Your Undivided Attention - The Fake News of Your Own Mind — with Jack Kornfield and Trudy Goodman

Episode Date: June 2, 2020

When you’re gripped by anxiety, fear, grief or dread, how do you escape? It can happen in the span of a few breaths, according to meditation experts Jack Kornfield and Trudy Goodman. They have helped thousands of people find their way out of a mental loop, by moving deeper into it. It's a journey inward that reveals an important lesson for the architects of the attention economy: you cannot begin to build humane technology for billions of users, until you pay careful attention to the course of your own wayward thoughts.

What's the right way to be in the world right now? When we've addictively been looking at coronavirus news and how many people died or not, and we've been looping on emails and rereading the old emails and then re-triggered by our spouse or our kids cooped up in an apartment and a major city and then rereading those emails again and looping again, it's never been easier to be anxious or triggered in a world with this much uncertainty. And these are the kinds of inner reactions that if we don't notice it, it controls us.

We are all grieving, and grief gets expressed in such different ways. That's Trudy Goodman, a meditation expert who's helped thousands of people find a way out of their mental loops by moving deeper into them. It can come out in a form of anxiety. It can come out in the form of regret, what if, and if only, and if only had done this, and if only had done that. And all of those forms of almost sideways or crooked expressions of grief don't help. We don't have training that we get as children for how to deal with the fake news of our own minds,

the anxiety, the fear, the emotions that just come up automatically. And noticing these things in our minds is equivalent to gaining agency over them. It doesn't take a long time or strenuous effort to radically alter the course of your thoughts. Trudy and her husband, the legendary meditation expert Jack Cornfield, have seen countless people shift their worldview in the span of a few breaths. What helps is to fully feel that feeling in the body, understand the stories that it generates in the mind, and be able to hold all of that with some measure of kindness, or at least willingness to be present with it, and then it can move through us.

Today on Your Individed Attention, we are talking with Jack Hornfield and Trudy Goodman. Both are dear friends and meditation teachers who've married each other and spent decades studying and teaching mindfulness meditation practice around the world. Jack was introduced to Buddhism in Thailand in the late 1960s, where he studied as a monk for several years and then returned to the United States. In 1987, he and a group of other teachers began creating Spirit Rock Meditation Center, here in Woodacre, California. Trudy was one of the first teachers of the mindfulness-based stress reduction practice

and taught with its creator John Kabat-Zinn for many years. In 1995, she co-founded the Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and she's also the founding teacher of Insight, L.A. What are the lessons that technologists can take and what we can take as users of technology from the insights of meditation experts like Jack or Trudy? I mean, why would we have mindfulness experts on a podcast about how technology impacts society? Because if you think about all these technology designers, if I'm a designer at Facebook, and I don't understand how my own mind works, how my own emotions, my own anxiety hijacks myself,

how can I possibly design to reduce the anxiety in other people? If I'm a designer of Gmail and I don't see the ways that email hijacks my breathing or my anxiety or my fear that cause me to go into those loops myself, how can I design email products that reduce those kinds of engagement loops with emails and texting and video conferencing? So only by becoming aware of the mental loops that are built inside of our internal systems can we start to become aware of how to design them away from our external systems? And humane technology is directly linked to mindfulness

because humane technology is about enabling choice by better understanding where we lose choice, where we get hijacked by our emotions, our anxiety. There are many people now re-evaluating what a web browser should be or what online video should be in much more aggressive and radical and creative ways because we're trapped in these video conferencing systems for hours a day now if you're an information worker. And so it's actually like almost the best time in the world for humane technology

thinking to be happening because whether it's with our addictions or our overwhelming communication or video that just doesn't feel right, everyone now wants to have a better solution. How can we meet that rare synchronicity of 3 billion people carried by the same situation? So this is actually kind of exciting in a way that this is the time that we can provide better and better solutions. I'm Tristan Harris and I'm Azaraskin and this is your undivided attention. people in these times and what's been most surprising that people haven't been yearning for

that maybe hasn't been kind of top of mind as we look inside ourselves first of all people don't have the training to track their own inner experiences whether their emotions or reactivity or the thoughts that they're having about things in a very conscious way often we just kind of live them out or we try to you know enact them or get things done so the first thing is just helping people with simple skills, sit quietly and begin to tune in with some loving awareness to all the labor that your body is carrying through this, the fight, flight, or freeze, trauma that gets activated, to really let yourself feel that as you get quieter, you realize, or I realize that there's a lot of grief and sadness more than I'm aware of

on a surface, and to let all of that be felt and held with compassion rather than be either unconscious or kind of get knotted up in the system. So the first thing is just giving people tools to be present, but of course the suffering isn't the end of the story. People also need a sense of possibility and hope, not just in a kind of naive way, but we know we need to make something meaningful out of this to change our society. And it's, you know, we see the injustice and the misuse of the resources and climate technology, but it speaks to a social and moral dilemma of our time. Maybe you could say a spiritual dilemma of the society, that we've organized ourselves in ways that caused suffering to so many people and the kind of injustice and racism and so forth

that have been perpetuated. And we've lost our moral compass. And so there's a longing for vision as well. I think on the first point that you're bringing up, what's most striking to me is the way that we don't know that we're actually grieving. You would think that, you know, if we're feeling those feelings, it would be obvious to us that in our conscious awareness, we would say, oh, yeah, I'm really grieving right now.

And it kind of reminds me of if you make the parallels to technology, when we can be looping in an addictive. pattern and scrolling to something. I mean, we're doing it, but we don't actually notice it. And I remember in my own meditation practice how useful it was to realize, am I resisting something right now? And what would happen for whatever it is that I'm resisting to accept it? And I actually notice what a huge shift that made in my own practice. The first point being that I didn't notice what was actually underneath the hood. And second, I didn't notice that I was resisting what was underneath the hood. Do you want to say more about that? Because I think it's sort of this optical illusion that we think we do see.

what's happening inside ourselves. What I've been maybe a little bit surprised by, but not entirely because we've worked, you know, with so many thousands of people over so many years is how much people need reassurance that what they're going through is what human beings go through, that they are not going crazy, that they are not specially, you know, defective in any way. And that also speaks to what you're talking about, having awareness that extends past just my individual me, what I'm starting. cycling through. And this long stay-at-home is really like a long and forced retreat for

people. Like you were saying, people are encountering their unhealthy patterns with each other or with their kids and people who are with their families and with others, roommates, whoever. And people are discovering that all these things that they thought they had dealt with or they thought they could set aside are just suddenly front and center. And so the capacity to develop more awareness so that these things are not invisible. I think what's been really helpful about people gathering on Zoom and listening to each other and chatting with each other during the classes and things we're doing is people realizing, oh yeah, I feel that way too. Thank you. Thank you for talking about that. Thank you for your honesty. It's been actually beautiful to

witness, but it's also just an illustration of what Jack was talking about and what you're talking about and what we talk about in these teachings of mindfulness and loving awareness and compassion, which is how do we know ourselves better? One of the things I am struggling with now is I'm awash in information outside of my control. Everything from the way that states are opening up before I think it's safe to do so, to relationships between nations. what are the practices, the tools for seeing a frame which is bigger than one that you have influenced to act upon?

It's a beautiful question that fits with the fact that the virus has actually stopped us in our tracks, made us go to our room, so to speak, as people will say. But then what do you do in that room? And it turns out you can be sequestered and still go on automatic. and just live your life and try to keep it going however you can. But it's also possible to take some time to actually close your eyes, quiet your mind, and begin to listen to your body and your heart and, you know, all the things that you're carrying.

And the example I love is of Mahatma Gandhi. During his effort to bring down or take apart the entire British colonial empire, He would take one day a week in silence to meditate. And it didn't matter if there were hundreds of thousands of people on the street and people getting angry, people getting killed. And they say, Gandhiji, we need you, must come out. And he said, I'm sorry, it's my silent day. And he would take the silence in a deliberate way to stop and listen more deeply to what do I most care about, what are my deepest intentions, what are all the wash of feelings that get brought up, and to become quiet, not in the. quietistic removal from the world, but somehow to become more spacious or ask,

how do I respond from the most compassionate place to myself and others? And when we do that, first we encounter the things that we haven't paid attention to, but that's the beginning of the journey. Underneath that is a whole vast opening to intuitive wisdom, to our deeper values, to a perspective of consciousness. awareness that brings a kind of freedom around it all where we can make new choices. And this is true for people now who are sequestered at home. And it's the same thing of stepping back from technology for a bit and saying, well,

how do I actually want to use this? What's their value? What's not? How might I make this into something that serves? It's interesting, Aza, when you brought up the problem of spheres of agency. I mean, Buddhism talked about this thousands and thousands of years ago, that our minds can actually pay attention to things that might be beyond our sphere of agency. And what is it the serenity prayer of having the grace to...

The courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference. Yes, exactly. Yeah, and that prayer and also, I mean, just the kind of practices in bosom to notice the ways that our minds can go into loops on things that we may not have agency over and to put them on the movie screen of our minds over and over and over. again, and already that being a challenge, but now with technology lets us think about a global and full-time 24-7 view of all the suffering in the world that we have no agency over. We have the kind of Buddhist practices of how to do this in our own minds, but then we need a

kind of exponential version of that now because the degree of things that we can be made aware of that we have no control over has just gone up exponentially. And I just wonder how you think about that. Because my sense is just that all of the things that you would teach in a week-long meditation course, we would need those, you know, exponentially, each one of those tools built into the ways that we obviously navigate our own minds, but also maybe some lessons for people who are making technology, who are some of our audience. Yeah, I mean, there's two pieces.

One is just the overwhelming awareness of so much suffering that we're not in a position to help or to change, you know, or determine a different outcome for the way. that. And we know that when we can incline our hearts and turn our minds toward the goodness of life and the beauty of what's possible for us going forward, when we can do that, when we can make that shift, it's actually good for us physically, mentally, emotionally, emotionally, you know, in every way. It's just we need to have some respite from that suffering. And we need to also learn ways of being with the unknown and with that which is completely uncertain. And the reality is that things have always been like this,

but we didn't need to be aware of it in that way. Like we just were not, it wasn't in our face, that we truly don't know the future, that no one guarantees our life, that we don't know who's going to survive through whatever period of time. We have never known, but now our not knowing is so intense and the tendency is to fill in the blanks with your future, But learning to be with the unknown, the don't know mind that my first teacher, the Korean Zen master, used to ask us to meditate with the mind that really doesn't know experience.

And that means the mind that doesn't overlay experience with all of its expectations and various biases and lenses based on early conditioning that we all go through in our childhood. Could you dig into that actually? Why is it that when we don't know, we can project all of our worst fears into that? I mean, I am stocked full of an encyclopedia of fearful outcomes that I can project into the void of my uncertainty. Like, my mind is just doing this without even noticing it. What is it about our minds that does that? I think you can speak to some subtler, deeper levels there.

Well, I'm sure Jack can add to this, but just briefly, you know, the neuroscientists have identified what is called the netherlands. negativity bias of the brain. And it's a survival mechanism to look for all the possible dangers, you know, that tiger that could be in the bush over there or to look for the predators, to look for the possible negative outcomes and protect ourselves from them. And so we need to actually actively work with because the default, you know, it's as you said, you're not even trying to do that. It's just happening because the brain is wired to help us survive. But these are not, you know, individual predators.

These are massive. But to understand that this is the brain's effort to take care of us is actually the activity of compassion. It's just that it doesn't work, not really helpful. So to thank our brains for thinking of all these possible terrifying scenarios or dystopian futures, you know, to thank the brain for being willing to protect. to try to keep us safe. Yes, exactly. That's what protection is, exactly.

Why does that work? Why is that so powerful? It seems so simple. It's because it's a shift of identity. At first, you're caught in the middle of it, and you believe it, and you believe that's who you are, the way things are.

And the moment you say, thank you, you become the loving witness of it, and you say, or the compassionate witness, and you say, yeah, I understand. I appreciate what my brain, and mind are doing, but that's not who I am or all of who I am. They say in Zen that there are only two things. You sit and you sweep the garden. That is that you quiet the mind and tend the heart and make conscious the things that are happening so that there's this sense of spaciousness or

compassion that grows inner freedom. And then you get up and you tend the garden of the world. And part of what's kind of the existential impact of this pandemic is that we're seeing the human condition writ large. We're seeing the Buddha describe these in his four noble truths. We're seeing that human life entails suffering. And no matter how much we try to protect ourselves, whether it's with technology or the wealth that we accumulate or other such things, that no one is exempt. and that we're seeing the traumas that we carry and the world carries. And it's not that life is suffering, but that existence has suffering. And so either we can run away or hide ourselves or get lost in our technology or lost in our fantasies or lost in our habits,

or we can take a breath and hold the trauma or the grief that we carry or the kinds of suffering, people we love, the world at large, experience, and bear witness to it. And when we do, then a different freedom comes because the suffering is not the end of the story. Start to see more deeply that individually and collectively the suffering grows when there's more greed and more ignorance and more hatred. And when the opposite of that, when there's more love and more clarity or wisdom and more mutual care and generosity, then suffering diminishing.

