Ezra Klein On: Sane News Consumption; The Power of Meditation; The Future of the Species; And the Message of His Tattoo

28:25But when you're reading, et cetera, certainly when you are tightly looking at the phone, it's this concentrated gaze. In this, what sounded to me like a probably bullshit Evo Bio Just So story, well, when we were doing that, we were worried we were going to be eaten by a mountain lion. But whatever it is that is behind that, I actually find it to be true. Even when I was doing this with you right here, just like looking at my palm in that, I noticed the change in my body as my gaze focused and held. And because the phone holds the gaze, something I notice when I am reading in newspaper or magazine or book is I look up a lot.

29:03It doesn't hold me that much. I look up, I think about what I just saw, I sort of look around the coffee shop. The phone, my iPad, other things I don't. The computer screen. And so it's holding that tight in gaze for long periods of time, this person argued, is sort of bad on the nervous system. It's anxiety producing. Whether the story there is true, for me, experience that when my gaze is wide and relaxed, something about that seems to allow my system to settle a little bit. and when I'm like staring at my phone for an hour, even if what I was looking at, I seem to like, some part of me afterwards is just a little clenched.

29:43I think that trying to be attentive to embodiment is pretty important and something I've become much more attentive to in the last couple of years. I think there's a lot of information in it. I want to go into that, but just on the eyes thing, I'll join you in copying to the fact that I have no idea what the fuck I'm talking about, but EMDR - Yeah, exactly. I'm a white guy. I have a podcast. I can say whatever the hell I want. EMDR, eye movement desensitization. I don't actually know what it stands for. I've only done one session of it. But it is about moving your eyes in a specific way to release trauma.

30:20There's a successor that I have more familiarity with called brain spotting where you're asked to, well, for me, I have claustrophobia. So airplanes and elevators have been hard for me for the last couple of years. And so I've been doing some brain spotting. And the idea is you imagine the thing you're scared of, and then you look around the room and you find the spot where you're most triggered. And then you sit there with your eyes on it. So long way of saying there seems to be something to this idea of the placement of your eyes, the way you're gazing and the nervous system. Yeah, I'm definitely happy to nod along to that on the podcast.

31:02Somebody I love did EMDR and it was really very helpful for them. That's sort of my experience with it. Yeah, I mean, there's something about the eyes seems related to sort of some. I might have seen of EMDR is it has to do with bilateral. Like my understanding is you can do EMDR by tapping. And by even walking, you can also do it with a pair of sunglasses that the lenses flip up and down. My vague, I don't want to go any further into this than this because I don't want to get things wrong. But my vague understanding is EMDR has to do with bilateral motion rather than being specifically optical.

31:33Let me promise the listener that I will do an episode where somebody knows more than I do about this issue. Coming up, Ezra Klein talks a little bit more about embodiment and desensitization. Also, his concerns about AI.

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34:03Let me go back to embodiment. What do you mean by that? why have you become so interested in it so what i mean by embodiment is just how my body feels when different things are happening and it's very very easy for me to get caught up in my mind and the body keeps the score by uh bessel van der kolk i think it's been on the new york times bestseller list functionally continuously now for years i mean there's a lot to it But I think we live in a very specifically disembodied time. The technologies we use are disembodying. They make you a floating brain in front of a flickering screen immersed in a weightless world of digital information.

34:50when that happens and i'm not saying there's a joy to it or an intensity to it again i work in front of a computer all day you're just losing all the information in your body and i think over the time you desensitize to it i think like we're here on a meditation podcast so i think sometimes like what has meditation actually done for me i'm not enlightened not awakened i know that for sure I don't believe that my Buddha nature has been uncovered yet, but I've been meditating most days for 15 years now, maybe more. And one thing that I think it's given me is an attention to my state, a deeper level of granularity than I would otherwise have.

35:37And I think there's a lot of information in the state. Now, unfortunately, oftentimes, I pay attention to my state. I'm like, I don't like my state. And there's not a lot to do about it in the moment. And obviously, the advice would be to accept it. But I think that to me has become a source of or a place of embodiment, has become a place of resistance to ways of living that feel increasingly inhuman. And things that over time I've noticed, I mean, none of them are earth-shaking. We know them all. There are just rooms I feel better in than other rooms. There are ways of consuming information I feel better with than others.

36:19is I'm constantly doing things to jack up my system. And I think I'm just attentive enough to what the other states feel like. I had George Saunders on my show years ago. I've had him on a couple of times, the author. He always seems to me, I think he would say he's not enlightened, but he always seems a little bit enlightened to me. But I remember him talking about meditation and saying that over time, what you begin to sense is that there are all these states you can be in. A1, A2, A2, A3, B1, B2, B3. And you begin to just have a knowledge when you're in one that the others are possible too.

