Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 271: The Antidote to Burnout | Leah Weiss

Episode Date: August 5, 2020

At a time when work has become more challenging than ever, we’re going to explore one myth and one revelation. The myth -- which many of us, myself included, have consciously or subconsciously incorporated into our lives — is that we need to grind ourselves into dust through faux “productivity” in order to achieve professional success. The revelation is that the more effective -- and cleaner burning -- fuel is that potentially sappy notion of finding your purpose. My guest is Leah Weiss, who has impressive bona fides on both the professional and contemplative fronts. She teaches Compassionate Leadership at Stanford Graduate School of Business, and she wrote a book called How We Work. She’s also done four 100-day retreats and one 6-month retreat. This conversion was recorded pre-pandemic, but is deeply relevant nonetheless. And toward the end of the conversation, she drops some words that have been rattling around in my head for months. Where to find Leah Weiss online:  Website: https://leahweissphd.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/leahweissphd Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/leahweissphd/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/leahweissphd/ You can always get started with the Ten Percent Happier app with our flagship course, The Basics. In The Basics, Joseph Goldstein and Dan Harris discuss the fundamentals of mediation and dispel common myths about meditation in a seven-day meditation series. Visit https://10percenthappier.app.link/TheBasicsPod to get started.  Other Resources Mentioned: The Stanford Prison Experiment - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment Christina Maslach - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christina_Maslach#:~:text=Known%20for,her%20research%20on%20occupational%20burnout. Kelly McGonigal - http://kellymcgonigal.com/ Thupten Jinpa - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thupten_Jinpa The Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) - http://ccare.stanford.edu/  Steve Cole, UCLA Researcher - https://people.healthsciences.ucla.edu/institution/personnel?personnel_id=45359 The Guest House by Rumi - https://gratefulness.org/resource/guest-house-rumi/ Additional Resources: Ten Percent Happier Live: https://tenpercent.com/live Coronavirus Sanity Guide: https://www.tenpercent.com/coronavirussanityguide Free App access for Frontline Workers: https://tenpercent.com/care Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/leah-weiss-271 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the Great Meditation Teacher Alexis

Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm. All one word spelled out. Okay on with the show. to baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey guys, we've been talking a lot about the meditation challenge. We've been running the summer at the summer, sanity challenge. The deadline for joining has passed. However, if you're still interested in learning more about

booting up or rebooting a meditation practice, you can always go check out the flagship course on the 10% happier app. It's called the basics. Joseph Goldstein and I discuss the fundamentals of meditation. We disbell-com and myths and Joseph leads you through a seven-day meditation series. I'll put a link to the basics in the show notes. Okay, let's do today's show. At a time when work has become more challenging than ever, we're gonna explore one myth and one revelation. The myth, which many of us myself included have consciously or subconsciously incorporated into our lives,

is that we need to grind ourselves into dust through foe, which many of us, myself included, have consciously or subconsciously incorporated into our lives, is that we need to grind ourselves into dust through faux, quote unquote, productivity in order to achieve professional success. The revelation is that the more effective and cleaner burning fuel here is the potentially sappy notion of finding your purpose. My guest is Leo Weiss, who has impressive bona fide's on both the professional and contemplative fronts. On the professional tips, she teaches compassionate leadership at Stanford Graduate School of Business, and she wrote a book called How We Work on the

Contemplative Front. She's done four one hundred day retreats and one six-month retreat all in the Tibetan tradition, I believe. This conversation was recorded pre-pandemic, but it is deeply relevant nonetheless. And toward the end of the conversation, you're gonna hear her drop and expression that has been rattling around in my head for months. So here we go with Leo Weiss.

Nice to meet you. It's lovely to meet you. Had your book on my bed stand for a while, I've been reading through it. Lots of good stuff in there. Thanks so much. I've been assigning your book for years. Oh really? My students always say it's a favorite because it's so much more relatable than most presentations of mindfulness. My child's college fund. Thanks you. So how did you get interested in meditation? I understand it started when you were 15 or something like that. Yeah, I grew up not far from here in Jersey and the school that I

attended, we had this amazing English teacher who taught meditation as part of his jam at this prep school. So my older siblings had done it and then when I got to the point in high school where I could learn to, I jumped right in and it really just landed. It was really on point with challenges that was having at the time. But like. So the high school I went to was a very kind of, I would call it somewhat conservative, traditional would probably be the term it would prefer. There was a young Republicans club that had the vast majority of my class. And I was like a very, I pushed back on a lot of rules. I was in detention the day.

I got in a Stanford, for example, for like protesting some kind of policies. It's a school that's since been in the news for consistently not delving into abuse that was going on there. Yeah, so I was really struggling in the environment, making sense of things and being much more kind of politically progressive and just feeling weird, you know, as an adolescent too. So when I first learned meditation and first started reading, specifically to bet in Buddhism, he had assigned a book in a course I was taking

with him called Literature of the Enlightenment. And it just really landed the section about how we sanitize illness and death in this culture and just the struggle defined meaning when you're an adolescent, I'll kind of fit together and got me really interested in just diving in with meditation. It sounds to me just from looking at your book that you didn't actually start doing it in earnest until your 20s. Meditation, that is.

I was very inconsistent in high school. I would have periods of time where I'd do it when I was in one of his classes or go a week and then not do it for a while. Detentions a good time to meditate. It was. It created some good open real estate in my schedule. I had it frequently, so it would have been a good opportunity if I had used it consistently that way. What kind of impact did it have in your

20s when you started doing it in earnest? And what flavor were you doing? So I had initially been exposed to Tibetan Buddhism and that was when I sought out my first retreat in my 20s. That was specifically what I sought out. So my early practice wasn't as much sitting and doing breath-focused as very early on learning about the Tibetan preliminary practices, which include 100,000 prostrations and a lot of visualizations, a lot of chanting, not the contents of what I teach now at the business school clearly, but for me,

those practices really fit. And you actually, there were the preliminary practices that you get before you get the kind of more nature of mind, meditation instructions and that tradition. So by the time I got those, I was really all in and excited for and ready for them and then practice a ton. Well, let's define those terms for a second.

100,000 press briefs. What does that mean actually? That means standing, putting your hands above your head. It's your hands above your head, prayer position. Then putting your hands above your head. You guys are hands above your head. Prayer position. Then putting your hands to your heart center, then lying your full body, prone on the ground, and then standing back up.

That's one. Is it like a cousin of a Sun cellutation? The movement's more like an inchworm than using your different muscles with great grace and elegance. You're throwing yourself on the ground. If you go to Tibetan Buddhist countries, it's much more kind of a devotional taking refuge.

It's a motion that goes with taking refuge. Is it meditative or just? There's a visualization that you're doing of the refuge tree. So like the archetypal imagery from Tibetan Buddhism. So the first part, if you're a Buddhist, then you're, you know, of the path is taking refuge in truth and community. And so this is the entry practice from that point of view. So you do this a hundred thousand times to really, really like take refuge and get

in in your bones. Is it to humble you in some way? Yeah. And it feels weird to be talking about. It was the first time I've ever like actually talked about it in any sort of interview because being prideful of having done this is its own kind of weird. Weirdness that I'm definitely. But doing a hundred thousand takes time, but you, but there's so many Tibetan practitioners who've done millions. There's people who do them all the way from Eastern Tibet to Lasa, and back, for example, instead of walking or riding in a vehicle, they would prostrate their whole way. Lasa being the capital city, and do that, yes, from, okay, so across country. Tell me again what the mental, psychological, contemplative value is of hurling yourself

onto the ground 100,000 times? It's about commitment to awakening, and it's about trusting in what's trustworthy, truth rather than wisdom, rather than one's own habits. It's not dissimilar from the mental movement in a very simple mindfulness practice where you decide to stop kind of following the chains of thought because you're used to it and they are seductive in some way. And you bring your mind back to the object. Here the object is a visualization And instead of attending your breath,

you're moving your body. And it's like a full body training in commitment and kind of rewiring what comes first to you. Then you said you moved into something called the nature of mind. Well, I don't claim to have personally moved into and have it that territory, but from the Tibetan Buddhist curriculum, let's say, you would do the 100,000, not just of these bows, but of, with refuge, there's like five practices that you do 100,000 of each. So my first 100 day retreat was making a big dent in those practices. And where were you?

In Texas. In Texas. Okay, nice. I thought you were gonna rattle off the name of another foreign capital. I thought it was gonna be Cat Man Doe or? I did do a lot when I was an undergrad in Stanford. I went to Jarmsella on an undergraduate research grant

which was basically cover for like taking a big break in my undergrad studies. And so that was where I first got traction with these practices and spent time among Tibetan refugees studying how they transmit resilience in exile. And that's when the topic of compassion really rose to the top in my interest because that was what they were prioritizing at the children's village, the orphanage my interest because that was what they were prioritizing at the children's village, the orphanage there, where I was formally doing my research, and then going to teachings of the Dalai Lama's there. There was such a focus on both compassion and wisdom. So that became the first real research area when I again had to have some sort of cover for doing

something with my life when I finally finished undergrad at Stanford, I went on to do research on compassion and then study with a teacher who had been trained into Baton Buddhism, who had done two of the three-year retreats and he was training a small group of students in Texas. So that's how I ended up in Texas, right? Next to a mini-donk ranch. A mini-donk ranch? Mini-assured donkeys.

Oh, nice. They're fabulous. I'll take you at your word. I like all animals. So you did several hundred-day retreats? I did four of those and one six- retreat between two of the hundred day retreats. This is all pre-kids. Yeah, yeah.

You went deep, so I don't forget it. Can you just say a little bit more about what nature of mind to your men? So nature of mind from the Tibetan point of view, the nature of everyone's mind is that point of view, the nature of everyone's mind is bootahood or awakening or enlightenment and we have obscurations out of the habits that we've formed, neuroses and different behavioral habits. And so, this set of teachings is about pointing out what your mind actually is underneath all those layers of junk. So the metaphors they use traditionally for thousands of years are like jewels buried

in the backyard that you don't know are there or a Buddha, a precious Buddha covered with mud, like that's our mind. So the nature of mind teachings, you would have a teacher transmit to you by describing and upholding from the point that the teacher would be in that state of mind, and would be trying to show you the nature of your own mind, the nature of everyone's mind, not anyone's special person. But that's, so it's a different kind of path to like, I have to create peace out there,

by bits that by step take my neurotic self and turn it into a Buddha. It's actually the flip is we have everything we need right here. The problem is we just don't know how to access it. So how does it work in your mind? You've done the 100,000 prostrations. You're sitting with a teacher who's trying to point out that beneath all of your discursive stories and habits and under the ghost in the machine and the hungry ghosts that are trying to get all the things you think you need. And under all of that is some radiance,

some buddha hood, something, which by the way, I wanna, as a scientist, I wanna get your sense on whether that you think that's actually verifiable, but set that aside for a second. In the moment of the teaching and then your subsequent practice, what does it look like to sort of get beneath all of that stuff to what the real you is really like? Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, and I look, if you were to ask great spiritual masters what that state is like,

they will be the first to say, well, in my humble experience, X and the tradition says, why? Because it's not, you don't want to present yourself, especially falsely, of having a realization you don't have. But I can speak to the process of looking, especially after so much effort, like years of effort doing, as you said, throwing yourself down, and standing back up and all that that kind of entails and the commitment, but also they're like, they're dark nights of the soul in that process. Like, what am I doing? I'm a Stanford grad, and all my friends are accomplishing all these things in the world. And this was not a time when mindfulness was cool. Like now, like this was between when mindfulness was cool in the 70s and now mind you. So it was kind of weird.

So you're doing, I want to assure you that it's still weird. Okay, because we just moved to Portland because we need to keep it weirder. So like I'm committed to weird. I'm kidding, it's not actually weird. It's, I mean, I think some people think it's weird, but it's an ancient technique.

And I don't want to name any names, but I know established scientists who are engaged in this practice as well. For sure. Yes, so. Nature of mind. What does that actually work like? Nature of mind.

I mean, what I can tell you the process of practicing with not doing something on the heels of doing so very much, it feels like you're coming home to a much more simple, non-contrived, not trying to create a sense of identity or even accomplish or count practices. It's like the opposite. It's the letting yourself not just be present with what is, but with an eye to seeing the clarity and lucidity of it. I guess I'm trying to get at what are you actually doing in your mind? What is the meditative practice? Because this is an audience of, I think, mostly meditators.

Most meditators. You don't want to know what is the practice? Yes, how do you do this thing? How do you do this is one of the main methods is called a nonmeditation. So you're not trying to focus on a specific object. You're being present with your own experience, the relationship between perception and awareness, and doing as little as possible in allowing the glimpse to happen to you, for you, not creating a glimpse or trying to create a mental state

of bliss or clarity. It's those are the descriptive words that I'm using for the nature of mine. And you try to be as simply as possible and recognize the glimmers of those. And there's a very paradoxical piece of this that the more you chase them, the more they go away. Right. So this is Zogchen? Cahneng Zogchen, yeah.

That's Hageu and Ningma Zogchen and Mahamudra. I practice with teachers from both traditions. Okay, so I think, and I'm not an expert by any means, not an expert in anything, but I'm definitely not an expert in Tibetan Buddhist practice. But I think there's a school, Zogchen is one of the sub-schools here of what are sometimes called glimpse practices where you're getting non-dual practices,

where you're getting a glimpse of what your mind is like beneath all of the aforementioned obscurations. And they're a little bit frustrating to talk about because it's not like watch your breath, and then I'll send you get the glimpse. It's more like one way to do it, as we've talked about on the show before, if you're anybody wants to hear even more about this, Diana Winston and I talked about it many episodes ago.

One way to do it is the classic way that's off in top of the West is close your eyes, listen to all the sounds around you, and then look for what or who is knowing. And then you won't find anything. And in the not finding, they're in lies the glimpse. Any of what I just said, accurate? Yes, a good portion of it.

A good portion of it. I like that, okay. No, I'm just kidding. Yeah, Zo Chan is a natural, great perfection that is a tradition of teaching taught within the Ningma School of Tibetan Buddhism. There's four schools of Tibetan Buddhism. And Kagu is another of the four schools, the Karmappas ahead of that school. And they teach Mahamudra.

And often the two of these teachings kind of go hand in hand or masters of one or masters of both. And that's right. That the way you're describing in more detail what I was saying by understanding the nature of perception and who's doing the perceiver and this deconstructing the identity, those are all, or magoam sanjay, which is to betten for Buddhahood without meditation, where you't do anything, and you let the nature of mind self-horize. But like, I am so did not come in here this morning

thinking I was gonna talk about this stuff. So oops. Well, no, no, this is great. I thought, oops, at all. We're gonna get to all of the research. But speaking of research, what do you think of this idea that there is a Buddha nature,

that we are essentially good, and that beneath all of the obscurations is this jewel buried in our backyard, etc. Is that verifiably true? I think the distinction between the brain and the mind trying to understand how awareness plays in, I can talk about it more clearly perhaps from the point of view of a competency or capacity like compassion. We, I can with firm convictions say, and I think there's good research behind we are born with compassion evolved for reasons to survive and be affiliated within our tribes and whatnot of this claim of science backed Buddha nature that would be tougher to make. Do I personally believe that each person has this? I

think people have there's different language word a best self or best non-self in this version. I think there's a propensity towards healing that we have, but it doesn't always win the day. People are inherently good. I think we're in a news station. I was looking at some of the screenshots of news going on in the world right now, I think it would be naive to overstate, I express this in terms of dual drives.

We have capacity for compassion, let's say, and we also have a need for purpose, a physiological need that's correlated with health for meaning in our lives. We need to be able to down-regulate self-south. Mindfulness is a great way to do that. And otherwise we get sick. And we are very, very influenced by our environments.

And many of us live in toxic, toxic environments are working them, and that influences our behavior. Going all the way back to the prison experiments from Zimbardo, take normal state. I had done it, Stanford Phillips, Zimbardo, did this infamous Stanford prison experiment where he set up a fake prison and had the students in prison one another, and the wardens or the guards were really cruel.

Kelly, McGonagall and I taught us I had practice and science of compassion class, right? In the lecture hall, right outside where that experiment was conducted. So one of the upshots, you never get approval to do studies exactly like this today, at least. But the upshot was you take normal people and you put them in a sick environment and they behave in kind. And so for me, that actually segues into why

the focus I have right now and my work is really on burnout and the epidemic of burnout because I believe we have the capacity for wisdom and compassion and all these great things. And I also know that we live in a time where we are spending the bulk of our waking hours and highly dysfunctional dehumanizing institutions. And it's why the World Health Organization just declared burnout a diagnosis,

not within this year. So I think to me it's both, we can heal, we can be great positive contributors, but if we are trained or environmentally socialized to do the opposite, we are great risk. And this is the East Coast Jew in me as well too, right? Like Ray is done, you know, dinners 15 miles from here with the elders saying the polygoscan happen anywhere. And I was like, oh, you people are all so hyperbolic and panicky. And you know, now we know a lot about how kind of anxiety gets transmitted generation to generation.

You know, look at our polarized world, look at the dysfunction of the work forces that we have. And I see a connection between these big questions and how we are existing as individuals. And I think the last thing I'd say on this little sidebar or rant, depending on what you want to call it. I like your rant, so keep going. Ranting. I think for me, a couple of years into teaching at the business school and working at the Compassion Center at Stanford, I was getting called in to do a lot of work and organizations.

And I was really excited about it because it was the moment of the mindful revolution. And I really believed and still believe in the impact these practices can have. But after a year or two, I realized I did not feel morally comfortable with giving people tools to be more resilient in sick environments. So my kind of non-negotiable at this point

is if I'm gonna work in an organization, I need to know that they're not just trying to make super viruses out of their employees to thrive in sick environments, but that they're actually simultaneously looking at the environment. Like the godmother of burnout, Dr. Maslock at UCSF, one of the metaphors she uses around burnout is it's like if you blame or your interpretation of burnout of the individual is to look at them with scrutiny, it's like blaming cucumbers and the pickle barrel for the result.

So to mix metaphors here, I think, you know, while I am so happy that people are turning to these tools and I do believe that they help us access the best versions of ourselves. I also don't want to let ourselves and organizations off the hook and are and beyond in our communities off the hook for calling out and dysfunction. And that's where Buddhism has long been criticized, right? From at least Western religions and in grad school, I did a lot on interreligious dialogue and that was always the reframe of like, is it not making you more complacent? And I don't believe that mindfulness

needs to make one more complacent, but I certainly believe it can. Mm-hmm. Just getting back to this question I was posing before about, can we say for sure that the claim may be about a ladder schools of Buddhism that, you know, we have this Buddha nature is true. I think what I heard you say is based on your practice, you have some confidence that it is true, but there isn't the science to verify it.

And I guess what I would say is it seems like out in the world there are at least three ways to view it. There's the, we're fallen and, you know, we're born sinful. That's one view. The other is the Buddha nature view, which is actually no wheat are now and always have been in our essence, even though we don't have an essence. Good. And then the other view is the sort of two wolves thing, you know, the idea that I think is a Native American expression that some grandfather has said to have said, you know, I have these two wolves fighting in me, the sort of the good wolf and the bad wolf, and the one that wins is the one I feed.

So I don't know which one of these is true per se, but what science does seem to show is that we have this innate capacity for compassion and that that is a skill that can be trained. So pick your metaphysics. What we know for sure is we can get better at this birthright of being more connected to other human beings, which by the way is, as the dollar llama has said, the wisest form of selfishness because that connection, that ability to have relationships, successful relationships with other people is what's gonna make you happy. I think that's an incredible summary of it, really, well put.

And for me, rather than turning to science as a way to like validate the idea that we have Buddha nature or some access to self-knowing awareness or whatever you want to call it. I tend to appeal to the fact that all the wisdom traditions in the world have an analog to contemplative practice and trajectories. I'm not trying to, I'm not a pluralist, believing everything's pointing at the same direction in different ways, but I do believe that when there's shared across all the people have taken a really good look at it for thousands of years, shared convictions about what happens when we explore inwardly Takes us towards more clarity that to me is meaningful information It may not be like a p-value and a randomized controlled experiment, but it's meaningful And I think for many of us may be more meaningful than a study that's always flawed or limited or whatnot

You said something intriguing about working with corporations that just made me rethink questions of my stick on this. So there are, as you know, in the Buddhist world, there are these folks who criticize what they call mic-mindfulness. And I've long said, I think there's a lot to that critique. And yet, I also have been of the view, and maybe this is too glib, you're making me rethink my position here, but I've always had this chick that, you know, look, more mindfulness is better than less mindfulness.

So maybe yes, people are adopting meditation and milleas that traditional Buddhists might not be entirely comfortable with, like the military or corporations whose products we don't particularly like, by we have not saying me, I'm speaking as if I'm in this kind of conjured group that I've positing here. My pushback is I was like, look, I think my phone is a pretty positive force in the mind in the universe and I'd rather see more of that out there than less. But you're saying, I've often heard the pushback to my pushback being, yeah, but I don't want to make a better sniper, or I don't want to make complacent workers in a abusive atmosphere.

And I kind of never took that in until you just said some of these work environments are really toxic and I don't wanna make people who are better able to withstand it, I wanna make people who are better people within a healthy environment. So should I, you know, I have a company that we don't have many corporate clients, we don't have one corporate client at this point, Apple,

and you can say whatever you want about them. But should I be using, should we, my team, be using this kind of sort of ethical guardrails, when or if we work with other corporate clients, or I don't know, I just love to hear you say more about all of this. I know for myself, my ethical barometer has become different than it's changed over time and working

in different environments. One of the most influential environments for me is a human being and a teacher and a practitioner I've worked in is at the VA and a residential post-traumatic stress clinic, or not clinic, even a residential site. And that's something I never thought that I would be doing or more recently I've done work with in many environments that I didn't initially anticipate. And I think we need to be thinking about it.

I think that having a set of questions to me is the right approach of having a set of clear values. And I don't think there's going to be organizations, even the ones that are kind of the most renowned for being committed to these kinds of practices. None of them are perfect. I just finished a case for the Stanford Harvard database looking at practices and some of these organizations that do a lot and invest a lot in mindfulness. And when you start talking to people, are these organizations not only they not perfect,

there's often, you know, there's people at the top often, or grassroots who care a ton about practice and see it as an important path for themselves and their colleagues. But then you also see people who, from their vantage point, don't really see the practices making the people around them more humane or more caring and that it's tricky. So I guess for me where I'm at right now is I want it to stay tricky. I'm not in a mindfulness and organizations is, make mindfulness is all bad point of you, but I'm also not ready to sign up and work with just anyone. I want to understand what the intention is so important.

What is the intention behind bringing this in the various levels I'm intersecting with? So it just sounds like do it carefully, thoughtfully. Do it carefully, thoughtfully, but you know what? Like ask me again in another year, I might, or another three years, some organizations I was more willing to give the benefit of the doubt to a few years ago, I'm not anymore. I wouldn't work in them anymore. Be thoughtful that we, as mindfulness practitioners and shares of these practices and information are not enabling that which we don't stand for and with.

Sounds like thoughtful, careful, and vigilant because you may say yes and it turns into a no later as you learn more. There's a lot of money on the line too in these corporate training markets. So I think we have to know that we are biased in a direction of accepting that this could be a good thing. And yeah, and I think we need accountability.

That feels important to me, people in this space who really want to keep integrity should not be enabling or siloing themselves, but also like having the tough conversations for years. I've been really interested in getting people to get together, not just to share our methods and our research, but like to really talk about implications like this, because I think there's a lot of experience out there, but this isn't the roundup conversation that's typically had at conferences. I think this is really good.

It's good for me to hear. More of my conversation with Leo Weiss after this. Hey, I'm Aresha, and I'm Brooke. And we're the hosts of Wunderys Podcast, even the Rich, where we bring you absolutely true and absolutely shocking stories about the most famous families and biggest celebrities the world has ever seen. Our newest series is all about drag icon RuPaul Charles. After a childhood of being ignored by his absentee father, Ru goes out searching for love

and acceptance. But the road to success is a rocky one. Substance abuse and mental health struggles threatened to veer Rue off course. In our series, Rue Paul Bornnaked, we'll show you how Rue Paul overcame his demons and carved out a place for himself as one of the world's top entertainers,

opening the doors for aspiring queens everywhere. Follow even the rich wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app. Now, let's talk about your work. You've written two books. One is how we work. The other is called Bavana. Let's start with the first one.

Walk us through what how we work is all about. So after I'd been teaching at the Stanford Business School for about five years, I felt, I'd been giving a lot of talks, doing a lot of trainings about the methodology I developed, which was really trying to bring together a combination of practice, like a laboratory for the students, where MBA or mid-career students

bring that together with organizational psychology, bring that together with case studies and bringing in great people to come explore and be provoked by my students. Often, we had some CEOs come in who are prominent spokesperson for this work and they really were asked a lot of tough questions. And that conversation to me has been really important. So what I tried to do and how we work is bundle together the methodology, the business cases for these various practices.

Because I do want to see them in organizations. I want to see mindfulness not just for the individual to make them a super virus, but I want to see mindfulness not just for the individual to make them super virus, but I want to see a mindful organization That's self-aware of its culture and the impact it has at various levels So the book is a distillation of the various parts of my What started out as syllabus and now is a framework looking at purpose? What's the research on purpose? How do you why is it matter for you as an individual for your health? Why is it matter for your organization? How do you, why is it matter for you as an individual,

for your health? Why is it matter for your organization? How do you cultivate more of it? And doing that for each of the topics of purpose and self-compassion and compassion and mindfulness. Let's talk about purpose for a second because we've done a lot on the show about compassion, mindfulness, self-compassion, all of which we can do more on because I don't think people can hear enough. I'll just speak to myself, I don't think I can hear enough. But purpose is interesting in that we haven't touched on it too much.

And so what do you mean when you talk about purpose and let's talk about it from an individual level? Do you think most people ask themselves, what's my purpose and am I living it? And is that what you're recommending? So I'll define purpose, borrowing on the definition of barbed-redrickson, the Stanford-trained positive psychology pioneer researcher. She defines purpose as a far-reaching and steady goal, something personally meaningful

and self-transcending. And each of those components of it is critical because we can get caught especially in a time where we all have more than one FTE, one full time position. It's like 1.1 to 1.3 is the new norm, so you cannot do all of your work. So mapping the freneticism of your daily responsibilities onto a far-reaching and steady goal that's meaningful and bigger than oneself becomes increasingly challenging. So I think there's two ways to go about getting more purpose if you look at the research.

One is what I describe in my book is top down. So using your kind of rational, self-reflective capacities, like in asking oneself that kind of question, what's my purpose and my living it? The other is bottom up that appeals to our embodied, emotional experience, knowing what we're passionate about, knowing what our core values are when we're acting out of alignment with them, when we are, by the way, we experience what's known in the research as moral injury. And that seems to be one of the key things that leads us to their burnout, or for trauma survivors, it leads them to worse outcomes.

If they're, the trauma is related to this gap between their values and behavior they had to participate in. So that's certainly been of great interest to the VA for War of Veterans with Post-Traumatic Stress, for example. For me, purpose was kind of the last... So it was always part of my practice. And to bet in Buddhism, you start every session with motivation and setting your intentions and doing some visualization and reflection about what you're there for, which is bigger than

yourself. It's about awakening for the sake of all beings in that context, would be a short hand. But I hadn't encountered the research and especially the health research around purpose until I was working at the Compassion Center at Stanford. And we were funded by the teacher training program I directed and working closely with Kelly McGonigal and Tuped in Jempa on developing and doing this work. Both former guests on the show. Both former guests on the show. Both former guests on the show. Fabulous, amazing people, incredibly inspiring, who have so much integrity in our, yeah, have been massively supportive for me,

kind of personally, in practice and professionally. So we were funded by the founders of eBay to start this teacher training program. And so these funders had a resilience R&D company nearby and I started going there as the person who is responsible, not just for curriculum design, but like strategy and operations and spreadsheets, which my theology and education degrees and social work did not exactly prepare me for. So I started going over there to get operations to support it first and then got really enthralled by the research they were doing on resilience.

And you know what the top line on their formula for resilience was, it was Purpose Plus Connection, which I would interchange with Compassion and Control or South efficacyefficacy agency. Because if you fall down, it's easier to get up when you know that it's connected with some self-transcendent, really deeply ingrained and held belief about the power and importance of what you're doing. 100%. And then not only the top line on that was fascinating to me, but I was talking to people like Steve Cole who were running research there in addition to his UCLA lab

where he does genomics work. And I write about him in my book and he was studying how purpose impacts our gene expression in terms of inflammation and antivirals in this sequence, the C-T-R-A sequence, which is predictive of all the causes that are likely to kill most of us and all of you listening in the show, unless we're like hit by a bus or some accident, the cancers, the heart diseases, and so on. So, purpose, I had no idea that people, I knew lots of compassion by Omar Ker work was happening and mindfulness by Omar Ker work, but not purpose. And so that actually was the thing for me that changed a lot of how I think about and approach the teaching that I do. And also how I think about the people who aren't going to become mindfulness meditators, what can be done in their lives that'll be supportive of their resilience and while being.

So how do we divine our purpose? What are the practices here that would get us to have a clear sense of purpose, which of course would be down to our benefit in lots of ways, not the least of which would be resiliency? So if you're one of the many people who doesn't come into this world or have a big epiphany along the way. My purpose is X, taking the path of trying to get clarity on core values, what matters most to me, looking into our own narrative, looking back at our lives, the choices we've made that feel demonstrative of who we are and who we want to be as a good way. What do you love doing? Who are you? What do you want to be is a good way. What do you love doing? Who are you?

What do you want to be remembered for at the end of your life? Getting your core values clear and then understanding. So that's the kind of from below. How do those show up in my lives and where are they in conflict? Because when we are in conflict with them, there's a huge amount of emotional frustration and stress and physical impact.

So I think values is the place. That's the thread to pull on. If you're not sure what your capital P purpose in life is, look back at your narrative, look at the environments that you feel most alive in, and most like yourself, most sane however you want to put it, is that's start following that directionally to understand and then articulate what you're about and then that can turn into a purpose. And then you can get very tactical with it. I mean, one of the exercises I have people do is a time to purpose calendar audit where they for a period of a month look ahead

at their calendar, predicts, try to mentally tie together things that are mundane, but are fitted to our purpose. But don't feel that way, right? Like the many activities that take a lot of our time trying to connect the dots, trying to get rid of things that shouldn't be on our calendars, where we're spending our time, and then reflect back at the end of each week and do this over and over until we're able to excavate patterns of where there's friction in our lives.

So this is where it comes together really well with mindfulness, your ability to have meta-aware awareness or be aware of what you're experiencing while you're going through your life, the better you are at that, the more able you are to see quickly when you're out of alignment with your values. Yeah. Yes. I mean, so this reminds me of a conversation I was having with your longtime colleague, Kelly McGonical, where she talks about understanding what matters most to you, getting some real

visibility on your values and purpose in the context in which I was speaking with her. It was about habit formation. So if you're thinking about healthy habits that you want to make or unhealthy habits that you want to break, a great way to boost your resilience as you're going through this very torturous process for most of us is to have a clear sense of what really matters to you in your life and pick your habit, the habits you want to make or break based on that because that will really help you pick yourself up because you are going to fall off the wagon a million times as we all do in that particular process. She and I had a moment that was really just for me,

I'm working on a book about kindness and so I've been all of these things are kind of on my mind but to use a fancy word kind of inco-it, unformed way because I haven't written the book yet. And I was telling her, I don't know exactly what I said to her but what I had in my mind was, I went on a one-on-one loving kindness retreat with a great teacher named Spring Washam and I walked away from that retreat with a lot of sort of, I felt like I had a lot of epiphanies. I got to go look it back in my notes because sometimes I feel after a retreat, I have a lot of epiphanies and it's just nonsense. But one of the things that I started to get a sense on that retreat is there's this expression that I hate, the words, not the sentiment. Listening to your heart, because I just feel like this is just blah, like with this, it's

been pulverized into meaninglessness by overuse. But there is something about contemplative practices that to use a Tibetan phrase that I really like, that they, as I understand it, this expression they use to describe enlightenment is a clearing away and a bringing forth. So you're clearing away the noise and you're bringing forth what lies beneath it, which by the way, ties back to the beginning of this conversation about Buddha nature. Anyway, I felt on that retreat like, oh yeah, I really had a sense in my body below the neck that you can kind of, you can use your body and your, to some extent, your intellect to maybe in combination to get a sense of this doesn't feel right and this does

feel right. And I guess you could call that listening to your heart. Aside that to Kelli, and she said, yeah, I feel like I have that in this thinking about core values and purpose and its marriage to contemplative practice. I feel like contemplative practice helps me see that somewhere in my chest I've got a fish hook and it's pulling me toward the things that I really care about and the meditation helps me see the hook more clearly and feel it more clearly. I've set a bunch of things. There's any of that make any sense to you. Yeah, I know. I love that description of how it feels that we can become more attuned to what behavior and what environments make sense for us. And I really appreciate that

you're also calling out one of the problematics of talking about all this stuff because like the language is really tough. Especially for a girl like I said from Jersey. I mean the first time I went to a meditation retreat and was doing the loving kindness practice. One of my first interview questions with the teacher was like, my God, this is so cheesy. I can't handle it. I see its power, but like I am torn because it's so cheesy. And he said, well, if you can't handle it. I see its power, but I am torn because it's so cheesy. And he said, well, if you can't be cheesy, you can't be free. That's maybe the title of my book.

So, bring on the cheese. I love it. That's really good. But I think this is to where when the Dalai Lama has been talking about secular ethics for so long and in the connection between when we have a contemplative practice that we're doing, when we have that touchstone with who we are, that we will be more ethical because we will, we can't ignore how uncomfortable we feel when we're not ethical. No one sets out to be unethical.

I believe that. I don't believe in that version of anyone waking up and planning to do something diabolical or making choices in an organization or political choices to harm. I think that's why we need these contemplative practices as well as community. And maybe that's the other caveat coming back to the question you had about the app and teaching. I do think there's a reason for thousands of years. These practices were taught in a context where the third jewel, the third most important

thing is community because we need accountability and we need feedback because we can fool ourselves. And the ethics, I think, is a really prime space where we just desensitize. But our practice can bring us back, but we can't just trust that the practice alone will, because some of our biggest blind spots are tough to see on our own. Amen. To all of us. So let's just go back to purpose for one second because, first of all, I think it's really, I'm glad we're spending a lot of time on this because I don't think most people go through this process.

I was actually writing one of the chapters in my book recently and I was listening to a conversation. I taped records on a lot of my conversations, especially with my wife, my poor wife. And I was listening to a conversation with her in which I said to her, you know, I was reading something recently and somebody I respected talked about, sort of getting in touch with their core values. And I said to Bianca, I'm like, I have no idea what my core values are. You thought about this? You said, no, I haven't thought about it either. And I was really wrestling with, do I have any self-transcendent core values? Am I just

thoroughly rotten and all I want is just to accumulate for myself or for my family. And part one of that is just pointing out that I think most of us don't go through this process, and my sense is that it's really useful. And I think that you're saying there's a lot of data to back up that it is. The second thing part of that is I kind of touched on already, which is I feel like the ego could get involved here pretty quickly. And I could say to you right now, maybe we should use me as an example. I could say to you right now that my purpose is something along the lines of re-languaging 2600 years of Buddhist wisdom so that it's approachable to skeptics and regular folks, which I think has a lot of value that one could describe

as self-transcendent, but I make a lot of money doing it. And I get a lot of attention and people clap for me and all this stuff. And so how do we manage that? How do we come up with our purpose in such a way that we aren't fooling ourselves and suggest grandiose selfishness? I am so happy here, this question being asked asked because I think that this is something that is really important in this mindful revolution that's happening in a context where I was at 2017 $1.2 billion were spent on mindfulness, programming and whatnot and businesses.

Like, it's a lot of money, 1.2 billion. And it was projected to rise for the 2018 cycle. And so on. And I think mixed motivations is one of the things that becomes really evident when we start practicing mindfulness, right, that we can have multiple motivations at the same time. Some of them altruistic for the benefit of others, even our own expense, some for our own benefit and some at cost. And I think to me, this is where if we can be really honest with ourselves in practice, but also in conversation about like where are the conflicts of interest, not the ones that rise to level we would get in trouble with external parties, but where are we feeling those conflicts of interest and really attending to that problem taking it seriously.

And I don't have like an idea about what the outcome of it should be, but this is something that's been talked about for thousands of years, like in the manuals when you look at students training to become teachers and getting the transmission a lot into that and Buddhism, along with it, come all these warnings about like just because you've had glimpses of wisdom and compassion, don't think that the kind of demon of ego isn't ready and waiting in the background. And so does that mean that there's not a real thing of there's wisdom and there's altruism?

I just think this mixed bag is, I worry when we don't talk about it, I worry when we get too comfortable with ourselves in the mindful revolution teaching moment. And a lot gets conflated. I mean, the first time I went to one of the conferences where there's a lot of CEOs who are prominent spokespeople about mindfulness. And they were on the stage alongside mindfulness teachers who'd been trained as such for decades. And the kind of mixing together of one's success in business as a equivalent or kind of a

basis for a platform to speak about a wisdom practice and have people just kind of listening equally to the, I mean, it's great. We want to hear different people's experiences and mindfulness and how practices served them. But I think there's a whole lot that gets mixed up, which can be problematic for people who want to get more clarity from doing these practices and find more purpose and live meaningful good lives to the best of our ability.

But as to this question of how do you go about sort of living an ethical life, and by the way, I don't want that to sound too antiseptic because I really like the living ethical life can sound kind of medicinal or like dogmatic. I don't think it if it in terms of being a saint, I think of it in terms of the Dalai Lama's framing of wise selfishness, that if you're living ethical life and you have good relationships

with people and you treat them well, etc., etc., you will be happier. By the way, it's also, I believe there's a lot of research to show that you'll be more successful, more popular, healthier. So there's a lot here. Anyway, when we're thinking about this, it's very easy as you've said, and as the manuals have said, for the ego to swoop in. And I think the answer here,

the one that I keep hearing from a lot of my teachers, as I think about this in my own life, is, man, I hate it when people quote, roomy, I always joke about like, like, just, say, and I have this executive coach, this guy, Jerry Colano, who I love, and he's been on the show a couple of times.

But I make fun of him all the time because he quotes Rumi. But he quoted Rumi to be recently and it kind of landed. He has this poem about called the guest house, which is sort of welcoming all of your, whatever shows up in your mind as a host would welcome a guest in her, his house. And he has a phrase in there, a true human, which I kind of latched on. A true human kind of is able to see all this ugliness and goodness with some warmth.

And I think that is the way for us to work in a fluid way with our purpose going forward, not to set it and stone and be so comfortable with it that it becomes a playground for the ego. But to be kind of have a sense of humor of like, oh, wow, well, that's grandiosity right there or that's greed and not to go into shame but go into a, you know, being a true human in the face of that. So here I am quoting Roomy and everything I didn't want to be better you than me.

I mean, the metaphor that I keep coming back to, well, it's actually not necessarily metaphor as much as part of my identity is parenting. I mean, I've got three little kids. And there's no world in which I can be a perfect mom. And there's no world where I would even want to strive to be that, but it's about the being in the context of this messiness and perfection and not knowing how it's gonna all work out. Like to me that, but still investing

in these relationships. Like to me, there's the ethics piece, I'm not expressing this clearly, but there's something around that we don't try less because there's no top line. Here's the signposts of great parenting. Everybody's always changing their tune on what the best parenting practices are.

And even if you want to follow them as a parent and reality with three kids in the chaos, I can't do it. So that doesn't mean I check out. It means I tried to view the swirl of that context as a crucible for learning. And I think that that's kind of the way I think about ethics that in the busy, frenetic, mistaking ourselves in our egoism, in our mixed motivations, like, and thus we are like, that's this whirl in which we try to view our practice of ethics. And I love how you bringing it back to.

It's not about being externally a good person. It's also about our own subjective experience of ourselves and how we feel at home and are on skin or the opposite. Yeah, it's also evolution. We evolved to be these social creatures. That's why shame hurts so much because loneliness on the savannah will kill you because then you didn't have your people around to protect you or to hung with you, et cetera, et cetera. So, there's something kind of deeply wired into us that makes a lot of sense here.

So, we kind of gave a little bit, we didn't probably explored it as much detail as I would have liked the your first book, but I want to get also get your second book called Bavina, which as I understand it is the ancient term for cultivation or meditation. So tell me about this book. Yeah, so this book came on the heels of when the Thai cave rescue was happening and in the aftermath of understanding the low oxygen levels and the role of being able to have meditation be a part of the coping strategy in the cave. I had done an interview about the physiology of meditation

and then got a call from someone at Hachat who said, can you write a book about this kind of expanding on the idea of meditation for resilience, meditation, how it functions. And I thought about it and they needed it quickly so that I had like two years and multiple babies in the process of writing how we work. Bob and I wrote in like three months. And I hadn't carved the time out to write it. It was like on top of the usual teaching and travel and all the things.

So I said I would do it, but I only if I could take it, the metaphor for where we're all going to find ourselves in some version of a cave at some point, whether it's the diagnosis or the unexpected event. So if it could be about how do we prepare our mental and emotional game. So in the meanwhile, so that we're ready for one that happens. And this project, the whole time I was working on it, I thought a lot about, I was pregnant with my first child at the same time as my father was getting more and more ill and eventually passed away right after he met my daughter a few weeks later. And in the process of being with him, super

pregnant, lying around and practicing and kind of being company to him. And I was with him when he passed. I felt like all the training I had done and on the heels of all the training I had done, all the sort of scandal that's been outed and Tibetan Buddhism, like many other religious traditions. You know, a lot of questions in my mind about a lot of things, but being with my dad in that process, I was like, this is all worth it. If for nothing other than being able to be with him in that. What I wanted in this book was to share just much more to still down. Here's how you practice and get ready for the big, really trying moments,

imperfectly. Like a true human. Like a person. Like a person. Yeah, I mean, sometimes I've heard my meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein say, you know, you can think, one of the many ways in which you can think of meditation or pavana cultivating the mind is practicing for death.

How are you gonna be? Before we go, you referenced before we started recording to you had some studies that you might wanna pull up on your iPad or you wanna go through so any of those are because I like knowing about. I know about the things. I like knowing about the things. Thank you.

Sure, I mentioned in one of the various rants that being called in to teach about mindfulness and organizations, what I learned to the theme often was, can you please come in and help people feel better, do better in environments that are varying levels of very difficult to deal with? And this topic of burnout first came up

in like a lot of notoriety in 2012 when there was a study in the primary physician's journal about the prevalence of burnout and docs and you know, which is like continues to be a massive, massive problem and with all of the offshoots of what that involves burnout leading not just to feeling badly, but substance abuse, medical error, physician suicide, all of that stuff. So more recently, in the last few years, we've been seeing burnout isn't just in healthcare, burnout is ubiquitous, and it has massive health implications. And so I've been increasingly interested in understanding what is burnout, how does it fit in?

I don't believe that general wellness or mindfulness can be a silver bullet because there's these environmental factors we talked about. You know, and it's just some of the sobering, talk about some of these statistics. So the cost to society of burnout is similar to cancer. I mean, it's roughly $150 billion a year. You see things like burnout affecting 67% of employees.

You know, 60% of sick days are about burnout actually. 24% of payroll goes away because of the cost of burnout and disability and whatnot. And then just even from the health perspective, being burned out increases your risk of heart disease as much as smoking or obesity. You're 1.84, I love the specificity, too. More times more likely to contract type two diabetes, accelerate biological aging, it's a health issue, which is why the World Health Organization declared it as such. But if you try to understand what are the interventions,

what can we do in the real world, not just in a laboratory about this? It gets very wishy-washy. There's a lot of, like, throw wellness at the problem. And we know wellness and coaching, these are billions of dollar industries. There's a lot of resources going to them. But there's a lack of precision of trying to understand what in these environments are causing the burnout for different individuals because of their personalities and other factors will react differently to the environments, so they need

different support. And we know mindfulness and meditation is a really powerful tool. The problem is how many people out of the whole, the billions are going to become meditators, so that's a rate limiter. And there's lots of other things that can be done. And at the cultural level, not just the individual resilience level. So that's the piece when I mentioned earlier before we started and earlier in this conversation. I think we as a global community, it's not just a problem in the states.

I do work with us at the European Commission. I've done work with this with our various government agencies. I was just a NASA last week doing work in this space. We are trying to figure out what this means and what to do about it. And I think we're very early in that, but we know it's we're documenting the enormity of the issue. And it's something that's just I hope it feels changeable. There's so much that's not changeable. But I, until I believe this isn't changeable, I'm going to double down on this. You said meditation, mindfulness is a proven intervention, but the rate is limited by the fact

that not everybody's going to do it. And then you said, I believe that there are other things possibly that could be thrown in there that will be more easily adoptable. What would those be? I mean, there's simple things like training managers. So managers are the massive input for burnout. How good or bad your manager is makes you likely or unlikely to experience burnout. And the managers aren't trying to be bad. They're crunched with limited resources, more and more work,

with talk of this oncoming recession. There's already so many companies that are consolidating, letting go. So everybody's in this crunch. I mean, some of the stuff is just very practical. If there's kind of like we have in any workplace, you have first responders that now had to operate a defibrillator

that you would have managers understand how to recognize science of burnout and employees that they're working with earlier upstream. So not waiting until someone's out on disability, but above that where there's a much higher percentage of us spending our time in that space, recognizing it, having more access, it's much cheaper to support a person than, than after they've burned out, and it takes a long time to heal. So meditation, I think, is important.

It's a piece of it, the ability to self-suit or down-regulate, and the ability to meditate does impact. It's related to chronic stress, related to anxiety, related to depression, but not exactly the same as any of those because it's also intersecting specifically with the workplace, not life at large. Maybe also purpose. And purpose, purpose is massively impactful. The depersonalization, emotional exhaustion, cynicism, lack of self-efficacy, these are all like, as the World Health Organization is defining burnout. And I think for me, there's a personal piece of this too

that I think I was a frog in a pot earlier in my career and didn't know it would just work longer and longer and longer. And slowly watch myself gain 80 pounds that I've now slowly in a subprocess dealing with. And I spent years learning how to meditate. So that wasn't the silver bullet. But I think there can be, and maybe for the listeners here, maybe part of what I want

to say for you specifically, if you are a meditator, it's a mistake to believe that meditation is a cure all. For me, personally, experiencing this, it was, I thought I should be able to have my, like, practice fix it. And if I was aware of it, it would be enough. And it's, you know, some other great meditation teachers call it, it's easy to take a spiritual bypass or mindful bypass. So this is where it's like, are we really, we're living an ethical life? Are we engaged at work? What is the impact we're having on those around us? Have we taken on?

Should we not be having 1.3 full-time jobs? We need to make some decisions carefully. Of course, there are economic exigencies that lead many of us to take on more work than we need. So it's a complex interweaving of the cultural societal economic with the personal decisions that may be wrapped up in pride or ego or greed or just plain need. So this is a complex stew you're diving into here. Yeah, yeah. And I feel similarly about it that I did in the beginning of the realizing compassion was something I wanted to spend the rest of my life understanding and studying and practicing. And speaking about I feel similarly because it's equally complex and important. And I think that this struggle isn't going to go away until we better understand it.

So that's the next chapter. That's the next book, too. As you may know, at the end of the show, I always want to get my guests to plug stuff, which you kind of jokingly call it, the plug zone. Can you plug the books again where we can find more information about you, social media, the internet, et cetera, et cetera. Sure. The books are how we work. Bob and I. My website is Leo Weiss. By the way, Bob and I was BHA VA and A. Sorry, go ahead.

No, thank you. And the website is Leo Weiss PhD. And I really do love hearing from people. So if anyone wants to share your experience with purpose or burnout, I'm all ears around stories. Yeah, those are the best ways to reach me. I've got all the other social stuff. All right, well, it's great to talk to you.

Great to meet you. You did a great job with this. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Big thanks to Leah. And as always, big thanks to the people who work so hard to put this show together. Samuel Johns is our senior producer, Marissa Schneiderman is our producer. Our sound designers are Matt Boyn and Ania Sheshik of Ultraviolet Audio.

Maria Wartel is our production coordinator. We get an enormous amount of valuable insight and oversight from TPH colleagues such as Jen Poient, Nate Toby, Ben Rubin, Liz Levin, and as always I want to end by thanking my ABC News colleagues Ryan Kessler and Josh Koham. We'll see you all on Friday for a bonus. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Or you can listen early and ad free with 1-3 Plus in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey

at Wondery.com slash Survey. completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey.