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

I think all of us carry things with us that we don't realize we do. And because we've been carrying these things for so long, we don't know that there's another way to live, that there's a lighter way to live where we're not carrying this pain, this trauma, those painful memories. It's just been amazing to discover what it felt like to not be carrying this with me. And once you've experienced what it's like to feel light, this is something you can strive for and that you can try and have more of in your life.

Hey, welcome back to Good Work. My name's Barrett Brooks and I'm your host. This is a show made up of long-form conversations with talented people who are using their careers to make the world a better place. On today's episode 4, I invited Anne-Laure Le Cunff to join me as my guest. She's a trained neuroscientist at King's College in London, wrapping up her PhD. She's a forthcoming author of an upcoming book, and she's the founder of nestlabs.com, which is where she hosts much of her writing for public consumption on what I would call applied neuroscience. How do you take what scientists know about how the brain works and apply it to everyday life through mindful productivity, creativity, relationships, and so much more? Anne-Laure is a fascinating human being. She's kind, thoughtful, and whip-smart. We had an excellent conversation ranging across a wide range of topics from personal history to cultural background, to how to achieve excellence in our work, to how to have more creative output. One of my favorite topics though, was Anne-Laure talking about how she balances her academic work within institutions and writing for public consumption, which she kicked off by writing 100 essays, 100 days in a row at the beginning of her writing career online. So please enjoy my conversation in episode 4 of Good Work with Anne-Laure Le Cunff. Let's get to it. Here's where I wanna start. It comes from the last thing I did actually was I read all of your annual reviews from the past 5 years, but sequentially, which was a really fascinating exercise because it's like seeing a person's life go by., you know, over the course of an hour, basically. There was this moment early in 2021, we were coming off a year of a once in a generation pandemic, uh, really once in a century pandemic. And it had been extremely hard on your extended family. You had lost loved ones. Nest Labs had this like momentum. It was growing. It was at 25,000 subscribers or something like that. You had a small team. Your revenue was growing. Your master's was complete and you were starting to think about, do you want to get a PhD? And in this moment, your partner gets a job offer in Singapore, 6,000 miles away, 8 time zones, you know, so far. Side note, my wife is from Singapore, so that was a fun little aside there. But you're in this moment of life where everything could change in any given direction. And I think you all decided to make what I see as maybe the most courageous and authentic decision you can make for both of you. And it just felt like this really pivotal moment to me in your story where things could have gone so many directions. And so I wonder if we might just start there and have you tell us a little bit about what that was like and what you ended up deciding.

Yeah, absolutely. That was definitely a liminal moment for me in the sense that I, as you said, I had no idea what was the right direction to take. There were so many options as well. I had to make a bet, basically. I had to take a risk. There, there was no way that I could calculate and rationally make that decision. So it was a mix of obviously thinking about the pros and cons of different choices I could make, but it was also very intuitive. I went with what felt right, and in our case, being in a long-term partnership and having the two people having their own dreams and their own ambitions, aspirations, et cetera. We believed at the time that if we prevented one of the two people to pursue their dreams, there would be resentment at some point or another further down the line. And so the only decision that both sounded logical to us, but felt right, again, from an instinctive standpoint, was to both pursue our dreams, even if it meant being in a long-distance relationship, very long-distance relationship. As, as you know, since your partner is from Singapore, this is very far. It's not only far to fly there, but the time zone difference can make it hard sometimes just to stay in touch. You can go a couple of days without talking to each other. So it is a bet you're making on your relationship, on your partnership. That you're going to be able to make it work. And now that it's been more than 2 years that we're in this situation, so we're still together, which is great. I'm almost done with my PhD. There's 6 more months to go. He's very happy in his job and we're approaching a new liminal moment now where now that I'll be done with the PhD and I'll be location independent again. So what next? Do I move there? Do I go somewhere else? Yeah, I just feel like life is this, life is this succession of liminal moments and every time you're at a crossroads and you just need to make the choice that feels right.

It's kind of one of the core concepts you talk about, that being in the in-between is this huge skillset that we have to develop because it happens over and over and over. And so I wonder if you might just share some of what you've learned from either a neuroscience standpoint or a personal standpoint on these in-between moments and what it's like for us and why they're so important?

I think from a neuroscience perspective, it's just interesting to keep in mind that we are designed to try and reduce uncertainty as much as possible. Our brains are pattern matching machines that are really trying to understand what is a signal in the middle of the noise and trying to make predictions. And it's trying to make the best predictions possible, really. That's how we survive. We evaluate risks. We decide, do I turn right? Do I turn left? Do I start running? Do I stay here? This is what we do. And we make those calculations all the time. And when we find ourselves in those liminal spaces, those spaces of uncertainty, it can be very easy to just listen to those instincts and just move or freeze or letting ourselves being guided by fear instead of letting ourselves being guided by our dreams, our, again, our ambitions, our aspirations. And so just starting by pausing, not rushing the decision, I think can be one of the best things that anyone can do if they find themselves in that situation. Do not rush the decision. Take your time, especially if it's a big decision that is going to have very long-term consequences. It is worth it taking your time to make that decision and making sure that you have considered all of the pros and the cons and that you're really listening to how it feels, to what feels right to you, and not to the alarm bells in your brain telling you, danger, danger, let's quickly run and, and, you know, move away from, from what feels very scary. So that's the first thing, just taking your time, which I did at the time, and I'm very happy I did. And the second thing would be to make space to connect with yourself in those moments, to really try and understand what it is you want. We are all prone to mimetic desire and copying those goals that other people have, or looking at other people's success and feeling like that may be the kind of success that we want. And again, this is very automatic. We're social animals and it does make sense to some extent to copy what other people are doing. This is how we learn. But if you want to learn and live different things than most other people are living, you need to go a little bit off the beaten track and you need to make sure that your decisions are based on what feels right for you and not what looks like it's right for many other people around you. So make time and make space to really think about those decisions.

Yeah. You know, it sounds so obvious. Make time, make space. And in those moments, I know in my own life, I have to resist every urge to just want to move through it and, and make the uncomfortable aspect of it end. And so it's, it's fascinating to know logically, like, we're fighting our nature when we're doing that. And then still to be able to sit in it and calmly, or maybe not so calmly, but like embrace whatever it's like in those moments in between and just sit in our bodies. You know, there's so many directions we could go from here, because you brought up 3 or 4 different things I want to talk about eventually. But in my work, I talk about it as the— your somatic experience. You know, you talk about interoception, they're very related. But our body has such a great— is such a great source of data. It's telling us many things all the time. And we're so detached from it because we stay up here so much. We stay in our brains, we stay in the logic side of things. But we have all of this rich input coming from our bodies and how we're reacting and whether we're tensing up or whether we want to move through something.

And I, I love how I really love how you hesitated when you said calmly, maybe not, maybe not calmly, because this is exactly what this is about. Maybe you don't feel calm and maybe that's important information. If a decision is making you feel really stressed, it could mean that it's because it's important. It could mean that it's because it's something you're resisting that you actually don't want to do. It may be because you, you want to do it, but you don't feel supported in the way that you would require in order to take that step., but you can't figure out why you're feeling this way if you're ignoring the feeling in the first place. So you really need to learn how to— I, I love this expression. I've never heard about it before, but somatic experience, that interoception I write about, but listening to the signals so you can then decode them.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. We're gonna get a lot more into kind of dropping into our emotional experience and some of the tools that you've used to get there, but, but Before we do, what came to mind for me is, so there's this concept of kind of superforecasters or forecasters out in the world. The book is Superforecasters, and the premise of the book is basically that experts are often very bad at predicting the future. And so that being true, what makes it different that some people are able to be accurate when looking at probabilities of outcomes and things like that? So we don't need to get way off on that, but it made me think I was pulling that into your situation where now you can look back and it was like, we made the right call, everything's okay, we're still together, we're both pursuing what is important to us. But there was some probability that it didn't work out well at all. And so I wonder if you have any practices for at the beginning when you're making a decision, kind of either writing it down or documenting it and predicting what you think will come true and then looking back against that. And maybe not, but I just wondered if you have any practices around that.

I actually don't do this. I know many friends who do things like these because a lot of my friends are engineers and I feel like it gives them a feeling of control to do this. They feel like, okay, I've made my prediction and then I can look back and even if it wasn't the right prediction, that's okay. That is part of the process and I will keep on improving and tweaking it until it's perfect, which obviously it never is because the parameters keep on changing as you go through life. What I, I pay more attention to is how I feel in that moment where I'm making that decision. And I do write that down because further down the line when things are a bit difficult, because they do become difficult, there are external factors that can impact the decision that you made. In our case, we made that decision after the pandemic, but there were many couples that also started long-distance relationships just at the beginning of the pandemic. And then imagine not being able to see each other for 6 months when you were planning on visiting each other every month, maybe. So that's an external factor that has completely changed. So writing down how you feel when you make the decision can be very helpful to look back on. When things are difficult, when the external situation has changed. So you can kind of reconnect with the why you made that decision in the first place, and it can make it a lot easier to navigate those difficult moments when you remind yourself, oh, that's why, because at the time I made that decision because I was willing to make that bet, because I believed in the future of that relationship, because I believe I'm going to be happier if I stay with this person over the long term. And then you ask yourself, have these things changed? No, they actually, they haven't. It's just that because of my PhD, I'm not going to be able to visit next month, or because of this, it's going to be a bit more difficult. But the core reasons why I made that choice haven't changed. So writing that down to me has been more helpful than any type of making predictions and then looking back on them.

Yeah, that's really good. I experienced that almost as the difference between like trying to train the algorithm that is your brain on one side. Versus really staying in touch with the reasoning and the intuition and like the, all of the things that went into the decision over time. Because we have these biases in our brains, whether it's the recency bias of our most recent experience that we're having, or negativity bias, that those things stand out more than the positive experiences. And so it's really easy to get lost and forget, wait, how did I end up here again? Because I'm not sure I like it anymore. So I really like that. That's great. One of the twists in the story that I did not expect at all was that you all decided to get married. It's like, we're going to do this really hard thing, so let's get married. And I just thought that was both fun and just kind of this really beautiful commitment to one another to say, hey, we're, we're in this together and we'll figure it out. And I don't know if that's how you all saw it, but I just wonder what that decision was like to commit to one another in that way.

This is the way I function in general. Once I've made a decision and I want for something to work out, I will do my best to make it succeed. And it doesn't mean that it will succeed, as you've mentioned. There is always a probability that things are not going to work out the way you want them to work out. But what I'm trying to optimize for is being able to look back and feel like I've done everything I could. I gave myself a fair chance. And if it didn't work out, it didn't work out. So really trying to optimize for minimizing regrets. I don't know if you have this distinction in, in English actually, because in French we make the distinction between regrets and remorses. And so a regret is when you didn't do something and a remorse is when you did something. So I'm trying to optimize for having remorses. That's fine. I did something and maybe that wasn't the right thing. Versus feeling like, oh no, I didn't do anything. So in this case, once we had made the decision that we were making that bet together, that we wanted to do our best to make it work, it turns out that at the time, only family could visit in Singapore. And so if I wanted to visit him, I had to be family. The only way to be family officially is to be married to each other. Maybe in a weird way from the outside, but for us, it, it was self-evident that once we had made that decision, if that was the thing it took to give us a chance for this to work, then we would just do it. We talked about it. We made the decision pretty quickly, just one evening, announced it to our family. And I think we got married maybe a month later or something like this. We did it in the, in his parents' backyard. Because it was right in the middle of COVID It was maximum 30 people. We were not even 30. I think we were 25, including 5 or 6 kids. So it was tiny. And I think it was perfect in, in its weird, magical way it happened. And, uh, that's how we committed to each other. You know, another thing that I think is really important is that we also designed it in a way where it would be very easy to separate. If we wanted to. So we didn't want the marriage papers or the admin to be the reason why we would stay together. We didn't wanna wake up and feel like, oh gosh, it would be so complicated. So we both at the same time committed to each other by doing this, by saying we're investing in this relationship and we want it to work. But also we made it very easy from an admin standpoint to separate if we wanted to. So that's not the reason why we stay together. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. So you set yourself up to continue to make decisions for the right reasons and not just because of logistics or the difficulty of unwinding it or whatever. Yeah. That's really beautiful. Your thing about remorse and regret made me think I, uh, as a random aside that was unplanned, I have this, um, this deck of cards here that are untranslatable words and a coach that I used to work with who was a dear, dear friend to me gave it to me. And so I'll read one just for the sake of entertainment. I think it's from School of Life, so many listeners will probably have heard of that. And this one happens to be French. How about that? So I'll butcher it, I'm sure, so you can correct me, but it's l'esprit de l'escalier, the witty or cutting retort that we should have delivered to a frenemy but that comes to mind only after we've left the gathering and are on our way down the stairs captures our maddening inability to know how to answer humiliation in real time. And so there's, of course, some fun ones as well. But, uh, you know, there's like a bunch of these little words, and I loved it because there are so many concepts that are just wonderful and beautiful in cultures around the world that English does a horrible job of translating and giving us a chance to experience.

This is so interesting. I have a friend, Anne-Laure Le Cunff, who maybe some listeners will know as well because she's pretty active on Twitter, and she created a website that is a database of untranslatable words, and I sometimes open it and have a look around because it's very fun, very inspiring. It's funny because it goes both ways. I feel like there are so many beautiful words that cannot be translated to English, but at the same time, English has something going for it. I find as someone who works in English, even though that's not my native language, is that English speakers are much more willing to play with their words and just like mash them together, create new words. You know, we don't have a word for brainstorming in French. We don't have a word for mindfulness either. And I love that about English, that you can say, hey, we're missing a word for this concept. How about we make one? Let's just invent one. Whereas in French, we're so protective of our language, and so it's a lot more rigid. And we even have l'Académie française, the French Academia, which is a bunch of old people who try to protect the French language. They even try to invent new words for email in French. So they, they say we should not say email. We all say email because that's because it's just the same word and it's easy, but they invented another one that no one is using. And they actually inspire me when I work on any kind of product or even an essay or something like this. I sometimes ask myself if I'm creating something of value that is actually going to help the reader or the consumer, or if I'm trying to force a worldview or perspective that is what I think things should be like versus what they really are like and having something that's really helping the reader and not just being based on my own experience. So weirdly, these, these old people all in a room trying to protect the French language have become a source of inspiration for me.

That's such a great anecdote because it is so easy to get caught up in, in our biases or whatever our preexisting views are and not update our, our priors for the world that exists, you know, and to want to try and like force our ideas on everyone around us despite all indications that we maybe are the ones that are wrong. So fascinating. So a couple other moments that seem pivotal to me in your journey that I wanted to ask you about, or kind of hear your perspective on whether they were as pivotal as they seemed. The first one was, you talk a lot about kind of following this typical success career ladder at Google, and then you thought you were getting off of that train by going and starting a startup, and then later realized that, oh no, that was actually just a continuation of the same thing in a different way. So that business failed, and I want to come back and ask a question about that. My first company failed as well, and so I have a feeling there's probably rich ground there. But the other was taking this, you know, what maybe didn't seem as a risk, or maybe it did, which was starting Nest Labs and using it as your kind of like playground online. And it's now become obviously this incredible community of human beings that you get to connect with all the time. So I wanna touch on both of those, but I wanna, I wanna, before we do that, ask if there are other pivotal moments. I mean, I'm sure there were, but any that really stick out in your mind in your kind of career journey and life that have really shaped who you've become today?

Another one I think would be much earlier when I was 21 and I moved to New York because that's when I learned how to speak English. And I think that if I hadn't gone there and not I spent those 6 months in New York completely immersed and trying my best to learn as much English as possible, I would not be where I am today. It's incredible to me to think that I signed a book deal with Penguin to write a book in English, in English. I also signed a book deal with a French publisher who bought the rights to translate it back to French. So I'm not even going to be the one translating my own book. Into my native language sounds completely absurd to me. But if you had told me 10 years ago that I would one day write a book in English, an entire book in English, I would have told you that you're crazy. That's impossible because I could barely talk at the time in English. So that would, that was a pivotal moment. And I think learning how to speak English has changed my life.

Yeah. I mean, I even just think about us ending up on this conversation. You know, it's like, how many podcasts have you done in English and how many essays have you written in English? And you're studying in English, you're writing a book in English. And number one, it's incredible and admirable. But number two, it feels like you've been very strategic and intentional about it. I mean, the publishing thing is an example. You know, you talk about, you turned down some book deals that could have been in French to begin with. So that you could get one with a major publishing house outta New York that actually gives you a better chance for your work to reach more people over time. And so, you know, they are interrelated, but I also see you being very intentional about using this asset that you have now of, of having learned the second language to reach more people and have more impact in your work.

Yeah. And to be fair, the reason why I turned down those French publishers, those deals from French publishers, because I asked around on Twitter to other authors and they're the ones who told me, don't do that, publish in English and then it can be translated back in French. So I think rather than my intentionality around using English to reach more people, it's more of an illustration of how amazing it can be to be online and have access to other people who have gone through the same process, but a little bit earlier than you, and you can just ask them directly. Everyone had the same reply and was like, don't do this. Don't take the French deal. Wait until you can have one in English. And it's been, for me, very often, rather than having a very clear vision of where I was going, the part I've been intentional about is just making sure to ask other people what their experience was and learning from them. And every time I'm taking a new step, it's something that's completely new for me, but I know other people have done it. I'm not the only person going through this, so I'm trying to learn from them.

Yeah, I mean, it just seems like building community and leveraging community, not in the unhealthy way, but in the very healthy way of just taking advantage of being surrounded by smart people has been such a core part of kind of how you've built your career, how you built your business. I mean, Nest Labs is a community at the end of the day, and I wonder if you had any role models or people showing you the way on how to build community, how to foster relationships amongst people so that you would have access to people to ask these kinds of questions. It just seems to be kind of inherent in you, and so I wonder where that came from.

Originally, probably from my mom. She, I, I grew up in a house where there were always a dozen people in and out of the house coming to catch up, to share the latest news, to know how things were going, have tea and cake, and then leave. It's taught me probably how to connect with people in a way that feels very natural for me. Another thing that's unrelated that it taught me is that I work really well even if there's a lot of noise around me because it was always very noisy in my house growing up. So I think having an Algerian mom for whom connecting with other people is such an important part of, of her life has been one thing. And then in terms of the people I am learning from nowadays, I have a few people around me that are a big source of inspiration when it comes to community building. There's, uh, Thiago Forte, uh, from Building a Second Brain, who is known, I think, mostly for the public community that he has built. There's a really big community around Building a Second Brain, but What people don't see is his generosity behind the scenes. He's always willing to help a fellow author, anyone who's curious about building a newsletter, being a creator, et cetera. He will always take the time to share advice, to share what he learned. He's published a lot of guides, very in-depth, about all of the challenges that he's been through at a level of transparency that you very rarely see because a lot of people treat their experiences almost as trade secrets. They think that maybe if they share too much, people are going to copy them and become competitors. There's none of that in the way Thiago approaches his work and his experiences. I'm learning from him a lot. Every time I'm a little bit hesitant, I'm like, should I share that much? Like, is that too much to share? I think about him and every time I realize, no, actually I can absolutely share this. I'm very far from the limit to of how much I should be sharing.

You mentioned there were a few people like that, that you kind of learned from and rely on as role models for it. Is there another, uh, aside from Tiago that you look to?

Uh, yes, there's a person called Marie-Denise. I don't know how in English she would feel like I'm butchering her name. She's French. She created a community called Women Make, and it's a tiny community. It's on Telegram. And what I admire the most from Marie is how diverse this community is and still everyone feels welcome. Because really the only thing that everyone in this community has in common is their gender. And so that's 50% of the population. And it's, it's a lot of people from all walks of life working on different types of projects and somehow it still works. And I think in this case, it's because the community leader has a way of making everyone feel welcome and connected and where All ideas are listened to, all voices are listened to. So this is also something that I admire a lot with her.

I love that. It reminds me of, I saw in some of your, your content, you were talking about building a community at one point over WhatsApp or text message for newsletter creators, sharing lessons learned along the way. And so it's just interesting to hear these parallels, you know, you get inspired by someone or someone gets inspired by you and then. That sparks you to try and experiment, and then it adds back into your work. I can't overestimate the degree to which community has shaped my career and, and just the way that I've grown over time. I think that seeking out people, taking risks, inviting people to things, looking like an idiot on occasion because no one responds or no one says yes, it's given me all the relationships that I have now and all the people that then introduce me to others or give me automatic rapport with someone like you where we haven't had the chance to talk before today, but there's like enough mutual connections where it seems like an obvious thing to do. So I love hearing about how different people build community like that. You know, you mentioned your, your mom is Algerian, your dad is French, is that right?

Yes.

So you've got this fascinating cultural background and now you live in London, so you, you even live in another place than either of your two primary cultural backgrounds. And I just wonder how that kind of diverse inherent cultural background between your parents and then also the experience of being an immigrant in new places has shaped you as a creator and you and your work today.

I think it started fairly early on because my mom was born in Algeria, but moved to France when she was still quite young. And so she had to adapt, she had to learn a new language and she had to navigate the those two different cultures on a day-to-day basis, at home with her parents who didn't speak French, and then at school and with her other students, etc., or at work where she had to, to speak French and try to blend in as much as possible. There was a long period of time where I only felt like I was French because my mom was trying so hard for us to be integrated in the culture that she wouldn't speak Arabic to us. She gave us the Frenchest names. Anne-Laure Le Cunff, I don't know if you realize that without being French, but Anne-Laure is super French. If there was a spectrum in terms of Frenchness of names, it's very, very French. And it's the same for my brother and my sister, very, very French. You could tell some that when people say, oh, I thought you were, you were French, that she smiles. She's kind of happy. It's a compliment for her. That she's so well integrated in the culture that people don't hear her accent, don't realize that she's from Algeria. And it's only much later in my late teenagehood, early 20s, that I started really reconnecting with my Algerian roots, with my mom. And we went back to Algeria. I visited several times now. I've met all of my cousins there, and it's been very interesting. To see how your environment shapes your behavior. I'm a completely different person when I'm in Paris versus when I'm in Biskra in the south, south of Algeria. I had not noticed. I think it's a lot more subtle now. I notice it. I notice that I'm actually a different person when I'm in London and when I visit San Francisco, I'm also a different person. When I'm in New York, I'm a different person. Before visiting Algeria, I did not notice it because it was subtle enough that I could miss it. Algeria gave me an extreme version of this where I, I would be a lot more discreet. I have to cover my hair when I'm there. You have to, you know, let men speak before you do. It's very, very different culturally. So that was a great example to see how your behavior changes. And once you've seen it once, once you've noticed that you do it in a situation, you see it all the time. And I would even say that you probably also change your behavior based on the different groups you're in, whether you're with different friends also. And we just take that for granted. We don't really pay attention to it, but I think maybe we would learn a lot from observing our behavior a little bit more and seeing which of those differences and changes in behavior are intentional and we wanna keep. Maybe some of them do make sense because it does make sense to adapt to a situation, But what are those changes in behavior that we do unconsciously that maybe are not serving us as much?

I don't know when I first noticed it, but I'll sometimes spend a long weekend with a friend or a friend's family, and I'll come home and I'll realize I'm, I've adopted some of their mannerisms or way of speaking. It's like, I would, I would, I've never used that mannerism before in my life. And then I come home from 3 days with someone and all of a sudden I've got this different aspect of how I'm communicating. And that's interesting to me. I mean, it's a reflection of our mirror neurons and wanting to connect with one another and just all of these different aspects, but then to be conscious of it and ask, okay, but is, do I want to be shaping myself to the people that I'm with, or do I want to try and be more authentically me? And so there's all these interesting questions in there.

Yes. And who you surround yourself with, we know it instinctively that this is something It's almost trite to say, right, that you become the people that you surround yourself with. There are lots of sayings like these that are trite because they're true and we don't act on them because we feel like, yeah, duh, I know that, but we don't really act on them. I think being more intentional with the people you spend your time with can be one of the highest leverage things that you can do to have a better life.

Yeah. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. You know, I wanna come back to a thing that you said about your mom and kind of the process of assimilation and the pride that she takes in being recognized as French when that comes up. And, uh, I had a wonderful conversation on the show with, uh, author and executive coach named Jerry Colonna, and he recently wrote a book called Reunion, and it came out of kind of him examining his own place in society during, right after George Floyd's death and in the summer where we had a lot of conversation in the United States about the Black community suffering disproportionately to the rest of our country. So the core of his book was really about learning to reconnect with our ancestors and where we come from, like where we really come from and how many in, you know, this is US specific in this case, but it's relevant to what you were sharing as well, how many of us pass as white because that is the thing everyone assimilated towards. But how that was like— white is not a culture, white is not a country of origin, white is— it's a, it's an agglomeration of many other things. But that for so long, every incentive almost in society was aligned so that people needed to assimilate to make it. Basically. And so yeah, it becomes a point of pride to say, yes, I'm an American, even though perhaps it's just been a generation since you came from your country of origin. And so my example of that is my great-grandparents are Mexican. They came from Mexico across the southern border. That's such an area of debate in our country today. No one learned Spanish after my grandmother. She didn't teach it to any of her daughters. Because it was probably more a subject of shame than pride that you would speak Spanish. They all pass as white now, even though they're half Mexican. And it's just this interesting and sad— I mean, really. And you talked about going back and kind of processing the pain of your ancestors at one point, and I've had a similar experience where it's like, man, there's a lot of shit that people have to go through. To leave their country of origin and go somewhere to create opportunity for the future of their family. And it's so sad what's lost in that process. There's so much richness that gets lost in that process.

Yeah. And it, it, what's interesting is that this destructive process, because that's what it is, comes very often from a place of, of love and protection. Because the reason why, you know, your grandparents or, or my mom, try to leave all of their culture behind was because they wanted their kids to have the best chance possible to succeed in this new country. So it's very interesting. I always find it fascinating when there's a tension like this in between where a behavior comes from and the actual effects that it has, which are not necessarily the intended ones, or, or which has also second-order consequences that I think nobody would've been able to think about a generation ago.

Right. Yeah. You don't anticipate them because they're optimizing for all the things we do have that are a little more invisible, right? It's like we take for granted all the gifts that it gave us and we see the things that we lost, you know, or that we didn't get to experience. But I think that's a, it's a beautiful thing about maybe our generation, maybe just people in positions of privilege and resource where we can go back and reclaim it. You can go back to Algeria and reclaim that part of your, your story in whatever way is meaningful to you. And, you know, I have that same opportunity too. So I guess I raise that as an invitation to everyone listening to say, like, it's a really powerful experience to be able to reclaim some of those aspects that may have been lost along the way. And there's a lot of richness there.

And you don't even need to, if you cannot afford to travel back to wherever it is your family comes from, you can do a lot of fun stuff. Like, I've been trying to learn how to cook more Algerian dishes, and nowadays with the internet, it is possible to find some very obscure recipes that usually you would have had to, like, literally get your hands on, on the grandma to ask her to tell you what the recipe is. That's what it used to be like. But now you can find YouTube videos that show you how to do these things, how to make those dishes. Music also, it's just crazy now that you can find any kind of music on Spotify, even the, the really obscure music that you would only listen in that little village in the south of Algeria, you can find that on Spotify. So we have incredible access to all of these different, those different cultures without even having to travel there.

Yeah, I totally agree. I've been working my way through a traditional Mexican cookbook, same thing, you know, right here from home, just learning to make things like. Mole or tamales or things that aren't just like tacos, basically. I want to shift tacks a little bit, if that's okay, and I want to come back to you leaving Google to start a startup, which, you know, on the surface and in reality is a big risk. You know, you're leaving a very secure job that's going to pay well with a career ladder to go do a thing that's inherently risky and try something. And we don't have to go through that whole process of what that's like because, you know, we already know how it ended. And I think that might actually be the more instructive piece of your experience. And so you've shared a lot about kind of starting this company and it ended up failing. And a big part of that was the relationship to the co-founder that you chose, or who, you know, you each chose each other. And I just wonder what you learned from that process about the importance of choosing partners in general, but specifically business partners and how much impact that then goes on to have on whether a thing can succeed or not.

It kind of connects back to some of the things we've talked about at the beginning of this conversation about intuition and listening to your intuition a little bit more sometimes. I think the big mistake that I made at the time was that I tried to apply a playbook in terms of finding my co-founder and finding a co-founder in the first place, because the playbook said, all of the startup playbook said, you need a co-founder to succeed. I didn't doubt it one second because Y Combinator said that, it meant that that's the way you build a startup. So I started looking for a co-founder and then, which I know is going to sound ridiculous, sounds ridiculous to me now, but felt completely logical at the time. You could download templates that had a little rubric where you could rate different aspects of your skills and personality, and you could do that together. With your co-founder to see if you would be a good match. And those templates, even based on the skills and the type of startups that you are going to build, helps you calculate the type of the split in terms of ownership of the company. So if it was more of a technical startup, they obviously, the CTO would have a bit more, et cetera. All of this automated with a spreadsheet. And I felt like, oh man, that this is genius. Like someone has figured this out. Like someone has figured this out and I have access to it for free and I can use it. Not that it means that I'm going to be successful, but I'm doing all of the right things to make sure that I'm starting on the right foot. And now that I have more experience, I'm a little bit older, that I have worked with more people in more different contexts. It does sound completely silly to go about it this way because there's a human factor that is much more important than anything, any kind of spreadsheet would be able to tell you. So that was my big mistake and this was my biggest lesson from this. And now when I select people to work with, whether I hire them to work with me on the team or it's just a collaboration that we're doing, I'm always listening to my intuition. And even if the person has the most impressive CV, but after a conversation with them, I feel like this is not going to work. And even if I cannot put my finger on it, this is enough of a red flag for me. Not that the person in themselves are wrong intrinsically, right? But this is enough of a red flag that I know it's not going to be a match, or at least I'm not willing to risk it. Yeah.

Yeah. That makes a lot of sense to me. Starting a company or working with someone is your life. It's a major part of your life. And I think sometimes we under-index on the importance of choosing partners and choosing people that we work with long-term. I don't know if you can really anticipate the degree to which that shapes your career without going through it, you know? And so it's like, it might even be not worth our time to try and share like what, what to do upfront, because I think maybe you just have to go through it. You have to try the way you think you should try. To choose someone to work with and learn the experiences from it. And so I guess I, I asked the question because like I've been through that as well. It's, you learn these lessons about how to choose who to work with. And I saw this quote once and I don't remember who to attribute it to, so someone listening can tell me and I'll give them credit. But it was basically, before the age of 35, you should never work with a friend. After the age of 35, you should only work with friends. And I found that really interesting, because I'm 36 now. And it really resonates with me that I know myself, it's not about really other people, it's actually that I know myself well enough now to know the boundaries I need to set the things that really matter to me, I've overcome some of my just old inner habits and patterns that were shaping the way I thought and the way I was in relationship. And so now I can be in partnership, much more consciously and intentionally with someone. Whereas 10 years ago, it was like, I was very reactive. I was, you know, I had all kinds of stuff going on that just made me, me a worse partner regardless of what the other person was doing.

Yeah. I think this is, this is great. I don't know about, I wouldn't necessarily make it a universal rule, but it wouldn't make for such a great quote if it was maybe do this and maybe do that. It's a great quote. I completely agree with you. And I think that again, like the, the reason why it didn't work out for us was not necessarily because the other person was intrinsically bad as a co-founder, but we both didn't know ourselves enough and we didn't have this self-awareness, this self-knowledge, this capacity for emotional regulation that I agree. Like, I don't, I don't think there's any shortcut to developing these skills is just something that takes time. And it does make sense that at age 36, you're a lot more able to navigate all of those different experiences than you were when you were 26. And so I'm still very grateful for that experience. I imagine it's the same for you of having gone through that partnership, for that partnership to not work out and to be able to learn from it. And take some of those lessons moving forward with me.

Yeah. Yeah. I guess my encouragement related to that would be to still do it, even if it doesn't work out, you know, it's still worth going through the experience and sometimes you get great outcomes even though the partnership wasn't the best option, you know? And so, um, I just love hearing the stories though. So I wanna ask you one more thing, then we're gonna take a break for a couple minutes. Nest Labs is I view it almost as a playground for you. It's a playground to learn, a playground to teach, a playground to share ideas, to hear ideas from others. And I heard you talking about the -ness aspect of it, and I want to see if I got it right, and I want to kind of hear you elaborate on it. But the -ness was this kind of suffix to words that becomes almost like a quality of a human— openness. I don't know, there's a million different ways we could describe someone. And that, that was the reason you named it that, was it like it represents the qualities of human beings and how wide-ranging they can be? So I wonder if you'd just kind of tell us a little bit of the story about why you started it and, um, and what you thought it might become relative to what it's actually become.

So yeah, that suffix is to describe the state of being something. So the state of being conscious, the state of being mindful, the state of being thoughtful. At the time, I didn't have big ambitions for NAS Labs at all. I actually came up with the name very quickly, like in an hour or so. And I just wanted it to be a space where I could write about the things I was learning. I wanted it, as you mentioned, to be a playground, a sort of, of laboratory for myself, for personal growth, hence the labs in NessLabs. And I was quite surprised when I saw that what I published there was resonating with so many people, because to me, I was just someone learning about these topics. I was not an expert. And I was very transparent about the fact that everything I was writing was a work in progress, that I was a work in progress myself, and that the only thing I was doing here was learning in public. And turns out now in hindsight, and I'm looking at the growth of Nest Labs, the engagement and, and the community that has gathered around it, it's exactly the things I thought would hinder the growth of this project that were the things people liked. I think they really liked learning with me and not necessarily just from me. They probably also like that I was very openly admitting when I was making mistakes. I would very transparently correct old articles and say, ooh, that thing I recommended you do 2 weeks ago, there's a new research paper that's out and actually this doesn't work. Like power posing, for example, it's something at some point I recommended that people do, and then it was debunked afterwards. Instead of putting it under the rug, I very transparently said, oops, sorry, this is what happens when you're learning in public. So I would have not, yeah, and a thousand miles expected that it would grow this much. I'm almost at 100,000 subscribers on the newsletter now. And we have a community, a private community of about 3,000 people. And this is way bigger than anything I would've expected. It's been great and it has really changed my life.

