[MUSIC PLAYING] SPEAKER: Thank you
so much for coming. I really appreciate it. We have an amazing
guest for you today, Dan Harris of "10%
Happier" and "Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics." Dan was basically primed for
just a conventionally very successful career in journalism
and perhaps nothing else. And in 2000, he joined ABC
News and was kind of primed to make it to the top there. In 2014, he actually had
a panic attack on air. And this was kind of an
inflection point for him. And he essentially did
what all of us would do, which is kind of investigate
the sources of his panic attack and what were the causes of it. And he used his journalism
platform as leverage to meet a lot of the best
in the self-help industry. And he documented
that in "10% Happier." And what's really
amazing about that book, as opposed to a lot of
other self-help books, it's not immediately
embracing of everything that's New Agey and self-helpy. He comes in, as
he calls himself, a hard-charging skeptic. And he kind of sifts the
substance from the snake oil. And it's written not in a
proselytizing or pedantic way. It's written in a way that
you can really identify with. So I definitely recommend
checking that out. And then he follows up with
"Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics," which is-- if "10% Happier" gets you bought
into meditating to begin with, this book is kind of the how-to. If you have a lot of objections
and maybe aren't fully bought in, then it is helpful. Or then you are bought in,
and you do think it's helpful, but you're having a hard
time just doing it every day, this book is going
to help you there. So I recommend both. He has a podcast as well,
"10% Happier" podcast. He has an app. And he's still doing all of
the amazing journalistic things as well on "GMA"
and other platforms. So yeah, thank you so
much, Dan, for coming here. DAN HARRIS: Thank you. SPEAKER: We really
appreciate it. DAN HARRIS: Thank you. I love from an anthropological
standpoint that-- [APPLAUSE] Oh, hi. Nobody sits right-- except
for this brave individual. It's like there's some
sort of force field. SPEAKER: Maybe they're
just afraid of meditation. DAN HARRIS: Or just me. SPEAKER: (LAUGHING) Yeah. So I want to kind of set
some context here and just talk about your life
pre-meditation and your outlook on life. I think your dad actually had
an interesting phrase that [INAUDIBLE] that kind of
represented your take on life and just being a very
ambitious person trying to make it to the top. It was something
about insecurity. And then post-meditation,
just so we kind of get people bought into
your transformation. Yeah. DAN HARRIS: So I was-- my dad is an academic
physician, a recently retired academic physician
in Boston and very-- both my parents are
academic physicians, so really sort of hard charging,
secular folks in Boston. And my dad had an expression,
which is, the price of security is insecurity, which is a
great thing to tell your child. It always shocks
people when I tell them that my father's Jewish. And so it was this kind of idea
that the only way to succeed is to work incredibly hard. And it takes a lot
of gnashing of teeth and rending of garments. And so that became my way
of surviving when I arrived at ABC News in the year 2000. And I was 28 and really
young and insecure about my lack of experience. And I mean, I had operated on
this thesis for a long time. But it really went
into overdrive when I came here to
New York 18 years ago. And even now that I'm, oddly
enough, sort of a traveling evangelist for meditation, which
was never in my plan at all-- even now that I am, I
still actually believe the price of security
is insecurity. I still think if you're
going to do anything great, it takes a lot of
work, and stress, and plotting, and planning. And I do a lot of that. Even though I really believe
in the benefits of meditation, I'm still as ambitious
as I ever was. I not only have my
situation at ABC, where I host "Nightline" and
the weekend edition of "Good Morning America," but I
have a startup company and I think five books
kind of planned in my head that I want to do. And I have a podcast. And I go around giving
speeches and stuff like that. So I'm still really ambitious
in some of the same ways that I was as a younger guy. But I think I'm just less
of an asshole about it. I mean, that is really-- people ask me all
the time, how do I know if meditation is working? And really the simple
metric is, are you less of an asshole to
yourself and others? And that's the key. Because often the number one
victim of our worst impulses is ourselves. And so I think that
where meditation helps is that I have
learned how to draw the line between
useless rumination and what I call
constructive anguish. There's a certain amount
of plotting and planning that makes sense, and
hard work, and stress, and banging your head
up against the wall. And then it stops making sense. And really having increased
self-awareness, which is really one of the big
fruits of meditation, can help you see, all
right, at this point, is this angst useful? And learning how to manage
that has made me much more effective in my job and
also easier to live with, just living with
myself, but also I've heard my wife talk about this
many times, just generally being less of a shithead. [LAUGHTER] SPEAKER: Fair. I want to go through the plot
line of "10% Happier" just a little bit. DAN HARRIS: Sure. SPEAKER: I think it basically
shows through your life how meditation is very
effective and that you tried a bunch of
different things and kind of looked
at everything. So you had this
panic attack on air. You kind of sought help. And you realized it was kind
of a mild form of depression and anxiety. And describe from there. You used your
platform as leverage to meet Deepak Chopra,
and Eckhart Tolle, and people like that. Describe those experiences
and then what brought you to realizing just plain
and simple mindfulness meditation is the most
scientifically studied thing. This works. DAN HARRIS: So I wouldn't
recommend you do it my way because it involved doing
a lot of stupid things. There are plenty of
seats over here, guys. SPEAKER: Front row. DAN HARRIS: I'm trying to
see if I can challenge people to sit directly in front of
me so I can give you a death stare the whole time. Hi. AUDIENCE: Hey. How are you? DAN HARRIS: Good. I like this guy. So I really don't recommend
you do it the way I did. So I had a panic attack on
national television in 2004-- unpleasant and
really embarrassing. And I was filling in as the
newsreader on "Good Morning America." They don't have that
position anymore. But there used to
be that somebody would come on at the top of each
hour and read the headlines. And I had filled in
on this job before. And I didn't have
any reason to foresee what was about to happen,
which was that I just basically freaked out. And because I have a
pretty good poker face, and I'd spent my entire
adult life on television, it didn't look-- I mean, it didn't
look like I was-- I didn't rip the mic
off and run away. I just had trouble breathing. And I was stammering a
lot, although actually, you can see it on a company I
believe you own called YouTube. If you Google or search on
YouTube for panic attack on live television, it's
the number one result. And after I had the panic
attack, I went to a doctor here in New York City. And he asked me a
bunch of questions. And one of the questions
