Dan Harris & Jeff Warren

00:05ladies and gentlemen please welcome Dan Harris and Jeff Warren I don't know why I started off that way I just felt weird it's always weird to start starting a stance that's always very odd welcome welcome Jeff very nice to meet you thank you man Dan first tank experience we didn't talk too much about it no you just got out yeah your tank that's word it is word you know we should tell people how you did it okay you basically taunted me on text which is awesome what'd you call my chick haunt but we're saying that you were scared of being in there Mike Huckabee scare there's nothing to be scared of it's just water yeah but it's not just water because you're in this enclosed space yeah you can't see anything or hear anything so we sure is in your mind well that is absolutely correct I just happen to have a mind that is really good at panicking yeah then I've demonstrated that time

01:01and again to myself and others so I was a little wary that you called me a chicken and I was like well now I have to do this thing so I did it not without trepidation but it was really interesting really interesting I know you spend so much time exploring your consciousness and meditating and just being in your head that I felt like this is something that you really should be exposed to you were absolutely right and I appreciate it I really do is it was what I realized is I think I need to do more of it yeah because the brief discussion we had I know we wanted to not fully explore it until we got on on the pod the brief discussion we had afterwards one of the things you said is that it's good to kind of explore your boundaries yeah when it comes to fear this is something actually that my meditation teacher hasn't had to me before and it made me realize I think I

01:50need to get in there and start pushing it a little bit in this in the tank because it will help me in lots of areas of my life because when you don't test those boundaries your life becomes smaller and smaller yeah that happens to people with panic it I think it well it happens just people in general and I think it's one of the reasons why people fall into pan it's because they don't have enough experience with stressful situations to the point where they could just relax and just let it happen and that that's one of the things that I one of the reasons why I think martial arts training is very good for people not just for the self-defense aspect of it but for the aspect of just dealing with stressful situations on a regular basis to the point where you're very comfortable with them and then you realize that the consequences of this is it's not really as bad as you think it

02:40is like most people are terrified of physical confrontation but when you have physical confrontation on a regular basis especially through my favorite which is jujitsu training because there's no striking so you don't get hit in the head you're not worried about brain damage or any of that stuff it's just basically grappling but that through the continual process of testing yourself and stress and regular life stresses sort of become diminished I think it's really important you know I do some of this in my 11 live news presentation is stressful and I do that a lot I've covered many war zones which is moderate more stress very stressful but I think there are areas in my life where I've closed off because of claustrophobia in particular I need MRIs for sure I've jacked up much both of my shoulders and my knee and I've been able to deal with them because I just won't

03:35get in a scanner Jeff and I were down at actually at Vanderbilt where they wanted to take a look at my brain in a scanner while I meditated I couldn't do it that's a great opportunity it's really expensive to get a neuroscientist to look at your brain while you meditate and I wasn't able to do it because I'm I'm afraid and so I think what are you afraid of it seems like there's no physical fear right so if there's a dog in the room that's gonna bite you right so why not just force yourself to go through it well have you ever expect had a panic attack no so it panic attack is you know we evolved for this fight-or-flight instinct where your brain you know when you're faced with saber-toothed tiger or whatever with the brain floods with adrenaline and it is overwhelming it made it overwhelms all reason and you either fight or flight in this case its flight a flea

04:29and you your you can't control your body in many ways and because I've had so many panic attacks primarily the ones that people know about are the one with the one one in particular was on television on Good Morning America in 2004 when your brain learns how to do this it gets really good at it and there's no you can't hurl yourself into the at least I can't hurl myself into the lotus position and meditate it away it is overwhelming and so I can't tell myself a story about hey I'm not in physical danger because the but the brain is just we say it's very interesting about getting really good at it there's a term in archery called target panic and it happens to people it happens to target archers it happens to bow hunters and there's a thing that happens where you literally can't keep the pin on the target your your brain won't let you and no one understand like

05:30the people that are having it look while it's happening they don't understand that like I can't believe I can't do this but your brain gets so used to freaking out in this moment that literally you no longer have control and you just you try to make the shot go off as quick as you can you'll miss by feet and you just you can't you understand it like I practice every day like how is this happening but if there's this weird overwhelming sensation of adrenaline and fear and nerves and the chaos of the moment and you just slam the trigger and the arrow goes flying nowhere near the target and it's really really common to the point where people see psychologists and sports trainers and there's all these different methods that they use to try to keep in in a controlled loop system of thought process to try to handle this it's probably like you you said let occur is probably the the

06:24fighting it and the getting in your head about it is probably the same as when you get in a slump in baseball you know it's you're just locked up in yourself and it takes a long time to get over it that is you know in the tank I was thinking a lot about how that has been just a huge recurring theme in my life where the ego steps in the thinking mind the the mind that won't surrender to what is actually happening right now comes in I get locked up and can't do what I want to do one of the things Jeff and I have talked a lot about in our time together is dancing as an and I can't do it I mean can't do it isn't the right way to say it but I've struggled for a long time with dropping my self-consciousness enough so that I can dance in a way that you know I have a three-year-old around the house and we like to dance and even around him I get a little in my own head

07:14about it and I think all these things are related they must yeah they have to be it completely makes sense but it doesn't make sense to me that you can't get your brain examined when you spend so much time examining your brain yeah so I think what's different is is this is an interesting time to talk about like the difference between the brain in the mind right so I'm looking at my mind and you know the the idea of first of all just because I spend I've spent the last nine years looking closely at my mind doesn't mean that I've conquered all of my neuroses and I don't know that that's on offer I think it's a gradual process you pointed to something important about testing those limits and I think meditation can be really helpful in testing those limits and I was meditating most of the time that I was in the tank and that allowed me bringing that kind of focused attention to what

08:08was happening allowed me not to get carried away with the waves of fear that came in and I was able to let them pass without hopping out and embarrassing myself but I don't know that I can magically I think it's gonna be a process before I can get in an MRI is but I'm what I'm trying to say in a long way well if you have damaged shoulders I mean you kind of have to I do I do do you know you don't but you don't even know what's wrong with them I think it's per situs but I need to get a diagnosis before I can figure out whether I got to get surgery or cortisone shot or whatever it is do you full range of motion can you put your arms over your head yeah yeah yeah you should try hanging have you ever looked into hang saw that it's just something else crazy your knees hanging from your shoulder this is a dangerous grabbing on to a bar bringing your weight yes it's really important for

08:57their shoulder joint and it's something that very few people do on a regular basis I don't do it on a regular base yeah most people don't and even people that work out don't and you're constantly compressing your shoulder yes compressing it with poor posture compressing it with stress exercise and your your shoulder needs to expand and it also needs this the sensation of hanging your body weight from your hands it's like tremendous for your shoulder yeah nice thing in pins mints and there's some doctors there's one doctor particular that explored this see if you can find that guy's name who stopped doing most shoulder surgeries and started putting people on hanging therapy where it just tells them you know at the beginning just have a bar that's not quite above your head so they you could just sort of relax your knees and you know if you can't carry all of

09:48your weight in your hands just carry a good percentage of your weight in your hands and try to relax your shoulders and it releases impingements it stretches that joint out the idea is that we came from tree swinging primates and then as tree swinging primates we're constantly doing that and that's what the shoulder joint is meant to do it's meant to articulate in that way we grab something swing and and then not having this full range of motion and not using it on a regular basis and here's this guy's book dr. John Kirsch John M Kirsch and he came up with this many years ago when he realized that one of the things that was messing people up was just they just their joints weren't being put through the full range of motion and that by hanging you could release a tremendous amount of the pain and undiscovered that a lot of people are facing that makes a

10:41ton of sense so you it seems to me that you guys are actually saying talking about the same thing when you're talking about the mind and you're talking about the body I'm talking about impingement and you're talking about where your mind is limited I think it's the same exact dynamic actually that's of what's going on like how would you define what an impingement is in the body a blockade you know like I would say lack of range of motion poor exercise habits there's a variety of factors ignoring potential injuries and then restricting your motion to the point where everything sort of tightens up muscle tissue in particular joint tissue like around the shoulders and any anytime where you're dealing with range of motion issues you have to stretch and your most people very rarely stretch their shoulders it's just something that we don't do and also most people very

11:34rarely strengthen their shoulders and I think it's it's a very complex joint I mean you look at the way your shoulders articulate there's not like there's not anything in your body that can do this sort of things and the range of motion that your shoulders exhibit while carrying weight so you think about all the different things carrying your kid picking up a briefcase you're doing a lot of weird motions with your shoulders and occasionally develop little tears those tears they start out superficial they get larger you injure them more you're playing you don't warm up something pops you ignore it it hurts you for years there's a lot of things that we do to our bodies that we just it just compiles and you never handle it you never deal with it you don't get that our MRI you don't get therapy and it just gets worse and worse to the point where you see a

12:19lot of people get shoulder replacements yeah so the exact same thing is true everything you just said is true for the mind hmm it's exactly the same it's conditioning it's repeating the same pattern over and over having some kind of involuntary response that gets a little bit deeper a little bit deeper a little bit deeper each time and it's like your your mind is a mental body and it has habits and it develops bad habits and it develops limited range of motions what it can do and so we end up in this really narrow situation inevitably because we end up with a particular set of conditioning and it starts to limit us so you use practices just like you use physical practices to open up your range of motion to work through impingements to you know have more flexibility you do the same for you know with meditation or with other kind of mental practices I think it's literally

13:08the same thing and you and you that there's just this sort of isometric nature between the mind and body it's the same kind of stuff it completely makes sense yeah and I was what I were talking about before the podcast we're in the hallway about just dealing with stressful situations and the tank like if there's a weird freak out that happens like how do you handle it like what what do you do and I was saying that the more stressful situations that I experience the more I understand what they are and the more I can relax but it's also like the matter of constantly being exposed to these stressful situations where there's not a long break in between doing stand-up or a long break in between martial arts training where to the point where anxiety can build up and then once you get into it it's almost an it's an unusual situation instead of an unusual one that's probably why I probably need

14:01to get in the tank reasonably soon yeah so but say more if you don't this is your show but if you don't mind would you say more about that like because you you're able to get in the tank not only regularly but you'll you'll dose yourself with some stuff you get in the tank well the thing about stressful situations is you're always trying to once you get comfortable you're trying to push them and make them more stressful and this most distressful way to experience the tank is either edibles or mushrooms those are the two fermenting mushrooms yeah Wow yeah well it's just it's basically mushrooms without any of the distractions of your body right distill a pure culture pure culture mushrooms and but but edibles it can be just as potent in there edible marijuana is you know the difference most people aren't aware that it's a completely different psychoactive

15:02substance when it's when you eat it because it's processed by your liver and your body produces something called eleven hydroxy metabolite that's four to five times more psychoactive than THC and it's not psychoactive in the smoking version it's very different that's why a lot of people when they eat brownies it's so strong yeah sure you there's a famous 911 case where there's an audio recording of these cops that took some pop from some kids and pot brownies of it and then ate it and then called the police and called 911 because they thought they were dying but it is one of the greatest audio recordings of all time so what do you do in those moments like you have I'm just interested because you've had from what I can tell quite a bit of experience with psychedelics and and also isolation tanks what's the right term for a thing through deprivation to sensory

16:03deprivation tanks so what do you do when the little imp in your head starts telling you like the world's ending or you slow just let it go you have to just relax I mean I've been there a hundred times more you know many more than a hundred times really but were you really nervous and really scared but what compounds it is trying to control it what compounds it is trying to wrestle the moment away from this experience and just taking control of it and try to sober yourself up now this I'm gonna whatever you know I gotta get getting control of the situation and that freakout is really what compounds and that's where the that's the root of all you know air quotes bad trips come from is this desire to control failure just surrender yeah you got a surrender you got to relax and resistance yeah nothing's gonna happen to you you're gonna be fine you're it's gonna feel

16:54really crazy and you're gonna that it brings up memories from years ago from weird conversations you might have had where you acted poorly or weird choices that you might have made decades ago or you know things that crossed your mind a couple of days ago that you're embarrassed about there's all these different things that will come out that will just your your your brain your mind your your consciousness wants to explore these because it feels that you neglected them or that you put them on the back burner or they didn't give them enough attention you didn't give them the attention that they deserve so they're festering and bouncing around the inside of your mind and I find that edibles in particular it's it's a very self exploratory experience and your brain desperately wants to point out all these areas that it feels that you might have neglected

17:45and that's terrifying for people and you just start really freaking out and not to mention the concepts of mortality you start thinking about your your children's life in your life and you know you get freaked out in there why would you want to do that because I think exploring those things makes regular life more it makes it more palatable it makes it more relaxed it makes me it gives me a perspective it's almost like having a near-death experience on a regular basis well you get out of a near-death experience and one of the things that people say is even if it's a near-death experience like from a severe illness or an injury you you have a perspective enhancement from that and you come out of it feeling like well I kind of have a new version of life now I understand life now because I understand this the full spectrum before I was operating in this

18:38very comfortable spectrum of everything being safe and now I realize like no it doesn't have to be say there can be terrible things where everything can go wrong so appreciate this with much more zeal like much more lust for life sounds like what we do in meditate oh my god I was just thinking that it sounds like a meditation retreat I think they're all connected yeah no question yeah you're not even you don't you don't need to ingest anything for all that stuff to start coming up I'm sure fact there's a kind of classic there's a classic progression and a retreat or an even in a city you could say there's for these terrains you move through where first you're just trying to get going and then you're kind of having all these breakthroughs and insights and then you can get into this really challenging stage where it's like you can't meditate all your dark stuff is coming up

