The Peter Attia Drive - #34 - Sam Harris, Ph.D.： The transformative power of mindfulness

00:00:00.000 Hey everyone, welcome to the Peter Atiyah Drive. I'm your host, Peter Atiyah.

00:00:10.140 The Drive is a result of my hunger for optimizing performance, health, longevity, critical thinking,

00:00:15.600 along with a few other obsessions along the way. I've spent the last several years working with

00:00:19.840 some of the most successful, top-performing individuals in the world, and this podcast

00:00:23.620 is my attempt to synthesize what I've learned along the way to help you live a higher quality,

00:00:28.360 more fulfilling life. If you enjoy this podcast, you can find more information on today's episode

00:00:33.000 and other topics at peteratiyahmd.com.

00:00:41.400 Hey everyone, welcome to this week's edition of The Drive. I'm your host, Peter Atiyah.

00:00:45.880 Our guest this week is Sam Harris, someone I consider a friend, a mentor, a teacher. I met

00:00:51.820 Sam about four years ago, and I suspect many of you already know about Sam or are familiar with his

00:00:56.500 work, but in case you're not, let me say a few words on that. Sam trained in neuroscience. He has

00:01:01.020 a PhD in neuroscience, but in many ways I consider him a philosopher and frankly just one of the

00:01:05.820 greatest minds that I know. He's an author of some extraordinary books, The End of Faith being his

00:01:11.040 first, The Moral Landscape, Lying, Free Will, and probably my favorite, which you've also probably

00:01:16.060 heard me talk about, is Waking Up, a book that I've read I think three times now, and I'm almost at the

00:01:21.320 point where I understand half of it. Sam is also the host of arguably, I would say the most important

00:01:27.960 podcast to me, The Waking Up podcast, and he is also the creator of an app for meditation called,

00:01:34.120 appropriately, Waking Up. I had the privilege of beta testing it for about nine months before it

00:01:38.200 went live, and it is now officially live, and for anyone who meditates, I would consider this an

00:01:42.760 essential part of your meditation app routine. You've probably heard me talk a lot about this in the

00:01:50.120 past few months, the importance of distress tolerance, mindfulness, the ability to understand

00:01:57.380 what's going on inside our own heads as a tool to be less unhappy. And that might sound kind of blah,

00:02:05.440 but the reality of it is I've never spent more time thinking about this than I have in probably the last

00:02:10.720 12 to 18 months, and Sam has been such an important part of helping me think about that.

00:02:16.540 And this podcast is pretty long. It's almost three hours. In that time, we go into a lot of this

00:02:22.660 stuff. I'm pretty open about how much Sam has helped me. And though I think at times it turns

00:02:29.160 into more of a discussion than an interview, I think we always sort of veer back to the place where

00:02:34.180 you as the listener are going to get something out of this. If you're not familiar with Sam,

00:02:38.620 I can't encourage you enough to listen to this podcast. And if it piques your curiosity,

00:02:43.940 dig a little bit deeper into this. A couple of housekeeping items. Obviously, we're going to

00:02:48.580 release this today instead of the day before Christmas. So this is kind of coming out a bit

00:02:52.180 early. And over the next week or so, we haven't quite figured out the schedule yet, but don't

00:02:56.360 worry, we'll be back to kind of our regular schedule in January. If you haven't already done so and you're

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00:03:10.140 like it, just unsubscribe. We also have great show notes, which everybody keeps raving about.

00:03:15.100 And I'm really proud of our team for the work they do. I, to be clear, don't do any of that work,

00:03:18.960 but I like that people are spending time on them, especially when it comes to following up

00:03:23.820 on all of the nuances and details that we go into. Finally, if you're enjoying this podcast,

00:03:29.340 please go to Apple podcast reviews and leave a favorable review. And if you are not enjoying it

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00:03:39.440 because it's a lot easier to course correct. If it's constructive than if you just tell me it sucks

00:03:43.560 without anything further to say, here's my guest, Sam Harris.

00:03:50.260 Well, Sam, thanks so much for making time today. Yeah. Yeah. It's a pleasure for me. I'm coming to

00:03:55.560 someone else's studio to record. Yeah. Well, that's you're getting the game long enough. This is the

00:04:00.460 way it happens. Well, I really appreciate it. There's so much I want to talk about today,

00:04:06.520 but I also want to be thoughtful about pulling out threads that I think are most valuable to

00:04:11.840 people I take care of. In many ways, that's sort of an undercurrent of what I like to talk about on

00:04:16.540 podcasts is things that I can then share with my patients and things like that. I don't know if

00:04:20.860 you remember this, but almost a year ago I called you or I emailed you and said, Hey man, do you have

00:04:26.220 time to talk? And you said, yeah. And it was like, actually, I know when it was, it was right after

00:04:29.900 Christmas. It was like the day after Christmas. Yeah. It was the 26th of December. And I said,

00:04:35.000 I want to talk with you about mindfulness meditation. And you said, great. And we hopped

00:04:38.540 on a call. Do you remember this discussion? Yeah. I think I, I think I remember the one you're,

00:04:42.080 you're referencing. So I had had a very profound experience. And prior to that, I had been somewhat

00:04:49.120 familiar, I think would be the, the, the most generous way of saying it, but somewhat familiar

00:04:53.200 with meditation, primarily focusing on concentration-based meditations, like mantra-based

00:04:58.200 practice. But I'd just come back from basically a rehab facility where you were sort of out in the

00:05:05.000 electronics, you weren't even allowed to have books or anything like that. And you were really

00:05:09.340 sort of stripped down into, um, I guess what could only be viewed as sort of your most fundamental,

00:05:15.000 basic elements of self. And I had an epiphany about 10 days into that, which was, I realized at the time

00:05:24.580 what must be the first moment in my life that I was present. And it's weird to be almost 45 at the time

00:05:31.160 and to think, wow, here I am 10 days of having every stimulus removed from my life. Plus going

00:05:37.900 through this very rigorous sort of therapeutic stuff. And I remember exactly where I was sitting.

00:05:42.280 I was sitting in the common room of this place at the edge of a couch. And in a moment, the only

00:05:50.100 thing that mattered was exactly what I was perceiving around me. So the light coming in through the window

00:05:56.100 and the, you know, the way in which it made the room sort of light up this, the, the, the faint

00:06:01.640 scent of, you know, something that was being cooked in the kitchen, you know, a few yards away or

00:06:06.980 whatever. And I don't know why I just felt like, wow, this is the first time I, I actually really

00:06:13.020 think I'm not thinking about something that has happened or worrying about something that is going

00:06:17.380 to happen. And the other thing that was odd that, that entire time I was, was there was it was they

00:06:25.180 allowed us to exercise, which was a big deal. I was really pleased that I was still permitted to

00:06:28.660 exercise, but you couldn't have music. You didn't have a phone or anything. So it was also the first

00:06:32.360 time in my life I exercised only being able to listen to the sound of my breath. So every morning

00:06:36.580 I would run in the woods and you just heard the sound of the wind blowing by you and you heard your

00:06:42.820 breath. And when I was, you know, doing pushups or whatever, it was the same sort of thing.

00:06:46.220 And of course I'd already read so much of your work, but the reason I wanted to speak with you

00:06:51.600 that day is I wanted to understand, Hey, is, am I getting a glimpse of what one might get if they

00:06:56.820 meditate, if they move to a mindfulness-based practice? And what you said was, well, there's

00:07:02.060 good news and bad news. The good news is I've got this app that's going to be coming out soon and

00:07:05.000 it's going to help you with this. The bad news is it's only in beta yet, but you can start right

00:07:09.180 away. There's only, you know, I think at the time there were maybe a dozen meditations.

00:07:12.180 Yeah. And the very bad news is it's going to take years for me to produce this thing.

00:07:16.220 I'm completely incompetent.

00:07:17.620 No, but come on. The thing actually is out now.

00:07:19.680 Yeah.

00:07:20.000 And I know it was a little longer than you wanted, but, um, yeah. And I very quickly put

00:07:24.700 as many of my patients who were interested on the beta version, you guys were so gracious

00:07:28.120 and let all of my, my, uh, my folks on this thing. And in many ways I view that as one

00:07:33.640 of the most important transitions of my life. I think of, uh, you know, life is a handful

00:07:38.540 of direction changes that, you know, some of them that you look back at the past and say,

00:07:43.420 wow, that was sort of a meaningful insight that came to me. So you've talked about this

00:07:47.200 idea of noticing what is arising versus not noticing at all. Can you elaborate on this?

00:07:53.780 Yeah. Well, so I guess I should define mindfulness, which is really the, the target state that one

00:07:59.880 is trying to cultivate in at least this probably what's the most popular type of meditation now.

00:08:05.900 I mean, there are different, as you alluded to, there are different types. There are two

00:08:09.660 basic types of meditation where the distinction is between being lost in thought and being clearly

00:08:17.920 aware of whatever the object of meditation is. So that's true for all types of meditation.

00:08:23.640 Thought really is the, the obstacle one is overcoming when one is learning to meditate because

00:08:29.840 our natural, our default mode is to just be lost in thought. We're telling ourselves a story

00:08:35.620 all day long and we're not aware of it. So once one begins to meditate, one is trying to pay

00:08:45.980 attention to something. And this is where the two different types diverge. The first that you alluded

00:08:52.520 to the, like a mantra based or a concentration based object of focus is the attempt to pay attention

00:09:00.680 to one thing to the exclusion of everything else, right? You want your attention to be absorbed in

00:09:06.180 that object. And in many of those practices, the explicit goal is to do that so well that thoughts

00:09:14.720 no longer arise, right? So you're really trying to get rid of thought in some basic sense. The arising

00:09:20.740 of thought in that context is a sign that you're not meditating hard enough or one pointedly enough.

00:09:27.680 Those types of practices can produce extraordinarily positive states of mind that you can feel bliss

00:09:34.320 and rapture and, and you can actually use as an object of meditation specific states of mind like

00:09:42.000 loving kindness, which is called metta in the, in the Buddhist tradition or sympathetic joy or

00:09:47.640 compassion or equanimity. You can cultivate specific attitudes, which if you can focus on them to the

00:09:54.600 exclusion of anything else, you're inhabiting that state to a degree that, you know, most people would find

00:09:59.900 unrecognizable. But the second type of meditation, which is the type I have spent much more time doing and is

00:10:08.680 almost universally considered the more fundamental or the deeper practice, is often described as, as mindfulness,

00:10:17.760 because that's the, that's the, that's the, that's the, the state you're using in the Buddhist tradition to

00:10:21.940 cultivate it. Mindfulness comes from a, a practice called vipassana, which, which is insight meditation.

00:10:29.620 And there you are, you're not trying to selectively notice one thing or another. You are trying to

00:10:35.820 break the spell of being distracted by thought. So you're, you're trying to be aware of everything

00:10:41.540 without perceiving things through this discursivity or this conceptual lens in each moment. But

00:10:51.100 your attention can be much more choiceless. I mean, you can just notice whatever, in fact, you notice.

00:10:57.740 You're noticing things all the time, sounds and sensations and moods and, and thoughts, but you're not

00:11:04.380 noticing them clearly because you're, you're thinking every moment of the day. Mindfulness begins,

00:11:10.040 for most people, as a training on one object like the breath. But very quickly, it becomes something

00:11:17.400 that you apply to the full range of your experience. And what's nice about it, apart from all the,

00:11:23.600 the benefits of doing it and all the things that can be realized by doing it, this type of meditation

00:11:31.200 is clearly coincident with any experience you can have. I mean, there's nothing that is excluded in

00:11:39.660 principle from the meditation. You're not, you can be working out or watching a movie or, I mean,

00:11:44.720 there's no, there's no thing that in principle does not admit of mindfulness. And that's not true

00:11:51.620 of other types of practice. Yeah. Just sharing one example, because the other thing that I remember

00:11:56.240 you said at the time, I said, you know, Sam, I want to really shift this practice and sort of,

00:12:01.600 I want to figure out a way to experience that, you know, more and more. And you actually said,

00:12:06.280 look, there are a bunch of apps that are already out there that are all pretty good. I mean,

00:12:09.100 obviously you're producing yours because you think it's going to offer something additional and I'll

00:12:13.140 just make my plug for it here. I've used every one of the apps out there and I do find yours the best.

00:12:18.860 But I also realized that there's no one thing that's the best. It's the way you explain things

00:12:23.460 just resonates with me and it might not resonate with the next person. But the other app that I

00:12:27.580 really liked that you recommended was 10% Happier, which is Dan Harris's app. No, no,

00:12:31.920 no relation, of course. And even within Dan's app, there are many teachers, but there are a couple

00:12:37.420 that I really like, Jeff Warren and Joseph. Joseph Goldstein. Joseph Goldstein, yeah. And

00:12:45.480 Jeff Warren has, I believe, a series of walking meditations that are, he refers to as sort of

00:12:51.200 informal meditations. And I remember the first time I did this, maybe it wasn't the first time,

00:12:57.140 but it might've been the second time, but it was pretty early. I realized for the first time that

00:13:01.040 when you walk, if you're paying attention to it, you can feel the wind going past your finger.

00:13:05.860 So if you're walking with your hands in a position such that your thumbs are facing forward and your

00:13:10.880 arms are swinging lightly in a normal gait, you can actually feel the air moving past the leading

00:13:17.520 edge of your hand. I remember thinking, how have I been walking for 45 years and I've never once felt

00:13:23.600 this sensation. And now when I pay attention to it, it's so noticeable. I don't know how it hasn't been

00:13:29.720 distracting me for the last 45 years. Yeah. Yeah. And one might wonder why one would want to notice

00:13:36.800 such a thing. But what you discover when you begin practicing meditation, especially intensively on

00:13:44.200 retreat, is that there's no such thing as a boring object of attention. What boredom is, is simply a lack

00:13:53.480 of attention. I mean, we get into these situations where we are convinced that we are bored because we

00:13:58.540 haven't found something compelling enough in our experience to capture our attention. But our

00:14:03.540 attention is so blunt an instrument normally that we need something that's thrilling or terrifying or

00:14:13.780 something to fully get us to commit. But what you discover when you learn to meditate is that

00:14:20.240 what pleases us most in those moments when we are fully captured by experience is the state of

00:14:29.920 complete attention to the present. And if you can muster that on your own, if you can actually

00:14:35.740 guide attention irrespective of the object you're attending to, then anything, any arbitrary object,

00:14:43.500 the feeling of wind on your hand as you walk, can be an exquisitely pleasurable thing to notice.

00:14:51.440 This is why in that first type of meditation practice, concentration practice, it doesn't matter

00:14:56.620 what you pay attention to. You can pick an arbitrary object. It can be a random sound. It can be a mantra.

00:15:03.780 It doesn't matter what the mantra is. It can be a candle flame. It can be a color on a piece of paper.

00:15:09.700 It can be a random sound in the environment. It can be the sensation of a fly walking across the back

00:15:18.240 of your hand, right? So anything that you can pay attention to, to the exclusion of anything else,

00:15:23.820 can suddenly disclose what it's like to have a very concentrated mind. And concentration is

00:15:30.180 intrinsically pleasurable. And this is why meditation can have the character of a kind of drug experience.

00:15:37.480 And this is kind of a superficial character. I mean, you can get kind of addicted to the changes in

00:15:45.660 state you experience in meditation. And you can be misled by these experiences. You can think that

00:15:51.760 it's about these changes rather than something more fundamental. Because anything you experience

00:15:58.440 by way of newfound pleasure that is based on having a very concentrated mind, you will lose because

00:16:06.200 it's an impermanent state of your physiology and attention. And it's not the deepest practice. But

00:16:12.540 yeah, it's amazing that concentration itself, regardless of the object, is incredibly pleasant.

00:16:19.580 You know, sort of going back to the why, which you've started to allude to. And again,

00:16:24.420 I can't remember if I'm, I know you've said this. I think many have said this. So I don't, you know,

00:16:28.720 I think many have come to this observation, which is virtually all negatively valenced emotions

00:16:34.560 are not rooted in the present. And that sort of becomes the corollary of being present,

00:16:40.980 therefore being able to concentrate on something in the moment can be quite pleasurable. And I guess

00:16:46.420 that was sort of what I recognized that first moment I experienced it, which was,

00:16:50.660 wow, when you're, when you're fully, fully, you know, engaged in or enveloped within this present

00:16:57.260 sensation, what you're seeing, what you're hearing, what you're feeling,

00:17:00.600 it becomes very difficult to be anxious or depressed or angry or any of these other things.

00:17:06.660 And for me, that was the most interesting part of this, which was, you know, taking a very big step

00:17:12.020 back. I'm trying to devote my life to figuring out this problem of how to live longer.

00:17:15.820 But if you asked me, how did I think about that problem five years ago versus how do I think about

00:17:22.260 it today? There have been two fundamentally significant differences. There are two things

00:17:27.820 today that I, that occupy much more of my energy with respect to longevity than they did, you know,

00:17:33.940 four or five years ago. And the first of those two is this notion of being happy, which again,

00:17:39.380 I think five years ago, I would have dismissed that as sort of a, an afterthought, like it is what it is.

00:17:44.620 And as long as all those other things happen, you'll be happy. You know, if you can figure out

00:17:48.140 how to not die and how to be stronger and have better cognitive powers, but you'll be happy as

00:17:52.980 a result of that. But of course that seems to be not the case. The second though, we're not going

00:17:57.120 to get into it is a much greater appreciation for the type of physical body that is necessary to age

00:18:03.300 well and how radically that differs from necessarily the physical body that we want to perform well when

00:18:10.100 we're in our thirties or forties or even our fifties. But going back to the former, which to me is in

00:18:15.660 many ways, your work and the work of people like you has had such a great influence on me is this

00:18:20.700 realization. Like none of this stuff matters if you're miserable. It doesn't matter if you can

00:18:24.620 live to a hundred. It doesn't matter if you can delay the onset of heart disease and stroke and

00:18:28.940 cancer and Alzheimer's disease. If you're too miserable to appreciate it, or if you're constantly in some

00:18:34.220 sort of tormented state, you might as well be dead. I mean, that sounds extreme, but that's really how

00:18:40.760 I started to feel about this. Yeah. And I think we also have inaccurate associations with terms like

00:18:47.320 happiness and we haven't distinguished terms that are different, like pain and suffering.

00:18:54.800 There's nothing about meditation that gets rid of physical pain. Pain is just something that you're

00:19:00.640 going to experience and you can actually experience surprising degrees of pain while meditating. If you

00:19:07.220 just resolve not to move your body, it doesn't matter how comfortable your chair is. Eventually

00:19:11.600 pain is going to arise. And you have a guided meditation that takes us through that exercise

00:19:16.120 that is, I feel like within two minutes, it's unbearable. There are people who sit for hours and

00:19:22.160 hours and 12 hours, you know, and it's excruciating. And yet when you get up, you haven't hurt

00:19:30.380 yourself. It's not synonymous with injury, right? Now, obviously there are ways you could injure

00:19:34.580 yourself if you don't move, but there can be a strange magnification of pain if you resolve to

00:19:41.240 sit still for a very long time. But one thing you discover there, which is useful to discover, is that

00:19:47.480 there is a difference between pain and suffering. You can feel intensely negative sensory experience,

00:19:55.300 and you can feel intensely negative emotions even. You can feel anger and depression and sadness.

00:20:03.240 And if you can be content to simply be aware of those sensations or those moods or emotions,

00:20:13.100 if you can recognize that consciousness is the prior condition in which all of those things are

00:20:19.100 appearing, and you are simply that which is aware of these changing phenomenon, if you can become

00:20:26.200 interested in the character of a mood like sadness or a pain in the knee, it's actually possible to

00:20:35.520 experience these states with total equanimity. And one of the features is, as you said, not being

00:20:44.440 focused at all by thought on the past or the future. So, I mean, one thing with physical pain

00:20:50.580 we all experience is this sense that some sensation is intolerable, but there's this paradox, because in

00:20:59.620 that moment, you've already tolerated it, right? I mean, it's fully arrived. You've merely experienced it.

00:21:05.000 You're worried about the future. You're worried about how long this is going to go on. And it's

00:21:12.140 certainly good to practice finding a place of equanimity with pain. I'm not saying, you know,

00:21:19.100 obviously there are pains that are conceivable that even the best meditator might find it difficult

00:21:26.160 to find equanimity with, but there really is an immense amount of growth one can have in this area,

00:21:34.360 where you just, you can notice this difference between reacting to pain, contracting around it,

00:21:40.380 resisting it, trying to make it go away, wishing it away, worrying about how long it'll be there.

00:21:46.540 And all of this happens, this cascade, it's just, it happens so quickly that it's just, you don't even

00:21:52.020 notice the mechanics of it. It's just you, right? It's just you suffering. But the moment you can pick

00:21:58.400 apart the mechanics of it, because you can pay attention to what is arising, the feeling of resistance,

00:22:04.100 the fear about what's going to happen in the next moment, and keep dropping back into a position

00:22:10.340 of merely witnessing all of these things arise and pass away. There are experiences I've had,

00:22:16.560 and many have had in meditation, where an excruciating sensation becomes so intense that

00:22:24.860 you actually don't know whether or not you're experiencing agony or ecstasy. Like the valence

00:22:30.740 of the intense mental state is it just gets kind of wiped out. It's just sheer intensity. And

00:22:38.580 there is a fundamental cancellation of suffering in those moments. And this goes back to what we were

00:22:45.040 just saying about the pleasures of concentration. Nothing concentrates your mind more easily than

00:22:50.660 pain, right? And so if you're willing, if you can get past your fear and just go into it,

00:22:55.860 you can experience a lot of mental pleasure. I mean, this is, you know, I mean, I'm not,

00:23:02.360 I don't think I've ever met somebody who claimed to be a masochist, but I can imagine that if masochism

00:23:08.180 is possible, there's some reason why this is the case. This would be a reason why this would be the

00:23:14.340 case. That there is, I can only imagine they're experiencing intense concentration in, you know,

00:23:22.460 various states that most people would find, you know, physically intolerable. But back to this,

00:23:28.360 the idea of happiness and, and other states that are commonly associated with it. I think we all have

00:23:36.020 this sense that happiness is a matter of being joyful all the time. And this is a very common idea.

00:23:45.140 This is sort of the misconception that makes many of us think that, well, that's not desirable because

00:23:50.100 if I were joyful every minute of every day, I wouldn't have the drive to do X, Y, and Z, or

00:23:54.780 I wouldn't be quote unquote real in some way. But, but.

00:23:58.900 Or if it is a matter of securing some durable source of joy, then it can't absorb any of the

00:24:06.620 other things in life for which joy would be inappropriate. You know, people die and there's just,

00:24:12.880 there are, there are ups and downs in life. And I don't talk about or think about happiness very

00:24:19.000 much. I think about well-being and, and flourishing more. And those concepts for me can embrace all of

00:24:26.060 the vicissitudes of life where you, if you experience some serious loss in your life, there's a resiliency

00:24:35.080 and a, and a way of embracing that, which is, which brings out the, the wisest and most compassionate and

00:24:41.520 most expansive parts of yourself. That is another, that is another component of well-being. The narrow

00:24:49.920 conception of happiness that most of us have by default is something that we, that we are always

00:24:56.620 trying to defend and shore up against all of the other things in life that are threatening to undermine

00:25:03.860 it. And the one obvious point is that it's just not, it's not a safe play. It is perpetually under

00:25:11.040 threat and any joy you can feel by virtue of it's having arisen based on some causes and conditions,

00:25:18.780 it's going to pass away. You know, you just can't keep any emotion going for days or even hours at a

00:25:27.000 time. And one thing you discover when you learn to meditate is that, you know, negative emotion in

00:25:32.520 particular has a very short half-life. You know, I mean, many of us imagine that we can stay angry

00:25:38.420 or sad for some people would imagine days. I think almost everyone thinks hours at a time. It's

00:25:46.360 actually impossible if you are no longer lost in thought about all the reasons why you should be

00:25:52.440 angry or sad. So this was one of the earlier, I can't remember if this was one of the lessons in

00:25:57.380 your meditation app early on, or it was just a discussion you and I had, but I got to put it

00:26:03.520 to the test shortly after. So I was in New York and obviously in New York, it's, everything's a hustle,

00:26:10.100 right? It's, you're, you're running around, people are rude. You're going to get bumped into.

00:26:14.220 And one of my pet peeves in New York is when you see somebody walking towards you and they're

00:26:20.280 for a moment lost in whatever they're doing, they're usually down looking at their phone or something

00:26:24.660 like that. I always think it's a reasonable courtesy to just not walk into them. Even if

00:26:30.200 they're in your line of sight, you still sort of go out of your way to not bump into them.

00:26:33.920 But for whatever reason, there's just a subset of people who love that opportunity to almost knock

00:26:39.260 you off your feet. So sure enough, one day I am about to turn a corner and this guy is walking and

00:26:46.920 it was clear that he could see me and I had looked down. So my bad, but this guy plows right into me.

00:26:54.660 And I had just had either had this discussion with you or just heard, you know, this lesson

00:26:59.420 about how long can you actually stay angry? And so this happens and I immediately sort of

00:27:05.120 observed this emotion, this rise of anger in me, right? Which was like the desire to turn around

00:27:10.480 and walk up to the guy and say something. Serves no purpose, of course. But instead I decided,

00:27:16.560 well, just watch this, watch this emotion. How long does it last? You know, I remember I was

00:27:21.880 walking somewhere that I was going to be in 10 minutes and I was like, do you think this will

00:27:24.900 last 10 more minutes? Could you be angry for the next 10 minutes if you just observe this feeling?

00:27:30.220 And the answer was no. I mean, it was gone. Actually, I felt like within seconds.

00:27:35.360 And to me, that was like a really big aha moment for, especially for someone like me who's so easily

00:27:41.460 prone to anger to think that by simply being observant of that emotional state, I could have

00:27:48.000 some control over it, which has always felt like the opposite, right? It's always felt like that

00:27:51.880 emotional state has control over me. Right. And it does. I mean, the important point to

00:27:56.940 never forget is that it has complete control over you. As long as you're identified with the next

00:28:04.300 angry thought that's arising in consciousness, if you have no perspective on the fact that you are

00:28:10.120 thinking, right, well, then you simply become that thought for the period that it's captivating and

00:28:17.700 you are pushed in whatever direction it's aimed, right? So if it is getting you to say the angry thing

00:28:25.200 or physically assault the person, you need some level of metacognition in order to pull the brakes.

00:28:32.560 Otherwise, you're just, it's exactly like being asleep and dreaming and not knowing that you're

00:28:37.980 dreaming. This happens to us, all of us, every night. We get into bed and then suddenly a movie

00:28:47.320 starts playing that we're totally identified with. We're one of the characters in it and we're

00:28:54.120 completely unaware of this change, right? And the most surprising thing about dreams is that

00:28:59.440 we're not surprised when they arise, right? Like there's no, you know, we didn't have the

00:29:03.760 expectation that we would stay in our beds, apparently. We're not surprised that the laws

00:29:08.860 of physics are being violated for our amusement. And we're suddenly in these situations where

00:29:15.620 we are fully captive to a completely illusory, seemingly sensory experience. But, you know,

00:29:25.000 all of this is some kind of hallucination. And identification with thought in the waking state

00:29:31.980 has that character to some degree. It's thought to be totally normal psychologically, right? Because

00:29:37.960 it is our default state. But once you learn the alternative, which is to be mindful,

00:29:45.800 you then have a very different sense of what optimal mental health would be. And so when I find myself

00:29:52.400 lost in thought and just, you know, suddenly angry or anxious or frustrated or whatever it is,

00:30:02.420 and I wake up from that experience, it is a little bit like waking up from a dream or a hallucination or

00:30:10.720 it's hard to shake the sense that it's pathological. I was stuck in something about which I had no

00:30:19.780 awareness, right? And it was forcing me to say and do and think and feel things that were given my

00:30:29.860 now current awareness were completely unnecessary. You see, to me, what's so interesting about this,

00:30:35.080 David Foster Wallace, in his commencement speech in 2005 at Kenyon College, the This Is Water,

00:30:41.200 which is one of my favorite things to listen to. I burned a copy off YouTube and now it sits on my

00:30:46.760 phone and I try to listen to it at least once a month, if not more. And even though I almost know

00:30:52.060 it off by heart, it doesn't matter. I still get some benefit every time I hear it. And when he

00:30:56.820 talks about this, he speaks specifically about the problem with this is that it is our default.

00:31:03.640 And that's the part that makes this so challenging. So do we have evidence of other species? Like,

00:31:09.840 are we the only ones that are blessed slash cursed with this ability for rumination and constant

00:31:18.280 thought? I mean, do we, do we have any evidence that a dog is spending any percentage of his or her

00:31:23.600 time thinking about what happened the day before or the next meal? Where do we as humans stack up in

00:31:30.580 this space? Well, it's important to acknowledge that we're blessed and cursed by this because this

00:31:37.080 capacity for linguistic, abstract, complex thought is what has given us everything that is recognizably

00:31:46.740 human. It has given us culture. It has given us civilization. It's allowed us to place all of

00:31:53.960 the learning of our ancestors in a strata that is accessible to all of us and to every present

00:32:01.960 generation so that we don't have to relearn everything from the ground up. I mean, just,

00:32:07.000 just imagine what the alternative would be if there was no acquisition of knowledge.

00:32:10.460 No progress in civilization.

00:32:11.420 Yeah. And, and for the longest time that was true of humanity as well. You know, if you go back

00:32:16.080 50,000 years and then you decide to go back 60,000 years, the differences are, are, are impressively

00:32:23.340 non-existent, you know, in terms of the toolkit anyone was working with.

00:32:27.200 So that's interesting, Sam. So do you, if we go back to, I don't, I know there's, there's some

00:32:32.840 debate about when language was really codified, but to pick a point in time when we're pretty sure

00:32:37.680 there was no language, we could say 200,000 years ago, right? I think most neuroscientists would agree

00:32:41.860 no language 200,000 years ago. Was the arrival of language, the arrival of this capacity or, you know,

00:32:48.800 when, where did this show up?

00:32:50.160 Yeah. I think language is the, the main variable there. I mean, it's the main variable with respect

00:32:57.300 to being able to abstract, to being able to represent anything that's, that's not currently

00:33:03.120 present or not currently happening. It's the basis for communicating anything of substance to anyone

00:33:09.480 else and, and storing a kind of cultural memory of anything, whether it's just by virtue of an oral

00:33:17.880 tradition or, or, you know, once writing came along. So language is necessary for all that. I mean,

00:33:23.120 just to, to be able to articulate the concept of time, you know, the concept of a past where the

00:33:30.360 causes of the present are stored and a future, which is yet to arrive, that needs to be planned for,

00:33:36.740 or that can be better or worse. It's something that, that I think other species probably have

00:33:41.400 in a very primitive form that is not associated with, with conscious thought. I think that a dog,

00:33:52.440 for instance, learns various associations with stimuli.

00:33:57.220 Right. There are Pavlovian responses that these animals can experience.

00:34:00.640 Yeah. And, and they, and they recognize people, obviously. I mean, they, they recognize people

00:34:05.220 arguably better than any other species other than, than the human. So they can have real relationships

00:34:12.300 and there's no question they have emotions and they have preferences and all of that. But

00:34:17.980 in terms of forming a notion of the future or a notion of the way in which the world might be

00:34:27.200 different, it's one thing to recognize your friend, record, in the case of a dog, recognize your

00:34:33.780 owner and prefer that person to somebody else. It's another thing to have any concept of having had

00:34:44.520 a past with that person. Now, the fact that you recognize them indicates a past, right? But all of

00:34:51.780 that could be pre-conscious to a dog. It's just, there's just this kind of binary difference between

00:34:57.900 recognition and, and not. So, so let's use an even more obvious example. And I'll tell you where I'm

00:35:03.680 going with this because then I want to understand this, which is, as I observe my three children,

00:35:09.120 there is a distinction in what I see in the younger ones that they seem to always be present.

00:35:14.520 So, which isn't to say that they don't get upset. I mean, you only have to look at a toddler for 10

00:35:18.060 seconds to watch what, that they can get upset. Yeah. But I doubt that they're upset about anything

00:35:22.900 other than what they're experiencing in the moment, right? They're hungry, their diaper's dirty,

00:35:26.520 whatever. They fell, they hurt themselves, something like that. But if you look at, you know,

00:35:32.280 a teenager or a 10-year-old, a preteen, they are now starting to suffer from this quote-unquote

00:35:39.260 disease of too much thinking, too much distraction. So somewhere from the moment you're born until,

00:35:47.420 let's just make it easy and say, until you're 13, you acquire this capacity. But yet an infant,

00:35:54.500 like the dog, recognizes the parent. There is some sense of a history with an individual.

00:36:01.240 Yeah.

00:36:01.580 Again, I don't know even what the relevance is of this other than to say,

00:36:05.900 the inability to recognize how distracted we are seems to be one of the greatest drivers of misery.

00:36:13.080 You know, there are three quotes I love, and I love them because they're basically all saying

00:36:17.340 the same thing across 1700 years. So in the first century, Seneca said,

00:36:21.520 we suffer more in imagination than in reality. In the 16th century, Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet,

00:36:27.920 for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. I have that on a t-shirt

00:36:32.460 that I love to remind myself. And then of course, in the 17th century, Pascal said, distraction is the

00:36:37.940 only thing that consoles us from miseries, yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.

00:36:43.960 Descartes says something very similar. I mean, this is something that's been acknowledged for so long.

00:36:48.740 Yeah.

00:36:49.700 And yet, it's so ingrained in us that it just strikes me as like, is there some evolutionary

00:36:58.680 basis for this? Or is it just that evolution wasn't even trying to optimize for this equanimity?

00:37:03.320 And instead, the benefits, as you've pointed out, of being able to do these things, the progress we've

00:37:09.340 been able to make as a society, our ability to leapfrog ahead of other species, has more than

00:37:14.300 made up for this difficulty? Or is it simply that, look, evolution wouldn't outselect this because

00:37:20.460 it's not interfering with your reproductive fitness. I just don't understand why we suffer so

00:37:25.580 much. I guess that's my question. The crucial point there is that evolution doesn't care about

00:37:30.540 your well-being.

00:37:31.740 Yeah. As long as you reproduce, what does it care?

00:37:34.220 Yeah. And so if there's some path by which we survive and reproduce in a state of misery,

00:37:44.900 evolution is perfectly happy with that path, right? It's just, if that were a more reliable

00:37:51.100 algorithm for reproduction and survival, then we would be getting more and more miserable.

00:37:56.980 Right? So we want to slip the logic of evolution because it just simply doesn't care about us,

00:38:04.660 right? And virtually everything we want as a species now, at some level, is a matter of breaking

00:38:12.540 the connection to many of our evolved tendencies. And we have a very strong evolutionary capacity for

00:38:19.220 tribal violence, right? But tribal violence is obviously something we want to outgrow as quickly

00:38:23.720 as possible. And there are many other examples of this. I think that language is, you can see it

00:38:29.800 when you're raising your kids, when you have a two-and-a-half-year-old and a three-year-old

00:38:35.560 where they're talking to you, but then they're talking to themselves as though they're talking to

00:38:43.680 you. Speech becomes something where you're narrating your experience as though you're talking to a

00:38:51.060 parent. And this seems to get internalized so that the conversation, you know enough to keep

00:38:57.360 your mouth shut, but you're really talking to someone who isn't there all the time. I think

00:39:03.260 that's probably the origin of it for every individual, that language is so useful. It's so essential to

00:39:12.420 everything we do that we just have this superfluous level of discursivity that from, again, from a

00:39:22.160 survival advantage that there's no reason to ever turn it off. But from a well-being point of view,

00:39:29.300 it's the character of it is almost universally unpleasant most of the time for most people. I mean,

00:39:37.200 there's some people who are very lucky and they have an intrinsic level of happiness that is just

00:39:42.580 kind of off the charts where they're just, they're basically happy all the time. They recover very,

00:39:47.480 very quickly from disappointments and losses and they just don't really see a problem. And many of

00:39:54.280 these people are not very reflective about, you know, the human condition, right? They're not living

00:39:58.400 necessarily examined lives because they, there's not much of a reason to, but they're just, you know,

00:40:04.200 they get up in the morning and they're just stoked to be alive. And you can, you can, you know,

00:40:09.220 if you get enough of the, the conditions for ordinary levels of happiness together,

00:40:15.300 and you're lucky enough to be able to maintain them fairly effortlessly, right? You're, you're,

00:40:20.620 you're wealthy and you're healthy and you're surrounded by happy, creative people who want the

00:40:25.800 best for you. And you're just by, by dint of good luck, people close to you haven't died. And you

00:40:31.780 have, you know, you haven't suffered any collision with reality. Then yeah, you can, you can be

00:40:38.200 conventionally very happy and still be talking to yourself all the time and not notice it. But

00:40:45.060 there's significant limitation even to that when you do develop this more refined way of noticing what

00:40:56.120 it's like to be you, which is what we're calling meditation. It's not that learning this, having

00:41:03.300 insight into the mechanics of your own suffering and the mediocrity of kind of ordinary transient

00:41:09.520 states of, of pleasure. It's not that that is at bottom incompatible with living an ordinary,

00:41:18.500 fulfilled, pleasure-seeking life. I mean, you can enjoy dinner just as much having learned to meditate

00:41:23.580 as, you know, anyone who's gluttonously attached to sensory experience without, without any kind of

00:41:30.240 metacognition about, you know, what's going on. But the difference comes in how you respond to

00:41:38.280 problems that arise. I mean, it's actually both, right? I mean, I think that mindfulness clearly

00:41:44.640 makes it easier to endure unpleasant things. So, you know, I, I was late to come over here today because

00:41:51.580 the, to get to your place, which should have been an hour, took two hours. And that is normally

00:41:58.080 something that would drive me bat shit crazy just by, by way of process. Like, why is it so

00:42:06.140 inefficient? Like, why are there so many cars on the road? Blah, blah. Like I would get into a woe is

00:42:10.680 me narrative about this, which is of course ironic because like, why am I more special than every other

00:42:16.560 car on this road, right? Like everyone is equally in the same situation of it's taking two hours to

00:42:22.420 get somewhere that it should take one hour. And I actually, I have used traffic because when you

00:42:29.180 live in Southern California and split your time in New York, you get plenty of exposure to traffic.

00:42:34.400 I've actually used this as an amazing tool for mindfulness and I no longer let it really get to

00:42:40.300 me. Instead, I just sort of observe, Oh look, you're feeling a little bit self-important today.

00:42:46.340 Like you're feeling like your time is more valuable than everybody else's time. Let's examine that.

00:42:50.300 Is that really true? Not really. Okay. What is happening in this exact moment? The sun is shining

00:42:55.560 this way or, you know, all these other things. So, so in many ways, if nothing else, it's simply a hack

00:43:00.360 to allow me to be less miserable. Yeah. Yeah. But on the flip side, I actually do think there is a way

00:43:06.540 to enjoy certain moments more. And, and I've certainly noticed this the most with my kids.

00:43:12.080 I think that, you know, I have a, our middle son who's four, you know, he's just, that's what four,

00:43:18.460 like a four-year-old boy is just going to be more prone to chewing up the air in the room when it comes

00:43:23.160 to doing bad stuff. And I find that, and to be clear, there are not all days that I can do this.

00:43:28.820 There are some days when he's acting crazy that it just drives me nuts. But more often than not,

00:43:34.000 I'm sort of able to actually reflect on it pleasantly and think about like, what's happening

00:43:38.600 in this moment, right? Okay. He's, he's yelling, he's screaming, he's throwing a temper tantrum.

00:43:43.820 He's hit his brother. He's done this. He's done that. But in this moment, is there anything that's

00:43:48.320 really that bad about any of these things? I mean, like, it's not like he's going to be doing this

00:43:51.720 when he goes to college. Like, what am I really worried about here? Yeah. And in fact, I can turn

00:43:56.440 that into a positive thing, which is one day he will be in college and he won't be a cute little

00:44:01.200 four-year-old who loves me so much. Yeah. You'll miss this moment. Yeah. I'll miss this

00:44:05.080 moment. So, so I have found that, again, I use the word hack because I, it's such an inelegant

00:44:10.600 way to describe it, but it's basically a tool to make me a little bit more aware of where I am in

00:44:17.340 a given moment. And whether that produces happiness or not, I mean, I sort of agree with you. The

00:44:21.360 semantics of happiness are too cumbersome for me to explain. You know, people have talked about the

00:44:26.960 happiness is simply the difference between reality and expectation. I mean, that's a bit

00:44:31.360 vague for me. I'm not smart enough to fully understand what that means, though. I understand

00:44:34.920 the concept, but clearly there's some component of expecting the world to be a certain way and it not

00:44:40.280 being that way, producing an emotional state or a valence that is negative one way or the other.

00:44:45.880 And, and, and so I think while as, as, as wonderful as mindfulness is to offset that,

00:44:50.840 there is this moment at times of taking a bite of food and rather than thinking about the next bite

00:44:57.300 or what you're going to eat later, like actually thinking, you know, or observing the sensations as

00:45:03.580 they're occurring in that moment, kind of slowing things down in a way. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cause I

00:45:08.480 don't know why I just tend to always live in a fast forward mode. That is my default is to be

00:45:13.360 full fast forward. Well, it's, it's most people's default. I always say it's everyone's default.

00:45:18.220 Who's not being mindful because you're, you're constantly, even when you're getting what you

00:45:23.920 want, even when you're in the very act of gratifying a desire, you're still subtly inclining

00:45:30.780 toward the next moment. You're not actually landing on each moment of experience with full attention.

00:45:39.500 And paradoxically, you can discover that many of the things you think you want, you don't want all

00:45:47.500 that much. If you pay attention to what it's actually like to gratify those desires. With food,

00:45:52.880 this is very clear. So you can be eating something, you can think you want dessert, you can have a real

00:45:57.520 sweet tooth. And if you pay very close attention to what it's like to eat that sweet thing, you're

00:46:05.840 finally gorging on, more often than not, you discover it's just a little too sweet. There's something

00:46:13.420 about it that is unpleasant. And your pleasure in that moment is predicated on your being able to

00:46:21.120 take a drink of water in the next, right? Like if you have to buy it a candy bar or something,

00:46:25.100 this candy that's made for kids delivers this insight to me very clearly. It's like the moment I,

00:46:30.020 I think I want something, you know, at the movies, whatever it is, a, you know, M&Ms or something that

00:46:36.100 hasn't changed its formula for the last 40 years. And I'm eating it. And I begin to notice that I'm

00:46:43.920 eating more of it as a way of just getting rid of getting rid of the sense in your palate. Yeah.

00:46:49.320 The last moment of taste that is just too chemical laden, too sweet. And, you know, if I didn't have a

00:46:55.860 drink of water, you know, this, this would actually be an unpleasant experience. And it's not what it

00:47:01.720 seems when you're not paying attention. And this is not to say that there's nothing that's truly

00:47:06.240 pleasurable. I mean, there's all kinds of pleasure. And again, being able to really connect with the

00:47:12.000 present moment delivers its own intrinsic pleasure. But your sense of what matters can definitely change

00:47:20.800 the moment you begin to pay closer attention to, to what experience is actually like.

00:47:27.860 I think it was in one of your lessons, but it might've been in a podcast where you

00:47:31.700 talk about, imagine you're playing a video game and it's the same video game every time.

00:47:38.380 And you always get killed by the same monster at the same part of the maze or whatever it is.

00:47:44.080 And I think about that a lot every time I falter at predictably, you know, known, understood things

00:47:52.480 that get under my skin. And it's very discouraging, right? It's sort of like a, there are like a dozen

00:47:57.080 things that I just know if they happen. So, I mean, one of them is,

00:48:01.700 there's certain types of questions that if I'm asked really irk me. You know, when people ask

00:48:06.520 questions that are, to which the answer is very complicated, but they ask through the lens of

00:48:12.580 just give me the one word answer, that just irks me. Like, I don't know why it just bugs the shit

00:48:17.500 out of me. And I know that. And yet over and over again, I find myself getting upset when that happens.

00:48:25.140 Right. And I feel like the guy that you're describing in the video game.

00:48:27.960 You're losing the boss fight at the same place every time.

00:48:30.520 Every single time. I know where the boogeyman is. I know what weapon he's going to use to kill me.

00:48:36.140 And I just walk over there and out comes the machete and I'm dead.

00:48:40.380 And then I'm back to the starting block again. And I've won fewer lives in the game, right?

00:48:46.140 But you can recover faster each time you lose. Getting angry is not the measure of having lost,

00:48:54.060 right? Obviously, you can aspire to a time where you never get angry again, or you never get angry

00:48:59.800 in certain circumstances again. But the real practice is to notice as early as possible what's

00:49:08.860 happening and to let go of it. The difference between being angry for 10 minutes and 10 seconds

00:49:15.520 and one second, those factors of 10 are enormous, right? And I have the same thing going on where

00:49:24.600 anger is something that I very frequently feel. And I also notice that it totally contaminates the

00:49:31.980 experience of people around me. So I have my wife and my daughters and my anger for them is clearly

00:49:38.340 toxic. And I have this commitment to letting go of it the moment I can let go of it. And again,

00:49:45.480 it's not that anger is never warranted. The energy of anger can be useful. Someone's attacking you

00:49:50.980 on the sidewalk, you know, and you're in a self-defense situation. That's not the moment

00:49:55.420 where I would say, get rid of all your anger as quickly as possible, right? I mean, there are

00:49:59.560 situations where you want to use that energy. But for the most part, you want to let go of it very,

00:50:05.860 very quickly and then be in a position to decide what's what and whether or not it's appropriate

00:50:11.900 to take some kind of confrontational path, whatever it is, by email or say the thing that would convey

00:50:19.940 your displeasure or whatever. But now I have my wife and my daughters as a kind of feedback mechanism

00:50:27.940 for me because they know my commitment. They know I can let go of anger on demand and they know I want

00:50:34.520 to and they don't like my anger, right? And they detect it in the subtlest way. So like, I mean,

00:50:42.140 it's not, it's not even anger where a normal person would classically think he was angry.

00:50:48.600 They don't have to wait till you raise your voice. They can see the mannerisms in

00:50:52.260 the way you might move or the way your answers become shorter or something like that.

00:50:57.800 Yeah. Or it may just, so, but like, you know, even mild frustration gets scored as, you know,

00:51:04.300 a kind of crazy level of anger, right? So like, if I, you know, if I say, wait a minute, I thought

00:51:09.060 the plumber was coming today. That's like, you know, that, you know, that's a four alarm fire,

00:51:14.540 right? So one of my daughters will say, Ooh, daddy's getting angry. Right. And they'll say that

00:51:19.540 it's so early now. And it's fantastic because it's, I just let go of it way earlier than I used

00:51:26.480 to. But if you can't be mindful, you actually have no choice. You know, you just, you will be

00:51:32.300 angry as long as you're angry. And the people around you who don't like it just have to figure

00:51:39.380 out somehow to put up with you. It's not that there's no other hacks. There are many other hacks.

00:51:46.120 And sometimes, sometimes there it's important to have a hack that is more global than being

00:51:52.520 simply being relentlessly mindful of everything that's coming up for you. Like a different

00:51:56.120 understanding of a situation can offer some kind of firmware update to the whole operating

00:52:04.160 system. And then you, you just simply don't go there anymore. So for instance, I mean, so

00:52:10.460 you're, you're driving in traffic. There are many hacks for that, but one hack is just,

00:52:14.340 you discover that you've got 400 hours of podcasts you want to listen to, and you're listening

00:52:19.960 to a great one and you, you're just, you're just happy to be listening. And the fact that

00:52:23.680 you're delayed an extra half hour or whatever is fine, you know, and that's a totally useful

00:52:29.780 hack, right? It modulates your state. You're, you're just, you're just discovering the silver

00:52:34.100 lining to something that's, that would otherwise be negative.

00:52:36.800 I'll, I'll share with you another one. Cause I agree with that completely. That's a great one.

00:52:39.780 The other one that I've taken on in the past year that has had surprising efficacy is any

00:52:46.260 customer service experience you have that is profoundly negative. And if you fly as much as

00:52:52.060 I do, you're pretty much guaranteed one of those a week. My friend, Jay Walker, who knows a lot

00:52:57.360 about the aviation industry said one out of six experiences with us aviation is a customer service

00:53:03.680 failure. Right. So anyone who flies would agree with that. But so the next time, like the flight

00:53:09.140 attendant's rude to you or the TSA person is sweating you or being obnoxious or whatever,

00:53:14.380 if you instead take a view of empathy, which is, God, this is a really hard job. You know,

00:53:22.460 I mean, like I have the privilege of getting to be, you know, intellectually engaged and doing all

00:53:27.320 of these things and boom, boom, boom. But this is a really hard job. I mean, most of the people

00:53:31.360 that they're encountering are on some level dissatisfied. Nobody's showing up to, to their

00:53:36.780 world happy. And so like simply taking that posture completely changes the way you interact

00:53:43.680 with that system. Yeah. And it's interesting because it doesn't even really require a huge

00:53:48.120 mindfulness insight. It's just sort of a, but it's a, it's a condition you want to walk in the

00:53:53.340 situation with, right? You want to be able to walk in with that in your mind. Yeah. It's a framing

00:53:57.220 effect. Yeah. Yeah. And it doesn't entail mindfulness at all. You could get the benefit

00:54:02.540 of that new framing without ever having heard of mindfulness. So you, you know, if you do get

00:54:07.160 angry, you'll be as angry as, as you ever were, but you have a different way of thinking about it.

00:54:12.820 Yeah. The combination of these is powerful. Yeah. When I think about one of the most difficult

00:54:17.480 things to, there are two things in my life that I have learned that I think were very difficult and

00:54:22.960 took a lot of time. The first was in the year 2000, when I was finishing medical school, I had a

00:54:28.880 really bad back injury and it's a long story, but it basically for a year of my life, I was not able

00:54:37.980 to move properly. And for three months I was not able to move at all. Wow. How'd that happen?

00:54:45.120 It's not clear how it happened, but what happened was a pretty bad outcome. And I ended up having

00:54:52.520 surgery, but the surgeon operated on the wrong side. So it went from a very bad situation to a

00:54:57.080 worse situation and a whole series of cascading events led to it being what it was. I look back

00:55:05.720 at that as I've described as before as the best worst experience of my life, because having been

00:55:11.340 in so much pain for so long, I had to learn how to do everything from scratch. So I had to learn how

00:55:16.820 to be able to brush my teeth without putting stress on my back, which most people wouldn't even think

00:55:22.160 about. You wouldn't think that there's a right and a wrong way to brush your teeth. You wouldn't

00:55:25.720 think that there's a right and a wrong way to get out of your bed, put your shoes on, or get out of

00:55:28.920 your car. It turns out there is, but you can only learn it when you are in such a fragile state that

00:55:34.040 you've lost every ounce of strength in your back. And because I experienced that for so long, a year,

00:55:41.300 it allowed me to make this transition, which I want to, of course, apply to meditation. The transition is

00:55:46.520 going from being unconsciously incompetent to then being consciously incompetent to then consciously

00:55:54.760 competent. And of course, the goal is to one day get to a point where you were unconsciously

00:55:59.280 competent. I don't think I'm unconsciously competent at a single thing I do, including movement,

00:56:03.960 but I'm now consciously competent at moving around and not hurting my back. But I couldn't have got there

00:56:11.200 if I didn't have that feedback loop that allowed me to go through it.

00:56:14.280 The other thing was learning how to swim as an adult. You know, you throw an adult in the water

00:56:19.120 who's never swum before, they are so incompetent, but they don't even really understand what it is.

00:56:24.640 And so the first act of learning how to swim is learning to feel what's making you sink,

00:56:30.600 figuring out what it is that is actually dropping you to the bottom of the pool. And then, of course,

00:56:35.980 you want to be able to correct that. And with great effort over short periods of time,

00:56:39.300 exercise some capacity to fix that. I would say those two experiences have been by far the most

00:56:46.340 difficult, but they pale in comparison to mindfulness. Now, I don't know if that just

00:56:51.280 makes me a hard case, but, and maybe it's, you know, the other thing I was thinking about when I

00:56:56.800 was reflecting on this is having a back injury, you don't get a time, you don't get a time out from it.

00:57:02.380 You know, it's every minute of every day, you're immersed in that exposure, that stimulus, and that

00:57:08.180 feedback loop. Similarly, once I dedicated myself to swimming, I swam four hours a day.

00:57:14.760 And I think maybe the issue is because I don't meditate for four hours a day, it's just going

00:57:20.100 to take a lot longer to do it. And I know you and I have spoken about this and your belief is that

00:57:24.720 something really happens when you go on a silent retreat. And I remember once asking you, I said,

00:57:30.480 hey, Sam, I see this retreat, it's four days, do you think I should go? And you actually said,

00:57:33.920 no, I wouldn't go for a four-day retreat. I'd wait till you can do 10 or 14 days.

00:57:38.900 Yeah, I guess I would modify that slightly. I think a week to 10 days is the shortest I can

00:57:46.540 recommend without caveat. I think the first three days or so of a retreat are more or less the

00:57:51.840 hardest for a retreat of any length. So if you do a three-day retreat or a four-day retreat,

00:57:56.620 you're almost guaranteed to have a lot of restlessness and just resistance to the whole

00:58:04.140 project. And you may not touch anything on the other side of that. You can just be kind of unhappy

00:58:11.240 the whole time and then just relieved to be getting off retreat. Whereas if you have 10 days,

00:58:17.740 just seems like an eternity. Once you put yourself on retreat and you've just shut down your connection

00:58:23.260 to everything, there's no talking, there's no writing, there's no reading. It's just you and

00:58:28.600 your attention in each moment. 10 days seems like an eternity. And so as you move through those first

00:58:37.840 few days of resistance, at day three, you're still so far away from the day that you're going home

00:58:44.960 that it's much more common to just surrender at that point and really get into it. Just decide that

00:58:51.980 you'll just pick up your life as you left it when you get off retreat. And that for this period,

00:58:59.180 there's just nothing worth thinking about. You just need to pay attention to whatever's appearing,

00:59:07.120 your breath, sounds, the movement of air on your hand as you walk.

00:59:11.560 Your first experience in this was sort of comical the way you describe it, right?

00:59:16.920 This was when you were 16, I believe?

00:59:19.420 Oh, no. Well, that was my first experience of solitude that I guess it would have been a retreat,

00:59:24.420 but I was on Outward Bound and the Outward Bound, I assume they still have it. But back then they had

00:59:29.760 something called the Solo, which was three, it was a 23 day period of camping and hiking and kind of

00:59:37.580 outdoorsmanship. But maybe day 18 or so, they put you in isolation for three full days where you would

00:59:46.520 fast and do nothing, right? So you couldn't go hiking and do anything that would distract you. And

00:59:52.800 I think that the reason for that was not based on any meditative agenda that they had. It was just

00:59:58.740 they don't want a bunch of not fully trained people wandering around the wilderness while fasted. So

01:00:05.540 they just park you

01:00:07.500 in some place. We were by this lake at maybe 9,000 feet and

01:00:13.720 you just camp with a water bottle

01:00:16.680 and

01:00:17.800 that's all you got. You just have your sleeping bag, your water bottle, and you have a journal.

01:00:21.300 Yeah, you can write in your journal. And I found the experience just intolerable. It was just...

01:00:28.500 You were 16?

01:00:29.180 Yeah, I was 16. And yeah, so I opened my book Waking Up With This Story because it was the first moment

01:00:35.140 in my life that I realized that I was on the wrong side of some understanding about the nature of my own

01:00:44.060 mind and the possibility of finding a durable source of happiness in this life. So I was alone in

01:00:52.880 an absolutely beautiful spot and totally miserable based on the fact that I didn't have any of the

01:01:01.300 usual distractions. And if you could have just swapped places with me and inhabited my consciousness,

01:01:07.960 I was spending all my time

01:01:10.860 fantasizing about the things I was going to do when I got off, when I got out of those goddamn

01:01:16.140 mountains and got back to my life in the world. And, you know, the friends I would see and the foods I

01:01:21.700 would eat and I would just... It was just a continuous advertisement for everything that I missed.

01:01:29.240 You know, it was just... It was like a meditation on loneliness and boredom and grief, ultimately. I just...

01:01:36.780 It was just to be separated from everyone I cared about and every fun thing I could do and every tasty

01:01:43.000 thing I could eat. It was just a source of perfect misery for me. So when I came off the solo and met all of

01:01:49.520 the other people who had also been on their solos, I was astonished to discover that many of them had had

01:01:57.140 profoundly happy experiences, right? And that...

01:02:01.060 Were you one of the youngest people on this?

01:02:02.560 Yeah. Yeah. So I was... I think I was the youngest. So it was... I think the cutoff... I don't know if

01:02:07.180 this is still the case, but the cutoff for Outward Bound was 16 and a half and I was just 16 and a half.

01:02:14.280 So, you know, there were lots of people who were 10 years older or so. And so they were in different

01:02:18.720 places in their lives and many of them just had a kind of breakthrough experience. I mean, they just...

01:02:24.980 It was just some of the best time they'd ever spent alive. And so they were kind of radiantly

01:02:30.200 happy, you know, for... Because we had just done 18 or so days of brutal hiking. I mean, just, you know,

01:02:38.400 kind of just 14-hour days of hiking with 60-pound packs. And, you know, we had this full ordeal of

01:02:45.120 learning how to function in the backcountry. And then it all stops and you're just alone by this

01:02:54.180 alpine lake. So many of them had come out of that feeling that they had touched something profound

01:03:00.420 and I had no idea what they were talking about. It was like being told, you know, I just got,

01:03:05.840 you know, run over by a car and it was the greatest thing that's ever happened to me. It's like,

01:03:08.880 I mean, I had come out of there having had a harrowing experience, right?

01:03:13.820 So what happened when you went back home after that? Did you look back and reflect on that? Or

01:03:18.480 does that basically just become a footnote into a broader story that really didn't factor into

01:03:24.060 your ultimate search for, you know, call it enlightenment, call it what you want?

01:03:31.840 It took a little time. It was probably a year and a half before I then had an experience with

01:03:39.320 with psychedelics that put all of this in perspective for me. So...

01:03:43.980 And was your first experience with psilocybin or LSD?

01:03:47.660 Strangely, I had taken psilocybin as a teenager before I had what really was the kind of breakthrough

01:03:55.840 experience for me on MDMA when I was 18.

01:03:58.560 Yeah, you wrote about that as well.

01:04:01.580 Yeah, yeah, that's in Waking Up. I had taken psilocybin, I smoked marijuana and I had taken

01:04:08.880 mushrooms a few times as a teenager and they never, they never signaled anything profound to me about

01:04:17.200 the nature of the mind or they never indicated a path forward apart from just this sense that

01:04:24.980 these drugs produced interesting experiences. I had no framing for what I experienced on these drugs.

01:04:32.440 In other words, you experienced the altered state, but there was no altered trait to borrow from the

01:04:37.220 title of the same book.

01:04:38.660 Yeah, and also just no sense that there could be altered traits. There was no project associated with

01:04:46.740 changing your experience in that way. It was just, you know, it was kind of fun. I guess,

01:04:51.720 some of the experiences had also been unpleasant on psilocybin, but it's just, these were drug

01:04:58.440 experiences, you know, and it was like getting drunk. Like if you get drunk, you don't come away

01:05:04.480 from that experience thinking, I wonder if this indicates that it's possible to feel, kind of

01:05:10.460 natively feel like I've had six beers and, you know, I can just be more that sort of person by some

01:05:16.740 other method that has nothing to do with drinking beer all the time, right? But with MDMA, you know,

01:05:24.360 my first experience on ecstasy, I had this epiphany that this is what consciousness was like

01:05:31.980 when it was no longer encumbered by my self-concern, by my egocentricity, by my...

01:05:39.460 And because you were 18, I mean, was it so much about, like, I'm trying to reflect on what it was

01:05:44.580 like to be an 18-year-old boy, but I think if I recall, you wrote about just sort of the empathy

01:05:50.760 that you had for your friend, because it was you and another friend, right?

01:05:53.660 Yeah.

01:05:54.400 And was that the part that was so stunning to you, which was, oh my God, like,

01:05:58.900 I've spent the last 18 years sort of not thinking about it through somebody else's eyes,

01:06:02.920 or what was it that you experienced, if you can recall, that at least showed you, or perhaps

01:06:08.400 was the thin end of the wedge that said, there is now an altered state of consciousness that

01:06:14.200 could exist outside of this state that I'm in that might be desirable?

01:06:19.660 It was a recognition that what was changing for me while I was coming on to the drug was that

01:06:30.740 I was losing my concern about myself, right?

01:06:35.380 So I'm talking to my best friend, somebody who I already love and am connected to and have,

01:06:42.700 you know, positive feelings for, but what was happening is that I started to punch through

01:06:49.260 to this level of connection with him that I had never felt before, despite the fact that

01:06:55.180 we were great friends and it had a kind of structure to it, or it was, it was dissecting

01:07:02.580 a structure within my mind that I had never had any cause to notice, which was my default

01:07:10.220 state was normally that, you know, if I'm talking to him, some amount of my attention is bound

01:07:18.120 up in a concern about what he thinks about me, right?

01:07:22.640 So, you know, if I see some change in expression on his face based on what I just said, I'm

01:07:30.120 reading into those changes some message about me, some message about how I'm doing.

01:07:36.140 And there are many other features to this.

01:07:38.920 I mean, there's also a sense of a kind of zero-sum aspect to my own stature in the world

01:07:48.460 and my, you know, feeling of well-being in light of other people's success and happiness.

01:07:55.060 So, and this is something you can discover in yourself.

01:07:57.800 Imagine those times where you have a friend who has some, you know, massive success, right?

01:08:03.720 You know, you're struggling in your life to be as successful as you want to be.

01:08:07.620 If you're like most people, you haven't arrived yet.

01:08:10.480 And then you have a friend, you know, who's winning some version of the lottery.

01:08:15.080 And when this is being communicated to you, you're asked to celebrate with them, essentially.

01:08:20.200 And you can discover in yourself a kind of begrudging feeling, whether it's envy or there's

01:08:26.620 a limitation on your capacity to experience what's called sympathetic joy in Buddhism for

01:08:32.200 that person.

01:08:33.520 And that's an ugly characteristic of the mind.

01:08:36.780 I mean, here's someone who you ostensibly really care about.

01:08:39.860 This is someone you really love.

01:08:41.280 This is someone who you think...

01:08:42.600 And their windfall did not come at your expense.

01:08:45.020 Right, exactly.

01:08:45.500 And yet you, there's something in you that can't actually celebrate for them fully because

01:08:51.180 you're so bound up with who you are and what you want for yourself and, you know, how you

01:08:56.820 think they may think about you.

01:08:59.620 And I mean, this horror show of self-reference and this miserly spirit with respect to the

01:09:07.820 circumstance you're in with everyone.

01:09:09.940 So what happened on, in this first MDMA trip is that I just punched through all of that,

01:09:17.360 right?

01:09:17.520 All of that was just gone.

01:09:19.240 And there was no associated inebriation.

01:09:23.680 I mean, it was just, my experience wasn't just...

01:09:25.280 That's the thing with MDMA that makes it sort of quite distinct and special from some of

01:09:29.240 these other agents, right?

01:09:30.240 Is there is no sense of altered consciousness.

01:09:33.120 Yeah, it can be kind of speedy and it also depends on whether you're getting pure MDMA.

01:09:39.140 If you're talking pure MDMA versus, yeah, yeah, of course, when they cut it with stimulants,

01:09:42.820 it's a different story.

01:09:43.740 But really, pure MDMA doesn't seem to really alter your consciousness in any way.

01:09:47.660 Yeah.

01:09:47.840 In the way that, you know, LSD would, for example.

01:09:49.780 Right, yeah.

01:09:50.060 I mean, there's no...

01:09:51.040 It's not considered really a psychedelic.

01:09:53.520 It doesn't have any of those visionary or hallucinatory qualities.

01:09:57.320 Yeah, it's referred to more as an empathogen versus an entheogen, correct?

01:10:00.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:10:01.700 So having lost all that, I just, I recognized that, one, just how much I loved him and how

01:10:10.100 that was synonymous with wanting him to be happy.

01:10:15.460 And in some basic sense, his happiness would be my own, right?

01:10:18.260 So the capacity for envy would just completely went out the window.

01:10:21.380 There's just no way to feel a zero-sum contest with somebody who you love in that way.

01:10:27.100 But then I recognized that if a stranger had walked into the room at that moment,

01:10:32.500 literally, the mailman shows up, I would have felt the same way about him.

01:10:37.180 It was not contingent upon having had a history with this person.

01:10:41.360 I was in a state where I wanted all beings to have their dreams realized.

01:10:48.440 I wish nothing but happiness on every conscious system, right?

01:10:52.800 Effortlessly.

01:10:53.300 Let me pause for a moment so you can explain the neurobiology of that.

01:10:56.840 I've experienced it as well with MDMA.

01:10:59.700 And I find it to be the most joyous state I've ever experienced to have such, I don't possess,

01:11:11.780 I don't, unlike you, I don't have the vocabulary to even describe what it feels like other than

01:11:15.780 to just say you love everybody in, obviously, a very non-sexual way.

01:11:22.340 It's just male, female are all the same.

01:11:25.960 It sort of becomes this, you just want the best for everyone.

01:11:30.480 So what is it about the neurobiology or neurochemistry that can produce that state?

01:11:38.380 And I'll tell you what the follow-up question is going to be.

01:11:41.480 Is there anything we can do outside of taking that drug to even get part of that?

01:11:47.440 Well, yeah, unfortunately, I don't know the answer to the neurobiology.

01:11:50.980 I'm not sure it is known.

01:11:52.660 I think most of these drugs are serotonergic, but they clearly are different.

01:12:00.540 Which subset of the receptors they're hitting is, we don't exactly understand the causal

01:12:05.000 relationship between the receptor being...

01:12:07.400 Yeah.

01:12:08.140 I mean, and I'm, you know, frankly, I'm not up on the literature on MDMA, so there may

01:12:11.600 be some clues that I'm not aware of.

01:12:14.300 But, and I would also add the caveat that some of these drugs, I think there's reason to be

01:12:20.200 concerned about in terms of the physical effects of taking them too often or...

01:12:24.620 So MDMA is something that was profoundly useful for me.

01:12:28.600 I remain somewhat concerned that it is potentially neurotoxic.

01:12:33.760 I wouldn't want to take too much of it.

01:12:35.520 I haven't taken it for years.

01:12:36.980 And I have much less of a concern for other psychedelics.

01:12:42.200 I think LSD is, I mean, there's no evidence that it's neurotoxic, for instance.

01:12:46.840 Having spoken with people, psychiatrists who have taken care of patients who have probably

01:12:53.900 taken too much MDMA, the two things that I have learned from them, which echo what you're

01:12:59.820 saying is, yeah, it's generally safe, but it's very important.

01:13:04.320 Like any drug, I mean, these aren't regulated compounds, right?

01:13:06.940 So you're always running a risk when you take these things of other things that the drug

01:13:12.880 is cut with.

01:13:14.040 And there's toxicity that can be amplified as a result of that.

01:13:16.840 And the second thing that I've been told is anything over a frequency of about every

01:13:24.720 three months, and you start to run a risk of these serotonergic toxicities down the line.

01:13:32.400 So, you know, you can take that for what it's worth.

01:13:35.420 I mean, I'm certainly not providing guidance on that other than to echo your point that I

01:13:40.920 think one has to be very careful with these agents.

01:13:42.960 Now, at the same time, I'm not following the work of MAPS that closely.

01:13:46.840 So I'm not sure what doses or frequencies they're using with the vets that they're studying.

01:13:52.800 Yeah.

01:13:53.380 And I think the-

01:13:54.720 So presumably they've worked out some of these kinks as well.

01:13:57.100 Yeah.

01:13:57.580 But frankly, it would be worth it even if it were neurotoxic to some degree in the right

01:14:03.600 conditions for the right person.

01:14:04.880 If you had debilitating PTSD, maybe a little bit of long-term consequence or short-term toxicity

01:14:10.000 is worth it to cure that.

01:14:11.740 But, you know.

01:14:13.380 So then back to the second question, which is, when you think about that profound empathy

01:14:18.000 in that moment that you had at the age of 18, has your meditative practice, which has

01:14:23.020 obviously evolved greatly since then, allowed you to either transiently or otherwise experience

01:14:29.580 or re-experience that phenomenon?

01:14:31.100 Yeah.

01:14:31.780 Well, there is a practice that targets that mental status.

01:14:35.040 Actually, I mentioned it earlier.

01:14:36.740 Yeah.

01:14:36.820 Yeah.

01:14:37.260 Metta practice.

01:14:38.360 And metta is the Pali word for loving kindness.

01:14:40.420 And, yeah, there are people who do that practice almost exclusively or almost exclusively.

01:14:47.840 So describe it a little bit for the listener.

01:14:50.260 Unlike mindfulness, where you are letting go of any agenda you have for what your experience

01:14:57.160 should be, and you're just reconciling yourself to noticing however it is.

01:15:03.480 And if you do that, your experience does change in reliable ways, many of which are quite pleasant.

01:15:08.980 They can be amazingly pleasant, but it's not about securing those changes or amplifying

01:15:16.320 those changes.

01:15:17.120 Because insofar as that creeps in, you're not being mindful.

01:15:22.060 You're doing something other than merely witnessing what's happening.

01:15:25.900 And doing that is an expression of your own desire and attachment.

01:15:30.120 And you're trying to change your experience.

01:15:32.520 And that's different than simply being mindful of it.

01:15:37.520 But with a practice like metta, you do have a goal.

01:15:41.900 You're trying to feel this feeling of loving kindness as intensely as you can feel it, as

01:15:47.260 durably as you can feel it.

01:15:49.500 And you're trying to acquire a state change.

01:15:54.000 But you're also trying to acquire a trait change in that your default attitude toward other

01:15:59.500 human beings or even any other conscious system would be just well-wishing and good vibes.

01:16:08.400 And there's no question you can train that attitude.

01:16:12.520 And it comes from both a framing effect and from an immersion in this change of state that

01:16:20.060 you can kindle in meditation and then keep humming along based on concentration.

01:16:25.960 So the same kind of concept, the same faculty of mind that could become one-pointedly focused

01:16:32.120 on a mantra or a sight like a candle flame can become one-pointedly immersed in the feeling

01:16:41.920 of love for all humanity.

01:16:43.880 And it's initiated by thinking thoughts about other people.

01:16:51.640 So you'll just imagine someone who you love.

01:16:54.980 And it's important that this not be contaminated with your notion of romantic love, because so

01:17:00.660 much of what we think of as love in a romantic context is desire and attachment.

01:17:05.300 And it's not the same.

01:17:06.620 Is there a child an appropriate object of that type of attention?

01:17:10.540 Yeah.

01:17:11.160 A child, a friend, a parent, whoever in your life, you can have just as uncomplicated an

01:17:20.500 experience of wishing this person well, wishing them to be free of suffering, wishing them happiness.

01:17:26.760 And the usual progression is to start with someone like that, who you know, who's someone who's

01:17:31.600 close to you, and then transition to a neutral person, you know, someone who you have no,

01:17:38.000 just kind of a randomly picked person from the crowd or some public figure who you have

01:17:43.120 no strong association with, but who you can visualize.

01:17:46.140 And then you're wishing that person happiness, wishing that they be free of suffering.

01:17:50.960 You're actually thinking these thoughts in your mind as a kind of, almost as a kind of mantra,

01:17:55.680 but you're not, it's not the sound of the utterances, it's the import of them that you're trying

01:18:01.880 to connect with.

01:18:02.720 So you're thinking, may you be happy, may you be free from suffering.

01:18:08.260 You're reiterating this, you could have, you know, three or four ways of saying it, and

01:18:12.600 you're saying it over and over again, but then connecting with the actual kind of energetics

01:18:16.760 of the wish that you really do wish that this person who you love be free from suffering.

01:18:22.160 And it can become this very deep feeling of basking in this well of good intentions for

01:18:31.880 everybody, right?

01:18:33.120 Because then you can include not only a neutral person, but someone for whom you have a so-called

01:18:38.460 enemy, someone for whom you have a real negative association.

01:18:42.060 And then you begin to see the importance of framing around all these things.

01:18:46.640 So just like you said, for the customer service situation, maybe it just takes a second to realize,

01:18:51.240 wait a minute, here's a person who's been standing at this desk since six o'clock in the

01:18:56.500 morning, meeting one disgruntled person after the next, and now she or he has just met me.

01:19:03.100 Their experience is completely different from mine.

01:19:07.100 Which by the way, is a beautiful cut to the sort of issue that David Foster Wallace talks about so

01:19:12.640 much is every experience we have is only through our lens, right?

01:19:16.320 It's that insight alone, which now you're giving a very tangible example of, is so powerful just to

01:19:23.700 be able to hit pause on that for a moment and say, what you just said, right? This person's been

01:19:28.480 standing here for seven hours, seeing one pissed off face after another. What they're seeing now is

01:19:35.680 totally different from what I'm seeing.

01:19:37.220 Yeah, yeah. And your impatience isn't helping. And you are so glad that you're not in their shoes,

01:19:45.540 right? Like you don't want their job. You actually feel compassion for their experience, right?

01:19:52.040 And I mean, there are many, you know, hacks of this kind where you're driving in traffic and someone

01:19:57.480 cuts you off and, you know, your default experience is what an asshole. But it just takes a second to

01:20:05.280 realize, wait a minute, you have no idea what's going on with this person. You don't know if this

01:20:08.920 person is in a rush because they have some real emergency. You don't know if they're 90 years old.

01:20:16.580 Now you just honked at some 90 year old man or woman, right? And who's the asshole now? There's so

01:20:22.000 many changes of frame applied to the exact same experience, which just fundamentally change your

01:20:29.700 interpretation of it. A loving kindness practice is based on a fundamental frame change for more or

01:20:40.460 less everything you can encounter in human affairs, which is everyone is suffering. Everyone was once a

01:20:49.300 child condemned to now be the adult they now are, right? So like there is no evil person who invented

01:20:56.940 himself, right? There's no idea. And this is something I've talked about with respect to Saddam

01:21:01.680 Hussein in the past. I usually talk about this in the context of talking about free will, but

01:21:06.220 I mean, just look at someone like the prototypical evil person, you know, Saddam Hussein is about as good

01:21:11.260 as it gets, right? So you look at him as a 40 year old man. He's just a terrifyingly evil sociopath who,

01:21:18.940 if you're in favor of the death penalty, it definitely applies to him. But you roll back his

01:21:24.220 his lifeline by a few decades. And at a certain point, you say, okay, here's a 12 year old boy who

01:21:32.400 could have well been a scary 12 year old boy. But, you know, when he's four years old, he's a four

01:21:39.020 year old. And he's a four year old who has every strike against him in the sense that he's guaranteed,

01:21:46.920 it seems, to be a morally damaged human being. He's living in a society riven by sectarian conflict.

01:21:55.760 The norms to which he's being pushed, the aspirations he can form in this context,

01:22:02.520 are barbaric by any standard, you know, ethical standard that we would form today, right? And

01:22:08.880 the kind of person who can thrive in that context is someone who's morally damaged by our lives.

01:22:14.760 And he didn't pick his parents, he didn't pick his genes. He's not the author of himself. And yet

01:22:20.600 he's going to become this evil person who, you know, half the world or more will think is deserving

01:22:26.820 of death at the end of it. It's possible to feel compassion, even for someone like Saddam Hussein.

01:22:33.160 You know, that's a reframing that may be hard for some people to get there. But for someone who's

01:22:37.420 practicing a state like Mehta, that's the frame. And if you can get there, you can recognize that

01:22:45.800 there is this capacity for love and well-wishing that really extends without limit to every conscious

01:22:52.940 system. And you want everyone to be relieved of all their problems on some basic level. Because the

01:23:00.740 most badly behaved people in the world are, for the most part, expressing their problems. Even when

01:23:09.260 you have a truly sadistic person who seems to be deriving pleasure from causing other people

01:23:15.860 suffering, and such people exist, what you're witnessing there is someone for whom all these

01:23:22.480 other sources of pleasure and well-being are basically unavailable, right? This person on some

01:23:28.000 level can't know what he's missing. You know, this is a person who's never going to have good

01:23:33.640 relationships of the sort that you and I would demand for ourselves and everyone we love as the

01:23:39.940 necessary ingredients of a life well-lived. It's not to say you wouldn't want to put this person in jail

01:23:44.520 because there is no cure for this problem. I'm not recommending that we not protect ourselves from

01:23:49.960 malevolent people, but you don't actually have to hate them. I mean, feeling compassion for these

01:23:55.460 people isn't incompatible with taking the steps we need to take to keep society orderly and safe.

01:24:02.600 You know, one thing I would recommend to anybody who's interested in pulling a little more on this

01:24:07.360 thread is to do a prison visit.

01:24:10.860 Yeah. I've never done that, but I heard you and Tim did that, right?

01:24:14.040 Tim and I did it, and I did a podcast with a guy named Corey McCarthy, who himself was incarcerated

01:24:19.460 for seven years for attempted murder and a bunch of other stuff. And, you know, there's a group of

01:24:25.300 three or four or five of us that actually went and spent a couple of days at a maximum security prison.

01:24:31.040 And we played this game there called Step to the Line, which I'm sure you've heard of. And it's,

01:24:36.120 you know, it's a game that's played in many reasons, but the purpose is always to basically

01:24:40.020 highlight our similarities and our differences. So on the one side of the line, we're all of these

01:24:43.700 inmates. Now we're in a maximum security prison in California. So everybody in that room, I don't

01:24:50.520 remember the exact numbers. I believe 70% of those men were serving life sentences. Some staggering

01:24:56.760 number of these guys were in there because of, you know, homicide or, you know, some, something more

01:25:02.000 than like they were trafficking some marijuana. Right. Right. And on the other side are all of us as

01:25:07.020 volunteers. And then the game begins of Step to the Line If. And some of the differences are so

01:25:14.460 humbling that it, it, you can't be a, you can't be a reasonable human being and be in that situation

01:25:20.040 and not be moved by it. You know, Step to the Line If you had two parents in your household and

01:25:25.880 amongst the volunteers, you know, maybe 60% step forward. And amongst the inmates, I think one step

01:25:31.460 forward, you know, Step to the Line If someone close to you died before you were 10, you know,

01:25:41.000 or died a violent death before you were 10, you know, these sorts of things. And, you know, Step

01:25:45.500 to the Line If you grew up in a home that had more than five books and those of us as volunteers, most of

01:25:51.340 us step forward of the inmates, you know, five step forward out of 50, that kind of thing. Right.

01:25:56.060 And it's to your point, right? It's like, we're, we're not going to excuse the mistakes that took

01:26:02.660 place. And there's, you know, society has said there's going to be a price that one has to pay

01:26:07.520 for one mistakes. But boy, you realize pretty quickly the randomness that allows you or me to

01:26:15.520 be standing on one side of that line and not the other. Oh, yeah. Yeah. No, if you were in precisely

01:26:20.940 that other person's situation, genetically, environmentally, you would be that other

01:26:26.960 person, right? There's just, there is no daylight between all of those causes and conditions and the

01:26:32.460 outcome. And even, even adding randomness, I mean, it's not, you know, quantum mechanics doesn't get

01:26:37.440 you out of this situation. And I think of all the times I've been lucky. Like when I was in eighth

01:26:42.640 grade, there was a kid that was a year ahead who was like my hero. You know, he was the absolute

01:26:47.820 toughest kid in the school. I mean, he was the bad, the bad-ass and he took me under his wing,

01:26:54.480 you know? So I was like really lucky to be the eighth grader who this super tough, bad-ass kid

01:26:59.560 really liked. And two years later, he wound up in jail for armed robbery. And I've often thought to

01:27:06.540 myself, I was so impressionable that if I had been with him on that night and he said, look, we're going

01:27:13.240 to go hold up a liquor store. Like, I'm not sure I would have had the common sense, the intestinal

01:27:18.320 fortitude, the whatever, the courage to say, dude, that's a bad idea. I'm not going to go.

01:27:23.900 Right.

01:27:23.960 It's so easy that I could have gone along for that.

01:27:26.940 Yeah.

01:27:27.240 And as I learned later on, once you get in that system, like, you know, once you're 16 years old

01:27:33.540 and you're pegged for armed robbery, like it's very hard to recover to Stanford.

01:27:37.900 Yeah. Yeah.

01:27:39.440 So, so, but that's a, that's a moment's decision. And the, and the luck is like, were you there or

01:27:43.680 not there?

01:27:44.340 Right.

01:27:45.360 And, and I'm, I'm, I have way more cards that are favorable in my deck than virtually all of

01:27:50.120 these guys I met. And I, yet I still could have easily slipped over that, you know, into that

01:27:56.120 abyss of that endless vicious cycle of one, one, one knock after another until before you know it,

01:28:02.560 like you're 40 years old and you're in prison for life.

01:28:04.800 Yeah. I mean, so the philosophical insight here goes by the name of moral luck. And so

01:28:12.200 I think it originates with an essay that the philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote probably 30 years

01:28:18.060 ago. We rarely recognize how morally significant differences in luck are and, and, and just how

01:28:26.780 lucky you need to be to live a good moral life. Any one of those things could have been

01:28:34.300 marginally different and you'd be the guy who was an accessory to armed robbery, right? I mean,

01:28:40.560 just think of how many times most of us have driven drunk or not a hundred percent and nothing bad

01:28:49.600 happened. The difference between nothing bad happening and killing somebody in a crosswalk

01:28:54.580 is enormous and just life deranging stranger still, because it's now, it's not even classed for most

01:29:02.640 people as a significant risk. They're running texting while driving. I mean, I would say most of

01:29:08.560 the people listening to this podcast have not totally shut down their texting while driving,

01:29:15.020 right? They're not, they're not even thinking of it as a grotesquely irresponsible thing to be doing,

01:29:20.860 right? I mean, because it's just, it's too tempting. You're at a red light, but being at a red light

01:29:25.580 migrates into the first hundred feet of your now responding to a green light. And then there's the

01:29:32.120 moments on the freeway. And then, and every day there's some totally normal, responsible, upstanding

01:29:38.640 person like you or me who kills somebody's kid in a crosswalk because they were texting. The

01:29:45.340 significance of that difference in luck, it's extraordinary. And, you know, these are,

01:29:50.980 these are unrecoverable errors most of the time. So there are two sides to that. One, it can get you to,

01:29:58.060 to take more care in all the spots where more care massively increases your odds of living a happy,

01:30:05.160 fulfilling life. But it also can give you this different framing that allows you to feel compassion

01:30:10.520 for even the worst people on earth, right? You can just, you should recognize that if you change

01:30:16.000 enough of the variables, you would be playing the same game they're playing. And this is, I think this

01:30:20.660 is so important, Sam. I don't think I understood how important this was until I read something you

01:30:27.400 wrote, which I'm paraphrasing, so I'll be bastardizing it. But the gist of it was, it's really the,

01:30:34.860 the caliber quality of our thoughts that determine the quality of our life. And I, so let's take a

01:30:41.140 most extreme example. I had a friend who was killed by a motorist who was texting. So he was on his

01:30:47.940 bike. He couldn't have been in a safer spot actually. And, um, but woman, you know, got distracted

01:30:56.560 for a moment and killed him. And I was angry in a way that sort of felt like it was never going to

01:31:05.820 go away. And truthfully, a big part of it was selfish. It was, I don't want this to happen to me

01:31:11.360 now. You know, I'm, I, at the time I was a cyclist, I was like, I'm sick and tired of seeing cyclists

01:31:16.800 get hit. And some of the times they're getting killed, but they're getting hit all the time.

01:31:20.860 Right. And it's, it always seems to be these, not always, but 90% of the time it's these distracted

01:31:24.740 drivers. Sometimes the cyclist just does something stupid, but for the most part, if you get hit,

01:31:29.760 if a road, if a cyclist on the road gets hit, the driver's usually at fault. Interestingly, unless

01:31:34.560 alcohol is involved, those drivers are never prosecuted. Right. And I spent so much time being

01:31:40.100 so pissed off. And part of it was just my own grandiosity. Like my life is too valuable. I'm not

01:31:46.060 going to die on the side of a road because some driver's too stupid to turn off their phone or blah,

01:31:50.100 blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But then I, I had, you know, after kind of reading something you wrote,

01:31:56.280 I, I reflected on it years later and thought, I've never once asked myself what that person is going

01:32:01.800 through who killed Nick. Yeah. Yeah. What is her life like today? Cause there's no way she forgot that.

01:32:08.720 There's no way she doesn't go to bed at night and think about the fact that she, it's such a tragic

01:32:14.160 story. Not only did she kill a guy who's just a beautiful soul who had, you know, a bunch of children,

01:32:20.100 he was killed two days before his life insurance policy kicked in. He was killed on, uh, I believe

01:32:27.460 it was May 30th. No, it was May 31st. And he had a policy that didn't start until June 1st.

01:32:32.240 I mean, it's like, you couldn't make this story up. It's so tragic, but it's too easy to not reflect

01:32:38.380 on her pain. Yeah. Which you could say, well, Peter, that's ridiculous. She doesn't deserve

01:32:43.260 any empathy. Put all of that empathy towards Nick's family. But it, in the end, if I'm really

01:32:50.420 optimizing for my own quality of life, there's no upside to just being upset about this. Like there

01:32:58.100 is some benefit to accepting the fact that everybody here loses. And if that makes me less

01:33:03.880 angry and makes me hate that person less, isn't that a good way to think about things?

01:33:09.640 Well, yeah, but I would even put it more strongly because again, she, the driver was profoundly

01:33:16.460 unlucky because she was, she was guilty of doing something that everyone listening to this podcast

01:33:22.780 has done and didn't pay that price. Worse still, she's guilty of doing something that most of the

01:33:30.220 people listening to this podcast will continue to do even after hearing this podcast.

01:33:35.980 This is a reset that I'm convinced most people are not quite ready for. At a certain point,

01:33:40.600 self-driving cars will come to the rescue. But the difference between being someone who was texting

01:33:46.000 and didn't even notice the danger because nothing bad happened and being someone who killed your friend

01:33:52.520 is just luck, you know? And so, yeah, and you can only imagine how awful it has been to be the person

01:34:02.700 who was irresponsibly texting and who killed somebody in the, in the prime of their life just to hear the

01:34:10.940 details and to have been the person who initiated that tsunami of suffering. Just imagine a website where

01:34:19.260 you present the texts that were the proximate cause of death.

01:34:26.960 Right. How irrelevant they must have been.

01:34:29.260 Yeah. The juxtaposition between what people were felt couldn't wait another 30 seconds or 30 minutes and

01:34:36.780 And what ultimately resulted in the loss of life.

01:34:39.320 Yeah. It would be astonishing. I mean, we can all predict what it would be, but

01:34:42.240 That's a sick idea, but it's a pretty damn good idea.

01:34:44.880 Yeah. Yeah. Again, it's just, if you imagine what that woman went through, it's, you would not want

01:34:51.780 to trade places with her.

01:34:53.440 So I want to shift gears for a moment and go back to a discussion I had a week ago with one of my

01:34:57.040 friends who's, who's a patient. He's been really struggling the last few months. He's a, he's a,

01:35:04.960 he's a father. He's a wonderful guy. He's got two kids, three dogs, and he's a guy with a really

01:35:11.060 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

01:35:17.060 never be upset at anybody. He could never, you know, not want to take care of somebody around

01:35:21.420 him. And, but his, one of the dogs, which was the first dog he ever had died, had cancer. And they

01:35:29.700 went through a bunch of treatments and, and the dog ultimately died. And I think for him losing that

01:35:34.900 dog was, was certainly on the spectrum of losing a child, right? I don't think it's the same, but,

01:35:40.720 but I think for him, it was very difficult and he's been unable to sort of get back in the, in the

01:35:47.760 saddle, so to speak. And it's, it's reflected in frankly, his cortisol levels. I've never seen

01:35:52.800 cortisol levels so high. So his, his degree of hypercortisolemia is if you didn't know better,

01:35:58.320 you'd think he had a cortisol secreting tumor actually. It's so profound. And we were talking

01:36:03.580 about it and he confessed that he couldn't stop dreading the death of his other two dogs

01:36:11.100 who are, you know, age six and seven or something like that. So these aren't dogs that are going to

01:36:16.360 die tomorrow. In fact, these aren't even dogs that are, you know, sick in any way, shape or form.

01:36:21.460 Right. But as he's three months out from the death of this dog, that was probably 14 or 15,

01:36:26.280 he's spending every moment now dreading the loss of these dogs that are going to die in five years

01:36:35.500 or something like that. And it was very hard for me to try to console him because I didn't want to

01:36:40.840 be dismissive of the pain, but I also wanted to remind him that, you know, that's the antithesis of

01:36:46.860 being present, right? It's like, but your children and your two dogs are right here with you right now.

01:36:52.660 And they're perfect. And all the worrying you can do about when these two dogs die doesn't change

01:36:59.620 the fact that they're going to die, but you don't know when, and you don't know how, and you don't

01:37:03.380 know any of these things. How would you explain to someone like that in not necessarily the most

01:37:10.980 technical sense, but maybe in sort of an appeal to their emotion, why this effort isn't going to pan

01:37:19.200 out and why there needs to be a new strategy for getting over this loss? Well, it depends on

01:37:25.520 whether or not the person is living an examined life of the sort that we've been discussing. So

01:37:31.500 this is a person who has no meditation practice and is not interested in that mode. He is. So I've

01:37:40.640 given him your books, he has been going through the meditation course that you have, but is still

01:37:50.080 having a real hard time, like all of us, I think in taking it from, you know, I, the example I use is

01:37:55.980 like, if you go to the gym and you sort of lift weights for 15, 20 minutes a day, you know, that's, that's

01:38:02.260 great. But the whole purpose of doing that is to take those new muscles and be able to use them in the

01:38:07.060 other 23 and a half hours. Right. And so I think that's the transition is like, I think the theory

01:38:11.740 makes sense to him, but it's now, how does one actually bridge that gap? So let's, for the purpose

01:38:17.360 of the discussion, let's say he accepts conceptually the value of this. Yeah. Well, so then to become

01:38:24.180 sensitive to the actual mechanics of suffering, I mean, that the only way to suffer this dog's absence

01:38:30.860 is to think about it and not know that you're thinking about it. Right. So it is to be

01:38:35.860 subsumed by this process of ideation and to have no perspective on it. And framing can help here.

01:38:46.500 So you can, you can say, well, there were many experiences he had with this dog alive where the

01:38:54.980 dog wasn't physically present, right? The dog leaves the room. There's no greater absence from a room

01:39:02.500 than simply leaving it. Right. Now it's an additional operation to think, well, there's a

01:39:08.340 big difference because I'll never see him again. Right. But everyone you love in the world, animals.

01:39:13.860 You're the only person I love who's in this room. Exactly. Right. They're all out of this room.

01:39:18.340 So in principle, you know what it's like to be content in moments where. In the physical absence.

