10% Happier with Dan Harris

her newest book is called Micro-Resilience. She really gets that resilience is important for all of us not only in a macro sense, recovering from traumas and setbacks but also just micro how do you make it through the day without the last conversation, dragging you down, heading into the next conversation.

So yeah so it's Micro Resilience but it builds on a lot of the things I've done.

It's called micro resilience because it's small things that you can do each day.

The other piece of business is related to that which is we're doing a special show and conjunction with this book I'm putting out which comes out on December 26th kind of in time for a new year, new you. It's called Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics and the whole thing is about basically we did this cross country road trip in a very weird orange bus and tried to meet people who want to meditate but aren't meditating and figure out how we can help them.

He wrote a book, I wouldn't have called the book this because I'm not a huge fan of the word heart but he called it A Fearless Heart, which I highly recommend. It's a really great book.

Chuck Raison, a psychiatrist and a professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, and Vlad Maletic, a clinical professor of neuropsychiatry and behavior science at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine, wrote a book together called, "The New Mind-Body Science of Depression," in which they offer research on the mind-body connection, such as looking at the immune system, as a way to tackle depression.

He'll hear, has a lot to say about this new book. He's written about depression and what meditation can and cannot do for that.

Well yeah, so it's called the new mind body science of depression and it's basically, so Vlad is being modest he is one of the countries real leading educators of mental health clinicians around the neurobiology of all sorts of stuff.

This sort of integrated view of what depression is as a mind body disorder. Let's foolishly let's write a book, and so we started writing a book, we had a lot to say and it took us five years and you know yeah it's like 700 pages but basically it's this sort of compendium of various views on depression like what causes it from evolutionary perspective, from a more pragmatic stress genetics and then what's its underlying neurobiology and how does it interrelate with you know the immune system and inflammatory systems and systems in the body and then a bunch that Vlad's done you know brilliantly on the brain.

So because it's actually dovetails nicely with this other big project I've been working on which is this book called Meditation for Figuity Skeptics which is coming out on December 26th and we're going to post this podcast in conjunction with that.

The idea is it's the time of year when people are setting new years resolutions and one of the big ones is meditation and of course creating a new habit is really hard. So the book is all about how to get you over the hump. We look at all the myths, misconceptions and self-deceptions that stop people from meditating kind of systematically demolish them.

So I just finished writing a book that's coming out at New Year's which is like an introduction to meditation for fields called Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics.

Oh yeah, it was a Jetson Pema book. It was, it was a little ditzel one but it was kind of a compendium of some of her stuff you know because she, man, you know, her articulations of compassion and emptiness are really, really powerful.

there were two books one was Halfway Through the Door by the actor Arnie his name was Ludwig Mietzmann.

And we ended up putting out two books that became best sellers and then a film that did really well

I got a new book coming out. It's called Meditation for Figuity Skeptics.

It's a how to meditate book, but it's also got a story.

It's the story of me and one of my favorite meditation teachers, Jeff Warren, going across country in a stupid orange bus meeting people who want to meditate but aren't really helping create a taxonomy of reasons why people aren't meditating and then throw on a bunch of practical advice at people about how they can get over these various obstacles like not finding the time or feeling like you can't clear your mind, et cetera, et cetera.

go easy with the internal cattle prod which is the way I talked about it in Ten Percent Happier.

I talked to a guy Alex Pang who wrote a really great book called Rest

with the launch of chat gpt Sam Altman and open AI reinvigorated our imaginations and fears of a world with artificial intelligence while the company looked like a stunning success from the outside a battle was brewing within on what the future of AI should be almost a year after launching chat gpt that battle erupted into a war when the company fired its charismatic CEO Sam Altman from Wondry.

Business Wars is a podcast about the biggest corporate rivalries of all time and in our newest season we tracked the power struggles within open AI that culminated in Sam Altman shocking firing the chaos that followed and what it all says about the future and safety of artificial intelligence

I quote from that book in that particular episode and um the passage that I quote is about um it's talking about discipline and in that episode in general I talk about this concept as sort of tender discipline right

he drank himself to death and like um slept with his followers and uh he was in a bodyman of an ancient and also quite controversial concept and Buddhism of crazy wisdom

there's this really amazing book called Scarcity I don't know if you're familiar with it um by um Elder Shafir and I think a send-all Molina Thin I might be miss pronouncing his name

I began to read William James a variety of religious experiences was a was a huge eye opener for me in terms of the different kinds of religion.

oh I also want to mention that my friend Jeff Warren with whom I wrote the book Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics he's hosting another Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics retreat

John cabbage and a hero talk I you know I just I learned so much his book where we go there we are which is you know hugely popular I don't know the title but um but the book itself I've like I reread it all the time it's one of those books

it's in celebration of a new book written by my friend and colleague Jay Michelson. The book is called Enlightenment by Trial and Error. I haven't read it yet but I'm pretty sure it's going to be really good about his own personal experiences in pursuit of Enlightenment.

He's just written a book called Chasing My Cure in which he endeavors to cure this little known disease, which has been afflicting him.

you're trying to do with this book chasing my care bring bringing awareness not only if you actually chasing the cure in the lab but also bringing broader awareness to this disease.

my books called Chasing My Cure but it's not my cure that I'm chasing it's our cure and it's it's our in the sense of Castleman's patients but it's also in the sense of any rare disease patient who might have a disease without a solution.