← 10% Happier with Dan Harris
10% Happier with Dan Harris
Ezra Klein On: Sane News Consumption; The Power of Meditation; The Future of the Species; And the Message of His Tattoo
01:15:54
On maintaining sanity in insane times. Ezra Klein is an opinion columnist and host of the award-winning . His latest book is , co-authored with Derek Thompson. He is also the author of Why We’re Polarized, an instant New York Times bestseller, named...
Loading summary
Transcript119 lines
- [00:00]
Dan Harris
Foreign this is the ten percent happier podcast i'm dan harris hey gang how we doing one of the ways that i try to keep myself sane in today's rather insane news environment is to listen to voices and from across the ideological spectrum i find it counterintuitively calming to consistently challenge my own views so i have folks i listen to on the right in the center and on the left one of my favorite voices on the left a guy who in my opinion does a real service through his public sense making is ezra klein who works for the new york times where he's an opinion writer and the host of the ezra klein show which is a hugely popular must hear podcast you may have seen that ezra has been on a pr rum springer of late promoting his new book which is called abundance which hit number one on the new york times bestsellers list we don't talk about that book at all in this interview although i do recommend you read it the basic thesis is that america's core problem right now is not a lack of resources or ideas but a failure to build to complete ambitious projects in areas like affordable housing infrastructure and climate change anyway instead of talking about that in this interview i talked to ezra a guy who really is living in the eye of the storm when it comes to the news about how he maintains some degree of equanimity we talk about his digital hygiene his meditation practice and his tattoo which is a reminder to maintain intellectual humility we also talk about his new end of the day ritual and about the future of the species at what appears to be a pivotal and potentially quite dangerous moment two things to say before we dive in first if you want to learn how to create equanimity in your own life this episode will come with a custom guided meditation if you sign up over at danharris dot com comma you'll get a bespoke meditation from the great teacher don mauricio who will be doing all of the custom guided meditations that come with our podcast episodes this month head on over to danharris dot com to become a paid subscriber you'll get not only the guided meditations that accompany every episode you'll also get full transcripts of my interviews access to the group chat and the ability to join my live video meditation sessions it's a lot of fun second we've got a merch sale running from july seventh through fourteenth head over to shop dan harris dot com if you've had your eye on our dump it here journal or the ten percent happier crew neck or that inner peace trucker hat some good deals are heading your way check it out shop dot danharris dot com all right we'll get started with my man ezra klein right after this literally right before i walked into my little home studio to record this advertisement and a couple of other things literally right before i walked in here our cat toby figured out how to get into a box of treats and i walked into our bathroom where long story but there's a whole cat set up in our bathroom anyway there were treats all over the floor and this dude he was having a field day and it was a mess i have to say i love my cats even when they do dumb stuff like get treats all over the place and my concern now is after he eats all of these treats he's going to have digestive issues if your cat is having digestive issues if they're throwing up their food or they just need a diet upgrade i get you and that's why you should check out our next sponsor smalls smalls cat food is protein packed recipes made with preservative free ingredients that you would find in your own refrigerator and it's delivered right to your door that's why katz dot com named smalls their best overall cat food to get sixty percent off your first order plus free shipping head to smalls dot com and use our promo code happier for a limited time see if my cat had broken into a package of smalls it wouldn't be a big deal there would be no digestive issues because that's super healthy stuff but instead he had to break into the treats i have to say though i've been feeding my cats smalls and they like it and it's very nice to have it delivered right to your front door it comes with dry ice it's packed nicely pop it in the freezer pop it in the fridge depending on when you want to use it and you're good to go you might be wondering why can't i just feed my cat kibble why can't i just let him eat all the cat treats they want believe it or not your adorable little cat descended from ferocious desert cats who hunted live prey for food and your cat really isn't that different they still need fresh protein packed meals to be at their best after switching to smalls eighty eight percent of cat owners reported overall health improvements that's a big deal the team at smalls is so confident your cat will love their product that you can try it risk free that means they will refund you if your cat is won't eat their food for a limited time only because you're a ten percent happier listener you can get sixty percent off your first order of smalls plus free shipping by using my code happier that's sixty percent off when you head to smalls dot com and use the promo code happier again that's promo code happier for sixty percent off your first order plus free shipping at smalls dot com i've made no secret of the fact that i have on many occasions directed some of my anxious energy at my receipting hairline in fact i wrote quite a bit about my struggles in this regard in my first book ten percent happier so i was very interested when a company called irestore elite wanted to advertise on this show with the irestore elite you can say goodbye to thinning hair and hello to fuller healthier locks the irestore elite is clinically proven to help regrow hair using three hundred lasers and two hundred leds that send light therapy directly to your scalp you can just pop it on while you're catching up on your favorite shows or even while you relax with a book lightweight hands free and seriously easy to use it's the self care routine your hair has been waiting for it's not magic it's just good science and for a limited time only our listeners are getting a huge discount on the irestore elite when you use code happier at irestore dot com that's promo code happierstore dot com to get huge savings on the hair regrowth device you've been wishing for and start feeling like yourself again just to say on the science there was a four month double blind clinical study performed by a board certified dermatologist and laser surgeon and in it nearly all the participants saw an increase in hair growth with irestore's laser and led technology you can feel confident you're buying a system with proven results and the best part about irestore they offer a twelve month money back guarantee so you can try it risk free and if your hair does not make a glorious return you'll get a full refund no arc or questions just fabulous hair or your money back there is a restocking fee that may be applicable give yourself the gift of hair confidence this year for a limited time only our listeners are getting a huge discount on the irestore elite when you use code happier at irestore dot com head over to irestore dot com and use the code happier for our shows exclusive discounts on the irestore elite please support our show and tell them that we sent you hair loss is frustrating but you don't have to fight it alone thanks to irestore ezra klein welcome back to the show thanks for having me i'm excited to have.
- [07:30]
Ezra Klein
You i am excited to be here.
- [07:34]
Dan Harris
I can't tell if you're with me i think you might be i'm not with you just ten percent you think.
- [07:40]
Ezra Klein
That after what feels now like years of talking about abundance i'm not excited to come talk about meditation i'll talk about anything but abundance now we're gonna.
- [07:49]
Dan Harris
Hit it at some point but we.
- [07:51]
Ezra Klein
Discussed i hope our publishers didn't hear that i love talking about abundance well.
- [07:56]
Dan Harris
You got the money you're good we talked in advance and i was asking you on email like what are you comfortable talking about and the question i asked you was like i'd be interested in hearing how you're staying sane because you are setting aside the book you're right in the middle of the conversation all the time you found a way i think in a way that i find very helpful to insert yourself into the discourse and i'm sure that has a toll so i said that to you and you wrote am i staying sane so my question for you is are you staying sane and if so.
- [08:27]
Ezra Klein
What are you doing so at every book event we do a signing line and in every signing line what i've noticed is almost every person i would honestly say a majority of people come up and the thing they say to me in the five to ten seconds that we're talking while i'm signing their book is you're helping me stay sane and i've been thinking about that a lot it's not what people usually say to me and i feel like maybe i've become a panic eater like i'm eating other people's panic but then the panic is in me i'm staying sane i do think that there is a comfort in being able to do work that you find useful in a moment that you find alarming but i think to stay sane right now what's the you would know better than me but it's not a mark of sanity to be adjusted to an insane world right yeah i'm not staying sane the sense that i'm not incredibly alarmed or that i'm sleeping well or that i wake up with a spring in my step i would really like to just cover some people trying to make the world better not burn critical piece of infrastructure or critical lattice of human cooperation trying to burn those to the ground like one after the other after the other after the other so i don't know i'm doing my best but i feel like the people who come to me are like helping me stay sane a little bit like it's not feeling the same inside it's maybe it's semen on.
