Dan Harris: 10% happier – meditation, kindness, and compassion

**Peter Attia** (0:04)
Hey, everyone, welcome to The Peter Attia Drive. I'm your host, Peter Attia.
The Drive is a result of my hunger for optimizing performance, health, longevity, critical thinking, along with a few other obsessions along the way. I've spent the last several years working with some of the most successful top performing individuals in the world. And this podcast is my attempt to synthesize what I've learned along the way to help you live a higher quality, more fulfilling life. If you enjoy this podcast, you can find more information on today's episode and other topics at peterattiamd.com.
Hey everybody, welcome to this week's episode of The Drive. I'd like to take a couple of minutes to talk about why we don't run ads on this podcast. If you're listening to this, you probably already know, but the two things I care most about professionally are how to live longer and how to live better.
I have a complete fascination and obsession with this topic. I practice it professionally, and I've seen firsthand how access to information is basically all people need to make better decisions and improve the quality of their lives.
Curating and sharing this knowledge is not easy, and even before starting the podcast, that became clear to me. The sheer volume of material published in this space is overwhelming. I'm fortunate to have a great team that helps me continue learning and sharing this information with you. To take one example, our show notes are in a league of their own. In fact, we now have a full-time person that is dedicated to producing those, and the feedback has mirrored this. So all of this raises a natural question. How will we continue to fund the work necessary to support this?
As you probably know, the tried and true way to do this is to sell ads, but after a lot of contemplation, that model just doesn't feel right to me for a few reasons. Now the first and most important of these is trust. I'm not sure how you could trust me if I'm telling you about something when you know I'm being paid by the company that makes it to tell you about it.
Another reason selling ads doesn't feel right to me is because I just know myself. I have a really hard time advocating for something that I'm not absolutely nuts for. So if I don't feel that way about something, I don't know how I can talk about it enthusiastically. So instead of selling ads, I've chosen to do what a handful of others have proved can work over time. And that is to create a subscriber model for my audience.
This keeps my relationship with you both simple and honest. If you value what I'm doing, you can become a member. In exchange, you'll get the benefits above and beyond what's available for free. It's that simple. It's my goal to ensure that no matter what level you choose to support us at, you will get back more than you give.
So for example, members will receive full access to the exclusive show notes, including other things that we plan to build upon. These are useful beyond just the podcast, especially given the technical nature of many of our shows. Members also get exclusive access to listen to and participate in the regular Ask Me Anything episodes. That means asking questions directly into the AMA portal and also getting to hear these podcasts when they come out. Lastly, and this is something I'm really excited about, I want my supporters to get the best deals possible on the products that I love. And as I said, we're not taking ad dollars from anyone, but instead what I'd like to do is work with companies who make the products that I already love and would already talk about for free and have them pass savings on to you.
Again, the podcast will remain free to all, but my hope is that many of you will find enough value in one, the podcast itself, and two, the additional content exclusive for members. I wanna thank you for taking a moment to listen to this. If you learn from and find value in the content I produce, please consider supporting us directly by signing up for a monthly subscription. My guest this week is Dan Harris. For those unfamiliar with Dan, he wrote the New York Times best-selling book 10% Happier. He also hosts the 10% Happier podcast, which I've appeared on, and is the co-founder of the 10% Happier Meditation app, which by the end of this podcast, there will be no ambiguity about how much I love that app. In addition to everything 10% Happier, Dan is also the co-host of Weekend Edition of Good Morning America, and up until quite recently was the co-anchor of Nightline. I met Dan through a very close friend of mine, and this is one of those times when I specifically just begged my friend to make the introduction. I read 10% Happier almost the minute it came out in 2014, immediately became a fan, and somehow have spent the last five years stalking him, trying to figure out how to get to know him, and eventually a friend of mine made the introduction. And I kind of talk a little bit about that in the podcast about how much his work has had just a profound impact on me and just how grateful I am for all that his journey into meditation has brought me. In this episode, we talk about a lot of things. We do go into his story in a bit more detail about his upbringing, and pretty quickly we get into the story of the breakdown, meltdown slash crisis he had on national TV in 2004 that ultimately began his journey that culminated sort of four or five years later with his discovery of meditation. And what I really like about this episode, truthfully, is we get into a lot of stuff that I've always wanted to talk about with Dan, and it's the exact stuff we would have talked about over dinner. And the fact that we got to have it in a podcast is exactly why I have a podcast. So I hope that you will find this discussion half as interesting as I did, and I hope that for those of you who have not yet taken an interest in meditation that maybe the topics that we discuss here become the thin end of the wedge that at least get you to start exploring a tool that I believe is one of the most important tools in the Longevity Toolkit. So without further delay, please enjoy my discussion with Dan Harris.