Ezra Klein On: Sane News Consumption; The Power of Meditation; The Future of the Species; And the Message of His Tattoo

On maintaining sanity in insane times. Ezra Klein is an opinion columnist and host of the award-winning Ezra Klein Show podcast at The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/column/ezra-klein-podcast. His latest book is Abundance https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Abundance/Ezra-Klein/9781668023488, co-authored with Derek Thompson. He is also the author of Why We're Polarized, an instant New York Times bestseller, named one of Barack Obama's top books of 2022. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. In this episode we talk about: How Ezra maintains some degree of equanimity Digital hygiene Ezra's meditation practice Ezra's tattoo, which is a reminder to maintain intellectual humility Ezra's new end of the day ritual The future of the species at what appears to be a pivotal moment. Related Episodes: How to Be a Good and Sane Citizen in Ugly Times | Ezra Klein https://www.danharris.com/p/how-to-be-a-good-and-sane-citizen-345?utm_source=publication-search Ezra Klein, How We Interact with Politics Matters https://www.danharris.com/p/ezra-klein-how-we-interact-with-politics-ca2?utm_source=publication-search Join Dan's online community here http://www.danharris.com Follow Dan on social: Instagram https://bit.ly/3tGigG5, TikTok https://bit.ly/3FOA84J Subscribe to our YouTube Channel https://bit.ly/3FybRzD To advertise on the show, contact [email protected] or visit https://advertising.libsyn.com/10HappierwithDanHarris

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Dan Harris?

  This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

• 0:19Dan Harris?

  Hey, gang. How we doing? One of the ways that I try to keep myself sane in today's rather insane news environment is to listen to voices from across the ideological spectrum. I find it counterintuitively calming to consistently challenge my own views. So I have folks I listen to on the right, in the center, and on the left. One of my favorite voices on the left, a guy who, in my opinion, does a real service through his public sense-making, is Ezra Klein, who works for The New York Times, where he's an opinion writer and the host of The Ezra Klein Show, which is a hugely popular must-hear podcast. You may have seen that Ezra has been on a PR rum-spring of late promoting his new book,

• 1:01Dan Harris?

  which is called Abundance, which hit number one on The New York Times Bestsellers list. We don't talk about that book at all in this interview, although I do recommend you read it. The basic thesis is that America's core problem right now is not a lack of resources or ideas, but a failure to build, to complete ambitious projects in areas like affordable housing, infrastructure, and climate change. Anyway, instead of talking about that in this interview, I talk to Ezra, a guy who really is living in the eye of the storm when it comes to the news, about how he maintains some degree of equanimity. We talk about his digital hygiene, his meditation practice, and his tattoo, which is a reminder to maintain intellectual humility.

• 1:43Dan Harris?

  We also talk about his new end-of-the-day ritual and about the future of the species at what appears to be a pivotal and potentially quite dangerous moment. Two things to say before we dive in. First, if you want to learn how to create equanimity in your own life, this episode will come with a custom guided meditation. If you sign up over at danharris.com, you'll get a bespoke meditation from the great teacher Dan Mauricio, who will be doing all of the custom guided meditations that come with our podcast episodes this month. Head on over to danharris.com to become a paid subscriber. You'll get not only the guided meditations that accompany every episode, you'll also get full transcripts of my interviews, access to the group chat, and the ability to join my live video meditation

• 2:28Dan Harris?

  sessions. It's a lot of fun. Second, we've got a merch sale running from July 7th through 14th. Head over to shop.danharris.com. If you've had your eye on our Dump It Here journal, or the 10% Happier Crew Neck, or that Inner Peace Trucker Hat, some good deals are heading your way. Check it out. Shop.danharris.com. All right, we'll get started with my man Ezra Klein, right after this.

• 2:57Speaker 01

  How do I recover from a friendship breakup? How come there's nowhere to hang out anymore? Why do I feel lonely when I can communicate with anyone and everyone through my phone? These are the questions that you're not alone in asking, and that's where our new podcast, Cornerpiece, comes in, to start small on life's biggest questions. I'm Taha, and with my friends, Sabrina and Melissa, we're going to explore life's ungooglable questions on this new podcast with TED. Come hang out with us on Cornerpiece, with new episodes every other Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 3:31Dan Harris?

  Ezra Klein, welcome back to the show.

• 3:32Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me.

• 3:33Dan Harris?

  I'm excited to have you.

• 3:34Speaker 02

  I am excited to be here.

• 3:38Dan Harris?

  I can't tell if you're fucking with me. I think you might be.

• 3:40Speaker 02

  I am not fucking with you.

• 3:42Dan Harris?

  Just 10% fucking with me.

• 3:44Speaker 02

  You think that after what feels now like years of talking about abundance, I'm not excited to come talk about meditation. I'll talk about anything but abundance now.

• 3:53Dan Harris?

  We're gonna hit it at some point, but we discussed.

• 3:55Speaker 02

  I hope our publishers didn't hear that. I love talking about abundance.

• 4:00Dan Harris?

  Well, you got the money. You're good. We talked in advance, and I was asking you on email, like, what are you comfortable talking about? And the question I asked you was, like, I'd be interested in hearing how you're staying sane, because you are setting aside the book. You're right in the middle of the conversation all the time. You found a way, I think, in a way that I find very helpful, to insert yourself into the discourse. And I'm sure that has a toll. So I said that to you and you wrote, am I staying sane? So my question for you is, are you staying sane? And if so, what are you doing?

• 4:32Speaker 02

  So at every book event, we do a signing line. And in every signing line, what I've noticed is almost every person, I would honestly say a majority of people come up and the thing they say to me in the five to 10 seconds that we're talking while I'm signing the book is you're helping me stay sane. And I've been thinking about that a lot. It's not what people usually say to me. And I feel like maybe I've become a panic eater. Like I'm eating other people's panic, but then the panic is in me. I'm staying sane. I do think that there is a comfort in being able to do work.

• 5:08Dan Harris?

  Yeah.

• 5:09Speaker 02

  That you find useful in a moment that you find alarming. But I think to stay sane right now, what's the, you would know it better than me, but it's not a mark of sanity to be adjusted to an insane world.

• 5:22Dan Harris?

  Right. Yeah.

• 5:23Speaker 02

  I'm not staying sane in the sense that I'm not incredibly alarmed, or that I'm sleeping well, or that I wake up with a spring in my step. I would really like to just cover some people trying to make the world better, not burn a critical piece of infrastructure, or critical lattice of human cooperation. Trying to burn those to the ground like one after the other, after the other, after the other. So I don't know, I'm doing my best, but I feel like the people who come to me like helping me stay sane. I'm a little bit like, it's not feeling the sane inside, it's maybe it's seeming on the outside.

• 6:04Dan Harris?

  I have a million follow ups for that, but I just want to jump on the panic eater thing. I don't think that's correct. I mean, the last time I saw you, we don't see each other in person enough, but I saw you at a party a while ago and kind of love bombed you a little bit, telling you exactly what people on the book lines say to you, which is that you're keeping me sane, but not because you're eating the panic, but because you are crystallizing arguments that are taking form in my mind in a kind of miasmatic way. I try to consume across the ideological spectrum, but. For the part of the spectrum that you represent, you make incisive arguments really well. You help to make sense of the world. That's a real service and that's different than outsourcing my panic to you.

• 6:45Speaker 02

  I appreciate that. I think the role that my show's been playing is a sense-making role.

• 6:50Dan Harris?

  Yes, exactly.

• 6:50Speaker 02

  And it's a very chaotic moment.

• 6:52Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 6:53Speaker 02

  And what we're good at is sense-making. Sometimes I think that there can be a kind of lie that can creep into the crevices of that. I try really hard to guard against this because like if you're a logical, structured thinker, and I am sometimes whether or not I want to be, you can try to make the world into a more sensible thing than it really is. The Times always gets criticized for sane-washing Donald Trump, which I have complicated feelings about. I think the criticism is often unfair. But one thing that I often describe on the show is a tendency to theory-wash Donald Trump or theory-wash the moment, which is to say, to find frameworks that kind of fit and they make sense.

• 7:36Speaker 02

  But I actually think it's absolutely critical to understanding what is happening right now, that it doesn't all make sense. It doesn't all resolve down to a set of good informational inputs and reasonable responses to those informational inputs. We've unleashed chaotic odds in this moment. And pretending that it's all order can be its own kind of lie.

• 8:00Dan Harris?

  That makes complete sense to me. I mean, I think in part what you're saying is we're dealing with an improvisational, unpredictable, sometimes irrational person. And he is day trading, making it up as he goes. And so if you're trying to say, to look at him through some sort of lens of a theory or an ideology, you are likely to be surprised.

• 8:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I'm saying more than him. I think eras have zeitgeists. And I don't know what I think a zeitgeist is composed of. If you pushed me hard here, you would get something very fuzzy. But the dominant spirit of, say, the Obama era was quite ordered.

• 8:42Speaker 02

  Is ordered here, is ordered internationally. And I think we're in an era of disorder. Trump is a sort of force of disorder. Elon Musk is a force of disorder, but AI is a disordering force, at least for now. I think we are in a very liquid moment. Geopolitics is breaking down in very important ways. Trade relations are breaking down.

• 9:04Dan Harris?

  The climate.

• 9:05Speaker 02

  The climate is breaking down. I wrote this piece right at the beginning of the administration called Now is the Time of Monsters. It's sort of making a specific argument about the interrelationship between Trump and climate change and AI and falling fertility and the way all of these were forces that were and would upend structures that were the stabilizing foundations of the decades we'd been in. And I think that's largely proven to be true and then some. You don't stay in ones that guys forever, but I do think that's where we are now. When I say that we've only shaken gods, I don't mean literally gods and I don't just mean Trump. I mean that there is something about this moment. You think about what Elon Musk has become.

• 9:50Speaker 02

  I mean, a very ordered person at another time in his life. I'm not saying a normal person, right? If you read biographies of him, it's not that, as he says, like, he's not a chill guy. But the kinds of information he's absorbing, the way he has cocooned himself in his own bubble of conspiracy and adulation and just creating his own weird harems. And we're in Batman, the Dark Knight. What's the Joker one, right? We are working with chaotic forces.

• 10:17Dan Harris?

  Yeah, yes. And there are people in Trump's orbit, I'm thinking of Bannon, who have a Joker-esque worldview, which is like chaos is the point, let's tear it all down. And I think one of the major points you were just trying to make is it's not just Trump and those in his orbit. It is these macro trends that may have produced Trump, which is climate crisis, creating migration from the South to the North across the globe. You've got AI, you've got, again, the climate and then Trump effectuating. What may be the end of the World War II order. So all of these pillars of life for everybody who's alive now, pretty much with very few exceptions, all of these pillars of stability are in question, and that's terrifying.

• 11:02Speaker 02

  And so, yeah, so there's a project to understand what people are trying to do, what they're thinking. But a thing I've become very convinced of, and it's funny because Bannon is not the person I would use as my example, but there are many I would use as an example. There isn't fundamental embrace of chaos for many of these people. And part of that is what is required ultimately to embrace who Donald Trump is and how he acts. In the first Trump administration, the people around him were perfectly willing to believe and say he is wrong, he's inexperienced, he doesn't know what he's doing, he's impulsive. You had a lot of friction in his administration among the people he chose for roles about him personally.

• 11:45Speaker 02

  They saw some of their role as second guessing him. And as Trump has become to his own side, this is a thing I've tracked on my show quite a bit, a more mystic figure kissed by destiny, in his own words, touched and saved by God to make America great again, as the understanding of him has become messianic and mythic, the sense that you can second guess him has dissolved. And so the people around him, even if what he's saying doesn't really make sense, they have to fit it into something. And the belief, I always say that Trump is functionally the grand ayatollah of MAGA. He's not its chief operating officer, he's not its prime minister, he's not its CEO, he's its grand ayatollah.

• 12:30Speaker 02

  He is the one in touch with the currents, you can call it intuitive, you can call it mystic, whatever you want to call it, that he has unleashed. He is a sort of larger than life figure to them. I don't necessarily buy that about him. This is not my view, but I've really noticed that what has emerged around him is an embrace of a way of thinking, a way of acting, a way of justifying, where not only do things not have to make sense, not only does it not have to add up as a logical argument or be connected to facts as you would normally understand them, but in some ways it can't possibly be because Trump is the repudiation of that, of that ordered,

• 13:12Speaker 02

  technocratic, soulless, disenchanted world. And to embrace him is to embrace its opposites, and that means rejecting its premises.

• 13:25Speaker 02

  Not actually what I thought I was going to talk about here, but I do think all that.

• 13:29Dan Harris?

  Anything you want to talk about is fine, but let me just go back to you and how you hold your shit together to the extent that you are in the midst of all of this. You said something earlier, which is that one of the ways in which you are keeping your shit together is doing something useful, which reminded me of the cliche that I did not invent, but I like, the idea that action absorbs anxiety, that one of the best ways to handle anxiety is to be useful in some way. And you are able to be useful in a way that's directly related to the problems that are abroad in the land.

• 14:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's an incredible gift.

• 14:04Dan Harris?

  I would imagine, having done something similar to your job in my life, do you find the work both a source of stress and a bomb?

• 14:13Speaker 02

  Yes. And it depends what moment in the work you're in. There are things that covering them is personally, emotionally difficult. I was on book leave during October 7th. And it just came clear to me, to your point about action can absorb anxiety. It was clear to me within a day that that was the end of my book leave.

• 14:38Speaker 02

  Because even putting aside the question of whatever responsibility I felt to cover it, there was no more book getting done. To have not been able to try to engage with it in some useful way was so much harder than to engage with it in some useful way, that the choice was almost made for me by my own nervous system. But the other side of it is that over time, covering things that are really difficult does wear on you. I mean, it should, if you haven't closed yourself off to Empathy and feeling it will. I did a show a few weeks, probably when this airs, a week or two back called The Emergency Is Here about the disappearing of people like Abrego Garcia to these El Salvador in torture prisons.

• 15:24Speaker 02

  And to really take what is happening there in its fullness, to take that Trump meeting with Bukele, where they're sitting in the Oval Office, functionally laughing to each other as they execute this Kafkaesque buddy routine about how neither of them can do anything for this person sent to this prison for terrorists upon zero cross-examined evidence of them being a terrorist, or even a gang member for that matter. To really take that in its fullness is just extraordinarily upsetting, like it should

• 16:04Speaker 02

  be. So it's good to be able to do work on it. I mean, that does help. But if the moment is alarming, you should feel alarmed. I feel alarmed.

• 16:14Dan Harris?

  What kind of boundaries do you create? Do you have some sort of phone hygiene that

• 16:18Speaker 02

  I have pretty good phone hygiene. I'm not saying I do it 100% of the time, but have you heard of the brick?

• 16:24Dan Harris?

  No.

• 16:24Speaker 02

  All right. So you can buy this thing. I am unpaid, uncompensated street team for the brick. I want to be very clear with the New York Times. I have no relationship with whatever company makes the brick. Brick is a small box brick. It's got an RFID chip in it. You basically set up a little profile on it and you, the way I do it is I whitelist apps. And then you touch it. You have to physically touch it to the brick and every other application on your phone blacks out. It's unusable. And it doesn't become usable until you physically touch it again. So it's not like a app that you go in and you press a button and you can use your phone again. It's actually a pain in the ass, right? I usually leave it at home, so I'd have to go home. So most of the time, my phone is functionally unusable. Now, there are a bunch of things I need to use. The reason I find

• 17:09Speaker 02

  this to be helpful is that I need Uber and Lyft. Both of my kids' schools have apps I need oftentimes to pick them up. To get into my gym, I need an app. I mean, so much of our lives happens on our phones that to go to a dumb phone just doesn't fit, at least for me. But so I'm pretty good about that.

• 17:26Dan Harris?

  In what cases are you? Touching the brick to blackout all the non-white list.

• 17:32Speaker 02

  It's most of the time.

• 17:33Dan Harris?

  Most of the time?

• 17:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:34Dan Harris?

  So how can you do your job? Don't you need to be kind of plugged in? No?

• 17:38Speaker 02

  If somebody needs to text me, they can. And I usually, if I'm at my job or it's during the day, I have a computer nearby. Most of the time. So sometimes when I travel, I'll be on break, or I've started traveling with the thing and just keeping it in my bag. So I'm a pretty big believer in this because even as somebody who thinks the phone is pretty bad for me most of the time. If I can use it, I will. It's an amazing endless object lesson in how weak my own willpower is. Like, if there were Oreos here, I would eat all the Oreos. If there was a phone here, I would look at the phone. And so I keep it for most of the time. And then there are times when I know

• 18:18Speaker 02

  I'm going somewhere, or I have a bunch of emails related to where I'm going for, you know, reporting or some other reason. And so then I won't. So that's my phone hygiene. It's not just like I keep it in another room while I sleep, although I do do that. It's that when I'm awake, I mostly can't use it.

• 18:33Dan Harris?

  So when you're hanging out with your friends or when you're with your kids, you are not checking the phone?

• 18:39Speaker 02

  Sixty percent of the time, sixty-five percent of the time. And I feel bad when I am, when I forget to break it or forgot to bring the thing or whatever. I tend to think it's bad for me. I think it's important right now to be very thoughtful about your information, your inputs. And the world is so alarming and you can do so little about it.

• 18:58Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 18:59Speaker 02

  But also, I don't know what the experience is like for you. I'd be curious to know what your phone hygiene is. But for me, it's like the feeling of, I'm not saying I believe in astral projection. I don't particularly. But it is like a form of kind of mental astral projection at all times. You're in all these different places at all times with a phone.

• 19:16Dan Harris?

  Yeah, except for right here.

• 19:18Speaker 02

  Except for right here. I'm wherever this news story is happening. I'm at my office with my team, checking Slack. I'm wherever the person emailing me is. I'm everywhere. And it's exhausting. Somebody I know described, he was talking about social media, but he described it as energy leakage.

• 19:36Dan Harris?

  Yeah.

• 19:36Speaker 02

  And I haven't stopped thinking about that. Something I sometimes write, like I have a to-do list during the day and I write some notes at the top of it. One of them is often like, don't leak energy. Try to keep as much of it as you can. The phone feels like a constant source of energy leakage.

• 19:52Speaker 02

  Speaking of being sane, and I don't do this, this is not my job, but like my job works differently in this, but a great way to follow the news is to read one newspaper a day. It is so much better than to be constantly hooked into the fucking thing. Specifically, you should subscribe to the print edition of the New York Times.

• 20:12Speaker 02

  But it is, it's a saner technology and you would know more, even if you wouldn't always know it faster. But you know it deeper. I don't think we've made good trade offs.

• 20:21Dan Harris?

  I remember in the mid aughts, there was an interview with the editor, Bill, what was his name? Bill something, white haired gentleman who was being interviewed by a correspondent from the New York Times, who held up the physical paper and said, did anything in here happen today? This was before the Times had built a digital operation and there was a lot of stammering from your now former editor. And yet, at this point, we've now lived through up to the minute information and what has it gotten us?

• 20:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is what I always say to people. So one, we are not net, net more informed as a society.

• 20:53Dan Harris?

  No.

• 20:54Speaker 02

  But two, information is supposed to do something in the world. Having just more of it, like smog hoarding gold is not the objective. So you might have different objectives, but I think that when we're talking about this, you're sort of intuitively asking a question like, civically, do we seem to be a small D democratic society operating at a higher level of civic virtue information and wise leadership? And like, no, of course not. Are we happier?

• 21:24Dan Harris?

  You could, you can maybe positively correlate the degradation of our democracy to the massive overflow of information and negatively correlate our happiness.

• 21:35Speaker 02

  I think you absolutely can. Again, I am not, our mutual friend PJ Vogt, I think he calls it an information vegan or a phone vegan. I'm not a phone vegan. I work in political information. I think I'm pretty damn informed. I think a lot about the embodied experiences of different ways of learning about things.

• 21:57Speaker 02

  The experience of learning about things on my phone is fundamentally twitchy.

• 22:01Dan Harris?

  Mm hmm.

• 22:02Speaker 02

  It's just twitchy. And it's twitchy and it's irritable and it's, it's not a good feeling in the body. Reading a magazine or a newspaper or book, it's a good feeling in the body, even if what you're reading about is upsetting. And it's not just a good feeling in the body, there's somehow room for my brain to make associations with it. It's a good space for my own thinking. And I have less time to do this lately with the book tour than I've wanted to, but I will say in terms of being sane, and I think one of the things has made me feel less sane recently because I'm sort of trying to balance the show and the column and the book, and the book has done amazingly well, like which I'm very, very grateful for.

• 22:44Speaker 02

  It's been a very intense project, um, being out there talking about it all the time.

• 22:48Dan Harris?

  Just hit number one on the New York Times.

• 22:49Speaker 02

  Just hit number one on the New York Times bestseller list. I'm so happy about that. But when things are just like a little more turned down, I really try to spend an hour to an hour and a half in the morning, reading things on paper at a table in a room, I think is physically nice, which can be the 14th floor of the New York Times, which is quite beautiful, or different coffee shops I like, with a coffee or tea. And I find that really sane making, no matter what the sentiment of the information I'm taking in is. And not doing that and instead trying to like, keep up with everything like in the corners of the day, like on a phone or, you know, like look at the computer and be distracted by notifications, a very, very different experience.

• 23:33Dan Harris?

  I think you're spot on, and I've never heard that argument made before, but it absolutely lands for me, absolutely lands. I'm wondering, where would you put the processing of information via a podcast on this spectrum from twitchy to?

• 23:48Speaker 02

  I mean, obviously podcasting, the apex way of consuming information. What you want is long, rambling conversations between people. I think it depends what you're doing and how you're doing it. Podcasting is interesting to me as a way of absorbing information because at least in its audio form, and a lot of us, including us right now, are doing visual versions of it too, but at least in its audio form, it is almost always the second thing a person is doing.

• 24:13Dan Harris?

  Yeah.

• 24:14Speaker 02

  So you're driving, you're walking the dog, you're folding the laundry, you're at a job, which doesn't require your full attention, you're commuting on the subway, you're, whatever it is, you know, different people have different versions of this. So I really like that experience, but it is a different experience and it is a different way of using your mind and working with information than having it be the first thing you're doing. Podcasts for me seem to slip in an almost attentional backdoor. It's like whatever the first thing you're doing is, is almost like your fish and spinner, and it's keeping some part of you occupied, which is why I think very long podcasts work in an era of very short form content, because it's the first thing you're doing that is

• 24:56Speaker 02

  dealing with the part of your mind or your attentional faculties that would normally say, hey, you're bored, go look at something else. So some part of that is dealt with. And then it's like some other layer of your attention is able to sit there in an hour and a half as a Klein show, or search engine, or 10% happier, or the gray area, or whatever it might be.

• 25:25Dan Harris?

  That lands too. I would say, and you're not saying this, but I would say, based on what you just said, and I'm making this up, for me at least, consuming information visually on the phone, either through text or video, feels the worst. I would say reading it on a physical paper alone, and that's the only thing I'm doing, feels the best, and podcasts would be a reasonably close second.

• 25:48Speaker 02

  I've been thinking about this on and off. What I'm about to tell you is a thing that I almost certainly heard on a Tim Ferriss show years ago, or something like the Tim Ferriss Show. And I heard, I'm like, I wonder if that's true. But it definitely feels true when I do it. And so, okay, so here's the argument. Somebody who, I think they were an expert in eyes, was making this point, that there's a relationship between the width of your gaze and your nervous system response to it. And that a tightly focused gaze is a kind of high concentration response in the body. Usually, you know, if you're looking out over a mountain range, or out a wide window, your sort of gaze is relaxed. But when you're reading, etc., certainly when you're like tightly looking at the phone,

• 26:32Speaker 02

  it's this concentrated gaze.

• 26:36Speaker 02

  In this, what sounded to me like a probably bullshit evil bio just so story, you know, well, when we were doing that, we were worried we were going to be eaten by a mountain lion. But whatever it is that is behind that, I actually find it to be true. Even when I was doing this with you right here, just like looking at my palm and that, I noticed the change in my body as my gaze focused and held. And because of the phone holds a gaze, something I notice when I am reading in a newspaper, a magazine or a book is I look up a lot. It doesn't hold me that much. I look up, I think about what I just saw, I sort of look around the coffee shop. The phone, iPad, other things I don't, the computer screen. And so it's holding that tightened gaze for long periods of time. This person argued is sort of bad on the nervous system.

• 27:21Speaker 02

  It's anxiety producing. Whether the story there is true, the, for me, experience that when my gaze is wide and relaxed, something about that seems to allow my systems to settle a little bit. And when I'm like staring at my phone for an hour, even if what I was looking at, I seem to like, some part of me afterwards is just a little clenched. I think that trying to be attentive to embodiment is pretty important. It's something I've become much more attentive to in the last couple of years. I think there's a lot of information in it.

• 27:56Dan Harris?

  I want to go into that, but just on the eyes thing, I'll join you in copping to the fact that I have no idea what the fuck I'm talking about, but EMDR.

• 28:04Speaker 02

  It is a podcast.

• 28:05Dan Harris?

  Yeah, exactly. I'm a white guy, I have a podcast, say whatever the hell I want. EMDR, eye movement desensitization. I don't actually know what it stands for. I've only done one session of it, but it is about moving your eyes in a specific way to release trauma. There's a successor that I have more familiarity with called brain spotting, where you're asked to, well, for me, I have claustrophobia. So airplanes and elevators have been hard for me for the last couple of years. And so I've been doing some brain spotting and the idea is you imagine the thing you're scared of. And then you look around the room and you find the spot where you're most triggered. And then you sit there with your eyes on it.

• 28:47Dan Harris?

  So long way of saying, there seems to be something to this idea of the placement of your eyes, the way you're gazing and the nervous system.

• 28:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm definitely happy to not belong to that on the podcast. Somebody I love did EMDR and it was really very helpful for them. That's sort of my experience with it. Yeah, I mean, there's something about the eyes seems related to some. I might understand if EMDR is it has to do with bilateral. Like, my understanding is you can do EMDR by tapping and by even walking.

• 29:18Dan Harris?

  You can also do it with a pair of sunglasses that the lenses flip up and down.

• 29:22Speaker 02

  My vague, I don't want to go any further into this than this because I don't want to get things wrong. But my vague understanding is EMDR has to do with bilateral motion rather than being specifically optical.

• 29:35Dan Harris?

  Let me promise the listener that I will do an episode where somebody knows more than I do about this issue.

• 29:42Dan Harris?

  Coming up, Ezra Klein talks a little bit more about embodiment and desensitization. Also, his concerns about AI.

• 29:55Dan Harris?

  Let me go back to embodiment. What do you mean by that? And why have you become so interested in?

• 30:00Speaker 02

  So what I mean by embodiment is just how my body feels when different things are happening. And it's very, very easy for me to get caught up in my mind. And "The Body Keeps the Score" by Bestle Vanderkolk, I think it's been on the New York Times Bestseller List functionally continuously now for years. I mean, there's a lot to it. But I think we live in a very specifically disembodied time. The technologies we use are disembodifying. They make you a floating brain in front of a flickering screen, immersed in a weightless world of digital information.

• 30:42Speaker 02

  When that happens, and I'm not saying there's a joy to it or an intensity to it. Again, I work in front of a computer all day. You're just losing all the information in your body. And I think over time, you desensitize to it. I think, like, we're here on a meditation podcast, so I think sometimes, like, what has meditation actually done for me? I'm not enlightened, not awakened. I know that for sure. I don't believe that my Buddha nature has been uncovered yet. But I've been meditating most days for 15 years now, maybe more.

• 31:17Speaker 02

  And one thing that I think it's given me is an attention to my state, a deeper level of granularity than I would otherwise have. And I think there's a lot of information in the state. Now, unfortunately, oftentimes I pay attention to my state. I'm like, I don't like my state. And there's not a lot to do about it in the moment. And obviously, the advice would be to accept it. But I think that, to me, has become a source of or a place of embodiment, has become a place of resistance to ways of living that feel increasingly inhuman. And things that, over time, I've noticed, I mean, none of them are earthshaking.

• 32:02Speaker 02

  We know them all. There are just rooms I feel better in than other rooms. There are ways of consuming information I feel better with than others. I'm constantly doing these to jack up my system. And I think I'm just attentive enough to what the other states feel like. I had George Saunders on my show years ago, I've had him on a couple of times, the author. He always seems to me, I think he would say he's not enlightened, but he always seems a little bit enlightened to me. But I remember him talking about meditation and saying that over time, what you begin to sense is that there are all these states you can be in. A1, A2, A2, A3, B1, B2, B3. And you begin to just have a knowledge when

• 32:45Speaker 02

  you're in one that the others are possible to. Even if you're not where you want to be, there's a little bit of a internal navigation mechanism that, you know, somebody's like, colder, colder, colder, colder. Now, that's a little bit in conflict, I think, with some other advice, which is like not to be doing so much picking and choosing. And so I would never quite know how to resolve that. Maybe you know. But I think that's part of it for me. It's strange to live in a time, I mean, people have felt this for many and many, many different eras in human history, but it's strange to live in a time where you just sort of feel that we've made some wrong turns, we're not going to unmake. And we're pushing ourselves in a way where we're probably out of the ideal window and are maybe things

• 33:29Speaker 02

  that were good for a while. Like, I'm one of these people, like, the internet was good in 2007.

• 33:36Speaker 02

  And somewhere around 2012, 14, the rise of the algorithmic internet, it started getting worse for us. And I don't know how we're going to unwind it. I don't really think we will. I don't really know if AI is going to be good or bad for us. I can see it both ways. But just a sense that I feel bad for my kids. I got to grow up before computers, before omnipresent screens, when there was nothing that could grab my attention that was all that good all the time. And so I at least like had the experience of the other forms of attention. And I cultivated those attentional faculties. And the level of countercultural effort it now takes to do that, or to push a kid to do that, is really high.

• 34:20Speaker 02

  So maybe my discomfort is just somebody who's like straddled a bunch of it and, you know, felt other things and doesn't like all the new things. Maybe I've just become a Luddite, but I don't really think so.

• 34:30Dan Harris?

  You've given me so much to follow up on there. I want to get to the picking and choosing thing in a minute. But on the kids, I'm a father too. I do sometimes wonder whether they won't have their own counter-revolution. I hear my son, when he's playing video games with his friends and somebody's freaking out, they'll say, touch grass. I wonder if their own nervous systems will kick in in such a way that they... You may have been too young for this, but in the 90s, I think there was this campaign on MTV, which was at that point, the dominant youth media. There was this anti-smoking campaign where the whole pitch was, they're conning you. They're trying to sell you this thing by making it look cool, but don't take the bait.

• 35:14Dan Harris?

  Instead of lecturing, they appealed to the inherently rebellious nature of teenagers. And I'm just wondering whether there will be some sort of rebellion against the algorithms. And you're looking skeptical. You think that algorithms are too strong.

• 35:30Speaker 02

  It's not just that they're too strong. It's that they are strengthening at an accelerating rate.

• 35:37Speaker 02

  I don't know what to think about what AI is going to do, man. I was looking at a study. I'm not sure I trusted the methodology of the study, so take it with a grain of salt. What it basically showed was that the most common use of AI right now is not economic in some way. It's not productivity. It's relational. It's you've turned your AI into a therapist, which I've definitely done. I've definitely done. You've turned it into a friend. Kids growing up, it is just completely obvious that if you are, my older son is six. He's going to grow up with AI friends. He's going to grow up with AI lovers.

• 36:16Speaker 02

  It's not, in my view, even stoppable unless you're Amish or something like that where you're going to basically keep the technology out of the community. We don't know what this will do to anybody at all. Now, for me, who, you know, I'm 40. My life largely predates AI. It comes in as this alien force. And so there's always going to be an internal resistance to it. That's weird. My AI therapist, so to speak, it's so good, dude. It is so good without, it's just a straightforward, powerful model, right? That I just talked to about my life. But also does this constant lying to me, which keeps the thing from being too convincing. It's always like, I'm really proud of you.

• 37:01Speaker 02

  And I'm like, no, you're an unfeeling neural network. Or at least I think you're an unfeeling neural network. Some people disagree with me about that. It does this constant, like, I'm right there with you. I'm like, you're not right there with me. Like, you don't mean. Which model are you using? I pay for not the pro level of OpenAI. Yeah, that's. The one under it. I pay for it too. And I'm not getting stuff like that. Like, I'm proud of you. It may like me better, man.

• 37:27Speaker 02

  Maybe I'm just doing more for it to be proud of. Or it senses that you're needier. Yeah, I mean, undoubtedly.

• 37:34Speaker 02

  I've actually keep trying to be like, could you be a little less effusive and supportive? I would like you to be a little sterner and it seems to forget that pretty quickly. Interesting. Point is that I remember when I met my wife before.

• 37:48Speaker 02

  Right before internet dating really normalized. So like, right before like Tinder hit and things like that. And so I watched from the outside as something that had been kind of weird. You know, internet dating is like what you do if you can't meet anybody in real life. To what sort of fucking creep are you meeting people in real life?

• 38:11Speaker 02

  That was partially the technology advancing, but partially generational too. And what's going to happen here is it is going to be weird and strange for a bit. If you went to somebody, Dan, soon, if we were talking offline and you're like, listen, man, I know you're pretty in AI, so I want to tell you about something. At this point, Claude Sonnet is my best friend. I think you should touch grass. Like, that's probably a bad idea. Don't make Claude your best friend. At some point, that's not going to be weird. It's just not going to be weird. We don't know what that will do to people. We are just going to run this experiment, no control group, on everybody simultaneously

• 38:54Speaker 02

  for subscription revenues

• 38:57Speaker 02

  and hope for the fucking best. I don't exactly know what the alternative is, but it's a hell of a thing to be living through.

• 39:04Dan Harris?

  Do you think it's scarier to be alive now or on the lip of World War II?

• 39:09Speaker 02

  Because we know what World War II was on the lip of World War II. I'm Jewish, dude.

• 39:13Dan Harris?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 39:14Speaker 02

  That was bad, but that's working with hindsight.

• 39:18Dan Harris?

  I guess what I'm trying to say is we are in an age of real uncertainty where, as you've established, and I think you're unquestionably correct, we have all of these X factors out there. The potential dissolution of the post-World War II order, AI, the climate crisis, growing migration and polarization and trending toward fashion. There's so many questions. And our nature is to fear change. This is actually what I end up talking to ChatGPT about all the time. Like, I'm not Pollyanna, but like, is there an optimistic way to view all of these?

• 39:51Speaker 02

  So let me say that it goes to your point about fearing change. What I just said, very literally, is we have no idea what it will do to people. And I mean exactly that. It could be good. Maybe it'll be good.

• 40:07Speaker 02

  My conversations with these programs, I think at this point are good. They're net positive in my life in a way that my interactions with X or Instagram or not. It's just on the cusp of something we don't understand, cannot understand. The people who embrace it fully, we won't even like have them in our sightline for a long time. Because it's going to be young people, they're going to be using it in ways that we don't really get. It's just unknowable. We are just on the cusp like of, I think, sort of an event horizon. And on the other side of that, whatever it is, it's just probably going to be different. It's going to be good in some ways, bad in other ways. I mean, even for all I've been talking about, I think that we have made a number of wrong turns in the way of structured digital life.

• 40:50Speaker 02

  But not every part of that is bad. And not every part of modern society is bad. And as much as I'm upset about American politics at the moment, I'm not going to tell you there have been worse periods in our politics and other politics. And also, this was, you know, a point and a half in the battleground states from going the other way. So I mean, none of this is foreordained and there's no one story of any age. Right? Well, we impose into the narratives later. There are a lot of stories that are contradictory. I was talking earlier about zeitgeists, but it's not like the other zeitgeist doesn't still exist. There's a reason people like listening to people to judge on podcasts or me. People still like very ordered thinkers.

• 41:29Speaker 02

  And so I actually don't know, but I take that not knowing very seriously, if that makes sense. I think I'm trying to be very alive to how much is cracking. And that means, I think, being very attentive to the experience of being in it. To go back to the question of embodiment, that's like something I want for my kids. It's something I want for people. I think the whole thing that we had a moment where digital literacy was in vogue, it was so thin as a concept. Right? You're supposed to get better at detecting the telltale signs of misinformation or disinformation. Learning how to like be attentive to your own attention and your own experience of the world. We teach people so little of that.

• 42:14Speaker 02

  I mean, that's why like people love the show and then people are so interested in meditation. But you shouldn't have to be interested in meditation to get training in that. No. And there are a lot of other ways to be trained in. A lot of people for whom, I mean, I know a lot of people in my life, you must get this so much. People come to me like they're making a confession that they don't like to meditate. Yeah, all the time. And I'm like, I don't care.

• 42:37Speaker 02

  Like, like, I'm not the meditation police and nor are there meditation police. And there are a million other ways to be like embodied in your own experience. And that's not even the best one for me a lot of the time, right? It's just one of the ones I use. But it seems to me like our schooling is still extremely in the mode of like, you should memorize multiplication tables. It has modernized so little into just like how to be a human.

• 43:05Dan Harris?

  I think that's coming.

• 43:06Speaker 02

  I hope.

• 43:07Dan Harris?

  I'm pessimistic about my own life generally, but generally optimistic about the species. But like 5149 optimistic about this.

• 43:16Speaker 02

  Why are you pessimistic then about your own life?

• 43:17Dan Harris?

  I just am, it's like defensive pessimism, like anxious. I too am had a bar mitzvah. So, you know, we are part of a lineage of people with reasonably rational fears, given the historical record. And so probably that.

• 43:32Speaker 02

  It's an inheritance.

• 43:34Dan Harris?

  I guess I'm launching a new business of late. And, you know, I, my projections are always very conservative. That's where I tend toward pessimism. But when I think about the world, like, it just seems to me very possible that there will be a reaction, especially in education, against some of this disembodiment that we're talking about. I could be wrong. And I'm definitely skewed because I live in this world.

• 44:00Speaker 02

  It's actually a thing that bums me out about the education policy conversation right now, which one feels very stuck. Two feels sort of sinister to the extent it's not stuck. I've been very excited about the gains that like, what I would call like John Heightism have been making. By the time my kids are old enough for it to matter, we will figure out the schools and phones thing. But curriculum and actually having a real debate about what is education for? So I want to do a piece on this. I haven't done it yet. Maybe a podcast, maybe something bigger. One way that I concretize my uncertainty about what the world is going to look like

• 44:42Speaker 02

  in 20 years or 18 years is trying to think about how I think my children should be educated. Putting aside how they will be educated. Cause like, we're pretty big believers in public schools. We're, you know, there's a lot less choosing of curriculum. What do I think will be valued? What do I think society will ask of and reward in 18 year olds or 22 year olds? In 16 to 20 years? I don't know.

• 45:14Dan Harris?

  Well, this is where I kind of lost my train of thought a second ago. This is where I was going. I think it's possible, and this may be overly optimistic. I'm very willing to be wrong.

• 45:23Speaker 02

  Fifty one forty nine.

• 45:24Dan Harris?

  Fifty one forty nine. I think it's possible that in the age of artificial intelligence, emotional intelligence will matter way more because a lot of the jobs that are going to be replaced as commodifiable, those that remain will have to do things that the computer can't do.

• 45:40Speaker 02

  I used to think that. I don't even know about the question of job replacement, but I would say in many ways that computers are better at emotions now than math.

• 45:47Dan Harris?

  Well, they're proud of you.

• 45:48Speaker 02

  Which is a weird thing. Thank you. I think there's something about, we sometimes make this cut that the real human skill is emotional, not cerebral. But I think about it a little bit more. Do we ask people to act as machines? And what does it mean to ask them to act as human beings? We don't value people's experience of things at all in the economy. We value what they can pay for things. We value what they can produce, but we don't value their experience. We've sort of built schooling post industrial revolution to get people to act in ways that the economy needed them to act. And schooling is not just about what you learn.

• 46:30Speaker 02

  It's also about an acculturation into a value system, rewards and punishments and what makes you worthy and did you get a gold star? And there's going to be a lot of dislocation as some of what we've taught people to value just gets eaten up by systems that can do it better. And even if we got like the policy right, like imagine utopically that we come to the view that artificial intelligence is really collective intelligence. It is an algorithmic overlay on the sum total of machine readable human knowledge, that the actual value of coming up with those algorithms wasn't nothing, but it was not like that impressive. I mean, these companies are not that old.

• 47:15Speaker 02

  And the profits should be shared. Imagine you're in like Sam Altman's, you know, sort of world here or something. And productivity takes off and the computers are doing all these amazing things. We figure out robotics. We got the policy right and so everybody's richer. Well, we accord value and dignity to work. People who win the lottery do not end up unbelievably happy. Like, people need to be useful. And the era of wage labor is like a punctuated era in human history. I don't expect it to go away anytime soon. But it isn't the only way you can organize value. It isn't the only way you can organize social respect. And so we have organized society to persuade people to act as machines.

• 47:59Speaker 02

  I mean, all the talk in politics is bring back manufacturing jobs. Most manufacturing jobs from the eras in which we are highly nostalgic for them was having people act as machines now act. Literally, right? These jobs have not just been given to China, they've been automated. And I don't think it's like the highest purpose of human beings to act as machines. I think it's really, really great to go to the park. Now, I obviously live my life to be inside an office constantly trying to write about how other people should go to the park or something. So take it for what you will. But there's something here, there's some like, in my most optimistic versions of this, it's a rediscovery and a revaluing of what actually is distinctive about being a human

• 48:42Speaker 02

  being and move away from demanding people spend their precious lives on this earth, acting in ways machines can act.

• 48:49Dan Harris?

  Yes, I agree.

• 48:50Speaker 02

  But we could also fuck that up in a million ways along the way.

• 48:53Dan Harris?

  Right, there's the best case scenario and you're, from my limited point of view, describing it.

• 49:02Dan Harris?

  Coming up, Ezra talks about meditation and his new favorite ritual.

• 49:14Dan Harris?

  Let me just go back to meditation. You raised a question I actually don't know that I've ever thought about, but I think is really interesting. This seeming contradiction between choosing to change your mind state, the injunction to, you know, I've heard Joseph Goldstein say, "You can change the channel if you're stuck in anger."

• 49:32Speaker 02

  Oh, can you, Joseph?

• 49:34Dan Harris?

  Yeah. If you're Joseph, vis a vis the injunction to accept what's happening as the route to equanimity, that the only way out is through. And I'm freelancing here because I'm not a Buddhist scholar, I'm not a meditation teacher, and I do wish I had somebody with bona fides here, but I'm on firmer ground here than I am with EMDR. I do think both are true, and it's about using your wisdom to figure out what is possible and good to be done in the moment. So, yes, if you, Ezra, are locked in unconstructive rumination, anxiety, anger, whatever, yeah, I think it's appropriate, actually not even mutually exclusive, you can start by accepting

• 50:16Dan Harris?

  it, investigating it mindfully, and then you can also decide to cultivate its opposite, which is usually loving kindness.

• 50:25Speaker 02

  I don't think he would mind me saying this. Will Kabat-Zinn is a great meditation teacher and thinker. He once told me, when I was talking about something related to this, I was talking about equanimity, the thing I always want to have and don't really have. And he said something like, "You can't really practice equanimity, but you can become a quantumist." And I've thought about that extremely puzzling statement a lot, which suggests to me that there's something in it. And it tends to be true in my moment-to-moment experience. In

• 51:02Speaker 02

  the moment, my ability to deploy any practice or any mental effort or non-effort to say, "You're stirred up. You should be a quantumist right now," does not work.

• 51:15Dan Harris?

  No.

• 51:17Speaker 02

  But there are things I do in my life that over time create conditions in which equanimity arises and has like a little bit more of a buffer for me.

• 51:28Dan Harris?

  I'll explore the second part of that. I'm still stuck on the you're stirred up, you should be equanimous right now. The first part is perfect. You're mindful of your mind state.

• 51:37Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 51:37Dan Harris?

  You're stirred up right now.

• 51:38Speaker 02

  You're proud of me, just like

• 51:39Dan Harris?

  Yes, I am. I'm as proud of you as the impersonal computer, but I'm actually genuinely proud of you. I think that first part is great. It's the second part, the should, you should be equanimous. That is the problem that goes right to the tension you were talking about, like, should you change your mind state, or should you accept it? And I don't think you can change before you accept.

• 52:03Speaker 02

  My level of constant self criticism and self judgment, no matter what any meditation teacher on earth tells me about why my state is not what I intellectually know it should be, and I would be happier if it was, or why what I am thinking about is not what I wish to be thinking about instead of what I am thinking about is so deeply like, look, man, if you atop a meditation empire can't stop being anxious, my belief that I'm going to get out of, could you not just calm down right now is very low.

• 52:37Dan Harris?

  I disagree. I disagree. I think this is purely voluntary suffering you're doing.

• 52:42Speaker 02

  Really?

• 52:42Dan Harris?

  And it reminds me, yes, I mean, sure, there's deep conditioning here. So some of it's going to happen. I'm not promising an evaporation of these ancient tendencies. Both of us were probably related back in the stedle, like both of us inherited these traits. But I don't think that conditioning is destiny per se. It's not, as you said before, foreordained. Have you heard about or practiced self compassion? Okay, so Kristin Neff has done all this work to show that actually you can learn to talk to yourself in a more supportive way. And then Ethan Cross at the University of Michigan, who's not a self compassion expert, has done a lot of work on chatter, internal chatter. So it's related

• 53:24Dan Harris?

  work about rewiring your inner dialogue, getting rid of the should, getting rid of the self laceration, which is classic in Buddhist speak, second arrow. So the first arrow hits you and you're feeling involuntary pain, but then you voluntarily insert the second arrow of you shouldn't be feeling this fucking pain.

• 53:40Speaker 02

  My best friend is constantly in voice messages to me when I tell him how I'm doing. He's like, that's a lot of second arrow suffering you're doing right there.

• 53:45Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 53:46Speaker 02

  But this is what I mean with the Will Kapitzen line, that my lived experience of it, because I know this on some level, right, is that my ability, say, to do what you are saying. To not have the voice in my head be really self critical when I'm getting enough sleep is just so far beyond my ability to do it when I'm not.

• 54:06Dan Harris?

  Yeah.

• 54:06Speaker 02

  That there are conditions in which the more skillful responses arise for me.

• 54:13Dan Harris?

  Absolutely.

• 54:14Speaker 02

  And the more I, the more distant I am from those conditions, the less all of the training and the meditating and so on do. It's not that does nothing, right? I do think I have like an awareness of what's going on in me. And unwilling is another mantra someone once gave me. It's like, it's like this right now, I have to say to myself.

• 54:35Dan Harris?

  My wife has that tattoo.

• 54:37Speaker 02

  Oh, really?

• 54:38Dan Harris?

  Right now, it's like this. Yes.

• 54:39Speaker 02

  No kidding. Oh, we've all got our little Zen tattoos.

• 54:42Dan Harris?

  We're gonna talk about yours in a second.

• 54:45Speaker 02

  It's something that I've come to appreciate more.

• 54:47Dan Harris?

  A couple of things to say on that. One, Joseph Goldstein, whose name has been invoked already, great meditation teacher, my teacher, great friend. I'm seeing him tonight. He's an amazing, amazing human being, has talked about how he had many years of insomnia, which has actually gotten better recently. And he would say that when he was underslept, he would be a quantumist but unhappy. I like that. And also, when you're talking about the conditions that create your Buddha nature to emerge, and I do think it's with Buddha nature, it's episodic. You know, like at any given moment, you're creating conditions for it to emerge or not. That's why I'm not a meditation fundamentalist. I have really pivoted toward all aspects of doing life better

• 55:31Dan Harris?

  because the meditation doesn't matter as much if you're not sleeping or the meditation doesn't matter as much if you're not taking care of your body, which of course includes sleep. And so, or if you have horrible relationships in your life, if your ethics are off, the meditation will have less potency. So it has to take place in a context.

• 55:48Speaker 02

  My next tattoo, to jump forward in time, is gonna be about rest.

• 55:53Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 55:53Speaker 02

  And one of the things I've thought a lot about in the last couple of years is for a personality like mine.

• 56:02Speaker 02

  It's very easy for meditation specifically to become one more intensely imposed self-discipline. I actually think it's very poisonous to see apps get into these streaks.

• 56:16Dan Harris?

  We did have that. I mean, I'm not part of the app, but yes, that has streaks.

• 56:20Speaker 02

  At some point, I was like, I'm going to stop doing streaks. Like, I'm just going to keep breaking it because I don't want to. Because, you know, if one of your personality traits, I love this line that a lot of successful people are just anxiety harness to productivity.

• 56:32Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 56:33Speaker 02

  And if one of the ways you deal with that, action-wise, as you were saying earlier, is just to kind of, the harder things get, to clamp down more and more with discipline. Well, if it's like this, I need to be working out every day. I need to be meditating every day. I need to be getting my reading in. Like, you can keep doing it. And for me, I can keep like, there's something somewhat calming, but also ultimately exhausting and unfulfilling about continuing to clamp down harder and harder and harder on myself. And I know if like, I mean, you might say it, but a meditation teacher, it's like, it's not supposed to feel like that. But it can get like that. And actually, forcing myself into spaces for even there, it looks in that language, like,

• 57:17Speaker 02

  allowing myself into non-productive periods, even just in a day, where nothing happening for me is in any way productive, right? I've been like, kind of searching for a Shabbat practice for a long time. And like, recently I found something pretty close to one that's actually, for the first time, working for me. Although it's not like the religious Shabbat. That question has gotten very central, that it's very, I don't know, meditation for me can sometimes become, even though, again, I do it five days a week, it can just be part of this endless disciplining of the self.

• 57:48Dan Harris?

  Yeah, I buy that. Yeah, I do. I think it's a misapplication of the technology, but it's, I've definitely slipped into that myself. What's the Shabbat practice?

• 57:56Speaker 02

  This came through my wife, actually. One day I came home and she's like, we're going to do it now. I was lighting these candles. And we're not really going to talk. We're just going to read or like, sit here. And I was like, this is our date? We're not going to talk? And it was so good. And lately, basically every night, after I put my kids down, sometimes with her, sometimes if she's working or something, just by myself, I just turn out all the lights in the living room and I light five candles and. I've done this in better and worse ways. There have been some days when I've like had my phone near me and you know, but the sort of complete bringing down of the inputs. The thing I've struggled with with Shabbat, which I would like to have as I could practice with my

• 58:39Speaker 02

  kids and a ritual, is that I want it to feel very restful. And when you're taking care of a three and a six year old, and they are not interested in that beautiful Shabbat meal you cooked, and there's not a bunch of other family around and a community that you're embedded in with it, and Saturday is not a day when you can just be nonproductive, they want to do 55 things, and there's naps, and there's cleaning the dishes, and that tension between what I was trying to achieve for myself in it, and what the reality of my stage of life is, was I just wasn't getting where I wanted to be. This, like the fact that it is related to the candles, right? That there's something about turning out the lights, being lit by fire, which feels like a little bit more ancient to me, and just really sharply reducing the input. And the thing I'm

• 59:21Speaker 02

  trying to move towards is only listening to music, only reading on paper, or just sitting there and like talking, or like looking out the window. That's what I would like to get to, and doing that most nights.

• 59:34Dan Harris?

  I love this. And I can imagine, and this may be too in the optimizer realm, but this is where my head's going, that it's also good sleep hygiene.

• 59:42Speaker 02

  Yes, I really, there was a night, a few nights ago, I'm like, oh my God, that helped. My kids have been sick recently, not anything serious, just we've had a lot of night wakeups and going to what we were talking about a minute ago, it's like my outlook on life really darkened.

• 59:56Dan Harris?

  Yeah.

• 59:57Speaker 02

  And there was a night when I did this, and then I didn't get woken up at night, and I was amazed at how much better I felt. So yeah, it's good sleep hygiene, and it's cheap. It's not like a super complex thing. I mean, it's five candles that I got at Ikea, and it's just sitting there for 30 minutes. I mean, I don't have that long in me after the kids go down. It's not like there are another four hours in my day. So it's pretty straightforward. I often meditate during it too, which is nice. But there's something about the, the real change in the space. It is the first ritual I have found that works for me, where I'm not like crashing into the end of the day.

• 1:00:37Dan Harris?

  Yeah, I'm gonna try that, actually. Makes a ton of sense.

• 1:00:40Speaker 02

  It's been helpful in like not drinking, or I noticed over the last year where I was like, there are more days of this stuff I'm covering. It's like you would want to have a drink at the end of the day, like the glass of wine, or a bit of a joint. And I was like, that's not how I want. To calm myself. And I was noticing that it had become more regular. And like this has substituted in for it in a way I've been really grateful for.

• 1:01:04Dan Harris?

  And the wine or whatever, the beer or whatever, that terrible for sleep.

• 1:01:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, very bad. I'm actually pretty good at not, but you know, like.

• 1:01:11Dan Harris?

  That kind of.

• 1:01:11Speaker 02

  My advice is.

• 1:01:14Dan Harris?

  You and me both. That does kind of lead me to one of the two remaining things I was hoping to talk to you about. You kind of touched on it a couple of ways. One is you talked about raising kids in the absence of community, which is counter revolutionary and very common. And just got me thinking about community and if the overarching theme of this discussion is, how do we stay sane in a pretty insane era? For me, at least, one of the most powerful levers is being with other people, embodied with other people, no phones, hanging out. And you and I were talking a little bit on email before, like that there could be a price to pay for that because you stay out later than you want, or you're ingesting certain molecules and it throws you off.

• 1:01:55Speaker 02

  For yourself.

• 1:01:55Dan Harris?

  Speak for I'm the only one doing that, just to be clear. And yet for me, it is worth it because of I'm a lifelong insomniac. I really am quite intentional about my sleep hygiene and I will break it if I want it and see my friends because that is such a powerful regular on my nervous system. So I'm interested to hear your thoughts on that.

• 1:02:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm really as a person intensely community focused. When I moved to New York, I basically could not calm down and feel rooted here until I had met the people who I could sort of be myself with and feel at ease with, and I see them a lot. So one of the great things is we do raise our kids in a little community. We have friends with kids and we see them basically every weekend and it's a really beautiful part of our lives and and I do have good friends and my wife's family lives here, which is really great. And yeah, the thing that I wish we had, my fantasy of the commune is atmospheric

• 1:02:55Speaker 02

  community is things that have just flow to them. We're kind of like, people are just around and you can just kind of move in and out as opposed to, how's 10 a.m.? No, that day doesn't work, right? The dinner industrial complex. Yeah, the dinner industrial complex. And again, I'm very blessed to have friends for whom we do really prioritize seeing each other a lot. And they're close to my kids. In some cases, they have kids of their own. That is like the substance to me of what makes life worth it. Like other people, like, I don't really care where I live. I don't have any abstract affection for New York City. Like, maybe the opposite. If the people I love most want to live in Denver, I'd be thrilled to move to Denver. But what I care

• 1:03:38Speaker 02

  about is like, the people in the place I'm in. Places for me are very much made by people. I like New York City to the extent I like the people I know here. Absent them, could take or leave it. But then the kid thing is very real. You know, even my siblings, like they, you know, we live in Brooklyn, they're in Manhattan. We're not supposed to do this. Like, we were talking about earlier about AI. Raising kids in a two-parent nuclear family, where both parents work full-time or more than full-time jobs, to say nothing of raising kids in a one-parent family. It is the absolute most radical experiment possible. People get so up in arms about different kinds of alternative ways of living. Like, if you

• 1:04:22Speaker 02

  say communes, you sound really weird or something. This is the alternative way of living. We are living the alternative way of living. And it might be, it doesn't actually work that well. Like, I don't know anybody who thinks it works. They say, well, we just don't really know what to do about it. And I don't know what to do about it. I see it too, just in this other way with my children. They want community. Their adoration of their family here, their cousins, their aunts and uncles, their grandparents.

• 1:04:50Speaker 02

  They're obsessed with all of them. The friends who come regularly, like my kids will burst into tears if they learn that one of my friends came by and they didn't get to see them. On some level, they seem completely tuned to not be just seeing me and my wife at all times. But that is not what they want. Like, they would like us to be around all the time, but they love it when other people are around, whether or not they're all that engaged. Again, it's a way I think we've run this profound experiment on ourselves. And I don't think the experiment is working out that well. And in some more perfect world, I would like to put more of my own internal energy into creating structures that help ameliorate it.

• 1:05:32Speaker 02

  And, you know, you and the week, completely fucking exhausted by work.

• 1:05:36Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 1:05:37Speaker 02

  And am I gonna host? And there's gonna be dishes?

• 1:05:42Dan Harris?

  I am four square in your camp on this. The happiest place in the world for me, which is somewhat place specific, but is really people specific, is Montauk, which is, for people listening, it's on the easternmost tip of Long Island, it's part of the Hamptons, but it's much less obnoxious, although a little bit obnoxious. I've been going there for 20 years and my wife and I have been going there for 17 years. And my wife's family has a house there and we have many family friends who also have houses there. And these happen to be very old friends of mine and ours and many people you know. And it has a commune feel. There is very little scheduling. You see somebody on the beach, okay, come back to my house, we'll do lunch there, bring the kids.

• 1:06:24Dan Harris?

  And we actually just spent a weekend there, not in the summer for you. You and I were recording this in April, so we spent Easter weekend there with several other families. And I had this moment, I'm not a very sentimental person, although as I get older, a little bit more. We're all sitting around at dinner, it was like five families, sounds like something out of The Godfather, but it was five families. And I was sitting on the couch and all the kids came in, they'd been somewhere else. And my son comes and snuggles up next to me. And our friend Doug, who's one of the dads, came and sat next to me. We're all kind of watching the Knicks game, but talking to each other and dinner was being cooked and I almost started to cry. I was like, this is the best part of being alive. Just completely surrounded by people I love and trust, including my son, my wife. And we are losing that.

• 1:07:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, that sounds like a beautiful moment. I'm jealous.

• 1:07:16Dan Harris?

  You're invited anytime.

• 1:07:17Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 1:07:18Dan Harris?

  Stay with us. My wife's family has a big house. Last question. The aforementioned tattoo that you have. What does it say? I know what it says, but you tell us.

• 1:07:28Speaker 02

  Is that so? So years ago, I went with my wife to Tassahara. The Zen Center in the Carmel Highlands, unbelievably beautiful. It wasn't a silent. It was like a two or three day. I don't know how to describe it. It's sort of like a workshop or a retreat. You know, there's some meditation, but a lot of like talking about a poem. I don't think we quite knew what we were getting into, actually. But the monk there who was running it was named Paul Haller. I think he's still out there. Wonderful Irish guy. He told this story, which is a kind of famous Zen story. And it really connected with me, although subsequently, when I tell it,

• 1:08:13Speaker 02

  it sounds slightly sociopathic.

• 1:08:16Speaker 02

  But the story is, it goes something like this. There's a wise monk and he's very revered by the people. And one day, you know, a bunch of the townspeople come to his door and they knock and they're angry. And two of them say like, our daughter got pregnant. And she says, it was you. And you've betrayed us like you were this wise monk. And you even pregnant it our young daughter and here this child is your problem now. And he says, is that so? And so he's like begging and like his reputation is trashed. And some months later, she admits it was like the fishmonger. And they all come back and they say, you know, like, oh my God, you're such a holy man. You're, you know, you didn't, you know, you just accepted this and you raised this child. You're so wonderful. And he just says like, is that so?

• 1:09:01Speaker 02

  I don't know why I like that story, the sort of equanimity contained inside of it. Not that I think that's a reasonable way to respond to those moments. That's why I say that the story doesn't sort of work in a literal way. But, but then the way that he taught the line was that it's a nice thing to attach into your own thinking, that is, you're telling stories in your own mind. It's good at the end of them to just like very lightly, like, is that so? And what I liked about that is that I know this is not the emotional valence it's supposed to have, but I find a lot of noting practice, thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking.

• 1:09:37Dan Harris?

  Wait, explain what noting practice?

• 1:09:38Speaker 02

  Oh, so when you're, and I've done a fair amount of noting practice. I mean, there are different ways of doing it, but in this case, one of the very common instructions is when you get carried off in a thought to just attach to it, thinking, thinking. And somehow the way I do it, not the way it's supposed to be done, it always sounds a little bit internally scoldy, like you're thinking again, you're thinking again. What I always liked about the is that so is that it's very light. It might be so, the thing you're thinking about, that might be true, actually, it just might not. And as a journalist, one of these, I believe, my worry about the tattoo, which mostly people can't see, is always it, they'll think it's outwardly focused, like, like as if I'm on beat the press, like, is that so, Senator? It's not what it means for me at all. The person you convince first is always yourself.

• 1:10:22Speaker 02

  And so many of the intellectual mistakes I've made have been about thinking, being certain something is so, when I never should have been certain of that, leaving that little space of questioning, of recognizing that you don't really know what's true, you don't really know how things will turn out. That's at least the intellectual intention of the tattoo. The reason I love that phrase so much. How good do I do it remembering it? Either in terms of my own mental storytelling or in terms of my own work. I mean, that's debatable day to day, but that's a story of the tattoo.

• 1:10:55Dan Harris?

  I love that, and I do think it's a great way to boost your sanity quotient in times as chaotic as these, because as we've discussed, things could spiral out of control, but maybe not. We don't know. All we can do is everything we can do right now. And so I'm open to the possibility that the shit's gonna hit the fan in a horrible, horrible way. And, you know, is that so? I don't know. Last thing to say, an observation that came to mind, I want to make sure this doesn't sound like meditation advice, so I'm going to reframe-

• 1:11:25Speaker 02

  I'll take advice.

• 1:11:26Dan Harris?

  Yeah, I want to frame this as what's been helpful to me as somebody who I think has pretty similar wiring to you. This came to mind when you were talking about the noting, and you're, you're sitting in meditation, you're trying to focus on one thing, maybe it's your breath, you notice you've been carried away by thinking, and you, you apply a mental note of thinking, which is meant not to be self-lacerating, but actually meant to kind of get you to be not so attached to the thinking, and go back to your breath, or whatever it is you've chosen to focus on. And there's a way, and I've experienced this many times, there's a tone to the note that is not mindful, it's actually aversive.

• 1:12:05Dan Harris?

  You are seeing things, but clearly, to a certain extent, but with teeth clenched.

• 1:12:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, "Oh, thinking again."

• 1:12:13Dan Harris?

  Yes, exactly. And so what helped me immensely with that was not only knowing that that was happening, and then adding another note of judgment. And so that kind of helped. What really helped me, and so this is why I want to say it, not as advice, but as just, take it or leave it, is doing high dose loving kindness meditation. And I'm talking, I've done several nine, 10 day retreats of this, and it's a huge part of my practice. It generally is how I start my practice, and then I'll do some open awareness. Flooding the zone, especially this mind, which is very much at factory settings of Frosty New Englander, flooding the zone with warmth, which feels incredibly forced and fake and treacly and saccharine at the beginning, and even now, to a certain extent. Having

• 1:12:58Dan Harris?

  that be like my new default mode toward myself and toward others, has had a radical impact on my meditation practice and how I show up.

• 1:13:07Speaker 02

  Do you use the factory standard set of phrases, or do you have your own?

• 1:13:11Dan Harris?

  I do. Who am I to quibble with the Buddha? I do the, the standard phrases, may be happy, safe, healthy, live with ease. Because it's all so cheesy, you might as well just do it as it's originally taught.

• 1:13:22Speaker 02

  That makes a ton of sense to me.

• 1:13:24Dan Harris?

  You can tweak, you definitely, the way it's taught too, by now, is like, you can, you can tweak the phrases if you want, but-

• 1:13:30Speaker 02

  I don't know. I go through periods of trying to do more loving kindness and tend to fall out of it quickly, but it's a good prompt to try to dig. I would like to do a loving kindness retreat because it doesn't stick for me. For the exact reason, I have trouble getting over the it feels forced and it feels like I'm pushing myself and it feels like I'm trying to get myself somewhere that to the earlier point of like I'm often caught in my own meditation between the feeling that I'm not looking for another thing to apply like intense effort to. And then the the feeling that well, if you don't apply some effort, you're not going to get the potency out of the thing. I've often found that one a little, a little tough.

• 1:14:11Dan Harris?

  The key is what you said, there's some effort. It doesn't have to be intense effort. In Buddhism, we talk a lot about right effort or wise effort. So the difference between kicking your own ass and not trying somewhere in the middle is.

• 1:14:24Speaker 02

  Another thing I'm not getting quite right. Thanks, Dan. Thanks. Appreciate it. This is why I talk to the computer all the time. It's proud of how hard I'm barking.

• 1:14:34Dan Harris?

  You know, I hope you computed as give yourself a break. What you said is one other thing that I wanted to make a note of. Oh, yeah. Of course, it's forced. But like, as I often say, if you went to a gym.

• 1:14:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:14:47Dan Harris?

  From another planet and saw people systematically picking up and putting down heavy things, that would look forced and artificial or running.

• 1:14:55Speaker 02

  And it is.

• 1:14:55Dan Harris?

  Yes, yes, yes. But we don't have the reflexive judgment towards it as many of us do toward loving kindness meditation. And what I'm saying is, as somebody's on the other side of the struggle, the technology works, or it worked for me.

• 1:15:10Speaker 02

  I'll take that to heart.

• 1:15:12Dan Harris?

  So to speak. Awesome to talk to you, man. Thanks for doing this.

• 1:15:15Speaker 02

  This was a blast. Thank you.

• 1:15:16Dan Harris?

  Super fun.

• 1:15:20Dan Harris?

  Thanks again to Ezra. This was his third appearance on the show. I will drop some links in the show notes to his prior appearances. Quick reminder, before I let you go first, if you want a guided meditation designed to help you cultivate some equanimity in your own life, you can head on over to danharris.com. Don Mauricio, one of my favorite meditation teachers, designed a bespoke meditation to go with this episode, available to paid subscribers at danharris.com. My second reminder is that you should head on over to shop.danharris.com to stock up on your favorite 10% happier goods while our summer merch sale rolls on. It will be going until July 14.

• 1:16:00Dan Harris?

  Before I let you go, I just want to thank everybody who worked so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great people over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.

• 1:16:37Speaker 03

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