Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 39: Jason Stirman, Ex-Twitter, Medium Exec Turned App Entrepreneur

Episode Date: October 12, 2016

Jason Stirman went to his first meditation class when he was working at Twitter. An early employee there, he eventually quit Twitter with founder Ev Williams with the intent of starting a new company with a “mindful culture.” When they started the publishing platform Medium, Stirman said they practiced Holacracy, meaning they ran the company without management, and they held guided meditation sessions in the office three times a week, which led him to a regular meditation practice. This past spring, Stirman launched a meditation app aimed at athletes called Lucid. And this Texas native once owned an auto repair shop. 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 guys, my guest today was a very early employee at Twitter. Like so early that when he joined, there were only a few dozen people there. So really early employee at Twitter, he's also done a bunch of other things, including

he once owned an auto repair shop. But the reason why he's actually on the show is he's got a new meditation app aimed at athletes called Lucid. His name is Jason Sturman. Here we go. From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Welcome, man. Hey, thanks, Dan. Thanks for having me. My pleasure. Here's the question I ask everybody. How and why did you start medicine? Yep. So I was maybe into my second or third year at Twitter, and one of my good friends there,

a lovely lady, Michelle Gail. She invited me to attend a meditation class at Twitter. Now I grew up in Texas, and the word meditation to me right away had some connotations that it was an Eastern religion thing. I thought it was something maybe you sit low to style and levitate into cave into bet or something. But almost as I didn't wanna tell her no,

so I decided to go to this class. Were you interested in her or? No, no, no, no, you're married, right? I married my high school sweetheart. Okay, okay. So, but she would did some HR stuff at Twitter and really, like you were macking on her is to think of her kind of.

In fact, she's now one of our best family friends. Got you, okay. But she was really interested in, she's now one of our best family friends. Gotcha. OK. But she was really interested in meditation, and she got me to go to this class. And I remember walking to the class, really hesitant thinking like, we have to change into robes, or we have

to understand some different language. I just had no idea what meditation was. And so I remember showing up and meeting the meditation teacher. And he was kind of a young hip white guy kind of looked like me or someone who could be like me. And right away I noticed he had the most calm aura about him. It just very warm and gentle and such a nice guy.

I really shook my hand, it seemed so authentic. And I remember thinking at that point, I don't know if meditation is what made him like this, but I want to be more like this guy. Do you remember who it was? I have no idea. No idea. I never saw him again. It's easy.

That was my first taste, and he did a get it, like maybe like a 30 minute guided meditation. I remember closing my eyes and breathing, and I remember about halfway through thinking, this isn't religious at all, this isn't spiritual. And I remember kind of at the end, opening my eyes and feeling like, okay, that was something, something happened there. I remember feeling calm afterwards.

And I thought, you know what, I could maybe get into this. And did you from that moment on pick up the habit or where there's some fits and starts? Yep, no, that was, yeah, that didn't get into it right away, that class was offered maybe once a month or so at Twitter. And so I think I went two or three times and toward the end of my career at Twitter.

And then when I left Twitter with Evan Williams, the start, what is now a medium? Evan Williams was one of the founders of Twitter. And so you went with him to start a new company at the Twitter, yep. And Ev had been really into meditation also. And so when we started medium, we really agreed from day one that one to have a really mindful culture at medium. And part of that would be having in-house guided meditation. And so then he hooked us up with a guy named Will Kabatzen,

who's doing Kabatzen Sun. And so we started bringing Will into our company three days a week to do guided meditation, 30-minute guided meditation Monday, Wednesday, Friday. And when I started practicing with Will and got to spend some time with his father, John, and that's when I really started my own practice, and that was five years ago.

And what has it done to you for you? Sure, yeah. Gosh, a lot. I'll say it's been very transformative for me and my wife and my family. And even at the company we built that medium, the company was very high functioning, high performing, but had this undertone of just calm and trust and it was a very human-centric

culture we built and I credit a lot of that toward the meditation practice. For me personally, I was never really a super stressed out, I never acted out, I don't have any sort of mental disorder that I know about. But it really came to find just a sense of calm and awareness in my life and kind of a foundation that I could return to and you know, not worrying about what I think may happen in the future or or dwell on some stupid mistake I made in the past, but just the ability to be here felt really powerful to me and I felt like my days were longer, I felt like my senses were sharper. And I just really wasn't that stressed. Although I can say now looking back

prior to my meditation practice, I think I was a pretty stressed out individual and it didn't, it never manifests itself in super unhealthy ways. But looking back, I was, man, I didn't live much of my life present until I was maybe 33, 34 years old and I started really meditating.

Better late than never. Absolutely. And earlier than I did just for the record. We got you. So what is your daily practice look like? Yeah. So it's changed quite a bit. I've been through kind of different phases and the first two or three years, I would really

sit with Will three days a week. And then I'd probably do two or three days, I would really, I would sit with Will three days a week. And then I'd probably do two or three days a week by myself, either using an app like Headspace or Calm or Insight Time or a Buddha Five, try to mall and I like them all. And sometimes I just wake up early and just sit for about 30 minutes by myself and just breathe. And it sounds simple.

