Your Inner Critic Won't Stop Adding Rules. Here's The Fix. | Julian Shapiro-Barnum

0:03Hello, everybody. Welcome to the 10 % Happier Podcast. I'm your host, Dan Harris. I have this mode that I go into that I really don't like. It's this kind of heads down, grind through it, bulldoze through your to-do list mode. It's kind of militaristic and mirthless. And I feel like one really prominent antidote to this mode is to be playful or childish in the positive sense of the word. So I was very eager to talk to my guest today because that's his whole thing. Julian Shapiro Barnum is a comedian and the host of the phenomenally successful digital show, Recess Therapy. You can see it on YouTube.

0:41You can see clips on social media. And he's got a new book, which is called How to Grow Up Without Becoming a Grown-Up. Julian, welcome to the show. Thank you so much. Did I get all of that right? Oh my God, That was more than enough. Okay, all right. Can you tell me a little bit about the... The impetus? Yeah, behind recess therapy, because I think there's a little bit of a story there. Yeah, 100%. So, hi, I'm Julian. Hi. Nice to meet you and everybody. Yeah, so I started recess therapy in college. I was at Boston University. It was my senior year and I was studying theater. And my senior year of college was COVID, which was not a fun way to spend theater school.

1:21Uh, we were, went from being in person and learning the craft of acting to suddenly just being in our rooms and doing zoom acting classes, which sucked. Um, and there's a lot to say about COVID, but I won't say it here, but basically I was not very happy. And my way of kind of combating that was I really fell in love with the act of interviewing. And, uh, every day I would go out into the street and interview people. And I was trying to connect with adults and interview people. And I think every other week, I would do a different random idea that came into my head. And then one day at the end of spring, my senior year of college, I was sitting in a playground with my friend Charlotte.

2:03And there were all these kids running around having so much fun. And I said something to her like, what do they know that we don't know? Like, they're also in Zoom school. But they seem to be tapped into something really joyful. They seem to be able to finish Zoom school and play and let go of all of that. And I need to know what that is. And so truly on a whim, we interviewed them and asked them how they found happiness during the pandemic. And as a comedian, I went into it looking for probably some piece of comedy. But what I found was something really heartwarming and deep. And I posted online, not really expecting anything of it and strangers connected with it and I thought this is something really special and worth exploring and it's almost six years later it's it's become a passion a career of mine no it's gigantic and you have many other shows now um but recess therapy seems to be like the the heart of what you do it's the flagship there is a genre of content here that I'm twice your age as we established before the interview.

3:13But I remember shows like kids say the darndest things. Right, exactly. And then there was a show like, are you smarter than a third grader? This whole idea of interviewing kids has been around for a minute. Why do kids say the darndest things? I mean, like the wisdom from the mouth of babes trope has been around since the Bible. I feel like recess therapy has marked, I don't want to be too self-aggrandizing here at all, But I feel like my show is tonally a little bit different from those shows. I feel like the kids say they're on this thing was, oh, my God, look how adorable and witty and off the cuff kids can be.

3:50And that served its purpose in this place. My whole thesis of recess therapy or hypothesis or the thing I was searching for with that show was how can I become a better adult by honoring and exploring the wisdom of kids? So instead of this top-down approach of like, oh my God, kids are so... Look at what these kids can say. My whole approach was, what can they teach me? What can I learn from these kids? And so when I started the show, I made a list of, I don't know how many, but maybe 80 topics of all things that I was wondering about as I was growing up. From climate change to anger to are there aliens in outer space?

4:37to is magic real? Like all these just things that I was really wondering about. And I made a list on my phone. And then every single week, I would go out and talk to kids about them. And we'd post them online. And what I really quickly learned was that adults were also fascinated to know what kids were thinking about these things. And what it came down to, and I think the whole crux of it, was that kids simplify things. We adults take topics and we think about them to death for a good reason, because there's nuance to everything. But when a kid takes something and strips the nuance of it and makes something a black and white issue, there's actually some relief in that.

5:19And there's beauty in that simplicity. And I think that's what I've really enjoyed about my conversation with kids. And now I have this book and I feel like I have grown up and I don't need it in the way that I did when I I was 20. And now I just really enjoy bringing interesting topics to kids. But back then, it was this real need. So the wisdom that emerges from the mouths of babes is, in your view, the fact that they're not burdened by this conceptual overlay that we bring things. They're not over-intellectualizing things. I think at its simplest, yes. If we pick any given subject, and if you give me like a genre of topic and say, what can you learn from kids?

6:08I think it can be brought down to they look at its essence because they're not seeing all the sides of it that adults are able to. Speaking as a parent, I have an 11 year old son. Did you agree with me? I agree, but I will complicate the picture slightly. And you may have seen this in your vast archive of interviews. is my son will occasionally say something truly profound. I was, we just finished a vacation and my friend Glenn taught my son how to ride a bike for the first time. And then my son wanted to ride the bike every day just to get it into his molecules. And at one point we're biking around this little neighborhood where we're vacationing and my son turned around to me and said, this is peak childhood.

6:54Struck me as like really, really just honing in on gratitude for the present moment is quite profound if you think about it. He will, in the next breath, make a deez nuts joke. 100%. So kids say wise things, but most of the shit they say is not. It's very, very stupid. Yeah. And I think that's awesome. I think most of it is just fun and goofy. Yes. I never, I don't think kids are philosophers by any stretch of the imagination. Most of what I do with kids is long form improv. Comedy improv is just playing. You're playing off of them. Yeah. I mean, my background is in improv. So the way I treat these interviews is through that lens.

7:36And I yes and them and I be their scene partner. That's how I think about it. So probably the most viral clip was the kid talking about corn. Yes, that was definitely the biggest one. With a mild and adorable speech impediment. So it doesn't pronounce corn. Corn. Corn. Yeah. Yes. So some of these clips aren't necessarily about wisdom from kids. They're just hilarity. Yeah. I also think people enjoy the cuteness of it, the cuteness factor. I think people see a kid that reminds them of themselves or their friend, and there's something relatable about that. I think there's a lot of reasons why the child trope brought to social media has worked and connected with people.

8:24But, you know, I was just looking for the deep side of it just there. I also have my own just, I just think it's fun side of it. Okay, but it is fun. And definitely the way it plays on YouTube and social is incredibly fun. But you now have this book, which again is called How to Grow Up Without Becoming a Grown-Up. And in stores now, in stores now, check it out. I'll put a link in the show notes. I am going to receive some kickback and payola from Julian's publicist after this. But the core thesis, as I understand it, really is that there is an enormous amount to learn for grown-ups about how to do our lives better from children.

9:06Yeah, 100%. I mean, the whole purpose of the book was that I had been doing all these interviews for years. And at a certain point, I started to feel like the interviews weren't showing the entire picture of what I was learning. Yes, the things they were saying were wonderful. But a lot of the times when somebody was like, what's the most impactful thing that a kid has ever said to you? It's really hard for me to like find a sentence. Because a lot of times they don't have these like quippy one-liners. A lot of times what I'm learning from the kids is more, I'm seeing it in the way they move and act in the world.

9:39And I'm sure you might relate to this as a parent, but the way kids problem solve or play or use their imagination or are inquisitive or make friends, like just the way they act to me is much more interesting sometimes than the things that they say. But the way that kids holistically act is really hard to put into a one minute Instagram clip. And so I thought I could translate that into a book much better. And so I started writing essays about all these topics like love or making friends or work and tried to make a compelling case about why adults could stand to bring some of this, what I call childish energy into their day-to-day lives and kind of make a case of saying that we would be happier if we did act a little bit more childish.

10:28I buy that. I mean, as I said in the intro, today is one of those days. We're recording this on the day after Labor Day. I've just been on a long vacation and now I'm back in the grind and I can feel like my face changing. I feel like I all of a sudden I have this stern, you know, look on my face that wasn't there a week ago. Yeah, I biked to Rockaway Beach this weekend. I just I just played all weekend and I was so happy. And then I woke up this morning and I was like, I got to do the adult grind again. In terms of your interest in childhood, your childhood was quite interesting. Can you talk a little bit about that?

11:04Yeah, I was raised in Brooklyn. I have three moms and two dads. The long and short of that was my mom's lesbian couple wanted to have a kid, asked their friends, a gay couple, to be the sperm donor. Each of my moms got pregnant. They had me and my brother and sister. My moms broke up. One of my moms met her wife and all five of them raised us in Brooklyn. And we had this really cool childhood where I had so many adults in my life. Yeah, so I grew up, I had all these different households with different parents. And I think it lay this groundwork for the way that I work with kids now because, yes, I was parented and had parents, but I also was around so many adults all the time.

11:55And in that, my parents and their friends allowed me to be privy to so many conversations where I was kind of looped in and allowed to share my thoughts and be part of an adult conversation. And I think from a really young age, I fell in love with being treated that way and being given a space where my opinion mattered that much. Like I remember sitting with my mom and all of her friends when I was like eight and they'd be like, what do you think, Julian? And I like love that so much. And then when I started interviewing kids, I think I was like remembering that experience and wanted to bring that to my interviews with kids.

12:40So I think having so many parents and so many adults in a bit of an unconventional childhood allowed me to interview in a maybe unconventional way with kids. Tell me if I'm close to this. It's like you, as a very young person, knew how to code switch between talking to grownups and talking to kids. 100%. And that has helped attune you to the way kids talk. I think you call it like the dialect of childhood. Yeah, the micro dialect. The micro dialect, yeah. Yeah, 100%. I also, at the end of the book, I talk a lot. I have this epiphany moment. spoilers not really uh at the end of the book i i the last chapter i have this picnic um it's my favorite chapter so if anything read the end where i i have all the kids and parents i've worked with we all this big picnic together and i i describe the experience of playing with 40 plus kids that i've worked with and then jumping around and talking to all their parents and i have this realization that the way I'm talking to the kids, the way I'm talking to the parents are actually a lot more alike than I realized.

13:49And that the version of myself that I put on to speak with kids and the version of myself that I put on to speak to adults is actually only a little different. It wasn't this grand dialect switch. They're both in me and they're both very close to each other. And I think that was a freeing thing to realize, which is that the childish version of myself is very close to the surface. And that's how you grow up without becoming a grown up. Or you learn to see that they can happen at the same time. You don't have to turn one off and turn one on. You can just be. They're not separate in the end. Yeah, it's all one guy.

14:30People ask me all the time, how do I boot up a meditation habit? Or if you already have a meditation habit, but it's an inconsistent, another question that I get from people is how do I maintain a consistent habit? Really, it's about having access to great teachers and having access to community. These are both of the most prominent features on my new-ish meditation app, which is called 10 % with Dan Harris. As part of this app, we've got some of the greatest teachers in the world who do guided meditations and also courses on various aspects of Buddhism. But the community features are really some of the most powerful aspects of the app.

15:08You can connect to other people who also take this weird little mental training program seriously. and we do weekly and sometimes more frequently than that, but at the very least, weekly live video meditation and Q &A session. So you can meditate with me and our teachers and with all of our subscribers. It is a great way to feel supported as you embark on the often difficult process of habit formation. So go to danharris.com. There's a free 14-day trial if you want to check it out before you buy. 10 % with Dan Harris, that's the name of the app. Again, danharris.com is the place to get all the information.

15:44Oh, and I should tell you that if you sign up, you'll also get ad free versions of this podcast. We'll be right back after this. You said before that kids aren't necessarily philosophers, but I do want to read you a quote that is really profound and it's from your show. It's from eight year old Sloan. When asked for her best advice on being a boss, she delivered this speech. Here's the quote. Even bosses cry. You need someone to lean on, even if you're an adult. It's okay to be scared and show it. So I guess really probably stick with your friends and family because they're who will be with you until the end.

16:23And if you're ever feeling sad, find someone to lean on. Even if you're an adult and you think adults aren't supposed to have strong feelings, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's a stereotype. Adults can cry too. Yeah. So for the book, I was, I, you know, I have all these interviews. I've interviewed thousands of kids, but I wanted to do all new interviews for the book. And so I went through this very funny process of inviting kids and their parents to my office, which is just a shared workspace near my house. And we would go in the backyard and I would conduct these very serious interviews with the kids about really non-serious things.

17:03And they were just really excited about the concept of being in the book. they were like wait anything I say could be in the book and I'd be like yeah anything you say could be in the book and then they'd say all this really insane stuff that would obviously not make it into the book but the concept of anything being in the book was enough to to keep them talking but on this quote in particular I think she's Sloan is on to so many things but in particular the fact that we move through the world many grown-ups believing we need to squelch our emotions yeah when in fact it is actually okay to cry and it is okay to be scared these are natural things and the we do more damage by pretending a hundred percent and like to her that's so obvious but we feel as though bosses can't cry yes and a boss is devoid of feelings um sloan is somebody i met really early in doing recess therapy she was maybe four years old when we first met.

18:00And she's been obsessed with the idea of being a boss ever since she was a baby. And now she's 12 years old and she still wants to be a boss. But she really believes that there's a right way to be a boss. And the right way to be a boss is to be a kind and gentle boss. And she talks a lot about it there. I mean, I would like to have Sloan as a boss. Right? Yes. A boss who shares about her feelings. She also says later in that same interview that a boss shouldn't be stinky. Which I think is really important. And a good boss showers, has good hygiene, which I think is hard to argue with. But back to the emotions piece, I believe one of the core arguments in your book is that children, there's something for grownups to learn about how children process their emotions.

18:41Yeah. One of the big points of the book is this whole emotion element, which is just that kids feel their emotions immediately and in real time. You've seen it as a parent, but like kids have temper tantrums. They will skip around and laugh. Like if they're excited about something, they'll sob and cry, but they also get over things really quickly. Their feelings are something that are able to pass through them very naturally and freely. Whereas I feel like adults in contrast, we hold on to our feelings. We control when we're going to have our feelings. And my big concern with that is that they stick with us for so much longer than they need to.

19:24I've had so many experiences in my life where somebody says something to me that sits wrong. And then, I don't know, I don't process it or I don't get mad about it or I don't feel sad about it. And then I'm still pissed about it a month later. And I really feel like if we, we shouldn't have temper tantrums or like break down. But if we could sit Shiva or like have a moment for our feelings in a more childlike way, my hope is that we could let them pass faster. And I've tried to put this into practice and I do think it genuinely works. I'm not just capping as the kids say. Just for grownups out there, capping is lying.

20:01Yes, I'm not just capping. Have you ever tried something like this? Are you good at processing your feelings? Well, it's a huge theme of the show and a huge theme of meditation, which I'm a dedicated practitioner of. I would say that naturally I come from the stuff at down school. Yeah. As a, you know, Gen X male, we were not encouraged to ever. No, not to display emotion, not to process it. So it's I kind of come up to it the hard way. But a million percent, it is my view that most emotions actually will come and go if you allow them to. if you let them in, you can metabolize them in a minute or two.

20:42I think the half-life of anger or something like that is a minute or two. But if you're not processing it and you're essentially just chewing on it and ruminating and re-upping it, it can last a lifetime. I talk about, I compare the way kids process feelings to meditation in the book. Just in the way that in meditation, it's not about having no thoughts, i.e. it's not about having no bad feelings but it's about letting them come to you addressing them feeling them but then letting them pass uh instead of trying to suppress them or fight the the action of feeling them you know i'm saying i do know what you're saying i had a bar mitzvah so i know what sitting shiva means yes which you referenced earlier that is just the what we do what the Jews do.

21:29It's the grieving process. You set aside time to grieve. And my kind of reference there is just that we should sit shiva for our feelings. What does that look like for you? Yesterday, I got into a kind of a scrap, not physical. My mom and I got into a little fight. And I let myself be really upset about it. And I didn't call any of my friends. I feel like sometimes my go-to unhealthy response is to tell the same story over and over again. And in that, I stir the emotions back up time and time again in kind of a masochistic way. I think I enjoy the story of it. But what I did was I just sat with it alone until it passed.

22:19And I think experiencing the frustration in isolation was more productive than spreading it and getting other people's opinions and rehashing it. And I think kids wouldn't FaceTime eight people and look for their opinions. I think they go in their room and they yell into a stuffed animal or something or kids just have to deal with it on their own. Not that yesterday I was processing it like a kid, but I think I was trying to purposely set aside time for my feelings and it really helped. are things copacetic now totally yeah i called her we're good i'm just curious how old is your mom my age yeah she's how old is 55 i'm she's she's like 61 okay okay so at least i'm we're good respect mom you did you did a great job we're good this kid is great okay so another lesson in the book that you learn from kids is it something about breaking rules oh my gosh do you break rules yeah i do not fashion rules i mean i don't have the confidence to break fashion rules just to say julian and i were talking before uh the show started about sorry that was an off-camera no that's fine but i'll just fill it in for people that i feel as um as a man of a certain age that it's probably not best to uh push the fashion envelope too much just i'm not as comfortable with it uh so i don't break the rules i think you should get a eyebrow piercing my son wants one really which i'm at 11 he got both ears pierced at eight which I fully supported.

23:52My wife and I are like totally down. That's a lot. He wants it. And if he asked for it, I think I would let him do it. Wow. Why not? It's kind of tough. Painful. Yeah. That's brutal. His pain tolerance is low. So I suspect when he learns that, he will opt out of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I can handle it. Do you break the rules? I love breaking the rules. So a big part of the book also I talk about is breaking the rules. Kids love breaking rules. I'm sure you've seen this. I feel like a big way that kids understand the world is by breaking the rules. I think when kids enter a new space, they like to test.

24:25They like to see what they can and cannot do by just doing it. This is not all kids, of course. I also just, big disclaimer, everything I say is not a blanket statement. This is just a lot of kids that I've worked with. I've seen this. Also from being a kid. We all were kids once. But I feel like a way that kids gather information is by testing boundaries. And you see this. They go in a school, in a classroom. They'll be told not to do something, and then they'll do it. They'd like to see how much they can get away with. And I feel like that act of exploration teaches them a lot about themselves, about the boundaries of the world, what kind of person they are and want to be.

25:02It is just this big experience of self-definition. And then as they get older, slowly, and people morph into adults, I think this really tricky kind of dangerous, and in my opinion, awful thing starts to happen, which is that less and less external adults tell you no. And all of a sudden, this internal adult, you, start to tell yourself what you can and cannot do. And I think what's dangerous about this is once you start being the adult in your own head telling you what you can and cannot do, there's like scope creep. Do you know that term? Like, there become more rules than are needed. You start to tell yourself that you can't do X thing.

25:45Like, oh, I don't dance. That's a rule for me. I don't do that. Or I don't do X. I don't do Y. And what once was like a helpful tool that we implemented for good reasons to protect ourselves, to kind of stay in line, so to speak, all of a sudden limits our identities. And my whole theory is that we need to start breaking the rules again, as kids do. even in small ways, just to test again and redefine ourselves. I love that. Like the inner grown-up, or it can be an inner critic, which is maybe one facet of the inner grown-up, kind of like a sheepdog herding you. But in this way, you become kind of uptight and unhappy.

26:30So what do you do to counteract your inner grown-up? My personal choice of counteracting it is by listening to small impulses that my body has. And I think for me, and it's different for every person, I talk about this in the book of like figuring out what your way in is or was. But for me, it was very much tactile impulses of like touching things. I found that when I was like on the subway or walking around, if there's like an interesting texture or a like a gargoyle or a weird flower or just things out in the world that I would notice or at first I wouldn't even notice them but then I would start to will myself to notice them again and then will myself to act on the impulse to touch or interact with them and this was just my like little window into being aware recognizing this thing that I have told myself I shouldn't do and then doing it and then allowing that to translate and snowball into bigger and bigger things.

27:34And it was a little bit like snapping the rubber band on my wrist in a good way. And then it was like, okay, if you do that, you can do the other thing. And it's like habit forming. And it really is. I said the dancing thing earlier. I've really always been like, I don't really dance. And now I've been doing it a lot more because I think I've gotten more comfortable with telling myself that there isn't anything that I couldn't try. So it's, it can start small with, Hey, you know what? If I see an interesting texture out in the world, I'm going to touch it. Right. And that can start to scale up to dancing or maybe saying the uncomfortable thing.

28:09Yeah. I think it's, you have to start with the thing that feels insignificant and be like, this feels stupid and completely disconnected. I mean, all of this is all that intention. You have to set the intention that I am going to actively unlearn these rules. My way in to unlearning them was through touch. And that I was able to correlate into trusting myself, into doing bigger things. But I feel like for every person, finding what impulse, what the easiest impulse that you've been suppressing to then try is the best way to start. I like that a lot. Two things to say about that. One is you're absolutely right.

28:52It's backed up by research that if you start small with anything, it can really grow into it. So you're correct. The second thing to say is one of my least favorite parts about myself is that I, too, struggle with dancing. It's bullshit. You gotta dance. Yes. You know, I keep referencing my... I guess it's appropriate to do that in this context. My son, he has this tell for when he's in a really good mood he just dances all day really yes just like around just constantly moving and dancing and totally unselfconscious and that is how i know he's having a an a plus day that's beautiful yes did you dance when you're younger or have you always been yeah i think i danced a little bit when i was younger um but maybe like a baby my mom said i used to dance around the house but not much since then the funny thing is i play the drums So I have rhythm.

29:44But when I dance, I feel like there's a pole in a place where it shouldn't be. You know, there's nothing better than a dancing dad. My son gets really embarrassed when I dance. I love when my dad dances. It's really he like it's like really awesome. He does that. Yeah. What you just did is close to what my move is. You got to go to like a family friend's bar mitzvah. Yeah, we have one coming up. Yeah, that's the spot. So, but when he did this, when you were a kid, did you find that mortifying? Yeah, mortifying. Okay, but now you're cool. But now I think it's sweet and I'm happy he's having fun.