10th Anniversary: Panic Attack on TV & Wrote A Meditation Book: Here's What I Learned | Dan Harris

[Music] hey Lauren hey Dan welcome welcome hey yeah so Dan we're gonna interview you [Music] today it is so much easier to be interviewed than it is to interview guess I'm about to find that out too I have so many followup questions there but we'll wait I plan to make this as hard as possible for both of you so you will just one one word answers the whole time so when you said beforehand you want like your guiding principle for the next hours that we should enjoy this you meant you're going to t

orture us and enjoy it yes I yes I meant I will enjoy watching you suffer which is the highest form of pleasure it says that in the Dharma actually must not have read that Su yet um let's let's introduce Lauren she has not been on the mic before um so Lauren Smith producer extraordinaire do you want to say hey hey I'm so happy to be here yeah I've been on the other side of this many many many times so this is my debut and uh you know you guys have done this many times before so thanks for lettin

g me in to the to the Bromance here I appreciate it yeah thanks for being here I I I love how your hay was so playful it was like a 2: a.m. text that's what I'm here to bring that's the energy I'm here to bring today um awesome hey all right so there were like seven wi's in that hay that's very me that's very me I I own that uh all right let's just set a bit of a road map here so this is the kickoff episode in a series that we've been working on for a really long time and we're really excited ab

out uh Dan it's the 10th anniversary of your book your first book which like this podcast is called 10% happier and so we thought it would be fun for Lauren and I to interview you we'll ask some questions about the book some questions about the 10 years since uh have some fun with it and at the end we we'll give a little preview of uh what's coming up in the next few weeks for listeners to look forward to so you know some of our listeners don't actually know your origin story Dan but you are a p

rofessional talker I don't know what you call yourself these days but you are good at talking so um who were you before you wrote this Memoir what are the broad Strokes of your story always happy to talk about myself I will say this has been one of the slightly embarrassing aspects of doing this 10th anniversary Rodeo is that well first of all how old I feel because it feels like yesterday that the book came out and second I think think I operated under the assumption that people who listen to t

he show read the book but I don't think and I I I you have the two of you have helped me realize this that I don't actually think that is entirely or even largely true there may may be many many people who listen to the show have no idea that I wrote this book or who I am or any of that stuff which is great it's totally fine it's just to somehow the book was such a landmark event in my life I like defining event in my life that I narcissistically walk around thinking that everybody uh or at leas

t certainly people who listen to the show would have a passing familiarity with it and I realize that that's probably not true and um um it's slightly embarrassing well tell us tell us tell the people who do not know about your book what led you to write the book that was Lauren's way of saying can you answer the question I asked you please um uh yeah okay so uh I was for million years a news anchor at ABC news I got to ABC when I was 28 so very young there's a picture there's a picture of me th

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

t this big break to come to ABC when I was 28 and um it was terrifying it was absolutely terrifying I had I grown up watching people like Peter Jennings and Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer and all of a sudden you know they were ostensibly at least my colleagues and um my way of coping with the insecurity that I felt was to become a workaholic um I think I probably already was a workaholic but at this point it just really went into high gear and I had this like running inner monologue of you kno

w how good was my last story what's my next story going to be who's getting the story I wanted what's my relationship with Peter Jennings right now blah blah blah and I believed that any success that I was experiencing was directly correlated to the intensity of my anxiety I had this little motto that was bequeathed to me by my dad who was at the time an academic physician at Harvard very successful dude and he had this little saying which is the price of security is insecurity which is a great

thing to tell your children uh people are often shocked when I tell them that my dad is Jewish um it's very cultural trait uh to venerate worrying in this way and um I I sub quently learned that my dad actually made this expression up to make me feel better about the worrying I was already doing he wasn't actually trying to get me to worry more but I kind of misinterpreted it and and used it to glorify this anxiety that I was experiencing and um so shortly after AB short shortly after I got to A

BC there was this huge event in the news which was 911 so I arrived at ABC in 2000 at age 28 and then 911 happened the next year and I um really motivated by a lot of my ambition and curiosity and some idealism too just volunteered to go overseas to cover whatever was going to happen next and then I ended up spending many years in Afghanistan Pakistan Israel the West Bank and Gaza I was there in 2002 during the second inata so I you know the events in the news these days definitely catch my atte

ntion in a pretty prominent way and um then I was in Iraq many many times often for months at a time and when I came home I came home after a six-month stint in Iraq in um the summer of 2003 so I was I was in Bagdad pretty much consecutively from the pre-war The Invasion and then the um the post-war sort of early flowerings of the in Insurgency and that was just my first of I think six or seven trips and I I came home in that summer and I got depressed um and I and I did a I didn't actually know

I was depressed uh but I I uh I knew I was not feeling well and so I did something incredibly stupid which is I started to self-medicate with with recreational drugs including cocaine and that is what occasioned uh a panic attack on live television I feel like I'm doing a lot of talking so why don't I stop the story there and see if there are any other questions that just sounds like a really hard few years all that time in the war zones all that time um striving like in one of the most competi

tive environments on earth like did you have any sense you said you didn't know you were depressed did you know that you were struggling like mentally that you were struggling you know it's so funny you say that it sounds like a hard couple of years because I remember those as um some of my favorite years of being alive and I experienced it at least consciously as incredibly exciting and I remember I don't I think I don't think I've ever written about this but I remember a moment where I was in

rala which is a major city in the West Bank Palestinian territory uh during a period of time when the Israelis invaded in 2002 and um uh there's quite a long story that's amusing that I won't share just because I'm internally editing about how I got there but the the punchline of the story is after spending a week in this incredibly hairy situation and where I saw horrifying things um which I didn't enjoy I'm not here to say that I you know got off on the on the horror the violence but it was ve

ry exciting and had this illicit feel of being in this place you're not supposed to be which I've always enjoyed I've always been a bit of a rule breaker um it had this illicit feel and you get on TV um and so it it was this very complex cocktail uh and I remember getting out of rala and going to my hotel room in Jerusalem and taking a shower and having the thought I have no problems that especially compared to the people I was just spending you know I was deeply immersed with these folks who ha

d a lot of problems uh and I I remember feeling just incredibly grateful that I got to do that job and and um so yeah just a long way of saying it didn't compute to me that period of time at least consciously did not compute as traumatic it's really interesting Dan cuz when just hearing you say that it makes me just think about our body's intelligence and how it'll speak to us when we need it even if we don't think we need it so when you you know bringing us back to you had a panic attack on air

it seems like even though intellectually you're like this is so exciting I'm you know this is an amazing time in my life I have no problems there was something confounding you that was just like I can't do this or this is too much or it was a stop gap for you and something inside of you spoke and I'm just curious if that resonates or what you think that moment was when the panic attack happened on air well it a million per resonates um I think that's exactly what was happening and it's an astut

e observation I you know I still retain some of the allergy to New Age um sentiments so certainly at that age you know we're talking more than 20 years ago or about 20 years ago when all of this happened at that age I was not in tune with the wisdom of my body or anything like that I wasn't I was I was Joseph Goldstein the great meditation teacher likes to talk about this line from um I think the Henry James novel where he describes a character as living a short distance from his body and I thin

k that was probably true for me um but but AB you're absolutely right I I I think it showed up in a couple of ways first I came home and got depressed and didn't know it I didn't feel depressed in my head my body was sending me another signal and I had all of I had a battery of tests I went to all these different doctors my parents were doctors and I was forcing them into these involuntary Medical symposia on the phone and trying to figure out why I didn't feel good I mean I had my apartment tes

ted for a gas leak all of this stuff and it finally um finally I realized uh no I was I was just depressed but by that time I'd already start started to self-medicate with cocaine mostly that was I mean I did a lot of other drugs but that was I think the one that really was the most problematic and and then the panic attack was another way of my body and specifically I think in this case my brain telling me uh you are I cannot we cannot trust you at the wheel of this uh vehicle anymore um and so

you know maybe it's worth my describing the panic attack yeah I think so so this was uh actually had two um but the the one that's on YouTube um was in uh 2004 we'll play a CP of it so proud what's that I said we'll play a clip of it yeah yeah it's it's the um I think it's the first clip that shows up if you Google panic attack on television it has like a ton of views use um that yeah it's my most successful video me losing my mind what an achievement um so yeah this was uh 2004 so the about a

year or so after ID gotten home from Iraq and I had actually inter in that interim period taken other trips to Iraq and I'd been given this opportunity to Anchor the news updates on Good Morning America so this job doesn't exist anymore but there used to be a person her name was Robin Roberts she's now the main host of the show uh and her job at the time was to come on at the top of each hour and read some headlines so the main hosts of the show were Diane Sawyer and Charlie Gibson and Robin whe

n she was out I started filling in for her which was a huge opportunity for me and um and it was really going well I had been doing it for a while and even getting to fill in for Charlie in the on in the big chair um and so but this morning I was filling in for Robin and um I started to read the story off of the teleprompter so there has a teleprompter with these words that float by you and I was reading the the morning the six or seven stories were on the duck at that day and a few seconds into

it I just started to lose it and I had had stage fright before so I knew exactly what this was I mean I I was pre-wired with stage fright and I'd had incidents that approached panic but not this strong um and I was trying to get the words out but my mind was racing and well I think probably started with the B I noticed that my heart was speeding up and then my mouth is getting dry and my Palms were sweating and I was having trouble breathing and in response to that my mind started racing like y

ou are screwed dude you got to get yourself out of this situation you you and all these people are watching and you know your career is on the line here and that just made my physical symptoms worse and then my mind started racing even more and um I you can hear on the tape I sort of degenerate into incoherence um and um get my voices kind of breathy I do kind of hold myself together reasonably well which speaks to the fact that I'm probably a sociopath but uh I I kind of held it together reason

ably well but I couldn't keep going and so in the middle of the shtick I tossed it back to the main hosts of the show actually you can hear me tossing it to the wrong host of the show I think I said Robin and Charlie or something like that but it was actually Charlie Gibson and Diane Sawyer and you can see their faces in the video they look like oh what's going on here this isn't supposed to be happening um and after they they then tossed it over to the weatherman Tony Perkins and then Charlie b

olted out of his chair and ran over to me to see what was wrong and all of the people in the control room were getting in my ear and saying what's what happened and I lied to everybody and said that I was fine I didn't know what had happened but I knew it was a panic attack my mom called me backstage she knew it was a panic attack uh and then I you know started to try to get under the hood and figure out what what went wrong did the symptom subside as soon as you tossed it back or did it take a

few minutes huh well there's the there's the shame and the deceleration period of the heart but yeah I wasn't in full Panic anymore as soon as I wasn't being watched I mean there and this is something I only learned recently like here on this show actually Matt Gutman of our guests who's also a TV an ABC news guy wrote a whole book about panic and he explained to me here when he was on the show that that part of panic is this social component um our deepest fear as Homo sapiens is rejection beca

use in the evolutionary times rejection equaled death if you weren't part of the pack anymore and so this idea that people were see that this was embarrassing people were going to think I was insane uh that shows up now even when I I don't when I get panic you know on an airplane or something like that a big component of the racing thoughts is these people are going to think I'm crazy when I try to like get out of this plane um and so I I I think that was a huge part of what was coursing through

my mind at the time so you knew you'd had a panic attack uh I imagine you also knew that that couldn't keep happening if you wanted to have the career that you had so what did you do well the way I often tell the story is I went to a shrink that's actually the I tell it in more detail in the book which is that I went to a a shrink uh after the first panic attack in 2004 but the shrink did not that shrink did not figure out what the real cause was so I kept partying and then I had another panic

attack much more mild one in 2005 and that's when I went to see Dr brotman who is a pretty big character in in the book um who pointed out who asked me the question Point Blank do you do drugs and I said yes and I often joke that he gave me this look this shrinky look that communicated the sentiment of okay mystery solved and I think he actually said mystery solved but he was looking at me like an um not not him being an me being an in this case that diagnosis was correct um and yeah so in that

off in the office with him in 2005 I agreed that day to quit doing drugs to come see him I think twice a week for or once or twice a week I think I ended up seeing him for like 10 years um and that's kind of the all of that is sort of the inciting event of the book it's the it's the story actually you know when I first started to write 10% happier I was not planning first of all I wasn't called 10% happier I think I had a I think I was calling it like the skeptic's Bible or something like that a

