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Buddhist Themes in The White Lotus, Explained | Josh Bearman
01:09:07
Dan deconstructs the Dharmic elements of the popular HBO show, with the co-host of The White Lotus Official Season 3 companion podcast. Joshuah Bearman is a writer and film producer in Los Angeles. He has written for Wired, GQ, Harper’s, Rolling...
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- [00:00]
Josh Bearman
Foreign.
- [00:05]
Dan Harris
This is the 10% Happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello party people. How we doing Today? We are going to deconstruct the Buddhist themes in the amazing HBO TV series the White Lotus Season 3. By my reckoning, there's never been a more popular work of art that I'm aware of that has dealt with Buddhist themes in such a rich and robust way. I mean, you can maybe look at the Matrix, but the Matrix, which came out many years ago, didn't deal with Buddhism head on in the way the White Lotus did. And it's caused this huge conversation which I think is is so interesting and so fun for me as somebody who loves the show and who loves the Dharma. So today we're dropping a special episode. We usually don't drop episodes on Thursdays, but we rushed this episode into the feed because we got so excited about it. Side note, I want to thank many people on the team who made this possible, including Marissa Schneiderman, our senior producer, and Caroline Keenan, another of our producers, and Abby Smith, who's another key member of the team. But there are many people who did a lot of hard work to get this episode ready for you. My guest is a guy I just met who I feel like I could easily be friends with. I liked him immensely and immediately. Josh Behrman is a journalist, a screenwriter and a producer. He is best known for writing long form non fiction. In fact, he wrote the story upon which the movie Argo was based. His work regularly appears in publications like Wired, Rolling Stone, Harpers, and the New York Times. And most relevant for this episode is that he is the co co host of the White Lotus Official Season 3 Companion Podcast along with another great writer, Gia Tolentino, who writes for the New Yorker, who sadly is not part of this episode. But I'm a big fan of hers. Anyway, Josh and I discuss a whole lot here. We talk about how Josh got interested in Buddhism, how Mike White, the creator and writer and director of the show, got into Buddhism. We talk about Buddhist concepts and themes that define season three of the White Lotus and also other seasons. We talk about Buddhist notions of self and identity, some of the paradoxes and pitfalls of Buddhism, the perils of seeking pleasure. We talk about how we crave certainty as a bulwark against anxiety. We talk about the importance of repetition, of simple Buddhist ideas that we are programmed to forget. We talk about the Buddhist concept of attachment and the three jewels of Buddhism and the importance of relationships. We'll get started with Josh Bearman right after this. I have a strangely busy travel schedule coming up in the next couple of months. But the thing that I'm really looking forward to, the bright spot on my calendar is in a few weeks I'm going to Montauk, which is one of my favorite places in the world. It's on the eastern tip of Long Island. It's primarily known as a summer spot, but it's actually beautiful year round. I'm going to Montauk with 1, 2, 3, 4, at least four families that are close friends of ours. They all have children who get along really well with my child, and we'll all be staying not at hotels, but in houses. I love being in a big house with lots of other people. It is so much more personal and intimate than staying in a hotel with other families. With many of these families, we've gone to places like Florida and gotten Airbnbs together. Being able to stay together in a beautiful place is so much fun and again, so much more intimate. And here's the cool thing. If you're going to be traveling soon, you might actually be sitting on an Airbnb gold mine. You might be able to put your own residence up on Airbnb so you can actually earn money while you're taking a vacation. I'm a huge fan of Airbnb. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much@airbnb.com host as the founder of a pretty new small business, I can tell you that one of the biggest and most urgent issues is hiring. You want to hire the right person and you want to do it quickly. Just by way of an example, our most recent hire is the mighty Abby Smith, who's my executive assistant and also plays many key roles throughout the team. And she was very much the right person and immediately improved my life and the lives of everybody around me by way more than 10%. So if hiring is an issue for you, Indeed is all you need. Stop struggling to get your job post seen on other job sites. Indeed's Sponsored Jobs help help you stand out and hire fast. With Sponsored Jobs, your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidates so you can reach the people you want faster and it makes a huge difference. According to INDEED data, Sponsored Jobs posted directly on indeed have 45% more applications than non sponsored jobs. I will say, as as happy as I and the rest of the team are with the aforementioned Abby Smith, the whole process might have been a lot quicker if we were using indeed. So lesson learned. Plus, with Indeed Sponsored Jobs, there are no monthly subscriptions, no long term contracts and you only pay for results. How fast is Indeed in the minute? I've been talking to you about this. 23 hires were made on Indeed according to Indeed data. There's no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed and listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit. To get your jobs more visibility@ Indeed.com happier just go to Indeed.com happier right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. That actually really helps. Indeed.com happier terms and conditions apply. Hiring Indeed is all you need. Josh Bearman, welcome to the show.
- [06:20]
Josh Bearman
Thanks for having me.
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Dan Harris
I'm excited to have you.
- [06:23]
Josh Bearman
Excited to chat.
- [06:24]
Dan Harris
Yeah. You and I share many mutual friends and also mutual obsessions, including the White Lotus and Buddhism. Before we get into the themes of the show, I'd be curious just to hear like, to what extent have you looked at Buddhism? Why is it interesting to you? Why. Why did you spend so much time talking about it on on your podcasts? A little backstory from you.
- [06:50]
Josh Bearman
Sure. My Buddhist insight, such as it is, and my exposure, I guess, to Buddhism was really through my therapist, who I had a therapist for about eight to 10 years somewhere in there in my 40s. So this is my one stretch really, with a therapist. And she happened to be a Buddhist nun to such a degree that I don't actually know her real name. All I know her by is Anila Tenzin Lamo. Yeah. And in fact, I never have seen her. I only talked to her on the phone. I was referred to her by a friend. She lives somewhere else. We spoke on the phone for 10 years. I often imagine that she was just sort of like a talking star, you know, or like, like a lotus flower, like speaking to me or something. So she was a clinical psychologist, but she also was, I don't know, 30, 40 years deep into Tibetan Buddhism, as I think is maybe obvious from her name. And so that informed. That kind of ran through the therapeutic process. And I mean like Mike, Mike talks all about that. He sort of discovered Pima Chodron, I think. I actually don't know who he. Which kind of like Buddha self help books he came across. But I was also given some of those books. And then I started talking to Tenzin Lamo. And then this was all in the midst of kind of a personal crisis. And so that pulled me out of this nosedive. And part of the ideas that were helpful in that were these basically sort of like cribnotes versions of Buddhism. So it has sat with me And I see it in places, but I gotta say, I definitely really saw it to a strong degree in White Lotus, even season one, which is not explicitly about that. And then of course in this season as well.
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Dan Harris
Just to say Pema Chodron is an eminent Western Tibetan Buddhist nun who's been on the show a couple times. I'll drop some links to my conversations with her in the show notes. She's pretty incredible. But you mentioned Mike and his connection to Buddhism. If memory serves, his story is not dissimilar to yours and also to mine where he kind of hit skids a little bit and got interested in Buddhism. How much do you know about his, his background with this stuff?
