Pod Insights 10% Happier with Dan Harris Are You Letting Politics Make You Bitter Or Better? A Psychological Survival Conversation With CNN's Van Jones About this episode Recorded in January 2025 during the week of the Presidential inauguration, this conversation with CNN commentator Van Jones is less about politics and more about how we react to politics. You'll hear the questions that Van always asks himself before he goes on air, what he considers to be his purpose on earth, and how he thinks about the future.
This conversation was part of a special Inauguration Week series which featured daily gatherings of the "Renegade Sangha," as Dan calls it, including guided meditations led by Dan, and interviews with thinkers to help us make sense of the moment. To join future live sessions, become a paid subscriber at DanHarris.com http://danharris.com. You'll also get cheatsheets and transcripts for every episode, plus access to a community of other folks who take this stuff seriously.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:04 Dan Harris? It's the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.
0:18 Dan Harris? Hello, everybody. To state the blazingly obvious, we're in a bumpy period in American public life. This is true in many parts of the world, in fact. So here's a provocative question for you. You're going to hear this question posed by my guest today. And here it is. "Are you going to let these times make you bitter or better?" Said guest is Van Jones, the CNN political analyst, who also happens to be a dedicated meditator. The format for this episode is a little bit experimental. This is an interview I did with Van live on Substack the day after Trump's inauguration. So a couple of things to note here before we dive in. First, at the time we recorded this interview, we were talking about theoretical things
1:03 Dan Harris? that might subsequently happen. At this point, though, many of those things have actually happened. That said, Van's overall advice and the major thrust of this interview, which is about how to maintain your sanity in turbulent times, all of that is evergreen. The second thing to say here is because we recorded on Substack, which at the time was a new-to-us platform, the sound quality here is not the greatest. We will improve that next time, I promise. Third and final caveat is you're going to hear me reading a couple of questions and comments from the live audience during the course of my interview with Van, which is all pretty cool and is a reminder for me to remind you that you should sign up over at danharris.com.
1:47 Dan Harris? I do live sessions twice a month at danharris.com, which again is powered by Substack. In those sessions, I guide a meditation and then take your questions. Sometimes I have guests. It's all very cool. Again, you can sign up at dan Harris dot com. Subscribers also get ad-free versions of this podcast. All right, enough yammering for me. Here we go now with Van Jones.
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3:38 Dan Harris? So Van, I'm really curious. I've been watching you for years, but just specifically over the last couple of days, on social media and on CNN, you're right in the thick of it. I used to be there as an anchorman myself. And I'm curious, on the receiving end of this fire hose of news, and given how engaged you have to be, what are your techniques for keeping yourself even and calm and sane?
4:04 Speaker 03 Well, part of it is, I'm a 12-year veteran at CNN. So I've been in that chair when my party won, when my party lost, when my candidate had good nights, bad nights. And so, you know, it is familiar. So the first thing I always remember is if somebody were to cut off my hand, my hand is not me.
4:29 Speaker 03 If they were to cut off my arm, my arm is not me. I'm a soul, I've incarnated. I am here to have an experience where hopefully I can learn and be of good use. And then I'll go on to some other thing. And I think part of why people get so anxious, especially when they're on live television, they think something bad's gonna happen to them. They're gonna say something bad, they're gonna do something wrong, they're gonna get a fact wrong, and they're gonna get beat up, they're gonna get canceled. So if I had to reprogram my mind, I can't be canceled. I can be criticized, and that's okay. If I say something wrong, I should be criticized. If I say something that someone disagrees with, they should be able to disagree. That's called having a democracy, okay? Everybody gets to disagree with each other. If you can't disagree, it's called dictatorship.
5:13 Speaker 03 So disagreement is fine, criticism is fine, this whole culture around cancellation, cancellation. All that just adds to anxiety. And so there's a lot of spiritual beliefs that I hold that I kind of dial up. And then I have a little exercise I take myself through that I learned from a teacher of mine. And I ask myself the question, how does this situation occur for me? I'm gonna be talking to millions of people, it occurs to me that they gave me another uncomfortable chair. It occurs to me as, I like to do the next day, I'm a Cooper, but they put me three seats away from the night, which makes me feel like they don't love me as much as they used to love me. So then after I get through saying all that stuff to myself, I then just imagine putting all those thoughts in a box and moving the box to one side.
