Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - Here's What I Learned From Writing A Whole Book About Meditation | Dan Harris

Episode Date: March 4, 2024

The tables have turned: Dan is interviewed by two of his producers.This is the kickoff episode of our upcoming series celebrating the 10th anniversary of Dan’s book, where two of Dan’s producers, DJ Cashmere and Lauren Smith, interview him.We talk about the story behind the book, what it was like to have a panic attack on national television, why Dan decided to admit it publicly, how the success of the book utterly transformed his life, and what he learned… Both while writing the book and subsequently.We talk about concepts such as “Respond, not react,” why our faults aren’t our fault (but they are our responsibility), and whether we all have the capacity to change. DJ and Lauren will even weigh in on how they think Dan’s doing on the score.To order the revised tenth anniversary edition of 10% Happier: click here For tickets to Dan Harris: Celebrating 10 Years of 10% Happier at Symphony Space: click hereSign up for Dan’s weekly 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://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/736-10th-anniversaryAdditional Resources:Download the Ten Percent Happier app today: https://10percenthappier.app.link/installSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, Dan here. Before we start the show, I want to tell you about a live recording of this podcast that we're doing in New York City on March 28th. I will be interviewing two frequent flyers from this show, the legendary meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein, who will be just coming off a three month solo silent meditation retreat, and Dr. Mark Epstein, a Buddhist therapist and bestselling author. The event will actually be a celebration of the 10th anniversary of my first book, 10% Happier and a percentage of the proceeds will go to the New York Insight Meditation Center. Come early if you want for a VIP guided meditation and Q&A with me. Thanks to our friends over at Audible for sponsoring this show and the event,

Tickets on sale right now at symphonyspace.org. and the event tickets on sale right now at symphonyspace.org. How do we want to do this guys? Should we, Dan, do you want us to welcome you? Is that? That's a good idea. Yeah. Yeah, okay. Should we just dive in? Yeah, let's dive in. Okay. Let's do it. It's going to be weird.

I would just say as an overarching thing, we should enjoy this. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Good. I would just say as an overarching thing, we should enjoy this. Yes. Yeah, yeah, good. This is the 10% Happier Podcast.

I'm Dan Harris. Hello everybody, how we doing? This show would not exist. In fact, my whole career as a meditation evangelist or whatever you want to call it, none of it would exist if I had not taken a huge risk 10 years ago and put out a book called 10% Happier, after which this show is of course named. It really was a huge risk. At the time, as many of you know, I was a network

news anchor, co-host of Nightline, also the co-host of the weekend editions of Good Morning America. I also spent a lot of time traveling around the world doing investigative stories and covering breaking news. So to be in this position and to publicly admit that I had struggled with depression and then self-medicated with cocaine and that it all resulted in a panic attack on Good Morning America. Well, as you can imagine, that was something of an out-of-the-box career move. And bear in mind, this was well before the current era where lots of people talk about

their mental health challenges openly. While I was terrified that the book might torpedo my career, I did not actually think, even if I survived, that the book would amount to much. However, to my career, I did not actually think, even if I survived, that the book would amount to much. However, to my surprise, the book became pretty successful, it produced this podcast, and it allowed me to do something I never would have imagined, quit the news business, and work in the world of mental health and happiness full-time. Anyway, the book is turning 10 years old this month. I just put out a revised 10th anniversary

edition of the book with a new preface and expanded appendix filled with meditation instructions. To celebrate this milestone, we're kicking off a big series in which I'm going to go back and interview many of the major players from the book. You're going to hear me talk to people like Deepak Chopra who's never been on this show before, also Joseph Goldstein, Dr. Mark Epstein, and even my younger brother who, if you read the book, played the role of snarky skeptic, was even more skeptical than I was about meditation and has, however, to my delight, recently become a convert. We are kicking this series off today with an unusual episode where two of my producers, DJ Kashmir and Lauren Smith, interview me. We talk about the story behind the book, what it was like

to have a panic attack on national television, why I decided to admit it publicly, how the success of the book utterly transformed my life, and what I learned during all of this, both while writing the book and subsequently. We talk about concepts such as respond, not react, why our faults are not our fault, but they are our responsibility, and whether every one of us has the capacity to change. DJ and Lauren will even weigh in on how they think I'm doing on the change front these days. That is coming up. First though, though some BSP blatant self-promotion Don't forget. I'm doing a live podcast taping in New York City on March 28th I'll be talking to Joseph Goldstein the great meditation teacher who will have just wrapped up his annual three-month

Solo silent meditation retreat. So we'll talk to him about what he learned. I'll also be talking to Dr. Mark Epstein, a Buddhist therapist who's been on the show many times and has been a great friend to me and a mentor for many, many years. There will be a band there, Mates of State, and you'll have one of your first opportunities to buy 10% happier merch, which we just started making. Oh, and finally, if you come early and pay a little extra, you can get a VIP ticket where you can get a guided meditation from me and a Q and A. Tickets on sale right now at symphonyspace.org. We're doing this event, by the way,

as a celebration of the 10th anniversary of a book I wrote called 10% Happier. Shortly after I wrote the book, I not only started this podcast, but I co-founded the 10% Happier app. And in celebration of the 10th anniversary until the end of the month, you can get the app for 40% off. Get this deal before it ends by going to 10%.com slash 40 and dive into guided meditations and insightful courses designed for you. That's 10%. One word all spelled out. com slash four zero for 40% off your subscription.

When you visit Audible, there are endless ways to ignite your imagination with over 750,000 titles, including bestsellers. There's a listen for every type of listener. Discover all the best in audio books, podcasts andals, featuring authentic Canadian voices and celebrity talent. Check out Audible Canadian Originals, including The Downloaded, a sci-fi adventure featuring Brendan Fraser and Luke Kirby. A first listen is waiting for you when you start your free trial at audible.ca. Hi, I'm Anna. And I'm Emily.

We're the hosts of Wanderer's podcast Terribly Famous, a show where we bring you outrageous true stories about our most famous celebrities. And our latest season is all about the one and only Katie Price. You might think you know her, you might have an opinion, but there is way more to the former glamour model than just her cup size. Yes, this is a woman who's gone from pin-up to publishing sensation. We all have teenage dreams and for Katie it was simple, massive fame and everlasting love. I just wanted to kiss a boy. Just one boy. Well, she does kiss a few boys, but there are plenty of bumps along the way. and when I say bumps, I mean terrible boyfriend choices, secret dates with spiky-haired pop stars, and a tabloid press that wants to tear

her apart at every opportunity. And she surprises even herself when suddenly she becomes a role model for a whole new generation of young women who want to be just like her. Want to hear more? Follow Terribly Famous wherever you listen to podcasts, or listen early and add free on Wondery Plus on Apple podcasts or the Wondery app. Hey, Lauren. Hey, Dan.

Welcome, welcome. Hey. Yeah, hi. So Dan, we're going to interview you today. It is so much easier to be interviewed than it is to interview. I guess I'm about to find that out too. I have so many follow up questions.

I plan to make this as hard as possible. You will you will say just one word answers the whole time. So when you said beforehand, you want like your guiding principle for the next hours that we should enjoy this, you meant you're going to torture us and enjoy it. Yes, I meant I will enjoy watching you suffer, which is the highest form of pleasure. It says that in the Dharma actually. Must not have read that Tuta yet.

Let's introduce Lauren. She has not been on the mic before. So Lauren Smith, producer extraordinaire, do you wanna say hey? Hey, I'm so happy to be here. Yeah, I've been on the other side of this many, many, many times. So this is my debut and you know, you guys have done this many times before. So thanks for letting me in to the to the bromance here. I appreciate it. Yeah. Thanks for being here. I love how your hey was so playful. It was like a 2am text. That's what I'm here to bring. That's the energy I'm here to bring today.

Yeah, there were like seven Ys in that hay. That's very me. That's very me. I own that. All right, let's just set a bit of a roadmap here. So this is the kickoff episode in a series that we've been working on for a really long time and we're really excited about Dan. It's the 10th anniversary of your book, your first book, which like this podcast is called 10% Happier. And so we thought it would be fun for Lauren and I to interview you. We'll ask some questions about the book,

some questions about the 10 years since, have some fun with it. And at the end week, we'll give a little preview of what's coming up in the next few weeks for listeners to look forward to. Dan, does that roadmap sound okay to you? Yeah, it sounds perfect. So some of our listeners don't actually know your origin story, Dan, but you are good at talking. So who were you before you wrote this memoir?

What are the broad strokes of your story? I'm always happy to talk about myself. I will say this has been one of the slightly embarrassing aspects of doing this 10th anniversary rodeo is that, well, first of all, how old I feel, because it feels like yesterday that the book came out. And second, I think I operated under the assumption that people listening to this show read the book.

The two of you have helped me realize this. I don't actually think that is entirely or even largely true. There may be many, many people who listen to this show have no fucking idea that I wrote this book or who I am or any of that stuff, which is great. It's totally fine. It's just that somehow the book was such a landmark event in my life, like a defining event in my life that I narcissistically walk around thinking that everybody, or at least certainly people who listen to this show would have a passing familiarity with it. And I realize that that's probably not true and it's slightly embarrassing.

Well, tell us, tell the people who do not know about your book, what led you to write the book. Okay, yes, that was Lauren's way of saying, can you answer the question? I fucking asked you, please. Yeah, okay, so I was for million years news anchor at ABC News. I got to ABC when I was 28, so very young. There's

a picture of me that I use in some of my public talks that was taken of me by the security folks in like a basement at ABC News on my first day. And a friend of mine once joked that if you take a wide shot of that picture, it looks like I might be holding a balloon because I was so young looking and so scared and terrified and wearing this terrible like double breasted gray pinstripe suit because I was trying to be a big boy at ABC News after seven years in local news in Maine

and Boston, I got this big break to come to ABC when I was 28 and it was 28. And it was terrifying. It was absolutely terrifying. I had grown up watching people like Peter Jennings and Barbara Welters and Diane Sawyer. And all of a sudden, you know, they were ostensibly at least my colleagues. And my way of coping with the insecurity that I felt was to become a workaholic. I think I probably already was a workaholic, but at this point, it just really went into high gear. And I had this running inner monologue of, how good was my last story?

What's my next story gonna be? Who's getting the story I wanted? What's my relationship with Peter Jennings right now? Blah, blah, blah. And I believed that any success that I was experiencing was directly correlated to the intensity of my anxiety. I had this little motto that was bequeathed to me by my dad, who was at the time an academic physician at Harvard, very successful dude. And he had this little saying, which is, the price of security is insecurity, which is a

great thing to tell your children. People are often shocked when I tell them that my dad is Jewish. It's very cultural trait to venerate worrying in this way. And I subsequently learned that my dad actually made this expression up to make me feel better about the worrying I was already doing. He wasn't actually trying to get me to worry more, but I kind of misinterpreted it and used it to glorify this anxiety that I was experiencing. And shortly after I got to ABC, there was this huge event in the news, which was 9-11.

So I arrived at ABC in 2000 at age 28, and then 9-11 happened the next year. And I really motivated by a lot of my ambition and curiosity and some idealism too, just volunteered to go overseas to cover whatever was going to happen next. And then I ended up spending many years in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. I was there in 2002 during the second Intifada. So, you know, the events in the news these days definitely catch my attention in a pretty prominent way. And then I was in Iraq many, many times, often for months at a time. And when I came home after a six month stint in Iraq in the summer of 2003, so I was in Baghdad pretty much consecutively from the pre-war, the invasion, and then post-war sort of early flowerings of the insurgency.

And that was just my first of, I think, six or seven trips. And I came home in that summer and I got depressed. I didn't actually know I was depressed. I knew I was not feeling well. And so I did something incredibly stupid, which is I started to self-medicate with recreational drugs, including cocaine. And that is what occasioned a panic attack

on live television. I feel like I'm doing a lot of talking. So why don't I stop the story there and see if there are any other questions? That just sounds like a really hard few years, all that time in the war zones, all that time striving in one of the most competitive environments on earth.

Like you said, you didn't know you were depressed. Did you know that you were struggling mentally? You know, it's so funny you say that it sounds like a hard couple of years because I remember those as some of my favorite years of being alive. And I experienced it at least consciously as incredibly exciting. And I remember, I don't think I've ever written about this, but I remember a moment where I was in Ramallah, which is a major city in the West Bank, Palestinian territory, during a period of time when the Israelis invaded in 2002.

And after spending a week in this incredibly hairy situation, and where I saw horrifying things, which I didn't enjoy, I'm not here to say that I, you know, got off on the horror or the violence, but it was very exciting and had this illicit feel of being in this place you're not supposed to be, which I've always enjoyed. I've always been a bit of a rule breaker. It had this illicit feel and you get on TV.

So it was this very complex cocktail. And I remember getting out of Ramallah and going to my hotel room in Jerusalem and taking a shower and having the thought I have no problems That yes, especially compared to the people. I was just spending You know, I was deeply immersed with these folks who had a lot of problems And I I remember feeling just incredibly grateful that I got to do that job So yeah, it's just a long way of saying it doesn't compute to me that period of time, at least consciously did not compute as traumatic.

It's really interesting, Dan, because when just hearing you say that, it makes me just think about our body's intelligence and how it'll speak to us when we need it, even if we don't think we need it. You know, bringing us back to you had a panic attack on air, it seems like even though intellectually we're like, this is so exciting, this is an amazing time of my life, I have no problems, there was something confounding in you that was just like, I can't do this or this is too much or it was a stop gap for you and something inside of you spoke. And I'm just curious if that resonates or what you think that moment was when the panic attack happened on air.

Well, at a million percent resonates. I think that's exactly what was happening in a student observation. I still retain some of the allergy to new age sentiments. So certainly at that age, we're talking about 20 years ago when all this happened. At that age, I was not in tune with the wisdom of my body or anything like that. I wasn't. Oh, Joseph Goldstein, the great meditation teacher, likes to talk about this line from, I think it's a James Joyce novel where he describes a character

as living a short distance from his body. And I think that was probably true for me. You're absolutely right. I think it showed up in a couple of ways. First, I came home and got depressed and didn't know it. I didn't feel depressed in my head. My body was sending me another signal. And I had all of it. I had a battery of tests.

I went to all these different doctors. My parents were doctors and I was forcing them into these involuntary medical symposia on the phone and trying to figure out why I didn't feel good. I mean, I had my apartment tested for a gas leak, all of this stuff. And finally, I realized I was just depressed. But by that time, I'd already started to self-medicate with cocaine. Mostly that was, I mean, I did a lot of other drugs, but that was, I think, the one that really was the most problematic. And then the panic attack was another way of my body and specifically I think in this case,

my brain telling me, we cannot trust you at the wheel of this vehicle anymore. And so maybe it's worth my describing the panic attack. Yeah, I think so. I actually had two, but the one that's on YouTube was in 2004. I think it's the first clip that shows up if you Google Panic Attack on television. It has like a ton of views.

That, yeah, it's my most successful video, me losing my fucking mind. It's one achievement. So, yeah, this was about a year or so after I'd gotten home from Iraq, and I had actually in that interim period taken other trips to Iraq and I'd been given this opportunity to Anchor the news updates on Good Morning America. So this job doesn't exist anymore But there used to be a person her name was Robin Roberts She's now the main host of the show and her job at the time was to come on at the top of each hour and read some headlines

so the main hosts of the show were Diane Sorer and Charlie Gibson. And Robin, when she was out, I started filling in for her, which was a huge opportunity for me. And it was really going well. I had been doing it for a while and even getting to fill in for Charlie in the big chair. But this morning I was filling in for Robin and I started to read the story off of the teleprompter. So there's a teleprompter with these words that float by you

and I was reading the six or seven stories that were on the dock at that day. And a few seconds into it, I just started to lose it. And I had had stage fright before, so I knew exactly what this was. I was pre-wired with stage fright. And I had incidents that approached panic, but not this strong.

And I was trying to get the words out. And I noticed that my heart was speeding up and my mouth is getting dry and my palms were sweating and I was having trouble breathing. And in response to that, my mind started racing. Like you are screwed dude, you got to get yourself out of this situation. You, and all these people are watching and, you know,

your career is on the line here and that just made my physical symptoms worse, and then my mind started racing even more, and you can hear on the tape, I sort of degenerate into incoherence and get my voices kind of breathy. I do kind of hold myself together reasonably well, which speaks to the fact that I'm probably a sociopath,

but I couldn't keep going. And so in the middle of the shtick, I tossed it back to the main hosts of the show. Actually, you can hear me tossing it to the wrong hosts of the show. I think I said Robin and Charlie or something like that, but it was actually Charlie Gibson and Diane Sawyer. And you can see their faces in the video. They look like, oh, what's going on here? This isn't supposed to be happening. And they then tossed it over to the weatherman, Tony Perkins, and then Charlie bolted out of his chair and ran over to me to see what was wrong.

And all of the people in the control room were getting in my ear and saying, what happened? And I lied to everybody and said that I was fine. I didn't know what had happened, but I knew it was a panic attack. My mom called me backstage, she knew it was a panic attack. And then I started to try to get under the hood and figure out what went wrong.

Did the symptoms subside as soon as you tossed it back or did it take a few minutes? Well, there's the shame and the deceleration period of the heart, but yeah, I wasn't in full panic anymore as soon as I wasn't being watched. I mean, this is something I only learned recently, like here on this show, actually, Matt Gutman, one of our guests, was also a TV, an ABC News guy,

wrote a whole book about panic. And he explained to me here when he was on the show that part of panic is this social component. Our deepest fear as homo sapiens is rejection because in the evolutionary times rejection equal death if you weren't part of the pack anymore. And so this idea that this was embarrassing people were going to think I was insane. That shows up now even when I get panic on an airplane or something like that. A big component of the racing thoughts is these people are going to think I'm

crazy when I try to like get out of this plane. And so I think that was a huge part of what was coursing through my mind at the time. So you knew you'd had a panic attack. I imagine you also knew that that couldn't keep happening if you wanted to have the career that you had. So what did you do? I tell it in more detail in the book, which is that I went to a shrink after the first panic attack in 2004, but that shrink did not figure out what the real cause was. So I kept partying and then I had another panic attack, a much more mild one in 2005. And that's when I went to see Dr. Brotman Who is a pretty big character in in the book who asked me the question point blank?

Do you do drugs and I said yes and I often joke that he gave me this look This shrinky look that communicated the sentiment of okay asshole mystery solved and I think he actually said mystery solved But he was looking at me like an asshole, not him being an asshole, me being an asshole, and in this case, that diagnosis was correct. Yeah, so in the office with him in 2005, I agreed that day to quit doing drugs, to come see him once or twice a week.

I think I ended up seeing him for like 10 years. Actually, when I first started to write 10% Happier, I was not planning, first of all, I wasn't called 10% Happ years. And actually, when I first started to write 10% happier, I was not planning, first of all, I wasn't called 10% happier. I think I had a, I think I was calling it like the skeptics Bible or something like that. And the idea was not to tell my own story.

I was really interested in getting people turned on to meditation because I had started to meditate and I wanted other people to get interested in it, but I wasn't gonna make it a memoir. And then at some point I had this idea of like, oh, maybe I'll tell the story about the panic attack. And so I included it in some early drafts. And a lot of my first readers came back and said,

give us more of this, because the earth, rhapsodizing about the theory of meditation is not so interesting, but you being an idiot is extremely interesting. So I ended up rebuilding the whole book around what was happening in my inner life with the goal, not of, you know, I didn't have some yearning

to write a memoir. I mean, I was in my late 30s when I started writing, so I didn't have an interesting enough life to have a memoir in me, but it just turned out to be the most effective way to make my pitch, which is, because I think in my core, I'm not a memoirist. I'm an evangelical, and my pitch, which is, because I think in my core, I'm not a memoirist, I'm an evangelical.

And my pitch was, or my good news was that meditation is based in all of the science. It can be good for you, you should do it, or you should consider it. And the memoir was, I came to believe then and still do now that that was the best delivery mechanism. There's also a layer, I think, Dan, that our most vulnerable moments can be so life-changing.

And that just has a very broad appeal for people in general, even beyond how good meditation can be for you. But to have someone talk about something that's really embarrassing and explain how it led to just a complete life change is really exciting, I think. And we talk about this as a team and we talk about this on the show, but vulnerability is really powerful,

even though that can seem a little cringy, but you displayed that and people want to hear that stuff. Yeah, I think you're right. And I just, there are two thoughts that are coming to mind as you're talking. For sure it is possible to do vulnerability inappropriately, to like bleed all over the place and overshare. And so I'm always worried about that.

And yes, and I was very worried about that with this book. And that's my second point, which is that you have to remember the historical context in which I was writing this book in the early in the late aughts and early 2010 So it was a five-year project that culture was very different We did not talk about mental health issues that openly at that time and we certainly didn't talk about meditation it was not it had a moment in the 60s, but it had gone back to the fringes and most certainly news anchors weren't talking about having panic attacks, being depressed,

doing a bunch of blow. That was like not a thing. And I was terrified, my family was terrified, my mom was trying to get me not to publish this book. My wife was incredibly supportive, but really worried. At this time, I was one of the main hosts of the Weekend of the weekend edition of Good Morning America. And I had the thought that it's possible that general managers of the affiliates

in certain conservative cities would say, we don't want this guy on our airwaves anymore. So I was really scared to publish the book. And I'm not generally that brave, especially not the type of person who is gonna willy-nilly take risks with his career. I think there were two things that stiffened my spine. One is I just had this incredible confidence that the important part of the book was not the embarrassing stuff about me,

but it was actually that inner technology that had several millennia of rigorous testing in the minds of people on many, many continents. I'm talking about meditation, of course. And so it struck me as being worth the risk. And then also my bosses, including Diane Sawyer, and also a guy named Ben Sherwood, who was the president of ABC News when the book came out.

They were incredibly supportive. And they read early drafts of the book came out. They were incredibly supportive and, you know, they read early drafts of the book, gave me notes, told me, go ahead, it's worth it, we got your back. And when the book came out, you know, I think Diane Sawyer did two stories on the evening news the week the book came out. And good morning, America had me on. Ben Sherwood, the boss, basically sent a note

to every anchor of every show. It said, you will do this story on your air. And that's what made it a hit. You said something a few minutes ago about not being a memoirist necessarily at heart, but being an evangelical. And it strikes me that you also would not have published the book if you weren't just so, so sure that it really, really could help people. When did you realize in your own life how potent this stuff was?

When did that evangelical part of like who you are latch itself onto meditation? Because at the moment of the panic attack, it wasn't even on your radar. No. So let me say two things. First, I think the best version of me, I think, is around this evangelical thing. You know, like the best version of me is like, let me harness these decades of training I got in network news and in local news to be a storyteller and to be a presenter of ideas and an explainer of ideas. Let me harness that to get out a what is essentially a public health message. Okay, that's the best part of me, but the worst part of me, which you guys see behind the scenes occasionally is

driven by fear often, which can turn into kind of over committing or greed, acquisitiveness, you know, like wanting to do too many things and then I get short-tempered and and then I'm scary and so I'm not saying, I think the evangelical thing is real and it's not the whole story. So I just want to be open about that. But yeah, I do, I think in moments where I can get my anxiety under control either internally through meditation and other modalities or externally by like having a boss like Ben Sherwood or Diane Sawyer sit me down and say, you're good. Then when I'm relaxed, I think the best part of me

can come out, which is helpfulness. You know, I say this all the time. You've heard me say it a million times. You probably have a drinking game for when I say this, but the Tibetan word for enlightenment roughly translates into a clearing away and a bringing forth. And that's at least one of the things that happens in meditation is you're starting to clear away

the more noxious tendencies in your mind. And then what is innate in all of us, which is this, we are wired as a species, so you don't have to take it personally. Like when I talk about the best in me, I'm not, I'm not patting myself on the back. I think this is a capacity we all have to be useful. And then the luckiest of us figure out some match between our innate desire to be helpful and useful and to matter and what our skills are. That's the sort of good fortune

I've had. Anyway, maybe I should answer the question you actually asked me, which is why meditation? They're nodding their heads. Okay, so I had no interest in meditation. None. I was none, no pre-existing interest in meditation. I was my parents, so I've referenced a couple times, were hippies, and they used to drag me to, you know, health food stores and to go camping. And I remember my dad wearing a du-rag, and they were very annoying. And they forced me to do yoga classes when I was a kid, and, you know, we, you know, whatever. So I had some scar tissue around that. And as a result, and that kind of entered into a noxious partnership with one of my less attractive tendencies, which is dismissiveness. I am at baseline dismissive, which is something I've worked on a lot with varying degrees of success. And so if you take my conditioning or, you know, a childhood and this pattern of being dismissive, I thought

meditation was, I mean, to the extent that I had ever considered it before, just complete bullshit. And for people who smelled like feet and were really into aroma therapy and cat Stevens and John Tash and crystals and whatever. And so after I had the panic attack and started doing therapy, I wasn't like diving into the meditation of it all. That actually happened over the course of a couple of years without telling too much of the story. We'll actually in the course of the next couple of weeks you'll be meeting some of the key players in that story. But the TLDR of it is the first thing is I read a book by a guy named Eckhart Tolle. And Tolle is a best-selling self-help guru and I was reading the book not because I was interested in him for my own purposes, but

because I thought he might be a good story for Nightline, which was one of the shows I worked on. And in the book, he made this argument that we all have a voice in our heads, not referring, he was not referring to schizophrenia or hearing voices. He was talking about the inner narrator that chases you out of bed and is yammering at you all day long and has you wanting stuff and not wanting stuff and judging people and comparing yourself to other people and judging yourself And thinking about the past or the future instead of focusing on what's happening right now And totally his argument was that this inner cacophony, which if we broadcast aloud you would be locked up this inner cacophony Owns you if you have no visibility into what's happening.

And I found that absolutely compelling. And I realized that this thesis about the human condition explained the panic attack, the most embarrassing moment of my life. It was because I had this inner dialogue fueled by greed and fear and confusion that I went and some good stuff too. So I went off overseas and started covering war zones.

Yeah, and in there were some good motivations with curiosity and idealism and service. And in there were also some ambition and desire. And I did all this without really taking a proper inventory of what my motivations were. And then I came home, got depressed, didn't know I was depressed, just started self-medicating and had a panic attack. So I thought there's just such an interesting thesis.

And I went and interviewed Eckhart and he turned out to be unsatisfying. That's kind of a story in and of itself that's in the book. And if I can cut to the chase here, it was through subsequent research post-meeting Eckhart Tolle that I found Buddhism through Dr. Mark Epstein, who's going to be part of the series in the coming days. You'll hear from Epstein. And he becomes a major character in the book. He's a psychiatrist based in New York City my wife gave me one of his books and I started to realize that this idea of this monkey mind that we all have was not an

Eckhart-Toly trademarked inside it it really dates all the way back to the Buddha and Epstein has written these beautiful books about the overlap between and Epstein has written these beautiful books about the overlap between Buddhism or the Dharma and modern psychology. And I started reading those books and then I called him up and begged him to be my friend and there's like a Tuesdays with Maury type vibe

with me and Mark throughout the book. And he's explaining the Dharma to me as I'm trying to put it into action in a busy modern skeptical life. So to answer your question about meditation, which I keep not doing, meditation itself is a key part of how one manages the ego or the voice in the head,

the inner chaos and cacophony. And it's, I thought it was, it must be some esoteric practice that involved joining a group or believing in special things, but it really is very simple and has been secularized in the form of mindfulness-based stress reduction, which was invented by John Cabot-Zinn, who was recently on the show at the beginning of the year,

who was an MIT molecular biologist who was a practicing Zen Buddhist and had this idea recently on the show at the beginning of the year, who is an MIT molecular biologist who was a practicing Zen Buddhist and had this idea that, well, maybe I can do a secular version of this. And so I started doing it and really is quite simple. You just sit in a comfortable position, close your eyes, try to focus on your breath. Usually that's what we start with. It doesn't have to be the breath, but often it's the breath.

And you're just trying to feel the raw data of the physical sensations of the breath, entering and exiting the nose, or the belly rising and falling. And then as soon as you try to do this, you will inevitably encounter a sort of mental mutiny where you get carried all over the place by your thoughts and urges and emotions.

And the whole game is just a notice when you've become distracted and begin again and again and again. And in this way, a couple of things happen. One, you change the part of the brain associated with attention regulation. And two, you develop a kind of self-awareness that we call mindfulness that allows you to see your ego,

your inner narrator or whatever, with some non-judgmental and maybe even humorous remove so that you're not owned by every neurotic obsession that flits through your mind. And there's a ton of data to suggest that this can have beneficial impacts on your brain, the rest of your body, and your behavior, specifically around anxiety and depression.

And so all of that, both the experience and the psychological research is what got me to attach to this practice. So that was like a 10 minute answer to your very simple question. As you would say, this is a podcast and long answers are totally fine. You talk about meditation, its various benefits,

different ways to practice it in the book. And one of the things you talk about is that it gives you this sort of superpower where maybe you've been reacting your whole life and all of a sudden you can respond instead of reacting. Can you talk a little bit about what that means? Yeah, I would say the thing in the book that I spent five years writing that most people latch on to is this idea of responding, not reacting. We spend so much time utterly ensorcelled by, utterly enthralled to, this chaotic inner

dialogue. We act out our thoughts like they're tiny dictators as the great meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein says, what meditation helps you do is to drop out of the noise to start to view your thoughts with some distance so that they don't own you. And that doesn't mean that you don't engage effectively in the world, quite the opposite. You learn to respond wisely to stuff instead of reacting blindly. Most of us are

on like just totally controlled by the malevolent puppeteer of our thoughts when in fact we have this inner capacity to view the contents of our consciousness with some mindfulness, with some self-awareness and without being totally attached to them. And to me, that's kind of the big headline of the book. And then what you see me do is fuck it up repeatedly. I've never personally seen that, but yeah. Yeah, of course. I want to hand things back to Lauren in a sec, but just one more question. I heard you say just a second ago,

you said we have this inner capacity. Is that true for everybody? I know people come up to you all the time and say, meditation sounds great, but it's not something I can do. My mind too busy. Do we all have that capacity? I love when people say that to me. Those are my people.

I stole that turn of phrase from Sharon Salzburg because she says the same thing. Sharon's a great meditation teacher. Yeah, I think that's very common. People have a sense that their mind is crazy, that they're like eminently distractible, or maybe they even tried meditation and very quickly saw that the mind is crazy, that they're like eminently distractible, or maybe they even tried meditation, and very quickly saw that the mind is busy. I sometimes joke that it's like trying to hold a live fish in your hands, and it's just going all over the place. And they see that and wrongly

conclude that that means that they have some sort of bespoke lunacy. I call this the fallacy of uniqueness that somehow they and only they cannot meditate when in fact evolution most likely wired us to have this racing mind because it kept us safe on the savannah and other places where we were evolving. And so the point is not to clear your mind, which I think is the most damaging misconception about meditation. As you've heard me say a million times, clearing your mind is impossible unless you're enlightened or you've died. The point is not to clear your mind. The point is to focus your mind for a few nanoseconds at a time on something neutral,

like the feeling of your breath coming in and going out. And then every time you get distracted, you start again and again and again. And that getting distracted, that waking up from getting distracted is not proof that you're failing, it's proof that you're doing it right. Because the whole game is just to notice how crazy the mind is. To notice what your life is actually about. You might think your life is about service or loyalty or whatever, and that's true in a certain way.

But if you pay attention to your mind, mostly what your life is about is like, what's for lunch? And did I miss the latest Bravo show about real housewives and where did gerbils run wild and blah, blah, blah, or you're planning a homicide or whatever it is, that is what's happening in your mind on a moment to moment basis. And what this process does is help you wake up to that so

that you can make better decisions. Coming up, we're going to talk about some of the aspects of my own personality that I've learned about along the way that needed to change. And DJ and Lauren will weigh in on whether I've been successful from their point of view. And we're going to talk about why our faults are not our fault, but they are our responsibility. Hello, I am Alice Levine, and I am one of the hosts of Wondries podcast, British Scandal.

On our latest series, The Race to Ruin, we tell the story of a British man who took part in the first ever round the world sailing race. Good on him I hear you say, but there is a problem, as there always is in this show. The man in question hadn't actually sailed before. Oh, and his boat wasn't sea worthy. Oh, and also tiny little detail almost didn't mention it.

He bet his family home on making it to the finish line. Wattenseud was one of the most complex cheating plots in British sporting history. To find out the full story, follow British Scandal wherever you listen to podcasts, or listen early and add free on Wondry Plus on Apple Podcasts or the Wondry App. I'm Afwa Hirsh. I'm Peter Frankopoulos. And in our podcast, Legacy, we explore the lives of some of the biggest characters in history.

This season, we delve into the life of Mikhail Gorbachev. This season has everything. It's got political ideology. It's got nuclear Armageddon. It's got love story. It's got betrayal. It's got nuclear Armageddon. It's got love story. It's got betrayal. It's got economic collapse. One ingredient that you left out, legacy.

Was he someone who helped make the world a better place, saved us all from all of those terrible things, or was he about who created the problems and the challenges of many parts of the world today? Those questions about how to think about Gorbachev. Was he unwitting character in history, or was he one who helped forge and frame the world today. Those questions about how to think about Gorbachev, you know, was he unwitting character in history or was he one who helped forge and frame the world? And it's not necessarily just a question of our making. There is a real life binary in how his legacy is perceived. In the West, he's considered a hero.

And in Russia, it's a bit of a different picture. So join us on Legacy for Mikhail Gorbachev. Don't forget to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the 10% Happier Book. We are offering subscriptions to the 10% Happier app at a 40% discount until the end of the month. Get this deal before it ends by going to 10%.com slash 40. That's 10% one word all spelled out.com slash 40

for 40% off your subscription. How successful do you think you are, Dan, at operationalizing this in your daily interactions? I mean, I have a lot of good news on the score. Although maybe I'll press DJ into answering that question. I am reasonably good, but there's a reason why I called the book 10% happier. Like I, there's no, I don't see perfection as being on offer.

Maybe there is such a thing as enlightenment, full enlightenment, but I have no evidence for that. I certainly haven't experienced it. So what I think is genuinely on offer is marginal and consistent improvement. As long as you understand it, you're gonna have bad days. So it's not a steady upward trajectory of improvement. It's more like a sort of an up and down zigzaggy line.

And so absolutely, if I haven't slept enough or if I'm anxious, particularly around money stuff, that's a big trigger for me. I can do some very dumb things, or I can be short, or I can push people too hard. And this kind of, you know, impacts people like you who work with me. And so this is a big thing that I talk to my shrink

and talk to my executive coach, Jerry Colona, and talk to my wife about, talk to my brother. People talk to Joseph Goldstein, the great meditation teacher who's also featured in this series and in the book in a big way. I try to work on this, but I'm not perfect at all. And so the good news is I do think I and anybody can get better. And so this is just another example of like, yeah, I use my story, but I'm not that interested in my story, but I'm not that interested in my story.

Ultimately, I get pretty tired of telling this story over and over again, but I love talking about the universal aspects of it. And it is, I believe, a universal that we all have the capacity to grow and change. In the book, there's a whole set of instructions at the end and it basically just teaches you how to meditate and actually went and revised and changed it

and for the new edition. But I kept something from the first book, which is that I ended with, I used to be a huge, this is gonna show my age, but I used to be a huge buyer of records and CDs. And I used to go to Newbury Comics, which I think is still there on Newbury Street in Boston. It was my favorite record store. And I would love to see which albums were coming out soon,

because there was no internet in the 90s or at least in the early 90s. So you'd have to go to the store to find out like which band was going to, you know, was guided by voices or pavement, are they going to be putting out a new record soon. And above the list of new releases, there was this great little pit, pit the little expression, all dates can change. So can you. And I love that because that that is true. Now, I think there are probably some people who have mental health disorders that makes this harder. And I would say if you have mental health issues, first of all, you're not alone, many of us, sadly an increasing number of us have them.

You just might want to work with your mental health professional if you have one to make sure that this practice is safe for you. But I do believe that generally speaking, the capacity to change is a universal. DJ, you have fewer compunctions about pissing me off. So, I mean, I know you've seen me on many a bad hair day. So it's not like you're working

with some like perfected guru here. Yeah, that's true. And, you know, I think one of the complicating factors is like, you move through most spaces in your life and certainly through this space with us with just a huge amount of power, right? And so yes, me having a bad day means something different than you having a bad day, right? I don't know. I think my experience of

you is like, your practice is real, you take it seriously, and it bestows on you a level of self-awareness that allows you to do a couple things that I've seen you do. One is like check your bad impulse in the moment, which you sometimes do. Another is like name the bad impulse almost immediately after it surfaces. And another is like name it a little later than that, but still name it, right? And it just takes a lot of the charge out of whatever the behavior is or the impulse is that you have that ability to either interrupt yourself before you

do the thing or name it really quickly, right? So sometimes that means you just acknowledging like, I'm pretty tired right now and I'm a little frustrated and like that might come out sideways And it's not about you and you just kind of set the table that way as a way to like Give everybody a sense of where you're at right and other times you'll say like You'd be a few minutes into a conversation and be like hey I think I came in hot at the top and like my bad, you know, and so I think like I don't know That's kind of all you can ask for really in a world where like you said perfection's not on offer and I think like, I don't know, that's kind of all you can ask for really in a world where like you said, perfection's not on offer.

And I also like, I walk through space with less power than you, but still certain amounts of power and certain respects. And I don't know, I just really empathize with you. Like I am reactive sometimes too, you know, I like Like I check my bad impulse a minute too late sometimes too. Yeah, I can say after like three plus years behind the curtain that like the things you say on the podcast feel genuine and there's not like some other sinister you lurking that like

doesn't meditate and doesn't care about anybody. I mean, that's my nightmare. might first of all thank you for that and I'm sorry to put you on the spot and my point in that was not to get you to push you to praise me in any way but actually quite the opposite which is to show I want to give people permission to continue to be schmucks right like that just because you're engaging in self development, whatever, it does not mean you should expect yourself to be perfect. That's just another form of, you know, delusion. And so really, that was my goal. And so I appreciate you playing along. And, you know, the power of it is a really important aspect that I'm glad you pointed to that, that I honestly did not take into account for a long time and didn't want to look at because I'm uncomfortable having power. And so now I see it more as like a responsibility, well, in my best moments, I see it more as a responsibility to other people. And, but, you know, forgetting is a huge problem. We talk about that a lot on the show that DJ and Lauren have a drinking game that they would probably be chugging around this thing that I'm about to say, which

is that one of the original translations of the word sati, which we now translate as mindfulness, is recollecting or remembering because forgetting all the inspiring shit you might hear on the show or in great books or whatever, we're wired for that, for forgetting and denial. And the culture militates against all of the wisdom that you might pick up in certain places like the show or great books or whatever. And so I can forget and I try to remember, but there are times in my next book,

I'm writing about an incident in which that involves a staffer who's no longer with us. She passed away where I was mad at her for like three months, and she was right. And I only recently really started to take into my bones that she was right. And, you know, I have a lot of regret around that. That kind of ugliness is definitely still in me.

And again, I'm not, I'm saying this, trying to be helpful just to say that this is a slow process in any Orthodox Buddhist tradition. They'd say this is a multi-lifetime affair. You know, the way we talk about the Buddha is that, you know, there are all these stories, the Jataka tales about his prior lives. And so this guy, again, I'm not saying you have to believe in any of this stuff, but the way the Buddha has talked about is as a guy who was messing it up for lifetimes until he got enlightened.

Yeah. This thing you just said about like how long it took you to admit that someone else was right. Just it calls to mind for me one of I think your most effective tricks in this arena, which is you just make it a habit to constantly name the fact that like there's probably information you don't have and There might be something you're not seeing clearly and you might be wrong about the thing you're about to say before you say the thing and I could be reading you wrong here, but I think sometimes that comes from Genuinely felt in the moment humility and sometimes it comes from like, knowing that that's a good thing to do. Even if you're pretty sure that you're right. But it really does make a difference. And it's just like a great hack, even in the times when like, you might not mean it at all. Like saying it is a reminder, even just to you, I think.

I'm glad you point that out. Because it had I've been given the feedback before I met either of you I got rather pointed feedback that When I said I could be wrong It was a clear signal that I did not believe I was wrong and I was gonna say something to prove that and so I would say one of the fruits of my practice that has showed up in the years after the book came out in the ten years is that I have decreasing confidence in my own correctness. And there's a long history of people praising intellectual humility.

You know, Yates said, the best among us lack all conviction. This is a quality that we praise, but it's not one in our current culture that we actually reward that often. We live in the middle of a time when certainty is really rewarded and the loudest all caps obnoxious version of that. And I as somebody who came out of the media where that is definitely rewarded did not bring to this game the best conditioning for intellectual humility. But the practice of like consistently being confronted with the madness of your own mind will, if you let it over time, give you a kind of,

I think attractive and helpful lack of dogmatism. I mean, the Buddha said, I am not a dogmatist, I'm an analyst. He also said, those who cling to their views and opinions travel the world, annoying people. And so I do try to take that on board. And at my worst, I fall back into the spouting of I could be wrong, but not actually believing that.

The one thing I do want to say that you're really good at, Dan, is creating a culture where even if it feels hard for all of us, we are encouraged to also speak our vulnerability or any kind of messy feeling. And I think that that is something that you've modeled, and it feels connected to this. Like, you're not perfect.

Let's talk about it. Instead of letting this narrative just run the show in the background, let's get it out there in the space, in the room, so that we're not just being led by these stories in our heads. And I think that that is something that I have experienced and is very interesting in a workspace. and I don't think necessarily very common. I appreciate that very much and I feel a little sheepish for having forced you guys into this situation like remember those Trump cabinet meetings when he would force all the cabinet folks to like say positive stuff about him I don't want this to be a hostage video. We really like you Dan, We like you so much.

Exactly. I'm not a monster. Guys, I don't know if you can't see them. I'm not sure if you're listening to this. You can see them, but they have fire emojis shooting out of their eyes. But I came to this through screwing it up. Another note I got was that I was actually rude to junior staffers, which was humiliating. This came in a 360 review I did many years ago,

and it really pointed out that I was rude and dismissive and impatient and not creating, I believe the term of art is psychological safety with people, and so it is not my default mode to do that. I've had to train myself and I still screw it up. Lauren doesn't want to say it, but I still screw it up, you know, semi-regularly. So these are just lessons that I've had to learn. And a lot of it is by, you know, being on, doing this show. Again, I always thought of the show for, certainly for the first few years as, you know, an interesting

little post script on the book, but the book was the thing. And now I think this podcast reaches more people in a six-week period if I'm doing the math correctly than the then then have ever read the book. And so this show has become like one of the main events of my life. And it's basically me getting free therapy and talking to people who are interesting. These lessons about vulnerability and psychological safety and communication skills. You know, I am trying to do what I hope the audience is trying to do, which is knit them into my life. When I hear you say that thing about how, for example, creating psychological safety

is not your default mode. I just want to like point to one thing in there, for example, creating psychological safety is not your default mode. I just want to point to one thing in there, not to make you feel better, but because it might be of service to other people, which is this notion that your default mode is somehow harmful, but also that it's yours is also that like I've learned to question through the practice and through listening to the guests on our show, right? So like one version of the story is like Dan selfish, Dan like wields power irresponsibly, like Dan fails to create psychological safety because Dan's default is bad, right? And I know you have spoken openly and often about how you have this sneaking suspicion

that you are somehow irredeemably selfish or bad, right? And all of that conditioning, the selfishness, the rudeness to junior staffers, like everything you're talking about, there are causes and conditions for that, right? There's things that you learned in your time at ABC News, and before that, there's things that you learned from your parents, your schooling, your teachers, the culture, the media, there are things that are baked into our DNA as people, like our defaults to fear and anger, or as like the Buddha would say, greed, hatred, and delusion. And so it's like, your default mode isn't really yours in a way, right? It's

like you have to take responsibility for it But you don't have to tell yourself the story that in the same way that like someone is not doesn't have a uniquely racing mind Like your default mode is not uniquely Reflective of something bad about you I mean gold star. Yes, that's it. I, that is one of the main thrusts of the Dharma. There's a great Burmese master who was the teacher to many of the folks who've been on the show, like Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Salzberg

and Jack Cornfield, his name was, you know, longer with us, Sayada Upendita. And he used to say, the mind is not yours, but it is your responsibility. And that can sound esoteric, but it's really as simple as this. As DJ was saying, everything that's happening right now, every event rests on the lip of a wave on an unfathomable ocean of causes and conditions dating back to the Big Bang and maybe before. And when you view things with that perspective,

it's hard to take your shit very personally. And so I do, I spend my life now, like not all of my life, but a big percentage of my life telling my own embarrassing stories. Not because I think, I mean, I try to make them interesting, but not because that's the point, but because I'm trying to get people to see That you don't have to take your own inner, michiga's too personally and that actually the

Real liberation is to start to see it as something that's impersonal doesn't mean you don't have to take responsibility for it But you don't have to add on the whole story about how this is you irrevocably Etc. Etc. on the whole story about how this is you irrevocably, etc. Coming up how the book's success has changed my life and how it feels now to find myself in the role of quasi self-help guru. The early 2000s was a breeding ground for bad reality competition series from shows like Kid Nation, CBS's weird Lord of the Flies style social experiment that took 40 kids to live by themselves in a ghost town, to The Swan, a horrifying concept where women spent months undergoing a physical transformation and then were made to compete in a beauty pageant. Hi, I'm Misha Brown and I'm the host of WonderRyze Podcast, The Big Flop.

Each episode, comedians join me to chronicle one of the biggest pop culture fails of all time and try to answer the age-old question, who thought this was a good idea? Recently on The Big Flop, we looked at the reality TV show The Swan. The problem. This dream opportunity quickly became a viewing nightmare. They were isolated for weeks, berated, operated on, and then were ranked by a panel of judges. Follow The Big Flop on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, grownups!

The Cat in the Hat Cast is a new podcast from Wondery, perfect for the whole family. Join the Cat in the Hat and your favorite Dr. Seuss characters as they get whisked away on a new adventure every week. Fish dreams of creating his very own polite and quiet podcast. That is, until he gets a surprise visit to his Fishbowl podcast studio from the Cat in the Hat himself, and it becomes very clear that the cat

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You can listen to the Cat in the Hat Cast early and ad-free on Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Wondery Kids Plus on Apple Podcasts today. Dan, your life obviously has changed significantly since this book came out. And one of the things that I find most interesting is that you've been turned into this kind of quasi self-help guru. And I'm curious, how do you feel when you hear that, first of all? And are people coming to you for advice all the time? How do you see yourself?

How are you comfortable as someone who's like a voice in the wellness field? And what do you even think about that word wellness? That's a great question. I initially had a lot of imposter feelings about it. And I have so much respect for meditation teachers who, as you know, I'm married to a doctor, my parents are doctors and have a lot of respect for doctors and they go through so much training. I lived with my wife when she went through residency

and then I think three or four years of fellowship after residency before she became a full attending physician and meditation teachers go through, I think more training, years of silent retreat. I have not done that. So I really, I really worried about this initially. And I didn't even know whether it was okay for me to teach meditation when I was giving talks. Just to be clear, when the book came out, I thought it would come out, make a little blip, maybe even not much of a blip and then go away. And

then it ended up being way more successful than I suspected and it led to this podcast and a meditation app and I still do a lot of speeches all over the place. And I was worried about, you know, was it responsible for me to teach basic meditation and then answer people's questions about it. And I had a big talk with Joseph Goldstein about this and he said, yeah, first of all, it's totally fine for you to teach basic meditation. And then when you answer people's questions, as long as you keep it in your experience, it's fine. You know, don't pretend you know more than you know, just use iLanguage to be, I don't think he said this, but this, this is one of the communication skills that I've learned

that if you keep it in like your own personal experience, you're much safer because you can be an authority in your own personal experience. Now 10 years that have passed and I increasingly feel comfortable with, I would, you know, quasi guru is right, you know, that I mean, I have not done the training to be a full meditation teacher, but I have done some training and I do one or two silent meditation retreats a year. Often 10 days, I've written a couple books on the subject. I host this show two to three times a week. So I do feel like I can give some advice with the caveat that I am not a doctor. I'm not a psychiatrist. I'm not a psychologist even.

And within that context, yeah, I can channel what I've learned, filter it through my own personal experience and share that. And if I take that approach, I do feel comfortable. And I like being the guy that my friends call if they have a problem. Yeah, I like that a lot, actually. And I do spend a certain amount of time at the beginning of those conversations explaining all the stuff I don't know. And then once I've done that, I feel better about saying what I see.

You said something a few months ago, I think it was just when the team was at dinner and it just popped out to me because I wasn't expecting it, which was you talked about how the book, or at least at the time that you were writing it, you felt like it had a kind of punk rock feel to it. And I'm curious like what you meant by that and if that still feels like an animating

spirit for you in the work you're doing now, especially given everything you've just said about how you've sort of established yourself as the sort of go-to person. I love that question. It's something I've been thinking about a lot. And I would actually like to get some feedback from the two of you on it. I'll say a few words and then be interested to hear what you think. For sure, well, first of all, I've always loved punk rock.

A lot of these records behind me in my little studio here are like, I guess you would technically call them sort of alternative or underground rock from the 80s and 90s, bands like The Minutemen and The Replacements and Sonic Youth and WhosGurdu. And in the 90s like Guided by Voices and Pave Men. So I've always loved that and I've always been very attracted to interesting worlds outside of the mainstream and that was a huge theme in my journalism. You know, I definitely I covered

big mainstream events and but I really loved, especially in the later part of my career, was diving into the world of like the underground drug trade in Rio or the child slave rings in Haiti and busting American pedophiles prowling in Cambodia and these little, these, these strange and often sometimes not so great subcultures. It's always been very interesting to me. And so that finding new ways to see the world and talk about the world has always been important to me. And when I started getting interested in meditation before the book came out, I was really intrigued by the science and by the practice and very annoyed by the books I was reading because there was this syrupy saccharin tone. And so I tried to write a book that used the F word a lot and told embarrassing stories

about cocaine and had a sort of eyebrow raising title because I thought that was the way to break through. Because again, remember the cultural context, there was a lot of skepticism generally in the culture at that time about meditation to the extent that anybody even thought about it So I thought well if I'm an evangelist, I need the right language You know the Buddha was very good at this, you know, he he was on the scene during an agrarian time and he would use Farm or very down home like analogies and metaphors in his teaching if he was talking to people who worship fire He would talk about theharma through the lens of fire.

I do think that's an important thing to talk to people in ways that they're likely to listen. I'm where I'd be interested to hear your points of view is that I think over time, I've been off at times because I think the culture has moved and there is less skepticism about meditation. And sometimes my, I've got these habits and this conditioning from that first book that may not be relevant or serving me so well now. Lauren, you're nodding your head.

Yeah, I'm just thinking how like my favorite versions of you, Dan, are when you're like earnest and not in that mode. But also, I think it just speaks to what different people are drawn to. I think that there's something about knowing that you had so much skepticism and then watching that soften and seeing you open is exciting to see for me. And maybe that's just my own personal preference. But I have a feeling that other people might feel similarly. Yeah, I appreciate that. Thank you. I think there's something to what you're saying. On the one hand, I got so much feedback, especially early on,

that the skepticism was so important for people like, oh, well, if this guy is going down this road, maybe I can go with him. And I think especially for people like my age and older, you know, I'm a Gen X,, I think still that's very important. And yet I think for younger people, especially because younger people, by most humans are younger than me, but I'm referring to anybody in their 30s or below,

that as you guys know, there's so much suffering going on right now. People are not bringing skepticism to tools that could help them turn down their anxiety or depression. They really want them. And so I don't need to gild the lily or dress it up with too much profanity or skepticism because that actually is that it's discordant

to many audiences. So I am increasingly trying to figure out how to straddle all of this and be effective. And be real, because I am a guy who swears a lot and I do like making jokes. And it's about thinking about the appropriate time and place for all of that. That's so interesting. There's probably never going to be a right answer there. That question will probably be alive for as long as you are, or at least as long as you're doing this. Or, yeah, we hear from people all the time,

like, thank God you got rid of the bleeping. It's nice to hear the authentic Dan, and we also hear from people all the time that's like, stop cursing, it's not mindful. I had to turn it off, like it's ruining my equanimity, you know? And those are just two things that are both true at the same time.

I guess when I think about your skepticism, I think like, yeah, we might be in a time when you don't need to work as hard to signal that you're not going to be using Serapi language and we're not going to be super precious about this. Like that just might not be as important as it was 10 years ago. But I think that the spirit of like, how do we really reach people and connect them to practices that can really help still needs skepticism because we now live in a world where mental health conversations and meditation conversations are everywhere and they're for sale everywhere. And there are a lot of claims being made and there are a lot of products being sold and there's a lot of conventional wisdom being peddled. And so we still need to be skeptical, but maybe just in different ways. Like, are we talking about trauma in ways that are good for people or bad for people?

Are we talking about trigger warnings in ways that are good for people or bad for people? Are we talking about trigger warnings in ways that are good for people or bad for people? Are we talking about anxiety all the time actually helpful? Or is it making people more anxious? So we still need the skepticism. And I think there is an echo chamber that we can sometimes fall into where we get pitched a guest. And they've got this great pedigree. And their book has been blurbed by 10 people

who have been on the show before. And it just feels like an obvious home run. Are we losing a little bit of the skepticism that you started with? Do we need to be pushing harder on what are really the best ways to be talking about this? What are really the most useful practices? So yeah, I think it's got to stay. It's just got to like bob and weave and change and be impermanent like everything else. Yeah, I think what I'm hearing you both say

is something like there's healthy skepticism and maybe a corrosive skepticism. Healthy skepticism that you're pointing to is like rigor and careful thought. And an unhealthy skepticism might look like cynicism or it might look like cynicism or it might look like glibness and lazy profanity and easy jokes. And so I don't think we're heading into a world where I don't say fuck anymore or I don't make jokes. But I was talking with Joseph

about this just the other day. He was saying that some people don't like how my sign off on Instagram is inner peace motherfuckers. And, but, you know, if you look at the comments, some of the people in his world don't like that I say that. But if you look at the comments on those videos, they're just like, people are like, make me a T-shirt that says that. And, you know, we were talking about

when is it appropriate to do this? When is it skillful and useful? And when is it not? And I don't have clear answers. I'm just trying to figure that out. I think your earnestness lands well though with that as the backdrop. Yeah. Yeah. So I think it's like we were pointing to is some sort of wise combination. Yeah. Like everything in life, right? Yes. This is another, you know, TPH staff drinking game.

I'm sure that they could play, but I'm always talking about this Esther Perel expression that I love, Esther Perel is the great couples counselor who's been on the show a million times. I love her so much. And she talks about how some things are not problems to be fixed, but dynamics to be managed. And I think we've just identified one.

I love that. So yeah, maybe before we let folks go, Dan, can you just give us a preview of what's coming up in this really exciting series that we've been working on for so long around the 10th anniversary? We are doing a big and ambitious series here on the show. Very grateful to DJ and Lauren for doing a ton of work. One of the guiding principles that we talked about a lot is that we didn't want this to

feel just like wrote and repetitive promotion for the book. And so, yeah, we are celebrating the fact that there's a new edition of the book coming out, a revised edition of the book, and that's fun for us. But these episodes are meant to stand on their own as value add for you, the listener. And so there'll be a thin veneer of, hey, this is part of this series, but mostly it's about just doing something useful and interesting for you.

So the theme is that we're just going back and talking to the key players from the book. And it's not so much about talking to them about their experience being in the book. That would be pretty boring. We're just talking about the things they're interested in now. So we're just producing a bunch of new episodes

that we would produce at any time, but we're just kind of lumping them together in this series. So we're talking to people like Joseph Goldstein. And when I asked him what he wanted to talk about, he said he's increasingly interested in talking about esoteric aspects of Buddhist cosmology like karma and rebirth and even superpowers. So we actually had a fascinating discussion about this and it's not the type of things

that modern Dharma teachers, especially in the West, really go into and he goes into it. We talked to Deepak Chopra who plays a bit of a, the role of a foil in the book. He make fun of him a little bit. And so I was interested to see what, what do I make of him now 10 years later? And is he mad at me? And so you'll hear the results.

We talked to spring washem, who's a great meditation teacher who, I also kind of make fun of a little bit in the book, although she turns into a hero. And subsequently she and I have become quite good friends. And so we're talking to her about should you go on a meditation retreat? It's something that people talk about a lot and increasingly people are interested in it so what do you need to know before you go? Should you even

go? We're gonna talk to her about that. I talked to Dr. Mark Epstein who I mentioned earlier and he's got fascinating things to say about the Buddhist concept of emptiness or not self, which we were talking about earlier, like this very hard to grok idea that you shouldn't take the contents of your mind personally and how that can seem scary or weird, but actually it should be deeply comforting. And then finally, we talked to my brother Matt,

who plays the role of skeptic in the book, who's making fun of me for getting into all this stuff, and is now, to my great delight, a very dedicated Dharma practitioner. I have jokes that there's times when he comes to me to talk about meditation and I have this Buddhist phrase that comes through my mind, which is, I fucking told you. And that's a really fun conversation,

very satisfying for me. And finally, just one last now, that I'm just shamelessly promoting everything here. Just what I do wanna say, that we are doing a live show in New York City. We're gonna have a band and some very special guests, many of whom you just heard me talk about. So you can come celebrate this in person.

This is also just kind of in keeping with us, running a bunch of experiments lately. So this kind of idea of doing a live party, I'm interested to see how it goes. So come join us all the information in the show notes. Awesome. Thanks for letting us grill you. This has been a fun turning of the tables today. We should do it more often.

You guys are really good at this. Well, we learn from the best, don't we? I think I just threw up in my mouth a little bit. I'm here to bring the Earth's energy too. Come on. You guys are the best. This has been an amazing series. It's also been a great conversation.

So thank you. Thank you, Dan. Thank you. Thanks for having us. Thanks again to DJ and Lauren. We've got many more great episodes coming up. Deepak Chopra, Joseph Goldstein, Mark Epstein, my little brother. It's going to be great. 10% happier is produced by Gabrielle Zuckerman, Justine Davy, Lauren Smith, and Tara Anderson. DJ Kashmir is our senior producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior editor.

Kevin O'Connell is our director of audio and post production and Kimmy Regler is our executive producer. Alicia Mackey leads our marketing and Tony Magyar is our director of podcasts. And finally, Nick Thorburn of the great band Islands wrote our theme. If you like 10% happier, I hope you do, you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus and 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 Wondry.com slash survey. AirPods Pro with adaptive audio automatically keeps out the sounds you don't want to hear so you can listen to your music and lowers your music to let in the sounds you do need to hear. Hi there. Hi, what can I get you? I'll have a strawberry mango coconut probiotic smoothie with wheatgrass. Anything else?

Extra wheatgrass. Here you go. AirPods Pro with adaptive audio, available on AirPods Pro's second generation when enabled. Welcome to Pura, the most pristine, safe, climate stable city on Earth, a haven amidst the wreckage. Help me! Here, you're safe from heat domes, super storms, water bandits in the Outerlands.

Run! There's no crime in Pyrrha. No murder, no suicide. And best of all, there's no cost to join us. In Pyrrha, we promised to keep you safe. They killed her! You took everything! In a world that doesn't feel so safe anymore.

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