Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 173: Sam Harris and Dan Harris Live Show

Episode Date: February 6, 2019

Neuroscientist, philosopher, best-selling author and podcast host Sam Harris teams up with Dan this week for a special podcast recorded in front of a live audience. Dan and Sam discuss a variety of topics including what meditation is and what it isn't, different types of meditation and they offer insight on meditation retreats. They also answer an array of questions from their live audience. This special program took place at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles on May 4th, 2018. Have a question for Dan? Leave us a voicemail at 646-883-8326. The Plug Zone Website: https://samharris.org/ 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 [♪ From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast.

I'm Dan Harris. Hey guys, special episode this week. This is a live conversation between me and Sam Harris. Hey guys, special episode this week. This is a live conversation between me and Sam Harris. Sam has had, I say this a lot about our guests, but happens to be true. In this case, especially, Sam has had a massive impact on my life and my meditation practice. Sam, if you don't know him, he's got a long resume. He's a neuroscientist.

He is an author of some best-selling books, including The End of Faith. He is a very prominent atheist. Atheism was at the core of the aforementioned End of Faith. He's a podcaster. He's got a podcast called Waking Up that is just now switching the name. He's actually changing the name of the podcast for a reason. I'll explain in a second to making sense One of the most popular podcasts on the planet. So was waking up and now it's changing to making sense He called it waking up because that was actually a name of the name of another book

He wrote that meditation was at the center of that book waking up as an amazing book I recommended highly and unreservedly to everybody an amazing book I recommended highly and unreservally to everybody, but he then went on to his found a meditation app called Waking Up. So he decided to change the name of his podcast to making sense and he also now has this new app called Waking Up, which I'm a horrible friend. I haven't checked out yet, but I can guarantee you is excellent just because everything Sam does in my opinion happens to be excellent But more about how I got to know Sam. So I met him oh I mean probably well over a decade ago when I was covering the religion beat at ABC news and

As part of that I did a big story about atheists and met Sam at a big Conference of atheists and Just really hit it off with him. I wouldn't call myself personally an atheist. I would say I use the term respectful agnostic and Sam is much more personally provocative style than I personally would adopt, but I just found him to be very interesting and intriguing. And over time, just got to know him personally

and we've become friends and friends with his wife, Anika as well, who's been on this podcast before and will again be in the future because she is in her own right of fascinating human being. So over time, Sam and I became friends and I got to learn that he was interested. And I talk about this in my first book, 10% happier.

When I found out that Sam, who was the ultimate skeptic, had a long history of meditation, dating back to his college years, and had done weeks and weeks and months of silent meditation retreat, I was at a sort of tender moment in my meditation career was I was trying to figure out of how seriously I was going to take this thing and I saw Sam and I think it was the second or third time I ran into him and he happened to mention to me that he had this long history of meditation and I thought, okay, if this guy's into it, I can get into it. And he really encouraged me to do my first meditation retreat and introduced me to his friend, Joseph Goldstein, who's subsequently become my meditation teacher.

And so just over the years, talking to Sam about meditation practice and how it shows up in his life and getting his advice on all sorts of things has been incredibly meaningful to me. So, when the kind folks at the Skurball Cultural Center in Los Angeles invited us to do a conversation in front of a live audience, I leapt at the opportunity because any time we can spend I can spend with Sam is time well spent. So this conversation we talk about what meditation is and what it isn't. We talk about the experience of being on a meditation retreat, something

I know a lot of you are curious about, and we take a lot of questions from the audience. And for that reason, I am not going to do voicemails this week because we're effectively doing it within the body of the episode anyway. We'll resume our voicemails next week, but there's a lot of you'll get to hear people ask very interesting questions and luckily for you, it won't just be me answering them, you'll be hearing Sam Harris as well. For those of you who want to hear more about Sam's personal history, he's been on the podcast before, you can go back and find that, but this one is much more topical about meditation

and lots of related issues. So I really enjoyed taping this and hanging out with Sam and Anika and my wife backstage beforehand. And I hope you enjoy this conversation. I think the first time we met was the American Atheist Convention, which I was covering as a journalist

and you were there as a card carrying Atheist. And... Although that... You gave, you got up at that event and actually gave a speech that you later described as the first time that you began with a standing ovation and ended with booze because you said to the atheist, first of all, I don't think we should be using the word atheist. And then you went on to say that there are forms of spirituality that they had closed their

mind to. I didn't hear the speech. I just met you outside in front of like all of these T-shirts, like that said, like Jesus save us from your followers. And... And... I was not wearing one of those T-shirts. That was a good question.

That was... I met you and we hit it off. It was a short encounter and then I saw you backstage at this debate, and we really started talking, and I had just gotten into meditation, and the fact that you were into it, which I did not know, because again, I hadn't heard this speech, was hugely validating, because you struck me as like the prototypical skeptic. Right. And so that really, when you told me you should go on a retreat and

Anika, who's also quite skeptical, said, hey, you should go on a retreat, I took it seriously. Plus, I was writing a book and I made some b**** right about so. Although ironically, because I got into meditation so much earlier, I think I was 19 when I started and I had no real scientific training to speak of at that point and I certainly had no persona as an atheist and I wasn't atheist but I didn't think of myself as an atheist. I didn't go into it with your level of skepticism. I mean, all the things that you're allergic to

that you talk about, the patchouli oil and the bad music. None of that was an impediment to me. So you're what's amazing. You're cool with Didgeridoo music and. Yeah of that was an impediment to me. So you're at what's amazing. You're cool with Didgeridoo music. And I went to India and I walked around in pajamas for a long time. But I had to, you were trying it for one of those pieces you did. You were trying to pry photos of me with long hair out of my reluctant fingers.

You were willing to give it to me, but Anika, you're being this right. And the only reason why there's not hippie photos of me out on the net is because my wife wisely saved me at the 11th hour. So, yeah, so I was a teenager and I got into it. So, but you, one of the things that's so useful about your books is that you prove that there is a doorway into this concern and this practice that is narrow enough and brightly lit enough so as to not admit any bulls.