- [09:08]
Josh Bearman
I, I only know what he. I mean, he's talked about it in interviews and I've talked about it with him a little bit. I know him from before White Lotus, professionally and socially. And I knew he talked about it. I mean, years ago when I first worked with him was like 12, 13, 14 years ago. So it was actually before I had any exposure to it. And I remember kind of that he had, there was some interest and thoughts about it, but it wasn't very explicit. It didn't come very much. Then I had sort of my whole encounter with it. And then now in the wake of White Lotus, it's become sort of part of the lore of his personal story. And we talked about it a little bit. I interviewed him for the official podcast and he didn't really say much more and actually I didn't pry. He's kind of, you know, doesn't like to talk about his work that much actually. So. So I was, I was treading a little bit carefully when I interviewed him. But it is very similar. I mean, fundamentally it's similar. I think he had a rough time in his professionally and personally. And then it was in my case, somebody like handed me a copy of Start where youe Are that was the first thing. And then, you know, it's like a classic, like read this. You know, and I think something similar had happened with him. And then I think it is also very similar in that he didn't become a serious practitioner. It was just that those ideas embedded themselves in his way of thinking about the world and his way of thinking about his art and craft and storytelling and so on.
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Dan Harris
Yeah, that all lands and again resonates with me just given that I had a cocaine fueled panic attack on national television and that's what got me interested in Buddhism. So many of us enter through the doorway of suffering, as they say in Buddhism.
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Josh Bearman
Right.
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Dan Harris
I want to dive into the show and the Buddhist themes in the show. But let me just kind of cop to something right from the jump that you and I are two white dudes talking about another white dude's rendering of an Eastern spiritual tradition on television. So. And also, neither of us is a Buddhist scholar. I have written a few books about meditation in the Dharma and, you know, do a lot of retreats and. And do my best to study it, but I'm not a monk or a scholar. So with those caveats issued, you and I will muddle through some pretty interesting territory. Does that all sound fair to you?
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Josh Bearman
That does, yes. Yeah. I don't pretend to be an expert in any way.
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Dan Harris
Well, pretending is a big theme on the show.
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Josh Bearman
That's true.
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Dan Harris
I identified seven themes that I. I want to talk to. Maybe we'll see if we get through all of them. But there's seven things that really stuck out to me, and one of them really is this idea of pretending, or to be more precise about it, and to use the language of the show, the idea that identity is a prison. I was struck in your interview with Mike that he said in some ways, the whole season was an exploration, a dramatic exploration of this idea. And he kind of thought about the season as. As a. And these are his words, a Buddhist parable about, you know, identity as a source of pain. And he hits it. He hits the theme, like, right in the first episode, where Piper is listening to a recorded talk from a Buddhist monk who says, and I'm going to quote here, identity is a prison. No one is spared this prison. Rich man, poor man, success or failure. We build the prison, lock ourselves inside, then throw away the key. Does that language land with you? Does it resonate?
- [12:44]
Josh Bearman
Yeah, for sure. I mean, when I was watching the pilot, which I saw early because we were, you know, I was ahead of this whole process. I heard that. And Piper sitting there listening on her audiobook, and I knew instantly, okay, this is what the show is about. It's the textual light motif. Right. Of the show. And also, I knew that he's interested in identity in general and is kind of opposed to the way that, like, looking at one's own identity has become a concretized, like, systematic way of thinking about the world. Identitarianism, basically, politically. And so then here he goes at it emotionally. Right. And so it's kind of an oblique way. It's a way to talk about it emotionally and then obliquely, sort of like the way identity has kind of reared its head in culture. And politics. Yeah, I found it to be very powerful. I mean, it's. I love. You know, the language is so simple and straightforward. This is why it was impactful for me when I encountered it sort of in this therapeutic setting. And I found it similarly impactful here, especially at the opening, because then you're like, okay, well, we've met all the characters. They've all been introduced now. They have strong identities. That's what character is. Right. So how are those identities going to be undone or subverted? Is anybody going to escape their identity? I listened to that several times, so I could remember specifically the wording because it's very succinct and it kind of says it all.
- [14:10]
Dan Harris
And it was interesting for me to listen to you talking to Mike about this. And it seems like this theme really plays out perhaps most strongly with two characters. And Mike describes this one is Tim Ratliff, the patriarch of the rich Southern family, who, as Mike describes it, has lived his life carrying around huge expectations from his family and the community, and, you know, has become a pillar of the community and then learns, you know, he's about to get arrested for something or probably get arrested for something, and feels this terror at the idea of, in Mike's words here, having the mask ripped off. So identity plays out in one way with Tim and then in another way with. What's the name of Walt Goggin's character again?
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Josh Bearman
Rick.
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Dan Harris
Rick, who is so trapped in his identity as a victim, you know, of this early trauma of losing his father. So trapped in that trauma that he, like, can't see the love that's available to him, like, in the present moment. You know, I personally, I found it to be a quite effective dramatic rendering of these ideas that can actually be, like, abstruse or esoteric.
- [15:30]
Josh Bearman
Yeah. I mean, that, I think, is kind of the main magic of the show of setting the taking this kind of format of White Lotus, which is essentially, you know, kind of a parlor drama. And parlor dramas are sort of embedded in, like, this. Like. Like social norms and, you know, and these kinds of things. And in this case. And. Which is what you would. Season one is, obviously, and season two in the sexual farce kind of mode, and then season three, explicitly putting it in this backdrop of a country that is Buddhist, and then that installment of the Yotus Hotel as kind of like a commodified wellness version of Buddhism. Right. Where people are meant to kind of have a quick epiphany or something. And, in fact, they're all challenged extremely. So I found that to Be very effective. You know, there's been a lot of everybody's like all a lot of chatter about the show and like who dies and who doesn't. And to some degree, I think that's not really actually the point. I think there are. It's sort of like an essay, you know, like a really great essay. You kind of can't really remember any of it. It's just like each line has a little kind of discovery in it. That's kind of how I felt watching the show. Of course, G and I had to like, examine the show in extreme analytical and thematic detail. So I feel very close to it as a text. So that's how I read it, as this kind of rich text and with these characters against this backdrop of Buddhism. And so the outcome isn't really that important to me. Which, by the way, and this might be on your list too, the final voiceover from that same monk is about how we all want our story to have a resolution. And this itself is a source of suffering and there is no resolution. And so it's kind of funny that then now there's all these people out on the Internet, like, clamoring over the resolution and it was stated explicitly in there, like the resolution's not actually that important.
- [17:29]
Dan Harris
Trust me. Dr. Bearman, I'm going to get to that closing speech from the monk, but let me just stay for a second on this identity as a prison. I kind of want to, if you'll humor me, I want to kind of hold forth on it and then get your response to my. My blathering.
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Josh Bearman
Yeah, I want to hear your thoughts. Yes, lay it on me.
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Dan Harris
Okay.
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Josh Bearman
Yeah.
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Dan Harris
There's an easy way to understand this and a trickier way to understand this.
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Josh Bearman
Okay.
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Dan Harris
The easy way to understand it is that if you're clinging to like a self limiting story about who you are, I'm this kind of person. I'm that kind of person. I am. You know, I have X kindness quotient and Y patience quotient. Like you're putting a ceiling on what you're capable of. And often when you're stuck in your own story, you're cut off from the rest of the world and you're fighting with the fluid nature of. Of reality. So it being stuck in an identity, you know, closes your mind. It limits your ability to connect with other people, to respond wisely to other people. As you mentioned, it also on a macro level, when we're stuck in identities, you know, polarized political identities, it can have a warping effect on democracy. But like on the show, it's much more on a micro level and how we're all kind of performing a version of ourselves. And, you know, this is, I think, true for, you know, especially in the era of Instagram, you know, this curated Persona version of ourselves as opposed to being real. That's one level. There's a deeper level I'll go to in a second. But, you know, does that all track for you?
- [19:10]
Josh Bearman
Yes, it does. I mean, it tracks for me, you know, in my own life. And I, to the degree that I, you know, have this kind of sense of Buddhism through my therapeutic experience, it also is a powerful idea. And then I feel like played out in the show was also a very powerful idea I had. Like I say, I don't know if you. I can't remember the degree to which this winds up in the podcast, but I had really seen this in season one. And then I asked Mike about it and he was like, I'm not so sure, but I'm pretty convinced. Actually. I rewatched season one and it is maybe an accident, but it is very clearly in there. The very first thing that Armand says when he's like waiting for the guest is make yourself have no identity. Try to make yourself sort of like an exchangeable, friendly faced widget of hospitality. And basically the whole time he's trying to efface his identity. And then when Belinda lays Tanya down, she's like, let go of your story. Every day is a new day. It doesn't have to be like the day before those ideas, just in those. Then that was in the spa, right? So it was this kind of like wellness version of that idea. And then all the characters are suffering in their own various ways. And the story is all very sympathetic to every character, even though there's kind of a putative villain and there are these extreme class differences and so on. And the suffering is universal except for the one character who basically escapes his identity, right? He, like, sees a whale and communes with the ocean. Is like, oh, what would happen if I just go like in the waves? Right, right. That's sort of the only way out. So that's, that's it's in practice. It's like in this one, it's very explicit because there's this narrative and you've got Piper seeking these things and then you've got these almost allegorical figures like Rick, who are archetypes of like, somebody who has no. Doesn't know how to love or be loved and is empty and is nothing. But you see this all the way through. And in season one, the other person who gets off the wheel is Armand because he dies. Which I thought that those two examples were very illustrative of this very same idea of identity as a prison. And so then now to see it kind of laid out explicitly, I thought was illuminating in a whole different way. Because everybody's encountering that idea on its face in season one, it's sort of like it's tacit. And in this one, it's, you know, it's the program.
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Dan Harris
I love that analysis of season one. I actually, just before I started this interview with you, decided to go back and watch season one yet again. I was just a couple minutes into it when I realized I needed to get my shit together for this.
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Josh Bearman
It's great.
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Dan Harris
It is great. It really is. Okay, but. But I do want to add that there is this, you know, in Buddhism, there's a deeper and more mysterious and brain breaking assertion here around the self, which is that the self is an illusion. Many people find that confusing. Have you bumped up against that and wrestled with it at all?
- [22:22]
Josh Bearman
I have in these kind of long conversations in therapy. I mean, and in some reading. Right. And I've thought about it in my own life, you know, I mean, there's sort of like this constant war, right. Like ourselves and everything else, basically. And I mean, also I've encountered this. You can come to that notion via like post structuralism, postmodernism and Derrida, where like everybody is a position in a web of language. Right. There's like other ways, there's neurological ways to arrive at that. Well, it's just a bunch of nerve tissue and electrical impulses. There's a lot of things that point towards that idea and how accepting that idea is ironically like a way of self care. Accepting that you have no self is like self care because the self and the needs of the self and the demands and the expectations, all the things that the characters deal with in White Lotus are sources of suffering and pain.
- [23:26]
Dan Harris
Yes. Yeah. I mean, I think you nailed it right there. From my point of view that I've often thought about the fact that the greatest form of self love or self compassion is to see that there's no self at all. And yet that can be so confusing for people because, like, they look in the mirror and they see that self and they build a resume, they make dentist appointments under their own name. Like it runs counter to lots of our intuitions.
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Josh Bearman
You have a Social Security number and.
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Dan Harris
Exactly, exactly.
- [23:58]
Josh Bearman
Right. And your five senses and. Right. It must add up to something. Well, I mean, and it does to some degree, obviously. It sort of does by default. Like, I mean, you have, you're walking the earth and you have an impact. You have like a carbon footprint. You have your actions which impact other people. So there is some individual agency by virtue of existing that cannot be imagined away even by a spiritual notion. And that part of life is what's most obvious to people because you're interacting with that part of yourself every day. And most of our ethics and stuff in fact relates to that. Because your agency, your moral agent, as a moral agent, you then are interacting with the world and then that's where sort of crime and punishment and ethics and behavior and so on come in. I feel like there's kind of like a roundabout. If you consider the Buddhist notion of self, it can bring you back to those same kinds of ethics because, well, I think it's stated clearly somewhere, right? Like basically the duty of life is to reduce suffering, yours and others. So that's kind of like the spiritual path to the same ethics of trying to, as a moral agent, be a positive force in the world or something. So I have thought about how these things relate before and a little bit, I mean, it's kind of a paradox. But then in some ways also the paradox of it is the message, right? Because you have to be kind of constantly engaged with this thought, right?
- [25:39]
Dan Harris
Yes. Well, two things I want to pick up on there that you said. One is it is true in my experience that if you can live a life where you are, and this is a very Buddhist idea focused on benefiting all beings, that's Buddhist phraseology. You are definitionally reducing your reliance on the self because you are pulling your head out of your ass and focusing.
- [26:07]
Josh Bearman
On other people, on others, right?
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Dan Harris
So that's, that's one kind of simple way to understand it. The other way to understand it that I think is really interesting but can be take a while to wrestle with is this notion of paradox. And it's been really helpful for me. And it basically, the way it's described in Buddhism is that two things are true at the same time. On one level, Josh Barman is a human being talking to me right now from his car, by the way, where he's recording this podcast. So outside a frozen lake, not non negotiable fact. Josh Barman exists. He writes, he, he talks into microphones, he drives, he does lots of stuff, he talks to his therapist, whatever. But at a fundamental level, if you can't find any essence of Josh, if you close your Eyes and look for some little homunculus of Josh Barman behind your eyes, between your ears, you won't find them. And a rough analogy can be made to quantum physics. Like, this chair I'm sitting in right now is a chair, but if we took a high powered microscope, it would be mostly empty space with spinning subatomic particles. And both of these things are true at the same time. And you can use this paradox as a kind of medicine. Like when you're caught up in your own shit, you can recognize, oh, yeah, well, there's no there there. Like, this is all an illusion on some fundamental level. Similarly, if you're too stuck in the mystical and floating off into the illusion and none of this matters. And you know, one of the common pitfalls in Buddhism is nihilism. Well, actually, then to fall back on. No, no, no. This, to a certain extent, this is all real and it does matter. This paradox of mattering immensely and not at all. Or like T.S. eliot, not a Buddhist, to my knowledge, talks about the injunction to care and not to care. And all of this, I think, is actually a great way to navigate life.
- [28:13]
Josh Bearman
Right? Yeah. I mean, that's in the. In the land of the lotus eaters. The Tennyson poem part of the story is like, well, the sailors are like, well, it's great here we've got the lotus. We don't have a care in the world, but it makes them nihilists. Which I think was part of the joke of calling the hotel the White Lotus, because the lotus makes you not care about the world at all. You lose the caring part of yourself. And it's kind of this like a retreat of comfort. I mean, that's what happens on the land of the lotus eaters. But yes, I like that idea of you have to care, not to care, and the duality. My father's a physicist, so I think about this all the time. And I have, in fact, in my thinking about, over the years, kind of like my worldview. I hadn't really thought about this way, but I do think about this, that my sense of caring about the world is partly related to the fact that I also know that it's an accident. And it's kind of like some lightning hit some nucleotides and made, you know, early life and the distance of the earth to the sun and, you know, like Planck's constant, if it was slightly different, none of this would be here. And, you know, like, if you go real deep, I mean, like your microscopic examination of the chair, like quickly the chair disappears Right. So I have thought about that in relation to life, about sort of like squaring a little bit. These again, very cribbed understanding of physics from proximity to my father, with my sense of moral purpose in the world. I mean, it's precisely because it's all kind of meaningless that therefore we are sort of giving it meaning by operating in the world in a mode with intent and purpose and with choice and with some kind of understanding. So that all that too is a paradox, I guess, in the same mode.
- [30:12]
Dan Harris
Well said. Coming up, Josh and I talk about the perils of pleasure seeking and why it's actually okay to enjoy pleasure, but there are still perils. We'll talk about that after the break. As the founder of a pretty new small business, I can tell you that one of the biggest and most urgent issues is hiring. You want to hire the right person and you want to do it quickly. Just by way of an example, our most recent hire is the mighty Abby Smith, who's my executive assistant and also plays many key roles throughout the team. And she was very much the right person and immediately improved my life and the lives of everybody around me by way more than 10%. So if hiring is an issue for you, Indeed is all you need. Stop struggling to get your job Posts seen on other job sites. Indeed's Sponsored Jobs help you stand out and hire fast. With Sponsored Jobs, your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidates so you can reach the people you want faster and it makes a huge difference. According to Indeed data, Sponsored jobs posted directly on indeed have 45% more applications than non sponsored jobs. I will say as as happy as I and the rest of the team are with the aforementioned Abby Smith, the whole process might have been a lot quicker if we were using indeed. So lesson learned. Plus, with Indeed Sponsored Jobs, there are no monthly subscriptions, no long term contracts, and you only pay for results. How fast is Indeed in the minute? I've been talking to you about this. 23 hires were made on Indeed according to Indeed data. There's no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed and listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility@inneed.com happier. Just go to indeed.com happier right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. That actually really helps. Indeed.com happier terms and conditions apply. Hiring Indeed is all you need. Okay, here's the second theme that I've identified in my watching of season three of The White Lotus through the lens of amateur Buddhist. The second theme is the problem of desire. In one of my favorite scenes in the show, Tim Ratliff, who's just such an awesome character and so he's so well acted, he's having this while on Valium or Ativan or whatever, he's on having this interaction with a Buddhist monk played, I believe, by a Thai news Anchorage. He's asking the monk like, what's this place all about? Why do people come here? And the monk says, here, I'm quoting, spiritual malaise. Lost connection with nature, with the family, lost connection with the spirit. What's left? The self. Identity, chasing money, pleasure. Yeah, everyone runs from pain toward the pleasure, but when they get there only to find more pain. You cannot outrun pain. To me, that was kind of like a. I know that identity as a prison is kind of the thesis statement of the, of the show, but in some ways this was a mic drop to me. You cannot outrun your pain. And we're papering over it with lattes and vacations and promotions and likes.
- [33:59]
Josh Bearman
Yes, I also found, I mean, I found that scene. That's when he kind of is. He's already sort of coming undone. And then Victoria, right, His wife says, go in there and check it out, right? And then he sits in front of the monk and basically has his mind blown. Right. And then I think it's also. Is that the same part where he says death is a happy return? He kind of hears the message about letting go of life in the same encounter. Yeah, I thought it was very powerful and affecting. I love him in general. It's such a funny notion to take a character like that. And by virtue of this sudden unraveling of his station in life and therefore sense of self and on this kind of like half baked vacation, indulging his daughter's loose college interest in Buddhism, that then he is the one who sits down there. Piper, of course, as we discover later, is not prepared for any of this at all and isn't really that serious about it. She's listening, she's trying really hard. She's like a good college student. She's not getting it. Tim gets it immediately when he's sitting there and he suddenly has to, because he's in a state of vulnerability where he is like. It's like the, you know, the shell is off and he has to consider himself. And so the message lands very hard with him. And then for an audience, at least for me, I felt a very. I felt it. I had a. You know, goosebumps, basically, because it's. It's so powerful. It's also like, it's so simple. The idea is so simple. Which is also why I kind of liked having it in my case in therapy because, like, I just have to hear it over and over and over again. It is very simple if you can put it into practice. But you kind of do have to, you know, be reminded of this message. It's so easy to stray. Although I think in Tim's case, I don't know, he's not going to come back a Buddhist or anything, but whatever release of his self happens there because of his financial troubles or legal troubles, when he goes home, he's going to be a different person. I don't even know if he escaped the prison. He's forced out of the prison by circumstances.
- [36:03]
Dan Harris
Yes. The word that kept coming up for me as I watched Tim's arc. This is a word that often is used in the pejorative in our culture, but it's used in a positive way in Buddhism. Disillusionment or disenchantment that we are waking up from the illusion, waking up from the spell, the lie that we tell ourselves, which is, yeah, the, the next achievement, the next acquisition, the, you know, the next sexual encounter is finally going to do it for me. But of course, it. It never does. You watch him realize that in a, you know, it's choppy and also he's sedated. He makes lots of mistakes along the way, including almost killing his whole family, etc. Etc. But that process is. Is kind of fun to watch play out. The other character who really embodies this, this idea of desire as like a losing strategy is Frank S. Sam Rockwell in maybe the best soliloquy on television in a long time, where he's sitting across from Walt Goggins in a bar in Bangkok and he talks about this insatiable desire he's bed young Thai women. So much so that he. He's so deep into this addiction that he eventually decides he wants to merge with the object of his desire and become a Thai woman. But of course that even that won't do it for him. And again, it just kind of a hilarious, ridiculous, so well delivered, both as in terms of the writing and the acting example of what a dead end chasing pleasure is.
- [37:47]
Josh Bearman
Yeah, I mean, I think like everybody, even, even people who are sort of critical of the show or don't like aspects of the ending are appropriately sort of awestruck by that soliloquy. I think it's Interesting. Well written. Comes as a shock. It's a surprise. It's like the last thing you'd imagine. We're like, Rick, who's clearly into some. Has had some weird business in his life, has this, like, you know, friend who lives in Bangkok who can get him a gun, so whatever that. What kind of guy is that going to be? Then he shows up, he's like, oh, yeah, how you been? You know, everybody's had that. I haven't seen you in a while. Oh, you're sober now. Okay. You kind of know where that's going. And then like, boom, there's the rest of that is not something that anybody would have seen coming. And I was thinking about it, and of course, you know, it's kind of brilliant in the sense of how it delivers on the leitmotif of identity as a prison. Because it is about somebody escaping their identity or reassessing their identity or under, like, broadening with a multiplicity of identities. Right. In terms of seeking, because he's lost and trying to fill the void. So it is a mode of seeking. And then the carnality of the sexual stratum on which this discovery is taking place is a mode of seeking. And we've seen that before. People that are like, oh, I'm gonna. I can fill the hole with sex. But then to sort of transcend that around the idea of sex embedded in a kaleidoscopic identity. To me, that was like. That was a new concept. I was like, that's. I don't think I'd ever really heard that before. It's one of the many ways that sort of. The show delivers on this premise that we see at the very beginning with the monk's words about identity being a prison.
- [39:38]
Dan Harris
Yeah, well said. Yeah. So in that scene, we're hitting two themes. Not only the one around identity, but also the one around desire and the disutility of pleasure.
- [39:50]
Josh Bearman
Well, and it combines these cliches, too, of Thailand of like a place of sort of, you know, wanton, you know, sexual tourism and Buddhist self discovery.
- [40:01]
Dan Harris
Right.
- [40:02]
Josh Bearman
Which are at odds normally. Right. These are two different places. It's one place, but there's two different experiences of it. People are there for one reason or the other. Usually Frank somehow has. Has brought them together.
- [40:15]
Dan Harris
Yes. Yeah. Hilariously. With a lot of pathos. Let me just go briefly into teacher mode for a second and say a few things about desire. Just.
- [40:27]
Josh Bearman
Yeah, I want to. I want to hear.
- [40:28]
Dan Harris
In the hopes of being helpful and. And you can respond or not. First of all, I Just want to point out that a lot of people, when the subject comes up, they worry. Like, are the Buddhists saying, like, no pleasure is kosher? Enjoying your meal is great. Enjoying having sex is great. The mistake is not to enjoy pleasure. The mistake is to think that pleasure is a strategy for true fulfillment. The Buddha used this analogy that he likened it to licking honey off the edge of a razor. So there's some pleasure to be had there, but there's a lot of danger in it because nothing lasts. So you just chasing the dragon. And so I was thinking a little bit of, like, what could I say that would be useful for people about this? And I had these two little ideas, both from my meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein. One is a great expression that he took from another Buddhist teacher. I'm always stealing from Joseph, and he always points out that we're part of a lineage of thieves. So the expression that Joseph's teacher used was lust cracks the brain. And I think that's a great little phrase to drop into your mind when you're in the throes of desire, potentially leading you to a disastrous decision. And then the other little meditative technique that Joseph talks about is to use mindfulness, to use self awareness to investigate. You know, if you notice that you want something, could be large or small, just sit with it for a second and watch the desire come and go. Because everything is impermanent. The desire will crest and eventually will go. And if you sit with it patiently enough, freedom is on the other side because it will go away and you will see. I don't need to be a marionette on the noxious, you know, puppeteer of. Of ego and desire. I'm yammering a lot, but does any of that make sense to you?
- [42:43]
Josh Bearman
Yeah, it does. I mean, again, I find these ideas to be powerful in their simplicity. My therapist would talk about emotions in general, so not just desire, but so applying this to her, this would come up in kind of another context. But I could see it also in relationship to desire. But she was sort of talking about these things as the wind in the trees, right?
- [43:11]
Dan Harris
Yes.
- [43:11]
Josh Bearman
The wind comes and blows the branches around and the boughs bend and, you know, and then it goes away and then comes from the other direction or whatever. And so you have to sort of like take some satisfaction or have some faith in the tree, basically. Right. And let the wind kind of like run through it and like, it'll be there when the wind is gone. Context is a little bit different, but I'm seeing the same notion. Right. If you like applying it to this idea of sitting with your desire and letting it pass. That's like the wind and the trees and it'll. Nothing is permanent and everything changes. And that's interesting, though. Now I'm trying to think about. I'm trying to resolve this in my head because in her analogy, it's like you're the tree, but that's relying on this idea of the self. But probably if we got deeper into it, it would be like the tree isn't like you, the self. It's kind of like your values and behaviors and really and. And engagements with other people in the world. And, you know, there would be like a. She would have had a Buddhist definition of what the roots of that tree are.
- [44:18]
Dan Harris
Well, I actually. And again, I'm going to remind everybody that I'm not a Buddhist scholar, but to me, the idea of self as tree strikes me as okay, because the core assertion here is that the self, it's all nature, and there is nothing in nature that is independent and disconnected. The tree has roots in the ground, is feeding off of water and all sorts of minerals, and is exposed to impersonal forces like the wind. And if you think about all of your internal processes, like meteorological phenomena like nature, they become much more workable. And that. That's the. That's one way out of the prison of identity.
- [45:11]
Josh Bearman
Right? Yeah, that makes sense. All right, I like this. I'm learning here. This is helpful. This is actually great. My therapist retired a couple years ago and I've been all right, but definitely, it's like I thought it sounds. I wish I could just call her out of the blue, but. So it's like my processing of these ideas in relation to my. The world that I'm living in kind of stopped a couple years ago. So this is like. I enjoy talking about it.
- [45:36]
Dan Harris
Well, it's. It's unlicensed therapy. My qualification is. I slept at a Holiday Inn last night, so. Perfect. Coming up, Josh and I talk about our craving for certainty as a bulwark work against fear and anxiety. We talk about the importance of repetition, the Buddhist concept of attachment, and the three jewels of Buddhism, and the importance of relationships. As the founder of a pretty new small business, I can tell you that one of the biggest and most urgent issues is hiring. You want to hire the right person and you want to do it quickly. Just by way of an example, our most recent hire is the mighty Abby Smith, who's my executive assistant and also plays many key roles throughout the team. And she was very much the right person and immediately improved my life and the lives of everybody around me by way more than 10%. So if hiring is an issue for you in Indeed is all you need. Stop struggling to get your job posts seen on other job sites. Indeed's Sponsored Jobs help you stand out and hire fast. With Sponsored Jobs, your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidates so you can reach the people you want faster and it makes a huge difference. According to Indeed data, Sponsored Jobs posted directly on indeed have 45% more applications than non sponsored Job jobs. I will say as as happy as I and the rest of the team are with the aforementioned Abby Smith, the whole process might have been a lot quicker if we were using Indeed. So lesson learned. Plus, with Indeed Sponsored Jobs, there are no monthly subscriptions, no long term contracts, and you only pay for results. How fast is Indeed in the minute? I've been talking to you about this. 23 hires were made on Indeed according to Indeed Indeed data. There's no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed and listeners of this show will get a 75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility@inneed.com happier. Just go to indeed.com happier right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. That actually really helps. Indeed.com happier terms and conditions apply. Hiring Indeed is all you need.
- [48:05]
Josh Bearman
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- [48:34]
Dan Harris
We are. And this is not a complaint, this is an observation. Spending a lot of time on these, which I think is perfectly reasonable. So instead of doing seven themes, I'm going to do four. I'll hit two more before I let you go.
- [48:45]
Josh Bearman
Okay? Sure.
- [48:47]
Dan Harris
One of them you already helpfully teed up the idea that life lacks clear closure and resolutions, which I think is another way of talking about our desire for certainty as a bulwark against fear and anxiety. Let me read the exact words from Mike White's Monk and then let you hold forth on the other side. Here's the quote. Sometimes we wake with anxiety and edgy energy. What will happen today? What is in store for me? So many questions. We want resolution, solid earth under our feet. So we take life into our own hands, we take action. Yeah. Our solutions are temporary. They are quick fix. They create more anxiety, more suffering. There's no resolution to life's questions. It's easier to be patient once we finally accept there's no resolution.
- [49:37]
Josh Bearman
Yeah.
- [49:38]
Dan Harris
What do you make of that?
- [49:41]
Josh Bearman
Well, I mean, that's in the final episode. Right. And again, I think it's kind of like an incredible irony that this is. It's coming at the finale in which some of the stories do resolve tragically, of course, but the other ones that don't resolve in that direction. And by the way, the one that resolves tragically is because of the character Rick's inability to escape the prison of his identity. Right. And his life has been deformed by this need for revenge or his belief that his entire identity is built around this one idea, and it becomes too powerful. He kind of thinks he faces it down and then he can't, ultimately. And so that story kind of partly resolves. Although if you believe Chelsea, then they're gonna keep at it in the afterlife. And then the other ones that don't resolve, I mean, there's something happens and there's an ending and they leave and they're gonna. But they're gonna face the world now in a different way. Particularly with the rat lives and then also with the three women. There's a kind of, like, rhetorical incantation that Laurie offers at the end when she's like, well, I don't. You know, like, time is what gives us all meaning. Right. She kind of has the other whole view, which is a little bit of a stealth emotional story all the way. Everybody, of course, likes watching those characters. Those seem very. Those characters seem like the most recognizable because they're people that we sort of feel familiar with in our everyday lives. But what happens at the end of that is probably, to me the most affecting and most surprising. And so that, too, is not really a resolution. And so I kind of. I loved that people are, like, kind of obsessing about who gets killed and what happens in the finale and who's the body and all these, like, you know, sort of online Reddit forum theories about how the story resolves. And Mike basically, via the Monk, says, well, the resolution is not the point. And in fact, wanting a resolution is what keeps you suffering. So I found that to be powerful. I mean, I have the same myself in my life. I found those words. I remember hearing them when I was like, oh, yeah, right again, it's just so simple. It's like every day. I do think like, what's going to happen today? Am I going to solve the problems I didn't solve yesterday? And I always fool myself every day I'm like, it's going to be. Today's the day where it's going to all come together. I literally probably think that every single day. I try to persuade myself not to, but it's very challenging. And, and so I like being reminded of, I liked being reminded of it in the show.
- [52:23]
Dan Harris
Yeah, just to go back into teacher mode for a second. The, the word mindfulness, which is very much associated with Buddhism, that's the word we use in English. But in the ancient language of Pali, in which the Buddhist teachings were written down, the word is sati s a t I. There are many ways to translate it, but it is often translated as remembering or recollecting. And so you've said several times in the course of this conversation, it's so simple. But I keep forgetting.
- [52:53]
Josh Bearman
Yeah, right.
- [52:54]
Dan Harris
But repetition is. There's a reason people like me repeat the same over and over again and learn to do so from my teachers, is that we're programmed for denial of these basic facts and we need to be woken up over and over and over again, you know, and particularly on this point, because we're, you know, essentially the descendants of nervous monkeys, you know, and we, we started as prey animals and somehow got to the top of the food chain. But we, we, we, we are really anxious. And one way we try to fend that off is to look for closure, look for happy endings, but that, and to look for certainty, but that puts you at war with the universe and actually drives you further into your identity because you're, you're an isolated ego peering fretfully out from your eye sockets, trying to manipulate a hostile world when, when in fact you're actually part of nature. And can you relax into the flow? And again, when I say all this, I know that some people are thinking, well, is this a recipe for resignation or passivity? And just to be super practical about it, it's not. The Buddha himself was quite an ambitious dude. He built a large body of monks and nuns and raised a bunch of money to do so from wealthy merchants and kings and laid out this huge body of teachings. He was doing shit in the world, and so can we. Yeah, he had ambition, and so can we. But the key Buddhist add on is not being attached to the results. Understanding that you can do what you can do from your limited position, but you're interconnected with an entropic, fluxing universe, and it's out of your control. Once you finish writing your screenplay, once Mike finishes writing and directing this season three, he can't control what they say on Reddit. And so that's a way to kind of have your cake and eat it too, to use an inappropriate metaphor here or, you know, the idea of non attachment to results.
- [55:06]
Josh Bearman
Yeah, yeah, that's. I mean, I like talking, thinking about all this stuff. I remember this is a slight digression. I remember seeing Kundun in the theater.
- [55:19]
Dan Harris
Yeah.
- [55:20]
Josh Bearman
Martin Scorsese movie about the childhood of the Dalai Lama, when he would sort of like, make, you know, every other movie was gangsters or like Last Temptation of Christ. And then Kundun, you know, like, there were these odd choices in there even still. Then he made silence. Right. Which I didn't see. But I remember watching it and just thinking, huh? Is that like, really the way they talk? Like, because we have, via cultural receipt of Buddhist culture or Eastern ideas sort of been filtered through, you know, many generationally derivative kind of, you know, cultural representation. So I just figured that the words that we understood were kind of some kind of cliche, that it's so simple. And so then when you encounter them in practice, it sounds, like, silly at first because it's so simple. And I was like, really? That's it. That was my first time really thinking about it. Then years later, I met the woman who wrote Kundun, and she had spent a lot of time with the Dalai Lama, kind of researching the movie and writing this whole story. And I asked her that same question. This is before my therapy or anything. And she said, yeah, that was. She's actually the person who later referred me to my Buddhist nun therapist. She had met him. Rough time in her life. Somehow. She was kind of a fancy person who would somehow encounter the Dalai Lama. They spent time together, and she decided to write this movie and then got Martin Scorsese to make it. She said, by the way, he liked it because it was a boys club. I was like, really? That's interesting. And that's not how I would have thought about the Temple palace. And she said the same thing. I said, is it really that simple? Because sometimes it seems like it's basically like it's a trafficking in some kind of, like, Eastern cliche. She was like, no, that's kind of the beauty of it. And I feel like I'm talking about it now and encountering it in the show a little bit more talking about it now because it's pretty sprinkled throughout the show. But since you are much more well versed in it and can elevate these themes. I'm realizing, again, like, oh, these ideas are profound, and they can be very useful if you pay attention and allow yourself to be reminded.
- [57:35]
Dan Harris
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I just key in on that word useful. The ideas are designed to be useful. They're designed to reduce suffering. And Buddhists can get incredibly esoteric and complex and, you know, lots of arguments over what the nature of consciousness and enlightenment is. And there. There's lots of not simple stuff in there, but when you whittle it down to its essence, you know, several teachers have been asked, you know, like, what's the core of the Dharma? One answer is, everything changes. Another is, are you sure? You know, like, it's very simple stuff that you could tattoo on your wrist as a, like, compass for navigating life. And they're. They're not designed to be, like, knit on throw pillows and never looked at again. But that's part of what's happened, is that they've become cliches, and as a result of rote repetition, they've been ground down into meaninglessness. But if you actually wrestle with them in a real way and try to, like, use them as. As, like I said, a compass, they're really helpful.
- [58:41]
Josh Bearman
Coming back to the show, I feel like, in particular, the transformation, which entails an escape from identity that was maybe the most surprising for sure, and then also impactful. I think this is slightly neglected is Saxon Ratliff's son. Because he starts off, like, on the boat. He's wearing glasses. On his way in, he's wearing sunglasses. He's like, I don't want to see anything, right? And then, by the way, by the time he's leaving on the boat, he's reading the book that Chelsea's given him. And in response to their whole mission, which is to allow Piper to kind of go see her dumb monaster, he says, like, oh, Buddhism is for people who don't want to try, basically. And he's responding to that cliched idea of you just sit in the lotus position with your thumb up your ass, which is funny. And then. Then he reveals to his father, at a certain point, once he has a whiff of something's going on with his dad and there's trouble in their life back home, he kind of confronts him. He's like, if something's going wrong, you need to let me know, because this is my entire identity. I don't have anything else. There's nothing else there. So then he realizes this whole time that Chelsea, with All of her sort of, you know, friendly mysticism, which he doesn't take seriously. Once he realizes that the identity that the identity that he's placed so much faith in might be challenged, and then there's nothing to replace it, he's then suddenly available then to Chelsea to kind of receive the message. And I actually think the duality between him and Rick is very interesting because Rick. They're both empty vessels. Rick is empty because he. The lid is closed. He refuses to let anything in. And then Saxon was empty the whole time. And then he kind of takes the lid off and he's like, huh, okay, well, Philip, I'm ready for my vessel to be filled. And then he's so genuinely sad when he realizes that the only person that has seen him at all, basically, as a person, is this is Chelsea. But her life is bound up with this other person who. Then he comes back from his Thai trip in the last episode in the morning, they see each other and have this, like, lens flare reunion on the beach. And Saxon's there looking sort of forlorn and realizes like, oh, he's gonna have to go do this on his own. And then on the way back on the boat at the end, he's reading the book that she gave him. That escape from identity and transformation and relationship to these ideas, I think was maybe the most kind of clear and in that way, maybe the most profound.
- [61:25]
Dan Harris
Yeah, I'm picking up what you're putting down, and. And. And it's another example of disenchantment, disillusionment. And he. He walks onto the scene as. I think you and Gia on the show described him, as the embodiment of pure American male id. Like, he literally is the antithesis of Eastern philosophy.
- [61:45]
Josh Bearman
That's right.
- [61:46]
Dan Harris
Everything. Buddhism is not in a really believable, not, you know, not overnight transformation way. He's still just at the beginning, but just to see the aperture open for him slightly is very interesting.
- [62:02]
Josh Bearman
That's how Mike described it, too, I think Patrick was saying. I think when I talked to him about it, he was saying Mike was like, well, he's not, you know, an instant convert and suddenly is, you know, enlightened. He's just getting started, which is kind of encouraging and really pleasant to. To see.
- [62:22]
Dan Harris
Okay, I'm gonna hit the fourth and final.
- [62:24]
Josh Bearman
Okay.
- [62:25]
Dan Harris
Even though I had all these ambitions, I'm. See, this is non attachment to results. I'm not going to be attached to my. My plan that I came into this conversation with, but there's a lot to talk about. So the fourth. The fourth theme that we'll hit, even though I had, you know, done all my homework and come up with seven is. The Buddhist term of art is sangha, which translates into community. Another way to say it is just the importance of your relationships to other people. And you talked about this a little bit. But I'll go back to the moment that, for me, is among the top three or four moments in the show, which is when Laurie, played by Carrie Coons, who's amazing, cries and says to her friends, who at times seem like frenemies. But in this moment, it becomes clear they're real friends. Jacqueline and Kate, she says, and I'm quoting, I'm glad you, Jacqueline, have a beautiful face, and I'm glad you, Kate, have a beautiful life. And I'm just happy to be at the table. And first of all, this is a real moment. You know, these. These guys have been passive aggressive in their cattiness and inauthenticity for much of the show and their relationships to one another. But here, like, there is no mask. She's not performing. She's genuinely sad and also genuinely loving. And, like, I think this is a great example of the fact that it is possible to get your head out of your ass, to get over yourself, to connect to other people, to break out of the prison. And, you know, like, taking it back to Saxon, like, Saxon is the embodiment also of a trend I see in American culture in a big way, especially among men. And this is something I've embodied myself, which is like this optimizer thing. I'm going to work out. I'm going to take the right smoothie, I'm going to whatever, track my steps, count my calories, monitor my sleep. But the data show very clearly that if you want to optimize, for one thing, the one thing that matters the most when it comes to our health and longevity is the quality of our relationships. It is the most important thing. And it was in the Dharma in Buddhism, the Buddha talked about three jewels. The Buddha, which is a kind of immodest thing to say, but, you know, he's just holding himself up as the avatar of awakening the possibility of change. The Dharma, which is the teachings of the Buddha and then the Sangha, the community, that there's this power of doing this work in the HOV lane, and it wasn't like two jewels and then an asterisk. It was three jewels. They were all, like, equally important. And in our individualistic age, we really overlook this. And so, to me, that moment highlighted In a show that's often about dysfunctional relationships, it highlighted a moment of like highly functioning relationship and how additive and essential that is for the human animal. Okay, now again, I. I spoke too much, but I'll see if you have anything to say.
- [65:26]
Josh Bearman
No, I mean, that's an interesting thought because I had in relation to Laurie's also affecting soliloquy, I feel like Frank's and hers are the standout specific moments in the show. I felt very affected by that speech to her friends because it was a surprise. I mean, it was sort of. You'd think it would be. Well, it's like kind of easy for three friends who grew up together but have kind of, you know, live different lives and think that they're going to go on this fun trip and come back together and then realize like, ah, we're kind of just different now and life goes on and things are, you know, not the same anymore. And Laurie is the one who is holding on to this, the resentment that could sort of basically break up the friendship and she overcomes it. So the reason why it's interesting the way that you're bringing it up in relation to Buddhism is that she says, I don't have a religion. This is not a spiritual. Her speech is in, the text is aspiritual. She says, I don't have a belief system is what she says. Right. And I thought it was work that didn't work. Oh. Then she says, like, I thought motherhood, I mean, that was like a killer. When she's, like when she admits that motherhood didn't make her happy. I mean that's. That was kind of an astonishing moment too. And then she kind of moves and she's like, I went through all these things. None of those things answered the question for me. And then she kind of says, well, for me it's time. Time gives us meaning. We spend all this time together and just knowing for this long, being in this circle of friendship is what matters. And I thought it was kind of meant as. I mean, it's meant to be affecting. But I thought also there was like the subtext of, well, if you are paying attention at the beginning, she says, I don't have a belief system, so it's kind of anti spiritual set against throwing kind of a stronger shadow against the backdrop, which is all explicitly spiritual. But it's interesting that in some way it nevertheless demonstrates these same ideas because for her to do that means she's shedding the part of herself that was holding onto this resentment and realizing that that's not what is important. And that was only causing suffering. And like, yeah, sure, she could have like put on a happy face for the final day and then they all go their separate ways. They probably wouldn't see each other for five years and then they would really drift apart. But she does the opposite and does something actually, again, quite simple. Her articulation is also very simple and brings them closer together. I mean, I think the last thing you see with them, well, I guess maybe they're on the boat too. But the last thing before then, before the final conclusion is they're sort of giggling together on the lovely outdoor couches on their $15,000 a night villa and they've returned to the girls that they were growing up. Right. It's just like that simple gesture, very generous gesture. But as you say, it comes from Laurie overcoming something in herself.
- [68:46]
Dan Harris
Yeah, I mean, she says she doesn't have a belief system, but one way to think about spirituality in a non metaphysical way is just anything that is beyond your limited small self.
- [69:03]
Josh Bearman
Right. Well, maybe it's kind of a funny. I mean, I'm sure Mike has thought about every single aspect. It's also kind of funny that like Laurie, she might say she's not having a belief system. Okay, she doesn't have a belief system, but her action is in accordance with the belief system that all these people are there to interact with, actually. Right. So she was not there for that at all. But yet she kind of arrives there anyhow and it's not explained. We don't know really what she was thinking about or how that happened. But that's kind of a. That's a funny little irony, actually.
- [69:41]
Dan Harris
Well, that's why for me as a secular person, you know, I mean, I am a Buddhist, but I don't mean it in a religious sense. Like I don't view Buddhism as a belief system. It can be for sure practiced that way, but I view it as just like the truth, but low, small T. It's just.
- [69:59]
Josh Bearman
Yes, this is like me. Yeah, yeah, right.
- [70:01]
Dan Harris
This is just a description of nature. And so you don't have to have a belief system to stumble upon. Like the truth.
- [70:10]
Josh Bearman
No, that's a good. I mean, that's how I feel too. I mean, Matanza, my therapist would every so often reveal that like she believes in ghosts and all this stuff. And I just like, oh, wow, that's a whole different. She's like, yeah, that stuff's in there too. Like, okay, that might not be for me, but it speaks to the applicability of the ideas you don't. It doesn't actually need to be a religion in the kind of classical sense. It can be a set of practices and ideas.
- [70:34]
Dan Harris
Yes.
- [70:34]
Josh Bearman
About yourself in the world. And that's what Laurie offers.
- [70:38]
Dan Harris
Our mutual friend Zev Borrow, who's been on the show, describes it as a diet. In a way it's like. Or as I've sometimes heard Buddhism described, it's not something to believe in, it's something to do. That really lands for me. Before I let you go, just for the record and to just show off, I want to just list for those who are curious, the other three themes that we didn't get a chance to talk about.
- [71:00]
Josh Bearman
Okay, sure.
- [71:01]
Dan Harris
One is the theme of violence as a result of like an inability to sit with your own pain. I think Rick really is a great example of that. In the monk really talks about, you know, the only good faith response is, is to sit with your feelings. And. And that is the radical move of, Of Buddhism, of mindfulness, which is instead of reacting blindly to every neurotic impulse, like you just sit with it. They sit with it in a. In a very specific way, like kind of an open, accepting, warm way, curious, interested way. And that's one of the main thrusts of mindfulness meditation. The other theme that we didn't get a chance to talk about but is huge is I guess you could call it karma, but like, more like choices and consequences. Everybody in the show is making these choices. And in the finale, you know, we see a lot of disappointing choices with Belinda doing to Pornchai what had been done to her and in season one and. And Gai Talk subverting his own Buddhist belief system to shoot a guy in the back as he's walking away in order to get the girl. And anyway, that. That seems to be, you know, karma is a huge Buddhist idea and it's often caricatured in culture like, you know, karma's a. Or what comes around, goes around or karma police arrest this man or whatever. But it, It's. It's really much simpler than that. It's not like a universal system of justice. It's just that actions have consequences and it's just the law of cause and effect. So I'm left imagining that Belinda and guy talk, you know, there will be consequences for them that will be unpredictable for going against their own belief system. And then the final thing, this is a quick thing. But in Buddhism there's this idea of right speech that you. We should say what is true, what is useful, and at the right time. And with the right intention. And the girls, the. The women, the blonde women, who are the three friends. You could see them talking, and then it kind of feels like they want to take a bath in Purell afterwards. It's like the. The consequences are unpleasant. And none of them is happy with the constant gossiping and backbiting. So, yeah, those are the three themes we didn't get to, but I just thought I'd say them out loud.
- [73:16]
Josh Bearman
Yeah, well, I mean, there's a lot in there. We could do a lightning round on the final three. It's the nice thing about the show that it is this ensemble character drama, which is just kind of an unusual mode of current popular entertainment. Right. So that allows for people to observe people's behavior and actions. Right. And talk about it around the figurative water cooler. I mean, I've, you know, I've been talking to Dave Burnett, who's the executive producer show, and he's like, you know, he's like, I'm trying not to read all the stuff about the, you know, finales, people that might are pissed off about it or whatever. And I was like, well, but you've got the whole country being engaged in an observation, like a fine microscopic observation, and read on human behavior, which itself is like a mitzvah. Right. So it's kind of this incredible thing, even though people are like, ah, I wish that this happened. That's just. The story is like reflecting back into people's ideas, and then if you come to it with these ideas, again, speaking to the applicability of Buddhism in this case, it's obviously like Mike intends a lot of it. But even so, you know, this lens is useful in many scenarios, and I feel like it's got a lot to say about even the aspects of this that are not explicitly Buddhist or spiritual at all. Yeah, it's been fun to think about. And like I say, I still, even though Mike himself disagrees, I think season one is a Buddhist allegory.
- [74:47]
Dan Harris
I'm on your side. Um, I just want to say in closing, I've loved listening to your podcast. I've loved meeting you. It's been so fun to obsess about the show along with the rest of the world, but then to get to nerd out with you, who I've never met before, but such an immediately fun and interesting and engaging conversation partner, and also extra credit for doing this from your car at an inconvenient time at the last minute. So. Josh Bearman.
- [75:18]
Josh Bearman
Yes. Thank you.
- [75:19]
Dan Harris
Many thanks to you.
- [75:20]
Josh Bearman
Thank you. Thanks for having me on it was really fun and I look forward to listening to it once it's all put together.
- [75:30]
Dan Harris
I just want to thank Josh Bearman again. Go check out his podcast the White Lotus Official Season 3 podcast. He and his co host Gia do a great job on that show. Don't forget to check out dan harris.com where you can get ad free versions of this podcast. And you can also get twice monthly live guided meditations from me which also include Q and A. And you get the ability to chat with me and members of my staff and comment on the thrice weekly emails I send out. Lots of stuff going on over there. Please check it out and I also am going to drop in the show notes some links to episodes that are relevant relevant to this one. Natasha Rothwell who plays Belinda on the show, she came on this show, she's a friend so I'm going to drop a link to that. Also a link to my interview with Michael Imperioli who was one of the stars of Season two and we did reference Pema Chodron. So I'm going to drop my two interviews with her into the show notes. And finally, I just want to thank everybody who worked so hard to make this show a reality. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan and Eleanor Vasily. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our production manager. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. Again, big thanks to Marissa for hustling this episode into the feed so quickly. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer and Nick Thorburn of the great indie rock band Islands wrote our theme.