Blocks w/ Neal Brennan - Sam Harris

Episode Date: March 19, 2026

Neal Brennan interviews Sam Harris (Making Sense, Waking Up) about his mother Susan Harris' sitcom history, philosophy of the mind, meditation, Trump, secular rationality, fiction writing, dropping out of Stanford, psychic powers, magic, eye contact, consuming bad news, pacifism, meditation vs. political agitation, social media addiction, leftist hypocrisy and much more. Subscribe to  @samharrisorg  00:00 Intro 2:25 His mother, Susan Harris 12:09 His father 15:13 Childhood perfectionism 17:22 Fiction writing aspirations & dropping out of college 18:52 MDMA 30:40 Sponsor: Huel 32:58 Sponsor: Mars Men 35:04 Psychic Powers & Spiritual Charisma 55:50 Eye Contact 1:02:28 Sponsor: Squarespace 1:04:30 Sponsor: Rag & Bone 1:06:08 Meditation vs. Political Agitation 1:14:12 Pacifism 1:23:30 Consuming Bad News 1:27:00 Social Media Addiction 1:40:34 Sponsor: Zocdoc 1:42:23 Trumpism & Leftist Hypocrisy 1:55:20 Political Optimism Thanks to our sponsors! Limited Time Offer – Get Huel today with my exclusive offer of 15% OFF online with my code NEAL at huel.com/NEAL . New Customers Only. Thank you to Huel for partnering and supporting the show! For a limited time, our listeners get 50% off FOR LIFE, Free Shipping, AND 3 Free Gifts at Mars Men at https://www.Mengotomars.com Check out https://www.squarespace.com/NEAL to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code NEAL. Visit https://www.rag-bone.com & use promo code NEAL for 20% off your order! Stop putting off those doctors appointments and go to https://www.Zocdoc.com/NEAL to find and instantly book a doctor you love today. ---------------------------------------------------------- Follow Neal Brennan: https://www.instagram.com/nealbrennan https://twitter.com/nealbrennan https://www.tiktok.com/@mrnealbrennan Watch Neal Brennan: Crazy Good on Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/title/81728557 Watch Neal Brennan: Blocks on Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/title/81036234 Theme music by Electric Guest (unreleased). Edited by Will Hagle Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Guys, my guest today is, it's hard to even describe what you, what you, what you, what you, what you've blossomed into. Uh, he's got an app called Waking Up. He's got a podcast, the Sam Harris podcast, I believe. He's got a substack. Is that just Sam Harris? That's Sam Harris. Yeah, the podcast is making sense. Making sense. My fault. Um, oh yeah, it is. Okay. Uh, I pay for something. Okay. I'm paying for something. I think I think I'm paying for the podcast and books. How do you describe yourself at this point? Yeah, I'm rarely in a situation when I have to. You're in it.

Hit me. Yeah. I mean, I am essentially a philosopher of mind. I mean, but technically my PhDs in neuroscience, but I got it really with, as an expression of my philosophical interest. I almost did a PhD in philosophy, but just did a lateral move to neuroscience because I wanted know more about the brain. So, you know, most of my writing is philosophy of mind and moral philosophy, but I get dragged into politics so much that I'm, you know, the phrase public

intellectual is sort of embarrassing to apply to oneself, but it's like it is, it's the way I'm functioning, right? I'm just bringing science into science and philosophy into whatever I can when we're talking about public. Do you find that you just bring science into it or is it, Meaning you just end up inevitably talking about neuroscience within this stuff? Yeah, I mean, not just neuroscience, but I just think we're, our understanding of our self scientifically is, is and should put pressure on what we think is real, obviously, and what we think human life is for and could be for and how good might it be and what should we know, what sort of public policies make sense to implement. And we know, what is ethic? What should we get our ethics? Should we get it from books that people think were dictated by the creator of the universe

2,000 years ago or 1,400 years ago, depending? Or should we be having a 21st century conversation about the foundations of human flourishing? And so every time I open my mouth on any of these topics, I'm trying to bring in kind of a secular rationality into pretty fraught topics. Yeah. So you know, so. But before even getting into all that serious stuff, can you explain to people who your mother is? Because this is, this, I'm getting ready to blow your head apart.

He's gonna take a sip of water, and then he's gonna tell you who his mom is. So my mom is Susan Harris, and she created a bunch of shows, but the one that was most seen and impactful was Golden Girls. So, but she created soap and a bunch of, you know, like, I don't know, 10 shows. Benson?

Benson was a spinoff of soap. Did she fire Jerry? Jerry Seinfeld? Jerry Seinfeld was a, didn't he had a bit part? He had a part on Benson and I think he didn't make it. Yeah, no, I don't think he, well, I don't know if that was just like a walk-on part or if that was he was trying to be a cast. I think he wanted, I think he was trying to be in the cast. Okay, well, I have not, I don't know the details on that.

But she discovered Billy Crystal, the soap launched Billy Crystal, which was great. Yes. The homosexuals go way back in history. Who? Alexander the Great was gay, Plato was gay. Play-Doh? Mickey Mouse's dog was gay? He was bait, well, I don't want to say he was impressionist at that point, but kind of.

Joe Fraser, don't want to talk about it. And what was it like? Was she a single mom? Yeah. What was, how did she start? Not in a way that, um, Sounds like it would give a high probability of success. So my dad left when I was two and a half and I still had a relationship with him,

but he moved to New York when I was three and a half. And so we were here. And like living in an apartment? Yeah, I live in an apartment in the valley. And my mother had no safety net. And I think my dad paid child support like once. So I think there was like one $500 check or something. that discharged his responsibilities there.

And she, I mean, as the story goes, she was watching television one day. I don't know what she was doing for work or looking, if she was looking for work at that point. But I mean, very soon after he left, she was watching television and just thought, I could write one of those scripts. And she wrote a first script and sold a first script,

I think for $2,000 or something. I think it was a first show. That's four months of child support. Yeah, yeah. Keep me track. I think it was for a show which I've never seen called, Then Came Bronson. It was about a guy who wrote a motorcycle

from town to town. Perfect. This is the 1970. Yeah, yeah. A sitcom called Then Came Brons. I don't think, I don't know, I don't think it was a comedy. Maybe it was a comedy, I don't know.

But she wrote for like Love American style, and then she started writing for some normal lyric stuff. Did she, did she, it was, she just wrote it and then sold it and then did she think like oh i can now do this or was it just sort of yeah well she got a foothold and then she then she um gary shan both gary shandling and norman lear were instrumental in getting her to placement i mean i think i think um i can't honestly can't remember who was norman or gary one of them said listen let's let her write a script and if it's not good enough i'll rewrite it or something something like that

Gary did that with me too. Oh yeah? One time, yeah. Okay. Incredibly nice. Yeah. So, and she just started going. I mean, so she was never on staff anywhere,

but she was submitting scripts. I don't even know if they had staffs, but back of the day there, but she was, she's, I mean, she wrote some of the biggest episodes of television. Yeah, she wrote like the Maud episode. She wrote like the Maud Abortion episode, which I think was in a country

that had like 150 million people, I think 60 million people got in front of their telephithe and watched it that night. We finally have the right to decide what we can do with our own body. All right, then will you please get yours into the kitchen? So it was like a Super Bowl event. But in English. Yes, yes. And with B. Arthur.

