Making Sense - Sam Harris - The Drive Interview with Peter Attia

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Waking Up Podcast. This is Sam Harris.

00:00:23.920 Many things to cover in today's housekeeping. You might not want to skip this one. I think

00:00:28.740 there will be something of relevance in here for most of you. First, the name of the podcast

00:00:36.680 is changing. The truth is, Waking Up was always the wrong name for this podcast. As most of

00:00:45.540 you know, I have a book by that title. I now have a meditation app, which is a direct descendant

00:00:53.900 of that book, dealing with all of the material I cover in it in greater depth. So there's

00:01:02.300 now a fair amount of confusion about what my app is and how it relates to the podcast.

00:01:09.180 So in order to protect the app and to put the podcast on truer footing, come some week in

00:01:19.080 January. This podcast will be retitled, Making Sense. So it will be the Making Sense Podcast

00:01:27.100 or Making Sense with Sam Harris. And I think you'll agree that name actually makes more sense

00:01:36.220 than Waking Up, given all the topics I touch here. So there's nothing for you to do. It

00:01:42.480 will appear on the same RSS feed. Everyone's membership on my site and in my app will be

00:01:50.820 as it is. All the old episodes of the podcast will still be available. At least for now, I

00:01:57.480 don't think anything's going to change there, but I'm not quite sure what we're going to do

00:02:01.320 with the archive. But all those episodes will still be under the same name, Waking Up in the

00:02:08.140 same feed. But just the new episode I release at some point in January will change over. Anyway,

00:02:15.600 just a change of name, logo, and indeed font. Okay, some new Experiments in Conversation events

00:02:27.520 to announce. Pre-sale tickets for Boston, D.C., and New York are now available to subscribers.

00:02:34.540 If you are a subscriber, you have already heard about that, presumably by email. And tickets

00:02:40.960 remain for Detroit, Milwaukee, and Chicago. You can find all that information at samharris.org

00:02:47.440 forward slash events, and more dates will be hitting the calendar soon. We've been trying to figure out

00:02:54.400 how to alleviate some of the lingering pain left by the dissolution of Pangburn philosophy. So what we're

00:03:02.120 doing here is that we're offering tickets to those of you who have unrefunded tickets for the Day of

00:03:07.780 Reflection Conference in New York that got canceled in November. If you are one of those unlucky ticket

00:03:14.520 holders, please email us at info at samharris.org, and we will give you tickets to my upcoming show

00:03:21.780 at the Beacon Theater in New York on March 1st. So again, if you are holding unrefunded tickets

00:03:27.360 for the Pangburn event, the Day of Reflection Conference, please forward those confirmation

00:03:33.480 emails to info at samharris.org. And do this by January 15th, because on January 16th, the remaining

00:03:42.560 seats will be released to the general public. So this is time-sensitive. I know this doesn't solve

00:03:49.300 for all of you. I know many of you were traveling to New York for that conference. In fact, some of

00:03:54.100 you traveled only to find out that it was canceled. Needless to say, I feel terrible about this.

00:04:01.480 But unfortunately, I can't make substitutions like this at other shows. This sort of thing is

00:04:06.160 actually hard to work out with Live Nation, holding back hundreds of seats for one of their events.

00:04:11.580 I'm very happy to do it, but unfortunately, I can't do it for other shows on other dates. It just

00:04:16.420 introduces too much chaos into planning this tour. So this is at least something I can do in an

00:04:22.600 attempt to clean up Pangburn's mess, however imperfectly. Again, the event is at the Beacon

00:04:28.740 Theater in New York on March 1st. And for those of you in Auckland who were left holding tickets for

00:04:36.380 that event that Pangburn canceled and were not refunded, please get in touch when I announce

00:04:42.440 events closer to you. I'm not sure I'm coming to New Zealand next year, but I'm almost certainly

00:04:49.920 coming to Australia, probably in the middle of the year. Anyway, stay in touch, stay on my newsletter,

00:04:56.220 and if I come anywhere near you, needless to say, I'll be happy to give you tickets to anything I do

00:05:02.480 down there. Okay. Patreon. As many of you probably know, I deleted my Patreon account and I issued a

00:05:12.960 brief statement, which those of you who are on my list received. I'll just read that here so we're on

00:05:19.540 the same page. I have a little more to say. It's very brief. This is what I posted. Dear Patreon

00:05:27.260 supporters. As many of you know, the crowdfunding site Patreon has banned several prominent content

00:05:33.460 creators from its platform. While the company insists that each was in violation of its terms

00:05:38.440 of service, these recent expulsions seem more readily explained by political bias. Although I

00:05:44.240 don't share the politics of the banned members, I consider it no longer tenable to expose any part

00:05:49.740 of my podcast funding to the whims of Patreon's, quote, trust and safety committee. I will be deleting my

00:05:56.680 Patreon account tomorrow. If you want to continue sponsoring my work, I encourage you to open a

00:06:00.880 subscription at samharris.org forward slash subscribe. As always, I remain deeply grateful

00:06:06.440 for your support. Wishing you all a very happy new year. Okay, so this got a far larger response online

00:06:13.440 than I was expecting. Most of it extremely supportive of me, and some quite critical. Truth is, both the

00:06:21.960 positive and negative responses were somewhat unfair. What I did here is not quite as selfless an act as

00:06:29.620 many people imagine, but nor was I signaling my support for the alt-right. So let me explain my

00:06:36.660 thinking a little more here. Patreon published their own response in the wake of my leaving, which

00:06:43.900 further muddied the waters here. So this is what happened. A few people were deplatformed, as I said,

00:06:51.120 and the case that really caught my attention, and which really seemed to bother many of you, was the

00:06:55.800 case of Carl Benjamin, otherwise known as Sargon of Akkad, a prominent YouTuber. He apparently had his

00:07:03.360 account deleted, and there was no process of appeal offered to him. He just got deleted and was told

00:07:12.400 there was no recourse. And I'm not very familiar with Benjamin, and nothing I say here should be

00:07:20.680 construed as a defense of anything he may have said or done online, about which I'm unaware. But when I saw

00:07:28.080 so many of you complaining about this, I reached out to Patreon CEO Jack Conte, and I asked him what went

00:07:35.760 into this decision, and he told me that they have a trust and safety team that evaluates these things

00:07:42.140 exhaustively. And so I said, well, can you provide links to the examples of the speech that sealed

00:07:49.320 Benjamin's fate with the team? And he did that. He sent me the transcript of what he said and links

00:07:56.880 to the audio on YouTube. And the transcript was fairly eye-opening. He was using the N-word

00:08:02.180 with apparent abandon and using other slurs. But then I clicked through to the offending audio,

00:08:11.040 and honestly, it took me about 45 seconds to determine that the context really mattered here.

00:08:21.420 What was happening was Benjamin was being attacked by white supremacists in an online chat, and he was

00:08:29.100 castigating them in terms that he thought they would find offensive. And while I don't support his

00:08:36.120 tactics here, you know, none of it sounded good, and obviously it could be used against him

00:08:42.400 maliciously, the truth is there was simply no indication that he would use these words in other

00:08:49.280 contexts to express his own bigotry. He was also appearing on someone else's channel, right, so therefore

00:08:55.060 this forum wasn't even funded by his own Patreon page. So it's very hard to see how he was in

00:09:01.760 violation of their terms of service. And the fact that it took me less than a minute to understand

00:09:07.120 these things, while Patreon claims to have done this exhaustive review, made me worry about the

00:09:13.820 degree to which political bias is clouding the company's judgment. So as I thought was clear

00:09:20.160 in my initial email, this really wasn't a pure case of me communicating my solidarity with Benjamin

00:09:28.520 or anyone else. It was in part that, certainly from what I can tell, what was done to him was deeply

00:09:35.860 unfair. But honestly, I was also motivated by my own self-interest here. As I said, I can't allow any

00:09:45.660 significant part of my podcast funding to exist at the pleasure of a bunch of millennials who can't

00:09:53.100 figure out which way is up when someone utters a taboo string of syllables. And given that I frequently

00:09:59.300 touch controversial topics, and I'm making a considerable effort to create a space where I can

00:10:05.700 do that, it just seems prudent for me to secure 100% of my funding through my own website. So anyway,

00:10:12.800 that's not adding much to my original statement, but those are the facts. And as many of you intuit,

00:10:20.580 this does come at some significant economic cost. There's certainly no guarantee that all of the 9,000

00:10:27.840 people who are supporting me on Patreon are going to make the jump to my own site. Certainly not all of

00:10:34.020 them have made the jump thus far. To those of you who have, I'm very grateful. Obviously, to those of you

00:10:40.600 who supported me all this time on Patreon, I remain extremely grateful. Nobody's status with respect to

00:10:47.500 their account changes. If you ever supported me on Patreon, you have access to my site. Most of you

00:10:55.440 have lifetime access to the Waking Up course because you got grandfathered in before launch. So nothing

00:11:01.800 changes there. But needless to say, if you still want to support the show, I encourage you to do that

00:11:07.640 through my website. Okay, so much housekeeping. There's a special Reddit AMA just on the topic of meditation

00:11:18.320 on Friday the 21st, I believe a day after this podcast drops. Otherwise, it'll be archived there. So you can

00:11:28.200 see that. You can go to the meditation subreddit to see that. A few more words about the Waking Up

00:11:35.640 course. Again, if you're finding the course valuable, you can give it as a gift for the holidays. And it

00:11:41.960 is especially good to give as a gift now because the price is changing in January. And all of you who

00:11:48.420 have subscribed or given gifts at the $7.99 introductory price will be grandfathered in at that price for as long

00:11:56.760 as you're subscribers. But the price is nearly doubling on February 1st to $14.99 a month. And I will

00:12:07.040 also say that if you do the first 50-day introductory course, right, the first 50 meditations, and you do

00:12:14.760 them in some reasonable time frame, like the first 90 days, and you don't get value from that, and you want

00:12:24.100 a refund, well then, we will be happy to refund you. So if that describes your experience on the app,

00:12:32.380 please reach out at info at wakingup.com. What else here? I think that's it. If I forgot anything,

00:12:41.640 I will tell you next time. And now for today's podcast. Today I am speaking with Peter Atiyah.

00:12:48.860 This is one of those episodes where someone is interviewing me for another podcast, but I

00:12:55.600 thought the conversation was valuable enough to broadcast on my show as well. Peter is a physician

00:13:02.380 who focuses on longevity. Peter earned his medical degree from Stanford, and he holds a degree in

00:13:11.220 mechanical engineering and applied mathematics as well. He trained for five years at Johns Hopkins

00:13:17.540 Hospital in general surgery, and he also spent two years at the NIH training in surgical oncology

00:13:24.660 at the National Cancer Institute. And he's really one of the most interesting doctors I've met.

00:13:31.500 You should definitely listen to his podcast, The Drive, where he goes very deep into conversations

00:13:37.560 on longevity. And he has a lot to say about nutrition and exercise physiology and sleep and

00:13:45.800 cardiovascular health. He did a great interview on Rogan's podcast, where I learned that when he was 30

00:13:54.100 years old, he did not know how to swim and went from learning how to swim to being, if I recall correctly,

00:14:02.540 the first person ever to swim from, what was it, the Big Island to Maui and back again. Something insane.

00:14:11.180 And he's done many swims of that sort. Anyway, that gives you some indication of what kind of guy he is.

00:14:17.340 But here he's talking to me about meditation, mostly, and interviewing me for his podcast.

00:14:23.500 Again, his podcast is called The Drive, and I highly recommend it. So we talk about various types of

00:14:30.720 meditation. We talk about the difference between pain and suffering, the difference between joy and

00:14:37.220 well-being. We talk about the half-life of negative emotions, the nature of thinking and dreaming,

00:14:45.580 the power of culture to shape our minds, the power of language. We talk about various drug experiences,

00:14:52.580 MDMA in particular, the psychological prospect of loving one's enemies, the phenomenon of moral

00:14:59.940 luck. We get into the details around the practice of Vipassana and Dzogchen and the differences there.

00:15:06.960 We touch on the ethics of lying and other topics. Anyway, I enjoyed the conversation,

00:15:13.400 and now I bring you Peter Atiyah.

00:15:20.380 Well, Sam, thanks so much for making time today.

00:15:23.180 Yeah, yeah.

00:15:23.820 This is a pleasure.

00:15:24.340 This is a pleasure for me. I'm coming to someone else's studio to record.

00:15:27.920 Yeah, well, you're getting the game long enough this is the way it happens.

00:15:32.040 Well, I really appreciate it. There's so much I want to talk about today, but I also want to be

00:15:38.280 thoughtful about pulling out threads that I think are most valuable to people I take care of. In many

00:15:43.760 ways, that's sort of an undercurrent of what I like to talk about on podcasts is things that I can

00:15:48.300 then share with my patients and things like that. I don't know if you remember this, but almost a

00:15:53.380 year ago, I emailed you and said, hey, man, do you have time to talk? And you said, yeah. And it was

00:15:58.280 like, actually, I know when it was. It was right after Christmas. It was like the day after Christmas.

00:16:01.720 Yeah, it was the 26th of December. And I said, I want to talk with you about mindfulness meditation.

00:16:07.340 And you said, great. And we hopped on a call. Do you remember this discussion?

00:16:10.280 Yeah, I think I remember the one you're referencing.

00:16:13.640 So I had had a very profound experience. And prior to that, I had been somewhat familiar, I think would

00:16:20.860 be the most generous way of saying it, but somewhat familiar with meditation, primarily focusing on

00:16:25.720 concentration-based meditations, like mantra-based practice. But I'd just come back from

00:16:31.040 basically a rehab facility where you were sort of out in the middle of nowhere. You had no

00:16:34.920 electronics. You weren't even allowed to have books or anything like that. And you were really

00:16:39.520 sort of stripped down into, I guess, what could only be viewed as sort of your most fundamental

00:16:45.180 basic elements of self. And I had an epiphany about 10 days into that, which was I realized at the time

00:16:54.740 what must be the first moment in my life that I was present. And it's weird to be almost 45 at the

00:17:00.980 time and to think, wow, here I am 10 days of having every stimulus removed from my life,

00:17:07.020 plus going through this very rigorous sort of therapeutic stuff. And I remember exactly where

00:17:11.760 I was sitting. I was sitting in the common room of this place at the edge of a couch. And

00:17:17.100 in a moment, the only thing that mattered was exactly what I was perceiving around me. So the light

00:17:25.020 coming in through the window and the way in which it made the room sort of light up, the faint scent

00:17:32.260 of something that was being cooked in the kitchen a few yards away or whatever. And I don't know why,

00:17:40.220 I just felt like, wow, this is the first time I actually really think I'm not thinking about

00:17:45.160 something that has happened or worrying about something that is going to happen.

00:17:48.040 And the other thing that was odd that that entire time I was, was there was it was they allowed us

00:17:55.760 to exercise, which was a big deal. I was really pleased that I was still permitted to exercise,

00:17:59.200 but you couldn't have music. You didn't have a phone or anything. So it was also the first time

00:18:02.640 in my life I exercised only being able to listen to the sound of my breath. So every morning I would

00:18:07.100 run in the woods and you just heard the sound of the wind blowing by you and you heard your breath.

00:18:13.360 And when I was doing pushups or whatever, it was the same sort of thing. And of course,

00:18:17.720 I'd already read so much of your work, but the reason I wanted to speak with you that day is I

00:18:22.260 wanted to understand, hey, am I getting a glimpse of what one might get if they meditate, if they

00:18:28.080 move to a mindfulness-based practice? And what you said was, well, there's good news and bad news.

00:18:32.940 The good news is I've got this app that's going to be coming out soon and it's going to help you with

00:18:36.000 this. The bad news is it's only in beta yet, but you can start right away. There's only,

00:18:40.000 I think at the time there were maybe a dozen meditations.

00:18:42.080 Yeah. And the very bad news is it's going to take years for me to produce this thing.

00:18:46.380 I'm completely incompetent.

00:18:47.800 No, but come on. The thing actually is out now, right?

00:18:50.200 Yeah. It's fine. I know it was a little longer than you wanted, but, um,

00:18:53.320 yeah. And I very quickly put as many of my patients who were interested on the beta version,

00:18:57.240 you guys were so gracious and let all of my, my, uh, my folks on this thing. And in many ways,

00:19:02.740 I view that as one of the most important transitions of my life. I think of, uh, you know,

00:19:07.400 life is a handful of direction changes that, you know, some of them that you look back at the past

00:19:13.340 and say, wow, that was sort of a meaningful insight that came to me. So you've talked about

00:19:17.200 this idea of noticing what is arising versus not noticing at all. Can you elaborate on this?

00:19:23.960 Yeah. Well, so I guess I should define mindfulness, which is really the target state that one is trying

00:19:31.160 to cultivate in at least this probably what's the most popular type of meditation now. I mean,

00:19:36.240 there are different, as you alluded to, there are different types. There are two basic types of

00:19:41.040 meditation where the distinction is between being lost in thought and being clearly aware of whatever

00:19:49.720 the object of meditation is. So that's true for all types of meditation. Thought really is the,

00:19:55.180 the obstacle one is overcoming when one is learning to meditate because our natural,

00:20:00.740 our default mode is to just be lost in thought. We're telling ourselves a story all day long

00:20:07.100 and we're not aware of it. So once one begins to meditate, one is trying to pay attention to

00:20:16.660 something. And this is where the two different types diverge. The first that you alluded to,

00:20:22.900 like a mantra-based or a concentration-based object of focus is the attempt to pay attention

00:20:30.740 attention to one thing to the exclusion of everything else, right? You want your attention

00:20:35.100 to be absorbed in that object. And in many of those practices, the explicit goal is to do that

00:20:43.560 so well that thoughts no longer arise, right? So you're really trying to get rid of thought

00:20:48.400 in some basic sense. The arising of thought in that context is a sign that you're not meditating

00:20:55.800 hard enough or one-pointedly enough. Those types of practices can produce extraordinarily positive

00:21:02.160 states of mind that you can feel bliss and rapture and you can actually use as an object of meditation

00:21:09.880 specific states of mind, like loving-kindness, which is called metta in the Buddhist tradition,

00:21:16.160 or sympathetic joy or compassion or equanimity. You can cultivate specific attitudes, which

00:21:21.500 if you can focus on them to the exclusion of anything else, you're inhabiting that state to

00:21:27.760 a degree that most people would find unrecognizable. But the second type of meditation, which is the type

00:21:34.400 I have spent much more time doing and is almost universally considered the more fundamental or the deeper

00:21:43.700 practice, is often described as mindfulness because that's the state you're using in the Buddhist

00:21:51.400 tradition to cultivate it. Mindfulness comes from a practice called Vipassana, which is insight

00:21:59.000 meditation. And there you're not trying to selectively notice one thing or another. You are trying to

00:22:05.980 break the spell of being distracted by thought. So you're trying to be aware of everything without

00:22:12.860 perceiving things through this discursivity or this conceptual lens in each moment.

00:22:19.880 But your attention can be much more choiceless. I mean, you can just notice whatever, in fact,

00:22:27.540 you notice. You're noticing things all the time, sounds and sensations and moods and thoughts. But

00:22:33.640 you're not noticing them clearly because you're thinking every moment of the day. Mindfulness begins,

00:22:40.920 for most people, as a training on one object, like the breath. But very quickly, it becomes something

00:22:47.560 that you apply to the full range of your experience. And what's nice about it, apart from all the

00:22:54.120 benefits of doing it and all the things that can be realized by doing it, this type of meditation

00:23:02.600 is clearly coincident with any experience you can have. I mean, there's nothing that is excluded in

00:23:09.800 principle from the meditation. You're not, you can be working out or watching a movie or, I mean,

00:23:14.900 there's no, there's no, there's no thing that in principle does not admit of mindfulness. And that's

00:23:21.400 not true of other types of practice. Yeah. Just sharing one example, because the other thing that

00:23:26.020 I remember you said at the time, I said, you know, Sam, I want to really shift this practice and sort

00:23:31.540 of, I want to figure out a way to experience that, you know, more and more. And you actually said,

00:23:36.460 look, there are a bunch of apps that are already out there that are all pretty good. I mean,

00:23:39.280 obviously you're producing yours because you think it's going to offer something additional and I'll

00:23:43.320 just make my plug for it here. I've used every one of the apps out there and I do find yours the best.

