B (5:34)

When anxiety shows up, do you try to outrun it or do you try to learn how to work with it?

A (5:40)

I had spent a lot of time in war zones after 911 and gotten depressed and then done this really dumb thing of self medicating with cocaine and other recreational drugs. That moment sent me on this weird windy thing where I ultimately ended up finding meditation.

B (5:55)

Welcome back. Or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast where we dive into the minds of the world's greatest thinkers and doers. I AM your host, Dr. Michael Gervais. By trade and training, a high performance psychologist. Now, the idea behind these conversations is simple. It's to sit with the extraordinaries to learn, to really learn how they work from the inside out. Today's conversation is with Dan Harris. He's a journalist, bestselling author, and host of the 10% Happier podcast. Many first met Dan after a a panic attack on live television.

A (6:27)

I was pretty unhappy. I loved what I did, but I was really stressed and really frustrated. And every time I got passed over for a job, which happened a lot, I would spin out and take it out on the people in my life.

B (6:38)

What followed was not a quick fix, but a serious commitment to understanding anxiety, attention and how the mind works.

A (6:46)

Most of us are like drill sergeants with ourselves, but we actually need to move into a coach mentality. So that's the self love piece. There's a whole body of research around something called micro interactions. So we can inject massive doses of happiness into our life by just paying attention to these little interactions we're having throughout the day that most of us sort of just ice out.

B (7:07)

In this conversation, Dan and I explore what it looks like to live with anxiety. We also dig into identity, meditation, self talk, and a process to choose growth over avoidance again and again and again.

A (7:19)

A lot of people try meditation and then notice how distractible they are and feel like they're failures. You sit and try to focus on one thing at a time. Then your brain comes in and starts like planning a homicide or whatever it is and you notice that start again, notice it, start again, notice it, start again. And what happens over time is you build this muscle of self awareness that allows you to see the contents of your consciousness without being owned by it.

B (7:42)

So with that, let's jump into this week's conversation with Dan Harris. Dan, I always look forward to spending time with you and so thank you for coming back and sharing, you know, the adventure you've been on since we last spoke. But for folks that the one folk or two folk that might not know, you know, kind of where you come from and how you and I became friends at this thing, can you, can you just share an overview, a flyover of the kind of major points of your life and what got you here?

A (8:14)

I mean, I think that the story that most people associate with me, if they know who I am at all, is that I used to be at ABC News as a anchor correspondent, kind of globe trotting newsman. And probably the thing I'm best known for in my 21 years at ABC News was having a panic attack on Good Morning America, which if you Google panic attack on TV, it's the number one result. You know, like 20 million views is like a, it's what will be on my tombstone. And that panic attack actually turned out to be. Well, first of all, it was awful in the moment and even worse in the aftermath because I, I went to a, a psychiatrist afterwards, try to figure out what had gone wrong. He asked me a bunch of questions. One of them was do you do drugs? And I had to admit, yes, I do. I had as a backstory, I had spent a lot of time in war zones after 911 and gotten depressed and then done this really dumb thing of self medicating with cocaine and other recreational drugs. Wasn't high when I was on the air, but the doctor explained that my ambient drug use made me more likely to panic. So that was all terrible. However, that moment sent me on this weird windy thing where I ultimately ended up finding meditation and it was incredibly helpful for me. And so I wrote a book about that called 10% happier that came out in 2014, so quite a while ago. And that ended up swallowing my life. And I, you know, started a podcast and meditation app and I was trying to do two things for a while, be a newsman and be Mr. Happiness. And then four years ago I retired from ABC News and this is what

B (9:52)

I do full time with your practice. Did you start off strong? Like, oh, there's a thing here, let me, let me dive into meditating because I feel something or we. Was it more intellectual for you? Like I hear people talking about it. I'll try it a little bit. Like, where did you start?

A (10:10)

I got turned on to Eckhart Tolle. He's a huge best selling self help guru. One of my colleagues at ABC News recommended I read the book because she thought it would be a good story because he was getting really big at the time. This was in like 2008.

B (10:27)

The power of now.

A (10:28)

Power of now a New Earth. Oprah Winfrey was, you know, pushing his stuff. And so I did not go into that thinking, oh, I'm going to read something here that would be useful for me. I thought, oh, maybe it's weird enough for a TV story. He's an interesting guy. He's kind of like an elfin German man and he's like the spiritual equivalent, equivalent of like, of watching a yule log. He's, he is kind of compelling in his, his blandness. You know, he's very soft spoken. But in reading his book, he delivered what I know now to be not an original thesis, but it was new to me, which is that we all have this voice in our heads, this, this inner narrator who chases us out of bed in the morning and is yammering at us all day long and has us constantly wanting stuff, not wanting stuff, judging people, judging ourselves, comparing ourselves to other people. And Tolly's argument, which The Buddha made 2600 years earlier, but totally's argument is that when you're unaware of this non stop nattering, it owns you. You just act out all of your neurotic, neurotic obsessions and as if they're like, in the words of my meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein, as if they're tiny dictators. And so that was an electrifying thing for me. I then went and interviewed Tole. I. A friend of mine has described TOY as correct but not useful. So like, he very incisively diagnoses the human condition, in my opinion, but doesn't, in my opinion, give you a lot to do about it. So I read Toy, was frustrated, and then my wife gave me a book by a guy named Dr. Mark Epstein, who is a psychiatrist who's written a bunch of books about the overlap between psychology and Buddhism. And that is what made me think, oh, okay, there is something to do about it. It's called meditation. I, as a child of two ex hippies who dragged me to, you know, health food stores and camping trips and, you know, made me listen to like free to be you and me and all that. I was not really down with the whole meditation thing at first, but then I saw that there was all this science and my parents are also scientists, my wife is a scientist, I'm not good at math. So I, I became a guy who like wore makeup and talked to television cameras. But I, I was like, all right, this is there, there's some Science here. So that's when I gave it a try. I remember the moment exactly where I was, I was at a. My wife and I were with some friends at a, a share house, like we were rented a house that we all shared at the beach. And I was reading a book by John Kabit Zinn. I was in the process of reading lots of books and I was at the, I was at the pool and I was reading this book and I was like, you know what? I'm just going to do it. So I, I didn't want anybody to know. So I went into the bedroom, closed the door, turned off the lights, sat on the floor and did five minutes of trying to focus on my breath. And then every time I got distracted, I started again and again and again. And I, I, I realized, you know, this is really difficult and I see exactly the value. You're not trying to achieve a special state, you're just trying to, it's like a bicep curl for your brain. You're, you're trying to focus on one thing, your breath usually, but it doesn't have to be your breath. And then every time you get distracted, you start again. A lot of people think, a lot of people try meditation and then notice how distractible they are and feel like they're failures. But I had read enough to know, actually, no, the whole point is to get distracted, start again. Get distracted, start again. Because that is how you deal with what Eckhart Tolle was pointing out, which is that you have this crazy voice in your head. It's giving you shitty ideas all the time. What's the antidote? Awareness. Seeing it clearly, AKA mindfulness. And so how do you develop that? You sit and try to focus on one thing at a time. Then your brain comes in and starts like planning a homicide or whatever it is. And you notice that. Start again, Notice it, start again, notice it, start again. And what happens over time is you build this muscle innate in all of us, but atrophied through disuse of self awareness again, AKA mindfulness. That allows you to see the contents of your consciousness without being owned by it. And so I knew really quickly in that share house and am against it that I. Yeah, there's something here.

B (14:36)

Something here. Yeah, I had a similar experience. It is the art of starting over a thousand times.

A (14:40)

Yeah.

B (14:41)

You know, within maybe a handful of minutes. And the way that you start over or the way that you refocus is equally as important, because I can refocus this way. Let's say I'm Focusing on my exhale. And then the homicide thought comes in and I say, what is wrong with me? Get back to the breath. Okay. Now I'm starting over with a critical mind, a judgmental kind of chipping away at myself.

A (15:09)

Right.

B (15:09)

Or I can notice that my wander. And I say, well that's interesting. Okay, come on back. You know, like. And it's more of a eloquent return back to the present moment, to the breath, if you will.

A (15:21)

Can I tweak that just a little bit?

B (15:22)

Yeah.

A (15:22)

Because sometimes we really can't help the massive blast of self directed opprobrium or whatever that is. Sometimes it's just so quick that you really can't control it, which.

B (15:34)

The negative critical.

A (15:35)

Yeah, the. Oh my God. I can't believe, Mike, that, that you spent the last five minutes, you know, planning some expletive bill speech you're going to give to somebody. The move there is just to note that you can, you can have a little note in your mind of oh, judgment. So everything can be co opted.

B (15:52)

That's right.

A (15:53)

And, and so what I don't want people to feel bad about is, oh, I'm kicking my own ass in meditation. That means I'm doing it wrong. No, no, all you have to do is be mindful of the kicking of your own ass.

B (16:03)

Yeah.

A (16:04)

And then you're back on safe ground. Everything can be included.

B (16:07)

That's good. Yeah, it's really clean. If knowing what you know now, because you've been practicing here for I don't know, 10, 15 years less than you.

A (16:15)

I started in like 0909.

B (16:18)

So knowing what you know now, if you could go back and kind of whisper to yourself the moment before you had the panic attack on air, what would you whisper to yourself right before the panic attack, before knowing what you know now?

A (16:32)

It's interesting. I don't know that for that specifically I would recommend meditation or mindfulness. I still struggle with panic disorder. And you know, being mindful, having, you know, calming the nervous system through consistent meditation is really helpful. But in the moment, right before I'm going to freak out, actually self talk is the most useful thing for me. And as, as you know, there's a ton of science around self talk. You can call this self love even, but, but self love has really negative connotations for most semi skeptical people. But the ability. Another way to describe this is self compassion, which is a robust field of scientific study. As you know, there's just a ton of evidence both out of the self compassion world and from Ethan Cross at The University of Michigan, who's looked at our inner chatter. Chatter that if you talk to yourself the way you would talk to a good friend or a mentee or a kid, it has really powerful psychological and physiological benefits. And so I've gotten. I'm really into that. I think it works really well with mindfulness because you can use the mindfulness to notice, oh, I'm starting to become dysregulated. And then you layer on top of that. You can put my. You can put your hand on your chest, which is a little cheesy. You may not want to see have anybody see you do it. But like me last night on a plane. I. I struggle on planes. All right. You know, I'm. I can. I can tell I'm feeling a little off hand on the chest, bro. By the way, it does actually supercharge it if you refer to yourself in the third person.

B (18:07)

It's a cool finding. So Ethan introduced that.

A (18:09)

Yes. Yeah, it's dude or bro. Or use your own name. Mike.

B (18:15)

Dan.

A (18:15)

Yes. Yeah, this may be uncomfortable. You are not going to die. You know, this is your brain overreacting to stimuli that are actually not dangerous.

B (18:25)

As opposed to. Okay, I'm not gonna die. When you talk to yourself in third person, Dan, you're not gonna die.

A (18:31)

Yes.

B (18:31)

Yeah.

A (18:32)

And it's like. Because it really. For me, it channels that same energy of how I talk to my kid. You know, it's like, well, I'm Alexander or Bro or Stinky, whatever I call him. We call each other lots of names. I. I've been joking recently that his rap name is Lil Dum Dum. So. Lil Dum Dum. You're good. I know you don't want to go to school today because whatever you got in a fight with Luke or. But it's fine. Your teacher's there to intervene. Any wisdom I would impart, I could then impart to myself. Does this track for you? Did you use any of this stuff?

B (19:06)

100. Thank you for asking. Self talk is one of the great tools, you know, to be able to work with one's own self. And if you're. First and foremost, if you're not aware of your inner dialogue, it's really hard to be good at it. So that's. That's why mindfulness is foundational. There's three practices for awareness. Mindfulness, journaling, and conversations with people of wisdom. Yeah, those are the three that I know that increase my awareness of what fill in the blank is. But then you need some skills and some. And self talk. Can be a skill. But I still want to know what you would whisper to yourself.

A (19:41)

Giddy up.

B (19:43)

That's cool. Okay, so let's do it this way. Let's think about it as a slide. Okay. Think about a water slide.

A (19:49)

Okay.

B (19:49)

Okay. And so sometimes you get to the top of a water slide, and you know, you're looking around from the platform, you're like, ah, here we go. This could be fun. And you jump in and you kind of go for the ride. And it's exactly what it's intended. That kind of threshold of excitement, fear, you know, Fun. Okay. Sometimes you get to the platform and you say, oh, boy, I don't think I. I don't think I really want this.

A (20:11)

Yeah.

B (20:11)

So if you're at the platform and you don't know which way it's going to go yet. Okay, let's do that. Self talk. And then when you put your. You sit on that platform and you're kind of holding the bar above you. I think most people have been on a water slide.

A (20:23)

Right.

B (20:23)

And you're holding the thing above you. The water's dripping down, and you know that you're not in a good spot. That's a different frame. And then when you're in the throes of the thing, your feet are spilling all over the place, and you're kind of feeling upside down in disaster. So there's three distinct moments of self talk. So upstream, ready for the rapids. And in the complete throws.

A (20:43)

I would say I think about this a lot with airplanes and with anything I'm afraid of. I would say a couple things. One, you're gonna be fine. Two, it's really important that you face your fears because you want your kid to see you doing that. I have a child who has plenty of anxiety, and he needs a father who is modeling a consistent facing of fears. The third thing is listen to yourself. If you're really on tilt right now, sometimes, actually the most courageous thing to do is take a break. Re attack it tomorrow.

B (21:19)

Cool. So the. The two things that you're doing is you're being. I'll work in reverse order. Three things. There's an agility to your approach. The middle is purpose mindset. So you're anchoring to something bigger than you.

A (21:30)

Yes.

B (21:31)

And the first is you're backing yourself.

A (21:32)

Yes.

B (21:33)

So, you know, there's some efficacy. Self efficacy is the first thing you're doing, which is that felt sense of like, yeah, I. I make things happen. I'm. I feel pretty powerful. Like, I can. I can do things. So if you can anchor into that type of self talk, it's cool. And then make it bigger than you, it's cool. And the all of the requisite skills to be agile in this topsy turvy, kind of wild world that we're in. That's a really nice formula.

A (21:58)

So are these exactly the skills you would present to a client?

B (22:02)

Yeah, if I'm working with an athlete or an executive that is like wanting to take a step in their abilities to execute in high stress conditions or be a little bit more home with themselves in high stress conditions. The three theories that we just work from, self efficacy, purpose and psychological agility, would be definitely at the foundation. And each one of those has a set of protocols. So self efficacy. Albert Bandor was the kind of the original theorists on self efficacy. In the said look, he said there was five ways to increase efficacy. Now if you do a search, there's only four. So I'm not sure what happened to the fifth one. But. But there's very specific ways to enhance your sense of feeling efficacious. And that word is like feeling powerful in your own self.

A (22:53)

How do you with your clients work with the subtle thing around agility? Because agility could be misused as a cop out.

B (23:04)

It's a cool question. You understand the nuance here, don't you? Because facing down.

A (23:08)

Because I've done it.

B (23:09)

Yeah, I know, right? Like wrestling with your dragon, you know, or like saying, I'm gonna fight this dragon tomorrow or I'm gonna get to know this dragon tomorrow. Okay. So psychological agility, it for me, pins on or rests on emotional agility. Not to confuse the two, but there's a ability to work with your emotions allows you to be more agile in navigating the world. So there is an emotional intelligence that I'm pointing to for the agility piece. The other thing though is if you think about stress inoculation and you think about systematic desensitization or flooding, those are all words maybe that need some explaining. But the idea that, the very simple idea is that when you, when you face down something and you stand toe to toe with it and you don't retreat, your body becomes more familiar with that stress and then is less fearful of it. And at the moment that you stand toe to toe with something, either in your imagination or in physical life, and then you retreat, you strengthen the response of retreating from, from the stress. So I would use that one sparingly. Right?

A (24:22)

Yes.

B (24:23)

Like there's a place to say, excuse me, I need to, like, I need to Go to the bathroom or I need to tie my shoes or I need to go to. Pull yourself from the throes of a thing that is clever, but on your own terms. When you decide that you want to tackle this thing, tackle it and do not retreat.

A (24:42)

Okay, so let me, I'll give you a real life example and you just tell me what you think. So I, you're good at interviewing.

B (24:50)

I see why you had a long career at abc.

A (24:53)

Well done, mate.

B (24:54)

Yeah, that's really good. And it also points to like, you know, you are a true learner. Right. Like that's probably the genius that you rest on is that you're curious and you want to understand.

A (25:04)

Yeah.

B (25:04)

Right. So curiosity is probably the crown jewel in yourself.

A (25:07)

Maybe. But what I can't do is, unlike you, I, I am not a mental health professional. I can't. When people ask me for advice, I always have to say, I'll give you advice, but you know, it's like you're talking to a guy who slept at a Holiday Inn last night. Like, I, I don't really know. I didn't, you know, I've done hundreds of interviews.

B (25:26)

But the fact that, you know, that actually creates a felt sense of safety.

A (25:30)

I think so. I think so.

B (25:32)

That's right.

A (25:32)

But I, you know, legally, like, I, I really can't treat patients or, and I, so I don't, I don't, I'm not even particularly interested in that. But that's quite, that's, I think a, that's, I think a major difference between the two of us. My only real training is as a journalist as opposed to as a caregiver, which is really within your wheelhouse.

B (25:54)

Yeah.

A (25:54)

Anyway, getting back to the specific situation, I, so I have, as I mentioned earlier, I have panic disorder. It's not just a panic attack I had on tv. I think that was a seminal event in that it, like once the brain, as you nodded toward this, once the brain gets good at panic, it, it, it's, it's gets really good at it. So not only do I sometimes worry about public speaking, but for that I take a beta blocker, which is really helpful. And so I don't shy away from it. I, I take a beta blocker which is a non narcotic medication that you need a prescription for, but it doesn't like alter your mind. It just, it puts a cap on how quickly your heart can beat. So it's kind of like a physiological. You can be as nervous as, as you can manage to be, but the body can't go into mutiny mode. And so that's really helpful. But for elevators and airplanes, I really struggle, and a beta blocker is not going to cut it. During the pandemic, I had a bunch of stressful things going on. It was a pandemic, a B I wasn't on. I had moved out of the city. I used to live in New York City. Now we live in the suburbs. My wife insists that I call it the country because she doesn't like the connotation of the suburbs.

B (27:03)

Suburban.

A (27:04)

We. I'm suburban douche. And so we live in the suburbs. So I wasn't on elevators as much and everybody was grounded, so I wasn't on planes that much.

B (27:13)

Oh, you were out of practice.

A (27:14)

I was out of practice, and I was going through a very difficult separation with my co founders at a meditation app that I had started back back in 2015.

B (27:26)

I didn't know that you had that separation. Yeah, yeah, I didn't know that.

A (27:29)

It was brutal. It was really.

B (27:30)

I still associate you with it, and you're not with that.

A (27:32)

I'm not with it.

B (27:33)

We don't need to name it or

A (27:35)

you can name it. The app used to be called 10% happier. It's now called Happier. So anyway, in the middle, in 2021, as all the sh. Or maybe 2022, as all this shit's going down, it's pandemic. I'm starting to get back on elevators and airplanes. I have this, like, deeply wired propensity for panic. I started freaking out on. On planes and elevators and bad. I did a classic. No, no. I was. I was on my way out to LA to give a speech and the panic hit. I hadn't felt panic like that in a long time. And I got off. And, you know, I can defend the decision as by myself. I didn't have anybody to calm me down, but that just set me on a spiral. And so I've really been working. I've been doing a lot of exposure therapy. I have a great therapist, Paul Green. Shout out to Paul Green. And he and I will. Will take planes together. Unmedicated little planes, like, not like Cessnas, but small commuter planes from the White Plains airport to Washington, D.C. you know, 70 seaters. And it is. I'm a guy who spent huge chunks of my life in war zones. I've never been more terrified than doing these flights unmedicated. And so I did, like, four of those, and I was able to do it, but it was still really hard. And now I'm kind of on my own. And so, like, I flew yesterday. I was on my own. I. So I. I take a really small dose of. Of Klonopin, which is a. Which can really ease your nervous system. And it's interesting. I. It's a small enough dose that I still feel nervous, but it's just like, gives me a little bit of comfort and I can manage it.

B (29:15)

Shallow pool instead of the deep pool.

A (29:17)

Yes.

B (29:17)

Yeah.

A (29:17)

And so then I'm flying, and I'm thinking I'm gonna break the pill in half and take even less. And then I have a bunch of flights coming up, some of them on small planes, some of them on big planes. Most I'm by myself, but I have one with my son, and I'm taking the one with my son. It's on a big plane. I can go unmedicated. And so this is the way I'm thinking about it. It's like I'm. I'm. I'm just trying to be careful because the avoidance problem is real, but the other problem is you actually push too hard when you're not ready and you traumatize yourself. So anyway, this is the way I'm thinking about it. I'm curious what you think.

B (29:51)

Yeah, first of all, badass. Awesome. Like, you're working. Yeah, yeah, you're working. And that's what, that's what psychology, let's call it what our parents thought about psychology. What they missed, that you go talk to somebody and you sit on a couch and it's a comfy couch and it's maybe a poorly lit room, and you, you need to talk about your parents, all the mistakes they made or whatever. Right. Like. Or you complain or somebody's going to give you advice and fix you, which is all not right. And what you're pointing to is psychological skills training.

A (30:27)

Yes.

B (30:28)

And that is the. Just like you do physical skills training to have a strong cardiovascular system or increase muscularity, that you do psychological skills training so you can be more free in your own body. You're training badass. That's exactly how it works. And I think what most people miss in elite sport, because we see them on Sunday in the NFL and we watch them and we say, wow. And then we say, must be nice. Born that way. No, you know, like, that's not how this. Yes, there is a probably good match between genetic coding and the environment that they're in. But on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday, they are working right at the edge of their capacity, because that's where you grow in front of their coaches that decide if they're going to get playtime or not in front of their teammates who's trying to take their job. So they're right at the edge nearly every day where they could drop a ball, make a ball in a situation that they're not necessarily good at because they're practicing things that they're not good at to get better. Right. And the consequences are larger than we recognize. Most of us never get to our edge on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and certainly not on a Sunday in front of handfuls of millions of people. So what you're doing is getting up on your edge. First and foremost, I say badass. That's exactly. Keep going. And at some point, you can become a professional patient, too, which would be a problem.

