From Monk To Entrepreneur: How Andy Puddicombe Became the Modern Voice of Meditation & Mindfulness

I was first introduced to meditation and mindfulness principles 17 years ago during my 100-day voluntary incarceration in what is more amiably referred to as rehab. Initially, I balked at the concept. How can stillness possibly improve my life? Intellectually, I attributed every decent personal achievement not to innate talent, let alone some intangible force of the Universe. Instead I credited my prodigious work ethic — a huge capacity to grind harder and longer than my peers. Get up early. Stay late. Put in the extra mile. Repeat. Never stop. Do more. At best, stillness meant stasis. Mostly I wrote it off as regressive — wasted time lost. The purview of flaky, new-age hippies who couldn't begin to fathom my logic-based intellect, understand my terminally unique life problems, nor comprehend how I successfully navigated the world. Always good for a solid re-sizing, my rehab counselor — let's call him Hugh because that's his name — reminded me of one simple, powerful fact: My best thinking landed me in a mental institution. That blast of truth and humility fell on my head like a ton of bricks. In recovery, they call it self-will run riot. And that was me, in a nutshell — a desperate hope to die alcoholic. A broken young man who had squandered promise and destroyed his life, literally tightrope walking the divide that separates life and death. Hardly a vision for you, It was time to try something different. Surrender. At the time, I perceived this concept as synonymous with defeat. Anathema to my core idea of who I was. But Hugh was right. I was out of options, with only one saving grace — willingness. So I (quite reluctantly) released my resistance. I let go of logic. I opened myself to possibilities beyond the rational, to something perhaps entirely unknowable. And in so doing, my life didn't just change, it transformed wholesale — dramatically and irrevocably improving every aspect of my mental, emotional, physical and spiritual well being. I wish I could tell you that from that day forward I devoted myself to a daily meditation practice. That didn't happen. Newly sober, life quickly got better. Priorities rearranged, and that willingness to surrender — the one character trait that had saved me — started to wane until the very thing that had been so indisputably beneficial to my overall sense of self had been relegated to back seat status — a convenient tool relied upon only when life got complicated, but hardly a consistent mainstay. Despite great appreciation for the benefits of meditation, consistency and momentum eluded me. For many years, I would practice only in spurts as a last ditch salve to alleviate some form of emotional pain. Then about six months ago, I discovered Headspace– a mobile app and digital platform (boasting over 1 million users) pre-packaged with an endless rotation of very accessible, secular guided meditation programs all pleasantly voiced by the company's founder and today's guest, Andy Puddicombe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

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• 1:05Speaker 01

  My teacher kind of used to sum it up like this. He used to say, "There is no such thing as good or bad meditation. There is only awareness or non-awareness." And that's it. You can't fail.

• 1:17Speaker 02

  That's meditation guru Andy Pudiccome, this week, on the Rich Roll Podcast.

• 1:36Rich Roll?

  Hey, everybody. Welcome or welcome back. I am Rich Roll. I am your captain on this adventuresome expedition. And the mission is to help you live and be better. So each week, I sit down with the best and the brightest across all categories of life, health, and excellence to educate, entertain, elucidate, inform, and inspire you and me to unlock our ultimate potential as humans and unleash the best, most authentic version of ourselves on the world at large.

• 2:08Speaker 02

  So thanks for sharing a little time with me today. Thank you for subscribing to the show on iTunes. Thank you for spreading the word, for subscribing to my newsletter, and also, thank you for clicking on the Amazon banner ad at ritual.com for all your Amazon purchases. So I'm really excited about today's show. This is a fantastic conversation with Andy Pudiccome. And it's a conversation that I think is really going to give you quite a few things to think about, and hopefully inspire, or make that compel you to get over yourself, to do what you know you should be doing, what you know will improve your

• 2:47Speaker 02

  life, but just can't seem to begin this pesky practice of mindfulness and meditation. So who is this guy? All right, well, Prepare Thyself. Considered the Jamie Oliver of meditation by The New York Times, and the international poster boy for the modern mindfulness movement, Andy is a meditation and mindfulness expert. He's an accomplished presenter and writer. He's written two books. The first is called Get Some Headspace, and the other one's called The Headspace Diet. These books have been translated into a zillion languages. And he is the voice of all things Headspace. What is Headspace? Well, Headspace is the award-winning digital health platform. It's a mobile app, it's a website, it's a blog, and it's a podcast

• 3:31Speaker 02

  also, on which I recently guested, that he co-founded, that provides a wide range of super-accessible, simple, secular-guided meditation sessions. With over a million users, it really is a fantastic service. And you've probably heard me talk about it quite frequently on the podcast, on my blog, when I guest on other people's podcasts. I'm always suggesting that people check it out. And I'm doing that because I think it's a great place to begin the journey of learning more about mindfulness and meditation, to really enter this world. And it's been very, very helpful to me personally. And just for the record, just so we're clear, I have zero business affiliation with this company whatsoever. I just love what they do, and I'm happy to support what they're

• 4:13Speaker 02

  doing. And so it was really a thrill and a pleasure to be able to sit down with Andy. Not only that, Andy has a really amazing personal story. In his early twenties, he made this unexpected decision to just drop out of university and instead travel to the Himalayas to study meditation. And this was a 10-year journey that took him all over the world, culminating with ordination as a Tibetan Buddhist monk in northern India. He essentially lived as a Buddhist monk for 10 years. Amazing, right? But this is also very much kind of a postmodern Siddhartha story because he had this realization that this was not his place, that he needed to kind of come back to the Western world.

• 4:55Speaker 02

  And he made this transition to lay life in 2004, and that transition is no less extraordinary. He trained briefly at the Moscow State Circus. Can you believe that? That's amazing. And then he returned to London, where he completed a degree in circus arts. I mean, who does that? With the conservatoire of dance and drama whilst drawing up the early plans for what would later become Headspace. This is a guy who's been featured widely in international press. He's appeared in Vogue, The New York Times, Financial Times, Entrepreneur, Men's Health, and Esquire, to name a few. He's also someone who's made regular appearances on TV and online. He's been featured on the BBC, Dr. Oz, Netflix, and TED. In fact, his TED Talk is a must-watch.

• 5:40Speaker 02

  It's super entertaining and it's caught almost 5 million views. 5 million views on his TED Talk. I'll embed that TED Talk on the episode page at my site, richroll.com. You guys all need to go and check that out. Maybe do that before you even listen to the podcast or after. It's cool. Whatever you want to do. In any event, he's an exceptional guy across the board. And on a personal level, it was really inspiring to me because he's been someone who has been instrumental in my own journey and helping me better and more consistently embrace mindfulness practices into my own life. And this journey for me has really been nothing short of completely transformational. So, this is really cool.

• 6:28Speaker 02

  All right, you guys. Let's expand our headspace with Andy Pudacom, shall we? Should we do that? All right, let's do that.

• 6:40Speaker 02

  In the booth at Headspace HQ. This is where the magic happens, right? Right here?

• 6:45Speaker 01

  That's what I'm told.

• 6:46Speaker 02

  I'm a little starstruck. All of that information coming into my head every morning happens right in this tiny room.

• 6:54Speaker 01

  A lot of hours in here.

• 6:56Speaker 02

  I know. How many? I mean, how does that work? Are you in here every day? Or do you have scheduled time once a week where you come in here?

• 7:02Speaker 01

  Not at the moment. So in the past, we've done somewhere, we reckon it's probably been about 700 hours total in the studio. A lot of that was done in the London office, actually, before we moved out to LA. But I tend to kind of schedule in a week at a time. So I'll spend like a week on a pack, on a 30-day pack. Yeah, and I'm in here most days.

• 7:23Speaker 02

  And you come in, I mean, are these like one takes? How many takes? Because I'm listening to it and I'm thinking, how much is this scripted? Or is he just so good at this? He just riffs it?

• 7:33Speaker 01

  Do you know what? None of it's scripted.

• 7:35Speaker 02

  Really?

• 7:36Speaker 01

  So I go in and I usually try and do maybe something like kind of five days in like one go. And I have one line for each day. And it's just an idea or a theme for that day that I've kind of worked out in advance. But other than that, it's not. And I, it's a funny one. I actually don't like to do any more than one take. So sometimes you'll hear me kind of tripping up over the words. And we could, if we wanted, kind of go back and do another take. But the idea is it's natural. And so we don't, we kind of don't mess around with it once we've done it.

• 8:14Speaker 02

  Right. And you just do it, you do it in real time. So you don't just like say it all and then space it out in the time.

• 8:19Speaker 01

  No. So I sit down and as far as I'm concerned, I'm doing the meditation with you at that time.

• 8:25Speaker 02

  I love it. That's pretty cool. And I infer from social media, did you just get back from Necker Island? What's going?

• 8:34Speaker 01

  I did.

• 8:34Speaker 02

  Hang out with Sir Richard Branson? What's happening?

• 8:37Speaker 01

  I took one for the team. No one else wanted to go.

• 8:40Speaker 02

  Right.

• 8:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was, I got invited down there to do, um, to do a bit of work over the weekend to, to lead a few meditations and that kind of thing. And, uh, and got back, was it yesterday? I think it was pretty amazing.

• 8:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, you were only there for like a couple of days, based on Instagram.

• 8:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:58Speaker 02

  What I could infer. My forensic analysis of your photos.

• 9:02Speaker 01

  I could only post so many tropical island sunsets in, uh, 48 hours. Now, I was there for, um, yeah, for, for two days. I think it was six plane journeys and something like two, four boats in five days. It was a, a long way to go for a short amount of time.

• 9:17Speaker 02

  To lead a, to lead some meditation.

• 9:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. But amazing, like, you know. Yeah. It was, the interesting thing in asking people to meditate there, it almost, it felt criminal to ask them to even close their eyes. You know, you look out over the ocean and nature does it for you. It's an amazing thing.

• 9:34Speaker 02

  If you can't, uh, get some headspace there, where are you going to get it?

• 9:37Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 9:38Speaker 02

  Right?

• 9:38Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 9:39Speaker 02

  Well, you're a, uh, you know, I'm looking around your office space. You have all of these, you know, young, energetic, you know, people working here and you're expanding. They're doing construction and there's, you know, some magic happening here and, and what you've built is really powerful and, and, and quite amazing. But, you know, your story is so fascinating because you're a most unlikely entrepreneur.

• 10:00Speaker 01

  I am. It's a complete accident. Um, and I have to say, it is a massive team. It's really important to say it's a massive team effort. I'm essentially the, the performing monkey in this circus and, um, everyone else is working extremely hard and I just get to go out and talk about it.

• 10:17Speaker 02

  Well, you're sort of the, the axle around which all of these spokes, you know, emanate, I would imagine.

• 10:23Speaker 01

  That's another way of looking.

• 10:24Speaker 02

  But I kind of look at you and, you know, I was trying to think as I was driving over here, like an appropriate analogy, but it's very much like this sort of post-modern Siddhartha story or this kind of, you know, modern take on autobiography of a yogi where you're taking these principles that date back millennia and trying to find a way to translate them to a modern audience so that they can not only understand what you're saying, but actually implement them into their lives to, you know, create sustainable, long-term positive change.

• 10:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I think that for me is the most important thing, you know, there's.

• 11:03Speaker 01

  There's a whole world out there, isn't there, of books and, you know, in back in the eighties or CDs and now kind of podcasts and talking about this stuff, you know, discussing it and there's a lot of thinking about it. But there's very little kind of application of it. And for me, with meditation, more than anything, you know, we we only, it is only in the experience that we get to see the benefits. So finding a way to, I sit in three separate kind of camps to see kind of awareness. So understanding why we need to do it, the importance of it, providing a really compelling invitation to try it, because until we try it, we don't know it.

• 11:43Speaker 01

  And then engagement, like, how do we keep coming back day after day for the rest of our lives? And it's only with kind of consistent practice, again, that we kind of really deepen the practice. So at Headspace, the idea is to try and create some awareness and education around the importance of looking after the mind to get people to come try it and then to encourage people to keep trying it on a daily basis.

• 12:06Speaker 02

  Right. So there's this gap, however, between the education, the knowledge, the information, and even the encouragement and traversing that, you know, gap into actually implementation and and action, right? And that's kind of where the magic starts. So you can get up and and try to talk about how important this is to, you know, large groups, small groups, one on one for the rest of your life. But, you know, how much power do you really have over whether somebody's going to take what, you know, even if they walk away from that conversation intrigued and interested, you know, what is the what is the engagement rate with them actually doing it? And I think what you're working on here and what I think is really starting to click in is you really are bridging that gap.

• 12:47Speaker 02

  For some reason, maybe it's deep rooted in, you know, something you're triggering in the human psyche is working like I, you know, just on a personal level. Uh, you know, I've been playing around with meditation for for years, the better part of sixteen years, trying this, trying that, this technique, that technique. And I have fits and starts and I could never create any kind of consistent momentum. And, you know, I started using Headspace not that long ago, you know, sixty, seventy days ago or something like that. And I've really found myself doing it every day. I don't know why it's creating, it's making me do it. But I will tell you, oh, I was going to show you on my phone, like I have a. One thing I did do, though, that I found effective is I put Headspace down in the dock on the

• 13:32Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 13:33Speaker 02

  So I can't escape looking at it every time I look at my phone.

• 13:36Speaker 01

  That's a good idea. I'll suggest that.

• 13:38Speaker 02

  So I guess, I don't even know if I asked you a question, but I guess the question is like, you know, how do you break down that that gap between information and action and try to bridge that? And what is Headspace doing differently than than maybe other your predecessors have?

• 13:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a good question. Yeah. There's there's part of me that says I haven't got a clue. And then there's there are things, you know. So the first thing I'd say is authenticity. So this isn't that Rich and I kind of went away on a weekend meditation retreat and kind of came out and thought, hey, let's set up a company. So this was as a result of going away for a very long period of time and doing nothing but studying meditation. And I'm a big believer in lineage and tradition. Doesn't matter whether it's meditation or if it's in learning to play the piano or surfing, whatever it is. If something gets passed down in a very personal way over, never mind decades, but if we start talking

• 14:36Speaker 01

  about hundreds of years or even millennia, there's something really, there's like a refinement and development that takes place, which is really powerful, I think. So I learned from my teacher who learned from their teacher, and that goes back a long, long way. And I think a big part of this is a very kind of gradual approach, right? When you come to the come to the app, you learn a day and you come back the next day and you're building on the day before. So it's it's this step by step learning kind of process. I think there's something very valuable in that. In the past, back in the eighties, you buy a meditation CD or something, and you just sit there and listen to the same thing every day. So there's no real kind of development of the practice. It's

• 15:17Speaker 01

  quite kind of static, in a way. So I think that's one thing. I think what Rich, the co-founder, and my very good friend has brought to this project is a degree of creativity, which has never really existed. If you look back at meditation, it's fine for people who are interested in that kind of thing. And don't mind images of lotus leaves and people sitting cross-legged under a waterfall with a sunset in the background. But for most people, that's not really kind of their thing, you know, and it's it's another barrier. And Rich has this ability to create a whole kind of world, a visual world, which is immediately engaging, which is non-threatening and which is very approachable.

• 15:58Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 15:59Speaker 01

  So I think those things, authenticity, creativity, and I'm going to add in a third one, which is science, have all helped bridge that gap. So if you look at the science in the last twenty years around meditation and mindfulness, it's astonishing, you know, like. We, in the past, you simply, there was no way of knowing what was happening to the brain. So now we're not only talking about what happens to the mind, but we're talking about the physiological impact on the brain itself. And seeing that parts of the brain actually change, not only in the amount of blood flow they get, but they change in shape and size and strength depending on our meditation. That's a, it's an amazing thing and it's a really compelling, again, invitation to practice, I think.

• 16:41Speaker 02

  Right, I mean, it's it's really having a moment right now. There is a zeitgeist moment happening. I mean, you've devoted your life to this. This is, you know, a long time coming, but it's really a convergence of popular culture with with your interest and your expertise and your authenticity to get to this place where now science is interested and we're looking at neuroplasticity. And I think you, I read or heard you say that, mentioned that, you know, there's maybe thirty or fifty thousand or three thousand to three to five thousand peer-reviewed studies on the impact of meditation.

• 17:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:15Speaker 02

  Um, I mean, that's crazy.

• 17:16Speaker 01

  It's huge.

• 17:17Speaker 02

  That many studies out there.

• 17:19Speaker 01

  It's and it's happened so quickly. Like, I mean, the early studies kind of go back maybe thirty-five years, but really sort of the ones involving FMRI machines where they can actually see what's going on in the brain during meditation, it's only in the last like twelve to fifteen years. So it's really kind of recent and, but I do think that that's sped up.

• 17:41Speaker 01

  Kind of this acceptance of it.

• 17:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, it makes it palatable, like, oh, well, if that guy says so, or, you know.

• 17:46Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 17:47Speaker 02

  Or, you know, and even in the corporate partnerships that you guys are, you know, have done with Virgin Atlantic, it sort of gives it this perimeter of acceptability with the mainstream that allows people to, to, you know, sort of embrace it a little more readily, I think.

• 18:01Speaker 01

  I think it just gives you that stamp of approval and people trust big brands like Virgin and they get on the plane and, man, Virgin are saying it's okay, I'll give it a go.

• 18:10Speaker 02

  Right, right, right. And then you get to occasionally go to Necker Island.

• 18:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, there has to be an upside, right, to sitting in this studio.

• 18:17Speaker 02

  You've got to get something out of this, right? No, that's so funny. Well, I want to talk about your story. I know that you've, you've told your story many, many times, but hopefully you'll indulge me a little bit because it's so interesting and so unique, this, this path to where you are right now.

• 18:34Speaker 01

  I'm, I'm, if it's of interest.

• 18:36Speaker 02

  Oh, it's certainly of interest.

• 18:38Speaker 01

  I'm happy to.

• 18:38Speaker 02

  You're always deflating, or deflecting, deflecting this. But I think, I think you, you, maybe because you've told it so many times, but I think for the average person to, to, you know, even have the opportunity to some, to speak to somebody who's had this kind of unique experience that you've had, it's, it's, it's really fascinating.

• 18:55Speaker 01

  I genuinely believe, you know, I'm not, this isn't deflection, and I will come on to the story. I genuinely believe we all, we all have a story to tell, you know. It, it doesn't sound extraordinary to ourselves because we've lived it. And so we're used to it. And so it doesn't kind of sound unusual in any way. And that's what I, I love about, you know, and speak to other people, like, everyone has a story. And it, even if people have stayed in one place their entire life, you know, and been around the same people, there is an incredible story to tell. And mine just happens to have been, you know, I guess it's quite varied, and it's been in a number of different places.

• 19:35Speaker 02

  But it starts with your, your mom being interested in meditation.

• 19:39Speaker 01

  It does.

• 19:39Speaker 02

  And encouraging you as a young lad.

• 19:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, it actually starts with my, with my folks getting divorced, going through quite a difficult period of time. My mom looking for a way to cope, and she decided to sign up for a, a course in, in meditation. It was actually TM back then. And my sister was going along and I was a bit put out that I hadn't been invited. I said, can I come along too? And that was the beginning of it, and.

• 20:08Speaker 01

  The very first time, I remember well, you know, the very first time, I don't think I'd ever experienced a quiet mind before then. I don't think I'd, you know, even as a kid, I had quite a busy mind. I was very active. I don't remember kind of experiencing that kind of silence before, and it left a real, a real mark.

• 20:26Speaker 02

  From that one experience, or were you going back? I mean, did this become a practice?

• 20:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I went, I went, so it was a course, I think, I forget, it was like about three months or something like that, the course, and we'd go back each week. I have to say, and this is very typical in meditation, I went along and I had such an amazing kind of first experience. But I went back the next week, assuming that it would happen again, and almost chasing the experience. And of course, it didn't happen, because I was thinking too much about trying to recreate the experience, rather than allowing the experience to happen. So it took a little while to kind of find, find the sweet spot there, but I, I kind of played around with it on and off for a good few years, I would say, between like ten and thirteen, something like that.

• 21:06Speaker 02

  Mm hmm. And then you had this sort of rapid fire series of, of kind of unfortunate occurrences that, that kind of changed the trajectory of where you were headed.

• 21:17Speaker 01

  So it was actually quite a bit later, it was probably like more when I was like eighteen or something, eighteen, nineteen, and

• 21:24Speaker 01

  yeah, I would, I would definitely attribute part of why I went away to, to this, and I was talking to a friend, actually, who was, who was there at the time, just earlier today.

• 21:34Speaker 01

  And we were just, it was Christmas Eve, we were stood outside of a, an old rugby club where we used to kind of play, and we'd had a party there that night, and everyone had had a few drinks, and we're just standing on the sidewalk.

• 21:50Speaker 01

  And a drunk driver came down the hill. At the time, myself and two friends just stepped away from the group, just to relieve ourselves against the wall, and the car, with a guy, I'd say he was a drunk driver, we lost control and just plowed into the group. Killing two people and putting, I don't know, I think like twelve people in, in intensive care. And it was heavy, you know, like.

• 22:15Speaker 02

  That's intense.

• 22:18Speaker 01

  And the

• 22:20Speaker 01

  You know, in terms of the imprint it leaves on the memory, kind of the, not only the sight of it, but the sound of it, it was, it's almost like it, like camera, like frames of, of a video or something, kind of shot, everything is just, you know, time is a very malleable thing, and in that moment, everything was seen and heard, like, in such a kind of shocking way, that everyone dealt with it, I guess, in, in different ways, and, and for me, I, I just never really felt like I processed that, so I just carried it around with me instead for a number of years, until it kind of bubbled to the, to the surface, wanting to be, wanting to be dealt with.

• 23:03Speaker 02

  In a, in a different way, yeah, and then you had, you, your stepsister was hit, was also was.

• 23:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, right after, about three months later, um, something like that, she was, uh.

• 23:15Speaker 02

  On a bicycle.

• 23:15Speaker 01

  A van, yeah, she was out cycling and a van driver fell asleep at the wheel and, uh, and very sadly, she, she died.

• 23:22Speaker 02

  Right, so you're dealing with, like, some compounded, you know, heavy grief.

• 23:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was, and all mixed in with that, still kind of growing up, trying to find kind of a place in life and be accepted by peers and all the usual kind of stuff.

• 23:39Speaker 02

  Young man, a lot of hormones and.

• 23:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. All that stuff.

• 23:44Speaker 02

  Right.

• 23:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:45Speaker 02

  And, and, and you're starting university.

• 23:48Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 23:49Speaker 02

  Nonetheless, and you're studying sports science.

• 23:51Speaker 01

  That's right, yeah, I went, um, I did, I took a few years away, uh, in retrospect, I see it was not only through a sense of adventure, it was probably also trying to get away a little bit, I went and worked a ski season in, in the Alps, did a summer season in Ibiza, I came over here and worked in America a little bit, did some summer camps.

• 24:09Speaker 02

  Oh, this is all before.

• 24:10Speaker 01

  This was all before university.

• 24:11Speaker 02

  So you had this wanderlust, this is already.

• 24:13Speaker 01

  For sure, oh, yeah, from a very, very early age, and then I went back to the UK and, um, started a sports science degree, and I was about, I'd finished the first year, I was just into my second year, when I had this moment of, why am I doing this? You know, I'm not happy, you know, it was, it's a really funny thing, cause. I was having a really good time, like student life is fun, like it's a good time. And we were going out and we're doing all the things you do when you're a student.

• 24:43Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 24:45Speaker 01

  But it wasn't, it wasn't happiness at a deep level. There was no kind of sense of fulfillment. It was just kind of temporary sort of fun, you know? So you wake up the next morning and if you're lucky, you can remember what happened the night before. But you're back where you were before, you know, which is wow, back here again. And for me, that was something that was kind of unsustainable.

• 25:08Speaker 02

  But that's a pretty heavy level of maturity to have at that age to be so introspective. I mean, you know, sort of the typical, you know, like, like looking back, I, you know, I could have that same dawning realization about my experience, but I certainly wasn't about to, you know, sort of wrestle with that at that time. So what do you think it was about you that, that you were really the one who actually was willing to look at it and actually take, you know, a contrary action?

• 25:36Speaker 01

  Well, rarely in life have I been accused of being mature, but I'll, but I'll take it.

• 25:40Speaker 02

  But that is, I mean, that is pretty, you know, mature.

• 25:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I think that I, I do think I grew up in an environment where that wasn't considered kind of alien.

• 25:53Speaker 01

  You know, mum was, she was trained as a, as a counselor, as a hypnotherapist.

• 25:56Speaker 02

  You got a hippie mom.

• 25:57Speaker 01

  You know, a little bit, you know? And she was, and you know, and we went and kind of, you know, we went along to meditation classes and all that sort of stuff. I, I think it was there in the background. So in that sense, there was permission, even if it wasn't permission from my peers who thought I was completely mad. There was at least some permission from my family that this was an okay kind of thing to do. And at that particular time, I was going out with a lovely girl at university who was heavily into Buddhism, had just been telling me all about kind of, you know, this, these monks and nuns in the Himalayas and. And the more I thought about it, the more I thought, that's a, that's a really good idea.

• 26:39Speaker 01

  And it was just, something kinda happened, some, it was really like, it was one afternoon. Just something, I wouldn't say something snapped, but something changed. And it changed with such a degree of clarity and certainty that I just knew. And I quit college that afternoon and left.

• 26:59Speaker 02

  That's amazing. That's, uh, do you know, you probably, do you know Sam Harris?

• 27:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, that's what Sam Harris did, kind of. I mean, when he was a freshman and he, we were class, I didn't know him, but we were in the same class at, in college. And he took off after a freshman year on a similar sort of search. And, you know, now look at the two of you being sort of leading minds in this arena.

• 27:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know Sam personally. I know of him and I know his story and yeah, I think there are a lot of, a lot of similarities.

• 27:27Speaker 02

  So, so you had, uh, you had East, you had India.

• 27:31Speaker 01

  I did.

• 27:31Speaker 02

  Well, you were, you went to a bunch of places.

• 27:33Speaker 01

  I did, yeah, I was actually gonna fly, the, the original plan was to, to go to Thailand and just straight to a particular monastery that I, I knew of there. And, um, and then I met someone who kinda said, oh yeah, my friend's just come back from this place in northern India, the Dalai Lama lives there, it's an amazing place. And I thought, great, sounds like a good place to start. So I, I went there first.

• 27:55Speaker 02

  Dharamsala?

• 27:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, Dharamsala, yeah, that's right. And it's, these days it's quite kinda touristy. Back then, it was a little less so, I would say. And I went there thinking, okay, well I'll find a Tibetan monastery. And I found the whole Tibetan thing completely overwhelming. It's, it's so rich, you know, there's, there's so much stuff going on. And some visionary rituals and at the time I, I just didn't understand it. And I, I was so complicated in my own mind. I was just really, uh, I just wanted simplicity. You know, whether it's like that idea of Zen, you know, where you just sit there and there's nothing, there's nothing.

• 28:36Speaker 01

  Or whether, you know, the more traditional types of Buddhism in Asia. So I ended up starting there, then I did probably, I studied about five years in the Burmese school, not just in Burma, but with a teacher in Australia as well, and back in the UK. And I would say the Burmese tradition is quite strict, but it's a really good foundation.

• 29:02Speaker 02

  Strict in terms of the practice and the sort of ascetic lifestyle?

• 29:07Speaker 01

  Everything.

• 29:10Speaker 01

  Everything. I actually found it, I found it quite challenging, you know, it's, there was, there was, I guess, the adventurous part of me that had this idea of what it was, and I really, you know, I loved the idea of it, but being in it, wow, it's quite hard.

• 29:27Speaker 02

  Is that when you're practicing to be ordained or once you?

• 29:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that was when I was a layperson and as a novice monk.

• 29:34Speaker 02

  So you're in, I see. And so what, you know, what's a day in the life like that?

• 29:38Speaker 01

  So it varies. As a layperson, it's a lot more varied, and you might not even be in the monastery. In the monastery, as a novice monk, it's quite, it's quite full on, I'd say. So typically in Burma itself, if you're in retreat, the day starts at about 2:30, the meditation begins at 3:00. And in the particular one that I trained in, there was, it was about 18 hours a day. So nine hours sitting, nine hours walking, one hour food, breakfast, 5 o'clock in the morning, one hour food, lunch at 11:00 in the morning, and then about three and a half hours for sleep, and that was it.

• 30:18Speaker 02

  Wow. Nine hours of sitting and nine hours of walking meditation.

• 30:23Speaker 01

  So there's one big room, so very different from the Tibetan. So in the Burmese retreats, there's one big room and everybody practices together. And you all sit down one side of the temple and under little mosquito nets, and you do like your hour, the gong goes, the mosquito nets come up, and you then walk just backwards and forwards very slowly, doing walking meditation for an hour, and then the gong goes again, you sit down.

• 30:49Speaker 02

  So you're alternating hour, hour, hour.

• 30:50Speaker 01

  Exactly. Whereas in the Tibetan retreats, the longer term retreats, it's maybe a little less, more like kind of 16 hours, but it might be sort of like four blocks of four hours throughout the day, just sitting and no walking.

• 31:03Speaker 02

  And no sort of like acclimation period, you just you go from sort of

• 31:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:08Speaker 02

  British schoolboy to sixteen, eighteen hours a day.

• 31:13Speaker 01

  I, yeah, and and and I kind of, um, I think that was part of the challenge. Like, it's it's a bit kind of all or nothing, just kind of jumping in at the deep end. And and when I look back now, I would, you know, often now people will write in and ask me about it. They're keen to go off and and I advise people in a very different, in a very different way. I'm like, look, start off with, start off with a weekend retreat, then try a week. If you're up for it, go away and do a month. If after a month or three months, you feel like that's the the way to go, great, jump in. But I wouldn't kind of jump straight in at the deep end.

• 31:48Speaker 02

  Right. And so how long were you doing, were you adhering to this rigorous of a?

• 31:54Speaker 01

  So again, that that's kind of retreat. So living in the monastery is different from retreat. Living in a monastery, you might do six to eight hours of meditation a day. And then alongside that, you're doing cooking and cleaning and that kind of thing. And then you'll go into retreat for a certain amount of time. The the longest retreat that that I did was uh was a year. Um, and you do that all day, every day for for a year.

• 32:17Speaker 02

  And is it silent retreat?

• 32:19Speaker 01

  Uh, that particular one, that particular one wasn't. Um, I would say about five to six months of it was in silence. So depending on the techniques you're doing at the time, you might be in silence or or not.

• 32:32Speaker 01

  But even when you're not silent, it's not like there's loads of spare time to just hang out and chat about the latest. And what are you going to talk about? What, the the latest movie that you didn't see?

• 32:44Speaker 02

  Like, are you writing letters back to your friends in in England? Like, how are they processing what you're doing? I mean, it sounds like your mom's all on board, but what about the rest of your family and your friends? And do they think you've gone off the deep end? Or are they, you know, sort of, do they have your back? Are they encouraging you?

• 33:01Speaker 01

  I think um mum was on board until it suddenly uh dawned on her that she may not have any grandchildren from me. Um, then she was

• 33:09Speaker 02

  We didn't even talk about the celibate.

• 33:10Speaker 01

  Then she was, then she was less on board. Um, my dad was kind of getting on board. It took him a little longer, I would say, to to, he was supportive always, but it took him a lot longer to to get on board. My friends, I think they were just genuinely bemused because they'd been going out drinking with this guy like.

• 33:30Speaker 01

  Like a few months earlier and then like, what is he doing? I think my lecturer at college probably summed it up. But he was, when I went and told him, he was like, yeah, you should just go and get some Prozac from the doctor. I think there was that kind of response, like, oh, he's just, he's having a breakdown. Like, he's lost it. Let's just let him go and do it, sort of thing.

• 33:51Speaker 02

  Right, but at some point, there, you know, maybe there's a little bit graver concern, like, you know, we better go get him because he might not come back.

• 33:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, they never sent out any kind of intervention parties or anything like that. Maybe they talked about it and couldn't afford it, I don't know. But I have to say, my friends, I was writing back, not loads from the monastery, but the the times in between different monasteries, I definitely kept in touch. And I've got to say, my friends were incredibly supportive. And the longer the journey went along, the more supportive they became.

• 34:25Speaker 02

  Interesting.

• 34:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:27Speaker 02

  Interesting. So how long does it take for you to get officially ordained?

• 34:31Speaker 01

  So probably, that was probably about five, maybe even six years into that journey to take full ordination in the Tibetan tradition.

• 34:40Speaker 02

  And once you're ordained, how does that, does your lifestyle change? Or it's just, what happens now?

• 34:45Speaker 01

  It does change. It feels, although it's all about impermanence, there's a greater feeling of permanence in the sense that, you know, you've taken a commitment. And it's not necessarily for life. You can take, in the Tibetan tradition, typically you'll go along and they'll say, okay, do you want to take a commitment for three years, for five years, or life? And so you can do three years, and at the end of the three years, if you're like, hmm, I'd like to carry on, then you might do five years. So there's no kind of feeling of regret when you walk away. It's kind of you've completed your period of training. So, yeah, I found it.

• 35:23Speaker 01

  I found it a real sense of relief, actually, making that commitment. There was no uncertainty, you know, often when you're not sure which way to go in life, like, once you've made the decision, there's a sense of relief that comes with that. And I just felt, I felt really content and kind of happy in my direction in life.

• 35:41Speaker 02

  Right, and that was, you made a three-year commitment or the five-year?

• 35:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I made, well, I went and did, first I went and did a year in retreat, and then I did three, I did three years.

• 35:53Speaker 02

  Got you, and at this point, are you in Moscow already, or how do you find your way there?

• 35:59Speaker 01

  So I took, I took ordination in northern India, but then, yeah, I went and spent some time in Moscow. So Moscow.

• 36:06Speaker 02

  But in, hold on a second, so, sorry. In northern India, I mean, were you in the Himalayas? Like, are you in the caves and having that kind of, you know, sort of experience that you hear about?

• 36:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I wasn't in any cave. I was lucky, there was a very nice Tibetan Buddhist monastery there, which was incredible. It's not, I wouldn't say it's set up for Westerners, but it's definitely a lot easier for Westerners to be there, and there's, there's not too much cave dwelling that goes on these days.

• 36:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, you hear these, this is an interesting question, I mean, you hear these sort of mythic stories of these legendary sadhus who are in meditation for just incredibly long, protracted periods of time, where they're either not eating, or they're being tended to by, you know, sort of people, and I'm wondering, you know, or, or, once they pass and leave their body, their bodies remain preserved, and, you know, I'm always trying to figure out the demarcation line between sort of truth and exaggeration here, and as someone who's lived there, I mean, what is your perspective on that?

• 37:06Speaker 01

  It is, it's a really tricky one, I would say. The, I think there's a lot we don't understand about the mind, and I think a monastery is an incredible environment in which to go and understand more about the mind. I think there are, there are definitely levels of kind of, of understanding, of consciousness, whatever you want to call it, and I would say it's, it's nothing kind of terribly mystical about it, just increasingly, the more time we spend in the present.

• 37:37Speaker 01

  Not only to the more calm do we feel, but the greater clarity there is, the greater the insight into the mind is. And with insight comes a different perspective and a different experience of life. As to some of those stories, um, I've never witnessed uh anyone having kind of passed on and their body being, I've certainly heard plenty of stories like that. All I would say is, I met people there who had spent their entire life in meditation and I really, you know, like their entire life and they were extraordinary on every single level. Um, I would be no more impressed, were they able to do that after they died than if they were simply what they were when they were alive.

• 38:21Speaker 01

  I can remember walking into, there's one particular kind of, it's kind of like the SAS of uh of meditators, you know, the SEALs.

• 38:29Speaker 02

  SEAL Team Six.

• 38:30Speaker 01

  Exactly. And they're taken out, they're chosen at a very early age, um, having a particular aptitude for meditation. And they're taken away, like of their own choice, you know, but they're taken away from the monastery, away from the retreats, they live up in the mountains and they spend their life dedicating it to meditation. And I went, I had a very unusual, I had the very good fortune to go and meet the, the man who kind of runs this, this school up in the mountains. And it was just extraordinary, like, there was someone there, right? I mean, he was there, he was sat on the, on the kind of couch as we went in the room, but it was as though no one was there.

• 39:13Speaker 01

  It was, it was as though the entire room was just pure, kind of compassion or love or space, whatever you want to call it, it kind of doesn't matter. There was something otherworldly about it, it was quite extraordinary. So, and I'm a very down to earth bloke, um, I'm not big on kind of mystical kind of stuff and hopefully that comes through in, in Headspace as a journey. Um, but I have to say, kind of some of the people I met there were, were quite extraordinary and I've never met anyone like it in the West.

• 39:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I can imagine. I think that, yeah, everything that you do is so grounded and relatable.

• 39:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:53Speaker 02

  That maybe there's a reticence to even, you know, kind of go there.

• 39:57Speaker 01

  I just don't.

• 40:00Speaker 02

  But, uh, but you know, I would imagine that, that surrounding yourself with that level of consciousness would make you start to, uh, kind of embrace a broader concept of our limited perspective of reality and how that relates to our abilities and our perceptions and all of that.

• 40:19Speaker 01

  I think what I saw in those teachers was a willingness to let go of, of self, you know, so they, they just weren't caught up in their own stuff, which meant there was just space for others. And that space, again, you can call it empathy, you can call it compassion, doesn't really matter what we call it, but they were just always present for others. And in doing that, they seemed to always bring happiness and benefit to those around them. It was an extraordinary thing.

• 40:45Speaker 02

  Right. That's very cool.

• 40:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:48Speaker 02

  All right, so Moscow.

• 40:49Speaker 01

  Moscow, next on the map.

• 40:52Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 40:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, Moscow came about, there was one particular teacher who fascinated me. He was, uh, he was an Irishman who had spent 12 years in Cloisted Retreat. So Cloisted, no contact outside. And he'd done it at a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in Scotland. And I was just fascinated by his, his journey and I think very inspired by his journey. And it was a journey that I wanted to kind of recreate, I suppose. And I heard that he was living in Moscow and teaching in Moscow. And so I moved to Moscow.

• 41:25Speaker 02

  It was really just seeking this guy out.

• 41:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. To, you know, to, to get some teachings from him. And in the end, we, we ended up, you know, I stayed in Moscow and then we went together to India and I took ordination as a, as a monk there. And then eventually kind of went back to Moscow and taught in the meditation center in, in Moscow.

• 41:53Speaker 02

  And what was that like, living the life of, I mean, it's a juxtaposition of so many bizarre things at once, you know? Like just a monk alone, no matter where, but then a monk in Moscow, you know, I can't imagine.

• 42:05Speaker 01

  That was, even now, when I look back, I, there's a part of me that goes, what are we doing? Like, seriously? Like, I can remember regu, it was a time. You know, Moscow is always a challenging place. I have to say, I love it as a city. It's it's still kind of feels like home to me now. But I can remember walking down the street, I'd regularly get stopped by the police. Um, they're not big fans of religious expression in in Russia. And and they'd be asking for papers and things. I can remember walking through the metro station one day. And a guy just running, charging at me and just rugby tackling me. Um, he thought I was a Hare Krishna anyway.

• 42:41Speaker 02

  Right, so so break break down the the attire, though. Are you wearing like a red skirt?

• 42:45Speaker 01

  Exactly. Think think the Dalai Lama kind of type outfit, so a maroon kind of. And so essentially, for people for people who aren't familiar with that, it's a bald headed guy in a purple skirt. Like, you know, for people walking up and down the streets in Moscow, that's what they saw. They just saw a bald headed guy in a purple skirt. And it was alien. And alien things tend to kind of freak us out a bit.

• 43:09Speaker 02

  It's so funny looking at you now because you have your very trendy trainers on and you're very dapper and bespoke and all of these things. So like that, you know, the except for the bald head, that then I can see the the trappings of the the attire. But that's interesting. So how long were you in Moscow then? So I guess you were there twice, but the second time.

• 43:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, all all together. Yeah, I mean, I stayed there after then for probably about another two and a half years, something like that.

• 43:34Speaker 02

  But is that where you kind of the the end of your tenure as a monk sort of started to wind down?

• 43:40Speaker 01

  And I was I was undecided, you know, I was I was genuinely not sure whether I was gonna keep doing what I was doing or whether I was gonna gonna change. And I actually went to see one of my teachers in in India.

• 43:53Speaker 01

  And it was someone I had a huge amount of trust in. And I actually handed over the responsibility of the decision to him. And I said, look, if you think I should do this for life, I'll do it for life. If you don't, I won't. And he said, well.

• 44:08Speaker 02

  That's a, that's, that's a pretty big decision to suddenly sort of deputize somebody else.

• 44:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:13Speaker 02

  On your behalf. Here, you can decide what I'm gonna do for the rest of my life.

• 44:18Speaker 01

  Some may say that was just avoiding the responsibility of making a decision. It's very hard to describe, but if, if you're in that practice every single day and you have a particular teacher and a feeling of devotion or whatever, you know, towards that person. I genuinely believe that he knew better than I did in that, in that moment. So I trusted him and his advice was to maybe not take life ordination just yet. And I went back to Moscow and I was coming to the end of my sort of commitment there. And there were a number of people coming along to the, the meditation center. And a lot of them were laypeople, some of them were expats, some of them were Russian.

• 44:56Speaker 01

  And increasingly, I just, I saw that the way I was living my life was so often an obstacle in kind of presenting those teachings that I was trying to present. People would say, oh, it's easy for you, you're a monk, you know, wait until you've got a wife and screaming kids at home or, you know, it's easy, you don't have any responsibilities, you don't have anything to kind of worry about. Or it might be the dress, you know, and it's like, yeah, like there are some people who find that a bit challenging to accept someone dressed like that or the fact that I smelled of incense, whatever it might be. You know, there are a number of potential obstacles and the more I thought about it, the more I kind of thought, yeah, you know, maybe, just maybe if it was taken out of

• 45:41Speaker 01

  this setting, this could be so much more accessible.

• 45:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think that clearly this is your Dharma, you know.

• 45:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:50Speaker 02

  It's, it's sort of ordained that you're, you're meant to be doing what you're doing. But, but I wouldn't say that, that you're the first person who's come up with this idea of trying to translate these concepts for a mainstream society. So, you know, in that regard, like, how do you conceptualize what has made what you're doing successful? And if somebody were to ask me my opinion of that for you, I mean, I would say that you're an extraordinary communicator. Like you have a, you have an, an ability, an agility, an adeptness to be able to convey these principles, distill them down to their, their very core essence in a way that's.

• 46:31Speaker 02

  Sort of palatable, not palatable is the wrong word, but understandable and embraceable, I suppose, by anybody.

• 46:39Speaker 01

  Well, that's really nice to hear and thank you. I mean, I genuinely, I can't, I don't know, is the truth. I think there is something in the experience. People have asked me to look at other people's kind of apps and material and things and say, what do you think? And everything, we all, different things appeal to different people. But for me personally, I believe it's the authenticity of the experience. I couldn't do what I'm doing unless I had done what I've done.

• 47:19Speaker 02

  Right. In this sort of Malcolm Gladwell-esque 10,000 hours, you've trumped that and then some with the amount of hours that you've put into this. So you're speaking not only from direct experience, but like, just a vast amount of that.

• 47:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think there's something in that journey, almost kind of cyclical, you know? It starts off very simple. It gets quite complicated at some stage, and then it comes back around to being very simple again. But there is an experience, and without that experience and without having walked that, it's very difficult to make it feel and sound simple again. So when I read books, sometimes it just feels so complicated and unnecessarily complicated, because we are only talking about the present moment, and there is nothing complicated about the present moment. But finding a way to approach that and talk about that, I think, yeah, I just think that comes about from experience.

• 48:17Speaker 02

  Right. And so you return to the UK from Moscow and intent upon teaching, certainly at first, initially one on one. Is that, well, we skipped over the whole circus thing.

• 48:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:32Speaker 01

  Part of every monk's journey is the circus thing, right? There's a bit of a segue and it may sound really random and it may sound completely unrelated.

• 48:44Speaker 01

  But it has become an integral part of what I'm doing now. So I was in Moscow, I had six months left to run of my time in Moscow, but I wasn't a monk. As a monk, you can't do kind of physical exercise, you can't go and play games and things. And yet before I was a monk, I competed as a gymnast and I was a very kind of active person. And a guy in Moscow I knew was going along to Moscow State Circus and doing a degree in circus arts. And he said, look, why don't you come along with me, you know? And so I went along and I was just hooked, you know, I absolutely loved it. I'd been very quiet and very, for such a long period of time, very introverted. And all of a sudden, there was an opportunity to express something physically again.

• 49:26Speaker 01

  And as a monk, I had, I had nothing, I'd given everything away, even my clothes I'd given away. So I was thinking, okay, how am I going to go back to England and start this thing that I want to do?

• 49:37Speaker 01

  Like, where am I going to live? How am I going to pay for it?

• 49:41Speaker 01

  And someone mentioned to me that you could go back to, in London, there was, you could do a degree in circus arts. And as I'd be classed as a mature student, I'd get a grant, I'd get a loan from the government. I thought this ticks all the boxes, you know, I can, I can go and do something that makes me feel a bit more kind of worldly again. I can find a way to express this stuff. And at the same time, on a very practical level, I could afford to go back to England and live there.

• 50:06Speaker 02

  Right, and did the circus art thing though kind of began in, was, there was, that was sort of swirling about you in Moscow?

• 50:13Speaker 01

  In Moscow, yeah.

• 50:13Speaker 02

  Because that's kind of a big thing there, isn't it?

• 50:15Speaker 01

  It's massive. So I probably spent about six months having one-to-one classes at Moscow State Circus. And then went and did a degree in London.

• 50:22Speaker 02

  Uh huh. And then, and your friends are now saying what? Like, they're like, well, he came back.

• 50:29Speaker 01

  I think my, my poor parents, they just got, they just started to accept the fact that, okay, he's chosen this path in life. They, they were suddenly started to feel kind of proud and telling their friends, yeah, this is what. And then it was like, oh no, he's, he's, he's now a clown in London. You know, so there was definitely, my, my friends just laughed about it. By that stage, I think they were just like, that's just his life, you know. They didn't think much about it.

• 50:57Speaker 02

  And so you're learning to, you know, juggle and tightrope walk and, and.

• 51:03Speaker 02

  All that stuff. That's so.

• 51:04Speaker 01

  Everything you can, just swinging around like a monkey for nine hours a day, five days a week.

• 51:09Speaker 02

  Right. And this is kind of like where you go if you want to be in Cirque du Soleil or the Cirque, the traditional circus, I suppose.

• 51:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was not so much traditional, it was a bit more contemporary. So the emphasis was on physical theatre, so a lot of dance and a lot of theatre. And for me, this is where it becomes relevant. If I'd have gone straight from the monastery, there is no way in the world that I would feel comfortable standing up in front of big audiences and, you know, doing what we do.

• 51:38Speaker 01

  At the circus, it was amazing because you had to get up on the stage and they'd just say, okay, make us laugh. No material. They can't tell any jokes, just physical, just make us laugh. And often it wouldn't work. Sometimes it would and that feeling's amazing when it does, but often it wouldn't work. And it'd just be like, okay, go. Until it kind of got to a point where you're no longer afraid to fail. And that's a, again, that's a, like, it's a really liberating place to be, to be able to go out there and do what you need to do in front of other people, but no longer be constrained by fear. Instead, just doing what you do because you're doing what you're doing. And being okay with that.

• 52:22Speaker 01

  And I've I have found that just an incredibly useful thing in in what we do at Headspace.

• 52:27Speaker 02

  Well, this plays into my great communicator theory. You know, I think when you're, you know, if you watch your TED Talk or any of your talks, it's the the comfort level that you have is, you know.

• 52:37Speaker 01

  And I enjoy it.

• 52:38Speaker 02

  Noticeable.

• 52:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I really enjoy it, you know, I I really enjoy the the conversation.

• 52:43Speaker 02

  What's also interesting is that it's it's this juxtaposition of the interior and the exterior, because you had this life that was so focused on the interior for so long, and then you step into this very physical world to kind of, and there's a, I would imagine that in the sort of looking in the rearview mirror, that that was the counterbalance in this yin yang kind of dance.

• 53:05Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 53:05Speaker 02

  That makes you a more well-formed person, I would imagine, to be able to kind of be in the world.

• 53:11Speaker 01

  I I really, I I really needed something to kind of, you know, to make me feel more grounded and to find a sense of humor again, like, I wouldn't say I lost it in the monastery, but there's not a lot of falling around laughing.

• 53:25Speaker 02

  Not cracking jokes.

• 53:25Speaker 01

  There's not, I wish there was more, but um, there was a little bit.

• 53:29Speaker 02

  The humor was pretty funny.

• 53:32Speaker 01

  There was some, there was some, but, you know, it it did, it just balanced everything out. And while I was there studying, I used to get up about four, four thirty every morning, and I would write, and I would-

• 53:46Speaker 02

  So you slept in, because this is, you're getting to sleep, but you get two extra hours of sleep.

• 53:50Speaker 01

  It's just, it's like a lie in, it's like a lie, you're right, you're right, but I was writing content, and I was writing the content which is now Headspace, you know, so weekends, mornings, evenings, I would just be be writing.

• 54:02Speaker 02

  And so there was never an idea that you were going to try to be a professional circus performer, this was some, just something that was interesting to you, but the intention was always to teach these principles that you had learned?

• 54:14Speaker 01

  Absolutely, I I think there was a time, you know, maybe like a year in, where I was just enjoying it so much, you know, kind of thought, mm. I'd say, I suppose a little bit of work kind of wouldn't be a bad thing. But it was never, I was far too old to be a, you know, I was at this, at this stage, I was thirty two. When I started the, the degree, they even made me sign a special form to say, look, I'm probably gonna get injured. If I do, it's not your fault. The rest of the kids were like, they were eighteen years old, you know.

• 54:42Speaker 02

  What is the, uh, application process? Do you have to go in and perform?

• 54:46Speaker 01

  You do. Uh, but I was in Moscow, so they let me do a, a video audition. So I had some friends in Moscow with a video and we.

• 54:54Speaker 02

  So you're juggling while like walking on a bouncing ball or something like that?

• 54:58Speaker 01

  That kind of thing, that kind of thing.

• 54:59Speaker 02

  Right. Very interesting. Alright, so, so you're beginning to teach.

• 55:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:05Speaker 02

  And my understanding is that it's sort of something that goes from the one-on-one to small groups to larger groups.

• 55:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:11Speaker 02

  And ultimately to kind of through your partner Rich.

• 55:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:15Speaker 02

  Uh, beginning to, you know, embrace the idea of using the web to kind of scale what you're doing.

• 55:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I was actually doing one-to-one in a clinic. So it was a mainstream kind of clinic where people would go if they were struggling with sleeping or high blood pressure or anxiety, and often it would be alongside traditional kind of medical treatment. Um, sometimes people self-referred and would come along. And, and I met Rich. Rich was just burnt out from working in advertising, just completely burnt out and wanted to learn how to meditate. And at the time, I knew I wanted to do something more than one-to-one, but I didn't know how to do it. So we did a skill swap and Rich would come along for an hour at the clinic. We'd do a session and then we'd pop across the road to the coffee shop and he gave me Marketing 101.

• 56:02Speaker 01

  And after meeting up over a period of about three or four months, we both knew that there was, there was something there and he was really excited about the opportunity. I was. And so we started to talk about, okay, what does it look like, you know? We spent probably about a year working on just the brand.

• 56:19Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 56:19Speaker 01

  So what, what does a brand do? What does it feel like? How does it talk? Cause brands haven't really existed in meditation before.

• 56:25Speaker 02

  Hmm. And your idea was, well, we must have this orange ball.

• 56:30Speaker 01

  That was the main idea. I think that was the, that was the principle.

• 56:33Speaker 02

  This is what you're bringing to the equation.

• 56:35Speaker 01

  Actually, that would make more sense than, our original idea was this, our brief for it was, how do we create something that we could talk about to our mates in the pub without them laughing about it? And that was the brief for Headspace. And.

• 56:51Speaker 01

  Maybe there's still a little bit of that in there now as well.

• 56:54Speaker 02

  And where does the orange ball come from? Is that from the juggling?

• 56:58Speaker 01

  It should be, right? Because that was a complete coincidence, I think. The originally, I don't know if you saw the old logo, it was actually a person sitting on a chair. And it was just how, like a feeling of headspace. So it was, the ball was actually their head and it was sitting on top of the body. And we had about four different colors for it. And eventually, as it usually happens, it just gets distilled and simplified. And yeah, and it became just the orange dot.

• 57:26Speaker 02

  Interesting. Well, it's, it's, you know, I think that, that back to this idea of kind of the postmodern autobiography of a yogi. You know, you look at Yogananda's life and he emigrates to the United States with this idea of trying to, you know, translate these principles of yoga and teach them to a Western audience. And so what does he do? Well, he creates a bit of a following and then he starts to construct these edifices, these ashrams, these giant, they're beautiful.

• 57:58Speaker 01

  In some of the best surf spots in the world.

• 58:00Speaker 02

  Exactly. Swamis in Encinitas. That's why it's called Swamis.

• 58:03Speaker 01

  Seriously, if he hadn't built on there, there might be a headspace construction going on down there right now.

• 58:08Speaker 02

  Right. And of course, the beautiful one in the Palisades, which are wonderful. But, but in 2015, that's kind of an outdated modality. So it's sort of, you know, what was once the ashram is now the app. Because the app is the forum around which groups can congregate. And that can be done, you know, liberated from geography. So, you know, the app is your ashram, really.

• 58:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, and

• 58:38Speaker 02

  I mean, to take, not to use that term, because I know that you don't want, you know, you're trying to, you know, avoid that kind of thing. But, you know, I think it's an, it's an apt analogy.

• 58:47Speaker 01

  I think for most people, realistically, given the amount of commitments and responsibilities they have in their life, it's highly unusual to be able to kind of disappear off to some mountain top and learn meditation. And there's no need to, like, that is the, I kind of would never have believed that before I went. But, but genuinely, like, The present moment is with us wherever we are in the world. We don't need to go to the Himalayas to experience the present moment. So if there is a way of bringing those teachings from the Himalayas and kind of making them accessible to somebody when they, I don't know, they're sitting in the car park at work before they go in at the morning, or they're sitting on the train going into work in the morning, or they're at home after the kids have just gone to sleep for their morning nap, whatever it might be.

• 59:32Speaker 01

  It just seems like such an incredible precious opportunity. You know, people often say there's a paradox, you know, like meditation on a phone? Like, does that make sense? And absolutely, it makes sense. You know, that's where people are right now. So that's the place to kind of meet them, I think.

• 59:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, there is that sort of inherent irony because it's about like getting off your phone. But now it's using your phone to be more mindful about your use of the phone, I suppose. I mean, it's just a tool, you know, whether you're using it for self-improvement or otherwise.

• 1:00:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:06Speaker 02

  But it's this idea, in the same way that your logo was distilled down from, you know, a head with a balloon on it or whatever, getting distilled down just to the circle. It's this distillation of these principles and these teachings down to their very, you know, sort of core essence. And then trying to relate those, you know, to a Western audience. Is there sort of a, what is the reception in a more traditional? Like, what are your fellow monks or people that know what you're doing? I mean, do they say, oh, you're bastardizing this? I mean, when authenticity is everything, you know, what is?

• 1:00:46Speaker 02

  Is there some level of like, you know, de minimis sacrifice that takes place by not doing it the way that you were actually taught?

• 1:00:55Speaker 01

  That is the risk, I think. And I would say that's what's kind of kept us honest in a way, kind of recognizing that there is that risk and working really hard to maintain that authenticity. When I first set about doing it, I would say the fear level was quite high in that community of, oh, my God, what's he doing?

• 1:01:19Speaker 01

  And definitely when Rich and I started, all the stuff we would get, like negative stuff, would always be from people in the Buddhist community, always. Even when we just ran events in London, it's like, how dare you charge people to come to an event? Not recognizing that actually if you go to any Buddhist centre anywhere these days, they charge you, they have to, because otherwise they can't afford to keep the place open. Um, so we, you know, definitely there was some kind of concern and it's changed over the years. And I have to say, you know, for me, that's a really, personally, that's a really important thing. Um, to have the support of my teachers, that's a really important thing.

• 1:02:02Speaker 01

  And I've chatted to a couple of people recently, there was a researcher we were talking to. And he said that a friend of his who's been, he was a monk and he'd been meditating for about thirty years, runs a meditation centre. And now whenever anyone goes there, he gets them away from the, the weekly session, he gets them to use Headspace. Somebody came back from Nepal and they'd gone to a monastery where a lot of westerns go to. And when they go there, before they do any kind of the longer meditations, they're advised to use Headspace.

• 1:02:33Speaker 01

  So I don't know if that kind of says anything or, or not, but there's, there's a sense at least internally here that, that we are not misrepresenting the teachings and have somehow managed to, to maintain that sense of lineage or authenticity.

• 1:02:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's, that's beautiful. I mean, that's gotta be kind of a tight rope walk, you know, right?

• 1:02:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's delicate. It's really, it's really delicate.

• 1:02:56Speaker 02

  And, and I think it's always open to this idea that if somebody wants to go deeper, there are the, you know, the resources are there to do that, so.

• 1:03:05Speaker 01

  And that was always our thing, like, there are teachers out there who are far more qualified and experienced than I am, you know, and there are so many different places you can go and learn about this stuff, but they will only ever attract a certain number of people. And we're probably talking less than five percent of the world's population. So what about the other ninety-five percent who have never even? Heard of meditation or looked at it or have thought about it and thought it wasn't for them or tried it and felt they couldn't do it.

• 1:03:34Speaker 02

  Or automatically turned off to it because of, you know, sort of reasons that have nothing to do with the value of it because of what somebody's wearing or something.

• 1:03:43Speaker 01

  Exactly, and that's what excites me, kind of, you know, putting meditation in front of people who've never even thought about it or putting it in places where it's never existed, that's, I think, what kind of drives the passion.

• 1:03:55Speaker 02

  Well, let's talk about the science and the benefits, right? Let's talk about neuroplasticity, let's talk about focus, all of these things. I mean, let's, let's assume that, that, you know, I'm a listener, I'm listening to this and this is my first introduction to meditate. I mean, of course, I've heard of meditation, but, you know, I'm not convinced that this is something that I really need to spend any time on.

• 1:04:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:24Speaker 01

  So, number one, I would say, I never tell anyone they should meditate. I would just say from a scientific point of view, look, there are these research studies that have been done, and in these research studies, there have been many, many benefits that have been discovered. I would, I would recommend that you have a look at those. If you're inspired to try, give it a go. Like, base it on, don't do it because someone else tells you to do it. Do it because you feel motivated to do it, and then continue to do it because you recognize the benefit yourself. In terms of the medicine internally, they're not obviously with us in the recording studio today. I would always defer, we have a chief medical officer, Dr.

• 1:05:07Speaker 01

  David Cox, and we also have a neuroscientist, Claudia. And both of them are far more adept in talking about this stuff. But, as you mentioned earlier, there are over 5,000 papers, peer-reviewed, published studies, showing that meditation, mindfulness can help us with everything from reducing anxiety, reducing depression and the relapse of depression, decreasing the incidence of insomnia, improving heart health, decreasing our cholesterol levels.

• 1:05:38Speaker 01

  All the way through to, I mean, there's sort of stuff around chronic pain, there's increasing levels of empathy. And sometimes you look at like the spread of this and it's like, you know, how is this even possible? How can one thing like have this impact on so many different things? And I think we just underestimate the the power of the mind. The body and mind aren't separate. We know when we get stressed in the mind that we feel it. We experience it in the body. We know when we're really relaxed and happy, we feel that in the body. So it's maybe not such a surprise that we see these kind of benefits arising.

• 1:06:16Speaker 02

  Well, when we look at the amount of time, energy and money spent on sort of taking care of other things that are less important, you know, whether it's like, you know, shampoo for your hair or brushing your teeth.

• 1:06:27Speaker 01

  Speak for yourself.

• 1:06:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, right, right. You know, what do we do to tend to our mental health? Well, we, oh, I guess, you know, when we get home, we pour ourselves a cocktail and we watch Dancing with the Stars and that's our, that's our way of relaxing or watch a football game or something like that. And that's not tending to, you know, that's not doing sort of mental pushups.

• 1:06:49Speaker 01

  Not at all. And there's just, you know, there's different ways. Some people, like, it's interesting when I look at, you know, we work with professional sports people and sports teams and corporations and for them it's more about focus, productivity. And for them it is about, it's like training the mind, like you say, it's almost mental pushups.

• 1:07:07Speaker 02

  For a very specific purpose.

• 1:07:09Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:07:09Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:07:10Speaker 01

  And then I think for, I actually believe for a bigger demographic, it's more like, you know, how can I sleep better at night? How can I feel a little less stressed? How can I have better relationships with those around me? And those things, they're huge. Make even a small shift in one of those areas in life and that is a life that's transformed right away.

• 1:07:31Speaker 02

  So I take it that although your doctor before you left on your, your adventure to become a monk had suggested that you take Prozac, that Prozac at some point did not become necessary?

• 1:07:43Speaker 01

  I never took Prozac.

• 1:07:45Speaker 02

  You seem like an affable, happy guy, you know?

• 1:07:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I, I never went down that, that route. Well, that's very tempting sometimes when, you know, a doctor, a person in authority tells us to do something, it can be tempting to go down there.

• 1:07:59Speaker 02

  I mean, when you look at at sort of this the state of mental health and the extent to which we, you know, we're so quick to medicate.

• 1:08:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:08Speaker 02

  People to deal with their, you know, sort of happiness issues, depression, et cetera. I mean, what do you make of that?

• 1:08:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm definitely not anti-medication. I feel that there are times when it's extremely important and very, very helpful. So I don't think it's meditation versus medication. But I do think we have a tendency, and I would say this is especially true in the US, having lived in a lot of different countries, to over-medicate and to medicate a little too quickly. Someone joked to me when I said I was moving to LA and they said, wow, over there you can hear people rattle as they walk down the street, the pills in their pockets kind of shaking around. And I am constantly astonished, not only how many people self-medicate, but also how

• 1:09:01Speaker 01

  openly people talk about it, kind of the.

• 1:09:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's no stigma.

• 1:09:05Speaker 01

  There's no stigma whatsoever, and there is in some countries, I would say. So I would love to see a shift. I'd love to see a shift in terms of prevention. So I think far too often in our society, we wait until something happens, until trying to kind of fix it. And that's what the medication kind of thing is, you know? There's already a problem. If we can get into a pattern in society, whether it's ourselves, the next generation, preferably both, where we're taking preventative care of the mind, where we're actually carving out prioritizing, what is 10, 15 minutes in a day, whatever it might be, to look after, to clean the mind each day. We don't even need to get to the point where we have to decide whether to medicate

• 1:09:49Speaker 01

  or not. Like, that's, I think, the potential.

• 1:09:52Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm. That's beautifully put. And, and to me, that's the future of medicine, you know, functional medicine, preventive medicine, you know, in the physical realm as well.

• 1:10:03Speaker 01

  And it's no coincidence, you know, we have, we have fifty-four research studies on the table right now, thirty-four are in motion, and these are all reverse engineered. So these are hospitals, clinics, universities coming to us and saying, we believe that mindfulness and meditation can be a meaningful intervention with these types of symptoms. Can we test it? And we're seeing time and time again, it makes a difference. And the more the medical community embrace that, the more I think we'll see it move from, right now, it's being seen more of a treatment, of management treatment, but I think over time, it will move from treatment to management to prevention.

• 1:10:47Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm. We're talking about the health impacts, we're talking about the improved ability to focus, we're talking about the impact on happiness. But for me, like, in my personal experience, the most profound impact that meditation has had on me is, well, first, sort of the watershed moment of, of truly sort of beginning to understand that there's a difference between who I am and what my brain is saying, the mental chatter of my mind. And then kind of tangentially to that, this idea of story. You know, you talked about the power of story, your story, how everybody has a story. And we all tell

• 1:11:27Speaker 02

  ourselves a story about ourselves. And generally, unless you're an incredibly well-adjusted person, you're not, you're usually not telling the greatest story about yourself. And you're hanging your hat on certain things that may have happened to you when you were younger, and you use those as reasons to do or not do things. And what meditation has given me is First, just a greater awareness of that simple fact and then tools and the sort of acuity and ability to reframe that story, to tell a new story.

• 1:11:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:58Speaker 02

  To empower me to understand that I have control over that.

• 1:12:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:03Speaker 02

  And I don't have to be a passive, you know, I don't have to be a passenger on that bus where this is just, you know, I'm assuming that this is just what it is.

• 1:12:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a beautiful way of describing it, I think. You know, so often words like freedom and liberation are used around meditation. Sometimes it can sound a bit kind of much to sort of liberation, but there is. It's a sense of being liberated. We let go. We put down our baggage from the past. We let go of our expectations for the future. And in that moment, we're free. There is freedom. And when we're not free, like it's almost self-imposed, but we don't realize what it is we're doing that is causing this sense of being constrained. And then when we discover that sense of freedom, I just think, yeah, life is, life is changed.

• 1:12:53Speaker 02

  Uh huh. Speaking of life changing, you're a father now.

• 1:12:57Speaker 01

  I am.

• 1:12:58Speaker 02

  So how does this color your experience as a meditator, as a, as a business person?

• 1:13:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I mean, compared to you, which I'm very, very inexperienced father.

• 1:13:10Speaker 02

  Yes, but you're, but you're in the young years where it's most, you know, it's pretty intense.

• 1:13:17Speaker 01

  It is, and I, we're, I think we're almost, we're almost six months in.

• 1:13:22Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:13:23Speaker 01

  So we have a baby boy called Harley and he's a joy. I, like, every new parent will say, I'm sure, it is both a joy, but also incredibly hard work. And definitely, look, juggling, juggling headspace and Harley is, is tricky, you know, as it is for any kind of, I was gonna say, working parent, doesn't matter whether you're working or not, looking after a baby or kids, it's a full-time job right there, you know? And I think the demands of headspace in so much as kind of traveling a lot make it, make it quite, quite difficult.

• 1:14:04Speaker 01

  But at the same time, it just makes me really cherish the time when I am at home with my wife and Harley. It just makes me enjoy that much more.

• 1:14:13Speaker 02

  Have you found that you need to increase your meditation game? Or have you found that now you understand why people give you the excuse of?

• 1:14:23Speaker 01

  I don't have any time. Yeah, I do. I have a much better understanding. I still believe, and at the moment, I mean, I only have one. So at the moment, I am able to find the time and I carve out the time.

• 1:14:39Speaker 02

  And what is your routine now?

• 1:14:42Speaker 01

  Well, before Harley was born, I would get up very early. I would do my meditation.

• 1:14:48Speaker 02

  Very early is a sliding, is a very relative term with you? Like, are we talking 2:30 or?

• 1:14:55Speaker 01

  Not that early. No, so I suppose it's not that early. I'd probably get up at like 5:00. I'd meditate for about an hour and then I'd go surfing with Richie. And then we'd have some breakfast and we'd come into work.

• 1:15:06Speaker 02

  Where do you go, where do you like to surf from?

• 1:15:08Speaker 01

  If it's a working morning, so during the week, we just go local. So OP or Venice, somewhere like that. But if it's the weekend, we'll go a bit further, further afield, north or south. But obviously now, that's changed a little bit. My wife is up during the night. And so my kind of shift, if you like, is the morning shift because I'm up early anyway. I do that while she kind of gets some more sleep. So I tend to spend that time now between sort of 5:00 and 7:00 in the morning. Looking after Harley, we hang out a bit, we play a bit. Sometimes I'll do a bit of meditation. If he's settled and quite kind of content, then we'll do, you know, I'll do a bit of meditation

• 1:15:53Speaker 01

  and he just kind of hangs out.

• 1:15:56Speaker 02

  Very cool. Well, Andy, listen, I tried this meditation thing. I just, I can't get my brain to shut off. It just doesn't, it doesn't work for me.

• 1:16:07Speaker 01

  Really?

• 1:16:07Speaker 02

  What do you, no, I'm saying, what do you, you know, what's your, I'm not talking about me. I'm just saying, you must have people say that to you all the time. Like, what is your, how do you respond to that?

• 1:16:16Speaker 01

  Well, I get very excited.

• 1:16:17Speaker 02

  Lament.

• 1:16:18Speaker 01

  I get very excited about it because I know there is an, there is an opportunity for transformation right there because there is nobody who cannot meditate. And what excites me about it is, is that person hasn't yet found or hasn't yet been shown the way to approach it in such a way that they get to experience what they think it might be. And so it's, it's, it's helping them find that, that approach, you know, because thoughts are thoughts, you know, that, that underlying sense of stillness and calm is always with us. It's not unique to one individual.

• 1:16:59Speaker 01

  Some people find it easier to let go of thoughts and experience that calm, but everybody has the potential to do it. Some people experience it the moment they first sit down. For others, it can take a number of days. For others, it can take a number of weeks. But helping people understand that it's not about switching off thoughts, it's not about clearing the mind. If that's the way you approach meditation, then of course you're gonna feel terrible about it because it is the nature of the mind to think. So if we can kind of flip that on its head and say, okay, instead meditation is actually about how can we learn to step back out of the, out of the traffic, out of the stream of thought and simply be present, then it doesn't matter, actually.

• 1:17:44Speaker 01

  If we can really feel confident and comfortable, that doesn't matter if the mind is busy, whether it's quiet. So you can have the busiest mind in the world and you're okay with it.

• 1:17:54Speaker 02

  My friend Charlie, do you know Charlie Knowles, meditation teacher?

• 1:17:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know the name.

• 1:17:59Speaker 02

  Do you know Tom Knowles? He's a well-known Vedic.

• 1:18:03Speaker 01

  It's familiar.

• 1:18:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, Charlie's his son. And Charlie does a lot of stuff around Venice. He started this thing called The Path.

• 1:18:10Speaker 01

  Yes, I have heard about that with Dina. Is that with?

• 1:18:13Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, I don't know her, but yeah.

• 1:18:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think so.

• 1:18:16Speaker 02

  Right, right, so they have it in New York.

• 1:18:18Speaker 01

  Yes, that's right.

• 1:18:19Speaker 02

  And Charlie famously says that meditation is failure proof. You cannot fail at meditation. Simply by virtue of the fact that you're doing it.

• 1:18:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:18:28Speaker 02

  You are succeeding at it because when that thought enters and then you develop an awareness that you're having that, you can always bring it back. And that is the practice.

• 1:18:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:38Speaker 02

  Right? Is that fair?

• 1:18:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. My, my teacher kind of used to sum it up like this. He used to say, there is no such thing as good or bad meditation. There is only awareness or non-awareness.

• 1:18:48Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 1:18:49Speaker 01

  And that's it. You can't fail.

• 1:18:51Speaker 02

  I love that. I think that's a good place to wrap it up.

• 1:18:55Speaker 01

  Sounds good.

• 1:18:55Speaker 02

  But I do want to know what's in store, if you're willing to share for the future, for version three.

• 1:19:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:04Speaker 02

  Space, like where, where are you taking this global domination of meditation?

• 1:19:11Speaker 01

  Well, we're taking a very physical, tangible sense. We are taking it to English speaking territory. So very excited. We're heading off to Canada this coming week. Then we're off to Hong Kong and Singapore, Scandinavia, Holland. So lots of, lots of countries around the world where English, you know, English language is widely spoken. In terms of the development of V3, we're going to do it in exactly the same way as we did V2. So V1 we built and then we just listened and we listened to feedback and we listened to what the, the user wanted and we put that together in a plan and we built V2.

• 1:19:54Speaker 01

  And when we built V2, kind of, we're a lot further along the line now. We're closer to what we originally intended, what we wanted to build. We're not there yet. I think there are, there is certain elements that are very obvious. Kind of the community is one. I don't think we've even begun with the community. At the moment, there's the buddy system where you can have up to kind of five friends or family. It's like a gym buddy and, you know, you can check in on them, they can check in on you. I think we'd like to develop the sense of community. So traditionally, meditation, there was always like a teacher and there was a set of techniques and then there was a community and those three things sit together, kind of supporting one another, like three legs of a stool. So we're really

• 1:20:34Speaker 01

  keen to kind of make the community a bigger part of it. But yeah, most of all, we'll, we'll listen to the community, even in terms of the packs right now. It's very democratic. We have a list of suggested packs. Once a month, it goes out to the community. They get to vote on it and whatever they vote on, that gets recorded as the, as the next pack.

• 1:20:58Speaker 02

  Interesting. I mean, there's so many cool things happening in the kind of health space, in the app health space with these apps getting smarter and smarter about reading your behavior patterns and your, like, kind of what you do and anticipating, you know, there's got to be a way to kind of build that in to sort of have, whether it's something as basic as reminders, but also, you know, hey, here's the part of the day when your, your heart rate starts to go up or, you know, these kinds of things.

• 1:21:24Speaker 01

  There's definitely stuff like calendar integration and all that sort of thing that we're, we're having there for sure. And together with kind of reminders and things, but in fact, there's even, it's fairly rudimentary, but there's reminder sort of function in there now. I think one interesting area is, is wearables and we've not really kind of talked about it. I have really mixed feelings about it. I think there is, there is something interesting there in that there is the potential, again, for, it's a conversation to take place. So let's just say it's a watch and the watch recognizes that your heart rate is spiking. Okay. It's kind of interesting if your watch in recognizing that can then suggest to you

• 1:22:05Speaker 01

  and serve you up a little exercise, a headspace exercise to do. Like, that's a really nice conversation to be able to have. Like, it's a nice intervention to be able to have.

• 1:22:17Speaker 01

  The tricky thing with wearables is meditation is not kind of goal orientated. You know, it's about kind of letting go. And so it's a tricky balance of not getting people too obsessed in the data. So we're just playing around with that at the moment, just trying to find the optimum kind of balance.

• 1:22:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's very interesting, very interesting because you know, the typical Westerner needs that goal.

• 1:22:43Speaker 01

  They love, yeah.

• 1:22:44Speaker 02

  I gotta get through and the app is sort of orchestrated around catering to that in the sense that like, hey, here's your first 10 days.

• 1:22:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:53Speaker 02

  Get to 30 days.

• 1:22:54Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:22:55Speaker 02

  And so.

• 1:22:55Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:22:56Speaker 02

  There is some recognition of that.

• 1:22:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, we've tried to do it in such a way that it's still, it's sensitive of that need to want to kind of progress and go on a journey. And yet, at the same time, there's still a sense of sort of freedom and letting go and not trying to be too focused on the future. Instead of being more sort of concerned with the present moment.

• 1:23:19Speaker 02

  Mm hmm. Very cool. Well, I'll be excited to see how that develops.

• 1:23:23Speaker 01

  Thanks, man.

• 1:23:23Speaker 02

  And maybe any final thoughts for the new meditator? Some words of encouragement or maybe just a tip or two that.

• 1:23:32Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:23:32Speaker 02

  People could take away.

• 1:23:34Speaker 01

  Number one, it only works if you do it. You can think about it all day long, but unless you actually do it. I met people and they said, oh, it's not really working for me. And I said, how often do you do it? Well, maybe let's go once a month or something. Okay, think about going to the gym once a month. Are we really going to see any kind of improvements? Probably not. So prioritizing it, like unless you do it first thing in the morning, there is a very good chance that it's going to slip down your to do list. And you're going to find yourself in the evening, in bed, tired, thinking, oh, no, I haven't done my meditation again. And even feeling stressed or guilty about this thing that you started doing to feel less stressed about.

• 1:24:18Speaker 01

  So do it first thing in the day. Kind of almost attach it to something. So it's like, okay, shower and meditate or breakfast and meditate. So it almost becomes part of your routine in the same way as you brush your teeth or whatever else you do in the morning. But be flexible. If you can't do it in the morning, find another, another time of the day. Start off realistic. You're a runner. You know, like you'd never.

• 1:24:43Speaker 01

  I'm sure have never have attempted a marathon without starting at a slightly kind of, you know, shorter period, right? And for some reason, I don't know why it is, but there's this idea that in order to get any benefit out of meditation, we have to do a long time, right? You have to sit there for an hour. We don't. Science has shown us that the benefits are felt and experienced within five minutes.

• 1:25:07Speaker 02

  And now do you look back on your 19 hours a day? What was that all about?

• 1:25:12Speaker 01

  Well, it's different, you know? I guess like anything, you know, there's the subtleties. But, um, so be realistic, 10 minutes a day is fine, you know? Download the app, it's free to download. In the Take 10, that 10 minute thing, you can use that for the rest of your life. We've had people use the free bit for two years.

• 1:25:33Speaker 02

  And they never subscribe.

• 1:25:35Speaker 01

  And honestly, and I really mean this genuinely, we put it out there so that people who didn't want to subscribe or couldn't afford to subscribe were still able to use it and to feel part of the community. I'm happy if people use it in that way. So, download the app, try Take 10, prioritize it in your day and know that it only works if you do it.

• 1:26:00Speaker 02

  Right on. Thanks for talking to me.

• 1:26:03Speaker 01

  Hey, it's a pleasure. Thanks for having me on, mate.

• 1:26:04Speaker 02

  So if you're digging on Andy and you want to learn more about him, you can find him on social media. You're on Instagram and Twitter.

• 1:26:12Speaker 01

  I am indeed.

• 1:26:13Speaker 02

  On Twitter, it's get underscore Headspace, right?

• 1:26:16Speaker 01

  On Twitter, it's Andy underscore Headspace. We have the Headspace account, which is get underscore Headspace and I'm Andy underscore Headspace.

• 1:26:24Speaker 02

  And then on Instagram, it's just your name, right?

• 1:26:25Speaker 01

  Just my name.

• 1:26:26Speaker 02

  And you put a comma. And there is the podcast, of which I was honored to be a guest.

• 1:26:30Speaker 01

  There is indeed.

• 1:26:31Speaker 02

  Headspace Radio or Radio Headspace.

• 1:26:32Speaker 01

  So we're doing a little swap here.

• 1:26:33Speaker 02

  I know.

• 1:26:34Speaker 01

  A little exchange.

• 1:26:35Speaker 02

  Awesome, man. I really appreciate it. That was fantastic.

• 1:26:39Speaker 01

  Pleasure, no, thank you so much.

• 1:26:40Speaker 02

  Peace.

• 1:26:45Speaker 02

  All right, how about that, you guys? I would call that another powerful, life-changing conversation. If you have struggled with these ideas of meditation and mindfulness, I really hope that Andy cleared a few things up for you. I hope that he took some of the mystery out of it and finally inspired you to, once and for all, begin a journey that truly will improve your life in countless ways. I can attest to that. Keep sending me the questions for future Q and A podcasts to [email protected]. For all the information, education products, tools, resources, and inspiration you need to take your health, your wellness, your fitness, and your self-actualization to the next level, go to richroll.com, peruse our nutrition products, our education products, and yes, our garments, all made with 100% organic cotton.

• 1:27:30Speaker 02

  If you're into online courses, I got two of those at mindbodygreen.com, The Art of Living with Purpose and The Ultimate Guide to Plant-Based Nutrition. Really proud of those. Check those out. They're right on the homepage of that site. You can find information about them there, again, at mindbodygreen.com. If you've been enjoying this podcast, please consider giving us a review on iTunes. Pick up the free app to listen to episodes older than the most recent 50 you see on iTunes. Just the Rich Roll app in the App Store. Easy to find and totally free. Support the show by telling a friend. Keep using the Amazon banner ad and keep sharing it on social media. Yes, you guys, I love that. All right, see you in a couple of days. Peace. Plants.