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

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Best thing that's ever happened to you financially. Go.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:02)
Easy.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:03)
Sold my car on Carvana.

**SPEAKER_4** (0:04)
Amazing offer.

**Dan Harris** (0:05)
Really? I hit 200 on a scratcher.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:08)
Did the scratcher come to your house and hand you a check? No. How many scratchers did you hit to get that?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:13)
I hit a button on carvana.com once.

**Dan Harris** (0:15)
Okay, that's fair.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:17)
It's like the lottery, except you always win.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:20)
Not like the lottery at all, actually.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:22)
Exactly.

**SPEAKER_7** (0:23)
Inexplicably good.

**Dan Harris** (0:25)
Offer's worth bragging about.

**SPEAKER_8** (0:27)
Sell your car today on Carvana. Pick up Vesma Apply.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:30)
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**SPEAKER_5** (0:45)
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**SPEAKER_3** (1:17)
This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is The James Altucher Show.

**SPEAKER_8** (1:28)
Presenting The Archive, classic episodes that remain timeless, the raw, unfiltered conversations from the early days in which people shared their failures and showed us exactly how they rebuilt everything from the ground up.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:43)
Today on The James Altucher Show.

**Dan Harris** (1:46)
We're 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.

**James Altucher** (1:56)
And it's almost like the difference, and there's a subtle difference even in the words, but it was between happiness and well-being. So, well-being doesn't necessarily imply happiness, it means you're well right now.

**Dan Harris** (2:09)
Equanimity.

**James Altucher** (2:20)
Once again, so excited to have Dan Harris on the podcast, Dan Harris, welcome.

**Dan Harris** (2:24)
This is like my third time, right?

**James Altucher** (2:26)
No, it's your second, but, oh yeah, it is your third. Yeah, because you did, first off, I'll introduce you. You did the New York Times bestselling book, 10% Happier. How many weeks was that on the bestselling list?

**Dan Harris** (2:37)
You know, I knew it was something like 10 or 11 or something.

**James Altucher** (2:42)
That had some legs.

**Dan Harris** (2:43)
Yeah, it had some legs, to my great surprise.

**James Altucher** (2:44)
It's still selling really well. Yeah, it does alright. It's like two years ago, right?

**Dan Harris** (2:47)
Four years ago.

**James Altucher** (2:48)
That book's four years ago?

**Dan Harris** (2:50)
I know. We're getting old, man.

**James Altucher** (2:51)
What the hell? And then your 10% Happier app you came on when you first developed that.

**Dan Harris** (2:56)
Oh, right, right, right.

**James Altucher** (2:57)
And we'll talk about that a little more today. Very excited to talk about that. And you also are co-host on Nightline on ABC, Good Morning America, you're an anchor on The Weekends. You have a very successful journalism career.
10% Happier was such a great book because not only was it about how to be 10% happier, which is a unique concept, it was about your experiences with meditation, but very personal experiences like your kind of post-traumatic stress from covering the wars. And you basically had this breakdown, this panic attack on air, which people could find on YouTube, and you had some substance abuse that led to that plus post-traumatic stress, and how you then your recovery back using meditation. And you write about it so authentically and sincerely in 10% Happier, which I think is really the key to a great book, to have the arc of the hero, a story, combined with something you want to say, which is, here's how you can be a little bit happier. There's all these books that you want to be 1000% happier, or power of happiness, or whatever, and you just say, just improve things a little bit, and life changes completely.

**Dan Harris** (4:05)
Yeah, my view is that over time, the 10% compounds annually.

**James Altucher** (4:09)
Yeah, right, and 10% compounding is a weird way to think about the math of happiness, but of course, it will double your happiness every seven years. So, over a lifetime, that's enormous. I always say 1% improvement a day at anything you love improves you 3800% a year.