And you don't have to take on any cultural trappings and be fascinated with Eastern religion or anything to find this useful. I think it's just an incredibly important thing to know. I often say that meditation has been the victim of the worst marketing campaign for anything ever. And because it's been presented to us in this very flowery way, and actually there are many levels to the bad marketing,

but just to address the level in which you're speaking, is that it just comes with all this cultural baggage that for people like me is just deeply off-putting. And as I've written about the fact that my parents were hippies and they may be go to a yoga class when I was little and the teacher didn't like my tough skin pants and made me do sunsightedations in my tidy whites and that created a life long.

I can do it to anything like that. And so I really hated that stuff. And some meditation just never even came on my radar screen until I started seeing the science. And that there is, and we have to be careful when we talk about the science because it's still in its early stages. And some of the science is frankly just not of a high quality, but I think what we can safely say is that it strongly suggests that meditation can confer a long list of tantalizing health benefits, and that to me was really what started to change

my mind and meeting people like you. Well, that's interesting because it seems to me that there are two doorways into this, at least two, and they're not the same. And so the first that you've just described is the usefulness of the practice. And so that extends now, as we know, to at least some medical claims that seem fairly well-founded. But there's another door, which is the door I took, which is really the still what I emphasize in my thinking about this, which is just the door of what is

true about the mind from the first person side. So what is it actually like to be you if you pay attention? And what you find, if you're new to this practice and even for the longest time, is that it's very hard to pay attention. Just get into the place where you can notice anything. It's quite a feat and takes training. But you can go through that door and not necessarily care that much about the benefits. And I often think that I would still be interested in meditation even if it were not good for you.

Even if it were a little bad for you. I mean, there are people who get into sports which are clearly not all that healthy, but they still love the sport. And this is a kind of intellectual sport in a way which I think you can become fascinated by even if you're not sold that it's reliably reduced in stress or anything else that it seems to do. I agree. My intuition as a storyteller, but also as a practitioner, and now as sort of a semi-facitiously use the word

evangelist for the practice is that it's I think more widely Attractive to talk about the benefits that is the bigger door But I think you many people quickly get to what you're talking about which is getting an experience of what Our minds get to what you were talking about, which is getting an experience of what our minds and therefore our lives are actually about. And that becomes, for many of us, practitioners becomes extremely interesting. I also think, as it pertains to the science, that, look, I think as an endeavor, it's a very good field of interest, but for me as an evangelist,

the science is useful as a way to get people interested, who might not otherwise be interested, but it doesn't have much of a bearing on your actual practice, like to say that you might start meditating because you see the brain scans, but you don't keep meditating because you think your prefrontal cortex would look different in it.

And an FMRI right now, you keep meditating because you're less of a **** to yourself and others. And that is the metric that matters. Yeah, yeah. It occurs to me now, actually, I think both doors lead you to that being less of a ****. Yeah, but you can still be an **** I find, too.

Rather regular. But not you. Yes, of an can still be an I find to rather regular. Let's not use. Our wives are both here, so if we want to flesh out this part of the discussion, we'll get a mic to them. It occurs to me we might want to just sit for two or three minutes just so that everyone knows what we're talking about. I assume many people in this room have at least had some experience with meditation. But if not, let's just do it for two minutes.

So we are on the same page. So you might close your eyes. You don't have to close your eyes, but many people like to do it that way. And sit a little more erect just comfortably. more erect just comfortably. And bring your attention to the sounds in the room. Just let each sound, whether it's my voice or anything else. Reveal this space of awareness that is knowing. And you also might feel your body resting in space, feeling of gravity, of pressure on the

chair, on the arm rests. And the moment you notice your thinking, just come back to hearing sounds and feeling the weight of your body. And then you might begin to pay attention to the breath, whether you feel it at the tip of the nose, when the rising and falling of your chest, or abdomen. So if you can follow the next inhalation from the moment it appears and so too with the exhalation. And again, the moment you notice your thinking, just come back to sensation, whether it's the breath or the feeling of just sitting or the sounds. Now you can open your eyes. And notice this feel, the color and light and shadow that you see. This is actually the same place where you're hearing sounds and

feelings and sensations. This is also the open space of consciousness. There's really no place else for anything to appear, but in consciousness. It's also the place you see with your open eyes is the same place where you're thinking too because you can broadcast a thought into this field of color and light. So just to test this, I want you all to in front of you as a statue. Make that about two feet high. Now, depending on how good you are at visualizing things, it may be a very evanescent image, may be barely an image, but it is something. It's not the same as picturing a bicycle. So this is the place you see with your open eyes is also your mind. It's also consciousness. So meditation, and now I'm officially talking and not just guide in a meditation.

Meditation is just the art of paying more careful attention to everything that's already happening, sights and sounds and sensations and changes in mood, and ultimately even thoughts can arise as objects of meditation and not distract you. But for the longest time when you're training in this, you're either lost in thought or you're aware of your senses, essentially, and thought is, at least presents itself as a kind of antithesis to meditation because we are so distractable by it. But ultimately, it's not about getting rid of thought or thinking less. It's actually just noticing everything that's arising as it arises including thought.

What has your experience? Now Dan's done many retreats where you just go into silence for a week or 10 days at a time and spend 12 to 18 hours a day, depending on how much you're sleeping, doing just what we were doing for the last few minutes You can do it while walking you can do it while sitting and you alternate hour by hour So what was that what was that first retreat like that on a gun I go to do into doing? It sucked It was

The first four days were some of the hardest days of my whole life, where you're just surrounded by all these weirdos and... You're welcome. Yeah, oh, I had things I wanted to say to you. And that hardest part is not... People often lash onto the silence part of it. There was nobody there I wanted to chat with. And I actually, despite the fact that I'm a professional talker, actually not a huge problem for me to be quiet.

