Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 131: Ezra Klein, How We Interact with Politics Matters

Episode Date: April 18, 2018

Vox's editor-at-large and journalist Ezra Klein, formerly of The Washington Post, has made a name for himself as a political commentator, finding context within the chaos of our political scene and exploring the idea of what a political system would look like if created amidst tribalism. Klein, who hosts the popular podcast, "The Ezra Klein Show," also argues in our interview that it's important to take a step back from social media - Twitter, Facebook, SnapChat and others - and be mindful enough to ask if these things we are obsessed with checking are good for us. 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. Hey, 10%ers, great guest this week. As you're clined, you probably know him,

big podcaster, big journalist, editor at large for Vox. And we're gonna talk about all sorts of things. How meditation has helped them and how it has not in the age of Trump. And whether he thinks mindfulness can play a role in the insidious, pernicious problem of political tribalization. First though, one piece of business, and then your calls. The piece of business mentioned last week, but bears repeating. There are, I believe, still a few tickets left for the event in LA that I'm gonna be doing on Wednesday, May 2nd at 8 o'clock with Sam Harris.

That will be at the Skurball Cultural Center Skurball.org. That's mean Sam. We'll just be wrapping. It'll probably end up on one or both of our podcasts at some point, but should be fun. Let's get to the phone calls. Here we go. Yeah, I, Dan. This is Rod calling from New Zealand. Thanks for all your great work.

My question is, I started practice about 18 months ago and initially noticed huge gains, almost immediately in my daily life. The ability to respond rather than react and even my long suffering wife noticed that I was a slightly nicer guy. However, I've noticed after a few months diminishing returns from my daily practice and maybe even a regression to my old temperamental hard wiring. I was wondering in your opinion and experience, is this plateau in benefits a common thing, and can you make any suggestions

to switch my practice up a gear? So I can continue to grow. Thanks for everything then, cheers, mate. Bye. So cool though, we've got anybody in New Zealand who's interested in the 10% happier stuff. That's just awesome. I should have given the caveat, which you guys are

kind of used to, but now I always have to say it. I answer these questions to the best of my ability. I don't hear them beforehand. I'm not a meditation teacher, not a mental health professional, just a reporter who happens to meditate doing his best. So that being said, I do have some thoughts doing his best. So that being said, I do have some thoughts for what they're worth on your perceived predicament. One is that, yeah, the meditation practice doesn't, in my experience, go in some straight uninterrupted line toward Nirvana. It's, you know, you will hit peaks and valleys, regressions, plateaus. Again, perceived peaks and valleys, regressions, plateaus, sprints, you know, where you feel like you're making all sorts of progress. But it's so multifactorial,

the practice itself is, you know, mysterious in how it plays out in any individual mind. It can be affected by somebody exogenous factors going on in your life that you may or may not even be aware of. I, I, I, I, I spend a lot of time getting wrapped up in the particulars of my practice, you know, in my, in my, how's my ability to concentrate, et cetera, et cetera. And my teacher, Joseph Goldstein, is always like, you know, you should have a little mantra of who cares. You know, every time you get sucked into these thoughts, just like tell yourself who cares. This is just a waste of time. He calls it the playing and replaying of the quote unquote practice assessment tapes waste of time largely, not entirely, but largely.

It's not necessarily bad to have some critical thinking about your practice, but it can be, it can tie you up in unnecessary knots. And it sounds to me like you're really focused on how it's playing out in your actual life. And again, you made a bunch of progress. Your wife apparently noticed it. That's all great, but it doesn't mean you're going to be perfect. And some weeks, depending on what's going on, you may even be worse than you ever were, but there's so many reasons for that. And it doesn't, anyway, suggest to me that you should give up on the practice.

But so to get to your actual question, how can you shake things up? Well, I think that's a constructive thing to look at. And there are lots of things. The first thing that comes to mind is to toy with more meditation. That could either mean more formal meditation, just boosting your daily dosage of seated meditation. If you feel like that is not feasible, giving your schedule, I totally understand that. So I would say then maybe experimenting with meditation, what we call at 10% happier, free range meditation, you know,

turning the washing of the dishes or the walking between meetings or even the driving of your car or even the using of your phone into little meditation into mindfulness exercises. Because this can do something really important, which is to take the practice out of the formal sessions and into your life, which is of course the point. The other thing to toy with is to, and if Jeffrey Warren, my co-author in my recent book, we're here, this is the first thing he would have said, is to look around at maybe joining a community. I suspect, I don't know where you are in New Zealand, you may have said it and I wasn't listening mindfully enough, but I suspect there are groups of people who get together and meditate. And I think joining one of these groups can have a lot of benefits.

It normalizes the practice. You get introduced to lots of other people who are going through the same things you're going through, so that's normalized too in terms of feeling like you may have hit a plateau or regressed. And it's inspiring. It can inspire you to do more, to experiment, to see what areas of your life you can apply to practice. So doing that, and also if there are great teachers around, maybe striking up a relationship with the

teacher, which is, you know, I found to be immeasurably beneficial in terms of seeing all the little cul-de-sex that I drive myself into and being able to sort of navigate my way out with the help of somebody who's been there him or herself many, many times as the case, often these are experienced teachers have all of these little problems that we've bumped into. They've experienced thousands and thousands of times, and so they can really give you great advice about how to get out of it. So those are just some thoughts about how you can possibly shake things up a little bit, and I admire your instinct rather than just giving up. All right, call number two. Hello, Dan. This is Tom from Canada.

And if this is on the air, hello fellow meditators as well. I've been meditating for the last six months using your app. I've just started listening to podcasts. So please excuse my ignorance of this question. It's been asked before. But from an athlete's point of view, and mainly at golf, first point of view, how does somebody get in or is it possible with meditation to get

in the zone, quote unquote, I've heard about visualizations while you're meditating and I heard about just the essence of calming yourself down, but is there an aspect of meditating that can basically be beneficial before a round to calm the nerves and kind of keep you in the moment or even during the round that can keep you in the moment. So, curious about your thoughts, and I'll be keeping listening to the podcast. Take care. Thanks. Bye-bye. Thanks for the call.

I have to, I'm going to profess like just utter ignorance here, not only about athletic performance because I'm not a great athlete, but specifically about golf. I actually grew up on the back night of a golf course, but we were not members of that golf club, and I therefore never really learned how to golf. I actually grew up on the back night of a golf course, but we were not members of that golf club, and I therefore never really learned how to golf. That being said, we have an excellent course on the 10% happier with the guy named George Mumpred, who is awesome in every way, and was the meditation teacher for the Chicago Bulls and the LA Lakers during their respective championship runs. And to this day, it works with all sorts of athletes. And if memory serves, what he says is that meditation

cannot magically put you in the zone, but it will make you quote unquote zone ready. So puts you in the zone where you're most likely to get into the zone. So what would I, what kind of meditation would I do? You mentioned two scenarios. One is calming nerves beforehand, and the second was improving performance during.

If, again, if my memory serves of what you said during your voicemail. So now I'm just gonna speak from my own experience as somebody who has extremely limited athletic experience with the guidance that you actually go check out the course from from George Munford. So here we go. What I would do beforehand is I find that focusing on the breath for me is the most calming. In particular, the breath as it enters and exits the nose. I find that to be the most common.

So I would find a quiet place or put on some headphones and do that as a way to calm myself. Although visualization is another thing I know many athletes do, I don't know enough about it to give advice. Two previous podcast guests, however, it might be worth going back to listen to their podcasts as I suspect they may have spoken about it. One would be George Mumford himself who's been on this podcast and Michael Jervé, I believe, who works with the Seattle Seahawks. In the actual game of golf or whatever you're doing, I do think one way to get yourself out of your head and into the moment is to quite literally use your body to bring your attention

to this physical sensations, which are always with you, but we often ignore because we're stuck in our own head, spinning off into random thoughts or horrible projections into the future based on all the terrible things that could happen to us if we missed this putt, blah, blah, blah. Just to come back to the feelings of your hand on the club, the feelings of your feet on the ground, wind, sun, all of that can just cut that cycle down. It's not magic, but in my experience, it can help you just refocus on what's happening right now and pull you out of all of your phantasmagoric images in your mind. Hope that helps, but again, I admit my lack of experience.

