A Toolkit for a Noisy Mind: How John Green Manages Anxiety, Depression, and Intrusive Thoughts

This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, my fellow suffering beings. How we doing today? We've got a wide ranging, super interesting and in its own way, very practical conversation with the writer and YouTuber John Green, who has a lot of experience, way too much experience, I think he would say, in managing anxiety, depression and intrusive thoughts. We're gonna do a deep dive into his toolkit for managing the aforementioned, which includes a lot of effective strategies. We're also gonna talk about his view of God, how he maintains hope in a chaotic and unfair world, and why he wrote a whole book recently about the thing that terrifies him. Many of you know John Green, but for those of you who don't, he's the author of many, many bestselling books, including Looking for Alaska, The Fault in Our Stars, and Turtles All the Way Down. He's not only a writer, he does a ton of stuff on YouTube with his brother Hank. John has created something called Vlog Brothers and also an educational channel called Crash Course. So John's coming up before we dive in though, heads up we're in the middle of a five-day meditation challenge over on my new meditation app, 10% with Dan Harris, and it's not too late to join. The challenge is called Even You Can Meditate. Every day it features a new meditation from the great Seb and Aselasi, and then twice during the course of the five days we do live video sessions where you can ask questions of me and Seb. The first video session already happened, but you're not too late to join the second one. And don't worry if you sign up after the fact, this challenge will be available on demand in perpetuity. Again, it's available exclusively over on the 10% with Dan Harris app. Head on over to danharis.com to join us. I should mention that this challenge is actually designed in part to celebrate a new audio book or Audible original that Seb and I co-wrote and co-recorded. That book is also called Even You Can Meditate, and if you want to check it out, you should go to Audible.com. One last thing to say on the promotional tip, I am doing a live event in New York City. I would love to see you there. It's at the 92nd Street Y on May 17th. You can meditate with me in person. I'll be guiding a meditation and then taking your questions and talking all about how to fit this practice into your life, and especially focusing on how it could be helpful at a time when so many of us feel so anxious and angry. I'll put a link in the show notes. Seriously, I would love to see you there. Okay, we'll get started with John Green right after this. Have you ever invested in something that seemed incredible at first, but did not live up to the hype? That happened to be back in the 90s when I invested in a company that made the Palm Pilot. People of a certain age will remember those. 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You can get smart reports that track where your money's going. You can use Square savings to auto set aside funds for taxes, upgrades or slow months. You can also manage your staff payroll and schedule all in one place. Right now you can get up to $200 off at square hardware at square.com slash go slash happier. That's squre.com slash go slash happier. Run your business smarter with Square. Get started today. John Green, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Pleasure. I started a podcast this way recently. I'm going to try it again with you. And I asked this question in the opposite of a perfunctory casual way. I'm just curious, how are you? You've been incredibly candid about ups and downs psychologically. So just like today, how are you doing? Today I'm doing really well, which is certainly not a guarantee. I wouldn't have told you that earlier in the week because there are ups and downs. I've lived with OCD for most of my life. I've had periods of major depression. Right now, all of that feels a little distant. It feels very well under control. It feels like I'm able to live the life I want to live. But I also know that as the old Liberian proverb goes, no condition is permanent. The Buddha could have said that. It's interesting to know it's an insight arrived at in Liberia as well. I noticed that you said a couple of days ago you might have felt differently. So this is really subject to change. Yeah, I just think a few days ago I was having a lot more stress in my personal and professional life. And so things were a little more hectic and a little more challenging. But the blessing of building a set of tools in your life that you can use to help with mental health problems, and I've had now 25 years of getting to work on this stuff, is that the periods of challenge don't go away, but for me, the intensity of them can shrink and also the length of them can shrink. And I wish that I'd known that when I was younger because I feel like when I was in my 20s, it always felt to me so permanent. Depression felt utterly permanent. It felt as permanent as the sun. And in my periods of depression, it would feel like there was no escape from it and there was no future. I mean, I can't say this universally, but now I think with the benefit of, like I said, the toolkit and also I think just maturation, I understand that these things can be really intense and really challenging, but I can also have a rich full life at the same time. And knowing that, like knowing that it's possible to live with mental illness and also have a good life is really important for me. I think it's important just for everybody to know whether they have a diagnosis like major depression or OCD or they're just worried well that a good life can include, inevitably will include ups and downs. Yeah. Yeah, no big ones. I'll definitely want to get into your toolkit in a pretty big way, but before we go there, I'd be curious to hear a little bit more about your situation. You mentioned depression, you mentioned OCD. Are they separate? Is one the product of another? How does it work, as far as you can tell? I'm definitely not an expert. I don't want to pretend to be an expert. Don't come to me for expert advice on anything, let alone mental health. But my own experience has been, and I think this is backed up by research, that OCD is pretty highly correlated with major depression and anxiety disorders. And so people who have OCD often also have concomitant depression or anxiety problems. For a long time, OCD was classified as an anxiety disorder. And now it's classified a little differently. I don't know how much it depends on those classifications. I think my personal experience has been that not being able to close the loop on a thought spiral is extremely anxiety-provoking. If, for example, I have a passing thought that there might be a radon problem in my house, and I can't get rid of that thought, and I can't reassure myself, and I can't close the loop on that thought by finding certainty that there isn't a radon problem in my house, even by installing a radon detector or calling the National Radon Federation or whatever. And then it comes to a point where I'm using these compulsive behaviors, making phone calls, checking, checking, checking, reinstalling different radon detectors, etc. That's a response to the overwhelming anxiety. And the anxiety is born of the fact that I don't want my family to die. I don't want my family to die of radon poisoning or whatever else it is. OCD tends to strike what we love