Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - From “Impolitic With John Heilemann” | Dan Harris: Meditation, Mental Health, Six-Peckered Goats & The 2024 Election

Episode Date: October 18, 2024

Last month, Dan appeared on Impolitic With John Heilemann — the two guys are old friends — to talk through Dan’s strategies for staying sane in the homestretch of this anxiety-fueled, agitation-inducing, existentially unnerving election; why failure is often more productive and profitable (mentally, emotionally, spiritually) than success; how to maintain a sense of calm, balance, and serenity while working harder than, in Dan’s phrase, a “six-peckered goat;” and the career earthquake that’s led to the big recent changes you’ve all heard about in the 10% Happier empire. Dan thought that the conversation was terrific, so he asked John if he could offer it to his followers—et voila, here it is! If this taste of John whets your appetite for more, please follow Impolitic With John Heilemann for a twice-weekly all-you-can-eat buffet of fresh, candid, no-holds-barred conversations with the people who shape our politics and culture. Thanks for listening, hope you enjoy, and namaste.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to 10% happier, early and ad free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. ["Wonderful News Theme"] Hey, gang, I'm starting to do something on my podcast feed here that I've wanted to do for a while, which is dropping interviews that I've done with podcast hosts I love. You may have noticed a few weeks ago, I dropped an interview I did with Dr. Becky Kennedy, who's actually been a guest on this show, but I was a guest on her show, which is excellent.

And I dropped that episode down this feed because I thought you might be interested in it. Similarly, I am dropping down the feed today an interview I did with one of my all-time favorite journalists, a guy named John Heilman. He has a new podcast, it's called ImPolitik, but he's also involved in many, many other things. He writes a column through Puck.

He's a co-host of a completely different podcast called Hacks on Tap, which I've listened to for a long time. And he's a regular on Morning Joe. I rely on John for a dose of sanity and reality as we navigate this tumultuous election season. He is one of the smartest and funniest journalists out there. In this interview, though, John interviews me, and we talk a lot about how to keep our anxiety in check as we enter these really nerve-wracking final weeks of the presidential

election here in the United States. We also talk a little bit about how difficult it's been for me to make the big career transition that we've talked about recently where I left the 10% happier app and started danharris.com. We also cover aspects of my reporting career. And you'll get to hear me use a term I have never used on this podcast before, but which I think is hilarious. It's a reference to a six peckered goat. I don't even know where I heard that phrase, but I love it.

Anyway, huge fan of John Heilman. Enjoy this conversation and please go check out his other stuff, including in politic with John Heilman, his column on puck, his other podcast hacks on tap, which is with David Axelrod and of course his frequent appearances on Morning Joe. Here we go with my guy, John Heilman. Aloha and Namaste everyone and welcome to Impolitik with John Heilman, my podcast for Odyssey and Puck. Coming at you every Wednesday and Friday with fresh topical candid conversations with the people who roam the quarters of power and influence in

America from Washington to Wall Street, Hollywood, Silicon Valley and beyond shifting and shaping the warp and weft of our politics and culture. When just a little bit more than 50 days to go before Election Day, those two streams politics and culture are increasingly merging into one and flooding the zone with a fizzy mixture of excitement and edginess, nervousness, anxiety, agita, and all around fear and trembling. So when my friend Dan Harris, longtime ABC News correspondent, former anchor of Nightline, the weekend edition of Good Morning America and World News Sunday, now turned full-time meditation guru and entrepreneur, when Dan reached out recently to alert me to an episode of his 10% happier podcast entitled eight things I'm doing to stay

sane during this election season I thought well if that episodes any good I should get that guy in the podcast to chop it up because if my friends and colleagues are any indication staying sane during this election is no mean feat in fact it's a combination of a full-time job, Sisyphean struggle, and total pipe dream. But, as expected, Dan's episode of 10% Happier is good, really good, and so, voila, we have Dan here with us today to talk about that and a whole lot more.

If you have never run across Dan Harris before, first of all, you are in for a treat, since there are very few very smart people, I know, who are as nice, kind, decent, empathic, and really just truly madly, deeply menschy. Son of a pair of Boston-based medical eminences, his dad a radiation oncologist at Harvard Medical School, his mom a pathologist and expert on lymphomas at Mass General, Dan graduated from Colby College in 1993 and then started his rapid fire ascent up the ziggurat of broadcast journalism

as a local TV anchor in Bangor, Maine. Soon enough, he made the big time, joining ABC News in 2000 and over the next 20 years. In addition to all those flashy anchoring jobs I mentioned earlier, he reported from all over the world, covering wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, producing investigative reports in Haiti, Cambodia, and the Amazon, winning himself an Edward R. Murrow Award

for his reporting on a young Iraqi man who received the help he needed in order to move to America, and an Emmy Award for his Nightline report, How to Buy a Child in 10 Hours. But early on in his rise at ABC News back in 2004, Dan experienced an on-air panic attack while hosting Good Morning America. With the help of therapy, he gradually realized

that he had to change his life bigly, and he turned to meditation to help him do it. Fully 10 years after that, in 2014, Dan published a book entitled 10% Happier, How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Really Works. A true story. That book went on to become a New York Times number one bestseller and the launching pad for Dan's hugely successful

podcast and meditation app. Dan had some news to share on that front and you'll hear about it shortly along with a hugely relatable account of the journey that led him to climb down from the upper echelons of broadcast journalism after three decades in the business and plunged full-time into the brave new world of mental wellness and equally disorienting a new identity as a grown-up social media influencer in 2021. And of course, you'll also hear Dan discuss the eight, count them eight, tools and techniques that he's using and recommending to help him and all of us survive the 2024 election with our heads and hearts intact. Okay, relatively intact. And while I won't be able to vouch

for their effectiveness until we emerge on the other side of this flame-spewing electoral crucible and national cardiac event that we're going through right now, I can tell you this. After listening to Dan lay out those tools and techniques, all eight of them, in his calm, encouraging, profoundly sensible sounding that we're going through right now, I can tell you this. After listening to Dan lay out those tools and techniques, all eight of them, in his calm, encouraging, profoundly sensible sounding way, not to mention that mellifilous set of pipes of his, I am feeling at least 10% happier already.

So settle in, take a few deep breaths, and if it's your jam, a couple of deep bong hits, as we engage in a seance with the great Dan Harris on InPolitik with John Heilman in three, two, one. Hey, Dan here. I know we're in the middle of a period of time where some of you, I would include myself in this category, some of you are freaking out

about the presidential election in the United States. And so I wanna talk about what I'm doing to keep it together during this turbulent time. For 30 years, I was a TV news anchorman and correspondent. So I covered many, many presidential campaigns. I really understand how turbulent this period of time can be. So that's the bad news. But the good news is the central plank of my platform,

the animating insight of my whole post-news career is that the mind and the brain are trainable. That peace of mind, happiness, compassion, gratitude, generosity, these are not unalterable factory settings. They're skills that can be trained through various modalities. And so I want to kind of reframe, or at least I've been trying to do this for myself, to reframe this presidential election as a workout,

as a kind of dojo where you get to practice these skills that will not only help you to deal with all of the misogast and the larger culture, but also help you in the rest of your life. So that was Dan Harris on his podcast, 10% Happier with Dan Harris, talking about a topic that, you know, concerns a lot of people,

even people who aren't in my business. It's like, man, this election is a shit show. I'm scared to death what to do about it. And Dan, it's good to see you. Someone I've known for a long time and have been a fan of for a long time. But I'll say, you know, we were texting each other and you raised the fact that you had done this

special episode of the podcast titled eight things I'm doing to stay sane during this election season. I was like, well, that'd be a good topic for him. Politics. So we're, so we're going to talk about that. But but first, Dan, how you doing? I'm doing great. It's always good to see you.