Me and like, when you say just breathe, but like pay attention to the feeling of your breath coming in and going out, and then when you get lost, start again. That's right. Okay. Yep. Yep.

Just breathe in, breathe out, and let the thoughts come as they may, but try not to focus on them, or hold on to them, and let them go. And that practice was really invigorating for me. I found a definite correlation between when I practiced and my ability to focus and perform at a high level at work. And when I didn't, I just felt kind of a little bit in a cloud.

And it felt good. It transformed my performance at work and at home. But it was still somewhat laborious for me to get up and do it. I tell people, a lot of people ask, well, if it's so good, you just do it all the time and every day. And it's kind of like going to the gym. Everyone knows that going to the gym is going to make you

healthier, but sometimes it's hard to get there. Everyone knows eating healthier is going to make you feel better, but sometimes you like sweets. So it's been somewhat hard for me to kind of keep a regular practice. So that's how it started. And then the last year or so, I've really been doing five minutes a day using Lucid, which maybe we'll talk about, which is,

your new app, my new app. And in Lucid, we have two mental skills coaches who are both big believers in meditation. One is George Mumford, who's been on your show. And one is Graham Bechhardt, who's worked with a bunch of young athletes who are now up and coming NBA stars. And George Mumford, for those who didn't listen to the show, he worked with the Lakers and

the Bulls, taught people like Kobe and Shack and MJ. So these are two very experienced teachers you have in your app. That's right. And athletic performance world, I think they're two of the best. And they're both big into meditation. And I talked to George and got to hear his story as an amazing story. Amazing. Graham has a similar one. And so now my practice looks like putting my headphones in and using my app and for five into the day, listening to one of those guys guide me through what we call a mental skills workout.

And part of the mental skills workout, there's a meditation component every day. And the audio and the mental skills workout is a little bit of meditation, some visualization, and some positive affirmation we call our MVP. All in five minutes. All in five minutes. And so that's all you're doing now. That's all I'm doing. Well, most days that's all I'm doing.

I now have some more awareness and I'm able to sense when I think I need to sit a little bit longer. Someone's like off into a little nap room or break room at work and do 20, 30 minutes of sitting and breathing and just returning to the present. Or I still like to use apps like Headspace and Call and to kind of get me there. But I've noticed that even five minutes a day,

five or six days a week over months and years, can I have a pretty significant effect? No, yeah, no question about it. So are you no longer at medium or are you full time at lucid? I'm full time at lucid, yep. I left medium after being there for four years, raised little seed money and started lucid. Great.

So what, I know this very well as somebody who has a meditation app himself, this is very crowded space. So why did you want to jump into it? And does it worry you that it's crowded? And how did you think Lucid was gonna be different? Sure. So really the Genesis of Lucid started

in some ways with George Mumford. My co-founder is a friend of George, and my co-founder has a conference on which George speaks at most every year. We should name your co-founder. His name's Soren Gordhammer, and he started a comment called Wisdom 2.0. So Soren's a big figure and he's a big dude, he's a tall dude, he's a big figure in

sort of modern mindfulness movement and he started this conference that's now all over the country called Wisdom 2.0 so they have New York LA, San Francisco is the big one every year. And I think one why maybe a few other things. And so Soren will be on the show at some point. But anyway, so he's your partner and the two of you, he's friends with George, so the two of you teamed up. So when I left medium, I didn't know what I wanted to do.

But I know that I'd been in the online publishing space working with Ev Williams for almost a decade. And I was ready to kind of take on a new chapter in my life. So I left medium. I started to look at the things that were important to me, and I'm a tech startup guy through and through. I had found as a company's prior to Twitter, then Twitter and a medium, and I just love tech startups.

And so I'm a tech guy. I'm a sports junkie. I still play basketball three, four times a week, and follow all my favorite teams and players closely. And meditation has become really transformative for me over the last five or six years. And so I sense there might be something at the intersection of these three. I had no idea what it looked like. And I started talking with Soren, who I'd gotten to know.

I've been on some meditation or treats with him. And he had heard, actually through our friend, Michelle Gail at Twitter, who's also friends with him, he had heard that I had left a medium. And he had had this idea for some software to support the wisdom 2.0 community outside the conferences And to heard I was available so it called me up and Wanted about some ideas off me and I was looking for something to do so we started talking about Technology and mindfulness. You know, it's a real big passion of of sorens and mine now and We started looking at the landscape and definitely had no Desired to build another headspace or build another calm.

I think you're right. I think the space is really crowded. But part of the conversations always started talking about mindfulness for athletic performance. There'd been some research done showing that even a small meditative practice have a pretty significant effect on the quarter on the field or the horse or the pool or how we choose to perform. And so I was really interested. And that I've always been really interested in the peak performance and things like this. And me and Soren started talking about it. And he said, we should really talk to this George Mumford guy. Soren explained how he brought George into his home to teach his son and his basketball

son's basketball team meditation. And he said the most amazing thing happened. He said, and this is down in Santa Cruz in California. And he said, George showed up and he invited these basketball players and for a new way, a house full of these young, mostly African-American basketball players who would have never shown up. They probably wouldn't have shown up for the Dalai Lama,

but they showed up to meet the guy who taught Jordan and Kobe their competitive advantage. And so that's when something clicked for Soren that, I think we can reach athletes in a way that a headspacer or a column can't. And so I started talking to George, and George told me his amazing story, and he explained that he's been doing this work for almost 30 years now.

