0:00

Hello friends, welcome back to

0:02

the show. My guest today is Sam Harris.

0:04

He's a best-selling author, moral philosopher, neuroscientist,

0:08

and a podcaster. The entire

0:10

world seems to be at each other's throats and

0:12

finding peace in the chaos is becoming increasingly

0:15

difficult. But there are tools at our

0:17

disposal to improve the quality of our lives.

0:19

Sam says on this episode, wisdom

0:21

is a matter of making your mind your

0:23

friend. Expect to learn what Sam's

0:25

life is like after Twitter, Sam's reflections

0:28

on his famous talk on death and the present

0:30

moment, how to live a life full of meaning, how

0:32

to take your mindfulness off the cushion and

0:34

into the real world, Sam's thoughts on Tucker

0:37

Carlson's move, his opinion on Andrew Tate,

0:39

RFK Jr., Andrew Huberman and Jordan Peterson,

0:42

whether we have reached peak woke, Sam's

0:44

take on young Western men converting

0:46

to Islam, and

0:47

much more. I

0:50

had

0:51

so much fun recording this

0:53

episode. Sam was a huge influence

0:55

on me starting this podcast six years ago, and

0:58

it feels great for everything to have come full circle

1:00

and to get to sit down for three hours opposite

1:03

him in a disgustingly sweltering

1:05

warehouse in the middle of LA because

1:08

we wanted to get some awesome visuals and

1:10

this was the best-looking location that

1:12

we could find but also happened to be a very

1:14

hot tin box. Anyway, I hope that you take

1:17

tons away from this episode. It really

1:19

is Sam at his best as

1:21

far as I can see. And don't forget

1:23

that if you are new here or if you're a longtime listener,

1:25

you might be listening but not subscribed

1:27

and that means you're going to miss episodes when

1:29

they go up. The next six months has the

1:32

biggest, most ridiculously stacked list

1:34

of guests that I have ever, ever

1:36

had and I cannot wait to get these ones out.

1:39

So you need to press the subscribe button or you're going

1:41

to be trez sad because you're going to miss those episodes.

1:44

So go and press the button.

1:46

I thank you. But now ladies

1:49

and gentlemen, please welcome Sam

1:51

Harris.

2:10

Sam Harris, welcome to the show. Thank

2:12

you. Great to meet you finally. What is life like

2:14

after Twitter? It

2:18

is immensely improved to

2:20

a degree that I find

2:23

actually embarrassing in retrospect because

2:25

it's proof that I was needlessly

2:28

degrading the quality of my life

2:30

for almost

2:32

12 years, technically, I think it was probably

2:35

five years where it was actually

2:37

degrading the quality of my life. But it was,

2:41

I mean, in retrospect, it was a psychological experiment

2:43

that we all got enrolled in and no one

2:47

read the consent form, much less signed it. And

2:51

it has given,

2:54

for me, if you're someone who has a significant

2:56

platform and you're at

2:58

all controversial,

3:00

I think it gives you a sense of what the

3:02

world is, which

3:04

is

3:07

basically false and destructive

3:09

to your feelings, the

3:12

feelings you have for the rest of humanity. I mean,

3:15

it was it was kind of sort of incrementally

3:17

like a slow ratchet,

3:20

but never to be reversed,

3:24

often undetectable, but still

3:27

nevertheless always in one direction, changing

3:29

me into a misanthrope. I mean,

3:31

I was just starting to perceive people who I had never

3:34

met

3:35

and many who I had met

3:37

as the worst,

3:40

most grotesque versions of themselves.

3:42

But it's not that it's totally inaccurate. It's not

3:45

that people tweet what you see them at their worst

3:47

moments or their most bad faith

3:49

moment or their most cynical moments.

3:51

But

3:55

it's like the evidence of that, of those

3:57

moments becomes indelible and

3:59

you lose. side of the rest and I just

4:01

was

4:02

noticing this mismatch of

4:04

being out in the world with people and people are great

4:07

and then

4:08

checking into my life online and

4:10

recognizing that people are horrible

4:12

and just bouncing back between these two

4:15

views

4:16

and I just realized I really only wanted

4:18

one of them. It seems to me that

4:20

a lot of people feel that, that

4:22

when they step out into the real world and

4:25

the people who spend more time in the real world, they realize

4:27

this is kind of nice. Everyone

4:29

seems pretty balanced out here. No one's

4:31

that antagonistic. No one's backbiting

4:33

or screaming or shouting or accusing me of being a bigot

4:35

or a racist or whatever and

4:38

then for some reason you step onto the internet

4:40

with frictionless communication and

4:43

all hell breaks loose. Yeah, yeah.

4:45

And it's not just anonymity. Anonymity

4:47

is part of it but it's also

4:49

people you know who

4:52

are captured by their

4:55

echo chamber which you're not seeing,

4:57

right? It's this illusion that you're inhabiting

5:00

the same space with the people you're

5:03

in conversation with but

5:05

in reality they're talking to their

5:08

fans, you're talking to

5:10

your fans, you have weaponized

5:13

your fans against their fans and vice

5:15

versa and without even necessarily

5:18

thinking in those terms, those

5:20

are the network dynamics of what's happening.

5:25

And I

5:26

mean I just kept getting, at

5:29

one point I recognized that

5:31

barring some

5:34

you know bad health outcomes

5:38

among friends and family over the years,

5:40

objectively the worst things that had

5:42

happened to me in a decade were the result of my engagement

5:45

with Twitter. And

5:47

in many cases the only bad things that had happened

5:49

to me in a decade of

5:52

any significance at all was born

5:54

of Twitter. I think you'd managed to torpedo

5:56

a family vacation in some beautiful

5:59

paradise. by sending a random

6:01

tweet and then putting your phone down to come back to it

6:03

and find out that there was a wasteland.

6:06

Where once there was a Twitter account. Yeah,

6:08

no, it was, it just, it kept giving

6:10

me a sense. It was a, the

6:13

time course of interaction with it

6:15

gives you this, I mean, this is endless opportunity

6:18

to comment on stuff. It's like,

6:20

it's always ready for your hot take. In fact, you're

6:22

on there to give your hot take and to see the hot

6:24

takes of others.

6:27

Again, this might not matter if your

6:29

hot take is, here's another cute photo

6:32

of my cat and you just get nothing

6:34

but love back, right? I know there are people

6:36

who have that experience.

6:38

But

6:40

given that I was

6:42

violating the blasphemy tests

6:45

of both the left and

6:47

the right, more or less on a weekly basis,

6:49

I mean, I'm not aligned politically with the left

6:52

or the right.

6:55

It was just pain on both sides. And I had

6:57

no tribe. Like

6:59

if you're just on the right, or

7:02

some segment

7:04

of the right, if you're Ben Shapiro,

7:09

you have a tribe that is going to just

7:12

incessantly defend you against the left,

7:14

right? And at a certain point, you just,

7:17

you learn to discount the attacks of the left because

7:19

you don't care what the left thinks about you. You've priced that in.

7:22

You're on the right.

7:24

And so it is with the left. If you're in

7:27

the middle and you're actually not even an especially

7:29

political person, you don't care about politics.

7:31

Politics is just an ugly necessity

7:34

that you continually have to touch, but

7:36

it's just you view it as an opportunity

7:38

cost, getting in the way of the things you actually care about.

7:42

And you're not tribal and you're not reflexively

7:46

aligned with the bullet points on one side of the

7:48

aisle or

7:51

the other.

7:53

You have offended

7:55

everyone on both sides at some point. You're getting ideologically

7:58

spit roasted here. Yeah.

7:59

And you don't have you don't have the people

8:02

who will defend you blindly.

8:05

I'm off last week at the view about why

8:08

even within your own audience which is

8:10

which is fine I'm very happy

8:12

to have the audience I have and I like

8:15

having an audience that.

8:18

Really cares about the

8:20

integrity and honesty of the very

8:22

last thing I said and if the last thing

8:24

I said didn't make sense they're going to hear

8:27

about it but. Social

8:30

media is just the wrong platform for that kind of conversation.

8:33

Do

8:33

you ever think about what civilization would be like

8:36

without social media in some of the smartest

8:38

minds of our time have

8:40

had the. I was captured

8:42

arguing over whether man and man

8:44

women are women are not about this particular

8:47

topic of that particular topic you think about how far

8:49

it's satisfied is in that negative net positive

8:51

overall do you think.

8:53

Well I think it's a net negative I think it's a massive opportunity

8:56

cost for almost everybody I just

8:58

think where you look at what you're doing.

9:01

And not doing based on your engagement

9:04

with these platforms me you're not.

9:06

Tending to read good long books

9:08

anymore it

9:09

minimum

9:11

even if it's your job to read those books has become

9:13

harder to do that I wasn't certainly noticing

9:16

that for myself. It's.

9:22

We're just say it has served to fragment

9:24

our attention and our lives in ways

9:27

that I just can't be good even

9:29

if again even if your diet

9:32

of information is. Almost entirely

9:34

positive there's this fragmentation effect

9:36

you know it's like you just I noticed

9:39

people I certainly I notice young people now.

9:41

Who are. Who appear

9:44

almost neurologically incapable of

9:46

watching a great movie from beginning

9:48

to end without interruptions you

9:51

know what's cool if you google the number of cuts

9:53

in the first fast and furious movie. I

9:55

had the number of cuts in the tenth fast movie pace.

9:59

Right yeah. It's got to be sped up.

10:01

Yeah. So I mean, I'm noticing this with

10:03

my daughters. It's just like

10:05

to get them to watch a movie

10:07

and, you know, it's not that it's impossible,

10:11

but I just noticed that they're,

10:12

they're tuned to a different cadence.

10:15

And, um, and

10:17

they're not even on, I mean, they're,

10:19

you know, they're not on social media in the normal way. I mean, they

10:21

don't have social media accounts or just, but the, the YouTube-ification

10:24

of everything has

10:25

gotten in and, um, yeah, I think

10:27

it's worth resisting, you know, it's not that we don't have

10:29

to use it. These tools in some way, but

10:32

I think it is worth realizing

10:34

that

10:38

even beyond time, your attention is

10:40

what you have. Your true wealth is

10:42

the quality of your attention. And we have, we've

10:44

now interfaced with machinery that

10:47

has systematically degraded our ability

10:49

to pay attention.

10:50

David Perrell has this idea called the never ending

10:53

now. And if you look at the content

10:55

that you've consumed, maybe not you after

10:57

your exit, but most people, almost all

10:59

of the content that you have consumed today has

11:02

been made in the last 24 hours. Right.

11:04

It's never ending now. Terrifying. It's

11:07

the opposite of Lindy. It's the opposite of the Lindy

11:09

effect. Right. It

11:11

is so

11:12

thoughtless

11:14

and it's yet it's captivating, right? I mean, it's

11:16

just this sugar high of, uh, you know, everything.

11:19

So, um, yeah,

11:21

so I'm, you know, I'm

11:23

more focused on good books now than I was before

11:26

I deleted my Twitter account, which is, which is good. Have

11:28

you reflected much on Tucker Carlson's move

11:31

to Twitter from Fox news? Is this

11:33

the beginning of some legacy

11:35

to alternative media

11:38

breakwater event or is it just a

11:40

nothing to you?

11:43

Well, I mean, I think Tucker Carlson himself

11:45

is, um,

11:47

worth considering. I mean, we know, you know, he's, he's

11:49

someone who has

11:51

shilled for Trump, for, you know, rather avidly

11:54

for years. And yet we now have

11:56

his behind the scenes commentary on the

11:58

Trump phenomenon. Describe. him as a demonic

12:00

force and somebody who he hates

12:03

with a passion. That's what Tuck has said about Trump?

12:05

Yeah, this came out of his texts got leaked

12:07

from the Dominion lawsuit against Fox.

12:10

Okay. Right, so we know like the mismatch

12:12

between who he is pretending to be for

12:14

his audience and

12:16

who he is behind closed doors is

12:19

something that I think should

12:21

trouble his audience, but it apparently doesn't, right?

12:24

And that's also true of someone like

12:26

Trump. So in many cases you have

12:28

these characters who to my

12:31

eye are very low integrity people.

12:33

I mean, they're not, you know, you're not getting

12:36

an honest look at what they really think even

12:38

though they're purporting to tell you what they think every

12:41

hour of the day or at least every day for some hours.

12:45

And you know, I view Tucker as that sort of person,

12:48

but I, you know, I think we're in a,

12:50

we're on a political landscape now where

12:53

there's no impediment to his building

12:55

and enormous business on the basis of,

12:58

of having left Fox or having gotten fired

13:00

from Fox

13:02

for reasons that, which I guess are still obscure. I

13:05

mean, he's

13:07

very good at what he does. He's a very good

13:10

demagogue and he's, he's very

13:12

facile.

13:15

I don't think there's an ethical core

13:17

there, but there's a, a

13:19

political one, you know, or it's really

13:22

not an opportunist one

13:24

in the political space. And

13:26

there's

13:26

a, there's an immense appetite

13:29

to have someone

13:31

call bullshit on the

13:34

powers that be the so-called elites,

13:36

the institutions again

13:38

and again and again, whether they're right

13:41

or wrong, you know, it's just like it's, it's say, this

13:43

is how it sort of opens the door to conspiracy

13:46

thinking of every flavor. It's

13:49

not that these contrarian takes

13:51

are always wrong because they're

13:53

not right. I mean, we have, we're living through a

13:55

time where many

13:57

of our institutions have. lost

14:00

trust for good reason right

14:03

but. Get what gets

14:05

layered on top of that are just

14:08

you know lies and misinformation and half truths

14:10

and and. Crazy

14:13

sort of. You know john

14:16

nash style connect the dots with everything

14:18

and you can find and if you're just searching

14:21

for anomalies and you're not actually

14:23

held to any sort of coherent standard

14:25

of having a basic. Theory

14:28

as to what's going on you just can find the next anomaly

14:30

will then you'll find anomalies everywhere

14:33

and they don't have to add up to anything except.

14:35

A kind of pornography of doubt

14:37

right and that's that's what's being spread by people

14:39

like tucker in my view. Did you see

14:42

douglas mory's debate with malcolm

14:44

gladwell matt tay be

14:47

malke.

14:48

I call it so i saw

14:51

i think i heard most of it

14:53

yeah yeah and i'm not it was a

14:55

discussion around. Is the

14:58

new alternative media is this where we're getting

15:00

the most truth from that unencumbered

15:02

the audience captured incentives are there

15:05

but also you are liberated

15:07

to not be. Tamped down

15:09

by whoever the biggs are that i've got some nefarious

15:12

agenda right on the other side is saying

15:14

it's this free wheel in wild west

15:16

where people can just make all manner of these sorts of claims

15:19

what did you have that landscape.

15:23

Well i mean i'm very

15:25

biased for that particular debate i love

15:27

douglas douglas is a friend of his he's obviously

15:30

brilliant and just enjoy to listen to.

15:34

I get a lot of his hate mail because he's

15:37

he's he's somebody who's happily on the right

15:39

or right of center. Who doesn't have to worry about

15:41

what the left thinks about him but you know every

15:43

time i have him on the podcast i get nothing but

15:45

pain from half my audience if there

15:47

is anything that is worth the pain of half

15:49

your audience it's bringing douglas mory. Yeah yeah no

15:51

he's fantastic but he

15:54

is adjacent to many people who are not

15:56

so fantastic right this is this is the sort

15:59

of. guilt by association

16:01

problem that he has

16:07

Navigated in a way which I you know, I don't know

16:09

if it's successful I mean it's he's

16:11

I think sleeps soundly at night given

16:14

what he's done But the truth is

16:16

he has been he's shared stages

16:18

with people who I wouldn't want to be on stage with and

16:20

I don't think It was good for him to be on a stage with the

16:22

person and half of the reason why I would

16:24

get hate mail about Having Douglas on would

16:26

be because he shared the stage with those people

16:31

and

16:32

Yet it's he's completely

16:35

correct in

16:37

Recognizing how hopeless it is to do

16:39

a full moral inventory of everyone

16:41

you might be You know Forced

16:44

to shake hands with and to decide in advance

16:46

whether it's worth shaking their hands or having a conversation

16:49

with them

16:51

So, yeah, I mean we just it

16:53

is the Wild West and you just have to do your

16:55

best and Just be

16:58

honest whenever you're in front

17:00

of the microphone. It feels to me like that guilt by

17:02

association thing seems to have Slowed

17:06

at least a little bit. P. Morgan put out a

17:08

video recently about we're at peak woke.

17:11

I'd yeah, I wouldn't agree I think I can't

17:13

remember whether it was it was Matt I be or somebody

17:16

else in the summer of 2020 said that that was peak

17:18

woke The most you know

17:21

inflammatory

17:21

over the top any

17:23

slight indiscretion is worth being smashed

17:26

in the face for right? I

17:28

wouldn't agree that

17:29

that's the case now and it seems to me like there is

17:31

at least a little bit more reason Beginning to seep

17:33

back in to that discourse. I

17:36

hope so, I feel like

17:39

It seems to be the case for me

17:42

except I don't know if it's just a an optical

17:44

illusion because I'm no longer on Twitter and

17:46

I no longer care Right, like so I just don't

17:49

you know, I used there's certain kinds of attacks

17:51

which a few years ago I might

17:54

have taken seriously for 15 minutes

17:56

and now they just are an entire holiday.

17:59

Why?

17:59

Yeah, but now they just bounce off or I don't even see them,

18:02

right? So,

18:03

and

18:06

that may be a good thing. I mean, certainly it's

18:08

a nicer way of being

18:10

in the world, but it could be a

18:13

version of,

18:17

I mean, something like digital leprosy, right? Where

18:19

you're like, you know, lepers lose their digits

18:21

because they don't sense pain anymore.

18:23

And they, you know, you walk by a table and you whack your fingers

18:25

on it and you don't notice that you're bleeding. I'm

18:29

thinking the worst cases in the developing world, literally,

18:31

you know, rats can come gnawing you while you're sleeping

18:33

and you don't feel that either. So

18:36

it could be that I have a

18:38

digital version of that, which is just that

18:41

I just don't, I'm not noticing how my reputation

18:43

is eroding

18:44

in ways that I actually would care about if I could notice

18:46

it, but I can no longer sense it because I'm in

18:49

my own silo.

18:53

But the truth is I just don't care

18:55

about certain kinds of attacks

18:58

anymore. And so, yeah, I have the

19:00

perception

19:01

you have that the pendulum has swung

19:04

back. People are rolling, even

19:06

people who would otherwise have been taken in

19:08

by

19:09

wokeness a few years

19:11

ago,

19:12

roll their eyes in private

19:15

and increasingly in public over certain

19:17

kinds of ad

19:19

hominem or bad faith arguments.

19:23

But back to this point with Douglas, so

19:26

my bias was his side carried

19:28

that debate spectacularly well.

19:34

But,

19:35

and the truth is, I don't know Malcolm, I've been on his podcast,

19:38

so I've spoken to him, but I don't know Malcolm. Malcolm

19:41

has a, it's

19:43

not the first time he's done this in debate. He has a habit

19:45

in debate of being ad hominem

19:48

in a way that is, if it's ever persuasive,

19:51

it's not persuasive when he's doing it. And

19:53

so it just, you sort of lose just

19:57

by default, whatever the actual topic.

19:59

you know, under discussion. Do

20:03

you remember the talk that you gave on

20:05

death and the present moment? I think it

20:07

was the Atheists, Australian New Atheist

20:09

Society, something like that. It was a big, it

20:12

was called the Global Atheist Convention, or Global

20:15

Atheist Alliance, but

20:18

I think at that point, maybe

20:20

still, it was like the biggest atheist convention ever.

20:24

So I went to a few of those, but that was

20:26

one.

20:27

How should it inform the way that

20:29

we live our lives, do you think, given

20:32

that we know that they're going to end sooner

20:34

or later?

20:37

Well, I really think that is the,

20:39

whether you think about it or not,

20:42

that is the ever-present

20:45

subtext to almost everything

20:49

you care about, should care about, fail

20:51

to, you know, when your priorities are not

20:53

straight, you know,

20:55

when you have regrets, it's

20:58

against this,

21:01

the incessant ticking of the clock, that

21:05

all of that makes sense, and the imperative

21:07

of

21:13

the incremental loss of this non-renewable

21:15

resource, you know. It's like, it's the one thing you

21:17

don't get back. I mean, as I said, I think even

21:20

more than time, attention is the

21:22

real cash value of time, but, because

21:26

we know that you can safeguard your time and squander it, right? So

21:28

it's like, it's,

21:30

and we know you can find

21:33

real joy, surprising joy and equanimity

21:36

and even transcendent experience

21:39

in the midst of experiences

21:42

that you wouldn't otherwise think were optimal, right? You

21:44

can have, you can be in a shitty situation

21:47

where nothing has really gone the way

21:49

you expected and still be

21:52

radiantly happy, right? I mean, it really is a matter of what

21:54

you're doing with your attention and the kind of

21:56

mind you have.

22:00

The fact is, everything is

22:03

changing at every moment. And there's

22:05

no real stability, right?

22:07

There's no

22:10

final stage of control over

22:12

experience. Every

22:14

goal you attain becomes

22:16

a memory the moment you attain it, right? And then

22:19

you're just left to think about it, right? And then the question is, what

22:21

are you gonna do next? And we have this perpetual

22:24

challenge

22:25

of figuring out what to do next. I

22:28

mean, morally, intellectually,

22:31

as a matter of just trying to

22:33

safeguard our own sense of wellbeing,

22:36

and you never arrive. And

22:38

it's because of the

22:40

nature of impermanence that you never do. I mean, everything

22:43

is in fact a mirage if

22:45

you think that your satisfaction

22:47

is gonna be a matter of finally

22:50

putting all of the most

22:52

important features of your life in the

22:55

correct place, right? Like you finally

22:57

have the job you want, the relationship you want, the

22:59

house you want, you're fit, you're healthy,

23:04

you've executed on the perfect

23:07

to-do list and you finally arrived.

23:10

Well, at a minimum, you're

23:12

gonna notice that all of that has

23:14

to be maintained at great energy.

23:19

Entropy is such that you

23:22

can't stay fit, you can't stay healthy, you can't stay rich,

23:25

your relationship's not gonna maintain itself. And

23:29

what's more,

23:30

most people's minds are out of control

23:33

anyway, right? And they're

23:35

not satisfied anyway, even having

23:37

everything. The moment you have everything,

23:40

your sense of what you

23:44

want, I mean, you just moved the

23:46

goalposts or they got moved for you by

23:48

some hand that you could never see. And so like,

23:51

you take all of this for granted

23:53

and now you want other things and you want them just

23:55

as much as you wanted the last things.

23:59

There is something about the passage

24:02

of time that

24:04

as you pay attention

24:06

to it, and as you get older, this is

24:09

relevant. But some people get managed

24:11

to get quite old without getting especially wise.

24:14

But other things can happen even when you're young. You

24:16

can you know, you can lose people close to you or

24:19

you can you can suffer some profound

24:21

career setback or something can happen where you recognize,

24:24

OK, this is. There's

24:27

a. There's

24:29

a false premise here. There's many, many bright shiny

24:31

objects I've been focused on because

24:33

they've been captivating for cultural

24:37

and psychological reasons that I never inspected and

24:39

never really agreed to. But that's just where

24:41

my attention went. And there's

24:44

this deeper principle,

24:46

which is. The

24:48

effort to become happy. Never

24:52

fully fulfills itself. Right.

24:54

It's the becoming part contains

24:56

its own dissatisfaction.

24:59

Right. Like at a certain level, you have to figure out

25:01

how you can be happy with

25:03

whatever is already the case, like

25:06

to want what you already have.

25:09

And then from that place, move

25:11

into the next moment.

25:13

Looking to do creative, beautiful, fun

25:16

things. But

25:18

your your happiness is not contingent

25:20

upon those things working out in any particular

25:22

way. Right. You realize that you're just at

25:25

some level, you have to be process oriented rather

25:27

than goal oriented

25:29

because.

25:31

Ultimately, there is only the process. Right.

25:34

And you're and the goals and the goals are so the

25:36

achievement of the goals is such a punctate

25:39

experience. It's so brief. It's

25:41

just an idea. It's an idea before it happens.

25:43

It's an idea. The moment it happens,

25:46

it's some burst of sensory experience.

25:49

And then it's an idea again. It's a memory. And

25:51

you're talking about you're talking about the thing you did yesterday.

25:55

It's not good enough. That could never

25:57

have been good enough for a truly satisfying.

25:59

live. We'll get back to talking to Sam

26:02

in one minute, but first I need to tell you about our sponsor,

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26:51

modernwisdom. Someone that you might not

26:54

have been expecting to give you mindful wisdom

26:56

that you might agree with. Andrew Tate has

26:58

a quote where he says,

27:00

having things isn't fun, getting things

27:02

is fun.

27:03

And I think that what he's referring to there is the

27:06

hedonic treadmill that we're talking about. The

27:09

fact that it's in the anticipation of an event that we think

27:11

it's going to happen as a club promoter for forever.

27:13

And we would be creating anticipation

27:16

for this next new DJ, this next new whatever

27:18

that would happen. But the protracted

27:20

nature of the buildup

27:22

was what people looked forward to. They looked forward

27:24

to the advance of it

27:26

when the event happened. In fact, they did a study where they

27:28

got people to track, they pinged their

27:30

phones and got them to track how their happiness was throughout

27:33

the entirety of a night out. And the most fun

27:35

part of a night out is

27:37

getting ready with your friends before you head

27:39

out of the door.

27:40

Yeah. I mean, neuroanatomically,

27:42

the reason why that is the case, because

27:45

our dopaminergic system

27:47

gets driven not by

27:50

pleasure itself, but by the

27:52

expectation of pleasure. Things

27:55

are about to get... It's

27:57

the center of the bullseye is...

28:00

the

28:01

pleasant surprise, like

28:03

this is about to get better than I was

28:06

expecting, right? That's the thing

28:08

that is truly reinforcing.

28:10

Yeah, I fear I might've

28:12

made an error by saying that I have a

28:14

guest coming on that I was very excited about and now if

28:16

someone isn't as sufficiently excited about

28:19

you, then that dopaminergic system is gonna

28:21

fall through the floor. Yeah, yeah, there's one disappointment

28:23

after another. So Andrew

28:25

Tate's a perfect example of somebody who, again,

28:28

he's not, he's radioactive

28:30

for obvious reasons. I haven't met him, I

28:32

haven't done an especially deep dive on what

28:34

he's guilty of or, you know, I mean, he's

28:37

obviously,

28:38

he's got issues, but

28:41

I just feel like we're at a moment now

28:44

where,

28:47

there is such a thirst

28:50

for wisdom that,

28:52

you know, it can come from

28:54

so many different places and those places can be

28:56

more or less contaminated with

28:59

concepts that are more or less

29:01

toxic, more or less divisive, more or

29:03

less confusing. And

29:07

yeah, I mean, I've

29:09

watched enough of his stuff to see why

29:12

young men are getting addicted

29:14

to his content and thinking that he's their life

29:16

guru. And I've

29:18

also watched enough to think that it's not,

29:22

it's not ideal that he's the

29:24

voice of a generation, right? Like we

29:26

need a more compassionate,

29:31

less self-infatuated standard

29:34

for manliness and success than

29:39

whether he's putting out. If I was

29:41

to,

29:42

I've got Jordan coming on the

29:44

show again at some point later this year.

29:46

And

29:48

it's something that I think I'll speak to him about that

29:50

he's onto big things with this

29:53

arc, which is kind of his competitor, I think, to the

29:55

WEF that he's doing later this year.

29:57

Yeah, I haven't followed that, yeah, no.

29:59

But I do think that

30:01

Jordan's relative abandonment of

30:03

the conversation directly to young men, to

30:06

move on to other things, whether it be

30:08

climate change or the trans issue or

30:11

pick your poison about whatever he's got interested in

30:13

recently. I think that that has left

30:15

a vacuum and you can't

30:17

expect young, you can't expect anybody

30:20

to go through life without

30:22

insights coming from somewhere.

30:23

And whether that insight is for young

30:25

men or young women or old men or

30:27

old women, whether it's Andrew Tate or whoopi

30:31

Goldberg or whoever happens to have the hot take

30:33

of the week and trends sufficiently highly on Twitter,

30:36

people

30:37

are going to look for someone, they're going

30:40

to look for answers. And in a world where we are chronically

30:43

mismatched, our evolved psychology and the world

30:45

that we find ourselves in has never really

30:47

been further apart.

30:49

People are going to find answers and

30:52

sometimes fluency

30:54

is a really brilliant

30:56

proxy for truthfulness or insight. And

30:59

if you can say things with a

31:01

sufficiently

31:03

well-rounded, compelling delivery,

31:06

regardless of who you are, whether it be whoopi Goldberg

31:09

or anybody else, people will say, that

31:11

sounds, that sounds true. Sounds

31:14

fluent. Not sure if it's true.

31:16

Yeah. Except the thing that surprises

31:18

me is that it

31:21

should be more obvious than it is to

31:23

more people that

31:25

someone's an asshole. Right.

31:27

It's like that, like it doesn't matter how fluent

31:30

you are, you're only just declaring

31:33

your assholery in more

31:36

concise form. Right.

31:38

And

31:40

so it's kind of a Trumpian moment. Like Trump

31:42

is obviously an asshole. He's obviously

31:45

a selfish person, but nobody,

31:47

none of his fans care. Right. He's like, he's not

31:49

a compassionate person. He's,

31:51

he can't even pretend to care about people

31:54

really. Right. He's, but his,

31:55

his shamelessness around

31:58

his selfishness.

32:00

has become a kind of superpower for

32:02

certain audience because he's conveying

32:05

the message,

32:07

I will never judge you because I'm incapable of

32:11

judging myself, right? Like I'm not holding

32:13

myself to any kind of standard apart

32:15

from the gratification of my own desires.

32:18

So, in

32:19

some sense I have a real

32:21

integrity because I

32:23

know I'm selfish. All those people who are pretending

32:25

not to be selfish or pretending to be ethical and compassionate

32:28

to care about the

32:30

sub-Saharan Africa and the education

32:33

in developing countries, I mean, someone

32:35

like Bill Gates, right? Now, Bill Gates

32:38

is somebody who can't get laid and he's just

32:40

gonna microchip you with the next vaccine, right,

32:42

like that's, this is gonna be a great quote

32:45

to export from this podcast. You're

32:49

welcome, Twitter. So,

32:52

that's the center of

32:54

narrative and ethical gravity for

32:57

these guys, right? I don't include Jordan

32:59

there, but like Andrew Tate, Trump, there's

33:01

like a, I've got a fucking Bugatti

33:03

and you know you want one and I've

33:06

got no apologies, right? I've got no fucks to give.

33:09

I know you wanna be like me, you

33:11

know, and if you don't, if you're not good enough to be like

33:13

me, I'll sleep with your girlfriend, right? Like that's

33:16

the, that's not an ethically

33:18

wise person on any fucking level,

33:21

even if he can, even if he can string

33:23

together a few sentences that seem actionable

33:25

and useful to get you to clean

33:27

your room and get in shape and meet

33:29

a girl, right? We

33:32

should be asking more

33:34

of our elders than that, right?

33:37

And so, where I

33:39

part ways with Jordan,

33:42

again, I do not

33:43

put Jordan

33:45

in the same category, but

33:47

he is, he

33:49

has a very different view of the, the

33:51

status of

33:54

objective empirical

33:55

truth in relation to the, to

34:00

the stories we tell about ourselves

34:03

and our place in the world and

34:07

what makes life worth living, what will

34:09

allow for a society to really cohere around

34:12

shared values. And he thinks

34:14

that there's a layer of

34:17

storytelling and what

34:20

I would call

34:22

myth and fiction really in a way

34:24

that is kind of somewhat derogatory,

34:27

right? Not to say that I don't see the power

34:29

in it, but it's just, what I wanna do is

34:31

be able to distinguish between the layer

34:34

of wishful

34:35

thinking

34:39

and a layer of delusion and a layer of

34:41

ancient confusion that

34:44

is still has good standing among

34:46

millions of people. And probably some symbolic truth

34:49

or figurative truth in that too. And

34:51

a kind of harmless

34:53

uses of the imagination that could be ennobling

34:56

and fun and empowering, right?

34:59

And kind of core

35:01

truths that don't require a story

35:04

to be ennobling. Did you see

35:06

that Jordan got into it with Richard Dawkins on

35:08

where you wouldn't have done your off Twitter. So I will

35:12

be the weather vane to update

35:14

you on whatever's happening in Twitter's conditions at

35:16

the moment.

35:18

Richard, a clip of Richard went

35:21

semi viral of him criticizing the

35:23

Old Testament God. And then I think

35:25

Jordan

35:26

basically called him out anytime,

35:29

anyplace, anywhere. It wasn't far off that I think that the actual tweet

35:31

was about saying that it was a, I think damaging

35:33

science and doing a disservice

35:36

to

35:37

maybe Dawkins himself and

35:39

some other stuff. Yeah, well, so I mean, that's,

35:43

I mean, I agree with Richard with

35:47

respect to the, what

35:49

I think of the Old Testament God and

35:51

the moral instruction we can or can't

35:54

take from him. I mean, I just think that's, I just

35:56

don't think that the Bible

35:58

is the wisest book we have. even though

36:00

there are pearls of real wisdom

36:03

there, which I understand that people

36:05

love.

36:07

It's a book, it was clearly written by human beings.

36:10

So the fundamental, the breach

36:12

point is not, is

36:14

upstream of many of the things people might

36:16

wanna debate. There's just this basic

36:18

claim. We've got millions

36:20

upon millions of books. Were

36:23

they all written by people or not? And

36:26

the moment you admit that they were all written by people, okay,

36:28

we're having a very different conversation about the status

36:31

of religion, certainly the religion of any

36:33

of the religions of Abraham. These are claimed

36:36

at bottom, Judaism, Christianity,

36:39

and Islam are claims about the

36:41

divine origin of a specific

36:43

book or certain texts.

36:46

And some of these texts were canonical for centuries

36:49

and then got thrown out within Christianity, and

36:52

then some got added later. And

36:55

so the process of cobbling together

36:57

these scriptures was all

36:59

too human. We know way too much about it. If

37:02

we knew more about it, it would look much more

37:04

like Joseph Smith and the Book of

37:07

Mormon, and it would look like the

37:09

South Park episode that Mormonism in fact looks

37:12

like. And you drag it further

37:14

into the present,

37:15

and it looks like Scientology. And then

37:17

you're just staring at L. Ron Hubbard's driver's

37:19

license, and it's just, okay, this goofy

37:22

guy with bad teeth

37:23

sold all these people on a

37:26

story about the stars that was just obviously

37:28

bullshit and it should have been obvious to

37:30

them. Now, again, it's not to

37:32

say that there isn't real wisdom

37:35

in all of these streams

37:38

of information, I mean, even Scientology,

37:41

but

37:43

you just,

37:45

the basic claim, and I think Richard would agree with this,

37:47

is that

37:48

you don't have to believe anything about insufficient

37:50

evidence to extract

37:53

all the wisdom that is to be found in the

37:55

world's literature and in the conversations,

37:57

conversations with people in the present,

37:59

with the dead by reading

38:02

their books.

38:03

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slash modernwisdom. The

38:59

first time that I think I heard

39:01

of Jordan was that first conversation

39:03

that you guys had. It was

39:05

a podcast, maybe in a bar, you know, hotel reception

39:07

or something and it was a chinking of glasses. Oh

39:10

no, that would have been probably Dan Dennett. Dan

39:13

Dennett and I had a debate in a bar, but Jordan

39:15

and I had a debate on my podcast. Right, well, I'd

39:17

heard this conversation and

39:19

I remember thinking, who's this Canadian fuck

39:22

having a part with Sam Harris at

39:24

the time and then later on went

39:26

on to really sort of fall in love with Jordan's work as

39:28

well. I think there's

39:30

an awful lot of people

39:32

who want to see

39:34

that public relationship

39:37

between you and him rekindled. Well,

39:40

it hasn't, I mean, to my eye, it

39:43

has not

39:46

been broken. I mean, I like Jordan. I mean,

39:48

I think this is just, this is what

39:50

I imagine because I have not had any dialogue with him in

39:53

a couple of years, but I

39:54

mean,

39:56

Jordan and I disagree fundamentally

39:59

about religion. I think, and we've debated that

40:01

ad nauseam. I've probably got like 12 hours

40:03

on the mic in

40:05

various venues debating that. And

40:07

that was fun and I'm always happy to talk

40:10

to him.

40:12

And I think while we disagree, I

40:14

think he has really helped

40:16

millions of people. I mean, I think there's

40:18

no question. I know

40:20

what

40:21

it's like to be with him at an event and

40:24

to hear from the people who are, to

40:27

hear from his fans and my fans side by

40:29

side, sitting at a table for an hour

40:31

after an event where we had

40:33

a debate in front of 8,000 people.

40:36

And there's a slightly different flavor to the

40:39

people whose lives we've changed, right?

40:41

He's intersected with a different

40:43

group of people at a different point in their lives than

40:46

I have for the most part. How would you categorize that difference?

40:51

Well, I mean, to a significant degree, is

40:53

people moving in two opposite direction. I mean, like

40:55

they're the people who were

40:58

stuck with a religious worldview, stuck,

41:01

I mean, literally in many cases, traumatized

41:04

by a fear of hell that had been inculcated

41:06

into them by their religious parents, but

41:10

were

41:11

enamored enough of enlightenment values

41:14

and secular rationality and science

41:16

so as to have the

41:18

spell break to some significant

41:21

degree and they needed some

41:23

language to help

41:26

kind of midwife their delivery into

41:28

the clear light of

41:30

reason, right? And they also needed, and

41:33

this is where Richard and I have had

41:36

different jobs. I mean, Richard is just critiquing

41:40

religion and counterposing it

41:42

with

41:43

all that's wonderful about science, right? And

41:45

so for him, the

41:46

spiritual attitude that is

41:48

on offer when you want to leave religion

41:51

behind and close the

41:53

church doors behind you is awe

41:55

at the beauty of nature and

41:57

just amazement at everything we hear.

41:59

are learning and may yet learn

42:02

about the way the world works and the

42:04

way the mind works. And

42:07

I mean, we are, to use Newton's

42:09

image, I mean, it's like

42:11

we are children on a seashore playing

42:14

with shells and the vast ocean

42:16

of ignorance and potential knowledge,

42:18

it just awaits our inspection.

42:23

For me,

42:24

that's not good enough, right? What I mean

42:26

by spirituality has

42:28

in fact, nothing to do with

42:31

the amazement that you feel when you look up at the Milky

42:33

Way, right? It's like, that's great,

42:35

but that's just not the

42:39

real opportunity on offer. And that's not what's

42:41

going to prepare us to die, and

42:43

that's not what's going to really console

42:46

you at four in the morning when you wake up feeling

42:49

bad about your life and not

42:51

sure how you can be happy in this world, right?

42:56

So I'm much more, so I'm convinced that at the

42:58

core of every religion, there

43:01

were real transformative and transcendent

43:04

human experiences that are attested

43:06

to by the literature and traditions

43:09

that have grown up around that religion. So

43:11

there really was, presumably there really was

43:13

a person in history

43:16

by the name of Jesus who had

43:18

this effect on the people

43:20

around him and said something

43:23

like what he is purported to have said in the Bible.

43:26

And I can understand all

43:28

of that as

43:32

an absolutely predictable

43:35

result of certain ways

43:38

of paying attention that are available to every

43:40

human being now, then, now, then

43:42

and now,

43:46

which allow you to recognize that this

43:49

ego you take yourself to be is an illusion, and

43:51

it allows you to recognize that unconditional

43:54

love is actually a possibility, right? It

43:56

is possible to just feel

44:01

shattered by your love for all sentient

44:03

beings and to just bask

44:05

in the profundity of that way of being.

44:08

And that's on the menu.

44:10

And whether you have to go into a cave and

44:13

meditate for a month to find that, or you take

44:15

MDMA, or you have, there are ways

44:17

to perturb your nervous system such that the

44:20

testimony of someone like Jesus or Buddha

44:24

is not,

44:26

is obviously not a fraud.

44:28

It's obviously not a confession of psychopathology.

44:31

It's obviously not a delusion about, belief-based

44:35

delusion about what happens after death or about

44:37

invisible parts of the universe populated

44:39

by angels or deities.

44:42

You don't have to believe in anything

44:45

unempirical in order to experience

44:47

that range of positive

44:49

experience. You just have to learn

44:52

to use your attention in the right ways. And if

44:54

you can't do that, you know, there are,

44:56

you know, psychedelics offer an

44:59

imperfect method at- Very reliable,

45:01

then. Yeah. I mean, it's definitely reliable.

45:04

It's a reliable glimpse of something

45:06

that is different enough,

45:08

assuming you have a positive experience. I mean, you can

45:11

have a different enough negative experience that will convince

45:13

you of something else. But if you have a different

45:15

enough extraordinarily positive

45:18

experience,

45:19

you'll be convinced that,

45:21

okay, whatever

45:25

the possibilities of sustaining that may

45:27

or may not be,

45:28

it is just clear that this experience is

45:30

possible because I just had it, right? I just had it

45:33

for four hours.

45:34

And

45:35

I can no longer imagine

45:38

that human consciousness is in

45:41

principle confined to

45:43

kind of the mediocre

45:45

bandwidth I tend to experience when I'm just

45:47

checking my email and then checking Twitter and

45:49

then worrying about my future, right?

45:52

I actually don't think I actually closed the loop on what

45:56

I wanted to say about Jordan there though. So

45:58

Jordan-

46:01

Jordan and I differ

46:03

in,

46:04

he wants to support

46:06

a much more traditional picture of the

46:09

utility

46:09

and even necessity

46:11

of religious thinking and religious identity

46:15

and that way of giving meaning to one's

46:17

life through traditional stories.

46:21

Stories which I

46:25

think a literal belief in can't be justified

46:27

based on what we have come to understand about

46:29

science.

46:32

And

46:33

I just think that the

46:35

burden is on us at this point in history to

46:38

find a truly non-sectarian

46:41

way of telling ourselves

46:43

a story about what we value and

46:45

what is possible. And

46:48

we do that in other areas of our lives. I mean, science

46:50

is one very clear place we do

46:52

that. There is no, to

46:54

say that

46:55

there's American science versus

46:57

Chinese science, and it's just that's just not science.

47:00

Science is at a layer more fundamental

47:02

than those cultural differences.

47:06

And so it has to be with something like

47:09

ethics and spirituality. In

47:11

the end, you shouldn't be able to talk about Christian

47:14

ethics or Christian spiritual insight.

47:17

And Jordan's not convinced of that or he's

47:19

apparently not convinced of that. And so that's

47:22

what we still disagree about. But I think the

47:24

final thing, the thing I wanted to say was

47:26

that, so you

47:29

seem to allude to some sort of breach between us, which

47:31

I certainly don't feel and have an experience.

47:34

I can only imagine though that in his world,

47:37

given what was happening

47:39

to me on Twitter when I left,

47:41

he perceives me as somebody who has just

47:47

gone off the rails in some way.

47:50

And so I was like, in his world, and

47:52

this is what was so amazing

47:55

to see, when

47:56

I

47:57

was looking at Twitter, when I made

47:59

this...

47:59

to if anyone doesn't know what I'm talking about,

48:02

there was this whole Hunter Biden laptop situation,

48:04

right? I commented on the Hunter Biden laptop thing

48:07

on a podcast. A clip

48:09

from that podcast got exported to apparently

48:13

every

48:14

planet in the solar system. And

48:18

it had an enormous

48:20

effect right of center, right? So right

48:22

of center, I had just destroyed

48:25

my career. I'm hearing from people like,

48:28

oh my God, are you okay? And

48:30

in my world and in every channel

48:32

I care about, literally nothing

48:35

had happened.

48:36

But Jordan

48:38

lives in the world where I just kind of

48:40

torched everything. So I can only imagine that

48:42

he has some view of my,

48:45

I mean, the truth is I would

48:47

expect him to be genuinely

48:50

confused about what I believe about things

48:52

like free speech or any of the relevant

48:55

variables there, unless he happens

48:57

to listen to my podcast, which I

48:59

don't know whether or not he does.

49:01

I think the

49:04

potential breach that I was talking about was more just

49:06

that there is a hunger for you and him to speak. I

49:08

think that you've both been formative to

49:10

a lot of people's intellectual journeys

49:13

in one form or another. I

49:15

think people are hoping that there is yet

49:17

more juice to squeeze from your conjoined lemons

49:20

in

49:21

however way that happens. Well,

49:23

I'm always happy to talk to him. I think

49:25

the thing that got into my head is someone sent me a clip

49:27

from

49:28

Joe Rogan's podcast where he and Joe

49:31

were talking about me and

49:34

Jordan seemed to be talking about me. It's like a cautionary

49:36

tale, like look what can happen to somebody.

49:39

And Joe said something like, oh, I still

49:41

have hope for Sam. And they're,

49:44

in my view,

49:45

they are in this contrarian echo

49:47

chamber, right?

49:49

Where, you know, mRNA vaccines

49:52

are terrifying, COVID was no big deal. January

49:56

6th was maybe a non-event, right? The

49:59

libtards.

49:59

are trying to ruin everything. And

50:02

there's a whole picture of sort of audience

50:04

capture and information

50:07

skewing there, which I understand. I

50:09

mean, that's sort of how, like, if I look to my

50:11

left, I can see all that.

50:13

But if you're only there,

50:16

there's

50:16

just a lot of half-truths, kind of

50:19

ricocheting around that echo chamber, which,

50:22

yeah, I mean, I'm happy to talk to both

50:24

those guys, but it's just, they're not,

50:28

in the lane I'm in and trying to maintain,

50:31

despite

50:35

the crosswinds, trying to maintain a straight

50:37

course in,

50:41

that's only half the story, right? So

50:43

it's, and I just think people are

50:45

genuinely confused now because

50:48

two things are true.

50:51

We have lost trust in the

50:54

normal channels of information and normal

50:56

institutions

50:57

post COVID, during COVID and post COVID,

51:01

for obvious reasons, but we

51:04

desperately need institutions and

51:06

a media that we can trust, right? And

51:08

we're not going to navigate this moment

51:11

by just proliferating podcasts and newsletters,

51:13

right? It's just not good enough. Much as we might try. Yeah,

51:16

so it's, and so that's the, that's

51:18

a seeming paradox because yes,

51:20

you can point to the moments where our

51:22

institutions have become untrustworthy,

51:25

but RFK Jr. is

51:27

not the Messiah we need at this moment.

51:29

Why do you think he's so hot at the moment? What is it about RFK?

51:32

Well, it's exactly, he is speaking

51:35

very directly to this contrarian

51:38

echo

51:40

chamber, contrarian

51:43

slash conspiracy thinking,

51:46

conspiracy addled echo chamber, where

51:48

the

51:50

non-standard version of everything

51:52

is almost certainly the right account,

51:55

right? So no

51:57

one can be trusted. All you really

51:59

can.

51:59

It is a kind of religion

52:01

of suspicion that is being born.

52:06

It's

52:11

a pseudo awakening of they're

52:13

all fucking

52:15

liars. That's what

52:17

happened to so many millions of people during COVID,

52:19

they're all liars. I mean, just got Gavin Newsom

52:22

closing the beaches and then he's

52:25

over at French Laundry,

52:27

perfectly coiffed

52:28

at a fundraiser.

52:30

Is that hypocrisy that people

52:32

found? I mean, that was just a 20 megaton

52:35

moment of hypocrisy that detonated

52:37

and broke

52:38

trust with

52:40

half the country. And

52:43

so it's,

52:45

again, that's all understandable, but

52:48

we have to be realistic about just

52:51

what is true and likely to be true in

52:53

each moment. And

52:54

is everything the CDC says

52:58

likely to be wrong? Like

53:00

is that really where we want to default to,

53:02

you can't trust the CDC about anything? Is that

53:05

how you really want to be a consumer of medicine?

53:08

It just is completely unworkable. What we need is

53:10

a CDC we can trust. And insofar as we

53:12

don't truly have that, then

53:14

that is where we have to perform surgery. But it's

53:17

not like we can tear it all down

53:19

and then we're just gonna chat GPT our way

53:21

to health.

53:23

It's not gonna happen. Well, get

53:25

back to talking to Sam in one minute, but first I need to

53:27

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54:18

www.drinklmnt.com

54:21

slash Modern Wisdom. How

54:23

far do you think RFK gets in this political

54:26

race?

54:27

Well,

54:31

I'm hopeful that if he keeps expounding upon

54:33

how COVID was targeted

54:35

to avoid Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese

54:38

people and it's like if

54:40

you give him a mic enough, he will

54:43

put his foot, he'll put both feet

54:45

in his mouth and in your

54:47

mouth and in any mouth that's available.

54:49

But again,

54:50

it's not that

54:52

he's wrong about everything. It's

54:55

harder than that. He is

54:57

right about many things and

55:00

the fact that people

55:01

love what he's saying

55:03

is totally understandable. It's

55:06

just not, you know, half truths are harder

55:09

to deal with or statements

55:12

which

55:12

are riddled with truths but the general

55:15

shape of them is wrong

55:17

and aiming in the wrong direction. Like that

55:19

is just, it's hard for people to parse that stuff

55:22

and it's especially hard when

55:26

occasionally the conspiracy

55:28

theory turns out to be true or very

55:31

likely to be true. It's like if you're a person who has

55:33

an appetite

55:35

for every conspiracy theory, right? So JFK

55:39

couldn't have been a single shooter and you've just bought

55:41

everyone since then,

55:44

then you're going to be, then when, you know, COVID

55:48

likely escaped a lab in Wuhan,

55:51

if you're the first person to sign up to that in

55:53

an environment where everyone's being

55:55

called racist for signing up to that,

55:58

you're going to look like this contrary.

55:59

who just like, they couldn't

56:02

fool me, right? I knew that it likely came

56:04

out of a lab. Whereas

56:06

the rational position

56:08

to have had, I mean, you have to take all of these things

56:11

all a cart,

56:11

right, like you just have to honestly investigate,

56:15

you know, within the

56:17

confines of opportunity

56:20

costs and bandwidth,

56:23

you have to investigate them as

56:26

they come. And I mean, with that one

56:28

in particular, it was always obvious

56:30

that it was at the very least plausible

56:33

that COVID could have escaped a lab. We

56:35

just know we have a problem with lab leaks and

56:37

there was the Wuhan Institute of Virology right

56:40

there working on coronaviruses. It

56:43

was never raised, that was a woke

56:45

shibboleth bullshit to call

56:47

that racist to worry that it

56:50

come out of a lab. Should have spoken to Rob Reed, that would have

56:52

made it easier.

56:53

Which Rob Reed is that? That

56:55

did after on, didn't he do a big- Oh, yeah,

56:58

yeah, yeah, yeah. I

57:00

was thinking about the Christian Rob Reed. Yeah,

57:03

so

57:04

Rob and I did a podcast on

57:06

this kind of topic, lab

57:09

leaks in general and synthetic

57:11

bio in general.

57:14

But again,

57:14

you

57:17

can't give, if

57:19

someone like RFK Jr. likes all the

57:21

conspiracies, like every one of them, he

57:23

likes the cell phones,

57:26

cause glioblastoma idea,

57:29

which again, it's totally possible. It's

57:32

not that it's not worth looking into, but if

57:35

you like that one and you like the Bill Gates

57:37

microchipping one and you like the Wuhan

57:40

one and you like that COVID itself was just

57:42

a pandemic and you like all of these

57:45

and you like the Ashkenazi Jews don't get COVID.

57:49

It's a characterological problem. You

57:51

have this appetite for, I

57:53

mean, you see this, the true

57:56

avatar of this way of thinking to someone

57:58

like Alex Jones, right? Like, I know.

57:59

And again, I don't know if Alice Jones is just a performance

58:02

artist and it's cynical and

58:04

not

58:05

real, or if he really

58:07

believes what he says he believes. But assuming he believes

58:10

what he says he believes, he

58:12

is just,

58:14

you know, it's like you're a nymphomaniac

58:19

and what you love is lies, right? And

58:21

half truths, right? You just love the

58:23

least credible ideas. You know,

58:26

whatever can come over the transom, that's

58:28

what gets you hard, right? And so that you're

58:31

just gonna keep

58:33

doing that. And it's a

58:35

disorder, right? But

58:39

if it's true that certain frogs are getting turned gay,

58:42

right, like, and you're the first one

58:44

talking about that, well, he

58:46

was right about those frogs, so he must be right

58:48

about everything. You're gonna find an audience. And

58:51

what's so perverse about our current environment

58:54

online is that

58:56

there is no real evolutionary pressure

58:58

anymore

59:00

because everything can succeed.

59:03

There's just a nut, there's always, you

59:05

can always just find another corner of the internet and

59:08

another echo chamber and just this part of 4chan

59:11

and a 4chan isn't good enough for you, it can be over at 8chan,

59:13

right? It's like you can find this little hellhole

59:16

where every, where you're gonna find, a

59:19

requisite number of people to monetize ultimately

59:23

are willing to hear and talk about anything.

59:25

And so unlike

59:28

many of the people we just spoke about, I'm

59:32

convinced that we have an enormous problem

59:34

with misinformation that

59:36

is held in tension with

59:38

our desire for free speech on every topic,

59:41

24 hours a day, that we

59:43

have to take seriously. We have to say, and

59:46

it's not that we should ever write a law

59:48

which says people have to go to jail for

59:50

saying crazy things. I think the

59:52

First Amendment truly is sacred and

59:55

the right, it's just beyond sacred, it's

59:57

just the right algorithm to have.

59:59

for it to run a democracy. And we

1:00:02

have it in America and almost no one

1:00:04

else has it. But

1:00:07

that's not the same thing as having a right

1:00:10

to the

1:00:11

gamification algorithm

1:00:14

that boosts the craziest stuff

1:00:16

preferentially to

1:00:17

the ends of the earth and maintains it forever.

1:00:21

And now you add generative

1:00:24

AI to that and I think the problem just gets worse.

1:00:27

So yeah, I'm worried

1:00:29

about

1:00:30

consequential lies and haftrids in

1:00:33

a way that many of my colleagues in podcast

1:00:35

stand aren't.

1:00:36

Getting back to something which is less

1:00:40

contentious, perhaps death and

1:00:42

the fact that we

1:00:44

maybe should spend more time thinking about it or at least be a little

1:00:46

bit more aware of it. I wanna read a quote

1:00:49

from that presentation that you gave

1:00:52

on death in the present moment. As

1:00:54

a matter of conscious experience, the reality of your

1:00:56

life is always now. And I think that this

1:00:58

is a liberating truth about the nature of the human

1:01:00

mind. In fact, I think there's probably

1:01:03

nothing more important to understand about

1:01:05

your mind than that. If you want to be happy

1:01:07

in this world, the past is a memory.

1:01:09

It's a thought arising in the present.

1:01:11

The future is merely anticipated. It

1:01:14

is another thought arising now.

1:01:16

What we truly have is this moment

1:01:18

and this. And we spend most of our lives

1:01:21

forgetting this truth, refuting it, fleeing

1:01:23

it, overlooking it. And the horror is

1:01:26

that we succeed. We managed to never

1:01:28

really connect with the present moment and

1:01:31

find fulfillment there because we are continually

1:01:33

hoping to become happy in the future.

1:01:35

And the future never arrives. It

1:01:37

is always now.

1:01:38

However much you feel you need to plan for the future

1:01:41

to anticipate it, to mitigate risks, the

1:01:43

reality of your life is now.

1:01:45

Even when we think we're in the present moment,

1:01:47

we are in very subtle ways, always

1:01:49

looking over its shoulder, anticipating what's coming

1:01:52

next. We're always solving a problem

1:01:54

and it's possible to simply drop your problem

1:01:57

if only for a moment

1:01:59

and enjoy whatever. is true of your life

1:02:01

in the present.

1:02:03

You say that your mind is all you have just

1:02:05

before that. What

1:02:07

does that mean? And reflecting

1:02:09

on that statement now, what

1:02:11

did you hope that people took away from it?

1:02:15

Well, it's,

1:02:17

there's this, we've

1:02:19

spoken about it a little bit already, there's this fundamental

1:02:21

truth that

1:02:22

you never truly arrive if

1:02:25

your attention is always purpose

1:02:27

toward looking for the next thing, anticipating

1:02:29

the next thing.

1:02:31

If even

1:02:33

in the presence of that very thing that was

1:02:35

the next thing and now it's now you are busy

1:02:39

telling yourself a story about it, you know,

1:02:41

if your engagement with it is mediated by

1:02:43

thought in each moment

1:02:46

and you can't actually make contact with

1:02:48

it,

1:02:48

you can't, you can't,

1:02:50

there's this dissatisfaction even

1:02:53

in satisfaction, right? You get the thing

1:02:55

you were longing for and you have

1:02:57

such a,

1:02:59

you're so distractible, you're so

1:03:01

burdened by this automaticity of thought,

1:03:05

this conversation you're having with yourself,

1:03:08

that the present moment

1:03:09

isn't

1:03:10

even salient enough to you, right? And

1:03:14

so it's a,

1:03:18

most of us most of the time live in that kind

1:03:20

of, you know, we

1:03:22

get buffeted between the past,

1:03:24

anticipating the future and thinking about the

1:03:26

past, and that flicker happens over even the

1:03:28

present moment, right?

1:03:33

I mean, we're just, we're just, you know, like, even

1:03:36

in a conversation like this, like I'm saying something, if part of my

1:03:38

attention is, well, I mean, have I

1:03:40

gone on too long about this or like, did

1:03:42

that even make sense? What would, there's part of

1:03:45

me that is potentially talking to myself about

1:03:49

the very conversation we're having now. Now, that

1:03:51

is all too normal. Everyone

1:03:53

is in

1:03:54

that position. I mean, people are, people who are listening to

1:03:56

us now are struggling. to

1:04:00

follow my train of thought as I speak. One,

1:04:03

because I'm long-winded, but two,

1:04:05

my speech is competing

1:04:07

with speech that is occurring to them

1:04:09

in their head, right? They're saying, well, what's he talking about?

1:04:12

Jordan didn't say that. Where does he get off

1:04:14

talking about Jordan now? And there's someone

1:04:17

in their fucking head who seems

1:04:19

to be them, but strangely not them,

1:04:21

because if they're the one talking and also listening,

1:04:24

why are they having that conversation in the first place? There's

1:04:27

this people

1:04:29

looking over their own shoulder into the, even

1:04:31

when they're trying to seize

1:04:34

the present with both hands, right? Even if they take

1:04:36

my advice in that quote and say, okay, I

1:04:39

gotta be all about the now, right? The

1:04:41

future never arrives. There's just now, so let's

1:04:44

enjoy the now. What they will find

1:04:46

is they

1:04:47

lack the tools to really do that.

1:04:49

And so one tool, again,

1:04:51

something like

1:04:53

psychedelics, right? You

1:04:56

take the requisite dose of LSD

1:04:58

or psilocybin or MDMA, and these are potentially

1:05:01

very different experiences, but what

1:05:04

will happen under the

1:05:06

aegis of any of those compounds is

1:05:10

very likely you will

1:05:12

have a full collision with

1:05:14

the present moment of a sort that you have

1:05:16

never had before, if it's your first time on one

1:05:19

of those drugs. And

1:05:21

all of a sudden,

1:05:23

your sensory experience and

1:05:25

even your conceptual experience will begin

1:05:27

to unfold,

1:05:30

and you will realize there is just much

1:05:32

more here than you realize,

1:05:35

right? Like everything becomes

1:05:37

a kind of miracle.

1:05:40

And

1:05:42

the problem with that is that finding meaning

1:05:44

in everything

1:05:48

is crazy,

1:05:50

right? You become the guy who's just like, if

1:05:52

I'm staring at this microphone, I'm so, I come

1:05:54

here stoned and I'm just like, oh my God, that microphone

1:05:57

is just, that, you know. That's

1:06:00

not the guy you want on your podcast, right? So,

1:06:03

but it is possible,

1:06:09

it is possible to fall into

1:06:11

the well of being such that

1:06:13

the present moment lacks for nothing, right?

1:06:17

You're just, you recognize that love,

1:06:19

what you really mean by love, what you should

1:06:22

mean by love, is not this transactional

1:06:24

thing that you get going with a specific person

1:06:27

because of your shared history together and because of their qualities

1:06:30

that you happen to like.

1:06:32

It is actually a state of being that

1:06:35

you can just plunge into and

1:06:37

you recognize that this is,

1:06:40

the point of life is to recognize

1:06:42

this more and more, right? And so,

1:06:44

and love is one

1:06:46

facet to this jewel, compassion

1:06:49

is another, just,

1:06:53

just awe, you know, is another. I mean,

1:06:55

it gets different shadings depending on

1:06:57

the environment you put it in. It gets like,

1:06:59

if you're in the presence of human or animal suffering,

1:07:01

well then compassion is the thing that gets

1:07:04

amplified. But

1:07:05

in real silence and in a real undistracted

1:07:09

collision

1:07:12

with

1:07:14

the present moment, when you don't have this voice

1:07:16

in your head diverting you

1:07:19

or coming up from behind seeming to be

1:07:21

you, right? But what happens is people

1:07:24

feel like a

1:07:25

separate self. Perhaps

1:07:28

I should rewind for a second. Here's

1:07:31

the starting point for 99.9% of humanity. People

1:07:35

feel like a self. People feel like they're

1:07:38

a subject in the middle

1:07:40

of their experience, right? They feel like they're having

1:07:42

an experience. They feel like they're

1:07:44

on the edge of experience in some sense. They

1:07:47

don't feel identical to experience, right? So

1:07:51

an experience is

1:07:52

your five sensory channels and

1:07:54

your mind, right? So you've got your seeing,

1:07:57

hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, thinking,

1:07:59

feeling.

1:08:01

and you've got this whole

1:08:07

cacophony of what it's like to be

1:08:09

you in each moment. And sometimes

1:08:11

it's very, very pleasant and sometimes it's very

1:08:13

unpleasant and sometimes it's just normal

1:08:17

and there's

1:08:20

nothing really especially salient about it.

1:08:24

And the default sense is to

1:08:26

feel like a self in the middle

1:08:28

of that. And

1:08:31

it's

1:08:33

that starting point that is actually

1:08:35

the basis for all of our dissatisfaction

1:08:38

and psychological suffering. That

1:08:40

is the knot

1:08:41

that has to be untied

1:08:43

that really allows

1:08:46

for a recognition of

1:08:48

what the mind is like prior to identification

1:08:51

with thought and prior to this

1:08:55

capture by this

1:08:58

reflexive

1:09:00

seeking and not finding operation

1:09:02

that we're constantly engaged

1:09:05

with. So,

1:09:08

yes, it's possible to... So, yes,

1:09:11

on some level,

1:09:13

certainly spiritually speaking, now is everything.

1:09:16

There really is just consciousness

1:09:18

and its contents in each moment, and

1:09:20

there's never a

1:09:22

reason to wait to recognize that.

1:09:26

This isn't to disavow all the other projects

1:09:29

we could have in human life that take some time

1:09:31

to accomplish. I'm not saying everyone

1:09:33

should just become a monk or go to a cave and starve.

1:09:35

There are things that I like to do in the world

1:09:38

and want to get done and I have projects. But

1:09:40

in each moment,

1:09:42

the question is what is available to

1:09:44

attention

1:09:46

and why do you suffer?

1:09:48

And if you're

1:09:51

going to ask yourself, why do you suffer in

1:09:53

each moment? Why is this moment just

1:09:55

a little crappy? Why is it just not good

1:09:57

enough? Why am I looking forward to

1:09:59

this

1:09:59

in an hour

1:10:01

and am unable to locate a

1:10:03

real ease of being now, before

1:10:06

this good thing happens,

1:10:09

before this uncertainty gets resolved,

1:10:11

before I've hear from the doctor that I don't have

1:10:13

the thing that I'm worried about. All

1:10:16

of these contingencies, what's

1:10:18

available now, what you find

1:10:20

is, and meditation is the ultimate

1:10:22

answer to this in my view,

1:10:25

you find this,

1:10:27

on the part of virtually everyone, this basic incapacity

1:10:31

to break the spell of identification with

1:10:33

thought and just rest attention

1:10:36

as consciousness in the present moment. And

1:10:39

meditation is simply the act of doing that ultimately.

1:10:41

I mean, there are many techniques that can seem

1:10:43

like something other in the beginning, but ultimately

1:10:46

if it works, meditation

1:10:48

is the ability to look at this thing you

1:10:50

thought was your ego,

1:10:52

that you thought was yourself,

1:10:54

that you thought was the homunculus that was in the

1:10:56

middle of your experience, and not

1:10:58

find it, and not find it in a way

1:11:01

that actually relieves you of the problem

1:11:03

of egocentricity

1:11:05

for that moment. It might only

1:11:07

last in the beginning, it

1:11:09

might only last a moment, and

1:11:12

then you'll be lost in thought again. But the

1:11:14

question is, once you learn to meditate,

1:11:17

the question is always what do you do next? And

1:11:20

if you don't know how to meditate, well, you're just gonna helplessly

1:11:22

be thinking that thought, and you'll think it for as long

1:11:24

as you'll

1:11:25

think it, and it'll make you angry or

1:11:27

sad, or regretful or whatever, depending on

1:11:29

its contents, and then you'll try to have to figure out how to

1:11:31

rearrange your life on the basis of that thought so as to

1:11:33

not be angry or sad or regretful. But

1:11:36

once you know how to meditate, you can recognize

1:11:39

thoughts as thoughts, and they just arise

1:11:41

and disappear in this wider space of awareness,

1:11:45

and you locate your well-being in

1:11:47

that space, as that space.

1:11:49

But

1:11:51

if all of that sounds like religious

1:11:53

gibberish that is totally interesting,

1:11:57

and it would have seemed that way to me when I was 18.

1:11:59

The only thing for a hard-headed skeptic,

1:12:03

much of the time is

1:12:05

an experience that snaps you out

1:12:07

of your egocentric illusions

1:12:10

for some period of time. And so for me- Peru,

1:12:12

go to Peru. Go to Peru, or,

1:12:15

which I haven't done, I haven't done ayahuasca, but for

1:12:18

me, psychedelics,

1:12:20

they were indispensable

1:12:22

because I

1:12:23

was someone, had you

1:12:26

confronted me as an undergraduate in college with

1:12:29

whatever I just said,

1:12:32

I would have, even if I had been convinced to

1:12:34

try meditating for an hour,

1:12:37

I wouldn't have had the aptitude for

1:12:40

it such that I would have immediately

1:12:43

noticed there was a there there. I

1:12:45

would have bounced off. I would have got the sense

1:12:47

that it

1:12:49

didn't work for me. Most people,

1:12:52

someone like Richard Dawkins is

1:12:54

a perfect example. He's like, I ambushed him on

1:12:56

my podcast with five minutes of meditation.

1:12:59

I thought you were gonna say spiked the drink with-

1:13:02

Yeah, he, no, Richard, I told- Heavy dose of psilocybin.

1:13:04

I told Richard he should do psychedelics.

1:13:08

But

1:13:10

most people who are, and

1:13:13

this is especially true of hard-headed

1:13:16

rationalists, skeptic, scientist types,

1:13:20

they're so enamored of

1:13:22

thought. Thought is the only

1:13:24

appendage they have ever found by

1:13:28

which to interface

1:13:31

with reality such that they can't imagine

1:13:33

a mind prior

1:13:36

to thought. They can't imagine a non-conceptual

1:13:38

engagement with reality that

1:13:41

reveals anything. It sounds like brain

1:13:43

damage. My

1:13:45

concepts are great. You should have

1:13:48

concept as good as my concepts. Why,

1:13:50

what, are you gonna hit me on the head with a hammer? Yeah, then I'll

1:13:52

have fewer concepts. But so

1:13:55

when you point them inward, when you say, okay, just

1:13:58

notice that, just try to follow-

1:13:59

Focus on your breath for 10 seconds

1:14:02

and notice how hard that is. Notice what happens.

1:14:04

Notice that you get carried away by something

1:14:07

that you are not authoring, right?

1:14:09

Like your, did you decide to get

1:14:11

distracted about what's gonna happen for

1:14:13

lunch when I just told

1:14:15

you to pay attention to your breath and you were on it for two seconds

1:14:18

and now you're thinking about lunch? Like does

1:14:20

that, is that at all interesting to you that that's

1:14:22

the hardest thing in the world to

1:14:25

just pay attention to anything?

1:14:27

Some people find that interesting. Some people find

1:14:29

that there's a sort of an

1:14:32

intimation of a path there. Like, okay, maybe

1:14:34

there's something to discover here that could

1:14:36

provide some relief to something that is in fact

1:14:39

ailing me.

1:14:40

But for many people not,

1:14:42

and then if you give those people

1:14:46

some psychedelic experience,

1:14:49

many of them recognize, oh, okay,

1:14:51

there is a there there. I don't

1:14:53

know if this one is optimal. This is just

1:14:56

different,

1:14:57

but it's so different and

1:14:59

some of it is so pleasant and some of it

1:15:02

is so undermining

1:15:05

of the bullshit that I generally

1:15:07

find so captivating

1:15:09

that

1:15:10

this is a counterpoint to how I've been living my

1:15:12

life. Right, and so I need more tools and

1:15:15

that's how many of us have got

1:15:17

into meditation.

1:15:19

What is the role

1:15:21

of feeling

1:15:23

in this, whatever term you want to call it,

1:15:26

the embodiment of emotions, the tapping into

1:15:28

some sort of intuition? Because I resonate

1:15:31

a lot with the

1:15:32

cerebral horsepower model,

1:15:34

relying

1:15:36

on whatever it is cognitively

1:15:38

that I've got that I can

1:15:40

deploy on the thing that's in front of me. And

1:15:42

I take a lot of pride in that. And I think a lot of people do.

1:15:44

A lot of the people that will be listening to this podcast, listen to your

1:15:47

podcast will feel the same. We

1:15:49

take pride in our ability

1:15:51

to wrangle the chaos of

1:15:55

the world into some sort of order by

1:15:57

thinking through things.

1:15:59

Taking concepts from different disparate areas

1:16:02

and bring them together and going wow that's really satisfying

1:16:04

and now understand the way that these two things could

1:16:06

result in this third thing and that third thing is.

1:16:09

But it does

1:16:11

to me in some ways.

1:16:13

Feel a little like

1:16:15

a prison and it's

1:16:17

almost a prison of your own making and it's one

1:16:19

that you're proud of you stand there with this gilded

1:16:21

prison wall and everything's coated

1:16:24

in the toilets fucking gold in the floors

1:16:26

gold and there's an open sky and all this stuff.

1:16:29

What's the role of

1:16:32

allowing some sort of embodiment

1:16:34

or emotion or feeling to

1:16:37

come back into this to allow the cerebral

1:16:39

stuff to slip away but not to just be completely

1:16:41

blank to be able to. To

1:16:44

hear what you're sort of truly feeling in the moment.

1:16:46

Yeah, well it's it.

1:16:48

Meditation is the kind of meditation

1:16:50

I recommend is is generally

1:16:53

called mindfulness and it's.

1:16:56

Initially it seems like a technique and it's taught as

1:16:58

a technique but ultimately it's not a technique

1:17:00

it's not it's not something you're doing more

1:17:02

of it's you're actually doing less of something

1:17:05

which is.

1:17:06

You're simply not being distracted by

1:17:09

thought and so when you have a feeling

1:17:11

when you feel

1:17:13

joy or you feel sadness.

1:17:16

Mindfulness is.

1:17:21

It's often thought of especially we talk about negative

1:17:24

feelings that people to classically want to get rid of or diminish

1:17:26

like anxiety right. It's

1:17:28

often thought that mindfulness is a way of getting rid of those

1:17:30

feelings right and it ultimately it

1:17:33

is but

1:17:35

it's not a way of getting rid of them

1:17:37

by. Born of an unwillingness

1:17:40

to feel them right like what you're doing when you're being mindful

1:17:43

of an emotion. Is you're

1:17:45

willing to is you're feeling that entirely

1:17:47

you're feeling it deeply you're letting yourself

1:17:50

become incandescent with that

1:17:53

feeling you're just not thinking

1:17:55

about it anymore and it's

1:17:57

not that you're blocking thoughts you're just noticing thoughts.

1:18:00

thoughts themselves arise along with the feeling,

1:18:02

but you're noticing them from the point of view of this

1:18:05

prior condition of awareness that can just see

1:18:08

thoughts as thoughts, right? The

1:18:10

default case is to not know that you're thinking,

1:18:13

even if you could say

1:18:15

that you know that you're thinking, in each moment

1:18:18

a thought is coming up from behind

1:18:20

and you just feel like it's you. And you're

1:18:22

thinking about the thing that's making you angry, and

1:18:25

that's making you angry. And so you're feeling anger,

1:18:28

and then you're thinking about the thing that's making you angry, and

1:18:30

that motherfucker, I can't believe, what was he thinking?

1:18:33

And that's the voice in your head, and that feels

1:18:35

like you, right? Like you have

1:18:37

no perspective on- Is that not you? No,

1:18:39

it's no more than these

1:18:43

sounds are you when you hear them, right? Like literally

1:18:46

it is like being asleep and

1:18:48

dreaming. I mean, that's why many people, I've

1:18:51

titled my book and my app, Waking

1:18:53

Up, and this is an ancient analogy,

1:18:56

which is all too literal. Breaking

1:18:59

the spell of thought is very much like waking

1:19:02

up from a dream when you

1:19:04

just didn't know you were having, like you're

1:19:06

asleep and dreaming,

1:19:08

you're asleep aside lucid dreams, which are a different

1:19:10

case.

1:19:11

The normal case is you're asleep and dreaming

1:19:14

and you have no idea what

1:19:16

your situation is. You are convinced

1:19:19

you're in a totally different situation than you in

1:19:21

fact are. You're actually safely in your bed,

1:19:25

and yet you think

1:19:27

you're somewhere else. You're at a nightclub,

1:19:30

you're at the office, you're

1:19:32

at the doctor's, something, and it

1:19:35

could be an emergency, and it's completely

1:19:37

imaginary, right? It could have some point of contact

1:19:39

with your life, but it's completely

1:19:42

imaginary. And

1:19:44

the amazing thing about dreams is the transition

1:19:46

from sleep, from waking

1:19:49

to sleep to dreaming, is

1:19:51

one in which we never register

1:19:54

a moment of surprise. Like

1:19:56

it's just, it is amazing that your mind

1:19:59

is capable. Like you go to sleep

1:20:01

in your bed, and then the very

1:20:03

next thing that happens to you as

1:20:06

a conscious entity is totally

1:20:08

discontinuous with where

1:20:11

you were in your memory 15 minutes ago

1:20:13

and where you in fact are in this moment.

1:20:16

You've thought that the laws of physics have been suspended,

1:20:19

dead people are now walking. I mean, literally talking

1:20:21

to someone who's dead and you're not even, you

1:20:23

might be surprised they're dead. But- I had

1:20:25

a dream a couple of days ago that I'd committed a war crime

1:20:28

and the old cricket team that

1:20:30

I used to play for 20 years ago was hunting me.

1:20:32

And I'm pretty sure that you were there as a newscaster.

1:20:35

So- It makes perfect sense. Yes,

1:20:37

obviously. Yeah, but that failure

1:20:39

of reality testing is something

1:20:41

we are guilty of in every

1:20:43

moment

1:20:44

that a thought seems to be

1:20:47

what we are. Where it seems like our mind

1:20:50

becomes identical

1:20:51

to this voice in our head. Where the self, where

1:20:54

you just feel like,

1:20:56

again, you're listening to me, you're not

1:20:58

grok in what I'm saying.

1:21:01

The voice in your head says,

1:21:03

what is he talking about? Was this Buddhism

1:21:05

or like, what's this guy banging on about? Look

1:21:07

at that. That is

1:21:10

just arising out of you

1:21:12

know not where, right? There's a total fucking

1:21:14

mystery at your back. And then you've got

1:21:16

this language and in many

1:21:18

cases imagery getting piped in

1:21:21

from,

1:21:23

the stage right and stage left.

1:21:25

And you can't figure out how to turn to see

1:21:28

where any of this is coming from. Where are

1:21:30

thoughts coming from?

1:21:31

It's utterly, subjectively

1:21:33

speaking, as a matter of experience, it's utterly

1:21:36

mysterious. Right, like they, and once

1:21:38

you break this spell, once you see, it's very,

1:21:41

again, it's very much like waking up from a dream. Like

1:21:43

once you begin to wake up from a dream, like

1:21:46

it could be as bad or

1:21:48

as seemingly consequential as possible, right?

1:21:50

You know, you're on a battlefield, you're

1:21:52

being prosecuted, you've been chased as a war criminal, right?

1:21:54

Your adrenaline is up. The moment you

1:21:56

begin to, your alarm goes off

1:21:58

and the, The dream is so insubstantial

1:22:01

that in most cases

1:22:04

you

1:22:06

can't even remember it. It could have

1:22:09

been really intense and yet it's so

1:22:11

discontinuous with your normal

1:22:13

waking consciousness that when

1:22:15

it begins to erode, sometimes

1:22:18

you can just get this wisp of, wait, was there a beach?

1:22:21

There's just nothing left

1:22:23

and yet it was all encompassing when you

1:22:25

were having it.

1:22:27

This,

1:22:28

we live our lives, so

1:22:31

that strikes us as perfectly normal because basically

1:22:33

we all dream when we're asleep and

1:22:35

it seems fine. Most dreams are fun

1:22:37

or

1:22:38

not, but

1:22:40

no real consequence. We

1:22:42

all live our waking lives having

1:22:44

this conversation with ourselves, which is also totally

1:22:47

normal. Everyone's doing it. And yet

1:22:50

both of these conditions, being asleep

1:22:52

and dreaming and not knowing it and

1:22:55

thinking every moment of the day and

1:22:57

certainly not seeing any alternative to being identified

1:23:00

with thought,

1:23:02

both of them are a kind of psychosis

1:23:04

and they really are, it's like they're so close

1:23:07

to what we recognize in the canonically

1:23:09

crazy people as psychosis.

1:23:12

So your thought

1:23:15

is only really different from psychosis

1:23:17

in that you have the good sense to keep your mouth

1:23:20

shut in public. If you were helplessly

1:23:22

exteriorizing this

1:23:24

conversation, just talking

1:23:27

to someone who's not there

1:23:30

in the way that you're talking to someone who's not there

1:23:32

in the silence of your own mind, you'd

1:23:35

be the crazy person on the street is talking to himself, right?

1:23:37

And I'm not trivializing the

1:23:40

tragedy of psychosis. I mean, there's other things

1:23:42

going on there. There's classic thought

1:23:44

disorder where you're,

1:23:46

you find Alex Jones credible and

1:23:50

every conspiracy theory is in fact real. But

1:23:53

we've

1:23:54

all accepted

1:23:54

a

1:23:56

status quo.

1:23:59

quo of more

1:24:04

or less

1:24:05

constant distraction

1:24:07

by this inner voice.

1:24:10

And it's, again,

1:24:13

it's universally subscribed, but it's

1:24:16

not,

1:24:17

what is also universally subscribed is

1:24:19

frank unhappiness and dissatisfaction.

1:24:22

And it is the basis for our unhappiness

1:24:24

and dissatisfaction.

1:24:25

Why is our inner voice so mean most

1:24:27

of the time? You know, if we spoke to

1:24:30

friends or even strangers the way that we often speak

1:24:33

to ourselves, we'd very quickly be on

1:24:35

the receiving end of something that we probably didn't enjoy.

1:24:38

Why is it that we have this

1:24:41

default,

1:24:43

not everyone, but a lot of people, this default

1:24:45

to

1:24:46

converse with ourselves, if that's even the correct term,

1:24:49

in a way which is

1:24:52

horrible?

1:24:53

Well, I can be very wise to

1:24:56

notice that and to notice that very difference

1:24:58

and to just leverage that as

1:25:01

a way of changing your inner voice.

1:25:03

I mean, like, so this is like, your meditation is

1:25:06

one thing. It's one remedy

1:25:08

for what ails us. But

1:25:10

there are other tools and one and one tool is

1:25:12

to just notice what you just noticed is that

1:25:15

you would never talk to your best friend the way that you talk to yourself

1:25:17

and you can learn to talk to yourself the way

1:25:19

you would talk to your best friend.

1:25:21

And then your mind is much more

1:25:23

your friend. You know, on some level,

1:25:27

wisdom is a matter of making your mind

1:25:29

your friend, right? And there are a few layers

1:25:33

that can be addressed to do that. And one is

1:25:35

the non-conceptual

1:25:37

layer of what I'm calling meditation.

1:25:40

Another is a conceptual layer of just noticing

1:25:43

the character of this conversation and noticing

1:25:45

how

1:25:47

bizarre it is and contingent

1:25:49

it is and how malleable it is ultimately. Like,

1:25:52

the moment you recognize that

1:25:54

you don't have to change yourself as a person,

1:25:56

like, you wouldn't talk to

1:25:59

your friend this way.

1:26:00

Like you're not this much of an, not

1:26:02

only you're not this much of an asshole to your friend, you're

1:26:05

not an asshole at all to your friend. Like

1:26:07

when your friend is going, if your friend is going through

1:26:09

the very thing you're going through

1:26:11

and beating yourself up over,

1:26:15

you know exactly what you would say,

1:26:17

you would successfully say it, you're not

1:26:19

an imposter, you wouldn't have to fake saying it.

1:26:22

Like you would just like, what would come out of you is

1:26:24

a compassionate, like let's

1:26:26

just figure out how to improve the situation.

1:26:29

Yeah, just like this is like, regret is

1:26:32

completely unhelpful. Like

1:26:35

the past is past, you know, you

1:26:37

are a great competent person who's

1:26:39

got all kinds of tools. Let's make the most of them. Let's

1:26:41

just, you know.

1:26:43

Meanwhile, you've got this despondent, horrible

1:26:45

voice that you give yourself and a kick in the dick

1:26:47

on the way out of the door. Yeah.

1:26:49

I think I said it or wrote at some point that,

1:26:52

to a first approximation, wisdom is simply

1:26:54

a capacity to take your own advice. Like

1:26:57

you effortlessly give that advice

1:26:59

to others. If you could

1:27:01

just give it and successfully receive it from yourself, you

1:27:03

know, you're basically Socrates.

1:27:07

But as to why

1:27:09

it has a negative character, I don't know that it does.

1:27:12

I mean, I think some people

1:27:14

don't have

1:27:17

nearly the self-critical voice that's

1:27:20

familiar to many of us, right? So there's just,

1:27:22

I think there's probably something like a bell curve there

1:27:25

where

1:27:25

some people have a fairly happy and even

1:27:28

somewhat happily delusional self-talk and

1:27:31

they're

1:27:32

a good company for themselves. You

1:27:35

often talk about the tension between being

1:27:37

and becoming. It kind of feels a little

1:27:39

bit like there's something going on here.

1:27:42

I'm fascinated with this

1:27:46

relationship between finding peace and

1:27:48

happiness and gratitude with what you have

1:27:51

while asking for more

1:27:53

from yourself and hoping that you can achieve

1:27:56

to be able to feel gratitude

1:27:58

and drive.

1:27:59

at the same time, why

1:28:02

this to me feels like a

1:28:05

perpetual challenge,

1:28:06

a perpetual difficulty because the

1:28:08

drive to do more often, not

1:28:11

always, but often is driven from

1:28:13

a sense of insufficiency. It's driven

1:28:15

from a lack, I will be happy when,

1:28:17

so on and so forth. But

1:28:20

the

1:28:22

thought of going through life and just leaving it

1:28:24

all on the table, because I'm just in this state

1:28:26

of sort of constant orgasmic

1:28:29

bliss. And I don't fucking need to

1:28:31

do anything anymore because I'm just

1:28:33

blissed out, man. Also

1:28:36

doesn't sound particularly great. And I struggle to achieve

1:28:38

that

1:28:39

no matter how much tantra I try. And

1:28:42

yeah, talk to me, this tension

1:28:45

between the drive to do more, the acceptance

1:28:47

of who we are,

1:28:48

the wanting to show up in the world and to

1:28:50

give it everything that we've got and the gratitude for the

1:28:52

things that we already have.

1:28:55

Yeah, well, it is a constant

1:28:57

tension. And I think you

1:28:59

want to ultimately, I think you want to be biased on

1:29:01

the, the being side of

1:29:03

it. I mean, certainly if you've succeeded enough,

1:29:06

right? Like if you have a,

1:29:08

if you recognize that you've won the lottery on

1:29:10

some level and you

1:29:13

are in a position now where

1:29:16

there are billions of people who would consider their

1:29:18

prayers answered if they could trade places with

1:29:20

you. Right. And you, there'll

1:29:22

be a time in your life where

1:29:25

you would pay, give anything to trade places with

1:29:28

who you are now. Right. Like when you're,

1:29:30

you know, when you're in your last months of life

1:29:33

and you're terminally ill or you're, you know, you've lost

1:29:35

someone very close to you. I mean, this, like when

1:29:37

you have, when you have this moment in the sun

1:29:39

where basically you're basically things

1:29:41

are basically going well, right. I

1:29:45

think it's appropriate to have a, a

1:29:48

module in your, in your mind, which

1:29:50

continually pings you, which

1:29:53

says like, if you can't enjoy this, right. Like

1:29:55

you, you know, if this is going to be wasted

1:29:57

on you, you're never going to be happy, right? Like, like this. you

1:30:00

should be able to enjoy this part. Like

1:30:03

this is dessert, right? Dessert has arrived.

1:30:06

And whatever story you have about all the other

1:30:08

things you might do or become,

1:30:10

this is really like, you know, this

1:30:13

is a wonderful life, right? So

1:30:16

can you settle into this at all

1:30:18

with your attention?

1:30:19

Right? And if

1:30:21

you can't, I think that's the problem

1:30:23

to recognize, right? Like if the thing

1:30:25

you should want to become is someone who's better at

1:30:28

recognizing the beauty

1:30:30

of your life moment to moment, right? Now

1:30:32

there's a paradox there that ultimately has to be

1:30:34

overcome, right? Like the wanting to become

1:30:37

more spiritual, wanting to become a great

1:30:39

meditator, wanting to become enlightened. That's,

1:30:42

you know, a

1:30:44

knot that gets untied, but

1:30:47

it's a fairly, you know,

1:30:49

refined one.

1:30:51

But it

1:30:53

is just totally appropriate to recognize

1:30:56

this mismatch between what

1:30:58

is objectively true of your

1:31:01

life by reference, by comparison to

1:31:03

anything else that is on the menu

1:31:05

and the

1:31:06

general mediocrity of your

1:31:09

way of being, you know, just the

1:31:11

feeling.

1:31:13

And so this is, again,

1:31:16

this is dolled out to you not

1:31:18

in big chunks, but in moments, right? Like

1:31:20

this is not like a grand plan, like, okay,

1:31:22

I got my calendar out, this month is gonna be about

1:31:24

X. Now I'm gonna

1:31:27

nail

1:31:27

X, right?

1:31:28

It's much more a

1:31:31

thousand lessons over the course

1:31:33

of a day, right? Like you have to just be attentive

1:31:35

to moments

1:31:37

where you miss it

1:31:39

and moments where you, and then just recognizing

1:31:42

that it's available now, right?

1:31:44

Like you were, a moment ago, you were tied

1:31:48

in a knot somehow for some reason, you

1:31:50

know, things were awkward or weird, and

1:31:53

then, and now you're back, right? Like I was

1:31:55

coming to this interview and I was late,

1:31:59

I was 15.

1:31:59

in minutes late, and I hate

1:32:02

being late for whatever reason. And

1:32:04

so I'm kind of rushing

1:32:06

to get out of the house. And my wife has

1:32:08

got her own day ahead of her and she's rushing

1:32:11

to get out of the house. And we're sort of ping ponging

1:32:13

around each other and we're kind of missing each

1:32:15

other and in and out of the bathroom, in and out of the closet.

1:32:18

And I

1:32:19

say goodbye to her,

1:32:21

but it was sort of a goodbye. I've

1:32:23

just completely missed her, like this beautiful

1:32:26

woman who I've decided to spend my life with. And she's

1:32:28

now just basically an obstacle

1:32:31

I have to navigate around so this would be 30 seconds

1:32:33

earlier than I would otherwise be

1:32:35

if I just took a moment to recognize

1:32:38

how beautiful my life is. So

1:32:40

I missed her, I missed her, I missed

1:32:42

her, I missed her. And then at the penultimate

1:32:45

moment, as I'm grabbing my keys, I'm like,

1:32:48

oh, here she is. So I

1:32:50

just stop her, I give her a kiss, and

1:32:52

then I leave. And it's just the

1:32:55

difference between finding that

1:32:57

moment and not is enormous. And

1:32:59

it's just, it's like

1:33:01

the area under the curve

1:33:04

could still suck a

1:33:06

lot. It's like in the beginning, you might

1:33:08

only have 20 moments

1:33:10

like that a day. But the difference between being

1:33:13

someone who never gets it

1:33:15

clearly, and

1:33:17

it never truly punctuates his busyness

1:33:20

and ambition

1:33:22

and disappointment

1:33:25

and every other module that's

1:33:27

been installed with just clear,

1:33:33

clear contact with the beauty

1:33:35

and sacredness of the present moment,

1:33:39

that difference is enormous. And once you

1:33:41

have those punctate

1:33:42

moments, and

1:33:45

again, this is a meditation by another name,

1:33:49

then you can have 100 and then you can have 1000 and

1:33:52

then the character of your life can more and more

1:33:54

resemble the

1:33:55

true virtues

1:33:58

of being.

1:33:59

even when you're still becoming, and

1:34:02

even when you have the whole apparatus of

1:34:04

you've got employees, you've got a calendar,

1:34:06

you've got Slack, it's open all

1:34:08

day. It's all that's happening.

1:34:11

You can still be someone who's

1:34:13

basically already happy. You're

1:34:15

not leaning forward so much. And

1:34:19

when you are leaning forward, part

1:34:22

of you recognizes, okay, what's this about?

1:34:24

Like you have a kind of mindfulness alarm that

1:34:26

goes off. When you're obviously

1:34:29

expecting to become happy by

1:34:31

the next thing,

1:34:32

right?

1:34:34

Rather than be truly taken in by that

1:34:36

dream,

1:34:38

part of you knows, okay, wait a minute.

1:34:40

Like just

1:34:43

correct your posture a little bit. Like you

1:34:45

know that no matter how good this dinner is, it's

1:34:47

just gonna be a dinner, right? And then you're gonna be too full,

1:34:50

and then you're gonna wish you hadn't eaten all that. And then you're

1:34:52

gonna find it hard to sleep. And

1:34:55

so like you know that there's,

1:34:59

it can't be a matter of reaching

1:35:02

and grabbing and fully

1:35:05

satisfying your desire again and

1:35:07

again and again as

1:35:10

a

1:35:11

way to finally become happy. You

1:35:13

have to locate your satisfaction

1:35:16

more and

1:35:17

more in the

1:35:19

state of being that is already here,

1:35:21

that's proceeding the next change. That

1:35:24

your happiness can't be ultimately

1:35:27

a matter of changing experience.

1:35:29

It has to be a matter of recognizing

1:35:31

the nature of experience. Now, it

1:35:34

can be very

1:35:35

easy to have a cynical take on that

1:35:38

and

1:35:41

say, okay, well, it's easy for you to say a rich white

1:35:43

guy for whom everything's going great and nothing bad

1:35:45

has yet happened, and the worst thing that happened to you was on Twitter,

1:35:47

and so go fuck yourself.

1:35:50

But no,

1:35:51

first of all, many bad things have happened.

1:35:54

I know what it's like to lose someone close to me. I know what it's

1:35:56

like to worry that your kid is really

1:35:58

sick. I know what it's like to be waiting for the.

1:35:59

MRI, like there are all these moments

1:36:02

where, you

1:36:04

know, even, even the luckiest among us know

1:36:06

what it's like to, to live in the,

1:36:09

in with real uncertainty

1:36:12

and the knowledge that,

1:36:15

you know, ultimately

1:36:18

every bad thing, some version of every

1:36:20

bad thing is going to happen. I mean, even if you're

1:36:22

the luckiest and healthiest and richest,

1:36:25

you know, then you're just going to be sitting by the phone,

1:36:28

you know, hearing that all your friends have died, right?

1:36:30

Like, if you live to be 120 in perfect

1:36:32

health, you know, you're Peter Atiyah and

1:36:34

you've, you know, you're still

1:36:37

doing kettlebells at 120, which I hope, yeah, I hope you

1:36:39

are Peter and Andrew.

1:36:42

Then you're just going to be

1:36:44

getting, you know, voicemails

1:36:47

and texts and whatever else exists

1:36:49

at that point, hearing that all, all these people

1:36:51

you loved have disappeared, right?

1:36:54

So no one gets out of here without

1:36:56

real, a real encounter with, with

1:36:59

Greek level tragedy.

1:37:01

And

1:37:02

the question is, is it possible to have

1:37:04

a mind that can

1:37:06

embrace that with equanimity

1:37:08

and compassion and love and tranquility,

1:37:14

or do you just have to,

1:37:16

to pretend none of that's going to happen?

1:37:18

The normal mode is

1:37:21

to try to be lucky enough

1:37:24

so that you can pretend hard enough and long enough that

1:37:27

none of that shit applies to me, right?

1:37:29

Like, I'm just going to, you know, I'm going to stay healthy

1:37:32

for as long as I can stay healthy. I'm not going

1:37:34

to think about cancer until somebody

1:37:36

has cancer. Like, it's like, I'm just, I'm going to

1:37:39

extract as much pleasure as I possibly can

1:37:42

in the moment. And, you

1:37:44

know, look, that Bugatti over there is mine,

1:37:46

right? You know, so it's like, that's,

1:37:51

the,

1:37:52

at best that's impermanent,

1:37:54

right? Even if that was as satisfying

1:37:57

as, as someone could pretend, and we actually

1:37:59

know it's not.

1:37:59

and

1:38:00

you can know that from the inside, the more you have those

1:38:03

experiences,

1:38:04

the,

1:38:06

it's impermanent, you know? I

1:38:08

mean, it's like, at

1:38:10

a certain point, Andrew Tate is gonna be the 80 year old

1:38:13

with bad tattoos, right? Like it's just not,

1:38:15

it's like, it's not, it

1:38:17

doesn't scale, like you need another

1:38:20

gear,

1:38:21

and

1:38:26

there

1:38:26

are many names for this. I mean, wisdom is one

1:38:28

name, spirituality,

1:38:32

enlightenment, awakening,

1:38:35

meditation, all of these concepts, you

1:38:37

know, psychedelic experiences, all

1:38:39

of these tools and concepts

1:38:41

are triangulating on a

1:38:44

part of the map where

1:38:47

one's wellbeing isn't contingent

1:38:49

upon changes in experiences.

1:38:52

There's a recognition that

1:38:54

is possible about the nature of conscious

1:38:56

life itself

1:38:58

that is fulfilling. Giving ourselves a

1:39:00

good enough reason to just be here in the present moment.

1:39:02

Yeah. Yeah, this, we're both fans

1:39:05

and friends with Paul Bloom, and Paul

1:39:08

managed to draw the perhaps surprising

1:39:11

correlation between this and the dominatrix

1:39:14

that he'd interviewed. Yes, he would, yeah, he's great

1:39:17

with surprising correlations, yeah. And it

1:39:20

really made me, it really made me realize, because I think

1:39:22

it's in maybe the death and the present moment talk that

1:39:24

you gave us something else that a lot of what we're doing

1:39:27

externally with the way that we try and show up in the world,

1:39:30

the way that we construct our

1:39:33

exterior lives and our experience

1:39:36

is to give us a good enough reason to

1:39:38

just be here now. Yeah. And

1:39:40

people find this through staring

1:39:43

at the night sky, people find this through going

1:39:45

to raves and collective F of essence, they

1:39:47

find it through, and Paul

1:39:49

gave me this reason, I interviewed

1:39:52

a dominatrix for one book, one

1:39:54

of the one I'm paying maybe, and

1:39:57

she'd said, nothing captures attention

1:39:59

like a whip. Right. Which

1:40:01

means that

1:40:02

if you get slapped hard by a lady,

1:40:04

presumably in bicep

1:40:06

length, gauntlet, leather gloves, high

1:40:10

me boots and stuff.

1:40:12

If you get slapped by her

1:40:14

for the next three seconds, you're thinking about nothing

1:40:16

apart from the fact

1:40:17

she just slapped me. Yeah. Ding! And

1:40:20

you're just hearing that ringing in your ears and that's it. And

1:40:23

I think that the way that I've conceived of

1:40:25

it, I wrote this on a beach whilst kind

1:40:27

of high on mushrooms. I wrote it on a beach that

1:40:30

the goal of a lot of mindfulness and the

1:40:32

goal of a lot of what we're doing with our life should

1:40:34

be to lower the bar

1:40:37

to which we need the

1:40:40

world's external stimulus

1:40:42

to be in order for us to feel happy.

1:40:45

It should be, as Naval says, if you

1:40:47

won't be happy with a coffee, you won't be happy on a yacht. Right.

1:40:50

Yeah. And continue to just whatever

1:40:54

the reverse of progressive overload is. Yeah.

1:40:57

Progressive under load. Yeah. Yeah. And

1:40:59

just continue to chip away, chip away. I

1:41:01

can find it when I'm washing the dishes. I can

1:41:04

find it when I'm walking the dog. I can find it when I'm,

1:41:07

et cetera, et cetera, waiting in traffic. Da,

1:41:09

da, da, da, da, da.

1:41:10

Yeah. And

1:41:14

if that seems difficult,

1:41:18

it certainly can be, but that

1:41:20

doesn't mean it's not possible. And

1:41:24

the crucial point is that

1:41:26

you have to recognize what the

1:41:28

alternative is. Right. The alternative

1:41:30

is just bad.

1:41:31

The alternative is to not be happy,

1:41:34

to be incapable of happiness, even

1:41:36

when you have every reason to be happy.

1:41:38

Right. It's the, the alternative is to

1:41:40

be

1:41:42

not all that loving, even

1:41:44

when you're surrounded by people you ostensibly

1:41:47

love. Right. Because you have a mind that is

1:41:49

constantly fragmented. You're