Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - Behind The Scenes Of The 10% Happier Podcast + A Sneak Preview Of Something Big

Episode Date: December 20, 2024

Dan and Executive Producer, DJ Cashmere, pull back the curtain on what we do, how we do it—and what’s coming next.In this episode we talk about:An exciting New Year's series reveal and upcoming meditation challengeWhat goes into making the show–and why we do itThe ins and outs of starting a new businessAnd much moreSign up for Dan’s newsletter hereFollow Dan on social: Instagram, TikTokTen Percent Happier online bookstoreSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelOur favorite playlists on: Anxiety, Sleep, Relationships, Most Popular EpisodesFull Shownotes: https://meditatehappier.com/podcast/tph/bts-878See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to 10% happier early and ad free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. It's the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, everybody. We are doing a little experimental podcast today. We're going to take you behind the scenes here at the 10% Happier podcast. And we also want to tell you about a big new project we're launching that we're really excited about.

So to help me with this little experiment, I'm bringing in our executive producer, DJ Kashmir. Yo, how we doing DJ? Doing all right. It's nice to see you. Likewise. All right. So I guess folks will be hearing this at just a few days before Christmas and Hanukkah and New Year's. What do you have on deck with you and the family, Dan? I know this time of year can be hard for a lot of people, but for me personally, I love it. I'm half Jewish, half Christian,

and I married a thoroughbred, sheiksa, non-Jew Christian. So we do Christmas in a big way around my house. We got the Christmas tree, and by we, I mean Bianca got the Christmas tree almost immediately after Thanksgiving. And we will be having a horde of children and their caretakers at our house on Christmas morning. It will be an orgy of consumerism and consumption of food. And then we will go down to Florida for a couple of days for an inexpensive vacation,

because we're going to stay with a friend of mine, Stefan, who's one of my little Sangha mates. I have this Sangha, this group of friends and fellow meditators that consists of only three people and one of them lives in Florida. He moved there a couple of years ago, so we're going to go spend some time with him and his family and then come back here and ride out the rest of the holidays while doing a staycation. What about you? Awesome. But you you? Awesome. But you seem genuinely excited.

Your face is like lit up thinking about that stuff. So I'm happy for you. Yeah, so we, let's see, we're recording this in early December. My brother and his partner are gonna come visit. They're coming right between Thanksgiving and Christmas so as not to deal with the holiday like travel craziness but they are coming which is great. We're excited to see them and

we're gonna get a Christmas tree when they're here and my son's second birthday party is coming up. And then Christmas day we host and then the small version of my wife's family, two or three days later we go to her sister's house for the large version of her family. My kids have so many cousins in Chicago that I literally do not know the actual number of cousins. That's how many cousins it is, which is awesome. It's part of why we moved back here. And then over New Year's,

this actually, I'm really excited about this. Over New Year's, my wife and I are taking the kids on a family meditation retreat for a week. It's first time doing that. And the hope is they're a little young for it and we almost canceled the plan because we have a feeling we're going to mostly just spend it chasing them around the grounds of the meditation center. But we figured at the end of the day, like still just like being there in that kind of

energy and no car and no figuring out meals and no devices for a week just feels like an exciting reset and yeah I have a feeling we might try to make like an annual tradition out of it if it goes well but that might be hubris so check back in with me in a month or two. Contemplative hubris. No I love that. I think that's awesome. I really wish that we had done that with Alexander when he was younger. Yeah I'm feeling some envy over here. That's awesome. I really wish that we had done that with Alexander when he was younger. Yeah, I'm feeling some envy over here. That's awesome. Yeah, the first meditation retreat I ever went on,

there were a lot of families and kids around. It was not a silent retreat. And I remember meeting this 14 year old kid who'd been coming every year for like a decade. And you could just tell when you met him that he had some kind of access to some kind of medicine or something that I did not have when I was 14. And that was before my wife and I were married,

long before we had kids. We weren't even dating then. But I remember meeting this one kid, I think his name was Casper. Which maybe added to the sense of magic. I don't know, he was just a super awesome kid, really grounded, really present, really happy. And I just remember telling myself then and there,

like, this is gonna be a thing, when and if I can make it a thing. So yeah. It's also the subject of Wes Anderson's next movie, I'm sure. Right. So you usually ask me at the top of these, like, what are we doing today? And I don't actually quite know what we're doing today. But I think what we want to do is just take folks behind the scenes on what's happening in 10% world a little bit. And then I do know that we've got some really exciting plans to share with folks coming up around New Year's. But let's just start with how you're doing and what's happening. This team behind the scenes has been through so much change and transition

is in the midst of a lot of that right now. What's happening in your world, in our world that listeners might be interested in? Yeah, let me just say the quiet part out loud before I answer your question directly. The goal of this episode is to talk about the slate of programming we have coming up in January, which is our biggest month of the year here on this podcast. And also to tell you about this amazing new project we're kicking off over on danharris.com, which is a meditation challenge, which will also include some opportunities to interact with me live, which have really been exciting for us.

But we didn't wanna just do an episode that was purely promotional in some sort of lame way. We wanted to add some value. And so what we thought is that we would, you and I would have this conversation and really take people behind the scenes and give them a glimpse of what goes into making the show, the obstacles we're trying to overcome at the moment.

And then we'll talk a little bit about what we have coming up. So just to say that out loud. But to answer your question, I've actually been toying with starting a column recently, they were on Substack or in LinkedIn, just kind of keeping a diary of what it's like to start a new business.

Because it's incredibly hard. It's really interesting and fun too, but it's really hard and for an anxious person, especially somebody whose anxiety kind of centers around often irrational, but deep, deeply conditioned fears around money and security. You know, as I've often said, I have a great grandfather who took his own life

after having lost the family fortune and been indicted for some sort of fraud. And I sort of feel like that guy's blood runs through my veins and I'm not doing anything, I don't think, untoward, but that kind of insecurity, that kind of hustler energy, it's a real issue for me to manage. So launching a business has been kind of an interesting practice. And as many people know, I went through this big earthquake of separating from the 10% happier meditation app that was announced and made public in September.

But it was a process that had been going on for two or three years beforehand. And it caused me a lot of fear and anxiety and anger and lots of stuff. Self recrimination. I certainly was not always at my best during that process. And so now we're doing the quote unquote fun part, which is launching this new business, but we started this danharris.com, the sub stack, and that's been awesome to watch that grow.

And also, if we have a down week, I can see my spirits descend. And similarly with this podcast, which isn't new, but now really is the center of my professional life. You send out these detailed analysis, which I've sometimes thought about making public of our monthly performance. And we had a tough month the other day

and it wasn't horrible, but it was down from the previous months. And I could just watch my catastrophizing ramp up when I read those emails. Anyway, there's so much to say about launching a business. I'm just kind of scratching the surface, but I don't want to flood you with too much information. And also you're in it too.

So like, how's all this going for you? Yeah, it is exciting and it is fun and it is hard. And I am anxious. Right? So, we like you knew that this separation was coming for a while, but now we're in the midst of actually doing the separating. And it's a huge change. It's a huge change for the people that make the show every day.

And we are actively trying to figure out, like, okay, who are we now? And why do we do what we do? And how do we want to do what we do? What are our core values? How do we want to be with each other? What's the org chart? How many people should be employed? What should we be making?

What can we afford to try right now? What has to wait? It seems like new opportunities come up on the horizon every day, but we're also busy doing the things we've already committed to. So there's this constant push-pull of, you know, do we say yes to another new thing or not? I've actually spent a lot of the last few weeks on calls with people who run shows like this show, finding out how they do what they do.

So I talked to someone on Gretchen Rubin's team, I talked to someone on Ryan Holiday's team, talked to someone on Shankar Vadantam's team, talked to someone on Jordan Harbinger's team, and I haven't had a chance to download any of this with you yet, but the number one finding was that no one does this the same way at all. There is no playbook. Those four organizations could not be run more differently.

It's as if I talked to a person who ran a hotel, a person who ran a fast food joint, a person who ran an amusement park and a person who ran like Comcast. It was just wild. And so yeah, you know, this feeling of looking for an answer when the reality is there isn't one that is anxiety inducing. But at the same time, like we have watched so many people who have been listening for so long and also folks who are new to the show find you in recent months in places they hadn't been able to find you before. You're doing more

on Instagram and reaching people you didn't used to reach before. We've got folks writing in on Substack every day and interacting directly with you, with me, with the meditation teachers who are coming on the show. And so I think the thing that's buoyed me through all of it is we just have much greater access than we ever did before to folks who are giving us really direct feedback, both about what they want from us, but also about the ways that the stuff we do is helping them do their lives better. And, you know, you can get a note from a listener that can get you through a month, or at least that's been my experience. So that's been the saving grace in all of it. It's just how many people are signing up and showing up and sticking around and speaking up and engaging.

It feels like something closer to community than it did a year ago. So much in there that I wanted to react to that I've forgotten. So many of the things I wanted to say. I know I talk a lot, Dan, I know. No, no, no, that was not a criticism at all. Just actually more of a compliment.

You said a lot of interesting things there. So I'll pick up on the last thing, which is it is so easy to forget that our job is to help people. Because run a business and making sure we can pay our mortgages and keep people employed. And it's easy to get sucked into how are the posts on Instagram doing?

How's Substack performing? How's the podcast performing? And so we have to, I have to remind myself all the time. That's why I have this little tattoo on my wrist that says FTBOAB for the benefit of all beings, which as I've often joked is kind of off brand in its earnestness, but it is the point. And so anything we can do to remember for me, I'll just keep it to myself, it gets me through the rough patches. It doesn't mean I don't have rough patches.

I had a rough email and subsequent conversation just last night and it was, you know, I had a little trouble sleeping and, you know, I woke up thinking about it and, but the quicker I can get back to, yeah, I know what my job is here, the saner I am. Does that sound right to you? Yeah, totally. I mean, it reminds me of, you know, we had the team together in New York City for a retreat a few weeks back.

And we, one of the first things we did was we had a big old whiteboard and we just wrote down, people are just shouting out answers to the question, why do we do this? We spent a solid hour just talking about answers to that question, filled the board with like a couple dozen answers to that question. And I think, you know, there's a reason that we wanted to start there. And it's because if you lose track of what's motivating you, then all of the slings

and arrows that are coming no matter what just hurt a lot more. If you can try to keep an eye on what's motivating you, it can not only help the hard stuff go down easier, but it can help you make better decisions. And so, yeah, that totally resonates. And I think you've been clear for a long time now that you get out of bed in the morning and you're thinking about how can I make cool shit with people that I enjoy working with

that helps people do their lives better. And I don't know, I would imagine on the days when you forget to ask yourself that question in the morning, the day feels a little harder. Yes. Because you're on this, what's this analogy that Joseph sometimes uses like, we're like bees in a jar, just kind of floating up and down through these various mental states all day long. There's no ballast. We're just yanked around by exogenous forces, like whatever, the latest data from Instagram or Substantive or the podcast, instead of having a sturdy ground to stand on.

In Buddhism, we talk a lot about the fact that there is no ground, which is true. But the sturdiest ground there is, is altruism, is giving a shit, is the desire to be useful. And you know, the Dalai Lama talks about this beautifully. And he's often thought of as this giggly, cuddly character, but let's not forget, he's the leader of a nation in exile. And he has kept that cause in the headlines for decades because he's a wily political practitioner as well. And his fuel, he's constantly argues that the cleanest burning fuel is altruism, is compassion.

And for me, if I can just come back to that ground as much as possible, I'm just much less of an asshole to myself and others. Yeah, that makes sense. The other thing you mentioned earlier that this is way less philosophical and a much more practical business point that I did want to make sure I double clicked on, which is that just for people who don't follow the media business, when I got into mainstream media in the 90s, first in local news and then moving to ABC News in 2000, you know, it was a pretty simple media ecosystem. The internet was around, but it wasn't huge yet. We didn't have social media, we didn't have YouTube, we didn't have podcasts, we had radio, television and newspapers, generally speaking. And now it is a massive proliferation of social media companies like Substack and podcasts

and there's just so many ways to have a voice, which I think is awesome. It has lots of deleterious impacts in terms of the end user. I think that this Wild West environment has created media silos so that we're not all sharing the same information, and that leads to increased polarization.

I think social media can have all sorts of negative impacts on our psychology. I'm not saying this is all good, but it is exciting if you're a content producer, especially if you're not in one of these mainstream organizations that are really struggling. With a few notable exceptions like the New York Times, many mainstream organizations are really struggling.

So what we've seen is a rise of, and this is not my term, but like one person media companies, media companies that are basically built around a loud mouth like me or like Sam Harris or in the political space, you've got people like Ben Shapiro and Megyn Kelly on the right and on the left, you've got the Pod Save America people in the obviously that's a multi headed organization, but charismatic personalities who can cut through the noise in these cluttered spaces like podcasts and social media. And you have done a lot of research on this and I have separately as well.

There is no clear business model. I mean, there are some best practices for sure, but everybody's doing it differently. There is no Harvard case study yet that I'm aware of on how to run one of these companies. And so it's maddening if you're trying to build one. And I spent a lot of my time and now you are too thinking about how to run one of these things sustainably. It's exciting and also massively anxiety producing. Yeah, actually I did look for a Harvard Business School case study on how to run one of these and I didn't find one, which doesn't mean it's not there.

But I tried because I thought that would be a good thing to look at together on retreat. And yeah, I have spent a lot of time thinking about what does it mean to build this thing around you? And how do we keep you healthy? And how do we keep everyone else's relationship to you healthy in this ecosystem? How do we make sure that we are executing on your ideas when they're great and find space to say no when they're not or when there's not time. How do I not have 10 different team members texting you, emailing you, slacking you, calling

you at all hours of the day, chasing you down for things? And this is one of the things I talked about with some of these members of some of these other teams. What does it mean to build a thing around a person, that person's strengths and that person's foibles and that person's preferences? I think something you and I are going to talk a lot about in the coming weeks as this sort of separation phase finalizes and the kind of new business launch really crystallizes is like, how do you want to interact with the team?

What do you want to personally have your hand on? What do you not need to have your hand on? Because there's a very easy way in which you can become both the generator of ideas and the bottleneck. We can't have everyone waiting on you for things all day and we can't have you inundated with stuff from us all day. And so yeah, it's tricky but I think we've already learned a bunch and we are continuing to work and on the nitty-gritty details because so many of the answers are in the weeds. For example, when you do voiceover for this show,

when you read an ad, when you do an intro for an episode, when you do an outro, like you do all of that in one big bundle on the weekend every week, because we sync it up to send you a whole giant package of it on Thursday. It took a long time to figure out that that's what worked. And now it's like, is that still working? Do we send you the things we need from you on Substack?

Like, do we send you those in that same bundle? And like, on some level, that's like the most boring detail possible, but it's like the devil really is in the details. And how we answer those things dictates whether or not everybody else's job feels sane and whether or not you can sit down and finish that book. Ha ha ha.

Ha ha ha. Finish the book that I've been working on for six years. Yes, that's been a battle. You've been working on for six years. Yes. That's been a battle. You've been so thoughtful about all of this. I mean, there are the interpersonal dynamics are incredibly tricky. They're always tricky, but in this, there are specific challenges when you've got a company with a very clear figurehead.

And yeah, you've been really thoughtful about this. And just to highlight one of the dynamics that you identified there is, you know, often people's greatest strengths are also their greatest weakness. So two for me, one is that I have a great strength in that I'm an idea machine. And it's also my greatest weakness because many of my ideas are stupid and I can get attached to them and I can flood the team in a way that makes people feel burned out. And so that's a big challenge that we've kind of identified as a group and are really talking about and working on.

And then the other is kind of related, which is stubbornness. I can work incredibly hard through real adversity and overcome often, not always. And then I also can just get overly attached to things that I should have dropped years ago. Learning how in a power dynamic where I'm the figurehead of the company to give an operating manual to people to help manage me. And then also in return to listen carefully to you

and hear what your strengths and weaknesses are. Like this is real work and we don't, the more I'm talking about it with you, the more I'm realizing we should probably talk about this publicly all the time because I think it's really interesting and probably would be very useful to anybody, whether you're building a business or not. But now I've just come up with a new content vertical that is going to make your life hard. You know, when we were doing that retreat I referenced earlier, we, and I mean, I think this is actually to your credit, we spent a solid hour, hour and a half on the second

day of the retreat. We cleared out the whiteboard from our why and our how and our core values. And we just spent an hour, hour and a half talking about your strengths and weaknesses in front of you and you were actively contributing. And it was in an effort to really, in the language you used earlier, say the quiet parts out loud, make sure that we're all on the same page about what the dynamics are

and what the best way is to manage it. And something that I think worked well across the board of that retreat is that every time we started a new session, we kind of absolved ourselves of responsibilities for landing on the answer in that session, right? So when we talked about our why, you push this, you were really clear, like, we don't have to award Smithist to perfection. We don't have to have, like, the mission and vision statement ready to put on a t-shirt an hour from now. And it was the same thing when we were talking about

our dynamics with you. It was like, let's just try to get to a shared reality. We don't have to fix it now, we might not fix it ever. You know, one of the phrases you like to use a lot is like, this may not even be a problem to be solved, it may just be a dynamic to be managed, but it's hard to manage it if we can't get on the same page about it. And so we've just been spending a ton of time, both collectively in person and in one-on-ones and in group meetings, just trying to move edge closer and closer and closer to, if not solutions yet, then at least all being in the same shared reality together. Yeah.

I found those sessions to be incredibly helpful to me. And I think part of it is, yeah, it's hard to sit around talking about my strengths and weaknesses as a boss while I'm in the room. I feel, I don't know, I can't speak for anybody else, but I feel a lot of trust. And I've known a lot of the room, I feel, I don't know, I can't speak for anybody else, but I feel a lot of trust. And I've known a lot of the people, you and Tony Magyar, who's the boss of the whole thing. I've known you guys for a while and really worked closely with you. So there's a lot of feeling of like, this is a safe, I don't love that word, but this is a safe place to have this conversation.

I'm mindful of the fact that, or two facts. A, I'm now really excited about doing more stuff like this more often, which is exactly what you don't want to hear because I'm constantly coming up with ideas and maybe this isn't even a good one. And then B, when you and I were brainstorming about what this episode could be, you didn't want it to be overly long or involved with for a bunch of good reasons on the back end that cause it can, one of my issues is that I get excited about an idea, but I'm kind of ignorant about what it entails downstream for other people.

And this is a good case study. Cause I was thinking we should have this big long conversation where we take people in inside the show. And you're like, yeah, if it's a long conversation though, it's more work for everybody else to get it posted. I say all that because we've now talked for a while, which I'm deeply enjoying, but I'm also sensitive to the points you've made to me about

not wanting to make this overly long. So perhaps we should, and this genuinely is a question, move on to the stuff we want to tell people about that's coming up. I think that's right. And I think this is a good taste of a kind of conversation we have thought about having more of. And so it's an opportunity for listeners, if they've stuck with us this long, and if they're interested in this kind of behind the scenes thing, like, and I mean this genuinely, like, let us know.

Go on danharris.com and let us know so that we know. And this is fun to do. And luckily, the thing we're about to talk about is also fun to do, which is the stuff that we're actually making and offering to people. And we are coming up on New Year's. New Year's is the biggest time of the year for us in a lot of ways.

We've been thinking about New Year's 25, basically, since New Year's 2024, because people across the US and around the world are noticing the fact that the calendar is about to turn over and looking to kind of harness what sometimes gets called that fresh start effect to start a good habit, break a bad habit, make a resolution. And so we think hard every year about how to meet that moment. And we just thought we'd let people

know a little bit of what's coming up in a week and a half around New Year's because we're taking probably the biggest swing we ever have at this time of year, even though we historically have always taken a relatively big swing. So yeah, do you want to start? Do you want me to start talking people through what to expect? Yeah, so first we're going to start talking about the programming on the podcast. And DJ is right, we think about New Year's all year long. It's our Super Bowl because it is the time of our numbers go through the roof, New Year's and then just kind of declined from there all year long. And so we really want to, as you said before, meet that moment robustly.

And you're the one who devised our programming slate for this January. So I would kind of want you to take the mic and describe what we're doing. Yeah. So what I did this time around was I did a little research on what are the top resolutions people are going to be making. And it didn't take too long to figure out, if you just do a little bit of Googling, what some of the most common resolutions are.

And a lot of them are intuitive. And we put together kind of a short list of the things that we think the majority of our listeners are going to be trying to tackle come January 1. And we thought really hard about how can we support them in doing that, right? Because we know on the one hand that this fresh start effect is real and that moments like New Year's can be great opportunities to try to hit reset buttons and engage in some kind of habit formation.

We also know that New Year's resolutions are notoriously likely to be broken by early to mid February because habit formation is, you know, to use another one of your phrases, it's diabolically hard. So what can we do to try to help people out? So what we decided to do was we picked what seemed to be the top four resolutions. Number one, diet, exercise, health, fitness, being healthier in our bodies. Number two is about financial health, making better choices, saving more, and also just how to have a healthier relationship to our money. Number three, reducing work stress,

increasing work-life balance, spending more time with the family, but also doing work that's meaningful to us. People may be wanting to switch careers or advance in their careers. And then number four is about breaking bad habits. So whether that's breaking up with your phone or undoing some kind of addiction, whether it's dry January, wanting to drink less, smoke less, that kind of thing. Those seem to be the top four. And what we're going to do is we're going to take a week on each of those resolutions. And on Monday, you're going to get a brand new episode with a top-notch scientific expert talking you through what the research says about how to approach that resolution and that kind of habit

change effectively. And then on Wednesday, you're going to get the Dharma take on it. A meditation teacher is going to come in and help us hear about how to meditate on these things and how to be more mindful of the way that we engage with these things. So it's going to be four straight weeks, one per resolution, Science Monday, Dharma Wednesday, just giving people a sort of classic 10% happier. And the thought is almost like, go into New Year's with an idea of your resolution

in your mind, and then maybe just hold it lightly while we walk you through the month and see if some of what you hear might not be able to help you tweak, hone the resolution and the supports you're putting around that resolution to make it a little more likely that you'll be able to be successful in whatever it supports you're putting around that resolution to make it a little more likely that you'll be able to be successful in whatever it is you're setting out to do.

That was a great description and it's a really elegant design for the month. I can take zero credit for it. And actually, I haven't been a boss until quite late in life. I was an anchorman, but I wasn't really in charge. I didn't have any direct reports until I started this business. And one of the unforeseen delights of being a boss is when the people who work for you have better ideas than you would have.

And this is a great example of that. And so I think we've already recorded most, if not all of the episodes and they're excellent. So I'm really excited for people to listen and feedback to us on how they think it's going. Just to lift the curtain even further, we already have February and March and much of April planned out and we've got lots of really cool ideas

for stuff that will come after our big January. That's right. Yeah, we try to plan out as far ahead as we can. One of the things that lets us do is be really nimble when stuff comes up at the last minute. There's one more thing I wanted to say about January, which is we've got a couple extra bells and whistles in addition to the lineup that I talked about. So on January 1st, on New Year's Day itself, we've got a brand new episode with the breakout star of

10% Happiers 2024 editorial programming. So Vinny Ferraro came on in, I believe it was May for the first time. Audience loved him. The episode did gangbusters. It was the top one or two highest performing episodes of the entire year. We brought him back in the fall for a handful of episodes and he'll be back on New Year's Day for a really, really, really special episode about some deeply counterintuitive, but deeply wise and hard-won suggestions about how to build a meditation practice in 2025 that might allow you to have a deeply meaningful year in a way that separates it from all the years you've had before. So I'm really excited about his episode on the first. And then on the third, which is a Friday, we've got a solo episode with you, Dan, where

you're basically breaking down your, almost a decade at this point, your learnings from having hosted this podcast for however many hundreds of episodes we've made. And so you're going to give people kind of a roadmap for Habit Formation 101, drawing from the wisdom of our vast archive. And that's actually going to set the table for all these scientific and meditation experts that are coming down the pike for the rest of January. So a lot to look forward to on the pod, or also taking some big swings

outside of the pod. So should we put it there? Yeah, I can pick up from there. So January, this year, the first is a Wednesday, and a lot of people are still kind of coming back from vacation. So we didn't start the big series that DJ described breaking down a resolution per week. We don't start that until the following Monday, which is the sixth. So in that first half week of January, we're doing the Vinny Ferraro episode.

And then on Wednesday, and then on Friday, we'll drop my solo podcast on habit formation. And then we'll kick off the series on the sixth. And simultaneously on the sixth, we're gonna kick off a meditation challenge, a free meditation challenge, which will be running through danharris.com. You can just go to danharris.com or find me on Substack.

And basically every day for seven days, you'll get in your inbox, a guided meditation, either guided by me or curated by me. So the first one will be from me and the rest will be from my close friends in the meditation world, people like Sharon Salzberg and Joseph Goldstein and 7A Solassi and Jeff Warren. And you'll get that in your inbox every day for seven days. By the way, if you're already signed up at tanharris.com, there's nothing more to do. You'll get those emails automatically. And if you're not signed up, you can sign up for free.

And so you'll get those emails every morning and then three times during the course of that week in the evenings, so Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday, I will do live check-ins. So people can ask me questions about starting or restarting or refreshing their meditation practice. This challenge is really designed for people at all levels. If you're a total newbie or if you did it a while and, you know, want to get back into the habit or if you're experienced, this is good for everybody. You can ask me questions, whatever level you're coming from. The first live check-in will be free. The second two will be for paid subscribers. And yeah, we're really excited about this. This is kind of just another in a

long series of experiments we're running. This is what you have to do. I've found when you're starting a new company is run a ton of experiments and see what the audience responds to. But we did an experiment during the election where we did live guided meditations and check-ins every day throughout election week just to see what would happen. And the response was overwhelming. And so we're kind of pivoting the business a little bit toward these chances to interact live with me

and to do something all together at the same time. What's interesting is that when I do a live event, we send out the video to the paid subscribers and thousands of people watch it and participate even asynchronously afterwards. So it appears to be a lot of signal here about some potential value we can add. Anyway, that was a long way of saying we're doing

a meditation challenge on top of our usual robust programming on the podcast, and we'd love to have you join for both. Yeah, absolutely. I think maybe one of the reasons that there's been so much signal here that people really seem to be responding to these live check-ins is, you know, goes back to something we talk about on the show all the time and was one of the Buddha's most foundational teachings, which is meditation is not a solo endeavor. This is not meant to be done strictly alone, right? The Buddha talked a lot about sangha, which just means community.

And I think what we're starting to see over on danharris.com is that we're starting to build a real sense of community. You know, we've been having these chats every time a new episode goes live, where we, you and I and other producers and sometimes the guests, are interacting directly with our listeners about what they heard in the episode, what the pain points are in their lives, how it's landing for them, what questions and confusion points still exist. And I think this idea of sending everyone a meditation to do every day, seven days in a row, and then also giving them a time to come and all get together and kind of decompress and share and ask questions about it throughout the week. That's Sangha, right? Like

this is our fledgling attempt to start to try to build some real sense of community around this show and give people an opportunity to not only have great advice coming from experts and curated by you and by the team, but also a place to talk through all of that and to bounce ideas off of each other. I'm really looking forward to hearing what people have to say about the ways that their resolutions might be altered by the conversations that we're having over the course of January. I'm really looking forward to giving people a chance to meditate, to do the same meditation every day for a week to kick off the new year.

One of the reasons we wanted to do a meditation challenge at this time is that no matter what habit you're trying to break or change or add, whether it's something around your eating or your exercise or your finances or your work or an addiction or any of it, one of the operating theses of this show is that meditation is the foundational habit, right?

Mindfulness meditation in particular, to the ability to know what is happening in your mind and in your body and in the world around you at any given time. Without that, it's really hard to do any of these other things. And so we wanted to sync a meditation challenge with this series so that people could start or restart or reboot or deepen their practice as they're getting this advice. And the meditations themselves are awesome and they're varied. I think just about everyone will come across at least one practice over the course of that week that is not a part of their regular rotation that they might enjoy. So it's exciting. And just to say one more time,

because this is the kind of thing we're going to get 1 million emails about, just to be super clear. If you want to do it, all you have to do is sign up at danharris.com. And on January the 6th, the meditation will fall on your inbox and it will fall in your inbox every day thereafter. And information about when the live check-ins are and everything will also be there too. If you're already signed up at danharris.com, you have to do precisely nothing. You will get the thing. So yeah, that's all you got to do. All you have to do precisely nothing. You will get the thing.

Yeah, that's all you got to do. All you got to do. Thank you for doing that. I appreciate it. And just to reemphasize, there is a lot of evidence to show that having a mindfulness practice can help you in many aspects of habit formation. It can be helpful if you're trying to exercise more or read more or whatever, just the ability to have this self-awareness can help you ride and not give into some of the impulses that often derail habit formation. So it's not a silver bullet, but it's quite helpful. Okay, well, this was really fun for me. The bad part for you is that it was so fun

that I'm probably gonna insist we do it more often. But thank you for bearing with me and this and many other regards. Yeah, no, this is great. Thanks for doing it. Okay, everybody, thank you for listening. Don't forget to sign up over at danharris.com for the Meditation Challenge. Don't forget to keep your eyes and ears peeled for more episodes coming up from us in our big January. And finally, just before I really end this, I just want to say thank you to everybody who works so hard on this show.

Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our production manager. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme. If you like 10% happier, and I hope you do, you can listen early and ad free right now

by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey.