Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - ABC's Dan Harris on Authenticity, Panic, Mindfulness

Episode Date: August 31, 2016

This conversation is with Dan Harris, who most of you know as a co-anchor of “Nightline” and the weekend edition of “Good Morning America” on ABC News -- or 20/20 -- or -- from his New York Times best selling book: 10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress without Losing My Edge and Found Self-Help That Actually Works. Dan has faced the public tension, in a panic attack that happened on live television. In This Episode: -Embracing not taking himself too seriously -Finding love in meditation -The humbling nature of sharing insight with others -The difference between pleasure and happiness -His method for showing gratitude -Surrendering to the process of meditation -Learning from his parents via “show, not tell” -Dealing with not being as smart as his parents and brother -Risk taking integrated in his DNA -The moment before and after his panic attack on live TV -Becoming aware of the triggers for his panic attacks -Having a pre-disposition for anxiety -The emotions around not being nominated for an EMMY this year -External vs. internal rewards -Approaching his newest venture with an open mind -Why being honest with yourself is the easiest thing to do -Inside his meditation practice_________________Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more powerful conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and meaning: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine! https://www.findingmastery.com/morningmindsetFollow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Finding Mastery is brought to you by Remarkable. In a world that's full of distractions, focused thinking is becoming a rare skill and a massive competitive advantage. That's why I've been using the Remarkable Paper Pro, a digital notebook designed to help you think clearly and work deliberately. It's not another device filled with notifications or apps.

It's intentionally built for deep work. So there's no social media, no email, no noise. The writing experience, it feels just like pen on paper. I love it. And it has the intelligence of digital tools like converting your handwriting to text, organizing your notes, tagging files, and using productivity templates

to help you be more effective. It is sleek, minimal. It's incredibly lightweight. It feels really good. I take it with me anywhere from meetings to travel without missing a beat. What I love most is that it doesn't try to do everything. It just helps me do one very important thing really well,

stay present and engaged with my thinking and writing. If you wanna slow down, if you wanna work smarter, I highly encourage you to check them out. Visit remarkable.com to learn more and grab your paper pro today. All right, welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. I'm Michael Gervais. And the idea behind these conversations is to learn from people who are on the path of mastery, to better understand what they're searching for, to understand their unique psychological framework, which is how they understand how the world works, how they understand how they work, and they fit in the world. And we also want to pay particular attention to the mental skills

that they use to build and refine their craft. And we're not to pay particular attention to the mental skills that they use to build and refine their craft. And we're not interested in just what the mental skills are, but how they apply those mental skills. What are the sturdy and robust practices that they've employed and developed to be able to weather the storms, to be able to deal with adversity, to be able to become resilient without losing the toughness required to excel in rugged and challenging environments. And just on that quick note, being resilient is wonderful. And it's important to be able to blend and be flexible and to adjust to whatever the demands are, but not at the cost of being tough and hard and having a tough underbelly at the same time.

And so that balance between the two is strikingly challenging to experience. And it's that life pursuit that allows masters of craft and people that are fully developed, I think, to be able to have both that flexible and that hard or tough side to them. So anyways, in this conversation, we get to touch on some of that. Finding Mastery is brought to you by LinkedIn Sales Solutions. In any high-performing environment that I've been part of, from elite teams to executive boardrooms, one thing holds true. Meaningful relationships are at the center of sustained success. And building those relationships, it takes more than effort. It takes a real caring about your people. It takes the

right tools, the right information at the right time. And that's where LinkedIn Sales Navigator can come in. It's a tool designed specifically for thoughtful sales professionals, helping you find the right people that are ready to engage, track key account changes, and connect with key decision makers more effectively. It surfaces real-time signals, like when someone changes jobs or when an account becomes high priority, so that you can reach out at exactly the right moment with context and thoroughness that builds trust. It also helps tap into your own network more strategically, showing you who you already know

that can help you open doors or make a warm introduction. In other words, it's not about more outreach. It's about smarter, more human outreach. And that's something here at Finding Mastery that our team lives and breathes by. If you're ready to start building stronger relationships that actually convert, try LinkedIn Sales Navigator for free for 60 days at linkedin.com slash deal. That's linkedin.com slash deal. For two full months for free, terms and conditions apply.

Finding Mastery is brought to you by David Protein. I'm pretty intentional about what I eat, and the majority of my nutrition comes from whole foods. And when I'm traveling or in between meals, on a demanding day certainly, I need something quick that will support the way that I feel and think and perform. And that's why I've been leaning on David Protein bars. And so has the team here at Finding Mastery. In fact, our GM, Stuart, he loves them so much. I just want to kind of quickly put them on the spot. Stuart, I know you're listening. I think you might be the reason that we're running out of these bars so quickly. They're incredible, Mike. I love them.

One a day, one a day. What do you mean one a day? There's way more than that happening here. Don't tell. Okay. All right, look, they're incredibly simple. They're effective. 28 grams of protein, just 150 calories, and zero grams of sugar. It's rare to find something that fits so conveniently into a performance-based lifestyle and actually tastes good. Dr. Peter Attia, someone who's been on the show,

it's a great episode, by the way, is also their chief science officer. So I know they've done their due diligence in that category. My favorite flavor right now is the chocolate chip cookie dough. And a few of our teammates here at Finding Mastery have been loving the fudge brownie and peanut butter. I know, Stuart, you're still listening here. So getting enough protein

matters. And that can't be understated, not just for strength, but for energy and focus, recovery, for longevity. And I love that David is making that easier. So if you're trying to hit your daily protein goals with something seamless, I'd love for you to go check them out. Get a free variety pack, a $25 value, and 10% off for life when you head to davidprotein.com slash finding mastery. That's David, D-A-V-I-D, protein, P-R-O-T-E-I-N.com slash finding mastery. And this conversation is with Dan Harris, who most of you know as a co-anchor of Nightline, and he's also on the weekend edition of Good Morning America on ABC News. You might've also seen him on 2020. You might've known him as well from his New York

Times bestselling book, 10% Happier. And the subtitle's great. How I tamed the voice in my head, reduced stress without losing my edge and found self-help that actually works. Well done. And he's also got a fantastic podcast that I was fortunate enough to be on as well. So it's called 10% Happier. So if you enjoyed this conversation, punch over to his podcast, 10% Happier. And I hope you enjoy those as well as my take on finding mastery and the journey that we're on together. Okay. So he's got the microphone, like he's done a lot and he's in front of a microphone often, whether that's in front of a camera or not. And he's credible. He comes from what I was able to suss and read and understand in person. He comes from a flat out authentic place in which he's earned that authenticity. I mean, he's literally earned

it by facing down anxiety and facing down panic attacks. And also professionally, that's impersonally, but professionally putting a shine on those people in places that deserve it. And so he's gone into tough neighborhoods. He's gone into tough conversations to illuminate what's really happening underneath, whether that's the slums, the slum lords down in Rio and the favelas, or, you know, hard hitting questions with the Catholic church around abuse. And so I just, I just hope that, that, that what we did together translates on the platform that he's using as well as the person he's becoming. And so if you've ever felt the tension, like seriously, the tension between ambition,

restlessness, and being way out of balance, and at the same time pushing harder for more achievement, knowing that that's not quite the right way to go and that strain and strive for achievement is at the cost of meaning and being deeply connected with loved ones, you know, and at the same time wanting meaning and wanting achievement and wanting connection with loved ones like that, that unique combination. I know I, I, it sits with me. Um, I think you're just going to really enjoy this conversation. I think you're going to enjoy Dan and his podcast as well. So we cover the map from skepticism to meditation, to humility, ambition, you know, parenting lessons that he's employing and ones that he learned from his parents as well.

And obviously he's experienced, um, you know, wonderful success in his career and personal life. Uh, we, we, We dive into risk-taking. Of course, we're going to go there. Panic attacks and the anecdote for anxiety in general. So I just hope you enjoy and love this conversation. As just a quick reminder, you can find us on iTunes, this podcast, which is Finding Mastery, as well as Minutes on Mastery.

And that's just a quick three-minute daily applied insights from people that are on the path of mastery that you can listen to every day just to kind of prime your day. You can also find us at our Finding Mastery community. Just punch over to findingmastery.net forward slash community. And then you can also stay connected to us on social at Michael Gervais and then on Instagram, Finding Mastery. Okay. One last thing. If you enjoy this conversation, punch over to Dan Harris's 10% Happier. And I think that you'll enjoy that as well. Okay. So let's jump right into this conversation with Dan Harris. Dan. Hey. Thank you for spending the time to sit down. Yeah, I'm looking forward to this because you have done something.

You've created a bit of a disruption in the psychology field about this idea of 10% happier and also not being scientific but being absolutely pure to your experience. Yes. Yeah. I pulled that 10% figure out of my butt. So I'm going to have to live with math jokes the rest of my life. But I like it because it's close enough and also because it's like counter-programming against the over-promising you often hear in the self-help space. What are your thoughts about the self-help space? Oh, hold on. I love the pause because I'm right there with you with the pause. Okay. Like this idea that, you know, um, I don't know, we can just, if we're just positive, we'll be okay.

Yeah. You know, and I don't know, I I'd love to get, cause you're, you're squarely sitting in it right now and you've got a book that's done really well and it's super authentic story, which we'll get to in a second, I hope. But I'm just curious about how you're situated in that space. Yeah. I mean, I think the scientific term for most of the stuff that's taught is bullshit, like hardcore bullshit, really dangerous bullshit. And it's a howling sea of bullshit, an $11 billion howling sea of bullshit. And most of it is built around the idea that if you think positively, you can get whatever you want.

You know, like that book and DVD, The Secret, where it says that you – they actually say, you know, if you can get a diamond necklace, you can cure cancer or whatever. And I think these are just demonstrably false claims. And, you know, and you see varieties of it all throughout the self help industry and wish fulfillment, people talk about things like that. And I just think it's a really reckless thing to be to be peddling. Yeah, and I had a sense of that for you coming into this conversation. So what I've done in my life is I've indexed on science and you did something totally different as you indexed on an N of one and told a compelling story. And so for me, like paying attention to science and I've got two filters that everything runs through for me. Like one is the bulls, the bullshit filter with people

that are best in the world. If it doesn't work with them, even if science says it's great, if I try that enough times and it doesn't work, it's not going to be useful ever in my mind again. And then everything else needs to go through science to make sure that there's something to stand on. And so can you, can you walk through this idea that you were going to write an authentic story and a book about you that was going to land squarely in the self-help industry knowing that you have a reaction to it? Like what does that do for you? Well, just let me say that science is really important for me too. I'm not a scientist, but science is what allowed me to start meditating

because I always thought meditation was ridiculous, ridiculous. But when I started to see the science that shows, and it's still in its early stages, right? And it's not in no way dispositive, you know, it's not conclusive, but it strongly suggests that it can do things like lowering your blood pressure and boosting your immune system and rewiring key parts of your brain. When I saw that as the child of two scientists and the husband of another scientist, and I had them take a look at the data, although my dad wasn't interested, but my mother and wife were very interested, it seemed pretty obvious to me that there was something there. So science is important.

And in terms of my discomfort in being part of an industry that I'm overall not comfortable with, yeah, I mean, if you look at an industry and think, well, this sucks, but there actually is a good way to do it, then that's actually from an entrepreneurial standpoint a really interesting place to be. There you go. Okay, cool. So that's how it an entrepreneurial standpoint, a really, really interesting place to be. There you go. Okay, cool. So that's how it's making sense for you. Yeah.

I mean, I had, I was actually, when I started doing it, I was less thinking about self-help and more thinking about the meditation world, to be honest with you. I, when I got interested in meditation, I started reading a bunch of books and these books were great on many levels. But there was one demerit, which is that they utterly lacked a sense of humor. And I realized that that was the opening in the market. So as I often say, there's nothing, there's no original ideas in my book, except for I use the word fuck a lot. And that's the difference. Okay. So, um, one of my partners in a business, uh, she was also on this podcast called, um,

her name's Ariana Cucors. So she was reading your book and she says, this is really funny. So you, you did it, right? Like, yeah. So you did it. You, you, you brought humor into, um, into a space that is really intense and serious and maybe a place where people take themselves too seriously. And there is a place for intensity. I get accused of being super intense. Like that's just kind of how I do it. But taking oneself seriously is a whole different deal. And so did you take yourself seriously before you were attracted to meditation? Or did you always have this non, I don't know, not nonchalant, but this irreverence

towards you and the world? I mean, I think it's funny. It's like a generational thing. I've noticed that our generation X is the age of irony. We literally were labeled that. We were raised on Seinfeld. And so if somebody is earnest with me, I just have trouble taking them seriously. What I've noticed is that it's definitely not a problem with boomers. And oddly enough, it doesn't seem to be a problem with millennials. It's just our generation. I mean I think everybody likes a sense of humor, but I see a much more earnestness above us and below us in the age cohorts.

Do I take myself seriously? I think I'm at my worst when I'm taking myself too seriously. I often make my worst mistakes or have my most annoying moments of self-righteousness and self-obsession when I'm taking myself too seriously. As having a public and a private life, does the public awareness of what you do and how you think and the words you choose, does that fuel taking yourself too seriously? Like if you read your own hype, if you read your own Twitter fandom, if you will, does that get in your way? Or have you figured out how to gate that out? Not for me because my whole – first of all, I don't think anybody was really super interested in my interior life before the book. I mean I was a B, C-level network news guy that – and I still am – that people saw me on the news and I delivered the news.

I mean and I did. I hoped interesting stories. It wasn't really about me so much so that I wasn't people weren't asking about what was happening internally for me. And then the book came out. And so, yeah, there has been subsequently much more interest in my thought process around various because the book is so personal. But the whole basis of the book is that i don't really take myself so seriously and and uh and actually the book was i was just thinking about this yesterday uh when donald trump got up at the republican national convention said he was humbled to accept the nomination you can believe him or not about that because it's

donald trump but but also tim kaine know, the day we're doing this interview, Tim Kaine was just picked by Hillary Clinton as the vice presidential choice, and he said he was humbled too. And I was thinking about people say they're humbled in these situations that have to be the opposite of humbling, right? There's nothing humbling about being on the cusp of the presidency or the vice presidency, or people say it when they win an Oscar. But actually there was something truly humbling about being on the cusp of the presidency or the vice presidency, or people say it when they win an Oscar. But actually, there was something truly humbling about writing the book because I realized very powerfully that I had angsted about, you know, should I divulge all of this personal information?

Was it going to ruin my career? My mother begged me not to publish the book like a couple weeks before it came out. It was already printed and sitting in a warehouse. And so I was really worried that it was going to destroy my career to be this personal. And what I realized afterwards is you can get up in public and admit, you know, I had a drug problem. I have suffered with depression, anxiety, panic, being an asshole, all these afflictions. And nobody, you know, people find it mildly amusing. But what they really care about is what did you learn that could be useful for me personally?

That is humbling. And so, yeah, people, I guess, are somewhat interested in my what I think about certain things or what's going on for me internally. But it's really connected to something that is useful for them at the end of the day. My story is like a thin veneer. And that actually is humbling in the real sense of that term. That's really cool. That's a great insight because I'm not sure that when we're trying to do good in the world, let's say that that's something that people want to do, is that if you miss what you just said, where doing good is really helping other people be better, and that is people's primary motivation is for them to be better. That there,

there's a taking that takes place in that exchange. And if you're unaware of that taking that is being taken, such as your insights on how you've gone through pains and struggles or whatever, and how that can be translated into something better for them, you know, a tool, an idea, a strategy that it can feel draining, at least for me. And I don't know if you've had that. It sounds like you have not. And I'll tell you why. It's because I missed it. I missed that early. I didn't get, I didn't have that insight that you just had that really other people want to be better. And so anything that I had to say was, I thought it was important. And I realized that, no, no, no, there's someone else on the other

side of it that they're trying to figure it out equally as much. And so how did you get to that insight? I don't know if that's the exact insight. There are parts of what I'm doing that I find draining. The one thing that I find draining, and we'll probably have to do it soon. Is that to retell my story a million times? Because that is the core of it. Like everyone wants to know you had a panic attack on national television. So two and a half years after the book came out, like I have to tell that story a lot.

And I give a lot of speeches too. So I travel around the country and I tell my story and I can recite the speech in my sleep. You know, I mean, I give this speech. So let's not do that. No, no, I've got something. I'm sorry to interrupt you. Yeah. Cause let's not do that because anyone that wants to know that you've had a panic attack and I did a, like they can look it up online. I'm more interested in the, the, the beginnings of your life, how that set you up in a particular way to be fearful

of something. I'm not sure what it is yet. And then I would like to know the minutes before the panic attack. I'd like to know that space and then the minutes after. And when I say minutes, I really mean like microseconds, like just before it was coming on and then after, like what that was like. And I'd like to know, I'd like to get that bookends pieces. And I don't know if you talk about that because I haven't heard you talk about that yet. A little bit, but not that much. But the point I was trying to make is actually that what – and this goes back to sort of taking myself seriously. What I've noticed is even for somebody like me who is like a TV news anchor and definitely has narcissistic tendencies as probably is required for this job, you can get tired of talking about yourself. You know, I am now tired of talking about myself, but I never get tired of talking about the importance of meditation and what it can do for other people and answering their questions about it, even though the questions are always

the same. So what I found is when I go out and give a speech, I'm a little, I'm a little – I'm not so excited often to do the formal part of the speech, but I'm always excited to do the Q&A. Q&A is way fun. Way more fun. And that is – even though the questions are always the same. It's always the same questions, but I can see the lights turning on. And actually, even when I'm giving my speech, which is a bit rote by now, the moments where I'm actually – because a lot of what I do in the speech is just tell stories, show videos, and have fun. But there are a few moments where I'm delivering the core message and I can see the lights turn on for people internally. That actually does give me a lot of juice. So there's something in that.

There's some lesson in that. Like, even though it's a kind of a Buddhist thing for me, the Buddha talks about this thing of suffering, which, you know, his principal pronouncement, his most famous pronouncement was life is suffering, which is actually a mistranslation. Suffering, we think of suffering, it's very dour. It's like, you know, crows pecking out our innards or something like that. But actually what he meant is just kind of life is inherently unsatisfying when you're focused on impermanent hits of pleasure. So it can feel really good to tell your story, to talk about your people love to talk about themselves. But it will feel after time, over time, you do it enough, actually, it loses its juice.

Same thing with ice cream. Same thing with sex. Same thing with music. Anything that is like a temporary fleeting pleasure, if you do enough of it, actually, it will lose its pleasure. But there are more, for lack of a better, for lack of a less cheesy term, there are more wholesome sources of pleasure, like generosity. It will never get old. uh it will never get old uh kindness will never get old uh sharing information that's useful to other people just doesn't get old and so for me there's a lesson in there somewhere yeah the and you articulated really well the difference between

pleasure and happiness the quick hit on pleasure and then the enduring lasting yes you know um pursuit if you will yeah and there's this idea about the pursuit of happiness a la the famous movie being um mistricken just a bit and so the pursuit of happy it's the pursuit that matters more than the end game of happiness and i think that that that um is in direct opposition of many budd. So I'd love to riff off that with you a little bit. And so this is my, some of my understandings for Buddhism is enlightenment is important, as well as the pursuit. And then happiness and joy and peace are all part of the process for eventually understanding

the insight and wisdom necessary for enlightenment. And that being said, I've found that if the pursuit is about happiness and joy, that oftentimes what gets missed is the importance for gratitude. And so the research that I've found is that gratitude, and it's the N of one as well, as well as reading about it from science, is that gratitude precedes joy and happiness. And I don't hear enough conversation. I heard you just dance with it about the importance of gratitude. And so can you just talk about like happiness as an end result or process? Like where, where, as I'm kind of rambling about these three things, right,

which is enlightenment, happiness, joy, and peace, and then gratitude. Where does your mind wander to? Where does my mind wander to when it comes to gratitude? Yeah, gratitude, and then happiness and joy as an end in and of itself, and enlightenment as your pursuit, maybe. Yeah, okay. So gratitude is, is i think super important uh uh it's hard to talk about it without being cheesy but it's i guess hard not suck it's hard to talk about any of this stuff without being a little earnest which is again some sort of constitutional issue for me but uh yeah gratitude is a very powerful antidote to our natural um to suffer in the Buddhist sense, which is to like, we're constantly in the hunt for the next hit of pleasure. And so we and we have the

psychologist, you know, this term of hedonic adaptation, where you know, you, you can have all this great stuff in your life, but actually you take it for granted very quickly. You bake it into your baseline expectations. So you get a promotion, you're so excited, you're walking on air for a certain amount of time, and then it becomes your baseline expectation and you're no longer excited about it anymore. So there's a way in which just doing something simple that, this is not a Buddhist practice, just something I've just started to do, which is make a list of, as I'm going to bed, uh, uh, make a list of the things that I'm grateful for. Many of which are not like new and fresh and exciting and shiny. Um, and I have a one and a half year old son. Uh,

we had to work really hard through, um, an infertility struggle to get him. And he's a little EF5 tornado and it can be profoundly pain in the butt, but can't believe we have him. So just pondering that for a minute before I go to bed. I love my job. I often find myself wandering toward the things about my job that I don't like, but those are so peripheral to the main chunk of the thing that I love this job and just reminding myself of that. My wife, our cats, the fact that I'm physically fit, that financially stable. We love our nanny. She's a part of the family. I could go on and on and I love my parents.

I love my brother and his kids and his wife. So if I just take through these before I go to bed, it actually runs counter to the way we're wired. You know, we're wired for threat detection in the savannah, right? And so it's natural to, especially since a lot of us are ambitious, too. We're just looking for the problems to solve. But in that hunt, we're overlooking all these amazing things. And so just doing this very kind of um syrupy exercise of reminding yourself of the stuff uh about which you are generally genuinely grateful but you've forgotten to be can be really useful and is that like a one minute two minute is that like does it how long does that take for you to be five seconds yeah so you just quick hits yeah before you go to bed yeah and then

sometimes i actually do it at the beginning of a meditation session because i found that you want to create the mental weather that is conducive to the mind settling yeah so that's actually i didn't know that you did that that's something i do in the mornings which is one thought of gratitude one breath one thought of gratitude one intention like how do i want to show up today yeah yeah and that's just kind of priming particular parts of my brain to wake up and i just put my feet on the ground and just feel the feet my feet so be here now yeah and so you do it at night and do you probably better to do it the morning i don't know you know i there's there's wanting research is wanting here right so i think both of us need

to figure out or all of us need to figure out like what really works in the cadence of our life and then is there science that is suggesting either way? And there's not on this particular thing, but I found at least. And so do you feel each thought, each gratitude thought, or do you, is it a mental picture, an image, or is it like, what happens for you when you do that quick hit at night? Actually, I do. I think because I have been doing for a couple of years this compassion meditation training, which does involve visualizing – this is also like ridiculously syrupy and I had to get over this in order to do this practice. But this compassion meditation involves picturing people and so from people you're close with to people you don't really know to people who are difficult to everyone.

Regions of the world that you've been once, regions of the world you've never been to. Sure, sure. All that. This is very much like a Confucius. I don't know. That's the way I learned it as well. I don't know anything about Confucius, but I'm interested. Yeah.

I'm interested. So you picture these people and you send them good vibes. Yeah. Or may you be happy, may you be safe, that type of thing. So I'm a little bit in that habit. Picture these people and you send them good vibes. Yeah. May you be happy. May you be safe. That type of thing. So I'm a little bit in that habit. So when I do the gratitude thing, yeah, if I'm flashing up my kid, that's pretty easy for me. To feel it.

Yeah. To see it and then it goes right to feeling it. Got it. Okay. And then when you're doing the compassion training, are you feeling or are you seeing? So the thing about compassion training, and I would say this for gratitude and I'm making – the compassion training is 1000s of years old. So I can speak some authority about like on the way you should do it. That's right. The gratitude thing, I'm just kind of making up as I go. But I think the rule probably would apply to both. You get into trouble if you expect a certain feeling, because it's very hard to conjure a certain feeling. And actually, the expectation of getting there of like, feeling love can

actually can be an impediment to the feeling. So you a great way to practice successfully is to say doesn't matter what I feel the F the the trying the intention is enough. So some nights I do the gratitude thing or or when i'm doing compassion training i don't feel much of it at all but the the idea is to surrender to the process and know that over time it will you are actually changing your mind and your brain yeah that that's the part like letting something wash over you or wash through you is a phrase that i think is has been important to me rather than like i'm supposed to feel a certain way when I'm grateful or compassionate or loving or whatever it might be.

And then sometimes though, you'll, I'll do the work. I'm curious about you. I'll do that work. And then I'm agitated. Yeah. And it's like, Jesus, why are you agitated? Yeah. Why do I get agitated?

Um, because it's like, I want to be somewhere else and I'm, I'm doing the work and I want to do the work, but my mind is pulling me somewhere else. Like there's something I need to do. You got other shit you need to do. Yeah, I need to fall asleep or I need to wake up or I need to go do A, B, and C. And that agitation, the pull from now to what future state I think I should be in is the part that's really a struggle. And then so having – I understand like the principles of like nonjudgmental high regard for myself to be able to come back to the present moment.

But still, when I battle that, you know, and I've been practicing a long time, when I battle that, there's times I'm like, man, this feels like I should probably stop. And then I just stay a little bit longer and it doesn't always change, you know? So that's, I think part of the process is accepting that too. But it's not

easy. Well, for sure, the move is the first move, it would be just to notice your rushing. And actually, sometimes that will just take the teeth out of the thing. 100%. But it doesn't always. And so that's where you that's where you're going, I think, with the idea that, okay, well, maybe this isn't going to work right now. Well, yeah. Not this moment with you and me, but the moment when I'm doing that mindfulness training. Yeah, for sure.

Finding Mastery is brought to you by Momentus. When it comes to high performance, whether you're leading a team, raising a family, pushing physical limits, or simply trying to be better today than you were yesterday, what you put in your body matters. And that's why I trust Momentus. From the moment I sat down with Jeff Byers, their co-founder and CEO, I could tell this was not your average supplement company. And I was immediately drawn to their mission, helping people achieve performance for life. And to do that, they developed what they call the Momentus Standard. Every product is formulated with top experts and every batch is third-party tested, NSF certified for sport or informed sport. So you know exactly what you're getting. Personally,

I'm anchored by what they call the Momentus 3, protein, creatine, and omega-3. And together, these foundational nutrients support muscle recovery, brain function, and long-term energy. They're part of my daily routine. And if you're ready to fuel your brain and body with the best, Momentus has a great new offer just for our community right here. Use the code FINDINGMASMastery for 35% off your first subscription order at LiveMomentous.com. Again, that's L-I-V-E Momentous, M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S, LiveMomentous.com and use the code FindingMastery for 35% off your first subscription order. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Felix Grey.

I spend a lot of time thinking about how we can create the conditions for high performance. How do we protect our ability to focus, to recover, to be present? And one of the biggest challenges we face today is our sheer amount of screen time. It messes with our sleep, our clarity, even our mood. And that's why I've been using Felix Grey glasses.

What I appreciate most about Felix Grey is that they're just not another wellness product. They're rooted in real science. Developed alongside leading researchers and ophthalmologists, they've demonstrated these types of glasses boost melatonin, help you fall asleep faster, and hit deeper stages of rest. When I'm on the road and bouncing around between time zones, slipping on my Felix Grays in the evening, it's a simple way to cue my body just to wind down. And when I'm locked into deep work, they also help me stay focused for longer without digital

fatigue creeping in. Plus, they look great. Clean, clear, no funky color distortion. Just good design, great science. And if you're ready to feel the difference for yourself, Felix Gray is offering all Finding Mastery listeners 20% off. Just head to FelixGray.com and use the code FindingMastery20 at checkout. Again, that's Felix Gray. You spell it F-E-L-I-X-G-R-A-Y.com and use the code FindingMastery20 at FelixGray.com for 20% off. Why do you use the word meditation? Because there's been a big push and debate in the mindfulness world in the last, you know, since I've been in it, which is not that long, like seven years. But in that time,

mindfulness has really sort of had a bigger public footprint. And there's been a lot of debate in this world about this pretty small community. Branding, you know, let's meditation has such a stink on it. So let's let's rebrand it. My view is, you're never going to get somebody sitting down with their eyes closed, and convince them that they're not meditating so you might as well stop playing games and just call it what it is and over time i think the best hope is to just is that the word meditation will no longer have a stink on it

because we'll change all of the preconceptions so yoga got there sushi got there that was weird in the 80s you know and now it's like nobody thinks it's weird my kid will not grow up thinking thinking sushi or yoga is weird because it's part of the culture so i think my kid will also grow up in a world where meditation is really fun because i see kids all over the country now doing it at age three four five six so to me i strongly feel that that is the root and rebranding it just is going to actually get you deeper into trouble. I could be wrong, but that's my intuition. Yeah, really cool. Because I think you and I are actually working, wanting to work in the same direction with the value and the

practice and the science and the art of mindfulness training. And I'm going the other direction. So you're doubling down on the first word meditation, which started 2500 or plus years plus years ago. And I'm saying, no, no, that doesn't sell in the rooms and the groups that I'm in. And I need to first gain some sort of momentum around it. And so training works. What is the it you were talking about? Mindfulness or meditation. Yeah. So when I say it doesn't work for me or it doesn't sell, right, is that so training does. There's only three things as humans we can train. We can train our body, our craft, and our mind. And there's lots to do about mental training that we haven't figured out as a society yet.

And mindfulness is certainly one of them. I don't think it's the – for me, it has, it's not the end all be all, but it is the process to increase awareness and gain insight to internal wisdom, which is a, those two things are massive, like never to be understated and all the science around it's really amazing. However, suggesting that we're going to go into a group of alpha male, alpha female competitors and say, okay, everyone, now we're going to do meditation. I never was able to get enough traction. And this is maybe, you know, 10, eight, eight, 10 years ago when I first started teaching about this. But when I would say we're going to do some training and it's, you know, we're going to call this mindfulness training

to become more aware, people aware of what, aware of your thoughts so that you can guide them towards what? Well, that's what we got to figure out later. But so mindfulness as a phrase has been something that has gained traction because I can tag the second word to it, which is training. So I hope we're not getting each other's way too much. No, no, no. I mean, I think you may be right. One thing I've learned is that I'm wrong all the time. It may also be true that both approaches can be successful. I don't know. And then the third thing is that came to mind when you're talking is that you actually have a pretty, you have a lot of arrows in your quiver. And when you try to help people train their mind,

you're also working from a psychological basis. And so for you, to the extent that I've done some research on you, it sounds like your mental training, mind training actually goes beyond mindfulness. You're actually doing some cognitive work. And so to call that all training makes a lot more sense because it seems to me that you do a lot more than just teach people how to meditate. Yeah. Well, for me, it's like the base. Meditation. Yeah. When I say base, in my mind, I'm picturing like a foundation. So the base, if there was a pyramid that would work from just for images, is really a psychological framework, which is who are you? How do you understand how the world works and how you work?

Which I want to get that from you as well. Mindfulness or meditation can help accelerate and get clear with what that is. But that's always the base. And then there's the training, which sits right above it, which is mindfulness. And then above that would be, once you're aware of your thoughts, what do you do with them? Once you're aware of your emotions, what do you do with them? And I can hear some of the great teachers like Jon Kabat-Zinn or Sharon Salzberg. I can hear them saying, no, you don't do anything with them. You just watch them and observe them. And I say, I understand that from a spiritual framework,

from a spiritual, yeah, from a framework and from an enlightenment path. However, when you're in an environment where you have to respond now. And if you don't respond accurately, immediately, you could lose your life or somebody next to you could lose their life in the case of war and or in the case of elite sport, the consequences sometimes are unbearable to actually find success. Like now has to happen and it has to be swift and accurate and timely. And so just allowing it to pass through is wonderful. Feels really good. But the other part of like, no, no, no, it's got to get back to bang, my ideal mindset for this moment. I feel like there's skill development there that we need to help people with.

Yeah. I don't, you know, it's funny. It's possible that I don't – that I've never – that I'm misunderstanding what Sharon, John and other sort of Buddhist-based meditation teachers are saying. I don't think they're saying just observe the thoughts, that there's the pure, the raw awareness of like the contents of your consciousness, what's the time, which is, you know, how can I get myself into this capsule and jump out, you know, right and fall or how can I win an Olympic volleyball and all that stuff, right? It's so that you're getting out of your own way, which does allow actually for you to access the zone and not trip yourself up. Yeah, because it's all of the self judgment and the critique that really does. It's like the chain frustration is like the chain that comes off the wheel, the 10 speed, you got to put it back on, you got to grease it back up, make sure it's working again before you

can get moving again. Right. And so that's where mindfulness is another accelerant to becoming the very best version of yourselves is that it increases the awareness of all that critical noise inside. So I don't know where we're going on this, but I like it. Me too. I mean, think about it. If you've just made a mistake in a high intensity athletic performance, you can use that moment of like getting your shoe back on or getting the chain back on the bike to hop on the train of self-laceration of like, oh, I just screwed that up.

I'm going to screw it up again. I'm useless. My mother was right. I'm never going to amount to anything. I'm going to live on the streets in San Antonio, whatever. You just get on this train of association and it ends up in oblivion. You can do that. Quickly.

Quickly. Quickly. Or you can notice you're doing it and let go of it and focus more on getting your shit together so you can get back in the game. And that actually can be the difference between bad performance and a great performance. 1000%. And it happens so fast. Zero to 100 happens really quickly in the mind. And having awareness of, well, we call it train of thought, right? Literally, and on trains, there's stops. So if I can be aware of what train I'm on, because there's an A train, a B train, a C train, like there's lots of trains here. And if I first know what train I'm on and then know what stop, you know, if I need to get off this train, like

how to get off, like that's super simple conceptually, but you got to put in the work to recognize what trains facilitate the best version of you in said environment. And I'm not sure that there are many versions of ourselves that we have to manipulate to be in certain environments. What I mean by that is that my core, wherever, whatever my core is, can I be authentic in any environment, express myself authentically, and then adjust and pivot as need be. Not to be something fake, but there's things that we can't prepare for. And so preparing for being able to adjust is a whole different game. Yeah. And I think that that's what you're finding to be valuable as

well. Because if I get your craft correctly, there's lots of preparation. And I want to learn from you about your preparation. And I want to learn from you about your preparation. And I want to learn from you about your recovery. Because from a distance, it looks like you're flying a million miles an hour. Like up early, late at night, young family. Like it looks like you are just getting after it. So I want to understand your preparation and your recovery process. Because if I think about your craft, the forced function of choosing a word to best capture this particular moment in time, I think sometimes has to come off the top of your

head. But I don't know that. I don't know if everything's scripted for you or not. So I want to understand that part of it. But before we go there, can we also go back to, no, let me think about this with you. Maybe we should start here. I still need to, I want to understand like your family structure. Dad is uber successful. Like he's, he's, he's done some cool stuff in the, in the Ivy league university settings. Mom is super successful. Your wife is super successful. Uh, the little digging I did, it looks like your brother is successful. Like you've got – so I want to understand what that's like growing up. Sure. What those messages were, which ones worked, which ones didn't work.

What are the beliefs that you brought in from childhood into adulthood and how that maybe set you up in some kind of way to have a moment of crisis that ultimately changed your life for the better, it sounds like. Sure. Sure. We can talk about that. So I grew up in Boston, outside of Boston. My parents are both academic physicians. And, you know, I'm thinking a lot about Trump just because I just spent a bunch of time at the Republican National Convention. And one of the interesting things there is that we got to hear a lot from his kids. And, you know, it sounds to me like growing up with it, he sounds like he was a great dad, to be honest with you. And that he was very hard charging and, you know, building these big skyscrapers and bringing his kids to the work sites. And I think they really got this high power. They really got access to this high power guy guy, very successful, and wanted that for themselves.

And you can see that in their testimonials. This is the hard part about him for me is that he's got some crazy ideas to me. OK, I don't want to get too political because, like, I don't know what you know. And I know you know a lot about the political landscape. But I would like to talk to – learn from you. But I watch his kids. How can a human being create such wonderful children unless this is all a game and they've mastered the public image? Like there's something that's translating to people that are paying attention.

Like that must be a good dad. Yeah, whether you agree with him or not, whether you agree with him or not, and certainly even as a journalist who's supposed to stay objective, he's said some things that are, to me, objectionable. So whether you agree with him or not, like I don't like some of the things he said about women. I wasn't a huge fan of, you know, so let's just leave it there.

But that being said, these comments are coming from an apolitical place. Not some – the word Trump – just mentioning him may just throw us off on – it may just be like counterproductive because people either love him or hate him so strongly that – Is that what's happening? Oh, yeah. It's a love or hate. He's completely polarized. Yeah, OK.

So is Hillary Clinton by the way. Yeah. We're dealing with two of the most unpopular politicians since polls were started to be taken. So it's really it's a it's a brutal situation. So I don't mean to bring up Trump in a political way. I'm only just bringing up because it's top of mind. And and and I'm more thinking of it as a human in a human way. Yeah. We're talking about being a dad.

Yeah. So and listening to his kids, it just it struck me that they grew up with a successful dad and he really instilled this big drive in them and he must have been such a big personality and but my parents who are are very successful now that i think about it we're actually very low key and we like didn't have a ton of money academic physicians um don't make a lot of money your dad's not just an academic physician right like this yeah he became a big deal within he is really one of the leaders in radiation oncology right um so is he still at harvard yeah he's still at harvard and my mother actually among physicians actually my mother's the bigger name because she's uh and again this happened later in life so i was i think in college by the time this because she's uh and again this happened later in life

so i was i think in college by the time this happened she became one of the editors of a very popular section of the new england journal of medicine so i was at a wedding recently with my wife and a bunch of doctors and they were asking i mentioned my mother and they were like that's your mother and like so she's a really big deal in the medical community what was that like as a kid for you like i was saying they were super low key about it. You know, like I, we grew up in Newton, Massachusetts, which had a lot of wealthy people in it. A lot of my friends were really wealthy, but my parents, my dad drove a Plymouth Valiant and because academic medicine wasn't super remunerative and, and, and they worked a lot, but, uh, you know, so I was a latchkey kid and

we had a babysitter, you know, from when I was two. But it wasn't like it wasn't being like being raised by somebody like Donald Trump or let's just use a different example. Somebody who's less political, you know. So, you know, if the CEO of Starbucks was my dad or IBM or Microsoft or Steve Jobs was my dad, his success would have just been palpable in almost every aspect of my life. My parents, it wasn't like that. They are really driven. They are super successful. But it was not like I was raised with some massive desire to succeed based on theirs. Really, what they instilled in me was, you're going to work the rest of your life unless you

hit the lottery. You better love what you do. That actually bled through. And another thing that bled through was because we were raised, and I'm not saying this with any pride, but because I grew up in a town where there are a lot of rich kids, there are also a lot of low-income people, and Newton, Massachusetts is a very interesting town, especially when I was growing up, where you had these incredibly, like Sumner Redstone lives there.

There's incredibly wealthy neighborhoods. But then there were housing projects. And my friend groups, my friend group was actually completely mixed from a socioeconomic standpoint and also a racial and religious standpoint. So we had a really mixed group. And instilled in me this desire from when I was young to like have more than my parents did, which actually still I think – which was actually I think could be productive in some ways. It gave me some drive, but I don't think it's really the right kind of drive. Okay. So parents taught you about loving what you do. Yeah.

Okay. How did that bleed through to use your language? Was it a drum that they kept beating? No. Did they show it to you? It was shown. Yeah. Okay. How did that bleed through to use your language? Was it a drum that they kept beating? No. Did they show it to you? It was show, not tell. Okay. So they loved it.

Yes. They loved the pursuit of academic excellence and research. Yes. They did two things that were show, not tell. I'm sure they did a bunch of telling, but I don't remember any of it. Yeah. Because that tells you how useless it is as a parent to tell your kids stuff. The two, three big things that were show, not tell. And that tells you how useless it is as a parent to tell your kids stuff. The two, three big things that were show, not tell.

One was they loved their work in an uncontrived way. It was just very obvious to me. They were – over dinner when the kids weren't yelling, that's what they talked about. They were just obsessed with their work. They were talking with each other? Each other. Yeah, and they would bring us into the conversations too. But they're always talking about work.

And they really loved it. I didn't care, but I picked up through osmosis that they were super into it and that one should be. The other thing is that they were really into exercise. They were really into exercise. Not in a grim way. I've got this image in my mind of super high-powered intelligence in your home and passionate about what they do. They would talk about it all day long and they were the expert in most rooms that they were in and they come home and they talk about it more and then they work out a lot as well. Yes. And they also were really, and still are very much in love with each other. And so that was the third thing that was a show

not tell. So they, I never saw them fight And I don't think that was because they were hiding the fights. I think that they just get along really well. Okay. How did you not feel, what's the question here? How did you not feel marginalized by priority one, two, and three in reverse order? I don't know what the, actually, this is a good question. I think like, was it their love first? Was it the passion for their work second or their drive for exercise third? What, what, what was the order of magnitude for their passions? Dr. Well, I mean, I would say probably actually, I probably left out the fourth thing they did that would show not tell is that they're really good parents. And not in a hovering way because they weren't because they did, they were at work. We actually basically

had a third parent who was our nanny um who we loved and she recently passed away but we're my parents and i weren't wherever we were all in touch uh way later in life so um i never felt marginalized by what they were doing the only there were two i guess two ways in which maybe it had negative consequence i want to pause you will you lose your train of thought no no you got it okay would you say it and this is more like you teaching me right now. Would you say it if it was true that you felt marginalized by two people that were supposed to be there for you and love you and guide you as caretakers? Would you be able to say that? Because I would imagine, I don't know this, that you have a loving relationship with your parents now. And so would, could you?

That's an interesting hypothetical. So I think I could if, if I was aware of it, but there's a possibility that they, I felt marginalized and it was too painful to admit to myself and therefore I wouldn't say it, but I don't think I did. Um, you know, I, I, I'd be interested if my brother was in the room. I'm my, we had a younger brother with whom I'm actually incredibly close. I would say outside of my wife We had a younger brother with whom I'm actually incredibly close. I would say outside of my wife, he's the person to whom I'm the closest in the world. You know, we've talked a lot about growing up. I don't think either – I've never heard either of us voice the sentiment that we felt left out of their work because they were working so hard. Because they were home for dinner every night.

So, okay, that's it. Because I work a lot. working so hard because they were home for dinner every night. Because I, so, okay, that's it. Because I, I work a lot. I work hard and I wish I was there more often because I travel a fair bit for my work. And so this is, I'm trying to learn right now, like selfishly, like we talked about earlier, like I'm not trying to take hopefully, but I'm trying to learn how did your parents translate to you that you mattered when they were so passionate about work and exercise and whatnot, but obviously they were passionate about parenting too. Yeah. You know, and I have,

I have the same concerns that you're voicing personally in my own life as a parent now, because I travel a ton and, uh, you know, my parents did travel some, but not as much as I think you and I travel. Um, I, I don't know i just have no memory of feeling marginalized in any way um and plus as a kid like you get sick your parents and was like i remember they went away when we were in junior high or something like that they went away for a couple weeks and they brought some irish young irish woman in to stay with us that whole time and like it was awesome know, it was great. So I loved when they went away, too. I think but but then again, I have memories of my dad spending literally hours with us playing catch with tennis balls, not like baseball catch, just

playing catch. And we had this little system of, which is grammatically incorrect, actually, with SOHs and COHs. Should have had and could have had. And he did it because my dad's verbal skills aren't his best. So it was could of had instead of could have had. It drove my mother crazy. But we used to have SOHs and COHs. And these games, to this day, I'm a terrible athlete.

To this day, if you give me a tennis ball and put somebody several hundred yards away, if I'm not in my own head, I can hit them every time. Or like with my son, we play a lot of what we call hall ball, which is we live in an apartment building in New York City. And he'll look at me and say, Daddy, hall ball? And so we go into the hallway and kick the ball around it's like i can almost always hit him wherever he is with the ball because my dad we played so much catch or kicking of the ball that it's like like into in my in my fibers of my muscles so i guess what i'm saying is when they were there they were really there and so i remember family dinners and i remember hours of playing catch and i remember my my mother explaining the Latin and Greek derivations of words to me and things like that. And I never picked up the sense of, just back to the Trump thing, I never picked up the sense of, I never thought of my parents

as successful. But now if you like, if I look at their Wikipedia pages, yeah, they definitely are successful. But it just wasn't, it wasn't palpable in the home. I got the sense that they were super excited about it, but not that they were ballers. Okay. So what message did they give you other than love what you do, like have passion, love what you do? What were the other messages? Maybe not about life, but about you.

Well, they were really progressive um i remember them saying you know we went to key west when we were younger and there are a lot of gay people around and this is in the 80s so this is before um you know way before gay marriage and you know it was a harder time to be gay in america i remember them saying whoever you grow up and love we will will love, too. And so there's no problem. I just really remember them instilling that in us. Also, Boston, there was this problem called the problem was not a problem at all. Actually, it was a program that was really cool. It's called METCO.

I don't know what that stands for, but they used to bus kids from the inner city out to suburban schools. Most of these children were African-American. And my parents were really supportive of this program and so much so that they volunteered me to be a buddy with one of those kids. So I thought you were going to say, I grew up very young in Virginia. We had the same program. So I got on a bus. My parents were really progressive. Oh, so they sent you to a different school.

Yeah, in the city. No, that wasn't really an option. I don't think the program ran both ways. It ran both ways. I remember showing up going, okay, this is different now. Well, basically what they wanted to instill was there are lots of different people on the planet. It's all cool. You need to be cool with all of them.

So I remember that being. So passion, acceptance. Those are two big deals, right? Like nonjudgmental acceptance of others. Yeah. And of you. Like whatever you choose, we're going to love you. Yeah. So passion, acceptance, and love.

Sounds like. And passion, which is what the war card means. But here's where I think those went. Here's how things got negative negative because you asked me before we I started on this train before and we did then we digressed yeah one was I'm actually in terms of raw brainpower not as smart as my parents or my brother when did you realize that early my brother what would age well really I don't know the exact age but really young pre-kindergarten, my brother, my younger brother started to be able to read whole books.

I'm talking like Roots, Charlotte's Web. He was reading whole books. Pre-kindergarten. Yeah, really, really, really, really smart. And now he's a venture capitalist at Big Bad Bain Capital, which is actually – I mean it's not what people think. But anyway – or at least my brother is not like that. People – it draws to mind Mitt Romney for some people. Some people love him.

Some people don't. Anyway, so Matt was really, really smart. My parents are obviously really, really smart. But I wasn't academically. I was just not that good. And that created problems for me. I think that hurt my self-esteem even though my parents were very careful about it. But I went off the rails in high school and was a really – I was a bad kid.

Partying. Partying, not participating in school and – Was that to show that like if you screw up before you have the chance of being tested, then it's not as bad? Some of that and also just discouragement and also just a natural desire and yearning for adventure and fun too. So a whole cocktail of things. Do you still have that yearning for adventure?

A little bit, but less so. So my yearning for adventure for many years here at work was, you know, I covered wars. So I have a little bit of that. But now if there was a war, I don't think I'd go because I have a son and I didn't have a kid before. So that changed? Yeah, I think that's changed. Although, you know, I was in El Salvador last year doing a story about gangs. And that was pretty edgy. I i mean i didn't feel like i was

in danger but m13 yeah ms13 and stuff like that so i do like a little bit of adventure now and again but i won't i really will take great pains not to make sure that my son has a father um but yeah that definitely has been part of my idea risk taking has been part of my – risk-taking has been part of my – in my DNA. Skydiving? I've never done that. So I am also terrified of a lot of things. And so skydiving, I've never done. Although I would consider it.

Would you base jump? I have no – it doesn't draw – it doesn't call to me. It doesn't, okay. Skydiving and base jumping, things like extreme sports doesn't call to me. Maybe I would think about it. So there's a particular type of adrenaline you're looking or risk that you're looking for. Yeah, which is not – well, I don't know what it is. It sounds like being in the mix of heavy situations you love. Yeah.

But not necessarily putting yourself in a heavy situation where you have to rely on yourself. Yeah, I have no – I've enjoyed covering wars, but I have no desire to be a soldier. Yeah, that's what I'm thinking as rely on yourself. Yeah, I'll have no, I've enjoyed covering wars, but I have no desire to be a soldier. Yeah, that's the that's what I'm thinking as well. None. Yeah. Although I have respect for them. The other, I would say potential pitfall of having parents who as based on my prior description, sound like very, very close to perfect. And were um is that actually it created some romantic impediments for me i like because i saw their relationship as being so high functioning that i i just everybody i met in my 30s i was like well i'm not really going to get there with them plus my mother is really really smart and and so then i was it was hard

you know i wanted to be with somebody who was as smart as my mom. As it turns out, I actually met somebody who was as smart as my mother. And, but I, but I did have to get over the sort of like the, the relationships not going to be perfect all the time. And it actually takes a lot of work. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Cozy Earth. Over the years, I've learned that recovery doesn't just happen when we sleep. It starts with how we transition and wind down. And that's why I've built intentional routines into the way that I close my day. And Cozy Earth has become a new part of that.

Their bedding, it's incredibly soft, like next level soft. And what surprised me the most is how much it actually helps regulate temperature. I tend to run warm at night and these sheets have helped me sleep cooler and more consistently, which has made a meaningful difference in how I show up the next day for myself, my family, and our team here at Finding Mastery.

It's become part of my nightly routine. Throw on their lounge pants or pajamas, crawl into bed under their sheets, and my nervous system starts to settle. They also offer a 100-night sleep trial and a 10-year warranty on all of their bedding, which tells me, tells you, that they believe in the long-term value of what they're creating. If you're ready to upgrade your rest and turn your bed into a better recovery zone, use the code FINDINGMASTERY for 40% off at CozyEarth.com. That's a great discount for our community. Again, the code is Finding Mastery for 40% off at CozyEarth.com. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Caldera Lab. I believe that the way we do small things in life is how we do all things. And for me, that includes

how I take care of my body. I've been using Caldera Lab for years now. And what keeps me coming back, it's really simple. Their products are simple and they reflect the kind of intentional living that I want to build into every part of my day. And they make my morning routine really easy. They've got some great new products I think you'll be interested in. A shampoo, conditioner, and a hair serum. With Caldera Lab, it's not about adding more. It's about choosing better. And when your day demands clarity and energy and presence, the way you prepare for it matters. If you're looking for high-quality personal care products that elevate your routine without complicating it, I'd love for you to check them out. Head to calderalab.com slash finding mastery and use

the code finding mastery at checkout for 20% off your first order. That's calderalab, C-A-L-D-E-R-L-A-B.com slash finding mastery. Do you remember the key message about the intelligence piece and like your brother shining and your parents shining in some kind of ways where you didn't? And then I want to, I'm going to ask that same question about relationships, but did you, do you remember a key statement that you made to yourself? Uh, I remember episodes, so I don't know what the statements I made myself to where I remember that, um, there was some, I had a desire early, like I would say, in fifth, sixth grade, to go to one of the sort of elite private schools in Boston, I had this. And so I went and took

what's called the SSATs, the secondary school admission test. So it's like the version of the SATs. And my, my for kicks, my mother just had brought my brother along to take the test with me. And then we got, I remember her telling me when I got the results back that I didn't do well. And then when I pressed her, she was like, oh, yeah, your brother basically got a perfect score or something along those lines. And so I didn't get into the school and my brother didn't even care. He didn't want to go to school.

And so that was, oddly, it never created any tension between me and my brother um but it definitely it was in my head i was like i'm not that smart um what actually the message should have been i just don't test these tests very well or he's really smart i'm not not smart but he's yes or i don't do standardized testing that's a great statement yeah you know so then because then that gives you something that you can work on correct where's the challenge with intelligence it's kind of baked i also just did i didn't like a lot of the subjects in school i wasn't like now there's a lot of uh there's a lot of talk in the educational community about sort of bespoke approaches to the way kids learn but that wasn't really in vogue in the 80s not at least not in

the public schools to which which i attended and so i didn't i wasn't interested i hated math and i wasn't super interested in science and uh it's like you either did it the way it was being offered or you didn't do it and uh so what it took me it really wasn't until college that i got good at academics where i could pick my classes what so what are you good at what is your genius i was i don't have a genius but I was definitely – I got pretty good at – I majored in what would be called poli-sci. I think in my college it was called government. But it was really about reading and reading books and writing reports about them and having a point of view and making that argument in a cogent way. And I was pretty good at – I learned in high school one of the classes I liked was somebody taught us how to formulate an argument in writing an expository paper. And I just actually took to that.

And I liked reading. And then I liked English class. I liked French class, which was basically English class in another language, in that you were just reading books and writing about them in another language. So I liked that. I went to film school first semester at NYU, and I was really interested in the movie business. Turns out I was really bad at making movies, but I really loved the course on documentaries. Okay. So, all right. That all makes sense. Yeah. It makes a lot of sense. So what is it that you're good at? What is the thing that makes the most sense to you? Is it words? Is it stories? complex arguments and simplifying them and putting them into language that everybody can understand. So mindfulness is a bit of a buzz phrase, but I feel like the one thing that I was able to do

reasonably well in 10% Happier was to make mindfulness completely understandable, which is mindfulness. It has a lot of definitions, but what I've been able to boil it down to is it's the ability to know what's happening in your mind without getting carried away by it. And previously, Jon Kabat-Zinn, who I love, had an operating definition that sounded like it was created by a committee. No disrespect to Jon. He would probably be mad at me for saying this. But it was something like paying attention in a specific way in the present moment. I didn't get it. And the whole course of the five years that it took me to write that stupid book was really about me just understanding what it actually is and being able to say it very simply.

I love that. You've done that. So thank you. So I think there's something in there that maybe I'm good at. And also over time, I think I've learned how to tell a story in a way that keeps the person. But in order to do that, I actually need a lot of help. So I had a lot of help in writing the book, not a ghostwriter or anything like that. But I had a huge kitchen cabinet of people who were giving me feedback. So my editor at the publishing house, but my wife and my brother, uh, I have really close friends, uh, uh, who are incredibly smart. Uh, my mother, uh, and several of my colleagues here at work,

including my boss, who's now the head of all of ABC, this guy, Ben Sherwood, who really dug in. And so I had like a, some thing of a sense of like how to structure the story, but then I had a lot of people who came in and helped me are you are you really good at relationships sometimes yes sometimes no oh okay so because what you just say that i'm really good at it no no what that's curious to me because you just described like a lot of people being there to help you i'm good at i'm good you know i my mother says that in my depths of my adolescence and they went pretty low i was a really bad teenager cool the one area where i was open to working with her was that she would edit my papers and i can take edits so i actually am really good at taking

edits and over the course of the book taking the edits was devastating because it was my story. It wasn't like I was writing somebody else's story. Okay. It's really personal. And some people will come back to me and say, actually, Dan, you know, you're coming off as a little crazy in this book or you're coming off as really unlikable. So I had to really massage that. It took me a long time to get it right. So athletes, great athletes well let me let me

not say that um i've met lots of athletes that are really good at being coached so they take feedback they assimilate it they make sense of it and then they create an output that is closer to alignment of what the observer the expert observer is suggesting is a better tweak that's really interesting because it's not an egolessness that allows you to take the notes. It's actually like enlightened self-interest. You're like, you get it. You want to be so great that you're willing to take the ego hit of having somebody say,

actually, what you did sucks, makes you look stupid or whatever, or your form is way off or whatever. You have to be able to hear that, really hear it, and then act on the advice in order to be great. And many people are so terrified by a critique or an evaluation that they hesitate to put themselves in that position to be coached or critiqued, and then thereby they miss the opportunity for growth. That's a mistake.

That's a mistake. So how did you you're on the edge? You're being critiqued. You're vulnerable with your story. And how did you filter the coaching and the self-criticalness? How did you feel? Because if someone says you look crazy, you could internalize that and say, oh, my God, the world, this person I respect thinks I'm crazy. And go back to that story you shared earlier, like, oh, my God, I'm going this person I respect thinks I'm crazy. And go back to that story you shared earlier, like, oh my God, I'm going to live in San Antonio, like quickly, right?

Oh, no, I did do that. I mean, I did. Oh, you did? Yeah, I did. But then I recognized that, like, I had a conversation with Ben, this guy, Ben Sherwood, who's a really powerful person. And I don't mean that just because of his professional status. At that point, he was the head of ABC News. Now he's the head of all of ABC. Can we pause there? Yeah, sure. What is a powerful person?

You can explain. So he is powerful in his professional status. But he's also powerful in his personal presentation. He's tall. He's incredibly smart. One of the smartest homo sapiens I've ever encountered. He's really charismatic and um yeah when he walks into the room like it changes the energy of the room he's a very dynamic person um and i have a lot of

respect for him and and he's my boss and so when he was sitting there saying dan actually he read an early draft of the book and he was like look look at parts of the book. I think is this guy crazy? And so, yeah, I had a little, it was very embarrassing. Um, but I quickly went to first, I went to two places. One, Ben knows me. He knows I'm not crazy. He was more just talking about the text and two, um, I got to fix this. Yeah, there you go. So you made it about something that can be fixed. Yeah. As opposed to the essence of Dan. Yeah. Yeah. I know I'm not crazy. Yeah. Right. Do you? Yeah, I think I do. Yeah. I think I have the capacity to be crazy and to be blinded, just like we all do. So situationally, I can certainly, I can, I don't think, but I think

fundamentally, I don't think I'm crazy. Yeah. That was more of a joke that you bit on. That's very funny. Okay. So not that funny I guess. You are a shrink so I'm taking your question seriously. That was the first jokey question. But now I'll be on guard. Yeah.

You know what's funny? It's like I said earlier. Like I'm pretty intense and then I I consistently is the right word. I consistently forget that I have had a rich academic training with a license. I consistently forget that. And I don't insist, but people call me Mike. And so that's what my name is from a young age instead of Dr. Something. And so what's Gervais?

But, you know, so I so I really never put this lens in front of, I don't wear a coat, a white coat, so to speak. I don't look at through a medical model. But I thank you for reminding me that I don't see myself that way, but I think others do. Because I see myself as just this guy trying to figure it out. And I've been in some really cool situations and around some really cool people that have incredible insight and I'm trying to sort it out myself. And so diagnostic abilities is not something I'm interested in. Like I'm never trying to sort out a diagnosis of somebody. Why not? Yeah. I think that that's harmful. It's like, let me, what bucket can I put you in?

And so to do that, I need to understand all the weaknesses that you have. And then I'm going to find the right bucket of weaknesses to drop you into. And then from that, this is medical models, right? From that, we'll develop a set of strategies that can be research based to get you out of the hole. And so the way that I look at the world and human beings is that we're amazing. We're not fragile. We are incredibly rugged and we all have incredible strengths. If we can know what those strengths are, index on those strengths, even when things are difficult right now, there's an incredible opportunity for many. And so that's the way I just tend to see people. And I never, I never, you just triggered something to me to talk about. I never talk about that, but that's really how I

see people. Maybe it's because I'm not good at diagnoses. But they just never really made sense to me. And they're not useful as a way of, you know, once you put somebody in a bucket, there are a bunch of treatment options, right? Isn't that useful? That's where good science comes into play. There's also great strategies for people that have a particular set of clusters of characteristics or whatever, and I'm speaking like a medical person, that they don't become bound or binded by that disorder. And so this is a perfect kind of leap for you right now, I think, for us about panic attacks and panic disorder and anxiety disorder is that there is an incredible gift to being around people that also are struggling with that because it's like, oh, I'm not alone.

I'm not crazy. I don't know if you found that to be a value to you. I think you did. Yeah. And then, however, that's a moment in time that you struggled. It was difficult and outrageously painful. However, that cannot define us. And so that's the model that I work from. Like, what are all the things that are asset based as opposed to liability based? Yeah. So all that being said, I don't

want to cloud anything about, um, can we use this as to go to the first few moments before your panic attack? Yeah. So, um, I'll set the stage so you don't have to tell the story again or what at least i know you're on air and you're breathing heavy feels like you're gonna die your heart's pounding you're probably sweating and there's a red light on and a camera's looking at you and you're aware that there's five million people watching what you have to say close to right yeah oh yeah that's exactly right okay now go to the moment when you realized that this thing is turning on that the panic was turning on yeah that's right uh it was so fast um and then what happens is remember we were talking before about uh this mental train of association that we hop on of that ends up on sleeping on you know living

in homeless in san antonio or whatever i said so that's anxiety right i mean you're you're the phd yeah um right phd right yes general anxiety is just a constant chronic worry that things could go wrong right okay so panic is that on steroids that's right and so much so that it triggers fight or flight. So you're just, your brain is just drenched with adrenaline. And all of these physical systems kick in, you know, like you're, you're breathing fast, your heart is racing, palms are sweating, mouth dries up, because your body's preparing for an emergency and even though it's an inappropriate moment for that kind of preparation and um what then what

happens is the cycle of thinking around oh my god things are spiraling out of control get your shit together blah blah blah that gets worse because it's being triggered by the physiological inputs. And then that triggers the physiological, physiological stuff to get worse. And so you get you're getting into the cycle between your body rebelling against you, your mind rebelling against you and that feeding one feeding the other. And then and then you just then for me, I had to quit. i just had to bail out of them i was this was i was anchoring the news updates on good morning america this is back in 2004 and so i was a few seconds into reading my stories the stories that i was supposed to read off of the teleprompter and i just it got so bad i just i just tossed it back to the other anchors

and and if they that was the flight fight flight freeze or submissiveness those are you have you come familiar with those four no just fight or flight but i just know fight or flight freeze and submission are also part of the the equation that happens for us as humans and submissiveness happens um oftentimes in public settings where we talk a big game in the hallway about we're gonna do this that and the other one we get the chance and then all of a sudden we're have the chance to our boss or whoever that might be and all all of a sudden, you know, we kind of roll over just a little bit like, no, okay. Now I, yeah, now I understand you, but you didn't, you weren't authentically you.

Right. So your response was flee. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. But I want to go right into the moments and maybe you can't remember them. So I don't want to try to create something that's not true, but the moment right before when, what, okay, maybe this is the way I can help. Is that what came first? Was it the thought? Was it the heart thumping? Was it the sweat? Was it the cotton mouth?

I don't know. OK. What I do know is – it's hard for me to – because it was so long ago and even my writing about it was long after the fact I do have this memory of just the thing I think I said this in the books just like rolling up over the back of my head and down the front of my face like this just a just wave I mean that's really what it felt like a wave of this heaviness and fear rolling over me and that this blanket being thrown over my head of dread and fear, panic. I remember that feeling. And I don't know if there was thinking before it or if that just happened and then the thinking started. Okay, so it was new. It caught you by

surprise. Well, I had felt minor versions of it before, but this one was irresistible. So I had, there was a moment I remember being on the roof of a hotel in Islamabad, Pakistan, right at the beginning of the Afghan war. And we were we were doing what a really cool statement that is. Seriously, right? I mean, that's a really cool statement. I guess it makes me sound much more badass than I actually am. But I was on this roof of this hotel and the bombing campaign had just started in Afghanistan. It was big news. And Peter Jennings was doing a, you know, was anchoring it live and they came to me and I, I just kind of didn't do a good job because I was panicky. And then they came back to me again and later. That panicky feels like, let's call it nervous. That nervousness is contextually appropriate. Yes. Right. Yes. Okay. But you could be a little bit too anxious for that moment and not being able to perform well, but that moment makes sense. Right. But I guess what I'm saying is I had some familiarity

with the feeling. So it wasn't when the anxiety and panic, when the panic rolled over me, I knew what it was. So it wasn't totally new was it physical or or um it's physical it was mental physical yeah like you like when i watched it your heart like your chest was pounding and your breathing was short okay and it wasn't predominantly mental like i gotta get out oh my god that kicked in after yeah what i was like what am i gonna do i'm i'm i'm but my body's in revolt you know it's so off you know it's like no one ever dies from a panic attack, but that's exactly what it looks and feels like. Yeah, it's terrible. It's totally terrible.

And also, once you have a panic attack, your body gets really good at panic attacks. And your mind becomes terrified about what's happening again. So I actually had a moment yesterday when I was flying back from Cleveland from the Republican National Convention. So one of my jobs here at ABC News is I anchor Nightline. So I had done Nightline on Thursday night. We finished at like one one thirty. My flight was at six thirty in the morning. I knew I had to leave the hotel at four thirty.

So I just didn't go to bed. I stayed up with my colleagues and then I meditated and worked in my room a little red in my room and then it was time to go so um i got on this little plane and uh sitting next to a cop randomly sitting next to a colleague uh who i didn't know was also going to be on the flight and when they closed the door i had a moment of like oh my god i'm feeling claustrophobic and because i hadn't slept uh it was more powerful than it usually was and i was like down i was like oh no is this gonna blossom into something and actually um it didn't um but panic is always with me how it is i think the potential for panic is always with me you you can change that statement

i'd love to change that yeah you can both so then change it but you can change that you can and you can change that. And you can change that framework because it is possible to extinguish fear. Yeah. And extinguish fear from close places or whatever it is. I don't know what your triggers are, but it is possible to do that work. Yeah. It is possible to do that. And I also, so we could talk about that some other time, maybe, unless you want to talk about now. But the thought that I'm trying to understand and sort out for you is like what did you do with yourself when it was coming? And it sounds like we'll use this story from last night or yesterday. What did you do when the plane door closed and you said, oh, here it is?

How did you work your way through that? I think this is actually a place where meditation helped. Yeah. Okay. Because I was aware, really aware i i talk about mindfulness as kind of like being an inner meteorologist like where you can see the storm before it hits landfall makes landfall and so i saw it coming and i was just like um so i think i dealt with it in two ways on a cognitive level i was like, you are – you didn't sleep last night, so you're more prone to this.

But you're totally fine. And if you need to, just turn like a video on in your phone and get lost in the story. So you had some tools. I had a little – what the Buddhists call propunca, which is this – was the little movie making that we do of like – I pictured myself having a panic attack and like it being really embarrassing in front of this colleague. And I pictured that real quick, really quick. Lots of things happened really quickly. But then I knew that I was doing that. So I didn't get as sucked up in that story.

There you go. So I saw that that was happening. And also I was telling myself cognitively, you have tools. Like if you just watch a video on your phone, like you will distract yourself probably. And then I actually just – I was talking to this woman who I really enjoy talking to, this colleague of mine. And then we stopped talking and I just actually meditated for a while, which meditation in a panic situation can be good or can be bad. Because sometimes actually, if you're just keying in on the panic, because the whole thing of mindfulness is just leaning into whatever's most predominant. You lean into the panic.

I found that it can actually just exacerbate the panic. That's what I was trying to articulate earlier, which is like, it's great for baseline of awareness and acceptance and practice at refocusing and practice it at, at, um, having a high regard nonjudgmentally. It's great at all that, but where do you take your mind when you need to take it somewhere right now? Well, so I ha I got an interesting piece of advice on this front recently. Um, uh, there's a great Tibetan master. Uh, he's young. He's actually, well, you're what? Mid forties.s? Yeah. So I'm 45. He's I think younger than I.

He's like 43. Maybe he's our age. I guess it's a little crazy for us to think of ourselves as young. But for a Tibetan master, he's very young. His name is Mingyur Rinpoche and he was on my podcast recently and he suffered from panic attacks as a kid. And what he used to do, he actually believes he's cured himself of panic attack through meditation. Um, what he used to do is actually call up anger. Okay. I got, I got something for you here.

He would call up anger and he found that that actually would get him out of panic. Yeah. So, okay. If you think about going into a competitive scenario for just a moment or performance-based scenario for a moment, you can go in poised, fluid, smooth, right? Like that being in the pocket, if you will, right? Or you could go in scared or you could go in angry, right? And you can choose now, right?

Once you're really aware, you can choose. So if you're not smooth, if you haven't done the mental work to know how to find the best version of yourself right now when there's millions of people paying attention and maybe you're heavyweight boxing and another grown man or woman is trying to beat you up um and you find yourself a little uh your mind's run wild and you're focusing more on what could go wrong that's the scared index you can flip it and you can call up a completely toggled different emotion, which is anger. Mother, I'm going to, you know, and you can call that piece up and at least you're not scared. Right. You might be tight. You might become exhausted a little bit earlier, but at least you're not going in for freeze or flee. Right. So fight, flight, free or submission.

At least you're not doing those three that will certainly get you hurt. Yeah. I mean, I, I, it's really interesting. And I, so I was prepared for that. If I was going to need to call up anger, um, I was thinking about that. Where would you have taken the anger? I don't, uh, not your colleague, not at my colleague. No, I would have just kept it inside. I think what would I have drawn upon for anger? I don't know. Probably I can always go to professional slights of some sort. Yeah, yeah, good. So and then the idea is not to do self anger. Like I'm such a no, no, no, I would have definitely gone to some self righteous external source. Self righteous. That fits for you. Okay, so then right after your panic attack, what were those moments right after? That I do remember. So the whole room, the whole studio.

Did they know? Well, they knew something was wrong because I quit in the middle. And so I had producers in my ear, you know, because I wore earpieces so that people in the control room could talk to you. And then stagehands and other people ran over to me and actually charlie gibson one of the anchors the main anchors of the show ran physically ran across the room to where i was and everybody was like are you okay heart attack and so then i had a new fear which was i can't let them know how to panic attack yeah there you go so i lied heart attack would you know i said i don't know I said, I don't know. Okay. I said, I don't know. And interestingly, nobody to my face and nobody even came back to me later to say, yeah, we suspect you have panic

attack. Because if you look at the video and I hear this a lot because the video is on YouTube. So people look at it a lot or I show it. And when I go give speeches, it doesn't look that bad. I mean, clearly I'm having, I'm struggling. And, um, and if you know that I'm, there were seven more stories or whatever I was supposed to read, then you definitely know there's a problem. What was the last line you said? Oh, yeah. Yeah, cancer. I was talking about cancer. I was talking – I don't know what I was supposed to say but what I ended up saying was that there was some study that showed that it was good for cancer production which obviously makes no sense when

i watched it i watched it for preparation for this and it was like there's no more news back to you or whatever peace i was done yeah so so i i you know on some levels like it didn't get that out of control um but it would have i mean it had had if i had been if you ever seen the movie broadcast news there's this famous movie where the anchor breaks out into this like flop sweat because he's a solo anchor in that moment. He has nowhere to go. If I had nowhere to go, I would have literally would have had to rip the mic off and run away. That's what that's what it was. That's where it was heading. Inextricably, I would not have been able to get. So you would have you would have ran. You would have moved. You wouldn't have stayed and sweat. I actually, yes, that's right. No way. I would, I would, I would have run. I would, I would didn't have the wherewithal in that moment to, to,

to slow the train down. Now there are reasons for that, that, you know, but your listeners may not. The reasons were that I had weakened my system because I was doing drugs, specifically cocaine, which was the consequence of being depressed depressed which was the consequence of spending a lot of time in war zones and getting addicted to the adrenaline and then coming home and doing stupid shit to like make up for that do you think you were on an adrenal burnout yes you were totally adrenally drained and you're using medication drugs yeah to pump up yes and then you had this weird fluctuation that could change my brain chemistry yeah and and i had a pre-existing penchant for stage fright

nerves anxiety on the air okay then that just oh all that combined okay so then go back with stitch for for for me like the thoughts that led you to have that predisposition and you might say mike it was just genetic like i just kind of came into the world a bit anxious. Like my cup was full. Like what was the stitch from childhood to panic or to anxiety or anxiousness? I'm half Jewish. We have a long history of anxiety. We're worriers.

My dad's a real worrier. So you learned it or genetically kind of part of it okay yeah so you came into the world just a bit anxious and then you heard all the worry that all the things that could go wrong from parents yeah and then um you're in a public place where you're evaluated and judged yeah a lot i was a sensitive child too i was afraid of bees and i was i a period where – you may know this as a psychologist, right? There was a really landmark study in the 80s of kids who were freaked out about nuclear war. I was one of the subjects of that study. No kidding. Because I was really worried about nuclear war. And so I was just a nervous kid. Interestingly enough, I thought I was like, to me, it was like more operatic.

You know, I thought like I was somehow special. And I remember years later in college, I was having dinner with the woman who I mentioned before, who was my third parent, my nanny. Her name was Juanita. I was having dinner with Juanita and my college girlfriend. And my girlfriend asked her, what was Dan like as a kid? And I thought she was going to say thoughtful, sensitive. She was like, oh, yeah, he was a nervous kid. And that's what it was.

That's all it was. I wove this big yarn about like I was some special kid. I was just nervous. So I've always been like a little bit of a nervous guy, I guess. So then it all happened right on camera. And what you see on camera is that I have a weird combination of being a nervous guy but like a really good poker face. And so – and I have training as a news anchor. So I have this – and I'm a nervous guy but also kind of a cocky guy too.

So it's like all this – it's a weird cocktail. And so what you see on camera is, yes, I'm definitely struggling. But I hold myself together pretty well for somebody who's having a panic attack, which makes the story a little hard to communicate to people because they, some people see, look, anybody who's ever had a panic attack knows what they're looking at when they watch it. You're in it. But a lot of people see it and say, ah, it wasn't that bad. I was expecting Albert Brooks in broadcast news and I'm not getting that. Got it. Okay. So if you were, if you started sweating and there was nowhere to go,

you were still left, that would have been a great strategy for you. It would have ended my career. It would have been awkward on the air because what would they have done? But it would have been the thing I did. You know, I've spent time with people that have panic attacks. They're best in the world at what they do. That's an interesting thought, right? Best in the world at what they do.

And you and I are talking. You're one of the best in the world at what you do. I don't know if there's rankings. I'm looking at some of the trophies you have here. These look pretty impressive. What are those? There are people who are a lot better than me. But what are those? Those are Emmys. Yes. There's just a couple of them hanging out in your office. But so-

It's really, what do you do with Emmys? Like, what do you do? Because I know I'm not going to put them in my house, right? Because that's, I can't do that. But do you put them in your office? Like, so just in my own defense, they're on a low shelf on the side of the room. So they're not like prominently placed. But, or do I like give them to my mom? I don't know what the thing to do is. Yeah, that's a cool thought. I mean, I can appreciate, they're not even like situated like honorably, you know, they're

like just kind of haphazardly thrown in the shell. They are. But the thing is, I don't want to be i don't want to be um dishonest about this like i really care about winning emmys i do do you yes in fact i you want more just the other day what does winning an emmy do for you i let's talk about this because i don't know if this is gonna be useful at all to your listeners or to you as a person but it's useful for me because just this week, the Emmy nominations came out and I got shut out. And I had this, I didn't do much last year. These are the nominations for 2015. So 2015 wasn't like the best year journalistically for me, but I did do several reports on the European migration crisis that I thought were really good

personally. And I usually don't think what I do is very good. But there were a couple reports I did that I thought were special. And the hierarchy here at ABC News was really excited about it. And we thought these were going to win. And I got shot out of everything. Everything. We didn't get any nominations, no nothing. And I took it really hard. And then I was like, why am I taking this so hard? Like, shouldn't there just be the joy in doing what everybody agreed was a really good job? Or maybe it wasn't that good of a job and we showed it to other people and they actually didn't think it was that good? Or like, what was it? Why do I care about these stupid trophies?

Why? I don't know, but I do. Yeah, no. That's a statement, but I'm wondering if there's a question like attached to it or – No, I just – like this internal dialogue I've been having with myself about going – turning from the real – just when I learned – when I saw the nominations, I didn't get anything. I was really disappointed. And then turning from that to like getting interested in like what and why? Why?

I think it's that balance between ambition and presence and enlightenment. Like how do these things work together? Yeah. Well, that is my life's question. Yeah. Me too. Right? And I'll tell you a quick little story as an analogy.

Analogy? No. As analogous. Analogous. A parallel story is that early on in my professional career, I was invited to a group where a bunch of colleagues or a bunch of colleagues or a bunch of gurus in the field got together and they brought on 10 or so of the young guns coming up.

And it was like a passing of the torch. And I was included in that. And it was like, wow. It was just an unbelievable sponge. Well, they did it again the second year that I was not included. And I was pissed. And I was hurt. Right underneath of it, I was not included. And I was pissed and I was hurt right underneath of it. I was hurt. I was left out of what I told. And I told everybody it was the most transformational weekend professional I've ever had. And so what was it? Did I say something stupid? Probably.

Was I not up to snuff? I don't think that was it, but I needed to figure out like what, what happened. It lit a fire, a really cool fire, but that fire can also burn. And so I'm thinking about ambition for you and for me maybe in the same kind of parallel, like not being included in the dance that you were once included in sucks. Yeah, it does. It really sucks. So I think it's more problematic to say, I think for me, at least you made something really important. You said, should I just care?

And that should word stop shooting on yourself as the old psychology, bad joke, you know, cause it smells, but that word should is, is so problematic. You know, shouldn't I just love something for the sake of loving it and do that more often? Okay. That's one thing that you talk about. And the other filter that you're working through is, is my, does my work, is it good? Are we, are we naive? I think that that's a tougher one, right? Because yes, you loved it when you're in it. And then it got,

only got complicated when you didn't get asked to dance. Yeah. And why, why do these, what is it about the awards that, you that – why do I need the gold star? Well, we both know why intellectually because it feels really good to be externally honored. But why can't I just be happy that I've already gotten it? That would be the enlightened one. That's hedonic adaptation. Yeah, because you already have two. Like how many people – is that two?

How many people don't have – or how many people would like to have two? Yeah. Loads. Yeah, the pre – before I had two, I would have loved to have had two and now it's not enough yeah that's exactly right yeah that's suffering that is what the buddha describes as suffering yeah right because this is temporary pleasure that there's a great high once you get it yeah and then so here's the here's part of the challenge i don't know what you want to do with this but every time you look over at these and you're like that's pretty cool you're feeding something about that i'm pointing to the statue being cool and and valid revalidating that you

matter as opposed to putting them in a shelf somewhere or giving them away or selling them or i don't know what you do with them give them to mom or whatever actually what it's interesting when i look at them to the extent that i do, I don't really look at them that much. I think it would be cool to have more. And I don't think that's like the right way to think about it. I'm aware that I'm thinking that and that like that may be problematic. But it's a little bit like, you know, I'm sure the way a developer looks at the skyline, like, you know, I should have more buildings out there. Yeah. And most Olympians I spend time with are elite athletes in any field. They do want more. And part of it is that they want to stay in the game longer. And that's how

you, so if you don't win, you don't get to stay in the game. Right. If, if you're not good at this, I don't know the, you lose your job, you lose your contract, you go somewhere else. Right. And you don't get to do the thing that you love doing. So that's part of it. Like you need it to continue. But the trap is that if I don't get it, I'm not okay. Right. So I don't think I felt, I didn't, it didn't throw me into a cycle of like, terrible despondency. I think there's a real difference. Maturation and meditation have been very useful in moments like this. So one, I'm 45, so I'm not, I'm not a kid anymore. And like, so it didn't make me, you know, kick the dog metaphorically. I didn't like, you know, I was actually on the road. So I was, I was working all day and i what i don't think it made me mean

to my colleagues or anything like that because i was aware and i actually was discussing with my colleagues you know why am i so bummed about this and so we became sort of an interesting source of discussion and then the other thing i did was um the producer with whom i did those stories we emailed a little commiserated a little bit and and then we decided we're going to go after it this year. Yeah, so if you're doing some kind of work. Yeah, we're like, well, let's find, we're going to figure it out. We're going to do something amazing this year.

Yeah, and then so balancing that fire. So all that drive and motivation is really important to do amazing things, as mom taught you and dad taught you early. And then balancing that, because you can sell your soul, you can sell your mindfulness, you can sell your peace of mind to do the big story. But then you're not loving the process of getting there. You're

agitated while you're there, but it just happens to be that you got the break or whatever. I'm making something up kind of. But so like having all that fire and fuel and having just a little bit more fire and fuel for the internal love of doing what you do. So you can be externally and internally motivated. And if the internal is just a little bit higher, it tends to be supportive for the long play. You know, you're getting at something also that I think about a lot and I don't have an answer. It's like, so I think you're actually not getting at it. You're talking about it fully, which is motivation. And motivation is a tricky thing because, you know and and i'm in the buddhist circles in which i move we talk about meditation excuse me motivation a lot uh and there's a real

emphasis sort of purity of motivation of you know doing this for the well-being of all sentient beings and things like that and i like actually i think that to the extent that i can align myself with doing things for other people actually it actually does really feel good. I have a chapter in my book called The Self-Interested Case for Not Being a Dick. So like I actually think there's real – it feels good to be doing things for other people. So I don't – even for a selfish guy. But also it's just not true that my motivation is all altruistic. It's just not true. There is – parts of my motivation are like financial and ego-based and I also think it's very useful to be aware of the truth of that. But what is the right mix? And I know the first step is just being honest about what your motivations are. But I don't know where you want to get to and how all of that mixes with enlightenment, whatever that means.

Yeah, I think that that is the modern day successful challenge, right? Is having a life that matters, that's authentically you, has deep, rich meaning, at the same time being honest in your pursuit of wanting to have, well, they're all false, if you will, safety mechanisms in place beyond food and shelter. You know, like you're fine. You could hang it up now and live in an apartment, you know, a one-bedroom apartment and your kid lives, you know, or sleeps in the living room. Like you guys would be fine. That's not comfortable.

That's not ideal. But you could probably go that path. You know, I think about it all the time that because my mind always goes to worst case scenarios is like, yeah, I could get fired. We can move to a less expensive place and be fine. Yeah. I find that really comforting. I do too. I'll tell you a quick story. My wife, um, you know, it was when I was starting to find some real momentum in business and, um, and it was just the beginnings. And my wife, my wife and our job, we've been married for a long time and we were driving past, uh, the apartment complex. We kind of grew up in, not grew up in, but, um, we're first married. And, and she goes, you know what? You can go right back there. And it was like $750 a month or something outrageous. And she goes,

go right back there and just be fine. That thought created so much space for me to take risk. Just that thought, like I can, I can go for it because the safety net with the person that I'm, I'm trying to love and support and do all these wonderful things and challenge to be better together. We can go right back to a awful little apartment and it's just fine. Well, she just gave you, it's just fine well she just gave you a i love your wife because she just gave you a huge gift on a couple of levels one gave you the space to take the risk because yes you know from a really basic level that you can survive but also she's saying to you our marriage will survive and i don't my love for you is not contingent upon you

achieving these the success and if it were if you suspected it on any level, it can pollute your whole drive I think. Yeah, I think 100% because then that external reward or external motivation and reward becomes more important than the internal. And that's where we find ourselves i think in traps you know so i've been thinking about this is the the first big new venture i've been able to get engaged in since really having a robust mindfulness practice in my life or meditation practice in my life is um is i started this this app company that we're talking about before we started recording that teach you it's also called 10 happier just because i'm if if nothing else i'm consistent about branding uh and and we teach people how to meditate through an app and actually what i have been the thing about this endeavor about which i am most proud is that i'm enjoying the ride. I had a really useful conversation with my aforementioned brother, who is a venture capitalist, who at the beginning, as we were

founding the company, took me aside and was like, Dan, 95% of startups fail. And so I put in a bunch of money, money I could afford to lose. And instead of approaching the thing with a closed fist, I'm approaching it with an open fist. Like, okay, we're probably going to fail. But whoever uses this app will benefit from it. And I'm going to learn a ton doing it. And I love the people I'm doing it with. And, you know, the CEO is this really great young guy. And we go to all these meetings and stuff.

And I always say to him, I'm more saying it to myself than I'm saying it to him because I don't think he has a problem with this. I'm like, this is just enjoyable. So who knows what's going to happen? I think we can probably bet that we're not going to get rich off of this. It's a safe bet. But this is actually really cool. Like we just went to meetings at Disney or we have all these great meetings of people who want to like get involved and, and let's just enjoy that. Or we're working with some amazing meditation teacher and teaching

people how to meditate or, or just yesterday I was Skyping there. The, the, my two co-founders are based in Boston and we had an hour and a half Skype conversation. It was just total run of the mill stuff. We were just dealing with stuff. Afterwards, I was just like, I really like those guys. And that was a great conversation. And we were just dealing with all these interesting issues. And I had a lot of feelings during the course of it. Like, we have big problems in the company, challenges that we're working on, redesigning the user experience of the app, figuring out big sort of existential questions for us. And usually, I get really clenched up about this stuff. And I'm doing a much better job with this new venture of, I think my motivations are kind of in the

right place. And it's making the whole thing much easier. Yeah. So that there goes back to the thought that you're talking about earlier is that the in your groups talking about pure motivations, right, like being pure and having that be consistent in your life. That's the path of wisdom and wisdom period. And what I've found is that the wise men and women in my life, they don't need mental training. Their framework is just so solid and it's really consistent. And every time they're challenged with something, it's like, or what I think that there would be a challenge for them. They make it really it's like just love just love love the person love the process yeah it's going to be hard at times and you know just keep loving it's like and they can it's consistent

like that message and so it feels like what you've done has had that pure motivation like okay so it's not economic it's maybe hopefully right that be good too, but let's just enjoy the process. Yeah. Yeah. And there you go. So then you, you know, we call it sphincter tightening, not fist clenching. Sphincter tightening is, is a problem, but yeah, there you go. So where can people find out more about it? Oh, just right now we're only available on the, on Apple. Oh, actually we're on iTunes, but I mean, sorry, the app app store on Apple. But but if you have an android phone i hear a lot of people tweet me all the time and say why don't you have an android version if you go to 10 happier.com there is a web enabled you know you can use this on the web and on your on your android phone it's a little bit more of a pain in the butt

we will be doing an android version soon but we're a total startup we just raised a round of venture capital money and we're just building the. We just raised a round of venture capital money and we're just building the thing. And I don't think we want to build an Android version until we've perfected the Apple version. Yeah, there you go. Because it would just be, it would be a lot of time and expense.

So we're just trying to be wise stewards of capital. But I've also really enjoyed just learning about business. I don't know anything about business. You know, my whole life I've been an employee. I've never been a manager. I'm actually not a manager now. I've successfully structured my whole life so that nobody reports to me. Nobody. I have no desire to be a manager. But, you know, in this company, while I'm not the CEO and I'm not managing the staff, I definitely have a role in, you know, making sure that the morale is good. And I guess that's

true on the shows that I work on too. I work on Nightline. I'm one of the anchors of Nightline and also Weekend Good Morning America. So I feel like I set a tone in the room. But in terms of like knowing something about business, ROI, all these UX, user experience, UI, user interface, all these like little... Capital runway. Oh, I don't even know what that means. It's churn rate I know a lot about.

And so I'm having to learn about all this stuff and it's really, really interesting. Really interesting. And not feeling like I'm going to be destitute and homeless and embarrassed if it fails. Like, oh, that's fine. I'm okay with failure. You have an incredible honesty about your approach to life. Hey, I did this. I did this. I'm not excited about them, but this is part of my journey. These are the things that have been painful and awkward and difficult.

And this is me, right? The same way. It's like I'm taking a shot at this. It's hard. It's difficult. It's wonderful. All of those things. And we'll see how it goes. Hopefully it does some good. Right. And it doesn't mean it can't make money, at least for me. Yeah, maybe it will.

Yeah, you can have both. Yeah, absolutely. The honesty, by the way, is not actually some sign of moral purity. It's actually just that being honest with yourself about your own bullshit is easier. Yeah, it is. It's easier, much more comfortable because hiding and lying to yourself is actually really painful and a pain in the ass and you have to – you're disingenuous in your public presentation as a consequence. It's much easier and as it turns out, nobody gives a shit about your shit. This is what I was saying before about my lesson from the book.

Nobody cares about my stuff. Like I had a boss before – two bosses ago. This guy David Weston who's – he used to be the head of ABC News. He's now an anchor on Bloomberg. He had this expression that when you're going through something major and public and embarrassing, he had a few crises that he weathered as – he said it's like being seasick. For you, it feels like the world is ending. When you're seasick, it's horrible. You think you're going to die. But for everybody else, it's like mild world is ending. When you're seasick, it's horrible. You think you're going to die.

But for everybody else, it's like mildly entertaining. And that is totally true. That's so good. It's totally – so for me to get and talk about – a lot of people come to me and say, you know, thank you for being so honest. And I'm always surprised. I always – I mean I get why they're saying it. But to me, it's just the easiest thing to do. And I've learned over time that it's the easiest stance externally and internally. And that it's not going to kill you because people don't give a shit about you.

I am not that interesting. Holding that idea that you matter and in the grand scheme of things, it's a blip in the radar. Those two concepts have been game changers for me. Trying to do that at least. Sometimes what usually happens is that I over index on the thought that I matter and that's where it gets sideways. I do that too. And then the worst moments for me are always when I'm taking myself too serious. I said this earlier. It's, it's, it's always the worst. Okay. So I want to honor our time. Thank you for all this, but I'd love for you to hit me with a couple kind of quick, but heavy thoughts heavy thoughts because I'm asking everybody these thoughts and I want to organize.

I'm trying to organize a theory on mastery and those that are on the path that are deeply invested in multiple parts of their life. So if you could just kind of quick hit and you can take as long or short as you want. But where do we start with you? Street smarts or analytical? Street smarts. That's a funny grin. Slow-paced environment or do you prefer a fast-paced environment? Fast-paced.

Rules or risk-taking? Both, interestingly. Yeah. I mean, I think we work well with structure. I see that with my kid, and I know that that was true for me as a kid. So I like rules, but then I also like to take risks. I feel like with artists, often you see modern artists who do crazy stuff are classically trained. Yeah.

Oh, there's always a base. Yeah. Yeah. It won't hold up against the ages if there's not some base. Yes. So you appreciate rules, but you take risks. Yes. Is that the way it goes for you and if you had if you were the first person you had the chance to be

the first person to go to mars with a 50 success rate of coming back or chance of coming back would you go before i had a wife and kid i might yes yeah that's the same way i answered it and then the person that i was discussing those said so what message are you giving your son if you don't go because i said before i was like yeah oh yeah i'm going yeah yeah and then i said wow wait a minute the message i'm giving my son is i love him and i think that that uh he deserves to have a father i benefited from having a dad and i would like him to have a dad even though i'm flawed so what if we that's beautiful what if we drill one more and i say the first person to go could change the world because you're designed to be able to maybe save the world.

Okay. Well, if that was true, I'd probably go. You'd probably go. Yeah. If it was more just like a vanity project or a curiosity thing, but if the future of humanity rested on it and I was uniquely – this is never going to happen. But if I was uniquely somehow qualified or situated to make a difference, yes. Got it. Okay.

All right. Intellectually competitive or physically competitive? You met me, so I'm like 5'7", maybe, and very scrawny, except for with too much belly fat. So it's like the worst combo of all things. So I'm definitely not physically competitive. Did you just describe yourself as like skinny and fat? Yes. I'm like skinny fat um terrible uh the are you intellectually

competitive if someone says something ridiculous will you say wait a minute i guess i don't really think of myself as intellectually that um advanced uh but sometimes i maybe. Do you think you're above average or below average of intelligence? Come on. Are you pausing? No, I'm just trying to think. Because I know this question generally people say they're above average. So if you look at the – nobody thinks they're average. So I don't really know. I think probably above just because in my case, you know, I just come from such rarefied air that not only genetically but also in terms of the environment in which I was raised.

So I've just been – I was born on third base is what I'm trying to say. Cool. I've just been – I was born on third base is what I'm trying to say. So I don't know if I had been raised in a different family or something like that. I'd probably be average. But given where I come from, like I did not overperform. Fair enough. Not intellectually. I mean intellectually. Again, my parents are doctors.

My brother is a really successful venture capitalist. I wear makeup and talk to cameras. So let's just put it in context. Do you have a high need for control? No. No. No. Although some of the panic must come from not being in control, like claustrophobia or being on a plane or like being in front of the camera and not being able to control.

So there may be some need to be in control, but I don't need to control every situation. In fact, I don't really – like I said before, nobody reports to me. So I don't really need to be in control, but I don't need to control every situation. In fact, I don't really, like I said before, I have nobody reports to me. So I don't really need to control other people or anything like that. Fraser Cain, Do you prefer fast decisions or slow decisions? I think my intuition is for fast decisions, but that's because I'm lazy. And I think I do better with slow decisions. Fraser Cain, Okay. Certainly, you would do better than with slow decisions where you're street smart, street savvy in a fast-paced environment.

Yeah. Right? Like in a slow-paced environment where you have to be analytical and then make slow decisions, that would be hard for you. Yeah. I would get bored. Yeah. There you go. Okay.

And then are you self-critical or self-positive? I'm definitely self-critical. Self-critical. Yes. Yeah. Okay. And would you call it self-laceration self-positive? I'm definitely self-critical. Self-critical. Yes. Yeah. Okay. And would you call it self-laceration? Yes.

One to 100 compared to the rest of the world. Oh, 350. Yeah. Very, very self-critical. How's that work out? No, but this is a huge part of my book because I always believed that the intensity of the anxiety and self-laceration was directly correlated to success. And now I do not believe that. You know, interestingly enough is that on the world stage, we find that people get to the world stage by being highly critical. But then that runs,

that tire runs flat. And not everyone, not everyone is highly critical, but that's not good enough. I can do better. God, I can do better. What's wrong? Okay, come on. I can do more. That criticalness does get people better, but can do better. God, I can do better. What's wrong? Okay, come on, I can do more. That that criticalness does get people better, but it runs thin. Steve Browning, Absolutely. There's a point of disutility. And cool. That's what mindfulness does is it helps you draw the line between useful laceration and and useless laceration.

Mark Leary, I love it. It all comes down to Steve Browning, I don't know. It comes down to a lot of things. But I feel like the trite answer would be love. There are so many possible answers on this, but I guess they all do come down to love, don't they? When you were going through that just now, were you being self-critical? Yes. Were you? Yeah. you're doing it right now like self-critical and also just trying to find something original to say thinking about it like what's the right answer yeah um

and why don't i have it why can't i call something what would be like what what does naturally happen for you when you say it all comes down to if you're going to teach your kid the kind of mind for me i have when i put when given a question like that is it just seemed i'm not really good at simplifying in that way and i've never thought about this question yeah it's a it's a tough one i think it's really tough so someone went through this conversation this podcast and afterwards they said those are really hard and i was like yeah yeah they are challenginged to get you to think. Yeah. There was a great quote, not mine, but I put it in my book. I stole it from somebody who put it in my book. An artist I was interviewing who said his whole life was, I want to be kind and do something awesome.

And so that's coming down to two things. That's cool. But that's a pretty great combination. I want to make awesome shit and I also want to be as nice as I possibly can. I love it. And not – again, not – in my case, not out of some shiny innate altruism but just because I've realized over time that when you have good relationships, you're just happier. Life is more supple. I love it.

Pressure comes from? It comes from a lot of places. Expectations. From self or from others? Both, but often others can have expectations of you that you translate into stuff that is not useful. But pressure can be good and pressure can be bad depends what you mean by pressure yeah and then so pressure for me is just like i feel like i need to think or do faster than i'm prepared to do or think i see well that's bad pressure that's stress yeah um and some stress is good some stress is bad yeah um yeah but pressure can come from exogenous sources and internal sources and so if there's if you had to pick one or the

other would you say i agree with you but would you say it's more internal or it's more external for most of us it's internal internal okay and then um last kind of two questions here what do you hope the next generation gets right look i think that um this stuff about mindfulness and compassion that we're talking about now is there at first, this really turned me off. But in the mindfulness world, there's a lot of sort of a utopian bent of – that this stuff we're working on right now can save the world at a time of climate change and war and terrorism and racial strains, financial inequality, economic inequality, huge structural problems in the world. And I actually do think, as a news reporter, mindfulness, which again, is just this ability to respond wisely to things instead of reacting blindly, not being yanked around by your emotions, and boosting compassion, which, you know, hand in hand. And it's not a syrupy thing. It's just like

being able to understand other people's plight and wanting to help them and understanding how that actually redounds to your benefit. Those two things, a marginal increase in those two things through what we're seeing as a proliferation of meditation, I think really could help solve the world's problems. Do I think it's going to be a magical, that we're going to end up in some sort of a thousand percent Pacific utopian future? No. But do I think given the problems we're facing, especially on the climate side, which are unprecedented in human history, learning how to, having marginal increases in these two innate human tendencies, I think could make a really big difference. So I would like to see that. What does your practice look like? Is it one minute a day, six minutes, 20, 20, two twenties? Two hours. Straight or split? I've

given myself that I was able to get to two hours a day. I always wanted to do two hours and I was able to get there because Sharon Salzberg, the great meditation teacher, told me about somebody she knew who wanted to get to two hours, who was able to, who had a busy life who uh said that he was going to break it up into whatever increments he wanted yeah right so he the guy could do uh you know a million five minutes 201 minutes yeah yeah um so i do whatever i can so like today i did 10 minutes in the morning another 10 minutes after this is a saturday So I did 10 minutes when I woke up. I woke up at 3.45 to anchor Good Morning America, which is my weekend gig. And then after the show, I did 15 minutes.

And then I did five minutes before I took a nap. So I've got 90 minutes left to do today and I will find it. Single point focus or more contemplative? I mix. You mix them. My practice is divided if i'm going to list off the top of my head i do some sort of concentration-based practice where i'm really more single-pointed like a body scan into breath really focusing on the top of the lip and just trying to stay there

and every time i get lost coming back um and then i do open awareness which is where whatever comes up i'm just aware of it wherever the mind goes i'm just i'm able to go with it just flow without judgment yeah well to the best of my ability then that's right there's a lot of judgment that does come up and then you don't judge the judgment so some at some point you're able to in the, you're able to let go. I do walking meditation. I do compassion meditation. Is your walking meditation slow or does it have a briskness? It's not brisk, but it's not super slow. It's somewhere in the middle.

It's not a labyrinth like the iconic? It's like right here in my office on this stretch right here I'll do. Got it. I do standing meditation. And then I do more contemplative, like sort of analytical meditation or some exercises that my teacher, Joseph Goldstein, taught about these three, three minute exercises. One, where you listen to sounds and try to find what is hearing them. It truly throws you up against the biggest mystery of existence which is who am i who are you yeah right and then it actually i i say that

i do three minutes that but actually my whole practice is shot through with that okay because interest is a huge part of practice you want to generate interest because meditation can be very boring so for me i find that when I look for who is knowing whatever is being known, that throws up a lot of interest. And so I use that tool a lot. The other three, three minute thing he does, which I think is also incredibly important and interesting, but it's going to sound very gloomy, is to think about everybody you know and think about the fact that they're going to die. and then think about how you are going to die oh you and i have had a very similar path like this is a great practice it's a great practice yeah um because we get caught up in a

lot of stuff man but but at the end of the day you are in a fragile body and you don't even know how the thing is working and it's going to run out of road and you should just be in touch with that to the best of your ability because it will inform your decisions in a good way and then the third is just to see every thought which is very hard to do it's very but actually but just the the benefit is if you can get caught up if you can avoid getting caught up in the failure of it is that you just see how fleeting these things are and we take them so seriously my teacher calls them little dictators. We act them out, because when you're unaware that you're thinking, it's like the gospel truth.

So here's one that maybe I can share with you that has helped me as well, for a single point, like getting that interest right. Walt Rutherford, I don't know, it was like 20 years ago, dropped this, he introduced me to this and mindfulness. And he dropped this little thought on me, which is, see if you can do this as if a loved one's life depended on you getting this breath right. That's pretty good. Yeah, it's pretty good. The other thing I like is, this is a Joseph and Sharon thing, just this breath. So can you just be with just this one? Just master this one. Yes. That's it. Because it's the larger thinking about the game of I'm no good at this and I'm never going to be good at this. These are all just going by and I'm missing them all. That fucks you up.

But if you can just – if your goal can be just this the breath, I get a lot of bodily feedback that feels really good. Yeah, it's amazing. And so that has actually been very useful. So Walt Rutherford also shared this second gem with me because I was like, ah, when he was first talking about meditation, I was like, what? Like, come on. Like, let's go do something. And he knew I needed it because I ran a little hot with too much anxiousness as well. Eager, ambitious, whatever that is, but a bit too

much worry embedded in there. So he's trying to help me out. And he says, he says, Mike, when you get this right, it's like a full body orgasm. He's right about that. He's right about that. So I was like 19 or 20. I was like, wait a minute. What? Yes. You know, so. Okay, brilliant. So, Dan, thank you.

Well, and on a full body orgasm. How's that? Nice place to end. Yeah, it's a good place to end. So where can we find out more from you? Twitter, I guess, at Dan B. Harris. If you want to send me a note, I actually do read my Twitter. I don't know. I'm on a bunch of a lot of social media, but the one I actually read the notes that people

send to me on is Twitter. So if you want to ask me a question, you can get me there. And then do you have a definition or can you articulate what mastery is? I would say, I don't know that I can define what mastery is, but I would say my, for me, a major component of mastery is, is the developing the ability to respond instead of reacting. Now, this is not, this is most meditation cliches are just very, very annoying, but this is a good one. Respond, not react is just once you have the telescope, the internal telescope, the internal meteorologist that allows you to see the contents of your consciousness, to see that you have a mind and are thinking. This is a thunderously obvious fact. This is what mindfulness practice or meditation does for you. You just get

to see what's happening internally. Once you see that, then you can respond to the stuff that's happening instead of reacting blindly. And it's the reacting blindly to your ego, to your thinking mind, your monkey mind or whatever, that is the source of all the things about which we're most embarrassed. It's what caused my panic attack. It's what caused me to go to war zones without thinking about the consequences to come home and get depressed and not even know it and then to blindly self-medicate. And so I find responding, not reacting has been a key for me and just being better at everything I do. I don't consider myself a master. So I do think I do think, though, it's a game changing proposition.

And that's why this conversation has been rich. So thank you. I've really appreciated your honesty, your openness, your authenticity and how easily you can articulate things that are invisible. So what I'm bummed that I didn't do is ask you for storytelling and ask you like, because you tell great stories. And I'm bummed that we didn't go down there, but I was so sucked in. We're at like almost two hours. So I apologize. That was two hours. Wow.

That's quick. So that part. And then the other, maybe hopefully I can learn how you prepare for interviews. So I just want to say thank you. My pleasure. Thank you. Yeah, it was awesome. So excited to meet you.

I followed your work for a long time. Yeah, thank you. So with that, let's have a great afternoon. And those of us who want to follow Dan at Dan B. Harris on Twitter, and then you can hit us up on at Michael Gervais. You can hit us up on facebook.com forward slash finding, oh no, forward slash community. And then that's a little community that we're building where people are just chiming in and talking shop, supporting each other on this journey. And the other is

findingmastery.net. Okay, everyone. See you around. Thanks. All right. Thank you so much for diving into another episode of Finding Mastery with us. Our team loves creating this podcast and sharing these conversations with you. We really appreciate you being part of this community. And if you're enjoying the show, the easiest no-cost way to support is to hit the subscribe or follow button wherever you're listening. Also, if you haven't already,

please consider dropping us a review on Apple or Spotify. We are incredibly grateful for the support and feedback. If you're looking for even more insights, we have a newsletter we send out every Wednesday. Punch over to findingmastery.com slash newsletter to sign up. The show wouldn't be possible without our sponsors and we take our recommendations seriously. And the team is very thoughtful about making sure we love and endorse every product you

hear on the show. If you want to check out any of our sponsor offers you heard about in this episode, you can find those deals at findingmastery.com slash sponsors. And remember, no one does it alone. The door here at Finding Mastery is always open to those looking to explore the edges and the reaches of their potential so that they can help others do the same. So join our community, share your favorite episode with a friend, and let us know how we can continue to show up for you. Lastly, as a quick reminder, information in this podcast and from any material on the Finding Mastery website and social channels is for information purposes only. If you're looking for meaningful support, which we all need,

one of the best things you can do is to talk to a licensed professional. So seek assistance from your healthcare providers. Again, a sincere thank you for listening. Until next episode, be well, think well, keep exploring.