Self-Discovery and the Power of Inner Transformation with Anne-Laure Le Cunff

Intro I think all of us carry things with us that we don't realize we do and because we've been carrying these things for so long we don't know that there's another way to live that there's a lighter way to live where we're not carrying this pain this trauma those painful memories it's just been amazing to discover what it felt like to not be carrying this with me once you've experienced what it's like to feel light this is something you can strive for and that you can try and have more off in your [Music] life hey welcome back to good work my name is Barrett Brooks and I'm your host this is a show made up of long form conversations with talented people who are using their careers to make the world a better place on today's episode 4 I invited Ann lla Kum to join me as my guest she's a trained neuroscientist at King's College in London wrapping up her PhD she's a forthcoming author of an upcoming book and she's the found of Nest labs.com which is where she hosts much of a writing for public consumption on what I would call Applied Neuroscience how do you take what scientists know about how the brain works and apply it to everyday life through mindful productivity creativity relationships and so much more Ann Laur is a fascinating human being she's kind thoughtful and whip smart we had an excellent conversation ranging across a wide range of topics from personal history to cultural background to how to achieve excellence in our work to how to have more creative output one of my favorite topics though was anord talking about how she balances her academic work within institutions and writing for public consumption which she kicked off by writing a 100 essays 100 days in a row at the beginning of her writing career online so please enjoy my conversation in episode four of good work with Ann Laur laum let's get to [Music] it here's where I want to start it comes from the last thing I did actually was I Liminal moments and navigating life's crossroads read all of your annual reviews from the past 5 years but sequentially which was a really fascinating exercise because it's like seeing a person's life go by you know over the course of an hour basically there was this moment early in 2021 we were coming off a year of a once in a generation pandemic uh really once in a century pandemic and it had been extremely hard on your extended family you had lost love ones Nest Labs had this like momentum it was growing it was at 25,000 subscribers or something like that you had a small team your Revenue was growing your Masters was complete and you were starting to think about do you want to get a PhD and In This Moment your partner gets a job offer in Singapore 6,000 miles away eight time zones you know so far side note my wife is from Singapore so that was a fun little aside there but you're in this moment of life where everything could change in any given Direction and I think you all decided to make what I see as maybe the most courageous and authentic decision you could make for both of you and it just felt like this really pivotal moment to me in your story where things could have gone so many directions and so I wonder if we might just start there and have you tell us a little bit about what that was like and what you ended up deciding yeah absolutely that was definitely a linal moment for me in the sense that I as you said I had no idea what was the right direction to take there were so many options as well I had to make a bet basically I had to take a risk there there was no way that I could calculate and rationally make that decision so it was a mix of obviously thinking about the pros and cons of different choices I could make but it was also very intuitive I went with what felt right and in our case being in a long-term partnership and having the two people having their own dreams and their own Ambitions aspirations Etc we believed at the time that if we prevented one of the two people to pursue their dreams there would be resentment at some point or another further down the line and so the only decision that both sounded logical to us but felt right again from an instinctive standpoint was to both pursue our dreams even if it meant being in a long-distance relationship very longdistance relationship as as you know since your partner is from Singapore this is very far it's not only far to fight there but the time zone difference can make it hard sometimes just to stay in touch you can go a couple of days without talking to each other so it is a bet you're making on your relationship on your partnership that you're going to be able to make it work and now that it's been more than two years that we're in this situation so we're still together which is great I'm almost done with my PhD there's six more months to go he's very happy in his job and we're approaching a new Lial moment now where now that I'll be done with the PHD and I'll be location independent again so what next do I move there do I go somewhere else yeah I just feel like life is this life is this succession of Lial moments and every time you're at a Crossroads and you just need to make the choice that feels right it's kind of one of the Core Concepts you talk about that being in the in between is this huge skill set that we have to develop because it happens over and over and over so I wonder if you might just share some of what you've learned from either a neuroscience standpoint or a personal Lessons from neuroscience on embracing the in-between standpoint on these in between moments and what it's like for us and why they're so important I think from a neuroscience perspective is just interesting to keep in mind that we are designed to try and reduce uncertainty as much as possible our brains are pattern matching machines that are really trying to understand what is a signal in the middle of the noise and trying to make predictions and it's trying to make the best predictions possible really that's how we survive we evaluate risks we decide do I turn right do I turn left do I start running do I stay here this is what we do and we make those calculations all the time and when we find ourselves in those Lial spaces those spaces of uncertainty it can be very easy to just listen to those instincts and just move or or freeze or letting ourselves being Guided by fear instead of letting ourselves being Guided by our dreams our again our Ambitions our aspirations and so just starting by posing not rushing the decision I think can be one of the best things that anyone can do if they find themselves in that situation do not rush the decision take your time especially if it's a big decision that is going to have very long-term consequences it is worth it taking your time to make that decision and making sure that you have considered all of the pros and the cons and that you're really listening to how it feels to what feels right to you and not to the alarm bells in your brain telling you Danger Danger let's quickly run and and you know move away from from what feels very scary so that's the first thing just taking your time which I did at the time and I'm very happy I did and the second thing would be to make space to connect with yourself in those moments to really try and understand what it is you want we are all prone to mimetic desire and copying those goals that other people have or looking at other people's success and feeling like that may be the kind of success that we want and again this is very automatic we're social animals and it does make sense to some extent to copy what other people are doing this is how we learn but if you want to learn and live different things than most other people are living you need to go a little bit off the Beaton track and you need to make sure that your decisions are based on what feels right for you and not what looks like it's right for many other people around you so make time and make space to really think about those decisions yeah you know it sounds so obvious make time make space and in those moments I know in my own life I have to resist every urge to just want to move through it and and make the uncomfortable aspect of it end and so it's it's fascinating to know logically like we're fighting our nature when we're doing that and then still to be able to sit in it and calmly or maybe not so calmly but like Embrace whatever it's like in those moments in between and just sit in our bodies you know there's so many directions we could go from from here because you brought up three or four different things I want to talk about eventually but in my work I talk about it as the your somatic experience you know you talk about interoception very related but our body has such a great is such a great source of data it's telling us so many things all the time and we're so detached from it because we stay up here so much we stay in our brains we stay in the logic side of things but we have all of this Rich input coming from our bodies and how we're reacting and whether we're tensing up or whether we want to move through something and I I love how I really love how you hesitated when you said calmly Maybe not maybe not cly because this is exactly what this is about maybe you don't feel Cal and maybe that's important information if a decision is making you feel really stressed it could mean that it's because it's important it could mean that it's because it's something you're resisting that you actually don't want to do it may be because you you want to do it but you don't feel supported in the way that you would require in order to take that step but you can't figure out why you're feeling this way if you're ignoring the feeling in the first place so you really need to learn how to I I love this expression I've never heard about it before but sematic experience that interception I write about but listening to the signals so you can then decode them yeah yeah exactly we're going to The power of intuition in decision making get a lot more into kind of dropping into our emotional experience and some of the tools that you've used to get there but before we do what came to mind for me is so there's this concept of um kind of super forecasters or forecasters out in the world the book is super forecasters and the premise of the book is basically that experts are often very bad at predicting the future and so that being true what makes it different that some people are able to be accurate when looking at probabilities of outcomes and things like that so we don't need to get way off on that but it made me think I was pulling that into your situation where now you can look back and it was like we made the right call everything's okay we're still together we're both pursuing what is important to us but there was some probability that it didn't work out well at all and so I wonder if you have any practices for at the beginning when you're making a decision kind of either writing it down or documenting it and predicting what you think will come true and then looking back against that and maybe not but I just wondered if you have any any practices around that I actually don't do this I know many friends who do things like these because a lot of my friends are engineers and I feel like it gives them a feeling of control to to do this they feel like okay I've made my prediction and then I can look back and even if it wasn't the right prediction that's okay that is part of the process and I will keep on improving and and tweaking it until it's perfect which obviously it never is because the parameters keep on changing as you go through life what I I pay more attention to is how I feel in that moment where I'm making that decision and I do write that down because further down the line when things are a bit difficult because they do become difficult there are external factors that can impact the decision that you made in our case we made that decision after the pandemic but there were many couples that also started long-distance relationships just at the beginning of the pandemic and then imagine not being able to see each other for six month when you were planning on visiting each other every month maybe that's an external factor that has completely changed so writing down how you feel when you make the decision can be very helpful to look back on when things are difficult when the external situation has changed so you can kind of reconnect with the why you made that decision in the first place and it can make it a lot easier to navigate those difficult moments when you remind yourself oh that's why because at the time I made that decision because I was willing to make that bet because I believed in the future of that relationship because I believe I'm going to be happier if I stay with this person over the long term and then you ask yourself have these things changed no they actually they haven't it's just that because of my PHT I'm not going to be able to visit next month or because of this it's going to be a bit more difficult but the core reasons why I made that choice haven't changed so writing that down to me has been more helpful than any type of making predictions and then looking back on them yeah that's really good I experienced that almost as the difference between like trying to train the algorithm that is your brain on one side versus really staying in touch with the reasoning and the intuition and like the all of the things that went into the decision over time because we have these biases in our brains whether it's the recency bias of our most recent experience that we're having or negativity bias that those things stand out more than the positive experiences and so it's really easy to get lost and forget wait how did I end up here again because I'm not sure I like it anymore so I really like that that's great one of the twists in the story that I did not expect at all was that you all decided to get married it's like we're going to do this really hard thing so let's get married and I just thought that was both fun and just kind of this really beautiful commitment to one another to say hey we're we're in this together and we'll figure it out and I don't know if that's how you all saw it but I just wonder what that decision was like to commit to one another and that way this is the way I function in general once I've made it decision and I want for something to work out I will do my best to make it succeed and it doesn't mean that it will succeed as you've mentioned there is always a probability that things are not going to work out the way you want them to work out but what I'm trying to optimize for is being able to look back and feel like I've done everything I could I gave myself a fair chance and if it didn't work out it didn't work out so really trying to optimize for minimizing regrets I don't know if you have this distinction in in English actually because in French we make the distinction between regrets and remorses and so a regret is when you didn't do something and a remorse is when you did something so I'm trying to optimize for having remorses that's fine I did something and maybe that wasn't the right thing versus feeling like oh no I didn't do anything so in this case once we had made the decision that we were making that bet together that we wanted to do our best to make it work it turns out that at the time only family could visit in Singapore and so if I wanted to visit him I had to be family the only way to be family officially is to be married to each other maybe in a word way from the outside but for us it it was self-evident that once we had made that decision if that was the thing it took to give us a chance for this to work then we would just do it we talked about it we made the decision pretty quickly just one evening announced it to our family and I think we got married maybe a month later or something like this we did it in the in his parents uh backyard because it was right in the middle of covid it was maximum 30 people we were not even 30 I think we were 25 including five or six kids so it was Tiny and I think it was perfect and in it's weird magical way it happened and uh that's how we committed to each other you know another thing that I think is really important is that we also designed it in a way where it would be very easy to separate if we wanted to so we didn't want the marriage papers or the admin to be the reason why we would stay together we didn't want to wake up and feel like oh gosh it would be so complicated so we both at the same time committed to each other by doing this by saying we're investing in this relationship and we want it to work but also we made it very easy from an admin point to separate if we wanted to so that's not the reason why we stay together yeah so you set yourself up to continue to make decisions for the right reasons and not just because of logistics or the difficulty of unwinding it or whatever yeah that's really beautiful your thing about remorse and regret made me think I uh as a random aside that was unplanned I have this um this deck of cards here that are untranslatable words and and a coach that I used to work with who was a dear dear friend to me gave it to me and so I'll read one just for the sake of entertainment I think it's from um School of life so many listeners will probably have heard of that and this one happens to be French how about that uh so I'll I'll butcher it I'm sure so you can correct me but it's lepr decaler uh the Wittier cutting retort that we should have delivered to a freny but that comes to mind only after we've left the Gathering and our our way down the stairs captures our maddening inability to know how to answer humiliation in real time and so there's of course some fun ones as well but uh you know there's like a bunch of these little words and I loved it because there are so many Concepts that are just wonderful and beautiful and cultures around the world that English does a horrible job of translating and giving us a chance to experience this is so interesting I have a a friend Steph Smith who maybe some listeners will know as well because she's pretty active on Twitter and she created a website that is a database of untranslatable words and I sometimes open it and have a look around because it's very fun very inspiring it's funny because it goes both ways I feel like there are so many beautiful words that cannot be translated to English but at the same time English has something going for it I find as someone who works in English even though that's not my dative language is that English speakers are much more will willing to play with their words and and just like mash them together create new words you know we don't have a word for brainstorming in French we don't have a word for mindfulness either and I I love that about English that you can say hey we're missing a word for this concept how about we make one let's just invent one whereas in French we're so protective of our language and so it's a lot more rigid and we even have like Fran the French Academia she's a bunch of old people who try to protect the French language they even try to invent new words for email in French so they they say we should not say email we all say email because that's just the same word and it's easy but they invented another one that no one is using and they actually inspire me when I work on any kind of product or even an essay or something like this I sometimes ask myself if I'm creating something of value that is actually going to help the reader or the consumer or if I'm trying to force a worldview or a perspective that is what I think things should be like versus what they really are like and having something that's really helping the reader and not just being based on my own experience so weirdly these these old people all in a room trying to protect the French language have become a source of inspiration for me that's such a great anecdote because it is so easy to get caught up in in our biases or whatever our pre-existing views are and not update our our priors for the world that exists you know and to want to try and like force our ideas on everyone around us despite all indications that we maybe are the ones that are wrong so fascinating so a couple other moments that seemed pivotal to me in your journey that I wanted to ask you about or kind of hear your perspective on whether they were as pivotal as they seemed the first one was you talk a lot about kind of following this typical success career ladder at Google and then you thought you were getting off of that train by going and starting a startup and then later realized that oh no that was actually just a continuation of the same thing in a different way so that business failed and I want to come back and ask a question about that my first company failed as well and so I have a feeling there's probably Rich ground there the other was taking this you know what maybe didn't seem as a risk or maybe it did which was starting Nest labs and using it as your kind of like playground online and it's now become obviously this incredible community of human beings that you get to connect with all the time so I want to touch on both of those but I want to I want to before we do that ask if there are other pivotal moments I mean I'm sure there were but any that really stick out in your mind in your kind of career journey and life that have really shaped who you've become today another one I think would be much earlier when I was 21 and I moved to New York because that's when I learned how to speak English and I think that if I hadn't gone there and not spent those six month in New York completely immersed and trying my best to learn as much English as possible I would not be where I am today it's incredible to me to think that I signed a book deal with penguin to write a book in English in English I also signed a book deal with a French publisher who bought the rights to translate it back to French so I'm not even going to be the one translating my own book into my native language sounds completely absurd to me but if you had told me 10 years ago that I would one day write a book in English an entire book in English I would have told you that you're crazy that's impossible because I could barely talk at the time in English so that would that was a pivotal moment and I think learning how to speak English has changed my life yeah I mean I even just think of About Us ending up on this conversation you know it's like how many podcasts have you done in English and how many essays have you written in English and you're studying in English you're writing a book in English and number one it's incredible and admirable but number two it feels like you've been very strategic and intentional about it I mean the publishing thing as an example you know you talk about you turn down some book deals that could have been in French to begin with so that you could get one with a major your publishing house out of New York that actually gives you a better chance for your work to reach more people over time and so you know they are interrelated but I also see you being very intentional about using this asset that you have now of of Having learned the second language to reach more people and have more impact in your work yeah and to be fair the reason why I turn down those French Publishers those deals from French Publishers because I asked around on Twitter to other authors and they're the ones who told me don't do that publish in English and then it can be translated back in French so I think rather than my intentionality around using English to reach more people it's more of an illustration of how amazing it can be to be online and have access to other people who have gone through the same process but a little bit earlier than you and you can just ask them directly and everyone had the same reply was like don't do this don't take the French deal wait until you can have one in English and it's been for me very often rather than having a very clear vision of where I was going the part I've been intentional about is just making sure to ask other people what their experience was and learning from them and every time I'm taking a new Step it's something that's completely new for me but I know other people have done it I'm not the only person going through this so I'm trying to learn from them yeah I mean it just seems like building community and leveraging Community not in the unhealthy way but in the very healthy way of just of taking advantage of being surrounded by smart people has been such a core part of kind of how you've built your career how you've built your business I mean Nest Labs is a community at the end of the day and I wonder if you had any role models or people showing you the way on how to build community how to Foster relationships amongst people so that you would have access to people to ask these kinds of questions it just seems to be kind of inherent in you and so I wonder where that came from originally probably from my mom she I I grew up in a house where there were always a dozen people in and out of the house coming to catch upop to share the latest news to know how things were going have tea and cake and then leave it's taught me probably how to connect with people in a way that feels very natural for me another thing that's unrelated that it taught me is that I work really well even if there's a lot of noise around me because there was always very noisy in my house growing up so I think having an Algerian mom for whom connecting with other people is such an important part of of her life has been one thing and then in terms of the people I I'm learning from nowadays I have a few people around me that are a big source of inspiration when it comes to community building there's uh Thiago Forte uh from building a second brain who is known I think mostly for the public community that he has built there's a really big Community around building a second brain but what people don't see is his generosity behind the scenes he's always willing to help a fellow author anyone who's curious about building a newsetter being a Creator Etc he will always take the time to share advice to share what he learned he's published a lot of guides very in depth about all the challenge that he's been through at a level of transparency that you very rarely see because a lot of people treat their experiences almost as straight Secrets they think that maybe if they share too much people are going to copy them and become competitors there's none of that in the way Thiago approaches his work and his experiences I'm learning from him a lot every time I'm a little bit hesitant and like should I share that much like is that too much to share I think about him and every time I realize no actually I can absolutely share this I'm very far from the limit to of how much I should be sharing you mentioned there were a few people like that that you kind of learn from and rely on as role models for it is there another uh aside from Thiago that you look to uh yes there's a a person called Mari Denise I don't know how in English she would feel like I'm butchering her name she's French she created a community called woman make and it's a tiny Community it's on Telegram and what I admire the most from Marie is how diverse this community is and still everyone feels welcome because really the only thing that everyone in this community has in common is their gender so that's 50% of the population and it's a lot of people from all works of Life working on different types of projects and somehow it still works and I think in this case it's because the community leader has a way of making everyone feel welcome and connected and where all ideas are listened to all voices are listened to so this is also something that I admire a lot with her I love that um it reminds me of I saw in some of your your content you were talking about building a community at one point over WhatsApp or text message for newsletter creators sharing Lessons Learned along the way and so it's just interesting to hear these parallels you know you get inspired by someone or someone gets inspired by you and then that Sparks you to try and experiment and then it adds back into your work I can't overestimate the degree to which Community has shaped my career and and just the way that I've grown over time I think that seeking out people taking risks inviting people to things looking like an idiot on occasion because no one responds or no one says yes it's given me all the relationships that I have now and all the people that then introduce me to others or give me automatic rapport with someone like you where we haven't had the chance to talk before today but there's like enough Mutual connections where it seems like an obvious thing to do so I love hearing about how different people build community like that you know you mentioned your your mom is Algerian your dad is French is that right yes so Cultural roots and identity you've got this fascinating cultural background and now you live in London so you you even live in another place than either of uh your two primary cultural backgrounds and I just wonder how that kind of diverse inherent cultural background between your parents and then also the experience of being an immigrant in new places has shaped you as a Creator and you and your work today I think it started fairly early on because my mom was born in Algeria but moved to France when she was still quite young and so she had to adapt she had to learn a new language and she had to navigate those two different cultures on a day-to-day basis at home with her parents who didn't speak French and then at school and with her other students Etc or at work where she had to to speak French and try to blend in as much as possible there was a long period of time where I only felt like I was French because my mom was trying so hard for us to be integrated in the culture that she wouldn't speak Arabic to us she gave us the frenches names and Laur I don't know if you realized they without being French but Anor is super French and if there was a spectrum in terms of frenchness of names is very very French and it's the same for my brother and my sister very very French you could tell some that when people say Oh I thought you were you were French that she smells she's kind of happy it's a compliment for her that she's so well integrated in the culture that people don't hear her accent don't realize that she's from Algeria and it's only much later and my late teenage early 20s that I started really reconnecting with my Algerian roots with my mom and we went back to Algeria I visited several times now I've met all of my cousins there and it's been very interesting to see how your environment shapes your behavior I'm a completely different person when I'm in Paris versus when I'm in bisra in the south south of Aleria I had not noticed I think it's a lot more subtle now I notied it I noticed that I'm actually a different person when I'm in London and when I visit San Francisco I'm also a different person when I'm in New York I'm a different person before visiting Algeria I did not notice it because it was subtle enough that I could miss it Algeria gave me an extreme version of this where I I would be a lot more discreet I have to cover my hair when I'm there you have to you know let men speak before you do it's very very different culturally so that was a great example to see how your behavior changes and once you've seen it once once you've noticed that you do it in a situation you see it all the time and I would even say that you probably also change your behavior based on the different groups you're in whether you're with different friends also and we just take that for granted we don't really pay attention to it but I think maybe we would learn a lot from observing our Behavior a little bit more and seeing which of those differences and changes in Behavior are intentional and we want to keep maybe some of them do make sense because it does make sense to adapt to a situation but what are those changes in behavior that we do unconsciously that maybe are not serving us as much I don't know when I first noticed it but I'll sometimes spend a long weekend with a friend or a friend's family and I'll come home and I'll realize I'm I've adopted some of their mannerisms or way of speaking it's like I would I would I've never used that mannerism before in my life and then I come home from three days with someone and all of a sudden I've got this different aspect of how I'm communicating and that's interesting to me you know I mean it's a reflection of our Mir neurons and wanting to connect with one another and just all of these different aspects but then to be conscious of it and ask okay but is do I want to be shaping myself to the people that I'm with or do I want to try and be more authentically me and you know so there's all these interesting questions in there yes and who you surround yourself with we know it intin that this is something it's almost TR to say right that you become the people that you surround yourself with there are lots of sayings like these that are tried because they're true and we don't act on them because we feel like yeah duh I know that but we don't really act on them I think being more intentional with the people you spend your time with can be one of the highest level things that you can do to have a better life yeah yeah I couldn't agree more you know I want to come back to a thing that you said about your mom and kind of the process of assimilation and the pride that she takes in being recognized as French when that comes up and uh I had a wonderful conversation on the show with a author and executive coach named Jerry Colona and he recently wrote a book called reunion and it came out of kind of him examining his own place in society during right after George Floyd's death and in the Summer where we had a lot of conversation in the United States about the black community suffering disproportionately to the rest of our country so the core of his book was really about learning to reconnect with our ancestors and where we come from like where we really come from and how many in you know this is us specific in this case but it's relevant to what you were sharing as well how many of us pass as white because that is the thing everyone assimilated towards but how that was like white is not a culture white is not a country of origin white is it's a it's a glomeration of many other things but that for so long every incentive almost in society was aligned so that people needed to assimilate to make it basically and so yeah it becomes a point of Pride to say yes I'm an American even though perhaps it's just been a generation since you came from your country of origin and so my example of that is my great-grandparents are Mexican they came from Mexico across the southern border that's such a area of debate in our country today no one learned Spanish after my grandmother she didn't teach it to any of her daughters because it was probably more a subject of Shame Than Pride that you would speak Spanish they all pass as white now even though they're half Mexican and it's just this interesting and sad I mean really and you talked about going back and kind of processing the pain of your ancestors at one point and I've had a similar experience where it's like man there's a lot of that people have to go through to leave their country of origin and go somewhere to create opportunity for the future of their family and it's so sad what's lost in that process there's so much richness that gets lost in that process yeah and it what's interesting interesting is that this destructive process because that's what it is comes very often from a place of of love and protection because the reason why you know your grandparents or or my mom try to leave all of their culture behind was because they wanted their kids to have the best chance possible to succeed in this new country so it's very interesting I always find it fascinating when there's a tension like this in between