Anu Gupta: When I was growing up in Delhi, my town was often under police lockdown. We couldn't leave our homes because of ethnic tensions. So at school, I'd ask my teachers, "Why is this happening?" They'd say, "Because those people are bad." Wait, what's bad about them? They're not like us. They're different.

After moving to New York, I became those people. Apparently, I worshipped cows. Apparently, I was stupid, dirty, ugly. These definitions were accepted as fact before I even said a word. All based on the way I looked. So I decided to assimilate and become American as quickly as possible. I changed my accent. I changed the way I dressed. I even went by the name Andy. Yet all too often, just walking down the street or riding the subway, I'd hear, "Hey, Osama, go back to where you came from." Every time I heard that, my heart sank. I'd already changed everything I could possibly change about myself.

For years, I just ignored it. I took comfort in the science. When I was in high school, the Human Genome Project proved that race is a story, that people are 99.9% genetically identical, regardless of what we look like. But emotionally, I began to feel disconnected from my peers and the country I now called my own. Over time, I just couldn't imagine living this way. So, eight years ago, I found myself on the ledge of my 18th floor window, contemplating jumping off.

As I stood there looking at the teeny tiny cars below, I had a flash of insight. The stereotypes people reduce me to are just ideas. They're not true. I realized people aren't seeing me. Honor, entrepreneur, lawyer—people are seeing ideas of me, and it was those ideas that kept me depressed and paranoid all these years. And I realized I wasn't alone. I don't want to live in a world where we live in ideas of one another. I want to live in a world where we live in the presence of one another, the real people. This is why I've committed my life to breaking bias. Hi, my name is Anu Gupta and I'm the author of Breaking Bias, with a foreword by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and I'm also the founder of Be More, a startup company that trains individuals and organizations in building belonging within workplaces and communities.

Host: I guess let's start with that, which is it's pretty unusual for a book to have a foreword by the Dalai Lama. That must be a big honor, and also how did that come about?

Anu Gupta: Indeed, I feel like it's a spiritual shield for this work. You know, we're living in these quite uncertain times where there's just such rise of polarization and division, not just in the US, but around the world. And I think His Holiness, after he read the book, really felt that and the potential of this book. And he wanted to lend his name to this work because, like him, I believe that the 21st century isn't just about technological innovation. It's really about inner development, particularly a development of warm-heartedness and other tools that I talk a lot about in the book.

Host: It is not a moment in the world, especially politically, where it feels like warm-heartedness or diversity, equity, and inclusion... they don't have, let's put it, the winds behind them. The wind is not in the sails of those concepts at the moment. So how do you adjust to going from a time where there was kind of broad cultural support for these ideas to now broad cultural repression of these ideas?

Anu Gupta: I think what's been a real gift for me, particularly using the mindfulness and the Buddhist mind sciences and the neuroscience, is that the gift of time... this work of breaking bias, it's really about deep time and the evolution of human consciousness. I look at it that way. I'm also really aware of history and where our species has been, not just a hundred years ago but a thousand years ago, 10,000 years ago. So knowing that deep time really gives me comfort that this is really how we become better humans. Breaking bias is not just a path that's rooted in social justice or fairness. It's really a path to more profitability, to success, to belonging, to healing, and so many other things.

Host: So your book Breaking Bias, one of the things that I think is so interesting about this is that instead of it just looking at bias and how to be more inclusive in a kind of narrow framework of "what do we do right now?" I mean, you quite literally go back millions of years. We're talking about like the geological formation of the earth, which is not what I expected from a book about bias.

Anu Gupta: Yeah, it's interesting, right? Because when we think about bias, we think about our relationships with each other as human beings. But we have to also shift our relationship with nature, with the living earth, with what's known as "more than human beings"—you know, animals, birds, fish, insects, the whole ecology of things. And we're living through a time of the Anthropocene, right? Where human beings have become so powerful that we have caused so much destruction to ecology. So I think for me, when I think about bias, of course we think about racism, sexism, anti-semitism, islamophobia, transphobia, and the standard human-based biases. But I think we also have to include biophobia—like deep hatred of the earth, the need to dominate the earth, speciesism... you know, what about the other beings with whom we share this planet? And I think for me going back into geological time and just seeing how we as a species have evolved has really been helpful to really think about all these other living beings as our kin and how breaking bias isn't just something that will enhance human relationships, but it's really the root cause or root solution to every single problem we face individually, locally, and globally. Whether it's climate change or ecological destructions or of course polarization, misinformation, breakdown of democracy, bias is really the building block of all these challenges.

Host: You've come to this work because of who you are and your background. Tell me about that. What is the personal history that brings you to this?

Anu Gupta: I am an immigrant to the United States. My family moved to the US when I was 10 years old. A lot of the slurs became directed at me for being a heathen, being a pagan, being a terrorist. You know, after 9/11, I was in New York City and I would just have people call me Osama bin Laden on the street and ask me to go back to where I came from. As a young person, I didn't know how to deal with any of these things. These things weren't sexy to talk about. So, I would just repress them. I would just be like, "Okay, well, let's just ignore them. They're just ignorant." And go about my way. And the way I thought I could really succeed in this new home of mine was to excel academically, professionally, which I did. You know, I went to college, I went to grad school at Cambridge, graduating top of my class, then went off to law school. And throughout this time, I was kind of following the thread of what is this thing called bias? Why are people cruel to one another just for no other reason than they're being? And it was in law school to study human rights law, civil rights law, and we're studying like all of the case law that has made us who we are, civil rights legislation, international human rights norms. But whenever I would talk about my own experiences with bias, I would just meet dead silence, awkward pauses, and often times gaslighting, basically denial of my own emotions. So I was a young 20-some year old person and never been to therapy, had never done any kind of healing work. I was just in my head and I started believing that maybe everything what people are saying about me is true. It wasn't just the societal narratives about my humanity because of my intersectional identities, but it was actually my own understanding of who I was because I was trying to go away from being brown, being an immigrant, being gay. I was still closeted. And it was actually right before the second year of my law school, I found myself on the ledge of my 18th floor window about to jump off. And the interesting thing about that night is I did jump. But I have no explanation for this, but for the grace of God, I'm alive. Because instead of falling forward, I fell backwards into my apartment. And within that moment, I just thought to call a friend, another queer Asian-American person and who lived quite far away from me. If you all know New York, I was in Midtown and she lived in Harlem, but she happened to be walking on my block that very moment. She just took the elevator up to the 18th floor, sat in my apartment for hours. And the next day, I began my own breaking bias journey. I was like, "Whoa, I can't believe I was almost not going to exist."

Host: When you say technologies, these technologies that we've had, what are some examples of those technologies that you're talking about?

Anu Gupta: Yeah. Well, I think for me, one of the things about the modalities that help break bias, I call it PRISM, and PRISM is an acronym for these five tools. And we start at M and move our way up to P. And it's really a mindfulness-based sematically informed practice. So we start with Mindfulness which is just present moment awareness. You know just noticing what happens one after another whether it's our breath whether it's our thought whether it's our emotions but especially our body sensations. Bias really lives in the body and we can't really begin to belong in the body until we heal that in our bodies. You know, every ancient technology which is basically wisdom traditions, whether it's Christianity or Judaism or Hinduism or Islam, they've all said awareness, "be still and know that I am." That's where we begin. That's mindfulness, a foundation. Then we move to Stereotype replacement for us, which is really when stereotypes arise. You know, so socially we've been like conditioned to think that, oh my god, I'm bad. And then kind of then you feel shame, you feel guilt, you feel blame. But actually all we have to do is shine a light on it. Oh, that's a stereotype. Okay. But instead of letting that just stay there, we replace it with a counter example, a positive example. For me, this was a really powerful tool. Like every time I had that critic come in and still does, you know, you're silly, you're stupid, you're dumb, like whatever. I take a moment, okay? I hear you. And I'm also the exact opposite. I'm also kind. I'm also sweet. I'm also charismatic. And constantly doing that. That's how we're rewiring the brain. That's how we're rewiring the nervous system that's been wired with all these biases. And then we move to I, which is really about Individuation, curiosity, interest, being with the person, being with ourselves just as we are in this moment. And lastly, we move to Pro-social behaviors and Perspective taking, the R and the P. And these are really heart-based practices. This is active cultivation of empathy, compassion, joy, altruism, imagination. This is what the Dalai Lama calls warm-heartedness.

Host: A way that you talk about this in the book is that bias is a habit. So can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Anu Gupta: You know, when I started my own breaking bias journey, I was like, well, what is bias? And I would go to the literature, the sociological literature, and a lot of the common trainers on this topic, and they would say that, oh, we're just born with it. It's a survival instinct in us. You know, our amygdala brain is fearful, and we kind of divide ourselves into ingroups and outgroups. But I was like, wait a minute. When my niece was born or my nephews were born, they didn't think that, you know, boys are better than girls. They didn't think that light-skinned is more beautiful than dark skin. This was taught to them. And the more I went into the neural mechanisms of how bias is learned, I was like, whoa, bias isn't inherent. Because yes, we have the survival instinct. We need to know a difference between a cute little puppy and a lion because of danger. But if we have two human beings who are exactly part of the same species, why is it that we treat them differently? That's the learned part. So the way I define bias is it's a learned habit that distorts how we perceive, reason, remember, and make decisions. So I think that last portion about making decisions is really essential and important. For me, it becomes nefarious when you're a doctor and you're making decisions around the types of medications you're going to prescribe or diagnosing a treatment and creating a treatment plan for them. If you're a teacher disciplining students, if you're a hiring manager, hiring certain people, you're making decisions that affect other people's livelihoods. And those micro decisions then aggregate at an institutional level at a systemic level into disparities into inequities, inequalities and so much human suffering.

Host: From reading the book and from doing some research about you, I believe that something that you really enjoy is learning languages and being a polygot. How many languages do you speak?

Anu Gupta: Fluently I speak three—Hindi, Urdu and English—but I have studied like a dozen others over the span of my lifetime. You know I've studied Persian, Arabic, Korean, Japanese, French and a few others. And I feel like for me learning languages has been really beautiful because it's given me access to different cosmologies, different ways of imagining the world. We're living through a time where we're losing a human language every 14 days. So basically with that library of wisdom of imagining what it's like to be in relationship with ourselves and the elements around us.

Anu Gupta: I'll give you an example that I found so fascinating. I was studying again how gender and binary gender in particular came around and I discovered a tribe in Indonesia, the Boogis people. In their language, they have five genders. So like everything that they conjugate is based on those five genders. You know, basically what in our language it would be basically a cis man, a cis woman, a trans man, a trans woman, and an androgynous person, generally intersex people. And you know, despite colonization, despite Islamization, that's still part of their language, their conception of humanity. And there's nothing wrong with the isness of these five genders of humans. And it's just so beautiful, right? And it's because of language. Language gave them permission to imagine that.

Host: You have these two interactions that you write about very movingly with your grandmother. One is where she quite aggressively tells you to not dance like a girl. And you feel really shut down. But then there's this other time where she explains to you the cultural idea that there's a vastness of gender, that there's just one spirit that puts on many different clothes.

Anu Gupta: And it's kind of drilled, you know, for me making sense of that was really because I began to look at her and her humanity and how bias was drilled into her, particularly bias toward herself as a woman. She was married off when she was 13 years old. And then she started having children at 15 and a lifetime of being othered. Someone who was so wise, so smart, but just wasn't given any opportunity for no other reason than her body parts. Again, she went back to her ancient wisdom, her spiritual wisdom which basically says that Shiva-Shakti... that's her idea of yin-yang that all human beings have these two energies, masculine and the feminine. For me that really came up when I was a young boy, I started noticing the third gender in Indian society, what are known as Hijras. I was like, "is it okay for them to dress like a woman?" And she was like, "yeah, of course, because that's the energy that's predominant in them." But that same woman also, I remember dancing to a Bollywood song as like a six or seven-year-old in front of some of her guests and she took me aside and really told me that I will never dance like that over her dead body until she dies—and I never did. She was really attached to a story that was drilled into her through a lifetime of experiences of a binary gender.

Host: I was interviewing a scientist who studies bonobos. She said that we are just as closely related to bonobos as we are to chimpanzees. However, chimpanzees have in the wild quite a violent society. Bonobos are a society run by the females, and the way that they solve problems is through love. We have always learned in school that chimpanzees are our closest relatives, and most people have really not heard about bonobos. Her point was the idea that to hurt people and to fight is natural is actually no more natural than it is to love and be inclusive.

Anu Gupta: Right. That's right. And you know, the science is showing that actually it's more natural to be compassionate, to be kind, to be forgiving. But again, we've been socialized to be averse to those emotions and as a result, we've blocked them in our own bodies. One of the beautiful quotes that I love is "Nature permits. Culture forbids." So our nature allows us to be in love with whomever we want. It allows us to try new things. But it's the culture that we build around it that forbids it. If we can imagine colonizing Mars, why can't we imagine living on Earth without bias? What's happened to our moral imagination? I feel like that's what the century is really calling for us to do.