36:56Even if you're not where you want to be, there's a little bit of internal navigation mechanism that some parties are colder, colder, colder, colder. Now that's a little bit in conflict, I think, with some other advice, which is not to be doing so much picking and choosing. And so I'll never quite know how to resolve that. Maybe you know. But I think that's part of it for me. It's strange to live in a time. I mean, people have felt this for many and many, many different eras in human history, but it's strange to live in a time where you just sort of feel that we've made some wrong turns we're not going to unmake.

37:30And we're pushing ourselves in a way we're probably out of the ideal window and are maybe things that were good for a while. I'm one of these people like, the internet was good in 2007. And somewhere around 2012, 14, the rise of the algorithmic internet, it started getting worse for us. And I don't know how we're going to unwind it. I don't really think we will. I don't really know if AI is going to be good or bad for us. I can see it both ways. But just a sense that I feel bad for my kids. I got to grow up before computers, before omnipresent screens, when there was nothing that could grab my attention that was all that good all the time.

38:12And so I at least had the experience of the other forms of attention. And I cultivated those attentional faculties. And the level of countercultural effort it now takes to do that, or to push a kid to do that, is really high. So maybe my discomfort is just somebody who's straddled a bunch of it, and felt other things and doesn't like all the new things. Maybe I've just become a Luddite, but I don't really think so. You've given me so much to follow up on there. I want to get to the picking and choosing thing in a minute, but on the kids, I'm a father too. I do sometimes wonder whether they won't have their own counter-revolution.

38:52I hear my son when he's playing video games with his friends and somebody's freaking out, they'll say, touch grass. I wonder if their own nervous systems will kick in in such a way that they – you may have been too young for this, but in the 90s, I think there was this campaign on MTV, which was at that point the dominant youth media. There was this anti-smoking campaign where the whole pitch was they're conning you. They're trying to sell you this thing by making it look cool, but don't take the bait. Instead of lecturing, they appealed to the inherently rebellious nature of teenagers. And I'm just wondering whether there will be some sort of rebellion against the algorithms.

39:33And you're looking skeptical. You think that algorithms are too strong. It's not just that they're too strong. It's that they are strengthening at an accelerating rate. I don't know what to think about what I was going to do, man. I was looking at a study. I'm not sure I trusted the methodology of the study, so take it with a grain of salt. What it basically showed was that the most common use of AI right now is not economic in some way. It's not productivity. It's relational. You've turned your AI into a therapist, which I've definitely done. I've definitely done that. You've turned it into a friend.

40:11And kids growing up, it is just completely obvious that if you are my older son is six, he's going to grow up with AI friends. He's going to grow up with AI lovers. It's not, in my view, even stoppable unless you're Amish or something like that where you're going to basically keep the technology out of the community. We don't know what this will do to anybody at all. Now, for me, I'm 40. My life largely predates AI. It comes in as this alien force. And so there's always going to be an internal resistance to it. That's weird. My AI therapist, so to speak, it's so good, dude. It is so good. It's just a straightforward, powerful model that I just talked to about my life.

41:01But also just this constant lying to me, which keeps the thing from being too convincing. It's always like, I'm really proud of you. And I'm like, no, you're an unfeeling neural network. Or at least I think you're an unfeeling neural network. Some people disagree with me about that. It does this constant. Like I'm right there with you. I'm like, you're not right there with me. Like you don't mean which model you're using. I pay for not the pro level of open AI. Yeah, that's the one under it. I pay for it too. And I'm not getting stuff like that. I'm proud of you. It may like me better. Dan. Maybe I'm just doing more for it to be proud of.

41:36Or it senses that you're needier. I mean, undoubtedly. I've actually keep trying to be like, could you be a little less effusive and supportive? I would like you to be a little sterner. And it seems to forget that pretty quickly. Interesting. Point is that I remember when I met my wife before, right before internet dating really normalized. So like right before like Tinder hit and things like that. And so I watched from the outside as something had been kind of weird, you know, internet dating is like what you do if you can't meet anybody in real life to what sort of fucking creep are you meeting people in real life?

42:18That was partially the technology advancing, but partially generational too. and what's going to happen here is it is going to be weird and strange for a bit if you went to somebody dan soon if we were talking offline and you're like listen man i know you're pretty in ai so i want to tell you about something at this point claude sonnet is my best friend i'd be like you should touch grass like that's probably a bad idea don't make claude your best friend at some point that's not going to be weird it's just not going to be weird we We don't know what that will do to people. We are just going to run this experiment, no control group, on everybody, simultaneously for subscription revenues and hope for the fucking best.

43:07I don't exactly know what the alternative is, but it's a hell of a thing to be living through. Do you think it's scarier to be alive now or on the lip of World War II? Because we know what World War II was on the lip of World War II. I'm Jewish, dude. That was bad. But that's working with hindsight. I guess what I'm trying to say is we are in an age of real uncertainty where, as you've established, and I think you're unquestionably correct, we have all of these X factors out there, the potential dissolution of the post-World War II order, AI, the climate crisis, growing migration and polarization and trending toward fashion.

43:44There's so many questions. And our nature is to fear change. This is actually what I end up talking to ChatGPT about all the time. I'm not Pollyanna, but is there an optimistic way to view all of these? So let me say that it goes to your point about fearing change. What I just said very literally is we have no idea what it will do to people. And I mean exactly that. It could be good. maybe it'll be good my conversations with these programs i think at this point are good they're net positive in my life in a way that my interactions with x or instagram or not it's just on the cusp of something we don't understand cannot understand that the people who embrace it fully we won't even like have them in our sight line for a long time because it's going to be young people.

44:39They're going to be using it in ways that we don't really get. It's just unknowable. We are just on the cusp of, I think, sort of an event horizon. And on the other side of that, whatever it is, it's just probably going to be different. It's going to be good in some ways, bad in other ways. I mean, even for all I've been talking about, I think that we have made a number of wrong turns in the way of structured digital life, but not every part of that is bad. And not every part of modern society is bad. And as much as I'm upset about American politics at the moment, I'm not going to tell you there have been worse periods in our politics and other politics.

45:10And also this was a point and a half in the battleground states from going the other way. So I mean, none of this is foreordained and there's no one story of any age, right? Well, we impose into the narratives later. There are a lot of stories that are contradictory. I was talking earlier about zeitgeists, but it's not like the other zeitgeist doesn't still exist. There's a reason people like listening to Pete Buttigieg on podcasts, or me. People still like very ordered thinkers. And so I actually don't know, but I take that not knowing very seriously, if that makes sense. I think I'm trying to be very alive to how much is cracking.

45:49And that means, I think, being very attentive to the experience of being in it. To go back to the question of embodiment, that's like something I want for my kids. It's something I want for people. I think the whole thing that we had a moment where digital literacy was in vogue. It was so thin as a concept, right? You're supposed to get better at detecting the telltale signs of misinformation or disinformation. Learning how to be attentive to your own attention and your own experience of the world, we teach people so little of that. I mean, it's why people love the show and people are so interested in meditation, but you shouldn't have to be interested in meditation to get training in that.

46:30And there are a lot of other ways to be trained in. A lot of people for whom, I mean, I know a lot of people in my life, you must get this so much. People come to me like they're making a confession that they don't like to meditate. Yeah, all the time. I'm like, I don't care.

46:46Like, I'm not the meditation police, nor are there meditation police. And there are a million other ways to be embodied in your own experience. And that's not even the best one for me a lot of the time, right? It's just one of the ones I use. But it seems to me like our schooling is still extremely in the mode of like you should memorize multiplication tables. It has modernized so little into just like how to be a human. I think that's coming. I hope. I'm pessimistic about my own life generally, but generally optimistic about the species. But like 51-49 optimistic about the species. Why are you pessimistic then about your own life?

47:25I just am – it's like defensive pessimism, like anxious. I too am patabar mitzvah. So we are part of a lineage of people with reasonably rational fears given the historical record. And so probably that. It's an inheritance. I guess. I'm launching a new business of late. And my projections are always very conservative. That's where I tend toward pessimism. But when I think about the world, it just seems to me very possible. that there will be a reaction, especially in education, against some of this disembodiment that we're talking about. I could be wrong. And I'm definitely skewed because I live in this world.

48:08It's actually a thing that bums me out about the education policy conversation right now, which one feels very stuck. Two feels sort of sinister to the extent it's not stuck. I've been very excited about the gains that what I would call John Heidism have been making. By the time my kids are old enough for it to matter, we will figure it out the schools and phones thing. But curriculum and actually having a real debate about what is education for? So I want to do a piece on this. I haven't done it yet. Maybe a podcast, maybe something bigger. One way that I concretize my uncertainty about what the world is going to look like in 20 years or 18 years is trying to think about how I think my children should be educated.

48:58Putting aside how they will be educated, because we're pretty big believers in public schools, where there's a lot less choosing of curriculum. What do I think will be valued? What do I think society will ask of and reward in 18-year-olds or 22-year-olds in 16 to 20 years? I don't know. Well, this is where I kind of lost my train of thought a second ago. This is where I was going. I think it's possible, and this may be overly optimistic. I'm very willing to be wrong. 5149. 5149. I think it's possible that in the age of artificial intelligence, emotional intelligence will matter way more. Because a lot of the jobs that are going to be replaced as commodifiable, those that remain will have to do things that the computer can't do.