where a behavior comes from and the actual effects that it has which are not necessarily the intended ones or or which has also second order consequences that I think nobody would have been able to think about a generation ago right yeah you don't anticipate them because they're optimizing for all the things we do have that are a little more invisible right it's like we take for granted all the gifts that it gave us and we see the things that we lost you know or that we didn't get to experience but I think that's a it's a beautiful thing about maybe our generation maybe just people in positions of privilege and resource where we can go back and reclaim it you can go back to Algeria and reclaim that part of your your story in whatever way is Meaningful to you and you know I have that same opportunity too so I guess I raise that as an invitation to everyone listening to say like it's a really powerful experience to be able to reclaim some of those aspects that may have been lost along the way and there's a lot of rich abolutely and you don't even need to if you cannot afford to travel back to wherever it is your family comes from you can do a lot of fun stuff like I've been trying to learn how to cook more Algerian dishes and nowadays with the internet it is possible to find some very obscure recipes that usually you would have had to like literally get your hands on on a grandma to ask her to tell you what the recipe is that's what it used to be like but now you can find YouTube videos that show you how to do these things how to make those dishes music also it's just crazy now that you can find any kind of music on Spotify even the the really obscure music that you would only listen in that little village in the south of Algeria you can find that on Spotify so we have incredible access to all of these different those different cultures without even having to travel there yeah I totally agree I've been working my way through a traditional Mexican cookbook same thing you know right here from home just learning to make things like mole or tamale or things that aren't just like tacos basically I want to shift tax a little bit if that's okay and I want to come back to you leaving Google to Learning from failure start a startup which you know on the surface and in reality is a big risk you know you're leaving a very secure job that's going to pay well with the career ladder to go do a thing that's inherently risky and try something and we don't have to go through that whole process of what that's like because you know we already know how it ended and I think that might actually be the more instructive piece of your experience and so you've shared a lot about kind of starting this company and it ended up failing and a big part of that was the relationship to the co-founder that you chose or who you know you each chose each other and I just wonder what you learned from that process about the importance of choosing Partners in general but specifically business partners and how much impact that then goes on to have on whether a thing can succeed or not it kind of connects back to some of the things we've talked about at the beginning of this conversation about inition and listening to your intution a little bit more sometimes I think the big mistake that I made at the time was that I tried to apply a playbook in terms of finding my co-founder and finding a co-founder in the first place because the Playbook said all of the startup playbooks said you need a co-founder to succeed I didn't doubt it one second because why combinator said that it meant that that's the way you build the startup so I started looking for a co-founder and then which I know is going to sound ridiculous sounds ridiculous to me now but felt completely logical at the time you could download templates that had a little rubric where you could rate different aspects of your skills and personal and you could do that together with your co-founder to see if you would be a good match and those templates even based on the skills and the type of startups that you are going to build help you calculate the type of the split in terms of ownership of the company so if if it was more of a Technical startup they obviously the CTO would have a bit more Etc all of this automated with a spreadsheet and I felt like oh man that this is genius like someone has figured this out like someone has figured this out and I have access to it for free and I can use it not that it means I'm going to be successful but I'm doing all of the right things to make sure that I'm starting on the right foot and now that I have more experience that I'm a little bit older that I have worked with more people in more different context it does sound completely silly to go about it this way because there's a a human factor that is much more important than anything any kind of spreadsheet would be able to tell you so that was my big mistake and this was my biggest lesson from this and now when I select people to work with whether I hire them to work with me on the team or it's just a collaboration that we're doing I'm always listening to my intuition and even if the person has the most impressive CV but after a conversation with them I feel like this is not going to work and even if I cannot put my finger on it this is enough of a red flag for me not that the person and themselves are wrong intrinsically right but this is enough of a red flag that I know it's not going to be a match or at least I'm not willing to risk it yeah yeah that makes a lot of sense to me starting a company or working with someone is your life it's a major part of your life and I think sometimes we under index on the importance of choosing partners and choosing people that we work with long term I don't know if you can really anticipate the degree to which that shapes your career without going through it you know and so it's like it might even be not worth our time to try and share like what what to do upfront because I think maybe you just have to go through it you have to try the way you think you should try to choose someone to work with and learn the experiences from it and so I guess I I asked the question because like I've been through that as well it's you learn these lessons about how to choose who to work with and I saw this quote once and I don't remember who to attribute it to so someone listening can tell me and I'll give them credit but it was basically before the age of 35 you should never work with a friend after the age of 35 you should only work with friends and I found that really interesting because I'm 36 now and it really resonates with me that I know myself it's not about really other people it's actually that I know myself well enough now to know the boundaries I need to set the things that really matter to me I've overcome some of my just old inner habits and patterns that were shaping the way I thought and the way I was in relationship and so now I can be in Partnership much more consciously and intentionally with someone whereas 10 years ago it was like I was very reactive I was you know I had all kinds of stuff going on that just made me me a worse partner regardless of what the other person was doing yeah I think this is this is great I don't know about I wouldn't necessarily make it a universal rule for sure but it wouldn't make for such a great quote if it was maybe do this and maybe do that it's a great quote I completely agree with you and I think that again like the reason why it didn't work out for us was not necessar because the other person was intrinsically bad as a co-founder but we both didn't know ourselves enough and we didn't have this self-awareness the self- knowledge this capacity for emotional regulation that I agree like I don't I don't think there's any shortcut to developing these skills it's just something that takes time and it does make sense that at age 36 you're a lot more able to to navigate all of those different experiences than you were when you were 26 and so I'm still very grateful for that experience I imagine is the same for you of having gone through that partnership for that partnership to not work out and to be able to learn from it and take some of those lessons moving forward with me yeah yeah I guess my encouragement related to that would be to still do it even if it doesn't work out you know it's still worth going through the experience and sometimes s you get great outcomes even though the partnership wasn't the best option you know and so um I just loved hearing the stories though so I want to ask you one more thing then we're going to take a break for a couple minutes Nest Labs is I view Ness Labs it almost as a playground for you it's a playground to learn a playground to teach a playground to share ideas to hear ideas from others and I heard you talking about the Ness aspect of it and I want to see if I got it right and I want to kind of hear you elaborate on it but the Ness was this kind of suffix to words that becomes almost like a quality of a human openness I don't know there's a million different ways we could describe someone and that that was the reason you named it that was it like it represents the qualities of human beings and how wide ranging they can be so I wonder if You' just kind of tell us a little bit of the story about why you started it and um and what you thought it might become relative to what it's actually become so yeah that suffix is to describe the state of being something so the state of being conscious the state of being mindful the state of being thoughtful at the time I didn't have big Ambitions for Nas laabs at all I actually came up with the name very quickly like in an hour or so and I just wanted it to be a space where I could write about the things I was learning I wanted as you mentioned to be a playground a sort of of laboratory for myself for personal growth hence the labs and Nest labs and I was quite surprised when I saw that what I published there was resonating with so many people because to me I was just someone learning about these topics I was not an expert and I was very transparent about the fact that everything I was writing was a work in progress that I was a work in progress myself and that the only thing I was doing here was learning in public and turns out now in hindsight and I'm looking at the growth of Nest laabs the engagement and and the community that has gathered around it it's exactly the things I thought would hinder the growth of this project that were the things people liked I think they really likeed learning with me and not necessarily The journey of learning and growth just from me they probably also like that I was very openly admitting when I was making mistakes I would very transparently correct all the Articles and say oh that thing I recommended you do two weeks ago there's a new research paper that's out and actually this doesn't work like power posing for example is something at some point I recommended that people do and then it was debunked afterwards instead of putting it under the rug I very transparently said oops sorry this is what happens when you're learning in public so I would have not yeah in Thousand Miles expected that it would grow this much I'm almost at 100,000 subscribers on the newsletter The power of authenticity and community now and we have a community pirate community of about 2,000 people and this is way bigger than anything I would have expected it's been great and it has really changed my life yeah it's incredible I mean I was looking at uh I just made a note of the numbers over time they're not an indicator of anything other than that people resonate with what you're doing you know I don't I don't really hold numbers as like the end all be but back in 2019 you were at just over 6,500 subscribers and then in a year you added almost another 20,000 you got up to 25 5,000 and then you did another half that to 37 and then to 55 and then in 2023 you jumped all the way up to almost 100,000 subscribers I mean it's incredible and to me the growth Arc Embracing personal evolution is a reflection from my seat of you becoming more and more yourself like more and more confidently yourself in your work and that's a lesson I've had to learn I think so much in my life we go back to the like mirroring behavior and being part of the communities that were in you know I think so much of especially my 20s was figuring out who I wanted to be like where do I want to fit in how do I want to shape myself how do I want to behave what do I want to adopt as my long-term values things like that now like this show is a great example I finally got to the point where I was like it I'm gonna make the show that I wish existed I'm going to have long conversations with people I'm fascinated by we're going to cover all kinds of stuff and maybe no one will listen listen but I'm going to have great conversations along the way and it took so much to get to the point where it's like oh yeah of course that's the only way to work it's the only way to work it's certainly the only way to be a Founder because you have to live with it every day the thing you create you have to live with every day and it's in your mind constantly and so to shape it into something someone else wants it to be in hindsight this was what I did for a long time so I'm I'm not even saying like you're dumb for doing it I did it it's seems silly almost that I would have tried to shape my efforts to other people's desires for me instead of my own and so any ways I just see that so The impact of public learning and mistakes much of that in what Nest Labs is growing into is it just seems like an authentic expression of your Fascinations and I want to add to what you said that I don't think it's CD at all our entire Society is pushing us to try and emulate what other people are doing and to try and please other people and again to fit in so I think this is just the instinctive behavior that we have since you're a little kid your parents tell you what you're supposed to be doing and then your teachers do the same and you're taught that if you do what you're told to do good things will happen if you misbehave bad things will happen and even though we do gain more freedom as an adult these things stay in the back of our minds that's you know how we've been taught growing up so unlearning all of these patterns and realizing that this Freedom you have as an adult you can actually use to do things that make you feel alive instead of just making you look good with other people it takes time it takes energy and it takes a lot of Courage as well yeah that last one especially it takes courage because ultimately it's an act of vulnerability it's like this is who I am so yeah I hope you like it you know and you're doing it in public and that's hard well I think that's a great place to take a brief break when we come back I want to talk about some of the kind of psychedelics that you've tried in terms or psychoactive drugs that you've tried in terms of inner growth I want to talk about other tools for inner growth um maybe a little bit about your creative process and see where that takes us hey it's Barrett you've reached about the midpoint of this conversation and while we take a little break for station identification as they say I want to tell you about two things first of all I write newsletter every Saturday for Founders and creators who are leading teams and companies to make an impact through your work it has three sections in it the first one is a mini essay From Me based on my Executive coaching work with Founders and creators about how to lead well it has three long form essays or links from around the web that will help spark new thoughts to help you lead better and it has one quote from a meaningful book that I often find myself recommending to friends and clients all the feedback I've gotten so far far is that it hits exactly on the kinds of issues that Founders CEOs and creators are facing every day in their work so if that sounds appealing to you make sure to go to my website at Barrett brooks.com and you can subscribe right at the top of the homepage that's b a r r tt b r o.com the second thing I want to tell you about is that my day job I actually do have a day job I'm not just a podcaster yet is as an executive coach as I just mentioned I work with founders of series A startups and later and with creators who are doing at least a million dollars as a solo founder and are now thinking about growing a team the uniting commonality between the founders and the creators I work with is that you've reached a point in your business where you know you're going to make it actually you're doing quite well and now the question is how much do you want to scale and what are the leadership challenges that you're going to face along the way this work is based on both my training as a coach and in my work as an operator and growing my old company convertkit from 3 to $30 million in annual revenue if you're a founder or Creator who might benefit from coaching or if you know someone who's looking for a coach I'd love for you to check out my site and my coaching page at Barrett brooks.com coaching you can learn everything about how I work as a coach and also fill out a form to have an exploratory conversation if that sounds interesting to you all right that's all I got for you right now there's no sponsors for the show at the moment so consider me your sponsor let's get back to the conversation for the second half one of the things that you've been really open about in your writing are Exploring inner growth through psychedelics some of the things that you've tried to make what I would call like inner growth breakthroughs to really like expand your possibilities going forward by understanding what's going on inside better uh you did an awesome podcast episode with I think it was with Johnny Miller about iasa I have not done any psychoactive drugs really just because I'm like scared of them not because I'm opposed to them or anything however as I listen to that conver ation I realized that it mirrored a lot of the experiences I have had over the past about year and a half using a therapy modality called internal family systems and then some of the like outputs of that process created some really really deep experiences that are similar to some things I heard you talk about with iasa although I know they would be completely different uh the like process would be completely different I don't want to repeat everything you talked about with Johnny because that's a better conversation about that topic if someone's really interested in iasa but really one of the things that really stood out to me as you were talking about that experience was and this might have been I think on Paul mallard's podcast you said this you talked about briefly as you were mentioning iasa purging the pain of your maternal ancestors and I hinted at this earlier when we were talking about that and I wonder if you just might be open to sharing more about what that was like and what you've taken away from that since then for people who don't know and without going into too much details but an aasa ceremony can last for maybe five Ayahuasca experiences to six hours so a lot can happen during this time this specific moment which was pivotal for me in the experience and was something that really stayed with me and changed me as a person was when at some point I was taken over I think some of the most excruciating pain that I've ever felt physically as as a woman uh we actually like have a lot of you know physical suffering we have to go through whether it's every month with our period whether you know it's like you know medical interventions Etc so I feel like I'm someone who can deal with pain pretty easily I have a very high tolerance to it but this was nothing like anything I had experienced before it started in my belly it felt like this pain had to come out in some way and I felt it moving from my belly to my chest to my throat to my mouth and then coming out almost as if it was a Silent Scream and I didn't know at first what it was but after a while of having several waves of this pain again starting from my belly moving through my chest and then through my throat and through my mouth and coming out as the Silent Scream I knew it was the pain of my mother and the pain of my grandmother and the pain of my great grandmother and the pain of of all of the woman that had come before me that was moving through me and leaving my body as if I was processing the trauma of generations and generations and generations of women that had come before me in terms of what it taught me I haven't really intellectualized that experience or tried to rationalize it because it was so visceral and so embodied that I think it would be hard to put words on it and I don't even think it would be helpful to try to put words on this but it made me realize that I think all of us carry things with us that we don't realize we do and because we've been carrying these things for so long we don't know that there's another way to live that there's a lighter way to live where we're not carrying this pain this trauma those painful memories it's just been amazing to discover what it felt like to not be carrying this with me I felt so much lighter when I left those ceremonies I still feel so much lighter I'm trying now to be a little bit more conscious of any type of weight or pain that I'm feeling and not just almost taking it for granted like being like Oh that's the default that's just feeling heavy like this is the default once you've experienced what it's like to feel light you know this is something you can Thrive for and that you can try and have more of in your life yeah this is such an area of Rich exploration for me right The significance of ancestral pain and healing now is kind of releasing that old pain The ancestral pain the the burdens that we carry and I'm not a scientist I'm not studying for a PhD like you are and so I have only cursory understanding of a lot of the science behind some of this stuff but as I understand it we're having a better and better body of work around the pain that we carry from our ancestors and the way that we get epigenetically shaped by pain from prior generations and I find that really fasc ating that it's not just the idea of what our people went through but it's actually like in our DNA get shifted and we end up carrying this with us over time this is how we survive as a species right it makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint that anything that has caused a lot of pain to an organism will be encoded and remembered and transmitted to their offspring so they have better chances of surviving but you find this pattern in in at the macro level at the you know in terms of timelines of generations but in your own life as well at that level where responses that you have that may protect you in some way can also hurt you in others and sometimes it is better to let go of some of the the tools and the protections and the armors that we have created for ourselves that may have been helpful at some point but are not so helpful anymore right yeah I sometimes talk about it too as kind of like every quality or habit that we have has a shadow side and an affirmative side and there are expressions of that same quality that if we can transform them from maybe the shadow side that's been living in us that we didn't realize into the affirmative version of that going forward it can just shape reshape how we experience things like the visual that I have that is of course reality is I almost imagine the brain equivalent of like a muscle knot like these little muscle knots in our conscious where we think that's the way we must be and it's like really tight and embedded and it's in there and then we you know we have to find these tools whether it's psychoactive drugs or whether it's forms of therapy or whatever that kind of like breaks it apart enough to where you can see the knot you know dissolving itself basically that's the VIS I have for myself and what it's done is once you can separate it out and in that form of therapy for me it was like seeing the different parts of it and how it was all shaped in my mind it was like ah okay now I can handle this a little better I can like acknowledge the pieces here and for me if you'll indulge for a minute because I know most people are here to hear you not me um but the story that really came to mind for me as I was listening to you talk about this experience of of IAS and the reason I asked about the like purging of that maternal ancestral pain that has been a major aspect of my own inner growth and work over the past couple of years and for me it's been through this internal family systems methodology of therapy I had had a couple of sessions and in one of the sessions I basically like imagined that I was a well and that the well was throughout my life people were just tossing their pain in there my extended family my cousins my parents my ancestors whatever and that I was ready not to be the well anymore that was like what came out of this therapy session and so and this was the first time that I realized that I had been acting as if it was my job to carry everyone around me's pain like the world's pain and on some level how egotistical that is like I can fix everything so this is the context going into a coach training Retreat I was on last year and without going way into like the coach training one of the half days we were on this like beautiful I don't know something like 40 acre property 50 acre property in the North Carolina Mountains and the southeastern United States and we were going to do a a day on the land or half day on the land as they put it and this is a like a little mini version of what Native American cultures would call A Vision Quest so being on the land for an extended period of time to see what it has to teach you and normally it involves like fasting and and purging yourself in that way so we didn't get all into that but we spent a half day on the land and they told us to go out with an intention or a question and you know I heard you talking about the preparation and the leadin to the iasa ceremony and and you not necessarily being certain what your question was but knowing enough about your intent to have something that you are starting with and the leader of that kind of reassuring you that like that's enough and so I went into that half day with this therapy session in the background of like being a well and trying to figure out you know why these are my burdens to carry and like what was wrong with me basically that I had I felt that way so I really tried to embrace the exercise it's like we're going to spend a day on the land I might I'm here I might as well see what I can get out of this and I went and laid by this River and I said okay trees and land I want to know what's wrong with me like why have I been carrying these burdens for so long I took a nap just laying on the ground there and I woke up and I just started balling C it was just like the tears were flowing and crying is a thing that I've had to work on like get access to my tears so I'm I'm crying and I feel this urge to like start wiping my body from my head to my toe and every time I do it I flick my fingers at the end and name one of these burdens that I had been carrying it was like I was ready for them to you know go in the bucket of the well and get tossed out finally and it was like I was throwing them in the river and I got to the end and it was like it was everything just from my whole life that I imagined my dad went through and his parents and my ancestors coming from Mexico and then I felt the urge to walk out into the river and it was like okay I'm trying not to judge myself when I'm in the middle of this because everything in me wants to hold myself back or like worry about what people are going to think if I go waiting into the river anyways I go waiting into the river and now I lean down and I'm like washing my hands and arms and it's like I want to get every little bit of this old pain out so I watch myself and say every pain all over again and I get done with this and I feel the lightest I've ever felt it like what you said when you got done with the ceremony and it's like I feel light I'm relieved I don't have these things that I'm carrying anymore it's exactly how I felt and there were probably still I don't know an hour and a half left and I had this sense that I wanted to go up towards where I could see the sunset so I walked up this hill and at the top the founder of this coach training company that originally owned the uh the land he's got a memorial because he's passed away as I'm walking up this hill I come over just the crest of the hill and the Sun is setting over the North Carolina mountains and it's like you can see the beams of the Sun and again I just start balling but this time I'm like laugh crying is the best way I can describe it and it's because I can see the beauty of a sunset for the first time it feels like I'm seeing it for the first time ever I can actually appreciate in that moment how wonderful and beautiful beautiful the world is and the Sun is and like the mountains and it feels so light and joyful that I just can't I'm laugh laughing and crying it's like this other experience the opposite of what I was feeling by the river and I go the rest of the way up the hill and there's like a swing sitting right there and I sit down and I feel this wind come from behind me that feels like it's coming from the memorial of this man who's there and like he's almost talking to me and creating this experience and I just sit there with my arms out on this swing and just like I'm little child you know I just sit there in the wind and watch the sunset on the swing I'm like sitting there and after the fact I'm thinking and now even as I tell it it's like I recognize how ridiculous this sounds you know it sounds ridiculous I can't believe that I would have never you know going back to the 26 versus 36 thing my 26y old self could not have fathomed embracing or even being vulnerable enough to try to have the experience that they intended for us to have and yet it reminded me so much of your story of like the lightness and just being ready to let things go and being able to welcome the experience whether it's you know you've talked about soloc cybin or iasa or whether it's just ritual that allows you to the space to shed these things so anyways I felt compelled to share that with you as a a relationship to your story you know you made me realize something it's that children are very good at doing weird stuff that feels good and then we grow up and we learn how to repress those instincts to just go and do the weird thing whether it's running naked around like in a field or screaming at the top of your lungs or just laughing like crazy rolling your body on the floor dancing when you feel like it all of that kind of stuff that we naturally do as children we stop doing as we grow up and I I wonder if self-development self betterment personal growth is not about relearning those skills that we had as a a child the the skills of letting go laughing crying dancing running and all of these kind of things you do see that sometimes when you have very old people and you're like they're so weird they just say whatever they want to say they're just doing whatever they want to do and usually when we talk about them we say that we're a little bit judgy but really we're a little bit admirative in the way we say it because we're a little bit jealous we feel like I wish I could be like this old person and so I feel like what you did and and what a lot of people are maybe trying to do when they do this work of reconnecting with their inner self is to try to accelerate this process so we don't have to wait until we're 80 to finally feel like we're free to be ourselves yeah and it it one of the things that stuck with me is um how many people live their entire lives never getting to feel like themselves you know I think about uh my dad or you know any number of people or even leaders you see out there that you can just see are operating from a place of paint and the way that they lead or the way that they make decisions you often know because you'll see it in the reactivity or the posturing or and it's given me so much appreciation just for the amount of pain in the world and how I wish that so many people could experience something different that they could have a similar kind of breakthrough or moment or moments like what you've had like what I've had that will unlock a different way of being and who knows maybe it won't last for us you know I hope it will and I certainly feel different now than I did before but who knows we'll see there are always going to be ups and downs like there's been ups and downs for me since I worked with ICA I think the main advantage of doing this kind of work is just knowing that the UPS exist and that you have ways you have tools of getting back up there which doesn't mean you'll manage to maintain yourself at that level all the time but you know this is something that you have access to yeah yeah yeah I agree with you well there's two places I thought we might go and we've got a little bit more time together one is I Creative process and the virtue of writing in public wanted to talk about your just kind of creative process and some of the ideas that you've had I think we should go there because I had some other questions but we've talked in such depth about just inner growth and all of that that I don't want to completely exhaust it I'd rather talk some about your creative process your amount of publishing and the number of ideas that you share is incredible and that didn't come from nowhere like you really challenge yourself and I think it's is a great example of personal experiments and growth Loops uh which are two concepts that you talk about and when you got started with Nest labs early on you challenge yourself to publish an essay a day for a hundred working days so you still took the weekends off but you gave yourself this challenge this experiment to see can I create a writing habit and maintain it over an extended period of time and now it's become the basis for all of this beautiful work that's out in the world I wonder how making that commitment to yourself and then living into becoming a writer over and over and over and over because I think you're my perspective is you're always kind of becoming a writer you're never a writer you're always becoming a writer and you practice it over and over and over I wonder how the practice of writing has changed you as a person and how it shaped you now it really has changed my life I used to consider myself a writer as a kid I was writing novels I sent a few to different Publishers and I really thought that I would be a novelist as I I was growing up this are that are a paleontologist those were the two cares I was considering as a kid and then adult life happened I went to University I got a job at Google and I completely forgot about my dreams of writing so for me this exercise this challenge I gave myself this little experiment of a 100 articles and 100 workdays was also a way to reconnect with the joy that writing was giving me as a child but putting it in as part of a a structure and a framework that would fit into my days as an adult and in terms of how it's changed me writing itself again is something that I've always been doing you know I'm I'm journaling a lot I I was writing poetry as a teenager so I think writing has always been kind of a part of me but what has changed me the most is writing in public writing online this is completely different in between having a bunch of notebooks at home where you write nobody's seeing that feels very safe versus putting yourself out there publishing your work and then whether you want it or not you are going to get feedback sometimes the feedback is that nobody comments on it nobody replies and it's crickets that's feedback too it just means that it didn't resonate with anyone and sometimes it's very positive and someone you get people pushing back on what you said saying I don't think that's true I don't agree so whatever you you will get that feedback I think this has created some sort of like muscle in me where I feel very comfortable now when you publish something every day and every day you're getting feedback then it becomes very natural to receive that feedback whether it's positive negative or you don't receive any comments at all it becomes part of the way you think and you work and you design everything around those growth Loops where you never feel like anything you're doing is an end goal in and of itself everything becomes part of your learning process and every time you use that muscle you create something you put it out there you listen to the feedback you incorporate what you learned into your next piece of work you're really creating this very virtuous cycle of growth for yourself that is not always comfortable but that is highly efficient and where even if you don't see it at the Loop level at each Loop you really feel it but when you look back one year later you feel like wow I can't believe how much I've grown yeah I mean even just in this moment I want to reflect back to you like the body of work you've created is remarkable I could have spent two or three more weeks just reading what you've created and you know five years is not a short amount of time but all things considered I mean it's a relatively short amount of time to completely transform your life and to to create a body of work that you know it's only the beginning of what you will create you know whether it's the book or whatever else you go on to do but it's incredible I wonder as you sit with that and you hear me reflect that back to you how that feels well first uh thank you and I think five years is about right and uh I actually think it's Paul Millard who said that but that it in his experience and he's been really looking at you know people changing cares and and those kind of things things for a long time 5 years is the amount of time it takes to completely change your life if you want to if you start from scratch and that feels right to me and I think you can start seeing effects and you can definitely start feeling the changes very quickly and as soon as a couple of month Rel you decide to commit to something and stick to it and take it very seriously but five years is the amount of time where you look back and you almost can't remember what life felt like before you started this journey yeah yeah just a contrast and um where you were you know at Google and then trying to start the startup and everything to now where you have I won't say complete autonomy because you're still going through a PhD program so you have requirements you have to meet but you know relative complete autonomy over your work in Direction I mean just the two realities couldn't be more different which I find fascinating one of the Navigating between academic research and public engagement things I was thinking a lot about is another guest on the show and I don't know whether her episode will come before or after this one but Hannah Richie from our world in data she also kind of bridges this gap between the academic world at Oxford and the public world and sees her work as kind of an interface between those things of like the data coming out of research and public understanding of that data so that we can use it in our decisions and society and I see you in a similar light you know you're occupying the space between the academic world and research and what we're learning from it and filtering through that and the practic ideas that come out of that that everyday people can apply to their lives and careers I wonder what it's like for you to try and balance those things like how you balance the living in the academic world and consuming what you need to and that side of things with the creative outputs and sharing the ideas and the research with people in a way they can understand so interestingly a challenge I have from having one foot in those two worlds is the way I write because sometimes if I have been working on a research paper for a while and I have to write my newsletter I notice or even I'm writing a book at the moment as I as mentioned and my editor can tell when I've been working on a research paper because she knows my tone gets a lot more academic and I use a lot more jargon and she's like yeah just bring yourself back to that that way of writing that you have normally for for the newsletter that has made it so popular because I just write like a normal human being and equally sometimes I've been working a lot on the book and on Nest labs and I need to write a research paper and I have to put myself back into this way of writing that is very stuffy that I don't particularly like but that is just the way academics are supposed to write and none of my papers would get published if I decided to invent a complete different style of writing so that's been something that's been quite fun that contact switching or sty switching in between the two in terms of what it's been like I feel like very selfishly it has helped me understand the science better because when you have to explain it to someone else who doesn't have a scientific background it forces you to to deeply get what you're talking about you cannot hide behind complicated words and pretend that you know what you're talking about you have to use metaphors sometimes and analogies and and you have to describe it in a way that is vivid enough that people will be able to picture it and apply it in their daily lives and you can't do this if you don't know what you're talking about so it's been a really good forcing mechanism to question my level of understanding of some of the topics that I write about because it's fascinating how easy it is to fold yourself into thinking that you understand something and there were topics where if you had asked me do you understand this I would have said yeah absolutely and then once I had to sit down and actually explain it in my own words I realized wait that's actually a bit fuzzy not quite sure I get it and I had to go back to research papers so selfishly I feel like it's really helped me think better about the topics I'm interested in and another benefit has been just again that feedback that I get from people where very often a lot of people the feed it's not even really feedback it's more additions expansions suggestions of other books I should read or podcasts I should listen to and really Avenues of of discovery that I would have not explored myself because I did not know they existed at all so this is also something very beneficial in terms of writing online creating content based on the topics you're interested in The personal content diet and the anti-library concept I was wondering about that like what are all of the different sources of input that you're taking into account for your writing because the foundationally I see it as you're translating things that we think we know are true from research but then you're bringing in Creator mindset to it making it applicable and giving people action items they can they can use from it so I'm I'm just interested in that like how do you divide your time between you know reading research and reading books and podcasts and like what does your content diet look like very messy I really admire other creators who have a very organized system there was a point in my life where you know we talked about those mimetic desires and other people's goals and I really wished at the time I was like this and I tried to copy some of those systems and use them for myself and it just doesn't work and I have to accept that I am a messy Creator this is a metaphor that I use in my writing but I'm less of an architect and more of a gardener when it comes to exploring and generating ideas so in terms of what it looks like I really just let myself fall into rabbit holes whenever there's one that I find I spend quite a bit of time on Twitter but I have created the people I follow in a way where my feed looks pretty good and most of the time if I open it I will see interesting Tweets in there so that has been really helpful just scrolling through my feed following people that I really admire intellectually and creatively speaking bookmarking things that I want to revisit later and then again writing actually is is really how I manage my content diet because since I'm always writing something whether it's a newsletter or a research paper or the book there's an automatic filter on the content that I consume I'll kind of always ask myself am I reading this for pleasure which is fine or am I reading this for work one of those different pieces of work and if something I'm stumbling upon is neither pleasurable to read nor useful for my work then I skip it and that's really the Only Rule that I have and this way I rarely feel like I've wasted my time because you know it doesn't have to always be utilitarian right sometimes you just read something because it's beautifully written or it makes you feel something and that's fine or it's useful to your work and and that's it so that's really the rule that I'm using yeah it's interesting to me to think about how the other ways that things end up in our feeds you know I I like save everything to matter is the app I've been using for saving reading stuff and every week before I write my newsletter I go through and I'm filtering for of these things that I've saved what might be useful to my audience and so then I use that filter to say all right what am I going to go read of the things I've saved and then of those which of them are actually useful to my audience in rank order basically and those become the top three that I share every week it's interesting to find the other things that just end up never getting read it's like they fall further and further down my matter list it's like why did they end up there did I think I was supposed to to read them is it because I'm like I want to be the kind of person who reads that kind of thing like what is that uh so I'm just fascinated by that how we filter our our reading and and things we consume it reminds me a little bit of the concept of the anti Library I don't know if you've ever heard about it yeah I I yes tell me more yes okay you're looking at all of your books around you same for me I have so many I I haven't read and I love this concept the idea that you collect books not to have a display of everything you know but as a reminder of everything you want to learn and it's the same with your bookmarks with matter it's just all of the things that you want to learn and it's not that you may never get to read everything you will never get around reading everything but that's fine because the fact that you're collecting so many ideas just shows how curious you are about the world even though you will never be able to go through all of them and it's the same with an entire library and with books and I really like your system I feel like it's very similar with books I buy way too many books I'm never going to be able to read them all but on a momentto moment basis I select the next one I'm going to read depending on what feels right what's useful what is something that I'm going to deeply connect with in this moment because it makes sense for the person I am today and the goals that I have at the moment and I think that's completely fine and some of them I may never read sometimes have friends visiting and there are books that I know I'm never going to read but they look at it and oh that looks cool I'm like take it just take it because I'm probably never going to get around this one yeah so I think keep on collecting bookmarks keep on collecting books that's completely fine yeah I had to really get over the idea that I should have read all the books on my shelves because I'm the same way I collect books I buy too many I can't possibly read them all and there's two things that helped me one was obviously it was like embracing it first that this just who I am I buy books I enjoy it but the two things that really helped me get over it were one pruning to go back to like your gardening idea I prune the books on my shelves in my anti- library I don't know probably once a year maybe once every six to nine months where sometimes I outgrow the intent for a book when I first bought it and it's like oh I don't need that one anymore I'll go put it in the little mini Library down the street and someone else can have it and it's such a moment of freedom because now I no longer feel obligated to that one it's like okay I outgrew it and it's gone and now I have all the rest of the ones left that are so interesting and so the second thing that has helped me embrace it is one of the most joyful moments to me is every time I finish a book and I close it and before I move on to whatever I'm going to do whether it's going to bed or moving on to the rest of my day I go and pick the next book in that moment of getting to look at my anti library and say what's next is the best it's the freaking best I love it and I'll read like the first two pages so that I just have a little head start to get into the next one and then I'll go do the next thing and that moment of joy is really help me embrace like and that's why I have all these unread books I love this so much I love this so much I sometimes I finish a book and then I get very busy with other stuff and I can spend like a couple of weeks without reading anything that is not completely like you know that is not a research paper or something that I'm I'm reading for work so I think I'm going to still that little technique that you have of just picking the next one and reading the first couple of pages one I'm going to also share with you and in case that's helpful for other people who like us enjoy reading it's a rule I've made for myself since I started the PHD I realized at the time that I was only reading non-fiction because I had gotten so obsessed with my work and because it was it is still very interesting and I love learning about the brain so I could only read non-fiction but now I make it a point to alternate so it's one non-fiction one fiction and if I'm very anxious to get to the next non-fiction book I can just slot in a quick like a short book of poetry or something that is not going to take me two weeks to read but I just make sure that I balance the two because in my experience you can learn a lot from fiction as well and and I think it's good to consume both types of books yes couldn't agree more I can't read non-fiction before bed or else my mind gets turning and so I always read fiction before bed so I kind of always have one of each going but one of the things I did on the fiction side was I went back and I downloaded all of my favorites I could remember from childhood uh so it was like the red wall series and Where the Red Fern Grows and Hatchet and just a bunch of these like their kids books basically and I started reading those in similar kind of moments if I'm feeling like I want to get on to the next one I'll read one of these shorter kids novels and it takes me back to a moment in time of childhood and and all of that that's been really fun and beautiful too we could talk about books all day however Envisioning the future and reflecting on personal growth we're running out of time and I have a couple of questions I usually close out with but before I get to those there was one thing that you shared when chatting with Johnny Miller about this Tik Tok filter that was available for a while where you could see a version of your younger self on the screen you talked about how emotional it was for some people to be a ble to see younger them and it makes total sense you know if anyone listening has done therapy you know like so much of that work is working with the younger version of yourself that's kind of Frozen in a moment in time so it makes sense that it would make people emotional what I wondered is from where you sit right now everything that you've done to this point all the growth you've experienced I wonder what you might say to your younger self that I know has gone through so much and you've shared so much of what you've been through earlier in life I wonder what you might say to that younger version of yourself that popped up on uh on the screen with the filter I would tell her you don't have to impress anyone nobody cares just do whatever you want to do yeah that's really awesome I would probably tell myself something similar and I don't think I would have been ready to receive it and so it would probably just sit there in the back of my brain for a while while I learned while I learned um okay here are my three closing questions you know people usually do rapid fire the these aren't always rapid fire but um I wonder often in interviews and I've been on a lot of podcasts mostly business stuff over the years there's like the question I wish they would have asked me and instead it was whatever it was and I wonder if there's a question you wish I would have asked in this conversation that maybe you'd like to answer now oh this is actually an excellent question to ask the guest what they want to be asked what am I hoping for in the near future or future in general I love it I'm to combine that with my last question because they are related so let me go to my second to last one first I named my coaching company and it's possible I'm working on a memoir right now it's possible this will be the name of it it is an unbearably beautiful future and it resonates with some people and it doesn't resonate with others but what it resonates with me based on is this idea that we could create a future for ourselves or for Humanity or anywhere in between that is so wonderful as to be almost imaginable right now it's like almost you don't want to touch it because it's so hopeful that it makes you that excited about it I wonder what the most beautiful ver version of the future could be for you and and how you hope to influence that for yourself and others I'm very very very much hoping that we get to a point where enough people have access to the same kind of tools I've had access to whether as you mentioned in your case it was IFS therapy and my case was psychedelics I find it incredibly painful to know that these tools exist and that so many people either don't know they exist or they know they exist but for legal or financial or cultural reasons they don't have access to them so to me this would be a beautiful feature one where everyone has access to these tools and one where at a personal level can keep on working with them as well yeah I'm with you on that more access to tools that help us process past pain is how I would frame that okay my last question is who are you becoming in this work that you're doing as a person as a professional a connector hopefully I think that's what I'm good at and not necessarily in a community building sense but just helping people connect the dots for themselves to achieve whatever their potential is to explore whatever their ideas are it's beautiful yeah connector helping people realize their potential so let's come back then to the question you want to be asked which is what's your vision and you've shared versions of this over time you know maybe the latest of which that I heard was that perhaps you might not stay in Academia but you might take the principles of Academia and create a place where people can come together and explore ideas and maybe do original research together it could be that building on that or something completely different how's your vision growing what's your vision for what you want to create it's changing all the time because there's always a tension between what I think should exist and how I want to design my own life at an individual level and so I'm very excited about this idea of creating a citizen lab where anyone could come and design their own experiments and learn about neuroscience and really getting all of that research out of just universities and having it in the world where anyone could access it and understand how it works because now that I've I'm almost done with my PhD I realized that there's nothing overly complicated about it it's really the impression that scientists give on the outside and maybe because there's not enough access to that education but anyone could learn to use these tools and I think that's something that should exist but on the other side after after being in London for so long and having in front of me this opportunity to become location independent again once I'm done with the PHD I have this yearning for being able to just have my little suitcase being able to live wherever I want and travel and meet people all around the world which is not necessarily compatible with having a brick and mortar lab that you're managing so again in that Lial space we talked about at the beginning not really knowing which path is the right one but I'm approaching this from a place of openness and I we'll see where the next month are taking me in terms of self-reflection that's awesome well I'll leave you with the slar I am so grateful for your work and I'm so grateful that you have put in all the work on your inner self to stay with it and become the kind of person who can share the things that you share it's been deeply impactful for me I enjoy it personally and I think it's very important I hope you keep going for a really long time so thank you for your work and thanks for joining me thank you so much thank [Music] you thanks for listening to another episode of good work this podcast is created by me your host Barrett Brooks and produced by my friends over at podcast Royale you can subscribe for all future episodes by going to Apple podcasts Spotify YouTube or wherever your favorite podcast app might be my guest today was Ann Laur lump you can find her excellent writing at Nest labs.com as well as consider joining her community there you can also follow along with her on Twitter Instagram or LinkedIn my favorite of all of those is Twitter but choose your favorite platform she's super fun to engage with and very approachable on all the topics she talks about you can also find all of the resources notes essays quotes clips and everything else you might want in the show notes at goodwork show.com if you enjoy today's episode there's two things I'd love you to do you can first of all share it with a friend podcast grow through word of mouth that's the fact of the matter so I'd love your help spreading the message if you enjoyed this interview share it with someone who will enjoy it too and secondly if you really enjoyed this interview and you're feeling generous I'd love it if you'd leave a review on either Apple podcast or Spotify reviews are part of the algorithm that help other people find it and so it really helps me as the show's Creator to reach more people when you go and leave a review next week's show you can look forward to an interview with Sophie perum Sophie's the co-founder founder of a site called climate Tech VC which is the preeminent publication about the climate tech industry climate Tech is an interesting one because we talk about it as one cohesive thing but I think about it more as a layer there is a entire technology layer that needs to get built where we're Reinventing many of the largest and most prominent Industries in the world to help reverse climate change Sophie's an expert in so many of the deep industry knowledge that's needed to help create that transformation lately she's taken that transformation all that knowledge about it and turned it into a new Venture Capital firm called planeter Capital we talk about her whole journey to working in climate Tech launching the fund what she's learned along the way I think you're going to love that so look forward to that next week for now thanks so much for tuning in this week hope you enjoyed it and we'll see you next 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