Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 161: Matt Gutman, The Boys in the Cave

Episode Date: November 14, 2018

ABC News Senior National Correspondent Matt Gutman is, unfortunately, no stranger to tragedy, both in his career as a journalist and his personal life. He learned the practice of meditation at just 12 years old, mere months before his father would be killed in a plane crash. And now, nearly 30 years later he's reporting on how meditation played a role in the miraculous rescue of 12 boys trapped in a cave in his new book, "The Boys in the Cave: Deep Inside the Impossible Rescue in Thailand." He opens up about his own personal tragedy and gives a riveting account of that rescue in this week's conversation. Have a question for Dan? Leave us a voicemail at 646-883-8326. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It kind of blows my mind to consider the fact that we're up to nearly 600 episodes of this podcast, the 10% happier podcast. That's a lot of conversations. I like to think of it as a great compendium of, and I know this is a bit of a grandiose term, but wisdom. The only downside of having this vast library of audio is that it can be hard to know where to start. So we're launching a new feature here, playlists, just like you put together a playlist of your favorite songs.

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I'm Dan Harris. Hey guys, very excited about our guest this week. He's a long time friend and colleague. He also, to my surprise, is a long time meditator and has written a new book about the rescue of those Thai boys. In that cave, it was an awful story that turned into an incredible story. A lot of you tweeted me about the fact that the boys who were stuck in that cave, the coach who was with them, taught them how to meditate. We have a lot more information about that. The story Matt has just written.

Matt was over there in Thailand when the story broke and has just written this great book about the stories behind the story that we didn't know until now and part of that is meditation. And so we not only talked with Matt about his meditation career but also the meditation that took place in that cave and and it's so interesting to know that my friend Matt who suffers with a lot of the same stuff I suffer with a you know work related anxiety in this high pressure career that we share. That meditation has been helpful for him and all these years I didn't know. Okay, Matt's coming up, but first I want to take your voice mills before that, just a quick point of business. Diana Winston.

She hasn't yet been on this podcast, but she's a fantastic meditation teacher. And she is now one of our new teachers on the 10% happier app. She's the director of mindfulness education at UCLA's Mindful Awareness Research Center. So she not only knows how to teach meditation, has been practicing and teaching since the 90s, but she's also has a real scientific mind and knows a lot about using meditation with children, and so she's going to be an incredible resource for the app. So another reason to go check us out. She's got two new meditations up there right now. Diana Winston will be on the show at some point soon. I hope. Okay, let's do your voice mails. Here's number one. Hi, Dan. My name is Casey. I just started mindfulness practice, probably within like the last three to six months.

I do it at night to help me speak, to kind of calm my mind down. And I just, kind of curious about what your thoughts are on that. I've only tried it a few times in the morning, and I find guided meditation helped me the most to kind of get in the zone. I guess there are some nights where I don't do it because I think I'm just too tired to or I'll probably sleep okay, but yet I think it would be better for me to do it on a more regimented schedule. So I guess I just kind of want your thoughts on what you think about doing it for sleep.

So hopefully that makes sense. Thank you so much. My brilliant producer, Ryan Kessler, chose the voice males wisely this week because we're going to be talking about meditation for sleep with our guests this week, Matt Gutman, who's been using it for that purpose. So big yes, I think it's a great idea.

Initially, I was a little reluctant about meditation for sleep because meditation is designed to wake up in the in the grandest sense of that phrase. The Buddha means you know the awakened one. The whole point is to wake up to the reality of your existence. Stop sleep walking through your life, etc., etc. But look if you're gonna live successfully, you do need to sleep. You do need to sleep. You need to have rest or you're not going to be able to function well. And I have found in my own experience, especially recently, oddly enough, where I've actually

been adding some meditation before I go to bed, not even, I'm gonna do a little bit as I'm lying down, but I actually have started every night before I go to bed stretching, and I'll talk about Matt, you'll hear me talk about this with Matt, stretching and then sitting for a while. And I have found that combination plus a few little practices I do

as I'm lying down in bed to be really helpful. There are, as you know, I'm not a big fan of panaceas and magic bullets and all that stuff, so I don't think it's anything like that, but I do think it's a really good thing, and I know it just now as a budding entrepreneur with this little company that we have an app that I talk about a lot on the show,

the demand we see among our users for sleep-related meditations is undeniable. So much so that we now have a whole tab, a whole section that's prominent, that's filled with sleep meditations. So I think, yes, it's great. It's a great thing to do. Obviously, I'm a pretty big proponent of meditation, So I think if you wanted to try it in the morning or other times as well,

I think it's more the better as long as it's not messing up your life. But yeah, unreserved yes, try meditation before bed. And like you, I too have experienced on the nights where I feel like I'm going to be fine without it. And then don't do it. Then I get in bed and I'm tossing and turning it. Keep it going.

Here's number two. Hey, Dan, I was wondering if Bob brought you TM and if so, what do you think of the practice? Thanks. Well, I can keep this answer short, not yet. And that's not Bob's fault. Bob's standing offer to teach me, TM has been out there on the table for years, actually,

even before I had him on the podcast. And I actually do, I promise I'm not lying, plan to take him up on this. And I have TM as a practice, whatever you think of, you know, if you go back and listen to my interview with Bob, we have a very forthright and he was not defensive about this. I thought admirably not defensive. There are critics of the TM organization, but whatever you want to say about the organization, you can't... I don't think there's much to be said about, you know, I don't think there's a strong argument for the

dis-utility of the basic practice that they teach in TM, which is millennia old. Is it millennia's old? Malayan, whatever. It's been around for 3 a few years. So I'm interested in this Vedic mantra meditation and specifically in whatever innovations they've come up with in the TM school. So yeah, I do wanna do it. I'm just, you know, I don't know, lazy, over-scheduled, one of the two, both. But we should say that our guest today,

Mac Gutman, does practice TM and has, and you're gonna hear his story. He has for a long time. So we'll get to him in just a moment. First though, I wanna give you our number for voicemails. It's 646-883-836-646-883-836. Give us a shout. All right, so the guest this week, Matt Gutman, as I said at the top, I've known him for a long time.

I've always been incredibly fond of Matt Gutman. He's just a great person and a great reporter. He's a senior national reporter here at ABC News. He's been doing it for quite a while. Before that, he was at ABC News Radio. And he's written a book called The Boys in the Cave, which is about the rescue of those Thai teenagers. It turns out it was much more perilous than we even knew. And of course, there's a big meditation subtext to this story.

I apologize from the outset because you're going to have to listen to a little bit of a love fest because every time Matt and I get together, that's just how it is. But his personal story about which I knew very little is really powerful and then the story that he uncovered from the cave is also incredible. So here we go, here's Matt Guttman. My man, great to have you on the podcast. So good to be here.

He's so handsome. Yeah, I've been calling, just for the listeners, I've been calling Matt Guttman, my man crush, for more than a decade. I first met you when you were in, when you were a radio reporter in Jerusalem for the ABC news bureau. And here you are, your big time correspondent. Since we have, since this is the place for rabbit holes, I'm going to go down a couple. Go down a rabbit hole. Before, so I've seen Dan do some amazing things. First, we met in the north of Israel actually because Israel was bombarding his Bala. I think it was 2005 or six six and

Dan anchored was the first time I saw him anchor an entire world news without a prompter off the top of his head I did that yeah, and as it sounded like like me. As a guy who just started in radio and it was a print reporter, it was an entirely different skill set that I didn't know even existed. And I just couldn't believe that somebody could do that without hemming and hawing and umming. And then watching you do the same thing from Haiti after traveling with you that entire Sunday and watching just going through the rubble and seeing the bodies that we saw and the pain and the suffering that we saw and then put together this cogent beautifully written show in about 10 minutes was one of the things that inspired me to really push to go from radio to TV because I realized there was so much that could be done outside of the very confined spaces

of network radio that I was working in. Very kind of you to say. I recall having spent time with you in the Middle East and then in Haiti, and then also just seeing you around in ABC, you were in Miami, but you occasionally come to New York. Brow beating you all the time, both in the field and in the office. You got to go on TV, and you were always really shy about it and then you know the oil spill happened in the golf Yeah, then you were often running and you never look back. Yeah pretty much the goal was your hesitation I actually there is a very good reason I tried at one point but

An executive at ABC who's no longer here told me I looked heavy on TV. What? Yes, true story. This is a podcast. Some of our listeners may never have seen your likeness before. I exhort listeners to go do a Google image search on you. Heavy would be the last word that comes from it. I may have weighed about 10 or 15 pounds more than, but I think your head, is you now obsessive about dieting

and exercise as a consequence? No, I was always obsessed with exercise. I was a wrestler in high school. All I did was play sports, so I was a meathead. But yeah, so anyway, it happened, and I was very fortunate to have the opportunity to report for ABC on multiple platforms, including ABC News radio,

where we're sitting right now, we're sitting right now on the radio studios. Which offered me the platform to do the kind of things I do, which was, you know, hard nose reporting and really getting into the meat of the story at the Gulf oil spill and it's through that actual reporting that the TV side picked me up and said, hey, that guy's not only a good reporter, but you know, he looks okay. Let's put him on air. And so I have, you know, Diane Sawyer was the first person to put me on world news. And David New York put me on world news weekend. So I was, I was very lucky. Yeah. You know, also being exposed to people like you early on who, you know, just thought, yeah,

give it a shot. Offer me encouragement. I've it says so i think we now established that we know each other for a while i've and there's great affection for all of you watching that's that clearly listening listening to anybody watching i don't know maybe oh yeah people are in the other room watching as we should say there's a case there's a glass uh... wall between us and the uh... and the control room and in there is matt's wife dafna

who was a producer for ABC News and was driving around in the war zones of Northern Israel with me when I met you. Exactly. I remember saying after meeting you, okay, yeah, you should marry this guy. You have my permission. No, I was very kind of you. She didn't really care what I thought, but testament to her. Anyway, she doesn't care what anybody thinks. She's a tough cook. Long way of saying, I've known you for a long time, and I didn't know until we spoke on the phone recently that you actually had a reasonably extensive or long

relationship with meditation. So how did that come about? When I was 12 years old, my parents, it was the summer of 1989, and my parents, you know, they were hippies. They grew up in the generation of the late 60s and early 70s. My father got lucky and got out of Vietnam in the lottery.

My mom went to Bennington College, you know, and they'd always been interested in doing things that are different. And I think they were also going through a crisis in their marriage and we were living in suburban New Jersey and they wanted something different. And so they hoped that maybe doing TM, transcendental meditation, was something that the whole family could unify around and find a sense of togetherness with, and maybe would make us happier, say, in our healthier people.

And so I did, I forgot how long the course is, but I went to Madison, New Jersey where we did the whole Maharishi Ayurveda course, and I learned about the, what's it called? The subcartes, the unify subcartes, what's it called? The sub-cartes, the Unified Subconscious. What's it called? Come on, Dan. I'm not an expert in TM. The Unified Subconscious. Oh my God, the Unified Field.

Anyway, basically. Unified Field? Yeah, something like that. I was 12, so it's been a while since I took the course. But we've had a lot of TM folks on this podcast, so if you want to learn more about it, go listen to the Bob Roth episode, he's the head of the David Lynch Foundation, Big Muckety Muck within TM.

Anyway, we're not counting on you for encyclopedic knowledge of the tradition. But what stayed 30 years later is my mantra and the very specific, which is very a specific method of getting into the meditation, right? So in Tm, you don't want to be on a beat or a cadence when you are saying your mantra. You want it to be almost A-rhythmic, which is a supremely difficult thing to do. Because naturally, everything in our bodies is almost rhythmic, right? Our breaths are heartbeat. Almost everything we do has a beat or a rhythm.

So, I've always struggled with that in my practice, but, and I've also adopted more mindfulness methods, and so depending on how much time I have, I do different things. If I have a whole half-hour, which almost never happens anymore, or 20 minutes, I will do old-school TM. So, I do a couple of minutes to breathe into it, and then I do my mantra, which I'm not allowed to tell anybody in the world. That was one of the things that kind of got me psyched up about it, because, you know, it's a secret. Only you know your mantra, and in TM,

they make a whole ceremony about revealing to you your mantra. And it's, you know, handed down to you from the Maharishi himself, or his people, or whomever, or some database, I don't know. But it was really cool at the time, and, you know, I remember once, like, 20 years later, you never told like your wife when you were a kid.

My mom, my wife doesn't know it. You know what I mean? No, my mom does, because she was the one who really was my meditating buddy at the time. Okay. And still sort of this. Were you only a child? No, I have an older sister. She was already off. Okay. And still sort of that. Were you the only child? No.

I have an older sister. She was already off in college. She was five years older. Okay. So she wanted no part of it and went off to school and never did TM. So you took to it. Even though you were 12 years old and your parents were kind of forcing you to do it, you actually took to it.

We did it together and then tragically, actually, that's the end of that summer, my father was killed in a plane crash just a few months after we did this course altogether. And so that was, my mom actually really encouraged me to keep meditating as a way to not lose my mind entirely because we are all very close to complete madness with grief and mourning. And so we meditated a lot. Sometimes, you know, summer is later, my family members made fun of me a little bit, but I kept doing it.

And it's a wide wider than make fun of you. Because it was so odd, you know, for a 12, 13, 14 year old to periodically meditate and take a few minutes in the you know this is the very early 1990s and It's you know today if you had your 14 year old kid go to a room and quietly sit and meditate People would accept it and probably encourage it But back then, you know when you're dealing with conventional family members That is so weird man. What are you doing? You're ahead of your time?

Yeah, but it sounds like the habit was forged in some really intense emotion. Do you know what's funny that I until this podcast, until you and I sat down, I never actually associated the two things? I didn't remember because I buried a memory of my father's death in so many different layers of grief and mourning that the two periods were so closely linked in time that it was really only a month and a half or two between the July, August that I took this course and September 25th when he was killed of 1990. For a 12 year old boy, that kind of thing has to be incredibly difficult.

I can only imagine. I'm sorry, I actually didn't know that story. For a 40 year old man, that kind of thing has to be incredibly difficult. I can only imagine. I'm sorry, I actually didn't know that story. For a 40 year old man, it's still difficult. You never get over that kind of grief. I'm actually feeling emotional now because it's funny that, you know, Dan Harris sitting here with me, a man who I've known for years, could actually make me feel emotional about something that is almost 30 years in the past. But every time you look into something, even to a

moment of grief and mourning like that, and to severe trauma in a different way, it can elicit emotions that you didn't expect you'd stumble upon. Absolutely, and I was just guessing, but there's, it's got to be fatherhood for you has to be an interesting endeavor, because you have two kids, son and a daughter. The poignancy asked, I would imagine is there given what you went through? Yeah, absolutely. And I'm only months away from being the age my father was

when he was killed, which is also kind of a mind trip. He was how old are you? He was almost 41, and he was barely 42. So yeah, it's, and I also have a daughter who's five and a half, almost six years older than my son. The similarities between the kids are amazing because my daughter, like my sister, is more introverted and shy. My son is a total extrovert and outgoing

and walks up to strangers at four years old. What's your name? I like your shirt. I swear. My wife's laughing in the other room. Yeah, so it's funny. Yeah. But you know the meditation thing, it's morphed into different things, the older I got in a different time periods, but in some ways a touchstone that I always come back to, and that I've had other experiences that brought me back to it. So a lot of people I talk to on the show

who started meditating young, the arc that I often hear is, you know, it's part of their DNA because they started so young, and I think in your case, probably part of your DNA, not only because it started young, but because, as we've established, it was kind of introduced to such an intense moment in your life. But often folks come in and say, you know, there are long periods of time where I'm a lapsed meditator, but it doesn't mean that the effect is gone. Is that similar to what's happened with you? Absolutely.

But it's another arrow in my quiver, because I am what's in my DNA is being a complete spaz. I am anxious, I am self-conscious, I am nervous by nature, I am high energy, I am everything that meditation is not, which is why it's so good for me when I do it, right? Well, you just have a few average TV reporter. I mean, Dan, you know, you one of your seminal experiences was having a panic attack on air. I've never said this to anyone, certainly not on broadcast, but since it's you,

I still have panic attacks all the time when I'm going live. Really? How do you, I've never seen you get nervous on here. Oh my god. I have full on pulse racing, tunnel vision, Wow. Palpatation. How do you get through it? Fear. I don't know. I just grit. Grit or I don't know what it is. And sometimes I stumble. And that's the only thing that causes me to stumble is not because I don't know what it is and sometimes I stumble and that's the only thing that causes me to stumble is not because I don't know what I'm going to say. It's because I get so nervous that,

you know, I can't control it. Even now. Yes, absolutely. So I get nervous all the time too. So just that was not to say what any judgment was said with sympathy, empathy, more, all of it. It's such a weird feeling. One of the things that I think you're one of the few people would understand what I'm going to attempt to say is that you're out there, especially when you're in the field. And it's just, you're standing there. There's nobody else around except for you

in a like a board camera crew. And maybe your producer is looking at her phone or his phone. And all of a sudden, in the anchor of the evening news or good morning morning America says, here's ABC's Matt Gutman and then it's just you with control of the national air waves and you can have a terratic outburst, you can do whatever you want and all of this little imp comes into your mind and starts giving you terrible suggestions and then you start thinking about how many people are watching but you can't see them but you know they're watching

and your bosses are watching and like all of that stuff just courses through your mind. And then for me, often it turns into like very difficult mental experiences. So there are two impulses, right? There's the impulses. Just say what you know. You already know how to say it. And the other one is, don't miss up. Don't miss up. Don't miss up. And the don't miss up one often is more powerful than the other one. And for me, it's not necessarily that that many people are watching. It's the expectation of perfection. Right? If you have 15 seconds to speak on national TV and the great David Neor,

who is truly a savant and completely unflappable tosses you the ball and says matt and you know that you've got to be perfect robin robberts or george stepin opus or any of the greats or dan harris uh... for me that's the hard part and one of the things that i've actually tried to calm myself before not tried a lot is mindfulness you know there are all sorts of different methods but one of them i have is

actually somebody who is a hypnotist taught this to me is imagine that you have a string and then there are five knots and you breathe in at the top of five and you exhale as slowly as you can to get the four and then inhale again at four and exhale to get down to three and so on and so forth. Do you go behind a tree when you're doing this? No, I don't actually hold the string. You do it in your mind, but you're doing the breathing. Yeah, but I just do it.

You can do it and like keep your eyes open and just sort of imagine it. And that's why meditation, mindfulness, are not a panacea. I mean, that's what you describe. It makes your life better, but it's not gonna solve every problem and it doesn't always help me. But it's definitely something that I've tried.

It doesn't always work, but I do try to sort of call myself through breathing before this. And sometimes I'm totally fine. And I'm like, I got this. But sometimes you never know and you start to get really nervous. This is a hard, maybe impossible question answer since there's no control group here.

But do you have a sense of what your life would be like if you didn't have these practices? but do you have a sense of what your life would be like if you didn't have these practices? No, I really don't. I don't, I don't, it's been so long that I've had them. I mean, could I be any more of a spaz that would be a scary thing if I had,

it was racked by more anxiety and nerves than I am now, but maybe that's, that would be the case. I don't know. How consistent are you, you were about to say something I apologize. I'll ask this question. No, it's just you know, we're talking about, you know, the tools in your arsenal or the weapons in your arsenal in terms of meditation. The other thing is that when I can't sleep, you know, I just deployed in all sorts of different methods. I don't have a very consistent practice, but when I can't sleep, that's where I go. I begin to meditate.

And as anybody who practices knows, one of the best ways to follow the sleep is to start practice. Yes. Sometimes it's very inconvenient, sometimes it's super convenient. Exactly. So, when you're having trouble following a sleep, do you go to the mantra or do you do a mindfulness, sort of, awareness of breath type of practice? It depends how urgent my sleep requirement is, but which one is better?

A more sure fire way to get there is to do my whole practice. So you do the breath up and then I start doing the mantra, but you know, I'm generally too impatient. I'm just going to go straight for the mindfulness and do some breathing exercises. I have trouble sleeping sometimes, and sometimes I'll use medical interventions. But one thing that I found really helpful, because I don't like to take medicine,

is I will stretch, and then I will sit and meditate. And it's not uncommon for me after stretching and then meditating to get really sleepy. And then, and then when as I lay down to bed, I will do this exercise taught to me by a guy named Sean Acor, a CHOR who was on the podcast a couple weeks ago. He's a really smart guy. He's written a bunch of books and he says, if you spend every couple of minutes every day, reviewing in your mind the things that you're grateful for that happened

today. I found that the combination of those three things nothing is sure fire but that's about as close as I've found. Those three things and an end for sure. Yes and as my dad used to say when I was little and unable to sleep and would come into complain to him he would say bend over and run as fast as you can into the wall. Yeah that's's the kind of challenge I had. The one thing that's great there, but I want you to go back for one sec to remind me and maybe our listeners, your listeners.

So it's, remember how many good things that happened to you? How many things are you grateful for? That happened today. He says, do that. I love that. Just do three, I think he says three, but it's really just listing off in your mind the

key variable. I actually had done my own little thing that I had made up, which was as I was going to bed every night, I would kind of do this cheesy thing of list off the things I'm grateful for. But they were always the same things. And I felt that it did help me sleep, but Sean said the research shows, Sean's done some of this research, that shows actually in order to have a true measurable benefit

on general populations, it really helps to focus on things that happened today because then it trains the mind, the brain, to be sort of scanning for good news. I love that for a couple of reasons. One, because it's super easy to apply, and that's something that I'm going to use for sure. But it's also something that I can see myself

teaching to the kids, because it's so easy. Yeah. Right? I mean, my 10 year old could totally do that because she could never fall asleep. Yeah. And even if it doesn't help her fall asleep, it reinforces the things that she's grateful for

and you know, lift her spirits a little bit. I really like that. I mean, I wish I could take credit for it. It's been for and you know, lift her spirits a little bit. I really like that. I mean, I wish I could take credit for it. It's been very useful and I just thank you on for us all. I will actually have I'm kind of forcing him to be my friends, so I will definitely do that. But I think for you as a grown up, those three practices mush together because if you're

rushing, well, I'm just going to speak from experience. When I'm rushing to go to sleep, it's almost a guarantee I will not. And so pushing those three together and just deliberately slowing down and saying, okay, however much sleep I get, I'm going to get, I can't control it. But I can do these three things together and I think I'll up my odds of sleeping. Because there's something about sleeping that's similar, following a sleep. It's similar to meditation, which is it involves letting go and a sort of surrender. And so anyway, I'm off on a tangent here, but I found that those things were useful. It might be for you. I'm going to go in another tangent since we're talking about it. Another method that I

use, not that anybody cares, and I'm like the worst meditator, I know everybody out there, I mean, we don't judge, but another thing that I use that I just talking about, things you're grateful for, that actually just makes me happy. And this is not getting to a more relaxed place or whatever it is, and this sort of happens organically too, the image of my children's smiling faces comes into my mind. And I sort of meditate on that. And that is one of the most joyous things, whenever I'm feeling really down, and maybe that is a gratitude thing because I am grateful for them.

So it's just a beautiful image, it just makes me happy in my core. Absolutely, so there's a way to kind of formalize what you're describing. There's a, I just did a nine day silent meditation retreat of a specific, I know, you're laughing because I'm ridiculous silent meditation retreat of a specific, you know, you're laughing because I'm ridiculous, but there's a specific kind of meditation. It's got a Buddhist name, M-E-T-T-A, Metta, which is often translated into the supremely annoying word of loving kindness,

but you can actually translate it into a different word, which is friendliness. Now, friendliness is an incredibly valuable skill and it should be omnidirectional. Now, arguably the most important person you should be friendly to is you, because that will impact how you show up in every other place in the world. So this practice, again, 2600 years old, the way it's often taught, and it was taught on this retreat I just did, was you visualize people, including yourself, your children, difficult people, neutral people, everybody, and send them good vibes through the mental repetition of phrases like may you be happy, may you be safe, et cetera, et cetera. The trick is, the way it was taught on the retreat

is start with an easy person. So you're already doing that. You're starting with your kids. And you actually can formalize it by starting with your kids and sending them these phrases kind of explicitly in your mind. And then as soon as that kind of juice is built up, you put in a picture of Mac Gutman.

Oh. And send it to Mac Gutman. And it changes your inner weather. And that will sting. And then you can grow from there to maybe your wife or a difficult colleague or somebody a neutral person who you overlook all the time of the dry cleaners and then maybe send it to all living beings everywhere. This is the classical progression within the Buddhist tradition. So actually you're kind of like doing the first step of this. That might be an interesting thing for you to, I found it to be an incredibly useful practice because as goofy and gooey as it is on some level,

one of the things that I really notice about my own personal practices, it's suffused with aversion. So you can mindfully note the arising of anger or impatience or restlessness and there is it's supposed to be non-judgmental but if actually you're paying close attention you kind of just want that thing to go away and if you can change your inner

weather to a friendly environment where anger arises and you're like come on let's hug it out. You and anger are hugging it out metaphorically. Yeah, you got it. Then you are so not owned by the anger and the difference and the multiplier effect that can have in how you show up in the world is in my mind, just incredible. So funny, because Daphne has no meaning longer than, I've known, Daphne no longer than, I've known you and she's in the other room listening.

She must be thinking, what happened to this to this dude Like he used to be cool No, but I want to just and I wanted to there are a couple of things I want to touch about on what you said because that was Very brilliant Dan ask and that was sort of the quintessential Dan But there are also some practical benefits to doing that to meta which you translate as friendliness, right? my general behavior is super friendly. Like, I barely overlook, and I'm not saying this is, I'm not the kind of person who overlooks anyone. No, that's true. I can both.

I say hi to everyone, right? Yes, you do. And that's like my thing. We can talk about the various psychosis that is involved with my, you know, craziness about that. But there's a practical benefit. When you are nice to people, good things do happen to you. If you are nice to a cab driver, which I typically am, and you forget something in the car,

they are more likely to stop and give you your wallet or your phone that you've left in there. All over. And you know, it is this loving kindness that it does reverberate back to you. But think about, so it's not only, yeah. Think about what you said before, about the two voices in your head when you're doing a live shot. One of them saying, just say what you want, say what you know, and the other is saying,

don't screw it up, don't screw it up. And I'm questioning how friendly you are to yourself. And that, I think, is the value of this practice. I think that was beautifully put. I think many of us are not friendly enough to ourselves. And yes, that would be wonderful if I were friendly or and I will work on that. I have a question.

Yeah. We have a book. If someone were going to talk about your book. Well, I'm going to give you the perfect segue. OK. So is meta the same thing as be pasta nut? Because no. OK.

Well, well, because when you, in Thailand, so I just did this book, right? And which you're going to introduce in a sec, but They said Vipassana is loving kindness. Like that's how they define it. Yeah, I spoke too soon. So I I'm not sure what I'm about to say is accurate so Vipassana Meditation I think Vipassana translates into insight

Hmm. I think that I think I'm right about this. And traditionally within the Buddhist tradition in Thailand, they're part of what's called a teravada Buddhism, old school Buddhism, the first sort of, there's several schools of Buddhism. The teravada is the oldest school. And that's where I come out of too. So the Pasina generally, when as I understand it, when that term is used, it means insight meditation, which is basically, you know, there are many ways to practice it, but one, the primary way it's practice is watch your breath coming in and going out, and every time you get distracted, you start

again. But it is often paired with meta practice. Now, I don't know if meta is considered not vipassana or it's considered to be a part of a package, but the two are taught together in the tradition at least the one that I've grown up in. And there's a reason for that, especially in the West, where we are really hard on ourselves in meditation, there can be an unfriendliness that creeps in in a very prominent way. And so taking the edge off of that through meta is really important. Also, it's very hard to be happy if you're being a jerk all the time. Well, just what you're saying, you know, we are so judgmental in our society and we are so success obsessed, right? So that even when we meditate, we feel that we have to meditate

well. Yes. Totally different. We feel like we have to win at meditation. And I'm speaking from experience here, and it's just a losing proposition. More 10% happier after this. Hey, I'm Aresha, and I'm Brooke.

And we're the hosts of Wundery's podcast, Even the Rich, where we bring you absolutely true and absolutely shocking stories about the most famous families and biggest celebrities the world has ever seen. Our newest series is all about drag icon RuPaul Charles. After a childhood of being ignored by his absentee father, Ru goes out searching for love and acceptance. But the road to success is a rocky one.

Substance abuse and mental health struggles threaten to veer Roo off course. In our series Roo Paul Born Naked, we'll show you how Roo Paul overcame his demons and carved out a place for himself as one of the world's top entertainers, opening the doors for aspiring queens everywhere. Follow even the rich wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app. Back now, my colleague, ABC's Mac Guttman, let's just talk about Thailand. So, you, I can't believe how fast you wrote this book and I want to talk about the process in a second, but you've written a book about an event that feels like a hundred years ago

given the speed of the new cycle these days, but it actually was like just a few months ago, which was the rescue of those adorable boys in the Thai cave. Right. So, no, go ahead. You were right there for I want to hear everything. Right. So, early July 20, I guess this summer, 2018, it feels like a century ago, but it's not. These 12 youth soccer players and their coach, so 13 people in all, were discovered having been maroon

got lost in this cave. They had been there for 10 days. These two middle aged pasty white wear black socks with sandals, British divers, who happened to be the very best in the world at cave dive rescues and who happened to have all of their training in the miserable murky dark cold type of conditions that were found in this particular cave in Thailand. So they were perfectly suited, discovered the boys, they're like, oh my god, they're alive! And that triggered this unbelievable rush of journalists to Thailand because everybody thought they were dead and suddenly became the story of the summer. And over the next week or so, those divers, the Thai government, US Special Forces, and others rack their brains to figure out

how the heck they're going to get them out. And nobody really knew how. The divers themselves, once they saw how deep in the cave they were, which was like over a mile and a half, which doesn't seem that far, but a mile and a half of scuba diving in, you know, sometimes the cave was no higher than this table, so they're like three. No, like two and a half feet. Wow. Yeah.

I mean, basically you think about a two-year-old, basically the height of a two-year-old. And so they're squeezing through these things and they're still agtites and still lagnites and jagged rocks that are tearing at them, whacking their heads, and they just couldn't believe how far into the cave these boys were. What had happened is that monsoon rains hit, but this year in Thailand because of climate change was wetter than normal, about three feet wetter. And the mountain, which is called the sleeping princess,

which normally absorbed these kinds of monsoon rains that type of that time of year, couldn't absorb anymore. So instead of sponging it in, it expelled the water. The water goes coursing through the main K outside the cave and coursing into it, forced by gravity and by all these little slits inside the mountain. And the boys had gone into about two and a half three miles in on their way out. It was like team building excursion, they go on the way out, suddenly they see that their exit is blocked. And they had no way of knowing that they would be marooned inside this cave.

Nobody knew where they were. It took a while to figure it out. Anyway, fast forward a couple of weeks. They've been in there. These British guys find them. There's this whole international effort to try to rescue them. And it was so much more complex than even we knew when we were reporting about it on the ground.

And I mean, we can get to how reporting about it on the ground. And I mean, we can get to how they did it a little bit later, but you know, it is, for me, it's kind of, I love the story because it presents rescuers with an unbelievably challenging problem that almost had no solution and somehow it was ultimately solved, but just the complexity of it, the international nature of it, the farness of it was just the makings everybody knew at the time that this could either go really, really well or really, really badly. Yes, yes. And, you know, part of why I wanted to talk to you is one of the coping mechanisms that the coach for those 12 kids introduced in that awful scenario was meditation. So what kind of meditation was he teaching them?

Do we have a sense of how it impacted the kids? So the boys, so it's really interesting. And I didn't know this at the time, but this is through the reporting that I did in the book, once I was actually reporting the book, not for ABC News, it's incredible. The degree to which the temple was a part of these boys' lines. The Buddhist temple. The Buddhist temple, a Wat, it's called a Wat in Tai. Wat Doi, wow, this one.

And so it's almost something that they do on weekends. It's like a church almost or like a synagogue. But people go and they had meditators in more like a cultural center. It's a cultural center, but they all learn how to meditate. And many of them had been apprentice monks even before they went into the cave. And, you know, not for long for a couple of days or at a time. But they do learn the rudiments of meditation. And so a lot of them already knew mindfulness and breathing when they went in, but what

the coach did who had spent a decade as a Buddhist monk, honing meditation, honing the craft and the practice, what he did is he realized that they were totally screwed and probably facing death. And so he kept them active, kept them digging and trying to find an alternate exit, even though he knew it wouldn't happen. And every night and day, he would gather them together and he would lead them through mindfulness breathing

and meditation. And sometimes it would be with chance and sometimes it would just be mindfulness. I didn't know he'd been a monk for a decade. A decade. He's a young guy. He's 25 years old. It's kind of a sad story.

He's one of the people who in Northern Thailand there's a whole segment of society that are stateless. And they're from a people that lives. And this is the original golden triangle. And this golden triangle area between Myanmar, Thailand and Laos. Active in the drug trade. Active in the drug trade. Opium.

Opium. That's why it was originally called the golden triangle by the CIA in the 50s and 60s. Thailand really cracked down on the opium trade, but what has flourished since is human trafficking. And so now the biggest trade applied is women and possible slaves from the much poorer countries into Thailand and then elsewhere into Asia. And so everywhere we're digressing, but all along the route from Mesa, which is the town where this cave is, which is snug up against the border with me and mar um...

twenty miles south are these checkpoints and that's what they're going for they're looking for human smugglers uh... and and human traffickers with you know they're they're cargo quote unquote with you said there was some sort of sad story about him having become among so he became sorry thank you for bringing back my job that's his job He's good at it. So coach Aik as he's known was part of the stateless minority living in Northern Thailand and his parents were pretty poor and a plague and we still don't know

what swept through his village when he was 10 years old, about 15 years ago. And it killed both his parents and his brother. And so within weeks he was orphaned. And his aunt took him in, and as happens a lot in that part of the world, especially in Thailand, families feel that their children, especially if they're poor, can get a better education if they enroll them in a monastery as monks then they could otherwise because otherwise they'd have to be forced to work, always, and not go to school at all.

So Coach Aik was sent to this monastery where he spent the better part of a decade. I think he was 12 and not, you know, you do some really awful, menial jobs, but they also teach you language, arithmetic, meditation, and there's also a practice which helped them, which is part of the whole priesthood in Thailand, which is really, I think it is the original older version tradition of Buddhism, which is that desire is one of the roots of all evil obviously right and as you feel if you can curb desire you can better work on your practice of meditation and boot it some in general. So they ate, they didn't eat after a big noon time meal, they had an early morning breakfast

and then a noon time meal. So all of the monks including coach Aik were used to eating one meal and then being hungry the rest of the day. So for a decade, he'd spent life understanding hunger. And once you understand hunger after a while and basically temporary fasting, you can control it because you're used to it. And so I believe, and this is what we know is that it helped him sort of understand what they were going through in the cave, although obviously in Buddhism, you know, deprivation to certain

degrees is okay, but they don't deal with real terrible self-flaggulation. So you wouldn't starve yourself for 10 days like they did. But at least he had a basic understanding of what it's like to endure a little bit of suffering, and he probably endure a little bit of suffering. And he probably knew what a lot of suffering was since he'd lost his parents and had worked really hard since an early age in the monastery. So the coach was heavily criticized during all this for leading the kids into what could have been a death trap.

Is it your view after having done all of this reporting and writing that he got a bad rap? In my reporting, I learned that by the way, I just remembered, I'm sorry folks, all those listening. I was on air with Dan when the first boy was rescue. That's right. Hello from New York, I'm Dan Harris alongside Paula Ferris and we are coming on the air with some great news about the rescue operation to save members of that young soccer team and

their coach trapped in a cave in Thailand for more than two weeks. So let's go to ABC's metupman on the scene in Changri Thailand. It was a stupendous day for these people, Dan and Paul. And it was one of the happiest. Yeah, you were psyched. We were all psyched. We couldn't believe that it happened. And it was happening on air on Dan's show on GMA. I'm not my show, but I'll show that I'm involved in, yes. He's the host. He's the anchor.

And it was one of the great moments. I've experienced a TV. It was awesome. Happening live, it was great news. Yes. Only happy, and it was, you know, certainly something I write home about. But we digressed.

So even at that time, when the boys had gotten out, everybody was highly critical of the coach. But what we had learned Listen Whether or not a coach Should take 12 kids alone Into a cave miles in without alerting their parents Probably not the best idea, but this was something people did in these parts, right?

They would explore those caves. It was a right of passage Especially for high school kids at the school where these kids went. So kids did do it, not that often, it was sort of a graduation thing, but it was definitely a right of passage. And the park rangers, with whom I spoke, all knew that this kind of thing happened. But of course, they didn't register with the park before they went in. The coach didn't have a kid's tell their parents where they were going. So he does deserve a little bit of criticism for that. However, the man who knew the cave best in the world is a Brit known as Vern on Swarth.

Vern in on Swarth fell in love. He's a cavever. He's a pot holder from Lancaster, England, who used to explore the Yorkshire Dales, which is an area laced with caves and pot holes as the British called them, and all sorts of very interesting geographical and geographical features. And he's now 63 and he's been caving his whole life. He had fallen in love with a woman who happened to live in a village called Mesaan, moved in with her, found out about this cave, and began exploring it back in 2013.

An initial survey had been done of the cave back in 1987 by a pair of French surveyors, but it hadn't really been dealt with since then. And Vern committed himself. He was in love with his girlfriend, Tick. He was obsessed with the cave. And he had committed himself to learning this cave along with the partner of his better than anybody else in the world.

He re-did all of those surveys. He was supposed to go and finish one of his surveys the day after the boys went in. And he did go there, but as a rescuer that morning, rather than as a caveer. And so they were very lucky in that the person who knew the cave best in the whole world happened to be going in, then very next day was ready to go because he had all the stuff ready and happened to be in Mayside at the time that they were lost and was able to give rescuers at least initially a pretty good idea of where they might be and it turned out ultimately was exactly where they might be and it turned out ultimately was exactly

where they were. Let me skip backwards a little bit. Why do I bring up Vern on his worth? Because Vern told me it could, it would have happened to me. Went the way the cave is, it shaped like a Y, basically. So you go in and there are a couple of different branches. They went to the left, which is the longer branch where there is more to explore. That's what he would have done.

And there was no way to know that the cave was flooding once he'd passed a certain point. The only way to know is once you retrace your steps to go back out to the exit of the cave, then you realize that the water flows in from the entrance, basically, and cuts you off. So he said, Matt, it could have happened to me. You know, I'm as an experienced cavever, as a risen the world, I've been doing it for 40 years. it could have happened to me. You know, I'm as an experienced caver as a risen the world. I've been doing it for 40 years. It would have happened to me.

It's not the coach's fault. So what's the view of the coach now in Thailand after we've had time to, you know, is he still a kind of a goat there or do people, or people more sympathetic? He's lying nice. Really? Yeah, everybody has put that behind them. He's the guy who kept the kids alive through meditation, through discipline, through morale. He's regarded very highly.

What do the kids say about, you know, the various techniques he used, including meditation, to keep them calm and motivated and hopeful? How did they describe how this stuff helped them? I'll give you an example. They loved Coach Aik before. He was everybody's favorite coach because he was a young guy. He taught the under 13 team, taught coached. And so when I was up there, it was one of the boys' birthdays. And we weren't quite sure where everybody was, but we went to go see Coach Aik. We went to the monastery because he's gone back to be a monk again in order to say his thanks to the spirits of the cave and the God, well not the gods, but the spirits of the cave specifically.

And so he did his period of service. All of those kids showed up to be with him. Every time they celebrate anything, it's with him. They basically credit him with saving their lives. All of that stuff. And they don't, you know, it's the whole package of this young guy sticking with them, making sure they don't freak out, giving them the instruction to keep digging,

to ration their lights and, you know, the way they drank and protect themselves and stay together to keep warm. They basically credit him with everything. way they drank and protect themselves and stay together to keep warm. They basically credit him with everything and their lives now revolve more around the temple and Buddhism, but specifically coach egg, than they ever have. And so it was really sweet to see the other amazing thing to all your parents out there. I mean, if something like that had happened to my kids, we would not let our child out of our sight.

But in Mesa, there was such a sense of community that and a sense that the boys need to be boys, that when I went there and it was five weeks after they'd gotten out of the cave. And that night, all the boys had ridden their bikes at night to coach Aicks in the monastery up the hill and around Mesa. They'd done an overnight bike ride around in the area just a few days before. Some kids were riding moped, like their parents, and I talked to one of the mothers about this. I'm like, how, what's the secret?

Just like, if I don't let him be a boy, I'm going to lose him. And so it's interesting. It's just very different from our society. Also, it's safe there. Everybody knows them and everybody knew them before. And there's a real sense of community in this small town. Everybody was pulling for these boys and everybody was so elated when they got out. But also everybody understands that they need to keep doing these things, or else they'll never recover. No, I think that's right. Just in our remaining time here, there's two things I want to ask you about.

One is you said this before and I don't want to give away the book, but you indicated that in your reporting, it became clear that the rescue, which was amazing to all of us in real time, actually was even more amazing and more complicated. Can you just give us a sense of what we didn't know? The rescuers were all convinced. Now we didn't know this as reporters, but the rescuers were all convinced. Okay, there were two options, right?

The first option, which the Thai government wanted to go with, was to wait out the monsoon season and let the boys simply walk out the way they came in. The problem with that was, as the original divers realized, there was already only 15% oxygen in chamber 9, which was this enclosed space, which is probably around the size of the space that you and I are in right now. 15%. Anything lower than that? You start to lose cognitive ability your lips turn blue already at 15 to 17% you're losing some function

and it was only going down. The divers realized the swim in was so arduous they wouldn't be able to resupply them with food. They also realized that the water was fluctuating and rising and they hadn't even hit the peak of monsoon season. So at this point, the US Special Operations Group, which is part of the Air Force and the divers and it was getting late, told the Thai government, they're like, listen, I know you want zero option. That can't happen.

If we don't take the boys out now, before this next monsoon rain comes, they're all going to die. And if they don't die in this monsoon rain, they're going to fixate to death. It's going to be a slow strangulation. And if that doesn't happen, they're going to starve to death because we can't feed them for 100 days. You have to pull them out, and you've got to pull them out now. You have 36 hours before those rains come, we've got to get this mission going. If you don't, they will die. Okay?

How many can you save? Some. What do you mean some? The divers themselves. They didn't tell the Thai government explicitly. But when they first started doing the plans, they thought 80% would die during the extraction. 80%. That means, you know, nine out of the 12 boys.

Why? I mean, how? Because there are only basically four people in the world that turned out to be six who could actually complete this dive in and out without getting to serious trouble. The tiny AV seals who did it? Now I'm getting stuff away. One of them died.

One of them died, but in a different part of the dive. But the other guys ran out of air because you can't resupply. There's nothing in there It is literally like being on an alien planet. In fact, the the US Specialer Ops Air Force guy was like it would be easier to communicate with people on the moon than it would be to the boys and anybody else in chamber 9 There was no physical way on the planet to pass a message that deep into a cave that far into the earth. So they were literally marooned as far into the world as you could possibly imagine, with

no way to resupply them. So the divers themselves barely made it in and out. And how are they going to haul 120 pounds of kid? And the kids weren't going to be able to swim because they could barely swim so they had to knock them out. They sedated them so heavily that they could have amputated an arm and the kids would have noticed. Wow.

And they had to read. But they can prop a fall or something like that? Close. They gave them ketamine. Propopol risks death as we know from Michael Jackson. I actually explicitly talk about that in the book. So they gave them massive doses of ketamine. But as a horse triangle or a cat trinocloser?

One of those two. It is, but it's a very commonly used drug in emergency rooms as well. It's also very commonly available in developing countries like Thailand. So they had to figure out not only what they could use, but what they could find in Thailand. So they dosed them up on ketamine, that's what they would do, and then haul them out. Now they're wearing full face masks, but as I described earlier, the space that they were working and sometimes was, you know, knee high. And so the kids masks were getting bumped around,

but they couldn't even tell, because it was so dark, you wouldn't be able to see. So they were terrified that these kids would drown to death on the way out. So that everything was conspiring against them. So the tide government's like, all right, well, what do you see as a successful mission? And the US major who was basically running the operation with the help, with the British

and foreign divers as the actual people who are going to implement it, he said, listen, if we get one boy home to his parents, I personally would consider that a success. Mind you, the Thai government was telling the whole country and the world that they're offering a zero risk option, which means all of the boys would be rescued. And they're telling them that success would be one live boy. So the divers were convinced they could get themselves

out of the cave. They were convinced they could get the boys physical bodies out of the cave. They were not convinced they could get the boys out of the cave. They were not convinced they could get the boys out of the cave alive. So glad it worked and glad I did not have a child in that cave. So to talk about a crazy mission, you wrote this book and how many weeks? I wrote the first manuscript in 24 days. Whoa. Yeah.

It's California, everybody has a little guest house, and my family went off on the vacation that we were supposed to go to to Vermont with family. And the dog and I moved out to this little office, and I slept there, and I took my meals there. And for 24 days, I didn't leave the house except to walk the dog. Wow. And I call it, you know, because I was reporting it. I didn't know anything that you just heard. I did not know until I started writing a movie.

In these 24 days. Yes. So you were writing and reporting at the same time. Correct. That's even crazier. Yeah. So I was, I had conversations with Thailand and sometimes I'd have a translator on the phone simultaneously, which was a nightmare,

but thank you to WhatsApp and to LINE and all these other applications out there because otherwise we couldn't do it. I was talking to Malta where there was one diver, Great Britain, Belgium, Finland, Australia, where else? Oh, and the guy in Israel. And you traveled to Thailand? I wrote the manuscript and then I went to Thailand to do my third trip to report for the book. The first trip was for ABC, the second trip was also, so I did reporting then and then I went again for a third reporting trip and I literally was filling in blanks. I would do the interviews, I'd jump back, I'd rewrite in the car as I'm going. and I literally was filling in blanks.

I would do the interviews, I jump back, I rewrite, like, in the car as I'm going. So it was super intense and then, you know, people probably don't know, but there are multiple passes. So you basically do four versions of the book and you keep updating and refining it as you go along. Generally they want you to be done by the first or second version, but you know, I kept getting new stuff in. And the more I became exposed to people who are involved, the more connections I made. And so I ended up having this network of dozens of people.

And it was amazing for me, because it was so, you know, it's everything that is different from what we do on the nightly news or GMA or those stories where so much gets left on the cutting room floor. In this case, nothing did. And I could get as deep into the gizzards of people's lives in their stories as I possibly wanted. And I could tell every single juicy detail. And so I loved it. I reveled in every minute of it. Agonizing 20-hour days. I was going to say, because what you were describing sounds horrible to me. Not the

product but the process. Did you take any time to meditate during those 24 days? I did mindfulness breathing. I wouldn't say I'm meditated. But I was so exhausted when it was over that it took me how long baby to month. I just all I wanted to do was sleep. I've never been so tired in my entire life. I was narcoleptic Well congratulations. What's the name of the book again? The boys in the cave the boys in the cave deep inside the impossible mission Thailand rescue possible rescue in Thailand messing up my own title. It's I don't I don't know the subtitles The boys in the cave people on Amazon available everywhere Congratulations. I'm seriously.

It's an incredible achievement. And you were a great guest. So thank you. Appreciate it. It was really fun. Want to meet you. OK, that does it for another edition of the 10% Happier Podcast.

If you liked it, please take a minute to subscribe. Rate us. Also, if you want to suggest topics, you think we should cover or guests that we should bring in. Hit me up on Twitter at Dan B. Harris. Importantly, I want to thank the people who produced this podcast, Lauren Efron, Josh Cohan, and the rest of the folks here at ABC, who helped make this thing possible. We have tons of other podcasts.

You can check them out at ABCnewspodcasts.com. I'll talk to you next Wednesday. Hey, hey, prime members. I'll talk to you next Wednesday. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash Survey.