Ted Audio Collective

Hello, I'm Chris Anderson, welcome to the Ted interview

and another episode seeking to make sense of the strange times we're in right now.

Today we're talking to the best-selling author Elizabeth Gilbert.

She has an extraordinary resume, she's the author of the smash hit novel Eat, Pray, Love and many other beautiful books.

Did you give a Ted talk about tapping into your elusive creative genius that has been viewed nearly 20 million times?

Some of you might also recognize it from the first episode of this podcast two years ago, which continues to be one of my favourites.

But the thing that underlies the success of all these things is why I wanted to talk to Liz today.

And that is that she has this incredible gift for putting into words the emotional landscape of our lives.

She's exactly who I want to be talking to in this moment given that we're all going through this emotional roller coaster.

We held this conversation live on Facebook and so that we could post it quickly, it's not been edited at all.

You may hear Ted's head of curation, Helen Malters, popping in every now and then from her bustling family home to ask questions from our online audience.

And look, if you'd like to join us live, we'll continue these conversations on our Facebook page next week at noon, US, Eastern time every weekday.

We'd love to see you here or just keep listening on this podcast. And with that, here is Elizabeth Gilbert.

Hey Chris.

Great to see you. How are you? Where are you? Are you who you living with or staying with? What's up?

I'm fine. I don't want to brag, but I'm in New Jersey where anybody would want to be. I'm by myself. I've got a little house out in the country.

And I think I'm on day 17 of no human contact other than virtually. And I'm well. I'm not anybody who you need to be worrying about right now. So I'm good.

Wow. Well, so you're in a way or you're having a related experience to what so many people are having. I mean, this is a days of isolation for many people. And that brings with it lots of difficult emotions in a way.

And we're going to we're going to go through many of them, I hope in the next hour. So I'm hoping to talk with you about this. Yeah, right now, I know this here about anxiety loneliness, curiosity, creativity, procrastination, grief, connection and hope.

How about that? That's our agenda. That's like a simple buffet. Just a little light tasting menu of all the massive human emotions. Let's do it. Absolutely.

So I think I think it's probably good to die of straight in with the anxiety that I know a lot of people are feeling right now. So many reasons to be anxious both for yourself, your loved ones. And just for this time and for the world and how we all get through this.

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