Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 91: Anurag Gupta, Attorney 'Hacking' Unconscious Bias

Episode Date: August 2, 2017

Anurag Gupta, who immigrated to the U.S. from India at age 10, has devoted much of his adult life to helping reduce racial inequality and transform bias into awareness and understanding with mindfulness techniques. An attorney and mindfulness expert, Gupta founded BE MORE America, a non-profit that works with various organizations, including hospitals, banks, tech firms and police academies, to train professionals on how to eliminate bias in hiring and decision making. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

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

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

the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad. Where did memes come from. And where's Tom from MySpace? Listen to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, it's Dan. Before we jump into this week's conversation, which is a really good and really important one, I just want to tell you that something new we're doing at the 10% happier app as part of our top secret corporate research by which I mean talking to customers and ex-customers. It's become very clear to us what is probably blazingly obvious.

Anyway, which is that the number one obstacle to meditation for people is time. People just feel like they don't have the time, which I get. So we've got a whole new initiative we're doing around one minute counts. That's our new slogan. I guess I should say mantra since it's a meditation context. One minute really does count actually. And you may have heard a while ago we had a guest Corey Muscarra is a great meditation teacher. He was not only a guest, he also came in and taught another guest how to meditate on a

separate episode. And Corey in the course of our podcast talked about, he actually really agrees that one minute counts. And he actually said something that really got me thinking. He said that if you can get your butt in the chair to do one minute, at the end of that one minute, there's a key moment where you may decide, okay, I've been here for one minute, I'll do another minute.

And that moment is a huge moment from the standpoint of behavior change, your habit formation, because at that point you're going from exogenous external expectations to really an internal decision of, oh yeah, I'm here, I'm going to do more, and then you're on your own steam there in a really different sort of way. So what we've done on the app is we've created all these one minute meditations, but they're adjustable length. So as soon as you get to the end of the one minute, you can either finish or you can re-up and do another one,

maybe another one after that, and another one after that, and see where it takes you. So we've got a bunch of these up there from people like Sharon Salisberg, 70 Slassy, Jake Michelson, a new teacher. We're working with them, they met you Hepburn. So go check it out.

That being said, I want wanna see our guest for this week who is truly doing important work. And I think it's gonna be a really thought-provoking listen for you. His name is Anorag Gupta, and he not only has a lot of experience doing meditation, but he has thought quite deeply about racism and bias in our culture, which is to state.

The obvious, a massive problem. And he's thought a lot about ways in which meditation can be useful on this front. So without further ado, here he is. From ABC, this is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Thank you very much for doing this. Really appreciate it. Thank you for having me.

I'm really interested to hear about your work. I think it's a massive societal, economic, cultural, moral importance. But I want to start with just getting to know you a little bit because we haven't met although we do have a really good mutual friend, Seb Celassi, prior guest on this podcast. So how did you get into meditation? Well, I come from a family, a Hindu family, and my grandmother actually was the first person with whom I meditated, and my mother introduced me to Kriya Yoga, which was a lot of pranayama and really learning about breathwork.

And then I... Kriya Yoga. Is that one of the popular kinds of yoga taught these days? Yeah, I mean, it was not, I mean, it's part of the yoga teacher training programs across the country and the world now, but it was really brought to the West in 1920

by Paramahansa Yogananda with the Self Realization Fellowship. Okay, so. That I've heard of, but not familiar with, and you sent me a little note about your background, you mentioned this, but I, the Self Realrealization fellowship. Indeed.

Indeed. It was kind of a way to fuse yogic philosophies of India with the Christian yogic philosophies of Jesus. So, my mother has been a student of that. So, she introduced me to that in college when I formally started meditating. So about 15 years ago, in an afro college I moved to South Korea, I was on a full bright there,

and I was assigned to teaching, which had a Buddhist school. So that was kind of my foray into full-on Zen practice, what they call sun Buddhism. So just so I've got my concept correct here, so when you were meditating in the Hindu context, was it more of a mantra meditation? Actually, there are mantra meditations, but Kriya Yoga was very much around the breath.

Okay. So it was really noting the breath, and very similar to the post-ino practice, actually, the ones that I was doing. Very similar to basic mindfulness, where you're aware of the breath coming in and going out, when you get lost you start again. You said that earlier when you first mentioned it, but I thought you were talking about being aware of the breath as you practice yoga, but you're actually talking about a meditation where you're just feeling the breath coming in and going out. And then also being able to control the breath. So a lot of pranayama practices, which is really around, you know, staggered breath,

counting along the line. So really being able to see the state of the mind as you're breathing. Huh. And so then you got into, you were doing Buddhist meditation. Did you say Korea? In South Korea. And then I was also, so I'll back up a little bit. I was always very interested in international development

and human rights. And when I was in college, my first year of college, I read about Dalong Sansuchi. So she is now one of the leaders of Burma, the country, what we call now, Myanmar. And I was just so thrilled by her story and just moved by it that I wanted to work in Burma. So as an American at that time

I couldn't go to Burma because of the totalitarian regime there. So I figured out a way to go there after college, which was why I went to Korea to start a nonprofit there in Burma actually. And there I was also introduced Buddhist practice in the Insight tradition, in the Vipassana tradition, so teravada Buddhism. So that's where it all began. So you were a kid at that time? Well, yeah, right after college, I was 21 at the time. How old you now?

