In this episode of the podcast, we talk about how to get your shit together in the legal world, and why you should never, ever go to a lawyer. We also talk about the benefits of using a time machine, and how you can make a will, a life insurance policy, a power of attorney, or a will or a living trust without ever having to go in to a fancy law firm. We're sponsored by Squarespace and LegalZoom, and we're also brought to you by Onnit. Onnit is a company that helps you create your own website, business, and social media presence. Onnit's mission is to help you create a better life for yourself and your family by helping you become the best version of yourself. And for special savings, use the code "ROGAN" at checkout to get 10% off your first purchase. Protect your family at legalzoom.co/ProtectYourFuture at Legalzoom and save yourself a bunch of cash! and for a chance to win a free trial with ROGAN.co, use code "JOE" and save 10% on your first legal bill! We'll be giving you $10 and you'll get a FREE trial and a discount of $10 when you enter the code: "Rogan" and you get $5.00 off your purchase. and a FREE product from Onnit will give you 20% off the entire bill. we're giving you a total of $50! and we'll give you 5% off of Onnitnit.co.co is giving you an ad-free version of the Onnit website, and they'll get you a FREE shipping on your purchase of $99.00 and you can use the promo code "Onnit will get you an extra $5,000, plus a FREE PROMO.00, plus they'll also give you an additional $10% OFF your first month, and a free shipping offer when you sign up to Onnit gets you $25, and you receive $10, you get an ad, they'll receive $15, they also get 5, they're also get $20, they get $50, they will also get a discount on the deal, and there's a discount, you'll also get an extra 5,000 total, they receive 5,00, they have a FREE FIBER, AND you get a promo code, AND they also receive a FREE PODCAST AND a FREE TALKING PRODUCED, AND FREE PROGAN!
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00:07:47.000I mean, don't you have to have faith in something to sort of – just the idea of a spirit?
00:07:54.000If you're going to talk about spirituality or a spirit, like, what are you really talking about?
00:08:00.000Yeah, well, I'm definitely not talking about a spirit or a soul or anything that can float off the brain at death.
00:08:06.000I think spirituality is one of these words that we just have to reclaim because there's really not an English equivalent for this area of inquiry.
00:08:45.000So this is a big hang-up for atheists and secularists and skeptics.
00:08:51.000This idea that spirituality is a word...
00:08:54.000That means magic and superstition by definition and by its etymology, because it goes back to the Latin spiritus, which comes from the Greek pneuma, meaning breath, and it's this idea that the spirit is, you're asserting some kind of dualism,
00:09:10.000the spirit that's internal to the body that is not produced by the body, that can leave the body at death.
00:09:16.000And it's true that most people, most of the time, Have some quasi-mystical, spooky association with the concept of spirituality.
00:09:26.000And it's obviously linked up with all the stuff that people believe about crystals and angels and all the other stuff that I don't want to be entangled with.
00:09:33.000But I just think there's no word for...
00:09:38.000If you're going to take seriously the project of becoming like Jesus, whoever he was, or becoming someone who could actually love his neighbor as his self, or...
00:09:48.000Becoming like the Buddha or just exploring the furthest reaches of positive human experience through meditation or psychedelics or some other methodology that really perturbs consciousness.
00:10:03.000There's no word for that endeavor, and to call it positive psychology or happiness or well-being, most people think they know what you mean when you use words like happiness and well-being and love, and yet they have no idea how rarefied things can get if you take the right drug,
00:10:22.000if you spend three months in silence doing nothing but meditate.
00:10:28.000There are many layers to this thing, and so I've tried to reclaim the term spirituality.
00:10:34.000Some guy I was talking to recently on a podcast drew an analogy to the word evil, which is another word that people are uncomfortable with, because once we understand things like psychopathy and other ways in which the human mind can malfunction, It seems that there's no rational basis to be talking about evil,
00:10:53.000I think we need to reclaim the word evil for a secular, rational conversation because we need a big word for really the worst of human impulses.
00:11:04.000Evil and good, they don't seem to be dependent upon a religious belief.
00:11:10.000I think evil is just what affects a gang of people in a negative way, or one individual.
00:11:38.000Once you understand what we're calling evil at the level of the brain, once you find a gene for a dopamine receptor that correlates with psychopathy...
00:11:54.000Then you begin to say, well, this is all just, we're talking about biology, we're talking about bad luck, we're talking about illness, and then what does evil name in that case?
00:12:19.000Say if you are in Gaza and a bomb has hit your apartment building and killed your family and you've made it your goal to kill as many Jews before they take you out.
00:13:33.000I mean, this guy was just as pure a psychopath as you're ever going to find.
00:13:38.000This is someone who, when he would see a wedding in progress in Baghdad, he and his thugs would descend and rape the bride and sometimes torture and kill the bride.
00:13:51.000So when you hear that, that's not the same thing as hearing that somebody's house got bombed and their family died and then they become committed to harming their aggressors or people like their aggressors.
00:14:06.000But yeah, so anyway, just to back up and end that point, I feel like I'm embarrassed, frankly, by the term spirituality, too.
00:14:15.000I think it's just not a great word given its history, and yet the only similar words that do a similar job are even spooky or something like mysticism, which is just even more I use the word contemplative to name any practice that would be designed to discover what consciousness is like,
00:14:42.000independent of just thinking about it.
00:14:45.000Yeah, I think we need a new word, right?
00:14:47.000We need a new word for being a positive person.
00:14:48.000But the thing is, quoting new words is also a dead end to me.
00:15:55.000This is really, in my view, a completion of the project I started with The End of Faith where I started by just noticing how divisive and unnecessary and ultimately dangerous our incompatible religious ideas are and how we need to have a secular conversation about the problem there.
00:16:17.000First, I started talking about just how there's, by definition, a zero-sum conflict between science and religion because there's a zero-sum conflict between believing things for good reasons and believing things for bad reasons.
00:16:32.000And the people who are satisfied with bad reasons and willing to defend their bad reasons with violence or even with policy are hostile to the project of science.
00:16:43.000So once you've criticized that problem and notice that these books can't possibly be infallible given all that we know through science and notice that they can't possibly be infallible given that they're all mutually contradictory, so Christians and Muslims can't both be right,
00:17:00.000Then you have to grapple with the fact that there's all these good things that people think they're getting out of religion and they want to find some other way to get those things.
00:17:07.000And the first on the list is ethics and morality.
00:17:10.000And so the moral landscape was my argument that we can have a strong conception of ethics without believing any bullshit.
00:17:16.000And this is my effort to open up a conversation on the topic of spirituality, which is the center of spirituality for me is the phenomenon of self-transcendence, just the fact that it's possible to lose your sense of self,
00:17:32.000lose your sense of being an ego, lose your sense that you're a rider on the horse of consciousness riding around inside your head, not exactly I think?
00:18:04.000And most people most of the time feel that they're in their heads and that they're a subject and they're a thinker of thoughts and that there's a thinker in addition to the thoughts themselves.
00:18:15.000They don't feel that there's thoughts arising in consciousness, but most people feel that They are the thinker that is authoring these thoughts.
00:18:22.000And this actually goes right to the issue of free will as well, because the feeling of having free will is the other side of the coin of the feeling of being a self, being a thinker, being an author of actions and intentions.
00:18:37.000So I'm arguing that it's possible to cut through that illusion and that there are good reasons to believe that it's an illusion based on just the underlying neurology and what we know about causality and what we know about the brain.
00:18:51.000But you can actually penetrate this illusion subjectively and that the spirituality is the act of cutting through it subjectively and no longer feeling that you're an ego riding around inside a bag of skin.
00:19:04.000And that one's life improves in many obvious ways once one is able to cut through that illusion.
00:19:14.000And so this is kind of a sustained argument for...
00:19:33.000It's a very complex situation as well, isn't it?
00:19:36.000When you talk about the concept of self and that the consciousness is inside the body.
00:19:42.000Because it's also dependent upon how the body feels.
00:19:46.000Like, the body feels bad, the consciousness is affected.
00:19:49.000Your thought process is affected when you're sick.
00:19:52.000Your thought process is affected if you're stressed out, if you're angry, if you're not getting exercise, if you're not getting good nutrition, if you're, you know, any...
00:20:00.000The sense of non-wellness in the body is reflected on the way the person thinks.
00:20:05.000It makes it more difficult to think with clarity.
00:20:08.000So it's not as simple as like we're riding in this thing, but this thing also affects the way, you know, you, when you think of you, who you are.
00:20:21.000If you presented me with the same situations, the same dilemmas and problems pre- and post-workout, I'd probably have a pretty different reaction to them.
00:20:34.000All the variables aren't even within your own body.
00:20:36.000You're different in different relationships and different situations.
00:20:39.000You walk into a restaurant and you're talking to the host and just the...
00:20:44.000The frame around that interaction, your expectation that you're in a restaurant talking to someone who wants to seat you, that changes just the way you approach human interaction.
00:20:55.000And if you had a different frame, things would be different.
00:21:00.000And it's almost true to say that different selves are called forth in those different situations, where you just can't be the same self with certain people.
00:22:19.000It's very complicated, and a lot of it is dependent, our own consciousness is dependent upon interacting with other consciousness, which is one of the reasons why solitary confinement is such a horrible torture to people.
00:22:31.000Like when you separate a person's mind indefinitely from any other mind, from any other interactions, it freaks people out.
00:22:42.000It's interesting you raised the point of solitary confinement because the experience that has got me to write this book is very much like solitary confinement.
00:22:51.000I went on meditation retreats, mostly in my 20s, I think?
00:23:13.000And you're there on your own volition, but this is many people's worst nightmare, and it would have been, at one point in my life, it would have been my worst nightmare.
00:23:21.000I went on a, it's actually where I start the book, I went on an Outward Bound when I was 16, which is a wilderness program in the mountains of Colorado, and it was this 23-day Well, uh, course, which culminated in, in this ritual they called a solo where they put us,
00:23:39.000they parked us all next on the, on the outskirts of a mountain lake, uh, for three days and three nights and they, there was no food.
00:23:47.000So we fasted and they were just told to just contemplate the universe.
00:24:57.000And then when I came off of this after three days and learned that some of the other people on the course loved it and just felt completely transformed by having three days with nothing to do, I just had no idea what to make of this.
00:25:12.000How could that have not been anything but a torture for these people?
00:25:17.000And so then I was 16 there, and it took me a few more years to see a kind of path forward and become interested in these things.
00:25:27.000But I eventually went on to spend almost two years on silent retreats in my 20s.
00:25:35.000In circumstances of isolation and sensory deprivation, far worse than that mountain solo, because I wasn't in an especially beautiful place.
00:25:49.000Your life is entirely dependent upon your mind.
00:25:57.000Now, it's not to say that external circumstances don't matter, but I mean, there are people who can be genuinely happy and at peace in terrible circumstances, objectively terrible circumstances, and there are people who have everything who are miserable.
00:26:11.000And so the fact that the delta is that big and can be that uncoupled from external circumstances...
00:26:20.000It shows you that you are almost entirely dependent on the character of your thoughts, really.
00:26:29.000The mechanism, which I go into at great length in the book, is that the difference is really the difference between being lost in thought and recognizing thoughts for what they are.
00:26:40.000Most people are thinking every moment of their lives And aren't aware of it.
00:26:44.000They may have an abstract idea that they're thinking every moment of their lives, but they're not aware of the automaticity and the relentlessness of this conversation they're having with themselves.
00:26:58.000To be identified with the next thought that arises in consciousness is to be its mere prisoner.
00:27:04.000You are then identical to whatever subjective state, emotional state, mood state it dictates.
00:27:13.000So if it's a self-critical thought or a fearful thought or a hateful thought, That is the character of your consciousness in that moment.
00:27:21.000And until you can break that spell, until you can see thoughts as thoughts just arising and passing away in consciousness, you see no alternative.
00:27:30.000There's just no basis for an alternative.
00:27:32.000And then you're as miserable as your thoughts demand.
00:27:34.000Was part of what was really fucking with you when you were 16 years old the fact that you were 16?
00:27:40.000That's how old you were when you were up there on the mountain?
00:28:13.000If I knew that I was going to do that, I probably would find some pretty deep enjoyment in it.
00:28:16.000Because I have so many life experiences to draw on, so many thoughts in my mind that would probably benefit from having that time just with nothing coming in but nature.
00:28:28.000Being 16 might have had a little to do with it because...
00:28:31.000Almost everyone else on the course was maybe a decade older, and they had a better time.
00:28:37.000But no, I think there are 16-year-olds who would have had a fine time, and there are definitely 20-year-olds and 30-year-olds and 40-year-olds who would be miserable in that circumstance, because I see them on meditation retreats.
00:28:50.000And on my own retreats, I've experienced...
00:28:55.000You know, deep feelings of loneliness and sadness.
00:28:58.000It's hard to leave everyone you love for three months.
00:29:02.000At whatever age, 25, I guess I was 30 the last time I sat.
00:29:07.000I was exactly 30 the last time I sat a three-month retreat.
00:30:11.000Eventually you become concentrated on, in this case, the practice I was doing is called Vipassana, which is mindfulness meditation.
00:30:19.000And The practice there is just to become very keenly aware of, you start with the breath as an object of meditation, but once you get a little concentration, you open it up to everything.
00:30:30.000So sounds and sensations and even thoughts themselves become objects of meditation where you're just noticing whatever arises in consciousness.
00:30:39.000But the difference between noticing a thought arise and pass away and being lost in thought is huge.
00:31:33.000It doesn't have a real implication so much for how you feel.
00:31:43.000It's easy to see, or in this case hear, that it is just an appearance in consciousness.
00:31:49.000It comes and it goes, it starts and it stops, and it's all sort of in plain view.
00:31:54.000But with your own thoughts, with your own voice, It sneaks up on you in a way that is, and even to use the word you in this case is a little misleading, but it colors consciousness and trims it down in such a way that it just feels like you.
00:32:13.000The feeling of being a self, the feeling that we call I, the feeling of being an ego in the head, Is what it feels like to be thinking without knowing that you're thinking.
00:32:26.000It's the feeling of this next thought capturing consciousness.
00:32:31.000So when you say that, thoughts, you are identical to thoughts.
00:32:34.000So if you're thinking something really fucked up, like I'm fat, I'm a loser, I'm always going to be a loser, like that is identical to who you are because you are sort of framing yourself in this thought.
00:32:45.000These thoughts that you're carrying around in your mind, they are what's...
00:32:50.000If those thoughts are in the forefront of your consciousness, if they identify you, you are that.
00:32:56.000You are those thoughts and you are identical to that idea.
00:32:59.000Yeah, and they're driving behavior, and they're driving emotion, and they're driving each subsequent train of thought.
00:33:05.000So it's determining the future expressions of your consciousness and your body as well.
00:33:13.000And again, I'm not separating the mind from the body here.
00:33:17.000We could talk about this in terms of events in the brain as well, but it's much easier to talk about it in terms of our first-person experience as thoughts and moods.
00:34:42.000I'll try to get it out of my head, but...
00:34:45.000I rationalize it by saying the only reason why I've gotten so good is because of this crazy obsession that I have with getting it correct and that when things go awry or when I go down a bad path, it doesn't quite pan out and then I have to sort of restart the whole conversation on stage.
00:35:03.000That uncomfortable moment and then the subsequent uncomfortable recollection of that moment is the very motivation that's led me to be a good stand-up in the first place.
00:35:15.000But fuck, man, when I'm eating dinner after a show and I just flub one word that fucks up a joke, I'll be in the middle of eating pancakes going, shit!
00:35:39.000Well, that's an interesting moment because there's a moment before the thought has arisen, right, where you have not yet remembered the flopped line.
00:35:50.000So you're just cutting into your dinner.
00:35:51.000And then it's an image or part image, part sentence, something.
00:35:57.000There's some expression of thought that arises in consciousness.
00:36:08.000It's a difference between watching a movie and being totally lost in the movie, forgetting that you're sitting in a room with a bunch of other people looking at light on a wall.
00:36:19.000There's a difference between that and actually just seeing the screen, the light on the wall, hearing the sound of the projector, seeing the artifice.
00:36:28.000And it's possible to see thoughts just as essentially like a play of light on the wall.
00:36:42.000It's almost like playing a video game where you can now not get killed in the same spot over and over again.
00:36:50.000It's like not losing in the same boss fight over and over again, yet we lose in that same fight a thousand times a day.
00:36:58.000But when you can actually see thoughts for what they are, so the next time you flub a line and the next time you recall it, It's possible, and again, it takes a certain degree of concentration to be able to do this, but concentration becomes kind of a native capacity at a certain point.
00:38:39.000And then you can selectively be as uptight and neurotic as you want, but it gives you a kind of freedom to pick your priorities in a way, rather than be captured by just whatever the next thought happens to be.
00:38:56.000I've also found, for me personally, that discipline and diligence are the best mitigating factors for dealing with neurotic thoughts.
00:39:06.000Like if I have an issue, one of the big issues, if I've ever had anything go wrong, was that I didn't work hard enough.
00:39:14.000So if I know for a fact that I worked as hard as I could, like back when I was competing, that was a huge issue.
00:39:23.000Because, look, whenever you're involved in a competition as terrifying as a full-contact martial arts tournament where concussions are not just likely, but someone, and there's 100 people fighting in this tournament, someone's going to sleep.
00:39:45.000If I trained really hard, if I know I did everything that I could, I ate right, I slept right, I put in all the practice, I worked on all my weaknesses, I didn't neglect my strengths, I was much less nervous.
00:39:59.000Much less nervous and much better at dealing with losses.
00:42:06.000When something like this happens to you, just think of how many times you repeat it to yourself.
00:42:12.000It's like you tell yourself the same story 15 times a minute for hours, and it doesn't strike you as insane, but it actually is insane.
00:42:23.000If your thoughts could be broadcast on a monitor for other people to hear, And they could hear you repeat yourself over and over and over again.
00:42:33.000It would seem starkly crazy, and yet it seems normal.
00:42:37.000It's kind of like the dream state where you go to sleep, and you're in your bed, and everything's obeying the laws of physics, and then in the next conscious moment, you are at a party somewhere, talking to someone who you know is dead,
00:42:53.000and saying, oh, I can't believe you're alive now.
00:42:56.000And then, you know, there's a gorilla in the room, and none of this strikes you as crazy.
00:43:02.000I mean, the craziest thing about dreams is that the mind seems to just accept them, accept these changes, one after the other, without any sense that there should be continuity.
00:43:14.000And this is due, there's no question that this is due to...
00:43:18.000The diminished activity of the frontal lobes during REM sleep.
00:43:21.000Our truth, our reality testing hardware has come largely offline during dreams.
00:43:26.000But there's something analogous happening when we're just thinking in the waking state because thoughts don't make much sense.
00:43:37.000We don't notice how crazy the repetition is, and we would notice it if we were talking to each other.
00:43:42.000If I was telling you the same thing 15 times in a row, Without honoring your expectation that I might move on to another topic, you would notice and I would notice, right?
00:43:54.000And the other thing that's crazy about thoughts is that much of our thinking, certainly our linguistic thoughts, It's structured as though it were a conversation, and we play both sides of the conversation.
00:44:10.000So I'll sit down here, and I came in, I sat down, and I brought you a book, and I wanted to sign the book, and I see this pen over here, and I think, oh good, there's a pen over there.
00:44:24.000Now, I can see that there's a pen over there.
00:44:27.000So why do I have to say there's a pen over there?
00:44:39.000And yet, our subjectivity is continually just, it is discursive in that way, and there's just voices talking to each other.
00:44:52.000Not only are there not two of us in there, there's not even one of us in there.
00:44:57.000The thinker isn't there, but we seem to have two of them.
00:45:00.000It's like we're constantly talking to mommy and daddy.
00:45:04.000In fact, that could be the way this conversation gets internalized because I can see it in my kids now.
00:45:12.000I'll listen to my daughter playing by herself And she's talking to herself out loud in the way that, you know, you'd have to be sort of crazy to do as an adult, but as a kid, you're just, you know, you're just talking out loud.
00:45:24.000And eventually, we all learn to internalize that conversation.
00:45:29.000And when you don't, when people who can't internalize it, well, they're the crazy ones.
00:45:33.000You know, the person who's walking down the street...
00:45:35.000Just saying, oh good, there's a pen over there.
00:45:43.000I can't believe I should have checked the traffic before I left.
00:45:46.000These are the kinds of thoughts I could think silently in the space of my mind, and it wouldn't be starkly crazy, but to verbalize them, then you're a madman.
00:45:56.000And that difference between letting them out and just knowing to keep your mouth shut It captures a large part of the difference between being a proper lunatic and a normal person.
00:46:11.000But what I argue in this book is that normal isn't good enough.
00:46:16.000The normal state of consciousness wherein you are just chased out of bed every morning by your thoughts and you think, think, think, think, think every waking moment until you fall helplessly asleep at night That's not necessarily a happy place to be,
00:46:37.000The goal is not to have a mind without thoughts.
00:46:41.000We need thoughts, and everything we do as human beings For the most part, it requires thought to get off the ground.
00:46:50.000So our relationships are based on thoughts and every public institution and science.
00:46:56.000This conversation we have with ourselves and with others is based on language and concepts that are mediated by language.
00:47:10.000So you need thought, but the difference is between thinking and knowing that you're thinking, really knowing that you're thinking in the moment of thoughts arising, Or being lost in thought.
00:47:25.000And then when you're lost in thought, it doesn't really matter what the content is.
00:47:30.000You're still confused about who and what you are.
00:47:34.000I mean, you could be thinking about the most profound things in science or in ethics or whatever it is.
00:47:41.000But if you're just thinking without knowing that you're thinking, there is a kind of delusion there.
00:47:46.000It is analogous to the dream state, in a way, where you're just It's not clear to you what's going on.
00:47:53.000You think you're the thinker of the thoughts.
00:47:56.000You think you're authoring your thoughts in a way that you're not.
00:48:03.000Isn't it fascinating that even in higher education, there's very little emphasis whatsoever on controlling thoughts.
00:48:10.000On managing thoughts, on managing your consciousness, on figuring out how to best analyze and approach your own thinking process because if you really think about it like what we were talking about earlier about getting obsessed about something, about something like getting into your mind and rolling over you,
00:48:29.000like that kind of process and that kind of runaway thought process can actually really negatively affect your life.
00:49:10.000It's not a common thinking thought management process?
00:49:13.000I mean, what is it that leads I mean, someone like you, who's had a higher education, goes on, writes a book like this, then it becomes a part of whoever's reading it, a part of their mindset.
00:49:26.000But if they don't have that, if they don't have that book, I mean, they literally have to be introduced into someone outside of the realm of high school, college, even master's, PhD.
00:49:36.000Very few people that go through that entire process are involved in a comprehensive analysis of how to think.
00:49:43.000Yeah, well, mindfulness is actually increasingly current now, and it's a bit of a, in some sense, a fad, but I think it's probably an enduring one because it's so useful.
00:49:57.000So mindfulness is now more and more being taught in schools, and actually my wife has even taught it in a public school.
00:51:30.000It makes perfect sense because if you want to know what it's like to be you, if you want to have a very clear look at the nature of your own consciousness, it just makes sense to pay attention.
00:51:39.000And all you're doing is paying attention.
00:51:40.000And there's no conceptual overlay that you're applying that's monkeying with your experience to try to change it.
00:51:49.000So the goal in that case isn't even...
00:51:52.000You're not even trying to have a better experience, although you can covertly hope to have a better experience and sort of corrupt the process that way.
00:51:59.000You're really just trying to witness just exactly what the character of your experience is in each moment.
00:52:07.000So you're just noticing unpleasant experience without pushing it away and noticing pleasant experience without trying to grab at it.
00:52:14.000And it just so happens that once you develop that kind of dispassionate attention to experience...
00:52:21.000Then certain very pleasant experiences start to come along because so much of what's unpleasant about our minds is our resistance to pain and our grasping at pleasure and our struggle with experience.
00:52:36.000So just paying attention, really just openly and without any agenda, for the period of time you can do that, you really have surrendered the struggle.
00:52:47.000And a tremendous relief just comes with that process.
00:52:51.000So yeah, it's becoming something that they are teaching in schools at various ages, and I think the one downside to the way mindfulness is being marketed at this point is that it's It's really being thought of as almost an esoteric version of an executive stress ball where it's a tool to optimize performance and it's the kind of thing that a CEO wants to have
00:53:28.000It's much more like, and it's traditionally intended to be much more like the Large Hadron Collider, which is to say a real tool for discovering something fundamental, in this case about the nature of the mind and the purpose of mindfulness.
00:53:43.000Is to discover that this self we think we have is an illusion and that the real breakthrough is not just a little less stress or a little more concentration or an ability to direct your mind where you want it to go.
00:54:04.000So if you want to stay on a diet but you're tempted by the chocolate chip cookie You can just get back on your diet without eating the cookie.
00:54:11.000I mean, that's one way in which you could use mindfulness, but that's not really the center of the bullseye.
00:54:16.000The center of the bullseye is to cut through this illusion that we're all riding around in our heads as a ghost in the machine.
00:54:26.000So we're not riding around in our heads?
00:55:58.000So anyway, this is Douglas Harding's metaphor for this insight into selflessness, but it does sort of capture the flavor of it.
00:56:07.000It gets your attention moving in the right direction, because if you look for the center of experience, and this feeling of being a self behind the eyes is this feeling of there being a center to experience.
00:56:19.000It's not just that It's not that we feel identical to experience.
00:56:23.000We feel like we are having an experience.
00:56:25.000We feel like we are appropriating the experience, and we're doing it from a point behind our eyes.
00:56:31.000We're doing it from this sense of being a subject.
00:56:34.000But if you look for the subject, That sense of a center can drop out.
00:56:41.000And that's very much like the kind of flow states or the unified full immersion experiences that people have when you're paying attention to something so closely that you lose yourself in it.
00:56:58.000Whether it's surfing or martial arts or sex or whatever it is.
00:57:03.000There can be these experiences where For a moment, there's no distance between...
00:57:09.000You're no longer looking over your own shoulder having the experience.
00:59:18.000No, it's just the zone can be found anywhere.
00:59:21.000It's just people tend to only find it...
00:59:24.000When there is this mastery component and there's no more error correction.
00:59:29.000So the problem that we all have when we're tuning up a skill is that we're constantly making mistakes and becoming incrementally more aware of the kinds of mistakes we're making and correcting for them and getting better at correcting for them.
00:59:42.000And there's all the self-talk of what we should have done, what we should do, what we're hoping to do in the next moment.
00:59:49.000And flow states come when you get good enough, for the most part, so that all of that goes away.
00:59:59.000There are no more thoughts in your backswing.
01:00:02.000You take the club away and you're not thinking 15 different things as you're trying to hit the little white ball.
01:00:08.000You're just hitting the little white ball because you've just grooved your swing so much that you just have no issue hitting the little white ball.
01:00:14.000And so jujitsu has its analogous component where you're not still trying to remember what you should be doing when somebody is in the middle of passing your guard.
01:00:25.000It's like you're just part of the whole motion that is...
01:00:29.000You're not having to make these conscious calculations.
01:00:37.000But you could be just as surrendered to the present moment and free of self-talk, free of neurotic expectations about what's going to happen in the next instant or what you wish didn't happen a moment ago.
01:01:15.000But people find these experiences really addictive and not addictive in a biological sense, but they're just really captivating and they orient their lives around having these experiences.
01:01:29.000And the really dangerous thing is that people traditionally have found these experiences in the context of religion and in the context of incredibly divisive beliefs about I think?
01:02:03.000They seem to be the only explanation for the meaning of these experiences.
01:02:08.000If you're a Christian and you feel absolute rapture and self-transcendence while praying to Jesus, well, of course, that's going to be a data point, if not the only needed data point, in favor of the story that Jesus is the Son of God and he's taking an interest in your soul.
01:02:25.000And if you're a jihadist feeling that, just as you get off the bus in Syria and you meet your recruiters at ISIS, it's going to prove to you that this is, of course, this is Allah's will and you're fighting the one true cosmic battle against the evil infidels.
01:02:45.000There's no question that these guys feel these very positive states of mind.
01:02:49.000They're not all running around depressed.
01:02:55.000And then there are people who have peak experiences at Burning Man, you know, and have a totally different interpretation of their significance.
01:03:02.000And what I'm arguing is that the only thing peak experiences prove is that...
01:03:09.000They can't prove that all of these incompatible doctrines are true because they can't all be true.
01:03:15.000The jihadist and the fundamentalist Christian can't both be right.
01:03:20.000And not only are they not the only people who have these experiences, there are Hindus who have experiences that are identical but are in the context of a totally different doctrine, and atheists like myself have these experiences.
01:03:35.000These experiences can't prove that any of these doctrines, these provincial doctrines, are true.
01:03:42.000What they prove is that the human mind is susceptible to altered states of consciousness, and some of which are really compelling and worth having, and yet we just have to understand them in a secular and universal sense, in a non-sectarian sense.
01:03:58.000Is that what's going on when Pentecostals speak in tongues?
01:06:28.000It would be interesting if it weren't.
01:06:31.000It's possible that somebody could produce a performance like this where it would have linguistic structure and then people would just be spinning out trying to figure out how this is...
01:07:01.000Develops a Boston accent, although people around them have that Boston accent.
01:07:04.000But when I watched this guy, and then I watched Robert Tilden, who's one of my favorite bullshit artists that's on late night religious television.
01:07:13.000He's one of those guys that Jesus wants you to see.
01:08:42.000The only way to do it is to, you know, it would be so unethical because you get these poor people believing that they're really talking in tongues just so you can listen to their lingo.
01:08:52.000It's interesting to know where the line between self-deception and conscious fraud is placed.
01:09:00.000It's like those fake martial arts videos we watched last time I was here, you know, the guys who were taking those dives with their Aikido master.
01:09:36.000That kind of brings us back to what we were talking about earlier, in that when you're around certain people, you're a different person.
01:09:45.000In that when these guys are around all these people that really believe that they have some divine ability to control other people's bodies with air.
01:09:55.000Like, there's something about doing that over and over again and reinforcing that belief.
01:10:00.000That it seems to be like they are a master when they're around those people.
01:10:05.000But then when you put them around someone who knows nothing about them and treats them just as an opponent in a martial arts contest and head kicks them, like all of a sudden...
01:10:22.000Now I'm just a guy getting the fuck beat out of me by some other martial artist and this is a terrible, terrible scenario I found myself in.
01:10:29.000That's what's so great about real martial arts.
01:10:32.000It's like science in that you're running an experiment that is as close to a real experiment as you can run without anyone getting killed.
01:10:44.000And that's what the UFC was in the beginning.
01:10:46.000The UFC was just this absolutely enthralling science experiment because no one knew what was going to happen.
01:10:54.000What's going to happen when you throw a boxer in with a karate legend, with a sumo wrestler, and just no rounds, and just let the clock run?
01:11:05.000So, obviously, now I'm telling you your own business, but now everyone has gone to school on everyone else's style and everyone knows enough jujitsu on the ground to be able to nullify the advantage of jujitsu.
01:11:20.000And so now everyone has kind of converged on...
01:11:23.000The common universal toolkit combatively that you want.
01:11:30.000The experiment has basically played out.
01:11:33.000Now everyone's going in with the same expectation that when you're standing up, you want to be able to kick and punch like a kickboxer or like a Muay Thai fighter or somebody who really knows how to kick and punch.
01:11:44.000And when you're vertically grappling, you really do want to be like Randy Couture or somebody who's got real clinch and pummeling skills and Greco skills.
01:11:56.000And then when you go to the ground, you want BJJ or Sambo or something that gives you those skills on the ground.
01:12:02.000And so there's not that many surprises left in store.
01:12:10.000There's variables, which is interesting because martial arts in many ways really is a scientific endeavor because so much of it involves leverage and force and physics, but also the introduction of new variables that haven't been practiced.
01:12:28.000And when you introduce new variables, like new kicking techniques especially.
01:13:19.000Terry Edom, when he first knocked out, or Edson Barboza, when he first knocked out Terry Edom with a wheel kick to the head.
01:13:25.000That was in 2001. I want to say 12 or 13. So there had been no wheel kick knockouts for the decade plus of the UFC. Now, do you think that...
01:13:37.000Do you think that's somewhat an artifact of everyone's expectations being so trained now that given all of the fights that have happened and how...
01:13:49.000All these traditional techniques have been discarded that now no one is expecting anything like a traditional kick so that it's almost like you threw a wheel kick in a boxing match where you've got two boxers and one has absolutely no expectation that kicks are even going to be involved and all of a sudden you wheel kick them.
01:14:08.000Is it just the sheer novelty or is there something else going on that once you have...
01:14:16.000All of the other skills that are the real foundation for being a good MMA fighter, then you can experiment with goofy traditional moves that wouldn't have worked if you were a pure traditional martial artist.
01:14:30.000Mary, do you think if you brought in just a pure traditionalist who was like one of the guys who showed up at UFC 1, Right.
01:14:56.000I think it's pattern recognition, and not very many people who are martial artists in the sense of mixed martial artists fighting in the UFC can actually do those techniques.
01:15:08.000I've worked out with high-level guys, like guys who are fighting for titles, guys who are top ten ranked, and I've worked out with them, showing them martial arts techniques like taekwondo techniques, and they don't know how to do them.
01:16:02.000So when I'm teaching them wheel kicks, you know, they're like, their body's all awkward, they're throwing it weird.
01:16:06.000They don't have, like, the fluidity that you need like an Edson Barboza has, where, you know, he's standing there and then, boom, and he throws it.
01:16:13.000If you're not used to sparring with a guy like that, you don't know that that can come at you like that, you're used to a certain distance as well.
01:16:19.000The distance between where a person could land a leg kick and a person could land a wheel kick is a little bit different.
01:16:26.000Yeah, so you don't know you're in range.
01:16:30.000Some kicks like spinning back kicks are a little bit easier than a wheel kick.
01:16:33.000The wheel kick requires a lot of flexibility.
01:16:35.000So you might anticipate a spinning back kick and then the kick comes up high and you only have a millisecond.
01:16:41.000You have the reaction time and action time are two very different things.
01:16:46.000The reason why a sucker punch works is a punch The action time is like a hundredth of a second, but reaction time is like a tenth of a second.
01:16:55.000So the amount of time that it takes for someone to punch you in the face and the amount of time it takes to go, oh, this fucking guy's going to punch me in the face.
01:17:07.000And that's why actually this opens up to, I don't know if we want to go recklessly in this direction, but this opens up into the ethics of uses of violence and just kind of use of force philosophy.
01:17:18.000And you have something like, you know, what's been going on in Ferguson, you know, around this shooting.
01:17:24.000People have erroneous assumptions about how violence unfolds.
01:17:28.000As you're saying, if you're deciding to block or to defend yourself once a guy has thrown his sucker punch, you are nine times out of ten too late.
01:17:44.000And I'm not making any claims about knowing what happened in Ferguson with the shooting.
01:17:50.000I mean, it could be every inch the homicide that many people seem to think it was.
01:17:54.000But the reality is that cops are having to work in a universe where they do a traffic stop and someone pulls out a gun and shoots them in the face, right?
01:18:07.000But that is a possibility no matter what you look like, no matter what kind of car you're driving.
01:18:12.000And so you see the cops are incredibly on edge.
01:18:15.000You see them unbuckling the strap on their holster as they just walk up to give you a ticket.
01:18:21.000But it's because they don't have the luxury of time.
01:18:26.000They can't wait to see you produce a gun and then they say, okay, now my lethal force option is beyond reproach.
01:18:32.000And so, I mean, the only mode to be in with a cop, no matter how much of an asshole he might be, is to be compliant, and then you sue him later.
01:18:42.000In the middle of negotiating with a cop, the...
01:18:49.000No matter how unjustified the arrest may seem, that's not the time to be telling him he's an asshole or talking about how you are such a good guy and this is a violation of your civil rights.
01:19:04.000You do what he says and then sue the cops later.
01:19:08.000The filter he is seeing everything through is...
01:19:14.000The sheer fact that a cop has a gun on his belt makes any contact a potential lethal encounter for him.
01:21:17.000For him to stop beating this cop up, but he's beating the fuck out of her, and she's unconscious, and he takes her gun, and I don't know how it ended.
01:21:23.000I shut it off, but there's a lot of those.
01:21:26.000You can't assume that someone's a good person.
01:21:32.000And also the psychology of being a police officer.
01:21:36.000The PTSD involved in day-to-day interaction with criminals, day-to-day interaction with people lying to you, day-to-day interaction with danger, violence, car accidents, death, Over and over and over and over again.
01:21:48.000You've got to be on edge all the time.
01:21:50.000And then thinking, is this the day where they get me?
01:21:53.000Is this the day, am I going to be the guy who gets his gun taken away?
01:21:56.000Am I going to be the guy who gets shot like this guy I saw in a video?
01:22:00.000There's so many instances that a cop has to think about when you have that job.
01:22:04.000I saw it argued, someone made this really irresponsible, ignorant Twitter post about how being a cop isn't dangerous because look how many cops die as opposed to look how many X amount of firemen or whatever job it was die.
01:22:22.000That cops actually are less likely to die than many industrial workers.
01:22:27.000But that's because they have protocol.
01:22:31.000That's because so many cops have been killed that they have all these standards and practices in place to make sure that it doesn't happen.
01:22:39.000That's why when a cop approaches a car, he does have his hand on his gun.
01:22:43.000That's why he does say, keep your hand on the wheel.
01:22:45.000That's why he does say, keep your hands where I can see them.
01:23:39.000The public has an expectation that the only justification for producing a gun, if you're a cop or if you're anyone, is if the other person has a gun or some similarly lethal weapon.
01:23:52.000I think some people think that a knife isn't lethal enough to justify the use of a gun, right?
01:23:57.000But the fact is cops are not superheroes, and they can't handle a person who is bigger than them, stronger than them, younger than them, and more aggressive than them who gets the jump on them.
01:24:09.000I mean, it's just, you know, that's a tall order even for a black belt in jiu-jitsu.
01:24:15.000And so their tool belt is there for a reason.
01:24:20.000They need tasers and they need guns and they need force of numbers in order to even do the job against somebody who doesn't have a gun themselves.
01:24:30.000And so it's a hard job and I've got huge respect for cops.
01:24:38.000All the while knowing that there are undoubtedly some bad cops who are just psychopaths and sadists and shouldn't be in the job.
01:24:45.000And there are a lot of cops who are, frankly, not as trained as they should be, even with guns.
01:25:06.000Still, even if you're well-trained, as a cop, you are moving into situations which it's just untenable to give this stranger the benefit of the doubt.
01:25:21.000You look like someone who's escalating force too early, if you're a cop, who's just taking...
01:25:34.000Totally rational steps to stay safe in a situation where there's just basic uncertainty as to what you're dealing with.
01:25:41.000I think we're requiring so much of someone who becomes a police officer that it's almost a job that no one can be qualified to do.
01:25:49.000You're requiring psychology, you're requiring the physical ability to defend themselves, Against a wide variety of people where you have zero idea of what their background is.
01:26:00.000You know, you see some young guy and he looks reasonably athletic.
01:26:03.000You have no idea what he can do to you.
01:26:05.000He might be a cigarette smoker with no martial arts experience whatsoever, or he might be a Muay Thai champion.
01:26:10.000And if you're within range of him, all of a sudden, boom, you're unconscious.
01:26:18.000The other thing about when people start talking about cops and violence and danger, most people have never been involved in a physical altercation with a trained martial artist.
01:26:31.000They have no idea how vulnerable they really are.
01:26:34.000I've seen people get in arguments before and get crazy with people and start fights and then watch the fight take place and it boggles my mind.
01:26:43.000I'm like, why was this guy so confident to get into a physical altercation when he has no idea what to do?
01:26:48.000With a guy with cauliflower ear, that's usually a tip block.
01:26:51.000A guy's got tats like you and he's got cauliflower ear and you've still got somebody mouthing off to him.
01:26:59.000And I think some people think they're going to bluff their way out of it.
01:27:03.000I think there's so much ignorance and ego involved in the average person when it comes to physical altercations.
01:27:09.000I think it would do a lot of people good just to realize how vulnerable they are.
01:27:14.000When I was a black belt in Taekwondo, when I was a national-level competitor, I'd won multiple tournaments, and then I started doing jiu-jitsu, I got mauled.
01:28:13.000You get in the water, and you're moving your arms and legs like you've seen people swim.
01:28:18.000It's like, how could there be that much to it?
01:28:20.000And in fact, once you know how to tread water, there isn't much to staying afloat.
01:28:24.000But if you don't know how to tread water, you don't know how to swim, all that moving of your arms and legs is just completely ineffectual.
01:28:32.000And you could be making 100% effort, and you're still going straight to the bottom.
01:28:41.000It's so surprising to feel like you have some skills, because you've done, you've trained for years in some stand-up art and you did a little, you know, you took some Krav Maga classes and you did some stuff on the ground and you have a basic feeling that, you know, you know, I would poke him in the eyes if it really got bad on the ground.
01:28:58.000And then you get on the mat with somebody who really has a deep jiu-jitsu game, and it's like wrestling a Martian.
01:29:52.000It's all like trying to hold someone off.
01:29:55.000If you knew that you were going to be working against a guy like Marcelo Garcia and you had months to prepare, I would just bench press and do everything about pushing away.
01:30:14.000Because if you debate the average person who has an illogical standpoint on something, like I've watched you debate many people when it comes to religion and things along those lines, and when you have the tools in place, those tools being logic, reason,
01:30:29.000and Defined arguments about different variables.
01:31:09.000And he got so dramatic in the way he was talking, which made it more ridiculous because you have this very calm, very flat way of expressing yourself.
01:31:22.000Which makes anyone who's super emotional and super dramatic seem preposterous.
01:31:28.000You seem more ridiculous because you're all, and what God has said to us and the Word of God and all this.
01:31:35.000And then you're like, well, that's not exactly the fact.
01:31:38.000The reality is this and this and that.
01:31:40.000This is what we know about neuroscience.
01:32:03.000No matter how obvious it becomes to the audience or to you.
01:32:07.000Actually, there's one thing that's kind of insidious about debates, which is actually terrible in politics.
01:32:13.000I hate it when I see this in political debates.
01:32:15.000Where laughter is a surrogate for tap-out.
01:32:21.000And so if you can get a big laugh in a debate, no matter how terrible your platform is as a politician, no matter how wrong you are on the facts, if you can get a big laugh line, you know, you are no Jack Kennedy, that's all that anyone cares about.
01:32:37.000It's like the stand-up comic wins the debate.
01:32:42.000Certainly politically, and it's even true in other contexts.
01:34:16.000Well, it's also, you know, people are looking, they're looking for a result, and they can decide that that result is correct, you know, through sheer force of will and through cognitive dissonance, all the people in the audience refusing to recognize the actual thing that's being debated, but rather not a point that they get to express themselves.
01:34:35.000Jesus doesn't want us to let queers marry each other.
01:34:39.000And they just hoot and holler and all that loud noise in that one room.
01:34:45.000Well, what's crucial about laughter, it's really only laughter and applause are the only moments where you know, as a member of the audience, that everyone's on the same page.
01:34:57.000Because that's the moment when everyone helplessly breaks into a laugh.
01:35:10.000I don't put a lot of laugh lines in my lectures, but I recognize that if you go long enough without having a laugh line in a lecture, you sort of lose the sense that everyone is with you,
01:35:45.000Yeah, public speaking is a very unique art form.
01:35:50.000Public speaking in terms of lectures, when you see people give public talks about a book that they have, the ability to hold people's attention It's like there has to be something that you're doing, some dramatic moment.
01:36:05.000Either you have to have a certain amount of charisma or you have to have a certain sense of humor.
01:36:09.000You have to have something to be able to sort of glue the whole thing together.
01:36:16.000It's hard to listen to someone, like lectures that boring professors give.
01:36:21.000I remember being in class, listening to some of those lectures and 10-15 minutes in, I'm checked out.
01:36:28.000I mean, I'm fucking thinking about my laundry.
01:36:30.000And I'm sort of paying attention because I have to, but I'm bored as fuck.
01:37:35.000And the other guy, even though it was just two people's opinions, it was more pleasant to listen to, it was more entertaining, so he was better at it.
01:38:03.000But Jefferson had a morbid fear of public speaking and gave exactly two speeches, two State of the Unions in his two terms as president and just read them in a kind of crushed monotone because he was so terrified.
01:38:48.000Well, fully on the force of his writing, he had the influence he had.
01:38:52.000Isn't it fascinating, too, that you need not just to be able to speak well publicly, but you need to have a certain style of communication where you address large numbers of people.
01:39:10.000You know, if someone was talking to you in your home in that same way, you would think they're absolutely insane.
01:39:15.000Like, if you had someone over your house, and you're having a conversation with them, and they spoke the way Obama speaks when he's addressing the nation, he would go, well, I got a fucking crazy person in my house.
01:39:24.000Like, even if they were just addressing your family.
01:39:25.000If it was just one person standing at the table, and you said, hey, Barack, would you, you know, give us thanks for this meal that we're about to have?
01:39:48.000Where it really gets crazy for me is when it becomes a full oratorical performance.
01:39:54.000I mean, someone like Martin Luther King Jr. or a...
01:39:58.000A preacher, somebody who's just going for it in the stentorian way of just, it's going to be big, and it's going to be dramatic, and I'm going to make you cry.
01:41:33.000There's a subtle dishonesty to the communication because it is a performance.
01:41:39.000As a speaker, I try to speak, and this is one reason why I would never be a great speaker, but I try to be as conversational as possible because internally, to inhabit it, I'm only comfortable feeling like I'm...
01:42:00.000So if it's just you or if it's a thousand people, maybe that situation is going to dictate subtle changes in the way I speak, but it's going to be pretty close in terms of how I speak.
01:42:15.000The moment I start to ape Pericles, I begin to feel dishonest.
01:42:26.000You know, Jay Leno, when he would practice his monologue for The Tonight Show, he would go to the Comedy and Magic Club every Sunday night.
01:42:34.000And it was like a regular show he would do there.
01:42:37.000And on Sunday night, when he would go to the Comedy and Magic Club and read these bits that he would try out for the week's monologue, he would do them dead, like monotone.
01:42:46.000And the reason why he did it, he goes, I didn't want to add any extra pizzazz to the jokes to sell them.
01:42:51.000He goes, I just want to know whether they stood on their own.
01:42:54.000And that was how he found out whether or not it was an actual funny idea or whether or not it was just his master showmanship ability that was getting it across.
01:43:03.000And I think that's what you get when you get a Hitler or a Martin Luther King.
01:43:09.000It's just there's an energy behind them that's captivating that...
01:43:13.000It can be, in terms of a guy like Martin Luther King, it can enhance the speech to the point where I Have a Dream is one of the greatest speeches in human history.
01:43:22.000And one of the reasons why it's such a great speech is not just because he said it, but imagine if the same speech was read by Noam Chomsky.
01:43:28.000You'd fucking fall asleep halfway into it.
01:43:30.000There's no question something would be lost, but part of it is...
01:44:33.000And he would go into this thing, and it was so compelling.
01:44:36.000Just like, whatever it is about human beings, when we see someone who speaks with this dynamic power, this passion, this ability to project words, it's so...
01:44:50.000And part of it is there's just something about us that, like, the reason why you can get hypnotized by a fucking watch swinging in front of your face is something about certain actions that are hypnotic, certain patterns of speaking that are hypnotic, oddly captivating, oddly influential.
01:45:41.000They don't feel any impulse to look away.
01:45:44.000They're not uncomfortable making silent eye contact with somebody.
01:45:48.000They're not constantly throwing their words into the space because they're uncomfortable, and yet they're just available, and they're just looking at you, and their attention is free.
01:46:06.000And these people can tend to make highly unusually intense eye contact, which is to say completely unbroken eye contact.
01:46:17.000And then there are psychopaths who do it, and it's a real power game where it's just – they're not – They're running something, they have a very different agenda, but they're also comfortable, you know, I fucking you and just doing it from a place of aggression.
01:46:36.000But it's a, it was interesting, when I got into meditation and early on, you know, I was 20, 21, and I got really into meditation and this is a period where I was doing a lot of psychedelics and one of the experiences you've probably had on psychedelics is the amazing experience of just looking into somebody's eyes on acid or mushrooms and just having that just open a kind of an inner landscape of profundity or seeming profundity where you can
01:47:07.000just be staring into somebody's eyes silently for an eternity or what seems like an eternity and What often happens to people is that after having experiences like this, then looking into people's eyes can become a way of activating that state of mind.
01:47:25.000Being committed to looking into people's eyes and never looking away can be a way of introducing that liquid psychedelic experience interpersonally.
01:47:37.000I was sort of into that for a while, and so I was kind of walking through life, you know, like as Tom Cruise does.
01:47:47.000To have people in the eye, try to trip.
01:47:51.000Just never, just like, oh, I'm just going to go with it, you know, let's see where this goes, and I'm just never going to look away from anyone ever again.
01:47:57.000And you get, you start having, I mean, it's intrusive, and I stopped doing it, but...
01:48:27.000And so whether it's a barista at Starbucks or whether it's just somebody who is 50 feet across the room at a party, you make eye contact, they're not going to be the first one to look away.
01:48:38.000And so you get into these really weird encounters.
01:48:40.000And I remember this one party I went to.
01:48:43.000Where I was sitting on a couch, and I looked across the room, and there was this guy looking at me, and there was probably 40 feet between us.
01:48:53.000And he looked at me, and I looked at him, and then it was just like War of the Warlocks.
01:48:59.000Neither of us were going to look away, right?
01:49:03.000And I was doing a lot of meditation, and I was probably...
01:49:39.000But in any case, when you walk through life like this, you discover that there are a lot of people doing this for whatever reason.
01:49:49.000And you definitely have unusual encounters with strangers.
01:49:53.000I had one on a train once when I was a kid.
01:49:56.000I was probably like 16 or 17 years old in Boston and it was some guy and we were sitting across from each other and we looked at each other and he looked at me and he gave me like a little extra look to get me to look away, like a little extra look.
01:50:11.000And I didn't, and I was like, what's going on here?
01:50:13.000And for whatever reason, it wasn't like a conscious practice.
01:50:17.000I just decided I wasn't going to look away.
01:50:20.000With an act of defiance, being a teenager.
01:50:22.000And he progressively got more and more angry, and then my level of stress raised up to the point where I'm like, am I going to have to fight this old motherfucker?
01:50:29.000We're going to have to go at it because we're staring at each other.
01:50:50.000But I remember very specifically thinking, like, this is so weird.
01:50:55.000There's obviously some aggression being displayed here.
01:50:57.000We're looking at each other in the eyes, and this guy just don't want to turn away, and I've decided I'm not going to turn away for whatever reason.
01:51:03.000And here it's like a moment that I remember to this day, you know, 30 years later?
01:51:08.000Thirty years later, it's still in my head?
01:52:03.000It's interesting to be with someone who...
01:52:05.000I mean, I study with a lot of great meditation masters who spent years on retreat, some of them decades on retreat, doing nothing but meditate, some of them spending years meditating just on compassion.
01:52:18.000And when you're with someone like that...
01:52:22.000Then it's a very different vibe, obviously, and what you're getting from that kind of eye contact is just a fundamental freedom from...
01:52:37.000Kind of the neurotic self-program that everyone's running.
01:52:40.000I mean, you can meet someone who you feel like is just, they don't have a problem.
01:52:46.000They're not, they wish you nothing but well, and they're not, they don't want anything from you.
01:52:53.000They're not worried about what you think of them.
01:52:57.000Their attention is free enough to just see what you need and what you want, and it's a very freeing thing.
01:53:09.000I think it's something to recognize in someone as being possible.
01:53:12.000To see someone who's just dropped down to a level of non-neurosis that you recognize you just haven't experienced in yourself.
01:53:24.000There are surrogates for this and there are artifacts which are confusing to people because Obviously, in any situation like this, there are power dynamics where when you're the guy on stage or you're the guy in the powerful role or you're the celebrity or whatever it is,
01:53:40.000you're kind of free to be non-neurotic when everyone else is dancing around being neurotic.
01:53:47.000When someone's busy trying to not spaz meeting Joe Rogan, You often are just free just to be a nice guy who is...
01:53:58.000I don't know if this is true of you, and maybe it's not true all the time, but you can be sort of empowered by a role, and it's kind of liberating, and then you can find yourself in another context.
01:54:09.000This goes to the first point we made about different states of self.
01:54:12.000You can find yourself in another context where you're just trying...
01:54:14.000You're not Joe Rogan, the celebrity, or you're not the guy who's on stage.
01:54:19.000You're just someone trying to get something done with somebody else who's not taking you seriously, and you can feel all of your sort of normal level of neurosis kick in because you're not empowered in that situation.
01:54:28.000There's nothing about the frame around the situation that is making you the center of attention or making anyone defer to what you're saying.
01:55:53.000Well, there's also the sexual attraction thing, the eye contact, that context, whereas you can't make eye contact with a woman like that and just lock eyes with her without her thinking you want to have sex with her, or she locks eyes with you without her thinking that you want to have sex,
01:56:43.000Because if a guy is locking eyes with another guy, it's weird.
01:56:47.000But it's not like, oh, God, this guy's going to fuck me.
01:56:52.000Although, between two guys, you get that monkey dance of, you know, what are you looking at, what are you looking at, and then it becomes, do we have to fight?
01:56:59.000Whereas with a man to woman, it's just, it's intrusive.
01:57:03.000The guy is not picking up whatever cues of disinterest or, you know, boundary setting are there, and he's just staring, and that's just, you know, it's just uncomfortable, given that, you know, women are the targets of Of sexual violence and just,
01:57:40.000Yeah, I have said no, much to the consternation of certain people, philosophers like Dan Dennett, who I collided with on this issue, even though it didn't have to be as unpleasant as it turned out to be.
01:57:58.000Well, yeah, I mean, what happened is, I wrote this very short book, Free Will, which was actually, there was a short section in my book, The Moral Landscape, in which I laid out my argument against free will, and it got so much attention,
01:58:14.000and people found it so interesting and disturbing, and it was clearly just one, it might have been only ten pages in the book, but It was something that just people wanted more of.
01:58:25.000And so what I did is I took those 10 pages and I blew them up into a hundred page, but still a very short book that you could read in an hour, an hour and a half, and published it as free will.
01:58:36.000And then Dan Dennett, who is a very well-known and very smart philosopher, who's a colleague and friend of mine and, you know, We're good to go.
01:59:29.000Rather than fully engage his view in my book, the truth is I think his view on free will, which is called compatibilism, is the argument that free will is compatible with determinism.
01:59:45.000It's that you don't have to, even if we're in a universe where all causality is just kind of running like clockwork, including every influence on the human brain and everything that's giving rise to thoughts and decisions and behavior,
02:00:00.000if it's all just a machine that's kind of running out from the Big Bang to the...
02:00:50.000This, you know, pissed him off, frankly.
02:00:52.000And he thought he was being, you know, in his defense, I think he thought he was being very diplomatic and measured and responsible in how he engaged me.
02:01:06.000And what he did is he wrote a review of free—I think he waited like a year, but then he wrote a review of the book— Which I published on my website, but it was a very hard-hitting, but in my view, misguided and confused review of my book.
02:01:25.000And so then I responded, and he didn't like my response, and that's kind of where we left it.
02:01:29.000But it was kind of a very long review that...
02:01:32.000That made a lot of noise to not much effect in my view.
02:01:36.000And then I responded with a very long review where I hit back probably a little too hard.
02:01:43.000And it's one of those problems you get into when you're just writing rather than having a conversation.
02:01:48.000So what I urged him to do, and this is the reason why my review came off as so frustrated, and people can find all this on my blog.
02:02:36.000And you're having these mutual 3,000 or 10,000 word volleys where I'm just going to lay it out.
02:02:42.000What's totally wrong with your worldview?
02:02:45.000And in the course of doing that, I'm going to make 15 huge mistakes that you could have corrected in real time, but now I'm committed to them because I wrote a page on each.
02:04:13.000And commensurate with that feeling is the sense that...
02:04:19.000You are in a position to do what it is you do, to decide to do...
02:04:25.000I can decide to lift my left hand or I can decide to lift my right hand, and I can deliberate between the two, and I can have reasons for one or reasons for the other.
02:04:44.000Objectively, we know that everything that you're consciously aware of, all your thoughts and your intentions and your impulses and your impulses to resist those impulses, whatever's coming up for you, we know that's all preceded by events in your nervous system of which you're not aware and which you didn't create.
02:05:05.000And the state of your brain in this moment, in every sense, Is the product of variables that you are not responsible for.
02:05:19.000You didn't pick the environment in which your genome was going to be expressed.
02:05:24.000You didn't pick the way that your interaction with the world and other people sculpted the microstructure of your brain so as to give you the brain you have.
02:05:34.000You didn't pick the number of receptors you have of every type at every synapse.
02:05:39.000You didn't pick all the charges that are currently in place in your brain at this moment.
02:05:45.000You haven't created your neurophysiology, and yet your neurophysiology is going to give rise to every next thought and intention That shows up for you.
02:05:56.000And we know that if you do an experiment, like you put someone in a neuroimaging device, whether it's EEG or whether it's an fMRI, and you image their neural activity in real time,
02:06:12.000and you have a very simple choice between pushing the left button or pushing the right button, we can predict Before the person is aware of having committed to right or left, whether they're going to go right or left.
02:06:26.000And we know that that ability to predict is only going to become more fine-grained.
02:06:33.000And again, someone like Dan Dennett has a story about why this doesn't matter.
02:06:37.000And the truth is, it actually doesn't matter.
02:06:40.000Because even if we couldn't predict...
02:06:42.000It matters in the sense that it's very persuasive to people that...
02:06:47.000If I can predict what you're going to do before you're aware of what you're going to do, well then the basis for free will seems to go out the window.
02:06:58.000So for instance, just notice this moment.
02:07:01.000So let's say I had written down on a piece of paper the next sentence you're going to speak, right?
02:07:07.000So I had verbatim what's going to come out of your mouth now.
02:07:10.000And you just, so you know, you start your side of the conversation and I just hold up this pad and you see that I have everything that is just now occurring to you to say, that would be pretty persuasive to you that you're not running a free will program over there.
02:07:36.000Because you're thinking it is the basis of your sense of free will in the first place.
02:07:43.000You feel like you're authoring this next thought.
02:07:48.000You feel like it's—but if I could show you that we knew what you were going to do before you did it, that would erode this sense that you're free to do otherwise.
02:07:57.000In what sense could you have done otherwise if I can hold up this piece of paper and show you that you were committed to saying what you were— Isn't this sort of a dishonest argument, though?
02:08:42.000And it's a little difficult to operationalize or design an experiment around, but what they've done is they created a clock which made it, and this has been done in a few different ways, but in each one of these experiments, they essentially created a clock that made it very easy for someone to discriminate time.
02:09:01.000So it wasn't just like watching an ordinary clock, but it could be, let's say, A bunch of letters and numbers streaming in front of you.
02:09:09.000You're being presented with a bunch of different letters and numbers.
02:09:17.000You're going to choose left or right, and I'm not forcing you to go at any particular time.
02:09:22.000You're just watching the letters and numbers.
02:09:25.000Your only job is to tell me what letter or number was present The moment you decided, right?
02:09:34.000So you're watching K and X and 4 and 7, and so all these different numbers and letters that are easily discriminated appearing on a screen, and you're just waiting to decide, and you're thinking, oh, maybe I'll go left, maybe I'll go right, I'm free to do whatever I want, and I'm just going to wait this out a little bit,
02:09:52.000And the moment you feel that you're committed, you just recall what number of letter you were looking at, And then you tell the experimenter afterward, I was looking at K. K was on the screen when I was committed.
02:10:04.000Now, you might think this is not so compelling when the time interval is very brief.
02:10:09.000In some of these experiments, the distance was like half a second, right?
02:10:14.000But with this recent fMRI experiment, the distance stretched out to like five seconds.
02:10:20.000You know, five to seven seconds so that the activity that was inclining a person to go right as opposed to left was building up subconsciously for that long so that at a certain point the person said, all right,
02:10:35.000I've decided, but the data show that we could have predicted that with great accuracy five to seven seconds earlier.
02:10:44.000See, but that's relying on a person being honest about when they decided.
02:10:52.000And it also seems to conflict with what we were talking about earlier, which is the idea of controlling your thoughts.
02:10:58.000The idea of getting to a point in your mind where you are essentially in control of which way your brain goes.
02:11:08.000Whether you adhere to one pattern of thinking or another.
02:11:12.000And if you're talking about something as crude as lifting a left hand or a right hand deciding when to do so based on whatever idea that pops into your head, that seems like an incredibly crude way to argue that there's no free will.
02:11:27.000Well, again, let me just be clear about this.
02:11:31.000I agree it's crude, except I think that with this time interval, it becomes – there's less of a concern that the person's judgment about when they decide it will be off by enough so as to make it an invalid experiment.
02:11:45.000But – I don't think it's enough, I mean, to satisfy me.
02:11:48.000But let me just tell you, nothing hinges on this, because even if the decision, the neural activity in the brain that gave you the decision, and your subjective feeling of having decided,
02:12:03.000even if those were coincident, even if there was no time lag, right?
02:12:06.000It still is coming out of nowhere, in a sense, for you subjectively.
02:12:36.000And yet it's very difficult to map on to third-person reality.
02:12:41.000It's very difficult to map on to the physical world.
02:12:44.000That is not the situation, from my point of view.
02:12:47.000I think it is very difficult to map on to—it's, in fact, impossible to map on to the I think?
02:13:19.000But the feeling is that, and this is a feeling that I think Dan Dennett has, there's this very compelling subjective sense of free will that we somehow have to make room for.
02:13:31.000And I'm saying we don't have to make room for it because if you look closely enough, you don't actually even feel it.
02:13:36.000You don't even feel that you have the freedom that you think you feel.
02:13:40.000Because if you just look at how thoughts arise, if I just pay attention to how I get to the end of this sentence, I don't know how I get to the end of the sentence.
02:13:50.000In the cases where I fail to get to the end of the sentence, where I miss a word, where I speak in a way that's not grammatically correct, each one of those hiccups is a mystery to me, subjectively, and no doubt it's caused by some events in my brain that could be understood if we were scanning my brain.
02:14:12.000But subjectively, It's always a surprise.
02:14:16.000But successfully finding the word you're looking for is also, in some sense, a surprise.
02:14:21.000It's also something that you're not actually authoring.
02:14:24.000And when you look at why you choose one word over another, you say something like...
02:14:34.000You know, there's a consistency between this story and that story.
02:14:39.000And then you say, well, why did I choose the word consistency?
02:14:42.000You know, there are other synonyms, there are other words that mean consistency that I could have used.
02:14:46.000I could have said, there's a harmony between this story and that story.
02:14:51.000That is subjectively mysterious and was determined by events in your brain that you are not responsible for.
02:14:59.000And so if I, a very simple experiment, if I say to you, what are you going to think of next?
02:16:27.000Based on the state of your brain, based on the inputs that had happened earlier today, based on whatever variables could control how this experiment was going to run, you thought Chicago, and you didn't think Paris.
02:16:40.000Now, in a deterministic universe, You were not free to think Paris.
02:16:47.000And if we add randomness, it doesn't give you the freedom of will that you think you have.
02:16:57.000Because the freedom of will people think they have is they are free...
02:17:13.000But your belief in free will entails the belief that if we rewind the movie of our lives right now, if we just go back in this conversation a few minutes and Sam says, think of a city, Leaving everything else the same.
02:17:31.000If the universe is exactly in the same state, I could have said Paris.
02:17:35.000And there's no reason scientifically to think that you could have.
02:17:39.000Because that would mean the universe would have had to have been in a different state.
02:17:42.000But are we not getting trapped in minutiae here?
02:17:45.000Because is it not a combination of determinism and randomness?
02:17:48.000Because of course there's determinism.
02:17:50.000Of course there's certain events that have taken place in my life that I can't change.
02:18:09.000And I think when you talk about free will, when most people talk about free will, They think about actions in terms of their life.
02:18:15.000Like, if you have an opportunity to cheat on your taxes, but you think it's morally wrong, you don't want to go to jail, isn't it not free will to look at your tax form and make the decision to be correct?
02:19:15.000You're on a diet and you've decided you're going to go carb-free for the next week, but then you come in here and someone's giving you some donuts and you're tempted to eat a donut, but then you have that moment, that tug of war with yourself and you say, no, no,
02:19:50.000The difference there, your ability to resist, your inability to resist, which part of you wins in that circumstance, is also being born of variables in your nervous system that you didn't author,
02:20:51.000My decision to train will be the proximate cause of my going into a school and training.
02:20:56.000My desire to get a black belt is going to be the proximate cause in each moment of my making it a priority to train, my making the effort to train, my...
02:21:08.000Getting over injuries, my ignoring injuries when I otherwise would be cowed by them.
02:21:15.000Your intentions and your efforts and your desires are just as causal and as important as you think they are.
02:21:26.000You are driven by desire and effort does matter and training has an effect.
02:21:33.000But, and so you can't, where people get confused is they think that determinism is the same thing as fatalism, whereas just, you know, if everything's just going to happen as it happens, well, then I don't have to do anything.
02:21:43.000You know, I'm just going to see if I get a black belt.
02:21:46.000You know, I just not, I'm not going to, I'm not going to make any efforts because if I'm destined to get a black belt, you know, someone's going to give me one.
02:22:18.000Isn't the only way to truly tell whether or not there is the ability to alter your events and your life and your behavior based entirely on your will, wouldn't you have to have someone live the exact same life with the exact same genetics, exact same life experiences, and confront the exact same circumstances and decide or find out whether or not they act randomly or whether or not you can determine it?
02:23:04.000I don't think that's true for a few reasons, but the crucial piece is ethical.
02:23:10.000So once you acknowledge that if someone was in exactly your situation, given the same genes and the same parents and the same environment, same life influences, same political circumstance, same micro-influences to his nervous system,
02:23:29.000that person would make all the same choices you're making.
02:23:34.000He'd have the exact same amount of willpower when he was confronted with a donut.
02:23:38.000He'd fall off his diet the exact same number of times and in the same places.
02:23:41.000The movie of your life, if replayed in your double on another planet that was exactly like this one, would play out exactly the same.
02:23:52.000And if randomness intrudes to make it different, well then randomness doesn't give you free will.
02:23:58.000If I just told you that You're going to be exactly the same as your double, and we can completely predict your behavior a thousand years before you're even born, right?
02:24:10.000Because we've run this experiment before, and we've tuned your genes and your world exactly.
02:24:13.000You're just a computer simulation of your double, right?
02:24:15.000You're just going to run out exactly the same way.
02:24:18.000So you've got no free will, but we are going to throw in a little randomness to make you, you know...
02:24:46.000If you knew that your decision to marry your wife, as opposed to somebody else, was born of someone having thrown the dice in a lab somewhere, you wouldn't ascribe that to free will.
02:25:01.000That would be a bizarre thing to dictate your decision process.
02:25:07.000So that's not what anyone means by free will.
02:25:09.000So randomness doesn't give you the freedom you think you have.
02:25:12.000Let me just say a bit about why this is important ethically.
02:25:17.000When we perceive good and evil in the world, we look at people as agents who really are the authors of their actions.
02:25:24.000We relate to people like they have free will.
02:25:28.000And this seems to make ethical sense to us, and it's definitely the basis for our impulse for vengeance and retributive justice and the feeling that people really deserve to be punished.
02:25:45.000I'm not arguing that punishment is never valid, and there may be a role for punishment that we want to retain in our justice system, but this idea of punishing people because they deserve it doesn't make a lot of sense.
02:25:57.000And the way to see that is two ways to see that.
02:26:02.000One is, you look at these cases where you have someone like Charles Whitman who got on the clock tower at the University of Texas in 1964, I think it was, or 66, And shot dozens of people.
02:26:15.000I think he killed 14. He killed his mom and his wife first, and then he got on the clock tower and killed 14 people and injured like 30 people.
02:26:25.000And this was just like pure evil, right?
02:26:27.000So this guy, if anyone deserves to be punished, this guy does, and he was killed by the cops.
02:26:33.000And he knew he was going to be killed by the cops, and he had written essentially a suicide note.
02:26:38.000But you look at this behavior and you think, alright, that's as stark as evil as we ever see.
02:26:43.000And this guy really is the cause of his actions.
02:26:45.000But then you read his suicide note and he describes how he was overcome with rages that he found inexplicable and he did not know why he was killing his wife or his mom.
02:26:54.000He loved them both, but he just felt like he had to do it.
02:26:58.000And he recommended the doctors Do a post-mortem on his brain because he knows something's wrong with it and maybe they can find the reason why he did all these terrible things.
02:27:07.000So they do an autopsy and they see that he's got a giant tumor in his hypothalamus pressing on the amygdala and that is certainly a plausible place to be driving some rages in somebody and to be undermining their impulse control.
02:27:22.000And so most people look at the story of Charles Whitman and they think, alright, this is an unlucky guy who had a brain tumor.
02:27:30.000Who was driven to act out on the basis of this brain tumor and that is not free will.
02:27:35.000He was an unlucky puppet and a victim of biology.
02:27:44.000The problem is a brain tumor really is just a special case of physical causality.
02:27:49.000And what I'm arguing is that if we had a perfect understanding of the brain, if we could scan your brain at this moment and see every variable that influenced behavior as clearly and as compellingly, As a golf-ball-sized brain tumor,
02:28:06.000we would see that your behavior and your thoughts and your innermost desires and your commitment to your diet and your love of jiu-jitsu and everything was just as determined as Charles Whitman's rages by a glioblastoma.
02:28:23.000And it all begins to look like a brain tumor.
02:28:26.000Your responsibility and the fact that you're a mensch and you're a kind guy as opposed to a vindictive one, all of those variables, again, that you inherited courtesy of genes and environment,
02:28:44.000Which are the only influences we think you have, right?
02:28:47.000The truth is, even if you add a soul, add an immortal Christian soul to the clockwork, you didn't create your soul.
02:28:55.000You can't take credit for the fact that you don't have the soul of a psychopath.
02:29:00.000So whatever you add is in some sense a gift.
02:29:04.000You know, brain tumors, souls, genes, cosmic ray bombardment, any influence.
02:29:10.000And if we could understand these influences clearly, it would all begin to look like Charles Whitman's brain tumor.
02:29:18.000And if you add the rolling of dice, you know, you add some randomness to it, that doesn't give you freedom.
02:29:25.000See, when I'm talking about randomness, I'm not...
02:29:28.000When you were saying, like, random events in the mind, what I was saying is that the only way to truly determine whether or not someone has the choice to make a decision one way or another is to have them live the exact same life, meaning the exact same amount of randomness, the exact same events inside their mind, and see whether or not conscious decision-making has any part in what you do.
02:29:48.000Like, the idea of free will is people are confronted with a scenario and they decide...
02:30:07.000There's something that's going on in your mind.
02:30:09.000Where it's causing you to act in one way or another.
02:30:12.000And in my opinion, the only way to know whether or not it is all determined by momentum and the momentum of the past, your genetics, is to have someone live the exact same life and see if they do the exact same thing, the exact same chemicals, the exact same diet, the exact same,
02:30:28.000no randomness at all, and whether or not you decide to go one way or another.
02:30:32.000Okay, but we know that every decision It has to be preceded by something.
02:30:39.000If you're going to take a scientific view of these things, we know it's preceded by neurophysiology.
02:30:48.000If there is a consciousness, if there's a something in the mind.
02:30:51.000What I'm arguing is that whether you think consciousness is arising out of the information processing of the brain, the mind is what the brain is doing, I don't know.
02:32:57.000That the self, even though the self is comprised of all these random variables like genetics, life experiences, The environment that you surround yourself with, the people that are in your life that influence you, these variables are the funnel through which all decisions are made.
02:34:03.000So you think of an evil person like Uday Hussain, who we mentioned at the beginning.
02:34:10.000The view of him as just pure evil, worthy of being destroyed, worthy if we could have locked him up, as worthy of punishment as anyone we could ever capture, and that it makes sense to hate him.
02:34:25.000The logic of hatred erodes here because it doesn't make sense to hate Charles Whitman.
02:34:45.000And you can see this, if you just roll back the clock of his life, when you look at him as a 40-year-old, he's the scariest psychopath you've ever seen.
02:34:55.000When you look at him as a 3-year-old, he was the little boy who was going to become Uday Hussein.
02:35:03.000He was the little boy who, through no fault of his own, had Saddam Hussein as a father.
02:35:28.000Whatever variables you want to include – genes, environment, souls – if you could trade places with him, you get the same genes, you get the same daddy, you get the same environment, you get the same soul, same ectoplasm, whatever you want to put into the box – You would become Uday Hussein.
02:35:49.000And it's the sense that there's something left which is an illusion.
02:35:56.000But what I'm arguing is that this actually can become the basis...
02:36:00.000For compassion and for a wiser justice system.
02:36:03.000And we have a justice system that's predicated on the notion of free will.
02:36:06.000And we've locked up 13 year olds for their entire lives based on a sense that this evil little bastard really deserves what he gets.
02:36:15.000Well, I think we've done that because we want to protect everyone else from this evil bastard.
02:36:20.000I think the idea is not whether or not this person is free to make these choices.
02:36:24.000It's whether or not they're a danger to society.
02:36:26.000No, no, but the Supreme Court has actually said that our system is based on the notion of free will and that determinism is hostile to any notion of retributive justice.
02:36:35.000So consciously, as a matter of jurisprudence, we think we are implementing a doctrine of free will.
02:36:42.000Well then how do you indict people based on their responsibility for something?
02:36:46.000It's exactly like what we would do if grizzly bears were walking around outside.
02:36:54.000So if I walk outside in the parking lot after this podcast and I see a grizzly bear I can be afraid of it.
02:37:51.000We let people go who are obviously going to reoffend in the most shocking ways, and we do it because we're making room for people who are selling acid out of their dorm room.
02:38:04.000Right, but that's a different argument, isn't it?
02:38:06.000I mean, that's an argument of privatized prisons and...
02:38:09.000Financial systems that have been co-opted by pharmaceutical companies and special interest groups like prison guard lobbyists.
02:39:17.000Now, that would be like withholding surgery from Charles Whitman when you knew that the brain tumor was the reason why he was going to be Charles Whitman, right?
02:39:25.000So Charles Whitman, you discover the brain tumor pressing on the amygdala before he's going to go out and kill everyone, and you say, all right, we're just going to solve the problem here, right?
02:40:32.000With someone like Charles Whitman, when you see that there's a brain tumor, you recognize, alright, he's just being a guy who's got a brain tumor in the wrong place, right?
02:40:40.000And if we had a cure for it even after the fact, that would be the appropriate thing to do.
02:40:46.000If we had a cure for evil, if we had a pill that just could make Uday Hussain a nice guy, We would just give him the pill.
02:40:53.000Right, but then they're not responsible for their past actions because they're a totally different person now that they've received this pill?
02:40:58.000Well, yeah, because evil is just the bad luck of having bad genes and bad neurochemistry.
02:41:04.000Boy, that's a hard pill for people to swallow if their daughter was fed to the dogs of Uday Hussein.
02:41:36.000And I think it sort of highlights the grey nature of reality itself.
02:41:39.000Everybody wants everything to be black and white, yes and no, plus and minus, but it's not.
02:41:44.000There's a lot of weird variables when it comes to being a human being.
02:41:49.000I see what you're saying, but it's sort of a weird argument because these pills don't exist, the shot doesn't exist, to turn someone who's a psychopath into a good person.
02:41:59.000Well, no, but that just proves, it's just the point of concept that it doesn't make sense to hold someone responsible for their genes any more than it does a brain tumor.
02:42:12.000And if you can't, but once you start taking each of these causal factors off the table of responsibility, genes, parents, society, environment, cosmic rays, there's nothing left and you can even take the soul off of it.
02:42:29.000You know, the soul, you didn't pick your soul.
02:43:39.000What I'm saying is the more we understand the human mind, the level of the brain, the more that feeling is going to encroach on all of these questions.
02:43:47.000But do we know enough about the human brain to really make that determination?
02:43:51.000Because when we're talking about where does a thought come from, what is going on inside your mind, we can very crudely look at fMRIs and see areas of the brain that are receiving activity, but we don't necessarily know what is going on.
02:44:12.000I mean, is it just the sum of their life experiences, their genetics, their expression?
02:44:17.000Or is it, when a thought comes to a mind, like, okay, in your case, when you're writing, and you're sitting in front of your computer, and, you know, I'm sure you probably have those moments where a concept or a sentence comes and it almost feels like it appears at a mid-air,
02:44:38.000The other reason why I'm so committed to this is the subjective side of the illusion can be cut through.
02:44:52.000Again, most people's starting point is we have this really robust feeling of free will and self-authorship and self-creation and self-determination and It's hard to make it square with Charles Whitman and Jeans and the rest of the neurochemical story.
02:45:48.000If I ask you, you and I go out now and have a few drinks, and we're sitting around for a few hours wondering whether we're sober, you're in a worse position to judge.
02:46:04.000What if I'm at a red light and someone revs their car engine?
02:46:07.000I'm like, oh yeah, bitch, come on, let's go, and we crash into someone.
02:46:10.000But again, you've got more variables there that are driving you and influencing you, and you feel like you're being led around by the nose, by the environment a little bit more there.
02:46:19.000In this case, I mean, there's no stakes, but this is as pure a moment of agency as you're ever going to get.
02:46:27.000When I say, think now of a famous woman.
02:46:33.000You're free to pick—think of a bunch, right?
02:46:46.000That is as pure—that's got to be as pure a demonstration of freedom of will as anything you're going to get in life.
02:46:52.000Now, again, nothing turns on it, but that's pure and less constrained by, I don't know, am I sober enough to drive or should I speed or, you know, should I— Should I buy this thing or not?
02:47:29.000Yeah, so you would have been lost on me.
02:47:31.000Yeah, I just think that I agree with you, without a doubt, that there most certainly are a bunch of factors involved in who a person is, and many of them are outside of your control.
02:47:44.000But the point you're missing here is that I'm not asking you, I mean, you can grant all of the fact that there are those factors, but what I'm saying is that you can subjectively experience I see what you're saying.
02:48:11.000Jennifer Lawrence just comes out of the ether.
02:48:15.000Yeah, and even if you deliberate, no matter how many times you go back and forth, the fact that you finally settle on her as opposed to somebody else is inexplicable.
02:48:56.000I'm just sort of bouncing it around inside my head.
02:48:59.000So when I say, but what about this, but what about that, I'm doing that as much for myself as I am.
02:49:05.000I'm not trying to disprove your point.
02:49:07.000I think there's so many variables as to what makes a person.
02:49:12.000To attribute anything to one thing, whether it's discipline or whether it's life experience, what makes a man great, what makes a woman fantastic, what makes someone creative.
02:50:13.000But most, certainly most scientists- Yeah, but the thing is, that doesn't take out any of the good stuff of life.
02:50:22.000From my point of view, nothing important is lost here, and something ethical is gained.
02:50:29.000So, for instance, the possibility of having compassion, even for evil people, loving your enemy, being like Jesus in that respect, which makes absolutely no sense until you actually see a basis for having compassion.
02:50:46.000For someone like Uday Hussain, I feel like that opens up based on this consideration.
02:51:49.000Well, it actually makes us more responsible for engineering a healthy society because we have to be aware of all the variables that are involved in every single human being's developmental process.
02:52:01.000And the more we can mitigate the negative ones, the better we can make our society.
02:52:06.000And that doesn't really discount the idea of people being responsible for their actions or punishing people or removing people.
02:52:40.000It makes them better people, whatever.
02:52:43.000Whatever those punishments are, let's say they exist.
02:52:46.000Then you don't need a retributive story.
02:52:48.000You just have a story of, you know, we want fewer carjackings, and we want the carjackers to be better people, so we're going to do X, Y, and Z and deter carjacking on the one hand and rehabilitate carjackings and carjackers on the other.
02:53:03.000And another way that also highlights the really, truly unethical practices of privatized prisons, of things along those lines where you are purposely setting up laws in order to victimize people,
02:53:20.000to make it so that, you know, like you're playing a game.
02:53:22.000You make it so that there are pitfalls.
02:53:24.000If they fall in those pits, ooh, look, I caught a beaver.
02:54:17.000And that happens in a massive amount of cases.
02:54:21.000In a massive amount of cases, they're well aware that it's possible they could be wrong, but their job is to prosecute.
02:54:28.000The same can be said for a defense lawyer.
02:54:30.000A defense lawyer could be aware that their client is probably lying, but they must defend that client to the best of their ability, including manipulating witnesses, including the way they communicate with these witnesses, to try to lead them down certain paths, to get them to say things that might be misconstrued by the jury.
02:54:48.000All those things become more unethical if you look at this concept of determinism.
02:55:02.000And that one is a classic case where what you'll get from defense attorneys is a very strenuous defense of...
02:55:11.000Even the guilty need representation, and our adversarial system completely depends on my giving the best possible defense of Jeffrey Dahmer I can, even though I know that if I succeed, and I sure hope I succeed, he's going to go off and cannibalize more people.
02:55:27.000I think there's an ethical problem with that, but it's set up by the problem on the other side where you have a prosecutorial system which is really not that concerned About locking up an innocent person for the rest of his life.
02:55:40.000So it's in a sense the system itself is so inherently flawed that it almost should be tossed out and it should be where no one has an incentive whether that person is guilty or innocent.
02:55:52.000I mean, that would be the most ethical way to represent it.
02:55:54.000You should just want to get to the truth.
02:56:26.000How do you feel about this, that, the other thing?
02:56:28.000You ask them all these questions and then you pick, the defense and the prosecution gets to pick from all these people based on their decisions.
02:56:37.000The idea being that this is our likelihood for success if we go with these people.
02:56:42.000And they have a whole algorithm based on what answers they're trying to get from these various people.
02:56:49.000That's a really big hole in the system that's sort of highlighted by these ideas.
02:56:53.000This idea that someone has that you can benefit financially from someone being innocent or guilty.
02:57:00.000Yeah, and if we had a reliable lie detector, this whole problem would go away.
02:58:31.000Well, that's interesting because, yeah, when you read something and it's in your mind, you have your mouth closed, you're not making any noises.
02:58:37.000You put something in there where it's got the consonants in the wrong place.
02:58:41.000And there was one time, it was like 20 takes...
02:58:44.000And you've got people in a booth, and you've got a producer and an engineer listening to you, and it's just, all right, I'm going to rewrite this sentence.