Eight tools in that thing, in that, in that they have eight tools for, and I love the fact that you frame it as these are not commandments. If you don't do all these things, I'm not trying to add to your stress, but these are some things that I'm trying to do as I go through this period. Why I want to say that the, you know, the, the first one actually gets us into, and we can spend more or less time on some of these as we go here, but the first one gets us into what you really, your form of the meditation, the form of meditation that you're most focused on, which is mindfulness meditation, as opposed to some of us who practice other forms

like me who do TM. Talk about how, what mindfulness meditation is and how it applies in this particular case to something that anybody can adopt as a strategy for dealing with election distress. Yeah, happy to. I love talking about this. Mindfulness meditation is derived from Buddhism, but it is totally secular and stress. Yeah, happy to. I love talking about this. Mindfulness meditation is derived from Buddhism,

but it is totally secular and simple. It's a kind of exercise for your brain. And I can just describe how to do it. You can sit quietly in as quiet a place as you can find, but if you're in a noisy place, you just put headphones on and play some white noise through them and close your eyes and bring your full attention to the feeling of

your breath coming in and going out. You don't have to breathe in any special way. It's not a breathing exercise per se. You just try to feel your belly rising, falling, or the air coming in and out of your nose. And then as soon as you get distracted, this is the big most important point, as soon as you get distracted, which you will a million times, the whole goal is just to notice you've become distracted

and start again and again and again. And this is the key point because a lot of people try to do this, they notice how distractable they are, and they tell themselves a whole story about how they're incapable of meditation, they're too distracted. They're failing, they're failing at meditation, yeah. What I like to point out to people,

and this has really become my job on the planet, is that when you see the distraction, that is proof that you're succeeding, because clearing the mind is impossible unless you're enlightened or you've died. The whole goal in meditation is just to see how wild the mind is so that you're not owned by it. And this is a game changer, so that you have a thought of,

oh, well, I'm gonna say something that's gonna ruin the next 48 hours of my marriage, but you don't actually act it out reflexively the way most of us do most of our lives. Meditation gives you this kind of inner clarity, this self-awareness that helps you not be so yanked around by your ego. I like the fact that the binary there is either,

you only have a quiet mind if you're dead or enlightened. And really none of us ever really achieve enlightenment and the other option is dead. We like to think, the idea of being interrupted, it's like a sign that you're alive, essentially. Exactly. You're interrupting yourself. I love the fact in that intro,

one of the great things about your work is that, I'm curious about it before I ask you about, talk about how that will help with election stress, specifically, did you script your podcasts, or are you just doing those off the top of your head? Well, like the podcast that you heard is actually the one on election stress.

It's pretty rare that I do a podcast where it's no guest, just me talking. And I just started to experiment with that. So for that one, I had a scripted intro and then I just, I had these eight points and I just riffed on them. And I realized while doing that, wow, I should do more of this.

Yeah, I mean, because, yeah. Well, I mean, I just, it was really striking to me because, you know, the phrase, some of the phraseology, you know, the central plank of your platform, the thing about turning election, dealing with election stress into a dojo, the notion of these things that you're trying to fix, that you can trying to fix,

that you can improve your mind and your brain, there's not like a permanently set on-off switch. There's just really, they're really nicely written. And they're like, they're very, they open up the conversation for people who might be intimidated by the topic in some way and think, oh God, this guy's gonna be some fucking guru or Bogwan or whatever.

But it's like a very, it's a very good colloquial kind of way of writing. And I know that's part of the point I haven't learned to write for television, but it's a very good colloquial kind of way of writing, and I know that's part of the point of having learned to write for television, but it's really, really nicely done. So tell me about, just a little bouquet I wanted to toss you there. I was listening to it going, man, dancing, you know?

Very nicely, it's very accessible and fun. Mindfulness meditation is key to dealing with election stress because? I think it's foundational because having that self-awareness, being able to have some idea like how your mind is always looping and fizzing and planning and ruminating, that is kind of the precondition for working with the mind in the face of all of the vexations and vicissitudes

of this time in American history. And so I led with that as a precursor to saying what is much more sort of directly relevant to the election, which is one is you should use your mindfulness, your self-awareness, to limit your news consumption. That does not apply to impolitic, puck, hacks on tap, or morning Joe,

or anything that John Heinlein is associated with. But I do think you might, having had some meditation under your belt, and you don't have to have meditation in order to be mindful. Mindfulness is innate in everybody who's human. Meditation just helps you build it. But you can use your mindfulness,

whether you meditate or not, to notice, oh, okay, I've been on Twitter for eight hours. I'm starting to send messages in all caps. I haven't gone to the bathroom. I hate everybody who's ever lived. Maybe I should turn this off. So it's interesting that you have the next two of the tools

that you list after you start with mindfulness meditation. Then you say two things. Then they're conjoined. And I think they're interesting and worth spending just a tiny bit of time on because limiting your news consumption and then also seeking out diversity of news opinions to the extent that you do have your news, that you're

going to have some news consumption. Of course you are. So it's limiting consumption, diversifying news consumption. And one of those goes to open-mindedness, the thing that you have a lot, the second has a lot, a thing you have a lot to say about. I'd like you to talk about the two of them and how they can go hand in hand, because I think for a lot of people, seeking out, you use social media as an example, which is obviously the example that people go to immediately.

And I say as someone who has been on Twitter for a long time and have ridden the ups and downs of that platform, I find the whole thing, if there was a way to, I totally agree with you about the diversity of opinion, and I'm with you. The problem is that there is no civilized diversity of opinion in a lot of these social media platforms, particularly Twitter, where if you come across diverse opinions, what you come across is a lot of hate speech, a lot of toxicity. There's a lot about that platform that drives, does anything but, that gives you touch a little bit of it, no matter how much you limit yourself to.

You run into Elon Musk or someone else, you know, propelling a conspiracy theory or yelling at you, calling you a child molester on the basis of no information whatsoever just because that's what they do now. I don't really – if you had said cut out social media entirely, I would have been like, well, there's a way to deal with election stress. I think that's a pretty good idea. But talk about how do you manage those – the actual reality of what our social media platforms have become, and particularly that one, in the actual reality of what our social media platforms have become,

and particularly that one, in the context of achieving what you're trying to achieve here? Yeah, I don't think it's a bad idea to cut out social media entirely. I hesitate to recommend it because it doesn't seem like a thing most people are going to do. So I don't want to be out there recommending the you know, recommending the impossible, but I don't, if you want to do it, I think it's a great idea. In terms of finding people with whom you disagree to follow,

I'm not sure social media is the place for that. I'm more a fan of like newsletters or podcasts, more thoughtful, you know, like, and if you just say you're on the left and you want to, you know, dip your toes in to what's happening on the. Maybe start start with the bulwark, you know, they're they're anti-trump but conservative or then you can you know for me I You know, I'm a little bit kind of down the middle I think just after years of being a journalist, but there are people on the right and the left that I listen to on the right

I would say You know the National Review guys have a podcast the commentary magazine There are people on the right and the left that I listen to. On the right, I would say, you know, the National Review guys have a podcast, the Commentary Magazine guys have a podcast. You know, they also have magazines and are putting out articles. And so there are, you know, there are lots of, the free press, Barry Weiss,

you know, there are lots of ways to dip your toes in there. And it might, you know, it's counterintuitive because some people might think, well, if I read people on the right, if I'm, you know, there are lots of ways to dip your toes in there. And it might, you know, it's counterintuitive because some people might think, well, if I read people on the right, if I'm on the left, it's gonna make me more stressed. And there's a way in which that is true, but I find on a deeper level, actually achieving some sort of non-caricatured understanding

of why people think the way they think, as opposed to being told that by the sort of conflict entrepreneurs on the left or whatever side you're on, having these sort of cartoonish versions of the rights served to me. Hearing it from the horse's mouth, as it were, is, I don't know, it kind of removes

some of the venom and vitriol from the situation. It's like, oh, okay, they're human beings. They have a reason for what they believe, and I don't know, for me, that makes it less stressful. Conflict entrepreneurs, that's another good phrase. Not my phrase, not my phrase. It's okay, don't do that, just steal it. Just take the compliment.

Great artists steal, as they say, don't do that. Which of those do you find harder? limiting or diversifying Versa fine I'm actually oddly enough. I was in you know we've talked about this. I was in the news business forever I Am not here. I am not actually a news junkie believe it or not So I don't find it hard to limit my news consumption. I do find it hard to diversify. First, it's been hard for me to find people that don't drive me absolutely nuts. And then, you know, it

takes some doing to get myself to press play on the people I disagree with, rather than the folks who are feeding me the red meat that I crave. And yet I do find in a paradoxical and maybe even perverse way, it is coming. It helps me view the world. It's challenging in a way that I think is really helpful. And I believe, you know, Maria Popova, who's this great writer, has said that we're living in a pandemic of certainty. And I feel like a good citizen when I challenge my own beliefs. And there's just something deeply satisfying

about getting out of the subtle pain of dogmatism. You know, like we're, you know, what's the, there's some expression like hysteria is believing something you know or believe might not be true. That's what makes you hysterical. And I don't know, I can see that if I interpolate back through my life as a citizen, I can see myself doing that.

I'm gonna skip over number four and five for different reasons. For number four, I see with loving kindness meditation, another form of meditation. I suggest anybody who wants to learn about that, go and listen to Dan's podcast about it, because I like you, Dan, when I hear any mention of loving kindness meditation

and how it all works, it makes me want to, makes me doubt that I'm still a Dan Harris fan. I mean, you even acknowledge the, I would say, screamingly obvious reasons to be skeptical of something that sounds this ridiculous right up front in the episode itself. Take a listen to what you said. I have made no secret about the fact that when this practice was first introduced to me, I found it revolting, just like unbelievably cheesy. But there's a ton of

science to show that it can have very powerful physiological benefits, but also psychological and behavioral benefits. So there's a lot to this practice. So, I mean, Dan, I mean, I'm not gonna quibble with research. You know a lot more about the research in this area than I do. And the fact I had no idea that this is a practice that the Buddha himself endorsed, so I'm not gonna quibble with the Buddha either. But I'm just not going there, okay?

Now, I'm just not gonna go there here on this podcast. We're not gonna talk about it. If you wanna hear about it, go listen to Dan talk about it on his podcast. Now, the other one that I'm just not going there, okay? Now, I'm just not gonna go there here on this podcast. We're not gonna talk about it. If you wanna hear about it, go listen to Dan talk about it on his podcast. Now, the other one that I'm gonna skip has to do with communication skills because I think it's the most obvious of the things,

which is basically a series of things that are, if you're gonna talk to people, especially people you disagree with, you're not trying to change their mind. You shouldn't attack their opinion. And you should formulate your concerns just to make them personal. Don't make them, put them in the absolute.

Just be like, this is what worries me. And those are all things I think that are good strategies, but also things that are not as unique as a couple of the others are the ones that I found most insightful. And those relate to your points six and seven. Six, which is action absorbs anxiety, and the second, which is never worry alone,

which I think may be the most important thing in the entire podcast. But talk about those two and how important they are, because I really found those the things where I was like, yeah, fuck yes, those I related to them in a pretty powerful way. I'm not necessarily great at the second one, but I think they're obviously super important.

To me, they're the fuck yeah elements of the podcast as well, and then really of like doing life better. Life, of life, yeah. So action absorbs anxiety, also you're going to not approve of this, not my phrase, but I like it. You know, it's so easy to look at what you call the dumpster fire of our election, or really any big and disturbing story from the Middle East to Ukraine, and feel helpless.

But there is always the possibility of getting involved in your sphere. It may not even be relevant to the issue that's stressing you out. So you could volunteer on a local campaign, and that would be more relevant to the election. But you could also volunteer at a homeless shelter or an animal shelter and or you could just be useful to your friends and family. You could just hold the door open for somebody. That is ennobling and empowering and available perennially. I highly recommend you help yourself to it.

And then on this- It's another version of just the idle hands or the devil's plaything. It's like, you know, just doing shit makes you, doing shit, if nothing else, just takes your mind off your stress and you feel like you're, like who goes, just chopping wood, man.

Like just go chop some wood, you'll feel better. Never worry alone. That's like that, this is the big kahuna. It is the big kahuna. And I got this expression from this guy, Robert Weldinger, who's run the longest running study in all of science. He's the third person to run it. It's a study out of Harvard that's looked at

several generations of folks in the Boston area and try to figure out like what are the variables that contribute to a long, healthy, happy and successful life. And the number one variable by far is just the quality of people's relationships. And you would think, no, it should be how much exercise or how often are they achieving ketosis?

Sleep. Sleep. Sleep, whatever. And sleep, and sleep, which people tell you about how important it is all the time, but this is like really just like, do you have good relationships? Correct. Correct. And sleep is important. All those things are important,

but the thing that moderates, the thing that modulates stress the best, and stress is what kills us, the thing that modulates stress the best is your relationships. And so when you're watching the debates, when you're reading the polls, whatever it is, do it with other people, text with other people, find some sort of community with whom to do life.

And that is probably the simplest recipe for a good life, whether we're in an election or not. It's funny because for a lot of people whether we're in an election or not. It's funny because for a lot of people who are type A personalities who are very individualistic and feel like they're very self-reliant, there's a point of pride and I go through these things alone, number one. And number two, there's also these people who are kind of like, I don't want to trouble people with my work. I know I'm freaking out about the election.

I don't want to be a burden to my friends, my constant freak outs about whether Donald Trump's going to put my mother in an internment camp or something. I know I'm being paranoid. I don't want to be a burden to my friends, my constant freak outs about whether Donald Trump's gonna put my mother in an internment camp or something. I know I'm being paranoid, I don't wanna do that. And you're basically saying you gotta fight through that because talking about it with an affinity group of some kind actually will reduce your stress and help you cope with your fears. That's exactly what I'm saying.

Call your mom, call your friends, do it. I'm gonna be calling you, actually, I believe in the next century. I'm gonna be on the phone, do it. Yeah, I'm gonna be calling you. Call me. Actually I believe in the next century. I'm gonna be on the phone, hey dad, dude, I'm not doing enough action, my anxiety's off the hook and I'm also worrying alone all the time. I need a worry partner.

What do you, I'm curious, first of all, you can always call me, but what do you, you're living in, you're marinating in this stuff all the time. What do you do, and I know you just took some time off, which I think is an awesome technique, but aside from that and inclusive of that, what do you do to modulate or moderate your stress?