You're still a kid. I'm 31, I'm 31, I'm 31. I'm pretty adult man. But from my vantage point of 45, you're young. Take it as a compliment. Thank you. It does not mean I don't take you seriously. It just means I'm amvious, is what really what it means.

So, you've been kind of steeped in the stuff for a while. I mean, this is my life. I mean, there's nothing more that I love about living today than the Dharma and mindfulness practices and meditation. So when you started by having exposure to both Burma and South Korea, what has that meant? How serious have you gotten about the practice? Did you go live in a monastery? Did you or did you just become a daily 30-minute a day thing? What's the dosage? Both actually, so I did a month-long retreat. I became a monastic in the Chan tradition in Taiwan. I literally just went on a program that was geared towards Western students of Buddhism

and really began to experience mindfulness and solitude altogether with a lot of devotional practices that are common in the contradition, but then also, of course, having a daily practice, have done over almost two dozen retreats across inside centers in the US. You mentioned some of them in the past in spirit, Rah, Khymas. I sit on the board of BCBS, which is a sister organization of Inside Meditation Society. BCBS, Barry Center for Buddhist Studies. Is he? Barry is spelled B-A-R-R-E. It's an amazing, Barry messages is where the Inside Meditation Society is, which was founded

by Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Salisberg and Jack Cornfield and it's where I do a lot of retreats. You do retreats as well. But it's kind of like a Buddhist Epcot center out there I mean, or it's like they've got they've got IMS which is a retreat center They also have a the forest refuge which is a retreat center for advanced students and then BCBS the Barry Center for Buddhist studies Which is a place where you can both practice meditation and also learn about Buddhism and in its many different flavors and I've never actually taken a course at BCBS, but they offer online courses,

which I think are superb. Yes. And you ought to visit. I've visited it in, but I've never actually sat. So anyway, so yes, you were listing off your basic, Darmic credentials there. Yeah, but basically, I mean, regardless of those, I mean, those opportunities really allowed me to become really intimate with my mind and really

understand the nature of the mind and how I was filled with so much violence towards myself, which really has percolated into the work that I've done prior to coming to mindfulness, but also since. What do you mean by that violence towards yourself? So basically, I immigrated to the US when I was 10 from India. So I grew up in Delhi and there was three things that were happening simultaneously. One thing is that I've always been really, really passionate about service, like giving back. And that's definitely something that I received from my family members. But also, I grew up in a very, very, I would say, emotionally unstable family.

Everybody is together, but there's a lot of issues that aren't talked about, issues like but there's a lot of issues that aren't talked about, issues like death and suicides and just arranged marriages which comes out in interpersonal, emotional violence. So experiencing that, I was already feeling like, oh, there's something wrong with me. Coming to the US, this was, you know, in the mid-90s and then 9-11 happening, I became oftentimes the subject of attack, mostly verbal, you know, being called a somber bin Laden, just walking down the street or on the subway quite often, or just feeling like I've been other and almost not human because of the way I looked. So that kind of perpetuated a whole sense of self-loading, which for me was difficult on the one hand, but the way I escaped

it was through achievement, doing really well at school, trying to prove myself as much as possible. And I did, I achieved a lot at a young age, as you said. I was addicted. Like that was my addiction, as a chief man, getting incredibly good grades, getting scholarships, being admitted to some of the most prestigious universities in the country, of four degrees, in different disciplines, including being a lawyer.

But there was always a sense of not being enough. And it was my mindfulness practice that really allowed me to understand the nature of that. You could have lived a high achieving but quite unhappy life without that. Agreed, I totally agree. Well, that's really interesting. So that fed into what you're doing now.

Be more America. Tell me about the organization that I have a thousand questions from there. Sounds great. So be more America. Actually, it stands, it's an acronym, be more itself, and it stands for beyond equality, the movement of opportunities rising for everyone more. And this idea really was conceived through my mindfulness practice as I was struggling with the amount of inequity that I saw in our world, but particularly in America after going to law school.

But also the amount of inefficiencies that I saw in our systems. So as someone who thinks in systems and was pursuing an academic career prior to going to law school, I was just like, wow, there's so much wasted costs and wasted human talent because of this thing that we have, that we call bias. And I also saw that in the world of inclusion and diversity, there's a lot of policing that goes on of people. There's a lot of shame and guilt and woundedness that we see. And we're constantly trying to show other people that they're wrong. Or these are how I felt. It's not a generalization about the entire industry.

And for someone who was experiencing a lot of that myself, once I began intimate with my own being, I was like, wait, no, like I'm okay, right? So my mindfulness practice of the first five years was just metaferself. We should define that. METTA is loving kindness and often it's a practice that you send to other people, but the first step generally is self-compassion.

Loving kindness for yourself and a lot of people have a hard time with that and sounds like you properly diagnosed yourself with somebody who needed to dive deeply into that. And thanks to the guidance of a lot of my teachers, including Sharon Salisberg, who saw that, they were like, wait, you need to start there. There's something blocking you from seeing the bigger picture. And then on a retreat with what I was just, you know, after law school, I was working in at a big think tank, but we're working on issues of criminal justice. And because it was a systems-oriented organization,

I was able to see a lot of just massive disparities what there came to prison populations, and who was being arrested, but also for how long people are going to prison, and sitting in the courtroom and seeing judges, sentence, young African-American children, 15, 16 years old, to jail for like four or five years for possession of marijuana, where I was like, well, in law school, like a lot of my classmates would have that much all the time, and they would be

smoking, but nothing would be made out of that. So I just saw that this is unfair. Not that my colleagues from law school should be arrested and thrown into prison, but I'm just saying that what is behind some of these systemic ways of being and what's needed to shift that? And you really think it's implicit bias. The judges aren't doing this because they hate young black people. It's because they are loaded up with a bunch of cultural assumptions that they're not even

aware of because it's mindless. Precisely. Of course, there's conscious bias out there as well, which is explicit bias, but the vast majority of bias that we've seen are country today, and the world is implicit, which is, again, like you said, implicit bias are ingrained habits of thought that lead to errors in the way we make decisions, in the way we perceive and reason and remember things. And that's, again, it's a mindfulness practice because as human beings, first of all, we're animals. So we have a brain and we have a nervous system and we receive stimuli from our five

senses and we make associations with all of the, that stimuli, visual stimuli being one of those things. So how are we, you know, making those associations when we see human beings of different color, the different size of the different genders and how is that impacting the decisions we're making? Isn't some of it adaptive? We adapted to make judgments very quickly because it paid off. Oh, that's a saber-toothed tiger. I should run away. So isn't some of the sizing up we do quickly? Aren't there benefits to some of that? Absolutely. I think that we need to know the difference between a tiger and a puppy, you know, a kitten and like a giraffe for sure.

But what about with human beings? Like, I just get a bad vibe off that person. I don't, I don't know if I want to sign my company over to them or whatever it is. Right. So a lot of that, so the vibe aspect is the whole aura of a person. Yes. Being with them, looking at their temperament, their facial expressions, their verbal nonverbal, how they're communicating. But when it comes to implicit bias, and let's talk about implicit racial bias,

so for example, judges on average, sentence, black, man, 18 months longer, then non-black defendants, for the same exact crime, controlling for all other factors. Did you see the documentary 13th? Of course. I mean, incredibly powerful. Yeah, so what's going on there, right? So for me, as someone again, who studied this stuff because I was like, I want to know

the root of this. So I had a professor in law school, a professor, Derek Bell, who's passed away by a teacher. Sure, sure. He's very famous at Harvard Law School, professor, Derek Bell, yeah. Exactly. He was professor of former president professor, Derek Bell, yeah. Exactly. He was a professor of former president, Barack Obama's, and he basically coined this thing called critical race theory.

And he and I would disagree on one thing. You know, I adored him as an academic, but the one thing we disagreed upon was that racism is permanent because as someone who practices the Dharma and the mind from the practitioner like, well, nothing is permanent, everything is impermanent, then when you really go to the roots of racism, race as a construct is very recent, right? And I don't want people to conflate race with ethnicity, with nationality, with citizenship, with religion,

which is where a lot of anti-Semitism comes in, but race as in looking at someone's appearance and assuming their geographic background, you know, African or Asian or Native American, and then making assumptions about that. So currently in all of our systems, we ask people, what is your race? Well, you know, the human genome project proved that there's no genetic or biological basis for race. It's been 17 years since they've coded the entire human DNA.

And they've actually found that there are actually people from different quote unquote racial backgrounds, maybe more genetically similar than people in the same quote unquote racial category. Well, how do you define the difference between race and ethnicity? It's a great question. So I define race as a human hierarchy that was constructed in the 17th century by a bunch of pseudo scientists who love to collect skulls and body parts of people

from across the world, people like Linnaeus, Woomingbach, and then put them on a hierarchy of competence and aesthetic. And that was very much based on their subjective beliefs. And but basically that idea just percolated and that was very much based on their subjective beliefs. But basically that idea just percolated across the world, you know, through academics, through scholarship. Also influencing our founding fathers, so the Nationality Act, the Citizenship Act,

the US, in 1791, required that any free white person may be admitted to become a citizen. So this idea of whiteness and being European was invented. And that didn't change until 1965 with the Immigration Act. It's invented, but it's based on some, I mean, obviously putting in a hierarchy is deeply problematic. But I am of Caucasian extraction, right? That's kind of inarguable, right? I mean, I may have different, who knows what happened in my gene pool leading up to me?

I have no idea. But your family comes from India, right? So that is a fact. So how do we untangle that from race and where does ethnicity come in and all that? So I apologize for my ignorance here, but I'm learning from you. No apologies necessary, and I think this was the best question you could have asked me today. Because the myth of Caucasianness was just invented in the 1790s,

based on a skull of a formerly enslaved woman from the region of the Caucasus, what is now the country of Georgia. So there is a scientist, in Bloomingbach, in German scientists, who had the largest skull collection of any person in the world. And the Russians are at the time,

was a friend of his, sent him the skull. And because the skull was from this region of the Caucasus, he anointed that skull, the name, Caucasoid the skull was from this region of the Caucasus, he anointed that skull, the name, Caucasoid, to make it sound scientific. And then simultaneously to that, he had four other skulls, Americanoid, Africanoid, Mongoloid, Malayaoid, and hence we have racial hierarchy. But if you think about modern-day Europe, Europe in the 17th century, 18th century, it was an incredibly diverse group of people. There was a lot of infighting. There was not very much

trust between them. And there was differences of religion, of ethnicity, of language, you name it. And also, there have been invaders pouring through from all over. All over. And there's so many mixtures and inner mixtures between them. We have no idea what those mixtures are. But because this story has been created, and it's been adopted by influential people, right? Influential leaders of countries, of companies, of academia, the story is percolated and kind of seeped into the human consciousness. So the better question would not be race, it would be ethnicity.

Exactly. And that would be ethnicity. Exactly. And that would be a much longer list. It's a much longer list, and ethnicity really isn't contingent upon one's phenotype exclusively, though it could be, right? Cino-type. Phenotype is people's appearance, physical appearance, how they appear in the world.

Their skin color, their facial features, their hair texture, your name it. But you can be an Italian, you can be ethnically Italian and be very dark skin, or someone dark skin or very light skin with light hair, but you're Italian. So ethnicity is really where you share a sense of history, a culture, oftentimes language, also spirituality with a group of people. And sometimes you also share physical attributes with the people from that group, but not necessarily.

So I would say African-Americans, for example, are an ethnicity because they have a very unique culture that they've developed because of the experience of enslavement and then Jim Crow. But African-American culture is very different from, you know, Kenyan culture or, you know, Nigerian culture. And they're loved into the same race. Precisely. Even though ethnically African Americans are actually predominantly mixed, and you can actually be more European in terms of the genetic pool, but still be called African American because of the one drop rule. And that's where some of the trouble around this hierarchy is.

And for me, as someone who wants to really unleash human potential, I think we have to overcome this separation, and this fictional idea has created, and so much misery and suffering also. No question. How do we overcome it and what role does mindfulness play? So for me personally, as someone who kind of broke my own bias, you know, and really understood it for myself, I think. Broke your own bias, meaning towards yourself or like you don't tell yourself some big story when I walk in the room. You're not like, okay, this is a white guy who's wearing a collar shirt, probably grew up privileged and whatever story you might spin. Both and, actually, broke my own vise around how I thought of myself, you know, and my potential

is what I could do and what I couldn't do based on my appearance and my ethnic background. But also the things I was assuming about people before I even talked to them based purely on what they looked like and I think for me it was the mindfulness practice that really helped do that but it's so I'll give you an anecdote so I was sitting on a retreat with Sharon Saliswarka it was one of the week-long loving-kindness practice and towards the middle of the week we started doing a forgiveness practice literally all day. So if you think about you know, meditating for 16 hours and just doing forgiveness, after

a while you just get like super, super sensitive and I began thinking about all the times I had harmed other people a lot of times white people by the thoughts I was carrying and how I was using even the word white in a way to dehumanize them. And that's when I began to see the seeds of violence in my own being towards myself of course because I'd been practicing for a while but also towards other people. So then I began questioning, so what is the difference between me and them? If someone is calling me, or someone has been letting me, without knowing anything about my spiritual background, my ethnic background, they have those seeds, and they're feeding those seeds, but I too am doing that, and I'm unable to see the humanity in the other

person. And look, most of the teachers that have brought me the practice of mindfulness are white. Or what we call white today. So I think that was when I was like, wow, there's something, there's something here, there's something here. And then the more I practice, the more I see it, percolating into reality. Celebrity feuds are high stakes.

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And it's about a movement to save a superstar, which set its sights upon anyone who failed to fight for Brittany. Follow Dissentel wherever you get your podcast. You can listen ad free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app. So for me, how do we do this? I mean, back to your question, there's two things. Mindfulness really allows us to be aware of what's going on, right?

So the four foundations of mindfulness, for example, we talk about the body, you know, feeling tone, thoughts, emotions, and hindrances and all sorts of things. So it allows us to become aware of it. But for me, it's also coupling that awareness with understanding. So this is where the information gap is in our society. A lot of us aren't taught that race is a fiction when it comes to biology and genetics. A lot of us are not taught how it came about. A lot of us aren't taught its implications in the world. A lot of us aren't taught how these implicit unconscious beliefs percolate into decision-making that not only prevent

many people from getting jobs or being compensated fairly or equitably as other people, but also is super expensive for companies. Like, for example, racial disparities in healthcare on an annual basis cost the US economy $310 billion. Why? Because what happens is the assumptions that healthcare practitioners may be making about the patients, which makes them come back and back and repeat visits over and over again. Right. And I saw some statistics about African Americans are much like likely to get pain

meant precisely precisely. That is wild. We're actually working on a study around this but that's from toddlers to senior citizens. Unbelievable. And this is not just white doctors. Like I want to be very clear that a majority of African Americans have an implicit bias towards African Americans, 55% in fact. Well this was true. This comes out in 13th because you hear in this documentary that ran on Netflix, which I highly recommend.

It's about the American criminal justice system and they sort of baked in prejudice against African Americans. And I'm not sure I'm going to nail this correctly, but they talk about the way news covers the African American communities. It convinces a lot of African Americans to be scared of other African Americans. Precisely.

And it's like the myth of criminality, right? So they actually point to the source of this movie, in the birth of a nation. And how that myth, that story, has really percolated not just our country, but across the world as a result. So, and that's the association. So, despite being egalitarian, despite having a wife and a partner and a children who may be black, my implicit associations immediately go to what I saw in the news, what I saw in

that movie. And unless I'm able to hack that, unless I'm able to recognize and become aware of that, and create space between entertainment and news media from real life, I'm going to be going to those autopilots. And that if I am the head of a hospital, if I am the head of a tech company, that's going to go into my decision making So but how do you have I mean I've been meditating for a little while not like forever but eight years right and I I Am increasingly aware and ashamed of my bias that's becoming that I when I see it operating

But I don't feel like I've hacked it. And I don't think most people are gonna do the amount of meditation I do. So how do you use mindfulness to some measurable effect on a society-wide basis? I think it's such a great question. And I think first of all, responding to you, and you said that you were ashamed, right? Yes.

First thing we have to do is really address that shame You know one of my favorite teachers in the world is burning around Who you know is a scholar is a shame scholar based out of university of Texas and Shame prevents us from behavior change because it already acknowledges that we're bad who are always gonna be bad But it's to acknowledge the underlining feelings and emotions around it. And people say, oh, shame is here. So not dismissing it. It was like, oh, wow, why is it here? Oh, because I'm not living up to the promise of my values. I stand for equity. I stand for justice. I stand for being free and loving towards all people, but my thoughts aren't. But then also giving yourself a break that, oh, wait, I'm an animal.

And my brain is a product of the environment and the culture I'm living in and have lived in all my life. So it's just repeating to me what I saw, those were the inputs. So can I cut myself a slack, some slack and create some space there? And now then it's time to rewire. And that's where mindfulness comes in. So our goal, and you're right, no one can just practice mindfulness the way you and I do, for example.

And we do it because there's a host of personal benefits that we get out of it. But for us, it'd be more. It's not just mindfulness practices, which we institute, and we hope can become a part of company cultures, whether it's in hospitals or banks or, you know, tech firms or even police academies, but also understanding the nature of bias and how it operates in the brain, understanding the origins of these stories and the assumptions,

and pinpointing to them. So that becomes a part of our becoming professionals, becoming doctors, becoming police officers, becoming nurses, becoming investment thinkers. So those decisions aren't those beliefs aren't percolating into what is the situation. You're training corporations and institutions on how to combat implicit bias. And I wouldn't even use the adversarial language as to how to transform and hack it. Right, right.

I knew this as I said, combat that you were gonna do. Somehow, I just, somehow I knew that was gonna be a problem. So walk me through the moment then. So you're hiring. You are a you're hiring. You are new are hiring and I walk in the door and you take a look at me and maybe the pre meditation you would have spun a whole bunch of yarns based on how I present in the world what I'm wearing, what my skin color is, how my hair is combed or not combed or whatever how has that changed now and how can it

change for the rest of us that literally the moment of looking at somebody and you how does it go for you now you see the stories arise and you just see them for what they are or the stories don't come up so interesting I think it depends on the context. It depends on how long I've sat in the morning, that day. It depends on if I've eaten or not. But what happens is, for the most part, for me, when I'm meeting someone new, I'm like,

oh, someone new. Oh, person. And I mean, of course, I use labels. Man, woman, looks African-American, looks Latino, but any of those associations that might accompany it, they're not there. So African-American becomes really loaded in our culture, you know, black in general, but those associations have been able to really decouple them. So I walk in the door, you say, looks white, but you're not thinking definitely shops at Whole Foods or definitely listens to NPR, whatever.

Or even if you do think it, you're able to see it and not be knocked around by it. Well, when you walked in, it was like, oh my god, Dan Harris. But yes, someone who may look like you or share your ethnic background, that's what I would say, think. And so what about for me then? Because I think, as I said at the beginning, that I do think this is an issue of towering importance on so many levels, economic, moral, cultural, societal. But I do, and I take it really seriously, and yet I do, I'm aware that I'm probably unaware

of so many of these stories that percolate up when I see another human being and that I act on unconsciously. And I'm a meditator. What would you recommend? How can I address this? I think first of all, the coolest thing now, which we didn't have as human beings before maybe like 25 years ago, is that we can measure implicit bias.

There's something called the implicit association test. It was invented by a few social psychologists at Bitharver. And they have created this thing that it's literally a two-minute matching game where you're basically, it's a dual categorization task where they're flashing images and positive and negative words at you. So it's images of black people and white people and positive words and negative words. And you just have to match them as quickly as possible. And what's happened is that sometimes, not sometimes most of the times when white faces are in the same category as

positive words, people are faster than the close association. I bet this would be a humbling thing for me and many other people to go through. I would highly encourage everybody to go online to take the test. With that said, once you learn your results, don't assume that this means you're racist or sexist. If you take the gender test or homophobic, if you take this actual orientation test. Because what it's telling you is that these are the deeply seated unconscious associations you have.

Again, it's an implicit association test. So the idea is, you know, as Peter Drucker famously said, once you can measure something, you can manage it. So now we have a way to manage this. And you know, last summer we had an intern from Singapore. This is at B-Mor, you had an intern? Yeah, at B-Mor in my company. And she was raising Singapore, Mornin raised there.

She's of ethnic background. I mean, Chinese ethnic background. So we made her take the IAT. She's completely neutral. I was like, impossible to have yet to meet anybody. It was neutral. And there are three to five percent of people that could do that on this test.

We made her take it three more times, neutral every time. Because for her, it was just a matching game. Oh, positive words in positive bucket, negative words in negative bucket, black faces in black bucket, white faces and white buckets. She was just matching things. But her mind wasn't getting confused by, and this is where the second pound of your mindfulness really comes in.

This is known as Veytina. Right, so we should unpack this for a second. So, foundation of mindfulness, when we talk about the four foundations of mindfulness, now we're getting actually real Buddhist, an old school, teravatin Buddhist. So the Buddha talked about, the Buddha himself, or at least allegedly talked about what are known as the four foundations of mindfulness. The first is the body. So basically, mindfulness of your body

is a great way to get grounded in being aware of what's happening right now. The second, we're not going to go through all four right now. But the second is what's known as Veda. Now that's the poly term. Poly is the ancient Indian language, in which the Buddha apparently spoke. And Veda means feeling tone. So everything that arises in your experience Indian language in which the Buddha apparently spoke and

Vedina means feeling tone. So everything that arises in your experience has one of three tastes Pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. So now that I've said that carry on. That's it. That's pretty much it So oftentimes what's happening is because since the this constructor race constructed, and accompanying the concept, the way it was constructed was that there were stories attached to all these categories. So even like a lot of the stories we hear in our society with anti-Semitism, for example, there are stories attached to being Jewish. And these are the stereotypes we call stereotypes.

Now this is the unpleasant experience of. And that is what's causing the distance, disconnect separation between two seemingly identical human beings when it comes to genetics and biology and their nervous system altogether. And for me, it's like, wow, can we tap into that? Can we transform that? And now that we can measure it and we have all these incredible mindfulness tools, we can manage it.

And they've been studies done showing that if you mindfulness reduces implicit bias. From University of Wisconsin, we have a bunch of other studies coming up, so it actually can help you manage bias. And for me, it's not just for the personal performance reason, it's also for unleashing true human potential, because what's happening is any industry we look at, whether it's healthcare, whether it's law enforcement, whether it's law firms, whether it's finance,

there's a massive issue of pipeline, massive issue of talent. So we're living in a country that's 40% non-white, but in all of these companies, the numbers of people from those non-white communities is like under 20, 15 percent what's going on. So they're just wasted talent. So we have so many challenges in our world, from climate change to poverty to hunger, you name it. But we're not able to use the vast majority of resources that are stuck in human bodies,

which is their brain and their passion because of this thing called bias. And it's actually bad for companies themselves. I remember I had a my mentor in law school was a very, you know, burly tall Midwestern white guy, you know, from all forms he was like the prototype of what would be considered a leader. And he was really into Chinese law, fluid in Chinese, all you wanted to do was like sit in the back and be a think tank policy guru on Chinese policy. But he told me that every time he was in any sort of a professional meeting, people would look at him and ask him for advice.

They would assume that he would know the answer because they assumed that he was a leader, except for him, no, he wanted to sit in the back. And he's like, I hate group meetings for this reason. And this is the reason why, we've so many studies showing that highest rates of suicide among white men in our country. Why do you why do you tie that? I think it's stress. It's the cortisol levels, expectations of performance and being a certain way.

There's a perfection to being male and being of a certain ethnic background who looks a certain way. In order to really live up to your humanity, you have to fit that prototype. It's interesting to frame it that way because I always think about like one of the things I've been thinking about in recent years is like as a white male in the society, I think if it's not about the expectations that are loaded on me, I'm not on any with a, I know you didn't use this term, but I don't have a victim mentality, but I have a more of a for sure mentality of guilt around, you know, how can you be a good white person? You know, how can you be part of the solutions that have part of the problem given that there have been a lot of white people over males over our history Who've done some pretty pernicious things

But you the way you frame it right there is that actually There's a certain there's a no shortage of suffering among white males because we're because it's returning to bias on ourselves precisely because there's an expectation I mean the opioid addiction that's pretty much spread across our communities, pervasive, anxiety, feeling helpless, like what is that about? And we've put so much pressure on ourselves to perform to a certain level. With that said, guilt is useful, because guilt means I've done something wrong, so I'm going to be better. Right, it's the first step to change.

Precisely. But with that said, this issue of systemic inequity and inefficiency isn't just individual. It's systemic, so a lot of times it's because of the policies and the practices that are in place that are creating this problem. So it's like that. I love this. It was in this metaphor of you know, there's a village right by a river and there are tons of like babies that are drowning in this river. So the villages are really concerned. So they start taking the babies out one after another, one after another, one after another. And they're taking the babies out, but the flood of babies continue to happen. It's like, oh, we can't save all of them,

we're just gonna do the best we can, and we'll just take as many of them out. And I feel like that's a metaphor for our society, whether it's through the charter school system or prison reform, we're just taking babies out, but there's so many other babies dying. What's causing this in the first place? Let's go to the root cause.

And that's where this bias has been instituted within policies, that's go to the root cause. And that's where the symbias that has been instituted within policies, that's where we have to go. We have to transform those policies. And for me, and for my company, Bemore, it's really about reaching leaders at the institutional level. So probation officers, pre-traumatic officers, prosecutors, public defenders, teachers, doctors, nurses. You should add newsmen on there. Yes, anchors, actors, casting directors. And if you think about our media entertainment, that really is the window to the world, how we see ourselves and imagine ourselves, and how we see others.

And it's not just that there's a lack of diversity within our movies and our TV shows. It's also the representations of the humanity of non-white people. I'm like, I'm not a poo. I was never a poo. I will never be a poo. And there's nothing wrong with that because there's tons of a poo who are Indian and will look like that and do that. But there's, you know, 1.3 billion Indians that are not a poo from the Simpsons, right?

But that's what people that I haven't exposed to our culture, or have an exposed to people who look like me, will assume of me. So I know you have a company, you don't want to give away all your trade secrets, you offering trade, you offer training to all sorts of folks in professional context, but give us some hacks about how we can,

people listening to this, who we can start to explore our own bias and do something about it. Absolutely. I mean, the first thing we have to do is know where we stand. So that's like taking the implicit association test. There and then. And then you can just get this on the internet. Yeah, get this on Google, IAT, IAT, or Project Implicit.

And there's a bunch of different tests I'm going to take. The second hack is really thinking about what are some of one's belief systems about people. And what is it, when I say that there is no gene for race, what is the resistance there? What is a resistance there? What in your experience prevents you from believing me in believing the science? And third is really listing and being

honest with oneself. What were the stories we heard about people who weren't like us when we were children? From people we love and we still love them and we will continue to love them from our parents our pastors our rabbis But what did they say? And how did that influence us? And that's really important because those were the seats that were planted such a young age that began to create that distance. So that's all sort of assessing what our baseline is. But it seems to me that you could do, like I was just thinking as well as listening to you talk, that you might just do a mindfulness practice

of walking around and everybody who walks by, you see what stories you tell yourself based on how they present. Exactly. You're walking on a plane, you see a stewardess, she's African-American. What story do you tell yourself? Right.

Oh, sorry, I should say flight attendant. Yeah. Basically, what we call it is prism. Prism are like these five strategies that have been proven by scientists in mitigating bias. It stands for perspective-taking, pro-social behaviors, individuation, stereotype replacement, and mindfulness. And they're all actually mindfulness-based practices, even though it's not all seated

meditation. So, I'll give you an example of stereotype replacement. So what happens when it comes to stereotypes, right? Like you said, there's an African-American flight attendant who's walking towards us, you know, male or female. There are certain stories that have been created. The second that arises, you're like, oh, wow. I know nothing about this person, but stereotype.

But then you label it stereotype, and then you replace it with a counter-stereotypic example there and then of a friend or a public figure who you really admire, who happens to be of the same ethnic background as that person, whether it's Dr. King, someone who's deceased, because what's happening in that moment is that you're not strengthening the neural pathways of the stereotype, but you're actually interrupting it.

And for us, it's actually helping people do that on a daily basis and making that a practice. That is a practice. So it's a great mindfulness practice. Somebody walks towards you, you see the story you're telling yourself, and A, you see it B, replace it with something more positive. And less that first story is positive. Precisely. And labeling it as such, as we do in the mindfulness practice.

That's pretty cool. Yeah, and then, you know, the iPhone, what we've been working on is that it takes as little as eight weeks of regular practice of these strategies to act biased, individually, not institutionally, but individually. To hack a bias. So you're fine when you go into an organization and teach them, you see change. Yeah.

Of course, I mean, it's funny because we, it was, there was an attorney in one of our trainings, pretty senior attorney who worked with the government, she was like, you should take this to Congress. You should take this to, you know, and we're like, yeah, we will, but, you know, when our time comes, but the idea is a lot of this information for me is, as someone who's a researcher, is like, basic, but they never learned it. They were supposed to be taught this stuff in high school, but they actually were taught something else, that there is a hierarchy, and there's five types of human beings, and

it was those types of decisions that went into or Supreme Court cases. So there's a famous Supreme Court decision, Loving Be Virginia, which I think was a movie about it recently. Loving, yes, right. Great movie. Great movie. And so to overturned the law in many states that opposed interracial marriage and Judge Basil, who was in the lower courts and if people saw the movie,

they'll know, he wrote in the decision that God Almighty created human beings, you know, white, black, male, yellow, and red, and but for the interference with this arrangement, there would be no cause for such marriages. This is a judge. I mean, respectable person loves his family, his belief in this fictional story that was created 200 years ago by a guy who collected skulls from across the world, percolated into policy, human suffering of no measure. Where if people want to learn more about you and your organization, how do they do so? So just log on to bemoreamerica.org. So it's bemorebemore.org, America, amuric.org, and also they can find us on social media, on links down on Facebook and Instagram.

Further reading you would recommend we do if we're interested in this? Absolutely. There's three books that come to mind. I'm first as Blind Spot by Anthony Greenwald and Mazrán Bonagy. So these are the preeminent scholars of unconscious bias and have done a lot of the research that we now apply in our trainings. The second is History of White People. So it's done by the former head of the American Historical Society, Nell O'Ving Painter, Princeton Professor, which really traces how this mythology of Caucasianness, which Dan

you actually also seem to believe, right? Yes, I was more likely just lazy language on my part, but anyway, yes. Yes, exactly, but it's not your fault. So no shame about it, it's because you weren't informed about it. So history of white people. And the third book that comes to mind is Whistling the Volty. It's by Claude Steele, also a social psychologist, and he talks about how stereotype threat and all these other psychological phenomena

to take place. It sounds like there's no great book on using mindfulness to work with implicit bias. Not yet. Right, not yet. That's the book to be written. work with implicit bias. Not yet. Right, not yet. That's the book to be written. I knew thank you very much. Thank you for having me.

Great guest. I mean, I think people are going to get a lot out of this. So thank you very much. So thank you. OK, that does it for another edition of the 10% happier podcast. If you liked it, please take a minute to subscribe, rate us. Also, if you want to suggest topics, you think we should cover or guests that we should bring in,

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

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