19:22sometimes I think of it as like you're exfoliating the brain you know you're just exfoliate exfoliate an almost suddenly hit an air pocket of some old-school like your old shame and your rage and your childish petulance and then and it all comes bubbling up and you're inside this atmosphere and then from inside that atmosphere you're seeing everything through that filter you're now seeing how everything sucks and your life's a catastrophe or whatever and that's and just like you were saying about the body and about the psychedelics and about the tank you got to learn to be okay with your own uncomfortableness you got to learn to be okay to sit inside discomfort and say actually to welcome in to say well this is just part of what's going on with me right now and if you can do that without resistance like you're saying without fighting it with it then it can actually work its way out

20:10and then you can get into this really beautiful stage of a practice words you know the equanimity stage they call it where it's just you're really open and available to things you're super present it's not exotic you're not in some peak experience like where you're you know melting in oneness and having an energy shooting up your spine but neither are you and one of these you know low experiences you're just in the it's like the beautiful ordinary mmm and those those and you go round and round and those cycles and then from actually that beautiful ordinary place that you can have these breakthroughs that's the kind of classic place where people have these shifts you know they have like a no self experience or it's pretty interesting the phenomenology of it is really cool like there's you know people describe very specific kinds of things happening that drop them into this next level of

20:57contour next progression of insight you could say I don't want to overstate my meditative capacities but I had a I would say probably like a JV version of what you're describing a lot last month just a few weeks ago I was on a 10-day silent meditation retreat and I could see as you describe this this progression I could see in hindsight that that was what I went through so as your mind starts to settle and you get more concentrated there are fireworks you know you you get a lot of sensations in your body that feel really good you're seeing things behind your eyes just the mind releases a lot of dopamine in and serotonin in response to the reduced chatter that can happen when you're more focused on what's happening right now as opposed to caught up and being caught up in in you know our egoic chatter and I at one point though I hit a stage that sometimes referred to as

21:58life review where I I just all the things I'm most ashamed of just started I couldn't avoid him I couldn't sleep and it was all just right there I was just thinking about him and then I started questioning the whole practice and what am I doing here is the waste of time and I had a conversation with my teacher who was a brilliant individual I mean you could argue some have argued and I would agree the one of the greatest living meditation teachers his name is Joseph Goldstein and he's not a he doesn't walk around in rows or anything like that he's a Jewish guy from the Catskills and he's in the 70s and he would I was staying and he in a cabin and he would pop in and see me in this cabin every once in a while because it was right near his house and he one day I was kind of complaining a lot about the futility of my practice and he said surrender he said you gotta

22:53surrender you gotta just stop you know just stop getting in your head about are you doing it right and all that stuff just let the practice do its thing as Jeff sometimes talks about it it's like let time and nature do its work just trust that the practice is we've been doing this for millennia human beings there's a reason for that just do the practice and stop worried about it and the next sit I had was this kind of equanimity thing that you're talking about where I could see it was two hours long I could see everything coming up all of my urges desires thoughts physical sensations things I was hearing things I was seeing she was very focused at this point it's all just coming at me and I'm not reaching for it and I'm not pushing it away the unpleasant stuff I'm not trying to push it away I'm not trying to grasp onto the pleasant and it's just and it's some

23:49it's like this incredible video game right where you can't I sometimes describe meditation it's like a video game where you can't move forward if you want to move forward it's the anti video game and once you stop wanting once you just surrender into this thing where you're just non-judgmentally observing whatever comes up in your mind whether it's fear whether it's planning lunch whatever it is you just you can start to move forward and then the ego comes in and tells you you are the best meditator ever dude and then you fall for that for a minute but then you stop falling for that anyway at the end of it I looked down at my watch the two hours had passed and but then I was fully in this zone of like oh this is the end of my next book I this is I'm enlightened this is the best thing ever and I then a couple of hours later start to realize that I had been telling myself a story about how

24:44amazing I was and how they should put a plaque up in that room this is where the the best meditation sit ever happened and the next meditation I went to the next time I tried to meditate it was as if I had never meditated before and I just could like I didn't know what I was doing anymore and it all collapsed wow there's so much there there's experience that you have in the tank where you you try to let go and you let go and relax and then you realize no you just there's one layer of relaxation totally but they're stacked on top of each other there's infinite layers and as you get deeper and deeper into these layers of relaxation you hit another layer and you go okay no this is relaxing and then you know there's way more than this there's way more to this and the more you think about the fact that oh now I'm on a new level relaxation well now you're not

25:38now you're probably two or three levels above where you were before you addressed it that's the exfoliation you were talking about it's somewhat the layers of the onion and just you have to peel those layers I always talk about it's exactly you're describing exactly it's the layers of the onion you it's like you you're holding this fist and you don't even realize you're holding this fist you're walking around going yeah everything's fine but you're holding this fist and then you realize you're holding on so tight and I need first you don't even know how to open the fist you've been closed the whole time at some point without you have to the way you open it is not trying to open it you have to just be so okay with the fact that you've got this tight fist here that eventually just opens of itself and then you think you're free and I think I described it as like walk in the onion

26:21you know it's like you're walking on top of the onion and your knee it's imagine the planet isn't onion you're walking and you're turning the onion is you walk and you've got the huge open air all around you that the universe you feel like you're free but very slowly you're sinking into the onion this layer of tension is kind of appearing or coagula that starts to kind of coagulate in your experience and eventually you realize that there's this layer of tension here and you're not free inside this thing and then you have to figure out how to exfoliate that or let that go and it just keeps going on because it's Turtles all the way down it's like an onion at layer after onion layer and every time you get into a new place of freedom the fact and the act of living is creating more coagulation it's creating more just natural frictions and things that are coming up so it's not just that you're

27:03going through so the the progress of insight the progress of what they call purification in Buddhism is a is a process of kind of working through your conditioning but also simultaneously learning to work through the the new conditioning that's secreting by virtue of just being a human being and that's that's the game and that's why a lot of people say there is no end to it you don't get to some final liberation because just the act of living is creating its own blind spots you know so you've got different people in different camps who argue different things about what your real freedom looks like but that to me seems the most realistic you know and least it's the one it that fits with my experience and it describes exactly how you describe it you know the - are they really line up I think most of us are operating on momentum and I think you you learn things as a

27:53child and those become you know whatever your personality is the way with it whatever thought process you sort of have carved into your mind like the grooves and patterns that you normally find yourself thinking in and I equate it to a lot - martial arts training like I I used to teach martial arts for a living one of the things that I found incredibly difficult was to reteach people it was way easier to teach a person with no training than it was to reteach someone with poor training so when someone has poor training they have these paths carved in their movements and their thought process and when they're in a situation they fall back on those patterns and it's extremely difficult to get people out of that and learn to do things correctly but if you can teach them how to do things correctly from the beginning then they naturally great like this is the stressful situation here comes the

28:46problem here's the issue what's the technique now you know it and it's it's locked into your brain you know the right pathway whether it's like don't go to the technique you've been using all your life now use a new technique and and remember to manage that situation under pressure I think that's how most of us are handling our lives we're handling our lives with poor techniques and poor management skills and in these paths that are carved in that are infantile and that are essentially like the remnants and the echoes of when you were a teenager or even younger than that and then maybe your parents and the learned behavior that you see watching them and maybe they weren't so good at managing life either and but these patterns are carved into your brain you find comfort in them because you know where they're going and so you slide right into them and then as an adult you start trying to

29:38remap your consciousness and remap those patterns and in doing that it's it's very difficult to sort of rethink how you think I mean I think what you're pointing to here is close to the the what has become for me the animating insight of my whole side hustle as a meditation proponent which is that the mind is trainable now we are you described I think very accurately the ruts in which many of us find ourselves or don't even know we're in but the good news is that there are ways to retrain the mind week and I didn't know that until my late thirties when I started reading books about Buddhism and all the things we want the most calm patience compassion generosity happiness whatever that means these are these aren't factory settings non-negotiable factory settings these are skills that can be trained that you can take responsibility for just the way you take responsibility for your body in

30:40the gym and there are lots of ways to train them you know Jeff and I obviously talked a lot about meditation but you've talked about other ways to do it as well from martial arts to and there's now been a lot of there's a growing body of research about psychedelics as well I it was obvious to me from being in the isolation from the sensory deprivation that that is a training - there are lots of ways to get at it but the fundamental good news is you aren't stuck with the patterns that are making you miserable yeah you're not you're definitely not stuck and I think that all these things are related and I think that even running even like exercise yoga I think in particular all these different things that are difficult when you do these difficult things you're stressing your mind or just don't stress in your mind exercising your mind and exercising your body's ability to manage intense

31:34situations like yoga poses are very intense yeah especially hot yoga it's hard it's very difficult it's very testing and in doing so you you lessen the stress of regular life exactly you're tied up in a reef knot yeah if you can be quantum as' with this ridiculous pose where you're shaking with exertion then how much more economists can you be how much more president open can you be in your life yeah same thing do you think those people know how to translate what they're learning in something like so because for me the what what broke through about meditation was it was so obvious how to translate what I was learning with my eyes closed to my life whereas all the other things you know I've been I've been running since I was in my teens and and while I it's absolutely good at staving off depression which I've dealt with a long time and and making me feel just

32:26generally fit I don't know that I was explicitly taking the lessons of running or any of the other things that many people do that they sometimes refer to as their quote unquote meditation now and applying it to my life the way meditation was again so obvious will seem like the obvious aspects of meditation are conscious like you're looking for these solutions whereas with running you might be getting them without being conscious of them or at least getting some of the benefits of it without being conscious but those benefits would certainly be enhanced with a different perspective going into the running like going into the running with the the thought process of testing your consciousness to endure this very difficult thing in front of you like Hill running in particular there's there's something about anything that's like very uniquely physically stressful like that

33:14which requires the mind to stay the course and in doing so especially in the other end once you come out of it there's this great feeling of euphoria and peace and it's not just a physical release of energy but it's also an understanding that the brain has exorcised the demons that are responsible for the anxiety while you're overcoming this stressful and the limits you told yourself were there yeah it's funny you know my wife and I've been doing a lot of soul cycle which I know my wife doesn't okay so we don't do with her but I so although in my she's she's out in the green room right now raging against me because she's angry because that I'm not that soul cycle right know that I haven't said what I'm about to say which is that I'm the one who got her into it so so in her defense so but they are often giving these the teachers are often giving these really sort of

34:09affirmations from the front of the room and my traditional approach to those is to completely ignore them as incredibly and irretrievably annoying and however what they're saying is what you're saying what they're saying is peddle through your resistance you're telling yourself a story that you can't turn the knob up to the right right now the resistance knob up to the right right now and stay on the beat and sprint and do all the crew you're telling yourself a story you can't do it but you actually can do it try it try it get good over the limiting stories you're telling yourself and in fact yesterday morning when we did SoulCycle the guy at the end said something I normally would have ignored which was next time somebody proposes something to you that you tell yourself you don't want to do do it hence the sensory deprivation tank direct link to what he

35:01said to my being willing to do it so there's some there there yeah there's something about things like SoulCycle like even if they're right even if the the motivational speech rings true you want it like this it's the problem with spiritual teachers right it's a problem with somebody who's there anybody who walks around that has the answer and that's and it's and and often the answer can be this sort of Pollyanna ish Disney Channel thing that maybe it probably is true on some way but it's just the delivery of that kind of certainty that's so annoying yeah I always say that my my you know there are millions of meditation books the only thing new about the books that I write is that I add the word a lot and and and that is a just a new way to talk about this stuff and because our tendency or at least guys like us I think are people like us men and women

35:56like us is to some people when you hear when you hear this kind of affirmation uttered you reflexively reject it which is again normal but if you can just say it to people in fresh language it's the reason why these things are cliched is because they're true and they become cliche through sort of mindless repetition but if you can find new ways to articulate them they can land I think also whether it's your book on meditation or anybody's just life experiences that they're they're writing down we gather information from other people's life experiences in a very unique way and it's one of the reasons why people really enjoy autobiographies it's one of the reasons why people really enjoy truly reflective introspective thinking because we we can pick out little gems in ourself so even though you might be talking in your meditation book about things that other

36:53people have talked about in meditation books you're talking about it from your unique personal experience right and when someone reads that or hears you say it you get something intangible out of that well we talked a lot about so my favorite comedian of all time other than Joe Rogan is Dave Chappelle and you you came on my radar screen because you were on the show the Chappelle show back in the and the the fear factor bit he did years and years ago which was one of the funniest things I've ever seen and Chappelle in one of the seasons Jeff and I were talking about this last night as a matter of fact talked about how he was doing one of these outtake episodes I can't remember which season was in because they only did two and a half he was doing an outtake episode and at the beginning he did a riff about how back in the day african-american communities never got the good part of

37:43the pig to eat the white people got the good parts of the pig so the African Americans had to figure out how to make good food out of snout and that's he said what this episode is gonna be we're gonna take the snout and we're gonna make good stuff out of it and my approach to writing books about meditation is the snout is the good stuff the embarrassing that happens to you when you're a minute when you're meditating is the good stuff it is what will allow people to see what the practice does for you so I take the worst most embarrassing stuff that happens and talk about it because that is gives you a front-row seat at what training the mind actually looks like and if you can't have a sense of humor about how crazy you are you are truly I think that those uncomfortable moments are so important for other people to hear about yeah yes absolutely we need to know we're not alone yes when

38:35all our madness what was it like on the set when you were working with Dave Chappelle it was great well I've known Dame for a long time I was actually on the very first episode we by chance I was walking through New York and I saw Dave and this is before the show had even been even know it existed but I ran into Bobcat Goldthwait who's there and I'm like what's up man what are you guys doing he's like he was oh hey Joe we're doing a TV sketch man you want to be in on it and I go I only have like 20 minutes oh wait a minute goes here he goes we're handing out ribbons for New York boobs and he had a box so it's me and him walking through Manhattan and he's got this crazy fake mustache on he's like you've got the best New York boobs and he would give someone like a ribbon for heaven New York boobs and it was really silly but fun and so I was like wow Dave's got a show and then you know

39:25turns out it's the greatest sketch show in the history of the world and a year later he calls me up again and asked me to do this thing for they wanted to do a fear factor sketch with Tyrone Biggums yeah so that's me and him fresh-faced Joe Rogan and Dave Chappelle thank you yeah well this is like what yours is that's 2003-4 yeah I think it's before that is it I think it's before that I want to say it's to 2002 maybe yeah because I wasn't even doing the man show back then and I was doing that in 2003 so I think it's 2002 The Fear Factor bit is one of my favorite that's a season two if I recall I think so yeah and is really one of the sliminess and one of the funniest bits in a show that is I would argue perhaps the greatest television show of all time I think it's the greatest sketch comedy show of all time yeah I'm saying something bigger it's hard to say that

40:18though because if you boiled down a lot of the all-time great shows like in living color some of the other ones but they had so many seasons if you boiled them down to two seasons maybe there would be some but he's got some sketches that worse just groundbreaking like the black white supremacist who was blind what about I was watching last night because we Jeff and I were talking about last night so I won the car ride home from this event we did together I was watching black bush which was another I think unbelievable which was about season two where he plays george w bush his version of george bush and all the rationales for going into the war in iraq and it's unbelievably funny yeah he's a genius he's a real comedy genius but also a guy who's you know you wouldn't get it if you just sort of see him do stand up but he's deeply introspective yeah very intensely well

41:14thought out you know he's not he's not a surface guy by any stretch to the imagination I love him I really do yeah I love thinking that shows gonna come back at some point i'ma show his Netflix specials are better I just like seeing him unfucked with in unless Netflix let him do a Chappelle show where they just left him alone then he genius but you think that was the problem in season percent yeah I know it was he was they were telling him what to say they were telling him there is so much money involved that they were trying to get him to slightly watered down his content in order to make it more palatable for advertisers they were asking him does not say the n-word there was a lot of behind the scenes nonsense that I dealt with the exact same administration in Comedy Central so I'm well aware of how silly they were about certain things they had these

42:06corporate ideas and this was also right around the same time Janet Jackson's nipple popped out there in the Superbowl which oddly enough changed everything people started freaking out about content because of a nipple it was it was very it was a very weird time for television and in their defense what they do is their producers they're not they're not creative people they're executives and they didn't know how to handle how to keep it funny and keep it free and loose but also figure out a way to make it fit into what their corporate structure is of what's acceptable and not acceptable for advertising so it was just a of control and neediness and too many cooks in the kitchen and and people's ego well there's a lot of people that just wanted to affect the show just so that they can put their greasy fingerprints on it and that's a really common thing with

43:01television that that ego aspect of you know these different people who are high up on the food chain in the you know executive world wanting to put their stamp on a show and then talking openly about putting their stamp well that was my idea I thought it was really important we get Dave out there like that and for him he was like this I'm going to Africa for a couple months and I'm just gonna come back and quit and everybody was like whoa but that's who Dave is I mean that's that's there's not a lot of people that walk away from fifty million dollars but he's one of them he's just like no I don't need to do this I could I could do something else I just do stand-up and he in fact we even weirder he didn't do stand-up for a long time and when he did it he did it for free he would just show up places like he would show up places with a speaker and plug it into a microphone in a park

43:50in Seattle and just start doing stand-up there was a lot of stories of that people just gather around hundreds of people and he would just be doing stand-up for these random people and they were like what's going on how does a guy get to be like that just be yourself that's who he is what was that do you think is that something because that sounds to me like somebody who had a practice or something or like or an inner compass that was mocked a lot of weed that maybe that was it he smokes weed all all day I mean if you watch this new Netflix special he's smoking a vape pen through the entire special to the point where I watched it and like 40 minutes to the special I started getting anxiety a mic how high are you right now man you said you might wait were you hiding your Netflix but yes okay yeah yeah because you said at the beginning you were baked and I was like that a bit or is he you

44:35know I was high but I didn't keep getting high through the special like Dave keeps hitting that vape pen and I don't know how strong that vape pen is but he's like seven eight nine ten hits deep and 40 minutes in I'm like yo this could get super slippery yeah he just kept pulling out this vape pen yeah I mean it was literally with him through the entire set in his hand that's increasing the degree of difficulty to that I would not want to isolate intact that's but it also it's freeing in a way because you're so comfortable that experience of like giving in to the to the marijuana like giving in to the the the THC where you just sort of like float away on it and don't question it yeah but as you were high backstage getting ready to do your Netflix special and I would imagine that's a pretty stressful environment cuz they're taping this thing it's gonna be your special

45:30it's a big deal did you not have a moment of like holy I shouldn't I shouldn't smoke no no no it's fun it's just like this is like a incredibly privileged position I find myself in like this this whole thing is amazing it's a crazy wild ride so I'm about to do the wildest part of the Wild Ride film a Netflix special and just it's just joy it's just taking it all in and going this is so like all the hard work is done the materials in place the the writing has been done the rehearsals been done there's been hundreds and hundreds of sets everything's tightened up and all the notes are in place and I've run it a hundred times and by the time you saw of the film the Netflix special was mostly the fourth show of four tapings already taped three taping so I've already got it in the can so there's the most the pressure is off so it's just like a regular okay yeah so it's just just happiness

46:33just let it let it happen now you seem happy what while watching it it was fun yeah it's a good time but it's one of those weird things where you know stand-up live stand-up is is weird itself because you know you're dealing with all these factors the people's consciousness you're you're trying to manage your material as well as bring them in and make sure your timing is right and everything's smooth and then on top of that there's the filming aspect of it like this will be locked in and recorded forever like this is this is going to go online and then people have copies of it and then it will be this is this is your material this is your thought process Lee do you have this iron down do you have this edited and parsed and sectioned and have you thoroughly examined it have you used the correct economy of words have you have you boiled it down into the best possible

47:35version of itself so funny with stand-up though because you watch it as a as a because I've never done stand-up II watch it as a consumer it looks casual looks off-the-cuff yeah there's an enormous amount of work that goes into it but it's both casual and off-the-cuff and incredibly well thought-out and rehearsed and it has to be both of those things but don't you have to so you prepare like crazies you got that but then when you're actually there isn't there a certain amount of just having to let go and try and be actually responsive to what's happening in the audience - that must be the skill it's like you do the preparation so you can almost let go yeah this both you know like you have to be prepared but you also have to be loose and yeah you have to be completely engrossed in what you're talking about but also in the moment yeah yeah yeah it's tricky but

48:25the bottom line is when it's done it's worth it like all the weirdness of it like when you get it done or something like triggered when it was done I finished it was like I did it like this is what I wanted to do like I wanted to I wanted to accurately represent a real I've stand-up comedy set that feels like any other set that you could catch me in San Francisco on a Saturday night and so was that so it's all worth it yeah it felt like that yeah so then I wait about a year and then I start doing it again and now I'm gonna process a couple more months I'll do it again no it's it sounds a lot like actually the experience of teaching you're teaching meditation sort of like because you got to be you kind of got to know you have to have experience and sort of know your stuff but the other hand you actually got to be super open to exactly what's coming up and what someone's

49:14describing or what's happening right and you got to be and so if you if you try to bear down too hard on that then you're just gonna be repeating your own back again so can you be had that total openness to actually see what it is that someone's saying and not have not have you put your projections on it but you have to have also done your homework in a way hmm and it's just having that balance and then there's that really this beautiful thing where you're kind of you get into flow you know when you're kind of in the zone and it just it's like you hardly even it's you know the words are coming out or response is happening it's not it's not remotely deliberated at all but it's the right thing in that moment or the right thing that someone need to hear or you needed to hear and it feels incredible it feels like it feels effortless but it's the effortlessness that comes out

49:57of preparedness yeah previous effort yeah yeah you have to have both you can't just wing it right you have to be prepared but you also have to be able to just be flexible in a moment and to be able to ride the wave it comes back to the word that we started with is surrender yeah and I noticed this a lot because I do a lot of traveling around and giving speeches and always about meditation and I have my little shtick that I do but then I will open it up for questions and and actually the same thing is true for when I'm live on Good Morning America you know where I have to if I'm in my head if I'm thinking about what I should say or how things should go I make the worst mistakes if I can get myself to surrender and just be there I've been playing that with that a little bit even in the course of this discussion as a big podcast don't screw it up say that don't say the dumb thing

50:51you know whatever blah blah blah actually if I can just like let all that chatter go away play itself out then you have a better conversation then you say the thing that you couldn't have planned yeah that is the art of the podcast it's the art of conversation in general is to get out of your own way and to be able to also at the same time find the right words articulate the right thoughts figure out or the right way to the piece the sentences together so it's both entertaining and engaging but also rings true and you there's there's not an air of to it or ego to it or you don't because people can there's a unique thing about a conversation especially with people interacting with each other the people they tune in to like and I tune into it like if I'll listen to certain conversations with people that I find awkward and I'm like well what is uncomfortable about this

51:49what is this weird and see it a lot of times it boils down to like one person trying to be too much in control absolutely yeah one person I'm usually that person everybody and you can tell when you're hanging out with that person because it's like there's this grip enos or or when I have that it's like oh you're fearfully worried you're you're trying a little bit hold on to the narrative and it just creates this unnaturalness yeah yeah and then everyone's got a little bit feels ever a little bit weird and and then someone's trying to overcompensate for someone over here and it just wrecks everything the whole flow of it you know when I first started reading a little bit about Zen Buddhism with one of the flavors they talk a lot about spontaneity yeah yeah and I didn't quite the Zen bounce yeah I didn't quite get that but this is what we're talking about actually if you

52:33they also use this word freshness that if you can get rid of the stale planned canned stuff and just touch in on what's happening right now which is fresh then the spontaneity arises finally can i there's a so I got a teacher discussions and young who I think is the the bomb you've got to get him on this he's amazing he's he is truly amazing he's a super nerd of consciousness and he is really articulate about the dynamics and he's trained a lot within a zen tradition but also in kind of old-school Theravada like the more strict zhen Shi ze and at Canadian sir ze and Shenzhen young and he actually likes miss martial arts and he guides people while watching mixed martial arts in his undershirt and he's the he's wicked dude yeah I can fully second that yeah so he but he talks a lot with something called the Zen bounce because he's interested in how like how you know

53:32how do these different practices from different traditions work like how do they what is the way in which they free you or they reduce yourself ringing and because they can look so different on paper or actually in experience so you might have one kind of meditation tradition it's all about just sitting with your eyes closed not moving all about that kind of stoicism and then you when you do move it's very slow and deliberate and you got to be mindful and all that stuff but then you have other traditions like within a certain kinds of Zen schools where you're actually if you it's frenetic it's like go-go-go all the time you're moving fast you're like unwrapping your you're putting your back together and you're eating your food in a particular kind of way and you got to get to this thing over here and got to get this thing over here and then you go to sittings to stop on a

54:09dime and what they're doing is they're deliberately shaking things up they're deliberately creating all this agitated energy to teach you how to ride the energy to teach you how to be calm enough in the center that you can that that energy turns into spontaneity turns into creativity turns into genuine being available in the moment nests as opposed to being stuck in some way that's what's getting trained and when you see these guys from those monasteries are from those traditions who are really who practice a lot they've got this bouncy available turn on a dime do this you know it's like they're just available to what's going on because they've trained that quality in their experience it's gotten out of their own way they gotten out of their own way I mean they would I mean Chin's in when you talked to how he is he you know I've had like hundreds of

54:55hours of discussions where I'll call him up I'll be like and he's the best thing about him is he answer the phone if he's ready to talk he's ready to serve you know whatever you got going on I'll be like a call him in the morning shins in so what's going on right now what's your experience of consciousness and he basically describes you know it's like he's just there and it's like he's sort of part of this upwelling of the world and it's all kind of vibrating up through him he has no Center you know you ask him where his center he experiences the set of himself sometimes it's over here sometimes it's over on the and he's just like yeah it's just it's all reality just kind this free flow of reality that he's just responding to now and then and then he'll tell me this is the that would blow my mind because you're like okay that sounds awesome but he's like no there's challenges for him

55:38the challenge is taking conditions seriously taking conditions seriously he has to convince himself that when a you know that the stakes are enough that he should work on this thing or that yeah I guess I should get her the way of that bus you know it's like I mean he will because his instincts kick in but it's like he's so in the uncondition that you know he his danger is just becoming one of those dudes sitting on a mountain not doing anything but the world is and it needs people like him who couldn't help us out so he he and he's very inspired to try to do his best to be a great meditation teacher but that's his battle he's no longer so most practitioners their battle is trying to get to taste that more unconditioned quality that that spontaneous that free that yourself as just a process he's is the other direction he's gone so far into that now he's trying to remember

56:29what it was like to be a human being he's more like a cosmic rock like just vibrating into infinity all the time which is you know great for stress but not so great for maybe other things very interesting yeah so he's just been doing this for so long it is very high level he's another Jewish guy from this case from from Los Angeles he you know was born in the 40s thinking or in the 50s Eisenhower America and he basically was way into Japan Japanese culture learned Japanese as a teenager I went to Japanese school and then went to Japan when he was like 19 or 20 and decided he wanted to study these some of these Zen practitioners eventually got in with a what's called the Japanese Vajrayana school so it's sort of a particular school of Buddhism started training with them and then that was never finished he's been impeached you hard core stuff like they had an ice baths and always

57:22like that yeah yeah I mean so it's always what we're talking about building up resilience building of equanimity can you sit any seriously I mean they do the in Japan they do the thing called he'll talk about this the marathon monks we're basically these guys sit for like no joke for days on end days not going to the bathroom not moving not eating not drinking water I mean it's hard to imagine how it even be possible but apparently it's a televised event on in Japan like they do these long walks and then they do these sets and these guys it's all about what Shinzon would say it's about recycling the reaction so it's all about you have these responses in your body you're feeling uncomfortable you're feeling you know hungry you're feeling this stuff but if you can bring enough equanimity and openness to those sensations then they just and I had this happen to me

58:08thousands of times meditating or the sensation just boils off it just goes from being pain in your knee to just vibrating feels like maggots squirming and then I just I just man and it's all about how how completely present can you be you can metabolize anything stuck and guess what you can metabolize stuck physical stuff too so if you put your attention on a knot in the back of your you know in the back of your shoulder something I've had the experience in meditation where I'm just feeling this tension in my body and I just hold my attention there long enough and this sort of in his open way not trying to make it change just curious about it looking at it I've had the experience of knots like dissolving we're like an actual impingement or a physical thing seems to change now that's really weird because then you realize wow like the mind the mind and body it's all part of

58:57one process you know and part of what was keeping that tension there wasn't just the problem in the muscle there was some part of me that was keeping it there there was some way in which I was holding on to it a little bit like holding my breath a bit you know or like when you said about releasing layers of tension you sit down on a meditation cushion and you think you're relaxed and you realize you're actually kind of uptight and you're like and then you let go of that and then you and you set a little bit more than your lies there's another layer of tension and you can just let go and let go and let go and it just seems to go on and on and on and it's like that can be I mean there's some I know another teacher all he teaches is lying down teaches people the Reggie ray go to a DotA go to his meditation verse it's you just you're laying on the ground you're not doing

59:41anything you could fall asleep doesn't matter for a month you just laying on the ground and he's teaching you how to actually land on the ground you could spend a week two weeks learning how to actually lay on the ground you think you're laying on the ground but you're still a little bit tense you're still a little bit holding yourself up in some way and it's like you're just letting go of those layers and letting go in those layers until you're just like a pool it's funny because everyone we all know that we need conscious awareness we need to be here and present but also that thinking of conscious awareness the in the control that we try to enact on our environment and all the the different ways that the ego forces us to to think and pushes us and nudges us it really is about getting out of your own way in a lot of ways like it's a paradox too because the the only way to truly

60:38surrender to reality is to not care it's absolutely true but and that's what's gonna free you up to be the most effective in your caring you cannot get around that head-fuck because it is absolutely and that is absolutely true you know so we would I mean this is the thing that people really struggle with because a lot of people here will hear everything you just said and you know and all this stuff about shins and you know not caring and think okay if I meditate well I'm gonna be ineffective I'm not gonna be able to do anything but that's what I'm saying is the paradox it's like the person who's most effective is the person who gives up needing to be effective it's like you because that's how you free up all the energy it's like if you're trying to control everything all the time you're gonna be really limited in what you can actually do if you just let go and let

61:24things be as they are you're kind of like it's like you're conserving all this deep deep well of energy that's there and then when you really do need to make a move because it does matter then you've got the energy to act and you act in a way that's probably more effective as it's less distorted so it's just skillful use of energy and that's actually that's what I've learned from practice and even from getting older because I'm 46 now and I don't have the energy I used to have it's like choosing your battles and didn't seem like now I'm like nothing is really tiring I'm not gonna do that I'm gonna actually just sit here and chill and relax so I'll have the energy to do what I need to do when I need to do it that's kind of that maturity is sort of I think a big part of the the meditative like learning also it's so interesting what you're talking about

62:06is as it relates to like how when you're on Good Morning America like it's sort of figuring out a way to just be in the moment and guide the conversation but don't think too much about what you're saying but say the right things and have poignant things and good questions and being able to engage but not being too conscious of how it sounds or what you're trying to achieve by your words or the image that you're trying to portray it's it's there's so many parallels that would exist in stand-up comedy that exist in podcasting they exist in martial arts like when you're doing martial arts that's that's a big part of being able to train effectively is to focus it almost entirely on the movements themselves to have them trained into a way where they're a pathway that you can almost observe like you you are an observer and a passenger as much as you're the driver of the

63:03experience that it's all just sort of taking place and when you start tweaking and freaking out about it that's when everything tightens up and that's when you start to run into all these like real issues with training well that's why I find basic you know we've talked a lot about Jeff has talked as he always does very beautifully about deep end of the pool you know mysticism and you know highly attained meditators but the the the nuts and bolts basic application of beginners mindfulness meditation which Jeff and I talked about is what allows you to get out of your own way because saying to people hey get out of your own way get out of your head it's a very frustrating thing to hear yeah as you're like how the hell do I do so but the basic the basic move of of what of a beginner meditation which is to sit with your eyes closed bring your full attention to the feeling of your breath

63:59coming in and going out and then as soon as you try to do this your mind's gonna go bonkers you're gonna start thinking about you know what's for lunch where do I need a haircut where the dribbles run wild blah blah blah and the whole game is just to notice when you've become distracted in a non-judgmental friendly way oh yeah that's anger that's random thoughts whatever let it go go back to the breath over and over and over ad infinitum and that basic bicep curl for your brain allows you to have a less hostile relationship to your inner chaos allows you to see it clearly and that is the mechanism by which all of for me at least by which all of the things we're talking about here you know not freaking out on live television being able to survive in a sensory deprivation tank when you think Joe Rogan might judge you for freaking out and jumping out all that stuff allows

64:50you to see the chatter arise this basic move that we're doing in meditation which is just sitting back and allowing all this stuff to come up without trying to grab it or push it away can help you in the things that we're talking about here martial arts stand-up comedy all of the things so just say something about what where it turned a corner from you when I was practicing because I was terrible meditator and it was it was understanding the actual skills that we're building and that's the thing I think that links all what we're talking about here when you talk about martial arts when you talk about being a broadcaster when you talk about comedy talk about practice it's like there are particular kinds of mind body skills that were training and those skills are actually they have names there's a feeling of what that that's happening that you can experience when you're

65:38training that muscle group and that was you know when I start understanding things that way because the Shin Zen because he talks about it that way but Buddhism talks about it that way they talk about the factors of awakening that you're building up concentration which is your capacity just to pay attention to what you want to pay attention to it's like a commitment your mind wanders you bring it back that's one skill you're building up clarity which is your ability to be clearer and make discernment so what's happening in your experience what's happening in a social experience is it's the right time to say this thing what's happening inside me like what am I really feeling and versus how am i acting you know like so dialing up that resolution dial and building up equanimity which is just the can I actually not fight with my experience as its unfolding can I have this

66:19centeredness in the middle of what's going on whether I'm doing martial arts whether I'm doing comedy whether I'm doing meditation the the beauty of a meditation practice is it makes explicit what those skills are in a simple situation with your eyes closed you can notice when you're being concentrated when you're being clear when you're being honest when you're being friendly which is another good skill like you notice when that's happening and because you notice when it's happening you can start to notice how to apply it in every other area of your life so that's all it is all practices is but being explicit and deliberate about what qualities of existence of being that you want to train in your life and then you just try to apply it everywhere and so that's why you can get people who are I see them as basically meditation masters on a comedy stage or people who are basically

67:04meditation masters in the sports arena or in the in a cage match or whatever it is they're applying the same principles so all these are paths that can bring you into more of a more presence in your life yeah and the problem comes when people start setting up in my past with a good path oh yeah but I teach meditation that's more fundamental or oh no no no no but I do a body practice this is more fundamental it's like it's about the skills those are what's fundamental yeah and the more you can concentrate on that the more you'll enjoy this weird experience the mystery of this yeah it's this weird experience that doesn't have an owner's manual yes yes dude that's one of the things that's always freaked me out about the the mind and the body it's like you have this incredible vehicle and it's this amazing resource that's sort of operating this vehicle and no one no one gets a manual

67:56and you're taught how to handle it by people that don't know what the they're doing there's teachers in school or whether it's the kids that you grow up with or maybe even perhaps your parents or yeah sports coaches you get shitty operating advice there's winding the gears and banging in the trees and no one knows how to handle this thing correct particularly in our culture you know I mean one of the points that sam Harris mutual friend of ours great podcaster great writer has made in his book waking up which was one of his many books but I think my favorite is that you know in the West we've developed an intellectual and scientific culture that is really robust and has changed the world and as in unquestionably valuable but in the East they actually were working on the owners manual for mind for millennia you know you've got to Buddha statues in here 2600 years ago this guy if he even

68:53existed or we don't we don't know but this culture of Buddhism and before that the Hindus were working on how do you operate this mind what is this mind and I think the beautiful thing we're watching now globally this trend is the meeting of these two things and Jeff is one of the people's most excited about this is partly why we're such good friends the meaning of this Western scientific rational culture and this Eastern exploration of the month but bro I want to just call you on something like I think I think that's absolutely true but I also think these the these on this understanding this way of thinking about is there in the West as well that it's like the East has made it explicit in very particular ways but even within humanistic traditions if you look at like some of the Greek philosophers who are allow them are really mystics if you look within the Abrahamic traditions

69:47there are these understandings are there as well and they're describing it in similar ways and like you hang out with some badass Catholic priest who spent his entire life like in poor neighborhoods helping people out and like totally being present and working on service and like the way in which that human being like has learned how to survive and has learned how to flourish and has learn how to be the present for his community or her community it's a lot of the same skills and did not there's obviously shadowy aspects everywhere too but you know these are human universals that's right and there's a book there's a just done speaking of badass priests there's a book called tattoos on the heart which was written by the guy who wrote ran homeboy industries here in LA and he as far as I know doesn't have any meditation practice but he talks about this is a bit of a sappy word but

70:37compassion you know at actually giving a about other human beings about whom very few other people give a and his whole life is the organizing principle is taking care of these gang members who have had who've been discarded by their families grown up with parents who were in prostitution or drugs or whatever and had no shot and this guy his whole life has given them a shot and if that's not living this stuff out then I don't know what it so why do we think compassion is a sappy word I'm just wondering because I know that it's so common to have those responses like what is that do you think it's a problem that we're talking about with SoulCycle before you know when they it's the presentation you know when you it's through repetition it loses its meaning and then sometimes you get the sense I get the sense at least that with the people who are saying this to me have no

71:26idea what it is they're saying or why yeah the coop words that's right they're clunky you know they're just they're signaling their tribal allegiance to unicorns or something by just repeating these phrases or really embodying what they mean or something right like the people that say that I'm not religious but I'm spiritual yeah right and they say that you're like oh Christ yeah on the other hand I hear that I just hear somebody who's trying to connect these principles and doesn't want to necessarily identify with some of these structured forms of religion that that are that all these problems yeah sometimes it's that and sometimes it's just weird people that are just making noises with their face because they want you to think a certain way about that making noises with your face just really just saying noise they hear other people say and they're not connected to them

72:16and you feel they're not connected to them so you're just kind of waiting it out so it's hypocrisy so the hypocrisy that makes you want to puke because it's a disconnect between what's real which because you know what's real is you can feel their body language and then what they're saying which is the opposite but even when it's real I mean this was my problem when I first started getting into meditation even when it's real there's an earnestness there's a lack of sense of yeah there's a sadness saccharine yes about the presentation of yeah really fresh amazing invigorating ideas that that I this is why I wanted to write a book with you but yeah you talk about these things in ways that got me interested as opposed to sometimes the preciousness it's like this preciousness I have this beautiful little box that I'm gonna unfold for you and it's like and it's so holy and

72:58perfect and it's just like this the whole thing around just makes you want a vomit soon you get any near it yeah it's like certain yoga teachers can say the exact same thing it's calming and when they say namaste you say it back totally exactly and that's everyone say I'm like will you please shut the up buddy so I have a I have a traitor that I work with this is badass woman named Jade Jade Alexis who was a former - Jade Jade Alexis former Golden Gloves boxer and she's just I I would take spin classes from her not so like just straight-up spin cause she would just get screaming your face turn up your resistance that'll for you and while you're in the middle of a sprint just a total badass and so I started working with her one-on-one she is the first person who got me to do yoga because when she says namaste I'll say right back to her I said yeah yeah I used to take yoga from

73:52this guy from South Africa he was amazing and he would say all the things that you would hate most coming out of insincere people but you knew he really believed it and he also was one of the rare guys and I've ran into a few people that do this that run a donation only yoga class which was fascinating for me because I would watch these people pull in in a Mercedes and not donate and take class for free and leave and I'm like this is amazing it's amazing to watch like how many people take advantage of that and it's amazing that the concept of it is the purest expression of yoga you can get like give what you can I'm not gonna charge you anything I'm not that's not what this is about this is about the yoga itself and if people contribute enough I can continue to do this and we could pay the rent and he managed to keep the place open that way because he was so good and it was so

74:44real many meditation teachers operate this way many of them that's how CCO nation moaning yes yeah it's great if it can work right it's that's how kind of it should be yeah we have a I have a group in Toronto called the consciousness explorers club that my friend James and I started like eight years ago or something and we try to do that principle and the idea is every week we get together and we we explore different practices and we explore then we do a part two so we might which is like a social practice or interactive or body practice the whole of thinking is basically like we want it to be kind of one-stop shopping that whoever you are whatever your background would however much money you have you can come once a week to this place and it will cost you nothing if you have no money they'll cost you the sliding scale is 10 to 20 if you have money you'll get the absolute best

75:31of what we can do with guest teachers you know every Monday is a different set of programming and that's and that's what we'll do and we'll do that as much as we can for you and it's like it then you can go home and do go back to your life and if you need referrals for more help there potentially there but this idea that once a week anywhere in any community in the world you could just go to a place where you could get the best and it's affordable there's no reason that can't happen because there are so many skilled practitioners out there and teachers and facilitators and different modalities and it's just exploding across the board like psychotherapy is exploding meditation is exploding like body therapy based therapies are exploding like insights about how sports are how sports work how the mind body works exploding so there's all this diet stuff movement stuff all this expertise

76:17out there and it just needs to it's like we wanted to create a framework where we could start to channel some of that expertise you know get together have an adventure explore what this particular modality has to say and then and then do it all in communities you get that community support yeah well I think that's good with everything I think having these shared experiences and and sort of relating like what are the hiccups that you found along the way what are the pitfalls how have you overcome those there's this great value to that whether it's in meditation or we we use that in comedy a lot there's a lot of like one of the great things about communities like the comedy stores that we get together and talk about the pitfalls like yeah I'm in the middle of the Saturday on some of them in my own head and I'm realizing this bits kind of clunky and I'm trying to get out of it

77:05and like what do you do it's like a group therapy for sure you know there's a lot of that like one of the things that's really interesting about stand-up in general today as opposed to in the past is that the consciousness of it is sort of shifted in the past it used to be a very solitary pursuit and everybody was sort of fighting in a scarcity mindset like there was a famine thinking mindset there's only a certain amount of slots on sitcoms there's a certain amount of host jobs for late-night talk shows and there's only a certain amount of jobs for comics certain amount of clubs to work at well now there's so many clubs to work out there's so many theaters on top of the clubs there's all these internet places where you can do podcasts and there's there's so many different avenues that comics don't feel this famine mindset anymore and it's much more of an open and supportive

77:58community do you think that in part it is driven by the fact that there are more women in comedy as well and they they can sometimes bring a more civilized approach no I think that's true that they do do that in a lot of ways but no that's not what it is I think it's a lack of scarcity it's a structure yeah and it's also more people who have meditated who have explored their consciousness who are aware of the pitfalls of the ego entering into comedy and then more people sort of fostering that idea of community through comedy now it's right there I know a reasonable amount of comedians and some of them have come on my podcast to talk about how meditation helps them in what they do yeah Malini in particular it's great yeah really good very funny very nice yes you kind of realized that the comic the comic is kind of like the canary in the coal mine because the comedians are

78:52really sensitive right I mean that's kind of part of what it means to be a community is to be sensitive to noticing cues and subtleties and things in the culture that other people overlook so it's not surprising because what I hear you saying is it's almost like some of the most like I hate this word but evolved or mature people out there professionals in the world or creative people in the world are people in that comedy community because they had that sensitivity and they've had to learn how to work together in some way I'm it's just interesting maybe they're like there's something we could learn from that population you know if we look around and saying who can we learn from is there something in comedians and the way they're doing things that other people can learn from and what and what is it can we distill those lessons you know well I think in a lot of ways it's

79:32an exploration of the mind you know and I think comedies an exploration of the mind not just in your own mind but also in how do you relay those thoughts to other people in the most efficient way possible and a lot of that has to do with how much have you managed your own mind and your own ability to communicate and meditation can greatly assist you in that regard do you do any meditation yeah I meditate yeah what's your practice like well I do a bunch of different things like one I do a lot of yoga breathing exercises and I do them by myself we're essentially just completely concentrating on the breath just breathing in and breathing out and forcing out all the thoughts and allowing them to come in and allowing them to leave and I like to do that also inside the tank like one of the things that I really like to do is get myself into a position where I've settled in

80:25the tank and then just completely concentrate on my breath and just just concentrate entirely on the breathing in and the breathing out and get it into this almost like hypnotic cycle of breathing in and breathing out and it's the same thing there's going to be all these different thoughts like you know I'm itchy I should scratch my nose and like maybe I should cut this down to an hour instead of two hours like I planned or you know I really need to go running instead of going to yoga tomorrow maybe I should quit and you got to let those go they come in they come out and just the the breathing being this consistent thing that I can always go back to concentrating on yeah I mean that is that's it you just described I do it exactly like that you know the tank well but it's interesting I was just gonna say that I was trying to figure out what when I was noticing my breath like what am i

81:18noticing here am I actually feeling the breath or am I just hearing the breath come through the nose and just that identifying that was actually a little bit interesting it actually boosted my level of attention to the breath when I decided to go in that direction yeah it's excuse me it's both I mean you're hearing it you're feeling it but it's just the act of it you know the thing that doing it they're doing it and they like this sort of like hypnotic in-and-out thing that happens when you have no sensory input whatsoever you're not feeling your feet on the ground you feel weightless you're not hear anything you're not seeing anything it's just a particularly effective environment for boring your thought yes there's a expression sometimes it's feeling of an experience of being breezed so it's like you're not you're no longer doing the breathing the breathing is just

82:05happening it's like you're being breathed by a giant cosmic lung it's like that that you know that feeling that you're letting go yeah try to do that in the tank and it's just like you you just let go of any sense of that there's a doer or and it's just that you just start to taste yourself as this process this thing that's just happening you know and a bird is passing outside the clouds are passing and someone's walking across the street talking on their phone and you're being breathed that's all just one system that's just happening it's also interesting too when I'm in the tank I lose the sense of what is up and what's down like you lose like what when you're lying there and you're floating you kind of lose this everything seems like all over the place but in the thought of relaxing and letting go it's always going down it's always like a deeper thing it's always like settling in more

83:02settling in more it always seems to go towards your back like you're just sinking in deeper and deeper and deeper it's one of the only times we have a sensation of a very particular direction that you're going in I found the directionless nosov it that initially was quite scary for me that I was you know how where am i moving or was this inner ear stuff you know like it was just that it's really flying yeah well but but I I didn't experience that as a soaring I experienced it as more terrifying yes do we have footage of Dan Klein the inside of the tank it's a practice man I see the value I mean another thing that actually it kind of reminds me of my last meditation retreat where we're talking about physical discomfort my teacher and I and because I was experiencing a lot of physical pain from long sitting for a long time pain comes up and I was asking you know

83:53is it okay for me to quit at some point because this pain is too intense and he Joseph was arguing you know I think you want to test your limits on this obviously at some point you're gonna get up but you wanna we're gradually increasing the amount that we can and and that to me seems very similar to the value that I can perceive of getting back in the sensory deprivation tank of being able to be with that fear a little bit more test the limit a little bit more consistently so that I'm eight so that my world isn't getting smaller people echo that same sentiment when it comes to psychedelics right is the next test for Dan I've let you know long been very easy there's a lot of as you know there's been a growing body of research into the salutary effects of psychedelics a lot of its being done it and why you on cancer cancer patients have anxiety but there's also some

84:47specific work being done at Johns Hopkins on meditators and and psilocybin what kind of effect to psilocybin have on meditators and can it in a way show them directionally where you want to be moving in your meditative practice and I've had a long-standing desire to get into this study my shrink and my wife strongly argue that I shouldn't somebody with my kind of brain chemistry who had asked to go on and perform under pressure when the red lights on on TV probably not a great idea to dose myself with psychedelics but this is something I've been wrestling with it what are you worried about Alex yeah what what do you think is gonna happen is right back to the my worries in the tank and to me I was thinking a lot about psychedelics and I've had you know when I was a kid and and would smoke weed I would have panic attacks and I think it's about the desire for control the ego the thinking

85:40mind moves in is and it's like it's like a vampire confronted with garlic you know it's just my egos were coiling yeah and can't handle the lack of control and it's not just the energy of those experiences that's so intense where you just have no control over it but it's also it just blows a part of your worldview like you had this idea you thought you think oh you think you know what's really going on and then you have one of those experiences and it just shows you that you don't know anything well and you think you're there you think you are you that there's some solid you there and that that is called into question fundamentally yeah but it's humbling to be shown that all your your ideas about how you think things are are just that you know that it's just like that you you don't know fuck-all and that has been that's my experience from doing doing that stuff it's like I just shows

86:25me that I'm just you know what just sit back sit back and and let nature do what nature's gonna do how can you say sit back dude when there's no dude there when that's what you're starting to see yeah and you get exploded so you basically you're gonna it's a win-win situation either you win because you're able to stay super economist with the greater and greater intensity of what you're experiencing under a trip or you win because you don't stay economist you fight with it and you get ripped to shreds and in that humbling moment you that isn't itself it's deeply consoling and healing both I think it's like both sides of that are positive it's like a net positive gain on both sides of that that's how I legitimate it you know when I'm getting ripped apart yeah getting ripped apart yeah it does you see you you see what I'm worried about yeah that's what I'm worried about yeah

87:16I think you just relax you'll be fine yeah I know but that's one of those things like get out of here when people say relax or get out of your own way if for somebody as tightly wound as me it's a frustrating thing to hear because it's hard for me to operational got to resist that clench resist the clench just let it go sometimes you do get ripped apart yeah most of the time if you do it right heroes anything heroes do Terence Mckenna yeah yeah high five dried grams that was seven to seven if you're interested but five dried grams is the recommended threshold yeah that's a different kind of emotional experience yeah yeah I think it's one of those things where if you test yourself slowly but surely in those waters you'll get more and more accustomed to the feeling of relaxation letting go and that treat it like it's a shamanic experience like it's a very

88:19deep intensive search to the the very the very meaning of your existence and don't don't think of it as like oh my god I'm about to do drugs right but there's they're not dissimilar in the way that that when you don't know up from down right when you have no sensation of your body anymore that is exposing the fundamental the fundamental fact that jazz Jeff has used as this description over and over I think quite beautifully throughout this discussion which is that we aren't as solid as we think we are in fact a process Brian the dude you're trying to console the dude it's okay that dude or or dudette that there's no there there and that I could see myself going in that direction in the tank that's inexorably where it takes you in yeah that is where psychedelics take you and again I mean I have I'm in this weird position because I'm deeply interested in that experience

89:17and I've tasted in my own meditation for sure yes scared yeah I mean this is where meditation goes there out of fear seeing that you're that the you that you've been defending and protecting since sentience actually doesn't exist is I think ultimately very liberating really is the true liberation but seeing it initially as a as a as a newbie is it tears apart as Jeff says your world view the world our world view is based on us at the center it's a death experience yes exactly so it seems to me it's like you want to learn how to swim but you really only interested in calf high water because if you if you really want to learn how to swim what happens is they take you on a jet ski out into the middle of the ocean they go jump off dude you're you're now in the center of the ocean and that's the psychedelic trip the psychedelic trip is you are swimming right there's no if

90:20ands or buts you must keep going or you're gonna drown I think there are different approaches based on different people because I think you're exactly right that I want to swim but my tendency is to stick to the calf I water but you're from what I know about you having spent a little bit of time with you and just follow following you you're kind of a baller like you're ready to go out on the jet ski and jump in or do all this crazy stuff that traditionally I I mean I have done some crazy things that we've discussed but traditionally I'm more cautious and I think for somebody with my kind of brain chemistry somebody whose brain is very good at panicking I think there's a more stepwise approach which is what I'm intrigued by which is what we keep discussing which is test those limits time and again keep testing him don't don't let up for example for example my shrink the one who got me to

91:10stop doing drugs after I had a panic attack on television and help me you know kind of straightened myself out I had a panic attack or the beginnings of a panic attack on a subway about five years ago and it was for me he was devastating because I was like this is such a setback I'm right back at Stage one I'm and my world's gonna get smaller again so I went to go see him kind of in an emergent basis and he laid out a plan which is not his original idea this is actually the way you treat these things called exposure therapy where he said okay here for the next 10 days I want you to go stand on the subway platform every day just for a couple minutes and then for the 10 days after that I want you to get on a subway a car and then get off before the door closes five five to ten days and then after that I want you to get on and go one stop and basically he got me back on the subway

92:02because I was able to gradually get through I'm not Joe Rogan my I would never be able to host a show called fear factor the way you did with it unless it was a completely different show where you know you're not getting in a tank full of tarantulas on the first day you know I have to do it in a stepwise progression because that's the way my brain is wired that's legit to me you know JIT that there's gonna be different ways for different folks to do it there definitely is did you were you exposed to a lot of difficulty when you were young did you have to overcome physical adversity did you participate in any and one-on-one sports or anything like that I think the problem was just the opposite that I had to incredibly loving former hippie parents um I was a bit of a spoiled kid and and Jeff and I have talked about this that to the extent that I experience anger or frustration oh sorry

92:55because I'm not getting what I want hmm yeah but I did do some competitive sports I just wasn't very good at it so you guys have you guys heard of somatic experiencing no somatic experiencing it's the super interesting way of addressing trauma that is starting to get really influential in the bodywork community and psychotherapists and psychiatrists and psychologists are starting to look at it and there's been a bunch of good papers out about it but basically the the thesis it comes from being really a guy named Peter Levine who spent a lot of time looking at animal behavior and what he noticed is that when animal goes into a fight or flight situation they so you're a gazelle and all of a sudden there's the tiger and then you go you just explode into action so there's this explosive release of energy running or fighting whatever it is afterwards they'll often

93:47go into this shaking effect where they'll start trembling unconsciously or they can't control it it's like and what they think is that it's like discharging all the excess energy and then they go back to homeostasis and so his theory is that what happens with human beings is because of these giant frontal lobes that we get shocks to our nervous system and we can't discharge the energy we can't punch our boss in the face or we can't run or whatever and this is what same as when we were kids we just swallow it up we swallowed up and the and that trapped energy in the nervous system starts to become our neurotic habits it becomes chronic anxiety it becomes a panic attacks it becomes chronic aggression or irritability also chronic freeze responses get stuck in there too which is sort of like chronic not their Nisour someone who's sort a little bit dreamy and so somatic

94:35experiencing is a whole way of working with it we're basically it's sort of like exposure therapy but it wouldn't it's not it's not the same it's like it's all in the it's very meditative it's like you're working with somebody and they and they go okay why you come into the room where do you feel comfortable sitting it's like oh I I felt comfort of sitting over here why did you sit there well I kind of like have my back to the wall well what is it about having your back to the wall it makes you feel more comfortable I just feel this and it's like well then what's the Optimates the discomfortable thing and then you and you notice what it would feel like to be uncomfortable there and you basically find a spot in your experience in your consciousness which is very centered and comfortable and then you find that the problem and you try to simultaneously notice both at

95:15the same time and basically all the trapped energy of the neural place starts to drain out that making sense I'm trying to make it vivid or visual but that's how you work with this stuff so you can start to drain out these patterns of like chronic fear these paddocks of chronic fight you do it by noticing how that pattern is in your body connecting to it and then it can kind of empty out it's so interesting because it also just it it blows the lid off trauma it says trauma is gonna be different for every person all traumas is just shock to the nervous system it's not just about you know surviving a terrorist attack or you know all this horrible stuff it's like someone might do something to Dan in the in the smallest way when he's a two-year-old that wasn't any big deal but it completely freaked him out it basically shocked his nervous system so intensely that now there's that pattern

96:06of shock that's in there that still lives in there and what happens it just grows and grows and grows and because if you don't release that energy it just just keeps causing havoc in the system that's the thinking of somatic experiencing it's and I've been working with somebody and I had a I mean just to give him to make it real I had a I've had a lot of injuries in my life like broke a neck and broke busted shoulder and different things from just being a jackass but one time I got hit by this truck I was on my bike and it blew up my shoulder hit the ground and then the back of the truck hit mean he has sent me spinning and so one time I was in there working with the somatic experiencing lady and she's like what direction do you want to look in I'm like I kind of feel like looking this way if you don't know you don't feel like looking that way I'm like not

96:52doesn't really I don't really want to turn my head this way the only one and I realized that that's always there Ike I don't want to look this way and she's like well what what happens when you look this way and I it was like I started looking this way it was harder do and suddenly I remembered the impact of this truck from when I was 17 years old on this side of my body and I could feel that the impact was still in my body and she got me to work to turn my head and actually got me to connect to that to this so I'm thinking of that memory and I'm feeling that memory in my body and she gets me to work through that turning my head and that act of doing that was like all of a sudden I felt all this new freedom in this pattern I've now not had that issue as much and that's just to give you an example of how you would work in that mode isn't that isn't that cool I mean I

97:39find that unbelievably I do too that is interesting listening to your story about your life about the lack of difficulty it sort of reinforces my ideas about martial arts in that it's not about learning how to be a great fighter or learning how to beat people up it's learning how to battle your own internal demons and and confront insecurities and and fears and to do it on a regular basis frees up a lot of the mental landscape it allows you to just be more relaxed about a lot of different approaches to life and this this tension and control that we have is a lot of time just pointless in it's it's that's highlighted by martial arts training yeah I think it's almost always pointless yeah although you know the thing is if you look at a good fighter just like if you look at a good dancer there's definitely a sense in which they're just flowing and they're

98:36responding but then when they need to be tense boom they got it it's like they got that power behind them it's like if you were dancing for example and you all you did was just flabby flow you would have there be no form to it it's like you need the pulling in you need that so it's about the it's about the intelligent use of tension you know knowing when to be soft and then wanting to be you know it's having those two sides yeah but what I'm talking about those the management of stressful physically difficult things on a regular basis frees the mind now it's just this the the getting comfortable with conflict and when in the absence of conflict then you look to try to restrict and control everything and then every little affront to that any little questioning and challenging of your control over things can cause anxiety because you're uncomfortable with this

99:27idea of surrender of relaxed ugly totally whether it's in psychedelics or whether it's meditation or all these things there's solution chills yeah and stand-up comedy communicating podcast hosting Good Morning America I mean there's so many parallels because a lot of it is in managing the mind and and just being able to again get out of your own way mm-hmm I agree yeah I definitely got that sorta keep doing it's like these books are all saying the same thing again and again and again but you still need to read it because you forget yeah yeah and it gets a little bit easier all the time you know managing the mind gets a little easier and part of you could chalk up to maturity and life experience but it's also just this continual practice of paying attention to what's going on inside your head exactly right me Jeff doesn't like my analogy that I'm about to use because he

100:20thinks it's slightly aggressive and he's right but it's it's mostly meant for comic effect but it's like when you have a dog who takes a on the rug you kind of sometimes you got to put their snout in the and that is what we're doing in meditation and in all of these practices seeing over and over again how crazy we are know how the fear arises how the anger arises has a the discontent with whatever is happening right now arises and not getting owned by it and and that's why these practices so useful and why you got to stick with you you don't get just fixed you know it doesn't work that was nothing like that no I mean there are a lot of people out there selling them yeah some real what's the most annoying aspect of that to you guys please our positive thinking oh you know we were talking about that yesterday where people were talking about president opera and I reminded

101:14everyone about Oprah and the secret yes I'm like do you know how many people ruined their lives because they thought all they had to do is have a vision board and think positive and this is gonna be the key to happiness yeah I think it's it's one of the most pernicious ideas that's ever been sort of released into our culture and it even predates the secret because there's there's a book called the show positive thinking there's another book called Think and Grow Rich I don't want people to go buy these books because I don't think you should I do that you can solve all of your problems through the power of positive thinking is so easily disproved just engaged in the following thought experiment anybody who's born right now in a refugee camp were they thinking incorrectly in utero in 2010 when the when the earthquake hit port-au-prince Haiti was everybody in town thinking

102:09incorrectly did they bring that upon themselves of course not of course not and yet we're telling all these people that if you make a good vision board you can cure your cancer well you don't have to go to the doctor all this it is demonstrably false and recklessly dangerous and most of the people that have had success with the power of positive thinking they attribute it to that but you're not talking to any of the people that thought the exact same way and failed you're only talking with the successful people the the sampling is so biased the only people who have had all their problems solved through the power of positive thinking other people writing those books and selling all the condoms and if by the way if it was that easy there only one book yeah come back to this next seminar in this freezing cold room with your credit card but I will sit like the one

102:58part of it that the idea that you can have an intention that having a clear intention of something of how you want to be or something you want to have happen that that can be helpful I think that absolutely omens sense there's a difference between having a positive attitude yes absolutely you know William James the great kind of Psych psychologist mystic he was a mystic he had this really cool he talked about I think was called firstborn versus twice born or once born once born and twice born and it was a fundamental way in which he distinguished people who had who have maybe had a spiritual outlook in life and he said the once born people were people who were just naturally they were the kind of the positive thinkers the kind of like everything is perfect everything is awesome this like rose-colored view of reality and and and really not able to kind of see suffering

103:48and everything that kind of a thing and we all kind of know people like that like kind of the classic naive spiritual person but he was really interested in the what he called the twice-born and that's what he was and I feel like that's that's certainly how I identify which is somebody who can come into a kind of perspective like a mystical or spiritual active but has to but only did it via having to look hard at the reality of suffering at the reality of evil of up in the world like that you can't wave away the world's unfair distribution of wealth and hardship and that you had to come to that you had to come to your view through honest reckoning with the crappy stuff about being a human being and the crappy stuff that's out there and that you couldn't not look at it and that you could do that like Tolstoy was the famous example then you kind of could be reborn into a

104:40perspective that was wide enough to include the that full bittersweet and that and so I think that's what I think to the to this to the twice-born the first-born outlook is kind of repellent because it seems like it's not looking at the truth of all the very real challenges that are going out there it's like you could just be and you go to your yoga class and eat your your perfect raw food and be in your perfect bubble but the war but meanwhile the world is just contracted in pain and if to really be a kind of true expansive humanist just to kind of look at all that and to still find your way into thinking that life is worth living you know there's a mystery there yeah I'm try I guess you have to recognize that there are these horrible things in the world but concentrating on them fully and and only is not gonna benefit you in that structure form right so true it's

105:30like you there are amazing things to this life and the more you concentrate on them the more you'll recognize them the more you'll sort of bask in right the amazing experience that we're all going through right now and so what you're describing as elements of positive thinking sure that's the good side that's totally legit that it's positivity right yeah a positive attitude as opposed to positive thinking which is loaded up with this idea of like sort of mental control of the external world and that I know is dangerous what I think Joe's describing is gratitude yes that's that's so important but it's important to parse this out what part of this is healthy and good and what part of this is destructive yes right and what part of it you could parse out from what you'd call the law of attraction which is not a law I mean that's another part of the problem too like the whoo is written in

106:23the title yeah like it's not a law it's just that's that's not what it is so you're calling it the law of attraction lets me know you're full of that was law made by Zeus yeah there's something that's undeniably important about positive thinking having a positive attitude and being enthusiastic and having energy and focusing on the good and focusing on your goals and focus on what you're trying to achieve but the idea that that in and of itself is all you need that it's it's uniquely powerful and then it can literally bring you your future and all these people that say that that this is what they use like you know you might have been successful and that might be your underlying thought process but there's a wide series of factors there's a big spectrum of things that had to happen for you to be successful including luck including great the great fortune of being born in America not a

107:22village yeah yes there's so many different places you could be so many different life experiences you've could have had horrific parental situations in household situations you could have been born into you're extremely lucky look look at the case of James Arthur Ray I covered it extensively for ABC News that he was one of the Guru's in the secret in the DVD of the secret he was one of the guys talking about how the universe is like Aladdin's lamp and he held a sweat lodge ceremony in Sedona Arizona which several people died and he went to prison yeah how well was the law of attraction working for him yeah maybe it did work got some balls yeah they also found in his hotel room a lot of like HGH and testosterone and stuff like that so he definitely wasn't as buff just through the power of positive thinking and he was trying to do what with the sweat lodge like what was the ID like

108:18look the sweat lodge is a beautiful ceremony from running for Native Americans maybe he had people too hot or too hot and they overheated and they their electrolyte balance got crazy or something and how two people died or something that you know um it was a while ago I can't remember but I think it was two people the problem with a lot of those people too is that what they do is they put together like some sort of a program maybe it's a book maybe it's a guideline you're supposed to follow then they start teaching seminars in it and they start putting it into practice and leading all these people with this stuff and that it becomes who they are like who they are is like a guru who they are is like this spiritual person and people come to them that's the dynamic they have people come to them what should I do and they the universe provides bounty oh and

109:06everybody claps and goes along with it and they live in this sort of bubble yeah it just it gets really odd with those folks yeah I mean that was why I mean I was I had been assigned years and years ago to cover faith and spirituality for ABC News even though I'm an agnostic and I ended up covering a lot of these New Age gurus and that was why I ended my the first book I wrote was called 10% happier because I was trying to counter program against the howling sea of yeah that is America's 11 billion dollar a year self-help industry because I was watching what this was doing to people's lives it's so fun I mean we've been talking about that a lot lately there's so many people that are trying to get in this on sort of the open mic level when you see it on Instagram like there's a lot of people like promoting these inspirational little posts and you know

109:54they'll have these little inspirational videos like you know what you got to do today is go out there and embrace life and just go after your goals and like and there's so many people that are trying to give people this fuel and give people this infer and they might not necessarily really even be in practice with that themselves yeah it's a I like the open I like your analogy about the open mic that is what it's like it's like they're trying it out they're learning had it be and Anthony Robbins or Tony Robbins it's fine I had a friend who was living in France and he came back to Canada and he'd been in Paris living there for like 10 years or something as he's walking around the streets of Toronto and he said was the same when he was anywhere in North America and he kept feeling like there was something wrong but he couldn't put his finger on it it was it put his wrong

110:44something wrong and then he realized that everyone was having the same conversation all the time over and over again which was everything's gonna be alright Anthony's gonna be alright Evans gonna be alright it was just this constant peppy cheerleading from everywhere whereas in France it's like things are that is fun now you are and that's what it's like being in France people you know it's like at least they're honest but that has its downside but I mean there's also a realism where people are just gonna like call it out as it is we're here there's such a there's a tendency to just to cut there can be this kind of pollyannaish everything is fine everything is fine because people don't really want to look at what's under what's lurking underneath you know well everything's fine right now in this moment right most of the time no doubt bro most of the time and when we talk

111:30about the mystical mystery underbelly weirdness sure off this idea that everything is fine in the moment this exact moment right now mmm like so in practice this is something chin Zen taught me that the more you it's almost like the present moment is on a continuum and that doesn't sound make any sense but it's like you can be present and you can be more present and more and more and you can start to get a feeling for that for practice of just the absolute now it's like you're getting closer and closer to the absolute now with ever actually getting there which I know just sounds like a bunch of wobbly glue but the feeling on the inside is just this everything is it's like the silence this presence it's like this sacredness you know that no kind of sacredness that what is that you know that to me is like I wrote about consciousness for a long time before I started realizing there's this

112:24thing here and how do you talk about how do you write about it in a way it doesn't sound ridiculous you know and yet it is the most important thing it it's the most it Orient's you you know to be able to come into that understanding yeah how do we talk about it you know the Mystics have always said it's you can't talk about it it's ineffable but it's true as an experience but where is it bears having talked about intelligently where are you gonna read about that in the New Yorker magazine or or whatever you know it's like it's either talked about in this Disneyland way or it's not talked about at all it's like we got to try to talk about we got try to or at least remember not talk about it come in too fine practices you know but honor that it's real and you know that that's something I'm really interested in and I'm trying to learn how to do it now let me ask you this as an outsider if

113:11someone is coming to this with zero meditation experience no no thought whatsoever about pursuing this and they're listening to you say things like okay what's in it for me what do I get out of that what do I get if I can get to this home what do I get what's what's in there yeah seems like you're just alive yeah like this doesn't seem like anything changes well I think that is what you get you get your life you get your life back most the time you're not in your life you're freaking out about your life you're in your head thinking about this this or that happen or you're responding to situations what you get is the capacity to be sitting here in the middle of all this and be and appreciate the richness and the fullness of it because that's the thing it has it has a quality of fulfillment in it has a quality of like nothing needs to be any different so there's a peacefulness and

113:56a beauty or something or even when things are objectively things are objectively shitty on this bittersweetness so you know this poignancy two things it's like you get exactly your life just more of it and that's why you know shenzhen used to say it's like it's like you lived it's like it you get to live ten times deeper or one time two times deeper or three times or four times the more you practice it's like it's the same surface but it's the depth dimension that's getting like richer and fuller and broader and and so then it gives you the capacity to also to appreciate more and more what's going on because most of time we walk around like I this is the stuff I like looking at but I don't like this stuff over here or I don't want to feel these things or I don't want to see these things so we're like we're kind of you know blah or it's like we live the analogy I use

114:42is like we're born into a mansion but room by room we're like no can't go in there can't go in there that's my ex-girlfriend oh that's my relationship with my parents or oh that's this limitation of this limitation at some point we're just sitting there under the stairs everything is fine nothing's fine yeah I really enjoy my life we're hiding in the dark under the stairs ago it's a so you want to set about reclaiming the mansion you know it's like can you be like you said exactly can you be free in more and more situations and can you begin to appreciate the the beauty of even these difficult situations and that way your whole life kind of can open up to you that's what the practice another way of thinking about it and is and this is a bit of a New Age trope so it's a little annoying but it's like what I said before that cliches become clichés for a reason and

115:25the reason is they're true generally all you get ever is right now everything you've experienced in your whole life happened to you right now and everything you ever will experience will always happen to you right now non-negotiable we live most of our lives however in a autopilot of an ass fog of rumination and projection and we're not paying any attention to the only thing we ever get meditation digging more deeply into the present moment is giving you your life back now how do you address because what we're talking about is managing the mind and increasing happiness by 10% or more hopefully how do you address psych meds because a lot of people that are going down this road have already gone down the pharmaceutical road and might be inexorably connected to it sort of way they might be on anti-anxiety medication be on antidepressants like how do you

116:25address that I yeah I think I can speak for both of us and that we are maximalists that when it comes to well-being it's important you got to surround the ball you got to use every arrow in the quiver and just because we're in the meditation doesn't mean we're not into all the other scientifically proven ways of dealing with your mental health you know that I often say that we as a culture we spend so much time working on our bodies on our stock portfolios on our cars and no time on the one filter through which we experience everything and that's our minds and so if you have clinically diagnosed anxiety or depression which again we need to be talking about more openly because there's so much stigma around it I've dealt with both since I was a kid if you have that you should avail yourself of every possible remedy and if your doctor recommends that you take psych meds then you should

117:19investigate it if it works for you then stay on a meditation is just another thing you can also use along with exercise getting enough sleep having positive relationships having a healthy diet all the other no-brainers what Jeff and I are saying is in the pantheon of no-brainers meditation needs to be included yeah I think I think with the meds thing sometimes meds can get you to the baseline of then then you can meditate yeah you know and it's almost like I mean I know too many people whose lives have been including people I know really really well really really helped by these meds I know other people have had super hard time with it but some of them at the same boat and some of them it's like it gets you to a place where it's almost like the meds can help buy time for your own system to work itself out and so you get to a place where you're like I've had a lot

118:09of trouble with crazy energy surges up and down like and like a manic thing yeah like I get hypomanic and then I get like despairing and hyper hypomanic I actually just got a diagnosis two weeks ago that I probably have a mild form of bipolar this is 46 years old I'm finally learning but it's not a surprise I kind of knew how do they how do they diagnose that so I so it was an interview so it's an hour long this in this case was like an hour and a half or an hour long interview or a guy just really would took my history like how how I've been challenged I have a DD big time a DD that's that's been diagnosed multiple times but just because the way my attention works but he basically really asked me lots of questions about how about my history and when things started to get into the the more surges and and they've been getting worse the past and this is entering as I meditated ton but

118:59and and there was a period of the meditation was super super working really well and stabilizing everything and then there was a period where the meditation felt like it wasn't working as well and all this energy it's like that trauma stuff I was talking about all that stuff started to come up so I go more into these ups and downs and I found that the practice would help it would help me from feeding the spikes but it wasn't I it hasn't been totally addressing it now I haven't actually started any meds or done any lithium me at all I'm thinking maybe I would try that because I want to understand what folks go through but basically he just asked a lot of questions there's you know I guess he they have a diagnostic criteria around a set of like does that seem to make sense for what we know about it and because they've seen all these patients they've got all these ideas

119:41it's so new I don't even know what to do with the information in fact I kind of can't believe I'm talking about it because it seems a bit premature but I'm you know the way I think about it is I would consider doing meds because I just want to be able to get to a place where I could then let my body kind of a heal itself help itself out figure itself out and the meds might buy me time to do that then they and the meditation can be part of that as well and that's just the messy human reality of it but you you seem like you've got your together so like what is it exactly that's bothering you so much you'd actually be considering medication well it's try writing a book when them yeah yeah so I'm like find six days a week and then one day a week so there's the there's the attentional stuff just being over excited about things and my getting pulled in every direction that's

120:26not really a problem so much anymore like I've learned to the problems there were more like you disappoint people you feel like you can't get your together you know you're just manured that can happen and and that back and create its own challenges but the energy ones are more fundamental it's like I wake up in the morning you know maybe once every week or two and all of a sudden I can feel my heart pounding and I could feel like this incredible energy in my hands in my body and I just I'm in this hypomanic state and I and I and it feels good I don't even realize it but I'm going around I'm talking I'm excited about stuff and I'm just jacked up on this like on this energy and it's and what comes up must go down so I usually like it but then late what will happen is I realized that I've been I've exaggerated like oh I've gone in something I've been too aggressive of a

121:16situation I've been exaggerating some situation I got grande grandiose about something and and I feel super embarrassed that I was in this sort of like hi and in in a way that and I and I didn't have my together at all and then I end up in the downswing which is the the catastrophizing the like the despair sometimes like you know I still only lose like that thing about being in the center that was talking about when it's there it's so true and it's so there and all of a sudden I'm not there at all I don't feel anything there's I feel like there's no meaning to anything and I am just in this desolation thing and that lasts for a few hours or like a day or something and then I'll pop out and I'm fine and I know that once a week or once every week two weeks or something I'm gonna go into that cycle now I've done my whole life without having I've tried to manage it entirely with meditation

122:01with exercise with diet and I may just continue to keep doing that have you gotten better at it I have got well so I have gotten better at managing it absolutely no question I've gotten way better at not believing in it when I'm in a high and not believing when I'm ended down I don't wanna interrupt you but the thought process like what when it kicks in like you know what are you aware of it so yeah it starts as and who I am because I starts as energy in the body so I feel the vibrating this I'm like okay that's the vibe first my early warning sign and then it gets bigger and bigger but the thing is it's addictive do you mind your heart rate well this is a no but I can feel the heart sometimes is going like a jackhammer and other times the heart it cools out but that it's like the I mean you know the power is still there the feeling of and that's that feeling of power which is

122:46very once you workout when that hit that's - that is what I do I hit a punching bag and the best so I this have been the best thing in the world for me is been hitting a punching bag and it's men meditation can't do when I'm in that place right but punching bag I feel calm and centered afterwards so that is the main intervention of what I'm doing I may never go the med route I think I can handle it like I've been doing it until now but what makes me want to do it is I want to know what other people have to deal with like I want to know what is like to be on those things and what and so I can help those people maximally and say this is what I can tell you about what meditation can do and this is what I can tell you about what it can't do this is what I can tell you about how physical practice can help but how they might not be able to help this is what I

123:25can say about how meds have helped in heaven but so it's if I can have get experience with those different things and talk to lots of other people who've done it then I can triangulate it on helping people up most in a in a more effective way so when you get these surges you know this energy surge you exercise you hit the bag and you feel great yeah does that even everything out yeah yeah usually it can discharge the energy then why on earth would you be thinking about theum well that seems insane because that is a very organic solution to this problem but I don't know that it always will work with the punching bag so it's working right now it hasn't perfectly worked every time what's you say hasn't person so sometimes I go and I hit the bags and afterwards the energy is still in me it may not have this but it's still I can still feel it and when you say energy is really

124:13interesting to someone who doesn't get these marriages I want I'm just trying to like do you feel like you're on caffeine do you feel like you like a speed thing speed it feels like nowhere so you wake up and you're on speed I'm on speed and that's and there's nothing I did externally nothing how didn't do anything all of a sudden so this is the things their corresponding thought process that goes with this is there a zest for life is life yeah some tomato kick some ass yeah it's a it's pure exuberance that sounds great it is great but that's the problem of it it's great so you feed it so you're like you want more of it so you just it's like so basically it's like this it's also not always great for the people around it's not always great for the people around you right right we have our ups and downs yeah this is like boom boom and the more you feed the up the higher you

125:02go but that means that the bigger you have to fall mmm so like that's what I've learned is that when I when I feed the grandiosity the energy that exuberance like I'm super fun to be with at parties for sure like I'll do crazy that's usually when I've had all my injuries like my various breaks because I've been on one of these crazy high so that's another reason not to do it but inevitably there's gonna be a part where it it's gonna crash so so now my whole job isn't from being a meditation teacher is I feel the energy start to come up and I back off so it's like I let it just come through me I try to let it just come up like a wave and just and I and I and it's really uncomfortable being in that vibrating energy and not acting on it not saying some stupid or not like being more whatever not acting on it and keeping it going I have to kind of let it so I just try to keep

125:49myself calm and centered and I try to let it just feed itself through and now with the punching bag or with the biking and with these things that really can help with that process so I do think I might be on the verge of maybe I won't do that maybe I won't but I don't know because it's the thing is dude it's hard being at talk to anyone who's bipolar or being up in those ups and downs it's hard to be in that it's exhausting every week it's like you don't you wake up you don't know who you're gonna be this week who am I gonna be today or what or if you're in a down place like now you've been all these plans with somebody then you got to cancel the plans we you're talking you were saying this is a slightly bipolar situation for you this is so it's not by I think the bipolar or I'm not sure one of them there's bipolar one and bipolar two one is more extreme like real mania where you go and

126:36buy 50 couches and like hey honey I bought 50 couches we're gonna put couches all over the neighborhood you know like your classic manic episode it doesn't go for me I never had that happen I just have the the hypomania so like the lots of the energy but I don't go into total craziness and biologically what is the process like what is actually happening to you yeah causing this I don't know there's no they don't understand that no I mean I mean so this is new for me I'm just I just found out two weeks so I haven't really done the research on the brain science yet they do say there's a brain signature just like there is for a DD for bipolar there's a particular signature of what of what it looks like as some kind of dampening of the frontal activity so probably a lot of activation and maybe the amygdala or something I don't know all I know is from the inside

127:24it really feels different it feels like I mean it's I mean sure people can relate like when you've had a coffee and you got that vibrating energy or you have or you're feeling super confident that your confidence goes too far you're a little bit like overconfident you know you're your conclusion delusional it's a and then that and that actually happens in meditation too like that stage the up stage and meditation then people call it the arising and passing you can get in a stage where suddenly you really feel like you get it you oh yeah I understand it's like what Dan said yeah they're gonna put a plaque here on the wall I'm the best meditator on the planet like cuz you got you're just you know you're just all that energy is coming through you and then inevitably there was the crash so actually that is why I didn't get diagnosed for so long I thought it was just meditation and then

128:12it was I was just noticing the cycles because of my meditation and it was really just a DD and it wasn't until it started to just to become I started to see okay there is a real pattern here like I need to just talk to somebody and get some other perspectives on this I just might work it's worth pointing out that it's highly unusual and very courageous for somebody in Jeff's position it's it's highly unusual for anybody talk about having mental difficulties at all in our culture unfortunately we need more people who are willing to say you know I deal with anxiety depression bipolar a DD but for somebody's a meditation teacher to do it because as Jeff has said that the traditional understanding of meditation teacher is someone who's got their together on every level for somebody who's a meditation teacher to deal to come out and say yeah I have these challenges

129:02he's incredibly brave and also really important because I think and working with Jeff on writing this book one of the things you know there were times when these patterns that he's describing were very annoying to me to deal with as his co-author but over time and actually I started to see that he was wrestling with this stuff and in many ways it felt like a meditation teacher it was obvious to me that he is a meditation teacher with impostor syndrome and now I think he gets and I think you can hear it and what he's saying that actually these challenges make him a better teacher that he's more in touch with the things that we're all dealing with and sometimes on on an exponentially higher level you know of degree of difficulty and that therefore he's better at getting under the hood and helping other people with their mental challenges yeah like so in many ways like what you're

129:52experiencing for your own profession is almost a gift because you have this unique opportunity to explore your own consciousness in a very challenging way and also to be completely honest about it which is very very beneficial to not just your students but a lot of the people that are listening to it's right now it's now it's living inside this now because you get it's more it just makes everything more dramatic you see you can see the dynamics cuz it's so frigging dramatic in you you're then able to see the more subtle way it plays out for everyone because you know the stuff I'm talking about it's just the human condition hand everyone's got is struggling with a version of this it may not be to that extreme thing but are they but they got it or they have an orthogonal challenge over here something a little bit different so you're you're continually

130:38training your compassion for how hard it can be in life we were also learning very practically how to work with the dynamics of that stuff is the downside of the the reaction to the upside or is there a corresponding physical feeling I think of it as like a rope it's just physics welcome it's just what comes up must come down and mine is a bit unusual in that it's I'm more up I don't have a ton of I don't stay down law it sounds great so that's why it took so long to get diagnosed but then but trust me that being up all is deranged too you know it's like you're you know I I go back sometimes I had an experience where I just was trying to fix up my website I look back at an old talk I did and like that I was videos in this big room I'm like holy I was so manic you know I just I was crazy it was like what the was I doing about the memos you sent me when we ran a book yeah so

131:30you're late so you know I mean do you want to explain it okay so we would be beginners it's like I wanted it to be really simple and we were doing it on a crazy deadline so we did a road trip across the country in January 2017 so not long ago and at the end of the road trip we recorded all of it we got the transcripts back and we had to hand the book in in June that set me up on a schedule where I had to write a chapter a week which is insane because I have a Thai anchor two shows at ABC and I have a wife in the child and it would be insane even though I didn't have that and so my job was to write the the narrative the overarching structure of the book and chef was gonna write the meditation instructions that got inserted in and all I wanted from him was to give me some basic meditation instructions I did not want an exegesis on like the Upanishads you know like I didn't need him to go

132:34through and explain to me like the whole Pali Canon from Buddhism or the you know do his version of the baat of bhagavad-gita but he would send me these memos with his grandiose he would be on a manic upswing he would have these ideas about how he was gonna explain meditation as it's never been explained before as a series of exfoliations of the mind bla bla bla 17 page 50 17 pages of life have like tightly like you get the energy comes up and you get super excited and now I'm just pumped I want to talk about all these little kind of like complicated bits and put it all together and create this really elaborate scaffolding and a metaphor it'll describe exactly how the mind works and and that's why you know that's why I had that's why I didn't get the book done before I was working on with Dan I spent 10 years working on this book about enlightenment about the

133:20but the progress of insight and meditation and I just kept getting more and more complicated and more because I kept I would kind of simplify it and get be very sane I have it all understood and then I would suddenly go into one of those these episodes and I would I would explode it all and like elaborate all new dimensions of stuff and it was like I would never get anything done you know and and I want to say in your defense that the memo because I've gone back and read the memo they're they're great it's just not what I needed while writing a very simple book on a deadline and I would get these memos I don't know what to do with this yeah and and so that actually you're putting your so that is the reason why the ups are challenging because when you're in an up you're not really seeing the world as it is and like this a person who needs a very particular thing if you're just centered

134:05you know that you respond with that but you're in your own story about something and that is the part that's so pernicious or dangerous about about the OPP's and you know and so that and that happened in that process work in the book but then we got to sort it out but yeah of course of course I know there's something about being on an upswing like that and in this connector for everybody it's not just Jeff and we're picking on Jeff here but when what any of us is on an upswing or any of us is just caught in any mental state your your your capacity for empathy and compassion goes way down you're stuck in your own story hmm and the name of the game here at the end of the day notwithstanding I already stated misgivings about words like compassion that is where the rubber hits the road because you can talk about performance that is important but I think the real

134:57measuring stick for how well you've trained your mind is are you an hmm yeah that's huge right like how well are you interacting with other people that's what that is the money do you care enough about other people to actually who they are yes to see the character in their face the you know what what they're really telling you can you actually get out of your you just get out of your own and see what's going on in front of you that's the name of the game right and the most awkward conversations you ever have are when people are just talking at you not not even taking you into consideration why would you even talk to that person anyway you're not there just talking to themselves but you got a for me it's about what this journey is often about journey is another word that I don't really like but what this exploration is all about adventure whatever you want to

135:45call it is I see sometimes I'm that guy I'm that guy I'm not really listening and you got to see that yeah you have to see that stuff in yourself instead of just complaining about it in others in order to really get to the to the good stuff which is actually then learning how to listen and it's also like we're talking about it's very important for people to hear because everybody's that guy sometimes exactly we may not we like to admit it many of us like to spend a lot of time complaining about how everybody else is a schmuck but you got to see that stuff yeah it gets back to the snout man you got to see that stuff because and actually that's the good stuff it's actually there can be a real pleasure truly a pleasure in seeing it there's a great expression from this eminent spiritual teacher named ramadasa lives in Hawaii many of your listeners may have heard of him he talks about how

136:37meditation doesn't conquer your neuroses it makes you a connoisseur of your neuroses you're like a Somali a of your own insanity and there's a real pleasure every time you see anger come up or your own selfishness come up oh yeah I see you I see that there's a real pleasure in that because then in the seeing your that not owned by it you're not in it you're not in it that's playing the game well and that's what this game is now for the uninitiated all this is very hard to absorb they're sitting back and then listening this long conversation and trying to put all these pieces together what's the best first step to take actually try meditation is the is the best step to take and here's the thing to know this doesn't require a ton time I often point out to people that a five to ten minute a day habit is a great habit I've spent everybody wants to know what's the least amount of

137:39meditation I can do and get the advertised benefits of meditation all this stuff we've been talking about in high-minded terms but there are some easier to comprehend benefits from meditation lower blood pressure boosted immune system literally rewiring key parts of the brain that have to do with focus and things like that people want to know what's the least I can do to get that good stuff I spent we haven't cracked that by we I mean the scientific community that studies meditation I'm actually part of it but I know a lot of these men and women they haven't figured out exactly what it is what's the minimum dose but I've asked them you know it's five to ten minutes probably enough and the general consensus is probably enough to derive many of these benefits but so that's the good news but I think the even better news is if five to ten minutes sounds like too much for you one

138:24minute most days one minute daily ish is really enough to see what you need to see what you need to see is that you're crazy you need to see it over and over again this is the schnauzer getting a snout put in the in the poop you need to have that happen to you over and over again why because every time you see that every time you sit try to focus on your breath see that you've become distracted in that moment that's the moment when most people think I've failed at meditation that is actually the victory and when you see how crazy you are when you've become distracted and learn how to start again and again and again every time you see that you've become distracted that's a win and it's when of really towering consequences because then you see that you don't have to be owned by all that craziness you could recognize it you could nip it in his tracks another thing that I think that

139:16people should take into consideration about this talk of this meditation and trying to manage the mind is that one of the big issues and struggles that we face with today is addiction to social media yeah it's a giant and it was the exact opposite of meditation yes it is it is this yes it is constant like clicking and and being distracted and just getting all this weird input from stuff and it's not I enjoy social media on occasion but you gotta recognize that this is something that can overwhelm your consciousness and I'm not gonna present myself as holier and I on this because I too enjoy it and sometimes I take it too far there's no question about it I'll get lost in in social media where meditation is useful is because again what your training is self awareness you're just training to see your own stuff clearly so that it doesn't own you met in the

140:07course of meditation because if you have some meditation under the belt when you're so deep in a Twitter hole that you're you know spent three hours on the thing maybe meditation kick in at some point and say oh my stomach is bubbling my head is aching I haven't eaten I'm not ignoring my children and you can pull yourself out of the spiral you just get better and better at doing that I don't think perfection is on offer I don't know that all of us are gonna live elections and young where the universe is just bubbling up through us all the time we were not questioning it because I'm editing for 50 years yes okay so great it's nice to have those aspirational figures out there it's also great to have masters out there who can get in and help us with our meditation practice for most of us that at a level of five to ten minutes a day or one minute a day or one minute most days

140:54it's just that you're gonna become marginally less of a schmuck and that's really valuable it it does not have to be complicated sit down for five minutes do it for 10 minutes notice your breath then we get distracted to come back notice what got you distracted that's it yep you do that you'll find your own way into these insights you know you will start to learn how it works let's take the time to do that you don't even have to do it in a sitting practice you could do it you know when you're exercising or something it's just harder to do it when there's more going on I mean normally we lead with that but since you're a beautiful weirdo you took us into like weird spaces and that's where we went first and Jeff is in my view one of the best people in the world at talking about meditation at the deep end but you normally we leave with what we just discussed but you know such is

141:42life well I think that this is an important aspect of it to focus on that social media use and this addiction that we have is literally the exact opposite of this mindfulness and met tation and and really trading on being completely free of all these these devices and things that you're distracting yourself I mean the thing to think it's like living is making habits what habit are you reinforcing you are what you repeatedly do you so if you are just completely if you're training your attention to be fragmented it's gonna only get more fragmented because it the things just keep changing they get deeper and deeper and deeper so at some point you need to start training a different set of circuits you know it's just about that it's about what you're gonna train and what you're not gonna train most of us don't think of life that way we land in life and you just

142:34start doing stuff but the things you're doing are the things that are gonna become your inevitable conditioning that's a very sobering thought but it's also a liberating thought because it shows you that if you can start to do the stuff that's better for you better for your brain your body then you can start to reverse that stuff as well amen to what you just said and just to amplify your point about this you know mindless use of social media being the opposite of meditation I actually think there it's interesting I think the proliferation of communication technology is in part why meditation has become so yes in vogue because people know on some level whether they can whether they can articulate it or not that something's wrong we are there's this really interesting woman manoosh summer OD who has a podcast called note to self and it's about all about our relationship with technology

143:24and I was talking to her recently and she said we're conducting this massive science experiment with these devices and we don't know what the outcomes gonna be but it's happening globally and people have a sense that something's off yeah and that I think is why meditation has become such a yeah but you know actually I think what I think is really interesting is you guys heard the SLO technology movement there's a few different ideas around this like slow design or the basic idea is that right now the interface is that we use these flat screens these and all the notifications the buzzing the flickers that's kind of blowing our attention apart but that it's a it's sure so it's training the brain and the mind in a particular kind of way but in the exact same spirit if you were to start to design these interfaces in a way that according to basic mental health principles you might be able to

144:12create more positive habits so it's just starting to think like actually how could we design our to fight our devices our interfaces our technology in a way that's promoting more you know happiness more connection more of all the good stuff and that's like a question people are just starting to ask and I think it's really really cool to like think think about things in that way that it's it could be an opportunity there could be an opportunity with these with the technologies to do something really awesome so it's not like it's it's because they're neutral in a way it's just a tool it's how you use the tool in the way in which the tools designs accept the allegation is that actually many of these devices and and platforms have been designed specifically to exactly but that's not neutral they're like they're you know too salty potato chips that you can't stop eating yeah

145:00but I'll just put in one plug but while we're waiting for slow technology to come to fruition there are ways that it's on us as users to use these things wisely one thing I would say is as somebody who does use Twitter and Instagram is there's a great tweet from his guy Ian Bremmer who who's a big thinker about current affairs his I think his pin tweet is something like if you're only following people you agree with you're doing it wrong and I think there's a way in which actually our social media use and in that we create these cocoons these bubbles these ideological echo chambers were only following people who give us visceral satisfying ideological red meat if in fact you can use these platforms and podcasts to listen to people with whom you disagree and maybe even communicate with them then actually that is a thoughtful and wise use of this technology and may solve some what I

145:58would argue is the biggest problem this country's facing right now which is toxic tribalism toxic tribalism a really good way of putting it you know that's like your bit everyone is just stuck in their own Facebook feeds yeah it's basically the Facebook feed is your reality yeah but you can use Facebook to connect no question who your neighbors no disagree with you and to actually be able to hear their arguments in a way that even blindly reactive it's about doing the rounds of the community can you actually go out there and do the rounds of duty and check out some different perspectives yeah absolutely I think that's very important I do that a lot I found a lot of people don't agree with and I also try to talk to a lot of people that I don't agree with I think that's that's also important too and to have some sort of common ground where you can explore the ideas themselves and

146:48not look at the person who presents the ideas as your enemy that's a real problem today in this country obviously I agree I mean we've never been more divided in terms of right left and you know that the ideologies and especially when you have such a divisive president I mean you have this this person at the very top of the heap who literally chastises people and mocks them on Twitter I mean you have a mocking insulting president it's up who who uses social media and there's a trickle down from that the unquestionably there's people that look to the guy was at the top of the food chain as being the one who we should sort of model ourselves after in some way shape or form and so the idea that people are leaning in that direction now where they weren't for eight years you know it's it's weird it's a weird time for interaction and debating ideas yeah well it's also that's that again one of

147:42the negative things about social media is that thing of just like the whole trolling thing you could just say whatever you want cuz you don't actually have a real human being written that's right I can't see them they're hurt you don't see they're hurt you know so people are just this unbridled reactivity that just creates more reactivity she's my own Twitter feed no balls you know with people people saying things to me that they I doubt they would ever say to my face I mean that's what we do that's what people do and that's one of the things that's so bizarre about the lack of social cues the the you know standing in front of someone there's no consequences it's it's communication incredibly unnatural and unrealistic way yeah all our lives throughout the time that we were monkeys coming out of trees or in exchanges have been face to face until very recently

148:27yes you know yes and again I know we're flogging the meditation thing and I don't want to present it as a panacea because it's not and nor is it the only approach to increasing the sanity quotient in our society which badly needs to happen but again I do think that meditation mindfulness the sort of self-awareness that's generated through meditation can play a positive role in this the aforementioned toxic tribalism because if you're so caught up in your own story you can't as we've discussed have the kind of empathy that is needed to understand people who have differing views and meditation is a way among other techniques to kind of just reduce how seriously how personally you're taking your own inner chaos and I think that can be very useful right now do I think everybody in the world's automatically gonna hurl themselves into the lotus position no but I think each

149:20individual can take a personal responsibility for making things less crazy I agree with you 100% I think that's a good way to wrap this up yeah bro well good thank you very much else you know any anything else to add or wrap this thank you for putting me in the tank I really appreciate that there's an expression gratitude is the expectation of future favors so I expect to be back in that tank anytime okay you let me know when you're in town we'll hook it up and by the way there's hundreds of tank centers over the country I know I'm sure you're in New York right they I'm sure they have them I know they have them in New York they have them all over California now so they're everywhere all the states so find them thank you guys Oh a book to people the title meditation for fidgety skeptics there you go that's it bye buddy that was three hours