YouSaid · the spoken record

Dan Harris

lines on the record: 125
first: 2020-11-19
most recent: 2020-11-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Really, my depression manifested itself as a kind of loginess or low energy, had trouble getting out of bed, felt kind of vaguely ill all the time. And cocaine, this kind of synthetic squirt of adrenaline really fixed that. Of course, it had horrible side effects. I'm like feeling awful the next day, et cetera, et cetera. And even worse side effect, which is the aforementioned event on a warm June morning in 2004, I was filling in on Good Morning America. And at the time, they had a job called the Newsreader. So somebody would come on at the top of every hour and read the headlines. The person who had that job at the time was named Robin Roberts, who's now the main host of Good Morning America. They don't have that role anymore. But I was in a rotation of regularly filling in for Robin. And so I wasn't particularly nervous on this morning, but for some reason when the main hosts of the show, Charlie Gibson and Don.”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of it too, that you're doing this important work, you're living in this hyper adrenalized way, and you're getting on TV all the while. And so I got hooked and spent so much time in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan. I covered the second Intifada in 2002, so Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, and then Iraq happened, spent months and months and months, probably altogether like a year on the ground in Iraq. In the summer of 2003, I came home and I got depressed. But I was not self-aware enough to know I was depressed. So I started to sort of, I did something incredibly stupid, which is I started to self-medicate with recreational drugs, including cocaine and ecstasy. So I was in my early 30s at this point. And I had never, I'd smoked weed and obviously drank a lot of beer in college, but I never done any hard drugs. And cocaine in particular.”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really competitive, unsafe in many ways, psychologically environment at ABC News. It's improved vastly since then. I'm happy to report. And then not long after I arrived, 9-11 happened. And I, again, driven by my anxiety and also my idealism about the role of journalists, our duty to sort of bear witness at the tip of the spear. raised my hand and volunteered to go overseas after 9-11 and I ended up in Afghanistan with the Taliban in Kandahar, their capital at the time. I think I'm one of the last people to get a Taliban visa before they were overthrown and just fell in love with combat reporting. Not because I like the gore, but because there's just, it felt so thrilling and so important. And of course, there is the ego aggression.”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To high, high gear. And I had gotten this job, just complete luck that I had gotten this job, and I just threw myself into it, skipped everybody, skipped all my friends' weddings, worked seven days a week, just was clawing and scratching to get ahead in an incredibly venomous.”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, in the year 2000, I, as a 28-year-old plankton from local news in Boston, I had spent like seven years in local news in Maine and Boston with ill-fitting suits and way too much plaid at 28, I rode the escalator up into ABC News at the headquarters on the upper west side of Manhattan. You've been to our building because when you came on my podcast, so you know that escalator. And I was terrified. I had watched Peter Jennings my whole life. He was the legendary anchor of World News Tonight until he died in the mid aughts. And I was just, I was so thrilled but terrified. And this is where price of security is insecurity kicked in.”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is incredibly interesting. There's the practice element, which thinking can be a big impediment to the practice. But the intellectual infrastructure that supports the practice is dense and fascinating. And it's a lifetime's supply of ideas to wrestle with and I think that's another component of why these people found this teaching so irresistible.”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Group of young Jewish people mostly from New York and some of them from Boston who went over to India or Asia and learned how to meditate and came back and really became these John Cabot Zinn. If I left him out, he was the granddaddy of mindfulness-based stress reduction. Without him, there is no secular mindfulness movement. New York Jewish guy went to MIT and studied microbiology and then found Zen and then invented MBSR. I think another aspect of this is that all of these people, all of these names that I've listened, and these are all people that I know quite well, they're incredibly smart. And I think if you add the anxiety, the spiritual yearning, and the braininess, it all is a perfect storm for Buddhism because Buddhism”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the evolution produced the culture. And so we have this culture of anxiety because the Jews that survived. Learn to worry. You know, and another, this is skipping back a question, but I think another aspect of the sort of causality that led to this remarkable...”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Jewish meditation teachers. So, what's going on here? And I say this as a half Jew bar mitzvah guy. What's going on here? The Jews, I have a cultural tendency toward anxiety, which I would argue is well earned from the pharaohs through Hitler. And, you know, that yearning for some sort of remedy to this really difficult anxiety, that plus the fact that Judaism in America is largely, not entirely, of course, but largely secular, I think created both a hunger for answers to anxiety and maybe a sense that there wasn't enough spirituality in their lives, throw in the 60s and all the psychedelics and the Vietnam and the searching nature of that era. And you get the Jews. Boost. That's my Sense. Of course, they may all yell at me for being wrong about this, but that's my sense.”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Jewish names like Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzburg, Jack Kornfield, Sylvia Borstein, Mark Epstein, who's a psychiatrist in New York City, who's written a whole beautiful series of books about the overlap between Buddhism and psychology. Daniel Goleman, who was a Harvard PhD, then went on to write, become a science journalist for the New York Times and then wrote a book called Emotional Intelligence, which is obviously a huge book on and on. Tara Brock is a slightly younger iteration of the same sort of trend. On and on and on, you have these great...”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The Jewish Buddhists. And the prototypical Jubu is actually a Jew who, or he's a Hindu, but his name is Ram Das. Yeah, so you will be as, because I know you're a real connoisseur of and supporter of psychedelic or plant medicine. And Ram Das, born Richard Alpert, a Jewish guy from Boston became a Harvard professor along with Timothy Leary. They got fired for running experiments on their students with either LSD or psilocybin. And he went off to India, Richard did, and discovered a Hindu guru and named himself changed his name to Ram Das and came back to the States. And there's lots of good documentaries on him. I think some of them on Netflix, and was extremely influential. And the slightly younger generation included lots of people with”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These people are all really good friends of mine now, and they go, there's a, I don't know how they feel about this name, but there is a name for this whole coterie, which is the Juboos.”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, no, go ahead because the number two is kind of off on a different thing. And I don't want to mess up your flow. So go ahead”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That is a great motto because, of course, we're going to do some worrying, and I, as a longtime inveterate Fredder, I'm borrowing that phrase from the great meditation teacher Sylvia Borstein. As an inveterate Fredder myself, I'm cool with some worrying. I think you need to do some of that. But at some point, maybe ask yourself, is this useful? And at that point, it's probably not. And you can pay attention to what your child is trying to tell you or not mindlessly say something that's going to ruin the next 48 hours of your marriage or whatever. Just live your actual life. And so that, to me, is a really useful motto. I'll stop there before I go on to the second one, unless in case you have something you want to add or clarify.”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That has real life consequences. Why would you tell me not to think about that? And he said, no, you're absolutely right. But on the 17th run through of all of the horrible knock-on effects of your missing that flight, maybe ask yourself one simple question. Is this useful?”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No relation, although I wouldn't be embarrassed because I love the guy So I'm at this retreat, and I'll spare you the whole story of the retreat. But the key moment as it pertains to this question was toward the end of the retreat, Joseph is talking to the assembled yogis, the meditators, and he says something like, okay, we're heading toward the end here now. And you might find your thoughts start turning to the things you have to do when you return to your life, but to the best of your ability to try to let those thoughts go. And I raised my hand because this was a Q&A. You were allowed to talk on an otherwise silent retreat. And I said, well, wait a minute, dude. If I miss my flight.”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I was on my first meditation retreat at Spirit Rock, and even though that's the place Jack founded, Joseph was teaching for 10 days there, and our mutual friend, Sam Harris, got me off the waitlist for this meditation. No revelation.”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Also, talked the one time we met in person when you came on my show. I've heard you drop the name of Jack Cornfield, who is a legendary meditation teacher and has had a huge impact on your life. Jack and Joseph are old, old, old co-conspirators from the 60s and 70s. And came back to the States and founded, co founded something called the Insight Meditation Society. And then Jack broke off and started something called Spirit Rock Meditation Center on the West Coast. IMS is on the East Coast. And so they're really responsible for bringing mindfulness to the West in many, many ways. And so the first meditation retreat I ever went on was at Spirit Rock, where I know you've done meditation retreats, or at least one and a tricky nervous breakdown retreats. I want to talk about that.”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I love mottos. I love little expressions, mantras that you can use to kind of drop into your mind because it's so easy. You know, you can listen to an inspirational podcast or read a great book or whatever and feel really like you're invigorated, you're awake to some important truth. But the habits of mine, the old habits of mine, reassert themselves really quickly. And so we need to find ways to continuously wake up and to remember our aspirations. And so these little mottos, I think, you know, they can be a little bit cheesy, but they're really helpful in my experience. So one of them that specifically applies to this question of how much insecurity or anxiety is too much, I got this motto from my meditation teacher, a guy named Joseph Goldstein. Now, I've heard you talk on this show and I've heard you.”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Walking that line seems to be, in my own life, it seems, it really has become one of the most important arts. And again, it's art, not science, and I have nowhere near perfect, and I don't expect, I don't think perfection is on offer.”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, you could be forgiven. It's a weird thing. I think it's the name of two scientists hyphenated who came up with this idea that a certain amount of anxiety, Loanna Marquez, the aforementioned Harvard affiliated anxiety expert, was talking about a certain amount of anxiety. You can think of it as like a curve, like a bell curve. A certain amount of anxiety is useful in that it gets us moving, it gets us protecting ourselves, it gets us doing the things we need to do. So that's the beginning part of the curve, the upward slope. At some point it starts to slope downwards, and you can think of that as the point of diminishing returns, where the anxiety is no longer motivational, it's paralytic.”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It really is. So Loanna Marquez came on my podcast right at the beginning of the pandemic, and I wanted to do an episode about how to handle all of the stress that I knew we were all feeling and were going to continue to feel for a while. And she talked to me about this, I think it's called the Yerks Dodson.”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think that was Correct. You know, I mean, I was a really anxious kid that carried into my adulthood. I would say now, here I am 11 years post beginning meditation, I still believe it is true that a certain amount of stressing, plotting, and planning, careful thinking Is necessary if you want to be great at whatever it is you've set your mind to, your work, parenting, volunteer work, relationships. Except what I've now started to see very clearly, and I'm imperfect at applying this, but what I see really clearly is that we take the worrying too far. We take the insecurity too far, and we cross the line between constructive anguish and useless rumination. And really the self-awareness that I have generated through meditation imperfectly for sure has helped me balance that much more effectively.”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I later found out from my dad that he made that expression up not to put worrying on a pedestal, not because he wanted me to be worrying all the time. Because if you think about it, it's maybe not the kind of thing to say to a kid. He, in fact, made it up because he wanted me to feel better about the fact that I was anxious. And...”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I have so much to say about that. It really was my guiding light and still is in many ways. In particular, as a young Journalist who was extremely ambitious. And again, I don't necessarily need to use past tense on all this. Some of it is Was directly correlated to the intensity of my anxiety. And that motto handed down to me by my father, who's an academic physician, was until recently until he retired, an academic physician at Harvard and a varsity warrior and longtime handwringer himself was just my way of kind of... Almost like venerating the constant worrying.”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT