
And that is damn fucking hard for people that are driven like you and me are. So I did that for almost a month last October. But we did some psychedelics during that time and shit. Come on. Towards the end. But in that particular case, I mean I'll just say that
I don't think humans are built for isolation. And there agreed. And there and there is a
fetishizing of self sufficiency and independent in the US that I think is unhealthy.
It exists in other places for sure. But if you look at our evolutionary biological like our biological programming.
completely refutes that. To be exiled, to be excluded from the group.
is effectively right. I'm not arguing that but I'm arguing is like what if you couldn't touch a pen or a computer for a month?
They shoot arrows.
Or or both. I mean the uh
I do think and I can't remember the
particular attribution of this. Man, I wish I could really remember it, but Jeremy?

The hedgehog. No. It was uh it was someone else. But it was basically like
Man finds leisure through the through the switching from one activity to another, like one compelling activity to another. Something along those lines. And
I wish I had the exact quote and the attribution, but I don't. And um this this applies obviously cross gender, but the point being
That
I'm not convinced that
Being idle.
Is
A
fruitful goal to have.
If you can't sit with yourself for five minutes, that's a problem. Yeah.
Right.
But different people have different constitutions. And for me, for instance, right, if you look at the four hour work week, okay, so I get rid of
not get rid of, but I automate my whole business, blah, blah, blah. What do I do? I end up doing tango like six to eight hours a day. Right.
But that was not done from a
position of obligation or
Fear was done from a place of like enthusiasm and excitement and love. That's different. And uh that
I think is good medicine.
Right? So
As long as I have the self-awareness to distinguish between something that is done from a place of fear or guilt or
or prestige hunger.
or responsibility or some nebulous obligation versus the things that enliven me. Mm-hmm.
I think being active is fine as long as I land in the latter category. Yeah. Right. Like for instance, like I'm doing
A lot of archery right now. And I fucking love it. Like I am so
Fed by it?
And I'm not saying I'm the world's best, I certainly am not, but I I just find it so meditative.
And
But can I ask you one question?
One of the things I'm really curious about is like
Tim, like I I I respect you so much because of
how I've watched you dissect and
You know, assimilate
like information like no other human I've ever seen on earth. And you are able to
lear and pick up and go deep on any topic within a matter of minutes or hours or weeks, you know, like you you do that quite well.
The one thing that is
the rounding out of the holistic picture of Tim.
that I'm curious if you can ever tap into
is the Tim that says
I can just
B without having to go.
for those things or having to engage in that type of thinking.
You know, that type of like
Pursuit.
That type of
analyzing, you know. I I I Daria, my wife is she's a PhD in neuroscience and and
I oftentimes get engaged in intense debates with her about this where I'm just like, Chill the fuck out. No

Uh so but I'm just like, you know, I I'm like I'm like I wish I I wish with all my friends balance
And I think the where our mutual friend was trying to get to is like might you find more Might you find a little bit more of that side of the house. Cause you have the other end spades. Yeah. Yeah. It's a good question. I mean, I'll sit with it. I think that balance can come in a lot of different forms.
Right. So the the balance is time bound. Right. In the sense that is it balanced on a daily basis? Is it on a weekly basis? No, hold on, hold on. No, it's not. It's it's finding the right conceptual
framework through which to think about it. And I and I don't think that's a mistake. I think it's actually very helpful.
Depends on how your mind works, right? For me, though, it's like if I'm super intense for a month.
And I'm going ten out of ten, and then I'm zero out of ten for a month.
Like that equates to kind of a five five, right?
That's for me a certain degree of balance, but it's not if you looked at it on the minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day.
It would look very lopsided. I know a fantastic app that I would love to build for you, which would be like the Tim Tim Random app.
And like you open it up every morning and it tells you what to do for a month and it'd be like today, it's like
What what the fuck is this? And you'd be like,
Oh, I have to buy a slip and slide and go down it twenty times. Like just like something where it's just like throwing you completely out of your like and you're like, wow, I didn't have to think about it. I didn't have to overanalyze it. It's just a fucking thing I'm gonna do. Well, this is this is part of the curse of the entrepreneur.
But it's also but it's just saying. Yeah. You know exactly what I'm talking about. But also
But also at the same time these are your mics. I know these are my mics.
But also at the same time I will say that like

dance, that's fucking hard, right? Yeah. Cause dark is very much about like
structure and shit where I'm Daria and I are very similar. Very similar. Super love you, Daria. She's you with hair. You're the best. Yeah. But she's Kevin doesn't have better body.
Okay.
I mean you look at my AI. Okay, thank you everyone for uh tuning in to the show. Great to see you, buddy.
Next up.
Jerry Colonna.
Co founder and CEO
Of reboot.io.
An executive coaching and leadership development firm.
And the author of
Reboot.
Leadership and the art of growing up.
And reunion.
Leadership and the longing to belong.
You can find Jerry on Twitter.
Uh
Jerry Kalona.
You know, if we go back in time to my mid thirties when I was
A prince of New York and a former VC.
And totally fucked up as an individual.
I was knee deep in
The first decade.
I'm now my fourth decade of psychoanalysis.
And I had a very
Tough as nails.
Nice Jewish lady psychoanalyst named Doctor Sayers.
And
What she taught me.
Repeatedly.
Endlessly.
boxing my ears when she'd say this.
Is
How have you been complicit in creating these conditions you complain so much about?
And you have to picture it, right? I'm lying on the couch, there's this
You know, old Jewish lady who's thirty years older than me, who's just basically had it with me.
Complaining. And so the roots of the question are really a kind of an exasperation, not
just from my analyst to me, but eventually with me
About me.
Mm-hmm.
And it was really only by
Taking that question, how have I been complicit in
creating the conditions I say I don't want.
That there was uh a massive unlock for me.
Now you asked about the misinterpretation.
The first level misinterpretation that people go through
Is that they assume I'm saying how have I been responsible?
Mm-hmm.
And I am very, very particular. I get very very angry when people misinterpret.
The word complicit for responsible.
And it's not because I want to let people off the hook.
But quite the opposite. I want people to understand that they've been an accomplice.
Here's the thing.
Tim, when we get into our mindset
That says I am responsible for all the shit in my life.
We're actually walking away from doing the hard work.
Can you expand on that?
Yeah, sure, because guilt
Is a defense mechanism.
Right, because some people might say, Well that's extreme
Ownership, as I say, I'm responsible for all the shit. Exactly. That's the beginning of the solution, but
Where do they take a wrong turn?
So I like the kind of ownership. I like the word ownership. I don't like the word responsibility.
And the reason for that is because and the reason I think it can be a defense mechanism is because it can be an old structure. So
Many people that I encounter, myself included,
Spend our childhood
pendulating between grandiosity and a sense of worthlessness.
I'm either shit.
Or I am the best.
You got rid of that in your childhood? Man, good for you. Well I got rid of it in my adulthood.
This is the point. I got rid of it.
By actually asking the right questions of myself.
If the word complicit
Is replaced with the words
Even extreme ownership.
The danger is
That I tip over into
misunderstanding what actually has been going on.
And I end up in this zone of being responsible.
For everything.
And the truth is
It's much more complex than that.
I was just thinking.
That
Your
referring to a pendulum and that
Not taking any responsibility for anything.
is one example of sort of absolving yourself of the hard work, but
I never thought of the opposite if you're accepting that
Anything and everything bad that happens.
is your responsibility slash fault.
It puts you in
A similar position.
It seems. Exactly.
The position it puts you in
is unable to actually with discernment
diagnose what's really going on.
And you know what?
You don't
Get
To transform stuff.
If you don't really know what's going on.
It's so
To understand what's really happening for you.
You have to understand what your role is and what it isn't.
So how do you walk, say, a client
through answering that question well.
How are you complicit in creating the conditions?
That you say you don't want.
or the conditions of your lives in your lives that you say you don't want.
How do you walk them through?
Their rough draft of trying to answer that.
Okay, so the unlock on the question is the second half of the question, which people
Skip.
You say you don't want.
So
Give me an example from your own life, Tim.
What do you say you don't want.
Oh man, how much time do we have?
I have become better at this, so I'm not dodging the question, but I would say
Probably some
form of busyness.
Right, right.
This and I'm over scheduled and I've got this and that and the other thing that is imposing on
What maybe I say I want, which is
More locked out.
Right.
space for writing or making.
Right. So you say Mr. Four Hour Work Week. I don't want to work more than four hours a week.
Nice turn. Nice turn. I think you said that to me. Right. Right. So you say you want to be so efficient and so productive that you get everything done that you want to get done so that you have time to
Play.
Take care of yourself, f wear breathe right strips as you talk to right you know this kind of thing.
Right.
Okay.
Just a quick sidebar.
Breathe right, this one's on me. Next time you gotta sponsor the podcast.

I could recognize them because I'm a breathe right user. I use them to sleep at night.
Oh my God. Oh yeah. And we would we would both like a lifetime supply, so feel free. Okay. So you say you don't want to be so busy.
Right. And you were asking, how do I walk a client through to understand the role of complicity?
Right, in this regard.
So
How does it feel when you're not busy?
I would say
And I don't wanna

Cheating with a cheat sheet.
Right, this is It's your show.
Oh founder.
And accent.
So segueing to a complement or maybe a necessary component of first question.
How are you complicit in creating conditions that you say you don't want, which is in what ways does that complicity serve you?
Okay, so to answer your question and that at the same time.
I would say probably
And this is almost a certainty, looking back at some of the scariest depressive episodes in my life, it's when I had a lot of empty space.
And there's an underlying fear.
Even though I haven't experienced anything close to that magnitude of
desperation and darkness in a very long time.
There is a fear that
If I create a void.
That is the voice. That is the narrative that is going to come to dominate my thoughts. I would say that
Therefore.
My complicity serves me by
Avoiding that.
Right.
And so if you really want to transform
When will you be comfortable with the void?
She has a good question. And uh in my
In my defense, your honor, I will say that
Yeah, I'm about to go off the grid for a week.
Starting.
This Friday. So in a few days I'll be going completely off the grid. No phone, no nothing.
for a period of time. So I have injected these periods.
But let's get into the messy stuff for a second.
Since
Life as rarely as uh
much of a randomized control trial as we would like.
I've had an ongoing number of
chats with friends and what's up and different messaging.
platforms and
It's been around
Taking breaks, creating space.
Chilling out.
Right. So a lot of these friends of mine
have passed every hurdle and objective they could have had.
And the goalposts keep moving, right?
They wanted to make a million and then it was ten and then it was twenty and then
Once it that trillion once it gets indefensible, then it's like what's your annual compounded growth rate and this that turns into percentages'cause they can't even with a straight face defend.
The rest of it.
What they claim to want or what they
believe I need is
to
Chill out, take a break, create all this space.
My experiences
As
social animals or at least as a person who benefits from social interaction, I do best
Around other people.
I just do.
And there are
It's not a hundred percent, but it's not zero percent. There's a risk.
That I do
return to some of those.
Dark places or dark narratives. It's not zero.
So
I struggle to answer the question of like when
Can I allow space? Because I do it in small doses, sometimes larger doses. I took almost all of October.
Last.
Yeah.
Off the grid.
So perhaps you can help me to
Find my way to answering.
The question you posed.
You know, look, Tim, we I feel like Uncle Jerry and that we speak every few years and every few years
My how you've grown.
I know you don't feel that way because you're in your body.
But when we first started talking, which was years and years ago,
This was a big struggle for you.
This was a tremendous struggle and there was a sense that you might miss out. There was a sense of like you being
falling behind in some sort of weird little race.
A race to the top, and I think.
The speed with which you're able to go right to the fear of the void.
What play is Pascal?
identify when he said that all of man's problems stem from their inability to sit
Alone in a room.
You know, I think you've you've got
Like a lot of us, you've got

And I also
Wanna say I'm I'm watching you
letting go of the need to turn that void time into productivity time.
Mm-hmm. Right.
When I first started promoting the notion of sabbatical, which we've talked about in the past.
I remember dealing with a client who would say, Well, I'm gonna learn Portuguese.
It's like, no, you're not. You're not gonna learn Portuguese in four weeks, you know. You're going to learn to breathe.
Without breathe right strips, you're going to
You know, you're just going to learn.
to enjoy yourself. Now what I hear you doing
is learning to enjoy yourself.
Mm-hmm.
Which
is a really powerful skill.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's gonna be uh
Lifelong project.
Which is okay.
Lot of things are lifelong projects. That's right.
We got here because you were asking about that process, and this is the process.
Right.
This is the process. So
For you when you're
Off the grid starting Friday.
You know.
What will that experience be like for you?
At what point might you be anxious and at what point might you
Start to relax.'Cause are you gonna be with friends?
This trip, too.
This particular example may not
But

done for the last handful of years is every year I do a past year review rather than setting let's just say blind, semi uninformed, overly optimistic New Year's resolutions. I look back at the past year and figure out what the highs and lows looked like.
If I were to do kind of an eighty twenty analysis. Places, people, activities.
the most life giving and the most life draining and then I
schedule time as soon as possible.
in blocks of one week, two weeks.
Depending on availability to spend time with energy and people doing energy and
Things. Right. And
This particular week off the grid is going to be a
Alpine Elk hunt, which I do once every two years or so.
With Bo.
At probably between ten and twelve thousand feet. So
Most of it. It's gonna get cold.
We're gonna be getting a lot of shitty.
Freeze dried fruit. Hopefully a bunch of trout.
Oh.
En route to finding elk.
And
I have just found that
particular experience and the time dilation that it allows to feel like
A month off.
or two months off. It is just so regenerative for me that it's it's become a core piece of my
Annual planning. Not necessarily a hunt, but that type of
shared experience with a small
Very small group of people.
So that's what that will look like.
And I
In a sense
А до вона сам динге.
From
feeling discomfort because there's going to be incredible discomfort physically.
Sleep is probably not gonna be fantastic.
And we will be very, very, very active.
But it's not the same as doing
A silent retreat and sitting there.
Watching your monkey.
Brain.

Right. Contort itself for
Yeah. Sixteen hours a day.
It's the kind of retreat where
like layers of your skin are stripped away because you're so raw and rugged out in the world. And that's just gonna drop you into your body.
And drop you more and more into the land.
And that's a a place of nourishment for you.
For sure.

Finally.
A special podcast on what happens when Israelis and Palestinians
Drink ayahuasca together.
Featuring an episode from the new psychedelics focused podcast.
Altered states.
Made possible in part.
By the fairest U C Berkeley.
Psychedelic Journalism Fellowship.
You can find altered states.
On Apple Podcasts.
Spotify.
Or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.
Welcome to Altered States. I'm Ariel Jim Ross.
This week, we are traveling thousands of miles away from where I am in Oregon to the Middle East to hear about another kind of psychedelic experiment. This one involves ayahuasca.
Producer Shayna Sheeley brings us this story.
So, Shayna, welcome. First off, I know some folks might be familiar with Ayahuasca, but others have probably never heard of it.
Tell me, what exactly is ayahuasca?
Yeah, so ayahuasca people typically drink it as a sort of
T.
And it's made out of a vine from South America.
which is often brewed together with another plant.
It's a type of shrub.
And that shrub contains something call DMT or dimethyltryptamine.
So what do we know about what ayahuasca does to the brain?
So usually about thirty minutes after drinking it.
Some people start having these hallucinations.
Others have out of body experiences or euphoric feelings.
There's often vomiting involved.
For some people there are visions.
Researchers have found that ayahuasca can promote what's called neuroplasticity, which is the brain's ability to adapt and build new connections.
In this case, increased adaptability is thought to be able to help people heal from traumatic experiences.
A few years ago, you came across these peace activists who were using ayahuasca to heal, and eventually you started reporting on that story.
So
Can you tell me more?
So these activists are Israeli and Palestinian, and they gather to drink ayahuasca in attempt to heal trauma, both personal trauma and collective trauma.
And I knew a bunch of them from previous reporting in the region, and I was really interested just in the links that these people went to.
To build empathy.
And
Then October 7th happened.
Suddenly, the work of healing was interrupted by this massive shockwave.
And these activists
sort of look to the group and to one person in particular to help them navigate it all.
That person was Palestinian peace and justice activist.
Sammy Awad.
And that's why your story starts with Sammy in his home in late summer twenty twenty three.
In Samia Wad's kitchen, near the Palestinian city of Bethlehem.
A small group of people are gathered around a table.
A handful of Israelis, a woman from Brazil, one guy from Ramallah.
They're all sitting there, around plates of eggs and Zatar, watermelon.
Balls of cured lobna and olive oil.
They were laughing, eating breakfast.
I did it.

Sammy describes his home as sort of an oasis for Israeli and Palestinian activists from all over.
It's where they can be together and find refuge from the harsh reality of living under forced separation.
Sammy's home office is filled with hundreds of books on meditation, yoga.
Psychedelic medicine, healing.
He's in his fifties.
And he's been working in the world of peace building for over twenty five years.
Sammy's piecework started when he was twelve years old.
He was with his uncle.
An influential nonviolent peace activist.
They were planting trees on a Palestinian farmer's land that was under threat of confiscation by Jewish settlers.
I remember Michael saying, No matter what happens, you're here to plant trees.
The group of activists was mixed.
Palestinian and Israeli.
They were hours into planting when a group of Israeli soldiers approached them.
Soldier coming, pulling the tree out of the ground that I was planting and throwing it on some rocks.
And in that moment.
There was this split decision what do I do?
Because as a twelve year old, you know, what what options? I could run away.
I could uh hide, uh run to my uncle crying, uh like twelve year old uh
I was like here to plant the trees and I decided I'm gonna go back and bring the tree and plant it. And I did that, that sense of feeling Wow.
Empowerment and and losing the fear.
That action changed my life. It it made me actually want to commit my life to this work.
The work of peace building through nonviolence.
Days after Sammy went with his uncle to plant trees.
He learned that the land had been confiscated by Israeli settlers.
That all the trees they had planted were uprooted.
Still.
Sammy would go on to plant even more trees.
By the time he was in his twenties, he was organizing boycotts and peace demonstrations.
Sometimes alongside Israeli peace activists.
But his actions
kept getting shut down.
He was beaten.
Imprisoned.
Put on lockdown.
And then in nineteen ninety three came the Oslo Accords.
A deal between Israeli and Palestinian leadership that was supposed to kick off a peace process in the region.
including limited Palestinian self governance in parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Then President Bill Clinton served as a diplomatic broker.
Let us today pay tribute
To the leaders who had the courage
То лідерпи.
Away from the scars of battle.
The wounds and the losses of the past.

The world today. Thanks.
Prime Minister Rabin.
Foreign Minister Perez.
And Chairman Arafat.
Sammy was optimistic.
There was billions of dollars of funds.
coming to create and sustain
That piece.
that was being created and all of a sudden you started seeing NGOs
begin to emerge, begin to rise, money in like crazy.
He built his own organization, Holy Land Trust.
It became well known for nonviolent activism trainings.
But even with this tireless dedication to peace.
The world around Sammy became more and more violent.
Both sides committed to negotiating an end to the conflict and charting a path to Palestinian self-rule in the West Bank of Gaza.
It triggered a violent backlash from religious extremists among both Israelis and Palestinians, including Hamas.
We're beginning to see this continuous loop of failures in the peace process.
And in nineteen ninety five, a right wing Jewish extremist assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Itzak Rabin.
This big plan towards peace began to unravel almost immediately.
Over the next decade, there was the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
Deadly attacks in Israel and the Palestinian territories.
During that time we began to understand the need to heal collective trauma as part of peacemaking as well.
Understanding how much the past influences us.
It was 2007.
Sammy was in his mid-30s and had begun to take an interest in reading up on trauma when he was invited to go on a pretty unconventional trip to the death camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau.
He spent eight days there.
Sleeping at the camp.
Eating all his meals there.
So we were there every day.
Doing our own ceremony and prayer and visuals.
Remembering the people that died.
I had like lists of names of people that we were all given to recite continuously, so like eight hour meditations we were doing.
I began to really see that wow.
This is something that is not
An incident that just happened in the past, this is something that continues
Until this day.
Pre-COVID.
Around forty thousand Israeli students visited concentration camps as part of their school curriculum each year.
The trips are sponsored by Israel's education ministry, typically right before mandatory military service.
While Sammy was there.
He kept saying school group after school group.
Israeli kids with Israeli flags wrapped around them, big flags and they're walking and then
Singing.
I I heard the Israeli teachers tell these kids the Holocaust is not over.
As Jews.
We're always threatened, we're always attacked. Many people want to destroy us. And of course then it's followed by this is why we have to be strong, this is why we have to be resilient, this is why security above everything, and this is why we never trust anybody.
What the hell is happening here?
Like how can you be even talking about peace with somebody when the the foundation is we don't trust them?
That night.
Sammy slept in Birkenau.
In the barracks where children were imprisoned.
He was there with a Jewish person from Israel.
And a Muslim person from Bosnia.
We just had candles and are very thick.
Coats and sleeping bags.
And just remembering being in in that place where these children
We're there and we're dying.
But also having these discussions about this issue of inherited trauma.
I began to realize that this whole peace process that we were in
that I was in that I was even supporting and advocating for
Was embedded
From a space of existential fear and threat.
The Palestinians we have a similar narrative.
That our existence is on the line, we need to do something about it. If we don't do something about it, we will cease to be as a people.
What happened to us is too shameful, too painful, we don't talk about it.
Sammy says
A lot of Palestinians don't really acknowledge the full scope of pain that their families have endured.
Like
The nineteen forty eight Nokba.
When hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were driven from their homes.
Or really any other traumatic events?

And listening to propaganda.
And the propaganda is we are resilient, we are strong, we will return, we will defeat them.
Th there is grief that needs to happen. There is pain that needs to be expressed of what happened to us as a people. There's a healing. But to not address these issues makes us unhealthy and how we're dealing with things.
When he got back to Bethlehem,
This is what Sammy wanted to focus on.
Healing.
to address the trauma that gets passed down from generation to generation.
He read books on this intergenerational trauma.
He studied the Rwandan genocide and the healing journey that followed.
He also met with Israeli studying trauma, including faculty at Hebrew Union College.
They develop tools for Israelis and Palestinians to work through their pain together.
At the same time, the
Foreign governments were pouring billions of dollars into the region to advance these peaceful coexistence programs between Israelis and Palestinians.
There were summer camps.
Organizations that raised up the voices of parents who had lost children.
Theater troops.
Art projects.
And still
Around two decades after Oslo
Sammy felt things were worse than ever.
Yeah, you see the wars in Gaza, you see settler violence towards Palestinians, see how Palestinians are treating each other. What do all of this money, all of this investment
Where is it all? All the peace processes.
Twenty five years of negotiating.
The reality is as messed up as it's ever been.
Things now are worse than any time before. All of the piece work, all of the money that was spent
And so for me I was in this place we need something new. We need something new.
That's when he got a phone call.
It was from an Israeli couple.
Around twenty twelve.
And they say we have a peace project that we want to involve you with.
Sammy rolled his eyes.
More Israelis who think they have the answers. He almost hung up.
And the woman like started yelling at me, No we have to come and we have to meet you and it's very important and don't bring anybody and it's just you
His interest was piqued.
He went to meet them.
I said three things came to my mind. Either this is some money laundering scheme, something to do with drugs, or something to do with weird sex. And she just started laughing, laughing. I said, like it has to do with the second one. And then the guy looked at me.
He looked at me straight in the eyes and he said, Have you done medicine before?
He was talking about the psychedelic brew ayahuasca.
As the man explained his vision, all Sammy could think about were the dangers.
Sammy says drugs are kind of taboo in Palestinian society.
It's
not just illegal, it's immoral, it's illegitimate, it goes against religion, it goes against social uh values.
People who drink ayahuasca have described emotional breakthroughs, conversations with anthropomorphic spirits, catharsis of traumatic events, and connections with ancestors.
So even though Sammy was terrified.
He thought it might be worth trying.
He traveled through checkpoints into Israel to join the couple for an ayahuasca ceremony.
He downed a cupful of the sludgy tea.
And soon
He was vomiting.

And now here are the bios for all the guests.
My guest today.
One of my favorites. Elizabeth Gilbert.
She is the number one New York Times best selling author of Big Magic and E Prey Love.
as well as several other international bestsellers.
She's been a finalist for the National Book Award.
The National Book Critics Circle Award and the Penn Hemingway Award. Her latest novel, City of Girls, was named an instant New York Times bestseller.
a rollicking sexy tale of the New York City theater world during the nineteen forties.
You can go to elisabethgilbert.substack.com to subscribe to Letters From Love with Elizabeth Gilbert, her newsletter, which has more than one hundred and twenty thousand subscribers. You can find her on Instagram at Elizabethers Gilbert underscore.
Writer.

This time we have a very special episode. This is always a
Listener favorite.
A recording with my close friend Kevin Rose. Kevin Rose, for those who don't know, at Kevin Rose, everywhere.
He is indeed a world class entrepreneur, serial founder.
investor in the smallest of seed rounds up to the largest of companies. He is a full spectrum, full stack.
Capitalist. I don't know what the hell I'm saying.
But we did this interview in person at his house in the format of the random show, and what we always do, and we've done this for

Ten years, I suppose now. We trade our latest discoveries, our latest findings, what our friends have sent to us.
And I think it is one of our best. There's tons of actionable takeaways.
Lots of laughing fits and that might have something to do with the fact that uh Kevin invited
His friend.
And bartender to service cocktails. We cover dozens of topic, new projects, what I've done on my recent sabbatical.
Kevin's latest findings and shenanigans, real vampire protocols. Apparently that's a thing, and much, much more. It even includes some incredibly bizarre footage of Kevin having his face assaulted by experimental technology. We videotaped that.
Live together.
And video is not at all required to enjoy this episode.
Whatsoever. Audio is great. But for some extra hilarity,

and more simply go to youtube.com slash Tim Ferris F E R R I S S

Sometimes I get
Not just a two for one, but a hundred for one. When I interview someone
Who also helps world class performers in addition to being such themselves.

sticking points to redefine themselves, to reinvent themselves, to chart new paths forward. And my guest today, Jerry Colonna, is such a person. He is the CEO and co-founder of reboot.io, an executive coaching and leadership development firm.
Dedicated to the notion that better humans make better
Leaders.
But prior to that.
He was an operator in many different ways.
Prior to being a coach, he was a partner with JP Morgan Partners, the private equity arm of JP Morgan Chase. He also led New York City based Flat Iron Partners, which he founded in nineteen ninety six.
with partner Fred Wilson, Flatiron.
went on to become one of the nation's most successful early stage investment programs. At age twenty five, he was editor in chief of Information Week magazine. He's written a bunch of books. We'll mention them at the end of the conversation, but one is reboot, the other is reunion, both
Highly recommended. You can find his company reboot at reboot.io and Jerry on Twitter and Instagram at Jerry Colonna C O L O N N A. And he has been on the
Podcast twice before.
He is a fan favorite. People always take a ton away from our conversations, and I recap some of my favorite aspects of those in this episode.
And uh we cover a lot of ground. There are a lot of stories I've never heard.
We have a lot of laughs.
Almost a few cries on my side. We dig into his toolkit, the questions that he uses with himself and with clients that I have adopted as some of my favorites. There is a lot to learn.
And it was a hell of an enjoyable conversation. It was a walk and talk. And I have done this before, where I am out in nature today. It is a
Beautiful.
Bluebird sky day in the mountains and to sit in a dark room.
Staring at a screen seemed like an insult to nature.
Complete travesty.
Totally unnecessary. So I have
High fidelity recording equipment.
That is what I'm using right now. It is a headset. I am sitting
Ten feet from a beautiful river where I'm watching the eddies swirl around rocks.
So
Why not?
Get out and move. If you can listen to this while you're moving, I encourage you to do so. Audio is a secondary activity. So if you can walk and talk, or walk and listen while I'm walking and talking,
All the better.
Four.
You, me, everybody involved.
For this episode I am doing something very different. I'm actually featuring
A special episode from a brand new podcast called Altered States. And I listen to a lot of podcasts. I test out a lot of podcasts. I found this one to be particularly impressive. It's very well reported, very well researched, very well produced.
Here's the teaser for the episode that you're about to hear. It's not a long one, but it is a very nuanced one, a very powerful one.
Quote.
For the last couple of years, producer Shana Sheeley has been following Israeli and Palestinian peace activists.
who have been coming together to drink the psychedelic brew ayahuasca in an effort to heal their collective intergenerational trauma.
It seemed to be helping them when suddenly the region erupts into chaos and violence.
Shana Sheeley as background was a fellow from the Ferris UC Berkeley Psychedelic Journalism Fellowship. That's how I actually heard about the podcast. And the fellowship offers ten thousand dollar reporting grants per year to journalists reporting in depth
print and audio stories on the science, policy, business and culture.
The fellowship is supported by my foundation, the Psy Foundation. You can find that
S A I S E I foundation.org if you want to see what types of projects and grants and so on we've made.
And it is made possible in collaboration with Michael Pollan, Molly O'Wallin, and others at UC Berkeley. So thanks to the entire team over there.
Altered States, the podcast looks at how people are taking psychedelics, who has access to them. They actually have an amazing episode where they walk through in real time someone's first experience with psilocybin, how they're regulated, who stands to profit, and what these substances might offer us as individuals and as a society.
It's hosted by journalist R.L. Duam Ross, and you can find it wherever you find your podcast.
Hey guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday.
Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. Kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps.
gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends including a lot of podcast guests and these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short.
a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to Tim.blog slash Friday. Type that into your browser, Tim.blog slash Friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one.
Thanks for listening.