In this episode, Dan and Jeff talk about their first time being in a panic attack and how it changed their perspectives on fear and how to deal with it. They also talk about the benefits of martial arts training and how you can use it to combat your own fears. This episode is brought to you by Anchor.fm and is produced by Dan Harris and Jeff Warren. Thanks to everyone for all your support, stay safe out there and Don't Get Lost in the Storm! Don't forget to SUBSCRIBE on Apple Podcasts or wherever else you get your podcasts. You can also become a supporter of the podcast by becoming a patron patron patron. Thank you so much for all the support, it means a lot to us and we can't wait to bring you more episodes like this in the future. Stay tuned for the next episode where we talk about fear and panic attacks and how they can affect us and how we deal with them. If you like what you hear, please leave us a review and tell a friend about it! Timestamps: 1:00 - What are you afraid of? 2:30 - How do you deal with panic attacks? 3:10 - How can you overcome fear? 4:20 - What do you cope with panic? 5:00 6:40 - What is your coping mechanism? 7:10 8:40 9:30 Is fear real? 10:00 How can I deal with fear and anxiety? 11:00 What are we can do to overcome fear and learn how to overcome it? 12:00 Do you know what you're afraid of something you like? 13: How do I know you're not scared of something? 14:30 15:00 Can you control your fear of something that s better than other people? 16:00 Is fear better than you can help you? 17:00 Does fear help you better deal with something you can control your life? 18:00 Are you scared of it better than someone else? 19: Is fear a bad thing? 21:30 Do you want to learn something new? 22:10: What do I need to be scared of fear and a better way to cope with fear or do you have a better chance of getting better at something better than that? 25:00 Will you let me help you learn to overcome your fear?
00:01:14.000I know you spend so much time exploring your consciousness and meditating and just being in your head that I felt like this is something that you really should be exposed to.
00:01:24.000You're absolutely right, and I appreciate it.
00:01:31.000Because the brief discussion we had, I know we wanted to not fully explore it until we got on the pod.
00:01:37.000The brief discussion we had afterwards, one of the things you said is that it's good to kind of explore your boundaries when it comes to fear.
00:01:45.000This is something actually that my meditation teacher has said to me before.
00:01:48.000And it made me realize, I think I need to get in there and start pushing it a little bit in this...
00:01:56.000In the tank, because it will help me in lots of areas of my life, because when you don't test those boundaries, your life becomes smaller and smaller.
00:02:05.000And that happens to people with panic.
00:02:07.000Well, it happens just people in general, and I think it's one of the reasons why people fall into panic.
00:02:13.000It's because they don't have enough experience with stressful situations to the point where they can just relax and just let it happen.
00:02:20.000And that's one of the reasons why I think martial arts training is very good for people.
00:02:25.000Not just for the self-defense aspect of it.
00:02:28.000For the aspect of just dealing with stressful situations on a regular basis to the point where you're very comfortable with them and then you realize that the consequences of this is it's not really as bad as you think it is like Most people are terrified of physical confrontation But when you have physical confrontation on a regular basis,
00:02:47.000especially through my favorite, which is jujitsu training, because there's no striking, so you don't get hit in the head.
00:02:53.000You're not worried about brain damage or any of that stuff.
00:05:40.000Used to freaking out in this moment that literally you no longer have control and you just you try to Make the shot go off as quick as you can you'll miss by feet and you just you can't understand it like I practice every day like how is this happening, but if there's this Weird,
00:05:56.000overwhelming sensation of adrenaline and fear and nerves and the chaos of the moment.
00:06:02.000And you just slam the trigger and the arrow goes flying nowhere near the target.
00:06:06.000And it's really, really common to the point where people seek psychologists and sports trainers and there's all these different methods that they use to try to keep in a controlled loop system of thought process to try to handle this.
00:06:19.000It's probably like you said, athletic trainers.
00:06:22.000Probably the fighting it and the getting in your head about it is probably the same as when you get in a slump in baseball.
00:06:29.000You're just locked up in yourself and it takes a long time to get over it.
00:06:34.000In the tank, I was thinking a lot about how that has been just a huge...
00:06:38.000Recurring theme in my life where the ego steps in, the thinking mind, the mind that won't surrender to what is actually happening right now comes in, I get locked up and can't do what I want to do.
00:06:53.000One of the things Jeff and I have talked a lot about in our My time together is dancing.
00:07:00.000I mean, can't do it isn't the right way to say it.
00:07:02.000But I've struggled for a long time with dropping my self-consciousness enough so that I can dance in a way that, you know, I have a three-year-old around the house and we like to dance.
00:07:10.000And even around him, I get a little in my own head about it.
00:07:14.000And I think all these things are related.
00:07:34.000So I'm looking at my mind, and, you know, the idea of, first of all, Just because I've spent the last nine years looking closely at my mind doesn't mean that I've conquered all of my neuroses.
00:07:51.000And I don't know that that's on offer.
00:07:55.000You pointed to something important about testing those limits, and I think meditation can be really helpful in testing those limits.
00:08:01.000And I was meditating most of the time that I was in the tank.
00:08:05.000And that allowed me, bringing that kind of focused attention to what was happening, allowed me not to get carried away with the waves of fear that came and I was able to let them pass without hopping out and embarrassing myself.
00:08:18.000But I don't know that I can magically...
00:08:23.000I think it's going to be a process before I can get in an MRI, is what I'm trying to say in a long way.
00:08:28.000Well, if you have damaged shoulders, man, you kind of have to.
00:08:33.000But you don't even know what's wrong with them?
00:08:35.000I think it's bursitis, but I need to get a diagnosis before I can figure out whether I got to get surgery or cortisone shot or whatever it is.
00:09:08.000Compressing it with poor posture, compressing it with stress, exercise, and your shoulder needs to expand and it also needs this sensation of hanging your body weight from your hands.
00:09:23.000It's like tremendous for your shoulder.
00:09:26.000And there's some doctors, there's one doctor in particular that explored this, see if you can find that guy's name, who stopped doing most shoulder surgeries and started putting people on hanging therapy, where he just tells them, you know, at the beginning, just have a bar that's not quite above your head so that you could just sort of relax your knees and,
00:09:46.000you know, if you can't, Carry all of your weight in your hands.
00:09:49.000Just carry a good percentage of your weight in your hands and try to relax your shoulders.
00:10:17.000Dr. John Kirsch, John M Kirsch, and he came up with this many years ago when he realized that one of the things that was messing people up was just, they just, their joints weren't being put through the full range of motion and that by hanging you could release a tremendous amount of the pain and discomfort that a lot of people are facing.
00:10:42.000It seems to me that you guys are actually talking about the same thing.
00:10:45.000When you're talking about the mind, and you're talking about the body, and talking about impingements, and you're talking about where your mind is limited, I think it's the same exact dynamic, actually, of what's going on.
00:10:56.000How would you define what an impingement is in the body?
00:11:00.000A blockade, lack of range of motion, poor exercise habits, there's a variety of factors, ignoring potential injuries, and then restricting your motion to the point where everything sort of tightens up.
00:11:17.000Muscle tissue in particular, joint tissue, like around the shoulders and any time where you're dealing with range of motion issues, you have to stretch.
00:11:27.000And most people very rarely stretch their shoulders.
00:11:32.000And also most people very rarely strengthen their shoulders.
00:11:36.000And I think it's a very complex joint.
00:11:39.000When you look at the way your shoulders articulate, there's not anything in your body that can do these sort of things in the range of motion that your shoulders exhibit while carrying weight.
00:11:49.000So you think about all the different things, carrying your kid, picking up a briefcase, you're doing a lot of weird motions.
00:11:54.000With your shoulders, and occasionally you develop little tears.
00:11:57.000Those tears, they start out superficial.
00:12:14.000You don't get that MRI. You don't get therapy, and it just gets worse and worse to the point where you see a lot of people get shoulder replacements.
00:12:27.000It's repeating the same pattern over and over, having some kind of involuntary response that gets a little bit deeper, a little bit deeper, a little bit deeper each time.
00:12:36.000And it's like your mind is a mental body.
00:12:39.000And it has habits, and it develops bad habits, and it develops limited range of motions, what it can do.
00:12:46.000And so we end up in this really narrow situation, inevitably, because we end up with a particular set of conditioning, and it starts to limit us.
00:12:53.000So you use practices, just like you use physical practices to open up your range of motion, to work through impingements, to, you know, have more flexibility.
00:13:02.000You do the same for, you know, with meditation or with other kind of mental practices.
00:13:07.000I think it's literally the same thing and that there's just this sort of isometric nature between the mind and body.
00:13:16.000And what we were talking about before the podcast when we were in the hallway about just dealing with stressful situations and the tank, like, if there's a weird freakout that happens, like, how do you handle it?
00:13:40.000It's a matter of constantly being exposed to these stressful situations where there's not a long break in between doing stand-up or a long break in between martial arts training to the point where anxiety can build up.
00:13:55.000And then once you get into it, it's an unusual situation instead of a usual one.
00:14:00.000That's probably why I probably need to get in the tank reasonably soon.
00:14:04.000This is your show, but if you don't mind, would you say more about that?
00:14:10.000Because you're able to get in the tank not only regularly, but you'll dose yourself with some stuff before you get in the tank.
00:14:58.000Most people aren't aware that it's a completely different psychoactive substance when you eat it because it's processed by your liver and your body produces something called 11-hydroxy metabolite that's four to five times more psychoactive than THC. And it's not psychoactive in the smoking version.
00:15:22.000There's a famous 9-11 case where there's an audio recording of these cops that took some pot from some kids and made pot brownies of it and then ate it and then called the police and called 911 on themselves because they thought they were dying.
00:15:38.000But it is one of the greatest audio recordings of all time.
00:16:53.000It's gonna feel really crazy, and you're gonna...
00:16:56.000It brings up memories from years ago, from weird conversations you might have had where you acted poorly, or weird choices that you might have made decades ago, or things that crossed your mind a couple of days ago that you're embarrassed about.
00:17:12.000There's all these different things that will come out that will just...
00:17:15.000Your brain, your mind, your consciousness wants to explore these because it feels that you neglected them or that you put them on the back burner or that you didn't give them enough attention.
00:17:26.000You didn't give them the attention that they deserve, so they're festering and bouncing around the inside of your mind.
00:17:32.000And I find that edibles in particular, it's a very self-exploratory experience.
00:17:38.000And your brain desperately wants to point out all these areas that it feels that you might have neglected.
00:18:12.000It's almost like having a near-death experience on a regular basis.
00:18:16.000Well, you get out of a near-death experience and one of the things that people say is even if it's a near-death experience like from a severe illness or an injury, you have a perspective enhancement from that and you come out of it.
00:18:29.000Feeling like, well, I kind of have a new version of life now.
00:18:34.000I understand life now because I understand the full spectrum.
00:18:37.000Before I was operating in this very comfortable spectrum of everything being safe.
00:18:40.000And now I realize, like, no, it doesn't have to be safe.
00:18:43.000There can be terrible things where everything can go wrong.
00:18:46.000So appreciate this with much more zeal, like much more lust for life.
00:19:04.000In fact, there's a kind of classic progression in a retreat or even in a sit, you could say there's sort of these terrains you move through.
00:19:12.000Where first you're just trying to get going, and then you're kind of having all these breakthroughs and insights, and then you can get into this really challenging stage where it's like you can't meditate, all your dark stuff is coming up.
00:19:22.000Sometimes I think of it as like you're exfoliating the brain.
00:19:26.000You know, you just exfoliate, exfoliate, and all of a sudden you hit an air pocket of some old school shit, like your old shame and your rage and your childish petulance and everything.
00:19:36.000And it all comes bubbling up and you're inside this atmosphere.
00:19:39.000And then from inside that atmosphere, you're seeing everything through that filter.
00:19:43.000You're now seeing how everything sucks and your life's a catastrophe or whatever.
00:19:47.000And just like you were saying about the body and about the psychedelics and about the tank, you've got to learn to be okay with your own uncomfortableness.
00:19:57.000You've got to learn to be okay to sit inside this discomfort and say, actually to welcome it.
00:20:01.000To say, well, this is just part of what's going on with me right now.
00:20:04.000And if you can do that without resistance, like you were saying, without fighting with it, then it can actually work its way out.
00:20:10.000And then you can get into this really beautiful stage of a practice where it's the equanimity stage, they call it, where it's just...
00:20:18.000You're really open and available to things.
00:20:50.000The phenomenology of it is really cool.
00:20:52.000People describe very specific kinds of things happening that drop them into this next level or next progression of insight, you could say.
00:21:00.000I don't want to overstate my meditative capacities, but I had, I would say, probably like a JV version of what you're describing.
00:21:10.000Last month, just a few weeks ago, I was on a 10-day silent meditation retreat.
00:21:14.000I could see, as you describe this progression, I could see in hindsight that that was what I went through.
00:21:21.000As your mind starts to settle and you get more concentrated, there are fireworks.
00:21:27.000You get a lot of sensations in your body that feel really good.
00:21:31.000You're seeing things behind your eyes.
00:21:35.000The mind releases a lot of dopamine and serotonin in response to the reduced chatter that can happen when you're more focused on what's happening right now as opposed to being caught up in the...
00:21:52.000And I, at one point, though, I hit a stage that's sometimes referred to as life review, where I just, all the things I'm most ashamed of just started coming up.
00:22:15.000And I had a conversation with my teacher Who is a brilliant individual.
00:22:20.000I mean, you could argue, some have argued, and I would agree, that one of the greatest living meditation teachers, his name is Joseph Goldstein, and he doesn't walk around in robes or anything like that.
00:22:32.000He's a Jewish guy from the Catskills, and he's in his 70s.
00:22:36.000I was staying in a cabin, and he would pop in and see me in this cabin every once in a while, because it was right near his house.
00:22:43.000One day, I was kind of complaining a lot about The futility of my practice.
00:24:01.000And once you stop wanting, once you just surrender into this thing where you're just non-judgmentally observing whatever comes up in your mind, whether it's fear, whether it's planning lunch, whatever it is, pew, pew.
00:24:38.000And I then, a couple of hours later, started to realize that I had been telling myself a story about how amazing I was and how they should put a plaque up in that room.
00:24:47.000This is where the best meditation sit ever happened and the next meditation I went to, the next time I tried to meditate, it was as if I had never meditated before.
00:24:57.000I didn't know what I was doing anymore and it all collapsed.
00:25:21.000And as you get deeper and deeper into these layers of relaxation, you hit another layer, and you go, okay, now this is relaxing, and then you, nope, nope, there's way more than this.
00:26:30.000But very slowly, you're sinking into the onion, this layer of...
00:26:33.000of tension is kind of appearing or coagulation that starts to kind of coagulate in your experience and eventually you realize that there's this layer of tension here and you're not free, you're inside this thing and then you have to figure out how to exfoliate that or let that go and it just keeps going on because it's Turtles all the way down.
00:26:50.000It's like it's onion layer after onion layer.
00:26:53.000And every time you get into a new place of freedom, the fact and the act of living is creating more coagulation.
00:26:59.000It's creating more just natural frictions and things are coming up.
00:27:03.000So it's not just that you're going through.
00:27:04.000So the progress of insight, the progress of what they call purification in Buddhism is a process of kind of working through your conditioning.
00:27:13.000But also simultaneously learning to work through the new conditioning that's accreting by virtue of just being a human being.
00:27:45.000I think most of us are operating on momentum and I think you learn things as a child and those become whatever your personality is, whatever thought process you sort of have carved into your mind,
00:28:03.000like the grooves and patterns that you normally find yourself.
00:28:06.000Thinking in and I equated to a lot to martial arts training like I I used to teach martial arts for a living one of the things that I found incredibly difficult Was to reteach people it was way easier to teach a person with no training than it was to reteach someone with poor training so when someone has poor training They have these paths carved in their movements and their thought process,
00:28:30.000and when they're in a situation, they fall back on those patterns.
00:28:33.000And it's extremely difficult to get people out of that and learn to do things correctly.
00:28:38.000But if you can teach them how to do things correctly from the beginning, then they naturally, like, this is the stressful situation.
00:28:53.000Whether it's like, don't go to the technique you've been using all your life, now use a new technique and remember to manage that situation under pressure.
00:29:01.000I think that's how most of us are handling our lives.
00:29:05.000We're handling our lives with poor techniques and poor management skills and these Yeah.
00:29:32.000Because you know where they're going, and so you slide right into them.
00:29:36.000And then as an adult, you start trying to remap your consciousness and remap those patterns.
00:29:41.000And in doing that, it's very difficult to sort of rethink how you think.
00:29:47.000I mean, I think what you're pointing to here is close to what has become for me the animating insight of my whole side hustle as a meditation proponent, which is that the mind is trainable.
00:30:03.000Now, you describe, I think, very accurately the ruts in which many of us find ourselves or don't even know we're in.
00:30:11.000But the good news is that there are ways to retrain the mind.
00:30:16.000And I didn't know that until my late 30s when I started reading books about Buddhism.
00:30:35.000These are skills that can be trained that you can take responsibility for just the way you take responsibility for your body in the gym.
00:30:41.000And there are lots of ways to train them.
00:30:43.000Jeff and I obviously talk a lot about meditation, but...
00:30:47.000You've talked about other ways to do it as well, from martial arts to, and there's now been a lot of, there's a growing body of research about psychedelics as well.
00:30:56.000It was obvious to me from being in the isolation, from the sensory deprivation tank, that that is a training too.
00:31:02.000There are lots of ways to get at it, but the fundamental good news is you aren't stuck with the patterns that are making you miserable.
00:31:11.000And I think that all these things are related.
00:31:14.000And I think that even running, even exercise, yoga, I think in particular, all these things that are difficult, when you do these difficult things, you're stressing your mind, or I should say, don't even stressing your mind, exercising your mind,
00:31:30.000and exercising your body's ability to manage intense situations.
00:31:35.000Like, Yoga poses are very intense, especially hot yoga.
00:32:00.000Do you think most people know how to translate what they're learning in something like...
00:32:04.000Because for me, what broke through about meditation was it was so obvious how to translate what I was learning with my eyes closed to my life, whereas all the other things, you know, I had been running since I was in my teens, and while it's absolutely good at staving off depression,
00:32:22.000which I've dealt with for a long time, and making me feel just generally fit, I don't know that I was explicitly taking the lessons of running or any of the other things that many people do that they sometimes refer to as their quote-unquote meditation and applying it to my life the way meditation was,
00:32:41.000It seemed like the obvious aspects of meditation are conscious, like you're looking for these solutions, whereas with running, you might be getting them without being conscious of them or at least getting some of the benefits of it without being conscious.
00:32:53.000But those benefits would certainly be enhanced with a different perspective going into the running, like going into the running with the thought process of testing your consciousness to endure this very difficult thing in front of you like hill running in particular.
00:33:08.000There's something about Anything that's like very uniquely physically stressful like that, which requires the mind to stay the course.
00:33:16.000And in doing so, especially in the other end, once you come out of it, there's this great feeling of euphoria and peace.
00:33:22.000And it's not just a physical release of energy, but it's also an understanding that the brain has exercised the demons that are responsible for the anxiety while you're overcoming this stressful.
00:33:33.000And the limits you told yourself were there.
00:34:40.000Get over the limiting stories you're telling yourself.
00:34:43.000And in fact, yesterday morning when we did SoulCycle, the guy at the end said something I normally would have ignored, which was, next time somebody proposes something to you that you tell yourself you don't want to do, do it.
00:35:05.000Yeah, there's something about things like SoulCycle, like even if they're right, even if the motivational speech rings true, you want to, like, fuck this.
00:35:15.000It's the problem with spiritual teachers, right?
00:35:18.000It's a problem with somebody who's, or anybody who walks around that has the answer.
00:35:22.000And often the answer can be this sort of Pollyanna-ish Disney Channel thing that maybe, it probably is true in some way, but it's just the delivery of that kind of certainty that's so annoying.
00:35:36.000Yeah, I always say that my, you know, there are millions of meditation books.
00:35:41.000The only thing new about the books that I write is that I add the word fuck a lot.
00:35:47.000And that is just a new way to talk about this stuff.
00:35:51.000And because our tendency, or at least guys like us, I think, or people like us, men and women like us, is to...
00:36:01.000When you hear this kind of affirmation uttered, you reflexively reject it, which is, again, normal.
00:36:07.000But if you can just say it to people in fresh language, the reason why these things are cliched is because they're true.
00:36:14.000And they become cliched through sort of mindless repetition.
00:36:17.000But if you can find new ways to articulate them, they can land.
00:36:20.000I think also, whether it's your book on meditation or anybody's just life experiences that they're writing down, we gather information from other people's life experiences in a very unique way.
00:36:34.000And it's one of the reasons why people really enjoy autobiographies.
00:36:37.000It's one of the reasons why people really enjoy Truly reflective, introspective thinking.
00:36:45.000Because we can pick out little gems in ourselves.
00:36:49.000So even though you might be talking in your meditation book about things that other people have talked about in meditation books, you're talking about it from your unique personal experience.
00:36:58.000And when someone reads that, or hears you say it, You get something intangible out of that.
00:37:06.000So my favorite comedian of all time, other than Joe Rogan, is Dave Chappelle.
00:37:11.000And you came on my radar screen because you were on his show, the Chappelle show back in the end, the Fear Factor bit he did years and years ago, which was one of the funniest things I've ever seen.
00:37:23.000And Chappelle, in one of the seasons, Jeff and I were talking about this last night, as a matter of fact, talked about how he was doing one of these outtake episodes.
00:37:32.000I can't remember which season it was in because I only did two and a half.
00:37:36.000He was doing an outtake episode, and at the beginning he did a riff about how back in the day African-American communities never got the good part of the pig to eat.
00:37:44.000The white people got the good parts of the pig.
00:37:46.000So the African-Americans had to figure out how to make good food out of snout.
00:37:52.000And that's, he said, what this episode is going to be.
00:37:55.000We're going to take the snout and we're going to make good stuff out of it.
00:37:58.000And my approach to writing books about meditation is the snout is the good stuff.
00:38:02.000The embarrassing shit that happens to you when you're meditating is the good stuff.
00:38:06.000It is what will allow people to see what the practice does for you.
00:38:10.000So I take the worst, most embarrassing stuff that happens and talk about it because that gives you a front row seat at what training the mind actually looks like.
00:38:19.000And if you can't have a sense of humor about how crazy you are, You are truly fucked.
00:39:05.000Ribbons for New York boobs and he had a box so it's me and him walking through Manhattan and he's got this crazy fake mustache on he's like you've got the best New York boobs and he would give someone like a ribbon for having New York boobs and it was really silly but fun and so I was like wow Dave's got a show and then you know turns out it's the greatest sketch show in the history of the world and a year later he calls me up again And asked me to do this thing for,
00:39:33.000they wanted to do a Fear Factor sketch with Tyron Biggums.
00:39:36.000Yeah, so that's me and him, a fresh-faced Joe Rogan and Dave Chappelle.
00:39:50.000Because I wasn't even doing the Man Show back then, and I was doing that in 2003. So I think it's 2002. The Fear Factor bit is one of my favorites.
00:40:17.000It's hard to say that, though, because if you boiled down a lot of the all-time great shows, like In Living Color or some of the other ones, they had so many seasons.
00:40:25.000If you boiled them down to two seasons, maybe there would be some...
00:40:29.000But he's got some sketches that were just groundbreaking, like the black white supremacist who was blind...
00:40:38.000What about, I was watching last night, because Jeff and I were talking about Chappelle last night, so on the car ride home from this event we did together, I was watching Black Bush, which was another, I think, unbelievably brilliant.
00:41:01.000He's a real comedy genius, but also a guy who's – you wouldn't get it if you just sort of see him do stand-up, but he's deeply introspective, like very intensely well thought out.
00:41:14.000He's not a surface guy by any stretch of the imagination.
00:41:43.000They were telling him there was so much money involved that they were trying to get him to slightly water down his content in order to make it more palatable for advertisers.
00:41:52.000They were asking him, does not say the N-word.
00:41:54.000There was a lot of behind-the-scenes nonsense that I dealt with the exact same administration at Comedy Central, so I'm well aware of how silly they were about certain things.
00:42:07.000And this was also right around the same time Janet Jackson's nipple popped out during the Super Bowl, which fucking, oddly enough, changed everything.
00:42:15.000People started freaking out about content because of a nipple.
00:42:20.000It was a very weird time for television.
00:42:23.000And in their defense, what they do is they're producers.
00:42:31.000And they didn't know how to handle, how to keep it funny and keep it free and loose, but also figure out a way to make it fit into what their corporate structure is of what's acceptable and not acceptable for advertising.
00:42:45.000So it was just a clusterfuck of control and neediness and too many cooks in the kitchen and people's ego.
00:42:53.000There's a lot of people that just wanted to affect the show just so that they could put their greasy fingerprints on it.
00:42:59.000And that's a really common thing with television, that ego aspect of these different people who are high up on the food chain in the executive world wanting to put their stamp on a show and then talking openly about putting their stamp.
00:44:05.000But was that, do you think, is that something, I mean, because that sounds to me like somebody who had a practice or something, or like, or an inner compass that was...
00:45:09.000But also, it's freeing in a way, because you're so comfortable with that experience of giving in to the marijuana, giving in to the THC, where you just sort of float away on it and don't question it.
00:45:23.000But as you were high backstage getting ready to do your Netflix special, and I would imagine that's a pretty stressful environment because they're taping this thing.
00:47:23.000Do you have this edited and parsed and sectioned and have you thoroughly examined it?
00:47:29.000Have you used the correct economy of words?
00:47:31.000Have you boiled it down into the best possible version of itself?
00:47:36.000It's so funny with stand-up, though, because you watch it as a, because I've never done stand-up, but you watch it as a consumer, it looks casual, it looks off the cuff.
00:47:45.000There's an enormous amount of work that goes into it.
00:47:47.000But it's both casual and off the cuff and incredibly well thought out and rehearsed, and it has to be both of those things.
00:47:56.000So you prepare like crazy so you got that, but then when you're actually there, isn't there a certain amount of just having to let go and be actually responsive to what's happening in the audience?
00:48:37.000Like I wanted to accurately represent a real live stand-up comedy set that feels like any other set that you could catch me in San Francisco on a Saturday night.
00:48:54.000So then I wait about a year, and then I start doing it again.
00:48:57.000And now I'm in the process, a couple more months, I'll do it again.
00:49:00.000It sounds a lot like actually the experience of teaching.
00:49:04.000Like when you're teaching meditation, it's sort of like, because you've got to be, you kind of got to know, you have to have experience and sort of know your stuff.
00:49:10.000But the other hand, you actually got to be super open to exactly what's coming up and what someone's describing or what's happening.
00:51:08.000It's the art of conversation in general, is to get out of your own way and to be able to also at the same time find the right words, articulate the right thoughts, figure out the right way to piece the sentences together so it's both entertaining and engaging,
00:51:35.000There's a unique thing about a conversation, especially with people interacting with each other, that people, they tune in to, like, and I tune into it.
00:51:44.000Like, if I listen to certain conversations with people that I find awkward, and I'm like, well, what is uncomfortable about this?
00:52:00.000And you can tell when you're hanging out with that person, because it's like, there's this grippiness, or when I have that, it's like, you're slightly fearful, you're slightly worried, you're trying to a little bit hold on to the narrative, and it just creates this unnaturalness.
00:52:11.000And then everyone's got a little bit, feels a little bit weird, and then someone's trying to overcompensate for someone over here, and it just wrecks the whole flow of it.
00:52:19.000You know, when I first started reading a little bit about Zen Buddhism, which is one of the flavors of it, they talk a lot about spontaneity.
00:52:28.000Yeah, I didn't quite get that, but this is what we're talking about, actually.
00:52:33.000They also use this word, freshness, that if you can get rid of the stale, planned, canned stuff, and just touch in on what's happening right now, which is fresh...
00:53:16.000And he actually likes mixed martial arts, and he guides people while watching mixed martial arts in his undershirt, and he's the wicked dude.
00:53:26.000But he talks a lot about something called the Zen Bounce.
00:53:29.000He's interested in how do these different practices from different traditions work?
00:53:34.000What is the way in which they free you or they reduce your suffering?
00:53:39.000Because they can look so different on paper or actually inexperienced.
00:53:42.000So you might have one kind of meditation tradition that's all about just sitting with your eyes closed, not moving, all about that kind of stoicism.
00:53:49.000And then when you do move, it's very slow and deliberate and you've got to be mindful and all that stuff.
00:53:54.000But then you have other traditions, like within certain kinds of Zen schools, where you're actually, it's frenetic.
00:54:02.000You're moving fast, you're like, unwrapping your shit, and you're putting your shit back together, and you're eating your food in a particular kind of way, and you gotta get to this thing over here, and you gotta get to this thing over here, and then you gotta sit and stop at a dime.
00:54:10.000And what they're doing is they're deliberately...
00:54:14.000They're deliberately creating all this agitated energy to teach you how to ride the energy, to teach you how to be calm enough in the center that that energy turns into spontaneity, turns into creativity, turns into genuine being available in the moment-ness,
00:54:29.000as opposed to being stuck in some way.
00:54:33.000And when you see these guys from those monasteries or from those traditions who practice a lot, they've got this bouncy, available, turn on a dime, do this.
00:54:44.000It's like they're just available to what's going on because they've trained that quality in their experience.
00:54:53.000He, you know, I've had like hundreds of hours of discussions where I'll call him up, I'll be like, and the best thing about him is he'll answer the phone if he's ready to talk, he's ready to serve, you know, whatever you got going on.
00:55:03.000I'll be like, I'll call him in the morning, Shinzen, so what's going on right now?
00:55:06.000What's your experience of consciousness?
00:55:08.000And he basically describes You know, it's like he's just there and it's like he's sort of part of this upwelling of the world and it's all kind of vibrating up through him.
00:55:45.000He has to convince himself that the stakes are enough that he should work on this thing or that, yeah, I guess I should get out of the way of that bus.
00:55:54.000I mean, he will because his instincts kick in, but it's like he's so in the unconditioned that his danger is just becoming one of those dudes sitting on a mountain not doing anything.
00:56:04.000But the world is fucked and it needs people like him who can help us out.
00:56:15.000So most practitioners, their battle is trying to get to taste that more unconditioned quality, that spontaneous, that free, yourself as just a process.
00:56:42.000So he's just been doing this for so long that he's achieved this very high level of...
00:56:46.000He's another Jewish guy from, in this case, from Los Angeles.
00:56:49.000He, you know, was born in the 40s, I think, or in the 50s, Eisenhower, America, and he basically was way into Japan.
00:56:56.000Japanese culture, learned Japanese as a teenager, went to Japanese school, and then went to Japan when he was like 19 or 20, and decided he wanted to study some of these Zen practitioners.
00:57:08.000Eventually got in with what's called the Japanese Vajrayana School, so it's sort of a particular school of Buddhism, started training with them, and then that was never finished.
00:57:28.000I mean, in Japan, they do the thing called, he'll talk about this, the marathon monks, where basically these guys sit for, like, no joke, for days on end.
00:58:26.000You can metabolize stuck physical stuff too.
00:58:29.000So if you put your attention on a knot in the back of your shoulder or something, I've had the experience in meditation where I'm just feeling this tension in my body and I just hold my attention there long enough in this open way.
00:58:42.000I'm not trying to make a change, just curious about it, looking at it.
00:58:45.000I've had the experience of knots dissolving.
00:58:48.000Where like an actual impingement or a physical thing seems to change.
00:58:52.000Now that's really weird because then you realize, wow, like the mind and body, it's all part of one process, you know?
00:58:58.000And a part of what was keeping that tension there wasn't just the problem in the muscle.
00:59:03.000There was some part of me that was keeping it there.
00:59:05.000There was some way in which I was holding onto it a little bit, like holding my breath a bit.
00:59:09.000You know, or like when you said about releasing layers of tension, you sit down on a meditation cushion and you think you're relaxed and then you realize you're actually Kind of uptight, and you're like, and then you let go of that, and then you settle a little bit more, and then you realize there's another layer of tension.
00:59:23.000And you can just let go, and let go, and let go, and it just seems to go on, and on, and on.
00:59:30.000And it's like, that can be, I mean, there's some, I know another teacher, all he teaches is lying down.
00:59:35.000He teaches people, Reggie Ray, go to his meditation, or sits, you just, you're laying on the ground, you're not doing anything.
01:00:14.000But also that thinking of conscious awareness and the control that we try to enact on our environment and all the different ways that the ego forces us to think and pushes us and nudges us.
01:00:29.000It really is about getting out of your own way, in a lot of ways.
01:00:52.000I mean, this is the thing that people really struggle with because a lot of people will hear everything you just said and all this stuff about Shinzen not caring and think, okay, if I meditate, well, I'm going to be ineffective.
01:01:07.000I'm not going to be able to do anything.
01:01:09.000But that's what I'm saying is the paradox.
01:01:10.000It's like the person who's most effective is the person who gives up needing to be effective.
01:01:15.000It's like you, because that's how you free up all the energy.
01:01:18.000It's like if you're trying to control everything all the time, you're gonna be really limited in what you can actually do.
01:01:22.000If you just let go and let things be as they are, you're kind of like, it's like you're conserving all this deep, deep well of energy that's there.
01:01:30.000And then when you really do need to make a move, because it does fucking matter, then you've got the energy to act and you act in a way that's probably more effective because it's less distorted.
01:01:41.000And that's actually, that's what I've learned from practice, even from getting older, because I'm 46 now and I don't have the energy I used to have.
01:02:04.000It's so interesting what you're talking about as it relates to like how when you're on Good Morning America like sort of figuring out a way to just be in the moment and guide the conversation but don't think too much about what you're saying but say the right things and have poignant things and good questions and being able to engage but not being too conscious of how it sounds or what you're trying to achieve by your words or the image that you're trying to portray There's
01:02:34.000so many parallels that would exist in stand-up comedy, they exist in podcasting, they exist in martial arts.
01:02:41.000When you're doing martial arts, that's a big part of being able to train effectively, is to focus almost entirely on the movements themselves, to have them trained into a way where they're a pathway that you can almost observe.
01:02:58.000Like, you're an observer and a passenger as much as you're the driver of the experience.
01:03:04.000And it's all just sort of taking place.
01:03:05.000And when you start tweaking and freaking out about it, that's when everything tightens up.
01:03:10.000And that's when you start to run into all these, like, real issues with training.
01:03:15.000But that's why I find basic, you know, we've talked a lot about, Jeff has talked, as he always does, very beautifully about deep end of the pool, you know, mysticism and, you know, highly attained meditators.
01:03:28.000But the nuts and bolts basic application of...
01:03:36.000Beginner mindfulness meditation, which Jeff and I talk about, is what allows you to get out of your own way.
01:03:42.000Because saying to people, hey, get out of your own way, get out of your head, is a very frustrating thing to hear because you're like, how the hell do I do that?
01:03:49.000But the basic move of beginner meditation, which is to sit with your eyes closed, I think?
01:04:34.000And that is the mechanism by which all of, for me at least, by which all of the things we're talking about here, you know, not freaking out on live television, being able to survive in a sensory deprivation tank when you think Joe Rogan might judge you for freaking out and jumping out.
01:04:48.000All that stuff allows you to see the chatter arise, this basic move that we're doing in meditation, which is just sitting back and allowing all this stuff to come up without trying to grab it or push it away.
01:05:00.000Can help you in the things that we're talking about here?
01:05:03.000Martial arts, stand-up comedy, all of the things.
01:05:06.000So, can I just say something about where it turned a corner for me when I was practicing because I was a terrible meditator?
01:05:13.000It was understanding the actual skills that we're building.
01:05:17.000And that's the thing, I think, that links all what we're talking about here.
01:05:20.000When you talk about martial arts, when you talk about being a broadcaster, when you talk about comedy, talk about practice, it's like...
01:05:28.000There are particular kinds of mind-body skills that we're training.
01:05:32.000And those skills are actually, they have names.
01:05:34.000There's a feeling that's happening that you can experience when you're training that muscle group.
01:05:39.000And that was, you know, when I started understanding things that way, because of Shinzen, because he talks about it that way, but Buddhism talks about it that way.
01:05:45.000They talk about the factors of awakening.
01:05:46.000That you're building up concentration, which is your capacity just to pay attention to what you want to pay attention to.
01:06:07.000What am I really feeling versus how am I acting?
01:06:10.000So dialing up that resolution dial and building up equanimity, which is just the...
01:06:15.000Can I actually not fight with my experience as it's unfolding?
01:06:19.000Can I have this centeredness in the middle of what's going on, whether I'm doing martial arts, whether I'm doing comedy, whether I'm doing meditation?
01:06:26.000The beauty of a meditation practice is it makes explicit what those skills are.
01:06:31.000In a simple situation with your eyes closed, you can notice when you're being concentrated, when you're being clear, when you're being Aquinas, when you're being friendly, which is another good skill.
01:07:39.000Yeah, this weird experience that doesn't have an owner's manual.
01:07:43.000That's one of the things that's always freaked me out about the mind and the body.
01:07:47.000It's like you have this incredible vehicle and this amazing resource that's sort of operating this vehicle.
01:07:54.000No one gets a manual, and you're taught how to handle it by people that don't know what the fuck they're doing, whether it's teachers in school, or whether it's the kids that you grow up with, or maybe even perhaps your parents or sports coaches.
01:08:18.000I mean, one of the points that Sam Harris, mutual friend of ours, great podcaster, great writer, has made in his book, Waking Up, which was one of his many books, but I think my favorite, is that, you know, in the West, we've developed an intellectual and scientific culture that is really robust and has changed the world and is unquestionably valuable.
01:08:41.000But in the East, they actually were working on the owner's manual for the mind for millennia.
01:08:46.000You know, you've got two Buddha statues in here.
01:08:49.0002,600 years ago, this guy, if he even existed, or we don't know, but this culture of Buddhism, and before that the Hindus, were working on how do you operate this mind?
01:09:28.000But I also think this understanding, this way of thinking about it, is there in the West as well.
01:09:35.000That it's like, the East has made it explicit in very particular ways.
01:09:39.000But even within humanistic traditions, if you look at, like, some of the Greek philosophers, who a lot of them were really mystics, if you look within the Abrahamic traditions...
01:09:47.000There are these understandings are there as well and they're describing it in similar ways and like you hang out with some badass Catholic priest who spent his entire life like in poor neighborhoods helping people out and like totally being present and working on service and like the way in which that human being like has learned how to survive and has learned how to flourish and has learned how to be present for his community or her community it's a lot of the same skills and did not there's obviously shadowy aspects everywhere too but But
01:10:20.000And there's a book, speaking of badass priests, there's a book called Tattoos on the Heart, which was written by the guy who ran Homeboy Industries here in L.A. And he, as far as I know, doesn't have any meditation practice, but he talks about...
01:10:35.000This is a bit of a sappy word, but compassion.
01:10:38.000You know, actually giving a shit about other human beings about whom very few other people give a shit.
01:10:43.000And his whole life, as the organizing principle, is taking care of these gang members who've been discarded by their families, grown up with parents who were in prostitution or drugs or whatever, and had no shot.
01:10:57.000And this guy, his whole life, has given them a shot.
01:11:00.000And if that's not living this stuff out, then I don't know what it is.
01:11:04.000So why do we think compassion is a sappy word?
01:11:20.000And then sometimes you get the sense, I get the sense at least, that the people who are saying this to me have no idea what it is they're saying or why.
01:11:32.000Yeah, they're just signaling their tribal allegiance to unicorns or something by just repeating these phrases without really embodying what they mean or something.
01:11:41.000Right, like the people that say that I'm not religious but I'm spiritual.
01:11:49.000I just hear somebody who's trying to connect these principles and doesn't want to necessarily identify with some of these structured forms of religion that are all these fucking problems.
01:11:58.000Sometimes it's that, and sometimes it's just weird people that are just making noises with their face because they want you to think a certain way about them.
01:12:06.000Making noises with your face by Joe Rogan.
01:12:09.000You know that thing that people do where they're just really just saying noises that they hear other people say, and they're not connected to them, and you feel they're not connected to them, so you're just kind of waiting it out.
01:12:20.000So it's a hypocrisy that makes you want to puke.
01:12:22.000Because it's a disconnect between what's real, because you know what's real, because you can feel their body language, and then what they're saying, which is the opposite.
01:12:28.000But even when it's real, I mean, this was my problem when I first started getting into meditation.
01:12:31.000Even when it's real, there's an earnestness.
01:12:36.000A sappiness, a saccharine-ness about the presentation of these really fresh, amazing, invigorating ideas that I... This is why I wanted to write a book with you because you talk about these things in ways that get me interested as opposed to sometimes...
01:12:54.000I have this beautiful little box that I'm going to unfold for you and it's so holy and perfect and it's just like the whole thing around it just makes you want to fucking vomit as soon as you get anywhere near it.