the most and what we care about the most. It tends to strike us in the places that are the most relevant to us. And for me, that's the health and well-being of my family a lot of times, or the health and well-being of myself. And that's what I have to manage, I guess. Like I said, great benefit of having that toolkit is that it's easier to manage, but yeah, it's been incredibly hard over the years. I'm sorry, that really sucks. I have some people who I'm very close to, extremely close to who have received a diagnosis of OCD. So I have some familiarity with it. But just for those who don't, you talked about these thought loops, these thought spirals. I can say, and I think this is quite common, that I get into those occasionally, like for me, it's always very self-centered. Am I losing my hair and I just can't fucking stop thinking about it? Or I looked fad, I think, in some recent picture and I'm just going down the rabbit hole and I literally lose sleep about it. Or we have a dip in our podcast numbers and I start thinking I'm going to have to sell the house or whatever it is. My understanding, and you'll tell me if I'm wrong about this, is that OCD is that normal thing, but just exponentially worse. Yeah, just where it completely takes over your ability to be conscious in the world, so that I can't read a menu, let alone a book. There's this great Edna St. Vincent Malay poem, I quote sometimes. I think she's talking about depression, but it works for OCD too. She says, night falls fast, today is in the past, blown from the dark hill, hither to my door, three flakes, then four arrive, then many more. It's like that for me. There's like three snowflakes of thoughts and then a fourth one and then it's an absolute white blinding blizzard, where I just can't think about anything else. I can't distract myself from the thought. There's a reason for me that the O comes first in OCD, that the obsessive thoughts come first, and then the compulsive behaviors are really born of a desire to control that fear in some way, trying to find some way to handle the obsessive fear, some way to reassure yourself, some way to calm down. The problem is that over time, those strategies that you develop, those compulsive behaviors you develop to try to deal with these obsessive thoughts, they become quite isolating, times quite paralyzing and overwhelming on their own as well. I could imagine that both the obsession and the compulsivity would be isolating because they're driving you deeper into the tunnel of yourself. Yeah, no, everyone else lives on planet Earth and I live on planet. My family's about to die from radon poisoning. Right. It's amazing to me how much you have gotten done and continue to get done with these incredible books you've produced in this YouTube juggernaut, never mind building and sustaining a family. I just find that very impressive. I don't know if this is a question, but I want to say I find it very impressive how much you've been able to get done. This is a more ordinary story than people think it is. I think a lot of us who live with serious mental illness also have rich and fulfilling lives and there are times when chronic illness really controls what you're able to do and that's very frustrating. I get really, really frustrated when I'm less productive than I want to be or when I feel like being unwell is hampering my ability to be in the world, but there's a lot of ways to be in the world. I think narrow constructions of productivity, writing X number of books or making Y number of videos, really can, I think, sometimes distract us from what's really productive. There's a great line in one of my brother's books where he writes that you will always be unhappy until you realize that one of the things you need to produce is your own joy. That's something that I maybe haven't focused on enough in terms of my thinking about production. I don't want to just think about, oh, I produce videos and books. I want to think about how I also produce memories and experiences and joy and richness in connection with other people. A lot of people will be familiar with your brother Hank, your best friend, partner in crime. Do you think he was saying that we need to take care of ourselves before we can be productive? In other words, if we understand productivity, even from a reductive standpoint of getting shit done in the world, actually joy makes sense even within that POV because you're just really not going to be good at what you're doing without the joy. Yeah, and also alongside the other stuff, that there needs to be a measure of joy within the work itself, I think. I'm really lucky that a lot of the work I do, not just working on books, but also working on a crash course with a team of people, is also joyful work. It's work that deepens my connections with other people that feels fulfilling. I find a lot of consolation and encouragement in a sense of purpose. When I don't feel a strong sense of purpose, it's pretty hard for me to even get out of bed in the morning. But when I do, it's a lot easier. A lot of things that would otherwise overwhelm me can fall by the wayside because I can tell myself, well, I know why I'm doing this. I know why I'm on book tour. I know why I'm getting out of bed in the morning. I know why I'm making podcasts and videos and stuff. When I have that clear sense of purpose, it's a lot easier for me. Well, it feels like now we've stepped into the toolkit. And again, with the caveat that you're not a mental health professional, we're just talking about what you personally do to keep your shit together to the best of your ability. And it sounds like you just listed two things that are related. Maybe three things, creative work, a sense of purpose, and then doing it with a team you enjoy working with. Yeah, my great friend, the late Paul Farmer who co-founded Partners in Health said, almost everything that you do in your life that's valuable will be done in partnership. And I found that to be true. Even writing a book which feels like a very lonely ivory tower kind of work is in fact deeply collaborative. Deeply collaborative with my editor, with my publicist, with the marketing team, with the people who lay out the book and decide the font and everything and the cover and all of that collaborative work is really, really important. And it doesn't exist separate from the writing process for me, but as part of it. And then making YouTube videos is inherently collaborative as well, because it requires a team of people. I mean, I still make Vlogbrothers videos alone in my basement by myself every Tuesday. But even that's a collaboration because it's a collaboration with the audience, a collaboration with my brother. I do find a lot of encouragement in collaboration and in creative work. I used to think that the only purpose of creative work was to reach an audience and to, you know, that it had to be made as a gift for the audience and that that was the point of it. These days, I find myself thinking that in fact, there's a lot that I get from it and that's okay. In fact, that's good. I would write novels even if they were for an audience of zero because I find a lot of fulfillment in it. I really enjoy it and I really learn from it. I learn about myself. I learn about other people. For me, writing fiction is a mirror in the sense that of course it's coming from me and I'm the one writing it. And so it's revealing to me of my own, the deeper rooms of myself. But it's also a window. It's a window into what other people's lives might be like, a window into trying to imagine that other people have just as complex and multitudinous and experience as I do. I absolutely believe that creative work can be an antidote to all manner of despair. And yet, I'm curious, I'm going to ask somebody who is himself in the middle of finishing up a book. I find that it also produces despair. Yeah, that's fair enough. It's really hard. It is hard, especially when you're trying to finish something. For me, the initial drafting, the initial writing of a story or a book is full of discovery and intoxicating intrigue and there's real thrill in it. And then even in the first set of revisions or so, you're still discovering so much about the story and you're still finding connections to other worlds. Like when I was writing my most recent book, Everything is Tuberculosis, I remember in revision, I was really trying to balance the story of this young boy trying to survive multi-drug resistant tuberculosis with the history of this disease that's killed so many billions of people. And I was still really enjoying that. And then by the third draft or so, it was just drudgery. It was really trying to get it right, not for myself or my personal fulfillment, but for the reader, which is of course extremely important, but it is really frustrating. And there are times when you're doing creative work, when it's super frustrating because you can't figure out a way into it. You can't figure out what you're trying to do. And that's really, really hard. But hard is not the opposite of fun. And I try to remind myself of that. Hard is not the opposite of fulfilling. Hard is just the opposite of easy. And there are lots of things that are hard that are also worthy. I want to signal to the listener that I have not lost the thread. We will come back to John's toolkit because I think that will be of high interest for this audience. But you did mention your recent book, Everything is Tuberculosis. And we're going to read a little bit from one passage that my ace producer on this episode, Eleanor, identified. So this is a couple paragraphs, brace yourself. I should acknowledge, I guess, that one reason I'm interested in TB is that I have obsessive compulsive disorder. And my particular obsessive worries tend to circle around microbes and illness. Before the germ theory of disease, we did not know that around half the cells in my body do not, in fact, belong to my body. They are bacteria and other microscopic organisms colonizing me. And to one degree or another, these micro organisms can also control the body, shaping the body's contours by making it gain or lose weight, sickening the body, killing the body. There's even emerging evidence that one's microbiome may have a relationship with thought itself through the gut brain information axis, meaning that at least some of my thoughts may belong not to me, but to the microorganisms in my digestive tract. Research indicates that certain gut microbiomes are associated with major depression and anxiety disorders. In fact, it's possible that my particular microbiome is at least partly responsible for my OCD, meaning that the microbes are the reason I'm so deeply afraid of microbes. This is a fascinating reading. And it just makes me wonder, why would you want to dedicate yourself to a book about the thing that terrifies you? Well, I'm interested in it, for lack of a better term. There's a great Virginia Wolf line where she writes about how, given the extent to which illness has shaped our lives and has shaped our communities, you would think that great epics would be written about it alongside love and war and the other great topics of epic literature. And yet relatively rarely do we write and read about illness. I've always, I guess, been of that Virginia Wolf persuasion that we should write and read about it more and think about it more. Now, I sometimes think about it unhealthfully, but I want to understand it. I want to understand it because I want to understand myself, but I also want to understand it because I want to understand my community and my social order. Like, what does it mean to live in a world where a million people die every year of a disease? We've known how to cure since the 1950s. What does that say about us? What does that say about the world we share and the world we might share instead? But I also want to write about it because it does just fascinate me. Illness fascinates me, the temporariness of us and everything we love fascinates me and I haven't fully reconciled myself to it. What does it say about us that hundreds of thousands of people are dying all the time from this disease that we know how to cure? And at the same time, our government, the United States government, both of us are citizens of the United States, our government has pulled back from funding global health in ways that appear to be directly leading to fatalities. Don't think you need to say appear to be. I think it is. And we saw hundreds of thousands of people get their treatment interrupted. And we know that when your treatment for tuberculosis is interrupted, so it takes about four months of daily antibiotics, usually to cure TB. And if we don't get those medicines to someone every day, and there's a period where they don't take any medicine, it's quite likely that they'll develop drug resistance. And that's a real, real challenge, especially in the case of extensive drug resistance. That can make TB much harder to cure, and in some cases, in some communities, make it impossible. And so, we're losing 4,000 people a day to tuberculosis, but I think that as a result of the pullback in the next few years, we'll see more people dying of TB rather than less. And that'll really be the first time since the 18th century that the number of people dying of tuberculosis goes up and set it down. And that really is an indictment of the way we distribute resources, not just in the United States, to be clear, but also in other wealthy countries. Ultimately, TB exists because we allow it to exist. And that's what I wanted to write about. There's all kinds of things in life that are just unfair. It's not fair that I have OCD. It's not fair that my brother had cancer a couple of years ago. It's not fair that kids die of cancer. All kinds of things in life are unfair. But when we have the tools to do something about injustice and we don't use those tools, that makes me especially angry and frustrated because it's not just that it's unfair because we don't know what to do. It's unfair and we do know what to do. We're just choosing not to do it. Yeah, I think another word you could describe, aside from it being unfair and cruel, is stupid. It's not like we don't share the planet with the other people with this communicable disease. Exactly. Yeah, I mean, it is really stupid to allow tuberculosis to still be a thing. It gives tuberculosis a lot of opportunities to develop further drug resistance and eventually it could develop resistance to all our tools. And we could go back to a world like the one we lived in 90 years ago where my great-uncle Stokes Goodrich died of tuberculosis in a sanatorium in North Carolina. That is not unthinkable. It's stupid. It's callous. I guess what's most interesting and distressing to me is that it reveals this deep truth about humans, which is that we know in our guts that all human lives are equally valuable and equally multitudinous and equally complex and rich. And yet we don't build systems that reflect that reality. Some of that is because of the nature of structural impoverishment going back for centuries. Some of it is because when lives feel distant from ours because people may not speak the same language or may not use the same tools of the social internet, it's easier to dismiss those lives. But ultimately, that's a failure of empathy. I mean, we do have some technology problems when it comes to tuberculosis and other communicable diseases, but the biggest challenge we have is an empathy challenge. Coming up more from John Green's toolkit, we talk about the very tricky and interesting question of how you find yourself. And we talk about how to reduce shame through naming. I'll let him explain that. We talk a lot on this show about peace of mind contentment. You know, one big way to have some peace of mind financial security for many of us and myself included, worrying about money takes up a lot of mental energy, which brings me to one of our sponsors today, Gamebridge. They offer financial products with a guaranteed rate and I want to emphasize that word guaranteed. 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Head on over to paleo valley.com slash happier or use the code happier at checkout for 15% off your purchase. That's paleo valley.com slash happier or use code happier at checkout. So the other thing that great passage I just from you that I just read back to you, the other thing that it raises, this seems to come up a lot in your work and in your interviews is the insubstantiality, the unfindability of the self. How can John call himself fully John if his microbe is populated by other beings? Indeed, half the cells that are made up of me are not mine. Yeah, that's a little distressing to me. I have a hard time with that one. But of course, self is incredibly complicated. Self is in many ways an illusion. Like, I'm not the same person I was 30 years ago. I don't have many of the same cells. I don't have a lot of the same worldview. I've grown and changed a lot and I hope that I can say the same 30 years from now. Self is a story that we tell ourselves and we need to make it an expansive story so that we're not stuck being the self that we were five or 10 or 20 years ago. We don't want to get stuck in that story so much that we don't keep an open mind to be able to change and grow. So if there's a positive to me from the fact that half the cells in my body aren't mine, if there's an upside to it, if there's an upside to the fact that the soul is not something that you can go into the body and pull out with a pair of tweezers, it's the fact that that means that myself is also malleable. Myself can also change and grow and that's actually an encouragement, I think. So I try to see the upside of that even at times I do feel a certain body horror in the fact that I'm stuck inside of a body with half the cells being microbes. Yeah, I think you've written about the fact that there's some mental horror of wondering, you know, as somebody who experiences a lot of thoughts spirals, I believe you've put it like, who's the captain of this ship if I can't even claim these thoughts as my own, I clearly can't control them. Yeah, I mean, that understanding that I'm not in control of my own thoughts is a hard thing to swallow for me. But of course, I'm not. And the thing about thoughts is that they're just thoughts. OCD and other disorders like it tell you the lie that your thoughts are somehow incredibly powerful, that if you think your parents are going to die, they're going to die, that if you think you're poisoning your family with radon, you probably are, or at least you can't fully reassure yourself that you aren't. But thoughts are just thoughts. Thoughts come and go. People have all kinds of weird thoughts all the time, all day long. And of course, the right thing to do when you have an unusual or distressing thought, I've heard therapists say that it's like you're standing on the side of the street and you're watching cars drive by. And the right thing to do is you see a weird car and you just let it drive by. And you're like, well, that was a weird car. I bet there'll be another car in a minute that'll be a different looking car. But of course, what I do is I'm like, I got to get in that car and figure out what's going on. And that's the wrong strategy. Have you learned better strategies over time? Yeah, I mean, definitely understanding that thoughts are not as powerful or as important as I believe them to be, or as I'm inclined to believe them to be, is powerful for me. Understanding that intellectually is of course different than being able to fully internalize it. But understanding it intellectually is a gift and one that I take pretty seriously, because I do find that knowing that as a ground of being is helpful. Just as knowing that myself is a story, I tell myself is helpful, because then I can kind of change the story if I need to. Do you have a story you're currently telling yourself? Is this like an exercise in some way? Yeah, Dan, I'm just a dad from Indianapolis. That's the story I'm currently telling myself. Just a husband and dad trying to make his way in Indianapolis. That's a really interesting question. I mean, I never want to put all my identity eggs into one basket. For a long time, I thought of myself like, I'm just a writer or just a public person. If my value as a public person goes down, that means my value goes down. If my value as a writer goes down or my books don't sell as well, that means I'm not as valuable as a person. I'm kidding when I say I just want to think of myself as a dad from Indianapolis, but at the same time, I'm not totally kidding, because those are the most important identities to me. My identity as a parent, as a spouse, as a son, as a brother, those core relationships are really where I want to put most of my eggs. Then the eggs that need to go into the professional basket, they're important, but they aren't nearly as important as whether or not I'm taking care of the basics. I really relate to what you're saying. You and I are broadly speaking in the same industry as I guess content creators or whatever you want to call it. Yet I'm embarrassed to admit, but I'm doing it anyway, that most of the time, my anxiety centers around the stuff that matters less, meaning, as I referenced earlier, when the podcast doesn't have a good month or I put out a book and it doesn't do that well. I'm clearly consciously and subconsciously putting my eggs in the professional basket when it's not the most important basket. It's not the most important thing, but it is the easiest to measure. Nobody tells you, like, your dad points are like 8% down this month. As a result, it'll probably continue to go 8% down next month, and then pretty soon you'll be out of business. Nobody tells you that. The good and the terrible thing about the internet is that it's made all of this stuff very easy to measure, and it's really easy to conflate what's easy to measure with what's important. Man, that is true. Back to the mystery of the self. I, as a practicing Buddhist, really see it through a Buddhist lens. Have you encountered much of the Buddhist thought and philosophy and practice around the self? No, not a lot. I mean, I know a little bit about nonattachment, but I don't know a lot about the self. So can you educate me? Well, I mean, it's just, I think you kind of nailed it to a certain extent when you said before that seeing the insubstantiality, the mystery of the self is good news, because then you have the ability to change. And in my understanding of the Dharma, which is basically just the fancy way of saying the teachings of the Buddha, that is the foundational insight, or at least one of them. The other is what your Liberian friends have noticed too, which is that everything's changing all the time. And of course, that bounces right back to the self. If everything's changing all the time, how can there be a solid self? Definitionally, there cannot be. So that is the thing to let go of. It's very hard to do, but through practice, you can. I'll give you one quick one, and it came to mind when you were talking before about your intellectual grasp of the fact that thoughts are insubstantial, but being merely intellectual is only of limited comfort. You can, I think, it make it more visceral. And this I'm going to steal from my longtime Buddhist teacher, Joseph Goldstein, which is just to ask yourself the question. And when you notice that you're in a flurry of noxious thoughts, like, what is a thought? Check it out. Go check it out. Don't just rest in the knowledge that there's no substance to us. Like, go look for it. And that can produce, at least in my experience, some visceral understanding of the insubstantiality. Is any of that land? Yeah, no, that really resonates with me. It can be very helpful, because I think a lot of people come to Buddhism for the stress relief, but wash up on the rocky shores of this brain-breaking idea of the self being an illusion. But on this level, then, it becomes very practical. Like, I don't have to take my thoughts so seriously. That's liberating. Yeah, for sure. And that they pass, and there will be other thoughts behind it. Indeed. All right, let's talk about some of your other strategies in the aforementioned toolkit. On my list here, that is the product of doing some research. I see something labeled shame reduction through naming. Does that ring a bell for you? And if so, what does it mean? It means, I think, that great Mr. Rogers line, anything mentionable is manageable. And anything not mentionable tends to be not manageable. And so, for me, a lot of the challenge of writing and living in the world is finding form for the formless, finding some kind of ability to give language to the way down deep stuff that's really abstract. And for me, that's where shame lives. That's where embarrassment lives. And if I can bring that fourth into the world and allow it to see light through giving it form or giving it some kind of structure, then it becomes manageable. So, how does that work on a moment-to-moment basis? Well, I guess I can give you one example. Like, when I was writing my book Turtles All the Way Down, which is about a young woman with OCD, her OCD is very different from mine, but, you know, we both have the same disorder and we both struggle with a lot of the same stuff. I was trying to find some way of not just saying what it's like, it's easy to say what pain is like. We almost always use similes when we talk about pain. It's like a stabbing in my neck. It's like a hammer on my head, whatever. But it's hard to say what it is. It's very hard to give direct form for pain, whether it's psychic or physical. And that was sort of the challenge I set for myself with Turtles All the Way Down. And what I really wanted to do was bring forth my own shame by giving it language. Language like, for instance, Thought Spirals. That idea wasn't inevitable or natural. Like, that's one way of conceiving of it. There are lots of other ways. But language like that, and then also in the novel to find structural solutions, find ways that, you know, Aza's internal voice can be loud enough in the mind of the reader that the reader can experience some of what she's going through so that they're not just empathizing with her. They are on some level experiencing what she's experiencing. I'd made a note of anything mentionable as manageable. That Mr. Rogers, he had a lot of good stuff. He did. It also kind of is consonant with my understanding of meditation practice, which is you sit and watch your mind either informal meditation or as you're just walking around the world and you notice hatred is coming up or fear. And just the act of labeling it in the moment creates enough distance so that you're not in it. Yeah. I cannot tell you how many times that has come to my rescue. And I could also not tell you how many times I have failed to do it and done a bunch of dumb shit. Another thing on my list is, and this has kind of come up obliquely, but I think it makes sense to name it explicitly, helping other people. For you, I believe you've found that one way to manage your own psychological struggles is to turn your attention outward. Yeah, absolutely. There is only so much work I can do within myself and find fulfillment in it. I also have to turn out to the world. And I know that's not true for everyone, but it is for me. I need to turn out to the world and act in the world as best I can on problems. And one of the challenges of that for me is that in the information landscape we all share now, there's a new problem every day. There's a new crisis turning our heads this way and that, and it's hard. The horror is abound in every direction. And that's true. All those horrors are real. It's not that they aren't real. It's just that if I'm looking in every direction at once, if I'm thinking about tuberculosis and malaria and climate change and HIV AIDS and COVID and and and and forever, I don't know what to do with myself. I get overwhelmed and I get paralyzed and I have complete decision paralysis and it's hard for me to even get out of bed and function. What I've found is that taking a long term view of long term problems is really helpful. My brother likes to say that bad news usually happens all at once and good news happens slowly. If we were to really report the most important news story every day, I would argue that the front page of the New York Times every single day for the last 30 years would read fewer children died today than any day in the last 5,000 years. And that's been true almost every day for the last 30 years. We've reduced the number of people who die under the age of five from 12 million the year I graduated from college to 5 million last year. It's an incredible, incredible achievement. It wasn't natural. It wasn't normal. It wasn't ordinary. It wasn't going to happen any way. It happened because hundreds of millions of people work around the world to make it happen. And that long term change has happened very, very slowly, infuriatingly slowly. It should be happening faster. We still lose millions of kids every year needlessly. And so I don't want to pretend that like this isn't a crisis. It is a crisis, but it's a crisis that can get better when we work on it when we share our attention to it. And whether it's maternal health or tuberculosis or climate change or any other big problem we share, we can see these problems get better when we work on them together. And that outward focus and that long term way of looking and a systemic way of thinking about these problems is really key for me, really key to my fulfillment and happiness as a person. Because the other thing is that then you're working with interesting people and interesting problems, which is fun. It's fun. It's interesting. It's interesting to think about how to lower barriers to educational access through something like Crash Course. It's interesting to think about how to improve maternal and child health in deeply impoverished communities like Sierra Leone where the government is desperate to be working on these problems, but just doesn't have the resources to do it. It's really interesting fulfilling work. And I get to participate with thousands or tens of thousands of people and working on those problems. And it's pretty fun, actually. One of my glib little lines is the view is so much better when you pull your head out of your ass. I just see that over and over again. And you and your brother have done a great job of really rallying your audience too. And I believe these are your words, decrease the suck, but as a team. Yeah, you're not going to decrease that much suck in the world by yourself, but you can decrease a lot of suck in the world in collaboration and partnership with other people. During this course of this conversation, we've touched on the bugs in human nature to be a little cute. We have an overabundance of bad bugs of tuberculosis because of the bugs in human nature where we can be selfish and otherwise people, etc. But then there's also the features in the human operating system you've also touched on, which is well-intentioned people working together in collaboration have brought down child mortality in some quite striking ways. Given all of that, where does that leave you in terms of your POV on our species? Well, I'm broadly in favor of humans, which used to be a fairly well-established fact, but I think now is a bit counter-cultural. I'm not sure everybody agrees with me, but I'm quite in favor of humans. I think our capacity for wonder is extraordinary. I think our curiosity is extraordinary. But most of all, I think our capacity for collaboration is very, very special. You know, ants are great collaborators too, but they don't have our brain power. I've been thinking about this because I live in Indianapolis, which is the home of Kurt Vonnegut, the great American novelist, one of my favorite writers, hugely influential person in my own creative and personal life. But there were aspects of Vonnegut's work that really bothered me. There was one novel that he wrote in the 80s, I think, called Galapagos. When someone would die in the novel, he would glibly say, well, they weren't going to write Beethoven's Ninth Symphony anyway. And it's true, they weren't. I'm not either, you're not either. And on that level, most people don't matter that much. They weren't going to write Beethoven's Ninth Symphony anyway. But the thing is, we only need one person to write Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. We really need our people to hear it, people to listen to it, people to be transformed by it. And that's the gift. It's not that it's some tragedy, like imagining a world without people is some tragedy because nobody will be around to write the next Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. It's a tragedy because no one will be around to hear Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Trees, I think, falling in the woods will still make a sound, but Billie Holiday records won't. And I really like us. I don't know that we are good news. I understand that we are a horror, that we have committed unspeakable atrocities against each other, against other forms of life. I don't mean to sound polyannish about this, but I think we can be good news for each other. I really do. I agree. Coming up, John talks about what he learned from his time as a chaplain in a pediatric hospital, a searing experience, his current view of God, the question of hope, and the question of how much or how little we should be sharing about ourselves with other people. A thoughtfully built wardrobe comes down to pieces that mix well and last. And that is where Quince shines. Premium fabrics, considered design, and everyday essentials that feel effortless to wear and dependable, even as the seasons change. Quince has the everyday essentials I love with quality that lasts. They've got lightweight cashmere sweaters, I've got three of those I think. Short sleeve Mongolian cashmere polos, linen bottoms and shorts, tees, and 100% Pima cotton and European jersey linen. These are versatile pieces that make a wardrobe actually work from season to season. And Quince works directly with top factories and cuts out the middlemen. You're not paying for brand markup or fancy retail stores, just quality clothing. I'm sitting in my podcast studio looking down at my feet while I read and I've got Quince socks on right now. High quality socks, highly recommend. They only partner with factories that meet rigorous standards for craftsmanship and ethical production. You've heard me say before, I wear Quince all the time, from the pants I wore to a dinner party last night to the socks I'm wearing right now and on and on. Right now go to quince.com slash happier for free shipping and 365 day returns. That's a full year to build your wardrobe and love it and you will. Now available in Canada too. Don't keep settling for clothes that don't last. Go to qince.com slash happier for free shipping and 365 day returns quince.com slash happier. I've asked about your view of the species. I'm curious like what your view is metaphysically. I understand in your younger years you spent time training to be an episcopal minister and also chaplain and children's cancer ward, I believe, which then I think went on to be the inspiration for your huge novel, Fault in Our Stars, which became a movie. I'd love to hear a little bit of that story, but also where are you on God these days? Yeah, so I worked as a chaplain at a children's hospital and did know a lot of kids who were really sick or who died not just of cancer, but of accidents of other illnesses. I was briefly in discernment, as we say, for the ministry. I'm still a Christian. I still am a episcopalian. I still work from within that religious tradition and find it helpful to work from within that religious tradition. I don't, and this drives people bonkers when I say it, but I don't know how else to say it, but I'm not really that interested in the question of whether God is really real in the way that a table is really real. Actually, quite like a table, tables are constructed. Whether God is a construct or a derivation is not the most interesting question in the world to me. What is really interesting to me, I realize this separates me from a lot of people in my faith tradition, but what is really interesting for me is what God wants in the world and what God wants from us in the world. I mean, I'm interested in ideas of heaven in a metaphysical way. I'm interested in what would be useful ways of recycling consciousness or maintaining consciousness. I mean, I guess I think about that stuff sometimes, but what I'm most interested in is what God wants from the world in my religious tradition, and that's pretty clearly laid out for me in the Gospels. It's pretty clearly laid out that wherever I see the sick or the imprisoned or those without clothes or resources, I see God. It's pretty clear to me that the last shall be first and the meek should inherit the earth. For me, it's laid out in the Gospels in a fairly straightforward way. If you're not totally convinced that God is real, how do you know that the Gospels are based on what he wants to see in the world? Oh, I don't. I mean, it's definitely a belief. I haven't derived my theological worldview the way that you derive Newton's second law. It's definitely a belief system and a theological system, and that system, I guess maybe because I'm American, I don't feel like it has to extrapolate out to everyone. I feel like I can be quite individualistic about my theology. Yeah, that makes complete sense. I think I was just getting at, like what you said before about God being a construct, and it may be that our understanding of what he wants in the world is also a construct, but maybe a useful one because we're channeling the best aspects of the human mind in that process. Yeah, and if you put Jesus at the center of history as Christians tend to, then Jesus' teachings take on an outsize role in your imagining of the moral universe. But I do think that for me, it doesn't really matter how exactly we came to this place. I'm happy to be there, I guess. Back to your time in the Childress Hospital, I think you've described it as the axis, Mundi, or like the sort of axis of the world for you of your life. Like there's kind of a before and after. Yeah. You say a little bit more about why that is. Yeah, I mean, I was 22 years old and spent six months being with people on the worst days of their lives. And I have so much respect for people who work in children's hospitals, so much respect for people who work in children's hospitals for longer than six months who don't bomb out of it like I did because it's hard work, it's hard to be with people as they lose their kids, it's hard to be with kids as they lose their lives. And for me, it challenged really everything that I thought I knew about the world. I knew abstractly, of course, that life isn't fair and that there's both luck-based and structure-based injustice, but it's different to see it up close. And I never forgot it. I never got over it. I never have been able to put it behind me. And on some level, I don't want to put it behind me. I want to grapple with the world as I saw it there. I want to grapple with the world as it really is. And that's the world. I mean, I remember one of my chaplaincy supervisors saying that it's important to remember that it's natural and normal for children to die, that historically half of children died, half of children died before the age of five. Most people who've been born in the history of the world, most modern humans who've been born in the last 300,000 years, never lived to see the age of 20. And so, I want to grapple with that world as it is. It makes me not want to live in a natural world. I don't want to live in a world that's in a state of nature. I want to live in a world that's shaped by empathy and by collaboration and by hard human work to make life better, especially for the most vulnerable among us and who is more vulnerable than a child. Well said. So, after that experience, you stopped pursuing the Episcopal Ministry. Did that experience kind of shake your conviction in the existence of God? Oh, yeah. I mean, it shaped my conviction about everything. I didn't emerge from that with really any understanding of a moral universe. I felt and still feel that the world either is random or behaves precisely as if it were. The world either isn't different to human concerns or behaves as if it were. And I need to build a worldview that incorporates that and that still finds a way to be hopeful. You brought me exactly where I was thinking I was going to go next, which is that word hope, which can be triggering or saccharine for folks. What do you mean by hope? Because it does come up in your public utterances, not infrequently. What do you mean by that and how do you generate it? I'd say I mean two things. One is that I mean hope that life can get better for ourselves and for each other and for the most vulnerable people among us. Now, I don't believe, of course, that hope is always rewarded, but I do believe that hope is always justified. And then the second thing that I mean is a more existential hope, the idea that forgiveness is available to all of us at all times, the idea that all of us are worthy of that forgiveness. I mean forgiveness from other people, but also forgiveness from the universe or however you want to construct it, that that's the idea of radical hope, that even unto death and beyond death, that there is cause for belief that we're going to be okay one way or another. I am both a big believer in hope and very suspicious of a lot of constructions of hope, because I think sometimes I don't want to be hope-pilled. Like when I'm going through a hard time, I don't want to be told like everything's going to work out. Well, and everything isn't going to work out. I'm going to die and everyone I love is going to die. So hearing everything's going to work out just fine is not very helpful when you're going through a dark night of the soul, when you're going through a really difficult time. Hearing that everything happens for a reason doesn't help me. In fact, it frustrates me because you tell me the reason why this kid died. You tell me the reason why people are suffering. You tell me the reason, you know, I have a hard time with that one personally. I know it helps a lot of people and I don't mean to judge them, but it just doesn't work for me. What I mean by hope is that I want to find a kind of hope that can hold up to reality as I find it, that can withstand the pressures and darknesses of reality. And I do find that. I find it in community. I find it in the fact that we've reduced the number of children who die by 60% in the last 25 years. I find it all over the place. I find stories of hope, stories of people helping each other, extraordinary acts of generosity and sacrifice among humans. I think that's the part of our story that I want to lift up when I think about hope. Again, amen. One last question I had for you just in preparing for this something stuck out to me. You were being interviewed by the New York Times recently and you talked about the importance of not losing the magic of our teenage selves. Yeah. Can you just say a little bit more about that? There are two things about being a teenager that I find interesting and I want to be clear, being a teenager was terrible. And so I don't want to go back to being a teenager. So I do want to lose a lot of our teenage selves, right? Like there's a lot that you can put behind you as you grow and change into this new imagined self as we've been talking about. But there are two things about being a teenager that I do want to hold on to. And the first is firsts. The first time you fall in love, it's so intense. It feels not just like it's unprecedented in your own life, but it's like it's unprecedented in human history. The first time you're grappling with grief, the first time you're asking big questions about meaning and suffering and what we owe each other and what we owe ourselves. Like there's such a lack of irony in those pursuits, such an open and honest earnestness in them. I don't want to lose that. I really want to hold on to that earnestness. And I know that like earnestness can be cringy and it can feel a little, ah, you know, just, I had this dog years ago, this wonderful dog, Willie. And Willie would roll over and he would show us his belly and I would always think, what an incredibly vulnerable making thing that is to do. Like that's where I could stab you. And yet you trust me with this. And there's something about being really earnest that is a similar thing where you have to show your belly to the world and it makes you nervous and it can make other people uncomfortable too. But I think there's real value in it. And then the other thing I don't want to lose about my teenage self or my teenage experience is the way I loved other people. I loved my friends in high school. I went to a boarding school in Alabama and so I spent 24 hours a day with my friends and with my enemies. And I loved the people I loved with such a ferocity. I loved them so much. I would never say that I loved them, of course, but I loved them so much and I thought they were so cool and I loved being with them and I loved learning about them and it came from a place of real curiosity with no judgment. And I want to hold on to that. I want to hold on to the way I loved when I was a teenager. Picked up my 11-year-old at school the other day and this is only his second year at the school and he got in the car and said, I love this place so much. That's great. Yeah, it's amazing. Oh, that's not your great feeling as a parent too. You're like, oh, I did it. Yes. At least for one moment. You know, in listening to you talk about loving your friends with that ferocity in high school, for much of my adult life, I just got so focused on my career that I let my friendships lapse and kind of woke up to this four or five years ago and have done a lot of work to reestablish that. I'm going to a party tonight and getting back in touch with that has been incredibly moving for me. Yeah, it's so fulfilling. I've been thinking about it. I mean, I'm so dependent upon my friends, so relying upon them, but also they're relying upon me. I've got this buddy, I won't name him because he'd probably be embarrassed by this, but he can solve any problem I have. I have a problem with the kid's treehouse or something and he'll come over and just fix it in five minutes and I spent a whole day trying to figure out how to get the ladder to work right and he can solve all my problems. One day he called me and he was like, hey, can you go to the doctor with me? I just feel like I need a patient advocate and I feel like you'd be a good one. I was like, I am a great patient advocate. I will go to the doctor with you and you will be duly astonished by my brilliance as a patient advocate. There is something that I can give you back. There's a lot of joy in that for me. Yes, I have a friend who everybody calls him Doug can fix it. Yeah, very similar friend. What's on your mind these days? What else is on your mind that we haven't covered? What are you working on? What are you interested in? I'm writing a new novel. I'm writing a novel about two kids in a movie. I'm interested in Hollywood, but I'm interested in Hollywood as a lens into the world that we all live in now, where we're all commodifying aspects of ourselves and packaging them up and then selling them for free to Instagram audiences and TikTok and podcast audiences. What that means, what we lose in that process, what we gain from it, whether that exchange is valuable or whether most of the value ends up getting captured by for-profit companies. I've been writing that novel. I've really been writing it since like 2018, but I've been very focused on it for the last couple of years and that's been really fun. Then I'm just trying to think a lot about the world, the world around me. I'm trying to get outside of myself and literally touch grass, get off the internet a little bit and go for walks. I live near the White River here in Indianapolis, which is to me anyway, the most beautiful river in the world. Just being able to walk along the White River and be alone with my thoughts and know that those thoughts aren't quite as powerful as I once believed they were is just a nice way to go about being alive. You have a Leslie-Nope-level Indiana patriotism, don't you? I do. I am a big... We have our problems, Dan. I don't wish to minimize the extent to which Indiana has its problems, but I really do love Indianapolis. I really love this town and I love the people in it and I'm grateful to the people who stay even when it's difficult sometimes to stay. I feel a lot, a deep, deep connection to this place. I'm not a native. I moved here in 2007 for my wife's job, very much a trailing spouse and Sarah got a job here and so we just moved here, but I love it. I really do. Yeah, I wouldn't want to be anywhere else. This novel you're writing, is it at all based in any kind of ambivalence you have about being such a prominent player on the internet yourself? For sure, yeah. I mean, there's no getting around the complex feelings I have about my own participation in the social internet. I have complex feelings about it because I feel like the social internet is not always a positive force in people's lives. I want my participation in it to be a positive force in people's lives, but I don't know that it is a positive force in the social order. In fact, I think it's been pretty destructive in a lot of ways and I don't see it getting better. But also, there's an ambivalence about what I've given up in the process of talking about my mental health, talking about other aspects of my private life. When you share something, you lose it. It isn't yours anymore and there are blessings in that, of course. I mean, there are tremendous blessings. I know that so many people have reached out to me, especially after reading Turtles All the Way Down and told me how much it meant to them and that they could relate to it and help them to feel less alone or help them to understand somebody in their lives who lives with mental health problems. And that's a gift, I mean, a huge gift. And yet at the same time, it's hard to get around the fact that I've lost something in that process. And so, I do have ambivalent feelings about it, but true ambivalence, where I understand the upsides and the downsides and I don't know where I land on it. So, some part of you thinks that maybe you would be better off if your personal struggles stayed personal? Parts of me would be better off, for sure. But at the same time, and a lot of my personal struggles are personal, I mean, is the other thing, right? Like, there's a lot I don't share. And then I think, well, if I shared some of that, it might be helpful to people in the same way it's been helpful to people as I shared my OCD or depression experiences. Problem with it is that, to what extent do you have an obligation to the public? And to what extent do you have an obligation to yourself? And I don't have an easy answer for that. I definitely do feel like I have an obligation to the public, but I think I might have a bigger obligation to myself. Well, we have all benefited from your generosity in this regard. Anything else that you were hoping that we would get to, that we haven't managed to get to? No, this has been such a great wide-ranging conversation. What a thrill. It's a huge pleasure to have you on. Thank you very much. Really appreciate it. It's a pleasure to meet you. Now, it's been such a pleasure to talk with you. Thanks again to John. It was so cool to meet him. I really like that guy. Just a quick reminder, we're in the middle of a very cool new meditation challenge over on my new-ish meditation app, 10% with Dan Harris. Challenge is called Even You Can Meditate. We're a couple days in, but it's not too late to join. And also, it's always going to be available on demand. I'm doing this with Seven-Axelassie as part of the challenge. And there's one more of these left. We're doing video check-ins where you can ask us questions. Head on over to danharris.com to download the app. I would appreciate your support. And finally, thank you to everybody who worked so hard on this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.