#72 - Dan Harris: 10% happier – meditation, kindness, and compassion
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Hey everyone, welcome to the Peter Attia Drive. I'm your host, Peter Attia.

The drive is a result of my hunger for optimizing performance, health, longevity, critical thinking, along with a few other obsessions along the way. I've spent the last several years working with some of the most successful top performing individuals in the world. And this podcast is my attempt to synthesize what I've learned along the way to help you live a higher quality, more fulfilling life. If you enjoy this podcast, you can find more information on today's episode and other topics at peteratiamd.com.

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My guest this week is Dan Harris. For those unfamiliar with Dan, he wrote the New York Times bestselling book, 10% Happier. He also hosts the 10% Happier podcast, which I've appeared on and is the co-founder of the 10% Happier meditation app, which by the end of this podcast, there will be no ambiguity about how much I love that app.

In addition to everything 10% Happier, Dan is also the co-host of Weekend Edition of Good Morning America and up until quite recently was the co-anchor of Nightline. I met Dan through a very close friend of mine and this is one of those times when I specifically just begged my friend to make the introduction. I read 10% Happier

almost the minute it came out in 2014, immediately became a fan and somehow have spent the last five years stalking him, trying to figure out how to get to know him. And eventually a friend of mine made the introduction. And I kind of talk a little bit about that in the, uh,

podcast about, you know, how much his work has had a, just a profound impact on me and just how grateful I am for all that his journey into meditation has brought me. You know, in this episode, we talk about a lot of things. We do go into his story in a bit more detail about his upbringing and pretty quickly we get into the story of his

the breakdown meltdown slash crisis he had on national TV in 2004 that ultimately began his journey that culminated sort of four or five years later with his discovery of meditation. And what I really like about this episode, truthfully, is we get into a lot of stuff that I've always wanted to talk about with Dan and it's the exact stuff we would have talked about over dinner.

And the fact that we got to have it in a podcast is exactly why I have a podcast. So I hope that you will find this discussion half as interesting as I did. And I hope that for those of you who have not yet taken an interest in meditation, that maybe the topics that we discuss here become the thin end of the wedge that at least get you to start exploring a tool that I believe is one of the most important tools in the longevity toolkit. So without further delay, please enjoy my discussion with Dan Harris.

Before we start the podcast, I want to just make a special announcement. As you're about to hear in this podcast with Dan, I'm a user and enormous believer promoter of the 10% Happier app for meditating. This is something that Dan and his team have been working on for several years. I've been using it for nearly two years now.

I think it is simply a remarkable tool and I recommend this app and one other app, Sam Harris's app, Waking Up, to any one of my patients who is finally willing to take the plunge and try mindfulness meditation.

Now, one of the things we wanted to do at the time of the release of this podcast was work with the team at 10% Happier to do a special subscriber discount code that's going to go along with the podcast release. And they were kind enough to do this at an unbelievable, amazing discount, which is available for only one week until September 30th. Now, they've also provided us with an ongoing discount that will go on beyond September 30th. It's just not as much of a discount, though I still think it's actually a pretty impressive discount.

So if you're thinking about using this app or after this podcast, you're thinking, hmm, you know, maybe I'll give this a try. This would be a great time to sign up to become one of our subscribers. If you're already a subscriber, you can visit us at peterottmd.com forward slash members where you can take advantage of the discount. And if you're not a subscriber and you want to access this code as well as all of our other subscriber only benefits, you can visit us at peterottmd.com forward slash subscribe.

As a reminder, we are not taking any money to promote, sell, or have any endorsement of 10% Happier. We are doing this solely because I believe in this product. I love this product. And rather than have this company or other companies pay us to advertise, we say, take the money you would have paid us to advertise and please pass that discount on to our subscribers. So thanks for listening. I hope you enjoy my interview with Dan Harris.

Dan, thank you so much for making time on no less a Saturday morning to sit here and talk with me. Well, I'm at work anyway on Saturdays. But anyway, it's a pleasure. And this is cool to be doing it in an awesome studio like this. I feel like there's some pretty cool stuff that's probably happened in this very room.

Yeah, I mean, we are sitting on the second floor of the ABC News headquarters and down the hall is where the late, great Peter Jennings used to work. So I've had some traumatic moments on this floor. And I can't wait to dig into some of those. He's definitely one of the most handsome people I've ever seen. He's a handsome dude. This is a general statement of handsomeness. 007. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, I've wanted to have you on this podcast for such a long time. I've wanted to meet you for a really long time, probably about from the day I finished reading your book, which would have been a little over five years ago. I read your book because I read your book as soon as it came out. In fact, I pre-ordered it. And as I've probably alluded to a little bit on the podcast before, it's really your book that

was the first thing that ever cracked the veneer of meditation is irrelevant. You know, that sort of ethos. And your book is really almost single-handedly responsible for my interest in meditation and in some ways for where I find myself today, which is in a much better place than I was then.

So I'd like to almost just start with that. The title of the book, 10% Happier, I think it's just such a beautiful title because it doesn't overpromise and it's just such a glib, cute thing. And what was the alternative title? The Voice in My Head is an Asshole. Which is just as good, probably a little bit better technically as a title. Rather than just make you tell the whole story of the book, take me back to...

the moment that started it. You've talked about this, and I know you're tired of talking about it, I'm sure, but maybe one more time. What was the moment when you realized all was not well in Dan Harris land? I've come to terms with the fact that I'm going to tell this story a million times, so don't feel sheepish. The inciting event of the book, to put it in Hollywood terms, was a panic attack. Not in this building, but at our studio in Times Square where we do Good Morning America every morning.

It was 2004, warm June morning. I was filling in for Robin Roberts, who was at that time the newsreader on the show. Newsreader, you don't have this position anymore, but it's the person who comes on at the top of each hour and reads off a bunch of headlines.

they've done a few big stories at this point and they'll say hey you know there are a few other headlines bubbling let's get it over to robin roberts or dan harris who's filling in for robert and roberts take it away so i had done this a bunch of times i was in a phase at this point where i was filling in for robin and also the main host of the show charl charlie gibson quite a bit there

they were giving me a shot and for reasons i don't fully understand why it happened this morning i was a couple seconds into my shtick i was going to read six what they call voiceovers off of the teleprompter that was 20 feet in front of me so voiceover is i'm talking to the camera but they roll video over what i'm saying and a few seconds in i just lost the ability to breathe my

palms were sweaty, my heart was racing, my lungs seized up, I just couldn't talk. My mind was racing and the more my body freaked out, the more my mind freaked out, and the more my mind freaked out, the more my body freaked out. And I had to do something I'd never done before, which was just quit right in the middle of the whole thing. And this is live? This is live. I later found out that the audience was 5.019 million and it was just terrible.

I lied to the people around me when they asked what had gone wrong. I said, I don't know. It's fine. And I was able to come on an hour later and do another bit. So, and if you look at it, it has a ton. If you just Google panic attack on live television, it's the first result. It has millions of hits. If you look at it, it actually doesn't look that bad. I'll just say something about that. If you've ever had a panic or high anxiety,

It will actually, it's a little triggering for those people. If you haven't, a response I hear from many people is, you know, it didn't look that bad, which is true. If I recall, it was, you were reading about either a new statin or a new drug, if I recall. It's been so long since I've seen it because I don't think I saw it. I watched it when the book came out because I was like, oh, I wonder what he's talking about. And I don't think I've seen it in five years. Yes. Well, no reason to go back to it unless you're me.

If I hadn't had the luxury of tossing the baton back to the main host, then it would have been truly epic because I was unable to speak. I would have had to rip the mic off and run away. But I was able to get out the words back to Charlie and – and I actually said back to Charlie and Robin when it was actually Charlie and Diane Sawyer. That saved me.

It really doesn't matter because this isn't about the panic attack. Yeah, it's about what led to the panic attack. Exactly. So even more embarrassing than the panic attack is what caused it, which is that I had spent a lot of time in war zones after 9-11. Very ambitious guy and very idealistic. And I want to say fearless, but in the pejorative.

I didn't really think much about what the consequences of going overseas would be. And so I was in Afghanistan a bunch of times, Pakistan, Israel, the West Bank, Gaza. I made a couple of trips to Iraq that all added up to about six months, which spanned the pre-invasion, invasion, and then all the way up until the insurgency started really cooking.

And I came home in this period of time and I got depressed. And I didn't actually know I was depressed. I was having trouble getting out of bed and I felt sick a lot. But I didn't know I was depressed. A friend of mine, I was out one night going out to a party and a buddy of mine offered me some cocaine. And I'd never, I'd smoked weed and drank, not really even to excess.

But I'd never had hard drugs. I was always really afraid of them. But because I was feeling like shit, I don't know why I said yes that night. And the cocaine made me feel better. Just like took it away. In hindsight, I think it's pretty obvious. I was depressed from coming home from the war zones, not because I was traumatized, but because I missed the action. I liked it. And I was in withdrawal from the adrenaline.

And the cocaine was a synthetic squirt of that adrenaline. And it made me feel better. Obviously, it didn't last that long, which is a hard lesson every Coke user has to learn. And if you haven't used Coke, I recommend you don't. How does that relate to the panic attack? After I freaked out, it actually happened to me twice. I went to a doctor here in New York City who's an expert in panic. He asked me a bunch of questions. One of the questions was, do you do drugs? Which at this point, you're thinking...

That would never even register as a potential college. No. I make this joke all the time. When I said, yeah, I do drugs, he gave me a look. And the look communicated the sentiment of, okay, asshole, mystery solved. I wasn't a heavy cocaine user. I was intermittent. It was only on the weekends. I wasn't high when I was on the air or anything like that. It was just I partied once in a while.

He was like, that's enough to change your brain chemistry and make it more likely for you to have a panic attack. So that was a big aha moment. And I quit doing drugs, started seeing him frequently. And that was really the beginning of me making a change. And I want to talk so much about what came of that. But I also want to kind of dig into a little bit of what got you here, because

I think there are a lot of people out there. I mean, I've had patients who have done a lot of cocaine or have done some cocaine and, you know, many of them still don't experience what you experience. They may not be on live television. That's right. They may not have the same provocation or the same stress that can produce that phenotype. But I want to kind of go back to something that's maybe even at the root of all of that, which was what was the void? It maybe is the wrong word, but what was the itch you were trying to scratch? What was the

the rush that you needed throughout your life. I mean, you, I could never do what you do. Let's start with that, right? Like I could never put myself out the way someone in your position puts themselves out. It's, it's kind of an amazing thing that you can talk to so many people every night, you know, like, or every day or get your start in this whole space of news. So in college, I remember you writing about how you, you know, you worked at a local news station, right? You get this big break to come to ABC and,

You're getting a dopamine hit every time you do something good, right? Do you have a sense of what that dopamine hit was numbing? Because I do think that on some level, cocaine, perfectionism, performance, sex, all of these things can numb. Have you ever read the book by Gabor Mate in the realm of hungry ghosts? No.

I haven't, but The Hungry Ghost is something I think a lot about. It's an ancient Buddhist idea. Yeah, I believe that's where he borrowed the title for the book. And as you can imagine, he writes a book about addiction. But what I love so much about the book is he does a great job of making the case. He's a psychiatrist, and he mostly treats patients who are on Skid Row in Vancouver, so usually opiate addicted. But you read the book, and you come away realizing, wait a second.

you could be a high flying news anchor. You could be a, you know, a wall street tycoon. You're an addict too. So the person on Skid Row for them, the opiate or whatever drug of choice is lighting something up in their cortex. It's a pleasure center, but you can get that from so many different things. So I guess what I'm getting at in a long winded way is when do you think your addiction or your junkie ism started? Was your career choice in any way

driven by that, which I would think for most of us on some level it is. Yeah, I have been trying to think about this quite a bit recently because I don't think I really satisfactorily answered it in 10% Happier. I don't think that was really the point. Maybe I should have or maybe I shouldn't have. I don't know. Either way, set it aside. Just one point.

That's sort of adjacent. When you talked about Gabor Mate's work, I have a friend, Dr. Judson Brewer, who actually might be a good guest for you. He's a neuroscientist formerly of Yale, now at Brown. He's one of the lead neuroscientists in the fascinating push to figure out what meditation does to the brain. But Jud is also an expert in addiction, and he actually treats people clinically.

He wrote a book published by Yale University Press called The Craving Mind, but his initial title was We're All Addicted. So it really goes to the fact that you don't have – addiction – these are my words, not his, and I don't know if he would have blessed them. But what I take from what he's saying is addiction is a spectrum.

You may think you're not an addict because you don't have a needle hanging out of your arm, but that needle hanging out of your arm is just the extreme end of the spectrum. But we're all addicted to lots of things. You know, what's your relationship with your phone? What's your relationship with professional success? What's your relationship with sex, shopping, gambling, drinking? We are rats in a maze, you know, and we go where the pellets are. Yeah. And for the first time ever, when I read Mate's book, which I think I read in 2016 or 2017,

There was a moment in when I realized those of us with the socially acceptable addictions actually have a disadvantage. If there's one advantage to having a needle in your arm, at least everybody realizes it's wrong and you're more likely to do something about it. But if you're a perfectionist, if you're a workaholic, you're getting a lot of attaboys before someone comes along and says, let's examine your relationship with this thing.

That's an excellent point. So what drives me? What makes Sammy run? You know that book? There was a moment when I was a kid, my parents were both academic physicians. And very prominent. I mean, your mom especially. Yeah, my mom was one of the editors at the New England Journal of Medicine. She's just about to retire. My dad was chief of radiation oncology at the Brigham and Women's, one of the pioneers in radiation therapy. But academic medicine doesn't pay that well.

We lived in Newton, Massachusetts, and I was really keenly aware of the fact that we were much poorer than a lot of the kids that I went to school with. My dad drove like a shit brown Plymouth Valiant, and my mother a very bland Chevy Chevrolet or something like that. And, you know, we had a nice house, but it wasn't that nice vinyl siding. And yet I knew...

One of my friends lived a couple doors down from Sumner Redstone. And interestingly, I also had a lot of – Newton's a pretty big city, so I also had a lot of friends who lived in public housing. But it was the rich people that kind of got in my head, and I felt insecure about that. I also remember during this period, my parents somehow took us on a trip to Europe.

and it was all paid for because they were going to give a few talks, lectures at various institutions around Europe, but we were also going to turn a lot of it into vacation. Most of the time we stayed in not very nice places, but when we went to Paris, we stayed at a really fancy hotel that whatever local institution they were speaking at put us up at. It's called the Hotel Regina, and it was really fancy, and it was the first time I'd ever been to a really fancy hotel. How old were you? I think 10 or 11, and I remember thinking –

This is how I'm going to live. I'm not going to live like these schmucks.

who didn't keep the heat on in the winter. We all had to wear down vests around the house because they were so flinty. They were so intent on saving money. And I think there was something, and it's not as simple as just saying it was the Hotel Regina that did it. But that, to me, seems like a defining moment. The other thing I think that's going on that I only really started to get clarity on recently is I have an executive coach who –

I actually mentioned to you when you came on my podcast, this guy's name is Jerry Colonna. And Jerry is an executive coach, but he's not interested in productivity hacks.

or how to get your next promotion, or how to manage your inbox. He is really interested in what are the primordial wounds in your life, what's your five-year-old logic that is happening in the backdrop of your adult life, and in many ways controlling you like a malevolent puppeteer, but that you don't have visibility on. And he tries to help you see sort of like what are these characters in your head that have so much power over you, especially when you don't see them.

And he often talks about the fact that as a young person, there are three primary needs we have, love, safety, and belonging. And when I first heard him say that, I said, well, that's bullshit. I don't – that's –

pretty much my reflexive response to anything. You're a healthy skeptic. Yes, I'm a healthy, no, I'm a, well, I'm a skeptic. Sometimes it's healthy. Anyway, so he's talked about love, safety, and belonging, and I don't know, Jerry's got a way that sometimes I have to reject his first foray for a while before I accept it. But over time, I started to realize that safety is actually something really important for me.

There is such a thing as intergenerational trauma. My great grandparents escaped the Cossacks. Another great grandfather lost his family's meager fortune, put his head in the oven and killed himself in the family kitchen. Lots of alcoholism, depression, poverty, fortunes lost and made and lost in my family tree. You know, my dad's an inveterate worrier. So is my mother, really, if I'm being honest.

I think that the desire for, I never felt unsafe in the home, but I think the world has always felt unsafe to me. And now having been raised during the Cold War, which freaked me out so much that I had to go see a shrink when I was a little kid, I think part of the drive is the self-protection. You mentioned one of your grandparents who had a pretty impressive temper. Was that a grandfather? Yeah, Robert Johnson. So my

maternal grandfather. He was raised in some shitty farm in upstate New York by an abusive, really abusive father. He was smart, though. He got into Middlebury and then got married a girl at Middlebury. And he was smart enough to get into Stanford to do a graduate degree in history. He was going to become a history professor. But he had a kid, my mother.

And then he had another and another and another, ultimately five. And they didn't have housing for kids at Stanford and he couldn't afford to go otherwise. And basically lived the rest of his life

Yes. Not only them, but the world. He became a middle manager at the Yellow Pages. Remember what the Yellow Pages were? They used to have a big Bible of telephone numbers that used to show up on our doorstep once a year. And he was part of that team, but not a particularly successful part of that team. Really embittered and took it out on his kids and was a bully with them, slapped them in the face, figured out what their weaknesses were and exploited them in public. And I

I remember when I was a little kid, he came in one day. I came to his house and he took me into his living room to show me his VCR and said, if you touch this, I'll break your arm.

Like that kind of guy. Fascinatingly, in his 80s, he became very nice. He got a computer and he was really into Twitter and email and he would email all of his grandchildren. And so this big radical change came over him later in his life. Did you ever get to talk to him about what precipitated the change? No, I didn't dare ask. Is he still alive? He is not alive. I don't know how he would have taken that question. Didn't strike me as something that would be safe to ask him.

Have you ever talked with your mom about him and his impact on her life and maybe what she's transmitted of that to her kids either directly or indirectly through trying to avoid patterns? She definitely, I think both of my parents tried to, my dad's parents were quite kind, but they had flaws of their own.

I think both of my parents had this idea that they were not going to repeat the mistakes their parents had made. And they were really good parents. But recently, I've been talking to my mother more about her relationship to her father because I'm writing a book about compassion and kindness, which are two words that most men don't want to talk about much. And they're just kind of, to my ears, kind of, I'm almost slightly embarrassed to have them pass my lips. But I think there's going to be a way to talk about this stuff that...

can be more attractive and aspirational because we clearly need it. And we need it as human beings. We need it as a culture. For me, it's important to understand my mother's relationship to this guy because I see so much of him in me. So I got to reckon with it. You have a brother and a sister? Just a brother. Just a brother. Yeah. Did any of that get transmitted to him in the same way? Does your brother feel that he has some of his grandfather in him? I don't think so. My brothers are pretty

Menchie guy, just widely beloved. He's a pretty prominent venture capitalist. And within that community, which I now know better as a startup co-founder, his reputation is just people really like him. He's got a wide, wide circle of friends and is very kind of relaxed and affable. My wife has referred to him as the nice Harris. Ha ha ha ha.

So I don't see, he's got his own stuff. For sure, we all have stuff. It's not the kind of stern authoritarian vibe that I can emit. So I want to come back to the story, but I want to sort of go off on one little tangent for a moment. You said that the words kindness and compassion, you almost feel a little uneasy when they pass your lips, or you said something to that effect. Why is that? Because I think the words are encrusted in so much

cultural stuff like cliche. I don't know that we found a great way to talk about kindness and compassion. It's hallmarky, ooey gooey, meaningless cliche, or it's bland, dogmatic, exhortation, figure wagging, God is watching type of stuff. It's not often sold to us the way it can actually be sold to us, which is in terms of our own self-interest.

There's a lot of evidence that shows that people who are compassionate are happier, healthier, more successful, more popular. And it feels good on a moment to moment basis. It feels good. We are wired to get better.

feel good chemicals released into our brain when we're good to other people. Just by way of an example, what does it feel like when you hold the door open for somebody? If you're mindful in that moment, if you're awake, that feels good. Well, that is infinitely scalable. Not to the point where you have to be an idiot or be a doorman, which, you know, I love my doormen. They're definitely not idiots, but they can do that job, which 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.

The point is that you can. My meditation teacher has a great little rule that I've been trying to operationalize, which is if he notices the impulse to give something arise, he does it.

So how many times during the day is the impulse to like, maybe, you know, I could compliment somebody on her shoes or his shoes, but you don't do it for one reason or another. Or, you know, you send that note to that person just to say they did a great job on something or walk down the street and you know you got two bucks in your pocket, but you don't really want to make eye contact with a person standing outside of Starbucks asking for money. No, actually, just do the giving. Why? Not because you're rah-rah just trying to make the world a better place, man.

Do it because it feels good for you. And by the way, yes, it will make the world a better place in lots of unpredictable ways. But my sales pitch here is that – and I wrote a chapter about this in 10% Happier called The Self-Interested Case for Not Being a Dick. And –

That's just a jokey way of putting it because it's me struggling with how to talk about this incredibly important subject in a way that avoids all of the cliches that have made it so meaningless to so many people. We all kind of vaguely want to be nice or we think we're good people. We've thought about it. We certainly want other people to be nicer, but I don't know. There's only one self-help book that I can think of that's been successful about compassion.

And that book does not advertise compassion on its cover. The book is called How to Win Friends and Influence People. And if you read it, which I happened to recently do, it's actually a book about compassion. That's been kind of inspirational for me in thinking about like how can you find a way to talk about these things in a way that people will actually listen.

You know, it's so funny you bring this up because just by total coincidence, I think yesterday the meditation I did in your app. So for the listeners, if you haven't figured it out by now, which means you haven't been listening to my podcast, which is fine, I still forgive you. But Dan is the co-founder of an app called 10% Happier, which along with another app that I've talked about a lot waking up are really the cornerstones of my meditation practice.

And I've probably also talked, you've probably heard me talk about Joseph Goldstein. Jeff Warren is a couple of the teachers that I really, really like in this app. And I think it was just yesterday I did a lesson. I think Joseph, I'm pretty sure it was Joseph. And it was talking about how even your physical characteristics change in a moment of conflict. Choose to

do the kind thing versus the not. So sure enough, I do my meditation in the morning. I go to the gym in San Diego. I have the luxury of working out at home, which I love because I can be alone. I'm kind of alone. But in New York, I go to a big crunch gym, right? Which always puts me in a little stressed state because I'm that guy who likes to be able to control everything. And I want to be able to do a circuit between these two machines back and forth, back and forth. So sure enough, I'm doing that and I'm using a machine, but

When I'm off the machine, another guy sits down at the machine. Okay, no problem. I'm a civil enough guy to go up to him and afterwards say, hey, do you mind if I work in with you? But he says, no, like I'm going to sit on this machine until I'm done and I don't want to trade. I don't want to share with you. And I said, you realize it's a machine. We all have to do is switch the pin. And he goes, yeah, but I don't want to. Now again, old Peter or maybe normal Peter, that would turn into an escalation. But I had just listened to this meditation that Joseph had done that day.

about how my external manifestation could change if I could be kind in that moment. And I said, okay, no problem. I'll wait till you're done. And I just walked away and did something else. I really thought about it for the next three or four minutes. And sure enough, A, I stopped being upset about it very quickly. And this is going to sound crazy, but within about five minutes, I felt bad for him. I started thinking, oh, he probably feels like a jerk now.

Because I haven't put up any fight. I've been very kind and pleasant. And I'm worried about him. I'm worried that this guy is over there thinking to himself what I'd be thinking if I were in his shoes, which is, why didn't I just share with this guy? So you're right. Let's be completely transparent. This is total self-interest. Yes. I just want to feel better. I'm just tired of feeling ashamed of myself. That's right. This is not me making this up. The Dalai Lama who's got a reasonably good pedigree on the issue of kindness and compassion.

says that there is a kind of selfishness that's called wise selfishness. And it's the ultimate form of selfishness. It is to be kind because you will be happier. And there's all this data to suggest not only would we be happier, but also healthier and more popular, as I was saying before.

Nobody tells us this. And that's why this is the book I'm working on now. And my ideas are not fully formed. So you're hearing me speak kind of early on before I have my shtick down, which may be good, may be bad. I don't know. We'll have you back when the shtick is ready. But I like pre-shtick discussion. The pre-shtick. Yeah. Well, I mean, maybe I'll figure things out by just talking to you about it. But I really think we are on some levels.

we are selfish. So I'm trying to, we don't generally do things unless there's a

Back to my rats in a maze analogy, unless there's a pellet in it for us. And I fear that the way kindness is discussed is like the care bears or some religious figure in robes wagging his finger at you. That doesn't strike me as scalable, especially at a time where we really need this. We've got epidemic levels of anxiety, depression, suicide, especially among young people. And we have epidemics.

epidemic levels of political polarization. We've got global problems that require cooperation, like climate change. This is the time where we actually need to start pulling our heads out of our asses. So I'm excited to see if I can make a little contribution in this way. How much of understanding this concept you've described do you think requires understanding its counterpart? So, you know, you and I have spoken before about this idea of

the numbing effects of anger and grandiosity, which in the short term are incredibly numbing. I mean, they are beautiful anesthetics for sort of the maladaptive mind. Kindness and compassion are antidotes to that. Do you think it's necessary for a person to understand the nature of

their addictions, their shames, their drives to these other counterparts to kindness and compassion? Or do you think you could say, no, look, you never need to explore those things. You never need to understand those things. You don't need to start exploring the relationship you had with your grandfather or your childhood. And instead, you can just focus on the behavior change one interaction at a time. Well, I'll speak for myself. I think for myself, it's been very important to explore it.

