Crazy Wisdom

Why you should listen to this episode: Julia has some really great techniques and tips for practicing mindfulness and meditation. She is an experienced teacher and has taught all around the world including in refugee camps. Julia offers some powerful wisdom about how to operate when surrounded by stress and friction. She does not sugar coat her wisdom and if you value truth you will find it here. I've found that many people are unaware when they meet truly compassionate and wise people. Julia is one of these people and I ask you to listen closely to the wisdom she has to offer as it is powerful.

Bill Tai is a very successful entrepreneur and investor. Not only is he successful according to external validators of success, but he is also humble and shares his knowledge and brilliance without expectation of reciprocation. It is a rare gift to be both successful and humble, and our conversation contains actionable wisdom to do this. Even though my podcast is primarily about meditation and its effect on creativity, we veered into talking about the history of work and how technology is contributing to a lot of change. A fundamental component of mindfulness training is the realization that everything is impermanent and change is the only constant. We are entering a period of rapid change. Bill gives some good insights on how to capitalize on this trend. I think the most valuable thing I got out of this conversation is that whether rich or poor, you have to find the thing that lights you up on the inside. For Bill, that activity is kitesurfing. It is the keystone activity for which the rest of his life is rejuvenated by. Listen to this episode if you want to find actionable insights into how to find joy in your life.

Julia Plevin is an author and entrepreneur. She is the founder of the Forest Bathing Club in San Francisco. She started studying the mental health consequences that people suffer from when they don't get enough time in nature. After this she decided to dedicate her life to getting people back to a state of nature and thus the Forest Bathing Club was born. (0-10 minutes) Subscribe Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address We respect your privacy. Thank you! What is Forest Bathing? She explains how it comes from a Japanese practice called Shinren Roku which literally means luxuriating in nature. It is essentially a practice where you go into nature and do nothing but attend to the present moment. It comes from a period where the Japanese started doing lots of research in the 1980s into the health effects of being in nature and how it lowers the heart rate, levels of cortisol and stress. When did you first start Forest Bathing? Julia says she has always loved being in nature, but it was only when she started living in New York that she became aware of the lack of nature and how that would affect her mental health. She started doing her graduate work on the mental health effects of being disconnected from nature in 2015. The forest bathing club was born out of this research. Is the Forest Bathing club a business? Forest Bathing is a community organization. They usually do an event that is a co-creative event where people bring something to share with the whole group, an offering back to nature. Sometimes they do charge, but usually it is to ensure that they can afford to make the experience a supportive one for all participants. When did you first start getting into mindfulness and how does that relate to your love of nature? Julia says she has been doing yoga since she was 15 years old and was aware of mindfulness, but didn't really know what was. She never wanted to do the meditation at the end of the class. She loved being in nature but she would always be running through. She then started to realize the importance of slowing down and finding that more mindful state of being. How does it feel to go from spending a lot of time in nature and then back into the city with all its frantic energy? Julia explains a story of how one day she was running through Sutro park in San Francisco and a guy stopped her and asked her "Do you know why there all these ribbons around the trees here?"She was like "I'm just trying to run here. Don't bother me". He responded by saying that "These ribbons mean they are about to cut down these trees". She became aware of what was going on and realized that someone had to shout at her in order to really pay attention. She says that this man told her about how they planted Eucalyptus in the park 140 years ago and now UCSF (who owns the land) is trying to cut them down. It is feared that they might be looking to build more housing there under the guise of reforestation. She talks about how in order to write her book about Forest Bathing she found a small cabin by Stinson beach and spent time deep in nature every day. As new communities form new cities or we restore old cities, how do we ensure proper access to nature as a byproduct of living in cities? Julia says that its important to make space in new cities for nature, but Forest Bathing is actually practiced where the city meets nature. Its the integration of urban and wilderness areas. She brings up an important point that as humans we usually separate nature from urban environments, but we forget that human beings are a part of nature and so is everything we create. The streets and buildings are all part of nature as well. While in your cabin in Stinson beach, how long would you spend in between times in nature and time spent with other people?Stinson Beach is a beach town in the summer, but Julia was living there during the winter so she didn't have much contact with other people except for a friend who lived up the road. Its also only 45 minutes away from San Francisco so she could also come back pretty quickly.Stewart mentions that the most difficult thing for him when practicing in nature for long periods of time was coming back into an urban environment and being hit by the wave of frantic energy that most people spend their lives in. Most people who live in cities are always on, always under a sympathetic nervous system response. How do you deal with coming back into the city and the hustle and bustle? Whenever Julia would find herself coming back to the city and getting stuck in traffic she would look at a tree on the side of the road and this would remind her that she still can find an avenue of relaxation when surrounded by urban chaos.She also mentions that when humans look at nature we go into a soft focus which calms us down as opposed to a hard focus when scanning the environment for danger which many of us are doing all the time. Just looking at nature lowers stress. She would reminder herself that every breath she is taking is nature and all the people surrounding her are part of nature. In times of stress she would continuously repeat this. (10-20 minutes) In your meditation practice do you use mantra? Yes she has picked up various practices like this over the years studying with various teachers. One in particular she picked up from Llyn Roberts when working with her for five days in the Hoh rainforest which is the largest temperate rainforest in the world. Llyn wrote a book with Sandra