Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 63: Billy Crudup, 'Jackie,' '20th Century Women' Actor (Oscars Bonus Episode!)

Episode Date: February 24, 2017

We're offering a special pre-Oscars edition of the podcast this week with actor Billy Crudup. Best known for his role as 70s rock star Russell Hammond in "Almost Famous," Crudup stars in two Oscar-nominated films this year, "Jackie" and "20th Century Women." A Broadway star as well as a movie actor, Crudup said he began practicing mindfulness as a way to help "triage" anxiety and panic attacks he experienced, including at three separate times while performing on stage. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It kind of blows my mind to consider the fact that we're up to nearly 600 episodes of this podcast, the 10% happier podcast. That's a lot of conversations. I like to think of it as a great compendium of, and I know this is a bit of a grandiose term, but wisdom. The only downside of having this vast library of audio is that it can be hard to know where to start. So we're launching a new feature here, playlists, just like you put together a playlist of your favorite songs.

Back in the day, we used to call those mix tapes. Just like you do that with music, you can do it with podcasts. So if you're looking for episodes about anxiety, we've got a playlist of all of our anxiety episodes. Or if you're looking for how to sleep better, we've got a playlist of all of our anxiety episodes, or if you're looking for how to sleep better, we've got a playlist for that. We've even put together a playlist of some of my personal favorite episodes. That was a hard list to make. Check out our playlists at 10%.com slash playlist. That's 10% all one word spelled out..com slash playlist singular.

Let us know what you think. We're always open to tweaking how we do things and maybe there's a playlist we haven't thought of. Hit me up on Twitter or submit a comment through the website. Hey y'all, it's your girl, Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, singer, and entrepreneur. I'm a new podcast, baby, this is Kiki Palmer. I'm asking friends, family, and experts,

the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad. Where did memes come from? And where's Tom from MySpace? Listen to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, we're posting a special edition of the podcast, a pre-Oscar edition of the podcast. That's because we happen to get a great booking here on the show. Billy Crudup agreed to come on and Billy's a phenomenal actor. He probably know him from almost famous, but he's also in two of the movies that are on the best of the year lists and have been fetted during the award season this year. He was in Jackie and also in 20th century women. 20th century women I believe is up for best screenplay on Sunday night. So we're posting this now and

I gotta tell you this guy is an absolute pleasure to sit with and as you'll hear at least for me completely different from what I expected So here we go. Here's Billy Crittup From ABC This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris So many things I want to talk to you about because you're in you're in two of the movies that are getting talked about a lot during the award season this year, a 20th century woman and also Jackie. I've seen both of them and last night just prepared for this. I also watched the first half of almost famous, which is amazing.

But also you're a meditator. So let's just start there for a second. Okay, how when, where, why did you a meditator. So let's just start there for a second. Okay. How when where why did you start meditator? Well, you know, I'm sure you have the same reaction Or have had a similar reaction before if somebody calls you a meditator If you came to it as an adult, which is no, I'm not like I I try, you know, I mean Mostly it's like it it became a kind of triage situation for me, which is similar, I think, which was similar to some of the experiences that I read about in your

book where all the tools that you had arrived at your successful adulthood with were suddenly not supporting your experience of living responsibly and happily in your adult life. And I can remember when I was a kid, also by the way, I'm sure this will be, I'll be, this will be a very fractured way of speaking the entire time because when I was asked to come on and do this,

immediately I thought of like a million things that I wanted to say and talk about, because these are normally conversations that I only have with my friends. And I guess that's for two reasons. One, when I speak publicly, I try to keep kind of an opaque reference or opaque version of myself out there, because my job is to create the illusion that I'm somebody else. And I'm not really great at it anyway and I don't want to put any more obstacles in the way of me succeeding in that.

So I don't want to have a public persona that people know a lot about me. It seems like that is a counterintuitive idea to being an actor. It's not in terms of being famous in a celebrity and people kind of conflate the two often. So it's a confusing situation. But this was the first situation where I thought, actually, I really do want to go and talk to Dan about this because we also have a lot of mutual friends. But mindfulness is something that I've arrived at or has been circling around my mind or I've been circling it for a little while now.

And I like talking about it and thinking about it and taking stabs at it and getting it wrong and practicing it and failing and all of that stuff that goes with it. But I remember when I was going to say before when I was probably 9 or 10, my dad who loved the ocean wanted to take us deep sea fishing. We were in North Carolina spending the summer with him. And I had never been deep sea fishing. We were in North Carolina spending the summer with him. And I had never been deep sea fishing. And you have to go about two hours off the coast of North Carolina to get to

the deep water. And I had always imagined, I guess, that once you got past the breakers, it was calm out there. And I was deeply disappointed and incredibly nauseous when I discovered that the swells continue throughout the entire ocean and forever. And that's sort of how I felt when I arrived at my adult life is I expected to then I already I had all the trappings of success and adulthood. trappings of success and adulthood. I had responsibility, I had artistic agency, I had money, I had friends. I was in relationships and my family was close to me and supported me.

But there was an underlying sense of disease and that was confusing to me. And so I began to reach out and talk to people about it. And I guess one of the things that kept coming up was this idea of mindfulness. Yeah. You did this thing that I love one yes to do, which is you said about 45 things that I want to follow up. I don't even know where to start. Good. Well, let's end it there then. No, okay, you're not off the hook. Okay, so the one thing you said immediately jumps out at me is this idea of creating sort of an opaque personality and that there's a difference between folks who are famous for being famous

celebrities and folks who are, you know, real character actors and make their living and not just for money, but really it's their art form to have people project onto them when they're on the screen, all of your own stuff, right? So I'm not seeing you and thinking about all the stuff in your personal life, I'm seeing you and thinking about you only as a character.

And I will say that the minute I met you, which was 10 minutes ago, I was already surprised, I expected you to be completely different because you know I just watch you in jacking which you're a really tough-nosed reporter, hard-nosed reporter tough-nosed is probably not an expression. That's fine with me because I'm going to use a lot of not-nosed expressions for this interview. Good, you have full license to do that. Venting all sorts of stuff right out of my butt. This is a safe place. Okay. So anyway, you've succeeded, as I guess my point, and it's a really interesting strategy,

and there are not many other public figures I can think of who pursued that strategy. Only one name comes to mind, and I'm not even sure. I'm right about this, but I think Matt Damon has kind of done that a little bit too. Well, I mean, he's an actor that I admire immensely and he's found a way to do both pretty convincingly and charmingly. I guess my experience and ridiculously successfully, you know, it's tough to do either of those well for a long time, so to sort of do both of them.

I mean, if you've watched his stuff on Kimmel, he has a spectacular kind of persona there that has been, they've been engaged in this dialogue for a long time that's really hilarious. But when I was in undergraduate at the University of North Carolina, I didn't really know what I wanted to do. I had an expectation that because I got into school there and the only reason I got into school there, I think was reason I got into school there, I think was because my dad went there, and my granddad went there,

I wasn't a good enough student to get in there from out of state without some help. And so I felt a burden of responsibility that better not screw up this privilege. I mean, there's a lot of ways that I was born into privilege. And that kind of responsibility is actually something that I wanted to talk about in terms of mindfulness as you get older. I remember, I've read about, um, you said last night you watched half of almost famous and I've read about a third of your book, 10% happier and I'm

only 1% happier. So I hope it picks up. It does, it does. But you talked about the sense of responsibility and that thing that your dad, the price of security, security. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I mean, I would have expressed it maybe a little differently. My grandfather was always like, you know, don't get a big head or don't, yeah, you know, just keep your nose down and if you

are successful at something, just keep trying harder and never take yourself too seriously but never stop working hard, you know, there was a, there was never a sense of you're doing great, you know, um, whatever you end up doing is good enough. I have an expectation that you'll want to succeed in the world and so don't put that pressure. That's not the way that I succeed in the world. And so don't put that pressure. That's not the way that I experienced life at all. And so when I was in college, and I couldn't figure out what to do, I kept getting really positive feedback about performances. And I was only doing like plays after, after school and taking performance classes as a sort of slide class, you know, like things that I enjoyed, I needed the attention, I guess, or it was a way

that I felt useful. People seem to keep encouraging me to do that. I think that you mentioned something else like that in your book, is you end up doing one of the things that people keep encouraging. If you're lucky, people keep encouraging you to do it. And I had some very encouraging teachers who said, no, you should keep performing. And when I finally finished undergraduate, which was a semester late because I realized my junior year that I really didn't know what I was going to do and I started taking like nine hours a semester and kind of got to the end of it and was like, Dad, I guess I'm

going to have to go an extra semester because I really didn't plan this well. And I needed the time really, I think, to figure out what I wanted to do. And so back to your point about how I thought about my job as an actor, I decided to go to graduate school. And I thought I would at the very least take it seriously and get a master's and so many of the people that I admired were teachers. And I thought what I'll probably end up doing is teaching because I love performance, I feel engaged by it and I've admired so many of my teachers. And the first day of graduate school, I realized that I wasn't interested in teaching in the same.

I was actually really interested in performing, but I needed to be around people who were serious minded about it, and we're really interested in whatever this craft was. However, we got there, whether it was through insecurity, or the neediness, or attention seeking all of that. However, we arrived at that moment when we were in our early 20s, and we going to take a stab at it. There was a group of us that were willing to go $80,000 in debt and take out student loans and study the craft and begin to imagine ourselves as craftspeople. And once I started getting opportunities

and I got opportunities almost right away. I felt a huge burden to take them seriously and to take the craft seriously. That was a part of, I think, the invention for me of that kind of ideology, which is to try to fly below the radar as much as possible so that I can do, I can be the most useful at my job, which is to try and tell somebody else's story. That's when I feel particularly useful. And not inventing my own story. I remember Matt Damon actually said to me one time when

I was sort of lamenting the fact that I couldn't find a job that was really inspiring to me at a certain period. Every actor goes through that about every three months. And actually, most actors go through that their entire life. You know, it's an impossible profession for most people who try it. He said, why don't you write something? And I just wanted to say, dude, I'm going to kill you. The first thing you wrote, you got an Oscar for, okay? I don't know how to write. I don't have any, well, why don't you just start welding or something? The reason I go to people like Tom Stopperd

and classics and plays and stuff is because I wanna be a part of storytelling that's much more interesting than anything I could have to offer. The best that I can offer is to be a part of that system. And the way to do that is to blend into that storytelling. Hopefully, that comes about through suppressing your own behavior in a way that you can surprise people by being... You always want people to imagine that's the only role you could have ever played.

I certainly have a publicist who thinks that idea is terrible. And but it's quite interesting to come and talk about something that's different than my career or my approach to acting or the actual project that I'm working on because it does reveal something about me. But I guess, you know, part of it is I feel a little further along in my career. And this is also a kind of selfish endeavor for me except for the fact that I've been the one talking the entire time, which is I'm really interested in how you've come to this and the people that you've spoken to and the people that we sort of have in common have

been inspirational to me in terms of navigating the middle of my life. So I feel kind of privileged to get an opportunity to have a dialogue about that. That's amazing, thank you. Again, at a fork in the road. I'm also very dreaded. I've never done it again.

A fork in the road where you just say too many things that are interesting. I guess one of the things I want to pick up on that I think is a really cool and brave admission is that you can seemingly have everything, right? You said you're a little further on in your career. I mean, dude, you arrived a long time ago and you have everything that most people in this society aspire to.

And yet, they're still chop. Yeah. So exactly. How is that true and how is mindfulness help with that? Well, I think it's true because one of the things that you allude to is the experience of constantly thinking about the past or the historical parts of your own story and imagining the future when you will

have solved the aspects of your history that haunt you and you will thrive in your future time. Strong, maybe I would be even a little taller. I don't know, all the things that I imagine are going to happen. When I, just for the record, according to your Wikipedia page, you're an inch taller than me. Just so that, so in this room, you're the tallest dude.

I wore my lifts today too. Good. I kept, one of my good friends is a director named Bart Freundlich and I would often lament to him during times of despair or just like listlessness, I keep waiting for my excellent life to start because when you have more privilege than you think is fair, really,

and you have more success than so many of your peers and so many opportunities. Most people get like one great role in their life. And I've had multiple opportunities on stage and in movies with phenomenal roles. And that's a real rare thing. And I guess I kept thinking that the pressure and responsibility that I felt that was the

insecurity is the price of for security was going to dissipate as I arrived into the calm of the ocean. And it didn't. And in fact, increased. And then there are other responsibilities that happen in your adult life. Those add to the pressures and whether you have success or failure in those, they kind of start to pile on and weigh you down. And without new tools to navigate them, you're stuck with the same systems that you grew up with. And I grew up in like, I'm sure many people who are listening, an American system of capitalist ambition, you know, that, and it's not that,

I don't mean that in a pejorative way. It's just a way of thinking, which is that, you know, you keep striving. You, you try to make the most of your opportunities. You don't take things for granted. You help people who are less fortunate than you are, there's not a sense of coasting in my idea of success. It's like grit and constant work. And at a certain point, if you, I tried to explain to somebody, maybe it was myself,

but I was trying to explain the idea of arriving at a life that you thought was what you had planned for and not really knowing how to navigate it. Being a public figure is a very different thing than being a storyteller. Having a responsibility as a parent is unlike anything you could have predicted. Trying to be a responsible citizen when you

depended upon people that you admired to do that before, to be one of those people is a different kind of pressure. So I think all of those things, a confluence of those things, led me to start feeling that level of anxiety in a pretty significant way. And I experienced it in a similar way to you with panic attacks, navigating those on stage. Oh, you were having them on stage. I had, I have had some pretty interesting experiences with respect to anxiety and performance, not performance anxiety, okay. I just want to make that clear in in a deity and performance. Well, there goes this interview.

No, no, no, this interview's just going swimmingly. In you end, it was totally fine here. So, one of the first times I experienced anxiety, I was doing a mold for my face for something. And they pour all this latex over your face. I give you a couple of videos. That sounds horrible. I have never had any kind of claustrophobia.

I kind of always counted myself as somebody to game for whatever. I'll try something once I might not like it. I might not be good at it, but I had two brothers growing up. And I don't allow myself to be intimidated very often about trying something, you know, like even if it goes very, very badly. But so I had this latex on my face and the guy who was in charge of it said, okay, so I'm going to say, are you okay and you give me the thumbs up if you're okay and give

me the thumbs down if you're okay? And give me the thumbs down if you're not. And I was gonna like, all right, whatever, man, I'm just do the latex thing. You don't have to worry about me. And he midway through, he's like, are you okay? And I'm like, you know, your eyes are closed and they're with it. Then he said, are you okay?

Give him the thumbs up, a couple more minutes went by. And this is probably like a 15 minute process or so. He said, are you okay? At that point, I started to get a little angry at it. I was like, why do you keep asking me that? You know, like, yes, that's a thumbs up again. And then he's like the fourth time. He's like, are you okay?

And I'm kind of like, and all of a sudden, my heart pounds out of my chest. I can't breathe. I feel, I never had this feeling before, you know, where you just you want to run. And I just put my thumb down. And like they immediately peeled the latex off my face, which felt like it had the consistency of a tissue.

I mean, it was nothing. It was not the oppressive weight that I was experiencing in my chest and I just turned to them and I was embarrassed as hell and I was like, I don't know what happened. I just started breathing. He was like, it's fine that it happens. Sometimes I was like, yeah, it's really strange. Can you just give me like 10 seconds and then let's do it again because I am not going to let that intimidate me. And I did it again and it was the longest 15 minutes of my life just trying to keep it

together. And if you've had panic attacks, then you become aware of something called the anticipatory anxiety. So there's this cycle that starts. Yeah, once you learn how to panic, you get really good at it. It's unfortunate. Your body, and it is a, yeah, you break through in a way. And I, so identified with that part of your book.

And then it started happening to you on stage. So then I can remember the first time it happened to me on stage, well, I may be getting the order wrong. I believe it's happened to me three times on stage once I was doing a play called the metal children which was off Broadway at the vineyard theater and It was a play by Adam Rapp and I had a monologue at a podium and Oh, that must have been the second time. Because the first time, I'm sure of it now,

was during coast of Utopia, which was a Tom Stopper trilogy. It was like three plays about Russian philosophy turn of the century. And I had a monologue during that one. And midway through the monologue, I went up. And going up is what actors say for the term for losing your lines. So during a monologue there aren't other people to help you,

especially if the end of the monologue is a really big, thematic part of the story. And I worked enough in the theater that you go up a little bit sometimes, but what feels like an hour for you is a millisecond. The audience never sees it. And so the typically the best thing to do is take a breath. Actually, like step back from where you are, look at the person in front of you, and usually because of rehearsal, because you've worked hard, it comes. But this one, like I step back, I took a breath and watching the actors who are on stage with

me at that time go from pretend listening to real listening because they knew something was up. I mean, I usually flew through this monologue. And so to have a break like that. So then I saw them looking at me. Then I could hear my breath. I'm going to freak it out here in the story. And then I started to have a panic attack. And I just sat down, actually, during my monologue, took some more breaths, kind of, and started to watch my mouth say the words. And I was kind of having an outer, out of body experience. But it was really the next day that was the biggest problem because it's such an uncomfortable experience.

And I took the approach that I took with everything before that, the approach that I took the first time I had the panic attack with the latex, which is I'm just gonna muscle through this. And yeah, that's just no bueno for very long. So I had to start figuring out some other ways to get some help. Mark Epstein was a big help. He was a mutual friend through someone I went and saw him.

He's a therapist. Dr. Mark Epstein, who is a friend of mine and a friend, I guess, your doctor, and he's written all these amazing books about the overlap between psychology and Buddhism and he's the reason I got into meditation and Buddhism. Yeah and a big influence for me too for sure. Certainly the way that he talks about mindfulness and he's processing your own history and I think it was during the next time that I had a panic attack, which was during the metal children, he prescribed that beta blocker. And it's a funny thing. It's like magic beta blocker. It is. I'm just explaining what it is just so people know

it's basically it's for high blood pressure. But everybody from concert pianists to surgeons to anybody who's speaking of public to actors, news anchors You can take them and it will prevent you from having the physiological impact of a panic attack It basically your heart rate cannot go above a certain level So you can have the psychological parts of the panic, but your body won't mutiny the way it does when you're not on one Mutiny is a perfect word for it, because when you know that your body is not gonna become hysterical in that way,

it's easier to manage the psychological parts of it. And that anticipatory anxiety becomes a lot less diminished and stuff. But then once you get past those actual moments, once the play ends and you don't have to go out there anymore, you're not having as much anticipatory anxiety or whatever, then the opportunity arrives to observe what brought you to that moment in the first place. How is it that I had done or have done, I don't know how many plays that I've done in New

York with a lot of pressure on many of them. Some very difficult performances. I can remember doing a play with Francis McDormand one time that was almost four hours long. And I went up so bad during that, because the dialogue was really repetitive and difficult that at a certain point we had a two person scene, I kept circling back to something in the beginning and got us into a loop.

And at certain points, she just stopped and looked at me and said, I don't know what we're saying anymore. So I'm just going to say this and I looked at her like a puppy like, thank you for getting me out of there. So I had navigated situations like that, you know, throughout, that's just part of performing, but I had never had that level of anxiety where I couldn't cope with it. I think that was the inspiration for me kind of to start considering the way that my mind works. Was that when you got into meditation or heard you had already tasted a little? I was first introduced to it my my son's mom when we were together. Mary Louise was teaching Mary Louise Parker

Mary Louise Parker. really of weeds. She was teaching yoga at the time too, and it's funny, the first time that she taught me meditation, I approached it the way that I guess I approached everything, which is with rabid, competitive antagonism. Yes, absolutely, I love it. It's just the way that, and I just wanted to be great at it. And after five,

actually terrific, because I think I don't know if it was like five or ten minutes, but afterwards she said, wow, you didn't even swallow during that, you know? And I was like, nailed it. Crushed that meditation. Don't ever want to do it again. Don't know what it was about But at least I was still and impressed her but I Ever since the end of college I

Have had an interest in I guess religion in the ways that I Think about myself in the world and I had a lot of did different influences growing up But I read the road less traveled when I was, you know, like in college and to me, that was really interesting to have an alternate perspective about how to manage relationships in your sense of self. And if you're an actor, you try to empathize with a lot of different kinds of people.

So it's good to have an open mind and take in new ways of thinking. But it was really when I started to work with Mark and also my other friend, Elizabeth Kathrell. It was the one who introduced us and she produced Jesus' soul. That's right, co-wrote, produced, acted in. She and I were in graduate school together.

Gotcha. And so that movie came out in like 1999, if I recall. Yeah, that's right. Right, right. And she has been a major influence in my life in a myriad of ways. She's a great friend and a brilliant artist. But also somebody who has always been interested in mindfulness, and we'd always go and have launched and stuff and talk about maybe doing some other project together.

And she would say, you know, you should go talk to my friend Joseph Goldstein, you know, he's a really Interesting because I guess the ways that I would speak about the struggles that I was having with anxiety or the ways that I was thinking about I want to say religion but ideology or whatever to her sounded familiar and So she kept encouraging me to Pursue that and I always be like, nah, you know, I don't have time for that. I'm, you know, it sounds great. But, and then she introduced me to Joseph Goldstein once at her house. And the first time I met this guy, the sort of gravity around him, I burst into tears.

I really? It doesn't take much for me to burst into tears. Dan, it's kind of my job. I'm like, there's another interesting thing about being an actor is you have to be really thin skinned if you want to be, well, the kind of actor I like being is really thin skinned when you're working. You're very available to the other actors.

So there's what I would describe as something called immediacy in your work. It appears as though it's happening for the first time, but then you have to be really thick skinned when it comes out and people tell you that your piece of bleep, you know, or worse, nobody sees it, nobody gets to cry, you know. And that's a very strange experience. Hey, I'm Aresha and I'm Brooke. And we're the hosts of Wundery's podcast, Even the Rich, where we bring you absolutely true and absolutely shocking stories about the most famous families and biggest celebrities the world has ever seen.

Our newest series is all about drag icon RuPaul Charles. After a childhood of being ignored by his absentee father, Ru goes out searching for love and acceptance. But the road to success is a rocky one. Substance abuse and mental health struggles threaten to veer Ru off course. In our series RuPaul Born Naked, we'll show you how RuPaul overcame his demons and carved out a place for himself as one of the world's top entertainers. Opening the doors for aspiring queens everywhere. Follow even the rich wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app.

So can I just jump in and just explain some of these characters? So you really hack into the Buddhist mafia on the East Coast. So Elizabeth Catherell, as we mentioned, she's a film producer. She's close with Dr. Mark Epstein, who became your shrink after you had the panic attacks, and then Joseph Goldstein. So this is another name that you mentioned. She's incredibly close with Joseph. Joseph has been kind of semi-facitiously referred to as the Pope of American Buddhism.

He's just this eminent meditation teacher and it was really a pioneer who helped bring meditation to the United States and back in the 60s and 70s. He also is my meditation teacher and is all over my book and he's the guiding teacher on the 10% happier app. I mean, I'm extremely close with Joseph. So anyway, just so that everybody has the background,

you meet this guy and you end up breaking into tears and bursting into tears? Well, I was going through a particularly difficult time and the way that I, you know, managed that was a lot of like grit, you know, like just keep it down, you know, or find ways to think it through or solve it somehow. You know, the idea of just existing with it, I can remember Mark saying at some point, I think I said, you know, man, if this anxiety keeps up like this, I don't know if I can handle it, you know, and he was like, yes, you can. And I was like, but my whole life, and he's like, yes.

And I was like, no, please, no. But I, apparently at that time was under a lot of stress. And Elizabeth is always incredibly encouraging and would kind of diminish the way that you just described him is the way that he exists in the world. But the way that she would describe him to me would be like, please meet my friend Joseph. He's a lovely person, a brilliant thinker,

and I think you two would really get along. And as soon as I met him, there was a kind of gravity to his presence, and I don't mean to sound, what's the word, pollyanna, pollyanna-ish, something? Told you I was gonna be inventing stuff. Let's go with that. Okay.

But he was looking right at me, and there was no hiding for me. I've got lots of social skills to deflect and to manage awkward situations, and you learn that as an actor, and probably one of the reasons I am an actor, and I, you learn that as an actor, probably one of the reasons I am an actor, and I moved around a lot as a kid, so I know how to socially get through

some awkward situations. This one, when that kind of presence, it just opened me right up. Like that's, he was where he was, so I had to be where I was, which was a mess at that time. And his reception of that was also so empathetic and compassionate, that I think that was moving to me in a different way too.

And Mark is kind of like that, not kind of Mark is like that as well. And so those experiences I think allowed me to imagine different practices, applying, learning, applying different practices to my life that might make things a little bit better as you say in your book. But I also, I'm talking the entire time. That's the point of being interviewed. Okay. As far as I understand it.

If I, I know none of my friends are listening to me, this because this is what they hear all the time, but they will have shut this off a while ago for sure. So, but no, I find it so fascinating, but I thought of this with respect to your book, Temperson Happier. For me, it wasn't just the idea of being a little bit, feeling a little bit better. It's the fact that the tools that I had and the mind that, my mind in motion as an adult, was actually taking me down. So it wasn't as though there was this plateau

I had reached that I could be a little happier. I was actually starting to feel worse and worse and worse and worse. You were at a deficit. Yeah, so it's really like about 40% happier. You know, that if that makes any sense. No, I'm terrible at math and so yeah, I hate that I'm kind of stuck with this title

that I pulled out of my rear end. But you're absolutely right. And this was one of the 45 things you said in your first answer that I wanted to follow up, then you brought us right back to it, which is that the tools that you're bequeathed by the culture and by your own idiosyncrasies that bring you to whatever success you achieve, or whatever point you're at in your middle life, don't serve you anymore at some point. Or they're kind of serving you, but you're reaching diminishing returns in certain areas.

And yeah, what meditation is useful for in my experience is to see where you're being an idiot and of course correct a little bit. And then also see where nothing's to be done. Like there's a certain amount of anxiety that is just part of your wiring or part of the conditions in which you exist in the world. And can you just be with it in a way that doesn't make it worse? It doesn't add, there's a great little parable in Buddhism that I'm sure you've heard, which is the second arrow.

Dude's walking through the forest, he gets hit by an arrow. That sucks, right? So, but you add on to the pain of the first arrow with a second arrow that you insert voluntarily, which is why am I always the guy getting hit by the arrow? Who did that? I'm gonna find them, you know, I'm not gonna make lunch now because I get hit by this arrow blah, blah, blah. The second that, that sort of optional suffering that we layer onto the baked in pain of existence.

Meditation is just good for managing all of that stuff. that we layer onto the baked in pain of existence. Meditation is just good for managing all of that stuff. That's my experience as well. And when you asked me before, when you said before that I meditate and I kind of bristle that that, I think part of it is because as you are like in your infancy and understanding your mind, you realize the constant ways in

which your mind leads you down crappy paths. And so in that way, you actually, the more mindful you become at the beginning, the worse you feel about your own capability. Because I had such smart influences, they never led me down the path that I was meditating to calm my mind. It was always the analogy of you're just going to go sit in the corner and watch the party going on. And the second arrow reminds me also to of the, you're not responsible for your first thought, your responsible for your second. That's right. That gets it a very weird idea for me which is I grew up hearing a lot about my gut and go with your gut, follow your

heart and your instincts are always right. And, you know, I've come to believe that that's not probably as useful as it sounds. Many of the things that feel instinctual, and that feel like gut reactions are responses to things that happened to you before you were probably even conscious. You know, like before you could speak before you can Well, well before you can remember or they're wired into your lizard brain and you inherited them from, you know, exactly

Thousands of years of evolution exactly and so Having to let go of that idea that your gut might actually lead you in that your gut might actually lead you in a direction that's not helpful for you sometimes, has been an interesting exercise. I'm so glad you brought that up because I've thought about this too

and I don't have it figured out, but you know that Malcolm Gladwell book, Blink, about the wisdom of the subconscious and that the decisions we make in the blink of an eye, et cetera, et cetera, or sometimes the smart one. I feel like I'm the anti-blink. My gut instinct is always like the dumbest thing. I'm always ready to do the dumbest thing on first. I have that experience too. I'll tell you where it's useful is creativity. It's really useful in making creative choices,

because what it allows you to do is identify what's singular about you, without intellectualizing it. You can make choices, you know, you can always invent things using your rational mind, but sometimes you can surprise yourself and surprise others by making creative choices that just

Where you're we call it in acting like getting out of your own way. Yeah, that's where it is useful for me It's not so useful for me when Living in New York City people don't follow my rules I always talk about that like with my brother Like if everybody just cooperated with my rules, I wouldn't have such a hard time taking my son to school. And I came up with this thing with my friend, Bart, to try to get out of that mindset because it happened so fast, you know,

that immediate response to somebody cutting you off, or somebody just driving in a way that makes me feel unsafe. And also when you have a kid, when you feel unsafe, makes them unsafe, I did not handle that well. Oh, that's that talk about lizard brain. I mean, you're gonna, I know that feeling having a kid, you just lose it. It's, I just would be giving people the finger.

Of course. So that he couldn't see it back there in the back, you know, I'd be like, but nothing's happening, son. This issue of the gut and when it's wise and when it's not, I haven't figured this out, so I'm not going to be dropping a whole bunch of wisdom here, but just thinking, just kind of putting that word fog. I feel like meditation is useful here maybe in that there's some sort of innate wisdom that you know when your gut's giving you, on some level you know when your gut's giving

you a good idea and when it's giving you a bad idea. For you as a performer and for me as somebody who is, you know, wants to be spontaneous in my podcast interviews or when I'm on the air, if you can get out of your own way, actually, if you can stop the useless chattering and listen to whatever intuition you have, actually, you can make better, more authentic decisions by the same token though, when you're in traffic it's somebody that cuts you off and you don't want to fall victim to the road rage that emerges right up from your brainstem. But there is, I feel to me, to me, in my experience, what meditation does is like a thin layer

of wisdom right on top of this. So like when I'm getting a spontaneous idea, maybe even a conversation with you where I'm trying to be right here and play ping pong with you back and forth It goes through the filter of my phone. This and if it's a terrible idea And you like some some percentage of the time I'll catch it and the same thing when I'm when I'm feeling rage And I'm about to say the thing that's gonna like ruin my marriage for the next 48 hours I'll catch it some percentage of the time and not do it. They're coming from the same kind of place I think.

Anyway, that was a word salad. No, it actually got to something that reminded me of something Joseph Goldstein said, which I found infuriating because this was the way that I responded to acting school too, which was I want the answers, man. Don't tell me that I haven't paid this much money to not get the key to acting. Don't tell me that it's a process, the lifelong process that I'm just like undertaking.

And Joseph Goldstein has a similar kind of thing with he said, well, when it's useful, use it. You know, when this is useful to you. So it doesn't mean like cutting off your instinct to eat when you're hungry. That's probably a good instinct. But it's probably not as useful for me to try and teach somebody that I don't know how to drive the way I want them

to by screaming at them. And it doesn't take long to kind of figure out that that's not a great strategy. So I think part of for me, and we would call it wisdom when people get older and they do, well, maybe you don't need to care about that. Or maybe this is something good to follow is Learning the ways in which your mind and your body helps you achieve the values Achieve achieve putting into the world the values that you

Hold or then are things that are important to you and trying to diminish a little bit the ways in which your mind and body encourage different values. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And it's not, it is not, there's no formula. That pisses me off too. There's no formula. It's so wrong.

It is wrong. Yeah, what are you gonna do about it? Joseph's just the messenger, we can't kill him. But what I do think is that there you Meditation helps you sort of get a cleaner signal to noise ratio so that when your instincts and urges and impulses and desires are arising You're like better at picking out the good ones and rejecting the bad ones and it's not gonna be a hundred percent of the time It'll just be so yeah, I mean a hundred percent of the time. I you know I am terrible at this by the way. I just want to add

Anybody who says they're good at meditation. I think you should be very Doobiesum. Absolutely. I mean, I'm horrendous at it good My behavior reflects it like when I can catch myself I count it as a complete triumph. Yes, and it only comes from like a ton of work So it's like a ton of work for a little bit of a payoff, but what there there was I was doing a What do they call it? where some guide of meditation. And the woman said something to the effect of,

hey man, give yourself a break just for coming in and meditating because ultimately what you're trying to do is be more in the world. And that's probably a good thing. That's probably a generous, loving, empathetic, civically responsible, good thing, just trying to be present. I can easily follow a different narrative in my head,

which is that it's a selfish, that even me talking about it is a selfish, egotistic experience that is revolting at best. When you give yourself a little bit of a break about that even trying to be mindful is a nice thing to be doing. It makes the effort worth it, I think, for me. Absolutely. And I hear this a lot, the idea that somehow meditation is self-indulgent or

naval gazing. I think it's totally misguided. It's totally misguided. If it's, and Joseph talks about this a lot too, that it's like the airline safety instructions. When they say, when the oxygen masks come down, they say, put your own on first before you can help any but before you help or assist others, or I think is the way they say it. You can't be useful or effective in the world if you're a complete mess. There's nothing you can do.

So we're not talking about spending 23 hours of day meditating, just a few minutes a day so that you're more sane. And that's what you're contributing to the rest of the planet, that is definitely a public service. Well, I agree. And because we're also not talking about becoming monks, what we're talking about is how do we live in an American society with the values that were given to us and that are

encouraged by the socio-political system around us? How do we live in that society in a way that helps to mitigate some of our anxiety so that we can be productive? And it's not an easy task. We haven't been encouraged in this culture to live in that way. Ambition is really the foundation of this culture. And we get a sense that to be a good American is to be an American who strives for something better

than their parents had, or to create a life for yourself that is inspirational or something, or takes advantage of all the opportunities you've been given. And that's sort of what I was talking about in terms of feeling that burden before is I didn't often feel grateful first. I felt the burden first, you know, like and I certainly didn't allow feelings of pride or even the acknowledgement that I was responsible for any of it for a long time, which is actually, I think, okay to, to fit into the mix.

You know, there's a lot of ways to experience success and still have ambition without being rigid with anxiety. And this is where I think just getting back to the self-indulgence versus public service thing, that actually you're gonna struggle with the things you struggle with, right? But you wanna be in the process like a good romantic partner,

you wanna be a good dad, you wanna be good to your colleagues on the various productions in which you participate. And it can't, to me, an inexorable outgrowth of understanding how insane you are is that you have empathy for everybody else. You realize we're all crazy. And that just makes you a better citizen. It just does. I totally agree. I don't think there's any two ways about it. I don't think there are two ways about it. There I go mixing up a messin' up an aphorism. Before we go though, I want to talk about

your son. You got a 13 year old son. Let's give him a shout out. He's in the meditation, right? He is. Yeah, his mom introduced him to meditation and yoga and he takes great pride in the fact that he's you know been able to meditate before and so we we try to do it sometimes together now and he's had lots of practice with his mom, but we were talking yesterday because he and I were on vacation in Jamaica. And we were on the way back. And I was telling him about coming in here and what we were going to talk about. And some of the things that I'd been thinking about. And I said, what are some of the things you think about when you meditate?

And he said, well, I tried to think about a word or I try to think about my breath, but sometimes it's really hard. My mind is really busy. And he asked about me and I said, well, the breath is the thing that I try to go to too. And I had some teacher who told me at one point, your mind is going to drift away a thousand times. Your job is just to bring it back a thousand and one. That's it.

Just bring it back to the breath. And Mark said something, because there was the idea that just watching your mind emotionally watching the party, standing in the corner, watching the party, and not getting drawn into the party, for me was a way of just identifying the feelings, like so sadness or, you know, anger or whatever feelings were being generated. And Mark said something to the effect of, I just go like feeling, there's a feeling,

there's a sound, there's a feeling. And I was continuing to think about that. And I think it was in Joseph's book Heartful of Peace, where he said something to the effect of, a feeling is being known. So not identifying with that as you being the one who generated, so I was explaining to Will, and I have kind of an empirical, I like science. To me, astronomy is one of my favorite things.

And learning about astronomy is one of my favorite things as an adult. And I said to Will, I said, so I've got this new thing when I think about, when I meditate, which is that like the universe is knowing sadness or something. Like you as an extension of the universe because we're made up of molecules and stuff and humans came about through evolution. So there is a way to describe this experience as just being the universe kind of knowing these things. And then, you know, and an awesome 13 year old fashioned,

he looks at me and the plane he goes, pooh! Ha ha ha ha! Dad! Yeah. So you just scored the biggest touchdown a dad can ever score, which is your 13 year old son. Thanks, you're cool and smart.

Well, I'm not sure. For a nanosecond at least. At least for a nanosecond. Yeah, I mean, I love that point. It's true. I mean, the point of meditation or one of the points is to see all the stuff in your head with some non-judgmental remove so that when you're hit

by it in real life, it doesn't own you. Exactly. When anger shows up, when the desire to eat 75 cookies shows up, you don't actually just get yanked around by it as much. But then there's a deeper level, which is like, okay, so what is, what's aware of these emotions? What is aware of all of these thoughts?

Once you've stepped out of the party, who is that person looking at everything else? And that's a huge mystical question. It drives me nuts too. And like when Mark's is driving us. Yeah, and Mark will say things like, well, no one really. Or, you know, like, it isn't being experienced

or something, you know, abstract like that. I'd just be like, what am I? But this is how you process that. I mean, I think it's a useful, it's a kind of frustration, confusion. Now we're getting to depend of the whole stuff here, but this is this confusion about who or what you are, where if you close your eyes and look for Billy,

you're not gonna find him, right? If you look for, if you listen to sounds and then try to find what's hearing those sounds, the thought without a thinker, right? Who is there, who's there? This is the mystery of consciousness. This is the big one. And I think, as I understand it, there's a useful confusion that can be generated that over time kind of cools you out. You said before that

there's a wisdom that emerges in old people that they're a little less some elderly people, that they're a little less caught up in everything and One of my favorite meditation teachers a younger guy named Jeff Warren who's my age 45 and He's based in Toronto and he talks about the fact that meditation is about bringing that wisdom of an older of aging gracefully into The earlier part of your life, right? And so that's what you're doing. You're basically just trying to generate some of this emotional agility around all of the crap in your own head.

And then when you push it a little deeper, you're also trying to create this kind of useful confusion about who is this anyway? Who's in here anyway? And that can all just kind of cool you out. Useful confusion is a fantastic term, I think. I don't have anything to add to that, surprisingly. What an unbelievably pleasant surprise you are, I guess. This is so cool to sit here and talk to you, man.

I really appreciate it. Thank you. It is absolutely my pleasure. I am a fan of the thinking that is going on right now, and your encouragement of that I think is Pretty rad. Thank you Anything that if our listeners want to know more about you want to learn about what you're kind of works You're gonna you've got coming up where can we go? Well, I hope that I Won't give up any more secrets about who I am or anyone, but I will

be in a movie called Alien Covenant coming out at some point soon, which was awesome to be a part of an Alien movie with Ridley Scott and Michael Faskmender. That was one of the first times Will was really excited about me being all the movie or stuff, yeah, it's my son Will. Most of the movies are like, I'm sitting around adults talking about hard stuff and he's like, yeah, dad, that's what I want to see. So this is one where I get to run through stuff

and be chased by aliens and he was super fired up about that. So I'm fired up too. I'm gonna see it, I guarantee it. Billy, thank you very much. Total pleasure, thank you for having me. You're the best. I really appreciate it. Okay, thank you very much. Total pleasure, thank you for having me. You're the best. I really appreciate it. Okay, there's another edition of the 10% Happier Podcast.

If you liked it, please make sure to subscribe, rate us, and if you want to suggest topics we should cover or guess we should bring in, hit me up on Twitter, at Dan B. Harris. I also want to thank Hardly, the people who produced this podcast and really do pretty much all the work. Lauren, Efron, Josh Kohan, Sarah Amos, Andrew Calp, Steve Jones, and the head of ABC News Digital Dance Silver.

I'll talk to you next Wednesday. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com-survey. Survey.