A Skeptic’s Guide To Meditation: Bob Roth On The Science & Extreme Benefits of Transcendental Meditation

30:36And so the main thing is just to say, well, give it a try. Because I teach kids on the autism spectrum disorder. I teach kids who can close their eyes for more than 30 seconds and they love, they do 10 minutes of meditation. It's a very satisfying, enjoyable experience. Not hard. You're not battling your thoughts. You're just diving within. And one last thing. Sure. You get to be a hundred participants. This is me. People ask me, I'm not exactly what you would consider, you know, your classic meditation teacher. I'm like a skeptic. I love science. I love data. I'm not into all the philosophies so much.

31:13And you could be a hundred percent skeptical. You could think everything that I'm saying is a crock and making difference. It'll work just as well as anything else. You just do the thing. You just do it. You're already hardwired for it. You already are drawn to, is it hard to watch a great movie? No. Is it hard to watch a bad movie? Yeah. Is it hard to be in an interesting conversation with someone? No. Hard to be in a bad one? So the mind, it's hardwired. I want, I'm drawn to something more satisfying, but I'm always looking out through my senses, this, this, this, this. Now I close my eyes and for a few minutes turn within and then effortlessly sink and dive within.

31:48And I remember telling someone once, this Wall Street guy, he said, wait, wait, wait, wait, you're settling your 20 minutes and you're settling down to this inner calm, this pure consciousness. How do you know when your 20 minutes are up? And I said, you look at your watch, you're not going someplace. You're just settling. Your nervous system can go faster and your nervous system also has the ability to decompress, to settle down. I suspect one of the other things that you get a lot of is, I hear you, Bob, that's great, but you know, my meditation is fill in the blank, you know, running or doing laundry or, you know, you name it, some kind of activity that on some level probably activates the unconscious mind.

32:31so I'm interested in how you draw the distinction between perhaps something that might be considered like a mindful practice versus the formality of what you're suggesting which is like you this is what you do and you follow the script and it works every time that's very different from I'm going out you know into the woods for a walk well first of all I think you should do all those things I think everything we do in our life should should be that mindful approach should be you know the going for a walk in the woods, the foods you eat, the people you're around, the work that you do, all those things should be life affirming, should be enlivening of all the different happiness hormones and all of that.

33:12You keep coming back to the thing, the rigor. And I am abhorrent to sort of rigor myself. Oh, good. Yeah, tell me more. Yeah, no, because I - I guess I'm trying to just get at the formality of it. Like, this is what I'm doing right now. And there is a way of doing it. Do you sit down and have lunch? Yeah, you eat a meal. Do you lie down and go to bed at night? The formality of going to bed at night? Maybe the rigor is in pushing through whatever resistance you have around like, okay, now I'm gonna do this thing. It's the leading up part. Yes, and I find that from people. And I would just say, you just give it a try because it's actually something that you look forward to.

33:51Because within minutes, your body gains it. There was a study that was done at Harvard Medical School way back in the 70s that compared oxygen consumption, which is a level of metabolic rest. Oxygen consumption with TM and what happens when you go to sleep. And they found that it took about five and a half or six hours of good night's sleep for oxygen consumption to drop 8%. And in 20 minutes of TM, oxygen consumption dropped 16%. I look forward to that deep rest and I can be in a crazy day. I can be in the back of a cab. It's not like I have to go to my pillow and my cushion and I have to sit like this.

34:28I did it at a Yankee Stadium. It was a bad game. You can do it anywhere. So it's not this, and it's not like I have to do it at 5.15 and in the evening and six. I do it. I do it. Usually I get up first thing in the morning, pee, sit up in bed, meditate. And then sometime in the afternoon, I find time for 15 or 20 minutes to do it. And it's very rejuvenating. And if I don't do it, fine but if i do do it i feel better on the rejuvenation piece uh talk a little bit about the deep rest aspect of it scientists are discovering this term like they just coined it deep rest which is different than the rest you gain during sleep which is sort of up and down you never know and it comes in waves you know there's sleep and dream and sleep and dream and it turns out that the human nervous system is hardwired to be able to access a state of deep rest at will in the case which you're going to see in the case of you know you have that alpha one and all that but we've lost the ability of doing that and some researchers believe the fact that we've lost that ability of that they call it a forced state of consciousness different from waking dreaming and sleeping it's inherent it's who we are we've lost access to it that lack of access to that has given rise to all this stress and stress-related disorders because only in that state of state of deep rest can the body heal itself from deeply rooted traumas and tensions and stresses and so tm accesses that other things can access it and i i would say it's not an either or when you say well i'm going to do this or that it's a yes and and as the world gets more intense we want to have practical tools that can help us deal with what's coming

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39:32Is there science around the deep rest and the trauma healing piece? Yes, yes. That's very interesting to me. So we are working, we've done a lot on this. We have worked for 10, 15 years now with veterans, offering TM to, with veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder. We also work with women survivors of domestic violence. In New York City, they have something called the Family Justice Centers, where we've taught a thousand women. And we're working with firefighters and police officers. And what they find is, they call it a state of restful alertness, that the benefits of TM show a reduction in symptoms more effectively than the gold standard, which is called prolonged exposure.

40:18I don't know if you know what that is. Prolonged exposure is reliving your experience. More effective than prolonged exposure. And one reason is, I mean, and the veterans like meditating and they don't like prolonged exposure. What happens in that instance is, again, there's a calming of the amygdala, which is that emotional center. There's a calming of the sympathetic nervous system. There's a reduction in cortisol, so we're less reactive. And one of the biggest things is people sleep better. So many of the symptoms of PTSD are exacerbated by the inability to sleep. So my friend Vin, who runs our veterans program, said that one of the first things vets say is, oh my God, for the first time in four months, I slept through the night.

41:04So there's a lot of benefits for trauma. Yeah, so you've worked with veterans and at-risk youth in at-risk neighborhoods, et cetera, trauma survivors, victims of abuse. And now you're working with victims of the LA fire, people who have been displaced and also the LA firefighters. I mean, that's quite a service and I'm interested in kind of what you're hearing. All for free. Yeah, all for free through the David Lynch Foundation. What you're hearing from the people who worked and also suffered through the LA fires. Just imagine if in the midst of all the chaos and frenzy and uncertainty in your life, and it's all happening around you, and you have the ability to sit down against a tree in a chair and just do this simple, effortless procedure that gives your body a state of rest, in many regards, deeper than the deepest part of deep sleep in minutes.

42:08In minutes. It's transformative. It's absolutely transformative. And not only do we do it in Los Angeles, we did it in Asheville. after that hurricane there, we got six or 700 people there. And there's this relief of stress and tension and fear. And it's transformative. I want, we're talking to the Red Cross because the Red Cross goes into these areas and they say, okay, we're going to build new roads. We're going to build bridges. We're going to, you know, fix hospitals. But no one is dealing with trauma, Rich. No one is on a scalable way. Are we going to give everyone Ambien? We're gonna give everyone talk therapy.

42:48So here is a tool that's scalable that they can use and they love it. And we're doing the research to show that it works so that Red Cross or Blue Cross Blue Shield or Aetna will reimburse for instruction. Right, that was my next question. Like, how is it working with healthcare and insurance reimbursement? Because that's really the crown jewel here, right? If you can get coverage for this, then it can be something that is widely prescribed. So when you want to get something reimbursed or covered by a third party, and not just insurance companies, carriers, there's every business or somebody that have their own self-insurance, there's research you have to do.

43:29Phase one trials with 60 people to show that it works. Phase two trials with 100 or 200 people in one hospital to show that it works. Now we're at the point of a phase three trial, which is four or five different hospitals, 600 people to 500 people. And if we get the same results that we've gotten in hundreds of previous studies, then that's going to be the basis for leveraging reimbursement. Now, before COVID, the idea of insurance companies covering meditation or TM, a joke. But now we're living, as I'm sure you know, in a crisis of mental health. you know and there's no if i cut my arm i get infected and this doctors know what caused that and there's an antibiotic nobody knows why a person gets depressed nobody and there's a million reasons person is anxious can't sleep so they created some medicines that work but they don't work they work for a minority of people so now the research has shown the tm in frontline hospitals doctors and nurses that it, within two weeks, they did the research, we didn't.

44:36And so when we do that from 100 people to 500 people, the research, then I think we're just a couple of years out. Well, all you have to do, I would imagine, is establish that this practice leads to positive health outcomes in such a way that saves them money over time. Like, look, you can pay this right now to teach these people this, or you can pay later when their PTSD or whatever isn't healed and suddenly they're addicted to opioids or whatever happens downstream of that, which obviously becomes a much more expensive proposition. That's actually, I'm glad you brought that up. It's economics from their perspective.

45:15That's our focus now, cost savings. So in this, the Department of Defense back in 2016 gave$2.5 million for a study on TM and PTSD. and they compared it with this prolonged exposure gold standard. And they found that TM was more effective than prolonged exposure. So then another researcher just now went in and looked at the data and see how much would it save. He said, okay, there's 6 million veterans getting treatment right now for any range. If 100 ,000 of those 6 million learned TM, it would save the government$375 million. Wow. Because those treatments don't work. They just, more medicines, more medicines, more medicines.

45:59And the suicide rate is going up. And yeah, it's a pretty interesting time. Are there any studies that distinguish people who have suffered acute trauma, like soldiers, et cetera, or domestic abuse victims versus like low-grade chronic trauma, you know, over many, many years? Well, first of all, low-grade chronic trauma, if you're living with it all the time, like an alcoholic parent, that's something called complex PTSD. And actually you can start having symptoms of PTSD even though you've not been in war. But for, and so it helps there. But just regular old life, I mean, I've been talking, the foundation is focused on people who are really suffering.

46:46But TM has been learned by 15 million people and it's just regular folk who find that they, you know, they're sort of, as they get a little older, they think, well, I'm not sleeping quite as well as I was or like getting my buttons pushed a little faster, getting triggered, little memory, I can't focus like I used to. That's where most of the people are who learn it. Right, some varying degree of stress and anxiety or low-hanging neurosis. Yeah, that's right. Very low-hanging neurosis. I would also say that there's more interest now Because I teach a lot of, with David, through David, he introduced me to a lot of very creative people.

47:25You've taught a lot of interesting people. I have. I remember once, like 30 years ago, thinking, you know, I've never, seriously, I've never met a famous person. Never in my life, you know. And then with David, I've taught lots of people. But as I'm sure you'll know, when you sit down with anyone, particularly when I teach them to meditate and I look in their eyes, they can't sleep or they're worried about their kid. They're just another human being just because their face is plastered all over a screen. It doesn't mean anything. When I think of like low hanging neurosis, it's like Jerry Seinfeld comes to mind.

48:00Yeah, exactly. Like who you taught him, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, he'd been meditating. Actually, we're good friends. He'd been meditating since 1972. He learned when he was a kid in Long Island. Same with Howard Stern, right? I remember like as a young person when he was a radio DJ in DC growing up and he was on the radio every morning and he would talk about TM. Yeah, he learned because he and his father were really worried about their mother who's having all these depressed qualities and all this stuff and deep depression. And then he called his mom up one time and he said, I heard something in her voice.

48:36I said, mom, what's going on? She said that she had learned TM. And he said, that was enough for him because there was something lifted in her voice, a heaviness. And he's been doing it for 50 plus years. Another example that you just become more of who you are. Meditation doesn't sort of wash you out, TM, just more of who you are. It seems like there's a very high, what's the right word? Not adoption rate, but like sustained practice rate with TM that also, you know, from an outsider looking in on it, looks like it distinguishes it from other traditions. Like, you know, I like sort of dabble in all different kinds of things, but people who do TM, I'm like, they're all in and they maintain it over extremely long periods of time with like great consistency.

49:22Yeah, it's enjoyable. Is it just the effectiveness of it? Like how do you - Two things, it's an enjoyable thing. It's not like I gotta go beat my head against, I gotta beat my, to do this thing and I gotta fight my thoughts. And it's that 20 minutes and you look at your watch, no, that's a minute and a half. It's not that way. You look forward to it. It's really enjoyable. And afterwards, the results are very real. In this case of Jerry, Jerry was meditating once a day. He didn't realize you were supposed to do it twice or could do it twice a day. And backstory, I was teaching the rest of his family to meditate.

49:54He'd been meditating about 20 years and I was teaching the rest of his family. And I said to them, he was sitting in on a meeting and I said, well, you know, then you'll do your afternoon meditation at this time. He said, wait, what, what? Yeah, I've been meditating for 30 years. There's a second meditation. And then he started doing it. Who instructed him that? He forgot. Did you? No, no, he forgot. And he said he has so much energy now from that second meditation. He used to just knock out at one o 'clock in the afternoon. Now he has so much energy. And he said, if he'd been doing twice a day, Seinfeld would still be on the air.

50:27That's what his words. Did he get Larry David into it? No, he said, Larry, talk about low hanging fruit. Yeah, Larry's like not gonna go there. No, no, no, no. Who is the most surprising, like well-known person that you would never suspect? I mean, I don't want you to talk about anything that's not public knowledge, but somebody you might not have expected to be into this, you know, coming to you and you teaching them. I don't know, because everybody's got stress these days or, you know, anxiety. I'll tell you the kindest, most genuine person I taught is Hugh Jackman. Oh, interesting. He's a real deal.

51:03He grew a very humble upbringing and he's very kind. It's not surprising though. I mean, that guy is very focused on his wellbeing. I mean, just unbelievably talented, but also committed person in what he does for a living. But it seems to carry over. No, and just genuine and you see him in crowds and he's very kind and puts attention on people. And I really, I admire him a lot. You mentioned that you're fundamentally a skeptic. So we talked about this a little bit last time, but let's trace this back a little bit to the origin story. Like, how did you overcome skepticism? What was your introduction to this?

51:42How did you get into this world? So I was just like a regular dumb kid growing up, you know, in the 50s and 60s in the Bay Area and just regular, just never thought about anything. And we got really involved in politics in my family. It was a Democratic, you know, interested in Kennedy and Johnson. Yeah, I mean, you're in the Bay Area during the 60s. This is ground zero. I went to Berkeley, ground, ground zero. Anyway, I worked for Bobby Kennedy Sr. and I really, I remember going to an event where he spoke to 2 ,000 people in San Francisco on June 1st, 1968 and thinking, not Republicans or Democrats, we're going to change this world.

52:18I had this sort of wanting to, and then I saw him, was assassinated four days later on television. Yeah. And I decided I was going to go to Berkeley. I was going to Berkeley. I would go to law school and I'd be a US Senator like Bobby Kennedy. I wanted to change. Those are the days he wanted to change the world. Took me about a month at Berkeley to realize that politics was not going to heal the soul of the nation. It's important, but it wasn't going to be my path. And so my mom was a teacher. Then I thought, okay, maybe I'll write educational curriculum, get a degree in that, teach inner city school kids to do it, help them navigate their way.

52:52So I was, here's to TM. So I'm going to Berkeley, working full time, well, going to school full time, working a lot, and tanks parked outside my door for Vietnam War and it was right near People's Park. And I was very stressed, although I didn't know that. And I was, I knew that there had to be some inner anchor because everything was just so crazy, some inner anchor. And I didn't wanna, I mean, Berkeley was a hotbed of crazy town and I didn't wanna get into a religion. I wasn't a political extremist. You weren't banging the bongos in the tie-dye shirt at the protests? No, I was just as naive, just as kid who wanted to make a better world.

53:32And I was really stressed out. and a friend of mine, I was working with at a Swenson's ice cream parlor. I remember Swenson's. Yeah, scooping the hazelnut or whatever. And he was the one guy at Berkeley that I thought was sane. He was nice, quiet, calm, clear, focused and it turned out he was doing TM. And I said, I don't believe in any of that stuff. My father's son, he was a scientist and a doctor and a researcher and he held up a pen and he dropped the pen in his hand, the other hand and he said you don't have to believe in gravity for gravity to work in this meditation you don't have to believe in anything so i said i told him i'm gonna go for three minutes if i'm weirded out i'm leaving he said go for one minute and one of my first meditations was so profoundly relaxing and unique different than any experience i'd ever had and a few days later I thought maybe this is a tool I'll teach those kids because I wanted to help kids.

54:32And that was June 28th, 1969. Now 50 plus years later, I run a foundations and brought it to a million and a half kids. And we want to bring it to 10 million in the next five years. The tradition of TM is rooted in the teachings of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Is he the founder of this? What is the lineage behind this? So transcendental meditation goes back. this effortless transcending. Maharishi has said this was an original form of meditation, effortlessness, not straining. This idea of having to concentrate or clear the mind is very difficult and unnatural in a way. And he said that the innocence and the effortlessness of transcending, which just means settling down, had been lost over time and effort crept in.

55:21But the meditation goes back thousands, you know, predates. People say, oh, this is Hinduism. This predates Hinduism, like what, 3 ,000 years old? People have been meditating forever. So it predates all those isms. Maharishi was a physicist, trained as a physicist in India. And then he had a chance to study for 13 years with a great meditation teacher. His name was Gurudev in India. And then in 1955, Maharishi started going around the world offering the meditation. The first thing he did is he went to scientists at Stanford and said, you should, and UCLA said, you should study this thing. He wanted it to be like seen as a healthcare intervention, not as some healthcare intervention, not just to deal with stress, to wake up the full creative potential of the brain, you know, that enlightened idea, but it would be rooted in science.

56:13So he was the one who brought it back out. He popularized it. Popularized it. And so TM sort of gets associated with him. And he was a, you know, like a controversial figure on some level, but people know him. The Beatles went and saw him and, you know, he's sort of well-known for many people making a pilgrimage to, you know, come and sit at his feet. Well, so let's unpack that statement. Yeah, yeah, yeah, please. Yeah, controversial figure only because the Beatles went and started, he traveled around because I had an opportunity to work with him or around. Did you go to India to see him or when he, No, he was in Europe.

56:50When he came down. I did see him in India, but I interned. He had established something, Maharishi European Research University, which was doing research on brain, and that was in Switzerland. And then I moved over to Holland. He was a scientist. I mean, he loved the science of consciousness. He loved the whole thing. So, but he was under the radar. And then I'm friends with, I name dropped Paul and Ringo. And they told me the story that Maharishi was giving a talk at a Hilton hotel. in London in 1967 with a handful of people, and all of a sudden three young guys walked in, and it was three of the Beatles, and then the press, and Margie didn't even know what that was.

57:32And so then he taught them in Wales, and then the next year they went to Rishikesh to take a break from all the crazy and just have like a retreat. All the controversy was around that, oh, he had Rolls Royces, not true. This ain't not true. It just got out there. people he alarmed a lot of people but a lot of people learned to meditate because of the beetles but 30 years later some reporter said to him you must be very happy because look what the beetles did they brought all his attention to you and he said they were very good creative young men but he set my work back 30 years because it became flower power rather than science yeah it got associated with something non-secular yeah that becomes alienating to a lot of people I think that association is still somewhat pervasive.

58:22Our generation or my generation, your generation, but the kids who are in their 20s and 30s, you know, it'll outlive that. Yeah. What I think is interesting here is this idea of transcendence. You're talking about transcendence in a very specific kind of secular way of becoming a little bit more of a master of the self, right? Like transcending your mind so that you can be more calm, more present, have more mental acuity and creativity and light and joy and equanimity, et cetera. I think of transcendence a little bit differently as sort of the peak of Maslow's hierarchy of needs in a broader kind of more spiritual sense, like a non-secular sense.

59:09What does it mean to transcend in my mind has more to do with, I don't wanna use the word enlightenment, but how can you like overcome the things that hold us back as human beings, like our attachment to the material world and to our identities and all of these things that keep us separate and challenge our ability to live more freely and with more unconditional love and gratitude and things like that. Like maybe I have a little bit of a broader lens on it. No, no, I agree with you a hundred percent. But I think you're very careful with your language, like in the way that you describe transcendence?

59:48Because what I focus on is the benefits for a person busy. I like to call this the democratization of meditation. This is for everybody. I don't want vocabulary to get in the way. This is for everyone can benefit from this, everyone. And I love what you said about Maslow because it wasn't until near his death that he came out and said, well, self-actualization is not actually the hierarchy of needs, it's transcendence. And he said, part of something bigger. And that - Making room for the ineffable. That's right. And that transcendent field that one accesses during meditation, that settled quiet level of the mind.

1:00:27And I would have brought this out earlier, but I knew you were wanting to talk about it. But that transcendent field is that field, that universal field of consciousness. That is that level of connectivity. And that is only where the fulfillment can lie. It doesn't, otherwise TM is just self-actualization. You know, it's great for self-actualization. It's like, quote unquote, optimization. Yes, but on the way to, it's not distinct from, on the way to that transcendence is optimization. It's not distinct from, it's a continuum on that. And there's even when they talk about the science of higher, quote unquote, higher states of consciousness.

1:01:10So there's waking, dreaming, and sleeping states of consciousness. and then the meditative state is the fourth state of consciousness they call it turiyatit in sanskrit means the fourth and that's that accessing that transcendent within you which is unbounded awareness and then what grows is and this goes back to harkens back to what we were talking about earlier what blurs is the line between the two i live more and more of that inner as I grow and outer. And as I am fully aware within myself, they call it a fifth state, cosmic consciousness. But then it goes on to unity consciousness, which is wholeness, oneness of everything.

1:01:50And the interesting thing when Marishi was in a conference, a science conference about this, and he said, yes, and there will be a neuroscience to every state of consciousness. This is not make-believe. This is what the human being is hardwired for. It's his or her birthright to have that unified level of consciousness. Are there neuroscience studies on what's going on in the brain when somebody is experiencing unified consciousness? There is that what happens, I mentioned earlier, where you have the EEG correlate, that alpha one, and some meditations will have, it changes in the front left lobe, an area that awakens and builds up more gray matter in the front left lobe or this area, this area.

1:02:34But what happens in that transcendent experience is it creates this coherent brainwave pattern across the whole brain. So that's during meditation. And what they're finding now is because the neural pathways, they say, you know, the neurons that fire together, wire together, that the coherent brainwave pattern is maintained at the same time as your waking state. and that's correlated with that feeling of inner calm, inner unboundedness in the midst of everything that you're doing. See, I wanna inhabit the fifth state, Bob. Yeah, I think you're pretty close. I don't think so. I do, I do. If you had a window into my mind, it's a bit of a mess most of the time.

1:03:17Should you ever want, I will teach you. I've had flirtations with that though. And so I have - No, tell me, tell me, tell me. The fifth state. I've had moments of transcendence in meditation, also in endurance sports. And then more recently and more vividly, I had for the very first time, I underwent like a medically supervised psychedelic experience. So that obviously, you know, was a much more intense experience. I had never done anything like that before. And so I had no frame of reference for what that experience was gonna deliver to me, but I would say that it over-delivered in every category.

1:03:59It allowed me to glimpse... Something I'm not sure even a lifetime of meditation would have been able to reveal to me, which is a complete dissolution of identity and boundaries of self and self and self and self and self and self and self and self and self and self and self and self and self. Like it was a disassemblage of everything that allowed me now in my normal day life to have a different perspective on what matters that has stayed with me in a very meaningful way and has also informed my meditation practice, which is not yet TM, even though we talked about it last time, but now you've sold me, like I'm in, has made me much more committed and devoted to that practice.

1:04:47Like in the kind of integration months subsequent to that experience where you have a higher degree of brain plasticity, like I very consciously leveraged that to deepen my meditation practice and that has proved beneficial. But there's something indelible about that experience that, you know, because it's so intense, just allowed me, like, you know, I'm very caught up in my intellectual mind and I get in my way and all these sorts of, It is very difficult for me to transcend that, you know, in and of itself. So this just allowed me to like see that there's more out there and has now made me much more interested in the nature of consciousness itself and these higher states of it and what they avail us of.

1:05:34I mean, every happiness expert that I've had on this podcast has talked extensively about what drives happiness and what drives us away from it. And it's pretty clear and they're all, you know, they have different views on this, but they all pretty much agree that it's connection and it's, you know, it's love and it's family and it's some relationship with the divine, whether you call it faith, whatever you label it, you have to have a connection with the ineffable, a power greater than yourself. And short of that, you are shortchanging yourself of happiness that's otherwise available to you. And I think that can be a struggle for the Western mind.

1:06:14It certainly has been for me, but I have changed my mind. So I would like to comment on a few things. When you talked about that experience, I liken that to, I worked as a kid in addition to Swenson's. I worked at a plant nursery. And in the spring, early spring, we'd get two different types of azaleas would come in. One azalea was this in a five-gallon, I don't know if there's still five-gallon cans, five-gallon can, this little budding with a few buds in azalea. And then come in a greenhouse, hot, you know, this azalea, fully bloomed, just absolutely exquisite, just whew. Well, the problem was that fully bloomed azalea sort of got its system blown out and never really recovered from that.

1:07:06Whereas the little five-gallon can planted properly and grown properly grew every season more and more and more and more and more. So in terms of sustainability, that azalea planted in the ground is not as much of a quick hit. But it did give you an idea of where this plant was going. But I think you could have experiences that way. but the sustainability is the nervous system likes to grow sort of steadily and sustainably and naturally. And as far as meditation could never develop all of those experiences, there are some, you read the saints and sages of the past, there's some pretty heavy duty experiences.

1:07:48Sure, yeah, but there are outlier people who I'm sure are able to inhabit that state, you know, on their own chemistry. I just don't know that I would have ever been able to do that on my own. And it's not like I need to go back and do this a bunch of times. There's more for me to learn in that, but it's not like, oh, I need to immediately jump back into that. Like I got what I needed from that. No, it's great, yeah. And I'm trying to use it and not just consider it a peak experience and move on. Which is a way to take advantage of that experience, grow from that experience.

1:08:29So right around this time last year, Julie and I embarked on this really incredible once-in-a-lifetime two-week journey in India. We visited the Dalai Lama and Dharamshala. We then went to Rajasthan, where we toured ancient temples. We took in the vibrant colors and daily life rhythms of Jaipur. And we walked the streets of Delhi, dining on its delights. The experience was profound in ways that words struggle to capture. but what really resonated was how people everywhere seek connection and understanding and how stepping outside familiar environments brings clarity to what truly matters. What I've been considering lately is this idea that home is where you find yourself.

1:09:12And therefore, when we travel, our living spaces can actually serve this purpose for others. That's where Airbnb comes in, offering this really cool and practical approach to share your space when it makes sense for your situation. The extra income from hosting can help fund these perspective-shifting journeys, and your home just might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at airbnb.com slash host.

1:09:41So we're agreeing on transcendence then, I guess. We are, completely. And I want to talk about something else. I don't know if you ever had this fellow, Dacher, oh, I had his name, wrote a book on awe. Just, he's great. And the transformative power of the experience of awe. He said that human beings are lacking the emotion of awe. We have emotions of shame or embarrassment or anger, and that has an effect on the nervous system. But the experience of awe, which we probably had more thousand years ago when you could look up into the night sky and you could see the Milky Way or whatever, and that he described as an experience of something vast, unbounded.

1:10:18And if you look up the definition of the word transcend, it means to go beyond ordinary human experience. And we're always looking for transcendent moments. I mean, to the small things, let's go to a different restaurant here or let's go to a different place for vacation to I'm going to join a theater group or something that breaks our boundaries to I'm going to meditate or I'm going to do what you did. We look for something that breaks our boundaries because human beings need awe. And everything is so calculated these days and everything is so, you know, that we don't have that. And when the research has done on awe, said that it reduces stress and it improves reasoning and clarity and health and all of that.

1:11:03Well, this is what I like about transcending is that if you use that cross-section of the ocean analogy, as the mind settles down, it expands. It's like a triangle from the point at the top, It expands in that they use the term unbounded awareness. Never really knew what that meant when I first learned meditation, but it's not that bound, it's that universality of awareness. So what I focus on, what are the health benefits of that experience? But the experience is that human beings need, oh, they need unboundedness. They can't live their life every day through the minutia of point, point, point, point, point.

1:11:43Yeah, it's interesting that we're in a moment in which we have to be told, okay, you have to go out and like get on your life. No, go for a walk. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, but it's, you have to seek it out. It doesn't, we're not, you know, it doesn't happen naturally. And because of the, you know, way, the gestalt of modern life, it's not gonna happen unless you intentionally pursue it. But I just know for myself, even if I said, okay, I got an hour, you know, before I have to do the next thing, I'm gonna go out here and I'm gonna go on a walk because this is my awe time, I'm probably not gonna experience awe.

1:12:18Awe happens also like in the in-between moments, like not necessarily when you're seeking it, but when you are present enough in your life to make yourself available to it. And I think one of the benefits of meditation is it teaches you how to be present in your life such that your attention becomes unbounded or at least expands such that you're able to see things that generally elude your notice. And those things tend to be the kinds of things that make space for the experience of awe. Like I would think that the guru who's in the cave, who's been one of those outlier people can experience awe in the most mundane of moments on a moment to moment basis because of their absolute expanded awareness and ability to be present on a level that is beyond what mere mortals are capable of.

1:13:18So you just made a really telling point of the point that I was making. Yeah, so he says you're supposed to have awe. Well, again, if I'm got worried about job and I'm worried about this and I'm gonna go out and I'm gonna have awe. Yeah, no fucking way. But if I have a direct experience of that unboundedness inside of me, not trying to control my mind, not trying to stop the waves, not trying to manipulate that mindfully. Just if I just settle effort, the key word is effortless. No effort, any effort stops it. Just settle down and expand. Then when I come from that 20-minute period, or if it's a kid, 10-minute period, I have a broader vision.

1:13:59I can appreciate everything more, the mundane and the extravagant more. So what is the preparation for that? I was just saying that it was interesting that psychology is now moving in the direction of recognizing the value of awe. But where do you find that? Well, you find out where it is right here, right inside you. Right, I guess the point I'm making is you can go out to New Mexico and where you can get a clear view of the night sky, right? And have that experience. But if you're super dialed, you can watch an old woman at the checkout counter, buying her groceries and just be absolutely amazed by that in a way that instills you with some level of awe.

1:14:40That's that higher state of consciousness. That's that fifth state. That's that state of having that equanimity within me and absolutely attentive what's going on. And again, I'll go back to David Lynch. Yeah, I was just gonna say like him and the hamster or whatever it is, like, you know, he would put like the dead animal on the concrete in his garage and watch it decay over days and just be fascinated by that. Because that's his, that's not my fascination. That's his fascination. Everybody gets to be more and more of themselves. And it's not of themselves that's shrouded by stress or past traumas or adverse childhood experiences.

1:15:14The human nervous system, given the opportunity, and one of the key elements here is deep rest, the human nervous system is incredibly resilient and is incredibly regenerative. And you just have to have that experience of that transcendence inside to enjoy the outside more. Why do we get in our own way so much with this kind of stuff? The world is not exactly conducive right now to turning within. There's nothing in our public square. There's nothing in advertising. It's, hey, you know, like you were saying at the very beginning, that's a big investment. It's not like you wake up and you say, hey, I got 20 minutes to kill this morning.

1:15:52What am I going to do? We have to make the time because the world has gotten so crazy. We're still very much lizard brains. Like we want instant gratification and convenience. We want everything expedited just the way we want it, when we want it, all of these sorts of things. These aspects of modernity that on some surface level have made our lives better, but actually are driving us away from the core aspects of what make us feel happy and fulfilled. And we have to override those, but it seems to be that you're saying on some level that there is some instant gratification to this practice. No, again, I go back to the research.

1:16:34Here is the middle of COVID, full-on COVID. We're in Miami, frontline hospitals. We taught like, I don't know, 60 or 70 doctors and nurses in the ICU and emergency rooms. And then they did a study. And within two weeks, there was a statistically significant reduction in depression and anxiety. Now, if you take an anti-anxiety medication, it's two months or antidepressant medication. Now, that doesn't happen with everybody at every time because we're all different. But it is not an aberration. The fact is the human brain and nervous system are hardwired to take deep rest at will. We've forgotten how to do it.

1:17:13Maybe hundreds of years ago in an agricultural world where you're more in the flow of everything, but today we've forgotten how to access that. And so when you do that, it has a transformational effect. You know, I work with schizophrenics or people who have serious problems that could take longer. but you know, regular folk like everybody, yeah. Yeah, so you're saying short of a very acute mental health disorder, somebody who is experiencing some level of depression or has some narrative around victimhood that's related to childhood trauma, like kind of more like garden variety, you know, health conditions.

1:17:53Run of the mill American. How do you think about like how meditation fits in when people need outside help? or I know you're very careful to not like overstate claims. This isn't like a prescription for mental health disease or you're not saying that, but like, how does this fit into - It's adjunctive. It's an adjunct. If a person has high blood pressure, sure, there's a ton of research showing that TM reduces high blood pressure in some regards more effectively than antihypertensive medication. When I teach a person who has high blood pressure, I say, talk to your cardiologist. In a few months, you may not need as much high blood pressure medication.

1:18:30But if it's a genetic predisposition, you may need high blood pressure medication for the rest of your life. Well, I'm not a doctor. No TM teacher is a doctor. We say this is an adjunct to the treatment that you're having. If you can reduce anxiety, if you can reduce cortisol levels, it can only help sleep better, make better decisions for eating, any of those things. So you've been doing this for over 50 years. meditating for 50, yeah, twice a day, every day. There must be days where you've missed. Of course, of course. No, I'm not like, I'm not a crazy person here, Rich. No, but I prefer doing it, but it's not like, of course.

1:19:10And so from a personal testimony perspective, like how do you, like, how is your life? I guess you've been doing it so long that you don't know what it's like to not do it. So you have nothing to compare it to. But like, how would you say from your personal view, how it's nourished and improved your life? Well, I run a foundation and anybody who's ever run a foundation knows they say for every yes, you stand on a mountain of no's, you know. So running a foundation and doing something that's against the, when I started this 50 years ago, started, I mean, Arshi brought it out well before that. You know, there's a lot of resilience.

1:19:47There's people saying this is nuts or this or that or that. And I just believed in the science of it. And I thought this is something that could help people. So I would say resilience and I would say conviction and persistence. It allows me to have, even with what you're doing, you're expanding. This is a lot of conviction, a lot of persistence. This is a big thing you're doing. And meditation helps with that. And I think that's what helped with David Lynch with him. Because again, if you're going against the grain, if you're doing something that's never been done before, then it takes conviction, which you have to be rooted in yourself and you have to have that over time.

