February 29, 2024

Episode 294 - Dan Harris: 10% Happier

February 29, 2024

Dan Harris is a former network news anchor who has become one of the leading experts in meditation, mental health, and how to be sanely ambitious.

In 2014, Dan released his runaway best-selling memoir 10% Happier, about how a fidgety, skeptical anchorman discovered meditation. It was a surprise hit—not only to his publisher, but to Dan himself. He went on to launch a meditation app, a massively popular podcast, and a bestselling how-to book called Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics. The one-time war correspondent and devout anti-sentimentalist even gave a TED talk on self-love, which garnered a standing ovation and millions of views. In 2021, Dan stepped down from his high-profile ABC gig to focus full-time on a thriving media business which includes his podcast, active social media feed, and upcoming books and video projects.

In this episode, we delve into the world of mindfulness and meditation with renowned author and meditation advocate, Dan Harris. In our conversation, Dan shares his personal journey from a high-stress career in the news to discovering the transformative power of mindfulness meditation. We explore Dan's best-selling book, 10% Happier which chronicles his exploration into mindfulness practices after experiencing a panic attack on live television. We discuss how Dan's quest for inner peace led him to explore meditation, the core principles of Dan's 10% Happier philosophy, and how mindfulness can lead to incremental but significant improvements in happiness. Discover why Buddhism is a religion that skeptics can line up behind, the intersection of mindfulness and financial decision-making, and the importance of empathy and self-awareness for financial advisors. Gain insights into applying mindfulness principles to everyday life, strategies for building the skill of happiness, the basic steps to start meditating, and much more! Join us on this insightful journey as we explore how mindfulness can truly transform lives and empower individuals to live with greater purpose, happiness, and fulfillment with Dan Harris!

Key Points From This Episode:

(0:04:49) Dan shares his journey from a high-stress career in news to discovering mindfulness meditation.

(0:06:48) What mediation is, why he initially thought it was nonsense, and why he changed his mind.

(0:09:11) Unpack the idea of mindfulness and the science that backs up the claims.

(0:11:22) The main thesis of Buddhism and its link to meditation.

(0:14:02) How mindfulness can help manage emotions, improve focus, and enhance relationships in everyday life.

(0:15:48) He shares how difficult it was for him to embrace the concept of meditation.

(0:21:12) Discover what motivated him to explore meditation and mindfulness practices.

(0:21:12) Recommendations to start meditating and how long it takes to form a habit of it.

(0:26:56) Insights on applying mindfulness principles to financial decision-making.

(0:28:29) Explore the benefits of meditation for the comparing mind and the wanting mind.

(0:30:59) How mindfulness meditation has influenced his financial decision-making.

(0:33:20) The principles of 10% Happier from the perspectives of a client and advisor.

(0:35:45) Strategies for making your own happiness and cultivating contentment.

(0:41:03) Transitioning from a career in news to focusing on mindfulness advocacy and podcasting.

(0:42:32) His biggest lessons since writing the book and his most influential podcast guest.

(0:48:26) Hear about Dan’s version of success and happiness.

Read The Transcript:

Ben Felix: This is the Rational Reminder Podcast, a weekly reality check on sensible investing and financial decision-making from two Canadians. We are hosted by me, Benjamin Felix and Cameron Passmore, portfolio managers at PWL Capital.

Cameron Passmore: Welcome to episode 294. This week, once again, we have a very special guest. Ben, you know, this whole project has been about helping people improve financial decision-making, and with the ultimate goal of improving each of our well-being and happiness and hopefully, helping listeners to accomplish that. We've talked often about your paper, Finding and Funding a Good Life. A lot of listeners have commented how we've been shifting the podcast towards that direction.

Well, this week, we dive into something a little bit different. However, it has the same objective of improving your happiness, and this is meditation. This week, we welcomed Dan Harris of 10% Happier. Now, you might recognize the name Dan Harris. He was an anchor at ABC News and he tells a story in the interview, so we're not going to spill the story here, but he has an incredible story about how he came to discover the benefits of meditation. It's an incredible story.

Part of that story is that he wrote a book while he was at ABC News called 10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works-- A True Story. This book, you and I read it back in 2018 when we were introduced to it by a professional colleague. I just reread it, and then our good friend, Hal Hershfield was on Dan's fabulous podcast, 10% Happier. That's the bridge to actually give me a chance to request to see if Dan could join us. Anyways, what did you think of it?

Ben Felix: Just to comment about us reading 10% Happier however many years ago that was, that book is what caused our professional colleague that you mentioned to go down this path of researching happiness, and he actually gave a talk to our team about his findings, and 10% Happier was the first book that he mentioned having read himself, that got him going down this path.

Cameron Passmore: Is that presentation, so I'd interrupt that I learned about PERMA?

Ben Felix: Yeah.

Dan Harris: And PERMA model.

Ben Felix: Five-factor model. Yeah. This book was the seed that started us thinking in this general direction. Then, of course, Brian Portnoy, also, the work that he did with us and our team and him being a guest on our podcast that pushed it even harder. But this book that Dan Harris wrote is really what started it all, which is cool.

Cameron Passmore: It's very cool. I said this in the interview to Dan, I find how his book and he frames these whole notes in meditation to be brilliantly compelling, 10% Happier, it's nothing weird. He's not apostleizing it. He's basically saying, try it.

Ben Felix: Oh, totally. Throughout this conversation, he's very humble about all of it. Like you said, this is something that you can do that he says, 10% Happier is a joke, but it is pretty powerful. It's just the idea that you can be a little bit happier by doing this exercise with your brain. Happiness is a skill, the idea that you can learn and get better at.

Cameron Passmore: 10% Happier is a book available widely. He's just released, I believe, the 10th anniversary of the book. There's also a 10% Happier app, which will help you with meditation. The podcast over 600 episodes. I listened to many of them. It's excellent. He was just telling us that there's an event in New York City. I had seen it mentioned. I didn't know if it was sold out or not, but he claims there's still space available. There's an event in New York City on March 28th with Joseph Goldstein, who's his mentor in this space. I think it'd be quite a treat if you're available and around to check out that. Tickets are available online, March 28th in New York City. Anything to add, Ben?

Ben Felix: No. I think this is a great episode. Meditation is discussed a lot, but it's really, like you mentioned at the very opening of the introduction, Cameron, it's an episode about living a good life and making better decisions. Dan talks a lot about how meditation can play a role in that, but I think the episode's even more general than that, about living a good life and what Dan has learned about that throughout his experience of the story that he tells in the book, but then everything that's happened to him since the book came out, because his whole life shifted directions after that. I think there’s a lot of the people can take away from this conversation.

Cameron Passmore: I agree. Okay. Let's go to our conversation with 10% Happier’s Dan Harris.

***

Cameron Passmore: Dan Harris, it’s great to welcome you to the Rational Reminder Podcast.

Dan Harris: Thanks for having me on.

Cameron Passmore: It's great. I love your book. I read it first six years ago, then I just reread it. Immensely enjoyable book. Thank you for it. To kick it off, can you talk about your journey as a journalist through, as you described in the book, self-help, then to meditation?

Dan Harris: Yeah. The abbreviated version is that I had a panic attack on live television, on a show that I used to be involved with called Good Morning America. It was a pretty big morning show, which I think can be seen in Canada in some spots, at least. This was back in 2004. I was reading some stories off of the teleprompter, anchoring the news, as it were, and just lost it and had to quit in the middle of my shtick and send it back to the main hosts. You can actually see it if you Google panic attack on TV, I think it's the first result, which makes me very proud.

The back story of the panic attack is that I had spent a lot of time in war zones as a very ambitious, young network correspondent. I had gotten depressed during this period of time and did this incredibly dumb thing, which is I started to self-medicate with recreational drugs, including cocaine. After I had the panic attack, I went to a psychiatrist and he pointed out that it was my cocaine use that was probably responsible for the panic attack. I wasn't high on the air. In the moment, I did not connect those dots, but it was pretty clear to him.

That was the first big change for me in my life. I stopped doing drugs. I started seeing the shrink, and then through my relationship with the psychiatrist and actually, through some odd work assignments that put me in the faith and spirituality realm, I ended up stumbling across meditation. This was back in 2008, 2009 before it got cool in its latest hype cycle. I ended up seeing some of the research that showed it was really good for you. I tried it and yeah, here we are.

Ben Felix: The story is incredible. Can you talk a little bit about what meditation is for listeners who maybe don't fully understand it?

Dan Harris: Yeah. I love this question, because I thought meditation was rank bullshit, just like, absolutely hippie nonsense. There are forms of meditation that I still probably wouldn't gotten to, but the kind of meditation that I got interested in is called mindfulness meditation. It is derived from Buddhism but secularized and stripped of any metaphysical claims, or anything like that.

This form of meditation had and continues to be studied extensively in the labs and it's been shown to reduce your blood pressure, boost your immune system, rewire, and keep parts of your brain and we can literally see changes on the brain scans. That's what really got me over the hump. What is it? The beginner’s instructions for mindfulness meditation are super simple. The first three steps really, sit comfortably, close your eyes. That's the first step. The second is try to bring your full attention to something neutral. Usually, it's the feeling of your breath coming in and going out. Some people don't like that, so they pick just the feeling of their body sitting in a chair, or lying on the ground, or sounds in the environment. Just picking something that is, and I don't mean this word in a naughty way, but sensual, based in your senses, instead of your thinking. You try to commit to it for a few nanoseconds at a time.

Then the third step is the most important, which is most people by now have tried meditation, or heard of it, or even an eight-year-old tries to stop thinking and realizes that you can't stop the thinking. A lot of people try meditation, they notice, “I'm trying to feel my breath and I'm getting distracted over and over again,” and they tell themselves a whole story about how they’re failed meditators and they quit. Actually, this is the third step of the three, the whole game is just to notice when you've gotten distracted and to start again and again and again. This is like a bicep curl for your brain. It's the mechanism, or at least one of them by which the brain changes as a result of meditation.

It's a key moment really, noticing the distraction. That is not failure. That is proof that you're doing it correctly. The whole game is to see how wild your mind is so that you're not owned by all of the mayhem. In that way, it's a very elegant practice.

Cameron Passmore: I find that very compelling, Dan. You mentioned a word, they're likely to clarify the meaning of, what is mindfulness?

Dan Harris: I'm glad you asked that question. Mindfulness is one of the skills that gets developed through mindfulness meditation. When you notice you're distracted, which again is the moment when most people get discouraged, the reason why that's a success is you get more familiar with what your life is all about. You might think your life is about service, or parenting, or hard work, or whatever. Actually, most of your life is about what's for lunch? Where did your bills run wild? How do I get that blouse that I saw in The Real Housewives? Whatever. Most of your life is random urges, thoughts, and emotions that are, if we broadcast aloud, you would be locked up. Mindfulness is the self-awareness that allows you to see all of the caroming, careening thoughts without being owned by them. The synonym would be self-awareness.

Ben Felix: You alluded earlier to evidence backing up the claims, I guess, of mindfulness meditation. Can you talk more about what kind of science is backing this up?

Dan Harris: It's really interesting. I want to be clear, it's still in its early stages. Science is basically, an argument taking place in public, and I'm not a scientist, so I don't want to overstate the results, but it seems to strongly suggest the research does, that short, daily doses of meditation can confer a long list of tantalizing health benefits. I listed some of them earlier; reducing your blood pressure, boosting your immune system.

The neuroscience is really interesting that shows that areas of the brain associated with attention regulation, or focus change in positive ways. The area of the brain associated with stress has been shown to shrink the area of the brain associated with self-awareness, and also, with compassion, those areas have been shown to get stronger, to change in beneficial ways. It's quite compelling, and I just want to be humble about A, my lack of standing to speak about the science as an expert, and also, the humble about the nature of science. There's always some new study coming out that raises questions about the ones that came before it.

Cameron Passmore: Can you talk about the main thesis of Buddhism and its link to meditation?

Dan Harris: I said before that mindfulness meditation is derived from Buddhism, but secularized. I was attracted to that as an agnostic, somebody who didn't want to sign up for a religion per se. But over time, I've become quite deeply interested in Buddhism itself. I would call myself a Buddhist, which actually is more and less than it sounds like. It's less than it sounds like, in that Buddhism isn't – it can be practiced as a religion, and it is by millions of people, and that's beautiful, and there are certainly metaphysical claims.

There's no real God in Buddhism, but there are metaphysical claims about rebirth, as an example, karma. But the Buddha was very specific, Buddha himself, and exhorted anybody within earshot to not take anything he said at face value. This is a “religion that skeptics can line up behind.” You can take or leave the metaphysics. What he, essentially, was talking about was a set of meditation practices and life principles that can drastically and meaningfully reduce your unhappiness, dissatisfaction, and suffering and make you a more useful, helpful player in the world around you. It's truly enlightened self-interest in that way.

I would say, one of the main theses of Buddhism, a great Buddhist master was once asked, “How do you sum up the Dharma,” which is lingo for the teachings “of the Buddha? How do you sum it up as briefly as possible?” He answered, “Everything changes.”

The foundational insight of the Buddha is thunderously obvious, but often overlooked, which is everything's changing all the time. We think we're walking around in a solid movie of reality, but every cell and atom in your body is changing all the time. Everything around you in nature is changing all the time. Your nature is changing all the time, depending on who you're in contact with, what your age is, what your employment status is, what your balance sheet might look like. Everything is changing with extraordinary rapidity.

If you are clinging too tightly to anything in a world where incessant change is the non-negotiable chief law of existence, then you're going to suffer. The Dharma just goes from there. I don't want to overstate my expertise in Buddhism either, but that's my beginner's understanding as somebody who's practiced it a non-trivial amount.

Ben Felix: You've talked about a lot of the effects of meditation. If you were to define the benefit concisely, how would you define the benefits of meditation?

Dan Harris: Of meditation, specifically, I would say, there are three for me. One is an increased sense of calm. Just the act of taking yourself out of the daily traffic for a few minutes at a time. We should talk about this, how much do you need to do in order to get all of the advertised benefits. Because that's the question most people have, but just taking yourself into a quiet place in your head for a couple of minutes a day injects a certain amount of calm into a lifestyle that for me, at least, has traditionally been quite frenzied.

The second is, and I referenced this earlier, it's been shown to boost your capacity to focus. That's very useful in an era that's been described as the info Blitzkrieg. The third, I think, is the most important, and it takes us back to this word ‘mindfulness.’ It gives you this ability to see the contents of your consciousness, to see your thoughts, emotions, and urges with some non-judgmental remove, so that you're not yanked around by them blindly. It allows you to respond wisely to things instead of reacting reflexively. I think that's the biggest benefit.

I'll just say one last thing, which is, there are other forms of meditation that traditionally, have been taught right alongside mindfulness that often get overlooked in our culture, that are actually designed to boost your capacity for warmth, friendliness, compassion, you might say, love. I think those are very powerful modalities as well, and they've been studied extensively.

Cameron Passmore: Before we get to practical recommendations for meditating, I'd like you to talk a bit about how difficult it was for you to gain the appreciation of meditation, and referring to when you're at that retreat for 10 days, and that you describe how difficult it was for you to get that appreciation, then you hit that break. Can you talk about that?

Dan Harris: Yeah. I want to just be clear, the chapter in my book that most people ask me about, or that I get asked about the most, is a blow-by-blow account of my first silent meditation retreat, is a 10-day, I think, I refer to it as a Zen Death March. You don't need to do this if you're interested in meditation. I had a book that I wanted to write, and I needed some shit to write about, so I went on a meditation retreat. But you can exercise without doing an Ironman, and you can meditate without doing a 10-day meditation retreat. I don't want anybody to get discouraged, or intimidated here.

