Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "How To Be Happy" with Pandit The Monk

Transcript

"How To Be Happy" with Pandit The Monk · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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  Get a humans, a quick programming note, that if you have sent an email to my producer at
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  now to uncomfyconvose at gmail.com, just type subscribe and then you'll be on the list and that'll
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  be ready to roll out in coming weeks. What made you happy today is my question for the day,
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  I opened the newspaper the other day and my goodness there was a lot of bad news,
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  there was environmental news, there were court cases about corrupt politicians,
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  there was stuff about things abroad, there was the war in Ukraine, there was just a lot and
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  it was a good exercise to make me think okay where do I want to locate my consciousness today?
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  Do I want my psychology to be inhabiting this abstract, never realm of ideas and distant
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  problems over which I have no control? Or do I want to locate my consciousness in the things around
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  me, the people around me, the places around me, the things over which I do have some control?
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  And in a strange way it can feel more exercising and more invigorating to fight the huge battles
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  than to fight the small personal ones. It's easier to go out to a protest march about climate
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  change than it is to tie to your room and make your bed. So sometimes I think it's worth just
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  reminding yourself where is my head, what am I focusing on? It might be comfortable to rail against
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  global injustice but sometimes focusing on the little things that I can control is more productive
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  even if it might feel in the moment a little more uncomfortable.
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  Today on the show someone who always fills my cup, I first met this guy and he was a monk,
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  he was the first Hindu chaplain of Columbia University, one of the most prestigious Ivy League
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  universities in the United States. And I met him when I was working on Huff Post Live in New York
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  and we were talking about spirituality and he came on and you know full monk get up like orange
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  robes and everything and he and I really hit it off and I just thought he was very wise and had a
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  very calm and centered attitude towards life and I visited his monastery in Lower Manhattan
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  and he was so kind and just exuded this energy of like I was like I want more of that,
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  I want more of this person in my life. It was less I mean it was it was about his ideas but it was
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  as much about his manner and his mode of being his kind of monk like Zen like attitude towards
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  everything that I found so captivating and so appealing. So it was interesting to me to hear from
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  out of the blue recently saying that now he's no longer a monk. Now he's essentially a
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  a corporate speaker and an educator who wears a suit, not the robes and talks about mindfulness
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  and the chaos monkeys in your brain. So I wanted to talk to him about that evolution and about how
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  he's managed to kind of repackage the two hours a day of meditating and living in temples in
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  India and all of that kind of heavy spiritual stuff with modern corporate capitalist life.
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  It's a fascinating chat. I hope you love Pandit as much as as I do. Please enjoy the book. Of
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  course I should I should plug. It's called closing the apps. How to be mindful at work and at
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  home. The analogy being not just closing the apps on your phone but closing the apps that are
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  constantly running in your head. Please enjoy it. The one and only, Pandit Dasa.
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  I'm so delighted to hear from you again. It was nice to hear from you out of blue and to learn
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  that you're no longer a monk. Well, I haven't been for about eight years now.
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  Our time flies. So when was the last time I saw you? You must have been the chat. I mean,
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  I think we first met when you were the chaplain at some Ivy League institution.
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  So on the university, yeah, I think we talked on your show at the Huffington Post like a decade ago,
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  I think. Yeah. Or more. Yeah, that would be because that would have been the year I started.
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  Yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That was a decade ago. Yeah. Oh, perfect. Yeah,
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  that's exactly what it happened then. Amazing. Can you turn yourself up at all at your end or can
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  you get closer to your mic? Well, my mic is right next to mine. Yeah, I'm I'm wearing a headset.
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  So I'm right next to the mic. Is this better or is it the same? No, that's better. Okay,
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  okay. So I'm just like, okay, now I know what to do. Got it. Okay, perfect.
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  And so what was the trajectory of your, well, actually, why don't we go back and you tell people how
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  you, you know, how you came to become a monk anyway, because it's not like you grew up in
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  India or in a highly aesthetic, you know, poor religious family. No, yeah. And my parents
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  didn't drop me off at a cave or at a monastery at the age of five, right? Like, were you
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  want to think romanticized the idea? No, I mean, so, you know, we came to the US in 1980.
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  My parents came over with very little to no money. They were working seven days a week selling
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  gift items at Venice Beach in Los Angeles, California. Very simple, very humble beginnings.
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  They were working literally seven days every single day. And then, you know, I was just sort of
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  exploring America on my own at Venice Beach. And then in the matter of about eight years,
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  they established a multi-million dollar jewelry business. So it was hard work, luck,
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  combination of all of that. And life was great for a while. We were living the American dream.
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  And then in the early 1990s, my parents jewelry business actually collapsed their factory caught on
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  fire. And we went almost completely broke. Oh my goodness. Yeah. And when that happened,
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  that really served as a trigger. It really made me start to ask all the questions like, why is this
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  happening to me? What did I do to deserve this? Why? You know, and how am I going to get back to
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  life as the way it was? Someone made some spiritual insight. Yeah. Someone was right for a religious
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  awakening. What if bad things happened to good people? Yeah. I mean, I was ready at that time.
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  I was looking for answers. And, you know, my dad decided to explore new business opportunities
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  in post-communist Bulgaria at that time. Okay. Natural choice. Natural choice. That's
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  which is what everyone does. My list right here of places to go to, if things go south in Sydney,
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  and I've got post-communist Bulgaria, I'll just take a approval from Pandit. Yeah. So I think
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  that things go in Bulgaria. It was crazy. It had just come out of communism. So, you know, we went
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  from living in a six bedroom house on a hill to a one bedroom apartment in a country where no one
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  spoke English. Everything on TV was either in Bulgarian or Russian. There was no places for me to
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  go play basketball or tennis or soccer or like everything that I used to play, not soccer maybe,
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  but everything else. And there was no internet. So my life as I had known it came to a screeching
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  hall, basically turned upside down. And that's when I started to practice a little bit of mindfulness.
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  Just trying to understand how to stay sane in this turbulence and upheaval and uncertainty
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  that I was going through. And, you know, we spent a couple years there, came back to the US,
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  to the East Coast, to New Jersey, that my parents had a little business in Manhattan. I helped them
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  with that little. Then in 1999, I decided that, you know, I just need to take a break from everything
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  that's been happening in my rollercoaster of my life. And I need to go clear my head. And
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  some of the monks that I've met in New York said that why don't you go to India and check out
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  a monastery there and just, you know, get a first perspective on life. I'm like, okay, I guess
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  that sounds good. And so I did. I flew off to a monastery in Mumbai in India in 1999 with the idea
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  of being there just for a month. That was it. And here I am living with 40 monks sleeping on a
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  hardwood floor. No one has any possessions. No one has a bed, a mattress. They're on room,
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  tiny three foot by three foot closet, waking up at 4 in the morning and meditating for a couple
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  of hours a day. And to my own sort of, I mean, it wasn't easy, but I kind of fell in love with that
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  lifestyle, the simplicity of it. And the rest of the day was spent serving one another and serving
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  the community. So it really was a life of simplicity, humility and service. And it upspending six
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  months in India, as a, well, not exactly as a monk, just sort of checking it out and came back to
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  the US, moved into a monastery in New York, thought I'd be there for maybe a few months, spent 15
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  years living as a monk. Yeah. Simple thing like everybody goes through this stuff, you know?
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  It was the 15 years living as a monk in New York City, better or worse than the six months spent
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  living as a monk in a temple in India. Well, New York was exciting. I don't think I could survive
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  in India. India is a little too congestive for me. So I think I would have to vote for New York.
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  Well, the good thing is that the three foot by three foot closet that you had to live in is
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  Duruga in Manhattan as well as India. So probably didn't have to put up with too much space and
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  given New York real estate. Speaking of just before we leave the subject of Bulgaria,
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  that you reminded me of a great line by PJ O'Rourke, the humorist who was writing after the fall
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  of communism after the fall of the Berlin Wall. And he says that like 72 years of communist
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  indoctrination and propaganda, all the tanks and the the Soviet hardware, the military, this huge
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  totalitarian system was basically brought to its knees because nobody wants to wear Bulgarian shoes.
