Thank you for joining us for episode 522 of Live Happy Now.

In a time of deep division and unease, overcoming our loneliness and uncertainty is a massive challenge.

But this week's guest tells us how we can begin.

I'm your host, Paula Phelps, and this week I'm joined by award-winning author,

educator, lawyer, scientist, and meditation teacher, Anu Gupta. His best-selling book,

Breaking Bias, is a rich toolkit to help each of us understand how to cultivate the wisdom

and compassion we need to transcend the bias, prejudice, and turmoil in the world around us.

In this episode, we talk about how to build the world where we all belong and get along.

Let's have a listen.

Anu, thank you so much for joining me on Live Happy Now.

Thank you so much for having me. I'm so delighted to be here.

You've got this incredible book that we want to unpack,

and it's really stunning in the breadth of its research as well as the timing of it. And this book,

for our listeners, it talks about biases. And I'd love to know your background. What made you

want to write about this particular topic at this particular

time? Yeah, absolutely. But there's two reasons. There's a personal reason and more of like an

existential reason. I'll start with a personal one. So the book is called Breaking Bias. And I really

came to this work of breaking bias. I think the work chose me because I was born in India and my family immigrated

to the U.S. when I was 10 years old. And after moving here in the mid-90s, I suddenly became

an object of curiosity, but also a lot of othering. So just because of the way I looked and the way

I spoke and the way I dressed, you know, I got called a lot of names like heathen or pagan or go back to where he came

from, just a lot of misconceptions. And I always was interested in understanding why people

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