I went on this retreat. I was very reluctant to do it. The first couple of days of that affirmed all of my reluctance because it was extremely hard and I was surrounded by people who struck me as extremely weird. It wasn't the silence that was hard. A lot of people key in on that detail that you're not supposed to talk. It was the meditating from 5.30 in the morning until 10 at night all day, every day. That was what was hard.

Cameron Passmore: No kidding.

Dan Harris: Yeah. You're doing formal, seated and then walking meditation. Walking meditation is this artificially slow walking back and forth, where you try to tune into the sensations of your body, and then every time you get distracted, you start again and again and again. It's a great practice. But at this dosage, it's a lot to take, especially for a beginner. You're doing 30 minutes to 60 minutes of seated meditation followed by 30 to 45 minutes of walking meditation, then you get breakfast and then lunch and dinner, although you're not supposed to eat much for dinner, and you're just doing this all day long with a few breaks and then there's an evening, what they call Dharma talk from the teacher.

It's really intense and I hated it. Was really miserable. It was interesting because I was simultaneously rebelling against being there and also, trying to win and be the best meditator, whatever that means. By day five, I think, I was at wit’s end and ready to go home, and I went and saw one of the teachers and she very quickly diagnosed the problem, which was I was trying too hard. Meditation is like this crazy video game, where you can't move forward. If you want to move forward, the first hindrance in meditation is desire. If you're trying to make something happen, it definitely won't happen. You just have to get into this relaxed, receptive mode. That's not easy for type A people.

After she gave me that advice, went and sat outside, instead of sitting in the meditation hall, and had this incredible experience, where the volume of chatter in my mind went way down and I was much more open to and receptive to whatever was happening in the present moment. It could be the raw data of physical sensations in my body, could be the bird song I was hearing in the trees, some leftover taste in my mouth from lunch. I saw how rapidly the mind moves between thinking, physical sensations, different types of thoughts and emotions, all coming up very quickly.

We don't really see that, because most of the time we're in this autopilot, this dream, this movie of our discursive thinking. When you concentrate the mind enough, usually on your breath, or something like that and the thinking goes down, it's like, you start to see into the gear works of how the human mind works. It was accompanied for me by just a huge blast of serotonin. I had 36 of the happiest hours of my life and ended up weeping on the floor of the meditation hall of these aging hippies and it was incredible. Then I went back to sucking uncontrollably. It really gave me a lot of faith. That's a loaded word, but you might even just say, confidence, that there's something to this practice and I've never stopped doing it. I still go on retreats.

Cameron Passmore: Wow. What a story.

Ben Felix: You told the overarching story earlier, but you have the panic attack. At what point did you discover meditation and then go on that retreat?

Dan Harris: I had the panic attack – I had two panic attacks. One was in 2004. That's the one you see on YouTube. Actually, didn't stop doing drugs after that one. I had another panic attack in 2005. That's when I went to see the shrink. Stopped doing drugs. Then it was three years or so before I got turned on to meditation, and then I went on the retreat in 2010, and I wrote the book. Came out in 2014.

I think I started meditating in 2009 and took me five years to get the book out because it's really hard to write a book, and especially a memoir where you're trying to live it out and then learn the life lessons at the same time. I'm writing a sequel right now and I'm – let's see, six years into that. This is not easy. I can write reasonably fast, but when you're doing something like this, where you're trying to learn life-changing lessons in a real way and in an authentic way and then make sense of them, it just takes a long time. Then you want it to be a hyper-palatable read in an afternoon type of experience, that takes a long time.

Cameron Passmore: How much of it was caused by, was it Peter Jennings that asked you to do some research, or some stories on religion? Did that start your path?

Dan Harris: Peter Jennings, noted Canadian. For anybody who hasn't heard of him, he was the anchor of World News Tonight, which was the flagship broadcast on ABC News where I worked back in the day. He was this just legendary figure, and somebody I'd watched growing up and really admired. He became my mentor right around the time of the panic attack. But totally coincidentally, he assigned me to start covering faith and spirituality for ABC News, which I didn't want to do, because I was raised by atheist scientists in the People's Republic of Massachusetts. I had no interest in the subject. No interest. But he didn't care and forced me to do it and actually, turned out to be great.

It was through covering faith and spirituality that I ended up stumbling upon a self-help writer by the name of Eckhart Tolle, who also lived in Canada. Eckhart Tolle, I ended up doing a story about him. Initially, I wasn't interested in him for any personal reasons, but he's very popular among celebrities and he'd been selling millions of books, so it was a sexy story. Although, he's not the most telegenic person in the world. He's this Elphin, elderly German man who speaks very, very slowly and softly. He's fascinating.

In his book, he was the first person I ever heard point out that we have a voice in our heads, that we have a non-stop conversation that's happening all the time that we're mostly unaware of. Because we're unaware of it, it owns us. We're just acting our thoughts out, like they're tiny little dictators. My beef with Tolle was that I couldn't discern in his book, or in my conversation with him that I wrote about in my own book and that I broadcast on television, I couldn't discern any practical advice for dealing with the inner torrent. But after I read Tolle and was whining about my frustration, my wife gave me a book by a guy named Dr. Mark Epstein, who's a psychiatrist, who lives and works in New York.

