Dan Harris: Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics [From the Archive]

21:30James Altucher:How do they measure compassion? They just measure the, they look at the part of the brain that they have most associated with a compassionate response to stimuli, and they see that that part of the brain, the gray matter, literally grows. After eight weeks of meditation, There's one study that I love that was done at Harvard in 2011. It took people who had never meditated before, and they scanned their brains for a baseline reading. Then they had them do eight weeks of short daily doses of meditation. At the end, they scanned their brains again, and they looked at three areas of the brain, one having to do with self-awareness, one having to do with compassion, and the third having to do with stress, the amygdala, which is associated with stress.

22:08And the areas of the brain associated with compassion and self-awareness, the gray matter, grew. And in the area of the brain associated with stress, that gray matter shrank. Now, this is just one study. It may prove to be wrong over time, but it is in line with the general thrust of the neuroscience I've seen thus far.

22:24James Altucher:And are the results enormous, or is it like 51 % saw growth, 49 % didn't show growth? I don't know, and I think the other, to say there are so many open questions about this neuroscience. For example, can you compare that to what would happen if you learned violin over these eight weeks? What parts of the brain would change that? That's a really good point. Maybe the Compassion Center would change if you just studied violin. Right. So that being said, I have spent quite a bit of time with the neuroscientists who are looking at this. And actually, their degree of confidence, they taught me to speak the way I just spoke, which is, look, let's be open that the science is in its early stages.

23:03We don't want to be too definitive. But it does. Scientists are very cautious, the good ones. and I think there's a very strong suggestion that when you meditate, you are changing your brain in salutary ways.

23:17James Altucher:And a lot of the, just the last thing I'll say about the science, they kind of focus on two styles of meditation and some of the results you quoted come from one style, some come from the other style. One is kind of the compassion, loving kindness type of meditation and the other is the more mindfulness style meditation. What really intrigued me in your book, by the way, and I had never really seen this, And it was a quote you took from Jeff, your co-author, but then it really got me to think a lot, which is that you can do the mindfulness style of meditation. And by the way, all these styles that you're hearing us talk about, the best part of Dan's book, I just want to say, is you give these five to ten minute meditation suggestions, how to meditate, that focus on all these techniques.

24:03James Altucher:And they're so easy and gentle to do. You're really gentle on the reader. Like most meditation textbooks will say, okay get a mat find an hour get in the lotus position boom and then you just eliminated 99.9 % of the planet this book is accessible to anyone who just wants to try anyone who's ever said I can't do this if you can't do this with Dan's book then I don't know what to say you're a hard kid I don't want to insult anyone but I don't know what to say thank you for saying that by the way but the other thing is about the science and this is why I only wanted to touch briefly on it we were talking earlier about Tim Ferriss and how in Tools of the Titan and so many of the titans he speaks to meditate.

24:42And one thing that's interesting about Tim

24:46James Altucher:is that, yeah, he'll look at the scientific studies, just like we took a brief tangent into that. But he says, he said it on my podcast, ultimately the most important sample size is a sample size of one, which is you. So people trying the techniques in your book, and if they try them accurately and thoughtfully and really pay attention to what you're doing or in your app, if they use the 10 % Happier app with its suggestions, and so that really helps them to do it kind of correctly, even though maybe you can argue there's no incorrect way. There really is probably ways more correct than others.

25:19James Altucher:If you do that, you could see if your life's better in a month, two months, six months, like to keep a diary and see how you're thinking about things differently. And that's the best scientific research you can do. I said a thing when my first book came out. I might have said it on your podcast. I don't know. I said it once and I've started, it a bunch since then. Oh, it's definitely on my podcast. Almost, almost, almost surely, which is, I just basically challenge people, do meditate for a month, maybe a minute every day or most days, better to be five to 10 minutes. And if you think by the end of the month that it's total bullshit, hit me up on Twitter and tell me I'm a moron.

25:54And people tell me I'm a moron all the time, but never for that. And so I have a high degree of confidence that it is useful just because I see lives change all the time as a consequence of people adopting this very simple habit.

26:08James Altucher:Like, give an example. And you give examples in the book, but give an example that's really impressed you. Of people's lives changing? Yeah. I mean, well, I just, just because of, by dint of being a guy who's now written a couple books about meditation, I get very dramatic stories coming into me about people who say, you know, they were suicidal and embracing this tactic has helped them to turn their lives around. But I'll give you a more close to home example, which is my wife. So you mentioned before that she's not a meditator. But actually, in the course of my writing this book, one of the plot lines is we, Jeff and I, my partner in crime, my co-author, Jeff is this amazing meditation teacher from Toronto, Jeff Warren.

26:49I call him Meditation MacGyver because he's really great at sort of getting under the hood and helping people who are interested in maybe meditating, but having trouble adopting the habit to get over the hump. And so he, I set him loose on my wife because I knew that there's no way that I could talk to her about it because she would kill me. And when I first started meditating, I was very annoying about it. And I almost, you know, got my eyes scratched out. And so I learned the hard way just to shut my mouth, that there's no point talking about meditation to somebody who doesn't want to hear it.

27:21So I've never proselytized with her since then. but I did have Jeff talk to her and she told him all the reasons that she was having trouble meditating. She's busy. She lives with a guy she referred to as the happiness guru, not in a positive way.

27:39James Altucher:Do people stop you on the street? Yeah, sometimes. Does she get annoyed? No, she doesn't get annoyed but it's just like she lives with me so she knows what an idiot I really am. So it's a little weird for her but it's not like I've gone out there and presented myself as a unicorn barfing rainbows. I mean, the book's called 10 % Happier, and it's about what a dummy I am, and I did a bunch of cocaine and had a panic attack. So it's not like I present myself as some sort of walking around in some cloud of impenetrable imperturbability. I am deeply flawed and open about it. So she's not super annoyed by when that happens, but she still knows that my persona at home is, She sees me in a very 360-degree way, so she's aware of the flaws that remain.

28:23Anyway, so she listed the reasons she was having trouble meditating to Jeff, and he really diagnosed correctly what would help her get over the hump. And for her, it was making the thing less of a chore. She somehow resisted it because it felt like another thing she's supposed to do. She's a doctor, and she's got a three-year-old, and a husband who's working all the time, and she's got a busy life, And somebody sort of implicitly, me, wagging my finger at her saying you should meditate just wasn't working for her. That's never going to work. No, it's not. And when I say implicitly, it means I never talked to her about it.

29:00But she was like, just by dint of living with you, you are a wagging finger, a walking wagging finger. So I get it. I get it. It's a little unfair to me because what am I supposed to do? But still, I do get why she wouldn't want to do it. Jeff's created a special meditation for her called Taking Back Lazy, where he just encouraged her at the end of the day just to line the ground for a couple minutes and enjoy that. Just tune into the physicality of it. I love that Taking Back Lazy. Yes, it's beautiful. Jeff's a genius. I mean, I don't say that lightly. And he's truly, when it comes to this stuff, he is a genius.

29:33He's uniquely talented.

29:34James Altucher:Yeah, it shows through the book how much respect you have for him. I do. I love him. And I've read hundreds. I mean, I don't know about hundreds, but I've read a lot of meditation books over the time. This is great not just for your, and I just love how you always tell your stories and other people's stories, but just seeing Jeff through you, he has like some really amazing quotes in this book. There's things in this book I learned, and you know, again, you always try to keep beginner's mind, but it's very difficult. After you do something for a long time, you don't think you're a beginner anymore.

30:07James Altucher:And there's one point when I always thought of mindfulness meditation, which is basically just to bastardize it, kind of observing your thoughts while you're breathing, and then if you go off into a tangent like we always do, getting back to center and breathing again and observing again. So it's mindfulness. And then compassion meditation, again, I'm going to bastardize it. Just feel love towards everything. Just totally bastardizing. But I like how you and Jeff, and I'd never seen this, I always thought of them as completely separate. And often if I'm sitting, I might do a little bit of one and then a little bit of another as if they're separate.

30:47James Altucher:You guys combined it, do mindfulness gently, like be gentle on yourself while you're doing it. And as a nice way to kind of combine the two. Yeah. Okay. And Jeff said it. So at this juncture, I just want to be clear. There are three things I want us, because you have a way of like saying 15 interesting things that all of which I want to comment on, but then we get on to something else. So there are just three things I want to say. Yes. So just, I'm going to say the first thing, which is in direct response to what you just said. I promise I won't interrupt. No, no, I love when you interrupt. I don't want to discourage you from interrupting.

31:17I just want to make sure that I'm on the record as saying there are three things right now that I want to say, but I reserve the right to add more. So in response to what you just said, Jeff's innovation in this book that was really new to me, and I think in some ways a response to what he diagnosed in me, which is that my meditation practice had a real sort of eat your vegetables, forced march, grit your teeth aspect to it. And so Jeff was trying to introduce into my practice two aspects. One, enjoyment. He's like, you are allowed to enjoy this. Actually tuning in to the ridiculously obvious but universally overlooked truth that you are alive and have a body is enjoyable.

31:57Tuning in to the raw data of your existence is enjoyable. And not always, but it can be. and you should allow that to be part of your meditation. And the other thing, and I think this is really what you were pointing at, was an attitude of friendliness toward yourself while meditating, which is like - Yeah, that's right.

32:15James Altucher:He used the word friendliness. Friendliness, which is a less sappy way of talking about compassion. So that when, for example, you're overtaken by some distraction, jag during meditation, like anger or desire for a cheeseburger or whatever it is, you aren't meeting the arising of these totally natural inner phenomena with anger, which is what I was doing. you are like, oh, what's up? I know this character. This is anger. And what is the value of seeing anger with friendliness? It's like when you fight with anger, it just gets worse. You get into self-flagellation, it's close cousin. But when you actually greet anger with some friendliness, the value in the rest of your life is enormous, which is that when anger ambushes you in the middle of a conversation with your wife or a colleague or your boss, you see it coming, you aren't owned by it, you can let it pass.

33:04And that is the judo move, the inner judo move that I think, for me at least, changes lives. Okay, can I get to the other things I was going to say? Did I answer your question? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.

33:15James Altucher:It wasn't a question. It was more of a statement that I really appreciated that he said that. Okay. I love the word friendliness. Me too. I never heard that in the context of meditation. Me too. This book, if nobody reads it, it's fine because what I learned in the course of this book has thoroughly changed my meditation practice and my life. So I'm delighted to have had the experience. And I like taking back the lazy too. Taking back lazy is amazing. So actually, which leads me to the second thing I wanted to say, which is, no, because there is a third, but this is the second. The third is actually, I want to ask you a question.

33:47The second is on Bianca, just to close the loop on that, because you had asked me for impressive stories of how things change. So if Bianca did, because of taking back lazy, start meditating and her practice is idiosyncratic. So she, our kid is just turned three. He's a horrible sleeper. And every night it takes like two hours to get him down sometimes. And I'm almost never around because I anchor Nightline during the week and I anchor a morning show on the weekend. So I'm either in bed or at work most nights. And now he's so used to her doing it that it's rare that he'll let me put him down. So she's marooned in this little nursery with this monster every night and often just pissed that she can't do the rest of her life because she's stuck putting him down.

34:31And she co-opted that time and turned it into meditation, thanks to Jeff. So she'll be lying there, just trying to tune into the sensations in her body, the breath coming in or going out, however her body is feeling at the moment. And then when she gets caught, notices that she'd been overtaken by rage, by the fact that Alexander won't go to bed. Or that you're not home. Or that I'm not home. Yeah, when she married poorly, She then returns her attention to her body. And I believe she's probably meditating more than almost anybody on the Upper West Side of Manhattan because of the length of time that she has to be there with her son.

35:09And so the impact on her has been incredible to watch my wife. I've known for years that my wife who has all of these stressors in her life, her job is incredibly stressful. She's had some family drama. She had breast cancer last year. We had an infertility crisis. Then we had a baby. and so many stressors in her life. And I've known for a long time that meditation could help, but I felt very powerless to talk to her about it because I knew that it would backfire. And to watch her be able to metabolize her own feelings without being owned by them as a consequence of this practice has been enormously gratifying.

35:43James Altucher:What have you seen just with your eyes different about her since starting? So the way she handles the stresses in her life has changed. You could really tell it. There's no BS. Yes, yes, yes. I can really say, because I didn't know she was meditating. I knew something was different. So just to tell the story. So in the course of the book, Jeff and I took an 11 or 12 day road trip across the country in a big orange bus. And we met people - It's like the Parsons family bus. Yes, except for less cool. And the conceit of the book is that we're going to go out and meet people who want to meditate, but aren't.

36:19And we'll have them get over the hump. And so every chapter is a different obstacle to meditation. Like, I don't have time for this. I can't clear my mind. This is self-indulgent. And in each chapter, we meet, you know, like celebrities or cops from Tempe, Arizona or social workers from New Mexico. And they talk to us about what, you know, what's stopping them from meditating. And we get into the behavior change science. We teach meditation, blah, blah, blah. So at the end of the road trip, we took like five months to write the book. And then when we wanted to write the last chapter, we wanted to go back to everybody we met to see if they were meditating.

36:52During those five months, I never went and asked Bianca, are you meditating? Because I was afraid to do it. But I was noticing changes in her, her handling of stress, the stress in her life in particular during this time, there was a lot going on at the office. And I could see that, one of the things I've noticed in my wife, but in all of us, myself too, is that we were very much the stars of our own movie. And sometimes these are sad movies. And we get sucked up into the story of me. and the world constricts when that happens. It's like a sort of horse blinders. And I could see that her cloud of woe was thinner and less gray and that she was not so stuck in the stories of what was upsetting her and that the upset about tumult at the office wasn't, at the hospital more specifically, just wasn't knocking her down the way her resilience was boosted.

37:48James Altucher:Well, I want to ask you about that, and then you have your third. First off, I want to say, tumult. Is that how you say that? I don't know. I always think of tumultuous, so I think tumult. Anyway. I think it's tumult. Yeah. You said tumult. I just was... Anyway. Take a quick break. If you like this episode, I'd really, really appreciate it. It would mean so much to me. Please share it with your friends and subscribe to the podcast. Email me at alcatra at gmail.com and tell me why you subscribed. Thanks.

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40:14James Altucher:given that i like that phrase you know we're stuck in the movie our lives and hers was very often many people is very constricted by oh the office tension and this and that do you think as those walls started to dissolve she was able to be more affectionate or compassionate with you did your communication with her get better yes so i wish i should say that my wife actually has a surplus of compassion. We are actually quite well-matched, whereas I think one of my issues is, or has historically been, and it's the thing that I've really worked on to my great benefit, empathy and compassion, is really boosting those muscles through meditation has been an enormous value add for me, but it was not something I came to naturally.

40:56My wife's actually the exact opposite. She's overflowing with compassion. But I did notice sort of an availability that she's just more available because the things... In what way? What do you mean by available? Maybe the better word would be lighter too. That in the... We used to have fights. When you asked me before, what were our biggest fights? It was about this, that when she was stressed at work, it was so heavy. I could tell that she was just carrying this like big overcoat of anxiety, invisible overcoat, but kind of visible overcoat of anxiety, this big heavy load of stress and that it was very inner focused.

41:37And so if I had a problem and I could shake her out of it, we could talk about it, but her default mode was to be kind of ruminating on things that she was dealing with at the office.

41:47James Altucher:And while she's ruminating and you're being self-centered and not asking her, hey, how'd your day go? It makes it worse. Yeah, it makes it worse. Yes. Because was there a way for her to reach out and teach you how to ask her? Yeah, well. But did that work or not work? It got pretty bad. These are our worst fights. So historically, our worst fights have been this mismatch where she actually does, I think, want some care and feeding in those times. And I am angry that she's upset. Irrationally angry. Doesn't it seem like a critical thing? These are the times when she needs to feel that she's loved the most to give her the strength to deal with these situations.

42:27James Altucher:This seems so critical. How did you guys start off? Well, because I would say it wasn't actually that common. I mean, when you met. When we met. Well, you haven't met her, have you? No. I mean, she's great. Dinner in January? We should hang out. Yes, I think you would really enjoy her. I think I'm having heart trouble too, so. Okay, she's more of a lung woman, but heart she can actually advise. She's hard to resist. A, she's beautiful. She's very smart. And she's really nice. She's really nice. So it's not like we had a tumultuous relationship overall. We actually don't fight very much. But our worst fights, since you asked, this is the general neighborhood of our worst fights.

43:09And so they weren't super common. In the beginning, they weren't super common. No, they never actually were super common. But when they happened, they happened. Overall, we have, as you can tell, this sort of breezy, banter-filled relationship. That is our day-to-day relationship. Once or twice a year, the conditions arise where the dynamic that you described before comes about, which is that she's at a point where she needs something. I revert into this kind of weird, stupid obstinance and it goes pear-shaped. And what I would say is breaking the cycle, I can see it breaking the cycle, is meditation for both of us.

43:49James Altucher:She's able to, A, be a little lighter about what's happening at work, Or maybe be a little open with you about when or signal to you more that she needs some affection and you're able to give it. Yes, in a way that gets through. And then yes, I'm less tied up. Sorry, my voice went there. Less tied up in my own knots of whatever, inner stinginess that we're able to come together in those moments. I'll tell you another thing that really helped, her getting breast cancer because there was no way to poo-poo that. And it was horrible for her. And I mean, it's hard for me to talk too much about it because she was the one who had to endure all the pain and fear.

44:24Well, not all of it because I was very scared too. But I heard her say the other day, actually she came on my podcast to do an interview, which was very interesting. That's a fun idea. It was actually really fun. But she referred to the breast cancer as the best thing that ever happened to her. And I thought that was really interesting and heartening to hear. And I would say it was one of the best things that happened to us, that and having a kid, because these experiences can either drive you apart or bring you together. And, you know, going through infertility infertility and then going through breast cancer, it was a lot.

44:55And it was very hard for me. There was no way, there's no backdoor on that one. There's no way in either of those circumstances where I could ever be like, oh, you know, she's overdoing it or I'm going to be stingy about giving her what she needs. These were emergencies. And once you kind of start breaking through some of those barriers, they don't really, in my experience, they haven't really gone back up.

45:17James Altucher:What hasn't gone back up? The barriers. I see. So once you're able to go through these experiences, what about the reverse? And I don't want to say it's all meditation. I think it's part meditation. I think it's getting more mature. I think it's getting to know each other more. And just baseline compatibility. It's obvious to me on our first date, frankly, that this was somebody that I could do business with. And the reason why her story is so important is because you yourself are like the scientists. You could see the results. It's not like just someone coming back to you six months later saying, oh, my life's completely better.

45:56James Altucher:Because you don't know what happened to them. Maybe they won the lottery in those six months too. But here's something where you've been through minute by minute serious stresses. And so you've put in your 10 ,000 hours of analyzing her emotions. So you're able to study the nuances of them. And you saw them changing without even knowing what the X factor was. And it turned out the X factor was this meditation. Yes, I think there are several X factors, but I think meditation was one of them. I'm always loathe to say, oh, you know, as you know, as I've said leading up to it and leading up to this point in our discussion, I'm not a big believer in silver bullets, but I do think meditation was part of that.

46:32And it just, again, sort of just starts to pull you out of your self-centrism, to allow you to see the bigger picture and to give you a different relationship to your problems. The world is impermanent and entropic, and we are not in control in many ways. And these exogenous factors are going to impact us in ways that we like and the ways we don't like, like illness and the vicissitudes of work and all of that, the office politics. And so what meditation helps you do is just kind of navigate this in a more supple way. And that's what I was seeing from my wife. And the other thing that's really changed with her, and it's interesting, because for her, meditation was part of a bucket of self-care, you know, including exercise, that she wasn't doing, which was really a source of tension for us because she went through a breast cancer and she really needed to start taking care of herself.

47:23Is she okay, by the way? She's fine. She's cured, like actually cured. And right now, as we speak, the healthiest I've ever seen her. She's gotten really into exercise. She found a form of exercise she really loves, SoulCycle, as it happens. And so we go together and it's a fun couple's activity and I'm just so proud of how well she's doing. And so I think it's all part of, the meditation is all also part of a little renaissance for her of realizing that she's going to be into taking care of other people, including her patients and her kid and her husband. She needs to take care of herself first.

47:57And I love watching that.

47:59James Altucher:Yeah, and it doesn't mean, it's such an important thing because it doesn't mean she's not going to take care of you and the kid. In fact, that's often the best way to take a view and the kid is if she preserves her own energy and conserves her own energy so she has it available for others as needed. Absolutely. And this, you know, Alexander watching mommy taking care of herself like this is great modeling. He's going to be fine if he goes to breakfast with me on a Saturday morning while she goes to a class instead of being with her every minute of every day. He's going to be fine. In fact, it's good for him to have just one time with dad.

48:32To know that mom's going to take care of herself is a, that's the mom I grew up, my mom was doing that. And it was a great model for me. My mom's a scientist, just like my wife, and was very into exercise. And so she's an incredible role model for me.

48:46James Altucher:You know, it's interesting because I never thought when I had my kids, oh, this would be a great idea for meditation, all the hours at night, you know, my wife would sleep and I would wake up with the kids. And, you know, three in the morning, kids are crying, have to figure out what techniques to use to get them back to sleep so you can get back to sleep. I never thought about meditating during that time. It probably would have been very good. What I used to do was I was getting into Scrabble. So I used to tape seven-letter Scrabble words to the stroller and just run around the apartment with the stroller while memorizing these seven-letter words, which I guess is a form of focus or whatever.

49:26It's training your mind. Yeah, I got better at Scrabble. But that sounds like classic altitude behavior. Because I can only imagine what happened when you got into Scrabble. Did you start competing?

49:35James Altucher:At that level. I was at that level. So, I mean, there's these things, just a side tangent. I don't know how into Scribble you are. I like it. Now it's a weird game because with words, or whatever it is on Facebook, I stopped playing because everyone's cheating. But there are these things called stems, the six letters, and any seventh letter you add will create a seven-letter word, a legal seven-letter word. So the key is to remember the stems and then remember all the seven-letter words that are created by adding a Z or an X or a J. And, you know, so these are important things that professionals remember.

50:10James Altucher:And there's, you know, hundreds of these stems. So my brother, my younger brother, who's, you know, other than my wife, my best friend in the world, and is a venture capitalist here in New York City. And he, his name is Matt Harris, if you want to see him on Twitter. He is still mad at me because when we were younger, I don't even know if I was the one who made the decision. He wanted to use the word Yeti, Y-E-T-I, which is abominable snowman in Scrabble. And we ruled it out because we said it was a proper noun. It apparently is not a proper noun. It's a legal word. And he still brings it up to the point where every time I come to his house, his seven-year-old son, Elliot, comes up to me with the dictionary and pointing out that Yeti is not a proper noun.

50:49James Altucher:Okay, play him in Scrabble again with the latest dictionary and use XU as a legal word. What does XU mean? It's a Vietnamese currency unit. So, and it happens to be a legal scrabble word. Okay, serendipity. Because that brings me to the third thing I wanted to talk about. You talked, you dropped a fascinating bomb of conversational potential earlier, and we didn't pick up on it. Spirituality of money. I want to hear your rap on that. Because I think there is, money is such a funny, loaded topic. It makes us uncomfortable. and yet we spend so much time thinking about it. And you in particular know a lot about money and finance.

51:33You've made and lost all these fortunes as we discuss on my podcast. And I absolutely think there's an enormous amount of wisdom from the spiritual world that can be brought to bear on money. So I just want to hear what your thinking is on the issue.

51:46James Altucher:I mean, I think from a 50 ,000 foot level, obviously money is important. I think money is often a side effect of our spiritual practice. So when you were stressed and abusing substances and not taking care of yourself and having a panic attack on air, what is the finance? There's many results to that. There's a physical health result. There's a mental health result. There's also a financial health result. You're going to make less money. So once you start incorporating meditation and these other ways of having energy, but in particular meditation, for a specific reason, you're going to make more money.

52:29James Altucher:Money is just a side effect of taking care of yourself. Now, you don't automatically make more money, but meditation, because let's say, this is a naive way to think about it, but let's say the average person thinks 50 ,000 thoughts a day. I don't know what the research is on this. I think people have said like 50, 60 ,000 thoughts a day. I don't know if that means anything, but let's just say that's the number. Let's say 80 % of those thoughts are totally useless. and like you say, 10 % happier. Let's say you can make it so that only 72 % of the thoughts are useless. You've just given yourself 8%, 10 % more, 8 % more thoughts that are useful.