Ingerman. Julia was called to live in the Hoh forest with llyn. She reached out to Llyn about research for the book. There was a synchronicity where Llyn had reserved the dates that Julia wanted to come see her in the Hoh for another client, but that client couldn't actually make it so it worked out perfectly. While in the Hoh rainforest, Llyn gave Julia a few simple mantras. One is "Out of my head, into my body, my heart and the earth". This can be done while putting your forehead into the ground and letting go of thoughts. She has another one that she uses. She went to Japan and lived with a shegendu monk. Shegendu buddhism is a lineage of Buddhism that holds that nature holds the ultimate truth. If you want to learn you have to go out into nature. The monk asked her "do you feel a connection with the universe?"She said "somedays, but somedays not". This guy also gave her a mantra that she uses with certain hand positions. She says her name out loud and says the date. She says "I'm grateful to be born in a human body. Today I connect to the universe and I aim to use my connection to serve the highest good."This reminds Stewart about the traditional understanding of mantra and how many teachers will argue that you need a mantra in Sanskrit because Sanskrit is a holy language that is able to make all the sounds that a human is capable of making which other languages cannot. Stewart says he doesn't buy into this, but the idea behind mantra was that you connect to a deity through Mantra and Julia's mantra fits this purpose. Can you describe the feeling you get when you are in nature? She says she can try and will do so through a story. When she first started writing the book, she was really stressed out about the process of writing and deadlines. She started getting imposter syndrome and questioned who she was to be writing a book about nature when stress was still a constant struggle for her. This feeling of stress became a sort of bullshit meter. She started to use it as a trigger to practice all the techniques she was learning from these people. She learned that its great to learn all these techniques but there is no point where the anxiety will somehow stop for good. It always comes back. Even today when she has a big decision to make she had to go to a redwood grove and just sit on the earth and let it take all the stress. When s...

She explains how she first got into mindfulness. She says that originally she didn't know what mindfulness was and thought it wasn't that cool. After quitting PayPal she started to look inward. She didn't know what mindfulness was but she did know how to practice self-love and self-care. She used to be really busy all the time when working. Once she quit she loved having the time to practice self-love and a more simple lifestyle compared to the working life. She would learn from people around her. Her friends served as the teachers instead of trying to find a formal teacher. She went on a retreat once to a center called Sunburst in Lompoc, California near Santa Barbara. The center was run by the organization of Sivananda.  How do you practice mindfulness? She lets her mind wander. She doesn't really have any formal practice. She essentially drops thoughts of future and past and hangs out in the current moment. So you don't have a formal sitting practice where you reserve a set time each day and focus on the breath or another object of meditation? She usually spends about 5-10 minutes in the morning before doing anything and just lets her mind wander. She practices free association meditation which is a different technique which most people associate with mindfulness where you focus on an object of meditation. Do you teach mindfulness as well? Michelle describes the backstory of how she got into sharing mindfulness. She wanted to start a company called Artificial Soul which is a way of automating therapeutic counseling. She applied to Singularity University.  Michelle wanted to help people make better decision by having a non-judgemental robot voice that could guide people. She says that she got distracted by only working on the robot angle of spreading mindfulness. She also needed to spread this stuff to other human beings. That's how she first got into sharing mindfulness on Facebook live sessions with her friends. She started weekly sessions covering everything from beliefs, relationships, and inner child work. She said only the brave people among her friends would do this work. Michelle says that mindfulness is an inner work. It's not only positive. A lot of people in the mindfulness world only see the positive side. They are stuck in duality. Its necessary to go beyond duality and recognize that the bad leads to the good and vice versa. (10-20 minutes) What is your most used technique when leading people to access their inner child in a safe way? Michelle uses dialogue and also vision boards to help people do this. She would have people work with visualization and using the symbolism and metaphors of those visualizations to help people to see deeper into their subconscious patterns. For Michelle, her visualizations would include lots of scenes of nature so her vision board was full of camping and nature. How does your mindfulness or meditation practice contribute to your ability to create? In order to create it's important to be original and not care about what people will think. To create you have to own your actions. To create means that you are no longer a victim. You are responsible for the things you are putting out into the world. Michelle says that when she is creating she seems to find people who will help. An important part of creating is collaboration with other people. They just find her and they are often weird but it works out. She says that faith helps her because she believes that what is best for the world will happen of its own accord. Everything will happen exactly as it needs to and creation just kind of happens. What is something you recently created or that was created as a byproduct of your faith? Michelle explains who she gave up a high paying job and a lot of stock options so that she could be free to create. She created Robotics for Good. She was rejected by Singularity university after pitching them, Artificial Soul. Shortly after this she was at a conference and started talking with an astronaut about getting rejected. He told her about some investors who wanted to invest in consciousness and then she met the investors. She lost touch with them for a year after this. During this year Michelle started working with the Loving AI project. They are building robots that help humans become more loving. At some point, the investor mentioned above responds to an email thread saying that they invested in the Loving AI project as well. It seemed synchronous and Michelle finds that synchronicities are a divine gift that must be received with open arms. What is the Loving AI project? Michelle explains how the loving AI project just made it through level 1 of the X-prize competition. They teamed up with Hanson Robotics which built an actual robot named Sofia. They are trying to build a robot that learns how to love people better than humans can. They have started trials with human beings testing these robots. One person who underwent this test says that he found transcendence from talking with Sofia. This interaction reminds Stewart about the novels by Philip K. Dick and the virtual therapists that Philip created in his fictional universes. Do you think that robots can serve as more effective therapists than human beings can? Do you think a robot can love us better than a human can? Yes because there is no judgment. She saw this directly with Sofia. She says that AI can support humans 24/7 days a week which in-person teachers or therapists can't compete with. It just makes sense that robots will love us better than we can do ourselves. (20-30 minutes) What is Hack Temple and what is your involvement with them? It is a church in San Francisco that was turned into an incubator. Michelle says she is a mentor for the entrepreneurs from all over the world, helping them with legal issues. Negotiations and contract law. This brings Stewart to a topic he really wants to discuss further. How do you bring mindfulness into negotiations? She says that as an attorney she has always been really calm and present. Even though lawyers generally get upset and angry, she is known for remaining calm when others are crazy. She says that mindfulness also gives her the ability to see into people's true intentions and know what they are looking for which is a very important skill in negotiation. Is anger ever an effective tool in negotiations? Michelle says that she can appear angry on the outside, but would be equanimous on the inside. She is used to lawyers around her yelling and screaming. There are a lot of time pressures and people are stressed. She says that mindfulness helps her to stay calm and collected. This doesn't mean that she doesn't question or be assertive. Stewart mentions that this constant returning to presence and equanimity can help in situations that are supercharged and particularly when other people involved are not present. He notices that when he is in these situations, his ability to return to the present moment influences those around him to also remain calm and collected. Stewart asks Michelle whether she notices the same thing. She says that she always has had the gift to read people really well. She notices that now she can tell beforehand what someone's intentions are and this helps her to filter the people who are really clear about their intentions and can be clear with those around her. This leads her to explain how she is now prioritizing working with people who are conscio...

(0-10 minutes) Aldric is a serial entrepreneur from Portugal who owns a 3D printing company which builds 3D printers for designers all over Europe. They also make scans and designs which are all open source and come up with new concepts for 3D printable objects. Its kind of like a research and development company for 3D printing. How did Aldric first get into yoga and mindfulness? Aldric is originally from Mozambique where his mother first introduced him to Yoga. He went to the yoga teachers house every day after school. He wasn't really aware what he was doing for the 3 years. He didn't recognize the significance of the practice at the time. He says that now when he practices yoga he has a whole different recognition of what the practice is and his awareness is much more focused. HIs practice has evolved. Does that have more to do with you maturing as a human being or as a natural by-product of spiritual practice? He says that, as a man, he matured later than most. He was a late bloomer. As his awareness slowly evolved he noticed his reactions to life-changing significantly. He's not sure how to answer the question. Do you have a daily practice? He continues talking about how his yoga practice evolved. After leaving Mozambique for Portugal, he found a yoga teacher at the university and he practiced 2-3 times a week. He normally practices meditation on weekends. He says that he can only meditate after running or walking. Stewart explains how Aldric's experience of needing to move before meditating is consistent with the historical evolution of yoga as a spiritual practice. Thousands of years ago it was developed in order to calm the body and mind and release neurotic energy before sitting silently. The practice of movement or Yoga asana can be from running just like moving the body in more traditional poses in a yoga studio. Aldric says that he most enjoys running into the forest until he finds a tree he likes and then sits underneath the tree for 3-4 hours of meditation. He says he did a maximum of 6 hours. He likes to meditate at night and stays until midnight at his special tree spot. What techniques do you use for meditation? He says that he uses music, in the beginning, to get him in the zone and then slowly transitions to zazen. He says that he likes to sit in half lotus as well. He says he can sit in half lotus for about four hours without pain or tension. He starts off with a guided meditation mixed with music by Alana Fairchild. He focuses on the breath and tries to relax. Sometimes he gets sleepy and he wakes himself up. He says its a struggle, but not a violent. It is a peaceful struggle. He says that afterward he finds himself singing often. Aldric says that many of his worries seem to dissolve, but often times they come back shortly. How do you bring the practice of meditation into your daily life? He explains how he is pretty busy with an important project at the moment so it's hard to fit it into his daily life as he used to. He says that he has to devote more energy to this project and less to wellness. This brings Stewart to interject with the idea that meditation is the practice of heightening and focusing an awareness that is already present every waking moment of the day. Thus it's important to see that the real juice of a meditative practice is to actually meditate when things are crazy and hectic. To bring the practice into everyday life. (10-20 minutes) How does mindfulness or meditation help you do your job better? Aldric says that it helps him for sure, at least indirectly. Meditation gives allows him to conserve energy and to face the day with more energy reserves. He says that he also struggles with insomnia and meditation helps him to rest. He says that right now because of a big project he can only meditate on the weekends. What is this big project that you are working on? Aldric gives a little backstory. He explains how he found Ajahn Brahm and the theory behind meditation. He was so inspired by Ajahn Brahm that he decided he wanted to do something to help spread Buddhism, meditation, and mindfulness around the world. He didn't find anything at the beginning and started his 3D printing company instead. Shortly after this, his girlfriend broke up with him and he fell into a depression. He was sitting in the same chair as he is sitting in the interview in his office in Portugal and he tried to meditate. It was very difficult so he put some music on. His suffering was so great and he just started spinning in the chair in circles. As he continued to spin in circles he noticed a meditative state start to unfold naturally. He felt calm and connected. All of a sudden his depression lifted and he felt in the zone. This is where the idea for Zenvow, his new project, came to him. He wanted to find out how to find external markers for the same meditative state he found spinning in his chair. He decided to build a sensor that could sense movement, respiration, and where the body is in space and time. These things could help track whether people were meditating or doing yoga. He also started working with blockchain technology and realized that he could allow people to get paid in cryptocurrency to meditate and do yoga. This is what Zenvow is trying to do. ZenVow will release two products that will help people earn cryptocurrency for practicing yoga and meditation: A meditation pad that senses whether you are sitting upright and a chest sensor that monitors breathing and body movement. (20-30 minutes) Is it possible to give accurate feedback into the meditative state? Isn't meditation in someway immeasurable? Are there external validators of an internal practice such as meditation? Aldric says that its true that meditation is difficult, but as long as you are sitting there with the intent to practice it is enough to get people into the practice. It is aimed at beginners. (30-40 minutes) Stewart explains the Sufi practice of Whirling Dervishes and how they spin in order to connect with a meditative state or an experiential understanding of God. Kids spin a lot. Kids move around. Can you explain the state that occurs after practicing the spinning or other movement practices that bring on this experiential understanding of God or ecstasy? Aldric explains how when he is floating in the water he gets an experience of spinning. This is how he usually finds this state and spinning in circles also brings this on. He explains how awareness is drawn to practices like this. What breathing exercises do you practice on a daily or weekly basis? Aldric brings up the app Prana Breathe which gives him instruction in breathing with a ratio of inhales, exhales and holding your breath. He also uses Wim Hof breathing. How would you describe your creative process? He says that its impossible to accurately indicate who had the amazing idea or why the idea became available to you instead of another. You can say that the neurons themselves and the connections between them created the idea, but then you have to dig further. Why did those neurons form in that way? What was the influence? Likely the idea is an interaction between you and your environment. Aldric goes onto say that when you say that I am an inventor or I invented something, that isn't quite accurate. Each inventor is influenced by their environment so it impossible to say that the inventor had any more responsibility for the idea than the results of the environment around her. He also states that modern physics and science still cannot accurately describe reality. It wou...

(0-10 minutes) Corvas is a founder and CTO of Meow Wolf in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Meow Wolf is a psychedelic art installation that is a mix between Disneyland and burning man. Corvas runs their technology. Stewart taught Corvas yoga and meditation previously and they discuss how his practice has evolved over the last ten years as he has helped to build Meow Wolf into the thriving business and art collective it is today. Corvas explains how he doesn't think that he would be able to do what he does at Meow Wolf without mindfulness. He describes how he discovered meditation in college along with experimenting with other avenues toward self-exploration. The first time he meditated he had messages and insights waiting for him. From that moment on he felt like he had an internal knowing of what meditation is. He said the only instruction he had at the beggining was that meditation was about bringing awareness back to the breathing. Focus on the breath. Let his mind unwind until it gets quiet. Stewart agrees and says that the breath is such a good meditation tool because it's always there. You don't need anything extra. Wherever you go you are always breathing so you never need another tool besides that for meditation. The breath is the thread that links many meditation traditions together. Stewart asks Corvas about his informal practices that he uses throughout the day in order to remain mindful and present. Corvas talks about how it's important to maintain a certain mindset while in challenging situations. He looks at environmental triggers where you intentionally leave a mark or a symbol to help him to remember to come back to the present. Do you want to become more creative? Sign up here for more educational and profound content! Email Address We respect your privacy. Thank you! (10-20 minutes) Corvas talks about his experience investigating the shadow side of his personality. When he encounters dark thoughts he uses his environment trigger to look and acknowledge these negative purposes. These shadow aspects have value. If we look away from these and pretend everything is great, then we become distorted. Corvas is learning how to appreciate these moments. Stewart brings up the cult of positivity and how it's difficult to share negative emotions with other people because they have taught to be positive all the time. We are all humans and we are fallible. Corvas says that fear and anxiety are really powerful motivators and that if you can have a healthy relationship to these negative emotions, there is great power there. This brings Corvas to talk about public speaking and the anxiety that comes with that. He's learned that just by acknowledging these emotions they tend to lose their power. They are still there but they don't bite as deep as they used to. Stewart brings up something one of his friends once said to him that "Anxiety is excitement without the breath". Stewart talks about his own experience with public speaking and how they are actually his best opportunities for mindfulness because they are the most emotionally affecting. Corvas says that human beings usually hear tone and body language before they connect with the linguistic and intellectual components of speech. You can talk about the most important things, but if you do it with no emotion, nobody will connect with it. This also works the opposite way too. (20-30 minutes) We talk about the beginning of Meow Wolf and how difficult it was in the beginning. Stewart asks whether Corvas was doing individual work to create the first exhibitions. He says that yes and that everyone was. It was an organization without hierarchy and if you were a part of the team you were creating. Now Corvas is in more of a strategic role and doesn't do as much creation. For Corvas, as an artist, he has had to adapt become an administrator. He says that because Meow Wolf is such a creative place to be he hasn't felt like he has left the creative process, but it has been an adjustment to being more hands-off in the process. He goes on to explain the story of Meow Wolf and how in 2014 they decided to move from an art collective to becoming a business and starting the House of Eternal Return. This was the first time many of the people in Meow Wolf actually had jobs. This transition was the first step in moving from an individual contributor