01:39:24.740 In the physical absence of everyone you love in this world. It's possible. And the only way to

01:39:32.500 make it intolerable to be in a room without everyone you love is to meditate on how intolerable it is

01:39:41.300 that they're not in the room with you right now. And this is why meditation is such an amazing

01:39:47.460 skill because it has a point of contact with your prison story. This is a point I make several

01:39:55.860 places. I think I make it in my book, Waking Up. The amazing thing about meditation is that, you know,

01:40:00.580 once you actually know how to meditate, it's possible to be alone in a room for weeks and months and even

01:40:07.780 years. You know, several teachers I studied with had spent literally years alone in caves where

01:40:15.780 in most people's lives, solitary confinement is considered a punishment, even in a circumstance

01:40:24.740 where to be outside of that room is to be surrounded by murderers and rapists who you might have to

01:40:32.260 fight. Right. So like even in prison, people don't want to be in solitary confinement because it's so

01:40:37.700 intolerable to be left alone with your thoughts. There's an evolutionary rationale for this. I mean,

01:40:44.260 we are clearly evolved to be social primates and a circumstance where you find yourself alone more

01:40:52.900 or less forever is not an optimum in evolutionary terms. But it's just simply a fact of the human

01:41:01.540 mind that it's possible to discover a form of well-being that is not only survives contact with

01:41:08.340 the solitude, but it's just totally undiminished by solitude. And if you can discover that even for

01:41:15.140 moments at a time, you can then enjoy the company of everyone you love without this feeling that your

01:41:24.980 well-being is at its core predicated on being able to have them at any moment you want, or that

01:41:33.540 that is predicated on the totally forlorn hope that this circumstance is going to endure forever,

01:41:40.740 that no one will die, that no one will leave you. We know that's not in the cards. And, you know,

01:41:48.260 we need to find whatever form of well-being is possible, given the fact that things are continually

01:41:55.780 changing. You know, your thought experiment or not, I mean, it wasn't really a thought experiment,

01:42:00.660 but it made me think of something was, think of all the people who are thrust into solitary

01:42:06.500 confinement. I mean, tragically in this country, it's an absolute epidemic in the US prison system.

01:42:14.340 And for all of the realities of how inhumane that is, especially for the lengths of time people find

01:42:20.660 themselves in there, do you think there's a subset of people who inadvertently stumble into mindfulness

01:42:26.740 without being formally taught? So the, the analogy would be like, if I threw 16 year old Sam into a

01:42:33.700 weight room, but I'd never shown him or forget a weight room into a basketball court, you'd never

01:42:39.940 seen basketball before. There is a basketball, there is a net. And I said, you know, you're confined to

01:42:45.940 this room for a year. Like at some point, will you figure out picking up the ball, bouncing it?

01:42:51.780 I wonder if, how hard it is to put that ball through that hoop over there, shooting at all

01:42:55.460 of those things. I mean, it seems unlikely, right? It seems like on some level you would have to at

01:42:59.220 least be shown what to do. And then even if you're left alone, if you could come back to that lesson.

01:43:04.180 And so similarly, you take a guy and let's say you put him in solitary confinement for a year.

01:43:07.860 He's had no exposure to mindfulness. Is there a chance he's going to spontaneously figure out,

01:43:12.980 oh my God, this is far less painful if I'm actually present in, you know, the sensations

01:43:20.020 of my body versus the ruminations and thoughts that are going to torment me? Or is that something

01:43:25.140 that is just so counterintuitive to the ethos of who we are that no way, like, you know, you're going

01:43:32.580 to have to have had some exposure to this, to at least be able to be thrust in that environment.

01:43:37.700 It's definitely possible because it is just the way consciousness is if you're paying attention.

01:43:45.380 So it's there to be recognized in each moment. But the odds are against anyone doing it. I mean,

01:43:52.900 there are people who have spontaneously awakened to this. I mean, they're kind of famous, you know,

01:43:57.700 adepts and certainly in the Eastern tradition. There are also, there are Western philosophers who've had

01:44:02.260 intimations of this where Jean-Jacques Rousseau has a story about, you know, riding in a boat on a lake,

01:44:10.260 I think, and spontaneously falling into kind of some very open and non-egocentric state of consciousness

01:44:17.700 that we would recognize. But the difference between having clear information and a clear map

01:44:25.060 and not, or having an erroneous one, it's just enormous. So-

01:44:29.380 I know I wouldn't have been able to have done it. Like when I think about how

01:44:34.100 counterintuitive, how difficult it is to practice mindfulness, to go through the practice.

01:44:40.180 Yeah.

01:44:40.580 Like, I think if you'd put me in solitary confinement for a hundred years, I would have never stumbled

01:44:45.060 into that, unfortunately. So I would have been confined to, you know, just been tortured.

01:44:50.340 Also, worse still, it's possible to be practicing mindfulness and to be on retreat and not recognize

01:45:01.540 many of the things that you really do want to recognize about the nature of the mind,

01:45:06.660 because the way the mindfulness has been taught to you is, however, subtly encouraging of a kind

01:45:12.980 of goal-seeking practice. And this is something I write about in my book and talk about in my app.

01:45:23.300 It's possible to be practicing mindfulness in a way that is dualistic. It's kind of ramifying of the

01:45:29.780 subject-object perception and, therefore, the goal of recognizing the selflessness of consciousness and

01:45:39.540 being relieved of this sense of, you know, ego at the center of it, the sense that there's a

01:45:44.340 meditator or a thinker of thoughts or an experiencer of experience, that that can be posited as the

01:45:51.940 ultimate goal of some incredibly laborious spiritual path that just has to be traversed

01:45:59.220 by increments over years. And that's an error. That's a mistake. I mean, that's just not

01:46:05.220 true. It's already true of consciousness that the ego is an illusion. And that can be realized directly.

01:46:13.460 And the expectation that it can't be is, in some basic sense, self-fulfilling for most people.

01:46:22.820 So, yeah, you can be in the most auspicious circumstance, having devoted a massive part

01:46:29.380 of your life to just practicing mindfulness and still be in a kind of crucible of unnecessary

01:46:36.980 seeking and suffering because you have an erroneous understanding of what the path actually is.

01:46:43.460 I want, there are a couple of, um, sort of semantics I want to, you, you've already alluded to a little

01:46:47.460 bit that the, the, the relationship between Vipassana and mindfulness, where does Dzogchen fit

01:46:52.820 into this? And like, if you were to try to draw a Venn diagram of these, these, these different

01:46:58.340 concepts, how would they overlap? Well, so Vipassana is the, the name of the practice in Theravada

01:47:07.060 Buddhism, the oldest tradition of Buddhism. And this is the Buddhism of, of Thailand and Burma and

01:47:15.300 Sri Lanka. And Vipassana, as I said, means insight. And you're having insight into what are thought

01:47:23.860 of as a fundamental, the fundamental characteristics of all phenomenon. And these are impermanence

01:47:32.020 and selflessness and unsatisfactoriness. It is often misleadingly translated as suffering rather

01:47:40.900 than unsatisfactoriness. So many people believe that the Buddha taught that life is suffering or

01:47:46.020 that all experience contains some intrinsic suffering. That's not quite the message. It's,

01:47:52.580 it's that life is a circumstance where there is no unchanging, fully satisfactory basis for

01:48:03.140 one's happiness because everything is changing. It's by virtue of impermanence that the boat is always

01:48:10.660 leaking, right? We're always bailing water. We're always responding to some slow emergency, really,

01:48:18.100 you know, where our health is always put in question. There's always some new pain arising in

01:48:24.100 the body because we're simply not moving, right? You always have to respond to something. And our

01:48:28.420 pleasures, however hard won, are fleeting. You know, they're vanishing even in the act of acquiring them.

01:48:34.020 So there's no place to land that is secure. And that's largely by virtue of the impermanence of

01:48:43.380 sensory experience. But the selflessness component is separable from those two other characteristics. And

01:48:54.580 well, I should say, so that's Vipassana. Vipassana is a practice whereby you would have insight into

01:49:00.180 those three characteristics. And mindfulness is the tool you use to have those insights. The training

01:49:07.380 in mindfulness is a training in a kind of awareness of experience, which is non-judgmental, non-reactive.

01:49:15.860 You're not seeking to maximize pleasure. You're not trying to make pains go away. You're just becoming

01:49:21.220 interested in a very open and focused way on just what the character of every experience is.

01:49:30.340 So if you're feeling restless, rather than try not to feel restless, you're becoming interested in

01:49:37.220 and increasingly aware of the actual characteristics moment to moment of restlessness. How is it that you

01:49:42.740 know you're restless? Where is it? What is it? I mean, we're talking about a pattern of energy in the

01:49:48.500 body that you can suddenly recognize as arising totally on its own and changing based on its own

01:49:56.180 dynamics. And you are merely the witness of that change in state. And so it is with any pleasant

01:50:01.860 emotion or experience. And you keep dropping back into merely witnessing. And that is mindfulness when

01:50:08.340 you can do it, when you're actually not trying to change anything, you're not judging anything, and

01:50:12.260 you're not staying at the conceptual level. You're not thinking about experience. You're just

01:50:20.260 experiencing experience more and more closely. And so if it's a matter of paying attention to

01:50:26.180 sensations in the body, you're not staying at the level where you feel like, oh, my hands are sweaty.

01:50:32.340 Right? No, you're actually, you're feeling the temperature and the tingling and the pressure

01:50:39.060 so closely that the concept of hands and sweat disappear. Right? So you're just feeling the raw

01:50:45.860 data of experience. And these changes can be pleasant. I mean, your sense of even having a body

01:50:51.860 can disappear while you're meditating. And just, it just resolves into a cloud of sensation. So

01:50:59.380 Dzogchen is a Tibetan practice tradition, which is explicitly non-dualistic. And what that means in this

01:51:08.020 context is, it goes after the selflessness of the mind very directly. Because most of us start

01:51:18.660 meditating where we are in our normal states of cognition with the sense that there's a subject

01:51:27.540 in the middle of experience. There's a mind in the head. And it is, by definition, separate from

01:51:35.780 everything that it knows. Right? So there's the subject that can be aware of sights and sounds and

01:51:41.940 sensations. And this subject is also a thinker. It's producing, it's in some sense, the author of

01:51:49.140 thoughts. And it's me. And I feel like I'm over here in my head, behind my face. You know, almost

01:51:57.300 wearing my face as a kind of mask. Right? I'm not identical to my face. I'm behind my face. And you're

01:52:02.020 looking across space at me. And your gaze has an implication for me. Because I can, you know, if I

01:52:09.220 follow where you're looking, I'm over here and not identical to my body. Right? I'm in my body. I'm a kind

01:52:16.340 of passenger in my body. I mean, you and I, I can say, well, you know, my hand is, I've got, you know,

01:52:21.860 an injury to my hand. And you and I can both look at my hand as a kind of object in space. Right?

01:52:26.420 My hand is part of the world. Separate from both of us. Yeah. And, you know, obviously,

01:52:30.020 I care more about my hand than you do, because it's my hand. But if something's wrong with my hand,

01:52:35.540 I'm still over here, up in my head, behind my eyes, some distance from the hand. And I can imagine

01:52:41.300 being without the hand. Right? It could be, you know, if I lost my hand in an accident,

01:52:44.660 well, then I would have one less hand. But I'd still be me up here in my head, behind my eyes.

01:52:49.380 Right? That locus of knowing, that sense of being located in the head as a self, as an ego,

01:52:57.460 is the starting point for everyone in meditation. And you can do Vipassana from that starting point.

01:53:06.500 You can be taught the method of mindfulness meditation. And you just begin to pay more and

01:53:11.780 more attention to what it's like to be you. And you can notice these three characteristics

01:53:16.580 of impermanence and selflessness and unsatisfactoriness. The Pali is anicca, dukkha,

01:53:21.620 and anatta, or anicca, anatta, and dukkha, in that order. And you can start from wherever you are,

01:53:27.460 and who knows how long it will take you to have this insight, a fundamental insight,

01:53:32.180 into the illusoriness of that starting point, of being a subject in the head.

01:53:35.860 Now, with Dzogchen, you can't start until you've had that insight. And so the path of Dzogchen entails

01:53:43.460 becoming available to that insight in various ways. It's usually a matter of actually forming a

01:53:51.540 connection with what's called a Dzogchen master in the Tibetan tradition. As someone who can actually

01:53:56.180 point this out to you in conversation, and for most people...

01:54:01.860 Meaning they can point out to you when you are falling to the illusion of ego? Meaning they can

01:54:09.780 point out when you are defaulting back into that mode?

01:54:12.740 Well, no. They can point out the intrinsic egolessness of consciousness in a way that you

01:54:20.420 can recognize it and then practice that. Because most people, they start meditating,

01:54:26.820 they still feel like they're up in their heads paying attention. It's that now I'm paying attention

01:54:31.620 to the breath. Now I'm noticing the difference between being lost in thought and being mindful.

01:54:37.140 But it doesn't fundamentally cut through the sense that there is one who can be mindful.

01:54:43.140 Right. And you can have experiences where the distance, the apparent distance between subject

01:54:50.820 and object can collapse, but they can come in a haphazard way where you don't know how you had

01:54:58.580 them and you don't know how you'll have them again. It can come by virtue of paying closer and

01:55:03.780 closer attention to sounds and sensations and things that are arising. And you can suddenly feel like,

01:55:10.500 oh, in that moment of hearing that bird, there was no me and there was no bird. There was just hearing.

01:55:18.020 That can collapse again and again. And it did for me, you know, when I was spending time on retreat,

01:55:23.940 practicing Vipassana. But I always associated it with the intense concentration of retreat.

01:55:31.620 And it seemed unavailable to me in ordinary moments of consciousness. You know, off retreat,

01:55:37.860 you know, I'm driving in traffic or, you know, working at my computer or whatever. Like,

01:55:41.620 there's no way I'm going to touch that level of concentration. You know, I haven't been spending

01:55:45.860 14 hours a day meditating. So this is a kind of a peak experience that isn't available now. Well,

01:55:53.700 with Dzogchen, you discover that the reverse is true. All the peak experiences are no more empty of

01:56:00.980 self than ordinary waking consciousness is. And you can recognize this about consciousness in any

01:56:08.420 moment. And it doesn't actually require previous moments of building momentum. I mean, framing really

01:56:16.340 counts for a lot here. So I spent a lot of time practicing with this one Burmese meditation master,

01:56:22.180 Upandita Sayadaw. And the analogy he would often use is that progress in Vipassana is like rubbing two

01:56:30.100 sticks together to get fire. The moment you stop, the heat dissipates and you're back to zero. Right?

01:56:36.820 So it's like you'd have the sense of you'd be on retreat with him practicing for, you know, up to 20

01:56:41.940 hours a day and trying to make your mindfulness absolutely continuous. So that's the difference between

01:56:47.700 sitting and walking meditation and every other moment. I mean, you're doing a ton of sitting

01:56:51.860 and walking meditation. It's like 16 hours a day of that. But every other moment when like you're going

01:56:57.060 to meals or anything else, you wake up and get out of bed in the morning, every transitional moment,

01:57:02.260 getting a cup of tea, you're trying to link every instant of conscious awareness together with

01:57:09.300 mindfulness. And whenever you would get distracted, part of you would begin scoring that as

01:57:17.060 a failure to build up enough momentum to get to the goal of the fundamental breakthrough that was

01:57:24.340 on offer by that path. So this framing, this idea that you're rubbing two sticks together,

01:57:28.900 the moment you stop, they're cooling off and you've made no progress, right? That's the opposite

01:57:36.020 framing for Dzogchen. The framing you need for Dzogchen is there's this something already true

01:57:44.260 of consciousness. You're not trying to produce this thing. You're not trying to get rid of the ego.

01:57:49.780 You're not trying to change anything about what is. You're trying to recognize

01:57:56.340 a feature of consciousness that is already the case. And it's actually nearer to you than you think.

01:58:03.300 It's not a matter of going deep within and having some kind of breakthrough. It's actually

01:58:09.940 right on the surface of the most ordinary form of consciousness. It doesn't require any pyrotechnic

01:58:15.860 change in the contents of consciousness. You're not actually closer to it if you take acid and all

01:58:22.660 the colors begin to change, or you feel a change in your energy such that you feel this kind of buzz of

01:58:31.140 connectedness to all things. As anyone who's taken acid can verify, that's on offer.

01:58:39.460 But all of that's interesting. I'm not discounting the power of those experiences, but those experiences

01:58:47.700 are no less empty of self than every state of consciousness. Precisely the state of consciousness

01:58:55.780 that's compatible with reaching for a glass of water and drinking it without anything novel

01:59:02.820 intruding. There's no bliss. There's no rapture. There's no profound or spiritual

01:59:09.060 change in state. It's possible to recognize in that moment that there's no center to consciousness.

01:59:17.140 And so what Dzogchen is, is the path of discovering that there's no center and then taking that insight

01:59:25.540 as your only object of mindfulness. So that what you're mindful of thereafter is that there's no

01:59:34.020 center to consciousness. So whatever's appearing, sights, sounds, sensations, you are continually dropping

01:59:41.860 the implied center. It's kind of a steep path because it's hard to start. You can't, you can't

01:59:49.060 really start. I mean, everything you're doing before you have that insight and can notice it again on

01:59:54.820 demand, everything you're doing is by definition a preliminary practice to that because you need

02:00:00.500 enough mindfulness to notice what is to be noticed and to follow the instructions to start that path.

02:00:07.780 But it's, you certainly don't have to have spent years on retreat to start that path. And so it's

02:00:13.060 having good information is, is certainly better than, than having misleading information there.

02:00:19.060 This practice, as I said, is, is, it's challenging. It's just not, there's no two ways around it. I think it's

02:00:28.420 for some people, it's probably as difficult as saying to someone who's 40 years old, who's never

02:00:34.340 exercised deliberately a day in their life. Okay. It's time to start spending an hour a day in the

02:00:40.100 gym and you're going to be doing these new movements and they're going to be very uncomfortable.

02:00:44.020 And for many people, you know, a few weeks or months into that exercise routine, they're still

02:00:50.260 not finding any great source of pleasure. And there are some of us who love exercising. Like we just get a,

02:00:55.860 again, going back to the, the lingo of states versus traits, like the, you know,

02:01:00.820 I worked out this morning before I saw you and I mean, I was in a new gym for the first time. And

02:01:06.500 sometimes that is a little, you're sort of like, I don't know where all the equipment is or, you know,

02:01:10.180 blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But, but regardless, it's just the actual state of exercise to me is so

02:01:16.740 pleasurable, even if it didn't offer any traits that were advantageous outside of it. Of course,

02:01:22.580 the real reason we exercise is not for the hour that we're in the gym, moving around these artificial

02:01:27.940 pieces of iron. It's because of the benefit that gives us both metabolically and structurally

02:01:33.940 beyond the time we're exercising. Right.

02:01:36.900 For, is it safe to say that for most people, the experience of meditation doesn't produce a state

02:01:43.380 that is necessarily as pleasurable as say the MDMA state was that you could describe. And that really the,

02:01:50.260 the reason this ought to be considered by someone who is not meditating is more the traits that come

02:01:56.980 outside of the act of meditating, the act of the practice.

02:02:01.620 Yes. Well, so it's possible to have extremely pleasant states arise in meditation, both

02:02:10.340 ones that have a kind of ethical implication like loving kindness and ones that just are

02:02:16.100 sort of the equivalent of you being on heroin. Right. So it's not necessarily pointed in any

02:02:20.660 auspicious or pro-social direction. It's just you experiencing more pleasure than you've ever experienced.

02:02:26.580 But none of those experiences really can be the point because they're transitory. When they're

02:02:32.580 gone, they really are gone. I mean, the demeaning analogy to drugs is not inaccurate. Like, what's the point

02:02:41.620 if it's just a matter of getting high and you're no better person in the world as a result of having had that

02:02:49.300 experience? So it really is about having a fundamentally different relationship to experience in general.

02:02:58.180 All of the counterproductive ways in which you grasp at the pleasant and push the unpleasant away.

02:03:04.820 I mean, that is a fairly Buddhist framing of it, but I think it's appropriate. I mean, basically,

02:03:12.340 it's about not suffering unnecessarily in the end, right? And then not broadcasting your suffering

02:03:20.500 to the rest of humanity. So it can't be about having an experience that's extremely pleasant

02:03:29.860 and becoming more and more attached to that experience. And so that's one of the things

02:03:35.620 that's misleading and a potential downside of getting very good at so-called concentration practices or

02:03:43.540 absorption practices is that they don't have the power to give you a perspective that is a fundamental

02:03:49.220 antidote to egocentricity and selfishness and even, you know, kind of starkly unethical instincts

02:03:58.500 in other areas of your life. And they really can be fundamentally no more interesting from a kind of

02:04:07.060 a larger examined life perspective than a drug experience. I mean, to take some clear examples

02:04:13.380 here, there have been gurus who have behaved shockingly unethically in their lives and had,

02:04:20.900 you know, their reputations ruined and just leave a wake of unhappy and even destroyed people behind

02:04:27.620 them who, there was no doubt, were meditative athletes and, in many cases, focused on concentration

02:04:36.660 practices. So, like, if you had asked, well, what was it like to be these gurus when they were meditating?

02:04:43.300 Certainly not all of them were frauds. Many of them were, you know, truly talented meditators.

02:04:48.660 But they were meditating in a way that was not, it was a separate game they were playing, right? And

02:04:55.140 again, it was a game that was probably produced immense pleasure while they were doing it,

02:05:01.380 but it didn't fully undercut everything else about them that was going to be, you know, fairly

02:05:09.540 monstrous in relationship to other human beings. This is where framing or the overall concept of

02:05:17.380 what one is doing is pretty important because it's, there are pathological states of pleasure.

02:05:24.820 There are even pathological states of spiritual pleasure. I mean, I think the suicide bomber before

02:05:29.860 he detonates his bomb, they're in states of a kind of ecstasy. I mean, they have a religious expectation

02:05:38.340 for what's about to happen, which entails going to paradise and experiencing more pleasure than

02:05:43.620 anyone can imagine. And in almost every case, that's sincere and deeply felt. And these people are

02:05:50.740 about to get whatever they want and they know the creator of the universe is happy that they're going

02:05:55.220 to get it. So that there's nothing about ecstasy per se that is good or even benign because it can be pointed

02:06:03.060 in the wrong direction. I think it's a missile that doesn't necessarily come with a guidance system.

02:06:08.180 Yeah. And I think what we're looking for to lead truly better lives across the board is something

02:06:15.620 that is anchored to an ethics, for lack of a better word, where our spiritual or contemplative tools

02:06:25.940 are actually making us better people across the board. And again, there's some bright lines here

02:06:32.260 that I think are useful to draw. I mean, so for instance, not lying is a major variable for me,

02:06:40.580 ethically. It's just like having formed a commitment to being honest in basically every situation that

02:06:47.220 wasn't like just a self-defense situation. I mean, I don't think you have to be honest to the person who's

02:06:51.620 attacking you, right? Or seems likely to attack you. But to put dishonesty somewhere on the continuum

02:06:58.420 of violence and only resort to it where things have broken down so much that you're just not

02:07:03.140 dealing with another person as though they're a rational interlocutor, that is massively simplifying

02:07:09.220 of a person's life. Right now, very few people have made that commitment, but having made it...

02:07:13.940 When did you make that commitment? I know you've spoken about this, but how old were you when you

02:07:18.340 decided that...? I was 18. I was freshman year in college. I took a course taught by this great

02:07:26.580 professor, Ron Howard. Not to be confused with that, Ron Howard.

02:07:30.180 Yeah, no, not the former actor, now director. This course was just an examination of whether

02:07:36.340 it was ever ethical to lie. You know, virtually everyone goes into that course more or less

02:07:42.500 not even knowing what their relationship to lying is. They haven't been sensitized to

02:07:47.300 it as a significant variable in their lives in terms of, you know, maintaining their relationships or

02:07:54.020 their reputations or... Yeah, I lie sometimes and they're white lies and, you know, sometimes it's

02:07:59.780 just too awkward to tell the truth or... And you don't know how often you do it, but you know everybody

02:08:04.740 does it and the world could be no other way. And this course was just a machine for exposing the

02:08:14.180 dysfunction of that and more or less it became this... It was like a seminar where everyone was just kind

02:08:20.820 of coming up with scenarios where it must be all right to lie. I mean, surely this is a white lie that

02:08:25.700 is better told and the professor would shoot that down. And most people left the course more or less

02:08:35.620 certain that lying was virtually always the wrong move for purely selfish reasons. It was just like it was

02:08:42.100 not creating the life you want. And by being committed to not lying, you were closing the door

02:08:49.300 to all kinds of complexity and risk, you know, both interpersonally and reputationally,

02:08:56.340 that you absolutely want to close the door to. I mean, it's almost analogous to like to texting while

02:09:02.420 driving. Just decide not to text while driving. You will not care about all those texts.

02:09:07.780 You don't have to worry about, well, I'll only text at intersections or if I'm stuck in traffic,

02:09:14.580 but we're not going that fast or whatever. Yeah. I can assure you that you will never

02:09:20.420 really regret the texts you'd sent later when you, when you finally arrived at your destination.

02:09:26.180 So how old were you when you met your wife, your now wife?

02:09:29.860 31. Okay. So you've had 13 years of this practice of not lying. And now you meet the woman you're

02:09:37.620 ultimately going to marry who presumably hasn't taken this course or made this commitment.

02:09:42.740 At some point, does that become a discussion, which is, by the way, I'm going to be a little

02:09:48.740 different than most guys that you've met in that, you know, if you ask me, if you look good in that

02:09:53.700 dress and I don't think you do, I'm just going to say you don't. Right.

02:09:57.460 Please don't interpret that as I'm an insensitive prick. I just don't want to go down that. Like,

02:10:02.340 did you ever have that discussion that sort of prefaced or, or maybe your wife's the wrong

02:10:07.860 example, but like, I mean, I've been, as you're explaining this, I'm thinking about all of the

02:10:12.580 lies I tell. No, it was sort of, you kind of stumble into it. I mean, you, you wind up training

02:10:18.180 the people around you to know what they're going to get from you. Right. And it's not, not necessarily

02:10:23.620 explicit. It's just in that case. Yeah. I mean, she, it became very clear, very quickly,

02:10:30.260 just what sort of importance I put on honesty. And, you know, there, there are a few hiccups in,

02:10:37.880 in many relationships, but the gain that people notice very, very quickly, which I don't think

02:10:43.940 they would want to forfeit to smooth over any of other possible awkwardness is they know you're

02:10:50.940 never going to lie to them. Right. They know that you're being truthful. And so like when you have said,

02:10:57.720 you know, that you didn't like something in a spot where most other people would have just

02:11:02.760 told some kind of white lie, so as not to have to communicate that, then your, your praise

02:11:08.580 means that much more. You know, if you're a creative person who's often needs to get feedback from

02:11:15.140 people, you immediately discover this. When I give a piece of writing to somebody and ask for feedback,

02:11:22.400 who do I value more? The person who is just going to praise me because they think that's what I want

02:11:29.120 to hear. And because they, they find it too awkward to deliver some bad news because they, they know I've

02:11:35.160 spent a lot of time writing this thing. Or do I want to hear from the person who is actually finding

02:11:40.940 flaws in this thing I've written and will now, because I'm going to them early, will now, now has a

02:11:47.220 chance to spare me the public embarrassment of broadcasting these flaws to all humanity. Clearly,

02:11:53.620 I value that the other reader more. And once you see the alternative, you realize you want the people

02:12:01.420 who will be straight with you. And then you meet, you meet people who think they want feedback, but

02:12:05.760 they don't want feedback. You can have a more or less grown up relationship to the opinions of others.

02:12:12.680 The people who don't want feedback, who just want to be told that what they did was fantastic.

02:12:17.080 Well, if they're surrounded by honest people, they very, very quickly feel the cramp of that,

02:12:22.540 right? They just, they want to be surrounded by liars and they'll curate their connections as a result.

02:12:28.660 You won't ask that same person again, if you're the sort of person who didn't want an honest opinion

02:12:36.460 and pretended to ask for one. Is it possible for someone to, let's pick an extreme example, but

02:12:42.680 could one go into public office and take that oath that I will never lie? I mean, is it, is that,

02:12:48.300 is that compatible with politics, for example?

02:12:52.420 It is widely assumed that it's a deal breaker, right? I think everything, virtually everything

02:12:58.260 that's wrong with our politics is the result of the mismatch between interpersonal ethics of this

02:13:04.420 sort and what works and what wouldn't work in the public sphere. I think it should be compatible

02:13:10.760 with politics. I think dishonesty should exact a, a massive reputational cost in politics, but now

02:13:20.460 we're in this strange, you know, mirror universe where the most dishonest person anyone has ever

02:13:29.240 witnessed is the president of the country and suffering absolutely no reputational cost among

02:13:36.820 those who love him for his dishonesty. It's like, it's not a bug, it's a feature. In my view, that is

02:13:42.920 the most dysfunctional thing about the Trump phenomenon. It's what it's done to the value of

02:13:50.180 honesty in our public conversation about politics, at least a half of the electorate. Pointing out that

02:13:56.740 he's lied yet again is completely ineffectual with the people who don't care that he's lied. I mean,

02:14:03.020 they just, they just assume he's going to lie. It's a very strange performance. It's like not even

02:14:07.300 about representing reality anymore. It's not that the people who love Trump are reliably duped by him.

02:14:15.100 You know, it's, it's that they're not holding him to a standard of honesty at all, right? And his

02:14:21.880 dishonesty, however obvious, is a different kind of performance. It's almost like, I mean,

02:14:28.320 there's been an analogy often drawn to professional wrestling. It's a fake sport with fake violence.

02:14:36.640 And the fact that it's fake is actually understood by basically everyone who enjoys it,

02:14:42.760 right? It's not that it's not like they're taken in. Unless you're five years old, by the time you're

02:14:47.500 a teenager or whatever, you sort of get that this is an act. They're still very athletic. Nothing

02:14:52.440 takes away from the skill required to do it.

02:14:54.780 Well, yeah. I mean, ironically, what they're doing is more dangerous than MMA for the most

02:14:58.800 part. And they're getting horrific injuries sometimes, but there's no illusion that these

02:15:04.040 guys are just as tough as the people in the octagon, right? So it's like there are people who watch both

02:15:09.920 or are certainly aware of both. And they clearly understand what reality is. Reality is what's going

02:15:18.400 on in mixed martial arts, right? There's things that are honest at the level of the language of violence.

02:15:24.060 And they're things that are pure fabrications. They're lies. And something has happened in our

02:15:31.420 conversation about facts in the political domain. And it's happened to some degree on the left for

02:15:36.580 different reasons. But yeah, to come back to your question, I think we're paying a massive price for not

02:15:43.000 being able to tell when people are lying definitively, like to not have a lie detector that forensically can be

02:15:49.900 relied upon. And, you know, analogous to, you know, like DNA evidence, you know, where you just know that

02:15:55.420 someone's representing their state of knowledge erroneously. And we're paying a massive price for the fact that

02:16:02.100 so many millions of people don't actually care that they're being lied to.

02:16:06.440 To me, that's the bigger issue, right? I mean, I think politicians have always lied. I don't think

02:16:10.780 that's what's new. It's almost like a threshold has been crossed where it's... So you go back to

02:16:18.960 sort of Clinton's impeachment, right? I mean, in the end, I think the legal issue was less about

02:16:23.800 whether he'd had an affair with Monica Lewinsky. The bigger issue was that he lie under oath.

02:16:27.780 Right. I mean, in many ways, that's what his impeachment came down to. Yeah. It's quite clear he probably did,

02:16:33.520 right? I mean, we could get into the semantics of sexual relations, but the, I mean, it's pretty clear

02:16:38.540 he lied under oath. But the point you're making is that now it's almost a feature. Like now it's almost...

02:16:46.840 I think it's... We've gone beyond it that it's accepted, and now it's almost like part of a theater.

02:16:51.580 But I think that is a uniquely Trumpian phenomenon. I don't know that anyone else

02:16:56.380 will be able to play it quite that way. I mean, it is a... It's a feature of politics that has been

02:17:02.840 true in other countries forever. I mean, it is a feature of authoritarian politics.

02:17:08.740 Wait, wait. You mean Kim Jong-un didn't really do that well in golf? Right, right. He was two years

02:17:13.880 old?

02:17:14.180 Got several holes in one.

02:17:15.160 Several holes in one. He doesn't defecate, I heard, as well.

02:17:18.460 Yeah. Yeah. In a democracy, it should be harder to get away with having one's lies exposed. And

02:17:28.240 it's got... When you look at what used to matter, you know, when you look at the fact that

02:17:33.020 someone like Gary Hart, his campaign, where he said that he was faithful to his wife and

02:17:38.900 encouraged journalists to keep a sharp eye on him and then was caught having an affair,

02:17:44.780 like that was the end, right? There is nothing like that that's conceivable for Trump. It doesn't

02:17:50.800 matter how discordant his behavior is with his next utterance. His opponents are keeping score

02:17:59.660 relentlessly. Like his lies are being documented every day. There are now thousands of them.

02:18:04.920 People are keeping score. It doesn't matter with at least 40% of America. So it might matter for

02:18:12.560 another person for those 40%. It really is a kind of personality cult phenomenon where it's just for

02:18:20.280 Trump, for whatever reason, how he showed up, what he represents, he can get away with stuff that

02:18:28.160 no one else can get away with. And that is what is so dysfunctional about having him

02:18:33.640 in that role from my point of view. So you have two daughters, right? So we think so much about

02:18:42.220 how do we prepare our kids for the world that's out there that we can only say one thing for certain

02:18:51.180 about, which is we don't know what it's going to look like. I mean, I had this discussion with my

02:18:54.240 daughter last night, actually, or two nights ago, which was Olivia, you're 10 years old today.

02:19:01.080 The only thing I can assure you of in eight years, I have no idea what the world will look like.

02:19:06.880 Yeah. But there are a handful of traits that I think will help you in life. And they might seem

02:19:15.800 somewhat arbitrary and they might seem somewhat ridiculous or even unpleasant. But the sooner you

02:19:22.280 can figure out a way to put these traits in place, the more well-equipped you will be with whatever

02:19:29.900 the future holds, right? So when I was 10, no one could have predicted that the internet was going to

02:19:34.400 exist and that somehow that was going to have all of these implications, right? With respect to all the

02:19:40.640 stuff we've been talking about today, specifically with respect to choosing to live an examined life,

02:19:47.040 choosing to live a life where we are not constantly being lived by our thoughts.

02:19:54.160 How do you teach your daughters about what the future holds? And I don't mean that in like a broad

02:20:02.620 sense, but I mean, aside from encouraging them to meditate, and I'm sure at some age, kids can learn

02:20:08.120 mindfulness meditation. But how else do you try to influence your kids with respect to the lessons

02:20:14.920 you've learned? I mean, they may never choose to go off on, and you've spent such a significant period

02:20:19.380 of your life on retreats. You've really devoted your entire life to this study. If they choose not to do

02:20:26.740 that, you know, they want to do something boring, like go into medicine or whatever, how will you still

02:20:31.820 impart some of these lessons on them? Or will it be much more by osmosis than anything deliberate?

02:20:36.140 First kids can be taught to meditate. And actually, my wife has done that work a lot.

02:20:42.680 Her wife teaches kids, right?

02:20:42.940 Yeah, she goes into school.

02:20:44.860 At what age does she start?

02:20:46.080 Like five, six. It's amazing. I mean, you can go very quickly, you can go from just,

02:20:52.760 you know, the first class, which is just chaos, to a room full of six-year-olds sitting in silence

02:21:00.520 for 15 minutes. So it's amazing. It seems unfathomable. Yeah. And they get real benefit

02:21:06.720 from it. I mean, it's not quite the same as adults connecting with the practice, but it can be pretty

02:21:14.160 similar. I mean, they're becoming aware of their emotional lives in a way that kids often aren't.

02:21:20.940 Do girls develop easier than boys at that age?

02:21:24.880 Generally speaking, I consider them separate species. So yeah, I mean, they do.

02:21:28.880 Yeah, because my son is like, yeah, I don't know how I could ever communicate any of that.

02:21:35.860 Yeah. Yeah. And I think boys have a harder time sitting still, certainly earlier on. So it's

02:21:42.420 amazing to see kids connect with the practice because they definitely do. And they just become

02:21:47.680 aware of the linkage between emotion and behavior, thought and emotion, emotion and thought. But

02:21:54.020 on some level, it just comes down to suffering and the end of suffering. It's just like, how much do

02:21:59.500 you want to suffer? People are suffering in reliable ways based on...

02:22:05.820 So do you spend time then explaining the nature of the suffering? Because I would agree completely,

02:22:11.080 nobody wants to suffer. I just think it takes many of us decades to even come to the realization of

02:22:19.020 how much of our suffering is self-imposed. Yeah.

02:22:21.760 So is part of it just getting them to realize that sooner?

02:22:24.700 Yeah. And again, to point out many of the things we've discussed here, where it's like the power

02:22:31.340 of framing, right? And the power of expectation. So I'll often point out to my daughters, even the

02:22:38.780 youngest, who's just turning five, but for the most part, the oldest, who's just turning 10,

02:22:43.900 the mismatch between her expectation of how something was going to be and how it was, right? And it's

02:22:50.500 usually a negative expectation. She was worried about something happening, I'll say, but

02:22:54.480 doctor's visit or, you know, getting blood drawn or getting a shot and the actual experience that was

02:23:01.900 far less traumatic than she was worried that it was going to be. And to point out that all of the time

02:23:10.340 spent suffering in anticipation of this negative thing was wasted, right? Like there's a lesson to

02:23:16.600 be learned here. Like the thing she thought she was sure was going to be awful turned out not to be so

02:23:22.700 awful or not in some cases, not awful at all, right? Or even net positive, right? Because she

02:23:30.120 had the experience of sort of overcoming a fear or, you know, it's like she felt stronger as a result of

02:23:35.920 that thing that just happened. So it's like the expectation is so often not only a bad guide, it's

02:23:43.520 just, it's no guide at all to what is going to happen. And yet people suffer in advance over this

02:23:51.500 thing that they're expecting to be negative. Even if it's going to be negative, you can decide to

02:23:57.440 suffer once or twice, right? Kids can get lessons like that. I think it's good to give them as early

02:24:05.080 as they can get them. A lot of it has to do with framing and just how one thinks about one's life. But

02:24:13.140 mindfulness for a kid can be, at the first pass, just more awareness over what they're feeling and

02:24:21.860 thinking. Young kids can be sad and they don't know that they're sad, or angry and they don't know that

02:24:27.480 they're angry. And just that level of awareness can be a major gain for a kid. And then that's

02:24:36.500 something to build on. And then they, as they get older, then they can, you know, I think certainly

02:24:41.900 once they're young teenagers can have a more or less grown-up relationship to observing what's going

02:24:49.840 on in their minds. When I think about how much effort I put into worrying about whether my daughter

02:24:57.120 is learning well enough, the sort of standard metrics that we care about, you know, math and

02:25:03.420 science and English and sports and all those things, I feel like probably I'm not paying enough

02:25:10.240 attention to those things as well, especially for someone who has spent so much time suffering inside

02:25:15.320 his own mind. Like I ought to know better, right? Like there is, there is no prison like the one between

02:25:20.740 your ears. Yeah. And yet, uh, yeah. When, when you frame it that way, boy, it makes me think I

02:25:27.620 really need to start investing a little bit more time in that, in that prep. I want to be mindful

02:25:33.600 of your time. So I kind of, I know we both have to get somewhere this evening. Are you writing a book

02:25:39.440 at the moment? Are you working on anything? I'm the worst author a publisher can have at this point.

02:25:44.040 I keep pushing back my deadline. I am supposed to be writing a book, but I'm so busy podcasting and

02:25:49.500 doing other things that... What is the book about? Well, I have, actually I have two books that I'm

02:25:53.640 supposed to be writing. One is just a digest of podcast conversations just, you know, because now

02:25:59.840 I have... So sort of like what Tim did with tools and titles and such. Yeah. I'm not quite sure what the

02:26:03.940 format will be, but something based on the podcast. It's probably going to be more like just updated

02:26:09.260 transcripts of significant parts of the conversation. And then I have a book with a working title

02:26:16.560 Making Sense, which is just, it was going to be a kind of manifesto about intellectual honesty and how

02:26:23.720 we have hard conversations about, you know, all manner of topics, whether it's race or gender or the

02:26:29.700 opposition between science and religion or, you know, many of the topics I touch on my podcast.

02:26:35.300 We're paying a price for not being able to talk about the most consequential and taboo and dangerous

02:26:44.240 and divisive things in a way that is conserving of good intentions and honesty and allows for

02:26:52.420 compromise and allows for breakthroughs and changes of opinion. I mean, it's like all the norms around

02:26:57.360 talking about these things are askew. You just can't have a conversation about the differences

02:27:03.340 between men and women, say. Are men and women exactly the same? No, they're not. Okay. But what do we do

02:27:09.360 down that path generates ire like you can't imagine? Yeah. And careers are lost over slight

02:27:16.120 misstatements, right? And there are people who say things that were ill-considered that they then

02:27:23.140 subsequently apologize for. They recognize that they're ill-considered. And yet the apology, however

02:27:29.260 heartfelt, however abject, isn't sufficient to stop their career from being destroyed.

02:27:36.080 Right. You had an example of this recently where you, on your podcast, where you talked

02:27:39.720 about the, um, she was a dean at Claremont McKenna, what was the college? Yeah. Claremont

02:27:45.000 McKenna. Claremont McKenna College, yeah. Well, actually there's a more recent example, which

02:27:47.720 is even more amazing in its own way. So like, like Megan Kelly's firing over her Halloween

02:27:54.460 blackface comments, right? Well, so, you know, she obviously couldn't hear how the phrase

02:28:00.620 blackface would land with many people. It's easy to see that the way she spoke about it

02:28:07.460 was a, constituted a mistake. It's pretty obvious it was not an expression of racism

02:28:15.880 on her part, right? She's not saying African Americans haven't suffered a massive inequality

02:28:21.600 in the past, or she was just saying, well, you know, if you're going to dress up like Diana

02:28:25.340 Ross, why can't you put brown makeup on your face? I mean, essentially that was, those weren't

02:28:29.180 her words, but that was the sentiment. That's absolutely something we should be able to talk

02:28:33.520 about. Yet she said the wrong thing and then clearly received a ton of pressure to apologize

02:28:43.080 for it. Her apology, I don't know if you saw her apology, but her apology was, I mean, someone

02:28:47.620 was joking on Twitter. I saw something on Twitter that said it was the closest thing you've ever

02:28:51.380 seen to a hostage video minus the newspaper. Right. Yes. Like just, you got to hold up the

02:28:55.240 newspaper as proof of life. But I didn't actually hear what she said or anything.

02:28:59.580 Yeah. But it was, by all signs, it was as full an apology as a person can muster. It was complete.

02:29:07.920 If it didn't strike the right note for you, well then, I mean, you have superhuman expectations

02:29:13.300 for what someone should be able to muster in a context like that. It did not seem insincere

02:29:18.620 at all, right? At least to my eye. And yet still, this was a career wrecking event, it

02:29:25.440 seems. And so now we're in a situation where people are calling for the destruction of other

02:29:33.100 people and celebrating the effects of that when these people actually do lose their shows

02:29:39.360 or suffer some massive penalty. And yet, I think it's true to say that most people who

02:29:46.400 were calling for her to be fired would recognize that, one, her initial statement was not actually

02:29:53.720 conveying her own racism. It was conveying her obliviousness to the significance of this phrase

02:29:59.760 for other people, but it was not conveying that she was somebody who wants to live in a society

02:30:07.220 where there's a lack of political equality, right? I mean, there was zero evidence of that.

02:30:12.660 I don't think anyone even alleges that that's her view of the world. But worse than that,

02:30:19.200 once she recognizes the mistake she's made, no apology is sufficient, right? Like, so do we really

02:30:26.220 want to live in a world where you misspeak on a fraught topic and it is impossible to adequately

02:30:35.300 apologize, right? You recognize that, you know, you use the word retard, say, right? And then you,

02:30:40.680 then you get feedback that, wow, people really find that offensive. There are kids with mental

02:30:45.200 disabilities, you know, and you, like, if you knew what it was like to be a parent of a kid who was

02:30:49.640 suffering this, you would recognize how offensive that term is. And they're like, why would you ever

02:30:53.800 use that term on a podcast, right? Imagine it being impossible to apologize for that. It's over for you,

02:31:01.220 right?

02:31:01.600 What's so interesting, bringing it back to the prison stuff, I remember when I spoke with Kat Hoke about

02:31:06.860 this. So Catherine Hoke is the woman that used to run this organization called Defy Ventures, and now

02:31:11.040 she's spinning up something that's going to be even better actually, to which I've suggested to her,

02:31:16.320 and I don't think I'm unique in this, a lot of people have suggested that this, this idea ought not

02:31:21.360 just be something that's sort of a nonprofit. Like there is such a benefit to the volunteers to going

02:31:26.340 into this experience that it almost needs to be sort of a corporate development program. Like people

02:31:31.220 need to be paying to go and have this experience. It's so profound, right? But it gets to this

02:31:36.540 question of like, can you be, is there something for which you cannot be forgiven? What is the crime?

02:31:43.000 What is the sin? What is the moral defect for which there is no forgiveness? And I don't know if

02:31:50.920 you're familiar with any of this stuff she's, she's spoken about, but you know, at some point she had to

02:31:55.720 make a decision about whether or not people who were sexual predators would be permitted into the

02:32:01.040 program. So if you'd raped somebody, if you'd molested a child and you're now serving whatever

02:32:06.240 term in prison, could you be a part of this rehabilitative program? And in the end she said,

02:32:12.160 yes. I mean, basically it really comes down to the degree of which a person, a person shows remorse

02:32:17.260 and their willingness to change. Because the idea is like, whether you choose to never forgive somebody

02:32:23.740 and whether it's Megyn Kelly or this rapist, it doesn't change the fact that something was said or

02:32:29.140 something was done that is in some cases, probably not really that ridiculous. And in some cases is

02:32:34.400 really tragic, but it's, you have two choices as a society, how you move forward from that.

02:32:40.820 Yeah.

02:32:41.380 And it seems we're definitely caught in the place of an inability to reconcile the good that can come

02:32:47.480 from moving on, which means acknowledging mistakes that were made, acknowledging remorse,

02:32:53.160 looking for ways to get better. I mean, we, we really don't seem to like that, that, that,

02:32:57.340 that seems a bit too soft for people or so. It's, I don't know if soft is the right word,

02:33:00.880 but there's something about that process that people don't like.

02:33:04.780 Yeah. Yeah. And, and in extreme cases, they're forced to accept it. I mean, they're, you know,

02:33:11.100 when, when societies have just become completely riven by, you know, sectarian violence of,

02:33:17.780 or, or political dysfunction of one kind or another, then you need things like truth and

02:33:23.260 reconciliation commissions in places like, you know, South Africa or Rwanda, where it's, you know,

02:33:28.540 then people who are guilty of objectively horrible things can get a, a pass essentially just by coming

02:33:35.340 forward and telling the truth and apologizing. Yeah. I think, you know, I actually, I brought this

02:33:40.840 up on my podcast not long ago. I was thinking about this, this very problem in terms of like a,

02:33:46.420 an ethical event horizon. I mean, is there something so bad that you could do or say that

02:33:53.420 no apology would be sufficient to, to pull your reputation back out of that, that singularity?

02:34:01.880 It is a kind of unrecoverable moral error. And I don't think so. I think, I think the,

02:34:06.940 the physics of an, of an appropriate acceptable apology are that it be sincere and believable.

02:34:18.340 And that the measure of it being believable is that it has to be clear how you could have changed

02:34:24.320 enough for it to be sincere. So for an apology to be accepted, you have to stand in relationship to

02:34:31.420 that thing you did in the same place where the other people who are horrified by what you did

02:34:38.000 stand. And they have to be able to see how it is that you have come to stand where they are now

02:34:44.760 in order to accept your apology. So if that transformation isn't believable for some reason,

02:34:51.100 if there's no path by which you could have had this epiphany that contextualizes your prior bad

02:34:56.700 behavior, you know, puts it in a box, which you disavow, well, then it will seem, it will seem

02:35:02.260 insincere or opportunistic. You're a sociopath who's just trying to get out of prison and game

02:35:06.760 the program. And, and those people exist. There's no question that, you know, an insincere apology

02:35:11.560 for calculated reasons is, you know, that that's as old as we've been speaking to one another and

02:35:18.860 that will continue for as long as people can get away with it. So that's a genuine concern if you're

02:35:24.420 talking about how to, to operationalize these kinds of insights. But I mean, you just, it just,

02:35:30.440 again, the, the path out of that darkness has to be intelligible to people. And I think this,

02:35:36.640 we'll, we'll stumble on this once we have breakthroughs in psychology and neuroscience that

02:35:43.520 admit of real changes in people's emotional and ethical lives. I mean, so if we just take the narrow

02:35:50.380 case, if we ever understood psychopathy clearly enough that we could cure it, right? So you have

02:35:57.680 someone who's from a very early age, just torturing animals and, and showing zero empathy for other

02:36:03.360 people. And they, they grow up into the, the scary adult that one would predict. And if we ever get to

02:36:11.340 a place where there's a cure for that, well, then psychopathy would be, will be viewed as a

02:36:16.160 neurological condition. It'll be, it won't be a moral problem. It'll be, these are, these are

02:36:20.460 malfunctioning robots that need the new module. And just imagine if we had that cure, we'd be no

02:36:28.640 more judgmental in how we applied it than we are when we cure any other disease. I mean, you're not

02:36:35.300 thinking about when you're giving diabetics insulin, you're not thinking, well, you, you're lucky I'm

02:36:41.720 giving you this insulin because you probably don't deserve it. You with your malfunctioning pancreas,

02:36:47.060 you're lucky that I'm so tolerant that I'm willing to give you this insulin. There's zero culpability

02:36:52.660 in having a bad pancreas. If we actually understood the neurochemical, neuroanatomical basis of even the

02:37:02.120 worst behavior, if it was discreet enough that it admitted of a, of a cure, we would say, oh, we just

02:37:09.040 got to, we got to fix that problem. You know, and it would be, yeah. Do you hold out hope for that,

02:37:13.940 Sam, or is that sci-fi? I mean, you're a neuroscientist, so you can, you can speak to

02:37:17.620 this with much more clarity or authority than, than I could ever speak of it. I hold out hope for it

02:37:23.520 in certain specific cases. Yeah. I mean, well, we know it's true. I mean, we've, we've already

02:37:30.060 stumbled upon it in cases where you're, you're talking about a brain tumor that is causing a

02:37:35.820 problem, but causing a problem which shows up as uncontrollable rage or pedophilia or, I mean,

02:37:42.880 there are cases where, you know, it's like the classic case is Charles Whitman, who in 1964

02:37:48.580 killed 14 people at the University of Texas. And he just had a glioblastoma pushing on his amygdala.

02:37:56.480 And the amazing thing is that you might know the story because I've talked about it, but I mean,

02:38:01.120 he suspected that he had something wrong with his brain and he, he knew he was going to be killed

02:38:06.000 by the police and he's recommended that they perform an autopsy to find out what was going on

02:38:10.620 in his head. And yeah, he had a, he had a tumor, which was arguably totally exculpatory. It was just

02:38:18.740 in precisely the place that you would think, okay, this, he's got, he can't control his impulses and

02:38:24.640 he's feeling, you know, uncontrollable rage. And this tumor explains it. I think there's virtually

02:38:30.520 no one who hears the whole story who thinks Charles Whitman was evil. He just seems profoundly

02:38:36.920 unlucky. And on some level, a complete understanding of evil would reduce it to that same species of

02:38:47.360 unluck.

02:38:47.780 That is an amazing thought. It's hard for me to imagine because obviously the mass effects

02:38:53.320 are the obvious ones, right? These lesions, uh, versus much more diffuse neurochemical processes.

02:39:00.960 We're going to have dinner tonight. So I know what we're going to keep talking about, man.

02:39:03.880 We got so much to keep going on. Um, for folks who are listening to this on my podcast, who might not

02:39:08.420 know you as well as they ought to is samharris.org basically where they can find everything,

02:39:14.780 your podcast, your blog, your books, all sorts of things.

02:39:19.220 Yeah. And as far as my meditation app, it's just wakingup.com. But yeah, both websites.

02:39:24.560 Some of us like me are lucky enough to have got it for free because we were supporters of the

02:39:28.440 podcast before it came out.

02:39:29.980 Yeah. Yeah.

02:39:30.660 But is it available for purchase now on both the, uh, on Apple and on, uh, Android?

02:39:36.800 I think Android's not quite out yet.

02:39:38.460 No, it's out. It's out as of yesterday.

02:39:40.840 Okay. Okay. Fantastic. Cause I know I had a patient who went to search for it on Android

02:39:45.260 a few weeks ago and it was coming soon.

02:39:47.640 No, no, we're, we're born on both platforms.

02:39:49.920 So, okay. Well, congratulations, Sam. It is, I mean, I just want to say, I want to thank

02:39:54.720 you personally for, for the effect and the impact that your work has had on me. I find myself,

02:40:03.220 like I said, spending so much time thinking about how to help people delay the onset of diseases

02:40:10.080 that kill them. And in many ways you're doing the same thing, but in a, in some ways, a higher

02:40:18.700 stakes arena, which is how to prevent people from suffering so much, which in some ways is just

02:40:23.920 harder to measure. We don't have the same stats on that, right? I can rattle off all the stats

02:40:28.580 on what the probability is that you're going to get cancer by the time you're 70. And what's the

02:40:32.860 likelihood you're going to make it to 90 without a heart attack and ball. I can rattle off all those

02:40:36.560 things, but we don't keep the same stats for how much we suffer. And I, I, I think of your work as

02:40:44.240 among the most important things that have helped me. And now by extension, some of my patients who

02:40:49.640 are willing to go down this path with me to reduce that burden of suffering.

02:40:55.060 Nice. Nice. Well, glad to hear it.

02:40:57.380 Well, thank you. Thank you for making, uh, making so much time this afternoon.

02:41:00.780 Yeah. Yeah. It's a pleasure. And congratulations on the podcast. You are one of these few examples of

02:41:05.720 somebody who goes from the conversation of, you know, I think maybe I want to start a podcast.

02:41:11.840 Should I, should I start a podcast? And then I turn around and three weeks later, you have this

02:41:16.740 amazing podcast that is more professionally produced than mine and people love. So congratulations on that.

02:41:22.760 Well, you and your team deserve a lot of credit for that. I know I've said this before, but, but

02:41:26.860 it's always worth repeating. I mean, I think that you and Tim were probably among the two most vocal,

02:41:33.500 along with probably Patrick O'Shaughnessy, but I think you and Tim the most really,

02:41:37.600 cause I honestly, I was just so intimidated by the work I saw you and Tim doing. I was like,

02:41:41.440 well, there's no goddamn way I can do that. Like that's, that's just above my pay grade. So

02:41:46.320 I still think my podcast pales in comparison to yours and Tim's, but I am happy to be in the arena

02:41:52.060 and it, it has turned out to be much more enjoyable than I would have ever predicted.

02:41:57.200 And so I do regret having not done it two years sooner when you were harping on me and Tim was

02:42:03.260 harping on me, but better late than never. And it's an honor to have you as a guest on my little

02:42:08.240 budding podcast.

02:42:10.020 Well, keep it up.

02:42:11.560 Thanks, man.

02:42:12.220 You can find all of this information and more at peteratiamd.com forward slash podcast.

02:42:19.900 There you'll find the show notes, readings, and links related to this episode. You can also find

02:42:24.960 my blog and the nerd safari at peteratiamd.com. What's a nerd safari you ask? Just click on the

02:42:30.980 link at the top of the site to learn more. Maybe the simplest thing to do is to sign up for my

02:42:34.980 subjectively non lame once a week email, where I'll update you on what I've been up to,

02:42:39.160 the most interesting papers I've read and all things related to longevity, science, performance,

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02:42:54.900 Now for the obligatory disclaimer, this podcast is for general informational purposes only and does

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The Peter Attia Drive - December 20, 2018

#34 - Sam Harris, Ph.D.： The transformative power of mindfulness

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