00:23:49.040 But I also realized that there's no one thing that's the best. It's the way you explain things

00:23:53.620 just resonates with me and it might not resonate with the next person. But the other app that I

00:23:57.760 really liked that you recommended was 10% Happier, which is Dan Harris's app. No, no, no relation,

00:24:02.760 of course. And even within Dan's app, there are many teachers, but there are a couple that I really

00:24:08.220 like, Jeff Warren and, um, uh, Joseph, actually, Joseph Goldstein, Joseph Goldstein. Yeah. And

00:24:15.660 Jeff Warren has, I believe, a series of walking meditations that are, he refers to a sort of

00:24:21.380 informal meditations. And I remember the first time I did this, maybe it wasn't the first time,

00:24:27.300 but it might've been the second time, but it was pretty early. I realized for the first time that

00:24:31.200 when you walk, if you're paying attention to it, you can feel the wind going past your finger.

00:24:36.040 So if you're walking with your hands in a position such that your thumbs are facing forward and your

00:24:41.060 arms are swinging lightly in a normal gait, you can actually feel the air moving past the leading

00:24:47.680 edge of your hand. Yeah. I remember thinking, how have I been walking for 45 years and I've never

00:24:53.080 once felt this sensation. And now when I pay attention to it, it's so noticeable. I don't know how it

00:24:59.520 hasn't been distracting me for the last 45 years. Yeah. Yeah. And one might wonder why one would

00:25:05.920 want to notice such a thing, but what you discover when you begin practicing meditation,

00:25:13.220 especially intensively on retreat is that there's no such thing as a boring object of attention.

00:25:21.400 What boredom is, is simply a lack of attention. I mean, we, we get into these situations where we're,

00:25:25.860 we are convinced that we are bored because we haven't found something compelling enough in our

00:25:30.760 experience to capture our attention. But what our attention is, is so blunt an instrument normally

00:25:39.500 that we, we, we need something that's, you know, thrilling or terrifying or something to, to fully

00:25:45.460 get us to commit. But what you discover when you learn to meditate is that what pleases us most

00:25:53.460 in those moments when we are fully captured by experience is the, the state of complete attention

00:26:01.520 to the present. And if you can muster that on your own, if you can actually guide attention

00:26:07.460 irrespective of the object you're attending to, then anything, any arbitrary object, the feeling of wind

00:26:14.740 on your hand as you walk, can be an exquisitely pleasurable thing to notice. This is why in that first

00:26:23.600 type of meditation practice, concentration practice, it doesn't matter what you pay attention to. You, you can

00:26:28.560 pick an arbitrary object. It can be a random sound, it can be a mantra, and it doesn't matter what the mantra

00:26:34.980 is. It can be a candle flame, it can be a color on a piece of paper, it can be a random sound in the

00:26:43.000 environment, it can be the sensation of a, a fly walking across the back of your hand, right? So anything

00:26:49.780 that you can pay attention to, to the exclusion of anything else, can suddenly disclose what it's like

00:26:57.460 to have a very concentrated mind. And concentration is intrinsically pleasurable. And this is why meditation

00:27:04.040 can have the character of a kind of drug experience. I mean, it's, and this is, it can have a superficial

00:27:09.760 character. I mean, you can, you can get kind of addicted to the changes in state you experience in

00:27:17.520 meditation. And you can be misled by these experiences. You can think that it's about these changes rather

00:27:24.380 than something more fundamental. Because any, anything you experience by way of newfound pleasure that is

00:27:31.940 based on having a very concentrated mind, you will lose because it's an impermanent state of your

00:27:38.820 physiology and attention. And it's not the deepest practice, but yeah, it's, it's amazing that

00:27:43.960 concentration itself, regardless of the object, is incredibly pleasant.

00:27:49.760 You know, sort of going back to the why, which you've, you've started to allude to. And again,

00:27:54.600 I can't remember if I'm, I know you've said this. I think many have said this. So I don't,

00:27:58.660 you know, I think many have come to this observation, which is virtually all negatively

00:28:03.720 valenced emotions are not rooted in the present. And that sort of becomes the, the, the corollary of

00:28:09.800 being present, therefore being able to concentrate on something in the moment can be quite pleasurable.

00:28:15.240 And I guess that was sort of what I recognized that first moment I experienced it, which was,

00:28:20.920 wow, when you're, when you're fully, fully, you know, engaged in or enveloped within this present

00:28:27.460 sensation, what you're seeing, what you're hearing, what you're feeling, it becomes very difficult to

00:28:32.420 be anxious or depressed or angry or any of these other things. And for me, that was the most

00:28:38.300 interesting part of this, which was, you know, taking a very big step back. I'm trying to devote

00:28:43.680 my life to figuring out this problem of how to live longer. But if you asked me, how did I think

00:28:49.920 about that problem five years ago versus how do I think about it today? There have been two

00:28:53.780 fundamentally significant differences. There are two things today that I, that occupy much more of

00:29:00.120 my energy with respect to longevity than they did, you know, four or five years ago. And the first of

00:29:06.400 those two is this notion of being happy, which again, I think five years ago, I would have dismissed

00:29:11.140 that as sort of a, an afterthought, like it is what it is. And as long as all those other things happen,

00:29:16.560 you'll be happy. You know, if you can figure out how to not die and how to be stronger and have

00:29:21.160 better cognitive powers, but you'll be happy as a result of that. But of course that seems to be

00:29:24.820 not the case. The second, though, we're not going to get into it is a much greater appreciation for

00:29:30.380 the type of physical body that is necessary to age well and how radically that differs from

00:29:36.360 necessarily the physical body that we want to perform well when we're in our thirties or forties

00:29:41.400 or even our fifties. But going back to the former, which to me is in many ways, your work and the work

00:29:47.180 of people like you has had such a great influence on me is this realization, like none of this stuff 0.57

00:29:52.280 matters if you're miserable. It doesn't matter if you can live to a hundred. It doesn't matter if you

00:29:56.400 can delay the onset of heart disease and stroke and cancer and Alzheimer's disease. If you're too

00:30:01.480 miserable to appreciate it, or if you're constantly in some sort of tormented state, you might as well 1.00

00:30:07.400 be dead. I mean, that sounds extreme, but that's, that's really how I started to feel about this.

00:30:12.160 Yeah. And I think we also have inaccurate associations with terms like happiness and we,

00:30:18.680 we haven't distinguished terms that are different, like pain and suffering. There's nothing about

00:30:25.800 meditation that gets rid of physical pain. Pain is just something that you're going to experience

00:30:31.640 and you can actually experience surprising degrees of pain while meditating. If you just resolve not to

00:30:38.900 move your body, it doesn't matter how comfortable your chair is. Eventually pain is going to arise.

00:30:43.580 And you have a guided meditation that takes us through that exercise. Yeah. That is,

00:30:47.240 I feel like within two minutes, it's unbearable. There are people who sit for hours and hours and,

00:30:53.100 I mean, you know, 12 hours, you know, and it's excruciating. And yet when you get up,

00:30:59.400 you haven't hurt yourself. It's not synonymous with injury right now. Obviously there are ways you could

00:31:04.540 injure yourself if you don't move, but there can be a strange magnification of pain if you resolve to

00:31:11.420 sit still for a very long time. But one thing you discover there, which is useful to discover is that

00:31:17.640 there is a difference between pain and suffering. You can feel intensely negative sensory experience.

00:31:25.480 And you can feel intensely negative emotions even. You can feel anger and depression and sadness.

00:31:33.420 And if you can be content to simply be aware of those sensations or those moods or emotions,

00:31:43.240 if you can recognize that consciousness is the prior condition in which all of those things are

00:31:49.260 appearing and you're, you are simply that which is aware of these, these changing phenomenon. If you

00:31:56.060 can become interested in the character of a mood like sadness or, or a pain in the knee, it's actually

00:32:04.240 possible to experience these states with total equanimity. And one of the features is, as you said,

00:32:13.040 not being focused at all by thought on the past or the future. So, I mean, one thing with physical pain

00:32:20.760 we all experience is this sense that some sensation is intolerable, but there's this paradox because in

00:32:29.800 that moment you've already tolerated it, right? I mean, it's fully arrived. You've merely experienced it.

00:32:35.140 You're worried about the future. You're worried about how long this is going to go on. And it's

00:32:42.300 certainly good to practice finding a place of equanimity with pain. I'm not saying, you know,

00:32:49.280 obviously there are pains that, that are conceivable that even the best meditator might find it difficult

00:32:56.340 to find equanimity with, but there really is an immense amount of growth one can have in this area

00:33:04.520 where you just, you can notice this difference between reacting to pain, contracting around it,

00:33:10.540 resisting it, trying to make it go away, wishing it away, worrying about how long it'll be there.

00:33:16.720 And all of this happens, this cascade is just, it happens so quickly that it's just, you don't even

00:33:22.180 notice the mechanics of it. It's just you, right? It's just you suffering. But the moment you can pick

00:33:28.580 apart the mechanics of it because you can pay attention to what is arising, the feeling of resistance,

00:33:34.260 the fear about what's going to happen in the next moment and keep dropping back into a position of

00:33:40.680 merely witnessing all of these things arise and pass away. There are experiences I've had and many

00:33:47.080 have had in meditation where an excruciating sensation becomes so intense that you actually

00:33:55.820 don't know whether or not you're experiencing agony or ecstasy. Like the valence of the intense

00:34:02.160 mental state is it just gets kind of wiped out. It's just sheer intensity. And there is a fundamental

00:34:10.660 cancellation of suffering in those moments. And this goes back to what we were just saying about

00:34:15.700 the pleasures of concentration. Nothing concentrates your mind more easily than pain,

00:34:21.580 right? And so if you're willing, if you can get past your fear and just go into it, you can

00:34:27.080 experience a lot of mental pleasure. I mean, this is, you know, I mean, I'm not, I don't think I've

00:34:33.220 ever met somebody who claimed to be a masochist, but I can imagine that if masochism is possible,

00:34:39.540 there's some reason why this is the case. This would be a reason why this would be the case, that

00:34:45.020 there is, I can only imagine they're experiencing intense concentration in, you know, various states

00:34:53.200 that most people would find, you know, physically intolerable. But back to this, the idea of

00:34:59.120 happiness and, and other states that are commonly associated with it. I think we all have this sense

00:35:06.940 that happiness is a matter of being joyful all the time. And this is a very common idea.

00:35:15.320 This is sort of the misconception that makes many of us think that, well, that's not desirable because

00:35:20.220 if I were joyful every minute of every day, I wouldn't have the drive to do X, Y, and Z, or

00:35:24.960 I wouldn't be quote unquote real in some way, but, but.

00:35:28.960 Or if it is a matter of securing some durable source of joy, then it can't absorb any of the

00:35:36.800 other things in life for which joy would be inappropriate. You know, people die and there's

00:35:42.860 just, there are, there are ups and downs in life. And I don't talk about or think about happiness very

00:35:49.160 much. I think about well-being and, and flourishing more. And those concepts for me can embrace all of

00:35:56.240 the vicissitudes of life where you, if you experience some serious loss in your life, there's a resiliency

00:36:05.240 and a, and a way of embracing that, which is, which brings out the, the wisest and most compassionate

00:36:11.360 and most expansive parts of yourself. That is another, that is another component of well-being.

00:36:19.000 The, the, the narrow conception of happiness that most of us have by default is something that we,

00:36:24.760 that we are always trying to defend and shore up against all of the other things in life that are

00:36:31.840 threatening to undermine it. And the one obvious point is that it's just not, it's not a safe play.

00:36:39.640 It is perpetually under threat and any joy you can feel by virtue of it's having arisen based on some

00:36:47.820 causes and conditions, it's going to pass away. You know, you just can't keep any emotion going for

00:36:54.500 days or even hours at a time. And one thing you discover when you learn to meditate is that,

00:37:00.760 you know, negative emotion in particular has a very short half-life. You know, I mean,

00:37:05.960 many of us imagine that we can stay angry or sad for some people would imagine days. I think

00:37:12.480 almost everyone thinks hours at a time. It's actually impossible if you are no longer lost in

00:37:19.960 thought about all the reasons why you should be angry or sad. So this was one of the earlier,

00:37:25.400 I can't remember if this was one of the lessons in your meditation app early on,

00:37:29.100 or it was just a discussion you and I had, but I got to put it to the test shortly after.

00:37:35.300 So I was in New York and obviously in New York, it's everything's a hustle, right? It's you're,

00:37:41.220 you're running around, people are rude. You're going to get bumped into. And one of my pet peeves in New

00:37:46.080 York is when you see somebody walking towards you and they're for a moment lost in whatever they're

00:37:52.480 doing, they're usually down looking at their phone or something like that. I always think it's a

00:37:57.000 reasonable courtesy to just not walk into them. Even if they're in your line of sight, you still

00:38:01.900 sort of go out of your way to not bump into them. But for whatever reason, there's just a subset of

00:38:06.340 people who love that opportunity to almost knock you off your feet. So sure enough, one day I am

00:38:12.600 about to turn a corner and this guy is walking and it was clear that he could see me and I had looked

00:38:19.960 down. So my bad, but this guy plows right into me and I had just had either had this discussion with

00:38:27.640 you or just heard, you know, this lesson about how long can you actually stay angry? And so this

00:38:33.080 happens and I immediately sort of observed this emotion, this rise of anger in me, right? Which was

00:38:38.760 like the desire to turn around and walk up to the guy and say something. It serves no purpose,

00:38:44.300 of course. But instead I decided, well, just watch this, watch this emotion. How long does it last?

00:38:51.360 You know, I remember I was walking somewhere that I was going to be in 10 minutes and I was like,

00:38:54.220 do you think this will last 10 more minutes? Could you be angry for the next 10 minutes if you just

00:38:58.780 observe this feeling? And the answer was no. I mean, it was gone. Actually, I felt like within seconds.

00:39:05.840 Yeah.

00:39:06.280 And to me, that was like a really big aha moment for, especially for someone like me,

00:39:10.940 who's so easily prone to anger, to think that by simply being observant of that emotional state,

00:39:17.460 I could have some control over it, which has always felt like the opposite, right? It's always felt

00:39:21.760 like that emotional state has control over me. Right. And it does. I mean, the important point to

00:39:27.100 never forget is that it has complete control over you as long as you're identified with the next

00:39:34.460 angry thought that's arising in consciousness. If you have no perspective on the fact that you are

00:39:40.280 thinking, right, well, then you simply become that thought for the period that it's captivating and

00:39:47.880 you are pushed in whatever direction it's aimed, right? So if it is getting you to say the angry

00:39:54.940 thing or physically assault the person, you need some level of metacognition in order to pull the

00:40:02.420 brakes. Otherwise, you're just, it's exactly like being asleep and dreaming and not knowing that you're

00:40:08.160 dreaming. This happens to us, all of us, every night. We get into bed and then suddenly a movie

00:40:17.500 starts playing that we're totally identified with. We're one of the characters in it and we're

00:40:24.300 completely unaware of this change, right? And the most surprising thing about dreams is that

00:40:29.600 we're not surprised when they arise, right? Like there's no, you know, we didn't have the expectation

00:40:34.380 that we would stay in our beds, apparently. We're not surprised that the laws of physics are being

00:40:39.820 violated for our amusement. And we're suddenly in these situations where we are fully captive to

00:40:49.720 a completely illusory, seemingly sensory experience. But, you know, all of this is some kind of

00:40:57.720 hallucination. And identification with thought in the waking state has that character to some degrees.

00:41:05.040 It's thought to be totally normal psychologically, right? Because it is our default state. But once you

00:41:12.080 learn the alternative, which is to be mindful, you then have a very different sense of what optimal

00:41:19.220 mental health would be. And so when I find myself lost in thought and just, you know, suddenly angry or

00:41:29.200 anxious or frustrated or whatever it is, and I wake up from that experience, it is a little bit like

00:41:36.640 waking up from a dream or a hallucination or it's hard to shake the sense that it's pathological.

00:41:44.340 I was stuck in something about which I had no awareness, right? And it was forcing me

00:41:55.020 to say and do and think and feel things that were given my now current awareness were completely

00:42:02.100 unnecessary. You see, to me, what's so interesting about this, David Foster Wallace, in his commencement

00:42:07.940 speech in 2005 at Kenyon College, the This Is Water, which is one of my favorite things to listen to.

00:42:14.100 I burned a copy off YouTube and now it sits on my phone and I try to listen to it at least once

00:42:18.700 a month, if not more. And even though I almost know it off by heart, it doesn't matter. I still

00:42:24.300 get some benefit every time I hear it. And when he talks about this, he speaks specifically about

00:42:29.420 the problem with this is that it is our default. And that's the part that makes this so challenging.

00:42:36.240 So do we have evidence of other species? Like, are we the only ones that are blessed slash cursed with 0.76

00:42:45.400 this ability for rumination and constant thought? I mean, do we, do we have any evidence that a dog

00:42:51.400 is spending any percentage of his or her time thinking about what happened the day before or

00:42:56.900 the next meal? Where do we as humans stack up in this space?

00:43:01.560 Well, it's important to acknowledge that we're blessed and cursed by this because this capacity

00:43:07.800 for linguistic, abstract, complex thought is what has given us everything that is recognizably

00:43:16.920 human. It has given us culture. It has given us civilization. It's allowed us to place all of the

00:43:24.280 learning of our ancestors in a strata that is accessible to all of us and to every present

00:43:32.120 generation so that we don't have to relearn everything from the ground up. I mean, just,

00:43:37.180 just imagine what the alternative would be if there was no acquisition of knowledge.

00:43:40.480 There's no progress in civilization.

00:43:41.600 Yeah. And, and for the longest time that was true of humanity as well. You know, if you go back

00:43:46.260 50,000 years and then you decide to go back 60,000 years, that the differences are, are, are

00:43:52.920 impressively non-existent, you know, in terms of the toolkit anyone was working with.

00:43:57.900 So that's interesting, Sam. So do you, if we go back to, I don't, I know there's, there's some

00:44:03.000 debate about when language was really codified, but to pick a point in time when we're pretty sure

00:44:07.860 there was no language, we could say 200,000 years ago, right? I think most neuroscientists would

00:44:11.720 agree. No language 200,000 years ago was the arrival of language, the arrival of this capacity

00:44:18.260 or, you know, when, where did this show up? Yeah. I think language is the, the main variable

00:44:25.160 there. I mean, it's the main variable with respect to being able to abstract, to being able to

00:44:30.560 represent anything that's, that's not currently present or not currently happening. It's the basis

00:44:36.620 for communicating anything of substance to anyone else and, and storing a kind of cultural memory

00:44:44.740 of anything, whether it's just by virtue of an oral tradition or, or, you know, once writing came

00:44:50.660 along. So language is necessary for all that. I mean, just to, to be able to articulate the concept

00:44:56.180 of time, you know, the concept of a past where the causes of the present are stored and a future,

00:45:03.560 which is yet to arrive, that needs to be planned for, or that can be better or worse. It's something

00:45:09.320 that, that I think other species probably have in a very primitive form that is not associated with,

00:45:18.940 with conscious thought. I think that a dog, for instance, learns various associations with stimuli.

00:45:27.400 Right. There are Pavlovian responses that these animals can experience.

00:45:30.680 Yeah. And they, and they, and they recognize people, obviously. I mean, they, they recognize

00:45:34.800 people arguably better than any other species other than, than the human. So they can have

00:45:41.600 real relationships and there's no question they have emotions and they have preferences and all of

00:45:47.580 that. But in terms of forming a notion of the future or a notion of the way in which the world might be

00:45:57.380 different, it's one thing to recognize your friend, in the case of a dog, recognize your owner and

00:46:05.760 prefer that person to somebody else. It's another thing to have any concept of having had a past with

00:46:15.620 that person. Now, the fact that you recognize them indicates a past, right? But all of that could be

00:46:22.380 pre-conscious to a dog. It's just, there's just this kind of binary difference between recognition

00:46:28.660 and, and not. So, so let's use an even more obvious example. And I'll tell you where I'm going

00:46:34.100 with this because then I want to understand this, which is, as I observe my three children, there is

00:46:39.820 a distinction in what I see in the younger ones that they seem to always be present. So, which isn't

00:46:45.500 to say that they don't get upset. I mean, you only have to look at a toddler for 10 seconds to watch

00:46:48.940 that they can get upset. But I doubt that they're upset about anything other than what they're

00:46:53.800 experiencing in the moment, right? They're hungry, their diaper's dirty, whatever. They fell, they

00:46:57.760 hurt themselves, something like that. But if you look at, you know, a teenager or a 10-year-old, a

00:47:04.540 preteen, they are now starting to suffer from this quote-unquote disease of too much thinking,

00:47:12.680 too much distraction. So somewhere from the moment you're born until, let's just make it

00:47:18.840 easy and say, until you're 13, you acquire this capacity. But yet an infant, like the 0.97

00:47:25.160 dog, recognizes the parent. There is some sense of a history with an individual.

00:47:31.420 Yeah.

00:47:31.740 Again, I don't know even what the relevance is of this other than to say,

00:47:36.140 the inability to recognize how distracted we are seems to be one of the greatest drivers

00:47:42.700 of misery. You know, there are three quotes I love, and I love them because they're basically

00:47:47.120 all saying the same thing across 1700 years. So in the first century, Seneca said,

00:47:51.700 we suffer more in imagination than in reality. In the 16th century, Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet,

00:47:58.100 for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. I have that on a t-shirt

00:48:02.640 that I love to remind myself. And then of course, in the 17th century, Pascal said,

00:48:07.380 distraction is the only thing that consoles us from miseries, yet it is itself the greatest

00:48:12.620 of our miseries. Descartes says something very similar. I mean, this is something that's been

00:48:17.260 acknowledged for so long, and yet it's so ingrained in us that it just strikes me as like,

00:48:28.060 is there some evolutionary basis for this? Or is it just that evolution wasn't even trying to

00:48:32.140 optimize for this equanimity? And instead, the benefits, as you've pointed out, of being able to

00:48:37.820 do these things, the progress we've been able to make as a society, our ability to leapfrog ahead

00:48:42.360 of other species, has more than made up for this difficulty? Or is it simply that, look, evolution

00:48:48.800 wouldn't out-select this because it's not interfering with your reproductive fitness? 0.99

00:48:53.520 Yeah, yeah.

00:48:54.100 Like, I just don't understand why we suffer so much, I guess is my question.

00:48:57.400 The crucial point there is that evolution doesn't care about your well-being.

00:49:02.160 Yeah, as long as you reproduce, what does it care?

00:49:04.040 Yeah. And so if there's some path by which we survive and reproduce in a state of misery,

00:49:15.140 evolution is perfectly happy with that path, right? It's just, if that were a more reliable

00:49:21.260 algorithm for reproduction and survival, then we would be getting more and more miserable, right?

00:49:27.660 So we want to slip the logic of evolution because it just simply doesn't care about us, right? And

00:49:35.140 we have virtually everything we want as a species now, at some level, is a matter of breaking the

00:49:43.360 connection to many of our evolved tendencies. And we have a very strong evolutionary capacity for

00:49:49.400 tribal violence, right? But tribal violence is obviously something we want to outgrow as quickly

00:49:53.880 as possible. And there are many other examples of this. I think that language is, you can see it

00:49:59.960 when you're raising your kids, when you have a two-and-a-half-year-old and a three-year-old

00:50:05.720 where they're talking to you, but then they're talking to themselves as though they're talking to

00:50:13.840 you. Speech becomes something where you're narrating your experience as though you're talking to a

00:50:21.220 parent. And this seems to get internalized so that the conversation, you just, you know enough

00:50:27.220 to keep your mouth shut, but you're really talking to someone who isn't there all the time. I think

00:50:33.440 that's probably the origin of it for every individual, that we, language is so useful, it's so essential

00:50:42.100 to everything we do that we just have this superfluous level of discursivity that from, again, from a

00:50:52.340 survival advantage, there's no reason to ever turn it off. But from a well-being point of view, it's

00:50:59.760 the character of it is almost universally unpleasant most of the time for most people. I mean, there's some

00:51:07.800 people who are very lucky and they have an intrinsic level of happiness that is just kind of off the

00:51:13.580 charts where they're just, they're basically happy all the time. They recover very, very quickly from

00:51:18.440 disappointments and losses and they just don't really see a problem. And many of these people are

00:51:24.800 not very reflective about, you know, the human condition, right? They're not living necessarily

00:51:29.240 examined lives because they, there's not much of a reason to, but they're just, you know, they get up in

00:51:34.840 the morning and they're just stoked to be alive. And you can, you can, you know, if you get enough

00:51:40.780 of the, the conditions for ordinary levels of happiness together, and you're lucky enough to

00:51:47.340 be able to maintain them fairly effortlessly, right? You're, you're, you're wealthy and you're

00:51:51.860 healthy and you're surrounded by happy, creative people who want the best for you. And you're just

00:51:58.040 by, by dint of good luck, people close to you haven't died and you had, you know, you haven't

00:52:03.280 suffered any collision with reality. Then yeah, you can, you can be conventionally very happy

00:52:10.120 and still be talking to yourself all the time and not notice it. But there's significant limitation

00:52:18.500 even to that when you do develop this more refined way of noticing what it's like to be you,

00:52:27.160 which is what we're calling meditation. It's not that learning this, having insight into the

00:52:34.320 mechanics of your own suffering and the mediocrity of kind of ordinary transient states of, of pleasure.

00:52:41.340 It's not that that is at bottom incompatible with living an ordinary fulfilled pleasure seeking

00:52:50.020 life. I mean, you can enjoy dinner just as much having learned to meditate as, you know, anyone who's

00:52:55.860 gluttonously attached to sensory experience without, without any kind of metacognition about,

00:53:01.620 you know, what's going on. But the difference comes in how you respond to problems that arise.

00:53:10.500 I mean, it's actually both, right? I mean, I think that mindfulness clearly makes it easier to endure

00:53:17.080 unpleasant things. So, you know, I, I was late to come over here today because the, to get to your place,

00:53:23.240 which should have been an hour, took two hours. And that is normally something that would drive me

00:53:29.960 bat shit crazy just by, by way of process. Like, why is it so inefficient? Like, why are there so

00:53:37.940 many cars on the road? Blah, blah. Like I would get into a woe is me narrative about this, which is of

00:53:42.760 course ironic because like, why am I more special than every other car on this road? Right? Like everyone

00:53:48.700 is equally in the same situation of it's taking two hours to get somewhere that it should take

00:53:53.720 one hour. And I actually, I have used traffic because when you live in Southern California

00:54:00.300 and split your time in New York, you get plenty of exposure to traffic. I've actually used this as an

00:54:05.800 amazing tool for mindfulness and I no longer let it really get to me. Instead, I just sort of

00:54:11.800 observe, oh, look, you're feeling a little bit self-important today. Like you're feeling like

00:54:17.340 your time is more valuable than everybody else's time. Let's examine that. Is that really true?

00:54:21.680 Not really. Okay. What is happening in this exact moment? The sun is shining this way or,

00:54:26.760 you know, all these other things. So, so in many ways, if nothing else, it's simply a hack to allow

00:54:31.120 me to be less miserable. Yeah. Yeah. But on the flip side, I actually do think there is a way to enjoy

00:54:37.340 certain moments more. And, and I've certainly noticed this the most with my kids. I think that,

00:54:43.360 you know, I have a, our, our middle son who's four, you know, he's just, that's what four,

00:54:48.620 like a four-year-old boy is just going to be more prone to chewing up the air in the room when it

00:54:53.140 comes to doing bad stuff. And I find that, and to be clear, there are not all days that I can do

00:54:58.760 this. There are some days when he's acting crazy that it just drives me nuts. But more often than

00:55:03.980 not, I'm sort of able to actually reflect on it pleasantly and think about like what's happening in

00:55:08.940 this moment, right? Okay. He's, he's yelling, he's screaming, he's throwing a temper tantrum.

00:55:14.000 He's hit his brother. He's done this. He's done that. But in this moment, is there anything that's

00:55:18.500 really that bad about any of these things? I mean, like, it's not like he's going to be doing this

00:55:21.880 when he goes to college. Like, what am I really worried about here? Yeah. And in fact, I can turn

00:55:26.600 that into a positive thing, which is one day he will be in college and he won't be a cute little

00:55:31.380 four-year-old who loves me so much. Yeah. You'll miss this moment. Yeah. I'll miss this moment.

00:55:35.680 And so, so I have found that, again, I use the word hack because I, it's such an inelegant way

00:55:40.920 to describe it, but it's basically a tool to make me a little bit more aware of where I am in a given

00:55:47.800 moment. And whether that produces happiness or not, I mean, I sort of agree with you. The semantics of

00:55:52.180 happiness are too cumbersome for me to explain. You know, people have talked about the, happiness is

00:55:57.920 simply the difference between reality and expectation. I mean, that's a bit vague for me. I'm not smart

00:56:02.800 enough to fully understand what that means, though. I understand the concept, but clearly there's some

00:56:07.600 component of expecting the world to be a certain way and it not being that way, producing an emotional

00:56:12.260 state or a valence that is negative one way or the other. And, and, and so I think while as, as,

00:56:18.360 as wonderful as mindfulness is to offset that, there is this moment at times of taking a bite of food

00:56:25.340 and rather than thinking about the next bite or what you're going to eat later, like actually thinking,

00:56:31.060 you know, or observing the sensations as they're occurring in that moment, kind of slowing things

00:56:36.200 down in a way. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cause I don't know why I just tend to always live in a fast

00:56:41.180 forward mode. That is my default is to be full fast forward. Well, it's, it's most people's default.

00:56:46.700 I would say it's everyone's default. Who's not being mindful because you're, you're constantly, even when

00:56:53.180 you're getting what you want, even when you're in the very act of gratifying a desire, you're still subtly

00:57:00.220 inclining toward the next moment. You're not actually landing on each moment of experience with full

00:57:08.860 attention. And paradoxically, you, you can discover that many of the things you think you want, you don't want

00:57:17.420 to all that much. If you pay attention to what it's actually like to gratify those desires with food,

00:57:23.060 this is very clear. So you can be eating something. You can think you want dessert. You can have a real

00:57:27.680 sweet tooth. And if you pay very close attention to what it's like to eat that sweet thing, you're

00:57:36.080 finally gorging on more often than not, you discover it's just a little too sweet. There's something about

00:57:44.060 it that is unpleasant. And your pleasure in that moment is predicated on your being able to take

00:57:51.420 a drink of water in the next, right? Like if you have to bite a candy bar or something, this candy

00:57:55.980 that's made for kids delivers this insight to me very clearly. It's like the moment I, I think I want

00:58:01.640 something, you know, at the movies, whatever it is, a, you know, M&Ms or something that is, hasn't

00:58:07.320 changed his formula for the last 40 years. And I'm eating it. And I begin to notice that I'm eating

00:58:14.460 more of it as a way of just getting rid of getting rid of the sense in your palate. Yeah. The last

00:58:20.100 moment of taste that is just too chemical laden, too sweet. And, you know, if I didn't have a drink

00:58:26.200 of water, you know, this, this would actually be an unpleasant experience. And it's not what it seems

00:58:32.300 when you're not paying attention. And this is not to say that there's nothing that's truly pleasurable.

00:58:36.880 I mean, there's all kinds of pleasure. And again, being able to really connect with the present

00:58:42.420 moment delivers its own intrinsic pleasure. But your sense of what matters can definitely change

00:58:50.980 the moment you begin to pay closer attention to, to what experience is actually like.

00:58:58.040 I think it was in one of your lessons, but it might've been in a podcast where you talk about,

00:59:02.660 imagine you're playing a video game and it's the same video game every time. And you always get

00:59:09.740 killed by the same monster at the same part of the maze or whatever it is. And I think about that a lot

00:59:15.980 every time I falter at predictably, you know, known understood things that get under my skin.

00:59:23.940 And it's very discouraging, right? It's sort of like a, there are like a dozen things that I just

00:59:28.400 know if they happen. So, I mean, one of them is there's certain types of questions that if I'm

00:59:33.980 asked really irk me, you know, when people ask questions that are to which the answer is very

00:59:39.760 complicated, but they ask through the lens of just give me the one word answer that just irks me.

00:59:45.800 Like, I don't know why it just bugs the shit out of me. And I know that. And yet over and over again,

00:59:51.700 I find myself getting upset when that happens. Right. And I feel like the guy that you're

00:59:57.060 describing in the video game. Yeah. You're losing the boss fight at the same place every time.

01:00:00.700 Every single time I know where the boogeyman is. I know what weapon he's going to use to kill me. 0.99

01:00:06.320 Yeah. And I just walk over there and out comes the machete and I'm dead. Yeah. 0.98

01:00:11.060 And then I'm back to the starting block again. And I'm one, one fewer lives in the game. Right.

01:00:15.360 Mm hmm. What? But you can recover faster each time you lose. Getting angry is not the measure of

01:00:23.440 having lost. Right. Now, you obviously you can aspire to a time where you never get angry again

01:00:28.620 or you never get angry in certain circumstances again. But the real practice is to notice

01:00:36.860 as early as possible what's happening and to let go of it. The difference between being angry

01:00:42.640 for 10 minutes and 10 seconds and one second, those factors of 10 are enormous. Right. And

01:00:51.480 I have the same thing going on where it's anger is something that I very frequently feel. And I also

01:00:59.600 noticed that it totally contaminates the experience of people around me. So I have my wife and my

01:01:04.780 daughters and my anger for them is clearly toxic. And I have this commitment to letting go of it

01:01:13.020 the moment I can let go of it. And it's again, it's not that anger is never warranted. The energy

01:01:18.440 of anger can be useful. Someone's attacking you on the sidewalk, you know, and you're, you're in a

01:01:23.340 self-defense situation. That's not the moment where I would say, get rid of all your anger as quickly

01:01:27.560 as possible. Right. I mean, there, there's, there are situations where you want to use that energy,

01:01:31.540 but for the most part, you want to let go of it very, very quickly, and then be in a position to

01:01:38.200 decide what's what and whether or not it's appropriate to take some kind of, you know,

01:01:43.760 confrontational path, whatever it is by email or, or, you know, say the thing that, that would convey

01:01:50.120 your displeasure or whatever. But now I have my, my wife and my daughters as a kind of feedback

01:01:57.540 mechanism for me because they, they know my commitment. They know I can let go of anger

01:02:01.500 on demand and they know I want to, and they don't like my anger. Right. And they detect it

01:02:09.000 in the subtlest way. So like, I mean, it's not, it's not even anger where a normal person would

01:02:16.900 classically think he was angry. They don't have to wait till you raise your voice. They can see the

01:02:21.480 mannerisms in the way you might move or the way your answers become shorter or something like that.

01:02:27.940 Yeah. Yeah. Or it may just, so, but like, you know, even mild frustration gets scored as, you know,

01:02:34.480 a kind of crazy level of anger. Right. So like, if I, you know, if, if I say, wait a minute, I thought

01:02:39.240 the plumber was coming today. That's like, you know, that, you know, that's a four alarm fire. Right.

01:02:44.940 Right. So one of my daughters will say, Ooh, daddy's getting angry. Right. And they'll say

01:02:49.520 that so early now. And it's fantastic because it's, I just let go of it way earlier than I used

01:02:56.660 to. But if you can't be mindful, you actually have no choice. You know, you just, you will be angry as

01:03:03.220 long as you're angry and the people around you who don't like it just have to figure out somehow to

01:03:10.600 put up with you. It's not that there's no other hacks. There are many other hacks. And sometimes,

01:03:16.860 sometimes it's important to have a hack that is more global than being simply being relentlessly

01:03:24.200 mindful of everything that's coming up for you. Like a different understanding of a situation can

01:03:29.820 offer some kind of firmware update to the whole operating system. And then you,

01:03:35.600 you just simply don't go there anymore. So for instance, I mean, so you're, you're driving in

01:03:41.680 traffic. There are many hacks for that, but one hack is just, you discover that you've got 400 hours of

01:03:47.500 podcasts you want to listen to, and you're listening to a great one and you, you're just, you're just

01:03:52.320 happy to be listening. And the fact that you're delayed an extra half hour or whatever is fine,

01:03:56.900 you know, and that's a totally useful hack, right? It modulates your state. You're, you're just,

01:04:02.920 you're just discovering the silver lining to something that's, that would otherwise be negative.

01:04:06.880 I'll share with you another one. Cause I agree with that completely. That's a great one. The

01:04:10.080 other one that I've taken on in the past year that has had surprising efficacy is any customer

01:04:16.940 service experience you have that is profoundly negative. And if you fly as much as I do, you're

01:04:22.840 pretty much guaranteed one of those a week. My friend, Jay Walker, who knows a lot about the

01:04:27.860 aviation industry said one out of six experiences with us aviation as a customer service failure.

01:04:34.780 Right. So anyone who flies would agree with that. But so the next time, like the flight

01:04:39.320 attendance rude to you or the TSA person is sweating you or being obnoxious or whatever,

01:04:44.540 if you instead take a view of empathy, which is, God, this is a really hard job. You know,

01:04:52.480 I mean, like I have the privilege of getting to be, you know, intellectually engaged and doing all of

01:04:57.600 these things and boom, boom, boom. But this is a really hard job. I mean, most of the people that

01:05:01.740 they're encountering are on some level dissatisfied. Nobody's showing up to, to their world happy.

01:05:08.340 And so like simply taking that posture completely changes the way you interact with that system.

01:05:14.720 Yeah. And it's interesting because it doesn't even really require a huge

01:05:18.260 mindfulness insight. It's just sort of a, but it's a, it's a condition you want to walk in the

01:05:23.500 situation with, right? You want to be able to walk in with that in your mind.

01:05:26.700 Yeah. It's a framing effect.

01:05:28.040 Yeah.

01:05:28.660 Yeah. And it doesn't entail mindfulness at all. You could get the benefit of that new framing

01:05:33.600 without ever having heard of mindfulness. So you, you know, if you do get angry, you'll be as angry

01:05:38.920 as, as you ever were, but you have a different way of thinking about it.

01:05:43.000 Yeah. The combination of these is powerful.

01:05:44.800 Yeah.

01:05:44.940 When I think about one of the most difficult things to, there are two things in my life

01:05:50.280 that I have learned that I think were very difficult and took a lot of time. The first

01:05:54.480 was in the year 2000, when I was finishing medical school, I had a really bad back injury

01:06:00.080 and it's a long story, but it basically for a year of my life, I was not able to move properly.