Mark had a whole series of books about the overlap between modern psychology and ancient Buddhism. That's how I got turned on to Buddhism and meditation. Mark plays Tuesdays with Morrie roll in the book, where I'm just touching base with him throughout. He and I are still very close friends.

Ben Felix: Okay. You did this retreat where you had the breakthrough. How would you recommend someone who wants to start meditation get started?

Dan Harris: I definitely would recommend not starting with a 10-day island meditation retreat. I mean, I actually know people who have started that way.

Cameron Passmore: Wow.

Dan Harris: It's a rough ride. You can do it that way, but I want to be clear that it's what we know about the science of habit formation is that, it appears that the best route for a human to take if you want to adopt a habit is to start very small. I often recommend that people shoot to start with a minute, or two, or three of meditation on a daily-ish basis. Really create some room to mess it up, some elasticity, because it is so hard to create habits. There's some data showing that some gigantic percentage of people who make New Year's resolutions have bailed on them by February. That's just indicative of how hard this is.

Given how hard it is, you want to have a sense of exploration and flexibility, maybe a sense of humour as you're doing this. My little slogans are one-minute counts and daily-ish. That's a great way to start.

Cameron Passmore: How long do you think it takes for that habit to stick?

Dan Harris: This is completely unscientific. My personal observation is generally, about a month before people get a sense of, “Oh, I can see the value for me.” This is not like physical exercise, where the feedback is immediate. Well, you get some feedback in that it’s uncomfortable to do, it feels hard. But the benefits, or the proof that something's happening, like sweating and hyperventilating you get from exercise is unlikely to happen immediately in meditation. If that happens in meditation, something is probably awry.

It takes some faith to say, “All right, I'm going to do this thing. The science pretty strongly indicates that it's going to be good for me. I'm going to do this thing. Let's do it for a month.” I don't know anybody who's done it for a month and come back to me and said, “No, this is bullshit.” I think after a month, you'll get a sense of the benefit. The habit part of it is harder, because habits, you can make them and then fall off the wagon. I think you just need to give yourself permission to be messy. Life happens and your practice might fade for a while, but nothing's been lost. You can start again.

Ben Felix: Do you think there's a best time of day to meditate?

Dan Harris: I don't. Some people will say, you should do it in the morning. But if you're not a morning person, that's going to make it even harder. Given how hard it is to start a habit, I don't want you cutting against the grain. I think you should experiment to get a sense of what time of day works for you. One habit hack is, it's called piggybacking. This comes out of the literature around human behaviour change, is that if you've got an existing habit, brushing your teeth, for example, you can piggyback a new habit on top of it. Brushing your teeth can become a cue for, “Oh, I'm going to do two minutes of meditation before or after.” Exercise. If you've got an exercise habit up and running, maybe you tack on two minutes of meditation at the end of that. That's one little hack.

Cameron Passmore: You recently interviewed on your podcast, our good friend, Hal Hershfield. That's the inspiration for this question because you also wrote about how your brain is fixated on the past and the future to the detriment of the here and now. Now, we're financial advisors. In our world, many people spend much of their time and money in the today at the expense of the future. Do you have any sense of how meditation can help with that?

Dan Harris: Yes. I guess, that can seem confusing, because here I am, extolling the virtue of the present moment, because that's the only time it ever really is. That doesn't mean you should be reckless and spend all of your money right now like you're going to die tomorrow or do a bunch of drugs because there's no consequences. I think, hopefully, people can hold these two ideas in their head at the same time.

Where I think meditation might be useful in terms of having a better relationship with your future self, which is what Hal Hershfield talks about, this whole idea is that if you can create a relationship, and that might seem like a weird concept, to create a relationship with the future version of you, then you're more likely to make investments now that will pay off for that future version of you; exercise, saving your money. What mindfulness meditation can do for you is to help you with impulse control.

You can see, “Oh, yeah. I have this desire to eat a whole sleeve of Oreos or to say something that's going to ruin the next 48 hours of my marriage or buy this thing online that's unreasonably expensive and I have no need for.” You might learn to watch those urges arise and pass. I think, even though there's a way to frame this question that makes it seem like these ideas are diametrically opposed, I don't think they are.

Cameron Passmore: Love it. In the book, you refer to the comparing mind and the wanting mind. How do you think meditation can help with social comparison and conspicuous consumption?

Dan Harris: Two huge problems. Social comparison is put on steroids by social media. I'm not anti-social media per se, but all new technologies can have negative externalities, and this is a big one. Comparing mind, it's a Buddhist term of art, but it's that state of mind we get into when we think our lives suck because we don't have what our neighbour has, or what our influencer who's currently on our scroll has. It's a really painful state of mind. I think meditation is useful because it gives you self-awareness.

You don't want to be stuck in a painful state of mind, unaware that you're in it, and then acting out of it. To be able to notice, “Oh, yeah. This pain, the asthmatic, ambient suffering that I'm in right now is because I'm on hour three of looking at the abs of some influencer, and this is a ridiculous way to spend my time, and that's why I'm unhappy right now. I don't need to go on some extreme unhealthy diet. I don't need to kick the dog. I don't need to binge eat out of some perverse self-soothing impulse.” The same with consumption. Eating is a form of consumption. By the way, I'm very pro-eating and very anti-trying to wrench your body into a certain shape. I don't think that's wise.

But we can take any healthy form of consumption and turn it into something unhealthy, whether that involves money, or food, or alcohol, or drugs, or whatever it is. I think there are healthy levels of consumption, and then unhealthy levels of consumption. Often, we tip into the latter, because of mindlessness. We don't know that we've got some painful mind state going on that we're trying to self-soothe.

I was interviewing somebody on my podcast just yesterday. We haven't posted it yet, but the interview was just yesterday. Emma Seppälä, she's a Yale professor, she's an expert in happiness, and she was talking about the fact that the average human, basically, gets no education in emotional regulation. We are swampped by emotions all the time. It's just a non-negotiable part of being alive. We have emotions. But we're not taught how to deal with them, and so, we end up mindlessly behaving in ways to compensate for or soothe these emotions, and it gets us into a lot of trouble.

Cameron Passmore: I have to ask you, how is your personal meditation practice – has it influenced your financial decision-making?

Dan Harris: For me, one of my Achilles heels, psychologically speaking, is fear and anxiety around money. I'm pretty sure as I tell the story, I think it will make it quite clear that this is – I don't think armchair psychology. I think there's some inherited trauma here. Half my family is Russian Jews who came to the United States in the early 1900s, escaping the pogroms. One of these characters is a guy named Arthur Leibovitz. He comes to the United States in his teens or early 20s. Somehow escapes the Russian pogroms, and this is not the most welcoming environment, and he's a real hustler. He changes his last name to Lubao, I think, because it sounded French.

He engages in a bunch of failed businesses. He has to grocery store. Ultimately, becomes a bail bondsman, and a crook. He's putting up his friends and relatives' homes as collateral for these bail bonds. He does this for a notorious con man, who then jumps the buy, he goes on the lamb. The FBI investigates, and my great-grandfather, Arthur Lubao, knows he's about to lose all of his money and freedom and kills himself in the family kitchen by putting his head in the oven. There are newspaper articles about this guy.

It's a graphic story to say that it helps me understand why I, as somebody – I have plenty of money, but it is a huge source of anxiety for me. Still, I find myself irrationally making these mental movies about how I'm going to lose everything. I think that's part of my conditioning, and I need to not be owned by it, and just to be self-aware and have some warm, non-judgmental awareness of this psychological pattern in my head. Also, to try to be careful to not put myself over my skis. In other words, to do my best not to exacerbate this ancient, primordial psychological pattern in my mind.

This self-awareness leads me to be reasonably conservative so that I don't unnecessarily wake up in the middle of the night, worrying about losing the house. I do that anyway, but I try not to make crazy risky investments because I know it would be aggravating a pre-existing tendency.

Cameron Passmore: Makes a lot of sense.

Ben Felix: Maybe to generalize from that, how do you think people can apply the principles of 10% Happier to their financial lives?

Dan Harris: There are some great experts I would recommend. One name that's coming to mind, Spencer Sherman is his name. He's a Buddhist financial advisor. He's way better at this than I am, but I really do think it's about learning through meditation to supple-y manage your emotions, so that you're not making rash decisions. I have all sorts of complex, stormy emotions, fear and anxiety around money. I don't want to let that pain govern all of my decisions. Having the self-awareness that I can generate through meditation really is useful.

I think, whatever your neuroses are around money, developing a friendly relationship with them, being able to see them clearly, I think that's one root toward some level of financial stability. Also, I would say, for lay people like me, just listen to your financial advisors. Save regularly and harness the power of dollar-cost averaging. Don't look at your balance sheet too often. That's personally what I do because I know what's going to help me stay steady.

Cameron Passmore: That's why I was going to go, this so fascinating, Dan, because those are great ideas to help the investor. I'm wondering about the benefit of mindfulness and meditation for the advisor to better help the client.

Dan Harris: One of the things that I think happens through meditation is that the more visibility you get into your neuroses, and we all have them, the more comfortable you can get with your own, in my experience, that inexorably leads to more empathy for everybody else's baggage. I have to imagine that would be very useful when dealing with people on this very sensitive subject, because I would imagine, I'm not a financial advisor, and that's a good thing, because my math skills are terrible. I would imagine, you're seeing people in dysregulated states, because this is sensitive stuff. The empathy that can be developed by understanding what it's like to feel that way on your own, and then being able to understand what's going on for somebody else, I have to imagine that would be useful.

Ben Felix: I would tend to agree with that statement.

Cameron Passmore: Absolutely.

Ben Felix: We live that. Everything you said is absolutely correct. How much agency do you think people have to affect their own personal happiness?

Dan Harris: A non-trivial amount, a significant amount, back to this observation from the Buddha about the fact that we live in this giant, fluxing gumbo of conditions. Most of them are out of our control. It's an entropic universe. Just to recognize that there are a lot of things that you can't manage and determine the outcome. If you believe in enlightenment, which jury’s out on that for me, but that would be the difference between 10% happier and a 100% happy. Not even 100% happier. It's a 100% happy, that you can be happy, irrespective of the conditions.

You can be happy, as my friend Sam Harris says, “Happy before anything happens,” because you have completely let go. There's no more clinging. That doesn't seem available to me personally, but I do believe that you can get 10% happier. Obviously, that number is a joke, but it's roughly true. Like any good investment, it compounds annually. You're building these skills and you just get better and better. It doesn't go in an unbroken hockey stick upward trajectory.

It's bumpy and blurry, and you're going to have, often, two steps forward, one step back, because most likely, you'll be buffeted by some exogenous event, or some chemical change in your own brain, or some health disaster for you, or somebody else. This is what life is all about. But I think you can get generally better over time at handling all of life's vexations with the caveat that so much is out of your control. Then the caveat to the caveat is that you can get better at existing in a universe where things are less in your control.

Cameron Passmore: It's funny you say that 10% happier is a joke. But I find the name, frankly, brilliantly compelling.

Dan Harris: Thank you.

Cameron Passmore: That's the big takeaway that I was reminded by the book is that not some sort of weird woo-woo person here. You're saying, look, it makes sense. Try it and make a bit happier. Question I have for you. I think you said in the book that happiness is a skill you can develop. How can people build that skill to continue to be happier through their life?

Dan Harris: I think of seven or eight no-brainers in this regard. We're talking a lot about meditation. The book was really a lot about meditation. Also, therapy is another modality that I talk about in the book, but it's been 10 years since the book came out. I've just put out a revised 10th anniversary edition, and so, I've been thinking about what's changed in the world and in my life since then. One of the big things that has changed in my life is that I host a podcast and we've done more than 600 episodes and I talk to experts in all areas of the human condition. It's just more and more true to me. The animating insight of this whole hitherto side hustle and now main job for me, the animating insight that got me out of the TV news business and into this thing is that the mind and the brain are trainable.

There are many ways to do it. Meditation is one, but I'm not a meditation fundamentalist. I think there are many others. I mentioned therapy, for sure. Nature has been shown to have a lot of impacts on your happiness.

Cameron Passmore: Absolutely.

Dan Harris: Sleep is a huge one. I think of that as the apex predator of healthy habits. If you're not getting enough sleep, nothing else works. Diet is huge, but with the caveat that you don't want to get too crazy about that, because that's an area where you can do a lot of unhealthy suffering. Exercise, same caveat. Then I would say, the most important variable and this is a data-backed assertion I'm about to make, and it's interesting because I talk about this a lot and this is the thesis of my next book. We live in an era of optimization. A lot of people are tracking their sleep numbers and counting their calories and trying to achieve ketosis and what's this very compulsive era that we're living in, where people are trying to improve their health in ways that I think speak to the anxiety of the age, because this is the thing we can control in a world where everything seems really scary.

Anyway, if we're in this mode of optimizing, what the data show is the most important variable is not sleep, exercise, diet. The most important variable, if you want to be healthy and happy and successful, is the quality of your relationships. Again, I'm not making this up. This is what is shown in the research. What's the mechanism for this? Stress is generally what kills us. The best stress reduction technique is positive relationships. There's an expression from Robert Waldinger, who is this incredible researcher. His expression is, “Never worry alone.”

By the way, that's a great part of the role of a financial advisor is that you can be a worry partner for somebody. That's certainly true with me and my wife and our financial advisor, who's amazing. Shout out to Patrick. If you're asking, what can you do to get happier? Those are some of the biggies. I would say, the one not to sleep on to be a little cute, the biggest is the quality of your relationships.

Ben Felix: Yeah, it's great. Really, really good points. Relationships are huge. I want to come back to your story as we get near wrapping up here. How do you decide to leave your job at ABC News and dedicate yourself to this 10% happier thing?

Dan Harris: I wish I could say it was some big stroke of bravery, but it was a math thing. Just became clear that I could afford to do it. There's a pretty good argument to be made that I should have left years ago, because there was an overlap of about seven and a half, almost eight years. Book came out in 2014. I left toward the end of 2021. I was definitely doing too many things.

There was a period of time where I was the anchor of two shows at ABC News, also traveling all the time to cover investigative stories and breaking news. Also, traveling to give speeches about meditation, writing more books about meditation, hosting a podcast and co-founding a venture-backed company that had a meditation app. We also had a baby during this period of time. I took on too much and it was a mess. I made a mess.

A lot of this was out of the fear that I talked about before, that Arthur Lubau is in my molecules. I finally got my shit together and left in 2021. ABC News, Disney, they were really gracious about it. It was very unusual for somebody to come and say, “Can you just let me out of my contract midway through?” But they were cool about it.

There are aspects of being on the news that I really missed. Chief among them, my colleagues. I'm still very close with people that I used to work with. To open my calendar day-to-day and see that, first of all, I have total control over it. I'm really focused on things that are clearly important to me. That's quite liberating.

Cameron Passmore: What's been your biggest learnings about living a good life, since you wrote the book a decade ago?

Dan Harris: I fear I'm going to be repetitive, but I was overlooking and there's a reason why I'm getting dogmatic and emphatic about the relationships piece. That I was overlooking in a massive way. It's a big part of why I stepped down. People often step down from big jobs and say, “I'm doing it to spend more time with my family.” Usually, that's bullshit and they've gotten fired. In my case, that's exactly what was going on. Not only my family, but my friends in that era, in that decade or so, when I was working doing all those jobs, I just listed for you, a lot of my very close friendships atrophied. Didn't go away. It's not like, that we no longer loved each other, but I wasn't seeing people. For me, a huge priority is time with family and friends.

