Here's What I Learned From Writing A Whole Book About Meditation | Dan Harris

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Hey, Dan here.
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Before we start the show, I want to tell you
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about a live recording of this podcast that we're doing
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in New York City on March 28th. I will be
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interviewing two frequent flyers from this show, the legendary meditation
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teacher Joseph Goldstein, who will be just coming off a
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three-month solo silent meditation retreat, and Dr. Mark Epstein, a
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Buddhist therapist and best-selling author. The event will actually be
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a celebration of the 10th anniversary of my first book,
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10% happier, and a percentage of the proceeds will go
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to the New York Insight Meditation Center. Come early if
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you want for a VIP guided meditation and Q &
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A with me. Thanks to our friends over at Audible
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for sponsoring this show and the event. Tickets on sale
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right now at symphonyspace.org.
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How do we want to do this, guys? Should we, Dan,
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do you want us to welcome you? Is that?
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That's a good idea, yeah. Yeah?
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Okay.
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Should we just dive in?
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Yeah, let's dive in.
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Okay.
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Let's do it.
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It's going to be weird.
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I would just say as an overarching thing, we should
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enjoy this.
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Yes. Yeah.
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Yeah.
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Good.
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This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, everybody.
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How we doing?
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This show would not exist. In fact, my whole career
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as a meditation evangelist or whatever you want to call it,
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none of it would exist if I had not taken
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a huge risk 10 years ago and put out a
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book called 10% Happier, after which this show is, of course, named.
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It really was a huge risk. At the time, as
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many of you know, I was a network news anchor,
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co-host of Nightline, also the co-host of the weekend editions
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of Good Morning America. I also spent a lot of
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time traveling around the world doing investigative stories and covering
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breaking news. So to be in this position and to
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publicly admit that I had struggled with depression and then
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self-medicated with cocaine and that it all resulted in a
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panic attack on Good Morning America, well, as you can imagine,
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that was something of an out-of-the-box career move. And bear
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in mind, this was well before the current era where
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lots of people talk about their mental health challenges openly.
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While I was terrified that the book might torpedo my career,
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I did not actually think, even if I survived, that
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the book would amount to much. However, to my surprise,
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the book became pretty successful. It produced this podcast and
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it allowed me to do something I never would have imagined,
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quit the news business and work in the world of
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mental health and happiness full time. Anyway, the book is
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turning 10 years old this month. I just put out
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a revised 10th anniversary edition of the book with a
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new preface and expanded appendix filled with meditation instructions. And
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to celebrate this milestone, we're kicking off a big series
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in which I'm going to go back and interview many
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of the major players from the book. So you're going
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to hear me talk to people like Deepak Chopra, who's
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never been on the show before. Also, Joseph Goldstein, Dr.
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Mark Epstein, and even my younger brother, who, if you
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read the book, played the role of snarky skeptic, was
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even more skeptical than I was about meditation, and has, however,
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to my delight, recently become a convert. We are kicking
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this series off today with an unusual episode where two
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of my producers, DJ Kashmir and Lauren Smith, interview me.
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We talk about the story behind the book, what it
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was like to have a panic attack on national television,
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why I decided to admit it publicly. how the success
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of the book utterly transformed my life, and what I
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learned during all of this, both while writing the book
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and subsequently. We talk about concepts such as respond, not react,
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why our faults are not our fault, but they are
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our responsibility, and whether every one of us has the
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capacity to change. DJ and Lauren will even weigh in
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on how they think I'm doing on the change front
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these days.
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That is coming up.
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Hey, Lauren. Hey, Dan. Welcome, welcome.
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Hey.
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Yeah, hi.
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So, Dan, we're going to interview you today.
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It is so much easier to be interviewed than it
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is to interview.
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I guess I'm about to find that out, too.
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I have so many follow-up questions there, but we'll wait.
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I plan to make this as hard as possible for
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both of you, so you will see.
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Just one-word answers the whole time.
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So when you said beforehand your guiding principle for the
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next hour is that we should enjoy this, you meant
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you're going to torture us and enjoy it.
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Yes, I meant I will enjoy watching you suffer, which
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is the highest form of pleasure.
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It says that in the Dharma, actually.
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Must not have read that sutta yet. Let's introduce Lauren.
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She has not been on the mic before. So Lauren Smith,
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producer extraordinaire, do you want to say hey?
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Hey, I'm so happy to be here.
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Yeah, I've been on the other side of this many, many,
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many times. So this is my debut. And, you know,
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you guys have done this many times before. So thanks
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for letting me in to the bromance here.
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I appreciate it.
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Yeah.
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Thanks for being here. I love how your hey was
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so playful. It was like a 2 a.m.
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Text.
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That's what I'm here to bring. That's the energy I'm
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here to bring today.
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Yeah, there were like seven whys in that hey.
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That's very me. That's very me. I own that.
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All right, let's just set a bit of a roadmap here.
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So this is the kickoff episode in a series that
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we've been working on for a really long time and
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we're really excited about. Dan, it's the 10th anniversary of
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your book, your first book, which, like this podcast, is
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called 10% Happier. And so we thought it would be
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fun for Lauren and I to interview you. We'll ask
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some questions about the book, some questions about the 10
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years since, have some fun with it, and at the end,
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we'll give a little preview of what's coming up in
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the next few weeks for listeners to look forward to. Dan,
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does that roadmap sound okay to you?
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Yeah, it sounds perfect.
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So Some of our listeners don't actually know your origin story, Dan,
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but you are good at talking. So who were you
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before you wrote this memoir? What are the broad strokes
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of your story?
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Always happy to talk about myself.
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I will say this has been one of the slightly
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embarrassing aspects of doing this 10th anniversary rodeo is that, well,
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first of all, how old I feel. Because it feels
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like yesterday that the book came out. And second, I
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think I operated under the assumption that people listening to
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this show read the book. The two of you have
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helped me realize this. I don't actually think that is
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entirely or even largely true. There may be many, many
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people who listen to this show have no fucking idea
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that I wrote this book or who I am or
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any of that stuff, which is great.
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It's totally fine. It's just that somehow.
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The book was such a landmark event in my life,
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like a defining event in my life, that I narcissistically
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walk around thinking that everybody, or at least certainly people
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who listen to the show, would have a passing familiarity
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with it. And I realize that that's probably not true,
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and it's slightly embarrassing.
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Well, tell us. Tell the people who do not know
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about your book what led you to write the book.
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Okay, yes. That was Lauren's way of saying, can you
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answer the question I fucking asked you, please?
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Yeah.
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Yeah, okay, so I was, for a million years, a
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news anchor at ABC News. I got to ABC when
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I was 28, so very young. There's a picture of
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me that I use in some of my public talks
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that was taken of me by the security folks in
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a basement at ABC News on my first day. And
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a friend of mine once joked that if you take
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a wide shot of that picture, it looks like I
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might be holding a balloon because I was so young
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looking and so scared and terrified and wearing this terrible, like,
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double-breasted gray pinstripe suit because I was trying to be
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a big boy at ABC News. After seven years in
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local news in Maine and Boston, I got this big
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break to come to ABC when I was 28.
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And it was terrifying. It was absolutely terrifying.
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I had grown up watching people like Peter Jennings and
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Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer. And all of a sudden,
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you know, they were ostensibly at least my colleagues. And
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my way of coping with the insecurity that I felt
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was to become a workaholic. I think I probably already
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was a workaholic, but at this point, it just really
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went into high gear. And I had this like running fear.
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inner monologue of, you know, how good was my last story?
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What's my next story going to be? Who's getting the
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story I wanted? What's my relationship with Peter Jennings right now?
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Blah, blah, blah.
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And I believed that any success that I was experiencing
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was directly correlated to the intensity of my anxiety. I
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had this little motto that was bequeathed to me by
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my dad, who was at the time an academic physician
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at Harvard, very successful dude. And he had this little saying,
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which is, the price of security is insecurity, which is
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a great thing to tell your children. People are often
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shocked when I tell them that my dad is Jewish.
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It's a very cultural trait to venerate worrying in this way.
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And I subsequently learned that my dad actually made this
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expression up to make me feel better about the worrying
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I was already doing. He wasn't actually trying to get
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me to worry more, but I kind of misinterpreted it
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and used it to glorify this anxiety that I was experiencing.
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And shortly after I got to ABC, there was this
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huge event in the news, which was 9-11. So I
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arrived at ABC in 2000 at age 28, and then
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9-11 happened the next year. And I really motivated by
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a lot of my ambition and curiosity and some idealism too,
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just volunteered to go overseas to cover whatever was going
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to happen next. And then I ended up spending many
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years in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Israel, the West Bank and Gaza.
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I was there in 2002 during the Second Intifada. So,
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you know, the events in the news these days definitely
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catch my attention in a pretty prominent way. And then
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I was in Iraq. many, many times, often for months
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at a time. And when I came home after a
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six-month stint in Iraq in the summer of 2003, so
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I was in Baghdad pretty much consecutively from the pre-war,
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the invasion, and then post-war sort of early flowerings of
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the insurgency. And that was just my first of, I think,
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six or seven trips. And I came home in that summer,
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and I got depressed. I didn't actually know I was depressed.
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I knew I was not feeling well. And so I
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did something incredibly stupid, which is I started to self-medicate
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with recreational drugs, including cocaine. And that is what occasioned
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a panic attack on live television. I feel like I'm
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doing a lot of talking. So why don't I stop
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the story there and see if there are any other questions.
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That just sounds like a really hard few years, all
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that time in the war zones, all that time striving
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in one of the most competitive environments on earth. Like
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you said, you didn't know you were depressed. Did you
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know that you were struggling? mentally?
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You know, it's so funny you say that it sounds
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like a hard couple of years because I remember those
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as some of my favorite years of being alive. And
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I experienced it, at least consciously, as incredibly exciting. And
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I remember, I don't think I've ever written about this,
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but I remember a moment where I was in Ramallah,
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which is a major city in the West Bank, Palestinian territory,
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during the a period of time when the Israelis invaded
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in 2002. And after spending a week in this incredibly
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hairy situation and where I saw horrifying things, which I
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didn't enjoy, I'm not here to say that I, you know,
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got off on the horror or the violence, but it
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was very exciting and had this illicit feel of being
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in this place you're not supposed to be, which I've
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always enjoyed. I've always been a bit of a rule breaker.
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It had this illicit feel and you get on TV.
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So it was this very complex cocktail. And I remember
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getting out of Ramallah and going to my hotel room
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in Jerusalem and taking a shower and having the thought,
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I have no problems. Especially compared to the people I
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was just spending, you know, I was deeply immersed with
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these folks who had a lot of problems. And I
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remember feeling just incredibly grateful that I got to do
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that job. So yeah, it's just a long way of
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saying it didn't compute to me that period of time,
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at least consciously did not compute as traumatic.
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It's really interesting, Dan, because when just hearing you say that,
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it makes me just think about our body's intelligence and
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how it'll speak to us when we need it, even
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if we don't think we need it. You know, bringing
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us back to you had a panic attack on air.
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It seems like even though intellectually you were like, this
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is so exciting. This is an amazing time in my life.
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I have no problems. There was something confounding in you
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that was just like, I can't do this, or this
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is too much, or it was a stop gap for
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you and something inside of you spoke. And I'm just
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curious if that resonates or what you think that moment
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was when the panic attack happened on air.
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Well, it a million percent resonates. I think that's exactly
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what was happening. And it's an astute observation. You know,
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I still retain some of the allergy to new age sentiments.
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So certainly at that age, you know, we're talking about
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20 years ago when all this happened. At that age,
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I was not in tune with the wisdom of my
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body or.
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Anything like that.
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I wasn't.
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Joseph Goldstein, the great meditation teacher, likes to talk about
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this line from, I think it's a James Joyce novel,
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where he describes a character as living a short distance
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from his body. And I think that was probably true
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for me. You're absolutely right. I think it showed up
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in a couple of ways. First, I came home and
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got depressed and didn't know it. I didn't feel depressed
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in my head. My body was sending me another signal.
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And I had a battery of tests. I went to
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all these different doctors. My parents were doctors and I
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was forcing them into these involuntary medical symposia on the
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phone and trying to figure out why I didn't feel good.
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I mean, I had my apartment tested for a gas leak,
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all of this stuff. And finally, I realized I was
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just depressed. But by that time, I'd already started to
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self-medicate with cocaine. Mostly that was, I mean, I did
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a lot of other drugs, but that was, I think,
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the one that really was the most problematic. And then
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the panic attack was another way of my body and Specifically,
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I think in this case, my brain telling me, we
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cannot trust you at the wheel of this vehicle anymore.
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And so, you know, maybe it's worth my describing the
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panic attack.
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Yeah, I think so.
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I actually had two, but the one that's on YouTube
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was in 2004. I think it's the first clip that
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shows up if you Google panic attack on television. It
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has like a ton of views. Yeah, it's my most
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successful video, me losing my fucking mind.
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Yeah.
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What an achievement.
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So, yeah, this was about a year or so after
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I'd gotten home from Iraq, and I had actually, in
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that interim period, taken other trips to Iraq. And I'd
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been given this opportunity to anchor the news updates on
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Good Morning America. So this job doesn't exist anymore, but
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there used to be a person, her name was Robin Roberts,
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she's now the main host of the show, and her
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job at the time was to come on at the
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top of each hour and read some headlines. So the
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main hosts of the show were Diane Sawyer and Charlie Gibson,
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and I Robin, when she was out, I started filling
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in for her, which was a huge opportunity for me.
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And it was really going well. I had been doing
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it for a while and even getting to fill in
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for Charlie in the big chair. And so this morning
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I was filling in for Robin and I started to
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read the story off of the teleprompter. So there's a
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teleprompter with these words that float by you. And I
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was reading the six or seven stories that were on
325
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the docket that day. And a few seconds into it,
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I just started to lose it. And I had had
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stage fright before, so I knew exactly what this was.
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I was pre-wired with stage fright. And I'd had incidents
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that approached panic, but not this strong. And I was
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trying to get the words out. And I noticed that
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my heart was speeding up and my mouth is getting
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dry and my palms were sweating and I was having
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00:16:25.940 --> 00:16:28.379
trouble breathing. And in response to that, my mind started
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racing like, you are screwed, dude. You got to get
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yourself out of this situation. And all these people are
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watching and you know, your career's on the line here.
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And that just made my physical symptoms worse. And then
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my mind started racing even more. And you can hear
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on the tape, I sort of degenerate into incoherence and
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get my voices kind of breathy. I do kind of
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hold myself together reasonably well, which speaks to the fact
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that I'm probably a sociopath.
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But I couldn't keep going.
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And so in the middle of the shtick, I tossed
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it back to the main hosts of the show. Actually,
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you can hear me tossing it to the wrong host
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of the show. I think I said Robin and Charlie
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or something like that, but it was actually Charlie Gibson
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and Diane Sawyer. And you can see their faces in
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the video. They look like, oh, what's going on here?
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This isn't supposed to be happening. And they then tossed
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it over to the weatherman, Tony Perkins, and then Charlie
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bolted out of his chair and ran over to me
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to see what was wrong. And all of the people
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in the control room were getting in my ear and saying,
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what happened? And I lied to everybody and said that
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I was fine. I didn't know what had happened, but
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I knew it was a panic attack. My mom called
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00:17:32.720 --> 00:17:35.549
me backstage. She knew it was panic attack. And then
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I started to try to get under the hood and
361
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figure out what went wrong.
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Did the symptoms subside as soon as you tossed it back?
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00:17:43.190 --> 00:17:44.950
Or did it take a few minutes?
364
00:17:46.710 --> 00:17:51.819
Well, there's the shame and the deceleration period of the heart.
365
00:17:51.859 --> 00:17:54.240
But yeah, I wasn't in full panic anymore as soon
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as I wasn't being watched. I mean, this is something
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00:17:58.000 --> 00:18:00.420
I only learned recently, like here on this show, actually.
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Matt Gutman, one of our guests, who's also an ABC
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News guy, wrote a whole book about panic. And he
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explained to me here when he was on the show
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that part of panic is this social component. Our deepest
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fear as homo sapiens is rejection because in the evolutionary times,
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rejection equaled death if you weren't part of the pack anymore.
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And so this idea that this was embarrassing, people were
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going to think I was insane, that shows up now
376
00:18:28.470 --> 00:18:31.509
even when I get panic on an airplane or something
377
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like that. a big component of the racing thoughts is
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these people are going to think I'm crazy when I
379
00:18:36.019 --> 00:18:38.500
try to like get out of this plane. And so I,
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I think that was a huge part of what was
381
00:18:40.559 --> 00:18:42.299
coursing through my mind at the time.
382
00:18:43.160 --> 00:18:45.460
So you knew you'd had a panic attack. I imagine
383
00:18:45.480 --> 00:18:49.009
you also knew that that couldn't keep happening if you
384
00:18:49.049 --> 00:18:51.410
wanted to have the career that you had. So what
385
00:18:51.430 --> 00:18:52.130
did you do?
386
00:18:52.150 --> 00:18:56.230
I tell it in more detail in the book, which
387
00:18:56.329 --> 00:19:00.140
is that I went to a shrink and after the
388
00:19:00.160 --> 00:19:03.799
first panic attack in 2004. But that shrink did not
389
00:19:03.900 --> 00:19:08.000
figure out what the real cause was. So I kept partying.
390
00:19:09.049 --> 00:19:10.980
And then I had another panic attack, a much more
391
00:19:11.069 --> 00:19:14.650
mild one in 2005. And that's when I went to
392
00:19:14.670 --> 00:19:19.109
see Dr. Brotman, who is a pretty big character in
393
00:19:19.150 --> 00:19:22.349
the book, who asked me the question, point blank, do
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you do drugs?
395
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And I said, yes.
396
00:19:25.670 --> 00:19:27.549
And I often joke that he gave me this look
397
00:19:28.710 --> 00:19:32.539
this shrinking look that communicated the sentiment of okay, asshole
398
00:19:32.599 --> 00:19:36.140
mystery solved. And I think he actually said mystery solved.
399
00:19:36.799 --> 00:19:39.140
But he was looking at me like an asshole. Not
400
00:19:39.200 --> 00:19:40.940
him being an asshole, me being an asshole. And in
401
00:19:40.980 --> 00:19:42.849
this case, that diagnosis was correct.
402
00:19:43.289 --> 00:19:43.509
Yeah.
403
00:19:43.529 --> 00:19:46.250
So in that off in the office with him in 2005,
404
00:19:46.250 --> 00:19:49.970
I agreed that day to quit doing drugs to come
405
00:19:50.029 --> 00:19:52.009
see him once or twice a week. I think I
406
00:19:52.049 --> 00:19:54.910
ended up seeing him for like 10 years. Actually, when
407
00:19:54.930 --> 00:19:57.970
I first started to write 10% Happier, I was not planning.
408
00:19:58.390 --> 00:20:00.410
First of all, it wasn't called 10% Happier. I think
409
00:20:01.319 --> 00:20:03.390
I was calling it like the skeptic's Bible or something
410
00:20:03.430 --> 00:20:05.680
like that. And the idea was not to tell my
411
00:20:05.740 --> 00:20:09.690
own story. I was really interested in getting people turned
412
00:20:09.789 --> 00:20:13.049
on to meditation because I had started to meditate and
413
00:20:13.130 --> 00:20:15.430
I wanted other people to get interested in it, but
414
00:20:15.470 --> 00:20:17.779
I wasn't going to make it a memoir. And then
415
00:20:17.819 --> 00:20:19.819
at some point I had this idea of like, oh,
416
00:20:19.859 --> 00:20:21.980
maybe I'll tell the story about the panic attack. And
417
00:20:22.000 --> 00:20:24.839
so I included it in some early drafts. And a
418
00:20:25.220 --> 00:20:27.779
lot of my first readers came back and said, give
419
00:20:27.819 --> 00:20:31.240
us more of this. Because you're rhapsodizing about the theory
420
00:20:31.269 --> 00:20:34.869
of meditation is not so interesting. But you being an
421
00:20:34.930 --> 00:20:37.869
idiot is extremely interesting. So I ended up rebuilding the
422
00:20:37.890 --> 00:20:40.769
whole book around what was happening in my inner life
423
00:20:40.809 --> 00:20:42.910
with the goal not of, you know, I didn't have
424
00:20:42.950 --> 00:20:44.890
some yearning to write a memoir. I mean, I was
425
00:20:44.970 --> 00:20:46.599
in my late 30s when I started writing. So I
426
00:20:46.619 --> 00:20:49.559
didn't have an interesting enough life to have a memoir
427
00:20:49.619 --> 00:20:51.359
in me. But it just turned out to be the
428
00:20:51.380 --> 00:20:55.079
most effective way to make my pitch, which is because
429
00:20:55.099 --> 00:20:56.799
I think in my core, I'm not a memoirist.
430
00:20:56.900 --> 00:20:58.369
I'm an evangelical.
431
00:20:58.819 --> 00:21:01.559
And my pitch was, or my good news was that
432
00:21:01.680 --> 00:21:04.880
meditation is based in all of this science. It can
433
00:21:04.900 --> 00:21:06.529
be good for you. You should do it or you
434
00:21:06.549 --> 00:21:09.569
should consider it. And the memoir was, I came to
435
00:21:09.589 --> 00:21:11.670
believe then and still do now that that was the
436
00:21:11.710 --> 00:21:13.170
best delivery mechanism.
437
00:21:13.829 --> 00:21:16.930
There's also a layer, I think, Dan, that our most
438
00:21:17.009 --> 00:21:20.569
vulnerable moments can be so life-changing. And that just has
439
00:21:20.650 --> 00:21:23.450
a very broad appeal for people in general, even beyond
440
00:21:23.890 --> 00:21:26.609
how good meditation can be for you. But to have
441
00:21:26.670 --> 00:21:31.380
someone talk about something that's really embarrassing and explain how
442
00:21:31.420 --> 00:21:35.859
it led to just a complete life change is really exciting,
443
00:21:36.119 --> 00:21:38.599
I think. And we talk about this as a team
444
00:21:38.640 --> 00:21:41.460
and we talk about this on the show, but vulnerability
445
00:21:41.500 --> 00:21:44.500
is really powerful, even though that can seem a little cringy.
446
00:21:44.660 --> 00:21:48.660
But you displayed that and people want to hear that stuff.
447
00:21:49.589 --> 00:21:53.190
Yeah, I think you're right. And just there are two
448
00:21:53.210 --> 00:21:55.730
thoughts that are coming to mind as you're talking. for
449
00:21:55.869 --> 00:22:00.039
sure it is possible to do vulnerability inappropriately to like
450
00:22:00.079 --> 00:22:02.119
bleed all over the place and overshare. And so I'm
451
00:22:02.200 --> 00:22:07.279
always worried about that. And yes, and I was very
452
00:22:07.319 --> 00:22:11.680
worried about that with this book. And that's my second point,
453
00:22:11.720 --> 00:22:14.960
which is that you have to remember the historical context
454
00:22:14.980 --> 00:22:16.819
in which I was writing this book in the early,
455
00:22:16.839 --> 00:22:19.759
in the late aughts and early 2010. So it was
456
00:22:19.799 --> 00:22:23.099
a five-year project. The culture was very different. We did
457
00:22:23.200 --> 00:22:26.599
not talk about mental health issues that openly at that time.
458
00:22:26.839 --> 00:22:29.500
And we certainly didn't talk about meditation. It was not,
459
00:22:30.019 --> 00:22:31.579
it had a moment in the 60s, but it had
460
00:22:31.619 --> 00:22:36.779
gone back to the fringes. And most certainly, news anchors
461
00:22:37.000 --> 00:22:41.349
weren't talking about having panic attacks, being depressed, doing a
462
00:22:41.349 --> 00:22:44.710
bunch of blow. That was like not a thing. And
463
00:22:46.569 --> 00:22:48.990
I was terrified. My family was terrified. My mom was
464
00:22:49.009 --> 00:22:51.210
trying to get me not to publish this book. My
465
00:22:51.250 --> 00:22:54.710
wife was incredibly supportive but really worried. At this time,
466
00:22:54.750 --> 00:22:57.589
I was one of the main hosts of the weekend
467
00:22:57.609 --> 00:23:00.009
edition of Good Morning America. And I had the thought
468
00:23:00.049 --> 00:23:04.299
that it's possible that general managers of the affiliates in
469
00:23:05.700 --> 00:23:08.200
certain conservative cities would say, we don't want this guy
470
00:23:08.279 --> 00:23:12.240
on our airwaves anymore. So I was really scared to
471
00:23:12.299 --> 00:23:16.430
publish the book. And I'm not generally that brave, especially
472
00:23:16.690 --> 00:23:19.250
not the type of person who is going to willy-nilly
473
00:23:19.349 --> 00:23:20.730
take risks with his career.
474
00:23:21.049 --> 00:23:23.759
I think there were two things that stiffened my spine.
475
00:23:24.210 --> 00:23:30.799
One is I just had this incredible confidence that the
476
00:23:30.839 --> 00:23:32.900
important part of the book was not the embarrassing stuff
477
00:23:33.480 --> 00:23:37.180
about me, but it was actually that inner technology thing.
478
00:23:37.640 --> 00:23:41.119
that had several millennia of rigorous testing in the minds
479
00:23:41.160 --> 00:23:45.119
of people on many, many continents. I'm talking about meditation,
480
00:23:45.140 --> 00:23:47.359
of course. And so it struck me as being worth
481
00:23:47.380 --> 00:23:49.839
the risk. And then also my bosses, including Diane Sawyer,
482
00:23:50.160 --> 00:23:51.980
and also a guy named Ben Sherwood, who was the
483
00:23:52.019 --> 00:23:55.599
president of ABC News when the book came out, they
484
00:23:55.660 --> 00:23:59.849
were incredibly supportive. And they read early drafts of the book,
485
00:24:00.049 --> 00:24:02.339
gave me notes, told me, go ahead, it's worth it,
486
00:24:02.369 --> 00:24:04.789
we've got your back. And when the book came out,
487
00:24:05.720 --> 00:24:08.440
I think Diane Sawyer did two stories on the evening
488
00:24:08.480 --> 00:24:11.400
news the week the book came out. And Good Morning
489
00:24:11.420 --> 00:24:13.549
America had me on. Ben Sherwood, the boss, basically sent
490
00:24:13.589 --> 00:24:15.750
a note to every anchor of every show and said,
491
00:24:15.809 --> 00:24:17.910
you will do this story on your air.
492
00:24:18.529 --> 00:24:21.049
And that's what made it a hit.
493
00:24:24.279 --> 00:24:27.299
You said something a few minutes ago about not being
494
00:24:27.380 --> 00:24:32.269
a memoirist. necessarily at heart, but being an evangelical. And
495
00:24:32.309 --> 00:24:34.289
it strikes me that you also would not have published
496
00:24:34.329 --> 00:24:36.589
the book if you weren't just so, so sure that
497
00:24:36.630 --> 00:24:39.869
it really, really could help people. When did you realize
498
00:24:39.910 --> 00:24:43.430
in your own life how potent this stuff was? When
499
00:24:43.450 --> 00:24:46.190
did that evangelical part of like who you are latch
500
00:24:46.230 --> 00:24:50.170
itself onto meditation? Because at the moment of the panic attack,
501
00:24:50.210 --> 00:24:53.730
it wasn't even on your radar. No.
