YouSaid · the spoken record

Andy Puddicombe

lines on the record: 87
first: 2019-09-23
most recent: 2019-09-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yes, one of the guy called Adam Breeden who had a business called All Star Lanes and he had asked me to help him out with some marketing. So I was helping him. We'd become good friends, and I was open about how anxious I was feeling and just how that was getting progressively worse. And he'd been getting one-on-one lessons from Andy. And he suggested I should go and meet Andy. Like Andy had this clinic and he wanted some help with it. So it was the skill swap. You know, I met Andy and he had the clinic. And so he said, look, why don't I put you through the clinic experience? And I think I can help you and maybe you can help me with some ideas for the clinic.”
2019-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Headspace: Andy Puddicombe and Rich Pierson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, freelance kind of just marketing advice. It was weird when I kind of quit my job, lots of people reached out. And so I kind of managed to cobble together quite a few independent jobs that was enough to kind of pay my mortgage. And I got a flatmate and I managed to survive that way and pay for my course.”
2019-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Headspace: Andy Puddicombe and Rich Pierson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I just felt like I wanted to do something that had some impact. And so I started the course three days a week in a normal academic kind of calendar. And then I was freelancing for the rest of the time to kind of make money.”
2019-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Headspace: Andy Puddicombe and Rich Pierson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have you ever thought about being an acupuncturist? I think you'd be a brilliant acupuncturist, and I'd said, no, I've never considered that But I went in the next week and I quit and decided that I was going to go and become an acute. Yeah, that's how that happened.”
2019-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Headspace: Andy Puddicombe and Rich Pierson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I'd love to be honest with you, I absolutely loved it when I felt like I'd found my career calling and I loved that I could be around creative people and come up with creative kind of products. Over time, I think when I gave up drinking, when I kind of decided that I was not going to kind of live as hard, you know, I just knew I didn't want to do that anymore. And I kind of felt the kind of the shallow nature of selling people things that they maybe didn't want. And I just wasn't getting any joy from that experience. And I didn't know what I wanted to do. And I was getting acupuncture at the time because I was just getting more and more anxious as I kind of didn't really feel like I understood my place in the world. And then the person that was giving me the acupuncture said, look, and I was obviously telling you about my job and how unhappy I was. Said, look, I've actually got a course starting next month.”
2019-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Headspace: Andy Puddicombe and Rich Pierson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I started with some workshops in the clinic I was primarily, yeah, but by that stage I'd finished kind of studying at the circus school. I was working full-time in the clinic, seeing anything from six to ten people a day. And I started weekends. I did a few workshops, but it only really changed to sort of much larger groups after I met my now very good friend Rich, who's the co-founder of Headspace.”
2019-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Headspace: Andy Puddicombe and Rich Pierson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I deliberately chose that clinic or that kind of approach because I didn't want it to be in an alternative kind of health clinic or something like that. You know, I wanted it to feel really kind of mainstream. That was intentional. Was also in the city, it was in the financial district of London. So most of the people I was seeing worked in the financial industry, they were struggling with depression, anxiety, insomnia, migraine. It was broad, but I would say that they were all struggling with many of the things that we all suffer with in life now.”
2019-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Headspace: Andy Puddicombe and Rich Pierson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, every available, I was up at four o'clock in the morning writing content and trying to work out, kind of, okay, well, what is this thing that I want to do? But alongside that, running in parallel, I managed to find a place where I could teach meditation just doing one-to-one at that point. I found a doctor who ran an integrative health center in London where they had everything from sort of rheumatic specialist to cardiac specialists, you know, right across the board, all different disciplines. And he had heard of mindfulness. And he said, well, look, if you can make it work here, then I'm happy to give you one of the clinics rooms.”
2019-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Headspace: Andy Puddicombe and Rich Pierson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So they funded not only the degree, but they also funded my living as well. So, you know, I got into a situation where I didn't have to find kind of a job when I went back to the UK. So during the day, I went to school and studied circus arts. It was a big, big difference”
2019-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Headspace: Andy Puddicombe and Rich Pierson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Money everything. So I was thinking, how am I going to go from Russia back to England? And I kind of saw an opportunity, I guess, as now a very mature student at 32. I was in a position where the government would essentially kind of pay for everything.”
2019-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Headspace: Andy Puddicombe and Rich Pierson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly that. So I found myself living in Moscow, still teaching in the meditation center, but no longer living as a monk. And I hadn't done any exercise for 10 years. And I was really excited about doing some exercise. And a friend of mine there was doing a degree at Moscow State Circus. And he said, look, you know, I used to love acrobatics and stuff and juggling. And he was like, why didn't you just come along? You know, meet some of my teachers. So I did. I don't really know how it happened, but I was there. And one of them said, hey, look, you know, you can do a degree in this back in London. And I was already thinking, okay, how do I make this transition from Buddhist monk living in the monastery? To kind of making this content more available. I'd no money, as a monk, you give away all your belongings, so I'd give”
2019-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Headspace: Andy Puddicombe and Rich Pierson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I found increasingly over the years that I was there that, as I say, I was meeting people and I was finding a way of talking about meditation in a way that I had never experienced myself, but that seemed to really resonate with people.”
2019-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Headspace: Andy Puddicombe and Rich Pierson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so it sounds crazy, I know. It actually stay with me. It does actually make more sense than it first sounds. What happened was I was in Moscow and I'd already made the decision actually to sort of hand back my ropes to no longer be a mon”
2019-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Headspace: Andy Puddicombe and Rich Pierson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You go back to the UK in 2004, a couple years in Russia. To study circus arts. This is a total like out of left field. People are going to listen to this and say, wait, what? Wait, I thought you were a monk. When you join the circus, what's the story?”
2019-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Headspace: Andy Puddicombe and Rich Pierson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Correct and mixed in with the Russians were a bunch of expats who lived in Moscow. And I got to know people who would come along to these centers kind of alongside the sessions that we'd have at the center. I'd meet up with them. And then one of the expats had invited me to go in and teach his execs, an oil company in Russia. And he said, look, you can't come in dressed as a Buddhist monk. It's an oil company. We're in Moscow. And that had got me thinking about this whole idea of, you know, demystifying this and trying to make it more accessible.”
2019-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Headspace: Andy Puddicombe and Rich Pierson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So there was a four year retreat coming up at one of the monasteries. And this retreat just kept getting pushed back. So I found myself in Moscow for a number of years kind of teaching meditation but waiting to go into long-term retreat. And so I think on the one hand, I was thinking, okay, I want to make a long-term commitment to retreat and better understanding my mind. And on the other hand, I was getting this kind of experience of what does it mean to teach meditation, you know? And it wasn't what I'd set out to do, but I kind of accidentally found myself in a position where I was then teaching.”
2019-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Headspace: Andy Puddicombe and Rich Pierson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I'm thinking in my mind, you know, there's this conflict, I'm a monk, I can't walk into a pub as a monk. And maybe it's okay if I just drink water and look, they're not going to meet me anywhere else because genuinely they've been sat in those same chairs for many years. They weren't going to give them up. I did. I walked into our local pub where we used to hang out as teenagers and I sat down around a table. I remember there were eight of us around this table. I drank water. They drank beer. And we talked about the Himalayas. I never felt like I I lost touch with the character or the person I grew up with. It wasn't like a different person. It was just I was having a different experience.”
2019-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Headspace: Andy Puddicombe and Rich Pierson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, so I do remember going back. So I was fully ordained and I remember walking down the high street. So, I mean, this is a small town in the southwest of England. I'm walking down there in my bright sort of maroon robes and seeing kind of old school teachers and, you know, old mates. And then saying to my friends kind of, hey, it'd be great to all meet up together. And they're like, sure, yeah, just come down the pub. We'll be there where we always are.”
2019-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Headspace: Andy Puddicombe and Rich Pierson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But he said it's so much easier to do that. So I started sort of looking at some other places as well. And I met this teacher, this Tibetan Lama. And we talked a lot. By that stage, I'd already kind of done multiple years. I don't know, probably four years, something like that, of training. And we talked a lot. And I was so moved by his warmth, by his compassion, by his sense of joy. things that I'd not necessarily I'd witnessed a lot of awareness and focus and attention in other monasteries, but I hadn't really kind of seen this other sort of side. And yeah, I made the decision. It was really easy, again, kind of actually. This is what I've been looking for. And yeah, now I don't know how many years later, 25 years later, he's still my teacher now.”
2019-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Headspace: Andy Puddicombe and Rich Pierson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think there's different ways of looking at that. I think through the lens of a Buddhist monk, I think you just look at it and say, well, it's karma, you know, kind of that was my journey. And this is the journey I'm on. You know when you're living your life and it just feels like you're in the right place in the right time, even if it's difficult, there's still a sense that this is just where I should be right now. So even when it was difficult, I still felt that this is where I should be right now. Yeah, eventually kind of there was a point where I think I kept getting ill in Asia as well. You know, like that is the additional challenge. It's not just the challenges of the mind. It's the challenges of the stomach and the bowels as well. And I remember eventually a teacher from Australia coming and he said, look, honestly, he said, if you want to kind of go and do like a year retreat or a two-year retreat or something like that, he said, I'd probably try and do it in the West if you can. He said, find a good teacher.”
2019-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Headspace: Andy Puddicombe and Rich Pierson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've talked to people who've done vipassana, which is like 10 days silent retreat, and who've had, and certainly in the first few days, really broken down, really just emotional breakdowns is so... Hard. Feels so isolating. You must have experienced that.”
2019-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Headspace: Andy Puddicombe and Rich Pierson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was a really, I mean, really kind of quite extreme retrospectively, I think I would have done things a little differently. There were no English people there. There was no one who spoke really English. Even my teacher there didn't really speak any English. So every afternoon I had 10 minutes with him. And I'd go and sit there and he'd look at me and he'd sort of smile and look very kind of warm and happy. Sometimes I'd sit there and I'd smile and kind of laugh and other days I'd sit there. So, there wasn't a lot of instruction taking place”
2019-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Headspace: Andy Puddicombe and Rich Pierson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So in Burma it was just meditation. So we were doing an 18 hour day, so it's eight hours of sitting and eight hours of walking meditation, all in the same room. Plus in the two hours for eating at five in the morning and 11, you'd have lunch and then no eating after midday. And then you'd have somewhere around three, three and a half hours sleep at nighttime. And that was it seven days a week. So it was...”
2019-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Headspace: Andy Puddicombe and Rich Pierson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In that particular tradition, you don't make a time commitment. I did it later on in the Tibetan tradition, I did, but I started training as a novice monk. And it was, of all the training, it was really full-on. It was way more full-on than what I'd come from in India.”
2019-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Headspace: Andy Puddicombe and Rich Pierson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To the retreat center and said, kind of, you know, this is what I'd like to do. Could I just start off maybe by working here, kind of maybe doing some retreat. And I was there for probably six months or so before then going on to Thailand and Burma sort of to actually train in a monastery.”
2019-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Headspace: Andy Puddicombe and Rich Pierson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I guess it is. And there are probably people kind of googling that. But no, back then I'd read a little bit and most of the stuff I had read was from Southeast Asia. So it has its home in Thailand and Vietnam and Sri Lanka. So I started thinking, okay, I'm going to go to Thailand. I knew of a teacher who was there who I really kind of respected. I enjoyed their writing. So I thought, okay, well, I'm going to go there. This girlfriend of mine said, oh, a friend of mine's just come back from the Himalayas. She went to visit the Dalai Lama. He was in northern India in this kind of small town. I went and got a lonely planet guy from the local library and looked it up and thought, well, that looks interesting. Okay, maybe I'll fly to Daddy instead. And, you know, the Dalai Lama's there. Must be a pretty good place. So I flew into Delhi. I think I'd done a little bit of research and I printed some stuff out before I went and I knew of a retreat center.”
2019-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Headspace: Andy Puddicombe and Rich Pierson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would frame it ever so slightly different. You're absolutely correct, but my experience of it was not that I sat there and chose to do it. I genuinely felt nothing else made sense. It didn't even feel like a choice. I didn't sit there for days thinking, should I do this? Shouldn't I do this? What are the pros, what are the cons. It sounds... I'm aware of how strange that sounds. I just suddenly think one day you're going to quit college in go and become a Buddhist monk. But at the time, for what it's worth, it felt like a calling that I couldn't sort of ignore.”
2019-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Headspace: Andy Puddicombe and Rich Pierson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I was just increasingly, you know, I just felt this sense of disturbance or unsatisfactoriness. I kind of felt like I was doing something I enjoyed, but I just didn't feel like it was really making me happy. And at the time I was going out with this girl who lived there kind of locally. We talked a lot. She was really into Buddhism and stuff. And she talked with a huge amount of admiration about these monks and nuns that would go away and meditate and try and understand their mind, you know. And it was just into the second year. It was pretty early on. Just had a day, you know, where all of a sudden that seemed to make a lot of sense. I just, it was an inexplicable feeling that I just had to do this so much so that I went into university that same afternoon and said, I'm going to leave. This is what I'm going to do.”
2019-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Headspace: Andy Puddicombe and Rich Pierson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's in Bedford. So it was a sports college. And actually, I didn't go straight there. So my grades weren't good enough. So I went and spent a couple of years, actually here in the US doing some coaching of sports. I already trained prior to university. I trained as a personal trainer. So I was already working in sort of gyms and things. I'm really enjoying that till eventually when I was 21, I got in as a, they called it as a mature student in England. It just basically means your grades don't have to be quite as good and you're a little bit older. So they let you in. I think it's a pity thing. And I started studying sports science.”
2019-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Headspace: Andy Puddicombe and Rich Pierson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Idea, the sense of getting away in a physical way, kind of we think that we're going to be able to outrun it mentally as well. And of course we never can. So yeah, I think a really to this day, kind of a really important and impactful part of my own journey.”
2019-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Headspace: Andy Puddicombe and Rich Pierson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was Christmas Eve. We'd had a party at the local rugby club in Canesham. And so it was Christmas morning by the time we all sort of came out onto the street and we were standing in a big group outside the club. And a drunk driver came down the road and crashed into the group of us. And I was just very lucky to be standing on the edge of the group, but it killed two people and injured sort of put in critical like intensive care, like 12 of the group. And, you know, every single one of us there that night dealt with it in a different way. I think we were all very confused. You know, we're still young, 18 years old, you know. I don't know if we ever really kind of know how to deal with that kind of thing. I just wanted to get away. I think we often do this, right?”
2019-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Headspace: Andy Puddicombe and Rich Pierson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With TM, it's typically a mantra, so you're given sort of a word or a phrase and you repeat it over and over for sort of a 20-minute period. And at that time, I found it really, really difficult as an energetic young kid to sit there and be still and to focus. But it was definitely something that I still found, you know, I still look back at it with a sense that it was a very positive influence at an early stage in my life.”
2019-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Headspace: Andy Puddicombe and Rich Pierson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I don't know if I had that point of comparison. You know, as a kid, you don't necessarily have the weird and that's not. My mum was going there, so I was going there. It wasn't until I told a really good friend of mine. He's still a very good friend of mine. I shared with him, confided in him that I'd been going to do this thing because I knew it was a little bit kind of weird. And I went into school the next day. All the other kids in the class were sat on their desk cross-legged sort of oming at me as I walked in the room. And it was at that point, I think then I registered that, oh, okay, this is definitely not something that is mainstream. It's probably not something that I'm going to be able to talk about too much to other people.”
2019-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Headspace: Andy Puddicombe and Rich Pierson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, my parents split up at 10, and my mum was looking for a way to cope. Meditation definitely was within her kind of sphere of interest. And in Bristol, there was a local group. It was a TM group, Transcendental Meditation Group. And she decided she was going to do a six-week course. And my sister, I found out, was going along with her, and I didn't want to be at home on my own. So I asked if I could join them. Yeah, and it led to actually kind of a couple of years of doing that kind of thing into my early teens.”
2019-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Headspace: Andy Puddicombe and Rich Pierson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At a top tier advertising agency in London, they met because Rich was spiraling. He was burnt out and looking for help. And Andy was the person he happened to come across. At the time, Andy was offering one on one meditation sessions out of a back room of a doctor's office. Neither Andy nor Rich could have imagined that eventually the two of them would build a meditation app, headspace, now used by millions of people, and a business that generates more than a hundred million dollars in annual revenue. And the story of how they came together at the exact right moment, each with the exact skill set they needed to co-found and build headspace. Well, it's a pretty long journey. And Andy, the Buddhist monk, he would say that it took as long as it was supposed to, but it actually starts when Andy was growing up in the UK.”
2019-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Headspace: Andy Puddicombe and Rich Pierson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And when you're ready to launch, you offer code built to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Loans issued by Celtic Bank and serviced by Stripe. All loans subject to credit approval. We knew the business that we had wasn't working. And so with the last bit of cash that we had, we managed to pull in every single favor that we had left. Friends and family had said, Look, we really love you guys, but we're not giving you any more money. This is a terrible business, like, well done, but...”
2019-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Headspace: Andy Puddicombe and Rich Pierson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, one of my favorite parts of traveling is getting a feel for a neighborhood, the way locals do. A few summers ago, I was in Rome and stayed in an apartment I booked on Airbnb. It was tucked in a quiet neighborhood just outside the Roman forum. Every morning I'd walk to the corner cafe, grab an espresso, and just watch the world go by outside. I even managed to chat with the owner about the neighborhood he lived in for nearly forty years. And he got me thinking about my own neighborhood. There are incredible hiking trails and great restaurants and, of course, the beach. And when I'm traveling this summer, listing my own place on Airbnb could be a really smart way to let someone else experience the area the way I do, like a local. Listing your home on Airbnb while you're traveling is a great way to make some extra money. You could put the money toward your next trip. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much”
2019-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Headspace: Andy Puddicombe and Rich Pierson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT