Podcrushed - Jay Shetty & Michael Karlberg: Humanity's Collective Coming of Age

Episode Date: February 12, 2026

In this special double episode, the gang tackles a big question: could the turbulence and chaos in our world be signs that humanity is collectively coming of age? To help them answer, they've recruited Jay Shetty, award-winning podcast host of On Purpose and New York Times bestselling author, and Michael Karlberg, a professor at Western Washington University whose work reconceptualizes human nature, power, social organization, and social change in the pursuit of peace and justice. Simply put, Michael helps make sense of our world, and Jay helps make sense of our place in it. Don't miss this one!    Right now, new customers can get 15% off sitewide at https://magneticme.com.    🎧 Want more from Podcrushed? 📸 Instagram 🎵 TikTok 🐦 X / Twitter ✨ Follow Penn, Sophie & Nava Instagram Penn Sophie Nava TikTok Penn Sophie Nava  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Lemonada. The people who want to tear the world down are really clear on what they're doing. And so for all of those of us who want to be hopeful, what we don't want to be is peace signs and like, you know, woo-woo, like, oh, let's just make everything wonderful. It's like, we've got to get organized. We've got to get diligent. We've got to get activated. And so to me, that energy is exciting. It gives you the purpose and meaning of life.

Welcome to Podcrushed. We're hosts. I'm Penn. And I'm Sophie. And I think we would have been your middle school besties. Breathing through our noses and exhaling through our hoses. We're so glad this thing is coming to an end. Oh, my goodness.

Pre-finally episode coming right up. Hello, hello. Welcome to Podgush. This is our pre-finally. We have the finale, which you should know by now. If you haven't heard, we will tell you it is Leighton Meister, who is our first, our A1 Day, our first guest. A lot of people asked for her to come back. She's the only person who's ever

come back. She is our last guest. And she's on video. We know that you were begging us for her to be on video. That's right. We were not a video enterprise then. We are now. Today's episode is very different from anything we've done in the past. If you've been listening to Pod Crush for a while, you would know that we're a show that explores our guest's middle school years. That's our launching point every time we start at 12, not 12 p.m. but 12 years old. It's boilerplate, right, for us. But today's episode is different because we're not exploring our guests coming of ages. We are asking our guests to help us make sense of humanity's collective coming of age. We're suggesting that that's the period that we're in and how this idea of coming of age can be

used as a prism to view the world through and to help us make sense of, you know, some of the admitted craziness we might see around us. What's really special about today's episode is that we have an academic who's going to frame like this historical moment who's going to help us think about this really from the view of the community, the collective, our systems and institutions. And then we have a guest who's going to actually really help us think about each one of us, what can we specifically do? And I love that we get to kind of hear that full perspective. That's exactly right. And as always now that you framed it perfectly much better than I could have. So our first guest is admittedly somebody that you're not going to have heard of,

Almost certainly, but he is a brilliant thinker. He is one of our favorite thinkers on the planet, truly. His name is Michael Carlberg. Michael Carlberg. We're keeping that. I like that character. I want that in there, just for the record. So we can repeat his name.

Say his name. Michael Carlberg is a professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Western Washington University with a focus on peace and justice studies. His research examines evolving conceptions of human nature, power, social organization, and social change. He is the author of the books, Beyond the Culture of Contest and Constructing Social Reality. That's two separate books.

I couldn't recommend them enough. They are incredible. Again, that's beyond the culture of contest. And the other one is constructing social reality. Really brilliant stuff. He has another book coming out later this year, co-authored with Derek Smith, another one of our favorite thinkers. from Claremont to McKenna College.

The title of this one is Rethinking Social Justice, and this book examines the concepts of contributive justice and radical constructive agency in the pursuit of social change. Now, if that doesn't sound like enough, we've got another guest today. We have got Jay Shetty. Jay Shetty is a global best-selling author, award-winning podcast host of On Purpose.

He's the chief purpose officer of calm, a purpose-driven entrepreneur, and former monk. He has made an indelible impact on hearts and minds worldwide with an astounding following of over 65 million across social media platforms. Man, we should have had him on earlier. And over 700 million monthly views across all platforms. Yeah, we needed to have him on in season one.

What were we thinking? Jay possesses a talent for making purpose and ancient wisdom not only relatable, but also practical and easily accessible. His journey of transformation and inspiration has touched the lives of millions across the globe. Jay Shetty harness the transformative power of digital and audio media with the launch of On Purpose with Jay Shetty in 2019, and this groundbreaking award-winning podcast tops the charts globally with over one billion listens.

My goodness. So he's just under podcrushed and is recognized by Spotify and Apple as a leading global podcast, again, right there along with this show. You know, why are we ending it? Really? I can't figure that out. So Jay, through captivating, sincere and never before heard dialogues,

he engages in conversations with some of the most influential and insightful individuals on the planet. That is really true. It enables him to delve deep into thought-provoking discussions that inspire and enlighten his listeners. Actually, in 2020, Jay released his debut book, Think Like a Monk, which soared to the top of the New York Times. Why didn't even come on?

You know what I mean? Like thinking of all this. Charity. I think Charitable Giving is part of the life of a monk. But yeah, his first book, his debut book, Think Like a Monk, it was right at the top of the New York Times. And UK Sunday Times bestsellers list, my goodness. In 2023, Jay wrote his second book. Eight Rules of Love in response to the most common questions he received over the pandemic,

which revolved around love and relationships, which quickly claimed its place as another instant New York Times and global bestseller, again, just beneath our book. Jay, like us, is on the mission of spreading love, purpose, and transformation globally. This conversation was helpful for us. We hope that it is helpful for you. We want you to experience it in full, so we just let it roll. If you're looking for a new domestic thriller to binge,

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Hiya, Julia Louis Dreyfus here from the Wiser Than Me podcast, among other things. And I've got a bit of a hot take. Our relationship to our food can feel disconnected. We don't always know how or where our food is grown. And if we throw food scraps in the garbage, we don't think about where it's going. Or at least we try not to. One way that I get back a little of that connection is by using my Mill food recycler. Sure, Mill has totally changed my home life in a lot of practical ways.

It works automatically. You can fill it for weeks. It never, ever smells. But this is also really important. When I use Mill, I'm participating in a circular system. All the food I don't eat is helping to grow the food that I do. It makes me feel like I'm part of something. bigger, and that feels really, really good. And it's all so ridiculously easy. I just drop my scraps

in my mill, and it transforms them into nutrient-rich grounds overnight. I have mine sent to a small farm, but if I wanted to, I could use them in my garden or for my backyard chickens, if I wanted backyard chickens, and I don't know, maybe I do now, maybe I don't. Anyway, mill is transforming me, too, just a little. If you want to feel more connected, or you just your kitchen to feel less gross, try Mills risk-free trial, and just live with it for a while. Go to mill.com slash wiser for an exclusive offer. So, Michael, we think of coming of age for an individual, meaning it's, so there's a period of confusion, there's turbulence, there's rapid growth. It sounds like we could apply

these same ideas to humanity, but there's probably also a lot more to consider as well. And this is something we know you've been sort of thinking about and exploring and researching for some time, if that's accurate. So please, you know, speak to us like we've never thought about it because maybe some of our listeners have also never thought about this idea of humanity coming of age and not just an individual. So, yeah, humanity coming of age, obviously is a metaphor. we look at individuals coming of age. We know what that means. We're trying to make sense of humanity as a whole. You know, a lot of people dismiss metaphors in these ways

because, oh, yeah, just a metaphor. It doesn't really mean anything. But I think it's helpful just to like spend a second to think about how fundamental metaphors are to the way we understand everything. So let me just give an example. If I say life is hard, I've just used a metaphor.

We're trying to understand this complicated thing, life. And hard is just a property of a physical object like a brick. Like, so we, like every other thought we have relies on metaphor. It's so fundamental to how we think. So we shouldn't dismiss a metaphor like humanity's coming of age. It has, I think, profound insights that can offer us into this really complicated thing, like humanity and what's happening historically. So, yeah, just sort of unpack this metaphor to see what insights it offers.

I think obviously the first insight is coming of age is a transitional metaphor. There's a period before. There's a period after, right, in the life of the individual that are completely different. Childhood is completely different than adulthood. So it's a period of transition. And I think it's a reason. reasonable to assume the humanity is going through a very fundamental transition in which life in the future will be fundamentally differently than it was in the past. And there are countless,

you know, great thinkers who have more or less concluded this. But not only like in the life of the individual, it's not just a big transition. It's the single most important transition in a person's entire life, right? Adolescence coming of age, period. It's when we most move from, let's say, our childish ways towards those mature ways of thinking and acting that are going to define us the rest of our life. So it's fundamental, most important transition we go through. I think another insight we can draw from this metaphor is that, you know, a lot of people say, like, oh, the past is the best predictor of the future.

But we wouldn't say that about the life of an individual. Oh, yeah, their childhood is the best predictor of who they're going to become, you know, and they're matured. No, in fact, we know that childhood is a period where we're developing all sorts of habits that we're actually going to leave behind. And adulthood, you know, our maturity is fundamentally different. So it's actually a metaphor in that sense when we think of humanity as a whole that I think should give us some hope.

If we look at the past, yeah, humanity has done some really terrible things in the past, and we're still doing some pretty terrible things. But those things don't need to define us forever. And this coming of age metaphor actually invites us to take seriously that possibility that we can live in more mature ways collectively. So like our mature self, it's not just a bigger version of our immature self. The adult human is not just a bigger version of the adult child. It's a fundamentally different state or condition.

And I think for all these reasons, it's very a helpful metaphor to think that humanity may be moving through a transition of that sort. You know, you earlier mentioned that we've done terrible things, but it doesn't mean we have to do terrible things. And, you know, I think like a way that I could imagine, that, you know, reframe that is because people who are doing it at the time don't think it's terrible.

It's the social norm. Like the political systems define the social norms. The culture, obviously, throughout all of history, there have been people who've engaged in, like, extreme acts that others would agree is evil and whatever. But I'm just thinking about, like, dominant trends. We could also probably just call them childish. Like, it was appropriate to the time,

but it wouldn't be appropriate to continue doing it now. And so I'm wondering if you could maybe delineate a few things that are like childish, that if we continue to do them, it's like not befitting. And then also define for some of the traits of the adolescent phase that we're experiencing as a species like, what is actually happening right now? There's some really fascinating research coming out about what I would describe as two human instincts that are pretty basic to all of us when we're born. And one is egoism.

It's the need to put the self first. And of course, that's a survival instinct. Like we need to eat, we need attention, we know all these things to survive. There's nothing wrong with that. It's appropriate when we first enter this world, so to speak, that we are the center of our own world and we're all that matters, like, you know, tending to our needs. The other instinct that we're born with, and there's evidence now showing this,

this begins to express itself in infancy, like as early as six, eight, ten, ten, months of old. It's the tendency to divide groups into like in-group and out-group. In other words, to look at the people in our environment. Infants start to do this. They look at the people in environment and they start to sort, oh, who's like me and who's not like me? Who's the in-group? Who's the out-group? And they do it over the most trivial things like food preferences and toy preferences. But the scary thing is, Also from these early ages, once we form these in-group, out-group distinctions, we begin to treat the in-group altruistically, benevolently, the helpful, we're helpful, we're cooperative, we care about the

in-group, the members of in-group, we begin to treat the out-group in-group in-group in-like competitive and aggressive and sort of egoistic ways. So those two fundamental human instincts, which play probably an important role in our early survival and, you know, like protecting us maybe from dangerous outgroups or whatever, if those habits of mind carry into adulthood, it's the cause of every system of oppression that humanity has ever created. like dividing the world into us and them and then treating us well and them poor like that is almost the definition of how systems of oppression arise so these instincts that we're born with that maybe play a certain kind of formative role early in our lives if we carry them into adulthood we're in big trouble and i think you could say collectively you see these them expressed in systems that do this. I think hopefully we all know many, many people who overcome the just

the basic raw, egoistic drive and this tendency to engage in othering, right? This in-group out-group thing, let's call it othering. Plenty of people who in their mature life, you know, as adults, learn how to overcome those things. That doesn't mean we aren't maybe forever tempted in small ways to sort of fall into those patterns, but we can develop habits of mind, practices, character, you know, moral commitments that enable us, you know, to really control those impulses and to replace them with more noble human capacities, right? Generosity and caring and inclusiveness and all, you know, all these other things that we're also capable of. So, I mean, there's lots of evidence in the life of the individual that we can do this. We can also see in the world around us

communities and movements and organizations where groups of people really have gone far in learning, again, how to overcome those habits of mind and behavior. You know, there's all sorts of research also about human nature that fundamentally what defines us is that we're like the most cooperative species ever to evolve. And I'm sure that when you say that, a lot of people are surprised. They would expect you say the most competitive. So I'm curious, what does that research point to? Yeah.

What it points to is, you know, humans have taken cooperation to a level that no other species has even come close. And, I mean, there's also a whole body of research showing out now that evolution itself is not just about competition, but it's about mutualism across species. and these basically cooperative behaviors that confer fitness on species. When species cooperate internally and makes them more fit, when they cooperate with other species through these mutualistic relationships, it makes them more fit.

So cooperation confers fitness in terms of like survival of the fittest. And humans are the most cooperative species by far. I mean, we have figured out how to get to the moon through human cooperation. You show me another species that has, you know, figured that out. Like the whole enterprise of science itself is a fundamentally cooperative accomplishment that no other species even remotely has approached. So, yeah, we are like off the charts by historic, by evolutionary standards when it comes to our capacity for cooperation.

And again, so many organizations, communities, societies have demonstrated this to various degree. all of which implies to some extent subduing these instincts for egoism and othering. I think sometimes to such a great degree that we are fish in the water in our cooperative ability. Like, zoom out a little bit. Driving a car is incredibly dangerous

every time you get in that car. And we are all so used to collaborating and cooperating, you know, so much. With these very basic, dumb rules, it's like, don't go on that side of the line. Don't go on that side of the line, stay within these lines. Stop at that one. Look at this color, then you can go.

Look at this color and you can stop. It's funny. If you think of it as like animals training themselves, there's no animal that could come close. They could come remotely close to that. And we're just overlooking the just incredible number of ways that we cooperate at a really high level, like every day all the time. It sounds like maybe competition, not all competition, let's say,

but unnecessary competition could be called childish. And so much of our childhood has been defined by competition, particularly between like, you know, in and out groups because every society has had them. So it's really thrilling to think about if that's really going to be left behind in our childhood. It hasn't been left behind in our teenage years yet, but you can see increasing movements to leave it behind and increasingly people saying like, we're one planet, we're one human race,

we are the world, right? There's been like music, art. dedicated to this concept, but it's not embodied in our social systems. And mostly in the 90s as well. Yeah, we left that, yeah, at 2025, we're us and them again. But it's really thrilling to think about what we will accomplish as a human race when it's like all about cooperation because we've not experienced that yet. So it's hard to imagine how great that will be, but it's also really hopeful.

Because I think when a lot of people imagine the future, I've literally heard friends of mine who I respect, who are smart, say, I think we're wrapping this all up in about 50 years. Like I think people don't imagine a future for the human species at all. Most of the stories we tell ourselves, most of the stories we listen to are driven by conflict, drama, violence, and it makes interesting stories. But, you know, our news fundamentally for years has operated

on trying to put a magnifying glass on the worst expression. And nothing else, by the way. Right. Nothing else. Almost. And now our social media algorithms do the same thing, you know, a thousandfold. They make things up to make us. They're taking it to the next level. They're making it fake things.

Yeah. So it's kind of like standing in front of a fun house mirror. We get this distorted picture of ourselves when we turn to the media, social media, to understand who we are because it's exaggerating our sort of our base. instincts and aspects. And it's obscuring those really remarkable accomplishments of the human spirit at the level of cooperation and so forth.

So I think it's easy to understand if our primary sources of self-knowledge are these like distorting funhouse mirrors of media, then yeah, it's going to lead us to that. Plus, you know, the stakes have become really high. We have weapons that can destroy planet now, we're warming the atmosphere. Like there are these existential challenges we face now.

So you put all that together, it's a pretty bleak picture. But when I put it together, I see a different picture. I see, oh, for the first time in all of human history, we are going to be forced to learn how to live together on this planet as like a single human family because the stakes are so high now. So this is going to test all those cooperative capacities that are innate within us that have expressed themselves to varying degrees. But now we need to figure out how to do this on a planet in which there is no other. In other words, right, there is no longer us and them.

There's humanity on this tiny little blue dot in space that has to figure out how to get along because it can no longer afford not to do this. like the stakes are too high. And that's the good news. The good news is we can't put this off any longer. The stakes are too high. And fundamentally, when I look at our species, what I see is an incredibly creative, adaptive, determined species.

We're not going to let this whole thing end in 50 years. We're going to figure out how to do this because that's what we do best. And these are new conditions we live in. The stakes are higher than never. And so, yeah, we got to learn lessons we haven't yet learned. But I have a lot of faith that humanity can do this, despite the many horrible things that we continue to see in the world.

But in fact, because of those things that I think we're going to be, we're going to have to dig deep and figure this out. Stick around. We'll be right back. This sponsor is a special one from my heart to all of the fellow baby parents out there. We all have those moments. Let's put them in quotes, right? Those moments as parents, especially the newborn stage, right?

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I'm just thinking of like how human beings have thought. about the story of humanity and maybe thinking about also how children think about that, their own story. And for a child, when they're having a tantrum, they think it's like the end of the world. You know, my five-year-old, he says something that, like, anybody who has had a five-year-old understands. It might sound alarming to somebody who hasn't, maybe. But he says something like...

I'll let you know. But you're quite understanding and you're around children a lot. So let's see. He said when he's like really upset, usually when he's very hungry or tired and something triggers him, he'll just say at first it's like maybe he wants to watch something. And then if I don't let him, he'll say, I'm going to break the computer. And then it goes from like he scales up what he wants to break. He'll be like, I'm going to break the whole city.

You know? And I guess I'm just thinking of like that's a five-year-olds, a child's capacity. to tell a story about what's happening right now. It's like... Michael is smiling and his face is saying, no, that's not normal. You're raising a sociopath. I have a destructive sociopathic.

