A Toolkit for a Noisy Mind: How John Green Manages Anxiety, Depression, and Intrusive Thoughts

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28:52So the other thing that great passage I just from you that I just read back to you, the other thing that it raises, this seems to come up a lot in your work and in your interviews is the insubstantiality, the unfindability of the self. Like, how can John call himself fully John if his microbe is populated by other beings? Indeed, half the cells that are made up of me are not mine. Yeah, that's a little distressing to me. I have a hard time with that one. But of course, self is incredibly complicated. Self is in many ways an illusion. Like, I'm not the same person I was 30 years ago. I don't have many of the same cells.

29:39I don't have a lot of the same worldview. I've grown and changed a lot, and I hope that I can say the same 30 years from now. Self is a story that we tell ourselves, and we need to make it an expansive story so that we're not stuck being the self that we were 5 or 10 or 20 years ago. We don't want to get stuck in that story so much that we don't keep an open mind to be able to change and grow. So if there's a positive to me from the fact that half the cells in my body aren't mine, And if there's an upside to it, if there's an upside to the fact that the soul is not something that you can go into the body and pull out with a pair of tweezers, it's the fact that that means that myself is also malleable.

30:23Myself can also change and grow. And that's actually an encouragement, I think. So I try to see the upside of that, even if at times I do feel a certain body horror in the fact that I'm stuck inside of a body with half the cells being microbes. Yeah, and I think you've written about the fact that there's some mental horror of wondering, you know, as somebody who experiences a lot of thought spirals, I believe you've put it like, who's the captain of this ship? If I can't even claim these thoughts as my own, I clearly can't control them. Yeah, I mean, that understanding that I'm not in control of my own thoughts is a hard thing to swallow for me.

31:00But of course, I'm not. And the thing about thoughts is that they're just thoughts. OCD and other disorders like it tell you the lie that your thoughts are somehow incredibly powerful, that if you think your parents are going to die, they're going to die. That if you think you're poisoning your family with radon, you probably are, or at least you can't fully reassure yourself that you aren't. But thoughts are just thoughts. Thoughts come and go. People have all kinds of weird thoughts all the time, all day long. And of course, the right thing to do when you have an unusual or distressing thought.

31:34I've heard therapists say that it's like you're standing on the side of the street and you're watching cars drive by. And the right thing to do is you see a weird car and you just let it drive by. And you're like, well, that was a weird car. I bet there'll be another car in a minute that'll be a different looking car. But of course, what I do is I'm like, I got to get in that car and figure out what's going on. And that's the wrong strategy. Have you learned better strategies over time? Yeah, I mean, definitely understanding that thoughts are not as powerful or as important as I believe them to be or as I'm inclined to believe them to be is powerful for me.

32:17understanding that intellectually is of course different than being able to fully internalize it but understanding it intellectually is a gift and one that I take pretty seriously because I do find that knowing that as a ground of being is helpful just as knowing that myself is a story I tell myself is helpful because then I can kind of change the story if I need to do you have a story you're currently telling yourself is this like an exercise in some way Yeah, Dan, I'm just a dad from Indianapolis. That's the story I'm currently telling myself. Just a husband and dad trying to make his way in Indianapolis.

32:56That's a really interesting question. I mean, I never want to put all my identity eggs into one basket. For a long time, I thought of myself like I'm just a writer or just a public person. And if my value as a public person goes down, that means my value goes down. And if my value as a writer goes down or my books don't sell as well, that means I'm not as valuable as a person. And so I'm kidding when I say I just want to think of myself as a dad from Indianapolis, but at the same time, I'm not totally kidding because those are the most important identities to me is, you know, my identity as a parent, as a spouse, as a son, as a brother.

33:34Those core relationships are really where I want to put most of my eggs. And then the eggs that need to go into the professional basket. They're important, but they aren't nearly as important as whether or not I'm taking care of the basics. I really relate to what you're saying. You and I are broadly speaking in the same industry as, I guess, content creators or whatever you want to call it. And yet I'm embarrassed to admit, but I'm doing it anyway, that most of the time my anxiety centers around the stuff that matters less. Meaning, as I referenced earlier, when the podcast doesn't have a good month or I put out a book and it doesn't do that well, or I'm clearly consciously and subconsciously putting my eggs in the professional basket when it's not the most important basket.

34:24It's not the most important thing, but it is the easiest to measure, right? Like nobody tells you like your dad points are like 8 % down this month. And as a result, it'll probably continue to go 8 % down next month, and then pretty soon you'll be out of business. Nobody tells you that. The good and the terrible thing about the internet is that it's made all of this stuff very easy to measure, and it's really easy to conflate what's easy to measure with what's important. Man, that is true. Back to the mystery of the self. I, as a practicing Buddhist, really see it through a Buddhist lens. Have you encountered much of the Buddhist thought and philosophy and practice around the self?

35:06No, not a lot. I mean, I know a little bit about non-attachment, but I don't know a lot about the self. So can you educate me? Well, I mean, it's just, I think you kind of nailed it to a certain extent when you said before that seeing the insubstantiality, the mystery of the self is good news because then you have the ability to change. And in my understanding of the Dharma, which is basically just the fancy way of saying the teachings of the Buddha, that is the foundational insight or at least one of them. The other is what your Liberian friends have noticed too, which is that everything's changing all the time.

35:41And of course, that bounces right back to the self. If everything's changing all the time, how can there be a solid self. Definitionally, there cannot be. So that is the thing to let go of. It's very hard to do, but through practice, you can. I'll give you one quick one. And it came to mind when you were talking before about your intellectual grasp of the fact that thoughts are insubstantial, but being merely intellectual is only of limited comfort. You can, I think, make it more visceral. And this I'm going to steal from my longtime Buddhist teacher, Joseph Goldstein, which is just to ask yourself the question when you notice that you're in a flurry of noxious thoughts, like what is a thought?

36:23Check it out. Go check it out. Don't just rest in the knowledge that there's no substance to us. Like go look for it. And that can produce, at least in my experience, some visceral understanding of the insubstantiality. Does any of that land? Yeah, no, that really resonates with me. It can be very helpful because I think a lot of people come to Buddhism for the stress relief, but wash up on the rocky shores of this brain-breaking idea of the self being an illusion. But on this level, then it becomes very practical. Like, I don't have to take my thoughts so seriously. That's liberating. Yeah, for sure.

36:58And that they pass and there will be other thoughts behind it. Indeed. All right, let's talk about some of your other strategies in the aforementioned toolkit. On my list here, that is the product of doing some research, I see something labeled shame reduction through naming. Does that ring a bell for you? And if so, what does it mean? It means, I think, the great Mr. Rogers line, anything mentionable is manageable, and anything not mentionable tends to be not manageable. And so for me, a lot of the challenge of writing and living in the world is finding form for the formless, finding some kind of ability to give language to the way down deep stuff that's really abstract.

37:46act. And for me, that's where shame lives. That's where embarrassment lives. And if I can bring that forth into the world and allow it to see light through giving it form or giving it some kind of structure, then it becomes manageable. So how does that work on a moment-to-moment basis? Well, I guess I can give you one example. When I was writing my book, Turtles All the Way Down, which is about a young woman with OCD, her OCD is very different from mine, but we both have the same disorder and we both struggle with a lot of the same stuff, I was trying to find some way of not just saying what it's like.

38:24It's easy to say what pain is like. We almost always use similes when we talk about pain. It's like a stabbing in my neck. It's like a hammer on my head, whatever. But it's hard to say what it is. It's very hard to give direct form for pain, whether it's psychic or physical. And that was sort of the challenge I set for myself with turtles all the way down. And what I really wanted to do was bring forth my own shame by giving it language, language like, for instance, thought spirals. That idea wasn't inevitable or natural, like that's one way of conceiving of it. There are lots of other ways, but language like that, and then also in the novel to find structural solutions, find ways that, you know, Aza's internal voice can be loud enough in the mind of the reader that the reader can experience some of what she's going through so that they're not just empathizing with her.

39:19They are on some level experiencing what she's experiencing. I'd made a note of anything mentionable as manageable. That Mr. Rogers, he had a lot of good stuff. He did. It also kind of is consonant with my understanding of a meditation practice, which is you sit and watch your mind either in formal meditation or as you're just walking around the world and you notice hatred's coming up or fear and just the act of labeling it in the moment creates enough distance so that you're not in it yeah i cannot tell you how many times that has come to my rescue and i could also not tell you how many times i have failed to do it and done a bunch of dumb shit another thing on my list is and this is kind of come up obliquely but i think it makes sense to name it explicitly helping other people.

40:10For you, I believe you've found that one way to manage your own psychological struggles is to turn your attention outward. Yeah, absolutely. There is only so much work I can do within myself and find fulfillment in it. I also have to turn out to the world. And I know that's not true for everyone, but it is for me. I need to turn out to the world and act in the world as best I can on problems. And one of the challenges of that for me is that, you know, in the information landscape we all share now, there's a new problem every day. There's a new crisis turning our heads this way and that, and it's hard.

40:51The horrors abound in every direction. And that's true. All those horrors are real. It's not that they aren't real. It's just that if I'm looking in every direction at once, if I'm thinking about tuberculosis and malaria and climate change and HIV AIDS and COVID and and and and and and forever, I don't know what to do with myself. I get overwhelmed and I get paralyzed and I have complete decision paralysis and it's hard for me to even get out of bed and function. What I've found is that taking a long-term view of long-term problems is really helpful. My brother likes to say that bad news usually happens all at once and good news happens slowly.

41:34If we were to really report the most important news story every day, I would argue that the front page of the New York Times every single day for the last 30 years would read fewer children died today than any day in the last 5 ,000 years. And that's been true almost every day for the last 30 years, right? We've reduced the number of people who die under the age of five from 12 million the year I graduated from college to 5 million last year. It's an incredible, incredible achievement. It wasn't natural. It wasn't normal. It wasn't ordinary. It wasn't going to happen anyway. It happened because hundreds of millions of people work around the world to make it happen.

42:13And that long-term change has happened very, very slowly, infuriatingly slowly. It should be happening faster. We still lose millions of kids every year needlessly. And so I don't want to pretend that this isn't a crisis. It is a crisis, but it's a crisis that can get better when we work on it, when we share our attention to it. And whether it's maternal health or tuberculosis or climate change or any other big problem we share, we can see these problems get better when we work on them together. And that outward focus and that long-term way of looking and a systemic way of thinking about these problems is really key for me, really key to my fulfillment and happiness as a person.

42:56Because the other thing is that then you're working with interesting people and interesting problems, which is fun. It's fun. It's interesting. It's interesting to think about how to lower barriers to educational access through something like Crash Course. It's interesting to think about how to improve maternal and child health in deeply impoverished communities like Sierra Leone, where the government is desperate to be working on these problems, but just doesn't have the resources to do it. It's really interesting, fulfilling work. And I get to participate with thousands or tens of thousands of people working on those problems, and it's pretty fun, actually.

43:30One of my glib little lines is, the view is so much better when you pull your head out of your ass. Yeah. I just see that over and over again. And you and your brother have done a great job of really rallying your audience to, and I believe these are your words, decrease the suck, but like as a team. Yeah, yeah. You're not going to decrease that much suck in the world by yourself, but you can decrease a lot of suck in the world in collaboration and partnership with other people. During this course of this conversation, we've touched on the bugs in human nature. To be a little cute, we have an overabundance of bad bugs of tuberculosis because of the bugs in human nature where we can be selfish and otherize people, et cetera, et cetera.

44:15But then there's also the features in the human operating system you've also touched on, which is well-intentioned people working together in collaboration have brought down child mortality in some quite striking ways. Given all of that, where does that leave you in terms of your POV on our species? Well, I'm broadly in favor of humans, which used to be a fairly well-established fact, but I think now is a bit countercultural. I'm not sure everybody agrees with me, but I'm quite in favor of humans. I think our capacity for wonder is extraordinary. I think our curiosity is extraordinary. But most of all, I think our capacity for collaboration is very, very special.

44:54You know, ants are great collaborators too, but they don't have our brain power. I've been thinking about this because I live in Indianapolis, which is the home of Kurt Vonnegut, the great American novelist, one of my favorite writers, hugely influential person in my own creative and personal life. But there were aspects of Vonnegut's work that really bothered me. There was one novel that he wrote in the 80s, I think, called Galapagos. When someone would die in the novel, he would glibly say, well, they weren't going to write Beethoven's Ninth Symphony anyway. And it's true, they weren't. I'm not either, you're not either.

45:28And on that level, most people don't matter that much. They weren't going to write Beethoven's Ninth Symphony anyway. But the thing is, we only need one person to write Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. What we really need are people to hear it, people to listen to it, people to be transformed by it. And that's the gift. It's not that it's some tragedy, like imagining a world without people is some tragedy because nobody will be around to write the next Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. It's a tragedy because no one will be around to hear Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Trees, I think, falling in the woods will still make a sound, but Billie Holiday Records won't.

46:07And I really like us. I don't know that we are good news. I understand that we are a horror, that we have committed unspeakable atrocities against each other, against other forms of life. I don't mean to sound Pollyanna-ish about this, but I think we can be good news for each other. I really do. I agree.

46:30Coming up, John talks about what he learned from his time as a chaplain in a pediatric hospital, a searing experience, his current view of God, the question of hope, and the question of how much or how little we should be sharing about ourselves with other people.

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49:44I've asked about your view of the species. I'm curious what your view is metaphysically. I understand in your younger years, you spent time training to be an Episcopal minister and also chaplain in Children's Cancer Ward, I believe, which then I think went on to be the inspiration for your huge novel, Fault in Our Stars, which became a movie. So I'd love to hear a little bit of that story, but also like, where are you on God these days? Yeah. So I worked as a chaplain at a children's hospital and did know a lot of kids who were really sick or who died, not just of cancer, but of accidents, of other illnesses.

50:28I was briefly in discernment, as we say, for the ministry. I'm still a Christian. I still am Episcopalian. I still work from within that religious tradition and find it helpful to work from within that religious tradition. I don't, and this drives people bonkers when I say it, but I don't know how else to say it. I'm not really that interested in the question of whether God is really real in the way that a table is really real. Actually, quite like a table, tables are constructed. Whether God is a construct or a derivation is not the most interesting question in the world to me. What is really interesting to me, I realize this separates me from a lot of people in my faith tradition, but what is really interesting for me is what God wants in the world and what God wants from us in the world.

51:20I mean, I'm interested in ideas of heaven in a metaphysical way. I'm interested in what would be useful ways of recycling consciousness or maintaining consciousness. I mean, I guess I think about that stuff sometimes, but what I'm most interested in is what God wants from the world in my religious tradition, and that's pretty clearly laid out for me in the Gospels. So, you know, it's pretty clearly laid out that wherever I see the sick or the imprisoned or those without clothes or resources, I see God. It's pretty clear to me that the last shall be first and the meek should inherit the earth. And for me, it's laid out in the gospels in a fairly straightforward way.

51:59If you're not totally convinced that God is real, how do you know that the gospels are based on what he wants to see in the world? Oh, I don't. I mean, it's definitely a belief. It's definitely a belief. I haven't derived my theological worldview the way that you derive Newton's second law. It's definitely a belief system and a theological system. And that system, I guess maybe because I'm American, I don't feel like it has to extrapolate out to everyone. I feel like I can be quite individualistic about my theology. Yeah, no, that makes complete sense. I think I was just getting at what you said before about God being a construct, and it may be that our understanding of what he wants in the world is also a construct, but maybe a useful one because we're kind of channeling the best aspects of the human mind in that process.

52:54Yeah, and if you put Jesus at the center of history, as Christians tend to, then Jesus's teachings take on an outsized role in your imagining of the moral universe. But I do think that, for me, it doesn't really matter how exactly we came to this place. I'm happy to be there, I guess. Back to your time in the children's hospital, I think you've described it as the axis mundi or like the sort of axis of the world for you of your life. Like there's kind of a before and after. Yeah. Can you say a little bit more about why that is? Yeah. I mean, you know, I was 22 years old and spent six months being with people on the worst days of their lives.

53:35And I have so much respect for people who work in children's hospitals. So much respect for people who work in children's hospitals for longer than six months. who don't bomb out of it like I did because it's hard work. It's hard to be with people as they lose their kids. It's hard to be with kids as they lose their lives. And for me, it challenged really everything that I thought I knew about the world. I knew abstractly, of course, that life isn't fair and that there's both luck-based and structure-based injustice, but it's different to see it up close. And I never forgot it. I never got over it.

54:18I never have been able to put it behind me. And on some level, I don't want to put it behind me. I want to grapple with the world as I saw it there. I want to grapple with the world as it really is. And that's the world. I mean, I remember one of my chaplaincy supervisors saying that it's important to remember that it's natural and normal for children to die, that historically half of children died. Half of children died before the age of five. Most people who've been born in the history of the world, most modern humans who've been born in the last 300 ,000 years never lived to see the age of 20.

54:53And so I want to grapple with that world as it is. It makes me not want to live in a natural world. I don't want to live in a world that's in a state of nature. I want to live in a world that's shaped by empathy and by collaboration and by hard human work to make life better, especially for the most vulnerable among us and who is more vulnerable than a child. Well said. So after that experience, you stopped pursuing the Episcopal ministry. Did that experience kind of shake your conviction in the existence of God? Oh, yeah. I mean, it shaped my conviction about everything. I didn't emerge from that with really any understanding of a moral universe, I felt and still feel that the world either is random or behaves precisely as if it were.

55:45The world either is indifferent to human concerns or behaves as if it were. And, you know, I need to build a worldview that incorporates that and that still finds a way to be hopeful. You brought me exactly where I was thinking I was going to go next, which is that word hope, which can be triggering or saccharine for folks. What do you mean by hope because it does come up in your public utterances, not infrequently. What do you mean by that? And like, how do you generate it? I'd say I mean two things. One is that I mean hope that life can get better for ourselves and for each other and for the most vulnerable people among us.

56:23Now, I don't believe, of course, that hope is always rewarded, but I do believe that hope is always justified. And then the second thing that I mean is a more existential hope, the idea that forgiveness is available to all of us at all times, the idea that all of us are worthy of that forgiveness. I mean, forgiveness from other people, but also forgiveness from the universe or however you want to construct it. That's the idea of radical hope, that even unto death and beyond death, that there is cause for belief that we're going to be okay one way or another. I am both a big believer in hope and very suspicious of a lot of constructions of hope, because I think sometimes I don't want to be hope-pilled.

57:07Like, when I'm going through a hard time, I don't want to be told, like, everything's going to work out. Well, and everything isn't going to work out. I'm going to die, and everyone I love is going to die. So hearing everything's going to work out just fine is not very helpful when you're going through a dark night of the soul, when you're going through a really difficult time. Hearing that everything happens for a reason doesn't help me. In fact, it frustrates me because you tell me the reason why this kid died. You tell me the reason why people are suffering. You tell me the reason, you know, I have a hard time with that one personally.

57:39I know it helps a lot of people and I don't mean to judge them, but it just doesn't work for me. What I mean by hope is that I want to find a kind of hope that can hold up to reality as I find it, that can withstand the pressures and darknesses of reality. And I do find that. I find it in community. I find it in the fact that we've reduced the number of children who die by 60 % in the last 25 years. I find it all over the place. I find stories of hope, stories of people helping each other, extraordinary acts of generosity and sacrifice among humans. I think that's the part of our story that I want to lift up when I think about hope.

58:17Again, amen. One last question I had for you just in preparing for this, something stuck out to me. You were being interviewed by the New York Times recently, and you talked about the importance of not losing the magic of our teenage selves. Yeah. Can you just say a little bit more about that? There are two things about being a teenager that I find interesting. And I want to be clear, being a teenager was terrible. And so I don't want to go back to being a teenager. So I do want to lose a lot of our teenage selves, right? Like there's a lot that you can put behind you as you grow and change into this new imagined self as we've been talking about.

58:54But there are two things about being a teenager that I do want to hold on to. And the first is firsts. The first time you fall in love, it's so intense. It feels not just like it's unprecedented in your own life, but it's like it's unprecedented in human history. The first time you're grappling with grief, the first time you're asking big questions about meaning and suffering and what we owe each other and what we owe ourselves. There's such a lack of irony in those pursuits. There's such an open and honest earnestness in them, I don't want to lose that. I really want to hold on to that earnestness.

59:26And I know that like earnestness can be cringy and it can feel a little, um, ah, you know, just, I had this dog years ago, this wonderful dog, Willie, and Willie would roll over and he would show us his belly. And I would always think what an incredibly vulnerable making thing that is to do. Like that's where I could stab you. and yet you trust me with this. And there's something about being really earnest that is a similar thing where you have to show your belly to the world and it makes you nervous and it can make other people uncomfortable too, but I think there's real value in it. And then the other thing I don't want to lose about my teenage self or my teenage experience is the way I loved other people.

1:00:05I loved my friends in high school. I went to a boarding school in Alabama and so I spent 24 hours a day with my friends and with my enemies. and I loved the people I loved with such a ferocity. I loved them so much. I would never say that I loved them, of course, but I loved them so much and I thought they were so cool and I loved being with them and I loved learning about them and it came from a place of real curiosity with no judgment and I want to hold on to that. I want to hold on to the way I loved when I was a teenager. Picked up my 11-year-old at school the other day and this is only his second year at the school and he got in the car and said, I love this place so much.

1:00:46Oh, that's great. Yeah, it's amazing. Oh, that's such a great feeling as a parent too. You're like, oh, I did it. Yes. At least for one moment. You know, and listening to you talk about loving your friends with that ferocity in high school, like I, for much of my adult life, just got so focused on my career that I let my friendships lapse and kind of woke up to this four or five years ago and have done a lot of work to reestablish that. I'm going to a party tonight and getting back in touch with that has been incredibly moving for me. Yeah, it's so fulfilling. I've been thinking about it. I mean, I'm so dependent upon my friends, so reliant upon them, but also they're reliant upon me.

1:01:34Like I've got this buddy, I won't name him because you'd probably be embarrassed by this, but he can solve any problem I have. Like, you know, I have a problem with the kid's treehouse or something, and he'll come over and just like fix it in five minutes. And I spent a whole day trying to figure out how to get the ladder to work right. And he can solve all my problems. And one day he called me and he was like, hey, can you go to the doctor with me? I just feel like I need a patient advocate and I feel like you'd be a good one. And I was like, I am a great patient advocate. I will go to the doctor with you and you will be duly astonished by my brilliance as a patient advocate like there is something that I can give you back and so there's a lot of joy in that for me yes yeah I have a friend who's everybody calls him Doug can fix it yeah very similar friend what's on your mind these days what else is on your mind that we haven't covered what are you working on what are you interested in I'm writing a new novel.

1:02:26I'm writing a novel about two kids and a movie. I'm interested in Hollywood, but I'm interested in Hollywood as a lens into the world that we all live in now where we're all sort of commodifying aspects of ourselves and packaging them up and then selling them for free to Instagram audiences and TikTok and podcast audiences. and what that means, what we lose in that process, what we gain from it, whether that exchange is valuable or whether most of the value ends up getting captured by for-profit companies. So I've been writing that novel. I mean, I've really been writing it since like 2018, but I've been very focused on it for the last couple of years, and that's been really fun.

1:03:05And then I'm just trying to think a lot about the world, the world around me. I'm trying to get outside of myself and literally touch grass, get off the internet a little bit and go for walks. And I live near the White River here in Indianapolis, which is, to me anyway, the most beautiful river in the world. And just being able to walk along the White River and be alone with my thoughts and know that those thoughts aren't quite as powerful as I once believed they were is a nice, just a nice way to go about being alive. You have a Leslie Knope level Indiana patriotism, don't you? I do. I am a big, uh, we have our problems, Dan.

1:03:43I don't wish to, I don't, I don't wish to minimize the extent to which Indiana has its problems, but I really do love Indianapolis. I really love this town and I love the people in it. And I'm grateful to the people who stay, even when it's difficult sometimes to stay. I feel a lot of, a deep, deep connection to this place. I'm not a native. I I moved here in 2007 for my wife's job, very much a trailing spouse. And Sarah got a job here. And so we just moved here. But I love it. I really do. Yeah, I wouldn't want to be anywhere else. This novel you're writing, is it at all based in any kind of ambivalence you have about being such a prominent player on the internet yourself?

1:04:25For sure. Yeah. I mean, there's no getting around the complex feelings I have about my own participation in the social internet. I have complex feelings about it because I feel like the social internet is not always a positive force in people's lives Like I want my participation in it to be a positive force in people's lives, but I don't know that it is A positive force in the social order. In fact, I think it's been pretty destructive in a lot of ways And I don't see it getting better But also there's an ambivalence about what i've given up what i've given up in the process of talking about my mental health talking about other aspects of my private life when you share something you lose it.

1:05:02It isn't yours anymore. And there are blessings in that, of course. I mean, there are tremendous blessings. I know that so many people have reached out to me, especially after reading Turtles All the Way Down, and told me how much it meant to them, and that they could relate to it, and it helped them to feel less alone, or helped them to understand somebody in their lives who lives with mental health problems. And that's a gift, I mean, a huge gift. And yet, at the same time, it's hard to get around the fact that I've lost something in that process. And so I do have ambivalent feelings about it, but true ambivalence where I understand the upsides and the downsides, and I don't know where I land on it.

1:05:40So some part of you thinks that maybe you would be better off if your personal struggles stayed personal? Parts of me would be better off for sure. But at the same time, and a lot of my personal struggles are personal. I mean, it's the other thing, right? Like there's a lot I don't share. And then I think, well, if I shared some of that, it might be helpful to people in the same way it's been helpful to people as I shared my OCD or depression experiences. Problem with it is that to what extent do you have an obligation to the public? And to what extent do you have an obligation to yourself? And I don't have an easy answer for that.

1:06:17I definitely do feel like I have an obligation to the public, but I think I might have a bigger obligation to myself. well we have all benefited from your generosity in this regard anything else that you were hoping that we would get to that we haven't managed to get to no this has been such a great wide-ranging conversation what a thrill it's a huge pleasure to have you on thank you very much really appreciate it it's a pleasure to meet you now it's been such a pleasure to talk with you

1:06:49thanks again to john it was so cool to meet him i really like that guy just a quick reminder we're in the middle of a very cool new meditation challenge over on my new ish meditation app 10 with dan harris challenge is called even you can meditate we're a couple days in but it's not too late to join and also it's always going to be available on demand i'm doing this with seven a selassie as part of the challenge and there's one more of these left we're doing video check-ins where you can ask us questions, head on over to danharris.com to download the app. I would appreciate your support. And finally, thank you to everybody who works so hard on this show.

1:07:24Our producers are Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vasili. 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 Kashmir is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.

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