The Peter Attia Drive - #72 - Dan Harris: 10% happier – meditation, kindness, and compassion

Episode Date: September 23, 2019

In this episode, Dan Harris, correspondent for ABC News and co-founder of the Ten Percent Happier meditation app, speaks openly about his struggles with self-centeredness, addiction, depression, emotional volatility, and the deep-rooted insecurities that drove him to career success. He tells the story of how a panic attack on live TV lead him down a path of self-discovery culminating in a meditation practice which has since transformed his life—in terms of his own personal suffering, his relationships with those closest to him, and his ability to be kind and compassionate (which has its own selfish advantages). Dan also shares some very practical advice and tips for new meditators, dispels some of the myths around meditation, and gives people some things to look forward to as they progress with their practice. Last but not least, we talk about the importance of not passing shame and trauma to our kids and the role that mindfulness and meditation plays in that. Dan’s meditation book, and the panic attack on live TV that started it all [8:00]; Addiction: the spectrum of addiction, the socially acceptable forms, and Dan’s own battle with addiction and depression [13:30]; Dan’s drive for self-protection, a defining moment of childhood, and how his upbringing shaped him [20:30]; A selfish reason to be kind and compassionate [28:30]; Using mindfulness to avoid being controlled by your emotions such as anger and grandiosity [36:15]; How Dan found meditation, and how he went from skeptic to someone willing to try it [40:45]; Advice for new meditators, misconceptions about meditation, and the difference between changes in state vs. changes in trait [48:00]; Difference between being “mindful” versus being “present” [55:00]; The overlap between psychology and Buddhism, who is the real Buddha, and a Buddhism 101 lesson [57:45]; What convinced Dan to finally try meditation, and how did his first session go? [1:05:30]; Lessons from Dan’s 10-day silent retreat: “You’re trying too hard” [1:12:30]; How Dan’s meditation has evolved over 10 years of practice [1:27:30]; Dan’s 360 Review: A painful process illuminating his selfishness, and putting him on a path to more kindness and compassion [1:30:45]; How to quiet mental suffering in tough times, and how meditation has helped (and not helped) Dan get through some of the hardest moments of his life [1:41:30]; How Dan’s practice has made him a better husband [1:47:45]; How to prevent the transference of trauma and shame to your kids [1:50:45]; Does past trauma drive successful people? Can a person be successful professionally if they give up that negative insecurity that is driving them? [1:56:00]; The pillars of emotional health, and how to help yourself when you feel insecure [2:08:30]; Why it’s important to let your kids see that you are a flawed human [2:11:30]; Learning from the incredible (but flawed) Peter Jennings [2:15:15]; When is Dan’s next book coming out? [2:21:15]; and More. Learn more: https://peterattiamd.com/ Show notes page for this episode: https://peterattiamd.com/danharris/  Subscribe to receive exclusive subscriber-only content: https://peterattiamd.com/subscribe/ Sign up to receive Peter's email newsletter: https://peterattiamd.com/newsletter/ Connect with Peter on Facebook | Twitter | Instagram.

Hey everyone, welcome to the Peter Atia Drive. I'm your host, Peter Atia. The drive is a result of my hunger for optimizing performance, health, longevity, critical thinking, along with a few other obsessions along the way. I've spent the last several years working with some of the most successful top performing individuals in the world, and this podcast is my attempt to synthesize what I've learned along the way to help you live a higher quality, more fulfilling life. If you enjoy this podcast, you can find more information

on today's episode and other topics at peteratia-md.com. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ Hey everybody, welcome to this week's episode of The Drive. I'd like to take a couple of minutes to talk about why we don't run ads on this podcast. If you're listening to this, you probably already know, but the two things I care most about, professionally, are how to live longer and how to live better. I have a complete fascination and obsession with this topic. I practice it professionally, and I've seen firsthand how access to information is

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itself, and two, the additional content exclusive for members. I want to thank you for taking a moment to listen to this. If you learn from and find value in the content I produce, please consider supporting us directly by signing up for a monthly subscription. I guess this week is Dan Harris. For those unfamiliar with Dan, he wrote the New York Times best-selling book, 10% Happier. He also hosts the 10% Happier podcast, which I've appeared on, and is the co-founder of

the 10% Happier Meditation app, which by the end of this podcast, there will be no ambiguity about how much I love that app. In addition to everything 10% happier, Dan is also the co-host of Weekend Edition of Good Morning America, and up until quite recently was the co-anchor of Nightline. I met Dan through a very close friend of mine, and this is one of those times when I specifically just begged my friend to make the introduction. I read 10% happier. Almost a minute it came out in 2014, immediately became a fan, and somehow who spent the last five years stalking him trying

to figure out how to get to know him and eventually a friend of mine made the introduction. And I kind of talk a little bit about that in the podcast about, you know, how much his work has had a just a profound impact on me and just how grateful I am for all that his journey into meditation has brought me. You know, in this episode, we talk about a lot of things. We do go into his story in a bit more detail about his upbringing, and pretty quickly, we get into the story of the breakdown, meltdown, slash crisis he had on national TV in 2004 that ultimately began his journey that culminated sort of four or five years later with his discovery

of meditation. And what I really like about this episode truthfully is we get into a lot of stuff that I've always wanted to talk about with Dan. And it's the exact stuff we would have talked about over dinner. And the fact that we got to have it in a podcast is exactly why I have a podcast. So I hope that you will find this discussion half as interesting as I did, and I hope that for those of you who have not yet taken an interest in meditation that maybe the topics that we discuss here become the thin end of the wedge that at least get you to start exploring a tool that I believe is one of the most important tools in the longevity toolkit. So without further delay, please enjoy my discussion with Dan Harris. Before we start the podcast, I want to just make a special announcement. As you're

about to hear in this podcast with Dan, I'm a user and enormous believer promoter of the 10% happier app for meditating. This is something that Dan and his team have been working on for several years. I've been using it for nearly two years. I think it is simply a remarkable tool. And I recommend this app and one other app, Sam Harris's app waking up to any one of my patients who is finally willing to take the plunge and try mindfulness meditation. Now, one of the things we wanted to do at the time of the release of this podcast was work with the team at 10% happier to do a special subscriber discount code that's going to go along with the podcast released and they were kind enough to do this at an

unbelievable amazing discount, which is available for only one week until September 30th. Now they've also provided us with an ongoing discount that will go on beyond September 30th. It's just not as much of a discount, though though I still think it's actually a pretty impressive discount. So if you're thinking about using this app or after this podcast, you're thinking, you know, maybe I'll give this a try. This would be a great time to sign up to become one of our subscribers.

If you're already a subscriber, you can visit us at pdratiamd.com, forward slash members, where you can take advantage of the discount. And if you're not a subscriber and you want to access this code as well as all of our other subscriber-only benefits, you can visit us at pteratiamd.com forward slash subscribe. As a reminder, we are not taking any money to promote, sell, or have any endorsement of 10% happier.

We are doing this solely because I believe in this product. I love this product, and rather than have this company or other companies pay us to advertise, we say, take the money you would have paid us to advertise, and please pass that discount on to our subscribers. So thanks for listening. I hope you enjoy my interview with Dan Harris. Dan, thank you so much for making time on No Less a Saturday morning to sit here and talk about. Well, I'm at work anyway on Saturday. But anyway, it's a pleasure.

And this is cool to be doing it in an awesome studio like this. I feel like there's some pretty cool stuff that's probably happened in this very room. Yeah, I mean, we are sitting on the second floor of the ABC News headquarters and down the hall is where the late great Peter Jennings used to work. I've had some traumatic moments on the floor and I can't wait to dig into some of those. He's definitely one of the most handsome people I've ever seen. He's a handsome dude. This is a general statement of handsomeness.

007. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I've wanted to have you on this podcast for such a long time. I've wanted to meet you for a really long time, probably about from the day I finished reading your book, which would have been a little over five years ago. I read your book because I read your book as soon as it came out. In fact, I pre-ordered it. And as I've probably alluded to a little bit on the podcast before, it's really your book that was the first thing that ever cracked the veneer of meditation is irrelevant.

You know, that's sort of ethos. And your book is really almost single-handedly responsible for my interest in meditation and in some ways for where I find myself today, which isn't a much better place than I was then. So I'd like to almost just start with that. The title of the book, 10% happier, I think, it's just such a beautiful title because it doesn't over-promise

and it's just such a glib cute thing. And what was the alternative title? The voice in my head is an asshole. Which is just as good, probably a little bit better technically as a title. Rather than just make you tell the whole story of the book, take me back to the moment that started it. You've talked about this, and I know you're tired of talking about it, I'm sure, but maybe one more time.

What was the moment when you realized all was not well in Dan Harris land? I've come to terms with the fact that I'm going to tell the story a million times, so don't feel stupid. The inciting event of the book to put it in Hollywood terms was a panic attack, not in this building, but at our studio in Times Square where we do Good Morning America every morning. It was 2004, warm June morning. I was filling in for Robin Roberts, who was at that time the news reader on the show. The news reader, you don't have this position anymore, but it's the person who comes

on at the top of each hour and reads off a bunch of headlines. They've done a few big stories at this point and they'll say, hey, you know, there are a few other headlines bubbling. Let's get it over to Robin Roberts or Dan Harris who's filling in for Robert and Roberts take it away. So I had done this a bunch of times. I was in a phase at this point where I was filling in for Robin and also the main host of the show Charlie Gibson quite a bit. They were giving me a shot.

And for reasons I don't fully understand why it happened this morning, I was a couple seconds into my stick. I was going to read six, what they call voiceovers off of the teleprompter that was 20 feet in front of me. So voiceover is, I'm talking to the camera, but they roll video over what I'm saying. And a few seconds in, I just lost the ability to breathe. My palms were sweating, my heart was racing, my lungs seized up. I just couldn't talk. My mind was racing and the more my body freaked out, the more my mind freaked out, and the more my mind freaked out, the more my body freaked out.

And I had to do something I'd never done before, which was just quit right in the middle of the whole thing. And this is live. This is live. I later found out that the audience was 5.019 million. And it was just terrible. I lied to the people around me when they asked what had gone wrong. I said, I don't know. It's fine. And I was able to come on an hour later and do another bit. So, and if you look at it, it has a tons of, if you just Google panic attack on live television, it's the first result. It has millions of hits. If you look at it, it actually doesn't look that bad. I don't want to just say

something about that. If you've ever had a panic or high anxiety, it will actually hit a little triggering for those people. If you haven't a response I hear from many people is, you know, it didn't look that bad, which is true. In the reason... If I recall, it was you were reading a book about either a new statin or a new drug as I recall. Yes.

Yes. I've been so long since I've seen, because I don't think I saw it. I watched it when the book came out, because I was like, oh, I wonder what he's talking about. And I've only seen it in five years. Yes. Well, no reason to go back to it, unless you're me. If I hadn't had the luxury of tossing the baton back

to the main hosts, then it would have been truly epic. Because I was unable to speak. I would have had to rip the mic off and run away. But I was able to get out the words back to Charlie and, and actually said back to Charlie and Robin when it was actually Charlie and Diane Sawyer. That's safe. It really doesn't matter because the,

it's not, this isn't about the panic attack. Yeah, it's not about, it's about what led to the panic attack. Exactly. So even more embarrassing than the panic attack, what caused it, which is that I had spent a lot of time in war zones after 9-11, very ambitious guy and very idealistic. And I want to say fearless, but in the pejorative, I didn't really think much about what the consequences of going overseas would be. And so I was in Afghanistan a bunch of times, Pakistan, Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, I made a couple of trips to Iraq that all added up to about six months, which spanned the pre-invasion invasion and then all the way up until the insurgency started really cooking.

And I came home in this period of time and I got depressed. And I didn't actually know I was depressed. I was having trouble getting out of bed and I felt sick a lot, but I didn't know I was depressed. I friend, I was at one night going out to a party and a buddy of mine offered me some cocaine. And I'd smoked weed and drank, not really even to excess, but I'd never had hard drugs. I was always really afraid of them. But because I was feeling like shit, I don't know why.

I said yes that night, and the cocaine made me feel better. Just like took it away. In hindsight, I think it's pretty obvious. I was depressed from coming home from the war zones, not because I was traumatized, but because I missed the action. I liked it. And I was in withdrawal from the adrenaline. And the cocaine was a synthetic squirt of that adrenaline. And it made me feel better. Obviously didn't last that long, which is a hard lesson. Every co-user has to learn. And if you haven't used Coke, I recommend you don't. How does that relate to the panic attack? After I freak out, actually happened to me twice. I went to a doctor here in New York City as an expert in panic. He asked me a bunch of questions. One of the questions was, do you do drugs?

Which at this point, you're thinking that would never even register as a potential coffee? I even, no. I make this joke all the time was when I said, yeah, I do drugs, he gave me a look and the look communicated the sentiment of, okay, asshole, mystery, salt. I wasn't a heavy cocaine user. I was intermittent. It was only on the weekends. I wasn't high one on the air or anything like that. It was just, I partied once in a while.

He was like, that's enough to change your brain chemistry and make it more likely for you to have a panic attack. So that was a big aha moment and I quit doing drugs, started seeing him frequently. And that was really the beginning of me making a change. And I want to talk so much about what came of that, but I also want to kind of dig into a little bit of what got you here because I think there are a lot of people out there. I mean, I've had patients who have done a lot of cocaine or have done some cocaine. And many of them still don't experience what you experience.

They may not be in life, tell you. That's right. They may not have the same provocation or the same stress that can produce that phenotype. But I want to kind of go back to something that's maybe even at the root of all of that, which was, what was the void? Maybe it's the wrong word, but what was the void, it maybe is the wrong word, but what was the itch you were trying to scratch? What was the rush that you needed throughout your life?

