He’s not exactly who you’d expect to be touting the benefits of meditation, but ABC News’ Dan Harris has been through hell and back, and has the power of mindfulness to thank for coming out the other side even stronger than before. In this interview, Harris spreads his wisdom on how we can all become 10 percent happier and shares his journey on the rocky spiritual road that led him to who he is today. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
How are you going to talk about issues related to our inner weather, our interior lives?
What I was really trying to do was to kind of knock this discussion off its pedestal, stop using the woo-woo language, really get away from over-promising, this kind of peddling of reckless hope, which I see sometimes in our $11 billion a year self-help industry, to speak very simply, very clearly from the perspective of a skeptic and a screw-up.
Hi, I'm Dr. Oz, and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast. and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast.
He's not exactly who you'd be expecting to be touting the benefits of meditation.
ABC News' Dan Harris has been through hell and he's come back and has the power of mindfulness to thank for coming out on the other side even stronger than before.
He's also the host of the wildly successful podcast 10% Happier, titled after his New York Times bestselling book and the author of a new book, Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics, which will be a topic today, a 10% Happier book about how to.
So this word 10% keeps coming up.
Lisa and I were debating it.
She wants to know Lisa, specifically?
No, I ask why 15. Of course, you want more.
He wants 20%.
50% happier, 100% happier.
I do a lot of haggling ever since this book came out.
So we're going to talk a little bit about this rocky road to recovery that we all face in life.
You've been very transparent about it, and I applaud you for that.
But it is a logical question.
Why that number in particular?
It must have some symbolism for you.
Actually, it's pretty random.
I was in the middle of a conversation with one of my colleagues at ABC News after I started meditating.
I like to say that my embrace of meditation marks the first time in my life I was ever ahead of a trend.
I started getting interested in meditation around 2008-2009, before it was as cool as it is now.
I started mentioning that to some people I worked with, and I was met with a lot of mockery.
Because at that time, meditation was viewed and still is viewed in some corners as a pretty niche, strange concern.
And I was talking to one of my colleagues, an old friend named Chris Sebastian, who is a senior producer at Good Morning America.
And she stopped me one day.
She's like, what's the deal with you and meditation?
The subtext was, why have you used to be cool?
What happened to you?
And I kind of was looking around for an answer.
And I said, you know, it makes me 10 percent happier.
And I noticed the look on her face went from scorn to something approaching interest.
And I thought, okay, that's my shtick.
That's how I'm going to talk about this from now on.
So let's go through where you are.
You're very well respected within the business.
Folks outside of you know all the wonderful things you've done hosting 2020 and weekend shows and, of course, be on GMA all the time, as you mentioned.
Yet, there were times in your life when you had fallen off the tracks.
Cocaine, ecstasy.
I mean, what did they do for you?
You had everything.
And I should point out, you're from Maine originally, right?
Or you just went to school there.
I went to school in Maine, but I'm from Boston, not far away.
Northeast.
Northeast.
Yes.
You had a pretty good life.
But people in Maine and Boston can do drugs, too.
Yeah, of course they can.
I mean, these are bucolic parts of the country that have a reasonable standard of living.
And you went to Colby, is that right?
Colby College.
So you went to a great school and you hit that out of the park in your career.
What gives?
My parents were doctors as a matter of fact.
Yes, parents doctors.
So what happened?
I went and spent a lot of time in war zones.
After 9-11.
So I got to ABC News very young.
I was 28 years old in the year 2000. Very ambitious, very insecure about my lack of experience.
And when 9-11 happened, I very eagerly raised my hand and said, send me overseas.
I want to cover whatever happened next.
I think for a range of Reasons partly was kind of crass ambition, careerism, I think also curiosity.
And then on the less embarrassing side of the spectrum, I was very idealistic, still am very idealistic about the power of journalism, and I wanted to sort of bear witness to what we were going to do.
And my bosses accepted my offer, and I spent a lot of time in journalism.
I was in Iraq months and months at a time.
And when I came home from one trip to Iraq, I got depressed.
I didn't actually know I was depressed.
I was exhibiting what I now know to be some of the signature signs and symptoms.
You'll be familiar with this in your practice.
Because of your practice as a physician, I was having trouble getting out of bed.
I felt like I had a low-grade fever all the time.
And that's when I reached for cocaine, which was an incredibly dumb move.
I was at a party.
I had never done drugs, hard drugs before.
Weed and booze as a younger person, but not really to excess.
And a friend of mine offered me some cocaine, and for the first time in my life I said yes, because I felt like garbage.
Just didn't feel good.
And it made me feel better.
And so I wasn't doing it all the time, but there were about 18 to 24 months where I was doing it semi-regularly, and that culminated in me having a panic attack on drugs.
Good morning, America, because as I later learned, I was doing enough cocaine.
I wasn't high on the air, but I was doing enough cocaine that it altered my brain chemistry and made freaking out more likely.
So this is an iconic moment.
You're on the air.
You have this nourish breakdown.
The country witnessed it.
People did not know what was happening.
Was that rock bottom for you?
Yeah, definitely.
Actually, I want to say yes, but I had a second one.
So I had this first panic attack, and then I kept partying, actually.
I knew I'd had a panic attack, and I kind of lied to my bosses and got away with it.
If you look at the video, and it's got millions of views on YouTube, one of the responses I get is, yeah, it didn't look that bad.
I kind of held it together.
I mean, it's not good, but it's not like Albert Brooks in broadcast news with flop sweat.
But people who knew you knew that wasn't you.
My mother called me right away and said, well, you had a panic attack.
So I knew something bad had happened, but I didn't really tie it to the drugs.
And then a couple of months went by, and I had another one, and then I went to go see a shrink.
Here in New York City, who asked me whether I did drugs, and I said yes, and he was like, all right, idiot, you know, mystery solved.
And that's what, that was rock bottom for me, and that's, you know, I started to build from there.
So you go from being a war correspondent, waiting to hear what you have to say about texts going on in other parts of the world that should scare us, because you're actually there.
You become the faith and spiritual correspondent.
I mean, it's almost like the opposite side of the spectrum, not just geographically, but emotionally, intellectually.
Was that obviously a conscious decision, but how did you even come to that epiphany that maybe that was what you needed to do?
It wasn't.
I didn't come to that epiphany, and it wasn't a conscious decision.
On my part, it was a conscious decision on the part of a guy named Peter Jennings, who was...
Peter told you to do that?
Peter took me aside.
It was his intervention.
No, actually.
He had no idea any of this stuff was going on.
And he was interested in faith and spirituality and wanted us to cover it aggressively.
And I didn't want to do that.
I was raised, as mentioned, in the People's Republic of Massachusetts.
Both my parents are atheist scientists.
I did have a bar mitzvah, but only for money.
So I was not interested in spirituality at all.
But Peter forced me to do it, and that ended up having a really positive effect on me because it's not like I embraced any faith, but I did...
I saw, first of all, how ignorant I was about faith and spirituality.
I made a lot of friends and really saw the value of having a worldview that transcends your own narrow interests.
For me, as a very selfish young, self-centered young man, that was pretty useful.
But ultimately, the faith and spirituality bead led me to a writer I met him through Oprah, actually.
That's a sentence most people don't get to utter.
He would be on the show with me.
Not on the same show, but we do two shows a day.
I'd be the morning, he'd be the afternoon, so you could sort of sit back and And talk to them.
Do you ever rather, I mean, people listening, if it happens, you rather someone who you have no idea who you are than you realize how blessed you were that you ran into them.
Which happened to you not just with Eckhart Tolle, but we'll get to Deepak in a second as well.
Yeah.
So, one of my colleagues was a big fan of Eckhart Tolle, and she said, you know, you should read his book because he might be a good TV story for your whole faith and spirituality beat.
By the way, for the uninitiated, Eckhart Tolle is a big, huge, mega best-selling self-help guru.
