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RWH055: The Inner Scorecard w/ Pico Iyer
02:16:53
William Green welcomes back Pico Iyer to talk about his new book, “Aflame,” which explores how to find peace of mind, happiness, and clarity.
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- [00:01]
William Greene
You're listening to tip. Hi there. It's a great pleasure to be back with you again on the Richer, Wiser, Happier podcast. One of the great challenges for all of us these days, both in investing and life, is that we live in a time of extreme uncertainty. You see it in the world of politics and geopolitics and economics, and it's also shown up recently in the tremendous volatility of the financial markets, with the stock market getting whipsawed lately by warnings about the risk of impending trade wars and the danger that tariffs might somehow backfire and drive the economy into a recession. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of people have been affected by the devastating wildfires in California, which have fueled a mounting sense of uncertainty about the impact of climate change. It's also impossible to assess the profound implications of technological breakthroughs like the rise of artificial intelligence. None of us know how these changes are going to affect our lives. But I think all of us sense that we're barreling forward into an unknown and unknowable future, and that everything is speeding up. With all this in mind, one of the great questions that all of us face is simply, how can we find peace of mind and equanimity and happiness and clarity in the midst of this maelstrom of change and uncertainty? To put it another way, how can you and I set ourselves up to lead rich and happy lives when none of us can tell what the future holds? This is the overarching theme of today's episode of the podcast. Our guest is Piko Ayer, who's The author of 17 books, including a brilliant new book titled A Flame, which is subtitled Learning From Silence. Pico has been a guest on the podcast once before, back in 2023, and that conversation was one of my two or three favorite episodes of all time. Quite simply, Pico is one of the cleverest, best read, most thoughtful, and most eloquent people I've ever met, and he's become an increasingly important role model to me in recent years. One reason for that is that he's thought so deeply about how to construct a life that's really aligned with his own priorities and passions and personality. In many ways, he perfectly embodies Warren Buffett's insight that it's important to live by an inner scorecard. As I wrote in my book, Richer, Wiser, Happier, Buffett and Charlie Munger never really cared that much about how other people would judge them. Instead, they measured themselves by an inner scorecard. Buffett famously said that you can tell whether you live by an inner scorecard or an outer scorecard. By asking yourself, would I rather be the worst lover in the world and be known publicly as the best or the best lover in the world and be known publicly as the worst, Pico has constructed an extremely idiosyncratic life that gives him a tremendous amount of freedom to do what he values most, basically reading, writing, reporting all over the world in exotic places like Cuba and North Korea and Iran, regularly going on retreats to a monastery in California and spending time with extraordinary people like the Dalai Lama, who've been a friend of his for more than half a century. Biko lives in a really unusual way, as we'll discuss. He shares a tiny apartment in the suburbs of Kyoto and Nara in Japan with his wife, Hiroko, and he doesn't own a car or a cell phone. He's not optimizing for financial riches, but for a deeper kind of wealth that he gets from having the freedom to live exactly the way he wants to live, prioritizing what matters most to him. I find thinking about these issues really thought provoking. It just makes me think about how on earth I'm going to set up my own life so that it deeply reflects what I value most. In any case, I hope you enjoy our conversation. Thanks so much for joining us. You're listening to the Richer, Wiser, Happier podcast where your host, William Greene interviews the world's greatest investors and explores how to win in markets and life. Hi, folks. I'm absolutely delighted to welcome my friend Pico Ayer. Back to the Richer, Wiser, Happier podcast. Pico is a fabulous writer who's written something like 17 books, and his new book is titled Aflame. And I have to say it's my absolute favorite of all of his books. And I Recently Pre ordered 25 copies to give as gifts, which is a sign of how much I love it. So we're going to talk in some depth about this new book, but really what we're talking about here today is about how to build a richer, wiser and happier life that's truly abundant in the deepest sense. And what we're talking about, I would say, is trying to create a life that's calmer and more peaceful and more joyful within the maelstrom. And so it's a particularly timely subject now because I think, not that many of us feel that sense of peace and calm and many of us are yearning for it. So, Pico, welcome. It's really wonderful to see you.
- [05:30]
Pico Iyer
I am so happy to see you, William. I've been Looking forward to this for. Forever. And thank you for the kind words. It's funny, I mean, I see my book as almost the twin to your book. Richer, wiser, happier. So we have a lot to talk about.
- [05:42]
William Greene
Oh, well, I look forward to that. That's great to Discuss. Back in 2014, you gave this fabulous TED talk called the Art of Stillness that's been viewed something like 4 million times, and it was all about the benefits of taking time to sit still and go nowhere. And that same year, you published a short book titled the Art of Stillness. And your new book, Aflame, feels to me like a continuation and a deepening of that theme of finding peace and quiet within the messy commotion and maelstrom of life. And I was wondering if we could start just by talking about why this topic is so important for you personally that you seemingly can't let go of it, that it's consumed you now for at least a decade.
- [06:26]
Pico Iyer
I think for all the reasons you just mentioned, William, and I would say I would distill it to three fundamental reasons. The first is we can all sense that the world is furiously accelerating. Even in the 10 years since I spoke about the Art of Stillness, the world is getting faster and faster, and we all feel, as you were saying, we're living at the speed of light, not at the speed of life. And my suspicion is that humans were never designed to. To live at a pace determined by machines. And the only way we could do that is by becoming machines ourselves. And not even my friends in Silicon Valley want that. And I find, just as you were describing with the Maelstrom, I'm often in such a hurry, I can't see what a hurry I'm in. I'm driving from the bank to the supermarket to the grocery store, and there's no way I can really see what I love and what's important to me and catch the larger picture. And so I came to feel that any of us has to do something really dramatic and radical to cut this vicious cycle. And even when I first started going on retreats, it was February 1991, so I never heard of the Internet then, of course, there were no smartphones, there was no social media. The world was a lot calmer then. And still I felt I needed to liberate myself from the distractions of the world just to be able to hear myself thinking or not thick. I think the second reason, which is much more pronounced since the Art of Stillness book came out, is, again, I don't need to tell you, the world is much more divided than we've ever known it or than I've ever seen it. And I feel the divisions are largely because of our words and our ideas. I mean, you and I are friends and we have so much in common. But if we started talking, as maybe we will today, for a couple of hours, we soon find you believe this and I believe that, and you're affiliation is over here, and suddenly we're at odds. But if we share a moment of silence, I think we're brought together in something on the far side of our ideologies and assumptions. That actually is really what brings us together. Words push us apart. And silence has a capacity to bring us together. So in a divided world, I wanted to think about how we could look beyond our divisions. And then maybe the third thing, which again may have increased in the last 10 years, is I've never known so many of my friends despairing as right now. There are so many reasons not to have hope. And so it seemed to me, and I felt this very strongly with your book too, that the writer's obligation now is to try to shine a light on places of possibility or confidence. And whether it's the Dalai Lama who's lived the most difficult life of anyone I know and yet radiates this robust confidence and this infectious laugh, or whether it's these Benedictine monks I stay with who are permanently encircled by fire and never lose confidence or. Or hope. I thought the best thing I could do for me, but maybe also for the poor reader, was to think about people who offer us the notion that we can be stronger than our fears.
- [09:21]
William Greene
We'll unpack a lot of this as we go along over the next hour or two, hopefully. But I wanted to start really by discussing how you came to fall in love with this hermitage, which you described to your wife Hiroko, as the home of Kong. Because in a way, it's such an unlikely love affair that you've had with this great peaceful place. But that's a hermitage for a religion that you don't belong to, not that you belong to any religion. And you've gone on retreat there several times a year, basically for more than three decades. Can you tell us how this love affair began? How you came to visit the monastery way back in the early 1990s?
- [10:00]
Pico Iyer
I can, and perfectly. It was really the result of necessity and not a choice that I made. So one day I was in my family home in the hills of California, and I went upstairs and I saw that our house was encircled by 70 foot flames. It was the worst fire in Californian history at the time and had broken out just up the road from us. I was actually caught in the middle of the fire for three hours. And so by the end of that evening I'd lost not just my home, but every last thing I owned in the world. And I was sleeping on a friend's floor and was sleeping on that friend's floor for many months to come as slowly my mother and I began to reconstruct our lives. And at another point another friend who was a schoolteacher came in and he saw me there. He said, come on, you can do better than this. And he told me that every spring he took his students up to a retreat house three and a half hours to the north. And as he said it, even the most distractible phone addicted, fidgety 15 year old Californian boys only had to spend three days in silence. And something in them cooled down and cleared out to the point where he said many of them never wanted to return. And I thought, well, anything that works for a 15 year old boy is probably ideal for me. And maybe more to the point, if nothing else, I'd have a bed to sleep in and a large desk and a private walled garden over the Pacific Ocean showers, all the food I can eat, all just for $30 a night. And so I drove up to this retreat house and as you say it was, it's a Benedictine hermitage and I'm not a Christian. And more than that, like you, I went through a series of Anglican schools in England where they had chapel every morning and chapel every evening and the Lord's Prayer in Latin on Sundays and the Gospel According to Matthew in Greek in the daytime. I'd had a lot of the Christian tradition I didn't think I needed anymore. But as soon as I drove to the top of the hill where the retreat house sat and stepped outside my car, the silence was palpable. It was a presence. It wasn't just an absence of noise. It was almost like these transparent walls that had been created through years of prayer and meditation. And on the drive up, as always, I'd been conducting arguments with my editors. I'm fretting over my deadlines and worried about my tax return. My head was just a beehive of useless thoughts. As soon as I stepped into my little room, looked out over the ocean, all of that fell away. And I was just seeing the sun burning on the water and a rabbit that had alighted on the splintered fence in my garden and the bees buzzing around the lavender instant, kind of liberational and it continued as long as I stayed there. And to go back to what you said at the very outset, I quickly realized I had never felt calmer or clearer or happier. So I did indeed start going more and more often, staying for two weeks, staying for three weeks, and often staying with the monks in their enclosure or even in one of their cells if the retreat spaces were full. And I think one of the great things for me was to cure myself of my many dogmas and preconceptions. And one of the first things I found was that these Catholic monks were so deep in their tradition, they were much less dogmatic than I or most of my friends are. I mean, to the point of opening their doors and opening their hearts to somebody who's not in their tradition. And I'd say the majority of people staying there are probably women. And I think maybe up to 50% of them are not pissed Christian at all. But nonetheless, the monks make no demands on anyone. They just offer hospitality. And I think they have the wisdom to see whoever you are and whatever your background, you will find in silence something that will sustain you. And if nothing else, you'll find T.S. eliot called the life we have lost in living. Maybe you'll find some deeper truth or self or non self that you lost along the way. And I love the fact that they refer to this process as recollection. So it's not some great discovery or revelation, but it's more remembering something that some level we knew or sensed. But in the rush and the maelstrom that you were describing, we lose sight of and it's something non denominational. And that's why I stress silence, because silence doesn't belong to any one tradition. It's a universal. And I think all of us, in the chaos and clamor that you were describing, as we're racing through our lives, not knowing how to juggle 16 things in 13 hours or 13 minutes, sense that we're longing for liberation, but we don't know how to get there. I mean, I think 80 years ago Simone Veil wonderfully said, the problem is not that there's no bread available, the problem is we can't acknowledge that we're starving.
- [14:45]
William Greene
Let's talk in more depth about silence because the book is subtitled Learning From Silence. You talk a lot about how silence provides renewal and you actually use a lot the word cleansing. You talk about silence as a kind of purifying thing. You write at one point that the lay residents there seem washed clean by the silence. They've chosen to live close to can you talk about that sense of what's being cleansed, what's being purified?
- [15:18]
Pico Iyer
The agitation of the mind? I would say the clutter in the head. And as soon as that clutter is taken care of, the clutter in the world gets much easier to make sense of. I felt that. That the main thing I was being liberated from as I stepped into that silence was Pika little Pica and his tiny plans and his constant worries and his to do lists and his fretting, which never really does me much good whatsoever. Just not long ago came upon this wonderful line from Thomas Merton, you know, the great Trappist monk, who said, when your mind is silent, the forest suddenly becomes magnificently real. And I think that's the best answer to your question. In other words, as soon as you step into this living, active silence, your thoughts fall away and you're surrounded by the world, and in this case, the radiance of the Big Sur coastline and the ocean in the distance and the cliffs all around and the dry hills behind. And that's infinitely more interesting than my thoughts about any of it. I always feel that our thoughts about reality are the least useful and significant part of our lives. So I think just being freed from all of that was such a blessing. And I think the more one lives by words, and you and I both do, that perhaps the more one needs to be emancipated from them. And again, as you know, in the book, I stress monks from many different traditions, and nuns, too, to show that this is not particular just to this very contemplative order of commodities, Benedictines. And the example that quickly comes to my mind is Leonard Cohen. And when I first went to spend time with him when he was living for five and a half years as a Zen monk in a high, cold, dark mountains behind Los Angeles, I quickly thought, this is the most articulate writer I've ever met. Like you, I spent time with many, many writers, and quite a few are spellbinding. He was in a different dimension. I mean, he was a wizard with words, and that's why he was such a beautiful poet and songwriter. And yet, when I would start visiting him in his little house in a very unfashionable part of Los Angeles, I remember the first time we had lunch together, and he spoke exquisitely about everything in the world. And then at the end of the lunch, he took two folding chairs and he brought them out to his tiny front lawn in front of a bed of flowers, and he sat down on one, and he invited me to sit down on the other. And I sat down. Nothing. I waited, waited, waited, nothing. And finally I thought, well, this is a gentle hint. And I said, you must be busy. I should leave you. And he looked up at me, beseeching me, please don't go. And I realized that he. Maybe partly because he was a monk. Was wise enough to see that really silence was the most intimate and beautiful thing he could share with somebody. And I gather many people who visited his home. Ended up just sitting next to him in silence. And he knew that that would admit them to a deeper place. Than any of the chatter that otherwise we specialize in. And, of course, the name that his wise Zen teacher gave to him in the monastery. Was Jikhan. Which translates to the silence between two thoughts. And so to think of the most articulate, eloquent person I know. Being able to see that silence is infinitely more valuable. Was itself an instruction and a humbling for me. And I think. I'm sorry for such a long answer. But as I say that, I'm also realizing you, too. Everyone listening to this has a social self for the silent self. And we need the social self to take care of our jobs. And to go to the post office and to be cordial to our friends. But I think we all sense there's something deeper and behind that. That is, to some degree, the core of us. And that's really our ultimate treasure chest. And I think when I went to the hermitage. Or into that silence, really, to answer your question. The social self became immaterial. And the silent self came to the fore. And then I could really remember what I love. And therefore what I should be doing with my next three months.
- [19:17]
William Greene
I'm so fascinated by the. The material in the book about Leonard Cohen. Who we've talked about before. And, I mean, I'm a huge admirer of Leonard Cohen. I found as I was preparing for this over the last few days. I was listening to Leonard Cohen in preparation. While I was working on my questions. And one of the things that struck me. I think you've written the liner notes for several, maybe four of his albums, something like that. And one of the things you talked about was how he was torn between these two worlds. That, on the one hand, he had this sense of this willingness to be in solitude and service as a monk. And then he also felt this kind of pull towards this other world. That he called Boogie Street. Which was sort of the less exalted world of being a rock star And a heartthrob in the heart of Los Angeles. And it seems to me, that in a way that you might not be an international heartthrob. In quite the same way as Leonard Cohen, you sort of feel the same tug between the monk's life and the traveler's life. Right. And I was wondering how you think about that. This sort of. This desire to kind of step back from the world and have more peace and at the same time, this constant draw towards what you describe as the profane and the earthly and the worldly that Leonard Cohen came back to in the end.
- [20:38]
Pico Iyer
Yes. So I think when Leonard Caron began singing, especially his first record, and when I began writing, we did feel that terrible tug. Something in us told us that the world we saw wasn't the whole of the picture. There must be more, there must be something deeper. And something in us also knew that we had to operate in the world. And I think neither of us could at a young age solve that conundrum. And I think probably in both cases, if I can be presumptuous, it was spending time in silence or in a monastic environment that resolved that tug by showing that the silence is only a means to having more things to bring back to Bookie Street. And in fact, in the record 10 new songs in which he writes again and again about Bookie street, he has this wonderful line, there are some gifts you can't return. And I take that to mean he had the gift of eloquence and worldliness and urbanity and being able to speak beautifully to the world. And as much as he might want to live forever up in the quiet of his monastery, his obligation to his gift and to his community was to come back into the world and share what he'd got in the monastery with the rest of us. And I think again, one of the big surprises for me when I began spending time in silence is, as you know, I'm an only child. I've chosen to be a writer. So I spend most of my day alone. I love being alone. And so to be alone above the beautiful coastline in Big Sur with not a responsibility in the world is pure heaven. But after I began staying there, I realized spending time alone there was just the gateway to actually having much more to give back to the world. It was an investment in that sense to being able better to serve Boogie street and to have something to offer in Boogie Street. And at the simplest level in my day to day life, if my wife says, pico, I've really got a problem, I'll say, oh, let's talk about it later. I'm really sorry. Got to talk to William at the moment, you know, this editor's bothering me, and I have a deadline, so I'm really sorry if I go for two days on retreat. I take a deep breath, and I remember what's really important in my life. And I come back, and my wife opens the door, and she sees this person who's so much calmer and fresher and more joyful than one who left. She realizes, I thank heavens Pico actually went and spent two days in silence. Because now he can actually give me something. He's a companion now. He remembers what community and compassion is a bit more than if he's just sequestered at his desk all the time. And so I think the two are very much insoluble. And that's what I had to learn by being there. That it was while being alone in that room. I learned that in some sense, I'm never alone. And that the aloneness has to be a gateway to something much more useful. And as you said, the Art of Stillness, which is actually a book that Ted requested because Ted, which has its finger on the global path, realized that that was what people were longing for at some level, Even back in 2014, that was just about the importance of taking a break. And I see this book as much more about what you do with that break and how you bring it back into our busy lives. Because I'm not a monk any more than you are. I can't spend the rest of my life on retreat, just reading and looking out over the Pacific Ocean. So how am I going to be able to make myself more helpful in the world, to myself and to anyone around me?
- [23:59]
William Greene
There is a curious point in the book where Hiroko and you are having a conversation. You say to her, what's the devil in me, the demon in me, the bad part in me? And she says, you need to be alone. And then you say, no, no, I don't mean the good part of me. I mean the demon in me. And she says, yeah, you need to be alone. Can you talk about that? Because I wonder if what she was talking about was the danger of kind of running away from intimacy, using. I think a lot of people fantasize about having a quiet, peaceful, solitary life so that they can get away from their obligations and the complexities of life. And. Yeah, I just wondered if you could unpack that for us, William.
- [24:41]
Pico Iyer
I knew you were going to alight on that sentence, which is really one of the essential ones in the book, and for exactly the right reason, because I'm A perfect example of what you were describing. Yes, I probably am one of those people because I love being by myself. And it's a great way of keeping the complexities and challenges of the world at the distance. And I think Hiroko has always sensed that. And as you remember in the book, there's a sort of pivotal moment. Soon after I began staying in this hermitage. One day I drove down to the payphone at the bottom of the hill to call my then girlfriend across the seas in Japan, Hiroko. And it was an April day and the slopes all around me were flooded with golden poppies and lupins. And there was a blue green waters of the Pacific at my feet. It's just, you know, Arcadia. And she could hear in my voice how happy I was. And finally she said, you know, if you found another woman, no problem, it could be more excellent than she is. But how can I ever compete against the temple? And this so shook me up that a few months later I flew across the world and basically made a commitment for life to her and to live in this tiny two room rented apartment where now I'm sitting where We've lived for 32 years. And I suppose it was my way of acknowledging that even though I couldn't make the kind of commitment the monks have made, they taught me the importance of commitment. And they taught me the importance of not being alone. And that was a benefit of going to this place of great isolation and great joy, it must be said. So I'll never be able to get rid of that sense that I'm often happiest when I'm by myself. But I can also at least see through it and see that it's not always the most constructive thing in the world. And I'm sure this is true of you and your family and most people. But it was very interesting because when Hiroko and I began to spend time together and live in this little flat, I, as an only child, I'd always had my own room. And here I am suddenly sleeping next to the tv with two pre adolescent kids running around in a foreign country where I can't speak the language. Wasn't the most solitary environment ever. But conversely, there's poor Hiroko, who's a very warm hearted and garious soul, suddenly next to a guy whose joy is sitting at his desk by himself all day. So each of us really had to move in the opposite direction. And I, as a solitary person, had to learn that really my life took place with other people. And she, as somebody who was always very at home with other people, had to learn that it was important for her sometimes to gather her resources by being away, being by herself. And now the beauty of it is all these 30 years later, she comes to the hermitage with me. She's on retreat in a separate room from me. And the monks are always much happier to see than they are to see me. But it's an example of how in the course of a long life, one learns to see past one's preferences and try to move exactly into the things that are difficult. I think in your book you have this wonderful line about how the Kabbalah is the path of most resistance. And I think the path of most resistance is often the one that's most constructive for any of us to take. So for me, it was an easy thing, a no brainer, to go to a place where I could sit by myself in a cell. That the important challenge that followed was that cell told me, come into a cluttered little two room apartment with three other people and spend your whole life there.
- [28:12]
William Greene
We talked last time I interviewed you on the podcast about the apartment and the very idiosyncratic life that you've set up there in the suburbs of Kyoto and Nara, right, in Japan, where you're talking to me now. And it's interesting because there is a parallel between your life there, which is very simple, not very extravagant. You know, I mean, it's a very. You've intentionally set yourselves up in this very modest, unpretentious way. And when you go to the hermitage, you describe the rooms you stay in, which are literally called cells, I guess, after the Latin word for these small spaces or storerooms. And you talk about how they have a single bed and a rocking chair and a dresser. So basically these bare, uncluttered rooms. And you say at one point in the book, luxury is defined by all you don't have to long for. And it's such an important idea. And I wonder if you could talk us through this idea of not having so much and why that might actually peculiarly be a form of richness.
- [29:23]
Pico Iyer
Yes. I hate to say this, William, but I do feel that's the theme every one of the investors in your book is stressing. I think Warren Buffett actually says richness means having enough. But what I sensed with, I think it's nine different investors that you highlight is of course, that the richness is just the means to the wisdom and to the happiness. And the richness doesn't mean the endless accumulation. As I think Buffett says, to have six houses instead of one is only going to be six times as many headaches for him. And that's the important thing, is contentment. And all the people that you cite in the book draw upon many of the people that I describe in my book. So whether it's the Stoics or Henry David Thoreau or all the wise people through history have said that the Buddha, too, that luxury is about being free of craving. You've got enough, I don't need anymore. And in most cases, we reach that stage pretty quickly. And it's then we start to think, well, what's really going to make me feel rich within? What's going to. And that's when we start thinking about happiness and seeing that money can't bring us our happiness, but it can make a secure foundation on which we have the chance to try to craft a life that will bring us to the state of contentment. So I know you write a lot about the art of subtraction, and you're right that that's what I'm practicing, like most of the people you describe in your book. So not having a cell phone means I can give myself entirely to you in this conversation. Nothing's vibrating. I'm not worried that there can be 11 messages waiting for me when I'm concluded. Not having a car means a hundred things I don't have to worry about today and for the next three months. And I don't think any of this is particular to me. You know, it's longing again. It's our. As all the Stoics reminded us, it's not our circumstances that usually get us in trouble. It's what our mind makes of our circumstances, or it's longing to have something that we don't have. And I still have longings, but I'm aware that they're the least productive aspect of my life, and they're the part that make me least happy. And it's the places where I see, oh, yeah, I've got exactly what I needed that make me most happy. And so I think when I was working at Time magazine, this was before you joined it. But I remember way back in 1986, I had lunch in midtown Manhattan with a friend, and I was leading the life of my dreams at Time magazine. And I said, my dream is to be living a quiet life in Japan and able to live off my writing. And it took me a while to get there, but I got there. So now why should I be dissatisfied?
- [32:04]
William Greene
I think one of the things that's had such a big impact on me from being friends with you, has been seeing how, in a way, it's the extremeness with which you live in alignment with those desires. I think I often feel misaligned. I feel like I have a sense of how I want to live and I'm sort of directionally heading there, but there's still a great sense of misalignment. Whereas maybe it's because you're a little bit older, a little bit wiser, a little bit smarter, but I feel like. Or maybe a little bit more stubborn, I don't know. But you, I think you've closed that gap much more. You're much more defiantly true to your version of what being happy and fulfilled actually is.
- [32:53]
Pico Iyer
Oh, well, thank you. That's a very, very generous thing to say. And all I can say is I did figure out, probably in my late 20s, what will really make me happy. And I think, again, like you, I had the advantage of this perfect job, the job I would have dreamed of as a boy, which endlessly stimulating, very comfortable, never boring. But I thought, I'm one of those people who craves time more than money and craves freedom more than security. And the virtue of having a good job, as you know, is that one can leave it because you're confident that if worse comes to worse, you can always go back and pick up that good job. So that's why I left Time magazine when I was 29, to go and live in a simple single room on the back streets of Kyoto. And actually, at 29, I was much too immature to be able to realize that intimation that I had. But the intimation was the correct one that finally, years later, I could grow into. So I think everybody listening to this conversation knows that the challenge in life is working out exactly what your priorities are and values, given that they're probably not the same always as societies. And so you're right. I like the way, in fact, you used the word stubborn because I'm fairly generous with money and I don't notice how much I get, but I'm incredibly parsimonious when it comes to time, and I won't give any of it, even to my closest friends in the world. And when it comes to freedom and security, too, it wasn't hard for me to leave a settled job, but if you asked me, leave your freedom behind, I wouldn't be able to do that. Monks are devoted to obedience, poverty and chastity. And I think Even in my 20s, I thought I could manage poverty quite well. I don't mind living simply. And chastity I didn't think was impossible, but I thought obedience I'll never manage. And I know now I never will. Stubborn is exactly the right word. So my job then was to construct a life based around the things I'd never be able to do and that I'm really bad at, and also based around the things that I had a longing for that I sensed that would make me most fulfilled. And I think, you know, one of the most important things I learned from the monks was just this notion that joy is the happiness that doesn't depend on circumstance. In other words, joy, which I think Dalai Lama and his friend Archbishop Jisman Tutu and most of the Benedictine monks I know in Big Sur radiate is there regardless of their circumstances, which are often very, very difficult. And I remember when I was at Time magazine I was really happy, but I couldn't tell how deep that happiness was lay. And I felt this is a kind of exhilaration, but there may be something beyond that that's a kind of joy that has nothing to do with whether I'm having an exciting time in life or not. And that's what I need to explore because otherwise I'll get so hypnotized by this life that excites me. I wake up that and find I'm 70 years old and I've never explored any other option. And I'd always loved Henry David Thoreau and always remembered his saying he didn't want to die feeling he'd never lived. And I thought, well, in my 20s it's a good chance to explore other ways of living. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors.
- [36:05]
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- [39:23]
William Greene
There's an extraordinary quote in the book that it really leaped out at me where you quote Thoreau, who also was a famous hermit and felt the call to solitude and he said, and this is an exact quote. I typed it out because I wanted to remember it he said, here was a man with the courage to. Sorry, this is you talking about him. You said, here was a man with the courage to step aside a little from regular society and live at an angle to the norm. The rare soul ready to shape his days in accordance with an inner account book and not the external spreadsheet that convention tends to encourage. And what struck me is the similarity, actually, with the language that Warren Buffett uses where he talks about living by an inner scorecard. And it seems to me, in a way, it highlights this idea that it's really about having the courage to question convention and to say, what does a rich and abundant life look like to me and what is it that I'm optimizing for? And for Warren and Charlie, it was different between them. I mean, Warren talked about this at the last Berkshire annual meeting, where he said he just liked to sit around and solve problems. Problems in the sense of figuring out, should I invest in this business, what's going to happen in the future with this company, this industry? And Charlie was much broader than he was and really just wanted to learn and study and share ideas and talk to people about ideas. And so they both structured their lives in a way that made them happy. And when I look at your story as well, I mean, there's a wonderful thing in the book where you write, the freedom to think, to wander, and to lose myself in what's around me is the greatest of treasures. And so I think you figured out that for you, you had to optimize for something very different than other people.
- [41:18]
Pico Iyer
Now, I'm so glad you say all of that. You literally took the words out of my mouth, William, because I was about to cite the inner scorecard. And honestly, every one of the people you feature in your book is essentially stepping away from the norm. You use this word, I think, non tribal, outsider. Every one of them, you will point out, they're not listening to Bloomberg, they're spending their days reading books, they're clearing out their schedule. I mean, in many ways, they reminded of my monks for many reasons, because, A, they're looking at the long term and they're looking at the larger picture. B, they're not listening to the chatter of the world. So they can hear something unusual and counterintuitive, and that's how they make original perceptions, and they have patience and they're not getting caught up in the sense of constantly moving. I think you say something in somewhere in your book. All the people I admire tend to err in the direction of heroic inactivity or something, which is a transcript of Thoreau and Exactly so that they have a sense of how to listen to their own voice and not the clamor of many less useful voices around. I remember years ago I was reading an interview with Philippe Stark, the very original French designer, and he was asked, how do you keep on coming up with new, fresh ideas all the time? He said, very, very easy. Every summer for three months, I go to my house in the countryside and I just spend my time quietly there. And I'm not going to dinner parties, I'm not reading the newspaper, I'm not talking to all the people I would usually meet in Paris. I'm just going around a quiet country life. And so by definition, everything I come out with at the end of the three months is going to be different outside the envelope entirely, other than what everybody is talking about in the 6th arrondissement. And I think all the people, the investors that you highlight are successes because they're thinking outside the norm and outside the box and in different ways from others. And I think that's always been my notion of writers. I remember when I wanted to be a writer, I looked at some of the prominent writers at the time, whether it was Thomas Pynchon or Cormac McCarthy or Annie Dillard. I thought, what do they have in common? We never see them on TV talk shows. They're living in the middle of nowhere. They're not at every Manhattan dinner party. That's why everything that comes out from them is radical and startling. And I love the fact you mentioned Thoreau again, because he's the answer to that question about Boogie Street. And as you said, people often think of him as a hermit and as somebody who loved solitude and forget that he writes in Walden. I am naturally no hermit. I love society as much as anybody. He had friends visiting him in Walden Pond on Saturdays and on Sundays he'd go back to his mother's house for dinner. And the very first talk he gave to the Concord Lyceum wasn't on solitude, it was on society. And he was known as a sort of man around town in Concord who would hold melon parties every year and look after Emerson's family when emerson was taking 10 month tours and would fix people's plumbing and the rest of it. And so again, his going to Alton Pond for two years and two months and two days was an investment so that he would have more to bring back when he started living in the center of Concord once more. And he chose to build his cabin right next to the railroad along which a railway was going to be charging noisily 20 times a day. So he wasn't really seeking seclusion, but just the chance to sit in a margin long enough to be able to remember what was important to him and then have gathered the resources he could bring back into the world and into Boogie Street. So I think his time at Walden Pond, like Leonard Cohen's time in the monastery, was as much as anything, the means to the ends of becoming a more useful member of society.
- [45:08]
William Greene
I think somehow it all revolves around this idea of defining how you're going to operate in the world in a way that suits you, that suits your temperament and your skills and your priorities. You and I were emailing yesterday about Nick Sleep, one of the famous investors in my book, who said that he and his partner, Case Zakaria Zach would refer to themselves often as hermits and monks. And they were sort of ornery enough and independent spirited enough that they were able to say, yeah, well, we're not going to live in, we're not going to work in Mayfair in London with the rest of the hedge fund guys. We're going to live above a Chinese herb store on the King's Road and in this beautiful light filled office that had their matching beekeeper suits on the wall. And Zach didn't even have a desk, I mean, literally had no desk. He just had a sort of easy chair, a sort of lazy boy chair. And so, yeah, there's something so amazing, I think, about that ability to live and work in a way that's true to you. And I think at a certain point when I was working on my book, I realized that I'd unconsciously selected all of these people who were ornery enough and independent spirited enough to live their way. Because I think I had such a deep yearning to do it myself. And so in some way they had kind of cracked the code of how to live in a way that was true to themselves and in a way that, I mean, Munger talked about how the money really wasn't about the fancy possessions, it was about independence. And so I think this gets at something so important, this whole idea of optimizing for freedom and independence, if that's what you happen to like. I think there are plenty of people who like to be part of an organization. I think you and I just happen to be these slightly off kilter humans who just disobedient and slightly subversive and just so independent spirited.
- [47:10]
Pico Iyer
Yes, and exactly. I think your book is essentially your prescription for how you, William, want to live, which is Why? I think if lots of other people were to write about Warren Buffett and Nick Sleep and Howard Marks and the others, they would highlight other aspects of them. But over and over, in all the people that do spotlight, I sense a stress of very much those same qualities which are clearly, as you say, the qualities you long for. I mean, I think of Sir John Templeton living in the Bahamas, isn't that right? But so the Wall Street Journal is finding him six days late. And that speaks for the fact that all of them are not read the Wall Street Journal so as to come up with something different. And also, of course, he was stressing spiritual wealth was really what he was about. And you point out how you couldn't appreciate that when first you met him, but now you see that the money he accumulated again was really a means to some bigger end. It struck me that so many of the people you focus on are in some ways moral idealists. Their concern isn't with getting rich and it is, it's with spreading the wisdom and with spreading the happiness to some extent. Some are certain of them are Christians. Many of them drive beat up pss or Toyotas instead of Teslas. And you can always sense that they're in the service of something beyond themselves. And that's what you choose to highlight. So that's clearly what is most important to you. And you're right. I probably when I'm describing people in my book, I'm sort of recreating them in the light of my own prejudices or my preferences and making them a reflection of what I want to aspire to. I think the other important practical element in all this that doesn't apply so much to investors, but does in this book is my question is what do I have to bring to the icu? In other words, whoever you are, life is going to throw many, many challenges our way. And suddenly you're going to get a call in the middle of night, somebody you love is in the hospital or you are in the hospital. What do you have to bring to that situation? When your bank account isn't really going to be much help and your resume is going to be immaterial and the books you've written or the books you've read are going to be beside the point. What do you have to bring to that? Because you're going to have to face that life is going to make a house call many times over. And so that too is one reason why I stress this sort of notion of an inner investment, inner savings account. And the only thing when Suddenly the phone began to rattle in this little apartment and I heard that my mother across the world had had a major stroke, and I, as her only child, had to be with her. Only thing I could bring to that situation, whatever resources I'd gathered within. And I felt that most of them had come not from when I was driving along the freeway or bustling through Times Square talking to a hundred friends, but from those times when I was quiet and could access something deeper that was really probably the core of me.
- [50:05]
William Greene
It's interesting how much compassion seems to come out of those experiences of being in a monastery. And I guess some of it is probably just seeing the monks and how they embody it. But there's a lovely scene where I think you see a wasp that's been annoying you, and then you see the next day that it's dying, and you kind of take it out on a tray into the sunshine so it can at least be in the sun in its last few hours. And I was really struck by that. Maybe this is a sort of Buddhist notion that once you strip away all of the stress and the anger and the stuff that we have on the surface that brings out the worst in us, that underneath there's a kind of goodness to us. Do you have thoughts on that?
- [50:51]
Pico Iyer
I love that, yes. I mean, Meister Eckhart in the Christian tradition said that the process of growing up is not addition but subtraction. So in a way, stripping away all the clutter and the excess and the obscuration to find what is there deep down. I think the Buddhists also talk about cleaning windows. In other words, at some level, all of us are a transparent pain, but it gets clouded over and full of dirt and mud here and there. Our job is to take all of that away, and then we are transparent to the world. So I very much believe that. And I think, certainly my Christian friends, I believe that might the monks that I spend time with. And of course, I've got to say, which I stress in the book, that after that evening of feeling compassionate towards the wasp, two days later, when I'm back in the middle of rush hour traffic down on the highway, I'm as frazzled and distracted and unkind as I would have been before, probably I know the way. There's not an instant cure, and it hasn't transformed me into some kind being. But as I'm in the middle of the rush hour traffic shouting at the next driver, at least I have the memory and even the prospect of, oh, there is a slightly better me somewhere in the world, that if I am so moved, I can recover. I don't have to be always this fretful, agitated character again. It's a recollection of the better self we can be, if only we can cleanse ourselves of the rest of it.
- [52:17]
William Greene
Talk to us more about the monks, because they're very extraordinary. And you talk about how, in some ways, monastic life is a training for death, but it's also a training for life. Can you talk about what their lives are like and what you actually learn from watching them that you can take out into the world and replicate?
- [52:43]
Pico Iyer
Yes. I remember soon after I first began to stay at the monastery and it seemed the equivalent to heaven for me. I was there in my little trailer, and suddenly one of those terrible winter storms broke out. All night, the rain just beat on my roof and the wind shook the very flimsy foundations of this wooden building. And I looked out through the mist and I couldn't see a single light or sign of human habitation. And I knew just to get a carton of milk from the kitchen, I'd have to walk through this torrential storm. It was terrifying. Really, really lonely. It felt like, you know, 40 days and nights in the wilderness, nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. I'm alone in the middle of nowhere, essentially. And of course, the next day the sun rose, and suddenly that. That was all just a distant memory. But it really reminded me of the courage of the monks who were living day in, day out in little cells, sometimes surrounded by nothing but their doubts, their fears and their frustrations. And when I go there on retreat, I'm in this idyllic place of absolute silence, when all I have to do is take walks and look at the stars and read books and look out over the ocean. But whenever I go and stay on the other side of the enclosure with the monks, it's the opposite. No ocean views. They're constantly in movement, as you were saying earlier, serving all of the guests and looking after one another and wheeling, taking things to the laundry and settling accounts and making sure there's food for dinner tomorrow. It's an incredibly difficult life, and they're there 24 hours a day for the rest of their lives, often living with people that in other circumstances, they never might have chosen to live with, but having made this huge commitment to serve them, which is even harder than a marriage, where at least you're choosing somebody that you know, that you feel, that you love. And so I really admire their courage and I really admire their confidence. And as you know, one of the recurrent themes in the book is that over and over, because they're living in this remote wilderness, an hour from the nearest post office, they're encircled by fire. And suddenly flames will surge over the ridge and nearly all of the monks have to take flight and evacuate. And at one point, I remember quite recently, there was another one of these fires, and three monks stayed behind to help the firefighters to try to protect their home. And the rest went off to a safer place. And every day the prior would send updates out to concerned friends such as myself. And I remember one day he wrote, and he said, smoke everywhere. There were flames coming over the ridge maybe 200 yards behind us. But don't worry, we're maintaining our offices and we're continuing with vigils and vespers and matins in the chapter room. Blessed day, all. Blessed day all, he wrote on the day when it looked like he might well lose his life and even more likely lose his home. That degree of confidence is heroic to me and extraordinary. And when I see that, I think if I could have a fraction of that, I'd be so much better off in my life. And in his case, of course, it comes from faith, but comes from something more than that. Or faith is a. Is a means to developing other resources that probably are available to all of us again, seven of the last eight years, the monastery I describe has been completely cut off from the rest of the world. Three times by winter storms, twice by fires, and twice by Covid. And most of the monks there, there are 15 or so left and mostly in their 80s, quite often falling ill. They have to be helicoptered out. And then the prior, who is literally their mother as well as their father, has to drive two and a half hours each way through the dark to be at the bedside, through a back road of his fallen brother every night, five hours through the dark, just to keep vigil with another monk who might be dying, and to see that kind of devotion and obedience. And even you mentioned before, you and I are probably not always very good at joining groups, and maybe we're not very good at making leaps of faith or to certain beliefs. But I can certainly believe in the heroism and the selflessness of that kind of act, and see, that's something that all of us would benefit from. So it's been a huge privilege to really spend. Grow so close to these monks over 33 years and spending more than 100 retreats with them. I've grown old with them and I've come to know them very, very well. And one of the touching things is that when I finished the book, I sent the manuscript off to two of the monks because I didn't want to presume they've made it a vow, really, of anonymity, and they live lives of deep privacy, and I didn't want to disclose things I shouldn't have or distort this very complicated and subtle discipline they've given themselves to. And in particular, I sent it to one of the monks who, as you read, confesses a lot of his fears and frustrations. He doesn't feel happy in this order, and it's a relentless order and there's no escape. And I said, well, please, if there's anything you'd like me to take out, I defer and I will do so instantly. And he wrote back instantly. And he said, no, please. The main gift we have to offer is our brokenness and our imperfection, our humanity. We're not above the clouds. We're just struggling through our own frustrations and doubts like everybody else. And that's the thing that we have to share with other people. And I was so touched that he wanted me to present him as somebody who half the time didn't know where he was going and wasn't sure if he was in the right place and not as somebody who put all questions behind him.
- [58:19]
William Greene
Yeah, I thought it was very interesting that you said that. One of the things. Well, I think you wrote, the dark places don't go away when you step into silence. If anything, they rise to the surface, but you can see them clearly as you never could when barreling along the freeway. And I think it's a bit similar to meditation, where when I do my hapless attempts at meditation, which I do most days, but not every day, really, what you see much more clearly is just the madness of your own mind and how it just never stops whirring and you see your own anxiety and stuff, and it's quite unsettling because you become more aware of the maelstrom under the sort of surface of the ocean. I was very struck by that you said that. I think it was one of the monks, maybe the one you just talked about was saying that you meet the shadow, as Jung would say. You see all the issues of your sexuality and you're alone with your thoughts and your longings.
- [59:20]
Pico Iyer
Yes, I'd say it's 100% the same as meditation, from what I understand. And I think if, as you do, you maintain a more or less daily meditation practice, there's probably much less need to go off and spend Three days on retreat, the way I do. I don't have a meditation practice, and that's why this is my equivalent. But it does come to the same thing. And silence is rightly terrifying to many people because they feel if I'm alone in my cell, that's exactly when the traumas will arise and the terrible memories. And there's no way I can distract myself with TV or music or any of the usual ways that I run away from the things that bother me. And that is a problem. And it does make it an unsparing kind of discipline, as with meditation. But I always feel since those shadows are not going to go away, and since I do have to face them at some level, I'd much rather do so in a place of relative quiet and safety like that when I'm trying to navigate the freeway or when I'm in JFK Airport running between flights or doing the things I do so often in the rest of my life that actually that's an open meadow in which I can see them much better than I could when I'm half distracted.
- [60:30]
William Greene
I feel like part of my frustration with myself is that maybe I'm more conscious, since I've been meditating, of the ways in which I'm sort of numbing myself or narcotizing myself. And I can see even that when I walk between my desk and the refrigerator or the loo or whatever it is, I feel like I should be playing a podcast or something. And I feel increasingly like, because of the seductiveness of technology and the fact that my phone has everything I could possibly want on it, it's actually very, very hard, increasingly, to be alone with myself and alone with my thoughts. And so I feel like, in some ways, your talks in the last few years and your books are kind of a reminder of how hard it's become in this society actually, to be conscious and awake and aware of what's going on beneath the surface. Because it's so easy to distract ourselves all of the time.
- [61:28]
Pico Iyer
Yes. And it's only I find by doing nothing that I'm really able to do anything in some ways. And again, it strikes me when I think of the people you profile in your book. They're not constantly on the phone. You again and again stress that they're keeping their schedules entirely empty. Buffett, at late age, is reading for five or six hours a day, and others of them are spending their time. Marcus Aurelius and Seneca. In other words, each one of them is spending a lot of time essentially alone. I think you say in reading and contemplation.
- [62:02]
William Greene
But I use the phrase intentional disconnection, and I think that's what they're doing. I think someone like Tom Gaynor very consciously would say. I remember him saying to me when I was in his office in Virginia when he was running the Markel Corporation with 20,000 employees. And he said, how many times have you heard my phone go today? And it was like once, twice in an entire day maybe. And so he just constructed this life that was so quiet and peaceful. And so I think part of it is this realization that we have that to do any kind of deep work, we're going to have to disconnect. But at the same time, it's like the difficulty that I have of knowing I should eat less and get on my peloton that's next to my washing machine and dryer so that I can do what I call the tour de laundry room. And it's just so hard. And so I think you're reminding us of something that we sort of all know and yet that's almost impossible for us to do.
- [63:04]
Pico Iyer
Yes. Until maybe necessity forces us to. I think that the pandemic had that effect on many of us. Suddenly we couldn't race around in the same way. And suddenly when we woke up, we had a choice. How am I going to fill these next 16 hours? And I think many people suddenly realized this is what's important in my life. My friends, my family, my health, my passions, and these other things that I've been so hypnotized by are much less important. But you're absolutely right. It's really, really difficult to force oneself to that understanding. I remember when I was working in New York City and I was having such an exciting time. I thought if I moved to Kyoto in a single room, whatever happens or doesn't happen, the day is going to last a hundred hours then. So who knows? That's a huge open field instead of the crowded skyscraper filled avenues that I was inhabiting before. And I thought in some ways that's what we really need. I mean, I think all of us have more time than we know. And when we say I don't have time to meditate, or I don't have time to go on retreat, or I don't have time to read or to do some of the things that the master investors you describe are doing, it's almost as if we're saying, I don't have time to take my medicine, or I don't have time to go to the doctor and you and I I think, and probably many people listening to this have made the time to go to the health club or to do some form of exercise every day, because we know it's essential to our body's health. And so I think we actually have it in us to make the time to tend to our emotional mental health, which is much more important essentially for how we survive our lives or not. As you say, we all sense that, and it's one of those good New Year's resolutions that is always in our heads but rarely in our lives. But I think the payoff is, I mean, when I started reluctantly going to the health club, the first surprise was I felt so much happier as well as healthier. It was a wonderful break in my day. It actually helped me with my work. And so I've implemented certain things, probably like the people that you describe in your book as a result of spending time in the Hermitage, that allow me to do nothing and allow me to be much happier than I would be otherwise. So a big part of my writing discipline is taking two walks a day. And that's when really I do the best writing. And when I'm waiting for my. I might have told you this before, and when I'm waiting for my wife to come back from work and I don't know if it's going to be 20 minutes or 70 minutes, I just turn off the lights and listen to music and I feel so much better. And it's not as if I'm wasting the time. I'm restoring it. I'm not killing the time, I'm making it alive. And I feel so much fresher when Haki is in the door. And I sleep so much better that day. So in some ways these are all self interested things that are sort of like eating your spinach. But if you can make the spinach tasty enough, it's as good as any ice cream that you would choose from Haagen Daz. And if it's going to make you feel happier at the end, it's worth it. And again, 100 years ago, JP Morgan, as most of the people listening to your podcasts probably know, gave himself two whole months off every year and said he could Never achieve in 12 months what he achieves in 10 months. And that was when the world was so much slower. And that's why, whether it's CEOs or people in Silicon Valley, I think all the leaders that we admire have conscious measures that they take, whether it's going for walks or meditating or digital detox to ensure that they have the space and time to think afresh.
- [66:37]
William Greene
Yeah, I was very struck you wrote on the final page of the book in the acknowledgments, this book is about the beauty, you could say the sanctity of clarity and silence. It's also about how such treasures are available to us in many settings, not only monastic. And that really got me thinking about this idea of how we can access these gifts in our day to day lives. And you mention in the book things like when you're in a crowded airport terminal that you'll very consciously go find a quiet corner in the sun, can you think about ways that our audience can very practically take this idea of finding peaceful moments? And because you mentioned at some point on leaving the monastery, that relapse can be so easy. I mean, how do you actually take this mindset of giving yourself more spaciousness and actually apply it in our day to day lives?
- [67:33]
Pico Iyer
I don't know if everybody can manage it, but I would say take a long hike, go and see a friend without your cell phone on you. Just sit quietly in your room for 20 minutes every day without any of your devices. And it doesn't have to be formal meditation, but just leave yourself in that undistracted space. So soon after I began going on retreat, and again, I apologize if I've said this to you before. I made this 3% rule for myself and I thought if I go on retreat for three days every season, it's only 3% of all the days in my life, but it completely transforms the other 97%. And then I thought, well, if I just spent 20 minutes every day in my day to day life doing Nothing, that's only 3% of my waking day. But I think it would illuminate and help the rest of my 97% of my waking days. So these are very simple, universal things that are really available to everyone. When you were talking about how we all know the virtue of it, it's really hard to do it. I've sometimes met kids who of course are the ones we most worry about because they've grown up in all their lives with these distractions and expect more and more of them. And they'll tell me how their parents will take them on a cruise or they'll take them on a rigorous hike for a week and they'll say, you know, that first day on the boat, there's no cell phone reception. No, couldn't get on the Internet. It's like the worst day of my life. I couldn't do anything. Couldn't talk to my friends, couldn't play games, couldn't contact anything. It's just like losing my arms and legs. And then the second day of that cruise is like the second worst day of my life, just unbearable. I didn't know what to do. 24 hours felt like 24 years. And then that week of the cruise was the best week I ever had. You know, once you get through that harshness of cold turkey, suddenly you remember what you've been missing all along. And I think it's nothing more exotic than that. That happened when I first went on retreat in 1991 for three days because I was sleeping on a friend's floor. I was leading a fairly quiet life anyway, as a self employed writer, wake up in the morning, go to my desk and write away and then take walks. So I couldn't complain of being too stressful. But nonetheless, as soon as I got there, it was as if I remembered something I'd been longing for that I hadn't found a way to get to otherwise. And it suddenly made me feel complete. And I think again, that word recollection suggests that I find I'm so scattered most of the time. And as soon as I step into that silence and when my monkey mind stops, I'm brought to a point I'm one person. I'm finally I'm recollected in that sense too. And it's such a relief.
- [70:11]
William Greene
Last year I had this strange experience that you were very involved in actually, where I had booked to go on a six day silent meditation retreat with Sopna Rinpoche, this great Tibetan Buddhist teacher that I've mentioned to you before, who I had on the podcast at one point with Dan Goleman. And then my life got so crazy because I had all these. It was right before the Berkshire Annual meeting and I guess Charlie Munger had passed away. And so I suddenly got all of these requests to give speeches about Charlie and various other things. And so I think I literally had four speeches to give in 36 hours, including two one hour keynote speeches. And I just thought, this is insane. I can't go away on a six day silent retreat that would end basically like two days before I went to give these speeches. And you kind of worked on me a little bit and said gently, well, you might find actually that you'll do a better job with the speeches if you go away and you have that peace of mind. And so I worked kind of maniacally to prepare. And then I went off on this retreat and I was absolutely startled When I came back at how calm and clear I was to a degree, it was some very strange experience. It was like, usually, I don't know if you feel this when you speak, but you can sometimes see that your breath is different or that you're stressed. And I just felt so sort of preternaturally calm. It was just kind of amazing. And it was like I could retrieve stuff from filing cabinets in my brain that usually I just, I wouldn't be able to retrieve because I'd be too sort of muddle headed. And it was very striking to me that it may. It was in some ways my first intimation that maybe this would actually be professionally beneficial, but it wouldn't actually be a distraction or an indulgence to go off and have silence and meditate for six days. But it would actually kind of help me professionally. Do you have any thoughts about that?
- [72:21]
Pico Iyer
I do. I mean, I remember that moment. It was one of the few really good things I did last year. I'm very proud that I urged you in that direction. And honestly, I'm guessing that the audience who listened to you really gained from that calmness and clarity as much as from the content that anyway you would have been delivering. And that's what I always find if you or I are about to deal with somebody and she comes into the room and she's just been driving through rush hour traffic and she's multitasking and doing 100 things, she's really. We can tell she's not much good to us or to herself. And conversely, if we meet that same person and she's just spent 20 minutes sitting quietly in her room, she comes into the room with a calmness and a clarity that instantly is hugely beneficial to us as well as to herself. You know, I have a friend at Google who makes appointments with himself every week for one hour he meets himself, knowing it's only by taking an hour quietly with himself he has anything to bring to his other meetings. So what you just told is a perfect example. And I think anytime we say, I don't have time for something, it's proof that our lives are out of control and we need to do something dramatic to put them into control. And what that usually means is taking time, I would say, to do nothing. You know, there's this great story of how Mahatma Gandhi used to meditate for an hour every day. And one day he woke up and he said, oh, I've got a really, really busy day. I'm not going to be able to meditate for an hour. And all his friends and followers were really startled. He said, no, this is a really busy day. I've got to meditate for two hours. What wisdom. I know that your speech was so much better for doing the six days on retreat, and I know that you've always got a very, very busy schedule. And the more busy it is, the more imperative it is for you to go on retreats. And that's. I say that to you with such confidence because that's what I'm always saying to myself, too. I'm usually in that same state and I can see that, yes, that's, that's why so many people in Silicon Valley use retreats or meditation in order to become more productive. And of course, Buddhist teachers would say, as Thoreau did, that's an improved means to an unimproved end. In other words, if the goal only is to make you even richer or more fanatical than you were before, maybe that's not the whole point of the procedure. But I feel that really that six day retreat was making you wiser and happier, which means that your audience was wiser and happier than it would have been otherwise. Even though maybe the words you were delivering would be exactly the same. Because you know from delivering so many lectures that at some level the audience isn't so much listening to what you say as how you say it. And what they're really being affected by is presence. Which is why when a Rinpoche goes onto stage and speaks very quietly, in very simple terms, in perhaps broken English, it sometimes goes right through us. And Elon Musk can get on the stage and speak with great fluency and confidence about many things, and it makes no impression at all. So how do we develop that presence that we admire so much in others? Because this is a different issue, a little from what we've been discussing. But I think the world is crying out for wisdom now. We don't know where to find depth and guidance in our leadership. That's one reason I think, Leonard Cohen became so popular in his last years. The speaker sensed that there was somebody there who really did live a life of depth and reflection. But we don't see much of it in our public sphere and we're hungering for it.
- [75:53]
William Greene
There's so much to unpack there. I think one, one great lesson of that retreat that I did, I've done a bunch in the last couple of years, was just that I think it should allay the fear that a lot of us have that in some way we'll lose our Edge. If we stop running as fast as we possibly can, it may be the opposite. But then another thing that happened, because that retreat was such a beautiful experience, I then said to my son Henry, who's 26, would you ever go on a six day silent meditation retreat with Sopanu Rinpoche? And he said, I'd go with you. Which was such an unbelievable thing for your son to say that I actually dropped everything. And so two months or so after that first retreat, I went to England and I went on another six day retreat with him because that was where Sakni was going to be teaching. And usually I'm not very silent on silent retreats. I'm the sort of least capable of being silent of everyone and everyone for some reason comes and talks to me. Maybe it's just being a journalist, I don't know, people tell me stuff. But on that retreat, Henry and I really stayed quiet. And you talk in your book about the intimacy of meals where you're quiet with someone. And it was one of the most joyful experiences I've had in years to be there with my son, who I love dearly. And I couldn't lecture him or give him advice. And so we just sat there kind of loving being with each other. And so there's something, there's something almost visceral, I think you have to experience that you've obviously experienced so many times about that intimacy and joy of not being able to speak.
- [77:32]
Pico Iyer
Yes. And so I feel, oh, I've been lucky enough to travel a lot around the world for 50 years, as you know. And so I'm always sharing with my friends who is so remarkable to go to Ethiopia or Antarctica or wherever it is. And this is the equivalent, this is one of the, probably the most exciting adventure I've undertaken in my life, even though I'm not a religious being. And so I, I say to my friends, there's some equivalent in your life and maybe you'll enjoy it just as much. And the question I was just going to ask you, William, is, is it fair to say, however, sometimes difficult and even maybe tumultuous they've been. You've never regretted one of the retreats you've taken?
- [78:10]
William Greene
No, they've really been the best thing. They've been an amazing thing. And I, yeah, it's been a, it's been a great gift. And actually I'm already figuring out, you know, the next retreat that I'm going to go on this summer. So, yeah, I think once you taste it, you start to, I mean, look, it's, it's not for everyone, but I think it goes to this question of how do you create a life? That's where you're optimizing what's really deeply valuable to you. I was very struck by. There was a, there was a, there was a wonderful passage in the book where you were writing about, I think it was, was it Admiral Byrd going off to the Pole or whatever and getting stuck for something like five months in his hut and realizing the importance of peace, that really what we were after was peace. Yeah, it's a lovely quote. Here it is. He goes to the South Pole and you write in his little cell. He came to see that success might be another word for peace and peace at heart, for freedom from ceaseless striving. And I think that's sort of what I'm wondering. Have you started to think that maybe we've kind of got it completely wrong with our just obsession with ceaseless striving? Because you work incredibly hard yourself. I mean, you've written 17 books and you've worked to help support your mom when she was elderly and needed lots of care. So, I mean, you did plenty of striving. But have we got it totally wrong?
- [79:41]
Pico Iyer
Well, actually, I think the wise souls throughout history have got it totally right. And they've never, whether it's Lao Tzu or the Buddha or Marcus Aurelius or Thoreau, they've never spoken on behalf of ceaseless striving. They've always spoken about the opposite in every single tradition in the world. So, yes, there's nothing to be gained by being out of breath. I mean, earlier you were. I would agree with you that the more you try to keep up with the moment as the world accelerates, the further behind you're going to fall these days. So you have to find some way to separate yourself from the rush. I mean, in your book, you quote, sentence, that's been my talisman for 50 years almost now from somewhere, simplify, simplify, and so Admiral Byrd stuck for five months alone, very close to death, near the South Pole. He was living in the simplest, most uncluttered existence possible. And this was an incredible dignitary who was a friend of President Roosevelt and was the only human in history to have three ticker tape parades through New York City. So he's one of the most eminent men of the world. He's suddenly in the middle of nowhere. And then he realizes, I don't need more than I have right now. And actually just to be able to see the light through there, through their whole and to read my books and to have time for reflection so long as I have enough food is. Is all I want. And I think again, it's an instance in which necessity reminds us how little we need and how much we can find in just having enough. And that the clutter, I mean, I find it's the clutter in my head and the clutter in my desk, which means I can't sift the trivial from the essential. I've got a thousand things on my mind, a thousand pieces of paper on my desk. And when the forest fire roars towards the house, I can't put my hands on what is essential because there's too much there. And that's what going on retreat helps me to do. Just always keep in mind, oh, this is the important thing that I need to have at the top of the pile on the top of my mind and the rest can pretty much fall away then. I loved what you said about already scheduling retreat for next summer because I found that it is such a release and a liberation for me that just to know that I've got this in the horizon or that it's a possibility transforms my days, especially sometimes when the days are very busy and stressful. I mean, you kindly said that I work very hard, which is true to some extent, but it's partly a result of coming to this little flat in the middle of nowhere in a country where I don't speak the language, where if I worked for eight hours, soon as I wake up, which I do, I then got 8 hours free just to take walks and see the temples of Nara and hang out with my wife and see movies and go to the health club and eight hours of sort of uninterrupted pleasure every day. So it doesn't feel like hard work. Whereas I think when I was in New York City, I was probably getting three hours of work done every day, but I was spending 16 hours a day in the office. So I decided rather than spending 16 hours every day to get three hours of work done, I will go off by myself and do eight hours every day and get eight hours down and then enjoy the rest of my time unencumbered. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors.
- [82:59]
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- [86:20]
Pico Iyer
Alright, back to the show.
- [86:22]
William Greene
How do you think about this whole issue of kind of achieving success and fame and all of that as a writer and speaker? Because you write in the book about how in the early days you wanted to be different and original. And then you write about how you come across these monks who have committed to being invisible, as you put it. And so there's a part of you that seems to be captivated by the possibility of erasing the cells, the ego. And then there's a part of you that's very much out on Boogie street that's trying to make a living, trying to hustle, trying to build a following. I think last time I checked, your TED talks have been viewed 12, 13 million times. You're a very well known guy. How do you reconcile those conflicting urges to be sort of in the world, building a successful career and having an impact on a lot of people and your awareness that in some way ego is the enemy and you want to kind of dissolve the ego?
- [87:28]
Pico Iyer
Yeah. Again, as with your earlier question about Bookie Street, I don't see it as a contradiction. In other words, I feel the more time I can spend either on retreat in my hermitage or just living in my quiet life in Japan, the richer. This is stuff I can share with the world now. And I've got all the money I need. My rent here is $500 a month. I can still afford that. So it's not as if I need much more money. And if I want my books to be interesting to people, then I need to spend as much time as possible just in the middle of nowhere, not on Bookie Street. So actually your retreat story is a perfect example that you, William, were asked to give a talk probably to a lot of investors who are very real world people. And the best way that you could do that was by going on retreat. And then the fruit of that is that when you, William, came out, as you said, you were calmer and clearer and you didn't have, I'm guessing, designs on the audience. You weren't trying to impress them, you weren't wanting them to go away thinking, oh, William's great, green is fantastic and I've got to read his book. You actually, I think you probably left your ego far behind wherever it got thrown in the corner in the retreat and I think most of the writers I admire some level, I'm responding to them because I can tell they have no designs on me. If you and I see two people on stage and one of them is really trying to play to the crowd and make a good impression, and the other is like a Tibetan monk, and not even caring whether people are walking out will be drawn to the Tibetan monk, I suspect. And I think it's the same on the page. So even in that regard, I think ego is going to be counterproductive because that's what comes between the writer and the reader, and it comes between the writer and the world. Choose to. Richard, in his wonderful way, said, the ego is like a fat man who will stand in front of you at a horse race, which is taking all the fun out of life if he's there. So it's in our own interest to get rid of him because then suddenly we can enjoy the race and not take ourselves so seriously. Again, sorry to bring it so often back to your book, but I felt that one of the motifs in Richer, wiser, Happier was that nearly everyone you talk to regards it at some level as a game, which means they're not taking it too seriously. There's some degree of detachment from it, and that's what allows them actually to be, I think, partly so successful. I read it as, in some ways, their ego didn't seem so much involved. They were fascinated by the process, and when they did get rich, many of them were using it for philanthropic purposes. So it wasn't as if they wanted to get their sixth Ferrari, though some of them would be happy to have one Ferrari and were very glad of the Ferrari they had, but they saw they didn't need the next five. But if you think of it as a game, then your ego is going to be much less involved and the results for everyone are probably going to be a lot better. So, you know, I think if I were. If I was still living in New York City and doing the kind of things that might help get a book, win recognition. Book would be much weaker, frankly, and wouldn't be one that I respect. And over the course of my career, I've written some books that are quite successful that I don't respect at all because I think they're written very quickly and can be read and taken in very quickly, just the way anyone probably can make a dazzling impression for five minutes. But as a writer, the thing you really want to do is engage somebody in an intimate, vulnerable conversation where she goes away and thinks about it for a Long time afterwards. And not necessarily thinking, wow, that was a great guy, but thinking, some door has opened inside me, and let's see where it takes me, because those are the books that I like, too.
- [91:15]
William Greene
I actually felt this was the most vulnerable of the seven or eight books of yours that I've read and the most personal and in some ways, the most courageous. There was something. I mean, I've always loved your writing, but I sometimes, as I said to you before, I sometimes feel like you are a very enigmatic man in your books. There's something very concealed. And here you're very generous in exposing yourself in a way that I was wondering if you were very consciously doing that or if you were scared of doing it. Because there's something much more intimate about the book.
- [91:51]
Pico Iyer
Yeah, no, I was trying for many things. As you see, I wrote it in a very slow way to try to rescue the poor reader from rush and acceleration so that you're forced almost back to a human pace. You're walking when you read this book rather than racing to keep up the way you would otherwise. So it's partly trying to bring the reader back to some calm. Calm and silent and spacious land within herself or himself. And I mean to speak to your earlier question about ego. The deeper we go inside ourselves, the more we share with everybody else. So at some level, you know, I keep stressing in the book that when I'm in my little cell and I'm scribbling away in my diary, I'm pretty sure that half the people who are also staying on the property at that time are scribbling exactly the same sentences. In other words, we're freed from our individuality, and we're sort of. We're part of some larger whole and we're speaking for some collective whole. Which is why, if you read an anthology of poetry or wisdom, so much of it comes from the author named Anonymous. And so at some level, this book could have been written by Anonymous. I felt so in the sense that I'm not using the sort of particulars and surface of me to engage the reader or to make an impression on the reader. But I'm trying to come to that part of me which William would instantly recognize as part of himself. And, yes, I think lots of what we've been speaking about has to do with the beauty, as I say, for me, of going on retreat is being released from that individual self to a sense of something much larger and much more lasting. And that's why one of the things that I found as a result of Spending time in this place is. It's made me much less scared of death because I'm less caught up in a fragile little resume self called Pico Aya, who's not going to last many more years anyway. And I'm much more part of this large landscape, literally a landscape of. Of rock and ocean and sky that is going to last for a long, long time. And when my father died, for example, only thing I could think to do in this very busy moment when I had to look after my mother and ten through a thousand obligations, was one day when my mother was being looked after, to drive three and a half hours just to sit for two hours in that silent place looking at the ocean, remembering what doesn't seem to change and what outlasts our little hopes and plans and then drive all the way back. That's a. That's taking us a long way from your question. So I think it is a much more. It's a more intimate book. You know what? I've always loved haiku because they're deeply personal, but they have nothing to do with personality. You know, a typical haiku will say snow falling, the geese are flying, an empty road, something like that. So you can feel how much emotion there is in that. But it's nothing about the speaker. He's really admitting you to a shared space. And insofar as this book feels to me a little like a series of haiku, the hope is that it's very personal, but in a way that has nothing to do with the kind of froth of personality.
- [95:09]
William Greene
Yeah, it's really a beautiful book. I mean, I'm certain that it'll endure because I'm certain I'll go back and read it multiple times. And I think one of the reasons is that you're also dealing with these very universal issues that all of us wrestle with, but maybe often we want to avert our eyes from them. And so this whole issue that you mentioned before, for example, of the fires, which we spoke about, I think on the podcast last time we chatted, it's this sense that this beautiful place, this monastery, is constantly in jeopardy. It's a wonderful metaphor for uncertainty and unpredictability and fragility and vulnerability. And I wonder if you could talk about that, because I think, as I think we probably spoke about last time we were on the podcast together, this idea of dealing with uncertainty is so central for investors and for everyone else. We live in this world where, as you found when you first went to the monastery, it was because a fire had just destroyed your home. And so this question of how the monks deal with impermanence, deal with uncertainty, I'd love to explore that a little because I think there's great wisdom that you are sharing in the book about just dealing with the fact that nothing's going to last and that we have no idea what's going to happen next.
- [96:35]
Pico Iyer
Yes. And that there are absolutely no guarantees. And again, I may have said this when last we spoke, but I've always been touched that Pope Francis doesn't pray for answers. He prays for the courage to live with answerlessness, because that's where we're all living round the clock with answerlessness. And again, it came home to us so forcibly in the pandemic, the universal and changeless truth that we never know what's going to happen tomorrow. And in fact, at one point I wanted as a cover of the book, one of those classic statues of the Buddha sitting surrounded by flames, because the central question of the book is the central question of the age that you just posed. How live calmly in the midst of uncertainty. And of course the monks have great faith, which is, I think, what really helps them through many things. And they have great discipline. But I think one of the reasons I was drawn to this place is that it's a thousand year old order. And so their discipline and routine has withstood any number of plagues and warfares and tumults and earthquakes and fires past. Through the centuries, I've never been much drawn to a spiritual center that's based around one human or based around some teaching, because I always feel that a human is mortal and infallible. And I don't want to go to a place where I'm being told this teaching is the way. And when I go to this place, as I say, there are no rules and no expectations. Nobody's asked to attend any of the services. But I just feel I'm part of this cycle that's been going on since St. Romeo founded the Camaldoli's order in the year 1012 that has been found to be able to withstand the many vicissitudes of the world. And when I think back on it, I think one of the critical moments in the book for me is when at one point we've rebuilt our house after that terrible forest fire and we have to evacuate it again, again and again, because we're up in the hills of California asking for trouble and flames are more or less perpetual, certainly increasing every year. So we have to run out of our house and stay downtown just as we were staying after our previous house burnt down. And at the same time, I see in the newspaper, my friends in Big Surre have had to evacuate their monastery. And my refuge, my sanctuary, looks as if it's about to go out in flames. And I don't know what to do. And I step outside one morning, and I don't know whether I want to look up into the hills where our house is meant to be or not to look up, because I may look up and see there's nothing there. So what can I do? I'm literally. I don't know if I'll have a home to go back to tomorrow. And I don't even know if I'll have a monastery to go back to next week. And so I remember that there is a Catholic retreat house or Anglican retreat house in my hometown up on the top of a mountain again, with a beautiful view over the Pacific Ocean. It's 15 minutes away from where I staying. So I drive up there and I step into the garden, and again, the silence is immaculate, absolutely liberating. And I see the planes flying over to where the fires are trying to contain them. And I look out on the ocean in the distance. I really do feel renewed and restored. And thank heavens there's this quiet place that can give me confidence at a time of great fear and anxiety. And then I go back into my life, and as it turns out, the monastery is saved and my house is saved. But that very same year, the sanctuary, which I'd gone to in my hometown, burnt to the ground five months later, in the next fire. And so, in certain ways, these fires are doing a good thing by just reminding us not to take anything for granted, to live each day as if it may be our last, and to remember what's important to us and what is really sustaining, because we could be stripped of anything tomorrow. And if it's not far where you living, it could be hurricane or flood or all the things that are rewriting the world every moment. And of course, if you live in California, you quickly see that fire is part of the natural cycle. So literally, the vegetation and the trees can't live without the fire. And then the question becomes, as you said perfectly, how do we live with the fire? And I feel so sort of open and free with you, William, as I never would with anybody else on any other podcast. I just want to go back to your last question, which is such a good one, where you're asking about how this book feels very vulnerable and intimate in a certain way. And I was trying to explain how I saw it. But it's very much as I see your book, because your book is, on the face of it, entirely external. It's entirely about these heroic investors and the things that we can learn from them and how they've charted their own individual course, each one of them, and come up with a different way of beating the market, you could say. But as we were saying maybe an hour ago, really, you've selected aspects of these investors and certain qualities that are reflections of the ones that really speak to you. And so, in that sense, it's a very, very personal book. That's really the book that only you could have written and the qualities only you could have found in these people, even though you barely have the word I throughout the book. And anyone picking it up casually would say, this is just a journalist's account of objective account of various investors. But it's a deeply personal books. And that's how books work wonderfully. I think that at some invisible level, we're bringing something to them that could only come from us. And that's what gives them a certain strength or beauty.
- [101:55]
William Greene
I think both of us are wrestling very honestly with the question of actually how to live. We're grappling with questions like if everything is unknowable in the future is unknown and a fire can come, or a mudslide can come, in the case of your hermitage, at any point, how the hell do you find peace? How do you. And so I think for both of us, when we are interviewing other people, we have so much skin in the game because we are really wrestling with these questions of how do we deal with our own mortality? How do we deal with our failures, our disappointments, our yearnings, the people we care for, but that we don't have control over? And so I feel like both books are very. There's something quite unexpectedly heartfelt about both of them.
- [102:44]
Pico Iyer
Yes. Yes.
- [102:45]
William Greene
There's a beautiful character in your book who I love, this old lady, Therese, who'd been living at the monastery for over 20 years. And she was talking at one point about how seven of her trees had been blown down by a tornado. And then there had been a fire evacuation. And her husband had died of a heart attack during the fire evacuation. So she was surrounded by threats and dangers and loss. And she said this wonderful thing to you where she said, you have to take care of beauty to make the most of it, because so soon it is gone. And then she said, when things are taken away from you, it's to make room for higher understanding. And I thought that was lovely, this sense that it's not like in the face of impermanence and uncertainty, we should just sort of lie down in fetal position and despair. There's also this gift of impermanence, which is that you have to take care of beauty and make the most of it, because, as Therese said, so soon it's gone. Do you have thoughts about that? Because there seems to be a quality in the book of if you look really honestly at impermanence and uncertainty, it should wake you up and make you notice the world you're living in, who you care about.
- [103:59]
Pico Iyer
Yeah. I mean, so Japan, in which I'm sitting right now, is premised on that. And as you walk down the streets of Kyoto, there are literally science, hopefully translated into English, saying, enjoy this moment, because tomorrow you could be white bones. And there are bells tolling that message. And as you know, the first page of this book aflame I mentioned beauty maybe has to have a taint, a trace of mortality in it. That's the nature. It's the fragility of beauty that gives it the depth that moves us so much. That's why people love the cherry blossoms here, precisely because they only lost for 10 days, and we never know when they're going to go. And if they did last all year, nobody would look at them twice. I'm so glad that you. You. You mentioned Therese, because she's easily overlooked. And I have her in the book for the important reason, to remind us that everything I had imagined about the Catholic monastery was imperfect or wrong. You know, just sort of stern, stiff guys who are telling everybody that they have to read the Bible and are going. And meanwhile, one of my monks is teaching at a Zen training center across the hills. The other is going off to the Hindu ashram that they maintain in southern India. Another one is pointing out that all monasticism comes from the Rig Veda. Another is talking about Islam, but also that they. Right next to their enclosure is this aged woman who for 38 years was living first with her husband and then alone till the age of 96, right next to the monks. And the monks gave them a house next to their enclosure because they felt that their community could gain from a lay presence and from a woman being there. And then when the husband died, the monks promised to look after this lady Therese, until her final breath. And what always struck me was that because she was living in this cottage in the valley with very, very few duties, she was actually the great contemplative in the community, because the monks, as I Was saying are very, very busy. And one's taking care of the bank books. And another is talking to the lawyers. And the third is having to go and buy the vegetables. And she is just sitting there for 36 years. Contemplating death as much as anything. And so I got so much wisdom from her. And also she was building her own sort of counter chapel. Her pagan animist chapel in the woods all around her. And again, I love the fact that the monks were open minded enough. To really have an old woman living by their side. Who could offer a whole different light on their scriptures. At one point they had a young man who became a rabbi, but was training to be a rabbi who lived with them for two years. And if you go to their Catholic Hindu ashram in southern India, you see that the motto of the place written up in big letters says. We are here to awaken from the illusion of separateness. Which I love. And actually, that's probably the best description of what I find when I go into my little room in the hermitage. I awaken from the illusion of separateness. Suddenly I'm not Pico. I'm up against the world. I'm just this drop in something huge and part of something magnificent. But it was wonderful. Only after I published the book Did I realize that that sentence comes from the Vietnamese Buddhist teacher. It's not Han. So here are these devout Catholics, not only running an ashram where their priest wears a dhoti and sleeps on the floor and eats with his hands, but their motto is actually taken from a Vietnamese Buddhist. And, you know, again, it speaks for I probably said to you before about the Dalai Lama. Who's so ready to learn from every tradition across the world. Including scientific traditions and those of people with no faith whatsoever. The deeper somebody is in his or her tradition, the more open minded that person is. Which is not something I understood. I think when I was young, I assumed that a depth of commitment meant an intensity of dogma. And of course, actually it means the opposite.
- [107:56]
William Greene
Yeah, I think they're not threatened. Because I had an extraordinary moment on that retreat in England. Where I said to Soknur Rupich, I asked him a question about how I'm constantly torn between these two parts. Because there's a part of me that, you know, is a Jew obsessed with Kabbalah, you know, this ancient mystical wisdom. And then there's a part of me that's deeply drawn to the teachings of Tibetan Buddhism. And he gave this kind of fierce answer where he said, go beyond paths in this beautiful way. And Sort of really knocked down any sense that I had to make a choice between the two is like basically saying, it's all one thing. If it's wisdom, it's wisdom, and it doesn't matter. And so he totally wasn't in any way threatened by the fact that I had teachers from another path. He was like, no, great. Whatever works for you, is it making you a better person?
- [108:50]
Pico Iyer
Yes. And essentially, I think he was also saying, go beyond binaries, go beyond dualities, because those are what are constructed by the mind and the world. And this is why I stress silence is living in some place far beyond the ways in which we cut it up with the mind or the names and explanations we put to it. So exactly that whether you were studying Kabbalah or with the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, both of them saying, leave all divisions behind. And Leonard Cohen was the great sort of master of that in some ways, because he maintained more zealously than anyone I know, all the customs of the Judaism to which he stayed absolutely faithful till his dying day, even as he was living as a Zen monk. And then he had the courage and honesty, after five and a half years as a monk, not just to come down to Boogie street, but then to start going to India to listen to a retired bank executive give a kind of philosophical formulation for what in Zen was just an experience, and to see that each of them was saying the same thing. But we can't always hear the whole story from one person. And there's an advantage to. To have three different people saying, giving us different kinds of wisdom. I mean, that's why I always get so much out of reading Marcus Aurelius. But I get more when I see, oh, there's the same thing in what the Dalai Lama is saying, and there's Proust, who's more or less saying the same thing. And they're all. And they're amplifying each other and rounding it out. So it's not as if, oh, I'm just holding onto one person's flimsy notion, but somehow or another, so many of these people across so many continents and centuries have come to the same basic conclusions. And I think contemplation is as universal as breathing or eating. And so it's probably no surprise that whether it's Lao Tzu or Emily Dickinson, they'll be saying variation on the same thing. But I love that. Go beyond paths. I mean, the Tibetans have a gift for that succinctness. I mean, three words and you don't need any more.
- [110:52]
William Greene
Yeah, he cut through so he. I. I feel like he actually sort of broke something. Like, I felt. I. I felt in that moment almost like I just wanted to burst out crying. Like it was like something dropped and it was. I actually feel like he freed me of something. And it was a very powerful thing. It was having. Having someone who's a. A master, like a real, you know, real master, actually sort of cut through with this kind of fierce compassion, some delusion of yours. It was very helpful. I wanted to go back to the Leonard Cohen thing that you mentioned, because there's a lovely scene in the book where you talk about going to a Shabbat dinner during Hanukkah with him in his house with a Zen monk celebrating Shabbat and Hanukkah, which is kind of a lovely image for me. And he tells you at that dinner, you write about how he was shaken as he told you how a friend he had trusted for decades made off with just about all his money while he was up on the mountain. And I was looking it up, and there's a. Who knows how reliable ChatGPT's account of this is. But as I understand it, he had this former manager confidant who he was close to, who basically, while he was up on the mountain, sort of stole millions of dollars or defrauded millions of dollars out of him. And I was looking at an account of it in the Guardian, and he said it was a long, ongoing problem of a disastrous and relentless indifference to my financial situation. I was certainly left with nothing. And then he said, I didn't feel I was the victim of a fraud. I felt it was my own fault for not looking after the store. And I was fascinated by how he dealt with adversity, that he didn't sort of lambast her publicly. He sort of took responsibility for his own lack of attention to his finances. Can you talk about Leonard Cohen as a sort of example of someone who dealt really wisely with. With adversity? Because obviously he dealt not only with that financial adversity, but also with his failing health and the like.
- [112:56]
Pico Iyer
He looked unsparingly at death. And I think one reason people saw him as a wise man was that he was always the first to confess himself guilty of every kind of folly. He was wise mostly about his imperfections, his failings. You know, as I mentioned in the book, every time he would see me, every single time, he would say, are you married? He'd say, yes. He'd say, oh, man, that's the hard disappear. Sitting on top of a mountain seven days a nice Marriage day. So that's easy by comparison, which it wasn't. But he knew, as he would put it, he didn't have the domestic chops. He could never make a relationship with a woman last, though he made his relationship with his Japanese teacher last beautifully for 45 years. And so I think in that scene where he's explaining to me the details of his sudden neo bankruptcy, and he says he went to the ATM and there's almost no money left. And I said to him, well, that's probably the reason you had to be in the monastery. The monastery was a preparation for that. There's some kind of karmic logic whereby it's perfect that you were living this very simple, impoverished life and then came down and found that you had to be simple impoverished. And he appreciated the wisdom of that. But he said, well, I'm also really worried about my kids and my grandkids. And of course, the second wonderful sort of karmic irony of all this is that there was a fact of being brought down to almost nothing that forced him at the age of 73, to go on the road and give 380 tours over the next six years until he was pretty much 80. And that suddenly made him more acclaimed and cherished than ever before. But it goes back to what you and I were talking about with the Ego and Boogie Street a few minutes ago. Because I think the reason people were so moved and shaken to the core by seeing those late Leonard Cohen concerts was that, again, they could tell he had no designs on them, he wasn't trying to make an impression. And that really, he was almost as invisible as a monk when he was on stage. And what he was doing was bringing to the great concert halls of the world the passion, the depth and the intimacy of the meditation hall. But he was really carrying himself as a monk. He would kneel at times before his accompanying singers, and he would almost erase himself as fully as he had when he was actually wearing monastic clothes. So whatever intuition sent him to the monastery was the right one. And the investment he made in those five and a half years, even though he came down from the mountain, was what got him through those last 16 years. And if he was only concerned with ensuring that people would listen to Leonard Cohen's songs again, that both the adversity and the time in the monastery are really what has given him a longevity he might never have had otherwise. And as I mentioned in the book, the thing that tickles me is that his songs were most intensely about religion before he became a monk. And Once he became a monk, most of his songs were essentially about saying goodbye to everything, about impermanence and about throwing his arms around the fact that nothing lasts, starting with himself and starting with everything that he loves. But he was throwing around songs like Alleluia or if it be your will, which are perhaps two of his great religious songs, came from 1984 to 11 years before he began to be a monk. And when he did become a monk, those final songs are all visions of the end, essentially. But he did. You know, I think one, one thing that I look to him for now is that the older he got, he never tried to be young. He embraced the oldness and the fragility and the fact that he was so close to the end. And that became the substance of what he shared with the rest of us. We could hear his voice wavering and we could see how tiny he looked on stage. And we realized it was a 78 year old man croaking about going home. And that was so true because this goes way back to the beginning of our conversation. I mean, we live in the so called real world. And I'm sure when you go on retreat and when I go on retreat, what I see is a reality behind that that's much realer. And he wrote about that very, very beautifully. And I think when you listen to Leonard Cohen's songs, especially the later songs, you're being admitted to that space that you and I have found in retreat where we see a reality beneath the excitement and movement of the world.
- [117:23]
William Greene
There's also something so powerful in what you write about Leonard Cohen, where you talk about his service, which you alluded to briefly a while ago, his service to his teacher, this abbot who died at 107 and who was a very controversial character because he was accused of all sorts of sexual improprieties which so many of these great spiritual leaders have been accused of. And Leonard, who obviously really understood the flaws and foibles of humans and could love them for who they were, served him in this incredible way. Whereas as you point out, he would cook and clean for him and scrub floors. And I was watching a video of him yesterday where he was talking about how he made his mother's chicken soup recipe for Roshi, his teacher, but that he didn't like garlic. And everyone has a flaw, you know, so he had to leave the garlic out. But he, I mean, I think you talked about how he changed his teacher's diapers when he soiled himself. And there's a wonderful line in the book where he says to you, that's what this practice, this whole life is about. And I wonder if you could talk about that a bit because I think there's something. There's something about him as a monk serving his teacher and something about the monks, the Benedictine monks you stay with where they've overcome their ego to such a degree and have become so profoundly driven by selfless service that they get this kind of incredible, paradoxically, this great power that comes from them having erased their own ego.
- [118:58]
Pico Iyer
I love that I hadn't thought of it like that, but you're absolutely right. And again, it's a reminder to me that ecstasy that I find when I go there is just the first step towards the service. That's the meaning of it all. And yes, I love the fact that he always stressed that. And even he turned himself into a Leonard Cohen, into kind of anonymous grunt. And whenever anybody would come to his house, his first impulse would always be to cook them for something. It might be chicken soup or it might be bagels from Montreal or whatever, but just to turn himself into a servant to everybody who came along, but especially to his teacher, who I think was the great love of his life. And when I listened to Leonard Cohen's love songs, the one love he could stay true to for more than 40 years was this, as you said, extremely mortal and flawed monk. And what you said about Leonard is so beautiful that he could see all the flaws in Sasaki Roshi and still love him. And that's partly because he knew from the outset the Sasaki Roshi saw all the flaws in Leonard and would love him for that. And there's a great line in I think It's Night Comes on or one of the early songs. One of the songs in the early 80s when Leonard thanks God for the few who forgive you and the fewer who don't even care. And I think that's very much a reference to Sasaki Roshi. Most of us meeting Leonard Cohen, either excited it's Leonard Cohen or vexed because we've heard that he's had too many girlfriends or whatever it is. Here he meets a person who's far beyond all of that and who's speaking to something that has nothing to do with the personality known as Leonard Cohen in front of him, but just this quivering, vulnerable soul and undistracted by all the clatter. When you were talking about the I love the way when you said that Sukhni Rinpoche kind of broke something. And I was remembering that when I have traveled with the Dalai Lama two Things that I always remember, partly because they're so brief, is that quite often people will come to him and say, your Holiness, what do you do if you really, really, really work hard on something and you want to reverse climate change and bring peace to the Middle east and it doesn't work out? He looks at them with that ferocious kindness you mentioned and says, wrong dream. If you've set yourself such an unrealistic dream, you're only going to be disappointed. You've got to be rigorous in establishing what your goals are. And the other is that when people come to him, and this is the other thing that happens all the time, with terrible grief. Your Holiness, I just lost my only child at the age of six, and is there anything you can say to me? And he always holds a person, just brings all the force of his presence and his compassion to them. And then he always says, wider perspective. Wider perspective in time and space, which speaks to the famous Buddhist story of when the Buddha was met by a woman who was losing her son. And he said, find a single house where they haven't encountered suffering and loss and impermanence, but wider perspective. That would be the two word summary for why I go on retreat. Because when I'm here in my little apartment, I'm caught up in my own problems and challenges and delights and victories, and I can't really see the world. And I go there, I get a wider perspective. And so suddenly the triumphs seem pretty negligible and I can laugh at them and the traumas too, suddenly, on this much larger canvas becomes something very small and not insuperable by any means. And it's one of those wonderfully simple things that the Dalai Lama hands around to everybody he meets from every tradition as a kind of pill. That sounds so simple. Wider perspective. But the more you live with it, the more you see how much there is in it and how much. Actually, that's probably what most of us are craving, that we're at some level shortsighted. And if only we could take the wider perspective, things are going to hurt much less and we're going to be much more hopeful about things. And we're going to see that humanity has withstood wars and plagues and forest fires any number of times before. And here we are, in certain regards progressing, in certain regards not progressing at all. But this isn't the end of the world.
- [123:08]
William Greene
There's a lovely moment right at the end of the book where the prior, who's an amazing character, I think it's Father Cyprian if I'm pronouncing that right, who's an old friend of yours whose music I watched online last night, who's a very remarkably talented, unexpected character. He says to you, as you're talking about the fact that the monastery needs $5 million to stay alive, and there are the fires encroaching in the mudslides, and he says, everything will be all right in the end. And then if he says if it's not all right, it's not the end. And it struck me it was. Someone had told me recently a guest on the podcast, Brad Stulberg, talked about Viktor Frankl's phrase tragic optimism. That somehow, in the face of all disaster and all the reasons to be miserable, it's not like you are Pollyanna, ignoring all of the suffering and the pain and the difficulty, but you look at it and you still maintain this kind of tragic optimism. It seemed a wonderful example of how. How to look at the future with hope.
- [124:13]
Pico Iyer
Yes, even I, as not a Christian, often reading the Book of Job, which is a perfect reminder that, as it were, divine arithmetic doesn't show up on our calculators. In other words, the heavens, the fates, nature, however you choose to define it, they're working in some way we can't begin to anticipate or understand. And that means that, as you were saying before, we're living in a constant state of uncertainty. But it also means we can't second guess them and say this is the end of the world, or things operate much subtler way than our minds ever do. But you're right, I really, really wanted to end on that sentence of hope. And Cyprian, in his 10 years as prior, seeing one after another of his elder brothers die, all his revenue disappear because the monastery was cut off from the world and unable to take visitors. Lawyers pestering him because he didn't have an evacuation road in case of the next fire. All he was doing was facing many more logistical, everyday and financial problems, much more than you and I would have to never losing faith or confidence. So, as with the Dalai Lama, if people like that leading such difficult lives can still beam to aspire to do the same.
- [125:37]
William Greene
The other thing, and I'll let you go in a minute, but the other thing, in terms of very practical wisdom, we've talked a lot about how to deal with adversity and uncertainty. It struck me that there's a very powerful example that the monks provide of gratitude, Thanksgiving. You write about one person, a grizzled monk, singing with carefree joy so deep in adoration and there's a lovely moment in the book where you despite the fact that you can't claim to be a total non believer or a partial non believer, and perhaps you say under your breath, you keep repeating thank you, thank you, thank you. And I think there's deep wisdom in that as well. Like this idea of somehow despite all the fragility of things, or maybe because of all the fragility of things, continuing to be really thankful for, for what we have and what we experience. Do you have thoughts on that?
- [126:32]
Pico Iyer
So I turn into a happy idiot every time I go there. And I find doing the things that I would laugh at or not believe the rest of the time, among others, as you say, pretty much every time I've been so that's more than 100 times over 33 years. At one point I'm stripped of all words, no need of any words there. And all I want to do is say thank you, thank you, thank you. And I just walk down the road sometimes was saying aloud to myself, thank you, thank you, thank you. Whom I'm thanking and doesn't matter whom I am. But the fact that I'm in a state of rejoicing and gratitude is really a delight because I'm not always like that the rest of the time. And I think as I mention in the book, it was being there that made me realize that prayer is really more about saying thank you than please. Petition repair is not something that I think every monk would idea. And Thomas Merton says wonderfully, if you go seek out contemplation in search of anything, you're going to be disappointed. There are no guarantees there as anywhere. As you said about meditation, it's not about peace and light and understanding much of the time and nor is going on retreat. But nonetheless I'm reduced to just grinning like a fool and saying thank you for the light that's coming over the top of the hills and the silence all around and of these flowers. And there's monk who's been quite lived at my hermitage for a long time called Brother David Stendall Rust, who I think has been instrumental in making gratitude such a center of people's lives. And I think having a gratitude journal is one of the more sensible semi secular things I can think of, especially at a time of relative despair and certainly during I found it was so much more helpful every day to think of the many things I was grateful for. I was still alive, my wife was still alive. We were lucky enough to have a roof over our heads, as many people don't and insurance policies. Much better to think about that than to think about all the things we were missing. Always, every day. There were so many causes for gratitude and so many causes for frustration. And as Marcus Aurelius would have told us, our lives will be determined by which we choose to attend to. William James would have told us the same thing. Every single person listening to this conversation has things that they're missing and wonderful things they have. And how their day and their life is going to proceed is almost entirely defined by which of those courses they choose. But none of that is a circumstance, and we're not a victim of any because we have agency over whether we're going to look at what opens us up or what cuts us up. So I think of the many things I could be thinking about and could be saying, gratitude and thank you is probably way better and more useful than most of the alternatives.
- [129:19]
William Greene
Yeah, absolutely. Well, that's a great note on which to end, Pico and thank you. I mean, it's one of the great gifts of doing the podcast over the last, what, three years has been that I became friends with you. I mean, it deepened my friendship with you, and you've been a great friend and role model and I've loved spending time with you and having you getting to ask you impertinent questions and personal questions that you've answered so thoughtfully. So thank you. It's really a great treat for me to get to chat with you.
- [129:51]
Pico Iyer
No, I really delight especially in the personal or impertinent questions. I count on them. And I can guarantee you, William, I've already done a few interviews for this book. I'll be doing some more. Nobody else in 17 pages of notes in nobody else will have accessed YouTube to watch father Cyprian singing. Probably almost nobody else will have access to YouTube to watch more of Leonard Cohen talking about his Roisi. And so when somebody like yourself is going to bring so much to a conversation, I just come away thinking, well, this is the best conversation I'm going to have this season. So calls again for another thank you.
- [130:27]
William Greene
Well, it's a great source of delight for me, so thank you so much and I hope to see you in New York very soon. All right, folks, thanks so much for listening to this conversation with the extraordinary Pico Ayer. If you'd like to learn more from Pico, I would strongly recommend reading his new book, which is titled Aflame. It's a beautifully written and meditative book that helps you to think about the profound question of how to find peace of mind and clarity and hope in a world on fire, sometimes literally as well as metaphorically. Pico also has an unusually good website, which includes a very wide array of his writings on everything from Graham Greene to Fidel Castro to Leonard Cohen and the Daoai Lama. You can find the website at www.picoiajourneys.com. i'll include this and various other resources in the show. Notes for Today's Episode if you enjoyed today's conversation, I'd also really encourage you to go back and listen to an earlier podcast episode that I did with pico back in July 2023. It was titled Beyond Rich. I think you'll be able to see why there's nobody I like speaking with more than Pico. He has a beautiful mind, but he's also a wonderful human being, full of kindness and wisdom and compassion and decency. If I ever grow up, I'd like to be a little bit more like him. I'll be back very soon with some more great guests, including a return visit to the podcast by my friend Christopher Begg. Chris is a renowned hedge fund manager who also teaches the class at Columbia Business School that Ben Graham talked to Warren Buffett back in 1951. In the meantime, please feel free to follow me on x williambreen72 or connect with me on LinkedIn. And as always, do let me know how you're liking the podcast. I'm always really grateful for your messages. Until next time, take good care and stay well. Thank you for listening to tip. Make sure to follow richer, wiser, happier.
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- [132:34]
William Greene
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