The Rich Roll Podcast - Dan Harris On The Power Of Meditation For The Fidgety Skeptic

Episode Date: February 9, 2018

Joining the podcast for a second time is my friend Dan Harris, an ABC News correspondent who serves up co-anchor duties on both Nightline and the weekend edition of Good Morning America. In one of the greatest side hustles of all time, Dan has distinguished himself in recent years as a leading voice in the advocacy of meditation as a means to live both happier and more fulfilled. For those unfamiliar, Dan’s journey is compelling. An embedded war correspondent covering everything from mass shootings and natural disasters to conflicts in Myanmar, Afghanistan and the Middle East, including six visits to war-torn Iraq, Dan's mental well-being began to suffer, his stress escalating with each overseas deployment. Depression, anxiety and PTSD ensued, followed by self-medicating with drugs like cocaine and ecstasy. Ultimately, these factors conspired to take a serious toll on Dan’s mental and physical health, culminating in a meltdown of epic proportions in 2004 when he suffered an on-air panic attack while delivering the news that was witnessed by 5 million people. Although unsure as to the cause of his breakdown, it was a wake up call that led him to seek professional help. At the same time, in a bizarre stroke of synchronicity, Peter Jennings assigned Dan to begin covering stories on faith, religion and spirituality. Dan was less than enthusiastic about this, but ultimately it was this exploration that that eventually led Dan to understand that the source of his problems was the very thing he always thought was his greatest asset: the incessant, insatiable voice in his head. A thinking mind which had both propelled him through the ranks of a hyper-competitive business yet also led him to make the decisions that provoked his on-air freak-out. We all have that voice in our head. It’s what has us losing our temper unnecessarily, checking our email compulsively, eating when we’re not hungry, and fixating on the past and the future at the expense of the present. Most of us would assume we’re stuck with this voice – that there’s nothing we can do to rein it in – but Dan stumbled upon an effective way to do just that. It's a protocol he initially dismissed as useless, but which ultimately not only saved his life, but gave him a new one altogether: Meditation. After learning about research that suggests meditation can do everything from lower your blood pressure to essentially rewire your brain, Dan took a leap of faith. A deep dive into the underreported world of CEOs, scientists, and even prison guards and marines who are now using it for increased calm, focus, and happiness. Dan chronicles his experiences in his highly entertaining and illuminating memoir, 10% Happier* and provides a practical guide to the actual hows and whys of meditation in the recently released, 10% Happier: Meditation For Fidgety Skeptics*. In many ways, Dan is the perfect ambassador for meditation. The furthest thing from a monk or a guru, he’s a professional family man living in New York City — a highly relatable, very human being who, just like all of us, is trying to live just a little bit better. Enjoy! Rich

A lot of people say, you know, they end a meditation and they think, well that was a good or a bad one. Doesn't matter. The only question to ask yourself at the end of a meditation you could have been squirming and miserable the whole time was, were you aware of it? Were you mindful of it? Because you are not training yourself to be better at putting yourself into a mental bubble bath. You're training yourself to learn how to see clearly your own inner chaos so that it doesn't own you. When you can have some distance from your repetitive grim thought patterns, your inner neurotic programs, then they don't control you as much. And that's what

depression and anxiety consists of. That's all that meditation is. It's like a systematic waking up to this reality so that you can surf it rather than be drowned by it. That's Dan Harris, and this is The Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey everybody, how's it going? How are you? Welcome to February. My name is Rich Roll Podcast. nutrition in 2018, perhaps Ray Cronise and Juliana Hever have inspired you to do so, then check out our meal planner. It's got thousands of custom-tailored plant-based recipes, grocery lists, even grocery delivery in most U.S. metropolitan areas right at your fingertips. It's this incredibly potent, powerful toolbox that contains essentially everything you need

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And there's a little bit more about the book on my website, richroll.com, right there on the homepage. You can click on the cover of the book to learn a little bit more. In any event, super excited. We're going to be doing some public appearances around the book launch, and I'll keep you posted as that develops. Okay. Today's guest is my friend, Dan Harris, who is joining the podcast for a second time. His first appearance was back in July of 2014, episode 97. If you missed it on the first go around, check it out. It's a great conversation.

Longtime listeners will recall that Dan is the co-anchor of ABC News' Nightline, as well as the co-anchor of the weekend edition of Good Morning America. And he's a guy who has made news himself in recent years for his incredible work promoting the benefits of meditation and mindfulness practices. For those unfamiliar, Dan's journey is pretty compelling. After multiple tours as an embedded war correspondent covering everything from Myanmar to Afghanistan and the Middle East, including six visits to war-torn Iraq, East, including six visits to war-torn Iraq, he found himself depressed and anxious and really dealing with PTSD. And so he began self-medicating with cocaine and ecstasy.

But his mental health just continued to decline. And it culminated in this epic meltdown that he experienced, an on-air panic attack in 2004 while delivering the news on Good Morning America that was witnessed by five million people. And this was really his nadir, his breaking point, his wake-up call that compelled him to make some pretty serious lifestyle changes. At the same time, in this bizarre stroke of synchronicity, Peter Jennings assigned Dan to begin covering stories on faith and religion and spirituality. And Dan was less than enthusiastic about this after being an embedded war correspondent.

But ultimately, it was this exploration that led Dan to the world of meditation. And it's a protocol that he initially dismissed as useless, but which ultimately not only saved his life, but gave him a brand new one altogether. Dan beautifully chronicles his crazy adventure in his first book, 10% Happier, which I highly recommend. It's a very fun, highly entertaining and instructive read, especially if you're somebody who believes yourself to be incompatible with meditation. if you're somebody who believes yourself to be incompatible with meditation. And he just released a brand new follow-up book called 10% Happier Meditation for Fidgety

Skeptics, which is fantastic. It's a practical and really highly accessible primer that delves deeper into the hows and the whys of meditation. And I think what makes Dan the perfect ambassador for meditation is really his relatability. He's not a monk. He's not a guru. He's a professional family guy living in New York City. And like all of us, a guy who's just trying to live a little bit better and a little bit happier in the face of the daily stressors and pressures that we all face. Really excited to share this one.

But before we get into it. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because unfortunately not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem. A problem I'm now happy and proud to share has

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all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem. A problem I'm now happy and proud to share has been solved by the people at recovery.com, who created an online support portal designed to guide, to support, and empower you to find the ideal level of care tailored to your personal needs.

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again, go to recovery.com. Okay, Dan Harris. So to properly contextualize and frame this conversation, let's just acknowledge that voice we all have in our head, that relentless chatter. It's that thing that has us losing our temper unnecessarily, checking our email compulsively, eating when we're not hungry, and fixating on the past and future at the expense of the present. Most of us assume that we're just stuck with this voice, that it is basically just who we are. But it's not. And the most effective way to combat and overcome the looping thought patterns and behaviors

that drag us down while also lowering our stress response, reducing our blood pressure and anxiety, alleviating depression, even rewiring our brains is meditation. Look, I understand that many of you listening may already know this, but if you're somebody who's tuned in, who's still skeptical, perhaps you think you're a unique case for whom meditation won't work or more likely you don't quite understand how to do it or you just don't have time or believe you can't reasonably justify the time. Then I think this wide ranging conversation with Dan, which picks up where we left off last time, is the perfect conversation for you. So without further ado, I give you Dan Harris. Are you good?

Yeah. All right, thanks, Dan. Thanks for making the time today. Thank you. It was a little chat. Where did you travel from? Well, here's the thing. I had a little experience confronting the limitations of my mindfulness today because I love this

I live in the hills above Malibu oh that's far I live pretty far away from here and started driving here like I don't know 12 30 or something like that my plan was to get here meet Michael here at about 1 30 help him set up, get everything organized. And I pulled into the parking lot here at about 115, looked in the backseat of my truck and realized that I left all of my podcast gear at home. I was like, okay, how do I solve this problem? So I call my wife. I'm like, I can't believe I did this. I'm such a knucklehead.

I live like an hour away. There's no way I'm going to be able to get home, get this stuff, and be back here in time to meet you. I'm immediately reflecting on our email exchange yesterday about where to do this and making sure that like, I'm all set up when you arrive. And so I called you, I was like, you gotta meet, you gotta get my stuff and meet me like on halfway or whatever. So I got my steps on to do it. Yeah, she did. She did it. And it was interesting because this is the exactly the kind of thing that would have just put me into an absolute manic tailspin a couple of years ago. And I'm not saying that i handled it with complete grace today but i actually kept my shit together pretty well i was like okay this is what it is dan's probably going to be there when i get here i'm not going to be ready to go at 2 30 i'll get there when i

get there and then you know traffic started stacking up as i got closer and closer to here with that you know the anxiety notches up incrementally with each red light it's like okay it is what it is so i wouldn't say my blood pressure was at complete baseline but i give myself like a b plus when normally i would probably get i'd probably get a d out of yeah i think that that delta between the d and the b plus actually adds up to an a in terms of the quality and quantity of your improvement i mean this is a case study for why you meditate it's not that perfection will arise because perfection is not on offer it's just being marginally but meaningfully less of an idiot right and this story crystallizes the benefits crystal i mean it's perfect yeah

this thing happens it's your fault right completely my fault right which pushes all my buttons like you're an idiot like you don't know what you're doing yes yes yes yeah it plays into i can i see i see it i see it i get it um and yet so you didn't handle it like, you know, you didn't dance through it like Fred Astaire, but you handled it much better than you would have before. That's an A. Yeah. And by the way, it will continue to get better. Not every day. And it won't be like a straight line.

It's not a linear thing. It's not a hockey stick. But it will gradually just kind of go in that direction. Yeah, I think it will. It will always like regress to the mean, which is probably at that 10% happier kind of, kind of like trajectory. That little spike was, was definitely above the 10% and it'll go back down. It'll rubber band a little bit. And it's not a direct reflection of what I did this morning either. It's just a compounded effect of what I've been doing over the last couple of years. That's right. You mean it's not a, it's not a direct, just to clarify what you said,

it's not a direct result of the meditation you did this morning. It's just having meditated for a while. There's actually a bunch of important things about that you just said. First of all, the 10% itself compounds. Now I don't, I mean mean i don't have any mathematical evidence to back this up but in my experience the 10 happier goes up over time because it just compounds like any good investment the other thing i'd say is um that it is so important that you point out that it's not a result of the meditation you did this morning and a lot of people say you know they end a meditation and they think well that was a good or a bad one. Doesn't matter. Right. Doesn't matter. The only question to ask yourself at the end of a meditation, you could have been squirming and miserable the whole time was, were you aware

of it? Were you mindful of it? Because you are not training yourself to be better at putting yourself into a mental bubble bath. You're training yourself to learn how to see clearly your own inner chaos so that it doesn't own you. I think that's a really important observation and distinction. And I kind of analogize it to, you know, what it's like to train for a race, you know, like one of the races that I do or to write a book. Like you just, you have to show up for it every day. And sometimes you show up and you feel amazing and you hit it out of the park or the words are just flowing. And other days it's a shit show, you know, it's not working at all, but you show up and you show up the next day. And the cumulative impact of that consistent application of intention is really the most important factor.

That's why they call it a practice. I mean, these are all practices and in order to practice anything the first step as you said is to show up right nothing else can happen it's funny because you know when you walked in here today i thought you seemed slightly less ebullient than the original i was agitated and then when i went to the bathroom i was like he knows i'm agitated like i'm running i'm looping this thing right in my mind he's like he can tell i'm off kilter no no i took it to maybe like I pissed him off by asking him to come all the way out here. I, I personalized it, you know, like I was like, oh, no, but it just tells, this is also useful to unpack because this is the way the mind works. We can personalize it and say, it's the way our minds work, but it's really just the way

the mind works. Every, you know, we're all in our own, and we're all the stars of our own movie, and whatever's happening in other people's movies is only interesting to us, A, for maybe some mild fleeting titillation, or B, as interesting or important because it says something about our own movie. So you walk in here, you're in a bad mood. Of course, by the way, it was totally minor vibrations. It wasn't a bad mood of course i i by the way it was totally minor vibrations it wasn't it wasn't a bad mood i was just agitated because of what i just under undergone i wouldn't have known you

were agitated i just thought slightly less bubbly than normal um but i immediately just went to oh yeah it's probably a little annoyed that i had him you know come all the way out here no i was just hoping i would get here before you, so I could get this thing set up before you walk. I got to talk to Michael, your new video. Awesome. All right. Well, let's, let's like, uh, you know, canvas your current situation here. I mean, from my perspective, you have like the world's greatest side hustle going on here. I mean, this is unbelievable. Like you, so you were on the podcast before we shared your story and perhaps we can kind of revisit that in a nutshell just so

we can contextualize what we're going to talk about. But while you're, you know, managing this incredibly, uh, I don't know what the word would be, um, high pressure career that you're in of hosting good morning America on the weekends and doing nightline at the same time you have this thing going on that for anybody else would would be an entire career you've written multiple books on meditation you've got the 10 happier app you went on this crazy bus tour and you've become this like the public face of mainstream meditation for America or the world in this kind of public health advocacy context. Like that's a lot you have going on right now. Well, thank you for saying that. It is a lot. I would say the biggest problem in my life right now

is time management. You know, I just don't have enough time because I also have a family, three-year-old son and wife who actually came with me to L.A. We live in New York City, so she came with me just so, A, we could escape the three-year-old, and, B, we could have some time together. That's nice. Yeah, she's, I think, at a spa right now or something like that. Oh, that's good. I enjoyed your podcast with her.

Oh, yes, I put her on my podcast. You had some weird trepidation about doing that, but I thought it was amazing. Yeah, I had weird trepidation about it because she knows me like she really knows me there's no she actually knows the the the when the mask is off i don't wear actually i don't wear too much of a mask but she knows what i'm like at home yeah for. For real. You're very self-effacing in your, in your writing and in your presentation on the podcast. So, you know, I, and that's part of, you know, that's part of your accessibility and relatability and charm. So I don't, it's, it was interesting to me that that seemed to, you know, sort of alarm you on some low level. Yeah. I mean, I couldn't, I can't control my wife. Right. So it's like i'm not nor would i want

to but but you know when i make self-effacing effacing jokes on a podcast or in a book it's i'm controlling it my wife's there she can say whatever the hell she wants and she knows everything so that was just a little anxiety get away with anything no but it was hilarious and she definitely gave me all the shit that i deserve to to have been given right and she's a very uh important and interesting case study in the context of this new book you know meditation for fidgety skeptics because she herself despite being your partner was not sold or at least not on board on a practice level with this whole thing that you're all about these days. No, she, uh, I, I asked in the book whether maybe,

maybe I hurt myself by frequently asking her whether what it's like to be married to your spiritual leader. Yeah, that'd go over well. No, she didn't like that joke no uh so the irony is she's the one who actually got me started on meditation she gave me a book by dr mark epstein called going to pieces without falling apart and i read that book and realized that i had up until that time i'd been reading a lot of sort of eckhart tolle self-help stuff and i thought was very interesting because it talked a lot about totally i think quite brilliantly describes our ego, the voice in our head, the sort of background static of perpetual discontent as he describes it. But I've also heard Eckhart Tolle, in my view, accurately described as correct but not useful. So he describes our situation well, but doesn't actually give you much to do about it.

And when I read Epstein's book given to me by my wife i realized oh yeah there is something to do about it's called meditation and so i started meditating as a consequence of that and then wrote i've written a couple books about it and bianca's lived with me through this period of time she likes the meditation in that it's made me less of an asshole than i used to be and i definitely had i retained the capacity to be a schmuck no question about it but i was much worse way back when and at a time when she knew me but she never adopted it herself for a whole complex bully a base of reasons including you know her schedule and um her sort of somewhat some she had a resistance to self-care which she viewed as a bit of self-indulgent. And then living with me, I'm like a wagging finger personified.

Even though I never, I don't lecture her about it. I did a little bit at the beginning, but I learned not to. She just had a real resistance to it. And over the course of the book. Just to differentiate herself. She's just not going to get on board. She just didn't want to do something that she knew I wanted her to do. That's marriage.

Yeah, absolutely. I do the same type of thing. I get it. No judgment. I don't actually have any. The only reason I wanted her to meditate was she has an incredibly stressful job. She's a physician. Right now, she's taking some time off, but she's a highly trained, highly specialized physician.

And we have a young child. And before that we had a fertility crisis and she had breast cancer last year. So it's been, she's had a tough run and I thought this would be very useful for her, but I knew that if I said anything, she wasn't going to do it. So Jeff Warren, my coauthor on the book, who's this brilliant meditation teacher, he sat down with her and he was really able to unlock it for her and in a way that she now does meditate and what was it specifically that he did that unlocked it for a couple of things uh first was he identified something that she identified and something that i had not seen in myself, which is that my practice, my meditation practice,

as it turns out, I learned in the writing of this book that I'm a huge hypocrite. I'm always telling people, take it easy. Don't worry about it. When you get distracted, when you're meditating, it doesn't mean you failed. It's actually the opposite. You've succeeded. But in my own practice, I was actually very mean to myself when I would get distracted. And I have a real sort of grit and determination to sit a certain amount every day. And Bianca saw this. She saw that there was a sort of eat your vegetables vibe to my practice, and it was not attractive to her. And so Jeff was like, I see what you see about Dan's practice. Get rid of that. about Dan's practice, get rid of that. What I think you ought to do is have a gloriously self-indulgent practice that at the end of the day, when you've put your son to sleep

and you come out, I want you to put on some reality TV, turn the volume down low, sprawl out on the ground and just notice how good it feels to lie down, tune into the physical sensations. And when you get distracted, start again and again and again. He called the meditation he created for her taking back lazy, which is a brilliant, brilliant reframing. The other thing he pointed out is that she had, she often is the one,

she pretty much always the one who has to put the kid to bed because I work nights and early mornings. So I'm almost never awake or available. And he's really hard to get down. So she can often spend 90 minutes to 120 minutes in there feeling rage. He was like, just when you're lying next to the kid and you're just waiting for him to fall asleep, just meditate right there.

You're already there. So she probably meditates more than anybody I know because she's marooned in this little monster's bed with him and she has co-opted that time and turned it into meditation it's interesting that the the people that go out of their way to make their life about caretaking are the ones that struggle the most with taking care of themselves you know your wife being a doctor and a mother um that idea that that you know you got to put the oxygen mask on yourself before you before you put it on the kid is so uh non-intuitive and and challenging for for people like that to literally because it feels indulgent i suppose yeah we have a whole chapter in the book about this, Bianca being a primary case study,

we also spent some time with some social workers who help kids with developmental delays in New Mexico. And their problem, as well as Bianca's, was this is self-indulgent. You know, if the five minutes I spend on meditation, I'm thinking, well, I could be with my husband, I could be with my son, I should be cleaning, I should be doing any number of things and it's just what you said if you if you care truly about taking care of other people you can't do so effectively if you don't take care of yourself right but that there's that guilt yeah even shame absolutely some people that crops up that prevents people from from doing that you know i think the key for somebody like me who's in the position of trying to help these folks is to acknowledge and validate those feelings i get it

i see the logic behind your rationale but it's useful in a sort of non-judgmental way to help help folks see that actually under close examination the logic doesn't hold up. Right. I see you as like this perfect cipher for the average human being who kind of knows what meditation is, is sort of, you know, tiptoeing around the outer edges of it, but is intimidated or, you know, not so keen on all of the lingo, you know, language. We can talk about the importance of language if you want. And here you are, this person who is, like I said earlier, like, you know, very relatable, who speaks the same language as the average human being speaks

and is able to translate these principles through storytelling and through science to make these kind of very esoteric ideas meaningful in a very practical way for people and that's like kind of like where you're like this wedge in between east and west where you could take what you know the buddha said or joseph goldstein says and translate it so the bond trader on wall street or the soccer mom in Topeka gets it. I really appreciate you saying that. I mean, I kind of think of myself as a gateway drug.

You know, I don't know. I'm not a meditation teacher. And there are great meditation books that already existed. My only innovation was to add the word fuck a lot you know and and and to and to tell very embarrassing stories and and and to tell stories at all to really turn this to use the skills that i had been uh that i had acquired in the course of being a tv journalist to to turn it on this um on on this practice and this tradition of Buddhism. I sometimes feel like I had this image.

I was on a meditation retreat with Joseph Goldstein, my teacher, a couple weeks ago, and I had this image like I'm standing in this vast treasury of unbelievable material, unbelievable journalistic and authorial material content. And I'm like, just taking it, taking stuff from Buddhism, taking stuff from meditation teachers. And I'm like, is somebody going to arrest me? I get to just take all this stuff, but I, I I'm just the right person at the right time. I think maybe that I, uh, I had all this training as a storyteller.

I ended up stumbling upon meditation and now I, I can just write about it as much as I want. There's an endless supply of things to talk about. I have in my head five more books that I want to write. I just don't have the time to do them all right now, but I would love to. Right. Well, I want to dig into this a little bit more deeply, but maybe you can give us the 20-second recap

of how you got to this place so i had a panic attack on national television viewable by anybody who wants on youtube how many how many views does that this video millions and millions of views yes i actually don't think it's that bad like it kind of i can see like now that i know this story when i watch it i can feel your pain but if i just stumbled if i just happen to have been watching it at the time, I don't know that I would have keyed in onto what exactly was happening. That's right. That's why my career didn't end that morning. So I get one of two responses to the video. Most people see it and they say just what you just said, you know, not awesome, but not that bad. Anybody, however, who's had even a taste of panic and looks at that video, their palms start

sweating. It's like a trigger. Absolutely. So I happen to have handled it quite well. I think either because I'm a sociopath or because I had the luxury of being able to toss it back to my co-anchors. I was on the air. It was at seven o'clock in the morning in 2004, and I was supposed to read six stories off of the teleprompter, six quick stories. My job was, that day on Good Morning America, my job was to be the newsreader, which they actually don't really do anymore on morning television, but they used to have people who came on at the top of the hour and just quickly read the headlines. And as soon as I started speaking, I was overtaken by this big bolt of fear. My heart was racing, my mind was racing, my palms were sweating, my mouth dried up. And most importantly, my lungs seized up.

I just couldn't talk. So I had to quit in the middle and I could toss it back to the main anchors, which if I couldn't have done, that panic attack would have looked much more dramatic. I would have ripped the mic off and run away. More embarrassing than the panic attack was the backstory. So I had spent a lot of time as a young, ambitious, idealistic reporter in war zones, Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, West Bank, et cetera, et cetera. And I came home from a lot of these experiences, after having had a lot of these experiences, and I got depressed. experience after having had a lot of these experiences and I got depressed and I very unwisely self-medicated with cocaine and ecstasy and even though I wasn't doing drugs all the time and definitely not when I was working it was enough according to the doctor I consulted after

the panic attack was enough to artificially raise the level of adrenaline in my brain and make me more likely to have a panic attack and And so that kind of sent me off on a long, windy, weird journey that ultimately several years later landed me on meditation, and the rest is history. And the rest is history. And now you're traveling around the country in buses. Yes, yes. Talking to people about this.

But importantly, not in a proselytizing way, but in a way of just trying to— I mean, evangelizing is the wrong word. No, it's not the wrong word. Being a living example of the benefits of this ancient way of approaching life. The gospel, I think the gospel literally means the good news. And that is basically what I'm trying this is good news the good news if whittled down to its essence is that the mind is trainable that all the things we care the most about that we want the most inner peace to use a cliched term but let's just say happiness calm

compassion focus gratitude these are skill These are not factory settings that you can't change. These are skills that you can practice, that you can generate, you can take responsibility for just the way you can work on your body in the gym as you do. And that is good news. And so my, my whole mission on life in life, aside from, I guess I have three main missions. One is to be a journalist. The second is to be a daddy and husband. And the third is to tell people this. And I'm just trying to come up with creative ways to tell people, if there are things about yourself that you don't like,

you can't magically make them go away. Like, I'm still shorter than I want to be, et cetera, et cetera. But you can train equanimity. You can train kindness, generosity. This is an incredible thing to know. And so to me, yeah, that's a kind of evangelism. But importantly, to amplify the point you were trying to make before that I probably cut you off in the middle of, is that I don't wag my finger for real. Like, if you're not interested in meditation, I'm not going to talk to you about it. I only talk to

people about meditation who, like, you gave me a microphone, so I'll talk. But, like, for years I didn't talk to my wife about it because I knew she didn't want to hear it. Right. What's interesting about what you just said is this idea of news, good or otherwise, that it's news. In the Western world, this idea that we can train the mind, that we can, there are things that we can do, that we can practice that can amplify our equanimity, that can make us more focused, that can, uh, you know, reduce the stress in our lives and, and, and set us on a trajectory towards achieving all those things that, that we spend so much time and effort on in other areas of our life to achieve, which is

happiness, fulfillment, contentment, you know, living purposefully, all of these things, right? And we do spend an unbelievable amount of time in the gym or, you know, at our job or doing whatever we're doing without any regard whatsoever for how this thing, you know, that's sitting on top of our shoulders actually functions. We spend so much time on our stock portfolios, our cars, our bodies cars our bodies our interior design our resumes all of which are important I'm not I'm not I'm I spend time on those things but it's important to spend time as well on the one filter through which you experience everything and that's your mind and I

think this is news people don't know this I didn't know this I mean I I did not know that any of this was possible i didn't even know the i was not even truly aware of the thunderously obvious fact that we have minds and are thinking and you know i mean yes i if you would ask me on the street do you have a mind and are you thinking yeah i would have said yes but i but I wasn't aware of the intensity of the nonstop conversation we are having with ourselves all the time. This just chaotic stew of urges and impulses and desires that is your inner life. And when you don't see it clearly, it owns you. that meditation is it's like a systematic wakening waking up to this reality so that you can surf it rather than be you know drowned by it and as much as it is news here i mean this goes back you know

hundreds thousands of years in the east like millennia not news no you know a large part of the world uh we're we're the we're late to the party on this and what's interesting is that science has now sort of caught up to this trend to verify it in a way that legitimizes it to the rational you know logical way that we as westerners kind of perceive the world i mean that's what allowed me to get over the hump because i was i mean to the extent that i had ever even thought about meditation i thought it was ridiculous i mean you know i often joke that i thought it was you know for people who live in a yurt and are really into enya and kat stevens and you know live in a

spend time on a himalayan mountaintop in loincloth. I mean, just, you know, all the cliches. But it was the science that changed my mind. My wife's a scientist. Both my parents are scientists. I was not good enough at math to do science, but it carries a lot of weight with me. When I saw the science that suggests that it can lower your blood pressure, boost your immune system, literally rewire key parts of your brain, then I thought, okay, this makes sense. And importantly for me, as somebody who's struggled with anxiety and depression, as well as panic and substance abuse, the science around anxiety and depression is actually the strongest. And I just, you know, in testing it in the laboratory of my own mind, it became very obvious that when you can have some

distance from your repetitive grim thought patterns, your neurotic programs, your inner neurotic programs, then they don't control you as much. And that's what depression and anxiety consists of. Maybe we can go in a little bit more deeply on what the science actually does say and doesn't say. So one thing to say about the science first is that it has been, it continues to be regrettably hyped. So I think people overstate what meditation can do, and they latch on to every hot new study, and then there's some breathless headline about how meditation can, you know,

make you dunk on a regulation hoop or whatever. It's just not, that is not the case. I think it's important to point out that the studies, that the research is in its early stages, and that while we can't say much definitively, what we can say is it strongly suggests, the research strongly suggests that meditation can confer a number of really attractive benefits from, as I said before, lowering your blood pressure, boosting your immune system. It's been shown to help with grades in school, behavior in school. It's been shown to help with anxiety, depression, age-related cognitive decline, ADHD. And the neuroscience is really the most exciting stuff that i'll just give you one study that was

done at harvard in 2010 or 11 they took people who had never meditated before just civilians and they scanned their brains to get a baseline reading of what their brains looked like and then for eight weeks they had them do a little bit of meditation every day at the end they scanned their brains again and what they found is that in the area of the brain associated with stress, the gray matter literally shrank. And in the area of the brain associated with self-awareness and also compassion, the gray matter grew. That is just really compelling. And it's also shown to have a salutary effect on the areas of the brain associated with attention regulation. And another last thing I'll say about this is there's a connected,

there are a series of regions of the brain known as the default mode network. These are the areas of the brain that fire when we're in our default mode, which is thinking about ourselves, thinking about the past, thinking about the future, just kind of ruminating. That's our resting state as humans. thinking about the past thinking about the future just kind of ruminating that's just the that's our resting state as humans meditators while meditating that area of the brain go the activity goes way down and importantly for long-term meditators it goes way down even when you're not meditating that's that's pretty compelling and amazing. I feel like we're in a very, uh, tenuous, interesting time. I mean, there's a lot going on right now. You know, we're in uncharted waters politically, uh, and particularly with respect

to emerging technology, there is a war for our time and attention afoot. And maybe there always has been, but with the advent of all of these devices that are vying for, you know, vying for our eyeballs i feel like you know we we have to be we almost have to be practicing some form of meditation to avoid the compulsion that we all are faced with with just pulling the phone out of our pocket every day and looking at it like i don't know about you but i can go down the rabbit like i'll be scrolling through Instagram and I'll be like, I can't stop scrolling. What is wrong? What is wrong with me? And then, and I realized like, well, you know, a lot of time and attention and millions of dollars were put into this app to, to achieve precisely this result so that they're achieving with me. And I have to go above and beyond and exercise like, you know, a lot of mindfulness and restraint to like create rules around these

things and avoid them so that I can actually move forward in my life. In other words, we're in a period where boredom need not exist ever again. We are so overstimulated and there's a lot of amazing things about that, but you know, we're in many respects we're prisoners right and so if you start to think of it in that context what are the tools to unlock us from this prison that we've that we've all volunteered for I had interviewed recently a very interesting person named Manoush Zemroti who she hosts a podcast called note to self and it's all about sort of our relationship to technology and she said and I'm probably going to mangle the quote but that we're in an essence

conducting a huge science experiment global science experiment about our attention with our relationship to these to these devices because we're just we don't know what it does to us. We know some things, but we just don't really know what the long-term effects are of having this supercomputer in your pocket and just being glued to it all the time. My view, and I'm open to change, but my view right now is that these are incredible tools and they're so useful and so delightful on so many different levels, but it's very important to try to create a healthy relationship to them. So I'm not, I mean, I, before we started rolling here, I was talking about how I went out and splurged on the iPhone 10. I mean, I, I don't, I'm not anti-tech, but I am anti-unhappiness.

And I find that having a mindfulness practice, which essentially just boosts your self-awareness, right? Through having increased self-awareness because of meditation, I notice more quickly when I'm doing this because I'm bored. I'm doing this because I'm lonely. I'm doing this. just i'm doing this because i'm bored i'm doing this because i'm lonely i'm doing this i'm drowning in twitter and i'm my stomach is roiling and my head is pounding because i'm upset about some political development step away man and that has really helped me um so it's not to say that i never use technology it's just that my relationship to it has become more healthy and then the other

thing i'd say is that i love that there's this proliferation of meditation apps out there because it, it's like co-opting the engine of our distraction and turning your phone into something that teaches you how to be mindful. I think there's a reason why these companies are doing so well. Yeah, it is. It's super interesting. And, and i can kind of contextualize it or analogize it to to uh you know recovery from substance abuse because i see my own denial mechanism creep up like oh well yeah i'm i'm on twitter while i'm waiting in this line because you know my career is tied to social media and i need to know what's going on and And I, it's like, it's bullshit. You know,

I don't need to be doing that. Like to, but to be able to catch myself in that argument and have enough self awareness to say, that's just a lie that I'm telling myself to, to validate this behavior that I know, you know, deep down is not in my best interest. It's just seeing it is a huge victory,

but I can always go on the 10% app, happier app instead. Right. I mean, I would, I'm on board with, it's really cool. Like I can always go on the 10% happier app instead, right? I mean, I'm on board with it. It's really cool. Like I think it's, you did a really great job. Thank you. And you know, I, I was, um, on Headspace for quite some time and I know Andy and I think they've done an amazing job there. Pioneers. Yeah. Incredible. Right. Incredible. And what you've done is I was always curious before you launched your app, like, oh, well, what's he going to do that that they're not doing or how do you differentiate? And I think you've done an amazing job of creating something unique and different that also serves the same ultimate goal with the video and the various different teachers and, and, you know, it's really, and it's, it's fun. You know, it's not, it goes to that thing that you said earlier, like this transition that you went through from that period of time when you wrote 10% happier, when you were looking at meditation, like your vegetables are just something that

you have to like, you got to do it. You got to get through it or whatever to something that you look forward to. That's enjoyable. It's funny because, well, first of all, thank you for saying all that because the app has become really just a major focus for me and that's just my baby and and i had no prior experience in business uh but luckily was able to through a long series of events that you probably don't care about find this amazing team and we just are having so much fun doing this thing. But, you know, in terms of making it fun, I come from morning television. And I often think, you know, weekend Good Morning America, which is one of the shows I do at ABC, our success in the ratings is because if we, yes, we give you the news,

we do all the things that you, we check all the boxes. But the five of us who are on the show, we love each other. We're having a great time, and it feels like a party that you want to be at. And I want the app to feel that way, that it's not just dry meditation instructions. When you watch the short little video clips that we serve up all the time right before you sit to meditate, although you can just meditate if you want but if you watch the video clips it's fun it's super practical it's me sitting with some brilliant teacher or scientist and you learn

something that can actually change the way you live but also have fun doing it to me that is just such a i don't know it's an amazing experience yeah it's cool how jeff ends the sessions by saying uh you know welcome to our meditation cult now go kick ass in your day as opposed to like yes so we you know our little slogan is no no no pan flutes you know we we just the the way meditation has been delivered is either dry or twee or super, like addressing you as if you're a grasshopper. We're trying to avoid all of those tropes and just stick with what this is, which is secular, simple exercise for your brain. But also, as soon as you start, just like you were talking about when you're online at the supermarket and you see, you're checking Twitter and then you're engaging in all of these sort of crazy rationalized rationalizations that's hilarious when you look at your mind it's fucking hilarious because it's crazy it's totally crazy if you can't have a sense of humor

about this you are in deep trouble and i think that's what we're trying to bring to this thing is it's not that you're going to conquer your neuroses. It's that, as one great meditation teacher has said, you'll become a connoisseur of your neuroses. So that said that they don't have so much power over you. Yeah, and just to break it down and make it super accessible and simple so that anybody can follow it. And to use language that people understand.

I mean, we kind of danced around this earlier, but, you know, the importance of language with ideas like this, and you've sort of famously said, like, you know, meditation is, you know, is in the greatest need of, like, rebranding or, like, a new marketing strategy, because the idea that, like, I'm just envisioning two guys watching Monday Night football sitting next to each other and one leaning over to the other one and saying, you know, how's your loving kindness

practice? It's like, it's not going to happen. Right. And yet these are profound practices that we can all benefit from if we, and I think guys, you know, have a harder time with the language than women do. For sure. But you know, two guys watching Monday night football might say, you know, And women do. For sure. But two guys watching Monday Night Football might say, how is your CrossFit class? Sure. But this is exercise for the mind and the brain.

And there's a reason why the Chicago Cubs meditate. There's a reason why Novak Djokovic meditates. The U.S. Army and the U.S. Marines are spending tens of millions of dollars on meditation for the troops for a reason. This is us up. These are bicep curls for your brain. And there are lots of different practices that can work on lots of different mental qualities that you care about. We just need to start talking about it this way

so that it's not embarrassing to talk about it at Monday Night Football. Because those guys deserve this practice just as much as the traditional yogis who've been doing it forever deserve it. Everybody deserves it. This is our birthright. Mindfulness is our birthright. Having a mind is our birthright. And so this should be done by foster care children. This should be done by inmates in prisons.

This should be done by patients in hospitals. Nobody is outside the scope. You've been doing this for a while now. is outside the scope. You've been doing this for a while now. And your initiation into this was, you know, very much about like trying to reframe it and redefine it for yourself. But as somebody who's now been around the block and has gotten to know all these amazing teachers and is very steeped in the various traditions, et cetera, do you find yourself at times, uh, like nothing static. So I would imagine your relationship with this is it's certainly more profound and different than it was when you began, but do you find yourself kind of gravitating a little bit towards the patchouli crowd in a way that you weren't initially? Cause I'm just thinking like,

I analogize this to when I adopted a vegan diet like I was like I'm never going to be vegan because those guys kick hacky sacks and have dreadlocks and talk about things that I'm not interested in you know like and now 10 years later like I kind of have become one of those guys a little bit you know in a way that I never would have thought not by conscious design but by evolution i think it's such a great question the short answer is not really like i i'm not as offended by it as i used to be and so i can be in the room when people are you know talking the talk but i still am pretty offended by it i don't like you know like like when Jeff and I were writing this book and we, we did some,

so we did straight up mindfulness practices in the book, but we also did some, as you said before, loving kindness practice, which I have a whole rap about. We can get into it, but we, so we did some,

uh, practices that are designed to boost your compassion. And I told him, don't use the word heart. Cause that's just, what does that even mean? It's just kind of sappy. So I still have some linguistic peccadillos um and uh little rules uh that i like to stick to

because i think there's a way to talk about this that makes it less annoying but i am now way in the tank for meditation and i regularly go on meditation retreats and have a deep relationship with this amazing meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein, who's my view, perhaps the greatest living meditation teacher. And so it's, I'm in a funny place catering to skeptics while I meditate two hours a day personally and go on these long meditation retreats. And it is, that is, you put your finger on a tricky balance for me, but I haven't really

given an inch on my firm convictions about the right and wrong way to talk about the practices. Yeah. As a translator. Yes. Yes. And, and that, that's certainly, you know, that's your place. That's your talent.

That's your role, at least as you see it. Clearly, like everything you do is a way of translating these ideas to the average person. That's my goal. That is definitely my goal. Is it really two hours? You're doing two hours a day? Yeah. So a couple of years ago, maybe two and a half years ago, I got it in my head.

So not long after 10% Happier came out, I just got it in my head that I really wanted to go deeper. The logic being, not that I, you know, I guess the way to describe the logic is, it's demonstrably true in my experience and based on the science that you can train yourself to to be kinder and more mindful and more focused and all these things so if you can be 10 happier what's the ceiling and i've become very interested in what's available at the sort of deeper end of the pool not only sort of as a journalist because i plan to write about this at some point, but also as a human, I saw so many benefits. So for example, one way to think about this is like with exercise.

So I like being fit. I got to look at my stupid face on television. So I try not to be overweight. And my wife and I went to SoulCycle this morning and I work six or seven days a week. I work out. You run these crazy like Ironman things. And so I would never do that.

But I don't think you're crazy because you do. It's just that you personally got so interested in it that you wanted to take it further. That's kind of what I'm going for on the meditation side. Although any serious meditation, like really serious meditation person knows that I personally am not yet a meditative triathlete, but I am making my best attempts to move in that direction. So about two and a half years ago, I had it in my head that two hours a day was the right number. I don't know. It's kind of out there that two hours is a number that a lot of dedicated practitioners do and i heard from my friend sharon salzburg an amazing thing she had a friend who

sharon is a great meditation teacher and she's not on the podcast okay so your listeners know her that's which is amazing she is amazing she had a friend who wanted to do two hours but was very busy and he came up with this rule of I can do whenever I want, wherever I want, and whatever increments I want throughout the day. And so now that's my rule. I just wake up in the morning. I don't know when or where I'm going to meditate or for how long. And I just fit it in where I can. And by the end of the day, I get to two hours.

On a great day, I'll bank a little bit for the next day. On a shitty day, I'll come up short and have to make that up the next day. So today, for example, I'm taking a lot of cars around LA and, you know, Lyft, I'm in the backseat of Lyft cars. And I've got a lot of time to meditate. And so I'll probably, I owe 45 minutes from a couple of weeks ago. I'll make it up today. Yeah. Interesting. And how long have you been doing the two hour experiment? Almost three years. Oh, three years. Almost three years, but two and a half, three years. And what is the qualitative difference in your life between that and the more typical, you know, 20 minutes a day or 20 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes at night?

I just think it's, it's taking the benefits you get as a beginner and ramping them up. It's not that I'm in some bubble of bliss with bulletproof imperturbability or anything like that. It's just that, so what are the three benefits you get as a beginning meditator? Increased calm, increased focus, and less emotional reactivity. I just turned up the volume on all three of those. The other thing I've noticed is that my actual practice is better. This is a skill. You know, people sit down to meditate and they find immediately that they're super distractible, which often people assume that's a failure, but it's not. I've just found that actually my ability to focus has gone up over

time and sort of more and more interesting and pleasurable things happen in meditation. And when unpleasant things happen, I'm actually able to be a quantumist in the face of the minute. Not all the time, but at a much higher level than I used to be. Well, certainly, you know, the proof is in the pudding in terms of like your productive output. I mean, the fact that you're a host on two different television shows, you're writing books. Presumably, you're traveling all the time to speak. And you're doing things like podcasts. You have your own podcast at the same time.

You've got this app like you're doing. And you're a dad. I mean, that would just blow the mind of the average human being or create so much anxiety that it would become an unsustainable situation. Yeah, I have a suspicion that that that has to do with meditation it's funny i've only recently started to think that because there was a long time where i was doing the two hours and it was a bit of a stunt i was thinking because i want to write a book about enlightenment at some point so i was kind of at my initial instinct was a little crass it was like okay let's see let's see what happens like kind of in an a.j jacobs

kind of absolutely yeah i actually thought of um that i maybe there's a book called a year of living dharmically you know like because he wrote a book called a year of living biblically um but i realized that first of all i don't want to do it just for a year i want to this is the way i want to live um and so my interest isn't, this isn't actually just stunt journalism. After a while, I started to realize that this is, I actually want to be doing this level of practice, if not more. And I actually have come to believe,

and I don't have any evidence to support this, but I have come to believe what you just described, that this kind of crazy workload has become i i is enabled by the fact that i do have this practice that gives me the ability to stay focused when i need to stay focused and also to um not suffer as much you know like suffering in the buddhist sense you know the buddists describe suffering as just clinging to things you want and pushing things away that you don't want, lacking any equanimity in the face of life's inevitable vicissitudes.

And I think I've gotten a little bit better at just kind of being more supple in my dealings with reality. That isn't to say I'm perfect, because I'm definitely not. But I have this suspicion that this practice, which started as a bit of a lark, is really helping me do all the things I want to do. It's multifactorial, though, because I think another part of it is just flat out greed, not necessarily greed for money, because, you know know, like I don't make any money off of the, I don't get paid by the app. You know, we're a startup. But greed for, like lust for, I am, I am doing all the things I love.

You know, I mean, I love being a journalist at ABC News. I'm so, I've been there for nearly 18 years. I love ABC News. It's such deep relationships there. So much gratitude for the amount of experience, the experiences they've given me. And just, I love the people at Nightline I work with and Weekend GMA. I just absolutely love it all. And then writing these books and having this company and a podcast, I get to hang out with people like you. This is an incredible

opportunity. And then having a family, you know, we had a huge, as I mentioned before, opportunity and then having a family we you know we had a huge as i mentioned before infertility struggle and so i just do not take for granted my three-year-old even when he's pooping on me um so all of this is just a there's a lot of greed just trying to wring out of life everything i can and also navigating your wife's breast cancer that would be brutal, man. I mean, she's, she's okay now, right? She's cured. She's great. And, um, but look, I mean, I had to state the blazingly obvious. She was a thousand times worse for her than it was for me with a lot of very painful surgeries and a lot of fear. And, um, but I will say that that practice, particularly the aforementioned loving kindness practices that we haven't yet fully excavated, but maybe we will, really made a difference. You know, I'm squeamish. I'm selfish. I am not by nature nurturing.

And having a baby around the house and a wife who is as sick as she was a big challenge for me and you know I found it actually in the end it really was I heard Bianca say recently that it was the best thing that ever happened to her getting sick that way and I would say was also the best thing that happened to our relationship it would just I really had to she's always been the caretaker she's a doctor she's actually actually naturally very, very compassionate. We're a bit yin and yang in that way. I'm a little more sort of aloof. And I had to, you know, really step up.

And I found that I, I don't want to say enjoyed it, but I found a lot of meaning in engaging in that way. And her gratitude stems from being able to reprioritize yeah her life yes as she says she was just kind of hurtling along in this high-powered medical career and parenting and a husband who's just non-stop and the breast cancer really made her stop and take stock and she's in the middle of this process of taking stock. But she is, for the first time, really taking care of herself.

She's gotten really into SoulCycle. I mentioned we went to SoulCycle this morning. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts, your candid thoughts on SoulCycle. No, it's great. Look, anything that gets anybody excited about being active is a good thing. So I was actually very down on SoulCycle because I used to do other forms of spin and I thought were much harder. Then I realized, actually, I was doing SoulCycle because I used to do other forms of spin and that I thought were much harder. Then I realized actually I was doing SoulCycle wrong,

that I wasn't actually rhythm riding, that other forms of SoulCycle are actually, other forms of spin are like go this fast at this time for this many seconds. SoulCycle is actually just about riding to the rhythm with enough resistance so that you kill yourself that way. And so it took me a while to figure it out. And so we do that together. It's so great to watch her take care of herself after years of not really taking care of herself,

as you're meditating and exercising in these ways. So I think it's been really good for her and good for us. That's amazing. I want to get back to, you know, this sort of contentment that you were expressing, you know, that you get to do all these things and you have this very big life. You know, it's almost intimidating to, like, talk about all these different things because it is, like, for the average person, that would be anxiety-producing. How are you going to manage all this stuff? But I have anxiety, just so you know. Okay like yeah you're okay you're a human being yeah

glad to hear that uh but i think it begs the question of happiness itself like you know the first book memoir uh sort of you know an argument in favor of meditation dressed up as a memoir through storytelling you know you make this compelling argument about the benefits of meditation. The title is 10% happier. Like what is happiness and how do you think about happiness in terms of, of, you know, a way of living or how does that kind of line up against other ideas, comparable ideas like contentment fulfillment living purposefully living mindfully i have a whole rap on this so the the the those other words are more specific and truly more meaningful happiness is the reason why i chose happiness or happier is is because that's the word we use more frequently but it actually doesn't mean much um and in fact if you look i

think i might have said this in my first book that the very roots of the word linguistically etymologically reflect our cultural ambivalence about the subject hap h-a-p is the same it's like haphazard haplesspless. It means luck. So happiness is like something you luck into. And in fact, as discussed before, it's really interesting. So when in fact happiness is a skill. I spent a lot of time asking happiness experts, like meditation gurus, how do you define happiness?

And nobody ever gave me a satisfying answer until Dr. Mark Epstein, who I talked about before, who wrote the book that really got me interested in meditation. That was your entry point. Yeah. Mark and I were having dinner and I asked him, how do you define happiness? And he said something to me that was not meaningful at the time, but I've come to believe that it is the smartest thing I have heard about happiness. He said, more of the good stuff and less of the bad. Okay, what does that mean? I've come to think about it in kind of geometric terms. I'm terrible at math, but if you think about, psychologists have this theory called the set point theory. So if you think about a graph that has an X axis

and a Y axis, the X axis runs horizontally. So the set point theory is the X axis. It's a kind of like you, we all have a happiness set point. So good things can happen. And we, you know, our happiness level goes up and then we tend to revert back to our set point, the X axis, the sort of straight line, and then bad things happen to us and then our happiness goes below the set point but eventually we were kind of revert to it that this is a theory about the way we are as humans that we have this kind of happiness set point in my experience that that sounds right but that what happens with meditation is that the top end of that graph, the way you are when good things happen, gets taller and more sustained.

Because you are enjoying in a more fulsome manner the, for lack of a less cheesy word, blessings in your life. And you're not so busy rushing off to see what the next hit of dopamine might be. So that's the top of the graph and then the bottom of the graph is when bad things happen to you i think through the meditation it's like become the bottom half becomes shallower that you're spending less time in useless rumination and you're kind of recovering more quickly and then meanwhile i think the set point itself moves up right and to me that's how i think about about happiness is how are you navigating life's ups and downs? And are you getting the most out of the ups?

And are you maximally resilient in the face of the downs? Yeah, I've heard Sam Harris, your friend, talk about the kind of half-life of negative emotions being reduced. Yes, it's brilliant. Can I have this? Yeah, of course. I got that for you. Thank you. You're angry or you're resentful or you're looping in your mind some, you know, insanity that the half-life is much shorter.

It will dissipate and go away. It's among... Sam is a valued friend of mine and he has said many brilliant things that I steal. That is one of them. He talks about one of the benefits of meditation having to do with the half-life of anger that you know we still are going to experience difficult emotions um unless you're enlightened if you even believe in that um and i i don't know if i believe in it um i don't know you gotta write this other book i am gonna I am going to write this other book. The Pursuit of Enlightenment. Yes.

We are still going to experience negative emotions. The mystery of consciousness is we don't know where our thoughts and feelings come from. They come out of a void. You can't, which is liberating to know because there's no point holding yourself responsible. You did this today. You got angry at being angry for forgetting your audio equipment at home and started telling yourself a whole story, which you caught yourself doing. But you did do it anyway. And we all do this.

We have a feeling, you know, impatience with our child, impatience with our spouse, whatever. And we tend to get into these knots of self-laceration around, I'm this kind of person as a consequence of having just had this feeling. We didn't invite the feeling. It just came out of a void. We don't know where it came from. You can't hold yourself responsible for what you feel,

but you can hold yourself responsible for how you deal with it. And so when anger ambushes you, for me, I deal with a lot of anger. And so when anger ambushes you, for me, I deal with a lot of anger. If I can see it, if I have an inner meteorologist that can tell me when the storm is brewing and is about to make landfall, then I may either let it pass and not be taken over by it, or I may get a few miles down the road with it, you know, a couple minutes of doing something stupid, but then i catch myself the the it the amount of damage as sam says that you can do in two minutes of anger as opposed to an hour of anger is incalculable right and that is the fruit of meditation which

is why i was so jazzed about the story you told at the top of this podcast because it epitomizes what the value of this practice is the beginning part of that um for me is understanding that there is a distinction between the thinking mind and you know your i don't know what you would want to call it your higher consciousness your awareness having awareness of the thinking mind being the observer of the thinking mind and that kind of like duality right these are two different things yes which is kind of a mind blow i mean you can go down the rabbit hole on that forever it's kind of a mind-blowing thing and it begs the question of you know what is consciousness and what is our minds and you know what is actually going on here like how do you think

about that kind of stuff? I mean, you just put your finger on perhaps the most interesting question facing mankind. You know, this is the fundamental mystery. What is consciousness? We know that we know stuff. In other words, you know what it feels like if you're driving right now. You know that you're the feeling of your hands on the wheel. You know that you're thinking.

But what knows it? Right. Try to find the little rich role in your head. You, rich, or whoever's listening. Try to close your eyes, but don't close your eyes if you're driving. And try to find you. You won't. We don't know what knows.

But does that mean it doesn't exist? I think the argument that gets made, and this is where it gets into the deep end, and I'm in some ways sort of insufficiently qualified to talk about it, so anybody who is qualified and hears me talking about it, I apologize in advance, but I think what the Buddhists would say is that this gets into the illusion of the self that we which is the primordial lie we are telling ourselves we think there is some core

rich in us some core dan in us and all of our negative emotions that is the wellspring of all of our negative emotions because we have greed to gratify the inner rich. We have hatred to defend our whatever we have. We have, you know, and then confusion about reality as a consequence of embracing this lie. But the simplest way to think about this is there is a difference between your thoughts and your awareness of your thoughts. So the thoughts or emotions or anything you're aware of are like actors walking onto the stage, right? They pass through or clouds going through the sky. Your awareness, your consciousness,

you just is the stage or it is the sky. If you want to, whatever analogy you want to use. So we don't know what sky is in this analogy or we don't know exactly what the stage is and you can get into lots of discussions about what it is. But for just your rank and file meditator, that doesn't really matter. The only interesting thing, the most practical thing to be aware of, is that there is a difference between your raw, bare awareness of things, like when you're just feeling the sensations of your butt on the chair,

that is just plain old awareness. Then there's thinking about the feelings of your butt on the chair. Man, I've got to do more exercise. My butt is too big. Those are just thoughts. That's a different thing. And, well, none of these are things, actually, which is an interesting idea. But the more that you self-identify your awareness with the actors on that stage the more

that you will suffer absolutely and the more that you can to the extent that you can transcend that self-identification and and and kind of step into a more expansive understanding of oneness the more you can free yourself from the chains of of that cycle of suffering yeah i think it's just like um to me it's like interrogating the mystery a little bit if you can do this little exercise which is a buddhist exercise that tibetan exercises um you know close your eyes and hear whatever sounds were there you know there's all sorts of sounds my voice maybe a little tape hiss whatever and then ask yourself what is hearing this and you won't find it but in the not finding as the buddhists say there is this kind of liberation because you're not you're seeing how you're seeing the mystery the fundamental mystery of your own identity and of our existence.

And that can disidentify, disentangle you from all of the suffering that we're creating of just being so entangled with our thoughts and our stories and all that stuff. It's not magic and it's not permanent unless, again, you're enlightened. that stuff it's not magic and it's not permanent unless again you're enlightened um but it can in just moment after moment there's this theory in meditation circles of short moments many times that uh if you just kind of are touching this mystery over and over and over again it has the net effect of making you lighter uh and, and, and pushing you closer toward enlightenment, whether you believe that's a thing or not. As beautiful as that sentiment is the prospect of, of really confronting that in yourself is terrifying because we're sort of raised and taught to, to, um, you know, identify

with these stories that we tell ourselves about who we are. I am this, I am Dan, I am a journalist, I am rich, I am whatever, right? And we craft these narratives around identity that we delude ourselves are real. And so to kind of engage with what you were just talking about is to kind of dismantle that in a certain way. Yeah, that's right. But there are two ways. The Buddhists talk about this in a way that actually is comforting, which is there are kind of two levels to life, two levels to reality. There's the relative truth.

You still are rich, you know, on the day-to-day basis, you know, even if rich doesn't exist on some deep level, you still have to put your pants on in the morning and you still need your podcast equipment if you want to do a podcast. And that is just the truth on a sort of relative, on the level in which most of us operate on which most of us operate most of the time but there is a deeper truth which they often call ultimate truth which is kind of it can be roughly analogized to quantum physics so like this table that you and I are doing an interview on is a table but at the deepest level it's a bunch of spinning atoms and empty space and so the same is true with the self and so you don't need to get you don't need

to get too wrapped up in this it's just it's just like it's a it's a useful thing to think of in so much as it can help you not get so wrapped up in your own stories. Well, I think this is a good kind of place to launch into talking a little bit about the obstacles that people have to embracing, um, to embracing meditation to begin with, which is really the heart and soul of this new book meditation for fidgety, um, skeptics, because as, as I understand it, like, you know, I was going to ask you, like, you know, why write this book? But, you know, I already know the answer to that, which is that you were under the impression that writing the first book would state this case for meditation, that everyone would read

it and then adopt these practices and live happier lives. And you were sort of surprised that that was not the immediate despite this being this book was a huge success right like that was not the reaction that you it was not the reaction i got i mean i i um first of all i didn't think anybody was going to read it i was like my view was i'm like a b-level network newsman writing about something at the time that was pretty niche. You know, meditation was, you know, it had some cultural capital,

but it wasn't super hot, as hot as it is now. So I just didn't think anybody was going to read it. Yes, it ended up becoming pretty successful, which was delightful and amazing, probably one of the most consequential

professional developments of my life. It's so gratifying. But it was humbling to see that it didn't have the effect. Because, you know, I actually, on 10% Happier, I didn't set out to write a memoir. I initially was going to write a how-to book. But then the memoir parts of it were the only parts that anybody that was reading it liked. Well, that's not true. I mean, it's the story that allows people to emotionally connect with you

so that they can hear the other part. Right, but I didn't, I mean, I only put some, like a few pages of how-to stuff way at the back of the book. And I got a very interesting phone call from a friend of mine, Daniel Goldman, who he wrote a seminal book called Emotional Intelligence. And he's a big meditator. And he called me up. He was like, this is great.

It's so cool that you're getting so people excited about meditation. But you do have some responsibility to actually teach them how to do the thing. And that was a big kind of, that set me on my heels. And I had to really think about, well, okay, what should I do? So the first thing I did was I ended up co-founding this company called 10% Happier. We have this meditation app that we've discussed and it's been incredibly fun to do this. And I've also learned a lot. And one of the things I learned as being part of this company is, while being part of this company, is that there's this rich pageant of neuroses that stop people from meditating or embracing any healthy habit.

And so that is why I wanted to write this book. But I didn't want to write a dry meditation manual because I didn't think anybody would read that. So I decided to do it as a story. manual because I didn't think anybody would read that. So I decided to do it as a story. So I rented this big orange tour bus previously occupied by Parliament Funkadelic and we went 18 states in 11 days, me and Jeff Warren, who's this meditation teacher from Toronto. And we met all of these different people at all these different stops, cops, politicians, celebrities, social workers, and use them as case studies for each of the eight main obstacles we identified. So the book is trying to do three things at once. It's like a fun story of this gonzo road trip.

It also is a systematic classification of all the obstacles to medication and then answers about how to surmount them. And it's a how to book. Halfway through writing the book, when I was tearing my hair out, I was like, oh, yeah. So there's a reason why nobody's written a book like this before. This is fucking hard. But what's great about it is that it is a fun story because it's a it's a it's a like a bromance road trip like you and jeff hit it off you guys develop this amazing relationship and and you embark on this adventure together and you know hilarity ensues and along the way we learn lessons and we learn

how to meditate and you kind of are able to quantify all of these reasons or these barriers that people throw up that's preventing them from accessing this tool that has been so transformational in your own life. And it begins before you even go on the road with your own co-workers and staff, which I thought was really instructive and hilarious to see these people that you work with. And you've had this epiphany in your life. And yet they're on a totally different page with this stuff my co-anchors at good morning america on my weekend so we have this little you know tight-knit group at weekend gma because we're the sort of weekenders you know not not the a team and but we really love each other and we have you know we're up early together on the weekends and we just got very lucky that we they the bosses

put together a bunch of people who really have close relationships. And they make fun of me for being the meditation guy all the time, but they all have interest in it, but aren't doing it. So I brought in Jeff, who I call the meditation MacGyver,

to see if he could help them get over the hump. And we had this hilarious session where these people who just never shut up, their jobs require them to never shut up. Like dead air is the thing we all fear. You know, trying to get them to sit quietly and meditate was a real challenge. And one of them, Paula Ferris, who is my work wife, she's my co-anchor on the show, we're the two main hosts of the show. She literally, she did something I've never seen anybody do before.

She turned the meditation, the actual guided meditation, into a call and response. She was interrupting Jeff and asking him questions, like a lot of questions. They were good questions, and Paula's very, very smart. So they were useful questions, but I'd never seen anybody sort of break protocol in this way. And it was interesting because, know after as partly as a consequence of this session you know paula is now a pretty regular meditator that's really cool and she had a different idea for the title of this book yeah she wanted to call it 10 less of a douchebag or 10 happier but still a douchebag yeah yeah she she refers to herself as the little sister dan never wanted but god anyway yeah she likes to torture me but how brilliant is it that like you have

you know you have this whole other life in this meditation world but you have this you have this platform where you can go on national tv and like talk about it it's kind of an amazing thing it's such is such a friend of mine wrote me a note the other day saying um you know congrats the book seems to be doing well congratulations i was like dude i have a minor advantage which is that the one of the largest media companies on earth is like this full-throated backer you know my bosses at abc have been just like irrationally supportive they're just like you want to start a company great you want to do a podcast great you want to write more books awesome we'll help you promote them uh they're just incredible i mean they're

absolutely incredible because they could have just shut it down and said we need your full attention on what we hired you to do i mean part of the deal is they know that i work seven days a week and i'm so super committed to abc and um uh so i mean I have to pull up, I have to do my side of the bargain, but, you know, they have been amazing. And I think, I think there are a lot of reasons for it. You know, just the depths of the relationships that we, that I have at the company, the fact that my bosses happen to be just very cool. And also that this is a healthy message to be putting out there. And I think it's just good for everyone to be promoting it. I mean, it'd be different if, I don't know, if I was writing

like how to pick up ladies or something, you know, something less wholesome. Right. It's a public service. Yeah. It behooves ABC to recognize that and embrace it. I think so. I think so. And, you know, like there are a lot of people at ABC who are into meditation, you know, George Stephanopoulos, Robin Roberts, Diane Sawyer. There are a lot of people there who are on board. And I think that has helped us. Yeah. Do you have like secret behind the velvet rope, like top level ABC, like executive washroom meditation session? No, but I did do a private

thing with the staff of Nightline the other day because, and it was so interesting because we have a very tight knit staff, very heavily, heavily female. And they're all like RoboCops in the sense that, you know, like RoboCop was like a cop and invented a lab who would do everything perfectly well. These people, these women, mostly women, although some men too, they can shoot the stories, they can produce the stories, they can write the stories, they can do it all. And there's an enormous amount of stress in what they do. And to sit and talk to them about the stress and how they feel the stress actually, this is another thing we tackle in the book, they feel like the stress is necessary to do the job, that if they don't have the stress, they'll lose their edge. And it was really interesting to talk to them about how actually, no, there are ways to manage the stress so that you don't have the stress, they'll lose their edge. And it was really interesting to talk to them about how actually, no,

there are ways to manage the stress so that you don't wear down your resiliency and energy. So that was a really useful private session with my team. It was nice. Yeah, I think that is a big one with a lot of people. It's certainly a big one with me. And the way you kind of break the book down, it's divided into sections that address each one of these objections and we don't have time to go through all of them but i think that's one of the ones that that is is is one worthy of exploring a little bit because

as somebody who's ambitious who's you know in certain respects you know has alpha tendencies tendencies, I have developed this idea that my self-will and my workaholism and my ability to kind of focus and go the extra mile is in certain respects, a secret weapon. And I've had to learn the hard way that is a very unsustainable source of energy that leads to burnout that, you know, unduly fatigues me and that ultimately makes me a difficult person to be around and generally unhappy and so although there's a dopamine charge that comes with that that's very addictive having to learn a new way of approaching my work that's more balanced that that involves more equanimity to use use your word, has been a challenge, but ultimately is leading

me in the direction of creating a more sustainable, productive way of approaching what I do. So a number of things to say about that. I mean, you just articulated a psychology that I run into a lot and one that I dealt with personally as I was adopting this practice. You're not wrong. The will that you described, the grit that you describe the motivation creativity has been a secret weapon for you i mean you look at what you've achieved um that that doesn't happen uh just by being you know perfectly equanimous in the face of everything that arises you know like you you gotta you gotta have some get up and go and you have it and that has worked to your advantage at some point there is diminishing returns and the self-awareness you generate through meditation can help you see oh okay so the 97th time i launch into a perseveration

loop around the audio quality on that last podcast. Does that, does it make any, am I helping? Is this useful? Is this useful? Probably not. If you notice, you know, to spend a little time worrying about whatever issue you're worrying about, make sense, take action, do what you can to fix it, let it go, move on to the next thing. That kind of rabbit hole of useless rumination just wears down your energy, wears down your resiliency, makes you unpleasant to be around, none of which gets you further toward your goal. But meditation, again, the self-awareness, the mindfulness that we generate in meditation, which can help you pull yourself out of the nosedive, is what allows you to have a more balanced effective approach but that is not to say that stress has no you know has no role i think if you want to do anything great plotting and planning wringing of hands is part of the deal and you mentioned before the the the

the scope of my personal responsibilities my professional responsibilities it does create anxiety for me and there are times in the writing of this book i talked about in the writing of this book my wife had to do a little intervention because i was just totally burnt out i was trying to write a book on top of everything else i was doing and i just took it too hard too fast too far and and i she had to take me aside and be like dude you can't like fall asleep with the pages of the book you know in your hand and then have macabre stressed dreams as a consequence and that made a big difference but so just goes to the final point i wanted to make as it pertains to

to you which is that you you talked about how you're you know you're sort of moving in the direction of having a more balanced approach i would just give yourself credit because you can't snap your fingers and just have the idyllic balanced approach that you have in your mind. It's going to be about kind of vectoring toward it and having failures along the way and then learning from those failures. So you're doing the thing. It's just, it's always going to be a messy process.

Yeah. It's, it's definitely messy. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm sure if your wife was here, we would get a whole story about how messy it is, but that's cool. That is absolutely cool. Cause there was no other way to do it. The other objection that I really connected with, um, is this idea is one of the ones ladder in the book, you know, blank is my meditation. Like, you know, everybody it's like, as an athlete, like I've, I've been that guy's like trail running is my meditation or when I'm out on my bike, that's my meditation. And I would imagine there's other people who, you know, Oh, Netflix, you know, when I get home at night, that's my meditation. And it took me a long time to understand.

And I think we talked about this when I was on your podcast. The difference between there is a meditative aspect to some of the training that I do, but that's not meditation proper. That there is a qualitative distinction between an active meditation or an activity that is meditative and formal meditation practice can I just say that when you were on my podcast that was one of the most popular podcasts we've ever done oh cool thanks man you're the man um uh so yes amen to what you just said um I hear all the time from people uh you know knitting is is my meditation or running. Running is the big one.

I hear running is my meditation. Yoga is my meditation. My answer to that is always maybe, you know, I mean, I can't rule it out. But mindfulness meditation is a specific thing. Mindfulness meditation is paying attention to whatever you're doing. So let's just step back for a second. Running, yoga, knitting, any of these things can be mindfulness meditation. attention to whatever you're doing so let's just step back for a second running yoga knitting any of these things can be mindfulness meditation but you have to do it in a specific way which is to

pay full attention to what's happening so if you're knitting you're feeling the the weight of the whatever i don't know how to knit but the little chapsticks that you hold while you knit you're feeling the weight of them you're feeling the movement you're making conscious movements and then when you get distracted which you will will a million times, start again and again and again. Mindful running would be, and I've done this, it's actually hurts much more than running the normal way where you're, you know, rehearsing some argument when you want to hurl at your boss or you're listening to a podcast or music. But mindful running is headphones out, you're feeling the physical

sensations of the movement, uh, the pounding of your feet, the wind on your face. Uh, then when you get distracted, you start again. Uh, same thing with yoga. Um, most people don't do the aforementioned activities in the way I just described them. They do it. They're letting their minds run hither and yon. By the way, that's not a bad thing. I think running and knitting and yoga all have really important health and psychological benefits just the way you've always done them. But I wouldn't call them mindfulness meditation unless you add on the tweak that I just did. Yeah. If you bring that level of intentionality to any action activity that you're participating in then i suppose yeah it could be but if you're just going like i'm running and my mind is doing whatever it's doing without giving it any thought or putting

any of that intention into it then that's that's not meditation doesn't mean it's not a good thing to do. Right. It's just not meditation. Right, right, right. So we live in divided times. As somebody who is in the news and your career is about kind of navigating the daily cycle of insanity that we're all immersed in, of insanity that we're all immersed in. Um, I, I'm interested in your thoughts of how to help, how to, how to kind of navigate and deal with, um, the day in day out, you know, cycle of news that I think is making people crazy. Yeah. So I, I think there are a number of ways in which meditation can be useful um now one is use of social media so the self-awareness that's generated through meditation can help you see when you're just like oh i've been on twitter for four hours and my stomach is upset and my um you know my chest is buzzing and um you know i'm just vibrating with rage that that is a signal like if you're tuned into those signals that

time to step away the other is i had that not to interrupt no but i just i just had that experience yesterday i got all caught up in the jake tapper stephen mill interview saga. I went down the rabbit hole and like watched the video and read the articles and then read the articles about what happened off camera and all this stuff. And I got really agitated by the whole thing. And I had to finally say like, what, why am I even doing this to myself? Like, what am I, what value am I getting out of engaging and learning about this? I think you got some value because it's important to be an engaged citizen. And then the mindfulness, your training kicked in, and you saw that you had reached the point of diminished returns, and you pulled yourself out.

Textbook application of mindfulness. So that's one example of how mindfulness can help in the current atmosphere. The other is when we're experiencing the kind of rage, frustration, helplessness, hopelessness that many of us feel in the face of current events, those emotions can drive us to do a lot of unhealthy things, stress, eating, snapping at people. unhealthy things, stress, eating, snapping at people. So the kind of, again, back to the self-awareness to know when you're super angry because of something you saw on the news this morning and you're carrying it out through the rest of your day. And, you know, in your case, maybe eating too many cacao nibs or whatever it is you vegans eat. Um, I was, by the way, I was planning on bringing you a green smoothie but I got all caught up in my crisis and couldn't make that happen you changed my life because you we have your cookbook and

not infrequently we'll dive in and plant power away right but also you told me one day I mean after you came to my office the first time we met you I was hungry and you you would come to my office to interview me for the podcast that I didn't even know who you were uh now i obviously know who you are and you said go get a smoothie with um kale spinach banana blueberry and almond milk and i went and it was like this is delicious it sounds disgusting but it's actually totally delicious it gives you a ton of energy sometimes i'll add in avocado So yeah, so instead of binging on food or snapping at your, you know, venting your spleen at your opinionated uncle, meditation can help you sort of not let,

not be so buffeted by the sort of noxious nature of our political age. And then the third thing is that... Let me just ask you this, though. Have you noticed a change in your... as somebody who's like did you're in the you're in this as much as anybody in the world right have you noticed a difference in how you process that information or the kind of news diet that you put yourself on or how you react to the the vicissitudes of the cycle so the truth is that I'm more tuned into the news than I've ever been.

And I find myself, I'm really following the story and I'm very concerned, very concerned about the polarization. And I'm very concerned about lots of things, but mostly the biggest problem, the root of it for me is how we're at each other's throats and we can't even agree on a basic set of facts that's to frame the discussion and that is so unhealthy um there's a total breakdown in our ability to communicate in a healthy way yes so i would say that leads me to the third benefit and actually there's one more so for the third benefit is that i think mindfulness again the self-awareness that you get through meditation can help you see your own biases and there's actually something satisfying about noticing oh yeah are you happy every time muller

appears to be making a uh moving closer to the white house or conversely do you have a coffee mug emblazoned with the words liberal tears on the side of it. You know, are you a tribal? And are you part of the problem? I think we are all part of the problem. And if you can start to see that, then you can do what I would recommend and what I have come to do, which is to have a really varied media diet. And so I consume the mainstream media, the so-called mainstream media, including ABC, New York Times.

But also I listen to liberal podcasts and I listen to conservative podcasts. And I find that seeing the world, you know, you can go from listening to Morning Joe to listening to Ben Shapiro. And it's like you're in a different universe. But I think that's very healthy. healthy and um seeing and seeing where your own biases are can be just as interesting as catching yourself on as that you described earlier catching yourself online at the supermarket justifying how you need to be using twitter twitter this can be a rich field for exploration and then the fourth area that i think meditation can help is the loving kindness meditation which we've just kind of discussed,

which is basically there's this other form of meditation that's often taught in conjunction with mindfulness where you systematically cultivate good vibes. You sit, close your eyes, and envision people, somebody you're close with, somebody you don't like, a neutral person, et cetera, et cetera. And you send them silently these phrases like, may you be happy, may you live with ease, etc., etc. It sounds like Valentine's Day with a gun to your head.

And it is super annoying at the beginning. But there is a lot of science that suggests that not only does it have a lot of health benefits, but that it actually can change behavior. of science that suggests that not only does it have a lot of health benefits, but that it actually can change behavior. Kids, preschoolers who are taught loving kindness meditation are more likely to give their stickers away to kids they don't know. Having a preschooler at home, that is a big deal. And so I think at this point in time, in fact, I think my next book is going to be about these practices. I think the title that I'm working on is 10% Nicer, and the subtitle is The Self-Interested Case for Not Being a Dick. And there is a self-interested

case that when, think about this, when you hold the door open for somebody, what does that feel like in your mind if you're paying attention? It feels good. That is scalable. Compassion, generosity, kindness, these are skills that you can work on and would make a huge difference in the age in which we find ourselves right now yes selflessness when perpetrated from for selfish reasons only still works yes yeah it does it's a beautiful thing because somebody like me who's not naturally altruistic if you you turn it into, if you show me the science that suggests you could live longer, you could be happier, you could be more popular and more successful, which is what the science suggests about kind people. If you show me that science and then you give me some practices, even if they are a little annoying, I will do them because my motivation is I want the popular, happier, healthier thing. I want all those things.

Right. It's so counterintuitive and it goes against all the messaging that we're constantly exposed to, which is that our happiness is wed to getting the Tesla or the new house or being able to go on this vacation, when in truth, it's completely accessible by extending yourself selflessly to another human being. And by the way, I got nothing against the Tesla. Like, I would love to have a Tesla. I would love to, too. That's why I always use it as an example, because I'm thinking about it too much.

So it isn't to engage in a whole self-flagellation cycle around that. that it's just to see that actually on a moment-to-moment basis the happiness of being kind to yourself and others is perennially available and just try it out you know don't take my word for it that's the way the buddha's approach was like don't take my word for it i'll teach you a bunch of things go and do it test it in the laboratory of your own experience and so i'm just telling you i've tried it it does work doesn't mean i'm never an asshole because i'm definitely still an asshole time at times but when you're mindful enough you can see what does it feel like when you're an asshole it feels like shit and that powerfully disincentivizes you you know powerfully disincentivizes you um yeah all right well we got to wrap this up in a second here but but before we do that what do you like what are you working on now like what is

emotionally like what is what's your biggest stumbling block or what is you know what's what comes up for you in your practice as a recurring issue that you need to like work through the biggest change to my practice came from jeff warren my co-author diagnosing in the course of spending 11 days in this tin can traveling across the country together he diagnosed that i have a lot of inner antagonism that i have the potential that while i can be an asshole externally most of it is self-directed and that my meditation practice had a had a real grim quality as a consequence that as i discussed this earlier that i'm always telling people you know when you get distracted it's no big deal but when i got distracted like i you know somehow i was

operating on this theory that i'll win at meditation i'll never get distracted and then i would engage yeah type a yeah yeah what a schmuck and so i was engaged in all this self-laceration internally and jeff helped me inject a huge dose of sunshine into my practice by he he he had an idea that i thought was really cheesy and i rejected it like i do with all good ideas initially i'm like the anti-blink um you know blink is about the wisdom of our our you know rapid fire uh my my my rapid fire intuition is always off so jeff's idea was look when anger arises for you internally like name it after your asshole grandfather, Robert Johnson, who you got it from. So when it arises, be like, hey, what's up, Robert? And I thought that is dumb.

That is corny. But after a while, I started to realize, actually, and this is because Jeff pointed out to me, there are five or six kind of neurotic programs that are are always running for all of us that are running that sort of compete for salience in your mind at any given time so for me anger logistical planning ambition uh writing like creativity um there are a few more and i've forgotten them right now but i gave them names so like goofy little names, like so Robert Johnson for anger, Sammy for my ambition after the book What Makes Sammy Run, which is about an ambitious Hollywood type, Julie, the cruise director for, Julie, after Julie, the cruise director

for the love book for The Logistician, Arthur, which sounds like author for every time I do some writing in my head and depersonalizing in that way making it lighter and literally saying the words welcome to the party when i see the arising of these neurotic patterns has just lowered the temperature in such a constructive way and it's made me see that all the sappy talk about being kind to yourself, you have to be kind to yourself, blah, blah, blah, which I also dismissed, is totally true. And that my whole meditation practice

has just become a much more congenial place. And when I close my eyes to meditate, you know, and I see, I actually sometimes smile when I see my anger come up or when I see, you I see my ambition overtaking me and I'm carried off on this train of planning world domination through meditation. I'm like, oh my God. There's pleasure in seeing it.

And so Jeff is a hedonist. And I lacked hedonism in my practice. And now I have it. And it's a massive gift that he's given to me, even though, as I write about in the book, there were many times when we wanted to murder each other. Right. Well, I would imagine part of that derives from the fact that now, you know, for better or worse, like you're the meditation guy. Like that's how people see you. And I'm sure people stop you on the street and say, Hey, it's the meditation dude, you know? And,

and, and the pressure that that probably puts on you a little bit to, you know, kind of monitor your behavior and like, Oh, well, if you freak out and get angry at somebody, you know, how do you, how do you like, you know, walk your talk in the, in the best the best way possible um is can be without you know it could be like an unhealthy relationship that you have with yourself yeah it could be i i though i think that frankly for me it wasn't really that it was just it was just this i have this conditioning then that veers me toward anger right you know, Robert Johnson, is a real person and not a nice dude. Later in his life, he actually became very nice. But most of his life, I remember one time in the 80s or something like that,

he got his first VCR and he took me and my little brother to see it. And he said, if you touch this, I'll break your arm. That was the kind of dude he was. And I have Robert Johnson in my veins. And there have been many times in my life, and to this day, touch this i'll break your arm that was you know that was the kind of dude he was and like i have robert johnson in my veins and like and there have been many times in my life and to this day where i am capable of very cutting comments and uh most of it though is self-directed and um jeff just saw that in me and you, there's benefits being locked up on a bus with a brilliant meditation teacher.

Interesting shit that you may not want to face will be dragged out of your subconscious and presented to you, and that's what happened. I like that idea of giving all of these qualities names, though, and recognizing that they exist rather than trying to deny their you know that they're they're even or it's it reminds me of elizabeth gilbert right she wrote about this in her book big magic i've read that book but like when you go on a creative

endeavor you know you're you're whatever that voice is that talks you out of your self-worth not like to not pretend that it doesn't exist. Like, okay, we're going on this road trip. You can come, but you've got to sit in the back seat and you can't pick the music and you can't give directions. Yeah, it's just... Sort of a similar idea. The weapon may not be the right word.

It's like a nerf weapon. The sort of nonviolent weapon we are equipping you with here through meditation is just seeing clearly when you see this stuff it can't own you and so they're all these little techniques that we use you know and and coming up with goofy names for your inner dramatist persona is uh one of these. You don't have to do it, but I found it to be very useful. And bringing it back to the book, you know, in terms of techniques, I mean, it's broken down in such simplistic terms, like, you know, anybody can do this.

I mean, literally, if you read this book, you will learn how to meditate and you will, it will be so accessible and so, you know, easy to incorporate into your life. And I think that's one of the great kind of like gifts of this message that you put forth in the new book. Thank you, man. I appreciate that. Because you have like these chapters, but then you break it down at the end and like,

here's the, here's how we're doing it. And it's like, oh, that's very elementary. I get it completely. It doesn't have to be some major ordeal where you're giving me 200 things to think about and tasks to do. It's just very simple. That was the goal. I mean, it was very hard to get there, but that was the goal. Make it as user-friendly as possible, simple, simple, simple. And also tell you an engaging story in the process.

Right. So for somebody who's now listened to us for 90 minutes and is thinking, all right, I'm sold. I'm on board. Other than getting your app and getting the new book, what's a way to just launch into this and begin? Look, this is going to make make me the worst shittiest businessman of all time um i will i love selling books i love having people subscribe to the app but the basic instructions are really basic you know sit in a reasonably quiet place close your eyes if you don't like having your eyes closed you can kind of keep them open just a little bit and stare at a neutral spot on the floor.

Second step is to just bring your full attention to the feeling of your breath coming in and going out. Pick a spot where it's most prominent, your nose, your chest, your belly. The third step is the most important because as soon as you try to do this, your mind's going to go crazy. You're going to have all sorts of random thoughts.

Where do gerbils run wild? Whatever, blah, blah but what kind of bird was big bird whatever blah blah blah and then the whole game is just to notice when you become distracted start again and again and again those are the instructions this is the way they've been doing it for millennia you don't need a book you don't need an app you just need your mind and your breath in a reasonably quiet place and And if it's not quiet, just put some headphones on. You could do that one minute a day, truly one minute daily-ish. So like most days. And I think you'd start deriving a lot of the benefits

that we've discussed from meditation. It helps to have support in the form of a teacher. If you like to go to a local class or an app where you have a bunch of teachers like ours, or there are lots of other good apps as well. It also makes me a shitty businessman, but it's true. Or reading a good book. These can all be very helpful tools,

but the basic instructions are just what I just described. So just play that back to yourself and go sit for a minute and do it. Set a timer on your phone and go do it. Good talking to you, Dan. Always a pleasure. Huge pleasure. Thank you, man. I appreciate it. Thanks for doing it. Set a timer on your phone and go do it. Good talking to you, Dan. Always a pleasure. Huge pleasure. Thank you, man. I appreciate it. Thanks for doing it. That was awesome. Definitely pick up the new book, Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics. Download the app, the 10% Happier app, available wherever you get your apps. Listen to the podcast. You've done a good job with branding here.% happier podcast and uh you know

turn your television on and you're sure to catch them on abc all right man and at at dan b harris on twitter right yes yes website 10% happier.com yeah there you go here we go all right man thank you likewise peace namaste namaste peace as much as it pains you peace plants namaste all right i hope you guys enjoyed that one please make a point of picking up dan's new book 10 happier meditation for fidgety skeptics and let dan know how you felt about the conversation by hitting him up on twitter at dan b Harris. And be sure to check out the show notes at richroll.com for plenty of additional links and resources on both Dan and the power of meditation to expand your experience of this conversation beyond the

earbuds. Once again, Plant Power Away Italia is now available for pre-order. So reserve your copy now. And if you would like to support my work, please subscribe on Apple podcasts. It really does help out with the show's visibility, extending reach, growing the audience. It only takes a second. And in turn, all of this will make it easier for me to book the very best people for future shows. You can also support the show on Patreon at richroll.com forward slash donate. And you could follow me on Twitter and Instagram at Rich Roll. I want to thank everybody who helped put on the show today.

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hit that subscribe button there as well. And theme music as always by Anna Lemma. Thanks for the love you guys see you back here in a couple of days. And until then make it great. And you know what, if you've never meditated before, let's put that into action. Let's get to work with that. You guys and hit me up and let me know how it went peace plants namaste Thank you.