This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

Hello, party people. How we doing? Today we are going to deconstruct the Buddhist themes in the amazing HBO TV series of The White Lotus season three. By my reckoning, there's never been a more popular work of art that I'm aware of that has dealt with Buddhist themes in such a rich and robust way.

I mean, you can maybe look at the Matrix, but the Matrix, which came out many years ago,

didn't deal with Buddhism head on in the way the White Lotus did. And it's caused this huge

conversation, which I think is so interesting and so fun for me as

somebody who loves the show and who loves the Dharma. So today we're dropping a special episode. We

usually don't drop episodes on Thursdays, but we rushed this episode into the feed because we got

so excited about it. Side note, I want to thank many people on the team

who made this possible, including Marissa Schneiderman, our senior producer, and Caroline Keenan,

another of our producers, and Abby Smith, who's another key member of the team. But there are many

people who did a lot of hard work to get this episode ready for you. My guest is a guy I just

met who I feel like I could easily

be friends with. I liked him immensely and immediately. Josh Barman is a journalist, a screenwriter,

and a producer. He is best known for writing long-form nonfiction. In fact, he wrote the story

upon which the movie Argo was based. His work regularly appears in publications like Wired, Rolling Stone, Harper's, and The New York Times.

And most relevant for this episode is that he is the co-host of the White Lotus official Season 3 companion podcast, along with another great writer, Gia Tolentino, who writes for The New Yorker, who sadly is not part of this episode, but I'm a big fan of hers.

Anyway, Josh and I discuss a whole lot here. We talk about how Josh got interested in Buddhism, how Mike White, the creator and writer and director of the show got into Buddhism.

We talk about Buddhist concepts and themes that define

season three of the White Lotus and also other seasons. We talk about Buddhist notions of

self and identity, some of the paradoxes and pitfalls of Buddhism, the perils of seeking pleasure.

We talk about how we crave certainty as a bulwark against anxiety.

We talk about the importance of repetition of simple Buddhist ideas that we are programmed to forget.

...