5:59 Speaker 03 Then I ask myself the question, how do I occur for myself? Uh, geez, I occur for myself as I didn't eat the right food today, too much caffeine, too much sugar. I occur for myself as not really as well-prepared as I thought I was gonna be. I didn't read everything I was supposed to read. And I just get all of those thoughts out, and I imagine myself putting that in a box. And I put that to one side. And then I ask myself the question, this is the key. What is my mission? What is my mission in life? And my mission in life is to help create a human civilization that works. That's my mission. I wanna create and cause a human civilization more at peace with itself, more at peace with the earth. That is my mission.
6:45 Speaker 03 Now, knowing that's my mission, how do I choose to be noticed? Not what am I gonna do? What am I gonna say? What am I going to achieve? Just how do I choose to be tonight? And so sometimes I just choose to be curious. Sometimes I choose to be clear. So I choose some way of being to anchor me. And by the time I remember that I'm just a soul, I can't be harmed. I'm at least at a being level, a good platform for any of the thinking or any of the talking. I have an amazing mentor named Randy, who was one of the main trainers for the Landmark Forum. And he's taken me under his wing and given me a lot of these mental techniques
7:29 Speaker 03 so that I can show up clear and I can show up helpful and useful and not just ego involved and crazy, which as you know, in television is the default setting.
7:41 Dan Harris? I mean, I had my head in my hands when you talked about the seating chart, having spent 21 years in network news. That shit like drove me crazy like I would really, to the viewer, this must seem insane. And yet, this is the type of shit that we are trained to obsess about. Where am I seating? What does that say about me? How much airtime did I get? And if you let that override your mission, you're fucked. You're not helping anybody. And what I just heard from you makes a lot of sense and it reminds me of one of the phrases I go back to all the time, which is my understanding of the Tibetan phrase for enlightenment. That roughly translates into this. A clearing away.
8:26 Dan Harris? And a bringing forth. And so what I heard you describe there is clearing away all of the ego crap.
8:32 Speaker 03 Yes.
8:33 Dan Harris? And bringing forth like, how can I be helpful? What's my job here on the planet?
8:37 Speaker 03 Yeah. Look, it took me a while. I used to over prepare at the mental level. If I were going to be on air for four minutes, I prepare for four hours.
8:48 Dan Harris? Yeah.
8:48 Speaker 03 And I would stammer, I would stutter, I would be so frustrated. And ultimately, what I learned is television is a conversational medium. I'll watch television, just try to get my brain in the right space, number one. Number two, I recognize that it's not all about me. I'm not usually in the host chair. I'm in the contributor chair. There are other people on that set. Some are conservatives, some are liberals, some are older, some are younger. They all have something to contribute. If I can focus on what is my note that I want to sound, what is the thing that I can contribute? Then, you know, what is my term, even if, as you say, they didn't put me next to Anderson, like, what are they trying to do, Jimmy?
9:30 Speaker 03 Anderson doesn't love me. I'm gonna get fired. I mean, you just go through all this crazy stuff. But when you get rid of all that stuff, then you could be more useful. Also, you know, the last thing I'll say about it is. I really deeply believe that we need each other.
9:48 Speaker 03 I'm a left winger, proud of it. But I need my right wing friends. I've never seen a bird fly with only a left wing. I've never seen a bird fly with only a right wing. We need each other. So when I'm there, after I've said what I have to say, I really try to listen. To really be present to what my conservative counterparts are saying. I don't want to listen with an already knowing mind, just listening to try to bat them down. I feel capable of doing that. Sometimes I have to do that. But I'm really trying to listen, like, what are they saying? What are they feeling? What are they not saying? So then when I respond, I'm responding, I'm not reacting. To try to stop them from spreading their lies, stop them from attacking our party,
10:33 Speaker 03 stop them. It's like, look, the viewer is very intelligent. The viewer is going to have lots of opportunities, get a lot of information. But in this exchange, if I can show some humanity, and if I can show some vulnerability, and if I can actually learn something, if I can be caught in the act of learning, I think that is the healthiest way for me to use my platform to demonstrate that you don't shrink by learning, you grow by learning.
10:58 Dan Harris? This is a delight, and I'm reading the comments, and you're getting nothing but love in the comments. One question that Kay McDavid asked in the comments that I think is really interesting, I'm getting this too, because I've been talking a lot publicly about the fact that it's good and thrilling and needed for us to keep an open mind. The Buddha, who's been a big influence on me, talked about being an analyst, not a dogmatist. People do push back on that. And Kay McDavid wrote in the comments here, are they though? Meaning like, whatever side you're on, is the other side listening? And if you are open-minded, are you somehow weaker because the other side isn't?
11:34 Speaker 03 Okay, I appreciate you so much, because this is a key question. And depending on where you come down on this question, it takes your whole life in a different direction. So I want to be very, very clear. I'm not empathetic, because I'm trying to change anyone else. I'm not kind, or open-hearted, or open-minded. I'm not doing that, because I think I can therefore get the other person to change. I can somehow fix the other person. No, that is not it at all. I'm not being kind and good when I am. To change someone else, I'm trying to make sure that other people don't change me.
12:19 Speaker 03 I don't want this acrimony and hatred in society to change me. I don't know if I can change it or not. That's not my business. I'm not God. I can't control other people. I can't make them do things, but I don't want to become what I'm fighting. I'm fighting intolerance. I don't therefore want to be intolerant. I'm fighting a sense of I'm better than you. I therefore don't want to be condescending. Right? And so now you say, well, man, what good is that? Here you are trying to be all good and other people try to be all bad. Well, in their mind, nobody's trying to be all bad. That's not what they're doing. Nobody is a villain in their own movie. Okay.
13:02 Speaker 03 In their mind, they have something they're trying to protect, something they're trying to preserve or some demon that they're running from or something they're projecting on me. So grace and gratitude are always the practice. Absolutely.
13:17 Dan Harris? We're getting a lot of questions about projecting into the future fretfully and thinking about, you know, on the left is all this talk about the end of democracy. On the right, there's all of this talk about really the same kind of fear that the left is restricting freedom of speech and all sorts of freedoms. So everybody has their projections into the future that can get quite dark. And Sharon McMahon, who's going to come on this live stream tomorrow, has said this too. You know, just do the next right thing. And I've gotten some pushback to that because people are like, well, you're a privileged guy and you don't have to worry, you know, maybe this administration isn't an acute threat to your home and safety in the way it is to mine. And so like, how do you balance looking forward into the future with not getting so swamped
14:02 Dan Harris? with anxiety that you can't do anything?
14:05 Speaker 03 Well, I have two responses that don't go together.
14:12 Speaker 03 So on the one hand, I do think we should actually think more about the future than we do. Because I do think that there's a lot of fixation with the past, certainly the black community. You know, there's a lot of talk about the past, black history. Don't forget our ancestors, don't forget our struggle, don't forget all the bad things that happened. Don't forget civil rights, don't forget slavery, don't forget the middle passage. And I think that's very important. I never deny the pain of the past. But don't let the pain have the last word either. Because tomorrow is more important than yesterday. And our ancestors didn't suffer the way that they did so that we could be miserable about their situation. They suffered so that we could be free of it. And so I think that the future is something we should think about more. But how do you think about it?
14:58 Speaker 03 See, the future has not been created yet. And you'll never live in the future anyway, you only live in the now. And so to me, the way we think about the future is to get very clear about the future we want to create. When some outside external force says it's going to give you a bad future that you don't want. As a mammal, you get very focused on that, you read that as a threat. And then your brain starts functioning very, very differently. In fact, your brain stops being creative. It stops being as elastic, you start thinking in fight, flight, freeze, appease, all the lower level forms. You're no different than that point than a scared rabbit. You do not want to think about the future from that place because then you'll be anxious
15:44 Speaker 03 and you'll come up with bad decisions and it'll be worse and worse and worse. You have to give yourself the permission to imagine Dr. King. Imagine Fannie Lou Hamer. Imagine Ella Jo Baker. Imagine the young John Lewis. Think about the threats they were facing. It wasn't some abstract threat that maybe Donald Trump will sign an executive order that then somebody in the FBI might then blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It was that sheriff might shoot me right now. That dog might bite me right now. That fire hose might blow my child down the street right now. It was a real and present danger. And how did they face that real and present danger?
16:25 Speaker 03 With a future.
16:28 Speaker 03 Dr. King didn't say, I have a complaint. He didn't say, I have a critique. He didn't say, I have somebody to criticize or cancel. He said, I have a dream. I have a dream. I have a positive future state. That frankly is better for me and my children and that sheriff and his children. I have a dream worth fighting for, but much more importantly, I can, in the present moment, be a stand for that future state. And by so doing, I can summon resources in myself that were not available to me a second ago when I was afraid. I can change the chemistry in my brain. I can change the length of my breath. I can change the posture of my shoulders.
17:14 Speaker 03 And so doing, I can inspire other people to do the same. And suddenly, there's resources flooding into this space. And it's in that unlikely moment where the resources flood in that miracles happen. Now, not always, not all circumstances. But it's a possibility. And that's what I think we have to get back to. We have abstract threats from abstract people we've never met over abstract devices, driving us nuts. And we are more afraid and less effective than people who were facing fire hoses half a century ago. To let the fear and let the pain make you bitter or better?
17:59 Speaker 03 That's the question. I'm a Democrat. We lost an election badly. Lost the House, lost the Senate, lost the White House, lost the Supreme Court, lost Silicon Valley, lost a bunch of the media. It's easy to be afraid. But the question is, in the face of that breakdown, how do you get to a breakthrough? How do you take something that could make you bitter and make you better? No pressure, no diamonds. No pressure, no diamonds. This is a very long answer to a very short question. I hope I'm not talking too long.
18:33 Dan Harris? That's great.
18:35 Speaker 03 But it's never the external condition.
18:39 Speaker 03 That gives you your internal state. The same hot water that makes a potato soft makes an egg hard. Same hot water. It's the internal condition that gives you the outcome. And so we have tremendous power because we have the power to choose how long our breath is. How far do we drop our diaphragm down when we take our next breath? We have the power to choose our own posture. When you put your shoulders back and stand up straight, it sends signals to your mind that I'm strong. And that begins to change your perception. And so I don't mind the bad times now, the way I used to. I used to hate the bad times. I don't mind them as much because for me, I know that no matter how much it hurts now,
19:25 Speaker 03 I'm going to look back on this moment. And if I am better, it will be because of how I dealt with the pain.
19:30 Dan Harris? Yeah. And I really appreciate you grounding in the historical analysis of the civil rights movement. And the phrase that came to mind when you were speaking, which comes out of that era. And there's a great documentary by this name too, Eyes on the Prize. And based in love, broadly understood, not as weak sentimentality, but as a fierce, gritty, steely persistence that's also calm and fed by giving a shit about yourself and your community and the country, rather than fear and anger. That's what can pull you forward, I think, more effectively, even if the fear is truly real, which in many cases it absolutely is.
20:09 Speaker 03 Especially when it is.
20:09 Dan Harris? Especially when it is.
20:11 Speaker 03 What I'm saying is that if you're going to go out the way that Dr. King did and face dogs and fire hoses and sheriffs or the equivalent thereof, there's an inner state that is more correlated with success. There's an interstate that's more correlated with failure. The opposite of fear is love. It can sound very high minded and that type of stuff. And by the way, a lot of days I don't live up to these values. A lot of days I'm miserable, I'm depressed, I'm sad, I'm mad. A lot of days I'm having personal problems. A lot of days, things don't go well for me. But at least I know what the values are that I'm falling short of. You know, if you don't know what the values are, it's harder.
20:55 Dan Harris? Well said. Really appreciate you and so do so many people in the comments. One person, L, asked if you would marry her. So there's a lot of positive responses. And so Van, just in closing here, I really want to thank you. It's such a pleasure to talk to you. Really appreciate it.
21:09 Speaker 03 Well, it's a big honor. It's a dream come true to get a chance to talk with you. I hope you can see some of your influence on how I'm, you know, living and talking and that type of stuff. And I hope we can talk again soon.
21:18 Dan Harris? Thank you very much. Really appreciate it. Have a great day.
21:21 Speaker 03 All right. Peace.
21:26 Dan Harris? Thanks again to Van Jones. It was great to meet him. Don't forget to sign up over at danharris.com so you can be part of future conversations like the one you just heard with Van. Again, twice monthly, at least, I do sessions where I guide a meditation and take your questions. You also, if you're a subscriber, get ad-free versions of this podcast. You get a cheat sheet with every episode that includes a transcript and a summary of the key learnings. You also get to comment on my posts. And most importantly, you get to join a really cool community filled with people who take this stuff seriously. Before I go, I just want to thank everybody who worked so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering
22:08 Dan Harris? is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our production manager. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.
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