was, do you do drugs? And I said, yeah, I do. And he said nothing,
except for he gave me a look that communicated
the following sentiment-- OK, asshole, mystery solved. [LAUGHTER] And so the back story is that
I had spent a lot of time as a really ambitious
young reporter. So I got to ABC
in the year 2000. Then 9/11 happened
the next year. And I was in Pakistan,
Afghanistan, Israel, the West Bank, Gaza,
Iraq, a lot in Iraq. And I came home after
a big spell in Iraq, and I got depressed. And I didn't know
I was depressed. And I did something
very dumb, which is I started self-medicating
with a lot of cocaine. And it turns out that's a good
way to have a panic attack. And so when that doctor
said what he said, or gave me the look
that said what it said, I quit doing drugs and
agreed to go see him once or twice a week. And that kind of-- it's not like
I found meditation that day. I didn't, actually. And so it's not like
then everything was all unicorns barfing rainbows
immediately or ever. Then it took me a couple years
to stumble onto meditation. And at first, I was
really skeptical. I mean, I just thought
it was complete bullshit. And I associated it with
hacky sack, and dreamcatchers, and yoga, and stuff like that. I had had a bad
experience in yoga as a little-- my
parents were hippies. And they made me
go to yoga class. And the teacher made me
do it in my underwear. So I was pretty anti-yoga. So I had all those
associations in my head. But then I saw the science
that suggests that meditation is really good for you. I don't want to-- the science sometimes is, I
think, inappropriately hyped. But I think what we can
say is that it strongly suggests that meditation, short
daily doses of meditation, can confer a lot
of health benefits, including basically
rewiring your brain. It changes key areas
of the brain that have to do with attention
regulation, stress, self-awareness, compassion. And that sounds cooler
than it is on some levels because everything you
do rewires your brain. The brain is the
organ of experience. So every experience you have is
creating new neural pathways. But this is just
an organized way to train the brain and the mind. And to me, that's the
revolutionary insight, which is that the mind is trainable. We think that we are
the way that we are. These are factory settings
that can't be rejiggered, that we are as compassionate
as we'll ever be, we're as calm, generous,
focused, whatever. But all of these
mental attributes, which are what we want
the most-- we may think we want whatever-- my
case, success, all the hedonistic pleasures
that are on offer. But all that stuff is
refracted through one filter, which is your mind. And that filter is trainable. And that is really what got
me interested in meditation. And in the process of getting
to that kind of secular, scientific view of meditation,
as Jesse indicated, I did use my job at ABC News to
meet a lot of these self-help gurus, which turned out to be-- I don't want to say useless
digression because it was useful in that it
provided me a lot of people to make fun of in my book. But I didn't learn that many-- I learned some things
that are very useful. But I also met a lot
of people who tell you that you can solve
all of your problems through the power of
positive thinking, which is utter nonsense and I think
actually a really destructive thing to tell people. Eckhart Tolle I think actually
is interesting in some ways. I don't know if-- do
you guys know who he is? Yeah. So Eckhart Tolle is a
really big self-help guru. And he changed my
life, I have to say. I don't know if he
did it on purpose. But I was reading
one of his books. And it was the
first time anybody had ever pointed out to me that
we have a voice in our heads, that we have this inner narrator
that chases you out of bed, and is yammering at
you all day long, and has you constantly
wanting stuff or not wanting stuff, judging people,
comparing yourself to people. My friend Sam Harris-- we're not related, but
we're good friends. He says that what he thinks
about the voice in his head-- he feels like he's been hijacked
by the most boring person alive who just says the same
shit over and over-- most of it negative, all
of it self-referential. And Tolle was really
the first person I had ever heard who was
pointing out that when you're unaware of this
nonstop conversation that you're having with
yourself, it owns you. And all the dumbest
shit we do is because we're
being yanked around by this malevolent
puppeteer, our ego. And that's why you eat
when you're not hungry, or you check your email in
the middle of a conversation. And for me, reading
Eckhart Tolle really-- well, first off, it
became obvious to me that my panic attack was
the result of the ego, that I had gone off to
war zones without thinking about the consequences,
came home, got depressed, was insufficiently self-aware
to know that I was depressed, then did this very dumb
thing of self-medicating. And so reading Eckhart
Tolle was really powerful. But my beef with him-- and I
did go meet him afterwards. And my beef with him is
that, as a friend of mine has described him, he is
correct, but not useful. So he diagnoses the problem
beautifully, brilliantly, although, by the way,
for thousands of years, people have been
diagnosing this problem. He just happened to be the
first dude I ever heard say it. But there was a guy
named the Buddha you might have heard of who
also talked about this stuff. But Tolle, he does diagnose
this and write about it really in, I think, an incisive way. But I don't feel
like he gives you an actionable, practical
advice to deal with it. And so I give him
a lot of credit for really changing my life. But I also then had to go
find something specific to do about it, which was meditation. That was a really long answer
to your simple question. Sorry. SPEAKER: No. It was a great answer. DAN HARRIS: Thank you. SPEAKER: Yeah. It's funny. With Eckhart Tolle, I think
the beginning of "Power of Now" actually, it's like
he's in a dark room. Everything's negative. And then he wakes up the next
morning, and everything's fine. DAN HARRIS: And then he
lives on a park bench for two years in a state of
bliss in the city of London, where they have winter. SPEAKER: That's right. Right. So can you replicate that? I don't really-- maybe. DAN HARRIS: Good luck. SPEAKER: I really
like something you say in your new
book, "Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics." Again, this is kind
of the followup to help you actually
meditate once you're more bought in at least. You say that human
beings are not-- the original word, it's
not just Homo sapiens. It's not just thinking beings. It's Homo sapiens sapiens. It's this self-referential
awareness that we can think. And that cuts to the core
of maybe your definition of mindfulness. So can we just
establish that context? What is your definition
of mindfulness? DAN HARRIS: Mindfulness is this. It's an interesting thing
because simultaneously a really boring sounding word, a
very anodyne sounding word, but also the recipient of an
incalculable amount of hype. So everything's mindful--
yarn bombing, mindful this, mindful that. And I often think
that people, when they talk about
mindfulness, really have no idea what
they're talking about. So I think the simple
definition is-- but we should say mindfulness
is actually an ancient term. The Buddha talked
about it a lot. It was really one of
his big talking points. And it has a lot of meanings. But I think a really easy
way to think about it as a beginner is
it's just the ability to know what's happening in
your mind at any given moment without getting
carried away by it. It's the skill of being
able to see what's happening between your ears
without necessarily taking the bait and acting on it. And this is really, in my view,
the big benefit of meditation. There are lots of benefits,
and we can talk about them. But in my experience,
the big benefit is to be able to have
some-- a term that's been used to describe this
is emotional intelligence. So we are just bombarded
with external stimuli, internal stimuli, internal
stimuli in response to external stimuli, these very
powerful emotions like anger, boredom, sadness. And often, we're just
owned by these things. We're just basically
bobbing around in a sea of our own emotions
without any real awareness of what's happening. And meditation just builds
you an inner microscope, an inner telescope, to see-- is that super contradictory,
telescope and microscope? Whatever. It's a way to see
what's happening. Thank you. It's a way to see what's
happening inside so that it doesn't own you. And it's not complicated. Basically, you sit,
watch your breath. Usually, we start
with the breath. You sit. You feel your breath
coming in, going out. And then you're
just going to get hit by all these distractions. And you notice, oh,
I've become distracted. And in that moment, when most
of us think we're failures, that is the win. Because when you see how
fucking crazy you are, the craziness doesn't
own you as much. And that is the game. The game is to sit and watch
the zoo and to see it is a zoo. And that seeing
clearly of the zoo makes you less of an animal. And that is what we're
doing in meditation. And that is mindfulness. SPEAKER: So you touched
on this a little. DAN HARRIS: You're going to
have to edit the hell out of this video. The YouTube censors are not
going to be cool with it. Sorry. When I'm not on television,
I break FCC violations. [LAUGHTER] SPEAKER: You're so
used to upholding them. So there are a bunch
of misconceptions about meditation-- this idea that you have to
be this Buddha-like character under a waterfall, that you
have to do it in a fixed time, that you have to do
it right, and there's some kind of perfect state
that you have to attain, or that you have to crowd
out your thoughts versus what you just said, which is
disidentify with your thoughts. So can you touch on a
lot of the big ones? Yeah. DAN HARRIS: Yeah. So I think the
two biggest ones-- we've already touched on a
little bit the first one. But I think it's actually
worth discussing again, which is that people say to
me all the time, OK, Dan, I get it. I see the science. Meditation, I should
be meditating. But you don't understand. I can't do it because
my mind is too busy. And I call this the
fallacy of uniqueness. The good news and the bad
news is you're not special. Everybody's mind is like this. We evolved, as I
think Bill Duane, one of your former
colleagues-- he was, until recently, the
superintendent of well-being here at Google and a great guy. He has said that we descended
from nervous monkeys. We evolved on the savanna
for threat detection and for finding sources
of pleasure, food and sexual partners. Evolution bequeathed
us a racing mind, which made a lot of sense. It still, in some cases,
makes a lot of sense. But this is the way
all of our minds work. And that doesn't mean
you can't meditate. Because it is a massive and
pernicious misconception that meditation involves
clearing your mind. I often joke that if you
sit, and you clear your mind, you're either enlightened,
or you're dead, more likely, the latter. The point is not
to clear your mind. The point is to focus your
mind for a few nanoseconds at a time. And then when you
get distracted, which you will, just start again
and again and again and again. And it is that seeing
of the distraction, knowing you've
become distracted, and starting again
that is the win. I often refer to it as the
bicep curl for your brain. This is what you see on the
brain scans of meditators. This is the mechanism
for changing the brain, for rewiring
key regions of the brain. So what are you focusing on? As I said before, you're
focusing on the breath. There are basically three
steps for beginning meditation. The first is you sit in
a reasonably quiet place. If it's not as pristine as you
would like, put in headphones. I sometimes, if I'm in
a really noisy place, will put in headphones and
then play a little white noise through it. So you sit in a reasonably
quiet place, close your eyes. If you don't want to close
your eyes, you can kind of just gaze at the floor
in a neutral way. The second step is just to
bring your full attention to the feeling of your breath
coming in and going out. By the way, there
are other objects of meditation, other things
you can meditate on aside from the breath. But the breath is a
great place to start because it's super portable. So you're just feeling the raw
data of the physical sensations of your breath coming
in and going out, like your belly rising and
falling or the cool air passing your nostrils. And then the third
step is you will just be ambushed by all of
these random thoughts. Where do gerbils run wild? Blah, blah, blah. And then the whole game
is just to notice, oh, I'm distracted right now. Back to the breath
over and over and over. And that is really the game. And I think when it's
explained that way, I can see the light going on for
people that this thing they've told themselves is
impossible is actually super possible for
anybody, no matter how distractable you are. I'm not some paragon of focus. I went to work in TV
specifically because I didn't have what it took to
be a coder or a lawyer or something like that. And so if it can
work for me, I think it could work for anybody. The other big misconception-- and this is, I think, probably
a bigger problem for people who are already bought in. They know they want to meditate. The big issue that people have
is finding the time to do it. So I like to say on this
one, I have good news, and I have even better news. The good news is I think five
to 10 minutes is a great habit. If you were doing that
every day, I think-- everybody wants to know,
what's the least you can do and still get the benefits? And so I've asked a lot of
these neuroscientists, what is the least you can do? Because I hear this from
people all the time. And so I said, is five to
10 minutes a day enough? And we don't know for sure. But the consensus that
I'm hearing from folks is five to 10 minutes
is probably enough. And just see for yourself. I've had this standing challenge
for the last four years since my first book
came out, which is I say publicly
all the time try meditating five to 10 minutes
a day every day for a month. And if you think it's
complete bullshit, send me a note on Twitter and
tell me I'm a moron. And people hit me on
Twitter all the time to tell me I'm a moron,
but never for that, never, not once. So I really do think this is-- the only way you're
going to know whether you're
getting the benefits is how it shows up
in your own life. The science is really useful
for me as an evangelizing tool. But you may start
meditating because you hear about the science. But you don't keep
meditating because you think your prefrontal
cortices are changing. You keep meditating
because, as I said before, you're less of an asshole
to yourself or others. And that's really just the way
to see whether it's working. So the good news is I think five
to 10 minutes a day is enough. I think the better
news is that I really do believe that if
that's too much for you, one minute most days is enough. We have-- at the
10% Happier company, we talk about this
one minute daily-ish. And I think that is a
great way for people who just don't feel-- I get it. I'm busy too. So I get the feeling of one
more thing on my to-do list is just going to make me more
stressed out than I already am. And that defeats the whole
purpose of this thing. So one minute most days is, I
think, a really good way to get started. SPEAKER: In "Meditation
for Fidgety Skeptics," you start actually
at home with "GMA," getting the whole
cast to meditate and listening to
their objections. And then you kind of go
west across the country. You just mentioned some
conventional objections. Were there any weird or
very surprising objections you got to people
wanting to meditate or for you telling them
they should meditate? DAN HARRIS: The objection
that we got that I just couldn't relate to
because I'm so selfish is the idea that meditation
is self-indulgent. So my wife has this objection. She's a physician. She's a mom. And she is really naturally
very compassionate and sort of other-oriented. But it turns out to
be a very common thing that I heard a lot when
we went out on the road. We took this big, orange
bus across the country to meet people who
want to meditate but aren't doing it
to try to figure out, what are the main obstacles? And how can we tackle them? That was kind of the narrative
conceit of the second book. And one of the
obstacles we found was this idea that
meditation is self-indulgent. And there's a really
easy knock down on this, which is, if you want
to help other people, it's really hard to do
that if you're a mess. And it's the cliche from the
airline safety instructions. Put your own oxygen
mask on first. If you truly want
to be of service, the way to do it
from a maximally resilient, calm,
useful standpoint is to have your shit together. SPEAKER: Given
what you just said, and given that there's
an emphasis of training from the neck down just in
terms of the formal physical education growing up, why is
this not instituted on a much younger level for kids? I know maybe-- did David
Lynch do some stuff? DAN HARRIS: He has
done some stuff, yes. SPEAKER: But it doesn't seem
still accepted on that level. It should be this foundational
thing that everybody learns. But yeah. DAN HARRIS: I think
we're heading there. I do. That's my optimistic view. But we're starting to see it. Now, it's in some
schools and pretends to be in more progressive
schools or some school district where they're lucky because
there's just an activist locally who's an
activist parent who's pushing it into the schools. But I actually think
we're going to-- again, this is me
being optimistic. But I think we're headed toward
a world where mental skills are taught in schools
across the country and in basic training
for the military. And that's already
starting to happen. Because the military is
embracing this stuff. And in locker rooms, again,
that is starting to happen. The Chicago Cubs
called me not long ago to come maybe talk
to their folks. They're into it. The fact that Google has several
courses on offer that teach it. I think we're at the beginning
of a public health revolution. And these things
often take time. And what started it,
what catalyzed it, is really the science. Because it's the lingua
franca in our culture. And people like me see the
science, the blobs on the brain scans, and think, all
right, yeah, I'm in. And I think that happens in
C-suites at companies like this and superintendents' offices
for schools around the country. And so I think we're
heading toward it. It may take a little while. And especially in schools,
you do occasionally have parents who don't
like it because they think it's religious,
especially evangelical parents. And I get that. Because they are correct. These practices are derived from
Eastern spiritual practices. But the kind of stuff that's
being taught in schools is secularized. Algebra was developed
by the Muslims, and we're not
worried about that. And so I think these are
innate mental skills that are our birthright. And it happens to be that
the Buddhists and the Hindus before them described
these skills really well. But that doesn't mean
they're Buddhist. SPEAKER: Right. And what is the science? Because you mentioned at the
top that some of it is a little overhyped. Anything you do is going
to affect your brain. The one thing that I always hear
is it affects, or decreases, the gray matter in your
brain associated with stress and anxiety. What else is out there? DAN HARRIS: It's
been shown to lower the release of stress hormones. It's shown to lower
blood pressure, boost your immune system. It's been shown to help-- I think where the
research is really the strongest is anxiety and
depression, both of which I've dealt with my whole life. And then the brain,
the neuroscience really shows that it can
grow the gray matter in the area of the brain
associated with self-awareness and with compassion. And it decreases the gray
matter in the area associated with stress. It's also been shown to
kind of fluff up the area associated with attention
regulation, which is a huge problem. I love joking that the people
who are developing the products and services-- I don't want to name any names,
but Google comes to mind-- that are destroying
our abilities to focus are now embracing these
ancient technologies that are proving that there's
a reason why folks at Google are embracing this stuff. Because it's been shown to
help with attention regulation. And we are in an age where
our attention's under siege. That is not to
unfairly malign Google. There are many
people in this space. So I think there
are a lot of things from the scientific standpoint
that make this practice really attractive. But again, I would
advise that it's not super useful to get really
hung up on everything the science says. Because once you
try it for yourself, you're not really going to
have that many questions about the science. Because it's just
about you start to see the benefits on your own. And what we know about
habit formation is the best way to create a habit, which
is a very hard thing to do, creating a habit--
the best way to do it is to be pulled
forward by the benefits, to make it either a pleasurable
experience-- or like for me, exercise is not pleasurable. But I like not being overweight. And I like that it
makes me less depressed. And so that really
helps me stay on it. And I think with meditation,
you start to see the benefits. You're less yanked
around by your emotions. You're more focused. And that really provides
a powerful incentive to keep doing it. SPEAKER: I know an
objection you had early on was the fear of
losing your edge. A lot of people think
maybe to be creative, you need a certain
amount of pain. There's the tortured
artist archetype. What do you say to that? DAN HARRIS: Who says if van
Gogh wasn't so messed up that he didn't chop off his
ear that maybe his art wouldn't have been better? I mean, I don't know that
this has been proven. And by the way, meditation-- I wish that it did,
but meditation doesn't solve all of your problems. It's not going to take
all of the Sturm und Drang in your life and
just evaporate it all into an impenetrable
bubble of bliss. It doesn't work that way. As one great meditation
teacher has said, it makes you more of a
connoisseur of your neuroses. But it doesn't
vanquish the neuroses. So you're more self-aware. You see, oh, yeah, these are the
various neurotic programs that are kind of running my life. When I'm in one mode,
I'm really greedy. Or when I'm in another
mode, I'm really fearful. Or in another mode, I'm
really self-critical. And it just allows
you to see, oh, this is the trance I'm
operating in right now, and to pop out of it--
maybe for a few seconds, or maybe really to pop out of
it just you don't immediately fall back into it. So I really don't think
it's the type of thing that is going to defang your
ability to be creative. Nor do I think it's going to-- as I said before, I'm
still really ambitious. And I do a lot of meditation. And so I've not found that it's
reduced my ambition at all. I do think maybe on the
edges it can clarify what is truly important to you. And we're all kind
of rats in a maze. We're going wherever
the food pellets are. In these mazes that
they set up for rats, they're just chasing
the little pellets. And we're looking for various
varieties of dopamine hit. And so I've seen
over time the things that I thought made me happy
don't make me as happy, but there are other
things that really do. And so I think it might change
the nature of your ambition. But if it truly makes you
happy to vanquish your enemies and be endlessly,
mindlessly acquisitive, I think that you will
retain those capacities. But I also think you might
find that you are not as blindly driven
as you used to be. But your ambition gets channeled
in more wholesome directions. But that doesn't mean
you're moving into a yurt or anything like that. SPEAKER: Right. And so you do "GMA." You do "Nightline." You have the podcast. You have the app, which
you guys should check out. It's basically a bunch of
awesome meditation experts, like Joseph Goldstein
you mentioned earlier, giving you their own tips and
tricks and take on meditation. What's your goal with all this? Just moving forward,
you have a lot going on. Yeah. DAN HARRIS: My grand-- I've been told by our
venture capitalists that I shouldn't say
what I'm about to say. But I'm just going
to say it anyway because I can't think of
a better way to say it. But my grand ambition-- and I say this in the spirit
of that old expression. They say a man's reach--
or let's just say a person's reach-- should exceed his or her grasp. So I say this as aspirational. But I would love if 10% Happier
became kind of like the Nike for the mind. Now that we know that the
mind is trainable, which is a really radical and
empowering thing to know, I would love if we become the
company that helps you do it in all areas of your life. So right now, we have an
app that's doing quite well. And I want that to grow. But I could see us moving
into in-person trainings, corporate trainings,
secular meditation retreats, lifestyle-brand-type
stuff like shirts. I want to make-- don't steal this. I want to make little,
really nice sweatshirts. And at that point
where the sleeve meets the watch, it should say in
just very subtle embroidery, don't be an asshole so
every time you look, it's just a great reminder. That's my little mantra. And so things like that,
kind of funny, 10% Happier branded stuff. And then books, I want
to do lots more books. And actually my
podcast is a place where people who
otherwise wouldn't be able to get attention, these
great meditation teachers who really reach their folks
in the Buddhist world but don't reach a wider
audience, that I can help them reach a wider audience. So yeah, that's where I
think I want it to go. But I also love
working in TV news. So I sometimes
describe my schedule as drowning in chocolate. I love everything I do,
but I'm still drowning. SPEAKER: That's a
great problem to have. DAN HARRIS: Yeah,
high-class problem. SPEAKER: And then it seemed
like the meditation retreat in "10% Happier" profoundly was
a big inflection point for you. At what point do
you consider that? If you don't have
any experience, can you just do
a 10-day retreat? DAN HARRIS: Totally. SPEAKER: You can? DAN HARRIS: Yeah. You can. I don't recommend
it, but you can. And the good retreats
are created in a way that they're for all
levels of experience. When I tell people that I
went on-- for my first book, I went on a 10-day silent
meditation retreat. I feel that sometimes that is-- I know how the
skeptical mind works. And I suspect for some
of you, it's like, oh, that's what this involves? Well, I'm never doing it. I'm never going to
meditate because then you have to go on a retreat. You don't have to
go on a retreat. I stand by my one minute
or five, 10 minute rule. I was writing a book
about meditation, and I needed some
shit to write about. So I went on a 10-day
silent meditation retreat. As it turns out, I
don't want to say I liked it so much because
that would be the wrong way to describe it. But I found it
meaningful, useful, powerful enough that I now
have done many of them. And I plan to
continue to do them. It's just like you're really
taking yourself out of-- [BACKGROUND VOICE] Is that me? It sounds like my voice. Sorry. I'm distracted now. 10-day-- a meditation
retreat, by the way, they have shorter ones--
one day, two day, three day. I actually do kind of recommend
going for seven days or longer. Because it sucks so
badly at the beginning, and it takes several days
for that to kind of wear off, that the inner rebellion,
in my experience-- Because I hate it so much. Even now when I go, I
mean, I hate it so much. I hate everybody there. I hate the teachers. I can't believe I'm here. It takes a while for that
kind of inner chatter to start to calm down. And that's when the
good stuff's on offer. So yeah, I really do recommend
it, but it's not a must. SPEAKER: OK. It's interesting. What you just said
about a retreat is almost like meditating
is a microcosm of that. Almost the harder the beginning
is, the more refreshing it ends up kind of being. DAN HARRIS: That's right. But here's the double bind. Here's the catch-22. SPEAKER: You can't go for that. DAN HARRIS: You can't go
for anything in meditation. The most valuable thing-- there's this friend
of mine who's written many beautiful
books about meditation. His name is Dr. Mark Epstein. He's a shrink here in New York. And he was looking
back at his diaries from various retreats
he's been on. And every time, the bottom
line, the lesson he takes away, he's found it-- for
every retreat he's gone on, he realizes he learns
the same thing, which is you can't try to feel--
the point of meditation is not to feel a certain way. It is to feel whatever you're
feeling clearly, mindfully so that your feelings
don't own you. And so if you sit
and try to feel calm, it's pretty much a guarantee
that you won't feel calm. This is the paradox
of meditation, of mindfulness meditation. The goal is not to vector
toward a certain state. The point-- as the
great meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg has said,
the point of meditation is not to become
a great meditator. The point of meditation is
to become a better human, to be better at your life. And so the same is true
on retreat that you-- I've done this a lot,
where I'm berating myself for not being calm or not
being as focused or whatever. And it's when that ends that
interesting things can happen or not. But we do so much-- the mind is so
interfering that it creates a buffer between
you, whatever that is, and your direct experience. Just think about
it with something small like eating, how
as we eat, as we chew, we're hunting around
for the next bite. We're never really experiencing
what's happening right now. And on a retreat,
that leaning forward can diminish to a
significant extent. And it can be accompanied
by a big blast of serotonin. SPEAKER: I want to let the
audience ask some questions. Final question from me,
you mentioned Mark Epstein, Sharon Salzberg. What other sort of
intellectual influences do you have that
you might recommend other people kind of check out? A lot of them I'm sure
you've come into contact with through your podcast. DAN HARRIS: Yeah. So I would say the folks
who I wrote about a lot in "10% Happier," often they
come out of this school called the JuBus. They're Jewish Buddhists. So they have these kind of
chewy Jewish last names, like Salzberg, Sharon Salzberg,
Mark Epstein, Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield. And these folks are
all really New Yorkers who went over to India
in the '60s and '70s and learned how to meditate
and then brought it back and started teaching it here. And without that
work, we wouldn't-- they really are the sine
qua non, the conditions-- they created the conditions
that allowed this current health revolution, public health
revolution, to arise. They've all written
really interesting books. But I also recommend Sam Harris,
who was trained by these folks. And some of you may
know him because he has a very popular podcast
called "Waking Up." "Waking Up" is actually
the name of a book he wrote called "Waking Up,"
which is about meditation, which I highly recommend. And Sam is just also a
really interesting dude-- controversial. And I get some
hate sometimes when I talk about how we're friends. But we are friends. And who else? Yeah. I'll leave it there. I don't want to overload you. SPEAKER: Cool. Does anybody have any questions? There's a mic right there. AUDIENCE: Thank you for coming. DAN HARRIS: My pleasure. AUDIENCE: My
question is, how has the success of your podcast,
your apps, your books impacted your personal
meditation practice? Do you feel a lot of pressure to
be really good because of that? DAN HARRIS: I know enough now to
know that that pressure is just a thought. However, in the writing
of this most recent book, I really did-- so we went-- I found this great meditation
teacher named Jeff Warren. I found him. That's a little
presumptive on my part. We met. And I really developed
a big man crush on him. And he's this awesome,
rad guy from Toronto. And so I thought he
would be the right person to put on a bus with me to
go across country in 11 days. Because he seemed like he kind
of had the stamina to do that. And being that
close every minute of every day with a
meditation teacher, he pointed out that
I'm a huge hypocrite. He pointed out that I
go around telling people that the goal of meditation is
not to be really good at it, as I've been saying. You've heard me say
it a million times. It's just to get distracted,
start again, get distracted, start again. But in my own practice, it
started to become clear to Jeff that I was berating myself
for my lack of focus. And he really helped me come
up with some ways to not do it. And I'll tell you
what the mechanism is that's been really
helpful to me, which is when you see that
you've become distracted to have this little mantra
of, welcome to the party. And like after-- there's
a lot of fake it until you make it involved here. But I've found that
now I've been doing it for a year and a half,
that often I'll see-- he had me kind of name
my various inner neurotic programs. Anger is a big one for me. My grandfather
Robert Johnson, who looks like the guy from
"American Gothic," he was just really, really tightass,
mean, old goat who-- he once took me and my
brother into his living room, pointed out his new Betamax-- this was back in the day--
and said, if you touch this, I'll break your arm--
when we were eight. So that kind of guy, but he's
running through my veins. I have this tendency
toward anger. I can be really crotchety
and really mean to myself. And so he was like, when you see
Robert Johnson, be like, what's up, Robert? Welcome to the party. And over time, I
found that as goofy as that is, it's really changed
my attitude toward myself and when I see anger just come
up with my wife or my child or whatever. So yeah. AUDIENCE: Awesome. DAN HARRIS: Thanks, man. Appreciate it. AUDIENCE: Hello. Thank you for being here. DAN HARRIS: Hi. AUDIENCE: "10%
Happier" was amazing. DAN HARRIS: Thanks. AUDIENCE: I think you should
be less hard on yourself about the panic attack because
it's not as bad as you describe it being. You mentioned having a kid. I think anxiety's
something that people deal with for all of their lives. And then they come to
meditation later in life. What advice do you
have for small children and getting them in a
habit that helps them deal with anxiety early on? DAN HARRIS: Yeah. Yeah, my kid's three-- not super mindful, really
good at pooping his pants. What did he say to
me the other day? We were talking. We were playing
basketball or something like that in the hallway with
the little Nerf basketball. And he dropped it. And he was like, pick it up. And I said, what do I look like? And he said, a poopy. That's the kind of
discussions we have. I have not-- I actually want to write a
book about mindful parenting. But I haven't started teaching
him yet or doing much because I don't really know
that much about how to teach a preschooler. And there are-- it can be done. Preschoolers can be
taught meditation. There's different techniques
for kids at different ages. I'd be perfectly comfortable
teaching a high schooler because it's the same
technique you teach a grownup. But I don't really
know all the stuff that you teach a kid, which
makes me a horrible parent. But let me say this. I actually think-- here's
the story I'm telling myself, which is when I think
back about my parents, I do 0% of the things
they told me to do. They told me I
couldn't watch TV. Now I work in the box. But I do everything they did. I do everything
I saw them model. So I found meaningful work. I have a great
relationship with my wife. I spend a lot of
time with my child. I do all the things
that I saw them do. I exercise a lot because my
dad was running marathons, and my mom was really into
exercise and all the things that just they didn't
lecture me about. And so I feel like lecturing
your kid is a bad move. But modeling behavior for
a kid is a better one. And the bad news for
parents is if you want to have a mindful kid, you
have to be a mindful parent. That is the sine qua
non of the whole thing. But there's a great
book out there, after I've now steadfastly
refused to give you any practical advice. There's a great book called
"Mindful Games" by Susan Kaiser Greenland and Annaka
Harris, who happens to be Sam Harris's
wife, that actually does explain how to do this stuff. AUDIENCE: Cool. Thank you. DAN HARRIS: My pleasure. AUDIENCE: Hi. Echoing everyone else,
thank you for being here. So you said one of the-- sort of where the
science is strongest is the impact that
meditation can have on depression and anxiety. So where do you think
that sort of falls in with things like
therapy or medication? How do all these things
relate to each other? Have you tried
those other routes, if that's not too
personal a question? And how do you think they
all relate to each other? DAN HARRIS: You can't get
into my current line of work without-- with anything
being too personal. So yes, tried all
those routes, still believe in all of those routes. But when it comes to mental
well-being, I'm a maximalist. I think you should
do everything. You should try everything that
there's some science behind. Talk therapy, a lot of
reason to believe it can be really useful. Medication, a lot of
reason to believe it can be really useful. What's the logic for
not doing either? We are, as a society,
perhaps overmedicated. So I'm not saying you should
willy-nilly be popping pills. But if you have a careful,
thoughtful doctor, I think it's
something to look at. I don't see meditation
as some silver bullet, and I don't prejudice it
over other modalities. I think it can work
really well in conjunction with medication, talk therapy. For depression, most doctors
will tell you exercise is incredibly important. Getting enough sleep, eating
right, having meaningful work, having positive
relationships, we know the pantheon
of no-brainers. And my only argument
is that meditation should be in the pantheon. AUDIENCE: Thank you. DAN HARRIS: Thank you. AUDIENCE: How's it going? DAN HARRIS: Hi. AUDIENCE: So through personal
experience and some anecdotes from friends, I found it
hard to kind of get over that hump in terms of
locking down meditation as a long-term habit. I know you mentioned
earlier in the talk once you start
realizing successes from a habit, that's
when it really gets easy to be repeated. But even having seen
some success 20 days, 30 days, I always
sort of fall off. Do you have any specific
tips for turning it into a long-term habit? DAN HARRIS: Yeah. I wrote a whole
chapter about this because this is one of the big-- there are many people
in your situation. So there are a lot of
people who've never tried. They just can't get it started. And then there are some
people who try and just fall off really quickly. And then there are people
like you who, they try. They see the benefits. And they still fall off. The thing to know-- well, there are a bunch
of things to know. One is that we are not-- I talked before about
evolution and how it bequeathed us a racing mind. It also bequeathed
us a mind that is shit at creating
healthy habits. We evolved, as I
discussed before, to spot saber-toothed tigers
and find where the food was. Evolution didn't care about
your long-term health. It just cared about getting your
DNA into the next generation. So we're not wired for brushing
our teeth and things like that. We are wired, as a
consequence of evolution, for really kind of
short-term thinking. And so just knowing that lowers
the temperature a little bit. You know you're wired to fail. This is hard to do. You are going to fail
time and time again. And so the answer is to
approach the entire enterprise with a spirit of exploration
and experimentation. And so try different
times of day. Try different apps. Try different kinds
of meditation. Try different dosages. Like maybe really it'd be
better for you to do one minute. Maybe five minutes is good. Try drafting off
of existing habits. Maybe you have an
abiding exercise habit. Well, right after
you stretch, if you could put meditation
right on there, it might be a good
way to get it going. So two parts here, one,
don't beat yourself up. It's totally normal. Two, try a bunch of
stuff, like those things that I just listed,
and see what happens. And I think over time, given
that you see the benefits, and you have a history
of making it work, it will click at some point. It will. AUDIENCE: Thanks. DAN HARRIS: And the
other thing to know is that starting,
falling off the wagon, and starting again, in that
process, nothing has been lost. It's not like you are
rebuilding from zero. I don't think that's the case. It's just like when you
get lost in meditation. The whole game is just to
notice and to start again. And I think that that analogy
holds true for the habit formation process. AUDIENCE: Hi. Thanks for coming. I'm a big fan. I really loved all the
potty talk, the potty mouth because I am so
used to hearing you talk like on a podcast, where
it's clean and everything. And thanks for coming too. DAN HARRIS: Yeah. Well, my podcast
is owned by Disney. AUDIENCE: So you're
at a company that you said our attention
is under siege by some companies like ours. And maybe you can help
us figure out how to-- because the next step, it seems
like artificial intelligence is-- like, we're trying to
program robots to think. But really, what we
needed to be doing is teaching robots
to be mindful. So maybe you could
help us with that? I don't want to be
part of the problem. DAN HARRIS: By the way, I
made that joke at Apple too. So I'm not just
picking on you guys. God, AI is such a tricky thing. And I know next to
nothing about it. But I see-- there's
plenty of reasons to be a technoskeptic
when it comes to AI or when it comes
to just basically the inundation of
data for all of us. But I just see this
countertrend of mindfulness as being really
powerful and being real. And so I don't know
what I would advise folks who are programming
AI in terms of how to-- I would love to come and sit
in on discussions about how to make that more mindful. I have nothing that's
surfacing right now. But I would say that everybody
doing the work and everybody just full stop would
benefit from this practice. Because it is such
a nice corrective to the tide of society
that's just yanking us along. AUDIENCE: I actually wanted
to ask you another question. So you talked a lot about-- I assume you've never
meditated on cocaine. But I don't know if
that's too personal. DAN HARRIS: No,
not too personal. Never done it. I mean if my doctor would've
allowed me to, I would love it. But-- [LAUGHTER] AUDIENCE: Yeah. I don't think-- I think that
would be a big zoo, right? I mean not that I ever partake. But I'm wondering-- AUDIENCE: No judgment here, man. AUDIENCE: I'm just
wondering what your-- I mean, there's
pleasure-seeking. There's alcohol, nicotine. How has your relationship
changed with other medications, whether it be self-medication-- I've heard you talk about
mushrooms on your podcast. And Sam Harris has certainly
talked about this stuff a lot. I mean to be mindful,
do you need to just wipe your hands clean of this stuff? DAN HARRIS: No, no. AUDIENCE: Or what's your
take on altering your mind? DAN HARRIS: A lot of
things to say on that. First of all, on the mushroom,
acid, ayahuasca, DMT [? tip, ?] I'm really interested
in Michael-- Jesse and I were talking before. Michael Pollan has a
new book out about this called "How to
Change Your Mind." And I recently struck up a
little bit of a friendship with Tim Ferriss, who's
really into this stuff. And Sam-- not anymore, but
Sam's done a lot of this and written about it. But my shrink and my
wife make the case in a very compelling
fashion that for somebody who has panic
disorder, messing with my brain chemistry while I still
have to go on television, probably not the best move. So while I'm very
interested in this stuff, I'm not going to do it,
at least not right now. But as to just the
everyday quote unquote, "vices," drinking alcohol,
smoking a little bit of weed, or whatever it is,
I am not really that judgmental about it. The Buddhist perspective is
not that you should never have any pleasure in your life. It's are you so
swamped and addicted to the pleasure that
it's actually really not pleasurable anymore? And that's the
line to play with. So I know plenty of really,
really well-trained meditation teachers who will have a
glass of wine once in a while, or like chocolate, or whatever. The point is not that you
should become an ascetic. The point is that
you should just be able to manage these
pleasures skillfully. And actually, you
can start to see over time that desire,
pleasure, these are all impermanent things. And you can start to surf
that and get interested in it in a way that the meditation
practice can help you with. And on the flip side,
displeasure and pain are also impermanent. So the practice can be
woven into all sorts of aspects of life. And I would argue that we're-- I have a friend who's a
neuroscientist and a meditation teacher. And he was writing a
book that he ended up calling something else. But he was going to call
it "We're All Addicted." Because we're all addicted. Addiction is part of our lives. We're just hurling
ourselves from one hit of pleasant experience, one
dopamine hit, to the next all the time-- one latte, one slice of
cake, one party, whatever. We're always on the hunt. And seeing that
is the first step towards starting to kind of play
with it in a more skillful way. It doesn't mean that
you are never going to have any pleasurable stuff. I went to a movie with
my wife this morning-- "Solo," which by the way--
and I'm a Disney employee, so I was supposed to say this. But it actually is really
good, the new Han Solo movie. So I still love all sorts
of things that I love. But it's about hopefully
managing addiction. AUDIENCE: Thank you. AUDIENCE: Thanks
again for coming in. I'm new to the
meditation practice. And everything I've read,
including what you said here today, the practical
application of meditating, it's always recommended to do it
sitting instead of lying down. I think I also fall
victim to trying to get the most out of something
with the least amount of work. And I want to incorporate
meditation in my day-to-day. And the easiest
thing I can think of is doing it right when
I wake up, lying down. Do you not recommend that? DAN HARRIS: I think
it's totally fine. AUDIENCE: Is there
science behind having to do meditation while sitting? DAN HARRIS: Totally fine. So the Buddha talked
about four ways to meditate, four
postures for meditation-- sitting, standing,
walking, or lying down. So you're on the right side of
the angels, as per the Buddha-- not a bad place to be. So I think it's totally fine
to lie down and meditate. Your mind's your mind,
whatever posture you're in. So if you're training
it, you're training it. Now, there are some
schools of meditation, especially the Zen
school, that are really strict about posture. And I think there's
something to that. But as a guy who doesn't
like to sit straight, can't sit cross-legged,
I'm really on the side of the argument
that's what I said before, that you're training your
mind, whatever position your body's in. And that's really where I
would put your attention. AUDIENCE: Great. Thank you. DAN HARRIS: My pleasure. AUDIENCE: Hi, Dan. A few years ago, you and
Sam Harris were at the Rubin and talked about
mindfulness meditation. And I think this
was around the time you had written "10% Happier." DAN HARRIS: Yeah. AUDIENCE: And so Sam,
I think jokingly, said, I don't want to denigrate
your experience. But he talked about
there being a little more to mindfulness and
the practice, things like the ability to
discover fundamental things about the mind,
self-transcendental experiences. And you brought up how this
is common across religious and nonreligious people. And you even see it in athletes
who get into a flow state. And then he brought up this
idea of the self and the ego and how, through meditation,
you can kind of get rid of that illusion. So I was wondering
if you could-- what's your take on that? Have you moved away-- or I guess researched more,
discovered more than just the utilitarian
aspects of meditation? DAN HARRIS: It's
a great question. Sam and I just did an event
together in LA the other day that's going to post on our
respective podcasts soon. It's really a
question of emphasis. So Sam is very erudite and is-- he's a public intellectual. That's the way he
thinks of himself. And so I am not nearly
as educated as Sam. And I'm a TV news anchor. So I'm really keeping
things more basic. And I'm really
trying to emphasize-- I speak to folks-- today, I'm at Google. But I'll be in Indiana or
New Orleans or wherever. I'm really speaking to all kinds
of people about this-- cops, social workers,
celebrities, whatever. I want to be able to talk
to everybody in language they can understand. And so I do. And Sam and I have talked
about this publicly. I choose to emphasize
certain aspects of the practice, primarily two. One is focus. And the other is mindfulness,
not being yanked around by your emotions. Of course, Sam is
correct when he talks about what is
sometimes referred to as the deeper end of the
pool, which is that you start to examine the nature of the
self, the nature of who you are, the nature
of consciousness. All of that stuff
is absolutely real and a huge part of my practice. And I'm always happy
to talk about it because I think,
actually, there's nothing more interesting. And we talk about it a lot
on my podcast these days. But it's not what I lead with. Because my audience is
very different from Sam's. Sam's is a bunch of really
smart, uptight young men-- maybe not uptight, but a
lot of really smart guys who have opinions about things. And I just did this
event with him in LA. And they all come. And they're great. They're super intense
and really smart. But so Sam can lead with the
biggest, most esoteric idea because that's what
his audience expects. But I'm not that smart. And I choose really to emphasize
the low-hanging fruit, which is why Sam often says, you
should read "10% Happier" before you read "Waking Up." They work as a
sequence in that way. Because I really am
happy splashing around in the shallow
end because I am-- I'm not talking about my
own personal practice here. I'm talking about my
public positioning. Because I really want-- I'm sort of at the
wide end of the funnel. I want to talk about
the basic human capacity to train the mind and
get people in the pool. And then in my own
personal practice, yeah, I do two hours
a day of meditation. I do 10-day silent meditation
retreats one-on-one with Joseph Goldstein. And all this stuff is the
stuff that I'm obsessed with. But it just doesn't
seem to me the way to-- the thing to lead with when
I'm trying to get people just to do a minute or five
minutes a day of meditation. AUDIENCE: Appreciate your work. Thanks. DAN HARRIS: Thank you. Appreciate it. SPEAKER: Everybody
check out "Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics." Check out "10% Happier,"
the podcast, the app. Is there anything else? DAN HARRIS: No, you've
done a great job plugging. Thank you. SPEAKER: Of course. Thank you for coming, man. Really appreciate it. DAN HARRIS: Thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. [APPLAUSE] It was fun, really fun. SPEAKER: That was awesome.
