Aloha and Namaste, everyone. And welcome to InPolitic with John Heilman, my podcast for Odyssey and Puck. Coming at you every Wednesday and Friday with fresh topical candid conversations with the people who roam the quarters of power and influence in America, from Washington to Wall Street, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and beyond, shifting and shaping the warp and weft of our politics and culture. With just a little bit more than 50 days to go before election day, those two streams, politics and culture, are increasingly merging into one and flooding the zone with a fizzy mixture of excitement and edginess, nervousness, anxiety, agita, and all-around fear and trembling. So when my friend Dan Harris, longtime ABC news correspondent, former anchor The Nightline, the weekend edition of Good Morning, America, and World News Sunday, now turned full-time meditation guru and entrepreneur. When Dan reached out recently to alert me to an episode of his 10% Happier podcast entitled 8 Things I'm Doing to Stay Sane during this election season, I thought, well, if that episode is any good, I should hit that guy on the podcast to chop it up. Because if my friends and colleagues are any indication, staying sane during this election is no mean feat.

In fact, it's a combination of a full-time job, Sisyphean struggle, and total pipe dream. But as expected, Dan's episode of 10% Happier is good, really good. And so, voila, we have Dan here with us today to talk about that and a whole lot more. If you have never run across Dan Harris before, first of all, you are in for a treat, since there are very few, very smart people I know who are as nice, kind, decent, empathic, and really just truly, madly, deeply, menchee. Son of a pair of Boston-based medical eminences, his dad, a radiation oncologist at Harvard Medical School, his mom, a pathologist, an expert on lymphomas at Mass General. Dan graduated from Kolby College in 1993 and then started his rapid fire ascent up the ziggarat of broadcast journalism as a local TV anchor in Banger, Maine. Soon enough, he made the big time, joining ABC News in 2000. And over the next 20 years, in addition to all those flashy anchoring jobs I mentioned earlier, he reported from all over the world, covering wars in Afghanistan in Iraq, producing investigative reports in Haiti, Cambodia, and the Amazon, winning himself an Edward R.

Mural Award for his reporting on a young Iraqi man who received the help he needed in order to move to America, and an Emmy Award for his Nightline Report, How to Buy a Child in 10 Hours. But early on in his rise at ABC News, back in 2004, Dan experienced an on-air panic attack while hosting Good Morning America. With the help of therapy, he gradually realized that he had to change his life bigly, and he turned to meditation to help him do it. Fully 10 years after that, in 2014, Dan published a book entitled 10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduce Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self Help That Really Works. A true story. That book on to become a New York Times number one best seller and the launching pad for Dan's hugely successful podcast and meditation app. Dan had some news to share on that front, and you'll hear about it shortly, along with a hugely relatable account of the journey that led him to climb down from the upper echelons of broadcast journalism after three decades in the business and plunge full-time into the brave new world of mental wellness.

And equally disorienting, a new identity as a grown-up social media influencer in 2021. And of course, you'll also hear Dan discuss the eight. Count them eight tools and techniques that he's using and recommending to help him and all of us survive the 2024 election with our heads and hearts intact. Okay, relatively intact. And while I won't be able to vouch for their effectiveness until we emerge on the other side of this flame-spewing electrical crucible and national cardiac event that we're going through right now, I can tell you this. After listening to Dan lay out those tools and techniques, all eight of them, in his calm, encouraging, profoundly sensible-sounding way, not to mention that mellifolious set of pipes of his, I am feeling at least 10% happier already. So settle in, take a few deep breaths, and if it's your jam, a couple of deep bong hits as we engage in a seance with the great Dan Harris on InPolitic with John Heilman in three, two, one.

Hey, Dan here. I know we're in the middle of a period of time where some of you, I would include myself in this category, some of you are freaking out about the presidential election in the United States. And so I want to talk about what I'm doing to keep it together during this turbulent time. For 30 years, I was a TV news anchorman and correspondence, so I covered many, many presidential campaigns. I really understand how turbulent this period of time can be. So that's the bad news. But the good news is the central plank of my platform, the animating insight of my whole post-news career, is that the mind and the brain are trainable. That peace of mind, happiness, compassion, gratitude, generosity, these are not unalterable factory settings. They're skills that can be trained through various modalities. I want to reframe, or at least I've been trying to do this for myself, to reframe this presidential election as a workout, as a dojo, where you get to practice these skills that will not only help you to deal with all of the mishigas in the larger culture, but also help you in the rest of your life.

So that was Dan Harris on his podcast, 10% and happier with Dan Harris, talking about a topic that concerns a lot of people, even people who aren't in my business. It's like, Man, this election is a shit show. I'm scared to death what to do about it. And Dan, it's good to see you. I'm someone I've known for a long time and been a fan of for a long time. But I'll say we were texting each other and you raised the fact that you had done this special episode of the podcast titled 8 Things I'm Doing to Stay Sane During this Election Season. I was like, Well, that'd be a good topic for in the politic. We're going to talk about that. But first, Dan, how are you doing?

I'm doing great. It's always good to see you.

Eight tools in that thing. Eight tools. I love the fact that you frame it as, these are not Commandments. If you don't do all these things, I'm not trying to add to your stress, but these are some things that I'm trying to do as I go through this period. I want to say that the first one actually gets us into, and we can spend more or less time on some of these as we go here, but the first one into what your form of meditation, the form of meditation that you're most focused on, which is mindfulness meditation, as opposed to some of us who practice other forms like me who do TM. Talk about what mindfulness meditation is and how it applies in this particular case to something that anybody can adopt as a strategy for dealing with election stress.

Yeah, happy to. I love talking about this. Mindfulness meditation is derived from Buddhism, but it is totally secular and simple. It's a extra exercise for your brain. I can just describe how to do it. You can sit quietly in as quiet a place as you can find. But if you're in a noisy place, you just put headphones on and play some white noise through them and close your eyes and bring your full attention to the feeling of your breath coming in and going out. You don't have to breathe in any special way. It's not a breathing exercise per se. You just try to feel your belly rising, falling or the air coming in and out of your nose. Then as soon as you get distracted, this is the big, most important point. As soon as you get distracted, which you will a million times, the whole goal is just to notice you've become distracted and start again and again and again. This is the key point because a lot of people try to do this. They notice how distractable they are, and they tell themselves a whole story about how they're incapable of meditation. They're too distractable.

They're failing at meditation. What I like to point out to people, and this has really become my job on the planet, is that When you see the distraction, that is proof that you're succeeding, because clearing the mind is impossible unless you're enlightened or you've died.

The whole goal in meditation is just to see how wild the mind is so that you're not owned by it. This is a game changer so that you have a thought of, Oh, well, I'm going to say something that's going to ruin the next 48 hours of my marriage, but you don't actually act it out reflexively the way most of us do most of our lives. Meditation It gives you this inner clarity, this self-awareness that helps you not be so yanked around by your ego.

I like the fact that the binary there is either you only have a quiet mind if you're dead or enlightened. Since really none of us ever really achieve enlightenment and the other option is dead, we like to think the idea of being interrupted is like a sign that you're alive, essentially. Exactly. You're interrupting yourself. I love the fact in that intro, one of the great things about your work is that I'm curious about it before I ask you to talk about how that will help with election stress, specifically. Do you script your podcast, or are you just doing those off the top of your head?

The podcast that you heard is actually the one on election stress. It's pretty rare that I do a podcast where it's no guests, just me talking. I just started to experiment with that. For that one, I had a scripted intro, and then I had these eight points, and I just rift on them. And I realized while doing that, wow, I should do more of this.

Yeah. It was really striking to me because some of the phraseology, the central plank of your platform, the thing about dealing with election stress into a dojo, the notion of these things that you're trying to fix that you can improve your mind and your brain, there's not a permanently set on off switch. They're really nicely written, and they open up the conversation for people who might be intimidated by the topic in some way and think, Oh, God, this guy's going to be some fucking guru or bogwan or whatever. But it's a very good colloquially way of writing. And I know that's part of I haven't learned to write for television, but it's really, really nicely done. So tell me about just a little bouquet I wanted to talk to you there. I was listening to it going, Man, dancing? Very nicely. It's very accessible and fun. Mindfulness meditation is key to dealing with election stress because?

I think it's foundational because having that self-awareness, being able to have some idea how your mind is always looping and fizzing and planning and ruminating, that is the precondition for working with the mind in the face of all of the vexations and vicissitudes of this time in American history. I led with that as a precursor to saying what is much more directly relevant to the election, which is, one, is you should use your mindfulness, your self-awareness, to limit your news consumption. That does not apply to impolitic, Puck, Hacks on Tap, or Morning Joe, or anything that John Heinland is associated with. But I do think you might... Having had some meditation under your belt, and you don't have to have meditation in order to be mindful, Mindfulness is innate in everybody who's human. Meditation just helps you build it. But you can use your mindfulness, whether you meditate or not, to notice, Oh, okay. I've been on Twitter for eight hours. I'm starting to send messages in all caps. I haven't gone to the bathroom. I hate everybody who's ever lived. Maybe I should turn this off.

So it's interesting that you have the next two of the tools that you list after you start with mindfulness meditation, then you say two things, then they're conjoined. And I think they're interesting and worth spending just a tiny bit of time on because limiting your news consumption and then also seeking out diversity of news opinions to the extent that you do have your news, that you're going to have some news consumption, of course you are. So it's limiting consumption diversifying news consumption. And one of those goes to open-mindedness, the second thing that you have a lot to say about. I'd like you to talk about the two of them and how they can go hand in hand, because I think for a lot of people, Seeking out... You use social media as an example, which is obviously the example that people go to immediately. And I say, as someone who has been on Twitter for a long time and have written the ups and downs of that platform, I find the whole thing, if there was a way to... I totally agree with you about the diversity of opinion, and I'm with you. The problem is that there is no civilized diversity of opinion in a lot of these social media platforms, particularly Twitter, where if you come across diverse opinions, what come across is a lot of hate speech, a lot of toxicity.

There's a lot about that platform that drives... Does anything but. That gives you to touch a little bit of it. No matter how much you limit yourself to, you run an Elon Musk or someone else, peddling a conspiracy theory or yelling at you, calling you a child molester on the basis of no information whatsoever, just because that's what they do now. If you had said, Cut out social media entirely, I would have been like, Well, there's a way to deal with election stress. I think that's a pretty good idea. But talk about how do you manage those the actual reality of what our social media platforms have become, and particularly that one, in the context of achieving what you're trying to achieve here.

Yeah, I don't think it's a bad idea to cut out social media entirely. I hesitate to recommend it because it doesn't seem like a thing most people are going to do. I don't want to be out there recommending the impossible. But if you want to do it, I think it's a great idea. In terms of finding people with whom you disagree to follow, I'm not sure social media is the place for that. I'm more a fan of newsletters or podcasts, more thoughtful. Just say you're on the left and you want to dip your toes to what's happening on the right. Maybe start with the bulwark. They're anti-Trump but conservative. For me, I'm a little bit down the middle, I think, just after years of being a journalist. But there are people on the right and the left that I listen to. On the right, I would say the National Review guys have a podcast, the Commentary magazine guys have a podcast. They also have magazines and are putting out articles. There are lots of... The Free Press, Barry Weiss. There are lots of ways to dip your toes in there. It's counterintuitive because some people might think, Well, if I read people on the right, if I'm on the left, It's going to make me more stressed.

There's a way in which that is true, but I find on a deeper level, actually achieving some non-charicatured understanding of why people think the way they think, as opposed to being told that by the conflict entrepreneurs on the left or whatever side you're on, having these cartoonish versions of the right serve to me, hearing it from the horse's mouth, as it were, is, I don't know, it removes some of the venom and vitrail from the situation. It's like, Oh, okay, they're human beings. They have a reason for what they believe. I don't know. For me, that makes it less stressful.

Conflict entrepreneurs, that's another good phrase.

Not my phrase.

It's okay. Don't do that. Just steal it. Just take the compliment. Great artists steal, as they say. Don't do that. Which of those do you find harder? Limiting or diversifying?

Diversifying. I'm actually, broadly enough, I was in, we've talked about this, I was in the news business forever. I am not-30 years. I'm not actually a news junkie, believe it or not. I don't find it hard to limit my news consumption. I do find it hard to diversify. First, it's been hard for me to find people that don't drive me absolutely nuts. Then it takes some doing to get myself to press play on the people I disagree with rather than the folks who are feeding me the red meat that I crave. And yet I do find in a paradoxical and maybe even perverse way, it is calming. It helps me view the world. It's challenging in a way that I think It was really helpful. Maria Popova, who's this great writer, has said that we're living in a pandemic of certainty. I feel like a good citizen when I challenge my own beliefs. There's just something deeply satisfying about getting out of the subtle pain of dogmatism. There's some expression, hysteria is believing something you know or believe might not be true. That's what makes you hysterical. I don't know. I can see that as I interpret back through my life as a citizen, I can see myself doing that.

I'm going to skip over number 4 and 5 for different reasons. Number 4 has to do Loving Kindness Meditation, another form of meditation. I suggest anybody who wants to learn about that, go and listen to Dan's podcast about it, because I like you, Dan, when I hear any mention of Loving Kindness Meditation and how it all works, it makes me doubt that I'm still a Dan Harris fan. I mean, you even acknowledge the, I would say, screamingly obvious reasons to be skeptical of something that sounds this ridiculous right up front in the episode itself. Take a listen to what you said.

I have made no secret about the fact that when this practice was first introduced to me, I found it revolting, just like unbelievably cheesy. But there's a ton of science to show that it can have very powerful physiological benefits, but also psychological and behavioral benefits. So there's a lot to this practice.

So I mean, Dan, I'm not going to quibble with research. You know a lot more about the research in this area than I do. And the fact I had no idea that this is a practice that the Buddha himself endorsed. So I'm not going to quibble with the Buddha either. But I'm just not going there, okay? Now, I'm just not going to go there here on this podcast. We're not going to talk about it. If you want to hear about it, you can listen to Dan talk about it on his podcast. Now, the other one that I'm going to skip has to do with communication skills, because I think it's the most obvious of the things, which is basically a series of things that are... If you're going to talk to people, especially people you disagree with, you're not trying to change their mind. You shouldn't attack their opinion, and you should formulate your concerns and make them personal. Don't put them in the absolute. Just be like, this is what worries me. And those are all things I think that are good strategies, but also things that are not as unique as a couple of the others or the ones that I found most insightful.

And those relate to your points six and seven. Six, which is action Absorbs anxiety. And the second, which is never worry alone, which I think may be the most important thing in the entire podcast. But talk about those two and how important they are, because I really found those the things I was like, Yeah, fuck yes. I related to them in a pretty powerful way. I'm not necessarily great at the second one, but I think they're obviously super important.

To me, they're the fuck yeah elements of the podcast as well. Then really of doing life better. Life.

Of life, yeah.

So action absorbs anxiety. Also, you're going to not a proof of this, not my phrase, but I like it. It's so easy to look at what you call the dumpster fire of our election, or really any big and disturbing story from the Middle East to Ukraine and feel helpless. But There is always the possibility of getting involved in your sphere. It may not even be relevant to the issue that's stressing you out. You could volunteer on a local campaign, and that would be more relevant to the election. But you could also volunteer at a homeless shelter or an animal shelter, or you could just be useful to your friends and family. You could just hold the door open for somebody. That is ennobling and empowering and available perennially. I highly recommend you help yourself to it.

It's It's another version of just the idle hands or the devil's play. It's like just doing shit. If nothing else just takes your mind off your stress and you feel like you're... Just chopping wood, man. Just go chop some wood. You'll feel better. Never worry alone. This is the big Cahuna.

It is the big cahuna. And I got this expression from this guy, Robert Weldinger, who's run the longest running study in all of science. He's the third person to run it. It's a study at a Harvard that's I've looked at several generations of folks in the Boston area and tried to figure out what are the variables that contribute to a long, healthy, happy, and successful life. The number one variable by far is just the quality of people's relationships. You would think, no, it should be how much exercise or how often are they achieving ketosis? Sleep. Sleep, whatever.

And sleep, whatever. Sleep, which people tell you about how important it is all the time. But this is really just like, do you have good relationships? Correct.

And sleep is important. All those things are important. But the thing that modulates stress the best, and stress is what kills us. The thing that modulates stress the best is your relationships. When you're watching the debates, when you're reading the polls, whatever it is, do it with other people, text with other people, find some community with whom to do life. And that is probably the simplest recipe for a good life, whether we're in an election or not.

It's funny because for a lot of people who are type A personalities who are very individualistic and feel like they're very self reliant. There's a point of pride, and I go through these things alone, number one. Number two, there's also these people who are like, I don't want to trouble people with my work. I know I'm freaking out about the election. I don't want to be a burden to my friends, my constant freakouts about whether Donald Trump is going to put me I'll put my mother in an internment camp or something. I know I'm being paranoid. I don't want to do that. And you're basically saying you got to fight through that because talking about it with an affinity group of some kind actually will reduce your stress and help you cope with your fears.

That's exactly what I'm saying. Call your mom. Call your friends. Do it.

I'm going to be calling you. Call me. I'm going to be on the phone. Hey, dad, dude, I'm not doing enough action. My anxiety is off the hook, and I'm also worrying alone all the time. I need a worry partner.

What do you... I'm curious. First of all, you can always call me. But what do you... You're living in this. You're marinating in this stuff all the time. What do you do? I know you just took some time off, which I think is an awesome technique. But aside from that and inclusive of that, what do you do to moderate your stress?

It was funny. When I told David Pluff the other day, we were talking about having him on the podcast, and he said, Well, what about the last week of August? I said, I'm going off the grid. I'm not talking to anybody. I don't give a fuck. If it was Kamala Harris, I would turn it down. I'm taking the fucking nine days off. And he goes, Pro move. He's like, Pro move before Labor Day to take a week off in this environment. You got to do that. I was like, David Plouffe, who's one of the most high-struct people I've ever met, I say that with affection, says that. I'm like, I think I'm on the right track. For me, the two things that you said before are really important. As you know, and we'll talk more about this later on the podcast, meditation is really important to me. And if I can get into 20 minutes meditations a day, it really helps. And exercise and sleep. And I'm bad at doing them. I'm not bad at doing them at all. I'm bad at doing them in a consistent way, especially when you travel a lot, as you know.

This is a business that fights those two things. It Finding time to meditate is okay for me. I can usually get that done because it's twice a day, 20 minutes a day, fine, which is what TM counsels. But when you're rolling around a lot, finding time to get in an hour in the gym and get seven or eight hours of sleep in the election season after Labor Day, that is harder than you can imagine, as you well know. If I could do all those three things, though, it helps a lot. And I really notice it, that my anxiety level is a lot less. We're going to take a break here. The last thing on Dan's list is a thing called... It's about self-compassion. Again, I think you should listen to this podcast because the podcast is 30 minutes long and it's fantastic. And I know you promised at the end that you're going to do more episodes on specific things related to how to cope with the election going forward. I hope that's true.

It is. And thank you.

We're going to take this break. We're going to come back and talk about Dan's journey right after this.

I have made no secret about the fact that when this practice was first introduced to me, I found it revolting, just like unbelievably cheesy. But there's a ton of science to show that it can have very powerful physiological benefits, but also psychological and behavioral benefits. So there's a lot to this practice.

So we're back with Dan Harris. And those were, Dan, the very first words in the very first episode of your podcast when you launched it back in 2016, 10% happier with Dan Harris. And you kick things off with a great get for your first episode, the Dalai Lama himself. I remember when that launch episode happened, I'm like, That's a hell of a kick-off guest for a show about meditation. And So that's why I wanted to start there, so we could step back and talk a little bit about how this decade-long journey that you've been on, how it all unfolded. And I will say, you and I, Dan, we know each other. We've known each other for a while, but we're We got super close. And I have marveled at what has happened to your life and your career. You were on a path and a track that was wholly identifiable and legible and familiar to me. And then you just weren't. You went off and did something else. I just want just for you to talk a little bit. We can unpack this in a lot of ways, but talk a little bit about how you got from that track to whatever it is you you're on now.

It may be a track or it may not be. I don't know.

Yeah, I may have a lot of thoughts about this. Yeah, I'm sure. I was definitely on a track that would be legible to you, given that I was a straight-ahead network news anchor and news correspondent for a long time. I was at ABC News for 21 years, and before that, I was in local news for a bunch of time. Then I had a panic attack on Good Morning America, which I I had this panic attack, I didn't tell anybody that I had a panic attack. If you watch the video of it, you can tell that something's wrong with me. But I didn't go public with the fact that it was a panic attack because this was in 2004, and we didn't have quite as enlightened notions in our society about mental health at that time. Then 10 years after the panic attack, I wrote a book about how that panic attack led me to meditation. I thought that book would come and go really quickly because who gives a shit? I was a B-level newsman writing about a very niche concern. But it came out exactly at the right time where mental health issues were starting to become more prominent, meditation was starting to get cool again, and it just swallowed my life.

I started a podcast, and I started a meditation app, and I started giving speeches and writing more books, and it just really took over. I tried to hang on to the news thing and the meditation thing at the the same time for a long time, and that had a lot of negative consequences. And so ultimately, a couple of years ago, I retired, and now I do this strange thing full-time.

Right. And I guess, well, there are a lot of questions that arise out of that. But let me step back and just ask the question about when you had the panic attack in 2004, right? 2004, you said? Yeah. Right. So what was that? Had you ever had a panic attack before? Or was that a first panic attack?

I had, yeah. My first panic attacks ever were when I was, I think, 14 and smoking weed. I had a few panic attacks then. I had Stage, I still have stage fright, which is weird, as I've joked that my career has been a triumph of narcissism over fear because I soldiered ahead even though I have stage fright. I had had panic attacks, mild ones on TV before, but never enough to slip me up this badly. But what the X factor here was that this is 2004, and the three years leading up to this moment I had spent in war zones post-911 as a reporter. So Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, West Bank, Gaza, all that stuff. I had come home from that, gotten depressed, started using cocaine to make myself feel better. Even though I wasn't high on the morning of the panic attack, the shrink I saw later explained to me that the ambient drug use was enough to change my brain chemistry and make freaking out much more likely.

Wow. And that led to the book, 10% Happier, which is the book that came out in 2014? Yeah. So there's still a 10-year gap between those two things. So it wasn't like the panic attack shook you in such a way that you were knocked off, we'll call the path, so to speak, the traditional journalistic path. It wasn't so much that that happened and you were like, okay, man, I got to change my life, which happens to some people when they have a jarring experience of that kind where they immediately go, whoa, I got to go to rehab or I have to start, I got to see a shrink right now or whatever. And they can very quickly sometimes change their life in a way that also dumbfounds me because I don't really know what I would do if I wasn't doing this. I'd be like, sleep in a bus shelter, I think. I'm not really sure if I have any other qualifications. But you kept soldiering along and rising in the business. You were still on... You'd done all that foreign corresponding work. You'd won awards for your coverage in Iraq and done other things.

You had our Morrow Award, really big time stuff. And you were rising within the ABC news hierarchy and becoming a bigger anchor and a bigger presence at the network. But it was like, during that period of time, that decade, as you worked towards the book, and I don't know how long the book took to pull together? Well, you can answer that in the context of this. But were you torn between the paths you were on, or were you just like, Hey, I'm going back on my same old path here, and this is a sidelet. I'll dabble with this, and we'll see where it goes. And then it just got larger and larger. There's a couple of different ways that dynamic can play out.

Well, just to pick up on one of the threads there. So after the panic attack, I did actually quite radically change my life in that I went to see a shrink who I then... He convinced me to come see him once or twice a week indefinitely. I think I was with him for 10 years, and I quit doing drugs. There was a pretty big change, but it wasn't like I got off what we're calling the path, the traditional journalistic path. Because it actually took me a while to find meditation. That didn't happen overnight. It was through my shrink that I found meditation about four or five years later. Then I had this... As I was nosy Closing around in the meditation space, I realized, Oh, there's a great story here. At this point, this was 2009. Meditation was not popular. It had been popular in the '60s, and then had fallen off. I was like, Oh, there's all this data that shows that meditation is really good for you. It can lower your blood pressure, boost your immune system, rewire key parts of the brain, and nobody was talking about it. I thought, Oh, this is a good story for me.

I spent five years writing a memoir about my experiences with meditation. Yes, definitely still on the train going forward with my traditional news career. But I have to say, and I think this gets to the heart of what you're asking, I think, I had an inkling in around 2009, I think, maybe even a little bit earlier than that, that the news business wasn't necessarily where it was at. The television news business was not necessarily where it was at for me. We We didn't have social media at this time, but in a big way. But I was getting the sense that personal brands were going to get bigger, and I wanted to invest in my own. I also was looking around and realizing the top of the pyramid in network news is incredibly small, and the odds of me getting all the way to that top job were de minimis. I needed to look around.

I mean, it's funny to think about that because I think of some of the most e maniacal, narcissistic, personal brand obsessed people I know are in the television business. And what they would say, if you were that person, you'd say something like, well, yeah, the very top of the pyramid is really hard to get to. But even if you're midway up the pyramid, you get more You have a bigger platform for your personal brand than if you have a failed meditation company. I mean, like most entrepreneurial ventures don't succeed. It's not like, hey, well, there's the easy path of I'll start a meditation company, and that will obviously be a fast route to personal Fame and fortune. And you sit here across from me here, remotely, but I'm like, it's staggeringly handsome, a full head of hair, a voice made for radio or television. It's not like you... And you're hosting some of the biggest shows at ABC News. So yeah, maybe George was going to be in your way, and no one could compete with David Muir because he's the only person I've ever seen with feathered sideburns. I mean, I literally have never seen that before.

He's got Farrah Fawcett sideburns. That man is like, none of us could ever compete with David Muir. But still, you could be pretty high up the food chain there. You already were pretty high up the food chain. That's a pretty big risk to leave the business you've been in for that long and have achieved that level of success to go on some entrepreneurial bender around the personal wellness space is crowded, too, Dan. Give me a break.

I think you're overstating my level of courage because I didn't retire until 2021. So I clung to the news business. Yeah.

What was the thing then that in 2021 made you finally take the leap?

Because it was so obvious at that point that my side hustle was working. The podcast I host was deeply entrenched. I had co-founded a meditation app that was doing well, although I do want to talk a little bit about that at some point.

Basically, you're saying you had no courage whatsoever. It was basically you juggled these At the moment, it was when the podcast and the meditation app and all of your meditation brand got big enough, you looked at them and went, Hey, this orange is bigger than this cherry, and I can now go and ride the orange.

I mean, I got it. Speaking of David Mühr, he sent me, when I retired, he sent me a gift. He found an old leather-bound copy of Profiles in Courage and sent it to me as, This is a brave to move, which I really appreciate it, and I'm hearing that in some of your questioning, but I really did take this very slowly, and I could go back and argue that it was a mistake not to have left way earlier because there are... I I failed to do some basic blocking and tackling in what is now my career, what you might roughly call the influencer space in some ways, which is embarrassing to admit. For example, I didn't have a social media presence of any real of any real substance until a year ago. So that was a mistake, but I just didn't have time to do it.

Right, totally. I'm curious about the meditation piece of it, and you said you wanted to talk about the app, but I said to you, it was interesting. I had George Slapodopoulos was on the podcast some months ago. I use Trump's term here lovingly, George Forever. And of course, I know that he practices TM. And we And I talked about it very briefly on the podcast because it's interesting to me. My exposure to TM was wholly through celebrities. They were people I knew who were really famous and really successful, totally type A people. Like George, Jerry Seinfeld, other people, people like that, right? In that camp. And there's a lot of them, as you know. I mean, this is an incredible... To a degree, the people are not aware how many super famous super powerful, super rich people are connected to the David Lynch Institute Foundation, the Bob Roth and that group. I love Bob. I think he's totally great. He taught me to meditate. But I came in through that door of what I knew about meditation was Mahrish Mahesh Yogi. I had no idea what TM was. And then I heard all these Type A people telling me that it was this tool that they used, in some cases, in a way that sounded appealing to me, and in some ways, that just sounded like They had found that drug that Bradley Cooper takes in...

Where it's a superpower drug that they are like, I got more energy, and I got more of this. It's like as if they were taking some cocaine without the nasty, it'll kill you side effects, right? And other people who talked about it more in terms of what I thought was appealing about it, which was that it would bring you to this... It would introduce some calm and some peace and serenity. That's in my very early, totally crude understanding of what was. I'm curious. That feels like I learned about this maybe at the 2010, 2011, 2012, when I first started hearing, becoming aware that there are all these people doing it. What was your in the process of... I know you wrote that. I know that 10% Happier is about your... I want to condense that thing of your meditation journey that went to not only discovering it after your shrink suggested you do it, but then how your relationship with it has evolved. Because I have had a on again, off again relationship with it over the last decade. I have never thought it wasn't valuable, but I've had a hard time for various periods of time staying committed to it.

But whenever I go back to it, I'm always like, Man, I got it. I'll have a good year where I'm like, This is great. Then I get knocked off course for various reasons, which if you were my shrink, I'd probably talk to you about that, too. But tell me about your journey with meditation.

I just want to say about what you just said, that that's completely normal to fall off the wagon, get back on the wagon. I actually think there's a way in which it can be helpful and healthy because what you described is, or I'll just put it in my own experience, when I fall off the wagon for a couple of days, I notice my inner toxicity getting much, much worse. That can lead to a intrinsic motivation to get back on the wagon. Intrinsic motivation is a key Another aspect of habit formation. Just to step back for a second. Habit formation is diabolically hard. What you're describing is totally normal. I think just saying out loud the words that habit formation is diabolically hard should be liberating because people tell themselves stories about how they're uniquely dysfunctional in this regard, and they're not. You've gotten to the point where you know it's good for you, not because somebody's wagging their finger and telling you to do it, but because you from the inside. That's huge. And those seeds have been planted, and it will come back over and over again in your life, I predict, in really helpful ways.

And I'll tell you, part of it, when I first... I probably meditated for about two years and then fell off the wagon for a period of time and felt all kinds of self-loathing about it. And then when I saw Bob Roth at the David Lynch place who had taught me to meditate, and I was full of like, this is terrible that I fell off that way. He said basically the same thing you just said, which is Everybody falls off. Everybody falls off and comes back. And it's totally not only... I mean, it's not literally everybody, but the vast majority of people have this phenomenon. You just shouldn't feel bad about it. Let's meditate and come back and talk to me whenever you want. And you'll almost certainly have this happen to you again. Don't worry about it. And the more over years, when these periods of time, when I would fall off, and then I would actually be like, I wish I had more time. I can't do it. And then at some point, the toxicity level would rise to the point where I'd be like, there are probably five reasons why my inner toxicity level is as high as it is right now.

But one of them is I haven't meditated in two months. And I just would be like, okay, I'm not forced. I'm not making myself. And one session of meditating, I'd be like, Oh, I have got to get back. I got to do that. It's like looking at yourself in the mirror and going, Wow, I'm 40 pounds overweight. At some point, you just go, Whoa, wait, what happened? I haven't worked out for three? I mean, what's... But I have come totally at the point where I think I can live with the notion of slipping and falling and getting back on for a long time. And I actually think every time I slip and fall and get back on, I actually feel in some incremental way, like I'm more bonded to it than I was the previous time. That feels incremental and positive. But again, tell me about your, though, how it's evolved for you over the course of you've been meditating for 15 years-ish.

Yeah,-ish. So I come from a very different school than TM thing, which is totally I'm down with TM. I think there's evidence there that shows that it's good for you. But TM emerged from a Vedic or a Hindu context. Mindfulness meditation, which is my sphere of operations, emerges out of Buddhism. In fact, actually, while I initially got interested in secular mindfulness meditation, which is a very simple exercise for your brain, and this form of meditation is what has gotten studied the most in the labs because it is secular. The bulk of the evidence about the benefits of meditation really is attached to mindfulness meditation. But over time, I've gotten more interested in going back into Buddhism to the point where I readily describe myself as a Buddhist. Not that I necessarily believe in enlightenment or karma or rebirth or anything like that. But the Buddha explicitly said Don't take anything I say at face value. Come check it out for yourself. I think of it more as a practice or a diet, a thing that you can... I do meditation and I follow some of the, I believe, all of the, hopefully all of the ethical precepts.