And he said, really only in the last few years have the elite athletes that he's been working with, been able to kind of point to him as their competitive advantage. And he says that's happened for a couple of reasons. One, there's this mindfulness trend that's happening. So it's becoming more accessible to talk about publicly when you're working on the organ between your ears.

Right. And it was embarrassing for a long time. Yeah, even when I first started getting into it, like 2009, 2010, it was like kind of embarrassing. For sure, for sure. And I remember, you know, a George did a lot of work with Phil Jackson, Phil Jackson, they called him the Zen Master,

but it was almost an assatera call. We got a joke away. Now it's something that athletes are starting to become proud of. And so they pointed Georgia and say, this is the guy that taught me what I knew. And coupled with that, the science behind what happens to your brain, which I'm sure you're familiar with when you have a meditative practice. There's overwhelming evidence now that shows that mindful or meditative practice can have a real significant effect on literally the physical makeup of your brain which controls

your body. And so the science behind it has allowed some athletes to kind of buy in and believe in it more. And so in Georgia, tell us a story and he was saying now that he says he's out of the closet now, what he does because athletes can talk about it. So he said his phone's ringing off the hook because if you're a professional athlete, you want the same competitive advantage

that Jordan or Kobe or Shaq or these Olympian that he worked with had. But Georgia's on staff with a Knicks now, because he works with Phil Jackson still and fills the GM over there. And does a market boss in college and he's getting older and his own travel as much. And so when he's telling us a story,

it would kind of of clicked me. I think we could use technology to scale the wisdom in George's head to a much bigger, broader global audience, specifically collegiate and high school and youth athletes who aren't being reached by the head space and columns and the Dalai Lama's of the world. But have this desire to be better at their sport and want that competitive advantage

to be great like a coveer Jordan. So, I want to talk about how the app actually works and what's in there and all that stuff. It's just a quick question. When I pick you up in the lobby to come up here into our radio studio to do this interview you were saying that you're in New York, you're living San Francisco. That's right. You were in New York doing some fundraising for the company. You're looking for venture capital money. I am new to this game myself of like talking to venture capitalists and building a business. And the thing that venture capitalists want to hear is,

how does it become a billion dollar company? Sure. I have like no idea how to answer that. That's why I have people around me who actually knows nothing about business. But what is your answer to that? How does is this a big enough market to target that it becomes a billion dollar company?

Yeah, so the way we're positioning Lucid is not another meditation app. We're producing Lucid as a mental skills training app for athletes. And it may be surprising, but there's nothing out there like what we're doing. And the headspaces and columns of the world, they're starting to sense that there could be an opportunity

to work with athletes, but they already kind of have a DNA and a profile in the world that isn't currently connecting with the demographic that we're targeting. And so an venture capital ask me, how's it gonna be a billion dollar business? One simple answer is, in the US alone, there's about 36 million youth athletes. And by our estimation, basically 0% of them have access to the sort of training.

So we have a business model in the app right now. It's a membership service, 10 bucks a month, that train with us through our app and work with George Mumpurge and Grand Batch Arts of the world. And that's going extremely well. However, we seem to be attracting a new breed of investor, and specifically venture capital investor, that are really looking to do something good in the world. And so we're finding some investors that really believe

in mindfulness and meditation and understand that we've crafted a product that's reaching a demographic that is not currently being reached. So the investors I get really excited about talking with are the investors where we can think about in 10 years when a whole new generation of young athletes is emerging and becoming the role models that the next generation is looking up to, what will the mindful athlete look like? And we're starting to see some models of that, but that's a thing that's really

the driving force behind Lucid. In fact, when I meet with an investor now that just wants to hammer me on engagement and business model and all that stuff, it's for me it's an indication like I don't think you're the right partner for us. It turns out there's some very notable investors that not only want to get into space because headspace and commerce are doing significantly well business wise, but they really want to do something good in the world and they think that Lucid is a way they can push this movement forward in a way that's not currently being pushed. Yeah, I mean, I almost want to give you money after listening to you talk. You know, because you're right, these are young athletes are people who are not being

reached by this message of, hey, you can train your mind to make it, as George says, zone ready. ready and given the outsized emotional role that athletes have in our culture, role model, the position of being role model locally, nationally, regionally, that if you have all these young people who are out there, you know, modeling these skills of mental fitness that could have an enormous, enormous multi-generational effect. So that's very cool. Yeah, that's what we believe. And we're already starting to work with some

elite athletes in the NFL and the NBA that are the role models for hundreds of thousand of not millions of kids. And they're starting to talk about this, they're starting to talk about Lucid, and we're starting to see the effect it has on the athletes they influence. And we're also working with about this, we're gonna talk about Lucid and we're starting to see the effect it has on the athletes they influence. And we're also working with, you know,

