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.
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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 language. Really get away from overpromising this kind of peddling of reckless hope, which I see sometimes in our eleven billion dollar 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 Doctor Oz podcast. Is that exactly who you would be expecting that be touting the benefits of meditation? ABC News is Dan Harris has been through help and he's come back and has the power of mindful this to thank for coming out on the other side even stronger than before. He's also the host of the wildly successful podcast ten percent Happier, titled after the New York Times bestselling book, and the author of a new book, Meditation for Fidgy Skeptics, which would be a topic today and ten percent Happier book about how to so this word tempercent keeps coming up least and I were debating it. She wants to know specifically, you know, I asked my fift of course you want more. He wants percent happier, happier. I do a lot of haggling ever since this book came out. So we're gonna talk a little bit about this rocky road to recovery that we all face in life. You've been very transparent about it. I applaud you for that. But it is a logical question why that number particularly 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, and I this is the I'd like to say that meditation is the first My embrace of meditation marks the first time in my life I was ever ahead of a trend. I started getting interested in meditation in around two thousand and eight two nine, but for it was as cool as it is now. And uh I started mentioning that to some people I worked with, and uh I was met with a lot of mockery because at that time meditation was viewed and still is viewed in some corners has a pretty niche strange concern. And I was talking to one of my colleagues, an old friend UH named Chris Sebastian who was the senior producer at Good Morning America. And she stopped me one day, She's like, what's the deal with you? In 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 ten percent happier. And I noticed the look on her face went from scorn to something approaching interest, and I thought, Okay, that's my stick. That's how I'm going to talk about this from now on. So let's go to where you are. You're very well respected within the business. Folks outside of you know of your your all the wonderful things you've done, hosting weekend shows and and and pors beyond Gmail all the time, as you mentioned, Yet there were times in your life when you had fallen off the tracks. Cocaine, ecstasy. What did they do for you? You You had everything? And I should want you're You're from May and originally right, he went to school there. I went to school in May, but I'm from Boston, now far away, but northeast, northeast. Yes, you had a pretty good life people in Maine and Boston can do drugs too, of course they count I mean, these are colleague parts of the country that have a reasonable standard of living. And you went to Colby's at right Colby College, so we went to you know, great school, and you know you had that out of the park in your career. What gives My parents were doctors as a matter, doctor Paris doctors. So what happened? I went and spent a lot of time in war zones after nine eleven. So I got to ABC News very young. I was twenty eight years old in the year two thousand, very ambitious, very insecure about my lack of inexperience and my lack of experience, and uh, when nine eleven happened, I very eagerly raised my hand and said, send me over ease. I want to cover whatever happened next. I think for a range of reasons that partly was kind of crass ambition careerism. I think also curiosity, and then on the more on the less embarrassing side of the spectrum, I was I was very idealistic still I am very idealistic about the power of journalism, and I wanted to sort of bear witness to what we were going to do, and uh, my bosses accepted my offer and I spent a lot of time in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, Iraq. I was in the rock months and months and 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 little grade fever all the time. And that's when I reached. That is when I reached for cocaine, which was an incredibly dumb move. At a party. I had never done drugs, hard drugs before we 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 of 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 eighteen to twenty four months where I was doing it semi regularly, and that culminated in me having a panic attack on Good Morning America because, as I later learned, I was doing enough cocaine. I wasn't high in the air, but I was doing enough cocaine that had altered my brain chemistry and made freaking out more likely. So this is a an iconic moment. You're on there, you have this s Norge break down. 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 actually it was I had a second one. So I had this first panic attack and then I kept partying. Actually I didn't. I knew I had had a panic attack, and I kind of lied to my bosses and got away with it. Because 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 It's not like Albert Brooks and broadcast news with flop sweat and so, but that was it was people who knew you. That wasn't it was. My mother called me right away and said, you had a panic attack. So I knew something about it happened, but I didn't really tie it to the drugs. And then I a couple of months went by and I had another one, and then I went to go see a shrink uh 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 that's what That was rock bottom for me, and that's you know, I started to build from there. So you go, for me, the war correspondent waiting to hear what you have to say about text going on other parts of the world that that should scare us, because you're actually there, you become the faith and spiritual correspondent. I mean's almost like the opposite side of the spectral, not just geographically but emotionally intellectually. Was that obviously conscious decision? But how did you even come to that epiphany that maybe that was what she 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. Peter took me intervention. No, actually, he had no idea any of this stuff was going on, and and he just he was interested in faith in 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. Um. So, like 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 in spiritual reality. I made a lot of friends and so and really sort of 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. Um. But ultimately the faith in spirituality be led me to a writer whose name is Eckhart. Totally have you guys heard of him? Okay, So that's a that's a sentence most people don't get to utter. Would be on the show with me, so I mean, I'm not on the same show, but we do two shows to day. I'd be the morning, he'd be the afternoon, so you could sort of sit back and and talk to me. You have a round your bust, I mean, people listening. It should happens that you run someone you have no idea who you are, and you feel how you rust, how blessed you are that you ran into that which happened to not just car totally, but we'll get to deep back in a second as well. Yeah. So one of my colleagues was a big fan of Eckhart totally, and she said, you know, she should read his book because he might be a good TV story for your whole faith in spirituality. Be by the way, for the uninitiated, are totally 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 were one of his books. That's actually I like, everyone knows his other book, but 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 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 for me, I have it just a particular idiosyncratic makeup, and some of his invoking of vibrational fields and spiritual awakenings didn't sit well with me. Um And Yet I continued to read his book even though I was thinking he was b s uh, and he though I'm glad I did because he started to talk about a thesis about the human situation, and 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 wanna 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 when. And Totally's argument is, as you know, when you're unaware of this NonStop 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 never heard it before, by the way, and this and the second part was that it explained the voice explained my pack attack because it was the voice in my head, my ego whatever that sent me off to war zones without thinking about the consequences that I came home, I got depressed, didn't know it, and then self medicated blindly and it all blew up in my face. So Kard totally had a huge impact on me. Even though I like to make fun of there's lots more will be come back. Yeah, So you transition from Mekrt to someone that I've gotten no pretty wealth de fact Chopra, who influenced me a lot. I remember watching pps specials he was doing as a medical student, and he seemed to connect the dots that that I needed desperate help with because you go many people going to 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 in your lize you don't actually get all of it. I kept waiting for the day when I really was a doctor, because the doctor knows everything and her. I am decades later, and I still have that same the queasiness that people expect me to know it all, and there's something none of us really know, and you need to go one step deeper to get there, because the medicine are answering different questions right medicine asking what is this? 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 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 I a scientist who Deepak went on to write a book with this guy. But I was moderating a debate one time and with Deepak and an atheist philosopher named Sam Harris, and there were a few other people in the stages. Well, no relationship and no relationship with that, but Sam and I are pretty pretty tight. Um. We share a lot of the sort of skeptical genes. So uh. One of the science scientists 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 um 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 in UH that we rely on in medicine and science. And and also he's been a really effective advocate for meditation on a grand scale. So I tease him a little bit, but I to the extent that I know him, I like him, and I do think he's been a force for good. If Brian Green used a similar phrase, you know, maybe tweaked slightly about the vortex, you probably also wouldn't understand it, but it would be purely based in science. He's a physicist at Columbia, is brilliant, boryant. He did um a bunch of PPS series as well. Um. Anyway, my only point is that there is an area where what Deepak is talking about, which is sort of the trans transcendent view of the cosmos and and physics, especially new physics, converge where we get to that space where there's something we don't understand but it is. It is powerful. You know, they're there are a bunch of books like the Dancing Wouie Masters was that I think what it was called Copras books and um. The more we I think, the deeper we go into physics, the more like the string theory. There's and parallel universes. It sounds like deep packs talking, but it's actually just physicist. No what I'm saying. What I'm saying that it has the same, It rings the same to a layman's ears. Yes, I was with Deepack at an event that actually was hosted as a Vatican and it was on medicine ethics, and they had brought together a bunch of philosophers. And I don't know if you talk to philosophers very much, but in a similar fashion to your the audience member of Deep Talking said, I know what the words mean individually, but put up, you know, I don't know what a spiral, vortext whatever. Yeah, uh, I was Depeck was in the conversation with me, and I was listening to them talk amongst each other. And I come from a specialty of field where we're often using words not on purpose, but because it becomes habit that no one else but us understands. Medicine is guilty of that, probably as much as any other specially lawyers, are guilty of it. You're in a in a field where you're specifically don't do that, because your job is to explain to us things we don't really get and maybe take us place as we would have gone otherwise. But I wastenessing these philosophers talking to each other, and I couldn't understandything we're talking about. I didn't I really the same thing. I knew what the words meant individually, but they had clear connotations, so I I thought you know, I'm a smart enough guy that I can understand this. Give me some papers, send me the articles that you guys are writing, because they're writing off ped pieces, and like they sent me some of them. Then I could understand them. I would read them all. I read the backwards. I could understand them. They're like hwever 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 at least these philosophers. In addition, deep back and some of these guys were their 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 the music, they'll use phrases that I'm not comfortable with, just I'm not in this field. They'll talk about gigs. I get what a gig is, right, but but it's a 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 ten percent happier? And the answer is it has to do with language. How are you going to talk about issues related to our inner weather or 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 less hope which I see sometimes in our eleven billion dollar 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. Uh. And and also to as I said, to sort a counter program against some of the more pernicious parts of of the self help industry. There's a humble nous too the way you speak this that you call yourself a scrub. We're all scrubs. I want to hear my voice and screw up. And if you don't realize that yet, you'll figure it out. Uh. You know, osmandis in the making, But h there's still wisdom that people who are screwed up can use to minimize the scrubs. So, for example, you speak to the in between moments, Why what are they? Why are they so important for our listener? I think we live and this is not my diagnosis that car Totally talks about this. Some guy who was alive years before KR Totally, whose name is the Buddha, talked about this too, which is that we kind of live in this 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 online, waiting for an elevator, uh, without very much to do, on an airplane, etcetera, etcetera, or you know, playing with your child and poured 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 into what's happening right now, because, by the way, that's all you ever get. Both at Art and Deepak talk about this in different ways. Uh In Eckhart would say the power of now. Deepak would say the present moment as 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, you know, 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 reject into the future and think about the past and learn from the past. So there's I'm not 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 how does the awareness of the present moment help you deal with post traumatic stress from the time that you were overseas? IM wanna answer that question. I'm not gonna say something first about PTSD. So which is which is that I don't have it? So? Um, are you sure? Because you witness some really horrific thing I did? I did. But it's two things about that. One is that much less this is I'm not saying this in a cavalier way. I'm actually saying this in a in a wrecking noizing 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 trauma. It was and this is actually quite common when I'm about to say, among both journalists, work correspondents and warriors is a kind of addiction and 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, what just couldn't compare to being in war zones. There's an expression, there's nothing more thrilling than the bullet that misses. And you know, for me, they all Winston Churchill's exactly right. So I it was the it was the list life and death. It's life at it's most heightened. Absolutely absolutely, And so for me it was the darkness of the universe. Okay, no, I mean, I believe me. I've seen a lot of darkness, um, but it to my knowledge consciously, that's not driving me as much as my kind of addiction to the you know, dopamine hits of thrill, and so I was getting that synthetically through cocaine. When I got home. You asked a deeper question. I was just asking how the meditation helps you not need that, not be seeking. Why? 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, right, This is why one would meditate, in my opinion, because it's about self awareness. It's about when you're in the 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, um 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, when 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 and meditation, the art of meditation is learning how to handle that distraction well, to blow it a kiss when you notice if whocomes distracted instead of feeding 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 of 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, a nice article about me, or next deal I can close, etcetera, etcetera. The next podcast I can do with the oz is with etcetera, etcetera. 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 bloat the 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 just I usually do trans ol meditation, which just frankly, I also use breathing to get into it. And then there's a mantra that I learned, but I actually I could easily find myself doing mindfulness meditation, which I you know, John cabots in it work with beyond years ago when I was trying to figure out this all out, I actually got induce this from Lisa's parents, who are way ahead of the curve on this stuff, and I began to believe that it must be you biquitous he done. Only later that I realized 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 people was I think clouded belief systems from the sixties because you know, the Beatles were going to India and they were bringing back you know, but people thought was so 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 the corporate c suites. You know, you've got senior executives doing it. You've got elite entertainers from Katie Perry, Lena Dunham, the lead singer of Weezer, fifty cent meditating. You've got the U. S. Marines in the U. S. Army spending tens of million of dollars to research whether it can make troops or less emotionally reactive in the field, 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 in prison, they're doing it in schools. It's happening all over the place. These are not 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 gonna tell the CEO of Twitter, whatever you think of Twitter, that you know that he's a slouch. I think he's a ceo of two companies at once. We've got a lot of the Chicago because Djokovic, all of these people who are highly effective. You you Ray Dalio, who's running a big hedge fund. So it is a 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 commonest person, the kindest person in the room in a in a difficult situation, Well then you shouldn't meditate. But I don't think anybody thinks that. I'm gonna take a quick segue if you don't mind, because meditation, to me has provided a remarkably important tool to get past stuff saying to myself that often blocks my creativity. So it helps me work harder that I normally would be able to work, probably because I can focus better, but also I can work smarter. And these you know mentioned 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 this is uh and mine gave me because he's a Buddhist American, but Buddhist, and you 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. Meditative practices are found in much of our mythology and 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 to spiritual practices in particular. You know where I'm sort of and where I'm gonna take this, and I don't know if this is at all what you were intending, So I apologize in advance of taking this in a different direction, which is that I think a lot of people you were talking before about the Beatles studying meda Yes, the Maharishi, Mahashi, etcetera, etcetera, And and how meditation is kind of seen as this fuzzy, fluffy thing in an era that's increasingly secular. Now, um, I actually think Um, while as I said before that I'm 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, but I do think in an era where we're seeing less um attend is sort of lower attendance that organized religious events and more sort of a cafeterious spirituality out there, I do think that meditation can play an incredibly positive role because people are looking for meaning. So why they go to soul cycle, this is why they go to cross fit. 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 something is a very hopeful sign in an increasingly acrimonious UH society. But just to add to that, meditation is a part of most religion. It is right if you mean, when I sit in a church service and we you know, we'll go with a Lesa's family that the beautiful cathedral where they live, and you sit in there, it's 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 are that have a melody to them and are uplifting. It's wonderful. And I think it came about Judaism uh Sufi Islam, which is you know, was in the town when my father grew up, uh you know, certainly in the Eastern religions. It's it's more explicitly stated. It does seem like meditative practices in ways of getting there are hard wired 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 in in the rainforests of Brazil doing these shamanic practices, often involving plants that were meditative and trying they're trying to transcend the ego and reach for spiritual enlightenment. You have meanwhile, in your dad's hometown Sufi um Islams uh Sufi Muslims dancing in circles. They're called whirling dervishes. That's where that term comes from. And that gets you into a trance state which is meant to transcend the the work a day 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 to focus the mind? You see this in cabal Judaism. You see it, of course, as you said, explicitly in Judaism and Buddhism and Hinduism. And so how why did we Why did we come to this? Because as you said, we're hard wired UH. Something in a 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 parameditation question. There's been a lot of medical debate of late about hallucinogens and Wilson, one of the founders A, actually stopped drinking because of some probably hallucinogen induced UH trance or state that he achieved nearly thirties, 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 those interest Kindaman just got approved for the Pressure States and PTSD approvals coming up. Uh. You know micro does give LSD s use a lot in Silicon Valley, for example, people say gives them creativity. I know the magic mush and psilocybin um is being used clinically now in you know, pre addictive manage measurement, addictions of alcoholism, uh uh, 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 Shamans. You mentioned in Amazon they would use ahahuasca. They would use it normally just to be clear. They would use it and then they would explain what they saw their practicis. But they were probably using for people who are having issues as well, so appropriately supervised, could these play a role? I am I want to issue the caveat that this is just one guy speaking who is semi informed. Um, 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 coming to talk about this. I think we're seeing a lot of evidence, um that this can have really salutary effects. I think it's a great shame that we lost decades is 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 these this plant medicine, these psychedelics can help people, and 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 panic disorder. But if we're that not the case, I would have done it. I'm a control freak, so I don't want to go first. But I don't blame but I sure you believe that there's a hypocrisy around allowing physicians to do what they should do to help people be 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 d A might stop this. We're putting the emphasis to power in the hands people don't even wanted. I've spoken to people the DA said, please don't make us spake a decision here. We don't want to be in that space. We want to take care of bad guys, not good people. Try to help other good people. Then there's always always ten percent 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 some SOMEONOST really accomplished quite a bit with this podcast. Wonderful successful. In fact, all the things you do seem to be touched with successful. Bless you for that. I did host the failed game show. But other than that, I'll do it all right. That most score. I love it, though I want to put it on my resume until it Happy head Harris, Thank you guys, thank you, this is fun. Thank you. I really appreciate it.