Finding calm in the chaos with 10% Happier’s Dan Harris (LNM Episode 52)

Dec 18, 2024

LNM 52 - Dan Harris

Dan Harris, podcast host, author of 10% Happier and former ABC News anchor, shares his journey from covering war zones to discovering mindfulness and meditation. He discusses the toll of high-stress journalism on mental health, including his on-air panic attack, and how meditation became a transformative tool. Harris also addresses misconceptions about meditation, its benefits for managing anxiety, and why it doesn’t mean losing your edge.

Harris opens up about leadership and entrepreneurship, reflecting on the challenges of co-founding a business, managing adversity, and learning to lead with greater emotional awareness. He explains how tools like therapy, mindfulness, and building strong relationships have helped him navigate life’s ups and downs, both personally and professionally.

The conversation also explores modern masculinity, the epidemic of loneliness, and the importance of friendships. Harris shares insights on how vulnerability and connection can improve well-being and why relationships are the key to a healthier, happier life.

Episode chapters:
(00:04:34) – Dan Harris on his early journalism journey
(00:09:06) – Ambition, anxiety and success as a young reporter
(00:13:32) – War reporting, big-T vs. little-T trauma, and industry support
(00:20:19) – From panic attack to discovering meditation
(00:25:35) – Misconceptions about meditation
(00:30:25) – Meditation and maintaining your edge
(00:37:57) – The pantheon of no brainers: Other tools for mental health and well-being
(00:44:23) – Never worry alone
(00:48:56) – Navigating the split with the Ten Percent Happier app co-founders
(00:55:25) – Handling criticism as a leader
(01:02:37) – Maintaining your team’s well being
(01:06:53) – Masculinity, male friendships and emotional openness
(01:15:39) – Rapid-fire questions

Listen to the episode here:

Links:

 

Bio:

Dan Harris

Dan Harris speaks at SESSION 3 at TED2022: A New Era. April 10-14, 2022, Vancouver, BC, Canada. Photo: Bret Hartman / TED

Dan Harris spent 21 years as an anchor and correspondent at ABC News, where he hosted Nightline and the weekend editions of Good Morning America. He also spent years in the field, covering combat, natural disasters, and presidential campaigns. After having an on-air panic attack, he turned to meditation, which he always thought was for robed gurus and unwashed hippies. In 2014, he published the #1 New York Times bestselling book, 10% Happier. In 2016, he launched the 10% Happier podcast. It now has over 600 episodes and regularly ranks among the top 100 shows. You can learn more about Dan at danharris.com

 

 

 

Full transcript:

(recorded via Riverside.fm; transcript automated via Castmagic.io, mostly unedited)

DAN HARRIS [00:00:00]:What's interesting is that this has really changed. Now, you know, they have all these, like, hostile conditions training, or hostile environment training. I think it's what it's called. If you're gonna go into a hostile environment, combat zone, a protest, you get taught a lot of stuff. That was not true when I went. I got no training. And we also didn't have in the early early days, we didn't have many rules around Kevlar or bulletproof vests and things like that. And sometimes we had them, sometimes we didn't, and there wasn't a lot of rules around when you should wear it. Sometimes we did, sometimes we didn't. Sometimes I wore the vest over my chest, but I didn't wear the helmet because I didn't like the way it looked on TV. You know? This is embarrassing shit to admit, but this is true. So I didn't have much training at all. And then on the back end, a few years into it, they started to offer some counseling, which I actually took advantage of because it's not like I was anti therapy. I had done therapy when I was a kid. My parents were pretty enlightened. So and that was helpful, but I think it was too late and too little to stop me from kind of going down a toilet vortex of being depressed and anxious and not knowing it and then self medicating with, I think, particularly for me, cocaine and then that making everything worse, and then down you go. And I know a lot of people who dealt with this and, you know, and then a lot of people just didn't survive because they got killed or really badly injured in the war zones. The news industry has gotten a lot smarter and better now. 

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:01:42]:
Welcome to the Local News Matters podcast, where we explore pathways to stronger journalism, better businesses, and healthier communities. I'm Tim Regan-Porter, CEO of the Colorado Press Association.  

This episode, I talk with Dan Harris, author of 10% Happier and host of the Ten Percent Happier podcast. Dan spent 21 years at ABC News, where he anchored Nightline and weekend editions of Good Morning America. He also spent years in the field covering wars, natural disasters and presidential campaigns.  After having an on-air panic attack, he turned to meditation and, despite his initial skepticism, found it transformational. He started writing and talking about it, and his books, talks and podcast have profoundly impacted many lives—including mine. 

This is the final episode in our three-part series on mental health in the newsroom, and it’s a somewhat personal one for me. Over the past decade, Dan’s work has been influential in my personal and professional journey. I was fortunate to spend some time with him in Denver earlier this year when he kicked off the Colorado Press Association convention. But even after interviewing him on stage and talking backstage, I’ll admit I felt a little nervous sitting down with such a highly skilled podcaster whose show consistently ranks among the top 100. I had the opportunity to practice my own mindfulness after a couple flubs and corrections that you'll hear, as well as some personal disclosures. 

We talk about mindfulness, meditation, and how they intersect with the realities of life, leadership and journalism. Dan shares lessons from his time as a war correspondent and as an entrepreneur navigating the ups and downs of running a business. We also discuss masculinity, male friendships, and breaking through the barriers that often keep men from forming meaningful connections. 

A quick note about the show notes: For those who want to dig deeper, I’ve included some excellent resources, including links to a couple of Dan’s podcast episodes of particular interest to this audience. One is an episode Dan shared from “Impolitic with John Heilemann”  which covers additional territory around Dan's pivot out of journalism. The other, just released, features journalist and host Sam Sanders exploring grief following losing his mom, his boyfriend and his job at NPR. They start with an interesting discussion of integrating the personal in journalism. 

I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did and come away with practical tips to apply in your own work and life.  

If you like this episode and what we're doing more generally, please follow in your favorite podcast app, leave us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, and tell your friends about us. This is a side project and a labor of love, and your support means a lot. You can find past episodes, full transcripts, and relevant links, and sign up for our newsletter at localnewsmatterspodcast.com, or for lazy typists like me at lnmpod.com. You also follow us on most social media channels @lnmpod. 

And now I bring you Dan Harris. 

Well, thank you, Dan, for joining me. This is a real pleasure. 

DAN HARRIS [00:04:33]: Thanks for having me. 

Dan Harris on his early journalism journey 

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:04:34]: Yeah. I've talked a little bit about your background in the intro. I think a lot of people will know you from ABC News, but I wanna talk a little bit about your—well, first, let me set the stage for this conversation. So, this is the third part in a series on mental health in the newsroom. I wanna talk about, you know, mindfulness and meditation, which is, you know, your full time gig now, your business. But I also wanna talk about the journey to becoming a business leader, an entrepreneur, starting your own thing. And then if we have time, I'd love to talk a little bit about masculinity and male friendships. That's a tall order, but I think those will all be valuable. 

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:05:17]: And so, you know, most of the people who know you from ABC News are very familiar with your background, you know, Nightline and Good Morning America and, you know, correspondent, war correspondent and other work there. But I didn't realize until I was listening to an NPR interview with you from last year. ABC News was your first television gig. So can you talk a little bit about your journey to journalism? 

DAN HARRIS [00:05:39]: Well, it's my first national television gig. I had been in local news for seven years prior in my so my twenties in the 1990s, I was in local news of a lot of sympathy for and, feel a lot of, support for your mission. I graduated college in ’93, and that was during a recession. I didn't actually know what I was gonna do. I had done a bunch of internships in college in news. And so I was interested in that, but I don't know. It seemed like a tough slog, and I was kind of thinking about being a paralegal. And, I had a fateful discussion with a woman who had overseen my work when I was an intern at the, what was then called the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour . 

DAN HARRIS [00:06:28]: Now it's called the PBS NewsHour. And she was like, don't be a dumbass. Don't become a paralegal. No disrespect to paralegals. She was just pointing out that was not where I was most passionate. She said, just, you know, you're a kid. Just take a risk and go to some of these small markets and see if you can get a job in television. You love television news. 

DAN HARRIS [00:06:51]: Go do that. And so I applied to a bunch of stations and was rejected everywhere. And then there was a station in Bangor, Maine that allowed me to work part-time operating the camera, during their 5:30 newscast. I was—that only lasted a couple months before they put me on the air. But in that time, I learned a ton about, specifically about how to write for the news, for visual storytelling. And I was given a book called, I think, Shorter, Sharper, Faster, or something like that. Merv Block, I think is his name. And I learned a lot about how to write short, pithy, clear sentences. 

DAN HARRIS [00:07:38]: And then I got on the air. And, I was there for another year, and then I got a job as the weekend anchor in Portland, Maine, when I was 23. And I did that for a couple of years, and then I moved to Boston when I was 25, where I was working for a cable news outfit called New England Cable News, NECN. And then when I was 28, I got a job at ABC News. It was a kind of a lark. They needed an anchor for their fun overnight show, which they still do, called, World News Now. And the guy who was anchoring it at the time was Anderson Cooper, and he was leaving, and then I got to ABC News. This was in the year 2000. 

DAN HARRIS [00:08:22]: I was as I said, I was 28. And then I got there for this job to anchor this overnight show, and then Anderson decided last minute that he didn't wanna leave. So they didn't quite know what to do with me. And so I was kind of bopping around doing some stories for the local news stations. We have a service for the affiliates, for the ABC affiliates where we provide national news, but we tailor it to the local market. So I was doing a little bit of that, and then I got a chance to do a few things for the weekend evening news. And then Peter Jennings, who was the main anchor of ABC news at that time, of the evening news on ABC, saw one of my stories and invited me to come on his show. And the rest is history. 

Ambition, anxiety and success as a young reporter 

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:09:06]: Being an anchor at 23, that's gotta be a kind of a heady experience. And then going to ABC, not much older and, you know, working with those luminaries there. How did you deal with that as a young reporter? 

DAN HARRIS [00:09:23]: Not well. Not well at all. I think I mean, I kind of toggled back and forth between arrogance, cockiness, on the one hand, and on the other hand, massive insecurity. And, of course, it was really the same thing underneath. Insecurity and anxiety, to be clear. So, yeah, I made a lot of mistakes out of hubris, overconfidence, what the kids today might call privilege. Also spent a lot of time really in a state of anxiety, believing that that anxiety was helpful for me. That's what was allowing me to do well. And to a certain extent, that's true. I mean, it's—we need some insecurity, but we generally take it way too far in ways that actually end up hobbling our resilience, our creativity, our relationships. And so I really had to learn that the hard way. 

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:10:16]: Talk about the path to, you know, to your panic attack on GMA. Was it GMA or no? 

DAN HARRIS [00:10:24]: It was okay. Yeah. GMA. 

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:10:26]: Had you been he had done war correspondents before that. And Yeah. I think you talked about signing up for that, not really keeping in mind the toll it might take on your mental health. So what was the path to getting out in the field in other countries? 

DAN HARRIS [00:10:42]: Well, 911 was really the proximate cause of all of that. I started at ABC in 2000. I was just kind of getting my sea legs as a baby correspondent for the big shows, like World News Tonight and Good Morning America, just starting to, you know, get on the air and not feel like a complete wreck all the time. Although most of the time I did. And then 911 happened. And, you know, it was the—it blotted out the sun for years. I mean, everything, all the big news stories for years after that were emerging properties of that event. So the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, the presidential election in 2004, all of these things I ended up covering. 

DAN HARRIS [00:11:26]: And I was—I think it was a mixture of ambition for sure. That was a huge thing. I wanted to be where the action was. I was young. I was hungry. And then also curiosity and idealism. You know, I really believed, and I still believe that, you know, as you say, local news matters. I mean, all news matters. 

DAN HARRIS [00:11:45]: And I believe in the mission of journalism and wanted to be bearing witness at the tip of the spear in these combat zones to—especially with Iraq, you know, I'm that was a—I really honestly deeply disagreed with that war. And, hopefully, my reporting didn't come off as activism, but I really felt a responsibility to show what the truth was because it differed from the words escaping the lips of our then president George W. Bush. So, yeah, I felt—motivations, which many of us don't really look at. You know, we kind of vaguely have a sense of what's motivating us. Actors do it. They always wanna know what their character's motivation is, but motivations bear some examination. Like, why do we do what we do? In the tradition that I've been deeply influenced by in the latter parts of my life, Buddhism. In Buddhism, there's a lot of attention paid to motivation because the quality of your action is, really depends upon your motivation, the reason why you're doing it. 

DAN HARRIS [00:12:56]: And I think motivation is generally quite mixed if we pay attention to it. And often there's a lot of selfish or maybe not so pretty stuff in there, and there's often something altruistic. And that was true for me in terms of why I ended up in war zones. And then, you know, the empowering thing for all of us is that if you've got some insight and visibility into what's motivating you, you can choose to emphasize the good stuff. That wasn't that that was not something, that was not a tool I had when I was 31 and, you know, landing in Afghanistan. 

War reporting, big-T vs. little-t trauma, and industry support 

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:13:32]: And I believe you've you've talked about that experience is what, you know, started you with some occasional drug use and that contributed to your panic attack. 

DAN HARRIS [00:13:41]: Okay. Yeah. 

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:13:42]: I have a feeling I know the answer here, but did you get any support when you were, you know, 30 years old, 31 years old, going out and becoming a war correspondent for the first time? What kind of support structures were there in place within the industry? 

DAN HARRIS [00:13:55]: What's interesting that this has really changed. Now, you know, they have all these, like, hostile conditions training, or hostile environment training. I think it's what it's called. If you're gonna go into a hostile environment, combat zone, a protest, you get taught a lot of stuff. That was not true when I went. I got no training. And we also didn't have, in the early early days, any we didn't have many rules around Kevlar or bulletproof vests and things like that. And sometimes we had them, sometimes we didn't, and there wasn't a lot of rules around when you should wear it. 

DAN HARRIS [00:14:28]: Sometimes we did, sometimes we didn't. Sometimes I wore the vest over my chest, but I didn't wear the helmet because I didn't like the way it looked on TV. You know, this is embarrassing shit to admit, but this is true. So I didn't have much training at all. And then on the back end, a few years into it, they started to offer some counseling, which I actually took advantage of. Because it's not like I was anti therapy. I had done therapy when I was a kid. My parents were pretty enlightened. 

DAN HARRIS [00:14:57]: So and that was helpful, but I think it was too late and too little to stop me from kind of going down a toilet vortex of being depressed and anxious and not knowing it and then self medicating with, I think, particularly for me, cocaine, and then that making everything worse, and then then down you go. And I know a lot of people who dealt with this, and, you know, and then a lot of people just didn't survive because they got killed or really badly injured in the war zones. It wasn't great. I think we, the news industry has gotten a lot smarter and better now. Although I'm sure it's not perfect, and I'm not in it anymore, but to my knowledge, it's a lot more considerate. And, you know, that tracks in part with the public acceptance and interest in mental health issues that which, you know, really has changed. You know, the morning I had a panic attack in 2004, I couldn't admit to people that I had a panic attack because it wasn't a thing at the time. You know, you would have been written off as weak or unqualified or green or whatever it was. 

DAN HARRIS [00:16:05]: And now, you know, my colleague, Matt Gutman, who's a practicing journalist at ABC News to this day, a very successful one, wrote a whole book about panic attacks and, which I recommend, and it's and he wasn't punished in any way for coming out of it, quite the opposite. So things have really changed. 

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:16:22]: Yeah. And we still have a long way to go, and, you know, just like the rest of the country, you know, I think we're still coming to terms with that. When you were in Denver speaking at our conference, we had someone in the crowd who was a former booker. I think that's the right term. 

DAN HARRIS [00:16:38]: Yeah. 

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:16:38]: And she just talked about the trauma of calling up people who've been through trauma themselves and trying to get them on air. And, you know, the traumas can range from being in a war zone to just the constant deadline pressure that, you know, a journalist might feel in daily newspaper jobs. I'm reading right now through, Gabor Maté's The Myth of Normal, which I know you had him on your podcast. And it's been very enlightening to me. It's fascinating. But one of the things he points is, you know, trauma comes in all sizes and the little “t” traumas can mess us up just as much as sometimes the big-T traumas, and we've got to address those. 

DAN HARRIS [00:17:17]: I think he's right about that. And I don't wanna claim to be an expert in trauma, but to the extent that I understand it, and have done a lot of interviews on it. So I have like a contact-high level of expertise. It's, especially dividing it into these two categories, I think it'd be very useful for because for people like me, I had a, you know, reasonably placid upbringing, intact family, you know, no abuse in the house or anything like that. I don't see my, I traditionally didn't see myself in that word trauma. And when you talk to somebody like Gabor Maté, he'll point out that there are big-T and small-t traumas. And Dr. Mark Epstein is a quite a well-known Buddhist psychiatrist, talks about the trauma of everyday life. 

