Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 116: Manoush Zomorodi, Host of 'Note to Self' Podcast

Episode Date: January 3, 2018

Manoush Zomorodi, the host of WNYC's "Note to Self" podcast, is an advocate for boredom because allowing our minds to wander, she says, can lead to problem solving and fresh ideas. Her book, "Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive and Creative Self," stems from an experiment in which she convinced more than 20,000 listeners to try to disconnect from their phones, just be bored for a moment and jump-start their creativity. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It kind of blows my mind to consider the fact that we're up to nearly 600 episodes of this podcast, the 10% happier podcast. That's a lot of conversations. I like to think of it as a great compendium of, and I know this is a bit of a grandiose term, but wisdom. The only downside of having this vast library of audio is that it can be hard to know where to start. So we're launching a new feature here, playlists, just like you put together a playlist of your favorite songs.

Back in the day, we used to call those mix tapes. Just like you do that with music, you can do it with podcasts. So if you're looking for episodes about anxiety, we've got a playlist of all of our anxiety episodes. Or if you're looking for how to sleep better, we've got a playlist of all of our anxiety episodes, or if you're looking for how to sleep better, we've got a playlist for that. We've even put together a playlist of some of my personal favorite episodes. That was a hard list to make. Check out our playlists at 10%.com slash playlist. That's 10% all one word spelled out..com slash playlist singular.

Let us know what you think. We're always open to tweaking how we do things and maybe there's a playlist we haven't thought of. Hit me up on Twitter or submit a comment through the website. Hey y'all, it's your girl, Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, singer, and entrepreneur. I'm a new podcast, baby, this is Kiki Palmer. I'm asking friends, family, and experts,

the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad, where the memes come from. And where's Tom from MySpace? Listen to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUT I'm Dan Harris. Ever meet somebody and just like them right away? I feel that way about all my guests, but I really feel that way about Manouche-Zemero who is my guest this week.

In fact, we're doing a swap. I'm on her podcast. She's on mine. Her podcast is called Note to Self. It's a huge podcast. It's all about technology, having a healthy relationship to technology. And she wrote a book called Board and Brilliant, subtitled as,

House Bashing Out can unlock your most productive and creative self. And it's all about our relationship with technology and are sometimes unhealthy relationship with technology, which is a massive, massive issue. She's thought deeply about it and as you will hear, I think we come at it from slightly different perspectives, but there's a lot of overlap in the Venn diagram, which we kind of sus out in the course of this discussion. So, if you want to really go for it, listen to this,

and then go ahead and check out her podcast, which you should be listening to anyway, and maybe listen to the flip side of the conversation when she interviews me. So big thanks to Manouche for doing this. This is actually suggested by somebody on Twitter who happens to listen to both of our podcasts and thought it may be a case of like two great tastes that taste great together. If you remember that commercial, anyway, I'm going to shut up. Here's Manouche. You and I have crossed paths, I think.

We have? Yeah, I think so. Really? Because I worked for the BBC for a news. Oh, at the time, my roommate, when I lived in DC, was a news producer, Charlie Herman. Oh, Charlie Herman. Yeah, yeah. Charlie Herman worked here.

Yeah, yeah. Okay, yes. But we, so this is back in the day, in the 90s, I lived in DC, and I was in the BBC's Washington Bureau and he was at ABC, whatever that was. And so I knew him and then of course, when horrible disasters would happen, I would inevitably end up hanging out with ABC people

or sleeping on their couch and some random house. I'm thinking of Nova Scotia, the Swiss Air Crash. I ended up sleeping I think on ABC's couch. I don't know. So when I read your book, the first one, 10% happier, I really resonated with me because I knew exactly like those moments that you described as you were, you know, and really having an adrenaline rush

when you were on the road and the highs and the very big lows that come with foreign news gathering really like that really struck me. And I also have had a history of anxiety. So I was with you all the way through that book all the way. I want to say good, but I'm like good question mark. Well. You know, I don't want to put a positive sheen on anxiety, for example.

No, but if it's brought the two of us to be sitting together on podcasts where I think we're helping people, you know, understand their brains and technology and all the other things affecting them, then I say, good, Dan, I'm going with good. Excellent. I'm gonna add an exclamation point. So let me ask you, the question I always ask everybody,

which is how did you get into meditation? Well, I don't know that I'm necessarily into meditation. I don't know what to call it. Yeah, what do you call it? So I was thinking about it on the subway right here. I did your one minute meditation as a preparation to come here. I think that for those of us who are slightly more resistant or who have struggled with it, obviously, the second book of yours is the first thing that we should turn to.

But I think that explaining it in a different way has helped me not be at war with my mind. And that is sort of what I discovered with my my book and boredom. That that was an entry point for me to sort of settling down. Having said that, should I go into boredom is a very different thing that happens in your brain. So when you allow yourself to space out, when you're folding the laundry, or walking to work, or whatever you're doing, you ignite a network in your brain called the default mode. And in the default mode, that's actually where you do your most original thinking. You do creative problem solving. You also do something called autobiographical planning. This is where you look back at your life. You take note of the highs and lows. You build

the personal narrative, and then you do what psychologists call perspective bias. You look into the future and you set new goals and figure out the steps to get there. So super important stuff that I sort of journeyed to find out about because I realized so many of us were looking at our phones instead of doing this sort of important look at our lives. And then of course, the inevitable question came up because meditation is something that people talk about a lot these days, and I think because of our technology is one of the reasons.

I agree. Yeah, so I wanted to understand how meditation was different than boredom. Now of course, as you talk about on your show, there are so many different kinds boredom. Now of course, as you talk about on your show, there are so many different kinds of meditation. So the way I like to describe it to lay people is like, in meditation from what I understand, it's a not thinking thing, right? Whereas with boredom, you're going into mind wandering and you're actually not saying don't let your mind wander. You're saying, let's watch and see where it goes.

That can be to some very dark places, but it can also be very positive, which I call just call positive constructive mind wandering, which is where you do what I was talking about, the good stuff, the creativity, the bigger problem solving, which you just cannot do if you are retweeting and posting and liking, etc.

So I have a bunch of things to say about all the questions you asked about. Well, I'm not going to do it actually. I'm working my way up to say I'm not going to do it yet, which is all the questions about the overlap between boredom and meditation and the default mode. I have a bunch of things to say, but I want to pull the story out of you a little bit about because you got interested in boredom for some really good and interesting reasons. So you just tell me the backstory to that? Yeah, well, you know, it's a personal moment of failure. As you describe your own personal moment, so for me, it was such a type A person. I was like, the podcast was like

in 2014. It was doing well. Tell her what no self is. Yeah. By the way, hello. So I host a podcast called Note to Self. Its origins are in New York Public Radio. Comes from WNYC Studios. And we sort of started out as a small on-air segment about a New York's burgeoning tech economy. But really, what I quickly learned, and this was in 2014, was that people didn't need another place to get tech news.

What they needed was a place to be guided through this transformation of every social structure in our lives from how we find love to how we parent to how we meet people, how we work, where we work. Technology is upending every single sort of thing that we've taken for granted, including how our brains work. And so for me, the show has really become, we used to call it the tech show about being human, but I think that it's beyond that. I think it's about finding a way to understand this accelerating world and reminding yourself what truly is important because Lord knows everyone and every platform and every app will try to distract you.

And so re-centering and making sure that we use our devices as tools rather than taskmasters. So I mean that's such an important subject, such an important subject. So you were doing this and it was doing well and yet you were probably pretty much sucked into your, it sounds like from, from whatever I read in your book, that you were nonetheless completely sucked into your devices. Oh completely, not only. Yes. But I thought, well, I'm a tech reporter, that's what I'm supposed to be doing, right? You got to do the drugs that you're dealing, I guess.

In any case, I sat down to think of big ideas for the show and I had this moment of panic like there was Like nothing upstairs like I've generally been a very good problem solver and there was a sense that there was like sand in my brain And I thought back, you know like when had I had my best Ideas in the past and it And it was such a cliche. It was like staring out the window while I was on a long car ride or waiting in line to get my latte. And now I realize that every little crack in my life,

those little moments of waiting for the subway to come or waiting to pick up my kids was always filled with information or my phone or swiping or letting someone know where I was or checking something and it made me realize that I had not been bored potentially in years actually and so I really wanted to know I was like well what actually happens in our brain when we get bored or I guess more importantly what could be happening to us if we never get bored? Like what would happen if we got rid of this human state entirely? Because that's what it seems

like we're doing. There was more to it. I mean, you actually had a lot going on at the time you'd had a new baby. Oh, yeah. Well, you know, it's like I see the sort of how my, well, my son and the iPhone were actually born the same month in 2007, but I did not get a smartphone till 2009. It's hard to imagine that, but back in the day, people were like, oh, what is this iPhone thing? Let the early adopters, you know, I was like that. Were you? Yeah.

It took me a little while. Did it? When did you first get a smartphone? Probably around 2009, right? Probably around 2009, right? Yeah, well, I was like that. Were you? Yeah, took me a little while. Did it? When did you first get a smart phone? Probably around 2009. 2009, right? Yeah. Well, I had a blackberry. Yeah, of course. That doesn't really count. No, because no, doesn't count. I mean, there were crackberries, of course, but it was different. And I will say, do you have kids? I have one kid. How old is your kid? He's going to be three soon. Okay, so you know how hard it can be those first years like. Oh, yeah.

It's tough. Yeah, it's really tough. And I had a really collicky baby, like a miserable baby who would not, who would only sleep when I was pushing the stroller like only. So I was walking 15 miles a day. Yeah, it was crazy. It was awful. And you couldn't stop because then you'd wake up and just bad cycle. And I didn't have a phone, like a smartphone. I had my flip phone. But so I just walked and thought and walked and thought.

And at first it was really uncomfortable. Really uncomfortable. And then it took me a couple weeks to get to a place where I realized now that the reason I'm sitting here talking to you is because what I was planning at that time. I really was taking stock of like what the hell are we doing on this planet? What's gonna make me feel like I've done the best I can for this little baby who won't sleep, you know, really thinking, taking the bigger picture and not, um, not sort of letting everyone know about my every

little move or being reactive to things. It was very, very solitary. And that led you to the big idea for the show or eventually took a while, but yeah. So where the stuff with your son, what was the chronological relationship? So 2007, iPhone born, it's a collicky baby. Then speed ahead,

and there's another baby in there, God bless her. And then 2014, like I'm at this point, where all the walking has turned into this podcast, I have my own show, that's pretty cool. I have two kids. I have my own show. It's all happening. And then I have this crisis of creativity. Gotcha. Okay. Okay. And so what did you, what did you, you, you, and the a-ha part of the crisis was, oh, boredom. There's something to that. Maybe. I wasn't sure. I didn't really know. There was a ton of research out there about boredom.

It turns out this is just a few years ago that we really researchers had just started to understand what happens in the brain. We are at actually a very crucial moment in neuroscience, well with many things, but with particularly understanding the science of mind wandering. And so that made sense to me as I started interviewing people, you know, one person told me, we have found that the more fatigued you are, the more likely you are to check Facebook. And I was like, well, that makes total sense.

I see it in my own behavior, you know, that way. You're just looking for an easy-to-open meeting. Totally, Jones, and at the end of the day, you know, that moment when you're swiping and swiping and you're not even reading what is going by, yeah, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, your exhausted, your brain is tired. And it's, it is crack-alicious. Yeah. So the more I learned about it, and, you know, that's the beauty of podcasting, right?

As I said to my audience, I was like, like you guys feeling a little weird like not sure what's going on with your brain would you be interested in taking a week like what if we try to week of little small behavior changes and we saw if we change the way we used our phones if we introduced a little bit more boredom into moments in our lives, if that jump starts our creativity, if we find that it actually is effective. And so in 2015, we did this one week, and I had assumed that like, I don't know, a couple hundred people would sign up

to do this weirdo experiment with me, but 20,000 people signed up. Yeah, like in two days, I was like, oh, this is a thing. People are feeling this. And I am so not a special snowflake. Everyone is going through this. So we did this experiment. Where every morning you woke up and you got a mini podcast that explained some of the design of the technology, the neuroscience, and you got a corresponding newsletter which laid out your sort of challenge for the day, a behavior tweak to try.

And then we, I mean, I don't know if I'm ironies, but you have an app you understand. We also partnered with apps that measured your actual time on your phone and also how many pickups, because I'm not on my phone a lot, but I'm a checker. Yeah. Like a lot of checking. Yeah. And, you know, we found that it worked, it was quite extraordinary. Like we had classrooms do it across the country,

we had offices do it, lots of therapists did it with their clients, and we heard of people finishing big projects like Therathesis, finally, kids who told me that they didn't think they were smart, but now they realize that like school isn't as hard as they thought it was. Other people who came up with problems, you know, ways to solve problems at work. And also I think Dan, more than just like, you know, the productivity side, it was a sense of, I like my life better like this. Like there was a guy, Liam, one of the things we asked people to do was to take

the app that was driving you crazy off your phone, the one that like gave you like twitchy thumb, you know. And this guy was like, I'm taking off all the social media off my phone, none of it. And he got back a week later, he's like, I just feel calmer, I feel more relaxed. My life is more contemplative, it's quieter, and I am good with that. So, fast forward to sitting here, and the book version is out. I went and did a lot more research and a lot more interviews and put together the book. And I reached out to some of the original people who had done the project and Liam got back in touch. And he said, I never put the apps back on my phone. That's interesting.

Like that, this is my new life. And I don't, and now when he wants to go on Facebook, it's not like he quit. He just, he sits down on his laptop. He does it for 20 minutes. And then he logs out and he's done done and it feels good. What about you? Yeah, so That's a good question. I

Struggle with this. I mean, I wrote a freaking book about it and I still struggle with it and I think you know as someone who understands a lot of the ways that these things have been built and How our brains operate the fact that I still have trouble really says I think what I don't want to use the word crisis because I don't like to be alarmist I like to be very positive, but what a What a juncture we are at and And I think to me, you know, earlier a few weeks ago, we had Facebook, Google, Twitter sitting on Capitol Hill, testifying to the Senate Intelligence Committee.

We are at this moment where two years ago, this seemed like a weird kind of fringy experiment, but it's really become mainstream that people are starting to question their relationship that they have with their technology. They're also starting to question the people and understanding that there are humans behind these algorithms and that we have to start holding them accountable, holding them to ethical standards, making sure that the tech is used for good and not just for the bottom line. So many things to ask you about there. So let's just start though with,

what did you learn about good tech hygiene? What are the best practices? Well, what shocked me was that people assume you get your phone like this, it's preloaded with these apps, that's what you do. And that, no, notifications, I could not believe how many people just leave their notifications on. When they download an app, they just say automatically, well

first of all, they sign the terms of service without, look, don't bother reading the terms of service. Just assume that they're taking your privacy. We can talk about that another day, but they also leave all the notifications on. So this idea that you are being pinged all day long and you kind of think that that's what being a modern person is, which is just ridiculous. So we ask people, for example, to, and they sound kind of silly,

but we ask people to keep their phone in their pocket while they were in transit or in their bag. And the idea being that you, so for one woman, she's a stay at home mom. She's like, well, I'm not really in transit. The most I'm doing is like walking from the couch where I'm nursing to the kitchen. And we were like, that counts.

Try not to take your phone with you. And she was like, ha ha, that won't be hard. It was really hard. She had a really hard time, not constantly checking. And that's why we ask people to download these apps that measured because what we realized was that it has become a reflex, right? That we don't even know that we are looking.

So for me, I'll give myself as an example. I figured I was checking my phone like 30 times a day, but the app told me I was checking between 90 and 100 times a day. And do you think that information, I mean they say an AA, the first step is admitting it, do you think that loading these apps and getting the information is the necessary first step toward developing a healthy relationship with your tech? Well, the way I looked at it is like that that's what, if you were doing a scientific study, you would want to establish your baseline, right?

And to me, we are now living in like one big lab. We are constantly experimenting on ourselves in our lives. And if we don't have a baseline, if we don't know where we start, how are we ever going to figure out whether we're happy with where we are now? So I found it very helpful. I think for me, it was the trigger that made me start to notice that, oh, every time I walk into an elevator, I look at my phone.

And guess what? Every time I walk out of an elevator, I look at my phone again. What the hell am I looking for? I'm not even looking for anything. It had just become smokers. A lot of smokers were like, oh, I felt like that. It used to be like, I'd get to work at stand outside.

It's, you know, this idea of linking behaviors. Um, so before you know it, there you are with a habit, right? And maybe that means that if you're on your phone in the elevator, you don't have any eye contact with your colleagues or you miss a, a moment where you remember that it's, I don't know, your mom's birthday, or maybe you just notice that your stomach is full and you don't need the donut that's going to be whatever. You know, these moments of checking in with our bodies, ourselves, are the people around us. I think a lot of people are missing out and they're starting to notice the absence of that.

And so just back to the, did you come to a view about the, what is the best route toward having a healthier relationship? The view that I come to annoyed some people. I think what I learned that first week was that whenever someone said, well, I don't know, am I doing it right? Did I do the challenge right? Did I do what you wanted me to do? And I would say, well, only you know. Like, whether it was the right amount. See why that's annoying, but it's unavoidable.

It is unavoidable. And so in the book, I'm much more specific because I realize that that's what people want. They want specific instructions. They want to know when they get a gold star, right? Like when they've done it right. But the message remains the same. What is right for my 73 year old mom is not going to feel right for a 16 year old. My mom takes two photos a year, a 16 year old, I mean, on the average, who knows? The average American spends 11 hours in front

of a screen. That's average, though, right? So we have to, whatever demographic you are, whatever age group, gender, everyone has their own right amount. And I think that that amount is as personal as what your home, your home screen looks, your home screen, Dan Harris's home screen is just right for Dan Harris. Mine is just right for me. And tech has personalized the experience to the point where I think we have to personalize our own ways of using it. And there's not a one-size-fits-all.

What do you end up recommending in the book? So what we do is we go through the different ideas that we tried out in the book. So for another one, so that was the physical connection, this idea of getting it off your body. I was feeling like I couldn't distinguish the difference between my phone vibrating and my stomach growling. Like there starts to be this real physical attachment that we have. It's got to be insane.

Yeah, it's like a version of the singularity. Yeah, completely. Exactly. So another one we did was we looked specifically at this idea of how photography has changed the way we use our memory. So we asked you to try one day of not taking any photos. And there's very interesting research that some of us

look at makes sense. If you are parking in some crazy parking garage, and you're like, wait, I'm never going to remember where I'm parked, you take a photo, right? I never think to do that. A lot of people do actually. That's a good idea. I know it's a good idea. But, okay, let's say that you're parking in the garage of a wonderful museum and then

you go in and you're like, this is amazing. I'm going to take a picture of that and that and, oh my god, look at that. Let me take a picture. That's what we do, right? Well, there's research that goes to show that when you do that, you are outsourcing, you are outsourcing your memory to your phone, that actually your recollection, your, it's not just about being in the moment, it's that you don't actually remember ever having been in the moment. So there's the right time to take a photo and there's the maybe, maybe don't take a photo time. And so if we can just, you know, that little,

it's this little, I don't even know, it's like less than a second, it's this little smidge of a moment where you decide to get your phone out or don't get your phone out, to tap it or not tap it, to respond or not respond, to react and be angry or favorite. Like maybe just ask yourself, do I need this? Is this going to help me? Am I having a good experience that doesn't need to be captured?

And if you do, then, okay, so stop. And I'm not saying like, bad, put your phone away. No, no, because if you decide, no, this is a beautiful moment. And I do wanna take a picture. And I want to look at this later or send it to someone and share it with them because I wanna tell them about what I experienced.

Then by all means, go ahead. This is not a detox at all. This is about finding better ways to use the technology. It's not a binary, it's not on or off. And I think some people think, oh, I'm dying for that week in the woods with the phone away. And no, you have to live with this stuff and it does improve our lives,

but we need to be smarter about it. I agree wholeheartedly. So what about you talked about having some wisdom around when to take pictures and when not? What about the reach? The sort of, I don't know what I'm looking for, but I'm grabbing my phone because I need something. What's your advice about managing that?

Well, so we're kind of strict about that. One of the other things was usually people are reaching for the same thing over and over again. We found so for me again, I'm always willing to use myself as a guinea pig. I have a game called two dots. You know this game. I heard you mention in the book. Okay, so that was my thing. That was my scch and soda at the end of the day. You know, gonna get me some two dots. That's what I'm gonna do. Hard for me to, I mean, one could argue better than Scotch and soda.

Well, yeah, when you're lying to your husband about like, are you playing the two, no, no, no, I was just checking actually what the weather is. I think the kids need to pack their boots. Yeah, that's bad. It's bad. That's in addiction. Yeah, I's bad. It's bad. That's in addiction. Yeah. I mean, yeah.

So we tried for, you know, take it off your phone. Now I will admit it's back on my phone. Do you want to hear how that happened? Yeah, I do. I know. I want to know, are you playing it like with the same sort of... Not with the same fervor. I was given a talking to by game designer Jane McGonagall.

She's awesome. You should have her on your show. I've heard of her. Her sister is also pretty cool. Oh, yeah. I don't know. She's also, both of them have public speaking careers and write books and stuff like that. Okay.

So I know Jane. Institute of the future. I'm stemped temporarily blanking on her sister's name, but we were on a TV show together. Oh, you were? Maybe in TV show together. Oh, you were? Maybe in TV show together. What's a couple of years ago? Is she a twin? No, she has twins.

No, she has twins. Jane has twins. So she doesn't believe in addiction. She's like, no, it's just that your brain has latched onto something that makes it feel good. But if you use it in the right circumstances, so for example, there's, you know, in some hospitals now, they're giving kids video games to play

before surgery or after surgery as a coping mechanism, as ways to divert your attention to something that is not productive. Pain is not productive, right? So her whole thing was, I was telling her that I had a really long flight. I had to go on to Australia, and I was really, really anxious about it.

She's like, so put your freaking game back on your phone, because what are you gonna do? Drink your way to Australia? Play your game, because your fear is irrational, so you don't need it. Play your game. I'm not an anti-game, when I said I thought it was an addiction before, I don't think,

I mean, what do I know, whether it's an addiction, just to be clear, but I'm definitely not an anti-game I'm just anti unhealthy use of anything precisely. I mean it's for some people that could be something else drinking Exactly. Yeah, and I think the difference is though There's something called alcoholism and we talk in society You know, there's there's laws around it, right? You can't buy it until you're 21, and you will get cut off by the stewardess, and there's a discussion around what is a healthy use of alcohol, or, you know, if you enjoy a glass of wine

at dinner, that's fine, not more than so many. But what we're doing is we are giving very powerful tools to brains that are not fully formed, you know, 13-year-olds can't have a moment of like, hmm, is this app serving me right now? Or is it acting as a, you know, neurological tool, you know? So for me, it's about explaining some of the design elements. Snapchat, for example, one of the people in my book is Tristan Harris. He's a technologist turned ethicist and he sort of talked to me through how Snapchat has something called streaks. Do you know what a streak is?

Is that like a usage metric? Yes, exactly. Well, what it is is let's say you and our 16 I know it's a stretch, but and I say damn let's do it. So let's start a streak. So tomorrow I send you a selfie and you send me a selfie. And we try to keep the streak up for as many consecutive days as possible. It means that our friendship is strong. It means we also get points, we get emoji trophies. And now it's turned into a thing in high schools and we're younger kids where if you break the streak,

it means that your friendship is over. It is like a serious issue. Wow. And so if you explain to a kid like, well, okay, so Snapchat went public in 2017. And one of the metrics that they are valued by is how many check ins a day a user has. So it behooves them to build ways of getting you

to come back consistently multiple times a day every day. That is the metric by which their company is valued. That is their stock price. It's your habit. So I think it's kind of like saying like, so I just so you know, this is how the sausage is made just so you know what's in your hot dog. If you still want to eat it, enjoy. If you're a

little growth dad or you're like actually I'm only gonna have a hot dog like when I go to a ballgame, that's cool too. That's the way you explain that to people you think. Oh yeah. Oh kids, kids. Oh yeah. Raising kids can be one of the greatest rewards of a parent's life. But come on, someday, parenting is unbearable. I love my kid, but is a new parenting podcast from Wondry that shares a refreshingly honest and insightful take on parenting. Hosted by myself, Megan Galey, Chris Garcia, and Kurt Brown-Oller, we will be your resident not-so-expert experts. Each week we'll share a parenting story that'll have you laughing, nodding, and thinking. Oh yeah, I have absolutely been there. We'll talk about what went right and wrong.

What would we do differently? And the next time you step on yet another stray Lego in the middle of the night, you'll feel less alone. So if you like to laugh with us as we talk about the hardest job in the world, listen to, I love my kid, but wherever you get your podcasts, you can listen ad free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. I mean, I now have a lot of teachers who are using Borden Brilliant as their curriculum, and you know, there's media literacy classes, and I think they're starting to build it into digital literacy classes. Knowing that the tech classes, it's not just about learning to code,

it is learning an interdisciplinary look at how technology is being used to form society, change habits, upending the economy, the health repercussions, the psychological repercussions, we see higher, I'm sure you know this, we see higher rates of depression and anxiety, particularly in young women and girls, many people say that it's related, researchers relate that to social media use and representation of girls and women online.

We have to have a holistic conversation about it. I don't want it to go away, I love my phone, it's in my bag right now. But I think it's more powerful than we were led to belief. You talked about earlier, there was a moment when I said, I have a million questions because you said a paragraph of worth of things that I wanted to follow up on and wasn't able to do through all at once. But one of the things you said was about sort of understanding,

design, and then instituting ethical standards. Yes. But one of the things you said was about sort of understanding design and then instituting ethical standards. Yes. But what's more about that, is that even possible? Well, there is a very small but vocal movement going on in Silicon Valley. To sort of, for example, in basic computer science courses, if you are a computer science major, very, very, very few institutions, is there a requirement for an ethical or moral conversation about how

you build whatever it is you decide to build, or a discussion about the attention economy, the fact that the way that the tech companies make money is based on the amount of attention and time they have with our eyeballs. And so, there's a movement to start that conversation in the valley itself. I am not of the valley. I think I, people relate to me because I'm kind of the every woman, right? And so, to me, going around on my book tour, stopping at all these cities and talking to people about their everyday experience where they feel overloaded or overwhelmed or unmoored and relating that back to the sort of systems that have been set up around it is very important to tell them to validate what they're feeling if they feel overwhelmed for example just now on the way to come see you

I got an email from a marine station to noke nawa saying that He was experiencing a lot of the things that I talked about in his family But that he was very concerned about some of the the younger Marines or people on his squadron whatever they're called Their ability to concentrate. Very important in their job, right? Precision, it's really important. We know that North Korea is testing missiles, right? Not so far away.

So he was saying, you know, can we do this on the base? Can we start to have this conversation? And it's not like, you know, Marines put away your phones. That is not the conversation. The conversation is, where does the technology fit into the important work that we are doing? And does it fit the right way so that it always improves us? It doesn't dampen our capacity. But do you think that we can, if we find that people are devising diabolically addictive uh... products

is there anything we can do to hold them accountable well so i think the conversation is starting around that i think the fact that there are senators who are finally questioning uh... the fake news argument i think we have uh... the entire conversation around the twenty sixteen presidential election has made people who sort of thought, oh, technology, I don't really understand it, namely people on Capitol Hill. They are starting to ask questions. They are asking not just questions about how fake news could possibly get out there,

but what kind of systems can be built in to make sure that what we're seeing online is productive, is true. In fact, not only that, but what about some of the monopolies that they're starting to be? They're starting to look up and say, oh, wait, there are five companies that are basically controlling, you know, if you go to Amazon, if you're in Amazon shopper, you go to Whole Foods, they own you there, you own all, they know your habits, they, I don't know if you have an echo in your house this idea that they are starting to take over Not just one part of your life, but every single facet of your life the privacy questions that there are Supreme court is hearing arguments right now about whether

Your cell phone can be used to track your movements or not by the police. It is starting to be a conversation at every single level of society. And I think it started in a very, very small place, which was like moms and dads and parents and people swiping Tinder and questioning, like why do I feel unhappy right now? But actually, the scale's to the Supreme Court, it's Capitol Hill, it is Silicon Valley,

it is the way that our economy is set up. It's something about you for a second. So you said, it seems to me that even after, at least what I've leaned from you as far as even after doing all of this work writing this great book and hosting this podcast, that you still are struggling to have a healthy relationship with your tech. Yeah, for sure. And I think part of that. What does that say about how how to do all this is? Well, it's less about me and more about the expectations that we've created in society. I don't think that this can be simply a personal, you know, it's not just self-help. This is about creating a culture, a community's, societies where time is valued more than responsiveness. I mean, what I think is that we've started to confuse productivity with responsiveness. We think because, you know, I can let my team know, like, I'm on my way back from seeing

Dan Harris up at ABC, like, no, okay, they don't need to know that. You're not, you know, I'm keeping my team up to date. We are constantly talking. We're constantly checking in with people. We're updating. What's on your mind? Twitter wants to know. Facebook's like, what are you doing?

My team is on Slack saying, hey, are you close? You know, this constant updating, updating, updating as opposed to saying, how do I want to use my time right now? And prioritizing. I think what it comes down to is self-regulation, asking yourself, you know, how to use your devices, but also culturally, setting expectations. So one of the other things we ask people to do is to take a vacation to, we all set out of office, you know, you go away for the holidays, you set an out of office email response. What if you set that up for one hour every day and just said, hey, I'm not available from 10 to 11,

but I'll get back to you. But the key is to say, I will get back to you at 11 when I a corrective to all this on boredom. You rapsed eyes a little bit about the upside of boredom. Well, there's a, it's funny, damn, because people were really weird when I wanted to use the word boredom. They were like, oh god, you really? Couldn't you use something a little more positive, like daydreaming or spacing out? And I was like, no, it needs to be boredom because boredom is painful. And it was interesting. Like there'd be some people who were like, oh, I totally know what you're talking about. It's when I mow the lawn on Sundays. And I can't do anything else.

It's so loud and it's so boring, but then about 10 minutes in, I start to like think about something. And then I had a teenager who said to me, I really don't like this, it feels super weird, I've never experienced this feeling before. And I was like, yes, so that's boredom. And that's my whole childhood. Yeah, right, exactly.

But I think you and I are this weird last sort of decade of people who remember talking on the phone for three hours and then hanging it back on the wall. Or somebody I saw a great tweet ironically today from my friend Michael Crowley who's a political writer. And he was replying to somebody who rate tweet ironically today from my friend Michael Crowley was a political writer and he he was replying to somebody who asked who put out into the Twitter sphere what what kind of story do you have that proves you're old and he said making a phone call to find out

what time it is. Remember that call on time. Yeah. Yeah. I can remember that. That was a thing. I used to do that a lot. Yeah. Oh, I totally remember that. That was a thing. I used to do that a lot. Yeah. Oh, I totally remember that actually.

I saw a good tweet that said, Twitter has this weird ability to make the small things seem important and the important things seem very trivial. Yes. I was like, wow. Yeah. That is true. That is so true. So you want to solve this, don't you, Dan? You're like, how are we going to fix it? What do we do? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no want to solve this, don't you, Dan?

You're like, how are we going to fix it? What do you do? No, no, no, no, no, I know it's not. I actually think you said the right thing right at the beginning, which is this is not science. It's art. And it's about just figuring out what, titrating it for yourself.

Everybody's going to have to figure these things out for themselves. I know that's kind of, you said it's annoying. It's a, it is annoying, but it's probably just true. We know the suggestions kind of you said it's annoying. It's a it is annoying, but it probably just true. We know the suggestions and tweaks you're giving us are all useful and we should try them, but ultimately, the decision is going to be ours. The lab is in our own mind. Now, I asked you at the beginning, unless though, I would like to point out, unless there is a consumer backlash, which could be coming, I think. You know, it's interesting.

I don't know how much I can say about this, but I spent some time talking to some tech executives recently at a major company. Uh huh. And I got the sense that there is concern about this. Mm. So I was talking to my 13 year old neighbor the other day. She got her phone, you know, to write a passage.

I was like, oh, what are you gonna do? Like, be on Instagram? Like, trying to be cool. And she just looked at me. And she was like, only losers around their phones all weekend. And I was like, oh, wow. That is interesting.

If there can, I mean, we've changed how we feel about wearing seat belts, hard to believe 15 years ago that you can smoke in a bar in New York City That would have been an outrage and like two years later And nobody wanted to stink when they came home at the end of the year No, it was a big deal when when Bloomberg was people were pissed at him. Yeah, yeah, so I don't know and I think time has compressed right the way ayear-old uses their technology is very different than the way a 13-year-old.

That's interesting. So, am I, you know, I'm curious, watch that space, look to see where it is so not cool to be posting on the weekends. Wow. That's really, really, really interesting. Like, what I was getting at, what I was trying to get at before is, is when I asked you whether you meditate or you're in meditation, you said you don't know that you are. Say more about that. So I, I think meditation has always been very aspirational to me. I love this. This is the subject of the book that I've just written, which is

like trying to figure out why, because I think it's aspirational for a lot of people. It's gone from I think it's aspirational for a lot of people. Yes. It's gone from being ridiculous to being aspirational. Yeah. But people have the aspiration and get aren't doing it. And my question is why. Did you notice I started fidgeting when I said that? By the way, I started like moving around in my chair.

I got to this point where I think I had tried so many times that I decided I was going to save it for my fifties. I don't know why I decided that. I decided I was gonna save it for my fifties. I don't know why I decided that. I was like, when I'm in my fifties, I will learn to meditate. I can't do it while I have kids. I can't do it while I'm, you know, hopefully at the peak of my career, you know,

trying to cram it all in every day. I think the peak is yet to come. I hope you're right. I think, you know, I, again, I have seen what happens to most women who are of a certain age in Newt where do they go Dan? Where do the older women in the newsroom go? You know, the businesses are kind of older men either do the record, but it is especially cruel to older women. I agree And it's not just this business. It's every business.

That's the truth. And we're at a really, I think, potentially very healthy moment in our society where we're starting to look not just at sexual harassment and assault, but sexism. And this is a thing that my wife and I talk about all the time. She's a doctor. What's her date? Yeah.

In medicine in particular, and my She's a doctor. Yeah. You know, just the, the, the, the, in medicine in particular, and my mother's a doctor as well, the system was set up by men for men. And it doesn't allow many women, especially women who want to have kids to thrive. And that drives a lot of incredibly talented people out of the workplace.

How did you guys manage it when you had your kid? We're still figuring it out now. She's taking a break right now. She's taking a break. After unbelievable amounts of study and work, and she's ultra specialized. Anyway, I've taken us on a way, way, way, deep-dagger. What is her specialty, mask?

She has double specialty in pulmonary medicine and I see ICU intensive care. Oh, she must know my, a very dear friend of mine at the UC San Diego's also an ER pulmonary specialist, surgery. So not ER, it's intensive care. So that's like the ICU, because you get to the ER

and you're really, really not in a good situation. They send you into intensive care. But so, yeah, so it's, but it's super specialized. Yes. But a long way of saying, I, I, I, yes, the media is tough on, it's hard, it's hard place to be, to have longevity, no question about it, but I think podcasting may be different.

It feels different than when I was doing CV. That's for sure. I mean, I don't know, that's a lame reason to be in podcasting, isn't it? Because no one can see how old I am. I don't think that's why you're in podcasting. I think it's a ancillary benefit, not the reason to get into it. Maybe. But anyway, I don't think you need to wait to your 50s to meditate.

Okay. Yeah, let's get back to that. Oh my God. So all over the place. Tech brain. No kidding. So I think what like what was the most ludicrous was when I started seeing that like I'd written like learn to meditate on my to-do lists, which is absurd. No. Isn't it? No. You think it's okay to schedule it? Yeah. Should I just do that? Yeah. Why not? So, I've spent a lot of time in, I spent, so the brief backstory is that I was very easy for me to adopt a habit, not because I'm super disciplined, but because I have a long

and pronounced history of depression, anxiety, panic, and substance abuse, and it was pretty obvious to me, A, from the research research and then b from my own personal experience That this is something is be useful and keeping this stuff at bay or mitigating it and so I it was pretty No, it was kind of a no-brainer. Do you use it probably a weird term? So ugly keep it doing it to keep it going and I had to try it when I wrote 10% happier I thought oh everybody will keep everybody who reads this will start to meditate. My own wife who basically edited the book didn't meditate until recently.

And so I had to do a reckoning with like, why is it that people aren't doing this thing that everybody now knows is good for them? And it doesn't involve a lot of the things that people feared, like, you know, you don't have to join a culture, anything like that. So, like that though, that it's prescriptive in a way. Yeah.

I mean, I don't know, I've read your book and I don't know why I didn't think of it that way is like, oh, I go to the gym, you know, because I don't, because I want to stay strong because I, because I, otherwise my back hurts, I need to meditate because otherwise I'm kind of a panicky nightmare. Yes. All I know is I am often looking for quiet. I desperately seek nature and I want to have it in my kids' life as well. And I think the closest I get to it is I actually I did it in the name of boredom, but perhaps I am doing it in the name of meditation

is I go running without listening to anything? That's a big one. That's hard to do. It's really hard. So I want to get into the issue of boredom versus mindfulness. So I'm not anti boredom at all in the way that you discuss it,

but it's interesting to me, I'm trying to organize my thoughts here, that you talked about the default mode network. I mean, you talked about it in a kind of positive way that we're not sort of doing some, we're not totally distracted by tech. We're not engaged in the motion of swiping and searching and replying, that then we can revert to what's called the default mode. And you talked about it again in a positive way, but in meditation circles, the default mode is often talked about in a very negative way, which is that when we are not paying attention

to our actual lives, we're not engaged in a, in something that we have to focus on, like an in-live-ending conversation with another human being, creative work, tasting our food, then we tend to revert to this default mode, which is mostly me, me, me, often very negative, and room-addedive, room-in-a-tiv, and repetitive. And yes, all these good things can come out of it. We need the default mode. Otherwise, we wouldn't have skyscrapers

and irrigation systems and pianosinadas. But that is kind of the beautiful tip of the iceberg that, but everything below the water is often kind of pretty nasty and repetitive. That's generally the logic you hear coming out of this group of neuroscientists known as contemplative neuroscientists who study what meditation does, and they show that meditation can knock you out of the default mode and into not what happens when you're on tech, but instead what happens when you are really into a beautiful piece of music

or you're really focused on what's happening right now. So to me, there's an interesting tension between the boredom that you are extolling and mindfulness, which is kind of a, and I think is room for both. I think I'm not anti-gay dreaming, mind-watering, constructive boredom. I think we need those things. You can't be mindful all the time.

We didn't evolve for that. But it is a really useful skill to have and to build. I think you're totally right about that. I feel like it's like mindfulness and mind wandering, which is what I'm talking about are like kind of salt and pepper, right? Like things taste best when you are able to have a little bit of both. I don't want too much of either of them. I find that when I think of boredom that then goes into, I want to frame it in a positive way, because I think boredom has gotten a bad rap, right? We think like, oh no, I'm bored, quick, get rid of it. But actually, if we frame it in a positive way,

if we explain that yes, the default mode does absolutely, all the experts that I spoke to were like, there's the dysphoric element, as you said, the, oh shoot, I wish I had said, told Dan about this amazing moment I had, and I'll kill myself, or that, my book got this one bad review, and I can't shake it.

Okay, but if I find that once you name it, that's an incredibly powerful thing. Oh, I'm in the default mode and I'm in a ruminating stage. Let's not do that. Let's see if I can use this time that I have to allow my mind to wander to a good place. And when I think of mind wandering, it's like with mindfulness, you talk about it.

With mindfulness, I think people talk about in the moment, right? With mind wandering, I think of it as time travel, like that you are remembering things and you're allowing yourself to go back in time to relive moments to think through things. And then you're going into the future and you are visualizing what it could look like and parsing out the tiny details to figure out how to make it so Can you actually? Do those things? That's where I think Mindfulness comes in I think that you the salt and pepper thing is really nice

We in the mindfulness community tend to run down boredom from a different side. You're, you're, you're, the, when you're talking about boredom and the pejorative, you're, you're talking about people who are so addicted to their technology, they can't, they can't abide the thought of, of not having stimulation. Simulation. Right. Simulation like that study. There was a study a couple of years ago that took, put people in a room.

Yes. We know nothing to do. It's, the only thing in the room was a machine that would years ago that put people in a room. We know nothing to do. The only thing in the room was a machine that would give you an electric shock. Dr. Wilson, University of Virginia, that's exactly right. And people ended up shocking themselves because they'd rather have pain than no stimulation. So that's a denigration of boredom from one side. In the mindfulness community, we denigrate boredom as a lack of attention.

That you are, something is boring to you, often your breath in meditation is boring to you because you're actually not really committed to it. And I agree with that, put down of boredom from our side, the mindfulness side. But I also think there is absolutely something to be said for daydreaming and mind wandering. And often we in the mindfulness commuter

criticize for being kind of like the nanny state of the mind. Like you always have to be paying attention. And by the way, I borrowed that term from a friend of mine, Barry Boyce. And that critique is right. You can't expect you to be mindful all the time. And the injunction to do so is just super, super annoying. I think the salt and pepper thing is really nice that you should develop the skill to

be mindful because so much of what we do when we're mind wandering is negative and self-referential and repetitive. But you can then do what you just described, which is the triple Lindy, which is to mindfully mind-wonder, which is to notice. Yes. Oh yeah, okay. My mind-wondering right now is ridiculous and useless. Let me mind-wonder about something more constructive.

Yes. I think that's exactly right. What I find interesting is that we're having this conversation at all, because when I do speak to some older people, they're kind of flummoxed. The meditation thing, I think, you know, the time had, when did meditation sort of like, really kick off in this country? 2000, I think it's,

so I got into it in like 2009, and as I often like to say, it was the first time in my life I've ever been ahead of a trend. And that was total happenstance, I just kind of stumbled upon it for a whole bunch of reasons. I would say it started to get cooler in early 2010s when you started to see big celebrities doing it and athletes and scientists, et cetera, et cetera. And it's just been building steadily since then.

So at the risk of sounding insane, I think you're in a safe place. Okay. Thank you for that. Um, now it's normal, right? Meditations kind of like, Oh, I got to go to my yoga class. Some of them are less meditative than others, obviously. But you know, it But yoga's normal. Meditation is something that we expect ourselves to do. We also order our groceries online and we do all of these things. It's almost like I think, I'll call it mind wandering.

We'll leave boredom out of it because it is controversial. The mind wandering thing, I think, is about five years behind what you're saying. And I'll give you an example. I did a TED Talk earlier this year. Boy, could I have used meditation? I should have used it. Actually, I did use some of it. Okay.

Now that I'm thinking about it, in any case though, there were like, so wait a minute. There was a moment where the producer was like, so your TED Talk is basically telling people that they need to think. I was like, yep. And she's like, and you're finding that people need to hear this? I was like, yes, that is where we are right now. We are so hyper saturated with information and stimuli, all kinds of stimuli, physical, mental, psychological that we're on the fritz.

So back to the salt and pepper, a little bit of meditation, a little bit of letting yourself think about the things that you are consuming. That, I think, is where we need to get to. That's a beautiful place to leave it. Let's go into what I started calling the plug zone. Oh, okay, yeah. Let's just plug the hell out of everything you got. Like, just give it to me.

Okay, so I mean, after this conversation, how dirty do I feel saying, you can find me on Twitter. I'm at Manouche Z, my website. But we're not saying don't use social media. We're just saying use it with wisdom. Use it with wisdom. To only contact me if you've thought about what you're going to say before him. So I'm at Manouche Z on Twitter.

I do love talking to people. You can email me or get in touch. I'm at Manouche Z.com. My book is called Board of Brilliant. It's wherever good books are sold. Maybe, wouldn't that be cool if they were like, you bought Board of Brilliant? Maybe you're interested in Dan Harrison. I would like that. That would be great. That'd be really cool. So I'm going to pet for books. The bigs. Yeah. We should have a dinner party. The podcast is called note to self, it's at notetoselfradio.org.

Hugely popular. Yeah. Hugely popular. People love it. Yeah, it's good. And meditation is a recurring theme that we talk about, for sure. Chade Mangten, I'm sure you're.

Yes, as he's a former guest on this podcast. Oh, okay, yeah, yeah. So he's been on, it's an important part of people's life. I really, I feel that like the things that you and I are talking about, we need to talk about them more. We need them to be part of what we teach our kids in addition to healthy eating and all those things. It's about being a better human.

Or just being human. Period. Right? Not just avoiding the singularity, at least for now. For now. Learning to tell the difference between your phone, ringing, and your tummy, roiling. Yes. Thank you.

Excellent job. Oh, damn, thank you. Thanks for having me. Oh, wait. One other thing we got to plug. You're on my show. Oh, yeah, that's right. Come hang out at note to self, because Dan's

going to be hanging out with me on my show. And, God, that's right come hang out at note to self because Dan's gonna be hanging out with me on my show And god I being interviewed by a journalist as a journalist. Yeah, it's a pain. Yeah, just you wait, buddy See you Thursday I'm gonna forward to that me too revenge Okay, that does it for another edition of the 10% happier podcast if you liked it Please take a minute to subscribe, rate us. Also, if you want to suggest topics, you think we should cover or guests that we should bring in,

hit me up on Twitter at Dan B. Harris. Importantly, I want to thank the people who produce this podcast, Lauren Efron, Josh Cohen, and the rest of the folks here at ABC, who help make this thing possible. We have tons of other podcasts. You can check them out at ABCnewspodcasts.com. I'll talk to you next Wednesday.

Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Or you can listen early and add free with 1-3-plus in Apple podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at 1dory.com slash survey.