It was funny when I told, I told David Pluff the other day, we were talking about having him on the podcast, and he said, well, what about the last week of August? I said, I'm going off the grid, I'm not talking to anybody, I don't give a fuck. If it was Kamala Harris, I would turn it down. I'm taking the fucking nine days off,

and he goes, pro move. Pro move. He's like, pro move, pro move before Labor Day to take a week off in this environment. You gotta do that. I was like, and David Plouffe, who's one of the most high-strung people I've ever met, I say that with affection, says that.

I'm like, I think I'm on the right track. For me, the two things that you said before are really important. Like we already, I mean, as you know, and we'll talk more about this later on the podcast, meditation is really important to me. And if I can get into 20-minute meditations a day, it really helps.

And exercise and sleep. And I'm bad at doing them, I'm not bad at doing them at all. I'm bad at doing them in a consistent way. at doing them at all. I'm bad at doing them in a consistent way, especially when you travel a lot, as you know. This is a business that fights those two things. Finding time to meditate is okay for me. I can usually get that done

because it's twice a day, 20 minutes a day, fine, which is what TM kind of counsels. But when you're rolling around a lot, finding time to get in an hour in the gym and get seven or eight hours of sleep in election season after Labor Day, that is harder than you can imagine, as you well know. And if I could do all those three things though,

it helps a lot and I really notice it, that my anxiety level's a lot less. We're gonna take a break here. The last thing on Dan's list is a thing called, it's about self-compassion. Again, I think you should listen to this podcast because the podcast is 30 minutes long and it's fantastic. And I know you promised at the end

that you're gonna do more episodes on specific things related to how to cope with the election going forward. I hope that's true. It is. And thank you. We're gonna take this break. We're gonna come back and talk about Dan's journey

right after this. Hey, this is Dan Harris. I am a fidgety, skeptical newsman who had a panic attack live on Good Morning America. That led me to something I always thought was ridiculous, meditation. I wrote a book about it called 10% Happier, started an app, and now I'm launching this podcast to try to figure out whether there's anything beyond 10%. Basically, here's what I'm obsessed with. Can you be an ambitious person and still strive for enlightenment, whatever that means?

So our guest this time is a pretty well-known guy. His name is the Dalai Lama, or more formally, His Holiness the Dalai Lama. So we're back with Dan Harris, and those were, Dan, the very first words in the very first episode of your podcast when you launched it back in 2016, 10% happier with Dan Harris. And you kick things off with a great get for your first episode, the Dalai Lama himself. I remember when that launch episode happened, I'm like that's a hell of a kickoff guest for a show about meditation. Uh, and so that's why I wanted to start there. Uh,

so we could step back and sort of talk a little bit about how this sort of decade long journey, uh, that you've been on, how it all unfolded. And I will say, you know, you and I, Dan, we know each other. We've known each other for a while, but we're not super close. And I have marveled at what has happened to your life and your career. You were on a path and a track that was wholly identifiable and legible and familiar to me. And then you just weren't. You just like, you went off and did something else. I just want just for you to talk a little bit,

well, you can unpack this in a lot of ways, but talk a little bit about how you got from that track to whatever it is you think you're on now. It may be a track or it may not be, I don't know. Yeah, I may have a lot of thoughts about this. Yeah, I'm sure. I was definitely on a track that would be legible to you, given that I was a straight ahead network news anchor

and news correspondent for a long time. I was at ABC News for 21 years, and before that I was in local news for a bunch of time. And then I had a panic attack on Good Morning America, which, you know, I had this panic attack. I kind of didn't tell anybody that I had a panic attack. If you watch the video of it, you can tell that something's wrong with me. But I didn't, you know, go public with the fact that I was in a panic attack because

this was in 2004 and we didn't have quite as enlightened notions in our society about mental health at that time. And then 10 years after the panic attack, I wrote a book about how that panic attack led me to meditation. And I kind of thought that book would come and go really quickly because who gives a shit? Like I was a B-level newsman writing about a very niche concern.

But that kind of came out exactly at the right time where mental health issues were starting to become more prominent. Meditation was starting to get cool again. And it just swallowed my life. And I started a podcast and I started a meditation app and I started giving speeches and writing more books. And it just, it really took over. And I tried to hang on to the news thing and the meditation thing at the same time for a long time. And that kind of had a lot of negative consequences. And so ultimately a couple of years ago I retired and now I do this strange thing full time. Right.

And I guess, you know, the, well, there are a lot of questions that arise out of that, but let me step back and just ask the question about when you had the panic attack in 2004, right? Yeah. 2004, you said? Yeah. Right. So what was that, just what, had you ever had a panic attack before

or was that a first panic attack? I had, yeah. My first panic attacks ever were when I was, I think, 14 and smoking weed. And so that I had a few panic attacks then. And I had stage fright, I still have stage fright, which is weird, as I've joked that my career has been a triumph of narcissism over fear, because I soldiered ahead even though I have stage fright. So I had had panic attacks, you know, mild ones on TV before, but never enough to slit me up this badly.

But what the X factor here was that this is 2004 and the three years leading up to this moment I had spent in war zones, post 9-11, as a reporter. So Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, West Bank, Gaza, all that stuff. And I had come home from that and gotten depressed, started using cocaine to make myself feel better. And even though I wasn't high on the morning of the panic attack, the shrink who I saw later

explained to me that the ambient drug use was enough to change my brain chemistry and make Freaking out much more likely Wow and That led to the book right ten percent happier. Yeah, which is the book that came out in 2014 yeah 14 so there's still a ten-year gap between those two things. So it wasn't like the the panic attack year gap between those two things. So it wasn't like the panic attack shook you in such a way that you were knocked off that, we'll call the path, so to speak, the traditional journalistic path.

It wasn't so much that that happened and you were like, okay, man, I got to change my life. Which happens to some people when they have a jarring experience of that kind where they immediately go, whoa, I got to go to rehab, or I have to start, I've got to see a shrink right now, or whatever. And they can very quickly sometimes change their life in a way that also dumb-founds me, because I don't really know what I would do if I wasn't doing this.

I'd be sleeping in a bus shelter, I think. I'm not really sure I have any other qualifications. But you still, you kept soldiering along and rising in the business. Like you were still on, you've done all that foreign corresponding work you'd won awards for your for your coverage in Iraq and and done other things. And we're a word like really big time stuff and you were like rising within the ABC News hierarchy and becoming you know a bigger anchor and a bigger presence at the network.

But was like during that period of time, that decade, as you worked towards the book, and I don't know how long the book took to pull together, well, you can answer that in the context of this, but were you torn between the paths you were on or were you just like, hey, I'm going back on my same old path here and this is a side light, I'll dabble with this and we'll see where it goes and then it kind of just got larger and larger. There's a couple different ways that dynamic can play out. Well just to pick up one of the threads there. So after the panic attack, I did actually quite radically change my life in that I went

to see a shrink who I then, he convinced me to come see him once or twice a week indefinitely. I think I was with him for 10 years and I quit doing drugs. So there was a pretty big change, but it wasn't like I got off what we're calling the path, the traditional journalistic path. Because it actually took me a while to find meditation. That didn't happen overnight. It was through my shrink that I found meditation

about four or five years later. And then I had this, as I was nosing around in the meditation space, I realized, oh, there's a great story here. At this point, meditation, this was 2009, meditation was not popular. It had been popular in the 60s and then had fallen off. And I was like, oh, there's all this data that shows that meditation is really good for you. It can lower your blood pressure, boost your immune system, rewire key parts of the brain

and nobody was talking about it. So I thought, oh, this is a good story for me. So I spent five years writing a memoir about my experiences with meditation. And yes, definitely still on the train going forward with my traditional news career. But I have to say, and I think this gets to the heart of what you're asking, I think.