to actually creating the circumstances for other people to be creative. He said that this transition was at first very scary because he thought he needed to be an individual contributor to feel like he was being creative. After he got into it, he realized that he could still find creativity and satisfaction in a more managerial and administrative work. He says that given all of the above, there is no replacement for the feeling of being on your own and creating a piece of art. That he still needs to find an outlet for this creative urge of his and he is waiting to get Meow Wolf to a more sustainable spot before he can take some time to fill this part of him. Stewart talks about how dancing fills that spot for him that Corvas talked about when he was explaining the solitary creative process and the cathartic experience that comes out of it. Stewart asks Corvas about the state of creative flow and whether he still experiences creative flow while doing administrative or strategic work or communicating with coworkers. He talks about a new experience he is building for their new exhibition in Las Vegas. He felt creative flow in this project as he was building out the script for one of the exhibitions there. He hadn't experienced a flow state like that for a month beforehand and he hasn't experienced one after that for a couple weeks. He says they are rarer these days. He says that the experience of creative flow happens most often when he is working with a team and they are advancing an idea and everyone is on the same page. Now that he is in a more high-level position, other people end up taking what they are working on and rolling with it. He no longer gets to keep the ball rolling and continuously has to zoom his work to a higher level. He says that a lot of his job is context switching throughout the day where the creative flow comes and goes. Stewart explains how it sounds like Corvas' job is now to set the conditions for his team members to experience creative flow for themselves. (30-40 minutes) Corvas explains how at the beginning when Meow Wolf transitioned into a business in 2014, the founders had to ask themselves the question: What is the most valuable thing I can do right now? Many times the answer was not the same as what is the most fulfilling thing I can do, so there was a sense of sacrifice that had to be made to make sure Meow Wolf got off the ground. Now that they are doing well and finding success, Corvas is asking himself: "What can I do right now that will bring me the most joy?" Stewart says that the more he finds joy in his life the more he is able to share with others. Corvas agrees. Stewart asks Corvas how he deals with the state of friction that is necessary to find creative flow. He says that the friction used to be depressing for him. He would get trapped in it. Now he has learned that those states of friction are important to his growth. Once he found the value, purpose, and lessons of the friction. He said the last time that he fell into such a depressed and lost state was maybe 4 years ago. He goes on to talk about how the state of friction between people is really important for creating something. They have worked with the same people for 10 years and he learned that the disagreement creates that dynamism where something really interesting is created. Stewart talks about his time at Meow Wolf and how the thing that impressed him most was the abil...

Check out Francis' Company Invisible Technologies (0-10 minutes) Stewart asks Francis: What does meditation mean for you? He says that being in the present is a bad response because it doesn't accurately reflect what the present is. The future merges with the present. He says you can continue to meditate when doing something mundane like thinking, planning, or abstract reasoning. He says that state of meditation is being connected to source or flow. When you are connected to everything else. This is the state of meditation. He says that meditation is about fully expressing yourself in the cosmos. Meditation is not anti-thought Subscribe Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address We respect your privacy. Thank you! Stewart responds by saying that sounds like a non-linear reality. Francis says that there was a time when he meditated for 8 hours a day. He did the Santiago de Camino in Spain and started to use headspace, he took an art class in Florence and then continuously increased the time that he meditated until it was eight hours a day. He ended up in monasteries in the east, particularly in Thailand. At some point, he realized that this meditation practice had permanently shifted him and he could either bring it into his daily life or he would stop living his life and end up in a cave. He said that spending time in Buddhist monasteries leads him to realize the falseness of secluding yourself in a monastery. Practice is meant to be lived. Francis talks about the Buddhist ideal or messiah, the bodhisattva. He explains that the first movement of Buddhism is realizing that the world is suffering. The second movement of Buddhism is that through meditation we can experience the unity behind all duality. He says that meditation is an act of living death. Its the act of getting used to death before it happens. He says that this consistent with Stoic forms of meditation. He says that if it ends there, then you have a pathetic religion. Francis says that its great that Buddhism doesn't end here and that the third movement of Buddhism is coming down from the mountain and sharing what you have found and fully expressing yourself. Francis gets into the idea that people who are fully expressing their truth are what the Buddhists refer to as Bhoddisatva's. He says that Donald Trump is a Bhodisatva, that Genghis Khan is a Bodhisattva. That horrible historical figures are more enlightened than your average person who is not fully expressing their own truth or dharma. He says that people like Martin Luther King or other "good" historical figures are also enlightened or bodhisattvas. All of these people, both "Good" and "Bad" fully expressed themselves. They took a position and risked being wrong. From here Francis gets into the historical evolution of Zen and how it is a combination of Buddhism and Taoism that merged in China. He talks about the great historical loss of great temples in China under Communism. He discusses the Yin Yang symbol of Taoism and how it represents duality and how duality becomes one. Male and female are one. Good and evil are one. Past and future are one. They are both present. We are all playing our part. (10-20 minutes) Stewart talks about how Enlightenment itself is misunderstood and that the actual state of enlightenment is not a concept but a way of being or an experience. He says that this whole comparison of enlightened beings kind of misses the points because each experience of enlightenment is a unique and subjective awareness of unity. He expresses that talking about enlightenment and comparing different historical figure's state of enlightenment gets into murky territory. He questions the validity of comparing different states of enlightenment. Francis responds that validity itself is a dogmatic word. It implies that there is one right way to do things, a scripture or a code that will tell you how to get there. How to find enlightenment. He offers that the explanation of enlightenment as someone who continuously comes back to the present is a trite one. True enlightenment comes from fully expressing your own truth, no matter what that entails. Essentially Francis says that if you are red, be red. If you are blue, be blue. But if you are blue, do not try to be red, blue, green and everything else. You have to choose to be who you really are. He returns to the idea of Trump being a bodhisattva because he believes that the person who is fully expressing their truth and triggering everyone around them is challenging everyone else to live their truth and express what reality wants them to become. He says that this is why he doesn't like normal people. They are ignoring their god given destiny and hiding from reality. He likes villains and heroes because at least they are playing in the drama of life. Francis brings up an important point about the three movements of Buddhism he mentioned earlier in regards to movement two and how meditation brings on a sort of psychological death. He says that with this psychological death comes the philosophical underpinnings of nihilism and that this is a dangerous field to play in. He says he considers himself a Taoist and Taoism has managed to fully move past this stage of nihilism. Francis talks about how in Zen monasteries they tend to decondition new participants harshly so that they come to find reality faster. They ask questions and any verbal or intellectual answer comes with a slap in the face. The proper answer could be something like a shout, something that fully expresses the terror or joy of a life being lived as opposed to the dry intellectual understanding of life. This leads to the realization that the truth is beyond words. Stewart asks Francis about how the three movements of Buddhism played itself out in Francis' own life. Francis explains that his own journey through these three movements of Buddhism was precipitated by the failure of his first company, Everest, along with the failure of his first ideology. He explains a little bit about his own life story. He grew up in San Diego, in the suburbs. He says its so nice that its horrible. It's purgatory. He says that his first blessing in his life was taking a five-year course on the great books of western history. He says that going to Cornell barely taught him anything, but he kept on reading the great book and his education flourished on its own as opposed to the schooling. After university, he started his first company which tied in with his first ideology. He built an app that helped people complete their goals. He thought technology could be used to make humans better at being human, i.e. accomplish their goals. He thought he could build an ecosystem to support this. He was building an educational system (20-30 minutes) Francis explains his story of developing his own ideology while he develops his first company, Everest. He says that he believed in truth, a final truth. He believed in Good and Evil. He thought that questions have answers. That it was possible to develop a unified theory of everything. He believed that someday humanity might grasp objective reality. He realized through reading that when reading an amazing book he would feel enlightened, he would feel like he would understand reality. Then, of course, he realized that feeling would go away and he would realize that he doesn't know. He explains how this ideology and his company failed. He made the mistake of not charging users and tried to use the Facebook strategy of growing very large and capturing a small amount of value. He and his team thought that everyone has goals so it would be a universal app that anyone could use to achieve goals. This failed because he realized that most aspirational products are just that, aspirational. Nike doesn't make money when people exe...

(0-10 minutes) Hannah introduces herself and Within Meditation. Within Meditation studio is in San Francisco and they offer 30 minute guided meditations to people who work in the financial district. Hannah talks about how she teaches beginners and how that is different from teaching more experienced meditators. Beginners have a lot of expectations and they aren't sure what exactly meditation is. This requires Hannah to be more present throughout the meditation with cues to come back to the breath and the body. When she teachers more experienced practitioners, she usually leaves a lot more silence as that is what they are looking for. We talk about our mutual experiences with Vipassana. Stewart asked Hannah which day was the worst day. She says that day 3. Stewart asks her about integrating after the ten-day meditation retreat. She says that in Vipassana on day 8 they usually talk about how people can bring back what they have learned on retreat. She said that a voice inside her said, "having a child is a way to bring love incarnate into this world". At the time she had never wanted kids and after the retreat, she ended up coming back and having two of them! She talks about how having kids is an amazing experience of unconditional love. Stewart mentions that they originally taught him how to do loving-kindness or Metta meditation and Hannah's description of being a parent perfectly describes this. Stewart asks Hannah where she got the idea for Within Meditation. She says that she noticed that in other countries with meditation traditions that they don't consider ten days to be too long. Here in the west, 10 days is a really long time. She realized that for people with busy lives the best way to introduce meditation is in short sessions and she started offering 30-minute sessions to people at pop-up events. Then they found a space in the financial district. (10-20 minutes) Stewart explains his own meditation practice and story and how he worked in office environments. He explains how he met a founder at a cryptocurrency event recently that reminded him of this intense energy that founders have when they try to create something out of nothing against a lot of barriers. He asks Hannah how she deals with this intense fire energy that founders have or how does it show up in her work. Hannah replies that when she takes her teaching into office environment's she often meets people who are skeptical about the whole practice. She says that skeptical people often say that they have good thoughts and they want to hold on to them because they are good. She tells these people to ask themselves "What are we doing right now? Are we just thinking or is there something else going on?". This reminded Stewart about a time on meditation retreat where he had a good business idea and he couldn't do anything about it at the moment. He couldn't let it go and it caused him to have insomnia. Once he learned how to let it go he was able to find that there will always be more ideas, but very few ideas that you actually want to spend your time or energy on. We talk about how creativity arises out of a natural byproduct of the meditative state and a quiet mind. Not a permanently quiet mind, but a mind that finds the spaces in between the thoughts. Hannah says that a lot of beginners realize that their minds and neurosis are running their lives. They realize that meditation is a non-pharmaceutical way of calming the mind and letting go of the neurosis. Stewart explains that a lot of beginners have an idea of what meditation will be like. He asks Hannah how she helps people move away from these preconceived ideas of meditation. She says that she helps them realize that mindfulness meditation is a method for coming back to the present reality. As Thich Nacht Hahn says, mindfulness is keeping one's consciousness alive to the present reality. (20-30 minutes) Hannah talks about coming back from Vipassana and the difference between practicing alone and practicing with a group. She says that when she got back she needed to find a group of people who she could practice with and found her teacher Michael Mcalister. Stewart asks Hannah about her favorite Dharma books. She says that Eckhart Toll's "The Power of Now"and Jack Kornfield's "The Path with the Heart". Stewart mentions that "The Power of Now" was the first book that got him into a mindfulness practice. He also mentions that he has been reading J. Krishnamurti. Stewart asks Hannah about Within meditation and where she sees it going for the next couple years. She says that she wants to fill the room and build the community. We discuss "How do you sell meditation?" Stewart brings up headspace and the other apps that have actually got consumers purchasing meditation services. Hannah says that apps are great for beginners, but that they don't serve the purpose of having a teacher give accurate feedback in the moment. Stewart responds by saying that Headspace is going to bring a lot of people into meditation and then a whole bunch of other services and teachers will not be needed to serve this larger population who are now into meditation. We talk about how prerecorded meditations like Headspace and others are a different experience than live ones. In live meditations, everyone in the room is on the same page and a prerecorded session is more of a solitary undertaking. Hannah brings up that she likes the meditation apps that give short practices that help people bring mindfulness into their daily lives. Stewart asks her how she helps her students at Within take mindfulness into their daily lives. She says that she gives students a trigger like a stoplight for remembering to stop and take a breath and notice what is going on. Hannah brings her own experiences up about how she tries to bring mindfulness into her life and she says the biggest practices is with her kids. When she is noticing anger she can regulate her emotions and take a break up. (30-40 minutes) Stewart brings up the two main tools that mindfulness gives us: regulation and awareness. Hannah says that when in a formal meditation practice she just uses awareness and whatever comes up she just moves through it without regulation. When she is having difficult moments with her children she uses regulation for example something called affect labeling, essentially labeling what is going on in her experience and choosing to respond skillfully to that. He asks Hannah about whether she uses any regulation practices when it comes to the breath....

(10-20 minutes) Andrew talks about his struggle with technology starting when he was 12. He grew up in the suburbs and had a sibling rivalry. Technology created a happy space where he could go to get away from these things. Technology helped Andrew connect with others, but the problem was that he was always on. At the time he thought it was great. He accidentally got disconnected from technology for a week and experienced presence and being aware of all the things that were going on when not connected to technology. He realized he had an issue and started to develop his own methods for staying mindful when using technology. He developed a way of taking notes offline when he wasn't connected to the phone using low-technology but then realized that a hardware device would be way better. This lead him to create Siempo which is a layer on top of a smartphone operating system that turns your phone experience into a more intentional but less distracting interface. Stewart explains the evolution of how technology is evolving quickly and human beings are adapting to it slowly. Siempo and Andrew are attempting to now harness technology to mediate the harmful effects that technology created. Mindfulness leads to the meta skill of where to place attention and how to prevent distraction from becoming chronic. It can enhance the tech that is being built (20-30 minutes) We talk about how technology plays itself out differently in diverse cultures. In Latin America, it seems that there is a strong family-oriented culture. They end up using a lot of technology and are some of the heaviest users of social media. Yet they use it differently. We discuss how its easier to take the social media off the phone, but when using the computer it's hard to regulate because of the way this technology is presented to users. Andrew mentions that Facebook seems to have engineered a system to get people addicted to new information in a very stick way. Mindfulness helps us to step in and cut this process out before it begins. He mentions that the social conditioning that humans have always undergone is now mediated by technology and we are having hyper-targeted versions of it on Facebook. Its a much more pervasive form of societal conditioning. Stewart asks Andrew about how maybe what we need is a lot more educational opportunities to teach people how to use technology mindfully. Andrew says that it is probably a mix. He mentions a program in Vermont that has its students sign a pledge to not drink or do drugs. In exchange, they get access to a lot of yoga and mindfulness programs as well as a special dorm. (30-40 minutes) Andrew notices a trend that Wisdom 2.0 conference is full of older people but hasn't found many young people getting into mindfulness solutions. He says that the banks, tech, and consulting are still taking most young people straight out of college because of high salaries. Stewart brings up the idea that many older people have a difficulty adapting to a new world with rapidly evolving technology. This is a difficult problem for the future. Stewart says that maybe its easier to get younger people to adapt faster than older people. Andrew says its still important to get older people as well. Andrew mentions some figures about how children who grow up in single-parent homes are much more likely to spend most of their waking life on their phone. Stewart asks Andrew about some of the practices he uses to get himself back to the present moment. He says that he has triggers that remind him. He has a google chrome app that reminds him to breathe every fifteen minutes. He has a fake watch that says "Now" on it. He makes sure that he takes time for rest. He downloads meditations that he can use offline. Andrew talks about how his meditation practice has evolved. He mentions his first retreat where he was taught that meditation is about focusing the mind on an object, which can be anything (the breathe, the body, etc).

Charlie talks about the Meow Wolf working environment and culture. He explains how its this weird progressive culture that actually supports the people working there as opposed to the stiff corporate environment that is present everywhere else. He says there is a punk angst to Meow Wolf that really draws people in. Everyone he works with gives him hugs and genuinely asks him how he is. Charlie talks about the difference between working in the tech world and working at Meow Wolf. Meow Wolf seems to be questioning everything that has been traditionally been considered necessary to get work done. He says that it is an emotionally draining place to work, but in exchange, there is a realness to is hard to find anywhere else. Charlie's main challenge is to help people at Meow Wolf see how some of the stuff they are doing might lead to problems in the future. (5-10 minutes) Working at Meow Wolf has helped Charlie to heal some of the trauma that he experienced when working at dysfunctional startups. Stewart mentions that working at Meow Wolf is like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) in a working environment. Stewart talks about how a lot of our reactions to things are based on what happened in the past and not what is currently going on. Stewart asks whether Charlie sees this at Meow Wolf. He says that he has seen this because there isn't a lot of judgment which allows people to quickly reassess what is going on. He mentions that this is a skill that is common for people who have gone through recovery and alcoholics anonymous. (10-15 minutes) Stewart asks Charlie whether he considers himself to be an artist. Charlie says he is a musician, but his main art is actually writing code. Charlie explains his history of learning how to code and how he found an interest in it that he had never found it before. Stewart asks Charlie how the perception of art is changing as technology changes how quickly we are able to create and with way fewer resources. Charlie says that writing code will become like writing. We will need to start teaching elementary school kids how to write code along with reading. The key is to learn how to use technology to make something. Technology is becoming ubiquitous and as they become more so if you don't know how to build something with technology you are missing out. Stewart asks if its possible for programming to get easier and Charlie says yes. He gives the definition of engineering as finding something a scientist has figured it out and making sure that no one ever has to figure it out again. It is the process of automation. The scientist figures out whether something is true. Engineers read what the scientist writes and finds a solution to incorporate the truth of what the scientist found. (15-20 minutes) Charlie talks about why he doesn't use Facebook. He deleted his account about 3 years ago because he was getting really depressed reading what a lot of his conservative family members were writing. They wrote a lot of homophobic things that caused him trauma. He also brings up the fact that he didn't really trust Facebook and he was giving them a lot of information. Stewart asks Charlie whether the creators or engineers of successful products have an ethical responsibility to make sure that their products do not become golems or Frankensteins. Charlie says that its very difficult for someone to create something and to know what the consequences will be, particularly for things like Machine Learning. He says that the product carries the biases of the creator. He also mentions that once it starts to grow and evolve other stakeholders like advertisers, employees and consumers start to change the product as well. It eventually becomes something of its own. (20-25 minutes) We talk about how pockets of the internet are centralized now such as Facebook or Google, but the internet itself is decentralized. Stewart brings up cryptocurrencies and how a lot of ideology behind cryptocurrencies is based on the benefits of decentralization and how that is really important. He mentions that it could evolve into another form of centralized products operating off a decentralized network similar to how the internet evolved. Charlie brings up the fact that the internet now gives everyone a voice, but some people's voices are toxic. He brings up how direct democracy allows for the majority to promote legislation that affects the minority such as legislation against gay marriage. (25-30 minutes) Charlie talks about ways to try and correct some of the negative consequences of new technological products. He says there are two options: work from the inside and try to influence the evolution of the product or not use the service or work for the companies creating the products. Stewart brings up the fact that we don't really know how pharmaceutical products are created and we can figure out short-term complications from their use, but they haven't been around long enough for us to know what the long-term consequences of taking them are. Humans tend to think they have a lot more control than they actually do. Charlie responds by saying its probably a good idea to internalize the saying "I am not that smart" to stay humble when faced with complexity. This brings Stewart to note that this idea of "I don't know" is really important for a spiritual practice as well because it brings us back to the present moment and how our awareness of what is really going on in the current moment is limited by our conditioned perception of what is going on. Charlie asks Stewart what his definition of Spirituality is. Stewart says that it is the process by which humans realize that the limited ego they have created is actually a puny mirror of the whole and that they are actually part of a much bigger universe. Its the process by which the self-constructed barriers to union with all that is around us crumbles. It is a felt experience of union with all that is around us. Stewart says that he recognizes that there is a divine presence that underlays all of experience and existence and that spirituality is about surrendering our individual consciousness to this greater reality. Charlie talks about how he has a difficulty with the term spirituality. He conflates it with religion or believing in ghosts or other things that aren't actually backed up by evidence. He practices a lot of things that a lot of other people consider to be spiritual but he sees them as practical. Stewart brings up the fundamental division between the theological underpinnings of Hinduism and Buddhism. Buddhism proposes that there is no separate individual self and Hindus believe that there is a bigger "Self" hiding behind the smaller "self." (30-35 minutes) Charlie brings up his idea that well-working technology is indistinguishable from magic. Stewart talks about how we are now creating what would have been considered magic with technology. Stewart says Meow Wolf is in the business of doing magic. We talk about how augmented reality and virtual reality will bring about a feeling of magic to its users. We segway into Nuclear power and how it relates to other fossil fuels. This leads us to talk about how a lot of fossil fuels create jobs and a lot of the reasons why we haven't moved to Nuclear power is because it would lead to fewer jobs.