The Peter Attia Drive - #72 - Dan Harris： 10% happier – meditation, kindness, and compassion

00:00:00.000 Hey everyone, welcome to the Peter Atiyah drive. I'm your host, Peter Atiyah. The drive

00:00:10.880 is a result of my hunger for optimizing performance, health, longevity, critical thinking, along

00:00:15.940 with a few other obsessions along the way. I've spent the last several years working

00:00:19.660 with some of the most successful top performing individuals in the world. And this podcast

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00:00:28.360 more fulfilling life. If you enjoy this podcast, you can find more information on today's episode

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00:00:41.460 Hey everybody, welcome to this week's episode of the drive. I'd like to take a couple of minutes

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00:03:58.320 My guest this week is Dan Harris. For those unfamiliar with Dan, he wrote the New York Times bestselling

00:04:03.140 book, 10% Happier. He also hosts the 10% Happier podcast, which I've appeared on and is the co-founder

00:04:09.200 of the 10% Happier meditation app, which by the end of this podcast, there will be no ambiguity about how

00:04:15.740 much I love that app. In addition to everything 10% Happier, Dan is also the co-host of weekend edition

00:04:22.020 of Good Morning America. And up until quite recently was the co-anchor of Nightline. I met Dan through a

00:04:28.840 very close friend of mine and this is one of those times when I specifically just begged my friend to

00:04:34.060 make the introduction. I read 10% Happier almost the minute it came out in 2014, immediately became a

00:04:41.540 fan and somehow have spent the last five years stalking him, trying to figure out how to get to

00:04:47.260 know him. And eventually a friend of mine made the introduction. And I kind of talk a little bit about

00:04:52.840 that in the podcast about, you know, how much his work has had a, just a profound impact on me and

00:04:59.340 just how grateful I am for all that his journey into meditation has brought me. You know, in this

00:05:04.040 episode, we talk about a lot of things. We do go into his story in a bit more detail about his

00:05:09.500 upbringing. And pretty quickly we get into the story of the breakdown, meltdown slash crisis he had on

00:05:17.540 national TV in 2004 that ultimately began his journey that culminated sort of four or five years

00:05:23.820 later with his discovery of meditation. And what I really like about this episode truthfully is we get

00:05:29.780 into a lot of stuff that I've always wanted to talk about with Dan and it's the exact stuff we would

00:05:34.380 have talked about over dinner. And the fact that we got to have it in a podcast is exactly why I have a

00:05:39.240 podcast. So I hope that you will find this discussion half as interesting as I did. And I hope that for

00:05:46.340 those of you who have not yet taken an interest in meditation, that maybe the topics that we discuss

00:05:51.480 here become the thin end of the wedge that at least get you to start exploring a tool that I believe is

00:05:57.400 one of the most important tools in the longevity toolkit. So without further delay, please enjoy my

00:06:02.600 discussion with Dan Harris. Before we start the podcast, I want to just make a special announcement.

00:06:09.060 As you're about to hear in this podcast with Dan, I'm a user and enormous believer promoter of the

00:06:14.620 10% happier app for meditating. This is something that Dan and his team have been working on for

00:06:19.600 several years. I've been using it for nearly two years. I think it is simply a remarkable tool. And

00:06:27.380 I recommend this app and one other app, Sam Harris's app, waking up to any one of my patients who is

00:06:34.560 finally willing to take the plunge and try mindfulness meditation. Now, one of the things we wanted to do at

00:06:41.060 the time of the release of this podcast was work with the team at 10% happier to do a special

00:06:46.740 subscriber discount code that's going to go along with the podcast release. And they were kind enough

00:06:51.520 to do this at an unbelievable, amazing discount, which is available for only one week until September

00:06:56.900 30th. Now they've also provided us with an ongoing discount that will go on beyond September 30th.

00:07:02.400 It's just not as much of a discount though. I still think it's actually a pretty impressive

00:07:05.640 discount. So if you're thinking about using this app or after this podcast, you're thinking,

00:07:11.380 hmm, you know, maybe I'll give this a try. This would be a great time to sign up to become one

00:07:16.500 of our subscribers. If you're already a subscriber, you can visit us at peteratiamd.com forward slash

00:07:22.320 members, where you can take advantage of the discount. And if you're not a subscriber and you

00:07:26.360 want to access this code, as well as all of our other subscriber only benefits, you can visit us

00:07:30.860 at peteratiamd.com forward slash subscribe. As a reminder, we are not taking any money to promote,

00:07:38.680 sell, or have any endorsement of 10% happier. We are doing this solely because I believe in this

00:07:44.320 product. I love this product. And rather than have this company or other companies pay us to advertise,

00:07:50.380 we say, take the money you would have paid us to advertise and please pass that discount on to

00:07:55.120 our subscribers. So thanks for listening. I hope you enjoy my interview with Dan Harris.

00:08:00.860 Dan, thank you so much for making time on no less a Saturday morning to sit here and talk with you.

00:08:07.940 Well, I'm at work anyway on Saturdays. But anyway, it's a pleasure.

00:08:12.540 And this is cool to be doing it in an awesome studio like this. I feel like

00:08:16.120 there's some pretty cool stuff that's probably happened in this very room.

00:08:19.920 Yeah, I mean, we are sitting on the second floor of the ABC News headquarters and down the hall is where

00:08:26.100 the late, great Peter Jennings used to work. I've had some traumatic moments on the floor.

00:08:31.380 And I can't wait to dig into some of those. He's definitely one of the most handsome people I've

00:08:35.620 ever seen. He's a handsome dude. This is a general, you know, statement of handsomeness.

00:08:39.340 007. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I've wanted to have you on this podcast for such a long time. I've wanted

00:08:45.920 to meet you for a really long time, probably about from the day I finished reading your book,

00:08:51.260 which would have been a little over five years ago. I read your book because I read your book as

00:08:55.960 soon as it came out. In fact, I pre-ordered it. And as I've probably alluded to a little bit on the

00:09:03.580 podcast before, it's really your book that was the first thing that ever cracked the veneer of meditation

00:09:14.400 is irrelevant. You know, that sort of ethos. And your book is really almost single-handedly responsible

00:09:21.620 for my interest in meditation and in some ways for where I find myself today, which is in a much

00:09:26.540 better place than I was then. So I'd like to almost just start with that. The title of the book,

00:09:32.140 10% Happier, I think it's just such a beautiful title because it doesn't over promise. And it's

00:09:38.040 just such a glib, cute thing. And what was the alternative title? The voice in my head is an

00:09:43.220 asshole. Which is just as good, probably a little bit better technically as a title. Rather than just

00:09:51.460 make you tell the whole story of the book, take me back to the moment that started it. You've talked

00:09:58.160 about this and I know you're tired of talking about it, I'm sure, but maybe one more time.

00:10:02.560 What was the moment when you realized all was not well in Dan Harris land?

00:10:07.920 I've come to terms with the fact that I'm going to tell this story a million times,

00:10:11.200 so don't feel sheepish. The inciting event of the book, to put it in Hollywood terms,

00:10:16.480 was a panic attack. Not in this building, but at our studio in Times Square where we do Good Morning

00:10:23.000 America every morning. It was 2004, warm June morning, I was filling in for Robin Roberts,

00:10:32.000 who was at that time the newsreader on the show. Newsreader, they don't have this position anymore,

00:10:37.860 but it's the person who comes on at the top of each hour and reads off a bunch of headlines.

00:10:43.080 They've done a few big stories at this point and they'll say, hey, you know, there are a few other

00:10:47.660 headlines bubbling. Let's get it over to Robin Roberts or Dan Harris, who's filling in for

00:10:53.080 Robin Roberts. Take it away. So I had done this a bunch of times. I was in a phase at this point

00:10:58.180 where I was filling in for Robin and also the main host of the show, Charlie Gibson, quite a bit.

00:11:03.140 They were giving me a shot. And for reasons I don't fully understand why it happened this morning,

00:11:08.760 I was a couple seconds into my shtick. I was going to read six, what they call voiceovers,

00:11:14.620 voiceovers off of the teleprompter that was 20 feet in front of me. So voiceover is,

00:11:19.940 I'm talking to the camera, but they roll video over what I'm saying. And a few seconds in,

00:11:25.480 I just lost the ability to breathe. My palms were sweaty. My heart was racing. My lungs seized up.

00:11:31.440 I just couldn't talk. My mind was racing. And the more my body freaked out, the more my mind freaked

00:11:36.140 out. And the more my mind freaked out, the more my body freaked out. And I had to do something I'd

00:11:40.320 never done before, which was just quit right in the middle of the whole thing.

00:11:43.520 And this is live.

00:11:45.080 This is live. I later found out that the audience was 5.019 million. And it was just terrible.

00:11:52.860 I lied to the people around me when they asked what had gone wrong. I said, I don't know. It's

00:12:00.320 fine. And I was able to come on an hour later and do another bit. So, and if you look at it,

00:12:08.180 it has a ton of, if you just Google panic attack on live television, it's the first result. It has

00:12:13.920 millions of hits. If you look at it, it actually doesn't look that bad. I'll just say something

00:12:20.980 about that. If you've ever had a panic or high anxiety, it will actually, it's a little triggering

00:12:28.920 for those people. If you haven't, a response I hear from many people is, you know, it didn't look

00:12:33.600 that bad, which is true. And the reason, if I recall, it was, you were reading a bit about

00:12:38.460 either a new statin or a new drug, if I recall. Yes. I've, it's been so long since I've seen it

00:12:44.000 because I don't think I saw it. I watched it when the book came out. Yeah. Cause I was like,

00:12:47.380 oh, I wonder what he's talking about. And I don't think I've seen it in five years.

00:12:49.660 Yes. Well, no reason to go back to it unless you're me. If I hadn't had the luxury of tossing

00:12:57.360 the baton back to the main host, then it would have been truly epic because I was, I was unable

00:13:04.760 to speak. I would have had to rip the mic off and run away, but I was able to get out the words

00:13:09.660 back to Charlie and actually said back to Charlie and Robin when it was actually Charlie and Diane

00:13:15.540 Sawyer. That saved me. It really doesn't matter because the, it's not, this isn't about the panic

00:13:21.820 attack. Yeah. It's not, it's not about what, it's about what led to the panic attack. Exactly. So

00:13:25.680 even more embarrassing than the panic attack, what caused it, which is that I had spent a lot of time

00:13:30.320 in war zones after nine 11, very ambitious guy and very idealistic. And I want to say fearless,

00:13:38.060 but in the pejorative, I didn't really think much about what the consequences of going overseas would

00:13:43.940 be. And so I was in Afghanistan a bunch of times, Pakistan, Israel, the West Bank, Gaza.

00:13:50.840 I made a couple of trips to Iraq that all added up to about six months, which spans the pre-invasion

00:13:57.520 invasion. And then all the way up until the insurgency started really cooking. And I came

00:14:03.680 home in this period of time and I got depressed and I didn't actually know I was depressed. I was

00:14:08.100 having trouble getting out of bed and I felt sick a lot, but I didn't know I was depressed.

00:14:14.940 A friend who I was at one night going out to a party and a buddy of mine offered me some cocaine

00:14:19.820 and I'd never, I'd smoked weed and drank, not really even to excess, but I'd never had hard

00:14:26.680 drugs. I was always really afraid of them. But because I was feeling like shit, I don't know why

00:14:31.400 I said yes that night. And the cocaine made me feel better. Just like took it away. In hindsight,

00:14:37.320 I think it's pretty obvious. I was depressed from coming home from the war zones, not because I was

00:14:42.760 traumatized, but because I missed the action. I liked it. And I was in withdrawal from the adrenaline

00:14:49.320 and the cocaine was a synthetic squirt of that adrenaline. And it made me feel better. Obviously,

00:14:55.440 it didn't last that long, which is a hard lesson every Coke user has to learn. And if you haven't

00:15:00.360 used Coke, I recommend you don't. Well, how does that relate to the panic attack? After I freaked

00:15:04.600 out, actually happened to me twice. I went to a doctor here in New York City who's an expert in

00:15:08.560 panic. He asked me a bunch of questions. One of the questions was, do you do drugs?

00:15:13.520 Which at this point, you're thinking that would never even register as a potential college.

00:15:18.180 No. I make this joke all the time. When I said, yeah, I do drugs, he gave me a look. And

00:15:24.860 the look communicated the sentiment of, okay, asshole, mystery solved. I wasn't a heavy cocaine

00:15:31.340 user. I was intermittent. It was only on the weekends. I wasn't high when I was on the air

00:15:35.920 or anything like that. It was just, I partied once in a while. He was like, that's enough to

00:15:39.920 change your brain chemistry and make it more likely for you to have a panic attack. So that was a big

00:15:44.820 aha moment. And I quit doing drugs, started seeing him frequently. And that was really the beginning

00:15:51.160 of me making a change. And I want to talk so much about what came of that, but I also want to kind of

00:15:56.900 dig into a little bit of what got you here, because I think there are a lot of people out there.

00:16:01.260 I mean, I've had patients who have done a lot of cocaine or have done some cocaine, and many of them

00:16:06.740 still don't experience what you experience. They may not be on live television. That's right. They

00:16:11.300 may not have the same provocation or the same stress that can produce that phenotype. But I want

00:16:17.860 to kind of go back to something that's maybe even at the root of all of that, which was what was the

00:16:23.480 void? It maybe is the wrong word, but what was the itch you were trying to scratch? What was the

00:16:28.260 rush that you needed throughout your life? I mean, you, I could never do what you do. Let's start

00:16:34.840 with that, right? Like I could never put myself out the way someone in your position puts themselves

00:16:40.880 out. It's kind of an amazing thing that you can talk to so many people every night, you know, like

00:16:47.100 or every day or get your start in this whole space of news. So in college, I remember you writing about

00:16:52.880 how you, you know, you worked at a local news station, right? You get this big break to come

00:16:58.340 to ABC. You're getting a dopamine hit every time you do something good, right? Do you have a sense of

00:17:07.400 what that dopamine hit was numbing? Because I do think that on some level, cocaine, perfectionism,

00:17:16.720 performance, sex, all of these things can numb. Have you ever read the book by Gabor Mate in the

00:17:24.720 realm of hungry ghosts? I haven't, but the hungry ghost is something I think a lot about. It's an

00:17:31.900 ancient Buddhist idea. Yeah, I believe that's where he borrowed the title for the book. And as you can

00:17:37.860 imagine, he writes a book about addiction. But what I love so much about the book is he does a great job

00:17:44.180 of making the case. He's a psychiatrist and he mostly treats patients who are, you know,

00:17:49.080 on Skid Row in Vancouver. So usually opiate addicted. But you read the book and you come away

00:17:55.280 realizing, wait a second, you could be a high flying news anchor. You could be a, you know,

00:18:00.780 a wall street tycoon. You're an addict too. So the person on Skid Row for them, the opiate or whatever

00:18:08.660 drug of choice is lighting something up in their cortex. It's a pleasure center, but you can get that

00:18:13.500 from so many different things. So I guess what I'm getting at in a long-winded way is

00:18:18.260 when do you think your addiction or your junkie-ism started? Was your career choice in any

00:18:24.440 way driven by that, which I would think for most of us on some level it is?

00:18:29.800 Yeah, I have been trying to think about this quite a bit recently because I don't think I

00:18:33.980 really satisfactorily answered it in 10% Happier. I don't think that was really the point. Maybe I

00:18:41.100 should have, or maybe I shouldn't have. I don't know. Either way, set it aside. Just one point

00:18:46.020 that's sort of adjacent. When you talked about Gabor Mate's work, I have a friend, Dr. Judson Brewer,

00:18:52.460 who actually might be a good guest for you. He's a neuroscientist formerly of Yale now at Brown. He's

00:18:58.240 one of the lead neuroscientists in the fascinating push to figure out what meditation does to the brain.

00:19:05.520 But Judd is also an expert in addiction, and he actually treats people clinically.

00:19:10.820 He wrote a book published by Yale University Press called The Craving Mind, but his initial title was

00:19:17.440 We're All Addicted. So it really goes to the fact that you don't have addiction. These are my words,

00:19:23.560 not his, and I don't know if he would have blessed them. But what I take from what he's saying is

00:19:27.360 addiction is a spectrum. You may think you're not an addict because you don't have a needle hanging

00:19:32.500 out of your arm, but that needle hanging out of your arm is just the extreme end of the

00:19:37.020 spectrum. But we're all addicted to lots of things. What's your relationship with your phone?

00:19:42.000 What's your relationship with professional success? What's your relationship with sex,

00:19:46.540 shopping, gambling, drinking? We are rats in a maze, and we go where the pellets are.

00:19:52.000 Yeah. And for the first time ever, when I read Mate's book, which I think I read in 2016 or 2017,

00:19:57.360 there was a moment in when I realized those of us with the socially acceptable addictions

00:20:03.900 actually have a disadvantage. If there's one advantage to having a needle in your arm,

00:20:09.520 at least everybody realizes it's wrong and you're more likely to do something about it.

00:20:15.320 I could help.

00:20:16.060 But if you're a perfectionist, if you're a workaholic, you're getting a lot of attaboys

00:20:21.680 before someone comes along and says, let's examine your relationship with this thing.

00:20:25.720 Yeah. That's an excellent point. So what drives me or what makes Sammy run? You know that book?

00:20:31.340 There was a moment when I was a kid, my parents were both academic physicians.

00:20:38.300 And very prominent. I mean, your mom especially.

00:20:41.480 Yeah. My mom was one of the editors at the New England Journal of Medicine. She's just about to

00:20:45.740 retire. My dad was chief of radiation oncology at the Brigham and Women's. I'm one of the pioneers

00:20:50.920 in radiation therapy. But academic medicine doesn't pay that well. And we lived in Newton,

00:20:57.940 Massachusetts. And I was really keenly aware of the fact that we were much poorer than a lot of

00:21:04.340 the kids that I went to school with. My dad drove like a shit brown Plymouth Valiant and my mother

00:21:10.080 a very bland Chevy Chevrolet or something like that. And, you know, we had a nice house,

00:21:16.360 but it wasn't that nice vinyl siding. And yet I knew, you know, one of my friends lived a couple

00:21:22.340 doors down from Sumner Redstone. And interestingly, I also had a lot of, Newton's a pretty big city. So

00:21:28.340 I also had a lot of friends who lived in public housing, but it was the rich people that kind of

00:21:33.480 got in my head. And I felt insecure about that. I also remember during this period,

00:21:40.640 my parents somehow took us on a trip to Europe. And it was all paid for because they were going

00:21:45.840 to give a few talks, lectures at various institutions around Europe, but we were also going to turn a lot

00:21:50.800 of it into vacation. Most of the time we stayed in like not very nice places. But when we went to

00:21:55.500 Paris, we stayed at a really fancy hotel that whatever local institution they were speaking at

00:22:01.600 put us up in. It's called the Hotel Regina. And it was really fancy. And it was the first time I'd

00:22:06.520 ever been to a really fancy hotel. How old were you? I think 10 or 11. And I remember thinking,

00:22:12.120 this is how I'm going to live. I'm not going to live like these schmucks who didn't keep the heat 1.00

00:22:18.460 on in the winter. You know, we all had to wear like down vests around the house because they were so

00:22:22.360 intent. They're so flinty. They were so intent on saving money. And I think there was something in,

00:22:27.660 I don't want to say, it's not as simple as just saying it was the Hotel Regina that did it. But

00:22:32.120 that to me seems like a defining moment. The other thing I think that's going on that I only really

00:22:37.220 started to get clarity on recently is I have an executive coach who I actually mentioned to you.

00:22:45.060 Yeah, I mentioned to you when you came on my podcast. This guy's name is Jerry Colonna. And

00:22:50.220 Jerry is an executive coach, but he's not interested in productivity hacks or how to get your next

00:22:56.500 promotion or how to manage your inbox. He is really interested in like, what are the primordial

00:23:02.280 wounds in your life? What's your five-year-old logic that is happening in the backdrop of your

00:23:08.940 adult life and many ways controlling you like a malevolent puppeteer, but that you don't have

00:23:13.920 visibility on. He tries to help you see sort of like, what are these characters in your head that

00:23:19.780 have so much power over you, especially when you don't see them. And he often talks about the fact

00:23:25.460 that as a young person, there are three primary needs we have, love, safety and belonging. And

00:23:32.420 when I first heard him say that, I said, well, that's, that's bullshit. I don't, that's pretty

00:23:37.000 much my reflective, reflexive response to anything. You're a healthy skeptic. Yes, I'm a healthy,

00:23:41.180 no, I'm a, well, I'm a skeptic. Sometimes it's healthy. Anyway, so he's talked about love,

00:23:46.420 safety and belonging. And I don't know, Jerry's got a way that sometimes I have to reject his first

00:23:50.580 foray for a while before I accept it. But over time, I started to realize that safety is actually

00:23:56.000 something really important for me. There is such a thing as intergenerational trauma. My great

00:24:01.480 grandparents escaped the Cossacks. Another great grandfather lost his family's meager fortune and

00:24:07.920 put his head in the oven and killed himself in the family kitchen. Lots of alcoholism, depression,

00:24:13.480 poverty, fortunes lost and made and lost in my family tree. You know, my dad's an inveterate

00:24:21.320 worrier. So is my mother, really, if I'm being honest. I think that the desire for, I never felt

00:24:28.320 unsafe in the home, but I think the world has always felt unsafe to me. And now having been raised

00:24:33.760 during the Cold War, which freaked me out so much that I had to go see a shrink when I was a little kid,

00:24:38.180 I think part of the drive is the self-protection. You mentioned one of your grandparents who had

00:24:45.380 a pretty impressive temper. Was that a grandfather? Yeah, Robert Johnson. So my maternal grandfather,

00:24:53.440 he was raised in some like shitty farm in upstate New York by an abusive, really abusive father.

00:25:00.400 It was smart though. He got into Middlebury and then got, I married a girl at Middlebury

00:25:07.360 and it was smart enough to get into Stanford to do a graduate degree in history. He was going to

00:25:15.680 become a history professor, but he had a kid, my mother, and then he had another and another and

00:25:22.560 another, ultimately five. And they didn't have housing for kids at Stanford and he couldn't afford

00:25:28.480 to go otherwise. And basically lived the rest of his life embittered. Yes. Not only them,

00:25:36.620 but the world, he became a middle manager at the Yellow Pages. Remember what the Yellow Pages

00:25:41.000 were? They used to have a big Bible of telephone numbers that used to show up on our doorstep

00:25:44.940 once a year. And he was part of that team, but not a particularly successful part of that team.

00:25:50.580 Really embittered and took it out on his kids and was a bully with them, slapped them in the face,

00:25:55.760 figured out what their weaknesses were and exploited them in public. And I remember when I was a little

00:26:01.760 kid, he came in one day, I came to his house and he took me into his living room to show me his VCR

00:26:06.680 and said, if you touch this, I'll break your arm. Like that kind of guy. Fascinatingly, in his 80s,

00:26:13.160 he became very nice. He got a computer and he was really into Twitter and email and he would email all

00:26:18.020 of his grandchildren. And so this big radical change came over him later in his life.

00:26:22.340 Did you ever get to talk to him about what precipitated the change? No, I didn't dare ask him.

00:26:27.560 Is he still alive? He is not alive. I don't know how he would have taken that question. Didn't strike me

00:26:34.620 as something that would be safe to ask him. Have you ever talked with your mom about him and his impact

00:26:40.860 on her life and maybe what she's transmitted of that to her kids, either directly or indirectly

00:26:47.080 through trying to avoid patterns? She definitely, I think both of my parents tried to, my dad's

00:26:52.800 parents were quite kind, but they had flaws of their own. I think both of my parents had this

00:26:58.760 idea that they were not going to repeat the mistakes their parents had made. And they were really good

00:27:02.980 parents. But recently I've, I've been talking to my mother more about her relationship to her father

00:27:07.420 because I'm writing a book about compassion and kindness, which are two words that most men don't

00:27:13.700 want to talk about much. And they're just kind of, to my ears, kind of, I'm almost slightly embarrassed

00:27:18.380 to have them pass my lips, but I think there's going to be a way to talk about this stuff that

00:27:24.480 can be more attractive and aspirational because we clearly need it. And we need it as human beings.

00:27:31.800 We need it as a culture. For me, it's important to understand my mother's relationship to this guy

00:27:36.220 because I see so much of him in me. So I, I got to reckon with it.

00:27:41.920 You have a brother and a sister or just a brother, just a brother. Yeah.

00:27:46.900 Did, uh, did any of that get transmitted to him in the same way? Do you feel, does your brother have

00:27:51.100 feel that he has some of his grandfather in him? I don't think so. My brother's a pretty

00:27:56.020 menschy guy. He's just widely beloved. He's a, he's a pretty prominent venture capitalist. And

00:28:02.420 within that community, which I now know better as, as a startup co-founder,

00:28:06.640 his reputation is just people really like him. He's got a wide, wide circle of friends and is

00:28:13.220 very, it's kind of relaxed and affable. My wife has referred to him as the nice Harris.

00:28:22.020 So I don't see, he's got his own stuff for sure. We all have stuff. It's not the kind of stern

00:28:28.420 authoritarian vibe that I can emit. So I want to come back to the story, but I want to

00:28:35.140 sort of go off on one little tangent for a moment. You said that the words kindness and compassion,

00:28:40.500 you almost feel a little uneasy when they pass your lips, or you said something to that effect.

00:28:45.560 Why is that?

00:28:46.420 Because I think this, the words are encrusted in so much cultural stuff, like cliche. I don't know

00:28:55.520 that we found a great way to talk about kindness and compassion. It's hallmarky, ooey gooey, meaningless

00:29:03.100 cliche, or it's bland, dogmatic, exhortation, figure wagging, God is watching type of stuff.

00:29:14.580 It's not often sold to us the way it can actually be sold to us, which is in terms of our own

00:29:21.320 self-interest. There's a lot of evidence that shows that people who are compassionate are happier,

00:29:26.340 healthier, more successful, more popular. And it feels good on a moment to moment basis.

00:29:34.000 It feels good. We are wired to get feel good chemicals released into our brain when we're good

00:29:42.020 to other people. Just by way of an example, what does it feel like when you hold the door open for

00:29:46.260 somebody? If you're mindful in that moment, if you're awake, that feels good. Well, that is infinitely

00:29:51.560 scalable. Not to the point where you have to be an idiot and stand at the door the whole day or be a

00:29:55.720 doorman, which, you know, I love my doormen. They're definitely not idiots, but they can do that job, which

00:30:00.500 is great. I'm glad they do it, but they could do lots of other jobs. The point isn't the holding of the door.

00:30:04.820 The point is that you can, my meditation teacher has a great little rule that I've been trying to

00:30:10.660 operationalize, which is if he notices the impulse to give something a rise, he does it. So how many

00:30:20.540 times during the day is the impulse to like, maybe, you know, I could compliment somebody on her shoes

00:30:25.860 or his shoes, but you don't do it for one reason or other. Or, you know, you send that note to that

00:30:30.800 person just to say they did a great job on something or walking down the street and you

00:30:34.520 know, you got two bucks in your pocket, but you don't really want to make eye contact with a

00:30:37.540 person standing outside of Starbucks asking for money. No, actually just do the giving. Why? Not

00:30:43.580 because you're rah, rah, just trying to make the world a better place, man. Do it because it feels

00:30:49.780 good for you. And by the way, yes, it will make the world a better place in lots of unpredictable ways.

00:30:55.240 But my sales pitch here is that, and I wrote a chapter about this in 10% Happier called the

00:31:01.620 self-interested case for not being a dick. And that's just a jokey way of putting it because

00:31:06.780 it's me, it's me, it's me struggling with how to talk about this incredibly important subject

00:31:13.260 in a way that avoids all of the cliches that have made it so meaningless to so many people. We all kind

00:31:20.160 of vaguely want to be nice or, or we think we're good people. We've thought about it. We certainly

00:31:26.740 want other people to be nicer, but I don't know. There's only one self-help book that I can think

00:31:31.440 of that's been successful about compassion. And that book does not advertise compassion on its

00:31:38.520 cover. The book is called how to win friends and influence people. And if you read it, which I happen

00:31:43.480 to recently do is actually a book about compassion. That's been kind of inspirational for me and thinking

00:31:48.460 about like, how can you find a way to talk about these things in a way that people will actually

00:31:53.780 listen? You know, it's so funny you bring this up because just by total coincidence, I think yesterday,

00:31:58.940 the meditation I did in your app. So for the listeners, if you haven't figured it out by now,

00:32:03.340 which means you haven't been listening to my podcast, which is fine, I still forgive you.

00:32:07.260 But Dan is the co-founder of an app called 10% Happier, which along with another app that I've

00:32:12.900 talked about a lot waking up are really the cornerstones of my meditation practice.

00:32:17.720 And I've probably also talked, you've probably heard me talk about Joseph Goldstein,

00:32:22.780 Jeff Warren is a couple of the teachers that I really, really like in this app. And I think it

00:32:27.080 was just yesterday. I did a lesson, I think Joseph, I'm pretty sure it was Joseph. And it was talking

00:32:32.880 about how even your physical characteristics change in a moment of conflict, choose to do the kind

00:32:42.080 thing versus the not. So sure enough, I do my meditation in the morning. I go to the gym.

00:32:46.600 In San Diego, I have the luxury of working out at home, which I love because I can be alone. I'm

00:32:50.820 kind of alone. But in New York, I go to a big crunch gym, right? Which always puts me in a

00:32:56.160 little stressed state because I'm that guy who likes to be able to control everything. And I want

00:33:00.960 to be able to do a circuit between these two machines back and forth, back and forth. So sure

00:33:04.580 enough, I'm doing that and I'm using a machine. But when I'm off the machine, another guy sits down at

00:33:10.360 the machine. Okay, no problem. I'm a civil enough guy to go up to him and afterwards say,

00:33:14.740 Hey, do you mind if I work in with you? But he says, no, like I'm going to sit on this machine

00:33:20.060 until I'm done. And I don't want to trade. I don't want to share with you. And I said,

00:33:24.280 you realize it's a machine. We all have to do is switch the pin. And he goes, yeah, but I don't

00:33:29.040 want to. Now, again, old Peter or maybe normal Peter that would turn into an escalation. But I had

00:33:37.500 just listened to this meditation that Joseph had done that day about how my external manifestation

00:33:44.340 could change if I could be kind in that moment. And I said, okay, no problem. I'll wait till you're

00:33:50.140 done. And I just walked away and did something else. I really thought about it for the next three

00:33:55.900 or four minutes. And sure enough, A, I stopped being upset about it very quickly. And this is going to

00:34:03.140 sound crazy. But within about five minutes, I felt bad for him. I started thinking, oh, he probably

00:34:09.340 feels like a jerk now because I haven't put up any fight. I've been very kind and pleasant. And I'm

00:34:15.200 worried about him. I'm worried that this guy is over there thinking to himself what I'd be thinking

00:34:19.240 if I were in his shoes, which is why didn't I just share with this guy? So you're right. Let's be

00:34:25.360 completely transparent. This is total self-interest. Yes. I just want to feel better. I'm just tired of

00:34:30.640 feeling ashamed of myself. That's right. This is not me making this up. The Dalai Lama,

00:34:35.400 who's got a reasonably good pedigree on the issue of kindness and compassion, says that there is a

00:34:42.280 kind of selfishness that's called wise selfishness. It's the ultimate form of selfishness. It is to be

00:34:50.500 kind because you will be happier. And there's all this data that suggests not only we'll be happier,

00:34:56.180 but also healthier and more popular, as I was saying before. Nobody tells us this. And that's

00:35:03.380 why this is the book I'm working on now. And my ideas are not fully formed. So you're hearing me

00:35:09.680 speak kind of early on before I have my shtick down, which may be good, maybe bad. I don't know.

00:35:14.680 We'll have you back when the shtick is ready, but I like pre-shtick discussion.

00:35:18.440 The pre-shtick? Yeah. Well, I mean, maybe I'll figure things out by just talking to you about it.

00:35:22.580 But I really think we are, on some levels, we are selfish. So I'm trying to, we don't generally

00:35:32.220 do things unless there's a, back to my rats and a maize analogy, unless there's a pellet in it for

00:35:37.580 us. And I fear that the way kindness is discussed is like the Care Bears or some religious figure in

00:35:44.860 robes wagging his finger at you. That doesn't strike me as scalable, especially at a time where we

00:35:51.920 really need this. We've got epidemic levels of anxiety, depression, suicide, especially among

00:35:57.240 young people. And we have epidemic levels of political polarization. We've got global problems

00:36:02.880 that require cooperation, like climate change. This is the time where we actually need to start

00:36:08.340 pulling our heads out of our asses. So I'm excited to see if I can make a little contribution in this

00:36:13.140 way. How much of understanding this concept you've described do you think requires understanding

00:36:19.420 its counterpart? So, you know, you and I've spoken before about this idea of the numbing effects

00:36:26.060 of anger and grandiosity, which in the short term are incredibly numbing. I mean, they are

00:36:31.600 beautiful anesthetics for sort of the maladaptive mind. Kindness and compassion are antidotes to that.

00:36:38.540 Do you think it's necessary for a person to understand the nature of their addictions,

00:36:45.880 their shames, their drives to these other counterparts to kindness and compassion? Or do

00:36:52.500 you think you could say, no, look, you never need to explore those things. You never need to understand

00:36:56.400 those things. You don't need to start exploring the relationship you had with your grandfather

00:36:59.780 or your childhood. And instead, you can just focus on the behavior change one interaction at a time.

00:37:06.680 Well, I'll speak for myself. I think for myself, it's been very important to explore it.

00:37:11.740 And it's useful. I mean, it's like you got to figure out the pain of holding onto the hot coal,

00:37:16.780 which then it feels really good to drop it. So for me, seeing both the psychological content of,

00:37:23.940 you know, exploring my relationship to my grandfather, et cetera, et cetera, but also the

00:37:27.160 moment by moment mental processes, what it feels like to suffer right now, really help you reorient.

00:37:35.000 The fact that it feels good, there's an expression about anger from the Buddha that I think is

00:37:41.900 useful, which is that he said it has a honey tip, but a poison root. I think the prerequisite for me

00:37:49.820 for seeing that is mindfulness. So in other words, having self-awareness, mindfulness is just the

00:37:57.800 ability to know what's happening in your head at any given moment without getting carried away by it.

00:38:02.840 This is a skill that we developed through meditation, but there are other ways to do it.

00:38:07.540 But I think meditation is the cleanest, clearest way to, if a couple minutes a day of meditation

00:38:12.020 helps you have more visibility on your own inner weather, and then you're not so yanked around by

00:38:18.000 it. And I think having that mindfulness on board can show you that anger sucks. It feels bad.

00:38:25.500 It may feel good. Initially, it's a good release of energy, but then it's in your system for a while.

00:38:30.380 It takes a long time to detoxify. And same with the grandiosity. It feels off to be tooting your

00:38:37.340 own horn as much as somebody like me is prone to do. I feel now that I've got enough meditation

00:38:43.560 on board. I'm just like, it doesn't feel good when I'm being braggadocious or even subtly self-promotional.

00:38:50.440 It's not even that. To me, the really dangerous grandiosity, because that's so obvious, is the

00:38:58.660 grandiosity when I'm in the line at the airport and the TSA guy pulls my suitcase out of the line

00:39:06.820 because of no reason apparently at all and decides to take 20 minutes to come and check out what's in

00:39:14.460 it so that that means I don't get to buy lunch before I get on my flight. It's the, I'm so much

00:39:19.780 better than you. Why don't you get over here and do your job? I'm doing my job. Do you know how hard,

00:39:25.380 and you're not saying any of this to anybody, but you're thinking it, right? Like, do you know how

00:39:28.900 hard I work? Do you know the effort I put into my job? Why don't you work as hard at what you do as

00:39:34.940 what I do? And blah, blah, blah. That's the grandiosity that I think is the absolute poison. And I just think

00:39:41.620 if I'm going to be brutally honest with myself, that's the biggest struggle that I have is that

00:39:46.060 inner one-upmanship. And I mean, I love that expression about anger. I completely agree with

00:39:51.600 it. And I, you know, my therapist has shared that one with me many times and it's, you know,

00:39:57.800 we're going to talk a lot about meditation, but you're absolutely right. Mindfulness is what has

00:40:02.160 even allowed me in, in the moments of anger to realize what the half-life is of the honey.

00:40:07.060 I read a tiny bit of a book called Assholes, a Theory, and it was like a kind of an academic

00:40:13.640 treatise on assholes. And it said the quintessential asshole rallying cry is, don't you know who I am?

00:40:21.300 Yeah. And again, you may never utter those words. I don't think I've ever uttered those words.

00:40:27.440 You know, they've never come out of my mouth, but I've thought them.

00:40:30.240 Oh yeah, me too. And the half-life of the honey is so short and the shame that follows actually

00:40:37.480 precipitates the following grandiose act. Like that cycle is so vicious.

00:40:43.140 That's good that you see it. And that's really important. Seeing it is huge.

00:40:48.500 So let's go back because we're going to jump around a lot, but we go back to the meltdown.

00:40:52.880 Fast forward, your therapist finally gives you the aha moment. Your start, and I assume that he's

00:40:59.940 helping you come to the grips with, Dan, you're a bit of an addict, right? You're addicted to the

00:41:07.060 high of your job, which is soothing you. It's soothing something. Let's put aside for the moment

00:41:13.660 what's being soothed. What was the next step in your evolution to exploring this? Let me do the

00:41:20.940 following. I know there's so much we want to talk about that we won't get into it.

00:41:24.040 I'll just tell the listeners that unrelated to all of this, you'd been given an assignment at work,

00:41:29.560 which was to sort of explore and probe the growing religious movement, something that you didn't find

00:41:36.440 remotely interesting initially, but being the good soldier you are, you're sort of going through this.

00:41:43.180 And is it safe to say that the work you'd been doing in understanding religion

00:41:47.820 created kind of an opportunity for you to also start exploring the spirituality of mindfulness?

00:41:55.060 Is that a fair... Okay. I'll let you finish it in more eloquent terms.

00:41:58.760 Sure. I mean, the assignment was given right here on this floor, on the second floor of ABC News.

00:42:02.560 Was it Peter Jennings that gave the assignment to you?

00:42:04.440 Peter Jennings who made me cover faith and spirituality, which I did not want to do.

00:42:08.440 I was raised in the People's Republic of Massachusetts, not particularly interested in this kind of stuff.

00:42:13.960 I like to tell the joke about the fact that I did have a bar mitzvah, but only for the money.

00:42:18.120 So it was not on my radar as an important subject.

00:42:22.580 But it ultimately was great for me because, first of all, I learned a lot about faith and spirituality,

00:42:26.740 which was I was totally ignorant on the subject.

00:42:29.400 And I made a lot of new friends and I just brought me into parts of the world that I wouldn't have otherwise seen.

00:42:35.400 And it also ultimately brought me to meditation.

00:42:38.400 In particular, it came in the form of a self-help writer named Eckhart Tolle.

00:42:44.160 One of my colleagues here at ABC News recommended that I read one of Eckhart Tolle's books because she thought maybe he would be a good story for us.

00:42:53.320 And I read the book and I thought...

00:42:55.020 At first I was reading the book and I was like, this is fucking bullshit, like really hardcore, just awful.

00:43:02.560 And Oprah had basically anointed him.

00:43:05.260 Oh yeah, she talked about how she did this whole...

00:43:07.720 She had him on the show and then she did a whole digital series with him.

00:43:11.360 And then she told everybody that she had put copies of his books in every bedroom of every house she owns.

00:43:16.680 And then Paris Hilton was seen carrying one of his books when she went into jail to do time for DUI.

00:43:21.480 Like there was a whole moment there in like 2006, 7, 8, where Eckhart Tolle was making a big name.

00:43:27.540 He was the guru.

00:43:28.420 He was the guru.

00:43:29.040 And I was, you know, I react poorly to all of those kinds of things and his writing has a lot of grandiosity in it.

00:43:37.880 He talks about spiritual awakenings and how he had a spiritual awakening and then he lived on park benches in a state of bliss for a couple of years in London.

00:43:46.680 And he talks about vibrational fields.

00:43:48.940 There's a lot in there not to like if you're me.

00:43:50.840 I have to be honest, I couldn't read the book the first time I tried.

00:43:54.740 It's hard.

00:43:55.740 Because even though...

00:43:58.080 And looking, I should go back and reread it now.

00:44:00.420 But at the time at least, this sort of metaphysical nonsense just...

00:44:07.060 It was just too much.

00:44:08.100 Like I just couldn't...

00:44:08.900 It became such a barrier to entry.

00:44:10.860 I agree completely.

00:44:12.700 It reads better to me now.

00:44:14.560 Yeah, I suspect it might as well to me.

00:44:16.220 But what he does do when he's lucid is describe our inner lives in an incredibly incisive manner.

00:44:25.660 He talks about how we have an ego, which he's not talking about...

00:44:30.020 The way ego is used in our culture now is like, oh yeah, that guy's got a big ego.

00:44:34.540 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:44:35.100 He's a jerk.

00:44:35.940 But he means that we all have this running dialogue, this inner narrator, this voice that chases you out of bed in the morning and is yammering at you all day long.

00:44:44.820 And it's just blah, blah, blah all day long.

00:44:47.660 Thinking about the past or thinking about the future to the detriment of whatever's happening right now.

00:44:53.000 Our mutual friend Sam Harris has this joke about when he considers the voice in his head, he feels like he's been hijacked by the most boring person alive who just says the same shit over and over.

00:45:04.060 Most of it negative.

00:45:05.640 All of it self-referential.

00:45:07.580 And Tolley's argument is when you're not aware of this nonstop conversation, it owns you.

00:45:12.600 That to me was incredibly powerful.

00:45:14.100 First of all, because it just seemed intuitively true.

00:45:17.140 And second, because it described or it explained the most embarrassing moment of my life, my panic attack.

00:45:23.260 The voice in my head was why I went off to cover wars without thinking about the consequences.

00:45:27.340 Came home, got depressed, was insufficiently self-aware to even know it, and then blindly self-medicated.

00:45:33.660 And it all just blew up in my face.

00:45:35.920 So that was...

00:45:36.860 Reading Tolley's book was incredibly powerful to me.

00:45:39.760 My problem with Tolley, and I did ultimately go interview...

00:45:42.220 You did do an interview with him in Toronto, if I recall.

00:45:44.860 Your hometown, I flew to Toronto and interviewed the man.

00:45:48.340 And first thing I asked him was...

00:45:50.420 It was interesting to me because this is the first time in my whole covering with the religion beat where I felt like I had skin in the game.

00:45:56.160 I was really excited.

00:45:57.060 You wanted to know.

00:45:57.900 I wanted to know.

00:45:58.800 I wanted what this guy had.

00:46:00.580 By the way, I didn't think he was full...

00:46:01.940 I didn't think he was a charlatan, and I had interviewed many charlatans.

00:46:05.240 Yep.

00:46:05.820 But he was weird.

00:46:07.140 Yeah.

00:46:07.940 And frustrating.

00:46:10.180 The first thing I did was I said, what do you do about the voice in the head?

00:46:13.280 Clearly, you're saying something that seems to me to be indisputably true, except for I don't...

00:46:18.940 How do you actually tame it?

00:46:21.040 You've acknowledged that there's a jerk sitting in the corner.

00:46:23.540 How do you make him stop talking?

00:46:24.900 There's no practical advice in the book, so I thought he maybe would be able to reveal his wisdom to me in person.

00:46:30.280 And the first thing he said was, take one conscious breath.

00:46:35.160 And the voice in my head was like, what the fuck does that mean?

00:46:38.080 What are you talking about?

00:46:39.540 And I asked him a bunch and a bunch, over and over and over, and he just didn't say anything that made sense.

00:46:45.300 Like, I understood the individual words he was using, but not in the order in which he used them.

00:46:50.360 So I left that interview quite frustrated.

00:46:53.480 I noodled, in the interest of time, I won't go into too much detail,

00:46:57.080 but I spent a little bit of time noodling around in the self-help world generally.

00:47:01.020 Your story about Deepak is pretty awesome.

00:47:04.040 At least that one's my favorite.

00:47:05.760 Okay, so Deepak and I started hanging around a little bit, and I like Deepak.

00:47:10.120 Deepak's actually more relatable in person than Eckhart Tolle.

00:47:14.440 But Deepak talks in this way that's like...

00:47:17.220 It literally makes no sense.

00:47:18.560 He uses, casually used the term with me one day, the transformational vortex to the infinite.

00:47:25.840 That's just the kind of shit he just says all the time.

00:47:28.780 So he was just even more confusing.

00:47:31.180 And I definitely didn't believe he was enlightened, because he was checking his phone all the time,

00:47:36.500 and in nonstop, in perpetual motion, always hustling.

00:47:40.700 Which, by the way, I don't say as a criticism.

00:47:43.340 I really liked him, but he just seemed as miserable as I was in terms of professional desire.

00:47:47.740 At least Eckhart Tolle seemed like blissed out.

00:47:50.240 Anyway, I ultimately realized, and Deepak helped me realize this,

00:47:54.020 that the mechanism one can use for taming the voice in the head is meditation.

00:47:59.220 And I was not positively predisposed to the idea of meditation,

00:48:04.800 because I felt like it...

00:48:07.640 It comes with some baggage.

00:48:08.420 Yeah, I mean, it was...

00:48:10.060 I often say it was...

00:48:11.820 It is the victim of the worst marketing campaign for anything ever,

00:48:15.260 because the traditional artwork shows people, you know,

00:48:18.240 sitting in an impossible position, floating off into the cosmos.

00:48:23.020 The rest of us sit to meditate, and either we're in a bunch of pain,

00:48:26.120 or we're noticing that we're distracted, and we don't feel at all like that,

00:48:29.200 and therefore we think we're failed meditators.

00:48:31.520 In fact, the experience of meditation is this constant humiliation,

00:48:35.700 where you sit, you try to focus on one thing at a time.

00:48:38.620 Usually it's the feeling of your breath coming in and going out,

00:48:41.100 and then you're distracted over and over and over again.

00:48:43.960 But the game in meditation is simply to notice you've become distracted,

00:48:47.720 and in the moment that you notice you've become distracted,

00:48:52.020 throw a little party for yourself,

00:48:53.260 because you are waking up from the automatic pilot,

00:48:57.660 the daydream of the hallucination of your life,

00:49:01.320 this constant discursive thinking, and then you're actually here, now, paying attention.

00:49:07.100 And so the whole game of meditation is not to stop thinking, which is impossible.

00:49:11.460 It's to notice when you've become distracted and start again and again and again,

00:49:15.340 and finding out that the process was that simple,

00:49:18.060 and that there's an enormous amount of science

00:49:19.840 that strongly suggests that it's really good for you.

00:49:22.720 I don't want to overly hype the science,

00:49:24.140 because I think that it's still in its early stages,

00:49:27.320 but it really certainly looks like a little bit of meditation every day can do quite a bit of good.

00:49:32.900 And that is what got me over the hump to start.

00:49:35.540 Have you read the book Altered Traits?

00:49:37.120 Yes.

00:49:38.060 I think that that book does such a great job explaining

00:49:41.640 that we don't meditate for the state, we meditate for the trait.

00:49:46.440 And that's hard to explain to people until they actually try it.

00:49:49.440 There's an app out there, there are many,

00:49:51.460 that are tracking your heart rate and your heart rate variability

00:49:54.720 and levels of calmness during meditation.

00:49:58.740 And I've tried these apps and come to the realization that,

00:50:01.700 at least for me, they don't make any sense,

00:50:03.340 because I don't find meditation generally to be that enjoyable.

00:50:07.200 Sometimes I do, by the way.

00:50:08.340 Like, you know, we talked about how I'm fasting this week.

00:50:10.760 Something about fasting makes meditation really amazing.

00:50:14.060 I think it sharpens the mind.

00:50:14.960 Yeah, there's just a much deeper connection.

00:50:17.180 But there are many days when my meditation is very difficult.

00:50:21.620 It's really hard to do everything that you just described.

00:50:25.380 So that's the state, right?

00:50:27.420 It's not a blissful state at all.

00:50:29.660 But what I'm interested in is, let's say if I meditate for 20 minutes in a day,

00:50:33.180 I'm not meditating for those 20 minutes.

00:50:35.440 I'm meditating for the other 23 hours and 40 minutes.

00:50:38.960 Those are the traits that I want.

00:50:40.600 And therefore, to me at least, an app that was helping me assess the change in my state

00:50:46.860 during 20 minutes is not nearly as interesting as a reflection on how is this going to help

00:50:52.140 me act the next time the TSA guy seemingly singles me out, which of course is a ridiculous

00:50:58.220 thought.

00:50:58.800 But you know what I mean?

00:50:59.820 I've always found this distinction helpful.

00:51:01.400 And by the way, going back to the whole drug thing, I view the entire distinction on

00:51:07.760 drugs to be somewhat arbitrary, right?

00:51:09.900 Like, is cocaine generally a drug that is good or bad?

00:51:12.780 In my opinion, very bad.

00:51:14.540 Why?

00:51:15.160 Because it's a drug that only impacts your state, but not your traits in a favorable way.

00:51:19.920 So it gives you a positive state and then a negative set of traits in the long run.

00:51:25.160 Have you ever been around somebody doing coke?

00:51:26.640 It's not that positive.

00:51:28.100 Oh, yeah.

00:51:29.080 Fair enough.

00:51:29.760 They're pitching you on new business ideas.

00:51:31.260 Yeah.

00:51:32.440 They've got this awesome new cat food idea.

00:51:34.460 It's the best cat food.

00:51:35.580 And conversely, when you look at things like psychedelics, psilocybin, MDMA, which is not

00:51:40.640 technically, I mean, sort of a quasi-psychedelic.

00:51:42.740 But I think these drugs, plants, or maybe lack of a better word, when done correctly under

00:51:49.340 these therapeutic settings are remarkable, not so much because of the state, which they

00:51:53.740 clearly alter, but much more because they can change the traits outside of them, which

00:51:59.220 is something, by the way, the authors of altered traits argue against.

00:52:02.320 Their view is that meditation is the only way to use the state to change the trait.

00:52:08.540 But that's sort of another issue.

00:52:10.080 So kind of listening to you talk about that, I realize this is a distinction that it can't

00:52:17.560 be stated enough to someone who's new to meditation, which I'm hoping some people listening

00:52:21.180 are, because it's easy to get discouraged.

00:52:23.340 It's music to my ears to hear you say that.

00:52:26.440 Richie Davidson and Danny Goldman wrote that book.

00:52:28.980 They actually sat in the chair you're sitting in.

00:52:30.720 Now we're doing this at ABC News in the room where I record my podcast.

00:52:34.680 And they've both been on my show many times, together and separately.

00:52:38.640 And I think it's an excellent point.

00:52:41.520 And it's what trips up so many meditators, because they sit to meditate and they think they

00:52:45.760 should feel a certain way.

00:52:47.100 And then they conclude that they're failures because they're not feeling a certain way.

00:52:52.400 But the point of meditation is not to feel any specific way.

00:52:56.060 It's to feel whatever you're feeling right now so that you learn how not to let your feelings

00:53:02.120 push you around.

00:53:03.960 And yes, of course, the real world application of that is that you're better at life.

00:53:10.280 We don't meditate, as is often said, we don't meditate to get better at meditation.

00:53:14.740 Meditate to get better at life.

00:53:16.020 Now, just to be clear, though, over a period of time, as you and some people get to this

00:53:21.920 point and some others don't.

00:53:23.640 But if you're getting to the point where you're starting to get actually quite serious about

00:53:26.940 the meditation practice, at some point, actually, you might want a teacher because getting

00:53:32.180 better at the meditation itself actually can have lots of benefits.

00:53:37.000 That doesn't mean the meditation is going to be fun.

00:53:39.020 It just means that you can technically understand the nuances of your own mind and the nuances of

00:53:45.240 various practices at differing levels.

00:53:48.340 And that, I think, can have a positive effect on your practice and on your life.

00:53:54.200 And it creates a kind of a virtuous cycle.

00:53:56.160 I'm getting ahead of myself here.

00:53:57.560 The thing to know primarily for meditators is don't get hung up on feeling calm or blissful

00:54:03.640 or anything like that.

00:54:04.440 But just tune in on your ability to see clearly whatever is happening right now.

00:54:10.080 But if what is a distraction?

00:54:11.820 Is it knee pain?

00:54:12.780 Is it an itch?

00:54:14.140 Whatever it is, pleasant or unpleasant, because what we're training over time is the ability

00:54:19.060 to notice that anger has come upon us off the cushion in our regular lives.

00:54:23.840 And can you resist the urge to say something that's going to ruin the next 48 hours of your

00:54:28.200 marriage?

00:54:28.540 That's where the rubber hits the road.

00:54:31.220 It's so powerful.

00:54:32.240 And I kind of remember the first time I was able to see the train coming before it hit.

00:54:39.220 It still hit, to be clear.

00:54:41.060 I wasn't able to stop the train.

00:54:42.780 But the fact that I realized, oh, the train started over there and it rolled there, bang.

00:54:49.580 Versus always just seeing impact, impact, impact.

00:54:52.520 The glass half full approach of that realization is, okay, maybe the next time you could slow the

00:54:57.840 train down and what if one day you could stop the train?

00:55:00.780 The train hitting something being a metaphor for you actually saying that thing that's going

00:55:05.260 to nuke that relationship.

00:55:07.400 Let's pause for a moment and explain the distinction maybe between mindfulness and being present.

00:55:14.740 I believe my children, especially the two little boys, are very present.

00:55:20.560 I don't think they're anywhere but in the present.

00:55:23.180 I absolutely don't think they have a shred of mindfulness in them.

00:55:29.740 How would you explain that distinction to people?

00:55:32.240 The way my meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein, talks about it is like a Labrador.

00:55:35.960 It's not dissimilar from-

00:55:37.280 Not dissimilar from a four-year-old.

00:55:38.420 Yeah.

00:55:38.720 I have a four-year-old boy myself.

00:55:40.680 You look at a Labrador, she or he is pretty present.

00:55:44.440 Which is to say, they're probably not thinking about what they're going to eat tomorrow.

00:55:48.120 Yes.

00:55:48.380 And they're not thinking about the dog that barked at them yesterday.

00:55:50.700 Yes.

00:55:51.280 They're not a lot of neuroses.

00:55:53.240 They're not swept up in brewing past decisions or fretting over the future or whatever.

00:55:57.620 They're just right there doing whatever, eating the kibble, sniffing some other dog's butt,

00:56:02.540 chewing your sweat socks, pooping on the rug. 0.87

00:56:04.660 They're right there for all of that.

00:56:06.880 Being present is necessary but not sufficient for mindfulness.

00:56:10.220 So you need to be present.

00:56:11.420 But then there's a metacognition that also happens, which is you know that you're in

00:56:17.540 the present moment and you know that you know you're in the present moment.

00:56:21.400 We are classified as homo sapiens sapiens, the one who thinks and knows he or she thinks.

00:56:29.380 And that second sapiens has atrophied over time because nobody bothers to point out to us

00:56:34.260 that we're capable of this.

00:56:35.140 We have this ability to step out of the stream of our consciousness and notice, yeah, I'm

00:56:41.660 having all these thoughts.

00:56:42.540 I'm having all these urges.

00:56:43.540 I'm having all these emotions.

00:56:46.160 And to not be carried away by them.

00:56:48.560 And by the way, you're not going to step out of the stream forever.

00:56:51.700 You can just do this for a nanosecond at a time just to see quickly, oh, yeah, I'm having

00:56:56.580 all of these racing thoughts.

00:56:58.240 That's homo sapiens sapiens, knowing and knowing that you're knowing.

00:57:02.200 Dogs can't do that. 0.60

00:57:03.160 Your boys can, but it's not very well developed.

00:57:06.620 Mine can, but we'll get them to work on it.

00:57:09.340 My son last night was aggressively for 10 minutes trying to get me to smell his socks.

00:57:19.380 And he was like, Daddy, they don't smell that bad.

00:57:21.960 I'm telling you the truth.

00:57:22.820 I'm like, dude, you're lying.

00:57:25.140 And I know this because you have the same face I have and I'm looking at it.

00:57:28.200 And that's how I lie.

00:57:29.140 And yeah, it was like karma.

00:57:31.220 My wife was dying because I'm always messing with my wife. 1.00

00:57:33.740 It's one of the hallmarks of our relationship with me, just kind of being a jokester with

00:57:37.440 her.

00:57:37.700 She's like, this is karma.

00:57:39.160 Your son is you.

00:57:42.320 So what was your first foray into a mindfulness-based practice of meditation?

00:57:48.100 So in this period of time when I was checking out Eckhart Tolle and Deepak, my wife gave

00:57:54.220 me a book by a guy named Dr. Mark Epstein.

00:57:57.140 Amazing human.

00:57:58.380 Who you've had on the podcast twice, I believe.

00:58:00.140 Yeah.

00:58:00.600 And he's a real friend.

00:58:02.340 I read the book and I realized, oh, wow.

00:58:04.980 Everything that I like about Eckhart Tolle was lifted without attribution from somebody

00:58:09.540 known as the Buddha.

00:58:10.780 Epstein's books are all about the overlap between psychology.

00:58:13.020 He's a practicing psychiatrist here in New York City, and he's written these beautiful

00:58:17.360 books about the overlap between psychology and Buddhism.

00:58:19.760 I didn't know anything about Buddhism, but it was very clear that all the stuff about

00:58:24.100 the voice in the head, which the Buddha refers to as the monkey mind, really is thousands

00:58:29.420 of years old.

00:58:30.780 Much of this philosophy honed by a guy heretofore known to me as a lawn ornament.

00:58:35.360 But the Buddha is a fascinating guy and really, really smart.

00:58:39.340 And the Buddha that you're talking about is actually kind of different from the big bellied

00:58:44.760 lawn ornament, isn't he?

00:58:45.960 Aren't they different entities altogether?

00:58:47.920 The big fat guy is known as the laughing Buddha, I think.

00:58:50.820 Okay.

00:58:51.120 But that's not the Buddha.

00:58:51.880 That's not the historical Buddha.

00:58:53.500 But there are plenty.

00:58:54.600 If you go to a spa that probably have the skinny one, that's the Buddha.

00:58:58.760 But they didn't make any representational art of the Buddha until hundreds of years after

00:59:02.480 he died.

00:59:03.040 When did he live?

00:59:04.400 He lived 2,600 years ago.

00:59:05.780 So, 600-ish BC and lived where?

00:59:11.040 India?

00:59:11.200 And I think he was born in what is now Nepal, but then was all over India.

00:59:16.460 And talk a little bit about his path or what we know or what we believe.

00:59:20.080 Well, the legend is, because again, we think there was a guy named the Buddha, but what's

00:59:26.200 been passed down to us is quite sort of mythological in terms of his biography.

00:59:30.580 So, we know his name was purported to be Siddhartha Gautama, and he was born, according to the

00:59:37.020 legend, into, he was the son of a king.

00:59:39.380 He was a prince, like a kind of a minor king.

00:59:42.020 And his mother died in childbirth or shortly thereafter.

00:59:45.860 And some wise man told his father, this kid's either going to be a great ruler or a sage.

00:59:53.260 And the father really did not want him to be a spiritual leader.

00:59:57.580 He wanted him to take over the job of being a king.

01:00:00.200 And so, built this world for him where he would be not exposed to any suffering.

01:00:05.920 So, just, you know, fanned by palm leaves and fed whatever the best cuts of the goat and

01:00:13.320 surrounded by women and musicians, et cetera, et cetera. 0.99

01:00:15.780 Again, this is the legend.

01:00:16.600 And at some point, he gets out for a tour of the local village or the local city, and

01:00:22.840 normally they clean everything up somehow.

01:00:25.160 But he sees the suffering.

01:00:25.780 He sees what are called the three, I think, three heavenly messengers.

01:00:31.000 He sees an old person, a sick person, and a dead person.

01:00:35.520 And he realizes that this whole thing, he realizes something that we all should know, everything's

01:00:41.980 impermanent.

01:00:43.220 Suffering is a part of life.

01:00:44.480 And if you try to pretend otherwise, you're going to suffer even more.

01:00:49.140 Then he runs off into the forest where he spends six years in these...

01:00:54.540 He's in his 20s here?

01:00:55.440 Yes.

01:00:55.740 And he has a kid who he's named Rahula, which is Pali, I believe, for fetter. 0.93

01:01:03.220 So, speaks to what kind of dad he was.

01:01:05.140 He viewed his kid as a sort of an impediment.

01:01:08.140 Flawed human being.

01:01:09.440 Again, this is all legend here, but runs off into the forest, spends six years studying with

01:01:14.460 great meditation masters in the fashion at the time was to do this self-mortification thing

01:01:21.040 where you like inflict a lot of pain, you don't eat, you stand in funny positions, you

01:01:26.240 hang upside down, whatever.

01:01:27.800 And he was doing...

01:01:28.660 He became the best at this.

01:01:31.020 He ultimately realized that this is...

01:01:32.800 He was still suffering.

01:01:34.480 So, one day he actually ate a little bit and stopped starving himself and sat down under

01:01:43.180 the Bodhi tree, a big famous tree in Bodhgaya, India, and said, I'm not getting up until I'm

01:01:48.720 enlightened.

01:01:49.640 Again, this is all legend.

01:01:51.260 He sat there for a long time, ultimately got enlightened and had a big battle in his head

01:01:56.000 with the God of desire, and he transcended greed, hatred, and confusion, and went off

01:02:02.800 and delivered his...

01:02:04.540 After he got enlightened, he went off and found some of his former monks and delivered

01:02:09.260 his seminal speech, which was the Four Noble Truths, which are, one, that life is suffering,

01:02:15.480 which is a mistranslation.

01:02:16.660 Suffering is a bit of a mistranslation, but the idea is that everything is impermanent.

01:02:20.920 If you try to cling to things that will not last, you will suffer.

01:02:23.820 So, life is unsatisfactory, inherently, because nothing lasts.

01:02:30.200 Two, the root of that suffering is desire or thirst, this kind of insatiability we have.

01:02:37.960 And three, there's a way out of this.

01:02:40.080 And four, the Eightfold Path, which is the way out of it, which includes meditation practices,

01:02:45.500 ethical practices, like right livelihood, right speech, right action, and then a bunch of

01:02:51.440 meditation techniques, like mindfulness and philosophical stuff about, like, how to view

01:02:56.900 the world.

01:02:57.980 That's Buddhism 101.

01:02:59.580 Yeah, I mean, does it kind of amaze you that something that came to an individual or even

01:03:06.700 individuals, plural, 2,600 years ago could prove to be so relevant today?

01:03:11.820 Yeah, well, so, I mean, my question is whether the story that I just told you is in any way

01:03:16.640 true.

01:03:17.360 Is it possible that this philosophy was...

01:03:20.280 It's possible this was just built upon and evolving over time.

01:03:23.220 Well, first of all...

01:03:23.960 It seems probable to me.

01:03:25.300 For sure, the Buddha, if he really was a guy, and I think he probably was, there was

01:03:29.860 somebody in the Buddha, he was standing on other people's shoulders.

01:03:32.500 But he had some real innovations, including mindfulness.

01:03:35.920 I guess what's amazing to me is, regardless of whether it was one guy, many guys, how long

01:03:40.880 it took, et cetera, et cetera, there's no doubt that what you just said, the Four Noble Truths,

01:03:46.700 were devised in a period of time when no one could have imagined or predicted the world we

01:03:53.680 live in today.

01:03:54.840 And yet here we are in a world today, and it's important to take a step back here and think

01:03:59.180 about this through the lens of evolution, right?

01:04:01.000 As a species, we are no different today than we were 2,600 years ago.

01:04:05.020 I mean, 2,600 years represents less than 1% of our genetic journey, identical species.

01:04:13.180 But if you think about the world 200 years ago, no electricity, right?

01:04:18.640 No irrigation, no sewer, no nothing, nothing, nothing.

01:04:21.580 And you think about the world today, again, not just 200 years later, but call it 2,600

01:04:26.200 years later, you simply couldn't imagine.

01:04:28.720 Like, there is no one with an imagination that could have come up with what we're going to

01:04:32.400 be living in today.

01:04:33.200 And yet, in some ways, what you just said is more important today.

01:04:39.000 I can't imagine it was as important 2,600 years ago.

01:04:42.780 But it also tells you about the perennial nature of human suffering.

01:04:46.360 Which is...

01:04:47.000 It's incredible.

01:04:47.800 It's unbelievable.

01:04:48.480 Yes.

01:04:48.960 But the Buddha had good news.

01:04:51.580 It wasn't some death-defying dogma where, you know, like, I can...

01:04:56.360 At least not the way I understand or practice.

01:04:58.100 It wasn't telling you that you can have eternal life or if you just believe everything I say

01:05:02.620 unquestioningly.

01:05:03.940 It was more like, look, don't take...

01:05:05.300 It's explicitly said.

01:05:06.420 Don't take anything I'm saying on faith value.

01:05:08.680 Try it out for yourself.

01:05:09.520 Here's some meditation techniques.

01:05:11.160 And you might be able to reduce the amount of suffering you're experiencing, much of it

01:05:17.440 kind of voluntary, in the face of life's inevitable vexations and vicissitudes.

01:05:23.260 And I have been trying this out for 10 years.

01:05:25.800 And in my experience, there's a lot to it.

01:05:28.300 And the science that has looked at it, too, has also been interesting.

01:05:31.300 So how did you go from the meeting with Mark or the meetings with Mark?

01:05:35.280 Because I know you talk about multiple meetings and just to say, I'm going to give this thing

01:05:38.960 a try.

01:05:39.720 And then ultimately, what I really want to hear about is your first extended meditation

01:05:44.160 retreat, which is something I'm so fascinated by.

01:05:46.100 Oh, the retreat.

01:05:46.940 Yeah.

01:05:47.160 Well, but even before that, because you'd obviously been practicing meditation before you went on

01:05:50.380 the retreat.

01:05:50.780 So what was the...

01:05:53.060 For a skeptical guy like you, what got you over the hump of, all right, Dan, you're going

01:05:58.440 to put your Blackberry down.

01:05:59.520 You're going to sit in this position, and you're going to focus on your breath.

01:06:06.060 Like, how did you make that leap?

01:06:07.580 Or was it relatively easy to make after everything you'd been through in the journey?

01:06:12.700 No, I mean, I was really intrigued by Buddhism as a philosophy.

01:06:16.320 I cannot overstate the power for me of that initial Eckhart Tolle lifting of the curtain

01:06:22.580 on my own mind.

01:06:23.700 Like, wow, the voice in my head is an asshole.

01:06:27.460 And I'm suffering all the time as a consequence of this.

01:06:31.220 And then the Buddha's philosophy, which I think says it way better, was also interesting.

01:06:37.000 I was just reading lots of books about it, talking to Mark about it.

01:06:40.100 And the meditation practice as the corrective is just, it's unavoidable as soon as you start

01:06:46.340 exploring the space.

01:06:47.160 Mark Foley, in some ways, is really credited for being the first person that showed you

01:06:52.240 what we would now, as people who meditate, take for granted, which is there's a thinker

01:06:58.160 of thoughts.

01:06:59.460 Those thoughts are not us.

01:07:00.600 Yes.

01:07:01.380 And neither is the thinker.

01:07:02.520 Yeah.

01:07:02.840 Yeah, exactly.

01:07:03.600 That's the transition that's very difficult, which maybe if we have time to, I'd love to

01:07:06.600 get into that.

01:07:07.240 So you're basically saying, look, I was already so primed because I realized the most important

01:07:12.740 of the truths, the how to tame that.

01:07:18.140 I was so thirsty for that, that basically when someone I came to trust and respect, like

01:07:23.300 Mark Epstein, who was completely rigorous, completely righteous, not a fraudster, when

01:07:29.220 he basically said, look, this is just a practice.

01:07:31.280 You're just going to start doing this thing.

01:07:32.980 That was an easy step.

01:07:34.280 I wouldn't say it was easy, but it got me closer.

01:07:36.880 Well, conceptually easier.

01:07:37.980 That and also seeing the science.

01:07:39.420 The science was a huge deal for me.

01:07:41.000 And when it just became obvious, oh, I can lower my blood pressure.

01:07:43.360 You know, I can boost my immune system.

01:07:45.420 There's all these brain scans that show that you can have an impact on your prefrontal cortex

01:07:49.680 and your amygdala.

01:07:50.580 And that was all very compelling too.

01:07:52.360 You know what's really funny, just as a sort of aside, for as much as I obsess over data and

01:07:58.440 everything I do, whether it's this type of exercise, this type of nutrition, blah, blah,

01:08:01.720 blah, blah.

01:08:01.940 The science has had the least impact on my interest in meditation relative to anything

01:08:07.640 I've ever done.

01:08:08.680 In fact, I would argue that if you told me meditation raised my blood pressure 10 points,

01:08:14.020 I would still do it for the benefits on the reduction of my suffering.

01:08:19.440 And I would just figure out more drugs to take to lower my blood pressure to compensate

01:08:23.280 for it.

01:08:23.600 Like I literally couldn't care less about that science, which is not to be dismissive of it.

01:08:28.420 No.

01:08:28.780 It's just to say that I don't care about any of that.

01:08:32.240 I care about one thing because there are an infinite number of ways to lower my blood

01:08:35.960 pressure, you know, do X, Y, and Z.

01:08:38.800 There's only one way I know about to understand the nature of my mind, which is an awful, awful

01:08:45.360 demon.

01:08:45.720 But I strongly, strongly, strongly, strongly agree with you.

01:08:49.160 I use the science primarily, if not exclusively, as an evangelical tool because I know how powerful

01:08:58.540 it was for me as a skeptic.

01:09:00.760 Oh, yeah.

01:09:02.160 You know, even if I don't believe this thing's going to make me happier, it apparently does

01:09:06.940 this other stuff for me and I'm always trying to optimize.

01:09:09.760 So, might as well do it for that reason.

01:09:12.560 My experience, the science gets people over the hump and then they no longer care because

01:09:16.760 once you've done it for six weeks or so and you realize you're less of a shithead, you

01:09:20.700 don't care if your prefrontal cortex might look different in an MRI.

01:09:24.240 That's utterly irrelevant.

01:09:25.980 Right.

01:09:26.180 So, for me, it's really useful because my job is to get people to meditate and science is

01:09:32.060 enormously helpful there.

01:09:33.320 Anyway, it was helpful for me back in this stage in 2009 and ultimately, I was on a beach

01:09:39.460 vacation with my wife and some friends.

01:09:41.000 We had a house at the beach and I was reading yet another book about this stuff.

01:09:45.220 I was kind of, I think for 10 or 11 years now, I've read no books other than books on

01:09:49.220 meditation and Buddhism.

01:09:51.040 Will you read my book when it comes out?

01:09:52.480 I will.

01:09:52.920 I kind of count that.

01:09:54.780 So, maybe happiness would be a better way to say that.

01:09:58.380 Or self-improvement in some way.

01:10:00.180 Self-improvement, yeah.

01:10:01.060 Although I love novels.

01:10:01.960 I think I've only read one in that whole time.

01:10:05.240 Me too, by the way.

01:10:06.220 Yeah.

01:10:06.420 I stopped reading fiction in 1999.

01:10:10.020 So, that's 20 years ago.

01:10:11.500 But I, three years ago, read The Alchemist as the first purview back into fiction.

01:10:15.620 But that's kind of a, isn't that kind of a spiritual?

01:10:18.340 It's bigger than fiction, yeah.

01:10:19.780 But there's so much good fiction on television that I feel like I'm getting that.

01:10:24.100 You're getting that described.

01:10:25.040 Yes.

01:10:26.060 So, anyway, I set my BlackBerry down because this was 2009.

01:10:29.700 And I went into the bedroom where I was staying with my wife, closed the door.

01:10:34.080 I didn't want anybody to see me because this was before meditation was cool.

01:10:36.740 I did not want to admit to anybody I was doing this.

01:10:38.920 And I kind of sat on the floor, set a timer, and I tried to watch my breath coming in and

01:10:44.720 going out, going in and going out.

01:10:46.740 And immediately, there was like a million thoughts, you know, where do gerbils run wild, blah, blah, blah.

01:10:51.340 I was going to actually bring in my copy of your book.

01:10:54.200 I still have, you know, the hardcover first thing that came out.

01:10:56.280 And I was going to do it just to read that.

01:10:59.760 That's one of the funniest parts of the book.

01:11:02.120 And you do it, I think, three times in the book.

01:11:04.560 You do the, these are my thoughts.

01:11:07.080 And I remember the first time reading that, how hard I laughed thinking, I'm not the only

01:11:11.380 one.

01:11:12.020 Like, I'm not the only one whose mind is an idiot.

01:11:17.620 Yeah.

01:11:17.940 Just, just an abject idiot.

01:11:20.340 Well, I think the fact that both of us share an affection for Fletch speaks to the kind of

01:11:24.360 humor that we, yeah.

01:11:27.200 It's just like, it's like a torrent of thoughts.

01:11:29.600 Yes.

01:11:30.460 A torrent.

01:11:30.820 And they're like, how ridiculous they are.

01:11:32.760 Yeah.

01:11:32.920 How ridiculous they are.

01:11:35.220 It's amazing.

01:11:35.940 I get some, like my best jokes in meditation.

01:11:38.660 And then, you know, I share them with my wife who just says, you are an idiot. 1.00

01:11:42.940 And my son who also thinks I'm a moron.

01:11:45.320 You can, if you have a sense of humor about it, which I think is really important, the

01:11:48.840 kind of grandiosity and randomness and negativity and ceaseless self-referentiality of it can be

01:11:57.820 kind of funny.

01:11:58.720 So that first experience was humbling, but I actually got up after the five minutes thinking,

01:12:02.400 wow, I suck at this.

01:12:04.060 But.

01:12:04.400 But you saw.

01:12:05.220 Oh, yeah.

01:12:05.840 You saw a light.

01:12:06.780 Oh, absolutely.

01:12:07.420 I knew this was, this was serious.

01:12:09.320 So this is, this is big.

01:12:10.480 This is a, at this point, almost a three-year journey.

01:12:13.640 Didn't this, I know the panic attack was in 04, but was it 06 that you really in earnest

01:12:18.640 started this quest to find something out or?

01:12:22.220 No, I actually think, I think, so 04 was the panic attack and I think it wasn't until 08

01:12:27.220 that I encountered Tully and then it was a year later that I got to meditation.

01:12:31.540 Okay, got it.

01:12:32.160 So only for the sake of time, though, I wish we could tell every detail of the story.

01:12:37.080 How long until you took what I consider one of the most remarkable leaps to do a silent 0.95

01:12:43.020 retreat?

01:12:43.660 A year.

01:12:44.220 A year.

01:12:44.340 But I want to be clear.

01:12:46.280 I often, I rarely talk about the meditation retreat because I worry, as somebody whose

01:12:52.580 job it is to appeal to skeptics, that the skeptic hears, oh, well, this guy went on a meditation

01:12:57.480 retreat.

01:12:57.820 I'm never going to do that.

01:12:59.660 Therefore, I'm never going to meditate.

01:13:01.400 So in my world, here's what I would say.

01:13:03.700 I routinely fast for seven days at a time, but I don't expect any of my patients to do

01:13:10.620 it.

01:13:11.160 And I don't think you have to do this.

01:13:13.320 I think, you know, one can do a whole bunch of other things that approximate 80% of that

01:13:17.920 value.

01:13:18.560 So through the lens of, we're not telling anybody that they have to go on a seven day or 10 day

01:13:23.780 or 14 day silent retreat, though I'm infinitely curious and would like to talk about it.

01:13:28.220 You should do it.

01:13:28.800 Yeah.

01:13:29.180 There are moments that I go back to remembering reading your book the first time.

01:13:33.040 And one of the most powerful parts of what you wrote about is something that occurred

01:13:39.440 during that retreat.

01:13:40.240 So that's sort of why I want to kind of dig into that.

01:13:42.400 There was something you wrote about that blew my mind.

01:13:44.620 And at the time I read it, I couldn't understand what you were talking about.

01:13:47.800 And even though today I still have never experienced it, I now can comprehend it.

01:13:52.840 Which part?

01:13:53.120 It was like day five or six when you actually heard the wings of the hummingbird flap.

01:14:00.520 Again, when you said that, I was like, he must be making that up or he was imagining that.

01:14:06.180 But I've had moments, like when I do walking meditations, which are great in your app,

01:14:10.520 by the way, I'm just going to plug 10% half here all day long.

01:14:13.760 My investors think.

01:14:14.880 But I think Jeff Warren does a great guided walking meditation.

01:14:19.080 And I think I even talked about this with Sam Harris on that podcast.

01:14:22.780 It was the first time I noticed that when you walk, you can actually feel the wind on your finger as your hand swings forward.

01:14:30.240 Never know.

01:14:30.760 How could I have ever?

01:14:31.980 I remember thinking to myself, how have I been walking all this time and never feeling that?

01:14:36.120 And then the sounds you could start to pick up.

01:14:39.940 Sometimes I would just do outdoor, like I would do a morning meditation outside, not walking, but still.

01:14:46.060 And I couldn't believe the sounds you could pick up.

01:14:48.180 So at least now I'm at the point where I can actually imagine what you're saying.

01:14:51.960 But then, of course, to think, well, what would six days of silence produce?

01:14:57.120 So, one, how did you decide to take that leap of faith?

01:15:00.420 And did you view that as more part of your personal development or part of your professional?

01:15:05.040 I'm going to take this story to its most extreme conclusion.

01:15:08.520 Both, but a big dose of the latter.

01:15:10.620 I think that should be comforting to the listener who's thinking, you know, maybe I'll do this.

01:15:15.380 Maybe I'll do a couple minutes a day.

01:15:16.220 You are to meditation what I kind of feel like I am to fasting, which is it's my job to sort of see what the boundaries are so that, A, nobody has to go past them.

01:15:25.600 And, B, I have a better view of what the landscape is.

01:15:28.340 That's a pretty good comp.

01:15:30.520 So there were two people who were really influential in terms of getting me to do this.

01:15:35.380 One was both of whom have come up, Mark Epstein.

01:15:38.320 And Joseph.

01:15:38.760 And, no, actually, I didn't know Joseph yet.

01:15:40.860 Oh, that's right, because Joseph was the teacher there.

01:15:42.560 Was the teacher, and then Sam Harris.

01:15:44.200 Yes.

01:15:44.540 So Sam, I met Sam Harris, prominent atheist writer, and this is before he had a podcast and before he had a meditation app.

01:15:52.740 And he was best known at this point just as a guy who wrote a couple of bestselling books about atheists.

01:15:57.180 And you narrated, or you narrated, you moderated a debate.

01:15:59.200 I moderated a debate between him and a couple of people, but one of the people on the other side was Deepak Chopra, and Sam kind of wore him up.

01:16:05.320 That doesn't even seem like a fight, by the way.

01:16:06.980 Like, I don't know Deepak, but I know Sam so well.

01:16:09.760 And just knowing the caricature of Deepak, like, that strikes me as a little baby seal laying there and a guy with a club.

01:16:19.960 It was a tough night for Deepak.

01:16:22.200 And I say that with affection because he's a really – if you meet him, he's a really hard guy not to like.

01:16:26.680 He's a very likable guy.

01:16:27.860 But Sam is amazing too, and I spent some – I had met Sam once before, but Sam and his wife, Annika, who I'm also friends with now, were backstage at this event.

01:16:36.380 And I was chatting with them, and they're so, so impressive, both of them.

01:16:40.200 And I mentioned that I was meditating.

01:16:42.320 And to my great surprise, they were both avid, active meditators.

01:16:46.720 And Sam had this whole long history of having spent a bunch of time in his 20s meditating.

01:16:52.260 And in that time, he became friend with this eminent meditation teacher by the name of Joseph Goldstein, who happens also to be the teacher of Mark Epstein.

01:17:00.140 And so I knew who Joseph was, but I hadn't met him, but I knew that Mark considered Joseph to be his teacher.

01:17:07.100 And Sam was saying, hey, you should go on a meditation retreat.

01:17:10.320 And Mark had been telling me the same thing, and I was like, well, this guy says I should do it, and Mark's saying I should do it.

01:17:15.840 And they're both talking about Joseph Goldstein.

01:17:17.940 I should do it.

01:17:18.880 And so Sam, as he said, toyed with the laws of karma and got me into a Joseph Goldstein retreat, which was a very hard thing to do.

01:17:26.240 And off I went without a lot of prep and with quite a bit of trepidation because I thought it was going to be a bunch of weird people doing a shitload of meditation, which I really didn't want to do.

01:17:36.520 I mean, I think I was up to like 10, 20 minutes a day or at this point, I wasn't doing that much.

01:17:42.660 The idea of doing it like 530 in the morning until 10 at night just struck me as super daunting.

01:17:47.840 Was this in Marin?

01:17:48.840 It was in Marin County, of course, and vegetarian food and blah, blah, blah.

01:17:53.900 I was a dedicated cheeseburger eater, and being away from my wife, I didn't have a kid at the time.

01:18:01.300 But there's nothing.

01:18:02.300 It just seemed like the shittiest summer vacation I could imagine.

01:18:05.520 And it was.

01:18:06.780 It was all those things.

01:18:08.040 I get there, and it's like I thought my – I think I wrote in the book that I thought my roommate was going to be wavy gravy.

01:18:13.360 But it turned out I didn't have a roommate.

01:18:15.140 But it was a bunch of, you know, faded hippies and weirdos and, you know, at least this is what my judging mind was saying.

01:18:23.260 They're actually lovely people.

01:18:24.800 I've met a lot of – I've become friends with some of them.

01:18:27.040 But my mind was on overdrive.

01:18:28.700 I was like, these are all NPR, you know, socks and sandals, folks.

01:18:32.220 And the meditation itself was just awful, just awful, like sitting there all fucking day.

01:18:39.880 You know, I was in pain.

01:18:41.440 I mean, I don't sit – I don't twist myself into a pretzel.

01:18:43.420 I sit in a chair.

01:18:44.140 But that hurts.

01:18:45.440 And the walking meditation, I'd never done that before.

01:18:47.620 I didn't know what I was doing.

01:18:48.820 I just hated it.

01:18:49.720 And I was just – it was all over the place.

01:18:51.700 I didn't feel like I was getting anywhere.

01:18:54.000 And by day four or five, I was going to go.

01:18:56.520 I was ready to quit.

01:18:57.840 It was a 10-day?

01:18:58.620 It was 10 days.

01:18:59.300 And I went to a teacher – actually, a teacher I didn't like, but she was the only one who was available to speak.

01:19:06.020 Because you have this sort of 10-minute window each day when you can potentially speak with a teacher one-on-one.

01:19:12.020 Yeah, but you would like – they give you a time.

01:19:14.440 So I was going to see Joseph every other day, sometimes in a group setting with like three or four people and then sometimes one-on-one.

01:19:21.420 But I didn't have a time with Joseph this day, and this is the day I was going to quit.

01:19:25.080 And one of his assistant teachers who I had made all these judgments about, Spring Washam,

01:19:30.600 and she was the only one I could sign up to see.

01:19:32.940 So I begrudgingly went and saw Spring, who I thought was like the embodiment of all, like, everything I hated about meditation.

01:19:40.160 She talked in a really soft voice and had long, flowing hair and wore shawls.

01:19:44.880 And Spring saved my sorry ass. 0.62

01:19:48.500 What did she say?

01:19:51.000 She said, you're trying too hard.

01:19:52.800 Like, no, no, like, ooey-gooey, lovey-dovey stuff.

01:19:57.660 She would just listen to me whine for a little while. 0.63

01:20:01.200 She's like, you're trying too hard.

01:20:03.400 Don't try too hard.

01:20:04.820 Just do, you know, notice your breath when it's coming in and when it's going out.

01:20:07.580 When you get distracted, start again.

01:20:08.860 Don't, you know, you're going to get distracted.

01:20:11.280 Don't try to make anything special happen.

01:20:12.800 Just stop trying too hard.

01:20:15.080 And I was like, all right, fine.

01:20:17.220 By the way, Spring has gone on to become a very important figure in my life.

01:20:21.200 She is an extraordinary human being.

01:20:25.560 But I took her word for it.

01:20:27.340 And instead of sitting in the meditation hall, I actually took my chair out of my room

01:20:31.260 and pulled it onto the balcony outside on the second floor of this building,

01:20:36.000 the dorm where I was staying.

01:20:37.820 And I sat outside.

01:20:39.540 And I was like, I'm not trying too hard.

01:20:42.780 I just sat down.

01:20:44.800 Whatever happens, happens.

01:20:46.160 And it was just like, vroom.

01:20:47.540 And as soon as I stopped trying, the whole thing unfurled for me.

01:20:52.780 And I was just so vividly present and mindful where I was just so quickly registering how

01:21:01.620 speedy my senses are, how I was going from hearing the rustling of the leaves to the clanking

01:21:07.560 of the pots in the kitchen, which was down the hill, to the footsteps in the hallway,

01:21:12.760 to the feeling of a pain in my knee, to an itch on my back, just to a thought coming up.

01:21:19.280 This is how reality works.

01:21:21.120 It's this.

01:21:21.780 You start to see how fast things are going in your sensory life.

01:21:27.100 And that's really thrilling.

01:21:28.960 It's also accompanied by a huge blast of serotonin.

01:21:33.020 And this breakthrough, for lack of a less grandiose word, lasted for like 36 hours,

01:21:39.580 where I was just the happiest I'd ever been.

01:21:41.920 I wept at one point, which is quite a rare thing for me.

01:21:44.820 I'm not super emotional.

01:21:46.740 It gave me an enormous amount of faith that there is so much to this practice.

01:21:51.100 And there's such a power to actually doing it in a container where that's all you have to do.

01:21:56.820 Your meals are cooked for you.

01:21:58.200 You don't have your phone.

01:22:00.040 The schedule is set for you.

01:22:01.440 All you have to do is get up and do the practice every day.

01:22:07.000 But the big asterisk is, if you try too hard, you will tangle yourself up in knots.

01:22:13.160 One of the classic hindrances to meditation is desire.

01:22:16.800 If you want it too hard, you're going to shoot yourself in the foot.

01:22:20.640 It's like a weird video game where the only way to move forward is to not want to move forward.

01:22:26.820 And that's a hard thing to do.

01:22:28.760 And the only way to get there for me is to surrender.

01:22:31.880 And you can't fake surrender.

01:22:33.480 I go into every retreat now thinking, I'm surrendered.

01:22:36.240 I don't care.

01:22:36.900 I don't care what happens.

01:22:37.800 I'm just going to sit here.

01:22:38.840 But I do care.

01:22:40.180 And my mind knows I care because the desire is in there.

01:22:43.260 Because you want to reproduce that experience.

01:22:44.000 Yes, of course.

01:22:45.080 I want breakthrough to Electric Boogaloo.

01:22:47.720 You know, I want like Pajama Jammy Jam.

01:22:50.400 I want the sequel to that breakthrough.

01:22:53.040 And I can't get it.

01:22:54.720 So what happens is, sorry, you got a good Pajama Jammy Jam laugh with you.

01:22:59.500 Landed with you.

01:23:00.260 This is like we're the right age where I can make a certain joke and you know the reference.

01:23:03.740 What happens though is, if I'm on the retreat long enough, usually it's 10, 11 days, I cycle

01:23:10.740 through the reproduction attempts and I get to a genuine surrender.

01:23:15.740 And it's like, I can't fake it.

01:23:18.000 I got to go through this process of trying to do this, of trying to get somewhere and

01:23:22.920 then just punching myself out.

01:23:24.260 Do you feel like listening to you describe this, it's almost like the Matrix where, and

01:23:30.160 again, I don't think you have to be on a retreat to experience this, but there's a realization

01:23:34.360 that Neo has when he sees the Matrix for what it is, that he's separate from that.

01:23:40.780 And do you think that that's a reasonable analogy for this idea of realizing that your

01:23:45.480 thoughts are not you?

01:23:46.540 Yeah, except for separation is a problem.

01:23:52.840 So the red pill of waking up and seeing that reality is not what you thought, that works

01:23:59.200 as a comp.

01:24:01.400 But in fact, in actual reality, there's no separation.

01:24:05.760 So not to get into the biggest cliche of them all, being one with the universe, but how can

01:24:12.420 you not be one with the universe?

01:24:13.760 I think you're separate from the universe, you're created from the same atoms from the

01:24:17.820 original exploding stars, you know, you are nature.

01:24:22.160 We feel, our lived experience is that we're looking out at the world fretfully from some

01:24:29.140 vantage point that's separate from nature.

01:24:33.060 But like, your animal body is obviously part of nature, and the workings of your mind is

01:24:38.860 part of nature.

01:24:40.100 And that's mind-blowing.

01:24:42.200 And mind-blowing, just conceptually, you might register it as I say those words, but you

01:24:48.180 can experience it viscerally on retreat.

01:24:52.480 And that is incredible.

01:24:54.940 So you get back from this retreat, and I mean, can one even draw a sort of a linearity around

01:25:04.260 this and says, look, a 10-day silent retreat is the equivalent of three years of a daily 15-minute

01:25:12.640 a day practice.

01:25:13.400 I mean, I know the answer to that question is no, but you see where I'm trying to go

01:25:16.080 with this, right?

01:25:16.740 Which is, are you leapfrogging in your practice such that when you came back from that 10-day

01:25:21.820 retreat, even if you went back to sitting for 10 to 15 minutes a day, you were able

01:25:27.140 to, quote-unquote, do something better?

01:25:33.320 I don't know.

01:25:34.560 I feel like you're leapfrogging in your practice, but I don't know if it shows up that prominently

01:25:43.140 in your 10 minutes when you get home.

01:25:46.840 You know what I'm saying?

01:25:47.740 You build up your capacity to concentrate.

01:25:50.280 Here's the lowest-hanging fruit is one important thing in meditation is the capacity to stay

01:25:57.180 present, which is your concentration.

01:25:59.880 Word concentration is a little hard.

01:26:00.900 The image that comes up for me is a furrowed brow, hunched shoulders, trying to concentrate.

01:26:05.600 But it's more like, can you just be awake for an extended period of time with your capacity

01:26:10.980 to stay undistracted?

01:26:12.680 And of course, there will be distractions, but your ability to be supple in the face of

01:26:15.880 those also improves.

01:26:17.580 So you can stay on the object, usually your breath, longer, and the distraction doesn't

01:26:23.300 throw you as much.

01:26:24.360 So that's a skill that gets built, I think, in a way on retreat that because it's such a

01:26:29.060 boot camp, you're going to build those muscles much more actively on retreat.

01:26:34.820 But then you also occasionally will have a peak experience.

01:26:38.620 Not always.

01:26:39.940 And wanting to have one, of course, is, again, a hindrance.

01:26:42.620 But sometimes, in my experience, you'll have a peak experience.

01:26:45.060 And that shows you something that, just like when you take drugs, it's like it becomes a

01:26:51.340 distant memory, but it's still with you.

01:26:53.340 And when I say drugs here, I mean more plants.

01:26:56.080 I haven't done much at all, but a lot of folks who have, my understanding of the way that

01:27:00.880 works is that you have a peak experience, and it does stay with you in the rest of your

01:27:05.420 life.

01:27:06.140 So in my experience, I'm only speaking from an N of one here, but my experience, having 1.00

01:27:10.560 had a few peak experiences, it's not like every time I meditate, that's coming to the

01:27:15.240 table with me now.

01:27:16.000 It's more just that, first of all, I'm imbued with a much deeper faith or trust that this

01:27:22.740 is a worthy endeavor.

01:27:24.700 And two, it's just, it's in my mind stream that this, that some of what I've seen and

01:27:32.320 understood, some distant echoes of that are still here.

01:27:36.760 When you think about how you meditate today, you think about the practice you did yesterday.

01:27:41.900 Oh, can I just say something to you?

01:27:43.040 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:27:43.440 You said before that often meditation is unpleasant, which is the same for me.

01:27:48.880 So I was actually happy to hear you say that because it really represents a wise perspective,

01:27:53.240 which is, we said it before, but it bears repeating, meditation is not about what you're

01:27:57.900 feeling right now.

01:27:58.740 It's just knowing what you're feeling so that your feelings don't own you.

01:28:03.300 But I will say that 10 years in, again, just speaking personally, having done five or six

01:28:08.960 retreats and having done a reasonable amount of daily sitting, I'm now at a point where

01:28:13.400 my concentration is good enough.

01:28:16.160 So the thing to know about concentration is that it often feels really good, which is why

01:28:20.440 people love TM, because it is a concentration meditation.

01:28:24.460 You're using this mantra that you're getting really focused on.

01:28:27.560 And it's less, it's more focused on concentration than it is on mindfulness.

01:28:32.220 And so being able to stay awake and concentrated on something feels really good.

01:28:39.340 And I find that my daily meditation actually is much more pleasant because there's like

01:28:43.620 a body high associated with it.

01:28:45.420 It's called, there's a word for it in the ancient language of Pali.

01:28:49.660 The word is P-T, P-I-T-I.

01:28:51.720 And it, I think the grandiose translation is something like rapture, but it really just

01:28:57.200 means like all the kind of like body tingling and high that you can get from meditation.

01:29:02.680 And so that's just something to look forward to.

01:29:05.320 There's no schedule for when this shows up.

01:29:07.240 And even for me, I don't always get it.

01:29:09.160 And wanting it guarantees that I won't get it, but it does show up on occasion, not infrequently

01:29:14.900 and can make my daily sitting so nice to have.

01:29:19.180 You can't get too focused on it.

01:29:20.420 So maybe you're, you're sort of answering the question that I was about to ask, which

01:29:23.840 is when you think about meditating 10 years ago versus today, it's safe to say you still

01:29:29.980 think about gerbils and wonder if your hair is okay and think about your abs.

01:29:34.400 Is the biggest difference that you are much more quick to realize that and come back to

01:29:40.240 whatever your object is?

01:29:41.380 Yes.

01:29:42.060 And, and my reaction to it is much warmer.

01:29:47.420 And this I think is when you're starting.

01:29:49.000 Is that the bigger difference?

01:29:49.980 Is it the speed with which you recognize it or the lack of pissed offedness that comes

01:29:54.160 with it?

01:29:54.400 I think the latter is, in my experience, more important.

01:29:58.860 Both are important.

01:30:00.620 So there's a mental acuity piece to that, which is that you're, you're, you're see, you're

01:30:05.400 catching this distraction more quickly.

01:30:07.100 But if you're catching it and then self-flagellating, you're, it's the purpose.

01:30:13.100 Yeah, it really does.

01:30:13.860 Because you're, you're teaching the mind that catching yourself getting distracted is going

01:30:17.800 to come with punishment.

01:30:18.780 There's some ways like not incentivizing the mind to wake up.

01:30:22.520 But if you can train yourself to be like, all right, I caught that.

01:30:26.140 Welcome to the party distraction.

01:30:27.560 That's a much bombier inner weather.

01:30:31.280 And I think that feeds on itself in a really positive way.

01:30:34.360 I'm not particularly good at this.

01:30:36.720 I catch myself lapsing into judgment all the time, but I catch the judging faster.

01:30:42.860 And I am over time through various meditation techniques, gotten better at just having a warmer

01:30:48.200 reaction to my own peccadilloes.

01:30:50.040 What's the most difficult thing you've gone through personally and or professionally in

01:31:00.240 the last five years where, and where I'm going to go with this is I'm curious to how you have

01:31:09.780 been able to take this remarkable training that you've done in the last decade and begin

01:31:15.940 to apply it to difficult experiences, which is, you know, where the proverbial rubber hits

01:31:21.740 the road.

01:31:23.980 Well, three things are coming to mind.

01:31:25.440 I'll say them and you can just pick whichever ones you want to dig in on.

01:31:28.360 One was that my wife and I had a really serious fertility crisis.

01:31:32.800 It ended well with a baby, but that was really hard.

01:31:36.500 And we were really under the impression we were not going to have a child, which was very

01:31:40.760 depressing.

01:31:41.500 She also got breast cancer.

01:31:43.120 Both of these were much harder for her, of course, than they were for me.

01:31:45.800 But obviously, you don't want to see the person you love suffering or start to worry that

01:31:51.560 they're not going to be around anymore.

01:31:53.480 So that was obviously awful.

01:31:55.340 And then on a much more personal, selfish level, I got a 360 review, which I think I

01:32:01.780 might have told you about once before we were recording.

01:32:05.280 For anybody who doesn't know what a 360 review is, it's often used in a corporate context.

01:32:09.560 It's a way to measure performance of executives.

01:32:12.540 The way they do it is they talk to the executive's peers, subordinates, and superiors.

01:32:18.480 So you get a holistic, panoramic, 360 view into this person's performance.

01:32:26.840 I began writing a book about compassion.

01:32:29.300 And the idea, as my wife would suggest it, she'd say, well, you know, a good way to jump

01:32:33.640 start the narrative would be to see what other people think you should do to work on in terms

01:32:38.580 of kindness and compassion.

01:32:40.540 And then there were a bunch of people in the room when she said this.

01:32:43.880 And one of the people in the room was the editor of the book.

01:32:46.560 And the editor said, oh, you ever heard a 360 review?

01:32:50.020 And I had.

01:32:50.580 And I was like, oh, that's a good idea.

01:32:52.480 And so we found this Buddhist executive coach, Jerry Colonna, who we were talking about before.

01:32:57.260 He's got this coaching firm.

01:32:58.340 And they do 360s, but they do the colonoscopy version of 360s.

01:33:03.300 So often 360s are these like kind of data entry thing where you give people a questionnaire

01:33:08.320 and they answer multiple choice questions.

01:33:10.200 And then you crunch the numbers and you see the data.

01:33:12.460 Jerry's firm does hour long interviews with everybody, anonymous interviews with everybody

01:33:18.800 in your orbit.

01:33:20.000 And then they write up a lengthy qualitative report with direct quotes, anonymous blind quotes.

01:33:25.940 And in my case, we made it even harder because we threw in people from my personal life.

01:33:30.900 And so we didn't want it to just be a professional measurement.

01:33:33.920 We wanted to get a holistic sense of how am I.

01:33:36.500 So my wife, my brother, my meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein, and all these peers, in total

01:33:42.100 16 people.

01:33:43.860 It was a 41-page report.

01:33:45.300 We also added on a bunch of questions about where and when and how I'm an asshole.

01:33:49.180 And it was devastating.

01:33:51.500 I thought, oh, this is this cute little narrative conceit for this book I'm working on.

01:33:56.480 And I got the 360 and it suggested I was, well, the way I took it, it didn't say this,

01:34:02.720 but I took it as monstrously broken, defective, incurably selfish, self-centered narcissist.

01:34:11.400 I just want to pause you for one second because I, I did the exact same thing in 2015.

01:34:18.160 It's uncanny how similar the experience is because it was everybody who worked for me,

01:34:24.080 my board, like at the time I was running a nonprofit.

01:34:27.500 So it was my board, everyone who worked for me, 10 friends plus family.

01:34:34.120 I mean, this was a tour de force and the, it's, as you were telling the story, the only

01:34:40.720 word I had in my mind was the word that described me, which was never once written, but it was

01:34:45.560 the only thing that came out and it was monster.

01:34:48.220 Monster.

01:34:48.740 And that you, the first thing you said was monstrous.

01:34:51.620 I believe that's what the first thing you said.

01:34:54.140 I rarely slip into overt depression.

01:34:57.980 I usually slip into covert depression, which is a shortcut to rage.

01:35:02.000 This was one of the few times in my life I went into a overt depression after I reviewed

01:35:08.420 that thing.

01:35:09.040 I did not want to leave a dark room for days.

01:35:13.060 I was eviscerated by that report.

01:35:16.140 Yeah.

01:35:16.500 That's the way I felt.

01:35:18.080 It was awful.

01:35:19.280 So how did you pick yourself up?

01:35:22.520 Uh, well, for a while I thought, uh, did you think I'm a fraud?

01:35:28.820 How could I write this book?

01:35:29.880 Yes.

01:35:30.080 That's, that's literally the word I was, I've just been, cause I am writing the book.

01:35:36.060 I just am working on the chapter where I read it and fraud is a word I use because I was

01:35:41.480 like, clearly I'm pretending to the world that I'm Mr. Happiness and I'm a fucking asshole.

01:35:47.740 How did I pick myself up?

01:35:49.000 Well, first I thought, okay, well, I can't do this book because nobody can see this.

01:35:54.420 One thing that helped was my wife and I, first of all, Jerry Colonna does a lot of coaching.

01:36:01.780 So I, I read it and then I saw him that day and he said a bunch of things that were super

01:36:07.080 helpful and we have an ongoing relationship.

01:36:09.820 So he's, I talked to him at least once a month, often more.

01:36:13.920 One of the things he said was, and this is very Buddhist, so you now see all this stuff

01:36:19.600 and know what we're going to do is we're going to love it.

01:36:24.320 We're not going to get into shame or anger or self-flagellation.

01:36:28.960 And we're going to be like, all right, this behavior was serving some sort of need that

01:36:35.940 some sort of primordial need you had that was not particularly skillful.

01:36:40.920 We're going to give it a hug and say, you're no longer needed.

01:36:44.920 His pushing me away from shame and more toward interest, like, wow, what's going on here?

01:36:50.500 Why would I do that?

01:36:51.400 Why would I be so snippy with my subordinates?

01:36:54.760 Why would I be so snippy with my wife? 1.00

01:36:57.620 Why would I be so self-centered that I ignore other people's needs?

01:37:02.300 Well, clearly, instead of just going right, instead of calling me a monster, Jerry was

01:37:06.920 like, no, clearly you're following some old script here that must have served you at some

01:37:12.260 point.

01:37:13.220 And putting it in that light was incredibly useful.

01:37:17.200 And then I'll say one other thing, which is that my wife, who I'm very close to my wife

01:37:21.560 and a lot of us are close with our spouses or our life partners, but she's like a

01:37:27.480 consigliere for me professionally.

01:37:29.680 So nothing leaves my desk in terms of what I write without her thoroughly reviewing it.

01:37:36.020 She's basically the uncredited co-author on both of the books I've written and is deeply

01:37:41.000 involved in all the aesthetic choices having to do with my app.

01:37:44.820 And she's just my right hand.

01:37:47.320 That's actually not even a good way to put it because she has her own career. 1.00

01:37:50.560 So she's really just doing this out of the goodness of her heart.

01:37:53.140 But I often say to people, and this is only kind of a joke, I don't know what I think until

01:38:00.340 she tells me what I think.

01:38:02.100 So one of the things we started-

01:38:03.400 Does she have any extra time? 0.98

01:38:04.780 She does now because-

01:38:05.740 I could use some help.

01:38:07.300 We'll talk about that.

01:38:08.180 Sure, I don't know how-

01:38:09.980 She would be great at this because she's amazing. 0.99

01:38:12.440 But one of the things that she got me to do was she and I would rent conference rooms

01:38:16.560 around New York City, get out of our house, go to a conference room, and sit there and

01:38:22.240 read the report together and discuss it section by section.

01:38:25.640 And one of the things she got me to do was focus on the first-

01:38:28.540 It was a 41-page report, but the first 15 pages were positive stuff.

01:38:31.700 And she got me to really focus on that.

01:38:33.820 And then when we went through the negative stuff, she was just like, it's not as my

01:38:37.480 first reading.

01:38:38.440 Nobody was calling me a monster.

01:38:40.200 They were just really describing, in unvarnished terms, me at my worst.

01:38:44.080 So are you like me in that-

01:38:46.620 I think my report is about the same, right?

01:38:48.320 It was the first-

01:38:49.140 Maybe it was a 50-50 mix of some really beautiful, glowing, positive things.

01:38:54.560 And then people who I know all care about me deeply, including people who describe horrible

01:39:04.180 things I've done.

01:39:05.160 They love me despite those things.

01:39:07.480 But do you just disproportionately naturally focus on the negatives?

01:39:12.520 I think we all do.

01:39:14.160 Evolutionarily, we come by this honestly.

01:39:16.260 We had to have a negativity bias, right, for survival.

01:39:21.100 You want to have salience-

01:39:22.220 Do you think you go above and beyond the evolutionary playbook?

01:39:25.140 Like, I mean, because I think I do.

01:39:26.640 I think I am-

01:39:28.220 If the evolutionary playbook is to wait at 70-30, I don't know why.

01:39:32.620 I think I've just adapted to 99-1.

01:39:35.920 Right.

01:39:36.740 Well-

01:39:37.820 Which sounds like you do as well.

01:39:38.780 I don't have data to support my assertion.

01:39:41.300 But yes, I strongly believe I dwell in the negative.

01:39:44.160 It's actually one of the things that I was dinged for in the 360.

01:39:46.740 And so it was incredibly useful that my wife take me by the scruff and say, you know, you're going to look at this positive stuff.

01:39:54.320 And then we're going to look at the negative stuff and see if it's not as bad as you thought it was.

01:39:58.540 Nobody's actually calling you a monster.

01:40:00.860 And yeah, you did do some things that are really uncool, but you can fix this.

01:40:05.980 And I'll tell you that one of the- there were a couple of comments made to me by people in my life that really helped me get over it.

01:40:13.040 One was Joseph- the aforementioned Joseph Goldstein read it and said with a laugh, self-knowledge is always bad news.

01:40:23.980 Wow.

01:40:24.480 Interesting.

01:40:25.660 So counterintuitive, right?

01:40:28.400 Yep.

01:40:28.620 And then my brother, Matt, another consigliere, prominent venture capitalist in New York City, an amazing human, he said two things that I thought were funny.

01:40:41.300 He said, well, first of all, I'm sorry you had to read this.

01:40:45.020 Second of all, now you got a good book.

01:40:48.900 And for me as an inveterate showman, which is another thing I was dinged for in the 360, that was actually comforting to hear.

01:40:55.120 It's like, all right, this is- I actually probably can talk about this, and it'll be useful for people.

01:41:01.460 And it's actually useful for me to hear you say that you and I- there's a huge overlap in the Venn diagram of our deficiencies.

01:41:08.600 And okay, so I think there are a lot of people out there who are really selfish and have really made a bunch of bad moves, but there are reasons why we are like this.

01:41:16.840 And those can get untangled, and we can work on it.

01:41:20.120 And not only will it be good for everybody, for us and those in our orbit, direct orbit, but if we do this in public, it could help countless people.

01:41:30.720 Now I'm really energized to work on the book.

01:41:33.460 So this is an awesome example of pain that you can pause for a moment and realize you have some control over the outcome.

01:41:43.340 The other two examples you gave kind of differ.

01:41:47.820 Infertility and cancer, you have a lot less control over, I think it's safe to say.

01:41:53.540 I mean, in the end, biology is sort of a complex organism.

01:41:58.620 Using either one of those, whichever one you're more comfortable talking about,

01:42:02.120 how did your practice either prepare you for and or allow you to suffer less through?

01:42:10.740 When she had breast cancer, I found that in some ways, I think she would agree with me.

01:42:18.260 It was actually really good for our relationship.

01:42:20.780 Because I am not particularly, well, this is the story I had told myself, was that I'm not particularly caring and nurturing.

01:42:27.720 And yet here we were in a situation where I really needed to be.

01:42:31.400 I needed to step up.

01:42:33.240 And I found that I really liked it.

01:42:34.860 After a double mastectomy, she was in a lot of pain.

01:42:38.980 And I wanted to sleep next to her, but if I slept in the bed every time I moved, it was going to drive her crazy. 1.00

01:42:45.180 So it felt good to sleep on the floor next to her, set the alarm for every three hours to make sure I got up

01:42:50.300 and made sure she was ahead of her meds so that she didn't fall behind because she would have.

01:42:54.500 And being of use in that way felt really good.

01:42:57.840 Not like, I'm such a good person.

01:43:01.840 I mean, there's a little bit of that too.

01:43:03.260 But it feels good to be of service to somebody who you love.

01:43:08.000 It feels good to be of service to anybody, frankly.

01:43:10.060 Why do you think that didn't naturally come to you?

01:43:12.700 Not selfishness.

01:43:13.960 Self-protective selfishness, probably.

01:43:16.440 Self-centeredness.

01:43:17.960 I had written a chapter in a book about it by this point, so I kind of knew it.

01:43:21.580 I knew it, you know.

01:43:22.660 But this was a very powerful example of it, and also probably some of the dynamics of our relationship

01:43:27.580 where she is very giving and loving and compassionate and I'm not.

01:43:33.260 Again, this is the story.

01:43:35.120 But of course I am.

01:43:36.700 There's a great description of enlightenment in the Tibetan tradition,

01:43:41.000 which is a clearing away and a bringing forth.

01:43:46.840 And that, you know, that to me seems like a great definition of enlightenment.

01:43:51.140 So, like, I can clear away some of my bullshit that blocks me from being useful to other people

01:43:58.220 and having a—I'm trying to find a better word than connection, but here we go—connection.

01:44:03.440 And a bringing forth of the parts of you that actually are good at that.

01:44:06.660 And so that, I felt, was an enlightening experience in that I was forced to do all that.

01:44:12.000 And I could see that in my mind, these registered—these acts of service registered as pleasant.

01:44:18.940 And again, there's science here.

01:44:20.240 There's a thing called the helper's high.

01:44:22.860 You know, when you give to charity, the same regions of your brain light up that are light up when you eat chocolate.

01:44:28.180 So this isn't new, and it's not unique.

01:44:31.140 It's just a universal human thing that I happen to stumble upon in this context in a powerful way.

01:44:38.360 So I don't want to minimize that because that's awesome,

01:44:41.220 but you could argue that all of those things could be experienced without being faced with a life-threatening disease.

01:44:47.920 The part to me that I'm most interested in is you are now faced with something that is—

01:44:56.880 there's a probability that is non-zero, and it's higher than it was a month earlier.

01:45:02.720 However, this woman, who is clearly the best thing that's ever happened to you, no offense—

01:45:08.500 Untaken.

01:45:09.240 —could be gone.

01:45:09.800 So as I think about my own practice when I've dealt with really awful things that have confronted me,

01:45:18.420 it's this realization that we are suffering so much in our minds, probably more than in reality,

01:45:25.700 and so much of that suffering is due to thought.

01:45:29.600 It's due to projection.

01:45:31.500 It's due to playing out scenarios that, I mean, if we're going to be brutally honest with ourselves,

01:45:37.860 we have no clue what's going to happen, and yet so much of our suffering is drawn out by those projections.

01:45:44.220 How much of that was going on for you, and how were you able to sort of tame that?

01:45:51.180 Or maybe asked another way, if all of this had happened to you in 2008 versus 2017-18, how would it have been different?

01:46:01.860 Two things are coming to mind, and I don't know if either of them are going to answer the question or be useful in any way,

01:46:05.800 but one of them is that I think, frankly, I didn't think much about the fact that she could die.

01:46:11.860 Partly I knew—I had a pretty high level of confidence based on the original diagnosis that she was going to be fine.

01:46:19.700 Well, maybe the fertility one's a better example then, like where there must have been a moment when you thought,

01:46:25.160 wow, we might not be able to have kids.

01:46:26.940 Oh, yeah, yeah.

01:46:27.680 So in that moment where, let's just say, before any of this happened, you think there's a 95% chance we're going to have kids,

01:46:34.420 and now at some point you're thinking there's a 10% chance we're going to have kids.

01:46:37.700 I'm making these numbers up, of course.

01:46:39.700 At that moment when it's a 10% chance we're going to have kids, it's really easy to start the projection of,

01:46:44.640 oh, my God, are we going to adopt?

01:46:46.580 If so, how, where, what, but it's not going to be our—blah, blah, blah.

01:46:50.880 I mean, I'm just—I'm the author of that playbook.

01:46:54.780 I could win a Nobel Prize in literature for that type of nonsense thinking.

01:47:01.500 But the point I was really driving toward is that in neither case did I do a particularly good job at relaxing into the uncertainty.

01:47:08.300 Maybe why that could potentially be useful to say or to hear is that there are limits to the practice, and I am not enlightened.

01:47:19.300 I'm a schmo who started meditating 10 years ago, and I'm good sometimes at applying the lessons, and sometimes I'm not.

01:47:28.220 And I think when Bianca got sick, I didn't really forthrightly look at the potential that she would die.

01:47:35.920 And I think that when we had the infertility, I didn't really allow myself to fully engage with the fact that we might not have a kid, and then we had a kid.

01:47:46.600 So sometimes I'm good at this stuff, and sometimes I'm not.

01:47:51.460 How has your practice made you a better husband?

01:47:54.300 I mean, maybe that's a better question for your wife, but where do you think it shows up most in your relationship with her?

01:47:59.320 So I think it's really the moment-to-moment stuff.

01:48:02.300 So while I didn't – I don't think I wrestled on a grand level with mortality or the fact that we weren't going to be able to have a kid,

01:48:10.700 but my moment-to-moment basic blocking and tackling of being a human in a relationship is much better.

01:48:16.080 In other words, the mindfulness helps me see when I'm over – some percentage of the time, not always,

01:48:23.840 helps me see when I'm about to be overtaken by anger or fear or whatever, irritation, and I can let it pass.

01:48:32.380 I can feel the raw data of the anger, which, by the way, feels really bad,

01:48:36.820 but I don't need to have the satisfying, energetic release of saying something tart that's going to get me in trouble.

01:48:46.080 And that just creates a much more seamless relationship.

01:48:51.480 Now, over time, actually, if you add on top of it, because you can make a case – I'm increasingly leaning toward this –

01:48:57.060 that mindfulness is just one piece of the overall Buddhist picture, and that alone isn't enough.

01:49:03.760 Like warmth, friendliness, compassion, whatever you want to call it, is also incredibly important.

01:49:09.340 And then there are also just like skills for better communication.

01:49:11.980 Adding all of those things in, which I'm now really starting to do as I work on this book,

01:49:17.380 just makes it even better.

01:49:19.700 So learning to be a better listener, learning how to phrase my assertions in ways that are less provocative,

01:49:26.880 training up through meditation, my baseline level of friendliness,

01:49:30.780 and ability to lean in and give a shit is all super useful.

01:49:35.120 And, by the way, feels really good when you're doing it because that kind of emotional availability –

01:49:40.000 or what did you say before?

01:49:40.880 One of your three mechanisms were – it was rage, upset, detachment.

01:49:45.680 Detachment feels bad, in my experience, because you know there's a bunch of stuff you should be doing,

01:49:50.780 and you feel guilty about that.

01:49:52.300 It just doesn't feel – it's not – it doesn't feel good, in my experience.

01:49:55.480 So the actual leaning in feels better.

01:50:00.460 Again, I still do detachment rage and say I do all of that.

01:50:04.840 This is not – you're not listening to a perfected human being talk to you now.

01:50:09.380 It's just lowering the – it's like a marginal improvement.

01:50:14.660 So, yeah, I think she would say that our day-to-day is much smoother.

01:50:18.020 I doubt she can recall the last time I raised my voice, which I did do before this.

01:50:23.760 Yes, and yet I think she would still say there are times where she walks on eggshells.

01:50:28.180 She can just sense you're really pissed about something.

01:50:31.160 Yes, yeah.

01:50:31.680 But then I think all the other thing is, over time, my being easier to be around has allowed her to see

01:50:37.380 that some of her walking on eggshells is her own stuff.

01:50:40.440 And she might not have gotten there if I was Robert Johnson all the time.

01:50:45.860 It's funny you bring up Robert because I was just going to – I was literally just going to –

01:50:48.540 this is amazing.

01:50:49.360 We can read each other's minds here.

01:50:50.540 So, when you think about your son and you think about Robert, Terry Reel, who we've spoken about a little bit,

01:50:57.080 has this great expression which I'm going to sort of butcher, although the expression which I have written down,

01:51:01.680 I feel like it's going to be the opening quote on this chapter in my book, which is,

01:51:05.660 every man is a bridge spanning the trauma of his past and the legacy of his future, something to that effect.

01:51:11.560 So, you're a bridge, right?

01:51:13.600 And you could make the case that some of the traits you have developed have been in response to things that were learned from him or his influence on others.

01:51:28.360 And you, like every man, have a choice about whether you'll pass those on to your son.

01:51:33.740 I mean, it seems to me like this practice is a big part, though not exclusively the only part of it,

01:51:40.700 but a big part of trying to leave Robert back where he belongs and not let him come up to be a part of your son's life.

01:51:50.320 I think a more, and I'm stealing some of this from Jerry Colonna, I don't have a pat answer to this,

01:51:57.440 but what's on my mind is, I think it's okay for Alexander to know that I have foibles and an inner Robert Johnson

01:52:09.580 and an inner, you know, Sammy from What Makes Sammy Run and all that stuff.

01:52:14.460 But I think he needs to see me being okay with it so that he is okay with all of it.

01:52:19.820 He's going to have negative parts of his psyche.

01:52:23.300 And I think the trick is not to stamp that stuff out, but to have a supple, warm relationship with it.

01:52:29.280 I guess what I'm getting at is, not to get all psychological analysis,

01:52:33.800 but I think a part of what Robert Johnson did when he smacked his kids around

01:52:39.540 and told you that if you touched his VCR, he was going to beat the shit out of you,

01:52:44.460 that's actually transmitting shame to you.

01:52:47.660 There's a feeling of shame that comes to a child that's hit.

01:52:50.620 It's bullying.

01:52:51.700 That's what it is, bullying.

01:52:53.000 And the bullying is a transmission of shame.

01:52:55.400 And I think that's the part that has to be stopped.

01:52:57.800 It's not about perfection.

01:52:59.200 It's about stopping shame.

01:53:01.060 And that's how I think about it in my life,

01:53:03.340 is there were a whole bunch of things that shamed the hell out of me.

01:53:06.920 And I think of that as my single greatest purpose in life at this point,

01:53:11.160 is what do I have to do to make sure that none of my shame makes its way to my three kids?

01:53:17.080 If I can accomplish that and nothing else, that's great.

01:53:20.800 If I can accomplish other things in life, that's even better.

01:53:23.500 But I have to accomplish that.

01:53:24.900 I mean, I sort of feel that way.

01:53:27.100 And a big part of not transmitting shame for me is recognizing shame when it shows up.

01:53:33.740 So I would challenge that slightly, but again, not slightly and lightly,

01:53:38.540 because I'm not sure I'm right about what I'm about to say,

01:53:40.820 which is that it strikes me that my dad and mom did not inject any shame into my life.

01:53:47.720 It was mostly the outside world.

01:53:49.520 I had very loving parents.

01:53:50.960 And they weren't perfect, but very loving.

01:53:53.140 I don't walk around resenting them for much, if anything.

01:53:56.340 I think it's possible I could get to a place where really I'm not the source of any shame for him,

01:54:03.120 and nor is his mother, and he's in a really loving home.

01:54:05.180 But the world is really tough.

01:54:06.480 For sure.

01:54:06.960 And so I want it to be a two-part thing.

01:54:08.860 I want it to be that we are bottomless wells of love and affection and wisdom for him

01:54:15.920 to the extent that we're possible.

01:54:17.480 Yep.

01:54:17.620 And that we show him that, like, you're going to have lots of dark parts of your own personality.

01:54:24.520 It's unavoidable, and you can be okay with that.

01:54:28.800 I think that's my operating thesis.

01:54:31.000 I actually think that's an even more eloquent way to explain what I'm suggesting.

01:54:34.840 But I think all I'm arguing is that the home should not be that your parents,

01:54:39.400 you know, there's a term they use for this, right,

01:54:41.040 which is your circle of origin or something to that effect, right?

01:54:44.060 Family of origin.

01:54:44.480 Family of origin, yeah.

01:54:45.200 Your family of origin really isn't the place where you want the shame to come from.

01:54:48.260 No.

01:54:48.340 Because you can't control the world.

01:54:50.680 Like, there will be bullies at school.

01:54:52.480 Yes.

01:54:52.660 There will be all this other bad stuff.

01:54:54.300 So yeah, I think the way you've described it is even more sort of nuanced and probably more accurate.

01:55:00.140 I guess what I would say is my two cents is I think meditation has probably prevented you

01:55:06.800 from transmitting some of your own shame, which has been manifesting itself largely

01:55:11.700 in very externally positive ways.

01:55:14.320 The successes you've had are in some ways driven, I think, by some of those attributes.

01:55:20.440 In other words, your adaptations, your maladaptations have been very socially acceptable,

01:55:25.240 but at some point they leak out in the weakest common denominator, which is generally to our family.

01:55:30.600 Right.

01:55:30.840 At least that's been my experience.

01:55:32.340 And like the people in my immediate professional orbit.

01:55:35.400 Right.

01:55:35.660 The people who you can't fake it around for long enough.

01:55:37.860 Right.

01:55:38.160 So the Hotel Regina left us with a book and a podcast and an app that had been useful in

01:55:44.660 other people's lives.

01:55:45.320 So it was like a maladaptive thing that had a positive impact on society, but also some

01:55:51.880 of the sort of not so pretty parts of my motivation stayed with me and manifested in my being

01:55:58.580 stressed and snippy and rushed and impatient and greedy and all that other stuff.

01:56:02.480 And now for future projects, I got to do a better job of coming not from Hotel Regina,

01:56:07.980 but from some other place.

01:56:08.920 And this gets to something that you wrote about in 10% Happier, but I'm curious as to

01:56:13.920 how you've evolved.

01:56:15.240 One of the big questions you're trying to answer in your journey, as you've described

01:56:19.600 it in that book, is can a person be successful professionally if they give up that thrive, that

01:56:31.460 sort of somewhat negative insecurity that feeds us?

01:56:37.100 And I'll let the readers go through your thinking at the time, circa 2014, five years

01:56:44.140 later, where are you on that particular issue?

01:56:47.280 Especially as you've just described it, right?

01:56:49.060 Which is Hotel Regina gave us a whole bunch of things that are externally and ostensibly

01:56:54.200 very positive, but it came at a little bit of a cost.

01:56:57.360 Do you believe that one can be all positively valenced without the negative?

01:57:02.680 Or does that negative need to exist?

01:57:04.580 First of all, I don't think you're going to make the negative go away.

01:57:08.400 In my experience, I don't have a sense that I'm going to just conquer all my demons and

01:57:12.820 just be operating out of a position of pure love.

01:57:16.400 Maybe, but I don't see that coming down the pike for me right now. 1.00

01:57:20.820 But I still think you can turn down the volume on the less wholesome motivations and turn up

01:57:28.540 the volume on the more wholesome motivations, such as, you know, being of service, et cetera,

01:57:33.720 et cetera, and the less wholesome one being like looking for attention and money. 0.99

01:57:40.700 And not to say that attention and money are all bad, but if you're like really, really

01:57:45.680 totally focused on that to the exclusion of anything else, I think it's probably maybe not

01:57:49.920 the best.

01:57:51.000 Is there a way in there that you can shift the ratios and still be successful?

01:57:57.980 I believe yes.

01:58:00.300 It may also require a little bit of a shifting of how you define success.

01:58:03.860 And I think in there, I'm starting to form a thesis, but I think I'm a little more nuanced

01:58:13.520 in my view during 10% Happier and the subsequent never-ending book tour.

01:58:18.900 I really was dogmatic about the fact that you're not going to lose your edge.

01:58:23.440 You know, look at all these professional athletes who meditate and C-suite executives and all this

01:58:28.800 stuff.

01:58:29.120 You know, and I believe that to a point, but I think at my level of meditation where I've

01:58:33.820 like taken it quite seriously, after a while, you start to change a little bit how you define

01:58:39.660 success.

01:58:41.360 And so, for example, I recently went part-time here at ABC News, and that was tricky.

01:58:47.360 This is a big deal.

01:58:47.980 This is a big deal.

01:58:48.340 This was announced a month ago.

01:58:49.660 Yeah.

01:58:50.060 So I was anchoring both Nightline and the weekend edition of GMA.

01:58:54.160 Now, I've given up Nightline, and I anchor the weekend edition of GMA.

01:58:58.080 GMA, I do my podcast, which is owned by ABC News, and I do special investigative reporting

01:59:04.120 for the network.

01:59:05.140 It's still a lot, but it's part-time, and the rest of my time, I'm working on the app

01:59:09.200 and books.

01:59:10.240 Did I mention how much I love the app?

01:59:11.760 Oh, thank you.

01:59:12.240 How did I mention that?

01:59:13.060 I don't know if I mentioned that enough yet.

01:59:14.700 Maybe not enough.

01:59:14.780 Maybe a couple more times.

01:59:15.860 You know, that was tricky because I was thinking, like, in some ways, I'm dropping this dream I've

01:59:22.020 had for 25 years of reaching the absolute top of TV news.

01:59:28.400 If you think about it, I'm kind of a B-level guy.

01:59:30.760 I've been very successful, but, you know, I'm not anchoring the evening news, or I'm not

01:59:35.520 the main anchor of Monday through Friday GMA.

01:59:38.080 I don't have a primetime cable show.

01:59:40.480 You know, those are the folks who...

01:59:42.060 How many A-level people exist at ABC and then NBC?

01:59:46.080 Like, each of the three networks have how many...

01:59:47.900 There was a day when Jennings and Brokaw and Dan Rather were the three, like, the pinnacles

01:59:55.740 of television.

01:59:57.000 We were talking about this earlier.

01:59:58.840 You said you could walk down the street with Peter Jennings circa 2000, and you might as

02:00:03.360 well have been walking down the street with Muhammad Ali or Michael Jordan.

02:00:05.660 It was crazy.

02:00:06.880 Crazy.

02:00:07.900 So, rough back of the napkin.

02:00:10.100 So, there are three main networks.

02:00:11.300 Each one has a single evening news anchor, and each of them has three morning anchors.

02:00:17.760 So, that's 11 people, and then three cable networks.

02:00:22.880 And I would say maybe each of them has four stars, maybe, true stars.

02:00:29.260 So, that's 11 plus...

02:00:31.140 So, 2025-ish.

02:00:33.160 Yeah.

02:00:34.040 I don't think I'm going to be one of those 25.

02:00:36.880 And by the way, there's massive gradations within the 25.

02:00:39.840 I bet I wouldn't recognize 15 of those 25.

02:00:43.980 That's right.

02:00:44.540 But you would recognize Anderson Cooper.

02:00:46.140 Yep.

02:00:46.420 Amazing person who's really been helpful to me.

02:00:48.980 You would recognize George Stephanopoulos.

02:00:50.980 Yep.

02:00:51.740 Diane Sawyer.

02:00:52.720 Yep.

02:00:53.300 Sean Hannity.

02:00:54.500 Yep.

02:00:55.300 Would you recognize Joe Scarborough?

02:00:56.980 No.

02:00:57.960 For the listener, it's not that I'm a moron.

02:01:00.180 It's just I never watch television.

02:01:02.100 I can't actually recall the last time I've watched a television event that was not a Formula

02:01:06.700 One race or a football game.

02:01:09.560 So, we may have reached the end of the list.

02:01:11.580 Yeah.

02:01:11.720 So, there might be five people on that list I would recognize if I saw them.

02:01:14.840 But we saw a picture of Michael Strahan in the hallway, and you recognized him.

02:01:17.280 Yes.

02:01:17.980 But that may be from football.

02:01:20.320 Yes.

02:01:20.660 I mean, I knew him from the Giants.

02:01:22.100 But no, but I remember, I've seen him on TV.

02:01:24.300 Just because whenever you're in the gym, that seems to be what they're showing.

02:01:27.580 Ah, right.

02:01:28.340 Yeah, right.

02:01:29.040 And a lot of people who you might have recognized have got Me Too'd.

02:01:32.180 You know, Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose.

02:01:34.200 Oh, of course.

02:01:34.880 Definitely Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose.

02:01:36.160 Yeah.

02:01:36.420 But everybody would have recognized Jennings and Rather and Brokaw.

02:01:40.280 Mm-hmm.

02:01:41.040 What I was trying to say is that I've had to, look, if tomorrow-

02:01:44.540 When did you decide it was okay to get off the train?

02:01:48.840 In the last year.

02:01:50.020 Wow.

02:01:50.740 Yes.

02:01:51.020 In the last year.

02:01:52.520 It's been a huge change for me.

02:01:53.620 So how, was that a funeral for a piece of your ego?

02:01:57.060 Did you have to bury that little piece?

02:01:59.060 I don't think it's clean like that.

02:02:01.480 I think it's like, you said to me on my podcast that you're a backslider.

02:02:06.640 Mm-hmm.

02:02:06.820 So like, I've had moments of realizing powerfully, okay, I'm letting this go.

02:02:12.300 But then something triggers me, and I start getting competitive and weird again.

02:02:15.880 And then I remember, oh, yeah, no, no, no, I'm not playing this game anymore.

02:02:18.920 But that's pretty much how it goes for me.

02:02:21.020 I could spend a week or two out of the building, you know, working on other stuff and just

02:02:24.920 not even remember I'm a TV news journalist unless somebody stops me on the street.

02:02:28.740 And then I get back in the building and one thing or another happens and I start, I'm

02:02:33.200 filling in on GMA and I'm around.

02:02:34.880 I'm filling in on weekday GMA and I'm around all these big hosts and, you know, I have great

02:02:39.500 relationships with these folks.

02:02:40.540 But I start thinking, wait, should I be trying to do this?

02:02:43.880 I spent 25 years trying to do this.

02:02:45.420 And so it's a, it's not clean, but the, the overall trend is toward not my wife described

02:02:53.560 it as like an app that was running that was sucking up a lot of my battery life, but I

02:02:58.460 wasn't using it.

02:02:59.480 So I think that's starting to happen in a pretty big way.

02:03:02.880 That doesn't mean I don't want to be in TV news.

02:03:04.960 I'm actually delighted.

02:03:06.200 The app she's describing is the talk, is the self-talk, right?

02:03:10.760 Yes.

02:03:11.340 That's such a great, I like that because right now I'm having this awful issue with my computer

02:03:15.080 where Adobe is not working well.

02:03:17.820 And if I have it open, it will take 50% of my battery in one hour.

02:03:23.780 So my new rule is I can't have any PDFs open when I'm on the airplane and I'm working on

02:03:28.700 battery.

02:03:29.640 But that's now forever.

02:03:31.040 I will be able to, every time I open a PDF, I'm going to think about that and think, hey,

02:03:36.080 what's my mental Adobe reader right now?

02:03:39.360 Just to close this out, I still want to be in TV news.

02:03:42.620 I just want to be in TV news in a way that's like really enjoyable, which is I'm not constantly

02:03:47.280 angling for the next job.

02:03:48.800 I'm just loving the one I have right now and trying to ace this thing.

02:03:52.180 And that's just, for me, it's much more pleasant.

02:03:54.980 And it doesn't mean I don't continue to have big ambitions.

02:03:57.780 I have a startup company.

02:03:58.960 I would like us to be a billion dollar company.

02:04:01.120 Did I mention how great the app is that that company makes, by the way?

02:04:04.260 Yes.

02:04:04.800 Yes, you have.

02:04:05.800 And I need billboards in Times Square with you giving this.

02:04:09.720 But, you know, one of our competitors is a billion dollar company.

02:04:12.720 And do I think we can also be one?

02:04:15.140 I literally, and I'm sorry to piss off all the comm users, I don't think it belongs in

02:04:19.920 the same sentence as your app.

02:04:21.440 Well, it's a different product.

02:04:22.960 It is a very different product.

02:04:24.040 So I'm sure the defenders of that product will say yes, but it does A, B, and C, which I guess

02:04:28.660 I don't place a premium on.

02:04:30.120 But I guess for the things that I'm looking for, I think yours and Sam's are kind of in

02:04:36.280 their own world.

02:04:37.260 And I think as the market matures, you'll see.

02:04:39.160 Yeah, you'll create these niche lanes.

02:04:40.400 Yes.

02:04:40.780 Yeah.

02:04:41.060 Yeah.

02:04:41.360 And I think comm is helping a lot of people.

02:04:43.600 So I'm a terrible businessman in that I'm...

02:04:46.360 You're a promoter of another product.

02:04:47.500 Yes, I am.

02:04:48.720 Because I think if somebody comes to me and says they're using comm, I'm happy for them. 0.99

02:04:51.680 Or if they're using headspace, I'm happy for them.

02:04:53.400 My view is I like ours better.

02:04:55.320 And I would put Sam's in.

02:04:56.420 I'm kind of obviously rooting for Sam.

02:04:58.060 Yeah.

02:04:58.760 I think it's impossible to put a stake in the heart of all of your demons forever, in

02:05:03.640 my view, speaking only for myself.

02:05:06.280 I don't imagine all of my inner hobgoblins evaporating permanently.

02:05:11.620 But I do think I can turn the volume down and operate out of a cooler space.

02:05:16.140 Let me just give you an example.

02:05:17.880 We talked about safety before.

02:05:19.920 No.

02:05:20.560 Remember how I noticed that Jerry Colonna has this thing about love, safety, and belonging?

02:05:25.020 And for me, I really keyed in on safety.

02:05:26.700 The free needs for the children.

02:05:27.500 Yeah.

02:05:27.840 And I realized that it's not that my life is devoid of risk, but I can make a pretty

02:05:33.560 solid intellectual argument that if my startup goes pear-shaped and my current situation with

02:05:42.060 ABC News doesn't work, worst case scenario professionally.

02:05:47.500 I'll still be fine.

02:05:48.320 And can I operate day to day from the place of feeling already safe?

02:05:54.380 And how will that change how I show up?

02:05:56.960 It means that I'm not so sweaty and super heated in meetings.

02:06:00.820 Everything isn't so stakes.

02:06:02.520 The stakes aren't so high.

02:06:03.840 I can operate from a much more relaxed place.

02:06:06.020 And I've found that experimenting with this, which is a bit of a leap of faith, has really

02:06:11.720 changed the way I show up.

02:06:12.900 Now, how do we extrapolate that to somebody who works at Walmart and every day they wake

02:06:19.500 up and think, is Amazon going to close this Walmart?

02:06:24.400 So it's one thing to be Dan Harris, who I would agree with your assessment.

02:06:29.800 If ABC fired you tomorrow and the app blew up, I agree with your assessment.

02:06:36.900 I just think you're going to be fine.

02:06:38.480 Like, I don't see any scenario under which you're not fine.

02:06:42.180 But I don't know if I can say that about that person.

02:06:44.920 And given that that person is not rare, there's not 17 people in the United States that feel

02:06:50.880 that way or that are in that experience.

02:06:53.280 And by the way, I feel much more like the Walmart person than you.

02:06:56.220 Like, I feel way more insecure about my existence.

02:06:59.880 So I'm asking this in many ways through a very selfish lens.

02:07:03.480 How do we do this if we're not where you are yet?

02:07:07.280 I think it's an excellent, truly excellent question.

02:07:10.900 There's a massive amount of privilege associated with what I just said.

02:07:14.500 I don't think there's any way around it.

02:07:16.160 We have to view this, step out of the spiritual for a second and into, step out of psychological

02:07:21.840 and into socioeconomic is a very easy thing for a white, male, wealthy, highly educated,

02:07:34.400 quasi-public figure to say all the shit I just said, as opposed to a Walmart worker.

02:07:40.340 Never mind if it's a trans person or a woman of color who happens to work at Walmart. 0.61

02:07:45.820 I just don't think there's any way around that.

02:07:48.120 I do think it applies to you.

02:07:49.720 I mean, you are going to be fine, with the exception of the white part, although you present 1.00

02:07:55.760 as white.

02:07:56.720 You have all of the privilege that I have, unless I'm missing something.

02:08:01.680 Yes.

02:08:02.280 No, I'm not suggesting I don't.

02:08:05.240 I think I'm just suggesting I don't feel it, right?

02:08:07.380 I still feel a tremendous insecurity of everything could be taken away tomorrow.

02:08:14.240 I think if there was a better meditation practitioner and teacher in the room right now, she or he

02:08:24.480 would have an answer to how we can all feel safe, no matter what our circumstances are.

02:08:30.800 I just am not that person.

02:08:32.880 We're bumping up against the limits of my abilities here.

02:08:37.720 And, you know, you said something earlier that I think is really important.

02:08:41.540 As I've been struggling with this chapter in my book on emotional health, you know, right

02:08:47.440 now it has sort of three pillars and I suspect it will evolve.

02:08:51.840 The three pillars are mindfulness, developing the capacity to be mindful, developing the capacity

02:08:57.820 to reframe things, which is basically stoicism and then some.

02:09:04.060 And also a cognitive behavioral therapy.

02:09:05.980 Correct.

02:09:06.700 And then the third pillar is relationality.

02:09:09.140 And you've basically said all three of those in your own terminology.

02:09:12.860 So that makes me feel better that I'm not on the wrong track.

02:09:15.860 It might be that mindfulness is not per se the tool for that, that one particular insecurity,

02:09:21.680 or maybe it is to some extent, but the one thing that I do that does give me comfort when

02:09:28.900 I feel very insecure is if I lose the capacity to do my work tomorrow, I don't lose my relationships.

02:09:39.600 That's not really me falling back on a mindfulness tool.

02:09:42.560 It's me falling back on.

02:09:44.240 It's a reframe.

02:09:45.080 It's a reframe.

02:09:45.940 Yeah.

02:09:46.060 It's basically a reframe that says, you know what?

02:09:47.840 If I had to give up all of the things that I love in life and if I couldn't do what I

02:09:54.740 do, but I still had these people in my life, I'm not going to kid myself and say my life

02:10:01.060 would be just as good, but it wouldn't be all bad.

02:10:03.840 And that's probably the closest I can come at this point to thinking about, to be clear,

02:10:08.940 I think I have so much evolution that still has to come because I'd love to get to the

02:10:14.740 point where I could show up from a place of zero insecurity.

02:10:18.640 Let me just stop you on that because I hope I didn't miscommunicate in that I gave anybody

02:10:26.320 the impression that I show up with zero fear and insecurity.

02:10:30.540 It's just that I'm experimenting with recognizing that I don't have any, there's no rationale

02:10:34.560 for it.

02:10:35.640 There is limited rationale for it.

02:10:37.840 And that I can go into today's meetings from a feeling of like, let's just enjoy this.

02:10:43.540 I can't believe I get to have all these meetings today about this amazing company or this amazing

02:10:47.500 story I'm going to work on.

02:10:48.680 And can I not be so clenched up because that's not helping the process or the end result.

02:10:55.180 That doesn't mean risk isn't out there.

02:10:57.340 And it doesn't mean I'm getting to zero on my demons.

02:11:00.700 It just means that I'm turning down the volume.

02:11:02.340 And that's the 10% happier spirit, which is there is no magic.

02:11:07.920 It's really about marginal improvement over time with an escape valve for backsliding.

02:11:14.620 Because that's just, I think my understanding of how human behavior works based on an end

02:11:19.180 of one.

02:11:20.260 But I think it's a pretty universal, I think we're all kind of in the same bucket in some

02:11:24.740 ways.

02:11:25.740 I'll bring up another point that you brought up something earlier, and this is sort of a

02:11:30.020 bit tangential, but I think it is really important, which is one of my therapists, I know you get

02:11:35.080 a kick out of the fact that I have three of them.

02:11:38.580 It's just such a type A way.

02:11:40.980 Nothing in moderation except moderation, Dan.

02:11:43.700 Okay, that's my ethos.

02:11:46.040 Such a type A way to do self-improvement.

02:11:48.760 But one of them made a really great point, which was the importance of my daughter, who's,

02:11:57.380 again, I think you commented on the age gap between my kids, but very different relationship

02:12:01.700 with my daughter than my son's at this point.

02:12:02.920 The 11-year-old.

02:12:03.480 Yeah, right.

02:12:03.980 There's one who's almost 11, and then there's the five and the two.

02:12:07.460 And I was talking about something that I was very uncomfortable about, something I was very

02:12:14.700 ashamed of. And the therapist said, it's funny, I may have been blanking on which one. It was either

02:12:21.000 Terry or Esther, but it was Esther. She said, it's actually very important that your daughter

02:12:25.860 sees how much you're ashamed of this and how much you're struggling with this. And it's okay if she

02:12:31.520 sees you cry about this. And she really went through all this stuff. And in retrospect, it seems

02:12:37.440 so obvious that what she was really trying to say was, you're not helping her by letting her think

02:12:44.260 you're some indestructible force who never struggles, who doesn't have remorse, who doesn't

02:12:51.020 make mistakes, and then come to repent. And as obvious as that sounds now, that has historically

02:12:58.240 felt wrong. It's felt like she should see me as perfect, and I should hide my mistakes from her.

02:13:07.440 I think what made me think of that was just something you said earlier about your son.

02:13:11.440 But you just said it so much more eloquently, right? Which is, you want him to see your struggle.

02:13:15.660 You want him to know that, boy, daddy's knee-jerk reaction is to lose his mind right now over

02:13:21.200 whatever. But I've figured out this whole practice, and I'm just less likely to lose my mind now. And

02:13:28.260 whatever it is that's sort of pissing me off, that used to piss me off for four hours, is actually

02:13:33.020 going to upset me for about two minutes. This is actually something I'm really looking forward to.

02:13:37.440 In life is just, as I feel like I'm right in the midst of finally starting to win the battle there,

02:13:44.800 is actually sharing that with my kids. My daughter is old enough to remember some of these outbursts.

02:13:51.200 She has seen some brutal outbursts. She has never been the recipient of an outburst, but she has,

02:13:57.360 I mean, she's been in the car when I have, I mean, uttered such profanity at another driver that you just,

02:14:07.720 and there's no way she's not traumatized by that. There's no way, even though, you know,

02:14:11.340 because another thing I've learned about children is, at that age, they can't sometimes tell that it's not

02:14:16.720 about them. It seems irrational to us. No, no, no. I'm clearly yelling at a person in a car who nearly

02:14:23.580 killed us. How could she take that personally? But, you know, on some level, she's pierced by that.

02:14:30.180 Yes.

02:14:30.420 So for her to understand that your dad's flawed and he's trying to be less flawed,

02:14:36.880 I think of this as like one of the greatest things that we could do as parents.

02:14:39.880 Yeah, because she's going to have flaws. And how is she going to relate to them?

02:14:43.700 Yeah.

02:14:44.100 And that's what I was trying to say before.

02:14:46.140 That's the key. See, that's the part that you're adding to it that I don't think I've thought through.

02:14:50.620 I'm stealing it from Jerry Colonna. So I think it's incredibly potent.

02:14:54.940 When you are modeling successful relationships with your own complexity and own demons to

02:15:05.200 your kid, that not only enriches your behavior and relationship with the kid, because they

02:15:11.680 really know you, but it also just gives them a tool for moving through life in a way that

02:15:16.440 will reduce their own suffering.

02:15:20.560 When was the last time you saw Peter Jennings before he died?

02:15:24.940 He called me into his office down the hall here and told me he wanted me to go to off

02:15:34.880 on a trip to the Middle East to spend some time in Israel and then go into Iraq.

02:15:39.380 And then also told me that there was a perception I wasn't very good at foreign coverage.

02:15:44.160 Oh, but this was before he told the world he was dying, right?

02:15:46.640 Yes. And this is just typical of him. He was like giving me this big assignment and also

02:15:50.680 like smacking me in the face while he did it. Just like a little pointed jab at, yeah,

02:15:57.540 you need to prove to us once again that you're good at this thing, even though I had like spent

02:16:01.600 years getting shot at. And then when I was on that trip, he announced that he had lung cancer.

02:16:07.500 This was 05?

02:16:08.580 05, yes. That was in the like late winter, early spring of 05. And then I didn't see him again.

02:16:15.780 He called me one time in the spring and he could barely talk. His voice, the cancer had

02:16:22.720 shredded his vocal cords. I can't remember what he was telling me, but he was kind of like

02:16:27.020 correcting something I had done. That's how he operated. He was very into correcting. And so

02:16:33.560 we talked and then that was it. And then I heard he died in August.

02:16:39.420 But you didn't see him in that interim?

02:16:41.020 No.

02:16:41.120 Ever came to visit him?

02:16:42.240 No.

02:16:42.760 Was he not the kind of person that would want to have been visited?

02:16:46.540 Or did you not feel close enough to him personally?

02:16:48.400 No. Our relationship, I was certainly one of his mentees and he really took that very

02:16:53.400 seriously. He really took me under his wing. I don't know if he was receiving visitors,

02:16:57.620 but I don't think even if he was, I would have been, somebody would have had to cajole or

02:17:02.020 invite me.

02:17:03.300 Because you just wouldn't have been comfortable in that setting?

02:17:05.760 I wouldn't have presumed that he wanted to see me.

02:17:07.580 So Peter died young. He was in his 60s, right?

02:17:12.280 Yeah. 66, I think.

02:17:13.260 Yeah. So if you could go back in time to the late 90s, you met him in what, the late 90s?

02:17:24.020 2000.

02:17:24.680 You met in 2000. So you can go back in time to then when he's, say, call it 60. But you

02:17:30.100 are the guy you are today. So you're still younger than him, but you're close enough, right?

02:17:35.360 But you know these things that you've learned. And you were having dinner with him. And you

02:17:42.720 know all the stuff about him, right? Which is like, he's this maniacal perfectionist. He

02:17:49.320 is the best of the best. Would you be probing these things? Would you want to know if he

02:17:55.880 was happy? Do you think he was happy?

02:17:57.420 I think he could be happy. But I think fundamentally, he seemed to me like somebody who wasn't super

02:18:06.080 happy. And I think he was driven a lot by the dark spots. You know, the wanting to prove,

02:18:12.160 wanting to win. And yet he also, that dysfunctional part of him created so much value in that he was

02:18:19.540 just so such an intrepid reporter. And he also trained, you know, like we learned so

02:18:26.060 much just by being near him. And so there's so many journalists who are working today because

02:18:29.960 or do a better job because of their relationship with Peter. I'm very reluctant to push meditation

02:18:37.920 on anybody. So I thought that's, that's where you were going with it, but simply to probe

02:18:44.240 his happiness level and what might be contributing to unhappiness. Yeah, I do think I would have done

02:18:50.720 that. And I actually think that could have been interesting and productive. If I had evangelized

02:18:56.020 meditation to him, I think that probably would have backfired.

02:19:00.080 I can't say one way or the other, but just as a general rule, I think,

02:19:04.300 even as I think about talking with some of my patients who have that phenotype, usually meditation

02:19:10.440 isn't the place to start. The place to start is just to try to get a sense of the similarities

02:19:16.860 between us. I'm not talking to anybody about this stuff as an authority who's figured anything out.

02:19:21.440 I'm talking about it as a schlep who's right there. Whereas a lot of times when doctors talk to

02:19:24.880 patients, there's this view of, well, the doctor's over here and the doctor's figured it out. And

02:19:29.800 they've got a couple of stone pillars that are carved with instructions and they're going to give

02:19:34.260 them to you. But this is clearly an area where that's not the case. And maybe even using Peter as an

02:19:39.340 example, which of course is just such ridiculous speculation. So I just want to caveat all of

02:19:43.160 that. You've pointed out that one, he was arguably the single best that ever did this job. Two,

02:19:50.600 he spawned a generation of people like you who have been imparted with a standard of professionalism.

02:20:00.120 Anderson Cooper, Jake Tapper, Chris Cuomo, John Berman, Bob Woodruff, Martha Raddatz, George

02:20:08.280 Stephanopoulos. I mean, Jonathan Karl, like on and on. Just Pierre Thomas, just incredible people

02:20:15.580 who came out of his orbit.

02:20:17.760 So it begs the question that we've sort of danced around. If Peter was a Buddha Zen dude,

02:20:29.020 could he have had that same impact or would it have simply been a different impact for which

02:20:34.640 it's impossible to speculate what the net ripple effect was?

02:20:37.900 My intuition is that you're going to have more of an impact on people if you're not

02:20:43.420 stressing them out so much that all they can, that you shut down their ability for cognitive

02:20:51.460 function. Because that's what he did. He was just so, such a bully that, you know, when you stress

02:20:57.040 somebody out, they can't learn well. But if he felt safe and was willing to sort of calmly impart

02:21:03.580 the many lessons he had learned over the course of his illustrious career, I think we would have

02:21:08.840 learned even more. Instead, one of the things we learned was how to deal with a bully.

02:21:16.400 Dan, there is so much more I'd love to talk with you about, but I think we should save it until

02:21:21.080 your book is in its next phase, which is to say about to come out. Talk to us about what that

02:21:26.640 timeline looks like. So you're in the throes of writing or are you still storyboarding?

02:21:29.880 Um, writing, actually writing, mostly storyboarded. It's, uh, it's mostly storyboarded. It's going

02:21:35.480 slowly, but I hope it will come out early. It may come out close to when yours comes out early 2021

02:21:42.680 or mid 2021. We'll see. I mean, the absolute, absolute best case scenario, which I think is

02:21:49.300 highly unlikely would be new year's 2021. I think more likely it would be some point in that year.

02:21:55.220 Got it. Well, I can't believe we might have to wait that long to talk again. So maybe we won't,

02:22:00.200 but nevertheless, no, we're going to work out together. Well, no, no. I mean, talk about,

02:22:03.440 talk on a podcast. Oh yeah. Well, thank you so much, Dan. I mean, thank you on several levels,

02:22:09.240 right? Thank you for 10% happier, just completely on a personal level. I'm simply not sure if that

02:22:17.420 door could have been pried open with any other tool and that door had to be pried open. And even

02:22:23.960 though it has, it's simply the beginning of a journey, I think it is one of the most important

02:22:28.540 journeys I've ever taken and will continue to take. And just thank you for creating an app that I think

02:22:35.960 takes something like meditation that comes with so many hangups and so much baggage and makes it so

02:22:43.640 completely accessible. And again, I'm biased, but it's the type of meditation and the type of practice

02:22:50.340 that on a personal level, I have found most helpful to alleviate my abject misery and suffering that

02:22:57.500 seems to be my default state. So thank you for that. And lastly, just thank you for making so much

02:23:02.080 time on a weekend to sit here and chat with me. My pleasure. My pleasure. Thank you.

02:23:08.420 You can find all of this information and more at peteratiamd.com forward slash podcast.

02:23:13.740 There you'll find the show notes, readings, and links related to this episode.

02:23:17.540 You can also find my blog at peteratiamd.com. Maybe the simplest thing to do is to sign up for

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02:23:27.920 the most interesting papers I've read, and all things related to longevity, science, performance,

02:23:32.800 sleep, et cetera. On social, you can find me on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook,

02:23:37.320 all with the ID peteratiamd. But usually Twitter is the best way to reach me to share your questions

02:23:42.340 and comments. Now for the obligatory disclaimer. This podcast is for general informational purposes

02:23:47.300 only and does not constitute the practice of medicine, nursing, or other professional health

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The Peter Attia Drive - September 23, 2019

#72 - Dan Harris： 10% happier – meditation, kindness, and compassion

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