I had an inkling in around 2009, I think, maybe even a little bit earlier than that, that the news business wasn't necessarily where it was at. The television news business was not necessarily where it was at. The television news business was not necessarily where it was at for me. We didn't have social media at this time, but you know, in a big way, but I was getting the sense that personal brands

were gonna get bigger, and I wanted to invest in my own. I also was looking around and realizing the top of the pyramid in network news is incredibly small and the odds of me getting all the way to that top job were de minimis. So I needed to look around. I mean, it's funny to think about that

because I think of like some of the most egomaniacal, narcissistic, personal brand obsessed people I know are in the television business and what they would say, if you were that person, you'd say something like, well, yeah, the very top of the pyramid is really hard to get to. But even if you're midway up the pyramid, you have a bigger platform for your personal brand than if you have a failed meditation company.

Most entrepreneurial ventures don't succeed. It's not like, hey, well, there's the easy path of all startup meditation company, and that will obviously be a fast route to personal fame and fortune. And you sit here across from me here remotely, but I'm like, you know, staggeringly handsome, a full head of hair, a voice made for radio or television.

It's not like you, and you're hosting some of the biggest shows at ABC News. So yeah, maybe George was going to be in your way and no one can compete with David Muir because he's the only person I've ever seen with feathered sideburns. I mean, I literally have never seen that before. He's got like Farrah Fawcett sideburns.

That man is like, none of us can ever compete with David Muir. But still, you could be pretty, you could be pretty high up the food chain there. You already were pretty high up the food chain. Like that's a pretty big risk to leave the business you've been in for that long and have achieved that level of success

to go on some entrepreneurial bender around like, you know, the personal wellness space is kind of crowded too, Dan. I mean, like, give me a break. I think you're overstating my level of courage because I didn't retire until 2021. So like I clung to the news business. Yeah.

Well, what was the thing then that in 2021 made you finally take the leap? Because it was so obvious at that point that my side hustle was working. You know, the podcast I host was deeply entrenched. I had co-founded a meditation app that was doing well, although I do want to talk a little bit about that at some point. So basically you're saying you had no courage whatsoever.

It was basically you juggled these things. At the moment, it was when the podcast and the meditation app and all of your meditation brand got big enough, you like looked at them and went, hey, this orange is bigger than this cherry and I can now like go and ride the orange. I mean, I got it, speaking of David Muir, he sent me when I retired, he sent me a gift of a, he found an old leather bound copy of Profiles in Courage and sent it to me as a,

you know, like this is a brave move, which I really appreciate it and I'm hearing that in some of your questioning, but I really did take this very slowly and I could go back and argue that it was a mistake not to have left way earlier because, you know, there are, I failed to do some basic blocking and tackling in what is now my career, what you might roughly call kind of like the influencer space in some ways, which is embarrassing to admit. Like for example, I didn't have a social media presence

of any real substance until a year ago. So that was a mistake, but I just didn't have time to do it. Right, totally. I'm curious about the meditation piece of it. And you said you wanted to talk about the app, but I said to you, it was interesting. I had George Slopidopoulos was on the podcast some months ago.

I use Trump's term here lovingly, I've known George forever. And of course I know that he practices TM. And we talked about it very briefly on the podcast ago, I use Trump's term here, lovingly, I've known George forever. And of course, I know that he practices TM. And we talked about it very briefly on the podcast, because it's interesting to me, my exposure to TM was wholly through celebrities. They were people I knew who were really famous and really successful, totally type A people like George,

Jerry Seinfeld, other people like that, right? In that camp, and there's a lot of them as you know. I mean, this is an incredible, like to a degree that people are not aware how many super, super famous, super powerful, super rich people are connected to the David Lynch Institute Foundation, the Bob Roth and that group. I love Bob. I think he's totally great. He taught me to meditate and, and, and I, but I, I came in through that door of like,

what I knew about meditation was Maharishi Mahasya Yogi. Like I had no idea what TM was. And then I heard all these type a people telling me that it was like this tool that they used in some cases in a way that sounded like appealing to me and in some ways that just sounded like they had found like that drug that Bradley Cooper takes in where it's a super powered drug that they like, I got more energy and I got more of this. It's like as if they were taking some cocaine without the nasty, it'll kill you side effects. And other people who talked about it more in terms of

what I thought was appealing about it, which was that it would bring you to this, it would introduce some calm and some peace and serenity. That's in my very early, totally crude understanding of what it was. I'm curious, like, that feels like I learned about, this may be at the 2010, 2011, 2012 when I first started hearing like becoming aware that there are all these people doing it.

What was your in the process of, I mean I know you wrote that, I know that 10% happier is about your kind of your, I want to kind of condense that thing of your meditation journey that went to not only discovering it after your shrink suggested you do it, but then how your relationship with it's evolved. Because I have had a on again, off again relationship with it over the last decade. I have never thought it wasn't valuable, but I've had a hard time for various periods of time

staying committed to it. But whenever I go back to it, I'm always like, man, I got it, like this is, it's, you know, I'll have like a good year where I'm like, this is great. And then I get knocked off course for various reasons, which I, you know, if you were my shrink, I'd probably talk to you about that too,

but tell me about your journey with meditation. I do wanna, I just wanna say about your, what you just said, that that's completely normal to fall off the wagon and get back on the wagon, and I actually think there's a way in which it can be helpful and healthy because what you described is, or I'll just put it in my own experience,

when I fall off the wagon for a couple of days, I notice my inner toxicity getting much, much worse and that can lead to a kind of intrinsic motivation to get back on the wagon. And intrinsic motivation is a key aspect of habit formation. Just to step back for a second, habit formation is diabolically hard. So what you're describing is totally normal. And I think just saying out loud the words that habit formation is diabolically hard

should be liberating because Because people tell themselves stories about how they're uniquely dysfunctional in this regard and they're not. And so if you can get to the, you've gotten to the point where you know it's good for you, not because somebody's wagging their finger and telling you to do it, but because you know it from the inside.

That's huge. And those seeds have been planted and it will come back over and over again in your life, I predict, in really helpful ways. And I'll tell you, part of it, when I first... I probably meditated for about two years and then fell off the wagon for a period of time and felt all kinds of self-loathing about it. And then went and saw Bob Roth at the David Lynch place who had taught me to meditate.

And I was full of like, this is terrible that I fell off that way. He said basically the same thing you just said, which is everybody falls off. Everybody falls off and comes back. And it's totally not only, I mean it's not literally everybody, but the vast majority of people have this phenomenon.

You shouldn't feel bad about it. Let's meditate and come back and talk to me whenever you want. And you'll almost certainly have this happen to you again. Don't worry about it. Like just, you know, and the more over years when these periods of time when I would fall off,

and then I would actually kind of be like, I kind of wish I had more time, I can't do it. And then at some point, the toxicity level would rise to the point where I'd be like, you know, there are probably five reasons why my inner toxicity level is as high as it is right now. But one of them is I haven't meditated in two months. And I just would be like, okay, I'm not forcing my fight. I'm going to make myself mad.

And one session of meditating, I'd be like, oh, I have got to get back. I got to do that. It's like looking at yourself in the mirror and going, wow, I'm 40 pounds overweight. Like that, at some point, you just go, whoa, wait, what happened? I haven't worked out for three? I mean, what's, you know. But I have come totally at the point where I think

I can live with the notion of slipping and falling and getting back on for a long time. And I actually think every time I slip and fall and get back on, I actually feel in some incremental way, like I'm more bonded to it than I was the previous time. Like that feels incremental and positive. But again, tell me about your though, how it's evolved for you over the course of you've been meditating for 15 years-ish?

Yeah, ish. Yeah? So I come from a very different school than the TM thing, which is totally, I'm down with TM. I think there's evidence there that shows that it's good for you. And TM kind of emerged from the Vedic or a Hindu context and mindfulness meditation, which is my sphere of operations, it emerges out of Buddhism.

And in fact, actually, while I initially got interested in secular mindfulness meditation, which is a very simple kind of exercise for your brain. And this form of meditation is what has gotten studied the most in the labs because it is secular. And so the bulk of the evidence about the benefits of meditation really is attached to mindfulness meditation.

But over time, I've gotten more interested in going back into Buddhism to the point where I readily describe myself as a Buddhist. Not that I necessarily believe in enlightenment or karma or rebirth or anything like that, but the Buddha explicitly said, don't take anything I say at face value, come check it out for yourself. And so this is like, I think of it more as a practice or a diet, you know, a thing that you can, you know, I do meditation and I follow some of the, I believe, all of the, hopefully all of the ethical precepts. And in that sense, I consider myself a Buddhist.

And I don't actually, I'm a bit of a mutant in that I don't really fall off the wagon that much. And maybe it's because I'm unwilling to live with that level of hypocrisy given that this is my full-time job. But I also, you know, for me there was something about the practice that just as a lifelong anxious person, it just spoke to, it scratched some profound itch and so, and it's also just the intellectual infrastructure of Buddhism around the practice is so interesting to me that it just keeps me coming back. It's interesting though, because there are people who, and I think this is true of like exercise and other things.

I know people who, you know, we all know people like this. If they miss their run one day, they're like, they feel like shit. Like literally they get the effects immediately. And so they get, they're like, I gotta run first thing tomorrow morning because if I missed, I had a travel yesterday so I couldn't run, I'm going out of my mind, right?

And I think some people have metabolically, whether it's physically or spiritually, or kind of like that, where if like they miss a day, they're like really knocked off course, where some of us, it's more gradual when they get, when they miss a day, whether it's meditation or exercise or whatever, it takes some days of that building up before the toxicity level rises to the point where you're like, Oh, wait, things have,

I got off course here somewhere because you don't kind of notice it as much. And I'm like that with both exercise and, uh, and meditation where I can go some days without I start noticing that it's really that I'm really tweaked. Maybe I am more tweaked than I actually think I am, but I don't notice it. Then all of a sudden, like the bile packs this out, like, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, I got something's wrong here.

You know, I'm like, I'm too fat, or I'm too, I'm out of shape, or I'm mentally, mentally spiritually out of shape, or physically out of shape, and it takes a couple weeks for that to kind of go like, oh, then it takes me another couple weeks to actually do anything about it. I can't speak for everybody who freaks out

when they miss a day of working out or meditating. But speaking as someone who freaks out when he misses a day of exercise or working or meditating, I think a lot of it in my case has to do with a kind of rigidity, where if my schedule's messed up in any way, I get on myself. So I actually think your attitude is closer to the Buddhist ideal of not being uptight or overly attached to things. Right. When you came back from, when you said before, and I knew this part of your story

from, because I think we had talked about it at some point, but I don't remember what the, in the seeding of this, when you started doing cocaine when you came back to make yourself feel better, did you have a drug pass at all or was that totally new to you then? No. I mean, I drank alcohol, but not, I never really spoke to me. I mean, I drank, but I didn't love it. And I smoked weed, but as established earlier, that had not necessarily always the most positive impact on me. So I and I, so I had always been too terrified to try hard drugs. And I was really.

I didn't know I was depressed, but I was really depressed in the months after I came home from my first long run in Iraq, which was six months and I was having trouble getting out of bed and I felt like low energy all the time and I ran all these tests and Hired all these doctors and couldn't find anything and a buddy of mine offered me cocaine one night and I was like, you know what I'll try it and Immediately boom. I just felt better and Obviously, you know then 30 minutes later, I felt terrible.

And the next morning I felt even worse. But then you did some more cocaine and you felt fine, and then you felt worse, then you felt fine, then you felt worse. Jason the Dragon is real, dude. Yeah, oh, don't I know it. It's funny, my friend, do you ever, me and my friend Chris Anderson, the photographer, war photographer.

No. So long time, was a magnet photographer for a long time, and has shot for everybody in the world. And his, he's written, he's, we've talked a lot about that PTSD experience, like being someone who was at, he was in the first, he was shooting, he was the only photographer who was shooting like the ground invasion into Baghdad in Iraq.

And he had been in Afghanistan around 9-11 and was a former neighbor of mine, lived with Sebastian Younger's, the guy who was the, Tim Hetherington, the photographer who was Sebastian Younger's partner, over in this building in Williamsburg called the Kibbutz, where I lived around the corner from them. And so, and he went and shot a bunch of stuff

on the 08 and 12 campaigns for me. And his encounters with PTSD, before there was a name for PTSD, again, it's a very similar thing of not understanding what this thing is you're going through and no one talked about PTSD for people who had been in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, which basically every foreign correspondent and war photographer who's ever done those things

comes back with some form of PTSD. But in the early 2000s even, you really have a name for that. And you're like looking around going like, I don't know that I'm depressed, but I just know something's off, right? You're looking for some kind of a solution. So, Dan, earlier you mentioned that you wanted to come back

and talk about the meditation app. And I know there are some big changes that are happening there. So let's do that, we'll talk about that. But first I gotta take one more break And then we'll return to that very topic and get into what's going on with the 10% happier platform Really with Dan Harris, we'll talk about all of that here on in politics with John Hylen Hey everybody, how we doing I a very personal episode for you today.

No guest, it's just going to be me talking. I have three things I want to talk about. The first thing is that I want to tell you about a career earthquake I have recently gone through that has been very hard for me. It's been going on for a while, but I haven't been able to talk about it until now. The second thing is that I want to tell you about something very cool that is emerging out of said earthquake. And then the third thing,

and this will be the meat of the episode, is that I wanna talk about some of the lessons I've learned in the course of this very difficult period of time, because I think some of these lessons are potentially directly applicable to your lives. So we're back with Dan, and that was the top of this past Tuesday's episode of the 10% Happier podcast,

where you announced, you've had a major change that's gone on in your whole life, as we've just discussed, has been built around, this big transition out of journalism and into the world of the mind and the brain and how to be better at all of that. And you built this mindfulness app, you wrote these books, you've done all this stuff, you become associated

with a particular mindfulness app, and now you've left it. As you announced on social media a couple days ago, you said, some of you might be surprised that I'm now abandoning the app that I co-founded. I was among those people, I was surprised. Like, what's that about? Yeah, I'm surprised too, it's a bummer.

The short version is, I arrived at a point where there were significant differences with my co-founders, creative, strategic, interpersonal, financial, the whole lot. And my co-founders are really good people, so it wasn't, you know, it wasn't a running gun battle or anything like that. We just, everybody really tried over several years

of negotiations and attempts to make it work, and we couldn't make it work, and I made a ton of mistakes in that process, so this isn't a blame game at all. And we arrived at this situation where they're gonna keep the 10% Happier app and change it to Happier. I'm gonna keep my podcast, which will still be called 10% Happier.

And so I'm starting this new thing, this new community over on Substack. So if you search for me on Substack, you can find it or just go to danharris.com. And yeah, I'm kind of at a vulnerable raw point in my life because I've just gone through several years of this breakup and starting over. And yeah, so I definitely,

it's awesome to get the, to anybody who can support me, I'm excited to have it. So this is a really big deal for you, Dan. I mean, it's a big big deal for you, Dan. I mean, it's a big upheaval in some sense. And you devoted your Tuesday episode to talking about how you're dealing with it. And for the sake of our listeners,

I'd love for you to talk a little bit about that here. This is a career earthquake, and I wanna be able to talk about what that's like for somebody who's a semi-professional meditator to go through a life crisis that many people go through. And you know, you've been through them. I know I've watched them from a distance. And so I'm kind of using this moment not only to talk about how to survive this election, but also we all have ups and downs and tumult in our professional lives. And I have some thoughts about how to handle that too.

Well, let's talk about that. And let me let me you know it's interesting because well there's we should talk about that but before we talk about that I want to go back and talk about one other thing prior to that which is you did journalism from like when did you first get interested in journalism at what age? Well I started working in journalism when I was 21, right out of Colby College in 1993, but then I had done a bunch of internships during college, so in the early 90s at TV news stations, including WBZ in Boston,

where I think that was my first internship. Right, and you were, I had no idea, only because I like to be familiar with all things about Maine now. You were up in Bangor, Maine for a while, right? I was in Bangor, Maine from 1993 to 95, and then in Portland, Maine from 95 to 98. And had you wanted to be a journalist in high school?

Was that something that was an aspiration for you? Like did you like, you know, had you been idealizing that? I know that I only ever wanted to be a journalist from the time I was like 12. So I sometimes wonder whether I wrote it as freakish as me. No my story is a little bit more embarrassing than that honestly. I think I had TV news and the movies mixed up in my mind as a kid. And I just, I knew I wanted to do something fun and sexy and exciting. And so I wasn't like an aspiring ink stained wretch. I was more an aspiring something flashy, which was like the opposite of my parents who were like nose to the grindstone

academic physicians. And I always thought they were kind of chumps for doing these very hard, low paid or relatively low paid jobs. And by relatively, I mean relative to lifestyles of the rich and famous, which was the TV show that I enjoyed watching as a kid. And so I-

So you thought you were gonna be Robin Leach is basically what you thought. Yeah, pretty much. I can be like the next Robin Leach. Yeah, it pretty much. I mean, that's what a douche I was when I was a kid. I really just had this idea in my mind that I was gonna do something big.

And I went actually to film school for a semester in college, realized I had no talent for that and had simultaneously been doing a bunch of internships in TV news and I had a sense, yeah, I could do this. I really liked the sort of what I thought would be a, you know, the glamorous side of it, which is actually, as you know, not that glamorous. And, you know, I got very, very interested ultimately in the hard work of the journalism part, but that was not what drew me in. So that's-

Right. You wanted to be on TV. You wanted to be on TV, basically. Correct. You didn't really know. You thought it was all one thing. You could be like, guys, you got to be on TV. You were all like, that's not that embarrassing. It's a little confusing. Sometimes now the lines are also,

the journalists are all such whores, and the whores are all kind of semi-journalists. That was before reality TV was even born. And now there's no distinction, basically, between all those things. I say somewhat kiddingly when you think back on your many many many year long career in journalism and on you know your success at it, which is undeniable and your

achievements in it which equally undeniable There are three questions that arise for me one. What did you love about it to what did you hate about it and Two, what did you hate about it? And three, what do you miss about it? If anything. There's so much to list on the love side, but I love dropping into some incredible location. It's, be it a war zone or in the later part of my career, really finding incredible investigative stories in all corners of the planet, from Papua New Guinea to Cambodia to Haiti and

dropping into an atmosphere that I had never been in before and really getting to experience it, not like a tourist, but as a journalist. That buzz is extraordinary and is the thing I miss the most. The other thing I miss the most is I actually really enjoy it as silly as it is being a morning television host. I was the co-anchor of GMA on the weekends for 10 or 11 years and filled in a lot on the weekday edition of the show and I love the banter. What I hated was getting up early and I also really came to not

enjoy the fact that my life would get upended, utterly upended in unpredictable ways just because somebody walked into a supermarket with an AK-47. Brutal. Yeah, I covered Newtown, I covered Gabby Giffords being shot, I covered so many shootings, school shootings and otherwise.

And yeah, that is a little bit of what drove me out of the business. Do you ever, as you sit here today, even with all of them, we'll talk about this in one second, with all the current level of angst, agitation, whatever in your, this new professional, the difficulties you had with your existing slash prior partners.

And is there ever a moment where you're like, I really miss journalism, I'd like to go back and be in it? Interestingly, no. The day that Trump got convicted, I went to the television, turned it on, and was watching the aforementioned David Muir anchor and one of my friends texted me, he's like, do you miss it now?

And I just don't. I think the fire really went out. Having said that though, I still would like to get back in the game and do investigative stories all over the planet. And what I would love to do is do stories that relate to my primary interest, which is how to upgrade the mind. And so I do think about that and having conversations about turning that into a TV show.

So I could get into that, but I don't think, I don't think the daily grind of daily news is for me anymore. Right, well, I think that one of the advantages to having, as you said, you know, you said you took too long in some ways to make that change, but one of the advantages of taking, being that deliberate about it is that you, when you're, you know, you didn't make it,

you make this, do this in a kind of, in a, you didn't do it in a way that you're, you know, you didn't make it, you didn't make this, do this in a kind of, in a, you didn't do it in a way that you're like, boy, I just, you know, decided I'll quit my job. What the fuck did I do? It's more like, you know, you, I grappled with it for a long time, because you said maybe too slowly, but you grab, when you finally got there,

you're like, okay, I'm pretty much at peace with this. And it's not as likely to create regret. And I think, you know, I was talking about this the other night, the first time I ever met Jeff Bezos in 1997, when he was still just like a total dork and had just taken Amazon public. And I was writing a story in the New Yorker magazine and we met and talked and he said this thing to me,

it's the only thing he's ever said, I don't know him well. I've interviewed him like twice or three times in my life. But he said this thing to me about how he was trying to, when he described his decision to go start Amazon, he said, I live my life according to a regret minimization framework. I just try to evaluate things and not make decisions that will not, that reduce the prospects that I'm going to have a giant regret about not doing the thing later. It's the only thing I think the man has ever said that stuck with me and I thought, it still pops up in my mind all the time.

And it's an interesting thing because, I think there's a really, there's a important distinction between being able to look back at your life and say, I've made a bunch of mistakes, which I've made hundreds, I make hundreds almost every day. But I have very few regrets.

That's a big, that's a thing I'm always mindful of is, you know, fucking stuff up, you know, inevitable, but not feeling like, boy, I really blew that, you know, and like, it still pains you. And the way you went about your decision kind of leaves you in a place where you're less likely to have that kind of regret, I would think. Yeah, I think that's exactly right.

And as I kind of interpolate back through your career, like you, yes, I'm sure you've made mistakes, but my understanding is you have consistently just taken big swings. And I think that is the route to regret minimization. You know, you've done entrepreneurial stuff, you've written big books, you now have like 72 jobs and are busier than a six-peckered goat

from what I can tell and like that, all of which I think really does go to regret minimization. Busier than a six-peckered goat, I've never heard that before but I'm definitely, that may be my, if I ever write a memoir, that could be the title of it. Busier than a six-pecker Goat, who knows?

I don't know where I heard that. I don't know either, but that's fantastic. I mean, look, I'll just, all of, it shouldn't be about me, but I'll just say, I remember when I did recount and it failed, I was just like, I mean, we ended up not working, and I was like, I had no regrets about it at all. I learned all kinds of stuff doing it.

I was just like, most companies that are trying to do anything worth doing are more likely to fail than succeed. And we tried really hard. We didn't embezzle any money. There were no dead hookers in the closet. We didn't do anything wrong. We just tried really hard in an honest way

and we didn't get there. Okay, moving on. I've always think of Barry Diller when he failed to take over Paramount in the early 90s. He did a press conference in New York where he stood up and said, literally, they won, we lost, next, and walked off stage. And I was like, that's a great way to like,

they won, we lost, next, moving on. Tell me about the thing you were talking about a second ago, which is how has this, you'll decide, obviously, because you're a skilled person about these things, about how much detail you want to talk about in terms of the conflict with your existing partners. But you can talk about it at whatever level you feel comfortable with. But the way you were just talking about it was how does a person for whom mindfulness and with the folk high that you have around improving the mind and

and and the in some ways the spirit like what's that been like going through this thing of having made this big career transition gotten to build a partnerships built a company built with all this stuff and then having it fall apart for whatever set of reasons how are you how what has that experience been like and how are you coping with it? Well, for better or worse, it's been a three-year-long thing. So I retired from ABC News in the fall of 2021 and things started to go get complex with my now former co-founders pretty shortly after that. And I think initially my feeling was embarrassment.

How could this be happening to me? Not in a woe is me way but more as in an embarrassment way. Like I'm supposed to, I'm out here trying to help people do their lives better and you know I'm in this, embroiled in this conflict and you know I made a lot of mistakes that were the preconditions for the conflict so it's not like I was blameless in any of this. And I, you know, we were trying everybody, my partners or former partners are well-intentioned people. So we're all trying to work this out in a very sane and civil way, but it was quite

protracted. And in the early part of that, I really, as I said, I felt very embarrassed. What I've come to really understand in a visceral way that I think is useful universally is that conflict is unavoidable. You get more than one human in a room, there will eventually be conflict. And psychologists talk about the difference between healthy conflict and high conflict. High conflict is almost always destructive and sometimes violent. And we see it all over our culture right now. We're stuck in a high conflict where there's a complete lack of understanding,

complete lack of compassion, a cartoonish caricaturization of the other side's positions. And that can happen not just on a cultural level, but on a business level, an interpersonal level. And healthy conflict is possible. And there are a whole bunch of skills that you can learn, communication skills, intellectual humility that can keep you in the healthy side of the conflict. And for me, really getting, taking a deep dive into that has been incredibly helpful. And the one thing I am, the one thing I do feel good about is, like everybody tried, these are everybody, from what I can tell, everybody, and I know these people very well,

everybody's well intentioned. So I don't see like there's a bad guy here. When I call it a failure, I mean more like a personal failure on my side that it just didn't work out. And so I'm stepping away to do something new. But you talked about recount and I wonder if you would agree with this,

because I would say another lesson that I learned in the wake of this failure is that failure is underrated. And that, first of all, it's awesome to take a swing. And even if you miss, there's a ton of learning there that you will take into everything you do going forward. And in, I found that as I was obvious to me that this company wasn't going to work out, at least my participation in the company wasn't gonna work out. I started running all these experiments. I got on social media for the first time.

I started selling merch. I started doing live events, like just trying stuff. Not all of it worked, but trying stuff is incredibly valuable. It was somebody, I think it was Michael Keaton. I was just looking at Michael Keaton on SmartList, and I think he was in that, I'm trying to remember where I heard this, but I think it was Michael Keaton. I was just looking at Michael Keaton on SmartList. And I think he was in that, I'm trying to remember where I heard this,

but I think it was those guys talking about how, like, the only things they've ever learned have been from failures. Like, their failures are what they've learned the most about their careers. They look back and go, oh, it's the misses that we learned anything from, the successes, and they learned shit.

And hey, I mean, look, let's just step back and put a fine point on something important here by repeating it for everybody. All hope is not lost here if you're a Dan Harris fan because although Dan is transitioning out of one mode and off of one platform, he's at the same time seamlessly transitioning into a different mode, but similar mode, and onto just a different platform

or a collection of platforms, you can go to danharris.com and there's gonna be a community. You're basically building like an audio substack, essentially, around the podcast and other things, but there's gonna be a membership community. You can pay money into it and you can still be part of the Dan Harris thing.

It's gonna be a more, it's gonna be a familiar model now that people are kind of familiar with on substack, but it's gonna be your own version of that and probably mostly driven by the podcast and the audio. Not exclusively, but mostly. You're exactly right. We post two episodes a week. They're super nutrient dense.

And historically, we've just kind of dropped them on people and walked away. And now you'll be able to talk to me, to the guests, to my staff, to each other about these episodes. And I'll be doing monthly AMAs. Already having just launched this, people are saying that maybe you should be doing monthly AMAs. Already having just launched this, people are saying that maybe you should be doing those more often, so maybe they become weekly.

It's really, it's an experiment, and so anybody who signs up now can help me figure out how to build this thing going forward, so yeah. I'm gonna be a charter member, because like 80 bucks a year, I believe, is like, 80 bucks a year, I think, is gonna be? It is, but you know, for people who can't afford it just send me a note I'll give it to you for free. Well I can't really quite credibly make that claim with you so I'll be

sending you my $80 and as a charter founding member of the Dan Harris of the Dan Harris mindfulness community. It's awesome to see you. Thank you brother I appreciate that and right back at you I mean this whole thing started because I sent you a random mash note on text about how much I've been enjoying all of your various television and audio work and also your newsletter at Puck is fantastic. Well, Dan, you're really nice to say all that and I appreciate it. And like I said earlier, in addition to me being a charter member of the Dan Harris mindfulness community, you should get ready for a stream of of the Dan Harris Mindfulness Community, you

should get ready for a stream of anxious, sleep-deprived, freaked out phone calls from me as we get closer to election day. Great. Peace out. Thanks. See you later. In Politics with Jon Holman is a Puck podcast in partnership with Odyssey. Thanks again to Dan Harris for meditating with us today and guiding us to a plane of

sublime spiritual enlightenment. If you dug this episode, please follow In Politics with John Heilman and share us, rate us and review us on the free Odyssey app or wherever you happen to bask in the splendor of the podcast universe. I'm John Heilman, your cruise director and the chief political columnist for Puck where you can read my writing every Sunday night, plus the work of all my terrific colleagues by going to puck.news slash impolitik, that's P-U-C-K dot N-E-W-S slash I-M-P-O-L-I-T-I-C, and subscribing.

Two of those colleagues from Puck, John Kelly and Ben Landy, are the executive producers of this podcast. Laurie Blackford is our senior executive booking producer. Ali Clancy is our executive assistant. J.D. Crowley and Jenna Weiss-Berman are our indispensable overseers and guardian angels at Odyssey. And the one and only Bob Tabador is the straw that stirs the drink, flawlessly producing, editing, mixing and mastering this show.

We'll see you next time, everyone, and as always, Namaste. If you like 10% happier, and I hope you do, you can listen early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey.