July 23, 2019 • 33 mins
He’s not exactly who you’d expect to be touting the benefits of meditation, but ABC News’ Dan Harris has been through hell and back, and has the power of mindfulness to thank for coming out the other side even stronger than before. In this interview, Harris spreads his wisdom on how we can all become 10 percent happier and shares his journey on the rocky spiritual road that led him to who he is today.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
How are you going to talk about issues related to
our inner weather, our interior lives. What I was really
trying to do was to kind of knock this discussion
off its pedestal, stop using the woo language. Really get
away from overpromising this kind of peddling of reckless hope,
which I see sometimes in our eleven billion dollar a
(00:21):
year self help industry. To speak very simply, very clearly
from the perspective of a skeptic and a screw up. Hi,
(00:46):
I'm Dr Oz and this is the Doctor Oz podcast.
Is that exactly who you would be expecting that be
touting the benefits of meditation? ABC News is Dan Harris
has been through help and he's come back and has
the power of mindful this to thank for coming out
on the other side even stronger than before. He's also
the host of the wildly successful podcast ten percent Happier,
(01:06):
titled after the New York Times bestselling book, and the
author of a new book, Meditation for Fidgy Skeptics, which
would be a topic today and ten percent Happier book
about how to so this word tempercent keeps coming up
least and I were debating it. She wants to know specifically,
you know, I asked my fift of course you want more.
He wants percent happier, happier. I do a lot of
(01:29):
haggling ever since this book came out. So we're gonna
talk a little bit about this rocky road to recovery
that we all face in life. You've been very transparent
about it. I applaud you for that. But it is
a logical question why that number particularly must have some
symbolism for you. Actually, it's pretty random. I was in
the middle of a conversation with one of my colleagues
at ABC News after I started meditating, and I this
is the I'd like to say that meditation is the
(01:51):
first My embrace of meditation marks the first time in
my life I was ever ahead of a trend. I
started getting interested in meditation in around two thousand and
eight two nine, but for it was as cool as
it is now. And uh I started mentioning that to
some people I worked with, and uh I was met
with a lot of mockery because at that time meditation
(02:12):
was viewed and still is viewed in some corners has
a pretty niche strange concern. And I was talking to
one of my colleagues, an old friend UH named Chris
Sebastian who was the senior producer at Good Morning America.
And she stopped me one day, She's like, what's the
deal with you? In meditation? The subtext was why have
you used to be cool? What happened to you? And
(02:33):
I kind of was looking around for an answer, and
I said, you know, it makes me ten percent happier.
And I noticed the look on her face went from
scorn to something approaching interest, and I thought, Okay, that's
my stick. That's how I'm going to talk about this
from now on. So let's go to where you are.
You're very well respected within the business. Folks outside of
you know of your your all the wonderful things you've done,
(02:57):
hosting weekend shows and and and pors beyond Gmail all
the time, as you mentioned, Yet there were times in
your life when you had fallen off the tracks. Cocaine, ecstasy.
What did they do for you? You You had everything? And
I should want you're You're from May and originally right,
he went to school there. I went to school in May,
but I'm from Boston, now far away, but northeast, northeast. Yes,
(03:17):
you had a pretty good life people in Maine and
Boston can do drugs too, of course they count I mean,
these are colleague parts of the country that have a
reasonable standard of living. And you went to Colby's at
right Colby College, so we went to you know, great school,
and you know you had that out of the park
in your career. What gives My parents were doctors as
a matter, doctor Paris doctors. So what happened? I went
(03:40):
and spent a lot of time in war zones after
nine eleven. So I got to ABC News very young.
I was twenty eight years old in the year two thousand,
very ambitious, very insecure about my lack of inexperience and
my lack of experience, and uh, when nine eleven happened,
I very eagerly raised my hand and said, send me
over ease. I want to cover whatever happened next. I
(04:01):
think for a range of reasons that partly was kind
of crass ambition careerism. I think also curiosity, and then
on the more on the less embarrassing side of the spectrum,
I was I was very idealistic still I am very
idealistic about the power of journalism, and I wanted to
sort of bear witness to what we were going to do,
and uh, my bosses accepted my offer and I spent
(04:24):
a lot of time in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, Iraq.
I was in the rock months and months and months
and months at a time, and when I came home
from one trip to Iraq, I got depressed. I didn't
actually know I was depressed. I was exhibiting what I
now know to be some of the signature signs and symptoms.
You'll be familiar with this in your practice because of
(04:44):
your practice as a physician. I was having trouble getting
out of bed. I felt like I had a little
grade fever all the time. And that's when I reached.
That is when I reached for cocaine, which was an
incredibly dumb move. At a party. I had never done drugs,
hard drugs before we and booze as a younger person,
but not really to excess, and a friend of mine
(05:05):
offered me some cocaine, and for the first time of
my life, I said yes because I felt like garbage
just didn't feel good and it made me feel better.
And so I wasn't doing it all the time, but
there were about eighteen to twenty four months where I
was doing it semi regularly, and that culminated in me
having a panic attack on Good Morning America because, as
(05:25):
I later learned, I was doing enough cocaine. I wasn't
high in the air, but I was doing enough cocaine
that had altered my brain chemistry and made freaking out
more likely. So this is a an iconic moment. You're
on there, you have this s Norge break down. The
country witnessed it, people did not know what was happening.
Was that rock bottom for you? Yeah? Definitely. Actually I
(05:48):
want to say yes, but actually it was I had
a second one. So I had this first panic attack
and then I kept partying. Actually I didn't. I knew
I had had a panic attack, and I kind of
lied to my bosses and got away with it. Because
if you look at the video and it's got millions
of views on YouTube, one of the responses I get is, yeah,
(06:08):
it didn't look that bad. I kind of held it together.
I mean, it's not good, but it's not It's not
like Albert Brooks and broadcast news with flop sweat and so,
but that was it was people who knew you. That
wasn't it was. My mother called me right away and said,
you had a panic attack. So I knew something about
it happened, but I didn't really tie it to the drugs.
And then I a couple of months went by and
(06:30):
I had another one, and then I went to go
see a shrink uh here in New York City who
asked me whether I did drugs and I said yes,
and he was like, all right, idiot, you know, mystery
solved and that that's what That was rock bottom for me,
and that's you know, I started to build from there.
So you go, for me, the war correspondent waiting to
hear what you have to say about text going on
(06:50):
other parts of the world that that should scare us,
because you're actually there, you become the faith and spiritual correspondent.
I mean's almost like the opposite side of the spectral,
not just geographically but emotionally intellectually. Was that obviously conscious decision?
But how did you even come to that epiphany that
maybe that was what she needed to do? It wasn't.
I didn't come to that epiphany, and it wasn't a
(07:12):
conscious decision on my part. It was a conscious decision
on the part of a guy named Peter Jennings. Who
was Peter. Peter took me intervention. No, actually, he had
no idea any of this stuff was going on, and
and he just he was interested in faith in spirituality
and wanted us to cover it aggressively, and I didn't
want to do that. I was raised, as mentioned in
(07:34):
the People's Republic of Massachusetts. Both my parents are atheist scientists.
