The transcript from this week’s, MiB: Dan Harris, 10% Happier, is below.
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ANNOUNCER: This is Masters in Business with Barry Ritholtz on Bloomberg Radio.
BARRY RITHOLTZ, HOST, MASTERS IN BUSINESS: This week on the podcast, wow, I have a fun, extra fun, extra special. Anyway, I have a really fun guest. Dan Harris wrote the book “10% Happier.” It’s a short read on how he was kind of messed up, depressed, using drugs, and literally had a panic attack on live TV where he was a newsreader and an anchor. And he tells the story of how he sort of stumbled his way into mindfulness and meditation.
And what I really found fascinating about the book is there are no great promises. This isn’t going to change your life. It’s called “10% Happier” because, hey, if you can make your life 10% better, that sounds like a worthwhile trade to me. And Dan is a fascinating guy, really tells a wonderful story about how he stumbled into this area of self-help and how it really helped turn his depression and his life around.
And I found Dan to be a fascinating guy who really has a good sense of human psychology and the condition we’re all born into, and teaches us practically how to make the best of the wetware that we’ve all inherited.
I thought this was a fascinating conversation, and I think you will find it so also.
With no further ado, my conversation with “10% Happier’s”, Dan Harris.
DAN HARRIS, AUTHOR,10% HAPPIER: Thank you, Barry. Happy to be here.
RITHOLTZ: So let’s talk a little bit about your background. Bachelors in English at Colby College, was the plan always journalism from day one?
HARRIS: I had TV news and the movies mixed up in my mind. I kind of thought they were the same thing. So I —
RITHOLTZ: Sometimes they are.
HARRIS: Yes, yes. I had this desire to do something fun and glamorous. TV news is fun, but not very glamorous. But I went and did film school here in New York City at NYU for a semester while I was at Colby College and was not very good at film, but I did love the documentary course I took.
So I then took a lot of internships in TV news and then I went off in that direction.
RITHOLTZ: So glamorous. You’re in Baghdad covering the war. You fly right into the middle of Katrina. That seems like sexy, real stuff happening. Was some of television glamorous?
HARRIS: Yeah, I think when I got to the national and international level, it was pretty glamorous. I was more talking about right out of college. I spent seven years in local news in places like Bangor, Maine and Portland, Maine. I was covering tire fires and murders with a musket and, uh, like lots of random stuff.
RITHOLTZ: So let’s forward a little bit, not only you at ABC for a while, but eventually they tap you to be a fill-in, uh, nights and weekends and late.
And then you get a call to fill in working with, you know, some of the bigs and you have what can only be described as a panic attack on live television. Tell us about that experience.
HARRIS: It was awful. This was 2004. I was filling in as a news reader. That’s like the person would come on at the top of each hour and read the headlines on “Good Morning America.” And I was a few seconds into my spiel and just lost it. My heart started racing, lungs seized up. I couldn’t breathe, which is inconvenient if you’re trying to do the news.
RITHOLTZ: That can’t be inconvenient.
HARRIS: Yeah, it didn’t work. And I had to quit right in the middle of my thing, and it was super humiliating, very scary, and I, you know, in the end it turned out to be a really good thing for me, but in the moment it was the most embarrassing moment of my life.
RITHOLTZ: Now to be fair, and you can find it on YouTube and elsewhere, you look like you’re in a little bit of distress, you have a little bit of difficulty breathing. I’m sure it felt much worse on the inside, but credit to you, you kind of kept it together long enough to finish one of the segments and then tapped out, even though you had a couple more segments to go.
Unless you were paying close attention, I think the average viewer might not have noticed anything other than suddenly the video doesn’t match what’s going on.
HARRIS: Yeah, I mean it helps to be a sociopath. You know, like I can really hide my emotions. I think that, you know, I was 32 at the time. I had spent basically my whole adult life on camera. I really knew how to keep it together in every circumstance. I’d been in war zones. And so, yes, you’re right. When you look at the video, it’s not like I’m, there’s flop sweat and I’m ripping the mic off and running away.
RITHOLTZ: Right, the scene from broadcast news with Albert Brooks, like just drenched, always, always cracks me up. But that said, it leads to the obvious question. You’ve been in harrowing situations where there’s death and destruction, literally, no hyperbole, you were in Iraq and Baghdad and Katrina and a bunch of other horrific situations. What led up to this moment that made it so disorienting?
HARRIS: I think it was being in horrific situations and then coming home and having undiagnosed depression and anxiety and then self-medicating with recreational drugs, including cocaine.
RITHOLTZ: I love the expression self-medicating. We’re just getting high, is what you’re saying.
HARRIS: Yes, getting high, but we–
RITHOLTZ: Numbing the pain.
HARRIS: We self-medicate or get high with lots of stuff.
RITHOLTZ: Sure.
HARRIS: Shopping, gambling, entertainment, social media, sex, food, we’re constantly–
RITHOLTZ: Dopamine junkies, right?
HARRIS: Yes, we’re soothing this inner insatiability, this inner fear, and so for me, it was cocaine, and I was not high when I was on the air having the panic attack. So it was only afterwards when I went to a shrink and he asked, “Do you do drugs? Could that maybe a contributor?” And I was like, “Oh, yeah.”
RITHOLTZ: Well, I don’t really do drugs, just some blow on the weekends.
HARRIS: Exactly, exactly.
RITHOLTZ: And then I’m back on the desk ready to go. So let’s talk about how this led, I hate the expression journey, but how this led to your next couple of steps. Your preconceptions about meditation were misconceptions. You write in the book, tell us why.
HARRIS: It’s funny, I hate the word journey too. It’s like–
RITHOLTZ: Right?
HARRIS: I feel like–
RITHOLTZ: It’s so willful.
HARRIS: It’s also, it’s just like played out. It’s hackneyed, clichéd. And I think a big, being persnickety about language or like being picky about the words that I use is really the only value that I’m adding here. I know we’re going to talk about business, but for me, I mean, I am really interested in meditation or what might be called spirituality, But the way it’s presented so often with words like journey and heart-centered and–
RITHOLTZ: Very woo-woo.
HARRIS: It’s–
RITHOLTZ: And kudos for using the word persnickety, which is a great word. I really appreciate that.
HARRIS: As soon as it came out of my mouth, I was like, oh my God.
RITHOLTZ: No, no, that works. So we don’t love the woo-woo side of dressing up what is really a way to quiet the inner voice that sometimes is really noisy, which leads us to the next step on your path, and again, sorry. You end up either seeing or meeting Eckhart Tolle. Tell us a little bit about–I’m not pronouncing his name right.
HARRIS: It’s a hard name to pronounce.
RITHOLTZ: Right, but tell us a little bit about him.
HARRIS: Okay, so first thing that happens, I got assigned to cover faith and spirituality for ABC News, which I didn’t want to do, but it turned out to be great, and I learned a lot, and through that, I ended up reading a book by a guy named Eckhart Tolle, is the way he pronounces it. Huge best-selling self-help guru.
RITHOLTZ: Yeah.
HARRIS: I never heard of him because I wasn’t interested in self-help, but one of my producers recommended I read his book.
RITHOLTZ: Tell us about Tolle and what did you learn from this gentleman?
HARRIS: He presents, at least to my eyes and ears then, as just totally off-putting. He has this otherworldly ethereality to him. He’s this small German man who writes about having a spiritual awakening, and he uses the word vibration a lot. It was not really my cup of tea.
RITHOLTZ: Robes?
HARRIS: No robes.
RITHOLTZ: Garlands of flowers?
HARRIS: No robes, none of that. But I wouldn’t be surprised if he — given what I read in his book, I wouldn’t have been surprised if that’s how he showed up, but he’s actually just like a guy who wears khakis.
RITHOLTZ: (LAUGHTER)
HARRIS: So at first I was very unimpressed with him, but then he started to unfurl this thesis about the human condition that was utterly captivating for me. His argument is that we all have a voice in our heads, by which he’s not referring to schizophrenia or hearing voices, he’s talking about the inner dialogue, the inner conversation that we all have all the time, and that if we broadcast aloud, we would be locked up.
RITHOLTZ: (LAUGHTER) Or canceled at the very least.
HARRIS: For damn sure you’d be canceled. For all of us, we wake up, we get chased out of bed by this voice and it’s yammering at us all day long, constantly we’re wanting things, not wanting things, judging people, comparing ourselves to other people, running ourselves down. And when you’re unaware of this nonstop conversation, which Tolle calls the ego, when you’re unaware of the ego, it owns you. And that to me was a huge aha, because I was like, okay, this is just true. And I’ve never heard it before, A.
And B, this ego, this voice in my head is what led me to have a panic attack. I went off to cover war zones. My boss at the time was your colleague, David Westin. I went off and covered war zones without thinking about the psychological consequences. Came home, got depressed, was insufficiently self-aware to know I was depressed, and then blindly self-medicated, or got high, and then it all blew up in my face. And it was all the ego.
And so that got me really, that changed my life. And that’s an overused phrase, but that is genuinely true. Reading that book changed my life.
RITHOLTZ: So you go from the Tolle book, name of it is?
HARRIS: The one I read is called “A New Earth.”
RITHOLTZ: But he has like a run of books, right? A whole run of books.
HARRIS: He’s written a whole bunch of books.
RITHOLTZ: And from there, you start meditating. Tell us about what that initial experience was and when you realized, hey, this is something I could do on a regular basis.
HARRIS: So Tolle is frustrating because he describes the voice in the head very well, but doesn’t actually give you anything to do about it. A friend of mine has joked that he’s correct but not useful. So I was frustrated after meeting him. It was only after bouncing around for a little while in the aftermath of that that I stumbled upon meditation and this was like 2008, 2009 so it was before meditation got cool. It was cool in the 60s and then it then it got un-cool and then it got cool again and like the early aughts.
RITHOLTZ: It definitely comes and goes TM and transcendental meditation was huge for a while and now it’s got all sorts of different names. So what was your gateway drug to meditation? How did you find your way in?
HARRIS: The science. I started reading about all this science that at that point was not well publicized that showed that meditation can rewire key parts of your brain, help with anxiety and depression, both of which I’ve been dealing with since I was a kid. It can help with your blood pressure, boost your immune system. So as a dyed-in-the-wool optimizer, the science really made me intrigued. I was like, “Oh, okay. Maybe I should try this.” I also thought but as a journalist, and you’ll relate to this, Barry, it’s like, since the science was not well known, I was like, oh, this is a good story. Nobody else is on this story. It’s one of the first times in my life I’ve ever really been ahead of a trend. And so I started trying it.
And I started with a couple minutes a day, and it was super hard. It was very frustrating. You know, when you sit, usually, and we don’t have to get too into the details here, but meditation basically involves sitting, closing your eyes, trying to focus on one thing. Usually it’s the feeling of your breath coming in and going out. You’re not breathing deeply, you’re just feeling the breath as it normally occurs. And then every time you get distracted, which is going to happen a million times because our minds are wild, you start again and again and again. But that last part is really hard because it’s like holding a live fish in your hands. The mind is so squirrely and out of control and constantly planning and asking stupid questions and where do gerbils run wild and blah, blah, blah. And it’s very easy to get discouraged think you’re failing at this.
And so I struggle with that at first and I think most people do.
RITHOLTZ: I was struck reading the book, how similar some of the advice about mindfulness is to good investing advice. And I’m going to give you a few lines that I pulled out from the book about your experience. I can’t help but point out how similar it is to good investing advice. Let’s start with striving for success is fine as long as you realize the outcome is not under your control. Tell us about that.
HARRIS: First of all, I think it’s a really good insight on your part. I do think there is a big overlap between the sanity you want to bring to your everyday mind and the sanity you want to bring specifically to this important area of life, investing.
So non-attachment to results. That’s a very sort of clunky phrase that the Buddhists have given us. But it basically means that we live in a world that is utterly out of our control. And so all we can do, this is a great expression, all we can do is everything we can do. You can work as hard as you want, you can think, analyze the market as assiduously as possible, but things are not fully in our control.
So if you can have this attitude of like, I’m going to do everything I can do and recognize that I cannot control the outcome, I should not be attached to specific results, I think that’s a recipe for happiness generally and good investing.
RITHOLTZ: Yeah, the best traders I know focus on the process, not the results, because if you have a good process, even if you have a great process, sometimes outside, listen, we can’t control what the Fed’s going to do or what corporate earnings are, or hey, this debt ceiling thing, maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t, but the results are only going to be as good as your process plus some randomness of the world.
HARRIS: Absolutely. China shuts down, supply chains get clogged, there’s a monsoon in India. I mean, there’s so many factors that are hard to predict, political upheavals. And so what do you want to do? Do you want to beat yourself up every time something happens that’s outside of your control? Is that going to help your resilience? Is that going to make your team feel happy to be at the office? No.
What you want to do is have a good process and hope for the best.
RITHOLTZ: So another one, a simple question to ask yourself when you’re worrying, quote, “Is this useful?” And I find that to be fascinating. I frequently get calls from clients freaked out about, I just saw this news story on TV, What good does worrying about it do? What value is that stress?
HARRIS: Sometimes, sometimes, some amount of worrying and stress helps. I call it constructive anguish.
RITHOLTZ: Motivation?
HARRIS: Yeah, or just like thinking through the angles, you know, there’s a little bit of hand rigging and, you know, you know, there’s a great expression, never worry alone. So I think talking to talking to your colleagues or your friends or your spouse about investing or anything else actually makes a lot of sense.
However, we tend to take our worrying too far. And on the seventeenth time that you’re running through all the horrible things that are going to happen if you don’t get the ROI you were looking for, or if you miss your flight or whatever it is, maybe ask yourself at that moment, is this useful? Would I be better off changing the channel and thinking about something else?
RITHOLTZ: So this kind of reflects the title itself, “Small improvements, incremental changes are much more viable than giant transformational wins.” That’s a huge insight.
HARRIS: How many times have you had giant transformational moments? They don’t come across or come, they don’t come over the transom that often. And often what you think is a giant transformational moment becomes a good memory but doesn’t get integrated into your life.
Change is hard. Change is, that’s the bad news. The good news is it’s totally doable. If you commit to making small changes, the 10% happier will compound annually like any good investment. And that is incredibly good news.
Happiness, calm, equanimity, connection, compassion, all of the mind states that we want, just as a brief aside. We may think we want money, power, success, but really what we want when it comes down to it, the elementary particles of being alive, is mind states. We want to feel specific ways. And these mind states are all skills that you can train and take responsibility for. And that is incredible news. The mind is trainable. You can see it on the brain scans. You take a baseline reading of somebody’s brain in an fMRI and then have them do meditation for a couple of weeks, put them back in the scan, brain is different. The brain can be trained and so by extension can the mind and that is radically uplifting news.
RITHOLTZ: Here’s another quote that I really like. Mindfulness represents an alternative to living reactively.
HARRIS: Yes.
RITHOLTZ: So let’s talk about the difference between reacting and responding, which you describe as two very different ways to interact with some input.
HARRIS: I can imagine a lot of people who are in the world of investing or finance business generally having the feeling that if they get too happy, they’ll lose their edge. And that is not what this skill is all about. There’s a reason why you see people in C-suites and locker rooms meditating, because it makes you more sharp, less emotionally reactive.
So what you want is the ability, as you said earlier, to respond wisely to things that happen in your life, rather than being captive to the malevolent puppeteer of your ego that’s going to have you making stupid decisions, saying the thing that’s going to ruin the next 48 hours of your marriage, eating the sleeve of Oreos just because some little thought popped into your head. You want to be able to respond wisely to your internal stimuli and your external stimuli so that you’re surfing all of the changes of life rather than drowning in them.
RITHOLTZ: Surfing the changes of life, I really like that.
I have a colleague, Mike Batnick, who has this wonderful chart going back 30, 40 years, and it’s called Reasons to Sell, And you see every year there’s some crazy thing that happens. That’s an excuse to react and sell. But over the whole time, that chart goes from the lower left to the upper right. And the markets compound and go over time.
If you react to the reasons to sell, you miss out on that big move up. And I see parallels in the book for just how we live our everyday lives.
HARRIS: Absolutely. Yeah, you don’t want to miss out on dollar cost averaging because you’re freaking out about every little jot and tittle in the news. Like you, I also have a podcast. Also, mine is called “10% Happier.” And we spend quite a bit of time talking about the psychology of money, because that’s a huge part of the human condition. We need money. But we also don’t want to get so obsessed with it that we make irrational decisions.
RITHOLTZ: So you mentioned executives and athletes. A lot of Wall Streeters very famously meditate– Ray Dalio, Paul Tudor Jones, Michael Novogratz, Dan Loeb, the list goes on and on and on. Have you worked with any people in finance and how have you found their intensity level and their ability to throttle back a little bit?
HARRIS: Well, then there’s Axe in “Billions.”
RITHOLTZ: Well, I’m trying to stay away from the fictional characters.
HARRIS: I, it’s very interesting. I do a lot of corporate speaking and a lot of banks bring me in, investment banks, big banks. And I think it’s really about wanting to have people who are, a more business-friendly term might be emotionally intelligent, who can ride the waves, you know, as we said before, rather than drowning in them, and who can be good leaders instead of acting out all of their neuroses. These are important skills in any field, but I get a lot of invitations from people in finance.
RITHOLTZ: You mentioned some people are concerned they would lose their edge, not be competitive. Do you have to be paranoid and worried all the time to stay at the top of your game?
HARRIS: Do you think it helps? Like I mean this is something I’ve wrestled with a lot. I’d be curious to see what your point of view is. You know I do a lot of worrying but at some and I do believe up into a certain point it’s useful.
