How To Handle Your Demons | Vinny Ferraro

Summary

Episode Overview

Title: How To Handle Your Demons | Vinny Ferraro
Podcast: 10% Happier with Dan Harris
Date: August 22, 2025

This episode centers on the Buddhist concept of "alignment," as taught by renowned meditation teacher Vinnie Ferraro. The discussion explores how to consciously choose which internal voices and mind-states to prioritize, rather than being driven by habitual, unhelpful patterns. Through relatable stories, metaphors, and practical wisdom, Vinnie outlines how alignment with our wisest and kindest inner qualities can lead to greater sanity, resilience, and personal transformation. The episode also briefly highlights related upcoming content and programming—especially Vinnie’s increasing involvement with the 10% Happier community.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Wildness of the Mind

Dan Harris introduces the theme

• The mind is described as a "dangerous neighborhood" full of neurotic patterns and “little characters” (00:00)
  • Dan: “There’s so much going on internally, much of it very, very difficult.”
• Practices exist that can help us move towards sanity by choosing which parts of ourselves we act from.

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2. Golden Nugget: Staff Pick by Eleanor Vasily

Teeing up the core insight

• Eleanor Vasily, the producer, frames the importance of Vinnie Ferraro's teachings for both podcast staff and listeners (06:54)
  • She highlights Vinnie’s charisma and relatability, his Buddhist grounding, and the concept of “alignment.”
  • Eleanor shares her own experience: “I was obsessing about five different things all at once... and there was something powerful in the way that he described it that offered a respite in shifting from what might have been one mindset into another.” (08:15)
• Emphasizes that we have “some agency when it comes to what we spend our time focusing on.”
• Noteworthy themes: “The subtle violence of self-improvement,” and empowering listeners to become "more unfuckable with."
  • “I can also get behind anyone who is empowering listeners to become, in Vinny's words, more unfuckable with.” (08:54)

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3. Vinny Ferraro Explains Alignment

What does it mean to align?

• Alignment is the process of choosing consciously which part of yourself you want to act from in any moment. (09:52)
  • Vinnie: “If the two components of mindfulness are seeing clearly and responding wisely… are we aligning with that which is wise within us? That's the short answer.” (10:47)
• Dan restates: It’s about intentionally picking from the “whole menu of mind states” rather than running on autopilot. Vinnie agrees: “We get to decide with some mindfulness, with some practice, what we align ourselves with. ...My thoughts were my reality, and they caused immense suffering.” (11:30)
• Vinnie’s X-Men metaphor (Magneto): Choosing a mental direction creates a sturdy, supportive path, just as Magneto creates a walkway beneath his feet as he steps off a roof. “When I'm able to take refuge in more wholesome or...boundless qualities... those energies inform the world I'm kind of inhabiting and in some way, co-creating.” (12:08)

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4. The Brahma Viharas—Developing the Heart’s Qualities

Dan and Vinnie on Divine Abodes

• Dan describes the Brahma Viharas (loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, equanimity) in approachable terms and acknowledges some resistance to “grand language.” (13:11)
  • “If you can set aside some of this sort of grand language... these are skills that can be developed.” (13:52)
• Vinnie on discipline: Just like brushing your teeth, guardianship over where the mind dwells is a daily practice. (15:06)
  • "I know the subtle violence of self-improvement. I know about trying to hate myself into becoming a better person. Didn’t really work." (15:28)
  • "Maybe the problem wasn’t like a lack of sincerity, but the limitations of anger, fear, or shame... So the Buddha was, I believe, asserting that the 'no' that comes from love, that comes from care, is way more transformative than the 'no' that comes from those other afflictive energies." (15:36)
• Vinnie explains that the point is not to bypass difficulty with “pseudo-spiritual” positivity, but to integrate all aspects of experience in “wholeness.” (16:57)

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5. The Balancing Role of Equanimity

• Vinnie: “Without equanimity, loving kindness can become very saccharine… Or the compassion can just be kind of like over-sentimentality. Equanimity is near to all things.” (17:24)
• Dan: Equanimity lets you “be up close with stuff that normally you'd armor yourself against.” (17:53)
• Vinnie: “In the prison, we talk about it as being… unfuckable with… you remember who you are... That’s the real danger, when we forget our own goodness.” (18:00)

