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

Hello everybody. This is another one of those episodes where I test that old adage about never meeting your heroes because they'll inevitably let you down.

I am a massive fan of Jennifer Egan. I just finished reading two of her novels, a visit from the Goon Squad, which won the Pulitzer Prize back in 2011, and then the companion novel, the Candy House, which was one of President Obama's favorite reads of 2022.

Jennifer Egan is not only a novelist. She's also written short stories and award-winning magazine journalism. She's one of those writers who can both spin a fascinating yarn and load it up with insights into everything from human nature to the future of technology all while pulling off these bewitching turns of phrase or with the writer Jonathan friends and has called micro felicity so I love that term.

As I continue to toil away at my own book, Egan's work gives me that pleasantly unpleasant feeling of being a complete hack.

Anyway, the good news is that she did not let me down at all as you will hear. She is as funny and interesting and open IRL as she is on the page.

Although I'm not sure she feels that way. One of the things we discuss here is how much smarter she feels in writing than in speaking.

We talk a lot about her writing process. In fact, the power of writing by hand and this truly shocking, relentless, ruthless discipline that she imposes on herself.

Basically, she never allows herself to do the same thing twice as she's writing.

We also talk about curiosity, our panic attacks, how she handles feedback, her feelings of insubstantiality, our culture's fetishization of authenticity, the impact of success on her work.

And we spend quite a bit of time talking about AI and our possible technological futures.

I've been thinking about this a lot and I thought Egan would be a great conversation partner on this subject given that in the candy house, her most recent novel, she plays out some wild ideas about uploading our consciousness to the matrix.

So she thinks a lot about technology. I wanted to hear what she had to say.

I think for many of us, we hear the word meditation. It conjures images of people sitting alone, maybe in robes, maybe on an outcropping of rock in the Himalayas and lotus position.

However, for many people, meditation is better while moving. You probably heard me talk on this show about walking meditation, which I have found to be an incredibly powerful form of the practice.

And it's a really good thing to do if you're feeling too fidgety to sit or if you're too tired to sit.

So if you want to give this a try, which I highly recommend, you can now do the walking meditations over on the 10% happier app for free.

The enjoy every day walking meditation pack in the 10% happier app is available for free until August 20th.

Download the 10% happier app today, wherever you get your apps and get started for free.

Well done. You've sorted through the embarrassment of riches that is the modern podcast landscape and found me, Rob Briden, on my podcast.

In this series of Briden and I talk to, among others, Harry Hill, Ben Elton, Charlotte Church, Steve Cougan and Dame Harriet Walter.

And that's just a few. We tend to chat for about 45 minutes to an hour, never longer.

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