1:20:22So I would say that's helped me a lot. Yeah, conviction requires clarity. Yes. Like you need clarity of purpose. Deep clarity. And that's what generates the conviction, right? But in order to have that clarity, you have to have like a calm state of mind and a perspective on your own life and what's important to you. If what this person said hurt my feelings or that or that, then like I never, you just get, And then persistence is the energy to keep going. So I have a ton of energy from the meditation. And the resilience is the ability to weather obstacles without letting them throw you off course, right?

1:20:58That's of a piece with equanimity, like not getting derailed because of something somebody said or getting a bunch of no's. I remember those, I don't even remember, those Bozo the Clown balloon things, you knock it down, it bounces up, you know, you hit it. You remember those things? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So just keep going, just keep going. because again, I'm sure there's times in your life that you've had to do those same things. Sure. At this point, the foundation has taught a million and a half people? Just the beginning. Wow. So it focuses on these people who are more at risk or people who are suffering from PTSD, et cetera, but it seems to be expanding out like with the LA firefighters and things like that.

1:21:40Like what's the cohort that you think is most in need of this that you're trying to connect with? Transcendental Meditation has its own nonprofit organization and there's 150 or 200 teaching centers in the United States and people, nonprofit and people come and learn TM. The foundation, David Lynch Foundation was started because David and I wanted to bring this to people who are in need, who may not have access. Like the women who are at the family justice centers in New York, they're not going to know to go over to a TM center in Manhattan and learn TM. So we bring it to them. So the David Lynch Foundation is our common theme is trauma and toxic stress.

1:22:17Well, when we started that 50 or 20 years ago, that was a few number. But now, I mean, I teach people, CEOs who come in and they look great. He or she looks great. And then you talk to them and there's a lot of trauma in there, a lot of pressure, a lot of concern. And it's whether it's their life or they're worried about their kids. I mean, we're doing a lot of fam, teaching a lot of families now because children and grandchildren children with the social media. There's a lot of, you know, the number two cause of death among teenagers is suicide. Social media, the loneliness epidemic. Yeah. We're seeing, you know, the rise of a lot of.

1:22:54And I want to go back to your point, the happiness talking about connection with people, you know, you're talking about that. I believe that that transcendent field, well, not, I believe the transcendent field we're talking about is in Sanskrit is called Ananda, which means bliss. bliss conscience. Jesus said, the kingdom of heaven is within you. Psalms 46.10 said, be still and know that I am God. Lao Tzu said, to he whose mind is still, the universe surrenders. So I think it's the connection with one's own innermost silent self. Still, not thinking about the self, not reading about it, but actually accessing that.

1:23:35That is where the foundation of true happiness is. You've got to find it in yourself, but it's not like, oh, true happiness lies within and, you know, cutesy, cutesy. It's a very real experience. Then you're in a position to enjoy that inner happiness more and more. What is your experience sharing this and teaching this with children? Children from the age of about five until 10, they have what's called a word of wisdom. So they get a mantra. but they do it for five minutes and they do it, you know, when they're playing or drawing or something or their parents take them for a walk. From about the age of 10 or 11 or above, they all love it.

1:24:19My experience is kids, when their parents tell them to do it, some kids will do it, but some kids will reject it after a while. But then when they're 16 or 17 and they start experiencing, if they started at 12, then they go, Mom, I'd like to get my meditation refreshed. Is Bob still around? and then they go for it. They go for it. What is the status in terms of getting it in the curriculums at schools? Just meditation generally. Schools have become such political hotbed right now. It's just, everybody's afraid of anything, you know, so you can't do yoga in schools because that's this or that. So we were really successful.

1:25:00We were in schools all over the country and it was going great. and then it just got to be not just us, but everybody. And we thought, we wanna bring this to kids. We now go to community centers. I see. It's just too much of a mess. Just it's a mess. And the principals, I mean, the administration hates the teachers, the teachers this. And it was like, the kids loved it, but it just got too much. So now we're working in community centers where whole families learn to meditate. It just seems so obvious that teaching this to young people at the earliest phase where they can really understand it is so critical.

1:25:36Like we look at our education system and it's just a, it's a vestige of a bygone era, the way in which we teach and instruct kids. How so? Well, I think that the basic format of it was created at a time where we were trying to raise people to become people we could plug into the factory system and have a good workforce essentially, right? And it doesn't seem that it's changed that much. And yet the world has changed drastically and radically. And the rate at which that change is accelerating right now is bewildering. So the fact that we would still be instructing young people in the way we always have, doesn't seem to make any sense.

1:26:17And in a world in which like learning facts and memorizing really isn't all of that relevant anymore. What's really relevant is learning how to think, how to communicate, how to cooperate, and how to develop the internal skills to follow your own compass and have conviction and resilience and self-esteem and know who you are. And it's ironic that the things that could do that, like meditation in some regards in general, is far too controversial, even though there's all this data. And I think in the name of what, they're undermining a whole generation of young people who can't, I mean, the ability to deal with change is gonna be the key to, I think.

1:27:04We talked about earlier AI, and I worry that there's forces that are trying to stop kids from having tools to really be able to change and grow. And as you said, all those qualities, I don't understand. We're ready and willing, but it's just crazy. There's such crazy. And so you're forced to go to these community centers, but those are fewer and far between compared to what it used to be. There isn't that kind of afterschool infrastructure that used to exist. We continue to do the research. which my feeling is, sometimes it's a voice of a few people who create fear, but, you know, oh, this is a religion, or this is this, or this is that.

1:27:47And when there's, which it's not, but you show overwhelming data, then it'll just make people shut the other people up. You know, just say, no, no, no, no, no. This is not the middle ages anymore. You know, this is - People love neuroscience. Yeah, they love neuroscience. The more clinical trials that you can run, and the more you can kind of make that library of evidence-based data robust, I think that's the way you win. Mayo Clinic is coming out now on a big meta-analysis of all the work we've done in hospitals. That's gonna open the doors for, again, coverage. We have a hospital in New York City that just gave the foundation quarter million dollars to teach doctors and nurses.

1:28:31Another hospital pays for all of their employees to learn to meditate. Firefighters and police officers in New York City are learning covered by the foundations there. So it's happening, the door is opening. What is the message that you give to the skeptic? Like you're a skeptic, somebody comes to you because their friend dragged them.

1:28:58How do you get into that person's mind? I just, I say to them, I say, I mean, everyone's different, but I'll say, does the idea of sleeping better at night and all these different things, all these benefits, lower cortisol, does that sound appealing to you? Yeah. Okay, there's no obstacle because you don't have to believe in this thing. There's no obstacle for you having those benefits. If you're a skeptic, I congratulate you. People should be skeptical. I think it's a healthy response. What is this song and dance? You know, what is this all about? I think it's healthy. I'm a skeptic. I love big ideas, but I like them to be rooted in reality, you know, something down to earth.

1:29:41And so skeptics, I enjoy teaching skeptics almost more than anybody else because it's, wow, I didn't, where was that experience in my life? Or you've had it occasionally like in running or something. But there's not, if a person is willing to give it a try, I think there's a difference between skepticism and cynicism. Cynicism that, you know, it's just gonna get a whatever. Although being cynical, it turns out - I mean, that's dismissiveness. Yeah, and it's very unhealthy. Turns out what it does to your brain and body to be cynical, but skeptical, I think is really healthy. Mm-hmm. You mentioned you were just at TED.

1:30:19And I know that TED this year was programmed pretty heavily around what's happening with AI right now. Yeah. I saw some clips of Chris Anderson talking with Sam Altman and the Peanuts cartoon. and Sam sort of just saying, yeah, well, you know, you guys can say whatever you want, but like enjoy, right? Like - It's coming. There is a lot that's coming. And when I think about that in the context of meditation, it seems to me, and I'm interested in how you think about this, all of us are increasingly more and more in our own bespoke information, you know, silo, right? Like everybody's feed is different.

1:31:01And these feeds are increasingly being populated by, you know, AI created content. I've been deep faked a couple of times in the last, in this past year, and they were terrible deep fakes, but those are the worst they're ever gonna be, you know? And when you see it, you're like, oh, in the not too distant future, it's gonna be very easy to make it identical to me, this person saying things I've never said, talking to somebody I've never met. And when you scale that out, like, what does that mean for how we're consuming information? And the only way to find your ballast in that is to go inside and develop your own inner compass and sense of self to guide you because you can no longer rely on like whatever you're seeing throughout the day to be accurate or real or something created for the purpose of manipulating you.

1:31:56In the Bhagavad Gita, it talks about having a resolute intellect. And the resolute intellect is described as like a candle flame in a windless place. And that is the ability to be true to yourself and not be swayed by all this outer stuff. I mean, you take in all the information, you have to take it in, but then you make your decision that's clear and self-aware. And I think that's what meditation does. It allows you to settle down again in that ocean analogy, cross-section. those quieter levels of the ocean, that is where you can see deeply into things and you know yourself and you can be true to yourself.

1:32:34And I think that is essential because what's coming with all that, we have that moral compass. And they call it in the ancient texts, they say that that level deep within Ritambara Pragya, which means that level of life where only truth exists. It's like true, you're locked into the universe. and we need that because there's so much misinformation and so much seduction and so much all of that stuff and there was an interesting i was at a press conference once with mahariji and a reporter asked him what's the key to happiness in life you know and i thought it was an unusual question because it was all about and and i thought well you know kindness love compassion he said discernment the ability to make the right choice said every day you make choices.

1:33:23What am I going to eat? Who am I going to be with? Should I have that extra brownie? Should I do that? Every single decision we make impacts us in one way or another. And the ability to make the right choice, clear headed, calm with discernment is key. And then he said, ultimately, you want spontaneous right action. Ultimately, like you're a plant-based, I am too. I'm not tempted to eat something else. It's just spontaneously, He's like, I eat what I eat. And he said, you wanna be on that level, that fifth state, where you're just spontaneously making right decisions. But I thought discernment was very interesting.

1:33:59That is, that's very astute. Discernment can only occur when on some level you like know yourself, right? Like sort of the yogis, like what is your purpose here on earth to know yourself? Which is easy to be dismissive about, but when you actually think about that, it is the most profound thing. The temple of Apollo in Delphi. What does it say? First thing, know thyself. And then the next instruction, then it says, know thyself. Maharishi talks about know yourself, then be true to yourself. That's the second thing he said. So know thyself. So I know who I am. Now be true to that. And then he said, do what you know to be right and don't do what you know to be wrong.

1:34:41And he said, that's the essence of every religious and wisdom tradition. Know yourself, be true to yourself, do what you know to be right and don't do what you know to be wrong. And that is put into action by dint of making decisions. Yes, that's right. And those decisions have to be made with discernment in order to adhere to that code. Yeah, not reactive. He said the gap, you mentioned the gap, the gap between action and reaction. That's where everything happens. Something happens and do I have a moment to react or do I just react? Somebody says something, I just fight back. Or is there a moment, just a gap to say, oh, I did a lot of work in San Quentin prison teaching inmates there.

1:35:21And you talk to every one of them. I blacked out. I don't remember. Some of them are pretty calculated, but a lot of them, they just blacked out. They didn't remember doing it. And I think they just overcome with rage. There's no freedom there. There's no freedom. That is like, for somebody who's brand new to meditation, I think that is the most powerful wisdom nugget. but like, what if you could just get an extra moment of pause before responding so that you're not just impulsively reacting and you have that minute or that brief moment to say to yourself, like, what's the best thing to say here or best thing to do?

1:36:03Like just that alone, like if you scale that out over the course of a day or a life could dramatically change the trajectory of your life. because we all have those experiences. We're like, oh, why did I say that thing? I just reacted or, you know, we get ourselves in trouble all the time because of our failure to have that buffer to like widen that gap a little bit. Have you ever heard the term that your amygdala hijacks your brain? So the hijack, there's a technical term that somebody wrote. So the amygdala is your, it's in the limbic system. They used to call it the fear center, but it's actually all basic emotions is governed from there.

1:36:43And what happens, you have someone walking down the street and it's dark and you see that and your amygdala goes, whoa. What's supposed to happen is that information is supposed to ping up to your prefrontal cortex and then the prefrontal cortex is no biggie, it's just a tree or something like that. But what happens is when the amygdala, when I'm tired or stressed, the amygdala hijacks the brain and it just sends it down to the adrenal glands and now you're pumping out cortisol and you're pumping out adrenaline and you're all freaking out. That's so anger takes over your brain. And when a person has that rage or every moment, then it happens is that you've been hijacked.

1:37:24The higher brain, the prefrontal cortex, which is judgment and rational thinking and rational filter against impulsive decisions goes offline. And now I'm just, I have no break in there. So meditation calms the amygdala. So you've gone into San Quentin. One of the first places I ever taught. Wow. Well, back story. My dad was a doctor in World War II, and he was injured badly in combat in World War II, and he got a job at the VA hospital in San Francisco. So I remember on Saturdays, this is my interest in vets and inmates. On Saturdays, he used to come into my room and said, Bobby, you know, get up.

1:38:03I'm going to read one X-ray at Fort Miley Hospital, then we'll go to Candlestick Park. We'll watch Willie Mays, you know, going to heaven. and then he'd take me to the VA hospital and I'd be there for hours because one emergency became another and another and another and I saw all these World War II veterans and Korean War veterans rolling by in wheelchairs and it was just, I made a searing impression. He also used to volunteer at San Quentin Prison and I used to go with him to San Quentin Prison as a 12 year old. So I saw, and my mom worked with under-resourced kids so I was like at an early age saw all these people that in many regards, no fault of their own, suffering profoundly from trauma.

1:38:45So when I became a teacher, I love teaching, but I always thought, okay, I used to say, why isn't there a foundation that will give us money so I could pay some TM teachers to go into schools and teach TM for free? And then I kept saying, my friend one time said, stop whining, start your foundation yourself. So I called up David and that's what we did. That was 20 years ago. Did you, so you knew David before? A year or two, a couple of years before through meditation. I see. He'd been meditating since 1973. He had a great story on how he learned. What is that? He was like 1972 and, you know, he had graduated and he got money and he had this great Doheny Park in Los Angeles where he could add a studio where he could everything and he had everything he'd want as a young filmmaker and he said and i wasn't happy i had everything and i wasn't happy and he never took any drugs and he said he was wondering where do i find happiness and he remembered the story true happiness lies within which he called the cruelest of all statements because they don't tell you where where the within is and they don't tell you how to get there and then he was on the phone talking to his sister one time and he heard a difference in her voice, like I said before.

1:40:02And he said, what are you doing? And she said, transcendental meditation. Next day he went out and learned. And he famously said he never missed a meditation in 50. I'm not in that boat. That's a great story. He seems like he's such a curious mind that if somebody says, oh, this helped me, like he's somebody who would actually do it. Like, oh, I'll go, well, I'll go check that out. No, because he read deeply. he heard in the voice, deep in the voice, truth. Whereas also, because he's a director, a great director, that if there wasn't truth in what an actor was saying, he stopped it and had him do it again.

1:40:38So he was always looking for authenticity. And I learned a lot from him when I would get up and speak at events and I'd be a little nervous and people would say, oh, Bob, you did great. And I'd say, David, he'd say, eh. Like he doesn't care if you follow the script. It's like, did you show up as yourself? Exactly right. And I learned a lot from that from him. I got just be yourself. Yeah. But when I think about those experiences you just shared about your dad and the VA hospital and going to San Quentin, like it all makes sense now. Like the meditation piece was, or is on some level, like your vehicle to like help people in a way that is somewhat similar to what your dad was doing.

1:41:21Well, I was thinking about that. First of all, Kierkegaard one time said, Life is lived forward, but can only be understood looking backward. So it all makes sense now. But, oh, so my dad was a doctor. So I looked at meditation as a healthcare intervention. My mom was a teacher. And I always wanted to do something like politics. My thing was, I wanted to go into politics so you could change the laws so that everyone had equal access. What people did with that, but there should be no law that doesn't allow everyone to have equal access. And so in a way, but it's scalable for happiness. pursuit of happiness.

1:41:57So meditation is a, as a medical intervention, it's an educational tool, and it can be scalable through the healthcare system. And what you're doing is providing equal access to themselves, right? Like the laws are like a top level thing, but like going to, you know, the inward journey is the foundation upon which you build a better society. Exactly right. It has to be. Even I think that Jefferson said that you couldn't have a democracy unless you had an educated electorate. And educated then was you knew how to grow crops or he was an agricultural guy. But now educated means, I think meditation is the foundation of education, particularly as our usefulness as a vehicle for knowledge.

1:42:42I mean, why should a kid memorize the state capitals? You know? I know. What? Doesn't make any sense. Especially when you look at the kind of erosion of ethics and the decline of like higher awareness in modern society. Like if you want society to not just cohere, but flourish, like you have to tend to people's souls and their spirits and teach them tools to better comport themselves and believe in themselves and feel connected to themselves. And as a result of that, other people and the world that we share. Like you can't have a compassionate society if we don't provide people with the tools for their own self-compassion.

1:43:27Yeah, I mean, I always thought of that with any of these political parties, you know, they say, well, the government should get out of people's business or be, it's like whatever. But if a person doesn't have the tools, as you just said, nothing's gonna work. Nothing's gonna work. What is your forecast for the near future, Bob? I mean, we're in a very interesting moment. What do you think? I feel like we're on the precipice of tremendous change. That's clear, right? And I feel like the script hasn't been written yet and it can go one of two ways, but it will go one of two ways. It's either gonna go off a cliff and maybe that is what needs to happen in order to like rebuild, or we can look at it as an opportunity for a breakthrough in higher awareness and higher consciousness.

1:44:14Like there is something to all these, you know, advance of artificial intelligence that could be leveraged for the many things that you care about and that you're talking about. Will that happen? I mean, all the incentives are pointing in the other direction right now. I think that we have advanced artificial intelligence and I think we need advanced human intelligence. And I think that's not just a, you know, pablum are just one word and i think the meditation techniques not just tm but met these tools for inner to develop the interior of the brain interior of life that is how we're right now we're thinking okay how are we as human beings as little human beings going to handle this big huge advent of artificial intelligence but we're sort of limiting who we are and i think that who we are could be much greater you've talked about it much bigger but that has to happen so we can manage the AI.

1:45:09Otherwise the AI is going to take over who we are today. We're just, you know, so many, the diet we eat, the medicines we take, all these things are just dumbing us down. We're just, well, increasingly outsource all of our decision-making. And what does that do to our ability to be discerning? Yeah. Yeah. That was one of the scariest things when I was at TED. Wasn't so much that, you know, it was inspiring what's happening in healthcare and education. And now with AI, a kid in Africa can have the access to the best teachers and tutors in the world but it was when they were talking about defense and weaponry and the decisions that have to be made human beings are too slow to make those decisions to calculate it's just gonna like wars could be fought out of our hands like a automated chess match yeah but i think that um i don't know i think this coming up, I think meditation and these ancient practices, just like healthcare has been improved by these traditional systems of healthcare, medicine, traditional system, who would have known all these different things?

1:46:14And I think, well, I'll just put it this way. I would like to do the most I can as fast as I can. Well, all of these things have to have their counterbalances in a yin-yang kind of way. And as we see this explosion in all things artificial, there has to be a corresponding reaction in what is authentic, right? And there's a craving and a yearning and an appetite for like real human connection and experience. And what you're teaching and what you offer is the juice, right? It is the conduit to all of those things that we're increasingly going to be desiring and yearning for, because we need them to be human.

1:46:54Even I was talking, yes, and I was talking to this one young woman, she's now 40 or something like that, baby. She said that even the younger generation, when it comes to meditation instruction, they want to teach her. They want to move away from, you know, just everything all online tech and all that, that people want that human connection. And yeah, I think this is the, this is, it has to counterbalance. You have to, as they say, as the rose gets bigger, the thorns get bigger. I think that's a good place to land the plane. Yeah. On a high note. Yeah. You're a gift, Bob. I love the work that you do.

1:47:34And you're just a brilliant ambassador for this movement and meditation more broadly. So I salute you and the incredible service that you provide to a million and a half people and growing at this point is really a beautiful, beautiful thing. It's inspiring to me. No, I get to say something. I am honored to be on this show. I'm honored to sit across from you. I think you provide a great service and an actual blessing to your audience, which is ever growing. And I said to you before of all the shows when I did this seven years ago, that was the best interview. This is two. and when I said, you said you wanna be in the fifth state.

1:48:15Enlightenment is not some woo-woo thing. I think it's the best of humanity. It's the best of clarity. It's the best of kindness. It's the best of compassion. It's the best of insight, discernment. And you're a great ambassador for humankind. So thank you for having me on. That means a lot to me. Thank you. And I gotta learn. I'll teach you. Okay, good. This time I'm gonna do it. Okay. Another seven years. No, that's not gonna happen. but I'm gonna learn how to do this. So thank you, my friend. I appreciate it. Really great. And maybe you can come back sooner than seven years from now. Anytime.

1:48:49All right. Cheers. Cheers.

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