So that wasn't the issue. Nor was it really the other people there who actually weren't that weird. I'm just joking. I hold my mind, my mind was judging them all all the time. It was sitting and meditating or walking and meditating, just meditating all day long was incredibly hard. You just really are thrown up against your own insanity. And I was ready to quit and went and sat with this teacher, actually the teacher I hated the most, was the only one available. And you're allowed to talk to the teacher,

so I was telling her this about how horrible it was, and she just said, you're trying too hard. And so I kind of the next meditation session, instead of sitting in the hall, the meditation hall, with everybody else, I went and sat on the balcony outside of my, on the hallway where I was staying. There was a balcony at the end of the hallway and this one building that was staying.

And, and had this kind of experience of effortless awareness of whatever was happening. So I was noticing the rustle of the leaves, the wind, the pain in my knee, the fact that I was distracted and then starting again, and it was all just coming really fast and easy and I wasn't trying as hard. And I have described it as, it was

like those first four days in retreat where I was like, I was being dragged by a motor boat by my head underwater. And it was horrible as that would probably be. And then on that, and that's sit outside, it was like I got up on water skis. And I could see what the point of this whole thing was, which is when the thinking, the volume of your inner conversation goes down significantly, there's an enormous amount of serotonin that accompanies that. And life is much more vivid.

And you understand how these unseen conversations you are having with yourself drive you nuts. Judging, you're wanting, and that then leads you to, you know, when you're not hungry, or as I sometimes do, say the thing that ruins the next 48 hours of your marriage. Um, and this is just a very powerful insight. Um, and really is actually available to anybody who sits and meditates you for two minutes

that you're crazy. And when you don't see the craziness, when you're unaware of the aforementioned non-stop conversation, it owns you. And so that moment where the conversation, the my inner conversation, that chatter had come way the volume came way down. That was really interesting.

And led to about 36 hours of some of the curious happiness I've ever experienced. And then it went away as all things do. But I came away from that retreat with, and this is a loaded phrase, word rather, in your presence and, but I came away from that retreat with a lot of faith in the practice. Confidence that this is not like, you know, the mental version of hacky sack, that, you know, just something that hippies do to pass the time, that this is real. Right. Right. You know, that's a fine use of faith. I'm not allergic to the word. I mean, it's confidence that you are not uniquely cursed. And that this sort of inner landscape that has been well-mapped by other people and

described, you, if you perform this experiment on yourself, you will have similar results. It seems to take, so before you went on retreat, you had been meditating. Did you retrospectively feel that you really had never been meditating before you did the retreat? Or did you, because I had that experience where once I did a 10-day retreat, I realized that for the previous year, I had just been sitting cross-legged and thinking with my eyes closed. I had just been sitting cross-legged and thinking with my eyes closed. And I think I had never broken through to anything other than, you know, boy, it feels good to sit here with beads on and think. I want those pictures.

Look, I actually think that that's a, again, I'm gonna revert back to... I realize this is counter-programming to the message that one minute a day is adequate. So I'm gonna get back on the program here because I actually think that there are like any skill, any field of endeavor, there are levels to it. And if you sit and try to meditate and notice they've become distracted and start again and again and again, that is meditation. It's meditation and you are deriving a lot of benefit from that because every time you

see, oh, crazy, or the craziness has less power over you. And that can happen for anybody at any time, anywhere. And so I don't, I will not back away from that. I will, however, concede that for sure that you once you put yourself in a container where everything about it is designed to support your meditation practice. You have no other responsibility. You're being fed, housed, instructed, that you can reach levels that are, for me, at least unavailable on the subway.

So I've come full circle on this where I feel like the thing that is most important to glimpse in the practice that many people only tend to find on, you know, after intensive retreat is the thing that you can see on the subway. I mean, there actually is no there, the connection to retreat disappears ultimately and it need only last a moment to be extremely valuable. But let's talk about the crazy side of it. I want to just say, we're going to dig into that for a second, because there is the thing about meditation. One of the many things about meditation is so interesting to me is that you can, you can emphasize different aspects. So I tend to emphasize the aspect of seeing how crazy you are, because because I hear from people all the time

to say, I can't meditate because my mind's too busy. And so I've made it my business to tell those people, no, no, you are meditating. The fact that you're noticing that your mind is busy is a success. What you're calling a failure is success. Yeah. And here's why it's a success.

Because every time you see how distracted you are, you notice something about your mind, which is that you're crazy. And then the great then when anger or distraction or whatever ambushes you later in the day, you have a better odds of not being owned by it. You emphasize a different aspect to which I think is, I think is, this is the thing you were about to say that you can see on the subway, which I think is, I think is, this is the thing you were about to say that you can see on the subway, which I agree with you, but it's harder for people to grasp, right? Because you just be, you talk about, you write about this brilliantly and waking up,

which I've read like maybe four times, but I think it's harder for people to understand what it is that you are emphasizing. So maybe make a run at that. I know you're just gonna be using me to questions. No, well, I realize I'm outgunned here. I'm sitting next to a professional journalist and this was bound to happen. How many minutes did I last? Well, let's talk about the crazy for a second because crazy sounds like an exaggeration,

but what you get when you have any significant experience in meditation is a very different picture of what a healthy mind must be like. And we have a, the other question, the status quo is so close to psychotic. That it's, I mean, it really, the difference for me is just the fact that most of us, most of the time, have the good sense to keep our mouths shut and not vocalize the

things we're thinking. But just imagine if everyone could hear what you're thinking all the time, or if you helplessly said the words that you're actually thinking with the voice of your mind all day long, you would be indistinguishable from someone who was actually crazy. And it's just, you'll tell yourself the same story, again and again and again. You have no capacity for boredom, apparently,

inside your head. And, but if you were forced to exteriorize that, you would immediately be confronted with the evidence that you were stark, Raven Med. And so that's what you get in from Buddhism as a tradition, but really, even from a secular – any kind of secular immersion in this practice, is a different sense of what a healthy mind would be like. And it's not to be, it can't entail spending virtually every moment of your waking life, identified with thought and unaware that you're essentially living in a kind

of waking dream scape where you're just, if it's a depressing thought, you're depressed, if it's a happy thought, you're happy, if it's a fearful thought, you're depressed, if it's a happy thought, you're, I tend to drink a lot of water at events like this. I notice there's water and there'll be a voice in my head. It's my, you know, I'm not schizophrenic, so it's actually my voice. It's not somebody else's voice.

But, you know, I'll think, oh, there's water there. But, who am I telling? Right? I can see the water. Right? You know, there's no one else that needs to be informed about this. So most of our, it's not to say that we don't need thoughts for anything, but so much of our conversation with ourselves is deeply superfluous.

I agree, and from personal experience, you know, there's a great writer, I don't know if you think he's great, but I think he's great. Stephen Bacheler, who writes books about Buddhism from the perspective of an atheist, although it's a little bit redundant because there's no God in Buddhism anyway. But he has said, and I'm probably not going to quote this exactly, but that if you look long

enough into your own mind, you'll see a murderer and a rapist. You will see the capacity we all have for all sorts of things, beautiful things, ugly things, and that's okay. Actually, that is part of the process, the seeing of the craziness, how hilarious it is, how shameful it is, how scary it is, this is what we're doing, this is the business, this is at least the part of this is the aspect that I at first at least emphasized because I think it is so useful to see this stuff so that it doesn't own you. Yeah, and it's good to break the habit, which you emphasize in probably both books, but having just read your current one,

you do it a lot there, which is this judgment that comes naturally to someone who's trying to learn to meditate, which is the moment you notice your lost and thought you've been distracted for five minutes or whatever, while your thought you were meditating, you've been thinking about lunch or or replaying some conversation in your head. And the moment you notice that, it's very common to have an additional moment of judgment about that. Like, I was supposed to be meditating. I'm like, well, when am I going

to learn to do this? And yet, you skillfully reframe that as that's a moment of success. I mean, that's when it's actually working. Hashtag winning is Charlie Sheen says. And I really do. I mean, that is an incredibly important thing to know. And I think it is what allows people to, many people to do this, because so many of us believe the story we're telling ourselves about

how we could never meditate because you don't understand my mind. I hear this all the time. My mind is so busy that I could never do this. I call it the fallacy of uniqueness, because we think that we have this kind of Swedish, how do you pronounce Swedish generous? Yeah, you know, lunacy, that only we have this kind of sewage, how do you pronounce sewage generous? Yeah, good enough. You know, lunacy that only we have, but that is, that this is the human condition. We evolved on the savannas, you know, for threat detection and for finding sources of pleasure and for a racing mind. And this is, this is the, if we weren't all like this, we wouldn't need meditation. Now, currently, this is like 10 years ago, when did we first meet?

We met and I believe the Jesus T-shirt thing was in 2006. Right. And I think the... So, when did you set your first retreat? I did in 2010, I think. Yeah, 2010. So, I think I met you in 2009. Right. So, you know, you, so now this is a, a, it's actually part of your job now. I mean,

now you have a, you've designed your life so that you are, you, you have to meditate. I mean, this is, this is a, this is a great family business. It's a great gig. Yeah. Yeah. Just want to put a pin in the fact that you evaded my question. Oh, it did. Aspect. Okay. So you can get to that your own. I can be dragged back. So the question is, what is the aspect that you, the thing you emphasized, different aspect here, which is the thing that you were saying before, could be seen on the subway, which I agree with, but it is a different thing. Or no thing at all.

So this is really the truth door versus the useful door, the utility door. There was no guarantee that seeing the character of your mind more clearly, which is to say more accurately, more truthfully, would be useful. We could live in a universe where it would destabilize you in some way, right? It could be, and it may in fact be bad for some people, and I think they're probably people who, there's certainly people who shouldn't do intensive retreats. I think that's, you know, it can

exacerbate certain psychological conditions. I think there's a trauma. Yeah. There's a... I didn't mean that as a joke. 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, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, Yeah, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, it's true. It is something you should talk to a professional before. So, and there is a very small literature on people who feel like they have been harmed by doing intensive practice because they just were thrown in the deep end of the pool and didn't swim well. But that, I mean, those are certainly minority cases, but if you get a group of 200 people together, there's very likely going to be one person for whom it was a bad idea to do an intensive retreat. I guess it's conceivable that's true of a daily practice, but I think

it's very unlikely that sitting in the middle of your life for 20 minutes and paying attention as we've just did would be bad for anyone. But if, you know, I guess the disclaimer is valid. If you find that it seems like it's not doing anything good for you, then, or doing something bad for you, then you should consult a psychotherapist who knows about these things and many now do. I mean, my mindfulness has invaded the psychotherapist

put a community and it's understood by many of them. But there just is a fact that seeing certain features of consciousness more clearly seems to be very helpful psychologically in many ways. It doesn't help everything. I mean, you can still at whatever level of stability you are in the practice, you're still going to spend most of your time lost in thought, and then you are hostage to whatever the character of your thoughts are.

So if you're in a f***ing way, when you're thinking, well then you're probably still on f***ing most of the time. But it's possible to punctuate that with a very clear scene of some surprising facts about consciousness. And one is that consciousness itself, just the sheer fact of knowing anything, whether it's a visual perception or an internal appearance, like a thought, that condition of knowing in and of itself doesn't feel like a self. It doesn't feel like I.

It doesn't feel like the subject that most people think is riding around in their heads, having the thoughts and the experiences and appropriating everything from this position of being a subject inside the head. And it's possible to recognize that. And that is freeing in a fairly radical way. I mean, all of the highfalutin language you get from the contemplative traditions, for the most part, is anchored to that kind of insight. That the ego is an illusion, or that the self is an illusion,

or that duality, that's subject object the ego is an illusion, or that the self is an illusion, or that duality, that subject object perception, is an illusion, and it can be a very ordinary realization. It doesn't have to come with all the pyrotechnics of a kind of psychedelic experience, and you don't have to feel like you're on acid in order to have that insight. But what that insight does is it does radically interrupt this identification with thought and with all of the things that follow from being identified with thought,

which are all the mediocre emotions that play us so much of the time. Yeah, I mean, one way to get this is, you know, with Sam was saying before when he was guiding us in meditation, he first had us just listen to the sounds in the room. You could do this at home later if you want. You listen to the sounds. You could do it now. And just try to find who or what is hearing them.

You look, you won't find anything. There isn't some little nugget of you there that you can find. And that is something you can explore at Infinite. And does, I think, slowly, at least in my experience, slowly lead to a compounded realization that the you that you think is so solid and that you're spending so much time trying to defend or advance the interests of actually doesn't have as much, if any substance as you've long assumed. Did that appropriately amplify your point?

Yeah, yeah,, although it also revealed these two different orientations that- I tried to make it to useful as you get your point. Yeah, no, but this issue of being, of fixating on retreat as being the necessary circumstance of meditation, there are two different paths to that insight you just described. So to take hearing as the basis of meditation, there are two different paths to that insight you just described. So to

take hearing as the basis of this, it's possible to pay such close attention to the experience of hearing, so every little impingement on your eardrum, just to catch it, the moment it occurs and to notice it's passing away, the moment it disappears, you pay such laser-like attention to that experience that for brief moments, the sense that there's a hearer and a thing heard that collapses and there's just pure hearing. So there is no sense of self in the midst of that noticing. But that seems to require this massive buildup of energy that people get for the most part only on retreat, where you get work up to that by just being continuous

in your mindfulness. It's also possible to take it from the other side, which you were sort of suggesting, which is that if you look for the one who's hearing, you can notice, without especially fixating so closely on what is being heard, you can notice that there is actually no subject there. There is just this wide open space where sounds are appearing. And it's a, that's the kind of experience that equalizes retreat and life, because there's no, it's clear that the moment proceeding was not a moment of you having some heroic level of concentration that you don't normally have or can't normally aspire to.

Yeah, I mean, I think what you're describing, that's why you said you can do it on the subway. You can look around in the subway and just ask yourself the question, who's seeing all of this? Where's the knee? And you won't find it. And there's something very healthy about the looking and not finding. That in my experience, you start to chip away at the sense of inner solidity, which is really the source of most, if not all of our suffering, that we're constantly trying to advance or defend the interests of this me.

And this is not to say that you then, you have this realization, or you try to you start to see, in my view, that you start to see yourself for what it is, which is a mystery. More 10% happier after this. 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 Brownleur, 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. Bye.

I think we want a good long while for Q&A, so it might be the moment to transition to that. Mr. Bravevy, I'm gentlemen. Hi, I'm Nico. Thanks for coming and chatting about meditation. I guess my question is, when you've gone on these long retreats, and I guess particularly you said, who's been away for 10 years going on these retreats on and off, at what point did you decide, you know, at this time to come back, given that, you know, meditation and mindfulness is such a this time to come back, given that meditation and mindfulness

is such a critical part to mental health? And if you were in those moments of mindfulness being super happy mentally, when do you say, hey, it's actually time to end this and come back? Well, I was writing and originally, I thought I was going to be writing fiction and if you're writing fiction Nobody cares that you dropped out of school and didn't make much of your academic career But the moment you transition to nonfiction all of a sudden it becomes highly relevant, you know how you know anything

so I Decided I just had to I couldn't keep just sitting retreats and being entirely self-taught to write what I wanted to write. And it was very useful to go back to school to do it because I was not, I had, at that point, all of the liabilities of being self-taught in every area that was relevant to me at that point, apart from meditation. And now I just have some of the liability

as being self thought. First of all, thank you guys very much for doing what you're doing. I think like what you're doing in the public sphere and your individual ways is immensely helpful and for people like me and probably lots of people here. My question having to do with meditation is how often you plateau in your practice and how do you kind of deal with that if at all? Want to take that? Sure.

With a caveat that I'm not a meditation teacher, I'm just a guy who writes about meditation sometimes and that Sam knows a lot more about this than I do. With that caveat, I think plateauing or the perception of plateauing is quite common. And probably not that useful to get to hung up on. Our mutual friend and my meditation teacher, I was introduced to by Sam, as a guy named Joseph Goldstein, who's been on Sam's podcast at least twice,

which I recommend to everybody because those are great interviews. Joseph Goldstein often talks about this habit we have playing what he calls the practice assessment tapes, where we're just obsessing about the state of our practice right now and have we plateaued or as our concentration level actually maybe diminish, this is this whole thing of waste of time, am I a helpless case, blah, blah, blah. This is just to put it in Buddhist terms, the a classical hindrance called doubt.

Not doubt in the positive sense, doubt in my line of work as a journalist is quite positive, but this is doubt in the majority, which is this quagmire, this quicksand of useless self-questioning. And so I would just put that flag out there for you to be aware that a certain amount of practice assessment is healthy and it might be worth talking to a teacher, but in my experience this can turn into rheumatative spirals that are entirely unconstructive. To know that the way a practice goes over time is sometimes based on whatever factors,

exogenous factors in your life, your ability to concentrate isn't that good, or maybe actually you feel like you're not able to apply the lessons of meditation off the cushion in the rest of your life. There are many factors that go into that, but in my experience over time, it's a sort of wavy line, but it does kind of go in the right direction. Thank you. Thanks, Harrison Harris for sharing this with us. Dan, I wake up to you on my bit more about the work that I'm going to do with the and I'm going to be a little bit more about the work that I'm going to do with the work that I'm going to do

with the work that I'm going to do with the work that I'm going to do with the work that I'm going to do with the work that I'm going to do with the work that I'm going to do with the work that I'm going to do with the work that I'm door to me of which I thought I could walk through. And I'm going to be very honest, I can fall into mindful minutes within seconds and driving anything, my feet, I mean everything, and it brings me to a place of my childhood.

I realize that's how I used to be all the time, and it brings a lot of joy, and I'm there, and everything else is quiet. My question is why is the choice not to go there so difficult because it's always there at my fingertips to be able to be in that place so easily and why do we let ourselves be so deferred it when we know that there's something that really does work? Thank you. Well, it is strange to, I mean, this is not just with something like meditation, and even if it's regardless of how accessible or inaccessible,

the pleasantness of meditation, maybe we often paradoxically, I think, experience using our attention in ways that we regret. We do things we know we will regret, and we know they're not even that fulfilling while we're doing them, and yet we still do them. So this is a philosophical problem, this is a psychological problem, it's a bit of a paradox, and conversely, we don't do the thing, we know will be satisfying,

and that we will not regret doing. And wisdom is in large measure, just aligning your uses of attention in ways that you won't regret. So meditation is certainly one of the better tools to just notice the consequences of various uses of attention and ways of acting in the world and to sort of keep a clear enough sense of those consequences so that you can get your priorities straight and paying close attention to the character of your experience in this way,

as mindfulness is at the end of the day, one of the things you won't regret doing. I would just say to give yourself a break, because when I was talking about evolution before and it's worth bringing that up again, we are not wired for this calm non-judgmental awareness. That is actually our birthright. We have this in a capacity of mindfulness, but evolution really equates us in mind that is really good at hyper-vigilance. And so to be cultivating this skill is to hack evolution in some ways. And that is available to you, and all of us, is great, but that you often, for reasons that you don't fully understand, find yourself doing mindless things. I don't think it's something that you need to break yourself for.

I think it's just the way we're wired. And for rating yourself for it is just another story. I didn't actually expect any answer that was going to make such a huge difference, but it did. Thank you. Thanks for having such low expectations. Hi, guys. First, I want to thank you for getting me to meditate. Sam, you sparked my interest many years ago. And then your app finally got me to establish a practice

and eventually go on a retreat. I know you guys are big fans of IMS and Spirit Rock as your recommendations, but for someone like myself I found those prohibitively expensive, so I turned to the Goenkov Aposina those 10 day retreats and because they're free and you can donate which I do to your podcast. It's just like that in that regard. So I was wondering if you had any opinions on the going curatory as it contrasts to the other retreats. I know there's walking meditation and you only do 45 minutes max at IMS.

I looked at the schedules a little bit. I was wondering if you had any opinions on their methodology and perhaps any alternative recommendations that something might be more affordable? Well, what I would say about IMS and spirit rock to retreat and perhaps any alternative recommendations that something might be more affordable. Well, what I would say about IMS and Spirit Rock the two retreat centers that you referenced. One is called the Insight Meditation Society

based in central Massachusetts, it's where Joseph Goldstein lives. Spirit Rock is up north of Marin, I think. They're kind of sister organizations that I believe they have scholarships. So that I think is worth investigating because I think they're keenly aware of the expense and so they'll actually charge people with means more. And as a way to subsidize others to go, which I think is really kind of beautiful. So I would look into that, but everything I've heard about Go Encore retreats

is that they're great. So I think you're in good hands. Good luck. My dear. Hello, thank you for being here. I have a question for both of you. Given that you're both seasoned meditators, I'm curious if your thoughts have shifted

regarding the value of emotions, specifically negative ones? Well, they might have shifted, but I think they're shifting back. Okay. I briefly imagined that expressing anger may actually be a good thing in certain contexts. What are you thinking of specifically?

Yes. But no, I think there's, I think negative emotion is certainly appropriate and useful in certain contexts. I think it's also useful to get over very, very quickly. So I think anger can be energizing. Outrage, moral outrage can be energizing. Fear can be energizing. Fear is totally appropriate if you're

in a situation of potential physical violence, say, or if a lion gets out of the cage at the zoo, it's totally appropriate to have the full adrenalized experience of now you're in the presence of some kind of emergency. But how long do you want to suffer the results of that hormonal kind of hijacking of your awareness? And what we tend to do is we keep these emotions alive in our thoughts for much

longer than they're useful. And it's just one of these truths you can notice about the nature of the mind. And you really can only notice it by learning to meditate. If you don't get lost in thought about the reason you have to be angry or fearful or anxious or whatever it is. You actually can't maintain that emotion for more than a few seconds at a time. It's impossible to stay angry no matter what it is, no matter how grave the injustice that merits anger. It's simply impossible to stay angry for an hour, much less a day. So becoming aware of the mechanics

gives you a choice. In the end, you can decide, well, how long do I want to be energized in this way by this stream of thought? And I think most of us, given that ability, will want to get off the ride far earlier than we do. But I wouldn't say that negative emotion is never appropriate or never useful.

I think it's, I mean, classically, negative emotions like anger or fear. I think occasionally that we need that energy. It's just what you do with it is something you want to be able to wisely choose. Yeah, the more I practice for myself, the more increased the more convinced I become of the dis-utility of things like anger.

I agree with Sam that there is a galvanizing quality to it in the face of pretty much everything we talk about on the news. But I don't find that that is the most constructive emotion out of which to act. Sam talks about this. I don't even probably don't even remember saying this, but I quote you on this all the time.

That we experience anger and then we just re-up it through compulsive neurotic thinking. But if you can cut down on that, on what Sam calls the half life of anger, the amount of damage you can do in an hour of anger versus two minutes, I mean that reduction is just incalculable. And I've just found that for me, cutting down on that has been a huge game changer.

It's not to say that I never experienced anger. I spent quite a bit of time in anger today. And I don't think it's the type of thing we should engage in a much of self-laceration over because we're experiencing it. But I do think it, in my own experience, having now investigated it at length, I don't see much use for it beyond what Sam described it,

in terms of taking action in extreme situation. Thank you. Hey, guys. Thanks for being here. Big fan about you. It's questions taking things in a little bit of a different direction, but it's not a perfect analogy, but if you were to look at the human race as somewhat of a hive mind, so we're collective consciousness, it seems like a lot of the ailments that plague humanity

are the same types of ailments that arrest this mind experiences. We fluctuate from war to peace to polluting the environment to trying to clean up the environment and then polluting it again to, it's just chaos and we don't quite know where we're going as a species. I'm just wondering if you guys think that's a helpful metaphor to view where we're at. And do you think there's some kind of collective

meditative state that we could reach or some kind of way that we could structure society or some of our institutions that take mindfulness and take meditation and what that can bring you, the level of awareness that can bring you into a count, if that makes any sense. It doesn't take long spending time in the meditation world before you hear claims about how meditation will fix everything.

It will surprise you to hear that I don't believe that. I think, however, that if we see a broad societal embrace of the practice, there will be salientory changes. If we had the same proportion of the population practicing mindfulness that currently engages in physical exercise. I think we probably see a real impact on things like road rage, bullying, the type of comments you see on social media, the quality of our politics. I don't think it would make everything, you know, barfing unicorns, but I do think it would start to change things, maybe 10% at a time. Um, see what I did there, Harris.

So I do actually think I'm not a utopian by nature, but I do think that a broad saddle embrace of mindfulness could make a difference. How much I don't know. Yeah, well, it's interesting to realize that we have virtually no norm around mental training. Like mental training is still a totally esoteric concern. And yet physical training is just an absolute norm where it's just impossible

to doubt the utility of it, whether you exercise a lot or not. There's nobody who's living in doubt as to whether or not there's something to be done to be physically better off, most of the time. And it seems obvious, I mean, even just thinking of it in physical terms. The brain is an organ which changes depending on how you use it. And we're training ourselves all day long based on how we use our attention to fixate on various things, whether it's social media or I mean, so much of it now is driven by the phone we've got in our pockets. And you can get better at doing anything you care about. You can get better at just having

conversations with people. You can get better in your relationships. Your marriage can get better. The thing you're doing by default is rarely the best possible version of that thing. And this becomes so obvious in athletics because you're learning to play a new sport that you don't know how to play and you're not in shape for that sport, say. And so everything you do is wrong, right? But most of what we are doing with our lives,

you can sort of go through school, and you get to a point where they say, okay, there's no more school for you on this topic. So you're done, now get a job. And there's no notion of mental training beyond that. You're just basically who you are, trying to figure out how to live a meaningful life after that. And the traditions out of which practices like meditation come have a very different picture of just meaningful life after that. And the traditions out of which practices like meditation

come have a very different picture of just what life, what's possible in terms of being comfortable here in your own skin as a human being, navigating social space with other human beings. And I think if we just acknowledged that emotional and moral development continues throughout life, and even in predictable ways, if you apply your attention in certain ways, or you think, or you just forget about meditation,

just reframing situations conceptually, can do enormous work in terms of how you feel. It's like a road rage is the perfect example. That's a cliche that we've all become, right? We've all experienced this thing. We're just magically, you're in a car and somebody does something in front of you or is just driving too slow. And a part of your personality emerges that simply does not emerge in other circumstances. When you're not surrounded by glass and metal, you never, I mean, this never comes out of you in an elevator with other people, right? Unless you're a total sociopath, but you're

sitting in the safety and relative privacy of your car, all of a sudden you're, you know, Uday Hussein. And mindfulness is useful there, but just a reframing. Like the person who just cuts you off, maybe on root to some medical emergency, right? So that's like, just thinking about what you don't know about that other person circumstance. The person who's driving slow, maybe 90 years old in front of you, right?

And how fast do you want that person to drive? So just learning to think new thoughts in those situations is also incredibly useful. I just want to add to that because this is, in many ways, the punchline. This is why you were asking me at the beginning, why have I allowed meditation to kind of take over my personal and professional life. To me, the animating inside of this whole jagum on is that the mind is trainable, that

all the things we want, the most positive social interactions, positive relationships, kindness, compassion, patience, calm, focus, self-awareness, all the things if we really think about that we want and need the most. These are not factory settings that can't be tinkered with. These are skills that can be trained. That is huge, it's radical, it's empowering, and that is why we do this. Whatever door you enter through. Yeah, yeah.

Thank you. Thank you. That's a word we haven't used as much as we probably should have tonight, which is skill. The skill contains that message that, you know, well-being is a kind of skill in the end. Yes. Yeah. That's a good lead into what I was going to ask. that well-being is a kind of skill in the end. Yes. That's a good lead into what I was going to ask. I recently did a 10-day retreat, and it was with the goinca.

But I really enjoyed that. I recommend it. But I was wondering what my next thing was going to be. And I thought about maybe a 10-day retreat every year, or if there, I don't know if I have the luxury of doing a month retreat or but, but I also had to actually write this down. I don't know if I can pronounce it right, but a who waska that is the type of herb, a who an herb, they're having these particular

retreats abroad where you can go and there's, I mean, I've done hallucinations when I was a younger person before I got into mindfulness. So I don't know if you know anything about Ahuwaska or if you have any recommendation. It's got Ahuwaska on an IV drip. But my ultimate question is, because this was mental development. I think it was the best mental development I've ever had.

And I think I hadn't really meditated before I'd done my 10-day retreat. So I want to keep developing, and I just kind of wanted to get some recommendations. Good on you. It's great. Had you deal with the psychedelic option and you're talking about this?

Well, I've long been interested in exploring things like ayahuasca, psilocybin, which is the active ingredient and magic mushrooms, LSD, things like that. But my shrink, aid and abetted by my wife, have argued convincingly that for somebody who has panic disorder, as my shrink said, his exact words, f***ing with your brain chemistry is not a good idea.

So, I have not played that game. I mean, I've, I've ingested plenty of drugs in my day, which is what gave me the panic disorder, ssss, also part of the argument. Um, so I have not done that, but I know a lot of really serious people including the guy to my left who takes.

Who's stolen right now? Yes. Yeah. Just give me those leftover drugs. Yes, exactly. I think those are your hands. I, you know, they're being really interesting studies going on right now at Johns Hopkins of using psilocybin on long-term

meditators and and I have friends who are experienced meditation teachers who lead retreats that mix ayahuasca with meditation and so I'm quite convinced that there's a lot of there there, but I'm not as a public figure going to strongly recommend it, nor have I done it personally because it might entail either more panic attacks or divorce or both. Yeah, well, briefly, I have not done Iowa's book, but I know many people who have, it's very invoked now, and people are claiming to get a lot of benefit from it. And I certainly don't doubt that. I think that the most significant benefit I got from doing psychedelics back in the day, and it's been many years since I've done anything like that more than a decade

since I've done any psychedelic. But what I got from them, which I couldn't have gotten, I don't think I could have got another wise, I was certainly not tend to get it otherwise, is the conviction that it was possible to have a radically different experience than I was tending to have. And it sounds like you already have that conviction because you're already going to sit 10-day retreats. That's not to say psychedelics couldn't be useful for you. And there were certainly people who would argue that their further benefits then just being

convincingly advertised to that there are other states of consciousness that you'd rather inhabit than the one you're tend into. But the reality is that whatever psychedelic you take, no matter how good the trip, it will wear off. I mean, it's just, it's impermanent by its very nature. It doesn't give you, it's not quite the same thing as building a skill that you always have recourse to.

And there's the other part, which is that it is, the experience you have on any of these drugs, is somewhat haphazard no matter how, assiduously you control your set and set in, you can have the exact same set and the exact same set in and have two very different experiences, one being absolutely sublime and one being heroically awful. And it's in the end, I mean, the reason why I stopped taking psychedelics more or less totally is for me, it felt like a kind of psychological Russian roulette. I mean, it was just like I had no way of expecting what I was going to get because again, I couldn't

control the variables that seem to matter. Dan, earlier you mentioned the bad marketing or the flowery message that meditation had in the past. In my perspective, there seems to be something more peer and honest about the piece love, the hippie approach to it, the wearing the robes, the long hair, like Sam did. It's not to be cynical, but it seems to be somewhat dishonest to like bulls**t when you hear these like CEOs make these ridiculous salaries and they'll talk about like, oh yes, how they meditate. They have guided meditations and stuff like that.

So, I mean, is there sort of like a legitimate practitioner versus an illegitimate practitioner? And like, you know, how can we nudge, you know, the people on power towards more, you know, giving up their possessions type direction of meditation? So. Look, it's been a big challenge for the traditional Buddhist community. I would consider myself a Buddhist.

So it's a big challenge for the traditional Buddhist community to have their beloved practice spread out to the masses. You know, I always joke that we Buddhist have spent so many years as seriously sending, you know, good wishes out to the world. You know, may you be happy, may you be safe, but it turns out there was an asterisk all along, which is if you do it like me. And look, we could take issue with the way some high profile There was an asterisk all along, which is if you do it like me.

And look, we could take the issue with the way some high profile meditators are choosing to leave their lives. But I'm still of the view of that, the end of the day, more mindfulness is better than less mindfulness. So I'm not going to trash talk. In less Uda and Kusay take up the practice, I'm not gonna get into the business of trash talking or nitpicking every public meditator,

unless I think they're doing demonstrable harm in the world. Yes, do I see some of the hypocrisy of the folks that you're referencing? Sure, but I still think, I still, it's a better thing for the world that we're seeing meditation seep into areas that are way, way, way, way outside the Buddhist ghetto. Yeah, my question is about, well, have either of you ever incorporated sensory

deprivation tanks into your practice? And if not, what are your thoughts on that as far as depriving your senses since most of the practices to be aware of sounds and sites? Well, it's been a very long time since I've done it. My friend, Joe Rogan, is a big believer. Actually, didn't you do the bullies? Yeah, he used it.

He used it to do the business. He had a more recent experience. He was a weird tax thing, and I was in LA. He was going to go on his podcast, and he said, come, he said, why don't you come a couple hours really and get my sensory deprivation tank? And I said, I don't want to do that. And he called me a chicken.

And so I did it. Yeah, so how was it? My question would have been how often do you change the water? Especially if you're using Joe's water. It's salt water so it's that's supposed to be cleaner. I don't know it's like the Dead Sea. I did find it pretty powerful. Yeah, but I don't know. I need to know how long will you win? I was in there for I think you only make me do it for an hour. So that's still something. Yes, yes, I know.

I did find that it, you know, I need to do more before I can develop a real opinion about it, but I could get a glimpse of the value. We just got the signal. We're down to our last question. So apologies to those of you in line. This is the way karma works, apparently. I got a good karma today.

Various forms of meditation exist, and I'm just curious, are they all created equal? Or do you have specific advice on? Well, they're not, there are different forms which have different purposes. So they're gonna use the Buddhist framework here. There are concentration practices where the goal is to focus one pointedly on some object. It could be the breath, it could be a candle flame or

an inner visualization. And the goal there is really to focus so one pointedly that you notice nothing else. So that your thoughts really are the antithesis of that practice. If you're thinking, you're not focusing and you're failing in that moment. And that kind of concentration becomes a tool that can be used for a practice like mindfulness, but that is not the same as a practice like mindfulness. Mindfulness is much more about, you need some concentration, but it's much more about simply noticing what is arising without having any expectation that anything should or shouldn't arise. And that begins to change the character of your experience,

and you begin to have various insights. But a concentration practice is a much more narrowly-focused thing, which is a useful skill. But it's just it is the thing that becomes, in the end of the day, it can seem like an artifice. It's more like a drug experience because when concentration really works, it becomes synonymous with very pleasant states of mind and you can kind of have this sort of heroin addict like attachment

to the pleasantness of meditation, but then it's transitory. When you're no longer concentrated, you're no longer getting that high. And so the other type of practice is called insight practice, which mindfulness is the technique. And there it's not about prolonging in any specific state. It's about actually seeing what is common to all states of consciousness. And therefore no longer clinging to, one of the things that's common is they're impermanent and you're no longer clinging to the highs

or pushing away the lows. I'm gonna assume, and this may be wrong, but I'm gonna assume that undergirding your question is a kind of sense of, you know, what kind of meditation should I be doing? And I guess what I would say to you is, at the beginning, there can be a real sense of wanting to try everything, which I think is cool.

I think you should try a bunch of things and see what speaks to what tradition, what flavor of meditation speaks to you the most. But then I would stick with one thing. Because if you're jumping around too much for too long, you really can't get a clear, clean signal of what's working. And I would do it for a little while, a couple of years and see what the benefits are, get grounded in one tradition before you go flitting around too much.

Sorry to bring this to a close, but thank you all for coming. It's really an honor to be here. That was a lot of fun. Big thanks to Sam for doing that. And big thanks to the folks at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles for hosting us at their truly beautiful facility. Okay, that does it for another edition of the 10% happier podcast. If you liked it, and I know we say this and podcasters say this all the time, but there's

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