And then you come to a sense where we can live our lives together with the measure of birth and death and joy and sorrow and, you know, illness and health that come with human incarnation with a free and a loving heart. We can make a very different world in this. So we're getting the deep spiritual lessons. And I'm speaking about this, you know, in a broader way. But in some way, we have to come to terms with how do we hold this? suffering of life and its magnificence, its unbearable beauty as well as the ocean of tears. And to become present for it, it become the loving, compassionate witness of it, opens the door to freedom for us individually and for us to set a new intention to visualize

what's possible. What's striking you wrote, or I think you said in a different interview, when you do that move, that shift in identity and move from being inside of. of the fear and dystopian visions that are projected on the movie screen of your mind to and say thank you to your mind for putting those up on the movie screen so that I can protect myself and how quickly that shift can take place. You say it can take just 10 seconds to kind of reset our consciousness. And I think this is part of what's so interesting is it's kind of optical illusions all the way down. When we're in one of those states, and I know

like any of us from this moment that space intimately, I'm very sensitive. I'm very sensitive. I see these pictures of what's happening in the world and I can get really hijacked for a while and it feels when I'm in that space that I'm very distant from an alternative perspective from a place where I'm feeling calm. And I think to speak to how close that actually is, it's like the mirrors that say objects in mirror are closer than they appear. A shift to a more loving state is actually closer than it might feel. And I was just wondering how we can do that because I think this is all about, like you said,

this is kind of a forced meditation practice for how we navigate to a different space. I'm just curious how you see that. Yeah, this idea of being distant or far away from ourselves, the source of our nature, actually, and how do you get closer and closer? That sense of closeness or unity to all life, actually, is a huge antidote to the dystopian futures or presence that we're perceiving, that shift of identity to something. that is not a centralized, you know, egoic focus of what do I love? What do I want more of? What threatens me? What do I want to get away from? You know, the shift from that into just willingness

to slow into experience enough to be with it. And it doesn't have to take long. Like you said, it can be 10 seconds that shift. It can be less. But that willingness to step back, Zen Master in the 13th century, Dogan called it taking the backwards step, letting things reveal themselves to us instead of constantly approaching everything with our agendas for them or our reactions to them. But just willingness to receive reality, which only can happen in the present moment. And that's the other reason that we focus so much on being present and we use that language of presence because our aliveness only happens in this moment right now. And that reality and immersing yourself 100% wholeheartedly in that reality is a way to get really close to

experience. It's amazing just these subtle reframes that I hear throughout a lot of your teachings and kind of guided meditations. I remember an early mentor to me when I was working on persuasive technology and we're talking about some of these themes back in 2012 or so. She said the power of a therapist to say to someone, you're not alone, it's okay, and there's a way out. But the feeling that we have this optical illusion of feeling like we're alone, we're the only one who's feeling the thing that we're currently feeling. And just that reframe of like, would anybody else in the situation feel the same thing? And there's this huge kind of breath of fresh air that kind of comes with realizing, oh, of course, you know, some other people

experience this or this has happened before. And I was just curious if you would speak to some of that because I think buried inside of all of this are these very easy to do but seemingly hard to remember kind of I don't want to call them psychological tricks because it makes them feel smaller than they actually are but these profound shifts that can come from certain ways of pointing our attention or communicating like in stories as opposed to as techniques they're not that complicated there's simply ways to step back as Trudy was talking about just little techniques that let us take a breath and step out of being caught in things to seeing them with a compassionate awareness.

And those three points that your friend was sharing with you, I think that's exactly what I was talking about when I was saying, I'm noticing how much people need to hear those things. You're not alone. You're not the only one going through this. And it doesn't mean you're not okay. you are okay and the other piece of the way out we have such an individual focus in our culture and just to be able to say when you're in the middle you know just feeling stricken by fear

paralyzed in some way or any kind of intense emotion that's arising in this time to be able to feel it fully and then to say okay this is what fear this is what terror feels like it looks like this It feels like my tight chest. It feels like my sweaty palms. This is what it feels like. And this is what it feels like to be a human being who is terrified. And right in that shift from just me to my humanness, I'm joined suddenly with the rest of humanity,

with everybody who has ever felt fear or intense anger or intense, you know, whatever it is, rage, sorrow, whatever it may be. And so that linking back to our common shared humanity is also really important because in this time of othering, and it seems like the forces of bias and prejudice are just rising in the world, anything that reminds us, yes, to be present, but also remember we aren't alone, I mean, in the vaster sense of not being alone, of being connected to all life and each other. It seems a lot of these practices are being able, as you're saying, to step back, saying, I'm separate from a little bit my emotions. I am not my fear. I am not my grief. And that awareness gives me the ability to have choice.

