Increase Performance By Working At Your Edge – Plus A Quick Hack For When Panic or Anxiety Swells

Key Takeaway

Most of us are like drill sergeants with ourselves, constantly judging and criticizing. The key is moving into a coach mentality through self-compassion. Research shows that talking to yourself the way you'd talk to a good friend - especially in third person ('Dan, you're not going to die') - has powerful psychological and physiological benefits. This isn't about eliminating fear entirely, but building the muscle of self-awareness through consistent practice at your edge.

Episode Overview

Dan Harris, journalist and author of '10% Happier,' discusses his journey with meditation, panic disorder, and high-performance psychology with Dr. Michael Gervais. The conversation explores Harris's panic attack on live TV, his ongoing struggles with anxiety on planes and elevators, and the psychological tools he uses to manage fear. They discuss self-talk, self-compassion, mindfulness practice, working at your edge versus retreating, and the difference between managing vs. extinguishing fear.

Full Transcript

Transcript of Increase Performance By Working At Your Edge – Plus A Quick Hack For When Panic or Anxiety Swells from 10% Happier. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, my fellow suffering beings. How we doing today? What you're about to hear is a conversation between me and a high-performance psychologist high-performance psychologist high-performance psychologist about a host of fascinating issues. What it's like to work at your edge, whether that's in meditation and managing panic disorder or in your professional life. Why love, broadly understood, not just as romantic love, but why love might actually be the most important skill you can develop. how to stay engaged in these tumultuous political times without getting consumed by rage and a concept called the ideal competitive mindset or ICM which I found extremely useful.

What you're about to hear is me ostensibly being interviewed by my friend Dr. Michael Jery who as I mentioned a few moments ago is a high performance psychologist which means that he works with elite athletes and executives to perform at their best. He was ostensibly, as I said, interviewing me for his podcast, which is called Finding Mastery. But I, of course, because I can't help myself, asked him a bunch of questions as well. So, it's much more of a conversation. Couple things to say before we dive in.

First, Michael's been a guest on my podcast several times. I'll drop some links to those conversations in my show notes. Second, we recorded this a few months ago right after the killing of Charlie Kirk and then Jimmy Kimmel's comments that temporarily got him fired or suspended. So, that part of the conversation may seem a little bit dated, but uh the underlying stuff about how to stay engaged in this difficult time is evergreen sadly. And finally, I just want to say don't forget to check out my new app.

It's called 10% with Dan Harris. You can sign up for it at danharris.com. We have a growing body of guided meditations from amazing teachers. We also do live video meditation and Q&A sessions every week. There's a 14-day free trial if you want to check it out before you spend any money. danh harris.com. Join the party. Okay, here's my conversation with Dr. Michael Jery on the Finding Mastery podcast. Probably the thing I'm best known for in my 21 years at ABC News was having a panic attack on Good Morning America.

But it's too early to to prescribe statins slowly for cancer production. I wasn't high when I was on the air, but the doctor explained that my ambient drug use made me more likely to panic. When anxiety shows up, do you try to outrun it or do you try to learn how to work with it? I had spent a lot of time in war zones after 9/11 and gotten depressed and then done this really dumb thing of self-medicating with cocaine and other recreational drugs. That moment sent me on this weird windy thing where I ultimately ended up finding meditation.

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

I was pretty unhappy. I loved what I did, but I was really stressed and really frustrated. And every time I got passed over for a job, which happened a lot, I would spin out and take it out on the people in my life. What followed was not a quick fix, but a serious commitment to understanding anxiety, attention, and how the mind works. Most of us are like drill sergeants with ourselves. But we actually need to move into a coach mentality. So that's the self- loveve piece.

There's a whole body of research around something called micro interaction. So we can inject massive doses of happiness into our life by just paying attention to these little interactions we're having throughout the day that most of us sort of just ice out. In this conversation, Dan and I explore what it looks like to live with anxiety. We also dig into identity, meditation, self-t talk, and a process to choose growth over avoidance again and again and again. A lot of people try meditation and then notice how distractable they are and feel like they're failures.

You sit and try to focus on one thing at a time. Then your brain comes in and starts like planning a homicide or whatever it is. And you notice that, start again, notice it, start again. it, start again, notice it, start again. And what happens over time is you build this muscle of self-awareness that allows you to see the contents of your consciousness without being owned by it. So with that, let's jump into this week's conversation with Dan Harris. Dan, I always look forward to spending time with you and so thank you for coming back and sharing, you know, the the adventure you've been on since we last spoke.

But for folks that the one folk or two folk that might not know, you know, kind of where you come from and how you and I became friends at this thing, can you can you just share an overview, a flyover of the kind of major points of your life and and what what got you here? I mean, I think that the story that most people associate with me, if they know who I am at all, is that I used to be at ABC News uh as a anchor correspondent kind of globe trotting uh newsman.

And probably the thing I'm best known for in my 21 years at ABC News was having a panic attack on Good Morning America, which if you Google panic attack on TV, it's the number one result. You know, like 20 million views is like a it's what will be on my tombstone. And that panic attack actually turned out to be well first of all it was awful in the moment and even worse in the aftermath because I I I went to a a psychiatrist afterwards to try to figure out what had gone wrong.

He asked me a bunch of questions. One of them was do you do drugs? And I had to admit yes I do. I had, as a backstory, I had spent a lot of time in war zones after 911 and gotten depressed and then done this really dumb thing of self-medicating with cocaine and other recreational drugs. I wasn't high when I was on the air, but the doctor explained that my ambient drug use made me more likely to panic. So, that was all terrible. However, that moment sent me on this weird windy thing where I ultimately ended up finding meditation and it was incredibly helpful for me and so I wrote a book about that called 10% Happier that came out in 2014.

So quite a while ago and that ended up swallowing my life and I you know started a podcast and meditation app and I was trying to do two things for a while be a newsman and be Mr. happiness. And then four years ago, I retired from ABC News and this is what I do full-time. With your practice, did you start off strong like, oh, there's a thing here. Let me let me dive into meditating cuz I feel something or was it more intellectual for you? Like, I hear people talking about it.

Uh, I'll try it a little bit. Like, where did you start? I got turned on to Ehart Tulli. He's a huge bestselling self-help guru. One of my colleagues at ABC News recommended I read the book because she thought it would be a good story because he was getting really big at the time. This was in like 2008. The Power of Now, a new Earth. Oprah Winfrey was, you know, pushing his stuff. And so, I did not go into that thinking, oh, I'm going to read something here that would be useful for me.

I thought, oh, maybe it's weird enough for a TV story. He's an interesting guy. He's kind of like an elf German man. And he's like the spiritual equivalent equivalent of like of watching a ule log. He he's he is kind of compelling in his his blandness. you know, he's very soft-spoken, but in reading his book, he delivered what I know now to be not an original thesis, but it was new to me, which is that we all have this voice in our heads, this this inner narrator who chases us out of bed in the morning and is yammering at us all day long and has us constantly wanting stuff, not wanting stuff, judging people, judging ourselves, comparing ourselves to other people.