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  Really? You know what I mean? It was like it was the capitalism and the desire of people for
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  Sony Walkmans and Levi 501 genes that brought it down. So that's my little Bulgarian
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  Bulgarian joke. And then what leads you to Bacala? I mean, after you've been among for 15 years in
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  New York, what leads you to leave? Well, I think multiple things. So you know, when I was a monk,
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  I was doing a lot of lecturing and teaching on college campus like Columbia, New York University.
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  And just around the country I was traveling around for like a dozen years, I spoke to college
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  students about mindfulness and stress management, work like balance, all of these things. And I
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  just started to get a calling to speak to a slightly older audience, audiences in corporate
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  America who have families who are living high stress lives who've got all kinds of responsibilities.
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  I just felt I had more to give. And so I decided that I wanted to pursue that opportunity. And even
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  as a monk towards the end of my monastic time, I was getting at friends who were working in major
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  corporations, started inviting me to speak to their groups. And when that was well received,
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  I was thinking, wow, this is really amazing. Now I get a chance to talk to people who are
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  living very complicated and, you know, challenging lives with so many responsibilities and I'm able
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  to help them. So that was a major sort of impetus for me wanting to go in that direction. And,
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  and yeah, and also I wanted to pursue having a family. I'm like, okay, you know, I've done this,
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  but I want to do more with my life. I want to do different things with my life and really just
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  reach out to as many people as I can. And I'm like, well, wearing robes and walking into a
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  corporation is not really going to cut it. I don't think they're going to really want me there in
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  robes. So even when I did do a couple of talks as a monk, I wasn't dressed in my robes like how
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  you saw me. I would ask you, you know, they would ask me to dress in like regular clothes. So
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  I would, I was in regular clothes, build up my speech, come back and change. That's what I always
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  thought that part of your appeal on the on the occasions on which we spoke when I was working in
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  in New York was that you had you were extremely articulate and clearly very astute at being able
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  to communicate with a Western mindset. But you also had the appearance of like straight out of
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  central casting monk, you know, maybe I'm a little bit Donald Trump here where like Trump would
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  just cast all of the people in his in his executive administration on the basis of what they looked
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  like, you know, the military man has to look very military with a short, close, cropped gray hair
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  and everything. But like, I was like, if I'm going to be running this damn show, then my source of
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  wisdom is going to be pandit and he's going to be wearing an orange fucking robe. It's not going to
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  suit. Yeah, well, you know, and we were having spiritual conversations on your show here in
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  corporate America. I can't talk about spirituality, right? So I can't show up wearing like religious
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  attire. So, you know, it all depends. You know, you got to dress for the occasion. So, you know,
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  on your show, I remember, you know, we were talking about all kinds of spiritual things and God
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  and everything else. So then, you know, robes are perfect fit for that kind of conversation.
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  Walking to corporate America who are looking to reduce stress and have work like balance,
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  then they're, you know, and you got people of all different backgrounds sitting in there and
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  you don't want people to get scared and run away before I even start talking. I remember one
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  speech I gave, and it was to a major financial institution after the speech and I was still
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  among at that time. She came up to me. She was like, you know, actually, I was really upset that
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  they were inviting them out to speak here, but I'm so glad I attended your talk. Thank you very
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  much for speaking here. Why was she afraid? Was she like an evangelical question who thought that
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  your head would like burst into flames? I don't know. She said, yeah, she was upset. She said that,
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  but maybe because it was it was a major financial institution and maybe they just wanted like a
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  corporate talk. Like, why is a month coming in here? Like, how's what's that have to do anything
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  with our culture? Right? So I don't, I think this is an interesting sort of misunderstanding of
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  what religion is. It reminds me a little bit of the conversation. We've been having a conversation
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  in recently on my show and on the ABC Radio and Sydney about drug decriminalization and stuff.
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  And you always get people talking about drugs being bad and drugs this and drugs that.
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  And I'm like, well, hang on. Cannabis is very different from meth, which is very different from
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  heroin, which is very different from ecstasy, which is different from cocaine. And they're all
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  different things. It's not like that you can't just have a one size fits all approach. And
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  similarly, when we talk about religion, I mean, the kind of religion that a monk is practicing
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  is very different from the kind of religion that an evangelical Christian is practicing in its
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  conception of how doctrinaire or rigid the rules are that a particular individual deity
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  handed down for us all to live by, isn't it? Yeah. And also, I think the different approaches
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  at least in the Eastern traditions, right, which is where I was a monk in, the whole idea of
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  converting others is not such a big deal, right? Like going out to convert others, like everyone's
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  got to believe what I believe, everyone's got to do what I do because I have the best way. And if
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  we don't practice this way, then you're going to hell, right? So in usually from what I've seen in
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  Eastern, the Hindu Buddhist traditions, that whole conversion, aggressive approach to conversion
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  isn't there. And where at least I know from within the Hindu tradition, people like, okay, you
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  want to believe what you want to believe? Wonderful. No problem. Be happy with it, right? We have no
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  problem with that. I'm not going to try to convert you to Hinduism. I'm not going to try to convert
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  you to Buddhism. So that's one thing that I found a little bit refreshing is that there's not this
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  active looking just to like convert everyone because I've got the best thing. I've got the only
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  right thing on the planet. And everybody needs to follow that. So there isn't a one size fits all.
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  I think people have to even within one tradition, not not all practitioners are at the same level.
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  There are some that are really gung-hoed. They love it. They want to show up to church every Sunday
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  or someone want to meditate like in my tradition every day. And some may want to only do that once
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  a week. And that's okay. We have to accept that, right? We can't impose it on. Yeah, it's like
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  Tylenol is not great for everyone, right? Not just one medicine, like, you know, a doctor doesn't
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  prescribe the same exact treatment for every person who walks into their office. No, but Tylenol is
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  great for everyone with a headache. And similarly, the argument could be made that some of the
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  practices that you might modestly advocate from the perspective of the monkhood are good for
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  everybody's headache of the soul, so to speak. Like, I mean, what interests, what interests me
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  about the way that Eastern religions fit into our into into other religions is that it struck me
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  that it was just so much more about the personal daily practice, the sitting quietly, the learning to
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  have some kind of mastery over the torrent of bullshit that's flowing through you, all of our minds,
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  all of the time, service to the community. It was much less about, do I believe in this rule and
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  in the old testament, it says that Joe did this and it's much more about like, what am I doing today?
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  When am I going to be able to sit down and get some control over the cacophony of what it means to
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  be a human being, like having a leading spiritual life? Is that true? Yeah, I mean, definitely. Like,
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  mindfulness, which is coming from these Eastern practices is all about understanding and getting
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  in touch with your thoughts and emotions and bringing your mind to the present moment, right? It's
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  really the act of getting in touch with oneself. And the more we understand ourselves,
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  the more we can overcome the obstacles that we create in our own lives, like for example,
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  the obstacle of like obstacle, like the greed or just judging ourselves and comparing ourselves
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  to others and just all of these things. The more it's really mindfulness about going
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  internal and discovering your own self, understanding who you are, understanding the mind, right?
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  Because the mind is such a powerful tool. And I think no one really talks about the mind,
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  like going up in school to talk about physical education and doing push ups and pull ups and
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  all these things are great, but no one's talking about training the mind. You know, like,
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  I like comparing the mind to a smart device, right? If you have too many apps open on your device,
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  it drains a battery and slows down. Same thing happens with our mind. An average person has
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  between one and two thousand thoughts every single hour. So the minds of very cluttered place
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  and mindfulness can help us close out some of the apps that are just constantly running in the
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  background that are draining us emotionally, mentally, physically. And when we clear them out,
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  then we can actually be more peaceful, we can have more empathy, we can develop more kindness,
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  we can develop more gratitude. And I know that Eastern traditions, and I think Western also,
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  they all have these underlying common ground of being a kinder, gentler, more humble individual,
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  where that, you know, humility like under, you know, no matter how successfully we are,
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  how brilliant we are, how powerful we are, knowing that it could all be taken away in an instant
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  from one little freak accident, right? So that's, and I think all traditions, and I know that
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  Eastern traditions definitely promote the idea of trying to become more humble, not that we're
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  just always being pushed over and walked all over. No, not that, but just understanding that whatever
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  gifts I have, they can be taken away and they can go. So let me just be grateful and use my gifts,
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  of course, to help my family and to help society as much as possible so that Eastern traditions do
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  focus a lot on self improvement, self development, and they also have, you know, if you want to worship
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  a specific deity, great, you can, but you can also do it in a secular way, where you just focused on
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  these mindfulness practices, breathing, focusing, gratitude, focusing on these, just to improve
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  yourself, because once we improve ourselves, then naturally that spills out onto our environment,
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  then we actually inspire others to be better versions of themselves. We won't become more
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  conscious of the environment, like, oh my gosh, I should be careful about what I'm eating,
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  what I'm drinking, how wasteful I'm going to be, what my carbon footprint's going to be.
