Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris is a former ABC News journalist who became a leading advocate for meditation and mindfulness after experiencing a live on-air panic attack in 2004. On his Substack, which you can read/listen to here, he explains how he went on a healthier path to well-being. His journey led him to meditation, which he credits with helping him achieve a happier and more balanced life. Click ‘Subscribe’ at the top of the Infamous show page on Apple Podcasts or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access wherever you get your podcasts. Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices A Campside Media & Sony Music Entertainment production. To connect with Infamous's creative team, plus access behind the scenes content, join the community at Campsidemedia.com/join Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: Who is Dan Harris and why is he significant?
Hey listeners, welcome back to Infamous, a production of Sony Music Entertainment and Campsite Media. I'm Natalie Robomet. If you're like most people, life can be a little overwhelming. between money, career, relationships, trying to avoid politics at the Thanksgiving dinner table, it can all get too much sometimes. So Vanessa called Dan Harris of the book and meditation app 10% Happier.
Chapter 2: What led Dan Harris to become a meditation advocate?
He teaches people how they can incorporate things like meditation into their lives to make real changes without doing anything extreme, like giving away all their possessions and joining a commune. But he didn't always do this. When Dan and Vanessa first met, he was a broadcast news reporter for ABC.
From flying into war zones to talking to celebrities like Paris Hilton and 50 Cent, Dan did it all. They talk about how the same ambition that fueled his success also fueled some pretty self-destructive behavior and how he managed to turn things around. It's a fascinating conversation, and I hope you get as much out of it as I did.
Oh, and by the way, just as Dan and Vanessa were wrapping up the interview, they decided they weren't quite done yet. So when you hear them say their goodbyes, keep listening. The conversation continues for another few minutes. And with that, here's the episode.
Dan Harris, my friend, an amazing newsman, now meditation guru. The infamous part of his life was the life he led before gurudom. And now he's just famous for 10% Happier, which is his podcast book, Substack, all off the idea that if you meditate, you can get 10% happier in your life. Not 20, as a force him to say, just 10, not 11, just 10.
But he has had this incredible story of climbing the ladder at ABC News. He was there for 21 years covering high-stakes stories, reporting from extreme situations. So Dan, welcome to Infamous.
Hi, Vanessa. Thanks for having me.
Hi, thank you for coming on. Let's go all the way back. to probably when I first met you. You were a newsman. Tell us your story, how you got there.
Well, I graduated college in the middle of an ancient recession in 1993. And there were not that many jobs. And I kind of had the sense that I wanted to do something cool. I had gone to film school for a little while at NYU. That's cool.
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Chapter 3: How did Dan's career in news impact his mental health?
yeah well that was pretty cool but I what was not so cool is that I was not very good at making films but I did take a documentary class that I really liked and then I started doing some internships in TV news and I thought it was really cool it wasn't as glamorous as I thought especially in local news where I started but after having done some internships I graduated from college and then I took a part-time job at a local news station in Bangor Maine and
And then ultimately they let me go on the air, even though, I mean, there's video of it. I just looked so young and inexperienced wearing my dad's blazers. And then I kind of worked my way south from Maine, from Bangor to Portland. And then I was in Boston for a while. And then when I was 28, I got this huge break, a call from the network, ABC News, and they said, come work for us.
And you said you were very excited about it. People can think about when they get their faces on the Jumbotron for like one second in a sports stadium. But you realized you could be on TV and your face would be there all the time. Yes.
Yeah. I'm embarrassed to admit, although I admit it freely, but it is embarrassing the extent to which A desire to be seen, a desire for notoriety really fueled many aspects of my ambition. I will say that there were other things in there, too. But there's no question that there's a thrill, especially back then when there wasn't social media, there was no real digital media.
Getting on TV was like a huge deal. And that was important to me.
And so you're at ABC News and Peter Jennings, who you describe as this almost 007 style of newsman. I don't think it's so extreme to say he took you under his wing.
Not at all. He absolutely did take me under his wing.
He saw that you, too, were like a 007 type. Perhaps.
Maybe I was closer to like Inspector Gadget. He did once say to my mom that he saw in me a younger version of himself. That's nice. I think that was the kind of thing you say to somebody's mother because I was... a foot shorter than him and not nearly as handsome and dashing and urbane as he was. But I definitely, I really looked up to him and he really did take me under his wing.
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Chapter 4: What was Dan's experience during his panic attack on live TV?
So in Pakistan, which is where most of the media was based for the Afghan war, there wasn't a ton of violence. There were some isolated incidents. Danny Pearl, if anybody remembers him, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was kidnapped and brutally murdered. Pakistan itself was not a raging war zone, although the hotel where we stayed, the Islamabad Marriott Hotel,
did later get blown up by al-Qaeda or some affiliate. There was this cognitive dissonance of being in the presidential suite at the Islamabad Marriott with, like, nice food delivered to the room and then occasionally crossing the border, which wasn't that far away, to go cover actual combat. The absurdity of that experience was... kind of amazing, you know, and I savored it.
This is not to say I enjoyed combat. I didn't. I don't like violence. And as I've sometimes joked, I didn't even play contact sports when I was a kid. But I am a junkie for experience. And this was an incredible experience to be so young and to be
part of this network news apparatus, which at that time, remember this before there was much digital news, this was the main game to be witnessing what's happening at the tip of the spear. With our tax dollars, that was just incredibly powerful.
And so you were driven by adrenaline, by fear, by ambition, all of the above?
Yeah, my meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein, talks a lot about how motivation, which most of us don't really look at unless you're an actor and you're asking the director, like, what's my character's motivation? But I don't think most of us think a lot about, like, what is our motivation? What drives us? Which is a very useful question to ask yourself.
And if you look at your own motivation with some forensic detail— Most of us will see a range. So for sure, at the craven end of the range for me was what we discussed earlier, the ambition, the ego, the excitement, the adrenaline. I would say in the middle of the range was ambition. curiosity, real journalistic curiosity about what is life on this planet? How much of it can I consume?
And then I would say at the stuff that's less embarrassing to talk about, the nobler end of the motivation was I believed and still believe, and I think you do too, in the importance and power of journalism and the value of having people who are willing to risk their lives to show The rest of us, what's happening on the ground? And so that was all there for me.
One of your parents once described you as Woody Allen, right? Like you're a little bit of a neurotic guy also. Or is that your brother? What is somebody in your family?
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Chapter 5: How did Dan's addiction to thrill affect his life?
My brother once said at my wedding, joked that I made Woody Allen look like a Buddhist monk. And so this was before I got interested in Buddhism was a particularly prescient comment.
But so you come back and it turns out that this has actually affected you more than you imagined, right? And you're messed up by this experience of being a war correspondent.
Yes. You know, I don't think I was messed up the way a lot of people get messed up in these situations, which is the term that often gets used, I think, accurately is PTSD. And so you see that especially among the people who are actually fighting the wars. I was not a warfighter. I was just a journalist. And there were many journalists who had way more experience than I did in war zones.
And so some of them also had PTSD. I think what messed me up was that I got addicted to the thrill of it. And when I came home, even though my job at home was pretty exciting, I was a network news correspondent and sometimes a fill-in anchor on our major broadcasts. And I had a pretty glamorous life, I guess, but nothing compares to being in a war zone.
There's a Winston Churchill quote, like, there's nothing more thrilling than the bullet that misses you. And in my case, they all missed. That wasn't true for a lot of my friends. You know, I had friends who died or got grievously wounded.
But for me, there was a real addiction to first Pakistan, Afghanistan, and then the second Intifada in Gaza and the West Bank and Israel, and then six or seven long, long tours of duty in Iraq. Yeah, there was a real addiction that when I came home, I would get depressed because it felt like all the energy had been sapped from my body and had trouble getting out of bed.
And I felt like I had a low-grade fever all the time. And that was a real problem. That led to some disastrous, infamous behavior.
Okay. So you start doing cocaine and ecstasy. Terrible things. And you're out all night and you're enjoying this or you're not enjoying this?
Well, I don't know. You were there. Did it seem like I was enjoying it?
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Chapter 6: What role did therapy play in Dan's journey?
Health news now, one of the world's most commonly prescribed medications may be providing a big bonus. Researchers report people who take cholesterol-lowering drugs called statins for at least five years may also lower their risk for cancer, but it's too early to prescribe statins slowly for cancer production.
And I'm pretty good because I've had spent my entire adult life on camera and because I'm not at baseline very emotionally expressive. I kind of hold it together reasonably well, but you can see that I'm having trouble breathing. And what's happening for me internally is my heart's racing. My palms are sweaty. My mouth is drying up. My lungs have seized up.
And I really can't speak, which is deeply inconvenient if you're trying to anchor the news. And then at one point I just squeak out like a back to you to the main hosts of the show, which Charlie Gibson and Diane Soar. That does it for news. We're going to go back now to Robin and Charlie. All right. Thanks very much, Dan.
What happens when the cameras turn off?
Okay, so you can see in the clip, Diane and Charlie both look a little concerned when I toss it back to them because I did it minutes before I was supposed to. And Charlie then sends it over to the weatherman. And then he, when the camera is off of him, bolts out of his seat and runs over to me to see like, what's wrong with you?
And the producers in the control room are getting in my ear like, are you okay? Well, what happened? And I lied. I totally lied.
But you were like, I am totally fine, man.
Pretty much. Pretty much. I knew I had had a panic attack because I had had little versions of this before. First of all, the first panic attacks I ever had were when I was smoking weed for the first time in my early teens. So I kind of knew what panic tastes like. And when your brain learns how to panic, it can get pretty good at it.
And then I had had a few little moments of panic on the air, but I'd always been able to cover them up. This was the first time where the train just like left the station and I couldn't
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Chapter 7: How has Dan's perspective on life changed through meditation?
control it so i was not in any doubt about what had happened but i was also not in any doubt that if i admitted this again this is 2004 20 years ago much less enlightened time when it comes to mental health if i had admitted this i was really sure that my career would have ended so i lied to everybody and i kind of got away with it in part because if you look at the video it didn't look
It looked bad, but not catastrophic. And I was able an hour later to come on and do my next news hit without any incident. So I kind of got away with it.
The Hamburglar was just a mascot, but Jerome Jacobson was the real deal, a McDonald's security chief who almost pulled off the ultimate inside job. On Wondery's podcast, The Big Flop, comedians join host Misha Brown to chronicle pop culture's biggest fails and try to answer the age-old question, who thought this was a good idea? At the time, the McDonald's collab with Monopoly was a genius idea.
Come get a Big Mac and you could go home with a million-dollar prize piece. The only problem? When they picked their head of security, the one guy in charge of protecting those million-dollar pieces, McDonald's drew the wrong card. Comedians Ify Wadiwe and Beth Stelling join Misha to break down what really happened with the McDonald's-Monopoly scandal.
Listen to The Big Flop wherever you get your podcasts.
This is Infamous from Campside Media.
You realize your career's on the line, so you're willing to go to therapy. But you're also still doing your job, but you get increasingly into lighter topics, right? You're interviewing a lot of celebrities, public figures. You are known for Paris Hilton walking out on an interview with you. You were trying to sort of tweak her, and she was taking herself very seriously.
Paris Hilton has said that she's changed. She's grown into a woman in her words, and she says she wants people to see that. We saw many different sides of Hilton in this wide-ranging interview, including a little bit of a touchy side. There's been some talk about the ratings in the show being low. Has that upset you?
No.
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