Future killer. I'm raising a little devil child. No. So I'm just thinking of like, just how literally we can take some of these metaphors, you know what I mean? Like to not see the future is sorry, brilliant rationales.

intellectuals, but like I think to not see the future is sometimes like its own childish behavior, right? It's like, oh, the world is ending because I'm uncomfortable right now. That is actually the way that children tend to see things, and that's okay, you know, for them, because that's, it's appropriate of the developmental stage. Yeah, like if we go back to that. So, you know, if you think about what begins to happen in adolescence in those years, is we begin to sort of lift up our vision beyond just our narrow personal concerns, and we begin to sort of pay more attention to our social environment and the conditions in the world around us.

Like that's natural. All adolescents begin to do this. It's like literally your vision sorts of lift and expand into the world. and part of what happens then associated with that is we begin to develop a sort of acute sense of justice because we're looking at the conditions in the world and we're thinking like, is that right? Is that fair?

And then, you know, associated that are like we become very sensitive of things like hypocrisy. Like the adults around us. Demonstrate hypocrisy. We see it. We perceive it because we're looking at the world now through these lenses. And so, you know, if we're an individual growing up in conditions that are characterized

by a lot of injustice and hypocrisy, we'll begin to question at that age how people are acting and the basic assumptions they're operating on and we'll rebel against those things. Like this is the natural thing that adolescents do. It's not that adolescents are naturally or inevitably rebellious. It's that when adolescents are in an environment characterized by injustice and hypocrisy, totally. They're naturally rebellious. I love that.

There's still a lot of that in the world. So we see this with a lot of teenagers and so forth. And in fact, this capacity of young people to do this is a really important aspect of how communities and cultures become more mature over time. because youth are willing to question everything, and they're willing to change things that need to be changed. So, like, in the life of the individual, we see that. We sort of know that. We see this pattern.

But if we think about humanity as a whole now and this metaphor of coming of age, I mean, let's think about it. Like, as a result of developments with media and communication technology and so forth, our vision has literally been lifted up beyond our own narrow local concerns. And we're paying attention to social conditions across our country, across the entire world. I mean, right on our phones. All of this is literally with us daily now.

We see this. And humanity as a whole, and there's evidence for this, is actually developing a sort of deeper sense of social justice. We can talk more about this later if you want, but we've become increasingly sensitized to social injustices, collectively. sensitized and hypocrisies and corruption. And so, yeah, we look around the conditions of the world today, and we see lots of injustice and hypocrisy and corruption. And we are starting to really question all of these things, all these patterns of behavior and the assumptions that underlie them, and we're beginning to rebel against it.

Like, this is part of what's happening in the world around us, and this is like this natural adolescent sort of thing. And it's good for humanity's collective development. Basic unquestioned assumptions are now being questioned. Long-established, like, immature patterns of behavior, like adults, acting like children, are being questioned. Is this sort of hypocritical and so forth? This is a really significant, I think, insight that this coming of age metaphor offers us. into what's happening in the world today.

And these are positive things that we're becoming more and more sensitized and willing to question these like age-old patterns that surround us. I'm just wondering about what's happening like neurochemically or neurobiologically for an adolescent because I'm wondering if there's utility to the metaphor

where we can think like, well, what is an adolescent sort of up against? Like what are they kind of day-to-day like what do they need to do to be you know to be like overcoming the challenges and and what happened you know like what does it look like to succumb to them you know what I mean

I mean take whatever you want of that so I think yeah this is another really interesting insight we can gain from this coming of age metaphor so what neuroscience says about like the development of human brain is this like when we're children our brain starts to form

all these neural connections, these synapses, like millions, billions, trillions, I don't know how many of them. You know, just like, that's what the job of being a child is. You do things, you try things, you see things, you start, you're forming all these connections. And in a sense, this

web of connections is like a bush, growing branches after branches, you know, connection after connection. I'm imagining also a big bang, kind of. And we hit adolescents, is what neuroscience says. We hit adolescents, and what happens is many of those connections, those branches, like the way our brain is structured,

so to speak, they reflect these like childish patterns that are no longer useful and the brain begins to prune them back. Like literally, these synaptic connections we developed in our childhood begin to disintegrate, the ones that are not useful. And the ones that are useful stay and We build on them. New, you know, new connections begin to integrate. So it's like this pruning period. That's a metaphor that they use in neuroscience. It's this pruning in the brain that's happening with all these connections.

And then it allows for this new growth, just like you prune a bush. And all of a sudden, like new growth. So that's what happens in adolescence to the brain. And again, it's necessary. It allows us to build on the strengths of our. childhood and leave the nonsense behind and then begin developing like a whole new level. Let's think about that collectively. You know, over hundreds of thousands of years, humanity has developed all these like ways

of thinking, ways of seeing, ways of doing things, this like tree of, you know, of the way our thought and perceptions are structured. What's happening in the world today is, a lot of that stuff is disintegrating. It's like proving, oh, we can no longer act that way because now we have nuclear weapons and now there's, you know, global health pandemics and, you know, the internet and social media and AI and whatever. We can no longer act like children.

Those patterns that developed in our childhood that are not suitable anymore are disintegrating. But the good news is that those processes of disintegration are opening up space. for new processes of integration, new processes of growth and development, which are like these new patterns we're going to need to figure out to live together on this planet successfully. And so what adolescence is,

it's a moment where these processes of like integration and disintegration are both accelerating in our brains, literally, and making way for new, patterns of maturity. And collectively, we could say the same thing about humanity. We look around the world. We see accelerating sort of processes of social disintegration. I mean, it's easy to see that. That's the stuff the news brings us, actually. But if we look carefully and we know what to look for, we can also see these processes of integration that are happening and they're accelerating,

people learning how to build new patterns of community life, new institutional structures, new way to organize collective activity. But you have to look for that and you have to see it for what it is. What does it mean to look for integration? What does that look like big and small? One is, I think, step back and just look historically at where we are and what we've accomplished.

So, you know, throughout much of human history in many, many societies, women lived under really terrible conditions of oppression. Like, patriarchy is a real thing historically in most societies. It was not much more than 100 years ago in the U.S. that women got the vote, right? That was a major historical accomplishment. Now, that's not to say we've entirely eliminated all the traces of patriarchy and women are like in perfect, equal opportunity in every field today.

But we've made great strides. Those are these new patterns, these integrative patterns, these like new synapses that are forming. Oh, actually, women and men are equal and need the same opportunities. And in fact, societies can't flourish and prosper unless and until women have full access to education and employment and all the opportunity to contribute their part to the betterment of society. the same thing is true with race. Now, clearly we're still struggling with lots of traces of racism. No one should deny that. But let's just also take stock of how far we've come, right?

And where do we want to set the clock back to? We want to look at plantation slavery and compare that to the moment we live in today? Do we want to look at like segregated Jim Crow South and compare that to the moment we live in today? Like, we have made progress, even though we have work to do. So those are processes of integration that are playing out in our society in these sort of broad scales. Look at the caste system in India and the many efforts to dismantle its lasting legacy. Obviously, it still has its traces and there's still work to be done. And you can say that about all these, like, oppressive and dysfunctional and corrupt systems

that humanity is inherited from the past, they're still with us. But you can see on every front there are movements to dismantle those systems and replace them with more mature systems. And even when we focus on those movements, sometimes all we see in the news are like the sparks flying and the most sort of confrontational or even violent sort of exchanges that happen on the edges of some of these movements. we actually don't get a good picture of how these movements really advance. Like, what's the fundamental? I've been teaching a course. In fact, on Wednesday, I start teaching another version of this course on social change. We really try to look with fresh eyes at the evidence about how movements advance,

the means by which they advance, some of the accomplishments that they've led to, and the work that's still in front of us. I would say all of that is sort of can be accounted in, let's say, the integrative forces column of our analysis here. And those are just a few examples. You could also look at the development of international law, right? A hundred years ago, there was no system for international law really of anything. And today it's far from perfect. but generally large portions of humanity recognize the need for certain forms of international law

to prevent certain kinds of aggressions, you know, and war and violence and other things. Now, we have people and countries who continue to ignore efforts to build up that framework of laws, but it's actually come a long way. And if you study the evolution of a system of international law and the institutions to support it, you can see there have been really significant process of integration at play and a lot more work to be done still again don't get me wrong if you haven't like completed any of these projects so to speak I used to work at the United Nations and you know would attend various kinds of meetings

and I was thinking about if I think about international relations in the past the first two words that come to mind are like imperialism and conquest and those processes like march on but like I have literally been in rooms where people from India, the United States, Colombia, Zambia, were like really concerned about a rural village where female genital mutilation was still happening. And it's incredible to think that like we have mature to a point where like a young man in New York City cares about what's happening to a rural girl in a community he's never been to. And we can actually like affect change. That's also

positive in those communities and help advance, you know, certain dynamics of gender equality, even if it's not that organic to the community, but it'll still come. Let me add one observation on that too, because this is part of these integrative forces, I think. So, you know, I teach at a university. I've taught for far too long, care to admit, many, many years. And, you know, a lot of faculty complain about, oh, students nowadays, they can't write as well

because AI or they can, you know, they're distracted because of social. social media, and, you know, there's probably some truth to some of these things. It's generations struggling with certain social forces that are acting on them. But I see something really fundamental that's also happened, just in my lifetime and in my time teaching, which is students come into my classes now with a deep understanding of the oneness of humanity. like the fact that we're all one human family on this planet and we should care about each other. And things like justice across all of our superficial differences,

it matters. That's just the starting point now for all of my students. That was not the case when I began teaching. And it was definitely not the case when I was a student myself even further back. And I think part of that again is, you know, I teach a generation students now that literally, grew up on the internet in a global community, listening to global music and seeking out global food and learning about global issues

and caring about the suffering of distant others. And like, that's new. And it's affected a generation in a really significant way. It's like literally reforming the way they think about their role in the world and how they care about distant others and how they care about the future, you know, people who haven't even been born yet. but are going to inherit a world that's, you know, warming and so forth. That's like the baseline has changed.

The baseline has changed with students in terms of their commitment to basic sort of moral responsibilities of living on a planet with other people. For the critical thinkers out there, right, who might have heard what we've said, have been like, yeah, but why does it feel like it's getting worse? And I want to introduce the way you talk about power, Michael, because I feel like representative of coming of age is you can't just like wrestle the toy out of the other kid's hand here

and say, ah, we've now done it. We wrestle the power away from the tyrants. We've wrestled the power away from the bad people. It's like, no, no, no, no, no. We are all in the same family system that we cannot leave because we can't leave the planet despite our efforts. We can't do it, you know.

how do we need to reframe the way we're thinking about our relationships to each other and namely power because if we're not thinking about self-help and what I can do for myself and we're thinking about society we're talking about power you know we're talking about power dynamics and there's a great case to be made for you know yes some of these especially virulent and violent ways of being have sort of and litigating have like fallen away, but we still have these deeply entrenched notions, you know, and ideas and beliefs about what it means to be human, and it doesn't seem to change unless we wrestle the power away

from all these bad people, these bad actors, you know? And so can you talk a little bit about that? You know, historically, we've understood the idea of power in terms of like control and domination, right? You have power. It's because you can control other people. You can dominate other people, and you use it to advance your own interests, often at expense of others.

And, of course, power can't operate that way, and it does often operate that way. But in a sense, we've structured the world around that notion of power. Like, we literally have created institutions of government and the courts and the way our economy works, to actually feed into and stoke that idea of power as control and domination. And that's part of the problem. That's part of the, like, childish habits that we carry with us and that make it impossible live together on this planet.

But if we expand our understanding of power, what we can see is those, let's say, childish notions of power, they're all what you could call zero sum. Like someone wins, but someone's going to lose. They're not win-win ideas. But there are other powers of the human spirit, the power of cooperation, the power of empathy, the power of compassion, the powers of creativity.

I mean, we could go on and on on. The human spirit is capable of expressing a wide range of powers, many of which they're not zero sum. They're powers in which everyone benefits, everyone wins, and everyone can contribute. So the question is, how do we start to rebuild patterns of community life and institutional structures and systems around these other ideas of power? We're talking about releasing the sort of society building powers of the human beings. spirit, right? This is hard work. You have to literally think about how do you restructure things like education, things like democracy, things like the justice system and the economy around different

notions of power. So this is hard work. It's a lot of what I've written about over the years, but we need to begin by adopting a more sort of expansive understanding of power. What kinds of powers do we want to actually tap into? And what are the full range of powers humanity is capable of? And which of those powers, when they're released or tapped into, result in our collective flourishing, not in just like the advantage of one group over another? I know that you have been writing a book with one of my other favorite thinkers of today, Derek Smith, and I know that you guys are exploring this notion of radical, constructive agency,

is that right? Those three words together. It's inspiring what you're saying about these notions of power. How can a person just practically think about it or believe in it or imagine it in a way that's like, okay, from here, there is a, you know, possibly. slow and laborious route to systems which express and support and channel these powers, how do we touch that? How do we imagine? How do we work towards that? Like, what would you say to that kind of, that kind of vacillating, hopeful, you know, cynical mind? It's sort of about

what is our theory of change we're operating on? Like, how do you bring about the world you want to live? Yeah. You know, we all want to live in a world, I think, that's peaceful, which we're not, like, you know, fearful of violence, and in which every individual and group has an opportunity to develop their capacity to contribute to the betterment of society. Like, that's, in my mind, the definition of social justice, a set of social conditions in which everyone has the opportunity to develop their ability to contribute. So how do we bring about that world?

One theory of change says we got to identify all the obstacles to that world and we got to try to like dismantle and disrupt and destroy them. The question is what replaces them? And there's all sorts of examples throughout history where you can throw off one oppressive system and create a vacuum and another oppressive system rushes in to fill the vacuum. So that's not an adequate theory of change, just dismantling systems of oppression. You have to actually replace those systems of oppression with different systems, systems that are just. You have to supplant them.

You have to make them irrelevant by actually providing, by building the alternative. When you begin to think about that, you ask, what are the powers at our disposal? What are all this sort of creative, cooperative, courageous, you know, powers that we can marshal, and they're considerable powers. And when we begin to think about power in that sense, not power as like confronting a system of oppression, but actually power as supplanting it with something new that we build, that's a different kind of power. And interesting enough, when you think about power that way, it even changes how you think about resistance.

Because, you know, power and resistance are these two concepts that go hand in hand. If power is about control and domination, then, yeah, resistance is the appropriate response. You know, we all want to resist people who want to, like, control and dominate us. But if power is about building a more just world, a more just social reality, brick by brick, then that's not an act of resistance. In fact, if you're trying to build a more just world, you should expect resistance from people who don't want to see that world, from people who benefit from the present world. They're going to resist you trying to build something more just. So, you know, I don't, in a sense, I don't want to be part of the resistance.

I want to be part of the project of building a new world. And yeah, I know there will be people who resist that. People who want to cling to their childish, you know, systems of hierarchy and privilege and oppression and yada, yada, yada. They're going to resist an effort to build a better world. But I'm not in that equation, I'm not the resistance. I want to be with those people who are trying to release the society building power, the radical constructive agency of building a new world. That's more just.

And it's a fundamentally different way of thinking about social change that I think also is a sort of part of our coming of age. In other words, when we're young and you don't get your way, you put up a fight, you protest, you resist, right? But at some point, you start to take a risk. responsibility for actually building the world you want to live, building the life you want to live. Like, it's up to us to do the hard work of making the world the way we want it to be. And it's very hard work. But there are a growing number of movements that are beginning to

recognize, oh, this is actually the fundamental work. The fundamental work is not about protesting those things that we don't like, it's about supplanting them by building something new. And in fact, in the literature, in the discourse on social change and in processes of social movement learning, this is beginning to emerge now as a central scene. So, oh, okay, wait a minute. A social movement isn't just about protesting.

A social movement is about building something new. I'm thinking about some of our listeners who I've had the pleasure of meeting. I'm thinking about two girls in particular. I'm thinking about Nicole who lives in Minnesota and in her community, neighbors don't know each other. She feels pretty isolated. She does remote work. So she doesn't have that many opportunities to meet people.

But she's like really pure-hearted and really wants to see humanity advance. So I'm wondering like what can Nicole do to be part of like building something new? Then I'm thinking about Yulia who lives in the Ukraine. Her family was directly impacted by the ward. directly, you know, like literally had to move and is still going through that and is trying to find her community in that process and also like her nation that she loves so deeply, like wants to see healing come to it and peace be established there. And I'm wondering like, what can Julia do to be part of a movement of social change? One thing we can do is actually just like adopt the kind

a historical perspective we've been thinking about, like, find causes for hope. Because if we don't have hope, we don't have motivation. If we don't have motivation, we don't act. And if we don't act, nothing changes. So, so in that sense, what we can do is practice hope. Like, hope isn't just an emotional state we fall into. Hope is something you actually have to practice. It's a discipline. And it begins in how we, perceive the world. And how we perceive the world, there's choice in that, right?

So I think we need to like cultivate this practice of hope, find ways of perceiving the world that give us hope, that offer motivation, that lead to action. I think in sense, that's one of the first things we have to do.

I want to appreciate for a moment how, how profound this is because you know, this is where if we continue with the metaphor of coming of age for the individual matching that of society, then actually what we are is no longer the person because we're not like the leader of society where we are a cell. We're some part of the body. And the body in adolescence is doing work. And so it makes me think this question when you're

talking about it's like a paradigm shift. You're shifting your perspective is the first step to sit up on the couch. And that's a little bit to be like, wait a second, I'm a cell here. Which part of the do I want to be in? Do I want to be a sloughed off dead skin cell or something? Or like, can I, you know, can I become an integral part of some process here, you know, some process. And I think it really is true. Just at least even thinking, beginning to think this way is an enormous step because

of what a virtual world we live in. You know, we're not out in the world all the time. We are on our phones and watching stories. And we are, you know, we are, it's almost like society has largely become the life of the mind. You know, it's like it's this intangible thing. And it's like just to realize that and to realize that you have to begin a process of reorientation, I think that's quite something, you know. So I want to give like credence to the thought work that does have to go into action.

Because I think we live in an age where we very understandably say like, yeah, yeah, yeah, but what are we going to do about it? What are we going to do about it? And in a way, it's like, yeah, but if you aren't truly thinking differently, you're not going to do anything differently. If we find causes for hope, we derive motivation from them, we sort of move into an action mode. In other words, how do we become protagonists in the story of humanity? Those are really significant questions.

And to bring it back to Navas' question about the individual in the neighborhood, like how do we start conversations that enable us to find others who feel that way, that even offer hope to others that help them find the motivation and the courage, you know, to act? So like social change begins often with meaningful conversations, really, exploring, trying to read and make sense of our reality, trying to think about the kinds of actions that are available to us, trying to identify the immediate problems we can try to address in our environments through which we can develop capacities over time to try to address even larger and more complex problems that extend beyond just maybe our neighborhood.

And how do we then do all that in a learning process? Like we don't assume, oh, I know how the world is going to be fixed or this person knows how the world is going to be fixed. I just need the answer book. We have to learn our way forward. We have to learn how to act with others, how to reflect on our actions, you know, gain new insights, adjust course, consult, you know, like, how do we engage in this learning mode oriented towards social change

and the betterment of humanity? And in that process, how do we develop new capacities along the way that we hadn't yet had in the past? I think, like, just those practical steps beginning in our own neighborhoods and our own families and, you know, at our schools and our communities are the first steps that can lead naturally over time to thinking about how to act also, you know, in some cases, on a wider stage, so to speak,

how to contribute into broader social processes. That really brings to mind that some of these young people listening, elder people listening, whoever you are, wherever you are, you might actually initiate the first activity of its kind in your community. And then from there, you'll learn and you'll adjust and it'll grow. And I actually just want to give one really small practical example. I'm going to get on the, what did we say, the pedestal, the high horse, the simplest thing ever when I moved to L.A. with my friend Noah Leibman, shout out Noah. We really wanted to do something to serve our community.

We tried a bunch of different things. Nothing we were doing was like sticking. And then one night we just like invited our colleagues and like friends we'd met to like have a meaningful conversation. and we set the theme and the theme was love, like the most accessible, universal thing. And we were like, everyone bring a quote on love and we'll discuss it tonight. And the only, there are like two norms.

Everyone has to bring a quote. Like everyone has to contribute. And no one can tear down someone else's idea. And then that became a monthly space. And every month the group chooses the theme. We meet different people. At some point, my neighbors started hosting it. I had the courage to start like knocking on my neighbor's doors

and inviting them. And it transformed my relationship with those neighbors. Unfortunately, they've moved, love them to death. Maybe new neighbors will, start coming, but it's so easy. It's so sustainable. You can do it and it really makes you feel safer. Like when the fires hit, I like had all of my neighbors information and we could like text each other, make sure we were okay, bring in packages for those who'd evacuated. So anyway, that's just like one practical thing that you can do. And it's the first of its kind on my block. No one else is doing that.

And it's okay to be the first person to host something. But then my neighbor started. So now there's two. Another thing we can do is start actually looking for like-minded people and movement. that are have this share these aspirations how do we find like it's sort of like yeah we talked earlier

about how it's easy to see all these disintegrative social forces at play it's harder to see these integrated ones you have to actively look for them where are the communities emerging

where are the movements emerging that are trying to engage in these like society building processes and release these tap into these incredible powers of the human spirit to change the world around us. They exist and the number of them in the world are growing.

But often they're kind of invisible, kind of quiet. Like we have to find them. And so there's a, I think, a searching process that's part of this too. We have to search. That's really nice. I like that. Don't go anywhere. We'll be right back. Hello, I'm James Gordon. new show this life of mine. I sit down each week with some of the most fascinating people on planet

Earth. From Dr. Dre to Julianne Moore to David Beckham to Cynthia Arrivo to Martin Scorsese, to Jeremy Renner, to Denzel Washington, to Kim Kardashian. We talk about the people, places, possessions, music and memories that made them who they are. These are intimate conversations full of stories that you've never heard before. This Life of Mine premieres October 21st, wherever you get your podcasts. We are so thankful for this conversation we've had with Michael, which has provided such a wonderful, like, historical framework, kind of broader systems framework.

Now we're going to turn to our friend, the incredible Jay Shetty, to kind of ground it a little bit more and help us think about what we as individuals can do. So Jay, I don't recall exactly what I said to lure you in here. So I'm just going to reframe it for us, for you, for our listeners, maybe if what I say is a bunch of nonsense, we'll edit it out and then we'll make sense of it, you know, along the way. But basically, you know, we have this series that has all been about asking individuals about their coming of age. And, you know, what has inspired us the entire time is this metaphor that humanity is also coming of age.

And that, you know, rather than an age which is in decline, which, you know, by many metrics you could say, there are things, namely probably mental health. I don't know, at least in this country, but that this is an age of transition that is completely unprecedented in the life of humanity, the way that it is unprecedented in the life of an individual. A 10-year-old, an 11-year-old, a 12-year-old

has no idea what is going to hit them, you know, and those changes are terrifying. Sometimes they're exhilarating and thrilling and empowering, but a lot of times they are, you know, if the stories that we've heard over the years on our show or any kind of metric, it's mostly like kind of humiliating. It's, it's, you know,

and so we're trying to draw some of those themes out to leave our listeners at the end of this whole thing we've done with this metaphor as a way to practice hope. You often talk about growth, not as becoming better, not in that kind of self-help manner, but becoming more integrated. what kinds of inner shifts do you think are required

before people can show up consistently for the kind of social change we know we all need? The first thing that comes to mind is this idea that the outer world is a reflection of our inner world. And I think we've all had experience of this where even if your space is beautiful and calm, if your mind is busy and chaotic, it can turn, as we've always heard,

heaven into hell or hell into heaven. And we have this idea that our perception makes a big difference to our perspective and what we see and what's before us. One of my favorite ideas that comes from Eastern spiritual traditions is this idea that we all are on a journey of purification. And we're all constantly trying to come cleanse ourselves or detox ourselves of anger, of envy, of greed, of control, of ego.

And these things are naturally there. They exist within all of us. So it's not something to shame or guilt. But it's something that we become aware of and we start to purify. And when we make that in a shift, we're actually able to see clearly. Because if we're still looking at the world through the lens of anger, envy, greed, ego, power, illusion, then ultimately we're not really able to shift it and change it because we're not even seeing the problem as clearly as we possibly could.

And so this idea that we're all on a journey of purification and when we clean our glasses and we look through that lens, we actually get a much more accurate and true view of what the real problem is. So now when you look at an argument, you don't see two people who don't get along. You see the influence of ego and the influence of compassion. comparison. When you see things playing out, you start noticing someone's desire for power or

someone's lack of love in their childhood. Now, this doesn't create excuses for what's happening or what you see or it doesn't allow for bad behavior, but what it does is that allows you to look at the root of the problem rather than the superficial surface level distractions that we often get eluded by. And so I think that's one of the core tenets that I'd probably focus on to begin with, because I think that's the number one shift that needs to happen to really make social change. I'm curious, what are some practical things that people can do to cleanse the lens

through which they're seeing the world? So there's three steps to this. The first is awareness. I think we all know when we're acting, and I know I do for myself, I think we all know when we're acting from a place of ego or when we're acting from a place of anger or when we're acting from a place of envy.

And like I said, it's not to judge or guilt or shame those things within ourselves. It's just to realize that anything that comes from that intention isn't going to reap the best rewards. It's not going to create impact. I'm sure, you know, if we just take a easy example, it's like if your partner walks through the door and they've had a tough day and, you know, they're telling you how tough their day was.

And by the way, I've done this, hence I'm volunteering and confessing. But my wife comes up to me and she goes, oh, I've had such a bad day. And I'm like, yeah, tell me about it. I've had such a bad week. And it's like, I've just hijacked her moment of vulnerability to try and present myself as more busy, more important, more needy, more relevant. And really all she was trying to do

is have a moment of vulnerability. So we can sense these things. And what they do is they don't create fractures immediately, but these things add up and they create a crack. So the first step is awareness. Are we even aware of when we're acting from a place that isn't uplifting, inspiring, thoughtful, empowering, and we all know what that feels like.

And by the way, sometimes you're justified to act that way. I was talking to someone the other day, and I felt so disrespected. I was able to hold it in, but inside of me, I was feeling some real, real, like, anger and, like, pain towards them at the same time. And so I'm aware of it. I'm aware when it comes up.

I'm aware when it arises. The second thing we want to do is we want to address the root of where it comes from. So it's like, is it coming from my ego? Is it coming from someone saying something to me that reminds me of something in the podcast? I mean, Penn was just talking about the value of therapy. It's like that's what I think therapy helps so many people do

is address what's the root of this? Is it coming from childhood trauma? One of my favorite quotes is from Russell Barkley where he said that people often ask for love in the most unloving ways. Right? So it's like this idea of like everyone's like seeking love. Everyone's looking for love.

But sometimes the way we ask for it is anger, ego, envy, pride. So there's some root. So it's addressing the root of where that's coming from. This takes time and practice. If you want simpler principles, simpler practices, I'll give you some too. No, this is great. It comes to, like, really looking at the root of where that comes from within us

because that root also exists in society outside of us. So it's not just us. We're in this symbiotic relationship. And the third is how do we amend our script? So it's a where address amend. How do we amend our script? How do we change our dialogue around that subject matter? So for example, if someone comes up to me and says,

oh, Jay, like I'm really struggling to date right now because, you know, all the men in the world are just useless. Right? So there's a script there, and there may be some proof and evidence of that script in their personal experience, but you're not going to change your lens unless you change that script. And when you go back to address the root of where that came from,

you might say it's because I had a couple of really bad experiences growing up with men, whether it started with my father, whether it was a boyfriend in my teens, and that's what's led me to this belief system. and actually let me become aware of how that's restricting me and trusting, bonding, feeling, connecting. And now if I'm doing all that work, I get the opportunity to change my lens. So to me it's those three steps of awareness addressing and amending that is the beginning process of parenting ourselves, of adulting, of growing up. I hope that answers your question, by the way.

Yes, absolutely. That's really so helpful. And I'm already starting to apply it to many scripts that I have. Yeah, that's great. But in your case, Sophie, you're right and men are trash. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Thanks for that, Pat.

Everyone's going to love you for some time. And I teed you up for it. Everybody's not only at a different point in the path, but we use different words. You mentioned purification. And then Sophie said cleansing, you know. And I think there's a case to be made that focusing on ourselves, you know, beyond a certain threshold then just has diminishing returns. And that's kind of like you need to get out there and be a part of that.

social change, right? So it is always this, as you said, a symbiotic relationship. Absolutely. I think it's a great point. One of the reasons why I studied in the monastic tradition I did is because half our day was self and the other half was service. And so it was always that perfect balance between the two because the idea was if you just sat in an idyllic place and tried to meditate all day, you'd think you're perfect and you'd think you're pure and you'd think you'd reach enlightenment. and it's only when you went into the real world that you realized how you still had so much to work on and how many challenges there were in the world

and how much you had to give to others and how fortunate you were and how grateful you were. And so I think this symbiotic balance is so powerful and so important. So I don't think, I definitely don't want to discourage people and say, you've got to be complete before you go into the world because that idea is not only not realistic, it's also kind of against the point because you're only going to grow

by going against the tension. It's almost like saying should a athlete just train every day and never play in the Super Bowl. And it's almost like, no, you've got to play in the Super Bowl. You've got to go out there and play in front of fans. You've got to know what it feels like to play in front of a full stadium,

to want to make people happy, to want to serve others using that as an analogy. And so when it comes to social change, you have to be out in the field. You have to be out there experiencing what the real problem is because otherwise, in your head, you're just predicting and projecting what you think people are struggling

with and then when you sit down with them you realize it's actually not that at all and that you've missed the point and so I think the goal is to have to be centered as possible to find as much stability and clarity as possible and then go and take that out there so that you can have a clear review so that you can listen better so that you can be more present with the pain with the change you want to create because otherwise you're basically going out there and either assuming you know everything or you're just going out there trying to do stuff but then you're injecting your own you know stress and pain into that i often think about it like if i want to give the world clean water but i've got muddy water it doesn't matter how enthusiastic i am to give it to

everyone muddy water because i haven't taken the patience and the time to clean it myself to make sure that everyone deserves clean water and so enthusiasm and energy are important of course they're hugely valuable. But at the same time, there has to be an intention that is, I want to make sure that I'm giving people the right ideas. I want to take responsibility that we're helping people in a way that's actually helpful for them, not just my projection of the problem. And I think that requires a bit more, it's almost like every therapist, if every time you went into a therapist office and the therapist just predicted that your divorce or your parenting challenge was the same as the person before you, they wouldn't be able to do their job. And for them to,

really make space for you, they've got to be able to be present and see you with fresh eyes and be able to be peaceful and not take baggage from a past relationship into the one with you. And that's what that cleansing, that's what that purifying, I think, looks like in a modern sense, if that makes sense. I was thinking about what you said about scripts. And I was thinking, you know, if someone were forming their script in the United States based on the news, I think it would be one of like the, you know, human beings are selfish, they're violent, they're aggressive.

crime is like popping off all the time. The news tends to highlight like the worst of what's happening in any community. And so for those who are watching the news because they want to stay informed, they want to engage, what do you think people can do without becoming numb or enraged or believing that story of human nature? So I love that question because if you watch the news as a way of feeling you're getting informed accurately, specifically and in the best way, the truth is we're not. So you end up buying into a narrative,

whereas if you watch the news and go, I want to understand what's going on here so that I can make a change in my community or so that I can make a change for my family or so that I can, it's almost the viewpoint through which you're looking at it. So I think we should be informed. I don't think it's healthy to not know what's going on around the world

and not be aware of what's happening around the world. For some people, distance in the beginning and completely switching off, may be powerful. But in your case, as you're saying, that people are watching the news, they want to be informed. I think we have to look at it through a different lens. So if it's just, hey, I'm just opening up myself to loads of information, then that is going to be overwhelming. That approach to learning about the news and looking at what's in it is always going to be overwhelming. You're going to feel overexposed. I mean, I was reading a study that was saying

that we consume around 32 gigabytes of data per day. Right? Now, you think about that, our phone used to be a gigabyte. Like now I think it's like a terrible. Yeah, you must mean the every individual consumes. Every individual, yes, every individual. So, yeah, every individual is consuming 32 gigabytes of day to a day. And some writers have like likened that to like reading Lord of the Rings every day. It was like 100,000 words or whatever.

It's like there was a one writer who was saying that. And so I'm like, you can tell the. We're readers now. We're readers. No, no, no, no. That's really uplifting. And so, you know, you're exposed to more tragedy in 24 hours than you were in a whole lifetime 25 years ago.

Yeah. So who in the world, me included, how many of us could possibly make sense of all of that? So let's just be really honest and give people a bit of grace that if you are feeling overwhelmed watching the news, if you are feeling completely overexposed, if your empathy is sky high, but your pain is also matching that, it's not a surprise because we're just so over-consuming because of the way, you know, social media, et cetera.

So let's take that into account and then let's go, okay, well, now if I'm going to look at the news, what am I wanting to get out of it, what am I hoping to get out of it, what's my intention for being there, how am I going to feel like I'm making a change? Because I've always found that problems are going to feel heavy, no matter what.

But if we feel closer to the solution, if we feel clear about how we can help, that helps on an individual level. I'm not saying you're going to change the world. I'm saying that helps on the individual mind. And ultimately what I'd say is that, I think it's what time of day we look at it too. So if someone tells me they're struggling with anxiety,

the first question I say to them is, what's the first thing you do in the morning and what's the last thing you do at night? Because your sleep is meant to be the period where your brain washes itself. Your sleep is meant to be this reset, refuel moment for you to be able to deal with more challenges in stress. That's what sleep's doing biologically, you know, in your brain, everywhere else.

But if your sleep is being disturbed by what you do before you go to sleep and what you do after you wake up, now you're overexposing yourself when your brain isn't even ready. It's almost like your brains are like three miles per hour and you're like putting your foot on the gas of, you know, how much pressure it can take in the morning. And so I think it's also what time of day we consume news that makes such a big difference.

So consume it when you feed your stuff. strongest, right? You wouldn't wake up out of bed and go immediately run a marathon. I'm hoping you'd give yourself a second to train, to build up to whatever. But that's what we're asking our brain to do is, hey, I'm going to run a news marathon at 7am, 6 a.m. for 30 minutes reading the worst things happening all around the world. It's impossible for any of us to cope with that. There is no coping strategy for that because it's all consuming and overexposure. I was talking to a friend the other day who has like completely gone off of social media. And she said one of the drawbacks

is that she feels like she's not as aware of what's going on in the world. Because like it or not, that is like a pretty big source of news. And she was saying, like, let's take the example of what's going on in the U.S. with ICE right now. She's not as aware of what's going on around the country, but then she is having, she's making sure that she's having conversations with the people in her immediate surroundings.

Like the owner of her daycare has talked to the parents about how they can help keep the teachers safe by not letting anyone unknown into the building or like the person who's doing work on their house after their pipes froze has said like he's busier now because three of his employees have been deported. If what we're taking in is mostly what's happening in a place where we cannot engage,

then it can start to feel really hopeless. But when it's the people who we're engaging with every single day, multiple times a day, there's actually action that we can take and it can feel a lot more hopeful. Yeah, the reason why that makes sense is because that's how we did it just like 25, 30, maybe 50 years ago. Like you would talk to someone,

you'd be like, oh, did you hear about what happened down the road? Like, you know, maybe a bit longer than what I'm saying. but that idea of just, yeah, like, did you hear what happened to so-and-so? Like, oh, did you read about that? Like, that's how we learned about it. And that's what our brains were prepared for and evolving into. And then we went on this, like, fast-forward, accelerated journey from, hey, did you hear about what happened down the road

and maybe in the town or in the city center to do you hear about what happened halfway across the world? And so people's inability to deal with that isn't a sign of a lack of empathy. It's just a sign of overexposure at, an accelerated pace. And I think when we make it feel like, when we judge people and think, well, you're not empathetic and you're not compassionate and you're not loving, it may not actually be

there. It's just the brain doesn't actually have the capacity to actually keep up with the amount of it is. And so if that's someone's version of dealing with it before they build, it's always like I think about it, when you're first trying to build a healthy relationships with something, sometimes you have to oscillate to the opposite extreme. Yeah. And then you kind of find a healthy way back, right?

That's that sometimes. For some people, it's work step by step. Like, you know, I'm an extremist, so I'm kind of like that with my wife. Like, she can have a little piece of chocolate every day and she's fine. I'm like, I'm either going to eat the whole slab or I can't touch it, right? Like, so knowing your personality type and the way you change your habits is so important for this because for me, sometimes I've got to go cold turkey on something to then build a healthy relationship with it because of how I'm built. But then someone else may say, oh, I'm good at actually diving in for five minutes a day and I'm better that way. And so I think you have to know yourself so much in order to make the right decisions.

And your friend who's doing that, I'm so happy that she's having a positive experience with that. We should be interviewing her. Yeah. It's crazy, man. I feel like, you know, even a year ago, I did not feel the way I feel now in terms of like, wow, wow. I'm looking around and I know what's happening, at least some of the things, the headlines. It's just like it feels, I mean, at least in a city like New York, you know what I mean? And LA too.

It's the same. It's the same. In LA as well, absolutely. Not to backtrack too much, but you're talking about this first thought and last thought, which I think is a really approachable, kind of great, possibly easy, possibly very difficult, depending on how fine tooth you want to get. I'm just thinking of like, for anyone who's like, you know, I tried that. I tried the first thought and last thought.

and I just can't stop the mind from racing. You can just maybe walk us through what it would look like for the first 30 to 90 seconds of a day to really put that into practice. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And again, it comes down to how we work. Like, as some of us are physical

and that's where the breath is really a powerful place to go. If you are more mental and your mind gets active, sometimes it's better to look at something visually or read something or hear something. Like, for example, like, I think, we'll talk about the breath and this could work both ways. I've been encouraging people to make their alarm clock their own voice. So imagine you woke up to your own voice that told you what you want to think in the morning

and how you want to feel and how you want to behave. Because by the way, that's what's happening in your head. So you wake up and one side of your mind is saying, just snooze. Come on, we're exhausted. Like, come on, who cares? Like it doesn't matter. And the other side in your head, that's the weaker side in the morning, is going, no, come on, you've had enough sleep.

wake up, get to the gym, meditate, breathe, whatever it may be, right? The other side's saying, look at your phone, sit in bed for another 30 minutes, you know, whatever you want. And then the other side is going, now don't look at your phone. You know that you listen to that episode and, you know, these guys are talking about not looking at your phone. And so, like, that's what you're doing in your head anyway. The problem is your conscious voice is really weak when you're exiting sleep and your subconscious voice is really powerful saying, just go back to bed, don't worry,

your conditioned voice. And so actually waking up to your own voice that says, hey, it's a lot of, 7 a.m. We're going to take a few deep breaths, breathe with me. And it's literally your voice guiding you through a meditation and then you take it, you know. And so to me, that's a really powerful way of almost interrupting the pattern. And that's what we all need. We need a pattern interrupt, which we've created this pattern that we wake up, we look at our phone. You need a pattern interrupt. And the interrupt isn't going to be put your phone in another room because you failed at that before.

It isn't going to be put it on the other side of the bedroom because you failed at that before. So this is my favorite one right now because I think, you can actually talk yourself into who you want to be in that moment. When it comes to breath, for me, I have a lot of favorite breath exercises. The simplest one or the easiest one for me is when people place their left hand on their stomach because I think diaphragmatic breathing should be felt. I think meditation's amazing when you're physically connected, audibly connected, and feeling it as well. And so you place your left palm on your stomach.

Everyone can do it listening to us right now. You could do this lying down when you wake up. and you're taking a deep breath and you're going to feel your stomach expand, really not flattering, but breathe in and feel your stomach expand and breathe out and feel your stomach go in. And you're going to feel that sensation of your stomach coming out as you inhale and you feel your stomach going in as you exhale. Diaphromatic breathing is used by athletes, musicians, singers

to perform at incredible levels. All people before 150 years ago, probably. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. And what that does is it gets you into your body, it gets you into your breath, that it's actually ideal breathing to actually get enough oxygen, right?

Most of us are breathing. We were always taught in our school, like fill up your chest, like breathe, you know, like kind of like you pump your chest out when you breathe, and the actual way of breathing is through your diaphragm and, you know, through our stomach as we can feel it.

And so even taking three breaths and feeling the sensation of your breath, feeling your hand on your stomach, feeling it inhale, and exhale, even that is getting you into your body. It's getting you into that space. It's bringing you back in a sink. And here's another one that I love. Often what we find when we wake up is our mind is ahead of our body. So your body is actually like, I just want to stay in bed and your mind is like, no, we got to get going. We got work to do. We got stuff to do. So your mind is ahead of your body.

Or we experience the opposite. Your body is ahead of your mind. Your mind is feeling lazy and tired. and your body's like, guys, we've got to go, we've got to go, we've got to do something. Like, I need to jump out. So we experience this imbalance. And so what I often encourage people to do is breathe in for the same count as you breathe out. So if you breathe in for a count of four, so try and inhale to a count of four, and then breathe out for a count of four. And you're counting in your mind as you breathe in, you're counting out. What you're doing is you're actually bringing your mind and body into sync.

Because your mind and body are at different paces, different stages. you're trying to align them in that moment so that you can actually be where your feet are so that your body and mind are in the same place. I hope that helps Ben and if you have any better ones, please feel free to throw them in. Jay, you've given us so many good like, you know, in order to be hopeful, you need to be helpful. The three A's that you gave us at the start, awareness, addressing, amending. I love, I love that type of thing because there's, I've been thinking about this a lot recently. Like a slogan can sometimes, it can become empty. It can lose meaning. But it also can be so helpful to just like pull you out of a neural pathway that is just so,

you're so entrenched in. Like I've been thinking about discipline with my toddler recently. And there's this line in my head from a book that's like connection before redirection. And sometimes if she's like screaming, it's so helpful to just have like one line because there's so much. going on in my head. There's so many things I want to do to just have like one simple phrase that I can come back to to like help me stay grounded in the moment. You've given us so many good ones. But I'm curious if you if you could leave listeners with one. Give us all you got. Acronyms, banners. It doesn't have to be in the form of a slogan or like a pithy phrase. but something that you've found helpful

to stay grounded, open, useful in this current, like turbulent moment in our history, what would it be? I love connection before redirection. That is so good. That's beautiful. I mean, that applies to adults too.

I'm like, you know, any time we did that, we'd be pretty good shape. That's it. Like if we did that online, if we did that with our partners, if we did, you know, that's a beautiful one. Not just for kids, that's such a beautiful. Thank you for sharing that with me.

That's such a gift. I've never heard that before, at least in that way. So I love that one. That's beautiful. A few things that come to mind, this isn't, again, I apologize for not giving a pithy. I have a couple of acronyms I can share, but I was thinking about this.

I feel like one of the biggest things that shifted in this landscape, not just phones, not just A, not just what's happening around the world is we have less interaction with older people and as last year I went to 370th birthday parties I'm 30A I went to 370th birthday parties yeah 3 70th birthday parties and two of the people I knew fairly well one person I'm getting to know

the two people that I knew really well it was honestly I wish everyone could go to a 70th birthday party because life just looks so different at 70 and from 70. It was a celebration. It wasn't like, you know, I feel like when you want to be 30, it's like, what have I achieved by 30? Like, am I married? Do I have kids?

Do I have, you know, what's going on? By 40, am I promoted? Did I have something to tell everyone? Did I, what did I achieve? And at 70, these people were just so like, there was a sense of peace. They were looking back on their kids, their grandkids. They had friends who gave speeches about them from, you know, 25 years or 30. whatever, maybe even from college.

And I was like, wow, like when you look back at your life from 70, it's very different than when you're looking at your life forward from 30 and 40. And so if I didn't have older friends, my life looks different. And I'll explain how this applies to what you're talking about. I think partly what helped me with my personal coming of age was having older people in my life, which happened to be my monk teachers. But even at this point in my life, I have older friends who happen to have that experience. and what's interesting is you get a historical perspective on what we're going through.

And there's something really valuable about studying history to be hopeful, to be resourceful, to feel resilient because you recognize what humans have been through and what they've survived and what they were capable of doing and how extraordinary change in the world was always created by a group of ordinary people it wasn't someone famous or rich or successful who changed the world. It was a group of normal people who came together and shifted the world, whether it was the independence that India got through Gandhi or whether it was the shift that Martin Luther King made here.

Like, you know, it's when you look at some of these incredible stories of humanity shifting in a positive direction, they happened through, and by the way, both of those were peaceful protests, which is a fascinating concept in and of itself, right? but I think there's such a value in having older friends in having friends in each decade of life for you to gain perspective. And to study history because there's a beautiful quote

from Mark Twain where he said that history never repeats itself but it always rhymes. And what I love about that is that idea of just like, you can see the cycle, you can see what's happening. And again, that doesn't make it better for the people who are suffering or struggling, but for those of us who want to change and want to make social change

and want to create some difference in the world, it's helpful to have this perspective. And that is also what helps us be hopeful because we can see how change was made even at really, really dark times in human history. And so I think having older friends is my little statement there of just, can you become friends with someone who's 10, 20, 30 years older than you,

40 years older than you, and how much perspective would that give you? and how amazing would the world be if we were listening to people who'd been through pain and atrocity and could talk about how we shouldn't keep creating this mess again and how we shouldn't end up in this again because of what they've seen.

Imagine we'd actually give them the microphone and say, hey, we need you to tell us how to shift and what to do differently. I think it would be really special. That's a really unexpected answer. I know. I love that. I really like that. I really like that.

It also makes me think that possibly one of the greatest divides humanity is facing right now is millennials and Gen Z. It's just, it's like, it's just, it is antagonism at its height. But yeah, yeah, it's so true. It's so, so, so, so true. We need our, to cross generations, though, it's, yeah. Experience friends, yeah.

I love that. An acronym that I love that really helps that. I try and practice in my life whenever I'm, and this doesn't apply to Penn, who's not sleeping very well. so I don't want to, you know. But I have this... Go ahead, rub it in.

These five habits that I don't think are as... These five habits that I don't think are as crazy as they sound when you think about how much time they actually take. So it's... The first is thankfulness. And when I think about thankfulness, I don't think about gratitude journals, I don't think about thinking it in your head.

I feel sending it in a text message, a voice message, a video message, an emailer, to a colleague, a friend of... a partner, a parent, like to actually take out 30 seconds of your day and send someone personally and professionally a message of gratitude or thanks is a game changer. It boost your mood scientifically. It obviously boosts their mood.

It builds connection and belonging at a time when we only feel transactional, when we feel like people reach out for something when they want something and we only reach out when we do. It's like, how about we actually took a moment to just say, you know what, when you did that thing last month, I really appreciate it. It was amazing. You know what?

Just taking, and that's 30 seconds. It literally isn't, I'm not asking you to start a gratitude practice. I'm asking you to text someone, which you're doing anyway, and to be specific. So thankfulness. The second is for listening to a podcast like this, insight or inspiration, what I find fascinating is it's kind of what you said about looking for helpers. We don't have, when you're out of something, like when you feel hungry or you look in your refrigerator and you don't have it, you go and buy it.

or you go and order it. So you're like, we're out of milk. I have to go and buy some milk. What's fascinating is when we're out of inspiration, we don't go and find inspiration. We just complain that we don't have inspiration. So physically and mentally, we operate very differently. Like, physically, we don't have something.

We'll go get it. Mentally, if we don't have something, we just get upset about it. I'm just imagining somebody sitting in front of their fridge, like, I cannot believe that you don't have eggs. I just can't believe. There's nothing I can do about this. I cannot believe. I didn't do this.

My mom didn't do it. Yeah, exactly. But we sit there and we're like, why don't I feel motivated today? What's wrong with me? Why am I not inspired? Why do I feel? And it's like, well, just go.

And I'm not saying you to go buy inspiration, but it's like you've got to go and find it. And so you can get it online. It's free. It's podcast like this, YouTube, whatever you use. Like, it doesn't bother me. It's like there's so much out there. But you've got to go and feed yourself.

Like your mind needs to be fed just like your body does. And you can't. do the opposite things. So if you're out of milk, buy milk, if you're out of motivation, inspiration, upliftment, go find that message like your connection leads to redirection.

That one thing could change the trajectory of your day. So you've got thankfulness, inspiration. The third one we already talked about was meditational mindfulness. And my simplest form of that is we schedule meetings with everyone. We have meetings throughout our day with our colleagues,

maybe even parents checking in with people, checking in with our kids, but we never schedule a meeting with ourselves. And if you just had seven minutes a day, like Penn said, or three minutes, five minutes, whatever it may be, and just you had three minutes a day for yourself, where you just checked in with yourself,

like you were just checking in, how am I? How's my day going? What do I need today? Rather than hoping that someone else is going to know what you need, like your partner will know what you need or your friend better check in with you. It's like, no, what do I need today? You know what?

I just need to go to bed early. That's what I need. You know what I need today? I need to have my coffee outdoors, non-distractive for five minutes. You know what I need today? I actually want to watch my favorite show tonight on Netflix and binge. Like, what do I need personally?

Just to think we found that helps a lot. Is the binging on Netflix? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That helps a lot, yeah. No, but you know what? Actually, I got to say, for those of kids out there, sometimes you do. I have been finding recently.

I'm like, actually, I need to make time for myself to literally disconnect, which I've always been kind of railing against on this podcast. but totally so you've got thankfulness inspiration mindfulness fourth is exercise we talked a bit about that I think exercise people think it's the gym it could be you know there's so many great five minutes seven minute workouts now that just get your body moving

that just get you activated and finally sleep I think when you can when you don't have young kids getting good sleep when your kids aren't young is is a game change and I often honest and so thankfulness two minutes inspiration five minutes mindfulness three minutes exercise maybe that's going to take 10 minutes and sleep of course prioritizing we know it's a bit longer

but if you really added that up we're talking about like a total of 20 minutes not including sleep talking about a total of 20 minutes per day to feel steady in the uncertainty of the day to have a foundation of 20 minutes of feeling prepared for the day mentally and physically and that in and of itself will take away 50% of our mental challenges because you are steadier, you are more peaceful, you are more centered. And I know it sounds hard, but it is just, let me text gratitude every day.

Let me learn something for five minutes today. Let me practice a bit of breathing. Let me get some exercise if I can, even if that's a walk or movement, whatever it may be. And of course, sleep if you don't have, you know, tiny, tiny baby. Yeah, just like you. And that spells out T-I-M-E-S. So, times, T-I-M-E-S. Thankfulness, inspiration, meditation, exercise, sleep.

times. I love that. Jay, you know, it's interesting. I feel like you've unlocked something for me. Not that I was questioning it, but in the Baha'i faith, which is the religion I practice, we have a commandment that you have to start and end each day by reading from the sacred text. I love that.

And like our conversation, I'm like, oh, this makes sense psychologically. And then of course I'm like, well, of course it does. It's all coherent with reality. But to start your day with inspiration, to end it with inspiration, which will, in fact, the way you sleep is like it's so healthy. So thank you for helping me better appreciate one of my own commandments. I've come across some of the teachings of the Bahia, and it's absolutely beautiful. So I love hearing that.

And Habi Day. We're actually all Baha'is. Oh, wow. All three of us, yeah. Oh, I didn't know that. Oh, my gosh. Wow. That's how we met.

That's amazing. Oh, that's so beautiful. Come with us, Jay. I just don't know that. I love that. I absolutely love that. That's beautiful. I actually have your book next door, so I've been at your text next door.

Yeah. Oh, cool. I've picked airplane. I did not know that. That's so beautiful. I love that. Yeah. Yeah. Feel very safe with you all. So thank you. Oh, thank you. It wouldn't be an episode of Podcrushed if we didn't ask our final classic questions.

We're going to go back to Michael for that one. But we have it with a little twist. Michael, for our last question, we typically ask our guests what they would go back, if they could go back to their 12-year-old self, what would they do or say? If there's a universal answer, and we've kind of, gotten one is what they would say is it's going to be okay it's going to be okay i don't think that quite translates on to now like do we just say to everybody listen it's just going to be okay but what what could be distilled from that like what what might the people of the future if they could come

to now say to us that would mean something to us you know like to give us to give us to give us They might say something like, have faith in humanity's capacity to get through this period. It's going to take time. It's probably going to get worse before it gets better in terms of, like, difficulty. It's going to be difficult, I mean tumultuous. People are going to suffer. But you have a capacity to get through this. The thing you don't want to do is sit on the sidelines and be passive.

You know, so even this perspective, like I have a lot of faith in humanity. You've heard me talk about one could interpret that as a license to just sort of sit back passively and say, oh, yeah, it's all going to work out. We're good. Humanity's got this. No, I don't believe that's the case. For me, it's not a question of whether we can figure out how to live together on this planet. It's a question of when. It's a question of how long it takes. and that question is a question of how much suffering are we willing to tolerate before we do the hard work because the longer we delay the more human suffering we're going to experience the greater the scale and scope of destruction we're going to wreak on this planet and on each other so so to sit by

passively either like just to give up and say oh there's nothing I can do or to have the naive idea that, yeah, it's all going to work out, and therefore I'm just going to watch Netflix 24 hours a day and wait for it to whatever. Like, neither those are helpful. We need to have faith in our capacity, but then we need to actually roll up our sleeves and do the work because the longer we wait, the more human suffering will experience.

And we're still, I think, on a trajectory where lots of people are still in that passive mode. So we know there's going to be more suffering. Like it's not going to be easy, period, we're going through. But if I was that voice from the future, I'd say, have faith in your capacity, roll up your sleeves, become a protagonist in the story of humanity, and hasten the day when we can put an end to all this immature, foolish suffering. Michael, this was such a pleasure.

Thank you so much. I wish we could go on for another three hours. We're going to start a new podcast with Michael, just all coming of age. He'll replace me as hosts. Yeah, that's what I meant. Actually, Michael, you're the new host of Podrush. Congratulations. Thank you so much again, man.

Thank you. Podfreshed is hosted by Penn Badgley, Navacavalin, and Sophie Ansari. Our senior producer is David Ansari, and our editing is done by Clips Agency. If you haven't subscribed to Lemonada Premium yet, now's the perfect time, because guess what? You can listen completely ad-free. Plus, you'll unlock exclusive bonus content. Like the time we talked to Luca Bravo about the profound effect that the film

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It's a great way to support the work we do and treat yourself to a smoother, uninterrupted listening experience. Just head to any Lemonada show feed on Apple Podcasts and hit subscribe. Make Life Suck Less with fewer ads with Lemonata Premium. Are you looking for ways to make your everyday life happier, healthier, more productive and more creative? I'm Gretchen Rubin, the number one bestselling author of The Happiness Project, bringing you fresh insights and practical solutions in the Happier with Gretchen Rubin podcast. My co-host and Happiness Guinea Pig is my sister, Elizabeth Kraft. That's me, Elizabeth Craft, a TV writer and producer in Hollywood.

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