Finding Silence in a Noisy World with Justin Talbot Zorn

Ashish Kothari: Hi there, Justin. Welcome. We're so excited to share the amazing work that you and Lee are doing with our listeners here on Happiness Squad. Thank you for joining us.

Justin Talbot Zorn: Ashish, it's really good to be here with you, and I'm grateful for the work you're doing, which feels very aligned with the message of this book.

Ashish Kothari: Thank you. For those who are listening, Justin and Lei wrote this beautiful book called Golden: The Power of Silence in a World of Noise. It couldn't be more needed in a world that's becoming busier and louder than ever before. So, my question to you, Justin, is what inspired the two of you to write this book?

Justin Talbot Zorn: Ashish, it's probably something familiar to you in these times, a sensation of despondency. This feeling of, "What are we going to do to bring some help and healing to this crazy world we're living in?"

It was late: 2016

I was just coming out of some time working on Capitol Hill with this feeling of: what can we do that will bring positive change, not just one step forward and two steps back, but real and meaningful change that will help our communities, families, and society in these times?

I had an intuition, and after a conversation with Lee, I found she had the same intuition. We both felt in our meditation practices that maybe the answer was to take a step back—not to look for the answers in more data, conversations, news, or analysis, but to look within silence.

Ashish Kothari: Yes.

Justin Talbot Zorn: And this wasn't just about feeling like we should go and meditate more. We were both experienced meditators at that point, but it wasn't about going off on a retreat. It was a feeling that we needed to tune into the silence in our everyday lives and stop trying to fill the space so much.

Ashish Kothari: Yeah.

Justin Talbot Zorn: So, we decided to do some writing and investigating. Lee and I were doing some writing together for Harvard Business Review, so we wrote an article about the psychology of silence, the neuroscience of silence, why it matters for creativity, why it matters for social justice, for managing energy, for inspiration, and also for our ability to discern what's true.

We were surprised when our editor at HBR wanted to see a piece on this, and it resonated with people, opening the door to a book deal and the opportunity to do more research. It was a really beautiful experience and a joy to work with Lee Marr as my collaborator.

Ashish Kothari: It's a beautiful article, and we'll dig into that a bit more, as well as the book. It's so resonant with me, Justin. When Lizzie forwarded that article and the podcast with you, it felt so true—what you tuned into and created.

We've spent so much time trying to fix the outside world, looking for answers out there, and trying to manage everything. We're busier than ever before, yet more anxious, with less control. There's a level of hopelessness and anxiety that people are living in.

That was a lot of the basis of our work as well, where I said, "Instead of trying to master the outside world, why don't we tune inward and start to master our inner worlds?" Let's mine what we already know, step back, and look at where we are in the context of everything. So, your message resonated deeply with me.

Justin Talbot Zorn: I'm glad to hear that.

Ashish Kothari: This question stuck with me. It's the most beautiful question, so I'm going to ask you, and I'm going to play this back. You posed this question in the HBR article: What is the deepest silence you have ever known? Talk to us a little bit about that question and about that moment for you.

Justin Talbot Zorn: Well, the question grew out of the start of this book-writing journey. We wrote this article, and we really wanted to not just write about why silence matters in terms of neuroscience and psychology, but also invite people to tune into silence as they experience it.

To take a break from one of life's most common responsibilities—taking a break from having to think of what to say, resting those mental reflexes that constantly protect your reputation and promote your point of view.

We realized there's no such thing as an expert in this kind of silence. There was no scientific definition that could satisfy the meaning of this pristine attention we're talking about.

So, we turned to ask a really unique range of people—poets, artists, neuroscientists, academic psychologists, sound engineers, national politicians, a Sufi whirling dervish, and someone who had been incarcerated on death row for more than 30 years for a crime that the preponderance of evidence showed he didn't commit.

We wanted to ask all these people about their experience of silence, about this most profound silence. So, we asked them this question: What's the deepest silence you've ever known? The answers were surprising, Ashish.

Oftentimes, silence wasn't what we expected it to be auditorily quiet. Sometimes it was running the perfect line through roaring rapids, or even at a heavy metal concert. They described silence as these places of pristine attention where nothing was making claims on their consciousness—states of attention where people could move into a more pure state of consciousness where they’re aligned with intention.

As we explored this question—what's the deepest silence you've ever known—it showed us a lot. When we combined it with academic literature and the science we were studying, it revealed much about the nature of noise. Noise is unwanted distraction at different levels, and silence is this place where nothing interferes with your perception or intention.

I've had some experiences, certainly in nature, like cool mornings looking at a placid ocean, breathing pure air, waking up while camping and feeling all the world still. But the deepest silence I've ever known, which I write about in the book, was being in the newborn intensive care unit after my wife and I had our twins.

We were there at the start of COVID. The stress and noise—the auditory noise, the beeping alarms, the informational noise of the COVID lockdown news, thinking about our kids' health—was overwhelming. The internal noise, the fear, and anxiety were overwhelming.

Then, I had this moment where, for the first time, I was able to hold both of my twins, still before their due date, on my bare chest, just skin to skin, and breathe for a while. All of a sudden, all those noises—the auditory noise, the informational noise, the internal noise—parted to the side. I just had this moment of pure connection. It was like, "This is the silence I seek. This is pure connection."

Ashish Kothari: As I listen to you, Justin, and that moment, I almost feel like I'm there with you. I can feel that level of peace and presence and how special that must have been.

Justin Talbot Zorn: Ashish, can I put the question back to you? What's the deepest silence you've ever known?

Ashish Kothari: For me, there have been tons of moments of deep silence that I've experienced when I've been in flow, working on something, and everything just disappears. But I'll tell you about one specific experience.

Two years ago, I took myself to a Vipassana, a 10-day silent meditation. It was magical. I was in California at the Dhamma Center, and it was such a profound experience, Justin. I still don't have a complete understanding of it.

I'm one of the most active people—I’m always talking. My wife was actually quite worried about me spending 10 days not talking to anybody and meditating 12-14 hours a day. So was my mother. She didn't think it would work for me. I had driven to the center from Colorado, a 16-hour journey, and I talked for most of it, except when I was sleeping.

When I got to the center, we turned in our devices. And before we even took the silent vow, my brain, for probably the first time ever, just went silent. This was before we even started the practice. It was magical, and I'll always remember it because it was a moment where the only thought in my mind was that I didn't have thoughts.

To give you context, I was leaving McKinsey after a 17-year career to start an entrepreneurship journey, focusing on the work around the book I'd written. There was so much going on—excitement, but also worry and fear. And in that moment, everything just went away.

I cannot describe how beautiful it was. You called it pristine attention. I cannot describe how soothing it was. I was in that state for three or four days. And then, funnily enough, I started to get thoughts back and began to experience things again. But it was beautiful.

I now find those moments quite often, and I create them consciously in my life. My parents were visiting for four weeks in May, and we were all together in the house. It’s a big house, but it was still a lot of people all the time.

When they left in the first week of June, my wife and son left with them. I spent six hours on that Sunday with my phone off, just sitting in our garden. And you know what was amazing? I noticed a tree in our garden from a different angle. We’ve lived here for 10 years, Justin, and it was like I was seeing this tree for the first time. That was magical too.

Justin Talbot Zorn: That’s beautiful. This is a theme we explored from different academic angles. This idea of clarity of sense perception—how we often have an informational overlay over our perception of a flower, a tree, a garden. This capacity to reach a deeper level of internal silence allows us to perceive more.

If it allows you to perceive a garden, a tree, a leaf, a flower, the smell of the air more, this internal silence will also allow you to perceive a problem at work, a professional challenge, or a personal challenge in a different way. It brings a deeper level of feeling and listening, enhancing our sense perception in the work we need to do in the world.

Ashish Kothari: Yeah. And it truly is a practice of cultivating it. I love how you differentiate in the book and in your work. There are two ways to talk about auditory silence—silencing the outside by taking ourselves away, but the deeper work and the deeper invitation is to silence the constant noise within. This allows you to reach that place of stillness.

You mentioned that practicing silence gives us access to so much, not just in problem-solving, creativity, ideas, and solutions. Talk to us a little about how leaders in organizations can use silence as a tool for better decision-making and fostering a more collaborative and productive work environment.

Justin Talbot Zorn: It's a really important question. I think of my friend Cyrus Habib, who went blind as a young man and overcame a life-threatening illness. He survived, learned Braille, and made it through Columbia, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, Yale Law School, and then onto Harvard. He became the Lieutenant Governor of Washington State in his 30s.

Everyone thought he was going to run for governor or U.S. senator. He held a press conference to make an announcement about his future, and he announced that he was taking a vow of poverty, chastity, and obedience as a Jesuit novice priest, essentially a monk, to live in silence for a time and study the rudiments of this contemplative tradition.

People were shocked. Many said, "This sounds like a cop-out, Cyrus. What are you doing? Are you just running away from the world?" But he explained that he wasn't running away from the world or his work. He made this decision so he could do his work with more intentionality.

This decision might seem outrageous to people in professional worlds, but he wanted to continue addressing issues like poverty and violence prevention, the same issues he dealt with as Lieutenant Governor. However, he wanted to do it from a place of not needing to look out for his own ego. He wanted to operate from a place where silence was his default.

He described it like this: He's a cook, really into cooking, though not a vegetarian. But he decided to learn how to cook vegetarian dishes well, so he wouldn't rely on meats and rich flavors as a crutch. He focused on bringing out the essence of the vegetables, aiming to become a "connoisseur of creation."

He applies this same principle to his life, spending more time in silence as his default. This is how he can fully taste, smell, and be present when washing dishes or solving public problems, like issues related to homelessness.

Instead of asking how something will look in a press release, he's putting himself in the shoes of the people he's trying to serve. The way he talks about it really gets to the essence of what it means to be a servant leader. To lead from a place of service, we have to be skillful about putting our ego in check.

Ashish Kothari: Yes.

Justin Talbot Zorn: And it's not just for those of us who spend a lot of time on social media promotion. Often, it’s the subtle things—thinking about how something will look, even at the most basic level, whether to the public, the board, or just to the people we’re working with. Instead, we should be tuning into a higher ethical standard.

Cyrus, being a religious person, puts this in terms of his faith, of tuning into a higher level of connection as a source of ethical guidance. But each of us, regardless of our religious path or belief system, can do this work of connecting to a place of presence and silence, and lead from that place with profound listening in our work.

Ashish Kothari: Wow. That is such a beautiful story and a reminder of the intentionality through which we lead. The only way to connect to that intentionality, if it's not ego-driven, is to drop into silence, to look within rather than try to look good in the external world.

The good news is that I'm starting to see more leaders finding this space. One of my dear friends at McKinsey, Manish Chopra, wrote a book called The Equanimous Mind. For the last ten years, he takes himself on a silent retreat every year.

For him, it's a moment to tune in, take stock of everything, and ask, "What else am I going to do?" Emma Seppälä, whom you probably know, follows the work of Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. She does a silent retreat once a quarter, if not every six months, to stop and listen.

My question for you, Justin, is this: For those willing to take the time to dip their toe into a retreat or formally learn meditation, there are pathways open. But what might be some other ways for leaders to cultivate silence and tune into what you call "pristine attention" in their day-to-day lives? What can they do until they get there?

Justin Talbot Zorn: I'm really glad you asked this question because we think of this book as a kind of non-meditator's guide to getting beyond the noise. Lee and I have tremendous respect for meditation traditions. I was a meditation teacher on Capitol Hill when I worked as a legislative director in the U.S. Congress.

Lee has integrated meditation into her work with NASA and various major organizations, working on serious issues like removing toxic chemicals from supply chains. Mindfulness, in the traditional sense, is something we've brought into our professional and personal lives, and we have great respect for it.

At the same time, we've had 40 or 50 years of mindfulness, and the world is more distracted than ever. It's not that there's a problem with mindfulness per se; it's just that, as one of our interviewees, Joshua Smyth, a professor at Penn State, told us, "If you don't take the medicine, the treatment won't work."

There's no one-size-fits-all approach for leaders across different sectors. We wrote this book to give people a license to let go of the doubt—am I doing this right? Each of us knows what silence feels like. Each of us knows what pristine attention feels like.

We cite the French philosopher Simone Weil, who says, "Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer." Each of us can arrive at this place, whether we're religious, spiritual, or not.

Ashish Kothari: Yes.

Justin Talbot Zorn: Each of us knows how to find this place of pristine attention. We lay out 33 different practices in the book. Some are just for little micro-moments, like how to take a moment and appreciate the little gifts of silence when the podcast stops streaming, or when you're making coffee in the morning and just focusing on one thing.

Or having a micro-hit of nature—taking three minutes to focus as deeply as you can, listening to sounds in a quiet place. There's an ancient practice from India called nada yoga, the yoga of sound, which is really the yoga of actively listening within silence.

It has been confirmed by neuroscience research to regenerate brain cells, the act of listening to silence. For me, if you live in a quiet place, step outside. If you live in a place without much traffic or construction noise, take a moment to step outside and listen to the sound of the breeze.

If you're in a big city, maybe find a quiet room, it doesn't need to be a fancy meditation room—just a hallway with some quiet. Take some time to meditate and listen—to listen to nothing in particular.

It might sound silly to listen to nothing in particular because it's so different from how we're trained. Listening is usually about tuning in to receive information. But this is about actively tuning in to receive the pure vibration of life, just tuning into the silence.

I know your question was about practices for leaders in particular. This is something we explore extensively. I could get into more of this around organizational and leadership practices, but it really starts with the personal. It starts with these simple practices of cultivating an appreciation for silence.

I'm glad you asked about this because we think of this book as a kind of non meditators guide to getting beyond the noise. Lee and I have both brought meditation into our work and Capitol Hill and federal agencies and corporations around the world.

And at the same time, even as personal and professional practitioners of mindfulness, we sometimes look at the state of the world and say we've had 40 or 50 years of mindfulness out there and we're more distracted than ever.

So we want to give people the license to look beyond the traditional rules and tools of mindfulness. Joshua Smythe, professor of biobehavioral health and medicine at Penn state shared with us that even through his studies of mindfulness, the problem is just often if you don't take the medicine, the treatment won’t work.

And it's not a judgment of people who don't meditate. It's just recognizing that there's no perfect one-size-fits-all approach that's going to deal with this huge problem of how we stay centered amidst this mass proliferation of mental stimulation in the world.

So we want this book to be an opportunity to let go of questions like: Am I doing it right? Am I practicing mindfulness right? And give people license to explore the silence as they know the silence because each one of us knows what pristine attention feels like for our own self.

So we lay out in the book 33 different ways that we can find silence as individuals, as families, as workplaces, as society as a whole. And it really starts with the overarching premise of finding appreciation.

For silence, this idea that goes back to the title of the book, that “Speech is silver. Silence is golden,” which is an ancient formulation. And for leaders, where all the practices start is in our own lives, personally. How to take time to just listen. Just listen to silence.

There's an ancient practice out of India called nada yoga, the yoga of sound, the yoga of simply listening to silence. We found in our interviews, academic research, and some of our research on our own various studies that reinforce the idea that listening in silence actually regenerates neurons in the brain, that this is something that's edifying and healing for our minds.

And it's such a counterintuitive thing, this idea of simply listening to silence. If you live in a quiet place where there's not a lot of sound of traffic, take a step outside and just listen to the sound of the wind, of the air. Maybe the leaves rustling in the breeze, but nothing in particular, just listening in the silence.

If you live in a noisy place, maybe go into the quietest room you could find. Maybe it's nowhere fancy, just a hallway and just listening to the silence, bringing your active attention to the silence.

Ashish Kothari: And Justin, it might even be, I'm just imagining if this is one of the practices and just imagining, and let's say if you do live in a noisy place, maybe getting noise-cancelling headphones, putting those on and just listening to the sounds of our own body, breath going in and out, our heartbeat, or how the temperature feels on our skin.

age, the composer, who in the: 1950

When he got there, he told the engineer in charge that he couldn't hear the silence—he heard two sounds, one high-pitched and one low-pitched. The engineer explained that this room was perfectly silent. The low-pitched sound was the sound of his blood in circulation, and the high-pitched sound was the sound of his nervous system in operation.

This gets back to the idea that maybe there is no place of perfect absence of sound and stimulus in this buzzing, pulsating universe in which we live. And that's okay because silence is what each one of us conceives it to be. It's this space of pure perception and intention as we perceive it.

Each of us can find that. So, as you mentioned, putting on noise-canceling headphones doesn't need to involve fancy technology, but if you've got them, use them. And if you hear the sound of your heartbeat or maybe a little bit of ringing in your ears, just getting comfortable with that, listening, and tuning into the most fundamental vibration of life that you can.

Ashish Kothari: Yeah. And isn't it interesting, we run into this all the time—how afraid people are of turning off the noise. Talk to me a little bit about if that ever came up in your research.

Justin Talbot Zorn: Ashish, I wish I could say I was beyond that fear, but Nietzsche wrote about the horror of the vacuum that a human being is subject to experiencing. Silence is scary.

There's a study out of the University of Virginia where Timothy Wilson, a researcher there, gave undergraduate students the choice to sit alone in silence or push a button that would administer a very painful electric shock. Initially, everyone said they would pay money to avoid this shock when they heard how painful it would be.

But after about 15 minutes, 67% of the men and 25% of the women chose to shock themselves rather than endure the silence. That's how much, especially these days, we're afraid of silence. Some of this is understandable; we seek information because it has not just entertainment value but survival value.

Ashish Kothari: Yeah. And I think many people would rather distract themselves because when we are silent, it sometimes requires us to process all those things we're holding onto that we'd rather not face, things about ourselves or others that we’ve stuffed deep into our unconscious. So, why not just keep ourselves busy? But in the end, there’s no running away from it.

Justin Talbot Zorn: Exactly. The ancient philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras, who we write about in the book—the originator of the famous theorem for finding the dimensions of a right triangle—was the leader of a rigorous school of spiritual and scientific study in ancient Greece about 2,500 years ago.

The legend has it that he required any member of his inner circle of students to spend five years in silence. Five years not talking. So we ask the readers, what would it feel like to spend five years in silence? What's the first thought that comes to you if you find out you're going to spend five years in silence?

Even if all the worldly considerations like your family's well-being are taken care of, there's this fear that comes up—like you said, Ashish—what will I find? How can I face myself to that kind of depth? And what's on the other side? Pythagoras, this extraordinary polymath, believed that this was a prerequisite to wisdom.

Ashish Kothari: So, you touched on this briefly, Justin—you ran a mindfulness program in the House of Representatives, and I'm curious about that. Tell me a little about that program and what benefits you saw for those who practiced it.

Justin Talbot Zorn: It was an extraordinary experience for me, but it wasn't so much that people practiced mindfulness and found a panacea or clarity. It was simply being present together—people of different ideological persuasions, people of different backgrounds.

Staffers for West Coast members of Congress, Democrats with experience in yoga and meditation, and some Republican finance committee staffers who had been introduced to mindfulness while working as attorneys on Wall Street. People with very different backgrounds and objectives on Capitol Hill.

I found that the silence, being together in a Capitol Hill office building on a day when Congress was in session for 25 or 30 minutes, created a space where all that nervous energy, anxiety, and adversarial energy could dissipate.

It could transmute, almost alchemize. It was the beauty of not necessarily practicing a particular kind of meditation, but just being in the presence of silence.

Ashish Kothari: Yeah, I can imagine. In fact, one of the things I'm inviting more and more leaders to do—many companies in oil and gas have a safety moment where, before they start a meeting, they take a minute to go over safety protocols. I'm inviting more leaders to start their meetings with a mindful or silent moment.

Six breaths where we stop and cultivate that presence, downregulate our emotional and sympathetic nervous systems, create space, and see the power in this micro mindful moment. I might start calling it the "golden moment."

Justin Talbot Zorn: It really is a safety moment in a sense. It's a moment to check all those energies of opposition and outrage, thinking about how to dominate the other and win the argument. If we take that moment, it brings the kind of emotional and intellectual safety we need in this day and age, so people can meet each other in a safe, clear, and friendly way.

Ashish Kothari: Exactly. A moment to empty our cups so we can really listen and truly tune in. Justin, this has been such an amazing conversation. I'd love for us to chat again and hopefully have Lee join the conversation.

We have a program called Rewire, where these micro practices help people move from knowing to doing. Golden is definitely going to be one of the books I recommend. These 33 practices—I love the invitation to cultivate silence, and I think people can embrace that even if they're not open to mindfulness.

It's going on our recommended list. Thank you for spending the time with me and sharing all of this beautiful work and wisdom with our listeners.

Justin Talbot Zorn: Ashish, I'm so grateful to you for this time. I really appreciate the presence, intention, and goodness you bring to your interviews and all your work. Thank you for having me. It's an honor.

Ashish Kothari: Thank you, my friend.

Justin Talbot Zorn: Take care.