But at some point it’s completely degrading my judgment, it’s degrading my sleep, it’s degrading my capacity to have an open mind with peripheral vision for new opportunities because I’m coiled into anger or fear. You know, only a certain amount of it is useful and I just, I can’t see the argument for being, it being perpetually useful.
RITHOLTZ: So the key, since you asked me, I’ll answer. The key from my perspective is you have to worry about the right things and recognize. So my favorite joke is talking to a manager who is complaining about the Fed. First it was quantitative easing and then it was zero interest rates and they’re complaining, complaining, complaining. And in the back of my head, I’m always thinking, “Oh, this guy’s underperformed for a decade and he’s blaming the Fed.”
That’s very different than saying, “Hey, the Fed is talking a lot about inflation in 2021 and it sounds like they’re going to rapidly raise rates. What happens when rates go up rapidly? Well, it’s very bad for long dated bonds. I got to tighten my duration and own shorter dated bonds so they won’t take a 10 or a 20% hit if rates do go much higher.
That seems to be a more responsive way of worrying as opposed to just freaking out about something that’s out of your control.
HARRIS: I love what you said. Worrying about the right things. Prioritize your worry and then stop it and you know live your life get enough sleep. All of those things will help your performance writ large and useless, miasmatic, you know constant freaking out is rarely helpful.
RITHOLTZ: So explain to me how do you go from, “Hey, this meditation thing helps me stay a little centered, quiets the voices in my head,” to, “I know I’ll write a book on this.”
HARRIS: This is a business story actually because I had an entrepreneurial feeling back in 2009, I think, that I was reading all of these books about meditation that were really helpful but they were also really annoying and they were written in a cloying, sentimental way, and I thought, “Well, I’m going to write one that has the F word in it a lot, and that tells a very embarrassing personal story.” And my whole goal was to make meditation attractive to a whole new audience of skeptics. And that was an entrepreneurial itch that I had.
RITHOLTZ: That’s kind of interesting. I love the premise that practicing meditation and mindfulness will make you a little happier. Why 10%?
HARRIS: It’s funny. I mean, it was a joke. I mean, I was in a conversation with somebody, one of my colleagues at ABC News, and she was asking me, like, “Why are you into this meditation thing? What’s the matter with you?” And I said, I was kind of reaching for some answer that would satisfy her, and I said, “Eh, it makes me like 10% happier.”
And I could see that it just made her go from scorn to mild interest. And I thought, “Okay, this is my schtick. I’m just going to say that.” And my publishers didn’t get the joke. They were trying to bargain me up to 30% happier.
RITHOLTZ: You’re haggling over the title.
HARRIS: Yes, we were haggling.
RITHOLTZ: But, you know, the idea of “10% Happier,” the whole concept of incremental change and not overselling it and here’s the bar and then we’re going to pass the bar, that’s a great approach as opposed to all the other books that promise to transform your life and then sit on the shelf a third read and disappoint them.
HARRIS: If they really were going to transform your life, those authors wouldn’t keep writing more books, right? And that overpromising, that kind of reckless hope that is peddled in the darker precincts of the self-help world is, I think, what I was really trying to counterprogram against. And like I said earlier, though, the 10% does compound annually.
These are skills and happiness and the other mental states that we want are skills, as I keep saying, because I think it’s so important and interesting and we can just, you can continue to get to improve over time.
RITHOLTZ: So the first line of the book just cracked me up. My inner voice is an (EXPLETIVE DELETED). Explain why your inner voice seems to be disagreeing with you.
HARRIS: I think it’s a pretty much a statement of the universal, you know, of the human condition. We have these nattering, chattering inner voices that are constantly running us down, constantly making negative comments about other people, and that is, you know, we don’t, that’s not actually something we should feel guilty about. I think it’s because of evolution, you know, evolution bequeathed us this mind that is racing, why? Because we need to look —
RITHOLTZ: Always looking for threats.
HARRIS: Yes, saber tooth tigers, food, sexual partners, because natural selection really didn’t care about your happiness, it cared about getting your DNA into the next generation.
RITHOLTZ: Right, right.
HARRIS: And so that is the mind we’re left with. And there are beautiful parts of it, like without the racing mind we probably wouldn’t have skyscrapers or the iPhone. And so yeah, there are a lot of great parts of the human mind, but there are a lot of bugs in the design. And one of the bugs is that we’re never satisfied, we’re rarely satisfied, we’re rarely in the present moment. And the good news is that you can train yourself to kind of reduce the power of those bugs.
RITHOLTZ: So I don’t find my inner voice to be as distasteful as yours, but I have a very noisy internal dialogue. It’s lots of distraction, constant input. And my wife says, you know, nothing escapes my notice, we’re sitting out having dinner and after every now and then she’ll like tell me about the people in that corner.
So well he came in from the bathroom, the zip was open. After the second he walked away, the wife pulled out the phone and started, just peripheral vision and it’s not that I’m trying to pay attention to other stuff, it’s just everything is this fire hose of input and then everybody in the back of my head is having a conversation about it.
So I don’t find it’s like a nasty, unpleasant person chattering away, it’s just a cacophony. And I would love to be able to sort of quiet that down a bit.
HARRIS: Yeah, I mean, it’s, as with a lot of the things I say, it’s meant to be kind of poetic language in the form of a joke. And so yes, what you’re describing isn’t necessarily as noxious as some of the thoughts that come up in my head. And yet it is making you less happy. And in that sense, it’s an (EXPLETIVE DELETED) and so, and what my point is, is that there are practices that can turn the volume down.
RITHOLTZ: So let’s talk a little bit about writing the book.
I know sometimes it’s exhilarating, sometimes it’s a slog, sometimes it’s both. What was your experience like putting this down on paper? I know you spent four years writing this.
HARRIS: Five years, I think.
RITHOLTZ: Five years.
HARRIS: Whenever anybody says I really love writing, I think, oh, you must be a bad writer, because it’s awful, and it just took so much sweat and grit, and I was doing it as a side hustle. I had a full-time job as the anchor of Nightline and the anchor of the weekend edition of “Good Morning America.” It was so hard, and I’m now on a, I’m writing the sequel right now, and I think I’m in my sixth or seventh year. It is just so hard for me to write. I’m trying to learn these important lessons and then give it back to you in the form of a narrative.
I want you to feel like you’re watching a movie and that you could read it in an afternoon because the story’s good and it tugs you along, but I need to weave in all of these teaching points and for me, the blocking and tackling of that is very, very hard.
RITHOLTZ: It’s work and it’s very hard to do on the side.
If you’re just doing that, and then when I was writing my first book, I remember I had to do less because your discipline, your creativity, it’s a very, very small tank and it gets exhausted pretty quickly. So at the end of a long day to sit down and pound out 20, 30 pages, that’s really hard.
HARRIS: You’re absolutely right. I mean, that’s an insight. I hadn’t really thought about this. It’s true. I mean, I have retired from ABC News, so I have fewer things on my plate, but I host a podcast, which is two, almost three times a week.
RITHOLTZ: That’s a lot.
HARRIS: It’s a lot and I’m writing this book and I’m working on some TV stuff and I give speeches. I have a lot of stuff going on still and one of the biggest battles for me is the tank issue that you just talked about. Because if somebody gets on my calendar in the morning, well that completely derails my creative time and there’s an opportunity cost. Any amount of time I’m thinking about something else or being creative in somebody else’s lane, it reduces my capacity to finish my own work.
RITHOLTZ: When do you do your writing? I personally have found like five to eight in the morning is just the golden hour.
HARRIS: I, for me, will get up at around seven or eight, because for me, I really try to get enough sleep. So I’ll get up around seven or eight. I don’t have a boss, so I can do whatever the hell I want.
RITHOLTZ: Right, the same.
HARRIS: And I work most of the morning, but I interrupt it. So I’ll try to not have anything else on my calendar to one or two.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
HARRIS: And so I will write for that time, but I will interrupt it with meditation and exercise. So that I’m not, you can’t really write for more than 90 minutes at a time in my experience.
RITHOLTZ: There’s something to that. And then get up from your desk, take a walk around the block, come back. That’s when you could do the edit, revise it. But that creative first flow, I love that feeling early in the morning when it’s like a clean slate of paper and a fresh reboot, words just tumble out, it’s very, very different.
HARRIS: I really don’t have, I have very few moments of joy. It really is mostly suffering for me. And I’m wondering, can I do this again? I’m 51, almost 52, and I think I could write small books or more like how-to books, but these big books like this one I’m writing now that is like a movie of a true narrative or like “10% Happier” they just read. It takes so much out of me, I’m not sure. Maybe I could do one more before I die, but I don’t even know.
RITHOLTZ: So if you break it down into smaller pieces, it’s much more doable.
HARRIS: Yes.
RITHOLTZ: And putting out, you know, thousand word columns, 800 word columns.
HARRIS: That I could do.
RITHOLTZ: So that’s all a book is, is a collection of those shorter chapters.
HARRIS: Not my books though, because it has this, it is a movie. Oh, you could have the thread weaving through the whole tapestry. You could certainly do that. To me, as soon as you get into that, it’s like it’s too —
RITHOLTZ: Really?
HARRIS: It’s like building the Taj Mahal. You know, it’s just too — that, for me, and I maybe just don’t have a good brain, but doing a discrete thousand-word essay, I’ll occasionally write something for “The Times” or whatever, that’s hard, but it’s discreet and I can get it done quickly.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
HARRIS: But as soon as I have to think about the structure, the themes carrying out and building upon one another and the scenes that are required in order to teach it, I’m torturing you with my process here.
RITHOLTZ: No, I find it fascinating because–
HARRIS: But it’s very hard.
RITHOLTZ: I have two projects I’m working on and one of them is just trying to stitch together all these previous writings and the other is something from scratch that’s a whole broad overview of something that, word one, I wrote the introduction, and that was pretty much it. It’s easier stitching together the previous thoughts than coming up with a whole holistic tapestry from scratch.
That said, the journey of 1,000 miles begins with one step and breaking big projects up into smaller and smaller chunks makes it doable, right?
HARRIS: Totally agree.
RITHOLTZ: Like if you’re thinking about, I have a 500 word book to write, that’s paralyzing. I have to write the introduction, I have to write the overview, I have to put together the structure. That makes it almost tolerable.
HARRIS: I completely agree with you. I just think the difference here is that in books like “10% Happier” and in the next book I’m writing, which is called “Me, A Love Story.”
RITHOLTZ: (LAUGHTER)
HARRIS: I’m glad you get that joke. Some people don’t get it.
RITHOLTZ: I think that’s very funny.
HARRIS: I’m really trying to make a movie. What I mean by that is it’s a yarn. It’s not me sharing a bunch of ideas with you. It should feel like you’re on one person’s story the whole way, and weaving the teaching points into that is just really, anyway, I’m rambling at this point.
RITHOLTZ: No, no, this is all good.
So what do you make of the claim that really you just need 12 and a half minutes of meditation a day to see positive results? I keep seeing 10 minutes, 12 minutes, how realistic is that?
HARRIS: Okay, so that 12 and a half minute number, I believe comes from a neuroscientist.
RITHOLTZ: Yes.
HARRIS: It’s a friend of mine at the University of Miami. Her name is Amishi Jha, and she studies high stress, people in high stress fields, like first responders and Marines. And she has found that the minimum effective dose for her populations is 12 and a half minutes a day. And I believe her.
However, I feel like it’s daunting for most people to hear that if you’ve never meditated before. And so I say two things. One, one minute counts, it will confer benefits. And we know from behavior change science that starting small is really important.
The second thing I have to say is daily-ish. Give yourself flexibility, don’t beat yourself up if you miss a day, don’t get overly persnickety about which time of day you’re meditating. Give yourself a break and take it easy and start small and that is the route to effective habit building.
RITHOLTZ: So what is the response to the book been like? And let me just tell the listening audience, you were 15 minutes late from speaking upstairs because we couldn’t get you out of there because it was a giant line of people asking you to sign books. So I have to think the response has been really positive.
HARRIS: The most amazing thing that’s happened in my professional life, right below having a child and getting married. I mean, I can’t believe it. It’s almost 10 years since the book came out. I honestly, honestly thought that it would go nowhere.
RITHOLTZ: You describe it as a fiery failure. Your mom begged you not to write about your personal failures.
HARRIS: Yes, I was terrified. And that this thing has turned into something that’s so helpful for so many people. It swallowed my life. You know, I mean, I quit this career that I loved in TV news to do this full-time, to host a podcast, to write more books, and to give speeches, and it’s just incredible. It’s absolutely incredible and I’m, this is a clichéd thing I’m about to say, but I’m like really grateful.
RITHOLTZ: Nothing wrong with a little gratitude, can’t go wrong with that.
What practical tips do you have for incorporating meditation, mindfulness, whatever, into people’s daily lives? Because the thing that makes the book so interesting versus all the other books is you really tell people do this, do this, do this, as opposed to the sort of woo-woo spiritual be at one with the universe, which really, all right, I’m one with the universe, now what? It really isn’t very helpful.
HARRIS: Yes, so a couple of ways to get started. One is there are lots of meditation apps out there, and they all are either free or they have free trials. I would do some taste testing. You can also read a good book. There are plenty of them. One book that’s come to mind is called “Real Happiness” by Sharon Salzberg. Very, very, very, very practical.
Another thing you can do is, If you live in a major city, most of them have meditation centers where you can drop in and even if they’re sectarian, in other words, even if they’re Buddhist, don’t worry about it. It’s not a proselytizing religion.
RITHOLTZ: Yeah, Buddhists tend to be kind of low key, right?
HARRIS: I consider myself a Buddhist and I’m not like trying to convince anybody to join me in that tradition. It’s really about giving you exercises to train your mind.
In terms of fitting it into your day, just like I said before, and you can’t hear this enough, set the bar low. Don’t try to do too much off the bat, and don’t beat yourself up when you fall off the wagon because it’s inevitable. So sneak it in into the little parts of your day where you’ve got an extra minute or two, right before dinner, or right when you pull your car into the garage, either at work or when you’ve come home.
Little points in the day where you might otherwise be FOMO-inducing, Instagram scrolling. You can do that too, but can you just carve one minute out or two minutes out to do this thing? I think you can.
RITHOLTZ: Really intriguing.
Let’s talk about the podcast. What made you decide to say, I know I’ll talk to people about this three times a week?
HARRIS: You know, I generally throughout this whole thing, I’ve had no idea what I was doing. So I’m almost like the opposite of a master’s, a master in business. I’ve been just stumbling through.
I wrote the book because I had this idea that I could maybe, that maybe there was a space in the market for this. And I turned out to be right about that, but I wasn’t confident as I did it. The book was way more successful than I thought, and then I was kind of thinking about it, like, “Oh, what do I do next?” And this was in, the book came out in ’14, and I think in around ’16, friends of mine were starting podcasts. I have a buddy named Sam Harris, we’re not related, but he’s got a very popular podcast, And he’s a friend. And I was like, “I ran into somebody in the elevator at ABC News.” And I was like, “Do we do podcasts here?” And they were like, the next day, there was a bunch of people in my office, they were like, “Let’s do this.” So I started a podcast with no real plan. My initial thought was, “Hey, I’m kind of interested in what’s beyond “10% Happier.” There’s all this talk of enlightenment. Is that real?” So I really focused it on deep end of the pool meditation and Buddhism stuff at first.
And then over the years, especially during the pandemic, I started to expand it to just the human condition and really how do we do life better in all areas of life. So now we talk about work, we talk about sex, we talk about romance, we talk about conflict, boundaries, managing money, every, any area of life where we tend to suffer or struggle, we bring in people to help you unlock. And that has been totally fascinating. It has really helped me do my own life better because this is like an extended therapy session for which I get paid.
RITHOLTZ: Really interesting. You have on the podcast His Holiness the Dalai Lama. How does that come about? Does the Lama have an agent or a PR firm? How do you land the Dalai Lama as a pod guest?
HARRIS: You know, one thing that’s interesting is I’m basically like the beat reporter for Buddhism. I know most of the Buddhists.
RITHOLTZ: You know all the big Buddhists.
HARRIS: I guess I do. I’m a little bit like, what’s that, in Caddyshack, Bill Murray talking about getting —
RITHOLTZ: Yeah, I got that going for me, so that’s nice. Right, you’re going to achieve total consciousness on your deathbed. So you have that going for you, so that’s nice.
HARRIS: I do, which is nice.
RITHOLTZ: By the way, I literally have that line written down on the off chance that you would reference it and I’m so happy you did. I’m 11% happy.
HARRIS: Any chance to reference Bill Murray or Caddyshack.
So I mean, I’ve found myself in this, I was like a traditional hard-charging newsman. I was covering wars and natural disasters, mass shootings, political campaigns, and then all of a sudden, I got interested in meditation and now I’m like, I know all these spiritual leaders. They sleep at my house. This is my life now.
RITHOLTZ: That’s hilarious.
HARRIS: It’s very strange.
RITHOLTZ: Oh my God.
HARRIS: And so the Dalai Lama was the first guest on my podcast because one of his best friends is an eminent American neuroscientist by the name of Richard Davidson, who is a friend of mine. And so I will call Richie once in a while and be like, “Hey, can you get the Dalai Lama on my show?” And he makes it happen. And so I actually have had him on four times. And in the fall, I went over to India and I spent two weeks hanging around him. And we did this whole big, long podcast series about the Dalai Lama. And he’s a fascinating dude.
RITHOLTZ: To say the very least, when he’s in America, does he crash on your couch? No, he doesn’t. Or where does the llama stay?
HARRIS: Well, he’s 87 or 88 now, so he is not traveling much. He tends to stay in highly secure hotel rooms.
RITHOLTZ: And you said something earlier that I let slip by unnoticed because I was so entranced with the Bill Murray reference, but you said you’re not a master’s in business, you never expected that. I can’t tell you how many people sat across from me who are wildly successful, very accomplished people, and they talk about the role of serendipity and random luck, and just recognizing an opportunity that, hey, am I crazy, but is this a market that’s untapped?
And, well, it’s untapped for a reason. Maybe we should tap it and see what happens.
So how much of your experiences with meditation in the book, in the podcast, and everything else around what you’ve learned is just random luck, and how much of it is you saying, there’s something here, and it’s a new story that no one’s really covering?
HARRIS: I think it’s a mixture. I mean, I will never underplay luck. I mean, I’ve been lucky in just so many areas of my life, and I also think there is some strategy and some lucky insights, you know? Like, I have a animalistic sense, I think, for what is going to work in this area and where the shortfalls and pitfalls are in self-help and self-development. And I think that is actually doing a service. It’s turned out to be quite a lucrative business. And I also think that it’s helping people and taking these ancient teachings and updating them for new audiences.
RITHOLTZ: Buddha, a lucrative side hustle, whoever would have guessed that.
HARRIS: (LAUGHTER)
RITHOLTZ: So before we get to our favorite questions that I ask all my guests, I have to just ask about the RAIN technique, Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Non-Identify. How familiar are you with the OODA loop from the fighter pilot, I want to say Boyd, I’m trying to remember his name, John Boyd, Colonel John Boyd, which is–
HARRIS: Never heard of it.
RITHOLTZ: All right, so the OODA loop is Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. And this was early mid-century US Air Force trying to figure out what sort of advantages can we give to fighter pilots when it was still, you know, hand-to-hand, air-to-air combat, not just press a missile and forget about it. That idea of Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Non-Identify is very similar to on a completely different context, Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. It’s just funny how those four steps — here you’re trying to deal with something internally, there you’re dealing with an external threat. Tell us about the RAIN technique.
HARRIS: I mean, I love that. I think there are lots of these acronyms out there that help you just navigate life. RAIN is Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Non-Identification. So That sounds like a mouthful, but it’s pretty simple. You’re in a tough moment, you’re struggling, and it could be something internal or external, and very quickly you can learn how to do these four steps. Recognize it just to notice what’s happening right now.
RITHOLTZ: Stop, take a beat, figure out what’s going on.
HARRIS: Wake up to what’s happening.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
HARRIS: Allow is instead of fighting it or acting on it in some way that is fighting it, like I’m feeling like some tiny pang of hunger and I’m just going to randomly eat the most recent thing or my wife said something mildly annoying and I’m going to snap at her. Instead of acting blindly, just allow the feeling to be there.
I is investigate, which doesn’t mean like, “Where did this come from?” And it’s not a cognitive thing. It’s more just like, “How is this showing up in my body?” Can you investigate, “How is this anger or hunger? Where am I experiencing in my body?” Which just allows you to sort of take it in on a deep level and be with it in the current moment.
And Non-identification is to recognize that you don’t need to take your inner (EXPLETIVE DELETED) personally. And you didn’t create your mind, you didn’t create your body, you didn’t create the world. You may think you have all of this agency, you’re this ego, separate from the world, peering out fretfully from behind these eye holes, but you’re part of the universe. That sounds a little out there, but it’s actually non-negotiably true.
And so all of this stuff is nature. You are nature. And can you just for a second see your emotion from that perspective so that it doesn’t own you. And I just think this is a nice little way to navigate the world.
RITHOLTZ: I like it, I like it a lot.
Let’s jump to our favorite questions and we’ll get you out of here in time to hit your next gig. Starting with, tell us what you’re consuming for entertainment. What are you streaming or watching? What podcasts are you listening to? Give us a little bit about what’s keeping you entertained.
HARRIS: “Succession” baby. I watch “Succession” you know, I mean, Not only am I watching the show as it wraps up, but my wife and I love it so much, we went back and started watching from season one.
RITHOLTZ: Really?
HARRIS: And I think it’s just a masterful piece of art. The writing, the acting, it’s all just incredible. And it’s hard to watch because you’re just watching, it’s one of the most violent shows I’ve ever seen.
RITHOLTZ: It’s so funny you say that. I couldn’t get past the second episode. I didn’t have that experience with The Sopranos. I didn’t have that experience with a lot of other great television, I had a hard time with this.
HARRIS: So I had a similar experience with you with “Succession.” The first time I watched it, I didn’t like it and I set it aside. And then COVID hit and I got COVID and I was in bed and I watched seasons one and two because I was in bed and bored and nothing else to do. And then I got it because I really had to like live with it for a minute. It is so–
RITHOLTZ: That’s a commitment. Here, 14 hours, see if you like it.
HARRIS: Well, if I didn’t like it, I would’ve watched something else. But it is, first of all, one reason to stay with it is it’s very funny, extremely funny.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
HARRIS: And it gets funnier as it goes. The other reason to live with it is it’s doing what I love in great art, which is it’s transporting you into a different world that feels real.
And so that’s just anthropologically interesting. But it is a hard show because you’re watching people do very skillful interpersonal violence to one another.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
HARRIS: And the show does a kind of violence to you because 3% of the time, they will allow real human kindness and that is what is the cruelest twist.
RITHOLTZ: It’s keeping you, oh, maybe these people aren’t the worst in the world.
HARRIS: Yes, yes.
RITHOLTZ: And then the shiv comes out.
HARRIS: Correct, right in the kidney.
RITHOLTZ: I love your concept of transporting you to a world that feels almost real. “The Diplomat” is just an eight series.
HARRIS: Oh yeah, yes, yeah.
RITHOLTZ: Just really well written and well-acted. And then if you like “Bridgerton,” the prequel, “Queen Charlotte,” it’s this crazy, colorful, weird, almost believable alternative world that’s like with great characters and great writing. And you know, you made me think of “Queen Charlotte” because it’s that transporting you to someplace that almost feels real. There’s like one thing that’s off that keeps it fictional, But it’s close.
HARRIS: I’ll give you two other little entertainment things. One is “Hacks” on HBO Max, or now it’s just called Max. It’s very funny.
RITHOLTZ: She’s amazing, the lead.
HARRIS: She’s incredible.
RITHOLTZ: Right, Amy Smart is it?
HARRIS: No.
RITHOLTZ: Not Amy Smart.
HARRIS: What is her name?
RITHOLTZ: I’m drawing a blank on it.
HARRIS: She’s a genius.
RITHOLTZ: Yeah, she’s fantastic.
HARRIS: Jean Smart.
RITHOLTZ: Jean Smart.
HARRIS: : Yes, and the comedian Theo Von, who’s been showing up for me a lot on social media, he is totally inappropriate, but also just incredibly funny. I’m just like, he’s very clippable, you can make short little clips of him because he says pithy little things.
RITHOLTZ: That’s hilarious. Tell us about your mentors who helped to shape your career.
HARRIS: I mentioned a couple of people in the course of this conversation. David Westin is one of your colleagues at Bloomberg who was my boss at ABC News, incredible boss and really helped me in my career. Sam Harris, who I also mentioned, who was one of the first people who was a real role model for me in terms of getting into meditation because here was this guy who’s quite well known as an atheist writer and who’s unafraid to mix it up with, and debate with all sorts of people.
RITHOLTZ: Right.
HARRIS: Yes, and so I, you know, I don’t always agree with him, but I find him inspirational and aspirational in that way, and he’s a committed, committed meditator, and so that was really helpful to me. And then Jerry Colonna is quite a well-known executive coach who has been referred to as the Yoda of Silicon Valley. He does a lot of CEO whispering, and he has worked with me in my career and has really helped me grow up.
And he did a very devastating but impactful 360 review on me, which resulted in me learning a lot about myself. That’s the sequel, actually. That’s the next book.
RITHOLTZ: Oh, the 360 review. Really interesting.
Tell us about, speaking of books, tell us about some of your favorites and what you’ve read recently.
HARRIS: I really am into novels right now, and I have been reading a lot of novels as I write my next book because I’m stealing their storytelling techniques. And I’m trying to up my game as a writer. And one of the ways I’m doing that is by reading the greats. Jennifer Egan is a modern writer. She won a Pulitzer for a book in 2011 called “A Visit from the Goon Squad.: And then she wrote a follow-up called “The Candy House.” And I find her to be mesmerizing and bewitching.
RITHOLTZ: Two interesting recommendations.
So what sort of advice would you give a recent college grad interested in a career in either journalism or broadcast television?
HARRIS: Steve Go for it. You know, it’s hard, it’s tough, but it’s awesome.
And I love, I think I said this in my first book, that the right that it confers upon you to walk up to important people and ask impudent questions is incredible.
And if you have curiosity, this is a playground and I mean it’s a tough business. Content creation is hard and ad supported models are hard as we get into subscriptions that too is hard. It’s tough and it’s competitive but I do think that if you can hack that, it’s worth it.
RITHOLTZ: And our final question, what do you know about the world today that you wish you knew 30 or so years ago when you were a Green Cub reporter.
HARRIS: I heard Scott Galloway, another big business voice, say this recently to me, actually, and he said it about himself, but actually it just comes to mind as my big oversight too. I wish I had been nicer.
And you think about niceness as kind of weakness, but it’s actually a real strength. And we are social animals. We need other people. We may think in this culture that’s individualistic that we’re going to be self-made, but nobody’s self-made. You’re all co-created. We’re all co-created. If I had taken the time to work on my relationships in all aspects of my life, my life would have been better way quicker.
Even after meditation came into my life, I was still failing on the relational front. That’s really what the 360 taught me, which is I needed to up my game. And that like taking small moments to be nice to people is, first of all, it can have a huge impact on other people but it’s good for me. I always go through the lens of self-interest because I’m naturally frosty and selfish and I think a lot of people are if they’re capable of looking internally.
RITHOLTZ: I’m going to interrupt you. I’m trying to remember if it was in the book or something else I had read where you describe and it might even be a Buddhist precept of there’s two types of generosity, the selfish generosity and generous generosity, and even the generous generosity comes back to you.
HARRIS: Yes, the Buddha talks about wise selfishness. That all — I’m sorry, the Dalai Lama talks about this concept of wise selfishness. If you want to be really good at being selfish, you will be compassionate and generous, because that is the number one source of happiness.
Let me just say this finally on a broader note, but it’s a related note.
There are so many bugs in the human design, but there is this feature that is the way out for us as a species of our problems. The feature is this, doing good for other people is to do good for yourself. And that we can ride to personal happiness and species-wide improvements. It is an incredibly hopeful and totally true thing. And I find that to be a source of real personal and sort of micro and macro optimism.
RITHOLTZ: It’s not a coincidence that billionaires also tend to be philanthropists. Right, works out.
Dan, thank you so much for being so generous with your time. We have been speaking with Dan Harris, author of “10% Happier.”
If you enjoyed this conversation, well, be sure and check out any of our 500 previous such discussions that we’ve held over the past eight and a half years. You can find those at YouTube, Spotify, Apple, iTunes, wherever you find your favorite podcasts.
Sign up for my daily reading list at ritholtz.com. Follow me on Twitter @ritholtz. Follow the whole fine family of Bloomberg Podcasts @podcast. I would be remiss if I did not thank the crack team that helps put these conversations together each week. Sarah Livesey is my audio engineer. Paris Wald is my producer. Atika Valbrun is our project manager. Sean Russo is my researcher.
I’m Barry Ritholtz. You’ve been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.
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