#33 — Ask Me Anything 4
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Summary
A day after the Brussels attacks, a new article accuses Sam Harris of being a "white supremacist" and a "jihadist." What does that mean, exactly? And what does it mean, and why should we be worried about it? In this episode of the Making Sense Podcast, I try to answer these questions and talk about what we can do to combat Islamic extremism and jihadi terrorism in our own community, as well as in the rest of the world. I also discuss why Hillary Clinton needs to stop demonizing Muslims as "bigots" and "Islamophobes," and why she needs to do more than just say words like "anti-Islam" when it comes to the problem of Islamic extremism, terrorism, and political Islamism. And I also talk about why Trump is dangerously unqualified to be president and why he should know better than to say things like "Islamic extremism" or "Jihadism" in the first place, and how he should stop lying about it, and start saying the words "Islamism" and other things about it that actually make sense, like "jihadi terrorism." And, finally, why he's not going to win the election because he's a bad guy, and Hillary is going to be good at it, because he doesn't know what he's talking about, and that's not a problem, and he's going to do anything about it at all, and it's a good thing, and so why he needs to start saying it, at least, and not just talking about it and not saying it in a way that makes sense, and saying it right and being a lot of things that actually makes him feel good about it in order to be a good guy, etc, etc etc. and a good dude, etc. etc., etc. And so much more. Thanks for listening to the episode, and I hope you enjoy it. Please consider becoming a supporter of the podcast, because I'm getting over yet another cold. I have just gotten over a cold, so I'm beginning to wonder whether my commitment to vegetarianism isn't just a strategy cooked up by the cold virus by which to prepare me as a vector by which I can be a vector to lay waste to the world by which we can all be a better human being. . Thank you for listening. -Sam Harris Sam Harris - Making Sense? - The Making Sense podcast by Sam Harris, by John Rocha
Transcript
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Apologies in advance, I'm getting over yet another cold.
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I'm beginning to wonder whether my commitment to vegetarianism isn't just a strategy cooked
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up by the cold virus to prepare me as a vector by which to lay waste to the rest of society.
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I have just gotten so many colds since I stopped killing animals or paying others to kill them
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Well, this is an Ask Me Anything podcast, which I'm doing a day after the Brussels attacks.
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So the questions I have here really don't reflect what has been going on, so I feel somewhat
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Maybe I'll just say a few words about Brussels at the outset.
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Everything I've written about Islam and jihadism and profiling and related topics should be viewed
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I really don't have any more to say about this kind of thing, but I'll just give you a glimpse
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So I'm at a conference talking about things like artificial intelligence, and I open my
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phone to discover that there's an article circulating calling me a white supremacist.
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Now, needless to say, Reza Aslan has circulated it saying, what do you think Sam Harris means
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when he says profile anyone who could conceivably be Muslim?
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Even though in the very paragraph where I make that claim, I make it clear that white guys
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like me also fit the profile I'm talking about.
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And then the very next day, we have attacks like these in Belgium, and you see the pictures
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of the likely suicide bombers, and once again, they're not blonde-haired old ladies from Iceland.
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White guys like me have also been recruited to ISIS and Al-Qaeda.
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So, I'm not putting myself or anyone who looks like me out of the profile, but not everyone
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My only point about profiling is that we have to admit that we know what we're looking for.
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In a place like an airport, in addition to random searches and searching all luggage,
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our security personnel should be looking for people who stand a chance of being jihadists.
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Now, out in the world, they should be looking for Muslim extremists who may be planning some
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It seems rather obvious that they should be reaching out to the Muslim community.
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More important, the Muslim community should be scrutinizing itself, profiling itself, one
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If you are a moderate Muslim, you have to admit that there is a unique problem of religious
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And if this offends you, you are part of the problem.
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And if you don't want Muslims demonized, you have to stop obfuscating this issue.
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What's more, you have to stop attacking people as bigots and Islamophobes for expressing
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their totally sane concerns about Islamism and jihadism.
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And as for the presidential election, assuming it's going to be Clinton versus Trump, it's
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time for Clinton to stop mincing words or lying outright on this topic.
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There are no liberals who are suddenly going to vote for Trump because Hillary says something
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So to make this clear, I think Trump is dangerously unqualified to be president.
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And his apparent unawareness of this is his total lack of concern for his obvious ignorance
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But in his own idiotic way, at least he is naming the problem.
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At least he's not pretending that we are all so worried about the IRA or that Middle Eastern
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Christians are just as likely to be suicide bombers as Muslims are.
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Just think of what a significant attack in the U.S. prior to our election could do if Hillary
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But she has to start using words like Islamic extremism and Islamism and jihadism and political
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The so-called war on terror is not a war against a generic problem of terrorism.
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It's a war, as Majid Nawaz has said over and over, against a global jihadist insurgency.
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Unless Clinton starts making sense on this topic, she's going to give ISIS a vote in electing
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And you can be sure they have a favorite candidate.
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So to say any more here, I think I will just be saying things you've all heard me say a hundred
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I mean, maybe there's just there's one more point to clarify.
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I clearly have followed Majid's line in distinguishing Islamism from Islam.
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And I've been hearing many disgruntled noises from readers who think this is intellectually
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So maybe I should make it clear how I see this.
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I think the notion of revelation and the notion that faith trumps reason is dangerous and intrinsically
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And I have made no secret of the fact that I think Islam is the worst religion on most
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points, currently ruling the minds of a significant part of humanity.
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There is a war of ideas that has to be waged and won with Islam and with anyone who believes
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that the Quran is the perfect word of the creator of the universe.
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But there's a distinction between nominal Muslims or those who are fairly non-committal in their
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faith or those who have some interpretation of the faith that allows them to ignore many
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And there's a difference between Islamists and jihadists.
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Islamism is the commitment to impose Islam on the rest of society.
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And jihadism is that variant of Islamism that intends to do this by force as opposed to winning
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And I agree with Majid that the way forward is to convince the Muslim world to be increasingly
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And that is a much more promising door to try to force 1.6 billion people through than the
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Now, insofar as I can persuade Muslims to be atheists and disavow their faith, that's also
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And occasionally I notice some success on that front.
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But I think it is far less realistic in any reasonable time frame to expect 1.6 billion
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Muslims to apostatize than it is to expect them to reform their religion in a direction of
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And I will not pretend to be optimistic on that score either.
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Many of you think that is just a fool's errand.
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What more reasonable project do you have to recommend?
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So, my view here is that wherever a distinction between Islam and Islamism doesn't exist, we
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And if you're feeling powerless here, if you're feeling there's nothing you can do that's useful
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after an event like this, I would say that the one thing you can do is lose your patience
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It is not a lie to say that there is a difference between Islamism and Islam.
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There are many Muslims who do not want a global caliphate.
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There are many Muslims who do not want homosexuals thrown off of rooftops.
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There are many Muslims for whom Islam in some form is important, but who are no more religious
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than the least religious person you met yesterday.
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And where they're not waging one, they have to be encouraged to wage it.
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And the only way I know to do that is for all of us to keep speaking honestly about the
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And when I last looked at this page, there were over 1,300 of them.
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So needless to say, I will not make much headway.
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But I really thank you for delivering so many questions and voting them up.
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And I can only assume that the ones that came first now were the ones that, in fact, were
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But maybe I'll dig around a little to find others that are of interest.
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Anxiety is a monster that is crippling and paralyzing and keeps you in a loop of debilitating
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negative emotions, even when one desperately wants out.
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Well, the neurophysiology of anxiety is pretty well understood.
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But I don't think understanding it in any detail really helps you.
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There are drugs you can take to mitigate the effects of anxiety.
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I should say, up front, I have no clinical experience, and this is not my area.
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I would think that if anxiety is really crippling, there's some role for drugs to play.
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Whether it's beta blockers that impede the effect of adrenaline on your heart rate, so you don't
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Or anti-anxiety drugs that work on the neurotransmitter GABA.
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But in general, the people who work with anxiety therapeutically, to my understanding, don't
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And that you do something more along the line of cognitive behavioral therapy, which is to
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say you expose yourself in manageable ways to the things that provoke anxiety, and you
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You become open to feeling the effects of anxiety and realize you can get through it.
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And there's certainly a role for meditation and mindfulness to play in this part of the
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For instance, many people are afraid to fly, and even those of us who aren't especially
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afraid to fly can feel anxious in significant turbulence.
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Well, we have some thought that turbulence might be dangerous, right?
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That it makes it more likely the plane will crash.
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And, of course, truly significant turbulence can cause a plane to crash.
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But this, as we know from the statistics of plane crashes, is a very, very rare thing.
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So, there are two levels to respond to this experience, so as to mitigate anxiety.
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You're in an airplane, and it begins to bounce.
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Now, unless you're in that rare and horrible experience of being actually thrown around the
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cabin so as to get injured, it's very likely that the bouncing is not physically painful,
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And in other contexts, you would subject yourself to even more violent bouncing and not be worried
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You might go on some ride at an amusement park, which exerts greater force on you bodily, and
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you do it because you're seeking that experience out.
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Now, on an airplane, it's totally unwelcome to you because you're afraid of dying.
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But if you just take the raw sensations, they are not your problem.
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It's what they portend is your interpretation of them that worries you.
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There are at least two levels at which you can deal with this.
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First is to think conceptually about the nature of the problem and about what you fear.
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Is it rational to worry that your plane will crash if you're experiencing turbulence?
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The likelihood of dying in a plane crash is minuscule.
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Over the course of your journey, you should begin to worry as you leave the airport and get
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in an Uber or a taxi or drive yourself home in your own car.
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That's when your risk of mortality begins to peak.
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So, if you understand that, if you understand that every moment in a plane is, in fact, safer
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than many moments you spend on the ground, certainly safer than when you're walking as a pedestrian
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fixated on your smartphone and stepping into the crosswalk, that's when your adrenaline
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should surge or when you're driving and glancing down at your phone to see what text just came
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Those are the moments where the sweat should begin beating up on your forehead.
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So, when you're in a plane and it's begun to bounce, it is, in fact, unreasonable to worry
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If you understand that, that actually can have an effect.
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Then you can become willing to just experience the raw sensations of turbulence.
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Then you can cease to interpret the experience as a sign of actual danger.
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The other level at which you can address this, and these are totally compatible moves, I recommend
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both of them, is to become mindful of the feeling of anxiety itself.
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And it actually doesn't mean anything at the level of raw sensation.
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You might have thoughts about it, and very likely much of your thinking in that moment is purposed
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toward trying to figure out how not to feel that way or not to let it get worse.
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But if you'll step out of your thoughts and just become willing to feel the raw sensation
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of anxiety, actually just surrender your resistance to it, just feel it as energy, it can lose
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It can become very difficult to distinguish from what, under another framing, would be
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How do you know the difference between being anxious about something that's about to happen
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For the most part, it is the thoughts you're thinking when you're feeling that arousal.
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There's a cognitive, conceptual overlay on top of this raw feeling.
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You can consciously reframe things, or you can step out of it altogether and just feel the
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And when you do that, anxiety can be like any other experience that has no meaning for
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Let's say you have a rash on your elbow and it's itching.
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Okay, that doesn't say anything deep about you as a person that has no psychological implications.
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It might be extraordinarily unpleasant, but it doesn't reach into your sense of who you
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The deepest way to respond to anxiety, and again, I'm not saying that there is no case in which
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But for anxiety in its more ordinary range, the deep way to respond to it is to become
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willing to feel it, to cease to interpret it as important, and to function in the midst
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Anxiety rises and falls like any other emotion.
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And if you're not continually thinking the thoughts that make you anxious, it actually can't stay
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And this is true of other unpleasant emotions like anger and sadness, and they're continually
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And we're spending most of our time thinking without knowing that we're thinking.
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So mindfulness in particular is a very good antidote to this problem.
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But the trick is you can't apply it as an antidote.
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You can't be mindful of anxiety so that it will go away.
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You can't push it away with meditation, or at least that attempt is more likely to fail.
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What you're really after in those moments is genuine equanimity, real acceptance of the
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Just let it burn bright in you and discover that it doesn't matter.
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It simply comes and it goes and you can function.
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What are your thoughts on immortality, or at least living a very, very long time, as pursued
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Aubrey, if you're not familiar with Aubrey de Grey, you should watch some of his talks.
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He has some very good arguments against people's ethical intuitions here.
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Many people seem to think that if we could cure aging and death and become immortal or live
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thousands of years, that there's something unethical about that project, that it's either
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so unnatural as to be unethical or it represents some kind of selfishness that we should be
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I think Aubrey's rejoinder to those intuitions is compelling.
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As to whether it's possible, I think it probably is in principle possible.
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I think Aubrey describes aging as an engineering problem.
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There are not that many ways in the end to grow old and die.
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I think he points to seven different ways in which our bodies begin to break down.
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The depositing of junk inside of cells or between cells is another way.
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There are just not that many ways that an old person on the verge of death differs from
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So I agree that if we understood those ways completely and we could intervene biochemically
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and make the necessary changes, well then we may find that aging is now no longer a problem.
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I think, as Aubrey argues, aging is the worst thing there is.
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And the only reason why anyone's tempted to accept it is because it appears currently
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But if you think Alzheimer's should be cured and you think cancer should be cured, well
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then aging is the super problem you should want solved.
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Because each of these evils, along with many others, are mere symptoms of aging.
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I think if there's any way in which I'm skeptical of his discussion of this topic, it may be
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just a basic uncertainty about whether he's too optimistic about the timeline here.
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But I think it's an incredibly interesting area to work in.
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And I think the taboos around declaring one's intent to cure aging are fascinating, both ethically
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And I think Aubrey has said some very useful things in that area.
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Sam, I remember you mentioning getting flack from Majid about not liking hip-hop.
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I'm curious what sort of music you do listen to.
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I'm just not, I don't listen to a lot of hip-hop, but I don't recoil at the sound of hip-hop.
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On this list, I would pick Radiohead of the three choices.
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The issue with me and music is, one, I'm not a musician.
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So I'm not, I'm fairly uneducated in this area.
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And there's a lot of music I like, but I don't spend a lot of time listening to music because
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I just spend a lot of time trying to ignore the music.
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And when I'm not working, I'm a bit of an information junkie.
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And so I'm listening to audiobooks or podcasts or the news in the car while traveling.
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So it's, it's, there's not a lot of time for music to get in.
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And if I'm going to listen to music, I often just put on Spotify or something now.
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And I, in fact, I don't even know what I'm listening to.
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I just have something that some AI somewhere is piping into my brain based on the few radio
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And maybe that will be the future of ideas too.
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At a certain point, you won't know what book you're reading or what lecture you're listening
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Something like Spotify will just start feeding you disconnected ideas.
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I'm an Arab who is fortunate enough to be fluent in English, but many Arabs are not as
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I just wish they could reach a larger Arab audience, especially the book Islam and the Future
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I've been sheepish about letting my books get translated into Arabic.
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There hasn't been much demand, as you might imagine.
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But on the few occasions when someone has asked permission to translate one of my books, it's
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But I remember declining because I just didn't want to have Salman Rushdie's experience of
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learning one day that one of his translators got killed.
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And when you're talking about Arabic or Urdu or any other language from a Muslim majority
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country, I begin to worry about this sort of thing.
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Can you please do a podcast with Richard Lang, disciple and close friend of the late Douglas
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Harding, about the headless way, the westernized version of Dzogchen?
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I imagine getting a Dzogchen master on a podcast could be tough and their message a little abstruse.
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But the way Lang and Harding talk about seeing is thrilling.
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And he seems to make perfect sense on this topic, as did Douglas Harding.
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And I will talk about this practice more, and I'll talk about it in particular in the meditation
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The exercises that Douglas Harding recommended and which I'm sure Lang teaches are based on
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changing your relationship to your visual field.
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And I write about this a little bit in my book, Waking Up.
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We define our sense of self, visually, in particular.
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You still, if you feel like a self with your eyes open, you're going to feel like a self
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But the experience of selflessness can be very striking with your eyes open, because it changes
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your felt sense of subject-object perception with respect to everything that you see.
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And the way that Harding described this, in particular in his book, On Having No Head,
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is as the experience of headlessness, where he would look out at his visual field, and then
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He would recognize that his head was not among the contents of his visual field.
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And as you listen to me now, you might do this.
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Just with your eyes open, look at whatever it is you can see, and notice that your face,
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your face, or your head, is not among the things that you see.
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In fact, where your head is supposed to be, there's just the world.
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And if you become sensitive to this consideration, if you look for what you presume you are looking
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out of and fail to find it, you can have a, as the questioner says, a thrilling sense of having lost
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And this itself can become a basis of mindfulness.
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This can be the thing you pay attention to when you meditate, as opposed to your breath or
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And some very powerful changes in your conscious experience can happen the more you do this.
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But as far as talking about this at length on a podcast, it's a little difficult because
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much of what needs to be said needs to be indicated visually.
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And so it definitely lends itself more to video than audio.
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But I will try to be precise about it in my meditation app.
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I watch television news rather often, whether it's the evening news or 60 Minutes or Frontline
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And often somebody on social media will send me a link to something more esoteric, like an
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English language paper in Pakistan, for instance.
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So I do see things that are off the beaten path.
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But for the most part, I have very standard and uninteresting sources of news.
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One of the virtues of social media is that if I haven't noticed something through any of
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these channels, I very often hear about it from one of you.
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Sam, I heard you say once before that the left has one advantage over the right and that
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Well, now that the left seems to be going off the deep end, we need those mechanisms.
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I'm not sure I said that, or at least I don't think I said that it was an advantage.
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The self-criticism of the left is a disadvantage in its tug of war with the right.
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The left eats its own in a way that the right never seems to.
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And what you find on the left is a criticism of one's own tribe, which can lead to a kind
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Now, short of masochism, obviously self-criticism is an intellectual virtue.
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It's very good to wonder whether or not one is wrong, to wonder whether or not one's opponent,
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politically, might have a point, to wonder whether or not one's group has treated other
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