Powered in many ways by Oprah, who loves his work.
And I read his book, or one of his books.
Which one?
A Power of Now?
A New Earth.
That's actually, I like, everyone knows his other book, but I think A New Earth is his best book.
I really think it's powerful.
I agree with you.
Although I have to say, I'm a pretty skeptical guy, and when I read that book, at first I had a I had negative reactions to much of what was in it.
Like the way he talks and writes is pretty soft and fluffy for me.
I have just a particular idiosyncratic makeup, and some of his invoking of vibrational fields and spiritual awakenings didn't sit well with me.
And yet I continued to read his book, even though I was thinking he was...
and he though I'm glad I did because he started to talk about a thesis about the human situation that I'm sure you're familiar with which is that we all have a voice in our heads that we have this inner narrator and ego whatever you want to call it that's just chasing us around all the time and yammering at us and has us wanting stuff or not wanting stuff comparing ourselves to people thinking about the past or thinking about the future to the detriment of whatever's happening right now and
And Tully's argument is, as you know, when you're unaware of this non-stop conversation that you're having with yourself, it owns you.
And that, to me, was an incredibly powerful argument because, first of all, it just struck me as intuitively true.
I'd never heard it before, by the way.
And the second part was that it explained my panic attack because it was the voice in my head, my ego, whatever, that sent me off to war zones without thinking about the consequences.
Then I came home, I got depressed, didn't know it, and then self-medicated blindly, and it all blew up in my face.
So Eckhart Tolle had a huge impact on me, even though I like to make fun of him.
There's lots more when we come back.
So you transitioned from Eckhart to someone that I've gotten to know pretty well, Deepak Chopra.
Yeah.
Who influenced me a lot.
I remember watching PBS specials he was doing as a medical student, and he seemed to connect the dots that I needed desperate help with.
Because many people go into medicine, and I was in that group, Because we all, not just because we want to help people, that's part of it.
And I do believe that sincerely is a passion that most doctors have.
But there's also a little bit of a selfish desire to understand more about the world that we're in.
And how can you understand the world outside of you if you don't understand the world inside of you?
Then you go to medical school and you realize you don't actually get all of it.
I kept waiting for the day when I really was a doctor because a doctor knows everything.
And here I am, decades later, and I still have that same little queasiness, that people expect me to know it all, and there's some things none of us really know.
And you need to go one step deeper to get there, because medicine's answering different questions.
Medicine's asking, what is this table made of?
Not why is it made of that?
Which is what some of these deeper spiritual practices take you into.
So how did the Deepak interaction affect you?
Well, I don't know how this is going to go down in this room, but I also make fun of Deepak a little bit because he has a way of talking that's pretty sort of out there.
And sometimes a scientist who Deepak went on to write a book with this guy, but I was moderating a debate one time with Deepak and an atheist philosopher named Sam Harris.
And there were a few other people on the stage as well.
No relationship.
No relationship, but Sam and I are putting pretty tight.
We share a lot of the sort of skeptical genes.
So a scientist got up in the audience and said something to Deepak that I've always thought was very funny.
He says...
He said, "I understand the words you're using individually, "but not in the order in which you're using them." So he says, Deepak, a lot of things that, like, I don't understand what he's saying.
He'll casually use phrases like the transformational vortex to the infinite and things like that.
And so I do.
He's a pretty good copy for me as a writer.
So I've made fun of him a little bit.
I did make fun of him a little bit in my book.
And yet, I agree with you that he's asking questions about what's beyond the hard facts that we rely on in medicine and science.
And also, he's been a really effective advocate for meditation on a grand scale.
So I tease him a little bit, but to the extent that I know him, I like him, and I do think he's been a force for good.
If Brian Greene used a similar phrase, you know, maybe he's tweaked slightly about the vortex, you probably also wouldn't understand it, but it would be purely based in science.
And Brian Greene is a physicist.
Do you know Brian Greene?
He's a physicist at Columbia.
He's brilliant, brilliant.
He did...
A bunch of PBS series as well.
Anyway, my only point is that there is an area where what Deepak is talking about, which is sort of the transcendent view of the cosmos, and physics, especially new physics, converge, where we get to that space where there's something we don't understand, but it is powerful.
You know, there are a bunch of books like The Dancing Wooly Masters, was that, I think, what it was called?
That is what it's called.
I never read it.
And Fritjof Capra's books.
And the more we, I think the deeper we go into physics, the more, like, the whole string theory.
And parallel universes.
It sounds like Deepak's talking, but it's actually physics.
He's not a physicist.
No, but I'm saying it has the same, it rings the same to a layman's ears.
Yes.
I was with Deepak at an event that actually was hosted at the Vatican.
And it was on medicine ethics.
And they had brought together a bunch of philosophers.
Now, I don't know if you talk to philosophers very much, but in a similar fashion to the audience member of Deepak Talk who said, I know what the words mean individually, but put up, you know, I don't want to spiral vortex into whatever.
Yeah.
Deepak was in the conversation with me, and I was listening to them talk amongst each other.
And I come from a specialty, a field, where we're often using words, not on purpose, but because it becomes habit, that no one else but us understands.
And medicine is guilty of that, probably as much as any other specialty.
Lawyers are guilty of it.
You're in a field where you specifically don't do that, because your job is to explain to us things we don't really get, and maybe take us places we wouldn't have gone otherwise.
But I was witnessing these philosophers talking to each other, and I couldn't understand anything they were talking about.
I didn't, I really, same thing, I knew what the words meant individually, but they had clear connotations, so I thought, you know, so I'm a smart enough guy that I can understand.
Just give me some papers.
Send me the articles that you guys are writing, because they're writing op-ed pieces, and I'm like, they sent me some of them.
Dan, I couldn't understand them.
I would read them, I read them backwards, I couldn't understand them.
And it was like hieroglyphics, but of syntax, not of words.
And it was very frustrating to me, and then I realized my brain hadn't trained itself to think the way that at least these philosophers, in addition to Deepak.
And some of these guys, they were data people, some of them were, you know, there were some physicists there.
Their minds just worked in a different way.
In many ways, if you listen to musicians talk about music, they'll use phrases that I'm not comfortable with, just because I'm not in this field.
They'll talk about gigs.
I get what a gig is, right?
But it's performance.
But I don't know what the other things said after that.
Do you ever feel that as you try to do research in their spirituality?
Absolutely.
You know, this gets back in many ways to the question you asked at the beginning, which is why 10% happier.
And the answer is it has to do with language.
How are you going to talk about issues related to our inner weather, our interior lives that can speak to a broad audience?
And what I was really trying to do was to kind of knock this discussion off its pedestal, stop using the woo-woo language, really get away from overpromising this kind of peddling of reckless hope, which I see sometimes in our $11 billion a year self-help industry.
And that's what I was trying to get at, to speak very simply, very clearly from the perspective of a skeptic and a screw-up.
And also, as I said, to sort of counter-program against some of the more pernicious parts of the self-help industry. - There's a humbleness to the way you speak this.
You call yourself a screw-up.
We're all screw-ups.
Everyone can hear my voice.
It's a screw-up.
And if you don't realize it yet, you'll figure it out.
You're Ozymandias in the making.
But there's still wisdom that people who are screwed up can use to minimize the screw-ups.
So, for example, you speak to the in-between moments.
What are they and why are they so important for our listener?
I think we live, and this is not my diagnosis, Eckhart Tolle talks about this, some guy who was alive 2,600 years before Eckhart Tolle, whose name is the Buddha, talked about this too, which is that we kind of live in this leaned forward state.
We're just always on the hunt for the next hit of dopamine, the next latte, the next appointment, the next party.
We're always kind of leaned forward, never quite where we are right now.
And in that state, we often tend to overlook much of our lives, and much of our lives are spent waiting on line, waiting for an elevator, without much to do on an airplane, etc., etc., or playing with your child and bored out of your mind.