Yeah, it's incredible. I mean, I was looking at, uh, I just made a note of the numbers over time. They're not an indicator of anything other than that people resonate with what you're doing. You know, I don't, I don't really hold numbers as like the end-all be-all, but back in 2019 you were at just over 6,500 subscribers. And then in a year you added almost another 20,000. You got up to 25,000 and then you did another half that to 37,000 and then to 55,000. And then in 2023 you jumped all the way up to almost 100,000 subscribers. I mean, it's incredible. And to me, the growth arc is a reflection from my seat of you becoming more and more yourself. Like more and more confidently yourself in your work. And that's a lesson I've had to learn. I think so much of my life, we go back to the like mirroring behavior and being part of the communities that we're in. You know, I think so much of especially my 20s was figuring out who I wanted to be, like, where do I want to fit in? How do I want to shape myself? How do I want to behave? What do I want to adopt as my long-term values, things like that. Now, like, this show is a great example. I finally got to the point where I was like, fuck it, I'm going to make the show that I wish existed. I'm going to have long conversations with people I'm fascinated by. We're going to cover all kinds of stuff, and maybe no one will listen, but I'm going to have great conversations along the way. And it took so much to get to the point where it's like, oh yeah, of course, that's the only way to work. It's the only way to work. It's certainly the only way to be a founder. Because you have to live with it every day. The thing you create, you have to live with every day, and it's in your mind constantly. And so to shape it into something someone else wants it to be— in hindsight, this was what I did for a long time, so I'm, I'm not even saying like you're dumb for doing it. I did it. It seems silly almost that I would have tried to shape my efforts to other people's desires for me instead of my own. And so anyways, I just see that so much of that and what Nest Labs is growing into is it just seems like an authentic expression of your fascinations.

And I want to add to what you said that I don't think it's silly at all. Our entire society is pushing us to try and emulate what other people are doing and to try and please other people and again, to fit in. So I think this is just the instinctive behavior that we have. Since you're a little kid, your parents tell you what you're supposed to be doing, and then your teachers do the same. And you're taught that if you do what you're told to do, good things will happen. If you misbehave, bad things will happen. And even though we do gain more freedom as an adult, these things stay in the back of our minds. That's, you know, how we've been taught growing up. So unlearning all of these patterns and realizing that this freedom you have as an adult, you can actually use to do things that make you feel alive instead of just making you look good with other people. It takes time, it takes energy, and it takes a lot of courage as well.

Yeah, that last one especially, it takes courage because ultimately it's an act of vulnerability. It's like, this is who I am, so yeah, I hope you like it, you know? And you're doing it in public, and that's hard. Well, I think that's a great place to take a brief break. When we come back, I want to talk about some of the kind of psychedelics that you've tried in terms of psychoactive drugs that you've tried in terms of inner growth. I want to talk about other tools for inner growth, maybe a little bit about your creative process, and see where that takes us. Hey, it's Barrett. You've reached about the midpoint of this conversation. And while we take a little break for station identification, as they say, I want to tell you about two things. First of all, I write a newsletter every Saturday for founders and creators who are leading teams and companies to make an impact through your work. It has 3 sections in it. The first one is a mini essay from me based on my executive coaching work with founders and creators about how to lead well. It has 3 long-form essays or links from around the web that will help spark new thoughts to help you lead better. And it has one quote from a meaningful book that I often find myself recommending to friends and clients. All the feedback I've gotten so far is that it hits exactly on the kinds of issues that founders, CEOs, and creators are facing every day in their work. So if that sounds appealing to you, make sure to go to my website at BarrettBrooks.com and you can subscribe right at the top of the homepage. That's B-A-R-R-E-T-T-B-R-O-O-K-S.com. The second thing I wanna tell you about is that my day job, I actually do have a day job. I'm not just a podcaster. Yet is as an executive coach. As I just mentioned, I work with founders of Series A startups and later, and with creators who are doing at least $1 million as a solo founder and are now thinking about growing a team. The uniting commonality between the founders and the creators I work with is that you've reached a point in your business where you know you're gonna make it. Actually, you're doing quite well. And now the question is, how much do you wanna scale? And what are the leadership challenges that you're gonna face along the way? This work is based on both my training as a coach and in my work as an operator and growing my old company ConvertKit from $3 to $30 million in annual revenue. If you're a founder or creator who might benefit from coaching, or if you know someone who's looking for a coach, I'd love for you to check out my site and my coaching page at barrettbrooks.com/coaching. You can learn everything about how I work as a coach and also fill out a form to have an exploratory conversation if that sounds interesting to you.

To you.

All right, that's all I got for you right now. There's no sponsors for the show at the moment, so consider me your sponsor. Let's get back to the conversation for the second half. One of the things that you've been really open about in your writing are some of the things that you've tried to make what I would call like inner growth breakthroughs, to really like expand your possibilities going forward by understanding what's going on inside better. Uh, you did an awesome podcast episode with, I think it was with Johnny Miller about ayahuasca. I have not done any psychoactive drugs really just cause I'm like scared of them, not because I'm opposed to them or anything. However, as I listened to that conversation, I realized that it mirrored a lot of the experiences I have had over the past about year and a half using a therapy modality called Internal Family Systems. And then some of the like outputs of that process. Created some really, really deep experiences that are similar to some things I heard you talk about with ayahuasca, although I know they would be completely different. Uh, the like process would be completely different. I don't want to repeat everything you talked about with Johnny because that's a better conversation about that topic if someone's really interested in ayahuasca. But really, one of the things that really stood out to me as you were talking about that experience was, and this might have been, I think on Paul Millard's podcast, you said this, you talked about briefly, as you were mentioning ayahuasca, purging the pain of your maternal ancestors. And I hinted at this earlier when we were talking about that. And I wonder if you just might be open to sharing more about what that was like and what you've taken away from that since then.

For people who don't know, and without going into too much details, but an ayahuasca ceremony can last for maybe 5 to 6 hours, so a lot can happen. During this time. This specific moment, which was pivotal for me in the experience and was something that really stayed with me and changed me as a person, was when at some point I was taken over, I think, some of the most excruciating pain that I've ever felt physically. As a woman, uh, we actually like have a lot of, you know, physical suffering we have to go through, whether it's every month with our period, whether, you know, it's like, you know, medical interventions, et cetera. So I feel like I'm someone who can deal with pain pretty easily. I have a very high tolerance to it, but this was nothing like anything I had experienced before. It started in my belly. It felt like this pain had to come out in some way, and I felt it moving from my belly to my chest, to my throat, to my mouth, and then coming out almost as if it was a silent scream. And I didn't know at first what it was, but after a while of having several waves of this pain, again, starting from my belly, moving through my chest and then through my throat into my mouth and coming out as this silent scream, I knew it was the pain of my mother and the pain of my grandmother and the pain of my great-grandmother and the pain of all of the women that had come before me that was moving through me. And leaving my body as if I was processing the trauma of generations and generations and generations of women that had come before me. In terms of what it taught me, I haven't really intellectualized that experience or tried to rationalize it because it was so visceral and so embodied that I think it would be hard to put words on it. And I don't even think it would be helpful to try to put words on this. But it made me realize that I think all of us carry things with us that we don't realize we do. And because we've been carrying these things for so long, we don't know that there's another way to live, that there's a lighter way to live where we're not carrying this pain, this trauma, those painful memories. It's just been amazing to discover what it felt like to not be carrying this with me. I felt so much lighter. When I left the ceremonies, I still feel so much lighter. I'm trying now to be a little bit more conscious of any type of weight or pain that I'm feeling and not just almost taking it for granted, like being like, oh, that's the default. That's just feeling heavy like this is the default. Once you've experienced what it's like to feel light, you know this is something you can strive for and that, you know, you can try and have more of in your life.

Yeah, this is such an area of rich exploration for me right now is kind of releasing that old pain, the ancestral pain, the, the burdens that we carry. And I'm not a scientist, I'm not studying for a PhD like you are. And so I have only cursory understanding of a lot of the science behind some of this stuff. But as I understand it, we're having a better and better body of work around the pain that we carry from our ancestors and the way that We get epigenetically shaped by pain from prior generations. And I find that really fascinating that it's not just the idea of what our people went through, but it's actually like in our DNA gets shifted and we end up carrying this with us over time.

This is how we survive as a species, right? It makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint. That anything that has caused a lot of pain to an organism will be encoded and remembered and transmitted to their offspring so they have better chances of surviving. But you find this pattern and, and at the macro level, at the, you know, in terms of timelines over generations, but in your own life as well, at that level where responses that you have that may protect you in some way. Can also hurt you and others. And sometimes it is better to let go of some of the, the tools and the protections and the armors that we have created for ourselves that may have been helpful at some point, but are not so helpful anymore.

Right. Yeah. I, I sometimes talk about it too as kind of like every quality or habit that we have has a shadow side and an affirmative side. And there are expressions of that same quality that if we can transform them from maybe the shadow side that's been living in us that we didn't realize into the affirmative version of that going forward, it can just shape, reshape how we experience things. Like the visual that I have that is of course not reality is I almost imagine the brain equivalent of like a muscle knot. We get these little muscle knots in our conscious where we think that's the way we must be, and it's like really tight and embedded, and it's in there. And then we, you know, we have to find these tools, whether it's psychoactive drugs, or whether it's forms of therapy or whatever, that kind of like breaks it apart enough to where you can see the knot, you know, dissolving itself, basically. That's the visual I have for myself. And what it's done is, once you can separate it out, and in that form of therapy, for me, it was like seeing the different parts of it and how it was all shaped. In my mind, it was like, okay, now I can handle this a little better. I can like acknowledge the pieces here. And for me, if you'll indulge for a minute, because I know most people are here to hear you, not me. But the story that really came to mind for me as I was listening to you talk about this experience of ayahuasca, and the reason I asked about the like purging of that maternal ancestral pain that has been a major aspect of my own inner growth and work over the past couple of years. And for me, it's been through this Internal Family Systems methodology of therapy. I had had a couple of sessions, and in one of the sessions, I basically like imagined that I was a well, and that the well was— throughout my life, people were just tossing their pain in there. My extended family, my cousins, my parents, my ancestors, whatever. And that I was ready not to be the well anymore. That was like what came out of this therapy session. And so, and this was the first time that I realized that I had been acting as if it was my job to carry everyone around me's pain, like the world's pain. And on some level, how egotistical that is, like I can fix everything. So this is the context going into a coach training retreat I was on last year. And without going way into like the coach training, one of the half days we were on this like beautiful, I don't know, something like 40-acre property, 50-acre property in the North Carolina mountains in the southeastern United States. And we were going to do a day on the land or half day on the land as they put it. And this is a, like a little mini version of what Native American cultures would call a vision quest. So being on the land for an extended period of time to see what it has to teach you. And normally it involves like fasting and purging yourself in that way. So we didn't get all into that, but we spent a half day on the land and they told us to go out with an intention or a question. And, you know, I heard you talking about the preparation and the lead-in to the ayahuasca ceremony and, and you not necessarily being certain what your question was, but knowing enough about your intent to have something that you were starting with and the leader of that kind of reassuring you that like, that's enough.. And so I went into that half day with this therapy session in the background of like being a well and trying to figure out, you know, why these are my burdens to carry. And like, what was wrong with me basically that I had, I felt that way. So I really tried to embrace the exercise. It's like, we're going to spend a day on the land. I might, I'm here. I might as well see what I can get out of this. And I went and laid by this river and I said, Okay, trees and land. I want to know what's wrong with me. Like, why have I been carrying these burdens for so long? I took a nap just laying on the ground there, and I woke up and I just started bawling, crying. It was just like the tears were flowing. And crying is a thing that I've had to work on, like get access to my tears. So I'm crying and I feel this urge to like start wiping my body from my head to my toe. And every time I do it, I flick my fingers at the end and name one of these burdens that I had been carrying. It was like I was ready for them to, you know, go in the bucket of the well and get tossed out finally. And it was like I was throwing them in the river. And I got to the end, and it was like it was everything just from my whole life that I imagined my dad went through, and his parents, and my ancestors coming from Mexico. And then I felt the urge to walk out into the river, and it was like, okay, I'm trying not to judge myself when I'm in the middle of this because Everything in me wants to hold myself back or like worry about what people are going to think if I go wading into the river. Anyways, I go wading into the river. And now I lean down and I'm like washing my hands and arms. And it's like, I want to get every little bit of this old pain out. So I wash myself and say every pain all over again. And I get done with this. And I feel the lightest I've ever felt it, like what you said when you got done with the ceremony. And it's like, I feel light. I'm relieved I don't have these things that I'm carrying anymore. It's exactly how I felt. And they were probably still, I don't know, an hour and a half left. And I had this sense that I wanted to go up towards where I could see the sunset. So I walked up this hill. And at the top, the founder of this coach training company that originally owned the, the land, he's got a memorial because he's passed away. As I'm walking up this hill, I come over just the crest of the hill and the sun is setting over the North Carolina mountains. And it's like you can see the beams of the sun. And again, I just start bawling, but this time I'm like laugh crying is the best way I can describe it. And it's because I can see the beauty of a sunset for the first time. It feels like I'm seeing it for the first time ever. I can actually appreciate in that moment how wonderful and beautiful the world is and the sun is and like the mountains. And it feels so light and joyful that I just can't— I'm laughing and crying. It's like this other experience, the opposite of what I was feeling by the river. And I go the rest of the way up the hill, and there's like a swing sitting right there. And I sit down and I feel this wind come from behind me that feels like it's coming from the memorial of this man who's there. And like, he's almost talking to me and creating this experience. And I just sit there with my arms out on this swing and just like I'm a little child, you know, I just sit there in the wind and watch the sunset on the swing. I'm like sitting there, and after the fact, I'm thinking— and now even as I tell it, it's like I recognize how ridiculous this sounds, you know? It sounds ridiculous. I can't believe that I would have never— you know, going back to the 26 versus 36 thing, my 26-year-old self could not have fathomed embracing or even being vulnerable enough to try to have the experience that they intended for us to have. And yet reminded me so much of your story of like the lightness and just being ready to let things go and being able to welcome the experience, whether it's, you know, you've talked about psilocybin or ayahuasca, or whether it's just ritual that allows you to the space to shed these things. So anyways, I felt compelled to share that with you as a relationship to your story.

You know, you made me realize something It's that children are very good at doing weird stuff that feels good. And then we grow up and we learn how to repress those instincts to just go and do the weird thing, whether it's running naked around like in a field or screaming at the top of your lungs or just laughing like crazy. Rolling your body on the floor, dancing when you feel like it. All of that kind of stuff that we naturally do as children, we stop doing as we grow up. And I wonder if self-development, self-betterment, personal growth is not about relearning those skills that we had as a child, the skills of letting go, laughing, crying, dancing, running, and all of these kind of things. And you do see that sometimes when you have very old people and you're like, they're so weird. They just say whatever they want to say. They're just doing whatever they want to do. And usually when we talk about them, we say that we're a little bit judgy, but really we're a little bit admirative in the way we say it because we're a little bit jealous. We feel like, I wish I could be like this old person. And so I feel like what you did or, and, and what a lot of people are maybe trying to do when they do this work of reconnecting with their inner self is to try to accelerate this process. So we don't have to wait until we're 80 to finally feel like we're free to be ourselves.

Yeah. And it, it, one of the things that stuck with me is, um, how many people live their entire lives never getting to feel like themselves. You know, I think about. My dad, or, you know, any number of people, or even leaders you see out there that you can just see are operating from a place of pain in the way that they lead or the way that they make decisions. You often know because you'll see it in the reactivity or the posturing, or— and it's given me so much appreciation just for the amount of pain in the world and how I wish that so many people could experience something different, that they could have a similar kind of breakthrough or moment or moments like what you've had, like what I've had, that will unlock a different way of being. And who knows, maybe it won't last for us. You know, I hope it will, and I certainly feel different now than I did before, but who knows? We'll see.

There are always going to be ups and downs. Like, there's been ups and downs for me since I worked with ayahuasca. I think the main advantage of doing this kind of work is just knowing that the ups exist. And that you have ways, you have tools of getting back up there, which doesn't mean you'll manage to maintain yourself at that level all the time, but you know, this is something that you have access to.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I agree with you. Well, there's two places I thought we might go and we've got a little bit more time together. One is I wanted to talk about your just kind of creative process and some of the ideas that you've had. I think we should go there cuz I had some other questions, but we've talked in such depth about just inner growth and all of that, that I don't want to completely exhaust it. I'd rather talk some about your creative process, your amount of publishing and the number of ideas that you share is incredible. And that didn't come from nowhere. Like you really challenge yourself. And I think this is a great example of personal experiments and growth loops. Uh, which are two concepts that you talk about. And when you got started with Nest Labs, uh, early on, you challenged yourself to publish an essay a day for 100 working days. So you still took the weekends off, but you gave yourself this challenge, this experiment to see, can I create a writing habit and maintain it over an extended period of time? And now it's become the basis for all of this beautiful work that's out in the world. I wonder how making that commitment to yourself and then living into becoming a writer over and over and over and over? Because I think you're— my perspective is you're always kind of becoming a writer. You're never a writer, you're always becoming a writer, and you practice it over and over and over. I wonder how the practice of writing has changed you as a person and how it's shaped you now.

It really has changed my life. I used to consider myself a writer as a kid. I was writing novels. I sent a few to different publishers, and I really thought that I would be a novelist as I was growing up. This or that, or a paleontologist. Those were the two careers I was considering as a kid. And then adult life happened. I went to university, I got a job at Google, and I completely forgot about my dreams of writing. So for me, this exercise, this challenge I gave myself, this little experiment of 100 articles in 100 workdays, was also a way to reconnect with the joy that writing was giving me as a child, but putting it in as part of a structure and a framework that would fit into my days as an adult. And in terms of how it's changed me, writing itself, again, is something that I've always been doing. You know, I'm journaling a lot. I was writing poetry as a teenager, so I think writing has always been kind of a part of me, but what has changed me the most is writing in public, writing online. This is completely different in between having a bunch of notebooks at home where you write, nobody's seeing that, it feels very safe versus putting yourself out there, publishing your work, and then whether you want it or not, you are going to get feedback. Sometimes the feedback is that Nobody comments on it. Nobody replies and it's crickets. That's feedback too. It just means that it didn't resonate with anyone. And sometimes it's very positive and someone, you get people pushing back on what you said, saying, I don't think that's true. I don't agree. So whatever you do, you will get that feedback. I think this has created some sort of like muscle in me where I feel very comfortable now. When you publish something every day and every day you're getting feedback, then it becomes very natural to receive that feedback, whether it's positive, negative, or you don't receive any comments at all. It becomes part of the way you think and you work and you design everything around those growth loops where you never feel like anything you're doing is an end goal in and of itself. Everything becomes part of your learning process. And every time you use that muscle, you create something, you put it out there, you listen to the feedback, you incorporate what you learned into your next piece of work. You're really creating this very virtuous cycle of growth for yourself that is not always comfortable, but that is highly efficient. And where even if you don't see it at the loop level, at each loop, you don't really feel it, but when you look back one year later, You feel like, wow, I can't believe how much I've grown.