nd and the idea was not to tell my own story I was really interested in getting people getting people turned on to meditation because I had started to meditate um and I wanted other people to get interested in it but I wasn't going to make it a memoir and then at some point I had this idea of like oh maybe I'll tell the story about the panic attack and uh and so I included it in some early drafts and a a lot of my first readers came back and said give us more of this cuz you're you're you're all

you're rapidz about the theory of meditation is not so interesting but you being an idiot is extremely interesting so I ended up rebuilding the whole book around my what was happening in my inner life with the goal of uh not of you know I didn't have some yearning to to write a memoir I mean I was pretty you I think it was in my late 30s when I started writing so I didn't have an interesting enough life to to have a memoir in me but it just turned out to be the most effective way to make my pit

ch which is because I think in my core I'm not a memoirist I'm a I'm an Evangelical and my pitch was or my good news was that um meditation is based in all of this science it can be good for you you should do it or you should consider it and um the Memoir was the I have come to believe or came to believe then and still do now that that was the best delivery mechanism H there's also a layer I think Dan that our most vulnerable moments are so can be so life-changing and that's just has a very broa

d appeal for people in general even Beyond how good meditation can be for you but to have someone talk about something that's really embarrassing and explain how it led to just a complete life change is really exciting I think and we talk about this as a team and we talk about this on the show but vulnerability is really powerful even though that can seem a little cringey but you displayed that and people want to hear that stuff I think yeah well I think you're right and I I think I just there a

re two thoughts that are coming to mind as you're talking for sure it is possible to do vulnerability inappropriately to like bleed all over the place and overshare and so I'm always worried about that and yes and I was very worried about that with this book and that's my second point which is that you have to remember the historical context in which I was writing this book in the early in the late a and early 2010 so it was a five-year project um the culture was very different we did not talk a

bout mental health issues that openly at that time and we certainly didn't talk about meditation it was not it had a moment in the 60s but it had gone back to the fringes um and most certainly news anchors weren't talking about having panic attacks being depressed doing a bunch of blow that was like not a thing and I was terrified my family was terrified my my mom was trying to get me not to publish this book um my wife was incredibly supportive but really worried um and I just had this I had yo

u know was at this time I was a I was the anchor I was the main one of the main hosts of The Weekend Edition of Good Morning America and I had the thought that it's possible that general managers of the Affiliates in certain conservative cities would say we don't want this guy on our Airwaves anymore so I was really scared to publish the book and and I'm not generally that brave um especially not like the type of person who is going to willy-nilly take risks with his career I think there were tw

o things that were that you know know uh stiffened my spine one is I just I had this incredible confidence that what that the important part of the book was not the embarrassing stuff about me but it was actually that inner technology that had several Millennia of um uh rigorous testing in the minds of people on many many continents um I'm talking about meditation of course and so that that it struck me as being worth the risk and then also my bosses including Diane Sawyer and also a guy named B

en Sherwood who is the president of ABC News when the book came out uh they were incredibly supportive and and you know I they read early drafts of the book gave me notes told me go ahead it's worth it we got your back and when the book came out you know I think Diane Sawyer did two stories on the Evening News the week the book came out and Good Morning America had me on Ben Sherwood the boss basically sent a note to every anchor of every show said you will do this story on your air and that's w

hat made it a hit you said something a few minutes ago about not being a memoirist necessarily at heart but being an Evangelical um and it strikes me that you also would not have published the book If yeah like you just said like if you weren't just so so sure that it really really could help people when did when did you realize in your own life how potent this stuff was when did you become when did that Evangelical part of like who you are latch itself onto meditation because at the moment of t

he panic attack it wasn't even on your radar no okay so let me let me say two things first I think the best version of me uh I think is around this Evangelical thing like the the best version of me is like let me harness these Decades of training I got in network news and in local news to be a Storyteller and to be a um a presenter of ideas and an explainer of ideas then we harness that to uh to get out a what is essentially a public health message um that's the best part of me but the worst par

t of me which you guys see behind the scenes occasionally is driven by fear often which can turn into kind of overc committing or greed acquisitiveness you know like wanting to do too many things and then I get short-tempered and and and and that I'm scary and so I'm not saying I think the Evangelical thing is real and it's not the whole story um and uh so I just want to be open about that uh but yeah I do I think to the extent in moments where I can get my anxiety under control either internall

y through meditation and other modalities or externally by like having a boss like Ben Sherwood OR Diane Sawyer sit sit me down and say you're good then when I'm relaxed I think the best part of me can come out which is uh helpfulness um you know I I say this all the time you've heard me say it a million times you probably have a drinking game for um when I say this but I love the Tibetan the Tibetan word for enlightenment roughly trans translates into a clearing away and a bringing forth and th

at's what I think that's at least one of the things that happens in meditation is you you're starting to clear away the more noxious tendencies in your mind and then what is innate in all of us which is this you know we are wired as a species so you don't have to take it personally like I when I talk about the best in me I'm not I'm not patting myself on the back I think this is a capacity we all have to be useful and then the luckiest of us figure out some match between our innate desire to be

helpful and useful and to matter and what our skills are um and so that's that's the sort of Good Fortune I've had anyway maybe I should answer the question you Ashley asked me which is why meditation yeah I love that uh okay so I had no interest in meditation none I None no pre-existing interest in meditation I was my parents who I've referenced a couple times s were hippies and they used to drag me to you know health food stores and go to go camping and I remember my dad wearing a doag and um

you know like they were very annoying and um and they forced me to do yoga classes when I was a kid and you know we you know whatever so I had some scar tissue around that and as a result and and that that kind of uh entered into a noxious partnership with one of my less attractive Tendencies which is dismissiveness I am at Baseline dismissive U which I is something I've worked on a lot uh or to VAR with varying degrees of success um and so if you take my conditioning you know childhood and um t

his pattern of being dismissive I thought meditation was I mean to the extent that I'd ever considered it before just complete and for people who smelled like feet and were really into aroma therapy and Cat Stevens and John Tash and crystals and whatever and so uh I was after I had the panic attack and started doing therapy I wasn't like diving into the meditation of it all that actually happened over the course of a couple of years um without telling too much of the story will actually in the c

ourse of the the next couple of weeks you'll be meeting some of the key players in that story um but the tldr of it is that I the first thing is I read a book by a guy named eart toi um and toly is a best-selling self-help Guru and um I was reading the book not because I was interested in him for my own purposes but because I thought he might be a good story for for Nightline uh which was one of the shows I worked on and um in the book he made this argument that we all have a voice in our heads

not referring he was not referring to schizophrenia or hearing voices he was talking about the inner narrator that chases you out of bed and is yammering at you all day long and has you wanting stuff and not wanting stuff and judging people and comparing yourself to other people and judging yourself and thinking about the past or the future instead of focusing on what's happening right now and to's argument was that this inner cacophony which if we broadcast aloud you would be locked up this inn

er cacophony owns you if you have no visibility into what's happening and I found that absolutely compelling and I realized that this thesis about the The Human Condition explained the panic attack the most embarrassing moment of my life it was because I had this inner dialogue fueled by greed and fear and confusion that I went and some good stuff too so I went off to over I went off overseas and start started covering War zones yeah in there were some good motivations with you know curiosity an

d idealism and service and in there were also some you know ambition and and and desire and uh I did all this without really taking a proper inventory of what my motivations were then I came home got depressed didn't know I was depressed and start started self-medicating and had a panic attack so I thought this was such an interesting thesis um and uh I went and interviewed art and he turned out to be unsatisfying that's kind of a story in and of itself that's in the book and if if I con cut to

the chase here it was um through subsequent research post post meeting at CI that I found Buddhism um through Dr Mark Epstein who is a who's going to be part of the series um uh in the coming days you'll hear from Epstein um and he becomes a major uh character in the book He's a psychiatrist based in New York City my wife gave me one of his books um and I and and I started to realize that this idea of this monkey mind that we all have with not an eart totally trademarked Insight it it it really

dates all the way back to the Buddha and Epstein has written these beautiful books about the overlap between Buddhism or the Dharma and modern psychology and I started reading those books and then I called him up and begged him to be my friend and uh and there's like a Tuesdays with Mory type uh Vibe with me and Mark throughout the book and he's explaining the Dharma to me as I'm trying to put it into uh um into action in a busy modern skeptical life so answer your question about meditation uh w

hich I keep not doing uh meditation itself is um a key part of how one manages the ego or the voice in the head uh the inner chaos and cacophony and it's I thought it was it must be some esoteric practice that involved you know joining a group or believing in special things but it really is very simple and has been secularized in the form of mindfulness based stress reduction which was invented by John kabit Zin who was recently on the show at at the beginning of the year um who is an MIT uh mol

ecular biologist who uh was a practicing Zen Buddhist and had this idea that wait maybe I can do a secular version of this and so I started doing it and really is quite simple you just sit in a comfortable position close close your eyes try to focus on your breath usually that's what we start with doesn't have to be the breath but often it's the breath and you're just trying to feel the raw data of the physical sensations of the breath entering and exiting the nose or the belly rising and fallin

g and then as soon as you try to do this you will inevitably encounter a sort of mental Mutiny where you get carried all over the place by your thoughts and urges and emotions and the whole game is Just notice when you've become distracted and begin again and again and again and in this way couple things happen one you change the part of the brain associated with attention regulation and two you develop a kind of self-awareness that we call mindfulness that allows you to see your ego your inner

narrator or whatever with some non-judgmental and maybe even humorous remove so that you're not owned by every neurotic Obsession that flits through your mind and and there's a ton of data to suggest that this can have beneficial impacts on your brain the rest of your body and your behavior specifically around anxiety and depression um and so all of that both the experience and the psychological research is what got me to attach to this practice so that was like a 10-minute answer to your very s

imple question uh as you would say this is a podcast and long answers are totally fine hey as you may know this show 10% happier has a companion app where you can go and learn uh how to put into practice all the great things you learn here on the show as I like to think about it it's uh it's like the in college the podcast is the lecture and the app is the lab where you can go and pound all of the wisdom from the show directly into your neurons the app is also called 10% happier it's available w

herever you get your apps go ahead and download it today you talk about meditation it's various benefits different ways to practice it in the book and one of the things you talk about is that it um that it gives you this sort of superpower where maybe you've been reacting your whole life and all of a sudden you can respond instead of reacting can you talk a little bit about what that means yeah I would say the thing in the book that I spent five years writing that most people latch on to is this

idea of responding not reacting we spend so much time like utterly insor by utterly enthrall to this chaotic inner dialogue we act out our thoughts like their tiny dictators as the great meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein says what meditation helps you do is is to drop out of the noise to start to view your thoughts with some distance so that they don't own you and that doesn't mean that you don't engage effectively in the World quite the opposite you learn to respond wisely to stuff instead o

f reacting blindly most of us are on like just totally controlled by the malevolent puppeteer of our thoughts when in fact we have this inner capacity to view the contents of our Consciousness with some mindfulness with some self-awareness H and without being totally attached to them and to me that's kind of the big headline of of the book and then what you see me do is it up repeatedly I've never personally seen that but yeah um yeah of course I want to hand things back to Lauren in a sec but j

ust one more question I heard you say just a second ago you said we have this inner capacity um is that true for everybody I know people come up to you all the time and say meditation sounds great but it's not something I can do you know my mind too busy do we all have that inner capacity I love when people say that to me those are those are my people I stole that that turn of phrase from Sharon salsburg because she says the same thing Sharon's a great meditation teacher um yeah I I I think that

's very common people have a sense that their mind is crazy that they're like eminently distractable or maybe they even tried meditation and and um and very quickly saw that the mind is busy I sometimes joke that it's like trying to hold a live fish in your hands that it's just just going all over the place and they see that and wrongly conclude that that means that they have some sort of bespoke lunacy I call this the fallacy of uniqueness that somehow they and only they cannot meditate when in

fact Evolution most likely wired us to have this racing mind because it kept us safe on the Savannah and other places where we were evolving and so the point is not to clear your mind which I think is the most damaging misconception about meditation as you've heard me say a million times clearing your mind is impossible unless you're enlightened or you've died the point is not to clear your mind the point is to focus your mind for a few nanocs at a time on something neutral like the feeling of

your breath coming in and going out and then every time you get distracted start again and again and again and that getting distracted that waking up from getting distracted is not proof that you're failing it's proof that you're doing it right because the whole game is just to notice how crazy the mind is to notice what your life is actually about you might think your life is about service or loyalty or whatever and that's true in a certain in a certain way but if you pay attention to your mind

mostly what your life about is about is like what's for lunch and did I miss the latest Bravo show about Real Housewives and where to J run wild and you know blah blah blah or you're planning a homicide or whatever it is that is what's happening in your mind on a momentto moment basis and what this process does is help you wake up to that so that you can make better decisions how successful do you think you are Dan at Opera operationalizing this in your like daily interactions I mean I interact

with you reasonably frequently um not that your job's on the line but how am I doing yeah I I don't know I don't know if I'm the best person to answer the question because I'm not we don't have this like an intimate daily back and forth right so like I'm curious mostly like in moments where maybe you're in an argument with your wife or you're you know something that's like happening constantly um a trigger that's happening constant constantly in your life I'm just curious how easy it is to call

on those learnings in the moment for you or if it's gotten easier if you feel like it's just more intuitive and yeah no I mean I have a lot of good news on this score um although maybe I'll press DJ into answering that question fair fair enough that you didn't want to answer it um I I've known DJ longer I think you guys will have a more fruitful back and forth there yeah I am reasonably good but there's a reason why I called the book 10% happier like I there is no I don't see Perfection as bein

g on offer maybe there is such a thing as Enlightenment full Enlightenment um but I I have no evidence for that um I certainly haven't experienced it so what I think is genuinely on offer is marginal and consistent Improvement as long as you understand that you're going to have bad days so it's not a steady upward trajectory of improvement it's more like a sort of an up and down zigzaggy line and so absolutely if I haven't slept enough or if I'm anxious particularly around money stuff that's a b

ig trigger for me um I can do some very dumb things um yeah I can or I can be short or I can uh push people too hard um and this kind of um you know impacts people like you who work with me and so this is a big thing that I talk to my shrink and talk to my executive Coach Jerry Cola and talk to my wife about talk to my brother people talk to Joseph Goldstein the great meditation teacher who's also featured in this series and in the book in a big way like I I try to work on this but I'm not perfe

ct at all um even though um Lauren didn't want to point that out uh uh she would be correct if she did uh and so the good news is I do think I and anybody can get better um and so this is just another example of like yeah I use my story but but I'm not that interested in my story ultimately actually I get pretty tired of telling this story over and over again but I love talking about the universal aspects of it and it is I believe a universal that we all have the capacity to grow and change I ac

tually end the um in the in the in the book there's a a whole set of instructions at the end and it basically just teaches you how to meditate and actually went and revised and changed it and for the new edition um but I kept something from the first book which is that I end it with a I used to be a huge this is going to show my age but I used to be a huge um uh buyer of records and CDs and I used to go to Newbury Comics which I think is still there on newbur Street in Boston was my favorite rec

ord store and they used to I I would love to see which albums were coming out soon because there was no internet in the90s uh um or at least in the early '90s and um so you'd have to go go to the store to find out like what which band was going to you know was Guided by Voices or pavement are they going to be putting out a new record soon and um above the list of new releases there was this great little p py little expression All Dates can change so can you and I love that uh because that that i

s true now I think there are probably some people who have um mental health disorders that makes this harder um and I would say if you have um mental health issues first of all you're not alone many of us sadly an increasing number of us have them and you just might want to work with your mental health professional if you have one to make sure that this practice is safe for you but I I do believe that generally speaking the capacity to change is a universal well how do you you're you're more you

're you're you're not really that afraid of me so um not sorry let me rephrase that DJ you have fewer compunctions about pissing me off so what I mean you you I know you've seen me on many a bad hair day so it's not like it's not like you're working with some like perfected Guru here yeah that's true and you know I think one of the complicating factors is like you move through most spaces in your life and certainly through this space with us with just a huge amount of power right yes yes me havi

ng a bad day means something different than you having a bad day right um and I think like uh we yeah but with that being said I don't know I think my experience of you is like your practice is real you take it seriously and it bestows on you a level of self-awareness that allows you to do a couple things that I've seen you do one is like check your back bad impulse in the moment which you sometimes do another is like name the bad impulse almost immediately after it surfaces uh and another is li

ke name it a little later than that but still name it right and it just takes a lot of the charge out of whatever the behavior is or the impulse is that you have that ability to either interrupt yourself before you do the thing or name it really quickly right so sometimes that means you just acknowledging like I'm pretty tired right now and I'm a little frustrated and like that might come out sideways and it's not about you and you just kind of set the table that way as a way to like give everyb

ody a sense of where you're at right and other times you'll say like you'll be a few minutes into a conversation and be like hey I think I I came in hot at the top and like you know my bad you know and so I think like I don't know that's kind of all you can ask for really in a world where like you said Perfection is not on offer and and I also like I walk through space with less power than you but still certain amounts of power in certain respects and I don't know I just really empathize with yo

u like I am reactive sometimes too you know I like I check my bad impulse a minute too late sometimes too um but yeah I I can say after like three plus years behind the curtain that like the things you say on the podcast feel genuine in and there's not like some other Sinister you lurking that like doesn't meditate and doesn't care about anybody I mean that's my nightmare that my first of all thank you for that and I'm sorry to put you on the spot and my point in that was not to get you push you

to praise me in any way but actually quite the opposite which is to show I want to give people permission to continue to be Schmucks right like that just because you're engaging in self development spiritual growth whatever it does not mean you should expect yourself to be perfect that's just another form of you know delusion and and um so really that was that was my goal um and so I appreciate you playing along um and you know the power of it is is a really important aspect that I'm glad you p

ointed to that that um that I honestly uh did not take into account for a long time and didn't want to look at because I'm uncomfortable having power and so now I see it more as like a responsibility to other people well in my best moments I see it more as a responsibility to other people and but you know forgetting is a huge problem we talk about that a lot on the show that the one of my if DJ and Lauren have a drinking game that they would probably be chugging around this thing that I'm about

to say which is that one of the original translations of the word Sati which we now translate as mindfulness is recollecting or remembering because forgetting all the inspiring you might hear on this show or in great books or whatever it we're we're wired for that for for forgetting and denial and the culture militates against all of the the wisdom that you might pick up in in certain aspect in certain places like the show or or great books or whatever um and so I can forget uh and I try to reme

mber but there are times I mean I'm writing about in my next book I'm writing about an incident in which um that involves a staffer who's no longer with us uh she passed away um where I was mad at her for like 3 months and she was right and I only only recently really started to take into my bones that she was right um and so that you know I have a lot of regret around that and so I I do those that kind of ugliness in is definitely still in me and again I'm not I'm saying this trying to be helpf

ul just to say that this is a slow process um you know in a in an in a Tibetan Buddhist view it would be like or in actually in any Orthodox Buddhist tradition they'd say this is a multi-life Time Affair you know the the way we talk about the Buddha is that you know there are all these stories the jota tales about his prior lives and so this guy again I'm not saying you have to believe in any of this stuff but the the way the Buddha has talked about as is as a guy who was messing messing it up f

or lifetimes until he got enlightened this thing you just said about like how long it took you to admit that someone else was right um just it calls to mind for me one of I think your most effective tricks in this Arena which is you just make it a habit to constantly name the fact that like there's probably information you don't have and there might be something you're not seeing clearly and you might be wrong about the thing you're about to say before you say the thing and I I could if I could

be reading you wrong here but I think sometimes that comes from genuinely felt in the moment humility and sometimes it comes from just like knowing that that's a good thing to do even if you're pretty sure that you're right um but it it really does make a difference and it's just like a great it's a great hack um even in the times when like you might not mean it at all like saying it is a reminder even just to you I think I I'm GL glad you point that out because it had I've been given the feedba

ck before I met either of you I got rather pointed feedback that when I said I could be wrong it was a clear signal that I did not believe I was wrong and I was going to say something to prove that um and so I would say one of the fruits of my practice that has showed up in the years after the book came out in the 10 years is that I have decreasing confidence in my own correctness um and and there's a long history of people praising intellectual humility you know Yates said um the worst lack all

conviction uh no no the best Among Us lack all conviction you know um and this is a quality that we praise but it's not one in our current culture that we actually reward that often we we live in the middle of a time when like certainty is really rewarded and like the loudest all caps obnoxious version of that and I as somebody who came out of the media where that is definitely rewarded did not bring to this game the best conditioning for intellectual humility but the practice of like consisten

tly being confronted with The Madness of your own mind will if you let it over time give you a kind of I think attractive um and helpful lack of dogmatism I mean the Buddha said I am not a dogmatist I'm an analyst he also said those who cling to their views and opinions travel the world annoying people um and so uh I do try to take that on board and at my worst I fall back into the like spouting of I could be wrong but not actually believing [Music] that I want to just because I feel like maybe

I dodged your question earlier and for the sake of like having a fruitful conversation the one I do want to say that you're really good at Dan is creating a culture where even if it feels hard for all of us we are encouraged to also kind of speak our vulnerability or like any kind of messy feeling and I think that that is something that you've modeled um and it feels connected to this like you're not perfect let's talk about it instead of letting this like narrative just run the show in the back

ground let's get it out there in the space in the room so that we're not just being led by these stories in our heads and I think that that is something that I've experienced and is like very interesting in a workspace and I don't think necessarily very common I appreciate that very much and I feel a little sheepish for having forced you guys into this situation like remember those Trump cabinet meetings when he would force all the cabinet folks to like say positive stuff about him I don't want

this to be a hostage video but I that that idea like you Dan we like you so much you're okay 10 out of 10 you're the best what you again guys I don't know you can't see them I'm not sure if you're listening to this you can see them but they have fire emojis shooting out of their eyes um yeah so but but I came I came to this through screwing it up another note I got was that I was actually rude to Junior staffers which was humiliating this was came in in a 360 review I did many years ago and um i

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

ly for the first few years has you know an interesting little postcript on the book but the book was the thing and now I think this podcast reaches more people in a two-month period than the in a month and in a six week period if I'm doing the math correctly than the than than have ever read the book um and and so this this show has become like one of the main events of my life and I'm it's basically me getting free therapy and talking to people who are interesting and I these lessons about vuln

erability and psychological safety and communication skills you know I am trying to do what I hope the audience is trying to do which is knit them into my life into my life when I hear you say that thing about how for example creating psychological safety is not your default mode um I I just want to like point to one thing in there um not to make you feel better but because it might be of service to other people which is like this notion that your default mode is somehow um harmful but also that

it's like yours is like also something that like I've learned to question through the practice and through listening to the guests on our show right so like one of the story is like Dan selfish Dan like wields power irresponsibly like Dan fails to create psychological safety Dan's roof to staffers because Dan's default is bad right and I know you have spoken openly and often about how you you have this sneaking suspicion that you are somehow irredeemably selfish or or bad right um and like all

of that conditioning the selfishness the rudess to jior staffers like everything you're talking about there are causes and conditions for that right there's things that you learned in your time at ABC News and before that there's things that you learn from your parents your schooling your teachers the culture the media there are things that are baked into our DNA as people like our defaults to fear and anger or as like the Buddha would say greed hatred and delusion and so it's like your default

mode isn't really yours in a way right it's like you have to take responsibility for it um but you don't have to tell yourself the story that that in the same way that like someone is not doesn't have a uniquely racing mind like your default Ro mode is not uniquely reflective of something bad about you I mean gold star yes that's it I mean that is one of the main thrusts of the Dharma um that there's a great Burmese master who was the teacher to many of the folks who've been on the show like Jos

eph Goldstein and Sharon salsburg and Jack cornfield his name is his name was he's no longer with us sayada pandita Burmese guy and he used to say the mind is not yours but it is your responsibility and that can sound esoteric but it's really as simple as this as DJ was saying everything that's happening right now every event rests on the lip of a uh of a wave on an unfathomed able ocean of causes and conditions dating back to the big bang and maybe before and when you view things with that pers

pective it's hard to take your very personally and so I will talk about my I do I spend my life now like a not all of my life but a big percentage of my life telling my own embarrassing stories not because I think I mean I try to make them interesting but not because that's the point but because I'm trying to get people to [Music] see that you don't have to take your own inner mishos too personally and that actually the real Liberation is to start to see it um as something that's impersonal does

n't mean you don't have to take responsibility for it but you don't have to add on the whole story about how this is you irrevocably etc etc Dan your life obviously has changed significantly since this book came out and one of the things that I find most interesting is is that you've been turned into this kind of Quasi self-help Guru and I'm curious how do you feel when you hear that first of all and are people coming to you for advice all the time how do you see yourself how are are you comfort

able as someone who's like a voice in The Wellness field and what do you even think about that word Wellness that's a great question I um initially had a lot of imposter feelings about it um and you know I have so much respect for meditation teachers who as you know I'm married to a doctor my parents are doctors and um have a lot of respect for doctors and they go through so much training I I lived with my wife when she went through residency and then I think three or four years of Fellowship af

ter residency um before she became a full attending physician and you know meditation teachers go through I think more training you know years of Silent Retreat and I have not done that and um so I really I really worried about this initially and I didn't even know whether it was okay for me to um teach meditation when I was giving talks so just to be clear when the book came out I thought it would come come out make a little blip maybe even not much of a blip and then go away and then it ended

up being way more successful than I suspected and it led to this podcast and a meditation app and and I I I still do a lot of speeches all over the place and I was worried about um you know was it responsible for me to teach basic meditation and then answer people's questions about it and I I had a big talk with Joseph Goldstein about this and he said yeah first of all it's totally fine for you to teach basic meditation and then when you answer people's questions as long as you keep it in your e

xperience it's fine you know don't pretend you know more than you know just talk use eye language to be U I don't think he said this but this this is um one of the communication skills that I've learned that if you keep it in like your own personal experience you're you're you're much safer because you can be an authority in your own personal experience you now 10 years that have passed and and I increasingly feel comfortable with I would you know quasa Guru is right you know that Ian I have not

done the training to be a full meditation teacher um but I have done some training and I do one or two silent meditation Retreats a year often uh 10 days I've written a couple books on the subject I host this show two to three times a week um so I I do feel like I can give some advice with the caveat that I you know I'm not a doctor I'm not a psychiatrist I'm not a psychologist even um and and within that context yeah I can Channel what I've learned filter it through my own personal experience

and share that and if I take that approach I do feel comfortable and I like you know I like being the guy that my friends call if they have a problem um yeah I like that a lot actually um and I and I and I do spend a certain amount of time at the beginning of those conversations explaining all the stuff I don't know um and then once I've done that I feel better about saying what I what I see Dan you've said something you said something a few months ago I think it was just when the team was at di

nner and it just popped out to me cuz I wasn't expecting it which was you talked about how the book or at least at the time that you were writing it you felt like it had a kind of punk rock feel to it and I'm curious like what you meant by that and if that still feels like an animating Spirit uh for you in the work you're doing now especially given everything you've just said about how you've sort of established yourself as this sort of go-to person I love that question it's something I've been

thinking about a lot and I I would actually like to get some feedback from the two of you on it I I'll say a few words and then be interested to hear what you think for sure well first of all I've always love punk rock a lot of these records behind me in in my little Studio here are like you know um I guess you would technically call them sort of alternative or underground rock from the 80s and 90s bands like the Minutemen and The Replacements and Sonic Youth and Husker do and then in the 90s li

ke Guided by Voices and pavement so I've always love loved that and I've always um I've always been very attracted to interesting worlds um outside of the mainstream and that was a huge theme in my journalism you know I I definitely I covered big mainstream events and but I I would but I really loved especially in the later part of my career was you know diving into the world of like the underground drug trade in Rio or um uh the child slave rings in Haiti and uh busting American pedophiles prow

ling in Cambodia and these little these these strange and often you know sometimes not so great uh subcultures it's always been very interesting to me and so that finding new ways to see the world and talk about the world has always been important to me and um when I started getting interested in meditation before the book came out I was really intrigued by the science and by the practice and very annoyed by the books I was reading because there was this syrupy saccharin tone and so I tried to w

rite a book that used the f word used the F-word a lot and told embarrassing stories about cocaine and you know had a a bit of a you know a sort of eyebrow raising title um because I thought that was the way to break through because again remember the cultural context there was a lot of skepticism generally in the culture at that time about meditation to the extent that anybody even thought about it so I thought well if I'm an evangelist I need the right language you know the Buddha was very goo

d at this you know he he was on the scene during an agrarian time and he would use Farm or very down home like analogies and metaphors in his teaching if he was talking to people who worship fire he would talk about the Dharma through the lens of fire um and so I I I do think that's an important thing to talk to people in ways that they're likely to listen I where I'd be interested to hear your points of view is that I think over time I've been off I've been off at times because I think the cult

ure has moved and there is less skepticism about meditation and sometimes my I've got these habits and this conditioning from from that first book that may not be relevant or serving me so well now not and Lauren you're nodding your head yeah I'm just thinking how like my favorite versions of you Dan are when you're you're like Earnest and not in that mode um but also I think it just speaks to different what different people are drawn to um there I think that there's something about knowing that

you had so much skepticism and then watching that soften and seeing you open is exciting to see for me and maybe that's just a my own personal preference but I I have a feeling that other people might feel similarly [Music] yeah I appreciate that thanks thank you I mean and I think there's something to what you're saying you know I on the one hand I got so much feedback especially early on that the skepticism was so important for people like oh well if this guy is going down this road maybe I c

an go with him and I I think especially for people like my age and older um you know I'm a Gen X like I I think I think still that's very important um and yet I think for younger people especially cuz younger people by most humans are younger than me but I I'm referring to you know um uh anybody in their 30s or below that uh there as you guys know there's so much suffering going on right now people are not bringing skepticism to tools that could help them turn down their anxiety or depression th

ey really want them and so I don't need to gild the Lily or dress it up with you know too much profanity or skepticism because that that actually is that it's discordant to to many audiences so I'm increasingly trying to figure out how to how to straddle all of this and and be effective and be real because I am a guy who swears a lot and I do like making jokes and it's about thinking about the appropriate time and place for all of that that's so interesting and I yeah there's probably never goin

g to be a right answer there that question will probably be alive for as long as you are at least as long as you're doing this work I mean we get yeah we hear from people people all the time like thank God you got rid of the bleeping it's nice to hear the authentic Dan and we also hear from people all the time that's like stop cursing it's not mindful I had to turn it off like it's ruining my equinity you know um and those are just two things that are both true at the same time and um I guess wh

en I think about your skepticism I think like yeah we might be in a time when you don't need to work as hard to signal that like you're not going to be using cupy language and we're not going to be super precious about this like that just might not be as important as it was 10 years ago but I think that the spirit of like how do we really Reach people and connect them to practices that can really help still needs skepticism because we now live in a world where mental health conversations and med

itation conversations are everywhere and they're for sale everywhere and there are a lot of claims being made and there are a lot of products being sold and there's a lot of conventional wisdom being pedal you know and so we still need to be skeptical but maybe just in different ways like are we talking about trauma in ways that are good for people or bad for people are we talking about trigger warnings in ways that are good for people or bad for people are we talking about is talking about anxi

ety all the time actually helpful or is it making people more anxious right so like we still need the skepticism and I think um there is an echo chamber that we can sometimes fall into where we get pitched a guest and they've got this great pedigree and their book has been blurbed by 10 people who have been on the show before and it just feels like an obvious home run are we losing a little bit of the skepticism that you started with like do we need to be pushing harder on yeah what are really t

he best ways to to be talking about this what are really the most useful practices um so yeah I think it's got to stay it's just got to like Bob and weave and change and be impermanent like everything else yeah I think I think what I'm hearing you both say is something like there's healthy skepticism and maybe a corrosive skepticism a healthy skepticism that you're pointing to is like rigor and careful thought and an unhealthy skepticism might look like cynicism uh or it might look like glibness

and lazy profanity and uh easy jokes um and so I don't think we're heading into a world where I don't say anymore or I don't make jokes um but you know I actually was talking about Joseph with I was talking with Joseph about this just the other day um you know do I he was saying that some people don't like how my sign off on Instagram is peace and but you know if you look at the comments some of the people in his world don't like that I say that but if you look at the comments on those videos t

hey're just like people are like make me a t-shirt that says that and and so um and know we were talking about when is it appropriate um to do this when is it skillful and useful and when is it not and I don't have clear answers I'm just trying to figure that out I think your earnestness lands well though with that as the backdrop like if you were just if you didn't have that then the moments where you are truly open and vulnerable and sharing on air or in other aspects of your career it it woul

dn't land it would just kind of be like all right that's just whatever he's just this guy that like there's the discernment makes those moments hit more yeah yeah so I think it's like I think what you're pointing to is some sort of wise combination yeah like everything in life right yes well we talk behind the scenes a lot about um this EST this is another you know tph staff drinking game I'm sure that they could play but I'm always talking about this Ester Perell expression that I love estere p

el is the great uh coup's counselor who's been on the show a million times I love her so much and she talks about how some some things are not problems to be fixed but Dynamics to be managed and I think we've just identified one I love that maybe we should take a minute before we let folks go and tell them what we're up to in these next few weeks um does that feel okay did we miss anything Dan before we do that no this great it's been a lot of fun and yeah I'm happy to do you want me to do like

a little preview of what's coming up so yeah maybe before we let folks go Dan can you just give us a preview of what's coming up in this really exciting series that we've been working on for so long uh around the 10 anniversary well first of all just to say DJ and Lauren have done a lot of work uh we are doing a big and ambitious series here on the show I'm thank I'm very grateful to to DJ and Lauren for doing a ton of work one of the guiding principles that we talked about a lot is that we didn

't want this to feel just like wrote and repetitive promotion for the book and so yeah we are celebrating the fact that there's a new edition of the book coming out a revised edition of the book and that's fun for us but these episodes are meant to stand on their own as value ad for you the listener um and so there'll be a thin veneer of hey this is part of this series but mostly it's about just um doing something useful and interesting for you so the the theme is that we're just going back and

talking to the key players from the book and um and it's not so much uh about talking to them about their experience being in the book that would be pretty boring we're just talking about the things they're interested in now so we're just producing a bunch of new episodes uh that we would produce at any time but we're just kind of dump lumping them together in this series so we're talking to people like Joseph goldsteen and when I asked him what he wanted to talk about he he said that he's incre

asingly interested in talking about esoteric aspects of Buddhist cosmology like Karma and rebirth and even superpowers and so we actually had a fascinating discussion about this and um and it's not the type of things uh things that modern Dharma teachers especially especially in the west really go into and and he he goes into it we talked to um Deepak Chopra who plays a bit of a the role of a foil in the book he uh make fun of him a little bit um and so I was interested to see what what do I mak

e of him now 10 years later and is he mad at me and so you'll hear the results um I talked to Dr Mark Epstein who I mentioned earlier um and uh he's got fascinating things to say about the Buddhist concept of emptiness or not self which we were talking about earlier like the this very hard to idea that you shouldn't take the contents of your mind personally and how that can seem scary or weird but actually it should be deeply comforting we talked to him about that uh we talked to Spring wasam wh

o's a great meditation teacher who I also kind of make fun of a little bit in the book although she turns into a hero um and subsequently she and I have become quite good friends and uh so we're talking to her about should you go on a Meditation Retreat something that people talk about a lot and increasingly people are interested in it so what do you need to know before you go should you even go we're we're gonna talk to her about that and then um finally we talk to my brother Matt who plays the

role of skeptic in the book who's making me fun making fun of me for getting into all this stuff and is now to my great Delight um a very dedicated Dharma practitioner I have joked that um there's times when he comes to me to talk about meditation and I have this Buddhist uh phrase that comes through my mind which is I told you uh and uh it's a that's a really fun conversation very satisfying for me and finally just one now that I'm just shamelessly promoting everything here just what I do want

to say that we are doing a live show in New York City uh um where we're GNA have a band and uh some very special guests many of whom uh you just heard me talk about uh so you can come celebrate this in person um uh this is also just kind of in keeping with us running a bunch of EXP experiments lately um so this kind of idea of doing a a Live party um I'm interested to see how it goes so come join us all the informations in the show notes awesome thanks for uh letting us Grill you this has been

a fun turning at the tables today we should do it more often you guys are really good at this well we learn from the best don't we I think I just threw up in my mouth a little bit I'm here to bring the earnest energy too come on uh you guys are the best this has been an amazing series it's also been a great conversation so thank you sweet thank you Dan thank you yeah thanks for having [Music] us