And Toli's argument, which the Buddha made 2,600 years earlier, but Toll's argument is that when you're unaware of this non-stop nattering, it owns you. You just act out all of your neurotic neurotic obsessions as if they're like uh in the words of my meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein, as if they're tiny dictators. And so that was a electrifying thing for me. I then went and interviewed Tuli. I a friend of mine has described toi as correct but not useful. So like he very incisively diagnoses the human condition in my opinion but doesn't in my opinion give you a lot to do about it.

So I read totally was frustrated and then my wife gave me a book by a guy named Dr. Mark Epstein who is a psychiatrist who's written a bunch of books about the overlap between psychology and Buddhism and that is what made me think oh okay there is something to do about it. It's called meditation. I as a child of two ex-hippies who dragged me to you know health food stores and camping trips and you know made me listen to like free to be you and me and all that [ __ ] I was not really down with the whole meditation thing at first but then I saw that there was all this science and my parents are also scientists.

My wife is a scientist. I'm not good at math. So I I became a guy who like wore makeup and talked to television cameras, but I I was like, "All right, this is there. There's some science here." So that's when I gave it a try. I remember the moment exactly where I was. I was at a my wife and I were with some friends at a a share house, like we were rented a house that we all shared at the beach. And I was reading a book by John Cabin.

I was in the process of reading lots of books. And I was at the pool and I was reading this book and I was like, "You know what? I'm just going to do it." So I I didn't want anybody to know. So I went into the bedroom, closed the door, turned off the lights, sat on the floor, and did 5 minutes of trying to focus on my breath. And then every time I got distracted, I started again and again and again. And I I I realized, you know, this is really difficult.

And I see exactly the value. You're not trying to achieve a special state. You're just trying to It's like a bicep curl for your brain. You're you're trying to focus on one thing, your breath usually, but it doesn't have to be your breath. And then every time you get distracted, you start again. A lot of people think a lot of people try meditation and then notice how distractable they are and feel like they're failures. But I had read enough to know, actually, no, the whole point is to get distracted, start again, get distracted, start again.

Because that is how you deal with what Earlulli was pointing out, which is that you have this crazy voice in your head. It's giving you shitty ideas all the time. What's the antidote? Awareness. Seeing it clearly, aka mindfulness. And so, how do you develop that? You sit and try to focus on one thing at a time. Then your brain comes in and starts like planning a homicide or whatever it is. And you notice that, start again, notice it, start again. And what happens over time is you build this muscle innate in all of us but atrophied through disuse of self-awareness again aka mindfulness that allows you to see the contents of your consciousness without being owned by it.

And so I knew really quickly in that share house in amigans it amigans it amigans it yeah there's something here something here. Yeah I had a similar experience. It is the art of starting over a thousand times. Yeah. you know, within maybe a handful of minutes. of minutes. of minutes. And the way that you start over or the way that you refocus is equally as important because I can refocus this way. Let's say I'm I'm focusing on my exhale and then the homicide thought comes in and I say, "What is wrong with me?

God, get back to the breath." Okay, now I'm starting over with a critical mind, a judgmental kind of chipping away at myself, right? where I can notice that it it might wander and I say, "Well, that's interesting. Okay, come on back." You know, like, and it's more of a eloquent return back to the present moment, to the breath, if you will. Can I tweak that just a little bit? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because sometimes we really can't help the massive blast of self-directed appropriate appropriate appropriate just so quick that you really can't control it, control it, control it, which the the negative critical.

Yeah. the oh my god I can't believe Mike that that you spent the last 5 minutes you know planning some expletive bill speech you're going to give to somebody the move there is just to note that you can you can have a little note in your mind of oh judgment so everything can be co-opted co-opted co-opted that's right that's right that's right and and so what I don't want people to feel bad about is oh I'm kicking my own ass in meditation that means I'm doing it wrong no no all you have to do is be mindful of the kicking of your own Yes.

Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. And then you're back on safe ground. Everything can be included. That's good. Yeah. It's really clean. If knowing what you know now, cuz you've been practicing here for I don't know 10 15 years. 15 years. 15 years. Less than you. I started in like 09. 09. So knowing what you know now, if you could go back and kind of whisper to yourself the moment before you had the panic attack on air, what would you whisper to yourself? Right before the panic attack.

Right before knowing what you know now. It's interesting. I don't know that for that specifically I would recommend recommend recommend meditation or mindfulness. Um I still struggle with panic disorder and you know being mindful having you know calming the nervous system through consistent meditation is really helpful but in the moment right before I'm going to freak out actually self-t talk is the most useful thing for me and as as you know there's a ton of science around self-t talk you can call this self-love even but self- loveve has really negative connotations for most semi-eptical people but the ability Another way to describe this is self-compassion, which is a robust field of scientific study.

As you know, there's just a ton of evidence both out of the self-compassion world and from Ethan Cross at the University of Michigan who's looked at our inner chatter that if you talk to yourself the way you would talk to a good friend or a mentee or a kid, it has really powerful psychological and physiological benefits. And so, I've gotten I'm really into that. I think it works really well with mindfulness because you can use the mindfulness to notice, oh, I'm starting to become disregulated and then you layer on top of that.

You can put my you can put your hand on your chest, which is a little cheesy. You may not want to see have anybody see you do it, but uh like me last night on a plane. I I struggle on planes. All right. You know, I'm I'm I can I can tell I'm feeling a little off. Hand on the chest. Bro, by the way, it does actually supercharge it if you refer to yourself in the third person. It's a cool finding. So Ethan introduced that. Yes.

Yeah. It's dude or bro or use your own name. Mike Dan. Dan. Dan. Yes. Yes. Yes. This may be uncomfortable. You are not going to die. You know this is your brain overreacting to um stimuli that are actually not dangerous dangerous dangerous as opposed to okay I'm not going to die. When you talk to yourself in third person, Dan, you're not going to die. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yeah. And it's like because it really for me it channels that same energy of how I talk to my kid, you know?

It's like, well, Alexander or Bro or Stinky, whatever I call him. Um, uh, we call each other lots of names. I I I've been joking recently that his rap name is Lil Dum Dum. Um, so Lil Dum Dum, you're good. I know you don't want to go to school today because whatever. You got in a fight with Luke or But it's fine. Your teacher's there to intervene. What any wisdom I would impart, I could then impart to myself. Does this trap for you? Does you use any of this stuff?

100%. Thank you for asking that selft talk is uh one of the great tools you know to be able to work with one's own self and if you're first and foremost if you're not aware of your inner dialogue it's really hard to be good at it so that's that's why mindfulness is foundational there's three practices for awareness awareness awareness mindfulness journaling and conversations with people of wisdom those are the three that I know that increase my awareness of what fill in the blank is but then you need some skills and some And selft talk can be a skill.

But I still want to know what you would whisper to yourself. Giddy up. Giddy up. Giddy up. That's cool. Okay. So, let's do it this way. Let's think about it as a slide. Okay. Think about a water slide. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. And so sometimes you get to the top of a water slide and you you're looking around from the the platform. You're like, "Ah, here we go. This could be fun." And you jump in and you kind of go for the ride and it's exactly what it's intended.

That kind of threshold of excitement, fear, you know, fun. Okay. Sometimes you get to the platform and you say, "Oh boy, I don't think I really I don't think I really want this." Yeah. So, if you're at the platform and you don't know which way it's going to go yet, okay, let's do that selft talk. And then when you put your you sit on that platform and you're kind of holding the bar above you, I think most people have been on a water slide, right? And you're holding the thing above you, the water's ripping down and you know that you're not in a good spot.

That's a different frame. And then when you're in the throws of the thing and your feet are spilling all over the place and you're kind of feeling upside down in disaster. So there's three distinct moments of selft talk. So upstream ready for the rapids and in the complete throws. I would say I think about this a lot with airplanes and with anything I'm afraid of. I would say a couple things. One, One, One, you're going to be fine. Two, it's really important that you face your fears because you want your kid to see you doing that.

I have a child who has plenty of anxiety and he needs a father who is modeling the consistent facing of fears. The third thing is listen to yourself. If you're really on tilt right now, sometimes actually the most courageous thing to do is take a break, reattack it tomorrow. Cool. So the the two things that you're doing is you're being I'll work in reverse order. Three things. There's an agility agility agility to your approach. The middle is purpose mindset. So you're anchoring to something bigger than you.

And the first is you're backing yourself. yourself. yourself. Yes. Yes. Yes. So you know there's some efficacy, self-efficacy is the first thing you're doing, which is that felt sense of like, yeah, I I make things happen. I feel pretty powerful. Like I can I can do things. So if you can anchor into that type of selft talk, it's cool. And then make it bigger than you. It's cool. and the all of the requisite skills to be agile in this topsyturvy kind of wild world that we're in.

That's a really nice formula. So, are these exactly the skills you would present to a client? Yeah, if I'm working with an athlete or an executive that is like wanting to take a step in their abilities to execute in high stress, you know, conditions or be a little bit more home with themselves in high stress conditions. the three theories that we just worked from self-efficacy, purpose and um psychological agility would be definitely at the foundation and and each one of those has a set of protocols.

So self-efficacy Albert Bendor was the kind of the original theorist on self-efficacy. He said look he said there was five ways to increase efficacy. Now if you do a search there's only four. I'm not sure what happened to the fifth one, but um but there's very specific ways to enhance your sense of feeling efficacious and that word is like feeling powerful in your own self. How do you with your clients work with the subtle thing around agility? Because agility could be misused as a copout. copout.

copout. It's a cool question. You understand the nuance here, don't you? Because facing down down down only because I've done it. Yeah. No, right. Like wrestling with your dragon, you know, or like saying I'm going to fight this dragon tomorrow or I'm going to get to know this dragon tomorrow. Okay. So psychological agility it for me pins on or rests on emotional agility. Not to confuse the two, but there's a ability to work with your emotions allows you to be more agile in navigating the world.

So there is an emotional intelligence that I'm pointing to for the agility piece. The other thing though is if you think about stress inoculation and you think about systematic desensitization or flooding, those are all words maybe that need some explaining. But the idea that the very simple idea is that when you when you face down something and you stand toe-to-toe with it and you don't retreat, your body becomes more familiar with that stress and then is less fearful of it. And at the moment that you stand toe-to-toe with something either in your imagination or in physical life and then you retreat, you strengthen the response of retreating.

M from the stress. So I would use that one sparingly, right? Like there's a place to say, "Excuse me, I need to like I need to go to the bathroom or I need to tie my shoes or I need to go to pull yourself from the throws of a thing." That is clever, but on your own terms, when you decide that you want to tackle this thing, tackle it and do not retreat. Okay? So let me I'll give you a real life example and you tell me what you think.

So I and you're good at interviewing. I see why you had a long career at ABC. Well done, mate. Yeah, that's really good. And it also points to like, you know, you are a true learner, right? Like that's probably the genius that you rest on is that you're curious and you want to understand. to understand. to understand. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So curiosity is probably the crown jewel in yourself. Maybe. Um but what I can't do is unlike you, I I am not a mental health professional.

I can't when people ask me for advice I always have to say I'll give you advice but you know it's like you're talking to a guy who slept at a Holiday Inn last night like I I don't really know. I didn't you know I I've done hundreds of interviews but the fact that you know that actually creates um a false sense of safety. I think so. That's right. I think so. That's right. But I I you know legally like I I really can't treat patients or and I so I don't I don't I'm not even particularly interested in that.

But um that's quite that's I think a major that's I think a major difference between the two of us. My only real training is as a journalist um as opposed to as a caregiver which is really within your wheelhouse. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, getting back to the specific situation situation situation I so I have as I mentioned earlier I have panic disorder. It's not just the panic attack I had on TV. Uh I think that was a seminal event in that it like once the brain as you nodded toward this once the brain gets good at panic it it's it's gets really good at it.

So not only do I sometimes worry about um public speaking but for that I take a beta blocker which is really helpful. Um and so I don't shy away from it. I I take a beta blocker which is a non-narcotic medication that you need a prescription for but it doesn't like alter your mind. It just it puts a cap on how quickly your heart can beat. So it's kind of like a physiological. You can be as nervous as as you can manage to be, but the body can't go into mutiny mode.

And so that's really helpful. But for elevators and airplanes, airplanes, airplanes, I really struggle and a beta blocker is not going to cut it. During the pandemic, I had a bunch of stressful things going on. It was a [ __ ] pandemic. A B I wasn't on I had moved out of the city. I used to live in New York City. Now we live in the suburbs. My wife insists that I call it the country uh because she doesn't like the connotation of the suburbs. Suburban douche. Suburban douche.

Suburban douche. We I'm suburban douche. And so we live in the suburbs. So I wasn't on elevators as much and everybody was grounded. So I wasn't on planes that much. Oh, you were out of practice. I was out of practice and I was going through a very difficult separation uh with my co-founders at a meditation app that I had started back in 2015. I didn't know that you had that separation. Yeah, I didn't know that. It was brutal. It was really I still associate you with it.

And you're not with that with it. We don't need to name it or No, you can name it. The app used to be called 10% Happier. It's now called Happier. So anyway, in the middle in 2021 as all the [ __ ] or maybe 2022 as all this shit's going down, it's pandemic. I'm starting to get back on elevators and airplanes. I have this like deeply wired propensity for panic. I started freaking out on uh on planes and elevators and bad. I did a a classic no. I was on my way out to LA no.

I was on my way out to LA to give a speech and the panic hit. I hadn't felt panic like that in a long time and I got off and you know I can defend the decision. I was by myself. I didn't have anybody to calm me down. But that just set me on a spiral. And so I've really been working I've been doing a lot of exposure therapy. I have a great therapist, uh, Paul Green. Shout out to Paul Green. And he and I will will take planes together, unmedicated, little planes, like not like Cessna's, but small commuter planes from the White Plains airport to Washington DC, you know, 70 seaters.

And it is I'm a guy who spent huge chunks of my life in war zones. I've never been more terrified than doing these flights unmedicated. And um so I did like four of those and I was able to do it but it was still really hard and now I'm kind of on my own and so like I flew yesterday I was on my own. Um I so I I take a really small dose of uh of clonopin which is a which can really ease your nervous system.

And it's interesting I it's a small enough dose that I still feel nervous but it's just like gives me a little bit of comfort and I can manage it. Shallow pull instead of the deep pool. Yes. And so then I'm flying back Sunday and I'm thinking I'm going to break the pill in half and take even less. And then I have a bunch of flights coming up. Some of them on small planes, some of them on big planes. Most I'm by myself, but I have one with my son and I'm taking the one with my son.

It's on a big plane. I can go unmedicated. And so this is the way I'm thinking about it. It's like I'm I'm I'm just trying to be careful. Uh because the avoidance problem is real, but the other problem is you actually push too hard when you're not ready and you traumatize yourself. Um, so anyway, this is the way I'm thinking about it. I'm curious what you think. you think. you think. Yeah. First of all, badass. Awesome. Like you're working. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You're working. And that's what that's what psychology, let's call it what our parents thought about psychology, what they missed that you go talk to somebody and you sit on a couch and it's a comfy couch and it's maybe a poorly lit room and you need to talk about your parents, all the mistakes they made or whatever, right?

Like or you complain or somebody's going to give you advice and fix you, which is all not right. And what you're pointing to is psychological skills training. skills training. skills training. Yes. Yes. Yes. And that is the just like you do physical skills training to have a strong cardiovascular system or increase muscularity that you do psychological skills training so you can be more free in your own body. You're training badass. That's exactly how it works. And I think what most people miss in elite sport cuz we see them on Sunday in the NFL and we watch them and we say, "Wow." And then we say, "Man, must be nice born that way." M no you know like that's not how this yes there is a probably good match between genetic coding and the environment that they're in but on Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday they are working right at the edge of their capacity cuz that's where you grow in front of their coaches that decide if they're going to get playtime or not in front of their teammates who's trying to take their job.

So they're right at the edge nearly every day where they could drop a ball, make a ball in a situation that they're not necessarily good at because they're practicing things that they're not good at to get better, right? And the consequences are larger than we recognize. Most of us never get to our edge on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and certainly not on a Sunday in front of handfuls of millions of people. So what you're doing is getting up on your edge. First and foremost, I say badass.

That's exactly. Keep going. And at some point, you can become a professional patient, too, which would be a problem. Uh, okay. So, unpack that. What do you think? think? think? Yeah. Uh, this the professional patient is somebody who likes who's really good at being a patient. Okay. I'm not suggesting you're there yet, but there is a pathway for you to extinguish, not just manage, but extinguish the fear. fear. fear. That's a whole different kind of apple to swallow here. Okay, I want to jump in on that for a second because there's hope here.

Well, there's hope, but I also for sure there's hope. What I'm what I'm a thousand% confident in is that there's hope for messy marginal improvement where I where I wonder is around the extinguishing. I think it's possible that I'm going to live with this the rest of my life and that I will just have to continue to dance with it. I don't know that that's being a professional patient. I think that's you please point out where I'm being delusional here. I'm not envisioning a lifelong having Paul Green move into my house and do exposure therapy with me every day.

It's more that this is such a powerful thing for me that I almost feel worse if the goal is extinguishing because that it feels so far away. I'd rather have this story of, hey, it's possible I never extinguish it, but I'm just going to have to dance with it for the rest of my life. I think that that's a cool safety valve. I think it's really I I understand that and I think what I hear I really understand it. Okay. And also what I hear is like it feels unreasonable in my mind to think that this could go away no matter how much training I do.

And I would say that there might be some room to expand that thought for you. And not to not to like at any point in your training arc to feel like that's a that's what am I do? Why am I getting my hopes up for that? So, if you lower the hope, which is like no, I can do this. I can train and I can be uh I don't know 40% uncomfortable on flights. And that's cool. I can do that. I can be I can bring a change of clothes so when I get off the plane, you know, I know that I'm kind of sweaty during the plane and that's okay.

that's okay. that's okay. Thought you were to say in case I [ __ ] my pants. you can go there too, you know. So, so I think that both can be true. I don't hear professional patient. I'm kind of placing that out there that there is a way to extinguish fear and you playing with that idea would be cool. And just working it working it out, you know, with your psychiatrist or psychologist, I'm not sure who's training. Is it Paul? Paul is a psychologist. Yeah. Work out with Paul like is Mike being sloppy here or is there a thing here?

You know, like that would be cool to work out. And I I would also say that the harder somebody trains, the more likely or the quicker you can get results. But training hard alone doesn't necessarily get you the results. There's this appreciation for recovery. There's this appreciation for consolidation of information from the training, you know. So, yeah, I think you're going to win both ways. Totally. And I don't know your brain chemistry, but you're going to win both ways because you're training at your edge and you're going to be x% better at it.

And if you invite this idea that one day I might just fully extinguish this loop that I find myself in. in. in. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I can extinguish that thing completely. completely. completely. That is the work that we did I did with Felix Bombgartner um for Red Bull Stratos. Stratos. Stratos. The guy who like went up into the into the edge of space. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And he was terrified to be in the space suit. And so he we called it claustrophobia, you know, cuz that's it was a panic attack.

claustrophobia's uh experience and he couldn't just manage that fear because the consequences were too dire if he got if he was just managing that plus managing all the other things he needed to do. So we needed to extinguish that fear. So there's a model there of somebody that you know was able to do it and it doesn't mean that everyone can. Yeah. I'm sort of middle path on this. Like that's cool. I'm open to the idea that extinguishing could happen and I know it can happen for some people and if I cling too tightly to that idea for myself, it actually doesn't help my nervous system.

So having the notion that it's just a thing that I work with forever. I'm also open to that. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. But I think you're going to win either way. Yes. Yes. Yes. You know, and so I would play both games. I'd be like, where's the threshold that I can manage well and feel cool with this? And then how much more work or what kind of work would I do differently once I'm to that threshold for extinguishing? Yes. Yes. Yes. You know, so it's a step-wise approach.

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

And I not as I I don't even know it was a deliberate strategy. I just maybe it's I don't like boredom, but so I'm just curious for you. What does it look like? Well, let's do a model first and then answer it. go to the edge with intelligent recovery following. Then I replenish so I can go back to that edge again. again. again. So what we're talking about is really working yourself up with acute stress and then intelligently recovering from that. that. that. And what most of us do is we have a acute stress moments experiences and then hold on to it.

we drop maybe like 3% from that acute stressor and then we talk about it and ruminate about it and you know kind of relive it and so we go from acute stress to moderate stress instead of acute stress recovery from that. So we don't empty our cup if you use that kind of metaphor and we're holding up at the full cup for an extended period of times, weeks, months. And then what happens from acute stress unmanaged to moderate stress unmanaged leads to chronic stress unmanaged leads to early death.

So if we can instead of like this spike of acute stress that's holding on for top volume and then a slide to early death as an arc if you think about an XY axis that if we went big spike big recovery so it's this act it looks like a seismma graph. Yes. Yes. Yes. And that is what I want my day to look like. like. like. Interesting. So let's say Monday, I want as many acute stressors as I can have and then recover from them as quickly as I can throughout the day and then a big recovery process with the 8 hours of sleep, you know, and and the mobility work that I do and the good conversations I have with loved ones.

And so those are all recovery mechanisms. So I want great stressors to keep me on my growth arc and then intelligent intelligent intelligent recovery process. recovery process. recovery process. What are the stressors for me? That was the question you asked. So for me, I'll do some physical. So I'll do some heart rate stuff to get me up there. And you know, that's no more complicated than let's say you're doing some sort of squat or something. You could put the weight down or you could do one more rep or two more reps.

So there's a a little bit of a stressor to think in the most concrete way. That would be probably 10% of how I do stress. The other 90 I'm kind of ballparking here is emotional where I'm getting to the edge of saying something that is difficult to say or listening to something that's difficult to listen to. And so it's a it's a vulnerability meets holding the space for it. And that all most of that for me is relational and that's that's where it happens. So I need to stay in that space long enough.

And then the other I shouldn't do that as 90. Let's call that like 60 or something. And the other percentage is when I'm doing something where if I do make mistakes, there's some consequence to it, you know, like public speaking or there's probably some consequence in this, but we have the controls to, you know, edit things that are completely out of whack, but there's some things that where there's real consequences to myself and others. And so, does that help? Yeah. No, I was just curious. Yeah.

Curiosity. There you go. And you know what I'm curious about is like if you didn't change your trajectory trajectory trajectory from the moment of that panic attack and invest in sorting that out and you just white knuckled grinded and stayed your path and didn't go the dual path of mindfulness even a second career arc you know through mindfulness what do you think that cost would have been for you I think about this a lot what like what's the counterfactual you know the the sliding doors You know, if I had just stayed in news and not gotten interested in any of this stuff, I don't think it would be great.

It's possible with all of my energy and intensity that I could have climbed to the top of the news business, whatever that looks like. You know, some of the people in my vintage are now at the top of the pyramid. So, I'm thinking about like Jake Kapper and David Mureer and Anderson Cooper and I were all like kind of in the same litter. Um, if you want to put it in puppy speak. Um, and so those guys really made it. I actually never in the news business.

I was kind of like always right at that second tier. I was I was the anchor of Night Line, which is a great job. I was the anchor of the weekend edition of GMA, Good Morning America, which is awesome. But I was never like the weekday guy. And, you know, I got to do reporting all over the world. And you know, one of the coins of that realm is I do win Emmys and I won some Emmys and all that other stuff that kind of mattered a lot to me in the time.

But I was doing all of that, you know, from 201 10 on when I started writing the book and the book came out in 2014. I was doing all of that while I had a very robust side hustle. And in the years before that, when I had no side hustle and I was just focused on the news, I was pretty unhappy. you know, I I loved what I did and I felt like it was really important, but and so I wasn't thoroughgoingly unhappy, but I was really stressed and really frustrated and every time I got passed over for a job, which happened a lot, I would spin out and take it out on the people in my life.

And so I think if I hadn't found this stuff, I would have gone probably hardcore down that route of trying to advance in the news industry, which even at its best, it would have been a hard place for me to advance because there's so few slots at the very top. But it's not at its best. The economic underpinnings of the of the industry are being decimated. The ratings are, you know, when I had that panic attack in 2004 on GMA, there were more than 5 million people watching.

Now, on a regular day at GMA, it's somewhere between 2 and 3 million people. And it's going down quickly. And I say this with no disrespect uh or Shod and Freud or anything like that. I still think what they're doing at ABC News and the other networks is really important. A lot of my best friends work in the industry, but it's a really hard time. So, like you're competing for limited slots in a sand castle that is being attacked by waves. And so I think I in the stress of that situation with my pre-existing predelections for overwork and irritability, it could have gotten pretty gnarly.

pretty gnarly. pretty gnarly. How gnarly? How gnarly? How gnarly? I don't think, you know, front page of the newspaper, you know, shave somebody in the kidney. early, but just like not as happy a life as I I really could have had and and not, you know, what what would have been like for my kid? That's what and my wife. That's what I think about. Would I have been abusive? No. But would I have been absent and absent and absent and unpredictable? unpredictable? unpredictable? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Consumed with self. And then also like, you know, prone to outbursts. Again, not like volcanic outbursts, but scary. You know, even even my team now, I think a lot about my grandfather. I had a grandfather, Robert Johnson, who was scary, scary guy. Lots of things in his life. He had been thwarted and he was a middle manager at the Yellow Pages. Remember the yellow pages? Those big like Bible thick compendiums of phone numbers that we used to have. So, my grandfather, who's really smart guy, but really he could be pretty gnarly.

Um I remember him once when he got his first VCR bringing me and my little brother in to show it to us and said and he said uh if you touch it I'll break your arm. Oh Oh Oh that kind of [ __ ] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And my mother describes him as like really funny sometimes but then you know he would like have these little napkin wars that they would play at dinner. They would ball up the napkins and throw at each other. But if you hit him in the face he'd slap you in the face.

It would just turn like that. And like that dude's blood is coursing through my veins. And that's a real aspect of my personality I have to work on. And even like within the last five or six years, I remember somebody on my team, one of my producers at my little meditation company, right? So, not the news saying, "You just have a scary face to you." to you." to you." Yeah. Which, you know, I love the fact that she felt comfortable enough to say that. My wife has made the same observation.

like I just have this like this I can my face can get like stony and hard to read and usually it has nothing to do with my irritation at anybody in my orbit. It's just that I'm thinking about something else. And so there's there's vestigages of of Robert Johnson in me now. I just think it would be uncontrolled if I didn't have all of these measures to control it. control it. control it. Tools. Tools. Tools. Tools. Yes. Absolutely. I want to say in defense of Robert Johnson, I the way I'm describing him now is something of a caricature.

He all the things I said are true, but actually in his 80s, he lived till he was 90, but at 80, somebody got him a computer. Somebody got a computer for his wife. Actually, his his wife didn't want to use it. So, Robert got really involved in the this is the early days of like social media. So, he got on Twitter and he was really funny on Twitter and he was very active in emailing all of his grandchildren. And I went through recently read all of his old emails and they were really loving.

So people can change and also it's, you know, never fair to completely carry, right? Yeah, that's cool. That's a good nuance. Back to the news folks for just a minute. Like I love the sand castle analogy and the people that you mentioned that were your peers or contemporaries like they are taking big voices in kind of the narrative of of our country given the context of what's happening with Jimmy Kimmel right now and censorship and the the entire landscape. Can you share your thoughts on how you're understanding this?

Well, with the caveat that I'm not on the inside, I would say that I didn't love what he said just because it seemed factually inaccurate. Like I think by the time he said it, we knew that the guy who murdered Charlie Kirk was not um a Trumpist. Mhm. Mhm. Mhm. So it it just seemed like factually questionable and maybe not the wisest thing. And yet free speech is a thing, you know, like I would die for Jimmy's right to say some stupid [ __ ] on a show.

And by the way, like everybody on the right has been carping about free speech for a long time with pretty good reason. You know, I think I think there is a bit of a monoculture in American media where it's very far to the left. And so I think some of the complaints about that and the left leaning tendencies of the media and and the disproportionate use of what you might call censorship on folks from the right. Yeah, I think there's something to that. But what we saw here appeared to be the state leveraging its power on a private company, Disney, or I guess it's a public company because it's publicly traded, but it's not a government company.

you know, in these sort seemingly sort of economically laden threats from Brendan Carr at the FCC. All that that that's worrisome to me sometimes. I think, you know, as an outsider now observing the news, one of the little phrases that comes into my head a lot is everybody sucks. It's like everybody on all sides of this of everything of the issues, it's so hard to find a reasonable voice. somebody on the there are reasonable voices on both sides, but they they seem very reluctant to acknowledge that there is anybody reasonable on the other side.

And so it's all of this motivated reasoning. Um and uh there's there's an expression I heard conflict entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship, people out there making money off of fermenting division in our country. And so what I'm really interested in is when can you get smart, well-intentioned people who disagree with each other having civil conversations. I think one guy who's modeling that is Ezra Klein at the New York Times. Caveat, he's a friend of mine, but I, you know, he had a great conversation on his show with Ben Shapiro, who was uh on the right.

Ezra's on the left. Uh I had I know Ben a little bit because I had profiled him back when I was at ABC News. And I disagree at times with things both of those guys say, but at least they were talking to each other. And so much of what we see in the media these days is people throwing red meat to their followers, people looking to have their priors confirmed, their prejudices confirmed instead of operating on the one thing that I think should be really powering our civic lives, which is the word that you keep using to describe me, which is curiosity.

Why? Why not have One of the great things about my journalistic training is it's just always at a healthy second guessing. Is that true? Is that really true? I I know. I think I believe this. You know, all the [ __ ] I just said. I don't agree with Jimmy Kimmel what he actually said, but I do agree with his right to say it. Huh. Let me go back and check that, too. You know, our brains should be constant reconsideration machines. This is like deep in the dharma.

The Buddha is said to have said, "I'm not a dogmatist. I'm an analyst." And I just I see I see so little of that. And the Jimmy Kimmel thing, it just seems like a great example of of it on all sides. Do you think that we're on this media censorship path that speaking the way that you want to speak has too great of a consequence, even not just being cancelled, but being pulled from your ability to speak freely. evidenced by I think in the Pentagon folks have to the media has to sign some stuff saying that they won't necessarily share what they see not from a not from a protection of secrets but like a protection of narrative type of uh thing and I don't again I'm I'm watching from the outside I was unaware of this thing you were referencing at the Pentagon I I do worry about intimidation from the state state state that's right Um, let me just say though, I mean, this is where history is useful.

This isn't the first time we've dealt with this. You know, this was happening during the Red Scare, during World War II, during Vietnam, LBJ. People with power have repeatedly, even in this democracy, attempted to use it to silence their critics. So, nothing's new. The question is, is it more intense, more concerted? Are the folks with power now more willing to disregard the guard rails? That's my concern. You know, I I try, as somebody who's not in the news game anymore, not to get carried away by every like jot and till in the in the in the news cycle.

I'm really keeping my eye on a number of things, but one thing in particular, and that's the rule of law. Are we going to have a democracy? That's what I'm that's what I'm keeping my eye on because all the culture war stuff and all the taxes stuff, it's it it matters, but none of it is going to matter if if the foundation on which all of this is built, which is our ability to work and live together peacefully and by and by a set of mutually agree upon laws, if that goes away, you can't count on anything.

on anything. on anything. Two-part question. what needs to happen for you to feel better about that dilemma? And then two, what can what do you think folks can do to move closer to ensuring democracy stands? No one individual, myself included, can wave a wand and fix everything to their liking. The most power you have is that you are a node in an interconnected society and and we live in a we are a species where emotions and behavior is contagious. And so I think if you can model for your friends and family an open-mindedness, a consistent relentless curiosity, a willingness to to reconsider and to engage, to not rest on your prejudices and your priors, uh that to me is a very Buddhist attitude about world events.

Specifically on the engagement piece, yeah, if you can engage with ideas that you do not like, that is going to make you stronger. that is a a kind of exposure therapy or a psychological fitness that um I I highly recommend. Even better if you can talk to actual human beings with whom you disagree and create a relationship. I believe I can't remember who said it. Um it was a congressman whose name is evading me right now. He's no longer with us. It's hard to hate up close.

So we need more engagement with people with whom we disagree. I don't think you and I have ever talked about this, but um for 18 years I ran developed it was an idea I had when I was just out of undergraduate school was um it was called late night sports and it was an idea to bring athletes in not midnight basketball but close and it was one center here in LA and it it was pretty intense of an environment and I quickly learned and I was there every Saturday night and the only price to admission was to listen to me for 5 minutes on sports psychology and how they could take a lesson from sports psychology, practice it on the court in an intense competitive environment across gang lines and then help them translate how they could practice that later in their in their week.

It was awesome. High school to college age kids, it was an amazing training ground for me and a incredible healing for me in a lot of ways and I learned so much and vice versa for the the folks that were in the gym. And so one of the things we quickly and I quickly learned is like, hey, if we shake hands before and after every game, I think we're not going to fight. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that one intervention, they were to play in this gym, you had to shake each other's hand, not just one person.

And f that dude over there. I'm not shaking his hand. To play the game, you had to shake every all five people's hands. And then you'd see them, they do that and the person that they were having a beef with, they'd still do it because they wanted to play more than they wanted to fight. And then they go dap their team and then it'd be like a great game and I eye contact and a brief physical contact changed the trajectory of the propensity of violence in that gym.

So you're right on and I think that's not new information to anybody, but then practicing it is a whole different thing. different thing. different thing. It is. I think one of the things that makes all this worse is that we are atomized and disconnected and as a culture we're not only are we lonely and disconnected and on our phones but we are self-sorting geographically by ide ideology and so it's becoming harder and harder to actually come face to face with people with whom you disagree on on political and cultural and social issues.

you know, the major pillars of society, which were all flawed, of course, but you know, labor unions and religious organizations and civic organizations have lost their have seen their memberships decline um rapidly. So there there just aren't opportunities for many of us to get involved. And yet, I believe I know this. I could be wrong, so somebody will fact check me and let me know on Twitter if I [ __ ] this up, but there's some evidence to suggest that exactly what you were doing where you bring people together who disagree, but get them to engage in a cooperative activity um and it could be sports or it could be working in an animal shelter or it could be um the local school board.

Get them to work together in a non-hirarchical activity where nobody's the boss and nobody has to kiss up to anybody. You're just having to cooperate, which by the way is what we were designed for. This is how we evolved. Cooperation is how we got to the top of the food chain. Put people in those situations. All that [ __ ] around polarization and tribalism can get vastly diminished. vastly diminished. vastly diminished. I think you might be pointing to what's called superord ordinles. And it's evidenced in jail that if you got three factions in jail, you know, three different gangs, if you will, that none of them like each other, but two of them will come together and work together to to create a stronger bond to go fight the other one.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So the superordinate goal, it's like, let's just say China and the US or whatever, we'll come together if we got to go fight some aliens. Yes. Yes. Yes. Right. So that's a superord, there's a bigger goal than the immediate goal of just taking care of yourself. And so I think that that's what you might be pointing to, which is a pretty wellestablished understanding, you know, in in grade school, high school, colleges, and for us adults that somehow we've missed that piece. There's a really smart person on these issues, Amanda Ripley, who's written about conflict and the difference between healthy conflict and um toxic conflict.

And she was on my show, and I found her work to be really compelling. And the truth is, we need conflict. We need healthy conflict. I I heard it when you were talking before about getting pure. There's a friction in that. Well, human beings, we need each other and um but we we're not all going to get along all the time and we want to have differing viewpoints in the room and so conflict is just it can be really healthy, but we have very few skills to to navigate these situations well.

And so it can then get into a kind of toxic conflict. And what we are seeing culturally and on a macro level in this country and honestly throughout the world is is the latter is the unhealthy conflict and it's we're in a tangle and it's hard to get out. I you know if for anybody listening I would say you know it's great if you can join a civic organization or a volunteer group where you can get out. By the way if you're lonely it's also a great thing to do.

But even if you're not going to do that, I I think going through the work of engaging with ideas that are difficult for you is good civic hygiene. I also find personally, and I don't think there's I don't know of any data on this, but I actually find for me that listening to podcasts and reading writers with whom I disagree, I find that it actually eases my nervous system because it it is hard to hate up close. If I listen to these folks, I understand that they have a logic.

I may not share it. Sometimes I actually do share it, but the nobody gets up in the morning or very few people get up in the morning and they're like, I'm going to be a dick today. I'm going to I'm I'm the bad guy in this movie. Everybody gets up trying trying to do what they think is the right thing. And I don't know, just if I just can engage with all of this on that level, it's not like a self gaslighting where I convince myself that people are trying to harm the country or doing the right thing.

It just it turns down the volume on the rage enough because the rage doesn't help. A certain amount of anger like does get you off the couch for sure, but it very quickly becomes counterproductive. How do you want to be engaging in these difficult times? From a position of blind rage, which burns you out really quickly and makes you do dumb [ __ ] or with like consistent values-based energy that burns clean, keeps you clear, keeps you motivated. You know, another word for that would be love. Like I I just I strongly feel for myself that that's where I want to go.

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

In athletics, we talk about knowing your ideal competitive mindset, your ICM, your ICM, your ICM, and that becomes a bullseye before you go on the field. You know, that's what a whole pre pregame warm-up is really about is to switch on your ICM. Now, in the NFL, we play one game a week, but you wouldn't want just Sunday to be the time that you're in your ICM, your ideal competitive mindset. want to find it on Wednesday and Thursday because you're trying to compete to be your very best every, you know, as many times as you possibly can be.

And by the way, competition, competition, competition, being a great competitor does not mean, in my mind, being better than somebody else. It means competing to be your very best. Right? best. Right? best. Right? Which is an interpersonal navigation, not a comparison to another's prowess. So the ICM, one of the things that we do for ICM is one, we label it which you just did. Your ICM, your ideal mindset, take the C out of it for a moment, is love. Yes. Yes. Yes. Okay. So now what do we do for athletes to help them be in that state more often?

We train for it. Okay. We label it. We ask them to describe what does it feel like look like? Then we back in a training mechanism so that's more familiar to them, more closer to the surface. for you that would be that backing in would be meditation would be a practice writing conversations practicing in conversation. So you got a whole set of things. The thing that I want to just introduce is we actually start when you wake up with a just a quick hit of imagery and we design a four-step process for folks, a morning mindset routine.

And one of the four steps is using your imagination to see yourself being exactly the person you want to be at a specific time or phase of the day. Right? And so it's super mechanical and simple, but it's using this powerful engine of your imagination to see yourself being brilliant in a difficult challenging moment. Okay? And so and then we do things. So that's a morning kind of thing. And then right before you are going to engage in anything, let's just say walking into a training facility for an athlete or into a stadium, what do you do to get connected to that state?

Maybe you tap something, you tie your laces a certain way, you do something to kind of get that activation going. And that is a nearly invisible practice that elite athletes across the board embrace that most of us do not put into practice. So, I just want to kind of share that. What does it look like for you? Like, how do you, Mike, get into your I am. So, for me, my I'll call it like an ideal performance mindset, if you will. Um, and and I have a trouble with the performance piece cuz I'm not performative.

It's more of an ideal being mindset for me, right? But that sounds like a little complicated. So, it starts with a morning mindset routine, which is four things. one breath, one gratitude, one segment of gratitude, one segment of uh imagery and then I just pull my sheets off and take a moment to be where I am. So now practicing present just start that again. So you wake up in the morning and you have sheets are still on. Okay. And you have one breath at least one.

So I'm I'm I am sending a signal to my brain. Hey, we don't need to get in the rapids yet. Mhm. Mhm. Mhm. We're cool. So an exhale sends the signal to the brain. We're good. I like that. Okay. So maybe it's three breaths, maybe it's 10 breaths, I don't know. But it's I commit to one dealer's choice. dealer's choice. dealer's choice. Yeah, dealer's choice with a great intention, intentionality behind it. And then I do a little bit of and this is like 60 seconds to maybe 3 minutes of work while I'm still in bed.

And then I do some gratitude stuff where I'm just kind of lighting up the parts of my brain that are like, yeah, there's a lot of good here. I'm So today I was like, I'm really glad I have two eyes. Mhm. Mhm. Mhm. So I just that classic like you know and I'm really I'm really grateful that my wife is healthy next to me. I think about that with my legs. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's like It's like It's like Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, let's not take these [ __ ] for granted.

granted. granted. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So So anyways, there's that. It's not a check the box is you. It's a feeling. feeling. feeling. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's activating the felt sense of gratitude. And then I'm using a quick hit of imagination, seeing myself, the way I walk and feel and the thing behind my eyes and inside of like my chest when I'm at my very best. And I did it for us today. Like how do I want to be with you when I see you for the first time?

And so so there's just a quick hit of that imagination. And then that kind of gives me a thing to work toward. And then the last is just a moment to be present. So that's a small example of four things I do in the morning. And there's other things that I do as well throughout the day. day. day. But that creates a foundation. Okay, let's go back to you and let's go back to meditation for just a minute or mindfulness in this topsyturvy world that we're in.

What do you know now that you didn't know 5 years ago? You know, call it midstream of your meditation mindfulness practice. What do you know now that you didn't know then? I would say the major development of the latter half of my contemplative career has been really starting to get interested in this incredibly fraught and widely misunderstood word of love or concept of love because it's it's it's been abused as a word, you know? I I'm a huge Beatles fan, but when I think about all you need is love, like you also need to go to the [ __ ] dentist, you know?

like but then actually thinking about love in a broad sense well going to the dentist is part of love it's you loving yourself and take care of taking care of yourself and so then I started to think about love really broadly understood as a whole set of skills from selflove again not self- loveve can easily veer into selfishness or self-gratification self-gratification self-gratification or self-indulgence but Actually, I think of it more as the self-t talk stuff or at least inclusive of the self-t talk stuff we're describing before where you're able to look clearly at your own like a good coach.

A good coach sees your flaws and just isn't a jerk about it. So, he or she or they will tell you what your flaws are, but they're they're not going to be like a drill sergeant. Most of us are like drill sergeants with ourselves, but we actually need to move into a coach mentality. So, that's the self-love piece. But then there's a whole other set of skills like how are you with people with strangers? How are you with the person at the with your barista? How are you with the trades people who come through your house to work on things?

And then there's how good a friend are you? How's your what's often called social fitness? Are you keeping up your relationships? How good a family member are you? What's up with your spouse? O often the spouse or your romantic partner is the hardest person to apply all the personal growth work you do. You just made a face that indicates you have some sympathy for what I'm saying. How are you with your kids? This is a whole suite of skills. Communication skills, which we haven't talked about, but but is a a discipline in and of itself that I find very interesting.

Back down to this level of strangers. There's a whole body of of research around something called micro interactions. So we can inject massive doses of happiness into our life by just paying attention to these little interactions we're having throughout the throughout the day that most of us sort of just ice out. So I've started to think a lot about this. It's actually what my next book is going to be about. And and I see it becomes more and more the value of it becomes more and more clear the diceier the social, political, and climate situation is on the planet.

Because at the root of all of this stuff is a lack of love, a lack of willingness to deal forthrightly with our own suffering and the suffering around us. And I'm pretty sure I as an individual can't fix all of it. But it still matters how I act given that we live in a world that is non-negotiably interdependent. interdependent. interdependent. How I act and I'm lucky. I mean people put microphones in front of me. So how I act actually does have some significance. But even if that weren't the case, how I am, what am I a vector of in my family and in my workplace and in my community, like that [ __ ] really matters.

And we all have agency in this regard. So yeah, you can if you want spend a lot of time on the news either celebrating or bemoning it. Um I would argue do a little bit of that. Stay an engaged citizen, but don't spend all of your energy there and instead start directing your energy to where you can make a change, which is in your actual orbit. That's a huge focus for me that I really wasn't thinking much when I first got into mindfulness. And I was really thinking of it in a quite a clinical way, you know, like, oh, I'm going to boost my self-awareness so I'm not so yanked around by all my neurosis.

Yeah, that's that's cool. But it's it it was missing a a lot of the warmth piece that the Buddha was very insistent on. Yeah. I think you're describing what I think about a lot as a pebble in the pond. And it's a it's a bit of when somebody is suffering or in pain, it's about mostly for them healing the suffering and pain, which is a self-focused approach, as opposed to being in the ripple in the pond, becoming as big of a pebble as you possibly can, as heavy of a pebble, so you create a bit more of a impact.

And that go that cuts both ways. like your grandfather, pretty big pebble set some ripples in one direction and maybe later in life sent those, you know, those waves in a more benevolent way. But what I hear you talking about is like from me to them, from me to we and that idea is so at home with where I think the selfhelp industry has gone wrong. Yes. Yes. Yes. Is that like me be better for what reason? so that I can help others in the best way that I possibly can.

You know, that is the central tenant into all 11 world religions. You know, it's a we thing. thing. thing. It's not a me thing. Yes. Yes. Yes. And so I hear the let's call it the adulting in in in that arc for you. But I think the really cool thing is that this me to wee thing is not a hair shirt, you know, catastrophic altruism self-sacrificing thing. It is enlightened self-interest. If you want to be happy, you will be useful because that is the most sustainable source of happiness.

happiness. happiness. Meaning Meaning Meaning meaning that if you have positive relationships and you're I often ask people to do this mental exercise. What is it like when you hold the door open for somebody? That's nice. That's nice. That's nice. Feels good. Infinitely scalable. That's right. That's right. That's right. Infinitely scalable. And it's so how do you Is that selfish? Is it selfless? Well, in the end, that's a useless distinction because yeah, you are a self on one level, but you're also like every thought you have is a manifestation of the living universe.

So, where's the self anyway? And this is again back to the Buddha like all of our striving and building up of our identity and acquiring of stuff is kind of misguided because it's all in service of a thing that's an illusion anyway which is the self. You know on one level the self is real. You and I are sitting here and we're each you know we have a physical self. We have a physical self. But even this physical self, the atoms are switching out every seven years.

And it's, by the way, falling apart. The wheels are coming off. We are designed for planned obsolescence. We are walking ocuaries. Like one of my favorite SCA bands from the 80s, the specials, had a line, "Enjoy yourself. It's later than you think." You know that that's the truth. So even this physical self isn't really defensible in an in an abiding way. And certainly the mind isn't. It's constantly, you know, in dialogue with the universe around it and never mind all of the causes and conditions that created it back through our ancestors and and through our parents and all of that stuff.

And so, yes, on one level you are you, but on a deeper level, it's more like a river like that's flowing all the time. And you can use the word river as a designation, but it's really a flow. And so given the fact that we are a process not a solid unchanging entity and we are in dialogue with a whole world of other processes that are not solid entities. The way to have the happiest possible flow and process is to have harmony in relationships with the whole.

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

You've done some work, Dan. work, Dan. work, Dan. You've done some work, my friend. Or I've stolen from all of my smart teachers. teachers. teachers. Yes. But yes, an probably. But you've done some work. Just a quick quick note, my my the teacher that I'm closest with is this guy, Joseph Goldstein. He and I were joking one day about how like my whole shtick is just b taken from him. And he was like, "Yeah, well, I did the same to my teachers." And he said, "We're we're part of a lineage of thieves." That's cool.

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

that place. that place. Yeah, I just do dharma and I add the word [ __ ] a lot. So, where where can folks find you now that you're not at 10% happier? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, so I started this thing. I just when I when the divorce was was find divorce business divorce. Yeah. Not I'm not getting I'm not getting divorced from my wife. Although actually in the early days when this business divorce was happening, my wife and I would use the shorthand of talking about the divorce and our son would occasionally be like, "Wait a minute, are you sub?" Yeah.

So when the divorce was finalized, I launched I just as a experiment launched a Substack where if you subscribe, I give guided meditations that come along with all of my podcast episodes and also do a weekly live guided meditation where you can meditate with me or with one of my teacher friends. And so it's a really it's kind of I'm kind of thinking about like a next generation meditation app. You know, I I was in the meditation app game for a long time and they're kind of static things.

Um but what I think is missing and and and I think there's a human thirst for this, especially as we get more and more saturated by technology, including now we're on the cusp of something big and dizzying with AI. Like we we need each other. And so I've been adding in like a real community element, which I'm interested in. is exciting and that's continuing to evolve and I can't say it yet but I think we have a next stage that we're going to go into. Yeah, my podcast 10% Happier.

I got a new book coming out in 18 months about love which is a whole embarrassing story that I can tell you another time. Could you do the same thing? Could you just tell everybody like what you're up to and where they can find you? The easiest place would be findingmastery.com and that's kind of where uh the whole housing of everything is. That being said, the podcast is a, you know, also an important way for us to communicate and be connected with our community. So, that's also finding mastery.

And so, social media is fun. We're having a good time on LinkedIn trying to find the the most simple and clever way to share ideas that help move people in the business world. And then Instagram, you know, Michael Jer is the place where I'm having more fun with uh sharing ideas. sharing ideas. sharing ideas. I got to go make sure I follow you. Yeah, about that. Awesome to talk to you, man. you, man. you, man. Dude, this is really fun. I I I absolutely appreciate all the time that we get to spend together.

Thank you for sharing what you've come to learn and doing it in an an honest way. Thanks, brother. Appreciate you.