I approach it just the way I do exercise, or meditation, or any of my other practices. I can feel it because I have a little bit more self-awareness these days. I can feel it, even when I don't want to go to a party. I mean, I pretty much say yes to everything now, but even when I don't want to go to a party or a dinner, or whatever it is, I'm an extrovert, I get so much energy out of that. I will say to introverts, you still need human contact, just less.

Ben Felix: You mentioned the 600 or so podcast episodes that you've done. When you look back, which of your past podcast guests have had the biggest impact on you personally?

Dan Harris: Well, mathematically, it's very clear that the Dalai Lama who's come on the show many times is the most popular with the audience. He has had a huge impact on me in many ways. I mean, not that I have much of a relationship with him, because he's been interviewed a million times, so I don't know if he would be able to pick me out of a line-up, but I've interviewed him three or four times. Those are the most popular episodes we've ever done.

I'll say one thing that he said that has been hugely influential for me. Wise selfishness. We're all selfish by nature, how we are designed. Yet, if you want to do selfishness correctly, you will develop a generous, compassionate, altruistic mindset, because that is the most abiding form of human happiness. That is how we were designed to be in contact with other people. I often use as an example, what's it like if you're paying attention while you hold the door open for somebody? Just that little moment. Very mundane. But if you're paying attention, that feels quite good. It's infinitely scalable. That's why selfishness, that's had a real impact on me.

The guests who really has had the most impact on me, a repeat guest who's probably the second most popular guest, and this is somebody I really do have a deep personal relationship with is a meditation teacher named Joseph Goldstein, who is featured quite prominently in my first book. He's the guy who's teaching the retreat that I went on, my first retreat. He's very funny. He's about to turn 80.

After the book came out and I had described this big meditative moment for me, he was back at the meditation retreat centre where it happened. He sent me an email saying, “I'm back at the scene of your great awakening. I can't believe they haven't put up a plaque,” which is typical Joseph. Joseph is an extraordinary human being. Unlike the Dalai Lama, he doesn't wear robes. If you walked into a room, you wouldn't think, “Oh, this is some great spiritual master.” He truly is a unique human being. I'm editing myself a little bit because he doesn't like when I praise him too much. That's the only thing I've ever seen him get irascible about is when I say – when I'm too nice about him.

He helped me co-found the company, the meditation app. I have seen him in a business context. I've been in a creative context with him, creating a lot of how to meditate courses for the app. He has slept over at my house many times. I have gone on retreat with him many times. We've been to parties together. He's a huge part of my life, and he's never let me down. He's just an incredible person. I'm almost done. There's a great expression, not from Joseph. I think it's from a teacher named Shinzen Young, “The soft sermon of your pores,” meaning you're not speechifying through your words. It's just how you are in the world. Being up close with somebody like Joseph who's meditated, and he's right now every year, he does a three-month silent solo meditation retreat. This is a guy who's been meditating at a pretty high level for 60 years nearly.

Being in his proximity, hearing the soft sermon of his pores for this period of time has been tremendously impactful for me. It gives me a lot of faith, or confidence, which is a work that keeps coming up. Yeah, just keep going. I'm still a mess. I retain the capacity to be a schmuck in many, many ways. That can be discouraging. I look at that guy and I'm like, “Oh, yeah. I don't know. I'm probably not going to get that far in my lifetime, but that's what's on offer here.”

One of the amazing things about hosting my podcast is that I'm speaking to people like Joseph and the Dalai Lama all the time. That's my job. I'm on an IV drip of faith and confidence and inspiration. Yes, the mind is trainable. I may be a tough case, but you can go pretty far.

Ben Felix: How impactful do you think your app and the courses in the app have been on the users of the app?

Dan Harris: I mean, I only have anecdotal evidence. But for sure, people using the app and people listening to the podcast. I hear things all the time with people, either I'm reading comments that are posted online, or in the podcast players in the app store, or people come up to me in airports, or on the street, and it's very positive. It's interesting, because I was, I guess, something of a public figure before all of this. I was a newsman. That was cool. People occasionally stop me in the airport and that was fun. This is completely different. Often, people are crying.

Cameron Passmore: Wow.

Dan Harris: Because it's a much more intimate relationship. I'm talking about things that are much closer to the bone. Yeah, so I get a lot out of that.

Cameron Passmore: Our final question, Dan. How do you define success in your life?

Dan Harris: I wish I had a pad answer to that. You would think that that would be something that I would have thought about. I definitely have thought about it, but I don't have, got a one liner. For me, right now, what's coming up when I think about success, I can't say too much, but this probably may be a bit of a crossroads in my own professional life. There is actually a little thing that I say to myself. It's the first thing I say in the morning, actually, is to make awesome shit that helps people do their lives better. That's really what I want to do. Make great content that is useful to people to be able, to pay my bills in the process.

Cameron Passmore: Love it. Well, I'm an avid listener of your podcast. It is wonderful. Everyone should listen to it. Your book is also incredible. Thank you for saying yes to coming and joining us. This has been an awesome experience.

Dan Harris: It has for me, too. Thank you very much for having me. I appreciate it.

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