individual little high schools, little organizations, and what we found is that when kids start using Lucid and start performing better, they also start acting a little bit different. It's start being okay with failure, a little bit more, I start exhibiting self-compassion and empathy and all these things that are life skills that go far beyond,

you know, the athletic performance. But what we found is those personality traits are somewhat attractive. Confidence is attractive. We say that Lucid really helps build your confidence and focus and once athletes start using Lucid and start exhibiting some confidence and performing better, we found that the other players

on the team are like, what's going on with you? What are you doing? And Lucid is an answer to that question sometimes, and more importantly, when parents of other kids see how some kids are acting once they start training with Lucid, it has a real riveting effect on the surrounding community and environment, and I feel like we're doing something good in the world and it's spreading in that way, and that's exciting for us. So I mean, like, grownups talk a lot, or especially in the meditation world you hear a lot about mindfulness or emotional regulation, whatever, but but really for athletes it's more about not losing it. Yeah, and and people who can keep it together, that is, I mean, that comes off as cool and confident.

Absolutely, absolutely. What we know from George's work over the last 30 years and Graham's work over the last 10 years is that training your mind can have some really quantifiable, trackable performance on resulting performance on the corner of the field. And so one of the things we like to talk about their athletes is a concept We call next play speed and the ability to Be in the middle of a play and it go either really well or really poorly and how quickly can you move on to the next play? And this is something that we really believe that learning how to meditate and learn how to be in the present is kind of the

Foundation for this skill and so you watch, you can watch an NBA game and you can see a player shoot at three pointer. As soon as the ball leaves his hand, usually they're kind of watching it. If it bounced off the back of the rim, a lot of times you'll see the players like they sulk for a second. Their head goes down, their shoulders go down.

They curse themselves, you can see them being hard on themselves. And then you can watch them and you can count one, two, three. And then you can see at what point their head snaps back up and they're back in the game. And then once your head snaps back up, then it takes another couple of seconds to understand what's changed on the core to the field while you are out of it

for just a couple of seconds. A couple of seconds on a basketball court, that's, you know, there's lots of moving pieces that have changed. So that takes a couple more seconds, kind of re-assimulate yourself with the court and then know where to go. And so we believe that having a real strong meditative practice and really channeling

your ability to be in the present helps you reduce your next play speed to as close to zero as possible. And so what that manifests as self is when you release a player releases the ball, she to three pointer. Mature mentally strong player will realize at that moment, he or she has no control over whether the ball goes in or not. And so the best thing to do is don't worry about that and worry about what you should be worried about, which is the next play.

And so you can watch a guy like Steph Curry is a great example that he's he's Steph, launch a three pointer and he's so good he might already be taunting you before the ball goes in. But you can see as soon as he lets go he's so good he might already be taunting you before the ball goes in. But you can see as soon as he lets go, he's already serving for where he should go next. As opposed, you can look at some younger players in the league who clearly aren't as mentally tough as a guy like Steph or Aaron Gordon is a guy that's a really mentally tough guy. And you can see they watch the ball, they sulk, and you can almost start to read when they're present in the game and when they're not.

And what George would say is that, you know, being in the zone is really about just being present. And for players that have experienced that, like I'm in the zone, they feel like time slows down. And I feel like the game kind of comes to them. And what we know is the real secret there is the ability to be present in the way that be present. Train your ability to be present is through meditation. So how does the app work? Well, if I open it up, what do I get, what do I see? Yep.

So it's super simple. You open it up, you put your headphones in, there's a big play button in the middle and you hit play. Every day there's a new five minute workout for you. And the five minutes are usually structured with a little story or anecdote or some wisdom from Georgia from Graham. And then we go into what we call our MVP. And this is where we actually do all audio, no video. All audio right now. Yep. go to some wisdom from Georgia from Graham and then we go into what we call our MVP and

this is where we actually do all audio no video all audio right now. Yep. We have some video coming soon one thing that we found is that when we show young athletes guys like Aaron Gordon like meditating before a game it can start to normalize it for them in a way that we think is going to really help push this forward but it's currently all audio get a little bit of wisdom maybe cool little story, and then we do our MVP, just how we train, which is meditation, visualization, and positive affirmation. And so it's a couple minutes of sitting and breathing and returning to the breath and training that ability to become present. And then visualization is not sports-specific right

now, but we have kids imagining performing really well or imagining performing really poorly and starting to be aware of the feelings wrapped around those the successes or failures. And then we can help them learn how to be aware of those in real time during a game. And then positive affirmation. One thing that both George and Graham have found working with youth athletes is negative self talk is really inhibits youth athletes from performing, probably professional athletes also, but when you have young kids that, you know, I grew up playing basketball, I always told myself,

I'm just the, you know, I'm the slow skinny white guy who just shoots threes. And that's what I'm telling myself about myself, all I'm ever gonna be is a slow skinny white guy shooting threes. And so we have a whole list of positive affirmations that we have our athletes kind of repeat to themselves in their head toward the end of the practice. And then the last like 30 seconds is a, you know, congratulations, you showed up, you did it. They should feel good about that

and show up and do it again tomorrow. How are the positive affirmations, do you run the risk of being a little hoki there? I don't think so. The way that the practices are, I realize the word positive affirmation, I kind of think of, what's that guy's sad or not alive? Yes, Stuart Smolling. I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and not gone at people like me. That's not how our affirmation sound in the app. And our affirmations are coming from, you know, the grand

b棺 charge and George Mumpers. They're coming from respectable, credible figures, and they use terminology that athletes understand. They almost embody kind of a coach's attitude talking to an athlete, and when you have athletes repeating to themselves that it's okay to fail, things like that. That doesn't have any of the hokey, Stuart Smalley connotation to it, but having an athlete said sit himself over and over again

and starting to believe that is a pretty powerful concept. Hey there listeners, while we take a little break here, I want to tell you about another podcast that I think you'll like. It's called How I Built This, where host Guy Razz talks to founders behind some of the world's biggest and most innovative companies to learn how they built them from the ground up. Guy has sat down with hundreds of founders behind

well-known companies like Headspace, Manduka Yoga Mats, Soul Cycle, and Koto Paxi, as well as entrepreneurs working to solve some of the biggest problems of our time. Like developing technology that pulls energy from the ground to heat in cool homes, or even figuring out how to make drinking water from air and sunlight. Together, they discuss their entire journey from day one, and all the skills they had to learn along the way, like confronting big challenges, and how to lead through uncertainty. So, if you want to get inspired and learn how to think like an entrepreneur, check out how I built this wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen early and add free

on the Amazon or Wondery app. One more question about the business, because I think about this a lot, the meditation business, which some people have, by the way, mixed feelings about the, you know, that you should be a business. And I, you know, as somebody who considers himself a Buddhist, it's an interesting thing. But anyway, here I am, we both are in this business. Do you think is the meditation instruction, slash technology,

whether it's through apps or other technology, or even in-person trainings to, is this Uber where there's gonna be Uber and then lift and others just way, way behind and trying to sell themselves on successfully or is it gonna be like fast food? Where you have a finite number but like not, you know, not just one number of big brands.

Yep. I think it'll be closer to the latter and the reason I believe that is because you can look at, I think headspace is probably the predominant most popular app right now. Yeah. Well, the first mover and they're great. And they're great. And they're great. And they're great. They're a great team and we know Andy over there

and we really believe that the work he's doing. But we know when we look at our athletic demographic, like they're not connecting with headspace. And I also know some people that are not athletes want to get into meditation, but for whatever reason headspace, the headspace brand and Andy's voice in the app just doesn't resonate with them for some reason. And so, you know, in the same way that, you know, spiritual people kind of, kind of, kind of gravitate toward a religion that, that, that kind of resonates with them.

I think there's the opportunity for several headspaces, although I don't think it's something that becomes hundreds or thousands. I think there will be, you know, a small handful of leading brands in this space. I hope elucidated becomes a brand for mindfulness for athletic performance. But I do think that- I can't really see it. I mean, I can see it. Look, I don't know anything just to be clear. But I can really see it.

I mean, just listening to you talk about the business, it sounds awesome. Well, I think we stumbled into something that even we only launched the app two months ago, so we're very early. But we are getting emails almost daily from young athletes, parents, coaches, and professional athletes that are telling us about some really transformative things happening both on and off the field. And for me, that's incredibly validating. And as proud as I am of the work that we did

at Twitter early on and grew that system and now at Medium is growing and becoming a more important system to publish thoughts and ideas in the world, I've never felt like the nugget the offering at Lucid just feels so resonant and powerful in the world and it's a very like human-centric level. You know, we're hearing from parents that say their young daughter would have panic attacks before, you know, going to perform her ballet on the stage or something. And she heard about Lucid and after only a couple of weeks, she's learned how to take a few minutes to breathe before she performs and kind of get grounded. And not only did she dancing better on stage, but when she messes up, she's okay with it.

And you know, I have parents calling me in tears sometimes to say this is incredibly powerful. So I feel like we've opened the door to a little mindfulness drug in a specific community and it's really spreading and working well. So I'm really excited to see where this goes. Bravo, me too. So let me torture you specifically for a minute here. Because I read some articles about you and there were some things in there that were really, really interesting. And I think kind of connecting a way to mindfulness and or and its

twin skill of compassion. So there was a big article about you in this thing called holocrystic. That's right. Which was a management free technique that you, or structure that you guys tried to use at medium. That's right. First of all, what is medium for those of us who may not know much about it? And second, what is holocracy and how does it work? Sure.

So medium is a new publishing platform from one of the founders of Twitter. And it's a publisher, stories and ideas in the world that are longer than 140 characters. And it's a beautiful publishing platform. It's a network of people that love reading longer-form stuff. And it's growing rapidly. And a lot of old publications are moving all their content over to mediums, just a better system. And so that's what medium is. A place to share your stories and ideas in the world, which is the third chapter of Ev Williams' mission in life. He started, he did blogger, helped people kind of invented blogging, let people write their thoughts

and ideas down on the internet, which was a new concept 15 years ago. And he did Twitter, which I assume most your listeners have at least heard of. And medium is the next chapter in his mission to really facilitate the exchange of stories and ideas in the world. And so we started medium and there was only a handful of us, five or six of us, and we

grow to six, seven or eight. And we realized that we need some sort of structure in a company like any company does. And to have credit, he's always attracted to shiny new ways to perform better, which I think is one of the reasons he got into meditation because it was, you know, pitched to him as a way he could, you know, function at a higher level and that proved true. And he had a friend that was running a company and adopted this crazy system called Halakrasi. And Ev's friend explained to him that they adopted this new system in their company and it changed everything for them.

And they'll never go back to a traditional hierarchy of people with middle management and the way they operate is super fluid. And everyone is very autonomous, making a decision, and they're kind of just kicking ass. And so EBS said, well, that sounds pretty amazing. So let's check it out. So Evan had some research on holocracy, and it turns out it was founded in Pennsylvania maybe seven or eight years ago and by a software developer who was really into how organizations are structured, how they run, how they make decisions, how it can perform at a higher level. And so the founders came down and did what we called a taste today, well they kind of gave

us a taste of what holocracy is. And I said, you know what, this seems really compelling and we're going to try it. It's, I call it a crazy system because it kind of is. And it gets touted in the media as a manager list system, which is not a fair portrayal. Oh, but I kept saying that. So I was being unfair.

Well, I think that's the number one misconception about HALOCRACY. Oh, OK. And there is no role in Hocrycee called manager. So that is true. Whereas most companies have something called a manager. Right. But there are roles.

I have like 18 of them. There you go. There are roles in a holocratic organization that very much look and function like a managerial role, but they're not called managers. And so the idea of holocrycee is you still have a boss. You still have a boss. In fact, you have multiple bosses in most situations. It's a non-hierarchical system of getting work done

in an organization. And what it really promotes is a high degree of autonomy. So you want to distribute decision-making authority as far down the tree as possible. And now this is much different than most organizations. Most organizations are hierarchies in which the power resides at the top and at the bottom, it's not much decision-making authority. In fact, if a decision has to be made at the bottom of this tree,

usually it has to go up through the channels to someone at upper management or executive level, and it has to go back down through the channels once your decision is made. And usually the people at the top don't have as much information as the people at the bottom who need the decision made. And so, Halakosy tries to distribute that decision making authority as widely as possible, which takes a pretty innovative progressive guy

like Evoyums to say, you know what? I've made an unbelievable career of knowing how to build products and grow companies and run them well, but we're gonna try something different. Instead of all the decisions kind of getting bottled next to my level, we're gonna let kind of everyone in the company just kind of make their own decisions

and run fast and trust we don't, you know, crash this car with driving. But it seems like a recipe for chaos. Like I'm just gonna give you a tiny little example recently from within ABC News. I was supposed to go to Africa for two weeks for work to first shoot. And so it was kinda planned and we got it.

I had to get, because I worked for Nightline but also worked for Weekend GMA. And so I had to get the heads of both of those shows to be okay with it. We had to work on the budget. I had to get the heads of both of those shows to be okay with it. We had to work on the budget. I had to get it okay with my wife, but that's like a sort of extracurricular. And then kind of toward the end of it, I also have to get it okayed by the people who deal with all of where the various news anchors are at any given time.

Because we always need to have people nearby just in case like George Stephanopoulos is sick, maybe I need to fill in for him or whatever, we're just going to take a vacation. So somebody is like looking at that. And so we're pretty far along and then the decision got kicked up to the boss of ABC News and it was like actually I think this is a bad time for Dan to be away for a variety of reasons. Totally of reasons. Yeah.

Totally legit reasons. Sure. All of which to say had people lower down and been empowered to just make that decision, we might have gotten to Labor Day and the manager, whatever you want to call it, would have been like, where's Harris? So that's just one tiny example.

Aren't there, weren't there lots of moments? Aren't there lots of moments where Ev was like, wait a minute, you did what? Yeah, absolutely. And so, a couple of points. One, Halakrasi gives you the ability to be very explicit about who can make which decisions. So Ev could say, in my organization, I want Dan to be able to plan his own travel. And he's gonna be called all over the world to do some new stories.

And I want it to be okay for him to make that decision. Full well knowing that he might not always make the best decision, but we'll learn. And then if he makes a bad decision, that'll be learning for us and we'll be more robust because we'll put up some guard rails so he doesn't crash the car in the same way. Got you. Or this wholeocratic system allows you to say, that'll be learning for us and will be more robust because we'll put up some guard rails, it doesn't crash the car in the same way. Gotcha.

Or this whole acrylic system allows you to say, you know what, for this kind of decision, we actually need a pretty robust process and this is the process we're going to put in place. And so, it actually doesn't really dictate, it doesn't prescribe how to make decisions, but it gives you a tool set to let you build a system around decision making that allows you to be on one and highly autonomous and let anyone make any sort of decision with rules or constraints you put in place. Or for some decisions, there could be a really robust, complicated process that has to go

through. But one of the core tenets is when you described everyone who needed to sign off before you went to Africa, one way you could be looking at that is that kind of consensus building. You have to look around and get everyone to kind of chime in and say, okay, and what the founders of Holocrossy would argue is that consensus building is usually a lot of wasted time and effort to make it, it might be better just to make a decision and hopefully it's a good one, it's a bad one, you'll learn from it and you won't make it again. Yeah, interesting. I mean, I don't know if it's a wasted time or effort, but it's a good one, so bad one you'll learn from it, and you won't make it again. Yeah, interesting.

I mean, I don't know if it's wasted time or effort, but it's a lot of time and effort, either I don't want to make a judgment on it, but I read that medium has now abandoned holocracy as it's gotten bigger. That's right. So does that say that this principle does not scale? I don't think it's about scaling.

I'll say the reason that holocracy didn't work, I'll say Hologrosi worked at medium and they learned a lot and even after I left they're still practicing a lot of holocratic like practices at medium. For example, one of the things with Hologrosi is the meeting structure is very, there's a very strict structure around how you have meetings. It worked incredibly well. Meaning everybody gets to weigh in. Yeah, everyone has a chance to be heard on certain things,

but they move very fast and you get a lot done and you optimize for the output of the meeting. And that was a tremendous aspect of the hologramsy that they still adopt at medium. But what we found was as we were growing and we started growing fast and adding people to the team every week, when you start a new job, you already come in with some anxiety. It's like, where am I going to sit, who am I going to have lunch with, how am I going to impress my boss, and people kind of come in with some nervousness

and anxiety. That's just because we're humans and we join a new organization. And when you throw on top of that, that all still exists because you're new to this organization. And we have this system of structuring and running a company that's, you've never heard of before. It's very complicated. The actual, the rules of the Halakrasi game that we play exist in like a 30 or 40 page constitution, which reads like a legal contract. So you slap that on their desk and say, here's a system we use. Don't worry about it, you'll get to learn it, but it really affects how employees operate day to day.

And so we found that there was a real big anxiety spike when new people joined. A lot of new people mature engineers and designers, they were attracted to a new and better system, but it was still caused a big anxiety spike. And then most recently, Zappos was the biggest company to adopt Velocracyme, and that they made some kind of ripples in the press

about this new structure that a big company was adopting. Prior to Zappos, medium was the biggest and most notable company to have done it. And so, as we were hiring tech people in Silicon Valley, the word got out that we had this other system, and it became just a conversation we had this other system, and it became just a conversation we had to have all the time, I think. Oh, yeah, because you gave me a look when I said I was going to bring it up like, oh man,

you're going to talk about that. Well, I probably did because it's incredibly hard to talk about because it's incredibly complicated. And that's ultimately the reason that... You did a good job of not getting overly arcane, but giving me a sense of it. Okay, well, I've done this in the multiple times, it's a bit higher at medium, but really even the things that I just explained,

you are really scratching the surface of the block, so it's a very complicated system. And that complication, when it's how you literally structure and run your company, there's a huge onboarding tax you have to pay to get someone up and running in the new system. And then there's this persistent tax

that you kind of have to keep working and relearning and putting into practice and readjusting. And that ever present tax has started to really weigh heavily on the organization, especially as we scaled from five people to 100 people. And a couple years, a good portion of those hundred were really new to this. So it did create a lot of questions,

and not chaos, but it would have been a lot easier how do we say we're just a traditional organization like every other organization you've seen. Now let's get to work. So I guess the reason why I wanted to talk about it is not that I'm interested in the minutia of management Theory sure but because there seem to be an emotional component to it because as I've read you did not like being a manager

There was something about treating people as resources. Yeah, that's struck you as wrong That's right. So I was at Twitter at Twitter. Yeah And when I when we heard about Haloxy at meeting him I was at Twitter. At Twitter, yeah. And when we heard about Haloxy at Medium, I was really drawn to it because it had a very human element to it. And so when I was at Twitter, I managed some teams. And being always into peak performance and wanting to connect with people, I was reading all the management books.

A lot of my mentors were helping me kind of become a better manager in a traditional sense of the word. And when you think about a high output management, you can look at your team and view them as like resources. In fact, like the term human resources, I hate it because it's like a resource is like a coal mine. You know, that you're trying to extract some valuable resource, right.

And, you know, I looked at my team at Twitter and I'm incapable of looking at them as resources. Yes, they have to be productive for my team to be successful. But their human beings with families and stresses and emotions. And I felt like the more I attended to them as humans and less as machines that could output something of value,

the higher functioning my team would be. And did that actually work? Or was it nice cotton candy? Always worked. Really? And measurably. Measurably. My team at Twitter was often touted

as one of the highest performing teams and one of the happiest. And what do your team do? So we built internal tools at Twitter. So we built software for everyone else internally at Twitter to make their job easier, automate what they're doing, or make their life easier. So when I really tended to the humans on my team, I felt like that's when we performed at a really high level. And so when, you know, fast forward two or three years, and I hear about this haloxy system, and it just had a real strong acknowledgement that an organization is made up of humans, not robots, and that really resonated with me, and how that manifests itself in the company

is, I'll give you one example. One of the things that haloxy teaches is how to understand you might have attention at work and how to process your tension. And so the way Haloxi defines tension is not necessarily a negative thing. It doesn't mean like I'm stressed out and I'm about to crack. It means I realize there's a difference

in what is and what could be. And there's a tension there. So tension could be, I have this amazing idea and I don't know what to do with it. That's attention. Tension could be, I hate my amazing idea and I don't know what to do with it. That's attention. Tension could be, I hate my co-workers. That's also attention.

Attention could be, I'm not happy with the product we built. And so, Halak actually gives you this language called Tensions where you go to this meeting, which is quite literally a tension processing meeting. And everyone has the ability to put their tensions on the table. And then the meetings are facilitated by a facilitator who, as quickly as possible, resolves all of the tensions. And this is where the meeting structure gets really important because say we have, you know, eight people in this meeting, we have an hour, we go through and we list all of our

tensions and it's not unusual to get maybe 20 tensions on the table, maybe sometimes even 30. And the facilitator has to resolve every tension before the meeting is up. That is the rule of the meeting. And so to resolve attention, it doesn't mean, in halokshy, it doesn't mean that you find the optimal solution. It doesn't mean that the tension no longer exists, but it means as quickly as possible, you identify a next step, a road forward.

A road forward. And as soon as you identify that next step, that tension is resolved for the time being, and you move on to the next one. And a couple of things that relate to meditation and mindfulness here, to acknowledge attention at work is a very mindful thing, to be able to step back and think, I'm feeling stressed or I'm feeling like my shoulders are at my ears. Something's not right, what is it that's making me feel this way? I think without having a culture rooted in meditation

and mindfulness, it would be easy just to plow through. Those things are trying to brute force you away out of that feeling. But to be able to just sit back and take a breath and kind of think like, what is it that's really bothering me here and realize what your tension is? And then bring it to a meeting where there's a system in place to resolve your tension is a very human thing

to do. And what it caused at medium was an incredible level of trust and respect and transparency and vulnerability at the company, which I think are, those are all the human elements that I think we really did good of nurturing at medium, which caused us to perform better. When you trust your coworkers,

it turns out you can move a little bit faster and make some riskier decisions. And so I really got to see the effect of this really human-centric organization on a really high-performing tech team in Silicon Valley. And, but you're not using holocracy at Lucid. That's right. Maybe some of the components of it,

but not the actual trick. Absolutely, absolutely. But before we go, you've been very patient with me, and this has been super interesting. But I want to just get you to explain this little fun fact that you owned an auto repair shop. I did. Why?

Nothing against auto repair. I just didn't think that that would be in your wheelhouse. It is not in my wheelhouse. In fact, to this day, I can barely open the hood of my own car. If I do open the hood of my own car, I definitely can't tell you what's underneath it.

So what were you doing? I was coming out of a time where I had been doing some freelance coding and design works. This is pre-twitter. Pre-twitter, I was in Texas. I always had to come and entrepreneurial kind of itch that I needed to scratch, and so I was always kind of making things in the world and playing with different ideas.

And my dad had a friend who ran this auto repair shop, and he was looking to sell it. And he had a deal and this deal was about to get closed. And right before the deal closed, the whole deal felt through, well, my dad's friend had already moved on and started a next business. And so there was this shop that was kind of looking to for someone to come in and run at him.

So I remember my dad, Candamene, he said, you know, I know you have an entrepreneur spirit. He always talk about running a small business. Here's an opportunity for you to run a small business. And I said, yeah, but I have no idea how to fix a car. And so I said, I know, but we had another friend that had run a shop, was currently running a shop and looking for a new location.

So I went in kind of 50, 50 with this guy. Well, right after we did that the the audio industry stopped doing so well and people were buying new cars not fixing their old cars and my partner had to really maintain his shop and so it kind of let me stranded at my shop. And so here I was maybe 23-24 years old city behind behind the desk, running an auto shop where people come in to these things, already kind of like, like their guards up, their combats, their cars not working. And they come in, and this is in Texas where these guys are these, you know, bringing

their big trucks, you know, how much to fix the Madoulab longada on my four by four, and most times I literally had no idea what they were asking me. And so I had to kind of put on this face like, let me go check. I lasted at the shop for about a year. That was pretty good. And I will say, it's a horrible idea to own a business in which you have no industry knowledge. Okay, that's a big learning.

Yes. However, that year, I think, taught me more about running a business than anything I ever could have learned in any sort of MBA program or business school And you know, I was the the owner the salesman I ended up changing tires and changing oil and doing the finances and Showing up at five a.m. To make sure that bathroom was more clean for the customer and you know, that was I've always been a pretty happy Optimistic cheery guy and that year of my life, I like to describe as the dark ages. That was not a happy time for me,

but sometimes it takes being uncomfortable to really learn and grow. I think that's absolutely true. And it certainly applies to meditation. Sure. Jason, thank you very much. Of course, that's right. If people want to get lucid work and they do it.

Get lucid.com. Get lucid.com. Get lucid.com, yeah, check it out. All right. There's another edition of the 10% happier podcast If you like it, I'm gonna hit you up for a favor. Please subscribe to it review it and rate it I want to also thank the people who produced this podcast Josh co-hand Lauren Efron Sarah Amos and the head of ABC News Digital Dan Silver and Hit me up at Twitter, Dan B. Harris. See you next time.

[♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ 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 1-3-0.com-slave-a. you