Stephen Fry is a comedian, actor, writer, presenter, voiceover artist, and activist. He s also written and presented several documentary series, including the Emmy Award-winning Stephen Fry's The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive. He was a close friend of Christopher Hitchens, and we cover much else. All I can say is that if you take even a fraction of the pleasure in Stephen s company that I did, you will enjoy the next two hours. And as you will soon hear, Stephen is just a wonderfully erudite man who fairly reeks of the most basic human decency. He really is one of the nicest guys in the world. And we cover a fair amount of ground. We discuss comedy, atheism, and political correctness. There s a lot of talk about meditation and mindfulness, negative emotions, ambition, empathy, psychedelics, and psychedelics. We cover much more. And I can t help but think that if I had any musical gift, I would have embraced that. If I really felt that I was a supremely good actor, I'd have stuck to finding good roles in TV and films. So in the end, I'm no doubt guilty of some combination of false humility or false self-awareness, which will come as no doubt come to me as a result of being a jack-of-all-trades. All-in-all a master of none-the-trade. And so in that case, I don't need to be a smart philosopher or a literary philosopher or something like that. I think if I was smart, I could be a good philosopher, or a good writer, right? I think I would just be a bad one. I mean, I think that I would be good at something. I don t know what I'm good at that? We don't run ads on the podcast because I'm made possible entirely through the podcast, and therefore, therefore, by the support of our listeners, I m made possible by the podcast by you, which is made possible because of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming a supporter of what we re doing here. - thank you, become a subscriber, become one of us, becoming a member of the Making Sense Podcast. You'll get a better version of yourself, you'll be making sense of the podcast and you'll help us all become a better friend of making sense by listening to the podcast.
00:07:21.480And I suppose Hugh and I had a very high doctrine of what comedy should be.
00:07:27.420It should surprise and be unlike anything you'd ever heard before.
00:07:31.040And each generation will want to tear away what they see as the, the, the cliches and the sort
00:07:37.840of cookie cutter approaches of the generation before.
00:07:43.760Do you feel that comedy does not age as well as many other products of creativity?
00:07:49.140Because I, I'm always mortified to go back to something I thought was hilarious only to find that not only is it deeply unfunny, but I, I hate my former self for, for, for, for having found it as funny as I did.
00:08:02.320I do know embarrassment is, is the word which we may come back to.
00:08:06.320And, and I think there are some sort of golden jewels of comedy that you seem never to age.
00:08:13.880I mean, uh, I played to a godchild of mine not long ago, Bob Newhart doing his driving lessons
00:08:21.560They still are just rock solid pieces of work partly because I guess they slightly suggest a sort of mad men era of guy in a suit with a cigarette standing on a stage being kind of easy.
00:08:37.200But other than that, they don't really date.
00:08:39.960Whereas some early Steve Martin that I thought was the greatest comedy I ever heard.
00:08:44.360Do you think, well, that wild and crazy guy isn't quite as wild and crazy as I thought he was.
00:08:52.100And not only that, of course, comedian's age.
00:08:54.020And I, I do think certainly sketch comedy, dressing up as a, you know, as a bishop or a lawyer or a judge or something is funnier when a young person does it.
00:09:10.540And when you're actually old enough to be a judge or a bishop, it's character acting.
00:09:14.660It isn't quite the same as the, the sort of Python-esque.
00:09:17.980Like, the wonderful thing about seeing Python playing brigadier generals and, uh, and bishops and things is that they're still in their 20s.
00:09:57.300As you go and gallop off and spread the news, I'll be back here with a, with a point for you when you're on your way back.
00:10:02.800Well, yeah, so, so that's, I should probably flag that at the outset here.
00:10:07.160So the nominal pretext for our conversation is that we're releasing the book version of the conversation, the four horsemen conversation that Hitch, Richard Dawkins, Dan Dennett, and I had in 2007, uh, which, um, was recorded happily.
00:10:24.300Really was recorded as an afterthought.
00:10:31.120And it was, I was surprised to realize that that was actually the only conversation the four of us ever had.
00:10:37.220It's counterintuitive even to me, but, you know, you know, in knowing my own life, but I'm sure it will be counterintuitive to the people who, who hear this.
00:10:45.140And so we, anyway, we, um, refine the transcript of that conversation and then each wrote introductory essays and you were generous enough to write a forward to it.
