Dan Harris: Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics [From the Archive]

[00:00:01] This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is The James Altucher Show. Presenting the Archive. Classic episodes that remain timeless. The raw, unfiltered conversations from the early days in which people shared their failures and showed us exactly how they rebuilt everything from the ground up. Today on The James Altucher Show. Dan Harris.

[00:00:31] We're very much the stars of our own movie, and sometimes these are sad movies. And we get sucked up into the story of me. And the world constricts when that happens. Allen där RW Having фильм better forダ IgEV And it's almost like, uh, the difference, and there's a subtle difference in the words between happiness and well-being. Well-being doesn't necessarily imply happiness. It means you're well right now. Gasteli Rundgren Jackbill

[00:00:54] Yeah. Once again, so excited to have Dan Harris on the podcast. Dan Harris, welcome. This is like my third time, right? No, it's your second, but... Oh, yeah, it is your third. Yeah, because you did... First off, I'll introduce you. You did the New York Times bestselling book, 10% Happier. How many weeks was that on the bestselling list? You know, I knew...

[00:01:23] It was something like 10 or 11 or something. It was a lot. Yeah, yeah. That had some legs. Yeah, it had some legs to my great surprise. It's still selling really well. Yeah, it does all right. It's like two years ago, right? Four years ago. That book's four years ago? I know. We're getting old, man. What the hell? And then your 10% Happier app you came on when you first developed that. Oh, right, right, right. And we'll talk about that a little more today. Very excited to talk about that. And you also are a co-host on Nightline on ABC. Good Morning America.

[00:01:51] You're an anchor on The Weekends. You have a very successful journalism career. 10% Happier was such a great book because not only was it about how to be 10% happier, which is a unique concept. It was about your experiences with meditation, but very personal experiences, like your kind of post-traumatic stress from covering the wars. And you basically had this breakdown, this panic attack on air, which people could find on YouTube. And you had some substance abuse that led to that,

[00:02:20] plus post-traumatic stress, and how you then, your recovery back using meditation. And you write about it so authentically and sincerely in 10% Happier, which I think is really the key to a great book, to have the arc of the hero, a story combined with something you want to say, which is, here's how you can be a little bit happier. There's all these books that you want to be 1,000% happier or power of happiness or whatever, and you just say, just improve things a little bit, and life changes completely.

[00:02:50] Yeah, my view is that over time, the 10% compounds annually. Yeah, right. And 10% compounding, it's a weird way to think about the math of happiness, but of course it will double your happiness every seven years. So, over a lifetime, that's enormous. I always say, 1% improvement a day at anything you love improves you 3,800% a year. And most people don't realize that, so they live their daily lives, and then, but if you just do 1% improvement a year at like knitting, a day at knitting,

[00:03:19] it'll be 38 times better in a year. I like that a lot. Yeah. I like that a lot. And that works for meditation, I think as well. For sure. Although the concept of improvement in meditation is weird, but we'll talk about that in a second. But just, for me, as you can imagine, I don't mind interrupting, and I'm curious your thoughts on this before we get into your latest book, Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics, which you wrote with Jeff Warren, and also you mentioned... Carly Adler. Carly Adler.

[00:03:48] Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics. We'll talk about that in a second. Great book. I'm so excited because I went on your podcast. Yeah. How can people find your podcast? You can find the podcast wherever you get your podcasts. You are an awesome podcast guest. Thank you. I mean, I already like you, but there were so many things that I didn't know, especially the comedy thing that I didn't know. And the meditation thing you didn't know for me. I didn't actually know that. This is evidence of what a good podcast host you are. You had me on twice, and you didn't even really talk to me

[00:04:18] about your meditation practice, I guess because you didn't want to hog the airtime, or I don't know. Well, I'm not, I have no problem interrupting and asking questions, but I also think everyone throws around, oh, I'm this, I'm this ism, I'm that ism, I'm that, you know, I'm an atheist who does transcendental meditation, or I'm a Buddhist, or I'm a Hindu, or I'm a Sufism, or whatever. I feel like what you do inside your skin

[00:04:48] is mostly personal. So, but, that's different from what you're doing, which is more telling your story, which I'm a big believer in telling your story and what you did, and then giving people the option to do what you did or not. Like when you, you write about in meditation for fidgety skeptics, you and Jeff Warren deck out a bus, the 10% happier bus, or whatever it was, and you go around and talk to people about meditation.

[00:05:17] But you weren't proselytizing. It wasn't like the Messiah has come, you know, stop us now. Like, you were just, you were just like, what was that story? Tell us about that. I will. I, I would say, I agree with you that what you do inside your skin is largely private. I would say what's different for me is that I kind of, I see myself as a public health advocate, you know, that I, came across meditation like the first time in my life I've ever been ahead of a trend.

[00:05:46] I started meditating a little bit before it became cool. Although I should say in your defense, I started meditating well after you did. You adopted it pretty damn early. Which we can hear about on your podcast. Yes, which is a hilarious story by the way. I, I recommend you tune in for that. But I, I started, I discovered meditation and realized, oh, okay, there's an, there's a significant amount of science that strongly suggests it's good for you. My personal experience strongly suggests it's good for you. And yet, when I looked at all the books about meditation,

[00:06:15] they were pretty annoying. Not all of them, but largely, some of them. Yeah, largely. 80% of them. 80-20 rule. Probably something like that. And it's like you hear a pan flute in the background all the time where the writer is addressing you as grasshopper or something. It's just, I knew, it didn't appeal to me and I knew it wouldn't appeal to people like me. And so, my only innovation was to talk about meditation and use the word fuck a lot. You know, like that. I just, I tried to make it raw and in my honesty

[00:06:44] and also funny and attractive to skeptics. And so, that's why I do it. Not because I have a ton of desire to tell everybody everything about my internal processes. It's mostly because I think it's actually a good thing to do for you. Although, I like how in your, in this book, Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics, you mentioned to your wife, you know, what's it like living with your spiritual master? I'm sure she really hated that. One of my favorite things to do is torture my wife.

[00:07:13] I get that sense in this book actually. And I was thinking about the relationship with your wife in this book because, so she's not a meditator. No. But I like how she accepts your meditation. I've had situations where my wife or relationship did not accept it and that was problematic. But you have kind of this nice banter with your wife. Reminds me of AJ Jacobs and the banter with his wife. It's like a little bit of a, I wouldn't say love-hate, but like a love-annoyance thing. Yes. Yeah.