It is useful. I mean, it's like you got to figure out the pain of holding on to the hot coal, which then it feels really good to drop it. So for me, seeing both the psychological content of, you know, exploring my relationship to my grandfather, et cetera, et cetera, but also the moment by moment mental processes, what it feels like to suffer right now really help you reorient.

The fact that it feels good, there's an expression about anger from the Buddha that I think is useful, which is that he said it has a honey tip, but a poison root. I think the prerequisite for me for seeing that is mindfulness. So in other words,

having self-awareness. Mindfulness is just the ability to know what's happening in your head at any given moment without getting carried away by it. This is a skill that we developed through meditation, but there are other ways to do it. But I think meditation is the cleanest, clearest way to, if a couple minutes a day of meditation helps you have more visibility on your own inner weather, and then you're not so yanked around by it. And

I think having that mindfulness on board can show you that anger sucks. It feels bad. It may feel good. Initially, it's a good release of energy, but then it's in your system for a while. It takes a long time to detoxify. And same with the grandiosity. It feels off to be tooting your own horn as much as somebody like me is prone to do. I feel now that I've got enough meditation on board. I'm just like, it doesn't feel good when I'm being braggadocious or

or even subtly self-promotional. It's not even that. To me, the really dangerous grandiosity, because that's so obvious, is the grandiosity when I'm in the line at the airport and the TSA guy pulls my suitcase out of the line because of no reason apparently at all and...

decides to take 20 minutes to come and check out what's in 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 better than you. Why don't you get over here and do your job? I'm doing my job. Do you know how hard, and you're not saying any of this to anybody, but you're thinking it right? Like, do you know how 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 what I do and blah, blah, blah.

That's the grandiosity that I think is the absolute poison. And I just think if I'm going to be brutally honest with myself, that's the biggest struggle that I have is that inner one-upmanship. And I mean, I love that expression about anger. I completely agree with it. And I, you know, my therapist has shared that one with me many times and it's,

You know, we're going to talk a lot about meditation, but you're absolutely right. Mindfulness is what has even allowed me in the moments of anger to realize what the half-life is of the honey. I read a tiny bit of a book called Assholes, A Theory, and it was like a kind of an academic treatise on assholes. And it said the quintessential asshole rallying cry is, don't you know who I am? Yeah. Yeah.

And again, you may never utter those words. I don't think I've ever uttered those words. You know, they've never come out of my mouth, but I've thought them. Oh, yeah, me too. And the half-life of the honey is so short, and the shame that follows actually precipitates the following grandiose act. Like, that cycle is so vicious. That's good that you see it. And that's really important. Seeing it is huge.

So let's go back because we're going to jump around a lot, but we go back to the meltdown. Fast forward, your therapist finally gives you the aha moment. Your start, and I assume that he's helping you come to the grips with, Dan, you're a bit of an addict, right? You're addicted to the high of your job, which is soothing you. It's soothing something. Let's put aside for the moment what's being soothed.

What was the next step in your evolution to exploring this? Let me do the following. I know there's so much we want to talk about that we won't get into it. I'll just tell the listeners that unrelated to all of this, you'd been given an assignment at work, which was to sort of explore and probe the growing religious movement, something that you didn't find remotely interesting initially, but being the good soldier you are, you're sort of going through this. And is it safe to say that

the work you'd been doing in understanding religion created kind of an opportunity for you to also start exploring the spirituality of mindfulness. Is that a fair? Okay. I'll let you finish it in more eloquent terms. Sure. I mean, the assignment was given right here on this floor, on the second floor of ABC News. Was it Peter Jennings that gave the assignment to you? It was Peter Jennings who made me cover faith and spirituality, which I did not want to do as raised in the People's Republic of Massachusetts, not particularly interested in this kind of stuff.

I like to tell the joke about the fact that I did have a bar mitzvah, but only for the money. So it was not on my radar as an important subject. But it ultimately was great for me because, first of all, I learned a lot about faith and spirituality, which was I was totally ignorant on the subject. And I made a lot of new friends, and it brought me into parts of the world that I wouldn't have otherwise seen. And it also ultimately brought me to meditation. In particular, it came in the form of a self-help writer named Eckhart Tolle.

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. And I read the book and I thought – at first I was reading the book and I was like, this is fucking bullshit, like really hardcore, just awful. And Oprah had basically anointed him. Oh, yeah. She talked about – she did this whole – she had him on the show and then she did a whole digital series with him and then she –

told everybody that she'd put copies of his books in every bedroom of every house she owns. And then Paris Hilton was seen carrying one of his books when she went into jail to do time for DUI. Like there was a whole moment there in like 2006, seven, eight, where Eckhart Tolle was, you know, making a big name. He was the guru. He was the guru. 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. It 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. And he talks about vibrational fields. There's a lot in there not to like if you're me. I have to be honest. I couldn't read the book. It's the first time I tried. Because even though and looking, I should go back and reread it now. But at the time, at least this sort of metaphysical nonsense just disappeared.

It was just too much. Like I just couldn't. It became such a barrier to entry. I agree completely. It reads better to me now. Yeah, I suspect it might as well to me. But what he does do when he's lucid is describe our inner lives in an incredibly incisive manner. He talks about how we have an ego, by which he's not talking about

The way ego is used in our culture now is like, oh yeah, that guy's got a big ego. He's a jerk. 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. And it's just blah, blah, blah, all day long thinking about the past or thinking about the future to the detriment of whatever's happening right now. Our mutual friend Sam Harris has this joke about when he considers the voice in his head, he

He feels like he's been hijacked by the most boring person alive who just says the same shit over and over. Most of it negative, all of it self-referential. And Tully's argument is when you're not aware of this nonstop conversation, it owns you. That to me was incredibly powerful. First of all, because it just seemed intuitively true. And second, because it described or it explained the most embarrassing moment of my life, my panic attack.

The voice in my head was why I went off to cover wars without thinking about the consequences. Came home, got depressed, was insufficiently self-aware to even know it, and then blindly self-medicated. And it all just blew up in my face. So that was reading Tully's book was incredibly powerful. My problem with Tully, and I did ultimately go. You did do an interview with him in Toronto, if I recall. Your hometown. I flew to Toronto and interviewed the man and.

First thing I asked him was, it was interesting to me because this is the first time in my whole covering of the religion beat where I felt like I had skin in the game. I was really excited. You wanted to know. I wanted to know. I wanted what this guy had. By the way, I didn't think he was full of shit. I didn't think he was a charlatan. And I had interviewed many charlatans. Yep. But he was weird. Yeah. And...

frustrating. The first thing I did is I said, well, you know, what do you do about the voice in the head? You clearly, you're saying something that seems to me to be indisputably true, except for I don't. Yeah. What do you, how do you actually tame it? You've acknowledged that there's a jerk sitting in the corner. How do you make him stop talking? There's no practical advice in the book. So I thought he maybe would be able to reveal his wisdom to me in person. And the first thing he said was take one conscious breath. And the voice in my head was like, what the

What are you talking about? And I asked him a bunch and a bunch over and over and over, and he just didn't say anything that made sense. Like, I understood the individual words he was using, but not in the order in which he used them. So I left that interview quite frustrated.

I noodled in the interest of time. I won't go into too much detail, but I spent a little bit of time noodling around in the self-help world generally. Your story about Deepak is pretty awesome. Can we at least – that one's my favorite. Okay, so Deepak and I started hanging around a little bit, and I like Deepak. Deepak's actually more relatable in person than Eckhart Tolle, but Deepak talks in this way that's like –

It literally makes no sense. He uses casually use the term with me one day, the transformational vortex to the infinite. That's just the kind of shit he just says all the time. So he was even more confusing. And I definitely didn't believe he was.

because he was checking his phone all the time and in nonstop, in perpetual motion, always hustling, which, by the way, I don't say as a criticism. I really liked him, but he just seemed as miserable as I was in terms of professional desire. At least Eckhart Tolle seemed like blissed out. Anyway, I ultimately realized, and Deepak helped me realize this, that the mechanism one can use for taming the voice in the head is meditation. And I was not positively predisposed

to the idea of meditation because I felt like it comes with some baggage. Yeah. I mean, it was, I often say it was, it is the victim of the worst marketing campaign for anything ever because the traditional artwork shows people, you know, sitting in an impossible position, floating off into the cosmos and,

The rest of us sit to meditate and either we're in a bunch of pain or we're noticing that we're distracted and we don't feel at all like that. And therefore we think we're failed meditators. In fact, the experience of meditation is this constant humiliation where you sit, you try to focus on one thing at a time. Usually it's the feeling of your breath coming in and going out. And then you're distracted over and over and over again. But the game in meditation is simply to notice you've become distracted. And in the moment that you notice you've become distracted,

Throw a little party for yourself because you are waking up from the –

automatic pilot, the daydream of the hallucination of your life, this constant discursive thinking. And then you're actually here now paying attention. And so the whole game of meditation is not to stop thinking, which is impossible. It's to notice when you've become distracted and start again and again and again. And finding out that the process was that simple and that there's an enormous amount of science that strongly suggests that it's really good for you. I don't want to overly hype the science because I think that

It's still in its early stages, but it really certainly looks like a little bit of meditation every day can do quite a bit of good. And that is what got me over the hump to start. Have you read the book Altered Traits? Yes. I think that that book does such a great job explaining...

that we don't meditate for the state. We meditate for the trait. And that's hard to explain to people until they actually try it. There's an app out there. There are many that are, you know, tracking your heart rate and your heart rate variability and levels of calmness during meditation. And I've tried these apps and come to the realization that at least for me, they don't make any sense because I don't find meditation generally to be that enjoyable. Sometimes I do, by the way, like, you know, we talked about how I'm fasting this week.

Something about fasting makes meditation really amazing. It sharpens the mind. Yeah, there's just a much deeper connection. But there were many days when my meditation is very difficult. It's really hard to do everything that you just described.

So that's the state, right? It's not a blissful state at all. But what I'm interested in is let's say if I meditate for 20 minutes in a day, I'm not meditating for those 20 minutes. I'm meditating for the other 23 hours and 40 minutes. Those are the traits that I want. And therefore, to me, at least an app that was helping me assess the change in my state during 20 minutes is not nearly as interesting as a reflection on how is this going to help me act the next time the TSA guy

seemingly singles me out, which of course is a ridiculous thought, but you know what I mean? I've always found this distinction helpful. And by the way, going back to the whole drug thing,

I view the entire distinction on drugs to be somewhat arbitrary, right? Like is cocaine generally a drug that is good or bad? In my opinion, very bad. Why? Because it's a drug that only impacts your state but not your traits in a favorable way. So it gives you a positive state and then a negative set of traits in the long run. Have you ever been around somebody doing coke? It's not that positive sometimes.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Fair enough. They're pitching you on new business ideas. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They've got this awesome new cat food idea. It's the best cat food. Conversely, when you look at things like psychedelics, psilocybin, MDMA, which is not technically, I mean, sort of a quasi-psychedelic. But I think these drugs, plants, or maybe lack of a better word,

when done correctly under these therapeutic settings, are remarkable, not so much because of the state, which they clearly alter, but much more because they can change the traits outside of them, which is something, by the way, the authors of Altered Traits argue against. Their view is that meditation is the only way to use the state to change the trait. But that's sort of another issue. So kind of listening to you talk about that, I realize that

This is a distinction that it can't be stated enough to someone who's new to meditation, which I'm hoping some people listening are. Because it's easy to get discouraged. It's music to my ears to hear you say that.

Richie Davidson and Danny Goldman wrote that book. They actually sat in the chair you're sitting in now. We're doing this at ABC News in the room where I record my podcast, and they've both been on my show many times together and separately. And I think it's an excellent point. And it's what trips up so many meditators because they sit to meditate and they think they should feel a certain way. And they're not.

Then they conclude that they're failures because they're not feeling a certain way. But the point of meditation is not to feel any specific way. It's to feel whatever you're feeling right now so that you learn how not to let your feelings push you around. And yes, of course, the real world application of that is that you're better at life.

We don't meditate, as is often said, we don't meditate to get better at meditation. We meditate to get better at life. Now, just to be clear, though, over a period of time, as you, and some people get to this point and others don't, but if you're getting to the point where you're starting to get actually quite serious about the meditation practice,

At some way, actually, you might want a teacher because getting better at the meditation itself actually can have lots of benefits. That doesn't mean the meditation is going to be fun. It just means that you can technically understand the nuances of your own mind and the nuances of various practices at differing levels. And that, I think, can have a positive effect on your practice.

and on your life, and it creates a kind of a virtuous cycle. I'm getting ahead of myself here. The thing to know primarily for meditators is don't get hung up on feeling calm or blissful or anything like that. Just tune in on your ability to see clearly whatever's happening right now. Is it distraction? Is it knee pain? Is it an itch? Whatever it is, pleasant or unpleasant,

Because what we're training over time is the ability to notice that anger has come upon us off the cushion in our regular lives. And can you resist the urge to say something that's going to ruin the next 48 hours of your marriage? That's where the rubber hits the road. It's so powerful. And I kind of remember the first time

I was able to see the train coming before it hit. It still hit, to be clear. I wasn't able to stop the train. But the fact that I realized, oh, the train started over there and it rolled there, bang, versus always just seeing impact, impact, impact. The glass half full approach of that realization is, okay, maybe the next time you could slow the train down.

And what if one day you could stop the train, the train hitting something, being a metaphor for the you actually saying that thing that's going to nuke that relationship. Let's pause for a moment and explain the distinction maybe between mindfulness and being present. I believe my children, especially the two little boys, are very present. I don't think they're anywhere but in the present.

I absolutely don't think they have a shred of mindfulness in them. How would you explain that distinction to me?

The way my meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein, talks about it is like a Labrador. It's not dissimilar from a four-year-old. Yeah, I have a four-year-old boy myself. You look at a Labrador, she or he is pretty present. Which is to say, they're probably not thinking about what they're going to eat tomorrow. Yes. And they're not thinking about the dog that barked at them yesterday. Yes. They're not a lot of neuroses. They're not swept up in rumors.

Ruing past decisions or fretting over the future or whatever. They're just right there doing whatever, eating the kibble, sniffing some other dog's butt, chewing your sweat socks, pooping on the rug. They're right there for all of that. Being present is necessary but not sufficient for mindfulness. So you need to be present. But then there's a metacognition that also happens, which is you know.

that you're in the present moment and you know that you know you're in the present moment. We are classified as homo sapiens sapiens, the one who thinks and knows he or she thinks. And that second sapiens has atrophied over time because nobody bothers to point out to us that we're capable of this. We have this ability to step out of the stream of our consciousness and notice, yeah, I'm having all these thoughts. I'm having all these urges. I'm having all these emotions.

and to not be carried away by them. And by the way, you're not going to step out of the stream forever. You can just do this for a nanosecond at a time just to see quickly, oh yeah, I'm having all of these racing thoughts. That's homo sapiens sapiens, knowing and knowing that you're knowing. Dogs can't do that. Your boys can, but it's not very well developed. Mine can't, but we'll get them to work on it. My son last night was aggressively angry

for 10 minutes trying to get me to smell his socks and he was like daddy they don't smell that bad i'm telling you the truth i'm like dude you're lying and how i know this because you have the same face i have and i'm looking at it and that's how i lie and yeah it was like karma my wife was dying because i'm always messing with my wife it's one of the hallmarks of our relationship with me just kind of being a jokester with her she's like this is karma your son is you that's

So what was your first foray into a mindfulness-based practice of meditation? So in this period of time when I was checking out Eckhart Tolle and Deepak, my wife gave me a book by a guy named Dr. Mark Epstein. Amazing human. Who you've had on the podcast twice, I believe. Yeah. And he's a real friend.

I read the book and I realized, oh, wow, everything that I like about Eckhart Tolle was lifted without attribution from somebody known as the Buddha. Epstein's books are all about the overlap between psychology. He's a practicing psychiatrist here in New York City. And he he's written these beautiful books about the overlap between psychology and Buddhism. I didn't know anything about Buddhism, but it was very clear that all the stuff about the voice in the head, which the Buddha refers to as the monkey mind.

Really, he's thousands of years old. Much of this philosophy honed by a guy heretofore known to me as a lawn ornament. But the Buddha is a fascinating guy and really, really smart. And the Buddha that you're talking about is actually kind of different from the big-bellied lawn ornament, isn't he? Aren't they different entities altogether? The big fat guy is known as the laughing Buddha, I think. Okay. That's not the Buddha. That's not the historical Buddha. Mm-hmm.

But there are plenty of you go to a spa that probably have the skinny one. That's the Buddha. But they didn't make any representational art of the Buddha until hundreds of years after he died. When did he live? He lived 2,600 years ago. So 600-ish BC. Mm-hmm. And lived where? India? I think he was born in what is now Nepal, but then was all over India. And talk a little bit about his path or what we know or what we believe. Well, the legend is... Because again...

We think there was a guy named the Buddha, but what's been passed down to us is quite sort of mythological in terms of his biography.

So we know his name was purported to be Siddhartha Gautama, and he was born, according to the legend, into he was the son of a king. He was a prince, like a kind of a minor king. And his mother died in childbirth or shortly thereafter. And some wise man told his father, this kid's either going to be a great ruler or a sage.

And the father really did not want him to be a spiritual leader. He wanted him to take over the job of being a king. And so built this world for him where he would be not exposed to any suffering. So just, you know, fanned by palm leaves and fed whatever the best cuts of the goat and surrounded by women and musicians, et cetera, et cetera. Again, this is the legend. And at some point he gets out for a tour of the local village or the local city. And normally they clean everything up.

But he sees the suffering. He sees what are called the three, I think, three heavenly messengers. He sees an old person, a sick person, and a dead person. And he realizes that this whole thing, he realizes something that we all should know. Everything's impermanent. Suffering is a part of life. And if you try to pretend otherwise, you're going to suffer even more. Then he runs off into the forest where he spends six years

He's in his 20s here? Yes, and he has a kid who he's named Rahula, which is Pali, I believe, for fetter. So it speaks to what kind of dad he was. He viewed his kid as a sort of an impediment. Flawed human being. Again, this is all legend here, but runs off into the forest, spends six years studying with great meditation masters. And the fashion at the time was to do this self-mortification thing where you like –

inflict a lot of pain. You don't eat. You stand in funny positions. You hang upside down, whatever. And he was doing, he became the best at this. He ultimately realized that this is, he was still suffering. So one day he actually ate a little bit

And stopped starving himself and sat down under the Bodhi tree, a big famous tree in Bodh Gaya, India, and said, I'm not getting up until I'm enlightened. Again, this is all legend. He sat there for a long time, ultimately got enlightened and had a big battle in his head with the god of desire. And he transcended greed, hatred and confusion.

and went off and delivered his... After he got enlightened, he went off and found some of his former monks and delivered his seminal speech, which was the four noble truths, which are, one, that life is suffering, which is a mistranslation. Suffering is a bit of a mistranslation, but the idea is that everything is impermanent. If you try to cling to things that will not last, you will suffer. So life is unsatisfactory inherently because nothing lasts. Two,

The root of that suffering is desire or thirst, this kind of insatiability we have. And three, there's a way out of this. And four,

The Eightfold Path, which is the way out of it, which includes meditation practices, ethical practices, like right livelihood, right speech, right action, and then a bunch of meditation techniques like mindfulness and philosophical stuff about how to view the world. That's Buddhism 101. Yeah, I mean, does it kind of amaze you that something that came to an individual or even individuals, plural,

2,600 years ago could prove to be so relevant today. Yeah. Well, so, I mean, my question is whether the story that I just told you is in any way true. Is it possible that this philosophy was – It's possible this was just built upon and evolving over time. Well, first of all – It seems probable to me. For sure the Buddha, if he was a guy – if he really was a guy – and I think he probably was – there was somebody named the Buddha. He was standing on other people's shoulders. But he had some real –

including mindfulness. I guess what's amazing to me is regardless of whether it was one guy, many guys, how long it took, et cetera, et cetera, there's no doubt that what you just said, the four noble truths, were devised in a period of time when no one could have imagined or predicted the world we live in today. And yet here we are in a world today. And it's important to take a step back here and think about this through the lens of evolution, right? As a species, we are no different today than we were 2,600 years ago.

I mean, 2,600 years represents less than 1% of our genetic journey, identical species. But if you think about the world 200 years ago, no electricity, right? No irrigation, no sewer, no nothing, nothing, nothing. And you think about the world today, again, not just 200 years later, but call it 2,600 years later, you simply couldn't imagine. Like there is no one with an imagination that could have come up with what we're going to be living in today. And yet in some ways, what you just said is right.

more important today. I can't imagine it was as important 2600 years ago. But it also tells you about the perennial nature of human suffering. Which is... It's incredible. It's unbelievable. Yes. But the Buddha had good news. It wasn't some death-defying dogma where, you know, like I can...

at least not the way I understand or practice. It wasn't telling you that you can have eternal life or if you just believe everything I say unquestioningly. It was more like, look, don't take, he explicitly said, don't take anything I'm saying on faith value. Try it out for yourself. Here's some meditation techniques and you might be able to reduce the amount of suffering you're experiencing, much of it kind of voluntary, in the face of life's inevitable vexations and vicissitudes. And I...

I have been trying this out for 10 years, and in my experience, there's a lot to it. And the science that has looked at it, too, has also been interesting. So how did you go from the meeting with Mark or the meetings with Mark? Because I know you talk about multiple meetings and just to say, I'm going to give this thing a try. And then what?

ultimately what I really want to hear about is your first extended meditation retreat, which is something I'm so fascinated. Oh, the retreat. Yeah. Well, but, but even before that, cause you'd obviously been practicing meditation before you went on the retreat. So what was the, for a skeptical guy like you, what got you over the hump of, all right, Dan, you're going to put your Blackberry down. You're going to sit in this position and you're going to

Focus on your breath. Like, how did you make that leap? Or was it relatively easy to make after everything you'd been through in the journey? No, I mean, I was really intrigued by Buddhism as a philosophy. I cannot overstate the power for me of that initial Eckhart Tolle lifting of the curtain on my own mind. Like, wow, my, the voice in my head is an asshole and I'm suffering all the time as a consequence of this. And then I,

The Buddha's philosophy, which I think says it way better, was also interesting. I was just reading lots of books about it, talking to Mark about it. And the meditation practice as the corrective is just unavoidable as soon as you start exploring the space. So really, Tully, in some ways, is really credited for being the first person that showed you what we would now, as people who meditate, take for granted, which is there's a thinker of thoughts. Those thoughts are not us. Yes.

And what neither is the thinker. Yeah, exactly. That's the transition that's very difficult, which maybe if we have time to, I'd love to get into that. So you're basically saying, look, I was already so primed because I realized the most important of the truths, the how to

I was so thirsty for that that basically when someone I came to trust and respect like Mark Epstein, who was completely rigorous, completely righteous, not a fraudster, when he basically said, look, this is just a practice. You're just going to start doing this thing. That was an easy step.

I wouldn't say it was easy, but it got me closer. Conceptually easier. That and also seeing the science. The science was a huge deal for me. And when it just became obvious, oh, I can lower my blood pressure. You know, I can boost my immune system. There's all these brain scans that show that you can have an impact on your prefrontal cortex and your amygdala. And that was all very compelling too. You know, it's really funny just as a sort of aside. For as much as I obsess over data and everything I do, whether it's this type of exercise, this type of nutrition, blah, blah, blah, blah.

The science has had the least impact on my interest in meditation relative to anything I've ever done. In fact, I would argue that if you told me meditation raised my blood pressure 10 points, I would still do it for the benefits on the reduction of my suffering. And I would just figure out more drugs to take to lower my blood pressure to compensate for it. Like I literally couldn't care less about that science, which is not to be dismissive of it. No. It's just to say that

I don't care about any of that. I care about one thing because there are an infinite number of ways to lower my blood pressure, you know, do X, Y, and Z. There's only one way I know about to understand the nature of my mind, which is an awful, awful demon. I strongly, strongly, strongly agree with you. I use the science primarily, if not exclusively, as an evangelical tool because I know how powerful it was for me as a skeptic.

Oh yeah.

Even if I don't believe this thing's going to make me happier, apparently it does this other stuff for me, and I'm always trying to optimize. So might as well do it for that reason. My experience, the science gets people over the hump, and then they no longer care. Because once you've done it for six weeks or so and you realize you're less of a shithead, you don't care if your prefrontal cortex might look different in MRI. That is utterly irrelevant. So for me, it's really useful because my job is to get people to meditate. Right.

And science is enormously helpful there. Anyway, it was helpful for me back in this stage in 2009. And ultimately, I was on a beach vacation with my wife and some friends. We had a house at the beach. And I was reading yet another book about this stuff. I think for 10 or 11 years now, I've read no books other than books on meditation and Buddhism. Will you read my book when it comes out? I will. I kind of count that. Okay.

So maybe happiness would be a better way to say that. Or self-improvement in some way. Self-improvement, yeah. Although I love novels. I think I've only read one in that whole time. Me too, by the way. Yeah. I stopped reading fiction in 1999. So that's 20 years ago. But I three years ago read The Alchemist as the first purview back into fiction. But that's kind of a, isn't that kind of a spiritual? It's bigger than fiction, yeah. But there's so much good fiction on television that I feel like I'm getting that

You're getting that as a scratch. Yes. So anyway, I set my BlackBerry down because this was 2009 and I went into the bedroom where I was staying with my wife, closed the door. I didn't want anybody to see me because this was before meditation was cool. I did not want to admit to anybody I was doing this. I kind of sat on the floor, set a timer, and I tried to watch my breath coming in and going out, going in.

Going in and going out and immediately there was like a million thoughts. You know, where did your rebels run wild? Blah, blah. I was going to actually bring in my copy of your book. I still have, you know, the hardcover first thing that came out and I was going to do it just to read that. That's one of the funniest parts of the book. And you do it, I think, three times in the book. You do the these are my thoughts.

And I remember the first time reading that, how hard I laughed, thinking I'm not the only one. Like, I'm not the only one whose mind is an idiot. Yeah. Just an abject idiot. Well, I think the fact that both of us share an affection for Fletch speaks to the kind of humor that we have. It's like a torrent of thoughts. Yes. And they're like, how ridiculous they are. How ridiculous they are.

It's amazing. I get some like my best jokes in meditation. And then, you know, I share them with my wife, who just says, you are an idiot.

And my son, who also thinks I'm a moron. If you have a sense of humor about it, which I think is really important, the kind of grandiosity and randomness and negativity and ceaseless self-referentiality of it can be kind of funny. So that first experience was humbling, but I actually got up after the five minutes thinking, wow, I suck at this. But you saw a light. Oh, absolutely. I knew this was serious. So this is big. This is a...

at this point, almost a three-year journey, didn't this? I know the panic attack was in 04, but was it 06 that you really in earnest started this quest to find something out or? No, I actually think, I think, so 04 was the panic attack and I think it wasn't until 08 that I encountered Toli. And then it was a year later that I got to meditation. So only for the sake of time though, I wish we could tell every detail of the story. How long until you

took what I consider one of the most remarkable leaps to do a silent retreat. A year. But I want to be clear. I rarely talk about the meditation retreat because I worry, as somebody whose job it is to appeal to skeptics, that the skeptic hears, oh, well, this guy went on a meditation retreat. I'm never going to do that. Therefore, I'm never going to meditate. So in my world, here's what I would say. I routinely fast for seven days at a time.

But I don't expect any of my patients to do it. And I don't think you have to do this. I think, you know, one can do a whole bunch of other things that approximate 80% of that value. So through the lens of we're not telling anybody that they have to go on a seven day or 10 day or 14 day silent retreat, though I'm infinitely curious and would like to talk about it. You should do it. Yeah. There are moments that I go back to remembering reading your book the first time. And one of the most powerful parts

of what you wrote about is something that occurred during that retreat. So that's sort of why I want to kind of dig into that. There was something you wrote about that blew my mind. And at the time I read it, I couldn't understand what you were talking about. And even though today I still have never experienced it, I now

can comprehend it. Which part? It was like day five or six when you actually heard the wings of the hummingbird flap. Again, when you said that, I was like, he must be making that up or he was imagining that. But I've had moments like when I do walking meditations, which are great in your app, by the way, I'm just going to plug 10% happier all day long. My investors think. But I think Jeff Warren does a great guided walking meditation and

And I think I even talked about this with Sam Harris on that podcast. 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. Never, how could I have ever, I remember thinking to myself, how have I been walking all this time and never feeling that? And then the sounds you could start to pick up. Sometimes I would just do outdoor, like I would do a morning meditation outside, not walking, but still walking.

And I couldn't believe the sounds you could pick up. So at least now I'm at the point where I can actually imagine what you're saying. But then, of course, to think, well, what would six days of silence produce? So one, how did you decide to take that leap of faith? And did you view that as more part of your personal development or part of your professional? I'm going to take this story to its most extreme conclusion. Both, but a big dose of the latter.

I think that should be comforting to the listener who's thinking, you know, maybe I'll do this. Maybe I'll do a couple minutes. 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, and, B, I have a better view of what the landscape is. That's a pretty good comment.

So there were two people who were really influential in terms of getting me to do this. One was both of whom have come up, Mark Epstein and Joseph. And no, I actually didn't know Joseph yet. Oh, that's right. Joseph was the teacher, was the teacher. And then Sam Harris. Yes. So, Sam, I met Sam Harris, prominent atheist writer. And this is before he had a podcast.

And before he had a meditation app. And he was best known at this point just as a guy who wrote a couple best-selling books about atheists. You narrated or you moderated a debate. I moderated a debate between him and a couple people. But one of the people on the other side was Deepak Chopra and Sam kind of tore him up. That doesn't even seem like a fight, by the way. I don't know Deepak, but I know Sam so well. And just knowing the caricature of Deepak, that strikes me as...

a little baby seal laying there and a guy with a club. It was a tough night for Deepak. And I say that with affection because he's a really, if you meet him, he's a really hard guy not to like. He's a very likable guy. 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 and I was chatting with them and they're so, so impressive, both of them. And I mentioned that I was meditating and to my great surprise, they were both

avid active meditators and sam had this whole long history of having spent a bunch of time in his 20s meditating 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 efstein

So I knew who Joseph was, but I hadn't met him. But I knew that Mark considered Joseph to be his teacher. And Sam was saying, hey, you should go on a meditation retreat. And Mark had been telling me the same thing. And I was like, this guy says I should do it. And Mark's saying I should do it. And they're both talking about Joseph Goldstein. I should do it. 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. 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. I mean, I think I was up to like,

10, 20 minutes a day. At this point, I wasn't doing that much. The idea of doing it from 5.30 in the morning until 10 at night just struck me as super daunting. Was this in Marin? It was in Marin County, of course, and vegetarian food and blah, blah, blah. I was a dedicated cheeseburger eater. Being away from my wife,

I didn't have a kid at the time, but like there's nothing. It just seemed like the shittiest summer vacation I could imagine. And it was. It was all those things. You know, 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. But it turned out I didn't have a roommate. But it was a bunch of, you know, faded hippies and –

And, you know, at least this is what my judging mind was saying. They're actually lovely people. I've met a lot of I've become friends with some of them. But my mind was on overdrive. Like, these are all NPR, you know, socks and sandals folks. And and the meditation itself was just awful, just awful, like sitting there all fucking day.

You know, I was in pain. I mean, I don't sit, I don't twist myself into a pretzel. I sit in a chair, but that hurts. And the walking meditation, I'd never done that before. I didn't know what I was doing. I just hated it. And I was just, it was all over the place. I didn't feel like I was getting anywhere. And by day four or five, I was going to go. I was ready to quit. It was a 10 day? It was 10 days. And I went...

To a teacher, actually a teacher I didn't like, but she was the only one who was available to speak. Because you have this sort of 10 minute window each day when you can potentially speak with a teacher one on one. Yeah, but you would like they give you a time. 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.

But I didn't have a time with Joseph this day, and this is the day I was going to quit. And one of his assistant teachers, who I had made all these judgments about, Spring Washam, she was the only one I could sign up to see. So I begrudgingly went and saw Spring, who I thought was like the embodiment of all, like everything I hated about meditation. She talked in a really soft voice and had long flowing hair and wore shawls. And Spring saved my sorry ass. What did she say?

And she said, you're trying too hard. Like, no, no, like, ooey-gooey, lovey-dovey stuff. She just listened to me whine for a little while. I was like, you're trying too hard. Don't try too hard. Just do, you know, notice your breath when it's coming in and when it's going out. When you get distracted, start again. Don't, you know, you're going to get distracted. Don't try to make anything special happen. Just stop trying too hard. And I was like, all right, fine. By the way, Spring has gone on to become a very important figure in my life. She is an extraordinary human being.

But I took her word for it. And instead of sitting in the meditation hall, I actually took my chair out of my room and pulled it onto the balcony outside on the second floor of this building, the dorm where I was staying. And I sat outside. And I was like, I'm not trying too hard. I just sat down. Whatever happens, happens. And it was just like, as soon as I stopped trying, the whole thing unfurled for me. And I was just so vividly

Present and mindful where I was just so quickly registering how speedy my senses are, how I was going from hearing the rustle of the rustling of the leaves to the clanking of the pots in the kitchen, which was down the hill to the footsteps in the hallway to the feeling of my pain in my knee to an itch on my back, just to a thought coming up.

this is how reality works it's this you start to see how fast things are going in your sensory life and that's really thrilling it's also accompanied by a huge blast of serotonin and this breakthrough for lack of a less grandiose word lasted for like 36 hours right just happiest i'd ever been i wept at one point which is quite a rare thing for me i'm not super emotional it

It gave me an enormous amount of faith that there is so much to this practice. And there's such a power to actually doing it in a container where that's all you have to do. Your meals are cooked for you. You don't have your phone. The schedule is set for you. All you have to do is get up and do the practice every day. But the big asterisk is...

If you try too hard, you will tangle yourself up in knots. One of the classic hindrances to meditation is desire. If you want it too hard, you're going to shoot yourself in the foot. It's like a weird video game where the only way to move forward is to not want to move forward.

And that's a hard thing to do. And the only way to get there for me is to surrender. And you can't fake surrender. I go into every retreat now thinking I'm surrendered. I don't care. I don't care what happens. I'm just going to sit here. But I do care. And my mind knows I care because the desire is in there. Because you want to reproduce that experience. Yes, of course. I want breakthrough to electric boogaloo. You know, I want like.

Pajama Jammy Jam. I want the sequel to that breakthrough. And I can't get it. So what happens is... Sorry, you got a good... Pajama Jammy Jam landed with you. This is like we're the right age where I can make a certain joke and you know the reference. What happens though is if I'm on the retreat long enough, usually it's 10, 11 days, I cycle through the reproduction attempts and I get to a genuine surrender. And it's like, I can't fake it. I got to go through this process of...

trying to do this, of trying to get somewhere and then just punching myself out. Do you feel like listening to you describe this, it's almost like the matrix where, and again, I don't think you have to be on a retreat to experience this, but there's a realization that Neo has when he sees the matrix for what it is, that he's separate from that. And

Do you think that that's a reasonable analogy for this idea of realizing that your thoughts are not you? Yeah, except for separation is a problem. So the red pill of waking up and seeing that reality is not what you thought, that works as a comp. Mm-hmm.

But in fact, in actual reality, there's no separation. So not to get into the biggest cliche of them all, being one with the universe, but how can you not be one with the universe? You're separate from the universe. You're created from the same atoms from the original exploding stars. You are nature. We feel our lived experiences that we're looking out at the world fretfully from some

vantage point that's separate from nature. But like your animal body is obviously part of nature and the workings of your mind is part of nature. And that's mind blowing and mind blowing just conceptually. You might register it as I say those words, but you can experience it viscerally on retreat. And that is incredible. So you get back from this retreat and I mean, can one even draw a

sort of a linearity around this and says, look, a 10-day silent retreat is the equivalent of three years of a daily 15-minute-a-day practice. I mean, I know the answer to that question is no, but you see where I'm trying to go with this, right? Which is, are you leapfrogging in your practice such that when you came back from that 10-day retreat, even if you went back to sitting for 10 to 15 minutes a day, you were able to, quote unquote, do something better? I don't know exactly.

I feel like you're leapfrogging in your practice, but I don't know if it shows up that prominently in...

In your 10 minutes when you get home, you know what I'm saying? You build up your capacity to concentrate. Here's the lowest hanging fruit is one important thing in meditation is the capacity to stay present, which is your concentration. Work concentration is a little hard. The image that comes up for me is a furrowed brow, hunched shoulders, trying to concentrate. But it's more like, can you just be awake for an extended period of time with your capacity to stay undistracted?

Of course, there will be distractions, but your ability to be supple in the face of those also improves. So you can stay on the object, usually your breath longer, and the distraction doesn't throw you as much. So that's a skill that gets built, I think, in a way on retreat that because it's such a boot camp, you're going to build those muscles much more actively on retreat. But then you also occasionally will have a peak experience. Not always.

And wanting to have one, of course, is, again, a hindrance. But sometimes, in my experience, you'll have a peak experience. And that shows you something that...

Just like when you take drugs, it's like it becomes a distant memory, but it's still with you. And when I say drugs here, I mean more plants. I haven't done much at all, but a lot of folks who have, my understanding of the way that works is that you have a peak experience and it does stay with you in the rest of your life. So my experience, I'm only speaking from an N of one here, but my experience having had a few peak experiences, it's not like every time I meditate, that's coming to the table with me now. It's more just that...

First of all, I'm imbued with a much deeper faith or trust that this is a worthy endeavor. And two, it's in my mind stream that some of what I've seen and understood, some distant echoes of that are still here. When you think about how you meditate today, when you think about the practice you did yesterday. Oh, can I just say something to you? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You said before that often meditation is unpleasant, which is the same for me.

