167. Faith, Depression, and Finding Calm in the Chaos (Professor Mark Williams)

30:50ministers who had breakdowns in their offices, whips intervening to try to take people home, people just beginning to work out how they could talk about it in Parliament. And a lot of it driven, I think, by the completely impossible demands of the job. One thing I've talked about is, you know, you are supposed to be 100 % in your constituency being a constituency MP. But as far as the whips are concerned, you're 100 % in Parliament, 350 miles away being a parliamentarian. And you're also supposed to be in your department if you're a minister, 100 % doing that. And goodness knows, someone like Alistair might want you out campaigning and going on the media at the same time in places which aren't your constituency and aren't London either.

31:29And you're pretending to know about all this stuff, which you can't possibly know about it. You're receiving incredible abuse on social media where, you know, as Alistair jokes, you put out a little tweet saying, here's my tree of the day, and immediately they're calling you whatever, a war criminal, a child molester, you know, whatever. I mean, talk to me a little bit about this. And what was your sense of unhappiness in Parliament and public life? I think what you say is true that, and indeed, there was a survey done, wasn't there, that by one of the Conservative MPs a few years ago, showing that about 74 % of MPs had stress, depression, major thing, and 50 % of their staff as well.

32:08And Mark, just to put that in context, how would that compare to the general population? That's presumably very, very high, isn't it? is very high. So at any time in general population, five or 6 % of people are depressed and over a lifetime about 20%, 25 % become depressed. So for 75 % to be very anxious, stressed and so on is enormous. And all the pressures that you talk about, Rory, were very manifest, I think. So the mindfulness sessions that we had were in a committee room where at least there was some light because there's not a lot of light in the Palace of Westminster. It's a fairly dark place.

32:44There's also no fresh air. And one of the things that drives me up the wall, I'm completely obsessed with fresh air. I love walking. I love being outside. And there's basically no outside space. You need to be within eight minutes of division bell so you can't go to the park. And all I could do is walk around like a lunatic on top of the car park to try to get a little bit of fresh air or stride back and forth on the terrace. I mean, it's so claustrophobic, dark and unnatural, and yet you're locked in for hours on land. Well, a few years ago, I mean, they need to refurbish the whole thing. And there was a move to move them out.

33:15I think if Parliament had been moved out to another location, they'd have never moved back to a location which was more like the Welsh Senedd or the Scottish Parliament or the Australian Parliament. And MPs going to visit these places and coming back to the Palace of Westminster must think, what on earth are we doing still here? and not only the adversarial way it's structured, but also the dark, oil-painted... But we met in a committee room, which at least had some light, large windows. Was that a group? Yeah. So we had a mindfulness cross-party group, yeah. So what did you do with them? So we did a mindfulness course.

33:49So tell me. Well, we started out explaining what mindfulness was about and giving some of the brain science and some of the clinical trials information. So we started, I think, with probably a taster session and then ask people, if anybody wants to know more, then we'll be running a group. So myself and Chris Cullen set it up. It was Chris Ruane, MP, who instigated it together with Lord Layard, Lord Richard Layard. Richard Layard, yeah, he was with me yesterday. Yeah, and so Richard and Chris said, would we come and teach a course there? And so we did, and that was in 2013, and now I think 350 parliamentarians have gone through, over 1 ,200 of the staff have gone through the course, and then there was a review of it a few years ago giving interviews with the MPs and the Lords and talking about how they had found it and what effect it had.

34:42And there were some people who'd said, well, I was actually clinically depressed and it helped me. Other people who said I was completely stressed and exhausted. One person who became Conservative MP, who became a minister, said that she would then, when giving a speech in the Commons, she would take her shoes off so she could feel the ground on her feet until she became a minister. And then it was advised, no, please keep your shoes on when you give a speech in the House of Commons. This was, I think for them, for many of them, very transformative. First, it was mostly, I think, Labour and Lib Dems and then Caroline Lucas, who's on record as having been through the course.

