 Yes, here we go. I can hear you loud and clear. Nice. Gentlemen, how you doing? Great, Dan, and we're really excited. Both of us are big fans. I believe I've certainly listened to your interviews with Joe and Sam, and I read your book, and I have a lot to say about it because, well... Johnny's a little unhappy. I'm a fidgety skeptic to begin with, so it was written for me, and I quite enjoyed it, and I have a lot to say about it. Well, how are you holding up? How long an answer do you want? I mean, I live in the hot zone, man. I'm in New York City. I'm recording this from my wife's closet. I just spent the day doing something I never, ever thought I would do, which is looking at houses in the suburbs. So these are strange times. And by the way, I say that as somebody who is aware that I'm at the .0001% luckiest end of the spectrum, so I haven't lost a job. Nobody I know has yet gotten sick. I haven't gotten sick, and yet and yet. Yeah, well, it was funny you mentioned that because Johnny and I had briefly talked about that, and then Amy and I on our walk with Puppers this morning, we're really considering what is the benefit to living in a big city right now? I feel like the lockdown and when we come out of it, a lot of the reasons that we move to the city versus living in the suburbs have evaporated for us. Which city do you live in? Los Angeles. Yeah. Well, I mean, but see Los Angeles, I can see the justification because it's not you're not living all over each other the way we are here in New York. I mean, there are more people living in this building that I'm living in than live in certain a whole set of blocks in LA and depending on the neighborhood you're talking about, just the density of the population, not only in the in the in the high rise apartments, but also in the office buildings. There are very few other, there's no place like this in the states and I don't know what this is going to mean for the long term of the city. I'm viewing this as, look, I got a five year old, he won't leave the house right now because he's scared of the virus, so I got to get him out of here. So I'm going to grit my teeth and go to the suburbs where I don't want to go. But this is a temporary retreat and I plan to reinvest in what I believe is the greatest city in the world at some point. Right. Well, for us, it has been the idea of paying metropolitan prices when you cannot live a metropolitan life and with with everything shut down. And to be honest, the first couple of weeks of this were quite scary. And I think it allowed all of us to feel vulnerable to a degree that in the past, we haven't really felt before. And that was for myself and for a lot of people, quite terrifying. And it is with that as the rest of this unfolds, we're still at the very beginning of this, of how society will move through this. It's it's a very thin line before civility starts to fall apart. And to be in a city and play that gamble is quite nerve wracking. And we've seen massive lines for all of the essentials that are still open right now in LA. Our friends in the suburbs, my friends back in Michigan, can't believe what we're experiencing in LA. And population density aside, exactly as Johnny's saying, the benefits of the nightlife and the entertainment and the action that you find in the city is all shut down and will be realistically not reopening anytime soon. So for us, it's been a lot of fun living in LA when when we were not in quarantine. But now we've really had to face the dangers of living in LA with the homeless population and how they've continued to expand in the areas that Johnny and I live, we encounter them quite frequently. And we're afraid of their safety in our own, because we know how quickly this virus can spread. Yeah, I hear you on all of that. You know, I think the the gray area is is used the expression, you know, not anytime soon, I think, that it's not going to return to the way it was. And it's, what does that mean? What does that look like? And, you know, and what are we willing to put up with? And so I think I think I suspect and I'm horrible at prognostication. So just take that as a greatest whatever I'm going to say next is a great assault. I suspect, and I'm really seeing this from talking to real estate agents in the suburbs right now, I suspect we're going to see at least on in socio some socioeconomic brackets that people with the means to do it and exodus from the cities. So I think a lot of people are thinking the way you're thinking. But you know, I also could see a world in which, you know, things do start to come back. I don't know when maybe it's a year, maybe it's 18 months, maybe it's longer. But what it does, it's going to be exciting and great and and sad. And it won't be exactly the way it was before. But my instinct, and I'm just speaking for myself here, is that when New York, which I love so much, comes back, I want to be here for that. Well, Johnny and I started The Art of Charm almost 15 years ago in New York City. And we know all about the action that that city has to offer and the energy. And talking to our friends there, seeing the photos of videos of the streets empty. It is completely different right now. Oh, dude, I mean, like I live on 9th Avenue and I can look down from my dining room. I say that like I actually have a dining room. There's a big area next to the kitchen that also includes a living area, whatever, because I've been to a small New York City apartment, hence the fact that I'm recording this in my wife's closet. When I can look out from a room in my apartment, I can look down 9th Avenue. Nothing. Crickets. No cars. You know how weird that is? That is zombie apocalypse shit. Yeah. I am legend is what it brings to mind. I think many of us have also been drawn to nature to find that calm, that happiness, that peace. And even here in LA, we have access to nature and hikes, but with everyone being on lockdown, it's the first place that everyone wants to go. So the hikes have been overrun, the beaches have been overrun. So we haven't been able to really find that solace and that space to find happiness in all of this uncertainty. And the other thing that's really jumped out at me in my own personal experience of this is realizing how much of my goal orientation and accountability is towards future planning and events on the horizon. So training for a half marathon with Johnny, getting in shape to get married, like all of these things that I would put on the calendar and then work backwards from to build out momentum to hold myself accountable, it's all collapsed because I don't have anything on the calendar any longer. I don't have anything to plan for. And that certainly impacted my own happiness. Well, this is the thing. Okay, so you're getting to one of the core issues that is core sort of psychological mental health issues that is raised by this pandemic, which is uncertainty. We are not wired as a species to handle uncertainty well. And I noticed for myself that I'm in this loop, and I say this as Mr. Meditation, but here we go. I get into this loop of I start thinking of, okay, so what is this going to mean for my contract at ABC News? What's this going to mean for my company 10% happier? What is, what is this going to mean for my kid, for my parents, for my wife's career? And I start projecting into the future and I hit a impenetrable fog bank. And I just don't know how to compute it. And so what I do is just loop on it and loop on it and loop on it. And I think you multiply that by six, seven billion people on the planet and you've got a mental health crisis of unprecedented proportions and you can add in just sort of isolation, domestic abuse, job losses, alcoholism, addictions of all varieties. And that just feeds everything about the aforementioned mental health crisis. But back to uncertainty, this is where I do think meditation can help because it can cut that kind of ruminative, anxious cycle so that you're not just stuck in the looping that I described. I know for myself, and we talked about this earlier this year, putting together a meditation practice is something that I struggled with in the past and trying