In that sense, I consider myself a Buddhist. I'm a bit of a mutant in that I don't really fall off the wagon that much. Maybe it's because I'm unwilling to live with that level of hypocrisy, given that this is my full-time job. But for me, there's something about the practice that just as a lifelong anxious person, it just spoke, it scratched some profound itch. And it's also just the intellectual infrastructure of Buddhism around the practice is so interesting to me that it just keeps me coming back.

It's interesting, though, because there are people who, and I think this is true of exercise and other things. I know people who, we all know people like this. If they miss their run one day, They feel like shit. They get the feel of the effects immediately. And so they're like, I got to run first thing tomorrow morning. I had a travel yesterday, so I couldn't run. I'm going out of my mind. And I think some people have met tibolically, whether it's physically or spiritually, are like that, where if they miss a day, they're really knocked off course, where some of us, it's more gradual when they miss a day, whether it's meditation or exercise or whatever. It takes some days of that building up before the toxicity level rises to the point where you're like, oh, wait, I got off course here somewhere because you don't notice it as much. And I'm like that with both exercise and meditation, where I can go some days without I start noticing that I'm really tweaked. Maybe I am more tweaked than I actually think I am, but I don't notice it. Then all of a sudden, the bile talks to this out.

I'm like, oh, something's wrong here. I'm like, I'm too fat, or I'm out of shape, or I'm mentally, spiritually out of shape, or physically out of shape, and it takes a couple of weeks for that to go like, Then it takes me a couple of weeks to actually do anything about it.

I can't speak for everybody who freaks out when they miss a day of working out or meditating, but speaking as someone who freaks out when he misses a day of exercise or meditating. I think a lot of it, in my case, has to do with a rigidity, where if my schedule is messed up in any way, I get on myself. I actually think your attitude is closer to the Buddhist ideal of not being up tight or overly attached to things.

When you came back from... When you said before, and I knew this part of your story because we had talked about it at some point, but I don't remember what the seed of this. When you started doing cocaine, when you came back to make yourself feel better, did you have a drug past at all, or was that totally new to you then?

No, I mean, I drank alcohol I had alcohol, but I never really spoke to me. I mean, I drank, but I didn't love it. I smoked weed, but as established earlier, that had not necessarily always the most positive impact on me. I'd always been too terrified to try hard drugs. I didn't know I was depressed, but I was really depressed in the months after I came home from my first long run in Iraq, which was six months. I was having trouble getting out of bed, and I felt like low energy all the time. I ran all these tests and hired all these doctors and couldn't find anything. A buddy of mine offered me cocaine one night, and I was like, You know what? I'll try it. Immediately, boom, I just felt better. Obviously, then 30 minutes later, I felt terrible.

And the next morning, I felt even worse. But then you did some more cocaine, you felt fine, and then you felt worse, then you felt fine, then you felt worse.

Jason the dragon is real, dude.

Yeah. Don't I know it? It's funny. Do you ever meet my friend Chris Anderson, the photographer, war photographer?

No.

So long time. He was a magnet photographer for a long time and has shot for everybody in the world. We've talked a lot about that PTSD experience, being someone who was in the first... He was the only photographer who was shooting the ground invasion into Baghdad in Iraq. He had been in Afghanistan around 9/11 and was a former neighbor of mine, lived with Sebastian Younger's, the guy who was the... Tim Hatherington, the photographer who was Sebastian Younger's partner, over in this building in Williamsburg called the Kibbutz, where I lived around the corner from them. And he went and shot a bunch of stuff on the '08 and '12 campaigns for me. And his encounters with PTSD, before there was a name for PTSD. Again, it's a very similar thing of not understanding what this thing is you're going through. And no one talked about PTSD for people who had been in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, Which is basically every foreign correspondent and war photographer who's ever done those things comes back with some form of PTSD. But in the early 2000s, even, you don't really have a name for that. And you're looking around going, I don't know that I'm depressed, but I just know something's off, right?

You're looking for some a solution. So Dan, earlier you mentioned that you wanted to come back and talk about the meditation app, and I know there are some big changes that are happening there. So let's do that. We'll talk about that. But first, I got to take one more break, and then we'll return to that very topic and get into what's going on with the 10% Happier platform, really, with Dan Harris. We'll talk about all of that here on InPolitic with Jon Hyland.

Hey, everybody. How are we doing? I have a very personal episode for you today. No guest. It's just going to be me talking. I have three things I want to talk about. The first thing is that I want to tell you about a career earthquake I have recently gone through that has been very hard for me. It's been going on for a while, but I haven't been able to talk about it until now. The second thing is that I want to tell you about something very cool that is emerging out of said earthquake. And then the third thing, and this will be the meat of the episode, is that I want to talk about some of the lessons I've learned in the course of this very difficult period of time, because I think some of these lessons are potentially directly applicable to your lives.

We're back with Dan, and that was the top of this past Tuesday's episode of the 10% Happier podcast, where you announced you've had a major change that's gone on in your whole life, as we've just discussed, has been built around this big transition out of journalism and into the world of the mind and the brain and how to be better at all of that. And you built this mindfulness app. You wrote these books. You've done all this stuff. You've become associated with a particular mindfulness app, and now you've left it. As you announced on social media a couple of days ago, said, Some of you might be surprised that I'm now abandoning the app that I co-founded. I was among those people. I was surprised. What's that about?

Yeah, I'm surprised, too. It's a bummer. The short version is I arrived at a point where there were significant differences with my cofounders, creative, strategic, interpersonal, financial, the whole lot. My cofounders are really good people. It wasn't a running gun battle or anything like that. Everybody really tried over several years of negotiations and attempts to make it work, and we couldn't make it work. I made a ton of mistakes in that process. So this isn't a blame game at all. We arrived at this situation where they're going to keep the 10% Happier app and change it to Happier. I'm going to keep my podcast, which will still be called 10% Happier. I'm starting this new thing, this new community over on Substack. If you search for me on Substack, you can find it or just go to danharris. Com. I'm at a vulnerable raw point in my life because I've just gone through several years of this breakup and starting over. I definitely... It's awesome to get to anybody who can support me. I'm excited to have it.

This is a really big deal for you, Dan. I mean, it's a big upheaval in in some sense. You devoted your Tuesday episode to talking about how you're dealing with it. For the sake of our listeners, I'd love for you to talk a little bit about that here.

This is a career earthquake, and I want to be able to talk about what that's like for somebody who's a semi-professional meditator to go through a life crisis that many people go through. You've been through them. I know I've watched them from a distance. I'm using this moment not only to talk about how to survive this election, but also we all ups and downs and tumult in our professional lives, and I have some thoughts about how to handle that, too.

Well, let's talk about that. It's interesting because... Well, we should talk about that, but before we talk about that, I want to go back and talk about one other thing prior to that, which is you did journalism from... When did you first get interested in journalism? At what age?

Well, I started working in journalism when I was 21, right out of cold It'll be college in 1993. But then I had done a bunch of internships during college, so in the early '90s, at TV news stations, including WBZ in Boston, where I think that was my first internship.

Right. And you were... I had no idea, only because I like to be familiar with all things about Maine now. You were up in Bangor, Maine for a while, right?

I was in Bangor, Maine from 1993 to '95, and then in Portland, Maine from '95 to '98.

And had you wanted to be a journalist in high school? Was that something that was an aspiration for you? Had you been idealizing that? I know that I only ever wanted to be a journalist from the time I was 12. So I sometimes wonder whether I It was as freakish as me.

No, my story is a little bit more embarrassing than that, honestly. I think I had TV news and the movies mixed up in my mind as a kid. I knew I wanted to do something fun and sexy and exciting. I wasn't an aspiring ink-stained wretch. I was more an aspiring something flashy, which was the opposite of my parents who were like, Nosed to the grindstone academic physicians. I always thought they were chumps for doing these very hard, low-paid or relatively low-paid jobs. By relatively, I mean relative to Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, which was the TV show that I enjoyed watching as kid.

You thought you were going to be Robin Leach is basically what you thought. I could be the next Robin Leach.

Yeah, pretty much. That's what a douche I was when I was a kid. I really just had this idea in my mind that I was going to do something big. I went actually to film school for a semester in college, realized I had no talent for that, and had simultaneously been doing a bunch of internships in TV news. I had a sense, Yeah, I could do this. I really liked what I thought would be the glamorous side of it, which is actually, as you know, not that glamorous. I got very, very interested, ultimately, in the hard work of the journalism part, but that was not what drew me in.

You wanted to be on TV, basically. Correct. You didn't really know. You thought it was all one thing. You were like, Guys, you got to be on TV. We're all like, That's not that embarrassing. It's a little confusing. Sometimes now the lines are also... The journalists are all such horrors, and the horrors are all semi-journal journalist. That was before Reality TV was even born. Now there's no distinction, basically, between all those things. I say somewhat kiddingly. When you think back on your many, many, many year long career in journalism and on your success at it, which is undeniable, and your achievements in it, which are equally undeniable, there are three questions that arise for me. One, what did you love about it? Two, what did you hate about it? And three, what do you miss about it?

There's so much to There's so much to list on the love side, but I love dropping into some incredible location, be it a war zone or in the later part of my career, really finding incredible investigative stories in all corners of the planet, from Papua New Guinea to Cambodia to Haiti, and dropping into it an atmosphere that I had never been in before and really getting to experience it, not like a tourist, but as a journalist. That buzz is extraordinary and is the thing I miss the most. The other thing I miss the most is I actually really enjoy it, as silly as it is, being a morning television host. I was the co-anchor of GMA on the weekends for 10 or 11 years and filled in a lot on the weekday edition of the show. I love the banter. What I hated was getting up early. I also really came to not enjoy the fact that my life would get upended, utterly upended in unpredictable ways, just because somebody walked into a supermarket with an AK-47. Brutal. Yeah. I covered New Town, I covered Gabby Gifford is being shot. I covered so many shootings, school shootings and otherwise.

Yeah, that is a little bit of what drove me out of the business.

Do you ever, as you sit here today, even with all, and we'll talk about this in one second, with all the current level of angst, agita, whatever, in this new professional, the difficulties you had with your existing/prior partners. Is there ever a moment where you were like, I really miss journalism. I'd like to go back and be in It was?

Interestingly, no. The day that Trump got convicted, I went to the television, turned it on, and was watching the forementioned David Muir, Anchor. One of my friends texted me. He was like, Do you miss it now? I just don't. I think the fire really went out. Having said that, though, I still would like to get back in the game and do investigative stories all over the planet. What I would love to do is do stories that relate to my primary interest, which is how to upgrade the mind. I do think about that and having conversations about turning that into a TV show. I could get into that, but I don't think the daily grind of daily news is for me anymore.

Right. Well, I think that one of the advantages to having, as you said, you said you took too long in some ways to make that change. But one of the advantages of being that deliberate about it is that you didn't make it... You didn't make it... You didn't make it do this in a You didn't do it in a way that you're like, boy, I just decided I quit my job. What the fuck did I do? It's more like you grappled with it for a long time, because you said, maybe too slowly. But when you finally got there, you're like, okay, I'm pretty much at peace with this, and it's not as likely to create regret. And I think, I was talking about this the other night. The first time I ever met Jeff Bezos in 1997, when he was still just like a total dork and had just taken Amazon public. And I was writing a story in the New Yorker magazine. And we met and talked. And he said this thing to me. It's the only thing he's ever said. I don't know him well. I've interviewed him like twice or three times in my life.

But he said this thing to me about how he was trying to... When he described his decision to go start Amazon, he said, I live my life according to a regret minimization framework. I just try to evaluate things and make decisions and not make decisions that reduce the prospects that I'm going to have a giant regret about not doing the thing later. It's the only thing I think the man has ever said that stuck with me, and I thought it still pops up in my mind all the time. And it's an interesting thing because I think there's a really... There's an important distinction between being able to look back in your life and say, I've made a bunch of mistakes, which I've made hundreds. I make hundreds almost every day. But I have very few regrets. That's a big... That's a thing I'm always mindful of is fucking stuff up, inevitable, but not feeling like, boy, I really blew that. It still pains you. The way you went about your decision leaves you in a place where you're less likely to have that regret, I would think.

Yeah, I think that's exactly right. As I interpret back through your career, you Yes, I'm sure you've made mistakes, but my understanding is you have consistently just taken big swings. I think that is the route to regret minimization. You've done entrepreneurial stuff, you've written big books, you now have 72 jobs and are busier than a six-packer goat, from what I can tell. All of which, I think, really does go to regret minimization.

Busier than a six-packard goat. I've never heard that before, but I'm definitely... That may be my... If I ever write a memoir, that could be the title of it, Busier than a Six-Peckered Goat. Who knows?

I don't know where I heard that.

I don't know where I heard that. I don't know where I heard that. I don't know where I heard that. I don't know where I heard that. But that's fantastic. I mean, look, I'll just all... It shouldn't be about me, but I'll just say, I remember when I did Recount and it failed, I was just like... I mean, we ended up not working. I was like, I had no regrets about it all. I learned all kinds of stuff doing it. I was just like, most companies that are trying to do anything worth doing are more likely to fail and succeed. And we tried really hard. We didn't embezel any money. There were no dead hookers in the closet. We didn't do anything wrong. We just tried really hard in an honest way, and we didn't get there. Okay, moving on. I've always think of Barry Diller when he failed to take over Paramount in the early '90s. He did a press conference in New York where he stood up and said, literally, They won, we lost, next, and walked off stage. And I was like, That's a great way to look at them. They We're the one we lost, next.

Moving on. Tell me about the thing you were talking about a second ago, which is how has this... And you'll decide, obviously, because you're a skilled person about these things, about how much detail you want to talk about in terms of the conflict with your existing partners. But you can talk about it at whatever level you feel comfortable with. But the way you were just talking about it was, how does a person for whom mindfulness and with the folk-kai that you have around improving the mind and in some ways, the spirit, what's that been like going through this thing of having made this big career transition, built a partnership, built a company, built all this stuff, and then having it fall apart for whatever set of reasons? What has that experience been like and how are you coping with it?

Well, For better or worse, it's been a three-year long thing. I retired from ABC News in the fall of 2021. 2021, right. Things started to get complex with my now former co-founder Founders, pretty shortly after that. I think initially my feeling was embarrassment. How could this be happening to me? Not in a woe as me way, but more in an embarrassment way. I'm out here trying to help people do their lives better, and I'm in this, and broiled in this conflict. I made a lot of mistakes that were the preconditions for the conflict. It's not like I was blameless in any of this. I We were trying. My former partners are well-intentioned people, so we're all trying to work this out in a very sane and civil way, but it was quite protracted. In the early part of that, I really, as I said, I felt very embarrassed. What I've come to really understand in a visceral way that I think is useful universally is that conflict is unavoidable. You get more than one human in a room, there will eventually be conflict. Psychologists talk about the There's a difference between healthy conflict and high conflict.

High conflict is almost always destructive and sometimes violent. We see it all over our culture right now. We're stuck in a high conflict. Where there's a complete lack of understanding, complete lack of compassion, a cartoonish caricaturization of the other side's positions. That can happen not just on a cultural level, but on a business level, on an interpersonal level. Healthy conflict is possible. There are a whole bunch of skills that you can learn, communication skills, intellectual humility that can keep you in the healthy side of the conflict. For me, really taking a deep dive into that has been incredibly helpful. The one thing I do feel good about is everybody tried. These are From what I can tell, everybody, and I know these people very well, everybody's well intentioned. I don't see like there's a bad guy here. When I call it a failure, I mean more like a personal failure on my side, that it just didn't work out. I'm stepping away to do something new. But you talked about recount, and I wonder if you would agree with this, because I would say another lesson that I learned in the wake of this failure is that failure is underrated.

And that, first of all, it's awesome to take a swing. And even if you miss, there's a ton of learning there that you will take into everything you do going forward. I found that as it was obvious to me that this company wasn't going to work out, at least my participation in the company wasn't going to work out, I started running all these experiments. I got on social media for the first time. I started selling merch. I started doing live events, just trying stuff. Not all of it worked, but trying stuff is incredibly valuable.

It was somebody, I think it was Michael Keaton. I was just looking at Michael Keaton on a smart list, and I think he was in that. I'm trying to remember where I heard this, but I think it was those guys talking about how the only things they've ever learned have been from failures. Their failures are where they learn the most about their careers. They look back and go, Oh, it's the misses that we learned anything from. The successes, they didn't learn shit. And hey, look, let's just to step back and put a fine point on something important here by repeating reading it for everybody. All hope is not lost here if you're a Dan Harris fan, because although Dan is transitioning out of one mode and off of one platform, he's at the same time seamlessly transitioning into a different mode, but similar mode, and onto just a different platform or a collection of platforms. You can go to danharris. Com, and there's going to be a community. You're basically building an audio substack, essentially, around the podcast and other things. But there's going to be a membership community. You can pay money into it, and you can still be part of the Dan Harris.

I think it's going to be a more... It's It's going to be a familiar model now that people are familiar with on substack, but it's going to be your own version of that and probably mostly driven by the podcast and the audio, not exclusively, but mostly.

You're exactly right. We post two episodes a week. They're super nutrient dense and Historically, we just dropped them on people and walked away. Now, you'll be able to talk to me, to the guests, to my staff, to each other about these episodes. I'll be doing monthly AMAs. Already, having just launched this, people are saying, Maybe you should be doing those more often, so maybe they become weekly. It's really an experiment. Anybody who signs up now can help me figure out how to build this thing going forward. I'm going to be a charter member because $80 a year, I believe.

It's $80 a year, I think it's going to be?

It is, but For people who can't afford it, just send me a note. I'll give it to you for free.

Well, I can't really credibly make that claim with you, so I'll be sending you my $80 as a charter founding member of the Dan Harris Mindfulness Community. It's awesome to see you.

Thank you, brother. I appreciate that. Right back at you. I mean, this whole thing started because I sent you a random mash note on text about how much I'm enjoying all of your various television and audio work. And also your newsletter at Puck is fantastic.

Well, Dan, you're really nice to say all that, and I appreciate it. And like I said earlier, in addition to me being a charter member of the Dan Harris mindfulness community, you should get ready for a stream of anxious, deep, deprived, freaked out phone calls from me as we get closer to election day.

Great.

Peace out. Thanks.

See you later.

Inpolitic with John Heilman is a Puck podcast in partnership with Odyssey. Thanks again to Dan Harris for meditating with us today and guiding us to a plane of sublime spiritual enlightenment. If you dug this episode, please follow InPolitic with John Hylman and share us, rate us and review us on the free Odyssey app or wherever you happen to bask in the splendend indoor of the podcast universe. I'm John Hylman, your Cruise Director and the Chief Political Columnist for Puck, where you can read my writing every Sunday night, plus the work of all my terrific colleagues by going to puck. News/impolitic, that's P-U-C-K-N-E-W-S-I-M-P-O-L-I-T-I-C, and subscribing. Two of those colleagues from Puck, John Kelly and Ben Landee, are the executive producers of this podcast. Lori Blackfoot is our Senior Executive Booking producer. Ali Clancy is our executive assistant. Jd Krauley and Jenna Weis-Burman are our indispensable overseers and Guardian Angels at Odyssey. And the one and only Bob Tabor, is the straw that stirs the drink, flawlessly producing, editing, mixing, and mastering this show. We will see you next time, everyone. And as always, Namaste.