Rejection Doesn't Scare Kids. Here's How To Learn From Them | Julian Shapiro-Barnum

Key Takeaway

Today, break one tiny “inner grown-up” rule. Notice an impulse you usually suppress—touch an interesting texture, dance for one song, ask someone a genuine question, or share one real detail instead of a polished version of yourself—and act on it. Starting with a harmless act of playful defiance builds evidence that you can tolerate awkwardness, rejection, and imperfection. Small experiments make your more curious, expressive self easier to access.

Episode Overview

Dan Harris speaks with comedian and Recess Therapy creator Julian Shapiro-Barnum about what adults can learn from children’s playfulness, emotional directness, and willingness to risk rejection. Shapiro-Barnum argues that adulthood need not mean abandoning childish energy; it can mean intentionally recovering the curiosity, honesty, and boundary-testing that remain close to the surface.

Full Transcript

Transcript of Rejection Doesn't Scare Kids. Here's How To Learn From Them | Julian Shapiro-Barnum from 10% Happier. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

Hello, everybody. Welcome to the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm your host, Dan Harris. I have this mode that I go into that I really don't like. It's this kind of heads down, grind through it, bulldoze through your to-do list mode. It's kind of militaristic and mirthless, and I feel like one really prominent antidote to this mode is to be playful or childish in the positive sense of the word. So I was very eager to talk to my guest today because that's his whole thing. Julian Shapiro Barnum is a comedian and the host of the phenomenally successful digital show Recess Therapy.

You can see it on YouTube. You can see clips on social media, and he's got a new book, which is called How to Grow Up Without Becoming a Grownup. Julian, welcome to the show. Thank you so much. Did I get all of that right? Oh, my God. That was more than enough. Okay. All right. Tell me a little bit about the impetus behind Recess Therapy because I think there's a little bit of a story there. Yeah. 100%. So, hi, I'm Julian. Hi. Nice to meet you and everybody.

Yeah. So I started Recess Therapy in college. I was at Boston University. It was my senior year, and I was studying theater. And my senior year of college was COVID, which was not a fun way to spend theater school. We went from being in person and learning the craft of acting to suddenly just being in our rooms and doing Zoom acting classes, which sucked. And there's a lot to say about COVID, but I won't say it here. But basically, I was not very happy. And my way of kind of combating that was I really fell in love with the act of interviewing.

And every day, I would go out into the street and interview people. And I was trying to connect with adults and interview people. And I think every other week, I would do a different random idea that came into my head. And then one day at the end of spring, my senior year of college, I was sitting in a playground with my friend Charlotte, and there were all these kids running around having so much fun. And I said something to her like, what do they know that we don't know?

They're also in Zoom school, but they seem to be tapped into something really joyful. They seem to be able to finish Zoom school and play and let go of all of that. And I need to know what that is. And so truly on a whim, we interviewed them and asked them how they found happiness during the pandemic. And as a comedian, I went into it looking for probably some piece of comedy. But what I found was something really heartwarming and deep. And I posted online, not really expecting anything of it.

And strangers connected with it. And I thought, this is something really special and worth exploring. And almost six years later, it's become a passion, a career of mine. No, it's gigantic. And you have many other shows now. But Recess Therapy seems to be like the heart of what you do. The flagship. There is a genre of content here that I'm twice your age, as we established before the interview. I remember shows like Kids Say the Darnedest Things. Right. Exactly. And then there was a show like Are You Smarter Than a Third Grader?

This whole idea of interviewing kids has been around for a minute. Why do kids say the darnedest things? I mean, like the wisdom from the mouth of babes trope has been around since the Bible. I feel like Recess Therapy has marked. I don't want to be too self-aggrandizing here at all, but I feel like my show is totally a little bit different from those shows. I feel like the Kids Say the Darnedest Thing was, oh, my God, look how adorable and witty and off the cuff kids can be.

And that served its purpose in this place. My whole thesis of Recess Therapy or hypothesis or the thing I was searching for with that show was, how can I become a better adult by honoring and exploring the wisdom of kids? So instead of this top down approach of like, oh, my God, kids are so look, look what these kids can say. My whole approach was, what can I what can they teach me? What can I learn from these kids? And so when I started the show, I made a list of I don't know how many, but maybe 80 topics of all things that I was wondering about as I was growing up from climate change to anger to are there aliens in outer space to is magic real, like all these all these just things that I was really wondering about.

And I made a list on my phone. And then every single week, I would go out and talk to kids about them. And we'd post them online. And what I really quickly learned was that adults were also fascinated to know what kids were thinking about these things and what it came down to. And I think the whole crux of it was that kids simplify things. We adults take topics and we think about them to death for good reason, because there's nuance to everything. But when a kid takes something and strips the nuance of it and make something a black and white issue, there's actually some relief in that.

And there's there's there's beauty in that simplicity. And I think that's what I've really enjoyed about my conversation with kids. And now I have this book and I feel like I have grown up and I don't need it in the way that I did when I was 20. And now I just really enjoy bringing interesting topics to kids. But back then, it was this real need. So the wisdom that emerges from the mouths of babes is, in your view, the fact that they're not burdened by this conceptual overlay that we bring things, they're not over intellectualizing things.

I think at its simplest, yes. If we pick any given subject and if you if you give me like a genre of topic and say, what can you learn from kids? I think it can be brought down to they look at its essence because they're not seeing all the sides of it that adults are able to speaking as a parent. I have an 11 year old son. Do you agree with me? I agree. But I will complicate the picture slightly. And you may have seen this in your vast archive of interviews.

My son will occasionally say something truly profound. I was we just finished a vacation and my friend Glenn taught my son how to ride a bike for the first time. And and then my son wanted to ride the bike every day just to get it into his molecules. And at one point, we're biking around this little neighborhood where we're vacationing. My son turned around to me and said, this is peak childhood struck me as like, really, really just honing in on on gratitude for the present moment is quite profound.

If you think about it, he will in the next breath make a deez nuts joke, 100 percent. So kids say wise things, but most of the shit they say is not very, very stupid. Yeah. And I think that's awesome. I think most of it is just fun and goofy. Yes. I don't think kids are philosophers by any stretch of the imagination. Most of what I do with kids is long form improv, comedy improv is just playing. You're playing off of them. Yeah. I mean, my background is in improv.

So the way I treat these interviews is through that lens. And I, yes, and them and I be their scene partner. That's how that's how I think about it. So the probably the most viral clip was the kid talking about corn. Yes. With a mild and adorable speech impediment, so it doesn't pronounce corn, corn, corn. Yeah. Yes. So some of these clips aren't necessarily about wisdom from kids. They're just hilarity. Yeah. Yeah. I also think people enjoy the cuteness of it, the cuteness factor. I think people see a kid that reminds them of themselves or their friend.

And there's something relatable about that. I think there's a lot of reasons why the child trope brought to social media has worked and connected with people. But, you know, I was I was just looking for the deep side of it just there. I also have my own just I just think it's fun side of it. OK, but it is fun and definitely the way it plays on on YouTube and social is incredibly fun. And you now have this book, which, again, is called How to Grow Up Without Becoming a Grownup.

And in stores now, in stores now. Check it out. I'll put a link in the show notes. I am going to receive some kickback and payola from Julian's publicist after this. But the the core thesis, as I understand it, really is that there is an enormous amount to learn. Yeah. Grownups about how to do our lives better from children. Yeah, 100 percent. I mean, the whole purpose of the book was that I had been doing all these interviews for years. And at a certain point, I started to feel like the interviews weren't showing the entire picture of what I was learning.

Yes, the things they were saying were wonderful. But a lot of the times when somebody was like, what's the most impactful thing that a kid has ever said to you? It's really hard for me to, like, find a sentence, because a lot of times they don't have these like quickie one liners. A lot of times what I'm learning from the kids is more I'm seeing it in the way they move and act in the world. And I'm sure you might relate to this as a parent, but the way kids problem solve or play or use their imagination or are inquisitive or make friends like just the way they act to me is much more interesting sometimes than the things that they say.

But the way that kids holistically act is really hard to put into a one minute Instagram clip. And so I thought I could translate that into a book much better. And so I started writing essays about all these topics like love or making friends or work and tried to make a compelling case about why adults could stand to bring some of this, what I call childish energy into their day to day lives and kind of make a case of saying that we would be happier if we did act a little bit more childish.

I buy that. And as I said in the intro, I've today's one of those days I just we're recording this on the day after Labor Day. Yeah, I've just been on a long vacation and now I'm back in the grind and I can feel like my face changing. I feel like I'm all of a sudden I have this stern, you know, look on my face that wasn't there a week ago. Yeah, I bike to Rockaway Beach this weekend. I just I just played all weekend and I was so happy.

And then I woke up this morning and I was like, oh, I got to do the adult grind again. In terms of your interest in childhood, your childhood was quite interesting. Sure. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, I was raised in Brooklyn. I have three moms and two dads. The long and short of that was I my mom's lesbian couple wanted to have a kid, asked their friends, a gay couple to be the sperm donor. Each of my mom's got pregnant and they had me and my brother and sister.

My mom's broke up when my mom's met her wife and all five of them raised us in Brooklyn. And we had this really cool childhood where I had so many adults in my life. Yeah. So I grew up at all these different households with different parents. And I think it lay this groundwork for the way that I work with kids now, because, yes, I was parented and had parents, but I also was around so many adults all the time. And in that, my parents and their friends allowed me to be privy to so many conversations where I was kind of looped in and allowed to share my thoughts and be part of an adult conversation.

And I think from a really young age, I fell in love with being treated that way and being given a space where my opinion mattered that much. Like, I remember sitting with my mom and all of her friends when I was like eight and they'd be like, what do you think, Julian? And I like loved that so much. And then when I started interviewing kids, I think I was like remembering that experience and wanted to bring that to my interviews with kids. So I think having so many parents and so many adults in a bit of an unconventional childhood allowed me to interview in a maybe unconventional way with kids.

Tell me if I'm close to this. It's like you, as a very young person, knew how to code switch between talking to grownups and talking to kids. A hundred percent. And that has helped attune you to the way kids talk like you. I think you call it like the dialect of childhood. Yeah, the micro-dialect. The micro-dialect. Yeah. Yeah. A hundred percent. I also, at the end of the book, I talk a lot. I have this epiphany moment, spoilers, not really. At the end of the book, the last chapter, I have this picnic, it's my favorite chapter, so if anything, read the end, where I have all the kids and parents I've worked with, we all have this big picnic together.

And I describe the experience of playing with 40 plus kids that I've worked with and then jumping around and talking to all their parents. And I have this realization that the way I'm talking to the kids, the way I'm talking to the parents, are actually a lot more alike than I realized. And that the version of myself that I put on to speak with kids and the version of myself that I put on to speak to adults is actually only a little different. It wasn't this grand dialect switch.

They're both in me and they're both very close to each other and I think that was a freeing thing to realize, which is that the childish version of myself is very close to the surface. Yeah. And that's how you grow up without becoming a grown up. Or you learn to see that they can happen at the same time. You don't have to turn one off and turn one on. You can just be. They're not separate in the end. Yeah. It's all one guy. People ask me all the time, how do I boot up a meditation habit?

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10% with Dan Harris, that's the name of the app. Again, danharris.com is the place to get all the information. Oh, and I should tell you that if you sign up, you'll also get ad-free versions of this podcast. We'll be right back after this. Some journeys reveal more than a destination, they reveal what is at stake. Survivor and conservation storyteller Tom Peshak spent 396 days on the perpetual planet Amazon expedition, traveling the length of the Amazon and documenting a river system that sustains extraordinary wildlife, I've seen it up close myself, and also millions of people.

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It's from eight-year-old Sloan. When asked for her best advice on being a boss, she delivered this speech. Here's the quote. Even bosses cry. You need someone to lean on, even if you're an adult. It's okay to be scared and show it. So I guess, really, probably stick with your friends and family, because they're who will be with you until the end, and if you're ever feeling sad, find someone to lean on. Even if you're an adult and you think adults aren't supposed to have strong feelings, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, that's a stereotype adults can cry to.

Right? Yeah. So for the book, I was, I, you know, I have all these interviews, I've interviewed thousands of kids, but I wanted to do all new interviews for the book, and so I went through this very funny process of inviting kids and their parents to my office, which is just a shared workspace near my house, and we would go in the backyard, and I would conduct these very serious interviews with the kids about really non-serious things, and they were just really excited about the concept of being in the book.

They were like, wait, anything I say could be in the book? And I'd be like, yeah, anything you say could be in the book. And then they'd say all this really insane stuff that would obviously not make it into the book, but the concept of anything being in the book was enough to keep them talking. But on this quote in particular, I think she's, Sloan is onto so many things, but in particular the fact that we move through the world, many grown-ups, believing we need to squelch our emotions, when in fact, it is actually okay to cry, and it is okay to be scared.

These are natural things, and we do more damage by pretending they're not there. 100%. And to her, that's so obvious, but we feel as though bosses can't cry, and a boss is devoid of feelings. Sloan is somebody I met really early in doing recess therapy. She was maybe four years old when we first met, and she's been obsessed with the idea of being a boss ever since she was a baby. And now she's 12 years old, and she still wants to be a boss. But she really believes that there's a right way to be a boss, and the right way to be a boss is to be a kind and gentle boss.

And she talks a lot about it there. I mean, I would like to have Sloan as a boss. Right? Yes. A boss who shares better feelings. She also says later in that same interview that a boss shouldn't be stinky, which I think is really important. A good boss showers, has good hygiene, which I think is hard to argue with. But back to the emotions piece, I believe one of the core arguments in your book is that there's something for grownups to learn about how children process their emotions.

Yeah. One of the big points of the book is this whole emotion element, which is just that kids feel their emotions immediately and in real time. You've seen it as a parent, but kids have temper tantrums. They will skip around and laugh, like if they're excited about something, they'll sob and cry. But they also get over things really quickly. Their feelings are something that are able to pass through them very naturally and freely. Whereas I feel like adults, in contrast, we hold on to our feelings, we control when we're going to have our feelings.

And my big concern with that is that they stick with us for so much longer than they need to. I've had so many experiences in my life where somebody says something to me that sits wrong, and then I don't know, I don't process it, or I don't get mad about it, or I don't feel sad about it. And then I'm still pissed about it a month later. And I really feel like we shouldn't have temper tantrums or break down, but if we could sit shiva or have a moment for our feelings in a more childlike way, my hope is that we could let them pass faster.

I've tried to put this into practice, and I do think it genuinely works. I'm not just capping, as the kids say. Just for grownups out there, capping is lying. Yes, I'm not just capping. Have you ever tried something like this? Are you good at processing your feelings? Well, it's a huge theme of the show and a huge theme of meditation, which I'm a dedicated practitioner of. I would say that naturally, I come from the stuff-it-down school. As a Gen X male, we were not encouraged to...

Ever? No. Not to display emotion, not to process it. So I kind of come to it the hard way, but a million percent, it is my view that most emotions actually will come and go if you allow them to. If you let them in, you can metabolize them in a minute or two. I think the half-life of anger or something like that is a minute or two. But if you're not processing it, and you're essentially just chewing on it and ruminating and relapsing it, it can last a lifetime.

I compare the way kids process feelings to meditation in the book, just in the way that in meditation, it's not about having no thoughts, i.e. it's not about having no bad feelings, but it's about letting them come to you, addressing them, feeling them, but then letting them pass instead of trying to suppress them or fight the action of feeling them. You know what I'm saying? I do know what you're saying. I had a bar mitzvah, so I know what sitting shiva means, which you referenced earlier.

That is just what we do, what the Jews do. It's the grieving process. You set aside time to grieve. My reference there is just that we should sit shiva for our feelings. What does that look like for you? Yesterday, I got into a kind of a scrap, not physical, my mom and I got into a little fight. I let myself be really upset about it, and I didn't call any of my friends. I feel like sometimes my go-to unhealthy response is to tell the same story over and over again.

In that, I stir the emotions back up time and time again in kind of a masochistic way. I think I enjoy the story of it, but what I did was I just sat with it alone until it passed. I think experiencing the frustration in isolation was more productive than spreading it and getting other people's opinions and rehashing it. I think kids wouldn't FaceTime eight people and look for their opinions. I think they go in their room and they yell into a stuffed animal or something. Kids just have to deal with it on their own.

Not that yesterday I was processing it like a kid, but I think I was trying to purposefully set aside time for my feelings, and it really helped. Are things copacetic now? Totally. Yeah, I called her. We're good. I'm just curious. How old is your mom? My age? She's 55. I'm 55. She's like 61. Okay. Okay. So at least I'm a little bit younger than your mom. We're good, Mom. Love you. Respect, Mom. You did a great job. We're good. We're fine. This kid is great. Okay, so another lesson in the book that you learned from kids is it's something about breaking rules.

Oh, my gosh. Do you break rules? Yeah, I do. Not fashion rules, though. I mean, I don't have the confidence to break fashion rules. Just to say, Julian and I were talking before the show started about- Sorry, that was an off-camera conversation. No, that's fine. But I'll just fill it in for people that I feel as a man of a certain age that it's probably not best to push the fashion envelope too much. Just I'm not as comfortable with it. So I don't break the rules.

I think you should get an eyebrow piercing. My son wants one. Really? At 11? He got both ears pierced at eight, which I fully supported. My wife and I are totally down with it. That's a lot. He wants it. And if he asked for it, I think I would let him do it. Why not? Self-expression. It's kind of tough. Painful. Yeah. That's brutal. His pain tolerance is low, so I suspect when he learns that, he will opt out of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I can handle it.

Do you break the rules? I love breaking the rules. So a big part of the book also I talk about is breaking the rules. Kids love breaking rules. I'm sure you've seen this. I feel like a big way that kids understand the world is by breaking the rules. I think when kids enter a new space, they like to test. They like to see what they can and cannot do by just doing it. This is not all kids, of course. I also just, big disclaimer, everything I say is not a blanket statement.

This is just a lot of kids that I've worked with, I've seen this. Also from being a kid. We all were kids once. But I feel like a way that kids gather information is by testing boundaries. And you see this, they go in a school, in a classroom, they'll be told not to do something and then they'll do it. They like to see how much they can get away with. And I feel like that act of exploration teaches them a lot about themselves, about the boundaries of the world, what kind of person they are and want to be.

It is just this big experience of self-definition. And then as they get older, slowly, and people morph into adults, I think this really tricky kind of dangerous, and in my opinion, awful thing starts to happen, which is that less and less external adults tell you no, and all of a sudden this internal adult, you, start to tell yourself what you can and cannot do. And I think what's dangerous about this is once you start being the adult in your own head telling you what you can and cannot do, there's scope creep, do you know that term?

There become more rules than are needed. You start to tell yourself that you can't do X thing, like, oh, I don't dance, that's a rule for me, I don't do that, or I don't do X, I don't do Y, and what once was a helpful tool that we implemented for good reasons to protect ourselves, to kind of stay in line, so to speak, all of a sudden limits our identities. And my whole theory is that we need to start breaking the rules again, as kids do, even in small ways, just to test again and redefine ourselves.

I love that, like the inner grown-up, or it can be an inner critic, which is maybe one facet of the inner grown-up, kind of like a sheepdog herding you, but in this way you become kind of uptight and unhappy. So what do you do to counteract your inner grown-up? My personal choice of counteracting it is by listening to small impulses that my body has. And I think for me, and it's different for every person, I talk about this in the book of like figuring out what your way in is or was, but for me it was very much tactile impulses of like touching things.

I found that when I was like on the subway or walking around, if there's like an interesting texture or like a gargoyle or a weird flower or just things out in the world that I would notice, or at first I wouldn't even notice them, but then I would start to will myself to notice them again and then will myself to act on the impulse to touch or interact with them. And this was just my like little window into being aware, recognizing this thing that I have told myself I shouldn't do and then doing it and then allowing that to translate and snowball into bigger and bigger things.

And it was a little bit like snapping the rubber band on my wrist in a good way. And then it was like, okay, if you do that, you can do the other thing. And it's like habit forming. And it really is. I said the dancing thing earlier, I've really always been like, I don't really dance. And now I've been doing it a lot more because I think I've gotten more comfortable with telling myself that there isn't anything that I couldn't try. So it's it can start small with, hey, you know what?

If I see an interesting texture out in the world, I'm going to touch it, right? And that can start to scale up to dancing or maybe saying the uncomfortable thing. Yeah. I think it's you have to start with the thing that feels insignificant and be like, this feels stupid and completely disconnected. I mean, all of this is all about intention. You have to set the intention. that I am going to actively unlearn these rules. My way in to unlearning them was through touch. And that I was able to correlate into trusting myself, into doing bigger things.

But I feel like for every person, finding what impulse, what the easiest impulse that you've been suppressing to then try is the best way to start. I like that a lot. Two things to say about that. One is you're absolutely right. It's backed up by research that if you start small with anything, it can really grow into, so you're correct. The second thing to say is one of my least favorite parts about myself is that I too struggle with dancing. It's bullshit. You gotta dance. Yes.

You know, I keep referencing my, I guess it's appropriate to do that in this context. My son, he has this tell for when he's in a really good mood, he just dances all day. Really? He's just constantly moving and dancing and totally unselfconscious. And that is how I know he's having an A plus day. That's beautiful. Yes. Did you dance when you were younger? Or have you always been? Yeah, I think I danced a little bit when I was younger. But maybe like a baby. My mom said I used to dance around the house, but not much since then.

The funny thing is I play the drums, so I have rhythm. But when I dance, I feel like there's a pole in a place where it shouldn't be. You know, there's nothing better than a dancing dad. My son gets really embarrassed when I dance. I love when my dad dances. It's really, he like, it's like really awesome. He does that. Yeah, what you just did is close to what my mood is. You gotta go to like a family friend's bar mitzvah. Yeah, we have one coming up.

Yeah, that's the spot. So, but when he did this when you were a kid, did you find that mortifying? Yeah, mortifying. Okay, but now you're cool. But now I think it's sweet and I'm happy he's having fun. But that's, you know, give your son 12 years. Cozy season is upon us. That means crisp mornings, movie marathons, and the like. Bambas makes your comfiest fall staples so you can make the most out of one of the best seasons of the year. I'm a particular fan of the Bambas socks.

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I really resonate with the fear of rejection. So just say a little bit more about this argument and what we could do about it. Kids put themselves out there all the time. Again, not generalizing, just a lot of kids. When your son was a little bit younger, would you bring him to public playgrounds? Would he play with strangers or would he stick with his friends? He wasn't as good at doing that as I would have hoped, but there were always kids on the playground who I super admired who would just walk up and say, you wanna play?

Yeah, exactly, do you wanna play? Do you wanna play, do you wanna be my friend is such a common phrase amongst kids. I've done multiple episodes now and spoken to probably like 100 plus kids about how to make friends. And I would say the most common answer is kids say to me, well, just ask them, do you wanna be my friend? Which is so mind boggling. An adult would never say that to another adult. Maybe they could, but I don't think it would work. Going up to a complete stranger and saying, do you wanna be my friend, I think would be creepy.

But I think in that there is this, it speaks to the ethos that kids have, which is just they bring their entire selves to somebody and they say, do you want me? The reason an adult would never do that is because I think the no would be painful. I think saying, do you want me is too open. It's too vulnerable. But kids are comfortable with that rejection. And I think being comfortable with rejection opens up the door to so much more opportunity because you can try and try and try again.

You can fall and get up and dust yourself off and be okay. I also think, there's so much here. Wow, I just had so many thoughts. Just two other quick things. One, two, I guess. Kids also never drip feed information about themselves. They are really comfortable being 100% who they are very quickly. Kids are just very forthcoming with information, may that be good or bad. I've had kids share very gross or bizarre or misleading or not misleading, but very like too much too fast with me.

And I kind of love that about them because they just share their entire being very quickly. Whereas I feel like adults try to share the right version of themselves a lot of the time. And I feel like in sharing the right version of themselves, they're not being themselves. And when you're meeting a new person, I think it's so much cleaner or leads to a healthier, faster friendship to just really to not hide anything and just be 100% you. Do you actually do that? Do I do that?

Yes, I've really gotten good at going whole hog. Here I am. I used to like code switch a lot more, but I don't. And then the last thing I was gonna say, and I think this is like the cheat code that kids have that adults just don't have, which is that the reason the playground works is because they're all kids. They all have this shared identity. Like being a kid is a shared identity. And so when a kid sees another kid, may it be on the playground, may it be at a kid's table or at the toy section at Target or at the aquarium, they have this shared thing that is exciting and allows them to connect.

When an adult sees another adult out in public, there isn't much, there's no reason to talk to each other. No. You see that go away the second you're in like Madrid and you hear someone else speaking English or you hear another American. You go, oh my God, what are you guys doing here? Having a unifying identity is really exciting and allows barriers to be broken down and it allows adults to drop that fear of rejection. And this thing I talk about in the book is, and again, so many of these lessons are so maybe obvious or simple, but I really think work, if you're looking for connection in this way, and it's something that I personally have done, is look for a space that gets rid of those boundaries.

When I moved to New York, I didn't know anybody and was having a hard time meeting new people. And so I, a comedy improviser, started going to improv jams, which is every Tuesday night, people would get together and do improv together at a comedy club. And that's where I met all my friends, like immediately, because we were there to do the same thing. We were there to be kids together. And so I always recommend to people, if you're having a hard time meeting new adults, put yourself in a space where you are like other kids or you're like the other people there.

And it just, those boundaries go away. You can be like, oh, how long have you been doing improv? Oh, how long have you been rock climbing? It just takes away that, there's no need to ask someone to be your friend because you already have something to talk about. Right, you can let the mask drop a little bit. You use this term, I think it's quite a beautiful term of like getting back in touch with your proto-self. Yes, yeah. Yeah, the proto-self, it's this idea that your childhood self, to use that word, had some really amazing things going for it.

And that you, as you got older, started to build this notion of an adult self, this idea of adulthood based off of the way other adults were acting or the way your peers were acting. But that you didn't need to get rid of everything that was there. There was a lot of really potent, beautiful philosophies and actions at work that should be teased back out and that are still in you. And the reason I don't really use the term inner child, and I like the term childish, even though people have not loved that I've used that word.

People would have preferred to use childlike. But I like childish. I stand by childish. Because I think inner child, to me, draws this association with something being deep within you and kind of hard to connect with. Also wounded. Wounded, like this wrapped up thing inside of you. But to me, childish felt accessible and casual. And to me it is. It's all about just having the right entry point. I think what you're saying is we should move through the world looking for opportunities for the proto-self that lurks right beneath the surface to emerge.

Exactly. Because it is right there. And it just takes some muscle building to get it back to a place where it feels accessible, I think. This thing about vulnerability or dropping your fear of rejection, I think there's a lot there. People are terrified of divulging. I think it's a little different for people like us because we're both in the public eye. I have made a whole career about talking about doing too much cocaine and having a panic attack. So I'm kind of used to it. I'm used to it.

But I think there's some research to show that selective vulnerability, picking one spot to say one thing, to test with other people, is a great way to overcome this fear of rejection. Just to say a little bit more, I was listening yesterday to an old episode of This American Life, the NPR show. They had pulled it out of the archives and it was just new in their feed. And it was all about middle school. They're interviewing this kid who was talking about the fact that he had arrived as a new student in a new town after living somewhere else in middle school and had a lot of friends from when he was younger in the old place, but now he's in this new place.

And it was middle school where you can't just walk up to somebody and say, do you want to be my friend? Because the world has set in on you by then and you're working with your masks and personas, new rules. So how do you find places where you can bring a little bit of that? How do you find the moment where you can bring a little bit of that, do you want to meet my friend energy without ripping off the Band-Aid in too terrifying a way?

I think you can start small and just pick your spot and see if you reveal something to somebody, how does it go? I think that maybe you don't need to be 100% yourself immediately, but at least drip feeding some very real pieces of yourself and not just being a character. I think when I was younger, especially in middle school and high school and probably for most of maybe the first two years of college, I was such a cartoon character when I met people. But also I was a theater kid comedian, so.

But that cartoon character was semi-real, semi-not. Yeah, but the feedback, this is, oh my God, he's gonna hate that I say this, but I'm gonna say it anyway. My dear friend Julian, also named Julian, I'll tell the story, it's very short. In acting school, we learned about this thing maybe junior or sophomore year called first circle, second circle, and third circle. And the concept was that first circle acting was being too internal. It was like that Shakespearean actor who's doing Hamlet soliloquy just only to himself.

It's acting, but it's not for the audience, it's just for you. Third circle is doing way too much over the top, clownish, no emotion in it. And second circle is what every actor is looking for, which is honesty, truthfulness, connection, balance. And one time, my dear, dear close friend Julian, we're not dear close friends at the time, he came over to my house to hang out with my roommate. And when he was leaving, we kind of had a short conversation. He gave me a hug and he went, ah, Julian, one day we're gonna get you out of that third circle.

And it was like 1 a.m. and I was going to sleep and I was like, I hate you. But I did get out of the third circle. And I think being a more authentic version of yourself takes comfortability with yourself and a trust that the real you isn't going to be rejected. fear that it might be harder for somebody in your generation because you've grown up with social media, which is all about performativity and curation. Yeah. Do you see this new thing about I'll answer that.

But the new thing, which is that the under 18, there's all this social these Instagram regulations. Yes. I think it's amazing. It's brilliant. I think the Instagram that I grew up with was different than the Instagram or the social media of now. I think we're just posting pictures of our food. Now it is reels and tick tocks and the whole social media landscape of now I can't imagine what it's like to be a teenager now. I think it's so performative and artificial. I don't want to say superficial.

I think at times. Yes. But I think it is very put on. But I think all we were dealing with was just they're hanging out without us. There's a lot of FOMO fear of missing out. Yes. I have that at 50, 55. Did any of my producers talk to you about this little segment that we're. No. OK. OK. We're just experimenting with this new segment at the end of the show called What's Good. Is there a TV show, a book? I like it. A record, anything that's out right now that you are that you would recommend?

Have you seen Todd Haynes's Velvet Goldmine? No. Say more. It's a movie he made in the early 2000s. He wanted to make a biopic about David Bowie, but Bowie wouldn't give him his life rights. So he made a knockoff Bowie biopic with Ewan McGregor and Christian Bale. And it's really weird and fantastic and really beautifully shot. And I was very captivated by it. Velvet Goldmine. And this is available to stream. Yeah, it's really 2002. OK. All right. Great movie. I appreciate that. Now, did you get into the you live in Brooklyn, right?

I think it felt like all of Brooklyn was into this band Geese. Of course, I love Geese. There's this band from the UK that, in my opinion, is even better than Geese, but kind of similar in its style. They're called West Side Cowboy. Saying this right now. Notes of Velvet Underground, Notes of Arcade Fire with a little bit of Modest Mouse mixed in and they're really young, really, really good. They have been. You can tell this is a band. You put me on. This is big.

This is a band that has been touched in some way, like they are going to have a huge career. Thank you for putting me on. I'm a huge Cameron Winter, Geese, Velvet Underground fan. All right. Hip. I'm going to redo mine. OK. No, you can just do two. I'm going to do a second one. Yeah. Coyote versus Acme. Oh, is that good? Fantastic. OK. That's in theaters right now. In theaters now. Oh, that's so fun. Go see it. OK, so this might be good for my son.

Yeah, it's good for everybody. Coyote versus Acme. Good for all ages. I went on a date to see it. Really? And we had a great time. I feel when I saw that it was out, I thought, OK, I'm not going to like this is my inner grown up saying this is going to be annoying. But it is. It is a it is how IP should be utilized. Interesting. It is a wholly original story told with characters, you know, in love. But it is hilarious. It's heartfelt.

It'll make you laugh. I'll make you cry. OK. I really think it's really fun. But I see it with your son. It's a it's a it's a hoot. Thank you. Two recommendations from Julian Shapiro Barnum. Everybody should check out Julian's book, which is called How to Grow Up Without Becoming a Grown Up. You should also check out his many three digital shows. OK. One is called Recess Therapy. We've talked about it extensively. Another is called Celebrity Substitute, where you get like you had Tom Holland. You get.

Yeah, we get everybody out there, Billie Eilish, Tom Holland, A$AP Rocky, SZA, all everyone comes out on that show. And then you have late Outside Tonight, which is my only non kid project as of now. It's a late night show, though, kind of it's it's a it's the it's a digital late night show that we film out in public. All of the links to all of these things, including his recommendations, will be in the show notes. Julian. Such a pleasure to meet you. Thank you so much for having me.

Great job. Yeah. Just a quick note before I let you go, if you're a listener to the show and you're looking for other ways to engage with my content, let me give you some options. Your first stop is Dan Harris dot com. That's my new Web site and it has information and links to my meditation app. It's where you can sign up for my free newsletter. It's where you will find all the latest information on upcoming live events that I'm doing. We've also got 10 percent happier plus, which is an ad free subscription right inside Apple Podcasts.

So that's another option. And if you would rather watch than listen, we film every episode now. Video versions are up on YouTube and Spotify. So please like and follow whether you're watching or listening. Also, I'm on social media. I try to inject a little sanity into your feed, into the darker corners of the Internet. So just search for my name, Dan Harris, and you'll find me wherever you have a scrolling habit. All right. That was a mouthful. Thank you for being here. Deuces. Thank you so much to everybody who worked so hard to make this show.

10 percent happier is produced by Tara Anderson, Marissa Schneiderman, DJ Kashmir, David Hart and Hayden Broom. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. And Nick Thorburn of the indie rock band Islands wrote our theme. Thanks for listening. Peace. Insurance is not one size fits all. That's why drivers have enjoyed Progressive's Name Your Price tool for years now. With the Name Your Price tool, you tell them what you want to pay and they'll show you options that fit your budget.

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