Okay, so let's go to Ezra Klein, our guest today. He is, as I said before, just a kind of really exciting dynamic young journalist for sure on the on the left. So just know that. So he approaches things from a pretty specific standpoint. He is the host of the Ezra Klein show, which is a great podcast. there are lots of great podcasts within the box network including one called the weeds which i really enjoy uh... he used to work for the washington post he is now his title at box is editor at large he is very much in the daily so hurly burly

of politics in the era of trump and so it's intriguing to me to hear how meditation has been useful and also the limits of its utility. So here we go as we're clung. For ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. Dan Harris. I always ask the same first question, which is how did you start meditating? What happened? So I have, I tried meditating on and off in college. I went to UC Santa Cruz. So by the way, I so weird to sit here with you because I feel like

I know you because I've listened to your podcast so many times. And I feel the same. And I listen to the weeds. Well, podcasting has a strange quality because it has this intimacy. Yes. And so when you meet people you listen to, you're like, I've been inside your head for a very long time. Or you've been in my head. Yeah. And then it's bad

because they're almost inevitably disappointment. Well, I'll do my best. The podcast is, it's put in the best face forward. Is it though? I mean, I mean, I think I'm, I think in virtually all of my work, I am a worst person than I am in my actual life and in my podcast, I'm a better person than I am in my actual life.

I wouldn't pack that for me. So, I'll take both sides of it. So I feel that, for those who don't know me, I do a lot of political writing and reporting. I think that in a lot of the commentary I do in how I and others end up portraying myself on Twitter and on TV. I do a fair amount of cable news. I think those are spaces where I end up coming off more definitive and in some cases, as frightened than I am,

even as I'm trying to, I think those spaces have a flattening effect on a personality. I think it's true for me. I think it's true for a lot of the people I know who I also see in those spaces. The podcast is nice and it's something I'm trying to do with that on the Ezra Clanchone, The Weeds,

where I'm trying to give a lot of voice to the fact that I have interest beyond politics, that I am hesitant, that I do not have full confidence in a lot of my opinions. And in some ways, going into those spaces and being able to have those kinds of conversations with those parts of my self-adfering mind, I like the person I am there. And so I think it's often a better person than I am in other parts of my world where I'm running around and being stressed out and feeling behind. But this is something that I'm struggling with a lot, which is, okay, if I like the person

I'm coming off as in my podcasting, that I'm being in my podcasting more than I like the person I'm being saying in my writing, how do I bring those together? And I've not found the answer to that, but it's something I'm thinking about quite a bit. It's a really interesting thing to think about, but maybe something you shouldn't be bludgeoning yourself with because we all play. That doesn't sound like me. Yeah, we'll definitely get to that. My kind of guy.

Now you're wondering what, so you want to know why I meditate. Well, we'll get to that. I totally derailed you, but now that we're talking about this, it seems to me, and I haven't thought about this deeply, that we do have different roles at different parts in our lives, and it's natural. Like, I like myself less when I'm lecturing my three-year-old about not putting his finger in the sockets,

than I do than when I'm giving a sympathetic ear to a colleague who has an issue, but that's just a different role. Like myself is probably not the language I should have come up with here, because that's very, as you say, the problem there, maybe I should just learn to like myself. But what I mean there is that I think that this is the first period, in my career as a political journalist, where I feel so profoundly profoundly uncertain where I feel that not only do I not know the answers But virtually nobody I

Can see seems to have good answers for for what's going on in the country for why things feel the way they do for what's going on in this Administration it's the first administration I've ever covered where you call people and you try to get an account of their reasoning and nobody can give it to you because nobody even knows what it is. Because it all lives in Donald Trump's head. And maybe not even there, right? Things just happen. I mean, there is something, there is something quite Buddhist about all of it. But I think that a lot of I think that a lot of political writing is not well tuned for uncertainty. I think column writing commentary, which I do a fair amount of that, obviously, opinion writing, that has a real push towards, here's the answer. Here's my take on it. One of the things that...

Hot takes, everybody's doing hot takes. Hot takes, smart takes, all kinds of takes. I like, I like takes. I wish we, I would like to go back to having some more neutral language for that, but, but yes, there, there's a lot of that. And sometimes, look, sometimes you do have a take. Sometimes I do want to say, you know what? This healthcare bill is bad.

I'm not hesitant about that. It's going to throw a lot of people off of health insurance. It's bad. We shouldn't do that. But a lot of the time right now, I find myself struggling with issues where I think there are like five plausible answers, and maybe six more that I haven't even figured out or I haven't heard or I haven't been able to find in my reporting. And I am trying to think about how do you create formats where that can come out. How do you create formats where instead of saying here is the answer, you can say here a couple of possibilities.

And look, there are ways to do it, and we do do it. The reason Vox is an explanatory journal, it's an organization, the reason we built it in the way we did is that one thing that is helpful to do in this period is to focus more on context than we have before. When everything is so chaotic, it's good to zoom out a lot and say, okay, what is this actually part of?

But putting aside the question of how it makes me feel about me, I just read a lot of commentary right now and it feels like we are operating with old formats and models for a world that our level of certainty about it and our level of knowledge about it is a whole lot less than we like to pretend. What would a new model look like?

I mean, just spitballing here. So something I play around with doing, sometimes when a new event happens, a big event happens, I will do, I do not have a good name for what this is, but just bullet lists of thoughts. Instead of saying, you know, instead of having a piece where you have a thesis and a respearment structure or it's a pinion piece and you have a thesis up at the top and you're running through the argument getting down to the bottom. These are just 15 ideas.

And they stop and they double back on each other and sometimes they contradict each other. I think that the... I love that. I like that too. Although the problem with that is it is hard in the structure of the piece to communicate what it is you're doing.

I mean, sometimes, let's show up with a rubric. Unless you come up with a rubric, but even so, the rubric will often be, well, here are some thoughts I have on this, which is fine. The readership figures it out, but it is in its cleanest head like in today. You know, just just, I'm thinking, I don't know how to pronounce this guy's name, but there's an amazing TV critic for the New York Times, James Pane Wozik. Pane Wozik. Pane Wozik?

Yeah. So he used to write for Time magazine, and I've been reading his hot takes on TV episodes for a long time, and he used to end his rapid reviews of episodes with what he called the Hail of Bullets. And he would just do what you just described. Just a bunch of the whole of bullets bullet points bunch of random thoughts some of them could contradict one another

but they were just like thoughts what do you think makes it take hot i don't mean i'm not in that business uh... but i think it's i guess it's hot because it it is uh... fresh like in other words is related to something that just happened, and because it's got a very specific point of view, which is what you're reacting against, from belief for what I take away from what you've said, which is that a hot take precludes you

from subtlety, nuance, or uncertainty. So the things that I struggle with this, because we seem to have gone into this language of take. So I'm somebody who has, you know, background in a lot of parts of news. I've done a bunch of TV, I've done, I've been on the news side at the Washington Post where I did some commentary too, but I was in the newsroom, not on the opinion side. And we've moved into this language of hot takes and smart takes. I almost want to create a take taxonomy.

Like, to me, a hot take is a take that is too fast and underbaked, right? Which you get, you know, something happens, everybody's got to come up in the opinion on it real quick, and you read some things. Sometimes people have a lot of knowledge about something, right? You're, you know, it's healthcare and Sarah Cliff is writing a piece, and so that's, you know, Sarah Cliff is a healthcare portal, she's amazing. And that's going to have a lot of knowledge to it. But if you don't, you can end up with a hot take, which is you are substituting the heat of your opinion for actual knowledge about the issue.

Well, there's a smart take. There's a reported take, but I, something about the take language bothers me. In part because I think a lot of news has more taken it than people admit. And this idea to call this thing over here takes is a way of denying that that I don't love. But you're hearing me think this, it's just language, it's just language that sticks with me a little bit.

I think you're onto something. Never in the history of my, in the brief history of my podcast and career, have I derailed a guest so rapidly and so thoroughly. Well, you know what I was saying about being able to communicate hesitancy and different points of view. So I cut you off at UC Santa Cruz where you dabbled with meditation.

So Santa Cruz is a spiritual place. If you've never been there, it is, I think it has to be the most beautiful college campus in America. It is built in a redwood grove, where literally the rule is that no building can be more than two thirds of the height of the tallest nearby redwood. So I mean, the Redwood Grove dominates. And when I was there, I read a lot of Technod Han and read about Buddhism and tried to do meditation,

but it didn't stick. I would say it only really stuck after I launched Vox, which was in 2014. And it stuck then because just launching and running Vox was incredibly, incredibly stressful. And I just needed not just meditation, but other things that would bring down my level of complete overwhelm and panic that I had at all times. And why were you overwhelmed in Panic?

I understand why you were overwhelmed. There's a fragility to building something new. We can describe what it is you were building. So Vox is a, we're an Expondentory News organization. The line of Tory News is so we focus, and the reason I emphasize that is that a lot of news organizations are built around breaking news. They are built around, if you look at what the product

of a story there is, it is the new bite of news. And that's a really important thing to do. It's something I've done before and it's something that I admire today. What I think a lot of those organizations traditionally have not done well is give people the context they need to understand that new piece of news. So you're covering something, I'll use here an example, I'm familiar with it is part of the genesis of box itself, Obamacare.

I covered along with our cliff, the Affordable Care Act's genesis and passage, and implementation when we were at the Washington Post. And something I always felt there was it, not just us, but a lot of our friends in the media, we were doing a great job answering the question of what happened with Obamacare two day. Just of what happened with Obamacare two day Like just like what happened with Obamacare in the last eight hours every day if you would come to walk blog

Which I launched at the post you would have gotten an answer on that and I think it was a good answer But when I would read the emails I got from people they didn't actually want to that's like not a question Anybody ever asked because they wanted to know what was Obamacare? How did the subsidies work and? What we didn't have were real products that were easy to find and that were continuously updated such that as we were iteratively covering a news story, we were able to give people the context if they were coming in just right now to understand the whole of the story. So Vox, in a lot of different ways, with a lot of different products and ideas in it, was launched to focus on that,

was launched to focus on this question of, okay, when the news happens, can we build an organization that is dedicated in our workflows, in who we hire, in the products we build, in the formats we prize, to giving people that broader context. And so that's the idea of it. We're now, we've now been around for about four years.

We have podcasts, we have, we're on YouTube, we're watching the Netflix show, there's a lot of great stuff happening. But I want to emphasize that because it's harder for you to do than me, but at least three of the podcasts I listen to regularly today explain, which as of this recording is quite new, which basically explains as the title suggests, some big topic in the news on any given day. Your show, the Ezra Klein show, and then the weeds, which the aforementioned Sarah Cliff, Matthew Eglaceus, and others, you often are on there, getting into the weeds of a policy issue. I find all of them useful in many ways. The weeds, you know,

especially if I'm covering something like gun violence or whatever to hear a detailed discussion of gun policy is just incredibly useful for me as a journalist. I think it's useful for many people as a citizen. Thank you. So anyway, you guys are doing a lot of stuff just a lot of great stuff. So I appreciate that. I'll set you the 20, the 20 after the show. But so when we were launching it, and it doesn't feel this way now,

because I mean, now we're a big organization, but I found the experience of launching something like that and going through the rapid growth. So within less than four years, we grew from zero people to over a hundred. I found the experience of launching that to be just very nerve-wracking. And one, you're always dealing with the distance between the thing you've built in your head

and the thing you actually have at that moment, right? It takes time to build an organization. And so, particularly when you're, I don't want to say particularly, I'm sure this is true in a lot of different industries, but Vox, you know, as one of the people who came up with the vision for it, You have to build to be able to execute on that vision. So one I found there to be just a lot of stress in all the things It I wanted us to do that we weren't yet able to do. Were you in a man. You were the editor of the chief But were you the CEO of so Vox media our parent company has a CEO, but in terms of Vox calm. I was the our parent company has a CEO, but in terms of Vox.com, I was the operationally top manager. I was the operationally top manager.

Any problem that did not get solved eventually came to me. That does not sound fun. Well, there are different personality types. Vox, I stepped down as editor in chief about, I think, 0.055 months ago, and our editor in chief Lauren Williams is an amazing manager. And there are things that I do that are fun to me that Lauren would hate. There are kinds of stress I handle well that are not her favorite thing, but she really enjoys the work of managing people. And I enjoy some of the work of managing people, but I don't really enjoy the work of

organizational design once it got too big. So I found running Vox. I had managed it the post. I had managed roughly seven or eight people ultimately. And I really liked that. And I really liked managing until it got to like 30, 40 people. And at a certain point, when it's not too big, you're actually managing the product. You're managing people through managing the product, managing people through assigning articles, through editing articles, and I have a lot of thoughts about that. And I like doing that.

When it got to the point where you're managing the managers and managers, that's an incredibly important thing to do. I will not like book for a second any criticism of middle managers or managing the people who dismiss management books. I mean, managing is a really important thing to do well, but it wasn't a thing that I think I did uniquely well, and it wasn't a kind of stress that I held well. So I can go on cable news or talk in front of a lot of people or write a big piece and I'll handle that stress very well. The stress of having conversations where you have to tell

people they're not doing the job, you know, the way you need them to do it, or even happier conversations and that, just the stress of all that kind of interpersonal management, just dealing with people as people, just the way I am, I find that, I just found that I carried that a lot. So was meditation helpful in this context? Somewhat. I've never, I ended up finding meditation to be more interesting than helpful, if that makes sense. I really like it. I'm a big user of the, as I've told you before, the 10% happier app. I like reading books about it. And I find it a really, really, I find mindfulness really interesting. And And I find it a really, really, I find mindfulness really interesting and that act of seeing what is really happening in my own head. I can't say that I find it calming.

It doesn't have the effect that it often, so it gets touted as having. And I'm not sure that's a bad thing. And who knows, maybe I'm on to something, to something you say, oh no, that's the way it was always supposed to be. But I started it because I thought it would help me manage my stress, and it didn't do that much of that. But it helped me see what was going on in my own head a lot more clearly.

And that had a different value. And I find it as an act, I find it pleasurable, and a way of pulling back time for myself. And so it's become a big part of my life. I really want to do a silent retreat, which I haven't done yet, but that I'm excited for. You should. I think given what you're describing, I would argue that you should investigate that. And I guess offline I can help you think about how to do that. But I want to go into what you just said about clarity as opposed to calm. I've thought about this and written about it a little bit, but I wouldn't call myself an expert, but my experience, the calm, comes through the clarity. So that to a lot of people get into meditation because they want to become.

In fact, there's an incredibly popular meditation app called COM. And I think this very wise marketing, because people don't feel COM. They feel they're opposite of COM. And they want to get back to some sense of serenity. But in my understanding of Buddhist- based or secular mindfulness meditation, the goal isn't to feel any specific way. The goal is to feel whatever you're feeling clearly

so that it doesn't own you. And it is that clarity and the lower volume on the internal chatter, or even if the chatter is the value of isn't down, you're less susceptible to being carried away by the internal chatter. That leads of a down, you're less susceptible to being carried away by the internal chair that leads to a different kind of calm, not sitting on a mountain top in a loincloth calm, but calm because you're not so owned by whatever neurotic impulse is flitting through your brain. I didn't find, and I still haven't found, I think,

that it gives me that freedom. And, you know, so I had a, I had on my podcast, I see Robert Wright's why Buddhism is true up there. Yeah, great. And I like, I like Bob a lot, and I really, really like that book. And that book is ended up having, and it'll be interesting to talk with you about this,

a different and kind of more profound effect on me as it has sat with me. I've been thinking about it a lot recently and in non-Buddhist dimensions. But what I will say is that, and what I said to him was, in some ways I have found the active meditation to be unnerving, really confronting how little control I have over what's going on

in my head really observing that, and not quite being able to take control over it, has been. It's a profound thing to realize. And I'm sure with enough work and with enough meditation, there's, you know, you can get to the other side of the shore and, you know, get more, more distance from it and more freedom from your neuroticism. What I found is that it gave me a much better sense of my own neuroticism,

but not necessarily all that much distance from it uh... which may be is okay to but isn't that this i mean i feel like the sense is the distance uh... and again you would be so i often describe myself as like the the dude who's slept at a holiday in last night and therefore thinks he can perform open-heart surgery you know like so i'm not a meditation teacher so i'm giving you my hot take based on my own. Based on only writing a couple books about it and launching a meditation app and having

a podcast for you interview the world's greatest meditators. So it's, it's some experience, some experience, but the meditation teachers who I truly, truly respect have, you know, my wife, for example, is a physician, and she has years and years and years of hardcore training. The meditation teachers who I truly, truly respect have way more training under their belt than my wife does, and my wife is highly skilled. So guy like Joseph Goldstein who's my teacher 50 years of Really serious practice right now. He's unreachable because he's doing a several month long silent meditation retreat He does it all the time. He's studied with great masters all over the world. So I

Wonder what somebody like that would say based on what you're saying as opposed to what I'm saying because my level of experience is way lower but But to me, what I hear, and again, I'm just refracting it through the lens of my own experience, is having a greater sensibly that was the words you used of your own neuroses, is actually the mechanism for the coming, that it's just seeing them clearly gives them less power over you. It's like the Wizard of Oz. You know, it's that all of a sudden you're seeing the man behind the curtain. Just something else you said, and I'll then I'll shut up and let you react to whatever you want to react to, is the sense of being unnerved by the lack of control. Actually, my experience is healing that, yeah, we can't,

we don't know where thoughts come from. We don't know where emotions come from. It's a mystery. It's called the mystery of consciousness. And actually getting in touch with that can lead over time to an unclenching of like, oh, yeah, I'm in the middle of a conversation with my wife or with my boss or whoever. And I'm having homicidal thoughts, right? But rather than act on them or beat myself up for having them, I can realize, yeah, I don't know why this is happening, but I don't need to be owned by it. That all sounds to me like it would be true where I am more advanced to end and heal person. I don't disagree with any of that.

You know the thing you made me think about there is that when I think of the life of someone like Joseph Goldstein or we had a writer at Vox who just went on an ayahuasca retreat and wrote a fascinating piece about it. And so maybe I'll use this as the example. And he came back from that. And one of the things you're saying is that, you know, this is I wasca, retreat where he did, I was got four times in four days, was just the singularly most profound experience of his life. And on the other hand, then you leave.

And after having this very, very, very intense confrontation with your own ego, with your own psyche, watching yourself dissolve before your very eyes. Then you come back into the world that is constantly reinforcing a particular story of yourself to you. You come back into the world and somebody's like, hey, where's the piece on your eye?

I want to go to eat. You know, that was supposed to be due two days ago. You know, and now speaking for wildlife, like your dogs, any things, and you know, it's just life has a lot going on in it. And sometimes I wonder, when I think about the structure that monks have built for themselves, when I think about what it means to be unreachable on retreat, and what it means to be in a monastery, and I read some memoirs of people who have done that. I think, well, is a secret or the meditation or a secret realizing that if you want to escape from this, you

actually need to escape from the cues of that life more profoundly and that absentee ability to do that, sit down for 20 minutes a day, is good. It's good for me. I continue to do it and think it's good for people. But what it can do is limited. That's a question that I struggle with. I've come to think a lot more about the cues we all have in our lives and the ways in which they reinforce a certain story of our ego and reinforce certain feelings, how different I can feel when I radically change my context.

And so one possible synthesis of what you're saying is that having seen these things about myself, that is knowledge I could use to begin to change the context of my life, such that the same things weren't reinforced. But unless I do that, it doesn't. It doesn't do that. I'm not sure about that. I sure i agree with that yeah i mean unless i'm misunderstanding you uh... i'm thinking of what coming to mind is this old zen parable about it

older munk who spent a lot of time meditating but hasn't gotten enlightened and it's kind of frustrated about that he declares he's gonna hike up a mountain and meditate until he gets enlightened and that's kind of frustrated about that and he declares he's going to hike up a mountain and meditate until he gets enlightened and that's it. And on his way up, he passes another monk who is enlightened and he asks the guy, he's carrying like a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a bundle of sticks. And the guy says to him, what is enlightenment? The, the, the unenlightened monk says to the guy with

the sticks, what is enlightenment like and a guy drops the sticks? And then the guy says what do you do then? And he picks up the sticks and keeps walking. And similarly there's another Zen, I think there's a bunch of somebody will correct me on Twitter from wrong about this, but there's a famous set of Zen paintings shows a guy with some cattle, I think, and it has something to do with enlightenment, but the punch line is at the end, you go to the market. In other words, you don't have to withdraw from life so thoroughly that the cues are all gone. It's just that you're relating to the cues differently. And I don't know that you ever, I don't know that it's possible for somebody in our position to ever so thoroughly relate to the cues differently

that we are what would be described as enlightened, but that's why I like the whole 10% thing. Because over time you're developing the skill of not being a rat in a maze, not being a robot controlled by a malevolent ego. Actually the various stimuli and triggers in your life can actually be served in a more subtle way and over time you just get better and better at it. I buy all that and I very much do not want to be taken the position that unless you're going to go devote your life to his and monastery, that there's nothing you can do about any of this.

I'm one thing I should say is in all of this, where you say you've said a number of times here of like, look, you're not a meditation master. I'm not even a very good meditator. So I want to be really careful that sometimes when you're in the guest chair on a podcast, it can seem like you're an expert. But as I said, when we were starting this, I'm as far from, you know, like 20 minutes a day. You said 20 minutes a day. Yeah, that's a robust. It's a robust habit. So, but the one that the judges want to make, they're good at meditation. I get very skeptical. So when you say you're not good at that, that tells me you're doing it right.

Life is short and it's full of a lot of interesting questions. What does happiness really mean? How do I get the most out of my time here on Earth? And what really is the best cereal? These are the questions I seek to resolve on my weekly podcast, Life is short with Justin Long. If you're looking for the answer to deep philosophical questions like, what is the meaning of life? I can't really help you. But I do believe that we really enrich our experience here

by learning from others. And that's why in each episode, I like to talk with actors, musicians, artists, scientists, and many more types of people about how they get the most out of life. We explore how they felt during the highs and sometimes more importantly, the lows of their careers. We discuss how they've been able to stay happy during some of the harder times,

but if I'm being honest, it's mostly just fun chats between friends about the important stuff. Like, if you had a sandwich named after you, what would be on it? Follow Life is short wherever you get your podcasts. You can also listen to ad free on the Amazon Music or Wondering app. So what I was going to say was that the thing that you never hear is a parable is the monk is walking up the the mountain and you saw the guy furiously refreshing Twitter to see how many faves it is tweaked God and he says what's meditation like and the monk retweets himself and then what's it you know so I do sometimes I think that there's a value in

some of the value for me is in being more mindful of what different stimuli in my life are pulling for me. What identity they're calling forth, what feelings are calling forth. And as you say, sometimes there are answers to be found in better practice and not just meditation, but I find exercise to be an incredibly calming thing. I mean, you know, sleeping, like these are good things.

And sometimes it's in saying, actually, I have architected things in a way that is not making me happy. Actually, I have architected things in ways that does not interact with my personal basket of anxieties and needs and hopes and wants very well. And I have to make changes. One thing that is true about how I think about a lot of things, and this goes far beyond

meditations, actually I think about politics and tech and a lot of other things, my wife calls me a structuralist, a clinyan structuralist, I am not a huge believer in individual agency. And I'm somebody who tends to see a lot more than what we want to admit is being elicited by the systems in which we place ourselves. So when that is the less than I take for meditating, there's something about my brain where that ends up being less than I take for almost everything. And so it's probably not a surprise that I spend more time meditating and looking at my own emotions and begin to question the systems

in which I've embedded myself. That might be an idiosyncratic thing for me that it may not be how other people experience the world. So what does that mean? Does that get you thinking about changing the structure of your life? So, you know, as I said, one thing I did over the past years, I stepped down as editor-in-chief of my organization.

And I am really proud of having done that. I had a did a podcast while back with a guy named Arthur Brooks. I know. Yes, I want to have the great, the school of defense. Oh, you defense. You should not have me on that. You should have Arthur on this podcast. He's much better.

He's much more interesting. He's just an exclusive. And he had this had this great line and we tell everybody he's from the, he's the head of the American Enterprise Institute, which is a big conservative think tank in Washington, but he's an economist who in his past life's focused on happiness research and thought a lot about what actually makes people happy. And he's just a guy, he's a Catholic, and he has a very, very open spiritual outlook on life. He's somebody who absorbs life through a very, very interesting filter. But I had him on my podcast, and he talked about the way that he was talking here about research, about work.

This was long before we were having this conversation with people. And he was saying that a thing that can happen to people is that they keep rising up at work. And then at a certain point, they rise above the level where the things are doing or the things they really love doing. But that to go down is a loss of status.

And so people have trouble doing that too. And so they get trapped. Because on the one hand, they don't want to feel demoted or to see other people to feel like they were demoted. Because on the one hand, they don't want to feel demoted or to see other people to feel like they were demoted. And on the other hand, they're not doing the things that really bring them the joy, the most joy, the things that make them feel most like them. And for me, recognizing at a certain point

that as much, I mean, I have a probably unhealthy level of like emotional connection to the organization that I launched and I'm not like, I mean, I think about it all the time. And I'm immensely proud of it and I care about it. But recognizing the certain point that what I was doing was not the best use for me in it was something I was proud of. That was a kind of hard internal decision to come to.

Yeah. So, you know, it had guilt and whatever. I think the clarity that you generated through meditation was useful. I think it was helpful in that. I do. Is your life calmer now? It's get, yeah, it is actually.

So, then meditation has definitely made you calmer by the trend. Well, and I think, and, you know, I don't want to give, there are a lot of things I was going through doing this experience to try to understand this, but, and I'd say too with tech, I've become very, very skeptical in a way that a lot of other people are two, so I don't think this is something special to me, but a lot of the platforms in which I had engaged pretty thoughtlessly over the past couple of years, Twitter and Facebook and others, just

we were all in it, so I'm in a two and, you know, I have however many followers and isn't that great. And, you know, trying to watch, well, what's actually happening to me when I'm there? Do I feel like I'm being more productive? Do I feel like I'm being a good version of myself? It's led to a lot more reassessment for me. Again, how much of this is meditation and how much of meditation is a symptom of some of the underlying discomfort that led to the meditation? It's like, who knows?

But, but that stuff I feel I feel, has been important. And so I am. I'm spending a lot of time thinking about the structures in which I put myself and the way I sort of build my own life. You know, what's story? What's parts of myself and my reinforcing? And which parts of myself am I calling back? I'll give one, sorry, I'm in a moment, I'm rambling here, but... No, this is what I can do. Something happened on Twitter recently, over the last year, that I think is really interesting, once I realized it had happened in May. So Twitter, until, I may have the dates wrong, but until let's say a year ago, was notable

in that it was not algorithmic. So when you turn on Twitter.com, you had a running reverse chronological stream of just what everybody you follow had tweeted. So whatever I saw, if you had tweeted two seconds before, that's what I saw. Then Twitter made changes. They made changes in part because they had fallen way behind Facebook. And Facebook has this news feed, and the news feed is delivered algorithmically, and it has complicated equations running in the background, working off of what it thinks you like like and then what it thinks you're going to want to see and what's going to engage you the most.

The Twitter went and did a version of that. So now when I turn on Twitter, instead of just seeing the overwhelm of people shouting at each other, which even there is probably not the best thing for me. Now I see a algorithmically served up menu of the best performing tweets from everybody else in my industry. Things you might have missed. Things you might have missed. And so I'm not even just seeing all of it tweets.

I'm just seeing it's like, my friend Chris Hayes at MSNBC, you know, I see the tweet of his that performed absolutely the best in the past 24 hours. And what that calls up and he's like, oh, you should write some better performing tweets, right? Like, this is your job. You should be competing with all the people on Twitter in addition to all the things you actually get paid to do.

And it took me a little while to go because I began using the platform more. And I was like, oh, I'm in a, you know, and I began getting better numbers. And, you know, I had 20,000 retweets and it isn't that great. And somebody was like, oh my God, this has done such a great job

playing on my own status anxiety. Like it has just shown me something every time I come in now that the part of me it pulls out is a part that always worries I'm falling behind in my industry, the part of me that always thinks I'm not doing enough at my work, the part of me that thinks like this could definitely be better.

You know, what are you doing? Come on, figure this out. And you know, that's a, like, I am not going to change up, I'm editing, I'm going to change up, I'm not going to the Twitter home screen as much. Like that is the answer. Right, but I just think these things are so multifactorial that actually you, I don't, I'm not in your mind. And I also, I'm not one, I think it's very dangerous

to get for somebody in my position, to get overly dogmatic about the benefits of meditation. So with those caveats issued, my hunch is that you're not giving your practice enough credit. And that actually, you're making a bunch of decisions that are, again, multifactorial, like you probably married really well and your wife gives you good advice. I did, thank you. And you are getting older and you have so you're becoming more self-aware and so I think

it's probably a bunch of stuff but to me on the receiving end of everything you've just said I'm hearing somebody who's more self-aware and making decisions about how to have a calmer, sane, or life, and that it sounds to me like I would put meditation in the variables that are pushing you in that work. Oh, of course. I don't think we're disagreeing on this at all. In fact, when I said at the end, like the woman I fixed that is not meditation,

the way I can see that might be meditation. That's my point. But the way I can fix it is to change the structures in which I operate. I mean, part of the feeling there is, okay, when I get up from sitting for a while, I feel calm. And then the second I open my computer, I don't. So what's going on there? I mean, part of it is just knowing what it feels like when you feel calm.

So you don't become so used to the feeling of feeling overwhelmed and stressed out. But you're picking up the sticks and stressed out that it becomes more normal. But you're picking up the sticks and keeping and continuing to walk. That's what you're doing. It's trauma very enlightened person. What did Bob Wright say to you? What did Bob Wright say in his book that has continued to resonate with you? So I almost wish I could retitle that book.

I've come to really think a lot about as I said that book and I want to recommend that book to a lot of people who do not want to read a book about Buddhism. Yeah. Because it's such a good book about the mind and Bob is such a sharp, thoughtful science writer and the thing I've been thinking about with that book is in the line of work I'm in, you end up considering a lot of ideas and hearing about a lot of ideas that are meant to solve on some really fundamental level, the fact that there's like things feel kind of sh** all the time. Like they feel economically sh**, they feel you know, they feel politically, and the thing that I've been thinking about a lot

from that book is, so the core argument of that book, in my view, and you should tell me if you feel this is wrong, because I know you're so kind of bobb about this. But the core argument of that book, when I read it and interviewed him, is that fundamentally, the brain did not evolve to make us happy. The brain evolved to make us want things. The brain evolved to make sure that we are gonna survive and we're gonna reproduce. And if you had a mind, if you had,

if you built a creature that adapted very quickly to what it had and was satisfied with that, that creature was not going to thrive in a doggie, doggie dog evolutionary world. And one of the things that has left me thinking a lot about is how many of the problems that we want to solve through policy or changing tech have to do with the way just humans are. How much of the suffering is baked into the system? That isn't to say that we shouldn't be trying to solve it, but it is to say that if you don't come from the perspective that we are going to fasten onto the parts of a system that have tribalism embedded in them, that have status

competition embedded in them, that have wanting and craving embedded in them, that if you don't begin with a realistic picture of the mind of how humans operate, then no system you'll be able to work. Because the thing, and this is my sort of core point about it, I think that we often intuitively frame things as like a fall from grace. We intuitively frame things, I mean, I read this about capitalist systems or neoliberal systems all the time, that they've somehow hijacked human beings into this endless wanting and grasping and my take on it is different that human beings relate that and capitalism and neoliberalism are systems that one reason that they have worked

to the extent they have worked is that they are within the greased grooves of humanity that they have that they they work with work with something that we already are. Now recognizing that thing we already are can get supercharged, we can get too much of it, and it can become a really bad way of living a life. Well, that's an important realization too, but it means that if you're going to start trying to imagine a system, which is going to cut against that, you can't imagine that what will happen is people will just embrace it, that just moving into the new thing, that's where they're going to be.

And they're going to be happy. Actually, like, it takes real intense work. I mean, you're talking about what it takes to be a great meditator. It takes real intense work to overcome these parts of yourself. It's an awesome. You can do just by tweaking a system and definitely not something you do by tweaking a system without recognizing that that's why the system was working in the first place. Except there are levels here.

So there's Joseph Goldstein, and then there's me, who's 10%, happier than he used to be. What I think is the brilliance of the Buddha is that he was very wisely and keenly focused on the pleasure centers of our brain. What keeps us moving is the wanting, but he has pointed out that it feels better to be mindful than mindless if you're paying attention. It feels better to be nice rather than to be cruel. And actually so that if you boost your mindfulness quotient, you start to see these things, and then it just becomes a new greased group.

And so to me, that actually gives me a lot of optimism that once you point out to people that the mind is trainable, why wouldn't you do that? Now, there are actually a bunch of reasons why you wouldn't, because of the same mind that we evolved for is also not good at adopting healthy habits uh... and so that that's a huge obstacle but i i do think there is something to be said about the fact that

the buta with the but the the brilliance that bob is holding in on is that actually you can you can co-op these same systems to create a same or world. I agree. I just think that, yeah, I'm not disagreeing with any of that actually. I'm just saying the reason the book is stuck with me is that in a kind of different realm. So do I take how Bob is looking at the systems themselves and the ideas of Buddhism, that to me is very, very straightforwardly correct.

But it's been helping me think about other spaces of reform. Let me give you an example. That's what I'm saying. So in other systems of reform, you can bring this spirit. Yes. But I think that the hard part is that the way dialogues about reform happen very rarely has a spirit. The way dialogues about reform happen almost always has implicitly that we have for reasons that are hard to understand or possibly related

to malign forces that are controlling everything behind these, we've just completely screwed up. We have lost touch with ourselves. We are not doing the thing that would obviously be better for us to be doing. We just need to do the thing that would obviously be better. And, you know, I don't mean to get too much into sort of 70s personal transformation stuff, but I think a lot of these things need to have more of a sense of, well, why do we, why do human beings end up choosing the systems we do? Why, why if this is so obviously better, hasn't it just one out on its own? And it's because we're not built to be happy, we're not built to pursue happiness in that way. I'll give you an example.

Sorry I read a book recently, I really enjoyed it, and we'd recommend to people who enjoy this podcast called Lost Connections by Johan Hari. The book is, he suffered from, and suffers from, very, very deep depression. The book is about trying to re-understand a lot of depression as a function, not just of individual chemical imbalance, but how society is structured, individual things that are happening in people's lives, understanding depression is contextual, not just chemical. On some level, that's obviously true. And on another level, it's often forgotten.

And appealing to you is a systems thinker. Peeling to be a systems thinker. But, and I have a podcast with you on coming out soon. And we talk about this in there. One of the places where I found the book, the frustrating is that there are a lot of things in it where it's like, well, look, if that's so much obviously better, and nothing's stopping people from doing it now, right? If it's

so much better for people to spend time outside. And we could spend more time outside most of us, I mean there are a couple of us who can, but if most of us could spend more time going to the park instead of watching so much Netflix or whatever, why aren't we? And in some ways I think it can get looked at as too much of a mystery. When in fact it's not that much of a mystery, it's, you know, we, for whatever reason, we are not always built to do the things that would be better for us. And just starting with that idea, for me, absorbing that idea fully has made a lot of things it didn't make as much sense to me make more sense.

And has helped me, I think, try to think about if you're going to do, I'm a big performer myself, I have lots of ideas about how the world can be a better place. But if you're going to implement them, recognizing that, you know, you often, you're often going to need to be working to pull people away from, uh, from ways of approaching problems and ways of approaching their lives that are, are really deeply baked in. As you're saying, there's a lot of wisdom in Buddhism, but one thing that that wisdom includes is that you got to practice a lot. You're trying to overcome something very deeply built into you. And that's difficult. I think just beginning with a realistic appraisal, that difficulty is important.

What do you think that you recently had in your podcast, Tristan Harris, if I don't know, and actually I want to get him on this podcast, who's a former Google executive, who's now started a group, something like Center for Humane Technology, something along those lines, designed to get technology working better for actual human beings. What if anything can be done in the spirit for you as a reformer to make

technology more humane and do you think any of the wisdom of the Buddha can be useful there? So, justons, just for people who are not super familiar with it, Tristan, his basic argument is that what's happened is that Silicon Valley, you know, sort of writ large, has know, sort of writ large, has built a lot of products that are designed to be addictive, that are designed with full knowledge of the ways of human, not full knowledge, because we don't have that, but with a lot of knowledge about the ways human brain actually works, what actually

addix it. So for instance, you're more likely to become addicted to something with variable rewards than something that always rewards you You would not enjoy playing slots so much if it gives you a dime every time But if sometimes it gives you a hundred bucks and then like a million other times it gives you nothing. It's very exciting So his whole thing is that we are building these products to addictus We are built we are we are in these products and they are doing things to like play on our status anxiety to play on our sense of social obligation to play on the way the human eye connects to color as opposed to grayscale, and all of it is leading to us ending up doing a lot of things in a kind of higher

order, more mindful way, we actually wouldn't want to be doing. So how can you change that? He's set up the center with some very, very good people out there to try to begin doing that research. He sort of has a four point plan, which I'm going to forget parts of it, but one of the things that he's doing that I think is really important.

And if my hope for this comes from anywhere, it comes from here, is actually trying to change the cultural conversation around this. So yes, are there different ways that we could architect these platforms so that they're not quite as crazy making? They're 100% are. A very good example is Facebook Messenger.

When you use Facebook Messenger, it automatically creates what's called a read receipt. So you send something to your friend, and then your friend opens it. And as soon as they open it, they know, and it says, a receipt has gone back to you saying they've read it. And that means that if you don't send anything back, they know you've read it and haven't how to ignore it. Now you can have read receipts on email, you can have read receipts on iMessage, but they don't make you do it.

Because nobody wants that. Nobody wants everybody to know exactly when they've read something. Maybe they don't want to get to doing a response right then. That's a way of building into a system. Something that is going to make you feel really bad if you don't engage with the product more if you let anything go without response. So you can just take stuff like that out, which would be nice. But in order for that stuff to really get taken out, I think in the long run, people have to get upset.

They have to start looking at these, and I think this is happening, where in the midst of a very profound backlash against these tech platforms, they have to begin seeing what's happened on them as problematic, as bad. The people who work for them have to feel a little bit bad about what they're doing. Something Tristan argues is that, look, these companies are in this unbelievably intense competition for employee talent. If the best people don't want to work at companies that they think aren't good for the world, well, that's going to force these companies to change as surely as anything else will.

So part of it is actually first coming to some recognition that what's happening on Facebook, that what's happening on Twitter, that what's happening on Snapchat, that's happening on Instagram, that it's not random. It isn't just the way it is, the ways that we are interacting with the platforms are not just 100% our revealed preference. And that, you know, we need to, we need to kind of step back and hit it slightly more rational space, ask if these things are good for us. Now, beyond that, I'm not that optimistic about it. I think it's pretty hard. I don't see, I've not heard any proposals

for regulation that I think would work. I'm not sure I prefer politicians making some of the decisions about where I should be spending my time. I think that addiction is a very powerful thing that we're getting better to listening in people. I'm very concerned about virtual reality from this perspective. I think that how good that's going to be in 20 years is something that our society's not prepared for at all.

And you know, I could see this going in a really bad direction. I don't think it's at all hard to imagine what I like to call the Ready Player One dystopia, where real life for a lot of people becomes quite a lot worse than virtual life because virtual life is really built for their pleasure centers and built to give them purpose and built to make them feel, you know, you see this already happening with addictions to massive multiplayer online games. And I could imagine as a technology, it's way better and way more omnipresent, this going in a really scary direction. So while I'm happy to see what's happening here, I don't have a plan, but I think hard

problems, they don't have easy solutions, but they have to come from some kind of cultural understanding that there is a problem in the first place. So interesting. Do you think that because I mean, as a proper proper structuralist you're looking at like the onus that is on the companies to or maybe even the government to get involved and change the way these things are built. But what about on the user end? Is there I mean like a mine naive to think that maybe there would be a uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh could play for the rest of us in terms of how we use this stuff. I mean, well, expand that. Tell me.

Well, for example, we have, um, I'm not great at this stuff because every, you were talking before about like refreshing your tweaked Tweets to see how many likes you get. I totally do that. So it doesn't really be upfront with it. I didn't say I didn't do that. Just for the right time. No, no, no, I think the implications of what they can do. Although you know, I downloaded this at work. Now I'm blanking on the name about it, which I feel terrible about. There's a Chrome extension that will now, if you install it,

you will see none of that information on Twitter. You won't see how many followers you or anybody else has, how many retweets, how many favorites, how many anything, you just see none of that information on Twitter. You won't see how many followers you or anybody else has, how many retweets, how many favorites, how many anything, you just see tweets. And I've installed it, and I think it actually makes a platform for me as somebody who does this partially professionally, a little bit less crazy-making. I'm a little less invested in my social media success

by nature of the difference in our jobs than you, but I certainly have some of this. It definitely feel it. But I guess, so for example, on the 10% happier app, there's this great little meditation, and I want to do more on this, from a teacher named Alexis Santos, and he talks about using your phone mindfully. Just like the simple act of while you're engaged with whatever you're doing on the screen, just to feel the heft of the thing in your hand. That actually can sometimes for nanoseconds pull me out of the story that I'm in as I engage with whatever article I'm reading or whatever Instagram

picture I've posted and I want to see how many likes there are. So these are just, that's just a small example and I wonder whether that's scalable in your mind. No. Rather than giving the false hope answer and let me, I'll say why I'm skeptical of that kind of thing. When you think about not just these platforms, but a lot of problems we have, it is a case that some amount of people are very invested

in solving problems for themselves and maybe or maybe not for others. So there's some number of people who are like, you know what, I do not like the way I feel when I'm on Facebook. I don't like the way I feel when I'm on Facebook. I don't like the way I feel when I'm on Snapchat. I got to figure this out and they turn on, they're already somebody who is downloaded a 10% meditation, 10% happier meditation app.

And then they go and they listen to the, the particular meditation on breaking your Facebook edition addiction or using your phone mindfully. And they begin to implement that or try to implement that and maybe it works or maybe it doesn't. I'm not that worried about those folks. I don't think that's probably where the worst problems are happening. I think that this stuff you really want to worry about is something Tristan says is happening with 14 year olds who are on these platforms, who their social worlds and ways of understanding the social world are being formed right now. Their sense of what isn't isn't normal has not really solidified.

They don't have a kind of before, when I say to you, I remember Twitter before the algorithm, while I remember the world before Twitter, but a 14 year old doesn't? I think the question of whether people know they even have a problem to solve. And I recognize even saying this, it sounds so paternalistic, right? Well, who am I to tell them they have a problem to solve?

And maybe I'm wrong, right? Maybe I'm nobody. We have some logistications around obesity. We do very much, and that's another good example, right? When I hear nobody. We do very much and that's another good example, right? When I hear that, what I hear is, you know, what if we just made it easier for people or gave them more options to go into the gym? And that works for some people, obviously. But I think that when you're dealing with something on this societal scale, asking that or assuming

that the way you're going to solve it is one, you know, that everybody who does have a problem that is going to recognize it and then it's going to have the self-control to do something about it. And even if somebody who wants to do something about it for myself, I feel how hard it is. I just, I think that's good. I think it should be out there. I'm glad that you guys have that meditation.

I'm glad that you can grayscale your phone. I'm glad there's this little Chrome extension for Twitter. I think all these things are helpful in the margin, but I'm more worried about the overall societal impact of it, given the size and scale of these platforms, and I don't think those kinds of things are going to be enough. I'm going to do something slightly rude. Usually I record this in a studio and I have a clock above the guests, but I'm going to look at my watch just to make sure I haven't held you too long and I haven't. So just, let me get to my last question. But it doesn't have to be the last, but this is the last thing that was on my mind that I wanted to talk about, which is tribalism. I mean, you've talked about this on your show, on the

Ezra Klein show, as well, with a recent guest whose name I'm from Gail, who wrote the Tiger Mom. And also the new about political trials, which is very, very interesting. Do what it's funny to tell me from wrong'm could tell me from wrong with this but i see a lot of people bemoaning tribalism these days correctly but i don't see many people doing anything about it uh... i know there's a group called better angels that's done some stuff in terms of bringing reds and blues together i know that bensast the senator from Nebraska's gonna be writing a book about

what's tearing us apart uh... uh... but i i'm not seeing any any real huge momentum toward trying to fix this problem do you think anybody's doing anything and what if anything can be done so i should say here that by the time i don't know when this will come out but uh... in a from where we are taping it i'm a week and half going on book leave where i'm also going to be writing a book about political tribalism so don't but from where we are taping it, I'm a week and a half from going on Bookleave,

where I'm also gonna be writing a book about political tribalism. So don't worry, it's all gonna be fixed. No, so I'm thinking about the right book. So I'm taking 10 weeks of Bookleave, but I'm not gonna finish that. Okay, I'm gonna get a start on it. And I'm also, yeah, so I wanna get,

I wanna get a lot of the conceptual work done. But I'll say this from myself and as somebody trying to write, I don't think I'm going to have any solution at all. I do not think that there is a plausible solution given where the system is gone, given how communication technologies work right now, given the ways in which, and here's, by the way, a big thing with us, given the ways in which, and here's, by the way, a big thing with us, given the ways in which our identities are increasingly stacked on top of each other. So it used to be that you could be a conservative and a Democrat.

If you go back to the 40s and the 50s, strong Thurmond was the second most conservative member of the Senate, and he was a Democrat. The fact we were not even in a country where Democrat and liberal were spacked on top of each other as identities, you had liberal Republicans like George Romney. Um, Rockefeller Republicans. Rockefeller Republicans and to say nothing of union membership, religion, geography, there are all these ways in which we are cross pressured in our identities. We are unbelievably stacked now.

You tell me a couple of things about you, I know which party you vote for. Yeah, so does Facebook. That was, so does Facebook. And that wasn't true 30 years ago. One thing that I do think it's important to persuade people of in this conversation is that things have changed. Because we have had the same labels for things for a long time, we've had Democrats and Republicans a long time.

It's very tempting to think it's always just been like this. And it hasn't. Things are different now. So one, we have a lot of what I think it's always just been like this. And it hasn't. Things are different now. So one, we have a lot of what I think of sort of catalyzing agents for tribalism. It used to be harder to be tribal because we were part of a lot of tribes that overlap with each other. Now, as we're just part of one super tribe that

doesn't overlap with the other tribe nearly as much, it's much easier to become much more tribal. And it's, by the way, rational. The more't overlap with the other tribe nearly as much. It's much easier to become much more tribal. And it's, by the way, rational. The more you disagree with the other side, the further the two sides become in there and how distinct they are and their plans for America, the more it's reasonable to fear, if you're somebody who cares a lot about, say, choice in reproduction, well, what compared to 40 years ago, the Republican Party is much more pro-life than it was. And similarly, by the way, the other way around,

if you had a lot of pro-life Democrats in 1990, you don't have them anymore. They're almost all gone. So if you care a lot about that from the pro-life side, then it's rational to be more concerned about the other party. So something happening is that our tribalism isn't just us all being jerks,

it's also as responding somewhat accurately to a system in which the other side is becoming more culturally different from you, more ideologically different from you, and more demographically different from you. That's another piece of this that's really big. Back in, we're self-sorting into doing it. We're self-sorting urban and rural is a huge divide in this country now um the

I just I I'm very fixated on this number that I read in a book called How Democracy's to I and it's that I'm don't remember the starting point of this uh scale but you know back in I think it was the 40s of the 50s the democratic party was 7% non-white um and the and now Party was 7% non-white. And now it's 44% non-white. And their public party is still 90% white. And so the parties have also become, the parties used to be much more mixed demographically. Now they're very, very different demographically.

And people have very deep demographic anxieties when they look at another side and see folks who don't look like them gaining power. That's what Amy Chua's book is about. We see this in society after society all across the world. So the thing I want to say that one yes, this is a problem. It's a bigger problem than it was. It is becoming a bigger problem. To know nobody's doing anything of a skill that would solve it. And nobody, and as this is somebody doing a lot of research in the space, nobody even has a remotely plausible sounding solution. Forget one that is going into execution or implementation. And that includes people who've been writing books on this.

I've been reading all these books, and they always end, you know, I think this is a weakness in Amy Chiu's book, and others, they end with these calls for politicians to have more of a rhetoric of communal identity. Amy's book ends with a, you know, an idea that, well, when we talk to each other one to one, we often are able to overcome our differences, which is great, but that doesn't scale. I don't think we know how to do this. The one thing I do think we know how to do is work on the other side of the equation.

Something unusual about the American political system is it it does not work amidst tribal, very, very heavy tribal disagreement. Unlike other systems where the expectation was they would be polarized and so a majority party can govern and then eventually they lose power to the minority party in the minority party governs and becomes a majority. Here if you don't have compromise because of the way the Senate works, because of the number of veto points, because of the ways in which we apportion seats in the House

and in the Senate, because of the way that the president can be elected with a minority of votes. I mean, all kinds of weird things happen in our system. We have a lot of veto points and a lot of counter small-dead democratic rules. You can end up with a really, really, really paralyzed political system. And when that happens and the outcomes begin getting worse, then you get in this terrible loop.

People are upset because the governing is bad. People being upset makes the governing worse and you just keep going. So one thing I do think we can do is think about how to create a political system that would work better amidst tribalism, a political system where a majority party, if they get the votes, can govern a system where the outcomes are more legitimate, where voting is something we're able to do if they don't have a lot of the voting ideals and stuff worrying me quite a lot. Money has become a big problem in the system. But what I will say is that getting from here to there is itself an unbelievably

intimidating task. And also, it requires people to deal with a pretty scary prospect, which is that the party they do not like could win and then would be able to govern more aggressively and effectively than they can now. Which even if that, you know, might in some abstract way be better for the system, for all the reasons a tribalism is scary and it's increasing, that's a scary thing to contemplate. I mean, if you're a liberal listening to this and you imagine their Republican party completely freed right now from the filibuster, that's a scary thing to imagine.

And so, there are not answers to this. But, I do think, as with everything, to get towards an answer requires getting your arms around the problem, which is something I'm hoping to spend the next couple of months doing. I just keep coming back to it. I'm not a much of a thinker at all, but I probably not a systems thinker. I mean, I see the validity to it when you talk about being a structuralist. It makes complete sense. I don't have any beef with it. Other than to say that I am interested in individual agency and how one-on-one there

may be hacks that can make you a happier actor within the system and add just a little bit of light to the sum of light. Of course. For example, when it comes to tribalism, something that I've been experimenting and my thoughts on this are not fully formed, but I've been experimenting on a couple levels. One is I just see that increased self-awareness through mindfulness helps me see my biases and helps me see that oh yeah maybe I'm getting a little bit of dopamine every time something bad happens to

the politicians that I just agree with and maybe that's a signal maybe there's something to look for there and also I've been really trying to expose myself to to really broaden my media diet in a way that shakes up some of my biases, which I find very healthy. Not only is it a journalist, but as a citizen. So what did you broaden that into? Well, specifically, I would say that most of my news diet for my whole life has been mainstream media. I haven't really listened much to far left stuff. It's been, I work at ABC News, I read the Times,

Washington Post, I watch CNN. But recently I interviewed Ben Shapiro who is for listeners who don't know him, a conservative, but very critical of Trump. But still a very conservative guy. He's got a show called the Ben Shapiro, show it's a podcast, but he's also got a website called The Daily Why or You Know All This. And I found that listening to him regularly, if not daily, has really helped me. It's a very different hot take than what you get

on mainstream media. And I find myself arguing with him a lot, but I find that process of kind of deliberately giving myself a jolt of a viewpoint that is way different than what I'm used to is actually quite helpful. I think that's right. So I've a couple thoughts on that. One is that there is definitely a lot somebody can do individually. When you ask me sort of what are solutions for tribalism,

I think about it on the country scale. And that I think is very hard. What can one do as a person? I think there's a lot we can all do sort of for ourselves. The media diet stuff is really interesting and I say it for this reason. An intuition people have is that consuming a lot more media that is opposed to them and opposed to their biases is going to make them open-minded. A lot of the time it does the opposite. A lot of the time and there's a lot of research on this going back many, many, many years, we read that media with our hackles up. We read that media with kind of lawyer in our mind, already being like this argument's bad.

These people are stupid. I can totally see that. Although what's different for me is that I went met Ben, so I've actually interviewed him and he's very charming individual. And so I feel like I kind of know them a little bit. So I feel like I'm having an argument with or I'm just listening to the viewpoint of somebody I know to be a rational human being. Exactly.

And so that's what I was going to say. It's very important if you're going to do this kind of broadening of the media diet to find people who fit you in other ways. We all have a lot of identities and we have a lot of different ways of understanding the world. Some of them are ideological, but others are not. They're temperamental there, you know. And so I seek out a lot of people who I don't agree with to read and listen to as well, but I am very, one of the things I really try to do is make sure that they are folks who access the world in ways that I can listen to them. They're kind of in my tribe

in another way that, you know, if they're if they're constantly like being jerks to people who I like, I'm not going to be able to hear them well, right? I need I need people who are different than that. Now maybe that's the problem in me but I think it's true for a lot of people. I think finding people who, knowing when you're reading someone that you can read with an open mind versus knowing when you're reading someone who it's like, this is just gonna prove to you how right you are and wrong.

They are, that's an important thing to be mindful of. Also say that some things are just for me, because I feel this in the Sarah II, and I also feel that the signal to noise ratio has gotten very bad. It's just a lot of yelling. I'm reading a lot more books, a lot more books than I was a couple of years ago.

I'm reading less news actually. I think that as much as I write some news, and I think you know, but I'm trying to expand out and I think that you can really over index on stuff happening in the Trump White House every day. The amount I end up reading about something Trump said that didn't end up mattering and never ended up happening.

Tell the amount I write about that. It does not feel reasonable to me. So I'm spending more time on books and also on things that are maybe related to politics, but not explicitly political. Then finally, I've been thinking a little bit. I don't know if you saw this, but the New York Times had this article about a guy who's completely blockaded himself off from all political news whatsoever. Yeah, I really don't know anything going on.

Yes, I mean, and the article one hand is like an amazing piece of trolling from the time. So you just like read this game like, what the hell are you doing? And on the other hand, when you get to the bottom of the piece, after you've gotten through the insane level of work he is doing to not know what is happening in the world, like the insane level of work. You hear that it's not just that he's receded from the world completely. He has decided that his big project is going to be restoring some land near where he lives,

that he thinks he can have a really positive impact on something happening near him. And so he's decided that he can't make anything better nationally, and it's just going to make him crazy to think about it. But he can make something better very, very locally. And I do think that all of us, I can't say all of us, I think that most of us, the overwhelming majority of us, think way too much about national politics, and not nearly enough about local politics.

And if you want to feel better and if you want to be able to have an impact and if you want to, you know, be able to engage in a way where you can make a difference in a way where people really need you, like go check out what's happening locally, run for office, go get involved, go volunteer. And I'm just being volunteer work. I mean, actual politics here, local politics, is often a whole lot more life affirming the national politics.

And it needs people engaged in it a lot more. We weigh underrated importance. So that's a piece of advice I often give people that I find the amount of time people are spending thinking about like, what can they do about Donald Trump, good or bad, versus the amount of time they're spending thinking about what they can do in their city or in their town?

When they really could do a lot in their city and in their town and who knows, people start by doing something in their city and in their town and they end up in Congress or they end up as senators someday. So I think that's a place where asking yourself, are you giving too much attention to just national stuff that really, it's a kind of tribal fear that is activating you as opposed to a place where you can engage constructively and feel good about what you're doing.

I think if people really look at that, it will lead them more towards state and local politics in a way that I think is healthy. That's great place to leave it. I had high expectations, you've exceeded them. So nice to meet you finally. It's great to be your own person as well. And I appreciate I've learned a tremendous amount from your books. And I'm a great fan of the app. I told you when I came in, Jeff Warren is in my years all the time. So I appreciate all you do.

OK, 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 produced this podcast, Lauren Efron, Josh Cohen, and the rest of the folks here at ABC, who helped 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.

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