- [09:59]
Dan Harris
The outside i have a million follow ups for that but i just want to jump on the panic eater thing i don't think that's correct i mean the last time i saw you we don't see each other in person that often but i saw you at a party a while ago and kind of love bombed you a little bit telling you exactly what people on the book lines say to you which is that you're keeping me sane but not because you're eating the panic but because you are crystallizing arguments that are taking form in my mind in a kind of miasmatic way i try to consume across the ideological spectrum but for the part of the spectrum that you represent you make incisive arguments really well you help to make sense of the world that's a real service and that's different than outsourcing my panic to you i appreciate.
- [10:42]
Ezra Klein
That i think the role that my show has been playing is a sense making role yes exactly and it's a very chaotic moment yes and what we're good at is sense making sometimes i think that there can be a kind of lie that can creep into the crevices of that i try really hard to guard against this because like if you're a logical structured thinker and i am sometimes whether or not i want to be you can try to make the world into a more sensible thing than it really is the times always gets criticized for sane watching donald trump which i have complicated feelings about i think the criticism is often unfair but one thing that i often describe on the show is a tendency to theory wash donald trump or theory wash the moment which is to say to find frameworks that kind of fit and they make sense but i actually think it's absolutely critical to understanding what is happening right now that it doesn't all make sense it doesn't all resolve down to a set of good informational inputs and reasonable responses to those informational inputs we've unleashed chaotic odds in this moment and pretending that it's all order can be its own kind of lie that makes.
- [11:56]
Dan Harris
Complete sense to me i mean i think in part what you're saying is we're dealing with an improvisational unpredictable sometimes irrational person and he is day trading making it up as he goes and so if you're trying to say to look at him through some sort of lens of a theory or an ideology you are likely to be surprised yeah.
- [12:18]
Ezra Klein
But i'm saying more than him i think eras have zeitgeists and i don't know what i think is that guys is composed of if you pushed me hard here you would get something very fuzzy but the dominant spirit of say the obama era was quite ordered it was ordered here as ordered internationally and i think we're in an era of disorder trump is a sort of force of disorder elon musk is a force of disorder but ai is a disordering force at least for now i think we are in a very liquid moment geopolitics is breaking down in very important ways trade relations are breaking down the climate the climate is breaking down i wrote this piece right at the beginning of the administration called now is a time of monsters sort of making a specific argument about the interrelationship between trump and climate change and ai and falling fertility and the way all of these were forces that were and would upend structures that were the stabilizing foundations of the decades we'd been in and i think that's largely proven to be true and then some you don't stay in one's eye guys forever but i do think that's where we are now when i say that we've unleashed a chaotic gods i don't mean literally gods and i don't just mean trump i mean that there is something about this moment you think about what elon musk has become i mean a very ordered person at another time in his life i'm not saying a normal person right if you read biographies of him it's not that as he says he's not a chill guy but the kinds of information he's absorbing the way he has cocooned himself in his own bubble of conspiracy and adulation and just creating his own weird harems and we're in batman the dark knight what's the joker one right we are working with chaotic forces yeah.
- [14:14]
Dan Harris
Yes and there are people in trump's orbit i'm thinking of bannon who have a joker esque worldview which is like chaos is the point let's tear it all down and i think one of the major points you were just trying to make is it's not just trump and those in his orbit it is these macro trends that may have produced reduced trump which is climate crisis creating migration from the south to the north across the globe you've got ai you've got again the climate and then trump effectuating what may be the end of the world war two order so all of these pillars of life for everybody who's alive now pretty much with very few exceptions all these pillars of stability are in question and that's terrifying and.
- [14:58]
Ezra Klein
So yeah so there's a project to understand what people are trying to do what they're thinking but a thing i've become very convinced of and it's funny because bannon is not the person i would use as my example but there are many i would use as an example there's a fundamental embrace of chaos for many of these people and part of that is what is required ultimately to embrace who donald trump is and how he acts in the first trump administration the people around him were perfectly willing to believe and say he is wrong he's inexperienced he doesn't know what he's doing he's impulsive you had a lot of friction in his administration among the people he chose for roles about him personally they saw some of their role as second guessing him and as trump has become to his own side this is a thing i've tracked on my show quite a bit a more mystic figure kissed by destiny in his own words touched and saved by god to make america great again as the understanding has become messianic and mythic the sense that you can second guess him has dissolved and so the people around him even if what he's saying doesn't really make sense they have to fit it into something and the belief i always say that trump is functionally the grand ayatollah of maga he's not its chief operating officer he's not its prime minister he's not its ceo he's its grand ayatollah he is the one in touch with the currents you can call it intuitive you can call it mystic whatever you want to call it that he has unleashed he is a sort of larger than life figure to them i don't necessarily buy that about him this is not my view but i've really noticed that what has emerged around him is an embrace of a way of thinking a way of acting a way of justifying where not only do things not have to make sense not only does it not have to add up as a logical argument or be connected to facts as you would normally understand them but in some ways it can't possibly be because trump is the repudiation of that of that ordered technocratic soulless disenchanted world and to embrace him is to embrace its opposites and that means rejecting its premises not actually what i thought i was going to talk about here but i do think all.
- [17:23]
Dan Harris
That anything you want to talk about is fine but let me just go back to you and how you hold your shit together to the extent that you are in the midst of all of this you said something earlier which is that one of the ways in which you are keeping your shit together is doing something useful which reminded me of the cliche that i did not invent but i like the idea that action absorbs anxiety that one of the best ways to handle anxiety is to be useful in some way and you are able to be useful in a way that is directly related to the problems that are abroad in the land.
- [17:58]
Ezra Klein
Yeah it's an incredible gift i would.
- [18:01]
Dan Harris
Imagine having done something similar to your job in my life do you find the work both a source of stress and a bomb yes and it depends.
- [18:11]
Ezra Klein
What moment in the work you're in there are things that covering them is personally emotionally difficult i was on book leave during october seventh and it just came clear to me to your point about action can absorb anxiety it was clear to me within a day that that was the end of my book leave because even putting aside the question of whatever responsibility i felt to cover it there was no more book getting done to have not been able to try to engage with it in some useful way was so much harder than to engage with it in some useful way that the choice was almost made for me by my own nervous system but the other side of it is it over time covering things that are really difficult does wear on you i mean it should if you haven't closed yourself off to empathy and feeling it will i did a show a few weeks probably when this airs a week or two back called the emergency is here about the disappearing of people like abrego garcia to these el salvador and torture prisons and to really take what is happening there in its fullness to take that trump meeting with bukele where they're sitting in the oval office functionally laughing to each other as they execute this kafkaesque buddy routine about how neither of them can do anything for this person sent to this prison for terrorists upon zero cross examined evidence of them being a terrorist or even a gang member for that matter to really take that in in its fullness is just extraordinarily upsetting like it should be so it's good to be able to do work on it i mean that does help but if the moment is alarming you should feel alarmed i feel alarmed.
- [20:10]
Dan Harris
What kind of boundaries do you create do you have some sort of phone hygiene that that's i have pretty good.
- [20:15]
Ezra Klein
Phone hygiene i'm not saying i do it one hundred percent of the time but have you heard of the brick no all right so you can buy this thing i am unpaid uncompensated street team for the brick i want to be very clear to the new york times i have no relationship with whatever company makes the brick brick is a small box brick it's got an rfid chip in it you basically set up a little profile on it and the way i do it is i whitelist apps and then you touch it you have to physically touch it to the brick and every other application on your phone blacks out it's unusable and it doesn't become usable until you physically touch it again so it's not like a app that you go in and you press a button now you can use your phone again it's actually a pain in the ass right i usually leave it at home so i'd have to go home so most of the time my phone is functionally unusable now there are a bunch of things that i need to use the reason i find this to be helpful is that i need uber and lyft both of my kids schools have apps i need oftentimes to pick them up to get into my gym i need an app i mean so much of our lives happens on our phones that to go to a dumb phone just doesn't fit at least for me but so i'm pretty.
- [21:21]
Dan Harris
Good about that in what cases are you touching the brick to black out.
- [21:27]
Ezra Klein
All the non white lists most of.
- [21:29]
Dan Harris
The time most of the time yeah so how can you do your job don't you need to be kind of plugged in no if somebody needs to.
- [21:35]
Ezra Klein
Text me they can and i usually if i'm at my job or it's during the day i have a computer nearby most of the time so sometimes when i travel i'll be unbreakable or i've started traveling with the thing and just keeping it in my bag so i'm a pretty big believer in this because even as somebody who thinks a phone is pretty bad for me most of the time if i can use it i will it's an amazing endless object lesson in how weak my own willpower is if there were oreos here i would eat all the oreos if there was a phone here i would look at the phone and so i keep it brick most of the time and then there are times when i know i'm going somewhere i have a bunch of emails related to where i'm going for you know reporting or some other reason and so then i won't so that's my phone hygiene it's not just like i keep it in another room while i sleep although i do do that it's that when i'm awake i mostly can't use it so when.
- [22:29]
Dan Harris
You'Re hanging out with your friends or when you're with your kids you are not checking the phone.
- [22:36]
Ezra Klein
Sixty percent of the time sixty five percent of the time and i feel bad when i am when i forget to brick it or forgot to bring the thing or whatever i tend to think it's bad for me i think it's important right now to be very thoughtful about your information your inputs and the world is so alarming and can do so little about it yes but also i don't know what the experience is like for you i'd be curious to know what your phone hygiene is but for me it's like the feeling of i'm not saying i believe in astral projection i don't particularly but it is like a form of kind of mental astral projection at all times you're in all these different places at all times with a.
- [23:12]
Dan Harris
Phone except for right here except for.
- [23:14]
Ezra Klein
Right here i'm wherever this news story is happening i'm at my office with my team checking slack i'm wherever the person emailing me is i'm everywhere and it's exhausting somebody i know described he was talking about social media but he described it as energy leakage and i haven't stopped thinking about that something i sometimes write i have a to do list during the day and i write some notes at the top of it one of them is often like don't leak energy try to keep as much of it as you can the phone feels like a constant source of energy leakage speaking of being sane and i don't do this this is not my job my job works differently than this but a great way to follow the news is to read one newspaper a day it is so much better than to be constantly hooked into the fucking thing specifically you should subscribe to the print edition of the new york times but it is it's a saner technology and you would know more even if you wouldn't always know it faster but you know it deeper i don't think we've made good trade offs i remember.
- [24:17]
Dan Harris
In the mid aughts there was an interview of the editor bill what was his name bill something white haired gentleman who's being interviewed by a correspondent from the new york times who held up the physical paper and said did anything in here happen today this was before the times had built a digital operation and there was a lot of stammering from your now former editor and yet at this point we've now lived through up to the minute information and what has it gotten us yeah this is.
- [24:45]
Ezra Klein
What i always say to people so one we are not net net more informative society no but two information is supposed to do something in the world having just more of it like smog hoarding gold is not the objective so you might have different objectives but i think that when we're talking about this you're sort of intuitively asking a question like civically do we seem to be a small d democratic society operating at a higher level of civic virtue information and wise leadership and like no of.
- [25:18]
Dan Harris
Course not are we happier you can maybe positively correlate the degradation of our democracy to the massive overflow of information and negatively correlate our happiness i think.
- [25:32]
Ezra Klein
You absolutely can again i am not our mutual friend pj vogt i think he calls it an information vegan or a phone vegan i'm not a phone vegan i work in political information i think i'm pretty damn informed i think a lot about the embodied experiences of different ways of learning about things the experience of learning about things on my phone is fundamentally twitchy it's just twitchy and it's twitchy and it's irritable and it's it's not a good feeling in the body reading a magazine or a newspaper or book it's a good feeling in the body even if what you're reading about is upsetting and it's not just good feeling in the body there's somehow room for my brain to make associations with it it's a good space for my own thinking and i have less time to do this lately with the book tour than i've wanted to but i will say in terms of being sane and i think one of the things that has made me feel less sane recently because i'm sort of trying to balance the show and the column and the book and the book has done amazingly well which i'm very very grateful for it's been a very intense project being out there talking about.
- [26:43]
Dan Harris
Just hit number one on the new.
- [26:45]
Ezra Klein
York times just hit number one on the new york times bestseller list i'm so happy about that but when things are just like a little more turned down i really try to spend an hour to an hour and a half in the morning reading things on paper at a table in a room i think is physically nice which can be the fourteenth floor of the new york times which is quite beautiful or different coffee shops i like with a coffee or tea and i find that really sane making no matter what the sentiment of the information i'm taking in is and not doing that and instead trying to like keep up with everything like in the corners of the day like on a phone or you know like looking at the computer and being distracted by notifications a very very different experience.
- [27:29]
Dan Harris
I think you're spot on and i've never heard that argument made before but it absolutely lands for me absolutely lance i'm wondering where would you put the processing of information via a podcast on this spectrum from twitchy to i mean.
- [27:45]
Ezra Klein
Obviously podcasting the apex way of consuming information what you want is long rambling conversations between people i think it depends what you're doing and how you're doing it podcasting is interesting to me as a way of absorbing information because at least in its audio form and a lot of us including us right now are doing visual versions of it too but at least in its audio form it is almost always the second thing a person is doing yeah so you're driving you're walking the dog you're folding the laundry you're at a job which doesn't require full attention you're commuting on the subway you're whatever it is different people have different versions of this so i really like that experience but it is a different experience and it is a different way of using your mind and working with information than having it be the first thing you're doing podcasts for me seem to slip in an almost attentional back door it's like whatever the first thing you're doing is it's almost like your fish it spinner and it's keeping some part of you occupied which is why i think very long podcasts work in an era of very short form content because it's the first thing you're doing that is dealing with the part of your mind or your attentional faculties that would normally say hey you're bored go look at something else so some part of that is dealt with and then it's like some other layer of your attention is able to sit there in an hour and a half as recline show or search engine or ten percent happier or the gray area or whatever it might be that.
- [29:22]
Dan Harris
Lands too i would say you're not saying this but i would say based on what you just said and i'm making this up for me at least consuming information visually on the phone either through text or video feels the worst i would say reading it on a physical paper alone and that's the only thing i'm doing feels the best in podcasts would be a reasonably close second.
- [29:43]
Ezra Klein
I'Ve been thinking about this on and off what i'm about to tell you is a thing that i almost certainly heard on a tim ferriss show years ago or something like the tim ferriss show and i heard i'm like i wonder if that's true but it definitely feels true when i do it and so okay so here's the argument somebody who i think they were an expert in eyes was making this point that there's a relationship between the width of your gaze and your nervous system response to it and that a tightly focused gaze is a kind of high concentration response in the body usually you know if you're looking out over a mountain range or out a wide window your sort of gaze is relaxed but when you're reading et cetera certainly when you are like tightly looking at the phone it's this concentrated gaze in this what sounded to me like a probably bullshit evo bio just so story you know well when we were doing that we were worried we were going to be eaten by a mountain lion but whatever it is that is behind that i actually find it to be true even when i was doing this with you right here just like looking at my palm and that i noticed the change in my body as my gaze focused and held and because the phone holds the gaze something i notice when i am reading in newspaper or magazine or book is i look up a lot it doesn't hold me that much i look up i think about what i just saw i sort of look around the coffee shop the phone ipad other things i don't the computer screen and so it's holding that tightened gaze for long periods of time this person argued is sort of bad on the nervous system it's anxiety producing whether the story there is true the for me experience that when my gaze is wide and relaxed something about that seems to allow my system to settle a little bit and when i'm like staring at my phone for an hour even if what i was looking at i seem to like some part of me afterwards is just a little clenched i think that trying to be attentive to embodiment is pretty important and something i've become much more attentive to in the last couple of years i think there's a lot of information in it i want to.