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6. Flashing Your Basic Goodness – Redefining Value

• “We talk about flashing our basic goodness. So that means that I remember there’s goodness in here and that I’m not determined by your thoughts of me.” (18:36)
• Vinnie stresses that these heart qualities are “immeasurable and they're boundless and they're incorruptible and untarnishable… it doesn’t matter what happened to us or what we’ve done, those things are still there.” (18:50)
  • Vinnie, as a prison visitor since 1987, sees his core role as reflecting value: “All I'm doing is reflecting value. I don't give a shit whether they know what meditation is. I want to go there and remind them of their value because I feel like that's the most important thing.” (19:49)

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7. The Universality of Basic Goodness

• Dan asks: Do you believe we are all basically good, or just capable of it?
• Vinnie: “There is no part of me that’s beyond redemption, that no matter how lost I get... All I’m doing is reflecting value.” (19:49)
• Vinnie’s practice is to reflect intrinsic value and goodness, especially in settings designed to squash it (prisons).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Dan Harris: “There’s this joke...my mind is a dangerous neighborhood. I don’t go in there alone.” (00:01)
• Eleanor Vasily: “There was something powerful in the way that he described it that offered a respite in shifting from what might have been one mindset into another.” (08:24)
• Vinnie Ferraro:
  • “My thoughts were my reality, and they caused immense suffering.” (11:30)
  • “When I'm able to take refuge in… the boundless qualities of the natural radiance of the unobscured heart… those energies inform the world I'm kind of inhabiting and in some way co-creating.” (12:08)
  • “I know about trying to hate myself into becoming a better person. Didn’t really work.” (15:28)
  • “The ‘no’ that comes from love, that comes from care, is way more transformative than the ‘no’ that comes from those other afflictive energies.” (15:36)
  • “In the prison, we talk about it as being… unfuckable with, unshakable… you remember who you are… That’s the real danger, when we forget our own goodness.” (18:00)
  • “Flashing our basic goodness… means that I remember there’s goodness in here and that I’m not determined by your thoughts of me.” (18:36)
• Dan Harris: “Equanimity lets you be up close with stuff that normally you’d armor yourself against.” (17:53)

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Recommended Timestamps for Key Segments

• Opening theme & context — 00:00–06:54
• Eleanor’s staff pick & context for Vinnie's wisdom — 06:54–09:34
• Core interview: Alignment and selecting mental pathways — 09:52–14:30
• Brahma viharas & habit of the mind — 14:30–17:20
• Equanimity and ‘unfuckable with’ — 17:20–18:33
• Flashing basic goodness & restoring value — 18:33–21:06

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Episode Takeaways

• Agency and Alignment: We can choose, moment to moment, which parts of ourselves to act from—moving away from harmful habits and into wiser, kinder states.
• Integration, not bypass: True wholeness means relating wisely to the difficult, not pretending it doesn’t exist.
• Basic Goodness: Our innate goodness remains no matter what; the path is remembering and reflecting that, both for ourselves and others.
• Practice is Habitual: Returning again and again to these heart qualities is a lifelong practice, not a one-time fix.

If you want to learn how to be “more unfuckable with” and align with what’s most deeply good and wise in yourself, this highlight from Vinnie Ferraro is essential listening.

Transcript

[Dan Harris]

Foreign. This is the 10 Happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello. Happy Friday, everybody. The mind is a wild place. There's this joke. I don't know who who originated the joke, but one meditation teacher said something like, my mind is a dangerous neighborhood. I don't go in there alone. You know, this is boiling over with all these different neurotic patterns and little characters that we've got. You know, for me, like, I've got, like, an angry character who I named after my grandfather. I've got a hustler, ambitious character who I named after a great grandfather of mine who was a crook. Seriously, he was a crook. And so there's so much going on internally, much of it very, very difficult. The good news is there are ways to boost your sanity quotient, practices that have stood the test of time and also are now withstanding a lot of scientific scrutiny. And today we're going to talk about how you can pick the sanest or smartest aspect of your mental repertoire in any moment and go with that instead of the more venal or unconstructive shit that may be happening in your brain. The technical term for this is alignment. You're going to hear about how to align from Vinnie Ferraro, who's an incredible meditation teacher, in a minute. But let me just step back for a second, give you some context. All this month on Fridays, we're highlighting golden nuggets from our vast archive. And we do it this way. We ask our staff members to think of some of their favorite moments from our long history here on this podcast. And what we're going to do is we're going to play you a member of our staff today. It's one of our ace producers, Eleanor Vasily, and she's going to describe why she found the golden nugget. We're going to play for you so compelling. And then we're going to play you the nugget, which in this case comes from Vinnie Ferraro and is about this concept of alignment, picking what aspect of your mental repertoire you want to act out of right now so that you're not just, you know, acting out all of your childhood fears or whatever it is. So that's coming up. Before we go to break, though, I just want to say that there's a lot of cool stuff happening over on danharris.com for paying subscribers. We now have guided meditations for all of our Monday episodes. Our teacher of the month this month is the brilliant Kyra Jewel lingo. So she's been creating bespoke guided meditations that come with our Monday Wednesday episodes. Next month, our teacher of the month will be Vinnie Ferraro. You're getting a little teaser of Vinnie's brilliance today. The other thing that's happening in our world is that starting on September 2, we are now going to make our live video meditation sessions weekly. I've been doing live guided meditations and Q and A on substack on video for, I don't know, the last 10 or 11 months. And it's been a little spotty. You know, I do it sometimes once a month, sometimes twice a month. Now we're going to do it every week. Why? Because our customers have responded very positively and also because I really enjoy it. Every Tuesday at 4 o' clock Eastern. Henceforth, live guided meditation either with me or with our teacher of the month or with both of us. The first is on September 2nd at 4:00 Eastern and it will be with me and Vinnie Ferraro. So go over to danharris.com, sign up. You'll be supporting me, my team, and lots of meditation teachers who we really love to support. Final thing to say and then I'll shut up is that coming up at the end of October, I'm heading back to the Omega Institute in upstate New York for another meditation party. This is an in person retreat with my friends Seben A. Selassie and Jeff Warren. Also Afosu Jones Corte, another amazing meditation teacher, will join us October 24th through the 26th. Can sign [e-mail] I'll also put a link in the show notes. Okay, coming up, we're going to hear from Eleanor Vasily, one of our producers. She's going to talk about why this nugget from Vinnie struck her so powerfully. And then you'll hear the wisdom directly from Vinnie right after this. I've recommended the podcast Think Fast, Talk Smart in the past. It's a great show. I recently was a guest and had a really interesting conversation with the host, Matt. I'd love for you to listen to my conversation with Matt Abrahams. As you've heard me say before, communication is such an important skill. We were designed for social interaction and one of the main ways in which we interact is conversation. But very few of us are taught how to converse, how to communicate, how to listen. And so we talk about that and Matt's show covers that all the time, which is a profoundly important public service. So check it out. Think fast. Talk Smart. The host is Matt Abrams. Great dude. Listen wherever you get your podcasts Robot vacuums can be cool, but some of them problematic. They struggle with stubborn stains. They tend to spread dirt with the mop. They have difficulty navigating complex homes or messes or tangled wires. They leave a mess in the corners and edges. So now there's this new company called Narwhal. They make the Narwhal vacuum. I just got one in the mail. I set it up. Even I could set it up, which says a lot because I'm not particularly good at these kinds of things. And then I let it loose in my son's room, which is the room that needs the most love and attention from a cleaning standpoint. It was really cool and very Jetsons. Like to watch this thing operate in my son's room. I just set it up right before I recorded this, so I will continue to update you on the results. But thus far my son's room is markedly cleaner. I'm not sure how the cats are going to react to this thing, but it's very cool. I'll tell you a little bit more about Narwal. They've got this flow wash mopping system. It's the hero feature of the Narwhal flow, and it's got this large, thick mop that continuously displays warm water to break down stains. The mop is continuously cleaned during use to avoid spreading dirt around, which is a problem with some of these robot cleaners. It removes tough stains in one pass. The dirty water goes instantly into a separate tank with odor prevention. And they've also got this extendable track mop which cleans along the edges. It's really cool to watch this thing navigate and see how it adjusts to different types of floors and the clutter in the environment. It really adapts on the go and learns the layout of your house. And apparently it can figure out when there's a carpet and the brush cover will automatically lower to boost the suction. Anyway, it's pretty cool. If you want to treat your home to spotless fresh floors, give Narwhal a visit. You can go to us.narwhal.com podcast to get the early bird price. That's us.narwal.com podcast.

[Eleanor Vasily]

Hi everyone, this is Eleanor Vasily and I'm a producer here on the 10% Happier podcast. For my staff pick, I'm going to be sharing a clip from an episode with Vinnie Ferraro, who is a meditation teacher and practitioner. The episode came out May of last year and that's actually right around the same time that I joined the team here. In fact, it might have been one of the first episodes that I helped edit. Vinny's actually been on the podcast a few times. He's both a staff favorite and a listener favorite. And once you hear him speak, you'll probably have a better sense of why he has this great charisma about him. And he's also incredibly relatable. We have all different kinds of guests on this show. We speak with scientists and writers and experts in all these different fields. And a lot of our episodes also feature teachers like Vinnie. And I'll be honest, don't be scandalized, but I'm actually surprised that I chose an episode that features a Buddhist practitioner. Before I started this job, I had a background in radio and storytelling, among many other things, and I had something that resembled a meditation practice, but I knew almost nothing about Buddhist teachings or the Dharma. But when Vinny opened up his mouth, you know, I thought, yeah, I can get behind this. The episode focuses on three core Buddhist practices that Vinny uses to navigate life. And I went with the first, which is the concept of alignment, loosely described as consciously choosing which internal mind states or parts of our existence to give life to. Essentially, it's about learning to choose which inner voices we actually want to follow. I re listened to this part of the interview the other day, and I was on a walk, and I was obsessing about five different things all at once, and a lot of them were negative. And there was something powerful in the way that he described it that offered a respite in shifting from what might have been one mindset into another. And I think it's. Yeah, it's incredible to be reminded that we have some agency when it comes to what we spend our time focusing on. We do have some choice in the narrative that we create in our minds. That's. That's a topic that we're going to get into a little bit deeper next month. I also kind of love this term that he used about the subtle violence of self improvement, which I am absolutely against. I can also get behind anyone who is empowering listeners to become, in Vinny's words, more unfuckable with. And side note, there's also an X Men reference in there. So for this self described nerd, that's also a win. Anyway, here's Vinny. I hope you enjoy it.

[Dan Harris]

Thank you, Eleanor. Just to say, that thing from Vinnie really stuck with me too. Okay, so now let's hear the part of the interview with Vinny Ferraro where he's talking about this concept that might seem a little mysterious at first, but stick with him. I promise. I promise, promise it will make sense. What is alignment?

[Vinnie Ferraro]

Yeah. So when we start sitting, we see how much is going on inside us, right? There's just so much to choose from, right? So many parts of our experience, right? There's our conditioning, there's the thoughts, there's hopes, there's fears, there's the characteristics, the defilements, right? Everything is like one moment away. And so we get to choose, well, what do I actually want to give life to? What do I want to actually follow, right? If the two components of mindfulness are seeing clearly and responding wisely. So am I seeing clearly all these different parts of me that are up for grabs in this moment? Then I say, okay, if I walk in this direction, where will that lead me? Right? Is this wise? Is this kind? Is it generous? Right? So it can have all of these different flavors. So are we aligning with that which is wise within us? That's the short answer.

[Dan Harris]

I want to encourage you to give long answers here, but I'm going to prod you because I think this is fascinating. We all have just tons of stuff going on internally. If you just turn the laser beam of your attention inward, you will see. You probably won't like what you see. There's just a lot of chaos and random thoughts and homicidal urges and whatever or desires. There's just lots of stuff in there. And there's beautiful stuff in there, too, of course. And you're saying, you, Vinnie, are saying, I try to check in regularly and figure out of this whole menu of mind states, which one do I want to go with? Am I restating you with some degree of accuracy?

[Vinnie Ferraro]

That's exactly right. Yeah. I mean, we get to decide with some mindfulness, with some practice, we can decide what we align ourselves with, right? In the beginning in my life, I was just. I received thoughts as commandments, right? They had the power to animate me, right? My thoughts were my reality, and they caused immense suffering. So then we get to decide with some practice, like, oh, well, what part of my personality is operating right now? You know, throwing out these marching waters. I don't know if you've ever seen the X Men movies. You know those ones?

[Dan Harris]

Of course. Yes.

[Vinnie Ferraro]

Yeah, yeah. So you remember Magneto? Magneto. So he has the power to completely control metal so he can walk off a roof. And as he does, every one of his steps are supported. Right. This is a perfect illustration of my understanding of the Dharma. Right. How Each moment is conditioned by the next. And so, you know, if I walk in the direction of the shadow worlds, they open up before me, right? And when I'm able to take refuge in maybe like more wholesome or more like the boundless qualities of the natural radiance of the unobscured heart is what the Buddha kind of called these Brahma Viharas. When I walk in those beautiful directions, those energies inform the world I'm kind of inhabiting and in some way co creating. So that's what I'm saying when I say, well, what do we align ourselves with? It's like, what do I want to give life to? Does that make sense?

[Dan Harris]

It does. It makes complete sense just to, you know, if anybody's new to the Dharma, when you talk about the Brahma viharas, it might, might be worth spending some time there. This is, you know, for people like me who just kind of have a anti sentimentalist conditioning. I think both of us are probably Gen Xers and that was like the Age of irony and we're nihilistically sarcastic and all this stuff. So when our kind of. Well, certainly for myself, when my kind of mind encounters an idea like the Brahma viharas, which translates, I think, into the divine abodes and that kind of language, often, traditionally I found that a little repellent. But it's really interesting, this idea. These divine abodes. There are four of them. Loving kindness or friendliness, compassion, sympathetic joy, which is like the opposite of schadenfreude, just delighting in other people's happiness. And then finally equanimity, which is just the ability to stay cool no matter what's happening. And, you know, if you can set aside some of this sort of grand language, what the Buddha is saying and what you're now saying more recently is that these are skills that can be developed. And I can see these capacities in my mind and like Magneto, create a pathway, a sturdy pathway to go in that direction instead of the more noxious alternatives.

[Vinnie Ferraro]

Yeah, well, we've seen the limitations of the mind, right? I mean, I certainly have. I've seen the limitations of taking my psychology to be a reality, right? Because even though a lot of my stories are based in fiction, in this inner narrative, the suffering they deliver is real, right? So we have to take good care of what we let the mind dwell on. We have to have some kind of, maybe we can call it discipline or it's a better word for it, when you brush your teeth every day, right?

[Dan Harris]

A habit, a practice.

[Vinnie Ferraro]

Yeah. A Habit or a practice. Right? So we can see, oh, thoughts on this inner judgment. Right. The inner narrative is strong, and it comes factory stock, you know, with this biology that we've inherited. Right? And if we look closely at that judgment, it doesn't really lead anywhere. And sometimes even as our awareness grows, we start to practice, the judgment grows. So it's like, wow, hold on a second. I know the subtle violence of self improvement. I know about trying to hate myself into becoming a better person. Didn't really work. And maybe the problem wasn't, like, a lack of sincerity, but the limitations of anger, fear, or shame as far as, like, transformative, Right? So the Buddha was, I believe, asserting that the no that comes from love, that comes from care, is way more transformative than the no that comes from those other afflictive energies. So with that in mind, we kind of offer ourselves a pardon. We say, okay, however I am, I've come by it honestly, and that conditioning is actually not who I am. So the Buddha kept coming back over and over to this, what is I, me or mine? What is I, me or mine? And he was like, not this, not this, not this, not this. But he did say, and I, like you used the word earlier, sturdy, in terms of the refuges that these heart qualities, the reliable refuge that they are a reliable way to receive experience, that even if it's painful, I can meet that with compassion.

[Dan Harris]

Right?

[Vinnie Ferraro]

It's not some just pseudo spiritual bypass, like, oh, yeah, it's all love, it's all good. It's like, how would that ever contribute to wholeness? Which is what I think the Dharma invites us into is wholeness. So it has to hold all of it. The difficulty, the beauty, the generous, and the equanimity that holds the whole thing in gear.

[Dan Harris]

Say more about that. The equanimity holds the whole thing in gear.

[Vinnie Ferraro]

Well, you know, without equanimity, loving kindness can become very saccharine. Right. That over sweetness, it's not actually authentic. It's not real. Right. Or the compassion can just be kind of like over sentimentality. Right? So equanimity is near to all things. So I like that because it gives us that balancing quality so that we're not overly anything. Right?

[Dan Harris]

Near to all things. Meaning it allows you to be up close with stuff that normally you'd armor yourself against.

[Vinnie Ferraro]

That's right. That's right. I mean, in the prison, we talk about it as being, you know, unfuckable with, you know, unshakable. Right? Like you remember who you are, right? So you don't have to engage in every fight. You don't have to, you know, defend your honor. In all these different cases, you remember who you are, right? So we talk about flashing our basic goodness, because that's the real danger when we forget our own goodness. At least it was for me.

[Dan Harris]

Flashing your basic goodness, what does that mean?

[Vinnie Ferraro]

Well, you know, in the prisons or even in schools, you know, you talk about flashing on people and that means you're going to flash some anger, right? So we talk about flashing our basic goodness. So that means that I remember there's goodness in here and that I'm not determined by your thoughts of me. Actually, your thoughts of me, Dan, are none of my business. You know what I mean? So we stay rooted in that there's goodness here, that these four heart qualities that the Buddha laid out, they're immeasurable and they're boundless and they're incorruptible and untarnishable. And it doesn't matter what happened to us or what we've done, that those things are still there. And so I really like that as somebody that's gone through a lot in my life and really lost my own goodness, lost connection to it. And then, you know, all kinds of things come out of that desperation. Right. That's the real danger.

[Dan Harris]

Even after everything you've been through. And this is interesting to me, and I like asking people about this. Do you believe that we all have the capacity for goodness or do you take it a step further to say that foundationally we are all basically good?

[Vinnie Ferraro]

Yeah, that's a very difficult question. I could only answer from my experience of myself, which believes that there is no part of me that's beyond redemption, that no matter how lost I get, and that's all I'm doing when I go to the prisons. Right. I've been going into prisons since 87 as a visitor. And yeah, that was a bit different earlier on. But it's like all I'm doing is reflecting value. I don't give a shit whether they know what meditation is. I want to go there and remind them of their value because I feel like that's the most important thing. And it's a very dehumanizing system, so it's meant to squash that out. And so when I go there, that's all I'm reflecting back. Everything is an excuse to connect. Right now we're connecting. Oh. The premise is we're going to talk about mindfulness or Buddhism. Cool. Killer. Doesn't really matter. Right. So when I go there, that's what's on the forefront of my mind is can I be in relationship with these fellas and can I reflect their goodness back to them?

[Dan Harris]

Thanks again to Eleanor. Thanks again to Vinnie Ferraro. Don't forget Vinnie and I will be doing a live guided meditation on September 2nd at 4:00 Eastern. That's a Tuesday. That is the beginning of our guided meditation sessions. Going weekly every week at Tuesday at 4:00 Eastern, we'll be doing live guided meditations and Q and A. The first one is with me and Vinnie. I'm really excited about this new feature. I love doing these things and you guys seem to love it. So that's available for paying subscribers [e-mail] Also, Vinnie is going to be our Teacher of the Month for September, which means that he'll be producing guided meditations that are customized to all of our Monday Wednesday episodes so that you can pound the learnings from the podcast into your neurons. Those meditations are also available to paying [e-mail] and finally, if you want to take your practice offline, don't forget that I'm doing a meditation party in person retreat at the Omega Institute last weekend in October. I think it's the last weekend. Anyway, it's October 24th and you should come eomega.org or just click the link in the show notes. Finally, I just want to thank everybody who worked so hard on this show. 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 Managing producer, Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer, DJ Cashmir is our Executive producer and Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally Responsible Financial Geniuses, Monetary Magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations.