Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - The Upsides And Downsides Of Living A More Examined Life | Matt Harris

Episode Date: March 20, 2024

Do you struggle to fit meditation into a busy life? Check out this candid conversation with Dan’s younger brother, Matt.Matt Harris is partner at Bain Capital Ventures, where he’s developed an expertise in Fintech, or financial technology. He’s also a father of six incredible children. He is 17 months younger than Dan, to the day. And as you will hear, he likes to make fun of his neurotic brother. In fact, he shows up a lot in Dan's first book, 10% Happier, mocking Dan for his budding interest in meditation.In this episode we talk about:Practical tips from Joseph GoldsteinThe books that have been integral to Matt's processTips on starting a practice. The biggest issues for meditatorsHow not to try too hardHow awareness of the ego impacts work,The upsides and downsides of living a more examined life.Related Episodes:Click here to listen to the previous episodes in our tenth anniversary series. 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/matt-harris-743Additional 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. This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, everybody. We are running a bit of an experiment on the show today. This is a much more personal episode, although I'm pretty confident it's also going to have practical and universal takeaways. As the title of this episode suggests, it's all about what happened when one of the smartest, busiest, and most skeptical people I know started meditating in a very deep and committed way.

The person in question is my younger brother, my only brother, Matt Harris. One of the most common questions I get is, how do you convince the people in your life to start meditating? And my answer is generally, don't try. One of the jokes I like to tell is about a New Yorker cartoon I saw many years ago. It features two women and they're sitting having lunch and one of them says to the other,

I've been gluten-free for a week and I'm already annoying. And that is what sometimes happens with people who get into meditation. They become insufferably evangelistic. That actually happened to me early on and I learned the hard way, mostly through screwing this up with my wife, not to press the practice on people close to me. That said, I completely understand why people who get interested in meditation want to share it with everybody they know because it really is an incredible adventure and it can be very helpful when it comes to managing your own anxiety and depression.

So it's fun to have your friends along for the ride. For that reason, I was beyond thrilled when my brother started getting interested in meditation and also in the Dharma in a very real and profound way. In fact, he recently wrote an incredible essay about his first year on the path. If you want to read that essay, I'm going to put a link in the show notes. It's up on my new website, which is danharris.com. A little bit more about Matt before we dive in here. He is a partner at Bain Capital Ventures, where he has developed an expertise in fintech or financial technology. I have really no

idea what that means, but I think it's pretty impressive. He's also a father of six incredible children. He is 17 months younger than me to the day. And as you will hear, he likes to make fun of his neurotic older brother. In fact, he shows up a lot, Matt does, in the first book I wrote called 10% Happier. And Matt can be seen mocking me there for my budding interest in meditation. So it's poetic that he now shares this interest. Speaking of my book, my first book, all month here on the show, we're doing a special series in honor of the 10th anniversary of 10% Happier.

I've just put out a revised edition with a new preface and appendix, which is loaded with the meditation instructions. If you want to check out the book, there's a link in the show notes. Anyway, back to Matt. In this conversation, we talk about how to fit meditation into a busy life,

the practical tips he's taken from to fit meditation into a busy life, the practical tips he's taken from the great meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein, the books that have propelled him on his path, how not to try too hard in meditation, how the awareness of his ego impacts him at his big, big job, and the difference between relative and ultimate reality. Matt Harris coming up. But first, some blatant self-promotion, our little BSP segment we do here on the show.

Just a reminder, there are a few tickets left for the event that we're doing on March 28th in New York City at Symphony Space. I'll be interviewing Joseph Goldstein and Dr. Mark Epstein live for a recording of this podcast. It's also a celebration of the 10th anniversary of a book I wrote called 10% Happier, after which this podcast is named. Speaking of the 10th anniversary of 10% Happier, our friends over at the 10% Happier Meditation app are offering a big discount. If you want to give meditation a try, join us over on the app for 40% off.

Get this deal before it ends on April 1st by going to 10% dot com slash 40 and dive into guided meditations and insightful courses for a 10% happier you. That's 10%, all one word spelled out dot com slash 40 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 audiobooks, podcasts, and originals, featuring authentic Canadian voices and celebrity talent. Check out A podcasts and originals, 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.

I'm Peter Frankenpern. And I'm Afro-Hersh. And we're here to tell you about our new season of Legacy, covering the iconic troubled musical genius that was Nina Simone. Full disclosure, this is a big one for me. Nina Simone, one of my favourite artists of all time, somebody who's had a huge impact on me, who I think objectively stands apart for the level of her talent, the audacity of her message. If I was a first year at university, the first time I sat down and really listened to her

and engaged with her message, it totally floored me. And the truth and pain and messiness of her struggle that's all captured in unforgettable music that has stood the test of time. Think that's fair, Peter? I mean, the way in which her music comes across is so powerful, no matter what song it is. So join us on Legacy for Nina Simone. Matthew Carmichael Harris, welcome to the show.

How dare you. Trot out the middle name right out of the gate. Yes, I'm happy to be here. We'll see if that happiness sustains under the withering barrage of questions. Let me just set the table a little bit, provide a little context, tell a few stories that came to mind as I was preparing for this interview. One is, I have a clear memory of being in Central Park with you in 2008 or nine.

We're walking out of the park, we had just finished a family picnic, and I mentioned to you that I had tried meditation, and you winced with your full body and expressed profound concern for me. That concern quickly morphed into your default mode of mockery. I have here a gift that you gave to me at Christmas in 2009.

This is an Eckhart Tolle calendar, which I opened and looked across the room and you had a shit-eating grin Plastered on your face and then a few other little stories One time you copied me on an email where one of your business colleagues noticed that I was on a podcast talking about Doing a startup and your colleague said oh he sounds so much like you and he clearly learned a lot from you and you wrote He sounds so much like you and he clearly learned a lot from you and you wrote Well, you'll tell if I've learned from him if I start saying things like life is the dance and I am the dancer

What one last little Matt Harris quip is when ten percent happier came out by the way You were a huge role and you played a huge role in making that book not suck and and I was getting offers after the book came out to do sequels and you replied all to some chain suggesting that I do a coffee table book on cats called 10% tabby-er. So, not my finest moment. So I say all of this because it's enjoyable to torture you in public, but also to ask like what changed because here we are in 2024,

10 years after 10% Happier came out and you're really into this stuff now. I just wonder, you wrote an essay called Field Notes on the Path, year one, and you say perhaps in my case, the path couldn't really begin until I had begun thinking about the second half of life.

So I wonder if you could after that big wind up just say a little bit more about that. Yeah, so the Eckhart Tolle thing in particular, I thought it was deeply ironic for the power of Now Guy to have like a calendar that allowed you to plan out your entire year in advance. I think he needs to be a little more thoughtful about his merch from a brand perspective. But yeah, I think, I mean, I've wrestled with this question of what took me so long. You know, so I would frame it that way rather than the way I think about it isn't, you know, why did I finally come to it? But rather what took me so long. And I say that a year or so into a quite deep exploration of these topics that you've been so thoughtful on.

The way I put it in the essay is how I feel about it, that this kind of work requires a really intrinsic curiosity. I had full intellectual knowledge of the utility of mindfulness meditation. I was not uncertain about that. I had seen its positive impact on you and obviously read all your books and even read some other books in the field and had conviction about the thesis that, as you would put it, that this is sort of like brushing your teeth. This will be over time something that everyone agrees is just sort of good hygiene and yet I just couldn't

commit to daily Meditation practice couldn't do it kept trying had my various kind of half-assed versions of it And so I am curious now still about why I couldn't and all I can Do to explain it is that you know right around my 50th birthday in December of 2022, I just started to have very different thoughts about what kind of life I wanted to live. And that led me to start reading additional books

and talking to people and finally sitting down to meditate. And then it developed its own gravity from there. As you talk about like why you didn't get into it, a couple thoughts come to mind for me. One is, you know, there's this hilarious line that you had when you were a little boy where mom and dad asked you, you know, they were trying to figure out like what was going on in your head. And one of them said to you, you're kind of like a closed book to us. And you said, eh, you know, I'm more like a pamphlet. And I wonder if there's anything onward leading in that joke. Yeah, I think the, as you would know, of course, would get lunch, you know, round about once a month

during this whole period where you were learning all these things and discovering these things. And you would share, you know, very generously what you were learning all these things and discovering these things, and you would share very generously what you were learning. And I wasn't a cynical bastard the entire time, so we actually had some constructive conversations. And I remember vividly, pretty early on, you shared this metaphor of the waterfall, of being behind the waterfall metaphorically,

where the water, of course, is your thoughts. And that image is elegant in that it very vividly shows the distinction between you between one and one's thoughts and also the way in which you can create that separation and reinforce it and get yourself out of the deluge and allow yourself some space to witness the deluge. And I remember thinking and even commenting to you like that, of course, you know, I think it really did come naturally to me this idea that my thoughts aren't me. And that was is sort of part of my makeup. I think it does go hand in hand with the pamphlet idea of, you know, having a relatively straightforward and pragmatic, hopefully not to say simple, kind of interior

life, you know, relatively few noticeable demons. And so I think part of the inertia against starting a really committed practice was this sense that I've kind of, I've got this. I can see why people would really, really need this, but the ideas resonate with me, and I feel like I kind of have a mindfulness that came right out of the box with my particular mental makeup. So that's a story I was telling myself

with some validity, but well short of the amount of credit I was giving myself. Well, actually, that's the story I was telling myself about you. I mean, I know I started by listing all of your wise ass comments, but you were absolutely not a cynical bastard in the main. You said a bunch of funny shit that I think is just hilarious to repeat. But yeah, you and I and also a third friend, Josh, have had a standing lunch date once every four to six weeks for 18 years. So you were very involved in the five-year

process of the book. And I would say you personally are among the three most important readers for me on everything I do. You, my wife, and our mutual friends, Avbaro, who actually is taking part in this special and 10th anniversary series as well. So I definitely never got a hostility off of you at all. And I basically told myself a story like I was always the troubled pain in the ass kid, you know, had to go see a psychiatrist when I was little and got arrested a bunch of times and you were like did well in school and were pretty placid all along. I really did believe that yeah, you were not hostile to meditation, but maybe didn't

really need it. Certainly not as much as I did. Which leads me to the other question I was going to ask you, which is, you know, I could imagine it would be hard to adopt something if your, you know, reasonably annoying older brother is trying to foist it upon you. And I'm sure in those early days, I was probably a little sweaty and evangelistic. And I know for Bianca, that turned her off and has created lasting resistance on her part.

I don't know if that played a role here for you. I've asked myself that question a ton. I remain convinced that it didn't. I think you were definitely not sweaty. I mean, the whole move you were making was a quite skeptical move and an exploration, not about proselytizing. And certainly in our interactions, you weren't advocating for me to do it.

So it wasn't that, I don't believe. I think in retrospect, though, I had a really elaborate set of defense mechanisms against these ideas. And it's ironic because when you frame it as a mental health move, in other words, I am more productive and I am at least 10% happier and I'm making all these improvements to my mindset and mentality and the quality of my life, et cetera. Again, I would readily acknowledge that. You'll note, you know, the teasing was largely

around the spiritual aspects of it, which of course, you know, go hand in glove, less so in your work, but certainly in this field, more generally, you know, you don't have to push very hard before somebody starts talking about what I would have called woo woo dynamics, the metaphysics of Buddhism and mindfulness. And that was the part that I really had deeply entrenched resistance to.

That's what I was mocking. So again, I would have acknowledged the mental health benefits and not consider myself the neediest candidate, but I didn't feel a lot of resistance, and I did in fact meditate. But where I really drew the line was at the spiritual and metaphysical level. And what's ironic about that is that that's actually what's sort of keeping me so vigorously in the game now. You know, I mean, I feel I've made huge progress in terms of the cognitive and emotional benefits of mindfulness meditation.

And I was surely not as evolved as I thought I was by a long shot. But the really intriguing part for me, the part that keeps me on the cushion more than I otherwise would be, and reading more, and just very deeply engaged with the subject matter, is this notion that once you recognize this awareness

within yourself, it's not a big leap to think that perhaps the awareness within yourself is connected to the awareness within other and maybe all sentient beings. And that's just a very different picture of how the world works than I was willing to engage with for the first 50 years of my life. That is so interesting. I mean, there are many interesting things you said there,

but the idea that what you were rebelling against is what actually is keeping you in the game right now. That's a twist. Yeah. Yeah, and I think the rebellion, as you've noted eloquently, part of it is the aesthetics of this set of folks. It's easy to mock. And I'm now incredibly sympathetic because when I sat down to try to write about some of these matters, and you'll hear me talk today, you already have, it's pretty hard

to make your point clear without resorting to language that gets fuzzy at best and flowery and abuses the traditional semantics that we're used to around certain words. So I am now very sympathetic to Eckhart Tolle, who by the way, I think is a proper genius at this point. But yet that was a real turnoff, just the way these folks wrote. So getting past that, but I really do think an openness to spirituality, which some people come by quite early in life and we think of them maybe as seekers or they inherit a spiritual tradition from their parents that they really buy into. But you and

I didn't have a spiritual tradition, particularly, and our parents were atheists, really, and you and I both identify as Jewish culturally and ethically, and yet there was certainly no sense of legitimacy to spirituality in our house growing up. No. And, you know, that appealed to me, the rational aspects of my brain sort of rebelled against it. So that's where the second half of life thing, I think, does come in. I'm not the first person to, in and around, you know, their 50s start thinking that maybe there's more to this

than what might appear. And so I think I'm just sort of the latest to have that turn of mind. This is a perhaps apocryphal story, but I have this memory that mom explained in the same sentence that not only was Santa Claus not real, but also God wasn't real. I don't know if she actually said that, but it's the type of thing she would have said. You know, you and I were both bar mitzvahed. I remember dad had to come to the temple for some preparation class in advance of my bar mitzvah. And the rabbi was there, who our rabbi looked like the Old Testament God, basically.

And he was at the front of the room and he was telling some Bible story. And then he paused and he asked if any of the kids or any of the dads wanted to talk about the story that he had just told. And our dad raised his hand and said, well, it's obviously a parable. And he's trying to make X, Y, or Z point. And I was so embarrassed. I was like, dad, these people believe this stuff. You can't go around calling it a parable.

These are religious folks. So yeah, that was our house. Mom dropping truth bombs about no Santa, no God. And then, Dad just knowing they had no limit to their skepticism and atheism, which again, I respect, but it certainly left us without some kind of spiritual spine to build from. Well, just as evidence of your spiritual commitment, when you ultimately did have your bar mitzvah, I recall when they brought you to the Torah to make your one wish, it was that you would

become taller than your older brother. So, I mean, that is a very holy moment. It was so that I could be a beacon among the Jews. Well, actually, I will say that somebody was listening, because you are taller than me, among the Jews. Well, actually, I will say that somebody was listening because you are taller than me. Just barely, but definitely taller than me. Since you brought up what you're calling the spiritual and what you might have previously called the woo-woo,

I'm just wondering, like, for me, first of all, it'd be interesting to know exactly what you're referring to, but having read your essay, I think what you're referring to is the fact that you can look at your thoughts and realize that they aren't you. You can't claim any ownership of them. You can also look at whatever it is that's aware of those thoughts, consciousness, awareness, and you can't really grab hold of that thing either. In Tibetan Buddhism, they say that the not finding is the finding.

You look for you, you look for some core nugget of matte between your ears, behind your eyes, and you won't find it. That which I think is what you're bracketing as spiritual, is to me at least not irrational. I mean, it could lead you to some non-evidence based assertions like, oh, well, maybe this awareness is, as you said before, somehow shared and universal and non-local and whatever. And that's interesting conjecture. But in and of itself, at least at the first blush, it's not like arguing in defense of wood nymphs and fairies. Correct.

Yeah, I think the, first the observation, the waterfall observation that your thoughts are not you and that you, or there is something that is separate from your thoughts, I think that was, again, step one that I would have acknowledged, but I think the takeaway from a lot more time meditating and reading and thinking is that that which is behind the waterfall is impersonal. It doesn't feel like me either. At first I was sort of like, oh, so I'm not my thoughts, I am the witness.

And then these more non-dual ideas like you're referring to from Tibetan Buddhism, and by the way, correct me if any of this is subtly or massively off as I'm still only a year into it, but that's not me either takeaway really kind of hit me right between the eyes and then creates the possibility of this next move which is to say, well, if that's not me, then maybe it is non-local.

Maybe it is universal. Maybe there is a more global consciousness or awareness that a sliver of which is in me and a sliver of which is in you. And I have no evidence for that, for sure. I think maybe it's impossible to find evidence for that, but it's compelling. It has some explanatory power, I would say, at least subjectively in terms of my lived experience in a way that reinforces its power. I'm self-conscious about maybe just wanting to believe this, right? I mean, I think the motivation for spiritual awareness in the second half of life can come

from the proximity to death and a felt need for something to comfort you in light of your parents perhaps passing away or becoming infirm and the sense that you're next up for the groom reaper. I don't recognize that in myself. It really feels like curiosity and delight and playfulness and excitement, but I remain open to various tricks my ego I'm sure is playing on me. But I just want to say that it's a big part of my motivation is trying to understand better that question of connectivity between people. It's so interesting to contrast our trajectories here because you're diving right into the

stuff that I didn't even bother with for years and still dance around warily sometimes. Like for me, it was all about the insight that you write about very well in your essay, that the ego is a slippery motherfucker that's constantly feeding up shitty ideas. And if you identify too strongly with these ideas, with these thoughts, then you know, you're owned by them and you're down the primrose path pretty quickly. And I was just utterly ensorcelled by that idea, that I'd been having this internal conversation with myself since sentience and that I was unaware of this conversation largely and that it was leading me in directions that were deeply unhelpful.

You've gone to this next level of, okay, well, what is knowing this conversation in the first place and what's going on with that? And you said it hit you right between the eyes. And so I'm wondering, like, what about it, beyond being intellectually interesting, keeps you coming back? Well, I should say, like, if I've gotten there faster, it's because I, you know I stand on the shoulders of a

very small giant, which is you. I really did have the advantage of deeply understanding that first move from 15 years of dialogue with you and the benefit of your book. So again, I took it as a given, this idea of separating from those thoughts, of not being lost in thought, and the mechanic of meditation as a way to help you avoid that trap of being lost in thought. And so that wasn't fascinating. It was the spiritual stuff that fascinated me. And that second move was part of that, which is the, you know, moving beyond just the mental

health benefits to this concept of awareness and consciousness as a thing. Again, whether it's local or universal, really thinking about that. That second question of, okay, so we're not our thoughts, well, what are we then? Which I didn't engage with until I turned 50. And that was what put me on a more intense path for sure. And being able to meditate, being able to in meditation as I lengthened from five minutes to 20 minutes at a stretch, being able to develop a closer relationship with that witness capability or that consciousness and awareness, it just grew more and more intriguing.

And there are great writings on this topic, and I was attracted to some of those minds as well. And I do sometimes think I have a too heady approach to all this where I'm much more likely to read the thinkers and there's no substitute in my mind and my experience for just meditating. But the ideas were and are very compelling to me. Is part of what is compelling this idea of,

now we're getting firmly into the realm of Eckhart Tolle's calendar, but this idea of interconnection that this mysterious awareness that's in all of us, the brute fact that the lights are on in the first place, that we can be aware of anything at all, the idea that since it's so mysterious, perhaps it is connecting us to some whole, and that is an ancient venerable spiritual notion, that is there's some unity in there, perhaps. Is that somehow comforting to you on a visceral level, but beneath the intellectual curiosity? Well, I am intellectually honest enough to acknowledge that it has to be.

Human beings are weak in many ways, wildly strong in others, but one of those, we are susceptible to fear and being scared of notions of separateness and feeling alone and all these vulnerabilities that we have. And so I think you'd have to acknowledge if you were being quite clinical about it that this you know perennial philosophy, this idea that's been around for a long time that consciousness is part of a unified whole, it addresses our vulnerability. So it's a little pat. You know, you'd have to at least suspect that it was something developed to make people feel better.

And so I think therefore you have to turn that lens on yourself and say like, well, is the appeal of that idea simply to make me feel better? And I'm fine with that hypothesis. I'd say my lived experience is a little different, which is just that it feels true to me. I don't really have a better way to say it than that. But just having spent a lot of time on this topic, on the cushion and off, it rings true. It feels right. So That could easily be simply because I deeply desire that feeling of connection and unity and it's gonna make me feel better to feel Connected versus feeling separate I get that but I that is not how it feels. It does not feel like a device It feels like a truth that I've discovered and I don't see any harm in going with that version of the theory.

Yeah, I mean it feels true to me too and I have no evidence for it. I mean I can't prove it. I mean I kind of sometimes think about us as like tornadoes. A lot of wind comes into the landscape and it pulls up lots of stuff from the earth, dust and you know houses and park benches or whatever, just atoms in various formations, and it spins and spins and spins, and then at some point it just dissipates and all the everything just goes back to the earth. And like, that's kind of us with this mysterious life force that we can't really fully put our finger on. And so we as humans and all the the other animals any other life form is just kind of Appearing and disappearing out of the raw materials that are available And so if whatever that mysterious life force that mysterious consciousness Whatever that is the idea that it may travel from life to life and be drawn from some

You know existing pond or soup of it, you it, and then we're getting a shard of it. I mean, again, this is all very hard to talk about, but it does make sense to me on some level and maybe I'm not making any sense right now, so save me if I need saving. Well, we're just muddling through it together and again, this is where the vocabulary is a hot mess. It's very hard ideas to capture in rational English. It may be easier in Hindi or Nepali, but English is tough. And it's all conjecture, and you and I are both evidence-based

folks. But I take comfort surely in the fact that you do the same things regardless. You know what I mean? You spend time meditating. As you meditate, you're led to, I think inexorably into things like loving-kindness meditation. You become more compassionate. That is a word that it took me a while, but once you see the path to compassion as just integral to the path of insight, you can't unsee it. Whether or not I feel like the consciousness within me is unified with the consciousness of my colleagues or of a homeless person, I feel it is the same. I feel we are the same in that sense. And that leads, again, inexorably to a compassion, very profound compassion, which makes you a better person.

So I just have yet to come across any kind of pitfall to entertaining this hypothesis of unity. And I see real benefits in terms of my lived experience and my conduct. That's well said. Coming up, Matt and I talk about some practical tips from Joseph Goldstein, the books that have been integral to Matt's process, and some tips on starting a practice. 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 second generation when enabled. Hello, I'm Emily and I'm one of the hosts of Terribly Famous,

the show that takes you inside the lives of our biggest celebrities. And they don't get much bigger than the man who made badminton sexy. terribly famous, the show that takes you inside the lives of our biggest celebrities. And they don't get much bigger than the man who made badminton sexy. Okay, maybe that's a stretch, but if I say pop star and shuttlecocks, you know who I'm talking about. No? Short shorts? Free cocktails?

Careless whispers? Okay, last one. It's not Andrew Ridgely. Yep, that's right, it's Stone Cold icon George Michael. From teen pop sensation to one of the biggest solo artists on the planet, join us for our new series, George Michael's Fight for Freedom. From the outside, it looks like he has it all.

But behind the trademark dark sunglasses is a man in turmoil. George is trapped in a lie of his own making with a secret he feels would ruin him if the truth ever came out. Follow Terribly Famous wherever you listen to your podcasts or listen early and ad-free on Wandery Plus on Apple Podcasts or the Wandery app.

To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the 10% Happier book, we're offering subscriptions to the 10% Happier meditation app at a 40% discount until the end of the 10% Happier Book. We're offering subscriptions to the 10% Happier Meditation app at a 40% discount until the end of the month. Get this deal before it ends by going to 10% dot com slash 40. That's 10%. One word all spelled out dot com slash 40 for 40% off your subscription. Just I want to steer us toward the practical for a second. If anybody's listening and is annoyed with the Harris brothers for, you know, thrashing around and attempting to grock the ineffable, or maybe just feeling like, how do I even get a glimpse of this in my own practice? Let me just say a little bit. I'd be curious to hear what you're doing on the cushion that puts you in touch with the, you know, consciousness, awareness, the observer. I'll just say a little bit about the way Joseph Goldstein,

who we're both students of and friends with, the great meditation teacher, Joseph, the way he instructs on this score. And I find this, I'm not sure everybody will find this pretty easy to understand and apply. Personally, it's been very helpful for me. He'll often have people do a little exercise, which is like, just move your arm. You don't have to do this, Matt, but just, you know, if you move your arm, how much effort does it take to be aware of the sensations of the movement? None. It's effortless. And so that little word is the start of it for me. And I'll walk you through the progression. Please, Matt, tell me if this makes sense. Once in a while, while I'm sitting in meditation,

I will just drop in the word effortless. What kind of effort does it take for me to know whatever is happening in my mind right now? The sights, sounds, smells, sensations, thoughts? None. Okay, so then the next step for me is, and this is from Joseph, is to put it all into the passive tense. So this kind of takes the you out of it. Instead of saying, I'm

knowing or I'm hearing, I'm thinking, no, thoughts are being known, sensations are being known, hearing is being known, and then this is the good stuff. By what? And what I often find is I can sense myself, usually the sensations center around like my face somewhere. So I get that sense, and then I can also sense the knowing of, you know, I can, that I'm hearing stuff, thinking stuff,

whatever, seeing stuff, but I can't sense the knowing that I'm hearing stuff, thinking stuff, whatever, seeing stuff, but I can't connect the two. So I can't find whatever is knowing all of my thoughts and other mental objects. And as they say, the not finding is the finding. That's the point. You can just see this pretty obvious thing, which is that we're aware of stuff all the time. We just don't know what is knowing all of it.

And you might even ask a supplemental question and then I'll shut up. So after you ask known by what, who's asking this question? Right. So what is this ghostly inner narrator that's asking the question in the first place, another thing you can't find. Does any of that land for you, Matt? Yeah. And I have the benefit, you know, because of you, of some of Joseph's wisdom directly.

But yes, that this move of going from the subject object to the passive voice, as I do, my ego still pipes up and says that our mother, the grammarian, would hate that. But it is so powerful and is a core part of my meditation practice of just thinking is happening, hearing is happening, removing the eye from it, which seems a little divisive, right? Because, you know, this Buddhist concept of no self and so you make a grammatical move and have you really made progress. But it's profound and just understanding that these things are happening and they're registered in awareness in removing the I from it.

But it also, I think as a side note, like it is snowing makes no sense either. You know, we actually, there's something bigger that goes on in our grammar where we cling to subjectivity. We want to believe that there's a doer behind things that are simply just happening. Mentally, of course, that is a really big problem. So I think that passive voice thing is very useful for me. Another move just tactically is, you know, I experience meditation as quite frustrating to begin with, and that's a nearly universal experience from folks I talk to who are trying to do Vipassana or insight meditation.

And I just laugh at myself. I'm much more playful now. And just not gripping the situation is having this relationship with my ego, with its incredible efforts to intervene in the middle of my meditation, it's amusing. It has to be amusing. And that has been really useful to avoid getting in these cycles of thinking and self-flagellation,

and, wow, this isn't working at all, and discouragement. So if you can be playful about it, and you can try to recognize the passive voice nature of the thoughts and the sounds and the sensations, those have been two really important steps for me. And I'd say the final one, and again, you have had 15 years of this and I've had a year.

So like, dear listener, take this as the thoughts of an amateur. But the geography of the body as it relates to awareness, I've found really useful. I think this notion that most of the sense organs feed into the head, combined with the sort of notion that that's where our brain is, I was coming to this thinking of my head, thinking of awareness being in my head right next to the thinking, and it made it harder to separate them, frankly.

So now I've practiced a long time thinking of awareness as more diffuse through my body, and in particular in my gut. I think about, I don't really think about it, but I experience awareness as emanating from my core, not emanating, from receiving phenomena into my core and throughout the body. And that has been really useful for me as a technique. The Tibetans, when they talk about the mind, they point to the heart. So it seems to me like you're onto something there. You're a dude with a very busy job and six children.

How are you finding time for this? I'd love to know all of those nitty-gritty details. Yeah, as you know, I put together a bibliography and tried to put it kind of in order and what will seem like pandering but isn't. I do think that 10% Happier is on ramp. And another really important book at the outset was Robert Wright's book, Why Buddhism is True, mainly to provide the intellectual scaffolding to sort of quiet the skeptic,

because he writes in a interesting, but sort of dry enough, academic enough way to bring a lot of credibility to the topic. Then I moved into some more heart-based stuff. So the reading agenda, which by the way, continues apace. I do find it really endlessly fascinating. It has a way of building on itself so that you can tackle more advanced material as you go. Meditating itself, I started, and I really highly recommend giving yourself permission to start with five minutes. It makes a big difference.

I can't quantify how much difference five minutes of meditation makes, but it is an enormous building block to where you can get to, you can't skip straight or I couldn't skip straight to longer sits. And so the confidence that I built in the five minute sits combined with some of these techniques around the passive voice, around diffuse awareness, the playfulness, all those were kind of built in these shorter sits and then stretched to 10.

And now I really view that I get much more benefit out of a 20 minute meditation session than anything shorter and have gone as long as 45 minutes and it really is a game changer. But as you note, from my lifestyle perspective, there's not a lot of quiet time in the house, I would say. We wake up early and we still have a four-year-old and two six-year-olds. So it's not the sort of thing where I can find even 20 minutes in the morning, or I've

failed to do so. So at my office, we have a wellness room and sometimes I'll use that. If I have a meeting canceled, sometimes I'll carve out 30 minutes and spend 20 of it meditating in the office, and my colleagues are very supportive of that. But usually it's in the evenings. Usually after the little kids go to bed,

so we're talking about 7.30, eight o'clock, maybe even nine. And I don't think if I had complete choice and no constraints, I would choose the evening because, you know, sleepiness is certainly a hindrance that shows up the later I get. But I'd say 70, 80% of the time it's in the evenings. You know, yesterday I flew out to California

and airplanes are amazing for meditation. I will just say like I had this incredible sit on the airplane. I was, I could have kept going, going, going. It was terrific. So there's a little bit of finding spots for it and not being afraid to experiment. Amen. It's satisfying to hear you say these things because it's exactly what I would recommend to people, which is give yourself a break, start really small, be super flexible, fit

it into your life. Don't march forward with this idea of what it should be, what it should look like, how long it should be. It's got to work with the conditions of your life. And if you can start really small, it will build. You'll find the time if it's findable. So amen. I mean, the other thing you mentioned in your essay was that given that most days

you don't have a ton of time, you've really been trying to do a lot of like off the cushion, IRL, free range mindfulness. Can you say a little bit about that? Yeah, one of the early, really, really powerful moves early in the chronology of the past 13 months for me was the more you purify your consciousness awareness and harnessing this idea that leaving aside what purification means, that there were actual benefits to not thinking. That flies in the face of my entire life. Where, I mean, even if I would acknowledge, as I have for a decade plus, that the thoughts aren't me, I mean, the thoughts

are my entire job and my entire life is having the right thoughts. It would seem obvious that the more preparatory thoughts you had, the better. These all build up to insightful and transcendent thinking, but that's not right. If you give yourself permission, and even an imperative, to think less, that's the off-the-cushion work that I've found most meaningful. imperative to think less. That's the off the cushion work that I found most meaningful. I just prioritize as much time as possible not thinking. Just being aware of what's happening.

Catching thoughts arise, putting them to rest while I'm walking around. And not only was that not intuitive, but a year and a half ago, I would have said it flies in the face of everything I'm trying to do, which is at work and even my family and my relationships just trying to be thoughtful, trying to have planned. And none of that was serving me. I still spend plenty of time thinking, like it or not, but moving from thinking being

a priority and something you want to do as much of as possible to something where you want to do as little of it as possible, fully recognizing that you're going to still do a ton of it, because that's the human condition, that was a big move for me. Yeah, it sounds like you're doing something quite wise there, which is emphasizing being mindful as much as possible off the cushion, which by the way, I think actually now that I've been doing this for a minute, I sometimes forget to do, so it's actually humbling and useful to hear your emphasis on it.

So it sounds like you're endeavoring to be as mindful as possible during the course of your day. And I was a little worried about this at the beginning when you talked about not thinking. And it doesn't sound like you're vilifying the thinking process or surprised or angry when thoughts of course come barging through the wall, like the Kool-Aid man, that like that is the deal.

I hear you pointing at that. That to me seems like, again, I don't want to pretend that I know more than I do. You've been very good about expressing humility. I'm not a trained meditation teacher, but to my ears, that sounds like the right balance. One thing I would just say to amend slightly or amplify what you said is I don't consider it the same as being mindful. When I meditate, there's an intensity. The word most people that I've read is alertness. And so I will say when I meditate, it does feel like effort.

I mean, there's an effortlessness to the way that awareness encounters phenomena, as you note. But mindfulness meditation to me feels active. And I couldn't do that all day long. Maybe I will someday. But what I'm talking about is more still than that, less alert. When I brush my teeth, I brush my teeth. When I do the dishes, I just do the dishes and I just quiet my mind to the extent possible.

But without that additional inflection of alertness, which I think is really important to my meditation practice, because that's where you catch thoughts early, where you really observe the entire out-breath or you observe the entire in-breath. Those are meditative techniques that I think move the ball forward. This is as much really about the absence of something. It's the absence of the unconscious rumination that would fill my day for 50 years. And I would often, you know, if I had to wash the dishes, I'm the dishwash guy in our house a lot, and I'd put on an audiobook, you know? Like so uncomfortable being with my own thoughts, I guess, that I needed to find out what Jack Reacher was up to or whatever.

And now I could just do the dishes. Coming up, Matt and I talk about one of the biggest issues for meditators, how not to try too hard, how awareness of the ego impacts work, and the downsides and upsides of living a more examined life. This podcast is brought to you in part by Audible. Every year offers us the opportunity to get closer to the best versions of ourselves. No matter where you are on your well-being journey, Audible is there for you. They have an ever-growing selection of stories to inspire, sounds to soothe, and voices that have the potential to change your life. Sometimes we need a little encouragement to truly spark change in our life. If you need

something a little more than someone simply telling you to be more positive, check out Don Miguel Ruiz's The Four Agreements. He dissects how people impose limitations on themselves that rob them of true joy, and provides a simple-to-follow code of personal conduct to start living life more freely. Get closer to the best you with Audible. Explore a wealth of well-being titles like bestsellers, new releases, and exclusive originals. Listen now on Audible. 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 Wondery's 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. Okay, you put your finger on something pretty subtle there. And I again want to make very clear something that you are aware of, but I just want to be very clear to the audience. The amount of training one needs to do, in my opinion, to be a proper Dharma teacher, meditation teacher who's gone through the Insight Meditation Society or Spirit Rock teacher training program. I'm married to a doctor.

These people are doing as much, if not way more, training in order to call themselves teachers. So I have so much respect for that, and I'm not that. Okay, so having said that, what I hear there touches on one of the biggest issues for meditators, especially at the early stages, which is right effort. That's a Buddhist term of art. In Buddhism, there's the Noble Eightfold Path. It's like a kind of a cookbook for how to get enlightened. And each of the eight entries on the list of eight starts with the word right or proper or correct or wise. So right

mindfulness, right view, right action, right speech, one of them is right effort. And meditation is extremely subtle and tricky in this regard, because on some level, the awareness of mental objects or phenomena, the awareness of stuff that's flitting through your mind requires no effort. And yet, meditation itself does require some effort, but probably not as much as we put in. And one of the, you know, the Buddha talked about it like tuning the strings of a guitar. Actually, at that time, I don't think they had guitars, so he was talking

about a lute, which is another stringed instrument, and it was about like not too tight. If your guitar strings are too tight, it sounds like shit, and if they're too loose, it sounds like shit. So it's a very tricky titration. And I'm wondering whether the absence of effort that you're feeling while you're washing the dishes is actually something that could be carefully ported over to the effortfulness of your daily meditation practice. Not to say that the daily meditation does not require some ardor, some intensity, but it might be something instructive about these more easeful experiences of what I would definitely call mindfulness because you were dropping out of the stories in your mind and into the raw data of your physical sensations of washing the dishes or whatever else it is.

So does any of that, does that whole word salad make any sense to you? Well, Dan, I think what you're missing here is I'm really trying to win this. I'm really trying to win this. I'm really trying to crush meditation, and I think this laissez-faire attitude you have towards it misses the entire point. Yeah, it does resonate. I think titration is exactly right, and I have no illusion that I'm in exactly the right spot. And I think there is something to pour it back over.

I do think of it as kind of chapters. I'm not trying to muscle it or grip it, but I do, there are techniques, you know, like paying careful attention to the breath and noting techniques. For instance, that's two examples that I've learned from Joseph that I don't do when I'm washing dishes

that I do do on the cushion. So there are some distinctions, but it may be that somewhere in the middle is where I end up after more than just a year where some of those techniques become less like techniques and more natural Things that feel quite yes peaceful and effortless, but right now They do feel like techniques that all makes sense something Joseph often says after he drops like a real wisdom But I'm unlike my disorganized set of thoughts There is you know, I'll look at him with an incomprehending look or feeling put upon by having to operationalize some complicated thing. He just dropped into my otherwise reasonably simple meditation and he'll just say, play

with it. And so I offer those words in the same spirit. Let me just go back to your essay. It struck me that there are two separate but related, although looked at from a certain light, perhaps maybe misunderstood as contradictory trajectories that you're on. On the one hand, you are very interested in understanding the impersonality of the ego and of whatever it is that's witnessing the ego. On the other hand, you are also digging into the specifics of your own ego.

Like what makes you tick? What are the patterns that have governed your life that are helpful, unhelpful? I'll read you back to you. There's one thing you said that caught my eye. You say, in my case, early experiences with shame and corporal punishment leave me feeling significant suffering when I cause disappointment in others. Are you comfortable talking a little bit about what you mean by that both historically and presently? Yeah, I would say, you know, I've sort of committed not to editing that piece because it's really meant to be kind of an artifact of a year. But I would, at this point, change disappointment to discomfort, as I've thought more about my own makeup on that.

I think, at least from my reading, about sort of more pure Buddhist writings, which I would contrast with the Mark Epstein's and the Bruce Tift and the, there's a lot as a rich vein that sit at the intersection of psychology, psychiatry, and Buddhism. But it kind of feels like the Buddhists would say like Buddhism contains all you need to march down the path. My own experience is that it is useful to think about your own personal history and stuff that you might have that's getting in the way.

Some people call it shadow work. So yeah, I have dedicated time to that. It goes very nicely with meditation because again, you're gaining these insights into the types of thoughts that are coming into your brain and it gives you some remove at which to contemplate your psychological makeup. So it's been a really, really useful tool. And yeah, specifically, I mean, you and I, you know, we grew up in a household where

we had a caregiver, love her very much, but she was kind of old school in the way she thought about corporal punishment. And so it was a pretty big feature of our lives, from a quite young age. And- The paddle. The paddle, the wooden spoon. Spatula.

Yeah. Look, I mean, you and I have talked about this, we're not talking about big T trauma. This is little boys getting spacked. And yet, for a two or a three or a four year old, who knows when you capitalize the T, you know? That was a big deal for me at that age. And so I think it's some degree of conjecture,

but I see a through line between the intensity of that reaction and a strong desire that I observe in myself to really not wanna cause people to be upset. And I think it's really gotten in the way of my career, my personal relationships, because it gets in the way of candor and directness, which are duties you owe to your colleagues and to the important people in your life. And not just duties, they bring all sorts of benefits, candor and directness.

Because when you keep these thoughts inside and you fail to communicate them, you're really subtly at least withdrawing from that counterparty. Whereas if you're quite direct, it's a form of connection in that. So that has all been extremely useful to me. Because I don't, you know, I think of awareness

and consciousness as impersonal. Unfortunately, the ego is, well, I don't know if it's personal, but it's quite particular. You know, it's conditioned in a specific way for people based on their lived experience. And mine is understanding the ways in which my ego has been conditioned. Even as I'm defanging it through this distance and ability to observe, understanding it deeply

has been extremely gratifying and useful and I've seen very strong benefits in how I show up. Just simply by understanding, oh, well, this would be a time when I would couch some feedback or I would retreat or avoid this conversation. Well, I'm not going to do that. I understand that conditioning, but I have the agency to do what feels right, and what feels right is to be more candid and forthright. So that's a good example. I think of why some of this do what feels right and what feels right is to be more candid and forthright. So that's a good example, I think, of why some of this personal history and shadow work, this more psychological work, it can be a quite good companion to the mindfulness work.

Yeah, I mean, I agree a million percent. And it really comes down to a concept that, for me at least, it comes down to a concept that gets talked about a lot in Buddhist circles and you mentioned it in your writing that there are two things that are true simultaneously all the time, but it is true that you are Matt and I'm Dan, I'm your brother, we grew up together and you need to move through the world as Matt

and I need to move through the world as Dan. I mean, the term of art in Buddhist circles for this is relative reality, your consensual reality. We're all living in the same movie. We agree that this is all true as far as it goes. And then there's ultimate reality. And one rough analogy for this is like, if you think about a chair on the relative

or consensual level, like it's a chair, you could sit in it. On the ultimate level, if you were, it's a chair. You can sit in it. On the ultimate level, if you were to take a high powered microscope, you would see that it's mostly empty space, spinning subatomic particles. And so they're both true. You can still sit in the chair. And it's a mysterious amalgamation of atoms and even

smaller particles, and there's no essence to the chair to be found. And so if you think about it in your life, yeah, it's true that the ego is impersonal and whatever knows the ego inside of you is also unfindable and impersonal as well and mysterious. That's all true on an ultimate level, but on a relative level,

like you do have your patterns injected into you by your parents, your caregivers, the culture, your frat brothers, whatever it is, not that you were in a fraternity, but you know what I'm saying, like the larger culture. And there is a fruitful conversation to be had between these two levels. And it's really useful to understand

that these patterns are impersonal and you don't have to take them as seriously. Anyway, does that all track with what you were trying to point to? Yeah. I'm sure given, again, the venerable lineage of the Buddhist-only approach that you don't need to do it. But surely what I found was that it made meditation easier and more appealing when I was also thinking about my personal history.

So it was very reinforcing and it helped me to make progress, I think, more quickly. So as somebody who'd never been and has never been in therapy, which I view as a categoric mistake at this point. But you know, I came to a pretty cold and as a result, I had an awful lot to learn. So I'm curious, like, where has all this left you? There's a world in which this kind of exploration could be pretty deeply destabilizing. The structure of your life is pretty firm, and there are a lot of people who are looking to you, your colleagues, your staffers, your family.

Where are you with all of this now? What are the, you end the essay with some open questions. Can you talk a little bit about what those are? Well, it's very useful to have this concept in mind of the two layers, the relative and the absolute. On the absolute level, what my investment returns look like isn't that important. I'm connected to that absolute level, and it makes a lot of the things I do every day seem less important at that level. And yet, not only have I not, but I really have no desire or intention of

relinquishing this relative level wherein my investment returns are extremely important. And my investment returns have real beneficiaries, hospitals and college endowments and pensioners. And so too my commitments to being as good a father as I can possibly be and as good a husband as I can possibly be, well, maybe not important on the absolute level where we're all puffs of energy.

They still are commitments that I embrace. No less than I did a year ago and much more skillfully than I did a year ago. I feel that I'm much better at those relative level commitments having had some level of early insight as we've been discussing. So you mentioned the eightfold path. Of course, one of those is right livelihood. And I could certainly imagine going through this exploration, coming to the conclusion

that even on the relative plan, I didn't have the right livelihood and I had to make a change. That has not been the case so far. My day job, I'm an investor at a venture capital firm. That involves making lots of judgment calls, but mostly what I do is try to help companies be successful. Mostly what I do is I sit with groups of people and I try to do my small part to get them collectively moving in the right direction

and make sure the relationships between and among them are healthy, both in our partnership and our team and in the companies I work with. And that's just all very, very consistent with the kind of motivations that I even retain on the absolute level around loving kindness and compassion. So I'd say so far so good. I do think you're right to flag some level of, maybe risk is too strong, but let's use that word.

There are people who go through the dark night of the soul, who as their identity is becoming less concrete, really have a crisis around, well, what's left and who am I? And that can be really scary for's left and who am I? That can be really scary for folks, and I'm mindful of that. Then of course, you might discover upon connecting with some new values that the choices you've been making are no longer what feels true. I think hopefully not totally coincidentally, I chose a line of work that's pretty aligned with my values.

And that's left me feeling pretty good about where I sit. I seem to remember, Dan, you used to work in broadcast television and now you don't. So I don't know if you have any comments about right livelihood from your experience. I actually, I had no question really. I didn't, I don't want to say no question about the ethics of television news for sure. There are things that I didn't like, but largely I felt journalism was a pretty noble pursuit with its flaws for sure, structural flaws and obviously individual flaws that I and

others were bringing to the table. But I didn't leave network news because I had ethical problems with the industry. I loved it and left it reluctantly because I realized that trying to do two things at once was making me miserable and by extension everybody around me. I will say just to embarrass you that so many people have said to me behind your back that you're this unusually menchie venture capitalist. Thank you for that comment about my menschiness. I think there is a part of journalism and actually oddly a part of venture capital,

which is hugely egoic. How you really have to, you know, build a brand. And I would say that's gotten harder. You know, I used to be active on Twitter and it's very hard for me to get motivated to be active on Twitter. It doesn't feel authentic. It feels highly egoic. And I'm much more interested in content like what we're talking about here. This is why I think it's non-egoic for you to be on Twitter because you're really bringing the good word about something incredibly important to lots of people. That same is not exactly true in my business life. And so I think if there's been a change in terms of how I work, it's been a little bit more focused on relationships and on these new to me concepts of candor and transparency

and forthrightness and directness and a little bit less on kind of personal brand building. Let me gently correct you not that you said anything, you know, like dharmically or factually incorrect or slightly factually incorrect as it pertains to my inner life. I can assure you that my Twitter and other social media are not empty of ego. Delusion, which you can translate into the lack of seeing of whatever's happening right now, delusion is slippery and insidious. And what I would say that is more accurate is there's less ego in my public branding now than there used to be. Not that there's no ego. For sure. Do I look at like how my posts are doing?

Yeah, I do. And to an embarrassing extent, yes. So I did want to be completely upfront about that. But does it feel less ego fueled than what I used to do? Absolutely. And do I have much more confidence that what I'm putting out into the world is like, often unassailably helpful? Yeah, that what I'm putting out into the world is like often unassailably helpful. Yeah, that's actually where the ego has gone way down because the stuff I'm putting out isn't my ideas in the first place. I'm just taking ancient ideas and putting a little bit of a spin on it. So I don't actually feel that much authorship over it anyway. And so I actually think there's a way in which, and I root for this,

you may just have a different brand going forward. And there may be things pushing you to Twitter or Medium I think there's a way in which, and I root for this, you may just have a different brand going forward. And there may be things pushing you to Twitter or Medium or other platform for self-expression that feels authentic rather than talking about market dynamics, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, I welcome that. All right, just one last personal question. You talk also about seeing fear in your mind that surprised you. I'd just be interested to hear any thoughts about that. All right, just one last personal question. You talk also about seeing fear in your mind that surprises you.

I'd just be interested to hear any thoughts about that. Like I guess I would not have hitherto described you as a guy who seemed that anxious, back to the fact that I never really thought you, you know, of all people desperately needed meditation. And yet you describe in your practice seeing, you practice seeing no small measure of fear. Yeah, I think this is, as I mentioned with this idea of the dark night of the soul, which is I think a term of art in the mindfulness circles. When you open up this Pandora's box, I think you're going to find good stuff and bad stuff.

So I think I was very good at disassociating, which is not to say the fear wasn't present, but I really wasn't giving it any attention or oxygen, which I don't think is healthy. But when you do get curious about the workings of your mind, you're gonna find some stuff that is unpleasant. I wouldn't describe myself as anxious, but I could now tell you what anxiety feels like. I have seen it.

You know, just being on an airplane this week, there are moments where I can connect with the anxiety that comes from the improbability of being 38,000 feet in the sky trapped in a tube. And it's very interesting to see that anxiety and then back up and see it in the context of a spacious consciousness where the anxiety is there, but it's not everything. It's a cloud in the sky. It's not your whole worldview. And it doesn't go away, at least not quickly, but I can treat with it as a part of me, a part that historically I think I had been quite

disassociated from and now I can't really avoid because I'm spelunking around in my brain all the time. But yet, thankfully you also get given these tools to where you don't have to attach to it and identify with it. So yeah, I have a new relationship with anxiety and it's more palpable. And I don't wish that were true. I mean, anxiety is a really terrible feeling. I assume our listeners are acquainted with it as well. It really, really feels like it could tilt you out of control. And so dancing with that, again, I wouldn't wish for it, but I think it's part of the

gig of opening up this clockwork and seeing how, what makes it tick. Life is the dancer. Um. I think life is the dance, Dan. I mean, come on, you're the dancer. Sorry, sorry. Can't even get your saccharin aphorisms right. I mean, what kind of podcast host are you? Just to hang a lantern on what you just said, this is very common.

Living a more examined life, going from pamphlet to novel or whatever, has its downsides. The heretofore unseen and uncomfortable aspects of your mental makeup will become more salient, and that's uncomfortable. And then the good news is that the whole path should be just replete with tools for handling in a more supple and sophisticated way the stuff that was there anyway and driving you blindly. So that just sounds from what I know progress on the path. So back for one second on this topic of fear, Joseph has this incredible line that you and I have both heard, which I was using this week as I sat on that airplane that I'm going to butcher the anecdote, but he also

struggled with fear when he's in his meditation practice for years. That was really problematic and eventually he came to a place where he said, if this fear never leaves me, that's okay. In effect, I can live with that. I can accommodate it. I can hold it. And lo and behold, the fear started to dissipate. And this is another, you know, I mentioned playfulness.

This is another takeaway here is that the resistance is the problem. You know, I say that with great confidence, still screwing it up all over the place, but I just keep learning over and over again that it's that resistance to the anxiety that is causing it to feel so real. If like Joseph, you can just acknowledge it and understand physically as you scan your body, can I live with this? You can actually, you can live with it. And that has a way of really defang it.

Well said. And if anybody interested in like operationalizing this in your own life, the little phrase that you can drop into your head when you're experiencing something uncomfortable is, it's okay. Meaning not that everything is right with the world, but it's okay to feel this. You can handle it. No defibrillator required. Like you can handle this uncomfortable sensation. And I find that to be extremely empowering. As we veer toward the end of our time together,

just to read you a little bit more from the essay, here's the quote, in the end, the most pressing question I'm wrestling with after year one is trying to figure out what consciousness wants of me. I sense it wants me to more fully embrace this sense of being connected versus separate. Consciousness wants me to live more and more

in a sense of ease and peace instead of conflict and suffering. This past summer, I had an ecstatic experience riding my bike on Martha's Vineyard and had an insight that consciousness wants to use my body and my life as a vehicle to enjoy as many peak experiences as possible. Above all, consciousness wants me to serve, not out of a pathological need to please, but rather as a compassionate urge to reduce human suffering. I love all of that. And also, it's just, you know, if I were to rewind it back to 18 months ago, it's extraordinary that those words are coming out of your keyboard.

Yeah, think how I feel about it. I just wonder if there's having read those words back to you, if there are any aspects of it you want to expand upon now. Well, I want to go back to the conversation we had about what's evidence-based and what isn't. You know, I stand by the framing because it feels exactly right to me, this question of what does consciousness want of us. It feels entirely authentic, like actually my lived experience

that I am setting about to do what feels true and right. And perhaps the most valid test of that is what would consciousness want? What does this awake and aware part of me want to do? And I don't know if that implies What does this awake and aware part of me want to do? And I don't know if that implies the kind of spiritual connectivity and unity that you and I were describing, but I do know this, it's a really useful test to live a better life.

So, it's a little bit Pascal's wager, you know, maybe there is no unity, maybe there is no God, but it sure as hell makes sense to live as though there is. At least that's what I've discovered. When you say, what does consciousness want of me? It's like, there's, there's some perhaps non-local universal, unified aspect of you. But even setting aside the metaphysics, we can just say there is definitely some wise part of you that is awake and aware, as you said.

What does that version of you want from you? That's the question. Some unconditioned part of me, some part of me that is not subject to my personal history and my quirks and all the thoughts, egoic thoughts that beset me. There's something in me that is removed from those things that has that vantage point and yes, the wisdom that comes

with that vantage point. And if I can access that as I make decisions, I will make better decisions, much higher integrity, more authentic decisions. And I've already seen that. And I am certain, however long the second half of my life is, it'll be much richer for having that as a guiding principle. Well, I hope it's long, selfishly. You humor me if I just say a few words in the closing moments here?

Yeah, totally. Matt and I were on a little meditation retreat that Matt and I co-organized with Joseph a few months ago, and I made this joke at the end that it was just so cool to be looking around the room and seeing my brother, while very supportive of all my various endeavors, we're not in the weeds on them, not arm in arm marching forward toward nirvana with me. It was so cool to be looking around the room and seeing him doing sitting meditation, walking meditation, asking really smart questions.

And I said at one point in my own meditation, this statement of the Dharma emerged that I believe is in one of the middle length discourses from the Buddha. And the statement was, I fucking told you. From the sutras. So that's, that's the joke. I'll say to you publicly, what I've said to you privately, which is even if you weren't my brother, I would want to be hanging out with you all the time.

I think you're incredible, but on top of that, you're my brother. So I say, and I say this with no, no part of me is like, I time. I think you're incredible. But on top of that, you're my brother. So I say and I say this with no no part of me is like I feel like I told you so I say this with only true delight, a lot of it very selfish delight that I'm incredibly proud of you and and it's just cool to be doing this with you instead of near you. So yeah, thank you for for everything you've done but specifically for coming on the show and talking about it's not easy. So thank you. So yeah, thank you for everything you've done, but specifically for coming on the show and talking about it. It's not easy. So thank you. Well, there's no way I'd be where I am today without your leadership and perseverance and patience with me. So and it really has been transformative. So grateful to you for so

many things, but not least caring for the lantern on this path and showing me the way. So thank you. Thanks again to Matt. Great to have him on this show. I think he's going to be something of a fixture here. In fact, he debuted on this show as a co interview of Sam Harris, to whom neither of us is related, although Sam is a great friend and mentor of mine. So I'll put a link in the show notes so you can hear Matt and I interviewing Sam. And by the way, there's one more thing to come in

this special series we've been doing on the 10th anniversary of 10% Happier. A special guided meditation, guided by me, will drop in a couple of days. 10% Happier is produced by Gabrielle Zuckerman, Justine Davy, Lauren Smith, and Tara Anderson. DJ Cashmere 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 indie rock 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.

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 2nd generation when enabled. Hey, grownups. The Cat in the Hat cast is a new podcast from Wondry, 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 has other plans for the podcast. And those plans are the opposite of quiet. Sing along to new favorite songs, try your luck at Titanic tongue twisters, have some fun with wondrous wordplay, and most importantly, bring your family along for all of the adventures

in the Cat in the Hat cast. Follow the Cat in the Hat cast on the Wondry app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to the Cat in the Hat cast early and ad-free on Wondry+. Join Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Wondry Kids Plus on Apple Podcasts today.