- [31:52]
Dan Harris
Go into that but just on the eyes thing i'll join you in copying to the fact that i have no idea what the fuck i'm talking about but emdr yeah exactly right i'm a white guy i have a podcast say whatever the hell i want emdr eye movement desensitization i don't actually know what it stands for i've only done one session of it but it is about moving your eyes in a specific way to release trauma there's a successor that i have more familiarity with called brain spotting where you're asked to well for me i have claustrophobia so airplanes and elevators have been hard for me for the last couple of years and so i've been doing some brain spotting and the idea is you imagine the thing you're scared of and then you look around the room and you find the spot where you're most triggered and then you sit there with your eyes on it so long way of saying there seems to be something to this idea of the placement of your eyes the way you're gazing and their nervous system.
- [32:55]
Ezra Klein
Yeah i'm definitely happy to nod along to that on the podcast somebody i love did emdr and it was really very helpful for them that's sort of my experience with it yeah i mean something about the eyes seems related to certain my understanding of emdr is it has to do with bilateral like my understanding is you can do emdr by tapping and by even walking you can.
- [33:15]
Dan Harris
Also do it with a pair of sunglasses that the lenses flip up and.
- [33:18]
Ezra Klein
Down my vague i don't want to go any further into this than this because i don't want to get things wrong but my vague understanding is emdr has to do with bilateral motion rather than being specifically optical let me promise.
- [33:31]
Dan Harris
The listener that i will do an episode where somebody knows more than i do about this issue coming up ezra klein talks a little bit more about embodiment and desensitization also his concerns about ai i always love it when a company that my family and i are already supporting decides to become a supporter of this show we have been owners of a different defender for many many years i think four or five years it's the car my wife drives it makes me very comfortable knowing that she and our son are moving around in a sturdy reliable vehicle like the defender and it looks really really cool it's just a great looking car it really suits my wife better than it does me given that she's just cooler than i am and one of the things that the folks who make the defender want you to know is that it's really about the spirit of adventure and healthy risk taking there's a meetup of people who are in this category it's called destination defender it's an incredible weekend festival in port jervis new york and it was created for people who embrace the impossible and includes a lot of outdoor activities live music chef tastings and more sounds really fun join the adventure at destination defender may sixteenth through eighteenth to learn more please visit destinationdefenderusa dot com imagine you're a business owner who has to rely on a dozen different software programs to run your company none of which are connected and each one is more expensive and more complicated than the last it can be pretty stressful now imagine odoo odoo has all the programs you will ever need and they're all connected on one simple easy to use platform giving you peace of mind that your business is always being taken care of from every angle odoo has user friendly open source applications for everything we're talking crm accounting inventory manufacturing marketing hr and everything in between basically if your business needs it odoo's got it odoo sounds pretty amazing right so stop wasting your time and money on those expensive disconnected programs and let odoo harmonize your business with with simple efficient software that can handle everything for a fraction of the price doesn't get much better than that so what are you waiting for discover how odoo can take your business to the next level by visiting odoo dot com that's o d o o dot com o d o o dot com odoo modern management made simple let me go back to embodiment what do you mean by that why have you become so interested in it so.
- [36:12]
Ezra Klein
What i mean by embodiment is just how my body feels when different things are happening and very very easy for me to get caught up in my mind and the body keeps a score by bessel van der kolk i think it's been on the new york times bestseller list functionally continuously now for years i mean there's a lot to it but i think we live in a very specifically disembodied time the technologies we use are disembodying they make you a floating brain in front of a flickering screen immersed in a weightless world of digital information when that happens and i'm not saying there isn't joy to it or an intensity to it again i work in front of a computer all day you're just losing all the information in your body and i think over time you desensitize to it i think like we're here on a meditation podcast so i think sometimes like what has meditation actually done for me i'm not enlightened not awakened i know that for sure i don't believe that my buddha nature has been uncovered yet but i've been meditating most days for fifteen years now maybe more and one thing that i think it's given me is an attention to my state a deeper level of granularity than i would otherwise have and i think there's a lot of information in the state now unfortunately oftentimes i pay attention to my state i'm like i don't like my state and there's not a lot to do about it in the moment and obviously the advice would be to accept it but i think that to me has become a source of or a place of embodiment has become a place of resistance to ways of living that feel increasingly inhuman and things that over time i've noticed i mean none of them are earth shaking we know them all there are just rooms i feel better in than other rooms there are ways of consuming information i feel better with than others i'm constantly doing things to jack up my system and i think i'm just attentive enough to what the other states feel like i had george saunders on my show years ago had him on a couple of times the author he always seems to me i think he would say he's not enlightened but he always seems a little bit enlightened to me but i remember him talking about meditation and saying that over time what you begin to sense is that there are all these states you can be in a one a two a two a three b one b two b three and you begin to just have a knowledge when you're in one that the others are possible too even if you're not where you want to be there's a little bit of a internal navigation mechanism that somebody's like colder colder colder colder now that's a little bit in conflict i think with some other advice which is not to be doing so much picking and choosing and so i never quite know how to resolve that maybe you know but i think that's part of it for me it's strange to live in a time i mean people have felt this for many in many many different areas of human history but it's strange to live in a time where you just sort of feel that we've made some wrong turns we're not going to unmake and we're pushing ourselves in a way where we're probably out of the ideal window and are maybe things that were good for a while like i'm one of these people like the internet was good in two thousand seven and somewhere around twenty twelve fourteen the rise of the algorithmic internet it started getting worse for us and i don't know how we're going to unwind it i don't really think we will i don't really know if ai is going to be good or bad for us i can see it both ways but just a sense that i feel bad for my kids i got to grow up before computers before omnipresent screens when there was nothing that could grab my attention that was all that good all the time and so i at least had the experience of the other forms of attention and i cultivated those attentional faculties and the level of countercultural effort it now takes to do that or to push a kid to do that is really high so maybe my discomfort is just somebody who's straddled a bunch of it and felt other things and doesn't like all the new things maybe i've just become a luddite but i don't really think.
- [40:41]
Dan Harris
So you've given me so much to follow up on there i want to get to the picking and choosing thing in a minute but on the kids i'm a father too i do sometimes wonder whether they won't have their own counter revolution i hear my son when he's playing video games with his friends and somebody's freaking out they'll say touch grass i wonder if their own nervous systems will kick in in such a way that they you may have been too young for this but in the nineties i think there was this campaign on mtv which was at that point the dominant youth media there was this anti smoking campaign where the whole pitch was they're conning you they're trying to sell you this thing by making it look cool but don't take the bait instead of lecturing they appealed to the inherently rebellious nature of teenagers and i'm just wondering whether there will be some sort of rebellion against the algorithms and you're looking skeptical you think that algorithms.
- [41:41]
Ezra Klein
Are too strong it's not just that they're too strong it's that they are strengthening at an accelerating rate i don't know what to think about what ai is going to do man i was looking at a study i'm not sure i trusted the methodology of the study so take it with a grain of salt what it basically showed was that the most common use of ai right now is not economic in some way it's not productivity it's relational it's you've turned your ai into a therapist which i've definitely done i've definitely done that you've turned it into a friend kids growing up it is just completely obvious that if you are my older son is six he's going to grow up with ai friends he's going to grow up with ai lovers it's not in my view even stoppable unless you're amish or something like that where you're going to basically keep the technology out of the community we don't know what this will do to anybody at all now for me who you know i'm forty my life largely predates ai it comes in as this alien force and so there's always going to be an internal resistance to it that's weird my ai therapist so to speak it's so good dude it is so good it's just a straightforward powerful model that i just talked to about my life but also does this constant lying to me which keeps the thing from being too convincing it's always like i'm really proud of you and i'm like no you're an unfeeling neural network or at least i think you're an unfeeling neural network some people disagree with me about that it has this constant like i'm right there with you i'm like you're not right there with me you don't mean which.
- [43:25]
Dan Harris
Model are you using i pay for.
- [43:27]
Ezra Klein
Not the pro level of openai yeah that's the one under it i pay.
- [43:31]
Dan Harris
For it too and i'm not getting.
- [43:33]
Ezra Klein
Stuff like that it may like me better maybe i'm just doing more for it to be proud of or it.
- [43:41]
Dan Harris
Senses that you're needier i mean undoubtedly.
- [43:46]
Ezra Klein
I'Ve actually kept trying to be like could you be a little less effusive and supportive i would like you to be a little sterner and it seems to forget that pretty quickly interesting point is that i remember when i met my wife before right before internet dating really normalized so right before tinder hit and things like that and so i watched from the outside as something had been kind of weird internet dating is like what you do if you can't meet anybody in real life to what sort of fucking creep are you meeting people in real life that was partially the technology advancing but partially generational too and what's going to happen here is it is going to be weird and strange for a bit if you went to somebody dan soon if we were talking offline and you're like listen man i know you're pretty in ai so i want to tell you about something at this point claude sonnet is my best friend i'd be like you should touch grass that's probably a bad idea don't make claude your best friend at some point that's not going to be weird it's just not going to be weird we don't know what that will do to people we are just going to run this experiment no control group on everybody simultaneously for subscription revenues and hope for the fucking best i don't exactly know what the alternative is but it's a hell of a thing to be living through do you think it's.
- [45:17]
Dan Harris
Scarier to be alive now or on the lip of world war two because.
- [45:21]
Ezra Klein
We know what world war two was on the lip of world war two i'm jewish dude yeah yeah that was bad but that's working with hindsight i.
- [45:30]
Dan Harris
Guess what i'm trying to say is we are in an age of real uncertainty where as you've established and i think you're unquestionably correct we have all of these x factors out there the potential dissolution of the post world war two order ai the climate crisis growing migration and polarization and trending toward fashion there's so many questions and our nature is to fear change this is actually what i end up talking to chatgpt about all the time like i'm not pollyanna but like is there an optimistic way to view all of these so.
- [46:03]
Ezra Klein
Let me say that it goes to your point about fearing change what i just said very literally is we have no idea what it will do to people and i mean exactly that it could be good maybe it'll be good my conversations with these programs i think at this point are good they're net positive in my life in a way that my interactions with x or instagram are not it's just on the cusp of something we don't understand cannot understand that the people who embrace it fully we won't even like have them in our sight line for a long time because it's going to be young people they're going to be using it in ways that we don't really get it's just unknowable we are just on the cusp like of i think sort of an event horizon and on the other side of that whatever it is is just probably going to be different it's going to be good in some ways bad in other ways i mean even for all i've been talking about i think that we have made a number of wrong turns in the way we've structured digital life but not every part of that is bad and not every part of modern society is bad and as much as i'm upset about american politics at the moment i'm not going to tell you there have been worse periods in our politics and other politics and also this was a point and a half in the battleground states from going the other way so i mean none of this is foreordained and there's no one story of any age right well we impose into the narratives later there are a lot of stories that are contradictory i was talking earlier about zeitgeists but it's not like the other zeitgeist doesn't still exist there's a reason people like listening to pete buttigieg on podcasts or me people still like very ordered thinkers and so i actually don't know but i take that not knowing very seriously if that makes sense i think i'm trying to be very alive to how much is cracking and that means i think being very attentive to the experience of being in it to go back to the question of embodiment that's like something i want for my kids it's something i want for people i think the whole thing that we had a moment where digital literacy was in vogue it was so thin as a concept right you're supposed to get better at detecting the telltale signs of misinformation or disinformation learning how to be attentive to your own attention and your own experience of the world we teach people so little of that i mean it's why people love this show and people are so interested in meditation but you shouldn't have to be interested in meditation to get training in that no and there are a lot of other ways to be trained in a lot of people for whom i mean i know a lot of people in my life you must get this so much people come to me like they're making a confession that they don't like to.
- [48:43]
Dan Harris
Meditate yeah all the time and i'm.
- [48:45]
Ezra Klein
Like i don't care i'm not the meditation police and nor are there meditation police and there are a million other ways to be embodied in your own experience and that's not even the best one for me a lot of the time right it's just one of the ones i use but it seems to me like our schooling is still extremely in the mode of like you should memorize multiplication tables it has modernized so little into just like how to be.
- [49:15]
Dan Harris
A human i think that's coming i hope i'm pessimistic about my own life generally but generally optimistic about the species but like fifty one forty nine optimistic.
- [49:26]
Ezra Klein
About the species why are you pessimistic then about your own life i just.
- [49:30]
Dan Harris
Am it's like defensive pessimism like anxious i too am had a bar mitzvah so you know we are part of a lineage of people with reasonably rational fears given the historical record and so.
- [49:42]
Ezra Klein
Probably that it's an inheritance i guess.
- [49:46]
Dan Harris
I'M launching a new business of late and you know my projections are always very conservative that's where i tend toward pessimism but when i think about the world like it just seems to me very possible that there will be a reaction especially in education against some of this disembodiment that we're talking about i could be wrong and i'm definitely skewed because i live in this world it's.
- [50:12]
Ezra Klein
Actually a thing that bums me out about the education policy conversation right now which one feels very stuck two feels sort of sinister to the extent it's not stuck i've been very excited about the gains that what i would call john heidism have been making by the time my kids are old enough for it to matter we will have figured out the schools and phones thing but curriculum and actually having a real debate about what is education for so i want to do a piece on this i haven't done it yet maybe a podcast maybe something bigger one way that i concretize my uncertainty about what the world is going to look like in twenty years or eighteen years is trying to think about how i think my children should be educated putting aside how they will be educated because like we're pretty big believers in public schools where you know there's a lot less choosing of curriculum what do i think will be valued what do i think society will ask of and reward in eighteen year olds or twenty two year olds in sixteen to twenty years i don't.
- [51:25]
Dan Harris
Know well this is where i kind of lost my train of thought a second ago this is where i was going i think it's possible and this may be overly optimistic i'm very willing to five thousand one hundred and forty nine i think it's possible that in the age of artificial intelligence emotional intelligence will matter way more because a lot of the jobs that are going to be replaced as commodifiable those that remain will have to do things that the.
- [51:51]
Ezra Klein
Computer can't do i used to think that i don't even know about the question of job replacement but i would say in many ways the computers are better at emotions now than math well.
- [51:59]
Dan Harris
They'Re proud which is a weird thing.
- [52:01]
Ezra Klein
Thank you i think there's something about we sometimes make this cut that the real human skill is emotional not cerebral but i think about it a little bit more do we ask people to act as machines and what does it mean to ask them to act as human beings we don't value people's experience of things at all in the economy we value what they can pay for things we value what they can produce but we don't value their experience we've sort of built schooling post industrial revolution to get people to act in ways that the economy needed them to act and schooling is not just about what you learn it's also about an acculturation into a value system rewards and punishments and what makes you worthy and did you get a gold star and there's going to be a lot of dislocation as some of what we've taught people to value just gets eaten up by systems that can do it better and even if we got the policy right imagine utopically that we come to the view that artificial intelligence is really collective intelligence it is an algorithmic overlay on the sum total of machine readable human knowledge that the actual value of coming up with those algorithms wasn't nothing but it was not like that impressive i mean these companies are not that old and the profits should be shared imagine you're in like sam altman's sort of world here or something and productivity takes off and your computers are doing all these amazing things and we figure out robotics we got the policy right and so everybody's richer well we accord value and dignity to work people who win the lottery do not end up unbelievably happy people need to be useful and the area of wage labor is like a punctuated era in human history i don't expect it to go away anytime soon but it isn't the only way you can organize value isn't the only way you can organize social respect and so we have organized society to persuade people to act as machines i mean all the talk in politics bring back manufacturing jobs most manufacturing jobs from the eras in which we are highly nostalgic for them was having people act as machines now act literally right these jobs have not just been given to china they've been automated and i don't think it's the highest purpose of human beings to act as machines i think it's really really great to go to the park now i obviously live my life to be inside an office constantly trying to write about how other people should go to the park or something so take it for what you will but there's something here there's some like in my most optimistic versions of this it's a rediscovery and a revaluing of what actually is distinctive about being a human being and move away from demanding people spend their precious lives on this earth acting in ways machines can act yes i agree but we could also fuck that up in a million ways along.
- [55:04]
Dan Harris
The way right there's the best case scenario and you're from my limited point of view describing it coming up ezra talks about meditation and his introducing the new dell ai pc powered by the intel core ultra processor it's not just an ai computer it's a computer built for ai that means it's built to help you do your busy work for you so you can fast forward things like editing images designing presentations generating code debugging code running lots of apps without lag creating live translations and captions summarizing meeting notes extending battery life enhancing security finding that file you were looking for managing your schedule meeting your deadlines etcetera etc leaving all the time in the world for more you time and for the things you actually want to do get a new dell ai pc starting at six hundred ninety nine dollars ninety nine cents cents at dell dot com ai pc dell dot com ai pc dell how those ahead stay ahead imagine you're a business owner who has to rely on a dozen different software programs to run your company none of which are connected and and each one is more expensive and more complicated than the last it can be pretty stressful now imagine odoo odoo has all the programs you will ever need and they're all connected on one simple easy to use platform giving you peace of mind that your business is always being taken care of from every angle odoo has user friendly open source applications for everything we're talking crm accounting inventory manufacturing marketing hr and everything in between basically if your business needs it odoo's got it odoo sounds pretty amazing right so stop wasting your time and money on those expensive disconnected programs and let odoo harmonize your business with simple efficient software that can handle everything for a fraction of the price it doesn't get much better than that so what are you waiting for discover how odoo can take your business to the next level by visiting odoo dot com that's o d o o dot com o dash o o dot com odoo modern management made simple new favorite ritual let me just go back to meditation you raised a question i actually don't know that i've ever thought about but i think is really interesting this seeming contradiction between choosing to change your mind state the injunction to you know i've heard joseph goldstein say you can change the channel if you're stuck.
- [57:51]
Ezra Klein
In anger oh can you joseph yeah.
- [57:54]
Dan Harris
If you're joseph vis a vis the injunction to accept what's happening as the route to equanimity that the only way out is through and i'm freelancing here because i'm not a buddhist scholar i'm not a meditation teacher and i do wish i had somebody with bona fides here but i'm on firmer ground here than i am with emdr i do think both are true and it's about using your wisdom to figure out what is possible and good to be done in the moment so yes if you ezra are locked in unconstructive rumination anxiety anger whatever yeah i think it's appropriate actually not even mutually exclusive you can start by accepting it investigating it mindfully and then you can also decide to cultivate its opposite which is usually loving.
- [58:43]
Ezra Klein
Kindness i don't think he would mind me saying this will kabat zinn is a great meditation teacher and thinker he once told me when i was talking about something related to this i was talking about equanimity the thing i always want to have and don't really have and he said something like you can't really practice equanimity but you can become equanimous and i've thought about that extremely puzzling statement a lot which suggests to me that there's something in it and it tends to be true in my moment to moment experience in the moment my ability to deploy any practice or any mental effort or non effort to say you're stirred up you should be a quantumist right now does not work no but there are things i do in my life that over time create conditions in which equanimity arises and has like a little bit more of a.
- [59:46]
Dan Harris
Buffer for me when i explore the second part of that i'm still stuck on the you're stirred up you should be a quantumist right now the first part is perfect you're mindful of your mind state thank you stirred up right.
- [59:57]
Ezra Klein
You'Re proud of me just like yes.
- [59:59]
Dan Harris
I am i'm as proud of you as the impersonal personal computer but i'm actually genuinely proud of you i think that first part is great it's the second part the should you should be equanimous that is the problem that goes right to the tension you were talking about like should you change your mind state or should you accept it and i don't think you can change before.
- [60:21]
Ezra Klein
You accept my level of constant self criticism and self judgment no matter what any meditation teacher on earth tells me about why my state is not what i intellectually know it should be and i would be happier if it was or why what i am thinking about is not what i wish to be thinking about instead of what i am thinking about is so deeply like look man if you atop a meditation empire can't stop being anxious my belief that i'm going to get out of could you not just calm down right now.
- [60:56]
Dan Harris
Is very low i disagree i disagree i think this is purely voluntary suffering you're doing really and it reminds me yes i mean sure there's deep conditioning here so some of it's going to happen i'm not promising an evaporation of these ancient tendencies both of us were probably related back in the shtetl like both of us inherited these traits but i don't think that conditioning is destiny per se it's not as you said before foreordained have you heard about or practiced self compassion okay so kristin neff has done all this work to show that actually you can learn to talk to yourself in a more supportive way and then ethan cross at the university of michigan who's not a self compassion expert has done a lot of work on chatter internal chatter so it's related work about rewiring your inner dialogue getting rid of the should getting rid of the self laceration which is classic in buddhist speak second arrow so the first arrow hits you and you're feeling involuntary pain but then you voluntarily insert the second arrow of you shouldn't be feeling.
- [61:58]
Ezra Klein
This pain my best friend is constantly in voice messages to me when i tell him how i'm doing he's like that's a lot of secondary suffering you're doing right there yes but this is what i mean with the will kabat zinn line that my lived experience of it because i i know this on some level right is that my ability say to do what you are saying to not have the voice in my head be really self critical when i'm getting enough sleep is just so far beyond my ability to do it when i'm not that there are conditions in which the more skillful responses arise for me absolutely and the more distant i am from those conditions the less all of the training and the meditating and so on it's not that does nothing right i do think i have like an awareness of what's going on in me and avilian is another mantra somebody once gave me it's like this right now i have to say to myself.
- [62:55]
Dan Harris
My wife has that tattoo oh really right now it's like this yes no.
- [62:59]
Ezra Klein
Kidding we've all got our little zen.
- [63:01]
Dan Harris
Tattoos we're going to talk about yours.
- [63:02]
Ezra Klein
In a second it's something that i've come to appreciate more a couple of.
- [63:07]
Dan Harris
Things to say on that one joseph goldstein whose name has been invoked already great meditation teacher my teacher great friend i've seen him tonight he's an amazing amazing human being has talked about how he had many years of of insomnia which has actually gotten better recently and he would say that when he was underslept he would be a quantumist but unhappy i like that and also when you're talking about the conditions that create your buddha nature to emerge and i do think it's with buddha nature it's episodic you you know like at any given moment you're creating conditions for it to emerge or not that's why i'm not a meditation fundamentalist i have really pivoted toward all aspects of doing life better because the meditation doesn't matter as much if you're not sleeping or the meditation doesn't matter as much if you're not taking care of your body which of course includes sleep and so or if you have horrible relationships in your life or if your ethics are off the meditation will have less potency so it has to take place in a.
- [64:07]
Ezra Klein
Context my next tattoo to jump forward in time is going to be about rest yes and one of the things i've thought a lot about in the last couple of years is for a personality like mine it's very easy for meditation specifically to become one more intensely imposed self discipline i actually think it's very poisonous the apps get into these.
- [64:34]
Dan Harris
Streaks we did have that i mean i'm not part of the app but.
- [64:38]
Ezra Klein
Yes that has streaks at some point i was like i'm going to stop doing streaks like i'm just going to keep breaking it because i don't want to because if one of your personality traits i love this line that a lot of successful people are just anxiety harnessed to productivity and if one of the ways you deal with that action wise as you were saying earlier is just a kind of the harder things get to clamp down more and more with discipline well if it's like this i need to be working out every day i need to be meditating every day i need to be getting my reading in like you can keep doing it and for me i can keep like there's something somewhat calming but also ultimately exhausting and unfulfilling about continuing to clamp down harder and harder and harder on myself and i know if like i mean you might say it but a meditation teacher it's like it's not supposed to feel like that but it can get like that and actually forcing myself into spaces for even there like language like allowing myself into non productive periods even just in a day where nothing happening for me is in any way productive right i've been like kind of searching for a shabbat practice for a long time and like recently i found something pretty close to one that's actually for the first time working for me although it's not like the religious shabbat that question has gotten very central that it's very i don't know meditation for me can sometimes become even though again i do it five days a week it can just be part of this endless disciplining of the self yeah.
- [66:07]
Dan Harris
I buy that yeah i do i think it's a misapplication of the technology but it's i've definitely slipped into that myself what's the shabbat practice this came.
- [66:16]
Ezra Klein
Through my wife actually when i came home and she's like we're going to do it now we're just lighting these candles and we're not really going to talk we're just going to read or like sit here and i was like this is our date we're not going to talk and it was so good and lately basically every night after i put my kids down sometimes with her sometimes if she's working or something just by myself i just turn out all the lights in the living room and i light five candles and i've done this in better and worse ways there have been some days when i've like had my phone near me and you know but the sort of complete bringing down of the inputs the thing i've struggled with with shabbat which i would like to have as like a practice with my kids and a ritual is that i want it to feel very restful and when you're taking care of a three and a six year old and they are not interested in that beautiful shabbat meal you cooked and there's not a bunch of other family around and a community that you're embedded in with it and saturday is not a day when you can just be non productive they want to do fifty five things and there's naps and there's cleaning the dishes and that tension between what i was trying to achieve for myself in it and what the reality of my stage of life is was i just wasn't getting where i wanted to be this like the fact that it is related to the candles right that there's something about turning out the lights being lit by fire which feels like a little bit more ancient to me and just really sharply reducing the input and the thing i'm trying to move towards is only listening to music only reading on paper or just sitting there and like talking or like looking out the window that's what i would like to get to and doing that most.
- [67:52]
Dan Harris
Nights i love this and i can imagine and this may be too in the optimizer realm but this is where my head's going that it's also good sleep hygiene yes i really there was.
- [68:03]
Ezra Klein
A night a few nights ago i'm like oh my god that helped my kids have been sick recently not anything serious just we've had a lot of night wake ups and going to what we were talking about a minute ago it's like my outlook on life really darkened yeah and there was a night when i did this and then i didn't get woken up at night and i was amazed at how much better i felt so yeah it's good sleep hygiene and it's cheap it's not like a super complex thing i mean it's five candles that i got at ikea and it's just sitting there for thirty minutes i mean i don't have that long in me after the kids go down it's not like they're another four hours of my day so it's pretty straightforward i have to meditate during it too which is nice but there's something about the real change in the space it is the first ritual i have found that works for me where i'm not like crashing into the end of.
- [68:56]
Dan Harris
The day yeah i'm going to try that actually makes a ton of sense.
- [69:00]
Ezra Klein
It'S been helpful in not drinking or i noticed over the last year where i was like there are more days of this stuff i'm covering it's like you would want to have a drink at the end of the day like the glass of wine or a bit of a joint and i was like that's not how i want to call myself and i was noticing that it had become more regular and like this has substituted in for it in a way i've been really grateful for and.
- [69:23]
Dan Harris
The wine or whatever the beer or whatever that's terrible for sleep yeah very.
- [69:27]
Ezra Klein
Bad i'm actually pretty good at not but you know like that kind of advices.
- [69:33]
Dan Harris
You and me both that does kind of lead me to one of the two remaining things i was hoping to talk to you about but you kind of touched on it in a couple of ways one is you talked about raising kids in the absence of community which is counter evolutionary and very common and just got me thinking about community and if the overarching theme of this discussion is how do we stay sane in a pretty insane era for me at least one of the most powerful levers is being with other people embodied with other people no phones hanging out and you and i were talking a little bit on email before like that there can be a price to pay for that because you stay out later than you want or you're ingesting certain molecules and it throws you off i'm the only one doing that just to be clear and yet for me it is worth it because of i'm a lifelong insomniac i really am quite intentional about my sleep hygiene and i will break it if i want it to see my friends because that is such a powerful regular on my nervous system so i'm interested to hear your.
- [70:33]
Ezra Klein
Thoughts on that yeah i'm really as a person intensely community focused when i moved to new york i basically could not calm down and feel rooted here until i had met the people who i could sort of be myself with and feel at ease with and i see them a lot so one of the great things is we do raise our kids in a little community we have friends with kids and we see them basically every weekend and it's a really beautiful part of our lives and and i do have good friends and my wife's family lives here which is really great and yeah the thing that i wish we had my fantasy of the commune is atmospheric community is things that have just flow to them where kind of like people are just around and you can just kind of move in and out as opposed to how's ten am no that day doesn't work.
- [71:25]
Dan Harris
Right the dinner industrial complex yeah the.
- [71:27]
Ezra Klein
Dinner industrial complex and again i'm very blessed to have friends for whom we do really prioritize seeing each other a lot and they're close with my kids in some cases they have kids of their own that is like the substance to me of what makes life worth it like other people like i don't really care where i live i don't have any abstract affection for new york city like maybe the opposite if the people i love most want to live in denver i'd be thrilled to move to denver but what i care about is the people in the place i'm in places for me are very much made by people i like new york city to the extent i like the people i know here absent them could take or leave it but then the kid thing is very real even marv's family we live in brooklyn they're in manhattan we're not supposed to do this we were talking earlier about ai raising kids in a two parent nuclear family where both parents work full time or more than full time jobs to say nothing of raising kids in a one parent family it is the absolute most radical experiment possible people get so up in arms about different kinds of alternative ways of living like if you say communes you sound really weird or something this is the alternative way of living we are living the alternative way of living and in my view it doesn't actually work that well like i don't know anybody who thinks it works say well we just don't really know what to do about it and i don't know what to do about it i see it too just in this other way with my children they want community their adoration of their family here their cousins their aunts and uncles their grandparents they're obsessed with all of them the friends who come regularly like my kids will burst into tears if they learn that one of my friends came by and they didn't get to see them on some level they seem completely tuned to not be just seeing me and my wife at all times that is not what they want like they would like us to be around it all the time but they love it when other people are around whether or not they're all that engaged again it's a way i think we've run this profound experiment on ourselves and i i don't think the experiment is working out that well and in some more perfect world i would like to put more of my own internal energy into creating structures that help ameliorate it and you know you end the week completely fucking exhausted by work and am i going to host and there's going to be dishes.
- [74:01]
Dan Harris
I am foursquare in your camp on this the happiest place in the world for me which is somewhat place specific but is really people specific is montauk which is for people listening it's on the easternmost tip of long island it's part of the hamptons but it's much less obnoxious although a little bit obnoxious i've been going there for twenty years and my wife and i have been going there for seventeen years and my wife's family has a house there and we have many family friends who also have houses there and these happen to be very old friends of mine and ours and many people you know and it has a commune feel there is very little scheduling you see somebody on the beach okay come back to my house we'll do lunch there bring the kids and we actually just spent a weekend there not in the summer for you you and i are recording this in april so we spent easter weekend there with several other families and i had this moment i'm not a very sentimental person although as i get older a little bit more we're all sitting around at dinner it was like five families sounds like something out of the godfather but it was five families and i was sitting on the couch and all the kids came in they'd been somewhere else and my son comes and snuggles up next to me and our friend doug who's one of the dads came and sat next to me we're all kind of watching the knicks game but talking to each other and dinner was being cooked and i almost started crying i was like this is the best part of being alive just completely surrounded by people i love and trust including my son my wife and we.
- [75:27]
Ezra Klein
Are losing that yeah i mean that sounds like a beautiful moment i'm jealous.
- [75:35]
Dan Harris
You'Re invited anytime come stay with us my wife's family has a big house last question the aforementioned tattoo that you have what does it say i know.
- [75:46]
Ezra Klein
What it says but you tell us is that so so years ago i went with my wife to tassajara the zen center and the carmel highlands unbelievably beautiful it wasn't a silent it was like a two or three day i don't know how to describe it sort of like a workshop a retreat you know there's some meditation but a lot of like talking about a poem i don't think we quite knew what we were getting into actually but the monk there who was running it was his name paul haller i think he's still out there wonderful irish guy he told this story which is a kind of famous zen story and it really connected with me although subsequently when i tell sounds slightly sociopathic but the story is it goes something like this there's a wise monk and he's very revered by the people and one day a bunch of the townspeople come to his door and they knock and and they're angry and two of them say like our daughter got pregnant and she says it was you and you've betrayed us like you were this wise monk and you've impregnated our young daughter and here this child is your problem now and he says is that so and so he's like begging and like his reputation is trashed and some months later she admits it was like the fishmonger and they all come back and they say you know like oh my god you're such a holy man you're you know you didn't you know you just accepted this and you raised this child you're so wonderful and he just says like is that so i don't know why i like that story the sort of equanimity contained inside of it not that i think that's a reasonable way to respond to those moments that's why i say that the story doesn't sort of work in a literal way but then the way that he taught the line was that it's a nice thing to attach into your own thinking that as you're telling stories in your own mind it's good at the end of them to just very lightly is that so and what i liked about that is that i know this is not the emotional valence it's supposed to have but i find a lot of noting practice thinking.
- [77:54]
Dan Harris
Thinking thinking thinking wait explain what noting.
- [77:57]
Ezra Klein
Practice oh so when you're and i've done a fair amount of noting practice i mean there are different ways of doing it but in this case one of the very common instructions is when you get carried off in a thought to just attach to it thinking thinking and somehow the way i do it not the way it's supposed to be done it always sounds a little bit internally scoldy like you're thinking again you're thinking again what i always liked about the is that so is that it's very light it might be so the thing you're thinking about that might be true actually it just might not and as a journalist one of the things i believe my worry about the tattoo which mostly people can't see is always they'll think it's outwardly focused as if i'm on beat the press is that so senator that's not what it means for me at all the person you convince first is always yourself and so many of the intellectual mistakes i've made have been about thinking being certain something is so when i never should have been certain of that leaving that little space of questioning of recognizing that you don't really know what's true you don't really know how things will turn out that's at least the intellectual intention of the tattoo the reason i love that phrase so much how good do i do at remembering it either in terms of my own mental storytelling or in terms of my own work i mean that's debatable day to day but that's the story of the tattoo i love.
- [79:15]
Dan Harris
That and i do think it's a great way to boost your sanity quotient in times as chaotic as these because as we've discussed things could spiral out of control but maybe not we don't know all we can do is everything we can do right now and so i'm open to the possibility that the shit's going to hit the fan in a horrible horrible way and you know is that so i don't know last thing to say an observation that came to mind i want to make sure this doesn't sound like meditation advice so i'm going to reframe it i'll take.
- [79:45]
Ezra Klein
Advice.
- [79:47]
Dan Harris
I want to frame this as what's been helpful to me as somebody who i think has pretty similar wiring to you this came to mind when you were talking about the noting and you're sitting in meditation you're trying to focus on one thing maybe it's your breath you notice you've been carried away by thinking and you apply a mental note of thinking which is meant not to be self lacerating but actually meant to kind of get you to be not so attached to the thinking and go back to your breath or whatever it is you've chosen to focus on and there's a way and i've experienced this many times there's a tone to the note that is not mindful it's actually aversive you are seeing things but clearly to a certain extent but with teeth clenched thinking again yes exactly and so what helped me immensely with that was not only knowing that that was happening and then adding another note of judgment and so that kind of helped what really helped me and so this is why i want to say it not as advice but as just take it or leave it is doing high dose loving kindness meditation and i'm talking i've done several nine ten day retreats of this and it's a huge part of my practice it generally is how i start my practice and then i'll do some open awareness flooding the zone especially this mind which is very much at factory settings of frosty new englander flooding the zone with warmth which feels incredibly forced and fake and treacly and saccharine at the beginning and even now to a certain extent having that be like my new default mode toward myself and toward others has had a radical impact on my meditation practice and how.
- [81:25]
Ezra Klein
I show up do you use the factory standard set of phrases or do.
- [81:30]
Dan Harris
You have your own i do who might equival with the buddha i do the standard phrases may be happy safe healthy live with ease because it's all so cheesy you might as well just do it as it's originally taught that.
- [81:42]
Ezra Klein
Makes a ton of sense you can.
- [81:43]
Dan Harris
Tweak you definitely the way it's taught too by now is like you can you can tweak the phrases if you want but i don't know i go.
- [81:51]
Ezra Klein
Through periods of trying to do more loving kindness and tend to fall out of it quickly but it's a good prompt to try to take i would like to do a loving kindness retreat because it doesn't stick for me for the exact reason i have trouble getting over the it feels forced and it feels like i'm pushing myself and it feels like i'm trying to get myself somewhere that to the earlier point of i'm often caught in my own meditation between the feeling that i'm not looking for another thing to apply intense effort to and then the feeling that well if you don't apply some effort you're not going to get the potency out of the thing i've often found that one a little tough the key is.
- [82:31]
Dan Harris
What you said there some effort it doesn't have to be intense effort in buddhism we talk a lot about right effort or wise effort so the difference between kicking your own ass and not trying somewhere in the middle is another.
- [82:44]
Ezra Klein
Thing i'm not getting quite right thanks dan thanks appreciate it this is why i talk to the computer all the time it's proud of how hard i'm working.
- [82:53]
Dan Harris
You know i hope you compute it as give yourself a break what you said one other thing that i wanted to make a note of oh yeah of course it's forced but like as i often say if you went to a gym yeah from another planet and saw people systematically picking up and putting down heavy things that would look forced and artificial or running into this yes yes yes but we don't have the reflexive judgment towards it as many of us do toward loving kindness meditation and what i'm saying is as somebody's on the other side of the struggle the technology works or it worked for.
- [83:29]
Ezra Klein
Me i'll take that to heart so.
- [83:31]
Dan Harris
To speak awesome to talk to you man thanks for doing this this was.
- [83:34]
Ezra Klein
A blast thank you super fun.
- [83:39]
Dan Harris
Thanks again to ezra this was his third appearance on the show i will drop some links in the show notes to his prior appearances quick reminder before i let you go first if you want a guided meditation designed to help you cultivate some equanimity and your own life you can head on over to danharris dot com don mauricio one of my favorite meditation teachers designed a bespoke meditation to go with this episode available to paid subscribers at danharris dot com my second reminder is that you should head on over to shop danharris dot com to stock up on your favorite ten percent happier goods while our summer merch sale rolls on it will be going until july fourteenth before i let you go i just want to thank everybody who worked so hard to make this show our producers are tara anderson caroline keenan and eleanor vasily our recording and engineering is handled by the great people over at pod people lauren smith is our managing producer marissa schneiderman is our senior producer dj kashmir is our executive producer and nick thorburn of the band islands wrote our theme.