01:13:03.000Yeah, it's like certain yoga teachers can say the exact same thing, and it's calming, and when they say namaste, you say it back and you mean it.
01:15:05.000And the idea is that every week we get together and we explore different practices and we explore.
01:15:11.000Then we do a part two, which is like a social practice or interactive or body practice.
01:15:16.000And the whole thinking is basically like we want it to be kind of one-stop shopping.
01:15:20.000Whoever you are, whatever your background, however much money you have, you can come once a week to this place and it will cost you nothing if you have no money.
01:15:28.000The sliding scale is 10 to 20 if you have money.
01:15:30.000You'll get the absolute best of what we can do with guest teachers.
01:15:34.000Every Monday is a different set of programming and that's what we'll do.
01:15:39.000We'll do that as much as we can for you.
01:15:40.000And then you can go home and go back to your life.
01:15:42.000And if you need referrals for more help, they're potentially there.
01:15:46.000But this idea that once a week, anywhere in any community in the world, you could just go to a place where you could get the best and it's affordable, there's no reason that can't happen.
01:15:54.000Because there are so many skilled practitioners out there and Teachers and facilitators in different modalities and it's just exploding across the board.
01:16:08.000Insights about how sports work, how the mind-body works, exploding.
01:16:13.000So there's all this diet stuff, movement stuff, all this expertise out there.
01:16:19.000It's like we wanted to create a framework where we could start to channel some of that expertise.
01:16:23.000Get together, have an adventure, explore what this particular modality has to say, and then do it all in community so you get that community support.
01:16:31.000Well, I think that's good with everything.
01:16:33.000I think having these shared experiences and sort of relating what are the hiccups that you found along the way?
01:16:46.000Whether it's in meditation, or we use that in comedy a lot.
01:16:50.000There's a lot of, like, one of the great things about communities like the Comedy Store is that we get together and talk about the pitfalls.
01:16:57.000Like, yeah, I'm in the middle of the set, and all of a sudden I'm in my own head, and then I'm realizing that this bit's kind of clunky, and I'm trying to get out of it, and I'm like, oh, what do you do?
01:17:06.000So it's like a group therapy for comedians?
01:17:11.000One of the things that's really interesting about stand-up in general today, as opposed to in the past, is that the consciousness of it has sort of shifted.
01:17:19.000In the past, it used to be a very solitary pursuit, and everybody was sort of fighting in a scarcity mindset.
01:17:43.000There's so many theaters on top of the clubs.
01:17:45.000There's all these internet places where you can do podcasts, and there's so many different avenues that comics don't feel this famine mindset anymore, and it's much more of an open and supportive community.
01:17:59.000Do you think that in part is driven by the fact that there are more women in comedy as well?
01:18:03.000And they can sometimes bring a more civilized approach?
01:18:15.000Yeah, and it's also more people who have meditated, who have explored their consciousness, who are aware of the pitfalls of the ego entering into comedy, and then more people sort of fostering that idea of community through comedy.
01:18:54.000I mean, that's kind of part of what it means to be a comedian is to be sensitive to noticing cues and subtleties and things in the culture that other people overlook.
01:19:01.000So it's not surprising because what I hear you saying is it's almost like some of the most, like I hate this word, but evolved or mature people out there, professionals in the world or creative people in the world or people in that comedy community because they have that sensitivity and they've had to learn how to work together in some way.
01:19:31.000Well, I think in a lot of ways it's an exploration of the mind.
01:19:34.000And I think comedy is an exploration of the mind, not just in your own mind, but also in how do you relay those thoughts to other people in the most efficient way possible.
01:19:42.000And a lot of that has to do with how much have you managed your own mind and your own ability to communicate.
01:19:49.000And meditation can greatly assist you in that regard.
01:19:56.000Well, I do a bunch of different things.
01:19:58.000Like, one, I do a lot of yoga breathing exercises, and I do them by myself where essentially just completely concentrating on the breath, just breathing in and breathing out and forcing out all the thoughts and allowing them to come in and allowing them I like to do that also inside the tank.
01:20:19.000One of the things that I really like to do is get myself into a position where I've settled in the tank and then just completely concentrate on my breath and just concentrate entirely on the breathing in and the breathing out and get into this almost like hypnotic cycle of breathing in and breathing out.
01:21:33.000I mean, you're hearing it, you're feeling it, but it's just the act of it, you know, the thing, the doing it, the doing it, and like this sort of like hypnotic in and out thing that happens when you have no sensory input whatsoever.
01:21:47.000You're not feeling your feet on the ground, you feel weightless, you're not hearing anything, you're not seeing anything.
01:21:52.000It's just a particularly effective environment for exploring your thoughts.
01:21:57.000There's an expression sometimes that's feeling or an experience of being breathed.
01:22:02.000So it's like you're no longer doing the breathing.
01:23:40.000I mean, another thing that actually kind of reminds me of my last meditation retreat where we're talking about physical discomfort, my teacher and I, and because I was experiencing a lot of physical pain from long sitting for a long time, pain comes up.
01:23:52.000And I was asking, you know, is it okay for me to quit at some point because this pain is too intense?
01:23:57.000And he, Joseph, was arguing, you know, I think you want to test your limits on this.
01:24:02.000Obviously, at some point, you're going to get up.
01:24:05.000We're gradually increasing the amount that we can stand.
01:24:10.000And that to me seems very similar to the value that I can perceive of getting back in the sensory deprivation tank of being able to be with that fear a little bit more, test the limit a little bit more consistently so that my world isn't getting smaller.
01:24:26.000People echo that same sentiment when it comes to psychedelics.
01:24:33.000There's a lot of, as you know, there's been a growing body of research into the salutary effects of psychedelics.
01:24:41.000A lot of it's being done at NYU on cancer patients who have anxiety, but there's also some specific work being done at Johns Hopkins on meditators.
01:25:01.000I've had a long-standing desire to get into this study.
01:25:05.000My shrink and my wife strongly argue that I shouldn't.
01:25:10.000Somebody with my kind of Brain chemistry, who has to go on and perform under pressure when the red light's on on TV, probably not a great idea to dose myself with psychedelics, but this is something I've been wrestling with a lot.
01:25:25.000Yeah, what do you think is going to happen?
01:25:26.000It's right back to my worries in the tank.
01:25:30.000To me, I was thinking a lot about psychedelics, and I've had, you know, when I was a kid and...
01:25:34.000And would smoke weed, I would have panic attacks.
01:25:36.000And I think it's about the desire for control, the ego, the thinking mind moves in.
01:25:41.000And it's like a vampire confronted with garlic.
01:25:44.000My ego is recoiling and can't handle the lack of control.
01:25:49.000And it's not just the energy of those experiences that's so intense, where you just have no control over it, but it's also, it just blows apart your worldview.
01:25:57.000Like, you had this idea, you think, oh, you think you know what's really going on, and then you have one of those experiences, and it just shows you that you don't know anything.
01:26:11.000But it's humbling to be shown that all your ideas about how you think things are are just that, you know, that it's just like that, you know, you don't know fuck all.
01:26:21.000And that has been, that's my experience from doing that stuff.
01:26:24.000It's like, it just shows me that I'm just, you know what, just sit back, dude.
01:26:28.000Sit back and let nature do what nature's going to do in some way.
01:26:33.000But how can you say sit back, dude, when there's no dude there?
01:26:35.000When that's what you're starting to see.
01:26:42.000Either you win because you're able to stay super equanimous with the greater and greater intensity of what you're experiencing under a trip, or you win because you don't stay equanimous, you fight with it, and you get ripped to shreds, and in that humbling moment, that in itself is deeply consoling and healing.
01:26:59.000I think it's like both sides of that are positive.
01:27:02.000It's like a net positive gain on both sides of that.
01:27:04.000That's how I legitimate it when I'm getting ripped apart.
01:27:16.000I think if you just relax, you'll be fine.
01:27:18.000Yeah, I know, but that's one of those things like when people say relax or get out of your own way, for somebody as tightly wound as me, it's a frustrating thing to hear because it's hard for me to operationalize.
01:28:02.000I think it's one of those things where if you test yourself slowly but surely in those waters, you'll get more and more accustomed to the feeling of relaxation and letting go.
01:28:15.000And treat it like it's a shamanic experience, like it's a very deep, intensive search to the very meaning of your existence.
01:28:25.000And don't think of it as like, oh my god, I'm about to do drugs.
01:28:31.000But they're not dissimilar in the way that when you don't know up from down, when you have no sensation of your body anymore, that is exposing the fundamental fact that,
01:28:46.000as Jeff has used as this description over and over, I think quite beautifully throughout this discussion, which is that we aren't as solid as we think.
01:29:26.000Seeing that the you that you've been defending and protecting since sentience actually doesn't exist is, I think, ultimately very liberating.
01:29:38.000Really is the true liberation, but seeing it initially as a newbie...
01:29:47.000Is it tears apart, as Jeff says, your worldview.
01:29:50.000Our worldview is based on us at the center.
01:29:56.000So it seems to me it's like you want to learn how to swim, but you're really only interested in calf-high water.
01:30:02.000Because if you really want to learn how to swim, what happens is they take you out in a jet ski out into the middle of the ocean and they go, jump off, dude.
01:30:12.000You're now in the center of the ocean.
01:30:21.000You must keep going or you're going to drown.
01:30:23.000I think there are different approaches based on different people because I think you're exactly right that I want to swim but my tendency is to stick to the calf high water but you're from what I know about you and having spent a little bit of time with you and just following you you're kind of a baller like you're ready to go out on the jet ski and jump in or do all this crazy stuff that traditionally I mean I have done some crazy things that we've discussed but traditionally I'm more cautious and I think for somebody with my kind of brain chemistry somebody who's Brain
01:30:54.000I think there's a more stepwise approach, which is what I'm intrigued by, which is what we keep discussing, which is test those limits time and again.
01:31:05.000For example, my shrink, the one who got me to stop doing drugs after I had a panic attack on television and helped me kind of straighten myself out.
01:31:17.000I had a panic attack or the beginnings of a panic attack on a subway about five years ago.
01:31:22.000And it was, for me, it was devastating because I was like, this is such a setback.
01:31:27.000I'm right back at stage one and my world's going to get smaller again.
01:31:30.000So I went to go see him kind of on an emergent basis.
01:32:07.000I would never be able to host a show called Fear Factor the way you did unless it was a completely different show where you're not getting in a tank full of torrentulas on the first day.