I did have a bar mitzvah, but only for money. Um. So,
like I was not interested in spirituality at all, but
Peter forced me to do it, and that ended up
having a really positive effect on me, because it's not
like I embraced any faith, but I did. I saw
(07:57):
first of all how ignorant I was about faith in
spiritual reality. I made a lot of friends and so
and really sort of value of having a worldview that
transcends your own narrow interests. For me, as a very selfish, young,
self centered young man, that was pretty useful. Um. But
ultimately the faith in spirituality be led me to a
writer whose name is Eckhart. Totally have you guys heard
(08:19):
of him? Okay, So that's a that's a sentence most
people don't get to utter. Would be on the show
with me, so I mean, I'm not on the same show,
but we do two shows to day. I'd be the morning,
he'd be the afternoon, so you could sort of sit
back and and talk to me. You have a round
your bust, I mean, people listening. It should happens that
(08:40):
you run someone you have no idea who you are,
and you feel how you rust, how blessed you are
that you ran into that which happened to not just
car totally, but we'll get to deep back in a
second as well. Yeah. So one of my colleagues was
a big fan of Eckhart totally, and she said, you know,
she should read his book because he might be a
good TV story for your whole faith in spirituality. Be
by the way, for the uninitiated, are totally is a big, huge,
(09:02):
mega best selling self help guru, powered in many ways
by Oprah, who loves his work. And I read his
book were one of his books. That's actually I like,
everyone knows his other book, but but I think A
New Earth is his best book. I really think it's powerful.
I agree with you, although I have to say I'm
(09:24):
pretty skeptical guy. And when I read that book at first,
I had a I had negative reactions to much of
what was in it, Like the way he talks and
writes is pretty soft and fluffy. For for me, I
have it just a particular idiosyncratic makeup, and some of
his invoking of vibrational fields and spiritual awakenings didn't sit
(09:46):
well with me. Um And Yet I continued to read
his book even though I was thinking he was b
s uh, and he though I'm glad I did because
he started to talk about a thesis about the human situation,
and I'm sure you're familiar with, which is that we
all have a voice in our heads, that we have
this inner narrator and ego whatever you wanna call it,
that's just chasing us around all the time and yammering
(10:08):
at us and has us wanting stuff or not wanting stuff,
comparing ourselves to people thinking about the past or thinking
about the future, to the detriment of whatever's happening right
now and when. And Totally's argument is, as you know,
when you're unaware of this NonStop conversation that you're having
with yourself, it owns you. And that to me was
an incredibly powerful argument, because first of all, it just
(10:30):
struck me as intuitively true. I never heard it before,
by the way, and this and the second part was
that it explained the voice explained my pack attack because
it was the voice in my head, my ego whatever
that sent me off to war zones without thinking about
the consequences that I came home, I got depressed, didn't
know it, and then self medicated blindly and it all
blew up in my face. So Kard totally had a
(10:50):
huge impact on me. Even though I like to make
fun of there's lots more will be come back. Yeah,
So you transition from Mekrt to someone that I've gotten
(11:10):
no pretty wealth de fact Chopra, who influenced me a lot.
I remember watching pps specials he was doing as a
medical student, and he seemed to connect the dots that
that I needed desperate help with because you go many
people going to medicine, and I was in that group
because we all not just because we want to help people.
That's part of it, and I do believe that sincerely
is a passion that most doctors have, but there's also
(11:32):
a little bit of a selfish desire to understand more
about the world that we're in and how can you
understand the world outside of you. If you don't understand
the world inside of you, then you go to medical
school in your lize you don't actually get all of it.
I kept waiting for the day when I really was
a doctor, because the doctor knows everything and her. I
am decades later, and I still have that same the
queasiness that people expect me to know it all, and
there's something none of us really know, and you need
(11:55):
to go one step deeper to get there, because the
medicine are answering different questions right medicine asking what is this?
What is this table made of? Not why is it
made of? That? Which is what some of these deeper
spiritual practices take you into. So how did how did
the Deepak interaction affect you? Well, I don't know how
this is going to go down in this room. But
I also make fun of Deepak a little bit because
he has a way of talking that's pretty sort of
(12:17):
out there. And sometimes I a scientist who Deepak went
on to write a book with this guy. But I
was moderating a debate one time and with Deepak and
an atheist philosopher named Sam Harris, and there were a
few other people in the stages. Well, no relationship and
no relationship with that, but Sam and I are pretty
pretty tight. Um. We share a lot of the sort
of skeptical genes. So uh. One of the science scientists
(12:41):
got up in the audience and said something to Deepak
that I've always thought was very funny. He says, he said,
I understand the words you're using individually, but not in
the order in which you're using them. So he says
Deepak a lot of things that like, I don't understand
what he's saying. He'll casually use phrases like the transformational
vortex to the infinite um and things like that, and
(13:03):
so I do. He's a pretty good copy for me
as a writer. So I've made fun of him a
little bit. I did make fun of him a little
bit in my book. And yet I agree with you
that he's asking questions about what's beyond the hard facts
in UH that we rely on in medicine and science.
And and also he's been a really effective advocate for
(13:24):
meditation on a grand scale. So I tease him a
little bit, but I to the extent that I know him,
I like him, and I do think he's been a
force for good. If Brian Green used a similar phrase,
you know, maybe tweaked slightly about the vortex, you probably
also wouldn't understand it, but it would be purely based
in science. He's a physicist at Columbia, is brilliant, boryant.
(13:46):
He did um a bunch of PPS series as well. Um. Anyway,
my only point is that there is an area where
what Deepak is talking about, which is sort of the
trans transcendent view of the cosmos and and physics, especially
new physics, converge where we get to that space where
(14:11):
there's something we don't understand but it is. It is powerful.
You know, they're there are a bunch of books like
the Dancing Wouie Masters was that I think what it
was called Copras books and um. The more we I think,
the deeper we go into physics, the more like the
string theory. There's and parallel universes. It sounds like deep
(14:33):
packs talking, but it's actually just physicist. No what I'm saying.
What I'm saying that it has the same, It rings
the same to a layman's ears. Yes, I was with
Deepack at an event that actually was hosted as a
Vatican and it was on medicine ethics, and they had
brought together a bunch of philosophers. And I don't know
(14:54):
if you talk to philosophers very much, but in a
similar fashion to your the audience member of Deep Talking said,
I know what the words mean individually, but put up,
you know, I don't know what a spiral, vortext whatever. Yeah, uh,
I was Depeck was in the conversation with me, and
I was listening to them talk amongst each other. And
I come from a specialty of field where we're often
(15:15):
using words not on purpose, but because it becomes habit
that no one else but us understands. Medicine is guilty
of that, probably as much as any other specially lawyers,
are guilty of it. You're in a in a field
where you're specifically don't do that, because your job is
to explain to us things we don't really get and
maybe take us place as we would have gone otherwise.
But I wastenessing these philosophers talking to each other, and
(15:35):
I couldn't understandything we're talking about. I didn't I really
the same thing. I knew what the words meant individually,
but they had clear connotations, so I I thought you know,
I'm a smart enough guy that I can understand this.
Give me some papers, send me the articles that you
guys are writing, because they're writing off ped pieces, and
like they sent me some of them. Then I could
understand them. I would read them all. I read the backwards.
I could understand them. They're like hwever and it was
(15:56):
like hieroglyphics, but of syntax, not of words. And it
was very frustrating to me. And then I realized my
brain hadn't trained itself to think the way at least
these philosophers. In addition, deep back and some of these
guys were their data people. Some of them were you know,
there were some physicists there. Their minds just worked in
a different way. In many ways. If you listen to
musicians talk about the music, they'll use phrases that I'm
(16:18):
not comfortable with, just I'm not in this field. They'll
talk about gigs. I get what a gig is, right,
but but it's a performance. But I don't know what
the other things said after that. Do you ever feel
that as you try to do research in their spirituality? Absolutely?
You know, this gets back in many ways to the
question you asked at the beginning, which is why ten
percent happier? And the answer is it has to do
with language. How are you going to talk about issues
(16:41):
related to our inner weather or interior lives that can
speak to a broad audience. And what I was really
trying to do was to kind of knock this discussion
off its pedestal, stop using the woo woo language, really
get away from overpromising this kind of peddling of less
hope which I see sometimes in our eleven billion dollar
(17:03):
a year self help industry. And that's what I was
trying to get at, to speak very simply, very clearly
from the perspective of a skeptic and a screw up. Uh.
And and also to as I said, to sort a
counter program against some of the more pernicious parts of
of the self help industry. There's a humble nous too
(17:26):
the way you speak this that you call yourself a scrub.
We're all scrubs. I want to hear my voice and
screw up. And if you don't realize that yet, you'll
figure it out. Uh. You know, osmandis in the making,
But h there's still wisdom that people who are screwed
up can use to minimize the scrubs. So, for example,
you speak to the in between moments, Why what are they?
Why are they so important for our listener? I think
(17:47):
we live and this is not my diagnosis that car
Totally talks about this. Some guy who was alive years
before KR Totally, whose name is the Buddha, talked about
this too, which is that we kind of live in
this in this leaned forward state, we're just always on
the hunt for the next hit of dopamine, the next latte,
(18:08):
the next appointment, the next party. We're always kind of
leaned forward, never quite where we are right now, and
in that state we often tend to overlook much of
our lives, and much of our lives are spent waiting online,
waiting for an elevator, uh, without very much to do,
on an airplane, etcetera, etcetera, or you know, playing with
(18:31):
your child and poured out of your mind. I have
a four year old, so I'm intimately familiar with this state.
Can you, however, co opt those moments, those in between moments,
to be right where you are, to tune into what's
happening right now, because, by the way, that's all you
ever get. Both at Art and Deepak talk about this
in different ways. Uh In Eckhart would say the power
(18:53):
of now. Deepak would say the present moment as the
transformational vortex to the infinite. I would just say, you know,
it's all you've got right now. Your whole life takes
place right now. The past and the future are thoughts,
you know, They're just formulations, which, by the way, I'm
not running them down. This is what makes us human,
the ability to prognosticate, to reject into the future and
(19:15):
think about the past and learn from the past. So
there's I'm not I'm not saying we shouldn't engage in that,
but recognize that much of our lives are lived in
this kind of autopilot, this fog of projection and rumination,
as opposed to being right where you are. How does
how does the awareness of the present moment help you
deal with post traumatic stress from the time that you
(19:38):
were overseas? IM wanna answer that question. I'm not gonna
say something first about PTSD. So which is which is
that I don't have it? So? Um, are you sure?
Because you witness some really horrific thing I did? I did.
But it's two things about that. One is that much
less this is I'm not saying this in a cavalier way.
I'm actually saying this in a in a wrecking noizing
(20:00):
that what I've seen and witnessed is very little compared
to many other more seasoned war correspondents, and of course
compared to the actual warriors, men and women on the
front lines. But more importantly, I think, and I've done
quite a bit of psychotherapy, I think the issue for
me wasn't trauma. It was and this is actually quite
common when I'm about to say, among both journalists, work
(20:21):
correspondents and warriors is a kind of addiction and a
kind of addiction to the action. So when I came
home from war zones, what was making me depressed was
that life here, even though we're in the greatest city
on Earth, in my opinion, seemed gray and boring. And
even though I have this incredible job and was out
covering presidential campaigns and being on TV and talking to
(20:42):
Peter Jennings and blah blah blah it, what just couldn't
compare to being in war zones. There's an expression, there's
nothing more thrilling than the bullet that misses. And you know,
for me, they all Winston Churchill's exactly right. So I
it was the it was the list life and death.
It's life at it's most heightened. Absolutely absolutely, And so
(21:02):
for me it was the darkness of the universe. Okay, no,
I mean, I believe me. I've seen a lot of darkness, um,
but it to my knowledge consciously, that's not driving me
as much as my kind of addiction to the you know,
dopamine hits of thrill, and so I was getting that
synthetically through cocaine. When I got home. You asked a
(21:25):
deeper question. I was just asking how the meditation helps
you not need that, not be seeking. Why? Why is
being aware of the present moment an antidote to the
thrill seeking of the elevated cocaine state, or the ecstasy
or the war zone. In my opinion, this is the
key question, right, This is why one would meditate, in
(21:46):
my opinion, because it's about self awareness. It's about when
you're in the when you're awake right now, you're seeing
what is clearly, you're hopefully seeing clearly what is happening
right now internally and externally, and when especially when you're
seeing things clearly internally, when you're aware of the sort
of inner cacophony of random thoughts, powerful emotions, desires, um
(22:11):
then you're not owned by them as much. And meditation
is a systematic waking up to what's happening right now
where you sit and try to in the kind of
meditation I practice, which is different than what you guys do,
when we can talk about those differences if you want.
But in mindfulness meditation, you sit, try to focus on
your breath, and then every time you get distracted, you
start again and again and again, and we use the
(22:32):
breath as an anchor to bring us back to the
present moment. And the distraction is natural and the whole
game and meditation, the art of meditation is learning how
to handle that distraction well, to blow it a kiss
when you notice if whocomes distracted instead of feeding yourself
up and then come back, come back, come back. And
it's the coming back that is the meditation and the
healing part of this is that the more you're aware
(22:55):
of the sort of inner tumult, then it has less
power of you. So for example, for me, I can
see more clearly how leaned forward I am, how I'm
always looking for that next thrill, that next book publication
that next I don't know, a nice article about me,
or next deal I can close, etcetera, etcetera. The next
podcast I can do with the oz is with etcetera, etcetera.
(23:18):
Then I can, then I can. It doesn't mean that's
all going to go away. It just means that it
can recede into the backdrop a little bit, because I
can bloat the kiss, salute it, and say, okay, it's here.
But I don't need to act out of that space.
More questions after the break just I usually do trans
(23:45):
ol meditation, which just frankly, I also use breathing to
get into it. And then there's a mantra that I learned,
but I actually I could easily find myself doing mindfulness meditation,
which I you know, John cabots in it work with
beyond years ago when I was trying to figure out
this all out, I actually got induce this from Lisa's parents,
who are way ahead of the curve on this stuff,
(24:07):
and I began to believe that it must be you
biquitous he done. Only later that I realized that very
few people were doing it, which sort of made sense
to me after a while, and one of the reasons
that I think people weren't doing it. Some people was
I think clouded belief systems from the sixties because you know,
the Beatles were going to India and they were bringing
back you know, but people thought was so soft, touchy
(24:29):
feely stuff. But there's also the belief that you would
lose your edge if you meditated. What do you say
to those folks? I would say, I have a bunch
of things to say to people who are worried about
losing their edge because of meditation. One is, look at
the people who are doing it these days. It's all
over the corporate c suites. You know, you've got senior
executives doing it. You've got elite entertainers from Katie Perry,
(24:52):
Lena Dunham, the lead singer of Weezer, fifty cent meditating.
You've got the U. S. Marines in the U. S.
Army spending tens of million of dollars to research whether
it can make troops or less emotionally reactive in the field,
making better decisions in the field and then more resilient
when they come home in the face of what has
become a scourge of PTSD. And those research results are
(25:12):
really interesting and compelling. You've got scientists doing it, lawyers
doing it, you've got teachers doing it. They're doing in prison,
they're doing it in schools. It's happening all over the place.
These are not the exception perhaps of prison. These are
not low performing, low functioning human beings. These are highly
effective people who have not lost their edge. You're gonna
(25:32):
tell the CEO of Twitter, whatever you think of Twitter,
that you know that he's a slouch. I think he's
a ceo of two companies at once. We've got a
lot of the Chicago because Djokovic, all of these people
who are highly effective. You you Ray Dalio, who's running
a big hedge fund. So it is a It is
a way if you think you'll have less edge if
(25:55):
you boost your ability to focus and boost your ability
to not be owned by all of your random emotions,
so you can be the commonest person, the kindest person
in the room in a in a difficult situation, Well
then you shouldn't meditate. But I don't think anybody thinks that.
I'm gonna take a quick segue if you don't mind,
because meditation, to me has provided a remarkably important tool
(26:18):
to get past stuff saying to myself that often blocks
my creativity. So it helps me work harder that I
normally would be able to work, probably because I can
focus better, but also I can work smarter. And these
you know mentioned vessels that we each have in our lives,
and we've got to fill them with whatever fluid we use.
It's a metaphor that a friend of this is uh
and mine gave me because he's a Buddhist American, but Buddhist,
(26:42):
and you think he's right, And we use different fluids,
and meditation I think for some people allows them to
fill the vessels in a different way. Meditative practices are
found in much of our mythology and much of our religion.
What do you think about some of these concepts and
how they might actually intertwine with more organized ways in
which we study the world around us to spiritual practices
in particular. You know where I'm sort of and where
(27:05):
I'm gonna take this, and I don't know if this
is at all what you were intending, So I apologize
in advance of taking this in a different direction, which
is that I think a lot of people you were
talking before about the Beatles studying meda Yes, the Maharishi, Mahashi, etcetera, etcetera,
And and how meditation is kind of seen as this fuzzy,
fluffy thing in an era that's increasingly secular. Now, um,
(27:30):
I actually think Um, while as I said before that
I'm I think I might have used the term atheist,
but I'm more of an agnostic, a sort of respectful agnostic.
I don't know. I don't take a view on issues
metaphysical issues, but I do think in an era where
we're seeing less um attend is sort of lower attendance
that organized religious events and more sort of a cafeterious
(27:52):
spirituality out there, I do think that meditation can play
an incredibly positive role because people are looking for meaning.
So why they go to soul cycle, this is why
they go to cross fit. You know, people are out
there looking for meaning. There's an increased sort of skepticism
and maybe cynicism about organized religion, perhaps for good reason,
given some of the scandals we've seen. And I do
(28:13):
think that meditation is something is a very hopeful sign
in an increasingly acrimonious UH society. But just to add
to that, meditation is a part of most religion. It
is right if you mean, when I sit in a
church service and we you know, we'll go with a
Lesa's family that the beautiful cathedral where they live, and
(28:33):
you sit in there, it's it's wonderful to hear people singing.
I don't even care what they're singing. It's just the
thought of all these voices in unison saying phrases that
are that have a melody to them and are uplifting.
It's wonderful. And I think it came about Judaism uh
Sufi Islam, which is you know, was in the town
when my father grew up, uh you know, certainly in
(28:54):
the Eastern religions. It's it's more explicitly stated. It does
seem like meditative practices in ways of getting there are
hard wired into us. Absolutely, And it's so incredible that
you see these meditative practices popping up in faiths that
came about in cultures that were not in any way
(29:14):
connected by space and time. Right, So you've got the
shamans in the in in the rainforests of Brazil doing
these shamanic practices, often involving plants that were meditative and
trying they're trying to transcend the ego and reach for
spiritual enlightenment. You have meanwhile, in your dad's hometown Sufi
(29:35):
um Islams uh Sufi Muslims dancing in circles. They're called
whirling dervishes. That's where that term comes from. And that
gets you into a trance state which is meant to
transcend the the work a day ego and put you
into a different state. You see the desert fathers in Christianity.
What are the rosary beads if not a way to
(29:56):
to focus the mind? You see this in cabal Judaism.
You see it, of course, as you said, explicitly in
Judaism and Buddhism and Hinduism. And so how why did
we Why did we come to this? Because as you said,
we're hard wired UH. Something in a sees that the
daily discursive mind trips us up and there needs to
(30:19):
be a way to get out of our own way.
One final parameditation question. There's been a lot of medical
debate of late about hallucinogens and Wilson, one of the
founders A, actually stopped drinking because of some probably hallucinogen
induced UH trance or state that he achieved nearly thirties,
(30:40):
and he tried to introduce LSD to alcoholics anonymous for
most of his adult life, and now we're seeing a
rebirth of some of those interest Kindaman just got approved
for the Pressure States and PTSD approvals coming up. Uh.
You know micro does give LSD s use a lot
in Silicon Valley, for example, people say gives them creativity.
I know the magic mush and psilocybin um is being
(31:01):
used clinically now in you know, pre addictive manage measurement,
addictions of alcoholism, uh uh, opiates, as well as some
of the more important psychiatric issues anxiety in the face
of chronic illness. These are shortcuts I think. I don't know,
but I think they're shortcuts to what you might get
through a life of meditation. Thoughts on and Shamans. You
(31:23):
mentioned in Amazon they would use ahahuasca. They would use
it normally just to be clear. They would use it
and then they would explain what they saw their practicis.
But they were probably using for people who are having
issues as well, so appropriately supervised, could these play a role?
I am I want to issue the caveat that this
is just one guy speaking who is semi informed. Um,
(31:44):
I'm really intrigued by this, and I think we are
starting to see a lot of evidence that this can
I've had a lot of folks on my podcast coming
to talk about this. I think we're seeing a lot
of evidence, um that this can have really salutary effects.
I think it's a great shame that we lost decades
is Nixon, where this stuff was outlawed, where we couldn't
conduct the research around it. I think at the very
(32:05):
least we should be able to conduct the research to
see whether these this plant medicine, these psychedelics can help people,
and and the early signs from what I can tell,
are incredibly positive. I have not done it because my
shrink really does not want me messing with my brain
chemistry given the fact that I panic disorder. But if
we're that not the case, I would have done it.
I'm a control freak, so I don't want to go first.
(32:28):
But I don't blame but I sure you believe that
there's a hypocrisy around allowing physicians to do what they
should do to help people be illnesses. And when I
start to see some of the data around solutions for
people who had no other options, and then I think, okay,
well the d A might stop this. We're putting the
emphasis to power in the hands people don't even wanted.
I've spoken to people the DA said, please don't make
us spake a decision here. We don't want to be
(32:49):
in that space. We want to take care of bad guys,
not good people. Try to help other good people. Then
there's always always ten percent happier. And he looks happier today.
How I tamed the voice in my head, reduced stress
without losing my edge, and found self help that actually works.
It's a true story about a good friend and some
SOMEONOST really accomplished quite a bit with this podcast. Wonderful successful.
In fact, all the things you do seem to be
(33:10):
touched with successful. Bless you for that. I did host
the failed game show. But other than that, I'll do
it all right. That most score. I love it, though
I want to put it on my resume until it
Happy head Harris, Thank you guys, thank you, this is fun.
Thank you. I really appreciate it.
How are you going to talk about issues related to
our inner weather, our interior lives. What I was really
trying to do was to kind of knock this discussion
off its pedestal, stop using the woo language. Really get
away from overpromising this kind of peddling of reckless hope,
which I see sometimes in our eleven billion dollar a
(00:21):
year self help industry. To speak very simply, very clearly
from the perspective of a skeptic and a screw up. Hi,
(00:46):
I'm Dr Oz and this is the Doctor Oz podcast.
Is that exactly who you would be expecting that be
touting the benefits of meditation? ABC News is Dan Harris
has been through help and he's come back and has
the power of mindful this to thank for coming out
on the other side even stronger than before. He's also
the host of the wildly successful podcast ten percent Happier,
(01:06):
titled after the New York Times bestselling book, and the
author of a new book, Meditation for Fidgy Skeptics, which
would be a topic today and ten percent Happier book
about how to so this word tempercent keeps coming up
least and I were debating it. She wants to know specifically,
you know, I asked my fift of course you want more.
He wants percent happier, happier. I do a lot of
(01:29):
haggling ever since this book came out. So we're gonna
talk a little bit about this rocky road to recovery
that we all face in life. You've been very transparent
about it. I applaud you for that. But it is
a logical question why that number particularly must have some
symbolism for you. Actually, it's pretty random. I was in
the middle of a conversation with one of my colleagues
at ABC News after I started meditating, and I this
is the I'd like to say that meditation is the
(01:51):
first My embrace of meditation marks the first time in
my life I was ever ahead of a trend. I
started getting interested in meditation in around two thousand and
eight two nine, but for it was as cool as
it is now. And uh I started mentioning that to
some people I worked with, and uh I was met
with a lot of mockery because at that time meditation
(02:12):
was viewed and still is viewed in some corners has
a pretty niche strange concern. And I was talking to
one of my colleagues, an old friend UH named Chris
Sebastian who was the senior producer at Good Morning America.
And she stopped me one day, She's like, what's the
deal with you? In meditation? The subtext was why have
you used to be cool? What happened to you? And
(02:33):
I kind of was looking around for an answer, and
I said, you know, it makes me ten percent happier.
And I noticed the look on her face went from
scorn to something approaching interest, and I thought, Okay, that's
my stick. That's how I'm going to talk about this
from now on. So let's go to where you are.
You're very well respected within the business. Folks outside of
you know of your your all the wonderful things you've done,
(02:57):
hosting weekend shows and and and pors beyond Gmail all
the time, as you mentioned, Yet there were times in
your life when you had fallen off the tracks. Cocaine, ecstasy.
What did they do for you? You You had everything? And
I should want you're You're from May and originally right,
he went to school there. I went to school in May,
but I'm from Boston, now far away, but northeast, northeast. Yes,
(03:17):
you had a pretty good life people in Maine and
Boston can do drugs too, of course they count I mean,
these are colleague parts of the country that have a
reasonable standard of living. And you went to Colby's at
right Colby College, so we went to you know, great school,
and you know you had that out of the park
in your career. What gives My parents were doctors as
a matter, doctor Paris doctors. So what happened? I went
(03:40):
and spent a lot of time in war zones after
nine eleven. So I got to ABC News very young.
I was twenty eight years old in the year two thousand,
very ambitious, very insecure about my lack of inexperience and
my lack of experience, and uh, when nine eleven happened,
I very eagerly raised my hand and said, send me
over ease. I want to cover whatever happened next. I
(04:01):
think for a range of reasons that partly was kind
of crass ambition careerism. I think also curiosity, and then
on the more on the less embarrassing side of the spectrum,
I was I was very idealistic still I am very
idealistic about the power of journalism, and I wanted to
sort of bear witness to what we were going to do,
and uh, my bosses accepted my offer and I spent
(04:24):
a lot of time in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, Iraq.
I was in the rock months and months and months
and months at a time, and when I came home
from one trip to Iraq, I got depressed. I didn't
actually know I was depressed. I was exhibiting what I
now know to be some of the signature signs and symptoms.
You'll be familiar with this in your practice because of
(04:44):
your practice as a physician. I was having trouble getting
out of bed. I felt like I had a little
grade fever all the time. And that's when I reached.
That is when I reached for cocaine, which was an
incredibly dumb move. At a party. I had never done drugs,
hard drugs before we and booze as a younger person,
but not really to excess, and a friend of mine
(05:05):
offered me some cocaine, and for the first time of
my life, I said yes because I felt like garbage
just didn't feel good and it made me feel better.
And so I wasn't doing it all the time, but
there were about eighteen to twenty four months where I
was doing it semi regularly, and that culminated in me
having a panic attack on Good Morning America because, as
(05:25):
I later learned, I was doing enough cocaine. I wasn't
high in the air, but I was doing enough cocaine
that had altered my brain chemistry and made freaking out
more likely. So this is a an iconic moment. You're
on there, you have this s Norge break down. The
country witnessed it, people did not know what was happening.
Was that rock bottom for you? Yeah? Definitely. Actually I
(05:48):
want to say yes, but actually it was I had
a second one. So I had this first panic attack
and then I kept partying. Actually I didn't. I knew
I had had a panic attack, and I kind of
lied to my bosses and got away with it. Because
if you look at the video and it's got millions
of views on YouTube, one of the responses I get is, yeah,
(06:08):
it didn't look that bad. I kind of held it together.
I mean, it's not good, but it's not It's not
like Albert Brooks and broadcast news with flop sweat and so,
but that was it was people who knew you. That
wasn't it was. My mother called me right away and said,
you had a panic attack. So I knew something about
it happened, but I didn't really tie it to the drugs.
And then I a couple of months went by and
(06:30):
I had another one, and then I went to go
see a shrink uh here in New York City who
asked me whether I did drugs and I said yes,
and he was like, all right, idiot, you know, mystery
solved and that that's what That was rock bottom for me,
and that's you know, I started to build from there.
So you go, for me, the war correspondent waiting to
hear what you have to say about text going on
(06:50):
other parts of the world that that should scare us,
because you're actually there, you become the faith and spiritual correspondent.
I mean's almost like the opposite side of the spectral,
not just geographically but emotionally intellectually. Was that obviously conscious decision?
But how did you even come to that epiphany that
maybe that was what she needed to do? It wasn't.
I didn't come to that epiphany, and it wasn't a
(07:12):
conscious decision on my part. It was a conscious decision
on the part of a guy named Peter Jennings. Who
was Peter. Peter took me intervention. No, actually, he had
no idea any of this stuff was going on, and
and he just he was interested in faith in spirituality
and wanted us to cover it aggressively, and I didn't
want to do that. I was raised, as mentioned in
(07:34):
the People's Republic of Massachusetts. Both my parents are atheist scientists.
I did have a bar mitzvah, but only for money. Um. So,
like I was not interested in spirituality at all, but
Peter forced me to do it, and that ended up
having a really positive effect on me, because it's not
like I embraced any faith, but I did. I saw
(07:57):
first of all how ignorant I was about faith in
spiritual reality. I made a lot of friends and so
and really sort of value of having a worldview that
transcends your own narrow interests. For me, as a very selfish, young,
self centered young man, that was pretty useful. Um. But
ultimately the faith in spirituality be led me to a
writer whose name is Eckhart. Totally have you guys heard
(08:19):
of him? Okay, So that's a that's a sentence most
people don't get to utter. Would be on the show
with me, so I mean, I'm not on the same show,
but we do two shows to day. I'd be the morning,
he'd be the afternoon, so you could sort of sit
back and and talk to me. You have a round
your bust, I mean, people listening. It should happens that
(08:40):
you run someone you have no idea who you are,
and you feel how you rust, how blessed you are
that you ran into that which happened to not just
car totally, but we'll get to deep back in a
second as well. Yeah. So one of my colleagues was
a big fan of Eckhart totally, and she said, you know,
she should read his book because he might be a
good TV story for your whole faith in spirituality. Be
by the way, for the uninitiated, are totally is a big, huge,
(09:02):
mega best selling self help guru, powered in many ways
by Oprah, who loves his work. And I read his
book were one of his books. That's actually I like,
everyone knows his other book, but but I think A
New Earth is his best book. I really think it's powerful.
I agree with you, although I have to say I'm
(09:24):
pretty skeptical guy. And when I read that book at first,
I had a I had negative reactions to much of
what was in it, Like the way he talks and
writes is pretty soft and fluffy. For for me, I
have it just a particular idiosyncratic makeup, and some of
his invoking of vibrational fields and spiritual awakenings didn't sit
(09:46):
well with me. Um And Yet I continued to read
his book even though I was thinking he was b
s uh, and he though I'm glad I did because
he started to talk about a thesis about the human situation,
and I'm sure you're familiar with, which is that we
all have a voice in our heads, that we have
this inner narrator and ego whatever you wanna call it,
that's just chasing us around all the time and yammering
(10:08):
at us and has us wanting stuff or not wanting stuff,
comparing ourselves to people thinking about the past or thinking
about the future, to the detriment of whatever's happening right
now and when. And Totally's argument is, as you know,
when you're unaware of this NonStop conversation that you're having
with yourself, it owns you. And that to me was
an incredibly powerful argument, because first of all, it just
(10:30):
struck me as intuitively true. I never heard it before,
by the way, and this and the second part was
that it explained the voice explained my pack attack because
it was the voice in my head, my ego whatever
that sent me off to war zones without thinking about
the consequences that I came home, I got depressed, didn't
know it, and then self medicated blindly and it all
blew up in my face. So Kard totally had a
(10:50):
huge impact on me. Even though I like to make
fun of there's lots more will be come back. Yeah,
So you transition from Mekrt to someone that I've gotten
(11:10):
no pretty wealth de fact Chopra, who influenced me a lot.
I remember watching pps specials he was doing as a
medical student, and he seemed to connect the dots that
that I needed desperate help with because you go many
people going to medicine, and I was in that group
because we all not just because we want to help people.
That's part of it, and I do believe that sincerely
is a passion that most doctors have, but there's also
(11:32):
a little bit of a selfish desire to understand more
about the world that we're in and how can you
understand the world outside of you. If you don't understand
the world inside of you, then you go to medical
school in your lize you don't actually get all of it.
I kept waiting for the day when I really was
a doctor, because the doctor knows everything and her. I
am decades later, and I still have that same the
queasiness that people expect me to know it all, and
there's something none of us really know, and you need
(11:55):
to go one step deeper to get there, because the
medicine are answering different questions right medicine asking what is this?
What is this table made of? Not why is it
made of? That? Which is what some of these deeper
spiritual practices take you into. So how did how did
the Deepak interaction affect you? Well, I don't know how
this is going to go down in this room. But
I also make fun of Deepak a little bit because
he has a way of talking that's pretty sort of
(12:17):
out there. And sometimes I a scientist who Deepak went
on to write a book with this guy. But I
was moderating a debate one time and with Deepak and
an atheist philosopher named Sam Harris, and there were a
few other people in the stages. Well, no relationship and
no relationship with that, but Sam and I are pretty
pretty tight. Um. We share a lot of the sort
of skeptical genes. So uh. One of the science scientists
(12:41):
got up in the audience and said something to Deepak
that I've always thought was very funny. He says, he said,
I understand the words you're using individually, but not in
the order in which you're using them. So he says
Deepak a lot of things that like, I don't understand
what he's saying. He'll casually use phrases like the transformational
vortex to the infinite um and things like that, and
(13:03):
so I do. He's a pretty good copy for me
as a writer. So I've made fun of him a
little bit. I did make fun of him a little
bit in my book. And yet I agree with you
that he's asking questions about what's beyond the hard facts
in UH that we rely on in medicine and science.
And and also he's been a really effective advocate for
(13:24):
meditation on a grand scale. So I tease him a
little bit, but I to the extent that I know him,
I like him, and I do think he's been a
force for good. If Brian Green used a similar phrase,
you know, maybe tweaked slightly about the vortex, you probably
also wouldn't understand it, but it would be purely based
in science. He's a physicist at Columbia, is brilliant, boryant.
(13:46):
He did um a bunch of PPS series as well. Um. Anyway,
my only point is that there is an area where
what Deepak is talking about, which is sort of the
trans transcendent view of the cosmos and and physics, especially
new physics, converge where we get to that space where
(14:11):
there's something we don't understand but it is. It is powerful.
You know, they're there are a bunch of books like
the Dancing Wouie Masters was that I think what it
was called Copras books and um. The more we I think,
the deeper we go into physics, the more like the
string theory. There's and parallel universes. It sounds like deep
(14:33):
packs talking, but it's actually just physicist. No what I'm saying.
What I'm saying that it has the same, It rings
the same to a layman's ears. Yes, I was with
Deepack at an event that actually was hosted as a
Vatican and it was on medicine ethics, and they had
brought together a bunch of philosophers. And I don't know
(14:54):
if you talk to philosophers very much, but in a
similar fashion to your the audience member of Deep Talking said,
I know what the words mean individually, but put up,
you know, I don't know what a spiral, vortext whatever. Yeah, uh,
I was Depeck was in the conversation with me, and
I was listening to them talk amongst each other. And
I come from a specialty of field where we're often
(15:15):
using words not on purpose, but because it becomes habit
that no one else but us understands. Medicine is guilty
of that, probably as much as any other specially lawyers,
are guilty of it. You're in a in a field
where you're specifically don't do that, because your job is
to explain to us things we don't really get and
maybe take us place as we would have gone otherwise.
But I wastenessing these philosophers talking to each other, and
(15:35):
I couldn't understandything we're talking about. I didn't I really
the same thing. I knew what the words meant individually,
but they had clear connotations, so I I thought you know,
I'm a smart enough guy that I can understand this.
Give me some papers, send me the articles that you
guys are writing, because they're writing off ped pieces, and
like they sent me some of them. Then I could
understand them. I would read them all. I read the backwards.
I could understand them. They're like hwever and it was
(15:56):
like hieroglyphics, but of syntax, not of words. And it
was very frustrating to me. And then I realized my
brain hadn't trained itself to think the way at least
these philosophers. In addition, deep back and some of these
guys were their data people. Some of them were you know,
there were some physicists there. Their minds just worked in
a different way. In many ways. If you listen to
musicians talk about the music, they'll use phrases that I'm
(16:18):
not comfortable with, just I'm not in this field. They'll
talk about gigs. I get what a gig is, right,
but but it's a performance. But I don't know what
the other things said after that. Do you ever feel
that as you try to do research in their spirituality? Absolutely?
You know, this gets back in many ways to the
question you asked at the beginning, which is why ten
percent happier? And the answer is it has to do
with language. How are you going to talk about issues
(16:41):
related to our inner weather or interior lives that can
speak to a broad audience. And what I was really
trying to do was to kind of knock this discussion
off its pedestal, stop using the woo woo language, really
get away from overpromising this kind of peddling of less
hope which I see sometimes in our eleven billion dollar
(17:03):
a year self help industry. And that's what I was
trying to get at, to speak very simply, very clearly
from the perspective of a skeptic and a screw up. Uh.
And and also to as I said, to sort a
counter program against some of the more pernicious parts of
of the self help industry. There's a humble nous too
(17:26):
the way you speak this that you call yourself a scrub.
We're all scrubs. I want to hear my voice and
screw up. And if you don't realize that yet, you'll
figure it out. Uh. You know, osmandis in the making,
But h there's still wisdom that people who are screwed
up can use to minimize the scrubs. So, for example,
you speak to the in between moments, Why what are they?
Why are they so important for our listener? I think
(17:47):
we live and this is not my diagnosis that car
Totally talks about this. Some guy who was alive years
before KR Totally, whose name is the Buddha, talked about
this too, which is that we kind of live in
this in this leaned forward state, we're just always on
the hunt for the next hit of dopamine, the next latte,
(18:08):
the next appointment, the next party. We're always kind of
leaned forward, never quite where we are right now, and
in that state we often tend to overlook much of
our lives, and much of our lives are spent waiting online,
waiting for an elevator, uh, without very much to do,
on an airplane, etcetera, etcetera, or you know, playing with
(18:31):
your child and poured out of your mind. I have
a four year old, so I'm intimately familiar with this state.
Can you, however, co opt those moments, those in between moments,
to be right where you are, to tune into what's
happening right now, because, by the way, that's all you
ever get. Both at Art and Deepak talk about this
in different ways. Uh In Eckhart would say the power
(18:53):
of now. Deepak would say the present moment as the
transformational vortex to the infinite. I would just say, you know,
it's all you've got right now. Your whole life takes
place right now. The past and the future are thoughts,
you know, They're just formulations, which, by the way, I'm
not running them down. This is what makes us human,
the ability to prognosticate, to reject into the future and
(19:15):
think about the past and learn from the past. So
there's I'm not I'm not saying we shouldn't engage in that,
but recognize that much of our lives are lived in
this kind of autopilot, this fog of projection and rumination,
as opposed to being right where you are. How does
how does the awareness of the present moment help you
deal with post traumatic stress from the time that you
(19:38):
were overseas? IM wanna answer that question. I'm not gonna
say something first about PTSD. So which is which is
that I don't have it? So? Um, are you sure?
Because you witness some really horrific thing I did? I did.
But it's two things about that. One is that much
less this is I'm not saying this in a cavalier way.
I'm actually saying this in a in a wrecking noizing
(20:00):
that what I've seen and witnessed is very little compared
to many other more seasoned war correspondents, and of course
compared to the actual warriors, men and women on the
front lines. But more importantly, I think, and I've done
quite a bit of psychotherapy, I think the issue for
me wasn't trauma. It was and this is actually quite
common when I'm about to say, among both journalists, work
(20:21):
correspondents and warriors is a kind of addiction and a
kind of addiction to the action. So when I came
home from war zones, what was making me depressed was
that life here, even though we're in the greatest city
on Earth, in my opinion, seemed gray and boring. And
even though I have this incredible job and was out
covering presidential campaigns and being on TV and talking to
(20:42):
Peter Jennings and blah blah blah it, what just couldn't
compare to being in war zones. There's an expression, there's
nothing more thrilling than the bullet that misses. And you know,
for me, they all Winston Churchill's exactly right. So I
it was the it was the list life and death.
It's life at it's most heightened. Absolutely absolutely, And so
(21:02):
for me it was the darkness of the universe. Okay, no,
I mean, I believe me. I've seen a lot of darkness, um,
but it to my knowledge consciously, that's not driving me
as much as my kind of addiction to the you know,
dopamine hits of thrill, and so I was getting that
synthetically through cocaine. When I got home. You asked a
(21:25):
deeper question. I was just asking how the meditation helps
you not need that, not be seeking. Why? Why is
being aware of the present moment an antidote to the
thrill seeking of the elevated cocaine state, or the ecstasy
or the war zone. In my opinion, this is the
key question, right, This is why one would meditate, in
(21:46):
my opinion, because it's about self awareness. It's about when
you're in the when you're awake right now, you're seeing
what is clearly, you're hopefully seeing clearly what is happening
right now internally and externally, and when especially when you're
seeing things clearly internally, when you're aware of the sort
of inner cacophony of random thoughts, powerful emotions, desires, um
(22:11):
then you're not owned by them as much. And meditation
is a systematic waking up to what's happening right now
where you sit and try to in the kind of
meditation I practice, which is different than what you guys do,
when we can talk about those differences if you want.
But in mindfulness meditation, you sit, try to focus on
your breath, and then every time you get distracted, you
start again and again and again, and we use the
(22:32):
breath as an anchor to bring us back to the
present moment. And the distraction is natural and the whole
game and meditation, the art of meditation is learning how
to handle that distraction well, to blow it a kiss
when you notice if whocomes distracted instead of feeding yourself
up and then come back, come back, come back. And
it's the coming back that is the meditation and the
healing part of this is that the more you're aware
(22:55):
of the sort of inner tumult, then it has less
power of you. So for example, for me, I can
see more clearly how leaned forward I am, how I'm
always looking for that next thrill, that next book publication
that next I don't know, a nice article about me,
or next deal I can close, etcetera, etcetera. The next
podcast I can do with the oz is with etcetera, etcetera.
(23:18):
Then I can, then I can. It doesn't mean that's
all going to go away. It just means that it
can recede into the backdrop a little bit, because I
can bloat the kiss, salute it, and say, okay, it's here.
But I don't need to act out of that space.
More questions after the break just I usually do trans
(23:45):
ol meditation, which just frankly, I also use breathing to
get into it. And then there's a mantra that I learned,
but I actually I could easily find myself doing mindfulness meditation,
which I you know, John cabots in it work with
beyond years ago when I was trying to figure out
this all out, I actually got induce this from Lisa's parents,
who are way ahead of the curve on this stuff,
(24:07):
and I began to believe that it must be you
biquitous he done. Only later that I realized that very
few people were doing it, which sort of made sense
to me after a while, and one of the reasons
that I think people weren't doing it. Some people was
I think clouded belief systems from the sixties because you know,
the Beatles were going to India and they were bringing
back you know, but people thought was so soft, touchy
(24:29):
feely stuff. But there's also the belief that you would
lose your edge if you meditated. What do you say
to those folks? I would say, I have a bunch
of things to say to people who are worried about
losing their edge because of meditation. One is, look at
the people who are doing it these days. It's all
over the corporate c suites. You know, you've got senior
executives doing it. You've got elite entertainers from Katie Perry,
(24:52):
Lena Dunham, the lead singer of Weezer, fifty cent meditating.
You've got the U. S. Marines in the U. S.
Army spending tens of million of dollars to research whether
it can make troops or less emotionally reactive in the field,
making better decisions in the field and then more resilient
when they come home in the face of what has
become a scourge of PTSD. And those research results are
(25:12):
really interesting and compelling. You've got scientists doing it, lawyers
doing it, you've got teachers doing it. They're doing in prison,
they're doing it in schools. It's happening all over the place.
These are not the exception perhaps of prison. These are
not low performing, low functioning human beings. These are highly
effective people who have not lost their edge. You're gonna
(25:32):
tell the CEO of Twitter, whatever you think of Twitter,
that you know that he's a slouch. I think he's
a ceo of two companies at once. We've got a
lot of the Chicago because Djokovic, all of these people
who are highly effective. You you Ray Dalio, who's running
a big hedge fund. So it is a It is
a way if you think you'll have less edge if
(25:55):
you boost your ability to focus and boost your ability
to not be owned by all of your random emotions,
so you can be the commonest person, the kindest person
in the room in a in a difficult situation, Well
then you shouldn't meditate. But I don't think anybody thinks that.
I'm gonna take a quick segue if you don't mind,
because meditation, to me has provided a remarkably important tool
(26:18):
to get past stuff saying to myself that often blocks
my creativity. So it helps me work harder that I
normally would be able to work, probably because I can
focus better, but also I can work smarter. And these
you know mentioned vessels that we each have in our lives,
and we've got to fill them with whatever fluid we use.
It's a metaphor that a friend of this is uh
and mine gave me because he's a Buddhist American, but Buddhist,
(26:42):
and you think he's right, And we use different fluids,
and meditation I think for some people allows them to
fill the vessels in a different way. Meditative practices are
found in much of our mythology and much of our religion.
What do you think about some of these concepts and
how they might actually intertwine with more organized ways in
which we study the world around us to spiritual practices
in particular. You know where I'm sort of and where
(27:05):
I'm gonna take this, and I don't know if this
is at all what you were intending, So I apologize
in advance of taking this in a different direction, which
is that I think a lot of people you were
talking before about the Beatles studying meda Yes, the Maharishi, Mahashi, etcetera, etcetera,
And and how meditation is kind of seen as this fuzzy,
fluffy thing in an era that's increasingly secular. Now, um,
(27:30):
I actually think Um, while as I said before that
I'm I think I might have used the term atheist,
but I'm more of an agnostic, a sort of respectful agnostic.
I don't know. I don't take a view on issues
metaphysical issues, but I do think in an era where
we're seeing less um attend is sort of lower attendance
that organized religious events and more sort of a cafeterious
(27:52):
spirituality out there, I do think that meditation can play
an incredibly positive role because people are looking for meaning.
So why they go to soul cycle, this is why
they go to cross fit. You know, people are out
there looking for meaning. There's an increased sort of skepticism
and maybe cynicism about organized religion, perhaps for good reason,
given some of the scandals we've seen. And I do
(28:13):
think that meditation is something is a very hopeful sign
in an increasingly acrimonious UH society. But just to add
to that, meditation is a part of most religion. It
is right if you mean, when I sit in a
church service and we you know, we'll go with a
Lesa's family that the beautiful cathedral where they live, and
(28:33):
you sit in there, it's it's wonderful to hear people singing.
I don't even care what they're singing. It's just the
thought of all these voices in unison saying phrases that
are that have a melody to them and are uplifting.
It's wonderful. And I think it came about Judaism uh
Sufi Islam, which is you know, was in the town
when my father grew up, uh you know, certainly in
(28:54):
the Eastern religions. It's it's more explicitly stated. It does
seem like meditative practices in ways of getting there are
hard wired into us. Absolutely, And it's so incredible that
you see these meditative practices popping up in faiths that
came about in cultures that were not in any way
(29:14):
connected by space and time. Right, So you've got the
shamans in the in in the rainforests of Brazil doing
these shamanic practices, often involving plants that were meditative and
trying they're trying to transcend the ego and reach for
spiritual enlightenment. You have meanwhile, in your dad's hometown Sufi
(29:35):
um Islams uh Sufi Muslims dancing in circles. They're called
whirling dervishes. That's where that term comes from. And that
gets you into a trance state which is meant to
transcend the the work a day ego and put you
into a different state. You see the desert fathers in Christianity.
What are the rosary beads if not a way to
(29:56):
to focus the mind? You see this in cabal Judaism.
You see it, of course, as you said, explicitly in
Judaism and Buddhism and Hinduism. And so how why did
we Why did we come to this? Because as you said,
we're hard wired UH. Something in a sees that the
daily discursive mind trips us up and there needs to
(30:19):
be a way to get out of our own way.
One final parameditation question. There's been a lot of medical
debate of late about hallucinogens and Wilson, one of the
founders A, actually stopped drinking because of some probably hallucinogen
induced UH trance or state that he achieved nearly thirties,
(30:40):
and he tried to introduce LSD to alcoholics anonymous for
most of his adult life, and now we're seeing a
rebirth of some of those interest Kindaman just got approved
for the Pressure States and PTSD approvals coming up. Uh.
You know micro does give LSD s use a lot
in Silicon Valley, for example, people say gives them creativity.
I know the magic mush and psilocybin um is being
(31:01):
used clinically now in you know, pre addictive manage measurement,
addictions of alcoholism, uh uh, opiates, as well as some
of the more important psychiatric issues anxiety in the face
of chronic illness. These are shortcuts I think. I don't know,
but I think they're shortcuts to what you might get
through a life of meditation. Thoughts on and Shamans. You
(31:23):
mentioned in Amazon they would use ahahuasca. They would use
it normally just to be clear. They would use it
and then they would explain what they saw their practicis.
But they were probably using for people who are having
issues as well, so appropriately supervised, could these play a role?
I am I want to issue the caveat that this
is just one guy speaking who is semi informed. Um,
(31:44):
I'm really intrigued by this, and I think we are
starting to see a lot of evidence that this can
I've had a lot of folks on my podcast coming
to talk about this. I think we're seeing a lot
of evidence, um that this can have really salutary effects.
I think it's a great shame that we lost decades
is Nixon, where this stuff was outlawed, where we couldn't
conduct the research around it. I think at the very
(32:05):
least we should be able to conduct the research to
see whether these this plant medicine, these psychedelics can help people,
and and the early signs from what I can tell,
are incredibly positive. I have not done it because my
shrink really does not want me messing with my brain
chemistry given the fact that I panic disorder. But if
we're that not the case, I would have done it.
I'm a control freak, so I don't want to go first.
(32:28):
But I don't blame but I sure you believe that
there's a hypocrisy around allowing physicians to do what they
should do to help people be illnesses. And when I
start to see some of the data around solutions for
people who had no other options, and then I think, okay,
well the d A might stop this. We're putting the
emphasis to power in the hands people don't even wanted.
I've spoken to people the DA said, please don't make
us spake a decision here. We don't want to be
(32:49):
in that space. We want to take care of bad guys,
not good people. Try to help other good people. Then
there's always always ten percent happier. And he looks happier today.
How I tamed the voice in my head, reduced stress
without losing my edge, and found self help that actually works.
It's a true story about a good friend and some
SOMEONOST really accomplished quite a bit with this podcast. Wonderful successful.
In fact, all the things you do seem to be
(33:10):
touched with successful. Bless you for that. I did host
the failed game show. But other than that, I'll do
it all right. That most score. I love it, though
I want to put it on my resume until it
Happy head Harris, Thank you guys, thank you, this is fun.
Thank you. I really appreciate it.
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