So I was actually happy to hear you say that because it really represents a wise perspective, which is, we said it before, but it bears repeating. Meditation is not about what you're feeling right now. It's just knowing what you're feeling so that your feelings don't own you. But I will say that 10 years in, again, just speaking personally, having done five or six retreats and having done a reasonable amount of daily sitting, I'm now at a point where my concentration is good enough

So the thing to know about concentration is that it often feels really good, which is why people love TM, because it is a concentration meditation. You're using this mantra that you're getting really focused on. It's less, it's more focused on concentration than it is on mindfulness. And so being able to stay awake and concentrated on something feels really good.

And I find that my daily meditation actually is much more pleasant because there's like a body high associated with it. It's called, there's a word for it in the ancient language of Pali. The word is P-T-P-I-T-I. And it,

I think the grandiose translation is something like rapture, but it really just means like all the kind of like body tingling and high that you can get from meditation. And so that's just something to look forward to. There's a schedule for when this shows up. And even for me, I don't always get it and wanting it guarantees that I won't get it, but it does show up on occasion, not infrequently and can make my daily sitting. It's a nice to have.

You can't get too focused on it. So maybe you're sort of answering the question that I was about to ask, which is when you think about meditating 10 years ago versus today, it's safe to say you still think about gerbils and wonder if your hair is OK and think about your abs. Is the biggest difference that you are much more quick to realize that and come back to whatever your object is? Yes. And and my reaction to it is much warmer.

And this, I think, is when you start. Is that the bigger difference? Is it the speed with which you recognize it or the lack of pissed off-edness that comes with it? I think the latter is, in my experience, more important. Both are important. So there's a mental acuity piece to that, which is that you're catching distraction more quickly. But if you're catching it and then self-flagellating.

It defeats the purpose. Yeah, it really does because you're teaching the mind that catching yourself getting distracted is going to come with punishment. So you're in some ways like not incentivizing the mind to wake up. But if you can train yourself to be like, all right, I caught that. Welcome to the party distraction. That's a much bombier inner weather. And I think that feeds on itself in a really positive way. I'm not particularly good at this. I catch myself lapsing into judgment all the time.

But I catch the judging faster. And I, over time, through various meditation techniques, gotten better at just having a warmer reaction to my own peccadillos. What's the most difficult thing you've gone through personally and or professionally in the last five years? Where I'm going to go with this is I'm curious—

to how you have been able to take this remarkable training that you've done in the last decade and begin to apply it to difficult experiences, which is where the proverbial rubber hits the road. Well, three things are coming to mind. I'll say them and you can just pick whichever ones you want to dig in on. One was that my wife and I had a really serious fertility crisis. It ended well with a baby.

But that was really hard. And we were really under the impression we were not going to have a child, which was very depressing. She also got breast cancer. Both of these were much harder for her, of course, than they were for me. But obviously, you don't want to see the person you love suffering or start to worry that they're not going to be around anymore.

So that was obviously awful. And then on a much more personal, selfish level, I got a 360 review, which I think I might have told you about once before we were recording. For anybody who doesn't know what a 360 review is, it's often used in a corporate context. It's a way to measure performance of executives. The way they do it is they talk to the executive's peers, subordinates, and superiors. So you get a holistic, panoramic 360 review.

into this person's performance. I began writing a book about compassion and the idea, I think it was my wife who suggested it, she said, well, you know, a good way to jumpstart the narrative would be to see what other people think you should do to work on in terms of kindness and compassion. And then my editor...

there were a bunch of people in the room when she said this. And one of the people in the room was the editor of the book. And she, the editor said, Oh, you ever heard a 360 review? And I had, and I was like, Oh, that's a good idea. And so we found this Buddhist executive coach, Jerry Kelowna, who we're talking about before he's got this coaching firm and they do three sixties, but they do the colonoscopy version of three sixties. So often three sixties are these like kind of

data entry thing where you give people a questionnaire and they answer multiple choice questions and then you crunch the numbers and you see the data. Jerry's firm does hour-long interviews with everybody, anonymous interviews with everybody in your orbit, and then they write up a lengthy qualitative report with direct quotes, anonymous blind quotes. And in my case, we made it even harder because we threw in people from my personal life.

And so they didn't want it just, we didn't want it to just be a professional measurement. We wanted to get a holistic sense of how am I? So my wife, my brother, my meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein, and all these peers, in total 16 people. It was a 41-page report. We also added on a bunch of questions about where and when and how I'm an asshole. And it was devastating. I thought, oh, this is this cute little narrative conceit for this book I'm working on. And I got the 360, and it suggested I was

Well, the way I took it, it didn't say this, but I took it as monstrously broken, defective, incurably selfish, self-centered narcissist. I just want to pause you for one second because I did the exact same thing in 2015. It's uncanny how similar the experience is because it was everybody who worked for me, my board, like at the time I was running a nonprofit. So it was my board, everyone who worked for me,

10 friends plus family. I mean, this was a tour de force and the it's, as you were telling the story, the only word I had in my mind was the word that described me, which was never once written, but it was the only thing that came out and it was monster. Yeah. Monster. And that you, the first thing you said was monstrous. I believe that's what the first thing that you said.

I rarely slip into overt depression. I usually slip into covert depression, which is a shortcut to rage. This was one of the few times in my life I went into a overt depression after I reviewed that thing. I did not want to leave a dark room for days. I was eviscerated by that report. Yeah, that's the way I felt. It was awful. So how did you pick yourself up? Well, for a while I thought,

But did you think, I'm a fraud? How could I write this book? Yes. That's literally the word. I've just been... Because I am writing the book, I just am working on the chapter where I read it. And fraud is a word I use. Because I was like, clearly I'm pretending to the world that I'm Mr. Happiness, and I'm a fucking asshole. How did I pick myself up? Well, first I thought, okay, well, I can't do this book because nobody can see this. One thing that helped was...

My wife and I, first of all, Jerry Colonna does a lot of coaching. So I read it and then I saw him that day. And he said a bunch of things that were super helpful. And we have an ongoing relationship. So I talk to him at least once a month, often more. One of the things he said was, and this is very Buddhist, so you now see all this stuff. And now what we're going to do is we're going to love it.

We're not going to get into shame or anger or self-flagellation. We're going to be like, all right, this behavior was serving some sort of need that some sort of primordial need you had that was not particularly skillful. We're going to give it a hug and say, you're no longer needed. His pushing me away from shame and more toward interest, like, wow, what's going on here? Why would I do that? Why would I be so snippy with my subordinates? Why would I

be so snippy with my wife? Why would I be so self-centered that I ignore other people's needs? Well, clearly, instead of just going right, instead of calling me a monster, Jerry was like, no, clearly you're following some old script here that must have served you at some point. And putting it in that light was incredibly useful. And then I'll say one other thing, which is that my wife, who I'm very close to my wife, and a lot of us are close with our spouses or life partners, but

She's like a consigliere for me professionally. So nothing leaves my desk in terms of

what I write without her thoroughly reviewing it. She's basically the uncredited co-author on both of the books I've written and is deeply involved in all the aesthetic choices having to do with my app. And she's just my right hand. That's actually not even a good way to put it because she has her own career. So she's really just doing this out of the goodness of her heart. But I often say to people, and this is only kind of a joke, I don't know what I think until she tells me what I think.

So one of the things we started. Does she have any extra time? She does now because. I could use some help. We'll talk about that. Sure. I don't know how. She would be great at this. She's amazing. But one of the things that she got me to do was she and I would rent conference rooms around New York City, get out of our house, go to a conference room.

And sit there and read the report together and discuss it section by section. And one of the things she got me to do was focus on the first. It was a 41 page report for the first 15 pages were positive stuff. And she got me to really focus on that. And then we went through the negative stuff. She was just like, it's not as my first reading. Nobody was calling me a monster.

They were just really describing in unvarnished terms me at my worst. So are you like me in that? I think my report is about the same, right? It was the first, maybe, maybe it was a 50 50 mix of some really beautiful, glowing, positive things. And then people who I know were all like all care about me deeply, including people who describe horrible things I've done. They love me despite those things. But, but,

Do you just disproportionately naturally focus on the negatives? I think we all do. Evolutionarily, we come by this honestly. We had to have a negativity bias, right, for survival. You want to have salience. Do you think you go above and beyond the evolutionary playbook? Because I think I do. I think I am – if the evolutionary playbook is to wait at 70-30, I don't know why. I think I've just adapted to 99-1. Right. Well –

Which sounds like you do as well. I don't have data to support my assertion, but yes, I strongly believe I dwell in the negative. It's actually one of the things that I was dinged for in the 360. And so it was incredibly useful that my wife take me by the scruff and say, you know, I'm going to, you're going to look at this positive stuff and then we're going to look at the negative stuff and see if it's not as bad as you thought it was. Nobody's actually calling you a monster. And yeah, you did do some things that are really uncool, but you can fix this.

And I'll tell you that one of the there are a couple of comments made to me by people in my life that really helped me get over it. One was Joseph, the aforementioned Joseph Goldstein, read it and said with a laugh, self-knowledge is always bad news. Wow. Interesting. So so counterintuitive, right? Yep. And then my brother, Matt, another consigliere said,

prominent venture capitalist in New York City and amazing human. He said two things that I thought were funny. He said, well, first of all, I'm sorry you had to read this. Second of all, now you got a good book. And for me as an inveterate showman, which is another thing I was digging for in the 360, that was actually comforting to hear. It's like, all right, this is

I actually probably can talk about this and it'll be useful for people. 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. 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 and those can get untangled and we can work on it. 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. Now I'm really energized to work on the book. So this is an awesome example of pain that you can pause for a moment and realize you have some control over the outcome. The other two examples you gave kind of differ. Infertility and cancer, you have a lot less control over, I think it's safe to say. I mean, in the end, biology is sort of a complex organism.

Using either one of those, whichever one you're more comfortable talking about, how did your practice either prepare you for and or allow you to suffer less through? When she had breast cancer, I found that in some ways, I think she would agree with me. It was actually really good for our relationship because I am not particularly, well, this is the story I told myself, was that I'm not particularly caring and nurturing.

And yet here we were in a situation where I really needed to be. I needed to step up. And I found that I really liked it. After a double mastectomy, she was in a lot of pain. 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. 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 and made sure she was ahead of her meds so that she didn't fall behind because she would have. And being of use in that way felt really good. Not like...

I'm such a good person. I mean, there's a little bit of that too. But it feels good to be of service to somebody who you love. It feels good to be of service to anybody, frankly. Why do you think that didn't naturally come to you? Selfishness. Self-protective selfishness, probably. Self-centeredness. I had written a chapter in a book about it by this point, so I kind of knew it. I knew it, you know, but this was a very powerful example of it. And also probably some of the dynamics of our relationship.

where she is very giving and loving and compassionate and I'm not. Again, this is the story. But of course I am. There's a great description of enlightenment in the Tibetan tradition, which is a clearing away and a bringing forth. And that to me seems like a great definition of enlightenment. So I can clear away some of my bullshit that blocks me from

being useful to other people and having a, I'm trying to find a better word than connection, but here we go, connection, and a bringing forth of the parts of you that actually are good at that. And so that I felt was an enlightening experience in that I was forced

to do all that. And I could see that in my mind, these registered, these acts of service registered as pleasant. And again, there's science here. There's a thing called the helper's high. You know, when you give to charity, the same regions of your brain light up that are light up when you eat chocolate. So this isn't new and it's not unique. It's just a universal human thing that I happen to assemble upon in this context in a powerful way.

So I don't want to minimize that because that's awesome, but you could argue that all of those things could be experienced without being faced with a life-threatening disease. The part to me that I'm most interested in is you are now faced with something that is, there's a probability that is non-zero and it's higher than it was a month earlier.

That this woman who is clearly the best thing that's ever happened to you, no offense. Untaken. Could be gone. So as I think about my own practice, when I've dealt with really awful things that have confronted me,

It's this realization that we are suffering so much in our minds, probably more than in reality. And so much of that suffering is due to thought. It's due to projection. It's due to playing out scenarios that, I mean, if we're going to be brutally honest with yourself, we have no clue what's going to happen. And yet so much of our suffering is drawn out by those projections. How much of that was going on for you? And, and,

How were you able to sort of tame that or maybe asked another way if all of this had happened to you in 2008 versus 2017, 18? How would it have been different? 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. But one of them is that I think, frankly, I didn't think much about the fact that she could die. Partly I knew I had a pretty high level of confidence.

Based on the original diagnosis that she was going to be fine. Well, maybe the fertility one's a better example than like where there must have been a moment when you thought, wow, we might not be able to have. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So so in that moment where let's just say before any of this happened, you think there's a 95 percent chance we're going to have kids. And now at some point you're thinking there's a 10 percent chance we're going to have kids. I'm making these numbers up, of course.

At that moment, when it's a 10% chance we're going to have kids, it's really easy to start the projection of, oh my God, are we going to adopt? If so, how, where, what? But it's not going to be our kid, blah, blah, blah. Like, I mean, I'm just, I mean, like I'm the author of that playbook. Like that's like, I could win a Nobel prize in literature for that type of nonsense thinking. 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.