I have a four-year-old, so I'm intimately familiar with this state.
Can you, however, co-opt those moments, those in-between moments, to be right where you are, to tune in to what's happening right now?
Because, by the way, that's all you ever get.
Both Eckhart and Deepak talk about this in different ways.
Eckhart would say the power of now.
Deepak would say the present moment is the transformational vortex to the infinite.
I would just say, you know, it's all you've got right now.
Your whole life takes place right now.
The past and the future are thoughts.
They're just formulations.
Which, by the way, I'm not running them down.
This is what makes us human, the ability to prognosticate, to project into the future, and think about the past and learn from the past.
So I'm not saying we shouldn't engage in that, but recognize that much of our lives are lived in this kind of autopilot, this fog of projection and rumination, as opposed to being right where you are.
How does the awareness of the present moment help you...
deal with post-traumatic stress from the time that you were overseas.
I'm going to answer that question, but I'm going to say something first about PTSD, which is that I don't have it.
Are you sure?
Because you witnessed some really horrific things.
I did.
I did, but two things about that.
One is that much less I'm not saying this in a cavalier way.
I'm actually saying this in a recognizing that what I've seen and witnessed is very little compared to many other more seasoned war correspondents and, of course, compared to the actual warriors, men and women on the front lines.
But more importantly, I think, and I've done quite a bit of psychotherapy, I think the issue for me wasn't And this is actually quite common, what I'm about to say, among both journalists, war correspondents, and warriors, is a kind of addiction to the action.
So when I came home from war zones, what was making me depressed was that life here, even though we're in the greatest city on earth, in my opinion, seemed gray and boring.
And even though I have this incredible job and was out covering presidential campaigns and being on TV and talking to Peter Jennings and blah, blah, blah, It just couldn't compare to being in war zones.
There's an expression, there's nothing more thrilling than the bullet that misses.
Teddy Roosevelt.
Oh no, Churchill.
Winston Churchill, that's exactly right.
So it's life and death.
It's life at its most heightened point.
Absolutely.
So it wasn't the darkness of the universe.
No.
Believe me, I've seen a lot of darkness.
But To my knowledge, consciously, that's not driving me as much as my kind of addiction to the dopamine hits of thrill.
And so I was getting that synthetically through cocaine when I got home.
You asked a deeper question.
No, I was just asking how the meditation helps you not need that, not be seeking.
Why is being aware of the present moment an antidote to the thrill-seeking of The elevated cocaine state or the ecstasy or the war zone.
In my opinion, this is the key question.
This is why one would meditate, in my opinion.
Because it's about self-awareness.
It's about when you're awake right now, You're seeing what is clearly, you're hopefully seeing clearly what is happening right now, internally and externally.
And when, especially when you're seeing things clearly internally, when you're aware of the sort of inner cacophony of random thoughts, powerful emotions, desires, then you're not owned by them as much.
And meditation is a systematic waking up to what's happening right now, where you sit and try to, in the kind of meditation I practice, which is different than what you guys do, and we can talk about those differences if you want.
But in mindfulness meditation, you sit, try to focus on your breath, and then every time you get distracted, you start again and again and again.
And we use the breath as an anchor to bring us back.
To the present moment.
And the distraction is natural.
And the whole game in meditation, the art of meditation, is learning how to handle that distraction well.
To blow at a kiss when you notice you've become distracted instead of beating yourself up.
And then come back, come back, come back.
And it's the coming back that is the meditation.
And the healing part of this is that the more you're aware of the sort of inner tumult, then it has less power over you.
So, for example, for me, I can see more clearly how leaned forward I am, how I'm always looking for that next thrill, that next book publication, that next, I don't know, nice article about me or next deal I can close, et cetera, et cetera.
The next podcast I can do with the Oz's, et cetera, et cetera.
Then I can, then I can, it doesn't mean that's all going to go away.
It just means that it can recede into the backdrop a little bit because I can blow it a kiss, salute it and say, okay, it's here.
But I don't need to act out of that space.
More questions after the break.
I usually do transcendental meditation.
Frankly, I also use breathing to get into it.
Then there's a mantra that I learned.
I could easily find myself doing mindfulness meditation, which John Kabat-Zinn had worked with me on years ago when I was trying to figure out this all out.
I actually got induced this from Lisa's parents, who are way ahead of the curve on this stuff.
I began to I just believed that it must be ubiquitously done.
Only later did I realize that very few people were doing it, which sort of made sense to me after a while.
And one of the reasons that I think people weren't doing it, some of it was, I think, clouded belief systems from the 60s, because the Beatles were going to India, and they were bringing back what people thought was sort of soft, touchy-feely stuff.
But there's also the belief that you would lose your edge if you meditated.
What do you say to those folks?
I would say, I have a bunch of things to say to people who are worried about losing their edge because of meditation.
One is, look at the people who are doing it these days.
It's all over corporate C-suites.
You've got senior executives doing it.
You've got elite entertainers from Katy Perry, Lena Dunham, the lead singer of Weezer, 50 Cent, meditating.
You've got the U.S. Marines and the U.S. Army spending tens of millions of dollars to research whether it can make troops who are less emotionally reactive in the field and making better decisions in the field and then more resilient when they come home in the face of what has become a scourge of PTSD.
And those research results are really interesting and compelling.
You've got scientists doing it, lawyers doing it.
You've got teachers doing it.
They're doing it in prison.
They're doing it in schools.
It's happening all over the place.
These are not, with the exception perhaps of prison, these are not low performing, low functioning human beings.
These are highly effective people who have not lost their edge.
You're going to tell the CEO of Twitter, whatever you think of Twitter, that, you know, he's a slouch.
I think he's a CEO of two companies at once.
We've got a lot of this.
Chicago Cubs, Novak Djokovic, all of these people who are highly effective.
You, you.
Ray Dalio, who's running a big hedge fund.
So it is a way, if you think you'll have less edge, if you boost your ability to focus and boost your ability to not be owned by all of your random emotions so you can be the calmest person, the kindest person in the room in a difficult situation, well then you shouldn't meditate.
But I don't think anybody thinks that.
I'm going to take a quick segue, if you don't mind, because meditation to me has provided a remarkably important tool to get past stuff that I'm saying to myself that often blocks my creativity.
So it helps me work harder than I normally would be able to work, probably, because I can focus better, but also I can work smarter.
Imagine vessels that we each have in our lives, and we've got to fill them with whatever fluid we use.
It's a metaphor that a friend of Lisa's and mine gave me.
He's a Buddhist.
American, but Buddhist.
And I think he's right.
And we use different fluids.
And meditation, I think for some people, allows them to fill the vessels in a different way.
And meditative practices are found in much of our mythology, in much of our religion.
What do you think about some of these concepts and how they might actually intertwine with more organized ways in which we study the world around us through spiritual practices in particular?
You know, where I'm sort of...
And where I'm going to take this, and I don't know if this is at all what you were intending, so I apologize in advance if I'm taking this in a different direction, which is that I think a lot of people...
You were talking before about the Beatles...
The Maharishi, Mahesh Yogi, etc., etc., and how meditation is kind of seen as this fuzzy, fluffy thing in an era that's increasingly secular now.
I actually think, while I said before that I think I might have used the term atheist, but I'm more of an agnostic, a sort of respectful agnostic.
I don't know.
I don't take a view on issues, metaphysical issues.
Sort of lower attendance at organized religious events and more sort of a cafeteria spirituality out there.
I do think that meditation can play an incredibly positive role because people are looking for meaning.
This is why they go to SoulCycle.
This is why they go to CrossFit.
You know, people are out there looking for meaning.
There's an increased sort of skepticism and maybe cynicism about organized religion, perhaps for...
Good reason given some of the scandals we've seen.
And I do think that meditation is a very hopeful sign in an increasingly acrimonious society.
Just to add to that, meditation is a part of most religion.
It is.
Yes.
And we'll go with Lisa's family to the beautiful cathedral where they live.
And you sit in there, it's wonderful to hear people singing.
I don't even care what they're singing.
It's just the thought of all these voices in unison saying phrases that have a melody to them and are uplifting.
It's wonderful.
And I think in Kabbalah Judaism, Sufi Islam, which was in the town where my father grew up, Certainly in Eastern religions, it's more explicitly stated.
It does seem like meditative practices and ways of getting there are hardwired into us.
Absolutely, and it's so incredible that you see these meditative practices popping up in faiths that came about in cultures that were Not in any way connected by space and time, right?
So you've got the shamans in the rainforests of Brazil doing these shamanic practices, often involving plants that were meditative and they're trying to transcend the ego and reach for spiritual enlightenment.
You have, meanwhile, in your dad's hometown, Sufi Muslims dancing in circles.
They're called whirling dervishes.
That's where that term comes from.
It's a trance state.
And that gets you into a trance state, which is meant to transcend the workaday ego and put you into a different state.
You see the Desert Fathers in Christianity.
What are the rosary beads if not a way to focus the mind?
You see this in Kabbalah Judaism.
You see it, of course, as you said, explicitly in Judaism and Buddhism and Hinduism.
And so why did we come to this?
Because as you said, we're hardwired.
Something in us sees that the daily discursive mind trips us up and there needs to be a way to get out of our own way.
One final para-meditation question.
There's been a lot of medical debate of late about hallucinogens.
And Wilson, the founder of AA, actually stopped drinking because of some probably hallucinogen-induced trance or state that he achieved in the early 30s.
And he tried to introduce LSD to Alcoholics Anonymous for most of his adult life.
And now we're seeing a rebirth of some of this interest.
Ketamine just got approved for LSD. Depression states and PTSD approvals coming up.
Microdosing of LSD is used a lot in Silicon Valley, for example.
People say it gives them creativity.
I know that magic mushroom psilocybin is being used clinically now for management of addictions, of alcoholism, Opiates, as well as some of the more important psychiatric issues.
Anxiety in the face of chronic illness.
These are shortcuts, I think.
I don't know, but I think they're shortcuts to what you might get through a life of meditation.
Thoughts on...
And the shamans you mentioned in Amazon, they would use ayahuasca.
They would use it normally.
Just to be clear, they would use it.
And then they would explain what they saw in their practitioners, but they would probably use it for people who were having issues as well.
So appropriately supervised, could these play a role?
I want to issue the caveat that this is just one guy speaking who's semi-informed.
I'm really intrigued by this.
And I think we are starting to see a lot of evidence that this can...
I've had a lot of folks on my podcast come in to talk about this.
I think we're seeing a lot of evidence that this can have really salutary effects.
I think it's a great shame that we lost decades post-Nixon where this stuff was outlawed.
Where we couldn't conduct the research around it.
I think at the very least, we should be able to conduct the research to see whether this plant medicine, these psychedelics, can help people.
And the early signs, from what I can tell, are incredibly positive.
I have not done it because my shrink really does not want me messing with my brain chemistry, given the fact that I have panic disorder.
But were that not the case, I would have done it.
I'm a control freak, so I don't want to go first.
But I share your belief that there's a hypocrisy around allowing physicians to do what they should do to help people with big illnesses.
And when I start to see some of the data around solutions for people who had no other options, and then I think, okay, well, the DEA might stop this.
We're putting the emphasis, the power in the hands of people who don't even want it.
And I've spoken to people at the DEA who say, please don't make a decision here.
We don't want to be in that space.
Mm-hmm.
Dan Harris is always 10% happier, and he looks happier today.
How I tamed the voice in my head, reduced stress without losing my edge, and found self-help that actually works.
It's a true story about a good friend, and it's almost really accomplished quite a bit with this podcast.
Vulnerable, successful.
In fact, all the things you do seem to be touched with success, so bless you for that.
I did host a failed game show, but other than that, I'm doing all right.