A (32:04)

Okay, so unpack that. What do you.

B (32:06)

Yeah, this, the professional patient is somebody who likes. Who's really good at being a patient. Okay. I'm not suggesting you're there yet, but there is a pathway for you to extinguish. Not just manage, but extinguish the fear. That's a whole different kind of apple to swallow here.

A (32:27)

Okay, I want to jump in on that for a second because there's hope here. Well, there's hope, but I also, for sure there's hope. What I'm. What I'm a thousand percent confident in is that there's hope for messy marginal improvement. Where I. Where I wonder is around the extinguishing. I think it's possible that I'm going to live with this the rest of my life and that I will just have to continue to dance with it. I don't know that that's being a professional patient. I think that's you. Please point out where I'm being delusional here. I'm not envisioning a lifelong having Paul Green move into my house and do exposure therapy with me every day. It's more that this is such a powerful thing for me that I almost feel worse if the goal is extinguishing because that it feels so far away. I'd rather have this story of, hey, it's possible I never extinguish it, but I'm just going to have to dance with it for the rest of my life.

B (33:25)

I think that that's a cool safety valve. I think that's really. I understand that. And I think what I hear, I really understand it. Okay. And also what I hear is like, it feels unreasonable in my mind to think that this could go away no matter how much training I do. And I would say that there might be some Room to expand that thought for you and not to. Not to, like, at any point in your training arc to feel like that's a. That's. What am I do. What am I getting my hopes up for that? So if you lower the hope, which is like, no, I can do this. I can train and I can be, I don't know, 40% uncomfortable in flights. And that's cool. I can do that. I can be. I can bring a change of clothes. So when I get off the plane, you know, I know that I'm kind of sweaty during the plane and that's okay.

A (34:16)

We just say in case I shit my pants.

B (34:19)

You go there too. Yeah, so. So I think that both can be true. I don't hear professional patient. I'm kind of placing that out there. That there is a way to extinguish fear. And you playing with that idea would be cool. And just working and working it out, you know, with your psychiatrist or psychologist. I'm not sure who's training. Is it Paul?

A (34:39)

Paul is a psychologist.

B (34:40)

Yeah. Work out with Paul. Like, is Mike being sloppy here or is there a thing here, you know, like, that would be cool to work out? And I would also say that the harder somebody trains, the more likely or the quicker you can get results. But training hard alone doesn't necessarily get you the results. There's this appreciation for recovery. There's this appreciation for consolidation of information from the training. So, yeah, I think you're gonna win both ways. Totally. And I don't know your brain chemistry, but you're gonna win both ways. Cause you're training at your edge and you're going to be X percent better at it. And if you invite this idea that one day I might just fully extinguish this loop that I find myself in.

A (35:22)

Yeah.

B (35:22)

And I can extinguish that thing completely. That is the work that we did, I did with Felix Baumgartner for Rebel Stratos.

A (35:30)

Oh, yeah. The guy who like went up into the.

B (35:32)

Into space. The edge of space.

A (35:34)

Yeah.

B (35:35)

And he was terrified to be in the spacesuit. And so he. We called it claustrophobia, you know, because that's. It was a panic attack claustrophobia experience. And he couldn't just manage that fear because the consequences were too dire if he got. If he was just managing that plus managing all the other things he needed to do. So we needed to extinguish that fear. So there's a model there of somebody that, you know, was able to do it. And it doesn't mean that everyone Can.

A (36:04)

Yeah, I'm sort of middle path on this. Like, that's cool. I'm open to the idea that extinguishing could happen, and I know it can happen for some people.

B (36:12)

That's right.

A (36:12)

And if I cling too tightly to that idea for myself, it actually doesn't help my nervous system. So having the notion that it's just a thing that I work with forever, I'm also open to that.

B (36:24)

Yeah, that's what I'm saying. But I think you're going to win either way.

A (36:26)

Yes.

B (36:26)

You know, and so I would play both games. I'd be like, where's the threshold that I can make manage well and feel cool with this? And then how much more work or what kind of work would I do differently once I'm to that threshold for extinguishing?

A (36:39)

Yes.

B (36:40)

You know, so it's a stepwise approach.

A (36:43)

My head's going in a slightly different direction now. When you talk about working at your edge, I. I don't know that I've thought a lot about that concept, but as you said it, I was just kind of interpolating back through my life. And I think, I think not only in this area of panic, but I think most of my life, especially in my professional life, but also as I'm talking many areas of my personal life, I'm pretty consistently working at my edge.

B (37:12)

I believe that.

A (37:13)

And I'm not as. I. I don't even know it was a deliberate strategy. I just. Maybe it's. I don't like boredom, but. So I'm just curious for you, what does it look like?

B (37:22)

Well, let's do a model first and then answer it. So to the edge with intelligent recovery following, then I replenish so I can go back to that edge again. So what we're talking about is really working yourself up with acute stress and then intelligently recovering from that. And what most of us do is we have acute stress moments, experiences, and then hold onto it. We drop maybe like 3% from that acute stressor and then we talk about it and ruminate about it and, you know, kind of relive it. And so we go from acute stress to moderate stress instead of acute stress recovery from that. So we don't empty our cup, if you use that kind of metaphor, and we're holding up at the full cup for an extended period of times, weeks, months. And then what happens from acute stress unmanaged to moderate stress? Unmanaged leads to chronic stress. Unmanaged leads to early death. So if we can, instead of like this spike of acute stress that's holding on for top volume and then a slide to early death as an arc. If you think about a x, Y axis that if we went big spike, big recovery. So it's this. It looks like a seismograph.

A (38:34)

Yes.

B (38:35)

And that is what I want my day to look like.

A (38:37)

Interesting.

B (38:38)

So let's say Monday, I want as many acute stressors as I can have and, and then recover from that as quickly as I can throughout the day. And then a big recovery process with the eight hours of sleep, you know, and the mobility work that I do and the good conversations I have with loved ones. And so those are all recovery mechanisms. So I want great stressors to keep me on my growth arc and then really intelligent recovery process.

A (39:04)

What are the stressors?

B (39:06)

For me, that was the question you asked. So for me, I'll do some physical, so I'll do some heart rate stuff to get me up there. And you know, that's no more complicated than let's say you're doing some sort of squat or something. You could put the weight down or you could do one more rep or two more reps. So there's a little bit of a stressor to think in the most concrete way. That would be probably 10% of how I do stress. The other 90, I'm kind of ballparking here is emotional, where I'm getting to the edge of saying something that is difficult to say or listening to something that's difficult to listen to. And so it's a, it's a vulnerability meets holding the space for it. And that all. Most of that for me is relational. And that's, that's where it happens. So I need to stay in that space long enough. And then the other, I shouldn't do that as 90, let's call that like 60 or something. And the other percentage is when I'm doing something where if I do make mistakes, there's some consequence to it, you know, like public speaking or. There's probably some consequence in this, but we have the controls to, you know, edit things that are completely out of whack. But there's some things that, where there's real consequences to myself and others. And so does that help?

A (40:19)

Yeah, no, I was just curious.

B (40:21)

Yeah, curiosity. And you know, what I'm curious about is like if you didn't change your trajectory from the moment of that panic attack and invest in sorting that out and you just white knuckled, grinded and staged your path and didn't go the dual path of mindfulness Even a second career arc, you know, through mindfulness. What do you think that cost would have been for you?

A (40:49)

I think about this a lot. What, like, what's the counterfactual, you know, the sliding doors? You know, if I had just stayed in news and not gotten interested in any of this stuff, I don't think it would be great. It's possible with all of my energy and intensity that I could have climbed to the top of the news business, whatever that looks like. You know, some of the people in my vintage are now at the top of the pyramid. So I'm thinking about like Jake Capper and David Muir and Anderson Cooper and I. We're all like kind of in the same way litter, if you want to put it in puppy speak. And so those guys really made it. I actually never. In the news business, I was kind of like always right at that second tier. I was, I was the anchor of Nightline, which is a great job. I was the anchor of the weekend edition of gma, Good Morning America, which is awesome, but I was never like the weekday guy. And, you know, I got to do reporting all over the world. And, you know, one of the coins of that realm is I do win Emmys, and I won some Emmys and all that other stuff that kind of mattered a lot to me in the time. But I was doing all that, you know, from 210 on when I started writing the book and the book came out 2014, I was doing all that while I had a very robust side hustle. And in the years before that, when I had no side hustle and I was just focused on the news, I was pretty unhappy. You know, I, I loved what I did and I felt like it was really important, but. And so I wasn't thorough goingly unhappy, but I was really stressed and really frustrated. And every time I got passed over for a job which happened a lot, I would spin out and take it out on the people in my life. And so I think if I hadn't found this stuff, I would have gone probably hardcore down that route of trying to advance in the news industry, which even at its best, it would have been a hard place for me to advance because there's so few slots at the very top. But it's not at its best. The economic underpinnings of the, of the industry are being decimated. The ratings are. You know, when I had that panic attack in 2004 on GMA, there were more than 5mil million people watching. Now, on a regular day at GMA, it's somewhere between 2 and 3 million people and it's going down quickly. And I say this with no disrespect or Shaden Freud or anything like that. I still think what they're doing at ABC News and the other networks is really important. A lot of my best friends work in the industry, but it's really hard time. So like you're competing for limited slots in a sandcastle that is being attacked by waves. And so I think I, in the stress of that situation with my pre existing predilections for overwork and irritability, it could have gotten pretty gnarly.

B (43:34)

How gnarly?

A (43:36)

I don't think, you know, front page in the newspaper, you know, shave somebody in the kidney gnarly, but just like not as happy a life as I, I really could have had. And.

B (43:48)

Okay.

A (43:48)

And not, you know, what would have been like for my kid. That's why my wife. That's what I think about. Would I have been abusive? No. But what I've been absent and unpredictable. Yeah.

B (44:04)

Consumed with self.

A (44:06)

Consumed with self. And then also like, you know, prone to outbursts. Again, not like volcanic outbursts, but scary. You know, even, even my team now. I think a lot about my grandfather. I had a grandfather, Robert Johnson, who was scary, scary guy. Lots of things in his life he had been thwarted. And he was a middle manager at the yellow Pages. Remember the yellow Pages? Those big like bible thick compendiums of phone numbers that we used to have. So my grandfather, who's really smart guy, but really he could be pretty gnarly. I remember him once when he got his first vcr, bringing me and my little brother in to show it to us and said, and he said, if you touch it, I'll break your arm. That kind of. Yeah. And my mother describes him as like really funny sometimes. But then, you know, he would like have these little napkin wars as they would play at dinner. They would ball up the napkins and throw at each other. But if you hit him in the face, he'd slap you in the face. It would just turn like that and like that dude's blood is coursing through my veins. And that's a real aspect of my personality I have to work on. And even like within the last five or six years, I remember somebody on my team, one of my producers at my little meditation company. Right. So not the news saying, you just have a scary face to you. Yeah. Which, you know, I love the fact that she felt comfortable enough to say that.

B (45:26)

Yeah.

A (45:26)

My wife has made the same observation. Like I just have this, like this. I can, my face can get like stony and hard to read and usually it has nothing to do with my irritation at anybody in my orbit. It's just that I'm thinking about something else. And so there's, there's vestages of, of Robert Johnson in me now. I just think it would be uncontrolled if I didn't have all of these measures to control it.

B (45:52)

Tools.

A (45:53)

Tools, yes, absolutely. I want to say in defense of Robert Johnson, I, the way I'm describing him now is something of a caricature. He, all the things I said are true, but actually in his 80s he lived till he's 90, but at 80 somebody got him a computer. Somebody got a computer for his wife. Actually his wife didn't want to use it. So Robert got really involved in the, this is the early days of like social media. So he got on Twitter and he was really funny on Twitter and he was very active in emailing all of his grandchildren. And I went through recently, read all of his old emails and they were really loving. So people can change. And also it's, you know, never fair to completely caricature.

B (46:33)

Right? Yeah, that's cool. It's a good nuance. Back to the news folks for just a minute. Like, I love the Sandcastle analogy and the people that you mentioned that were your peers or contemporaries, like they are taking big voices in kind of the narrative of, of our country. Given the context of what's happening with Jimmy Kimmel right now and censorship and the entire landscape, can you share your thoughts on how you're understanding this?

A (46:58)

Well, with a caveat that I'm not on the inside, I would say that I didn't love what he said just because it seemed factually inaccurate. Like I think by the time he said it, we knew that the guy who murdered Charlie Kirk was not a Trumpist. So it just seemed like factually questionable and maybe not the wisest thing. And yet free speech is a thing, you know, like I would die for Jimmy's right to say some stupid on a show. And by the way, like everybody on the right has been carping about free speech for a long time with pretty good reason. You know, I think, I think there is a bit of a monoculture in American media where it's very far to the left. And so I think some of the complaints about that and the left leaning tendencies of the media and, and the disproportionate use of what you might call censorship on folks from the right. Yeah, I think there's something to that. But what we saw here appeared to be the state leveraging its power on a private company, Disney, or I guess it's a public company because it's publicly traded, but it's not a government company. You know, in these c. Seemingly sort of economically laden threats from Brendan Carr at the fcc, all that, that, that's worrisome to me Sometimes I think, you know, as an outsider now observing the news, one of the little phrases that comes into my head a lot is everybody sucks. It's like everybody on all sides of this, of everything, of the issues. It's so hard to find a reasonable voice. Somebody on the. There are reasonable voices on both sides, but they, they seem very reluctant to acknowledge that there is anybody reasonable on the other side. And so it's all of this motivated reasoning. And there's a, there's an expression I heard, conflict, entrepreneurship, people out there making money off of fomenting division in our country. And so what I am really interested in is when can you get smart, well intentioned people who disagree with each other, having civil conversations. I think one guy who's modeling that is Ezra Klein at the New York Times. Caveat. He's a friend of mine, but I, you know, he had a great conversation on his show with Ben Shapiro, who was on the right, Ezra's on the left. I had, I know Ben a little bit because I had profiled him back when I was at ABC News. And I disagree at times with things both of those guys say, but at least they were talking to each other. And so much of what we see in the media these days is people throwing red meat to their followers, people looking to have their priors confirmed, their prejudices confirmed, instead of operating on the one thing that I think should be really powering our civic lives, which is the word that you keep using to describe me, which is curiosity. Why? Why not have. One of the great things about my journalistic training is it's just always at a healthy second guessing. Is that true? Is that really true? I know, I think I believe this. But you know, all the. I just said I don't agree with Jimmy Kimmel, what he actually said, but I do agree with his right to say it. Huh, let me go back and check that too. You know, our brains should be constant reconsideration machines. This is like deep in the Dharma, the Buddha is said to have said, I'm not a dogmatist, I'm an analyst. And I just, I see, I see so little of that. And the Jimmy Kimmel thing just seems Like a great example of, of it on all sides.

B (50:43)

Do you think that we're on this media censorship path? That speaking the way that you want to speak has too great of a consequence, even not just being canceled, but being pulled from your ability to speak freely? Evidenced by, I think in the Pentagon, folks have to, the media has to sign some stuff saying that they won't necessarily share what they see. Not from a, not from a protection of secrets but, but like a protection of narrative type of thing. And I don't. Again, I'm, I'm watching from the outside.

A (51:17)

I was unaware of this thing you were referencing at the Pentagon. I, I do worry about intimidation from the state.

B (51:26)

That's right.

A (51:28)

Let me just say though, I mean this is where history is useful. This isn't the first time we've dealt with this. You know, this was happening during the Red scare, during World War II, during Vietnam, LBJ. People with power have repeatedly, even in this democracy, attempted to use it to silence their critics. So nothing's new. The question is, is it more intense, more concerted? Are the folks with power now more willing to disregard the guardrails? That's my concern. You know, I, I try as somebody who's not in the news game anymore not to get carried away by every like jot until in the, in the, in the news cycle. I'm really keeping my eye on a number of things, but one thing in particular, and that's the rule of law. Are we going to have a democracy? That's what I'm, that's what I'm keeping my eye on. Because all the culture war stuff and all the taxes stuff, it's, it matters. But none of it is going to matter if, if the foundation in which all of this is built, which is our ability to work and live together peacefully and by, and buy a set of mutually agreed upon laws. If that goes away, you can't count on anything.

B (52:42)

Two part question. What needs to happen for you to feel better about that dilemma? And then to what can, what do you think folks can do to move closer to ensuring democracy stands?

A (52:54)

No one individual, myself included, can wave a wand and fix everything to their liking. The most power you have is that you are a node in an interconnected society. And, and we live in a, we are a species where emotions and behavior is contagious. And so I think if you can model for your friends and family an open mindedness, a consistent relentless curiosity, a willingness to, to reconsider and to engage, to not rest on your prejudices and your priors that to me is a very Buddhist attitude about world events. Specifically on the engagement piece. Yeah. If. If you can engage with ideas that you do not like, that is going to make you stronger. That is a kind of exposure therapy or a psychological fitness that I highly recommend. Even better if you can talk to actual human beings with whom you disagree and create a relationship. I believe, I can't remember who said it. I was a congressman whose name is evading me right now. He's no longer with us. It's hard to hate up close. So we need more engagement with people with whom we disagree.

B (54:05)

I don't think you and I have ever talked about this, but for 18 years I ran developed. It was an idea I had when I was just out of undergraduate school was it was called late night sports and it was an idea to bring athletes in. Not midnight basketball, but close. And it was one center here in LA and it was pretty intense of an environment. And I quickly learned and I was there every Saturday night and the only price to admission was to listen to me for five minutes on sports psychology and how they could take a lesson from sports psychology, practice it on the court in an intense competitive environment across gang lines and, and then help them translate how they could practice that later in their. In their week. It was awesome. High school to college aged kids. It was an amazing training ground for me and incredible healing for me in a lot of ways. And I learned so much and vice versa for the, the folks that were in the gym. And so one of the things we quickly and I quickly learned is like, hey, if we shake hands before and after every game, I think we're not going to fight. Yeah. And that one intervention they were to play in this gym, you had to shake each other's hand, not just one person. And f that dude over there, I'm not shaking his hand. To play the game, you had to shake every. All five people's hands. And then you'd see them, they do that and the person that they're having a beef with, they'd still do it because they wanted to play more than they wanted to fight. And then they go dap their team and then it'd be like a great game. And I eye contact and a brief physical contact changed the trajectory of the propensity of violence in that gym. So you're right on it. I think that's not new information to anybody. But then practicing it is a whole different thing.

A (55:52)

It is. I think one of the things that makes all this worse is that we are atomized and Disconnected. And as a culture, we're. Not only are we lonely and disconnected and on our phones, but we are self sorting geographically by ID ideology. And so it's becoming harder and harder to actually come face to face with people with whom you disagree on, on political and cultural and social issues. You know, the major pillars of society, which were all flawed, of course, but you know, labor unions and religious organizations and civic organizations have lost their. Have seen their memberships decline rapidly. So there's. There just aren't opportunities for many of us to get involved. And yet I believe I know this, I could be wrong. So somebody will fact check me and let me know on Twitter if I this up. But there's some evidence to suggest that exactly what you were doing, where you bring people together who disagree, but get them to engage in a cooperative activity and it could be sports or it could be working in an animal shelter, or it could be the local school board. Get them to work together in a non hierarchical activity where nobody's the boss and nobody has to kiss up to anybody. You're just having to cooperate. Which, by the way, is what we were designed for. This is how we evolved. Cooperation is how we got to the top of the food chain, put people in those situations. All that shit around polarization and tribalism can get vastly diminished.

B (57:20)

I think you might be pointing to what's called superordinate goals, and it's evidenced in jail that if you got three fashions in jail, you know, three different gangs, if you will, that none of them like each other, but two of them will come together and work together to. To create a stronger bond. To go fight the other one. Yeah. So the super ordinary goal, it's like, let's just say China and the US or whatever, we'll come together if we got to go fight some aliens.

A (57:44)

Yes.

B (57:44)

Right. So that's a super ordinance. There's a bigger goal than the immediate goal of just taking care of yourself. And so I think that that's what you might be pointing to, which is a pretty well established understanding, you know, in, in grade school, high school, colleges, and for us adults that somehow we've missed that piece.

A (58:01)

There's a really smart person on these issues, Amanda Ripley, who's written about conflict and the difference between healthy conflict and toxic conflict. And she was on my show and I found her work to be really compelling. And the truth is we need conflict. We need healthy conflict. I hear, I heard it when you were talking before about getting your eggs. Yes. Getting to your.

B (58:24)

There's a friction. Yeah.

A (58:26)

Human beings, we need each other and, but we, we're not all going to get along all the time and we want to have different viewpoints in the room. And so conflict is just, it can be really healthy, but we have very few skills to, to navigate these situations well. And so it can then get into a kind of toxic conflict. And what we are seeing culturally and on a macro level in this country and honestly throughout the world is, is the latter, is the unhealthy conflict. And it's, we're in a tangle and it's hard to get out. You know, for anybody listening, I would say, you know, it's great if you can join a civic organization or a volunteer group where you can get out by the way, if you're lonely. It's also a great thing to do. But even if you're not going to do that, I think going through the work of engaging with ideas that are difficult for you is good civic hygiene. I also find personally, and I don't think there's, I don't know of any data on this, but I actually find for me that listening to podcasts and reading writers, but with whom I disagree, I find that it actually eases my nervous system because it, it is hard to hate up close. If I listen to these folks, I understand that they have a logic. I may not share it. Sometimes I actually do share it, but the. Nobody gets up in the morning or very few people get up in the morning and like I'm gonna be a dick today. I'm gonna, I'm, I'm the bad guy in this movie. Everybody gets up trying, trying to do what they think is the right thing. And I don't know if I just can engage with all of this on that level. It's not like a self gaslighting where I convince myself that people are trying to harm the country or doing the right thing. It's just, it turns down the volume on the rage enough because the rage doesn't help. A certain amount of anger like does get you off the couch for sure, but it very quickly becomes counterproductive. How do you want to be engaging in these difficult times from a position of blind rage which burns you out really quickly and makes you do dumb or with like consistent values based energy that burns clean, keeps you clear, keeps you motivated. You know, another word for that would be love. Like I, I just, I strongly feel for myself that that's where I want to go.

B (60:54)

You want to operate from that place?

A (60:55)

I want to operate from that place, yeah. And that that involves curiosity. That involves being very clear about my values and what I care about and which is, to put it in Buddhist terminology, to like reduce suffering for beings everywhere. That's what I'm about and I'm pretty clear on it. And so if I just tune into that instead of like getting wrapped up and I hate Trump and I can't believe he got away with that again. And like, I just don't see how that helps.

B (61:20)

In athletics, we talk about knowing your ideal competitive mindset, your icm, and that becomes a bullseye before you go on the field. You know, that's what a whole pre, pregame warmup is really about, is to switch on your icm. Now, in the NFL, we play one game a week, but you wouldn't want just Sunday to be the time that you're in your icm, your ideal competitive mindset. You want to find it on Wednesday and Thursday because you're trying to compete to be your very best every, you know, as many times as you possibly can be. And by the way, competition, being a great competitor does not mean in my mind, being better than somebody else. It means competing to be your very best. Right, Interesting. Which is an interpersonal navigation, not a comparison to another's prowess. So the icm, one of the things that we do for ICM is one, we label it, which you just did, your icm, your ideal mindset, take the C out of it for a moment, is love.

A (62:16)

Yes.

B (62:16)

Okay, so now what do we do for athletes to help them be in that state more often? We train for it. Okay. We label it, we ask them to describe what does it feel like, look like. Then we back in a training mechanism. So that's more familiar to them, more closer to the surface for you. That would be that backing in would be meditation, would be a practice, writing conversations, practicing in conversation. So you got a whole set of things. The thing that I want to just introduce is we actually start when you wake up with just a quick hit of imagery. And we design a four step process for folks, a morning mindset routine. And one of the four steps is use your imagination to see yourself being exactly the person you want to be at a specific time or phase of the day. Right. And so it's super mechanical and simple, but it's using this powerful engine of your imagination to see yourself being brilliant in a difficult, challenging moment. Okay. And so, and then we do things. So that's a morning kind of thing. And then right before you are going to engage in anything, let's just say walking into a training facility for an athlete or into a stadium, what do you do to get connected to that state? Maybe you tap something, you tie your laces a certain way. You do something to kind of get that activation going. And that is a nearly invisible practice that elite athletes across the board embrace that most of us do not put into practice. So I just want to kind of share that.

A (63:49)

What does it look like for you? Like, how do you, Mike, get into your im?

B (63:53)

So for me, my. I'll call it, like an ideal performance mindset, if you will. And. And I have a trouble with the performance piece because I'm not performative. It's more of an ideal being mindset for me.

A (64:05)

Right.

B (64:06)

But that sounds like a little complicated. So it starts with the morning mindset routine, which is four things. One breath, one gratitude. One segment of gratitude, one segment of imagery. And then I just pull my sheets off and take a moment to be where I am. So now present.

A (64:21)

Just start that again. So you wake up in the morning and you have.

B (64:24)

Sheets are still on.

A (64:25)

Okay. And you have one breath, at least one.

B (64:28)

So I'm. I'm. I am sending a signal to my brain. Hey, we don't need to get in the rapids yet. We're cool. So an exhale sends the signal to the brain. We're good.

A (64:39)

I like that.

B (64:40)

Okay, so maybe it's three breaths. Maybe it's 10 breaths. I don't know. But it's. I commit to one.

A (64:45)

Dealer's choice.

B (64:45)

Yeah, dealer's choice. With a great intention. Intentionality behind it. And then I do a little bit of. And this is like 60 seconds to maybe 3 minutes of work while I'm still in bed. And then I do some gratitude stuff where I'm just kind of lighting up the parts of my brain that are like, yeah, there's a lot of good here. So today I was like, I'm really glad I have two eyes. So I just. The classic, like, you know, and I'm really. I'm really grateful that my wife is healthy next to me.

A (65:13)

I think about that with my legs.

B (65:14)

Yeah, yeah.

A (65:15)

It's like, yeah, let's not take these fuckers for granted.

B (65:18)

Yeah, Right? Yeah, yeah. So. So anyways, there's that. It's not a check. The box is you. It's a feeling.

A (65:24)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

B (65:25)

It's activating the felt sense of gratitude. And then I'm using a quick hit of imagination, seeing myself, the way I walk and feel and the thing behind my eyes and inside of, like, my chest when I'm at my very best. And I did it for us today. Like, how do I want to be with you when I see you for the first time? And so there's just a quick hit of that imagination and then that kind of gives me a thing to work toward. And then the last is just a moment to be present. So that's a small example of four things I do in the morning. And there's other things that I do as well throughout the day.

A (65:59)

But that creates a foundation.

B (66:02)

Okay, let's go back to you and let's go back to meditation for just a minute. Or mindfulness in this topsy turvy world that we're in. What do you know now that you didn't know five years ago? You know, call it midstream of your meditation, mindfulness practice. What do you know now that you didn't know then?

A (66:20)

I would say the major development of the latter half of my contemplative career has been really starting to get interested in this incredibly fraught and widely misunderstood word of love or concept of love. Because it's, it's, it's been abused as a word. You know, I, I'm a huge Beatles fan, but when I think about all you need is love, like you also need to go to the dentist, you know, like. But then actually thinking about love in a broad sense, like going to the dentist is part of love. It's you loving yourself and take care of you taking care of yourself. And so then I started to think about love really broadly understood as a whole set of skills from self love, again, not self. Love can easily veer into selfishness or self gratification or self indulgence. But actually I think of it more as the selft talk stuff, or at least inclusive of the selft talk stuff we're describing before where you're able to look clearly at your own like a good coach. A good coach sees your flaws and just isn't a jerk about it. So he or she or they will tell you what your flaws are, but they're, they're not going to be like a drill sergeant. Most of us are like drill sergeants with ourselves, but we actually need to move into a coach mentality. So that's the self love piece. But then there's a whole other set of skills like how are you with people with strangers? How are you with the person at the, with your barista? How are you with the trades people who come through your house to work on things? And then there's how good a friend are you? How's your, what's Often called social fitness. Are you keeping up your relationships? How good a family member are you? What's up with your spouse? Often the spouse or your romantic partner is the hardest person to apply. All the personal growth work you do. You just made a face that indicates you have some sympathy for what I'm saying. How are you with your kids? This is a whole suite of skills, communication skills which we haven't talked about but, but is a discipline in and of itself that I find very interesting back down to this level of strangers. There's a whole body of, of research around something called micro interactions. So we can inject massive doses of happiness into our life by just paying attention to these little interactions we're having throughout the, throughout the day that most of us sort of just ice out. So I've started to think a lot about this. It's actually what my next book is going to be about and, and I see it becomes more and more, the value of it becomes more and more clear the dicier the social, political and climate situation is on the planet. Because at the root of all of this stuff is a lack of love, a lack of willingness to deal forthrightly with our own suffering and the suffering around us. And I'm pretty sure I as an individual can't fix all of it. But it still matters how I act. Given that we live in a world that is non negotiably interdependent. How I act and I'm lucky, I mean people put microphones in front of me so how I act actually does have some significance. But even if that weren't the case, how I am, what am I a vector of in my family and in my workplace and in my community, like that really matters. And we all have agency in this regard. So yeah, you can if you want spend a lot of time on the news either celebrating or bemoaning it. I would argue do a little bit of that, stay an engaged citizen but don't spend all of your energy there and instead start directing your energy to where you can make a change which is in your actual orbit. That's a huge focus for me that I really wasn't thinking much when I first got into mindfulness and I was really thinking of it in a quite a clinical way, you know, like I'm going to boost my self awareness so I'm not so yanked around by all my neuroses. Yeah, that's, that's cool. But it, it, it was missing a lot of the warmth, peace that the Buddha was very insistent on.

B (70:25)

Yeah, I think you're describing what I think about a lot as a pebble in the pond. And it's a, it's a bit of when somebody is suffering or in pain, it's about mostly for them healing the suffering and pain, which is a self focused approach as opposed to being in the ripple in the pond, becoming as big of a pebble as you possibly can, as heavy of a pebble. So you create a bit more of a impact and that cuts both ways. Like your grandfather, pretty big pebble. Set some ripples in one direction and maybe later in life set those, you know, those waves in a more benevolent way. But what I hear you talking about is like from me to them, from me to we. And that idea is so at home with where I think the self help industry has gone wrong.

A (71:16)

Yes.

B (71:17)

Is that like me be better for what reason? So that I can help others in the best way that I possibly can. You know, that is the central tenant into all 11 world religions. You know, it's a we thing, it's not a me thing.

A (71:31)

Yes.

B (71:32)

And so I hear the, let's call it the adulting in, in in that arc for you.

A (71:37)

But I think the really cool thing is that this me to we thing is not a hair shirt, you know, catastrophic altruism, self sacrificing thing. It is enlightened self interest. If you want to be happy, you will be useful because that is the most sustainable source of happiness.

B (72:01)

Meaning?

A (72:02)

Meaning that if you have positive relationships and you're. I often ask people to do this mental exercise. What is it like when you hold the door open for somebody. That's nice, feels good. Infinitely scalable. That's right, Infinitely scalable. And it's. So how do you. Is that selfish? Is it selfless? Well, in the end that's a useless distinction because yeah, you are a self on one level, but you're also like every thought you have is a manifestation of the living universe. So where's the self anyway? And this is again back to the Buddha, like all of our striving and building up of our identity and acquiring of stuff is kind of misguided because it's all in service of a thing that's an illusion anyway, which is the self. You know, on one level, the self is real. You and I are sitting here, we're each, you know, we have a physical self, physical self. But even this physical self, the atoms are switching out every seven years.

B (73:01)

Yeah.

A (73:02)

And it's by the way, falling apart. The wheels are coming off. We are designed for planned obsolescence. We are walking ossuaries like one of my favorite sky bands from the 80s. The specials had a line. Enjoy yourself. It's later than you think. You know that that's the truth. So even this physical self isn't really defensible in an. In an abiding way, and certainly the mind isn't. It's constantly, you know, in dialog with the universe around it, and never mind all of the causes and conditions that created it, back through our ancestors and. And through our parents and all of that stuff. And so, yes, on one level, you are you. But on a deeper level, it's more like a river, like, that's flowing all the time. And you can use the word river as a designation, but it's really a flow. And so, given the fact that we are a process, not a solid, unchanging entity, and we are in dialogue with a whole world of other processes that are not solid entities, the way to have the happiest possible flow and process is to have harmony in relationships with the whole. And that doesn't mean you can't take firm action when you see injustice.

B (74:22)

Just.

A (74:23)

It just means that that firm action doesn't have to be motivated by hatred. And that's what I'm talking about when I was saying before, the shit that might have pissed people off about, like, you should be curious and engag with ideas and people with whom you disagree because it doesn't preclude you from doing the right thing as you see it, but it can calm your nervous system so that you can do whatever right thing you've chosen on from a position of some level of equanimity and peace.

B (74:52)

You've done some work, Dan. You've done some work, my friend.

A (74:56)

Or I've stolen from all of my smart teachers.

B (74:59)

Yes, and probably. But you've done some work, which is

A (75:02)

a quick, quick note. My, my. The teach closest with is this guy, Joseph Goldstein. He and I were joking one day about how, like, my whole shtick is just B taken from him. And he was like, yeah, well, I did the same to my teachers. And he said, we're. We're part of a lineage of thieves.

B (75:18)

That's cool. Yeah. Yeah. It gives some permission to. Appropriately so, to, you know, respect where you've learned. At the same time, know that, like, reinventing something with a small T or big T for truth is not the game. No, but it's trying to figure out how to say it in a way that feels like you can connect to it and maybe help somebody else connect to it. You And I are not alone in this thing. Like, do I have an original idea? I'm not sure, you know, but I have a way that makes sense to me, and I'm. I'm trying to kind of work from that place.

A (75:50)

Yeah, I just do Dharma and I add the word a lot.

B (75:57)

So where can folks find you now that you're not at 10% happier?

A (76:00)

Yeah. Oh. So I started this thing. I just. When I. When the divorce was. Was finalized.

B (76:06)

Divorce. Business divorce.

A (76:07)

Yeah. Not. I'm not getting. I'm not getting divorced from my wife, but. Although, actually, in the early days when this business divorce was happening, my wife and I would use the shorthand of talking about the divorce, and our son would occasionally be like, wait a minute, are you. So when the divorce was finalized, I launched. I, just, as a experiment, launched a substack where, if you subscribe, I give guided meditations that come along with all of my podcast episodes. And I also do a weekly live guided meditation where you can meditate with me or with one of my teacher friends. And so it's really. It's kind of. I'm kind of thinking about, like, a next generation meditation app. You know, I. I was in the meditation app game for a long time, and they're kind of static things, but what I think is missing. And, and, and I think there's a human thirst for this, especially as we get more and more saturated by technology, including now we're on the cusp of something big and dizzying with AI, We. We need each other. And so I've been adding in, like, a real community element, which I'm interested in, is exciting, and that's continuing to evolve. And I can't say it yet, but I think we have a next stage that we're gonna go into. Yeah, my podcast, 10 Happier. I got a new book coming out in 18 months about love, which is a whole embarrassing story that I can tell you another time. Could you do the same thing? Could you just tell everybody, like, what you're up to and where they can find you?

B (77:29)

The easiest place would be finding mastery.com and that's kind of where the whole housing of everything is. That being said, the podcast is a, you know, also important way for us to communicate and be connected with our community. So that's also finding mastery. And so social media is fun. We're having a good time on LinkedIn, trying to find the. The most simple and clever way to share ideas that help move people in the business world. And then Instagram, you know, Ichael Gervais is the place where I'm having more fun with sharing ideas.

A (78:02)

I gotta go. Make sure I follow you.

B (78:03)

Yeah, how about that?

A (78:04)

Awesome to talk to you, man.

B (78:06)

Dude, this is really fun. I absolutely appreciate all the time that we get to spend together. Thank you for sharing what you've come to learn and doing it in an honest way.

A (78:15)

Thanks, brother. Appreciate you. We're lost.

B (78:20)

I'm gonna pull over and ask that man for directions. Hi there.

A (78:23)

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