35:20Then gradually more Conservatives came and there were times when half the place was full of people who would vote for Brexit. And then, OK, so everybody's welcome. Everybody's welcome. It actually turns out that when you look at people in the country, there's been a poll of how many people in the UK practice mindfulness, have learned mindfulness, and so on. It turns out that 25 % of the population, if you take this poll seriously, have done some sort of mindfulness through a book or an app or a course. And who's carried on practicing? Well, half don't. The other half do. And people, if you divide them to Brexiteers and Remainers, remainers are more likely to have heard of mindfulness but brexiteers are slightly more likely to carry on practicing mindfulness if they have so wow and then when the same researcher has looked at whether mindfulness changes affective polarization and he's done work on brexiters and remainers and on democrats and republicans in the states then the affective polarization shrinks as a result of mindfulness or as a result of particular meditations we do a sort of kindness meditation where you count to yourself and then count to neutral people and count to people you don't get on with.

36:30So it helps people disagree more agreeably. It helps exactly that. It helps do that. And that shows that the Democrats and Republicans shift and they shift by the same amount to the center. Okay, Mark, Rory, a quick break and then back for more. So klingt Weihnachten bei Rewe. Jetzt festlich sparen bei deinem Weihnachtseinkauf. Diese Woche bei Rewe. Frägenet Sekt, verschiedene Sorten,

37:20As the year draws to a place, it's time for our annual reminder that even in an age of political noise and division one national consensus still stands firm roast potatoes oh god all this british stuff if you're wondering however what to buy the politically obsessed person in your life this christmas might i gently suggest a year's membership to the rest is politics plus it's the thoughtful kind of present ad-free listening, bonus episodes, early access to Q &As, book discounts, and perhaps I think most interesting, it's our mini-series available only to members focusing on the world's most complex characters and topics.

38:02We've already explored Rupert Murdoch and J.D. Vance, and we're doing many more subjects to come. So think of this as a civilised gift to allow families to disagree agreeably over Christmas. What could be nicer? And if you've left it until Christmas Eve, as I fear I often do. The great thing is it's digital. No queues, rapping or panic. The membership lands neatly in their inbox on Christmas Day. So spread a little political peace and goodwill. Head to therestispolitics.com and click gifts. Hello, I'm Professor Hannah Fry. And I'm Michael Stevens, creator of Vsauce. We thought we would join you for a moment, completely uninvited.

38:42We are not going to stay too long. Unless you want us to, of course. We're here to tell you about our brand new show. The rest is science. Every episode is going to start with something that feels initially familiar, and then we're going to unpick it and tear it apart until you no longer recognize it at all. Yeah, banana flavor doesn't taste like bananas. Yeah, what is that about? So it is supposed to taste like an old species of banana that was wiped out in a banana apocalypse. And now you will only find it in botanical collections in the gardens of billionaires. Wow. Banana candy is actually the ghost of a long extinct banana.

39:21So if you like scratching the surface, thinking a little bit deeper or weirder. Yes, definitely that too. You can join Michael and I every Tuesday and Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.

39:40Do you think Donald Trump practices mindfulness? Well, you'd have to ask him that. I know what the answer would be. So that's Parliament where you, and I didn't realise that, I didn't even know that happened, but that's really interesting. But Rory first came across you when he was prisons ministering, you were working in prisons. So what do you take from doing mindfulness in Parliament and taking into prisons? Do you do the same thing? Or do you kind of adapt for different challenges and different audiences? Yeah, you adapt. So in the prison, in the Remand prison in London, where Andy Fee and I were working and Debbie Murphy in the well-being unit there, we found that groups of prisoners, it's a male remand prison, who are coming to the well-being unit either in the morning or the afternoon to do music or to do cooking or to do anger management or whatever, were offered a mindfulness course.

40:31And it was based on the same thing we'd done with MPs, but made so that it was very adaptable to their situation. So we did a chocolate meditation, for example, where they would give them bits of chocolate, wrapped up these little, green and blacks. And interestingly, the people in the group would say, oh, you're going to take them away. You're not going to allow us to eat this, are you? But they would unwrap it very slowly and look at it and then taste it. And then we would teach them that way how to focus their attention and the consequences of focused attention by gathering the attention on just one thing at a time.

41:09I've done that. Yeah. I've done it with raisins. Raisins are very good for that. Interestingly, later on, one of the men said that he'd been doing that. He'd spent some of his precious money on a gingerbread cake and he took it back to his cell. He was there and he cut it up and broke it into pieces. and he took one little bit of a time and he was just taking the second bit and just taking the third bit and his cellmate appeared from his top bunk saying, are you going to eat that or not? Because if you don't want it, I'll have it. And he said, he explained what he was doing. So next time it spread in this way.

41:47One of the things about being in prison is it's noisy. I mean, people bang things and they shout, you know, not just during the day, but all night as well. so getting used to just the noise and so teaching people to gather their attention and we used to teach them a sort of a feet on floor bum on chair breath so feet seat and breath feet seat and breath and they could get that and the other thing we noticed was that sometimes they would sit there looking like they were completely zoned out like they didn't want to be there but after a short meditation maybe two minutes three minutes if we ask well how was how was that does anybody want to share their experience.

42:22You know, one of the guys from having to lean back looking like he wasn't even taking anything in, he would say really insightful things about what it felt to just pay attention on the feet or on the seat or on the breath. Two or three minutes, eyes closed. Mark, one of the challenges you will have come across and you'll be living with all the time, which I experienced as a prisons minister, is that it's very difficult to get public funding for anything like this. Even when you have pretty good data, even when you can show that it actually is good for people and it stops them re-offending, therefore stops them going back to prison again.

42:59So you'd hope you could go to the Treasury or the Ministry of Justice and say, look, here's a program. And sending someone to prison for a year costs as much as more than sending them to Eton. So if you invest a little bit of money in this program, you'd make the public safer, you'd make prison safe. But it never works. For some reason, the Treasury remains unbelievably narrow-minded in the way that they do these analyses. And I suppose because they, to be fair to the treasurer, it's because they feel that everybody's coming to them, doesn't matter whether they're doing opera or mindfulness or football coaching or whatever, making the same arguments, and they've got used to saying there's no cash.

43:33Did you find it difficult though and frustrating when you felt you were making a difference in lives, you could see the difference you were making, but in the end, the national system wasn't getting fully behind you? I think part of the problem is that, yeah, it is frustrating. I mean, when you hear as well that, you know, when people are inside, they might lose their benefits and so on. So when they get out, what have they got to go back to if they've lost their housing or lost their family? They tend to get back into the same networks. And the probation service has been, was under great strain as well as the prison service.

44:06I remember when Judge Stephen Toomin, I think he was prison's inspector for a while, and he would say, people are in prison as punishment, not for punishment. The deprivation of liberty is what is the punishment. And when they're there, why should we give them an environment that is itself further punishment and not rehabilitative at all? and doing these sort of things like the wellbeing unit at the Remand prison in London, doing things there was really giving hope. I mean, mindfulness was part of it, but there are lots of other things they were doing as well, like the music that Alistair was talking about.

44:45And there are some projects. There's Liberty Kitchens, I think, which is a Pentonville-based thing. Great food. They do street markets in London. And I was at an event a couple of weeks ago in London where they provided the food. And they have to bring the ingredients through all these gates to get into Pentonville and then make the stuff, then all these gates to get out, and then ex-prisoners are serving it and so on. And that sort of project is great at making links. And Mindfulness in Taiwan, which is given to prisoners in Taiwan, they have a businessman going in to say how to set up little tea bars when they come out so they've got something where they don't need much investment.

45:19But yes, I guess the reason why the Treasury found it so difficult to give money is because it's a long-term gain. I mean, Richard Layard is always going on about, if you spend this now, you will save money later. But I'm not sure that's because he's an economist. I think he's got more sort of right to say that than the rest of us. But yes, it does save money later. But also, there's not a lot of popular support, I think, for doing something which appears to be being too kind to people that people put their hands on the hips and say they have to be paying their due without people thinking about future victims for example so it's difficult but that's where we are but we'll carry on i mean lots of charities go in the prison phoenix trust goes in there's a mindfulness prisons network so people charity and the chaplains do what they can in prisons they do a wonderful job and they are increasingly learning including jonathan aiken in bentonville he's a chaplain there you said the thing about um prisons being very very noisy when you're and you practice mindfulness every day yeah really forgive me if this is a really stupid question but can you do that in a very noisy place i think you can but it's a bit it's a bit difficult but i think the strategy is to treat the noise as your breath as your anchor so that you start the mindfulness not by saying right i'm going to focus on my feet i'm going to get into comfortable posture focus on my breath close my eyes then the noise is just an interruption and then all you end up is, can't they shut off the noise and so on?

46:51There was a famous monk in the Thai forest tradition, which was one of the progenitors to mindfulness called Ajahn Chah, who went into the forest to meditate and he thought he was in a place of complete silence, but the village, it was so quiet, the village a couple of miles away was having a party for a long time and he could hear this and at first he was bothered by it and then he found himself saying, oh, at least my ears are working well. So he'd sort of turned it into, ah, I have good ears, I can hear. But I think even if you don't go that far, there's a sense of saying this sound, what is this sound?

47:30Really moving into the sound and seeing if you can hear the sound behind the sound, the rhythm, the pitch, the loudness, and then making that your anchor. Then if it goes quiet, you might find yourself, oh, where's my anchor gone? Oh, I better use the breath then. So I think it's possible, but it can take some work. Rory, do you do this? Because I regularly spot you, and occasionally I rather cheekily film you, including in here. I've sometimes walked to that door and then seen Rory sort of sitting here like this, and I've seen you outside in different places. Is that what you're doing? Yeah. In fact, actually, people starting meditating, Mark has a wonderful series, which he's recorded himself.

48:08And he's written a book on mindfulness. You can hear his lovely voice helping you through 20-minute meditations. But yes, when I go off on these silent retreats, do a 10-day silent retreat, that's exactly what I'm doing. This mindfulness thing, I think another word for it might be awareness. And what I think Mark is talking about, I'm not going to suggest. I'm going to give Mark a chance to talk about it because he knows much more deeply about it than I am. Give us a bit of a... Take us back to the... We've looked at politics. We've looked at prisons, we've looked at depression, we've looked at societal ideation, but it takes back to the heart of what this thing, this idea is and where it comes from.

48:43Well, mindfulness, as we use the word now, is a translation of a Pali word. Pali is the language in which the early Buddhist writings were written, related to Sanskrit. The word is sati, and sati means awareness or non-forgetfulness. And it's not just a cold, attentive sort of focus. It's a sort of kindly awareness, which is, well, you might say lucid awareness, clear seeing. And it comes from this Buddhist tradition. But the Buddha himself was the best way to think of it as like a master and his disciples, rather like Pythagoras school or the Athenian school in Greek philosophy, where a master would gather disciples around them and teach them and they would have a school.

49:27And so the Buddha in India, about the same time, actually, as Pythagoras was teaching this thing. And part of that teaching was this awareness, this clear seeing. And there seemed to be three aspects to what was being taught there. One was how to focus and gather your attention when it's scattered and dispersed, a sort of gathering of focus. Some people call it concentration, but that can sound a bit frowny, like it's got to really work hard. It's a gathering. The second thing is insight. And the third thing is doing all this with kindness. And each of those three pillars, the stability, the insight, and the kindness, work together so you begin to treat your thoughts and your feelings and other people with a sense of gatheredness and insight and kindness.

50:16So an anxiety that people have, many people have actually, I think, is that it's all gone a bit kooky. I mean, if you are traditional-minded, you sort of slightly despair. It sort of sounds like self-help books. It sounds like Buddhism without the Buddha. It sounds like it's a sort of gentle, nice bits of it, but all the theology has been stripped out, all the discipline's been stripped out. Do you ever encounter that kind of objection? What's going on with that objection? Is there something to it, something not to it? Or do you hear less of that now than you used to? I think it comes and goes.

50:53So when mindfulness started, people were very excited about it. When I say it started, but it sort of became very mainstream. People were interested to think of the clinical trials. And when people do a clinical trial, well, John Kabat-Zinn started this in UMass Medical School in the 1970s. He did it in the inner heart of a hospital where people were referred to him that the doctors gave up chronic pain, people who couldn't have surgery on their backs anymore. and they learned what became known as mindfulness-based stress reduction, MBSR. We learned our mindfulness from him and from what's called the insight meditation, the Westernized insight meditation tradition.

51:30And you're right that the intention of Jon Kabat-Zinn was to make it mainstream. That is to deliberately, as it were, not make it something that people would have to go to a monastery in Asia to find out or to a retreat center. He said people aren't going to get it by going to Asia. They're not going to get it by going to a retreat center, even though there are many retreat centers around. How can we make it available where people need it, hence in a hospital or where I used to work in the Warnford Hospital and mental health unit? Bring it into the heart of the hospitals. So now MBCT is available on the National Health Service.

52:05It's available in the Talking Therapies Service in England. You can ask, you can self-refer to it. Just ask for MBCT, Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy. Not a lot of people know that. It's an evidence-based practice. So it's known to be about as effective in dealing with depression as cognitive therapy and preventing depression as well. But if it's going to be, as the Dalai Lama once said, people aren't going to learn ethics by becoming Buddhists. So that's why he was supporting secular ethics, as he called it. And when I asked him, well, what did he think about secular mindfulness? He said, that's what people need.

52:41People are not going to come to become a Tibetan monk like me, he said. It needs to be taken to them. Now, are we concerned that people can click on an app and get three minutes? No, I'm not. Why not? Because everybody needs to start somewhere. And for some people, it might be a lifesaver. And also, there's virtually nowhere you can go now where mindfulness has not touched it. And for those who really do need clinical mindfulness over eight weeks taught by a good teacher, either online or in person, they can go to a dinner party and say, I've been referred to a mindfulness course. And everybody will say or half the people around the table.

53:20So I've done mindfulness. So there's no stigma attached. And I think the cost of keeping it sort of very precious is that it remains something which only a few people ever get round to doing who can seek it out. The cost of spreading it thinly is that it is no longer authentic. But somewhere there's a middle view where you can continue to click. You can have a taste of it. If you want to go further, you're only ever a couple of clicks away from the books that will really help, that are informed by the best of the history and the foundational traditions, as well as the best of psychology. If you are somebody like me, who has got a history of depression and has often had depression around Christmas and New Year, you know, and always worries about it in advance.

54:10okay and i don't think i'm alone in that i think there's quite a few people who find this time of year quite difficult tell me how mindfulness would help and what i would do to make it help should i get back to my raisin i remember my raisin i do remember the raisin well getting back to your raisin is not a bad idea in this respect what alistair's describing is eating one raisin but taking quite a long time to look at it you smell it i didn't eat it i just looked at it for about an hour okay you never got around to eating it oh that's a pity i was very You kept very attached to your raisin. I did, yeah.

54:43The raisin became a star in one of my novels. So, yeah. So, as we do the raisin practice in a mindfulness class, you get to look at it, yes. You get to smell it, yes. But eventually, you get, if you wish, if you choose, to put it in your mouth. But without chewing it, you discover that it actually doesn't have much taste. But then eventually, when you chew it, it's like the taste explodes in your mouth. and you think, oh, why have I never tasted raisins before like this? Because I've never thought about it. Because I've never actually studied it. I've never actually attended to it. I've never actually brought it into my field of consciousness.

55:18I just usually eat, yeah, just eat them automatically 20 at a time. This is really helpful at teaching something. I mean, you know, what you learn is that paying attention makes a difference. The quality of attention that you bring to something makes a difference. Now, if you can bring that quality of attention even to the things that disturb us, because often we want to push away the nasty stuff. By the time you get into a mindfulness class, eventually in session five or six, you get to look at some of the dark things, but to allow them just to stay a little bit longer than you might usually, without trying to push them away or sort them out or problem solve them.

55:56and by looking closely you realize that some of these things actually are a complex bundle of thoughts feelings body sensations that because we've sort of repressed them pushed them away we've never really looked at the heart of them so we bring rays in mind if you will even to some difficult things now that takes practice and i'm not suggesting you do that just straight that would be like taking your cold swim which you do because you do it a lot other people wouldn't want it would want to do it gradually. But what you could do is bring raisin in mind, that sense of studying it, to say eating and drinking over Christmas.

56:31So instead of just thinking, ah, here's a glass of wine, I'm going to neck the first and second and see if I enjoy the third, that you treat the very first sip of the drink as if that was the raisin. And you really, really taste it. And if you think, ah, this is going to quench my thirst, then have a drink of water first and then take the drink for its own sake, because it's taken a lot of effort to produce that drink. So really value it and the piece of cake or whatever, so that instead of just eating, drinking, whatever, you've got a sense of paying attention much more gently. You've been through a very difficult time in your own life recently, and we're now coming into Christmas.

57:14And I wonder whether just as my final question, you could reflect a little bit about your own experience of tragedy and difficulty, mindfulness, and then maybe also the message of God and Jesus. You're a priest, and it would be good also, if we're talking about Christmas, to hear a little bit about the birth of Christ. So my own life circumstances, which isn't secret, but I lost my daughter last year to cancer. she was a very very lively woman many many friends lived in bristol which is a fantastic place for her to live really found her place there in bristol she was a software engineer and she had discovered actually meditation through uh she called herself when she went into the hospice and they asked her what's your religion she said secular buddhist and when she had her diagnosis which came at christmas time two years ago um 2023 she died on maunday thursday 2024 so she didn't she didn't survive till easter but because she discovered all these things mindfulness meditation not through her dad i think but through independently because she was dependent girl.

58:27She asked what books will be helpful. But by the time I'd asked my colleague, right, recommend you one book, Joan Halifax's Being With Dying, she'd already got it. So by the time I arrived on the scene and said, oh, somebody's, she already had bought it and was working through that Joan Halifax, a Zen teacher and hospice accompanier of people and wonderful, emphasizing three things about being with dying, whether you're the dying person or whether you're accompanying them. Not knowing, bearing witness, and compassion. And not knowing is one of the most difficult things, just allowing yourself not to know how this will go.

59:14Not giving advice, you know, not beating yourself up, just not knowing. And I remember once when I was staying fairly close before we got a place to stay close at hand in Bristol. So I was staying with a family member on the outskirts of Bristol. And usually every night she would send a message saying, and every morning she would say, hey, I'm up now. You know, come, come, the door's unlocked. And one morning, this was when she was early on, when she was back home from hospital before she went into the hospice. Wonderful St. Peter's Hospice in Bristol. Nothing came from eight o 'clock. Nothing came 8.30.

59:53Nothing came at 9. I thought, I'm going. I'm just not going to hang around and wait for a message. What's happened to her? And then as I was driving down to her flat, and my phone pinged and I pulled in, looked at it, said, oh, sorry, I didn't get messages saying you're coming. Just been listening to Jack Kornfield on Dharma Seed, which was a meditation teacher, listening to his talk on impermanence. This was a girl who just about two weeks before got a diagnosis that was an incurable cancer. So she found these meditation and this understanding of the world in Buddhism really, really helpful. But it means that for me, for family, for many others who've been in this situation, Christmas is a difficult time.

1:00:39Because, you know, they say Christmas is a time for families. And so it is. And it's great that the family be around me, but there'll be that missing. space. And what was it she discovered in Buddhism? What is it we discover in Christianity? What is it that Christmas is all about? And how could it appeal to people who aren't got a faith at all? Well, I think it's about its love at the heart of the universe. I mean, many people believe, whether they call it God or not, that there's a presence or power in the universe that in some way might influence them that they can access. Sometimes they say it's something in me, the immortal diamond or whatever that the mystics talk about, or not just in Christian traditions, but in Sufi traditions and Jewish traditions, the sense of there being a path that you can take either within where you get closer and closer to a universal truth, a universal consciousness, a universal love.

1:01:39And in the Christian tradition, there is this belief that this love is shown in the most vulnerable form possible in the form of a baby and the stories at christmas all about people on the move right people who have to make a commitment to witness this so you know wise men from the east or shepherds or the parents or whatever there's a sort of making a move in my philosophy philosophy i read recently about William James and William Clifford, these Victorian philosophers who had this debate about the pursuit of truth and the avoidance of error. And William James was all for the pursuit of truth.

1:02:16And William Clifford was all for the avoidance of error. And William James said, no, it's not all about avoidance. That might be true in maths. But in life, William James said, if you want to understand the truth, especially in relationships or in faith, you've got to commit in some way. And unless you commit you won't ever discover so if you if you want to know does she really love me or not or does he love me not you can't just sit back with your arms folded and wait for the evidence that somebody loves you you've got to do something and test the water and see so christmas is about testing the water i think it's about the preposterous idea that this love at the heart of the universe should be manifest in this little tiny uh scrap of humanity and the whole of the Christmas story then but the whole of the story that Christians believe is about love being shown in vulnerability that's the meaning of the crucifixion and so on uh it's about uh a sort of sense of vulnerability rather than love being shown or the the answer being found in power autonomy might violence and so on well amen well thank you for sharing your story about your daughter.

1:03:27Thanks, Alistair. And thank you for your time. It's been great to talk to you. Thank you for inviting me. Thank you, Mark. Very happy Christmas. Thank you.

1:03:38Well, Rory, that was very moving at the end. I don't know how it felt down the line, but it was very charged in the room. Yeah. I mean, I'm a slightly speechless, which I'm not usually at the end of recordings. I would say, it's true with all our guests, but people who'd like to learn more. Mark does do these wonderful books on mindfulness and classes on mindfulness. I think one of the things that I take from him, and I guess is also true of the other guests that we've interviewed who are often children of ministers, is that sense of service, the sense that he goes out into prisons, goes out into parliament trying to take this and make a difference.

1:04:19The other thing that I really liked about him, he's got a he's got a lovely manner about him and he mentioned Richard Layard a couple of times and I don't know if you know Richard Layard but Richard Layard is like the sort of one of the drivers the big drivers of the happiness movement and I think he's in his 90s now I saw him yesterday and he was trying to get me involved in a new campaign to try and persuade the government to get well-being and mental health and happiness back center stage in the political and policy debate and I just think the way these guys just keep going. And I think the thing that was so moving about the, not just the way he talked about his daughter, but also then it was the fact that you asked him to set that in the context of the whole meaning of Christmas and Christianity and what have you.

1:05:07And you just felt that sort of power within him. It was very, very, it was really moving. Lovely guy. Because I think one of the things that's so striking is that it comes out naturally. The risk, if you ask someone to reflect on the meaning of Christmas, is they end up making a slightly artificial speech where they're trying to sound like a priest. I slightly felt that, remember at the end of our live tours when I was supposed to be, you've set me up to do a two-minute speech about the future of the world, that you can end up becoming a little bit over the top and histrionic. What's lovely there is the sense of somebody speaking from lived experience.

1:05:51Anyway, I'm a real fan of Mark, and thank you, Alistair, for having him on. It was great, thank you. And have a lovely Christmas. Happy Christmas. Bye-bye.

1:06:02Thank you.