to find something that would stick and trying the apps and different ways of going about it. I finally found in working with a coach and creating my own mantra, that space for me to do just that. And on the days that I miss it, where the morning gets the best of me, I find myself struggling with uncertainty tenfold. So I completely agree with what you're saying that I don't think it wanes it completely, but it definitely has a noticeable impact on the way my day goes. And ultimately, those negative reactions that uncertainty forces out of me, my fiance notices on the days that I don't meditate. So I can actually now pinpoint that that morning and that space in the morning is just so important to me. And I know Johnny, as someone who has not fallen into meditation as easily as I have, was excited to talk to you about your book, 10% Happier. But before I jump into that, I know that your journey into meditation, you weren't naturally drawn to it. You're not the most Zen guy in a career that's very demanding. So how did meditation become a focal point of your life? Yeah, I grew up in a, and by the way, I can just see from looking at your faces that you and you're a meditator and Johnny's a mess. So like, there we go. So yeah, I mean, to exhibit a, yeah, so for me, I mean, I had no interest in meditation to the extent that I'd ever thought about it. I thought it was ridiculous. I mean, I had some exposure as a little boy to yoga. My parents, who were these sort of left of Trotsky hippies in the suburbs of Massachusetts, sent me to a yoga class when I was five or six. And the teacher did not like that I was wearing tough skins. Remember those kind of jeans that our parents used to make us wear? Anyway, she made me take them off and do the whatever sun salutations in my tidy whiteies in front of all the other kids. And so that instilled in me a deep and lasting hatred for anything sort of whoo-whoo. And so I was not interested in meditation at all, but I did get an interesting wake-up call in the form of a panic attack on an obscure news broadcast called Good Morning America back in 2004. And yeah, I was in the middle of anchoring the, or I was kind of, I was assigned that morning to do what's called the news reader role. So they have the main hosts of the show at that time where Charlie Gibson and Diane Sawyer, and then they had a person who would come on at the top of every hour and read the headlines. At the time, the person who did that was Robin Roberts, who's now the main host of the show. I was filling in for her and the job was to kind of just read four, five, six headlines off of the teleprompter, and then you're done. And I had no reason to be worried on this particular morning, but just a couple seconds into it, I just lost the capacity to breathe, which is inconvenient if you're trying to be a news anchor. And I just had to kind of squeak out a, you know, that's it, back to you or whatever, and it sucked. And after that, I ended up in a, my mom saw it on TV and said, okay, you had a panic attack. And so she sent me to see a shrink and he asked me a bunch of questions. And one of the questions was, do you do drugs? And I said, yes. And he gave me a look that communicated the sentiment of, okay, asshole, mystery solved. That's why you had a panic attack. And the quick backstory there is I was a super ambitious, hard driving, young correspondent, new to ABC News. I had arrived there at the age of 28. And right after I arrived, or about a year and a half after I arrived, 9-11 happened. And I, you know, very eagerly went overseas and I was in, you know, I was in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Israel, the West Bank, Gaza. I was in Iraq for months and months and months. And when I came home from some of that, I got depressed. And I, that's when I started to self-medicate. And even though I wasn't high on the air, it, you know, according to the doctor, changed my brain chemistry in a way that made it more likely for me to freak out. And that, I didn't start meditating right away after this, but it, that's what put me on the path toward ultimately doing this thing I thought was ridiculous. Now, obviously, for many people, meditation is that woo-woo spiritual hippie-dippy alternative lifestyle that I think scares a lot of people. And what we enjoyed about your book is you actually made it more approachable for those who are, as Johnny says, fidgety, analytical, who aren't steeped in Eastern philosophy and really open to that. How did your mind become open to that? It sounds like you're very similar to us in that way. Right. Science is really the short answer. I, but by the way, you know, I, no disrespect to the people who want to practice meditation in the traditional, you know, more smells and bells, you know, incense and all that stuff. That's cool. I wasn't for me. It's still not so much for me. But what allowed me to really get over the hump is, is the science. There's been a ton of science that strongly suggests that meditation can lower your blood pressure, boost your immune system, rewire key parts of your brain associated with stress and self-awareness and focus in this era of distraction. And, and that, you know, on the sort of, sort of psychological front, it's been shown to help with anxiety and depression, two things that I've suffered with since I was a little kid. It's been shown to help with relationships. And yeah, it's, it's, it's been shown to be good for kids. There's just a ton of evidence. It's still in its early stages, but it's really strong. The strongly suggests that there's a lot of benefits to meditation. And so that's what allowed me to do it. I think for a lot of people, the idea of meditation and what it is supposed to do sounds incredibly attractive to even the fidgety skeptics. And they want to participate. They want the benefits. But for whatever reason, there is some sort of, of row block of understanding it to a degree where you could just let it do its thing. I've been into self-development for 16, 17 years. We've been doing this company for 14. We have interviewed quite a few meditation people and guides and whatnot. And for whatever reason, and all that time, as much as I was interested in the benefits, nothing really spoke to me or reached out. Now, in reading your book, I kind of saw it as, as a marketing material for meditation. Whereas it wasn't trying to sell me on the application or the practice itself, that if I'm holding the book, I already want the benefits. I'm already plugged in. I already want this to work. However, when you get the marketing material of something you already want, you just need to know it's exactly what it needs to be. And there needs to be social proof in a testimonial that speaks to who you are, where you go, that's exactly, this is for me. Now I'm going to buy. And I found that in your book in one line. And the line for me that, for whatever reason, put it into another space in my mind of how to approach it, or at least to allow myself to approach it, was that it was a celebration in being. Now, I can't remember which person said that in the book. You're on the bus tour. It was a few stops in. And I believe it was a womanage. And she referred to it as a celebration of being. And in this time where so many things have been upended and upside down for a lot of people. And as you were mentioning about being in the 1% of having still a job, being safe, having something to do every day, for myself, yes, which is having appreciation and gratefulness for all those things. And the idea of just celebrate being just really appealed to me in that moment over the weekend where I was getting really ramped up. And a few things that were, I've always been able to channel this energy into my hobbies, which is playing music, rehearsing with the boys, going out to see a show, writing, like those are my, that's where I blow off steam. But those have been taken from me going out to a show, socializing, getting into a rehearsal room and banging out tunes. Those are the things that allow me to feel good about life and celebrate life. And I haven't been able to have those. And I had noticed that without those and being able to blow off steam in that manner, that it is solely, everything else, the anxiety, the nervousness, the uncertainty has slowly have been amping itself up. And I had found myself in that one quote, being able to go, all right. So the next meditation here is the 10 breaths. Let's just go ahead and do that. You want to celebrate being, don't you? Well, yeah. And that 10 breaths went to about 30. And I can tell you that everything that I needed to have happened in that moment did. And I will say that for every day since then, I have sat down to do 30, 40, 50 breaths. And it has changed my, just in feeling of what is going on and being able to center and focus because I haven't been able to do that since all this has happened. So, well, thank you in that. And it is always that one line or that one thing that hits where it's like, oh, I can accept this now or this is what I need it to be. Thank you. Here's the funny thing is I have no memory of writing that line. But tell me more about what it is in the, Jeff Warren, who was my co-author on that book, you're talking about the second book I wrote, which is called Meditation for Fidgety Sceptics. And Jeff Warren, who co-authored it with me, who's an amazing meditation teacher. I'm not actually a meditation teacher. I'm just like a journalist who writes about it and talks about it. Jeff is a trained professional. And he came up with this meditation called 10 Good Breaths. And it's, if I recall, doesn't mean like breathe in any special way. It's just sit there and feel the breath as it happens naturally coming in and going out. Can you do it for 10? And it sounds like you're doing, you're tripling, quadrupling down. What is happening in your mind that is having the benefits that you're describing? For me in that moment, and as I've been doing this every day after waking up since then, was as a company, we have a lot of things going on. The podcast and what we're doing right now is just one part of many different components to it. And in the past, I would see AJ on a regular basis working. We were together. We were always collaborating and doing stuff. I've been isolated in my apartment on Hollywood Boulevard. And I don't have fan, I live by myself. And the isolation, I think, with the uncertainty and always having my computer in front of me, which means, well, there's nothing else to do but work. So I might as well just keep working. And the work that I'm doing is I'm on Twitter interacting with people and putting together. I go live every morning as an opportunity to chat with our listeners and also a sanity check for myself because I haven't had the opportunity to really connect with people being over here. And all that has taken its toll where it just seemed that every direction I looked was uncertainty and chaos. And it just only perpetuated itself. And so on breathing and focusing on it, just everything else sort of washed away for that time period. I was reminding myself about being here safe, plenty of things to work on. Nothing's going to happen magically. We're just going to plug away and enjoy having what I do have in these moments. And it just allowed my, just everything to calm down. And certainly my thought process to quit racing, which was leading to getting panicky. So what I'm hearing, it's like a short circuit. The mind is always racing, planning, plotting, ruminating and just taking your attention south of the border, south of your neck and putting it on your body and your breath can be a circuit breaker on this racing mind, this voice in your head. And so that is amazing and textbook. And then I would say it goes, there's, in this kind of meditation, which is a little bit different from what AJ is doing. AJ has a mantra that's known as Vedic meditation. It's kind of usually taught in the Hindu school. The kind of meditation that I've, the cult I've pulled you into is mindfulness meditation, which is derived from Buddhism, but is stripped of any sort of metaphysical claims or, you know, religious lingo. The first step is you calm the mind a little bit by pulling you out of your racing thoughts. The second step is, and this is in my opinion, where things get really, really beneficial, even more beneficial, which is you, once you have that baseline of calm and concentration, you can start to investigate what's happening when you get distracted, because of course you'll sit, you'll try to feel your breath, and then your mind's going to go nuts and your start, you know, it's like, what was Casper? The friendly goes before he died and blah, blah, blah, just random thoughts. What's for lunch? When can I get a haircut? blah, blah, blah. And the whole game in meditation is to notice when you've become distracted and to start again and again and again. And it actually, distraction, many of us, we get distracted and we think, oh, well, I can't do this. I'm a failed meditator. But actually the distraction is the money, because when you see how wild and cacophonous and and how fast moving your mind is, you're seeing fundamentally what your life is actually about. You may think your life is about your friends, your work, whatever, your family, but your life is actually about what's happening in your mind in any given moment. And if you look at that, it's embarrassing. And it's really useful to see how embarrassing that is, because then when you have the visibility, you are less likely to be owned by all of that noise. And that is mindfulness, it's the ability to see what's happening in your mind without being yanked around by it. And that just gets better, you get better and better at it. It's a skill just like any other skill. And to me, so the 10% happier thing, the 10% compounds annually. And you can just, I retain the capacity to be a massive schmuck. Don't get me wrong. But I'm much less of a schmuck than I used to be. The other thing that I hadn't really put much thought into was just how I like running. And I go out a few, why I used to go at least once a week for a six to 10 mile run. And that has been taken from me here in Hollywood. Why? Can't wear a mask? It's just, there's a lot of different components. There's masks. There's people without masks. There's other runners. There's traffic still. It's wild out here. There is a great article in Vox about the fact that I think running is actually not as dangerous as people think it is. And I run with a mask in Central Park. I don't run as far as you guys do because my knees get all jacked up and I'm old. But I think you might, I'm sad that that release has been taken away from you. And I wonder if you couldn't reclaim it. But I'll take my nose out of your business. Well, it's certainly something I'd like to get back to. It is some of the, my paths and where I had run are closed down. And with, so there's a, there's a pattern that has been interrupted. There's also the homeless situation has gotten, has been untouched for several months now in Los Angeles, where the encampments have gotten very large. And where I live on Hollywood Boulevard, it is difficult to even walk out in the street without getting some harassment. And it's, I don't want to be, there's a part of me that doesn't want to be put caught in a, in a compromised situation on that run. Well, I think what the book and Johnny's point brings up that I think a lot of us don't realize because when we take a historical view, we look around and we're like, well, we're technologically advanced. We all have comfort. We have more access to things than ever before. But yet we're constantly running in this fight or flight response. We don't realize it. And we're not really wired systematically to do well in that endless stream of fight or flight. We often try to distract ourselves from it, sometimes in healthy ways and unhealthy ways, but it's ever present and running in modern society. And, you know, if you think to caveman times, oh, that makes sense. You're very worried. There's a lot of threats that you have to be concerned about. Why are we in this fight or flight system currently? And why is that running so much for everyone? It's a design flaw. You know, the, the fight or flight mechanism, you know, a bunch of adrenaline gets jumped, you know, sort of dumped into your brain and your heart races and your palm sweats, your palms sweat. This was really meant to be, you know, when you're confronted with a tiger. But now we get it when we're confronted with our boss or we're in traffic. We're looking at tweets we don't like, et cetera, et cetera. It's inappropriately triggered all the time. It is not a surprise, then, that we have this epidemic of cardiovascular problems in this country. You know, heart disease is just a massive killer, if not the number one. And, and it's this, it's the, the stress. And, you know, and then add on top of that the amount of self judgment we do, where we're not only the person being confronted with the tiger, but we're also the tiger. And that's just, it's just incredible that how this is working and how, and this is why watching your own mind in meditation is so instructive. Because then once you see these patterns, these storylines you've been running since you were a kid that were injected into you by your friends or your parents or the culture, then you, then you have the opportunity to make a choice instead of reacting blindly to everything that happens, you can, you can respond wisely. That's the only meditation cliche I really liked, you know, to respond, not react. And that, that is a truly game changing skill. Well, I think many of us are wired for stimulus response. And what that mindfulness does is create space between the two. So that you're no longer constantly having your life dictated by this never ending stimulus that we see constantly, whether it's the media, whether it's social media, whether it's video games or whatever our proclivities are, we're constantly in this seeking of stimulus and then immediately responding to stimulus. And mindfulness creates that space for you to realize exactly what you said. A lot of the thoughts you had, they're not original thoughts. Someone told you that as a kid, it was imprinted on you, you learned it in school, you picked it up from somewhere else, but you don't even get to that point unless you sit with those thoughts and you create that opportunity to really examine them. Yeah, and it's uncomfortable. But what's the alternative? That's where fidgeting comes in. Yes, yes, yes. It's just like, would you rather, I'm not gonna sit here and say meditation is, you know, I often describe it as like going to the gym, you know, you go to the gym, if you're not panting or sweating, you're cheating. And if you sit and meditate and, you know, all of your thoughts evaporate and you're just floating off into the cosmos, then you're either enlightened or you're dead. And so it is gonna be some stuff, there will be some discomfort in meditation. There will also be amazing things. But what's the alternative? If to live, to have an unexamined, I wouldn't say that an unexamined life is not worth living, but it's not gonna be nearly as enjoyable as having an examined life. You know, something I feel has made a lot of this difficult as well. And you're well versed with the news and everything, which is without our feedback loop of societal pressures and chatting with our friends and finding a center there, for a lot of us who are alone, like for me, every time I reach out of my own comfort zone or just my own box that I've put myself in to feel safe to see what's going on in the world, I'm being inundated with the most horrific, insane news and squabbling and garbage. And I feel that it has even been amplified during this time. And it was not as the news was anything worthwhile looking at leading up to this, but it has gotten, it seems to me, and that much worse. And it makes very hard to get some footing of what is going on and how to make plans, as we were mentioning earlier. Yeah, I mean, so let me, can I say two things in response to that? Yeah, please. Cool. So the first is, you know, obviously I make my living as a newsman in part, but I'm not defensive about critiques of the news at all. I think there are lots of legit critiques to be made of the news. What I would recommend is a kind of thoughtful titration of news consumption. I do think it's useful to be an informed citizen. I don't think it's useful to be so drenched in the stuff that you're just, you know, in fight or flight mode all the time. The second thing I would say is, and this isn't directed at you because I have a suspicion you're already doing this, but just to put this out there, the one guaranteed method for stress reduction that I can offer when you're feeling lonely or uncertain or despondent about the state of the world, you know, after having consumed too much news or whatever, the one guaranteed, and this isn't my experience, but guaranteed stress reliever is and get ready for the biggest cliche, but I'm sorry, sometimes cliches become cliches because they're deeply and non-negotiably true, but the antidote here is kindness. And if you reach out and do something for somebody else, it, a service you could just say. And I don't mean it's getting groceries for your neighbor, checking in on your mom, checking in on a buddy who's struggling, giving a small amount to charity. Any of those things will do a couple of things. One, it'll pull you out of the black hole of self-obsession. Two, it will remind you of your own worth because you can be, you can see how you are, you are demonstrating in real time your utility on the planet. And those, and by the way, there's tons of, you don't have to take, you know, my word for it as, you know, like a C-level news anchor, you can just look at the science. The scientists refer to this as the helper's high, that what happens in the brain when you are generous is very similar to what happens in the brain when you get a, when you get chocolate or when you get a gift, you know, the pleasure centers of the brain light up. And this is, you know, it doesn't have any of the weight game that is associated with chocolate, no disrespect to chocolate. What I'm saying is this is a healthy, scalable, easily reproducible thing. And it's a muscle you can build when you find yourself feeling like shit to say, to just be like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Call my mom or go to, I have an elderly neighbor. I see her every day or pretty much every day. And that's just like 45 minutes where I'm not in my own head. Like I'm, you know, helping out my neighbor. And that has just been, she's done more for me in that way than I've done for her. Now, in your career, news has exploded. So, you know, in last century, the news was a couple hours a day, a lot of planning to get the big headlines. And now it's a 24 seven plus social media news cycle. And in order to get and hold people's attention, the news is fairly driven by outrage because there are all these competing stimuli that we have to deal with. So whether it's the cryons on the bottom of the screen or the talking heads and the pundits who have to out outrage one another and, you know, setting politics aside, both sides have been guilty of this. One, how do you stay sane having to work in that environment now where much of what meditation says is to do the opposite, which is to remove that stimulus, focus on what you can control and not worry constantly about what's going on all over the planet in areas and situations where we literally have no control. And that's one thing that this pandemic has taught us is that so much of what we think we have control over, we really don't. And I can't imagine being in the newsroom throughout your career trying to be Zen. That's not arguably the Zen space. Can I give two answers again? I'm sorry. You this is your fault. You ask good questions. And then I have too too many things to say in response. All right. So the first one is that so the word news or the term of the media is, you know, a plural plural noun. Like it describes a whole range of news outlets. So there's a vast difference between the New Yorker and Breitbart. And there's a pretty big difference between Fox News, CNBC, not CNBC, but MSNBC and CNN, where they are doing a lot of like opinion stuff. And the traditional rather stayed in some ways, network news divisions like ABC, CBS, NBC. So in my line of work, I do as a newsman, I have two primary responsibilities. One is I anchor the weekend editions of Good Morning America. And the other is I do big investigative stories. So I recently did a big story about a crazy story where I embedded with an indigenous tribe in the Amazon, who are taking up arms to fight back against the illegal loggers. And it was nuts. Actually, it's on Hulu. You can watch it on Hulu. It's called Guardians of the Amazon. Totally nuts. So big, big, big marquee investigative reporting pieces. And then also sort of morning chat show where we do do the news and we do it really well, I think for the first part of the show. And then we do a lot of super light stuff. But even when we're doing the news, we definitely get into the hard, tough, ugly aspects of life. But we're not really in shouting matches. And I'm not like referring between a Trump supporter and a Biden supporter. So I'm not really in the part of the news that is maximally stressful. That's a long answer to your question. But it means that for me, there are stresses in the news like being so in touch with everything that's happening and how disturbing it is. Yes, that is tough. But I don't have to... I'm not on Twitter mixing it up with people who I disagree with or getting in shouting matches with political opponents. It's just not my world. And I'm really happy about that. Yeah. And certainly what's going on outside of network news is even crazier. But even in network news, a lot of the stories, and it sounds like even in that Amazon story, we're dealing with suffering that we have no control over in locations that don't really influence our lives. And I feel that many of us, the more we spend in that line of thinking, taking on the suffering of others that is completely foreign to us and something that we just have no control. You personally can't stop loggers in Brazil as much as we would try. We could band together, maybe the three of us would stop a couple. But in reality, we are moving outside of our center of control. And when it comes to mindfulness and meditation, it's kind of the opposite. It's like, let's collapse it back down onto what we can control, which is our thoughts and not fusing those with our behaviors. So I do feel like that balance is still going to be a struggle even when we're talking about those pieces of the news that you're involved in. Yeah, you're absolutely right. And the second thing I wanted to say, I'll get to in a second, which is about the sort of lack of control, because I think that's the big, deep issue here. But you're absolutely right. There's no question that even though my day-to-day life is way less stressful than if I were a cable news anchor, I am very much on the front lines of disturbing stories and on the receiving end of just a massive nonstop fire hose of information. And that does require, for me, has having meditation in my life and all the other good habits I've been able to episodically cobble together over the years has helped me not be so crazy in such an asshole, really. And interestingly, and this just is not flattering, but a lot of what made me an asshole, not that I'm perfect now. I just want to be clear, I'm not. If I were to let my wife into this closet, she would talk to you a lot about my remaining floss. Yeah, please don't. Anyway, a lot of what made me crazy wasn't so much the exposure to other people's suffering, and I hate saying that, but it's true, was really the competition. I was so caught up in the competition against my fellow on-air colleagues or on-air colleagues from other, you know, the news business, especially the on-air part of it is tiny, and there are just so few jobs, and the higher you get, the top of that pyramid becomes tiny. And so the competition, the dumb luck of it, the politics of it, the amount of work and churn and all that's in the comparison, the comparing yourself to other people, which is an incredibly painful mindset, the jealousy, all of that, it just really wore on me. And I didn't, I don't think I even really knew how bad it was until I started meditating and looking at my mind. And so yeah, there are many ways in which the news business can be hard to navigate, and I think that meditation has been incredibly useful to do the two things I discussed with Johnny before, which is one is to have a circuit breaker on the racing mind, and two is to be able to get familiar enough with the nature of your own mind so that when your demons do pop up, you're not owned by them necessarily, that you can kind of, you know, give them a high five and let them go sit in the corner and then make a better decision. And that is, that's huge. I think what makes it hard for people and is the ability to understand when it's, it's coming to a boil. It's, it's the, and it's the, it's the boiling the frogs, so to speak. So that you don't realize the irritableness and your anxiety, because it's usually, at least for me, it's just, it was slow onset and there was no release and it continued to build and not to say that it was at a degree where I was in a panic, but just as you mentioned, it wasn't until after I had done the exercise that I realized, holy cow. And I was able to look, take a step from it and look at how I was feeling and how my mind was raising and to be able to at least stop it for that time or to let off that steam through that, that practice. It, it was only then that I realized to the extent of it. Yeah, I think that's what's so powerful about, about meditation. The first time I ever did it, I remember, you know, feeling like I sucked at it and that it was very frustrating and all of that. And I also remember feeling like, oh, this is not like hacky sack or going to a fish concert. This isn't some, you know, hippie pastime. This is, is exercise for your brain in a really profound way. And I just saw something really important about my own mind, which is that there is this inner narrator in there that is yammering all day long. And that if I were to broadcast that aloud, I would be arrested. And that, and that there was a way to work with that is radical. You know, that it, what it, what it, what it suggests is that the, if you think about it, what do we want out of, what does anybody want out of their life? The answers will be variable, but they'll be something like, you know, I want love or I want a career, I want a corvette or whatever it is. But really, if you go beneath the, the idiosyncratic desires we may all have, what we really want are mind states. We want the happiness or the connection or the peace of mind or whatever it is that accompanies the things that we think we actually want. And what the radical news of meditation is, is that those mind states are not factory settings that can't be unaltered. And they're not gifts given to you by the universe. They are skills that you can train. And that is amazing. And that's why I, I have my, this little side hustle of meditation that was a weird little distraction to my otherwise reasonably good news career has taken, swallowed my life because to me that is good, you know, the word gospel means good news. Like that's my gospel. And, and I'm just out here beating the drum on that because I think it's a huge deal. Well, I think for myself, and I know a lot of our listeners included, we are very competitive. We are type A. And yes, sometimes that voice, we don't like what it's saying, but a lot of times we feel that voice gives us an edge and brings us to the top of our field. And even in your book, you mentioned your boss saying, stop being so Zen. And I think a lot of type A personalities like cringe at that thought of like, well, Zen, I'm not going to be taken seriously. I'm not going to get ahead. Like, what are you talking about? And it feels so contradictory that mindfulness and compassion is somehow going to give you an edge in this never ending competition. And how did you experience this? Because I feel like that is really the profound side of this that could help so many people in our audience. So in my face, this is, this is such a huge issue in my first book with 10% happier. Sorry, I hit my mic again. So I'm going to start that again. But in my first book, which you call 10% happier, this was the core issue I was trying to wrestle with, which is, can you be a happier person without being a paluka or totally ineffective or just a complete loser? And, you know, I remember that Nirvana song from that, that there's their third album in their last album in utero, where I think it's called dumb, you know, and he said, maybe I'm dumb or I'm just dumb or maybe just happy or something like that. Anyway, I had always conflated, you know, I thought if you were happy, you were just an idiot. And in order to be successful, you need to have this internal tattle prod that you were ruthlessly jabbing yourself with. And actually, as it turns out, that's a false dichotomy in my experience. First of all, it's a misunderstanding of happiness. The happy that I think Kurt Cobain might have been referencing or that we are all sort of maybe subconsciously referencing, that's complacency. That is different from happiness. And, and it's a false dichotomy to say, I'm either going to be constantly jabbing myself with this cattle prod, or I'm going to be on the couch, you know, watching Real Housewives or whatever for the rest of my life. In fact, yes, a certain amount of plotting and planning and stress is going to be part of doing anything great. There's no, there's no question about it. No question about it. And I'm still incredibly ambitious. I still have the news career that I had when I started this whole thing. And I have a startup company and a podcast, sorry, and a podcast and a, and I give speeches all over the place and blah, blah, blah. I'm doing more now that I'm a meditator. But I have learned how to, to draw the line between useless rumination and what I call constructive anguish. So a certain amount of the worrying makes sense. So you got to, you got to do it. You got to, you guys got to be on the horn talking to each other about who's our next guest and what are we going to do next with the business and how are we going to deal with this pandemic? Yes, all that needs to happen. But at some point, you take it too far and you reduce your own resiliency, you kill your own creativity, you ruin your sleep, you're shittier to your partner and to, and to everybody else in your life and you're less successful. And so drawing that line, having a wake up moment where you're on the 85th run through of all the horrible ramifications of whatever, if you can pose yourself a question, is this useful? And then pop yourself out of it and focus instead on something that is genuinely useful. Well, that is what will make you more effective. And that's why you see meditation practiced by so many super, super effective people. Do you want to be more focused? Do you want to be less yanked around by your emotions? Do you want to have some wisdom about when to draw the line between worrying and thinking about something else? That's what meditation can give to you. And that's why so many successful people do it. I think it's that conflation with Zen and being passive and AJ bringing that up. I, I, for, I, yeah, I've seen it myself and I've seen a lot of young entrepreneurs and you, and you, it's not talked about as much as it should be. And if you've turned on somebody like Gary Vee, who I adore and love his stuff, but it is, you cut constant barrage of grind, what are you doing? You got to be doing this. And you don't hear very much about having this opportunity for yourself to relax, to be able to think. And there's almost this idea that if you allow that to happen, how are you going to get this momentum back going? Yeah, you're going to be left behind because everyone else is still running and racing. So, I mean, I love Gary Vee. I actually used, I knew him a little bit socially here in New York City and I've had him on my podcast. So no disrespect to Gary Vee, but I fundamentally disagree with, again, I'm, I'm all about the hustle. I have a venture-backed startup company and I, and you know, so I'm an entrepreneur now, like you, a podcaster like, but unlike you, I also try to hold down a day job at ABC News and all that stuff, all the things. I'm, yes, but constant grinding, constant FOMO, constant comparing yourself to other people is going to grind you into a fine powder and that is not going to make you effective. And in fact, I've been deeply influenced by a book called Rest, which takes a look at, it's by Alex Sujung Pang. He was also on my podcast. I, I, I, I think we titled the show, like how to do more, how to do less and achieve more or something like that. But he went back and looked at the work habits of incredibly successful people, prime ministers, athletes, Darwin, and they all have very systematized rest built into the structure of their day. And by rest, it doesn't mean lying on the ground, although that, that can be fine too. We're sitting in a chair and meditating, but also like really engaging rest, like Johnny, your music thing, that's rest, running, rest, carpentry, not that I would ever do that because, you know, why would I, I'm just too much of a city boy who doesn't have any calluses on his hands. But anything that engages the mind in something that can put you in a flow state of happiness and focus or you're working with other people, that is, that is, can make you so much more effective. And, but trying to grind all the time. I just, I know there's some, there's like, there seems to be a spectrum here between Tim Ferriss, who says you can work four hours, you know, four hour work week and Gary V, who's like, you got to, you know, grind all the time. I think there's somewhere in the middle where you have a workflow to your day that is pleasurable and where you have good relationships with yourself and with other people. And you're actually hitting your sweet spot in terms of creativity and not, you know, just stuck in this, you know, internal jabbing of the cattle prod. It was certainly much easier when I, before the pandemic hit and I was, we were on this, this quarantine lockdown, whereas before those, all those different components allowed me to stretch the rubber band in other directions and to feel loose and to come into work charged up. But now just sitting in this studio apartment in Hollywood Boulevard, it's, well, what, oh, I'm sitting here. What do I do? Let's start, just start with doing something. Well, to defend Gary V a bit is I do feel his advice is a little more nuanced and compassion and stopping the comparison with others is a big part of it. Hustle for your own journey. And yes, there's definite benefits to both sides of hustle and rest. But I think the other thing that a lot of us struggle with, and I know personally, this is something that I struggle with deeply. And there's a quote from your book that really stood out to me around compassion. And I was raised in a Catholic family and compassion for others was practiced through and through in all of our behaviors and charity work that we did growing up. But self compassion, there wasn't much room for that. In fact, there was an immense amount of guilt around what we were unable to accomplish and what we should be accomplishing with the skills and talents that we have. And when we look at compassion, it is contradictory and difficult for many of us to turn it back on ourselves and be compassionate. And especially in times like these, I feel like it's even more important. And what you describe in the book is being nice for selfish reasons. And it's interesting trying to grapple with that. It feels like a contradiction. So how does that work? And how can we balance those two being nice for selfish reasons? Yeah, so I have a lot to say about this because I'm actually writing a book about this very subject. I'll try not to say too much so that we can keep this as a conversation rather than just a monologue. But briefly, in the name of compassion, Gary, if I got your message wrong, much love to you. And I'm sure actually it is way more nuanced. So I took a cartoonish version of Gary Vee's argument, but I do worry that there are a lot of people out there who have that attitude, whether Gary Vee is spreading it or not. And I just want to counter program against that. But back to your question, AJ, about compassion. I had an interview with the Dalai Lama that I wrote about in my first book that was really formative for me. And at this time I was already a meditator. And so I was really interested in meditation, but I wasn't so much interested in compassion, which is something that a lot of Buddhists talk about. I was still really kind of out for myself. And using meditation is a way to calm myself down and be more focused and less emotionally reactive. It was all kind of like, pretty self focused. But a lot of Buddhists are talk about it more as like really other focused. And that didn't, I mean, just my wiring is pretty selfish. And, you know, again, I'm not proud of that, but that is just the way I am. And that doesn't mean I don't work on that. I do. But my inclination often is quite selfish. And so I remember talking to the Dalai Lama about it. And he said, he introduced a term to me that I never heard before, which is wise selfishness. If you want to, you know, it's okay to be selfish, we're wired, all of us are wired for a certain amount of selfishness. But if you really want to do selfishness right, then you will orient your life around service. Because all of the evidence in the science suggests that people who are compassionate are healthier, happier, more popular and more successful. And so that is wise selfishness. And that really landed with me. I think something that I missed was something that you missed in the world of original sin among the Catholics was extending that compassion to myself. And it's very hard to sustainably and genuinely express compassion in the world and be kind, be of service, be of use when you're just being an asshole to yourself all the time. And so for me, I found that, you know, there are specific meditation practices designed to boost self compassion. And I found that doing that, warming up my own inner weather has had a really virtuous, created a really virtuous cycle, spiral, a sort of upward spiral of, you know, I'm kinder to myself, I'm more accepting of my own neuroses and demons and selfishness even. And as a consequence, I'm easier to be around my relations with other people are better, I'm more compassionate toward them. And then they're nicer to me, and then I'm happier. And as a result, even nicer to myself. And then I'm even nicer to other people, and they're nicer back and on and on. And that is profound. And can you be a little more specific around this particular meditation practice that's unlocked that for you? Yeah, so there's a, I wrote about this, I think in both books, we've talked a little bit about this practice. And we talk a lot, I talk about it a ton on my podcast too, because so in in the West, in the mindfulness meditation, sort of craze that's hit over the last decade or so, it's good craze. But it's really been focused on this, on the kind of meditation that Johnny described earlier, when you just, you feel your breath coming in and going out. And then every time you get distracted, you start again. And that's an incredibly valuable practice. It sounds super, it almost so simple that it's dumb, but actually it has a really, really deep ramifications in your own mind. But it was traditionally taught, while that practice has gotten most of the airtime, it was traditionally taught in conjunction with another practice that goes by the supremely spiritual, supremely syrupy name of loving kindness. And now when I heard about loving kindness, it sounded to me like, you know, Valentine's Day with a knife to your throat, just the worst, the worst, the most annoying thing. And I'm going to describe it to you. And some of you will be cool with it. And some of you will think as I did that this is the worst thing I've ever heard. But okay, here it is, you sit, close your eyes, just like you would in regular meditation, sit in a comfortable place, back reasonably straight, and you systematically envision a series of people. Often we start with ourselves or like a really easy person. So maybe you start with yourself, and then you move to a really easy person like your dog or cat or kid, you know, then you move to a benefactor or a mentor, somebody's been really helpful to you in your life. Then you move to a neutral person. That's a particularly poignant category now, because the neutral people, the people who man the cash registers at the grocery store or deliver our food, we often overlook them for a long time. And now they're literally saving our lives, allowing us to live comfortably. And then you move to a difficult person. And then finally, all beings. So as you pull, pull together in your mind some sort of image of these people, you then repeat to them, may you be happy, may you be healthy, may you be safe, may you live with ease. And then you move to the next super syrup, like systematic sappiness. But a couple things. One, ton of ton of scientific research has been done on this kind of practice. And it's shown to have deep physiological psychological and behavioral ramifications at all age groups. And, you know, we're talking from MRIs to studying it on kids. It's really impressive. The other thing is that, you know, as clunky as it may sound, imagine if you were an alien and you landed in a gym. Well, we can't go to even aliens probably can't go to gyms right now. But if you landed in a gym BC before Corona, you would think, what the hell's going on here? They get people running in place for 30 minutes or they're picking up heavy things and just putting them back down over and over. What is this? That's how you develop muscles. Well, this clunky practice, loving kindness, develops the muscle of compassion and kindness and friendliness and warmth. And it's omnidirectional. It's at you and it's at other people. And for me, this has been incredibly useful because, you know, I like all of us have things about myself that I really don't like. You know, the selfishness that I talked about before has been a source of real shame for me when I've wondered really, am I a broken person? Am I capable of love? Am I just totally out for myself at times? And just to be able to see, oh, yeah, this is just a habit pattern that is based in fear and is the organism trying to protect itself and is no longer useful. And so when I see this, you know, unquenchable thirst arising in me, I can salute it and say, hey, you know, you're doing your job. You're trying to protect me, but I don't need to listen to you right now. And it's like instead of, you know, slaying the dragon, slaying your inner demons, you're actually just giving them a hug. And that is the most effective disarmament plan. I think, and I've done that practice and with the same level of skepticism as you. And the remarkable quality of it afterwards is exactly that. It's omnidirectional. So although you are focusing on others and you're gearing this practice towards others, you actually have this halo of compassion towards yourself and seeing yourself as someone who should be loved and should have those same feelings. And I think, whether it's, you know, traditional religion or the way you were raised and some of those patterns that we've developed, that space for self compassion is shrank. It may not even be existing in some of our lives, but it is so important. And as we're seeing, especially in this time, where struggle is inevitable for all of us, our routines, habits, everything has been upended. I think that's such a powerful practice. And I know right now what you said is exactly true. Meditation is going mainstream. And, you know, we recently started talking about it on this show in 15 years. We hadn't really talked about meditation, but it is everywhere. What do you think are the most popular misconceptions because of this mainstreaming of meditation that are happening right now? And I know a lot of people because it's gone mainstream, they want to be that rebel, the counterculture of like, oh, it's just another thing that the guys in the West Coast, AJ and Johnny, that's so LA of them. Let's speak to that listener who's like, come on guys. Yeah. So there are a number of misconceptions that we've talked about a few of them. One is, you know, that that it's going to make you lose your edge. And I really don't think that's going to happen. The other is this idea that you have to clear your mind that if you get, if you sit and notice that you've become distracted, that somehow you're a failure, you know, and, and of course, you know, clearing your mind's impossible. And knowing that's really important. The game in meditation is just to focus for a nanosecond or two on one thing at a time. And then when you get distracted, you start again and again and again. And the thinking is not a mistake. That's actually part of the meditation. It's really important to see the nature of your own mind, because that's how change can happen. But then another misconception is what you just described, which I call as the, you know, it's, I call that the, it's all bullshit misconception, you know, this is hippie nonsense. But I go back to the science, you know, and look at, you know, why do you think Bill Gates and Jack Dorsey and Michael Jordan and before he passed Kobe Bryant and, you know, the lead singer of Weezer and 50 Cent, who, you know, that guy got shot nine times. I'm glad he's meditating. He needs some peace of mind. You know, why do you think all these people are doing this? George Stephanopoulos. I could go on, you know, the, the, the amount of celebrities I've had on my podcast, talking about this, Josh Groban, Moby, Rivers Cuomo, just Anderson Cooper, just tons of people who are doing this thing because it has the impact of boosting your focus and lowering your emotional reactivity. It is not nonsense. You don't have to do it. It's not like I'm saying you're never going to be happy if you don't do this thing or you're somehow defective if you don't do this thing. I'm just saying you should consider it as an option instead of writing it off. And by the way, I say this as a guy who wrote it off. Dan, you know, we have a network group, which is our hardcore fans. And we did a, we do a monthly or every two weeks book review. And so yours was over the weekend. And one of the questions that I was coming in here with and was brought up multiple times, there were, and there was a couple of fellows who had the same sort of view of it that I did and who had found your book refreshing and allowed them to take the time out to practice. And their thoughts were now that we had come to this place and this focusing on the 10 breaths is there's a utility in that that we are now seeing. And what is the progression? Where, what is the move from there? First of all, in the, let me get a little Buddhist on you. And by the way, I consider myself a Buddhist, but, but really not as a, you know, and there are people who practice Buddhism as a religion. And no, again, I've been no problem with that. That's not how I practice it. I consider one of my favorite comments about Buddhism is it's not something to believe in. It's something to do. So I, I do Buddhism in that I do a lot of meditation and I try to live my life by the precepts, the set up by the Buddha, because I think he was a genius and the idea of like being kind to people and that making you happy. That just seems to be like in the laboratory of my own mind proven over and over and over again. But that's similar to the way I do journalism. I do parenting. It doesn't mean I have to believe any, you know, you know, believe anything that, that can't be proven. It's, it's more of a set of practices. But in the Buddhist sense, the idea of just focusing on your breath and then when you get distracted starting again and again and again, you could, that could be all you ever do and you could get enlightened. Now, enlightenment, you can have an argument about, argument about what does that even mean? And does that even exist? And I'm happy to have that discussion because I have no idea. I'm fascinated by it, but you're, it's not like you're missing out on like the next super secret level. It's just, you know, you could do that forever and you'd be building these muscles of one focus. You're, you know, in a world where our attention is pulled in a million different directions all the time, you're trying, you're trying to focus on the feeling of your breath. And then every time you get distracted, you come back and come back and come back. That is a bicep curl for your brain. And that is what shows up on the brain scans of meditators. The other skill you'd be building is calm. It's not that every time you meditate, you will feel calm. That's actually, I think it's a big mistake to go into a meditation hoping to feel a certain way, because that actually just guarantees you churn. But you will, over time, as your emotions have less purchase over your actions, you will just be calmer. So you're building that muscle. And then the third muscle is this self-awareness known as mindfulness, which is the ability to see all of your inner machinations and desires and random thoughts with some, dare I say, journalistic remove that allows you to respond wisely instead of reacting blindly. So those skills and others are being trained through that very simple practice. So you could do that forever and you don't need to move on. But, you know, the other practices would include what AJ and I were talking about before with loving kindness practice. Highly recommend that as a compliment. And then there's another thing you can do one more layer that you can add on top of that basic meditation practice that you're doing already, Johnny, which is called mental noting. So when you get distracted, so you're sitting there, you're going to try to be with your breaths, 10, 20, 30, 40 of them, whatever it is, or maybe you want to set a timer and just be with your breath for however long a period of time on the timer. Every time you get distracted, you might just apply a non-judgmental label on what's distracting you, planning, worrying, anger, itch, restlessness, whatever. And that the putting a label on it kind of objectifies it in a nice way where it's not this monolithic, all-powerful force moving through your mind. It's actually just it's like pushing, pressing picture-in-picture on the remote control where the story that's been taken up the whole screen can be seen with some perspective. And I found this practice incredibly powerful because then, you know, I'm talking to my wife, I'm in a bad mood, and I know anger. And then I don't say the thing that's going to ruin the next 48 hours of my life. And that is huge. Well, that explains why you're in the closet. Yeah, that there seems to be some countervailing evidence here. Yes, I have said the things that have ruined the next 48 hours of my life. I just don't say them as much and I'm better at apologizing. Thank you so much for joining us, Dan. Obviously, Johnny and I enjoyed the book. Where can our listeners find out more about how to take 10% happier and apply it in their lives and obviously enjoy your show. Well, first of all, thank you guys for having me on. And it's like it's really there are very few things I enjoy more, very few things I enjoy more than talking about meditation. And to do it when people are sincerely interested in asking really like smart questions, but also questions based in your own experience that you really like care about. There's some skin in the game here is awesome. So I this is a great use of my time. So I've really enjoyed it. That's the first thing to say. And if anybody's interested in learning about meditation, I have a meditation app. It's called 10% happier. You can find it wherever you get your apps. I also have a meditation, I have a happiness related podcast where we talk about not just meditation, but all sorts of stuff related to happiness. And that's also called 10% happier. And we're now we're doing it twice a week during the pandemic, trying to talk about all sorts of issues that can be of use for people. And yeah, maybe that's enough plugging for one day. Thank you so much, Dan. Enjoy the rest of your day outside of the closet there. Thank you. I appreciate that.