#481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More

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Check it out. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. And I'll see you personally quite. Now it is seen it. My cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal enough scalar. Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show.

My guest today. Is Dan Harris. Who is Dan Harris? After ABC News anchor Dan Harris had a nationally televised panic attack. on Good Morning America in 2004, he knew he had to make some changes. He found himself on a bizarre adventure to rein in the voice in his head that provoked his on-air freak out and found a solution in meditation.

A lifelong nonbeliever, meditation was something Dan always assumed to be either impossible or useless. 2014, Dan publis the book Ten Percent Happier, which takes readers on a ride from the outer reach of neuroscience to the inner sanctum of network news, to the bizarre fringes of America's spiritual scene, and leaves them with a takeaway that could actually change their lives. In 2017, Dan followed up with Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics, subtitle A 10% Happier How To Book. In 2016, Dan launched the 10% happier company. That's number one zero than percentage sign with co-founders Ben Rubin, CEO, and Derek Haswell. VP of product the company then was rebranded to

10% happier, all spelled out in 2019. You can find Dan on Twitter at Dan B Harris. That is Harris with one S. on Instagram at Dan Harris and Facebook at Dan Harris ABC. Dan. Welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me. I'm so excited to dig into many, many, many things, and it's going to be nonlinear because that is my want in terms of memento style interview approach. And I'd like to begin with something I found in the process of doing homework. And that is a Quote feel free to correct this if it's Not accurate, but here we go.

This is from you. My career has been guided by a motto bequeathed to me by my dad, who is a successful academic physician, and here's the motto The price of security is insecurity. Could you please Explain what this means and means to you? Yeah, I have so much to say about that.

It really was my guiding light and still Is in many ways. But it in particular as a young Journalist. who was extremely ambitious. And again

I don't necessarily need to use past tense on all this. Some of it is is is present tense, but In my younger days in particular, I really believe that any success I was achieving as I was working my way up the ladder at A B C News, et cetera, et cetera was directly correlated to the intensity of my anxiety. And That motto

handed down to me by my father, who's an academic physician, was until recently, until he retired an academic physician at Harvard and a varsity warrior and you know, long time handringer himself. Um Was just my My way of kind of Almost like venerating.

The Constant worrying. I later found out from my dad that he made that expression up Not Two

Put worrying on a pedestal. Not because he wanted me to be worrying all the time, because you think about it, it's maybe not the kindest thing to say to a kid. Uh um He in fact made it up because he wanted me to feel better about the fact that I was anxious. And I think that was give you permission to feel the anxiety.

Correct. You know, I mean I was a really anxious kid and uh that carries into my adulthood. I would say s now I here I am eleven years post beginning meditation. I still believe it is true.

That A certain amount of stressing plotting and planning, careful thinking. is necessary if you want to be great at whatever it is you're you've set your mind to your work

Parenting, volunteer work. Relationships. Except what I've now started to see very clearly, and I'm imperfect at applying this, but what I see really clearly is that we take the worrying too far. We take the insecurity too far and we cross the line between Constructive anguish.

And useless rumination. And really the self awareness that I have generated through meditation imperfectly for sure has helped me balance that much more effectively. And we're gonna go back to the uh scene of the crime or more accurately the scene of the car accident, psychologically speaking, b back on air. Uh we're not gonna reuse that just yet, but because you mentioned this line

And I'm gonna I suppose apply it metaphorically here, but I had never heard of something called, and I've only read this and I could not figure out how to pronounce it, but the Yerkes Dodson Law. That I believe Doctor Luana Marquez

Brazilian born now at Harvard had Told you about it. Perfectly or imperfectly, could you describe What? The Yerkes Dodson Law.

implies or claims to sort of describe in some fashion because I this is quite freeing to me. Yes, the way that I read it. It really is. Uh so Luana Marquez came on my podcast right at the beginning of the pandemic and I want to do an episode about how to handle all of the stress that that I knew we were all feeling and we're going to continue to feel for a while. And she talked to me about this, I think it's called the Yerkes Dodson.

Well I was fucking that one up. Before I said it I mean you can be forgiven. It's a weird I think it's the name of two scientists hyphenated who came up with this idea that a certain amount of anxiety Luana Marquez, the aforementioned Harvard affiliated Anxiety expert. Was talking about Th the a certain amount of anxiety you can think of it as like a curve, like a bell curve. A certain amount of anxiety is useful in that it Gets us.

moving, it gets us protecting ourselves, it gets us doing the things we need to do. So that's the beginning part of the curve, the upward slope. At some point it starts to slope downwards and you can think of that as the point of diminishing returns where the anxiety is no longer motivational, it's paralytic. And So walking that line Seems to be I in my own life, it seems t it really has become one of the

Most important. Arts. And Again. It's art, not science.

And I am Nowhere near perfect and I don't expect I don't think perfection is on offer. It also seems to

Showcase for me. the fact that there is a an evolutionary value. Two

If we were to define it as the ability to foresee future threats and perhaps forestall or mitigate them, right? But when it bleeds over into expecting catastrophe and wringing your hands and biting your nails at all times, then it it ceases to be. of utility, right? It actually ends up being disabling. But the seeing it in graph form or in visual form with the Yirks Dodson law. There we go. Correct it. Correct it on lucky number three. Was was really freeing in a sense because There's a uh desire that I find myself succumbing to, which is to

erase or remove all anxiety and vilifying anxiety is this sort of shadow that I can't rid myself of. And I liked reading about it. I'll just put it that way. Like give yourself a break on some level.

Speaking of giving Anyone a break. If The price of security is insecurity. Was a motto that you kept in the back of your mind.

And assuming that you don't want your kids to have a model like only the paranoid survive or something like that. What might be A motto you would want. Your

Kids to have. in the back of their mind as they navigate. their lives the first twenty years, thirty years, whatever it might be. Can I give you two? You c you are allowed to give me three if you'd like.

I love motto's. I love little expressions, mantras that you can use to kinda drop into your mind. Because it's so easy. You know, you can listen to an inspirational podcast or read a great book or whatever And feel really Like you've You're invigorated, you're all you're awake to some some important truth. But

the habits of my the old habits of mine reassert themselves really quickly and so We need to find ways to To continuously wake up. And to remember uh the our aspirations. And so these little mottoes I I think You know, they can be a little bit cheesy, but but they're really helpful in my experience. So one of them that specifically applies to this question of

How much it? Insecurity or anxiety is too much. I I got this motto from my meditation teacher, a guy named Joseph Goldstein. No, I've heard you talk on this show

And I've heard you you you also talked about the one time we met in person when you came on my show, or I've heard you drop the name of Jack Cornfield, who is a legendary meditation teacher and has had a huge impact on your life. Jack and Joseph. are old, old, old co conspirators from the sixties and seventies when they uh met Both of them along with Sharon Salzburg who's another just s meditative Titan. The three of them all spent a lot of time in Asia.

and came back to the States and founded uh co founded something called the Insight Meditation Society. And then Jack broke off and started something called uh Spirit Rock Meditation Center on the on the West Coast. IMS is on the left uh on the east coast. And so they they're really responsible for bringing mindfulness to the West In many, many ways. At one uh the first meditation retreat I ever went on was at Spirit Rock, where I know you've Done meditation retreats and uh or at least one and uh tricky. I want to talk about that.

So I was on my first meditation retreat at Spirit Rock and even though that's the place Jack founded, Joseph was teaching for ten days there and our mutual friend Sam Harris um got me off the wait list uh for this note. No no relation. Although I wouldn't be embarrassed uh'cause I I love the guy. Um So I'm at this retreat and and I I'll spare you the whole story of the retreat, but the the key moment as it pertains to this question was toward the end of the retreat, Joseph's Is Talk to the assembled yogis, the meditators, and he says something like Okay, we're heading toward the end here now, and you might find your thoughts start turning to the things you have to do when you return to your life, but to the best of your ability, you know, to try to let those thoughts go. And I raised my hand because this was a Q and A you were allowed to talk on an otherwise silent retreat and I said, Well wait a minute, dude

If I miss my flight. That has real life consequences. Wha why would you tell me not to To think about that. And he said, No, you're absolutely right. But on the seventeenth run through of all of the horrible knock on effects of your missing that flight.

Maybe ask yourself one simple question. Is this useful? That's the is a great motto. Because of course we're gonna do some worrying and I Yeah.

I'm borrowing that phrase from the great meditation teacher Silvio Borstein. As a inveterate fretder myself I I'm I'm cool with some worrying. I think it you you need to do some of that. But at some point maybe ask yourself, is this useful? And it's at at that point it's probably not. And you can like pay attention to what your child is trying to tell you or not mindlessly say something that's gonna ruin the next forty eight hours of your marriage or whatever. Just live your actual life. And so that to me is a really useful motto. I'll stop there before I go on to the second one, unless you in case you have something you want to add or clarify. I have a follow up question, but I don't want to interrupt the flow to number two, so let's go to number two. No, no, no, go ahead,'cause this the the number two is is so so is kind of off on a different thing and I don't wanna I don't wanna I don't wanna mess up your flow, so go ahead.

Well, my flow as such is absolutely gonna take us off on a wild tangent, but that's okay. So you mentioned a few names. You mentioned Joseph, is it Goldstein or Goldstein? I always mix this up because there are so many different Goldsteins and Goldsteins. How does he pronounce his last name? He's a Goldstein, yes. Okay. So Goldstein Salzburg.

And Cornfield, right? So I asked Jack at one point. Check. I have to ask you. This was in private because of course this is not the kind of thing that you always want to ask in public, but I said Jack

Is there any reason Why All of these Meditation and mindfulness teachers, these pioneers from the West in the 70s are Jewish. And he said, That's a really good question. And we talked about it. He said, Yeah, it sounds like a law firm. And I would just love to hear If you have any thoughts on why

That is the case. Is it just Coincidental? Is there something that maps from Judaism to Buddhism? Or otherwise? Do you have any thoughts on that?

Because it's it is. Uncanny. Yes. I was just gonna say, as it happens, Tim Ferris, I have a lot of thoughts on this. So these these people are all like really good friends of mine now. And they go, there's a I don't know how they feel about this name, but there is a name for this whole coterie which is the juos. Um the Jewish Buddhists. And the prototypical Jew Boo is actually a Jew

who or say he's a Hindu, but his name is Ram Das. He is Yeah, so you will be as'cause I know you're a real uh connoisseur of and supporter of uh psychedelic or plant medicine and Ram Das born Richard Halpert uh Alpert rather, a Jewish guy from Boston, became a Harvard professor along with Timothy Leary. They got fired for, you know, running experiments on their students with either L S D or psilocybin and and he went off to India Richard did and discovered a Hindu guru and named himself Changed his name to Ram Dash.

and came back to the States and and and there's lots of good documentaries on him, I think some of them on Netflix and was extremely influential and the slightly younger generation included lots of People with like Jew uh chewy Jewish names, uh like Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzburg, Jack Cornfield, Sylvia Borstein, Mark Epstein, who's a psychiatrist in New York City's written a whole beautiful series of books about the overlap between Buddhism and psychology. Uh Daniel Goleman.

who was a Harvard PhD, then went on to write, become a science journalist for the New York Times, and then wrote um a book called Emotional Intelligence, which is obviously a huge book. On and on. Tara Brock is a slightly younger iteration of the same sort of trend. On and on and on you have these Great. Jewish meditation teachers. So what's going on here? Uh and I say this as a half Jew, Barmitzfud guy, what's going on here? Uh the Jews uh have a a cultural tendency toward anxiety, which I would argue is well earned from the pharaohs through Hitler.

And you know that yearning for some sort of remedy to this really difficult anxiety. That plus the fact that Judaism in America is largely not entirely, of course, but largely secular.

Um, I think created both a a hunger for answers to anxiety and Maybe a a sense that there wasn't enough spirituality in their lives. throw in the sixties and all the psychedelics and the and the Vietnam and the and the searching nature of that era, and you get the juice. That's my sense. Of course they may all yell at me for being wrong about this, but that's my sense. Well.

You're entitled to your opinion and perspective on the whole thing. I certainly uh I I'm not part of the club, so it's harder for me to have a strong opinion of any type about this. It's also been a long standing fascination of mine. I have a lot of Jewish friends uh to observe this What seems to be fairly ubiquitous anxiety in many of the families I grew up around, many of the friends I

develop close friendships with in high school and college. How much of that do you think is cultural and uh how much of that is survival of the fittest, in the sense if you think about Jews as having been persecuted. For Like you said, you know, millennia since the time of the pharaohs.

Is there just a a sort of selection process over time where the the people who are the first to flee or sense danger and move are the people who then end up Producing. sort of modern day. Jews. I mean how how do you think

about that, if you think about it at all. I think the evolution produced the culture. And so we had this culture of anxiety because those of the the Jews that survived Learn to worry. You know and an another

This is skipping back a question, but I think another aspect of the The sort of causality that led to this remarkable You know, group of young uh Jewish people m mostly from New York and some of them from Boston who went over to India or Asia and learned how to meditate and came back and and really became these Cr John Cabot Zinn, I I left him out, who was the who was the granddaddy of mindfulness based stress reduction. Without him, there is no secular mindfulness movement. Uh New York Jewish guy who went to MIT and studied microbiology and then and then

found Zen and then d uh invented MBSR. I think another aspect of this is that all of these people, all of these names that I've listened, and these are all people that I know quite well, they're incredibly smart. And I think If you add the anxiety the spiritual yearning and the braininess.

It all is a perfect storm for Buddhism because Buddhism Is Incredibly interesting. There's the practice element which You know, thinking can become can be a big impediment to the practice. But the intellectual infrastructure that supports the practice Is

dense and fascinating and it's it's a lifetime's supply of ideas to wrestle with, and I think that's another component of why these people found this teaching so irresistible. I think one might also argue that

being well educated and having a lot of CPU cycles. in your prefrontal cortex is also a perfect recipe for grist for the mill in the form of anxiety and rumination and open loops for the salve in a sense that then is mindfulness practice. So let's let's dial up the volume on the anxiety.

Two eleven. to use a spinal tap reference. I know you have told this story a lot, but there will be people listening who have no idea. Uh what the catalyzing event looked like what preceded it and so on. Could you walk us through

Your life. From say Two thousand to two thousand four. Obviously, we're gonna use a montage of some type, or two thousand one to two thousand four. Two. Let's call it the event.

And quotation marks. In the year two thousand. I uh Uh

As a twenty eight year old plankton from local news in in Boston. I had I had spent like seven years in in uh local news in the in uh in Maine and Boston with ill fitting suits and way too much plaid. At twenty eight I rode the escalator up into ABC News at the headquarters uh on the upper west side of Manhattan. You've been to our building uh because you can when you came on my podcast, so you know that escalator and I was terrified.

I had watched Peter Jennings my whole life. He was the legendary anchor of World News Tonight until he died in in the mid mid-oughts. And I was Just I was so thrilled but terrified. And this is where Price of security. His insecurity kicked into high high gear.

And uh I had gotten this job, just complete luck that I had gotten this job and I just threw myself into it, skipped everybody, skipped all my friends' weddings, worked seven days a week, just was clawing and scratching to get ahead in an incredibly Venomous. really competitive, unsafe in many ways, psychologically, environment at ABC News. It's it's improved vastly since then, I'm happy to report. And Then not long after I arrived, nine eleven happened. And

I again driven by my anxiety and also my idealism about the role of journalists our our duty to sort of I uh

after nine eleven and I ended up in Afghanistan with the Taliban in Kandahar, their capital at the time. I I think I'm one of the last people to get a Taliban visa before they were overthrown. And just fell in love with combat reporting. Not because I like

the gore, but because there's just it felt so thrilling. And so important. And of course there is the ego in aggrandizement of it too, that you're doing this important work, you're living in this hyper adrenalized way, and you're getting on T V all the while. Um, and so I got hooked and spent so much time in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan. I covered the second in Tafada in two thousand two, so Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, and then Iraq happened. Spent months and months and months, and probably all together like a year

In on the ground in Iraq and Uh in the summer of two thousand three I came home. And I got depressed. But I was not self aware enough to know I was depressed. So I started to sort of

I did something incredibly stupid, which is I started to self medicate with recreational drugs. Including cocaine in ecstasy. So I was in my early thirties at this point. And I had never I'd smoked weed and and obviously drank a lot of beer in college, but I'd never done any hard drugs and Cocaine in particular. Really

My depression manifests itself as a kind of Loginess or low energy I had trouble getting out of bed, felt kind of vaguely ill all the time, and cocaine, this kind of synthetic squirt of adrenaline, really Fix that. Of course it had horrible side effects, like feeling awful the next day, et cetera, et cetera. And then an even worse side effect, which is the

aforementioned event on a warm June morning in two thousand four. I was filling in on Good Morning America. And at the time they had a job called the newsreader. So you somebody would come on at the top of every hour and read the headlines. The person who had that job at the time was named Robin Roberts, who's now the main host of Good Morning America. They don't have that role anymore, but I was in a rotation of regularly filling in for Robin and so I wasn't particularly nervous on this morning, but for some reason when the main hosts of the show, Charlie Gibson and Diane Sawyer Tossed it over to me to do my little spiel. I just lost it. Uh and you can see this if you if you if you type panic attack on live television, it's the first result, so go for it. Uh you

You can see it, uh has tens of uh has millions and millions of hits. So I start Reading and then my uh lungs basically seize up and my heart starts racing, my palms are sweating, my mouth dries up, and I can't talk, which is a prerequisite for anchoring the news. Talking is and it was horrifying. And so if you watch the tape, it actually do it it looks like I definitely look s flustered and But a lot of people will say, you know, it didn't didn't look that bad. And that's because I had the luxury of being able to squeak out Back to you, Charlie and Diane, and they took it back. But I had to cut the whole thing short. I mean I think I had read like two and a half stories by the time uh the freak out hit. And it was awful and really scary, not only because a panic attack is horrifying, but because I just thought, Well, this is the end of my career.

And my mom was watching that morning and she And she called me backstage and said, Oh, you just had a panic attack, dude. And well she didn't say dude, but anyway, she said you had a panic attack. And she hooked me up with a shrink and the shrink asked me a bunch of questions to try to figure out what was going wrong. And one of the questions was, Do you do drugs? And I kinda said Sheepishly, yeah. And he gave me I like to make this joke, he gave me this look I'm sure you've gotten this look before, Tim, from the shrinks with whom you've worked.

Uh he gave me a look that communicated the sentiment of okay, asshole, mystery solved. And he pointed out that even though my drug use was pretty intermittent and short lived, I wasn't like You know uh I wasn't like one of the people from um the wolf of Wall Street or anything like that, but it was enough to change my brain chemistry and make a panic attack more likely. So that's the story. On that day.

Was there anything different about that day leading up to it? Anything at all that could have hinted that this was not a day like any other. I mean, do you have like itchy feet and your eyeballs feel too big? I mean, was there w was there anything symptomatically to indicate that something was just slightly off. Or more than slightly off. Or did it really come out of left field? Left field, man. I I I hadn't I wasn't high in the air. I hadn't been

I don't think par I don't remember I definitely hadn't been partying the night before or anything like that. Maybe in the week before But there was no I had no reason to foresee what was about to happen and it sucked, uncontrollably. I Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens.

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My understanding is After all of this happens, and we're probably skipping a few things, so feel free to fill in the blanks if you think that uh that we should. But you were then assigned to cover Faith and spirituality.

Against your own wishes, right? Uh So you you began exploring mainstream religion, self help, spirituality, neuroscience, and so on. And somewhere in that sort of chop salad of

Spirituality. And so on. Was Meditation like in there like a Like a crouton you found.

Meditation amongst everything. Before we we jump to meditation though, I'm I'd be very curious to know was there anything else That you Got exposed to the That was interesting to you.

Not because it was salacious or completely a hoax, but Is there anything else that really seemed like it could be a value to you outside of meditation? First of all, the metaphor about the chop salad is awesome. Um That really landed with me about

religion the religions that I spent time you know, sort of Spent time marinating in. I spent a lot of time with evangelicals, Mormons, Muslims. I I as the child of Yeah, atheist scientists. Constitutionally I just can't

Get myself to believe in things for which there's no evidence. So I I had a bit of an allergy, m maybe understating it, to the Dogma and to the faith claims the metaphysical claims and all that stuff. But what struck me was that these folks were with regularity contemplating their place in the cosmos.

Which I was not doing. I was utterly unreflective in many, many important ways. And these guys on eleven o'clock on a Sunday morning Or whatever time, you know, on a Frida afternoon if you're a Muslim or a Saturday for the Jews, like They were getting together and talking about the universe. And

That really hit me as somebody who I had a sense of my own selfishness and how that was making me unhappy and I didn't know what to do. based on what I was encountering from these folks of faith because I found so many of their beliefs to be really hard to swallow

But I I had this kind of I'm I don't I now I'm gonna use a word that I don't know how to pronounce. I think it's in Coet this kind of Oof. You know that word, right? You see it in like fancy books and like y I never know how to pronounce it. But I had this kind of beginning inkling that Yeah, there's something here that I that I should pay attention to.

So as you're paying attention then, how does meditation first Come over the transom. What was the first exposure that actually made you raise an eyebrow and go, huh? I'm a hard case, so it took me a while. But the first the first first exposure was I was shooting a story was when right after Sarah Palin was nominated to by John McCain as h his vice presidential candidate. And I was she's a she's a Pentecostal, so I was doing a story in Jersey City about Pentecostals. I was shooting at a street fair with some Pentecostals and um trying to get a sense of like what that flavor of evangelicalism was like to educate The American you wanted to say there?

I was just gonna say for people who don't know anything about Pentecostals, you should add some color here because it it is It is a f fascinating flavor. Yeah. Yeah, so th these are the folks that like speak in tongues. I mean there there's there's a I don't wanna Describe Pentecostalism as a monolith, because there are flavors within the flavor, but but

You know, when you s and and there are non Pentecostals who speak in tongues too, but they're sort of charismatic in and that's actually a term of art, the charismatic Christianity where you uh some of them will uh will handle snakes during services or speak in tongues, um which is a kind of like your your Speaking in tongues is like you're speaking a a n a nonsense language that is in some way divine, that you're being taken over by the Holy Spirit. So it's a really Dramatic

And again, I think they'll use the word charismatic form of Christianity. Thank you for the context. Please continue. Didn't want to interrupt too much. No, you interrupt me any time'cause I I I like tangents. So anyway, I'm I'm out shooting the story The story Pentecostalism has nothing to do with what is about to happen, which is that I was waiting you know when you're shooting a story, there's like lots of Downtime.

Chit chatting with the crew. the the cameraman, the sound man, and our producer, Felicia Baberica, who is uh still a uh actually She's quite senior producer at World News Tonight. At that time she was a field producer, so she and I were covering the story together. We had known each other for quite a while. And she started talking about A book, a self help book she was reading by a guy named Eckhart Tolley. Who I had never heard of.

And Felicia said something like, Dan, you know, you should read this book. It's all about controlling your ego. And Me and the crew started laughing because W it was clear to us that she was saying, You have an out of control ego which by the way was true. And so it was very funny, but it wasn't what she meant. What she meant and what Tolly means by the ego, I subsequently learned because I went out and ordered his book and read it, or one of his books and read it, what

Tolly means by the ego is the nonstop conversation we are all having with ourselves, this inner narrator, this constant flow of thought. And urge it urges and emotions. Coursing through our minds. Into which v very few of us have any visibility.

And so I I I I started to read Toli's book And At first I thought it was complete nonsense'cause he he layers in lots of like talk about vibrational fields and spiritual awakenings and all this other stuff. But when I got to the stuff about the ego, which again, he has a much more expansive definition of the sort of inner ghostly sense of you.

that is constantly spewing sort of Self centered Thoughts. hurling us into the future or ruminating about the past to the detriment of The here and now.

When I s read his diagnosis of the ego, which is essentially just the human condition, that was a gigantic waking up. Moment for me because First of all, it was just like Oh yeah, that is true. And it also really explained

My panic attack because it was my ego and again Not just the sort of stereotypical parts of the ego, the like self-aggrandising part, but also like all of the fear and idealism and all this sort of unseen mental machinery that Propelled me to cover combat without really thinking about the psychological ramifications. It was the ego, the sort of mindless inner conversation that allowed me to come home, get depressed, not see it, and blindly reach for cocaine as a as medicine.

And that all produced the the panic attack. So it was reading Eckhart Toli that was really The first step toward me Getting interested in meditation. And the problem with Echartoli was that He

Didn't offer any actionable advice. Felicia And I ended up flying to Toronto to meet Tully. Uh, he lives in Vancouver, but he was giving a speech in Toronto and he gave us an audience in a like beige hotel room and

And I interviewed him and I asked him, you know, what it was actually the first interview I did with anybody in the faith world where I like felt like I had some skin in the game'cause I was really interested. And I tried to get him to To answer like what do you do about the voice in the head? And I remember at one point he said Take one Conscious breath. And my voice in my head was saying, What the fuck does that mean? Like what are you talking about? Give me something to do here.

A friend of mine has described Totally as correct. But not useful. And So he woke me up to a a thunderously obvious but

regularly overlooked fact, which is that we all have minds and our thinking, but he didn't give me anything to do about it. Still very valuable to say hey. Bro, you got a huge abscess in your gums or whatever it is, right? Even though you might not be the surgeon or the or the dontist or whatever the specialty would be to take it out. A helpful first step. Correct. It was. It was really helpful first up.

I'm thankful for him. What happens at that point? You're like you've diagnosed, I don't want to say the problem, the condition, let's call it. To where Does Dan Harris go? At that point.

Shamelessly leveraging all the privilege of my journalistic perch, I basically Started With the aforementioned Felicia, we started doing a lot of stories about self help. Because I thought, you know, somebody in this ought to be able to tell me more about like what to do about this. So I ended up doing all these stories about you know Deepak Chopra who I think is on the far I mean I make fun of Deepak, you know

with gusto in my book, but nonetheless I think he's on the far benign end of the self help spectrum. And then we I did a lot of stuff on the folks who are way more questionable to sort of solve all of your problems through the power of positive thinking crew, you know, the secret, and uh I did a lot of stuff on James Arthur Ray, I believe his name is the guy who had that sweat lodge ceremony where people died. And basically I was completely, completely Unimpressed. Depressed. confused, didn't know what to do. And actually during this period of time I came home one night to my

the upper west side of Manhattan and my then fiance and now Baby mama, Bianca. gave me a gift as I walked into the apartment that evening. She said I've been listening to you talk about

Deepak Chopra and Eckhart Toli and blah blah blah. Uh not making much sense as you do, but it vaguely reminded me this is her talking here vaguely reminded me of a book I read many years ago and here it is. And the book was by a guy I've I mentioned earlier on the show when we were talking about the juboos, named Doctor Mark Epstein. I liked him right away'cause he had actual credentials. He's a as I said, a shrink lives and works in New York City and he's written all these incredible books about The overlap between Buddhism and psychology, modern psychology. And so I started reading one of his books that night, the book I

we started reading was going to pieces without falling apart. And it was my title. It's a great title. It's a gr and it's a great book. I highly recommend it. And and It was the first It was my first introduction to both Buddhism and meditation.

Did you begin? Some type of practice after that book? Did it give you the prescriptive How to in a a form of self help that you did not have anaphylactic shock in response to? Yes. I had hives on the regular when I was in the covering. That's a really good phrase. I might steal that. Steal away. I'm high I have like five million milligrams of caffeine in my system, so I'm on fire. Please continue.

I can't have caffeine, but I'm just it's the poor man's caffeine. So I what I am a tough case, as I referenced before, so I read about Buddhism, was really interested in Buddhism. But the talk about meditation I found repellent. And So I

I was very, very resistant and what Finally Brought me over to Trying it was So this is like two thousand nine.

I As I started researching meditation, I came across some of the science. That really strongly suggests that meditation can confer a long list of tantalizing health benefits. And at that time, that science was not well. Publicized? And so I had this

Inkling of Oh, this is a huge story. that people don't know about and I had this kind of entrepreneurial itch of Meditation appears to be really helpful. And all these books I'm reading

Or many of the books I was reading,'cause I started reading a ton. Are really annoying. And I could write a book that uses the word fuck a lot and like tells embarrassing stories. And maybe

that would reach people who otherwise would never do this thing. And so I started After really looking at the science and kind of reviewing it with my wife who's a scientist I was really convinced that there was something here. So I started doing like five to ten minutes a day.

And It really helped. And then after about a year of that I met Sam Harris, I actually re met him. I had met Sam once years before and then I met him again. I was moderating a debate that he was in against Deepak Chopra and he actually dismantled him. You can you can see that on YouTube too. And Sam I loved

Uh still love as a general rule, you do not want to debate Sam. No. He's very scary. Actually the thing about Sam and you know this Tim'cause you know him is like He can seem very intimidating, but if you interact with him, especially if his wife's around And his wife is an extraordinary person, Anika Harris, who's written written a great book about consciousness. You know, he he she can reduce him to like a bl you know, giggling, you know, red faced ball, a puddle, which is amazing. And he's like a he's really warm and uh incredible and he told me about Joseph Goldstein and got me into this meditation retreat and that really cracked things open for me and and

I would say since doing that retreat for the last decade, it is just a non negotiable part of my life. Is it part of your life on the frequency of Daily a few times a week. What is the current Or when you are at your best. When you are your best self.

Let's just say. What is your frequency of practice? So the I'm gonna I forget the answer here because I'll answer for me and then I I do want to say a few things about Because I I think the question that's probably coming up in the minds of of some of your listeners is like

What's the least I can do? to get all of the advertised benefits. So I'll say it I'll say something about that too, but I don't want you to be discouraged by what I'm about to say, which is that for me it's every day. Once in a r blue moon I will miss a day because something has, you know, like that it's just gotten totally crazy or whatever. And I went through a period where I did two hours a day, which was way too much. It was nuts. It was

It was just eating up too much of the rest of my life. So now I do about an hour a day, but I'm much more relaxed about it and I kind of My rule has always been and this was true even when I was doing two hours a day, is like I can do it whenever I want, wherever I want, and in whatever increment I want. So it may be five minutes here, ten minutes there. On a really good day

I'll get a long sit, you know. thirty, forty five, sixty minutes. But on many days it's just like a succession of smaller sits and uh or I'll do a walking meditation. So yeah, I'm pretty consistent. But I don't think that's That's necessary for beginners. I really think the access point here is really easy and user friendly and what I say for my two little mantras, little slogans here I go again, for

One is One minute counts. I really think and we can talk a little bit more about how to do the practice, but I really think that Even in a minute.

You can start to get a sense of Oh yeah, I've got this inner cacophony. And I don't need to be owned by it. So it's the visibility that is the kryptonite. for the ego that seeing it really defangs it, which is kind of amazing. And that can happen in a minute. Would I love to see you do five to ten, sure.

But We know that habit formation is really hard, diabolically hard. So setting the bar really low, I think is very helpful. And then the other little slogan is daily ish. You know, yes, would it be great if you were doing this every day? Sure, but if you grit your teeth and tell yourself you're gonna do it every day. The first day you miss, which inevitably you will

the voice in your head will swoop in and tell you you're a failed meditator and then like deuces, you know, you're out. And and so I think daily ish has like elasticity and flexibility and In it that I really like. Yeah, it's like brushing your teeth, right? You miss a day, your your your teeth aren't gonna disintegrate. You miss you to twenty thirty days, then you might have an issue that starts to crop up exactly. Back to the appearance, uh Back to the abscess. I don't know why I'm so focused on dentistry today, but

question for you about the subjective experience of This is a regular practice. for me in my own personal experience, the value of meditation, which I can find tremendous benefit in. 10 to 20 minutes a day done consistently. Like I I find tremendous value. The value is not always obvious when I am doing it, but it becomes more obvious if I suddenly stop for a period of time. I would just love to hear

What is Dan With meditation. look like compared to Dan without If you suddenly go cold turkey for a period of time for whatever reason or however you'd like to tackle that. Just so people can get a g a grasp on

the benefits as you experience them. That was just really well articulated when you talked about your own practice because this is perhaps the hardest thing to understand about meditation because all of us I'm making an assumption here that but I think it's safe for your audience. We're all type A people we do th something and we expect to succeed. We expect to win.

So we we go into meditation with expectations Which Are the most noxious thing you can bring to the Party.

So in In individual Sitting.

The goal is not to feel any certain way. In fact, Going into it if you're expecting or hoping to feel a certain way, it pretty much blocks you from getting there. The goal instead is to feel whatever you are feeling clearly.

So that you build the muscle Of not being owned by your feelings. Let me just say that again because it's a little hard to understand. When you sit to meditate, you're n you really don't need to like will yourself into a bulletproof Bliss bubble.

Instead, you should just be noticing whatever's coming up. you know, I'm planning lunch, I'm planning a homicide, I'm um, you know, uh I'm I'm jealous of uh of like I'm I'm I'm remembering primordial anger toward my younger brother, whatever is coming up. And that is correct meditation because The Visibility is the kryptonite. Seeing clearly

the cacophony of your own inner landscape. Is how you are no longer owned by it. And Over time.

So you can have a whole week of quote unquote bad sits where you're totally distracted or you know you're restless or you're sleepy, but over time the net effect of it is that you are more self aware. and therefore less yanked around by the malevolent puppeteer of your ego. And so for me, what I notice And actually this is why falling off the wagon

Can be really helpful. Because it can increase your faith in the practice. What I notice is that if I miss a few days, my inner weather becomes much more You know, stormy. And I'm likelier to

you know, make a nasty comment, be impatient, beat myself up more, be more judgmental when I look in the mirror, et cetera, et cetera. I can just really see the Venom quotient increase. When I'm not doing this thing. You used the word weather. I'm I can't remember who shared this imagery with me at some point, but they said, you know, the difference between

experiencing as you experience without meditation and with meditation. is Like standing outside in the rain in a storm. versus standing inside looking out the window at the storm. And there are there are a bunch of other analogies that I like. I mean, one would be you know being eighteen inches outside of the

Washing machine, looking at the clothing versus being inside or sitting in the Audience watching the movie. of your emotions versus being in the movie. Right there, there are these All these analogies or metaphors that sort of imply a level of observation and detachment, although I'm sure some psychologists would take issue with that term.

What does the practice look like? What does your actual practice look like? Because there's so many ways to meditate, right? It would be like saying, I do sports. It's like, well, what are we talking about? Racquetball, swimming? Curling, what are we talking about here? So in meditation, what is your particular Format. What does it look like? That's exactly right. That there are many, many forms and people can get pretty Dogmatic about

You know, their support for whatever Meditative team they've chosen. The kind of meditation that I generally talk about publicly and that, you know, we teach on my app and everything is Called mindfulness meditation. Which is derived from Buddhism.

But and I I talked about John Cabot Zinn before. This was his innovation. He was this M I T whiz kid who discovered Zen and then was on a meditation retreat, a Buddhist meditation retreat, and had this insight that like, oh, if we strip this of its religious lingo and metaphysical claims, we could teach it in secular contexts. Such as health care. And

People who otherwise would reject it might embrace it. And He invented an eight week protocol for teaching what's called mindfulness. And Secularizing it and giving it a a structure of an eight week teaching program, that is what allowed for science, scientists to come in and say, Okay, well we can this is replicable now. We can run this

On a bunch of different populations and measure their cortisol levels and look at their brains, et cetera, et cetera. And that's what's given us this in large measure, that's what's given us this explosion of research into what meditation does to the brain. So that's the kind I was initially attracted to and the kind of meditation that I now Evangelised. Four. I have over time, and this is totally optional, but for me, I've over time gotten more interested in the Buddhist antecedents. And so I would describe myself as a Buddhist

But in the sense that There's a great author named Stephen Bachelor, who wrote a book called Buddhism without beliefs. And he describes Buddhism not as something to believe in, but as something to do. And in that sense I'm a Buddhist in the in the maybe in the same sense that I'm a journalist. It's like it is something that I do regularly, but I'm I wouldn't sit here and pound the table on behalf of Rebirth.

But I do think that the Buddhist practices are uh just a revelation and this like Uh just a vast treasury really. So what does the practice look like? Beginning mindfulness meditation really is very simple. You just

Find a reasonably quiet place. And sit. With your spine reasonably straight. You don't have to be uptight about that. In fact being uptight is Not recommended in any aspect of this. If you don't want to sit, y first of all, you don't have to be in

You don't have to fold yourself into a pretzel. I don't. You can sit in a chair. You can also lie down. If you're feeling sleepy and are worried about falling asleep, you can stand up. By the way, falling asleep is not a problem, very common, and actually a good sign that maybe you need more sleep. So that's the first step. Find a reasonably quiet place, comfortable position, close your eyes. If you don't like to close your eyes you can kind of just gaze softly at a neutral spot. Second step is bring your full attention to the feeling of your breath coming in and going out.

Pick one spot like your belly or your chest or your nose. Just kind of commit to feeling that and And that's a key word here, feeling'cause you We do m we spend most of our life trapped in thought.

Well actually we're in this practice kind of dropping below the level of thought and tuning into the raw data of the physical sensations of the belly rising and falling, the chest rising and falling, the air Entering or exiting the nostrils. And so that's step number two, just Oh, by the way, I should say that if some people find the breath

To be anxiety producing and and that's actually not uncommon, especially now where like COVID has a pulmonary implication, obviously, and BLM has a lot of uh stuff about not being able to, you know, people The I can't breathe has become a really a really uh resonant in a difficult way phrase. So if the breath is hard for you, you can just focus on the feeling of your body sitting or lying down or standing or pick one spot on your body, like your hands, whatever they're touching.

Just commit to that. And then so the the third step is As soon as you try to do this thing, which is gonna sound reasonably simple. you'll realize it's infernally difficult because your mind will go into mutiny mode. It's like

It's like trying to hold a live fish in your hands. Like it it's just slipping away from you all the time. You know, it's like you're planning lunch or you're planning some, you know, expletive filled speech you're gonna deliver to your boss, or you know, like random what was Casper the Friendly Ghost before he died, or we just like your mind's all over the place. And that that is the moment most people Think they are failed meditators. But I'm here to tell you that is the moment when you notice you've become distracted, even if it's for The whole session.

Just noticing that you've become distracted. is proof that you are meditating correctly. Because As I said before, the goal here is not to clear Actually I haven't said this yet. This is really important.

The goal is not to clear your mind. Because clearing your mind is impossible unless you're enlightened or you have died. The goal here is instead to focus your mind. for a nanosecond or two on on something like The feeling of your breath or the feeling of your body sitting. And then every time you get distracted, you start again and again and again. And that act of noticing the distraction

And starting again. Is like A bicep curl for your brain. And this is what we see on the brain scans of meditators. This is the mechanism by which we're training your attention we're we're boosting your ability to focus. We're boosting your self awareness.

And that self awareness, that regular sort of systematized collision we're engineering in meditation with the voice in your head. That is Revolutionary because as soon as you start to see how chaotic your mind is. And I know I'm I'm banging on about this point, but it's just i you you can't say it too much. As soon as you start to see the chaos of your own mind, that's the first step toward not being owned by it. And You know, I just think that's you used a bunch of analogies earlier. Another analogy that John Kabitzin uses is

You can think of the mind like a waterfall. And the thoughts. And urges and impulses. That's all the water flowing ceaselessly down the waterfall. Mindfulness, which is the self awareness that we're generating through meditation, is like the crevice in the rock face.

behind the water that lets you And now I'm mixing my metaphors. kind of step out of the traffic and to view the contents of your consciousness with some nonjudgmental remove. And this is not new age nonsense. We are classified as a species as n homo sapiens sapiens. The one who thinks and knows he or she thinks. And yet that capacity, this birthright of yours

is atrophying for many of us because in our culture at least nobody points out that we have this bonus level in our in our brain. And so that's what you're developing in meditation. I wanna come back to the bicep curl. Yeah. Because I think it's a helpful way to view

And that is I'll I'll pull from a different type of meditation for just a second because uh for all it's all the criticisms levied against TM, I do think that uh some Transcendental meditation teachers, which is A mantra based practice have a way of setting

the pass fail bar very low to help you Practice consistently in the beginning. And I think that's really important. I mean, if you decide as a type A person, like anything worth doing is worth overdoing. Therefore, I'm gonna sit in full Lotus two hours a day. five days a week. That's my resolution.

the likelihood of you failing is is almost a hundred percent, right? But if you instead come into it as I was advised at one point when I've practiced TM is If you say your mantra once, I mean this is like one or two syllables, if you say it once in a twenty minute session, that is a successful session, right? Uh then for someone who's accustomed to trying to put Points on the scoreboard and compete.

It's the proper Sort of mental contortionism and trickery. to get me to do it two or three days in a row. And uh I found that extremely helpful. And the I can't remember if it was Tarbrock or Sharon Salzberg who said to me, I I think it was one of the two who said

the bringing the attention back from Casper the ghost to your breath even once, like that's the bicep curl. That's the repetition. That that is the practice. The practice isn't sitting there. Like a bodhisattva in this single pointed experience of universal consciousness for twenty minutes. The practice is

thinking about Pornhub or different strokes or like Dunkin' Donuts, and then coming back to the breath once. Like that's the rep. That's when you earn the points. Uh, which was just an incredibly helpful reframe for me. You can have an incredibly messy, seemingly messy Meditation practice. And still consider it. Successful.

uh which was difficult for a Sort of compulsive type A. personality like yours truly to uh get a toe hold on in the beginning. Amen to everything you just said. That was just all perfect and and difficult for me too.

And and and which is why to me the biggest revolution in my own practice and r and this is Yeah. Just goes back to me being a hard case because This is recent for me.

When great meditation teachers Give the beginning instructions. They often say You know, it's not a cold clinical detachment with which we're viewing the contents of our consciousness. It's actually a They often use the word.

traditionally found quite overwrought, but like a A loving awareness. And I completely ignored that part of the instruction and Over time what I have found this actually will bring me to the second slogan I was gonna try to get to at the beginning of this conver or earlier in this conversation. Over time I've really started to add into the mix

Instead of like a cold, maybe you might say journalistic remove on the various machinations of my ego that I'm witnessing when I sit in meditation. To bring a warmer, friendlier Again, maybe even loving sense. As um

View, you know, all of my ugliness. Um, that has been a revelation. And what Which brings me to the slogan, which is you know, I think in our Western individualistic Uh Culture we think of spiritual quests as like a slaying the dragon.

Pretty violent. And so I actually Think it's more like hugging the dragon. And that that is like a radical disarmament. Because I've just noticed as I see like my own selfishness or my own jealousy or

my own impatience, my own self laceration. If I can see that as like Ancient and you I heard you talk about this recently on the on that Incredibly brave podcast you did about Uh Childhood abuse you suffered.

If you can start To View these storylines as They're ancient storylines, they're ancient inner characters who are trying to help you.

And they made sense. They were adaptive at some point in your life. But they aren't working now. But instead of like slaying those dragons, which by the way will only make them stronger If you hug them, if you give them a high five and a seat at the table and a party hat. They will quiet down and you can then make a better, smarter decision.

Yeah. Totally. For whatever reason I was thinking of this tiny huffy bike that I had as a kid. Huffy, some people recognize that name. This tiny huffy bike with like the padded Handlebars, BMX with training wheels and that's a great bike when you are the proper size. But if you're still trying to ride that when you're in your twenties, thirties, and forties That is uh you're gonna have some panty pinches. That's very uncomfortable, right? So it's perfect for a time.

And uh is no longer the right tool for the job. But it doesn't mean you have to throw it in a trash compactor and write curses all over it. It um also brought up a memory of a Pin that my mom bought for me. 'Cause it's a good thing. last summer for my birthday.

Which says sometimes I wrestle with my demons, sometimes we just snuggle and I thought that was a pretty good Reminder. for mindfulness practice. Uh What is your relationship?

with anger. And that could be past tense and present tense. But I uh Have read that one of the, let's call it, difficult emotions that you still experience regularly, this was at least in an interview in two thousand eighteen, was anger.

Could you speak to your relationship with anger or how that has been a a presence in your life. a prominent interplayer. And I'm still like kinda working on this. So uh what I'll say is'cause maybe Gonna be.

Not polished. Um just as a joke to start, I uh Chris Cuomo, who used to work at ABC News and we became friends back then, but he's now a C C N prime host. Um he wrote an article years ago for some men's health magazine or something like that, and he talked about his emotional landscape having two gears, anger and self pity. And uh was just so great and so Per perfect for me in some ways. Cause those

Those two Emotions are just so prominent for me, and particular anger. And It's a knot, man. It's a just a you know, I I will Yeah.

angry because you know just say I'm I'll get angry at somebody I'm working with because if they're not doing a good enough job, it threatens my high standards for my work, which then threatens my safety My you know, it it triggers my anxiety. And I will Lashout.

And then I'll lash back at myself for being such a horrible mean person. And That

is really hard to untangle. And this is where The hugging the dragon becomes really useful. To see at the root of that is fear. Right, anger

is often described as a secondary emotion. It's usually something that happens as a knock on effect of a more primary emotion. In my case Over time I've just seen The Emotion that seems to be at the root of so many of my problems.

is fear. Anxiety. And so it can lead to as a knock on effect, this anger at other people, but primarily There's not so much blowing up at other people going on in my life now, but a lot of anger at myself.

I can get into whole loops around I'm a I'm approaching fifty and The abs that I had in my mid thirties are now not visible in any way unless you have a high powered microscope and You know, I can get into a whole thing around that and and It it's like this anger at myself for being sloppy or not being up to my old old standards or whatever, and the same thing can happen around my productivity levels. There's a great phrase I heard.

from a podcaster named Jocelyn K. Gly. She has a phrase Productivity shame. Which I just love that. You know, like I I you I know you're writing a book. I'm writing a book right now and like if I'm not hitting my cadence for completing a chapter, it's just there's It's just so much anger at myself. And so it's been really useful. I've worked with this coach who I know you know. Uh Jerry Colonna. Yeah.

I've been working with Jerry for years. He's a an executive coach, but in many ways it's like very close to therapy. And so he I've been working with him for years and and uh you know, really he definitely helped me attune to A the fact that there w was, notwithstanding my Meditation practice quite a bit of anger and Since you invoked the name of the

Coach with the spider tattoo. I'm going to Use that. And Ask you a question that uh I'll paraphrase. I'm sure I'm not getting it entirely right, but a question that Jerry often asks is.

How are you well, he encourages you to phrase it in the first person. So how am I complicit in creating the conditions I say I don't want? Yes. That is that is a col colonnaism. How would you answer that? Or actually, l how would you have answered that? In say the pre two thousand ten and has the answer changed?

I suspect funny, that's not a question I mean, I've heard him ask that question, but it's not one we've worked on a lot, so I don't have a ready answer because I'm gonna have to process it a lot, you know, in real time. I suspect it all comes back to the fear and anxiety too. that in particular pre two thousand ten or whatever, before I started getting really serious about meditation But even after two.'Cause it didn't it doesn't solve all of your problems. Hence the whole ten percent shtick. The

The I would say that the Anger that flows out of the fear. was creating a lack of collegiality for me in my work relationships and could sometimes be a really Tough thing for my wife to deal with as well.

And I wanna be clear, it's not like I was a rajaholic or anything like that. It's more just like um I could go inward. I could withdraw. And that was hard for people to r that is hard for people to read. But and nonetheless I could also lose my temper and that would be scary or annoying for people. And I think now

So th back then it would say i if if I felt like I had too much stress in my life, too much conflict in my life, I think I was complicit because I hadn't taken a look at The sources of my own. Fear and anger. And I would say now the answer would change to be more around the anxiety, which I worry

One of the things I really learned from Jerry and why Jerry focuses on the leadership in organizations is that a primary thesis of his is that When you have unexamined baggage as a leader in an organization You Pass your pathology along willy nilly.

throughout the rest of the organization. It just starts to mirror your idiosyncrasies. And Now that I'm You know, helping to run an organization. I mean I mean I guess I have a kind of a leadership role at ABC News, but in within the ten percent happier company

You know, I worry about And Jerry and I have talked a lot about my anxiety Leading you know, bleeding out into the rest of the organization and I really have to watch that. You mentioned

Long ago. in this conversation. Actually let's not go long ago. There is there's something that I bookmarked for Later discussion. The withdrawal, the uh not in the drug sense, but the uh

emotional withdrawing. Uh is something I'd like to dig into a little bit. So I'm looking at some of my notes and One says that you've had the experience or the habit of tending to avoid social engagements.

Is that related to the withdrawing or you More of would you consider yourself an introvert? Uh I ask in part because I uh generally

withdraw from social engagements. I find them more depleting than re energizing. generally speaking, particularly if it's a larger group, particularly if it's people I don't know very well. from the outset, could you speak to Any aspect of that non question that I just threw at you?

It's it's not a non-question. That was super redundant, what I just said. Not a non-question, but it's a real question. And I I think actually the reason why I I I've had a big shift on this I was not very good at Keeping up with my friends. And prioritizing social engagement for a long time. Largely

Well, it started a little bit when I stopped doing drugs and that had a could have a negative relationshi you know, relationship on Your friendships with It can have a negative impact on your friendships with people who are still partying. So there's that. And then I as I started to write ten percent happier and then

all of the stuff that happened after ten percent happier, like launching a podcast and a company and all that stuff. I was just I told myself I was too busy. And so I was really like letting my friendships starve. I Am not an introvert though. I actually get an enormous amount of energy. I think I have some introverted tendencies. Annika

And I started Anika Harris and I started talking recently about this and We've never finished the conversation, Chad. I think she might have a good diagnosis for me, but I have some introversion. in me, but generally speaking, I really love seeing my friends. And there was an an episode a couple of years ago where my wife and my son and I went to a rooftop party. It was a goodbye party for two of my colleagues at ABC News. And it was just a small group of my ABC News colleagues. And it was so much fun. And I got in a car afterwards

And I was like, why am I in such a good mood? And I realized it's'cause I don't do this anymore. I I I'm not making this a priority. And so over the last couple of years I've Completely switch that. And Which is hard during Covid.

But you know, we we moved out of the city. We had the incredible good luck to be able to our lease was ending in the city, so we were able to get out of our apartment in the city and rent a house up in the suburbs and has a pool and so over the summer we're able to like Bring our friends over all the time. And My happiness level went through the roof from regular social engagement. And this actually speaks to a huge issue in our culture, which is the lack of prioritization of social connection, which

Has led to a pandemic. That predated the current pandemic, which was the pandemic of loneliness. Which is a major contributing factor from the evidence I've seen. To Depression, anxiety

drug abuse, suicide. Um I you know uh there are many contributing factors here from the way we live, you know, the way our societies are structured, um the the myth of individualism where we think we can do everything alone, social media, which is further sort of uh taking us out of, you know, seeing each other in person

And I think this is a gigantic social issue and on an individual level to be practical about it for your listeners, I think Being deliberate about cultivating interpersonal relationships will pay

unbelievable dividends. You know, we've talked a lot about meditation, but I'm not a meditation fundamentalist. I I think there are many, many, many levers to pull here. And there's the one incredibly powerful one is just having good relationships. It's just right there in our evolution. You know, we evolved To be social creatures. This is how we survived. We killed the Mastodon as a group. And yet we have as the great writer Johan Hari has written, we're the first generation to voluntarily dissolve the tribe.

But we need the tribe. And so making your own tribe and if you're introverted, you know, for you, Tim, it's might be about like smaller close knit group of really, really powerful intimate relationships, but we need those relationships and I would recommend to people like being super deliberate about keeping those up, even in a pandemic. Maybe especially in a pandemic. Yes.

So the ten percent happier shtick. Your words not mine. You used those earlier. I I want I I have a comment and then a whole slew of questions. So the the comment is I think you Called it the ten percent happier shtick because you were alluding to the fact that many of the emotional experiences that you had before meditation, you still have post meditation. And it made me think Of I'm gonna paraphrase here, but a a parable in a book called Awareness by Anthony DeMello, who is a Jesuit priest.

And I suppose you call him a psychotherapist or therapist, but Tells this parable of this enlightened master who says Before Enlightenment, I was depressed. After enlightenment, I was still depressed. But he goes on to say that the relationship to the depression changed.

And I'm gonna take some creative liberties here, but in in Brief. effectively says, you know, before enlightenment, I was depressed. And then after enlightenment, I continued to experience what we would call depression, but it was more of a there is depression. Or I am making myself depressed. And it was that level of

observer status. That allows you to Perfect. certainly facilitates decreasing the half life of depression, right? Sam Harris has talked about the half life of anger. And if you can reduce that from like two hours to two minutes or five hours to one hour.

the benefits are are huge, even if the subjective experience at times can still feel the same kind of pre and post. So I just I I I thought that was Something very important. That you alluded to. When you were

calling it the ten percent happier stick. So let's talk about that. You publish ten percent happier. Excellent title. By the way. Thank you. And It does very well. It spawns all of these various

businesses, apps, and so on that both contribute I think incredible tools to Those who are open to them. And has also made you into uh I'm gonna use a little bit of hyperbole here, but A very unlikely self help guru. Right. So uh you have spent a lot of time

as and and probably still do, as the The sceptic, the debunker of self help pundits in in a sense. When you were writing or dis or contemplating writing. what became 10% happier. How did you approach it? And

I think there are probably quite a few things that um digging for here and one is How did you create a book that Or think about creating it. that ended up being very successful in a hugely crowded category.

Right, because I would imagine at the time if you had said to some of your friends, like, Hey, I'm thinking about writing a book on meditation, they were like Yeah. Well Yeah, if you want to be number, you know, five million six hundred and seventy six thousand on the list of meditation books, knock yourself out. None the less.

It cut through the clutter. So How did you think about writing this book. I mean, you mentioned a l a little bit in brief earlier, but it really cut through and stood out so effectively in a crowded category. I would just love to hear Anything that you would have to say about that.

What I mentioned to Barbara Walters one time that I was working on this book, she turned to me and literally said, Don't quit your day job. So I had no re this was an uh complete I say this as somebody who's already out at himself as an atheist or an agnostic or whatever, but like I This was a complete leap of faith. I I had no reason to believe this was gonna be a success. I did not think it was going to be a success. I thought it was gonna be mildly embarrassing and then go away. My publishers Let me push back just for a second, though. A book is a hell of a heavy lift. Like that is not an easy thing to do. So what were you hoping this book would do? Cause as we both know,

Book economics. If you are a huge outlier can produce some income, but They're not the best. It's like relying on music royalties or something like that. Why do it? You you you might not have had high expectations, but maybe you had some hopes related to it.

So there's that amount of work. There was the fantasy Which I really was aware that was was a fantasy. And then there was

the thing that kept me going day to day. So the fantasy, yes, was that I was kind of like a and still am like a B or C level network news person who, you know, I I I worried about ever like really cutting through in that industry. And you know, also could see quite clearly that it's not an industry that's kind to its senior statesmen, so

you know, what was my future here? And so like my fantasy was that I would create a whole new brand for myself in some ways. And that it would really help a lot of people Who would reflexively reject meditation? in the ordinary course of events, but if talked about in the right way would really embrace it. And so that was my fantasy, but I didn't allow myself to indulge in that that much because

It all the messages I was getting Including from my own publisher, where that this was not going to uh first of all, I couldn't sell the book. I m I had a fancy book agent and he couldn't even he got me one meeting. And I w and that one editor a lot of eggs in one basket. Yes, and that one editor bought it, but for very little money. And Was the title ten percent happier? Okay, so here so they then tried to bargain me up to twenty or thirty percent happier.

And I was like, you don't get the joke. They also at one point tried to get me to change the title to Be Happy Now, uh which I I did have a like a real temper tantrum about that. Um And so it wa it was not good. I mean the the initial print run was fifteen thousand. I really didn't think it was going I honestly didn't think it was gonna succeed, but of course I had the fantasies. But the the re the thing that got me going from day to day 'Cause I remember I had many conversations with the people in my life, including my brother who's really like my closest advisor and probably the smartest person I know and I'm

I remember him just kind of marveling at like dude, you are s it took me five years to write that book. And he was just like, You are spending so much time on this thing and you have no idea. you know, if it's gonna be published or whether it's gonna be a success, what are you doing this for? And I think it was'cause I needed to figure this stuff out. And I know you know this, Tim,'cause you've written so many books, like

Uh uh there was a great expression I heard once that you should only write a book if you have to. And I felt like I had to write this book because I was trying to figure out these incredibly important issues to me around anxiety and ambition and and this the voice in the head and and and the remedies for that or the ways to work with it. I only fulted to get some level of understanding

As I was writing. And so That's really what Kept me going. Five years. That's a long time. Yeah. When did you have the book I'm writing now is much to the consternation of the people in my orbit, is gonna take me at minimum four.

What are you working on right now? Can you say or is that under undercover? I think it's similar to what you're working on in some ways, is um 'Cause I know you're writing a book about healing and in I would say I've only recently started using this formulation of I think it's a book about love. Which is and I I think love has gotten a really bad rap.

Because it comes. And All you need is love, which I love that song, but like it's definitely not true. Like you also need to brush your teeth and Whatever. There are lots of other things you need. And I also think we we we don't think about love in the right way. Our understanding is kind of limited to the romantic or maybe the you know the way we feel about our kids, but

In a lot of Buddhist circles that you can think about love as kind of Anything north of neutrality, just like the human capacity to Yeah. And And you can also think of it as

Omnidirectional, which I think is Perhaps the most interesting aspect here, which is And this gets to the hug the dragon aspect of it. It's like if you can start to Love yourself. And I don't mean love yourself like you're walking around giving yourself hugs or talking about how great you are, but like have some warmth toward your own inner ugliness, or as Ram Das

Has said Defeating your neuroses, it's about becoming a connoisseur of them. Like if you could think about like self love in that way, well, that's like the unlock that can improve your relationships and lead to A really virtuous cycle of

Okay, so your inner weather is balmier. then your relationships get better and as a consequence of your relationships getting better, because we know that relationships are in many ways like the apex predator of like self care techniques. Then then your inner weather gets better and then your relationships get better. And then it goes into a virtuous cycle, upward spiral and So for me, like that's what I mean when I'm talking about

Love. I wrote a subsequent book to Ten Percent Happier called Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics, and I wrote it really quick and I made myself and everybody around me miserable and in the end the book was fine, but it wasn't like It's not as impactful, I don't think, as as ten percent happier. And so my goal for this next book, and I may fail, but I'm willing to make the leap of faith and the investment, largely because I'm trying to figure this shit out for myself. And so it's just gonna take me a long time. Books. What a what an Everest.

Books are and I'm on the fence. You know, I have I will be honest, I have God knows how many words, I mean fifty thousand, hundred thousand, hundred and fifty thousand words gathered largely in the form of notes and rough drafts and so on for this healing. This book about I should I should personalize it because I don't think it's one size fits all, but my own healing journey and I'm not gonna lie that I have uh become

Largely demotivated. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. after releasing this podcast about the childhood abuse, because that was the big reveal. That was going to be in a sense the nucleus of this book and

I feel like the live Dialogue with My friend Debbie Millman was a A more suitable format. In a way. It was a more emotionally charged.

appropriate format for that. reveal than text. I'm not saying that's true for all things. I think that many, many things are better explored in the the printed word. But since Releasing that into the wild.

I have all these notes and I'm I'm not I've lost a bit of the uh the internal pressure and the Uh this is gonna be really dramatic, but sort of the the like the devil whipping me at my back to get that out into the world, if that makes any sense. Which I think is is a good thing in a sense because

I'm having I'm not having to, but I'm choosing to leave more slack in the system, which I have done for the last month or two, and it's deeply uncomfortable. Deeply, deeply, deeply uncomfortable. It's like You know, if you're thrashing around in the kitty pool, it's like, yeah, you don't have to look at the stuff that's at the bottom of the pool. But you're just creating so much surface froth with like frenetic activity and a lots and lots of projects and so on which I've

always not just done, I would say to cover things, but because I enjoy that like the uh To borrow from your From your friend's uh

Two gear analogy. When do you feel most Uh Ease and expansive. Or when do you feel the greatest sense of spaciousness?

I'm gonna answer that, but Can I just go back to your book for a second? And I and I don't say this to be a devil whipping you and I think it's totally fine if you never write the book and because the service you provided by releasing that podcast. Is already immense. So I say this very

Gingerly because I again it's not to apply pressure, but it's maybe to It's a perhaps weak attempt at remotivation, if that's even appropriate. But because I think there's a difference I mean,'cause that the podcast was stupendous. In in many ways,'cause you know, I uh f f of course for people who suffer trauma and as you guys

Exposed on there. or or or described on there it may be as high as one of every three women and one in every six men, and perhaps even higher given the shame around reporting it among men. So tha that's a huge population. But beyond that there were the themes that you described that really resonated with me who who uh luckily didn't suffer any childhood abuse. There are the themes you described in there that are very similar to the themes that I'm describing, which is You know, viewing these adaptive

patterns, behavioral patterns, and storylines that we adopt in childhood. You you talked about sort of a dissociation which made a lot of sense. Was a gr was brilliant as a kid, but not So useful as you got older. That the universality, I think, of Bringing

Some warmth. Exploring through various modalities you've described, uh therapy, CBT in particular, but also uh s um Psychotropic. Yeah. Hearing you walk through that narrative in a much more granular way and letting us watch your process.

I think there there's an enormous amount of value you could provide there. I again I'm not saying you're Fucking up if you don't do it. But I could see how it would serve a lot of people if you did do it. I appreciate the pep talk, Dan. I it's not

It's not absolutely off the table. It's not absolutely off the table. I have a f a uh you know, Seth Gooden would s sort of give me a stiff drink and give me an another talking to if you heard me saying this. But I have this I think developed a certain apprehension around writing because I really haven't written a monster book. Not that this would need to be a monster book, but it probably would, knowing me and my My tendency to write phone books.

Was two thousand Eleven. So it's been a long time. I mean you have Tools of Titans which did have s uh quite a bit of original writing. I mean, probably a hundred and fifty. A hundred, hundred and fifty pages of original writing and but it w it was connective tissue for the rest of the book, Tribe of Mentors, which was like

One of the Sort of an incredible demonstration of efficiency in having other people write a book for you. Which I can't recommend highly enough. So there's some apprehension around it, but I'll I'll be getting back into the writing game and I think I need to sort of sharpen up my ice gates and take a bunch of shots on goal that are uh in a practice setting before I get back to

real live gameplay, but I suspect I'll get there. Very early on in this conversation. You mentioned I don't want to say reverence, that's too strong, but an appreciation for how adherence to these various religions you were exposed to. through your assignments.

had regular regular cadence of contemplating their place in the cosmos, contemplating the universe in in whatever capacity. Have you found an opportunity or vehicle. For doing that yourself.

Or is that still a non essential or non present at least? element in the the puzzle that is Dan Harris. No, it's totally essential and it it really comes in the form of Buddhism. Uh and It's not just Buddhism. I don't wanna be t too sectarian about this. It's just

living an exam and examined life generally. And so For me that can happen. In the form of my meditation practice and going on meditation retreats. It's also a

you know, hosting a podcast where I get to interview all of the peop all sorts of people, including you. It's listening to other people's podcasts. Yours, Sam's our mutual friend uh Peter Atiya. It's reading books.

So It's walking in nature. It's it's anything that can jar you out of the constricted sense of being An ego being a small self

out at the world through your eye holes. And more into God, this is this is where you get into the sort of cliched stuff. But like

Uh feeling Connected. Um The And so uh I haven't

Toy much with uh psychedelics, although I'm very interested in it. But you know, you can get that in psychedelics, I can get it pretty easily in meditation. I can get it in socializing with my friends.

I get it with I have a five year old And a son and He is just like Just a constant source of this and also like

worry and frustration too in engaging in the lifelong exercise and project of being in a marriage. So there's so many for me it seems like such a target rich environment for contemplating Externally and internally. I mean that has been just such an incredible

shift in my life. Since Those days when I was reluctantly exposed to, you know, the faithful. And had that

Incoet sense of maybe there was something I was missing, but I didn't want Exactly what these guys were doing. I feel like I've figured that out. I mean I'm figured out much. But I figured out.

The various access points for me to start this. This investigation. J just a quick side note on uh psychedelics for people who may not have any exposure to other conversations about them. This may seem odd, but I just pulled it up because I thought it might be fun and instructive for folks. There's a book called The Island, written by Aldus Huxley. Yeah, I've read it. And Okay. So Aldous Huxley also read doors of perception.

Yeah. His most important work was a novel about Pala, this Utopian Island, and And there's this psychedelic brew, you know, the psychedelic medicine called Moksha. Moksha.

And then there's a there's a portion. If you don't mind me sort of indulging myself on this podcast. Uh, I'll just read this real briefly. So Here we go. This is a dialogue between uh two characters in the novel. The moksha medicine takes you to the same place you get to in meditation.

So why bother to meditate? You might as well ask why bother to eat dinner? But according to you, the moksha medicine is dinner. It's a banquet, she said emphatically. And that's precisely why there has to be meditation. You can't have banquets every day. They're too rich and last too long. Besides, banquets are provided by a caterer. You don't have any part in the preparation of them. For your everyday diet, you have to do your own cooking. The moksha medicine comes as an occasional treat. In theological terms, the Moksha medicine prepares one for the reception of gratuitous graces, pre-mystical visions, or the full-blown mystical experience.

Meditation is one of the ways in which one cooperates with those gratuitous graces. How? By cultivating the state of mind that makes it possible for the dazzling ecstatic insights to become permanent and habitual illuminations, by getting to know oneself to the point where one won't be compelled by one's unconscious to do all the ugly, absurd Self stultifying things. that one so often finds oneself doing. And I think that's a great I suppose.

Description, narrative, painting of a scene. Two compare or put side by side. Psychelic. compounds and experiences with meditation. Because I think the tendency among

Also many type A driven personalities when they hear the description of Say a Very

strong silicon experience or ayahuasca experience as fifteen years of therapy and Two nights, they're like, Great, I've been looking for the shortcut. Let me go do this and get on the front lines and take a thousand bullets to the face in a short period of time to get this over with. So I can move into my more enlightened phase. And uh that's a very problematic approach. and can backfire, can destabilize, can really untether people also. I used the expression ontological hives earlier in the conversation, which I don't know, I'm not sure where that came from, but there is a term that Um I don't know if the scientist would be comfortable with me using his name, but very well known scientist. would call ontological shock where people come out of these experiences so

I'll just use this the the same word, destabilized. Because of the richness, vividness Comprehensiveness. of their experience under psychedelics that they lose their faith in the fidelity and the realness of

This let's call it ordinary reality. And that May sound like word salad to some, but it is it can be a not just terrifying but persistent issue for some folks. And uh, you know, there is a reason that psychedelics

Prior to that becoming the default term. were called psychometics. Right? They were used to instigate what clinicians at the time assumed to be psychotic.

Episodes even though neurobiologically, they're actually quite different. If you were to look at, say, functional MRI or or the activity, they're quite different, but subjectively, they can seem quite similar. So that is that is not something you want to do on a daily basis. It may be something you never want to do. But meditation allows you to sort of access.

many of the same channels. without having it at spin tap eleven of volume. So that's Soliloquy complete. But

If we flash forward. Say Three years. Like three years for these kind of thought exercises. For you to be

In retrospect. Looking back at the past three years. This is three years from now. What would you like to see? In your own life. That's deliberately very broad.

But if we were to flash forward. And sort of ask, are you happy with the last three years? Are you satisfied? Are you content? Pleased. Choose your adjective.

What assessment would you would you run? What are the things you would look for? Anything in particular? Well, like there's a superficial level that's not unimportant, but the superficial level of, you know, I'm really focused on Professionally on building a brand

And a company that Is gonna help a lot of people and grow And be good for our employees. and you know, writing the book is part is, you know, sort of related to that. And so all of that stuff

Which I would put on the more superficial end of the spectrum. Well, again, not being unimportant. That's there. I'd say deeper. Is

Is this stuff again, just to invoke this cheesy little Hug the dragon phrase, you know, like That seems to me like to be incredibly Onward leading. And to

Have profound ripple effects for like every aspect of my existence. the more I can switch my response to my own to use this phrase again, sort of inner ugliness from Anger or just sort of blind obedience.

to a sort of slightly amused warmth. That just strikes me as like really consequential. in terms of how I'm treating myself and then how I'm treating other people and then All of the

Ramifications of that dynamic. And so it i it will show up in lots of ways. Like how am I About you know, my own feelings about like my own body or toward food or toward productivity or How am I in my marriage? How is all of that modeling, which of course your kids gonna see?

How's that all impacting him and what kind of human he's gonna become. And all the Rippects of his actions in the world. So yeah, that seems like the project to me. And it's not just as simple as, you know, you talked before about like kind of

And I didn't respond to it. Uh, because we moved on, but there was you were talking before about like Selflessness or not self, the the uh the idea in Buddhism that there is no solid self here, so instead of saying

I'm angry, you can just say there is anger. And I see that as related to the it's not just that you have a warm relationship to your anger. You see that there the the anger isn't as like Identify with it as my anger. Instead of seeing it and this is kinda radical. As nature.

We again think of ourselves Has Atomized individual egos. Right. Nature is outside of us. We're looking at it through

This lens of me. But absolutely ca can't be true. to go to the cliche about like you're the the atoms that make up your body are from the first exploded stars. You are And so therefore

All of the horrible little Things that you're thinking. All of these things that you f that feel so much like you. That's nature too.

And and that helps you Not identify with it. Not It doesn't have to be your anger anymore. It can just be Anger. And so the combination of

viewing it with some warmth and then viewing it as just nature as a selfless phenomenon that you don't have to Claim. That project seems like a I would love to be

Further and further along in the development of those twin mutually reinforcities over the next three years. Yeah, me too. You mentioned the weather patterns. earlier in the conversation, right? I mean uh getting

I very uh rarely, I would say never get angry at the day for being overcast or raining or Fill the blank, right? So getting closer to that level of equanimity. Uh Detachment slash Connection.

with the occurrences of emotions and viewing them similarly, that's something to aspire to. You can view your emotion as a weather pattern. This is not my analogy, but you can view The What is a hurricane or any storm, it's a confluence of meteorological, atmospheric events that

come together to create a storm, but this you can't find any core to the storm. There is no essential nugget of storm. It's a coming together of a variety of Phenomenon. And the same is true for your anchor. But we just don't see it that way. And so starting to just play with the idea of like This anger may just be a naturally occurring phenomenon, just like a storm, as Joseph Goldstein often says, takes the nutriment of I out of it. Um and makes it so much less loaded.

There's this question that keeps popping to mind for me. I don't know why I wanna ask it, but I'm gonna ask if I were to ask Doctor Bianca. You're a partner in crime, partner in life. Or not I, if I were to rather Put her in a situation with you where she is saying to you

Dan, I'm so proud of you for Dot, dot, dot. Just looking back over the last Could be last few years, could be last week, it could be anything, but what might she say to you? I don't have to guess actually because Jerry Colonna, not that long ago, he and I were having a Skype session And he asked me something to the effect of like what would be a similar question to what you

Just ask, like what would Bianca say? And I said, Well we don't have to guess. Let's bring her in and she She's pretty shy, so she was mad at me for doing this, but I pulled her over in front of the camera and he asked her a bunch he she loves him, so she was happy to see him. So she asked him a bunch of questi he asked her a bunch of questions and And she said the following Which was So just by way of background, I got involved with Jerry because I had a three sixty review.

This was two and a half years ago. For those have you ever had one? I have. Okay. It took me a while to recover recover from it. Okay, so I'm still recovering. This was like two and a half years ago. Um and I had a three sixty review. I did it as like a cute little thing that I thought might be like a good element for a a book that I was writing. Now let's do you want to just for people who don't know what it is, describe what this is. Yes, I will. Uh so a three sixty review is A corporate thing mostly where you

Uh where you hire a c a company An executive will hire a company or the b the executive's boss will hire a company that comes in and interviews said executives, superiors, peers, and subordinates. So you get a three sixty view of how they're performing in the company. I With Jerry did the colonoscopy version of this where we

interviewed sixteen people both from my professional life and my personal life. So like my wife, my brother, my be dragons. Exactly. There be dragons, which by the way, I I've learned how to hug. But I didn't what I didn't know this I didn't have a lot of sort of warmth toward my inner dragons in the when we did this two and a half years ago and the results were Devastating. Devastating. I mean I was Because everybody

The i the feedback is reported anonymously. Yes. Yes. Right. That's a key point. It's it's like basically I w got to eavesdrop on a conversation that sixteen of my closest colleagues and friends and family members had Behind my back. And and all the feedback was anonymized. And it was I was sick for days.

And That's the book I'm writing now. So the first book began with a panic attack. This book begins with a three sixty. And um So I thought it was gonna be like a cute little

device I would use for a book. It turned out to be so devastating that it became The whole book. My sort of dealing with what I learned in this three sixty and It's the best thing that ever happened to me, it's horrifying. One of the best things that ever happened to me, as horrifying as it was. And so anyway, Jerry called Bianca over and she said that she was incredibly proud of me for dealing with

All of the contents of the three sixty which she has read. Yeah. She said she was very proud of my dealing with it forthrightly and really digging in. And I said at the moment Well Bianca, you know like

I'm writing a book about this, so I'm essentially getting paid to do this work. And I don't know, like I I have trouble giving myself too much credit and she H She's had to say this to me time and time again, and it's really a relief. She's like, I don't care why you're doing it. You're doing it. And you can't fake the doing of it. Whatever your motivations are, like if you're really doing it, you're really doing it and

The benefits for her, for my son. Potentially if I do my job correctly and write the book well, the benefits for other people should be real. So that was re I I was just I I audio record all of my conversations with Jerry'cause I often write about them and I was just re listening to that the other day. So your question is serendipitous'cause I happen to happen to have her words fresh fresh in my mind and

Yeah, it's very moving for me to hear. Well I don't care why you're doing it. That's a good partner right there. That's a good intervention.

Just a few more questions. And um We'll do it'll do a couple of we'll we'll land on some Some candy, some shorter questions. Although the answers. Books you've gifted the most to other people outside of of your own.

What books have you gifted the most to other people? Anything that comes to mind and why? Yeah, so the books that I most recommend Or it won't surprise you. All gonna be um With one exception.

They're all gonna be sort of meditation books, although the one exception is has uh some pretty strong ties to it too. For people who are interested in learning more about this, I recommend Why Buddhism is true. By Robert Wright. Waking up by Sam Harris. Buddhism without belief.

By Steven Bachelor. Real happiness by Sharon Salzburg. And now there's a new entrant which would be You Belong by Seven A. Selassie. The The non meditative book I would recommend. But it actually has some pretty strong Dharma overtones.

Is perhaps the best novel I have ever read. And it was sent to me by Seven A. Selassie, who I just referenced, who wrote that book. Sh her love language is to send people books. And so she sent me a book recently and it was called The Overstory. Uh

Did you read it? This is where I'm gonna I'm I'm like gonna drown in my own Productivity shame because this book has been recommended to me so many times. It's on my Kindle. And I haven't yet gotten past page one, so I I need to read it, but please describe it for people. Well, page one is tough, actually. Um I can see why you wouldn't get past page one because he he um It's a barn burner of a story. And so in fact y th you sho you don't need to look at this as homework, uh because it's it's it's in a massively pleasurable read. The only warning I would give you is that

F as a fellow writer I found the book to be utterly humiliating because I realized that He has more skill. In a single paragraph than I will ever muster in my entire writing career. This guy is a force of nature. And the book is about nature. The book is is ostensibly about trees. But it's it's really about humans and their relationship to trees and

He is able to render these incredible characters and create this Really? page turner of a book that is, again, sort of ostensibly about trees, which makes it sound very boring. But now I'm fascinated by trees and I loved the book and I I I just couldn't believe Still can't believe how much how talented A writer he is. It's just it's not fair.

Um I will just say I will just f finally say that one of the great joys of my life recently has, you know, has been having a son and uh or child, but he happens to be a boy and and uh we moved to the suburbs and we're doing the most quintessential cheesy suburb thing, which is he's a Cub Scout now. And um He loves nature. So we will like we have these like Cub Scout pamphlets and we'll walk around the yard trying to identify trees and that has in part been fueled by the reading of the overstory. Do you have any favorite documentaries? Or documentaries you most recommend or tend to recommend a lot. And I I also have question about Well, very personal.

Space. approach to documentaries, but how would you answer that? I love I'm a sucker for a rock doc. So I will watch pretty much any rockumentary That comes out.

I obviously the king of of them is the the last waltz, which is uh Martin Scorsese movie about the final concert put on by the band. There actually is a new documentary called Once We Were Brothers, I believe. And it's also about the band, Robbie Robertson. Ja it's on Hu Hulu right now, and I loved that. But I will watch like my wife and I just watched a Shotime documentary about the go goes and it was amazing. I watched a decidedly mediocre Netflix documentary about the K pop band Black Pink, but I loved it anyway, even though it wasn't really that good. No Direction Home about Bob Dylan. Uh Song Exploder, which is uh the new Netflix show uh where they they do a half hour on like

A song that I watched one last night. Just last night, uh about losing my religion by R M. And it's basically a doc a little mini documentary about how they made the song and ended up telling the story of the band as part of that. And so yeah, that's what I find myself watching when I'm looking to relax. So perhaps when people are not looking to relax necessarily, but could you please

Describe Guardians of the Amazon. I feel I would be remiss not to bring that up. I did a documentary, like an hour long documentary about this Amazonian Indigenous tribe. We finished it and posted it in February. It's on U

YouTube, you can watch it there. It's also on Hulu. And I went and followed this indigenous tribe. They started their own paramilitary organization. to go out and do this incredibly dangerous thing of Arresting. Illegal loggers.

illegal loggers are basically the tip of the spear when it comes to deforestation. The way it works is the loggers come in, they Take all the valuable trees and then Then people come in and flatten the whole part of the forest and turn it into grazing land for cattle. If you want to know why we have so much deforestation, it you you can largely blame your cheeseburger.

This tribe though is incredible and we embedded with them on a mission and they Uh, we were right it's just like so much action unfolded in front of our lenses as they went out and found these loggers and They're armed with bows and arrows, machetes, r muskets, rifles, pistols is extraordinary. It is visually and emotionally arresting if people just watch the uh Trailer.

For Guardians of the Amazon. my reasons for saying that will be extremely, extremely clear. You've given a few mottos Few mantras. If you had A billboard, metaphorically speaking, to reach billions of people.

Message to put up. Could be a quote, could be a word, could be An image could be anything at all. What might you put up on that billboard? I don't know if this is if this would work on a billboard, but the most exciting idea I've ever encountered.

And I think it's now my job on the planet to Spread the word about this, which is in part why I was badgering you about writing your book. Because I think your book Makes this point.

Mm. will make this point in a beautiful way. The most imp exciting idea. Is that the mind is trainable. That we are not stuck.

With all of the things we don't like about ourselves that w you can Through various modalities, including meditation, therapy. Psychedelics. Walks in nature.

Working on your relationships. There's so many ways that you can train your mind. I'm obsessed with music as and I used to back when record stores were a thing, I would I would always go to Newbury Comics in Boston and spent an hour or so flipping through the r new records and they would had this like whiteboard that listed

All of the um Upcoming releases when I was so interested to see like what new records were gonna come out and And there was an expression above the list and it said all dates can change. So can you.

That is the truth, dude. Like you can change and like you you've demonstrated this is why I was so sort of galvanized by listening to your podcast, and I knew some of it because you when you came in to do my podcast a while ago, you actually I think we had stopped rolling, but you had told me some of the story and so I was aware of some of what I was gonna hear on the podcast, but just Hearing more about the work you've done to recover from this grievous injury. makes that point. That we can change. It's not I'm not saying it's gonna be easy.

But it is doable. Are the options. Yeah. All dates can change and so can you. Yeah, I like it.

And that's stuck, clearly. Minutes. That's That, I guess what was it? Sign? Poster?

Board. the letters that fit into those grooves. I'm just imagining one of those announcement boards in high school. All dates can change and so can you. I think that's a a good place to start to wrap up. Dan, is there anything else you would like to Say request.

Complaints, comments, anything you would like to Deposit a request of my audience listening. No. I'm very grateful to you for having me on. Thank you. And it was actually it was really fun. So

This has been a whole hell of a lot of fun. Uh Dan, I always enjoy our conversations and Can't wait. to see the new book. When that is done.

And people can find you online quite easily. They can find the book ten percent happier. Also the follow up meditation for fidgety skeptics. a ten percent happier how to book, you have the ten percent happier company. With the app and so on. Twitter at Dan B Harris One S, Instagram at Dan Harris, Facebook at Dan Harris ABC

Is there anywhere else? Any other URLs or anything that that might be helpful to mention for people who want to See and learn more about what you're up to. I mean you can check out the podcast. We've had illustrious guests such as Tim Ferris.

And uh many of the all of the meditation teachers who've been referenced in the course of this show are regulars on the show on the show. We we're we post episodes twice a week. So um Basically it's a fiesta of the if you enjoy if you like thinking about Human flourishing. That's that's all we talk about. Uh just like Tim and Sam and Others do as well, so

That's the Can check that out. What is the name of your podcast? Also called Ten Percent Happier. Easy to remember. Brand continuity. You know, you uh I know you're a big investor in in in uh in companies and so brand continuity is reasonably Yeah.

H Yes. Very important. Dates can change and so can you, but your brand shouldn't change every Tuesday. That is something that you probably want to keep more constant. Uh, Dan, once again, thank you so much for taking the time. This was just a great way to

wrap up this week. We're recording on a Friday. And uh really appreciate also what you're doing in the world and what you're sharing. I think it's incredibly valuable and incredibly practical also coming at it from the perspective of a skeptical investigative wartime journalist. Who is loath to believe in any

mythology or fairy tales. I think that appeals to an entire large segment of the population. who would otherwise not be open to even test driving any of these

these tools that can so demonstrably help. So it's it's a It's quite a service that you put into the world. So I want to thank you for that. And to everybody listening. Everything we've talked about. We'll be linked to in the show notes, so you can find all of that at Tim.blog forward slash podcast. Until next time, thank you for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share

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