00:10:55.940And so that's coming out in, I believe March, obviously it's not available on, um, Amazon now for pre-order and, and we're, you know, shamelessly plugging this here.
00:11:07.260All the, all the proceeds go to the Richard Dawkins foundation for reason and science, which I believe is now joined at the hip with the center, with the center.
00:11:14.280It is indeed, they very kindly gave me an award at Las Vegas this year.
00:11:17.380So I went to submit, but yeah, they've, they're fused as, as one body.
00:11:22.700And, and it's worth remembering that, uh, at that time you four were, you were characterized as the new atheists.
00:11:29.200There was this idea of a new atheism, a rather more intellectually rigorous, open, free thinking, unafraid way of addressing secularity, humanism and the burdens and, uh, and, and, and torments that religion was imposing on the world.
00:11:50.640The year Twitter came out, you know, this is a lot has changed since then.
00:11:54.640And, and it's fascinating to hear and watch you, you four talking about the world and wondering whether this has been made irrelevant by the rise of social media and the rise of all the things that have risen since then.
00:12:09.900But actually one finds that, um, as I think I say in the introduction, that the talking about religion and the dangers of accepting religion or being bound by religion or allowing religion,
00:12:19.200or allowing religious doctrine to inform policy and, uh, and, uh, and, and to be sort of unquestioned in, in, in, in, in, in government and the world, that the dangers of that are as apparent now as they were then.
00:12:32.900And then they actually leech out outside and things become a subset of religion in a way that are just as important that the same kind of heresies and blasphemies, uh, no longer pertaining to God and Jesus and Allah, but, uh, obtaining to gender politics and to all kinds of other issues.
00:12:50.900And we're still in the same position of, of thinking, gosh, there, there, there is, there is, there is still, there are still inquisitions.
00:12:59.900There's still utter deface, you know, that, that there, you see people falling, tumbling, disgraced because they've said something heretical.
00:13:10.900And, and, and it's actually greater now than it was in 2007 when the, the power of religion was still strong then.
00:13:16.820And the church in particular, the Roman church, but also evangelical Christianity in this country, United States where we're speaking was, was on the rise, the tea party and all those things would be going to happen.
00:13:27.900But yeah, I wouldn't count religion out just yet.
00:13:30.620I think, I mean, we, we see the pendulum keep swinging, but yeah, you, you're, you're right to see the parallel with this new orthodoxy of political correctness, which was, you know, it has always been a term and a concept, at least in, for the last few decades.
00:13:44.580But this is really a front on which Hitch is so dearly missed.
00:13:49.920I mean, it's, I've, I've, I've, on more than a hundred occasions, I'm sure I have thought, man, wouldn't it be great for Hitch to respond to this, this, this horror that just appeared.
00:14:03.000Actually, I just want to reference something that you wrote in your forward to the book, which caught my eye now that I've spent some time in the mindfulness minds producing a meditation app.
00:14:13.540Uh, you wrote in your description of me, you described me as being, quote, proficient in forms of meditation that an Englishman of my caste finds incomprehensible and deeply embarrassing.
00:14:24.240I can't even say the word mindfulness without blushing.
00:14:39.860Meditation and mindfulness, and I've subscribed to it, and I've been obediently following through.
00:14:44.260And your voice now has, has a very special place in my head, because it's that irritating voice, which you're fully aware of.
00:14:50.980You flag this, that just as one's mind is beginning to spin off into a nothingness or whatever it is that, as one concentrates on one's breathing and obeys the instructions you're giving, there's a nice silence and inhalation and exhalation.
00:15:04.120And then, damn it, your voice comes in again and plucks one up.
00:15:08.240And, and as you're aware, it can be, it's something one's got to get used to, because my instinct is simply to fall asleep.
00:15:14.460The moment you start, I start concentrating on my breathing, I'm falling asleep.
00:15:19.460And, and I know meditation and sleep aren't the same thing.
00:15:22.920No, no, both are good, but they're, they're distinct.
00:15:26.020But I, no, I'm very fascinated by this and fascinated by your role in this, because, yes, I am embarrassed by words like mindfulness, because I'm not quite sure what they mean.
00:16:16.460What is a higher level of consciousness?
00:16:18.260Does it mean I am seeing the red as redder, or hearing the music more keenly, or understanding a situation more accurately, with greater acuity?
00:16:31.160And I'm a very, very empirical person.
00:16:34.540And I, I love to see how things are true.
00:16:37.520And with mindfulness, and let me just be a devil's advocate with, I'm not going to attack you.
00:16:44.180I really, I've got great value already out of your course, and I'm finding it fascinating.
00:16:49.120But I think we all know that brain training games have been found to have zero applicability as far as actually improving the brain is concerned.
00:17:00.160They might make you slightly better at the game you're training at.
00:17:02.720So, for example, whether it's a crossword or it's a memory game or something, you're better at the crossword and better at the memory game.
00:17:10.180There may be some slight advantage in delaying forms of dementia by playing these games, which again, I mean, that makes rational sense.
00:17:18.420But there may be empirical evidence, epidemiological evidence that that works.
00:17:21.920But I am puzzled to think that you make claims for, for meditation, for example, that has, that it has cognitive effects.
00:17:32.800And I, I, you know, I did a, I went documentary series going around America.
00:17:38.700I remember when we were in Iowa, I went to this town in Iowa, which is owned by transcendental meditation people.
00:17:44.960And they have a university there and I went to interview them and they covered me in electrodes and tried to battle me with science about alpha and you would say theta with theta in English.
00:17:57.540But, you know, waves and I'm, I'm aware of this, that you can be in a position of such concentration and relaxation at the same time that you can probably think off the top of your head.
00:18:06.920And a thousand uses for a paperclip, which are creative and amusing, which someone who's trying too hard wouldn't be able to.
00:18:15.100It's, it's a bit like the, the, the salmon, um, if a live salmon is, is, is what an idea is, what, what a thought is.
00:18:23.280And if you try and clutch it, it's because it's alive and it's wet, slips out of your grasp.
00:18:28.040But if you hold it just right, you know, and, and that's what I know some of the claims of meditation are,
00:18:34.400that, that, that they allow this simultaneous relaxation and concentration.
00:18:38.540And, and, and I think that's, that's, it's good.
00:18:42.300And I like the idea of it, but I've always been propelled by, as I say, by greed and by ambition and by all the sort of darker sides of kind of lust and awkwardness and embarrassment,
00:18:56.620as I've said, that, that drive one to a fascination with things and the very torment and difficulty of a human mind and its need for things and its greed for things has been for me what energizes and what makes me who I am.
00:19:13.980And I see, I've always had this terrible fear of almost anything, whether it's a pharmaceutical or psychoanalytical, psychotherapeutic, or, or to do with meditation.
00:19:25.840I've seen it as a kind of zombifying, a kind of taking the edge off my mind.
00:19:45.860There's truth to, to many of those claims.
00:19:48.180I think let's, let's take the first piece.
00:19:50.340So yeah, the research on the benefits of training, even forget about just mental training.
00:19:56.420This is even true of physical training suggests that you get better at what you train very specifically.
00:20:03.920And, and in many cases, there's much less of a transfer effect than you'd expect.
00:20:08.740And this, again, this can be true even of, you know, physical training in a gym.
00:20:12.600It's like you get stronger in precisely the ways in which you exercise and people who, you know, could be just hulking with muscle and look like, you know, fantastically strong, you know, athletes.
00:20:24.300If you put them in a paradigm that has to be working the same muscle groups, but it's not the way they train, they're not nearly as impressive as they are.
00:20:40.740So as you say, if you, if you train, if you do these brain training games that work, you know, some aspect of working memory say, well, you get better at that particular task, but you're not, it doesn't transfer into the rest of your intellectual life.
00:20:55.160And then, or at least there's no evidence that I'm aware of that it does at this point.
00:20:58.160And we should also just acknowledge that meditation can mean many different things.
00:21:02.720There are different types of meditation.
00:21:04.160And so people can be training different things under that guise.
00:21:06.920But with mindfulness, what you're training is the very thing you want more of, arguably, once you understand how it can function in the economy of your emotional and cognitive life, which is you're becoming more aware of the dynamics of your own mental suffering.
00:21:27.040It's just the way in which being captured by thought moment to moment is leaving you hostage to whatever the contents of those thoughts are.
00:21:36.680And once you learn, you know, there's some modicum of mindfulness, you're, you actually see there's just a, there's a choice between being lost in thought.
00:21:43.180And by lost, I mean, thinking without even being dimly aware for those moments or minutes or hours that you're thinking.
00:21:51.300It's very much like being asleep and dreaming, right?
00:21:54.900You're just, you're just, you're just ruled by your thoughts.
00:21:57.440And then you're just laid bare to whatever emotional and behavioral implications are there.
00:22:03.320So you're, you know, you're angry, you're sad, you're saying the life deranging and relationship deranging things you say as an angry or sad person to your spouse or whoever.
00:22:12.160And mindfulness simply gives you the ability to, if nothing else, choose how long you want to be angry or sad for, really.
00:22:22.040Because you can just punctuate that wheelworks of reactivity and pause, if only for a few moments.
00:22:30.960And those pauses can be enormously beneficial.
00:22:33.760Now, to your point about, I guess, classically negative emotions being a source of creativity and energy, I think that's true for many of us some of the time.
00:22:46.980But I think it's easy to either just, in a delusory way, make a virtue of necessity there.
00:22:53.920I mean, those of us who are ruled by negative emotion are finding some silver lining to them.
00:22:58.380Whereas mostly they're just a source of suffering that would be great to get rid of.
00:23:01.760I mean, if you could put on one hat, which would allow you to feel the optimum motivational component of, one, positive emotions that you're not tending to feel.
00:23:12.680And two, you could titrate your negative emotions just to, like, their creative optimum, but then not suffer whenever you didn't feel like suffering.
00:23:20.800If there's some happy balance there, you might understand that very few of us find it just by accident.
00:23:27.120Because, like, if you can't be mindful, if you can't notice the next thought arise and capture your conscious life for moments or minutes or hours,
00:23:38.420you are simply living out the consequences of your past conditioning and your, you know, just who you were yesterday.
00:23:44.440You're like, there is actually no choice to make.
00:23:46.840Whereas if you train this particular skill, again, the awareness of the process and an ability to step back can give you another degree of freedom.
00:23:58.260And if it is just, listen, this is, it's good to be angry for the next 10 minutes because that's how I'm going to write this scene.
00:24:38.760And if we project ourselves into that cow for just a minute, we are absolutely, absolutely distraught with boredom.
00:24:48.040The idea that all we have to do is haul these calories into our interior, cropping grass, never stopping, always standing up, occasionally looking around.
00:24:57.640Bits of rain fall on you and then you wander around and you break wind and then you drop a cow pat and then you move on.
00:26:00.120Oh, there's always going to be envy as well.
00:26:02.260But, you know, and at their best, you look at an animal.
00:26:05.100I always think of the Amazonian tree frog I once encountered, and its face was just, it's like the face of someone you fell in love with when you just briefly glanced them getting onto an underground train and never saw them again for the rest of your life.
00:26:18.180But you always know they were the one, you know.
00:26:19.800And this tree frog was standing, you know, with an arm on one branch and an arm on another, legs open, with an enormous grin on its face.
00:26:27.700And I remember thinking, you know, you don't, as a tree frog, you never wake up in the morning thinking, was I a good tree frog yesterday?
00:26:54.960And if I met someone who had, I would just think they were just like some joke, you know, smiling Buddhist who always just gave me the truth in reverse all the time.
00:27:04.180You know, you must not sit down on the sofa.
00:27:06.480You must let the sofa stand up on you.
00:27:11.380And, you know, that we're actually annoyed by placidity by the cow in the field.
00:27:16.100When we meet it amongst humans, we think, come on, where's the juice, the bite, the vinegar, the fun, the snap?
00:27:24.940And again, I am definitely being devil's advocate here.
00:27:28.600I'm not saying that I genuinely don't disparage these ideas of mindfulness.
00:27:33.720And I'm fully aware that unhappiness and its wider forms, as we all know, the epidemiology on suicide and self-harm that is sweeping our culture is huge.
00:27:45.020Although, again, there's a lot of misreading of those data.
00:27:49.400You know, WHO will tell you that there is no higher instance of depression in the so-called developed world than there is in the undeveloped world that actually is pretty even.
00:28:00.060I feel like that's been we've been propagandized with another message recently.
00:28:03.200Exactly, that we must be guilty because we live in an emotionally constipated, difficult, bad, awful culture that needs released into a nice, sweet world of friendliness and, you know, and empathy.
00:28:43.580We were naked and we were ashamed, we say to God, you know.
00:28:46.780But there's the real embarrassment is the embarrassment you feel for other people.
00:28:50.400I think it's a form of real empathy to feel awkward about others.
00:28:56.680That's why I can't watch any reality TV.
00:28:59.540I'm just really, just cannot bear seeing people put in that position, even if they're happy or clearly believe they are and think they've triumphed.
00:29:15.780The failures in ice skating I find more painful than anywhere in athletics because the mismatch between what was gracefully being accomplished a moment before and what happens when they splatter all over the ice.
00:29:31.800But that is, do you know Paul Bloom's work on empathy?
00:29:34.800I've heard of it, but I don't know it.
00:29:36.520Yeah, maybe we'll touch that in a second because it's fascinating.
00:29:40.820To come back to your point about the cows, the mindful cows, no one who studies mindfulness or who gets deep into the practice thinks that mere placidity, like, I mean, and certainly not bovine placidity, is an exemplar of the practice.
00:29:56.640And this is actually a misunderstanding that you can persist for a long time while one's practicing.
00:30:04.040I mean, there's something very active about mindfulness because you are keenly aware of the actual character of your experience in a way that you're tending not to be in every other moment.
00:30:15.620I mean, the moment where you're consumed by thought, where your reach is exceeding your grasp tends to be a moment where you are actually not, your attention is bound up by thought and reactivity and prejudice, you know, and in ways where you're not actually cognitively and emotionally available in all kinds of other ways that you could recognize the value of.
00:30:42.620And the rewarding nature of if you could inhabit that band of consciousness long enough.
00:30:48.520So, I mean, just like socially, like when you are in the mode of your ambition in relationship to other people, there are all kinds of experiences you're not having with other people that if you could have them, you might recognize they're actually preferable, right?
00:31:04.820So, like when you're ambitious, when there are many things you desire, you walk into a room with a bunch of other people and they're beginning to function like props in your world where you either have to get around them, you have to use them, they all have kind of instrumental value.
00:31:19.100If somebody is incredibly wealthy, that may be relevant to you, if you are a fundraiser or you have something, if that completes part of the puzzle of your own ambition, you know, you begin to see people in ways which are, again, instrumentalizing of them.
00:31:34.620And it makes you unavailable to actually connect in ways that you would otherwise connect if your attention were free of your own desire.
00:31:45.620I mean, if you're talking about body-mind or body-brain, and obviously that's a whole thorny issue about brain and mind, but let's just say for the moment they're roughly the same.
00:31:55.160If someone's been to the gym, if someone has bodyfulness, if someone runs and goes to the gym and is brilliantly trained and very fit, I can see it straight away.
00:32:17.280Now, can you say to me that we can have a random test in which I meet 20 people and I will be able to see straight away which 10 of them have had mindfulness training and which 10 haven't?
00:32:30.720If they're just a random bunch of people, is there some equivalent to that, my God, look at what they can lift.
00:32:36.460Look how fast they can go up the stairs without getting out of breath.
00:43:01.060And I would argue that you'd be more appreciative of many of the products of your own creativity or others because you can actually pay attention.
00:43:11.020You're just not as distractible, right?
00:43:12.800So it is, you know, the distraction is the enemy of everything we want to pay attention to, whether it's our own creativity, a movie we're trying to watch, a telephone call that we're, you know, we're on the phone with our mothers or whatever.
00:43:26.440And we're losing the train of her thought because what we're multitasking.
00:43:29.840Certainly you and I, and I bet most people listening would agree that if we could bottle concentration, if we could learn how to just instantly zoom in and focus on the job that has to be done without having to look out of the window for half an hour first or traipse around the room or go off to drive and pick up some eggs and milk and come back again and then face the dreaded blinking screen or whatever it is, the job.
00:43:52.260And that actually is one of the primary skills that is transferable from meditation because meditation is the ability to pay close attention to any arbitrary object.
00:44:04.800So as you say, stare at that water bottle for five minutes, somebody who really knows how to meditate, who has trained it as a skill, can stare at it and be one pointed enough such that not much else is happening, right?
00:44:20.600So if the goal is to just keep eyes on the water bottle and attention on the, you know, inwardly on the water bottle, that is an impossible task for most people.
00:44:29.640It becomes increasingly possible the more you learn to meditate.
00:44:32.700So then swap out that water bottle for anything else, you know, the laughing face of your child, right?
00:44:38.080When you have your smartphone competing for your attention, but your child is there and you've got this one opportunity to pay attention.
00:44:45.360We're constantly faced with this triaging of our attention in our lives.
00:44:51.120And it is the one thing we never get back.
00:44:54.460How we use each moment of attention is how we use it.
00:44:58.060And you can subscribe now at SamHarris.org.