I mean, you, I could never do what you do. Let's start with that, right? Like I could never put myself out the way someone in your position puts themselves out. It's kind of an amazing thing that you can talk to so many people every night, you know, like, or every day, or get your start in this whole space of news. So in college, I remember you writing about how you, you know, you worked at a local news station, right? You get this big break to come to ABC. You're

getting a dopamine hit every time you do something good, right? Do you have a sense of what that dopamine hit was numbing? Because I do think that on some level cocaine perfectionism performance Sex all of these things can numb have you ever read the book by Gabor Mate in the realm of hungry ghosts? I haven't, but the hungry ghost is something I think a lot about. It's an ancient Buddhist idea.

Yeah, I believe that's where he borrowed the title for the book. And as you can imagine, he writes a book about addiction, but what I love so much about the book is he does a great job of making the case. He's a psychiatrist and he mostly treats patients who are on Skid Row and Vancouver. So usually opiate addicted. But you read the book and you come away realizing, wait a second, you could be a high-flying news anchor, you could be a wall street tycoon, you're an addict too. So the person on Skid Row,

for them, the opiate or whatever drug of choice is lighting something up in their cortex. It's a pleasure center, but you can get that from so many different things. So I guess what I'm getting out in a long-winded way is, when do you think your addiction or your junkyism started? Was your career choice in any way driven by that, which I would think for most of us on some level it is? Yeah, I have been trying to think about this quite a bit recently, because I don't think I really satisfactorily answered it

in 10% happier. I don't think that was really the point. Maybe I should have, or maybe I shouldn't have, I don't know, either way, set it aside. Just one point that's sort of adjacent when you talked about Gabor Mate's work. I have a friend Dr. Judson Brewer who actually might be a good guest for you. He's a neuroscientist formerly of Yale now at Brown. He's one of the lead neuroscientists in the fascinating push to figure out what meditation does to the brain. But Judd is also an expert in addiction, and he actually treats people clinically.

He wrote a book published by Yale University Press called The Craving Mind, but his initial title was We're All Addicted. So it really goes to the fact that addiction, these are my words, not his, and I don't know if he would have blessed them. But what I take from what he's saying is addiction is a spectrum. You may think you're not an addict because you don't have a needle hanging out of your arm, but that needle hanging out of your arm is just the extreme end of the spectrum. But we're all addicted to lots of things.

What's your relationship with your phone? What's your relationship with professional success? What's your relationship with professional success? What's your relationship with sex, shopping, gambling, drinking? We are rats and amazes, you know, and we go where the pellets are. Yeah, and for the first time ever, when I read Mate's book, which I think I read in 2016 or 2017, there was a moment in when I realized those of us with the socially acceptable addictions

actually have a disadvantage. If there's one advantage to having a needle in your arm, at least everybody realizes it's wrong and you're more likely to do something about it. But if you're a perfectionist, if you're a workaholic, you're getting a lot of out of boys before someone comes along and says let's examine your relationship with this thing That's an excellent point. So what drives me or what makes Sammy run you know that book? There was a moment when I was a kid my parents were both

academic physicians and very prominent. I mean, I want your mom especially. Yeah My mom was one of the editors at the New England Journal of Medicine. She's just about to retire. My dad was chief of radiation oncology at the Brigham and Women's. I'm one of the pioneers in radiation therapy. But academic medicine doesn't pay that well. And we lived in Newton, Massachusetts. And I was really keenly aware of the fact

that we were much poorer than a lot of the kids that I went to school with. My dad drove like a shit brown, Lumberth Vallean and my mother, a very bland, Chevy Chevrolet or something like that. And you know, we had a hot and nice house, but it wasn't that nice vinyl siding. And yet I knew, you know, one of my friends lived a couple doors down from Subnau redstone and Interestingly, I also had a lot of different Newton's a pretty big city So I also had a lot of friends who lived in public housing, but it was the rich people that kind of got in my head and I felt

insecure about that I also remember During this period my parents somehow took us on a trip to Europe and It was all paid for because they were going to give a few talks, lectures at various institutions around Europe, but we were also going to turn a lot of it into vacation. Most of the time we stayed in like not very nice places, but when we went to Paris, we stayed at a really fancy hotel that whatever local institution they were speaking at put us up at. The hotel Regina, and it was really fancy.

And it was the first time I'd ever been to a really fancy hotel. How old were you? I think 10 or 11? But I remember thinking, this is how I'm gonna live. I'm not gonna live like these schmucks, who didn't keep the heat on in the winter, you'll well had to wear like down vests around the house

because they were so flinty, they were so intent on saving money. And I think there was something, and I don't want to say, it's not as simple as just saying, it was the hotel Regina that did it. But that to me seems like a defining moment. The other thing I think that's going on that I only really started to get clarity on recently

is I have an executive coach who I actually mentioned to you. Yeah, I mentioned to you. Yeah, I mentioned to you when you came on my podcast. This guy's name is Jerry Colona. And Jerry is an executive coach, but he's not interested in productivity hacks or how to get your next promotion or how to manage your inbox. He is really interested in like,

what's your, what are the primordial wounds in your life? What's your five year old logic that is happening in the backdrop of your adult life and many ways controlling you, like a malevolent puppeteer, but that you don't have visibility on. And he tries to help you see sort of like, what are these characters in your head that have so much power over you,

especially when you don't see them? And he often talks about the fact that as a young person, there are three primary needs we have. Love, safety, and belonging. And when I first heard him say that, I said, well, that's bullshit. I don't, that's pretty much my reflexive response to anything. You're a healthy skeptic?

Yes, I'm a healthy, no, I'm a, well, I'm a skeptic, sometimes it's healthy. Anyway, so he's talked about love, safety, and belonging, and I don't know, Jerry's got a way that sometimes I have to reject his first for a for a while before I accept it. But over time, I started to realize that safety is actually something really important for me. There is such a thing as intergenerational trauma. My great grandparents escaped the caustacks.

Another great-grandfather lost his family's meager fortune and put his head in the oven and killed himself in the family kitchen. Lots of alcoholism, depression, poverty, fortunes lost and made and lost in my family tree. You know, my dad's an inveterate, worrier. So is my mother really, if I've been honest? I think that the desire for, I never felt unsafe in the home, but I think the world has always felt unsafe to me. And now having been raised during the Cold War, which freaked me out so much that I had to go see a shrink when I was a little kid, I think part of the drive is the self-protection. You mentioned one of your grandparents who had a pretty impressive temper.

Was that a grandfather? Yeah, Robert Johnson's a my maternal grandfather. He was raised in some shitty farm in upstate New York by an abusive, really abusive father. It was smart, though. We got into middle-berry. And then got married a got into middle-berry and then got a married a girl at middle-berry and it was smart enough to get

into Stanford to do a graduate degree in history. He was gonna become a history professor, but he had a kid, my mother, and then he had another and another and another, ultimately five. And they didn't have housing for kids at Stanford And he couldn't afford to go otherwise and Basically lived the rest of his life Inbitered yes, not only them, but the world he became a middle manager at the yellow pages

Remember with the yellow pages where they said the big Bible of telephone numbers It used to show up on our doorstep once a year. And he was part of that team, but not a particularly successful part of that team, really embittered and took it out on his kids and was a bully with them, slapped them in the face, figured out what their weaknesses were and exploited them in public. And I remember when I was a little kid, he came in one day to, I came to his house and he took me to his living room to show me his VCR and said, if you touch this, I'll break your arm.

Like that kind of guy. Fascinatingly, in his 80s, he became very nice. He got a computer and he was really into Twitter and email and he would email all of his grandchildren and some of this big radical change came over him later in his life. Did you ever get to talk to him about what precipitated the change? No, I didn't dare ask him. He's still alive? He is not alive.

I don't know how he would have taken that question. Didn't strike me as something that would be safe to ask him. Have you ever talked with your mom about him and his impact on her life and maybe what she's transmitted of that to her kids either directly or indirectly through trying to avoid patterns. She definitely, I think both of my parents tried to,

my dad's parents were quite kind, but they had flaws of their own. I think both of my parents had this idea that they were not gonna repeat the mistakes their parents had made and they were really good parents. But recently I've been talking to my mother more about her relationship to her father

because I'm writing a book about compassion and kindness, which are two words that most men don't want to talk about much. And they're just kind of, to my ears, kind of, I'm almost slightly embarrassed to have them pass my lips. But I think there's going to be a way to talk about this stuff that can be more attractive and aspirational because we clearly need it.

And we need it as human beings, we need it as a culture. For me, it's important to understand my mother's relationship to this guy because I see so much of him and me. So I got to reckon with it. You have a brother and a sister or just a brother? Yeah. Did any of that get transmitted to him in the same way? Does your brother have the feel that he has some of his grandfather in him?

I don't think so. My brother's a pretty menchie guy. You're just widely beloved. He's a pre-prominent venture capitalist. And within that community, which I now know better as a startup co-founder, his reputation is just, people really like him. He's got a wide, wide circle of friends

and is very, kind of relaxed and affable. My wife has referred to him as the nice Harris. So I don't see, he's got his own stuff, for sure we all stuff. It's not the kind of stern authoritarian vibe that I can emit. So I want to come back to the story, but I want to sort of go off on one little tangent room and you said that the words kindness and compassion, you almost feel a little uneasy when they pass your lips or you said something to that effect. Why is that?

Because I think the words are encrusted in so much cultural stuff like cliche. I don't know that we found a great way to talk about kindness and compassion. Ki, ui, gooey, meaningless, cliche, or it's bland, dogmatic, exhortation, figure-wagging, God is watching type of stuff. It's not often sold to us the way it can actually be sold to us, which is in terms of our own self-interest. There's a lot of evidence that shows that people who are compassionate are happier, healthier, more successful, more popular. And it feels good on a moment-to-moment basis.

It feels good. We are wired to get feel good chemicals released into our brain when we're good to other people. Just by way of an example, what does it feel like when you hold the door open for somebody? If you're mindful in that moment, if you're awake, that feels good. Well, that is infinitely scalable.

Not to the point where you have to be an idiot. Or stand at the door of the whole day. Or be a dormant, which, you know, I love my dormant. They're definitely not idiots, but they can do that job, which is great. I'm glad they do it, but they could do lots of other jobs. The point isn't the holding of the door. The point is that you can, my meditation teacher has a great

little rule that I've been trying to operationalize, which is if he notices the impulse to give something a rise, he does it. So how many times during the day is the impulse to like, maybe you know, I could compliment somebody on on her shoes or his shoes But you don't do it for one reason or you know, you know, you send that note to that person just to say they did a great job on something We're walking down the street and you know you got two bucks in your pocket But you don't really want to make eye contact with a person standing outside of Starbucks asking for money No, actually just do the giving why not because you're No, actually just do the giving. Why? Not because your

raw rod just trying to make the world a better place man do it because it feels good for you And by the way, yes, it will make the world a better place and lots of unpredictable ways, but my sales pitch here is that and I wrote a chapter about this in 10% happier called the self-interested case for not being a dick. And that's just a joky way of putting it because it's me struggling with how to talk about this incredibly important subject in a way that avoids all of the cliches that have made it so meaningless to so many people. We all kind of vaguely want to be nice or we think we're good people, we've thought about it. We certainly want other people to be nicer, but I don't know. There's only one self-help book that I can think of that's been successful about compassion.

And that book does not advertise compassion on its cover. The book is called How to Win Friends and Influence People. And if you read it, which I happened to recently do, is actually a book about compassion. That's been kind of inspirational for me in thinking about like, how can you find a way to talk about these things in a way that people will actually listen. You know, it's so funny you bring this up because just by total coincidence, I think yesterday the meditation I did in your app, so for the listeners, if you haven't figured it out by now, which means you haven't been listening to my podcast, which is fine, I still forgive you. But Dan is the co-founder

of an app called 10% happier, which along with another app that I've talked about a lot waking up are really the cornerstones of my meditation practice. And I've probably also talked, you probably heard me talk about Joseph Goldstein, Jeff Warren, as a couple of the teachers that I really, really like in this app. And I think it was just yesterday. I did a lesson. I think Joseph, I'm pretty sure it was Joseph. And it was talking about how even your physical characteristics change in a moment of conflict

choose to do the kind thing versus the not. So sure enough, I do my meditation in the morning, I go to the gym. In San Diego, I have the luxury work out at home, which I love because I can be alone. I'm kind of alone. But in New York, I go to a big crunch gym, right? Which always puts me in a little stressed state because I'm that guy who likes to be able to control everything, and I want to be able to do a circuit between these two machines back and forth, back and forth. So sure enough, I'm doing that, and I'm using a machine, but when I'm off the machine, another guy sits down at the machine.

Okay, no problem. I'm a civil enough guy to go up to him, and afterwards say, hey, do you mind if I work in with you? But he says, no. Like, I'm going to sit on this machine until I'm done, and I don't want to trade. I don't want to share with you. And I said, you realize it's a machine, we obviously do a switch to the pin and he goes, yeah, but I don't want to.

Now again, old Peter, or maybe normal Peter, that would turn into an escalation. But I had just listened to this meditation that Joseph had done that day about how my external manifestation could change if I could be kind in that moment. And I said, okay, no problem. I'll wait till you're done. I just walked away and did something else. I really thought about it for the next three or four minutes. And sure enough, A, I stopped being upset about it very quickly. And this is going to sound crazy, but within about five minutes, I felt bad for him. I started thinking, oh, he probably feels like a jerk now because I haven't put up any fight. I've been very kind and pleasant. And I'm worried about him.

I'm worried that this guy is over there thinking to himself what I'd be thinking if I were in his shoes, which is, why didn't I just share with this guy? So you're right, let's be completely transparent. This is total self-interest. Yes, I just want to feel better. I'm just tired of feeling ashamed of myself. That's right. This is not me making this up. The Dalai Lama, who's got a reasonably good pedigree on the issue of kindness and compassion,

says that there is a kind of selfishness that's called wise selfishness. And it's the ultimate kind of selfishness that's called wise selfishness. And it's the ultimate form of selfishness. It is to be kind because you will be happier. And there's all this data to suggest, not only will we be happier, but also healthier, and more popular as I was saying before, nobody tells us this. And that's why this is the book I'm working on now and my ideas are not fully formed. So you're hearing me speak kind of early on before I have my stick down, which may be good, maybe bad.

I don't know. Well, have you back when the stick is ready, but I like pre-stick discussion. The pre-stick? Yeah. Well, I mean, maybe I'll figure things out, but I just talked to you about it. But I really think we are on some levels, we are selfish. So I'm trying to, we don't generally do things

unless there's a back to my rats and amazes, an LG, if unless there's a pellet in it for us. And I fear that the way kindness is discussed is like the care bears or some religious figure in Robes wagon his finger at you. That doesn't strike me as scalable, especially at a time where we really need this. We've got epidemic levels of anxiety, depression, suicide, especially among young people. And we have epidemic levels of political polarization. We've got global problems that

require cooperation like climate change. This is the time where we actually need to start pulling our heads out of our asses. So I'm excited to see if I can make a little contribution in this way. How much of understanding this concept you've described, do you think requires understanding its counterpart? So you know, you and I've spoken before about this idea of the numbing effects of anger and grandiosity, which in this short term are incredibly numbing. I mean, they are beautiful anesthetics for sort of the maladaptive mind. Kindness and compassion are antidotes to that.

Do you think it's necessary for a person to understand the nature of their addictions, their shames, their drives to these other counterparts to kindness and compassion. Or do you think you could say, no, look, you never need to explore those things. You never need to understand those things. You don't need to start exploring the relationship you had with your grandfather or your childhood. And instead, you can just focus on the behavior change one interaction at a time. Well, I'll speak for myself.

I think for myself, it's been very important to explore it. It is useful. I mean, it's like, you got to figure out the pain of holding onto the hot coal, which then it feels really good to drop it. So for me, seeing both the psychological content of, you know, exploring my relationship to my grandfather, et cetera, et cetera. But also the moment-by-moment mental processes what it feels like to suffer right now really help you reorient.

The fact that it feels good, there's an expression about anger from the Buddha that I think is useful, which is that he said it has a honey tip, but a poison root. I think that prerequisite for me, for seeing that, is mindfulness. So in other words, having self-awareness, mindfulness is just the ability to know what's happening in your head at any given moment without getting carried away by it. This is a skill that we developed through meditation, but there are other ways to do it. But I think meditation is the cleanest, clearest way to, if you a couple minutes a day of meditation

helps you have more visibility on your own inner weather, and then you're not so yanked around by it. And I think having that mindfulness on board can show you that anger sucks. It feels bad. It may feel good. Initially, it's a good release of energy, but then it's in your system for a while. It takes a long time to detoxify and same with the grandiosity. It feels off to be tuned your own horn as much as somebody like me is prone to do.

I feel now that I've got enough meditation on board. And just like, it doesn't feel good when I've got enough meditation on board. I just like, I doesn't feel good when I'm being braggadocious or even subtly self-promotion. It's not even that. To me, they're really dangerous grandiosity because that's so obvious is the grandiosity when I'm in the line at the airport and the TSA guy pulls my suitcase out of the line because of no reason apparently at all and decides to take 20 minutes to come and check out what's in it. So that means I don't get to buy lunch before I get on my flight. It's the, I'm so much better than you.

Why don't you get over here and do your job? I'm doing my job. Do you know how hard and you're not saying any of this to anybody, but you're thinking it, right? Like, do you know how hard I work? Do you know the effort I put into my job? Why don't you work as hard at what you do as what I do? And that's the grandiosity that I think is the absolute poison.

And I just think if I'm going to be brutally honest with myself, that's the biggest struggle that I have. Is that inner one-upmanship? I mean, I love that expression about anger. I completely agree with it. And my therapist has shared that one with me many times. And we're going to talk a lot about meditation, but you're absolutely right. Mindfulness is what has even allowed me in the moments of anger to realize what the half-life is of the honey.

I read a tiny bit of a book called Asshole's a theory and it was like a kind of an academic treatise on assholes and it said the quintessential asshole rallying cry is don't you know who I am. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And again, you may never utter those words. I don't think I've ever uttered those words. You know, they've never come out of my mouth, but I've thought them. Oh, yeah. Me too.

And the half life of the honey is so short and the shame that follows actually precipitates the following grandiose act. That cycle is so vicious. Well, that's good that you see it. And that's really important, seeing it is huge. So let's go back, because we're gonna jump around a lot, but we go back to the meltdown. Fast forward, your therapist finally gives you the aha moment. Your start, and I assume that he's helping you come

to the grips with Dan, you're a bit of an addict, right? You're addicted to the high of your job, which is soothing you. It's soothing something. Let's put aside for the moment what's being soothed. What was the next step in your evolution to exploring this? Let me do the following. I know there's so much we want to talk about, but we won't get into it. I'll just tell the listeners that unrelated to all of this, you'd been given

an assignment at work, which was to sort of explore and probe the growing religious movement, something that you didn't find remotely interesting initially, but being the good soldier you are, you're sort of going through this. And is it safe to say that the work you'd been doing in understanding religion created kind of an opportunity for you to also start exploring the spirituality of mindfulness, is that a fair, okay? I'll let you finish it in more eloquent terms. Sure, I mean, the assignment was given right here

on this floor in the second floor of ABC News. Was it Peter Jennings that gave the assignment to? Made me cover faith in spirituality, which I did not want to do as raised in the people's Republican Massachusetts. It's not particularly interested in this kind of stuff. I like to tell the joke about the fact that I did have a bar mitzvah, but only for the money.

So it's not on my radar as an important subject. But it ultimately was great for me, because first I learned a lot about faith in spirituality, which was, I was totally ignorant on the subject. And I made a lot of new friends and I just, it brought me into parts of the world that I wouldn't have otherwise seen. And it also ultimately brought me to meditation. In particular, it came in the form of a self-help writer named Eckhart Tolly. One of my colleagues here at ABC News recommended that I read one of Eckhart Tolly's books because she thought maybe he would be a good story for us.

And I read the book and I thought, at first I was reading the book and I was like, this is fucking bullshit, like really hardcore, just awful. And Oprah had basically anointed him, right, yeah, she talked about it. She did this whole. She had them on the show and then she did a whole digital series with him. And then she told everybody that she'd put copies of his books in every bedroom of every house she owns. And then Paris Hilton was seeing carrying one of his books when

she went to jail to do time for DUI. Like there was a whole moment there in like 2006, 2008 where Eckhart Tolly was, you know, making a big guru. He was that guru. And I was, you know, I react poorly to all of those kinds of things. And his writing has a lot of grandiosity in it. I talked about spiritual awakenings. And now he had a spiritual awakening. And then he lived on park benches in a state of bliss for a couple of years in London and he talks about vibrational fields. There's a lot in there not to like if you're me.

I have to be honest, I couldn't read the book the first time I tried because even though and looking I should go back and reread it now, but at the time at least this sort of metaphysical nonsense, just, it was just too much. Like, I just couldn't, it became such a barrier to entry. I agree completely. It reads better to me now. Yeah, I suspect that my does well to me.

But what he does do when he's lucid is describe our inner lives in an incredibly incisive manner. He talks about how we have an ego, by which he's not talking about the way ego is used in our culture now. I was like, oh, yeah, that guy's got a big ego. He's jerk, but he means that we all have this running dialogue, this inner narrator, this voice that chases you out of bed in the morning, and is yammering at you all day long, it's just blah blah blah all day long thinking about the past or thinking about the future to the detriment of whatever's happening right now. Our mutual friend Sam Harris has this joke, but when he considers the voice in his head,

he feels like he's been hijacked by the most boring person alive who just says the same shit over and over. Most of it negative, all of it self-referential. And tolly's argument is when you're not aware of this non-stop conversation, it owns you. That to me was incredibly powerful. First of all, because it just seemed intuitively true. And second, because it described or it explained,

the most embarrassing moment of my life, my panic attack, the voice in my head was why I went off to cover wars without thinking about the consequences. Came home, got depressed, was insufficiently self-aware to even know it, and then blindly self-medicated, and it all just blew up in my face. So that was reading Tolly's book was incredibly powerful for me. My problem was Tolly, and I did ultimately go into it. You did do an interview with the Toronto I recall your hometown of Luda Toronto and interviewed the man and First thing I asked him was it was interesting to be because this is the first time in my whole covering With a religion beat where I felt like I had skin in the game. I was really excited. You wanted to know

I wanted to know I wanted with this guy had But I didn't think he was foolish. I didn't think he was a charlatan and I had interviewed many charlatans, but he was weird and frustrating. The first thing I did was I said, what do you do about the voice in the head? Clearly, you're saying something that seems to me to be indisputably true, except for I don't know how do you actually tame it. You acknowledge that there's a jerk sitting in the corner. How do you make him stop talking? There's no practical advice in the book.

So I thought he maybe would be able to reveal his wisdom to me in person. And the first thing he said was, take one conscious breath. And the voice in my head was like, what the fuck is that? What are you talking about? And I asked him a bunch, over and over and over. And he just didn't say anything that made sense.

I like, I understood the individual words he was using but not in the order in which he used them. So I left that interview quite frustrated. I knew it all over in this interest of time. I won't go into too much detail, but I spent a little bit of time noodleing around in the self-help world generally. Just not. Your story about Deepak is pretty awesome.

Deepak. At least that one's my favorite. Okay. So Deepok and I started hanging around a little bit. And I liked Deepok. Deepok is actually more relatable in person than Eckhart Toley. But Deepok talks in this way that's like, it literally makes no sense. He said, what is he just, he uses casually use the term with me one day, the transformational vortex to the infinite.

That's just the kind of shit he just says all the time. So he was even more confusing. And I definitely didn't believe he was enlightened because he was checking his phone all the time and in nonstop, in perpetual motion, always hustling, which by the way, I don't say as a criticism, I really liked him, but he just seemed as miserable as I was

in terms of professional desire. At least that car totally seemed like blissed out. Anyway, I ultimately realized, and Deepak helped me realize this, that the mechanism one can use for taming the voice in the head is meditation. And I was not positively predisposed to the idea of meditation because I felt like it. Comes with some baggage.

Yeah, I mean, it was, I often say it is the victim of the worst marketing campaign for anything ever because the traditional artwork shows people, you know, sitting in an impossible position floating off into the cosmos. The rest of us sit to meditate and either we're in a bunch of pain or we're noticing that we're distracted,

and we don't feel at all like that, and therefore we think we're failed meditators. In fact, the experience of meditation is this constant humiliation where you sit, you try to focus on one thing at a time, usually it's the feeling of your breath coming in and going out, and then you're distracted over and over and over again.

But the game in meditation is simply to notice you've become distracted. And in the moment that you notice you become distracted, throw a little party for yourself because you are waking up from the automatic pilot, the daydream of your hallucination of your life, this constant discursive thinking. And then you're actually here now paying attention. And so the whole game of meditation is not to stop thinking, which is impossible. It's to notice when you've become distracted and start again and again and again and finding out that the process was that simple and that there's an enormous amount of science that strongly suggests that it's really good for you.

I don't want to overly hype the science because I think that it's still in its early stages, but it really certainly looks like a little bit of meditation every day can do quite a bit good. And that is what got me over the hump to start. Have you read the book Altered Traits? Yes. I think that that book does such a great job explaining that we don't meditate for the state, we meditate for the trait. And that's hard to explain to people until they actually try it. There's an app out there. There are many that are tracking your heart rate and your heart rate variability and levels of calmness during meditation.

And I've tried these apps and come to the realization that at least for me, they don't make any sense because I don't find meditation generally to be that enjoyable. Sometimes I do, by the way, like, you know, we talked about how I'm fasting this week. Something about fasting makes meditation really amazing. They share it with us. Yeah, there's just a much deeper connection.

But there were many days when my meditation is very difficult. It's really hard to do everything that you just described. So that's the state, right? It's not a blissful state at all. But what I'm interested in is, let's say if I meditate for 20 minutes in a day, I'm not meditating for those 20 minutes. I'm meditating for the other 23 hours and 40 minutes. Those are the traits that I want. And therefore, to me, at least an app that was helping me assess the change in my state during 20 minutes is not nearly as interesting as a reflection on how is this going to help me act the next time the TSA guy seemingly singles me out, which of course

is a ridiculous thought. But you know what I mean? I've always found this distinction helpful. And by the way, going back to the whole drug thing, I view the entire distinction on drugs to be somewhat arbitrary, right? Like, is cocaine generally a drug that is good or bad? In my opinion, very bad. Why? Because it's a drug that only impacts your state but not your traits in a favorable way.

So it gives you a positive state and then a negative set of traits in the long run. Have you ever been around somebody doing a coke? It's not that positive sometimes. Oh yeah, fair enough. They're pitching you on new business. Yeah, they've got this awesome new cat food idea. It's the best cat food. Conversely, when you look at things like psychedelics, so a cyber, MDMA, which is not technically, I mean, sort of a quasi-psychedelic, but I think these drugs which is not technically, I mean, sort of a quasi-psychedelic, but I think these drugs, plants, or maybe a lack of a better word, when done correctly under these therapeutic settings,

are remarkable, not so much because of the state, which they clearly alter, but much more because they can change the traits outside of them, which is something, by the way, the authors of altered traits argue against. Their view is that meditation is the only way to use the state to change the trait, but that's that's that's sort of another issue. So kind of listening to you talk about that, I realize this is a distinction that it can't be stated enough to someone who's new to meditation, which I'm hoping some people listening are. It's it's easy to get discouraged. It's music to my ears to hear you say that. Richie Davidson and Danny Goldman wrote that book.

They actually sat in the chair you're sitting in. Now we're doing this at ABC News in the room where I record my podcast and they've both been on my show many times together and separately. And I think it's an excellent point. And it's what trips up so many meditators because they sit to meditate and they think they should feel a certain way Mm-hmm, and then they conclude that they're failures because they're not feeling a certain way

But the point of meditation is not to feel any specific way. It's to feel Whatever you're feeling right now so that you learn how not to let your feelings push you around and Yes, of course the real world application of that is that you learn how not to let your feelings push you around. And yes, of course, the real world application of that is that you're better at life. We don't meditate, as is often said, we don't meditate to get better at meditation. We meditate to get better at life. Now, just to be clear though,

over a period of time, as you, and some people get to this point and some others don't. But if you're getting to the point where you're starting to get actually quite serious about the meditation practice, at some point you actually might want a teacher because getting better at the meditation itself actually can have lots of benefits. That doesn't mean the meditation is going to be fun. It just means that you can technically understand the nuances of your own mind and the nuances of various practices at differing levels.

And that, I think, can have a positive effect on your practice and on your life. And it creates a kind of a virtuous cycle. I'm getting ahead of myself here. The thing to know, primarily, for meditators is don't get hung up on feeling calm or blissful or anything like that. Just tune in on your ability to see clearly whatever is happening right now. If what is a distraction, is it knee pain, is it in itch, whatever it is, pleasant or unpleasant. Because what we're training over time is the ability to notice that anger has come upon us off the cushion in our regular lives.

And can you resist the urge to say something that's going to ruin the next 48 hours of your marriage? That's where the rubber hits the road. It's so powerful. And I kind of remember the first time I was able to see the train coming before it hit. It still hit to be clear. I wasn't able to stop the train. But the fact that I realized, oh, the train started

over there and it rolled there bang versus always just seeing impact impact impact. The glass half full approach of that realization is, okay, maybe the next time you could slow the train down. And what if one day you could stop the train? The train hitting something being a metaphor for the you actually saying that thing that's going to nuke that relationship. Let's pause for a moment and explain the distinction maybe between mindfulness and being present. I believe my children, especially the two little boys, are very present. I don't think they're anywhere but in the present. I absolutely don't think they have a shred of mindfulness in them. How would you explain that distinction to people? The way my meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein talks about it is like a Labrador. It's not the similar

front. Not the similar front. Yeah, I have a four year old boy myself. You look at a Labrador, he's sheer, he is pretty present. Which is to say, they're probably not thinking about what they're going to eat tomorrow. And they're not thinking about the dog that barked at them yesterday. Yes. They're not a lot of neuroses, they're not swept up in ruined past decisions or fretting over the future or whatever, they're just right there doing whatever, eating the kibble, sniffing some other dogs, but chewing your sweat socks, pooping on the rug. They're right there for all that. Being present is necessary but not sufficient for

mindfulness. So you need to be present, but then there's a meta-cognition that also happens, which is you know that you're in the present moment and you know that you know you're in the present moment. We are classified as homo sapiens sapiens the one who thinks and knows he or she thinks and That second sapiens has atrophied over time because nobody bothers to point out to us that we're capable of this We have this ability to step out of the stream of our consciousness and notice. Yeah, there's I'm having all these thoughts I'm having all these urges. I'm having all these emotions and notice, yeah, there's, I'm having all these thoughts. I'm having all these urges. I'm having all these emotions. And to not be carried away by them. And by the way, you're not going to step out of the stream forever. Like you can

just do this for a nanosecond at a time and just to see quickly, oh yeah, I'm having all of these racing thoughts. That's almost sapiens sapiens knowing and knowing that you're knowing. Dogs can't do that. Your boys can, but it's not very well developed. Mine can, but we'll get them to work on it. I'm I son last night was aggressively for 10 minutes trying to get me to smell his socks. And he was like, daddy, they don't smell that bad. I'm telling you the truth.

I'm like, dude, you're lying and how I know this, because you have the same face I have, and I'm looking at it, and that's how I lie. And yeah, I was like, karma, my wife was dying, because I'm always messing with my wife. It's one of the hallmarks of our relationship and me just kind of being a jokes you're with her. She's like, this is karma, your son is you.

So, what was your first foray into a mindfulness based practice of meditation? So in this period of time, when I was checking out Eckhart Tolly and Deepak, my wife gave me a book by a guy named Dr. Mark Epstein, amazing human. Who you've had on the podcast twice, I believe. Yeah. And he's a real friend. I read the book. And I realized, oh wow, everything that I liked about Eckhart Toley was lifted without attribution from somebody

known as the Buddha. Epstein's books are all about the overlap between psychology. He's a practicing psychiatrist here in New York City and he's written these beautiful books about the overlap between psychology and Buddhism. I didn't know anything about Buddhism, but it was very clear that all this stuff

about the voice in the head, which the Buddha refers to as the monkey mind, really thousands of years old. Much of this philosophy honed by a guy here too for it known to me as a lawn ornament. But the Buddha is a fascinating guy, and really, really smart. And-

And the Buddha that you're talking about is actually kinda different from the big, belly lawn ornament. Isn't it? Isn't it different entities altogether? The big fat guy is known as the laughing Buddha, I think. Okay. That's not the Buddha.

That's not the historical Buddha. But there are plenty of you go to a spa that probably have the skinny one. That's the Buddha, but they didn't make any representational art of the Buddha until hundreds of years after he died. When did he live? He lived 2600 years ago. So 600-ish BC and lived where? India.

And I think he was born in what is now in Nepal, but then was all over India. And talk a little bit about his past. Hey, he what the legend is, because again, we think there was a guy named the Buddha, but what's been passed down to us is quite sort of mythological in terms of his biography. So, we know his name was a purported to be Siddhartha Gautama, and he was born according to the legend into, he was the son of a king, he was a prince, like a kind of a minor king. And he's mother died in childbirth or shortly thereafter. And some wise man told his father, this kid's either going to be a great ruler or a sage. And the father really

did not want him to be a spiritual leader. He wanted him to take over the job of being a king. And so built this world for him where he would be not exposed to any suffering. So just, you know, fanned by palm leaves and fed whatever the best cuts of the goat and surrounded by women and musicians, et cetera, et cetera, against the legend. And at some point he gets out for a tour of the local village or the local city and normally they clean everything up. the local village or the local city and normally they clean everything up. Somehow he sees what are called the three, I think three heavenly messengers. He sees an old person, a sick person and a dead person. And he realizes that this whole thing, he realizes something that we all should know. Everything's impermanent.

Suffering is a part of life. And if you try to pretend otherwise, you're gonna suffer even more. Then he runs off into the forest, where he spends six years in these... He's in his 20s here? Yeah, and he has a kid who he's named Rahula, which is Polly, I believe, for Federer.

So speaks to kind of dad, he was. he viewed his kid as a sort of impediment. Flood, human being. Again, this is all legend here, but runs off into the forest, spends six years studying with great meditation masters in the fashion at the time was to do this self-mortification thing where you like inflict a lot of pain, you don't eat, you stand in funny positions, you hang upside down, whatever, and he was doing, he was like, became the best at this. He ultimately realized that this is, he was still suffering. So one day he actually ate a little bit and stopped starving himself and sat down under the Bodode tree a big famous tree in boat guy india

and said i'm not getting up until i'm enlightened again this is all legend he sat there for a long time ultimately got enlightened and at a big battle in his head with the god of desire and he transcended greed hatred and confusion and went off and delivered his, after he got enlightened, he went off and found some of his former monks and delivered his seminal speech, which was the four noble truths, which are one that life is suffering, which is a mis-translation, suffering is a bit of a mis-translation. But the idea is that everything is impermanent, if you try to cling to things that will not last, you will suffer. So life is unsatisfactory inherently because nothing lasts. To the root of that suffering is desire or thirst, this kind of insatiability we have. And three, there's a way out of this. And four, the eightfold path, which is the way out of it, which includes meditation practices,

ethical practices, like right livelihood, right speech, right action, and then a bunch of meditation techniques, like mindfulness and philosophical stuff about how to view the world. Buddhist Buddhism 101. Yeah, I mean, does it kind of amaze you that something that came to an individual or even individual's plural 2600 years ago could prove to be so relevant today? Yeah. Well, so my question is whether the story that I just told you is in any way true. Is it possible that this philosophy was...

It's possible this was just built upon and evolving over time. Well, for sure, that seems probable to me more like. For sure the Buddha, if he was a guy, if he really was a guy, and I think he probably was, there was somebody in the Buddha who's standing on other people's shoulders, but he had some real innovations, including mindfulness. I guess what's amazing to me is regardless of whether it was one guy, many guys, how long it took, et cetera, et cetera. There's no doubt that what you just said,

the four noble truths, were devised in a period of time when no one could have imagined or predicted the world we live in today. And yet here we are in a world today. And it's important to take a step back here and think about this through the lens of evolution, right? As a species, we are no different today

than we were 2600 years ago. I mean, 2600 years represents less than 1% of our genetic journey, identical species. But if you think about the world 200 years ago, no electricity, right? No irrigation, no sewer, no nothing, nothing, nothing. And you think about the world today, again, not just 200 years later, but call it 2600 years later, you simply couldn't imagine like there is no one with an imagination that could have come up with what we're going to be living in today. And yet in some ways, what you just said is more important today.

I can't imagine it was as important 2600 years ago. But it also tells you about the perennial nature of human suffering. We, it's incredible. It's unbelievable. Yes, but the Buddha had good news. I wasn't some death-defying dogma where, you know, like, I can, at least not the way I understand her practice. I wasn't telling you that you can have eternal life

or if you just believe everything I say unquestioningly. It was more like, look, don't take it explicitly said, don't take anything I'm saying on faith value. Try it out for yourself. Here's some meditation techniques, and you might be able to reduce the amount of suffering you're experiencing, much of a kind of voluntary, in the face of life's inevitable vexations and vicissitudes. And I have been trying this out for 10 years, and in my experience, there's a lot to it.

And the science that has looked at it too has also been interesting. So how did you go from the meeting with Mark, or the meetings with Mark, because I know you talk about multiple meetings and just to say, I'm gonna give this thing a try. And then ultimately what I really wanna hear about is your first extended meditation retreat,

which is something I'm so fascinated with. Oh, the retreat. Yeah. But even before that, because you'd obviously been practicing meditation before you went on the retreat. So what was the, for a skeptical guy like you, what got you over the hump of?

All right, Dan, you're gonna put your blackberry down. You're gonna sit in this position and you're gonna focus on your breath. Like, how did you make that leap? Or was it relatively easy to make after everything you'd been through in the journey? No, I mean, I was really intrigued by Buddhism as a philosophy. I cannot overstate the power for me of that initial Eckhart Toley lifting of the curtain on my own mind. Like, wow, the voice in my head is an asshole.

And I'm suffering all the time as a consequence of this. And then the Buddha's philosophy, which I think says it way better was also interesting. And I was just reading lots of books about it, talking to Mark about it. And the meditation practice as the corrective is just unavoidable as soon as you start exploring these things.

Totally. In some ways is really credited for being the first person that showed you what we would now as people who meditate take for granted, which is there's a thinker of thoughts, those thoughts are not us. Yes. And what neither is the thinker. Yeah, exactly. That's the transition that's very difficult, which maybe if we have time to, I'd love to get into that. So you're basically

saying, look, I was already so primed because I realized the most important of the truths, the how to tame that. I was, I was so thirsty for that that basically when someone I came to trust and respect like Mark Epstein, who was completely rigorous, completely righteous, not a fraudster, when he basically said, look, this is just a practice. You're just going to start doing this thing. That was an easy step. But when he was easy, but it got me closer.

Yes. That and also seeing the science. The science was a huge deal for me. And when it just became obvious, oh, I can lower my blood pressure. You know, I can boost my immune system. There's all these brain scans that show that you can have an impact on your prefrontal cortex and your amygdala. And that was all very compelling, too. You know, it's really funny just as a sort of side for as much as I obsess over data and everything I do, whether it's this type of exercise, this type of nutrition, the lobo-bola,

the science has had the least impact on my interest in meditation, relative to anything I've ever done. In fact, I would argue that if you told me meditation raised my blood pressure 10 points, I would still do it for the benefits on the reduction of my suffering, and I would just figure out more drugs to take

to lower my blood pressure to compensate for it. Like, I literally couldn't care less about that science, which is not to be dismissive of it. No, it's just to say that I don't care about any of that. I care about one thing, because there are an infinite number of ways to lower my blood pressure, you know, do X, Y, and Z. There's only one way I know about to understand the nature of my mind, which is an awful, awful demon. I strongly, strongly, strongly agree with you.

I use the science primarily, if not exclusively, as an evangelical tool, because I know how powerful it was for me as a skeptic. Oh, yeah. You know, even if I don't believe this thing's going to make me happier. Hey, apparently it does have this other stuff for me and I'm always trying to optimize. So might as well do it for that reason. My experience, the science gets people over the hump and then they no longer care. Because once you've done it for six weeks or so and you realize you're less of a shithead,

you don't care if your prefrontal cortex might look different in MRI. That's utterly irrelevant. So for me, it's really useful as because my job is to get people to meditate and science is enormously helpful there. Anyway, it was helpful for me at this back in the stage at 2009 and ultimately I was on a beach vacation with my wife and some friends. We had a house at the beach and I was was reading another yet another book about this stuff. I was kind of, I think for 10 or 11 years now,

I've read no books other than books on meditation and Buddhism. Well, you read my book when it comes on. I will, I kind of count that. So maybe happiness would be a better way to say that would be a better way to do it. For self-improvement, self-improvement. Yeah, although I love novels,

I think I've only read one in that whole time. Me too, by the way Yeah, stopped reading fiction in 1999 So it's 20 years ago, but I Three years ago read the alchemist is the first purview back into but that's kind of a isn't that kind of a Spear bigger than fiction. Yeah, but there's so much good fiction on television that I feel like I'm getting that You get that as well. So anyway, I set my blackberry down because this was 2009 and I went into the bedroom where I was staying with my wife close the door. I didn't want anybody to see me because this before meditation

was cool. I did not want to admit to anybody I was doing this. I kind of sat on the floor, sat a timer and I tried to watch my breath coming in going out, going in and going out. And immediately there was like a million thoughts, you know, where did your elbows run wild, blah, blah. I was going to actually bring in my copy of your book. I still have, you know, the hard cover, first thing that came out and I was going to do it just to read that. That's one of the funniest parts of the book. And you do it, I think three times in the book. You do the, these are my thoughts. And I remember the first time reading about how hard I laughed thinking, I'm not the only one.

Like, I'm not the only one whose mind is an idiot. Yeah, just an abject idiot. Well, I think the fact that both of us share an affection for Fletch speaks to the kind of humor that we It's like a torrent of thoughts. Yes. That's or and they're like how ridiculous they are. How ridiculous they are It's amazing. I get some like my best jokes in meditation and then you know I share them with my wife who just says you are an idiot and my son who also thinks I'm more on it You can if you have a sense of humor about it, which I think is really important the kind of with my wife who just says you are an idiot. And my son who also thinks I'm more on it.

You can, if you have a sense of humor about it, which I think is really important, the kind of grandiosity and randomness and negativity and ceaseless self-referentiality of it can be kind of funny. So that first experience was humbling, but I actually got up after the five minutes thinking, wow, I suck at this, but.

But you saw a light. Oh, absolutely. I knew this was serious. So this is big. This is a, at this point, almost a three-year journey. Didn't this, I know the panic attack was in 04, but was it 06 that you really, in earnest, started this quest to find something out or?

No, I actually think, I think, so O4 was the panic attack and I think it wasn't until O8 that I encountered totally and then it was a year later that I got the meditation. So only for the sake of time though, I wish we could tell every detail of the story. How long until you took what I consider one of the most remarkable leaps to do a silent retreat? A year, but I want to be clear.

I often, I rarely talk about the meditation retreat because I worry as somebody whose job it is to appeal to skeptics. That the skeptic hears, oh well, this guy went on a meditation retreat. I'm never gonna do that. Therefore, I'm never gonna meditate. So, so in my world, here's what I would say.

I routinely fast for seven days at a time, but I don't expect any of my patients to do it. And I don't think you have to do this. I think one can do a whole bunch of other things that approximate 80% of that value. So through the lens of, we're not telling anybody that they have to go in a seven day or 10 day or 14 day silent retreat, though I'm infinitely curious and would like to talk about it.

You should do it. Yeah. There are moments that I go back to remembering reading your book the first time. And one of the most powerful parts of what you wrote about is something that occurred during that retreat. So that's sort of why I want to kind of dig into that. There's something you wrote about that blew my mind. And at the time I read it, I couldn't understand

what you were talking about, and even though today, I still have never experienced it, I now can comprehend it, which part? It was like days five or six when you actually heard the wings of the hummingbird flap. Again, when you said that, I was like, he must be making that up up or he was imagining that, but I've had moments like when I do walking meditations, which are great in your app,

by the way, I'm just going to plug 10% of your all day long. My investors think. But I think Jeff Warren does a great guided walking meditation. And I think I even talked about this with Sam Harris on that podcast. It was the first time I noticed that when you walk, you can actually feel the wind on your finger as your hand swings forward. Never.

How could I have ever, I remember thinking myself, how have I been walking all this time and never feeling that? And then the sounds you could start to pick up. Sometimes I would just do outdoor, like I would do a morning meditation outside, not walking, but still. And I couldn't believe the sounds you could pick up.

So at least now I'm at the point where I can actually imagine what you're saying, but then of course to think, well, what would six days of silence produce? So one, how did you decide to take that leap of faith? And did you view that as more part of your personal development or part of your professional? I'm going to take this story to its most extreme conclusion. Both, but a big dose of the latter. I think that should be comforting to the listener who's thinking, you know, maybe I'll do this, maybe I'll do a couple minutes. You are to meditation what I kind of feel like I am to fasting, which is it's my job to sort of see what the boundaries are.

So that, a, nobody has to go past them. And, b, I have a better view of what the landscape is. That's a pretty good comp. So there were two people who were really influential in terms of getting me to do this. One was both of whom we've come up, Mark Epstein and Joseph. And no, I actually didn't know Joseph yet. Oh, that's right. Because Joseph was the teacher was the teacher. And then Sam Harris. Yes. So Sam, I met Sam Harris prominent atheist writer. And this is before he had a podcast and before he had a meditation app. And he was best known at this point, just as a guy who wrote a good

bestselling book. Yeah. Are you narrated? Are you narrated? You're moderated. I'm moderated. I'm moderated. I'm moderated. I'm moderated. I'm moderated.

I'm moderated. I'm moderated. I'm moderated. I'm moderated. I'm moderated. I'm moderated. I'm moderated. between him and a couple of people, but one of the people on the other side was Deepak Chopra and Sam kind of tore him up. That doesn't even seem like a fight, by the way. It was like, I don't know Deepak, but I know Sam so well, and just knowing the character of Deepak, like that strikes me as a little baby seal laying there and the guy with a club.

Like it's tough. It was tough night for Deepak, and I say that with affection because he's a really winchie. If you meet him, he's a really hard guy, not to like. He's a very likeable guy. But Sam is amazing too and I spent some I admit Sam once before but Sam and his wife Anika who I've also friends with now were backstage at this event and I was chatting with them and they're so so impressive. Both of them and I mentioned that I was meditating and to my great surprise they were both av, active meditators and Sam at this

whole long history of having spent a bunch of time in his 20s meditating. And in that time, he became friend with this eminent meditation teacher by the name of Joseph Goldstein, who happens also to be the teacher of Mark Fstein. So I knew who Joseph was, but I hadn't met him. And I, but I knew that Mark considered Joseph to be his teacher. And Sam was saying, hey, you should go on a meditation retreat. And Mark had been telling me the same thing. And I was like, well, this guy says I should do it.

And Mark sang, I should do it. And they're both talking about Joseph Goldstein. I should do it. And so Sam, as he said, toyed with the laws of karma and got me into a Joseph Goldstein retreat, which was a very hard thing to do. And I will off I went without a lot of prep. And with quite a bit of trepidation because I thought it was going to be a bunch of weird

people doing a shitload of meditation, which I really didn't want to do. I mean, I think I was up to like 10, 20 minutes a day or at this point I wasn't doing that much. The idea of doing it like 5 5.30 in the morning until at night, just struck me as super daunting. Was this in Marin? Is it Marin County, of course, and vegetarian food and blah, blah, blah.

I was a dedicated cheeseburger eater and being away from my wife, I didn't have a kid at the time, but like there's nothing, there's just seemed like the shittiest summer vacation I could imagine. And it was, it was all those things. You know, time, but like there's nothing, there's just seemed like the shittiest summer vacation I could imagine. And it was, it was all those things. You know, I get there and it's like, I thought my, I think I wrote in the book

that I thought my roommate was gonna be wavy gravy, but it turned out I didn't have a roommate, but it was a bunch of, you know, faded hippies and weirdos and, you know, at least this is what my judging mind was saying. They're actually lovely people. I've met a lot of, I've become friends with some of them. But my mind was on overdrive.

I was like, I these are all NPR, you know, socks and sandals, folks. And, and the meditation itself was just awful, just awful, like sitting there all fucking day. You know, I was in pain. I mean, I don't sit, I don't twist myself into a pretzel. I sit in a chair, but that hurts. And the walking meditation I had never done that before. I didn't know what I was in pain. I mean, I don't twist myself into a pretzel. I sit in a chair, but that hurts. And the walking meditation, I had never done that before.

I didn't know what I was doing. I just hated it. I was just all over the place. I didn't feel like I was getting anywhere. And by day four or five, I was gonna go. I was ready to quit. I was a 10 day. It was 10 days.

And I went to a teacher, actually, a teacher I didn't like, but she was the only one who was available to speak to. Because you have this sort of 10 minute window each day when you can potentially speak with a teacher one-on-one. Yeah, but you would like, they give you a time. So I was going to see Joseph every other day, sometimes in a group setting with like three or four people and then sometimes one-on-one. But I didn't have a time with Joseph this day and this is the day I was going to quit. And one of his assistant teachers who I had made all these judgments about spring wash him.

She was the only one I could sign up to see. So I do begrudgingly win and saw spring who I thought was like the embodiment of all like everything I hated about meditation. She talked in a really soft voice and had long flowing hair and war shells and Spring saved my sorry ass. What did she say? She said you're trying to art. Like no, no like we we gluey lovey, we stuff she just listen to me wine for the watch like you're trying to art. Don't try to hurt. Just do, you know, notice your breath when it's coming in and when it's going out, when you get distracted, start again. Don't, you know, you're gonna get distracted.

Don't try to make anything special happen. Just stop trying to hurt. And I was like, all right, fine. By the way, spring has gone on to become some of the very important figure in my life. She is a extraordinary human being. But I took her word for it, and instead of sitting in the meditation hall, I actually took my chair out of my room and pulled it onto the balcony outside of on the second floor of this building where the dorm where I was staying.

And I sat outside. And I was like, I'm not trying to, I just sat down, whatever happens happens. And it was just like, as soon as I stopped trying, the whole thing unfurled for me. And I was just so vividly present and mindful where I was just so quickly registering how speedy my senses are, how I was going from hearing the wrestling

of the leaves to the clanking of the pots in the kitchen, which was down the hill to the footsteps in the hallway to the feeling of my pain and my need to an itch on my back, just to a thought coming up. Shhh, shhh, shhh, this is how reality works. You start to see how fast things are going in your sensory life. And that's really thrilling. It's also accompanied by a huge blast of serotonin. And this breakthrough for lack of less grandiose word lasted for like 36 hours, right? I just just happiest I'd ever been. I wept at one point, which is a quite a rare thing

for me. I'm not super emotional. It gave me an enormous amount of faith that there is so much to this practice. And there's such a power to actually doing it in a container where that's all you have to do. Your meals are cooked for you. You don't have your phone, the schedule is set for you. All you have to do is get up and do the practice every day. The schedule is set for you. All you have to do is get up and do the practice every day. But the big asterisk is, if you try too hard, you will tangle yourself up and not. One of the classic hindrances to meditation is desire.

If you want it too hard, you're gonna shoot yourself on the foot. It's like a weird video game where the only way to move forward is to not want to move forward. And that's a hard thing to do. And the only way to get there for me is to surrender. And you can't fake surrender. I go into every retreat now thinking, I'm surrendered. I don't care. I don't care what happens. I'm just going to sit here, but I do care. And my mind knows I care because it's been there. The desires in there. The producers. Yes, of course. I want breakthrough to electric Buggaloo, you know? I want like, Pajama Jammy Jam, I want the sequel to that breakthrough.

And I can't get it. So what happens is, sorry, you got to go, I think Pajama Jammy Jammy Jam left with you. Landed with you. This is like, we're the right age where I can make a certain joke and you know the reference. What happens though is, if I'm on the retreat long enough, usually it's 10-11 days, I cycle through the reproduction attempts and I get to a genuine surrender. And it's like, I can't fake it. I gotta go through this process of trying to do this, of trying to get somewhere and then punch in myself out.

Do you feel like listening to you describe this? It's almost like the matrix where, and again, I don't think you have to be on a retreat to experience this, but there's a realization that Neo has when he sees the matrix for what it is that he's separate from that. And do you think that that's a reasonable analogy for this idea of realizing that your thoughts are not you? Yeah, except for separation is a problem. So the red pill of waking up and seeing that reality is not what you thought, that works as a comp. But in fact, in actual reality, there's no separation. So, not to get into the biggest cliche of them all, being one with the universe, but how can you not be one with the universe?

Think you're separate from the universe? You're creative from the same atoms from the original exploding stars. You know, you are nature. We feel our lived experiences that were looking out at the world fretfully from some vantage point that's separate from nature. But like your animal body is obviously part of nature and the workings of your mind is part of nature.

And that's mind blowing. And mind blowing just conceptually, you might register it as I say those words but you can experience it viscerally. On retreat and that is incredible. So you get back from this retreat. And I mean. Can one even draw a sort of a linearity around this and says look. Can one even draw a sort of a linearity around this and says, look, a 10-day silent retreat is the equivalent of three years of a daily 15-minute-day practice. I mean, I know the answer to that question is no, but you see where I'm trying to go with

this, right? Which is, are you leapfrogging in your practice such that when you came back from that 10-day retreat, even if you went back to sitting for 10 to 15 minutes a day, you were able to, quote unquote, do something better. I don't know. I feel like you're leapfrogging in your practice, but I don't know if it shows up that prominently in your 10 minutes when you get home, you know what I'm saying? You build up your capacity to concentrate. Here's the lowest hanging fruit. Is one important thing in meditation is the capacity to stay present, which is your concentration.

We're concentrations a little hard. The image that comes up for me is a furrowed brow, hunched shoulders, trying to concentrate. But it's more like, can you just be awake for an extended period of time with your capacity to stay undistracted? Of course, there will be distractions, but your ability to be supple in the face of those also improves. So you can stay on the object, usually your breath longer, and the distraction doesn't throw you as much. So that's a skill that's gets built, I think, in a way on retreat that because it's such a boot camp, you're going to build those muscles much more actively on retreat. But then you also occasionally will have a peak

experience, not always, and wanting to have one, of course, is again, a hindrance. But sometimes, in my experience, you'll have a peak experience. And that shows you something that, just like when you take drugs, it becomes a distant memory, but it's still with you. And when I say drugs here, I mean more plants. I haven't done much at all, but you know, it's a lot of folks who have my understanding of the way that works is that you have a peak experience in it.

It does stay with you in the rest of your life. So in my experience, I'm only speaking from an end of one here, but my experience having had a few peak experiences, it's not like every time I meditate, that's coming to the table with me now. It's more just that, first of all, I'm imbued with a much deeper faith or trust that this is a worthy endeavor. And two, it just, it's in my mind stream that this, that some of what I've seen and understood, some distant echoes of that are still here. When you think about how you meditate today, when you think about the practice you did yesterday,

or can I just say something to you? Yeah, yeah. You said before that often meditation is unpleasant, which is the same for me. So I was actually happy to hear you say that because it really represents a wise perspective, which is we said it before, but it bears repeating. Meditation is not about what you're feeling right now. It's just knowing what you're feeling

so that your feelings don't own you. But I will say that 10 years in, again, just speaking personally, having done five or six retreats and having done a reasonable amount of daily sitting, I'm now at a point where my concentration is good enough. So the thing to know about concentration is that it often feels really good, just why people love TM because it is a concentration meditation. You're using this mantra that you're getting really focused on. It's less, it's more focused on concentration than it is on mindfulness.

And so being able to stay awake and concentrate on something feels really good. And I find that my daily meditation actually is much more pleasant because there's like a body high associated with it. It's called, there's a word for it in the ancient language of Polly, where it is P-T, P-I-T-I, and I think the grandiose translation is something like rapture, but it really just means like all the kind of body tingling and high that you can get from meditation.

And so that's just something to look forward to. There's a schedule for when this shows up. And even for me, I don't always get it and wanting it guarantees that I won't get it. But it does show up on occasion, not infrequently, and can make my daily sitting. It's a nice to have. You can't get too focused on it. So maybe you're sort of answering the question that I was about to ask, which is when you think about meditating 10 years ago versus today, it's safe to say you still think about gerbals and wonder if your hair is okay and think about your abs, is the biggest difference that you are much more quick to realize that and come back to whatever your object is? Yes, and my reaction to it is much warmer.

And this I think is when you're starting. Is that the bigger difference? It is the bigger. Is the speed with which you recognize it or the lack of pissed off in this that comes with it? I think the latter is in my experience more important. Both are important. So there's a mental acuity piece to that,

which is that you're catching distraction more quickly. But if you're catching it and then self-flagulating, it's the purpose. Yeah, really does because you're teaching the mind that catching yourself getting distracted is going to come with punishment. So in some ways, not incentivizing the mind to wake up. But if you can train yourself to be like, ah, I caught that. Welcome to the party distraction.

That's a much bombier inner weather. And I think that feeds on itself in a really positive way. I'm not particularly good at this. I catch myself lapsing into judgment all the time. But I catch the judging faster. And I over time through various meditation techniques gotten better at just having a warmer reaction to my own pegadillos. What's the most difficult thing you've gone through personally and or professionally in the last five years where I'm going to go with this is I'm curious to how you have been able to take this remarkable training that you've done in the last decade and begin to apply it to difficult experiences which is where the proverbial rubber hits the road. Yeah, where the proverbial rubber hits the road.

Well, three things are coming to mind. You know, I'll say them and you can just pick whichever ones you want to dig in on. One was that my wife and I had a really serious fertility crisis. Ended well with a baby, but that was really hard. And we were really under the impression we were not going to have a child, which was very depressing. She also got breast cancer. Both of these were much harder for her, of course, than they were for me, but obviously you don't want to see the person you love suffering or start to worry that they're not

going to be around anymore. So that was obviously awful. And then on a much more personal selfish level, I got a 360 review, which I think I might have told you about once before we were recording. Is there anybody who doesn't know about a 360 review? It's often used in a corporate context. It's a way to measure performance of executives. The way they do it is they talk to the executives peers, subordinates, and superiors. So you get a holistic panoramic 360 view into this person's

performance. I began writing a book about compassion and the idea because my wife would suggest that it she said well, you know a good way to jump start the narrative Would be to see what other people think you should do to work on in terms of kindness and compassion and Then my editor there were a bunch of people in the room when she said this and one of the people in the room was the editor of the book And she the editor said oh you ever heard a 360 review and I had and I was like oh, that's a good idea And so we found this Buddhist executive coaching or Jerry Kelona who we're talking about before He's got this coaching firm and they do 360's but they do the colonoscopy version of 360's so often 360's are these like kind of data entry thing where you give people a questionnaire

and they answer multiple choices. Questions and then you crunch the numbers and you see the data. Jerry's firm does hour long interviews with everybody, anonymous interviews with everybody in your orbit and then they write up a lengthy qualitative report with direct quotes, anonymous blind quotes.

In my case, we made it even harder because we threw in people from my personal life. And so we didn't want it to just be a professional measurement. We wanted to get this holistic sense of how am I? So my wife, my brother, my meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein, and all these peers. In total, 16 people. That was a 41-page report. We also added on a bunch of questions about where and when and how in total 16 people. That was a 41 page report. We also added on a bunch of questions about where and when and how I'm an asshole.

And it was devastating. I thought, oh, this is this cute little narrative conceit for this book I'm working on. And I got the 360 and it suggested I was, well, the way I took it, I didn't say this, but I took it as monstrously broken, defective, incurably selfish, self-centered narcissist. I just want to pause you for one second because I did the exact same thing in 2015.

It's uncanny how similar the experience is because it was everybody who worked for me, my board, like at the time I was running a non-profit. So it was my board, everyone who worked for me, 10 friends plus family. I mean, this was a tour de force. And that it's, as you were telling the story, the only word I had in my mind was the word that described me, which was never once written, but it was the only thing that came out and it was monster. Monster. And that you, the first thing you said was monstrous. I believe that's what the first thing you said. I rarely slip into overt depression. I usually slip into covert depression, which is a shortcut to rage.

This was one of the few times in my life I went into a overt depression after I reviewed that thing. I did not want to leave a dark room for days. I was eviscerated by that report. Yeah, that's the way I felt. It was awful. So how did you pick yourself up? Well, for a while, I thought. but did you think I'm a fraud? How could I write this book?

Yes. That's literally the word. I've just been, because I am writing the book, I just, I'm working on the chapter where I read it. And fraud is a word I use, because I was like, clearly I'm pretending to the world that I'm Mr. Happiness Happiness and I'm a fucking asshole How did I pick myself up? Well first I thought okay? Well, I can't do this book because nobody can see this

one thing that helped was My wife and I first of all Jerry Kallona does a lot of coaching So I read it and then I saw him that day. And he said a bunch of things that were super helpful. And we have an ongoing relationship. So I talked to him at least once a month, often more. One of the things he said was, and this is very Buddhist. So you now see all this stuff.

And now we're gonna do is we're gonna love it. We're not going to get into shame or anger or self-legilation. We're going to be like, all right, this behavior was serving some sort of need that some sort of primordial need you had that was not particularly skillful. We're going to give it a hug and and say you're no longer needed. His pushing me away from shame and more toward interest. Like, wow, what's going on here? Why would I do that?

Why would I be so snippy with my subordinates? Why would I be so snippy with my wife? Why would I be so self centered that I ignore other people's needs? Well, clearly, instead of just going right, instead of calling me a monster, Jared was like, now clearly, you're following some old script here that must have served you at some point.

And putting it in that light was incredibly useful. And then I'll say one other thing, which is that my wife, who I'm very close to my wife, and a lot of us are close with our spouses or life partners, but she's like a consignory for me professionally. So nothing leaves my desk in terms of what I write without her thoroughly reviewing it. She's basically the uncredited co-author on both of the books I've written and is deeply involved in all the aesthetic choices having to do

with my app and she's just my right hand. That's actually not even a good way to put it because she has her own career. So she's really just doing this out of the goodness of her heart, but I often say to people, and this is not, this is like only kind of a joke, I don't know what I think until she tells me what I think.

So one of the things we started, is she have any extra time? She does now because- could do some help. Yeah, we'll talk about that. Sure, I don't know how, she would be great at this because she's amazing. But one of the things that she got me to do was she, and I would rent a conference room

around New York City to get out of our house, get go to a conference room and sit there and read the report together and discuss it, section by section. And one of the things she got me to do was focus on the first, it was a 41 page report for the first 15 pages were positive stuff. And she got me to really focus on that. And then we went through the negative stuff.

She was just like, it's not as my first reading, nobody was calling me a monster. They were just really describing in unvarnished terms, me at my worst. So are you like me in that, I think my report is about the same, right? It was the first, maybe it was a 50-50 mix of some really beautiful glowing, positive things. And then people who I know were all like all care about me deeply, including people who describe horrible things I've done. They love me despite those things. But do you just disproportionately,

naturally focus on the negatives? Of course. I think we all do. Evolutionarily, we come by this honestly. We had to have a negativity bias, right? For survival. You know, you want to have sayings. You go above and beyond the evolutionary playbook.

Like, I mean, I, because I think I do. I think I am, if the evolutionary playbook is to wait at 70, 30, I don't know why I think I've just adapted to 99, one. Right. Well, which sounds like you do is, I don't have data to support my assertion, but yes, I strongly believe I dwell in the then I get, it's actually one of the things that I was dinged for in the 360. And so it was incredibly useful that my wife taken me by the scruff and say, you know, I'm gonna,

you're gonna look at this positive stuff, and then we're gonna look at that negative stuff and see if it's not as bad as you thought it was, nobody's actually calling you a monster. And yeah, you did do some things that are really uncool, but you can fix this. And I'll say that one of the, there are a couple of comments made to me by people in my life that really helped me get over it.

One was Joseph, the aforementioned Joseph Goldstein read it and said, with a laugh, self-knowledge is always bad news. Wow. Interesting. So counterintuitive, right? Yep, and then my brother, Matt, another consiglary, prominent venture capitalist in New York City, an amazing human. He said two things that I thought were funny. He said, well,

first of all, I'm sorry you had to read this. Second of all, now'm sorry, you had to read this. Second of all, now you got a good book. And for me as an inveterate showman, which is another thing I was digging forward in the 360, that was actually comforting to hear. It's like, all right, this is, I actually probably can talk about this

and it'll be useful for people. It's actually useful for me to hear you say that there's a huge overlap in the Venn diagram of our deficiencies. And okay, so I think there are a lot of people out there who are really selfish and have really made a bunch of bad moves, but there are reasons why we are like this and those can get untangled

and we can work on it. And not only will it be good for everybody for us and those in our orbit, direct orbit, but if we do this in public, it could help countless people. Now I'm really energized to work on the book. So this is an awesome example of pain that you can pause for a moment and realize you have some control over the outcome. The other two examples you gave kind of differ, infertility and cancer, you have a lot less control over, I think it's safe to say.

I mean, in the end, biology is sort of a complex organism. Using either one of those, whichever one you're more comfortable talking about, how did your practice either prepare you for and or allow you to suffer less through? When she had breast cancer, I found that in some ways, I think she would agree to me. He was actually really good for our relationship because I am not particularly, well, the story I told myself was that I'm not particularly caring and nurturing. And here we were in a situation where I really needed to be.

I needed to step up. And I found that I really liked it. After a double mastectomy, she was in a lot of pain. And I wanted to sleep next year, but if I slept in the bed every time I moved, it was going to drive her crazy. So, it felt good to sleep on year, but if I slept in the bed, every time I moved, it was gonna drive her crazy. So it felt good to sleep on the floor next to her. Set the alarm for every three hours to make sure I got up and made sure she was ahead of her meds

so that she didn't fall behind because she would have. And being of use in that way felt really good. Not like I'm such a good person. I mean, there's a little bit of that too. But it feels good to be of service to somebody who you love. It feels good to be of service to anybody, frankly. If you're paying attention. If you're paying attention, naturally come to you.

Not selfishness. Self-protective selfishness, probably. Self-centeredness. I'd written a chapter in a book about it by this point, so I kind of knew it. I knew it, you know, but this was a very powerful example of it. And also, it's probably some of the dynamics of our relationship where she is very giving and loving and compassionate. And I'm not. Again, this is the story. But of course, I am. There's a great description of enlightenment in the Tibetan tradition,

which is a clearing away and a bringing forth. And that, you know, that to me seems like a great definition of enlightenment. So like I can clear away some of my bullshit that blocks me from being useful to other people and having a kind of find a better word than connection, but here we go, connection. And a bringing forth of the parts of you that actually are good at that. And so that I felt was an enlightening experience and that I was forced to do all that.

And I could see that in my mind that these registered, this acts of service registered as pleasant. And again, there's science here. There's a thing called the helper's high. When you give to charity, the same regions of your brain light up that are light up when you eat chocolate. So this isn't new then, it's not unique. It's just a universal human thing that I happen to assemble upon

in this context in a powerful way. So I don't want to minimize that because that's awesome, but you could argue that all of those things could be experienced without being faced with a life-threatening disease. The part to me that I'm most interested in is you are now faced with something that is, there's a probability that is non-zero and it's higher than it was a month earlier. This woman who is clearly the best thing that's ever happened to you, no offense,

could be gone. So as I think about my own practice, when I've dealt with really awful things that have confronted me, it's this realization that we are suffering so much in our minds, probably more than in reality, and so much of that suffering is due to thought. It's due to projection.

It's due to playing out scenarios that, I mean, if we're gonna be brutally honest with yourself, we're gonna clue what's going to happen. And yet, so much of our suffering is drawn out by those projections. How much of that was going on for you and how were you able to sort of tame that or maybe ask another way if all of this had happened to you in 2008 versus 2017-18, how would it have been different?

Two things are coming to mind and I don't know if either of them are going to answer the question or be useful in any way. But one of them is that, I think, frankly, I didn't think much about the fact that you could die. Partly, I knew I had a pretty high level of confidence based on the original diagnosis that she was going to be fine. Well, maybe the fertility ones are better example than where there must have been a moment when you thought wow

We might not be able to have. Oh, yeah, yeah, so so in that moment where let's just say Before any of this happened you think there's a 95% chance we're gonna have kids and now at some point you're thinking There's a 10% chance we're gonna have kids I'm making these numbers up. Of course At that moment when it's a 10% chance we're gonna have kids It's really easy to start the projection of oh my god. Are we gonna adopt if so how where what but it's a 10% chance we're going to have kids, it's really easy to start the projection of, oh my God, are we going to adopt? If so, how, where, what? But it's not going to be like, blah, blah, blah. I mean, I'm just, I mean, I'm the author of that playbook.

That's like, I could win a Nobel Prize in literature for that type of nonsense thinking. But the point I was really driving toward is that in either case did I do a particularly good job at relaxing into the uncertainty. Maybe why that could potentially be useful to say or to hear is that there are limits to the practice and I am not enlightened. I'm a schmo who started meditating 10 years ago and I I'm good. Sometimes I'd applying the lessons and sometimes I'm not. And I think when Bianca got sick, I didn't really forthrightly look at the potential that you would die. And I think that when we had the infertility,

I didn't really allow myself to fully engage with the fact that we might not have a kid, and then we had a kid. So sometimes I'm good at this stuff, and sometimes I'm not. How has your practice made you a better husband? I mean, maybe that's a better question for your wife, but where do you think it shows up most in your relationship with her? So I think it's really the moment to moment stuff. So while I didn't, I don't think I wrestled on the grand level with mortality or the fact

that we weren't gonna be able to have a kid, but my moment to moment basic blocking and tackling of being a human in a relationship is much better. In other words, the mindfulness helps me see when I'm over 7% of the time. Not always. It helps me see when I'm about to be overtaken by anger or fear, whatever, irritation. And I can let it pass. I can feel the raw data of the anger, which by the way, feels really bad.

But I don't need to have the satisfying, energetic release of saying something tart that's gonna get me in trouble. And that is just create a much more seamless relationship. Now over time, actually, if you add on top of it, because you can make a case, I'm increasingly leaning toward this, and mindfulness is just one piece of the overall Buddhist picture.

And that alone isn't enough, like warmth, friendliness, compassion, whatever you want to call it is also incredibly important. And then there are also just like skills for better communication. Adding all of those things in which I'm now really starting to do as I work on this book just makes it even better. So learning to be a better listener, learning how to phrase my assertions in ways that are less provocative, training up through meditation, my baseline level of friendliness, and ability to lean in and give a shit, is all super useful.

And by the way, it feels really good when you're doing it, because that kind of emotional availability, or what did you say before, one of your three mechanisms where it was rage, it was attachment. of set, detachment. Detachment feels bad in my experience. Because you know there's a bunch of stuff you should be doing and you feel guilty about that. It just doesn't feel, it doesn't feel good in my experience. So the actual leaning in feels better.

Again, I still do detachment rage and say, I do all of that. This is not, you're not listening to a and say, I do all of that. This is not, you're not listening to a perfected human being talk to you now. It's just lowering the, it's like a marginal improvement. So yeah, I think she would say that our day to day is much smoother. I doubt she can recall the last time I raised my voice, which I did do before this. And yet, I think she would still say that are times where she walks on eggshells.

She can just sense you're really pissed about something. Yes. But then I think all the other thing is, over time, my being easier to be around has allowed her to see that some of her walking on eggshells is her own stuff. And she might not have gotten there if I was Robert Johnson all the time. It's funny to bring up Robert because I was just gonna, I was literally just amazing. Like we can reach out those minds here. When you think about your son and you think about Robert, Terry Real, who we've spoken about a little bit, has this great expression, which I'm gonna sort of butcher, although the expression, which I have written down,

I feel like it's gonna be the opening quote on this chapter in my book, which is, every man is a bridge spanning the trauma of his past, the legacy of his future, something to that effect. So you're a bridge, right? And you could make the case that some of the traits you have developed have been in response to things that were learned from him or his influence on others. And you, like every man, have a choice about whether you'll pass those on to your son. I mean, it seems to me like this practice is a big part, though not exclusively the only part of it, but a big part of trying to leave Robert back where he belongs and not let him come up to be a part of your son's life.

I think more, and I'm stealing some of this from Jerry, Kelona. I don't have a Pat answer to this, but what's on my mind is, I think it's okay for Alexander to know that I have foibles and an interriver Johnson and an inter, you know, Sammy from what makes Sammy run and all that stuff. But I think he needs to see me being okay with it so that he is okay with all of it. He's going to have negative parts of his psyche. And I think the trick is not to stamp that stuff out, but to have a supple, warm relationship with it. I guess what I'm getting at is not to get all psychological analysis, but I think a part of what Robert Johnson did when he smacked his kids

around and told you that if he touched his VCR, he was going to beat the shit out of you. That's actually transmitting shame to you. Like there's a feeling of shame that comes to a child that's hit. It's bullying. Yeah, that's what it is, bullying. And the bullying is a transmission of shame. And I think that's the part that has to be stopped.

Yeah, it's not about perfection, it's about stopping shame. Yeah, and you know, that's how I think about it in my life is there were a whole bunch of things that shamed the hell out of me. And I think of that as my single greatest purpose in life at this point is what do I have to do to make sure that none of my shame makes its way to my three kids? If I can accomplish that and nothing else, that's great. If I can accomplish other things in life, that's even better. But I have to accomplish that. I mean, I sort of feel that way and a big part of not transmitting shame for me is recognizing shame when it shows them.

So I would challenge that slightly, but again, not slightly and lightly, because I'm not sure I'm right about what I'm about to say, which is that strikes me that, so my dad and mom did not inject any shame into my life, was mostly the outside world. I had a very loving parents, and they weren't perfect, but very loving, I don't walk around resenting them for much of anything. I think it's possible I could get to a place

where really, I'm not the source of any shame for him and Norris's mother and he's in a really loving home, but the world is really tough. For sure. So I want it to be a two-part thing. I want it to be that we are bottomless wells of love and affection and wisdom for him to the extent that possible.

Yeah. And that we show him that like you're going to have lots of dark parts of your own personality. It's unavoidable and you can be okay with that. I think that's why we're operating these. I actually think that's an even more eloquent way to explain what I'm suggesting. But I think all I'm arguing is that the home should not be that your parents, you know, there's a term they use for this right, which is your circle of origin or something to

that effect right now. Family of origin. Your family of origin really isn't that effect. Family of origin. Family of origin. Your family of origin really isn't the place where you want the shame to come from. Because you can't control the world. There will be bullies at school. There will be all this other bad stuff. So yeah, I think the way you've described it is even more nuanced and probably more accurate. I guess what I would say is my two senses, I think meditation has probably prevented you from

transmitting some of your own shame, which has been manifesting itself largely in very externally positive ways. The successes you've had are in some ways driven, I think, by some of those attributes. In other words, your adaptations, your mal-adaptation have been very socially acceptable, but at some point they leak out in the week as common denominator, which is generally to our family. At least that's been my experience. And the people in my immediate professional orbit. Right. The people who you can't fake it around for long enough. So the hotel Regina left us with a book and a podcast and an app that have been useful in other people's lives.

So it was like a maladaptive thing that had a positive impact on society, but also some of the sort of not so pretty parts of my motivation stayed with me and manifested in my being stressed and snippy and rushed in and patient and greedy and all that other stuff. And now for future projects, I got to do a better job of coming not from hotel Regina, but from some other place. And this gets to something that you wrote about in 10% happier, but I'm curious as to how you've evolved.

One of the big questions you're trying to answer in your journey, as you've described it in that book is, can a person be successful professionally if they give up that drive, that sort of somewhat negative insecurity that feeds us? And I'll let the readers go through your thinking at the time, circa 2014, five years later, where are you on that particular issue, especially as you've just described it, right, which is how tell Regina gave us a whole bunch of things that are externally and ostensibly very positive, but it came at a little bit of a cost.

Do you believe that one can be all positively valanced without the negative, or does that negative need to exist? First of all, I don't think you're gonna make the negative go away. In my experience, I don't have a sense that, I'm gonna just conquer all my demons and just be operating out of a position of pure love. Maybe, but I don't see that coming down the pike for me

right now. But I still think you can turn down the volume on the less wholesome motivations and turn up the volume on the more wholesome motivations such as being of service, etc. etc. and the less wholesome one being like looking for attention and money. And that's to say, attention and money are all bad, but if you're like really, really totally focused on that, to the exclusion of anything else, I think it's probably maybe not the best.

Is there a way in there that you can shift the ratios and still be successful? I believe yes. It may also require a little bit of a shifting of how you define success. And I think in there, I'm starting to form a thesis. But I think I'm a little more nuanced in my view. During 10% happier and the subsequent never-ending book tour, I really was dogmatic about the fact that you're not going to lose your edge. You know, look at all these professional athletes who meditate and see sweet executives

and all this stuff. You know, I believe that to a point, but I think at my level of meditation where I've like taken it quite seriously, after a while, you start to change a little bit how you define success. And so, for example, I recently went part time here at ABC News and that was this is a big deal this is this is announced a month ago yeah so I was anchoring both nightline and the weekend edition of GM a now I've given up nightline and I anchor the weekend edition of GM a I do my podcast which is owned by ABC News and I do

it special investigative reporting for the network. It's still a lot, but it's part time, and the rest of my time I'm working on the app and books. That I mentioned how much I love the app. Oh, thank you. How I mentioned that, I don't know if I mentioned that enough. Yeah, yeah. I mean, we'll cut more times.

You know, that was tricky because I was thinking, like in some ways I'm dropping this dream I've had for 25 years of reaching the absolute top of TV news. If you think about it, I'm kind of a B level guy. I've been very successful, but you know, I'm not anchoring the evening news, or I'm not the main anchor of Monday through Friday, GMA. I don't have a prime time cable show. You know, those are the folks who...

How many A level people exist at ABC? And then NBC, like each of the three networks have how many there was a day when Jennings and Broca and Dan rather were the three like the pinnacles of television we were talking about this earlier you said you could walk down the street with Peter Jennings circuit 2000 Yes, and you might as well been walking to the street with Muhammad Ali or Michael George. It was crazy. Crazy. So rough back of the napkin. So there are three main networks.

Each one has a single evening news anchor and each of them has three morning anchors. So that's 11 people and then three cable networks. And I would say maybe each of them has Four stars maybe true stars. So that's 11 plus so 2025-ish. Yeah, I Don't think I'm gonna be one of those 25 and by the way, there's massive gradations within the 25 like I Bet I wouldn't recognize 15 of those right, but you recognize Anderson recognize Anderson Cooper yeah amazing person who's really been helpful to me you would recognize George

Stephanopoulos yeah Diane Sawyer yeah Sean Hannity yeah would you recognize Joe Scarborough no for the listener it's not that I'm a moron it's just I never watched television I can't actually recall the last time I've watched a television event that was not a Formula One race or a football game. So we made a reach stand of the list? Yeah, so there might be five people on that list. I would recognize if I saw them. But we saw a picture of Michael Strahan in the hallway and you recognized him. Yes. But that may be from football.

Yes, I mean, I knew him from the giants, but no, but I remember I've seen him on TV. Just because whenever you're in the gym gym that seems to be what they're showing Uh, right. Yeah, right and a lot of people who you might have recognized have got me to you a Matt Lauer Charlie Rose Of course definitely Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose. Yeah, but everybody would have recognized Jennings and rather in Broca What I was trying to say is that I've had to look if tomorrow. When did you decide it was okay to get off the train? In the last year. Wow. Yes.

In the last year, it's been a huge show for me. How was that a funeral for a piece of Urego? Did you have to bury that little piece? I don't think it's clean like that. I think it's like, you said to me on my podcast, that you're a backslider. So I've had moments of realizing powerfully, okay, I'm letting this go,

but then something triggers me and I start getting competitive and weird again. And then I remember, yeah, I think I'm, no, no, no, I'm not playing this game anymore. So that's pretty much how it goes for me. I can spend a week or two out of the building, working on other stuff, and just not even remember I'm a TV news journalist, unless somebody stops me on

the street. And then I get back in the building and one thing or another happens and I start, I'm filling in on GMM and I'm around, I'm filling in on week day GMM and I'm around all these big hosts and, you know, great relationships with these folks, but I started thinking, wait, should I be trying to do this? I spent 25 years trying to do this. And so it's not clean, but the overall trend is toward not my wife described it as like an app that was running that was sucking up a lot of my battery life, but I wasn't using it. So I think that's starting to happen in a pretty big way. That doesn't mean I don't want to be in TV news.

I'm actually to be clear, the app she's describing is the talk, is the self-talk, right? Yes, that's such a great, I like that. Because right now I'm having this awful issue with my computer where Adobe is not working well. And if I have it open, it will take 50% of my battery in one hour.

So my new rule is I can't have any PDFs open when I'm on the airplane, and I'm working on a battery. But that's now forever. I will be able to every time I open a PDF, I'm going to think about that and think, Hey, what's my mental Adobe reader right now? That's right. Just to close this out, I still want to be in TV news. I just want to be in TV news in a way that's like really enjoyable, which is I'm not constantly angling for the next job. I'm just loving the one I have right now and trying to ace this thing. And that's just for me, it's much more pleasant. And it doesn't mean I don't continue to have big ambitions. I have a startup company.

I would like us to be a billion dollar company. Do I mention how great the app is that that company makes by the way? Yes, yes, you have. And I need billboards in Times Square with you giving this. But you know, one of our competitors is is a billion dollar company. And do I think we can also be one? I literally and I'm sorry to piss off all the comm users. I don't think it belongs in the same sentence as your app. Well, it's a different product.

It is a very important. So, so I'm sure the defenders of that product will say yes, but it does A, B, and C, which I guess just I don't place a premium on, but I guess for the things that I'm looking for, I think yours and Sam's are kind of in their own world. And I think as the market matures, you'll see. Yeah, you'll create these niche lanes. Yeah. Yeah.

And I think, calm is helping a lot of people. So I have a terrible businessman in that I'm, I'm a, you're a promoter of another problem. Yes, I am. Cause I think if somebody comes to me and says they're using Kahn, I'm happy for them. I'm using head space.

I'm happy for them. My view is I like hours better, and I would put sams in. I'm kind of obviously rooting for sams. Yeah. I think it's impossible to put a stake in the heart of all of your demons forever in my view. Speaking only for myself, I don heart of all of your demons forever in my view, speaking only for myself.

I don't imagine all of my inner hobgoblins evaporating permanently, but I do think I can turn the volume down and operate out of a cooler space. Let me just give you an example. We talked about safety before. No. Remember how I noticed that Jerry Colona has this thing about love, safety, and belonging and for me. Oh, yes.

I really did. I really did. I did not say. It's for the children. Yeah. And I realized that like, it's not that my life is devoid of risk, but I can make a pretty solid intellectual argument that if my startup goes pear-shaped and my current situation with ABC News doesn't work.

Worst case scenario professionally. I'll still be fine. And can I operate day to day from the place of feeling already safe? And how will that change how I show up? It means that I'm not so sweaty and super heated in meetings. Everything isn't so stakes. The stakes aren't so high.

I can operate from a much more relaxed place. And I found that experimenting with this, which is a bit of a leap of faith, has really changed the way I show up. Now, how do we extrapolate that to somebody who works at Walmart? And every day they wake up and think, is Amazon going to close this Walmart? So it's one thing to be Dan Harris, who I would agree with your assessment. If ABC fired you tomorrow and the app blew up, I agree with your assessment. I just think you're gonna be fine.

Like I don't see any scenario under which you're not fine. But I don't know if I can say that about that person. And given that that person is not rare, there's not 17 people in the United States that feel that way or that are in that experience. And by the way, I feel much more like the Walmart person than you, like I feel way more insecure about my existence. So I'm asking this in many ways through a very selfish lens, how do we do this if we're not where you are yet? I think it's an excellent, truly excellent question. There's a massive amount of privilege associated with what I just said.

I don't think there's any way around it. We have to view this step out of the spiritual for a second and into step out of psychological and into socioeconomic. step out of psychological and into socioeconomic. He's a very easy thing for a white male wealthy, highly educated, quasi-public figure, to say, all the shit I just said, as opposed to a Walmart worker. Never mind if it's a trans person or a woman of color who happens to work at Walmart. I just don't think there's any way around that. I do think it applies to you.

I mean, you are going to be fine with the exception of the white part, although you present as white, you have all of the privilege that I have, unless I'm missing something. Yes, no, I'm not suggesting I don't. I, I'm not suggesting I don't. I think I'm just suggesting I don't feel it, right? I still feel a tremendous insecurity of everything could be taken away tomorrow. I think if there was a better meditation practitioner and teacher in the room right now, she or he would have an answer to how we can all feel safe no matter what our circumstances are.

I just am not that person. We're bumping up against the limits of my ability. And you know, you said something earlier that I think is really important. As I've been struggling with this chapter in my book on emotional health, right now it has sort of three pillars, and I suspect it will evolve.

The three pillars are mindfulness, developing the capacity to be mindful, developing the capacity to reframe things, which is basically stoicism and then some. And also cognitive behavioral therapy. Correct. And then the third pillar is relationality. And you've basically said all three of those in your own terminology.

So that makes me feel better that I'm not on the wrong track. It might be that mindfulness is not per se the tool for that, that one particular insecurity, or maybe it is to some extent. But the one thing that I do that does give me comfort when I feel very insecure is if I lose the capacity to do my work tomorrow, I don't lose my relationships. That's not really me falling back on a mindfulness tool. It's me falling back on it's a reframe. It's me falling back on... It's a reframe. It's a reframe.

It's basically a reframe that says, you know what? If I had to give up all of the things that I love in life and if I couldn't do what I do, but I still had these people in my life, I'm not going to kid myself and say my life would be just as good, but it wouldn't be all bad. And that's probably the closest I can come at this point to thinking about, to be clear, I think I have so much evolution that still has to come because I'd love to get to the point

where I could show up from a place of zero insecurity. Let me just stop here on that because I hope I didn't miscommunicate in that. I gave anybody the impression that I show up with zero fear and insecurity. It's just that I'm experimenting with recognizing that I don't have it. There's no rationale for it. There is limited rationale for it.

And that I can go into today's meetings from a feeling of like let's just enjoy this. I can't believe I get to have all these meetings today about this amazing company or this amazing story I'm going to work on and can I not be so clenched up because that's not helping the process or the end result. That doesn't mean risk isn't out there and it doesn't mean I'm getting to zero on my demons. It just means that I'm turning down the volume and that that's the 10% happier spirit, which is there is no magic. It's really about marginal improvement over time with an escape valve for backsliding.

Because that's just, I think my understanding of how human behavior works based on an end of one, but I think it's a pretty universal, I think we're all kind of in the same bucket in some ways. I'll bring up another point that you brought up something earlier and this is sort of a bit tangential, but I think it is really important, which is one of my therapists. I know you got a kick out of the fact that I have three of them. It's such a type A way in moderation except moderation, Dan. Okay, that's my ethos. It's not a type A way to do self-proof. But one of them made a really great point, which was the importance of my daughter, who's again, I think you commented on the age gap between my kids, but very different relationship

with my daughter than my son's. The only point. Yeah, right. Is one who's almost 11 and then's the big 5 and the 2. And I was talking about something that I was very uncomfortable about. Something I was very ashamed of. And the therapist said, that's funny. I mean, I've been blanking on which one.

It was either Terry or Esther, but it was Esther. She said, it's actually very important that your daughter sees how much you're ashamed of this and how much you're struggling with this. And it's okay if she sees you cry about this. And she really went through all this stuff. And in retrospect, it seems so obvious that what she was really trying to say was, you're not helping her by letting her think you're some indestructible force who's not, to say was, you're not helping her by letting her think you're some indestructible force who's not, who never struggles, who doesn't have remorse, who doesn't make mistakes, and then come to repent. And as obvious as that sounds now, that has historically felt wrong, like it's felt like

she should see me as perfect. And I should hide my mistakes from her. I think what made me think of that was just something you said earlier about your son, but you just said it so much more eloquently, right, which is you want him to see your struggle. You want him to know that boy, Daddy's knee jerk reaction is to lose his mind right now over whatever.

But I've figured out this whole practice practice and I'm just less likely to lose my mind now. And whatever it is that's sort of pissing me off, that used to piss me off for four hours is actually going to upset me for about two minutes. This is actually something I'm really looking forward to in life is just as I feel like I'm right in the midst of finally starting to win the battle there is actually sharing that with my kids. My daughter is old enough to remember some of these outbursts. She has seen some brutal outbursts.

She has never been the recipient of an outburst, but she's been in the car when I have, I mean, uttered such profanity at another driver that you just, and there's no way she's not traumatized by that. There's no, even though, you know, because another thing I've learned about children is, at that age, they can't sometimes tell that it's not about them.

Yeah. It seems irrational to us. That's not, no. I'm clearly yelling at a person in a car who nearly killed us. How could she take that personally? I'm clearly yelling at a person in a car who nearly killed us. How could she take that personally? But, you know, on some level, she's pierced by that.

Yes. So for her to understand that your dad's flawed, and he's trying to be less flawed, I think of this as like one of the greatest things that we could do as parents. Yeah, because she's gonna have flaws. And how is she gonna relate to them? Yeah.

And that's what I was trying to say before. That's the key. That's the part that you're adding to it that I don't think I've thought through. I'm stealing it from Jericho, so I think it's incredibly potent. You are modeling successful relationships with your own complexity and own demons to your kid. That not only enriches your behavior and relationship with the kid because they really know you, but it also just gives them a tool for moving through life in a way that will reduce their own suffer. This is the last time you saw Peter Jennings before he died.

It was the last time you saw Peter Jennings before he died. He called me into his office down the hall here and told me he wanted me to go to off on a trip to the Middle East to spend some time in Israel and then go into Iraq. And then also told me that there was a perception I wasn't very good at foreign coverage. But this was before he told the world he was dying, right? Yes. And this is just typical of him. He was like giving me this big assignment and also like smacking me in the face while he did it.

Just like a little pointed jab at it. Yeah, you need to prove to us once again that you're good at this thing, even though I had like spent years getting shot at. And then when I was on that trip, he announced that he had lung cancer. This was O5? O5, yes. That was in the late winter, early spring of O5.

And then I didn't see him again. He called me one time in the spring. And he could barely talk. His voice, the cancer had shredded his vocal cords. And I came over where he was telling me if he was kind of like, correcting something I had done. That's how he operated. He was very into correcting. And so we talked and then that was it. And then I heard he died in August. But you didn't see him in that interim.

You never came to visit him? No. Was he not the kind of person that would want it would have been visited? Uh, or did you not feel close enough to him personally? No, our relationship, I was certainly one of his mentees and he really took that very seriously, really took me under his wing. I don't know if he was receiving visitors, but I don't think even if he was, I would have been, somebody would have had to control or invite me because you just wouldn't have been comfortable in that setting. I wouldn't presume that he control or invite me. Because you just wouldn't have been comfortable in that setting.

I wouldn't have presumed that he wanted to see me. So Peter died young. He was in his 60s. Yeah. 66, I think. So if you could go back in time to the late 90s, well, you met him in what the late 2000. You met 2000. So you can go back in time to then when he say, call it 60, but you are the guy you are

today. So you're still younger than him, but you're close enough, right? But you know these things that you've learned. And you were having dinner with him. And you know all this stuff about him, right, which is like, he's this maniacal perfectionist. He is the best of the best. Would you be probing these things? Would you want to know if he was happy? Do you think he was happy? I think he could be happy, but I think fundamentally he seemed to me like somebody who wasn't super happy.

And I think he was driven a lot by the dark spots, you know, the wanting to prove, wanting to win. And yet he also, that dysfunctional part of him created so much value in that he was just so such an entrepid reporter. And he also train, like we learn so much by being near him. So there's so many journalists who are working today because they do a better job because of their relationship with Peter. I'm very reluctant to push meditation on anybody.

So I thought that's where you were going with it. But simply to probe his happiness level and what might be contributing to unhappiness. Yeah, I do think I would have done that. I actually think that could have been interesting and productive. If I had evangelized meditation to him, I think that probably would have backfired. I can't say one way or the other, but just as a general rule, I think, even as I think about talking with some of my patients who have that phenotype, usually meditation isn't

the place to start. The place to start is just to try to get a sense of the similarities between us. I'm not talking to anybody about this stuff as an authority who's figured anything out. I'm talking about it as a schlep who's right there, whereas a lot of times when doctors talk to patients, there's this view of, well, the doctors over here and the doctors figured it out. And they've got a couple of stone pillars that are carved with instructions, and they're going to give them to you. But this is clearly an area where that's not the case. And maybe even using Peter as an example, which of course is just such ridiculous speculation. So

I just want to caveat all of that. You've pointed out that one, he was arguably the single best that ever did this job. Two, he spawned a generation of people like you who have been imparted with a standard of professionalism. Andrew Acouper, Jake Tapper, Chris Cuomo, John Berman, Bob Woodruff, Martha Raditz, George Stephanopoulos, Jonathan Karl, like on and on, just pear Thomas, just incredible people who came out of his orbit. So it begs the question that we've sort of danced around, if Peter was a Buddha then dude, could he have had that same impact or would it have simply been a different impact for which it's impossible

to speculate what the net ripple effect was? My intuition is that you're going to have more of an impact on people if you're not stressing them out so much that all they can, that they shut down their ability for cognitive function. Because that's what he did. He was just so, such a bully, that when you stress somebody out, they can't learn well.

But if he felt safe and was willing to sort of calmly impart the many lessons he had learned over the course of his illustrious career, I think we would have learned even more. Instead one of the things we learned was how to deal with the bully. Dan, there is so much more I'd love to talk with you about, but I think we should save it until your book is in its next phase, which is to say about to come out. Talk to us about what that timeline looks like. So you're in the throes of writing

or are you still storyboarding? Writing, actually writing mostly storyboarded. It's mostly storyboarded, it's going slowly, but I hope it will come out early, make them close to when yours comes out, early 2021 or mid 2021. We'll see. I mean, the absolute, absolute best case scenario, which I think is highly unlikely would be new years 2021.

I think more likely it would be some point in that year. Got it. Well, I can't believe we might have to wait that long to talk again. So maybe we won't, but nevertheless, no, we're going to work out together. Well, no, no, I mean talk about talking about. Oh, it's up. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, no, no, I mean talking about talking about pie charts. Oh, it's happening. Oh, yeah. And then we'll definitely talk about that. Well, thank you so much, Dan.

Thank you on several levels, right? Thank you for 10% happier, just completely on a personal level. I'm simply not sure if that door could have been pride open with any other tool. And that door had to be pride open. And even though it is, it is simply the beginning of a journey, I think it is one of the most important journeys I've ever taken and will continue to take. And just thank you for creating an app that I think takes something like meditation that comes with so many hang ups and so much baggage and makes it so completely accessible.

And again, I'm biased, but it's the type of meditation and the type of practice that on a personal level, I have found most helpful to alleviate my abject, misery, and suffering that seems to be my default state. So thank you for that. And lastly, just thank you for making so much time on our weekend. So here, that would be my pleasure. My pleasure. Thank you.

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