Sam Harris Returns

[0] Welcome, welcome, welcome to armchair expert.

[1] I'm your host, Dax Harris.

[2] I'm joined by Monica Sam.

[3] That's me. Today we have returning one of our few returning guests.

[4] Yeah.

[5] Small pool.

[6] That's right.

[7] Sam Harris, he's a neuroscientist, a philosopher, and a best -selling author.

[8] He's also got a very popular podcast that we like called Making Sense Podcast.

[9] And he has a new app called Waking Up App, which is all about meditation.

[10] And on this episode was Sam, Samuel, if I could.

[11] Samuel Harrison.

[12] We talk way more about, you know, just overall mental health, mindfulness.

[13] Yeah, it's a really fun exploration because he's well versed on several topics.

[14] But one in particular, he's super into meditation and is dedicated his life to it.

[15] So it was a really fun conversation and a much different speed than our last.

[16] And hopefully we'll have many other speeds in the future.

[17] So please enjoy Sam Harris.

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[21] Sam Harris.

[22] Round two.

[23] You know, I imagine you, well, I hope that you run into this problem.

[24] You might not because of your superior intelligence.

[25] Last night it crossed my mind like, hey, maybe I should listen to Sam and I's first interviews so that I don't just stupidly ask him the exact same questions.

[26] I think it's unlikely.

[27] We're going to repeat that.

[28] No, we're not going to.

[29] By the way, complaints aside, I was super interested.

[30] Once again, what you were saying last night.

[31] I was like, oh, yeah, I'm super interested in it.

[32] I just love that moral philosophy question you pose that you murder everyone in the middle of the night and no one's left alive to suffer.

[33] Right, right.

[34] What's wrong with that?

[35] Some people have an intuition that really is a victimless crime because there's no suffering and there's no one to be bereaved by it.

[36] So how is that bad?

[37] If you don't recognize that there's some value in all the goodness you're closing the door to, then it's very difficult to parse.

[38] But, you know, Anika has a bit of a nihilistic streak in her and she can get going on that not being necessarily a bad thing, which makes her the biggest psychopath of all time.

[39] Yeah, I can too.

[40] The times that I can are, I guess this would be nihilistic, Monica and I's favorite thought exercises to imagine the aliens hovering above Earth, just watching what we do, you know?

[41] Yeah.

[42] Laughing at us.

[43] Laughing.

[44] And then sometimes finding us quite cute.

[45] Like we were at a hotel and the balcony overlooked this wedding area, and we were watching this great wedding.

[46] It was a Jewish wedding.

[47] And so they were singing and doing all this stuff.

[48] And I thought, boy, the aliens are like, oh, sometimes these monkeys get together and they dress this way and they sing and they step on a glass and everyone's happy.

[49] And this is, this is lovely of us.

[50] You know, a lot of it's head scratchy, but then some of it's like, oh, the aliens are probably digging this right now.

[51] Right.

[52] Yeah.

[53] But I often think, yeah, I mean, you can overthink a lot of stuff at the end of the day.

[54] We're just a bunch of monkeys trying to stay busy until we're dead.

[55] I mean, that's really at the heart of everything.

[56] And it's like once you wind yourself up, you do have to remember, we're just another species on planet Earth just staying busy and fed. Yeah, except our creativity has really allowed us to fly the perch of evolution.

[57] I mean, we're not just monkeys in the end, you know.

[58] Well, tell me why.

[59] Make a case for why we're not just monkeys.

[60] Because when you agree that we do like to think of ourselves is like 300 deviations above a chimp, but that's just not the case.

[61] We're only like a couple.

[62] We're not that far off.

[63] Well, there's, there is a quantum difference and a binary difference between us and every other species in that the leverage we get from being able to use language, create culture, basically create an operating system for the rest of the species, wherein the acquired knowledge doesn't get lost generation after generation.

[64] I mean, just imagine what it would be like to lose all of this.

[65] Every generation.

[66] All the institutional knowledge, all the technical knowledge.

[67] I mean, how do you, just having to reinvent everything, you know, including, you know, computation and computers, and it would be hopeless, right?

[68] Yes.

[69] So, so every person born today, I mean, these are, you know, the kind of the trivial things we can observe, but like anyone who goes to school, you know, even in elementary school, understands more about certain things than all of humanity did, you know, even during the greats, Plato or...

[70] Yeah, exactly.

[71] Right.

[72] And that inheritance gives us so much leverage.

[73] And ultimately, it'll give us the leverage to change ourselves genetically and change the germline and integrate ourselves directly with technology.

[74] And in some ways, we're already integrated with our technology because we're so dependent on it for communication and information retrieval.

[75] I mean, we're functioning like cyborgs in a way.

[76] I mean, we're kind of neurotic cyborgs.

[77] I mean, our technology is driving us a little crazy.

[78] Sure, sure.

[79] And shattering society.

[80] Yeah, yeah.

[81] Splendering all of us.

[82] We have to get a handle on that.

[83] But where all of this is headed is not clear.

[84] And I think the future of creativity and insight is truly open -ended in a way that it's not for any other species.

[85] I mean, the chimps are going to be doing what the chimps did a thousand years ago.

[86] a thousand years from now unless we decide to change them somehow yeah right but do you think because i just had malcolm gladwell on which is one of your greatest interviews ever for people who don't know malcolm invited you on which i don't know i don't think i know you know this is one of the great the truth is i didn't even know until it happened which was my assumption i imagine you like him like i do you love his books and stuff and just to get to talk to him would be an honor and i'd never spoken to him before, so there was very little context.

[87] He was interested in the writing I had done on self -defense and violence, I believe, for, but it was not clear how this, how this was going to be framed or what the context was, or the narrowness of the focus.

[88] And for the 10 % of people who might not know who you are, not things that you're associated with being an expert in self -defense and security.

[89] This is my side gig.

[90] Right, right.

[91] At best could be described as a hobby.

[92] Right.

[93] Okay.

[94] So he gets invited on to Malcolm Gladwell's podcast, and he says, basically, if there's a home invasion and the perpetrator takes your family hostage, what's the best move?

[95] And Sam, Sam basically said it's wisest for the adults to flee the same, which, you know, you lay out a really compelling argument, and I think you're ultimately right, but what a gut check.

[96] Well, first of all, in the interest of my own PR.

[97] This solution doesn't originate with me. Okay, okay.

[98] And I had to be sold on this.

[99] And first of all, it's not the generic solution to that problem.

[100] You have to stipulate a few things before that's the thing you should do.

[101] Okay.

[102] I mean, if you can effectively fight back, well, then by all means, fight back.

[103] And I have lots of thoughts about that.

[104] Sure.

[105] But if you are in the situation where it is a choice between lying down on the floor and getting immobilized, right?

[106] You know, you're going to get tied up in front of your family, right?

[107] or you can run, running is better because running, running starts the clock ticking where the person who now is holding your family hostage knows that you're now summoning help, right?

[108] I think that makes sense, yeah.

[109] No, again, I think he mounted a really successful argument.

[110] Did Malcolm freak out or something?

[111] No, I think he enjoyed it because it was like provocative.

[112] It's a fairly emasculating argument.

[113] It is, it's incredibly amazing.

[114] To go live with.

[115] In all of, you know, I think it's a male thing, maybe it's a male thing.

[116] But, yes, I would say of seven nights a week that I fall asleep, three of the nights before I go to bed, I do plot out some kind of scenario where I'm going to defend my family that evening in the middle of the night.

[117] It's something that's always in my mind.

[118] And so in these 100 ,000 scenarios I've created in my mind, never did I just sprint on the door.

[119] So when you hear someone you respect, say that that's the move, it really takes you off guard.

[120] What you have to imagine is the look on your family.

[121] Oh, my God.

[122] That would be, that would almost be worse than surviving for me. The look in your daughter's eyes when you flee the room.

[123] But in actuality, you probably wouldn't.

[124] Even if you knew logically that that was the thing to do.

[125] It's an extremely hard thing to imagine doing.

[126] But the bright line I think you need to have, which I would defend really against any challenge, is that you should never let yourself be immobilized.

[127] Well, I was going to say you kind of reverse engineering a very commonly known thing, which is you never go to a second location with somebody.

[128] It's better to get to get shot right there in the street than get in a car and end up at a second location.

[129] Nothing good ever happens to the person who's taken to a secondary crime scene.

[130] Yeah.

[131] Right.

[132] It's never a surprise birthday party.

[133] That's right.

[134] And you know this from the movies, but you also know this from just reading what the police say about what happens in those cases.

[135] Right.

[136] So it never gets easier to fight for your life.

[137] life with whatever tools you have available, then it is right when somebody is saying get in the car and drive or whatever it is, right?

[138] I'm going to make a weird parallel, but that's kind of, it reminds me of the ruling off -road racing, which is whenever you're freaked out, floor it, because the front of the car will get lighter.

[139] And whatever you're going to hit or go over or jump off, you're better off with a light front end.

[140] But it's a real counterintuitive muscle memory thing you have to train yourself out of.

[141] Like, oh, fuck.

[142] Flore it.

[143] I'm trying to figure out how to apply that to my life now.

[144] I'm sure there's a bunch of ways.

[145] But anyways, back to the Malcolm Gladwell thing.

[146] I was saying this cumulative knowledge that we're born into in a weird way is our Achilles, isn't it?

[147] In that your general person, myself included, I drive around all day long in the super high tech car.

[148] I'm talking on a phone that's super high tech.

[149] And then I just start feeling like I have accomplished this stuff that like I'm really brilliant.

[150] Again, so it's important to remember that, yes, we are smarter and an expert.

[151] exponential fashion over chimps in ways, but at the same time, we're also dumber than we give ourselves credit for quite often, right?

[152] Yeah.

[153] Well, this is a point that was made by David Krakauer, who's a very, you know, really a wonderful biologist who's running the Santa Fe Institute, which is a interdisciplinary think tank that brings together biology and physics and economics, and they've been doing fascinating work for decades now.

[154] And his point about this is that certain technology is cognitively competitive with our acquired talents and other technology is cognitively complementary.

[155] So certain tools you use make you worse at doing things that other people who never had those tools were actually pretty good at.

[156] So like navigating.

[157] So it's like GPS, you know, most people can't read maps anymore or find their way in a city because they never took the time to figure out where anything was because they're totally dependent on their on their phone.

[158] So that's cognitively competitive with us.

[159] But there are other tools, I mean, language itself, it gives you, you know, just learning a language and learning arithmetic.

[160] You can learn this with pencil and pen in the world, but you internalize it and it actually allows you to do things that you couldn't otherwise do.

[161] And his favorite example of this, which I don't have any experience of, is an abacus, which apparently, once people get good with an abacus, they internalize it and they can do it with their minds.

[162] They don't actually need a physical advocates.

[163] Right.

[164] Yeah.

[165] There's no question we're getting worse at certain things.

[166] And if our tools fail, we'll be on a very crowded episode of Survivor where nobody knows anything.

[167] Well, the reason it came up with him is that, you know, his new book talking to strangers is just really pointing out how terrible we are at communicating with one another.

[168] If we're in -group and they're in an out -group of any kind, you want to construct, whether it's police and people getting pulled over or innumerable ways we don't understand different groups.

[169] groups that we're so bad at it.

[170] And the question is why do we think we're so great at it, you know?

[171] And I think it's because we are aware of that many people can communicate with different cultures and they understand those things.

[172] And we see it pretty regularly.

[173] So we just kind of assume that we're probably not bad at it, but in fact, we're quite bad at it.

[174] And we could be getting worse at it.

[175] I think perhaps we're getting worse at it too.

[176] And technology would be culpable for that.

[177] Okay.

[178] So when you and I emailed, we talked about we're going to have a different conversation today.

[179] And it's one that you and I were kind of made to have for.

[180] different reasons.

[181] But the topic today is living in examined life.

[182] Before we even like drill down into the particulars of that, globally, do you ever think to yourself?

[183] Sometimes I'll really be on the hamster wheel upstairs and I'm employing all the tools I have at my disposal.

[184] And I still this thought pops up in my head, which is like, how about just stop fucking thinking and exist on planet Earth?

[185] I have some fantasy that there are people who are just like waking up and they're having coffee and then they go to bed that night and everything just happened and didn't require any self -analysis or inventory taking.

[186] And it seems a little bit luxurious and enviable.

[187] A, does that not even exist?

[188] Is there a human being that's just kind of floating through life and it's not plagued by all this racket?

[189] Well, it can just take some heroic work to get there.

[190] But yeah, there's no question that those people exist or, you know, people.

[191] But out of the factory.

[192] Do you think off the line anyone done?

[193] No. No. I think that's pretty unlikely.

[194] Okay.

[195] Or it may be some form of brain damage, but, okay.

[196] But, yeah, the high functioning, thoughtless person is, that's the hard one feature of the operating system that you have to, I mean, meditation or some other path of recognizing that 99 % of your self -talk is actually occurring to no good purpose.

[197] It's just producing largely negative emotions and expectations and rehearsals.

[198] It's not that thought is not useful.

[199] I mean, again, thought to go back to where we started, thought is the thing that differentiates us from chimps, you know, virtually it's entirely a matter of being able to articulate ideas, both to ourselves and to other people, and then act on those concepts.

[200] But we're totally taken in by these concepts, and we live at a layer of discursivity within our own minds where we're having a conversation with ourselves, which in some strange way presupposes that there's more than one of us there, right?

[201] Oh, yeah.

[202] The eye is talking to the me in a way that seems frankly psychotic.

[203] I mean, if you externalized it, you know, if you just didn't keep your mouth shut, you would be the crazy person on the sidewalk who is demonstrably crazy because they're talking to themselves.

[204] But everyone is talking to themselves all day long anyway.

[205] They're just not vocalizing it.

[206] Yeah.

[207] Oh, it's a nary quiet moment in my head.

[208] Yeah, same.

[209] Almost never.

[210] Well, but everyone discovers that.

[211] when they try to meditate or do any practice where they're, when you're asked to focus on anything without getting lost in thought, this is a challenge that we could give to our listeners.

[212] But if they just tried to focus on anything for 15 seconds, there'd be the people who would, at some point in those 15 seconds, a thought is going to appear unrecognized.

[213] They won't see a thought as a thought.

[214] It'll simply seem to be what they are, you know.

[215] And they'll be thinking, you know, they'll think, well, I can do this for 15 seconds.

[216] That's easy.

[217] but they're already lost in thought, right?

[218] They're not, and they're not recognizing that.

[219] Yeah, even going like, this is going well.

[220] Yeah, yeah, right on the breath.

[221] Yeah, I'm seeing the bird outside.

[222] I'm a natural with this.

[223] Yeah, no, this is easy.

[224] Well, what's this guy talking about?

[225] The conversation has started and they won't have noticed.

[226] And then the other cohort will be the people who recognize just how ceaselessly they're getting buffeted by thought and how vulnerable their attention is in each moment and how it's just very hard to pay attention for even three seconds at a time.

[227] And then there'll be a tiny band of, you know, expert meditators who will be able to do it, right?

[228] But it really is a, as much of a training as being able to hit a golf ball 300 yards, right?

[229] Like, it looks easy.

[230] Like, the ball's not moving.

[231] It's just sitting there on the tee.

[232] You just have to swing once and you hit it and it goes straight and, you know, problem solved, right?

[233] Right.

[234] But when you think of how much training goes into being able to do that reliably.

[235] Well, you did a great, great job.

[236] You played an excerpt from your app on your podcast.

[237] So the app is waking up, and then you played an excerpt on making sense.

[238] And you just kind of asked this great question.

[239] It definitely got me thinking while I was driving it.

[240] Side note, your voice is one of the few things that can get my racket to stop.

[241] It's very hypnotic.

[242] It's one of the things I like most about you.

[243] Well, the irony is I have this waking up app, but people, Many people use it to fall asleep because I have such a, such a monotone.

[244] Hypnotic boys.

[245] I have dozed off listening to it.

[246] And I thank you for that.

[247] That's also a goal of mine is the dos up.

[248] That's a sanctioned use of it.

[249] But you kind of just ask the question of there's so much stuff to focus on in life.

[250] And what do you want to focus on?

[251] And that's a decision you make.

[252] And it's kind of something that we, I don't want to say take for granted, but just like your eyes open.

[253] In my case, I hear two people fighting almost every morning.

[254] There's a four and a six -year -old that are into some, you know, dust up over God knows what.

[255] And so my eyes open and now I'm attending to that and then it goes straight into the routine and then, or maybe I had to get up and rush out the door to work, whatever.

[256] And then one thing just happens after another.

[257] And at no point do I take like 10 minutes to go like, oh, what did I want to focus on today?

[258] Or what direction am I trying to aim this ship in?

[259] Any of these things, none of us are really making time to even evaluate that we get to choose what we focus on.

[260] And then it can be very hard and challenging to focus on the things we'd like to.

[261] I'll even be laying in bed with my daughter reading a book, which is, I would imagine the thing that's going to be purest and most joy inducing.

[262] And often it is.

[263] And then yet often while it's happening, I'm reading out loud.

[264] I can hear the words coming out.

[265] But I'm off fantasizing about nine different things, things I need to do.

[266] And I think, God, you fucking piece of shit, you can't even be present for this thing.

[267] It's always I'm most disappointed in those moments when it's like, God, I should really.

[268] I want to put these in the vault for the rest of my life.

[269] And yet I'm thinking about, you know, how much mileage I'm racking up driving a Santa Clarita every day.

[270] Yeah, well, I mean, this comes back to what it would mean to live an examined life and why that would be a better default program than the one that's installed.

[271] Many of us notice that our real wealth are time.

[272] Time is the non -renewable resource.

[273] You don't get a second of it back and you don't know how much you have.

[274] That is the frame in which we're living.

[275] and we're only temporarily associated with all the things we can acquire in this time.

[276] Even more deeply than that, what we have is our attention.

[277] Because we know we can squander our time, even when we guard it.

[278] You can guard an hour to spend with your child, say, I'm really just going to read her a book.

[279] I'm a good dad.

[280] She's going to love this.

[281] Writing the story of my identity.

[282] Yeah, this is, you know, and we can still blow it if our attention is elsewhere.

[283] So really the cash value of guarding your time is to use your attention wisely each moment.

[284] And once you understand that that's the game, on some level, you can bring that tool into any other use of your time.

[285] Because you're going to, you will just inevitably find yourselves in situations that don't seem like a good use of your time.

[286] You're in the doctor's waiting room and he's an hour late and you're just sitting there with a bunch of bad.

[287] magazines in front of you.

[288] Once you understand that you are really only as fulfilled as your attention is in each moment, I mean, it's like really the difference between happiness and suffering or, you know, wisdom and confusion is using attention in a profound way.

[289] And, you know, meditation is really the art of breaking that spell so that your attention can actually be free and available to simply put it where you want it to be.

[290] So if you're relating to your daughter in that moment, to actually have free attention is to be able to pay so much attention to her that you essentially disappear.

[291] Yeah, yeah.

[292] In its best cases, that is what happens.

[293] Yeah, yeah.

[294] Yeah, I guess the thing I always think about, and as I get spells of being busier and busier and I'm going from one to three jobs, never would I, I would have thought I would have said this.

[295] And I still haven't seen the movie, but I know the concept of the movie, this Adam Sandler movie, click where it's like i never saw i didn't either but if i'm getting it right they get he gets a magic remote control and he can basically just fast forward through the stuff that he doesn't want to be doing and i find myself regularly going like okay i get through this week at work shooting the show so that i can get to this so i get to that and then also with some overall awareness of like well then that puts you three years down the road because it'll that's just the nature of life it'll be one thing after another until you're on your deathbed going, oh, wow, I wasn't terribly present for most of that.

[296] I'm glad I raised ahead to this moment.

[297] Yes, exactly.

[298] Well, I mean, that is worth lingering on because this mirage -like quality to every experience is something that we can notice and we can price that in.

[299] It's like when you're looking forward to something, when you're looking forward to the weekend or the vacation or whatever it is, you have to recognize that you are essentially deferring your happiness to some future point, which you already know will never truly arrive, right?

[300] Because like when you're on the vacation, you're dealing with the hassle of checking into the hotel.

[301] And when you're in the hotel, there is some other hassle that you're dealing with or you just give the same fight that happens at home's happening in the hotel room and I'm closer now.

[302] It's a smaller room.

[303] And your kids have fewer toys, right?

[304] And then you're bouncing between the beach and the pool.

[305] And then that's, and then you got to put on sunblock.

[306] And if I can only get this sunblock on.

[307] Now I got to get it off, right?

[308] And it's just, you just, you never arrive unless you can actually let your attention land in the present moment.

[309] And to be able to do that, again, is a skill.

[310] It's worth viewing well -being as a skill, right?

[311] It's something you can learn or fail to learn or learn badly.

[312] I mean, there's, they're right and wrong answers here with respect to how to use your mind.

[313] I do think most people have a kind of need.

[314] jerk thought of like, well, I can't meditate.

[315] I'm not the type of person that can sit still.

[316] Right.

[317] That's true of almost everyone in the beginning.

[318] They all, everyone.

[319] Even I, you know, Howard Stern always talks about transcendental meditation.

[320] I thought, oh, well, if he liked it, I'll try it.

[321] Thinking I'm a bad candidate, I somehow put it in the category of that I'm a bad candidate for hypnosis, you know, when you see like a live show.

[322] Yeah.

[323] Because you think you're too smart for it.

[324] Yeah.

[325] Yeah, exactly.

[326] Yeah.

[327] Well, that is, that aren't even different.

[328] I think that's along those lines, but I don't know that it's smart is just...

[329] Some people are more susceptible or less susceptible to hypnosis.

[330] That is true.

[331] I mean, there's a scale.

[332] Right.

[333] Stanford scale of hypnotizeability.

[334] But meditation for virtually everybody is a skill that they simply don't have in the beginning.

[335] I mean, some people show a natural aptitude for it, but it's like, you know, anything, juggling or riding a unicycle or something that you just have not done, you don't know how to do it.

[336] The worst case, and in the most common case, there's a fairly long interval there where people think they're actually doing it, but they're actually so distracted, they can't even notice their capacity for distraction.

[337] Right.

[338] They just close their eyes and they think where their eyes closed and they think, well, okay, I just meditate it.

[339] Yeah, and I don't feel that great.

[340] Yeah.

[341] We're the rewards.

[342] Yeah, this is not very interesting.

[343] Well, a couple of concepts that I think are fun to bring up.

[344] I had never truly understood Buddhism.

[345] I had read Sid Arthur in high school.

[346] And then it wasn't until I read Yuval Harari's book, Homo Deus, he articulated it in a way that I was like, oh, I fully understand that and I can relate to it.

[347] I had known the old axiom of like life is suffering.

[348] I guess that's a derives from Buddhism, yeah, in some way.

[349] Yeah, although it's actually based on a mistranslation.

[350] Oh, here we go.

[351] Talking to strangers.

[352] Yeah.

[353] So, yeah, I mean, it's not, there's obviously a lot of suffering in life.

[354] right and it's inevitable right well we will encounter old age and and sickness and death and you know even if everything works great for us and we live to be a thousand we will see the people around us dying and and and that will be a source of suffering so that kind of gross suffering is intrinsic to life but the buddha's point that's often translated as life as suffering is actually the the translation of the term the Sanskrit term duca would is best translated as unsatisfactory or unsatisfactoryness.

[355] And it comes back to this mirage -like quality that we were just discussing where because experience, by its very nature, is impermanent, right?

[356] Like, first it's not there, then it's there, and then it goes away, right?

[357] Conditions come together, you know.

[358] Or become some memory that really probably doesn't even bear any resemblance to the atomic truth of what happened.

[359] But then you're just left with the memory, right?

[360] And then that just keeps arising.

[361] But then that passes.

[362] away, right?

[363] So there's nothing stays in consciousness.

[364] There's no durable sense impression that you can just stick with, right?

[365] So you can't get the taste of ice cream so fully, you can't fill your mouth with enough ice cream so that it just stays like ice cream.

[366] And the truth is that the paradox there is you wouldn't even want it to.

[367] So we're trying to anchor our well -being to a cascade of changing sensory and emotional phenomena.

[368] And, you know, it's just trying to grab onto a waterfall, right?

[369] Well, it's not, it's, so the Buddhist point about suffering there or unsatisfactoriness is that he wasn't denying that there are all kinds of, you know, levels of happiness to be experienced.

[370] It's just they're all impermanent.

[371] And so that, that's that instability where people are led to believe that they can successfully become happy.

[372] Just as you said, deferring their happiness to such a time where the present moment is just going to yawn wide enough.

[373] You've checked off everything on your to -do list for all time.

[374] Everyone around you, there's no problems, there's no conflict.

[375] And now you can just enjoy your family and your, you know, your dotage.

[376] But the reality is that you actually can't become happy.

[377] You can only be happy.

[378] And our efforts to become happy are, you know, efforts to arrange the world in such a way that we have a good enough reason for that period of time until something bad happens to actually relax into the present moment and give ourselves license to be happy.

[379] But that is a quality of attention that you can actually marshal directly.

[380] And if you can't marshal it directly, the happiness you achieve by arranging everything on the Titanic will be, you know, again, bleeding, right?

[381] It'll last for an hour.

[382] Right.

[383] And then the next doubt will arise or the next desire will arrive.

[384] Stay tuned for more armchair expert.

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[403] But back to Yuval, the thing, yeah, and I guess unsatisfactory is a very similar word, is that he phrased it as, the suffering is actually the craving.

[404] That craving is suffering, and that even if you're happy, our natural state of thought is to go, ooh, I recognize this as joyful.

[405] How do I either, A, make this last forever, or how do I heighten it, even one notch further.

[406] This is my thing I'm guiltiest of as an addict.

[407] I'm like, we're getting somewhere now.

[408] Let's double the dose.

[409] I can only, you know, I'm just doing math in my head of how great I could feel, even at the apex of serotonin and dopamine dump.

[410] It's that desiring another state of being that is so uncomfortable.

[411] Well, yeah, and the neurology there is interesting because the main dopamine dump comes not in the actual satisfaction of the desire.

[412] It's in the anticipation of the satisfaction, right?

[413] So it's like junkies who throw up before they, when they score the heroin, before they even shoot it, they'll throw up sometimes.

[414] Oh, yeah, I didn't know that.

[415] Yeah.

[416] Well, you know, heroin in the right dose will make you throw up with euphoria.

[417] I've experienced it once on now, an MDMA where I threw up.

[418] And I was like, this is one.

[419] It's charming.

[420] Yeah, my girlfriend was throwing up.

[421] And I looked at her, I go, are you okay, honey?

[422] And she goes, I mean, I've never been better.

[423] Oh, my God.

[424] Oh, wow.

[425] Wow.

[426] Wow.

[427] But anyways, what were you going to say?

[428] I mean, again, this is something that is counterintuitive, but if you pay attention, you can see that it's psychologically true, that most of your desire, it doesn't fully land on the object of desire.

[429] You're tumbling forward to the next thing with every bite of ice cream.

[430] Yeah, well, Sacks illustrates it really well also.

[431] So you're not actually, like, fantasizing about the orgasm, per se, but it's, you're not actually, like, fantasizing about the orgasm, per se, but it's all the lead -up that is the euphoria.

[432] I mean, that can be hours of distraction as opposed to the event itself.

[433] And much of it is the anticipation of, again, I mean, this is true for sex, but it's actually true for drugs of abuse or anything else.

[434] It's the dopamine, you know, to the medial frontal cortex is most triggered by the knowledge that the reward is definitely coming.

[435] It's like, it's like, okay, I have the six in hand.

[436] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[437] But that's the most reinforcing moment.

[438] Yeah, boy, can I relate to that?

[439] But don't you think some things in life are permanent, like a parent's love for a child or something?

[440] Like, those are things that aren't feelings and aren't fleeting.

[441] They just exist in your world.

[442] Well, this is what's so humbling about living an examined life.

[443] I mean, even among fairly wise, compassionate, enlightened, well -resourced people, you can recognize how fragile your love is.

[444] You're not a perfect, unconditional lover of even the people you love most in the world.

[445] I mean, just how obnoxious could your child be such that you would feel like, God, I just want to get out of the room, right?

[446] Like, this is, this emotion is not synonymous with love.

[447] Like, you have this abstract idea that you love your child or you love your spouse, and even you may believe you love them unconditionally.

[448] But when you actually take a moment -to -moment inventory of the quality of your emotion in the company of these people, you are not St. Francis of Assisi.

[449] You know, you are this reactive entity.

[450] Yeah, it's amazing to just see the kinds of judgments and the poverty of emotion you are capable of even when you're surrounded by the people you love most in the world who you've made the biggest commitment of time and energy for your, your attention is so vulnerable to the next I'll add you take a totally uncomfortable moment which is a screaming child and of course you don't think what happened warrants all this screaming and then you add on another layer or I do at least where it's like and now I feel guilty that I can't enjoy this you know I feel like God I'm I'm not the person I wished I was on top of being inconvenienced and made uncomfortable by this other person so it's like a double Like, yeah.

[451] Well, so for me, I think there's wisdom in that in that one sort of global goal that I think is worth having is to generally and more and more specifically live without regret.

[452] I mean, you want to get to the end of your life without massive regrets.

[453] And I think you want to more and more get to the end of every week and every day and every hour without regret.

[454] And so you could look back on it and say, I would do it exactly that.

[455] way again.

[456] Right.

[457] And insofar as none of us even approach that, that is a statement of the chaos or just the negligence of our lives, right?

[458] I mean, we're just not, we're not using our time wisely if at the end of every given day the honest assessment would be, why the hell did I spend my time that way?

[459] Right.

[460] Like that's a catastrophe.

[461] I mean, that's you losing the only real resource you have, which is your time here.

[462] And what's ill understood is, is that mental training is a thing, right?

[463] Now, we all know that physical training is a thing, but that used to be a fairly esoteric knowledge.

[464] I mean, when you, if you go back 100 years or 120 years, the only people lifting weights were just these, you know, crazy guys at the circus.

[465] And I mean, they're literally wearing like that leopard skin singlet, you know, in the circus, right?

[466] And then if you just imagine trying to sell that activity to people who had no concept for it.

[467] So like, okay, let me get this straight.

[468] I'm going to walk around for an hour every day, just arbitrarily picking up heavy objects.

[469] Lifting and setting them down.

[470] And doing it to the point of just real discomfort, right?

[471] It doesn't look fun.

[472] It isn't fun.

[473] You know, certainly not in the beginning.

[474] And what's the point?

[475] And now, basically, everyone understands the wisdom of doing this.

[476] And there's a couple things we understand about it.

[477] A, it has benefit.

[478] I think anyone who's tried exercising with any regularity will immediately experience the benefits.

[479] But also we get really comfortable with the notion that there's no last workout.

[480] There's no, you're not going to have that perfect set.

[481] You got your six pack and nice packs.

[482] And then you're done.

[483] Right.

[484] It's going to be an ongoing daily or other, other, whatever your, your program is, it never ends.

[485] Yeah.

[486] And actually, it's interesting.

[487] That's where the analogy breaks down in a way that is to our advantage.

[488] I mean, it is kind of a happy breakdown there, which which is that there are gains you can make in meditation that you don't lose and that don't actually, it's not that it really ends, but there's things you can recognize about the nature of the mind, which you will always recognize, or just that you can't, one scene, you can't unsee them.

[489] Right.

[490] And the scene of these things actually changes you for the better.

[491] But also a daily practice or whatever fits into your life is obviously advisable, right?

[492] I mean, it's still to tune up.

[493] The goal is to, from the point of view of meditation, is not to become a meditator.

[494] Oh.

[495] And it's not to become a good meditator.

[496] Oh, okay.

[497] It's actually recognized something about the nature of your mind such that you don't suffer unnecessarily, you know, for the rest of your life in whatever situations you happen to be in.

[498] And it's true that the path to making those discoveries for most of us does require a fair amount of training in meditation.

[499] So sitting, you know, once a day or twice a day or going.

[500] on long retreats.

[501] I mean, all that makes sense.

[502] But the analogy to physical exercise breaks down a little bit in that with working out, you'll get to the point where you're as fit as you can possibly be.

[503] If you get very serious about it, you're, you know, you'll take it as far as you can take it, you know, genetically.

[504] And then you'll begin to get older and older.

[505] And then you'll, you'll peak wherever, you're at 35, right?

[506] And then you'll be all downhill from there.

[507] But you're on the backside, you and I. Yes.

[508] Yes, I've noticed.

[509] But it's still good for you.

[510] until you're dying, you're dying day, right?

[511] I mean, it's like, this is a wise thing to do with your life.

[512] But the analogy would be if it were possible at some point, you know, doing pull -ups, right?

[513] Like, if you could just do 30 pull -ups, a set of 30 pull -ups clean, you'd have some kind of breakthrough where your back would be fit for the rest of your life.

[514] Yeah.

[515] And they're just, you're basically, you just occasionally just do a couple pull -ups just to remember that, you know, that's how you got there.

[516] But you just have a fantastic back for the rest of your life, right?

[517] That's the dream.

[518] something analogous like to that in meditation yeah but it's not to negate that there's a lot of pull -ups involved for for most people let me ask you the another concept that it was introduced to me by yvall which i'm sure a lot of people knew before him but that i i'm really conscious of all the time now your experiential self versus your narrative self and ever since i've really comprehended that i find myself being able to recognize what thing is being a service so in the case of the crying kid the experiential self i don't know who enjoys that you know i don't know apparently you maybe could get to a point where you're like oh yeah this is life and i'm living it and i'm in the middle of it and that's great but just in general it's just hard on your ears and you know you're constantly coming up with a game plan how you can finally get through to them to not do this behavior anymore well no but that is uh i don't want to sidetrack you but because we have to talk about the experienced and and remember selves but you know reframing can change your emotional relationship to situations like that.

[519] So, like, if you look at the crying kid and you think, okay, this is the video game that I'm in right now.

[520] And this is the video game of parenthood.

[521] Right.

[522] And I've been, you know, annihilated at this point, you know, a thousand plays in a row.

[523] Like, this is the boss fight that I keep losing, right?

[524] Right.

[525] So there has to be a way of just fundamentally transforming the situation.

[526] If you actually approach it like a game, right, that can just free up some cognitive.

[527] Yeah, like, oh, I have another shot at this.

[528] Yeah, it's like, this is fantastic.

[529] I've not gotten through to them in six years.

[530] The crying child, you know, it's just fantastic.

[531] Our first child was miraculously easy.

[532] We thought we should write a book.

[533] We're so good.

[534] Now you're leveled up, yeah.

[535] Yeah, the second one came.

[536] It's just like everything that worked, does not work with this person.

[537] Yeah.

[538] Which is a thrilling challenge.

[539] I like the challenge of it.

[540] I'm like, I'm not going to quit trying to get through to her, figuring out how to, you know, gently steer her in one direction or the other.

[541] And so I guess in that way, when I have the presence of mind to go like, oh, yeah, this is my fun challenge.

[542] That helps.

[543] But you also compared it to reframing things.

[544] You compared like if you dropped into a meditation and the experience was similar to dropping into the fourth set of a bench press, those are both could be uncomfortable things, but just the knowledge that when you're physically exercising, you go, oh, well, this is going to result in gains.

[545] This is going to be ultimately beneficial.

[546] I'm going to have a reward that maybe lasts the next 15 hours.

[547] That is all just mental framing.

[548] It's objectively uncomfortable.

[549] Yeah.

[550] Right.

[551] And yet you think your way through that.

[552] Yeah.

[553] Well, the thing to recognize there is that so much of our sense of whether an experience is good or bad is the conceptual frame.

[554] So I like that analogy of those of us who are, you know, addicted to working out.

[555] We love it.

[556] I mean, the pain is part of, you know, the feeling of going to muscle failure when you're lifting weights, that's part of why we're doing it.

[557] We like that experience.

[558] Yeah.

[559] That if you woke up in the middle of the night with those sensations, you'd call 911 and you'd be terrified, right?

[560] So it's because you don't have a coherent story as to why you're feeling this way, whereas in the gym, this is part of the program, and it's part of your pleasure.

[561] So, but back to the point you just raised about the experiencing self and this more retrospective, it's often called the remembered or the remembering self.

[562] Right.

[563] This is not due to you've all the is due to Danny Kahneman.

[564] So I sort of disagree about with respect to how to interpret these data, but this is what the data show that there's really two apparently incompatible ways in which we can score our well -being, right?

[565] And so there's the moment -to -moment question that can be answered of what is it like to be us, right?

[566] Just second by second throughout our lives.

[567] Right now, you and I are sitting in a room.

[568] It's a little chilly.

[569] I'm thinking, oh, I could have left that heater on, but I was nervous it was going to get too hot mid -interview.

[570] Like, that's happening right now.

[571] Right.

[572] Yeah.

[573] So there's this, our life is doled out in these moments and you can track people's sense of well -being and the way they operationalize this scientifically is they give people essentially like a, you know, a beeper or, you know, probably now an app on their phone, which pings them at random moments throughout the day.

[574] And they just have to report their sense of well -being at that moment, just like how good do you feel right now right what is the metric is like just out of 10 or yeah i think i think i haven't actually um done an experiment like this but it would be some scale of one to 10 just you know one being i'm absolutely miserable and 10 being this is one of the greatest moments of my life and then you just get lots of you know fives and sixes and sevens and then that obviously bears some relationship to the things that are going on in their lives right but what you discover is that a lot of that signal is you know all of the all of the duke's all of the unsatisfactoriness of life.

[575] I mean, just being stuck in traffic and, you know, I just broke a shoelace and, you know, it's like all these little things, these micro moments, right, that are annoying, that keep people somewhere around their, they're happy in a set point, whatever it is.

[576] I mean, some people are lucky.

[577] They have a much higher set point.

[578] And some people are, you know, fairly depressive.

[579] And so there's the thought that if you could just add up all those moments, that would be the way to tally a person's well -being, right?

[580] But the problem is, is that when you talk to people and you just ask, you know, how's it going?

[581] How's your life?

[582] You invoke a very different module in the brain.

[583] You get this, this, what Danny Kahneman calls the remembering self, which is this part of the mind that has apparent access or thinks it has access to some global appraisal of life.

[584] You're not thinking about what it was allowed.

[585] like to be at the dry cleaners and recognize that they'd lost your shirt, you know, and you're like, that's 10 minutes of your life, right?

[586] Like, that's not what's showing up there.

[587] That's, you're going like, oh, I mean, I went to college.

[588] Yeah, yeah, I graduated.

[589] I had kids.

[590] That was a goal.

[591] Your kids are, you know, are basically healthy and you've got a good marriage.

[592] And, you know, you got a vacation that's coming in six months, you know, that you're looking forward to.

[593] And then you have that particular module also applies to any.

[594] discrete period of experience.

[595] So if you have an hour with somebody, right?

[596] And when asked how that hour was, the only person in you who can talk is not the person who can take a perfect inventory of all of the seconds in that hour.

[597] It's the person who will just remember the peak experience and what that was like.

[598] And the most recent, there's a strong recency effect.

[599] So it's called the peak end rule.

[600] The way the way the remembering self assesses the quality of an experience, whether it was a vacation or a dinner or any discrete period of time, you basically remember the positive or negative valence of the most intense part of the experience.

[601] And you remember how it ended.

[602] Right.

[603] So like on your vacation, if you're checking out of the hotel and something horrible happens with the bill or whatever, like it's twice as much as you thought and they, you know, that back propagates to the whole vacation.

[604] And you feel like I'm never going to home to Maui again, right?

[605] Well, weirdly, we have this shared friend Steve Brill now.

[606] Uh -huh.

[607] Right?

[608] Yeah.

[609] Steve Brill has this great thing.

[610] He always says where, like, you ask a guy like, oh, you went to Prague.

[611] Would you like?

[612] Oh, fuck, don't go to Prague.

[613] Prague's the worst.

[614] Oh, I hate Prague.

[615] Oh, really?

[616] The food's bad.

[617] No, I fucking lost my wallet, like, on the second.

[618] Yeah, right.

[619] It's just all about the person lost their wallet on that vacation.

[620] Is there research on the percentage of people who are member things positively versus negatively, or is it just all 50 -50?

[621] Yeah, well, I'm sure there is.

[622] I actually don't know.

[623] But the important point is that you can really uncouple these things, right?

[624] So, like, you can be somebody who is wrong about what it was like to be you through all of those micro moments of an experience, let's say a vacation.

[625] And then you have a global assessment of it that doesn't actually bear much relationship to what it was like to be you.

[626] But the issue, and this is, what's so interesting about Danny's work here is that the truth is that the only one who makes decisions about what to do in life is the one who's anchored to these global assessments.

[627] It is the remembering self.

[628] So when you talk to people about what they want and what satisfied them globally about their lives, you're not tracking the moment -to -moment well -being issue much at all.

[629] You're tracking the memories.

[630] And so, you know, on Danny's account, people are trying to acquire satisfying memories.

[631] That's like that is the modus operandi for, you know, living a satisfying life.

[632] And yet, that is actually almost fully divorceable from the moment to moment question of what it's like to be them.

[633] And so, and this is where he and I disagree.

[634] I mean, he basically has decided it is hopeless.

[635] to try to integrate these two modules.

[636] There is no there there when thinking about human well -being, really, because the person you talk to is the one who's making the decisions, is the only one who comes online when making a global evaluation of how good life is.

[637] But it's uncoupled from the moment -to -moment reality of what it's like to be that person.

[638] Well, the most concrete, I think, example that everyone can relate to is you're on Instagram and you're scrolling through all these stimulating photographs, and that could go on for two hours.

[639] And the whole two hours, you'll be, it's not the right word, but happy.

[640] You'll be entertained.

[641] You'll be focused on that thing, and it's distracting enough, whatever the thing is.

[642] And then at night, you're lying in bed and you go like, well, I spent four hours a day scrolling through Instagram, and that's not at peace.

[643] That's the narrative or the remembered self.

[644] It's like, well, I'm writing this story of my life, and that's not an awesome chapter.

[645] of my life that I stared at a six by four inch screen for four hours, right?

[646] Right.

[647] So I think when I was introduced to that concept, I lean towards, oh, I feel like you should be servicing the narrative side of your life.

[648] Like you should be servicing the thing you'd be proud of at the end of the day, the way you spent your time.

[649] Yeah.

[650] But what is curious, though, is that in the nihilists, the aliens are watching us from above.

[651] Who gives a shit about the story?

[652] Is the story relevant?

[653] Like us summing up our lives and in trying to decide whether it was a fruitful endeavor or not?

[654] Is that not just ego?

[655] Like, oh, I did these things.

[656] And if you sacrifice the experiential self for that narrative self, it's really tricky because I don't think spending your whole life looking at Instagram is advisable.

[657] Yet at the same time, I do think the narrative is just somewhat ego.

[658] So it's a very, it's hard to decide which way to point the ship.

[659] Yeah, well, this is where my interest in meditation causes me to diverge from Danny's analysis of this because I think you can actually integrate these two views of the mind and bring them into closer register such that you're actually spending your moment -to -moment existence on earth in more and more fulfilling ways.

[660] Once you recognize that your moment -to -moment sense of well -being is a matter of attention, it's really not a matter of the content of experience, right?

[661] So you can get it looking at Instagram if you're looking in the right frame of mind, and you can get it looking at anything else, right?

[662] So like literally you can get it just paying attention to your breath, which has to be the most boring object in the world.

[663] If the breath can become interesting and a source of actual rapture for a concentrated mind, well, then anything will do, right?

[664] Certainly Instagram will do.

[665] So the punchline is that it's possible to recognize that consciousness itself is already that way, that consciousness has an intrinsic openness and uncontractedness and self -sufficiency, that you can keep kind of dropping back into that.

[666] And when it seems like that experience is coming from the world, I mean, if you have some high associated with sex or athletics or some, you know, you just got some great news and it just sort of cancels all of your worries, you know, for the next five minutes, right?

[667] Like, all is right with the world for that moment.

[668] What's being unlocked there is an intrinsic quality of just consciousness itself, just the uncontracted state of being wide open to experience.

[669] Right.

[670] It would be easy to think that it was the event itself that caused it.

[671] That's always the hallucination were part of.

[672] Yes, yes.

[673] Like when I buy Air Jordans online, I at least do it with the knowledge that it's going to be 70 minutes tops.

[674] Yeah, it's not going to be the last pair of Air Force.

[675] No, I go like, I'm going to buy this and maybe for 70 minutes.

[676] And you're not even wearing them now.

[677] No, I don't even enjoy wearing them.

[678] I just enjoy feeling like I'm not the kid in high school that couldn't have them.

[679] Yeah.

[680] So just to close the loop on this point.

[681] So Danny thinks it's hopeless to integrate these two, right?

[682] But I think you can keep both views of the mind in view and get them to converge.

[683] So you can recognize that your moment -to -moment feeling of well -being really is a matter of what you're doing with your attention and be present and then choose what you want to pay attention to.

[684] So like how long do you want to be angry for, right?

[685] Well, anger has arisen.

[686] Are you simply going to be identified with it, motivated to say the angry thing that deranges?

[687] your life in that moment and your relationships to other people or do you want to actually just let it go and just let me just literally let the the neurophysiology of it dissipate and act with a clear head about what well i'd love when you talk about anger because you when you were describing it at one point i was like oh my god that is exactly how it works like you pointed out that the first five minutes or an hour whatever it's irrelevant of it is just happening right you find out something you don't you didn't want to find out or whatever's happening but then you actually have to continue to shovel coal into that oven.

[688] Like, you actively have to remember, oh, yeah, I'm still pissed about this.

[689] And I think of another thing that I'm, another thing that's going to.

[690] It's a mechanism that if you can't inspect it, well, then it just becomes you.

[691] But once you see how the machine works, then you actually have another degree of freedom where you can decide, okay, I can just get off this ride at any point, right?

[692] Which is hard.

[693] It's hard.

[694] And you're dead right.

[695] Like when you articulate it, I was like, oh, yeah.

[696] like I get angry at work and then on my ride home I'm just like throwing gas on it and I'm coming up with even better points and the email is getting longer and longer or the conversation is getting longer and I'm active in it I'm but this is where the the experiencing self and the remembering self can converge in their quality assessments and they can get more and more accurate the steward of the moment to moment experience can arrive at the place of global assessment and honestly say that went well.

[697] Like this, I'm now the kind of person who isn't gratuitously lighting his hair on fire, you know, several times a day.

[698] And my relationships are better as a result.

[699] And the choices I'm making in my career are better as a result.

[700] So all of this can be made to converge, but it's important to recognize that there are really, there are, you know, there are many modules in the mind.

[701] I mean, this is not a, we're kind of a piecemeal Congress of selves.

[702] I mean, there's not one unitary self who you can always talk to.

[703] The self in you that wants to lose weight is going to be usurped sometimes only minutes later by the self that wants the chocolate chip cookie.

[704] And there's no one in charge, right?

[705] I mean, it's like a Darwinian contest of states of mind.

[706] Well, in that Darwinian contest, I will say we're kind of hardwired for it to be a lopsided battle.

[707] We have way more things that are going to reward that bite of the chocolate chip cookie than the satisfaction of having avoided it and been proud of ourselves.

[708] Yeah, but that's why so much of getting the global story right is things like discipline and having an ethical code.

[709] If you're entirely focused on the moment, even in a meditative sense, there are just things you can't decide to do that have a longer time horizon.

[710] In order to be motivated by something that has a time horizon of two years, some part of you has to be able to focus that far out and stay aligned with it.

[711] Otherwise, you'll get up every day and have no plan.

[712] Yeah.

[713] And, I mean, there are certain lives are amenable to that.

[714] I mean, you can be a Buddhist monk.

[715] And, you know, the only plan required in that office in life is just to pay more careful attention to the present moment.

[716] But there are many things in life we rightfully want to do.

[717] I mean, we want to build a durable civilization that allows the most creative collaboration among strangers possible.

[718] We need more than just meditation to do that, right?

[719] We need ethics.

[720] We need insight.

[721] We need institutions that enshrine our better judgment.

[722] so that when we're, you know, reliably mediocre, you know, we have, you know, laws and norms that anchor us to something that's more forward -leading.

[723] Yeah.

[724] Well, one of the tricks in that for me is just like dedication to honesty with myself, which sounds so simple and yet it's really not that simple.

[725] But it's like when I'm confronted with the hot fudge Sunday at Big Boys, I go, you can do it, but you can't lie about it.

[726] So it's going to be awesome for four and a half minutes and then you're going to feel like shit for three hours.

[727] And as long as we agree on that, we're both recognizing this is the equation, you know, go ahead and pick it.

[728] But you can't just go, oh, this is going to be awesome.

[729] And then there'll be no downside of it.

[730] Yeah.

[731] And it is interesting one's relationship to one's future self, right?

[732] So your future self inherits all the choices you're making now, right?

[733] And as you turn up the present focus, you can sort of break that connection.

[734] It's like it's like what ethical responsibility do you actually have to your future self?

[735] Like if you want you want the hot fog Sunday now, the schmuck who's going to feel bad about it in four and a half minutes is not really me, right?

[736] Yeah.

[737] And that's and so that is, you know, again, that's not the recipe for living a life without regret at every scale.

[738] Yeah, how does Buddhism attack that?

[739] exactly what you say if you're truly present well well buddhism is so again to come back to the framing you got from yvall which is which is accurate that buddhism spends a lot of time focusing on craving as the source of dissatisfaction right so like the the the optical illusion is that because we have all of this desire you know that the word in sanskrit is tanha which is literally translated as thirst right we thirst for experience oh yeah and because that's the operating system that's installed, we assume that the only mode of living that gets us anywhere worth going is to satisfy desire the moment it comes up.

[740] So just keep this like whack -a -mole with desire, right?

[741] And yet the unfortunate fact is that our capacity for desiring experience is bottomless, right?

[742] And experience is impermanent.

[743] So we're just, we're on this treadmill, you know, or continually bailing water here.

[744] And so from a meditated point of view, the thing to recognize is that desire is also impermanent.

[745] I mean, you can literally just watch the desire for the hot fudge Sunday or for the Air Jordans or whatever it is arise and pass away and recognize that there was nothing you ever had to do, you didn't have to do anything about it, right?

[746] You could literally just be inactive.

[747] Yeah, it's just don't move.

[748] Yeah.

[749] And then it's possible to have a mind that is actually not moved by desires of any kind.

[750] Stay tuned for more armchair expert, if you dare.

[751] That sounds like an unattractive nullification of everything that's good in life.

[752] Right.

[753] So confront that because I imagine I'm listening and I'm like, okay, well, all the highlights in my day are like getting hungry and satisfying it, getting horny and fucking and then getting bored and getting drunk, whatever.

[754] Yeah.

[755] Well, so it comes down to what it's like to satisfy each of these desires.

[756] So, like, the high you get when you cancel the desire by gratifying it, right?

[757] So the hot fudge Sunday hits the tongue, right?

[758] Or you're finally, you know, uniting with the object of your love.

[759] The clothes are off.

[760] Yeah, exactly.

[761] So it's like the warm bodies have finally made contact, right?

[762] Yes, here we go.

[763] So, again, the real moments of surrender to peak experience there, I shouldn't oversell the pleasures in any of these experiences, because.

[764] The reality is that most of the time our satisfaction is fairly mediocre, even when we're getting the good stuff, right?

[765] It's like we're just kind of skating across the top of the present moment and not really, not really landing.

[766] But in those moments where we land, where it's just like you forgets yourself because this is so good.

[767] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[768] Those are kind of peak experiences that keep us coming back to the 10 things that are on the menu, right?

[769] They don't change very often.

[770] But what we want is that state of mind of a nullification of self by a total engagement with the seeing, the hearing, the smelling, the tasting, the touching, the feeling of the present moment, right?

[771] We want a full collision with the present such that it totally suffices, right?

[772] So there's no thought about past and future necessary because this is it.

[773] And that is, again, a quality of attention.

[774] It's never what is attended to.

[775] I mean, you can get that with any arbitrary object.

[776] And so what's paradoxical about this is that does seem to cancel the importance of any particular thing in life.

[777] I mean, like it cancels.

[778] Like, what's the point of having a family or having a career or just struggling for anything if it's possible to recognize that just the view outside that window?

[779] you know, any arbitrary tree is the beatific vision, right, where you can feel like, you know, you're completely at one with the universe.

[780] It seems antithetical to ambition or progress or anything future -oriented.

[781] So the saving grace there or the cosmic joke is that even recognizing this and even spending a lot of time training to access this, for most of us, we're still going to want many other things and be taken in by those wants and have to work for them.

[782] Right.

[783] It's like it's just, you know, I spend a lot of time thinking about these things.

[784] I've spent a lot of time meditating.

[785] I've done a lot of psychedelics.

[786] I've probably spent two years on silent retreat in my 20s.

[787] I now have a meditation app, which I'm constantly talking about.

[788] And yet there are all kinds of things that are still important to me that require creative thought and effort to maintain.

[789] So I've got relationships and other projects.

[790] And it's possible to, more and more exemplify the life of somebody who doesn't see the point in any of those things for at least 30 years I've known I've known the logic by which someone would become a Buddhist monk say or you know kind of a fundamental renunciate and just spend all on top of a mount yeah all their time meditating because I look at that and I go why even fucking be born right yeah and and and ironically that the person who is really fulfilling that program would sort of agree right like like they like Yeah, they'd have no retort.

[791] They've achieved a state.

[792] I mean, the whole point is to no longer be moved by the possibilities of experience.

[793] But what you have to realize is that the state of being in which that is true of you is so amazingly tranquil and beautiful, right?

[794] Like, I mean, just like the peak of the times when you can honestly say, it doesn't matter if I live or die now.

[795] Like, there's no fear of death.

[796] There's no fear of loss.

[797] There's just no problem to solve.

[798] Yeah.

[799] And I would also just counter, if I understand it correctly, or at least my understanding of it is the transition is, yeah, you could still be ambitious and you could still be engaged in a lot of different endeavors.

[800] The big transition, and this is when I'm happiest, is just it's now about the process and not about the result.

[801] That to me feels like the mindful way to be productive and still work.

[802] Absolutely.

[803] Yeah, well, the results are not ever entirely under your control.

[804] And the process is your life.

[805] Like the results are these micro moments.

[806] Again, more and more living and fulfilling life is figuring out how to enjoy the process, whatever that is.

[807] And so even how to enjoy stress, meditation ultimately is not a matter of being without stress.

[808] It's recognizing that, again, the analogy to working out, I think is apropos here.

[809] It's like when you go to the gym, you're going for the stress, right?

[810] You're imposing, you're creatively imposing a useful stress on yourself, but you also want to be the kind of person who when you leave the gym can really relax.

[811] There's a psychological analogy there, which is you can mindfully engage in a very stressful, creative enterprises.

[812] The crucial difference between someone who actually knows how to practice and someone who doesn't is being able to just put down the burden.

[813] whenever you want.

[814] Again, back to anger.

[815] How long are you going to spend being angry the next time anger arises?

[816] Well, if you don't know how to meditate, you will be angry for as long as the neurophysiology and the situation dictates, right?

[817] Whether that's a minute or an hour or two weeks, whatever it is, right?

[818] With all of the attendant consequences, you know, all the bad conversations, all the bad decisions, all the bad tweets that, you know, that invoke a tsunami of hatred.

[819] So you'll derange your life as much as you do.

[820] Once you can actually decide to just let go of it, then you can decide at any point to let go of it.

[821] That is the near -term rational goal.

[822] I mean, if your meditation can't do that, then it's not actually working for you.

[823] So that's a very discrete skill that's kind of a near -term landmark, which, you.

[824] you know, people will acquire or not.

[825] And, you know, I would recommend that they, if they haven't, then they need to keep looking into it.

[826] Yeah.

[827] And even calling it a stressor, this is another area where, like, reframing that is useful, which is stress can also be seen as excitement.

[828] You know, it's how you think of it.

[829] For me, as, say, a comedian who walks out on stage sometime with now to script and I have to entertain people for two hours, that, quote, stress is fuel.

[830] for me. It makes my brain operate in a way.

[831] It doesn't normally.

[832] So when I'm seeing it as like, oh, yeah, here we go.

[833] I recognize these sensations.

[834] And these sensations generally for me result in me thinking quicker and performing and whatever.

[835] It doesn't have to be a negative thing.

[836] Right.

[837] And one point there, which I've often found useful, is that it's helpful to just connect with the raw energy of a so -called negative emotion.

[838] Right.

[839] So like if you're anxious before going out on stage, that framed one way, that's a problem, framed another way, that's just the energy of the moment.

[840] Right.

[841] It will be quicker on your feet with that wind in your sails than without it.

[842] The negative valence of it can just come off if you just reframe it that way.

[843] And so it is with any negative emotion.

[844] Like the freedom that comes from mindfulness, real mindfulness, I mean, there's sort of different stages of practice.

[845] But there's a crucial stage where you recognize where it's not about being mindful so that negative.

[846] emotions go away, right?

[847] You're not, you're not meditating so that the anger will go away.

[848] You're not pushing it out of consciousness.

[849] That actually is never actually mindfulness.

[850] I mean, mindfulness entails truly accepting whatever's arising in that.

[851] Well, it would be not craving relief from that anxiety.

[852] It would be recognizing this is something that's happening and it has, you know, some value.

[853] Yeah, or just becoming interested in it.

[854] Yeah.

[855] Just being just being wide open to it.

[856] Because it is interesting.

[857] Like, you're just this thing.

[858] And because this context has changed now there's a lot of stuff going on biochemically and that's a fascinating aspect of being a human we're not just stagnant yeah but it also when you connect to it purely at the level of the neurophysiology just the feeling in your chest and stomach and face it ceases to have any psychological import right then it becomes a lot like a pain in your knee or indigestion or something that you wouldn't normally while it might be unpleasant you wouldn't read into it a global assessment you're not sending out an sOS yeah you're not like why am i the kind of person who feels this itch on his thigh you're right but where character assessment yeah but when you feel anxious in front of a crowd you feel like oh fuck like why am i this guy right i'm failing yeah and so to break the link between the character assassination and the sheer physiology of it you can just be open and interested in the raw feeling of the sensations and that's mindfulness in that case but when it really works there is a kind of one taste one taste is actually a jargon phrase within one school of Buddhism there's a single taste to experience in a way because it really is just consciousness and its contents in each moment I mean the analogy that's often used is to a mirror like it just as a mirror reflects everything impartially and it doesn't matter whether what's what's being reflected as ugly or beautiful or whether it was you know, something's on fire.

[859] I mean, it's like from the mirror's frame of reference, there's just an expanse of light.

[860] And consciousness has that quality to it when you keep dropping back into merely witnessing experience as it arises, you notice more and more that that which is aware of joy is exactly the same thing as that which is aware of sadness.

[861] So then that would cause you to wonder, well, then why put so much emphasis, you know, in your life on seeking joy and seeking to avoid sadness.

[862] The truth is, you know, wisdom more and more is a matter of having a kind of baseline of tranquility and well -being amid those inevitable changes in life such that, you know, the joy has come and the sadness has come.

[863] Well, and that's the thing that's not really, it's undersold in our advertising, I would just say.

[864] It doesn't seem to be a state of mind that as a kid is glorified in any way that you would go out to seek it.

[865] Tranquility, yeah.

[866] Yeah, or in AA, you know, the real goals like contentment to no contentment is for an addict, the most elusive thing, right?

[867] Because you're just constantly recalibrating how you feel inside or chasing something that'll recalibrate that.

[868] And so the notion of contentment is the most elusive thing in the world.

[869] And it's not something that makes for a good movie or a good ending of anything for this great story.

[870] So it doesn't seem to be something that we value as a virtue or something that we aspire to have.

[871] No, it needs to be rebranded, but it's...

[872] Yes, it's a great way to say it.

[873] But it is the place when you pay attention, it is the place you want to live from more and more.

[874] It's like it's how you want to show up for other people.

[875] I mean, the alternative is to constantly be imposing your desires on the people around.

[876] you want all these things right you're going to judge all these things you're going to be they say something that doesn't totally align with what you wanted them to say and you're contracted yeah right and then you're trying to put out a fire with your words in each subsequent moment yeah just like no no no that's not yeah and you're constantly reacting to everything right and essentially like your your mind is already like twitter right like twitter it's just the most reactive you know caricatured version of this but basically your Twitter feed is already your mind.

[877] It's not the bio statement.

[878] It's the feed.

[879] I will often get like attacked by somebody.

[880] And I'll go look at their bio and it's like, love all day.

[881] Right, blah, blah, blah.

[882] I was like, hold on.

[883] You just call me some pretty horrendous names.

[884] Now, one of the things I was curious about is, so you've put together this app and you have an approach to meditation and mindfulness.

[885] And it's kind of like a, what are the ethics of this?

[886] And the reason I asked is I just have, happen to watch.

[887] I don't know if you've seen it yet, the Bickram Netflix.

[888] Did you see it yet?

[889] I've seen probably half of it.

[890] But yeah, it's, I love it.

[891] I don't know why that's so delicious to me. He's a charlatan of such heroic proportions is really, it's amazing.

[892] Yeah, I listened to the podcast.

[893] There's a great 30 for 30 podcast on him, like a five or six parter.

[894] That's just phenomenal.

[895] Monica and I both listened to it.

[896] And now there's the, and he was on HBO Real Sports and he was saying that women would pay one million dollars for a ounce of his.

[897] semen, which is just, I just aspire to that kind of self -image.

[898] It's a sentence that can't be uttered with much dignity, it turns out there's no, there's no right number to put at the end of that sentence, which makes you sound like a mensch uttering it.

[899] You're right.

[900] $75.

[901] That sounds fair.

[902] You know, he was in a situation where he came here and he sold these, I don't know, if it's 26 poses, I think.

[903] Yeah, 26 kind of patented sequence of poses.

[904] yes and that was his magic recipe later to be revealed as being minimally his master's recipe and you are in a position where it's like none of these thoughts are proprietary to you but maybe your your arrangement of them are or your synthesis could be proprietary so yeah where what are you drawing from and what's the sam harris spin yeah well so i'm drawing from my experience above all I mean, I'm not comfortable saying anything that I can't empirically stand behind myself.

[905] I mean, or if I say something that I can't vouch for directly, I'll make that very clear.

[906] This is what they say in the teachings about X, Y, and Z, but, you know, who knows?

[907] I'm making claims about what is true or what I have, you know, what I think we have good reason to think is true about the nature of the mind or the nature of human suffering or reality at large.

[908] I mean, there are many claims that I make throughout my work and also throughout the waking up course, because again, my background here is in, you know, neuroscience and philosophy and so there's many kind of streams of knowledge intersecting here, which puts me in a kind of unique, I certainly don't bill myself as the world's greatest authority on any one thing, right?

[909] There's certainly better meditators than me, and I've studied with them, right?

[910] I've had the benefit of studying with some of the greatest teachers.

[911] And you can recognize in them, like, oh, wow, this dude or this gal is on some level I'm just not at.

[912] You can see it.

[913] Oh, yeah, yeah.

[914] Oh, really?

[915] Yeah, because, well, first of all, I mean, I had the benefit of studying with some of just who were widely acknowledged some of the greatest meditation masters of the 20th century.

[916] These guys were in their 80s or 70s when I met them.

[917] Can I just ask what the test of that would be?

[918] Is there anything demonstrable?

[919] Is there anything?

[920] Like, obviously, the famous photo of the guy lighting himself on fire and just burning alive, I can easily look at that and go, well, that's far beyond my capabilities.

[921] I couldn't even have someone like, you know, light my toe on fire without moving.

[922] Well, it's hard because the reality of it is internal to the person's mind, right?

[923] You can only expect so much of it to be made visible in how they operate in the world, right?

[924] Right.

[925] And there's also more to live in a good life than being a great meditator.

[926] There are clearly examples of great meditators who, because of cultural reasons or, you know, a lack of a real ethical scrupulosity, just completely flame out, right?

[927] And Bikram, I wouldn't, and I wouldn't think he was actually a great meditator, but he is an example of just a...

[928] But maybe the Bogwaw?

[929] Yeah.

[930] Oh, show is interesting.

[931] That's another great documentary, World Wild Country.

[932] Probably the best.

[933] Yeah, yeah.

[934] I'm so in love with Mauna, Sheila.

[935] I can't even stand it.

[936] She sent a 25 -year -old gal to Oregon and said built a city and she did it.

[937] I couldn't do that.

[938] That's hilarious.

[939] Yeah.

[940] Just bust in all the homeless people to change the vote for you.

[941] Unfortunately, the punchline here is not as clear psychologically or ethically or spiritually as we would want it to be.

[942] It would be great to be able to say that Osho, for instance, was just a fraud, right?

[943] He grew with a beard long enough and no one could tell that he was a fraud, but he was a. in fact a fraud.

[944] I don't think that's true of Osho.

[945] I don't either.

[946] Right.

[947] So there are many layers to the story, but one layer is he actually was a very insightful person who had some measure of real practice experience and some real insights into the nature of mind.

[948] And it was a great curator of the insights of others.

[949] And he could go back to the literature and talk about the Buddha and the Upanishads and he was very eclectic and what he used as source material.

[950] But he was also smart and he came up with his own analogies and so he was an authority of a sort but then when you put these people in the role of being a guru surrounded by people who for good and bad reasons idolize them right so like on one level the good reason is in the beginning you know absolutely nothing right and you're being introduced to a possibility of freeing yourself from unnecessary suffering, and your gratitude toward, in this case, you know, the guru for being led to those insights is not misplaced.

[951] I mean, the gratitude is totally appropriate.

[952] So it's possible to get benefit even while being exploited by somebody who's really exploiting you.

[953] That's not an argument for it being a good thing to be exploited by a guru in general.

[954] Right.

[955] It would be better to have a real teacher who was not in it just to screw people over or to sleep with his students or whatever device is.

[956] And that's possible, right?

[957] It's possible to meet someone who actually has canceled their own rapacious grandiosity and narcissism and desires enough so that they're not deranged by the role that they've been placed in as a teacher.

[958] And you can be effortlessly ethical even while confronted by other people's projections and all the rest, but clearly it's not a role that is easy for most mortals to navigate.

[959] I'd say nearly impossible.

[960] It's really hard to find those examples.

[961] It's like you're a rock star where, in addition to all of the fame -related adulation that a rock star gets, you're also genuinely transforming people.

[962] Truly helps people.

[963] Yeah.

[964] And so you get a layer of gratitude on that that, you know, Axel Rose didn't get.

[965] Right.

[966] Yes.

[967] But, I mean, back to question.

[968] I mean, given what is unique about my past, as a meditator, as somebody who learn these techniques in a Western context and in a non -religious context, though I do think, you know, Buddhism, some strands of it more than others, is almost uniquely wise on this point of just how to practice meditation and what there is to be recognized about the nature of mind when you do it.

[969] The religion of Buddhism has zero interest.

[970] Yeah.

[971] Right.

[972] And, and is worth criticizing as any of those fountains at your house.

[973] Well, I do like, I love, I love the artwork, yeah, but not just, you have all the iconography.

[974] But I also like Christian artwork too.

[975] I mean, you know, I'll, you know, sure, I'll go, I'll go all the way with you.

[976] It's, it's the ideas that trouble.

[977] Sure, sure.

[978] I mean, a 21st century conversation about human well -being and the nature of mind.

[979] Like, that's my bend diagram of those competencies.

[980] That's what's unique about my.

[981] take on meditation.

[982] So I am explicit in my gratitude for and original reliance on the teachings of specific strands of Buddhism, like the Zokhchen teachings within Tibetan Buddhism.

[983] So the teachers who really got through to me were Zokhchen teachers, Tibetan lamas, one in particular, Tukhurigen Rimpichet, who taught a kind of non -dual mindfulness practice.

[984] A non -dual mindfulness.

[985] Yeah.

[986] The crucial point is the sense that there's something behind your eyes looking out at the world, right?

[987] Yeah.

[988] Yeah.

[989] That feeling of being behind your face, right?

[990] That is the illusion that mindfulness ultimately allows you to cut through.

[991] And thereafter, once you have done that, every moment of mindfulness is synonymous with being mindful of that, the fact that consciousness has no center to it.

[992] So if you're seeing something, I mean, I can look at my hand.

[993] the dualistic default state is to feel like I'm over here.

[994] I as the conscious witness is somehow, I'm somehow over here looking across space at this object that is my hand.

[995] Yeah.

[996] But that's easy to get to, Monica.

[997] Right.

[998] I'm looking at my hand.

[999] I feel like that's what's happening.

[1000] And so that's the starting point.

[1001] But if you look at any object, now you take your hand and you try to turn attention upon itself.

[1002] If you look for what's looking, right, if you look for your face, if you look for your head, you can recognize an initial moment of trying to make that turn, right?

[1003] I mean, it sounds impossible, but if you look for the center of experience, you cannot find it in a way that's conclusive.

[1004] I mean, the center can just drop out and you recognize it's just the single sphere of experience.

[1005] There's just the world.

[1006] Now, are you able to extend that out?

[1007] Will you go so far?

[1008] Does this get too metaphysical?

[1009] This is kind of the Michael Pollin stuff with psilocybin, where right, the side of your brain that can allow you to feel connected to all the things.

[1010] Not even forget your body or your consciousness that can illuminate how interwoven all of it is.

[1011] Can you go that far with it or does it break down for you at that point?

[1012] Well, I just, I want us to be honest about the experiential component and then the theorizing or there's the conceptualizing, the thoughts that are being added to the experience.

[1013] Right.

[1014] And, you know, I'm agnostic as to what we can say about reality at large on the basis of these kinds of experiences.

[1015] Yeah.

[1016] I guess I'm asking, do you believe in a collective consciousness?

[1017] Well, again, I mean, to believe in that would be to answer some of these questions that we don't have answers to.

[1018] Right.

[1019] But I do know that the only difference between us can't be at the level of consciousness because consciousness is just the sheer fact.

[1020] that anything is being experienced at all, we're talking about differences in the contents of consciousness.

[1021] So there's Dax -like contents being known over there.

[1022] There's Sam -like contents being known over here.

[1023] To change places isn't even a coherent idea because we're just talking, if I were aware of your contents, I would be you.

[1024] Well, I do, I can fantasize and imagine a state.

[1025] Again, for me, it would have to be drug -induced, where you and I would somehow magically kind of join consciousness or at least overlap in some significant way.

[1026] Well, you can definitely imagine that, I mean, whether that's possible by some spooky mechanism, I don't know.

[1027] I mean, I'm actually open -minded on that topic, but it's something for which we don't have much evidence of it being so, but despite the fact that many of us have had weird experiences.

[1028] but it's definitely something that you could create technologically.

[1029] I mean, and it is in fact true of an intact human brain as it is.

[1030] I mean, the fact that your hemispheres of your brain have not been divided as they are, you know, when people get a surgery for Grand Mal seizures, there's a sharing of contents across the hemispheres, which if we created an artificial commissure between our two brains, we could easily imagine a sharing of contents.

[1031] Yeah.

[1032] I tried the last time you were here to like, I tried unsuccessfully to get you to tell me why you're interested in the things you are.

[1033] Or maybe to some level of success.

[1034] I don't remember that.

[1035] So it'll be a fresh answer to.

[1036] Well, this is slightly different.

[1037] You probably will see it as totally symmetrical and congruous.

[1038] But I, from the outside, will say, there is a big side of Sam that, well, A, there's the original Sam who went and studied philosophy.

[1039] so that's one type of guy right and then there's the sam who then dropped well did drugs right had some experiences that made you think there are more experiences to be had and then that led you on a trip to india and your discovery of meditation and whatnot and then there's going to ucla and neuroscience which is a very empirical science historic right these are all categories of kind of thought and then yet always still exploring this other thing, as much as you would probably like to position it as something kind of empirical or measurable, it's not that.

[1040] You know, it is ultimately your experience with meditation.

[1041] You have a little bit of paradoxical interests, I'll say.

[1042] I know you won't see them that way.

[1043] Yeah, no, yeah, I don't.

[1044] Well, I can tell you why I don't.

[1045] First of all, any internal experience is like this, right?

[1046] So if I tell you, you know, there's actually an area.

[1047] the visual field where you're not getting any information at all.

[1048] So if you close one eye, you know, I could move an object into the visual.

[1049] Into the blind spot.

[1050] Into the blind spot.

[1051] And it's just, it's gone.

[1052] And here's why you should believe that this is likely so.

[1053] Even before you experience it, I can tell you about the anatomy of the eye and say that, you know, the optic nerve passes through the retina because it was designed backwards by an omniscient god.

[1054] And so there's this, this is a massive blind spot, right?

[1055] to sign backwards by and um yeah so you just there's no way you're getting data there and so let's just check this out there's got to be a way to see this directly and lo and behold there is and you know in five minutes you can teach anyone to do this but all that said let's just say you and adam grant great great interview we then talked to adam grant right you know he he is a very smart person you just couldn't find any traction and that's totally fine and i am someone on the outside who respects both of you and i can just go like yeah i've had the experience at sam's not to the level that you've had, but some taste of that experience where to me everything you're saying makes total sense and I believe it.

[1056] And it's in the same way that I would, which I am so often have to do, is explain the cult I'm in AA and why it somehow was the one thing that got me to get sober.

[1057] And there's a lot of stuff in there that I just have to accept is kind of indefensible in ways.

[1058] Again, I think we can do better than that.

[1059] Now, there may be ways in which it would be rational to change A .A. for the better.

[1060] So it's to actually help more people.

[1061] No one's going to be harmed by these changes and it'll just be to the benefit.

[1062] I'm saying there's some optimal protocol for everyone.

[1063] And maybe there's, you know, five different variants or maybe we could, you know, 200 years from now, we'll be able to scan your brain and give you a totally bespoke behavioral change program.

[1064] Yes.

[1065] That's perfect for you.

[1066] As far as my debate with Adam about the wisdom or utility of meditation, that really is just an experience he hasn't had.

[1067] Right?

[1068] Yeah, totally.

[1069] Well, Andy's right in saying that there are a lot of claims that aren't necessarily conclusively backed by studies.

[1070] Well, but this is where I agree with him, where many of the claims that are made about the benefits of meditation are either premature or they're not even the point in the end.

[1071] I mean, so you can read studies which show or purport to show that meditation boosts the immune system, right?

[1072] Or it'll stave off, you know, cortical degeneration, right?

[1073] You know, like the age -related thinning of the cortex.

[1074] Now, that all may be true.

[1075] None of it may be true.

[1076] None of what's really interesting about meditation is predicated on any of that being true.

[1077] So that's not the science I'm putting any weight on, though I'm interested in it.

[1078] And it would be great if, you know, all the good facts were substantiated.

[1079] But the place to actually put your weight scientifically where you know you're on firmer ground than not here is where insights in meditation are actually bringing your experience of your mind into closer register with what you have every reason to believe is true from the third person neurophysiological side, right?

[1080] So very much analogous to the blind spot.

[1081] Like we know the anatomy of the eye.

[1082] we know that that actually predicted that the blind spot would be subjectively discoverable, right?

[1083] Yeah.

[1084] We know there's no self in the brain.

[1085] We know there's no ego.

[1086] He's cut it up.

[1087] Unchanging me just lurking there for 75, 85, 95 years, right?

[1088] There's no place in the brain where it all comes to, there's no unitary anything in the brain, right?

[1089] It's a process.

[1090] It's a structure, but it is a structure that is, substrate for a process of neurophysiology described at one level, information processing described at another level, but there's no man riding the horse.

[1091] And then drugs, I mean, drugs have been an indispensable component for many of us in that they cancel beyond any possibility of doubt, the uncertainty as to whether or not it is possible to have a fundamentally different experience of consciousness in the present moment.

[1092] Yeah, you're occupying the exact same physical world and it's all completely different completely fascinating and it should give everyone a question you know it should make everyone question how certain the one we're experiencing right now is yeah and it is just in fact true that the pharmacology of drugs is such that the drugs aren't causing your brain to do anything your brain can't do right they're just they're mimicking neurotransmitters or changing the the level at which they're yeah it's all the medicines in your brain.

[1093] Weirdly.

[1094] Yeah.

[1095] I mean, the receptors are there.

[1096] So it's either mimicking serotonin or it's doing something to serotonin.

[1097] Stopping the uptake.

[1098] Yeah.

[1099] So, and I think for many people, I think for me, frankly, taking psychedelics in my 20s was the only thing.

[1100] I mean, I would have been Adam Grant on this issue, I'm sure, but for the fact that I dropped acid and recognized, oh my God, there is a radically different way of being in the present moment than I was ever going to find on my own.

[1101] Yeah, yeah.

[1102] And so to not have that reference point is a disadvantage.

[1103] It makes total sense.

[1104] Yeah, and I had similar thoughts while listening.

[1105] I was merely pointing out that whether you see it this way or not, there are positions and there are areas you can speak as an expert on that would win in a court case, let's just say.

[1106] And then there's other things that is your, this is my story and you can choose to try it or not.

[1107] Well, no, but it's also, again, you can do better than that.

[1108] You can force someone to recognize that it's their story, too.

[1109] Is it interesting to you in your own life that you have come onto the scene and accrued a large audience of people who like listening to you talk about one thing in one lane?

[1110] And then there's another group of people who have followed you over to some other thing.

[1111] And I know to you, they're the exact same thing.

[1112] But to me, they're different things.

[1113] Right.

[1114] Okay?

[1115] One is like a little bit inflammatory.

[1116] Remind me not to hire you as a publicist.

[1117] One is provocative.

[1118] One is inflammatory and scenery.

[1119] One creates argument.

[1120] One is literally a path to perhaps contentment.

[1121] And now you have these two spheres in your life.

[1122] You have your podcast, which I would say from the outside, you may disagree, but I would say has evolved in and of itself.

[1123] where it is increasingly less inflammatory in some ways, either because it's just too fucking exhausting to fight those battles.

[1124] I mean, that's probably a big chunk of it.

[1125] But then there's another part is that you get older, you care about different things.

[1126] There's hills you want to die on.

[1127] And then there's now they're not hills you want to die.

[1128] And I think that's just part of being a human and evolving.

[1129] Howard Stern has a different show today than he had 25 years ago.

[1130] It doesn't make him fraudulent either end of that career.

[1131] Is it exciting to you?

[1132] Does it seem like a lighter life?

[1133] to spend your time in the app direction.

[1134] Yeah, well, this is a good question.

[1135] Honestly, there is a unifying way to view this, but part of it is, as you suggest, everything's a work in progress, and I've begun to notice that certain battles are not worth fighting or at minimum they're worth fighting more efficiently, right?

[1136] So I spend less time on certain points.

[1137] I'm not avoiding controversy on the podcast as much as I'm cutting my losses sooner.

[1138] And so that is giving a different character.

[1139] There are certain people who I have in the past thought, you know, why not roll the dice and try to have a conversation with this person, you know, on air for a million people to listen to.

[1140] And now I'm curating those choices a little more intelligently, I think, in the end.

[1141] I mean, it's not that, you know, I don't have massive regrets, but I do feel like there was a period on my podcast.

[1142] where the podcast was basically a symptom of what social media was doing to my brain.

[1143] Like, Twitter was amplifying certain voices and giving me the sense that certain things really had to be responded to.

[1144] That there was consensus.

[1145] That's what I always fall for.

[1146] I think if I read 12, you and I talked about this in the Mark Dupluss thing.

[1147] It's like I've been on the inside of it where I do assume that 1 ,200 comments is consensus of 2 million people, which is a bizarre.

[1148] But I do.

[1149] I'm just a human.

[1150] And it's just a, it's a kind of a failure of the interface, but it is the response to that for me is to just spend less time seeing what's coming back at me. My feeling is if it's really important, I will notice it some other way at this point.

[1151] But like, because it even gets worse than Twitter.

[1152] I mean, like I have a Reddit, a subreddit, you know, devoted to me. I think there's now two.

[1153] But the original one got captured by like an army.

[1154] of the woke such that it basically the the sam harris subreddit the main one is filled with people who just despise me sure like so if i felt like i had to pay attention to that much less respond to it you know that would be a very different and but there was one time where in the last few months where i was hearing enough rumors from other channels that this had gotten so out of hand that i really should say something to respond to what was happening in my subreddit.

[1155] And the main thing was like just being attacked as a white supremacist.

[1156] So I actually devoted three podcasts, two of my own and one.

[1157] I've made an appearance on someone else's podcast to try to put out that fire.

[1158] Right.

[1159] Now, I don't know whether that was a complete waste of time or worth doing.

[1160] But generally speaking, you're right.

[1161] I'm curating my own controversy diet a little more carefully.

[1162] So for me, I don't know how you look at it.

[1163] For me, I too seem to be more and more just avoiding stuff I used to get ensnared with.

[1164] And I think my global thought on it or perspective is basically like it's almost just high school.

[1165] Like I can bond with a group of people because I hate Michael Jackson or it can bond with people because I love Prince.

[1166] Right.

[1167] I can weed people out by either of those methods.

[1168] Now, if I choose to weed people out by saying I love Prince, now the people I've attracted, we can do something with that.

[1169] Let's go see Prince play.

[1170] Whereas if my, I've selected my friends by I hate Michael Jackson.

[1171] Now what?

[1172] Let's not buy his CDs.

[1173] There's almost something intrinsically not productive about it.

[1174] Yeah, except on those points where swap in Trump, you know, it's like if you want to get rid of Trump next time around, you have to spend a lot of time making the case for why that would be a good thing.

[1175] Assuming that the people that you need to persuade are actually listening, which I'd argue they're not.

[1176] But I do think there is a kind of global.

[1177] thought I'm coming towards, which is like, I can say the same message by just letting you know what I love.

[1178] I need to broadcast and spend my energy amplifying the things I love.

[1179] Is it Stephen Pinker's take on this?

[1180] Is it this guy's take on this?

[1181] Or do I need to spend my energy in time refuting somebody I basically don't agree with?

[1182] Like what just what is tactically a better agenda in life?

[1183] You don't think it's either or.

[1184] For me, I think I have to do both.

[1185] But what I have now with the app.

[1186] The difference now is that what was so phantasmagorically strange about launching the app was for the first time in living memory, I got back.

[1187] All love.

[1188] All love.

[1189] That was one thing, but that wasn't even the most startling thing.

[1190] What I got back was no misunderstanding as to what my intentions were.

[1191] I'm putting this out because I have found this incredibly valuable.

[1192] These are the most valuable things I've ever learned here, maybe you'll find them valuable.

[1193] Yes.

[1194] And all I got back was a pure, both just appreciation, which is great, but just no misunderstanding, right?

[1195] Which was such, I forgot that anyone has a life like that where you just put stuff out in the world and it makes people happy.

[1196] Yeah.

[1197] And they tell you, right?

[1198] And so for all the books I've written and all the, you know, the podcast I've done, I had just habituated to the natural state of things, which is however good your intentions, however clear you try to make them, you know, however fair you try to be to your opponents, your day -to -day experience will be to be vilified for things you don't actually believe.

[1199] And again, just in my personal life and experience, there's been one topic in my life that's transcended all other things I care about, which is if some dude wants to get sober, because he's on the verge of dying, I help that person.

[1200] You've got something to say.

[1201] And quite often, I don't agree with anything that person thinks.

[1202] But I've done this one thing that I've elevated above all other things, which has helped someone save their life from addiction.

[1203] And so I've been lucky in that I've had the experience.

[1204] I'm like, well, that is very fucking rewarding.

[1205] Like when I've seen guys who now have a family and are employed and stuff, I'm like, oh, wow, that kind of trumps all the other things I care about just for me. I know everyone's got their own narrative they're telling.

[1206] But for me, it's just a hugely rewarding feeling.

[1207] Yeah, I recognize that it looks kind of incoherent or at least very different from the outside, but all of these things come together for me in a recognition of the truly absurd power of bad ideas.

[1208] And this covers like our own moment to moment psychological suffering and our beliefs about ourselves and the nature of mind and what it, what we are.

[1209] as people and, you know, our kind of our misapprehension of all that, but then just the bad ideas that scale to the level of culture that become this larger operating system that we're all struggling to get free of.

[1210] The culture we build is so often not aligned with our deeper values that we could just, we could figure out in five minutes, you know.

[1211] I think the only thing you and I differ on is I think if people had that road to self -fulfillment, I think so many of the other problems that we spend a lot of time fighting over or trying to correct for would magically evaporate.

[1212] I really do believe that.

[1213] Well, I know I agree.

[1214] Yeah.

[1215] So it's just kind of like, oh, maybe I've just put all my attention and energy into like each individual I can help reach fulfillment.

[1216] And then that other stuff that was appealing that I was fighting against might just erode on its own.

[1217] Yeah.

[1218] And I do, I view all of the fights as an opportunity cost.

[1219] I mean, basically at least 80 % of what I've paid.

[1220] attention to in the last 15 years or so, I view as much of it seemed necessary at the time, certainly.

[1221] And in retrospect, I can't say that I regret it, but it definitely was an opportunity cost.

[1222] And what I'm paying attention to on the app is the real opportunity.

[1223] It's the real thing I wanted to pay attention to.

[1224] I'm not being critical of your past.

[1225] I'm just, I'm excited that you have these two channels that are a little different.

[1226] Like, I enjoyed selfishly, I like to listen to your podcast and have you defeat someone.

[1227] I have an opposite opinion.

[1228] of from that's some thrill for me right but then i've used your app and and i came into it with some baggage which is i've done tm and i think that works for me so i'm like i don't know why i need to learn sam's version of this so i'm already coming in maybe with a little more baggage than someone else and i'm sitting there in my wife's closet listening to it and i'm like oh fuck i feel calm and content and this is wonderful right i probably i owe sam a bigger thing Thank you for this, then I do when he's dethrone someone I don't agree with.

[1229] I think if I can't sum it up in that experience.

[1230] I mean, I can't say that I've closed the door to the controversy, just because I know we, I mean, I know the next 12 months, is politically speaking.

[1231] Oh, yeah, yeah, force my hand.

[1232] Yeah, yeah.

[1233] You'll get right back into that kitchen.

[1234] Turn that boiler up.

[1235] But Twitter, Twitter, I've broken up with Twitter to a degree that I think I will, I mean, I still use it.

[1236] but I really have reconfigured my brain with respect to that piece of social media.

[1237] All right.

[1238] Well, I didn't even get to any of the things.

[1239] Every time you're here, I have a panic that I wish I had you for.

[1240] Oh, just answer one question.

[1241] Some people will listen to this and they'll go, oh, yet another luxury of rich people.

[1242] Like the way people are critical of like eating organic.

[1243] Like, well, yeah, if I had a ton of money and I go to Whole Foods and I had time, blah, blah, blah, blah.

[1244] all, you know, semi -realistic complaints.

[1245] I certainly have more time to evaluate.

[1246] I have the freedom.

[1247] I was saying this the other day in an A -A meeting.

[1248] Got in a fight with my wife.

[1249] I went downstairs and worked out.

[1250] I was running for about an hour.

[1251] About 30 minutes into the run I was able to see.

[1252] I wasn't stellar in that argument, you know?

[1253] I don't think I was really trying to see her point of view, blah, blah, blah, blah.

[1254] I had an hour to reflect on it.

[1255] I came back upstairs.

[1256] I apologized for how I was acting.

[1257] And then we went on without our day.

[1258] And I recognized, what a fucking gift.

[1259] I have an hour to run on a treadmill.

[1260] A lot of people get in that fight with their wife, they go straight to that second job or whatever the thing is, whatever fire they're putting out.

[1261] So I do recognize I'm super privileged in many ways.

[1262] I have an hour to reflect sometimes.

[1263] But just say why this isn't an elite endeavor to meditate or anything.

[1264] Well, so at a certain level, even to be able to think about living a fulfilling life, even to have a concept of happiness is a privilege.

[1265] Sure.

[1266] I mean, if you're spending your time along with your eight children searching a landfill outside of, you know, Calcutta or Bombay, just to define scraps, right?

[1267] You don't have the time for any of this stuff.

[1268] You can have as fine -grained a view of that hierarchy as you want.

[1269] But yes, that is true and undeniable.

[1270] And we should want to engineer a civilization which causes the floor for.

[1271] needless human suffering and drudgery to just keep rising so that the worst lives of the 21st century and the 22nd century become unimaginably good right I mean that's got to be the global endgame for us it still doesn't negate the fact that certain things are true about the nature of the mind and you either have the time and interest to discover these things or not right right and this is true anywhere else I mean science is a luxury if you don't if you're if you're living in a failed state No one's got the free attention to do science.

[1272] It doesn't mean that science isn't there to be done.

[1273] On the narrow financial point, one thing I've always been clear about, and it's right there in the pricing on the app, if you can't afford a subscription to the Wakenup app, that should never be the reason why you don't use it.

[1274] If you just send us an email to support at wakingup .com, we'll give you a free year on the app.

[1275] And if your luck hasn't changed at the end of the year, you just send another email.

[1276] And there's just, there's zero judgment about that.

[1277] I mean, that's, I think that's lovely of you.

[1278] And that's true with all my, I mean, I wish that were true of everything I've ever produced.

[1279] I mean, you can't do that with a physical book.

[1280] But for all my digital stuff, that's always true.

[1281] And a lot of people, like, I think, I think it's now like 150 people send that email every day.

[1282] Right.

[1283] So, I mean, we now have, you know, thousands and thousands of people doing that.

[1284] So zero judgment there.

[1285] The thing I do have judgment on is just the expectation that all, digital work should be free, right?

[1286] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[1287] Because, like, you know, this is just not, ultimately you're going to get what you pay for.

[1288] It has to make sense for people to spend their lives producing content.

[1289] Yeah.

[1290] Well, yours is really great.

[1291] I just want to give a personal testimony that I really like it.

[1292] And there's, like, a historical aspect to it.

[1293] Like, you can learn about it.

[1294] You can just go through the, what is it, 50 the first?

[1295] Well, the introductory course has 50 sessions.

[1296] 50 sessions.

[1297] And now there's actually, there's essentially a podcast channel.

[1298] within the app, it's called Conversations, but I'm now just interviewing other teachers and scholars and scientists on related topics.

[1299] And occasionally, one of those episodes is also appearing on my podcast, but for the most part, I'm assuming my podcast audience doesn't want to hear about the specifics of meditation or, you know, ethics or, you know, the related science or, right.

[1300] So I'm, without ever intending to start a second podcast, I have effectively started a second podcast.

[1301] We all just repeat the exact same thing with some different packaging.

[1302] Well, listen, Sam, I look forward to seeing you arrive in a Rolls -Royce one day, and on that day I'm going to follow you to Oregon or to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, wherever you build your city.

[1303] I would need 93 others behind that Rolls -Royce.

[1304] I really hope you reach Baguan status, and I will be the first joyful dancing Rush Nishi to follow you.

[1305] I adore you, Sam Harris.

[1306] Well, likewise, it's great to be back, and thank you for...

[1307] And next time, you know, the lifting's going to be on your shoulders in some capacity.

[1308] When you email me, it was like, oh, great, this time you'll take the lead.

[1309] And you're like, no, no, you're still in charge.

[1310] I'll just show up.

[1311] All right.

[1312] Well, then it's a date.

[1313] Okay, great.

[1314] And now my favorite part of the show, the fact check with my soulmate, Monica Padman.

[1315] Working on them fact checks.

[1316] Sam Harris.

[1317] Samuel Harris.

[1318] Round two.

[1319] We're still on our field trip.

[1320] We are.

[1321] More bless this mess.

[1322] Yeah, you're still in your outfit.

[1323] My Viking garb.

[1324] Yeah.

[1325] Do you think it's a good look for me?

[1326] Um, no. It's not my favorite look.

[1327] Well, actually.

[1328] When I had the horns on.

[1329] I like it all.

[1330] Okay.

[1331] But I don't think it's something you should adopt for the, like, your every day.

[1332] I needed to hear that.

[1333] Because I had a moment looking at me as I was like, should I start going techno -viking style everywhere?

[1334] I could tell you were thinking that.

[1335] Yeah, I felt fun.

[1336] Well, look, I want you to have a fun life.

[1337] So, you know, chain mail, stuff.

[1338] sleeveless shirt might be the new thing might be and never know i'm thinking about bringing back my seventh great haircut which is super long and back shaved on the side mullet spike on top yeah in bangs oh wow yeah because a crew member has got a mullet and some of the girls here at work are now super into him because of this haircut and i was looking at his haircut and i was like god damn is it time is it time for the mull to come back and i was like that was my best haircut and that's when people liked me the most i would say not true at all well you've never seen me in real life well i know that that's not when people liked you the most seventh grade that's not when the world liked you the most my world the world didn't even know you i'm not um i'm not gonna like that okay okay well i'm gonna tell you now could you look at it before you decide or you got to decide now look i guess i could look at it but That'll be too late.

[1339] Let's look at some photos.

[1340] I know the picture.

[1341] Oh, you do?

[1342] And it's very cute on a little...

[1343] 12 -year -old?

[1344] Yeah.

[1345] And I think it's...

[1346] But a 45 -year -old might not be...

[1347] I think it's going to be that you just need a lot of attention.

[1348] Do I lose you at the spike, the bangs, or the long and back?

[1349] The long and back.

[1350] The long and back.

[1351] It's the first thing I need to go.

[1352] Okay, on the list.

[1353] Uh -huh.

[1354] All right.

[1355] And then second would be spike.

[1356] Because it was a tall one.

[1357] It was like a five -inch tall spike.

[1358] Oh, wow, wow.

[1359] Yeah.

[1360] And then bangs.

[1361] Bangs is fine.

[1362] Can be fine.

[1363] Okay.

[1364] Well, I was going to make the claim that my spike was about the length of the average male penis.

[1365] Really?

[1366] Which might have had something to do with its appeal.

[1367] Like maybe there was something phallic or primal.

[1368] This is, I don't think, accurate.

[1369] That someone would go like, I fucking like that haircut.

[1370] Reminds me of a penis.

[1371] Yeah.

[1372] We could put a bet on it like we did last time.

[1373] Uh -huh.

[1374] I don't know how we would really, we could just pull people.

[1375] We would have to send people to the mall to ask them.

[1376] That's, I think, how they do most research.

[1377] That's true.

[1378] Yeah.

[1379] I think I participated in a few of those studies.

[1380] Yeah.

[1381] Because I spent so much time in malls.

[1382] Every now and then there would be a random person that was doing some sort of study.

[1383] Market research.

[1384] Yes.

[1385] And then they would pay you like $10.

[1386] Oh.

[1387] Yeah.

[1388] And I would always do it so that I could then spend that $10.

[1389] Oh, I would 100 % done it for the money.

[1390] But I did spend an in an inordinate amount of time at the 12 oaks.

[1391] mall in novi michigan i mean like you know 12 hours there on some days yeah same but they didn't deem novi worthy of market research i guess there was never anyone there and what would you do at the mall i'd like hang with my friends you'd have some beef with another group of guys that was eminent that was going to happen yep and then you go to burger king oh remember that song rectangle sandwich no oh yeah yeah the home of the rectangle sandwich but remember the um song the humph The Humpty Dance.

[1392] No. The Humpty Dance is the dance doing the hump.

[1393] Oh, do me, baby.

[1394] Digital Underground.

[1395] Anyways, at one point he goes, I once got busy in a Burger King bathroom.

[1396] Oh.

[1397] And I once got busy in a Burger King bathroom at the 12 Oaks Mall.

[1398] Wow.

[1399] Yeah, it was so exciting.

[1400] That is exciting.

[1401] You don't like that store.

[1402] I could see it on your face.

[1403] The micro movements in your face I was perceptive of.

[1404] You really know how to read those.

[1405] I do.

[1406] Just generally.

[1407] don't think people should hook up at the rectangle home of the rectangle sandwich or just it's gross or sound like bragging it's fine no it's fine everyone can do whatever they want yeah you just hooked up everywhere well i tried i tried my hardest then you did you succeeded it wasn't some like let's let's say this i wouldn't have told you that story had there not been a song the humpty dance where then he talked about it and i and i was just like oh i see you i did that yeah yeah well that's cool how was it tell me details i guess you know it's not what you want it to be it's not the most hospitable environment for romance was there like pee in the toilet already i'm sure i mean it was a fucking burger king bathroom at the mall i'm sure it was in a shambles now i regret telling the story and in fact you know over the years i've learned to stop telling fight stories which i do a really good job at because i think i've only told you like five or six yeah yeah and there's dozens well you can tell me can i what do you mean i don't know i think it's an unbecoming thing i i i'm glad i don't know that about you so it's not like it'd be a shock yeah i just i've learned to recognize like what do you do it a a story for someone whatever i it's not a it's not an attractive quality me doing that i used to do it nonstop yeah ad nauseum and then obviously now i'm i'm learning that telling a hookup story just isn't people don't like that maybe the guys like it you know if i find myself in a locker room but the girls don't like it i think that's true i don't really know why it's not like it's offensive or anything at all it's just like okay sure but I told one the other day in the living room I was like you know what that was a lead balloon and I got to stop that and I think for people was just like that was weird and gross and I was like yeah I get it it is weird and gross if you're not I don't think it's weird and gross I just think it's like there's a little bit of like a good for you well right because right because I think the easily implied intention was that I was bragging but I wasn't it yeah I don't know I don't know.

[1408] I think you're right.

[1409] I think there's something about a hookup story that sounds bragging regardless.

[1410] And then it's also like not really something to brag about because everyone can hook up at any time.

[1411] And so it kind of just feels like, all right.

[1412] Yeah.

[1413] What if they're really funny, though, like that gal in New Mexico who changed the policy of the hotel?

[1414] Like that one's worth telling, right?

[1415] Yeah.

[1416] I mean, I think you're allowed to do whatever you want?

[1417] No, I would, I would aim to not do things that people don't enjoy.

[1418] Yeah.

[1419] Well, I like that about you.

[1420] And, okay, so.

[1421] I'm rounding that corner.

[1422] There we go.

[1423] Real time progress.

[1424] Right.

[1425] Anyway, okay.

[1426] So Burger King.

[1427] Oh, mall.

[1428] Mall.

[1429] Market research.

[1430] $10.

[1431] I would have done, let me just say, I would have done anything for $10 at the 12th.

[1432] Oh, really.

[1433] If they would have said, like, jump off the balcony, I would have been like, absolutely.

[1434] Sure.

[1435] For the listeners, we got interrupted because Dax had to leave.

[1436] Now he's back.

[1437] No, I'm back.

[1438] But you know who never tells hookup stories?

[1439] Sam Harris.

[1440] I've listened to probably 300 hours of him talking and he's never told a hookup story.

[1441] It's not really on brand for him.

[1442] It's a little off brand.

[1443] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[1444] It doesn't seem like it would lead.

[1445] I would love to hear it.

[1446] Well, sure.

[1447] I mean, he's talked about being in love.

[1448] He talks about his wife.

[1449] Oh, yeah.

[1450] He talks about sex.

[1451] Right.

[1452] He's fearless on all topics.

[1453] But I just imagine how it would sound.

[1454] There's so many of his words that I love.

[1455] love that I try to incorporate into my...

[1456] It would have a high vocab.

[1457] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[1458] Yeah, he has a bunch of keywords that he...

[1459] These are just in regular rotation and I love him.

[1460] Okay.

[1461] We were talking about the movie Click.

[1462] Oh, right, with Adam Sandler.

[1463] Mm -hmm.

[1464] And you were kind of giving a synopsis of what you thought it was but didn't know because you hadn't seen it?

[1465] Yeah.

[1466] Sandler plays Michael Newman, an overworked architect who neglects his family.

[1467] When he acquires a magical universal remote from Morty that enables him to fast forward through unpleasant or outright dull parts of his life, he soon learns that those seemingly bad moments that he skips over, contained valuable time with his family and important life lessons.

[1468] Yeah.

[1469] So it's pretty much what I thought it was.

[1470] It is.

[1471] Could you tell me about the firefighter one?

[1472] Frequency?

[1473] No, that he did with Chuck and Larry.

[1474] I now pronounce you Chuck and Larry.

[1475] I now pronounce you Chuck and Larry.

[1476] I do remember that.

[1477] What was the premise of that one?

[1478] Hey, Google, what is I now pronounce you Chuck and Larry about?

[1479] Chuck Levine, Adam Sandler, and Larry Valentine, Kevin James, are firefighters and true blue buddies.

[1480] When Larry, a widower, learns he cannot name his children as beneficiaries on his life insurance policy, he needs a big favor from Chuck.

[1481] Sign on as Larry's domestic partner.

[1482] The pals unexpectedly become front page news and must carry the masquerade to extremes when an overzealous bureaucrat becomes suspicious of their true relationship.

[1483] Oh, okay.

[1484] That's an interesting concept in that you would have a life insurance policy that required you were married or whatever.

[1485] That just to pass something on to your kids, it would require you to be married.

[1486] That's okay.

[1487] Like if I was using policy genius, I would have them filter out ones that require me to stay wet to give my shit to my kids.

[1488] That doesn't seem fair even.

[1489] No. It's still your money and stuff.

[1490] Yeah.

[1491] It's like a pro -marriage conspiracy.

[1492] There's too much pro -marriage, pro -family conspiracy.

[1493] is happening.

[1494] You know.

[1495] I'm one of the worst offenders.

[1496] I've been thinking about this a lot because, you know, there was an incident at the White Elephant.

[1497] I actually don't even know if you know this story.

[1498] Oh.

[1499] At the White Elephant Party, our beautiful Hansen White Elephant Party, I got a present that was a, like, Ouija board -ish, and then some pot and some stuff.

[1500] It was like a big package.

[1501] And then it got stolen from me. And Eric, our friend Eric, said, oh, good, I'm glad that got taken.

[1502] That has a bad energy.

[1503] Oh, right.

[1504] He didn't want you to bring it into your home.

[1505] He didn't want me to bring that into the home.

[1506] He thought it had a bad energy.

[1507] And then he said, maybe I was going to die if I had it.

[1508] Right.

[1509] Six times more likely to die or something.

[1510] And there was a witch involved.

[1511] You know, there's lots of stuff.

[1512] Witchcraft.

[1513] He was, yeah, he was saying that.

[1514] And I was like, well, we should probably tell Jenny who got it.

[1515] Yeah.

[1516] That it has a bad energy.

[1517] Right.

[1518] And he said, oh, yeah.

[1519] Does she have kids?

[1520] And I said, no. And, And he said, oh, okay, that's fine then.

[1521] Well, he thought, well, hold on, though.

[1522] No, we're not going to hold on.

[1523] Well, we are going to hold on.

[1524] We're going to talk about it.

[1525] Well, I could see where he was saying, if that thing's going home to somebody's house, and I think we would agree on this, that you should try to spare the innocent, you know, the young kids.

[1526] No, no, no, but he wasn't talking about the kids.

[1527] He was saying she had less value.

[1528] He, exactly.

[1529] He was saying if she died, it mattered less because she doesn't have children.

[1530] That's true as well.

[1531] I don't like that.

[1532] at all.

[1533] Well, I mean in that, like, that's crazy to say.

[1534] Well, in the, if, if, if one person has a few people depending on them for everything, you know, it seems like it's coming at a greater cost, doesn't it?

[1535] Or is it just like someone dies and then their cat's just curious, like, oh, I haven't seen them in a few days.

[1536] But then a cat being a cat forgets it even had an owner after four days.

[1537] And then it gets into the cupboards and, you know, takes care of itself.

[1538] You don't like it.

[1539] Well, of course I don't.

[1540] Because I'm a single person.

[1541] So that's saying that I'm less valuable as you or as him.

[1542] And I don't think that's true.

[1543] Well, I would say that two things are true.

[1544] Like if I was still single in that came up, I would think I deserve to be alive as much as anyone else personally.

[1545] And then also I would have been able to say objectively there's going to be more damage if that person with kids dies than me. Yeah.

[1546] Well, there's going to be more.

[1547] Pain probably.

[1548] Well, again, just dependence, the nature of dependence.

[1549] Sure.

[1550] Sure.

[1551] You know, yeah.

[1552] Sure.

[1553] Yeah.

[1554] So, like, you know, if one person dies, their life's ruined.

[1555] But then if this other person dies, then three lives are ruined.

[1556] Well, they're not ruined.

[1557] It's so sad.

[1558] But I know many people who've lost parents and their lives are ruined.

[1559] No, they're not.

[1560] Oh, okay.

[1561] I thought you're going another way.

[1562] No, they're not.

[1563] They live happy lives and they had a sad, horrible thing happened to them.

[1564] I would never wish that.

[1565] on a kid, but it doesn't ruin their lives.

[1566] It doesn't ruin all kids' lives, and it ruins some kids' lives, for sure.

[1567] Yeah, and other things ruin kids' lives as well that have both of their parents.

[1568] Yeah, true.

[1569] I guess here's what I'm saying.

[1570] You're a sniper, and you have to kill someone on the street or all of humanity dies, and one of the persons has two kids and one of the persons has zero kids.

[1571] Okay, so one of the persons is you and one of the persons.

[1572] is me. Well, no. That's not that hypothetical.

[1573] But that is the hypothetical.

[1574] That's exactly my point.

[1575] Okay.

[1576] Well, honestly, though, if you have to kill someone on the street and you have your choice between someone with no kids or someone with kids, which one would you kill?

[1577] I don't know.

[1578] Okay.

[1579] Sticking to your guns.

[1580] We don't have any other information.

[1581] We don't know if they're a good or a bad person.

[1582] All we know is one person is kids and one person doesn't.

[1583] Everything else is neutral.

[1584] They have the same moral integrity and they're both equally of service.

[1585] not a cost to civilization.

[1586] The only difference they have is one has two kids and one doesn't.

[1587] I think it's an easy choice.

[1588] Okay.

[1589] I mean, it doesn't favor you in this case, which sucks.

[1590] Nor would have favored me up until six years ago, but I do think we would both make that choice.

[1591] Maybe.

[1592] You don't like being thought of as less important than other people, and you're not less important.

[1593] But it's not really an evaluation of importance.

[1594] It's an evaluation of wreckage and consequence.

[1595] But I think that's where the system breaks down.

[1596] I think that's an emotional thing to say.

[1597] I think maybe if we had to poll people and we really did some actual research on this, I don't know that that's true.

[1598] I mean, granted, we would have to control for all the other variables.

[1599] Like, sure, if Stalin had kids, I don't know, you know, or Hitler did not have children.

[1600] But, you know, you plug in those people with children and then it's easy.

[1601] But if everything else is the same.

[1602] But not everything is all the same.

[1603] That single person could be giving tons of money to charity every month.

[1604] And that dad could be a horrible person or a mom or whatever.

[1605] And also.

[1606] Probably a dad.

[1607] Or a mom.

[1608] And be a bad parent.

[1609] You know, be neglectful.

[1610] Who knows?

[1611] Like the idea that just because you have children makes you more valuable or worthy of life, I don't like that.

[1612] And I don't think it's true.

[1613] Like, the immediate reaction is to think that's true.

[1614] But I don't, I think if you really start thinking about it, I don't know that it is.

[1615] I don't know.

[1616] Okay.

[1617] I won't ever say it to you.

[1618] Well, I know you think it, so it's fine.

[1619] It's also fine.

[1620] It's fine.

[1621] He wasn't.

[1622] Well, no, there's plenty of people with two kids I'd killed before I killed you.

[1623] Well, that's just because I'm selfish.

[1624] If it's you on a street and a stranger on the street and the stranger has two kids, I'm definitely killing the stranger.

[1625] Let's be clear.

[1626] Yeah.

[1627] I don't know.

[1628] And in Eric's case, he wanted her to go home with it because he didn't know her.

[1629] But he knows you and he did not want you to go home with it.

[1630] So then he went to everyone's just, of all the strangers, I would prefer that a childless stranger took it home.

[1631] Yeah.

[1632] Yeah.

[1633] I understand.

[1634] I'm not saying it's like foreign to me, but I. Just doesn't sit well with you.

[1635] Mm -mm.

[1636] It doesn't.

[1637] Okay.

[1638] So, oh, he was talking about how some people are more susceptible or less susceptible to hypnosis.

[1639] And there's a scale.

[1640] And there's actually a couple scales.

[1641] There's a Harvard scale and a Stanford scale.

[1642] Okay, two different competing scales.

[1643] Mm -hmm.

[1644] And you guys can do.

[1645] We like Stanford, right?

[1646] Yeah.

[1647] I mean, we like both.

[1648] They're both -in -file schools.

[1649] In theory, we know nothing about either.

[1650] We've never attended either place.

[1651] I've only stood in Harvard.

[1652] I've never even been to Stanford.

[1653] But what I think about them is that Stanford's more artistic.

[1654] Yeah, well, because it's like West Coast.

[1655] It's breezy.

[1656] Sure, sure.

[1657] If I'm really being honest, if I could go to either of those goals, I would pick Harvard.

[1658] I mean, they have the lampoon.

[1659] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[1660] That'd be fun.

[1661] Natalie Portman went there.

[1662] Yeah, I think she had fun.

[1663] Mike Scher liked it.

[1664] Yeah.

[1665] I pick Harvard.

[1666] Okay, so basically there's like a rating system and there's all these different things that they test for and there's lots of different sections.

[1667] It's pretty intensive.

[1668] Mm -hmm.

[1669] But some of the things that they test for are postural sway, eye closure.

[1670] hand lowering, immobilization, finger lock, arm rigidity, hands moving together, verbal inhibition, hallucination, eye, catalypsy, post -hypnotic changes chairs, and amnesia.

[1671] So I guess they test these people and they rank them on these levels and then come up with whether or not you're susceptible.

[1672] I can't imagine I told the story when he brought it up.

[1673] But I didn't tell the story about when I saw a live hypnotist in Salt Lake City when I was 18.

[1674] Oh, my God.

[1675] It was one of the most amusing things.

[1676] If anyone has an opportunity to go see a live one, it's so fun.

[1677] First of all, this guy had a great accent.

[1678] And he would say, you feel your body's becoming as stiff as a two before.

[1679] And he said two before instead of two by four.

[1680] And I thought, how do they in their hypnosis state understand he's saying two by four?

[1681] But at any rate, he had all these people hypnotized on the stage.

[1682] there was like eight people and he told the people you're your favorite celebrity and so he's going down the line he's like holding the microphone i was like no sir who are you and the guy's like i'm on those swatsenegger right and of course the guy wants to be honest one and you're going down the people people are all you know who'd you expect and then they get to this girl and i had been watching this girl way before he got to her because she was like moving around on her seed and like smiling really big moving her hands and everything and then the guy said no ma 'am who are you And she goes, I'm Minnie Mouse.

[1683] And her fucking favorite celebrity was Minnie Mouse.

[1684] I was like, this person, what a person.

[1685] What a person.

[1686] That's her favorite celebrity is Minnie Mouse.

[1687] Could there be a cuter thing?

[1688] Okay, now I have a question.

[1689] Do you think maybe she was foreign?

[1690] No. And she wasn't.

[1691] She wasn't.

[1692] She was fucking glass of milk.

[1693] You know what I'm saying?

[1694] White American.

[1695] White bread.

[1696] Wow.

[1697] Yeah.

[1698] And I'm telling you right now, like if you're skeptical, you know, I'm the most skeptical person.

[1699] I'm such a cynic.

[1700] These people were fucking hypnotized.

[1701] No one would do in public what they did.

[1702] I mean, they were doing stuff like maybe Jim Carrey could pull off or Jess.

[1703] Yeah.

[1704] Fuck, it's so great.

[1705] It's so embarrassing.

[1706] But they have no idea.

[1707] It's so great.

[1708] And then the physical feats are almost impossible because they do make themselves stiff as a two before.

[1709] And then he would like balance them on two chairs and shit, like a plan.

[1710] you can't even imagine doing.

[1711] Wow.

[1712] It was great.

[1713] I wonder if I would be susceptible.

[1714] Well, your whole not peer pressure thing, I think you wouldn't have, you wouldn't let yourself.

[1715] Exactly.

[1716] Have your guard down.

[1717] God knows what this person would do.

[1718] But also, I hate audience participation more than anything.

[1719] Mm -hmm.

[1720] Break number two.

[1721] We're back.

[1722] Oh.

[1723] I just drove that golf cart.

[1724] So fast.

[1725] Oh, you did?

[1726] How many minutes?

[1727] The old cut and I sprinted to y 'all.

[1728] And then I jumped in the golf cart and I sped away.

[1729] Wow.

[1730] Yeah.

[1731] Good job.

[1732] Do you know, I got in trouble here on the golf cart?

[1733] Because you were going too fast.

[1734] I came down that hill was going really, really fast.

[1735] Oh, God, now I feel like I'm telling the hookup story.

[1736] It's like, fight story, driving.

[1737] So I came down the hill really, really fast, and I locked up the back in and I did a 180, and everyone was out there getting their lunch.

[1738] It was really a great trick without having rehearsed it.

[1739] Okay.

[1740] And everyone was so into it.

[1741] And then the fire marshal.

[1742] was staring at me. He was about 85 years old.

[1743] Oh, boy.

[1744] Wait, what was the trick just going fast?

[1745] Well, no, then I locked up the back and did a 180.

[1746] I spun around and then parked exactly where I wanted to and then got out like I was going into the, well, I was going into the food trailer.

[1747] Did everyone cheer?

[1748] People were really into it.

[1749] It was a big stunt out of nowhere, which is a fun surprise.

[1750] Sure.

[1751] But the fire marshal, who again was high 80s, was not happy.

[1752] It was unsafe.

[1753] I recognized that.

[1754] It was unsafe.

[1755] Yeah, and I could see the look on his face and I go, I'm so.

[1756] sorry and he goes yeah not again and i go i won't do it again he goes do not do that again and i was i felt like i was in junior high you are well emotionally and spiritually yeah and face wise oh god bless you bless yourself oh we were talking about hypnotism oh right and i was saying i don't think i'm susceptible because peer pressure yeah you've you have a long history of not being susceptible and i don't like audience participation right two of your triggers big time Okay.

[1757] So Sam said, well, I thought this was a really interesting part of the episode.

[1758] Sam was talking about how we remember things, our remembered selves versus our.

[1759] Like present or experiential self.

[1760] Yeah.

[1761] And anyway, I just find that all fascinating.

[1762] Also because he said that, you know, there's a high recency effect in how we remember things.

[1763] So the way it ended is a huge element of our overall.

[1764] all thought of a memory is, which is so fascinating.

[1765] And your memory is just so peculiar in how well it edits out negative stuff.

[1766] It's like there's so many memories I have that are now, like most of my drug abuse stories, to me are now very funny.

[1767] Yeah.

[1768] But in the time, they were not pleasurable or funny at all.

[1769] But now, like.

[1770] Yeah, I know what you mean.

[1771] But I was wondering, and I think I said it out loud, but he wasn't sure if there was research on the amount of people who view things negatively versus positively, which I didn't really find, but I also found some other interesting stuff.

[1772] Oh, tell me. There is this article in psychological science about memory and experience, and it says, many studies suggest that we are more likely to remember negative experiences over positive experiences.

[1773] And according to Laura Carstinson, a psychology professor at Stanford.

[1774] One point to Stanford, zero to Harvard.

[1775] In general, we tend to notice the negative more than the positive.

[1776] Many psychologists think that this has evolutionary roots.

[1777] That is, it is more important for people for survival to notice the line in the brush than it is to notice the beautiful flower that's growing on the other side of the way.

[1778] Carstinson, who is known for her research on aging, said one school of thought believes that our attention to negative events has adaptive value.

[1779] She said that there's a lot of information to be learned in difficult or dangerous situations and that our brains can apply that knowledge when a similar.

[1780] similar situation presents its help in the future.

[1781] Karsten's research group is studying what she describes as a phenomenon.

[1782] Paying attention to negative memories is more pronounced among younger people, she said.

[1783] We think what happens with age is that younger people, because they have these long and nebulous futures, really need to collect a lot of information.

[1784] And so they remember many things that will possibly help them manage those futures, she said.

[1785] The older people get, the more they're able to live in the present.

[1786] And so focusing on positive information makes that present feel good.

[1787] Simply put, older folks are better at living in the moment and enjoying what's around them.

[1788] Oh.

[1789] That's interesting.

[1790] Well, I have felt like, and it would be hard for me to credit sobriety versus age, but definitely the older I get, the easier going I am.

[1791] Yeah.

[1792] And the less I have to engage in conflict and all these things.

[1793] Yeah.

[1794] And I'm sure a good part of it is just getting older.

[1795] Yeah, I'm just getting tired.

[1796] Yeah.

[1797] I'm pretty, you know.

[1798] No, I'm not.

[1799] I have so much energy.

[1800] You're so young.

[1801] Yeah, I'm young and I have a lot of energy.

[1802] Yeah, you do.

[1803] I don't.

[1804] Well, I know, but you're not old enough yet, too.

[1805] Oh, that's right.

[1806] That's right.

[1807] It's opposites.

[1808] Yeah.

[1809] You know, it's really funny.

[1810] I will say, I notice it in you.

[1811] You and I have a lot of conversations where I'm like, I know how you feel.

[1812] And I definitely felt that way when I was 32.

[1813] And yet I can just now say it doesn't matter so much.

[1814] Like you and I have had a few of those where it's like, we're equal intelligence.

[1815] We're equal communicators.

[1816] And then there's just an age that.

[1817] where sometimes it's harder when you're younger.

[1818] Well, only in that you're also gathering data the whole time and you're like, oh, all those things that I say either did great at and I was really proud of myself or I came up short and I was really mad at myself, how did they affect the course of my life?

[1819] And just over time more and more, you just have more data.

[1820] You're like AI learning like, oh, it didn't matter.

[1821] You know, I was watching, so there's a cheerleading documentary on Netflix.

[1822] I saw it last night.

[1823] About us college cheer team in Texas?

[1824] Yeah.

[1825] I saw that and I was interested in it, but then I thought it was scripted.

[1826] But it's not?

[1827] No, it's a dog.

[1828] Oh, shit.

[1829] I would love that then.

[1830] Yeah, I couldn't turn it off last night.

[1831] I was just watching it.

[1832] Did you start cheering in your living room?

[1833] The mirror neurons were so intense.

[1834] I mean, I could just relate to every single element of that.

[1835] But that's a great example.

[1836] It's like the stakes, I think you could have done the same job.

[1837] You could have cared about the same amount.

[1838] but the like emotional ups and downs of like, like beating yourself and all that stuff, I don't think was probably necessary.

[1839] I totally disagree.

[1840] The stakes have to be that high if you're going to commit yourself to that level.

[1841] And I was thinking when I was watching it, some of the skills and stuff that I got over time during cheerleading and they were so hard for me and I couldn't do it and I couldn't do it and so stressful and so much turmoil.

[1842] and I was crying every day.

[1843] But I'm so proud of that time and eventually getting those things.

[1844] Uh -huh.

[1845] Which, again, is your narrative self because it couldn't have been fun crying every day.

[1846] The process wasn't necessarily fun, but it felt so good to have worked really hard and had a pay off.

[1847] Yeah.

[1848] You know, this is interesting.

[1849] There's a famous skier, I think his name is Bodie Miller.

[1850] Yeah, that's a famous skier.

[1851] Right.

[1852] And I saw a great 60 Minutes segment on him.

[1853] And I believed him.

[1854] He's like, I am not going to Soji for a gold medal.

[1855] I am going to Soji to have a perfect run.

[1856] I really want to have a perfect run.

[1857] Yeah.

[1858] And everyone else has all their mechanisms for trying to do good.

[1859] But his to me just felt like, oh, that's the aspirational version.

[1860] Where it's like he does this thing and he's looking for a feeling when he does it.

[1861] Yeah.

[1862] And I just think that's great.

[1863] Yeah.

[1864] And I just think that viewpoint gets easier and easier as you get older.

[1865] But I don't think Bodie Miller is, he's still grinding.

[1866] Like, it's still really hard for him to practice and whatever he's doing.

[1867] It's grueling to get that perfect run.

[1868] So sure, his aim isn't a metal, but it's still something he doesn't have and he's aiming to have.

[1869] And that requires a lot of work.

[1870] But grueling is a mindset.

[1871] So someone who got hired to write and direct chips would have found that grueling.

[1872] I did not find it grueling at all.

[1873] People go like, how could you have, you know, been acting in it and directing it and all those action scenes and doing the stunts and blah, blah, blah.

[1874] Objectively, that's a lot of work for someone to take on, but it was in no way grueling for me, never once.

[1875] Right.

[1876] So I can see where Bodie Miller, he's doing a ton of stuff.

[1877] That doesn't mean it's grueling.

[1878] It's kind of like your mindset when you're working out.

[1879] Some people work out and they hate it.

[1880] It's miserable.

[1881] and then other people work out and it's not.

[1882] Yeah.

[1883] And it's the same activity and people aren't that dramatically different physiologically.

[1884] You know, it's all just a mental space.

[1885] Sure, sure, it is.

[1886] I mean, I think in athleticism it's a little different.

[1887] You're falling.

[1888] Your body hurts.

[1889] There's real pain that comes with some of that stuff.

[1890] Yeah, so I had to get wrist surgery after chips because I did a stunt and his helmet landed on my wrong and I fucked up my wrist.

[1891] But again, in no moment of that, even when that happened, I was meaning like, nothing happened.

[1892] Let's go again.

[1893] I want to do it again.

[1894] Right.

[1895] And yeah, I don't know.

[1896] But now, if I were on another thing with a different context where I was just a gun for hire and I'd have been like, why are you going to make me do it a third time?

[1897] Or why, you know what I'm saying?

[1898] So I just know in my own experience, it's totally this mental state.

[1899] It's not about falling or getting hurt.

[1900] It's about how I feel about falling and getting hurt.

[1901] heard.

[1902] Sure.

[1903] Anyway, that's all.

[1904] That was it?

[1905] Yeah.

[1906] Okay.

[1907] Well, Sam, thanks for coming back.

[1908] Yeah.

[1909] Come back again.

[1910] Come back every day.

[1911] Third time.

[1912] There's a charm.

[1913] Love you.

[1914] Love you.

[1915] Love you.

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