The One You Feed - Tony Stubblebine

Episode Date: February 4, 2015

This week we talk to Tony Stubblebine about the science of behavior designTony Stubblebine co-founded Coach.Me (formerly knows as Lift) on the idea that positive reinforcement and community support could be deployed universally to help people achieve their goals. Prior to Coach.Me, he was the founder and CEO of CrowdVine Event Social Networks, which builds simple and powerful social software to help people connect and meet. He was part of the Wesabe launch team, Director of Engineering at Odeo.com and Engineering Lead for O'Reilly Media. He is the author of Regular Expression Pocket Reference (O’Reilly). In This Interview Tony and I Discuss...Searching for work that matters.Achievement that is not gratifying.How we all have a mediocre and excellent version of ourselves.The switch from Lift to Coach.me.The science of behavior design.The BMAT model.The three factors of behavior change: Motivation, Ability, Trigger.Designing our space to reinforce behavior change.Growth mindset vs fixed mindset.Changing our belief system about what we can accomplish.How our failures feel more visible.Using tiny habits to build momentum.Giving ourselves permission to start small.An experience is 10x more powerful than an opinion.Making a game out of behavior change.How meditation is not about clearing out our mind.Meditation is not all about being calm.How meditation isn't just for hippies anymore.The biggest benefits of meditation.Using meditation to disrupt your habitual responses.How without awareness we can't do anything about our issues.What cognitive budget is and how to use it in our lives.Majoring in minor things. Tony Stubblebine LinksCoach.meTony Stubblebine on TwitterCoach.me on Twitter   Some of our most popular interviews that you might also enjoy:Dan HarrisTodd Henry- author of Die EmptyRandy Scott HydeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What really changed my mindset about meditation was when I started meeting who was meditating. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.

I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast.

Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest today is Tony Stubblebine, CEO and co-founder of Lyft, or as it's now called, Coach.me. Coach.me is an app that helps you achieve any goal, change any habit, or build any expertise. Here's the interview. Hi, Tony. Welcome to the show. Hey, Eric. Thanks for having me. Yeah, I'm really glad to get you on and talk through some of the concepts that are behind your app, which you're

now calling coach.me, that I know is Lyft, and I'm a longtime Lyft user, so maybe we'll get into that a little bit. So I'd like to start off like we always do with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson, and he says, in life there are two wolves inside of us. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second. He looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you how that parable applies to yourself and your life and in the work that you do. Well, I definitely know professionally, nobody starts a company like mine unless they've seen both sides, unless they've fed both wolves.

And I think of just my entire career has been a search for work that felt more gratifying. And at first I thought, well, I should take the job that gives me the most money. And then I had that job, but it wasn't intellectually satisfying. So I went to find a job that I thought was the most interesting. But then I found that it wasn't like a particularly-run company I didn't feel like my contributions were having any impact so then I started to work for startups and I mean that just even got worse because most startups fail in spectacular fashion

and I thought well okay what if I do it myself and so I started a company for myself and my entire thought process for the first three years of running that company was like, I have to prove that I can make this company a success. And then I got into year four and it was profitable. I had a team that was running it on my behalf and I had maybe only a day, a week of work to really keep it running. And so I got to examine, well, is this what I want to do

with the rest of my life? Do I want a life of leisure? It didn't really feel like that was going to work out for me. Do I want to recommit to this first company? No. And so I really had to then say, well, what is my life's mission? Because I just achieved what I wanted to do, and it wasn't as gratifying as I hoped. And so for me, the answer was obvious. I've just always been interested in, you know, what is the difference between mediocrity and excellence? And I think all of us have a mediocre version of ourselves, and all of us have an excellent version of ourselves. a mediocre version of ourselves and all of us have an excellent version of ourselves. And, you know, it's kind of, uh, like good news, bad news. The, the excellent version of yourself doesn't happen accidentally. Yeah. And so tell us a little, so you went on to found, um, you went

on to found lift, which is a, uh, which now you call Coach.me, which is really about how do people build good habits and how do they transform their life via the habits that they have? Would that be an accurate summation? Yeah, we changed our name just recently for the new year to Coach.me because we wanted to take a really active role in helping people achieve their goals, any goals. And so, you know, probably the best way to describe that or the way that I like to think of it is that it's a community of people coaching each other. And people in the community are trying to achieve practically every goal that you've ever heard of. So something really popular like the paleo diet or training for a triathlon, those goals are matched by people who are learning to meditate or who are exploring gratitude practices. So really the full gamut.

Yeah, there's a lot out there. Let's talk about some of the underlying principles that you used when you originally built the application. And let's talk about, for lack of a better word, the science of behavior change or of habits. You use something that you refer to a lot called the Fog Behavior Model, BMAT. Can we talk through what that is and then how that ties into what you've done at Lyft? Yeah. All right. I'm sorry. I keep calling it the old name. You got to give me some time here. It's only like January 20th and I've got years of calling it the old thing. It's fair. We have a tip jar and people in the company screw up all the time. So how much do I owe you now? Like $8? We'll let you slide. But, you know, a name change is tricky that way. When we started the company, we were doing a lot of research into behavior design, is what we call it.

Sort of the science of behavior design. And one of the people that I like the most is a professor at Stanford, BJ Fogg, who runs a behavior design lab down at Stanford. And what I liked about him is that he created frameworks for thinking about behavior design that were really simple. And in fact, I took a course from him where part of the course is they teach you how to teach his BMAT model in two minutes or less. And so I actually was able to walk around and teach other people what he had taught me. And I think that's the mark of a good teacher. And his realization is that, probably one of his biggest or most influential, is that

when you think, well, why am I not succeeding? Or why, especially when you judge someone else and you say, well, why are they not succeeding? The first thing you think is, well, they're not motivated. They're lazy and not motivated. But actually there's almost always three factors at play. And a lot of times we're over-focused on motivation. So the three factors would be motivation, yes. Ability, you know, it's sort of like you can't floss if you don't own floss, right? That's an ability thing, not a motivation thing. And then the third, trigger.

So if it doesn't occur to you, then you're not going to do it. And so as you design for an intervention with yourself or with someone else, you kind of evaluate where they are, you know, on that, on that curve. Do they have enough motivation? If they do, then it's an ability issue. And great example, like great examples, I would say are like smoking. Most people know that smoking is unhealthy. And in fact, most people who are smokers, many people who are smokers, many people who are smokers would want to give it up. It's not a motivation issue.

It's that smoking is addictive. And so it's actually really hard to give up. On the flip side, your dentist tells you to floss every time you go in for a visit. Flossing is trivial. It's super easy. But it's not super fun. It's not super exciting. You might not be really that motivated to be a flosser. And so what your dentist is always trying to do is actually make a coherent sales pitch for why you should floss. Because your dentist has identified that, well, he's handed you free floss

every single time you've ever gone in for a visit. So it's not an ability issue. He's like, you know, my hygienist actually has me floss in front of her. And so it's clearly a motivational issue. This is going to be an embarrassing admission, but that regular floss caused me all kinds of trouble. But when they've got that new kind, it's like the little flosser things, I turned into a flosser overnight.

So I think that points to, at least in my case, I needed some help with the ability. Yes, I imagine most of our listeners and the rest of the world will be like you, which is, yes, anybody can floss. But in my case, there might be more to it. You know, it's a great example. Then even I am a little bit over-focused on motivation when it comes to flossing. And, like, we can do more, you can often make the habit or the goal easy enough that it'll work with that level of motivation. And, you know, the thing is, we're not trying to rehabilitate criminals here, right? We're almost always working with people that have some level of motivation.

Right. Even if that motivation seems intermittent. So to take this model is to say that we need to make sure that we have enough of the motivation, the ability, and then we are reminded to do it or not do it often enough that that stays front of mind or shows up at the right times? It is. When we design the app, we were looking at all three. And so motivation could be coming from the community. They're cheering you on or you're seeing your progress and you're attached to that progress. Ability can come really from, again, the community who are there to answer your questions. What is the best way to do this? What is the easiest way to do this? How do I get started?

I'm having this trouble. What do I do about it? All of those are questions that trip you up. And now with the switch to Coach to Me, we actually have personal coaches who you can hire for $15 a week who are dedicated to giving you that information and helping you make your goal as easy to achieve as possible. And that's an ability tactic. And then we have reminders. So you set a reminder and it pops up on your phone and you think, oh, right, I had decided that I was going to go to the gym. Or I had decided that I was going to go somewhere different for lunch that's healthier. A lot of times you make this decision the day before and then you forget about it. And he's just,

you know, the issue is don't let yourself forget. Right. So the trigger is that reminder. I think there's other it's so as far as the app, it's the reminder, I think in other aspects of life, I've heard of triggers being things like leave your shoes by the front door or do these things that make you almost, you know, run into what it is you set out to do. Right. That's a good way of kind of physically designing your space in order to trigger the behavior. And one I do, like I try and drink a fair amount of water during the day. So my actual habit is refill my water bottle when I get to my desk. That's the actual thing I need to do. Once I've done that, I'm triggered to drink water all day.

Now, I have a question for you, if that's okay. Yeah, please. As a longtime user, we built the app initially in this really direct kind of operant conditioning way is how psychologists would say. There's a positive reinforcement loop, all this other stuff. But as we've talked to people, we see the other side of positive psychology, which is about belief and mindset change. So there's a different Stanford professor, Carol Dweck, who wrote really influential

work on how your mindset affects your performance. So a lot of sort of two common mindsets, one a growth mindset and another a fixed mindset. Some people believe they were born as smart as they are and other people believe that they worked for it. People people believe that they worked for it people who believe that they work for it i like also see sort of the corollary that they want to be smarter if they want to be more successful all they have to do is put in more work and uh and they do and uh so that's an interesting observation but my favorite thing about her research was that she found that people were flexible in this mindset. So the most famous of the studies was in taking high school kids and taking like a group of them and giving a module, a lesson, like 12 hours total on how people achieve goals through work and practice. And the kids who happened to have had that module tested higher for the remaining four years of high school. So it was amazing, right?

Like you can learn it. Yeah, can you learn that mindset? And that's what I've run into with a lot of my peers in coaching is that they come into it thinking, well, I'm going to be really direct. But then what they find is that their biggest success stories were almost epiphany-like or were definitely mindset-related. And the one story I think about a lot from our community, it's Kai Robin.

He writes in and he said, you know, your app is so great. It helped me pick up a low-carb lunch habit. Now I lost 10 pounds. So thank you for that. And now that I've lost this weight, I'm using you guys to learn Italian and Vietnamese because I want to travel the world. And I was like, well, first of all, thank you.

Second of all, what did losing 10 pounds have to do with traveling the world? Right? Right. And so it's just he had, he was stuck because he thought he was stuck. And then he had some small success. I mean, I wouldn't consider 10 pounds a small success, but in the overall scheme of his life, the 10 pounds isn't going to be nearly as important to him

as this year of travel. And so he had this little success and then became unblocked, thought of himself as a completely different person, as traveling the world. And what did we have to do with that? thought of himself as a completely different person as traveling the world. And like, what did we have to do with that? Or what did BJ Fogg's BMAT model have to do with that? I see how it helped the low carb lunch habit. But I think that there's something much more magical that's going on around belief change and surrounding yourself by people who are succeeding.

around belief change and surrounding yourself by people who are succeeding. Yeah, I think that's true. And I think that if we have a habit of letting ourselves down in building habits, right, which I certainly have, you know, it points in my life, a long history of that, I'm going to do this. And I do it for a day, a week, two days, whatever, and then I quit. And then a period later, I go, I'm going to do this, and then I start, and then I quit. That takes a toll on, it really does put, it tends to put us more into that fixed mindset. Like, well, look, I've tried this and it didn't work. Oh, I tried this and it didn't work. So I must just be the kind of person that can't do it or that I don't have the willpower. And I think the power of successfully building a habit, at least for me at different points has been the belief that, oh, all right, now I can take what I learned. And so not only a do I now have a little bit

more belief in myself and confidence. Now I actually also have some experience to draw on some skill to draw on of like, oh, okay, well, remember when I was trying to lose 10 pounds and I ran into that problem? Okay, now I know what to do with that a little bit more. Yeah, a lot of times I think the failures feel more visible to us. It's almost like all we do is fail, so why bother? Even though it's, you know, the flip side, the other way to frame that should be incredibly obvious, right? We're not children anymore. What happened? Right? How did we go from naive, ignorant, like, you know, not that smarter, educated children to adults, right? We learned something along the way. So clearly,

we're capable of change. And but I think we get caught up in seeing all the ways that you know that we have have failed well what i love about both you know carol's work and we're actually we have carol coming on the show in the near future really yeah which i'm excited about can i can i be like in the background sure i'm a huge fan. Oh, she's wonderful. So I think the combination of, so that mindset. The other piece then is the recognition of that there is, that there is a way, there are ways to change your behavior that work. And so I think in a lot of cases, it's that recognition like, oh, I don't have, instead of I'm a failure, I didn't do this. It's an, I don't have that, I don't have that ability yet. You know, I don't have that skill.

I don't have that knowledge of how to do it. And I think that's the other big piece is what I love about that model. And there's other similar ones out there. But that general idea that in order to, the stuff is hard first, there's a reason why everybody struggles with it, and that there are ways to approach it that are much more effective than others. People trip over where they want to be. They have this idea that they want to be perfect tomorrow, and so they try and be perfect tomorrow, and then they trip up over that. That's another good B.J. Fogg concept idea of a tiny habit. I actually sort of feel,

the way he explains it makes a lot of sense, but I'll preface this by saying, I find it almost un-american in that it it's uh so patronizing right but his canonical example is that don't start with a flossing habit start with a floss one tooth habit right and if you can floss one tooth then tomorrow you can floss two teeth and eventually you'll floss your whole mouth yeah but if on day one you floss all your teeth and you hate it then you're not going to come back for day two and of course it's un-american because i mean where this is a more is better country and uh and why would we want to do a tiny habit

when we want to do you know when our goal is to do a massive habit but it's what it is is about building momentum and i am more likely to use the word momentum there because everyone wants momentum. And so the big thing is, can you do this five days in a row? Can you do this 11 days in a row? That's actually when we see the failure rate start to go down, usually around day 11. And almost all the goals that we've looked at, hard or easy, that's when it starts to get a lot easier for people apparently. Interesting. And, yeah, I do have an example of someone that I worked with.

He was trying to write his dissertation, and he just felt like he was never going to finish his dissertation. Of course, everyone who's ever written a dissertation felt like that way at some point. And I said, well, you know, what are you trying to do? He's like, well, you know, all I want to be able to do is write for eight hours a day, but I keep procrastinating. I can see you laughing there, right? Because all you want to do is write for eight hours. I'll tell you, actually, Stephen King doesn't write for eight hours a day his productivity

system is to write a set number of pages and the thing that blew my mind is that he finishes his work generally between 1 p.m and 4 p.m you know never never 7 p.m right and so here's like one of the most prolific authors of all time his thing is just to write consistently so anyways go back to my friend who's trying to write the dissertation and uh i say to him okay let me just do a little bit a little exercise we'll get to eight hours like i'm not trying to contradict him or start an argument like Like, we'll work our way up there. But let me start with something. How about tomorrow, you time yourself? How long does it take you to go from sitting at your desk to writing your first sentence? And just tell me how fast that is. And we'll start with that. So he comes back later that next day. And he says, Hey, hey, you know,

that was actually really good advice. Rather than procrastinating, I challenged myself, how quickly can I do that? It took him two minutes. And once I got the first sentence on paper, I wrote for two hours. And then I thought, well, this is more than I've written in weeks. So good job. And maybe all I need to do is write for two hours every day. And so like, to me, that's the power of momentum is that he had this giant idea in his head that had completely paralyzed him. And when he reframed it in terms of, well, let me get a small win tomorrow and build on that. It just transformed him overnight into a productive dissertation writer. I mean, to the point where weeks later, he was telling me he was writing his dissertation

from his cell phone, right? Like no one who procrastinates is capable of writing on their cell phone. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor we got the answer will space junk block your cell signal the astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer

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I call some of that stuff, one is the all or nothing mentality, right? Like I'm going to write eight hours a day or I just don't do it at all. And it's so easy to fall into that. And then the other is, you know, my saying to myself always is that a little bit of something is better than a lot of nothing. Like, you know, 10 minutes of exercise is far better. You know, 10 minutes of exercise every far better. You know, 10 minutes of exercise every day is far better than three hours every two weeks. It just, and that's the way I work. That's just, and I think a lot of us are that way. And that, that breaking these things

down into these small steps is, is so obvious when you think about it. And yet so rarely do most of us do it. It's hard to give ourselves permission to do it. And that's a lot of what I see when I see a coach work with someone. A big part of the role of the coach is just to give that person permission to start small. Yeah, that's a great point. Yeah, and that ends up being really powerful. Also, I was thinking the other day about something I heard Tony Robbins say.

He says it in a bunch of different ways, but one of his things is that an experience is 10 times more powerful than an opinion. If you experience success, that's 10 times more powerful than me telling you you could be successful. And that goes back to the belief change, right? Theoretically, you know that if you work hard, you can achieve a lot of things, a lot more than you currently are.

But until you actually have a victory under your belt, you don't really believe it. That is so true. So let's change gears just a little bit and talk about a favorite subject of mine, which I think is also a favorite subject of yours, which is meditation. And you guys are actually working on a book. But first, maybe just for fun, we can talk about how I build a meditation habit, partially using Lyft that, you know, sort of incorporated a lot of these different ideas. Sure. And I'd be curious if, because it sort of ties to so much of what you said. I mean, I've been trying to meditate on and off for a long time. I don't really want to talk about how old I am, but it's been a long time.

I got interested in meditation very young and I was very intermittent, you know, I'd meditate. And it, part of the problem was just that whole, like, like you said, I would stay, you know, I'm going to sit down and meditate for 45 minutes, which like, if you've got a brain mic like mine, that's like going to the horror show. I mean, it's just, it's awful. And so I would do it for two days and be like, all right, you know, I give this up. But the thing in Lyft that I loved, the thing that helped me the most was the streak. The number of days in a row. Because once I got to a certain number of days in a row, it became a thing. And I can't tell you how many times that I was like, oh, Christ in heaven.

I'd be laying in bed and realize I hadn't done it and be like, nope, I'm not giving up my, you know, I'm not giving up my 150 days. I'm not giving up my, and that, for me, that works. Some pride in that, some game, you know, making a game out of it. But, boy, it saved me so many times. I think I'm somewhere around 460 days or something at this point. And I know I'd be nowhere near that if it wasn't just for that, that streak. And I have to say that at one point, I forgot to check in long enough on Lyft that my streak ran out and I had to email your customer service and plead with them to go in

and update it so that I could have my little, uh 300-day flame or whatever it was. Yeah, well, I'm glad we did it, because that streak is really important. And I'm glad to hear that you have a 400-day streak. When you talk about, just first of all, a life worth living, right? And I said, like, this company, starting this company was part of, was a statement for how I want to live my life. Just to have you tell me that story, that we played any role, and I mean honestly with 90% of you,

but that we played any role in you having a 400-day meditation streak, that's very gratifying. The thing, though, is that we've watched 85,000 different people try to meditate within the app, and we were able to survey them and find out their stories. And basically, there's two types of stories. There's the person who says, all I tried to do was meditate for 40 minutes, but I couldn't keep a clear head. So maybe, maybe, maybe I'm not cut out for meditation. Right. Doesn't work. Meditation doesn't work for me. Yeah. Right. And they take it very personal. Yes. Right. It's like, this is my, my bad. Right. And, uh, and in fact, uh, nobody

can meditate for 40 minutes with a completely clear head. People can meditate, uh, but nobody keeps a clear head even for two minutes. Or as a meditation teacher I work with sometimes said is, well, if you could keep a clear head for 40 minutes, we'd take you to the hospital. Like this is not, it's not natural or normal. Right. And so then the other story that we heard is, oh, yeah, I just start for two to five minutes, whatever felt fit into my day, build up a streak. And I got better over time. But it can still be a struggle. But that's okay.

And you kind of dig into that and you realize that the struggle, the supposed struggle, is just a person judging themselves. What's actually going on is your mind wanders, and then you bring it back to your point of focus, usually breath. You're breathing, you're focusing on some point in your breath, and then you realize you're thinking about where you're going to get lunch that day. Then you catch yourself, and you bring it back. And we call that the two phases there, sort of awareness followed by focus. You become aware that your mind has wandered and then you refocus on your breath. That's a mental push-up. Every single time you do that, you become better at becoming aware of what your

mind is doing, and you become better at controlling where you focus it. And so, in fact, if your mind never wandered, you wouldn't get to do any push-ups. And so, I think of it as a good thing. Every single time my mind wanders, it's a good thing. But the people that are struggling, I think they got told that meditation is about calm. And actually, in fact, I'm an advisor at a meditation startup called Calm.com. So it's not a mystery why that idea got put in people's heads. But the thing is, it's not all calm. put in people's heads. But the thing is, it's not all calm. It's at the end of the meditation, many people feel more calm than they did at the beginning. But between A and B, it's not about having a completely clear head. And if you start judging yourself every time your mind wanders,

it's going to feel like a struggle. Yeah, that's my story exactly. I mean, that was, I think the combination, the three things for me that finally clicked were one, we talked about, I think, tracking it and just making a game out of it. Second was just doing a shorter amount. All right, three minutes, I'm going to do three minutes for a few days. And then that last one was such a big one, because I really did. I look at it now. I'm like, I read so many books about it. And I know they all said this, but it just never sunk in that it wasn't about the experience itself. I thought I should be peaceful while I meditated. And I was not anywhere near peaceful when I meditated, right?

I mean, and so I finally realized it's not about that three minutes, 15 minutes, hour, whatever it is. It's about the rest of the time around that. That that's and that I, you know, that I don't know where I heard it from, but somebody referred to it as like mental hygiene. And I was like, that makes sense, like brushing your teeth, because I'm not brushing my teeth going like, this is awesome. Or, you know, like, man, I was, I was really killed it on the, you know, with a tooth brushing and I, right, I just do it. And, and that was, and once I did that, then I actually started to have more of meditation that was enjoyable, because I stopped fighting it. But boy, it took me, I mean, like I said, I tried this on and off for a long time before I figured those things out. And it, it all changed. I think the other thing that's important in that is that this idea, like every time we come back to our breath, or we come back to whatever our anchors we get better, is absolutely true, except that some days, you're you feel far worse than you ever did before. Like, it's just, it's not a linear thing. It's not like each day I'm getting, my focus grows every day. It's some days you're just all over the place and some days,

and just, that's fine. Yeah. I, you know, I've never seen this be taught successfully, except through having a guided meditation teacher and that guide can be recorded. Um, you know, we have guides on coach to me certainly i learned originally through the headspace app advisor at calm i've seen it in person it's basically when you start to judge yourself in a human voice voice it has to be a voice it can't just be an article or something you read has to be an actual voice who feels present with you says you know what that's okay right it's like actually a lot of times when you listen to a guided meditation like the teacher is just every like 30 seconds is saying did your mind just wandered totally

normal let's bring it back to your breath right and you just need to be reassured uh because it it's so because you don't know what to expect and you're kind of projecting onto it um i just i find it is an amazing practice that uh basically affects every part of your life uh it's calming it reduces stress. Everyone would rather be more productive, more present. And that's trained by being aware of what's distracting in your head and being able to point your focus where it needs to go. I think what really changed my mindset about meditation was when I started meeting who was meditating. So my parents were married by their Tai Chi teacher. I was born in California, and it could not be a more hippie situation.

And so I always thought meditation was from their generation. And so I always thought meditation was from their generation. I was just like, well, that's something my parents would have done in the 70s. And it just kind of has this little bit of a spiritual connotation for me that I didn't think that's what I was looking for. But then I started meeting really successful entrepreneurs who were not particularly spiritual. They just felt like they had a job to do and it was better if their mind was more under their control. And then I started researching it and I realized that professional athletes were meditating. And then I did more research and I realized that hedge fund managers were meditating. And actually, I came to think about it in a completely different way, that meditation is something that you can do for purely practical benefit.

I was in a hospital last year, not for myself, but visiting someone. And I walked by this room and it's a meditation room like oh so this is part of the pain management strategy for this hospital is to teach people how to meditate and that's not about spirituality it's a that's a very pragmatic concern and you know so as telling telling this story to a meditation teacher. Actually, his name is Will Kabat-Zinn. And if you recognize the last name, you should. It's John Kabat-Zinn's son.

And John Kabat-Zinn is the, you know, sort of the, you know, one of the founders of American mindfulness. And so Will Kabat-Zinn, great meditation teacher, and, you know, been in this his whole life. I was telling him about, about that we wanted to write a book, and we wanted to call it The Strongest Mind in the Room, just because I wanted to get as far away from the spiritual aspects as possible. And he, he pauses for a second, and he goes, well, that sounds like the dark side. And then, but this is what I love, and this is, well, that sounds like the dark side. But this is what I love and this is how you know that he's a meditator. Rather than immediately trying to argue with me, he goes, why do I think that?

And he just started, like he caught himself. And he goes, why do I think that? And he just started kind of saying, well, let me share with you. And he starts talking out loud. And I thought, well, here's a guy that recognized he had a reaction. That's awareness. And then he was able to point his control to something constructive. He actually told us a really interesting story about a parallel debate in the mindfulness community uh is it okay to teach mindfulness to the military which i think is a great way to frame it it's like half of you know on one side of the debate you have people in the mindfulness community that's just like why would we want to train

more efficient killers and uh then you have the other half of the debate it's like well they're already efficient killers what we want them to be is to be mindful and to be aware and to think well maybe there's another way that i can do this and you know so of course it is actually going on um and that's sort of i feel that uh if you train someone for practical reasons they they'll often come to some higher good along the way. And the practical reasons are just for entry point to teaching meditation. Yeah, that's such an interesting debate on so many levels. Because mindfulness certainly at least originated within a broader philosophical teaching, Buddhism.

within a broader philosophical teaching, you know, Buddhism. And so is that, you know, that debate is if you strip it out from that, does it still, what meaning does it have? And is it, are people using, you know, this wonderful thing for bad purposes? But I think it's the way I tend to think about it ultimately is it's like any other technology, right? The genie's kind of out of the bottle. You can't put technology back in the bottle. It's a question of, all right, how can we talk about it, discuss it, and frame it in positive ways? Because there's no going back with it now, right? Buddhism can't take it back. It's gone. I mean, it's out there. The debate now is, okay, what do we do with that and what individuals want to do with that?

What is it that you want to teach or carry on? But from a cultural perspective, I think the horse has left the barn. Well, this goes right to the heart of the title of this podcast. And this is so once you have awareness, you become aware of both worlds and you realize that one of them is more fulfilling. And I think people with awareness tend to gravitate towards being better versions of themselves. Actually, I know Will Kabat-Zinn shares that view because he told me a story about – I know him because he teaches meditation twice a week, I think, at a startup in the same building as me, a startup called Medium.com, which is a blogging platform. And so he was invited in because the CEO meditates and wanted to teach it to everyone else because he thought they would be better workers.

And Will was like, yeah, I could see how this would be good for productivity but I feel like I should warn you. People might become more aware and then realize that working in tech isn't their calling. You might have people quit because of this. And I was like, oh, that's an interesting point. But I'll risk it. I'll just make sure that we have a mission-driven company. I think that risk it. Like, you know, I'll just make sure that we have a mission driven company. Anyways, I think that's it.

You know, it's like certainly someone could work at a startup for selfish reasons. It's exciting. You can make money. You know, there's prestige if you live in the Bay Area. But, you know, it just like meditation doesn't make you more of that. It makes you less of that. Yeah. And I think it's like anything else.

It's rare that, at least I know, it's rare that I approach anything with purely good or purely bad motive. There's almost always some blend in there of like, yeah, I want to meditate because of this, but it all, I mean, it's just hard to, I don't know that I believe in completely pure motivation from anybody. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden.

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So tell me, what is it about meditation that you think are the biggest benefits? I mean, the one you just named, you know, when you were talking with, what was it, Will? Yeah, when you were talking with Will is probably the one, when people ask me what I think the biggest benefit is, it's exactly that thing thing is that there seems to be just a little bit more space from when I have some stimulus that I have a response and it's not even that response isn't even necessarily outward right because it's but it's like I have a stimulus there's either either there's a little bit more space or there's a quick thought and then I go wait do I really believe that do I like you know which is just great because it helps to disrupt these habitual thought patterns that certainly in my case have been very destructive at points. Exactly. I mean, if you've ever been to a therapist or a relationship therapist, one of the great things they can do is they can point out patterns in your life,

right? But that's not sufficient because when those patterns come up you're you don't notice them you're not in your therapist's office at that time right like someone has to point you out i mean that goes back to bj fogg and triggering right and sort of like that a little bit of space where you have trained yourself how to be aware of your thoughts and then how to shift them somewhere is what allows you to then after knowing a pattern then you can do something about it um i just i think about that those two things i mean there's basically three legs to meditation as i experience it and you know i probably there's meditation gurus who experience something completely different there's talk of the ultimate bliss, all sorts of stuff way beyond what I got as a beginner.

But as a beginner, there's three things that happen really quickly. You train awareness, you train control of focus, and you train more calm. I mean, overall, I'm calmer when I'm meditating. But everyone, I think, focuses on the calm without focusing on what it would mean if you had complete awareness of what's going on in your head. Because I think we don't face that often how out of control we are. There's another

book that I like, Thinking Fast and Slow, that talks about two different modes of thought. One is very instinctual. It's what is actually happening most of the time. And then the other is, and that mode is very fast that's that you're maybe you make rapid fast decisions there the other is very slow and effortful but it's what we think of as thought it's the rational part of your brain and if you try you can turn it on but mostly it's off um and uh like being able to have awareness of like, oh, right, my like irrational lizard brain is taking me this direction. That's not actually what I want to do.

Let me turn on my rational brain for a second and switch gears, right? That comes up in parenting. It comes up in work, comes up in relationships, friendships. It comes up, I got yelled at rightfully. So on the street, like, you know, I bike home sometimes and I like trying to weave through a crosswalk that had a bunch of people. It's like it's either I'm weaving through cars to make this turn or weaving through people.

And this woman yelled at me and I was like, like part of me was like, don't you dare yell at me. And then then part of me was like, oh, you know what I should actually say is, thank you for saying something. You're right. And she yelled and walked away before I had a chance. But I was like this close to being able to say that because I have enough awareness now. I mean, not the Will Kabat-Zinn level, right? But enough that I was like, well, I was having a defensive reaction. But I'm actually capable of a really generous reaction there, even there.

And, you know, that second person is who I want to be. And that is exactly it. You know, what triggers you to behave in a way that you don't want to behave it for me you know it's like eating things that i don't want to eat or you know staying in bed too long or getting angry for no good reason uh i just i have a lot more control of that because i built up a meditation practice yeah exactly that awareness is i that i was doing an interview right before this we were talking about awareness like if you don't have that all the rest of this stuff is just you're just not going to do you can't do anything with it because you don't know what you're there there's nothing there's no i love that analogy you just

made of like being you know with your therapist and i've been in those situations where somebody will point out something to me it's so it hits me i'm like that is so freaking obvious and i don't think about it again for two weeks until they you know like it's just it's not it's not there for me in my day-to-day life i know it but i can't i i intellectually know it but i'm in no way incorporated in my life and i think that that really helps um we i just looked at the clock and we are at like way over normal time which i feel like i feel like i could do this all day so but i'm i'm gonna i'm gonna honor my at least only double the normal time of the show. But I want to finish with one thing that you talk about that I think is an interesting idea and I just want to talk about, which is the idea of cognitive budget.

And I was joking earlier about how mine is gone for the day. So what is cognitive budget? Well, it's the idea that you have a certain number of decisions to make in the day, and you actually have control over where you spend those decisions. And so a decision is not like, what car do I buy? I mean, that's certainly a decision, but it's also, what pants do I put on? What shirt do I put on? Or do I even put on pants? That could be another one. Exactly. If you work from home, which I've had that period in my life.

Or you're a streaker. Yeah, well. Let's move on. I look forward to meeting your audience. And actually, it's an idea that I heard the opposite way. There was a really good article in the New York Times about decision fatigue, and it was explaining how people stopped being able to make rational decisions at the point at which they became fatigued. And I'm always trying to reframe something in the positive. So decision fatigue is an excuse, right? Oh, well, I'm not a good parent when I get home because I used up all my decisions at work, right? But the flip side of it is just you could decide how to spend your decisions differently. And the example, since I spend a lot of time with entrepreneurs and especially out here in tech, people have this irrational love of Steve Jobs. especially out here in tech, people have this irrational love of Steve Jobs.

The example I use is he wore a black turtleneck every day for basically a long time at the end of his life. And what that meant is that when he got up and got dressed, he just reached it into a pile of black turtlenecks and put on a black turtleneck. No decision necessary. When I get up, I look at the weather. I look at my calendar. Who am I meeting? Am I going to be on a podcast interview where I'm visible? Am I going to be meeting people outside of the company? What is it that I should wear?

And so I basically would probably leave the house 50 decisions behind where Steve Jobs would have left the house. He wanted to spend those 50 decisions at work. Certainly, I would rather spend my 50 decisions at work or with my friends or on exercise or with my spouse. I would rather spend it all somewhere else than i'm getting dressed and once i realized that i just became a lot more regimented about things that didn't matter that much right like i got a lot more uh pairs of the same type of socks like why am i looking at a sock drawer trying to make a decision right right just like get you know like i'm going to

wear socks i know that and um sam it just like a lot of things in the morning are about saving myself for later later in the day and i thought that was a really powerful way then to look at habits because people would ask me sometimes what are the habits of really successful people and if you think about it in terms of cognitive budget, the answer is any habit is the habit of a successful person, because that's something that saves yourself to be fully present on the things that matter. So for example, if I have a habit of going to the gym and on Tuesdays, I know that I'm going to do this workout routine.

I'm not having to spend decisions debating whether I go to the gym, which exercise routine I'm going to do. So that's a savings on the cognitive budget. Yeah, we call that negotiation sometimes. You're negotiating with yourself. Should I go to the gym today? What should I work on? Should I do weights?

I don't feel like doing weights but i i'm supposed to do weights right and so like each the outcome of each negotiation is a decision and you waste a lot of your energy there where absolutely if you have a consistent gym routine that you're first of all it'll hold up it'll hold when you're you are fatued. And people who go to the gym later in the day are at risk because they get tired. And also, it won't spend down the rest of your day. And a lot of us kind of refuse to plan. And maybe in order to preserve some option value, like, well, maybe I'll have more energy in the afternoon so I won't go to the gym this morning. But what we're really doing is spending a lot of our cognitive budget because we can't hold ourselves to anything and everything ends up getting negotiated.

And it's not that you want to live a really boring life. It's you just want the boring parts of your life to be boring. Or another Tony Robbins quote I liked the other day, he said, you know, a lot of us major in minor things, right? I was like, I love that. Absolutely. Like, why am I fussing over my socks? Like, I'm running a company. Like, how does that compare? Yeah, exactly. Does negotiation, do you guys, does that go into your habit framework? Because we just talked about it in the context of preserving cognitive budget, but it sounds like it could be a pretty key part into staying on habits too.

How do you go into saying these things are, I'm not negotiating these things? Is it simply that you just say to yourself, this is non-negotiable? Or where does that fit into the, to the building the habit phase? I mean, you have the experience of having a streak and so your streak is non-negotiable, right? Like you are going to meditate and I don't think, it doesn't sound like you negotiate very much on whether you should meditate. I bet you negotiate on how long and when. Yeah, yeah, I do. I mean, and so yeah, and when I'm in, you know, there's a little negotiation when I'm nearly asleep, and I realized that I haven't, but it's not much. And I have sort of a fallback plan that says, okay, when that happens, here's what I'm going to do. It's,

I'm not going to go, you know, sit in, you know, on a cushion upstairs for, you know, an hour, but I'm going to do something. I've got some things that I fall back on. But yeah, you're right that I try not to negotiate when becomes a problem for me because my schedule is kind of chaotic. But when I can get it routine, it's so much better to just know when it's going to happen. Yeah, we have a lot in the app about making your life easier and helping you pre decide. about making your life easier and helping you pre-decide. So it's convert a big goal into a routine. That's a pre-decision.

I might do this every day or at least a couple days a week. I might do it this many days a week. I might set a reminder for this time on these days. Even as we add in more levels of coaching, one level is a daily plan. So it's actually a coach has written for you, today do this. They just, you know, a user coached on me, it's already in the habit of opening the app and then it just tells them,

oh, this is how many pushups I'm going to do today. Or, right? And then the last level of coaching is that uh is actually a personal coach and um you know that's a just another example of someone who's helping you uh not negotiate right is that um i tell the coaches you know the new coaches it's okay if you don't feel smart what you want is for the the person being coached to feel smart so like a question like what days were you planning to go to the gym this week it doesn't make the coach feel smart but it actually is a really eye-opening question for

most people who are like well i hadn't decided at all right and um those sorts of basic planning questions are about pre deciding, so you're not having to negotiate in the moment. Yep, that's such a good approach. And I like that idea of people buy into stuff that they have a say in coming up with or thinking up versus, you know, there's that some of us, I won't name anybody, might sometimes resist authority. So if it feels like that in certain cases, but... I just want to say it's an interesting thing to watch so many people be coached is actually there's a type of person that wants to be told what to do and wants to do it.

And then there's a different type of person who hates to be told what to do and definitely won't do it. And you just have to coach each person differently. And that's actually partly why we've ended up with so many humans, why it's a community, is because software is not that great at being that flexible. But a human can figure that out pretty quickly and say, well, okay, this is a person that just wants to do it on their own and I'll advise them, which is how I am. Like I always tell my coaches right away, I don't want to plan. I don't want you to tell me what to do. I want to tell you what I did,

ask you questions and get your feedback. And for me, that's very valuable. That's because I'm uncoachable and that's how I ended up being the CEO. Yep. I can, I can relate. Well, thank you so much. This has been, uh, like I said, I could probably do this for another hour, but this has been really fun. Um, thanks for being on the show. Thanks for the, the app. I'm a, I'm a big fan. And should we tell people where they can get it? Yes, please. I'll, I'll have it linked in the show notes, but go ahead. Definitely. So the URL, the website is coach.me. That's not a.com or anything. It's coach.me. And then you can download the app also from the Google Play Store for Android and from the Apple

Store for the iPhone. So you can use it on the iPhone, on Android, or the web. Basically, everyone should be able to use it. Yep. And there's a lot in it. I probably use 10% of what's in it, but it's been really effective for me. So thanks again, Tony. All right. Thank you so much for having me and good luck, everyone. Yes, take care.

you can learn more about tony stubblebine and this podcast at one you feed.net slash t s