DAN HARRIS [00:18:04]: There is trauma or difficulty or suffering in being born unsolicited and knowing you're gonna die at a time, not of your choosing, most for most of us. I mean, that's bumpy. Knowing that you will ultimately lose everything and everyone you care about. I mean, that's, we don't like to think about this shit, but these are the nonnegotiable ground rules for this being alive thing. There's trauma inherent in that, and I think that's a very useful way to think of it. And Gabor, when he was on my show, you know, really called me out on I was saying, you know, I don't think I've had trauma. And he was like, did your parents spank you? And I was like, yes. And he said, well, that's trauma. So, and I didn't know. 

DAN HARRIS [00:18:52]: Thankfully, spanking isn't a thing anymore. But it's really helpful because many of us and I know from so many of the shrinks that I know, so many of their patients are saying, are talking about this guilt. Like, how can I come in here and spend time talking to you when there's a war in Ukraine? And that's just the wrong way to look at it. Like, it is hard to be alive, and there's real benefit to the world for when you get your shit together. Like I talk about this, that there's a geopolitical case for all of us to get our shit together because then we are more useful and helpful. And so there's nothing self indulgent about examining your own big-T or small-t traumas. It's really important. 

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:19:33]: Yeah. And don't feel guilty about your level of trauma. I mean, I struggle with depression, in my twenties and early thirties, and just dealing with the guilt of feeling like, hey. I've got a pretty blessed life. You know? I've had I didn't have those traumas in my background. What am I, what am I depressed about? And just sort of being myself up for the depression. 

DAN HARRIS [00:19:53]: In Buddhism, that's referred to as the second arrow. So, as I understand it, the story is there's a guy walking through the woods. He gets hit by an arrow, mistakenly, and that hurts, obviously. But then he compounds the pain by launching into some whole story about how why does this always happen to me? I'm gonna be late for dinner. Whatever it is, that's the second arrow that we inject voluntarily, and we're doing that all the time. 

From panic attack to discovering meditation 

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:20:19]: Yeah. Absolutely. So let's talk a little bit about the path to meditation specifically. So you had the panic attack. What led you to meditation? 

DAN HARRIS [00:20:30]: The panic attack was part of it. So after I had this panic attack on Good Morning America, I that was a real “aha moment” for me. I ended up in therapy, and the shrink pointed out that most likely what caused the panic attack was having done drugs. Yeah. As you know, I wasn't high that morning, but I was the shrink said that the ambient use of illicit drugs made it, you know, changed my brain chemistry in ways that made it more likely for me to panic. So I stopped doing drugs, and I started seeing the psychiatrist once or twice a week for, I think, a decade before he got bumped upstairs to management where he still is. Shout out to Dr. Brodman. And then I saw other therapists. 

DAN HARRIS [00:21:14]: In that time, in the first few years where I was in therapy, I started to hear mentions from my therapist and from some books that I was reading of meditation. And I was very, I had no interest in meditation. None. I mean, I mentioned my parents earlier. They were both recovering hippies, and I was raised in the People's Republic of Massachusetts, and they made me go like hiking and the health food stores, and I do yoga and all this stuff. And I saw a real attitude about anything related to or associated with the new age. But I was, you know, still unhappy. I had stopped doing drugs. 

DAN HARRIS [00:21:47]: I wasn't unhappy writ large, but I still had these small-t traumas of everyday life going on, and I was still very stressed out about work. And sometimes that was making me unpleasant to myself and others, and so I still had this kind of background static of anxiety and stress, and so meditation kept coming up, and I was against it. And, finally, I started looking at or somehow somebody showed me some of the science that showed that meditation, in short, daily doses can lower your blood pressure, boost your immune system, really help with anxiety and depression, and also rewire key parts of your brain. That was probably the thing that got me, that there's all these brains, there were all these brain scans that show that, you know, the areas of the brain associated with attention regulation and with stress would change if you were doing this practice. And at that time, this was, like, 2008, 2009 when I was first getting curious about this. That research was not well publicized. So I had two responses. One was I started trying it. 

DAN HARRIS [00:22:47]: I remember I was at a shared summer house in the Hamptons with a bunch of friends, and I was kind of surreptitiously reading a book on meditation by the pool. And I was like, you know what? I'm gonna I'm just gonna, I'm gonna stop reading about this. I'm gonna go do it. And I got up and went to the room that my wife or my then fiance and I were sharing. Maybe we were married at this time. So nobody could see me, and I sat on the ground, leaned up against the bed. I am not limber enough to sit in the cross-legged position, the lotus. And I did it for five minutes, and I realized very quickly, okay. 

DAN HARRIS [00:23:22]: This is not hippie nonsense. This is mental exercise. This is exercise for the brain. You're trying to focus for a few seconds at a time or a few nanoseconds at a time, really, on the feeling of your breath coming in and going out. And then every time you get distracted, you start again and again and again. And in this way, you're really training the brain over time to get better at paying attention. And in those distractions, in those moments that many people there feel they're failing, like, they notice that they're thinking about, you know, lunch or they're planning a homicide or whatever it is. They notice how wild the mind is, and they feel like, oh, this means that I can't do it. 

DAN HARRIS [00:23:58]: I'm an ADHD journalist. Like, there's no way I can do this. But, actually, those are the moments of success because over time, the goal is to get more and more familiar with the chaos and cacophony of your mind so that it all doesn't own you as much. I think I saw that quite clearly really early, and I started doing it, you know, five minutes a day for a while. And I'm really, I remember I was at a cocktail party with my wife and the same friends, and I heard her say to somebody, “Oh, yeah, Dan started meditating, and he's less of a shithead.” And I thought that was really funny and also really indicative. And then the second impulse I had was a more entrepreneurial one was which was, okay. I was really skeptical about this thing, but now I'm doing it, and I like it. 

DAN HARRIS [00:24:43]: I mean, I don't like it. It's hard, but I am seeing the benefits of it. And, also, there's all this not so well publicized evidence for the practice. Maybe I should write about this. I had always wanted to write a book, maybe as a way to kind of counterprogram against the relentless, you know, impermanence and ephemerality of news. I wanted something a little bit more sturdy. And I saw it. This is, this would be a good book. And so, yeah, I ended up writing a book about it. 

Misconceptions about meditation 

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:25:14]: Yeah. So maybe we can talk a little bit about misconceptions and how overcoming those might help people. One of them you just alluded to, which was really transformational in my path on meditation, which was the sense that you're doing it wrong, that you should be able to just clear your mind, and that the failure is the success. Can you talk a little bit about that? 

DAN HARRIS [00:25:36]: Well, I mean, you said it really well. Clearing your mind is impossible, as I—my little joke is it's impossible unless you're enlightened or you've died. So that's the wrong goal. And because we have this goal, we think we're failing. When in fact, as you said, the failure or the quote, unquote failure is the success. The whole we're not trying to reach some special state here in meditation. We're just trying to focus our mind for a few nanoseconds at a time. And then every time we get distracted, we start again and again and again. 

DAN HARRIS [00:26:08]: That is meditation. That's the practice. And so just knowing that, because it can relax you a little bit so that you can relax into meditation. Another thing is, another major misconception is that it needs to be some time sucks, some, like, huge commitment. And as you heard me say, I started with five minutes a day. And I think if you were doing five minutes a day or, I think even better, dailyish, you need to have permission to fall off the wagon for a day or two or even a month. Nothing's been lost. You can always start again. 

DAN HARRIS [00:26:36]: And so it doesn't have to take a bunch of time. Everybody wants to know what's the least amount I can do and still get all the benefits. We don't really know, but some of the data I've seen, there's a great neuroscientist who's a friend of mine, Amishi Jha, at the University of Miami who does work specifically with high stress populations, so first responders, military folks. And what she's found is that 11 or 12 minutes appears to be the minimum effective dose. Having said that though, I think you can get a benefit from a minute of it. And all of the research around behavior change or habit formation strongly suggests that starting small is the way and being flexible. So I often recommend one minute dailyish, and then see if you can grow from there. But it's also fine if you don't grow. Even if you're—and by the way, even if you're growing into, you know, 10, 12 minutes a day practice, that's not a huge time commitment. 

DAN HARRIS [00:27:34]: And there's so much on offer. You know, we spend so much of our time working on our resume, our social media feeds, our interior design, our bodies, but no time, most of us working on the one filter through which we experience everything, and that's our mind. So I strongly recommend it. 

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:27:54]: Yeah. And, you know, one of the things you talk about, with Jeff Warren in your book, Fidgety for Meditation Skeptics or… 

DAN HARRIS [00:28:01]: Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics. Yeah. That's a long title.   

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:28:03]: Is that, you know, there's the formal sitting meditation on the cushion. And then you've walking meditation, that sort of thing, but they're also just snippets of time you can take to come back to your breath and to become aware. You just re aired a podcast with a former BBC journalist, who's now a Buddhist monk, Sister True Dedication. And she talked about when she was at the BBC of just quietly, no one else was noticing it, but, you know, getting up to go to the water cooler and treating that as a walking meditation. These little snippets of time she could take to bring meditation into a very hectic work environment. 

DAN HARRIS [00:28:41]: My coauthor on that book, Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics, was a guy named Jeff Warren, who's an amazing meditation teacher, still a very close friend. And I think he used the phrase, he talked about slotting little moments of mindfulness into the interstices of your day. So, like, having a kind of interstitial approach to all of this. And so I think it's great if you've got a formal practice of a minute or five minutes or 10 minutes or whatever, first thing in the morning or, you know, on a lunch break or right before bed. That's great. But also there are these little moments throughout the day of, okay, I'm gonna, I have to walk between meetings. Instead of looking at my phone and maybe bumping into a wall or whatever it is, can I just feel my hamstrings or feel my arms swinging or feel the temperature change as I move between outdoors and indoors? Just tuning into the raw data of my physical sensations for 10, 15 seconds. Can I, at the beginning of lunch, dedicate the first two or three bites to actually tasting the food? To bring—this is a way to bring you south of the neckline, out of the spinning stories of your head and into your actual lived experience. 

DAN HARRIS [00:29:56]: And that the more you do that, the better you'll get at it. And you'll notice, oh, okay. This moment that heretofore would have been really annoying, like, I'm standing on line, and I'm frustrated. Oh, well, actually, no. This is a little break. Can I just feel my feet? Can I notice the colors in my environment? And this is giving your brain a really helpful break. And this is a well—this is a break that can be a wellspring for not only sanity and stress reduction, but also creativity, resilience. There's a lot here. 

Meditation and maintaining your edge 

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:30:25]: And one of the obstacles you addressed in your first book and even in the subtitle, and you talked about it a lot on the podcast, although you've done it much less in the past few years, was that fear of losing your edge and that meditation might actually make you lose your edge or facilitate, you know, contribute to that, and that is not the case. So can you talk a little bit about that? 

DAN HARRIS [00:30:45]: I think what I was doing there, what I was worried about, what if I got too happy, I'll be ineffective is misunderstanding what happiness is. It was actually conflating happiness with complacency. Like, my friend, Sam Harris, has joked, like, you know, you're gonna start meditating and then spend the rest of your life eating ice cream. That's not how it works. I wish the technology worked that well, that it you know, you got so happy that nothing mattered and you weren't ambitious and you didn't care about making great stuff and having an impact in the world. And that's just it doesn't work that way. It, by the way, it doesn't also doesn't conquer in my experience, it does not thoroughly conquer your neurosis. So all of the less attractive motivations for being successful will still be there, but you may just be less owned by them. 

DAN HARRIS [00:31:35]: And I think over time, you can—we talked about this before we’re coming back now to motivation. Like, is it possible that over time—you know, this is something I play with. Like, that over time, you can turn the dial so that you're motivated less by insecurity or ancient story lines or your grudges or traumas and more motivated by, and I'm gonna use a loaded word here, love. I don't mean love like romantic love, although when I talk about love, it's kind of inclusive of every form of giving a shit. So and it, the problem in our language is we only have one word, but in other languages, there are, like, 12 words for love. So everything from basic friendliness to all beings everywhere to romantic love to friendship to, and I know you wanna talk about friendship, to familial love. And that I think is a really clean burning fuel for the ambitious person, for a journalist, for an activist, for a physician. Can you tune—you're not gonna, I don't think, get all the way there that it motivates everything you do. 

DAN HARRIS [00:32:45]: But to the extent that you can, it's a recipe for greater effectiveness. You know, the Dalai Lama talks a lot about this, and there's a way in which you can reduce the Dalai Lama to a character, this guy with a funny laugh and the robes and the interesting hats and all that. But, really, he's a canny political operator who's managed to keep the Tibetan cause in the headlines for decades when it went up against a massive superpower of China. And he talks a lot about how his motivation is not revenge or hatred of the Chinese. It's the benefit of all beings, including the Chinese. His argument is it's bad for them to be oppressors. And I like that. 

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:33:29]: Yeah. And as you alluded to, you know, I think getting taming that voice in your head and becoming less of an asshole to yourself can also help you do better work. You're tuned in to what's going on and less reactive. 

DAN HARRIS [00:33:41]: Yes. Absolutely. 

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:33:43]: At the same time, you know, you used a phrase in a recent podcast that I hadn't heard, the subtle aggression of self improvement. And I think that's something I felt challenged on myself because, you know Yeah. We have step counters. We have all sorts of ways to measure our lives, and meditation could easily become one of those. 

DAN HARRIS [00:34:03]: That's not my phrase. I love it. But it's stolen from somebody. I don't know who, but it's amazing. And it's illuminating because you can look at what—here we go with motivation again. Like, why am I doing that? Why whatever resolution you've just made or habit you're trying to boot up, why are you doing it? Are you doing it because some aging, washed up anchorman told you to do it on a podcast? Or are you doing it because you want the abs of your favorite Instagram influencer? Are you doing it because your parents never showed you enough affection or because you always felt like an outsider in high school? Or you are you doing it to meet external needs or the culture's expectations, the aesthetic arbitrary, the arbitrary aesthetic standards that the culture sets for like the way a body should look or whatever. Is that what's driving you? Or you're doing it because you, you have like some basic sense of self worth? It doesn't have to be narcissism. That's actually, I think, a misfiring. Or for me, if self worth or self love doesn't land for you. 

DAN HARRIS [00:35:08]: And I think for many of us, it makes us a little uncomfortable. And for me, I just think about when okay. When I hop on the Peloton or the elliptical or about to go running, just pause for a second. Like, why am I doing this? Well, I have a 10 year old son. I would like to be healthy for as long as I can so that he's got his dad in his life. My work, I think, has a lot of, if I do a good job, it has a lot of potential to impact a lot of people, and that's true for everybody listening here because if you're a journalist, it's an incredibly important societal function. I wanna be good at that. I wanna be strong and healthy to help other people be strong and healthy is a little thing I say to myself. To me, getting back to a cleaner burning fuel, that's better than subconscious self hatred. 

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:35:52]: And you alluded earlier too to that. This doesn't solve all your problems. Right? That's why I like the 10% Happier name. When you spoke at the convention, a couple of the comments I heard, you know, afterwards was how surprised people were that some of the, you know, issues, the panic attacks and anxiety is still something you struggle with. You brought your son. It's great seeing him. And I think you referenced having an episode in an elevator not that long ago. And [Yeah.] And I think people had expected, oh, well, you're doing this podcast for many years now, and you're beyond all of that. 

DAN HARRIS [00:36:28]: So it's this little line that I've been using recently is, some experts teach from the mountain top. I teach from the fetal position. So I'm not perfected. I still, as you alluded to, Tim, I still have panic attacks. I still, you know, deal with anxiety. And I think, honestly, some of these experts, put a gun to their heads, they'll admit this stuff. I'm just much more willing to admit it. 

DAN HARRIS [00:36:55]: And, also, I'm probably, you know, less evolved than some of these guys, so it's probably a mix. But I have skin in the game. I am doing my podcast and writing my books and posting on social media. I do this in no small measure because I'm, you know, a normal person who has anxiety and can tip over to depression sometimes, and I'm trying to deal with this to the best of my ability. And my whole brand is about being honest about that and then sharing what I've learned and using this amazing training I got as a journalist to separate wheat from chaff and, like, understand, like, who's bullshit, who's not, who's got evidence behind what they're saying, who doesn't, and to do some curation for the audience, and then also to test it in the laboratory of my own mind. So, yeah, you're not listening to the Dalai Lama, who, by the way, I've interviewed many times and is fully willing to admit that he still gets into a bad mood, and he would not call himself enlightened or perfected at all. 

The pantheon of no brainers: Other tools for mental health and well-being 

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:37:57]: So you're a meditation evangelist, but you on your podcast and in your talks, you know, you recognize there it's, this is not a cure all, and it's not the only thing that, you know, is super important for health and tools that people can try out. And in your podcast recently, you've had episodes on journaling, on getting out nature, you know, exercise, reading. What are some other tools people might think about? And then I wanna ask you, too, what are your nonnegotiables? 

DAN HARRIS [00:38:27]: I think I can answer them at the same time, those two questions. You know, just to step back for a second. I think to the extent that anybody knows who I am, I think I'm kind of the meditation guy. I think that's my reputation. However, in recent years, I pivoted a little bit, and I think you'd have to be a pretty avid listener to my podcast to know this. And most people, of course, are not avid listeners to my—I would love if more people were, but my point here is that I've really broadened my focus. Absolutely. 

DAN HARRIS [00:38:58]: I do think meditation is incredibly valuable. And when I started this second career of mine in this space, I was really interested in meditation because at that time, it was not socially acceptable. And so I was trying to make it acceptable to more people. So I've not in any way diminished my focus on meditation, but I've added in over 700 interviews, on my show. I've added in basically every aspect of doing life better, of human flourishing. And I have, and I sometimes blow this, but I have a kind of list that I refer to as the pantheon of no brainers. Just the evidence-based levers that are there to be pulled if you wanna have a happier, healthier, more successful life. So meditation absolutely is one of them. 

DAN HARRIS [00:39:46]: And let me be clear, you don't have to do all of these things. I actually think, especially at the beginning, you shouldn't try to do all of these. You should pick, like, one and test it for yourself and see if it works. And if not, try something else. So these are all—I’m kind of dogmatically non-dogmatic about this, But these are, what I'm about to list are things that I do and levers or modalities for which there's a lot of evidence. So meditation. Therapy. If you want, medication if you think it would be helpful and your therapist is down. Exercise is a huge one, but I would put the asterisk that you should just get in touch with why you're exercising. Are you trying to keep up with, again, arbitrary aesthetic standards that may have nothing to do with underlying and deeply valid health metrics? 

DAN HARRIS [00:40:36]: Same for healthy eating. I eat cookies. So I don't think you wanna be super strict about this. And there are many pitfalls when you get into healthy eating, but it's important nonetheless. Sleep is huge. I sometimes call this the apex predator of healthy habits because it's like nothing functions without it. But nature—and I would lump in with nature, like beauty of all sorts. There's a lot of evidence to show that aesthetic experience, either as a maker or a beholder, is really good for you. There's a great book on this called Your Brain on Art. 

DAN HARRIS [00:41:11]: So nature and aesthetic experiences of all kinds. And then finally, and I'm saving this one for last because I think it is genuinely the most important. I probably should call this one the apex predator, but the most important thing to do if you're interested in being healthy, happy, and successful is to work on the quality of your relationships. Like, this is the thing, and nobody's talking about this on Instagram. This isn't what we get sold, but this is the kind of red pill people should be—this is a healthy red pilling because we are being misled by the culture about what makes us happy. The implicit and sometimes very explicit message is it's about consumption. And again, I'm not an anti capitalist, but the next purchase is not going to do it for you. The quality of your relationships will, in the words of my friend Esther Perel, the great couples counselor, the qualities of the quality of your relationships will determine the quality of your life. 

DAN HARRIS [00:42:14]: And this is not me just pontificating. There's a study at Harvard. It's the longest studying, longest running study in the history of science called the Harvard study for adult development. And they've been following several generations of people in the Boston area. And the goal was to figure out over nearly 90 years, like, what are the variables for a long and healthy and happy life? And it's super clear that healthy eating and sleep and all that matters for sure. But the most important thing is the quality of your relationships. Why? Because it reduces your stress. It helps you manage life's inevitable ups and downs, and stress is what kills us generally. 

DAN HARRIS [00:42:53]: And so if you can regulate that and moderate that, you're winning. And what's cool is that relationships or you might use the word love. It's not like, oh, well, I'm an introvert, so I'm fucked. Or, I had unhappy childhood, for which that's a real problem. And that sucks if you've had an unhappy childhood. But the ability to learn how to relate to yourself and others, that's a skill. That's a learnable skill. It's not an unalterable factory setting. 

DAN HARRIS [00:43:25]: And that's incredibly good news. There are a whole set of skills that you can practice that will improve the way you relate to yourself, which will improve the way you relate to others from communication skills, from self compassion, from meditation, there's this whole body of work around micro interactions, just like getting better at having a kind word with your barista, which can have a huge psychological impact. And so I'm actually, as you can tell, quite excited about this, and it is the subject of my next book, which I have not been able to complete after six and a half years, but I'm still working to get there. 

Never worry alone 

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:44:03]: I wanna talk more about relationships a little later, but I do wanna, bring up a couple things that are relevant to that. You've talked about this on a number of podcasts, but I think it first came up, when you were doing tips to deal with election anxiety. And one of the tips was never worry alone, which has really struck me, and I know it struck you. You talk a little bit about that. 

DAN HARRIS [00:44:23]: I've thought about naming the book that. I have a title that I like better that I think is funny, but a lot of people don't get the joke. I still may call the book Me, A Love Story because I think that's funny. But, some people think it's, like, blatantly narcissistic, but that's just not getting the joke, or maybe it's just a stupid joke. Anyway, never worry alone, also not my expression, is a brilliant piece of life of life advice. Our society, it's so interesting, and I've said this before, and so I apologize if I'm being repetitive. I say this a lot publicly. I haven't said it yet in this podcast, but it's something I think about a lot, out loud. 

DAN HARRIS [00:45:01]: We are a social species, as you said. But we got to the top of the food chain for better or worse, not because we have wings or fangs or size. It's because we have the ability to cooperate and communicate. And yet, nobody teaches us how to do it. You know, like, we have home ec, we get physical education, history, math, but basic interpersonal and intrapersonal hygiene, generally not taught. And that's a huge oversight given that this is going to determine your success in life and your health and happiness. And the other thing about the culture is that we're massively individualistic and consumption-oriented and now lonely, because we've created a world that just kinda militates against social connection at every turn. And I don't think it's a coincidence that we are in the middle of an unprecedented spike in anxiety, depression, suicide, addiction, and loneliness. 

DAN HARRIS [00:45:59]: This is a huge problem. A huge problem in that it's causing massive unhappiness. I think it's fueling the social divides we're seeing, and it's also very expensive and bad for the economy because sick time and burnout and—burnout, by the way, is another thing that's on the rise. So never worry alone. It's just a long, it's just a pithy way of pointing to the fact that if you wanna be able to survive life's ups and downs, it's a great, a great way to counterprogram against what the culture is often pushing us to do, which is to self medicate with our phones, with, you know, individual achievement, all of which is fine in moderation, but it's not what's gonna carry the day for you. 

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:46:41]: And then the last thing before we go on to leadership, I think this might be helpful particularly to a lot of journalists and just ambitious people in general, and that's the concept of prapañca. Can you talk a little bit about what that is and just that voice in your head that can get you stuck? 

DAN HARRIS [00:46:57]: One of the things I love about Buddhism, and I know I've talked about Buddhism a lot and maybe just to say this, it can be practiced as a religion, but there are many people who don't, and myself included, who don't practice it as a religion. There are some there's no god in Buddhism, but there are, for sure, some metaphysical claims and claims about karma and enlightenment and multiple realms of existence for which there, I have seen no evidence. But the Buddha was very explicit that you can take or leave all of that. You know? His little slogan was see for yourself. So test it in the lab of your own mind. So I don't know about reincarnation personally, but I do know that this is a brilliant system, many parts of it now validated by modern science, for improving your life. You know? Both the ethics and also the mental exercises, are have, you know, can have a huge impact. And so one of the amazing things that happens in the Dharma or Buddhism is that they have names for little things that all of us experience, but have never named before. 

DAN HARRIS [00:47:59]: And so I'm sure you've had the experience where something happens. You have a thought or somebody says something or you stub your toe, and you immediately make a whole mental movie, like a, mostly a horror movie about what's gonna happen as a result. Like, my boss gives me a look that I don't quite understand, and then it's like, oh, he doesn't like me or she doesn't like me, and that's gonna, I'm not gonna get that next promotion. I'm gonna live under a bridge. It's just that fast, and that's prapañca. It's, one of the translations is the imperialistic tendency of mind. Something happens right now, and then we colonize the future with our phantasmagoric projections. And it's just so helpful to have it named because then you can catch yourself doing it. Oh, yeah. That's prapañca. And prapañca, these projections can make you do dumb stuff. So you wanna get a handle on it, have some mindfulness of it so that you're not so owned by it. 

Navigating the split with the Ten Percent Happier app co-founders 

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:48:56]: Alright. So let's talk about leadership and entrepreneurship and your journey there. When you were in Denver, it was just before you announced the breakup in your company. And we talked a little bit about that. And, you know, the fact that in this industry and most industries, this industry being journalism, we don't prepare people for leadership, and we certainly don't prepare them for entrepreneurship. And it's also a heady thing. Why don't we start with that breakup? And I know that was a difficult experience for you. What have you learned about your own practice and mental health in going through that? 

DAN HARRIS [00:49:35]: Sure. I'll describe what happened. I'll say a little bit about what I learned, but this will prove that what a lucky, or privileged, I don't love that word but, privileged person I am, that this breakup was probably, it was among the worst things that I've ever gone through. And I don't wanna paint myself to be a victim here. I made plenty of mistakes in this process, so it's, but I started back in 2015. I co-founded a meditation app called Ten Percent Happier. And over time, developed, more recently developed some interpersonal and some financial and creative differences with my cofounders. And so we split. And it was incredibly painful as a protracted negotiation, and I experienced a lot of fear and anger during all of this. 

DAN HARRIS [00:50:23]: As I keep saying, I made a ton of dumb decisions during, you know, and probably didn't behave at my best at times. And so one thing to say is that you can do practices like meditation and, you know, life's still gonna happen to you. There's a great book title, After the Ecstasy, the Laundry. You know, you can do practices, and I've had, like, transcendent experiences on meditation retreats and but then, you know, you get into a conflict. And people I know who run large meditation centers and have been doing this for decades, they still have, you know, political differences and I'm not talking about national politics. I'm talking about, like, political differences within the organization, and I've seen both marital and corporate divorces in the meditation world. And it's just, you know, life is still gonna keep coming at you. And the idea is that hopefully you're just dealing with it more skillfully. 

DAN HARRIS [00:51:18]: And so I think I made a bunch of mistakes, but not nearly as many mistakes, I don't think as I would have made with an untrained mind. Another thing I learned is that life is not always gonna be an unbroken upward trajectory. There's this escalator theory that I think many of us, I think intellectually, we understand that life's gonna evolve a lot of ups and downs, but viscerally, we expect an escalator. That's just an unbroken, like, glide path up upwards, but that you have to expect adversity. That's a tough mind state to be in, and life will remind you. And so this was a big, big chunk of adversity for me, and I think it—one of the things I learned is to be a little less surprised when I get nasty surprises. 

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:52:09]: Yeah. If I understood correctly from our brief conversation in the green room, you know, a lot of this came to a head, as you were leaving ABC News to do this full time. And you discovered a lot of it was relational. Right? How your role now changes. You're being perceived perhaps differently in part because of that, in part because of the politics, you know, that were going on. And that's something I don't think people who are new to leadership are prepared for. You know, you're the same, you're the same Dan, but your role is different. You’re—perceptions of you are different. 

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:52:44]: And, you know, anybody in any type of organization who goes from solo performer to manager, can experience that that, you know, you're the same person, but your power relation, the power dynamics are different 

DAN HARRIS [00:52:56]: Yeah. 

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:52:57]: And you're being treated differently. And that can be hard to adjust to. 

DAN HARRIS [00:53:00]: It really can. And it's interesting because in some ways, I was a leader in the newsroom and in the, you know, to the extent that anybody watched my shows, I guess, in the culture a little, a tiny little bit, but that's different from really being the, you know, face and figurehead of an entire organization. At our peak, we had 70 people. So it's, you know, it's a small business, but it's not nothing. It's not, it's not nobody. And I also, this was, I didn't, I was untrained. I didn't, I was insufficiently sensitive to the fact that when you're in that position, everybody's gonna be scrutinizing every facial tick through the lens of, am I safe? Does this person like me? Did I do a good job? And I just was blinded to that, even though of course, it's too super hypocritical because I was doing that to my bosses, but I just didn't—it was not crystallized for me. And so one of the things that's—one of the things that's really helped is to have an executive coach who can really point out some of my, you know, being a dummy. 

DAN HARRIS [00:54:04]: So I work with this guy, Jerry Colona, who lives and works in Colorado, although he travels quite a bit. He's got a company called Reboot, and they do executive coaching. He's excellent. And not everybody can have an executive coach, and I understand that. Jerry wrote a book called Reboot, which is about the art of leadership,  so I recommend that as something people could take a look at as a resource. And one of Jerry's primary insights is that if you're not dealing with your stuff, you are gonna pass your pathology along willy-nilly throughout your organization. And that could that's true whether you're at the top of the pyramid or you're a middle manager or you're—we're all leaders in some way. We're all trying to work with other people to get them to see things our way, to do what we want them to do. 

DAN HARRIS [00:54:50]: And so if you don't get a handle on, like, what are the ghosts in the machine for you? What are your demons? And you don't have a relationship, a healthy relationship with them, then they're gonna control you. And, that will really have deleterious effects when you're in a leadership position, and it did for me. 

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:55:10]: Yeah. Yeah. And one of the quotes that he's known for to the extent that he's known is how are you complicit in creating the conditions that you say you don't want. And I think that's also a good thing for leaders to ponder for sure. 

DAN HARRIS [00:55:23]: Yes. Totally agree. 

Handling criticism as a leader 

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:55:25]: You know, and you've talked about on your podcast, and I think this predated all of this, was 360. Was that at ABC News, your first 360, or was that at Ten Percent Happier? 

DAN HARRIS [00:55:33]: So it was at both, back in 2018. This actually goes back to the sore spot issue of me, of my next book, which I haven't been able to finish. But the next book is about this story. So back in 2018, I worked with Jerry to get a 360 review. For the uninitiated, a 360 review is kind of like an anonymous survey of your bosses, peers, and direct reports to get a sense of your strengths and weaknesses. And Jerry, I had this idea, this, like, stunty idea to include my wife and my brother and a few of friends, like Joseph Goldstein, the eminent meditation teacher. 16 people did hour-long anonymous interviews with Jerry's team, and then I got a 39-page report. And I just kind of thought I was—I didn't think that much about it. 

DAN HARRIS [00:56:20]: I was in the stage of, like, I was four years into being a quasi self-help guru, and I was really busy. And I had a full time, more than full time job at ABC News, but I also had a meditation app and this podcast, and I was speaking and writing books. And I was totally overwhelmed, and I thought the 360 was a good idea as a conceit for a book, but I didn't really think much about what the results would be. And I deliberately loaded the recipients up with people that I'd had conflict with at work, at both ABC and in my 10% Happier world. Because, again, I wanted to amp up the conflict, but I really was not thinking what the results could be, which is, again, I know, incredibly stupid, but this is the truth. And then I read it in July of 2018, and it was devastating. It was devastating. There were so many things that I had. 

DAN HARRIS [00:57:08]: I kinda, one of the hardest parts was that there were aspects of my own personality that I was really ashamed of that I thought I was hiding, but were clearly on full display, like my—in particular, my selfishness and my penchant for anger. And indeed, the four things that showed up in the four areas of needed growth, to put it in corporate speak, were impatience, stubbornness, dismissiveness, emotional—I'm always, I always mangle this list, but emotional guardedness. It's something, that's basically the list. And it was a massive wake up call for me, and I've spent the years since then really working on the deficiencies that were identified in the report. And three years after that report, I got another 360. It was completely different. And so the headline here is that you can work on this stuff. I took communications coaching. 

DAN HARRIS [00:58:07]: I did ongoing executive coaching with Jerry. I did, I moved into a different kind of meditation called loving kindness meditation, which is really designed to increase your capacity for friendliness. I did a lot of research into—I did couples counseling with my wife. I think more people should do, especially if even if you're in a healthy relationship as I was and am, that it can really, romantic relationships entail a lot of work, and there are skills and practices in there that that can really help. And so I've been working on this book, and, I thought after that second 360 back in 2021 that I had the final scene, I was good to go. But it's been a very hard book to write, and I think it'll come out in 2026. 

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:58:55]: That's good to hear about the improvement. You know, it can be hard to face up to those. You know, you, I think a lot of people in this field think they're very self aware, and so they already know their shortcomings, and they don't necessarily wanna hear it reinforced. What was the key to really making those improvements and taking in that criticism in a productive way? 