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  So mindfulness helps us, I think, just improve on many levels of our own selves. And as we do that,
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  I think naturally, that is how we also grow in our spirituality.
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  Speaking of the environment, Pandit, are you still a vegetarian or when you ditched amongst
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  robes, did you jump on the back of a deer and sink your teeth into its neck and feast on venison?
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  I turn into a vampire, you mean? No, no, I'm still a vegetarian, you know, like,
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  like the same, I mean, it's my own phrase, like once a month, always a monk, I guess, you know,
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  to some degree or another. So no, I have not ditched that, I'm still a vegetarian, you know,
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  all the time. I love what you were saying about, like, that everything could be taken away from us
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  in a heartbeat in an instant, because we all know people for whom that reality, that threat
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  of, say, a loved one suddenly being diagnosed with cancer or, you know, someone suddenly being
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  assaulted or, you know, them losing all of their money or something, that that threat lands for
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  them as a constant, ever-present source of anxiety. And then we also know people who are more like
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  the Stoics, who are like, you know what? I think about that from time to time, just to remind myself
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  of the worst-case scenario, and to realize that I would still survive, and life would still go on,
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  and so I should just be really, really grateful that that is not currently the path that exists
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  for me right now, but it could in the next minute. And so, you know, if the universe chooses
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  that, then so be it. Yeah, I mean, it's all about acceptance, right? I mean, life is going to
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  do to us, what it's going to do to us. Most of what happens in our life, I feel like, is not really
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  predictable. I don't think anyone expects, most people don't expect to be where they're at.
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  That's not what, that wasn't their game plan originally. So I think the more we move into a
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  space of acceptance, that yeah, I'm going to try my best to live a good, healthy life, positive
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  life, but stuff can happen. I could diagnose with something, something or another, some tragedy could
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  happen. And in that moment, it's going to be hard no matter how much you've prepared yourself for
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  it, no matter how much mental preparation you've done for that difficult moment. When it shows up,
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  it's going to turn our life upside down. But now, how do we respond in that moment? Do we begin
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  to blame others? Like, oh, it's this person's fault that this happened. Like, you know, when we lost
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  everything, of course, naturally, I kind of did blame my parents. I'm like, what the heck did you
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  guys do? Look at what's happening here. Yeah, what are you doing? Bulgaria, geez, you know,
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  and I'm like, well, I also made a choice. I chose to go there. I could have stayed back if I wanted to.
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  Maybe not, but I don't know. I was 21 when they moved to Bulgaria. Oh, that's on you,
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  dude. Yeah, that's on me. Yeah, I could have stayed. So I think that the more we learn to accept
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  what's happening in our life right now, as opposed to complaining and yelling and blaming,
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  I think the more peaceful we can be, it doesn't mean acceptance doesn't mean that we don't try to
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  change our situation for the better or try to help someone else and improve their situation.
• 25:15
  It just means that, hey, I'm going to be patient with this. I'm going to work hard to see if I can
• 25:20
  change the situation, but I'm going to be patient until my time comes, until that time comes,
• 25:26
  when things do make a turnaround for the better, for the positive. And I think that's another huge
• 25:31
  sort of component of, like, at least for me, I connect that with also with mindfulness that
• 25:37
  it gives you an ability to accept when you realize, I mean, Josh, like, look at it. How much do we
• 25:43
  control? Do we control our thoughts? We don't. Do we control our heartbeat? We actually don't.
• 25:49
  It's just happening on its own. Do we control our respiratory system? We don't. Do we control our
• 25:55
  digestion? I mean, we can improve it or, you know, deteriorated by just not, you know,
• 26:01
  having a healthy diet. But a lot of, most of the stuff happening within our body is not even in
• 26:08
  our control. It's just happening. I don't want to, I don't want to boast here, but I can hold
• 26:12
  in a fart for at least 20 seconds. Well, you know, that's that control. We've got to give you a
• 26:17
  trophy for that one. You're looking at right here. This is the kind of self-master. I know that
• 26:22
  if 15 years as a monk, you know, is great and all, but this is the kind of mastery that you have
• 26:26
  to understand you're in the presence of. I'm humbled. And if we were face to face, I would definitely,
• 26:33
  you know, bow down to that level of mastery. 20 seconds is over. Now it's to your luck. You're lucky,
• 26:39
  you're not here in person. Yeah, what you're saying is great, Pandit. But I think, I feel like,
• 26:44
  so there are a couple of things that I think are interesting. One is acceptance of where we are,
• 26:49
  right, and not railing against the universe for not having placed us into an alternate life path.
• 26:56
  And the kind of rumination on our past and rumination on our current circumstance that
• 27:01
  can occupy so much about time. And I think the thing about the stoics that I was pointing to when
• 27:07
  you were saying, you know, all of this could be snatched away from us at any moment is the flip
• 27:13
  side of that, which is worry about the future and anxiety about things that haven't even happened
• 27:19
  yet. I mean, we spend a lot of our time dreaming up imaginary scenarios that aren't real that could
• 27:25
  happen in the future. And they're stressing out about these things that we've made up, like the
• 27:31
  universe hasn't given them to us. We've just made them up that what, you know, someone we love is
• 27:35
  going to get sick. And I find that peculiar and I, you know, I wonder how, you know, the
• 27:42
  stoics wanted to get away from that by sort of they would like act out and rehearse the worst
• 27:46
  possible thing that might happen and like walk through the village naked, you know, and muddy
• 27:53
  to prove to themselves that actually when the worst thing happens, it's not that bad. I think all
• 27:56
  of a Bertman has a bit in what he's a philosophy columnist formally of the Guardian. He's terrified
• 28:06
  of being embarrassed in public. And so as a stoic exercise, when he was living in New York,
• 28:11
  or maybe he was in London, it was on the tube or on the New York subway, he would get on, he got on
• 28:16
  one day and promised himself that before every stop, he would stand up and loudly shout the name
• 28:24
  of the stop to the entire rest of the car. He wanted to prove to himself that he was capable of
• 28:33
  doing something incredibly humiliating in public and he ended up doing it for like the duration of
• 28:38
  the entire line or something and came off feeling incredibly proud and relieved and then never
• 28:45
  really had to worry about public speaking ever again because he'd just done the most absurd
• 28:50
  form of talking in front of other people imaginable. What do you make of that?
• 28:56
  I guess whatever works for him, you know? I mean, I was terrified of public speaking and that
• 29:06
  wasn't my solution to overcoming it. I just did it by teaching in on college campuses and
• 29:12
  in corporations, right? That's how I overcame it. But I guess if people want to take extreme measures,
• 29:17
  you know, I find life kind of funny where you imagine one type of worst case scenario and you
• 29:22
  try to prepare for it and a completely different type of worst case scenario can happen, right?
• 29:26
  So life's not going to give you what you want all the time and even if it's something you don't want,
• 29:32
  it's not going to give you that, it's going to give you something, something completely different
• 29:37
  so that you can actually grow and mature from it, right? Because if we get what we're already
• 29:42
  expecting, not much growth is going to take place because we've already done a lot of mental
• 29:46
  preparation for that. I come up with who I was listening to, but they were talking about how
• 29:53
  little we can appreciate the coming problems in our lives. And they were talking about the,
• 29:58
  you know, the end of year wrap kind of predictions that magazines will make about like, you know,
• 30:03
  2020, our top picks for 2023, all of the most intelligent magazines in the world generally do
• 30:12
  one of these bumper December issues so that the journalists don't have to work, they can work,
• 30:15
  they can write it in October and then put it to press. And like the economist, which is a fantastic
• 30:21
  publication, this person was saying, it's hilarious to go back and read the December 2019 predictions
• 30:27
  about 2020 in the economist. You think they had any idea what 2020 was going to look like?
• 30:35
  And then in December 2021, their predictions about 2022 had no mention of a massive war in Europe,
• 30:44
  like between Russia and Ukraine. So even the smartest people in the world, when they try to sketch
• 30:50
  an outline of what the contours of the next challenge will be, don't just underestimate it completely
• 30:59
  blindsided by it. Yeah, I think nature is so much smarter than we are and is not listening to anyone's
• 31:05
  opinion in a column in some newspaper like, oh, well, I guess they wrote about it might as well do
• 31:10
  that now, right? So it just doesn't work. Life just does not, I didn't expect to be a monk
• 31:17
  growing up in LA and thought I'd be running my father's business. Everything that's, I never
• 31:21
  thought the thing I was afraid of most, which is public speaking. Literally, that was what I was
• 31:26
  afraid of the most. I didn't think I would do that as a living like speaking in corporations
• 31:29
  for under like thousands of people. I never thought that like my, even my parents can't believe
• 31:33
  that I do this because they knew how afraid I was. So life has a way, it's like the, I was saying
• 31:38
  earlier, the only way growth happens is when life surprises us and not in a pleasant way, right?
• 31:44
  When something unexpected and painful and difficult happens, how do we deal with it in that moment?
• 31:48
  How do our emotions deal with it? How do we, how do we grow from that? How do we mature from that?
• 31:53
  Are we just end up blaming and crying and complaining through that whole thing? And then we miss out on
• 31:58
  all the growth lessons. And you know, life also, when something good happens, that's also a great
• 32:03
  challenge for us now. When something good happens, do we take all the credit for it? Do we rub it
• 32:08
  in everyone's face? Or do we accept it with some humility and express gratitude to others who
• 32:14
  have helped us achieve that because no one just achieved success on their own. There's always other
• 32:19
  people, family, friends, colleagues that are involved in our success. So both the good things,
• 32:25
  the challenging things and the positive things are both tests to us and how we're going to deal
• 32:31
  with it and how we're going to grow from those. And they're usually going to be surprises.
• 32:36
  They're going to be surprises. Life is filled up with surprises. Big and small and all shapes and
• 32:41
  sizes. And they show up for a reason. I think you just wrote a homework greeting card. Life is
• 32:47
  full of surprises. They show up at all sizes. Well, that one, right? There you go.
• 32:55
  It's interesting that you say that, you know, even when good things happen, we don't deal with them
• 32:59
  very well. And you mentioned that that can be partly because we might take all the credit for
• 33:04
  them and not understand how much gratitude we should have. But there's also an interesting
• 33:09
  phenomenon that I wonder if you've experienced or have seen in people around you, which is
• 33:14
  when a really good thing happens, you may have fantasized about it in ways that obscure the
• 33:19
  downsides of the good thing too. And you find yourself once you've got the thing that you have been
• 33:26
  chasing for a while, a bit like the dog who catches the car when the car stops and after the
• 33:32
  dog's been chasing it and then doesn't quite know what to do with the car and realize and you just
• 33:37
  find yourself going, oh, okay, here I am in this new situation that I've been looking forward to
• 33:44
  for a really long time. But I still have to get up in the morning and have a shower and put my
• 33:48
  clothes on and now figure out what I'm actually going to do with it. That wasn't in my fantasy.
• 33:53
  Yeah, I think we really do come up with like, and now we come up with the best case scenario.
• 33:59
  Like you see somebody, for example, see somebody famous, right? Oh, I'd love to have that fame.
• 34:04
  Yeah, but do you do you want to like dress up and put on a costume every time you go for a cup of coffee
• 34:09
  outside? But you can't even go for a walk peacefully on the street. Like now are you ready for the
• 34:15
  a million people who are going to criticize you who are envious of your fame who are going to
• 34:18
  criticize you? Can you handle that? Are you able to handle that? Are you able to handle the
• 34:24
  sleepless nights because of like the millions of things going on in your life? So I think we don't,
• 34:30
  it's almost like we see a really nice car like, oh, I want that car and you get it and now it's
• 34:34
  like the insurance payment on that is huge. You know, you fill the tank up in a cost for every
• 34:38
  change of tire costs hundreds of dollars. You're like, oh, my God, I didn't realize that all this
• 34:42
  was going to come with it. So I think we're kind to some degree, I think humanity to some degree
• 34:46
  can be short-sighted when it comes to success and all of these things because we don't realize
• 34:52
  that everything has a whole different, different side to it. You see, another opposite side of the
• 34:58
  coin, which we fail to see because we only see the shining part of it. We don't see like, oh,
• 35:04
  the dog is so cute. Well, you know, then you have to clean up after it. You have to feed it,
• 35:08
  take it to the vet. You got to do so much other stuff with it too. So I think that, you know,
• 35:12
  we do set ourselves up and we don't sometimes chase something so strongly that we don't stop to
• 35:19
  see like, you know, well, this is also something that comes along with it that I'm going to have
• 35:24
  to deal with and not that that should deter us from what we want to pursue. I think we just
• 35:29
  approach it with like a healthy balance. Like, you know, in some of the Eastern traditions,
• 35:33
  say you should walk the middle path, right? Don't get too excited about something and don't get
• 35:38
  too depressed when something bad happens. Just walk the middle path, accept what comes
• 35:44
  and accept means the good, the bad and ugly, that comes with it because you wanted it. Now you got
• 35:51
  to got some degree of it, some quantity of it. And now you just have to accept the whole thing.
• 35:56
  You wanted a baby. Great. You got one. It's going to cry at 1am and 2am and 3am. You have to accept
• 36:03
  that too now. So it's all part of the journey. It's all part of the growth. Everything comes
• 36:08
  with a package of stuff. And too often, we just see the external of that, what it looks like,
• 36:17
  but we don't look deep within sometimes of what all the things it entails. And because of that,
• 36:23
  we can sometimes leave ourselves a little disappointed and frustrated.
• 36:27
  Let's talk about what contribution your new book then makes to all of this about trying to get
• 36:33
  on top of the insane craziness that's constantly going on inside our heads. What were you shooting
• 36:41
  for there when you just started to write it? Well, first of all, it was during the pandemic.
• 36:45
  I had a little extra time and I had a lot of extra ideas because I've been speaking on mindful
• 36:50
  leadership and mindfulness and organizations around the globe. And I had all these ideas and
• 36:55
  people were asking you, like, hey, after your talk, is there something we can read? And I really
• 36:58
  didn't have anything. So I'm like, well, now it's the pandemic. I'm not traveling. So I decided
• 37:02
  to put down all the things that I speak about in corporate, like, you know, what it means to be a
• 37:05
  mindful leader, leading with empathy, leading with care, you know, not just treating your employees
• 37:10
  like a number. And if there's, if they're not performing care for them, to provide them the
• 37:14
  support, don't lead with fear, lead with inspiration, right? So I had all of these thoughts and I
• 37:20
  started to just put them down so that people had something to follow up on. And I also describe a
• 37:25
  lot of the mindfulness practices that people can practice at work. Like if you just came out of a
• 37:30
  heated and nasty meeting and you're just like fuming, what do you do? Well, why not take a moment,
• 37:36
  remove yourself for a little bit and take 10 deep breaths and calm yourself down before you
• 37:42
  have your next interaction. Because otherwise, you're going to carry the baggage of that previous
• 37:45
  interaction into your next interaction. And now you might, you run the risk of ruining another
• 37:50
  relationship. If you go into that with a heated mind with an upset and angry mind, so take a moment
• 37:56
  to press pause, take a few deep breaths, close out some apps, calm down, and then go into your next
• 38:03
  interaction. So I'm really hoping that people in corporate America who are so stressed, so anxious,
• 38:09
  have so much going on, especially when the pandemic and everybody, you see, this is another thing,
• 38:12
  right? When people, most people like, oh, I wish I could work from home. It would be so great.
• 38:17
  I could get up and I want to work in my pajamas, eat pancakes at noon. Well, you've got your
• 38:22
  wishfulfill. Just nature doesn't give you too much time to have it for two years. You can
• 38:27
  have it. And what we're going to do is we're going to make sure your kids are home studying,
• 38:32
  the pets are home. Everyone is home fighting for internet bandwidth and fighting for the best
• 38:38
  place to have their call or their classroom. And here you go. Here's the full package of what you
• 38:43
  wanted, right? Everyone's home working from home. So my whole, the purpose behind this book was
• 38:48
  how to help individuals in corporate America, also just in their personal lives, be mindful
• 38:53
  on a regular everyday basis. And specifically what they can do while they're at work, to find some
• 38:59
  calm, to find some peace, to be more mindful in their interactions with their clients, their colleagues,
• 39:04
  and if you're a leader, how to be more mindful when you're dealing with your direct reports.
• 39:09
  That was really my hope that after I finish a talk in an organization or some conference that
• 39:14
  people can go back, get a copy of the book and just read a little bit more about it, learn a
• 39:20
  little bit more on how they can be mindful in all of their interactions. And you know, it's
• 39:25
  something I'm hoping people could use as something that sits on their desk as opposed to on a bookshelf
• 39:30
  because you know, I have writing exercises at the back of each chapter that reflective exercise.
• 39:35
  You know, what are the thoughts that make you really upset? What gets you upset? And why do you
• 39:39
  think that is? So I have all kinds of questions in the back of each chapter that people can reflect on.
• 39:45
  Like one thing that I think that's really, really prevalent in organizations that I hear a lot of
• 39:50
  is like people don't get appreciated enough for the work that they're doing. And that's such a
• 39:54
  sour point for a lot of people because you've put all this energy into it and you're, and you're in
• 39:58
  the leaders maybe they don't properly appreciate or it's just so broad that it's not even specific.
• 40:04
  And so I talk about the importance of appreciating your people so that that's how you get retention
• 40:08
  in an organization. That's how you get people to be loyal to you and want to stick around as
• 40:12
  opposed to posting their resume on LinkedIn. I mean, all of this is very like you're very much
• 40:20
  at the zeitgeist at the cutting edge of the corporate like what corporations are into at the moment.
• 40:25
  I mean, I would say if there are two things that Silicon Valley and Big Tech and corporate
• 40:30
  America are super activated on at the moment. It's social justice issues and diversity, equity,
• 40:38
  inclusion, orthodoxies, and then how to use the insights of the masters and spiritual leaders
• 40:45
  to coax better performance out of their executives and their teams and use the wisdom of the ancients
• 40:51
  and kind of, you know, Tim Ferrissi sort of like spiritual dollops of whipped cream on top of
• 40:59
  the ice cream of capitalism, so to speak. I mean, you know, I don't mean there's to come across
• 41:05
  the wrong way, but there's a depth and a profundity to your experience and to the person who
• 41:14
  I knew in New York that took real diligence and self like I guess self control and self mastery.
• 41:26
  I mean, how many hours a day did you meditate when when you were in New York?
• 41:31
  I was doing about two hours a day. I mean, I have I've maintained that practice.
• 41:36
  Right. So you sit down two hours a day, regardless of what's going on in the world around you,
• 41:43
  and you do nothing but be with your thoughts, be with the universe, cultivate the practice
• 41:52
  of disentangling that like flickering flame of spirituality that we call like the self or
• 41:59
  consciousness from all of the neuronal nonsense that is being fired back and forth in your head.
• 42:06
  And I do just worry that there's a bit of a bubble gum version of this that corporations want
• 42:12
  to take on that is frankly a bit fatuous. Like, yeah, take lots of deep breaths before you go into
• 42:18
  another meeting so that you're not carrying the energy of like, yeah, that's fine. But at the end
• 42:22
  of the day, don't you have to do the work? Don't you have to do the practice? No, I do mention that,
• 42:30
  you know, and even when I do practice, it's not like I'm able to like shut my mind off my mind,
• 42:34
  like a crazy wild animal, you know, but I try and I do encourage. I'm like the only way you're
• 42:39
  really going to be able to practice this is if you do this on a regular basis, there is no shortcut.
• 42:44
  I'm like, you're not going to remember to take a deep breath when you're in the middle,
• 42:47
  a little bit heated argument because people want that shortcut. Like, how can I remember this when
• 42:51
  I'm in the middle of a argument? I'm like, if you do it in the morning and if you do it the day before
• 42:55
  and the day before that and the day before that, just like what happened to in the karate kid, right?
• 43:01
  He was painting the fence so much and waxing the floors that one finally came time he was able
• 43:06
  to defend himself. I'm like, so if you put in the practice, then when you need it, your mind will
• 43:10
  kick into that space and help you stay calm in that situation. So yes, it may be a bubble gum version,
• 43:16
  right? But that's what the corporations is. I'm hoping to give them something because
• 43:22
  Are you hoping that the bubble gum becomes the thin edge of the wedge through which
• 43:27
  enough people in a corporation become interested that they actually create a daily practice and they
• 43:32
  go deeper or you're hoping that the bubble gum in itself is at least better than nothing.
• 43:37
  No, so I do hope it goes deeper. That's my personal hope and I've heard it from people
• 43:41
  saying that, you know, I spoke at one really large financial organization and the lady there
• 43:46
  who's now like the global head of some division over there. She's like, Pundit, you know,
• 43:51
  you taught me this meditation eight years ago and you spoke here. I'm still practicing it after
• 43:56
  eight years, not every day, but I still practice it. I still remember what you taught me.
• 43:59
  Sometimes I might just practice it in the elevator going from the ground floor to the top floor,
• 44:03
  but I still do it. So that makes me so happy that wow, she chose to keep it apart of her life
• 44:12
  because it benefited her. Most of the people who I teach, they do experience a benefit. Like the
• 44:18
  other last week I spoke at a conference in Dallas and then next morning the one guy came up to me,
• 44:23
  he said, you know, the stuff you said last night and then the practice you taught, I think it's
• 44:28
  going to change my life. And I was like, oh my gosh, you know, I'm just like here eating some
• 44:32
  granola and, you know, yogurt. And then all of a sudden this person's like drops his, you
• 44:36
  know, I'm like, I just changed your life. He's like, I think it changed going to change my life.
• 44:39
  And then some other guy came up and said, I got so emotional after you've been with you,
• 44:43
  that meditation it went so deep, so much stuff started coming up. So I'm trying to give them
• 44:49
  a brief experience of what it could be like on a regular basis for them, right? I'm giving them
• 44:54
  that teaser trailer so to speak so that they'll want to go deeper and watch the full matrix trilogy
• 45:01
  if you want to become Neil. You're for your $10,000 six month course one on one session.
• 45:11
  I'm going to be pitching you on that. That's your next business opportunity.
• 45:14
  Yeah, no, I mean, I'm the only reason I'm playing sort of devil's advocate here is because there's
• 45:19
  so much kind of bullshit in the corporate world about shortcuts towards things and about every
• 45:26
  exercise being and having an instrumental purpose towards essentially serving some corrupt
• 45:34
  corporate interests. Like my buddy Sam Harris makes the point that if you're doing meditation
• 45:41
  because it's going to lower your blood pressure or make you less stressed or create greater
• 45:47
  team loyalty in your corporation or increase profits, he's like, we keep reading all these articles
• 45:53
  about this sort of stuff and about how corporations are bringing in, I mean, when I was at half
• 45:58
  post, I don't know if you ever saw the napp rooms that Ariana Huffington set up because she was big
• 46:02
  on the phone tables and we had weekly buffets and things like that. And these are all great things,
• 46:12
  but if the end purpose is so that the shareholders of the corporation can make more money or in the case
• 46:18
  of half post the vast telecommunications company that had recently purchased us, then
• 46:24
  Sam Harris makes the point of like imagine if we treated any other pursuit that is fulfilling in
• 46:32
  its own right on the basis of whether or not it's satisfied these criteria of these instrumental
• 46:41
  criteria of other things. Like imagine if we said, oh, you know, a new study shows that reading
• 46:47
  lowers your blood pressure, reading fiction novels every evening before bed lowers your blood
• 46:52
  pressure. Would you want to pin the grandeur, the scope, the scale, the richness of being a reader
• 47:02
  on the criterion of the fact that it lowers your blood pressure by two points? I mean, that would
• 47:07
  feel like you're short-changing, you know, what it means to be a literate person, like being a
• 47:13
  literate person is its own reward. And his analogy is being a mindful person who has the self-mastery
• 47:20
  of some kind of practice of disentangling their awareness of the world from all of the worries
• 47:27
  about the past and fears about the future and from regrets and from the buzzing monkey mind. That is
• 47:34
  the reward. It shouldn't, we shouldn't need to pin it to whether or not it's going to create
• 47:41
  superior corporate outcomes or make us a more popular person in the boardroom. See, I agree,
• 47:46
  I completely agree with that. And what happens is, so in order to introduce mindfulness to people
• 47:53
  who are completely unfamiliar with it, the research helps. So if someone is a highly productive guy,
• 47:58
  right, he's like, I just need something that's going to make me more productive. I want to be more
• 48:01
  successful. I want to be richer. Like, okay, well, here's the research. And here's what you can do,
• 48:06
  right? That'll help you get there. My hope is that it will also make them go deeper within themselves,
• 48:13
  right? So they can achieve their goal. And but mine is because I'm teaching it because I want
• 48:18
  people to go deeper within themselves and become a better human being. And in the process,
• 48:23
  they become more successful. I don't have a problem with that because then they'll hopefully use
• 48:27
  that success in a more mindful and compassionate manner, right? So if that's what they want,
• 48:34
  fine, I'm like, okay, here, that's what you want to hear. Definitely, there's research supporting
• 48:39
  that. But what it's going to do for you as a human being, you're going to become a better human being.
• 48:44
  That means it'll probably improve your relationships. It'll probably just make you less stressed.
• 48:49
  You'll be more calm. You'll just be a better person to be around. And that means if you're a
• 48:56
  better person to be around, that you're probably also going to be have better teams because people
• 49:00
  like you more, that might mean that your teams are going to be more productive. And you might,
• 49:03
  you might succeed more. So if people want that, if that's all they want, I'm like, you know what?
• 49:08
  I know how powerful a mindfulness meditation practice is. I know what it can do to people.
• 49:13
  So if that's all you want it for, I'll give it to you because I know that it's going to do
• 49:18
  something more than you expected it to. It will take you deeper than what you expected.
• 49:24
  Yeah, right. Yeah. Yeah, I guess I'm just, or I'm reacting to the to the fatuousness of so
• 49:30
  many people in the media and in the corporate world. I mean, it's not this is not your problem
• 49:33
  to solve. I don't know what the solution is. Hopefully podcasts like this where people can have
• 49:37
  actual long conversations about things instead of talking about talking in sound bites is partly
• 49:42
  is one tiny piece jigsaw piece of the whole solution. But like I saw you, I saw a clip of you on
• 49:47
  on an LA morning show right on TV, talking about this book. And I was like, my face was practically
• 49:54
  in my hands at the, at the presenters at the hosts of the show, who are like these chipper,
• 49:59
  more glib morning people. And I know the depth of kind of spiritual insight that you have and
• 50:05
  you're wisdom about humanity. And like you're talking about like ruminating on the past and how
• 50:09
  that can be bad. And like this blonde host, I mean, I don't mean to throw them under the bus. And
• 50:15
  you know, I know what it's like to do morning television. It's, it's hard. And you've just
• 50:19
  working up and you're, you know, you don't know who you're talking to because you're talking to
• 50:21
  so many people it's morning, but you're coughing and you're just scrambling to get through the show.
• 50:25
  But she's like, oh, it sounds like what you're talking about is going down that mental rabbit hall.
• 50:30
  And her, you know, co-host is like, I think what he's really saying is let it go. Just let things go.
• 50:36
  And so I'll bend it. And I'm like, there's so much being missed. There's so much being missed
• 50:44
  that they are not getting. I don't know if it's too much to expect that they will. Or if you feel,
• 50:50
  I don't know, do you feel stymied about how to communicate this or do you feel fully liberated
• 50:55
  that at least they're getting something? I have the the ladder approach. I'm like, you know,
• 51:01
  if at least someone is getting it like a long time ago when I first was a month,
• 51:05
  an NPR got a hold of me and they did it like a day in the life of a monk in New York. And
• 51:12
  years later, years later like five, six years after that interview, I met someone that said,
• 51:18
  you know, I was going through a really dark time. I heard you on the radio. And after that,
• 51:23
  I started practicing meditation and my life changed after that. And that was a eight,
• 51:29
  nine minute piece on the radio. So I know that every time I talk about mindfulness and meditation,
• 51:37
  one person is going to hear it that needs to hear it. And Josh, that's all you can really do.
• 51:42
  You put the message out there, whether it's two minutes, one minutes, one hour, like we're doing
• 51:46
  right now, I know if we talk about it enough in different capacities that it will make a difference.
• 51:52
  If enough people start practicing this, I think the world can change significantly at least a
• 51:59
  little bit at a time because the more we go inward and start recognizing our unconscious biases that
• 52:06
  we have towards each other, recognize the kind of things we don't like about each other for no reason.
• 52:11
  I think we will start to become more compassionate. And so I'm happy to speak about this in a very deep
• 52:18
  way, like a much deeper way like we are now or in a in a lighter way for a, on a two minute show.
• 52:24
  But I'm like, at least there's always people out there that are struggling that are looking for
• 52:28
  answers and maybe something I'll say inspires them to either get my book or check out a million other
• 52:34
  books on meditation. Look online about meditation and try some practice on their own. So for me,
• 52:40
  I'm like, any opportunity is a good opportunity because I'm sure it's going to help someone else in
• 52:46
  like that NPR interview. Somebody else told me about it not too long ago, like 10 years afterwards.
• 52:51
  Someone said, Oh, you know, my mom heard that and she really liked it and she became more open to
• 52:55
  meditation after that. And this was 10 years after the thing came out. I mean, of course, what I'm
• 53:01
  really doing, if I'm honest with myself when I'm criticizing the the hosts on the morning show
• 53:07
  or criticizing corporate boardroom, fatuous, you know, personnel HR people who are trying to get
• 53:14
  their teams to be more mindful is just channeling on to them, my own self criticism or my own
• 53:21
  my own self regret for not having gotten into it and for being too undisciplined or too,
• 53:27
  you know, uncommitted to actually make a permanent practice of it because I do think there's a
• 53:34
  phenomenon of people like me who are very interested in this intellectually and are interested in the,
• 53:41
  I suppose, the metaphysics of what it means to be conscious, what we're all doing on this planet,
• 53:47
  the psychology of how our brains operate, the psychology of wellness and of ambition.
• 53:53
  And so I'll talk a lot to people like you and I'll talk a lot about the usefulness of being
• 54:04
  able to separate your sense of self from the monkey brain, but I'll never quite step over and I'll
• 54:12
  I dipped my toe into meditation a million times and then after the third week,
• 54:19
  think life gets in the way and I go and I haven't seen enough of a payoff
• 54:23
  with the exception of sort of temporary, you know, a temporary calm that it then gets swept away
• 54:29
  on the ocean of my to-do list. And so now I'm probably just lashing out at everybody else and
• 54:35
  blaming it on the American television. You said you dipped into it a million times and I'll
• 54:41
  tell you from my opinion, this is my personal opinion, I think every one of those times you've
• 54:46
  tried is all building up. So I don't see any of those times as a wasted time. That means you
• 54:52
  invested time in your own self and you kept trying it. And you know, hopefully after this, Josh,
• 54:57
  hopefully you'll try it again for a few weeks and then even if you stop, okay. That's my hope
• 55:03
  that you'll try it. And for me, I'm like, this was a successful conversation. If Josh gives it
• 55:07
  another try, even if it's the last few weeks because you add up all the minutes and seconds that
• 55:12
  you've done it, it's phenomenal. That has all benefited your mind. That's benefited your soul,
• 55:17
  right? It has had a cumulative impact. I don't think it's just all I did it once and I didn't do it
• 55:21
  for a year. It's a waste of time. No, every time you do it as helps, it builds up on the previous
• 55:28
  time that you did it. So, you know, so like I said, if you do it, I'll be like, great. This was a
• 55:33
  purpose of my thing was like, Josh did it for a few times and maybe a few people who hear this,
• 55:37
  try it out or get back into it. That was a successful conversation. That was a successful podcast.