49:48I used to think that. I don't even know about the question of job replacement. But I would say in many ways the computers are better at emotions now than math. Well, they're proud of you. Which is a weird thing. Thank you. I think there's something about – we sometimes make this cut that the real human skill is emotional, not cerebral. all. But I think about it a little bit more. Do we ask people to act as machines? And what does it mean to ask them to act as human beings? We don't value people's experience of things at all in the economy. We value what they can pay for things. We value what they can produce, but we don't value their experience.

50:27We've sort of built schooling post-industrial revolution to get people to act in ways that the economy needed them to act. And schooling is not just about what you learn. It's also about an acculturation into a value system, rewards and punishments and what makes you worthy and did you get a gold star? And there's going to be a lot of dislocation as some of what we've taught people to value just gets eaten up by systems that can do it better. And even if we got the policy right, imagine utopically that we come to the view that Artificial intelligence is really collective intelligence. It is an algorithmic overlay on the sum total of machine-readable human knowledge that the actual value of coming up with those algorithms wasn't nothing, but it was not that impressive.

51:20I mean, these companies are not that old. And the profits should be shared. Imagine you're in Sam Altman's world here or something, and productivity takes off, and computers are doing all these amazing things, and we figure at robotics. We got the policy right. And so everybody's richer. Well, we accord value and dignity to work. People who win the lottery do not end up unbelievably happy. People need to be useful. And the era of wage labor is like a punctuated era in human history. I don't expect it to go away anytime soon, but it isn't the only way you can organize value. It isn't the only way you can organize social respect.

52:01And so we have organized society to persuade people to act as machines. I mean, all the talk in politics is bringing back manufacturing jobs. Most manufacturing jobs from the eras in which we are highly nostalgic for them was having people act as machines now act. Literally, right? These jobs have not just been given to China, they've been automated. And I don't think it's like the highest purpose of human beings to act as machines. I think it's really, really great to go to the park. Now, I obviously live my life to be inside an office constantly trying to write about how other people should go to the park or something.

52:38So take it for what you will. But there's something here. There's some like, in my most optimistic versions of this, it's a rediscovery and a revaluing of what actually is distinctive about being a human being and move away from demanding people spend their precious lives on this earth yes acting in ways machines can act yes i agree but we could also that up in a million ways along the way right there's the best case scenario and you're from my limited point of view describing it coming up ezra talks about meditation and uh his new favorite ritual

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55:51Let me just go back to meditation. You raised a question I actually don't know that I've ever thought about, but I think is really interesting. this seeming contradiction between choosing to change your mind state the injunction to you know i've heard joseph goldstein say you can change the channel if you're stuck in anger oh can you joseph yeah if you're joseph uh vis-a-vis the injunction to accept what's happening as the route to equanimity that the only way out is through and i'm freelancing here because i'm not a buddhist scholar. I'm not a meditation teacher, and I do wish I had somebody with bona fides here, but I'm on firmer ground here than I am with EMDR.

56:32I do think both are true, and it's about using your wisdom to figure out what is possible and good to be done in the moment. So yes, if you, Ezra, are locked in unconstructive rumination, anxiety, anger, whatever, yeah, I think it's appropriate, actually not even mutually exclusive. You can start by accepting it, investigating it mindfully, and then you can also decide to cultivate its opposite, which is usually loving kindness. I don't think he would mind me saying this. Will Kabat-Zinn is a great meditation teacher and thinker. He once told me when I was talking about something related to this, I was talking about equanimity, the thing I always want to have and don't really have.

57:19And he said something like, you can't really practice equanimity, but you can become a quantumist. And I've thought about that extremely puzzling statement a lot, would suggest to me that there's something in it. And it tends to be true in my moment-to-moment experience in the moment my ability to deploy any practice or any mental effort or non-effort to say you're stirred up you should be a quantumist right now does not work no but there are things i do in my life that over time create conditions in which equanimity arises and has like a little bit more of a buffer for me. Let me explore the second part of that.

58:07I'm still stuck on the you're stirred up, you should be a quantumist right now. The first part is perfect. You're mindful of your mind state. You're stirred up right now. You're proud of me just like that. Yes, I am. I'm as proud of you as the impersonal computer, but I'm actually genuinely proud of you. I think that first part is great. It's the second part, the should you should be a quantumist, that is the problem. That goes right to the tension you were talking about. Like, should you change your mindset or should you accept it? And I don't think you can change before you accept. My level of constant self-criticism and self-judgment, no matter what any meditation teacher on earth tells me about why my state is not what I intellectually know it should be and I would be happier if it was, or why what I am thinking about is not what I wish to be thinking about instead of what I am thinking about is so deeply, like, look, man, if you, atop a meditation empire, can't stop being anxious, my belief that I'm going to get out of, could you not just calm down right now is very low.

