How to Be a Better Human

What it means to truly pay attention (w/ Kevin Townley)

January 19, 2026

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  • Engaging deeply with art, by moving beyond initial judgment and spending significant time looking, allows one to see the object itself rather than just one's preconceived opinions about it. 
  • Buddhist principles suggest that difficult emotions like anger, pride, craving, and jealousy contain inherent intelligence and wisdom that can be investigated rather than simply avoided. 
  • Humor and art function as a liberation from the self, creating spaciousness by showing us that solid realities we take for granted can be viewed from alternative perspectives, thereby fostering connection over self-centeredness. 

Segments

Sponsor Reads and Introduction
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(00:00:00)
  • Key Takeaway: Sponsors for this episode of How to Be a Better Human include Workday Go, Blue Apron, Quince, Verizon, and Car Gurus.
  • Summary: The episode begins with advertisements for Workday Go, a unified HR and finance AI platform for SMBs, and Blue Apron, which now offers non-subscription shopping for meal kits. Further sponsors include Quince for high-quality apparel, Verizon for phone deals, and Car Gurus Discover for natural language car searching.
Introducing Guest and Book Premise
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(00:02:00)
  • Key Takeaway: Kevin Townley’s book, Look, Look, Look, Look, Look Again, connects Buddhist wisdom, specifically the five Buddha families, with the work of 26 artists.
  • Summary: Host Chris Duffy introduces Kevin Townley, noting his background as a comedian, actor, and meditation teacher. The book’s premise involves mapping the five difficult emotions described in ninth-century Tibetan Buddhist teachings onto the creative process of artists. These five emotions are ignorance, anger, pride, craving, and jealousy, which Buddhism views as having inherent intelligence.
Art, Creativity, and Suffering
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(00:03:09)
  • Key Takeaway: The energy that leads to artistic creation can also lead to self-destruction, highlighting the difficulty of beginning creative work by facing the ‘inner abyss.’
  • Summary: Townley reads an excerpt discussing the trope of the tortured artist, whose protective membrane against life’s abrasions is absent, leading to intense expression. Many artists fear beginning creative work because it requires entering the ‘white hot center’ of the unconscious, which can feel like hell due to unresolved traumas and fears.
Museum Tours and Accessibility
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(00:13:36)
  • Key Takeaway: Comedic museum tours break down the stuffiness of art appreciation by humanizing artists and giving visitors permission to have opinions.
  • Summary: Townley has led hundreds of comedic museum tours, using factual biographical details to make artists relatable, suggesting they were often ‘just as much of a wreck’ as the audience. This approach combats the feeling that visitors don’t belong or must already possess expert knowledge.
Looking Beyond Opinion
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(00:16:34)
  • Key Takeaway: The average person spends only 17 seconds on an artwork, seeing only their initial judgment, but extended looking reveals the object’s true visual structure.
  • Summary: Spending more time looking at art, even to the point of boredom, allows one to move past narrative and opinion to see the underlying color, form, and structure. When this happens, the viewer ceases to ‘know’ what they are looking at in a conceptual sense, focusing instead on raw visual data.
Buddhist Marks of Existence
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(00:21:49)
  • Key Takeaway: The three marks of existence in Buddhism are suffering, impermanence, and no-self, with the latter emphasizing that identity is constantly in flux.
  • Summary: The five Buddha families relate to intense emotions like ignorance and jealousy, which are reflections of self-centeredness. By taking a curious, distanced approach to these feelings, their intensity lessens, and a sense of humor about one’s own experience can arise.
Art as Liberation from Self
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(00:25:47)
  • Key Takeaway: Art and humor, when used correctly, build connection and reduce self-importance by revealing the absurdity of clinging to a fixed, central identity.
  • Summary: The attempt to maintain a branded, solid identity is described as an act of violence against the fluid nature of selfhood. Art, like the bird song example, can express a ’third thing’ arising between perception and curiosity, serving as a liberation from the self.
Practical Exercise for Deeper Looking
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(00:34:54)
  • Key Takeaway: To practice deeper awareness, fix the eye on a central point of an artwork and consciously move visual awareness to isolate specific elements like all the triangle shapes or all the blue colors.
  • Summary: The core skill strengthened by both meditation and art appreciation is awareness, which prevents one from being led by knee-jerk thoughts and opinions. This exercise trains the mind to perceive dynamism in still objects, which translates to greater awareness in daily life situations.
Masterpieces and Human Process
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(00:42:28)
  • Key Takeaway: Engaging with a masterpiece means connecting with a work that underwent a rigorous human process of transforming inner turmoil into considered form.
  • Summary: Masterpieces are nourishing because they represent the artist’s sustained effort to handle the ‘white-hot heat’ of the creative process and transmute it into a new medium. Agnes Martin exemplified this by waiting for inspiration and destroying work that deviated from that initial vision, reminding us not to fill space with flailing when we don’t know what’s next.
Laughing at Self-Importance
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(00:50:56)
  • Key Takeaway: Finding absurdity in one’s own clinging to self-importance, such as panicking over creative uncertainty, is a sign of spiritual growth.
  • Summary: Townley finds absurdity in his own self-importance when panicking about finishing films, contrasting it with Agnes Martin’s patient waiting for inspiration. He recalls the lesson that beauty resides in the mind, not the object, suggesting that embracing imperfection allows one to see clearly what arises next.