01:32:17.000I have to do it in a stepwise progression because that's the way my brain is wired.
01:33:08.000It's this super interesting way of addressing trauma that is starting to get really influential in the body work community and psychotherapists and psychiatrists and psychologists are starting to look at it and there's been a bunch of good papers out about it.
01:33:22.000But basically the thesis, it comes from being really a guy named Peter Levine who spent a lot of time looking at animal behavior.
01:33:29.000And what he noticed is that when animal goes into a fight or flight situation, so you're a gazelle and all of a sudden there's the tiger and then you just explode into action.
01:33:41.000So there's this explosive release of energy running or fighting, whatever it is.
01:33:45.000Afterwards, they'll often go into this shaking effect where they'll start trembling unconsciously or they can't control it.
01:33:52.000And what they think is that it's like discharging all the excess energy.
01:33:57.000And so his theory is that what happens with human beings is because we have these giant frontal lobes that we get shocks to our nervous system and we can't discharge the energy.
01:34:08.000We can't We can't fucking punch our boss in the face or we can't run or whatever.
01:34:12.000And this is the same as when we're kids.
01:34:24.000It becomes chronic aggression or irritability.
01:34:27.000Also, chronic freeze responses get stuck in there, too, which is sort of like chronic not-there-ness or someone who's sort of a little bit dreamy.
01:34:34.000And so somatic experiencing is the whole way of working with it where basically it's sort of like exposure therapy, but it's not the same.
01:36:11.000Because if you don't release that energy, it just keeps causing havoc in the system.
01:36:15.000That's the thinking of somatic experiencing.
01:36:18.000It's And I've been working with somebody, and just to make it real, I've had a lot of injuries in my life, like broken neck and busted shoulder and different things from just being a jackass.
01:37:01.000I started looking this way and it was hard to do and suddenly I remember the fucking impact of this truck from when I was 17 years old on this side of my body and I could feel that the impact was still in my body and she got me to work to turn my head and like she got me to connect to that to that so I'm thinking of that memory and I'm feeling that memory in my body and she gets me to work through that turning my head and the act of doing that was like all of a sudden I felt all this new freedom and
01:37:43.000Listening to your story about your life, about the lack of difficulty, it sort of reinforces my ideas about martial arts in that...
01:37:52.000It's not about learning how to be a great fighter, learning how to beat people up.
01:37:58.000It's learning how to battle your own internal demons and confront insecurities and fears.
01:38:05.000And to do it on a regular basis frees up a lot of the mental landscape.
01:38:11.000It allows you to just be more relaxed about a lot of different approaches to life and this tension and control that we have.
01:38:20.000It's a lot of time just pointless, and that's highlighted by martial arts training.
01:38:26.000Yeah, I think it's almost always pointless.
01:38:28.000Yeah, but although, you know, the thing is, if you look at a good fighter, just like if you look at a good dancer, there's definitely a sense in which they're just flowing and they're responding, but then when they need to be tense, boom, they got it.
01:38:40.000It's like they got that power behind them.
01:38:41.000It's like if you were dancing, for example, and all you did was just flabby There'd be no form to it.
01:38:49.000It's like you need the pulling in, you need that.
01:38:51.000So it's about the intelligent use of tension, knowing when to be soft and then having those two sides.
01:38:59.000Yeah, but what I'm talking about, though, is the management of stressful, physically difficult things on a regular basis frees the mind.
01:39:08.000It's just the getting comfortable with conflict.
01:39:13.000And in the absence of conflict, then you look to try to restrict and control everything.
01:39:18.000And then every little affront to that, any little questioning and challenging of your control over things can cause anxiety.
01:39:25.000Because you're uncomfortable with this idea of surrender, of relaxing.
01:39:58.000It's like, hey, these books are all saying the same thing again and again and again, but you still need to read it because you forget.
01:40:04.000Yeah, and it gets a little bit easier all the time.
01:40:07.000Managing the mind gets a little easier, and part of it you can chalk up to maturity and life experience, but it's also just this continual practice of paying attention to what's going on inside your head.
01:40:17.000I mean, Jeff doesn't like my analogy that I'm about to use because he thinks it's slightly aggressive, and he's right, but it's mostly meant for comic effect.
01:40:25.000But it's like when you have a dog who takes a shit on the rug, sometimes you've got to put their snout in the shit.
01:40:30.000And that is what we're doing in meditation and in all of these practices.
01:40:35.000Seeing over and over again how crazy we are, how the fear arises, how the anger arises, how the discontent with whatever's happening right now arises and not getting owned by it.
01:40:47.000And that's why these practices are so useful and why you've got to stick with them.
01:41:08.000Oh, you know, we were talking about that yesterday, where people were talking about President Oprah, and I reminded everyone about Oprah and the secret.
01:41:16.000I'm like, do you know how many fucking people ruin their lives because they thought all they had to do was have a vision board and think positive, and this is going to be the key to happiness?
01:41:25.000I think it's one of the most pernicious ideas that's ever been sort of released into our culture.
01:41:32.000And it even predates the secret because there's a book called The Power of Positive Thinking.
01:41:37.000There's another book called Think and Grow Rich.
01:41:38.000I don't want people to go buy these books because I don't think you should.
01:41:43.000The idea that you can solve all of your problems through the power of positive thinking is so easily disproved.
01:41:52.000Just engage in the following thought experiment.
01:41:56.000Anybody who's born right now in a refugee camp, were they thinking incorrectly in utero?
01:42:02.000In 2010, when the earthquake hit Port-au-Prince, Haiti, was everybody in town thinking incorrectly?
01:42:13.000And yet, we're telling all these people that if you make a good vision board, you can cure your cancer.
01:42:18.000Well, you don't have to go to the doctor.
01:42:20.000It is demonstrably false and recklessly dangerous.
01:42:25.000And most of the people that have had success with the power of positive thinking, they attribute it to that, but you're not talking to any of the people that thought the exact same way and failed.
01:42:36.000You're only talking to the successful people.
01:42:40.000The only people who've had all their problems solved through the power of positive thinking are the people writing those fucking books and selling all the copies.
01:42:48.000And by the way, if it was that easy, there'll only be one book.
01:42:52.000They keep saying, come back to this next seminar in this freezing cold room with your credit card.
01:42:57.000But I will say, like, the one part of it that the idea that you can have an intention, that having a clear intention of something of how you want to be or something you want to have happen, that that can be helpful, I think that's common sense.
01:43:08.000There's a difference between having a positive attitude.
01:43:22.000He had this really cool, he talked about, I think it was called First born versus twice born, or once born, once born and twice born.
01:43:29.000And it was a fundamental way in which he distinguished people who had, who had maybe had a spiritual outlook in life.
01:43:35.000And he said the once born people were people who were just naturally, they were kind of the positive thinkers, the kind of like, Everything is perfect.
01:43:43.000This like rose-colored view of reality and really not able to kind of see suffering and everything, that kind of a thing.
01:43:50.000And we all kind of know people like that, like kind of the classic, naive spiritual person.
01:43:56.000But he was really interested in what he called the twice-born, and that's what he was, and I feel like that's certainly how I identify, which is somebody who can come into a kind of perspective, like a mystical or a spiritual perspective, but only did it via having to look hard at the reality of suffering,
01:44:13.000at the reality of evil, of fucked up shit in the world, like that you can't wave away the world's unfair distribution of wealth and hardship, and that you had to come to that You had to come to your view through honest reckoning with the crappy stuff about being a human being and the crappy stuff that's out there and that you couldn't not look at it.
01:44:34.000And if you could do that, like Tolstoy was the famous example, then you kind of could be reborn into a perspective that was wide enough to include the full bittersweet.
01:44:46.000I think to the twice-born, the first-born outlook is kind of repellent because it seems like it's not looking at the truth of All the very real challenges that are going out there.
01:44:57.000It's like you could just go to your yoga class and eat your perfect raw food and be in your perfect bubble.
01:45:02.000But meanwhile, the world is just contracted in pain.
01:45:06.000To really be a kind of true expansive humanist is to kind of look at all that and to still find your way into thinking that life is worth living.
01:45:19.000I guess you have to recognize that there are these horrible things in the world, but concentrating on them fully and only is not going to benefit you in any way, shape or form.
01:45:30.000It's like there are amazing things to this life, and the more you concentrate on them, the more you'll recognize them, the more you'll sort of bask in the amazing experience that we're all going through right now.
01:45:44.000And so what you're describing is elements of positive thinking.
01:45:50.000It's positivity or positive attitude as opposed to positive thinking, which is loaded up with this idea of sort of mental control of the external world.
01:47:03.000Like, you know, you might have been successful, and that might be your underlying thought process, but there's a wide series of factors.
01:47:14.000There's a big spectrum of things that had to happen for you to be successful, including luck, including the great fortune of being born in America.
01:47:24.000There's so many different places you could be, so many different life experiences you could have had, horrific parental situations and household situations you could have been born into.
01:49:30.000Counterprogram against the howling sea of bullshit.
01:49:33.000Yeah, that is America's 11 billion dollar a year self-help industry because I was watching what this was doing to people's lives It's so far.
01:49:41.000I mean we've been talking about that a lot lately There's so many people that are trying to get in this on sort of the open mic level when you see it on Instagram like there's a lot of people like Promoting these inspirational little posts and you know they'll have these little inspirational videos like you know what you got to do today is go out there and embrace life and just go after your goals and like and there's so many people that are trying to give people this fuel and give people this info and They
01:50:11.000might not necessarily really even be in practice with that themselves.
01:50:45.000And then he realized that everyone was actually having the same conversation all the time over and over again, which was, everything's going to be all right.
01:51:06.000Of course it has its downside, but I mean, there's also a realism where people are just going to call it out as it is, where here there's a tendency just to kind of, there can be this kind of Pollyanna-ish, everything is fine, everything is fine, because people don't really want to lurk at what's lurking underneath.
01:51:28.000Can we talk about the mystical mystery underbelly weirdness stuff?
01:51:34.000This idea that everything is fine in the moment, this exact moment right now.
01:51:40.000So in practice, this is something Shinzen taught me, that the more you...
01:51:44.000It's almost like the present moment is on a continuum.
01:51:48.000And that doesn't make any sense, but it's like you can be present and you can be more present and more and more.
01:51:54.000And you can start to get a feeling for that, for practice of just the absolute now.
01:51:59.000It's like you're getting closer and closer to the absolute now with ever actually getting there, which I know just sounds like a bunch of gobbledygook, but the feeling on the inside is just this...
01:52:08.000Everything is, it's like the silence, this presence, it's like this sacredness, you know, the no bullshit kind of sacredness.
01:52:18.000You know, that to me is like, I wrote about consciousness for a long time before I started realizing that there's this thing here, and how do you talk about it?
01:52:26.000How do you write about it in a way that doesn't sound ridiculous, you know?
01:52:29.000And yet, it is the most important thing.
01:52:31.000It is the most, it orients you, you know, to be able to come into that understanding.
01:53:09.000As an outsider, if someone is coming to this with zero meditation experience, no thought whatsoever about pursuing this, and they're listening to you say these things, like, okay, what's in it for me?
01:53:59.000Even when things are objectively shitty.
01:54:00.000Even when things are objectively shitty, there's bittersweetness.
01:54:02.000So, you know, this poignancy to things.
01:54:04.000It's like you get exactly your life, just more of it.
01:54:07.000And that's why, you know, Shinzen used to say it's like you get to live ten times deeper or one time or two times deeper or three times or four times the more you practice.
01:54:18.000It's the same surface, but it's the depth dimension that's getting richer and fuller and broader.
01:54:26.000And so then it gives you the capacity to also to appreciate more and more what's going on.
01:54:30.000Because most of the time we walk around like, this is the stuff I like looking at, but I don't like this stuff over here.
01:54:35.000I don't want to feel these things or I don't want to see these things.
01:54:37.000So we're like, we're kind of, you know, it's like we live, the analogy I use is like we're born into a mansion, but room by room, we're like, no, can't go in there.
01:55:31.000Everything you've experienced in your whole life happened to you right now, and everything you ever will experience will always happen to you right now.
01:55:40.000We live most of our lives, however, in an autopilot of, in a fog of rumination and projection, and we're not paying any attention to the only thing we ever get.
01:55:50.000Meditation, digging more deeply into the present moment, is giving you your life back.
01:55:56.000Now, how do you address, because what we're talking about is managing the mind and increasing happiness by 10% or more, hopefully.
01:56:10.000Because a lot of people that are going down this road have already gone down the pharmaceutical road and might be inexorably connected to it in some sort of a way.
01:56:37.000Just because we're into meditation doesn't mean we're not into all the other scientifically proven ways of dealing with your mental health.
01:56:48.000I often say that we, as a culture, we spend so much time working on our bodies, on our Stock portfolios on our cars and no time on the one filter through which we experience everything and that's our minds.
01:57:01.000And so if you have clinically diagnosed anxiety or depression, which again, we need to be talking about more openly because there's so much stigma around it.
01:57:09.000I've dealt with both since I was a kid.
01:57:11.000If you have that, you should avail yourself of every possible remedy.
01:57:15.000And if your doctor recommends that you take psych meds, then you should investigate it.
01:57:20.000If it works for you, then stay on them.
01:57:21.000Meditation is just another thing you can also use, along with exercise, getting enough sleep, having positive relationships, having a healthy diet, all the other no-brainers.
01:57:31.000What Jeff and I are saying is, in the pantheon of no-brainers, meditation needs to be included.
01:57:38.000Yeah, I think with the meds thing, sometimes meds can get you to the baseline of, then you can meditate.
01:57:46.000And it's almost like, I mean, I know too many people whose lives have been, including people I know really, really well, really, really helped by these meds.
01:57:55.000I know other people who have had a super hard time with it.
01:57:58.000And some of them, it's like it gets you to a place where it's almost like the meds can help buy time for your own system to work itself out.
01:58:06.000And so you get to a place where you're – like I have a lot of trouble with crazy energy surges up and down.
01:58:32.000In this case, it was like an hour and a half or an hour long interview where a guy just really took my history, like how I've been challenged.
01:58:39.000I had ADD, big-time ADD. That's been diagnosed multiple times just because of the way my attention works.
01:58:45.000But he basically really asked me lots of questions about my history and when things started to get into the more surges.
01:58:54.000And they've been getting worse the past, and this is interesting because I meditate a ton, and there was a period where the meditation was super, super working really well and stabilizing everything, and then there was a period where the meditation felt like it wasn't working as well and all this energy, it's like that trauma stuff I was talking about, all that stuff started to come up.
01:59:10.000So I go more into these ups and downs, and I found that the practice would help, it would help me from feeding the spikes But it hasn't been totally addressing it.
01:59:20.000Now, I haven't actually started any meds or done any lithium yet, although I'm thinking maybe I would try that because I won't understand what folks go through.
01:59:28.000But basically, he just asked a lot of questions.
01:59:32.000There's, you know, I guess they have a diagnostic criteria around a set of like, does that seem to make sense for what we know about it?
01:59:38.000And because they've seen all these patients, they've got all these ideas.
01:59:41.000And it's so new, I don't even know what to do with the information.
01:59:44.000In fact, I'm kind of can't believe I'm talking about it, because it seems a bit premature.
01:59:48.000But the way I think about it is I would consider doing meds because I just want to be able to get to a place where I could then let my body kind of heal itself, help itself out, figure itself out.
01:59:59.000And the meds might buy me time to do that.
02:00:01.000And the meditation can be part of that as well.
02:00:03.000And that's just the messy human reality of it.
02:00:05.000But you seem like you've got your shit together.
02:00:07.000So what is it exactly that's bothering you so much that you'd actually be considering medication?
02:00:38.000That can happen, and that can create its own challenges.
02:00:41.000But the energy ones are more fundamental.
02:00:43.000It's like, I wake up in the morning, you know, maybe once every week or two, and all of a sudden I can feel my heart pounding, and I can feel like this incredible energy in my hands, in my body, and I just, I'm in this hypomanic state, and I, and I, and it feels good.
02:00:58.000I don't even realize it, but I'm going around, I'm talking, I'm excited about stuff, and I'm just jacked up on this like, on this energy.
02:01:07.000So I usually like it, but then what will happen is I realize later that I've exaggerated.
02:01:13.000Like, oh, I've gone into something and I've been too aggressive of a situation or I've been exaggerating some situation or I got grandiose about something.
02:01:20.000And I feel super embarrassed that I was in this sort of like high and in a way that – and I didn't have my shit together at all.
02:01:27.000And then I end up in the downswing, which is the – The catastrophizing, the despair sometimes.
02:01:34.000That thing about being in the center that I was talking about, when it's there, it's so true and it's so there.
02:01:41.000And all of a sudden I'm not there at all.
02:02:07.000I have gotten better at managing it, absolutely no question.
02:02:10.000I've gotten way better at not believing in it when I'm in a high, and not believing when I'm in the down.
02:02:15.000I don't want to interrupt you, but the thought process, like when it kicks in, are you aware of it?
02:02:21.000So, yeah, it starts as, well I am, because it starts as energy in the body, so I feel the vibratiness, and I'm like, okay, that's first my early warning sign.
02:02:29.000And then it gets bigger and bigger, but the thing is, it's addictive.
02:02:33.000Do you monitor your heart rate while this is happening?
02:02:35.000No, but I can feel the fucking heart sometimes is going like a jackhammer.
02:02:38.000And other times the heart, it cools out, but it's like the...
02:03:08.000But what makes me want to do it is I want to know what other people have to deal with.
02:03:12.000I want to know what it's like to be on those things.
02:03:15.000So I can help those people maximally and say, This is what I can tell you about what meditation can do, and this is what I can tell you about what it can't do.
02:03:21.000This is what I can tell you about how physical practice can help, but how they might not be able to help.
02:03:25.000This is what I can say about how meds have helped and haven't.
02:03:28.000So if I can get experience with those different things and talk to lots of other people who've done it, then I can triangulate it on helping people out in a more effective way.
02:03:36.000So when you get these surges, you get this energy surge, you exercise, you hit the bag, you feel great, does that even everything out?
02:03:45.000Yeah, usually it can discharge the energy.
02:03:48.000Then why on earth would you be thinking about taking lithium?
02:03:51.000That seems insane if there's a very organic solution to this problem.
02:03:55.000Well, I don't know that it always will work with the punching bag.
02:04:59.000And the more you feed the up, the higher you go.
02:05:02.000But that means that the bigger you have the fall.
02:05:04.000So, like, that's what I've learned, is that when I... When I feed the grandiosity, the energy, the exuberance, like I'm super fun to be with at parties, for sure.
02:06:17.000Or if you're in a down place, like now you've made all these plans with somebody and then you've got to cancel the plans.
02:06:22.000But you're talking, you were saying this is a slightly bipolar situation for you.
02:06:27.000So it's not, I think the bipolar, I'm not sure, one of them, there's bipolar 1 and bipolar 2, one is more extreme, like real mania, where you go and fucking buy 50 couches, and like, hey honey, I bought 50 couches, we're gonna put couches all over the neighborhood, you know, like your classic manic episode.
02:06:43.000It doesn't go, for me, I never had that happen.
02:06:45.000I just have the hypomania, so like, the lots of the energy, but I don't go into total craziness.
02:06:51.000And biologically, what is the process?
02:06:54.000What is actually happening to you that's causing this?
02:07:29.000Like when you've had a coffee and you've got that vibrating energy or you're feeling super confident about yourself, but it's almost like your confidence goes too far.
02:07:39.000You're a little bit, like, overconfident.
02:08:11.000I was just noticing the cycles because of my meditation.
02:08:15.000And it was really just ADD. And it wasn't until it started just to become, I started to see, okay, there is a real pattern here.
02:08:21.000Like, I need to just talk to somebody and get some other perspectives on this.
02:08:26.000I just, I think it's worth pointing out that it's highly unusual and very courageous for somebody in Jeff's position.
02:08:34.000It's highly unusual for anybody to talk about having mental difficulties at all in our culture.
02:08:40.000Unfortunately, we need more people who are willing to say, you know, I deal with anxiety, depression, bipolar, ADD. But for somebody who's a meditation teacher to do it, because as Jeff has said, that the traditional understanding of meditation teacher is,
02:08:56.000Someone who's got their shit together on every level.
02:08:58.000For somebody who's a meditation teacher to come out and say, yeah, I have these challenges, is incredibly brave and also really important.
02:09:07.000Because I think, and working with Jeff on writing this book, one of the things, you know, there were times when these patterns that he's describing were very annoying to me to deal with as his co-author.
02:09:17.000But over time, it actually, I started to see that He was wrestling with this stuff and in many ways felt like a meditation teacher.
02:09:25.000It was obvious to me that he is a meditation teacher with imposter syndrome.
02:09:29.000And now I think he gets, and I think you can hear what he's saying, that actually these challenges make him a better teacher.
02:09:36.000That he's more in touch with the things that we're all dealing with and sometimes on...
02:09:40.000On an exponentially higher level, you know, of degree of difficulty, and that therefore he's better at getting under the hood and helping other people with their mental challenges.
02:09:49.000Yeah, like, so in many ways, like, what you're experiencing for your own profession is almost a gift.
02:09:57.000Yeah, because you have this unique opportunity to explore your own consciousness in a very challenging way and also to be completely honest about it, which is very, very beneficial to not just your students but a lot of the people that are listening to this right now.
02:10:16.000It just makes everything more dramatic.
02:10:18.000You can see the dynamics because it's so freaking dramatic in you.
02:10:22.000You're then able to see the more subtle way it plays out for everyone.
02:10:25.000The stuff I'm talking about, it's just the human condition, man.
02:10:28.000Everyone is struggling with a version of this.
02:10:31.000It may not be to that extreme thing, or they have an orthogonal challenge over here, something a little bit different.
02:10:36.000So you're continually training your compassion for how hard it can be in life, but you're also learning very practically how to work with the dynamics of that stuff.
02:10:44.000Is the downside of that the reaction to the upside, or is there a corresponding physical feeling?
02:12:07.000I anchor two shows at ABC, and I have a wife and a child.
02:12:11.000And it would be insane even if I didn't have that.
02:12:13.000And so my job was to write the narrative, the overarching structure of the book, and Jeff was going to write the meditation instructions that got inserted in.
02:12:21.000And all I wanted from him was to give me some basic fucking meditation instructions.
02:12:26.000I did not want an exegesis on like the...
02:12:30.000The Upanishads, you know, like I didn't need him to go through and explain to me like the whole Pali canon from Buddhism or, you know, do his version of the Bhagavad Gita.
02:12:42.000But he would send me these memos with his grandiose, he would be on a manic upswing.
02:12:47.000He would have these ideas about how he was going to explain meditation as it's never been explained before as a series of exfoliations of the mind, blah, blah, blah, 17 pages.
02:12:56.00050, 17 pages of like, of like tightly, you know, cause like you get the energy comes up and you get super excited.
02:13:03.000I want to talk about all these little kind of like, uh, complicated bits and put it all together and create this really elaborate scaffolding and a metaphor to describe exactly how the mind works.
02:13:11.000And, and that's why, you know, uh, that's why I had, that's why I didn't get the book done before I was working on with Dan.
02:13:17.000I spent 10 years working on this book about enlightenment, about the, about the progress of insight and meditation.
02:13:23.000And I just kept getting more and more complicated because I would kind of simplify it and be very sane.
02:14:29.000But when any of us is on an upswing or any of us is just caught in any mental state, your capacity for empathy and compassion goes way down because you're stuck in your own story.
02:14:43.000The name of the game here, at the end of the day, notwithstanding my already stated misgivings about words like compassion, that is where the rubber hits the road.
02:14:52.000Because you can talk about performance, that is important, but I think the real measuring stick for how well you've trained your mind is, are you an asshole?
02:15:52.000You have to see that stuff in yourself instead of just complaining about it in others in order to really get to the good stuff, which is actually then learning how to listen.
02:16:03.000And it's also, like we're talking about, it's very important for people to hear because everybody's that guy sometimes.
02:18:00.000I mean, the scientific community that studies meditation, I'm actually part of it, but I know a lot of these men and women.
02:18:06.000They haven't figured out exactly what it is, what's the minimum dose.
02:18:10.000But I've asked them, you know, is five to ten minutes probably enough?
02:18:13.000And the general consensus is probably enough to derive many of these benefits.
02:18:18.000So that's the good news, but I think the even better news is, if five to ten minutes sounds like too much for you, one minute most days, one minute daily-ish, is really enough to see what you need to see.
02:18:31.000What you need to see is that you're fucking crazy.
02:18:34.000You need to see it over and over again.
02:18:36.000This is the schnauzer getting his snout put in the poop.
02:18:39.000You need to have that happen to you over and over again.
02:18:55.000And when you see how crazy you are when you've become distracted and learn how to start again and again and again, every time you see that you've become distracted, that's a win.
02:19:05.000And it's a win of really towering consequences because then you see that you don't have to be owned by all that craziness.
02:19:15.000Another thing that I think that people should take into consideration about this talk of this meditation and trying to manage the mind is that one of the big issues and struggles that we face with today is addiction to social media.
02:19:26.000And it is the exact opposite of meditation.
02:19:58.000Where meditation is useful is because, again, what you're training is self-awareness.
02:20:02.000You're just training to see your own stuff clearly so that it doesn't own you.
02:20:07.000In the course of meditation, if you have some meditation under the belt, when you're so deep in a Twitter hole that you're, you know, spent three hours on the thing, maybe meditation can kick in at some point and say, oh, my stomach is bubbling, my head is aching,
02:20:24.000I haven't eaten, I'm not ignoring my children, and you can pull yourself out of the spiral.
02:20:28.000And you just get better and better at doing that.
02:20:43.000It's nice to have those aspirational figures out there.
02:20:45.000It's also great to have masters out there who can get in and help us with our meditation practice.
02:20:48.000For most of us, at a level of 5 to 10 minutes a day, or 1 minute a day, or 1 minute most days, it's just that you're going to become marginally less of a schmuck, and that's really valuable.
02:21:43.000Well, I think that this is an important aspect of it to focus on, that social media use and this addiction that we have is literally the exact opposite of this mindfulness and meditation and really concentrating on being completely free of all these devices and things that you're distracting yourself with.
02:22:28.000It's about what you're going to train and what you're not going to train.
02:22:31.000Most of us don't think of life that way.
02:22:32.000We land in life and you just start doing stuff, but the things you're doing are the things that are going to become your inevitable conditioning.
02:22:39.000That's a very sobering thought, but it's also a liberating thought because it shows you that if you can start to do the stuff that's better for you, better for your brain, your body, then you can start to reverse that stuff as well.
02:22:52.000And just to amplify your point about this mindless use of social media being the opposite of meditation, I actually think that it's interesting.
02:23:01.000I think the proliferation of communication technology is in part why meditation has become so in vogue.
02:23:08.000Because people know on some level whether they can articulate it or not.
02:23:16.000We are, there's this really interesting woman, Manoush Zamarodi, who has a podcast called Note to Self, and it's all about our relationship with technology, and I was talking to her recently, and she said, we're conducting this massive science experiment.
02:23:31.000And we don't know what the outcome is going to be, but it's happening globally.
02:23:35.000And people have a sense that something's off.
02:23:38.000And that, I think, is why meditation has become such a big thing.
02:23:40.000But, you know, actually, what I think is really interesting is, have you guys heard of the slow technology movement?
02:23:46.000There's a few different ideas around this, like slow design.
02:23:49.000The basic idea is that right now the interfaces that we use, these flat screens, and all the notifications, the buzzing, the flickers, that's kind of blowing our attention apart.
02:24:01.000So it's training the brain and the mind in a particular kind of way.
02:24:04.000But in the exact same spirit, if you were to start to design these interfaces in a way that according to basic mental health principles, you might be able to create more positive habits.
02:24:15.000So it's just starting to think, like, actually, how could we design our devices, our interfaces, our technology in a way that's promoting more, you know, happiness, more connection, more of all the good stuff?
02:24:27.000And that's like a question people are just starting to ask.
02:24:30.000And I think it's really, really cool to, like, think about things in that way that it could be an opportunity.
02:24:36.000There could be an opportunity with the technologies to do something really awesome.
02:25:01.000I'll just put in one plug, but while we're waiting for slow technology to come to fruition, there are ways that it's on us as users to use these things wisely.
02:25:10.000One thing I would say is, as somebody who does use Twitter and Instagram, is there's a great tweet from this guy Ian Bremmer, who's a big thinker about current affairs.
02:25:21.000I think his pinned tweet is something like, if you're only following people you agree with, you're doing it wrong.
02:25:29.000I think there's a way in which actually our social media use in that we create these cocoons, these bubbles, these ideological echo chambers.
02:25:38.000We're only following people who give us visceral, satisfying, ideological red meat.
02:25:44.000If in fact you can use these platforms and podcasts I think?
02:26:03.000Toxic tribalism is a really good way of putting it.
02:26:07.000Everyone's just stuck in their own Facebook feeds.
02:26:12.000Yeah, but you can use Facebook to connect with your neighbors who disagree with you and to actually be able to hear their arguments in a way that isn't blindly reactive.
02:26:24.000It's about doing the rounds of the community.
02:26:27.000Can you actually go out there and do the rounds of the community and check out some different perspectives?
02:26:44.000And to have some sort of common ground where you can explore the ideas themselves and not look at the person who presents the ideas as your enemy.
02:26:52.000That's a real problem today in this country, obviously.
02:27:21.000Unquestionably, there's people that look to the guy who's at the top of the food chain as being the one who we should sort of model ourselves after in some way, shape or form.
02:27:29.000And so the idea that people are leaning in that direction now, where they weren't for eight years, it's weird.
02:27:36.000It's a weird time for interaction and debating ideas.
02:27:40.000Yeah, well it's also, again, one of the negative things with social media is that thing of just like, The whole trolling thing.
02:27:46.000You can just say whatever you want because you don't actually have a real human being right in front of you.
02:28:28.000And again, I know we're Flogging the meditation thing, and I don't want to present it as a panacea because it's not, and nor is it the only approach to increasing the sanity quotient in our society, which badly needs to happen.
02:28:41.000But again, I do think that meditation, mindfulness, the sort of self-awareness that's generated through meditation can play a positive role in this situation.
02:28:50.000The aforementioned toxic tribalism, because if you're so caught up in your own story, you can't, as we've discussed, have the kind of empathy that is needed to understand people who have differing views.
02:29:02.000And meditation is a way, among other techniques, to kind of just reduce How seriously, how personally you're taking your own inner chaos.
02:29:11.000And I think that can be very useful right now.
02:29:14.000Do I think everybody in the world is automatically going to hurl themselves into the lotus position?