59:15I disagree. I disagree. I think this is purely voluntary suffering you're doing. Really? And it reminds me, yes. I mean, sure, there's deep conditioning here. So some of it's going to happen. I'm not promising an evaporation of these ancient tendencies. Both of us were probably related back in the shtetl, like both of us inherited these traits. But I don't think that conditioning is destiny per se. It's not, as you said before, foreordained. Have you heard about or practiced self-compassion? Okay, so Kristen Neff has done all this work to show that actually you can learn to talk to yourself in a more supportive way.

59:55And then Ethan Cross at the University of Michigan, who's not a self-compassion expert, has done a lot of work on chatter, internal chatter so it's related work about rewiring your inner dialogue getting rid of the should getting rid of the self-laceration which is classic in buddhist speak second arrow so the first arrow hits you and you're feeling involuntary pain but then you voluntarily insert the second arrow of you shouldn't be feeling this fucking pain my best friend is constantly in voice messages to me when i tell him how i'm doing he's like that's a lot of second arrow suffering you're doing right there yes but this is what i mean with the will capitan line that my lived experience of it, because I know this on some level, right, is that my ability, say, to do what you are saying, to not have the voice in my head be really self-critical when I'm getting enough sleep is just so far beyond my ability to do it when I'm not.

1:00:44Yeah. That there are conditions in which the more skillful responses arise for me. Absolutely. Absolutely. And the more I, the more distant I am from those conditions, the less all of the training and the meditating and so on that do. It's not that it does nothing, right? I do think I have like an awareness of what's going on in me. And a willing is another mantra someone once gave me. It's like, it's like this right now, I have to say to myself. My wife has that tattoo. Oh, really? Right now it's like this. Yes. No kidding. Oh, we've all got our little Zen tattoos. Yes. We're going to talk about yours in a second.

1:01:22It's something that I've come to appreciate more. A couple of things to say on that. One, Joseph Goldstein, whose name has been invoked already, great meditation teacher, my teacher, great friend. I've seen him tonight. He's an amazing, amazing human being, has talked about how he had many years of insomnia, which has actually gotten better recently. And he would say that when he was underslept, he would be equanimous but unhappy. I like that. And also, when you're talking about the conditions that create your Buddha nature to emerge, and I do think it's with Buddha nature, it's episodic, like at any given moment, you're creating conditions for it to emerge or not.

1:02:02That's why I'm not a meditation fundamentalist. I have really pivoted toward all aspects of doing life better because the meditation doesn't matter as much if you're not sleeping, or the meditation doesn't matter as much if you're not taking care of your body, which of course includes sleep. And so, or if you have horrible relationships in your life, if your ethics are off, the meditation will have less potency. So it has to take place in a context. My next tattoo to jump forward in time is going to be about rest. And one of the things I've thought a lot about in the last couple of years is for a personality like mine, it's very easy for meditation specifically to become one more intensely imposed self-discipline i actually it's very poisonous the apps get into these streaks we did have that i mean i'm not part of the app but yes that has streaks at some point i was like i'm gonna stop doing streaks like i'm just gonna keep breaking it because i don't want to because he you know if one of your personality traits i love this line that um a lot of successful people are just anxiety harnessed to productivity.

1:03:11And if one of the ways you deal with that action wise, as you were saying earlier, is just to kind of the harder things get to clamp down more and more with discipline. Well, if it's like this, I need to be working out every day. I need to be meditating every day. I need to be getting my reading in. You can keep doing it. And for me, I can keep like, there's something somewhat calming, but also ultimately exhausting and unfulfilling about continuing to clamp down harder and harder and harder on myself. And I know if like, I mean, you might say it, but a meditation teacher, it's like, it's not supposed to feel like that, but it can get like that.

1:03:48And actually forcing myself into spaces for even there, like this is not language, like allowing myself into non-productive periods, even just in a day where nothing happening for me is in any way productive, right? I've been like kind of searching for a Shabbat practice for a long time. And recently I found something pretty close to one that's actually for the first time working for me, although it's not like the religious Shabbat. That question has gotten very central that it's very, I don't know, meditation for me can sometimes become, even though again, I do it five days a week, it can just be part of this endless disciplining of the self.

1:04:26Yeah. I buy that. I do. I think it's a misapplication of the technology, but I've definitely slipped into that myself. What's the Shabbat practice? this came through my wife actually when i came home and she's like we're gonna do it nice we're just lighting these candles and we're not really gonna talk we're just gonna read or like sit here and i was like this is our date we're not gonna talk and it was so good and lately basically every night after i put my kids down sometimes with her sometimes if she's working or something just by myself, I just turn out all the lights in the living room and I light five candles.

1:05:04And I've done this in better and worse ways. There have been some days when I've had my phone near me, but the sort of complete bringing down of the inputs. The thing I've struggled with with Shabbat, which I would like to have as a practice with my kids and a ritual, is that I wanted to feel very restful. And when you're taking care of a three and a six-year-old and they are not interested in that beautiful Shabbat meal you cooked, and there's not a bunch of other family around and a community that you're embedded in with it. And Saturday is not a day when you can just be nonproductive. They want to do 55 things and there's naps and there's cleaning the dishes.

1:05:36And that tension between what I was trying to achieve for myself in it and what the reality of my stage of life is, I just wasn't getting where I wanted to be. This, the fact that it is related to the candles, that there's something about turning out the lights, being lit by fire, which feels a little bit more ancient to me. and just really sharply reducing the input. And the thing I'm trying to move towards is only listening to music, only reading on paper, or just sitting there and like talking or like looking out the window. That's what I would like to get to. And doing that most nights. I love this.

1:06:13And I can imagine, and this may be too in the optimizer realm, but this is where my head's going, that it's also good sleep hygiene. Yes, I really, there was a night a few nights ago, I'm like, oh my God, that helped my sleep. My kids have been sick recently, not anything serious, just we've had a lot of night wake ups and going to what we were talking about a minute ago. It's like my outlook on life really darkened. And there was a night when I did this and then I didn't get woken up at night and I was amazed at how much better I felt. So yeah, it's good sleep hygiene and it's cheap. It's not like a super complex thing.

1:06:47I mean, it's five candles that I got at Ikea and it's just sitting there for 30 minutes. I mean, I don't have that long in me after the kids go down. It's not like they're another four hours of my day. So it's pretty straightforward. I often meditate during it too, which is nice. But there's something about the real change in the space. It is the first ritual I have found that works for me where I'm not like crashing into the end of the day. Yeah. I'm going to try that actually. Makes a ton of sense. It's been helpful in like not drinking or – I noticed over the last year where I was like, there are more days of this stuff I'm covering.

1:07:25It's like, you would want to have a drink at the end of the day, like the glass of wine or a bit of a joint. And I was like, that's not how I want to call myself. And I was noticing that it had become more regular. And like, this has substituted in for it in a way I've been really grateful for. And the wine or whatever, the beer or whatever, that's terrible for sleep. Yeah, very bad. I'm actually pretty good at not, but you know, like, I have my advices. You and me both. That does kind of lead me to one of the two remaining things I was hoping to talk to you about. You kind of touched on it in a couple of ways.

1:07:58One is you talked about raising kids in the absence of community, which is counter-evolutionary and very common. And just got me thinking about community. And if the overarching theme of this discussion is how do we stay sane in a pretty insane era, for me at least, one of the most powerful levers is, being with other people, embodied with other people, no phones, hanging out. And you and I were talking a little bit on email before, like that there can be a price to pay for that because you stay out later than you want, or you're ingesting certain molecules and it throws you off. I'm the only one doing that just to be clear.

1:08:35And yet for me, it is worth it because of I'm a lifelong insomniac. I really am quite intentional about my sleep hygiene and I will break it if I want it and see my friends, because that is such a powerful regular on my nervous system. So I'm interested to hear your thoughts on that. Yeah. I'm really as a person, intensely community focused. When I moved to New York, I basically could not calm down and feel rooted here until I had met the people who I could sort of be myself with and feel at ease with. And I see them a lot. So one of the great things is we do raise our kids in a little community.

1:09:14We have friends with kids and we see them basically every weekend and it's a really beautiful part of our lives and and i do a good friends and my wife's family lives here which is really great and yeah the thing that i wish we had my fantasy of the the commune is atmospheric community is things that have just flow to them we're kind of like people are just around and you can just kind of move in and out as opposed to how's 10 a.m. No, that day doesn't work right. The dinner industrial complex. Yeah, the dinner industrial complex. And again, I'm very blessed to have friends for whom we do really prioritize seeing each other a lot.

1:09:53And they're close to my kids. In some cases, they have kids of their own. That is like the substance to me of what makes life worth it. Like other people, like I don't really care where I live. I don't have any abstract affection for New York City. Like maybe the opposite. If the people I love most want to live in Denver, I'd be thrilled to move to Denver. But what I care about is the people and the place I'm in. Places for me are very much made by people. I like New York City to the extent I like the people I know here. Absent them, could take or leave it. But then the kid thing is very real.

1:10:29You know, even my wife's family, it's like they, you know, we live in Brooklyn, they're in Manhattan. We're not supposed to do this. Like we were talking about earlier about AI. Why raising kids in a two-parent nuclear family where both parents work full-time or more than full-time jobs, to say nothing of raising kids in a one-parent family, it is the absolute most radical experiment possible. People get so up in arms about different kinds of alternative ways of living. Like if you say communes, you sound really weird or something. This is the alternative way of living. We are living the alternative way of living.

1:11:06And in my view, it doesn't actually work that well. Like, I don't know anybody who thinks it works. Well, we just don't really know what to do about it. And I don't know what to do about it. I see it too, just in this other way with my children. They want community. Their adoration of their family here, their cousins, their aunts and uncles, their grandparents, they're obsessed with all of them. the friends who come regularly, my kids will burst into tears if they learn that one of my friends came by and they didn't get to see them. On some level, they seem completely tuned to not be just seeing me and my wife at all times.

1:11:47That is not what they want. They would like us to be around all the time, but they love it when other people are around, whether or not they're all that engaged. Again, it's the way I think we've run this profound experiment on ourselves. And I I don't think the experiment is working out that well. And in some more perfect world, I would like to put more of my own internal energy into creating structures that help ameliorate it. And you end the week completely fucking exhausted by work. And am I going to host? And there's going to be dishes? I am four square in your camp on this. The happiest place in the world for me, which is somewhat place specific, but is really people specific, is Montauk, which is, for people listening, it's on the easternmost tip of Long Island.

1:12:33It's part of the Hamptons, but it's much less obnoxious, although a little bit obnoxious. I've been going there for 20 years, and my wife and I have been going there for 17 years, and my wife's family has a house there, and we have many family friends who also have houses there. And these happen to be very old friends of mine and ours, and many people you know. And it has a commune feel. There is very little scheduling. You see somebody on the beach, okay, come back to my house. We'll do lunch there, bring the kids. And we actually just spent a weekend there, not in the summer for you. You and I were recording this in April.

1:13:08So we spent Easter weekend there with several other families. And I had this moment. I'm not a very sentimental person, although as I get older, a little bit more, we're all sitting around at dinner. It was like five families. Sounds like something out of The Godfather, but it was five families. And I was sitting on the couch and all the kids came in, they'd been somewhere else. And my son comes and snuggles up next to me. And our friend, Doug, who's one of the dads came and sat next to me. We're all kind of watching the next game, but talking to each other and dinner was being cooked. And I almost started to cry.

1:13:37I was like, this is the best part of being alive. Just completely surrounded by people I love and trust, including my son, my wife, and we are losing that. Yeah. I mean, that sounds like a beautiful moment. I'm jealous. you're invited anytime come stay with us my wife's family has a big house last question the aforementioned tattoo that you have what does it say uh i know what it says but you tell us uh is that so so years ago i went with my wife to tasahara the zen center in the carmel highlands unbelievably beautiful it wasn't a silent it was like a two or three day I don't know how to describe it.

1:14:23It's like a workshop or a retreat. There's some meditation, but a lot of talking about a poem. I don't think we quite knew what we were getting into, actually. But the monk there who was running it was named Paul Haller. I think he's still out there. Wonderful Irish guy. He told this story, which is a kind of famous Zen story. and it really connected with me although subsequently when i tell it it sounds slightly sociopathic but the story is it goes something like this there's a wise monk and he's very revered by the people and one day um you know a bunch of the townspeople come to his door and they knock and they're angry and two of them say like our daughter got pregnant and she says it was you and you've betrayed us.

1:15:13You were this wise monk and you've impregnated our young daughter and here, this child is your problem now. And he says, is that so? And so he's begging and his reputation is trashed. And some months later, she admits it was like the fishmonger. And they'll come back and they say, oh my God, you're such a holy man. You just accepted this and you raised this child. You're so wonderful. And he just says, is that so? I don't know why. I like that story, the sort of equanimity contained inside of it. Not that I think that's a reasonable way to respond to those moments. That's why I say that the story doesn't sort of work in a literal way.

1:15:49But then the way that he taught the line was that it's a nice thing to attach into your own thinking. That as you're telling stories in your own mind, it's good at the end of them to just very lightly like, is that so? And what I liked about that is it, I know this is not the emotional valence it's supposed to have, but I find a lot of noting practice, thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking. Wait, explain what noting practice is. Oh, so when you're, and I've done a fair amount of noting practice. I mean, there are different ways of doing it, but in this case, one of the very common instructions is when you get carried off in the thought to just attach to it, thinking, thinking.

1:16:27And somehow the way I do it, not the way it's supposed to be done, it always sounds a little bit internally scoldy, like you're thinking again, you're thinking again. What I always liked about the is that so is that it's very light. It might be so. The thing you're thinking about, that might be true, actually. It just might not. And as a journalist, one of the things I believe, my worry about the tattoo, which mostly people can't see, is always that they'll think it's outwardly focused, like as if I'm going to beat the press, like, is that so, Senator? That's not what it means for me at all. The person you convince first is always yourself.