Yeah. I mean, even just in this moment, I wanna reflect back to you, like the body of work you've created is remarkable. I could have spent 2 or 3 more weeks just reading what you've created. And you know, 5 years is not a short amount of time, but all things considered, I mean, it's a relatively short amount of time to completely transform your life. And to create a body of work that, you know, it's only the beginning of what you will create, you know, whether it's the book or whatever else you go on to do. But it's incredible. I wonder as you sit with that and you hear me reflect that back to you, how that feels.

But first, uh, thank you. And I think 5 years is about right. And, uh, I actually think it's Paul Millard who said that, but that it, in his experience and his been really looking at, you know, people changing careers and, and those kinds of things for a long time. 5 years is the amount of time it takes to completely change your life if you want to, if you start from scratch. And that feels right to me. And I think you can start seeing effects and you can definitely start feeling the changes very quickly. And as soon as a couple of months, really, if you decide to commit to something and stick to it and take it very seriously. But 5 years is the amount of time where you look back and you almost can't remember what life felt like before you started this journey.

Yeah. Yeah. Just the contrast and, um, where you were, you know, at Google and then trying to start the startup and everything to now where you have, I won't say complete autonomy because you're still going through a PhD program. So you have requirements you have to meet, but relative complete autonomy over your work and direction. I mean, just the two realities couldn't be more different, which I find fascinating. One of the things I was thinking a lot about is another guest on the show, and I don't know whether her episode will come before or after this one, but Hannah Ritchie from Our World in Data. She also kind of bridges this gap between the academic world at Oxford and the public world and sees her work as kind of an interface between those things of like the data coming out of research. And public understanding of that data so that we can use it in our decisions in society. And I see you in a similar light, you know, you're occupying the space between the academic world and research and what we're learning from it and filtering through that and the practical ideas that come out of that, that everyday people can apply to their lives and careers. I wonder what it's like for you to try and balance those things, like how you balance the living in the academic world and consuming what you need to and that side of things. With the creative outputs and sharing the ideas and the research with people in a way they can understand?

So interestingly, a challenge I have from having one foot in those two worlds is the way I write, because sometimes if I have been working on a research paper for a while and I have to write my newsletter, I notice, or even I'm writing a book at the moment, as I had mentioned, and my editor can tell when I've been working on a research paper because she knows my tone gets a lot more academic and I use a lot more jargon. And she's like, yeah, just bring yourself back to that, that way of writing that you have normally for, for the newsletter that has made it so popular because I just write like a normal human being. And equally, sometimes I've been working a lot on the book and on Nas Labs and I need to write a research paper and I have to put myself back into this way of writing that is very stuffy that I don't particularly like, but that is just the way academics are supposed to write. And none of my papers would get published if I decided to invent a completely different style of writing. So that's been something that's been quite fun, that context switching or style switching in between the two. In terms of what it's been like, I feel like very selfishly, it has helped me understand the science. Better because when you have to explain it to someone else who doesn't have a scientific background, it forces you to deeply get what you're talking about. You cannot hide behind complicated words and pretend that you know what you're talking about. You have to use metaphors sometimes and analogies, and you have to describe it in a way that is vivid enough that people will be able to picture it and apply it in their daily lives. And you can't do this if you don't know what you're talking about. So it's been a really good forcing mechanism to question my level of understanding of some of the topics that I write about, because it's fascinating how easy it is to fool yourself into thinking that you understand something. And there were topics where if you had asked me, do you understand this? I would've said, yeah, absolutely. And then once I had to sit down and actually explain it in my own words, I realized, wait, that's actually a bit fuzzy. Not quite sure I get it. And I had to go back to research papers. So selfishly, I feel like it's really helped me think better about the topics I'm interested in. And another benefit has been just, again, that feedback that I get from people where very often a lot of people, the feed, it's not even really feedback, it's more additions, expansions, suggestions of other books I should read or podcasts I should listen to and really avenues of, of discovery that I would have not explored myself because I did not know they existed at all. So this is also something very beneficial in terms of writing online, creating content based on the topics you're interested in.

I was wondering about that. Like, what are all of the different sources of input that you're taking into account for your writing? Because the foundationally, I see it as you're translating things that we think we know are true from research, but then you're bringing in this creator mindset to it and making it applicable and giving people action items they can, they can use from it. So I'm, I'm just interested in that. Like, how do you divide your time between, you know, reading research and reading books and podcasts and like, what does your content diet look like?

Very messy. I really admire other creators who have a very organized system. There was a point in my life where, you know, we talked about those mimetic desires and other people's goals, and I really wished at the time I was like this, and I tried to copy some of those systems and use them for myself, and it just doesn't work, and I have to accept that I am a messy creator. This is a metaphor that I use in my writing, but I'm less of an architect and more of a gardener when it comes to exploring and generating ideas. So in terms of what it looks like, I really just let myself fall into rabbit holes whenever there's one that I find. I spend quite a bit of time on Twitter, but I have curated the people I follow in a way where my feed looks pretty good. And most of the time, if I open it, I will see interesting tweets in there. So that has been really helpful, just scrolling through my feed, following people that I really admire intellectually and creatively speaking, bookmarking things that I want to revisit later. And then again, writing actually is, is really how I manage my content diet because since I'm always writing something, whether it's a newsletter or a research paper or the book, there's an automatic filter on the content that I consume. I'll kind of always ask myself, am I reading this for pleasure, which is fine, or am I reading this for work, one of those different pieces of work? And if something I'm stumbling upon is neither pleasurable to read nor useful for my work, then I skip it. And that's really the only rule that I have. And this way I rarely feel like I've wasted my time because you know, it doesn't have to always be utilitarian, right? Sometimes if you just read something because it's beautifully written or it makes you feel something and that's fine, or it's useful to your work and, and that's it. So that's really the rule that I'm using.

Yeah, it's interesting to me to think about how the other ways that things end up in our feeds, you know, I, I like save everything to Matter is the app I've been using for saving reading stuff. And every week before I write my newsletter, I go through and I'm filtering for of these things that I've saved, what might be useful to my audience? And so then I use that filter to say, all right, what am I going to go read of the things I've saved? And then of those, which of them are actually useful to my audience in rank order, basically? And those become the top 3 that I share every week. It's interesting to find the other things that just end up never getting read. It's like they fall further and further down my Matter list. It's like, why did they end up there? Did I think I was supposed to read them? Is it because I'm like, I want to be the kind of person who reads that kind of thing? I'm like, what is that? Uh, so I'm just fascinated by that, how we filter our, our reading and, and things we consume.

It reminds me a little bit of the concept of the anti-library. I don't know if you've ever heard about it.

Yeah. I love, I, yes. Tell me more.

Yes. Look, you're looking at all of your books around you. Same for me. I have so many I haven't read and I love this concept, the idea that you collect books, not to have a display of everything you know, but as a reminder of everything you want to learn. And it's the same with your bookmarks, with Matter. It's just all of the things that you want to learn. And it's not that you may never get to read everything. You will never get around to reading everything, but that's fine because the fact that you're collecting so many ideas just shows how curious you are about the world, even though you will never be able to go through all of them. And it's the same with an entire library and with books. And I really like your system. I feel like it's very similar with books. I buy way too many books. I'm never going to be able to read them all, but on a moment-to-moment basis, I select the next one I'm going to read depending on what feels right, what's useful, what is something that I'm going to deeply connect with in this moment because it makes sense for the person I am today and the goals that I have at the moment. And I think that's completely fine. And some of them I may never read sometimes. I have friends visiting and there are books that I know I'm never going to read, but they look at it and they're like, oh, that looks cool. I'm like, take it, just take it because I'm probably never going to get around this one. Yeah. So I think keep on collecting bookmarks, keep on collecting books. That's completely fine. Yeah.

I had to really get over the idea that I should have read all the books on my shelves because I'm the same way. I collect books, I buy too many, I can't possibly read them all. And there's two things that helped me. One was Obviously it was like embracing it first that this is just who I am. I buy books, I enjoy it. But the two things that really helped me get over it were one, pruning to go back to like your gardening idea. I prune the books on my shelves in my anti-library. I don't know, probably once a year, maybe once every 6 to 9 months where sometimes I outgrow the intent for a book when I first bought it and it's like, oh, I don't need that one anymore. I'll go put it in the little mini library down the street and someone else can have it. And it's such a moment of freedom because now I no longer feel obligated to that one. It's like, okay, I've— I outgrew it and it's gone. And now I have all the rest of the ones left that are so interesting. And so the second thing that has helped me embrace it is one of the most joyful moments to me is every time I finish a book and I close it, and before I move on to whatever I'm going to do, whether it's going to bed or moving on to the rest of my day, I go and pick the next book. And that moment of getting to look at my anti-library and say, what's next? Is the best. It's the freaking best. I love it. And then I'll read like the first 2 pages so that I just have a little head start to get into the next one, and then I'll go do the next thing. And that moment of joy has really helped me embrace, like, and that's why I have all these unread books.

I love this so much. I love this so much. I sometimes I finish a book and then I get very busy with other stuff and I can spend like a couple of weeks without reading anything that is not completely like, you know, that is not a research paper or something that I'm, I'm reading for work. So I think I'm going to steal that little technique that you have of just picking the next one and reading the first couple of pages. One I'm going to also share with you, and in case that's helpful for other people who, like us, enjoy reading, it's a rule I've made for myself since I started the PhD. I realized at the time that I was only reading nonfiction. Because I had gotten so obsessed with my work and because it was, it is still very interesting and I love learning about the brain. So I could only read nonfiction, but now I make it a point to alternate. So it's one nonfiction, one fiction. And if I'm very anxious to get to the next nonfiction book, I can just slot in a quick, like a short book of poetry or something that is not going to take me 2 weeks to read. But I just make sure that I balance the two because in my experience, you can learn a lot from fiction as well. And, and I think it's good to consume both types of books.

Yes. Couldn't agree more. I can't read nonfiction before bed or else my mind gets turning. And so I always read fiction before bed. So I kind of always have one of each going. But one of the things I did on the fiction side was I went back and I downloaded all of my favorites I could remember from childhood. Uh, so it was like the Redwall series and Where the Red Fern Grows and Hatchet and just a bunch of these, like, they're kids' books basically. And I started reading those in similar kind of moments. If I'm feeling like I want to get onto the next one, I'll read one of these shorter kids' novels and it takes me back to a moment in time of childhood and all of that. And that's been really fun and beautiful too. We could talk about books all day. However, we're running out of time and I have a couple of questions I usually close out with. But before I get to those, there was one thing that you shared when chatting with Johnny Miller about this TikTok filter that was available for a while where you could see a version of your younger self on the screen. You talked about how emotional it was for some people to be able to see younger them, and it makes total sense. You know, if, if anyone listening has done therapy, you know, like so much of that work is working with the younger version of yourself that's kind of frozen in a moment in time. So it makes sense that it would make people emotional. What I wondered is, from where you sit right now, everything that you've done to this point, all the growth you've experienced, I wonder what you might say to your younger self that I know has gone through so much and you've shared so much of what you've been through earlier in life. I wonder what you might say to that younger version of yourself that popped up on, uh, on the screen with the filter.

I would tell her, you don't have to impress anyone. Nobody cares. Just do whatever you wanna do.

Yeah, that's really awesome. I would probably tell myself something similar and I don't think I would've been ready to receive it. And so it would probably just sit there in the back of my brain for a while, while I learned, while I learned. Um, okay, here are my 3 closing questions. You know, people usually do rapid fire. These aren't always rapid fire, but, um, I wonder often in interviews And I've been on a lot of podcasts, mostly business stuff over the years. There's like the question I wish they would've asked me, and instead it was whatever it was. And I wonder if there's a question you wish I would've asked in this conversation that maybe you'd like to answer now.

Ooh, this is actually an excellent question to ask the guest what they want to be asked. What am I hoping for in the near future or future in general?

I love it. I'm gonna combine that with my last question cuz they're related. So let me go to my second to last one first. I named my coaching company, and it's possible— I'm working on a memoir right now. It's possible this will be the name of it. It is An Unbearably Beautiful Future, and it resonates with some people and it doesn't resonate with others. But what it resonates with me based on is this idea that we could create a future for ourselves or for humanity or anywhere in between that is so wonderful as to be almost unimaginable right now. It's like almost, you don't want to touch it because it's so hopeful that it makes you that excited about it. I wonder what the most beautiful version of the future could be for you and how you hope to influence that for yourself and others.

I'm very, very, very much hoping that we get to a point where enough people have access to the same kind of tools I've had access to, whether, as you mentioned, in your case, it was IFS, you know, therapy. In my case, it was psychedelics. I find it incredibly painful to know that these tools exist and that so many people either don't know they exist or they know they exist, but for legal or financial or cultural reasons, they don't have access to them. So. To me, this would be a beautiful future, one where everyone has access to these tools and one where at a personal level I can keep on working with them as well.

Yeah, I'm with you on that. More access to tools that help us process past pain is how I would frame that. Okay. My last question is, who are you becoming in this work that you're doing as a person, as a professional?

A connector. Hopefully, I think that's what I'm good at and not necessarily in a community building sense, but just helping people connect the dots for themselves to achieve whatever their potential is and to explore whatever their ideas are.

That's beautiful. Yeah. Connector, helping people realize their potential. So let's come back then to the question you want to be asked, which is what's your vision? And you've shared versions of this over time, you know, maybe the latest of which that I heard was that perhaps you might not stay in academia, but you might take the principles of academia and create a place where people can come together and explore ideas and maybe do original research together. It could be that building on that or something completely different. How's your vision growing? What's your vision for what you want to create?

It's changing all the time because there's always a tension between what I think should exist and how I want to design my own life at an individual level. And so I'm very excited about this idea of creating a citizen lab where anyone could come and design their own experiments and learn about neuroscience and really getting all of that research out of just universities and having it in the world where anyone could access it and understand how it works. Because now that I've, I'm almost done with my PhD, I realize that there's nothing overly complicated about it. It, it's really the impression that scientists give on the outside, and maybe because there's not enough access to that education, but anyone could learn to use these tools. And I think that's something that should exist. But on the other side, after being in London for so long, and having in front of me this opportunity to become location independent again, once I'm done with the PhD, I have this yearning for being able to just have my little suitcase, being able to live wherever I want and travel and meet people all around the world, which is not necessarily compatible with having a brick and mortar lab that you're managing. So again, in that liminal space we talked about at the beginning, not really knowing which path is the right one, but I'm approaching this from a place of openness and, uh, we'll see where the next month are taking me in terms of self-reflection.

Yeah, that's awesome. Well, I'll leave you with this, Anne-Laure. I am so grateful for your work and I'm so grateful that you have put in all the work on your inner self to stay with it and become the kind of person who can share the things that you share. It's been deeply impactful for me. I enjoy it personally, and I think it's very important and I hope you keep going for a really long time. So thank you for your work and thanks for joining me.

Thank you so much. Thank you.

Thanks for listening to another episode of Good Work. This podcast is created by me, your host Barrett Brooks, and produced by my friends over at Podcast Royale. You can subscribe for all future episodes by going to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever whatever your favorite podcast app might be. My guest today was Anne-Laure Le Cunff. You can find her excellent writing at nestlabs.com, as well as consider joining our community there. You can also follow along with her on Twitter, Instagram, or LinkedIn. My favorite of all of those is Twitter, but choose your favorite platform. She's super fun to engage with and very approachable on all the topics she talks about. You can also find all of the resources, notes, essays, quotes, clips, and everything else you might want in the show notes at goodworkshow.com. If you enjoyed today's episode, there's two things I'd love you to do. You can first of all, share it with a friend. Podcasts grow through word of mouth. That's the fact of the matter. So I'd love your help spreading the message. If you enjoyed this interview, share it with someone who will enjoy it too. And secondly, if you really enjoyed this interview and you're feeling generous, I'd love it if you'd leave a review on either Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Reviews are part of the algorithm that help other people find it. And so it really helps me as the show's creator to reach more people. When you go and leave a review. Next week's show, you can look forward to an interview with Sophie Purdum. Sophie's the co-founder of a site called Climate Tech VC, which is the preeminent publication about the climate tech industry. Climate tech is an interesting one because we talk about it as one cohesive thing, but I think about it more as a layer. There is an entire technology layer that needs to get built where we're reinventing many of the largest and most prominent industries in the world to help reverse climate change. Sophie's an expert in so many of the deep industry knowledge that's needed to help create that transformation. Lately, she's taken that transformation and all of that knowledge about it and turned it into a new venture capital firm called Planeteer Capital. We talk about her whole journey to working in climate tech, launching the fund, and what she's learned along the way. I think you're going to love that. So look forward to that next week. For now, thanks so much for tuning in this week. Hope you enjoyed it, and we'll see you next time.