01:06:09.580 And for three months I was not able to move at all.

01:06:11.820 Wow. How'd that happen?

01:06:14.940 It's not clear how it happened, but what happened was a pretty bad outcome. And I ended up having

01:06:22.680 surgery, but the surgeon operated on the wrong side. So it went from a very bad situation to a

01:06:27.260 worse situation.

01:06:27.960 Oh man.

01:06:28.220 Yeah.

01:06:29.220 And a whole series of cascading events led to it being what it was. I look back at that as I've

01:06:36.780 described as before as the best worst experience of my life, because having been in so much pain

01:06:42.600 for so long, I had to learn how to do everything from scratch. So I had to learn how to be able to

01:06:47.440 brush my teeth without putting stress on my back, which most people wouldn't even think about. You

01:06:52.640 wouldn't think that there's a right and a wrong way to brush your teeth. You wouldn't think that there's a

01:06:56.440 right and a wrong way to get out of your bed, put your shoes on or get out of your car. It turns out

01:07:00.280 there is, but you can only learn it when you are in such a fragile state that you've lost every ounce

01:07:05.760 of strength in your back. And because I experienced that for so long, a year, it allowed me to make

01:07:12.800 this transition, which I want to of course apply to meditation. The transition is going from being

01:07:17.960 unconsciously incompetent to then being consciously incompetent to then consciously competent. And of

01:07:26.460 course, the goal is to one day get to a point where you were unconsciously competent. I don't

01:07:30.560 think I'm unconsciously competent at a single thing I do, including movement, but I'm now consciously

01:07:36.680 competent at moving around and not hurting my back. But I couldn't have got there if I didn't have that

01:07:42.160 feedback loop that allowed me to go through it. The other thing was learning how to swim as an adult.

01:07:48.040 You know, you throw an adult in the water who's never swum before, they are so incompetent, but

01:07:52.600 they don't even really understand what it is. And so the first act of learning how to swim is learning

01:07:57.980 to feel what's making you sink, figuring out what it is that is actually dropping you to the bottom of

01:08:04.560 the pool. And then of course, you want to be able to correct that. And with great effort over short

01:08:08.680 periods of time, exercise some capacity to fix that. I would say those two experiences have been

01:08:15.720 by far the most difficult, but they pale in comparison to mindfulness. Now, I don't know if

01:08:21.200 that just makes me a hard case, but, and maybe it's, you know, the other thing I was thinking about

01:08:26.760 when I was reflecting on this is having a back injury, you don't get a time, you don't get a time

01:08:32.040 out from it. You know, it's every minute of every day, you're immersed in that exposure, that stimulus

01:08:37.940 and that feedback loop. Similarly, once I dedicated myself to swimming, I swam four hours a day. And I

01:08:45.520 think maybe the issue is because I don't meditate for four hours a day, it's just going to take a lot

01:08:50.920 longer to do it. And I know you and I have spoken about this and your belief is that something really

01:08:56.640 happens when you go on a silent retreat. And I remember once asking you, I said, Hey, Sam, I see

01:09:01.300 this retreat. It's four days. Do you think I should go? And you actually said, no, I wouldn't go for a

01:09:05.100 four day retreat. I'd wait till you can do 10 or 14 days. Yeah. I guess I would modify that slightly.

01:09:11.340 I think a week to 10 days is the shortest I can recommend without caveat. I think the first three

01:09:19.900 days or so of a retreat are more or less the hardest for a retreat of any length. So if you do a

01:09:25.200 three day retreat or a four day retreat, you're almost guaranteed to have a lot of restlessness

01:09:32.120 and just resistance to the whole project. And you may not touch anything on the other side of that.

01:09:39.660 You can just be kind of unhappy the whole time and then just relieved to be getting off retreat.

01:09:44.660 Whereas if you have 10 days, just seems like an eternity. Once you put yourself on retreat and

01:09:51.300 you've just shut down your connection to everything, there's no talking, there's no writing,

01:09:56.640 there's no reading. It's just you and your attention in each moment. 10 days seems like an

01:10:02.780 eternity. And so as you move through those first few days of resistance, at day three, you're still

01:10:12.300 so far away from the day that you're going home that it's much more common to just surrender at that

01:10:18.840 point and really get into it. Just decide that you'll just pick up your life as you left it when

01:10:26.980 you get off retreat. And that for this period, there's just nothing worth thinking about. You just

01:10:33.080 need to pay attention to whatever's appearing, your breath, sounds, the movement of air on your hand as

01:10:41.280 you walk.

01:10:41.720 Your first experience in this was sort of comical the way you describe it, right? This was when you

01:10:47.820 were 16, I believe.

01:10:49.600 Oh, no. Well, that was my first experience of solitude that I guess it would have been a retreat,

01:10:54.600 but I was on Outward Bound and the Outward Bound, I assume they still have it. But back then they had

01:10:59.940 something called the Solo, which was three, it was a 23 day period of, of, you know, camping and hiking

01:11:06.580 and, and the kind of outdoorsmanship. But maybe day 18 or so, they put you in isolation for three

01:11:14.920 full days where you would fast and do nothing, right? So you couldn't go hiking and do anything

01:11:20.740 that would distract you. And I think that the reason for that was not based on any meditative agenda

01:11:27.760 that they had. It was just, they don't want a bunch of not fully trained people wandering around

01:11:32.640 the wilderness while fasted. So they just park you in some place. We were by this lake at maybe

01:11:41.960 9,000 feet and you just camp with a water bottle and that's all you got. You just have your, you

01:11:49.800 know, sleeping bag, your water bottle, and you have a journal.

01:11:51.480 In your journal.

01:11:51.920 Yeah. You can write in your journal. And I found the experience just intolerable. It was just...

01:11:58.640 You were 16?

01:11:59.340 Yeah, I was 16. Yeah. So I opened my book, Waking Up With This Story, because it was the

01:12:04.700 first moment in my life that I realized that I was on the wrong side of some understanding

01:12:11.800 about the nature of my own mind and the possibility of finding a durable source of happiness in this

01:12:20.400 life. I mean, so I was, I was alone in an absolutely beautiful spot and totally miserable based

01:12:29.140 on the fact that I didn't have any of the usual distractions. And if you could have just swapped

01:12:35.640 places with me and inhabited my consciousness, I was spending all my time fantasizing about the 0.98

01:12:42.980 things I was going to do when I got off, when I got out of those goddamn mountains and got back to 0.98

01:12:47.320 my life in the world. And, you know, the friends I would see and the foods I would eat and I would 0.97

01:12:52.880 just, it was just a continuous advertisement for everything that I missed. You know, it was just,

01:13:00.040 it was like a meditation on loneliness and boredom and grief, ultimately. I just, it was just to be

01:13:07.800 separated from everyone I cared about and every fun thing I could do and every tasty thing I could eat.

01:13:14.000 It was just a source of perfect misery for me. So when I came off the solo and met all of the other

01:13:19.900 people who had also been on their solos, I was astonished to discover that many of them had had

01:13:27.300 profoundly happy experiences, right? And that-

01:13:31.240 Were you one of the youngest people on this?

01:13:32.860 Yeah. Yeah. So I was, I think I was the youngest. So it was, I think the cutoff, I don't know if this

01:13:37.500 is still the case, but the cutoff for Outward Bound was 16 and a half and I was just 16 and a

01:13:43.640 half. So, you know, there were lots of people who were 10 years older or so. And so they were in

01:13:48.660 different places in their lives and many of them just had a kind of breakthrough experience. I mean,

01:13:54.760 they just, it was just some of the best time they'd ever spent alive. And so they were kind of

01:13:59.860 radiantly happy, you know, for, cause we had just done 18 or so days of brutal hiking. I mean,

01:14:08.180 just, you know, kind of just 14 hour days of hiking with 60 pound packs. And, you know, we had this full

01:14:14.260 ordeal of learning how to, to function in the, in the back country. And then it all stops and you're

01:14:22.780 just alone by this Alpine Lake. So many of them had come out of that feeling that they had touched

01:14:29.540 something profound and I had no idea what they were talking about. It was like being told that,

01:14:35.100 you know, I just got run over by a car and it was the greatest thing that's ever happened to me.

01:14:38.660 It's like, I mean, I had come out of there having had a harrowing experience.

01:14:44.000 So what happened when you went back home after that? Did you look back and reflect on that? Or does

01:14:48.820 that basically just become a footnote into a broader story that really didn't factor into your,

01:14:55.560 your ultimate search for, for, you know, call it enlightenment, call it what you want?

01:15:01.520 It took a little time. I said, it was probably a year and a half before I then had an experience

01:15:09.000 with, you know, with psychedelics that put all of this in perspective for me. So.

01:15:14.400 And was your first experience with psilocybin or LSD?

01:15:17.100 Strangely, I had taken psilocybin as a teenager before I had what really was the,

01:15:24.880 the kind of breakthrough experience for me on MDMA when I was 18.

01:15:29.240 Yeah. You wrote about that as well.

01:15:31.720 Yeah. Yeah. That was, that's in waking up. I had taken psilocybin, I smoked marijuana and I had taken

01:15:39.080 mushrooms a few times as a teenager and they never, they never signaled anything profound to me about

01:15:47.380 the nature of the mind or they never indicated a path forward apart from just this sense that

01:15:55.160 these drugs produced interesting experiences. I had no framing for the, what I experienced on these

01:16:02.440 drugs. You experienced the altered state, but there was no altered trait to borrow from the title of the

01:16:07.980 same book.

01:16:08.660 Yeah. And, and, and also just no sense that there could be altered traits. There was no project

01:16:15.420 associated with changing your experience in that way. It was just, you know, it was kind of fun.

01:16:21.360 So I guess some of the experiences had also been unpleasant on psilocybin, but it's just,

01:16:28.120 these were drug experiences, you know, and it was like getting drunk. Like if you get drunk,

01:16:32.980 you don't come away from that experience thinking, I wonder if this indicates that it's possible to

01:16:39.560 feel kind of natively feel like I've had six beers and, you know, I can just be more of that sort of

01:16:46.200 person by some other method that has nothing to do with drinking beer all the time. Right. So,

01:16:50.920 but, but with MDMA, you know, my first experience on, on ecstasy, I had this epiphany that this is what

01:17:00.300 consciousness was like when it was no longer encumbered by my self-concern, by my egocentricity,

01:17:09.040 by my... And because you were 18, I mean, was it so much about, like, I'm trying to reflect on what

01:17:14.600 it was like to be an 18 year old boy, but I think if I recall, you wrote about just sort of the empathy

01:17:20.940 that you had for your friend, because it was you and another friend, right? Yeah. And was that the part

01:17:25.700 that was so stunning to you, which was, oh my God, like I've spent the last 18 years sort of not

01:17:30.880 thinking about it through somebody else's eyes? Or what, what was it that you experienced, if you

01:17:35.480 can recall, that at least showed you, or perhaps was the thin end of the wedge that said, there is

01:17:42.000 now an altered state of consciousness that could exist outside of this state that I'm in that might

01:17:47.660 be desirable. It was a recognition that what was changing for me while I was coming on to the drug

01:17:59.800 was that I was losing my concern about myself, right? So that I, so I'm talking to my best friend,

01:18:07.500 somebody who's, who I already love and, and am connected to and have, you know, positive feelings

01:18:14.120 for. But what was happening is that I started to punch through to this level of connection with

01:18:22.380 him that I had never felt before, despite the fact that we were great friends. And it had a kind of

01:18:29.340 structure to it, or it was, it was dissecting a structure within my mind that I had never had any

01:18:36.680 cause to notice, which was my default state was normally that, you know, if I'm talking to him,

01:18:45.180 some amount of my attention is bound up in a concern about what he thinks about me, right? So,

01:18:53.040 you know, if, if I see some change in expression on his face, based on what I just said, I'm reading

01:19:00.700 into those changes some message about me, some message about how I'm doing. And there are many

01:19:08.160 other features to this. I mean, there's also a sense of a kind of zero sum aspect to my own stature

01:19:18.040 in the world and my, you know, feeling of well-being in light of other people's success and, and

01:19:24.600 happiness. So, and it's something you can discover in yourself. Imagine those times where you have a

01:19:30.480 friend who has some, you know, massive success, right? You know, you're struggling in your life

01:19:35.440 to be as successful as you want to be. If you're like most people, you haven't arrived yet. And

01:19:41.120 then you have a friend, you know, who's winning some version of the lottery. And when this is being

01:19:47.120 communicated to you, you're, you're asked to celebrate with them essentially. And you can discover

01:19:51.180 in yourself a kind of begrudging feeling, whether it's envy or there's a, there's a limitation on your

01:19:58.260 capacity to experience what's, what's called sympathetic joy in, in Buddhism for that person.

01:20:03.700 And that's an ugly characteristic of the mind. I mean, here, I mean, here's someone who you

01:20:08.100 ostensibly really care about. This is someone you really love. This is someone who you think...

01:20:12.940 And their windfall did not come at your expense.

01:20:15.220 Right, exactly. And yet you, there's something in you that can't actually celebrate for them fully

01:20:20.940 because you're so bound up with who you are and what you want for yourself and, you know, how you

01:20:26.980 think they, they may think about you. And I mean, this horror show of self-reference and this miserly

01:20:35.420 spirit with respect to the circumstance you're, you're in with, with everyone. So what happened on,

01:20:42.860 for, in this first MDMA trip is that I just punched through all of that, right? All of that was just

01:20:48.340 gone. And there was no associated inebriation. I mean, it was just, my experience wasn't just...

01:20:55.460 That's, that's the thing with MDMA that makes it sort of quite distinct and special from some of

01:20:59.420 these other agents, right? Is there is no sense of altered consciousness.

01:21:04.020 Yeah. It can be kind of speedy and it also depends on whether you're getting...

01:21:09.300 If you're talking pure MDMA versus, yeah, yeah. Of course, when they cut it with stimulants,

01:21:12.980 it's a different story, but, but really pure MDMA doesn't seem to really alter your

01:21:16.300 consciousness in any way. Yeah. In the way that, you know, LSD would, for example.

01:21:19.880 Right. Yeah. I mean, there's no, it's not, it's not considered really a psychedelic. It doesn't

01:21:23.980 have any of those visionary or, or hallucinatory qualities.

01:21:27.460 Yeah. It's referred to more as an empathogen versus an entheogen, correct?

01:21:30.340 Yeah. Yeah. So having lost all that, I just, I recognized that one, just how much I loved him and

01:21:39.140 how that was synonymous with wanting him to be happy. And in some basic sense, his happiness would

01:21:47.480 be my own, right? So the capacity for envy would just completely went out the window. There's just

01:21:51.800 no way to feel a zero sum contest with somebody who you love in that way. And, but then I recognized

01:21:58.900 that if a stranger had walked into the room at that moment, literally the mailman shows up,

01:22:04.220 I would have felt the same way about him. It was not contingent upon having had a history

01:22:10.360 with this person. I was in a state where I wanted all beings to have their dreams realized.

01:22:18.580 I wish nothing but happiness on every conscious system, right? Effortlessly.

01:22:23.560 Can we pause for a moment so you can explain the neurobiology of that? I've experienced it as well

01:22:28.360 with MDMA. And I find it to be the most joyous state I've ever experienced to have such, I don't,

01:22:41.240 I don't possess, I don't, unlike you, I don't have the vocabulary to even describe what it feels like

01:22:45.600 other than to just say you love everybody in obviously a very non-sexual way. It's just a

01:22:53.320 male, female are all the same. It sort of becomes this 0.99

01:22:58.360 you just want the best for everyone. So, so what is it about the neurobiology or neurochemistry

01:23:05.700 that can produce that state? And I'll tell you what the follow-up question is going to be.

01:23:11.660 Is there anything we can do outside of taking that drug to even get part of that?

01:23:17.680 Well, yeah, unfortunately I don't know the answer to the neurobiology and I'm not sure it is known. I

01:23:23.040 think most of these drugs are serotonergic, but they clearly are different.

01:23:30.720 Which subset of the receptors they're hitting is, we don't exactly understand the causal relationship

01:23:35.640 between the receptor being... Yeah. I mean, and I'm, you know, frankly, I'm not up on the literature

01:23:40.500 on MDMA. So there may be some clues that I'm not aware of, but, and I would also add the caveat that

01:23:46.780 some of these drugs, I think there, there's reason to be concerned about in terms of the physical effects

01:23:52.800 of taking them too often or, or MDMA is something that was profoundly useful for me. I remain

01:23:59.740 somewhat concerned that it is potentially neurotoxic. I wouldn't want to take too much of it. I haven't

01:24:05.940 taken it for years and I have much less of a concern for other psychedelics. I think LSD is, I mean,

01:24:14.000 there's, there's no evidence that it's neurotoxic, for instance. Having spoken with people, psychiatrists

01:24:20.340 who have taken care of patients who have probably taken too much MDMA, the two things that I have

01:24:28.100 learned from them, which echo what you're saying is, yeah, it's generally safe, but it's very important.

01:24:34.480 Like any drug, I mean, these aren't regulated compounds, right? So you're always running a risk

01:24:39.960 when you take these things of other things that the drug is cut with and there's toxicity that can

01:24:45.180 be amplified as a result of that. And the second thing that I've been told is anything over a

01:24:53.820 frequency of about every three months and you start to run a risk of these serotonergic toxicities down

01:25:01.280 the line. So, you know, you can take that for what it's worth. I mean, I'm certainly not providing

01:25:07.000 guidance on that other than to echo your point that I think one has to be very careful with these

01:25:12.760 agents. Now, at the same time, I'm not following the work of MAPS that closely. So I'm not sure what

01:25:18.000 doses or frequencies they're using with the vets that they're studying. Yeah. And I think the-

01:25:24.280 So presumably they've worked out some of these kinks as well. 0.95

01:25:26.700 Yeah. But frankly, it would be worth it even if it were neurotoxic to some degree

01:25:32.660 in the right conditions for the right person.

01:25:35.040 Yeah. If you had debilitating PTSD, maybe a little bit of long-term consequence or short-term

01:25:39.720 toxicity is worth it to cure that. But, you know. So then back to the second question, which is

01:25:45.620 when you think about that profound empathy in that moment that you had at the age of 18,

01:25:51.180 has your meditative practice, which has obviously evolved greatly since then,

01:25:54.980 allowed you to either transiently or otherwise experience or re-experience that phenomenon?

01:26:01.840 Yeah. Well, there is a practice that targets that mental status. Actually, I mentioned it earlier.

01:26:06.460 Yeah. Metta practice. Metta is the poly word for loving kindness. And yeah, there are people who do

01:26:13.860 that practice almost exclusively or-

01:26:17.980 So describe it a little bit for the listener.

01:26:20.420 Unlike mindfulness, where you are letting go of any agenda you have for what your experience should

01:26:27.600 be, and you're just reconciling yourself to noticing however it is. And if you do that,

01:26:34.920 your experience does change in reliable ways, many of which are quite pleasant. They can be amazingly

01:26:41.240 pleasant. But it's not about securing those changes or amplifying those changes. You're just because

01:26:47.560 that, insofar as that creeps in, you're not being mindful. You're doing something other than merely

01:26:54.140 witnessing what's happening. And doing that is an expression of your own desire and attachment. And

01:27:00.260 I mean, you're trying to change your experience. And that's different than simply being mindful of

01:27:07.560 it. But with a practice like Metta, you do have a goal. You're trying to feel this feeling of loving

01:27:14.440 kindness as intensely as you can feel it, as durably as you can feel it. And you're trying to acquire a

01:27:22.740 state change, but you're also trying to acquire a trait change in that, you know, your default attitude

01:27:29.080 toward other human beings or even any other conscious system would be just well-wishing and,

01:27:35.580 you know, good vibes. So, and there's no question you can train that attitude. And it comes from both

01:27:44.120 a framing effect and from an immersion in this change of state that you can kindle in meditation and

01:27:52.720 then keep humming along based on concentration. So the same kind of constant, the same faculty of mind

01:27:59.320 that could become one-pointedly focused on a mantra or a sight like a candle flame can become

01:28:09.000 one-pointedly immersed in the feeling of love for all humanity. And it's initiated by thinking

01:28:19.120 thoughts about other people. So you'll, you'll just imagine someone who you love and it's important

01:28:26.860 that this not be contaminated with, with your, your notion of romantic love, because so much of what

01:28:31.140 we think of as love in a romantic context is desire and attachment. And it's not, it's not the same.