And our technology in many ways, it ossifies us because, you know, we're on social media, Facebook, Twitter. It learns our preferences. and then it reflects those preferences or perceived preferences, the things we click on. They're not our true selves. It's showing us what we think is a mirror, and we actually see this fun house mirror, and then we're surrounded by that image of who we were, and it keeps us both individually and societally from becoming who we could be, that Emersonian, obtainable, but as of yet

unobtained self. So what would be the equivalent of taking that backward step that Trudy talked about of becoming the consciousness, the loving or compassionate awareness, rather than being lost in the avatar and the creativity of technology, what would be the equivalent for people to learn in relation to technology? Yeah, it's interesting, this feeling of stepping back and saying you are not your thoughts and the thoughts are not reality in the same way that a story and a Facebook newsfeed can go viral. Fear inside of your brain can go viral. And as you were talking and asking that, Jack,

I was just thinking, imagine at the top of your Facebook news feed, it said something like, this set of newsfeed stories and posts are not reality. Something that kind of like, it maintained the metacognitive perch sitting above. I don't mean to be so rational about it, but it enabled and presented visually access to, you can stand above this very specific set of things here. And of course, we wouldn't want it just to keep showing you the fear feed because in a way, my brain is a fear news feed. I mean, it's an anxiety news feed.

And we should also name the profit motive. You know, Facebook is kind of like the exon of human anxiety. It extracts and pumps itself off of, you know, some of the worst parts of ourselves and the inability to distinguish between anxiety and love or preference, you know, according to Facebook, if I am driving down a freeway and my eyes keep looking at car crashes, then it thinks that I want more car crashes and starts looping. But your brain does the same thing. Your brain is sort of a self-learning news feed that says, oh, you tend to have this thought

pattern where you keep looking at the fear and the dystopia. So I'm going to give you more of that. And so the things that are wrong with the news feed and that algorithm and reinforcing based on what our patterns are and what we repeat is the same pattern that we have to face, it seems, in our own mind. And what are the lessons for how we would design technology that let us see more clearly? This newsfeed is not a picture of reality at all, just like our mind is not. An image that came to me, when you talk about Facebook, I can imagine on the computer screen, it's just playing with it, that actually you have a proscenium arch and it looks like a theater and that everything that's presented is within that. And then at the top of it, it would say

the theater of human incarnation or human drama, and then there would be, you know, several different things that would light up, the drama of fear, or the drama of tragedy, or the drama of beauty or art or love, and you kind of get to see, oh, yeah, today the channel is providing us, you know, romantic love or something like that. Again, this isn't real, but what it's doing in my mind is envisioning what you're saying somehow, that we, take the inner tools that are the birthright of humanity that we've learned as cultures over thousands of years to bring an inner freedom to ourselves and we somehow embed them in the way that technology presents itself so that instead of

putting us to sleep it actually awakens us yeah it's a really apt image another image that's used a lot is the dreamlike nature of existence you know that you go to sleep and you have a really vivid dream. And as soon as you wake up, you know, oh, that was a dream. But then really, yesterday is like that too. I'm in today, and when I reflect back on yesterday, it's sort of a dream. I wanted to just come back to something that you said earlier is about the silos that are created by the algorithms feeding us more of what we already know, of learning, which would be learning what we don't yet know.

You know, what you're describing is a reality where we only get to have the life we already know. We don't get to have a new life that we haven't explored yet and we don't even know what it would look like. And there's something about that that is also very infantilizing and protecting, you know, like little kids. We don't want them to know too much because they're not ready. they actually don't have the capacity yet. But we do. And we were talking about micro and macro, but there's something in between, which is the family. And the family provides usually the same function.

They see you as you were. And if you begin to change, they will usually, sometimes in kind ways, sometimes in not so kind ways. They will usually either encourage or provoke you into behaving the same way you used to. All it's family homeostasis. I used to do a lot of family therapy. And so there too, we're drawn to the comfort of what we know, but it's paradoxical. It's not real comfort because it's, again, then we only get to have the life that we already know. And the other thing I wanted to say, I loved your phrase, Tristan, maintaining the metacognitive perch.

That could be a definition of mindfulness, really. Right. Yeah, it's really, that's beautiful. and it's difficult, it's difficult to do, and it doesn't matter if we fall off that perch. As long as we remember, there is a perch, there is a way out. And so that's the tricky part, because the forgetting and the remembering is like the rhythm of life, expansion, action, breathe in, breathe out, exactly. It's natural.

I love what you're saying, especially on the beginner's mind, I mean, the famous phrase, the Zen mind, beginner's mind, and any notion of looping, you know, what is the definition? mission of crazy. It's doing the same thing. And you've done many times before and expecting different results. Yeah. And I think of it as if you go out, if you zoom out enough, I think, you know, in a meditation retreat, that's one of the things you actually notice. Like, you didn't see that if you zoom out enough, there's actually kind of a, even though you're not repeating the exact same thought, the pattern of the thought at the highest level, like jumping from this dystopia to, oh, the whole world is going to melt down. That higher level thought might be a pattern

that in quarantine keeps coming up and when you're looping there you're not actually being or thinking because you're actually hijacked by something and it's almost like how many layers of the matrix do I have to punch a hole through to get out of that one to a higher level one and I might even see higher and higher level loops but any definition of freedom and awakening would require not being in a loop and that's what I think of the word hijack we used to say technology hijacks your mind, hijacking is a narrowing and a repetition and a non-freedom. And the ability to name or see the hijack, even if you fall off of it multiple times, is the ability to temporarily go back up into creativity, into something fresh, into something awakened and new, and creating

new choice on life's menu where there were not choices before, where there was a false choice. You kept feeding yourself the same menu. And I find that fascinating. It's thinking about lessons for how do you design technology to avoid loops. I think of Slack. I think of email. I think of text messages. This is happening all the time. Yes, it is. Yes, it is. What you're saying about that looping and repetition, it also reminds me psychologically looking at the psychoanalytic tradition, there's something called the repetition compulsion where you keep looping around the same behaviors or the same patterns of bad relationships and unhealthy things, maybe self-destructive things, looping around and around these patterns. And the looping in those patterns, you can't get out

because the mechanism is something that is rooted in earlier behavior and the repetition is an unconscious search for a better outcome, you know, but because it's unconscious, it just keeps going, it figures like, okay, I'll try it again, you know, maybe this time I'll reread that email, maybe this time I'll see the way to respond. Right. And that the mechanistic nature of that looping and the revisiting of patterns in us, there's something innocent about it. It's somebody used a phrase that I loved the other day, the innocence of karma, which was referring

to the fact that we don't choose the thoughts that we're having. We don't choose the emotions that we're having. I mean, nobody announces to us, hey, anxiety barreling towards you on track nine. So so much of this is actually already ungovernable and out of our control. If we could control them, we wouldn't be having these feelings. I guess the point of that innocence of karma is that when we can positively connote what's happening, and I'm talking about what's happening within, not how it's getting projected out into the tech world, that's really your department.

But when we can positively connote these things, we can change them and let them go. it's completely counterintuitive. You would think that the things we hate about ourselves would be the easiest to let go of and to change. But it doesn't work that way. And this is where the essential role of kindness and compassion and loving awareness comes in. Because when we can say, you know,

well, that was the best I could do at that time, or this was the only way that the mind knew how to approach this thing, it's a kind of the tender understanding that we all wish we could have had all the time growing up but it isn't like that, right?

It really reminds me of I learned in my training in neurolinguistic programming and it's used in counseling all the time as you're saying, Trudy, there's that when you go back to seeing the earlier childhood memory of where that pattern might have come from, the response to a fearful situation

or to betrayal or trust or whatever it was, that you have to go back and see that little boy who experienced that and say oh my gosh could he have been expected to do anything other than what he did to find that strategy at that time to thank that little boy for how he responded to say oh that was so understandable and we're so sorry we couldn't be there for him when he needed more support and then that allowing that compassion allowing something new to exist on top of that but if that little boy being traumatized is still running in the autopilot, you know, homunculus little version of, you know, in the cockpit of your mind, running the controls without seeing that that little boy is running the

cockpit. Well, of course, you've kind of narrowed that kind of agency. And another theme that this brings up from reading some of your both earlier interviews, I think Jack talked once about the compulsion towards suicide or the feeling that I need to die, need to not be here. And that, in fact, that might be actually a part of ourselves, like an older, innocent part of ourselves that actually it's not the body that needs to die. It's that there's a more innocent earlier part of ourselves that we might be needing to let go over, that that's the thing that's being traumatized and needs to be lost. But it's not the body. And the mind again, being so fragile and not having these kind of Jedi level understandings of ourselves is the difference

between, you know, taking an action like suicide versus allowing that different understanding, which allows us to transcend and grow and alchemize into a new version of ourselves. And I think there's a really critical nuance in there, which is, and I've noticed this in myself, that if I can name, you know, say a childhood reason for why I am the way that I am and not distinguish it from the pattern that I'm exhibiting now, then that reason can become my identity and it fixes me. And there's this kind of way which you have to acknowledge and then let go of the reason so that you can address directly the pattern. Yeah, that sounds right. There's another critical nuance to pick up your phrase, Aza, in what you said earlier, Tristan, which is that part, say, the little boy, in your example, that part doesn't have to die or even get lost, like get lost kid. Right, right, right, right. You know, that part actually just needs to not be in charge of your behavior.