53:07James Altucher:Some of those thoughts can be useful for making money or having ideas to help other people at the workplace or whatever. Just simply doing that, you're going to in the long run make more money because that's going to compound. Do you think, because there are people, and I tackle this in the book, there are people who worry though that if they start meditating they will lose the ability to the the sharp elbows the the ambition and aggression they need in order to succeed in whatever business in which they find themselves absolutely not i think that's a myth that they're telling themselves you'll have just enough uh ambition you know first off nobody needs to step on anybody else to succeed it's a that's a scarcity way of looking at the world and i think part of meditation is teaching your brain that the world is more abundant than you thought because it helps reduce that cortisol.

53:57James Altucher:Cortisol is a scarcity way of thinking. Oh, I'm in the tribe and I'm not going to get enough food. So cortisol is going to spike. So anything that helps reduce it helps you to think that the world's a little bit more abundant than you thought. So you don't have to step on anyone else to get to where you want to be. It's not zero sum. And once you start thinking that way. And once you start casting those thoughts aside, it gives you room to be more creative. And then you say, oh, instead of stepping on this person, I'm going to help this person. And helping people is how you make more money. No one is going to pay you to destroy other people.

54:33James Altucher:People will pay you because you're the person at work who's the most helpful. So that's part of the reason why people pay you. But again, I think taking care of yourself and And meditation is part of that, but a strong part of that frees up your creativity, gives you more energy to have great ideas, increases your compassion to help people, allows you to see problems and then the creativity to solve them. All of those things together as a side effect is more money. It's not linked directly to more money. Money is just like a benchmark. People who go to work and who are in business, probably the more they meditate, I don't know if this has probably never been measured, but my guess is probably the more opportunities for financial increase they have.

55:19James Altucher:I know when I've lost the most amount of money, I would stop meditating because it was really hard because I was so stressed and anxious. And it doesn't help to stop meditating. The time I lost the most money, I went into meditation overdrive. I would do as many hours a day as possible. And that was the only way to survive. Otherwise, I would have gone off the deep end of just stress and anxiety and who knows what would have happened. Meditation saved my life in those moments. So then I was able to make money again. So just by carrying me across that river. I've spoken to a lot of people about meditation and not like in a proselytizing way, but people tell me about meditation.

56:00James Altucher:Oh, I ask them what they do. Everyone assumes I never do anything because I'm just, they look at me, they think, oh, I'm this logical, scientific thinking. glasses, whatever. And so they are lecturing me on it. But I'm just curious. I always ask people what they do. But I think a lot of people do use these excuses that you mentioned in the book. None of them are really excuses. They're just the tip of the iceberg for some deeper things going on in their life. And that's why I like in this book how you say it's okay to do five minutes. Or one minute. You know, like I'll give you an example that someone, not your wife, but someone like that could do.

56:41James Altucher:which I recommend. You know, New York City is a beautiful city to walk around in. Not the ground, because the ground's often disgusting. But I always feel, I don't know why this is in New York City. Maybe someone can, maybe you can answer or someone can answer. I feel the rooftops in New York City are beautiful. It's like the architect was given, hey, make these 20 floors and they have to look like this. But then do whatever you want with the roof. We don't care at that point. And the roofs are always beautiful. And so I think it's like a nice meditation and it takes you away from the daily grind.

57:14James Altucher:As long as you make sure to stop at green lights and stuff and don't bump into anything, look at the rooftops and notice how beautiful the most boring buildings on the bottom have these beautiful structures at the top. I think that's a decent form of one minute meditation. Yeah, why not? You also, you, my brother, I remember years ago before I wrote my book, sent me some meditations that you had improvised on your blog. And one of them was like standing in an elevator and pretending you just arrived here from Mars? Something like that? Something like that, yeah. Like how would you then, just like taking yourself out of the normal, no, actually it was this, it was this for that particular one.

57:52James Altucher:Waking up in the morning and imagining that you just arrived from another planet or universe or whatever, so you had no idea where you were. You have no idea whose body you just woke up in. You have no idea where you are or what world this is or what time period or anything. And then you just have to move your fingers. Like, oh, I have fingers. You have to move your arms. I have arms. And there's a sun here. There's light. And you just kind of rediscover the world in this very innocent beginner's mind sort of way. It basically, all of these, what you're describing, just jars people out of their autopilot.

58:28This fog that we walk around in. And it's just a new way of seeing the world. And out of that, fresh ideas can emerge.

58:35James Altucher:By the way, related to that, I just read this yesterday. it's totally unrelated to meditation did you know that it's illegal in New York City to talk to people in an elevator? there's an actual law on the books I forget what the fine is maybe it's like$25 or something it's never been enforced no one's ever been arrested but it's actually just a law on the books that it's illegal to talk to people in the elevator because elevators used to be run by a guy who were on the elevator and people talk sometimes by flailing their arms around so you wouldn't want to hit the guy who is managing the elevator right there.

59:11James Altucher:Elevators were small. So it became illegal to turn to someone and talk to them in an elevator. The antisocial part of me kind of likes that. What's interesting though is try talking to people in an elevator. That's a good meditation too. It's an awkward thing. Elevators are weird. I think, and this is nothing to do with, it's a little bit mindfulness, but doing things that mildly take you out of your comfort zone, I view a small meditation. I mean, for me, there are a couple of ways to define meditation. One is just sort of anything that gets you to pay attention to what's happening right now.

59:48That's a very broad definition of meditation. Another broad definition of meditation, you can argue about this until the cows come home, is training the mind. Mental training. The animating insight for me of my whole evangelical side hustle here is the science. the one thing we can take away from the science is that the brain is plastic. They have neuroplasticity. The brain and the mind are trainable.

1:00:09James Altucher:There's a recent discovery for adults. It used to be known for teenagers and kids, for babies and then for teenagers. These are the two. But now it's true for adults. That's right. So the received dogma in neuroscience circles for generations was that the brain only just deteriorates. That's the only change you will see after something like the early 20s. Now we know that the brain and the mind are trainable. And that is really exciting. And yes, formal mindfulness meditation is one way to do it. I strongly advocate for it. But what you're talking about, which probably aren't techniques that the Buddha was discussing, are nonetheless in this broad category of just training the mind in lots of different directions.

1:00:51We can train the mind. We're constantly training the mind, as a matter of fact, blindly to want more dopamine and to ignore whatever's right in front of us and to hate people who we disagree with politically because we're on this kind of, just in this kind of mindless default mode. But actually, if you are more intentional about it, there are tons of ways to train the mind, all the things we want the most. The kind of perspective that you've just been talking about, the sort of fresh ideas, spontaneity, gratitude, calm, one might say inner peace, self-awareness, compassion, These are all mental skills.

1:01:31It's not like we have factory settings that we can't tinker with. These are skills that you can train. To me, that is just a hugely liberating idea. And that's a little grandiose, but it happens to be true. And let me ask you this, because let's say you start any skill.

1:01:46James Altucher:It feels frustrating the first year because you don't know if you're getting better or not. You might, in fact, even be, quote-unquote, getting worse because you're trying to flail around and figure something out. And so I'm not saying meditation's a skill. I'm not saying compassion's a skill, although, you know, they are muscles to be, compassion's a muscle to be. Exercise and meditation does that. When someone here is 10 % happier, the one frustrating thing I could think is, man, I don't want to be 10 % happier. I'm really down. I need to be 100 % happier now. Yeah, well, show me what's going to do that.

1:02:23You know, I mean, go drugs, go buy a lottery ticket. it but that's just not the way the world works i wish it was it's just my experience it's not and it's very rare uh that that something comes along and just makes you 100 happier cliches become cliches for a reason because usually they're true there's a reason why the expression be careful what you wish for is around and it's actually taps right into the buddha's concept of suffering you know buddha gets a bad rap because the first thing he said after he became enlightened if you even believe in enlightenment was life is suffering. So suffering is actually a bit of a mistranslation from what he said.

1:03:02Basically, the long version of what he said is life is going to be frustrating if you are completely yanked around by getting what you want and avoiding what you don't want. But one way to think about suffering is in this context is that when we, you know, eat the ice cream cone when we get the promotion that we've long wanted, when we finally get a latte that we've been jonesing for, does that solve everything? No. We live with this lie that it will. You know, if I finally, like Bianca and I, will finally crack this infertility nut and get a baby, well, then we'll be fine. Well, then the little dude doesn't sleep and, you know, well, as soon as we sleep train him, he's going to be fine.

1:03:45As soon as we, I changed his diaper this morning. As soon as he's potty trained, and then everything's going to be rainbows and unicorns. No, that's just not the way the world works. And for me, the hack that the Buddha came up with is actually having a sort of settled back, mindful relationship to this constant seesaw of desire and aversion.

1:04:09James Altucher:And it's almost like the difference, and there's a subtle difference even in the words, but the difference between happiness and well-being. So well-being doesn't necessarily imply happiness. It means you're well right now. Equanimity. Yeah. And to put it in historical context, forget about Buddhism for a second, but look at Buddha or however you say his name, Siddhartha, Gautama, or I don't know if that was his first name or last name. No, you got it. So he was a family member of a... He had his grove where all his monks were and where he would meditate every day. and that's where they lived, there were three warring kingdoms surrounding the grove, and he was a relative of the ruling family of one of the kingdoms.

1:04:55James Altucher:So for him to be not stressed is kind of amazing because he was right in the center, unprotected, and at least two of the kingdoms wanted to kill him probably. So I don't remember all of the details, and I highly recommend if people are interested in the life story of the Buddha, that you investigate the books of a guy named Stephen Batchelor, who, by the way, make a great guest. He actually was on the podcast. Oh, he was? After you recommended him the last time, Ron. Okay. And by the way, I was a big fan of all his books, Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist. Yeah, great. Great, because he sort of shows it's not, Buddha never talks about God.

1:05:32James Altucher:He just talks about what we've been talking about here. Yeah, Buddhist Atheist is actually just redundant. Yeah. Because there is no deity, like a creator god in Buddhism. He's not like against it, but he doesn't talk about it. Yeah, it's just not, he's not, he's not, people ask him, you know, how did we get here? Why are we here? He's like, I don't, he didn't really have answers to that. But you've correctly identified the historical Buddha, what we know about him. He lived at a very tumultuous time historically, and he was hanging out with, you know, psychopathic murderous kings and very, very rich people.

1:06:07and trying to kind of negotiate peace in this context and also build his cadre of nuns and monks. And it was not an uncomplicated world in which he existed. And I think, especially when it comes to meditation, the way it's presented with these Buddha statues that you see at the spa and the airport, they seem like they've got these beatific looks on their faces, or I use a picture in my book of some dude with wavy hair sitting on a rock wearing loincloth. That is not the deal. That is not the experience of meditation, nor is it what your life is going to become, some sort of frictionless bliss state.

1:06:44Just because you've started to meditate, it's an unrealistic expectation. I think we just need to recognize that the world is, as I said before, characterized by chaos and impermanence. And we just need to have a more seamless, supple relationship to all that. To me, as far as I can tell, listeners can tell me I'm wrong about this. That seems to be the recipe.

1:07:04James Altucher:well tell me about the app the 10 % happier app because I think still a lot of people have a hard time getting started they're 40 50 years into this really difficult thing called life and for to tell them oh now we're going to do something to completely change the plasticity of your mind it's like whoa how am I going to do that and I think your app helps so so what is it how do you get it yeah so it's you know it's available wherever you get your apps it's called 10 % happier. And, you know, I really think of myself as kind of a gateway drug. You know, I am not a, you know, I've studied, I've spent, you know, last nine years studying meditation and Buddhism and Eastern spirituality generally.

1:07:47And so I'm really interested in it. I love talking about it. It's my favorite subject, but I don't pretend to be a teacher. What I am is really somebody who can talk about it. I hope talk about it in a way that, you know, gets, I'm a non-traditional meditator and I hope I can talk about it in a way that gets people excited to do it.

1:08:03James Altucher:Just to interrupt, in your book, Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics, this is like the perfect book for what you just said. For anybody who's ever had any doubts on meditation, there's so many techniques and ideas on how to view just the simplest meditation. 30 seconds. Here's one, Smart Compassion, 30 seconds or more. Pro tip, give yourself permission to fail. I have that one, earmarked, all these great, just gentle suggestions and stories just to ease you into understanding that this doesn't have to change your whole lifestyle. You can start this. No one will know. And it will change your life. You'll be 10 % happier or more.

1:08:47I really appreciate you saying that. You actually, as we're taping this, the book hasn't even come out yet. So I haven't met any human beings, many human beings who've actually read the thing, who aren't, you know, related to me. So it's just very interesting to hear what you're keying in on. But just on the app, I guess the app is, the app is the reason why I wrote the book, because so I wrote 10 % Happier, and I had this very naive kind of cavalier attitude that I didn't think anybody's going to read it. But I thought to the anybody who did read it, would start meditating, because I thought I made a good case in the book.

1:09:17The book is really, it's a memoir, but it's, it's actually an argument dressed up as a memoir. The argument is you should meditate. And the way I make the argument is just by telling my own story.

1:09:28James Altucher:You tell the story intensely. So I mean, you're a storyteller. Yeah. And I think people, what I realized is that I think many people were reading it as a beach read, which is great. No, I'm super excited. It's all good. But I think my mistake in the book, because I didn't set out to write a memoir. My initial goal with 10 % and a half years, I was going to write the book I've written now, which is more of a how-to book. I ended up, the feedback I was getting on the early drafts was people just liked the story. So I just went in that direction. So I went and set up to be a memoirist. I'd never written a book before.

1:09:59It wasn't really in my wheelhouse whatsoever. I really just wanted to promote meditation. That was my driving force. So after putting the book out, I got some feedback from some friends in the meditation world of like, hey man, you're getting people really excited about meditation, but you're not really telling them how to do it. Even though there were some instructions in the back of 10 % Happier. They're kind of buried after the acknowledgements and they weren't extensive. So I started a company. I'd never, you know a lot about business. I didn't know anything and still very much a beginner.

1:10:29But I started a company with some partners to teach people how to meditate. And that's what 10 % Happier is, this app. And what we do is we bring in the people who I believe are the best teachers in the world, scientists, people who've had, also people who've had 40, 50 years of meditation practice and teaching, including my personal teacher, a guy named Joseph Goldstein, who's just the menchiest of the menches. He's just an amazing guy. So not with meditation teacher. Yes. Very famous meditation teacher. Not at all what you would think a meditation teacher is like, you know, he's just like a 70 year old Jewish guy from the Catskills who is very, very funny and wry.

1:11:04And I really love him. And so we, so basically, unlike most meditation apps where you just get a bunch of guided meditations, we are very video-based. So you can do straight audio guided meditation from our teachers if you want. But most of our users actually watch a short two-minute clip before they meditate where I'm chatting with the teacher and it really brings the practice to life and it makes it fun and is super educational. These people are so damn smart. And the other thing we do is that we give you a coach. So a real live meditator, a human being, not a robot with whom you can text through the app if you have any questions.

1:11:46And the people who use that function are our most frequent and devoted users. How many users right now? 16 ,000. That's a lot. Well, yeah. I mean, we're a small company. We just started. The last year, we've quadrupled. That's great. We're really starting to hit our stride.

1:12:02James Altucher:I mean, for someone who hasn't done a business before, to still be in business after several years is a very great accomplishment. Yeah, and I will actually put 100 % of the credit on particularly the CEO of the company. It was a young guy named Ben Rubin who is phenomenal. We've got very close friends. And he had a pre-existing company that was teaching, who's doing sort of a whole bunch of mobile courses through a company called Change Collective. And they were doing mobile, like a two-week course on how to have more gratitude in your life or how to go paleo or how to get up earlier. He came to me and said, well, you would do a meditation course with Joseph.

1:12:39So we did the course and it was the most successful thing they'd done that I ended up joining the company as a co-founder, taking on a bunch of equity, investing in it. We raised more money from venture capitalists and so we're off to the races. And it has been just like an unbelievable adventure for me.

1:12:56James Altucher:So by the way, first, very sophisticated stuff you did which is that you like something, you provided a service, you invested in, you made a business decision, you invested in it, you started growing in it, you found a CEO to work with, part of that you have to attribute to meditation because identifying who are good people to work with, what are appropriate problems to solve, this is what's created out of that extra space you get when you are not ruminating down the rabbit hole about, oh, she said this at work or he did this or she did that. Those ruminations take up a lot of energy. Yeah, and I want to be clear.

1:13:31I still do that. I just do it less. And so that to me -

1:13:36James Altucher:there's no way to solve all the problems. No. Because we're human. Absolutely. I, as my friend Sam Harris likes to say about himself, I retain the capacity to be a schmuck. And that is true for me. And again, I ask my wife. Infallibility is not on the table. Is it like matter meets anti-matter when you go on Sam Harris's podcast? Do people think you're related? People think we're related all the time. We're actually quite close. We're very good friends. and he's the one who introduced me to Joseph Goldstein because he's old friends with Joseph Goldstein. Sam, a lot of people don't know this, even though he wrote an excellent book about it called Waking Up.

1:14:12Sam is a long, long, long time meditator. Yeah, he's been on this podcast. Yeah, I mean, he's a controversial guy. There are plenty of people who don't like him and it's so funny when I hear from people who don't like Sam because the Sam I know, when I'm hanging out with Sam, it's usually with his wife and his wife is amazing and so our wives are friends and I know him as a guy, like a really as just a human and he's goofy and she's making fun of him and just the way my wife is making fun of me and that is different from the Sam I think that a lot of people perceive

1:14:42James Altucher:maybe but you know it's funny I once saw him on Bill Maher and Ben Affleck was the other guest on famous clip yeah it's a famous clip and Ben Affleck whatever the political controversy was I'm not even had to do with Islam yeah and Ben Affleck's like yelling at him and Sam's just like sitting there looking at him, like you could tell, he's just a calm. Yeah, he is. He meditates. The calmness comes from somewhere or exercising some muscle and meditation is that way of exercising it. It doesn't mean you have to agree with him and everything, and I'm sure there are plenty of areas where he and I disagree.

1:15:19It's just that, you know, I think actually this is a function too for me of meditation, which is over time, I've been able to really just get comfortable with disagreeing with people and doesn't mean that I... Yeah, life's not over. No, life's not over. I can still have a really, actually quite a deep relationship with people. And also, at this time in our country's history, I think it's really important that we have varied news and information diets. And so I will listen to podcasts way across the political spectrum. For example, I'm a very frequent listener of Ben Shapiro, who's very controversial.

1:15:52I'm also a frequent listener of Pod Save America. And also I'm a big consumer of the mainstream media. And I think, right. And to me, it's all tied in in ways that I'm not sure I can articulate with the mindfulness, which is kind of seeing my own tendencies toward tribalism and seeing my own opinions and how maybe I don't like having them challenged, but then knowing actually there's something healthy in doing that as being a good citizen. And I think, yeah, I'm kind of taking this far afield, but I think there's something important there.

1:16:21James Altucher:I think that is. And I think having, I mean, I don't consume any news, so that's my way of dealing with it. Like I zero know what's going on. This is embarrassing, and I haven't said this before to anybody, but I kept seeing people talking about this guy Roy Moore when the election was going on. And they were like, oh, he did some sexual thing, but I wasn't clear what it was. For maybe a month or two, I thought, oh, is he a baseball player or a football player? That's just what I thought. I didn't want to know. And then I found out, of course, as the elections got closer, oh, he's running for Senate.

1:16:56James Altucher:But that's the level of news I consume. It's so funny because my way of dealing with this, I think everybody's got ways of dealing with the current tumult. Tumult. Yeah, I don't know if I'm pronouncing that correct. Tumult, whatever. I don't know what it is. My way, so I work in the news business, but frankly, I think left to my own devices, it wasn't a huge news junkie. What I liked about the news was the adventures. So for example, last night, but this won't be last night anymore by the time this posts, but as we taped this last night, I did a big report on Nightline about Russia. I spent 10 days in Putin's Russia and really did all this crazy stuff.

1:17:32And for me, you know, covering war zones and I wasn't really up on every jot and tittle in the sort of UN debates over sanctions and Iraq or anything like that. Just to me about the experience. And however, with Trump, my response, and it wasn't planned, is just that I've actually, I've found that having more information has really been helpful to me. It's not that I'm sort of over, I don't think I'm overdosing on the thing, but I find being engaged and really being engaged across the ideological spectrum and trying to sort of understand. I love one of the features they have on the New York Times, which you're probably not reading on their website.

1:18:10They'll often compile writers from across the ideological spectrum on the major news events from the administration, like the tax plan will go through and they'll put together what conservatives are saying and what liberals are saying and what centrists are saying. And I just find that being plugged in and having a sense of how things are going has actually just made me feel more connected and less dire than a news blackout might. But that's not to say I disagree with your tactic. It just hasn't worked for me.

1:18:36James Altucher:I'm probably wrong and people tell me, oh, you should be aware so you can engage where it's needed. I sort of see a lot of news outlets as just trying to scare or just trying to appease one side or the other. So unlike you, I don't take the time to go across all of them so I can get a balanced perspective. But at the same time, I'm also not really aware of what I should be afraid of, which maybe you should be aware of it so you can say, okay, well, the worst case scenario is this. So for instance, I know that a tax plan was passed. I have no idea what it means for anybody or anything or for me.

1:19:12James Altucher:My assumption is it means nothing, just like almost every other tax bill that's ever been passed in history. And apparently it's the only law that Trump's passed in the entire time he's been president. So, okay, he's pretty ineffective. And he's done zero vetoes and passed one bill. That's all I know about his entire presidency, other than the fact that he fires a lot of people and whatever. So, and here I am a year later, my life hasn't changed much, and I don't read the news. Look, different strokes. I get it. I mean, everybody's got to find their own way of dealing with the toxicity of our domestic scene right now.

1:19:50James Altucher:But you have to as your job. I do. I do. I do. But I could do less. You know, I could be doing less and be fine in my job. It's just, for me, a feeling of having more information has been comforting for me. One thing I'd say to people who are struggling with this, I've spoken to a lot of meditation teachers about sort of survival tactics for these kind of very, very divisive times, is the most constructive response is actually to figure out what is in your jurisdiction and do something. I agree. And I'll tell you a story about one podcaster I know, and I really enjoy this guy's podcast and I've been on it.

1:20:29James Altucher:He wrote once, right after the election, he wrote, I am so upset and depressed that I'm stopping my podcast. And so I wrote to him and I literally said, are you functionally an idiot? just compare two worlds one is a world of Trump who you don't like and now that world doesn't have your podcast and another world has also Trump and now it has your podcast which world is a better world that you would like to live in so he restarted his podcast to his credit so that's one way to look at things but again I think that's a way also too of like I'm not going to take credit for thinking this way, although I don't know.

1:21:13But, I don't know,

1:21:16James Altucher:training your mind to look at scenarios from different angles is helpful. And that's what I think meditation in part does. And just to be clear, for me, the problem isn't Trump per se. For me, the problem is just how much antagonism there is in the atmosphere. Right, I agree with that. I think antagonism limits our vocabulary and prevents intelligent discussion. It actually just goes back to everything we've been talking about this whole time, which is it just, and this is again just to amplify your point there is that it's constricting it's horse blinders you are in your own world where you're sort of partially you're not seeing the whole picture and again what meditation is about is insight seeing clearly and I think that is the remedy for much of what ails us that and compassion I actually had a whole bunch of questions for you relating to productivity because you wear so many hats at ABC plus your business plus all your writing and meditation and I wanted to talk about that because that's obviously, we have a busier and busier world and fitting meditation into that and you write about that a little or a lot in your book but I wanted to dive deeper into that we're going to have to do another podcast all about just productivity but I want to plug everything first off, your new book again, Dan Harris with Jeff Warren and Carly Adler, Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics.

1:22:44So these are just great, mind-blowing, simple ways to get started in meditation and overcome any excuse you've ever heard.

1:22:53James Altucher:And I just love every, I learned so much from just the way you put things made me think about meditation in different ways and caused me to, I mean, I have bookmarks all over. which caused me to stop and think about it. And this is a subject I've read a lot about and done a lot in. So there's Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics. There's your original book, 10 % Happier. And by the way, when you talk about the concept of compounding happiness, I do think you're happier than the last time you came on the podcast. You seem more relaxed. You seem more balanced in a lot of ways. It's hard to see that really, but I don't know, that's how it seems to me.

1:23:31James Altucher:And your app, 10 % Happier, you can get it in iTunes, Google Play Store probably other places so Dan Harris, again we were talking earlier before the podcast started you were asking me why do I even, you didn't say it this way but why do I even do this podcast it's not like a big, it's not for instance a source of income for me but I do this because I get to talk to Dan Harris you're 10 % happier guy anchor, a co-host on Nightline and anchor on Good Morning America it's such a pleasure to keep getting to know you as we do more and more of these podcasts Right back at you, man. You are really good at this.

1:24:05And it's like, we had no idea what we're going to talk about. And it just flows. That is a rare gift.

1:24:11James Altucher:Thanks so much. And again, next time you're on, let's talk about productivity. Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics by Dan Harris. Thank you, sir.

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