• 55:43
  Yeah. Yeah. That's true. All right. I guarantee I'll do it for at least another two weeks.
• 55:48
  Before the time comes. Was there a point in your meditation practice? Do you even remember
• 55:53
  from decades ago where there was some moment where you were like, oh, okay, I think I get what this
• 56:01
  is now. I think I've had many such moments and they've all been very different.
• 56:09
  You know, there's not just one thing to discover when we meditate. Ultimately, you know,
• 56:15
  you're you're trying to go deeper within yourself and understand like who you really are.
• 56:21
  Like, am I just this bag of blood and bones? Like, is that it? Is that all there is to me, right?
• 56:29
  And then what the heck is the mind? How deep is the mind? How long has the mind actually been
• 56:34
  around? Right? It was there in the womb. Was it there before then as well? Like, you know,
• 56:40
  I always think about these things and meditation just helps me kind of dabble into it and think
• 56:46
  about it because it's so powerful that you forget about all the little petty things that we're
• 56:49
  worrying about. Like my my phone charger won't reach the wall, you know, or something like that.
• 56:55
  It's just not I've had so many of those sort of experiences where I just dive deep into my own
• 57:00
  existence and meditate on how this universe came about. And I just love it.
• 57:05
  Lord, you meditate on how the universe came about and dive deep into your own existence
• 57:11
  because your phone charger won't reach the wall. I'm going to send you a new phone charger.
• 57:17
  The mind goes from the universe to the phone charger and that's how the mind is, right? The
• 57:23
  mind's like a puppy. If you don't train it, it's going to leave a mess everywhere. If you train
• 57:27
  it, it'll be your best friend. How do you train it? Regular, consistent practice of, you know,
• 57:35
  breathing exercises, focusing exercises. When something difficult happens, telling yourself,
• 57:39
  reminding yourself, this difficult thing is a stepping stone for my next success. It's not a set
• 57:44
  back, right? When there's something negative happening, remembering something great,
• 57:49
  being grateful for something positive that's happening in your life right now because there's
• 57:52
  always a bunch of good things happening. So on a regular basis, being grateful for that, on a
• 57:58
  regular basis, appreciating others in our life that are making our success possible. I'm not just
• 58:03
  talking about professional success, also our personal transformation. The difficult people that
• 58:08
  are put into our life are meant are put there to help us grow because they make us see
• 58:13
  a part of ourselves that we haven't seen. So that's how we train the mind by seeing every opportunity
• 58:20
  as an opportunity for growth and not an opportunity to complain. That's how we train the mind.
• 58:27
  Especially like what you just said about like looking for positive things in, you know,
• 58:31
  challenging people around us or like, trying to figure out how we can better ourselves from
• 58:37
  people in our lives who are challenging rather than blaming them or hating them because a large part
• 58:43
  of what I'm trying to do in my media life is help people to look at their adversaries in a more
• 58:50
  generous light and not regard them as adversaries, but as people and to recognize that we're all
• 58:55
  here having this shared experience and the world is not divided into enlightened, you know,
• 59:01
  progressives and evil neo-fascist Nazi right wingers nor, you know, nor good upstanding religious
• 59:11
  conservatives and wild-eyed hysterical lefties who want to tear down civilization. Like,
• 59:18
  that's just not the way that most people live their lives. Almost everybody is a complicated
• 59:23
  bag of predispositions and preconceptions and flaws and and good bits. Is there a particular way
• 59:30
  that you try to encourage people to have more empathy for people they disagree with or who rub them
• 59:36
  the wrong way? Well, so and I just did this earlier today at a talk I gave at this conference in L.A.
• 59:42
  where I had everybody close their eyes. There was about 1200 people in the audience that I want you
• 59:47
  to think of a colleague that you haven't seen eye to eye with and now think about their positive
• 59:53
  personal qualities and the positive contributions they're making to your team even though you don't see
• 59:59
  eye to eye with them. So what I encourage is people to take those moments sit peacefully and meditate
• 1:00:06
  positively on the people, whether it's a relative, it's a colleague or it's a neighbor, a friend,
• 1:00:12
  someone you haven't gotten along with someone you've had a disagreement with and just think of the
• 1:00:16
  good that they do because otherwise in our mind we have boxes and we throw people in the negative
• 1:00:22
  box. We have so many people in the negative box we're like we're like being weighed down by that
• 1:00:27
  box. We need to take people out of that box and put them if not in the positive box at least in
• 1:00:31
  the neutral box in our mind like okay I don't love them and I don't hate them they're in the middle
• 1:00:36
  let's get people out of the negative box into the middle the neutral box and but that requires time
• 1:00:42
  we can't just be doing multitasking throughout our day and expect us to shift our consciousness
• 1:00:47
  and mood and mindset towards people we don't get along with we need to take time out and think about
• 1:00:52
  this person who's done some good things who's got a family who's maybe struggling with some things
• 1:00:57
  again it just takes a little time to pause and do that one activity of appreciating someone else
• 1:01:04
  and having empathy for that person it can't just happen on the run it can't happen on the go it's not
• 1:01:09
  you can't there's no drive-through for that right you have to stop reflect and then move forward
• 1:01:16
  and then and then also I'm like if there's a way I mean you know in a workplace context I'm like
• 1:01:23
  try to appreciate something that that person said or did somebody you haven't gotten along with
• 1:01:26
  and you'll surprise them like hey I really appreciate that comment in the meeting I thought it was
• 1:01:31
  really helpful I was inspired by that and you're the last person they expected to hear that from
• 1:01:36
  and when they see that it's genuine it changes their mind and their heart towards you they'd be like
• 1:01:41
  oh maybe this guy isn't as bad now you just so we have to be proactive to do that it's a great
• 1:01:47
  way to build relationship it's just to appreciate someone right so if you can appreciate
• 1:01:52
  should I appreciate them by saying I'm surprised at how good that comment was coming from an
• 1:01:57
  asshole like you is that the way that I should phrase it I think that would be wonderful
• 1:02:03
  general I think I think you got to put that in your next self-help book you know
• 1:02:08
  a dickhead like you would be able to come up with something even remotely as interesting as that
• 1:02:14
  so good on you shit what at the end of each meeting I think we all have our own unique approach Josh
• 1:02:22
  you know how do you do that yeah I think all right so what I'm getting from you is like there's
• 1:02:30
  a lot of emphasis on taking a moment like allowing yourself to just pause reorienting towards
• 1:02:40
  what you might call gratitude or like finding the silver lining in somebody or something combined
• 1:02:48
  with a daily practice of just sitting down and doing nothing and focusing on your breath for
• 1:02:53
  a little while does that pretty much sum it up yeah I think just a time of self-reflection on a
• 1:03:01
  everyday basis or every other day even if it's a few minutes doesn't have to be 20 30 minutes like
• 1:03:07
  you don't have to turn to a monk it just be like two minutes three minutes just a little
• 1:03:11
  quiet time for yourself to be grateful to take some deep breaths I think that in itself is a great
• 1:03:16
  starting point and you know if you do one to two minutes a few times a day it can be powerful
• 1:03:22
  that can really help build a practice as opposed to a 20 minutes at one stretch because that
• 1:03:26
  overwhelms people because most people cannot do that and Pandit how do you feel about the amount of
• 1:03:32
  time that we're spending focused on big issues versus the small like I'm I want a recent guest on
• 1:03:40
  the podcast with David plots who who was previously a political journalist and who's a co-host of
• 1:03:45
  the slate political gab fest and he now works on a podcast that's very much about people's local
• 1:03:51
  cities and their local environment and he's found I've heard John Stuart talk about this as well
• 1:03:55
  you know I used to do the daily show it shapes the national conversation now he like helps out
• 1:04:00
  that the local community garden and like assists activists at a local level and there's something
• 1:04:07
  psychological about focusing like the lock us of your own attention on things that you can control
• 1:04:17
  on things that involve actual human beings in the flesh around you like about learning your
• 1:04:23
  friends kids names and you know just doing things that are good in your local life that I think
• 1:04:32
  is fulfilling in a way and I'm I mean I'm not preaching from experience here because I'm the
• 1:04:36
  first person to fall into the trap of talking about gigantic abstract ideas that are
• 1:04:42
  motivating the world instead of making my bed but there's something I mean I think there's
• 1:04:47
  something in the kind of Jordan Peterson idea that can sometimes get caricatured as harsh and
• 1:04:52
  strict and patriarchal in just like have the self discipline to like look after your own little
• 1:04:58
  patch and that doesn't mean don't care about climate change doesn't mean don't care about
• 1:05:04
  you know rovers is weighed or whatever but the more your mind exists in this abstract social
• 1:05:12
  media argument universe of big issues over which you really have no control the less happy you're
• 1:05:18
  going to be and the more you can focus on your sphere of influence sphere of control the more
• 1:05:24
  happy you're going to be yeah I mean I totally agree with that because if we can really focus
• 1:05:30
  on our immediate surrounding and let it sort of cascade from there that's a powerful thing
• 1:05:38
  especially focusing on the people around us our family our friend our community being there for
• 1:05:43
  our friends if they need to go to the hospital be if someone's not feeling good showing up to their
• 1:05:48
  home and sitting with them giving them time and energy and attention like kindness can be spread
• 1:05:55
  in that way in a most powerful way and that's really what's that's really what's going to make
• 1:05:59
  us happy when we have a small community of individuals that we are supporting and encouraging a
• 1:06:04
  really being there for one another and then you can also have the inspiration to talk about the
• 1:06:09
  bigger things it doesn't have to be one or the other it could be done simultaneously like if
• 1:06:13
  your friends says Josh I really need you to come and to the hospital with me yeah you drop in
• 1:06:17
  you drop everything and go that's meaningful right you did something for a friend you were there
• 1:06:22
  for them in a time of need or whoever is in your life right like not forgetting our neighbors not
• 1:06:27
  forgetting our immediate community and society because that's where we will as human beings get the
• 1:06:32
  most nourishment we will feel feel more secure and peaceful and happy when we care for people around
• 1:06:38
  us and when the people around us care for us and that takes a lot of work to create a harmonious
• 1:06:43
  environment where we can kind of care and trust one another and then at the same time we can't
• 1:06:48
  think about the bigger issues why not right and but in order for as we're thinking about the bigger
• 1:06:54
  issues implementing them in a smaller and are sort of like microcosm of our own environment
• 1:07:01
  right so we can be you can have a small group a little village that's being very environmentally
• 1:07:06
  friendly very conscious about the earth and caring for one another what a great example they're
• 1:07:10
  setting now for anyone else to see right and then that can spill out onto the the greater society
• 1:07:16
  on the meeting by example on the question of having an even kale that you were talking about
• 1:07:22
  like you know not necessarily thinking that the good things that happen are good and bad things
• 1:07:27
  happen are bad but maintaining an equilibrium an emotional equilibrium do you remember the moment
• 1:07:32
  in Charlie Wilson's war the Tom Hanks film with Philip Seymour Hoffman it's not a great film but
• 1:07:39
  it's a lot of fun when Philip Seymour Hoffman who plays a CIA officer is he tells a parable to
• 1:07:46
  the Tom Hanks character who has successfully managed to chase the Soviets out of Afghanistan by
• 1:07:51
  arming the Mujahideen and of course they can't see that that ultimately will lead to Al-Qaeda and
• 1:07:56
  ultimately lead to 9-11 at the time but he says this parable where he goes like there's a zen master
• 1:08:05
  and a boy and on his 16th birthday the boy gets a horse as a present and all the people in the
• 1:08:09
  village go oh that's great and the zen master goes we'll see and then one day the boy's riding and
• 1:08:15
  he gets thrown off the horse and he hurts his leg and he can't walk anymore and the villagers go
• 1:08:18
  oh that's terrible and the zen master says we'll see and then the village goes to war and all the
• 1:08:24
  young men get sent off to fight but the boy can't fight because his legs all messed up and the villagers
• 1:08:28
  say how wonderful and the zen master says we'll see it's sort of the favorite of mine yeah no I've
• 1:08:36
  heard that actually in slightly in a slightly different way with the same exact story because
• 1:08:40
  when something happens we're so quick and eager to label it as good as bad good or bad depending
• 1:08:46
  on what we've seen on social media or our opinions been formed by everything we're watching in
• 1:08:51
  the media right we're so quick to label it good or bad we don't know what is good and what is bad
• 1:08:58
  why don't we just see everything as an opportunity for growth and maturity right everything is that
• 1:09:05
  how do you label something good or bad right we don't know like it's just it's a strange idea right
• 1:09:11
  like what is good and what is bad maybe something's maybe obviously good or bad but still you don't
• 1:09:15
  know what the like the pandemic it's bad yes is it making us more conscious as a human race of being
• 1:09:21
  a little bit more environmentally conscious maybe more conscious of our health I hope so
• 1:09:26
  I'm hoping that's something good that's coming out of it like how are we treating the planet how
• 1:09:30
  are we treating the animals is that contributing to what just happened or did we all just do this
• 1:09:34
  are we are I know we're busy blaming one part of the world for the pandemic but I'm like we're all
• 1:09:40
  to blame from this thing you know we're all just like totally tearing apart our environment like we're
• 1:09:44
  all to blame for whatever just happened it's not just one nation or one person or whatever we're
• 1:09:50
  all responsible for everything that's happening collectively we do have to take responsibility for
• 1:09:55
  everything that's that's happening right and panda do you optimistic or pessimistic about
• 1:10:03
  the trajectory of the human race
• 1:10:06
  that is an interesting question optimistic or pessimistic you know I think that
• 1:10:18
  at least mindfulness and meditation are spreading like wildfire and not obviously everyone's
• 1:10:25
  going to practice it and you know on a consistent basis or practice it in the right way if there is a
• 1:10:33
  right way to practice it but I do think that as a human race we are becoming more conscious of the
• 1:10:40
  environment of our own minds of our own emotions about empathy I think we are becoming more conscious of
• 1:10:47
  that and so I'm hopeful because we are becoming more conscious what happens a hundred years from now
• 1:10:54
  I don't know and honestly I'm just trying to live a better life each year for myself and
• 1:11:02
  trying to inspire others to do the same that day the next day the next week right so I'm
• 1:11:10
  happy that I have a chance to spread that message and hoping that people take it and spread it to
• 1:11:17
  another person and then to another person right so that's all I can really focus on and I feel
• 1:11:23
  very positive very grateful that I'm having a chance to do that and I think we all every single one
• 1:11:29
  of us has a chance to spread a little positivity and positive message to others through our own
• 1:11:35
  speech through our own behavior through our own actions through our own practices so that's how I
• 1:11:41
  would answer I'm neither I'm just focusing on how I can improve how how I can be better tomorrow
• 1:11:49
  than I was today and how I can help other people think about doing the same in their own lives.
• 1:11:55
  Pandit thanks for helping me thanks for ruminating with me I'm going to go away and meditate
• 1:12:00
  for precisely four days and then pack it in and blame you it's lovely again thanks mate Josh
• 1:12:08
  thanks so much it was wonderful speaking to you again. Uncomfortable conversations is produced by
• 1:12:16
  Stefan Postuma follow me Josh leaps on Twitter and Instagram for all the latest may your day be
• 1:12:22
  fruitful your mind humble your enemies generous and your conversations perfectly sparklingly