pub med

2017-06-26T17:14:00.001-07:00

make meditation public!

meditation is really useful, and it is weirdly alien to most people. 👽

meditation is mostly done in private, which keeps it weirdly alien.
because meditation is weirdly alien, most people keep doing it in private.

if meditation was a public thing, you could do it almost anywhere. 🌎
if meditation was a public thing, it would quickly not be alien.
when meditation is no longer alien, nor private, many more people will see it, try it.

pub med is a talk show about meditation, with guests, where there is no talking. 🎤

pub med is people meditating in public, often streamed live

pub med is looking for guests, hosts, and co-conspirators of all sorts ✋

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some links

see jimmy fallon and the roots do a pub med
see pub med, done by others
see how to host a pub med
see pub med, the talk show on facebook
read an interview about pub med

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people who have done a pub med
people who we'd love to see a pub med (coming soon)
contact us, press, logo, misc stuff

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2017-06-26T15:01:00.003-07:00

Why

Hey, I’m excite you’re going to do a Pub Med!

The goal is to make it easier for people to meditate wherever, particularly in public. Right now most people think meditation is a private thing. When they want to take a few minutes and close their eyes, they have to find a discreet, private place to do it. That little bit of inconvenience and friction often stops them from doing it.

Instead, it would be great if they could just sit in a chair and feel normal meditating in a coffee shop, building lobby or while waiting in an airport. That cultural change - make a private activity public - can happen quickly. All that’s required is seeing enough people doing it. Only a few decades ago you’d almost never people running, other than at a track or in a gym. It wasn’t normal to jog in a park or on city streets. Yoga is similar. It was an alien activity in the US less than 20 years ago, practiced almost exclusively in the privacy of people’s homes. It became accepted, and now it’s something the culture highlights as aspirational. It’s changed so much, that at least 10 times the number of people who practice yoga now wear yoga apparel as public attire.

To make a new norm, all it takes it to see something a few times. If you see a friend or someone you admire doing something new, it will become normal almost instantly. You know that person and, well, if they meditate, it’s instantly becomes less weird. They’re familiar, so it’s familiar.

Lastly, most people don’t know if any of their friends meditate, when many of them do. As long as meditation stays private, it carries an implicit secrecy. People are less likely to feel normal doing it or talking about it with friends.

All you have to do is see it, and that changes.

How to Host a Pub Med

2017-06-26T14:55:00.000-07:00

1. Pick a place

This is really the creative part. Pick a great public place to meditate. The simplest option might be a coffee shop, inside or outside. It’s public, convenient, usually has good wifi and places to sit. The goal of Pub Med is make meditation in ordinary places very normal. So one criteria in choosing a place is somewhere that makes meditation convenient for people, ordinary places like in an airport, on a subway or bus, in a park or playground.

2. Keep it simple
The original goal of Pub Med is make this practice feel normal, so one approach is to limit other alien elements - things like odd costumes or poses. You might just sit in chair or on a bench and simply close your eyes for your meditation. Again, that’s one approach. Feel free to do what works for you.

3. Turn on Facebook LIVE
Facebook LIVE works fine on cell networks. Wifi is usually better quality video and doesn’t use your data plan. So when you choose you place maybe consider somewhere near free WIFI as you choose. Once you open up Facebook and just press LIVE and follow the on-screen instructions. Super simple.

Little Details

Tripod. You can usually prop up your phone with something nearby - a backpack or book. Inexpensive phone tripods are available on Amazon for less than $10.

Audience. The audience for the LIVE will probably be By default Facebook will probably have the audience set to FRIENDS. That’s great. You can change it to PUBLIC if you want us to reshare it on the PubMed page (we’d like that, but entirely your call).

Post. You might want to add some text to the post. Simplest thing is to add the hashtag. #pubmed. It’s probably not important to explain yourself. If you wanted to say something you might say: “taking a break for few minutes, you’re welcome to join me.”

Safety. If you’re concerned about someone taking your phone or belongings while you’re meditating, consider that before you close your eyes. You might ask someone nearby to watch your stuff, or bring a string to tie to your phone.

Style. Most Pub Meds follow a minimal format. You start off camera. You walk on camera and sit without conversation. You meditate. You slowly awake and then walk off camera. End. If there are multiple people there isn’t interaction between them. That’s the template. Do not feel bound by it.

Friends or Guests. Having other people can make a Pub Med even more fun. Also, after you post the video you can tag specific friends in the comments so they see it.

Pub Med, done by others!

2017-06-24T09:33:00.000-07:00

1. Headspace has a company meditation everyday at 10am. People come together in the main lunch area where they take a 10 minute break with a guided meditation. They began streaming this once a week - Tuesday at 10am - starting in April 2017. The first live meditation was viewed by more than 10,000 people. A week later their second meditation was viewed by over 100,000 people.

2. (coming soon)

people who have done a pub med

2017-06-23T09:34:00.000-07:00

0001. Bailey Richardson - public park
0002. Mia Quagliarello - conference room, work
0003. Bubba Murarka - outside grocery store
0004. Christine Tsai - glass conference room
0005. Dion Almaer - backyard
0006. Pedram Keyani - inside coffee shop
0007. Sara Sperling - outside coffee shop
0008. Soren Gordhamer - meeting room
0009. Gopi Kallayil - office
0010. Peter Deng - office
0011. Keith Coleman - office
0013. Jeremy Galen - yogurt shop
0012. Scott Joachim - office
0015. Sam Lessin - backyard
0016. Amanda Kelso - office
0017. Alicia Dougherty-Wold - office
0018. Arturo Bejar - dining room
0019.

2017-06-20T10:04:00.000-07:00

contact: antonow (at) gmail (dot) com

logo

facebook page

interviewed by Sam Lessin on Pub Med from Modest Conversation.

Interview about Pub Med

2017-06-13T17:31:00.000-07:00

A longish interview about Pub Med and meditation.
Eric Antonow gets interviewed by Sam Lessin on Modest Conversations.
(edited for clarity and length)

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Sam: What about you? How did you get into meditation?

Eric: It was pretty accidental. I was watching stand-up videos on YouTube one night, and it auto-played a video of Jerry Seinfeld at a benefit in New York. It was for the David Lynch Foundation, an organization that uses meditation for people who are in pretty tough situations: people coming back from war, people who are getting out of prison, people in tough schools, and they provide meditation programs to help those people moderate and metabolize stress.

Sam: Interesting.

Eric: So Jerry got up at this benefit and did about a ten minute description of how meditation fit into his life. He says, “I’ve been doing it for more than 40 years. It was probably the reason I could do Seinfeld. It was incredibly tough to do a show for nine years on television -- you're the star of the show, you’re the writer, you're the producer of the show.” Every day he would block out 20 minutes in the middle of the day and meditate while everybody else went to lunch.

He described it as a form of rest, just a way to rest and get energy. That left an impression. Here’s a person who has a great deal of energy, and meditation has not blunted his edge in terms of creativity. That package was really compelling. It was like 10:30 at night, and found a meditation training online and signed up. I’ve done it pretty much every day since then.

Sam: That's awesome.

Eric: The larger epiphany for me came months later when I was sitting in a dental chair getting my teeth cleaned. It seemed really crazy that we were at a point in our culture. If I looked around the neighborhood, 95% of people brush their teeth twice a day. And what percentage of people go see a professional once or twice a year to get a check-up and use tools to actually look at things that you can't see? Probably similar: 80%-95%. Of course, that's because the teeth are the most important organ in the body. They affect your mood, and your emotions, and how you perceive the world, right?

No, that's your mind, not your teeth. To me, it seemed like we are crazy to be at a point in culture where there was this practice of dental hygiene that was broadly accepted, many countries, many cultures. You’re taught from age four this how manage the daily hygiene of your teeth. And yet we didn't have an equivalent one for the mind. That seemed so odd. We haven't invented the toothbrush for the mind...yet. The mindbrush!

Eric: The point is we don't have a very simple tool for daily hygiene of the mind. We also don’t have a common practice of which professional to go see once or twice a year to help us see what we can’t see about the state of our mind. Any thoughts? Any reflections? What should I do next? Using that simple analogy, it seemed funny and weird that we're not there yet.

Now, I'm completely agnostic about this. It doesn't matter to me what meditation practice somebody chooses, or whether it was meditation or whether it was just taking time to write in a journal or do something. But it seems crazy not have some technique to metabolize the experience of the day. That, to me, seems like a missing piece.

Sam: If you think the services and products around brain health - history of psychiatry, psychology, things like that - there are big practices that exist in these spaces. But everything's been reactive. Once you have a crisis, then there are services. There's very little prophylactic practice that exists, at least in Western culture. Other cultures have very developed senses of these things

Eric: Yes. I suspect even in many of our Western religions, we did have some things.

Sam: Prayer is meditative.

Eric: Prayer, there were reflective holidays, people took a moment of silence before eating meals. Even just to take time out, 10 seconds, 10 minutes, whatever it is, to settle the mind seems like an interesting missing piece.

Sam: Do you think that it's missing historically or do you think the problem is it hasn't been, for the last hundred years, commercializable? If anything, it's like a lost thing coming back.

Eric: Yeah, I think it’s coming back.

Sam: That’s what interesting about meditation. There's the new forms like Headspace and Calm. There's are meditation studios springing up in New York. There's a trend here going on, but because we live in a capitalist society, the question does come down to how do you monetize and create enough capital flow to create enough attention flow around a thing which is fundamentally sitting by yourself with your thoughts.

Eric: It wouldn't be shocking to me if it followed the path of yoga, which is a form of exercise you can pretty much do anywhere. You don't need any special equipment.

Sam: People have monetized the lifestyle, though.

Eric: That's true, and I wouldn't be shocked if that same thing happened. To me, I remember 40 years ago when running was a really odd thing to do. It was a high school and collegiate sport, and it was localized to running tracks. Then there was a book called Running by Jim Fixx that came out. That made it semi-popular, and it took off, mostly urban areas and people began running in parks, down sidewalks. It became a thing.

If you look now, if you walk down the street and you look at people's feet, there's 100x the people wearing running shoes - or a derivatives of running shoes - than actually run. We've gone from something that was once alien to an accepted thing to an aspired thing. Yoga followed the same path from alien to accepted to aspired. Look at yoga pants - many more people wear them than practice yoga.

Sam: Have you read Phil Knight's biography?

Eric Antonow: No, is it good?

Sam: It's awesome. He was obviously fully in the swing, partially driving and partially being a huge beneficiary of that shift. Totally worth reading.

Eric: So I would not be surprised to see meditation follow a similar path that jogging took and that yoga took 30 years ago.

Sam: At Slow Ventures we did one investment in this company called Brain.fm. It's basically music for the brain. They have focus music; they have calm music; they have sleep music. Dave Morin likes to talk a lot about digital drugs. This is this interesting spectrum where the markets that are evolving on these, how it affects people, and then also I guess this question of what is luxury? Time is a luxury.

I also saw an article discussing how sleep is the new luxury. That's like saying you can afford to have this space in your life to do eight hours of sleep. It is critical for your mental health, but still viewed as a luxury more than a necessity. Meditation's going to be interesting – it's not a sleep, but it's a similar. What’s the value of rest is? Who gets it?

Eric: I suspect they’ll be different versions. There will be luxury versions of these things like the studios in New York, like Inscape or MNDFL.

Sam: Also there are week-long, silent medications. A friend who I wouldn't have expected did a month-long medication. That is a luxury consumption.

Eric: The things that are very interesting to me is to think thing about the extremely accessible end of the spectrum. The least expensive version will being as ubiquitous as the toothbrush, which is as inexpensive a medical device as you can buy. My experience with meditation is very much on the daily hygiene level. It's so interesting to me as a tool for rest. It gives me the equivalent of getting a nap everyday without having to find a bed or having to fall asleep.

I think a lot about how making meditation easy, and how to speed its ubiquity. I agree with you, that it will be interesting to watch the luxury end of this. There is desire around being able to take time off and being able to get space to do things. I think that end will probably also happen very fast.

Sam: Well, meditation is highly transmittable because it's so accessible. And I think about how will it interface with social media.

You do a thing which is super cool where you do a short meditation with a different person on Facebook Live. I mean, it does seem like it would built for viral growth because anyone can pick it up and do it anywhere.

Eric: I didn't think about it that way, but I think that seems right. I was particularly interested in why meditation has to be a private activity. It's not public for most people, and that seems to me arbitrary and silly. Like breastfeeding, in some cultures it’s public and then some cultures it's private. That's arbitrary, but in the private culture it makes breastfeeding much more inconvenient.

There's no reason meditation shouldn't be public, and when it’s public two things happen: people feel comfortable doing it everywhere, and when people are doing it everywhere, other people can see it. The viral coefficient changes as soon as people feel comfortable doing it publicly. Making meditation public is essential to changing its growth curve. That’s what is driving me to do Pub Med.

Sam: If you make it public, you're also driving down the cost of it. There's a much higher cost associated with finding and maintaining private spaces in the world. It much cheaper to find a seat and just closing your eyes.

Eric: That is entirely right. For me, the largest cost of meditation was finding a place to do it. I would have time between two meetings or an appointment downtown and I'd have 15 minutes. There am I going to sit and close my eyes where it won't be disruptive to somebody else? Where won’t someone tap me on the shoulder, like, “Are you okay?” I've done parked in the car a number of times. People drive by, tap on window and ask, “Are you leaving?”

Sam: That's awesome. Eric, thanks for joining me on Modest Conversations.

Eric: That was great. Thank you.