Why Silence is Powerful in a World of Noise with Leigh Marz & Justin Zorn

don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us.

Our guests on this episode are Justin Zorne and Lee Mars. Justin has served as both a policymaker and a meditation teacher in the US Congress. He's a Harvard and Oxford trained specialist in the economics and psychology of well being and has written for The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Harvard

Business Review, Foreign Policy, and others. He is co founder of Asterius Strategies, a consultancy that bridges contemplation and action, helping leaders and teams envision and communicate solutions to complex challenges. Lee Mars is a collaboration consultant and leadership coach for major universities, corps, operations, and federal agencies, as well as a longtime student of pioneering researchers and practitioners of the

ritualized use of psychedelic medicines in the West. She has led diverse initiatives, including a training program to promote experimental mindset among teams at NASA and a decade long cross sector collaboration to reduce toxic chemicals and products. Lea's also co founder of Astria Strategies. Today, Lee, Justin, and Eric discuss their book Golden, The power of silence in a world of noise. Being consistent with your habits is the

engine that drives your transformation and growth. Think about it. You can't feed your good wolf one big meal a year and expected to thrive consistent Steady bits of food fuel a good healthy wolf, but it's hard to create consistency. You might listen to this podcast on a Thursday feel really inspired, but then life takes over and by Saturday

night you've forgotten all about it. That's why I'm hosting a free live Q and a town hall zoom meeting on Thursday, February, where I'll be answering your questions about how to take what you know and turn it into what you consistently do. Had to one you feed dot net slash town hall to register for this free live session with me. During this town hall, you'll ask me your specific question and I'll answer it. It's that simple.

So if you would like my help creating some tools to deal with real life when it gets in the way of your best intentions, let me help you. If changing habits feels overwhelming, if you struggle to make time for things because life is so busy, if it's easy to get caught up with your to do list, you feel consistently behind and taking time for yourself feel selfish,

then let's talk. The things we do consistently are more important than the things we do once in a while in this free town hall session, you'll ask me your questions and I'll help you find what works for you, how you might look at things differently and create the structure to help you do the thing you really want to do. And if you don't have a specific question, just come listen to the conversation. A little bit of

something is better than a lot of nothing. Truth is, you can make a lot of progress by doing just a little bit. To register for this free zoom session on February, go to one you feed dot net slash town hall. That's when you feed dot net slash town hall. I hope I get the chance to meet you there. Hi Lee, Hi justin, Welcome to the show. Hi Eric, thanks for having us so good to er. Yeah, we're going to be discussing your book Golden, The Power of Silence in a World of Noise. But before we do that,

let's start like we always do with the parable. In the Parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say, in life, there's two wolves inside of

us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear, and the grandchild stops, thinks about it for a second, looks at their grandparents, says, well, which one wins, and the grandparents says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in

the work that you do. Thank you, Eric, and I love so much that you start every episode with this parable. It's such a good lesson for all of us, such

a good parable. And I'd like to start my answer to it by just describing what we learned from one of the neuroscientists we interviewed in writing this book, Judson Brewer, who explained that in decades of studying the human brain in situations of deep meditation as well as the brains of people facing addiction, he described to us that there is a term he would use to describe a noisy state of the brain, which is a state of contraction. It's when a person feels like they're in a place

of contraction. And there's a state that describes, according to this expert neuroscientist, a place of what he called and what we call silence in the mind, clarity Christine attention, and he said that in his research that corresponds to

a place of expansion. So when I think about the one that we tend to feed off and in our culture, it's this state of contraction, which is the dopamine hit, which is reaching for more news, reaching for more sound and stimulus, reaching for more data, reaching for the like on Facebook or Instagram. And then there is this state of expansion, which is another wolf we can feed in ourselves, the good wolf, which is a state of openness, the state of as I said, pristine attention and really the

state of being open to mystery and wonder. And that's not the dopamine hit. That's a different, deeper kind of well being that many cultures historically recognize as a kind of well being that's grounded in patience and virtue. So this book is about cultivating that second wolf in our minds, that expansive state of consciousness, that openness to wonder, that openness to silence, and not needing that dopamine rush. Well, I think we can wrap right now. We've got we

got all we need. That's done, perfect episode. Thanks guys, that's great. And that idea of expansion and contraction I've described before that that is almost a proxy for everything in life, like particularly I talk with a lot of people about their spiritual lives, and I think that's as good a definition of what spiritual growth is is moving into a place of more expansion versus contraction. And I love that idea and that image because you can feel

it right. Spiritual teacher Audie Shanty said to me wants the listeners who are listening won't see this, But he said his teacher used to say to him, less of this, which is like a closed fist, and more of this. Sometimes I just do that gesture myself because it can aesthetically gives me that expansion versus contraction. And I also love the phrase pristine attention. That's a beauty full phrase.

Lee anything you want to add on there. It was occurring to me that sometimes it's hard to know whether we're feeding the good wolf for the bad wolf, and that silence affords is the opportunity to discern when we're feeding the good wolf or the bad wolf. It's not always so clear, and sometimes we're really like scurrying to do something, we're just actually adding in our case, noise to the you know, our bad wolf is noise to the mix in this place of urgency and contraction like

we're describing, but we're coming from a good place. So I think if we can pull back sometimes and bring in some silence, then we allow for some space for discernment, so we know which wolf were feeding. Thank you, you know, and looking at your guys biographies, right, it's clear that you both have been very focused on doing really good work out in the world, all sorts of different justice type projects and climate work, and you know your lives

have been devoted to service. Yet early in the book you say that sometime around let's say I think it's two thousand seventeen, you were feeling like a lot of us were feeling, which is a little bit of despair, a little bit of like, God, we keep doing all this work and these problems don't seem like they're changing. And that led you to a place where silence was what you guys came up with as perhaps the answer to that. Talk to me a little bit about that process. Yeah,

this is really a book. It's an exploration of the question where do good ideas come from? Where do really good ideas that generate real progress, not just you know, one step forward, perhaps two steps back kinds of movement, But how do we really make the kind of change that's durable in our world that really improves our lives, really improves the lives of people around us? And, as you mentioned, Eric, in that period around we were just like,

what can we possibly do to make positive impact? We had spent so much time in social movements and environment of economic movements and policy work where we felt like we were doing good work, but looking at it five years, ten years after some of the policy interventions or media stands we had taken, it's like we just weren't really sure. So when we thought about this question, what does it take to really generate progress? The answer that came to

us was first, go deep into silence. Yes, turned down the noise, Yes, figure out how to be less distracted, but go deeper than that, tune into the most pristine silence you could find. So it was really kind of experimenting with this idea that we first started to come onto this possibility of writing about silence. We wrote this article for Harvard Business Review, and that got us started really in this formal exploration, Lee, you want to say

somewhere about that. So we set out to have all these conversations with neuroscientists and poets and activists and a Whirling Dervish and a man incarcerated on death row who has become a close friend Grammy winning opera singer heavy metal front man a Whirling Dervish, if I didn't already mentioned, so we just had all these exploratory conversations asking this question, what's the deepest silence you've ever known? And it's their answers that really led us on this path to this book.

So we started with the article we were really looking at auditory noise, and we were looking at strategy and problem solving, like Justin was mentioning. But as we embarked upon these conversations, like it got so much deeper, asking this question, hearing their responses, and the responses surprised us.

There were moments like births, deaths, moments of awe, moments running the perfect line through roaring rapids, or the four a m Market at all my dance party, so not auditorially quiet, which begged the question like, what is the silence they're talking about? And so we started thinking about that framework, that external silence. Of course, at decibel levels that's interest to us. But internal quiet that's where things get really interesting, and so that's what shaped the book. Yeah.

I love what you talk about with silence, which is silence isn't just the absence of noise, you know, it's also a presence undo itself. And I remember the first time, and I'm referencing the spiritual teacher Audio Shanty twice in five minutes, so I guess he's on my mind. But I remember sitting retreat with him, he said something and he just said, just notice, before you have to do anything, that silence is already here. And it was a revelation to me, it really was. I went, oh my God,

Like it's right there. All the sound is coming out of it, but it's still there. And it just was a very foundational moment for me in learning to settle more deeply, um say a little bit more about silence as a presence or also silence not just being the absence of noise. I love that what you just shared from Ataschanti Eric about the silence already being here, because one of the reasons we wanted to write this book is to give people a sense that there is already

clarity in abundance that's always reachable. You don't have to run off to a meditation retreat, you don't have to have some fancy teachings or some fancy initiation. It's accessible, it's always here. So we look at silence at one level, is the absence of noise as this kind of space where no one is making claims on the consciousness. And we think of noises that which interferes with your perception or your intention. So the noise isn't just any at

all sounded stimulus. The noise is that which is interfering with our ability to perceive the world clearly and perceive our own intention, perceive what we really want, perceive what's true, perceive what's good. And then there's a deeper level though, you know, in line with what you were just saying about your experience, Eric, you know, silence not just as the absence of noise, but silence also as a presence unto itself. And this presence isn't something that we can

readily put into words. It's something subjective. It's something each one of us can grasp in our own way. You know, this can be a place of not knowing, of letting go of accepting that it's okay to not fill the space. A friend told us that silence can reset the nervous system. One teacher of ours described this presence of silence as the essence of everything. But we say in the book that this silence is this space where there's nothing signaling

what needs to be done. The world is so noisy because there's all these signals pushing us to movement, pushing us to change things, pushing us to to fix things. And that can be good. It can be good that we have these signals that can be important. But when we can encounter silence, we're in this space of pristine awareness where there's nothing signaling what needs to be done.

It's where nothing needs to be done. It's wholeness. I think there's just one thing I want to say or add to that what justin just said, which was so beautifully put, but just speaking to your experience and your encounter with silence. When I have had those experiences and the deepest silence I've ever known, and we share a little bit about our own experiences there. We don't just

ask people that we actually do answer it ourselves. It was one of those encounters when I also noticed that silence was there holding me all along and I really could cough and this painful psychotic episode I was having postpartum. When I met the silence in that moment and felt the holding of that presence, it changed me and it made it something I can find my way to from here on out. So I just wanted to put a

little rod to that. It's not just like this grade encounter this it actually changes us, changed me cellularly when I came in contact with silence in that way, And that's the silence that we're really speaking to. Yeah, so we've talked a little bit about what silence is. There's actually about fifty different quotes in the book about different people talking about silence that I could just go through, one after the other after the other because they're so beautiful.

But I want to keep us moving and I want to now talk about noise. And in the book you call noise say we can sum it up in two words, unwanted distraction, but then you go further to break noise down really into three types of noise. Right, there's the noise that we all think of. When I think of noise, I think of gas powered leafblowers, which I have heard have been outlawed in Berkeley. Is that true? It's true. Yeah,

but I'm in Kensington, so I don't benefit from that. Okay, Well I've learned to try and treat them as a spiritual teacher, um, but they drive me crazy. So there's that kind of noise, right. Then you also talk about informational noise, which is just this constant more and more information that we're all deluded with, and then finally internal noise.

And so I wonder if maybe we could just talk a little bit about those three types of noise for a moment, and anything about each of them that you feel like would be salient to say, Sure, I can get us started on that. You know, we think of auditory noise, you know, as you mentioned the noise in our ears, informational noise essentially the noise in our screens,

and internal noise is the noise in our heads. And when we set out to write this book, when we first had this intuition about the power of silence as a resource for being able to solve problems and find inspiration, we weren't actually sure that the noise of the world was increasing. We had a haunch. I mean it seemed fairly obvious to us, but we didn't know empirically if that was true, and we set out to answer this question. The answer was a resounding yes at all three levels.

In terms of the auditory noise, the National Park Service estimates that noise pollution increases two to threefold every thirty years, and there's evidence for urban landscapes of how the noise of sirens of emergency vehicle sirens has increased astronomically, the decibel levels have increased in order to deal with the increasing noise of the surrounding din Across Europe and estimated four hundred fifty million people, we found roughly sixty five

per cent of the population lived with noise levels at the World Health Organization says are hazardous to the health. And then there's the informational noise. We looked how in two thousand ten, Eric Schmidt, when he was the CEO of Google, made an estimate that every two days we now create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until two thousand three, just as exponential rise in the amount of content bombarding each and

every human being we've been responsible for. Like of that with the number of podcasts we've released, at least it's good content, or at least that's good noise, good noise, beautiful noise. So I mean, so that level of the content on our screens. I think that one is often the most obvious to folks, but one that's often a

surprise is the third level. And that's this that researchers at the University of Michigan found that we now have to listen to an estimated three hundred and twenty State of the Union addresses worth of inner monologue on any

given day. There's that much internal noise in our heads. Yeah, and as often other guests of the show have pointed out, how much of it is habitually repetitive and inane, you know, like it's just if it's not outright detrimental, you know, if it's not act of that sort of internal critic, then a lot of it is just like if I had a friend who talked that much, we would have not been friends more than like three hours. I would have been like, Okay, you're done, buddy, Like this isn't

gonna work. So how then can we be friends with ourselves? That good question. That's what this whole book is about is how to be friends with ourselves. Yeah, so I guess when we really, when we compile all this together, this auditory, informational and internal noise that we're taking on and in and creating, it's not just that it's irritating. It's not just that it's annoying. It's that it's actually taking us off track on what we're here to do,

what we intend, you know, our purpose for being here. Cumulatively, the cost is too dear. And we were really just and I were in the midst of that, really saturated in that noise, and much of it of our own making and our own generating as we were trying to take on our work being responsible family members, community members in all this, and it really just became too much.

And that seems to be a pretty shared experience. So, given we have this much noise, with the exception perhaps of the well even the internal, you can't turn it off, right, It's just not the way that our physiology is wired up, given that there's this much noise, right, And you know, if you live in Europe then you're exposed to it. If you live in the modern world and you engage with it, you've got more information by noon than you could process all week. What are some ways that we

start to work with this skillfully in our lives. Yeah, we turned to a teacher in the book, really the soul of the book, Jarvis j Masters, to ask this question because he is in San Quentin on death row. I mentioned, he's our friend there who is um on death row for the last thirty two years now for a crime. The preponderance of evidence shows he didn't commit, and we certainly believe that to be true. He's in one of the loudest environments imaginable. When we speak with

him on the phone, it is so echoes. All this cement and metal and keys and boots on some all it just in hollering day and day out. It is impossible to concentrate. And yet in that environment he is not just kept his sanity in a pretty insane situation, but he's written two books, one of which was just picked by Oprah's Book Club, That Bird Has My Wings just recently. It's a huge So he's a New York Times bestselling author at this point. He's brought equilibrium to

those around him, including us as friends, you know. So he's brought this calm, this quiet and he's kept his balance in an impossible situation. So how we asked him,

how do you do that? Even in that environment? It's not just the auditory, of course, it's also the information around their cases and appeals and things like that that's just always changing and stressful, but also the reverberation of fear and of trauma and the internal noise that gets kicked up even even for him, as things change, shift and change, And how does he calm back down? How does he find his balance? Where? How does he find it?

And it's in the silence. So while he does have a deep meditation practice and is an accomplished Tibet and Buddhist teacher, he also finds it through his workouts in his cell is for by nine cell, through his studies of astronomy, through his correspondence, letter writing and writing as well. So what he told us is that when he first got into prison and realized this is where he was going to be for some time, the thought jumped into his mind It's like I'm being buried alive. It's like

I'm being buried alive. And he immediately knew, even as a young man, I have to stop that thought. I have to interrupt that I can't feed that, and I can't respond to it, I will go crazy. So he has been practicing on his responses to the noise to quiet the noise by quietening his response to the noise, because his spear of control was very limited. We do point the readers to their sphere of control, what do

they have power over? And that response is one of those places he found even in that environment where do we have influence? And he's even got a little bit influence with the guys around him in the tier at this point, with his reputation as it is like they'll protect his writing time. You know, hey, man, Jarvis is writing leave him alone and that kind of thing. And then that which is out of your sphere of control,

you let it go. So we start off by talking to Jarvis jan Masters and having him point the way, who would you add justin you know, this question, what can we actually do? We turned to Jarvis because we didn't want to write a book about going off to a monastery to find silence. We didn't want to write a book about going off and running away from society.

You know, I have two year old twins and a six year old and a full plate with work and community responsibilities and leaves a teenager and a very full work life. And we really wanted to look at what it's like to be immersed and sound and stimulus, including what could be really debilitating noise. And Jarvis is just this like this sherpuff for us in this regard. He

knows exactly the terrain. He knows the toughest terrain. So as a society as a whole, we write in the book you know about how we often mistake the feeling of stress for aliveness. And it comes back to what he was saying before about the wolf we tend to feed is that kind of stressed out, contracted state. So to this question of what we can actually do to get beyond this world of noise that you pose, Deeric, the first thing we look to is notice noise, pay

attention to it. Figure out how you can notice where things are noisy, including the signals that noise creates in your body, like getting tense and a cleansed jaw, and then tune into silence, even if the pockets of silence are only a second, five seconds a minute. You know, don't focus so much on the quantity of silence. You can get in your life, but the quality how deeply can you go into each of these pockets of silence?

And that's a starting point for us. We get a lot more specific in the book, but that's the essence of it. Hey, everyone, this is Jenny. One of my absolute favorite things is when we hear from listeners of the show, and something we hear quite often is that one of the biggest obstacles to feeding the Good Wolf is remembering, because life is busy and we get caught up in routines and we're all on autopilots so much

of the time. So to help with that, we've started sending a couple of text messages after each episode is released to listeners who sign up for them, and it's something we're offering for free. A listener wrote us and said, the message has caused me to pause, even if just for a moment, and help me to remember important bits of wisdom, bringing them to the forefront of my mind. Remembering is the hardest part, and the text messages are

super helpful. So if you'd like to hear from us a few times a week via text, go to one you feed dot net slash text and sign up for free Yeah, there's a lot of similarities in your books approach and the approach I've taken in my Spiritual Habits program, which is that you know, people who want to deepen their spiritual life for I mean, I would just call it their inner life, right if you don't like that word.

And I kind of came to the same place you guys did, which is, yeah, you could go to a monastery, but that's not what the people who encounter my work are going to do. So if you're not going to do that, then how do you do this in all the moments of your life? How do you bring it into moment by moment? How do you weave it into your busy day, because that's the type of practice we need, right because noise isn't going away. I'm a big believer in ear plugs, and I buy industrial great earplugs by

the giant box full. So there are practical ways to deal with it. But broadly speaking, our lives are busy, and so I did really appreciate that about your work, that it was really about finding these moments, you know, I call them still points in the day, right, you call them I think pockets of silence, But it's essentially the same thing, which is, Okay, I don't have an hour to do some practice, but for a minute, can I reorient towards what matters, what's important to this presence

of silence? You know? Is that a way that I can re engage. And so I really appreciate that about the work, and I do think it's really interesting. I think it's why so many of us are drawn to

people like Jarvis J. Masters or Victor Frankel's work. It's because when we see these people who are living the extremes and they show us what's possible, it really then, at least for me, has a tendency to go, Okay, Eric, your excuses for why you can't do this, you need to work on that, not that your challenges aren't real. It's not to do like comparative suffering and oh I don't have any problems, but it does say like, look, people have found ways to do this sort of thing

in really difficult situations. Means that you can find ways to do it in your situation. And I think those people are always a guiding light for that very reason. Absolutely, he is such a guiding light for us. I mean, we're so appreciative and we also wanted to avoid this being thought of silence being categorized as a luxury, as something only some people get. He identifies it as a survival mechanism and as his human right to be able to find it even in that situation, under his own power,

And so we can all do that as well too. Yeah, I think he said, if I have it right here, he talked about I started quieting the noise by quieting my responses to the noise. And holy mackerel, is that right on point. It's me and the leaf blower, right, Like, part of the noise is the leafblower, but a huge part of the noise is my reaction to that leaf blower. This shouldn't be happening. What's the matter? I mean, all

that that is a whole another level of noise. And I can't make the leaf blower go away, but I can work skillfully with all that other noise. And I just thought that was such a great summer. I started quieting the noise by quieting my responses to the noise. You know one thing that's so beautiful about that? Eric? Is it for us revealed this interplay between external noise and internal noise it's often the internal noise are responses to what's going on around us that produced the most suffering.

And one thing about Jarvis, you know, being on death row for a crime he didn't commit. This guy shows us what it means to be able to receive a teaching out of a difficult situation. It's not to make light of any the difficulty he goes through, but to give you an example. When COVID first hit, one of his blockmates was the first person in San Quentin to die. Many people died, many people suffered a lot, and he was one of the first people to get COVID, and

in that moment he was given an experimental treatment. He described to us, they handed him a bottle of pills and he was reading all of these side effects on the bottle of pills, and he was freaking out, bad headaches, difficulty breathing, really going through it. And then in that moment of suffering, he just heard an intuition. There was a voice in his head that said, this isn't about you right now, This isn't about you right now, and

it just stopped him cold. And he said that that moment was the quietest he's ever been and for us, it was like he brought this teaching about how if we really want to get to profound quiet, there's this moral dimension to it. It's getting beyond fixation on the self. Like when we talk about that internal noise, the internal noise that the noisiest are the thoughts within the self about the self. You know, we're caught grasping for our own position or performing to how we look to the world. Yeah,

that's beautiful, Lee, Well just that made me wonder. I would love to know. And you don't have to do it right on the spot here, but Eric is such a thoughtful person. I am very curious about the deepest silence you've ever known. I think it was listing audio Shanti is getting tiresome for this episode. I hate to be a one trick pony. But it was on a retreat and I had sort of the classicalistical experience where everything fell away and I felt completely connected to everything.

It was the real deal we talked about, and the word I would use is the deepest piece I have ever felt. But I think there was a deep silence too. There was a deep, deep silence. It wasn't that everything went quiet, although everything kind of was quiet because we were on a silent retreat, but it was pretty quiet. But all that internal noise that we're talking about, that was just gone, you know, in the most profound way

I've ever heard it. It's not that my brain was silent, It's just that the internal talking to myself out of quality to me. And they're somewhere in the book that you talk about that the goal of a quiet mind is not that we will get rid of all thoughts, because that would be to be dead. But the quiet mind is when the mind stops talking to itself about itself, right, And that was profoundly what happened. That faculty just went offline, and so the result was a truly deep, deep silence.

So yeah, and I love silent retreats for that reason. I love the quiet. Some people like I would be so hard. I'm like, sitting in meditating twelve hours a day, that can be hard. But for me, the silence is

not hard. It's just glorious. Yeah. I think it's important to say when we can get away and have those big, profound, rapturistic silence experiences, whether that's on a meditation retreat or out deep nature or the use of mind expanding plant medicines or anthogens, however, are route or flow states things

like that. However, our route just to have those deeper moments is important as well as finding those tiny micro moments, or that what we call in the book the healthy successor to the smoke break, because that's what helps teach us, Ah, this is the space. Now, let's bring it home, let's bring it back. Yeah, yeah, that's right. I remember the first time I went on silent retreat and when it ended,

I was like, what is happening? All of a sudden, everybody started talking, and I just was like, I just wanted to run and hide. So my point with that is, even if you get these very special moments where you go away and it does douce, I mean, it's done some very profound things to me, there's still the moment to moment managing of it. We don't get out of that, right, we don't get out of still having to, moment by moment manage noise and seek silence in our day to

day lives. I love how you describe that. Erica's peace his piece is a really beautiful word for what we mean. I think sometimes people just glancing at this book quickly, they might misunderstand what we mean by silence, because the word silence can be a little bit loaded sometimes. I mean sometimes it could mean censorship. Sometimes it could mean self censorship, mean a kind of oppression, and it could mean a kind of forced stillness, forced in the sense

of artificial. The physicists and neuroscientists and psychologists and doctors today are describing how really nothing in the body, nothing in our whole universe is really completely still. As you were describing before, a mind that is totally without thought, without sound and stimulus is in a word, dead. But peace is a good word for what we mean by silence, because we're talking about this pristine attention, this pristine presence which is inherently alive, and the word piece and the

experience you're describing, I think captures that really. Well, yeah, maybe let's take a minute and have one of you talk a little bit about that idea of silence, the bad kind of silence. There have been various movements that talk about breaking the silence, right, because silence around, say, domestic abuse, is not good silence, right, So silence can be a tool of the oppressure, right, So you know, just make that distinct for us a little bit clearer.

You know, we look at a kind of silence that is the refusal to speak and act in the face of injustice, and we not only acknowledge but honor that that is truly wrong. This idea of silence as complicity, silence as complacency, even silence as violence, like we honor

that idea. But we look in the book and we this is a result of our own contemplation that silence of close lipped complacency like that isn't silence in the truest sense, because the refusal to see what's happening in the world, to perceive, to address what's wrong, that is the polar opposite of what we mean by this kind of state of pristine attention. That's the polar opposite of

clear perception and intention. And when we're really open our eyes and our hearts were really open to it's going on, we're not going to be just satisfied to look elsewhere.

We're going to take skillful action. So we look in the book about how you know, there's this idea of silence as violence, but there's also the fact that it's a noisy world that's enabling injustice, Like if everyone's just obsessed with the noise of what's happening with Instagram likes and reality TV stars and you know, socially unproductive profit seeking in which way the noise of the market might

be in any one short term measure. It's like, how are we going to have the attentional space that's necessary to perceive what's really helpful for the world, but even more importantly to feel another person suffering or to feel what's happening in nature. So we need silence in this sense of pristine attention in order to do good in the world. Yeah, we need that silence for that place a discernment of the best path forward and to really a two with what is true and what is needing

our attention. And it was really the work of Gandhi that taught us that when we started digging around this whole area. In fact, we just thought we would maybe briefly mentioned, oh, and then there's this other type of silence, but we're not talking about that silence, and we're talking about this silence. And we kept trying to put it, maybe wrap it up in a few paragraphs, and it

just wasn't happening. It wasn't. It was just kind of roaring back, And we're so glad it did, because then it brought us into this relationship with silence as the work of justice. And really that's what's going to help our path forward from here is just working with that silence as that place to discern what is the right path forward, what is true here. So Gandhi took every Monday in silence, even in the midst of the most intense work he was doing for Indian independence. He would say,

I am not speaking on Mondays. And he would take meetings still, he would go to conferences still, but he wouldn't say a word. And his colleagues would say that on Tuesday, when he'd come out, be ready to speak, he would speak just words would pour forth in this rapturous flow without notes, with such eloquence that it was remarkable. Right this Monday was obviously doing wonderful things for him to attune to silence, And he said, a seeker of truth has to be silent. So we take that in

other lessons. The Quakers, for example, will practice silence together, which by that we haven't touched on shared silence. But silence is magnified when it's shared, and so together they're tuning into what is true, what is the word that needs to be spoken, what is worthy of breaking the silence? You know, and even in conflict, when things get difficult in a meeting, the clerk would call for silence. That's the person running the meeting, just kind of paying attention

to the situation, the dynamics and the meeting. If it starts to feel a little polarized or rigid, the clerical call for a moment of silence and income silence and there's a soft finding of this positionality right, an ability to attuned why is it important that we resolve this without blame perhaps or without being rigid, and incomes an answer that is better than where they started for sure.

And the gentleman we spoke with, Rob Livinkop, he's a birthright Quaker, he said, inevitably someone will say the thing I was thinking, but even better, and then they can continue on to their problem solving to be in that place. As the Quakers the speaking truth to power, they're the ones who coined that term, and you know, they're the ones using silence and they are also speaking truth to power. So that got really interesting for us as a whole

place to consider and think about silence. Yeah, you've got some great stories in the book about Tick not Han, Martin, Luther King, and Thomas Merton, and so we're not gonna have time to go into all those but all those people, you know, I've just often reflected on when we look at some of the people we most admire from an activist perspective, they were people that sought some degree of silence,

of time away, of reflection. You know, they really balanced contemplation and action really really well, like they knew how to do that. You know, as you were talking about the silence of somebody who's oppressed, it made me think of something from my own life, which is very minor in comparison. I want to be careful that I'm not

saying this is I'm not comparing my oppression. But there have been times in my life where I silently don't say what I need to say in a relationship or a situation, because what I would say is I want to keep the peace. There are two deep insights I had about that. One was it doesn't work. It simply doesn't work. But secondly was in the moment where there's no active conflict, what has happened is all the conflict

has gone inside. My internal noise is now at eleven. Right, So I've stopped the external noise of you and I having a loud conversation, but my internal noise is way way up. And so you know, I just sort of noticed that. That was a real insight for me. Oh that's so good. I was transferring the conflict all internally. You can't resolve conflict between two people inside one of them, like, it doesn't work that way. Now again, I think it's always a good idea to pause, cool down, take a moment,

collect yourself. But this perpetual I just won't say anything to keep the peace. That was my insight. Oh, it's such a good one. And just to notice where the noise goes. Okay, if the noise was in the relationship, but then you shift, you know, and don't say anything. Now where's the noise. Just to notice that and go from there. That's that's helpful to me. Eric, Thank you. I'm glad you said something about me too, Me too, her.

And then that gets to like a big reason for this understanding of the external noise and the internal noise, because if a person is quiet when they to speak up, and there's that internal noise that that elevates, that's going to be felt in the field. I mean even people who aren't super intuitive necessarily people, whether they consciously recognize

it or not, they can feel that. Maybe we could take a minute and talk a little bit about informational noise, and we could talk about some strategies for dealing with informational noise, because as you mentioned, I mean, the numbers on how much new content is created every minute. It just every time I read it, it's more than it was time and it was mind blowing ten years ago, and now it's just preposterous. What do we do with all this information on noise? How do we turn that

down in a way for ourselves. There's one little piece I want to share before we look at the strategies, and that is just to know this, not only is that information on the rise, but our ability to process that information has not increased. So our attentional capacities are maxed and we need them, right, We need them to take note of what's grabbing for our attention and bottom up, those are the things, just like someone says Lee, So you know, Eric, you know that's the bottom up attention

grabbing or a top down what we're focusing on. So we have two types of attentional things going on at once. The things grabbing for our attention pinging, Hey you've got a new blah blah blah whatever. This little notifications are way way way up. There's nothing more precious than our attention. Where we put our attention. We only have so much to go around. There are eleven million bits of information

coming for our attention at any moment. Our attentional networks sift through that to that gathered bits get sifted through, and now even more things of less quality, we would argue, are coming for our attention. So where is our attention not happening what we found? It's like not happening on ourselves, maybe on our health, with our family, the relationships that need, you know, the tasks were doing the deep work we're

trying to get done. So I just want to put that perspective on there in terms of why it's really important. It's not just the information and our attention grabbing things are going up. It's just that our attention isn't getting any bigger, better, vaster. It's a scarce resource. So where

we put it matters what Lee just said. They're about our capacity to discern from the signal from the noise, and to be able to really incorporate all this information is such an important part of this at the individual level, and then there's also the macro level, all the societal level. And at the societal level, we look in the book that that noises our most celebrated addiction. So it's your question, Eric,

about how we get beyond the informational noise. A big part of it is whether we perceive noise to be part of the problem, or that if the noises progress, And again going back to this idea of the one we feed, you know as contraction, the one in our society we tend to feed the maximum possible proliferation of sound and stimulus. And we explore in the book how we measure progress as a society, often not just by how much industrial stuff we're creating, but also how much

mental stuff we're creating. The way we measure GDP. For example, if you take a forest and you chop down all the wood sell it for lumber at home depot, that counts as a plus according to GDP. But if you keep the forest intact as a pristine natural environment that doesn't count as progress and into GDP, which is our foremost indicator of progress as a society. And you can

say the same thing about human attention. If we keep our human attention intact, admire and great arts, spending time in nature, rolling around on the floor, being silly with our kids, that generally doesn't count as any positive for GDP. But if we take our attention, we chop it up and turn it into eyeballs on a Facebook page that generates advertising revenue, then that's a plus for GDP. So I think at the macro level, one answer to your

question is how do we measure progress? What do we deem to be positive and productive in our culture, in our economy, in our society. So it starts with changing some of those norms, just as it starts with, you know, recognizing, as Lee was saying, our attentional capacities aren't going to grow all that much. Yeah, I mean, it's a real problem. And I joked earlier about us contributing to the always

out there. Obviously it's it's a very small percentage, but I do at times go, well, you know, I put out two of these a week, like that's a lot, right, And so in my own life, I've had to really work with how to balance consuming information and content and then application and deepening. And the best example I found in my life recently is there was a period of time I was studying very deeply with a Zen teacher, and you know, I read at least one book a

week for this podcast sometimes too. So I am just moving right, and I've been doing it for eight years. It's just coming in right. But then I started working with this Zen teacher and I specifically went, you know what, I need to pick a path that I stay on because the nature of my work fragments me if I don't. And so all of a sudden I started reading. You know, he'd give me a book, you know, like as part of our work together, why don't you read this book?

And I started reading it in a completely different way. I might read the same hundred sixty page book for six months, because that's how it actually changed me, you know, that's how it happened. If I read seven books in six months or seventy books in six months, I think the change that would happen to me is often less than one book for that long, you know, and it's sort of the foundation of so much of what you guys talk about feeds into what goes on in the

Spiritual Habits program. Is the idea was pick some core principles and keep coming back to them again and again and again. It's not about more information, it's not about learning something else. You know everything you need to know in that realm. I'm not saying we don't need to learn other things, but I have found for me in my own personal development, I have to slow the flow

of information way down. And I've learned to recognize that I like to consume things like listening to podcasts like this and doing that because they call me, they soothed me, they entertain me, right, they're they're really helpful. But I have to have another lane too that is much more slow and deliberative. This is so perfect because so much of this is really about getting onto ourselves, like I'm onto me, I'm onto me in my habits like I get it. So so in this book, we don't make

a really prescriptive case here. You know, don't do podcast. You know that would be sad if we don't do podcast, don't read too much. You know, it's not about that it's really tuning in with when are you in that kind of maybe it feels in my in my mind, did my body? It feels kind of grasping. I just I didn't. I don't feel like there's enough. I need more information or I've got some downtime and I'm going to stuff something more in. I start to feel agitated.

I start to feel a tightness in my diaphragm. There is like a graspy, greedy kind of monster that gets unleashed in there. And that's when I know, Okay, we've gone too far. That's on the spectrum in this way. Now. It's not that podcasts are not my thing. Is sometimes they do really such deep quiet. I remember one just like gardening and listening and just falling into a story of someone's story. It's beautiful. So what truly brings us

quiet and what really is our noise? And it might surprise us those things that are really quietening to us. So we talked to a professor by behavioral health and medicine, Joshua Smythe, who told us about a guy in one of his studies who carves with the chain. Saw these big hunks of wood and that's his quiet place, right, and for others in this podcasts and things and sometimes it's things in nature. I teach dance in a really loud studio, so auditorially loud, but Christine quiet on the inside.

So really for us to be really feeling into what truly brings us quiet and what at a certain point tells us, what signals at a certain point tell us we're actually veering into noise and you know, not giving us us the space to actually digest these things that we're taking in. Yeah, that's the practice. That's the practice. Yeah,

I've learned. This is a new thing for me, but we all know that feeling of just sort of like checking the phone again and again and again right for nothing right, and it does it as this rush contracted quality to it, and nobody's perfect at this. I've gotten better at recognizing, oh, it's happening, and then saying to myself, what you're looking for is not on this device, instead of continuing to look in the place that it's just simply not going to come from. It hasn't. Just to

recognize whatever you need is not here. It is a really profound way for me to then go, Okay, where might it be right. Our friend Joshry, who's a podcast, really cool podcast called The Emerald that applying mythology to the modern world, says that all human beings want light, need light, need the light of the sun, needs spiritual light, and we're attracted to this blue light of our phones

as we're seeking illumination in our consciousness, you know. And we were talking Eric with the neuroscientist psychologist duo Adam Gazzali and Larry Rosen, and they were explaining they found in their research. One thing they really focus on is how human beings are driven for what they call information rewards, more content, more news, in very much the same way that many other animals seek food and juice rewards in a forest, even though for us it's not critical for

our survival. So sometimes when that you know, news alert comes up on our phone or Twitter notification, we react in the same way that one of our ancestors might have been, you know, picking a ripe and BlackBerry forging in the forest. It's really not the same level of of necessity. Yeah. Well, you talked in the very beginning about dopamine, right, And there's a book that I don't know if it's out yet. I think it comes out at the end of the year. I think you guys

would really like it. It's a guy named Chris Bailey, and it's called how to Calm Your Mind, Finding Presence and Productivity and Anxious Times. And I didn't think, even though I've had him on he's a great writer, I didn't think like I just the title didn't really grab me. I thought I was going to be talking about meditation, and but he didn't. And he helped me see, really explained, well, this dopamine aspect that is driving us, you know, in the same way that it's dopamine that seeks a chimp

in the forest to go get the berry. Right, I'm vastly oversimplifying, but that's what it's doing. And you know, dopamine's role is not to satisfy, it's to drive behavior. And we live in a completely dopamine infused culture. We are way over saturated in and I love justin that that's kind of where you started us. Yeah. Absolutely, I was just thinking, we know we're up against these big systems like the GDP, the way we measure success. I mean,

it's not just that we're failing at something here. You know, those of your struggling with noise and silence. It's it's a huge system that's pushing towards the commodification of our attention. For example, these systems are also tapping and exploiting our evolutionary ways, you know, our dopamine ways. That's about evolution and how it's been working. So it's not just that

we're personally failing or falling short here. And yet there's still are strategies and ways that we can find our way through this and find our way to quiet through little practices and bigger still, and we can get into those that we have a little time left. Yeah, I'm gonna start to pivot us towards wrapping up, but we'll

do a little of that. Maybe we could just have you guys each share maybe your favorite practice at the end of the book you have I think it's thirty three ways to find silence, to have the number right, Maybe share one or two of your favorites. From there, we can use that as a way to kind of

wrap up here, just to kick yourself. You're I would say that the core kind of common thread that runs through many of these is a Japanese aesthetic principle called ma and MA is appreciation for the empty space, appreciation for silence, for the space in between words exchanged among conversation among friends, for the in between intervals and music notes, and even for the space in between the flowers in ikibana flower arranging and the Kanji Japanese character mob means

golden light pouring forth through the slats in a temple gate. So so one one definition of MA is pure potentiality.

We have many practices in this book that are built around MA. How to find momentary math through your day when you finish a task taking a moment, yeah, perhaps for a deep breath, but really to just be in silence and listen to the silence for a moment, Or when you go between rooms and turn a doorknob, taking just a moment to appreciate MA. Or where you get a glass of water and turn on the tap, appreciating just a moment of MA. And we talk about how

we can bring MA on the job in brainstorming sessions, for example, into dispersing periods with deep silence, and we look ultimately in the in these practices. You mentioned the thirty three practices. What would mean like for mod to go to Washington if we actually appreciated the value of this purited potentiality of empty space and honoring people's quiet attention as a priority for public policy, particularly as we

think about the attention economy. So that's a little bit of a teaser and an overview of what we get into. What would you add, Lee, Well, you know, one of my favorite things is really the silence I find in dance, So to point people towards the flow states and movement things, and just to not just think about those merely as exercise, right or merely as a little hobby, but to really honor them for the silence they bring in our lives. So what cheeks set me hi and hi cheeks set

me hi. The Hungarian American psychologists points us towards us that in those states, all of our attentional capacity is needed to focus on this place of skill and mastery. Right, is so sweets lot where all of our attentional networks are needed, and what falls away is that self reflective thought, and that ends up being a very delightful experience for us. It's a quiet new experience for us in addition to being probably something we love, you know, maybe with others

or in nature or any of those things. So I just want to give a shout out to that silence and motion, those flow states things you may already do, just to honor it all the more for the silence it brings to your life. Yeah, guitar playe is a strangely silent activity, right, I mean when I'm really doing it, Yes, of course your sound coming into the environment, but that internal chatter gone, you know, so it speaks to that.

And I have to give you guys a special call out because Cheek set Me High has been mentioned on our show. He may be the most mentioned human, but nobody has ever had the decency to put how to pronounce it in the book so up till now, I've just never tried. I have never tried until this very moment just there, and I may not have had it right, but Cheeks sent me High is in the neighborhood. And that is thanks to you guys and your kindness of pronunciation.

I'm so grateful. That was all me. Okay, I spelt strongly about that. I've heard his name said so many ways, and he's, you know, a genius. He's a genius, So let's say his name right. Yeah, you look at how it's written, and I literally have been like, I'm not going to attempt that. I hear people say it and I read it and I'm like, that doesn't make any sense to me. So well, justin Lee, thank you so much for coming on. I've really enjoyed the conversation. I

really did enjoy the book again. It's called Golden The Power of Silence in a World of Noise. While of links in the show notes to where people can find the book, where they can find you. Thank you, thank you. It's so nice to hear. How will our work works together? Thank you, Eric. I love the conversation and thanks for all you do. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community.

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