Your Inner Critic Won't Stop Adding Rules. Here's The Fix. | Julian Shapiro-Barnum

Dan Harris (0:03)

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 heads down, grind through it, bulldoze through your to-do list mode. It's militaristic and mirthless.

I feel like one really prominent antidote to this mode is to be playful or childish in the positive sense of the word. 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. He's got a new book which is called How to Grow Up Without Becoming a Grown-Up. Julian, welcome to the show.

Julian Shapiro-Barnum (0:49)

Thank you so much.

Dan Harris (0:50)

Did I get all of that right? Oh my God.

Julian Shapiro-Barnum (0:51)

That was more than enough.

Dan Harris (0:53)

All right. Can you tell me a little bit about the impetus? Yeah, behind Recess Therapy because I think there's a little bit of a story there.

Julian Shapiro-Barnum (1:02)

Yeah, 100%. So hi, I'm Julian.

Dan Harris (1:05)

Hi. Nice to meet you and everybody. Yeah.

Julian Shapiro-Barnum (1:08)

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.

There's a lot to say about COVID, but I won't say it here. But basically, I was not very happy. My way of combating that was I really fell in love with the act of interviewing.

Every day, I would go out into the street and interview people. I was trying to connect with adults and interview people. I think every other week, I would do a different random idea that came into my head. 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 and having so much fun. 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. I need to know what that is.

Truly on a whim, we interviewed them and asked them how they found happiness during the pandemic. As a comedian, I went into it looking for probably some piece of comedy, but what I found was something really heartwarming and deep. I posted it online, not really expecting anything of it, and strangers connected with it. I thought, this is something really special and worth exploring. Almost six years later, it's become a passion, a career of mine.

Dan Harris (3:00)

No, it's gigantic and you have many other shows now, but Recess Therapy seems to be like the heart of what you do.

Julian Shapiro-Barnum (3:06)

It's the flagship.

Dan Harris (3:07)

There is a genre of content here that is twice your age as we established before the interview. But I remember shows like-

Julian Shapiro-Barnum (3:14)

Kids Say the Darnedest Things.

Dan Harris (3:16)

Right, exactly. Then there was a show like, Are You Smarter Than a Third Grade? This whole idea of interviewing kids has been around for a minute. Why do kids say the darnedest things?

The wisdom from the mouth of babes trope has been around since the Bible.

Julian Shapiro-Barnum (3:33)

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 tonally a little bit different from those shows. I feel like the kid 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 at what these kids can say. My whole approach was, 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 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 all so fascinated to know what kids were thinking about these things. And what it came down to, I think the whole crux of it was that kids simplify things. We adults take topics and we think about them to death.