DAN HARRIS [00:59:17]: I think that for me, the key was this loving kindness practice. And specifically, so let me just say it. Loving kindness practice is an ancient meditative practice allegedly invented by the Buddha himself as an antidote to fear actually and to anxiety. It has also been studied quite extensively in the labs in recent decades and has been shown to have psychological, physiological, and behavioral benefits, and meaning that it changes the way people behave. Preschoolers who were taught this meditation are more likely to give stickers away to kids they don't like. So it's a very powerful inner technology, and it's gonna sound very annoying because it is, at least at first to many people, but you basically call to mind a series of beings. You,  you know, you're, some, an easy person, yourself, usually not an easy person, but often we start with an easy person then you move to yourself, a mentor, a neutral person, somebody you see often but don't don't pay much attention to, a difficult person, and then finally, everybody everywhere. And then you repeat, you call them to mind individually and repeat phrases in your mind to each person. 

DAN HARRIS [01:00:29]: May you be happy, healthy, safe, live with ease. And I've joked that it can feel like Valentine's Day with a gun to your head, but—and it kinda is at the beginning. It's like, if, you know, you landed from another planet and went to a gym, and you saw people systematically picking up and putting down heavy stuff or running in place for 45 minutes, that would look ridiculous too. But that's what exercise is. You're training specific muscles. And we have within us this capacity for friendliness or love, benevolence, and it needs to be trained for most of us. And in particular, the angle for me that was the, that kind of unlocked all of this was having friendliness toward myself. And specifically, it wasn't like a, yes, I think it's good to have a writ large overall friendly attitude toward yourself, but where the rubber hits the road is, can you be okay with your neurosis and your dark sides? So for me, can I be okay with the fact that, yeah, I have the capacity for selfishness? I have the capacity for a lot of anger. Can I make friends with those demons? Can I high five them as a form of radical disarmament? Because we tend to compartmentalize, deny, or indulge, our demons. 

DAN HARRIS [01:01:45]: But, actually, there's another move, which is to be, to recognize, oh, yeah. This is an ancient inner program that's trying to help me. It's the organism trying to protect itself, but it's not doing a good job. But so thank you. Thank you, anger. Thank you, selfishness, narcissism, whatever, but I'm gonna choose a different path. And that's, that thank you, that having a sense of humor and warmth even toward my stuff changed my own inner weather that allowed me, that boosted my capacity to be available for other people. And since your relationships are the key to your own happiness, as those relationships improved, my inner weather got even better, and then the relationships improved even further. And I call this the cheesy upward spiral, and it's really the insight at the heart of my book. 

Maintaining your team’s well being 

TIM REGAN-PORTER [01:02:37]: Well, now you've got, you know, your own company. You've got a new team. How do you approach that as a leader in maintaining their own mental health? And what's your approach there, and how has your own journey really influenced that? 

DAN HARRIS [01:02:55]: Well, one thing that I really try to pay attention to—well, two things. In terms of the health of my team, you know, you I don't think as a manager, you can take on everybody's psychology as your thing. I think you can create an environment where people feel safe and comfortable and where you're not overworking people. So these are all works, this is all a work in progress for me because it, this is really now the first time I've had my own team. But really trying to think about how are we, do we have enough balance in the system? I tend to work really hard. This is because I'm totally obsessed with this business. And so how do I, you know, I try to think a lot about not sending the signal to people that you should work as much as I am. 

DAN HARRIS [01:03:43]: So really, you know, emphasizing the importance of vacation, taking time off, we use, we have a little phrase we use internally, sanely ambitious. Like, let's pick ambitious goals, but let's do them sanely. That's one thing. The other thing is this, the idea of psychological safety, which kinda sounds a little boring or I don't know what, but it has been studied a lot, and it is the key for a healthy functioning team. Everybody at every level should feel safe to speak up and speak out. And so that was actually one of the things I got dinged for in my 360, which was that I was not good with junior employees, which was a huge body blow for me because I thought I was. And so I'm now really paying attention to it. Like, I wanna hear what you have to say even if you're 25, especially if you're 25 because, we do a lot of new media, you know, or what we now call new media, social media, etcetera, etcetera. 

DAN HARRIS [01:04:36]: And those guys grew up with this stuff. They understand it way better than I do. So those are the two things on my mind. Like, can I, can we have some sense of balance on the team, and do people feel safe to speak their minds? Again, these are, if you were to talk to my team members, I'm sure they would criticize. I think they would have some healthy criticism. So I'm not saying I'm perfect, but these are north stars. 

TIM REGAN-PORTER [01:04:59]: Yeah. And then finally, in this section, I wanna talk about the journey to entrepreneurship. You know, I think in my podcast, we'll have a number of journalists who've started things or are thinking about starting something, and most of them aren't going from the level of ABC News to, you know, a top listened to podcast and meditation app. But still, I imagine that that felt risky. And you imagine there was a sense of responsibility you have for the salaries and well-being of your team. Talk about that, that journey and then how you absorb that burden. 

DAN HARRIS [01:05:32]: Sometimes there's this expression that we should teach from scars, not wounds. So people in my position should talk about things, you know, lessons we've really had time to absorb. In some ways, I worry this is more of a wound in the—because it's all so new, but it's definitely a thing I'm thinking about a lot. So I have my own team now, and running a company is like a running existential crisis. You know, there's this constantly—just the other day, we got an email that indicated that $500,000 might disappear from our balance sheet, and it's just like, oh, shit. You know, how are we gonna deal with this? And, I don't think it's actually gonna be that bad, but it—still we're gonna take a hit, because of some wrinkles in the podcast industry and blah blah blah. And how can I manage my own anxiety so that I'm not making the lives of my employees hell? And so I'm working on that now, and I think, you know, Jerry Colona, who I still work with, is really helpful in this regard. It's an ongoing thing. 

DAN HARRIS [01:06:39]: I don't think there's a, you arrive at a place of perfection and then just dwell there for the rest of your life, just as we don't eat ice cream for the rest of your life. It's, you get a little bit of ice cream, and then it melts. 

Masculinity, male friendships and emotional openness 

TIM REGAN-PORTER [01:06:53]: So then in the final section, I wanna talk about masculinity and male friendships. This was actually suggested by a former podcast guest, Karen Renlund. Before she knew that we were inviting you out to the convention, she recommended your podcast as one of her recommended listens. And when she found out you're coming on the podcast, she said she'd be fascinated to hear about sort of your thoughts on masculinity and male friendship, which you've talked some about recently. And, you know, as you alluded to earlier, loneliness is an epidemic. The surgeon general has been talking about that. There have been a lot of good books on that recently, and particularly male loneliness. And you have a son who's, what, 11? 10, 11? And I'm sure you're thinking about that as a father. And, you know, given what you said earlier about relationships, which I agree with intellectually, I'm having a hard time operationalizing it, relationships being the most important thing. 

DAN HARRIS [01:07:49]: Yeah. 

TIM REGAN-PORTER [01:07:50]: And I think 

DAN HARRIS [01:07:50]: Are you an introvert? 

TIM REGAN-PORTER [01:07:52]: I am an introverted extrovert, I think. I am very risk averse. I don't mind doing a podcast or being up in front of people, but it can be hard for me to make close friendships. 

DAN HARRIS [01:08:04]: Yeah. Well, so just to say about introverts, I mean, you don't need as many friends if you're an introvert. But you still do need friends, and all sorts of relationships, family relationships. And if you're in the market, romantic relationships and casual relationships. That's, what is sometimes referred to as the micro interactions, good work relationships. And, yeah, I think it, there's particular challenges for men because we're not really socialized in this way. You know, there's this kind of myth of, like, rugged individualism and independence, and, I think it's a real problem. I don't know if you ever saw this iconic SNL, Saturday Night Live, skit where wives and girlfriends take their emotionally imbecilic husbands and boyfriends to a dog park or a dog run, and meet other awkward men. And they're all talking about, what, a Star Trek or whatever. 

DAN HARRIS [01:08:58]: So I, you know, I just acknowledge at this outset here that it's hard and awkward and weird for many people, and it's doable. So for somebody like you, I mean, one great way to meet people and have real relationships is to join an affinity group or volunteer. You know, if there's a thing that you really like to do, if it's golf or running or board games or whatever it is, join a group to do that. That is a great way to meet people. And then, second, volunteering, you know, is tapping into something that often you really care about. If it's animals or, you know, a food kitchen or soup kitchen or a local meditation group or whatever it is, something you're volunteering. You're gonna meet people who you're gonna have a lot of in common with, and that can be huge. For me, you know, one of the things I learned in my 360 is that I didn't even include any friends, like, close personal friends. 

DAN HARRIS [01:10:01]: I included some meditation teachers that I was also friends with, but I didn't include any of my personal friends because, honestly, I was so busy that a lot of those relationships had withered. And this 360 was a wake up, and then when I retired from ABC News, I had more time, especially on the weekends because I had been working on weekend Good Morning America. And so and then I suffered for a little bit shortly after that because I felt like those relationships that I had in my thirties and twenties had really atrophied. And so now I'm, like, really attentive to that. I have several groups where we have recurring dinners. So, there are two former ABC News colleagues of mine, Whit Johnson and Rob Marciano. Rob's now at CBS. And I got a text this morning from Whit to Rob and I. 

DAN HARRIS [01:10:54]: We have a recurring dinner, and we hadn't met up in a while. And Witt was like, can you do it last minute tonight? And I, like, changed things around so I could do it. And I have another group. These are women, actually, three female friends of mine, and we have dinners every quarter. And at the end of the last dinner, we schedule the next one. And, I've had two dads from this area where I live up here. I live in the suburbs now, and, you know, it's not as target rich an environment for friendships as the city was. And so, like, when I meet somebody I like, I really collect them. 

DAN HARRIS [01:11:27]: And we have a recurring dinner, and I've got two guys that I go on meditation retreats with. And it's not just, like, being super diligent. I've got a lunch group with my brother and our other friend, Josh, that's been going for, I think, 15 years. So it's about looking for and then nurturing these relationships. And sometimes there's a lot of risk and discomfort in it. You have to decide, am I gonna, you know, for you, you say you have trouble creating close friendships. It, there's gonna be some risk in there, like, let me run let me run an experiment. Let me say something to somebody that I might not otherwise said, that I might not otherwise say. 

DAN HARRIS [01:12:05]: In fact, I think you did it in this interview where you said I have trouble sometimes making close friendships. That's an experiment. That's a risk. That's being vulnerable to use Brene Brown's language. And that's a good thing to do. Sometimes it's not gonna work. People won't pick up on it or they won't care or they're made uncomfortable by it, but you try that every once in a while. And then, because that's how things get deeper, faster. Yeah. Does any of that land for you? 

TIM REGAN-PORTER [01:12:33]: Yeah. Absolutely. No. Those are good tips. Writ large, you know, do you have any thoughts—you know, we, this past election, there was a lot of talk about working class males and alienation and anxiety, and I think a lot of that stems from, you know, some of the things you were referencing earlier, the rugged individuality and being taught not to be vulnerable. You know? How do you think about that as someone in the mindfulness field and as a father? 

DAN HARRIS [01:13:01]: I think it's a real problem. I think it's a real problem, and I worry about it. And I think one of the answers is, you know, the skills we're talking about in this conversation. I think there's some structural things too. There are some societal cultural things. I think a lot of these men feel the economic opportunities have been diminishing. I think they rightly or wrongly feel that they've been made into quite literally the bad guys. They may be threatened by some of the social justice stuff that's happened, and maybe some of the social justice stuff has you know, maybe some of the messaging has, needs to be recalibrated. 

DAN HARRIS [01:13:40]: Yeah. I think so. I think there's a lot going on here. I would not claim to be an expert. Lewis Howes, who's a podcast host, has written about, like, the mask of masculinity and this need many of us have to be stoic, not in the healthy sense. You know, stoicism has come back in recent years, and I think that's quite healthy. But to be unemotional. I mean, this is a huge problem for me, and this is one of the things that was talked about in my 360 with this emotional guardedness or unavailability. That's a very masculine thing. 

DAN HARRIS [01:14:11]: You know, we're speaking in generalities here, but that can be a really masculine thing. My wife even said in the 360, I've never seen him cry. So, yeah, that's that. And then with my son, you know, when he cries, if he's apologetic about it, I really try to be like, no. It is okay and normal to cry. I wish my emotional range were larger so that you saw me do it. And yeah. I mean, I do cry more now, actually. It's fine. 

DAN HARRIS [01:14:34]: It's not frequent, but my wife's father died recently. We were in the room for it, and I didn't have a particularly close relationship with him, but I was so upset about the impact I knew it was gonna have on his family that I cried. I think that might have been the first time my wife had seen me cry in, like, 17 years of knowing each other. 18 years. TikTok serves me a lot of videos of reunions for, among soldiers who just came home and their family, and that but that'll get me a little misty. And so I think it's, you know, there this is a complex societal and interpersonal and intrapersonal issue, and it's not, there's no quick fix. I think many of these tools really will really help, and I think it's also healthy that we're talking about it. 

TIM REGAN-PORTER [01:15:19]: And I was just gonna say I think just talking about some of the specific issues that we deal with, not just as men, but in general, but to hear a man talk about it, body image issues. Yeah. Women have it differently, but men we don't talk about it with men. And you've talked about your relationship to eating and body image. 

DAN HARRIS [01:15:35]: Yeah. 

TIM REGAN-PORTER [01:15:36]: And I've really appreciated that. 

DAN HARRIS [01:15:37]: Yeah. Thank you. 

Rapid-fire questions 

TIM REGAN-PORTER [01:15:39]: And then if we can end with a quick, rapid fire. So now you're outside of news. Do you have more hope or dread for the future of local news? 

DAN HARRIS [01:15:49]: Mixture of both. I think there are real opportunities for local news, and the economic underpinnings are really difficult. The demand is there, but we need a business model that makes it sustainable. 

TIM REGAN-PORTER [01:16:02]: How are you feeling about AI and journalism and also what you do now with podcasting? 

DAN HARRIS [01:16:08]: I use AI a lot. I've missed every new technological development. I've been late to everything. You know, like social media for all of its flaws, and there were many. I didn't do it until, like, a year and a half ago. I mean, I had accounts, and I posted it occasionally, but I didn't really do it. And most of my peers, you know, are still way far ahead of me in this regard. And so I was determined with AI to really do a better job of being open to it. So I got, like, the ChatGPT subscription, you know, the $20 a month thing, and I really talked to ChatGPT a lot. 

DAN HARRIS [01:16:41]: And we now have a little bot that I haven't played with yet that allows me to query the wisdom of every of the 700 episodes I've recorded of the podcast. And so, hopefully, we'll make that public over time. And so I really am trying to use it as a tool to make my writing easier and also just to, you know, be culturally and technologically literate. 

TIM REGAN-PORTER [01:17:04]: Do you have a favorite piece of advice you've received or you like to give? 

DAN HARRIS [01:17:08]: Well, let's go and never worry alone. 

TIM REGAN-PORTER [01:17:10]: Is there a piece of common advice or conventional wisdom that drives you crazy in its wrongness or oversimplification? 

DAN HARRIS [01:17:17]: Be yourself. How can you be yourself if you don't even know yourself? You know? 

TIM REGAN-PORTER [01:17:23]: Yeah. And we won't even get into, is there a self? 

DAN HARRIS [01:17:26]: Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. 

TIM REGAN-PORTER [01:17:29]: Do you have a favorite failure of yours? 

DAN HARRIS [01:17:31]: Yeah. Where to pick? I mean, the two are the panic attack and the 360. 

TIM REGAN-PORTER [01:17:36]: Do you have a time saving hack? 

DAN HARRIS [01:17:39]: AI is becoming one, honestly. Saying no is a great time saving hack. 

TIM REGAN-PORTER [01:17:45]: Alright. And then we'll just end with recommendations. So if someone is visiting, either New York or where you're now in New Jersey, you have 3 to 5 places you would recommend people check out, maybe something, particularly for New York that people don't already know about. 

DAN HARRIS [01:18:02]: Well, just to be clear, because my wife would kill me. We're still in New York. But we're in the suburbs of Westchester County. But New York City, what would I recommend? Check out the Hotel Chelsea. My friend Sean McPherson took this legendary hotel that was where Sid and Nancy died, and it was like a flophouse for generations and made it really nice in a kind of bohemian way. And it's a little spendy, so, you know, maybe just go to the bar and have a drink and check it out. But it's really cool. And some of the original residents still live there even though it's a hotel, and I stay there a lot. 

DAN HARRIS [01:18:41]: But shout out to Sean. He gives me a cheaper rate. 

TIM REGAN-PORTER [01:18:44]: I appreciate your time. 

DAN HARRIS [01:18:45]: No problem. Thanks a lot. 

TIM REGAN-PORTER [01:18:49]: Thank you for listening to the Local News Matters podcast. Never miss an episode by subscribing in your favorite podcast player and sign up for our newsletter at lnmpod.com. 

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