It can be there, you know, it can be part of, it can be part of a family, but it can't be in charge. Yeah, it reminds me of a neurolinguistic programming, and I guess it's part of internal family systems. There's a practice called the Parts Auditorium, where you invite all of the little parts of yourselves into an auditorium and to notice who's getting the joystick and to sort of have each part of ourselves feel included and respected and part of the broader sort of society of the self, you know, because we do regress and shift between these little parts of ourselves. and that acceptance and welcoming and love for all those different parts is critical for integration. One of my favorite examples of this is the movie Inside Out and Daker Keltner's work, which if you think of Inside Out as sort of an ultimate in understanding technology, it gave a roadmap, a visual roadmap, a metaphor for six, seven, eight, nine, ten-year-olds to understand this sort of many versions of ourselves.

all voting for what we do as a mental model and being there to be present with all of them. Yes, years ago, my friend Spencer was trying to stop smoking, and I asked him how it was going at one point, and he said, well, some of us have stopped, but others of us are stopped. Right. And I loved that because, yes, that's actually, you know, will the real Spencer please stand up? there isn't one. It's really, you know, yeah, we're made of all these, all these different parts. And if people could understand and have, maybe it doesn't have to be Jedi level, but a little more, a little more understanding, they wouldn't have to hate so much.

They wouldn't have to project onto an other. Right. You know, there's a beautiful Zen story, really simple one where the abbot of the monastery, the Zen master, he has a practice that he does to maintain awareness, to sustain his cognitive perch. And he called out to himself. And he says, hey, are you awake? And then he answers himself and says, yes. And then he says, you know, are you staying here? Are you here?

And he answers himself. And he's like, yeah, I'm present. I'm here. And then he says, do not be deceived by others. And that's the call on. Like that's the point of, you know, we make things an other. We make them, because there is that separation of becoming the witness and not believing our thoughts and being able to have that space. But then there's also the unity of being able to merge

and sense our connection in a visceral way, our innate connection to all life. Right? And yet we make an object, we reify things and we make them other and we do that to each other. And that to me is the source of just so much of the problems in our world. Yeah. What a deeply enlivening conversation. Oh, it's my pleasure. Anytime, really. Our pleasure. We love you guys. Our friend Linda Stone coined the phrase email apnea. Just like with sleep apnea, when we read our email, we actually hold our breath because it's stressful. And if you watch closely when you read your email, you'll watch that you do that. And when you hold your breath, you're kind of suppressing the parasympathetic nervous system and you're increasing the amount of stress in your body, which

makes you more vulnerable to anxiety-driven, juicy dopamine-type things that are going to help us run away from that stress even faster. You know, something as simple as our breathing can sound like some kind of new-age woo-woo introduction of something irrelevant to the conversation, especially talking to meditation teachers. I think a lot of people naturally have that reaction to when people say just focus on your breath. But how much is our breath and our breathing affected by technology? Blue light is another great example where if you shine blue light into a human being's eyes, especially late at night, it keeps them up, it disrupts the sleep cycle.

But it's a subtle shift. It's not like you just snap your fingers and stop sleeping. It's that the quality of life changes. And to detect that change in the quality of life requires a kind of internal practice of slowing down. of noticing. I think technologists don't generally take responsibility for small design decisions that end up having profound effects on our physiology. It can really alter our physiological states in very surprising ways. When we talk about humane technology and how do we, you know, design for people's broader well, people often think, well, then we need the technology to make us happy, as opposed to

what if it uncluttered the background to make space for well-being to emerge naturally as part of a complex system? For example, let's say you're trying to build humane technology that increases my daily sense of unconditional love and delight in the world. Oh my God, okay, how would we do that? You can imagine the computer notifications. Notifications or the computer points a camera at my face and it sees what my micro expressions are. It says, oh my God, he's not happy. Let's start like dosing him with puppy photos until his micro expressions start. squinching in a way that go up to the full facial smile. Now we know his eyes are smiling. That's when we get a real smile. Okay, the computer's making us happy. It's optimizing for well-being.

I think there's a real fallacy here. One of the principles of humane technology is actually finding and strengthening existing human brilliance with regard to a human value we're trying to fulfill. So let's say it's well-being or unconditional love. I remember when we went into the coronavirus, I actually posted on Facebook, now would be a great time to adopt a rest of rescue animal because pets are one of the few things that actually just give you unconditional love and just look at you with that little smile. And so when you think about, okay, well, imagine technology knows those of us that are feeling at home and are depressed and are actually by ourselves. Like we're actually on quarantine, not with someone else. We're just by ourselves.

And that we're given rich and empowering menus of ways that, you know, that might help us. So that could be finding a supportive community or a book club or reading club or, you know, on Zoom. but it could also be, you know, here are animals you can rescue right now. That's the kind of thing we want to optimize for, not the kind of moment to moment smiling and happiness and joy. So we're not ranking news feeds by puppy videos that just make your smile, you know, curvature go up by five degrees. We're designing for the resilience and groundedness of each human being,

increasing their deeper sense of sovereignty and capacity as a human being in the world. I also wanted to bring it back to, if you think about what specifically technology could do, one of the things we've talked about in this interview is the identifying of looping patterns. You know, watching when my mind is looping on a specific anxiety. You know, humane technology might help us by identifying looping patterns. I mean, I'm just riffing in real time here. But, you know, what if I could sort of hit a checkbox on my operating system that said, hey, could you actually identify when I'm looping?

You know, email could actually identify when I'm looping on those same emails and I'm not actually answering them. browsers could identify when I'm just switching back and forth rotating between three or four tabs without actually getting anything done. Here is a mindfulness tool which says notice a looping pattern of thought and then name it,

compassionally lean into it and accept it instead of push it away. And then where do I want to go with it once I see even more choices on Life menu once I've integrated that part of myself that was coming from a place of anxiety and looping? It's a really interesting design prompt because there's the naive way of dealing with it. A notification to say, like, hey, you're looping.

That's probably not the way to go. Now you're feeding the problem even worse because you're just letting people know all at once. Here's all the places. Obviously, that's not the right thing. Or maybe we should give them, like, bars and charts so that they can feel shame at the end of the week about how much they've looped.

That's actually a really important point, though. There's something in willpower theory, which has some contestation, but if you show people evidence of how they're breaking their own set limits, they actually feel even worse about it, and they're more likely to engage in the destructive behavior. So if this is the sixth time that I went for the candy in the candy jar, and now you're showing me this the sixth time, and I was only supposed to do it twice in a day, now I just feel even worse.

And what's the fastest way to run away from that feeling worseness and that anxiety? I'm going to go for even more of those damn emin. Well, I've already broken it. I've already broken it effect is what I call the what the hell effect. So it's the once I set a boundary and then once I go past that boundary, notice that we don't stay close to that boundary, we just, like, all bets are off. And now we're just down the rabbit hole of our anxieties and fears and addictions. So besides putting the cookies or the sweets even further away, what are other good design patterns for overcoming that? I think it's important

to sort of say, how do I reset the nervous system and remove the cobwebs? Like, you know, one day in nature, a digital Sabbath. And I think technology is so integrated into our lives. It's hard to do that when it's literally an extension of you, especially in a post-coronavirus world. So how do you have a Sabbath from your arm when your arm is fundamental to the way that we live. I think this is kind of maybe an optimistic way to see things like Apple Watch or the light phone where you have smaller, more minimalistic arms that you get to put on. You know, you get a choice. You get to put on the fully featured arm that connects you 24-7 to all the world suffering

in real time and beams all that knowledge down into your brain by putting that arm on, aka the iPhone and like the computer and the web browser. Versus I can put on this sort of calmer arm, the arm that's more. limited in its constraints that only lets me make phone calls and maybe makes me aware of some basic things like my calendar but mostly is really about turning off you know how do we get more agency back so we're not just given this all or nothing choice which is back to my first head talk uh between being 100% connected to everything all the time and having that be the choice or completely disconnecting there's got to be as i say in buddhism a middle way mm-hmm

Your undivided attention is produced by the Center for Humane Technology. Our executive producer is Dan Kedmi and our associate producer is Natalie Jones. Nor Al Samurai helped with the fact-checking, original music and sound design by Ryan and Hayes Holiday. And a special thanks to the whole Center for Humane Technology team for making this podcast possible. A very special thanks to the generous lead supporters of our work at the Center for Humane Technology, including the Omidiar Network, the Gerald Schwartz and Heather Reisman Foundation, the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, Evolve Foundation, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, and Knight Foundation, among many others.

Huge thanks from all of us.