1:17:00And so many of the intellectual mistakes I've made have been about thinking being certain something is so when I never should have been certain of that. Leaving that little space of questioning, of recognizing that you don't really know what's true. You don't really know how things will turn out. That's at least the intellectual intention of the tattoo. The reason I love that phrase so much, how good do I do at remembering it, either in terms of my own mental storytelling or in terms of my own work? I mean, that's debatable day to day, but that's the story of the tattoo. I love that. And I do think it's a great way to boost your sanity quotient in times as chaotic as these, because as we've discussed, things could spiral out of control, but maybe not.

1:17:46We don't know. All we can do is everything we can do right now. And so I'm open to the possibility that the shit's going to hit the fan in a horrible, horrible way. And, you know, is that so? So I don't know. Last thing to say, an observation that came to mind. I want to make sure this doesn't sound like meditation advice. So I'm going to reframe. I'll take advice. I want to frame this as what's been helpful to me as somebody who I think has pretty similar wiring to you. This came to mind when you were talking about the noting and you're sitting in meditation, you're trying to focus on one thing, maybe it's your breath.

1:18:19You notice you've been carried away by thinking and you apply a mental note of thinking, which is meant not to be self-lacerating, but actually meant to kind of get you to be not so attached to the thinking and go back to your breath or whatever it is you've chosen to focus on. And there's a way, and I've experienced this many times, there's a tone to the note that is not mindful. It's actually aversive. You are seeing things, but clearly to a certain extent, but with teeth clenched. Yeah. Oh, thinking again. Yes, exactly. And so what helped me immensely with that was not only knowing that that was happening and then adding another note of judgment.

1:19:00And so that kind of helped. What really helped me, and so this is why I want to say it, not as advice, but as just take it or leave it, is doing high-dose loving-kindness meditation. And I'm talking, I've done several 9, 10-day retreats of this, and it's a huge part of my practice. It generally is how I start my practice, and then I'll do some open awareness. flooding the zone, especially this mind, which is very much at factory settings of frosty New Englander, flooding the zone with warmth, which feels incredibly forced and fake and treacly and saccharine at the beginning. And even now, to a certain extent, having that be like my new default mode toward myself and toward others has had a radical impact on my meditation practice and how I show up.

1:19:45Do you use the factory standard set of phrases or do you have your own? I do. Who am I to quibble with the Buddha? I do the standard phrases, maybe happy, safe, healthy, live with ease. Because it's all so cheesy. You might as well just do it as it's originally taught. That makes a ton of sense to me. You can tweak. Definitely, the way it's taught too by now is you can tweak the phrases if you want, but I don't know. I go through periods of trying to do more loving kindness and tend to fall out of it quickly but it's a good prompt to try to dig i would like to do a loving kindness retreat because it doesn't stick for me for the exact reason i have trouble getting over the it feels forced and it feels like i'm pushing myself and it feels like i'm trying to get myself somewhere that to the earlier point of like i'm often caught in my own meditation between the feeling that i'm not looking for another thing to apply like intense effort to and then the the feeling that, well, if you don't apply some effort, you're not going to get the potency out of the thing.

1:20:47I've often found that one a little tough. The key is what you said there, some effort. It doesn't have to be intense effort. In Buddhism, we talk a lot about right effort or wise effort. So the difference between kicking your own ass and not trying somewhere in the middle is right effort. Another thing I'm not getting quite right. Thanks, Dan. Thanks. Appreciate it. This is why I talk to the computer all the time. It's proud of how hard I'm working. You know, I hope you compute it as give yourself a break. You said one other thing that I wanted to make a note of. Oh, yeah. Of course it's forced.

1:21:21But like, as I often say, if you went to a gym from another planet and saw people systematically picking up and putting down heavy things, that would look forced and artificial or running in place. And it is. Yes. Yes. Yes, but we don't have the reflexive judgment towards it as many of us do toward loving kindness meditation. And what I'm saying is as somebody who's on the other side of the struggle, the technology works or it worked for me. I'll take that to heart, so to speak. Awesome to talk to you, man. Thanks for doing this. This was a blast. Thank you. Super fun.

1:21:58Thanks again to Ezra. This was his third appearance on the show. I will drop some links in the show notes to his prior appearances. Quick reminder before I let you go. First, if you want a guided meditation designed to help you cultivate some equanimity in your own life, you can head on over to danharris.com. Don Mauricio, one of my favorite meditation teachers, designed a bespoke meditation to go with this episode. Available to paid subscribers at danharris.com. My second reminder is that you should head on over to shop.danharris.com to stock up on your favorite 10 % happier goods while our summer merch sale rolls on.

1:22:35It will be going until July 14th. Before I let you go, I just want to thank everybody who worked so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasily. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great people over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer, and Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.

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