[00:07:43] Love to make her hate me is probably the way. Have you succeeded? Oh my good. I mean. Like what's your worst argument with your wife? Worst arguments is when she has a, like there's something upsetting her and I am dismissive of it. Oh yeah. That is the worst. And it's Give me a specific. So she'll have a hard time. She actually just came through a pretty hard time at the office and ended up actually leaving her job temporarily and she's a physician

[00:08:13] highly, highly trained. It was like she's an incredibly smart human. And What kind of doctor? She has double specialized, double boarded, she's a board certified in two areas, pulmonary and critical care and also, no, pulmonology and critical care. So those are her two. I'm glad you really paid attention when she was one at the graduate school. This is an example. So I don't listen. Like I have a way, I grew up in my, both my parents are doctors and some of the details of the science and the politics that they're around

[00:08:43] the hospital. I've grown up with this talk and so I think I have a way of tuning it out and I think that I, you know, one of the things that I talk about openly in my books is trying to sort of recognize the fact that I may be missing a chip on some levels and working on my lack of empathy sometimes. You know, I don't really lack it with, you know, when I'm working as a journalist, I think, but, you know, with her sometimes I think I just don't tune in appropriately to what's bumming her out and I can be a little dismissive and then that can

[00:09:12] balloon into a fight. But, you know, that's really interesting because your work at Good Morning America at Nightline, your years and years and years of being a journalist like particularly in war zones, you kind of had to use that empathy muscle like in overdrive and maybe when you get home and even work at the office and so it's harder for you to turn it on for your loved ones. That or the less charitable explanation would be that I'm a self-centered asshole who, you know, I don't believe that though. Well, you know what I think it is

[00:09:42] is that over time I've become less of that. You know, meditation is a great technology for uprooting self-centrism and I think that to me when I first started reading about it is the Buddha's pitch is about, you know, the source of our suffering is being self-centered and I was like, I am really self-centered and I actually have never fully rocked how self-centered I am and over time as I loosen the knots on that I find myself freer that sounds a little grandiose but truly freer

[00:10:11] to tune in to what's going on with other people that's actually as it turns out a little bit counterintuitively a happier way to live especially counterintuitive for somebody like me who really was type A super ambitious and as I said self-centered and over time I think as a consequence of meditation but also maturation marriage other processes that where I've just gotten better at not being so much you know, sort of stuck in my own head well, it's interesting

[00:10:40] because part of being ambitious is being a little bit self-centered because you know, let's just take your being a co-host of Nightline Nightline is a big show it's been a big show for decades there's one person who's going to sit in the seat you're sitting in you're sitting in that seat 50 million people would have loved to have sit in that seat you have to be ambitious and I'm going to use the word narcissistic but not in a bad way

[00:11:10] you have to be narcissistic enough to basically get that seat you have to focus on your skills building up doing the best things you can even overriding other things that maybe you could be doing better for your life you know a baby a child has to be narcissistic to grow up to survive when they're younger they have to say they have to start crying when they need food why are they being so narcissistic well they need food they need to eat

[00:11:39] so they're just going to think about themselves during that time if you ever have kids you know they're only thinking about themselves when they're hungry or when they're tired and forget whatever you're thinking about because they don't care at all but you know I want to get to the meditation improving you know this aspect of your life in a second because there's a lot of things to unpacking what you just said one is there already has been a lot of research in the benefits of meditation and I think part of that the Dalai Lama has been involved in he's worked with lots of researchers all over the

[00:12:09] country and you know other people have looked at it what are some of those just clear-cut scientific results and then I want to never talk about that again okay well can I because you said a lot there I want to amplify a point you were making and then I'll answer the question I really like talking to you because I have no idea where the conversation is going to go in a good way so when you were talking about self-centrism being necessary for being effective in the world you are 100% correct I think for me meditation has helped me draw the line between sort of useful

[00:12:39] stress and self-obsession and useless rumination that just degrades my effectiveness and makes me difficult to be around both for others and myself right I'll give you a specific example and you can tell me if I'm right or wrong after you have a conversation with your or after you do a show of Nightline wondering whether the millions in the audience liked you or not is probably a useless rumination probably better is to look back over the tape and say oh I could have done

[00:13:08] a better job there that's exactly right so when you look over the tape it's like how do you do that do you do it in a way where you're able to you know not get stuck in some rabbit hole old junior high based insecurities or can you really be pretty clinical about what it is that you need to fix honest with yourself I talk about taking it easy with the internal cattle prod but we do need an internal cattle prod to get out of bed to be ambitious to do what we need to do to do what we want to do but I think you just don't and there's no

[00:13:38] magic formula here but you don't want to take it too far and you just need your own sort of inner meteorologist to tell you when you're taking it too far and for me mindfulness has been a really good tool mindfulness is just kind of self-awareness this the ability to see what's happening in your head without getting carried away by it and that's just so valuable but by the way I just want to say I think that is the most valuable thing in meditation like I think everybody buys those 80% books or they see stuff on TV

[00:14:07] or whatever and they say oh okay I'm going to meditate and suddenly achieve enlightenment have superpowers or read auras or whatever and I think the ability to basically notice like and you talk about it in this book separating out awareness from thinking your awareness is not the same as your thinking so being aware that oh I'm thinking these thoughts that are really wasting time and energy you know people don't realize the brain consumes 25% of your calories a day

[00:14:36] you spend a lot of energy thinking so if you could kind of like if you're aware of the thoughts that are useless which is really what meditation is practiced for the rest of the day then you'll have much more energy for the day that's exactly right it's funny I just came back from I was on a 10 day silent meditation retreat which is a Vipassana yeah Vipassana it was very interesting you know I hate it a lot of it but I also love it too and one thing that happens on these retreats is if you're really going for it you're really trying to be mindful all the time you end up

[00:15:06] not needing much sleep so to me and I've heard a neuroscientist friend talk about this if you are decreasing the amount of mental churn and suffering you need less sleep because you don't need as much recovery so I was sleeping three four hours a night because during the day the volume of my mental chatter was way way down the further I was getting into the retreat by the way I don't want to forget to answer your science question no we'll get to it because there's so many different interesting things so obviously meditation

[00:15:35] has nothing to do with ambition and success and so on I mean it has something to do with it in the sense that we just kind of suggested ways that could improve chances for success but I think a lot of people think one path of meditation will take you to a point where you don't need that success or you don't need to strive as hard and I think that's a dangerous direction for meditation not for everybody but for some people like a lot of people say oh it's you know thinking about nothingness and you know

[00:16:05] oh you don't need to do anything you can just live on you know your spirituality and your meditation sunshine yeah the reality is if you have to raise kids and raise a home and live you need to do things that are going to make you successful and meditation which as you just described it can give you more energy can stop you from thinking going down rabbit holes of thought that are annoying like being oh I just had this argument with the boss I should say this this this all that stuff is a rabbit hole you don't need to go down well some of it's useful at some point it becomes useless and you just need the

[00:16:35] self-awareness to know when you cross the line and again it seems like that's not only a reasonable but a sufficient goal of meditation absolutely for me absolutely and for people I know who started doing it and come to me and say what a big deal it's been in their life I think you just need to set aside the kind of promises that we hear from what I call the 11 billion dollar a year howling sea of bullshit that is America's self-help industry that tells you that there are silver bullets there are no silver bullets set that aside understand that

[00:17:04] there are a variety of tools that are available to you including meditation that will help you with your well-being and just I think when it comes to well-being you should surround the ball right you should do everything you should pull every lever that you possibly can because as I say in the new book we spend so much time on our stock portfolios especially probably your listeners stock portfolios interior design cars and no time on the one filter through which we experience everything and that's our minds and so what

[00:17:34] what works what do we know works when it comes to the mind exercise sleep having good relationships diet and now meditation thanks to the science which we will get to at some point and so all I'm saying is nothing's going to solve all of your problems but meditation is a good thing to change your relationship to those problems and again it's okay to be ambitious and to want to achieve goals and at the same time meditate you know it's not like it's not like

[00:18:03] I one time gave a retreat on meditation at a well-known place I wanted to title it the spirituality of money something like that it's a great topic it is a good topic and I thought because so many people everybody in America is scared about money so understanding how you can be spiritual and have that interweave with your worries about money is important they called me back and they said you have to change the title we cannot have money in the title because it's not spiritual and this is a real like if I said the place you would know

[00:18:33] the place most people would know the place it's well-known place I had to change the name nothing so I don't really love the word spirituality the problem is we have a poverty of language in this area yes and so we're stuck with spirituality which has lots of embarrassing metaphysical implications which it's mostly part of the 80 of the 80-20 yeah but true spirituality leaves out nothing and so you can't say money is not spiritual money is a huge part of our lives everything in our life counts when it comes to what I would view as spirituality which

[00:19:03] is just your approach to anything in your existence okay so the science okay so very briefly early stages the scientific research into what meditation does to the brain and to the rest of the body but I think what we can say is that it's the science strongly suggests that it can produce a long list of tantalizing health

[00:19:33] benefits from boosting your immune system lowering your blood pressure reducing the release of cortisol in the brain and the neuroscience is probably the most interesting stuff so it shows essentially when that regulate attention so focus which is under assault by technology these days compassion self awareness these areas of the brain change in particular how do they measure compassion they just measure the they look at the

[00:20:03] part of the brain that they have most associated with a compassionate response to stimuli and they see that that part of the brain the gray matter literally grows after eight weeks of meditation there's one study that I love that was done at Harvard in 2011 they took people who had never meditated before and they scanned their brains for a baseline reading then they had them do eight weeks of short daily doses of meditation at the end they scanned their brains again and they looked at three areas of the brain one having to do with self awareness one having to do with

[00:20:32] compassion and third having to do with stress the amygdala which is associated with stress and the areas of the brain associated with compassion and self awareness the gray matter grew and in I don't know and I think the other

[00:21:02] so there are so many open questions about this neuroscience for example can you compare that to what would happen if you learned violin over these eight weeks what parts of the brain would change that maybe the compassion center would change if you just studied violin right so that being said I have spent quite a bit of time with the neuroscientists who are looking at this and actually their degree of confidence they taught me to speak the way I just spoke which is look let's be open that the science is in its early stages we don't want to

[00:21:32] be too definitive but scientists are very cautious the good ones and I think there's a very strong suggestion that when you meditate you are changing your brain in salutary ways and a lot of the last thing I'll say about the science they kind of focus on two styles of meditation and some of the results you quoted come from one style some come from the other style one is the compassion loving kindness type of

[00:22:16] mindfulness style meditation and by the way all these styles that you're hearing us talk about the best part of Dan's book I just want to say is you give these five to ten minute meditation suggestions how to meditate that focus on all these techniques and they're so

[00:22:46] is accessible to anyone who just wants to try anyone who's ever said I can't do this if you can't do this with Dan's book then I don't know what to say thank you for saying that

[00:23:16] we took a brief tangent into that but he said it on my podcast ultimately the most important sample size is a sample size of one which is you so people trying the techniques in your book and if they try them accurately and thoughtfully and really pay attention to what you're doing or in your app if they use the 10% happier app with its suggestions that helps them to do it correctly maybe you can argue there's no incorrect way there is probably

[00:23:46] ways more correct than others if you do that you could see if your life's better in a month two months six months to keep a diary and see how you're thinking about things differently and challenge people meditate for a month maybe a minute every day or most days better to be five to ten

[00:24:16] minutes and if you think by the end of the month that it's total bullshit hit me up on Twitter and tell me I'm a moron and people tell me I'm a moron all the time but never for that and so I just

[00:24:46] because of by dint of being a guy who's now written a couple books about meditation I get very dramatic stories coming into me but people say they were suicidal and embracing this tactic has helped them to turn their lives around but I'll give you a more close to home example which is my wife so you mentioned before that she's not a meditator but actually in the course of my writing this book one of the plot lines is Jeff and I my partner in crime my co-author Jeff is this amazing meditation teacher

[00:25:15] from Toronto Jeff Warren I call him meditation MacGyver because he's really great at getting under the hood and helping people who are interested in maybe meditating but having trouble adopting the habit to get over the hump and so he I set him loose on my wife

[00:26:07] very does she get annoyed but it's just like she lives with me so she knows what an idiot I really am so it's a little weird for her but it's not like I've gone out there and presented myself as a unicorn barfing rainbows I'm not the book is called 10% happier and it's about what a dummy I am and I did a bunch of cocaine and had a panic attack so it's not like I present myself as some sort of walking around in some cloud of impenetrable imperturbability I am deeply flawed

[00:26:37] and open about it so she's not super annoyed by when that happens but she still knows that my persona at home she sees me in a 360 degree way so she's having trouble meditating to Jeff and he really diagnosed correctly what would help her get over the hump and for her it was making the thing less of a chore she somehow resisted it because it felt like another thing

[00:27:06] she's supposed to do she's a doctor and she's got a three-year-old and a husband who's you know working all the time and and she's got a busy life and somebody sort of implicitly me wagging my finger at her saying you should meditate just wasn't working for her and that's never gonna work no it's not and when I say implicitly it means I never talked to her about it but she was like just by dint of living with you you are a wagging finger a walking wagging finger so

[00:27:36] I get it it's a little unfair to me what am I I love that taking back lazy yes it's beautiful Jeff's a genius I mean I don't say that lightly and he's truly when it comes to this stuff he is a genius he's uniquely talented how much respect you have for him I do I love him

[00:28:06] and I've read hundreds I don't know about hundreds but I've read a lot of meditation books over the time this is great not just for your and I just love how you always tell your stories and other people's stories but just seeing Jeff through you he has some really amazing quotes there's things in this book I learned and again you always try to keep beginner's mind but it's very difficult after you do something for a long time you don't think you're a beginner anymore and there's

[00:28:36] one point when I always thought of mindfulness meditation which is basically just to bastardize it kind of observing your thoughts while you're breathing and then if you go off into a tangent like we always do getting back to center and breathing again and observing again so it's mindfulness and then compassion meditation again I'm going to bastardize it just feel love towards everything just totally bastardizing but I like how you and Jeff

[00:29:05] and I've never seen this I always thought of them as completely separate and often if I'm sitting I might do a little bit of one and then a little bit of another as if they're separate you guys combined it do mindfulness gently be gentle on yourself while you're doing it and it was a nice way to kind of combine the two yeah okay and Jeff said it so at this juncture I just want to be clear there are three things I want to you have a way of saying 15 interesting things all of which I want

[00:29:35] to comment on but then we get on to something else so there are three things I want to say yes so just I'm going to say the first thing which is in direct response I love when you interrupt I don't want to discourage you from interrupting I just want to make sure that I'm on the record as saying there are three things right now that I want to say but I reserve the right to add more so in response to what you just

[00:30:06] grit your teeth aspect to it and so Jeff was trying to introduce into my practice two aspects one enjoyment he's like you are allowed to enjoy this actually tuning in to the ridiculously obvious but universally overlooked truth that you are alive and have a body is enjoyable tuning in to your the raw data of your existence is enjoyable and not always but it can be and you should allow that to be part of your meditation

[00:30:35] and the other thing and I think this is really what you were pointing at was an attitude of friendliness toward yourself while meditating which is like yeah that's right he used the word friendliness which is a less sappy way of talking about compassion so that when for example you're overtaken by some distraction jag during meditation like anger or desire for a cheeseburger or whatever it is you aren't meeting the arising of these totally natural inner phenomena with anger which is what I was doing you are like oh what's up

[00:31:05] I know this character this is this is anger and what is the value of seeing anger with friendliness it's like when you fight with anger it just gets worse you get into self flagellation it's close cousin but when you greet anger with some friendliness the value in the rest of your life is enormous which is that when anger ambushes you in the middle of a conversation with your wife or a colleague or your boss you see it coming you aren't owned by it you can let it pass and that is the judo move the inner

[00:31:35] judo move that I think for me at least changes lives okay can I get to the other things did I answer your question yeah it wasn't a question it was more of a statement that I really appreciated that he said that I love the word friendliness I never heard that in the context of meditation me too this book if nobody reads it's fine because what I learned in the course of this book has thoroughly changed my meditation practice and my life so I'm delighted to have had the experience taking back lazy

[00:32:05] is amazing which leads me to the second thing I wanted to say there is a third but this is the second the third is actually I want to ask you a question the second is on Bianca just to close the loop on that because you had asked me for impressive stories of how things change so Bianca did because of taking back lazy start meditating and her practice is idiosyncratic so she our kid is just turned three he's a horrible sleeper and every night it takes like two hours to

[00:32:35] get him down sometimes and I'm almost never around because I anchor nightline during the week and I anchor a morning show on the weekend so I'm either in bed or at work most nights and now he's so used to her doing it that it's rare that he'll let me put him down so she's marooned in this little nursery with this monster every night and often just pissed that she can't do the rest of her life because she's stuck putting him down and she co-opted that time and turned it into meditation thanks to Jeff so she'll be lying

[00:33:05] there just trying to tune into the sensations in her body the breath coming in or going out however her body is feeling at the she has to

[00:33:35] be there with her son and so the impact on her has been incredible to watch my wife I've known for years that my wife who has all of these stressors in her life her job is incredibly stressful she's had some family drama she had breast cancer last year we had an infertility crisis then we had a baby and so many stressors in her life and I've known for a long time that meditation could help but I felt very powerless to talk to her about it because I knew that it would backfire and to watch her be able

[00:34:05] to metabolize her I didn't know she was meditating I knew something was different so in the course of the book Jeff and I took an

[00:34:34] 11 or 12 day road trip across the country in a big orange bus like the part of the less cool and we the conceit of the book is we're going to meet people who want to meditate but aren't and we'll have them get over the hump and every chapter is a different obstacle to meditation I can't clear my mind this is self indulgent and in each chapter we meet celebrities or cops from Tempe Arizona or social workers from New Mexico and

[00:35:04] they talk to us about what what's stopping them and never going to do it but I was noticing changes in her her handling of stress the stress in her life in particular during this time there was a lot going on at the office

[00:35:34] and I could see that one of the things I noticed in my wife but in all of myself too is that we were very much the stars of our own movie and sometimes these are sad movies and we get sucked up into the story of me and the world constricts when that happens it's like a sort of horse blinders and I could see that her cloud of woe was thinner and less gray and that she was not so stuck in the stories of what was upsetting her and

[00:36:04] that the upset about tumult at the office wasn't at the hospital more specifically wasn't just wasn't wasn't knocking her down the way her resilience was boosted well I want to ask you about that and then you have your third first off I want to say tumult is that how you say that I don't know I was thinking tumultuous so I think tumult anyway I think it's tumult you said tumult I just was anyway

[00:36:34] take a quick break if you like this episode I'd really really appreciate it it means so much to me please share it with your friends and subscribe to the podcast email me at alcatra gmail.com and tell me why you subscribed thanks we've been using storyblocks for years because as you know I'm always making podcasts videos newsletters and we hate

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[00:38:02] it's become essential to my workflow talk soon given that I like that phrase you know we're stuck in the movie our lives and hers was very often many people was very constricted by oh the office tension and this and that do you think as those walls started to dissolve she was able to be more affectionate or compassionate with you did your communication

[00:38:32] with her get better yes so I should say that my wife actually has a surplus of compassion we are actually quite well matched whereas I think one of my issues is or has historically been and it's the thing that I've really worked on to my great benefit empathy and compassion is really boosting those muscles through meditation has been an enormous value add for me but it was not something I came to naturally my wife's actually the exact opposite she's overflowing with compassion but I did notice sort of an availability that

[00:39:01] she's just more available because the things in what way what do you mean by available maybe the better word would be lighter too that we used to have fights when you asked me before what were our biggest fights it was about this that when she was dressed at work it was so heavy I could tell that she was just carrying this like big overcoat of anxiety invisible overcoat but kind of visible overcoat of anxiety this big heavy load

[00:39:30] of stress and that it was very inner focused and so if I had a problem and I could shake her out of it we could talk about it but her default mode was to be kind of ruminating on things that she was dealing with at the office and while she's ruminating and you're being self-centered and not asking her hey how'd your day go it makes it worse yeah it makes it worse yes was there a way for her to reach out and teach you how to ask her yeah well but

[00:40:00] did that work or not work it got pretty bad these are our worst fights so historically our worst fights have been this mismatch where she she actually does want some care and feeding in those times and I am angry that she's upset right irrationally angry doesn't this seem like a critical thing like these are the times when she needs to feel that she's loved the most to give her the strength to deal with these situations this seems so critical how did you guys start off well

[00:40:30] because I would say it wasn't it wasn't actually that common when you met when we met well you haven't met her have you no I mean she's great dinner in January we should hang out I think you would really enjoy her I think I'm having hard trouble too more of a long woman but she can actually advise she's hard to resist she's beautiful she's very smart and she's really nice so it's not like we had a tumultuous

[00:40:59] relationship overall we actually don't fight very much but our worst fights since you asked this is the general neighborhood of our worst fights and so they weren't super common in the beginning they weren't super common they never actually were super common but when they happened they happened overall we have as you can tell this sort breezy banter filled relationship that is our

[00:41:31] about which is that she's at a point where she needs something I revert into this kind of weird stupid obstinance and it goes pear shaped and what I would say is breaking the cycle I

[00:42:03] less tied up in my own knots of whatever inner stinginess that were able to come together in those moments I'll tell you another thing that really helped her getting breast cancer because there was no way to poo-poo that and it was horrible for her and it's hard for me to talk too much about it because she was the one who had to endure all the pain and fear well not all of it because I was very scared too but I heard her say the other actually she came on my podcast to do an interview which was very interesting it was

[00:42:32] actually really fun but she referred to the breast cancer as the best thing that ever happened to her and I thought that was really interesting and heartening to hear and I would say it was one there's no way in either of those circumstances where I could ever be like oh you

[00:43:02] know she's overdoing it or I'm gonna be stingy about giving her what she needs these were emergencies and that once you kind of start breaking through some of those barriers they don't really in my experience they haven't really gone back up what hasn't gone back up the barriers I see so once you're able to go through these experiences what about the reverse and I don't want to say it's all meditation I think it's part meditation I think it's getting more mature I think it's getting to know each other more

[00:43:32] and just baseline compatibility obvious to me on our first date frankly that this was somebody that I could do business with so and the reason why her story is so important is because you yourself are like the scientists you could see the results it's not like just someone coming back to you six months later saying oh my life's completely better because you don't know what happened to them maybe they won the lottery in those six months too but here's something where you've been through minute by minute serious stresses

[00:44:02] and so you could you've put in your 10,000 hours of analyzing her emotions so you're able to study the nuances of them and you saw them changing without even knowing what the x-factor was and it turned out the x-factor was this meditation yes I think there are several x-factors but I think meditation was one of them I'm always loath to say oh you know here as you know as I've said leading up to it and leading up to this point in our discussion I'm not a big believer in silver bullets but I do think meditation was part of that and it just again sort of

[00:44:32] just starts to pull you out of the bigger picture and to give you a different relationship to your problems the world is impermanent and entropic and we are not in control in many ways and these exogenous factors are going to impact us in ways that we like in the ways we don't like like illness and our vicissitudes of work and all of that office politics and so what meditation helps you do is just kind of navigate

[00:45:01] this in a more supple way and that's what I was seeing from my wife and the other thing that's really changed with her it's interesting because for her meditation was part of a bucket of self care you know including exercise that she wasn't doing which was really a source of tension for us because she went through a breast cancer and she you know she really needs to start taking care of her she's fine she's cured like actually cured and right now as we speak the healthiest I've ever seen her she's gotten really into exercise she found

[00:45:31] a form of exercise she really loves soul cycle as it happens and so we go together and it's a fun couple's activity and I'm just so proud of how well she's doing and so I think it's all part of the meditation is all also part of a little renaissance for her of realizing that she's going to be into taking care of other people including her patients and her kid and her husband she needs to take care of herself first and I love watching that yeah and it doesn't mean it's such an important thing because it doesn't mean

[00:46:00] she's not going to take care of you and the kid in fact that's often the best way to take a view and the kid is if she preserves her own energy and conserves her own energy so she has it available for others as needed absolutely and this you know Alexander watching mommy taking care of herself like this is great modeling he's going to be fine if he goes to breakfast with me on a Saturday morning while she goes to a class instead of being with her every minute of every day he's going to be fine in fact it's good for him to have just one time

[00:46:30] with dad to know that mom's going to take care of herself that's the mom my mom was doing that and it was a great model for me my mom is a scientist just like my wife and was very into exercise and she was an incredible role model for me you know it's interesting because I never thought when I had my kids oh this would be a great idea my wife would sleep and I would wake up with the kids and three in the morning kids are crying have to

[00:47:00] figure out what techniques to use to get them back to sleep so you can get back to sleep I never thought about meditating during that time probably would have been very good what I used to do was I was getting into Scrabble so I used to tape seven letter Scrabble words to the stroller and just run around the apartment with the stroller while memorizing these seven letter words which I guess is a form of focus or whatever but training your mind I got better at Scrabble classic altitude behavior

[00:47:29] because I can only imagine what happened when you got into Scrabble did you start competing? at that level I was at that level so I mean there's these things just a side tangent I don't know how into Scrabble you are and now it's a weird game because with words whatever it is on Facebook I stopped playing because everyone's cheating but there are these things called stems the six letters and any seventh letter you add will create a seven letter word a legal seven letter word so the key is to remember

[00:47:58] the stems and then remember all the seven letter words that are created by adding a Z or an X or a J and you know so these are important things that professionals remember and there's you know hundreds of these stems so my brother my younger brother who's you know other than my wife my best friend in the world and as a venture capitalist here in New York City and he his name is Matt Harris if you want to see him on Twitter he is still mad at me because when we were younger I don't even know if I was the one who made the decision he wanted to use the word yeti y-e-t-i

[00:48:28] which is abominable snowman in Scrabble and we ruled it out because we said it was a proper noun it's a legal word and he still brings it up to the point where every time I come to his house his seven year old son Elliot comes up to me with the dictionary and pointing out that yeti is not a proper noun okay play him in Scrabble again with the latest dictionary and use XU as a legal word what does XU mean it's a Vietnamese currency unit

[00:48:58] so and it happens to be a legal Scrabble word okay serendipity because that brings me to the third thing I wanted to talk sure you talked you dropped a fascinating bomb of conversational potential earlier and we didn't pick up on it spirituality of money I want to hear your rap on that like because I think there is there money is such a funny loaded topic it makes us uncomfortable and yet we spend

[00:49:27] so much time thinking about it and you in particular know a lot about money and finance you've made and lost all these fortunes as we discussed on my podcast and I absolutely think there's an enormous amount of wisdom from the spiritual world that can be brought to bear on money so I just of our spiritual practice so

[00:49:56] when you were stressed and abusing substances and not taking care of yourself and having a panic attack on air what is the finance there's many results to that there's a physical health result there's a mental health result there's also a financial health result you're going to make less money so once you start you're going to make more

[00:50:26] money money is just a side effect of taking care of yourself now you don't automatically make more money but meditation because let's say this is a naive way to think about it but let's say the average person thinks 50,000 thoughts a day I don't know what the research is on this I think people have said like 50,000 thoughts a day I don't know if that means happier let's say you can make it so that

[00:50:57] only 72% of the thoughts are useless you've just given yourself 8% 10% more thoughts that are useful some of those thoughts can be useful for making money or having ideas to help other people at they will lose the ability to the

[00:51:27] sharp elbows the ambition and aggression they need in order to succeed in whatever business in which they find themselves absolutely not I think that's a myth that they're telling themselves you'll have just enough ambition you know first off nobody needs to step on anybody else to succeed it's a that's a scarcity way of looking at the world and I think part of meditation is teaching your brain that the world is more abundant than you thought because it helps reduce that cortisol is a scarcity

[00:51:56] way of thinking oh I'm in the tribe and I'm not going to get enough food so cortisol is going to spike so anything that helps reduce it helps you to think that the world is a little bit more abundant than you instead of stepping on this person I'm going to help this person and helping people

[00:52:27] is how you make more money no one is going to pay you to destroy other people people will pay you because you're the person at work who's the most helpful so that's part of the reason why people pay you but again I think taking care of yourself and meditation is part of that but a more energy to have great ideas increases your compassion to help people allows you to see problems and then the creativity to solve them all of those things together

[00:52:56] as a side effect is more money it's not linked directly to more money money is just like a benchmark people who go to work and who are in business probably the more they meditate I don't know if this has probably never been measured but my guess is probably the more opportunities for financial increase they have I know when I've lost the most amount of money I

[00:53:34] survive I would do as many hours a day as possible and that was the only way to survive otherwise I

[00:54:04] they look at me they think this logical scientific thinking glasses whatever and so they are lecturing me on but I'm just curious I always ask people what they do but I think a lot of people do use these excuses that you mentioned in the book none of them are really excuses they're just the tip of the iceberg for some deeper things going on in their life and that's why I like in this book how you say it's okay to do five minutes or one minute

[00:54:34] I'll give you an example that someone not your wife but someone like that could do which I recommend New York City is I feel the rooftops in New York City are beautiful it's like the architect was given hey make these 20 floors and they have to look like this but then do whatever you want with the roof we don't care at that

[00:55:03] point and the roofs are always beautiful and so I think that is a decent form of one minute meditation why not you also you my brother I remember years ago before I wrote my book sent me some meditations that you had

[00:55:33] improvised on your blog and one of them was like standing in imagining that you just arrived from another planet or universe or whatever so you had no idea where you were you have no idea whose body you just

[00:56:03] woke up in you have no idea where you are or what world this is or time period or anything and then you have to move your fingers I have arms and there's a sun what you are describing just jars people out of their autopilot this fog that we walk around in and it's just a new way of seeing the world and out of that fresh ideas can emerge

[00:56:33] by the way related to that I just read this yesterday it's totally unrelated to meditation did you know it's illegal in New York city to talk to people in an elevator what there's an actual law on the books I forget what the fine is maybe it's like $25 or something it's never been enforced no one's ever been arrested but it's actually just a law on the books that it's illegal

[00:57:12] to talk to turn to someone and talk to them in an elevator the antisocial part of me kind of likes that what's interesting though is try talking to

[00:57:44] anything that gets you to pay attention to what's happening right now that's a very broad definition of meditation another broad definition of meditation you can argue about this until the cows come home is kids

[00:58:13] for babies and then for teenagers but now it's true for adults that's right so the received dogma and neuroscience circles for generations was that the brain only just deteriorates that's the only change you will see after something like the early 20s now we know that the brain and the mind are trainable and that is really exciting and yes formal mindfulness meditation is one way to do it and I strongly advocate for it but what you're talking about which probably don't you know

[00:58:42] aren't techniques that the Buddha was discussing are nonetheless in this broad category of just training the mind in lots of different directions we can train the mind we're constantly training the mind as a matter of fact blindly to want more dopamine and to ignore whatever's right in front of us and to hate people who we disagree with politically because we're on this kind of just in this kind of mindless default mode but but actually if you are more intentional about it there are millions

[00:59:12] there are tons of ways to train the mind all the things we want the most the kind of perspective that you've just been talking about the sort of fresh ideas spontaneity gratitude calm one might say inner peace self-awareness compassion these are all mental skills it's not like we have factory settings that are like that we can't tinker with these are skills that you can train to me that is just a hugely liberating idea and that's a little grandiose but it just it happens to be true and let me ask you this because

[00:59:43] let's say you start any skill it feels frustrating the first year yes because at least you don't know if you're getting better or not you might in fact even be quote unquote getting worse because you're trying to flail around and figure something out so I'm not saying meditation's a skill I'm not saying compassion's a skill although you know they are muscles to be compassion's a muscle to be exercise and meditation does that when someone here is 10% happier the one frustrating thing I could think is man

[01:00:12] I don't want to be 10% happier I'm really down I need to be 100% happier now yeah well show me what's going to do that you know I mean drugs go buy a lottery ticket but that's just not the way the world works I wish it was it's just my experience it's not and it's very rare that something comes along and just makes you 100% happier cliches become cliches for a reason because usually they're true there's a reason why the expression

[01:00:42] be careful what you wish for is around and it actually taps right into the Buddha's concept of suffering you know Buddha gets a bad rap because the first thing he said after he became enlightened if you even believe in enlightenment was life is suffering so suffering is actually a bit of a mistranslation from what he said basically the long version of what he said is life is going to be frustrating if you are completely yanked around by getting what you want and avoiding what you don't want but one way to think about suffering

[01:01:11] is in this context is that when we you know eat the ice cream cone when we get the promotion that we've long wanted when we finally get a latte that we've been jonesing for does that solve everything? no we live with this lie that it will you know if I finally like Bianca and I will finally crack this infertility nut and get a baby well then we'll be fine well then the little dude doesn't sleep and you know

[01:01:41] well as soon as we sleep train him he's going to be fine as soon as we I changed his diaper this morning as soon as he's potty trained like then everything's going to be you know rainbows and unicorns no that's just not the way the world works and for me the hack that the Buddha came up with is actually having a sort of settled back mindful relationship to this constant seesaw of desire and aversion and it's almost like the difference and there's a subtle

[01:02:10] difference even in the words but difference between happiness and well-being so well-being doesn't necessarily imply happiness it means you're you're well right now equanimity yeah and you know to put it in historical context like forget about Buddhism for a second but look at Buddha or however you say his name Siddhartha Gautama or I don't know if that was his first name or last name but you got it so he was a family member of

[01:02:38] he had his grove where all his monks were and where he would meditate every day and that's where they lived there were three warring kingdoms surrounding the grove and he was a relative of the ruling family of one of the kingdoms so for him to be not stressed is kind of amazing because he was right in the center unprotected and at least two of the kingdoms wanted to kill him probably so I don't remember all of the details and I highly recommend

[01:03:08] if people are interested in the life story of the Buddha that you investigate the books of a guy named Stephen Batchelor who by the way make a great guest he's actually was on the podcast oh he was after you recommended him the last time and by the way I was a big fan of all his books Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist great because he sort of shows it's not Buddha never talks about God he just talks about what we've been talking about Buddhist Atheist is actually redundant because

[01:03:37] there is no deity like a creator god in Buddhism he's not like against it but he doesn't talk about it yeah it's just not he's not people ask him how did we get here why are we here he's like he didn't really have answers to that but you correctly identified the historical Buddha what we know about him he lived at a very tumultuous time historically and he was hanging out with you know psychopathic murderous kings and very very rich people and trying to

[01:04:06] kind of negotiate peace in this context and also build his cadre of nuns and monks and it was not an uncomplicated world in which he existed and I think especially when it comes to meditation the way it's presented with these Buddha statues that you see at the spa and the airport they seem like they've got these beatific looks on their faces or I use a picture in my book of some dude with wavy hair sitting on a rock wearing loincloth you know like that is not the deal that is not the experience of meditation

[01:04:36] nor is it what your life is going to become some sort of frictionless bliss state just because you've started to meditate it's an unrealistic expectation I think we just need to recognize that the world is as I said before characterized by chaos and impermanence and we just need to have a more seamless supple relationship to all that to me as far as I can tell you listeners can tell me I'm wrong about this that seems to be the recipe well tell me about the app the 10% happier app

[01:05:05] because I think still a lot of people have a hard time getting started they're 40 50 years into this really difficult thing called life and to tell them oh now we're going to do something to completely change the plasticity of your mind it's like whoa how am I going to do that and I think your app helps so what is it how do you get it yeah so it's available wherever you get your apps it's called 10% happier and I really think of myself

[01:05:35] as kind of a gateway drug you know I am not a you know I've studied I've spent you know last nine years studying meditation and Buddhism and Eastern spirituality generally so I'm really interested in it I love talking about it it's my favorite subject but I don't pretend to be a teacher what I am is really somebody who can talk about it I hope talk about it in a way that you know gets I'm a non traditional meditator and I hope I can talk about it in a way that gets people excited to do it just to interrupt in your book Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics

[01:06:05] this is like the perfect book for what you just said like for anybody who's ever had any doubts on meditation there's so many techniques and ideas on how to view just the simplest meditation 30 seconds you know here's one smart compassion 30 seconds or more like pro tip give yourself permission to fail I have that one earmarked all these like great just gentle suggestions and stories just to ease you into understanding that this is not like

[01:06:34] this doesn't have to change your whole lifestyle you can just you can start this no one will know and it will change your life like you'll be 10% happier or more I really appreciate you saying that you actually as we're taping this the book hasn't even come out yet so I haven't met any human beings many human beings who've read the thing who aren't related to me so it's just very interesting to hear what you're keying in on but just

[01:07:04] happier and I had this very naive cavalier attitude that I didn't think anybody was going to read it but I thought to anybody who did read it would start meditating because I thought I made a good case in the beach

[01:07:34] read which is great I was I when the early draft was people just liked the story so I just went in that direction so I went and set up to be a memoirist I never written a book before wasn't really in my wheelhouse whatsoever I really just wanted to promote meditation that was my driving force

[01:08:04] so I after putting the book out I got some feedback from some friends in the meditation world of hey man you're getting so I started a company you know a lot about business I didn't know anything still very much a beginner but I started a company with some partners to teach people how to meditate and that's what 10% happier is this app and what we do

[01:08:34] is bring in the people who I amazing guy so not very famous meditation teacher and not at all what you would think a meditation teacher is like you know he's just like a 70 year old Jewish guy from the Catskills who is very funny and wry and I really love him and

[01:09:05] so we so basically unlike most meditation apps where you just get a bunch of guided meditations we are very video based so you can do straight audio guided meditation from our teachers if you want but most of our users actually watch a short two minute clip before they meditate where I'm chatting with the teacher and it really brings the practice to life and makes it fun and is super educational these people

[01:09:45] that function are our most frequent and devoted users how many users right now 16,000 that's a lot well yeah we're a small company we just started the last year we've quadrupled we're really starting to hit our stride for someone who hasn't done a business before to still be in business after several years is a very great accomplishment yeah and I will actually put 100% of the credit on particularly the CEO of the company who's a young guy named Ben Rubin who is phenomenal and we've

[01:10:15] become very close friends and he had a pre-existing company that was teaching who's doing sort of a whole bunch of mobile courses through a company called Change Collective and they were doing mobile like a two-week course on how to have more gratitude in your life or how to go paleo or how to get up earlier he came to me and said well you would do a meditation course with Joseph so we did the course and it was the most successful thing they done that I ended up joining the company as a co-founder taking on a bunch of equity investing

[01:10:45] in it we raised more money from venture capitalists and so we're off to the races and it has been just like an unbelievable adventure for me so by the way first very sophisticated stuff you did which is that you like something you provided a service you invested in you made a business decision you invested in it you started growing in and you found a CEO to work with part of that you have to attribute to meditation because identifying who are good people to work with what are appropriate

[01:11:15] problems to solve this is what's created out of that extra space you get when you are not ruminating down the rabbit hole about oh she said this at work or he did this or she did that those ruminations take up a lot energy yeah and I want to be clear I still do that I just do it less and so there's no way to solve all the problems because we're human absolutely I as my friend Sam Harris likes to say about himself I retain the capacity to be a schmuck and that is

[01:11:45] true for me and again ask my wife infallibility is not on the table is it like matter meets anti-matter when you go on Sam Harris podcast do people think you're related people think we're related all the time we're actually quite close we're very good friends and he he's the one who introduced me to Joseph Goldstein because he's old friends with Joseph Goldstein Sam a lot of people don't know this even though he wrote an excellent book about it called Waking Up Sam is a long long long time meditator yeah he's been on

[01:12:14] this podcast he yeah I mean he's a contrarian guy there are plenty of people who don't like him and it's so funny when I hear from people his wife is amazing and so our wives are friends and you know I know him as a guy like a really as just a human and he's goofy and she's making fun of him and just the way my wife is making fun of me and that is different from the Sam I think that a lot of people perceive maybe but you know it's funny I once saw him on Bill Maher

[01:12:44] and Ben Affleck was the other guest on famous clip yeah it's a famous clip and Ben Affleck whatever the political controversy was I'm not even had to do with Islam yeah and Ben Affleck's like yelling at him and Sam just like sitting there looking at him like you could tell he's got he's just a calm yeah he meditates and you know the calmness comes from somewhere or exercising some muscle and meditation is that way of that exercising yes so yeah it doesn't mean you have to agree with

[01:13:14] him and everything and I'm sure there are plenty of areas where he and I disagree it's just that you know I think actually this is a function too for me of meditation which is I over time like I've been able to really just get comfortable with disagreeing with people and doesn't mean that I life's not over I can still have a really actually quite a deep relationship with people and also you know at this time in our country's history I think it's really important that we have varied news and information diets and so I will listen to

[01:13:44] podcasts way across the political spectrum for example I'm a very frequent listener of Ben Shapiro who's very controversial I'm also a frequent listener of Pod Save America and also I'm a big consumer of the mainstream media and I think to me it's all tied in in ways that I'm not sure I can articulate with the mindfulness which is kind of seeing my own tendencies toward tribalism and seeing my own opinions and how maybe I don't like having them challenged but then knowing actually there's something healthy in doing that as being a good citizen

[01:14:13] and I think yeah I'm taking this far afield but I think there's something important there I think that is and I think having I mean I don't consume any news so that's my way of dealing with it like I zero know what's going on this is embarrassing and I haven't said this before to anybody but like I kept seeing people talking about this guy Roy Moore you know when the election was going on and they were like oh he did some sexual thing but I wasn't clear what it was

[01:14:43] for maybe a month or two I thought oh is he a baseball player or a football player like that's just what I thought I never I didn't want to know and then I found out of course as the elections got closer oh he's running for senate but that's the level of news I consume it's so funny because my way of dealing with this I think everybody's got ways of dealing with the current tumult tumult yeah I don't know if I'm not saying that correct tumult whatever I don't know what it is my way so I work in the news business but frankly I think left to my own devices

[01:15:12] it wasn't a huge news junkie what I liked about the news was the adventures so for example last night but this won't be last night anymore by the time this posts but as we taped this last night I did a big report on Nightline about Russia I spent 10 days in Putin's Russia and really did all this crazy stuff and for me you know covering war zones and I wasn't really up on every jot and tittle in the sort of UN debates over sanctions in Iraq or anything like that just to me about the experience

[01:15:41] and however with Trump my response and it wasn't planned is just that I've actually I've found that having more information has really been helpful to me it's not that I'm sort of over I don't think I'm overdosing on the thing but I find being engaged and really being engaged across the ideological spectrum and trying to sort of understand I love one of the features they have on the New York Times which you're probably not reading on their website they'll often compile writers from

[01:16:11] across the ideological spectrum on the major news events from the administration like the tax plan will go through and they'll put together what conservatives are saying and what liberals are saying and what centrists are saying and I just find that being plugged in and having a sense of how things are going has actually just made me feel more connected and less dire than a news blackout might but that's not to say I disagree with your tactic it just hasn't worked for me I'm probably wrong and people tell me oh you should be aware so you can engage where it's needed like I

[01:16:41] sort of see a lot of news outlets as just trying to scare or just trying to appease one side or the other so unlike you I don't take the time to go across all of them so I can get a balanced perspective but at the same time I'm also not really aware of what I should be afraid of which maybe you should be aware of it so you can say okay well the worst case scenario is this so for instance I know that a tax plan was passed I have no idea what it means for

[01:17:22] so okay he's pretty ineffective and he's done zero vetoes and passed one bill that's all I know about his entire presidency other than the fact that he fires a lot of people and whatever so and here I am a year later my life hasn't changed much and I don't read the news I look different strokes I get it I mean everybody's got to find their own way of dealing with the toxicity of our domestic scene right now but you have to as your job I do I do but I could

[01:17:52] do less you know I could be doing less and be fine in my job it's just for me a feeling of having more information has been comforting for me one thing I'd say to people who are struggling with this I've spoken to a lot of meditation teachers about survival tactics for these very divisive times is the most constructive response is actually to figure out what is in your jurisdiction and do something I agree and I'll tell you a story about

[01:18:22] one podcaster I know and I really enjoy this guy's podcast and I've been on it he wrote once right after the election he wrote I am so upset and depressed that I'm stopping my podcast and so I wrote to him and I literally said are you functionally an idiot just compare two worlds one is a world of Trump who you don't like and now that world doesn't have your podcast and another world has also

[01:18:52] Trump and now it has your podcast which world is a better world that you would like to live in so he restarted his podcast to his credit so that's one way to look at things but again I think that's a way also too of like I'm not going to take credit for thinking this way although I don't know but I don't know being trained in your mind to look at scenarios from different angles is helpful and that's what I think meditation in part does and just

[01:19:22] to be clear for me the problem isn't Trump per se for me the problem is just how much antagonism there is in the atmosphere I agree with that I think antagonism limits our vocabulary and prevents intelligent discussion it actually just goes back to everything we've been talking about this whole time which is it just it's and this is again to just amplify your point there is that it's constricting it's horse blinders you are in your own world where you're sort of partially you're not seeing the whole picture and what again what meditation is about

[01:19:52] is insight seeing clearly and I think that is the remedy for much of what fails us well compassion you know I actually had a whole bunch of questions for you relating to productivity because you're so you wear so many hats at ABC plus your business plus all your writing and meditation and I wanted to talk about that because that's obviously we have a busier and busier world and fitting meditation into that and you write about that a little

[01:20:21] or a lot in your book but I wanted to dive deeper into that we're gonna have to do another podcast all about just productivity but I wanna plug everything first off your new book again Dan Harris with Jeff Warren and Carly Adler meditation for fidgety skeptics so these are just great mind-blowing simple ways to get started in meditation and overcome

[01:20:50] any excuse you've ever heard and I just love every I learned so much from just the way you put things made me think about meditation in different ways and caused me to I mean I have bookmarks all over it caused me to stop and think about it and this is a subject I've read a lot about and done a lot in so there's meditation for fidgety skeptics there's your original book 10% happier and by the way and by the way when you talk about the concept of compounding happiness I do think you're happier

[01:21:20] than you the last time you came on the podcast you seem more relaxed you seem more balanced in a lot of ways it's hard to see that really but I don't know that's how it seems to me and your app 10% happier you get it in iTunes Google Play store probably other places so Dan Harris again you know we were talking earlier like before the podcast started you were asking why do I even you didn't say it this way but why do I even do this podcast it's not like a big it's not for instance a source of income for me but I do this because

[01:21:49] I get to talk to Dan Harris 10% happier guy anchor a co-host on Nightline and anchor on Good Morning America it's such a pleasure to keep getting to know you as we do more and more of these podcasts right back at you man you are really good at this and it's like we had no idea we're going to talk about and it just flows that is it's a rare gift so thanks so much and again next time you're on let's talk about productivity but meditation for fidgety skeptics by Dan Harris thank you sir

[01:22:46] mean girls shut up Titanic I'm the king of the world and so much more for showtimes press nothing they're free 24 7 that is so fetch on Pluto TV stream now pay never