01:28:36.820 An appropriate object of that type of attention. Yeah. A child, a friend, a parent, but whoever

01:28:44.400 in your life, you can have just an, as uncomplicated an experience of wishing this person well, wishing

01:28:53.120 them to be free of suffering, wishing them happiness. And the usual progression is to start with someone

01:29:00.200 like that, who, you know, who's someone who's close to you and then transition to a neutral person.

01:29:06.680 You know, someone who you have no, just a kind of a randomly picked person from the crowd or

01:29:10.980 some public figure who you have no strong association with, but who you can visualize.

01:29:16.300 And then you're wishing that person happiness, wishing that they'd be free of suffering. You're

01:29:21.300 actually thinking these thoughts in your mind as a kind of, almost as a kind of mantra, but you're not,

01:29:26.520 it's not the sound of the utterances. It's the, the import of them that you're, you're, you're trying

01:29:32.060 to connect with. So you're thinking, may you be happy. May you be free from suffering. You're

01:29:38.860 reiterating this. You could have, you know, three or four ways of saying it and you're saying it over

01:29:43.400 and over again, but then connecting with the actual kind of energetics of the wish that you really do

01:29:49.060 wish that this person who you love be free from suffering. And it can become this very

01:29:56.100 deep feeling of basking in this well of good intentions for everybody, right? Because, and

01:30:03.620 then you can, you can include not only a neutral person, but someone for whom you have a so-called

01:30:08.620 enemy, someone for whom you have a real negative association. And then you begin to see the

01:30:14.620 importance of framing around all these things. So just like you said, for the customer service

01:30:19.260 situation, maybe it just takes a second to realize, wait a minute, here's a person who's been

01:30:23.460 standing at this desk since six o'clock in the morning meeting one disgruntled person

01:30:29.740 after the next. And now she or he has just met me. Their experience is completely different

01:30:35.220 from mine. And which by the way is a beautiful cut to the sort of issue that David Foster Wallace

01:30:41.940 talks about so much is every experience we have is only through our lens, right? Yeah. It's that

01:30:47.860 insight alone, which now you're giving a very tangible example of is so powerful just to be

01:30:53.940 able to hit pause on that for a moment and say what you just said, right? This person's been standing

01:30:58.860 here for seven hours. Yeah. Seeing one pissed off face after another, what they're seeing now is

01:31:05.840 totally different from what I'm seeing. Yeah. Yeah. And your impatience isn't helping. And you are so

01:31:12.660 glad that you're not in their shoes, right? Like you don't want their job. You actually feel

01:31:18.660 compassion for their experience, right? And I mean, there are many, you know, hacks of this kind where

01:31:25.440 you're driving in traffic and someone cuts you off and, you know, your default experience is what an 1.00

01:31:32.340 asshole. But it just takes a second to realize, wait a minute, you have no idea what's going on with 1.00

01:31:37.820 this person. You don't know if this person is in a rush because they have some real emergency. You

01:31:42.880 don't know if they're 90 years old. Now you just honked at some 90 year old man or woman, right? And

01:31:50.140 who's the asshole now? There's so many changes of frame applied to the exact same experience, 0.99

01:31:57.560 which just fundamentally change your interpretation of it. A loving kindness practice is based on

01:32:06.180 a fundamental frame change for more or less everything you can encounter in human affairs,

01:32:14.480 which is everyone is suffering. Everyone was once a child condemned to now be the adult they now are,

01:32:23.800 right? So like there is no evil person who invented himself, right? There's no, like,

01:32:28.960 this is something I've talked about with respect to Saddam Hussein in the past.

01:32:32.800 I usually talk about this in the context of talking about free will. But I mean,

01:32:37.340 just look at someone like the prototypical evil person, you know, Saddam Hussein is about as good 1.00

01:32:41.420 as it gets, right? So you look at him as a 40 year old man. He's just a terrifyingly evil sociopath

01:32:48.260 who, if you're in favor of the death penalty, it definitely applies to him. But you roll back his 0.98

01:32:54.380 life line by a few decades. And at a certain point, you say, okay, here's a 12 year old boy who

01:33:02.560 could have well been a scary 12 year old boy. But, you know, when he's four years old, he's a four

01:33:09.200 year old. And he's a four year old who has every strike against him in the sense that he's guaranteed,

01:33:17.080 it seems to be a morally damaged human being. He's living in a society riven by sectarian conflict.

01:33:25.900 The norms to which he's being pushed, the aspirations he can form in this context are

01:33:33.120 barbaric by any standard, you know, ethical standard that we would form today, right? And

01:33:39.060 the kind of person who can thrive in that context is someone who's morally damaged by our lights. And

01:33:45.840 he didn't pick his parents, he didn't pick his genes. He's not the author of himself. And yet he's

01:33:50.980 going to become this evil person who, you know, half the world or more will think is deserving of 0.97

01:33:57.200 death at the end of it. It's possible to feel compassion, even for someone like Saddam Hussein. 0.85

01:34:03.320 I mean, that's a reframing that may be hard for some people to get there. But for someone who's

01:34:07.580 practicing a state like Mehta, that's the frame. And if you can get there, you can recognize that

01:34:15.960 there is this capacity for love and well-wishing that really extends without limit to every conscious

01:34:23.120 system. I mean, you want everyone to be relieved of all their problems on some basic level. Because the

01:34:30.900 most badly behaved people in the world are, for the most part, expressing their problems. Even when

01:34:39.440 you have a truly sadistic person who seems to be deriving pleasure from causing other people

01:34:46.040 suffering, and such people exist, what you're witnessing there is someone for whom all these

01:34:52.660 other sources of pleasure and well-being are basically unavailable, right? This person on some

01:34:58.160 level can't know what he's missing. You know, this is a person who's never going to have good

01:35:03.820 relationships of the sort that you and I would demand for ourselves and everyone we love as the

01:35:10.100 necessary ingredients of a life well-lived. It's not to say you wouldn't want to put this person in jail

01:35:14.700 because there is no cure for this problem. I'm not recommending that we not protect ourselves from

01:35:20.140 malevolent people, but you don't actually have to hate them. I mean, feeling compassion for these

01:35:25.620 people isn't incompatible with taking the steps we need to take to keep society orderly and safe.

01:35:32.780 You know, one thing I would recommend to anybody who's interested in pulling a little more on this

01:35:37.520 thread is to do a prison visit. Yeah, I've never done that, but I heard you and Tim did that, right?

01:35:44.220 Tim and I did it, and I did a podcast with a guy named Corey McCarthy, who himself was incarcerated

01:35:49.640 for seven years for attempted murder and a bunch of other stuff. And, you know, there's a group of

01:35:55.480 three or four or five of us that actually went and spent a couple of days at a maximum security prison.

01:36:01.200 And we played this game there called the Step to the Line, which I'm sure you've heard of. And it's,

01:36:06.280 you know, it's a game that's played in many reasons, but the purpose is always to basically

01:36:10.200 highlight our similarities and our differences. So on the one side of the line, we're all of these

01:36:13.860 inmates. Now, we're in a maximum security prison in California. So everybody in that room, I don't

01:36:20.680 remember the exact numbers. I believe 70% of those men were serving life sentences. Some staggering

01:36:26.940 number of these guys were in there because of, you know, homicide or, you know, something more than

01:36:32.380 like they were trafficking some marijuana, right? Right. And on the other side are all of us as

01:36:37.200 volunteers. And then the game begins of Step to the Line If. And some of the differences are so

01:36:44.640 humbling that you can't be a reasonable human being and be in that situation and not be moved

01:36:50.920 by it. You know, Step to the Line If you had two parents in your household. And amongst the volunteers,

01:36:57.020 you know, maybe 60% step forward. And amongst the inmates, I think one step forward. You know,

01:37:03.060 step to the line if someone close to you died before you were 10, you know, and, or died a

01:37:11.960 violent death before you were 10, you know, these sorts of things. And, you know, step to the line

01:37:16.100 if you grew up in a home that had more than five books. And those of us as volunteers, most of us

01:37:21.620 step forward of the inmates, you know, five step forward out of 50, that kind of thing. And it's to

01:37:27.060 your point, right? It's like, we're, we're not going to excuse the mistakes that took place. And

01:37:33.400 there's, you know, society has said there's going to be a price that one has to pay for one mistakes,

01:37:39.020 but boy, you realize pretty quickly the randomness that allows you or me to be standing on one side

01:37:46.680 of that line and not the other. Oh yeah. Yeah. No, if you were in precisely that other person's

01:37:52.840 situation, you know, genetically, environmentally, you would be that other person, right? There's

01:37:58.060 just, there is no daylight between all of those causes and conditions and the outcome. And even

01:38:04.240 if, even adding randomness, I mean, it's not, you know, quantum mechanics doesn't get you

01:38:07.940 out of this situation. And I think of all the times I've been lucky. Like when I was in eighth grade,

01:38:13.200 there was a kid that was a year ahead who was like my hero. You know, he was the absolute toughest

01:38:18.360 kid in the school. I mean, he was the bad, the bad-ass and he took me under his wing, you know?

01:38:25.000 So I was like really lucky to be the eighth grader who this super tough, bad-ass kid really liked.

01:38:31.560 And two years later, he wound up in jail for armed robbery. And I've often thought to myself,

01:38:37.220 I was so impressionable that if I had been with him on that night and he said, look, we're going to

01:38:43.460 go hold up a liquor store. Like, I'm not sure I would have had the common sense, the intestinal

01:38:48.480 fortitude, the, whatever, the courage to say, dude, that's a bad idea. I'm not going to go.

01:38:54.040 Right.

01:38:54.140 It's so easy that I could have gone along for that.

01:38:57.120 Yeah.

01:38:57.420 And as I learned later on, once you get in that system, like, you know, once you're 16 years old

01:39:03.700 and you're pegged for armed robbery, like it's very hard to recover to Stanford.

01:39:08.400 Yeah. Yeah.

01:39:09.480 So, so, but that's a, that's a moment's decision and the, and the luck is like, were you there

01:39:13.740 or not there?

01:39:14.520 Right.

01:39:15.540 And, and I'm, I'm, I have way more cards that are favorable in my deck than virtually all

01:39:20.200 of these guys I met. And I, yet I still could have easily slipped over that, you know, into

01:39:26.060 that abyss of that endless vicious cycle of one, one, one knock after another until before

01:39:32.280 you know it, like you're 40 years old and you're in prison for life.

01:39:34.960 Yeah. I mean, so the philosophical insight here goes by the name of moral luck. And this

01:39:42.340 is, I think it originates with an essay that the philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote probably

01:39:47.600 30 years ago. We rarely recognize how morally significant differences in luck are and, and

01:39:56.440 just how lucky you need to be to live a good moral life. Any one of those things could have

01:40:04.240 been marginally different and you'd be the guy who was an accessory to armed robbery,

01:40:09.100 right? I mean, just think of how many times most of us have driven drunk or not a hundred

01:40:17.820 percent and nothing bad happened. The difference between nothing bad happening and killing somebody

01:40:24.040 in a crosswalk is enormous and just life deranging. Stranger still, because it's now, it's not

01:40:31.440 even classed for most people as a significant risk they're running, texting while driving.

01:40:37.400 I mean, I would say most of the people listening to this podcast have not totally shut down their

01:40:43.420 texting while driving, right? They're not, they're not even thinking of it as a grotesquely

01:40:49.180 irresponsible thing to be doing, right? I mean, because it's just, it's too tempting. You're at a red

01:40:53.920 light, but being at a red light migrates into the first hundred feet of your now responding

01:41:00.100 to a green light. And then there's the moments on the freeway. And then, and every day there's some

01:41:05.940 totally normal, responsible, upstanding person like you or me who kills somebody's kid in a

01:41:12.920 crosswalk because they were texting. The significance of that difference in luck, it's extraordinary. And

01:41:20.420 you know, these are, these are unrecoverable errors most of the time. So there are two sides to that.

01:41:26.640 One, it can get you to, to take more care in all the spots where more care massively increases your

01:41:33.300 odds of living a happy, fulfilling life. But it also can give you this different framing that allows

01:41:39.700 you to feel compassion for even the worst people on earth, right? You can just, you just recognize

01:41:45.180 that if you change enough of the variables, you would be playing the same game they're playing.

01:41:49.940 And this is, I think this is so important, Sam. And I don't think I understood how important this was

01:41:54.700 until I read something you wrote, which I'm paraphrasing, so I'll be bastardizing it. But

01:42:01.240 the gist of it was, it's really the, the caliber quality of our thoughts that determine the quality

01:42:08.560 of our life. And I, so let's take a most extreme example. I had a friend who was killed by a motorist

01:42:16.200 who was texting. So he was on his bike. He, he couldn't have been in a safer spot actually. And, um,

01:42:24.160 but woman, you know, got distracted for a moment and killed him. And I was angry in a way that sort

01:42:34.840 of felt like it was never going to go away. And truthfully, a big part of it was selfish. It was,

01:42:40.000 I don't want this to happen to me now. You know, I'm, I, at the time I was a cyclist, I was like,

01:42:44.760 I'm sick and tired of seeing cyclists get hit. And some of the times they're getting killed,

01:42:49.480 but they're getting hit all the time. Right. And it's, it always seems to be these,

01:42:52.700 not always, but 90% of the time it's these distracted drivers. Sometimes the cyclist just

01:42:57.380 does something stupid, but for the most part, if you get hit, if a road, if a cyclist on the road 0.58

01:43:01.380 gets hit, the driver's usually at fault. Interestingly, unless alcohol is involved, those drivers are 0.99

01:43:06.500 never prosecuted. Right. And I spent so much time being so pissed off. And part of it was just my

01:43:13.160 own grandiosity. Like my life is too valuable. I'm not going to die on the side of a road because

01:43:17.860 some driver's too stupid to turn off their phone or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But then I, I had, 1.00

01:43:23.660 you know, after kind of reading something you wrote, I, I reflected on it years later and thought,

01:43:28.660 I've never once asked myself what that person is going through who killed Nick. Yeah. Yeah.

01:43:33.920 What is her life like today? Cause there's no way she forgot that. There's no way she doesn't go to

01:43:40.700 bed at night and think about the fact that she, it's such a tragic story. Not only did she kill a

01:43:45.560 guy who's just a beautiful soul who had, you know, a bunch of children, he was killed two days before

01:43:53.040 his life insurance policy kicked in. He was killed on, uh, I believe it was May 30th. No, it was May 31st.

01:43:59.900 And he had a policy that didn't start until June 1st. I mean, it's like, you couldn't make this story

01:44:04.160 up. It's so tragic, but it's too easy to not reflect on her pain, which you could say, well,

01:44:11.640 Peter, that's ridiculous. She doesn't deserve any empathy. Put all of that empathy towards Nick's 0.92

01:44:16.120 family. But it, in the end, if I'm really optimizing for my own quality of life,

01:44:23.200 there's no upside to just being upset about this. Like there is some benefit to accepting the fact

01:44:30.780 that everybody here loses. And if that makes me less angry and makes me hate that person less,

01:44:37.380 isn't that a good way to think about things?

01:44:39.800 Well, yeah, but I would even put it more strongly because again, she, the driver was profoundly unlucky

01:44:47.340 because she was, she was guilty of doing something that everyone listening to this podcast has done

01:44:53.480 and didn't pay that price. Worse still, she's guilty of doing something that most of the people

01:45:00.640 listening to this podcast will continue to do even after hearing this podcast.

01:45:06.100 This is a reset that I'm convinced most people are not quite ready for. At a certain point,

01:45:10.760 self-driving cars will come to the rescue. But the difference between being someone who was texting

01:45:16.180 and didn't even notice the danger because nothing bad happened and being someone who killed your

01:45:22.320 friend is just luck, you know? And so, yeah, and you can only imagine how awful it has been to be

01:45:32.260 the person who was irresponsibly texting and who killed somebody in the prime of their life just to

01:45:40.760 hear the details and to have been the person who initiated that tsunami of suffering.

01:45:46.900 Just imagine a website where you present the texts that were the proximate cause of death.

01:45:57.600 Right. How irrelevant they must have been.

01:45:59.420 Yeah. The juxtaposition between what people were felt couldn't wait another 30 seconds or 30 minutes

01:46:06.120 and the tragedy. And what ultimately resulted in the loss of life.

01:46:09.500 Yeah. It would be astonishing. I mean, we can all predict what it would be, but-

01:46:12.580 That's a sick idea, but it's a pretty damn good idea.

01:46:15.140 Yeah. Yeah. Again, it's just, if you imagine what that woman went through, it's, you would not want to 0.87

01:46:22.240 trade places with her.

01:46:23.500 So I want to shift gears for a moment and go back to a discussion I had a week ago with one of my

01:46:27.220 friends who's, who's a patient. He's been really struggling the last few months. He's a, he's a,

01:46:35.140 he's a father. He's a wonderful guy. He's got two kids, three dogs, and, um, he's a guy with a really

01:46:41.240 big heart. So he's, he's, he's one of these guys who just, I don't know, you get the sense he could

01:46:47.220 never be upset at anybody. He could never, you know, not want to take care of somebody around him.

01:46:51.840 And, but his, one of the dogs, which was the first dog he ever had died, had cancer. And they went

01:47:00.040 through a bunch of treatments and, and the dog ultimately died. And I think for him losing that

01:47:05.080 dog was, was certainly on the spectrum of losing a child, right? I don't think it's the same, but, but

01:47:11.020 I think for him, it was very difficult and he's been unable to sort of get back in the, in the saddle,

01:47:18.180 so to speak. And it's, it's reflected in frankly, his cortisol levels. I've never seen cortisol levels

01:47:23.620 so high. So his, his degree of hypercortisolemia is if you didn't know better, you'd think he had

01:47:29.140 a cortisol secreting tumor actually. It's so profound. And we were talking about it and

01:47:34.860 he confessed that he couldn't stop dreading the death of his other two dogs who are, you know,

01:47:43.560 age six and seven or something like that. So these aren't dogs that are going to die tomorrow.

01:47:47.160 In fact, these aren't even dogs that are, you know, sick in any way, shape or form.

01:47:52.220 But as he's three months out from the death of this dog, that was probably 14 or 15.

01:47:57.740 He's spending every moment now dreading the loss of these dogs that are going to die in

01:48:05.200 five years or something like that. And it was very hard for me to try to console him because

01:48:10.400 I didn't want to be dismissive of the pain, but I also wanted to remind him that, you know,

01:48:15.840 that's the antithesis of being present, right? It's like, but your children and your two dogs

01:48:21.080 are right here with you right now. And they're perfect.

01:48:23.780 Yeah.

01:48:24.800 And all the worrying you can do about when these two dogs die doesn't change the fact that they're

01:48:30.500 going to die, but you don't know when, and you don't know how, and you don't know any of these 0.62

01:48:34.000 things. How would you explain to someone like that in not necessarily the most technical sense,

01:48:42.340 but maybe in sort of an appeal to their emotion, why this effort isn't going to pan out and why

01:48:50.040 there needs to be a new strategy for getting over this loss?

01:48:53.240 Well, it depends on whether or not the person is living an examined life of the sort that we've

01:49:00.820 been discussing. So if this is a person who has no meditation practice and is not interested in

01:49:06.660 that mode.

01:49:09.020 He is. So I've given him your books. He has been going through the meditation course that you have,

01:49:17.860 but is still having a real hard time, like all of us, I think in taking it from,

01:49:24.680 you know, the example I use is like, if you go to the gym and you sort of lift weights for 15,

01:49:30.060 20 minutes a day, you know, that's, that's great. But the whole purpose of doing that is to take those

01:49:35.120 new muscles and be able to use them in the other 23 and a half hours. Right. And so I think that's

01:49:40.000 the transition is like, I think the theory makes sense to him, but it's now, how does one actually

01:49:45.340 bridge that gap? So let's, for the purpose of the discussion, let's say he accepts conceptually

01:49:51.500 the value of this.

01:49:52.640 Yeah. Well, so then to become sensitive to the actual mechanics of suffering, I mean,

01:49:57.500 that the only way to suffer this dog's absence is to think about it and not know that you're thinking

01:50:03.820 about it. Right. So it is to be subsumed by this process of ideation and to have no perspective

01:50:13.020 on it. And framing can help here. So you can, you can say, well, there were many experiences he had

01:50:21.900 with this dog alive where the dog wasn't physically present, right? The dog leaves the room.

01:50:28.120 There's no greater absence from a room than simply leaving it. Right. Now it's an additional

01:50:36.260 operation to think, well, there's a big difference because I'll never see him again. Right. But

01:50:41.360 everyone you love in the world, animals.

01:50:44.020 You're the only person I love who's in this room.

01:50:45.640 Exactly. Right. They're all out of this room. So in principle, you know what it's like to be content

01:50:52.900 in moments where... In the physical absence. In the physical absence of everyone you love

01:50:57.060 in this world. It's possible. And the only way to make it intolerable to be in a room without everyone

01:51:06.960 you love is to meditate on how intolerable it is that they're not in the room with you right now.

01:51:13.780 And this is why meditation is such an amazing skill because it has a point of contact with your

01:51:22.820 prison story. This is a point I make several places. I think I make it in my book, Waking Up.

01:51:28.160 The amazing thing about meditation is that, you know, once you actually know how to meditate,

01:51:32.280 it's possible to be alone in a room for weeks and months and even years. I mean, you know,

01:51:38.960 several teachers I've studied with had spent literally years alone in caves where in most

01:51:48.340 people's lives, solitary confinement is considered a punishment even in a circumstance where to be

01:51:56.600 outside of that room is to be surrounded by murderers and rapists who you might have to fight.

01:52:03.020 Right. So like even in prison, people don't want to be in solitary confinement because it's so

01:52:07.960 intolerable to be left alone with your thoughts. There's an evolutionary rationale for this. I mean,

01:52:14.520 we are clearly evolved to be social primates and a circumstance where you find yourself alone

01:52:22.380 more or less forever is not an optimum in evolutionary terms. But it's just simply a fact of the human mind

01:52:32.040 that it's possible to discover a form of well-being that is not only survives contact with solitude, but

01:52:39.480 it's just totally undiminished by solitude. And if you can discover that even for moments at a time,

01:52:46.660 you can then enjoy the company of everyone you love without this feeling that your well-being

01:52:55.800 is at its core predicated on being able to have them at any moment you want or that is predicated on

01:53:04.980 the totally forlorn hope that this circumstance is going to endure forever, that no one will die, that no one

01:53:12.960 will leave you. We know that's not in the cards. And, you know, we need to find whatever form of well-being

01:53:22.960 is possible given the fact that things are continually changing.

01:53:27.160 You know, your thought experiment or not, I mean, it wasn't really a thought experiment, but it made

01:53:32.080 me think of something was, think of all the people who are thrust into solitary confinement. I mean,

01:53:37.440 tragically in this country, it's an absolute epidemic in the U.S. prison system. And for all of

01:53:45.540 the realities of how inhumane that is, especially for the lengths of time people find themselves in

01:53:51.680 there, do you think there's a subset of people who inadvertently stumble into mindfulness without

01:53:57.360 being formally taught? So the analogy would be like, if I threw 16-year-old Sam into a weight room,

01:54:04.880 but I'd never shown him, or forget a weight room, into a basketball court. You'd never seen basketball

01:54:10.920 before. There is a basketball. There is a net. And I said, you know, you're confined to this room for a

01:54:16.880 year. Like at some point, will you figure out picking up the ball, bouncing it? I wonder how

01:54:22.660 hard it is to put that ball through that hoop over there, shooting at all of those things. I mean,

01:54:26.420 it seems unlikely, right? It seems like on some level you would have to at least be shown what

01:54:30.440 to do. And then even if you're left alone, if you could come back to that lesson. And so similarly,

01:54:35.080 you take a guy and let's say you put him in solitary confinement for a year. He's had no exposure

01:54:39.180 to mindfulness. Is there a chance he's going to spontaneously figure out, oh my God,

01:54:43.880 this is far less painful if I'm actually present in, you know, the sensations of my body versus the

01:54:52.000 ruminations and thoughts that are going to torment me? Or is that something that is just so counterintuitive

01:54:58.120 to the ethos of who we are that no way, like, you know, you're going to have to have had some exposure

01:55:04.340 to this to at least be able to be thrust in that environment?

01:55:07.900 It's definitely possible because it is just the way consciousness is, if you're paying attention.

01:55:15.600 So it's there to be recognized in each moment. But the odds are against anyone doing it. I mean,

01:55:23.100 there are people who have spontaneously awakened to this. I mean, they're kind of famous, you know,

01:55:28.060 adepts and certainly in the Eastern tradition. There are also, there are Western philosophers who've

01:55:32.320 had intimations of this where Jean-Jacques Rousseau has a story about riding in a boat on a lake,

01:55:40.560 I think, and spontaneously falling into kind of some very open and non-egocentric state of

01:55:47.420 consciousness that we would recognize. But the difference between having clear information and

01:55:53.920 a clear map and not, or having an erroneous one, it's just enormous. So...

01:55:59.320 I know I wouldn't have been able to have done it. Like, when I think about how

01:56:02.860 counterintuitive, how difficult it is to practice mindfulness, to go through the practice.

01:56:10.400 Yeah.

01:56:10.800 Like, I think if you'd put me in solitary confinement for a hundred years, I would have never stumbled

01:56:15.200 into that, unfortunately. So I would have been confined to, you know, just been tortured.

01:56:21.300 Well, also, worse still, it's possible to be practicing mindfulness and to be on retreat

01:56:28.740 and not recognize many of the things that you really do want to recognize about the nature

01:56:35.880 of the mind, because the way the mindfulness has been taught to you is, however, subtly encouraging

01:56:42.620 of a kind of goal-seeking practice. And this is something I write about in my book and talk

01:56:51.120 about in my app. It's possible to be practicing mindfulness in a way that is dualistic. It's

01:56:58.820 kind of ramifying of the subject-object perception. And therefore, the goal of recognizing the selflessness

01:57:08.620 of consciousness and being relieved of this sense of, you know, ego at the center of it,

01:57:13.720 in the sense that there's a meditator or a thinker of thoughts or an experiencer of experience,

01:57:18.960 that that can be posited as the ultimate goal of some incredibly laborious spiritual path that just

01:57:28.240 has to be traversed by increments over years. And that's an error. That's a mistake. I mean,

01:57:34.340 that's just not true. It's already true of consciousness that the ego is an illusion.

01:57:39.740 And that can be realized directly. And the expectation that it can't be is, in some basic

01:57:49.780 sense, self-fulfilling for most people. So, yeah, you can be in the most auspicious circumstance,

01:57:57.260 having devoted a massive part of your life to just practicing mindfulness, and still be in a kind of

01:58:05.380 crucible of unnecessary seeking and suffering because you just, you have an erroneous understanding

01:58:11.700 of what the path actually is. I want, there are a couple of sort of semantics I want to, you've

01:58:16.800 already alluded to a little bit the relationship between vipassana and mindfulness. Where does

01:58:22.400 Dzogchen fit into this? And like, if you were to try to draw a Venn diagram of these different 1.00

01:58:28.480 concepts, how would they overlap? Well, so vipassana is the name of the practice in Theravada Buddhism,

01:58:37.580 the oldest tradition of Buddhism. And this is the Buddhism of Thailand and Burma and Sri Lanka. And

01:58:46.900 vipassana, as I said, means insight. And you're having insight into what are thought of as the

01:58:54.480 fundamental characteristics of all phenomenon. And these are impermanence and selflessness

01:59:03.160 and unsatisfactoriness. It is often misleadingly translated as suffering rather than unsatisfactoriness.

01:59:12.480 So many people believe that the Buddha taught that life is suffering or that all experience contains

01:59:18.620 some intrinsic suffering. That's not quite the message. It's that life is a circumstance where

01:59:27.280 there is no unchanging, fully satisfactory basis for one's happiness because everything is changing.

01:59:36.740 It's by virtue of impermanence that the boat is always leaking, right? We're always bailing water.

01:59:43.240 We're always responding to some slow emergency, really, where our health is always put in question.

01:59:51.520 There's always some new pain arising in the body because we're simply not moving, right? You always

01:59:56.640 have to respond to something. And our pleasures, however hard won, are fleeting. They're vanishing even

02:00:03.020 in the act of acquiring them. So there's no place to land that is secure. And that's largely by virtue of

02:00:12.300 the impermanence of sensory experience. But the selflessness component is separable from those two

02:00:22.320 other characteristics. And I should say, so that's Vipassana. Vipassana is a practice whereby you would

02:00:29.620 have insight into those three characteristics. And mindfulness is the tool you use to have those

02:00:36.180 insights. The training in mindfulness is a training in a kind of awareness of experience

02:00:42.280 which is non-judgmental, non-reactive. You're not seeking to maximize pleasure. You're not trying

02:00:48.940 to make pains go away. You're just becoming interested in a very open and focused way

02:00:55.880 on just what the character of every experience is. So if you're feeling restless, rather than try not to

02:01:03.980 feel restless, you're becoming interested in and increasingly aware of the actual characteristics,

02:01:10.620 moment to moment of restlessness. How is it that you know you're restless? Where is it? What is it?

02:01:15.780 I mean, we're talking about a pattern of energy in the body that you can suddenly recognize as arising

02:01:22.260 totally on its own and changing based on its own dynamics. And you are merely the witness of that

02:01:28.920 change in state. And so it is with any pleasant emotion or experience. And you keep dropping back into

02:01:35.600 merely witnessing. And that is mindfulness when you can do it, when you're actually not trying to change

02:01:41.060 anything, you're not judging anything, and you're not staying at the conceptual level. You're not thinking

02:01:47.640 about experience. You're just experiencing experience more and more closely. And so if it's a matter of

02:01:55.460 paying attention to sensations in the body, you're not staying at the level where you feel like, oh, my hands are

02:02:02.220 sweaty, right? No, you're actually, you're feeling the temperature and the tingling and the pressure

02:02:08.420 so closely that the concept of hands and sweat disappear, right? So you're just feeling the raw

02:02:16.060 data of experience. And these changes can be pleasant. I mean, your sense of even having a body

02:02:22.100 can disappear while you're meditating. And it just resolves into a cloud of sensation.

02:02:27.460 So Dzogchen is a Tibetan practice tradition, which is explicitly non-dualistic. And what that means

02:02:38.060 in this context is it goes after the selflessness of the mind very directly. So most of us start

02:02:48.060 meditating where we are in our normal states of cognition with the sense that there's a subject.

02:02:57.460 in the middle of experience. There's a mind in the head. And it is by definition separate from

02:03:05.940 everything that it knows, right? So there's the subject that can be aware of sights and sounds and

02:03:12.160 sensations. And this subject is also a thinker. It's producing. It's in some sense the author of

02:03:19.060 thoughts. And it's me. And I feel like I'm over here in my head behind my face, you know, almost

02:03:27.480 wearing my face as a kind of mask, right? I'm not identical to my face. I'm behind my face. And you're

02:03:32.220 looking across space at me. And your gaze has an implication for me because I can, you know, if I

02:03:39.380 follow where you're looking, I'm over here and not identical to my body, right? I'm in my body. I'm a

02:03:46.500 kind of passenger in my body. I mean, you and I can say, well, you know, my hand is, I've got, you know,

02:03:52.120 an injury to my hand. And you and I can both look at my hand as a kind of object in space. My hand is

02:03:57.220 part of the world. Separate from both of us. Yeah. And, you know, obviously I care more about my hand

02:04:01.780 than you do because it's my hand. But if something's wrong with my hand, I'm still over

02:04:06.440 here up in my head behind my eyes, some distance from the hand. And I can imagine being without the

02:04:12.180 hand, right? It could be, you know, if I lost my hand in an accident, well, then I would have one

02:04:15.800 less hand, but I'd still be me up here in my head behind my eyes, right? That locus of knowing, that sense

02:04:22.860 of being located in the head as a self, as an ego, is the starting point for everyone in

02:04:31.760 meditation. And you can do Vipassana from that starting point. You can be taught the method of

02:04:38.700 mindfulness meditation. And you just begin to pay more and more attention to what it's like to be you.

02:04:44.160 And you can notice these three characteristics of impermanence and selflessness and

02:04:48.640 unsatisfactoriness. The Pali is a Nitya, Dukkha, and Anata, or Nitya, Anata, and Dukkha, in that order.

02:04:54.840 And you can start from wherever you are. And who knows how long it will take you to have this insight,

02:05:01.180 a fundamental insight into the illusoriness of that starting point, of being a subject in the head.

02:05:06.860 Now, with Dzogchen, you can't start until you've had that insight. And so the path of Dzogchen 0.97

02:05:12.060 entails becoming available to that insight in various ways. It's usually a matter of actually

02:05:20.600 forming a connection with what's called a Dzogchen master in the Tibetan tradition.

02:05:25.100 someone who can actually point this out to you in conversation. And for most people...

02:05:32.540 Meaning they can point out to you when you are falling to the illusion of ego? Meaning they can

02:05:40.040 point out when you are defaulting back into that mode?

02:05:43.280 Well, no. They can point out the intrinsic egolessness of consciousness in a way that you

02:05:50.640 can recognize it and then practice that, right? So because most people, they start meditating,

02:05:56.580 they still feel like they're up in their heads paying attention. You know, it's that now I'm

02:06:01.420 paying attention to the breath. Now I'm noticing the difference between being lost in thought and

02:06:05.880 being mindful. But it doesn't fundamentally cut through the sense that there is one who can be

02:06:13.000 mindful, right? And, you know, you can have experiences where the distance, the apparent

02:06:20.000 distance between subject and object can collapse, but they can come in a haphazard way where you don't

02:06:27.880 know how you had them and you don't know how you'll have them again, right? It can come by virtue of

02:06:32.600 paying closer and closer attention to sounds and sensations and things that are arising. And you can

02:06:39.600 suddenly feel like, oh, in that moment of hearing that bird, there was no me and there was no bird,

02:06:46.900 there was just hearing. That can collapse again and again. And it did for me, you know, when I was

02:06:52.880 spending time on retreat, practicing Vipassana. But I always associated it with the intense

02:06:59.680 concentration of retreat. And it seemed unavailable to me in ordinary moments of consciousness. You know,

02:07:07.480 off retreat, you know, I'm driving in traffic or, you know, working at my computer or whatever,

02:07:11.440 like, there's no way I'm going to touch that level of concentration. You know, I haven't been

02:07:15.760 spending 14 hours a day meditating. So this is a kind of a peak experience that isn't available now.

02:07:23.740 Well, with Dzogchen, you discover that the reverse is true. All the peak experiences are no more empty 0.99

02:07:31.020 of self than ordinary waking consciousness is. And you can recognize this about consciousness in any

02:07:38.600 moment. And it doesn't actually require previous moments of building momentum. I mean, framing really

02:07:46.540 counts for a lot here. So I spent a lot of time practicing with this one Burmese meditation master,

02:07:52.480 Upandita Sayadaw. And the analogy he would often use is that progress in Vipassana is like rubbing

02:08:00.020 two sticks together to get fire. The moment you stop, the heat dissipates and you're back to zero.

02:08:06.980 Right? So it's like you'd have the sense of you'd be on retreat with him, practicing for, you know,

02:08:11.420 up to 20 hours a day and trying to make your mindfulness absolutely continuous. So that's the

02:08:16.860 difference between sitting and walking meditation and every other moment. I mean, you're doing a ton of

02:08:21.920 sitting and walking meditation. It's like 16 hours a day of that. But every other moment when like

02:08:26.900 you're going to meals or anything else, you wake up and get out of bed in the morning, every transitional

02:08:32.000 moment, getting a cup of tea, you're trying to link every instant of conscious awareness together

02:08:38.620 with mindfulness. And whenever you would get distracted, part of you would begin scoring that

02:08:46.640 as a failure to build up enough momentum to get to the goal of the fundamental breakthrough that was

02:08:54.540 on offer by that path. So this framing, this idea that you're rubbing two sticks together, the moment

02:08:59.800 you stop, they're cooling off and you've made no progress. Right? That's the opposite framing for

02:09:07.540 Dzogchen. The framing you need for Dzogchen is there's this something already true of consciousness.

02:09:16.260 You're not trying to produce this thing. You're not trying to get rid of the ego. You're not trying

02:09:20.680 to change anything about what is. You're trying to recognize a feature of consciousness that is

02:09:28.180 already the case. And it's actually nearer to you than you think. It's not a matter of going deep

02:09:36.400 within and having some kind of breakthrough. It's actually right on the surface of the most ordinary

02:09:42.340 form of consciousness. It doesn't require any pyrotechnic change in the, in the contents of

02:09:47.700 consciousness. It's not, you're not actually closer to it if you take acid and all the colors begin to

02:09:54.000 change or you feel a change in your energy such that, you know, you feel this kind of buzz of

02:10:01.320 connectedness to all things. As you know, anyone who's taken acid can verify that's, that's on offer.

02:10:07.540 But all of that's interesting. All of that's, you know, I'm not discounting the power of those

02:10:15.400 experiences, but those experiences are no less empty of self than every state of consciousness.

02:10:23.680 I mean, just the, the, precisely the state of consciousness that's compatible with, you know,

02:10:27.900 reaching for a glass of water and drinking it without anything novel intruding. You know,

02:10:34.080 there's no bliss, there's no rapture, there's no profound or spiritual change in state. It's possible

02:10:41.200 to recognize in that moment that there's no center to consciousness. And so what Dzogchen is, is the path 0.98

02:10:49.640 of discovering that there's no center and then taking that insight as your only object of mindfulness.

02:10:58.900 So that what you're mindful of thereafter is that there's no center to consciousness.

02:11:06.020 So whatever's appearing, sights, sounds, sensations, you are continually dropping the implied center.

02:11:15.260 It's kind of a steep path because it's hard to start. You can't, you can't really start. I mean,

02:11:20.040 everything you're doing before you have that insight and can notice it again on demand,

02:11:25.460 everything you're doing is by definition, a preliminary practice to that because you need

02:11:30.800 enough mindfulness to notice what is to be noticed and, and to follow the instructions to

02:11:36.660 start that path. But it's, you certainly don't have to have spent years on retreat to start that path.

02:11:42.680 And so it's having good information is, is certainly better than, than having misleading information

02:11:47.660 there. This practice, as I said, is, is, it's challenging. It's just not, there's no two ways

02:11:55.700 around it. I think it's for some people, it's probably as difficult as saying to someone who's

02:12:03.420 40 years old, who's never exercised deliberately a day in their life. Okay. It's time to start spending

02:12:09.500 an hour a day in the gym and you're going to be doing these new movements and they're going to be

02:12:13.300 very uncomfortable. And for many people, you know, a few weeks or months into that exercise routine,

02:12:19.920 they're still not finding any great source of pleasure. And there are some of us who love

02:12:23.680 exercising. Like we just get a, again, going back to the, the lingo of states versus traits,

02:12:30.000 like the, you know, I worked out this morning before I saw you and I mean, I was in a new gym for

02:12:35.720 the first time. And sometimes that is a little, you're sort of like, I don't know where all the

02:12:39.280 equipment is or, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But, but regardless, it's just the actual

02:12:44.280 state of exercise to me is so pleasurable, even if it didn't offer any traits that were advantageous

02:12:51.220 outside of it. Of course, the real reason we exercise is not for the hour that we're in the

02:12:56.160 gym moving around these artificial pieces of iron. It's because of the benefit that gives us both

02:13:01.660 metabolically and structurally beyond the time we're exercising. Right. For, is it safe to say that

02:13:08.580 for most people, the experience of meditation doesn't produce a state that is necessarily as

02:13:15.020 pleasurable as say the MDMA state was that you could describe? And that really the, the reason this

02:13:21.440 ought to be considered by someone who is not meditating is more the traits that come outside of

02:13:28.120 the act of meditating, the act of the practice? Yes. Well, so it's possible to have extremely

02:13:36.400 pleasant states arise in meditation, both ones that have a kind of ethical implication like

02:13:43.940 loving kindness and ones that just are sort of the equivalent of you being on heroin, right? So it's

02:13:48.960 not necessarily pointed in any auspicious or pro-social direction. It's just you experiencing more pleasure

02:13:55.200 than you've ever experienced. But none of those experiences really can be the point because they're

02:14:01.340 transitory. When they're gone, they really are gone. I mean, the demeaning analogy to drugs is not

02:14:09.400 inaccurate. Like, what's the point if it's just a matter of getting high and you're a no better

02:14:16.920 person in the world as a result of having had that experience? So it really is about having a

02:14:23.580 fundamentally different relationship to experience in general. All of the counterproductive ways in

02:14:31.320 which you grasp at the pleasant and push the unpleasant away. I mean, just like that is the,

02:14:37.060 there's a fairly Buddhist framing of it, but I think it's, it's appropriate. I mean, basically it's about

02:14:43.260 not suffering unnecessarily in the end, right? And then not broadcasting your suffering to the rest of

02:14:51.540 humanity. So it can't be about having an experience that's extremely pleasant and become, becoming more

02:15:02.060 and more attached to that experience. And so that's one of the things that's misleading and a potential

02:15:08.200 downside of getting very good at so-called concentration practices or absorption practices is

02:15:15.000 that they don't have the power to give you a perspective that is a fundamental antidote to

02:15:20.400 egocentricity and selfishness and even, you know, kind of starkly unethical instincts in other areas of your

02:15:29.660 life. And they really can be fundamentally no more interesting from a kind of a larger examined life

02:15:38.720 perspective than a drug experience. I mean, to take some clear examples here, there, there, there have been

02:15:44.580 gurus who have behaved shockingly unethically in their lives and had, you know, the reputations ruined

02:15:52.540 and just, they just leave a wake of unhappy and, and even destroyed people behind them who, there was no

02:16:00.060 doubt were meditative athletes and in many cases focused on concentration practices. So like I, if you had to

02:16:09.180 ask, well, what was it like to be these gurus when they were meditating, certainly not all of them were

02:16:14.660 frauds. Many of them were, you know, truly talented meditators, but they were meditating in a way that

02:16:20.980 was not, it was a separate game they were playing, right? And again, it was a game that was probably

02:16:28.100 produced immense pleasure while they were doing it, but it didn't fully undercut everything else about

02:16:35.940 them that was going to be, you know, fairly monstrous in relationship to other human beings. This is where

02:16:43.720 framing, or the, the overall concept of what one is doing is pretty important, because it's, there are

02:16:52.560 pathological states of pleasure. There are even pathological states of spiritual pleasure. I mean, I think the

02:16:58.940 suicide bomber before he detonates his bomb, they're in states of a kind of ecstasy. I mean, they have a

02:17:06.220 religious expectation for what's about to happen, which entails going to paradise and experiencing

02:17:12.700 more pleasure than anyone can imagine. And in almost every case, that's sincere and deeply felt, and

02:17:19.680 these people are about to get whatever they want, and they know the creator of the universe is happy that

02:17:24.860 they're going to get it. So that there's nothing about ecstasy per se, that is good or even benign,

02:17:32.000 because it can be pointed in the wrong direction. I think what we're...

02:17:35.420 Right. It's a missile that doesn't necessarily come with a guidance system.

02:17:38.860 Yeah. And I think what we're looking for to lead truly better lives across the board is something that

02:17:46.080 is anchored to an ethics, for lack of a better word, where our spiritual or, or contemplative

02:17:54.680 tools are actually making us better people across the board. And again, there's some bright lines

02:18:02.200 here that I think are useful to draw. I mean, so for instance, not lying is a major variable for me

02:18:10.740 ethically. It's just like having formed a commitment to being honest in basically every situation that

02:18:17.440 wasn't like just a self-defense situation. I mean, I don't think you have to be honest to the person

02:18:21.560 who's attacking you, right? Or seems likely to attack you. But to put dishonesty somewhere on

02:18:28.020 the continuum of violence and only resort to it where things have broken down so much that you're

02:18:32.820 just not dealing with another person as though they're a rational interlocutor, that is massively

02:18:38.220 simplifying of a person's life. Right now, very few people have made that commitment, but having made

02:18:44.020 it... When did you make that commitment? I know you've spoken about this, but when,

02:18:47.700 how old were you when you decided that... I was 18. I was freshman year in college. I took a course

02:18:55.040 taught by this great professor, Ron Howard. Not to be confused with that, Ron Howard. Yeah,

02:19:00.640 no, not the former actor, now director. This course was just an examination of whether it was ever

02:19:07.060 ethical to lie. You know, virtually everyone goes into that course more or less not even knowing what

02:19:13.800 their relationship to lying is. They haven't been sensitized to it as a significant variable in

02:19:19.960 their lives in terms of, you know, maintaining their relationships or their reputations or,

02:19:26.260 yeah, I lie sometimes and they're white lies and, you know, sometimes it's just too awkward to tell

02:19:31.000 the truth or... And you don't know how often you do it, but you know everybody does it and the world

02:19:36.540 could be no other way. And this course was just a machine for exposing the dysfunction of that and

02:19:46.840 more or less it became as... It was like a seminar where everyone was just kind of coming up with

02:19:51.800 scenarios where it must be all right to lie. I mean, surely this is a white lie that is better told

02:19:56.660 and the professor would shoot that down. And most people left the course more or less certain that

02:20:06.800 lying was virtually always the wrong move for purely selfish reasons. It was just like it was not

02:20:12.720 creating the life you want. And by not, by being committed to not lying, you were closing the door

02:20:19.540 to all kinds of complexity and risk, you know, both interpersonally and reputationally.

02:20:26.660 That you absolutely want to close the door to. I mean, it's almost analogous to like

02:20:31.620 to texting while driving. Just decide not to text while driving. You will not care about all those

02:20:37.820 texts. You don't have to worry about, well, I'll only text at intersections or if I'm stuck in traffic,

02:20:44.760 but we're not going that fast or whatever. Yeah. I can assure you that you will never

02:20:49.620 really regret the texts you'd sent later when you, when you finally arrived at your destination.

02:20:55.980 So how old were you when you met your wife, your now wife?

02:21:00.280 31.

02:21:01.440 Okay. So you've had 13 years of this practice of not lying. And now you meet the woman you're

02:21:07.900 ultimately going to marry who presumably hasn't taken this course or made this commitment.

02:21:12.740 At some point, does that become a discussion, which is, by the way, I'm going to be a little

02:21:18.900 different than most guys that you've met in that, you know, if you ask me, if you look good in that

02:21:23.980 dress and I don't think you do, I'm just going to say you don't.

02:21:27.620 Right. 0.95

02:21:27.760 And please don't interpret that as I'm an insensitive prick. I just don't want to go down that. Like,

02:21:32.540 did you ever have that discussion that sort of prefaced or, or maybe your wife's the wrong

02:21:38.040 example, but like, I mean, as you're explaining this, I'm thinking about all of the lies I tell.

02:21:44.020 No, it was sort of, you kind of stumble into it. I mean, you wind up training the people around you

02:21:49.500 to know what they're going to get from you. Right. And it's not, not necessarily explicit.

02:21:55.060 It's just in that case. Yeah. I mean, she, it became very clear, very quickly, just what sort

02:22:02.160 of importance I put on honesty. And, you know, there, there are a few hiccups in, in many

02:22:08.360 relationships, but the gain that people notice very, very quickly, which I don't think they would

02:22:14.380 want to forfeit to smooth over any other possible awkwardness is they know you're never going to lie

02:22:21.780 to them, right? They know that you're being truthful. And so like when you have said, you know,

02:22:28.980 that you didn't like something in a spot where most other people would have just told some kind

02:22:33.740 of white lie so as not to have to communicate that, then your, your praise means that much more.

02:22:40.780 You know, if you're a creative person who's often needs to get feedback from people, you immediately

02:22:46.800 discover this. When I give a piece of writing to somebody and ask for feedback, who do I value more?

02:22:55.180 The person who is just going to praise me because they think that's what I want to hear and because

02:23:00.400 they, they find it too awkward to deliver some bad news because they, they know I've spent a lot of

02:23:05.840 time writing this thing. Or do I want to hear from the person who is actually finding flaws in this

02:23:12.400 thing I've written and will now, because I'm going to them early, will now, now has a chance to spare

02:23:18.100 me the public embarrassment of broadcasting these flaws to all humanity. Clearly I value that the other

02:23:24.840 reader more. And once you see the alternative, you realize you want the people who will be straight

02:23:32.420 with you. And then you meet, you meet people who think they want feedback, but they don't want

02:23:36.440 feedback. You can have a more or less grown up relationship to the opinions of others. The people

02:23:43.720 who don't want feedback, who just want to be told that what they did was fantastic. Well, if they're

02:23:48.520 surrounded by honest people, they very, very quickly feel the cramp of that, right? They just,

02:23:53.240 they want to be surrounded by liars and they'll curate their connections. As a result,

02:23:58.260 you won't ask that same person again, if you're the sort of person who didn't want an honest opinion

02:24:06.640 and pretended to ask for one. Is it possible for someone to, let's pick an extreme example, but

02:24:12.600 could one go into public office and take that oath that I will never lie? I mean, is it, is that,

02:24:18.460 is that compatible with politics, for example? It is widely assumed that it's a deal breaker,

02:24:25.200 right? I think everything, virtually everything that's wrong with our politics is the result of

02:24:31.240 the mismatch between interpersonal ethics of this sort and what works and what wouldn't work in the

02:24:38.280 public sphere. I think it should be compatible with politics. I think dishonesty should exact a,

02:24:47.020 a massive reputational cost in politics. But now we're in this strange, you know, mirror universe where

02:24:54.600 the most dishonest person anyone has ever witnessed is the president of the country and suffering

02:25:04.200 absolutely no reputational cost among those who love him for his dishonesty. It's like,

02:25:10.180 it's not a bug, it's a feature. In my view, that is the most dysfunctional thing about the Trump

02:25:15.320 phenomenon. It's what it's done to the value of honesty in our public conversation about politics,

02:25:23.680 at least a half of the electorate. Pointing out that he's lied yet again is completely ineffectual

02:25:29.620 with the people who don't care that he's lied. I mean, they just, they just assume he's going to

02:25:34.860 lie. It's a very strange performance. It's like not even about representing reality anymore. It's not

02:25:40.800 that the people who love Trump are reliably duped by him. You know, it's, it's that they're not

02:25:47.440 holding him to a standard of honesty at all. Right. And his dishonesty, however, obvious

02:25:54.540 is a different kind of performance. It's almost like, I mean, there's been an analogy often drawn to

02:26:01.020 professional wrestling. It's a fake sport with fake violence. And the fact that it's fake

02:26:08.520 is actually understood by basically everyone who enjoys it. Right. It's not that it's not like they're

02:26:14.580 taken in. Unless you're five years old by the time you're a teenager or whatever, you sort of get

02:26:19.460 that this is an act. Yeah. They're still very athletic. Nothing takes away from the skill

02:26:24.060 required to do it. Oh yeah. I mean, ironically, what they're doing is more dangerous than MMA for

02:26:28.700 the most part. And they're getting horrific injuries sometimes, but there's no illusion that these guys

02:26:34.600 are just as tough as the people in the octagon. Right. So it's like there are people who, who watch

02:26:39.660 both or are certainly aware of both. And they clearly understand what reality is. Reality is

02:26:48.180 what's going on in mixed martial arts, right? There's things that are honest at the level of the language

02:26:53.700 of violence. And there are things that are pure fabrications. They're, they're lies. And something

02:27:00.540 has happened in our conversation about facts in the political domain. It's happened to some degree on

02:27:06.120 the left for different reasons. But yeah, I, to come back to your question, I think we're paying a

02:27:11.220 massive price for not being able to tell when people are lying definitively, like to not have

02:27:17.680 a lie detector that forensically can be relied upon. And, you know, analogous to, you know, like DNA

02:27:23.040 evidence, you know, where you just know that someone's representing their state of knowledge

02:27:28.080 erroneously. And we're paying a massive price for the fact that so many millions of people

02:27:33.720 don't actually care that they're being lied to. And to me, that's the bigger issue, right? I mean,

02:27:38.620 I think politicians have always lied. I don't think that's what's new. It's almost like a

02:27:43.240 threshold has been crossed where it's, so, so you go back to sort of Clinton's impeachment, right? I mean,

02:27:51.280 in the end, I think the legal issue was less about whether he'd had an affair with Monica Lewinsky.

02:27:56.320 The bigger issue was that he lie under oath. Right. I mean, in many ways, that's what his impeachment

02:27:59.960 came down to. Yeah. It's quite clear he probably did, right? I mean, we could get into the semantics

02:28:05.300 of sexual relations, but the, I mean, it's pretty clear he lied under oath. But the point you're

02:28:12.240 making is that now it's almost a feature. Like now it's almost, I think it's gone beyond it that

02:28:18.700 it's accepted and now it's almost like part of the theater. But I think that is a uniquely

02:28:23.620 Trumpian phenomenon. I don't know that anyone else will be able to play it quite that way. I mean,

02:28:29.820 it is a, it's a feature of politics that has been true in other countries forever. I mean,

02:28:35.240 it is a feature of authoritarian politics. Wait, wait, you mean Kim Jong-un didn't really

02:28:41.320 do that well in golf when he was two years old? Right, right, yeah. Got several holes in one.

02:28:45.220 Several holes in one. Yeah. He doesn't defecate, I heard, as well. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. In a democracy,

02:28:52.100 it should be harder to get away with having one's lies exposed. And it's got, when you look at what

02:29:00.700 used to matter, you know, when you look at the fact that someone like Gary Hart, his campaign,

02:29:05.980 where he said that he was faithful to his wife and encouraged journalists to keep a sharp eye on him

02:29:12.360 and then was caught having an affair. Like that was the end, right? Right. There is nothing like

02:29:18.760 that that's conceivable for Trump. It doesn't matter how discordant his behavior is with his

02:29:26.860 next utterance. His opponents are keeping score relentlessly. Like his lies are being documented

02:29:32.440 every day. There are now thousands of them. People are keeping score. It doesn't matter with at least

02:29:38.240 40 percent of America. So it might matter for another person for those 40 percent. It really

02:29:46.820 is a kind of personality cult phenomenon where it's just for Trump, for whatever reason, how he showed

02:29:53.620 up, what he represents, he can get away with stuff that no one else can get away with. And that is what

02:30:02.320 is so dysfunctional about having him in that role from my point of view. So you have two daughters,

02:30:09.120 right? So we think so much about how do we prepare our kids for the world that's out there that we can

02:30:19.700 only say one thing for certain about, which is we don't know what it's going to look like. I mean,

02:30:23.300 I had this discussion with my daughter last night, actually, or two nights ago, which was,

02:30:27.940 Olivia, you're 10 years old today. The only thing I can assure you of in eight years, I have no idea

02:30:35.880 what the world will look like. Yeah. But there are a handful of traits that I think will help you

02:30:43.360 in life. And they might seem somewhat arbitrary and they might seem somewhat ridiculous or even

02:30:49.400 unpleasant. But the sooner you can figure out a way to put these traits in place, the more well

02:30:58.480 equipped you will be with whatever the future holds, right? So when I was 10, no one could have

02:31:02.940 predicted that the internet was going to exist and that somehow that was going to have all of these

02:31:07.940 implications, right? With respect to all the stuff we've been talking about today, specifically with

02:31:13.240 respect to choosing to live an examined life, choosing to live a life where we are not constantly

02:31:21.420 being lived by our thoughts. How do you teach your daughters about what the future holds? And I don't

02:31:31.860 mean that in like a broad sense, but I mean, aside from encouraging them to meditate, and I'm sure at some

02:31:37.260 age, kids can learn mindfulness meditation. But how else do you try to influence your kids with

02:31:43.140 respect to the lessons you've learned? I mean, they may never choose to go off on, and you've spent

02:31:48.520 such a significant period of your life on retreats. You've really devoted your entire life to this

02:31:54.440 study. If they choose not to do that, you know, they want to do something boring, like go into medicine

02:31:59.480 or whatever, how will you still impart some of these lessons on them? Or will it be much more by

02:32:04.800 osmosis than anything deliberate? First kids can be taught to meditate. And actually, my wife has

02:32:11.580 done that work a lot. Her wife teaches kids, right? Yeah, she goes into school. At what age does she 0.97

02:32:15.500 start? Like five, six. It's amazing. I mean, you can go very quickly, you can go from just, you know,

02:32:23.140 the first class, which is just chaos, to a room full of six-year-olds sitting in silence for 15 minutes.

02:32:31.700 So it's amazing. It seems unfathomable. Yeah. And they get real benefit from it. I mean,

02:32:37.360 they're not, it's not quite the same as adults connecting with the practice, but it's,

02:32:43.700 it can be pretty similar. I mean, they're, they're becoming aware of their emotional lives in the way,

02:32:49.140 in a way that kids often aren't. Do girls develop easier than boys at that age?

02:32:54.480 Generally speaking, I consider them separate species. So yeah, I mean, they, they do.

02:32:59.060 Yeah, because my, my, my son is like, yeah, I don't, I don't know how I could ever

02:33:04.480 communicate any of that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think boys

02:33:07.720 have a harder time sitting still, certainly earlier on. So it's amazing to see kids connect

02:33:14.260 with the practice because they, they definitely do. And, and they just become aware of the,

02:33:18.620 the linkage between emotion and behavior, thought and emotion, emotion and thought. But on some level,

02:33:25.260 it just comes down to suffering and the end of suffering. You know, it's just like a,

02:33:29.140 how much do you want to suffer? People are suffering in reliable ways based on...

02:33:36.020 Do you spend time then explaining the nature of the suffering? Because I would agree completely,

02:33:41.260 nobody wants to suffer. I just think it takes many of us decades to even come to the realization

02:33:48.640 of how much of our suffering is self-imposed. Yeah.

02:33:51.940 So is it, is part of it just getting them to realize that sooner?

02:33:55.920 Yeah. And, and again, to, to point out many of the things we've discussed here,

02:34:00.660 where it's like the power of framing, right? The power, and the power of expectation. So, you know,

02:34:04.880 I'll often point out to my daughters, even the youngest who's just turning five, but for the,

02:34:10.940 for the most part, the oldest who's just turning 10, the mismatch between her expectation of how

02:34:17.260 something was going to be and how it was, right? And it's usually a negative expectation. She was

02:34:22.520 worried about something happening, I'll say a doctor's visit or, you know, getting blood drawn or

02:34:27.580 getting a shot and the actual experience that was far less traumatic than she was worried that it was

02:34:36.260 going to be. And to point out that all of the time spent suffering in anticipation of this negative

02:34:43.120 thing was wasted, right? Like there's a, there's a lesson to be learned here. Like the thing she

02:34:48.040 thought she was sure was going to be awful turned out not to be so awful or not in some cases, not

02:34:55.040 awful at all. Right. Or even net positive, right? Because she, she had the experience of sort of

02:35:01.900 overcoming a fear or, you know, it's like she felt stronger as a result of that thing that just

02:35:06.720 happened. So it's like the expectation is so often not only a bad guide, it's just, it's no guide at all

02:35:15.240 to what is going to happen. And yet people suffer in advance over this thing that they're, they're

02:35:23.100 expecting to be negative. Even if, even if it's going to be negative, you can decide to suffer

02:35:27.840 once or twice. Yeah. Right. Kids can get lessons like that. I think it's good to give them as early

02:35:35.260 as they can get them. A lot of it has to do with framing and just how one thinks about one's life,

02:35:42.940 but mindfulness for a kid can be at the first pass, just more awareness over what they're feeling

02:35:51.480 and thinking. Young kids can be sad and they don't know that they're sad or angry and they don't know

02:35:57.520 that they're angry. And just that level of awareness can be a major gain for a kid. And then that's

02:36:06.660 something to build on. And then they, as they get older, then they can, you know, I think certainly

02:36:12.060 as a, once they're young teenagers can have a, a more or less grownup relationship to observing what's,

02:36:19.700 what's going on in their minds. I think about how much effort I put into worrying about whether my

02:36:26.140 daughter is learning well enough, the sort of standard metrics that we care about, you know,

02:36:32.220 math and science and English and sports and all those things. I feel like probably I'm not paying

02:36:40.200 enough attention to those things as well, especially for someone who has spent so much time suffering

02:36:45.180 inside his own mind. Like I ought to know better, right? Like there is, there is no prison like the

02:36:50.460 one between your ears. Yeah. And yet, uh, yeah. When, when you frame it that way, boy, it makes me think

02:36:57.660 I really need to start investing a little bit more time in that, in that prep. I want to be mindful

02:37:03.780 of your time. So I, I kind of, I know we both have to get somewhere this evening. Are you writing a

02:37:09.460 book any, at the moment, are you working on anything? I'm the worst author a publisher can have at this

02:37:14.020 point. I keep pushing back my deadline. I am supposed to be writing a book, but I'm so busy

02:37:18.800 podcasting and doing other things that. What is the book about? Well, I have actually have two books that

02:37:23.660 I'm supposed to be writing. One is just a digest of podcast conversations just, you know, because

02:37:29.820 now I have. So sort of like what Tim did with tools. Yeah. I'm not quite sure what the format

02:37:34.380 will be, but something based on the podcast. It's probably going to be more like just updated

02:37:39.440 transcripts of significant parts of the conversation. But, and then I have a book with a working title

02:37:46.740 making sense, which is just, it was going to be a kind of manifesto about intellectual honesty

02:37:53.480 and how we have hard conversations about, you know, all manner of topics, whether it's race or

02:37:58.540 gender or the opposition between science and religion or, you know, many of the topics I touch

02:38:04.160 on my podcast. We're paying a price for not being able to talk about the most consequential and taboo

02:38:13.340 and dangerous and divisive things in a way that is conserving of good intentions and honesty and

02:38:21.540 allows for compromise and allows for breakthroughs and changes of opinion. I mean, it's like all the

02:38:26.700 norms around talking about these things are askew. You just can't have a conversation about

02:38:32.060 the differences between men and women, say. Are men and women exactly the same? No, they're not.

02:38:38.400 Okay. But what do we do with that?

02:38:39.640 But to go down that path generates ire like you can't imagine.

02:38:42.760 Yeah. And careers are lost over slight misstatements, right? And there are people who say things that

02:38:50.980 were ill-considered that they then subsequently apologize for. They recognize that they're

02:38:56.140 ill-considered. And yet the apology, however heartfelt, however abject, isn't sufficient to

02:39:04.020 stop their career from being destroyed.

02:39:07.340 You had an example of this recently where you, on your podcast, where you talked about the,

02:39:10.360 she was a dean at Claremont McKenna. What was the college?

02:39:14.260 Yeah. Claremont McKenna.

02:39:15.380 Claremont McKenna College, yeah.

02:39:16.600 Well, actually, there's a more recent example, which is even more amazing in its own way. So like

02:39:20.920 Megyn Kelly's firing over her Halloween blackface comments, right? Well, so, you know, she obviously 1.00

02:39:27.720 couldn't hear how the phrase blackface would land with many people. It's easy to see that the way 1.00

02:39:36.700 she spoke about it was a, constituted a mistake. It's pretty obvious it was not an expression of

02:39:45.580 racism on her part, right? She's not saying African-Americans haven't suffered a massive 0.98

02:39:51.320 inequality in the past, or she was just saying, well, you know, if you're going to dress up like

02:39:55.140 Diana Ross, why can't you put brown makeup on your face? I mean, essentially that was,

02:39:58.920 those weren't her words, but that was the sentiment. That's absolutely something we should be able to

02:40:03.480 talk about. Yet she said the wrong thing and then clearly received a ton of pressure to apologize 0.99

02:40:13.260 for it. Her apology, I don't know if you saw her apology, but her apology was, I mean, someone was

02:40:17.980 joking on Twitter.

02:40:19.060 I saw something on Twitter that said it was the closest thing you've ever seen to a hostage video

02:40:22.560 minus the newspaper.

02:40:23.800 Right. Yes. Like just, you got to hold up the newspaper as proof of life.

02:40:27.820 But I didn't actually hear what she said or anything.

02:40:29.700 Yeah. But it was, by all signs, it was as full an apology as a person can muster. It was complete.

02:40:38.080 If it didn't strike the right note for you, well then, I mean, you have superhuman expectations for

02:40:43.760 what someone should be able to muster in a context like that. It did not seem insincere at all,

02:40:49.480 right? At least to my eye. And yet still, this was a career wrecking event, it seems. And so now

02:40:57.240 we're in a situation where people are calling for the destruction of other people and celebrating

02:41:04.840 the effects of that when these people actually do lose their shows or suffer some massive penalty.

02:41:13.160 And yet, I think it's true to say that most people who were calling for her to be fired

02:41:17.980 would recognize that, one, her initial statement was not actually conveying her own racism. It was

02:41:26.800 conveying her obliviousness to the significance of this phrase for other people, but it was not

02:41:31.060 conveying that she was somebody who wants to live in a society where there's a lack of political

02:41:39.520 equality, right? I mean, there was zero evidence of that. I don't think anyone even alleges that that's

02:41:45.660 her view of the world. But worse than that, once she recognizes the mistake she's made,

02:41:52.760 no apology is sufficient, right? So do we really want to live in a world where you misspeak on a

02:42:00.640 fraught topic and it is impossible to adequately apologize, right? You recognize that, you know,

02:42:08.060 you use the word retard, say, right? And then you get feedback that, wow, people really find that 0.51

02:42:13.560 offensive. There are kids with mental disabilities, you know, and you, like, if you knew what it was

02:42:17.800 like to be a parent of a kid who was suffering this, you would recognize how offensive that term

02:42:22.740 is. And they're like, why would you ever use that term on a podcast, right? Imagine it being impossible

02:42:28.600 to apologize for that. It's over for you, right?

02:42:31.740 But what's so interesting, bringing it back to the prison stuff, I remember when I spoke with Kat

02:42:36.460 Hoke about this. So Catherine Hoke is the woman that used to run this organization called Defy Ventures,

02:42:40.800 and now she's spinning up something that's going to be even better, actually, to which I've suggested

02:42:45.740 to her, and I don't think I'm unique in this. A lot of people have suggested that this, this idea

02:42:50.980 ought not just be something that's sort of a nonprofit. Like there is such a benefit to the

02:42:55.540 volunteers to going into this experience that it almost needs to be sort of a corporate development

02:43:00.400 program. Like people need to be paying to go and have this experience. It's so profound.

02:43:05.220 Right.

02:43:05.740 But it gets to this question of like, can you be, is there something for which you cannot be forgiven?

02:43:11.340 What is the crime? What is the sin? What is the moral defect for which there is no forgiveness?

02:43:19.480 And I don't know if you're familiar with any of this stuff she's, she's spoken about, but

02:43:23.740 you know, at some point she had to make a decision about whether or not people who were sexual

02:43:29.780 predators would be permitted into the program. So if you'd raped somebody, if you'd molested a child 0.90

02:43:34.820 and you're now serving whatever term in prison, could you be a part of this rehabilitative program? 0.56

02:43:40.560 And in the end she said, yes. I mean, basically it really comes down to the degree of which a

02:43:46.020 person, a person shows remorse and their willingness to change. Because the idea is like, whether you

02:43:52.160 choose to never forgive somebody and whether it's Megyn Kelly or this rapist, it doesn't change the

02:43:58.200 fact that something was said or something was done that is in some cases probably not really that 0.98

02:44:02.960 ridiculous. And in some cases is really tragic, but it's, you have two choices as a society,

02:44:09.440 how you move forward from that. And it seems we're definitely caught in the place of an inability

02:44:15.340 to reconcile the good that can come from moving on, which means acknowledging mistakes that were made,

02:44:21.960 acknowledging remorse, looking for ways to get better. I mean, we, we really don't seem to like

02:44:26.900 that, that, that, that, that seems a bit too soft for people or something. It's, I don't know if soft

02:44:30.600 is the right word, but there's something about that process that people don't like.

02:44:34.960 Yeah. Yeah. And, and in extreme cases, they're forced to accept it. I mean, they're, you know,

02:44:41.260 when, when societies have just become completely riven by, you know, sectarian violence of, or,

02:44:48.060 or political dysfunction of one kind or another, then you need things like truth and reconciliation

02:44:53.880 commissions in places like, you know, South Africa or Rwanda, where it's, you know, the,

02:44:59.060 then people who are guilty of objectively horrible things can get a, a pass essentially just by coming

02:45:05.520 forward and telling the truth and apologizing. Yeah. I, I think, you know, I actually, I brought

02:45:10.860 this up on my podcast not long ago. I was thinking about this, this very problem in terms of like a,

02:45:16.580 an ethical event horizon. I mean, is there something so bad that you could do or say that

02:45:23.580 no apology would be sufficient to, to pull your reputation back out of that, that singularity?

02:45:31.900 It is a kind of unrecoverable moral error. And I don't think so. I think the, the physics of an,

02:45:38.660 of an appropriate acceptable apology are that it be sincere and believable. And that the measure of

02:45:49.820 it being believable is that it has to be clear how you could have changed enough for it to be sincere.

02:45:56.680 So for an apology to be accepted, you have to stand in relationship to that thing you did

02:46:02.620 in the same place where the other people who are horrified by what you did stand. And they have to

02:46:10.360 be able to see how it is that you have come to stand where they are now in order to accept your

02:46:16.420 apology. So if that transformation isn't believable for some reason, if there's no path by which you

02:46:22.900 could have had this epiphany that contextualizes your prior bad behavior, you know, puts it in a box

02:46:28.940 which you disavow, well, then it will seem, it will seem insincere or opportunistic. You're a sociopath 0.99

02:46:35.300 who's just trying to get out of prison and game the program. And, and those people exist. There's no 1.00

02:46:39.360 question there, you know, an insincere apology for calculated reasons as, you know, that that's as

02:46:45.640 old as, uh, we've been speaking to one another and that will continue for as long as people can get

02:46:52.320 away with it. So there's a genuine concern if you're talking about how to, to operationalize

02:46:56.980 these kinds of insights. But I mean, you just, you just, it just, again, the, the path out of that

02:47:02.480 darkness has to be intelligible to people. And I think this will, we'll stumble on this once we

02:47:09.360 have breakthroughs in psychology and neuroscience that admit of real changes in people's emotional

02:47:17.700 and ethical lives. I mean, so if we just take the narrow case, if we ever understood psychopathy

02:47:23.680 clearly enough that we could cure it, right? So you have someone who's from a very early age,

02:47:29.720 just torturing animals and, and showing zero empathy for other people. And they, they grow up

02:47:35.620 into the, the scary adult that one would predict. And if we ever get to a place where there's a cure

02:47:43.300 for that, well, then psychopathy would be, will be viewed as a neurological condition. It'll be,

02:47:48.120 it won't be a moral problem. It'll be, these are, these are malfunctioning robots that need the new

02:47:52.920 module. And just imagine if we had that cure, we'd be no more judgmental in how we applied it than we

02:48:02.380 are when we cure any other disease. I mean, you're not thinking about when you're giving diabetics 1.00

02:48:08.040 insulin, you're not thinking, well, you, you're lucky I'm giving you this insulin because you

02:48:13.600 probably don't deserve it. You with your malfunctioning pancreas, you're lucky that I'm 1.00

02:48:18.640 so tolerant that I'm willing to give you this insulin. There's zero culpability in having a

02:48:23.800 bad pancreas. If we actually understood the neurochemical, neuroanatomical basis of even the

02:48:32.300 worst behavior, if it was discreet enough that it admitted of a, of a cure, we would say, oh, we just

02:48:39.220 got to, we got to fix that problem. You know, and it would be, and that-

02:48:43.100 Do you hold out hope for that, Sam, or is that sci-fi? I mean, you're a neuroscientist,

02:48:46.680 so you can, you can speak to this with much more clarity or, or authority than, than I could ever

02:48:51.660 speak of it.

02:48:52.200 I hold out hope for it in certain specific cases. Yeah. I mean, we know it's true. I mean,

02:48:59.640 we've, we've already stumbled upon it in cases where you're, you're talking about a brain tumor

02:49:04.220 that is causing a problem, but causing a problem which shows up as uncontrollable rage or pedophilia

02:49:12.260 or, I mean, there, there are cases where, you know, it's like the classic case is, uh, Charles

02:49:17.020 Whitman, who in the 1964 killed 14 people at the university of Texas. And he just had a glioblastoma

02:49:25.180 pushing on his amygdala. And the amazing thing is that you might know the story because I've talked

02:49:30.420 about it, but I mean, he suspected that he had something wrong with his brain and he, he knew he

02:49:35.340 was going to be killed by the police. And he recommended that they perform an autopsy to find out what was

02:49:40.340 going on in his head. And yeah, he had a, he had a tumor, which was arguably totally exculpatory.

02:49:48.560 It was just in precisely the place that you would think, okay, this, he's got, he can't control his

02:49:54.140 impulses and he's feeling, you know, uncontrollable rage. And this tumor explains it. I think there's

02:50:00.460 virtually no one who hears the whole story who thinks Charles Whitman was evil. He just seems

02:50:06.560 profoundly unlucky. And on some level, a complete understanding of evil would reduce it to that

02:50:16.040 same species of unluck.

02:50:18.840 That is an amazing thought. It's hard for me to imagine because obviously the mass effects are

02:50:24.000 the obvious ones, right? These lesions, uh, versus much more diffuse neurochemical processes.

02:50:31.020 We're going to have dinner tonight. So I know what we're going to keep talking about, man.

02:50:33.920 We got so much to keep going on. Um, for folks who are listening to this on my podcast, who might not

02:50:38.600 know you as well as they ought to is samharris.org basically where they can find everything, your

02:50:45.180 podcast, your blog, your books, all sorts of things.

02:50:49.260 Yeah. And as far as my meditation app, it's just wakingup.com, but yeah, both websites.

02:50:54.740 Some of us like me are lucky enough to have got it for free because we were supporters of the podcast

02:50:58.960 before it came out. Yeah. Yeah. But is it available for purchase now on both the, uh,

02:51:04.340 on Apple and on, uh, Android? I think it's Android's not quite out yet.

02:51:08.700 No, it's out. It's out as of yesterday.

02:51:11.440 Okay. Fantastic. Cause I know I had a patient who went to search for it on Android a few weeks ago

02:51:16.100 and it was coming soon.

02:51:17.640 No, no, we're, we're born on both platforms.

02:51:20.100 Okay. Well, congratulations, Sam. It is. I mean, I just want to say, I want to thank you personally for,

02:51:25.960 for the effect and the impact that your work has had on me. I find myself, like I said,

02:51:34.420 spending so much time thinking about how to help people delay the onset of diseases that kill them.

02:51:42.140 And in many ways you're doing the same thing, but in a, in some ways, a higher stakes arena,

02:51:49.640 which is how to prevent people from suffering so much, which in some ways is just harder to measure.

02:51:54.780 We don't have the same stats on that, right? I can rattle off all the stats on what the probability

02:51:59.580 is that you're going to get cancer by the time you're 70. And what's the likelihood you're going

02:52:03.700 to make it to 90 without a heart attack and ball. I can rattle off all those things, but

02:52:07.200 we don't keep the same stats for how much we suffer. And I, I, I think of your work as among the

02:52:15.140 most important things that have helped me. And now by extension, some of my patients who are willing

02:52:20.140 to go down this path with me to reduce that burden of suffering.

02:52:24.940 Nice. Nice. Well, glad to hear it.

02:52:27.340 Well, thank you. Thank you for making, uh, making so much time this afternoon.

02:52:30.940 Yeah. Yeah. It's a pleasure. And congratulations on the podcast. You are one of these few examples

02:52:35.700 of somebody who goes from the conversation of, you know, I think maybe I want to start a podcast.

02:52:42.060 Should I, should I start a podcast? And then I turn around and three weeks later,

02:52:46.240 you have this amazing podcast that is more professionally produced than mine and people

02:52:51.340 love. So you and your team deserve a lot of credit for that. I know I've said this before,

02:52:56.340 but, but it's always worth repeating. I mean, I think that you and Tim were probably among the

02:53:02.600 two most vocal along with probably Patrick O'Shaughnessy, but I think you and Tim the most

02:53:06.680 really, cause I honestly, I was just so intimidated by the work I saw you and Tim doing. I was like,

02:53:11.600 well, there's no goddamn way I can do that. Like that's, that's just above my pay grade. So 0.96

02:53:16.500 I still think my podcast pales in comparison to yours and Tim's, but I am happy to be in the arena

02:53:22.220 and it, it has turned out to be much more enjoyable than I would have ever predicted.

02:53:27.580 Yeah. And so I do regret having not done it two years sooner when you were harping on me and Tim

02:53:33.260 was harping on me, but better late than never. And it's an honor to have you as a guest on my little

02:53:38.420 budding podcast. Well, keep it up.

02:53:41.600 Thanks, man.

02:53:46.000 If you find the waking up podcast valuable, there are many ways you can support it. You can review

02:53:50.420 it on iTunes or Stitcher or wherever you happen to listen to it. You can share it on social media

02:53:54.920 with your friends. You can blog about it or discuss it on your own podcast, or you can support it

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02:54:06.360 find subscriber only content, which includes my ask me anything episodes. You also get

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02:54:27.200 like you that make all of this possible.

Making Sense - Sam Harris - December 20, 2018

The Drive Interview with Peter Attia

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