502
00:24:54.589 --> 00:24:57.609
So let me say two things. First, I think the
503
00:24:57.789 --> 00:25:03.319
best version of me, I think, is around this evangelical thing.
504
00:25:03.700 --> 00:25:07.859
The best version of me is like, let me harness
505
00:25:08.559 --> 00:25:11.740
these decades of training I got in network news and
506
00:25:11.779 --> 00:25:14.180
in local news to be a storyteller and to be
507
00:25:14.240 --> 00:25:17.259
a presenter of ideas and an explainer of ideas. Let
508
00:25:17.279 --> 00:25:20.369
me harness that to get out what is essentially a
509
00:25:20.410 --> 00:25:22.799
public health message. Okay, that's the best part of me.
510
00:25:22.809 --> 00:25:24.670
But the worst part of me, which you guys see
511
00:25:24.710 --> 00:25:29.000
behind the scenes occasionally, is driven by fear often, which
512
00:25:29.039 --> 00:25:33.440
can turn into kind of overcommitting or greed, acquisitiveness, you know,
513
00:25:33.460 --> 00:25:36.089
like wanting to do too many things and then I
514
00:25:36.119 --> 00:25:40.420
get short-tempered and then I'm scary. And so I'm not saying,
515
00:25:40.440 --> 00:25:44.130
I think the evangelical thing is real and it's not
516
00:25:44.250 --> 00:25:44.890
the whole story.
517
00:25:45.109 --> 00:25:46.390
So I just want to be open about that.
518
00:25:46.630 --> 00:25:49.150
But yeah, I do, I think in moments where I
519
00:25:49.190 --> 00:25:53.509
can get my anxiety under control, either internally through meditation
520
00:25:53.569 --> 00:25:57.170
and other modalities or or externally by like having a
521
00:25:57.210 --> 00:25:59.470
boss like Ben Sherwood or Diane Sawyer sit me down
522
00:25:59.519 --> 00:26:03.319
and say, you're good. Then when I'm relaxed, I think
523
00:26:03.339 --> 00:26:07.700
the best part of me can come out, which is helpfulness.
524
00:26:08.079 --> 00:26:09.480
You know, I say this all the time. You've heard
525
00:26:09.500 --> 00:26:10.700
me say it a million times. You probably have a
526
00:26:10.720 --> 00:26:15.049
drinking game for when I say this, but the Tibetan
527
00:26:15.109 --> 00:26:19.069
word for enlightenment roughly translates into a clearing away and
528
00:26:19.089 --> 00:26:21.690
a bringing forth. And that's at least one of the
529
00:26:21.710 --> 00:26:24.509
things that happens in meditation is you, you're starting to
530
00:26:24.809 --> 00:26:30.529
clear away the more noxious tendencies in your mind. And
531
00:26:30.569 --> 00:26:34.299
then what is innate in all of us, which is this,
532
00:26:35.180 --> 00:26:38.480
we are wired as a species, so you don't have
533
00:26:38.500 --> 00:26:41.160
to take it personally. When I talk about the best
534
00:26:41.220 --> 00:26:43.400
in me, I'm not patting myself on the back. I
535
00:26:43.420 --> 00:26:46.559
think this is a capacity we all have to be useful.
536
00:26:47.369 --> 00:26:50.069
And then the luckiest of us figure out some match
537
00:26:50.130 --> 00:26:53.589
between our innate desire to be helpful and useful and
538
00:26:53.650 --> 00:26:56.730
to matter and what our skills are. That's the sort
539
00:26:56.750 --> 00:27:00.349
of good fortune I've had. Anyway, maybe I should answer
540
00:27:00.390 --> 00:27:02.799
the question you actually asked me, which is why meditation?
541
00:27:04.940 --> 00:27:05.720
They're nodding their heads.
542
00:27:05.859 --> 00:27:06.140
Okay.
543
00:27:06.160 --> 00:27:11.480
So I had no interest in meditation, none. None, no
544
00:27:11.539 --> 00:27:14.559
preexisting interest in meditation. I was, my parents who I've
545
00:27:14.579 --> 00:27:16.660
referenced a couple of times were hippies and they used
546
00:27:16.680 --> 00:27:19.480
to drag me to, you know, health food stores and
547
00:27:20.420 --> 00:27:24.359
go camping. And I remember my dad wearing a do-rag
548
00:27:24.619 --> 00:27:27.869
and they were very annoying. And they forced me to
549
00:27:27.920 --> 00:27:30.329
do yoga classes when I was a kid and, you know, we,
550
00:27:30.549 --> 00:27:33.849
you know, whatever. So I had some scar tissue around that.
551
00:27:33.890 --> 00:27:36.289
And as a result, and that kind of entered into
552
00:27:36.349 --> 00:27:40.140
a noxious partnership with one of my less attractive tendencies,
553
00:27:40.200 --> 00:27:44.230
which is dismissiveness. I am at baseline dismissive. which is
554
00:27:44.430 --> 00:27:46.950
something I've worked on a lot with varying degrees of success.
555
00:27:47.369 --> 00:27:50.430
And so if you take my conditioning, you know, a
556
00:27:50.450 --> 00:27:54.329
childhood and this pattern of being dismissive, I thought meditation was,
557
00:27:54.970 --> 00:27:57.140
I mean, to the extent that I'd ever considered it before,
558
00:27:57.200 --> 00:28:00.599
just complete bullshit. And for people who smelled like feet
559
00:28:00.799 --> 00:28:05.099
and were really into aromatherapy and Cat Stevens and John
560
00:28:05.140 --> 00:28:08.880
Tash and crystals and whatever. And so after I had
561
00:28:08.900 --> 00:28:11.059
the panic attack and started doing therapy, I wasn't like
562
00:28:12.059 --> 00:28:13.349
diving into the meditation world.
563
00:28:13.990 --> 00:28:14.369
Of it all.
564
00:28:14.809 --> 00:28:16.950
That actually happened over the course of a couple of
565
00:28:17.009 --> 00:28:20.349
years without telling too much of the story. We'll actually,
566
00:28:20.650 --> 00:28:22.970
in the course of the next couple of weeks, you'll
567
00:28:22.990 --> 00:28:24.950
be meeting some of the key players in that story.
568
00:28:25.400 --> 00:28:27.920
But the TLDR of it is the first thing is
569
00:28:27.960 --> 00:28:29.839
I read a book by a guy named Eckhart Tolle.
570
00:28:30.779 --> 00:28:36.539
And Tolle is a best-selling self-help guru. And I was
571
00:28:36.579 --> 00:28:38.220
reading the book not because I was interested in him
572
00:28:38.299 --> 00:28:40.549
for my own purposes, but because I thought he might
573
00:28:40.569 --> 00:28:42.049
be a good story for Nightline.
574
00:28:43.029 --> 00:28:44.230
Which was one of the shows I worked on.
575
00:28:44.609 --> 00:28:46.829
And in the book, he made this argument that we
576
00:28:46.930 --> 00:28:51.109
all have a voice in our heads, not referring, he
577
00:28:51.130 --> 00:28:54.269
was not referring to schizophrenia or hearing voices. He was
578
00:28:54.289 --> 00:28:56.410
talking about the inner narrator that chases you out of
579
00:28:56.450 --> 00:28:58.890
bed and is yammering at you all day long and
580
00:28:58.910 --> 00:29:00.980
has you wanting stuff and not wanting stuff and judging
581
00:29:01.000 --> 00:29:04.039
people and comparing yourself to other people and judging yourself
582
00:29:05.019 --> 00:29:07.460
and thinking about the past or the future instead of
583
00:29:07.500 --> 00:29:10.660
focusing on what's happening right now. And Tully's argument was
584
00:29:10.700 --> 00:29:14.430
that this inner cacophony, which if we broadcast aloud, you
585
00:29:14.450 --> 00:29:20.019
would be locked up. This inner cacophony owns you if
586
00:29:20.059 --> 00:29:25.359
you have no visibility into what's happening. And I found
587
00:29:25.400 --> 00:29:30.400
that absolutely compelling. And I realized that this thesis about
588
00:29:30.420 --> 00:29:35.069
the human condition explained the panic attack, the most embarrassing
589
00:29:35.109 --> 00:29:35.710
moment of my life.
590
00:29:35.769 --> 00:29:37.329
It was because I had this.
591
00:29:37.529 --> 00:29:41.819
Inner dialogue fueled by greed and fear and confusion that
592
00:29:42.059 --> 00:29:43.880
I went, and some good stuff too. So I went
593
00:29:43.920 --> 00:29:47.759
off overseas and started covering war zones. Yeah, and in
594
00:29:47.779 --> 00:29:52.039
there were some good motivations with curiosity and idealism and service.
595
00:29:52.119 --> 00:29:56.690
And there were also some ambition and desire and I
596
00:29:56.730 --> 00:29:59.029
did all this without really taking a proper.
597
00:29:58.789 --> 00:30:00.309
Inventory of what my motivations were.
598
00:30:00.329 --> 00:30:02.549
And then I came home, got depressed, didn't know I
599
00:30:02.589 --> 00:30:05.509
was depressed, started self-medicating and had a panic attack.
600
00:30:05.589 --> 00:30:05.910
So I.
601
00:30:07.670 --> 00:30:11.859
Thought this was such an interesting thesis. And I went
602
00:30:11.880 --> 00:30:14.539
and interviewed Eckhart and he turned out to be unsatisfying.
603
00:30:14.579 --> 00:30:16.200
That's kind of a story in and of itself that's
604
00:30:16.240 --> 00:30:18.700
in the book. And if I can cut to the
605
00:30:18.740 --> 00:30:23.859
chase here, it was through subsequent research post meeting Eckhart
606
00:30:23.880 --> 00:30:25.880
Tolle that I found Buddhism.
607
00:30:26.640 --> 00:30:27.019
Through Dr.
608
00:30:27.470 --> 00:30:30.950
Mark Epstein, who's going to be part of the series
609
00:30:31.589 --> 00:30:34.670
in the coming days. You'll hear from Epstein. He becomes
610
00:30:34.710 --> 00:30:37.529
a major character in the book. He's a psychiatrist based
611
00:30:37.569 --> 00:30:39.470
in New York City. My wife gave me one of
612
00:30:39.509 --> 00:30:43.650
his books, and I started to realize that this idea
613
00:30:43.779 --> 00:30:46.319
of this monkey mind that we all have was not
614
00:30:46.359 --> 00:30:50.119
an Eckhart Tolle trademarked insight.
615
00:30:50.140 --> 00:30:52.299
It really dates all the way back to the Buddha.
616
00:30:52.980 --> 00:30:56.269
And Epstein has written these beautiful books about the overlap
617
00:30:56.289 --> 00:31:00.759
between Buddhism or the Dharma and modern psychology. And I
618
00:31:00.799 --> 00:31:02.480
started reading those books and then I called him up
619
00:31:02.539 --> 00:31:05.000
and begged him to be my friend. And, uh, and
620
00:31:05.019 --> 00:31:08.500
there's like a Tuesdays with Maury type, uh, vibe with
621
00:31:08.559 --> 00:31:11.900
me and Mark throughout the book. And he's explaining the
622
00:31:11.940 --> 00:31:14.450
Dharma to me as I'm trying to put it into, uh,
623
00:31:15.349 --> 00:31:20.650
action in a busy, modern skeptical life. So to answer
624
00:31:20.670 --> 00:31:24.759
your question about meditation, which I keep not doing. Meditation
625
00:31:24.900 --> 00:31:29.500
itself is a key part of how one manages the
626
00:31:29.599 --> 00:31:33.130
ego or the voice in the head, the inner chaos
627
00:31:33.170 --> 00:31:37.369
and cacophony. And I thought it must be some esoteric
628
00:31:37.390 --> 00:31:41.710
practice that involved joining a group or believing in special things.
629
00:31:41.750 --> 00:31:45.710
But it really is very simple and has been secularized
630
00:31:45.859 --> 00:31:50.109
in the form of mindfulness-based stress reduction practices. which was
631
00:31:50.150 --> 00:31:53.190
invented by Jon Kabat-Zinn, who was recently on the show
632
00:31:53.250 --> 00:31:55.269
at the beginning of the year, who is an MIT
633
00:31:55.869 --> 00:31:59.759
molecular biologist who was a practicing Zen Buddhist and had
634
00:31:59.799 --> 00:32:01.660
this idea that, well, maybe I can do a secular
635
00:32:01.720 --> 00:32:04.339
version of this. And so I started doing it and
636
00:32:04.440 --> 00:32:07.700
really is quite simple. You just sit in a comfortable position,
637
00:32:07.740 --> 00:32:12.230
close your eyes, try to focus on your breath. Usually
638
00:32:12.269 --> 00:32:14.650
that's what we start with. Doesn't have to be the breath,
639
00:32:14.670 --> 00:32:17.769
but often it's the breath. And you're just trying to
640
00:32:17.849 --> 00:32:20.569
feel the raw data of the physical sensations of the
641
00:32:20.609 --> 00:32:24.559
breath entering and exiting the nose or the belly rising
642
00:32:24.579 --> 00:32:26.660
and falling. And then as soon as you try to
643
00:32:26.700 --> 00:32:31.680
do this, you will inevitably encounter a sort of mental
644
00:32:31.779 --> 00:32:34.140
mutiny where you get carried all over the place by
645
00:32:34.160 --> 00:32:37.349
your thoughts and urges and emotions. And the whole game
646
00:32:37.410 --> 00:32:39.589
is just to notice when you've become distracted and begin
647
00:32:39.630 --> 00:32:43.599
again and again and again. And in this way, a
648
00:32:43.759 --> 00:32:45.640
couple of things happen. One, you change the part of
649
00:32:45.660 --> 00:32:49.559
the brain associated with attention regulation. And two, you develop
650
00:32:50.079 --> 00:32:53.700
a kind of self-awareness that we call mindfulness that allows
651
00:32:53.720 --> 00:32:56.410
you to see your ego, your inner narrator or whatever,
652
00:32:57.190 --> 00:33:00.509
with some nonjudgmental and maybe even humorous remove so that
653
00:33:00.529 --> 00:33:03.670
you're not owned by every neurotic obsession that flits through
654
00:33:03.710 --> 00:33:07.410
your mind. And there's a ton of data to suggest
655
00:33:07.450 --> 00:33:10.099
that this can have beneficial impacts on your brain, the
656
00:33:10.130 --> 00:33:11.720
rest of your body, and your behavior.
657
00:33:12.170 --> 00:33:13.970
Specifically around anxiety and depression.
658
00:33:14.490 --> 00:33:17.769
And so all of that, both the experience and the
659
00:33:17.829 --> 00:33:23.329
psychological research is what got me to attach to this practice.
660
00:33:23.349 --> 00:33:24.910
So that was like a 10 minute answer to your
661
00:33:24.950 --> 00:33:25.710
very simple question.
662
00:33:26.930 --> 00:33:29.200
As you would say, this is a podcast and long
663
00:33:29.259 --> 00:33:35.299
answers are totally fine. You talk about meditation, its various benefits,
664
00:33:35.339 --> 00:33:38.619
different ways to practice it. in the book. And one
665
00:33:38.640 --> 00:33:40.420
of the things you talk about is that it gives
666
00:33:40.440 --> 00:33:43.799
you this sort of superpower where maybe you've been reacting
667
00:33:43.839 --> 00:33:45.420
your whole life and all of a sudden you can
668
00:33:45.460 --> 00:33:48.519
respond instead of reacting. Can you talk a little bit
669
00:33:48.539 --> 00:33:49.440
about what that means?
670
00:33:50.619 --> 00:33:53.980
Yeah, I would say the thing in the book that
671
00:33:54.029 --> 00:33:58.089
I spent five years writing that most people latch onto
672
00:33:58.650 --> 00:34:01.750
is this idea of responding, not reacting. We spend so
673
00:34:01.769 --> 00:34:07.119
much time like utterly ensorcelled by, utterly enthralled to this
674
00:34:07.509 --> 00:34:11.469
chaotic inner dialogue. We act out our thoughts like they're
675
00:34:11.510 --> 00:34:15.090
tiny dictators, as the great meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein says.
676
00:34:15.829 --> 00:34:19.889
What meditation helps you do is to drop out of
677
00:34:19.949 --> 00:34:24.469
the noise, to start to view your thoughts with some
678
00:34:24.750 --> 00:34:29.230
distance so that they don't own you. And that doesn't
679
00:34:29.289 --> 00:34:31.949
mean that you don't engage effectively in the world.
680
00:34:31.989 --> 00:34:32.699
Quite the opposite.
681
00:34:32.980 --> 00:34:37.510
You learn to respond wisely to stuff instead of reacting blindly.
682
00:34:38.030 --> 00:34:41.949
Most of us are just totally controlled by the malevolent
683
00:34:41.989 --> 00:34:45.989
puppeteer of our thoughts, when in fact, we have this
684
00:34:46.070 --> 00:34:52.210
inner capacity to view the contents of our consciousness with
685
00:34:52.409 --> 00:34:57.389
some mindfulness, with some self-awareness, and without being totally attached
686
00:34:57.449 --> 00:35:00.460
to them. And to me, that's kind of the big
687
00:35:00.500 --> 00:35:03.780
headline of the book. And then what you see me
688
00:35:03.840 --> 00:35:06.820
do is fuck it up repeatedly.
689
00:35:08.420 --> 00:35:14.019
I've never personally seen that but yeah yeah of course
690
00:35:14.059 --> 00:35:15.800
i want to hand things back to lauren in a
691
00:35:15.840 --> 00:35:17.960
sec but just one more question i heard you say
692
00:35:17.980 --> 00:35:20.880
just a second ago you said we have this inner
693
00:35:20.940 --> 00:35:25.880
capacity um is that true for everybody i know people
694
00:35:25.900 --> 00:35:29.380
come up to you all the time and say meditation
695
00:35:29.440 --> 00:35:32.519
sounds great but it's not something i can do you
696
00:35:32.559 --> 00:35:36.429
know my mind too busy Do we all have that
697
00:35:36.449 --> 00:35:37.320
in our capacity?
698
00:35:38.099 --> 00:35:40.900
I love when people say that to me. Those are
699
00:35:40.920 --> 00:35:41.360
my people.
700
00:35:42.599 --> 00:35:45.079
I stole that turn of phrase from Sharon Salzberg because
701
00:35:45.099 --> 00:35:49.239
she says the same thing. Sharon's a great meditation teacher. Yeah,
702
00:35:49.739 --> 00:35:52.599
I think that's very common. People have a sense that
703
00:35:52.619 --> 00:35:55.900
their mind is crazy, that they're eminently distractible, or maybe
704
00:35:55.920 --> 00:36:00.269
they even tried meditation and very quickly saw that the
705
00:36:00.309 --> 00:36:02.750
mind is busy. I sometimes joke that it's like trying
706
00:36:02.769 --> 00:36:04.610
to hold a live fish in your hands, that it's just.
707
00:36:05.139 --> 00:36:06.170
just going all over the place.
708
00:36:06.889 --> 00:36:12.329
And they see that and wrongly conclude that that means
709
00:36:12.369 --> 00:36:16.690
that they have some sort of bespoke lunacy. I call
710
00:36:16.710 --> 00:36:20.409
this the fallacy of uniqueness, that somehow they and only
711
00:36:20.480 --> 00:36:24.659
they cannot meditate. When in fact, evolution most likely wired
712
00:36:24.739 --> 00:36:27.219
us to have this racing mind because it kept us
713
00:36:27.280 --> 00:36:30.119
safe on the savanna and other places where we were evolving.
714
00:36:30.539 --> 00:36:34.119
And so the point is not to clear your mind
715
00:36:34.690 --> 00:36:39.929
which I think is the most damaging misconception about meditation.
716
00:36:40.929 --> 00:36:43.190
As you've heard me say a million times, clearing your
717
00:36:43.210 --> 00:36:46.170
mind is impossible unless you're enlightened or you've died.
718
00:36:46.769 --> 00:36:48.070
The point is not to clear your mind.
719
00:36:48.090 --> 00:36:50.159
The point is to focus your mind for a few
720
00:36:50.219 --> 00:36:53.159
nanoseconds at a time on something neutral, like the feeling
721
00:36:53.199 --> 00:36:55.420
of your breath coming in and going out. And then
722
00:36:55.440 --> 00:36:57.739
every time you get distracted, you start again and again
723
00:36:57.760 --> 00:37:00.739
and again. And that getting distracted, that waking up from
724
00:37:00.760 --> 00:37:04.289
getting distracted is not proof that you're Failing, it's proof
725
00:37:04.309 --> 00:37:05.050
that you're doing it right.
726
00:37:05.070 --> 00:37:05.969
Because the whole.
727
00:37:05.889 --> 00:37:08.880
Game is just to notice how crazy the mind is,
728
00:37:09.360 --> 00:37:11.320
to notice what your life is actually about. You might
729
00:37:11.340 --> 00:37:14.570
think your life is about service or loyalty or whatever,
730
00:37:14.610 --> 00:37:15.800
and that's true in a certain way.
731
00:37:16.199 --> 00:37:16.820
In a certain way.
732
00:37:16.900 --> 00:37:19.280
But if you pay attention to your mind, mostly what
733
00:37:19.300 --> 00:37:21.969
your life is about is like, what's for lunch? And
734
00:37:22.030 --> 00:37:25.849
did I miss the latest Bravo show about real housewives?
735
00:37:25.909 --> 00:37:28.650
And where do gerbils run wild? And you know, blah, blah, blah.
736
00:37:28.969 --> 00:37:31.409
Or you're planning a homicide or whatever it is. That
737
00:37:31.730 --> 00:37:34.789
is what's happening in your mind on a moment-to-moment basis.
738
00:37:35.570 --> 00:37:37.590
And what this process does is help you wake up
739
00:37:37.630 --> 00:37:40.170
to that so that you can make better decisions.
740
00:37:42.909 --> 00:37:44.460
Coming up, we're going to talk about some of the.
741
00:37:44.469 --> 00:37:47.039
Aspects of my own personality that I've learned about along
742
00:37:47.059 --> 00:37:51.019
the way that needed to change. And DJ and Lauren
743
00:37:51.039 --> 00:37:54.260
will weigh in on whether I've been successful from their
744
00:37:54.300 --> 00:37:56.239
point of view. And we're going to talk about why
745
00:37:56.320 --> 00:37:59.860
our faults are not our fault, but they are our responsibility.
746
00:38:07.519 --> 00:38:10.179
How successful do you think you are, Dan, at operationalizing
747
00:38:10.199 --> 00:38:12.420
this in your daily interactions?
748
00:38:13.239 --> 00:38:14.260
I mean, I have a lot of good news on
749
00:38:14.280 --> 00:38:17.980
the score, although maybe I'll press DJ into answering that question.
750
00:38:18.619 --> 00:38:22.719
I am reasonably good, but there's a reason why I
751
00:38:22.760 --> 00:38:27.860
called the book 10% Happier. Like I, there's no, I
752
00:38:27.909 --> 00:38:31.190
don't see perfection as being on offer. Maybe there is
753
00:38:31.230 --> 00:38:35.289
such a thing as enlightenment, full enlightenment, but I have
754
00:38:35.329 --> 00:38:36.250
no evidence for that.
755
00:38:36.670 --> 00:38:37.960
I certainly haven't experienced it.
756
00:38:38.030 --> 00:38:41.630
So what I think is genuinely on offer is marginal
757
00:38:41.809 --> 00:38:45.679
and consistent improvement as long as you understand that you're
758
00:38:45.699 --> 00:38:49.090
going to have bad days. So it's not a steady
759
00:38:49.219 --> 00:38:54.389
upward trajectory of improvement. It's more like a sort of
760
00:38:54.429 --> 00:38:57.829
an up and down zigzaggy line. And so absolutely, if
761
00:38:57.909 --> 00:39:00.670
I haven't slept enough or if I'm anxious, particularly around
762
00:39:00.929 --> 00:39:04.369
money stuff, that's a big trigger for me. I can
763
00:39:04.429 --> 00:39:07.050
do some very dumb things or it can be short
764
00:39:07.269 --> 00:39:12.960
or I can push people too hard. And this kind of,
765
00:39:13.320 --> 00:39:15.769
you know, impacts people like you who work with me.
766
00:39:15.849 --> 00:39:18.050
And so this is a big thing that I talk
767
00:39:18.070 --> 00:39:20.349
to my shrink and talk to my executive coach, Jerry Colonna,
768
00:39:20.409 --> 00:39:22.230
and talk to my wife about, talk to my brother.
769
00:39:22.289 --> 00:39:24.989
People talk to Joseph Goldstein, the great meditation teacher, who's
770
00:39:25.030 --> 00:39:27.369
also featured in this series and in the book in
771
00:39:27.409 --> 00:39:29.550
a big way. Like, I try to work on this,
772
00:39:29.590 --> 00:39:34.059
but I'm not perfect at all. And so the good
773
00:39:34.119 --> 00:39:38.820
news is I do think I and anybody can get better.
774
00:39:40.489 --> 00:39:42.369
And so this is just another example of like, yeah,
775
00:39:42.429 --> 00:39:45.610
I use my story, but I'm not that interested in
776
00:39:46.170 --> 00:39:49.260
my story ultimately. Actually, I get pretty tired of telling
777
00:39:49.300 --> 00:39:51.530
this story over and over again. But I love talking
778
00:39:51.550 --> 00:39:53.630
about the universal aspects of it.
779
00:39:53.820 --> 00:39:54.050
And it.
780
00:39:55.550 --> 00:39:57.929
Is, I believe, a universal that we all have the
781
00:39:57.969 --> 00:40:00.769
capacity to grow and change. In the book, there's a
782
00:40:01.250 --> 00:40:05.369
whole set of instructions at the end. And it basically
783
00:40:05.389 --> 00:40:07.190
just teaches you how to meditate. And I actually went
784
00:40:07.210 --> 00:40:10.610
and revised and changed it for the new edition. But
785
00:40:10.650 --> 00:40:12.469
I kept something from the first book, which is that
786
00:40:12.489 --> 00:40:15.570
I ended with, I used to be a huge, this
787
00:40:15.630 --> 00:40:17.329
is going to show my age, but I used to
788
00:40:17.369 --> 00:40:20.719
be a huge buyer of records and CDs. And I
789
00:40:20.760 --> 00:40:22.719
used to go to Newberry Comics, which I think is
790
00:40:22.739 --> 00:40:25.119
still there on Newberry Street in Boston. It was my
791
00:40:25.179 --> 00:40:27.519
favorite record store. And I would love to see which
792
00:40:27.659 --> 00:40:30.159
albums were coming out soon because there was no internet
793
00:40:30.179 --> 00:40:32.219
in the 90s, or at least in the early 90s.
794
00:40:32.590 --> 00:40:33.739
So you'd have to go to the store to find
795
00:40:33.780 --> 00:40:36.809
out which band was guided by voices or pavement.
796
00:40:36.829 --> 00:40:38.869
Are they going to be putting out a new record soon?
797
00:40:40.210 --> 00:40:43.630
Above the list of new releases, there was this great
798
00:40:43.690 --> 00:40:48.030
little pithy little expression, all dates can change, so can you.
799
00:40:49.019 --> 00:40:53.349
And I love that because that is true. Now, I
800
00:40:53.409 --> 00:40:59.349
think there are probably some people who have mental health
801
00:40:59.389 --> 00:41:04.440
disorders that makes this harder. And I would say if
802
00:41:04.500 --> 00:41:07.420
you have mental health issues, first of all, you're not alone.
803
00:41:07.760 --> 00:41:10.579
Many of us, sadly, an increasing number of us have them.
804
00:41:11.739 --> 00:41:14.239
You just might want to work with your mental health
805
00:41:14.280 --> 00:41:17.130
professional if you have one to make sure that this
806
00:41:17.269 --> 00:41:19.619
practice is safe for you. But I do believe that
807
00:41:19.679 --> 00:41:24.659
generally speaking, the capacity to change is a universal. DJ,
808
00:41:24.719 --> 00:41:28.269
you have fewer compunctions about pissing me off. So I mean,
809
00:41:29.630 --> 00:41:31.949
I know you've seen me on many a bad hair day.
810
00:41:32.250 --> 00:41:34.710
So it's not like you're working with some like perfected
811
00:41:34.769 --> 00:41:35.349
guru here.
812
00:41:36.289 --> 00:41:38.750
Yeah, that's true. And, you know, I think one of
813
00:41:38.789 --> 00:41:43.590
the complicating factors is like you move through most spaces
814
00:41:43.630 --> 00:41:47.449
in your life and certainly through this space with us,
815
00:41:47.610 --> 00:41:50.679
with just a huge amount of power. Right. And so
816
00:41:51.360 --> 00:41:53.760
me having a bad day means something different than you
817
00:41:53.800 --> 00:41:54.469
having a bad day.
818
00:41:54.610 --> 00:41:54.769
Right.
819
00:41:54.789 --> 00:41:57.630
I don't know. I think my experience of you is
820
00:41:57.690 --> 00:42:02.269
like your practice is real. You take it seriously and
821
00:42:02.570 --> 00:42:05.860
it bestows on you a level of self-awareness that allows
822
00:42:05.889 --> 00:42:08.940
you to do a couple of things that I've seen
823
00:42:08.980 --> 00:42:12.480
you do. One is like, check your bad impulse in
824
00:42:12.500 --> 00:42:16.070
the moment, which you sometimes do. Another is like, name
825
00:42:16.090 --> 00:42:20.570
the bad impulse almost immediately after it surfaces. And another
826
00:42:20.659 --> 00:42:23.340
is like, name it a little later than that, but
827
00:42:23.460 --> 00:42:25.460
still name it, right? And it just takes a lot
828
00:42:25.500 --> 00:42:29.619
of the charge out of whatever the behavior is or
829
00:42:29.659 --> 00:42:33.340
the impulse is that you have that ability to either
830
00:42:34.139 --> 00:42:37.119
interrupt yourself before you do the thing or name it
831
00:42:37.159 --> 00:42:40.380
really quickly, right? So sometimes that means you just acknowledging like,
832
00:42:41.179 --> 00:42:43.269
I'm pretty tired right now and I'm a little frustrated
833
00:42:43.349 --> 00:42:46.110
and like, that might come out sideways and it's not
834
00:42:46.150 --> 00:42:47.969
about you. And you just kind of set the table
835
00:42:48.030 --> 00:42:50.969
that way as a way to like give everybody a
836
00:42:51.010 --> 00:42:53.380
sense of where you're at. Right. And other times you'll
837
00:42:53.400 --> 00:42:56.199
say like, you'd be a few minutes into a conversation
838
00:42:56.260 --> 00:42:58.019
and be like, Hey, I think I, I came in
839
00:42:58.059 --> 00:43:00.639
hot at the top and like my bad, you know?
840
00:43:00.800 --> 00:43:03.079
And so I think like, I don't know, that's kind
841
00:43:03.119 --> 00:43:06.050
of all you can ask for really in a world where,
842
00:43:06.070 --> 00:43:09.989
like you said, perfection's not on offer. And I also like,
843
00:43:12.050 --> 00:43:16.000
I walk through space with, less power than you, but
844
00:43:16.139 --> 00:43:19.179
still certain amounts of power in certain respects. And I
845
00:43:20.699 --> 00:43:22.610
don't know. I just really empathize with you. Like I
846
00:43:23.050 --> 00:43:26.349
am reactive sometimes too, you know, like I check my
847
00:43:26.389 --> 00:43:28.789
bad impulse a minute too late sometimes too.
848
00:43:29.469 --> 00:43:29.750
Yeah.
849
00:43:30.050 --> 00:43:32.250
I can say after like three plus years behind the
850
00:43:32.289 --> 00:43:35.449
curtain that like the things you say on the podcast
851
00:43:35.510 --> 00:43:40.829
feel genuine and there's not like some other sinister you
852
00:43:41.349 --> 00:43:44.889
lurking that like, doesn't meditate and doesn't care about anybody.
853
00:43:44.909 --> 00:43:48.510
I mean, that's my nightmare that my, first of all,
854
00:43:48.530 --> 00:43:50.130
thank you for that. And I'm sorry to put you
855
00:43:50.210 --> 00:43:52.710
on the spot. And my point in that was not
856
00:43:52.730 --> 00:43:54.289
to get you to push you to praise me in
857
00:43:54.349 --> 00:43:56.829
any way, but actually quite the opposite, which is to show,
858
00:43:56.849 --> 00:44:00.929
I want to give people permission to continue to be schmucks, right?
859
00:44:00.969 --> 00:44:06.260
Like that, just because you're engaging in self development, spiritual growth, whatever,
860
00:44:06.280 --> 00:44:10.110
it does not mean you should expect yourself to be perfect.
861
00:44:10.150 --> 00:44:13.130
That's just another form of, you know, delusion. And so
862
00:44:13.230 --> 00:44:15.610
really that was, that was my goal. Um, and so
863
00:44:15.639 --> 00:44:20.039
I appreciate you playing along. Um, and you know, the
864
00:44:20.059 --> 00:44:22.119
power of it is, is really important aspect. And I'm
865
00:44:22.139 --> 00:44:24.579
glad you pointed to that, um, that I honestly did
866
00:44:24.599 --> 00:44:27.380
not take into account for a long time and didn't
867
00:44:27.420 --> 00:44:29.980
want to look at because I'm uncomfortable having power. And
868
00:44:30.119 --> 00:44:33.239
so now I see it more as like a responsibility. Well,
869
00:44:33.880 --> 00:44:36.869
in my best moments. I see it more as a
870
00:44:36.909 --> 00:44:40.789
responsibility to other people. And, but, you know, forgetting is
871
00:44:40.809 --> 00:44:42.210
a huge problem. We talk about that a lot on
872
00:44:42.230 --> 00:44:44.590
the show that DJ and Lauren have a drinking game
873
00:44:44.610 --> 00:44:47.400
that they would probably be chugging around this thing that
874
00:44:47.420 --> 00:44:49.340
I'm about to say, which is that one of the
875
00:44:49.380 --> 00:44:52.480
original translations of the word Sati, which we now translate
876
00:44:52.519 --> 00:44:56.340
as mindfulness is recollecting or remembering because forgetting all the
877
00:44:56.659 --> 00:44:58.809
inspiring shit you might hear on the show or in
878
00:44:59.170 --> 00:45:02.940
great books or whatever is, And we're wired for that,
879
00:45:03.019 --> 00:45:06.199
for forgetting and denial. And the culture militates against all
880
00:45:06.219 --> 00:45:09.619
of the wisdom that you might pick up in certain
881
00:45:09.909 --> 00:45:12.610
places like the show or great books or whatever.
882
00:45:13.130 --> 00:45:16.469
And so I can forget. And I try to remember.
883
00:45:16.590 --> 00:45:18.969
But there are times in my next book I'm writing
884
00:45:19.010 --> 00:45:22.030
about an incident in which that involves a staffer who's
885
00:45:22.070 --> 00:45:25.900
no longer with us. She passed away. Where I was
886
00:45:26.280 --> 00:45:29.960
mad at her for like three months. And she was right.
887
00:45:31.260 --> 00:45:35.400
And I only recently really started to take into my
888
00:45:35.480 --> 00:45:38.320
bones that she was right. And, you know, I have
889
00:45:38.340 --> 00:45:41.039
a lot of regret around that. That kind of ugliness
890
00:45:42.000 --> 00:45:44.510
is definitely still in me. And again, I'm not, I'm
891
00:45:44.550 --> 00:45:47.090
saying this, trying to be helpful, just to say that
892
00:45:47.150 --> 00:45:51.090
this is a slow process. In any Orthodox Buddhist tradition,
893
00:45:51.110 --> 00:45:53.909
they'd say this is a multi-lifetime affair. You know, the
894
00:45:54.380 --> 00:45:56.380
the way we talk about the Buddha is that, you know,
895
00:45:56.420 --> 00:45:58.900
there are all these stories, the Jataka tales about his
896
00:45:59.039 --> 00:46:02.420
prior lives. And so this guy, again, I'm not saying
897
00:46:02.440 --> 00:46:03.840
you have to believe in any of this stuff, but
898
00:46:03.860 --> 00:46:06.480
the way the Buddha is talked about is as a
899
00:46:06.519 --> 00:46:09.159
guy who was messing it up for lifetimes until he
900
00:46:09.179 --> 00:46:09.679
got enlightened.
901
00:46:10.300 --> 00:46:10.519
Yeah.
902
00:46:11.000 --> 00:46:12.519
This thing you just said about like how long it
903
00:46:12.559 --> 00:46:15.179
took you to admit that someone else was right. Just,
904
00:46:15.519 --> 00:46:17.920
it calls to mind for me, one of, I think
905
00:46:17.940 --> 00:46:22.510
your most effective tricks in this arena, which is You
906
00:46:22.530 --> 00:46:25.110
just make it a habit to constantly name the fact
907
00:46:25.159 --> 00:46:28.480
that like there's probably information you don't have and there
908
00:46:28.500 --> 00:46:30.679
might be something you're not seeing clearly and you might
909
00:46:30.699 --> 00:46:32.880
be wrong about the thing you're about to say before
910
00:46:32.900 --> 00:46:36.400
you say the thing. And I could be reading you
911
00:46:36.420 --> 00:46:40.699
wrong here, but I think sometimes that comes from genuinely
912
00:46:40.880 --> 00:46:43.639
felt in the moment humility. And sometimes it comes from
913
00:46:43.659 --> 00:46:46.000
just like knowing that that's a good thing to do,
914
00:46:46.940 --> 00:46:50.400
even if you're pretty sure that you're right. But it
915
00:46:50.820 --> 00:46:53.380
really does make a difference. And it's just like a
916
00:46:53.440 --> 00:46:55.940
great hack, even in the times when like you might
917
00:46:55.980 --> 00:46:58.579
not mean it at all. Like saying it is a
918
00:46:58.599 --> 00:47:00.699
reminder even just to you, I think.
919
00:47:03.039 --> 00:47:05.070
I'm glad you point that out because it had I've
920
00:47:05.510 --> 00:47:07.710
been given the feedback before I met either of you.
921
00:47:08.230 --> 00:47:11.690
I got rather pointed feedback that when I said I
922
00:47:11.730 --> 00:47:14.550
could be wrong. It was a clear signal that I
923
00:47:14.590 --> 00:47:16.449
did not believe I was wrong. And I was going
924
00:47:16.469 --> 00:47:19.550
to say something to prove that. And so I would
925
00:47:19.590 --> 00:47:22.659
say one of the fruits of my practice that has
926
00:47:22.719 --> 00:47:26.659
showed up in the years after the book came out
927
00:47:26.679 --> 00:47:30.559
in the 10 years is that I have decreasing confidence
928
00:47:30.739 --> 00:47:35.360
in my own correctness. And there's a long history of
929
00:47:35.440 --> 00:47:40.489
people praising intellectual humility. You know, Yates said, the best
930
00:47:40.530 --> 00:47:44.510
among us lack all conviction. This is a quality that
931
00:47:44.550 --> 00:47:48.289
we praise, but it's not one in our current culture
932
00:47:48.329 --> 00:47:51.389
that we actually reward that often. We live in the
933
00:47:51.429 --> 00:47:53.809
middle of a time when like certainty is really rewarded
934
00:47:53.829 --> 00:47:57.369
and like the loudest, all caps, obnoxious version of that.
935
00:47:57.710 --> 00:47:59.510
And I, as somebody who came out of the media
936
00:47:59.550 --> 00:48:02.650
where that is definitely rewarded, did not bring to this
937
00:48:02.710 --> 00:48:07.429
game the best conditioning for intellectual humility. But the practice
938
00:48:07.489 --> 00:48:11.349
of like, consistently being confronted with the madness of your
939
00:48:11.409 --> 00:48:15.929
own mind will, if you let it over time, give
940
00:48:15.969 --> 00:48:20.309
you a kind of, I think, attractive and helpful lack
941
00:48:20.349 --> 00:48:23.530
of dogmatism. I mean, the Buddha said, I am not
942
00:48:23.570 --> 00:48:27.489
a dogmatist, I'm an analyst. He also said, those who
943
00:48:27.530 --> 00:48:31.170
cling to their views and opinions travel the world, annoying people.
944
00:48:31.750 --> 00:48:33.800
And so I do try to take that on board.
945
00:48:34.449 --> 00:48:39.320
And at my worst, I fall back into the like
946
00:48:39.559 --> 00:48:42.360
spouting of, I could be wrong, but not actually believing that.
947
00:48:43.239 --> 00:48:44.889
The one thing I do want to say that you're
948
00:48:44.909 --> 00:48:50.969
really good at Dan is creating a culture where even
949
00:48:51.030 --> 00:48:54.050
if it feels hard for all of us, we are
950
00:48:54.110 --> 00:48:57.869
encouraged to also speak our vulnerability or any kind of
951
00:48:57.989 --> 00:49:01.300
messy feeling. And I think that that is something that
952
00:49:01.320 --> 00:49:03.920
you've modeled and it feels connected to this.
953
00:49:04.039 --> 00:49:05.320
Like you're not perfect.
954
00:49:05.780 --> 00:49:08.579
Let's talk about it instead of letting this narrative just
955
00:49:08.659 --> 00:49:11.199
run the show in the background. Let's get it out
956
00:49:11.239 --> 00:49:15.050
there in the space, in the room, so that we're
957
00:49:15.150 --> 00:49:19.050
not just being led by these stories in our heads.
958
00:49:19.329 --> 00:49:22.739
And I think that that's... is something that I have
959
00:49:22.780 --> 00:49:25.239
experienced and is very interesting in a workspace.
960
00:49:25.440 --> 00:49:27.869
And I don't think necessarily very common.
961
00:49:29.469 --> 00:49:31.969
I appreciate that very much. And I feel a little
962
00:49:31.989 --> 00:49:36.070
sheepish for having forced you guys into this situation. Remember
963
00:49:36.090 --> 00:49:38.699
those Trump cabinet meetings when he would force all the
964
00:49:38.739 --> 00:49:41.110
cabinet folks to like say positive stuff about him.
965
00:49:41.190 --> 00:49:42.630
I don't want this to be a hostage video.
966
00:49:44.389 --> 00:49:45.670
We really like you, Dan.
967
00:49:45.730 --> 00:49:47.250
We like you so much.
968
00:49:47.650 --> 00:49:48.710
I'm not a monster.
969
00:49:50.690 --> 00:49:52.030
Guys, I don't know. You can't see them.
970
00:49:52.070 --> 00:49:53.429
I'm not sure if you're listening to this, you can
971
00:49:53.469 --> 00:49:55.789
see them, but they have fire emojis shooting out of
972
00:49:55.809 --> 00:50:01.809
their eyes. So, but, but I came, I came to
973
00:50:01.829 --> 00:50:06.210
this Through screwing it up. Another note I got was
974
00:50:06.250 --> 00:50:10.570
that I was actually rude to junior staffers, which was humiliating.
975
00:50:10.610 --> 00:50:14.000
This came in a 360 review I did many years ago.
976
00:50:14.719 --> 00:50:17.239
And it really pointed out that I was rude and
977
00:50:17.280 --> 00:50:21.219
dismissive and impatient and not creating, I believe the term
978
00:50:21.260 --> 00:50:23.719
of art is psychological safety with people. And so it
979
00:50:23.800 --> 00:50:26.400
is not my default mode to do that. I've had
980
00:50:26.440 --> 00:50:30.070
to train myself and I still screw it. Lauren doesn't
981
00:50:30.090 --> 00:50:32.000
want to say it, but I still screw it up.
982
00:50:32.610 --> 00:50:37.070
you know, semi regularly. So these are just lessons that
983
00:50:37.090 --> 00:50:38.489
I've had to learn. And a lot of it is by,
984
00:50:38.510 --> 00:50:41.690
you know, being on doing this show. Again, I always
985
00:50:41.730 --> 00:50:44.110
thought of the show for certainly for the first few
986
00:50:44.150 --> 00:50:47.929
years as, you know, an interesting little postscript on the book,
987
00:50:47.969 --> 00:50:50.349
but the book was the thing. And now I think
988
00:50:50.369 --> 00:50:53.530
this podcast reaches more people in a six week period
989
00:50:53.550 --> 00:50:56.329
of if I'm doing the math correctly than have ever
990
00:50:56.389 --> 00:51:00.409
read the book. And so this show has become like
991
00:51:00.739 --> 00:51:02.800
one of the main events of my life. And It's
992
00:51:02.840 --> 00:51:06.039
basically me getting free therapy and talking to people who
993
00:51:06.059 --> 00:51:11.510
are interesting. These lessons about vulnerability and psychological safety and
994
00:51:11.829 --> 00:51:15.369
communication skills. You know, I am trying to do what
995
00:51:15.409 --> 00:51:16.949
I hope the audience is trying to do, which is
996
00:51:17.190 --> 00:51:18.070
knit them into my life.
997
00:51:20.210 --> 00:51:23.489
When I hear you say that thing about how, for example,
998
00:51:23.550 --> 00:51:27.320
creating psychological safety is not your default mode. I just
999
00:51:27.340 --> 00:51:29.969
want to like point to one thing in there. not
1000
00:51:29.989 --> 00:51:31.889
to make you feel better, but because it might be
1001
00:51:31.909 --> 00:51:35.159
of service to other people, which is like this notion
1002
00:51:35.260 --> 00:51:40.920
that your default mode is somehow harmful, but also that
1003
00:51:40.980 --> 00:51:44.820
it's like yours is like also something that like I've
1004
00:51:44.860 --> 00:51:47.130
learned to question through the practice and through listening to
1005
00:51:47.150 --> 00:51:48.110
the guests on our show.
1006
00:51:48.170 --> 00:51:48.369
Right.
1007
00:51:48.409 --> 00:51:51.530
So like one version of the story is like Dan's selfish,
1008
00:51:52.170 --> 00:51:56.789
Dan like wields power irresponsibly, like Dan fails to create
1009
00:51:56.809 --> 00:52:01.309
psychological safety because Dan's default is bad, right? And I
1010
00:52:01.349 --> 00:52:04.809
know you have spoken openly and often about how you
1011
00:52:04.849 --> 00:52:08.230
have this sneaking suspicion that you are somehow irredeemably selfish
1012
00:52:08.349 --> 00:52:12.940
or bad, right? And all of that conditioning, the selfishness,
1013
00:52:13.860 --> 00:52:16.800
the rudeness to junior staffers, like everything you're talking about,
1014
00:52:17.239 --> 00:52:19.719
there are causes and conditions for that, right? There's things
1015
00:52:19.739 --> 00:52:22.110
that you learned in your time at ABC News and
1016
00:52:22.230 --> 00:52:25.289
before that, there's things that you learned from your parents
1017
00:52:25.309 --> 00:52:29.559
and your schooling, your teachers, the culture, the media, there
1018
00:52:29.579 --> 00:52:32.760
are things that are baked into our DNA as people,
1019
00:52:32.960 --> 00:52:36.179
like our defaults to fear and anger, or as like
1020
00:52:36.199 --> 00:52:38.730
the Buddha would say, greed, hatred, and delusion. And so
1021
00:52:38.789 --> 00:52:45.050
it's like, your default mode isn't really yours in a way, right?
1022
00:52:45.110 --> 00:52:47.150
It's like, you have to take responsibility for it, but
1023
00:52:47.449 --> 00:52:50.119
you don't have to tell yourself the story that in
1024
00:52:50.139 --> 00:52:52.250
the same way that like someone is not doesn't have
1025
00:52:52.289 --> 00:52:55.070
a uniquely racing mind. Like your default mode is not
1026
00:52:55.349 --> 00:52:58.610
uniquely reflective of something bad about you.
1027
00:53:01.170 --> 00:53:03.190
I mean, gold star. Yes, that's it.
1028
00:53:03.590 --> 00:53:06.030
I mean, that is one of the main thrusts of
1029
00:53:06.050 --> 00:53:08.650
the Dharma. There's a great Burmese master who was the
1030
00:53:08.690 --> 00:53:10.889
teacher to many of the folks who've been on the show,
1031
00:53:11.010 --> 00:53:15.409
like Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Salzberg and Jack Kornfield. His
1032
00:53:15.449 --> 00:53:19.860
name was, he's no longer with us, Sayadaw Upandita. And
1033
00:53:19.900 --> 00:53:22.619
he used to say, the mind is not yours, but
1034
00:53:22.639 --> 00:53:26.309
it is your responsibility. And that can sound esoteric, but
1035
00:53:26.349 --> 00:53:28.550
it's really as simple as this. As DJ was saying,
1036
00:53:29.170 --> 00:53:34.510
everything that's happening right now, every event rests on the
1037
00:53:34.670 --> 00:53:39.190
lip of a wave, on an unfathomable ocean of causes
1038
00:53:39.230 --> 00:53:43.150
and conditions dating back to the Big Bang and maybe before.
1039
00:53:44.130 --> 00:53:49.980
And when you view things with that perspective, It's hard
1040
00:53:50.019 --> 00:53:54.119
to take your shit very personally. And so I do,
1041
00:53:54.139 --> 00:53:56.489
I spend my life now, like not all of my life,
1042
00:53:56.530 --> 00:53:58.309
but a big percentage of my life telling my own
1043
00:53:58.349 --> 00:54:01.170
embarrassing stories, not because I think, I mean, I try
1044
00:54:01.190 --> 00:54:03.389
to make them interesting, but not because that's the point,
1045
00:54:03.449 --> 00:54:08.699
but because I'm trying to get people to see that
1046
00:54:08.719 --> 00:54:11.440
you don't have to take your own inner Mishigas too personally.
1047
00:54:11.880 --> 00:54:14.809
And that actually the Real liberation is to start to
1048
00:54:14.949 --> 00:54:17.380
see it as something that's impersonal. Doesn't mean you don't
1049
00:54:17.420 --> 00:54:19.500
have to take responsibility for it, but you don't have
1050
00:54:19.559 --> 00:54:23.000
to add on the whole story about how this is
1051
00:54:23.039 --> 00:54:28.409
you irrevocably, et cetera, et cetera. Coming up, how the
1052
00:54:28.449 --> 00:54:31.230
book's success has changed my life and how it feels
1053
00:54:31.309 --> 00:54:35.440
now to find myself in the role of quasi self-help guru.
1054
00:54:44.519 --> 00:54:47.900
Dan, your life obviously has changed significantly since this book
1055
00:54:47.960 --> 00:54:49.719
came out. And one of the things that I find
1056
00:54:49.760 --> 00:54:52.639
most interesting is that you've been turned into this kind
1057
00:54:52.679 --> 00:54:58.070
of quasi self-help guru. And I'm curious, how do you
1058
00:54:58.090 --> 00:55:00.750
feel when you hear that, first of all? And are
1059
00:55:00.769 --> 00:55:02.590
people coming to you for advice all the time?
1060
00:55:02.849 --> 00:55:07.150
How do you see yourself? Are you comfortable as.
1061
00:55:07.130 --> 00:55:09.510
Someone who's like a voice in the wellness field? And
1062
00:55:09.590 --> 00:55:11.369
what do you even think about that word wellness?
1063
00:55:12.760 --> 00:55:16.539
That's a great question. Initially had a lot of imposter
1064
00:55:16.579 --> 00:55:20.460
feelings about it. And I have so much respect for
1065
00:55:20.579 --> 00:55:24.659
meditation teachers who, as you know, I'm married to a doctor.
1066
00:55:24.719 --> 00:55:26.800
My parents are doctors and have a lot of respect
1067
00:55:26.820 --> 00:55:29.179
for doctors. And they go through so much training. I
1068
00:55:29.199 --> 00:55:31.719
lived with my wife when she went through residency. And
1069
00:55:31.739 --> 00:55:35.500
then I think three or four years of fellowship after
1070
00:55:35.559 --> 00:55:40.949
residency before she became a full attending physician. And meditation
1071
00:55:40.969 --> 00:55:45.119
teachers go through, I think, more training. you know, years
1072
00:55:45.280 --> 00:55:49.380
of silent retreat. And I have not done that. So
1073
00:55:49.420 --> 00:55:52.760
I really, I really worried about this initially. And I
1074
00:55:52.800 --> 00:55:54.980
didn't even know whether it was okay for me to
1075
00:55:55.940 --> 00:55:59.599
teach meditation when I was giving talks. Just to be clear,
1076
00:55:59.659 --> 00:56:01.320
when the book came out, I thought it would come out,
1077
00:56:01.400 --> 00:56:03.199
make a little blip, maybe even not much of a
1078
00:56:03.219 --> 00:56:05.639
blip and then go away. And then it ended up
1079
00:56:05.699 --> 00:56:08.670
being way more successful than I suspected. And it led
1080
00:56:08.750 --> 00:56:12.809
to this podcast. And meditation app and I still do
1081
00:56:12.829 --> 00:56:14.809
a lot of speeches all over the place. And I
1082
00:56:14.829 --> 00:56:17.110
was worried about, you know, was it responsible for me
1083
00:56:17.150 --> 00:56:21.090
to teach basic meditation and then answer people's questions about it?
1084
00:56:21.820 --> 00:56:23.699
And I had a big talk with Joseph Goldstein about
1085
00:56:23.719 --> 00:56:27.780
this and he said, yeah, first of all, it's totally
1086
00:56:27.800 --> 00:56:29.719
fine for you to teach basic meditation. And then when
1087
00:56:29.739 --> 00:56:31.639
you answer people's questions, as long as you keep it
1088
00:56:31.679 --> 00:56:35.460
in your experience, it's fine. You know, don't pretend you
1089
00:56:35.500 --> 00:56:38.340
know more than you know, just use I language to be,
1090
00:56:38.739 --> 00:56:41.239
I don't think he said this, but this This is
1091
00:56:42.179 --> 00:56:44.429
one of the communication skills that I've learned, that if
1092
00:56:44.449 --> 00:56:46.969
you keep it in your own personal experience, you're much
1093
00:56:47.030 --> 00:56:49.030
safer because you can be an authority in your own
1094
00:56:49.070 --> 00:56:54.570
personal experience. Now, 10 years have passed, and I increasingly
1095
00:56:54.610 --> 00:57:00.789
feel comfortable with, quasi-guru is right. I have not done
1096
00:57:00.809 --> 00:57:04.289
the training to be a full meditation teacher, but I
1097
00:57:04.329 --> 00:57:06.369
have done some training, and I do one or two
1098
00:57:06.469 --> 00:57:09.730
silent meditation retreats a year often 10 days. I've written
1099
00:57:09.750 --> 00:57:11.530
a couple of books on the subject. I host this
1100
00:57:11.590 --> 00:57:14.309
show two to three times a week. So I do
1101
00:57:14.469 --> 00:57:18.909
feel like I can give some advice with the caveat
1102
00:57:18.929 --> 00:57:20.389
that I am not a doctor.
1103
00:57:20.409 --> 00:57:23.030
I'm not a psychiatrist. I'm not a psychologist even.
1104
00:57:23.570 --> 00:57:27.530
And within that context, yeah, I can channel what I've learned,
1105
00:57:28.769 --> 00:57:31.449
filter it through my own personal experience and share that.
1106
00:57:31.550 --> 00:57:33.710
And if I take that approach, I do feel comfortable.
1107
00:57:33.730 --> 00:57:36.159
And I like, you know, I like being the guy
1108
00:57:36.199 --> 00:57:38.559
that my friends call if they have a problem. Yeah,
1109
00:57:38.579 --> 00:57:40.820
I like that a lot, actually. And I do spend
1110
00:57:40.840 --> 00:57:42.739
a certain amount of time at the beginning of those
1111
00:57:42.780 --> 00:57:44.679
conversations explaining all the stuff I don't know.
1112
00:57:45.320 --> 00:57:47.119
And then once I've done that, I feel better about
1113
00:57:47.239 --> 00:57:47.920
saying what I.
1114
00:57:49.519 --> 00:57:49.699
See.
1115
00:57:51.500 --> 00:57:54.559
You said something a few months ago. I think it
1116
00:57:54.599 --> 00:57:56.679
was just when the team was at dinner. And it
1117
00:57:56.699 --> 00:57:58.619
just popped out to me because I wasn't expecting it,
1118
00:57:59.309 --> 00:58:03.030
which was you talked about how the book... Or at
1119
00:58:03.070 --> 00:58:04.750
least at the time that you were writing it, you
1120
00:58:04.769 --> 00:58:07.070
felt like it had a kind of punk rock feel
1121
00:58:07.130 --> 00:58:11.210
to it. And I'm curious what you meant by that
1122
00:58:11.449 --> 00:58:17.380
and if that still feels like an animating spirit for
1123
00:58:17.460 --> 00:58:20.760
you in the work you're doing now, especially given everything
1124
00:58:20.780 --> 00:58:24.340
you've just said about how you've sort of established yourself
1125
00:58:24.480 --> 00:58:26.019
as this sort of go-to person.
1126
00:58:27.260 --> 00:58:29.039
I love that question. It's something I've been thinking about
1127
00:58:29.079 --> 00:58:30.639
a lot. And I would actually like to get some
1128
00:58:30.659 --> 00:58:32.519
feedback from the two of you on it. I'll say
1129
00:58:32.559 --> 00:58:34.179
a few words and then be interested to hear what
1130
00:58:34.199 --> 00:58:34.500
you think.
1131
00:58:35.159 --> 00:58:37.019
For sure. Well, first of all, I've always loved punk rock.
1132
00:58:37.400 --> 00:58:39.460
A lot of these records behind me in my little
1133
00:58:39.480 --> 00:58:41.769
studio here are like, I guess you would technically call
1134
00:58:41.809 --> 00:58:44.750
them sort of alternative or underground rock from the 80s
1135
00:58:44.809 --> 00:58:47.869
and 90s. Bands like the Minutemen and the Replacements and
1136
00:58:47.909 --> 00:58:50.250
Sonic Youth and Husker Du. And then in the 90s,
1137
00:58:50.250 --> 00:58:54.190
like Guided by Voices and Pavement. So I've always loved that.
1138
00:58:54.230 --> 00:58:59.820
And I've always been very attracted to interesting worlds outside
1139
00:58:59.840 --> 00:59:01.820
of the mainstream, and that was a huge theme in
1140
00:59:01.880 --> 00:59:06.429
my journalism. I definitely, I covered big mainstream events, but
1141
00:59:06.489 --> 00:59:08.849
I really loved, especially in the later part of my career,
1142
00:59:08.909 --> 00:59:11.699
was diving into the world of like the underground drug
1143
00:59:11.800 --> 00:59:16.079
trade in Rio or the child slave rings in Haiti
1144
00:59:16.340 --> 00:59:22.139
and busting American pedophiles prowling in Cambodia and these little
1145
00:59:22.199 --> 00:59:26.519
these these strange and often sometimes not so great subcultures.
1146
00:59:26.840 --> 00:59:28.219
It's always been very interesting to me.
1147
00:59:28.260 --> 00:59:32.349
And so that Finding new ways to see the world
1148
00:59:32.389 --> 00:59:34.849
and talk about the world has always been important to me.
1149
00:59:35.210 --> 00:59:38.150
And when I started getting interested in meditation before the
1150
00:59:38.170 --> 00:59:41.550
book came out, I was really intrigued by the science
1151
00:59:41.929 --> 00:59:44.179
and by the practice and very annoyed by the books
1152
00:59:44.239 --> 00:59:47.400
I was reading because there was this syrupy saccharine tone.
1153
00:59:47.880 --> 00:59:48.269
And so I.
1154
00:59:49.389 --> 00:59:51.730
tried to write a book that used the F word
1155
00:59:51.750 --> 00:59:55.349
a lot and told embarrassing stories about cocaine and, you know,
1156
00:59:55.389 --> 00:59:59.190
had a sort of eyebrow raising title because I thought
1157
00:59:59.210 --> 01:00:01.449
that was the way to break through. Because again, remember
1158
01:00:01.469 --> 01:00:04.610
the cultural context, there was a lot of skepticism generally
1159
01:00:05.800 --> 01:00:07.820
in the culture at that time about meditation to the
1160
01:00:07.840 --> 01:00:10.420
extent that anybody even thought about it. So I thought, well,
1161
01:00:10.440 --> 01:00:12.679
if I'm an evangelist, I need the right language. You know,
1162
01:00:12.699 --> 01:00:15.519
the Buddha was very good at this. You know, he
1163
01:00:15.559 --> 01:00:18.000
was on the scene during an agrarian time and he
1164
01:00:18.039 --> 01:00:23.079
would use farm or very down home, like analogies and
1165
01:00:23.119 --> 01:00:25.340
metaphors in his teaching. If he was talking to people
1166
01:00:25.360 --> 01:00:28.000
who worship fire, he would talk about the Dharma through
1167
01:00:28.039 --> 01:00:30.590
the lens of fire. I do think that's an important
1168
01:00:30.690 --> 01:00:33.130
thing to talk to people in ways that they're likely
1169
01:00:33.170 --> 01:00:36.230
to listen. I'm where I'd be interested to hear your
1170
01:00:36.289 --> 01:00:38.730
points of view is that I think over time I've
1171
01:00:38.750 --> 01:00:41.699
been off at times because I think the culture has
1172
01:00:41.780 --> 01:00:44.360
moved and there is less skepticism about meditation.
1173
01:00:44.639 --> 01:00:45.480
And sometimes my.
1174
01:00:47.869 --> 01:00:51.449
I've got these habits and this conditioning from that first
1175
01:00:51.530 --> 01:00:55.309
book that may not be relevant or serving me so
1176
01:00:55.369 --> 01:00:56.159
well now.
1177
01:00:57.519 --> 01:00:58.380
Lauren, you're nodding your head.
1178
01:00:58.980 --> 01:01:02.679
Yeah, I'm just thinking how like my favorite versions of you, Dan,
1179
01:01:02.920 --> 01:01:06.619
are when you're like earnest and not in that mode.
1180
01:01:06.920 --> 01:01:09.309
But also I think it just speaks to what different
1181
01:01:09.329 --> 01:01:11.849
people are drawn to. I think that there's something about
1182
01:01:11.889 --> 01:01:16.199
knowing that you had so much skepticism about And then
1183
01:01:16.260 --> 01:01:21.230
watching that soften and seeing you open is exciting to
1184
01:01:21.289 --> 01:01:25.949
see for me. And maybe that's just my own personal preference,
1185
01:01:25.989 --> 01:01:29.150
but I have a feeling that other people might feel similarly.
1186
01:01:29.170 --> 01:01:32.469
Yeah, I appreciate that. Thank you.
1187
01:01:32.630 --> 01:01:34.730
I think there's something to what you're saying on the
1188
01:01:34.829 --> 01:01:38.389
one hand. I got so much feedback, especially early on,
1189
01:01:38.409 --> 01:01:41.769
that the skepticism was so important for people. Like, oh, well,
1190
01:01:41.789 --> 01:01:43.809
if this guy's going down this road, maybe I can
1191
01:01:43.849 --> 01:01:46.550
go with him. And I think, especially for people like
1192
01:01:46.590 --> 01:01:50.050
my age and older, you know, I'm a Gen X, like,
1193
01:01:50.309 --> 01:01:53.309
I think still that's very important. And yet, I think
1194
01:01:53.329 --> 01:01:55.789
for younger people, especially because younger people, by most standards,
1195
01:01:56.969 --> 01:01:59.619
humans are younger than me, but I'm referring to, you know,
1196
01:02:00.179 --> 01:02:03.800
anybody in their 30s or below that, as you guys know,
1197
01:02:03.820 --> 01:02:06.400
there's so much suffering going on right now. People are
1198
01:02:06.500 --> 01:02:09.739
not bringing skepticism to tools that could help them turn
1199
01:02:09.780 --> 01:02:11.210
down their anxiety or depression.
1200
01:02:11.510 --> 01:02:12.329
They really want them.
1201
01:02:12.429 --> 01:02:15.289
And so I don't need to gild the lily or
1202
01:02:16.110 --> 01:02:20.010
dress it up with, you know, too much profanity or skepticism,
1203
01:02:20.050 --> 01:02:23.590
because that actually is that it's discordant to many audiences.
1204
01:02:23.989 --> 01:02:27.369
So I'm increasingly trying to figure out how to straddle
1205
01:02:27.409 --> 01:02:30.389
all of this and be effective and be real because
1206
01:02:30.469 --> 01:02:32.190
I am a guy who swears a lot and I
1207
01:02:32.670 --> 01:02:35.670
do like making jokes. And it's about thinking about the
1208
01:02:35.730 --> 01:02:37.340
appropriate time and place for all of that.
1209
01:02:37.800 --> 01:02:40.440
That's so interesting. There's probably never going to be a
1210
01:02:40.500 --> 01:02:43.480
right answer there. That question will probably be alive for
1211
01:02:43.539 --> 01:02:45.019
as long as you are, at least as long as
1212
01:02:45.039 --> 01:02:48.340
you're doing this work. Yeah, we hear from people all
1213
01:02:48.360 --> 01:02:51.469
the time like, thank God you got rid of the bleeping.
1214
01:02:51.530 --> 01:02:53.750
It's nice to hear the authentic Dan. And we also
1215
01:02:53.769 --> 01:02:55.710
hear from people all the time that's like, stop cursing.
1216
01:02:55.769 --> 01:02:57.969
It's not mindful. I had to turn it off. It's
1217
01:02:58.010 --> 01:03:02.239
ruining my equanimity. And those are just two things that
1218
01:03:02.280 --> 01:03:05.320
are both true at the same time. I guess when
1219
01:03:05.400 --> 01:03:10.239
I think about your skepticism, I think like, yeah, we
1220
01:03:10.280 --> 01:03:13.829
might be in a time when you don't need to
1221
01:03:14.670 --> 01:03:17.429
work as hard to signal that you're not going to
1222
01:03:17.469 --> 01:03:20.929
be using syrupy language and we're not going to be
1223
01:03:21.110 --> 01:03:23.570
super precious about this. That just might not be as
1224
01:03:23.630 --> 01:03:27.010
important as it was 10 years ago. But I think
1225
01:03:27.070 --> 01:03:33.889
that the spirit of how do we really reach people
1226
01:03:34.250 --> 01:03:38.550
and connect them to practices that can really help still
1227
01:03:38.670 --> 01:03:42.960
needs skepticism because we now live in a world where
1228
01:03:43.019 --> 01:03:47.449
mental health conversations and meditation conversations are everywhere and they're
1229
01:03:47.489 --> 01:03:52.789
for sale everywhere. And there are a lot of claims
1230
01:03:52.829 --> 01:03:54.690
being made and there are a lot of products being
1231
01:03:54.730 --> 01:03:57.329
sold and there's a lot of conventional wisdom being peddled.
1232
01:03:57.570 --> 01:04:00.320
And so we still need to be skeptical, but maybe
1233
01:04:00.340 --> 01:04:02.980
just in different ways. Like, are we talking about trauma
1234
01:04:03.079 --> 01:04:05.039
in ways that are good for people or bad for people?
1235
01:04:05.139 --> 01:04:07.139
Are we talking about trigger warnings in ways that are
1236
01:04:07.159 --> 01:04:08.940
good for people or bad for people? Are we talking
1237
01:04:08.960 --> 01:04:11.880
about Is talking about anxiety all the time actually helpful
1238
01:04:12.139 --> 01:04:14.599
or is it making people more anxious, right? So like
1239
01:04:15.340 --> 01:04:18.260
we still need the skepticism. And I think there is
1240
01:04:18.320 --> 01:04:20.980
an echo chamber that we can sometimes fall into where
1241
01:04:21.019 --> 01:04:23.489
we get pitched a guest and they've got this great
1242
01:04:23.510 --> 01:04:26.150
pedigree and their book has been blurbed by 10 people
1243
01:04:26.170 --> 01:04:28.130
who have been on the show before. And it just
1244
01:04:28.150 --> 01:04:32.429
feels like an obvious home run. Are we losing a
1245
01:04:32.469 --> 01:04:35.840
little bit of the skepticism that you started with? Like,
1246
01:04:35.880 --> 01:04:39.230
do we need to be pushing harder on, what are
1247
01:04:39.389 --> 01:04:41.409
really the best ways to be talking about this? What
1248
01:04:41.449 --> 01:04:44.969
are really the most useful practices? So yeah, I think
1249
01:04:45.010 --> 01:04:46.960
it's got to stay. It's just got to like bob
1250
01:04:47.000 --> 01:04:50.139
and weave and change and be impermanent like everything else.
1251
01:04:51.079 --> 01:04:53.380
Yeah, I think what I'm hearing you both say is
1252
01:04:53.440 --> 01:04:58.500
something like there's healthy skepticism and maybe a corrosive skepticism.
1253
01:04:58.599 --> 01:05:02.989
Healthy skepticism that you're pointing to is like rigor and
1254
01:05:03.139 --> 01:05:07.329
careful thought. And an unhealthy skepticism might look like cynicism.
1255
01:05:08.429 --> 01:05:13.579
Or it might look like glibness and lazy profanity and
1256
01:05:14.139 --> 01:05:17.500
easy jokes. And so I don't think we're heading into
1257
01:05:17.539 --> 01:05:20.440
a world where I don't say fuck anymore or I
1258
01:05:20.480 --> 01:05:24.070
don't make jokes. But I was talking with Joseph about
1259
01:05:24.110 --> 01:05:26.510
this just the other day. He was saying that some
1260
01:05:26.550 --> 01:05:29.590
people don't like how my sign-off on Instagram is inner
1261
01:05:29.610 --> 01:05:33.090
peace motherfuckers. But if you look at the comments, some
1262
01:05:33.110 --> 01:05:34.650
of the people in his world don't like that I
1263
01:05:35.090 --> 01:05:36.550
say that. But if you look at the comments on
1264
01:05:36.570 --> 01:05:38.869
those videos, they're just like people... Or like, make me
1265
01:05:38.889 --> 01:05:41.139
a t-shirt that says that. And we were talking about
1266
01:05:41.239 --> 01:05:43.440
when is it appropriate to do this? When is it
1267
01:05:43.519 --> 01:05:47.079
skillful and useful? And when is it not? And I
1268
01:05:47.119 --> 01:05:49.679
don't have clear answers. I'm just trying to figure that out.
1269
01:05:51.099 --> 01:05:54.590
I think your earnestness lands well, though, with that as
1270
01:05:54.630 --> 01:05:55.269
the backdrop.
1271
01:05:56.510 --> 01:05:57.570
Yeah. Yeah.
1272
01:05:57.610 --> 01:05:59.829
So I think it's like what you're pointing to is
1273
01:06:00.170 --> 01:06:02.489
some sort of wise combination.
1274
01:06:02.989 --> 01:06:05.489
Yeah. Like everything in life, right?
1275
01:06:05.880 --> 01:06:06.099
Yes.
1276
01:06:06.579 --> 01:06:09.900
This is another, you know, TPH staff drinking game I'm
1277
01:06:09.920 --> 01:06:12.860
sure that they could play. But I'm always talking about
1278
01:06:12.880 --> 01:06:17.150
this Esther Perel expression that I love. Esther Perel is
1279
01:06:17.190 --> 01:06:19.210
the great couples counselor who's been on the show a
1280
01:06:19.210 --> 01:06:21.369
million times. I love her so much. And she talks
1281
01:06:21.429 --> 01:06:24.489
about how some things are not problems to be fixed,
1282
01:06:24.969 --> 01:06:26.349
but dynamics to be managed.
1283
01:06:27.030 --> 01:06:28.869
And I think we've just identified one.
1284
01:06:30.469 --> 01:06:30.869
I love that.
1285
01:06:32.170 --> 01:06:35.429
So, yeah, maybe before we let folks go, Dan, can you...
1286
01:06:36.269 --> 01:06:38.809
Just give us a preview of what's coming up in
1287
01:06:38.829 --> 01:06:41.849
this really exciting series that we've been working on for
1288
01:06:41.889 --> 01:06:43.889
so long around the 10th anniversary.
1289
01:06:44.670 --> 01:06:46.929
We are doing a big and ambitious series here on
1290
01:06:46.949 --> 01:06:49.289
the show. Very grateful to DJ and Lauren for doing
1291
01:06:49.329 --> 01:06:51.969
a ton of work. One of the guiding principles that
1292
01:06:51.989 --> 01:06:53.739
we talked about a lot is that we didn't want
1293
01:06:53.760 --> 01:06:57.440
this to feel just like rote and repetitive promotion for
1294
01:06:57.460 --> 01:06:59.760
the book. And so, yeah, we are celebrating the fact
1295
01:06:59.800 --> 01:07:01.980
that there's a new edition of the book coming out,
1296
01:07:02.019 --> 01:07:04.730
a revised edition of the book. And that's fun for us.
1297
01:07:05.059 --> 01:07:07.760
But these episodes are meant to stand on their own
1298
01:07:08.000 --> 01:07:11.840
as value add for you, the listener. And so there
1299
01:07:11.860 --> 01:07:13.840
will be a thin veneer of, hey, this is part
1300
01:07:13.860 --> 01:07:16.739
of this series. But mostly it's about just doing something
1301
01:07:16.800 --> 01:07:19.480
useful and interesting for you. So the theme is that
1302
01:07:19.500 --> 01:07:21.800
we're just going back and talking to the key players
1303
01:07:21.840 --> 01:07:26.079
from the book. And it's not so much about talking
1304
01:07:26.119 --> 01:07:29.489
to them personally. about their experience being in the book,
1305
01:07:29.550 --> 01:07:31.449
that would be pretty boring. We're just talking about the
1306
01:07:31.510 --> 01:07:33.869
things they're interested in now. So we're just producing a
1307
01:07:33.889 --> 01:07:36.889
bunch of new episodes that we would produce at any time,
1308
01:07:36.909 --> 01:07:39.550
but we're just kind of lumping them together in this series.
1309
01:07:39.590 --> 01:07:42.210
So we're talking to people like Joseph Goldstein. And when
1310
01:07:42.250 --> 01:07:43.989
I asked him what he wanted to talk about, he
1311
01:07:44.179 --> 01:07:47.860
said that he's increasingly interested in talking about esoteric aspects
1312
01:07:47.960 --> 01:07:52.349
of buddhist cosmology like karma and rebirth and even superpowers
1313
01:07:52.409 --> 01:07:55.409
and so we actually had a fascinating discussion about this
1314
01:07:55.510 --> 01:07:57.719
and and it's not the type of things that modern
1315
01:07:57.739 --> 01:08:00.940
dharma teachers especially especially in the west really go into
1316
01:08:01.000 --> 01:08:03.320
and and he he goes into it we talked to
1317
01:08:03.679 --> 01:08:07.559
deepak chopra who plays a bit of a the role
1318
01:08:07.599 --> 01:08:09.949
of a foil in the book he uh make fun
1319
01:08:09.969 --> 01:08:11.670
of him a little bit. And so I was interested
1320
01:08:11.690 --> 01:08:13.650
to see what do I make of him now, 10
1321
01:08:13.650 --> 01:08:15.590
years later, and is he mad at me? And so
1322
01:08:15.989 --> 01:08:18.569
you'll hear the results. We talked to Spring Washam, who's
1323
01:08:18.590 --> 01:08:20.909
a great meditation teacher, who I also kind of make
1324
01:08:20.949 --> 01:08:22.250
fun of a little bit in the book, although she
1325
01:08:22.270 --> 01:08:26.100
turns into a hero. And subsequently, she and I have
1326
01:08:26.119 --> 01:08:28.899
become quite good friends. And so we're talking to her
1327
01:08:28.960 --> 01:08:31.939
about Should you go on a meditation retreat? Something that
1328
01:08:32.020 --> 01:08:34.670
people talk about a lot and increasingly people are interested in.
1329
01:08:34.760 --> 01:08:36.670
And so what do you need to know before you go?
1330
01:08:36.770 --> 01:08:39.369
Should you even go? We're going to talk to her
1331
01:08:39.409 --> 01:08:42.109
about that. I talked to Dr. Mark Epstein, who I
1332
01:08:42.130 --> 01:08:45.670
mentioned earlier, and he's got fascinating things to say about
1333
01:08:45.689 --> 01:08:49.149
the Buddhist concept of emptiness or not self, which we
1334
01:08:49.170 --> 01:08:51.729
were talking about earlier, like this very hard to grok
1335
01:08:51.789 --> 01:08:54.430
idea that you shouldn't take the contents of your mind
1336
01:08:54.529 --> 01:08:57.489
personally and how that can seem scary or weird, but
1337
01:08:57.550 --> 01:09:00.920
actually it should be deeply comforting. And then finally, we
1338
01:09:00.939 --> 01:09:03.180
talked to my brother, Matt, who plays the role of
1339
01:09:03.239 --> 01:09:05.039
skeptic in the book, who's making fun of me for
1340
01:09:05.079 --> 01:09:08.079
getting into all this stuff and is now, to my
1341
01:09:08.140 --> 01:09:13.159
great delight, a very dedicated Dharma practitioner. I have jokes
1342
01:09:13.340 --> 01:09:15.340
that there's times when he comes to me to talk
1343
01:09:15.380 --> 01:09:19.470
about meditation and I have this buddhist phrase that comes
1344
01:09:19.510 --> 01:09:21.760
through my mind which is i fucking told you uh
1345
01:09:23.380 --> 01:09:26.560
and uh it's a that's a really fun conversation very
1346
01:09:26.600 --> 01:09:29.479
satisfying for me and finally just one now that i'm
1347
01:09:29.520 --> 01:09:32.520
just shamelessly promoting everything here just what i do want
1348
01:09:32.560 --> 01:09:34.560
to say that we are doing a live show in
1349
01:09:34.579 --> 01:09:37.180
new york city um we're gonna have a band and
1350
01:09:37.520 --> 01:09:40.609
uh some very special guests many of whom you just
1351
01:09:40.630 --> 01:09:41.369
heard me talk about.
1352
01:09:41.670 --> 01:09:43.289
So you can come celebrate this in person.
1353
01:09:43.310 --> 01:09:45.689
This is also just kind of in keeping with us
1354
01:09:45.829 --> 01:09:48.810
running a bunch of experiments lately. So this kind of
1355
01:09:48.850 --> 01:09:52.430
idea of doing a live party, I'm interested to see
1356
01:09:52.449 --> 01:09:54.470
how it goes. So come join us. All the information's
1357
01:09:54.529 --> 01:09:55.090
in the show notes.
1358
01:09:56.189 --> 01:09:56.510
Awesome.
1359
01:09:57.970 --> 01:10:00.590
Thanks for letting us grill you. This has been a
1360
01:10:00.630 --> 01:10:02.390
fun turning of the tables today.
1361
01:10:04.109 --> 01:10:05.449
We should do it more often. You guys are really
1362
01:10:05.470 --> 01:10:09.300
good at this. Well, We learn from the best, don't we?
1363
01:10:09.479 --> 01:10:11.619
I think I just threw up in my mouth a
1364
01:10:11.619 --> 01:10:13.300
little bit.
1365
01:10:13.359 --> 01:10:20.939
I'm here to bring the earnest energy too. Come on.
1366
01:10:20.979 --> 01:10:22.779
You guys are the best. This has been an amazing series.
1367
01:10:22.850 --> 01:10:24.649
It's also been a great conversation. So thank you.
1368
01:10:25.289 --> 01:10:25.930
Thank you, Dan.
1369
01:10:26.050 --> 01:10:27.210
Thank you. Thanks for having us.
1370
01:10:30.109 --> 01:10:33.069
Thanks again to DJ and Lauren. We've got many more
1371
01:10:33.149 --> 01:10:37.869
great episodes coming up. Deepak Chopra, Joseph Goldstein. Mark Epstein,
1372
01:10:38.170 --> 01:10:40.970
my little brother. It's going to be great. 10% Happier
1373
01:10:41.029 --> 01:10:43.850
is produced by Gabrielle Zuckerman, Justine Davey, Lauren Smith, and
1374
01:10:43.869 --> 01:10:47.380
Tara Anderson. DJ Kashmir is our senior producer. Marissa Schneiderman
1375
01:10:47.420 --> 01:10:50.199
is our senior editor. Kevin O'Connell is our director of
1376
01:10:50.279 --> 01:10:53.359
audio and post-production. And Kimmy Regler is our executive producer.
1377
01:10:53.439 --> 01:10:56.539
Alicia Mackey leads our marketing. And Tony Magyar is our
1378
01:10:56.600 --> 01:10:59.829
director of podcasts. And finally, Nick Thorburn of the great
1379
01:10:59.869 --> 01:11:01.649
band Islands wrote our theme.