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. I'm a schmo who started meditating 10 years ago and I'm good sometimes at applying the lessons and sometimes I'm not. And I think when Bianca got sick.

I didn't really forthrightly look at the potential that she would die. 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. So sometimes I'm good at this stuff and sometimes I'm not.

How has your practice made you a better husband? 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? So I think it's, it's really the moment to moment stuff. So I, 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, but my moment to moment, basic blocking and tackling of being a human in a relationship is much better. In other words,

The mindfulness helps me see when I'm over, some percentage of the time, not always, helps me see when I'm over, about to be overtaken by anger or fear, whatever, irritation, and I can let it pass. I can feel the raw data of the anger, which by the way, feels really bad, but I don't need to have the satisfying energetic release of saying something tart that's going to get me in trouble.

And that is just creates a much more seamless relationship. Now, over time, actually, if you add on top of it, because you can make a case, I'm increasingly leaning toward this, and mindfulness is just one piece of the overall Buddhist picture. And that alone isn't enough, like warmth, friendliness, compassion, whatever you want to call it, is also incredibly important. And then there are also just like skills for better communication, right?

Adding all of those things in, which I'm now really starting to do as I work on this book, just makes it even better. So learning to be a better listener, learning how to phrase my assertions in ways that are less provocative.

Training up through meditation, my baseline level of friendliness and ability to lean in and give a shit is all super useful. And by the way, feels really good when you're doing it because that kind of emotional availability or what did you say before? One of your three mechanisms was rage, upset, detachment. Detachment feels bad in my experience because you know there's a bunch of stuff you should be doing and you feel guilty about that. It doesn't feel good in my experience.

So the actual leaning in feels better. Again, I still do detachment rage and say I do all of that. This is not you're not listening to a perfected human being talk to you now. It's just lowering the it's like a marginal improvement. So, yeah, I think she would say that our day to day is much smoother. I doubt she can recall the last time I raised my voice, which I did do before this.

And yet I think she would still say there are times where she walks on eggshells. She can just sense you're really pissed about something. Yeah. But then I think all the other thing is over time, my being easier to be around has allowed her to see that some of her walking on eggshells is her own stuff. And she might not have gotten there if I was Robert Johnson all the time. It's funny you bring up Robert because I was just going to I was literally just amazing. Like we can reach other's minds here.

When you think about your son and you think about Robert, Terry Real, who we've spoken about a little bit, has this great expression, which I'm going to sort of butcher. Although the expression which I have written down, I feel like it's going to be the opening quote on this chapter in my book, which is every man is a bridge spanning the trauma of his past, the legacy of his future, something to that effect. So you're a bridge, right? 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. And you, like every man, have a choice about whether you'll pass those on to your son. I mean, it seems to me like this practice is a big part, though not exclusively the only part of it, 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.

I think more, and I'm stealing some of this from Jerry Colonna. I don't have a pat answer to this, 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 and an inner, you know, Sammy from What Makes Sammy Run and all that stuff. But I think he needs to see me being okay with it.

so that he is okay with all of it. He's going to have negative parts of his psyche. And I think the trick is not to stamp that stuff out, but to have a supple, warm relationship with it. I guess what I'm getting at is not to get all psychological analysis, but I think a part of what Robert Johnson did when he smacked his kids around and told you that if you touched his VCR, he was going to beat the shit out of you. That's actually transmitting shame to

Yeah. Like there's a feeling of shame that comes to a child that's hit. It's bullying. Yeah. That's what it is. Bullying. And the bullying is a transmission of shame. And I think that's the part that has to be stopped. Yeah. It's not about perfection. It's about stopping shame. Yeah. And, you know, that's how I think about it in my life is there were a whole bunch of things that shamed the hell out of me.

And I think of that as my single greatest purpose in life at this point is what do I have to do to make sure that none of my shame makes its way to my three kids? If I can accomplish that and nothing else, that's, that's great. If I can accomplish other things in life, that's even better. But I have to accomplish that. I mean, I, I, I sort of feel that way. And a big part of not transmitting shame for me is recognizing shame when it shows up.

So I would challenge that slightly, but again, not slightly and lightly because I'm not sure I'm right about what I'm about to say, which is that strikes me that. So my dad and mom did not inject any shame into my life. It was mostly the outside world. I had a very loving parents and they weren't perfect, but very loving. I don't I don't walk around resenting them for much, if anything.

I think it's possible I could get to a place where really I'm not the source of any shame for him and nor is his mother. And he's in a really loving home. But the world is really tough. For sure. And so I want it to be a two part thing. I want it to be that we are bottomless wells of love and affection and wisdom for him to the extent that possible. And that we show him that, like, you're going to have.

Lots of dark parts of your own personality. It's unavoidable, and you can be okay with that. I think that's my operating thesis. I actually think that's an even more eloquent way to explain what I'm suggesting. But I think all I'm arguing is that the home should not be that your parents, you know, there's a term they use for this, right, which is your circle of origin or something to that effect, right? Family of origin. Family of origin, yeah. Your family of origin really isn't the place where you want the shame to come from. No. Because you can't control the world.

Like there will be bullies at school. There will be all this other bad stuff. So yeah, I think the way you've described it is even more sort of nuanced and probably more accurate. I guess what I would say is my two cents is I think meditation has probably prevented you from transmitting some of

your own shame, which has been manifesting itself largely in very externally positive ways. The successes you've had are in some ways driven, I think, by some of those attributes. In other words, your adaptations, your maladaptation have,

been very socially acceptable, but at some point they leak out in the weakest common denominator, which is generally to our family. Right. At least that's been my experience. And my, and the, and like the people in my immediate professional orbit. Right. The people who you can't fake it around for long enough. Right. So the Hotel Regina left us with a book and a podcast and an app that have been useful in other people's lives. So it was like a maladaptive thing that

had a positive impact on society, but also some of the sort of not so pretty parts of my motivation stayed with me and manifested in my being stressed and snippy and rushed and impatient and greedy and all that other stuff. And now for future projects, I got to do a better job of coming not from Hotel Regina, but from some other place. And this gets to something that you wrote about in 10% Happier, but I'm curious as to how you've evolved

One of the big questions you're trying to answer in your journey, as you've described it in that book, is can a person be successful professionally if they give up that drive, that sort of somewhat negative insecurity that feeds us? And

I'll let the readers go through your thinking at the time, circa 2014, five years later, where are you on that particular issue? Especially as you've just described it, right? Which is Hotel Regina gave us a whole bunch of things that are externally and ostensibly very positive, but it came at a little bit of a cost. Do you believe that one can be all positively valenced without the negative or does that negative need to exist?

First of all, I don't think you're going to make the negative go away. In my experience, I don't have a sense that I'm going to just conquer all my demons and just be operating out of a position of pure love. Maybe, but I don't see that coming down the pike for me right now. But I still think you can turn on the volume on the less wholesome motivations and turn up the volume on the more wholesome motivations, such as being of service, et cetera, et cetera, and the less wholesome ones being like looking for –

attention and money. And not to say that attention and money are all bad, but if you're like really, really totally focused on that to the exclusion of anything else, I think it's probably maybe not the best. Is there a way in there that you can shift the ratios and still be successful? I believe yes. It may also require a little bit of a shifting of how you define success. And I think in there, I'm starting to form

But I think I'm a little more nuanced in my view during 10 percent happier in the subsequent never ending book tour. I really was dogmatic about the fact that you're not going to lose your edge. You know, look at all these professional athletes who meditate and see sweet executives and all this stuff.

I believe that to a point, but I think at my level of meditation where I've taken it quite seriously, after a while, you start to change a little bit how you define success. For example, I recently went part-time here at ABC News.

And that was a big deal. This is announced a month ago. Yeah. So I was anchoring both Nightline and the weekend edition of GMA. Now I've given up Nightline and I anchor the weekend edition of GMA. I do my podcast, which is owned by ABC News, and I do special investigative reporting for the network. It's still a lot, but it's part time. And the rest of my time I'm working on the app and book.

books did i mention how much i love the app oh thank you i mentioned that i don't know if i mentioned that enough yeah i mean a couple more times you know that was tricky because i was thinking like in some ways i'm dropping this dream i've had for 25 years of reaching the absolute top of tv news if you think about it i'm kind of a b-level guy i've got i've been very successful

But, you know, I'm not anchoring the evening news or I'm not the main anchor of Monday through Friday GMA. I don't have a primetime cable show. You know, those are the folks who. How many A-level people exist at ABC and then NBC? Like each of the three networks have how many? There was a day when Jennings and Brokaw and Dan Rather were the three hosts.

Like the pinnacles of television. We were talking about this earlier. You said you could walk down the street with Peter Jennings circa 2000. And you might as well have been walking down the street with Muhammad Ali or Michael Jordan. It was crazy. Crazy. So rough back of the napkin. So there are three main networks. Each one has a single evening news anchor. And each of them has three morning anchors. So that's 11 people. And then three cable networks.

And I would say maybe each of them has four stars, maybe, true stars. So that's 11 plus. So 20, 25-ish. Yeah. I don't think I'm going to be one of those 25. And by the way, there's massive gradations within the 25. I bet I wouldn't recognize 15 of those 25. That's right. But you'd recognize Anderson Cooper. Yep. Amazing person who's really been helpful to me. You would recognize George Stephanopoulos. Yep.

Diane Sawyer. Yep. Sean Hannity. Yep. Would you recognize Joe Scarborough? No. For the listener, it's not that I'm a moron. It's just I never watch television. I can't actually recall the last time I've watched a television event that was not a Formula One race or a football game. So we may have reached the end of the list. Yeah, so there might be five people on that list. I would recognize if I saw them. But we saw a picture of Michael Strahan in the hallway and you recognized him. Yes. But that may be from football.

Yes, I mean I knew him from the Giants. But no, but I remember – I've seen him on TV. Just because whenever you're in the gym, that seems to be what they're showing. Right, right. And a lot of people who you might have recognized have got me too. Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose. Oh, of course. Definitely Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose. But everybody would have recognized Jennings and Rather and Brokaw. What I was trying to say is that I've had to –

Look, if tomorrow... When did you decide it was okay to get off the train? In the last year. Wow. Yes. In the last year. It's been a huge change for me. So how... Was that a funeral for a piece of your ego? Did you have to bury that little piece? I don't think it's clean like that. I think it's like...

You said to me on my podcast that you're a backslider. So like I had I've had moments of realizing powerfully, OK, I'm letting this go. But then I something triggers me and I start getting competitive and weird again. And then I remember, oh, yeah, no, no, no, I'm not playing this game anymore. So that's pretty much how it goes for me. I can spend a week or two out of the building, you know, working on other stuff and just not even remember I'm a TV news journalist unless somebody stops me on the street.

And then I get back in the building and one thing or another happens and I start filling in on GMA and I'm around. I'm filling in on weekday GMA and I'm around all these big hosts and, you know, I have great relationships with these folks. But I start thinking, wait, should I be trying to do this? I spent 25 years trying to do this. And so it's not clean. But the overall trend is toward not clean.

My wife described it as like an app that was running that was sucking up a lot of my battery life, but I wasn't using it. So I think that's starting to happen in a pretty big way. That doesn't mean I don't want to be in TV news. I'm actually the lighter. The app she's describing is the talk is the self-talk, right? Yes. That's such a great, I like that because right now I'm having this awful issue with my computer where Adobe is not working well and it's

If I have it open, it will take 50% of my battery in one app. So my new rule is I can't have any PDFs open when I'm on the airplane and I'm working on a battery. But now forever I will be able to – every time I open a PDF, I'm going to think about that and think, hey, what's my mental Adobe reader right now?

Just to close this out, I still want to be in TV news. I just want to be in TV news in a way that's like really enjoyable, which is I'm not constantly angling for the next job. I'm just loving the one I have right now and trying to ace this thing. And that's just for me, it's much more pleasant. And it doesn't mean I don't continue to have big ambitions of a startup company. I would like us to be a billion dollar company.

Did I mention how great the app is that that company makes, by the way? Yes. Yes, you have. And I need billboards in Times Square with you giving this. But, you know, one of our competitors is a billion-dollar company. And do I think we can also be one? I literally – and I'm sorry to piss off all the comm users –

I don't think it belongs in the same sentence as your app. It's a different product. It is a very important product. So I'm sure the defenders of that product will say yes, but it does A, B, and C, which I guess I don't place a premium on. But I guess for the things that I'm looking for, I think yours and Sam's are kind of in their own world. And I think as the market matures, you'll see – Yeah, you'll create these niche lanes. Yeah, and I think –

Calm is helping a lot of people. So I'm a terrible businessman in that I'm I'm a promoter of another. Yes, I am, because I think if somebody comes to me and says they're using calm, I'm happy for them. I'm using Headspace. I'm happy for them. My view is I like ours better. And I would put Sam's and I'm kind of obviously rooting for Sam. Yeah, I think it's impossible to put a stake in the heart of all of your demons forever. In my view, speaking only for myself.

I don't imagine all of my inner hobgoblins evaporating permanently, but I do think I can turn the volume down and operate out of a cooler space. Let me just give you an example. We talked about safety before. No. Remember how I noticed that Jerry Colonna has this thing about love, safety, and belonging, and for me, I really keyed in on safety. Oh, yes, yes, for the three needs for the children. Yeah, and I realized that, like, it's not that my life is devoid of risk, but I can make a pretty solid intellectual argument that if...

My startup goes pear-shaped and my current situation with ABC News doesn't work. Worst case scenario, professionally, I'll still be fine. And can I operate day to day from the place of feeling already safe? And how will that change how I show up? It means that I don't go, I'm not so sweaty and superheated in meetings. Everything isn't so stakes. The stakes aren't so high. I can operate from a much more relaxed place. And I found that experimenting with this, which is a bit of a leap of faith,

has really changed the way I show up. Now, how do we extrapolate that to somebody who works at Walmart and every day they wake up and think, is Amazon going to close this Walmart? So it's one thing to be Dan Harris. I would agree with your assessment. If ABC fired you tomorrow and the app blew up, I agree with your assessment. I just think you're going to be fine. I don't see any scenario under which you're not fine.

But I don't know if I can say that about that person. And given that that person is not rare, there's not 17 people in the United States that feel that way or that are in that experience. And by the way, I feel much more like the Walmart person than you. Like I feel way more insecure about my existence. So I'm asking this in many ways through a very selfish lens. How do we do this if we're not where you are yet? I think it's an excellent, truly excellent question.

There's a massive amount of privilege associated with what I just said. I don't think there's any way around it. We have to view this step out of the spiritual for a second and into step out of psychological and into socioeconomic is a very easy thing for a white male, wealthy, highly educated person.

quasi public figure to say all the shit I just said, as opposed to a Walmart worker. Never mind if it's a trans person or a woman of color who happens to work at Walmart. I just don't think there's any way around that. I do think it applies to you. I mean, you are going to be fine with the exception of the white part. Although you present as white, you have all of the privilege that I have unless I'm missing something.

Yes. No, I'm not suggesting I don't. I think I'm just suggesting I don't feel it, right? I still feel a tremendous insecurity of everything could be taken away tomorrow. I think if there was a better meditation practitioner and teacher in the room right now, she or he would have an answer to how we can all feel safe no matter what our circumstances are.

I just am not that person. We're bumping up against the limits of my abilities here. And, you know, you said something earlier that I think is really important. As I've been struggling with this chapter in my book on emotional health, you know, right now it has sort of three pillars and I suspect it will evolve. The three pillars are mindfulness, developing the capacity to be mindful,

developing the capacity to reframe things, which is basically stoicism and then some. And also cognitive behavioral therapy. Correct. And then the third pillar is relationality. And you've basically said all three of those in your own terminology. So that makes me feel better that I'm not on the wrong track. It might be that mindfulness is not per se the tool for that, that one particular insecurity, or maybe it is to some extent, but

The one thing that I do that does give me comfort when I feel very insecure is if I lose the capacity to do my work tomorrow, I don't lose my relationships. That's not really me falling back on a mindfulness tool. It's me falling back on. It's a reframe. It's a reframe. It's basically a reframe that says, you know what?

if I had to give up all of the things that I love in life and if I couldn't do what I do, but I still had these people in my life, I'm not going to kid myself and say my life would be just as good, but it wouldn't be all bad. And that's probably the closest I can come at this point to thinking about, to be clear, I think I have so much evolution that still has to come because I'd love to get to the point where I could show up from a place of zero insecurity. Let me just stop you on that because

I hope I didn't miscommunicate in that I gave anybody the impression that I show up with zero fear and insecurity. It's just that I'm experimenting with recognizing that I don't have any – there's no rationale for it. There is limited rationale for it. And that I can –

go into today's meetings from a feeling of like, let's just enjoy this. I can't believe I get to have all these meetings today about this amazing company or this amazing story I'm going to work on. And can I not be so clenched up? Because that's not helping the process or the end result. That doesn't mean risk isn't out there. And it doesn't mean I'm getting to zero on my demons. It just means that I'm turning down the volume. And that's the 10% happier spirit, which is there is no magic.

It's really about marginal improvement over time with an escape valve for backsliding. Because that's just, I think, my understanding of how human behavior works based on an N of one. But I think it's a pretty universal. I think we're all kind of in the same bucket in some ways. I'll bring up another point that you brought up something earlier. And this is sort of a bit tangential, but I think it is really important, which is one of my therapists. I know you get a kick out of the fact that I have three of them. Yeah.

It's just such a type A way. Nothing in moderation except moderation, Dan. Okay, that's my ethos. Such a type A way to do self-improvement. But one of them made a really great point, which was the importance of my daughter, who's, again, I think you commented on the age gap between my kids, but very different relationship with my daughter than my son. The 11-year-old. Yeah, right. There's one who's almost 11, and then there's the five and the two.

And I was talking about something that I was very uncomfortable about, something I was very ashamed of. And the therapist said, it's funny, I may have been blanking on which one. It was either Terry or Esther, but it was Esther. She said, it's actually very important that your daughter sees how much you're ashamed of this and how much you're struggling with it. And it's okay if she sees you cry about this. And she really went through all this stuff. And in retrospect, it seems so obvious that what she was really trying to say was,

You're not helping her by letting her think you're some indestructible force who's not, who never struggles, who doesn't have remorse, who doesn't make mistakes and then come to repent. And as obvious as that sounds now, that has historically felt wrong. Like it's felt like she should see me as perfect and I should hide my mistakes from her.

I think what made me think of that was just something you said earlier about your son. But you just said it so much more eloquently, right? Which is you want him to see your struggle. You want him to know that, boy, daddy's knee-jerk reaction is to lose his mind right now over whatever. But I've like figured out this whole practice and I'm just less likely to lose my mind now. And whatever it is that's sort of pissing me off that used to piss me off for four hours is actually going to upset me for about two minutes.

This is actually something I'm really looking forward to in life is just as I feel like I'm right in the midst of finally starting to win the battle there is actually sharing that with my kids. My daughter is old enough to remember some of these outbursts. She has seen some brutal outbursts. She has never been the recipient of an outburst, but she has, she's been in the car when I have

I mean, uttered such profanity at another driver that you just, and there's no way she's not traumatized by that. There's no way, even though, you know, cause another thing I've learned about children is at that age, they can't sometimes tell that it's not about them. Yeah. It's, it seems irrational to us. No, no, no. I'm clearly yelling at a person in a car who nearly killed us. How could she take that personally? But you know, on some level she's pierced by that. Yes.

So for her to understand that your dad's flawed and he's trying to be less flawed, I think of this as like one of the greatest things that we could do as parents. Yeah, because she's going to have flaws. And how is she going to relate to them? Yeah. And that's what I was trying to say before. That's the key. See, that's the part that you're adding to it that I don't think I've thought through. I'm stealing it from Jerry Colonna. So I think it's incredibly potent. You are modeling successful relationships with your own complexity, right?

and own demons to your kid, that not only enriches your behavior and relationship with the kid because they really know you, but it also just gives them a tool for moving through life in a way that will reduce their own suffering. When was the last time you saw Peter Jennings before he died? He called me into his office down the hall here and told me he wanted me to go off on a trip to the Middle East to spend some time in Israel and then go into Iraq.

And then also told me that there was a perception I wasn't very good at foreign coverage. But this was before he told the world he was dying, right? Yes. And this is just typical of him. He was like giving me this big assignment and also like smacking me in the face while he did it. Just like a little pointed jab at, yeah, you need to prove to us once again that you're good at this thing. Even though I had like spent years getting shot at.

And then when I was on that trip, he announced that he had lung cancer. This was 05? 05, yes. That was in the late winter, early spring of 05. And then I didn't see him again. He called me one time in the spring, and he could barely talk. His voice, the cancer had shredded his vocal cords. I can't remember what he was telling me, but he was kind of like correcting something I had done. That's how he operated. He was very into correcting. And so we talked, and then...

That was it. And then I heard he died in August. But you didn't see him in that interim. You never came to visit him? No. Was he not the kind of person that would want to have been visited? Or did you not feel close enough to him personally? No, our relationship, I was certainly one of his mentees and he really took that very seriously. He really took me under his wing. I don't know if he was receiving visitors, but I don't think even if he was, I would have been, somebody would have had to cajole or invite me. Because you just wouldn't have been comfortable in that setting?

I wouldn't have presumed that he wanted to see me. So Peter died young. He was in his 60s, right? Yeah, 66, I think. Yeah. So if you could go back in time, the late 90s, you met him in what, the late 90s? 2000. You met him in 2000. So you can go back in time to then when he's, say, call it 60, but you are the guy you are today. So you're still younger than him, but you're close enough, right? But you know these things that you've learned. And you were having dinner with him.

And you know all this stuff about him, right? Which is like he's this maniacal perfectionist. He is the best of the best. Would you be probing these things? Would you want to know if he was happy? Do you think he was happy? I think he could be happy, but I think fundamentally he seemed to me like somebody who wasn't super happy. And I think he was driven a lot by the dark spots. You know, the wanting to prove, wanting to win. And yet he also...

That dysfunctional part of him created so much value in that he was just so such an intrepid reporter. And he also trained, you know, like we learn so much by being near him. So there's so many journalists who are working today because or do a better job because of their relationship with Peter. I'm very reluctant to push meditation on anybody. So I thought that that's where you were going with it.

but simply to probe his happiness level and what might be contributing to unhappiness. Yeah, I do think I would have done that. I actually think that could have been interesting and productive. If I had evangelized meditation to him, I think that probably would have backfired. I can't say one way or the other, but just as a general rule, I think, even as I think about talking with some of my patients who have that phenotype,

usually meditation isn't the place to start. The place to start is just to try to get a sense of the similarities between us. I'm not talking to anybody about this stuff as an authority who's figured anything out. I'm talking about it as a schlep who's right there. Whereas a lot of times when doctors talk to patients, there's this view of, well, the doctor's over here and the doctor's figured it out. And they've got a couple of stone pillars that are carved with instructions and they're going to give them to you. But this is clearly an area where that's not the case.

And maybe even using Peter as an example, which of course is just such ridiculous speculation. So I just want to caveat all of that. You've pointed out that one, he was arguably the single best that ever did this job. Two, he spawned a generation of people like you have been imparted with a standard of professionalism. Yeah. Anderson Cooper, Jake Tapper, Chris Cuomo, John Berman, Bob Woodruff.

Martha Raddatz, George Stephanopoulos, I mean, Jonathan Karl, like on and on. Just Pierre Thomas, just incredible people who came out of his orbit. So it begs the question that we've sort of danced around. If Peter was a Buddha Zen dude, could he have had that same impact? Or would it have simply been a different impact for which it's impossible to speculate what the net ripple effect was?

My intuition is that you're going to have more of an impact on people if you're not stressing them out so much that all they can – that you shut down their ability for cognitive function because that's what he did. He was just so – such a bully that when you stress somebody out, they can't learn well. But if he felt safe –

and was willing to sort of calmly impart the many lessons he had learned over the course of his illustrious career, I think we would have learned even more. Instead, one of the things we learned was how to deal with a bully. Hmm.

Dan, there is so much more I'd love to talk with you about, but I think we should save it until your book is in its next phase, which is to say about to come out. Talk to us about what that timeline looks like. So you're in the throes of writing or are you still storyboarding? Writing, actually writing, mostly storyboarded. It's mostly storyboarded. It's going slowly, but I hope it will come out early next year.

It may come out close to when yours comes out, early 2021. Okay. Or mid-2021. We'll see. I mean, the absolute, absolute best-case scenario, which I think is highly unlikely, would be New Year's 2021. I think more likely it would be some point in that year. Got it. Well, I can't believe we might have to wait that long to talk again, so maybe we won't. But nevertheless— No, we're going to work out together. Well, no, no. I mean talk on a podcast. Oh, a talk on a podcast. Oh, yeah, yeah. We'll definitely talk.

Well, thank you so much, Dan. I mean, thank you on several levels, right? Thank you for 10% happier, just completely on a personal level. I'm simply not sure if that door could have been pried open with any other tool and that door had to be pried open. And even though it has, it's simply the beginning of a journey, I think it is one of the most important journeys I've ever taken and will continue to take. And just thank you for

creating an app that I think takes something like meditation that comes with so many hang-ups and so much baggage and makes it so completely accessible. And again, I'm biased, but it's the type of meditation and the type of practice that on a personal level I have found most helpful to alleviate my abject misery and suffering that seems to be my default state. Mm-hmm.

So thank you for that. And lastly, just thank you for making so much time on a weekend to sit here and chat with me. My pleasure. My pleasure. Thank you. Thank you.

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