In the role of that. Quarterback, yeah. Then she started creating her own shows with Paul Witt and Tony Thomas. So it was with Thomas Harris and they created Soap and Benson and a few other shows. And Whit Thomas was still going in the 90s? Or was she involved still? There were Whit Thomas shows that were

my mom wasn't involved in. So they had, they produced other stuff. She just, she was only involved in stuff she wrote. And then she retired before they did. So there was, I think, with Thomas continued. Oh, got, got, got it. And what was it like? So what were you, were you kind of,

was she working a lot once that all started? How old were you? Again, I was like, you know, three or something, which you really had to start to work, you know, so, or even two and a half. But I was only, I mean, so I had lots of babysitters. I mean, that was like, that was the thing. I mean, the story I love, which I don't remember, I just remember in the retelling of it, but apparently she once asked me that when her career was starting to take off,

she saw some, you know, daylight as to how successful this could be. At this point, we were living in a little rented house in the valley. But I was going to a private school where I had, so some of my friends were not like rich, rich, but I mean, they had like they had pools in their backyards and they had a kind of different quality of life. She apparently came to me and said, so I have a choice to make. I could work a lot harder. And if I do, we may one day be able to get a pool like your friend Tom Brown. But you're going to spend a lot more time with your babysitter.

So I had this babysitter, I don't know who was at that point, but she named her and said, and you got to have, you know, I'll be home late. And so it's really a choice for the two of us. It's, you know, we'll have a different life, you know, one way or the other. And apparently I thought for about 10 seconds and I said, get the pool, mom. So she got the pool. Yeah, it took a while. But she, I mean, we went from zero to,

being you're just wealthy. I mean, I think that started when I was maybe 12 or 13, something like that. Was there a big difference, like in your day-to-day life? Yeah, I mean, there was not, I mean, that age, it's not such a big deal, but, or at least, you know, I don't remember it being, so, apart from just the house we were living in, I don't remember being so transformative. But she, you know, she was a single mom who wanted to track,

travel, like for the, actually the big thing was that she took me on a bunch of trips, just the two of us. She was very brave, frankly. I mean, it was just, you know, a woman in her, I guess, late 30s with a, or mid-30s with a, you know, seven-year-old, eight-year-old taking him to Africa and China when it opened up and Europe. And I mean, she was just, you know, traveling alone in, I mean, she had not traveled a ton as, you know, and she was just traveling alone. as a kid or a young adult herself because they didn't have a lot of money and it was a different time. So she had just never traveled and so she took, she slept me all over the world.

But by the time I was 14 or so, 15, I had gone many places, just the two of us. Do you think she was like typical of, I mean, because Maude was kind of, it was a lot of these shows at that point were like the tip of the spear of women's lip, right? and was she she's kind of

the word iconic is silly but but she seems like emblematic of that and does she seem like she was living a life that a lot of women wanted to lead or or it's very empowered because at a certain point she became a kind of a

powerful person in the industry right so it was like she was just objectively successful and in demand I got her I mean I'm like hearing her credits, I'm like, she's top three, maybe the best female ever, top three ever

in terms of sitcom writers? Yeah, yeah. Because as somebody pointed out, my Jimmy Carr pointed out, if she created Golden Girl, she also created Sex and the City because it's highly derivative. Well, the other thing, the real feat of writing that I think very few people have matched

is for soap, she wrote one, she wrote it entirely by herself for the first, I think, two and a half years. So she was banging out one episode a week. She did like 75 episodes straight, you know, over the better part of three seasons, something like that. I did two seasons with another guy, and I'm still mad about it.

Yeah, yeah. So she had no, so she never had a stand. On Golden Girls, she got a staff after whatever, like the first 10 episodes or something like that, and then she stepped away. Yeah, but. But she, so she was not, so she was really just prolific in a way.

that is not normal. And was not a writer? No. Prior to that. No. She had, she was a reader. She was an English major in college and she, so she loved, you know, story and fiction. You know, she's mostly a reader of fiction.

So she wasn't started from zero in that sense, but no, but not a writer. And how does the, growing up, how often would you see your dad? Maybe twice a year or something like that. That's funny. Like a Christmas vacation for maybe two weeks and summer for three weeks, something like that. What do you make of it all looking back? Well, I didn't make anything of it really until I became a father. Like it didn't seem, it didn't reveal itself to be as pathological as I in fact think it is until I had kids.

and a kid of that age, I had a daughter of two and a half. I'm looking at my daughter and thinking, okay, what would it take for me to, at this point, decide to have an affair and then leave, and then let's just be charitable and say that, you know, it was an unhappy marriage saying and leaving made sense, but then decide to move across the country because I'm an actor who can't figure out

how to act in Los Angeles, so I've got to go to New York, to act, right? That's a strange choice. And I realized that, forget about me, I knew a lot of dads of varying quality at that point, and I'd realize that as narcissistic or as noncommittal as any dad I could think of, I didn't know any who would do that. Yeah. Like, that's an extreme choice. And these are Hollywood deaths. Yeah. And you still couldn't find that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, so it just, it didn't. It didn't. I didn't triangulate on it as a thing until I was a parent. And because I really, I did have a good relationship with him.

It was a very loving relationship. Yeah. He was a very good person in many respects, but, or at least he seemed that way to me. And he was very, we were very connected, but this was despite the fact that it was long distance. And also because it was long distance, he was never really in the role of being a parent. He was always kind of a vacation dad, you know. Right. We would go there and we would just have fun.

Okay, so then once you have kids and you're like, and is he still alive and do you go like, hey man? Yeah, no, he's your buddy Sam. No, he died when I was 17. So I never had like an adult's point of view on his situation. Have you had an imaginary conversation with him about it? No, it's not, I mean, it's amazing how little I think about him, really. I mean, that's the kind of thing that, you know, time does,

And I mean, it's just, you know, I guess it's, you know, I'm sure it's shaped me in many ways, but these ways are not, you know, obvious when I look at myself in the present. And I'm not, I don't think I'm anything like him as a dad. So, you know, there's just nothing. I think I internalize, I mean, the, if the pop psychological version of it is that, you know, I, whatever I suffered, the perfectionism I suffered as a kid, which I did, you know, perfectionism was really sort of the frame in which a lot of my psychological suffering is quickly.

Yeah, I mean, for just, just, just as long as I can remember, perfectionism was a problem for me, and I actually went into therapy as a teenager, and that's all I, we talk about. How does that manifest as a 12-year-old? Oh, I mean, just being hard on myself or, you know, not being the best soccer player or, you know, as a student or whatever. I was hard on myself. It's not, it really, honestly, it's not a thing anymore.

It's like perfectionism is, you know, if arguably I could be more of a perfectionist now. It was a thing growing up, certainly into my late teens, early 20s, and maybe that was just sort of my reaction to him leaving and somehow internalizing it, like somehow I was to blame for him leaving, right? If I was good enough, he wouldn't have left.

I mean, that's, certainly that's what my therapist would have thought was going on my brain. I'm not sure that's true, but it's sort of, you know, the crater that was left in my life or in my psyche from his leaving probably had that shape of just me feeling like, okay, I must have done something wrong. There's got to be some way to correct this flaw in myself. Did you have a brother-sister? No, no. Later, I got half-brothers. So it really was all your fault. Yeah, exactly. There was no one else. I could have blamed my mom. I mean, I'm sure she did something. Who are you dispositionally like?

Because you seem more like my son, dispositionally. Yeah. I guess I think I'm more like my mom. I mean, I can't really know. I mean, my dad wanting to be an actor. She's, yeah, and she's, I mean, she's funny, but she's not on. Right.

Yeah, I don't have a clear enough sense of who my dad was. Okay, so you start going to therapy. Did, real quick, do baby, can babysitters? I don't know, make a difference, fill any sort of gap. Can you get any parenting nutrients from a good babysitter? I'm sure it's possible. I'm sure you can get some bad babysitters. Of course, yeah, of course.

No, I mean, the babysitters were not like real relationships in my life. Okay, and you were probably, were you independent? Yeah, pretty quickly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so then you're a good student, good brain, are you, like, advancing winning prizes? What's happening? I was a good student, but I was in kind of small private schools.

But I mean, no, but I was kind of a serious student. And, you know, I just took it serious. But I wasn't someone who knew that he wanted to go into science or anything rigorous. I thought I wanted to write, as a senior in college, so going into my freshman year, so as I was a senior in high school, going to my freshman year in college. You went to Harvard?

Where did you go? I went to Stanford. I knew I wanted to write fiction. And so I was an English major. I took a creative, they had kind of a famous creative writing program for graduate students, but I just sort of took what I could of that. But then I ended up dropping out of college because it won my interests change. But going into college, the first time around, I just thought I wanted to write fiction.

I just loved books and I loved reading, you know, I just thought I was going to write the Great American novel so that that was a I was sort of serious about reading and writing but I was not really somebody who knew he wanted to gather the tools of science at that point and so I was late to that and were you so you go to you go to Stanford and you're getting a good education and then what changed I took MDMA I think it was the first the input that changed everything I took that once and were you an especially, I mean, I, I was, I meant to call this the world series of flat affect. Uh-huh.

You and I. Yeah, yeah. And are you, were you a particularly joyous person? Were you, are you a fun-loving guy? Are you, so when you, my, my idea is that you take MDMA and you're like, wow, this is different. Yeah, it was different than your day to day. I mean, it is for everybody, but, but was it, did it seem extraordinarily different from what, from most of your experiences? Yeah, but in a way, it wasn't in a way that it would just totally change my personality, just stripped away, sort of ego fears that I didn't realize I had.

What were that? I mean, it was just a very, I mean, it was a very, I write about this in, in my book, Waking Up, I think it's in the first chapter, but, so I mean, I did, I wasn't at a rave, I wasn't at a party, I was just sitting with my, sitting, sitting, sitting, I mean, it was a very, sitting. across from my best friend, and we took it with the intention of learning something about our minds, right? Like we had been given to us as a kind of export from the psychotherapeutic community, right? This was before a rave culture and before it was a popular joke.

90, 91? This was like 87. Okay, right? Maybe even 86, but. This actually, people say they experimented with drugs. This actually sounds like someone actually. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, this was intentionally to discover something about the nature of the mind.

How two people at Stanford would do in B. But again, because this was just not, it wasn't in the culture that I was aware of. I'm sure there were other people taking it at this point. But it had just been, I think it was not Schedule 1 until 85, so it was actually legal to use therapeutically up until 85. Yeah, I mean, I took it and just the thing that happened was that, you know, I'm talking to my best friend and all of a sudden I realize that there's there, I have a kind of 100% free attention just to pay attention to him, right?

And there's no sense in which I'm looking at myself through his eyes, neurotically wondering how what I'm saying is affecting him. I'm just looking at him. Yeah. Right? With just 100% free attention. And I realize that. Like all I want is for him to be happy, right?

Like I just have nothing but goodwill for my friend. And it just sort of occurred to me in this moment just how much I loved my friend. Like how lucky I was to have such a good friend and all of my, the kind of layers of self-concern and sort of kind of calibrations around, you know, comparison. And like, you know, I mean, so this is like a friend who was better looking than me and like a better athlete than me.

And I was not aware of, ever thoroughly thinking about that, but like, suddenly just the whole framework by which you would make a comparison between yourself and another person got evaporated in my mind. And I was just like, this is a person I love. I like, if I would make him as good an athlete as I could,

if I could give him the gift of being an Olympic athlete, I would give him that, like, of course, right? So like there was no, this sense of like, the possibility of the, of envy or the possibility or or feeling your own happiness diminished by the happiness or flourishing of another person that just I mean that equation just got erased from the blackboard of my mind right so like that was just an impossible thing to for a mind to do and so there was just kind of layers of of confinement that just got stripped it with that I didn't know we're there in the first place

but having been stripped away I just suddenly felt like okay this is This is sanity. Like for the first moment in my life, I felt morally sane, right? And but the real, so, I mean, this just seemed, you know, on some level, perfectly ordinary until I realized that, and this is something that I actually, once I realized it, I said this to my friend

and it kind of the bomb went off in his brain too. I realized that everything I was feeling for him, you know, just wanting him to be happy and feeling completely, non-neurotic in his presence, I recognize I would feel for the postman if he walked into the room, like a perfect stranger. Like, as a, the feeling of wanting others to be happy, this kind of state of love was a state of mind.

It wasn't this transactional, you know, verb. Yeah. Aimed for me to you. And it wasn't contingent upon having a personal history. with somebody. It was just, it was just like, this is, this is my default feeling toward all sentient beings on some level. Like, why I, I, why wouldn't I want all minds, you know, to, to, to be filled with happiness, right? And so then there's kind of like this well of, of, you know, loving kindness and kind of unconditional love opened up, and I just, I realized,

okay, well, this is a, a possibility of the human mind that has been, you know, well, a tested to in contemplative spiritual religious literature, you know, surrounded by all kinds of cockamamie beliefs and unscientific notions. But clearly there's a human experience here that isn't a matter of just having temporal lobe epilepsy or being a fraud, right? I mean, this is a, you know, the patriarchs and matriarchs

of the religions of the world have to be talking about something like this, right? And so then when I came down, I was furious. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yes, I had to try to get more drugs. No, I just realized, okay, this is, this is what life is for. It's like figuring this out.

Like what is keeping me, you know, sort of the prison of my neuroticism that reasserted itself, what is that? And is there some other way to get relief from all that? So it is, you're chasing a high. Yeah, yeah. I mean, or an absence of, an absence of a low for lack of. Oh, yeah.

It really is, I mean, the Buddhist framing of it is, you know, suffering and the end of suffering. It's like the mechanic, becoming sensitive to the mechanics of psychological suffering and ceasing to do those things that keep that wheel spinning. So you start the path toward dropping out? How soon do you drop out after that? I think I finished my, I would have been like spring quarter of my sophomore year, so I finished, and then summer,

I went on my first meditation retreat. Did you any, do you have any relationship with meditation to that point? No, but so, so again, back to my mom, my mom had given me the MDMA. She had taken it with a therapist

the years before, and she had said, I think when I was, I'm just thinking about pre- 85. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, but I had a cool mom. I'm not she was the cool mom. I mean, and not a druggie at all. Like she had never smoked pot in the 60s. 60s completely missed her, right? And I think she smoked pot once and just hated it. And so was not a drinker of alcohol. And therapeutically she did in M.A. Yeah. That's wild. She'd always been, she had done a lot of

therapy and she was with some therapists who had done who had recommended MDMA with it. And she'd done it, but she'd done it, I think just once or twice. But she'd had a similar experience. And so she said to me when I was, I think 16 or 17, she said, listen, she told me about the experience. And then she gave me one of Ram Dass's books, which I had no interest in reading. I just put it on the shelf. But then maybe a year later, I said, you know that experience you were talking about on that drug? I think I'd like to have that.

And then after I had had that insight with MDMA, I then just saw the book on my shelf and read it. It was just a transcript of one of his talks. It was a book called The Only Dance There Is. And realized he was just, he was teaching a retreat in Oregon that summer. And so I went on my first meditation retreat with him. And yeah, so he became a friend and just helped. helping find other teachers and i that i got i spent a lot of time with buddhist meditation teachers and meditation teachers mostly uh after that but not exclusively were you ambitious

i guess if you wanted to be a writer that's a form of ambition but what did you so did you when you stop going to school did you were people like hey man yeah this is you might be making a mistake here or were you like were you just like i don't give a shit i'm this this is a I have to do this. Well, both of those. I mean, there were people who were concerned. I mean, it was not an obviously auspicious thing to be doing, to be dropping out of Stanford when you got into Stanford.

And, I mean, it seemed like I was a promising young man who had a lot of opportunities in front of me. And then here I was basically recapitulating the 60s for myself in a context when virtually no one my age was doing that. I mean, it was not surrounded. by other 20-year-olds who were sitting meditation retreats or going to India or, I mean, it's not that there were none, but it was like most of the people I met now and and befriended were 20, 25 years older than me who, they were people who had kind of caught

the wave of the 60s. Right. Some of them had careers and were just doing retreats and studying with various meditation teachers in their free time, but some had kind of- Truly dropped out. out, you know, and just what I had spent, you know, decades in India or had spent a lot of time on long meditation retreats in the West or in the East. And, but I had access because I, I just got very, very lucky I had access to some great

meditation masters in the, among Tibetan llamas and, you know, Burmese meditation masters, but a lot of people who were in their 70s and 80s when I was just kind of getting into this. So it was like the old generation. Did you travel to Tibetan Barba? I spent a lot of time in India, Nepal. With most of the Tibetans I studied with, I mean, most of the great Tibetan meditation masters were in Nepal or India at that point.

Who was the guy that Ram Dass was constantly talking about? He was Neme Kroly Baba, called Maharaju. What do you believe in the? But he didn't really teach much. I mean, he was much more of a devotional, what's called a Bhakti yogi. What do you make of this sort of, I don't want to say magic tricks? Yeah.

But do you believe that a guy that people, the way, the way Ram Dass described them, exist? Mystical, magical. Right. So let's have a here. We'll have a sidebar conversation about psychic powers. Guys, I am a real Karen when it comes to my time. I don't want to waste time. I don't.

I've turned down meals. I one time alienated someone by saying, I don't like eating meals alone with men. It was dinner, but point made. Guys, that's where Hewle comes in handy. It really works for my antisocial behavior. Hewle is a perfect solution for high protein routine routine support, busy days, habit building, convenience, and control. I mean, control is kind of a big word.

Okay, just autonomy. Okay, here's a personal story about me and Hewle. I'm late a lot. lot and and a lot of times when doing stand-up I'm like I don't want to have to I don't want to eat a big heavy thing and then go on stage and I got them burping up veal palm or something it's not veal but you know chicken parm but I grab a heel 70% vanilla pouring some chocolate maybe throw some powder in there shakey shakey shakey I'm out the door I get there on time I basically fulfilled my appetite

they've got the black edition ready to drink that's the RTD in the biz that's the one that I mostly, I do most of my work with the RTD. They're ready to drink. 35 grams of protein, 27 essential vitamins and minerals. No artificial sweeteners, colors, or flavors, gluten free, under $5 a meal. I'm cheap. I can't help it. I think it's official.

I'm cheap. And then they got the black edition powder. This is more like, you know, for smoothies, adding it with fruit. Do you get the, I go in almond milk or an oat milk. If you had a little thicker, you need to. to hit them protein. You know what I mean? It's just great. I can't say enough. I feel like boring with these ads because I feel like now I'm just like, I'm kind of like this as a person where I'll, I send people links and stuff. Somebody accused me recently being intense links.

But you know, I'm trying to turn you on, Playboy. If you're trying to stay consistent, this combo makes it stupidly easy. Limited time offer get Hueled today with my exclusive offer of 15% off online with my code N-E-A-L at Heuleh-H-U-E-L.com slash N-A-L. That's new customers only. Thank you to Hewle for participating and supporting our show.

They're going to do a survey afterward till Neil sent it. I'm happy that you guys must be doing some of this stuff because they keep advertising. So good. I hope you like it. Guys, have we talked about Mars men?

I talk about a lot of stuff on here. You know, I don't like aging. I bleep my age. I think it stinks. I don't agree with it. But, you know, you got it the older you get you got to start kind of thinking about what's happening a lot of talk about testosterone here's the thing with testosterone when you do the testosterone shots it a lot of people

don't like shots um i don't especially care but a lot of people don't when you basically testosterone make it like shoots testosterone in you your body stops making it on your own right so it's not great it's like what if there's what if you just can't get it what if it's not good You don't want to not be making testosterone. So I was like, screw it. Why don't I, I should try this Mars men. It gives you the same benefits of optimized testosterone, energy, strength, focus without shutting your body down. There's no synthetics, no needles.

People don't like needles. You keep making your own testosterone. It's like hitting the reset button on your hormone factory instead of shutting the whole dang thing down. I need less sleep on this stuff. It's pretty crazy. I'm energized by it. It's pretty sweet. Not jittery.

It's good. Made of the U.S., third party tested. 90-day money-back guarantee, so there's no risk. Worst case, you don't absolutely love it, and you get your money back. But over 91% of users report higher energy levels. Thousands of guys are feeling incredible results. Just check out the reviews on the website to see for yourself. Guys, here's the call to action.

You knew it was coming. It's here. For a limited time, my listeners get 50% off for life, plus free shipping and three free gifts at men go to mars.com. That's men go to mars.com for 50% off and three free gifts when you check out. After you purchase, they will ask you where you heard about them. Please support my show. Tell them, blocks sent you, Neil.

I think you've said Neil blocks, blocks, blocks, Neil, just Neil, just blocks. Combination. It's good. Men go to Mars.com. Good website. Good name. Men go to Mars.com. So I've, you know, to the consternation of many atheists and secularists and scientists,

I've always been quite open-minded about the psychic powers. And I'm just like, let's see the evidence. I haven't just, I haven't dismissed them, it out of hand. I agree with you. Intellectual pornography, right? But it's certainly treated like pornography in most scientific circles. And frankly, for a reason, because the truth is, is that if these powers existed in anyone to any degree, significant degree, this would be like the easiest thing to demonstrate in a lab, right?

Like this is not hard to test. You know, if anyone can really read minds, if anyone can really deliver the goods here, whether it's, you know, telepathy or clairvoyance or being able to affect the material world with, you know, telekinesis or any of these powers, it would be trivially easy to roll in to any great university and get this tested to the satisfaction of everyone, right?

So the fact that no one has done, done this should be a clear indication that it's very unlikely that anyone really has these powers. Because so, so the usual dodges that, that, you know, spiritual teachers make when given this challenge is that it would be, you know, somehow too, you know, spiritually uncouth to actually submit to a test or to prove, to demonstrate these powers on demand. But we know that's a lie effectively because many of these teachers purported. to display this magic more or less on demand in context where they really can't be tested, right? And in front of audiences that are just utterly credulous with respect to the existence

of these phenomena in the first place. So they're surrounded by people who want to believe that their teacher has magic powers and there's a ton of confirmation bias. There's all, I mean, you know, most of the demonstrations of these powers are the kinds of things that are, you know, just unfalsifiable. And it's like, if you're sitting in front of 300 people talking, you are going to tend to say things that are going to seem uniquely prescient with respect to somebody in the audience. And then that's going to get counted as yet more evidence of the, you know,

the guru read my mind or whatever. So this is a situation that we can understand as being a kind of machine for hallucination, right? Like people can just, and I've been in that situation a lot, you know, surrounded by people who want to believe that the teacher has magic powers. Could you feel yourself wanting to believe it? Yeah. So I've always been skeptical enough to just, you know, if I had enough of a bullshit detector where I just have not wanted to be credulous on this front.

So I'm, the thing I can say, which I have experienced a lot and experienced with this one teacher, Punjaji, is that there's something about spiritual charisma that we don't understand. Right now, I don't know if it's magic. I don't know if it's just pheromones,

if it's a social situation that gets tuned up in such a way as to kind of bowl over people's, you know, emotional resistance. But I have been in the room with a teacher where I didn't even want him to be the most impressed, So this was what was interesting about this, my relationship with Punjaji is that, so he was, he was this non-dual teacher who was criticizing, you know, all spiritual practice. And he was very useful to me because I had gotten very kind of tight in my practice and very

kind of dualistic and sort of goal-oriented. And I probably spent about a year on silent meditation retreats at this point. Dualistic meaning. Just very like, so very, I had a very strong sense. So in the Buddhist tradition, I was, I was. practicing in at that point, there's a very kind of goal-oriented framing in how the teachings are given. So you're like, you really are unenlightened. You really are like a prisoner of your mind in this moment. And there is one path to get out. You know, you can break out of this prison,

but it is difficult and it requires sustained effort. And there really is a distance between where you are now and the freedom you can actually get. get to, right? And so it's not, it's, so it's not true to say that, you know, the mind of the Buddha is right here and you need to only recognize it. No, no, you are, you are a captive of your, you know, of, you know, profound, you can accomplish it. Yeah, you can accomplish it, but it's like rubbing two sticks together to get fire. Like you, the moment you stop, the sticks cool off and you're back to zero again. So, so I would go on meditation retreats for, and the longest was, was three months in silence. I did that twice. And I did, you know, you

you know, two months and one month, and I did, you know, at this point, maybe a year of silent retreat. And all you're doing is, you know, for 12 to 18 hours a day, all you're doing is is meditate in silence. So you're sitting and walking, you know, hour by hour and trying to link together moments of mindfulness, moments of clear seeing of your senses and of thoughts and emotions arising in the mind and of noticing impermanence and and so the moment a sensation arises it passes away the mother's every sound every every physical sensation and the moment you know you're trying to catch thoughts the moment they arise and and pass away but doing this from the place of feeling like there it really is a this subject that can pay attention or be or be distracted there's

a really is an eye in the middle of experience that would be the dualism yeah even though the eye is considered to be an illusion in this teaching. It's an illusion that's difficult to see, right? And it's usually seen by virtue of just noticing greater and greater evidence of impermanence. I mean, you begin to see that, I mean, the more you pay attention to your experience, I mean, your body just disappears into this cloud of sensations. So there's just these micro sensations of pressure and temperature and movement. And, you know, you begin to notice the very quick fluctuation between sounds and sights and

thoughts and sensations. And it's just, everything is just this kind of blizzard of phenomenon. And you begin to draw the lesson. Well, there's no basis for a stable self in here, right? Because everything is changing moment to moment, including these acts of noticing, right? These acts of noticing seem to be this kind of piecemeal arising of consciousness in the presence of each new new. object of consciousness. So I want to clarify for people, the dual meaning two, one is one of the two things would be I, the observer, and then the other thing would be everything else, right?

Yeah, including the body. I mean, this is the thing that is a little strange about our default sense of ourselves. And most people don't feel identical to their bodies. They feel like they have bodies, right? There's the world, which is not self, and there's a body in the world, which I know is me, but on some level, I feel like I'm a passenger in my body. I'm like a subject of this, this locus of consciousness. This is if they think about it at all. Yeah, but I mean, this is the kind of the starting point for everyone in meditation. I mean, you say, okay, pay attention to your breath or pay attention to your body,

and they feel like, okay, I'm this sort of spotlight of attention in the head, and I can now aim attention at the breath or at sounds or at the, you know, the sensations in, you know, my knee say, And yet there's, it's me up here, you know, I'm behind my face. You know, if I'm looking at you and you're looking back at me, the default feeling is, okay, I'm behind, I'm what you're looking at, but I'm not just, I'm not my face. I'm sort of, I'm something behind my face.

I'm this, I'm a mind, I'm a subject behind my face. But in some sense, in relation. It's really a continuation of you and your friend doing MDMA. Yeah, right. But yeah, exactly. Yeah, but, but so, but, but, This is the ordinary place one starts. People feel like they're in relationship to their bodies in some sense.

And the bodies can betray them, you know, and they're up here, you know, now reacting to the pain or to the thing I don't like. So the dualism is the sense that there's a subject in relation to experience, right? There's experience on the one hand, both experience in the body and the sensory experience of a world. and there's this subject that is sort of this unchanging center of narrative gravity, right? This unchanging self, right? The eye in the middle of experience. This is the, it's believed this is the thing that has free will, right? This is the one that is doing all the willing, right?

Or this is the one, this is the thinker of thoughts, right? There's the thoughts, but there's a thinker in addition to the thoughts, right? This is somehow the author of thoughts, right? Now, this is an illusion. Or the receiver of the thoughts? Yeah, but so the crucial point is that this is the sense that there's this center to experience, the sense that there's someone who's on the edge of experience, sort of looking into experience, appropriating experience in each moment.

This self is the self that is claimed is illusory in Buddhism and in other Eastern contemplative of traditions. And when you lose your sense of self, this is the thing you're losing. It's not that you're losing your sense that there's a belief. body in the world or, you know, or your sense of psychological continuity with who you were yesterday. It's like if you lose your sense of self, it's not like you suddenly start having another person's memories of yesterday, right? No, you, dropping the sense of that there's this dualistic subject is totally compatible with other normal psychological functioning, right? So it's not as spooky as it sounds to transcend the ego or transcend the sense of self. But anyway,

it's this point of view of always being the observer of experience rather than just identical to experience. That's the thing that is deconstructed in meditation. So anyway, so Punjaji was a radical non-dullus in the sense that he was saying, okay, this self you think you have already doesn't exist, right? It's not like you're good. It's not like you really have it and I can teach you how to get rid of it, right? Or that meditation, if you do enough meditation, you're going to get rid of it. No, no, you already don't have it.

It's already not here. I'm talking to someone who now wants to be motivated by this sense of self to do something, like meditate. But anything you do on the basis of this self-sense is doomed because you're just, you're basically, I mean, it's like waking up from a dream. Like, I'm talking to the dream character. The dream character wants something to do in the dream. I'm telling you to wake up from the dream. You're saying, no, no, no, I'm in this dream where I'm on a beach and I've got a wife and she's unhappy. And you don't have to solve that problem.

You have to wake up, and the moment you wake up, you're not going to be disposed to go back to the beach to talk to the imaginary wife, right? And so everything you're giving me as a student of meditation, every problem you're bringing to me is a false problem. It's a misapprehension. So he would just call bullshit on everyone's spiritual efforts, and he was totally uncompromising in that way,

which was, again, very useful for me at the time. But the other thing he did, which I think was not useful, and, you know, frankly, struck me as delusional. He guessed your ATM pin code? Exactly, yes, right, yes. How'd I do, Joe? Is that your ATM pin code? Yeah.

Yes. He got very handsy with me. Because he was sort of in this place, which was kind of radical, I mean, I think he was radically free himself and kind of seeing everyone with this sort of pure perception of just like most radically free meditators he was a womanizer yeah no not not that i'm aware of but what he would do is anytime someone in his presence would say i got it right like i like i like i just i got it i'm free you know he would celebrate this person's epiphany as though there's just like there's no more to do

right you're done you're you're the buddha right you're completely free like you're in his world you have You're either got it once and for good or you're doomed, right? Like there's no, there's no getting it and then overlooking it again, right? Which is in fact, you know, phenomenologically, that is, that's the most common case where you can recognize non-dual awareness and then lose that recognition in the next moment when you get distracted by thought. And then the practice becomes recognizing it again and again. I mean, that's what Zokchen practices.

So anyway, Punjaji was teaching, he was so radical that he would just, anytime someone, no matter how floridly neurotic this person seemed, or grandiose, or narcissistic or delusional, he would just, I mean, and tears would stream down his face, I mean, just tears of evident compassion, and he would just embrace this person and just say, you did it, you can, and he would bless people to go, then go on and teach, you know, so that many people set up shop as gurus. who consider themselves, you know, finished, you know, having been blessed by Punji. And to a man and woman, I mean, there's some people who seem like they were fine teachers and, you know, not being irresponsible and kind of going off and hanging up their shingle there.

But most of the people who had these radical breakthroughs in his presence, to my eye, were not done. Like, I mean, this was not like this. Was he making fun of them or he really believed that? No, no. He just seemed like, he. he was just always in touch with the fact that anything else, anything other than non-dual awareness was an illusion.

Like so whenever somebody would say, I see it, he would be like, can you believe, like, of course, this is it, it's like high five, you know, and he was just, you know, he was so labile in a positive way, I mean, so empathic. What's labial mean? Like his emotions were so change, so quickly changeable.

I mean, it's like, but so literally, I mean, so, you know, the moment someone would say, I got it, he just tears, you know, and, and, but, but he was, so anyway, this is a very long-winded way of, of creating the context, answer your question about magic powers. There was something so charismatic about him. And the other thing is that he spoke perfect English. So, like, you would talk to him and you know, you're looking right at him. Whereas in most contexts with great meditation masters, at least the Tibetans I was studying with, you had to go through a translator. So, you know, I'm talking to the great Sokhton master. He's, you know, jabbering in Tibetan, which I don't understand. Then I look to his translator who gives me the English.

Then I speak my question. It bounces back in Tibetan to the master. And because there's this sort of triangulation, socially, it's less profound experience. But the thing that was undeniable to me was that Poonji was the most impressive person spiritually I had ever met, right? Just in terms of what I was getting off of him. The experience of that charisma was something that I don't rationally understand, because I, Because it really did feel like when he would walk in the room with him and sit down and start talking to him or have, you'd watch him talk to other people and just sitting in a room with, you know, 10 people with him in his living room. I mean, suddenly the kind of the energy of the situation, the energy in my body, the way I felt was like I had just spent two months on a meditation retreat or I just dropped MDMA.

I mean, there was a physiological change in me that was undeniable, right? And it was... That you didn't understand and you still don't understand it. No, and so the word for, I mean, the, in, you know, Indian yogic terminology, you know, that was his Shakti as a person, like his energy, you know, his yogic energy. I've definitely had this experience that you would call evidence of a person's Shakti. I have no idea what, you know, what explains it. But the thing that doesn't explain it, or is unlikely to explain it in my case, is a purely sort of wishful thinking projection onto him because I was having this experience with him

feeling in some ways deeply critical of his teaching, because I think his teaching was misleading, he was misleading people in basically acknowledging the enlightenment of everyone who had the temerity to say they were fully enlightened. And I was comparing him to the Zokchen masters. I was also studying with at the time. I was bouncing back between Nepal and India. And the Zokhchen master who was really teaching, like the perfectly true teaching from my point of view,

was less charismatic. Like I wanted to get this, I wanted to have this experience with that guy, right? But I was having this experience with the guy who was giving this misleading teaching. So it wasn't, you know, wishful thinking or, or projection doesn't seem like the best explanation of the experience I was having because I was kind of at odds

with everything that was coming out of his mouth and yet I was being bowled over by who he was, his presence, you know. Charisma. I mean, that is the closest thing to magic to me is charisma. It's like unexplainable. It's nonlinear. It shouldn't work. It does.

It's more how they're saying something and what they're saying. I mean, again, there are other elements to it which can be game. I mean, for instance, just being told that somebody is a great and light master, you say now all of a sudden you're giving your attention to them in a way that you wouldn't. I mean, if you were told this guy is a madman or this guy was a murderer, well, then all of a sudden, you would be framing everything in those terms and you would feel a certain way. But being told to look for evidence of, you know, Buddha-like wisdom in every gesture that this person has made.

making, then all of a sudden everything seems, you know, to have this kind of sheen to it or can certainly can, right? And, you know, I have enough kind of respect for scientific objectivity and intellectual honesty, so to constantly be kind of trying to factor that out of my experiences with these people. But yeah, it's undeniable that I've been with people who were so stable in the people. their recognition of, you know, what I'm calling non-dual awareness. I mean, whether they were fully done or not, I don't know.

But they were stable enough to really bring a very different energy, you know, of being into social situations. Have you changed your Shakti over time? And or has, how can one change their Shakti? Because I found that I have changed my Shakti. via MDMA, DMT, like it was, I tell people all the time, like I did DMT and I started getting 10 to 15% bigger laughs. Yeah, oh really?

With the same jokes. That's interesting. You know, it was crazy, but I'm wondering how you feel, because I think it's the thing. I think life force is the thing. Well, honestly, I think I've reduced my shock date. He went the other way. Yeah, I went the other way.

I don't know if it was conscious or not, but so when in my 20s, what I was doing, so the truth is there's a, there's a kind of a game that can be played. I wasn't thinking of it as a game at that point, but effectively, I mean, the best person, there's video of Rajneesh in an interview, which is just so hilarious.

You know the teacher Rajneesh, Oshah, it was a great documentary. Yeah, yeah, yeah. wild wild country that's the kind of expose on his cult but there's some video what was that Sheila was his gal so anyway but Rajneesh when he was a teacher

in good standing or whatever standing with his 97th Rolls Royce he gave an interview I think it was to like 60 Minutes Australia was definable on YouTube shout out to 60 Minutes Australia underrated YouTube follow

so he just makes relentless eye contact with anyone he's talking to. It's just a completely unwavering eye contact. See, prove to be a perfect bitch. I love bitches. And that is a kind of spiritual game. I mean, it's sort of asserting dominance, but it's also, it's leading to,

it's creating a kind of experience for the other person deliberately, which is, which is just produces that kind of. kind of experience. So like, and Poonji was somebody who made, you know, relentless eye contact. But the way Rajneesh does it is just hilarious. So anyways, worth looking at the video. I love bitches. Many of them. But in my 20s, when I was doing, when I had just done acid for the first time, and I was doing, actually I did ask it for the first time on this retreat with Ram Dass in 87. It would have been.

and ran into him on acid and had like, you know, a couple of hours of just sitting with him on a bench looking into his eyes on acid. And it was, so it was like an open-eyed meditation that really just kind of rewrote my firmware around human eye contact. Like so from that moment forward, I didn't, I didn't recognize who I had been before that. I guess I was somebody who didn't make a lot of eye contact or made sort of normal, you know, glancing eye contact when speaking. you know, it's much more common to be making eye contact with the person when they're talking to you, you know, kind of just unwavering eye contact when they're speaking. But then when you're speaking to be sort of making eye contact, but also just to be looking away and forming your thoughts.

But after this acid trip, I just had unbroken eye contact with everybody. Like I just, I was completely locked in in a way that was just, in fact, just, it was basically, you know, anti-social in certain contexts because it would just freak people out. Like I would just be sitting in a, in a, toll booth collectors. Yeah, yeah, I would just, you know, I'd walk into, I would walk into a Starbucks or whatever and sit down and make eye contact with somebody and then not look,

not be the one to look at it. The usual routine in, I think, too much shock to maybe. It changes in culture, but, from culture to culture, but the normal routine in our culture is, if you're the one to, if you're looking at somebody who's not looking at you and they look at you, then you're the one to look away, right? If you're looking at someone and they're not looking at you,

and they look up and they see you staring at them, and you keep staring, and they look away, and they look back, and you're still staring, and that's like a hostile or creepy thing. Now, I wasn't in a creepy state of mind. I was in a very kind of loving, you know, DMA sort of state of mind, right? So, so, but what happens is when you do, when you live on this channel, when you just like when you, when you don't have that thing in yourself that makes you feel

like you need to break eye contact, right? Like, because it's a visceral feeling of, you know, you suddenly make eye contact with a stranger. There's this feeling that makes, feels like you should look away. And this is sort of this contraction of this of self-consciousness that happens. when you've dropped that or just decided to disregard that, I mean, just kind of, if what's your sort of practice is, is to just, like, obviate that and just be open and non-reactive and still keep your eyes in the direction of this social encounter. One, you sort of, you're now engaging,

you're performing a kind of dissection of society revealing all of the people who are on that channel. Like, like, then you find all the people who are not going to look away. when you are just not looking away, right? Like, if you're the person who looks away. Is it the best and brightest? You know, no, I mean, there, oh, so there,

you, it's everything, but it's like the crazy people, yeah, the psychopaths, you know, the people who immediately just want to punch you in the face. Yep. But it's also the people who are gonna fall in love with you in like 10 seconds, right? So it's like, so you're having the experience of changing people's state a lot, right?

And at a certain point, it just, I don't, I wasn't aware of ever conscious, stopping that, but I definitely stopped doing that. Like, I'm not that person. Like, in social situations, I make whatever eye contact I make, but I'm like not the... Are you aware of it now? Were you like, okay, I got to relax with this?

Well, yeah, I'm just, no, I'm just aware of... You're pretty pretty above average eye contact in the last hour? Yeah. Well, yeah, but I'm not, I'm not someone who's... Not creepy. Yeah, like, so what it used to be was, if we're having a conversation, you know, like this, like we know we've just met or we, you know,

you're not a stranger, but we're, you know, we're supposed to be having a conversation. I would just never break eye contact. And then people get sort of inducted into a very kind of meditative, psychedelic state because they're, because they may be looking away when they're talking, but they're not looking away when you're talking, right?

And it feels meaningful. Yeah. Why would this person be, looking at me this much if they didn't have mean like there's some relevance or meaning to this yeah level of intimacy and and then it becomes it can become very profound for people especially when if you're talking about spiritual things yeah you're talking about just the nature of consciousness or unconditional love and and then so then I so then yeah so that was I know what it's like to be able to

kind of bowl people people over in that way and I think eye contact, you know, unrelenting eye contact is a big variable there. But I don't think it's the only thing. Guys, this podcast is sponsored by Squarespace. Been around. Been around a long, whatever.

I've been around. I've been around. I've had many website managers, webmasters, we used to call them. Kind of a grandiose term, looking back. What I realize is I could have done it. Well, I don't think I could have done it the whole time myself, but because it was too complicated.

But now Squarespace has got all the stuff you need available to build into your site. You used to have to like, it was such a pain. I don't even want to talk about it. But it's all stuff that you can build into your site. You can build video into your site. You can build links to your YouTube, your podcast in my case, your Netflix specials. You can have your own basically like merch stand. You can set up if you want to like a charity button.

People can donate to charity, email lists. And it used to be all disparate places. Now you can get it all on Squarespace, set up your business, set up your brand location, set up whatever you need to set up. You can do it with Squarespace. It's never been easier. I'm excited for you. I've been doing it a little bit.

I took control of my site and I've been doing it a little bit. We're building slowly. We got the crazy good logo. We got the crazy good link. You can, so we're working on some stuff. We got some new photos. We got to the, it's, we're growing. But it's, if you don't, but it's me now.

Okay. Okay. Here's the all important call to action. Head to Squarespace.com slash N.A.L for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code N-E-A-L to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Again, you can buy domain names on Squarespace. That's new. You used to have to go to another place.

You can do it. One place. One step shop. Squarespace.com slash any a L. Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code any al. SquareSpace.com slash any al. Do it. It's great.

It really is. Guys, I feel like the fact that Ragged Bone advertises on this show is a flyers me. A buddy of mine one time referred to Ragginbone as showrunner clothes, which I think is a perfect description. intelligent, sophisticated, not obnoxious, quality, quiet, luxury sophistication. Good, good clothes. I got some more pants coming. They hooked, they got me hooked because they sent me two free things, the infused denims.

They sent me the jean, the denim shirt and the, I think it's the quilted one. Will, show them some photos. That's me doing my incredible stand-up, my award-winning stand-up comedy. never been never won an award and it's real buttery soft i can move around the amount of compliments i got on the wool thing is unlike any shirt i've ever had also warmer than anything i've ever worn like literally i was like i should have had one of these my whole life in terms of warmth here's the call to action it's time to upgrade your denim with rag and bone for a limited time our listeners get 20% off their entire order with code n e a l at rag dash

bone.com. That's 20% off at rag dashbone.com with promo code Neal. When they ask you where you heard about them, please support our show and let them know we sent you. You would think they'd get the message with the promo code. Just make sure, guys, I need this so bad. I can't wait to see you in your new pants and shirt. This episode is brought to you by FedEx. These days, the power move isn't having a big metallic credit card to drop on the check at a corporate launch. The real power move is leveling up your business with FedEx intelligence

and accessing one of the biggest data networks powered by one of the biggest delivery networks. Level up your business with FedEx, the new power move. A friend of mine went to see you at... He's on tour. I don't know if I promoed that. And he's a huge fan. but he said the, his issue, not an issue,

but if you're, he's like for as much, if this guy is an avatar meditation, and he seems very easily agitated. And he's reacting to my political. No, no, no, well, yeah, he's reacting to the full portfolio, right? Of your political speech, basically, you know, speech capital S. And the, if you're, if you're, if you're,

espousing equanimity. I don't know, you know, like, I don't know what the goal of teaching meditation is, but some version of that. Yeah. How do you, how do you mitigate that? In terms, and I, I, it's a good observation. It is like, I am, I happen to agree with you a lot politically,

but I'm saying, I think he's kind of like, well, if someone's espousing so much meditation, shouldn't they meet be more like Ram Dass, barefoot, but in Hawaii, et cetera, you know. That was him post-stroke. Yeah, well, yeah. Yeah, so pre-stroke, I guess he was just driving around. But, but, but.

Well, so one, I'm not, despite the fact that I give a lot of instruction on, over the waking up app and written books that have touched the topic of meditation, I've never wanted to set myself up as a spiritual teacher and just, put myself out there that way for a few reasons. So is meditation a, because Jerry Seinfeld, in my understanding, doesn't see it really as spiritual?

It's not spiritual. He sees it as almost like a tool for brain. I need a way to rest. It can be that. But it means it's spiritual in the sense that there really are insights that are classically spiritual or mystical that are there to be had. Right, right. Of the sort that we've just talked about, I mean, just the fact that the self can be transcended and you can, you can not feel that way anymore. You can actually not feel that there's a, that there's a, you know, something looking out of your face at the world that is separate from yourself. Yeah, I mean, you have those kinds of insights. Then you read the spiritual literature and you know what these people are talking about. I mean, it's not, it's, so it's quite, it's more profound than stress reduction or just, you know, more focus or et cetera. I think there are, there are many things that are, misunderstood about what wisdom, your spiritual, quote, spiritual wisdom could or should look like in a modern context, right?

So like I don't think it suggests political quietism, right? The idea that you're just going to withdraw from the concerns of the world and just be happy. It kind of historically has been that though, you know? I think that's a mistake. I think we need, I mean, first of all, if you're a person at my level, right, who's, you're going to be thinking about lots of things anyway, right? And you're going to have lots of preferences that you actually are going to want to act on. You don't, you say you're a level. What do you mean?

Like, I'm not, I'm not somebody who's so, I mean, I've spent a lot of time in silence and on retreat, but for whatever reason, I'm not someone who wants to spend his entire life that way. Have you judged yourself for that, by the way? Because I, there are times where I think where I'm like, yeah. But like I wanted a family. I have kids, I have two daughters, right? I want them to live in a good world, right?

I don't want them to live in a society that is falling apart, right? And so therefore that already seems to demand some entanglement with the political concerns of the hour, right? So like when I see needless human misery being manufactured based on dumb ideas, criticizing those dumb ideas somehow seems like an ethical imperative. The equanimity comes in in every moment when I realize, okay, whatever the state of the world, whatever the state of my

life personally, whatever the state of my physical health, whatever the state of anything that I might seek to change, it's actually possible to be at rest now. I need a quick, deep rest. It's possible to be okay with what is right now, if only for this moment, right? It's possible because this moment's already fully arrived, and I've already borne it fully. Right. Like the idea that you can't endure this pain a moment longer is a fear about the future. I mean, in this moment, you've already fully endured it, right? So, like, if you radically come back to the present, you can find an equanimity there, even with a lot of chaos and a lot of

you know, what would be classically, you know, a source of misery. So I'm continually reminding myself of that all the while I do the things that I think are important to do to correct some, you know, obvious errors that are just that we're making that scale. Yeah. So I criticize people who it's like, yes, you could, there's sort of this remedial spiritual instruction like, you know, don't, don't criticize people. Don't just see the good in people. Yeah. Right. But, okay, I see the good in people, but I also see people who are. are doing awful things and affecting the lives of millions. And I have a platform, and I'm in a position, if anyone's in a position to change a few

minds that are worth changing, you know, I'm one of those people. So I have a kind of duty to use this opportunity to say something that seems sensible in this situation. So when Elon Musk, who was a friend, begins to act like a sociopath, you know, at great consequence, you know, I could be someone who just. decides to endure all of that in silence and just release my attachment

to him being any way other than he is. And the truth is, I have released my attachment. I'm not actually personally suffering over what he's doing. But every time I look over there, I see, okay, he's being a colossal asshole in ways that are damaging the lives of potentially millions of people.

I mean, it's just, It's unbelievable, just the level of chaos, he based on the dysregulation in his mind and life is able to produce. So, yeah, saying something about all of that seems important to do. So I do, like, so like the public talk, I'm sure your friend was reacting to, I'm spending a lot. I'm spending maybe five minutes talking about the esoteric things, like meditation, you and I've been talking about almost this whole time. but an hour and a half talking about politics and hyper-partisanship and the errors of the left and the errors of the right and Trump and Elon. Yeah, I'm very worried that we're in a position socially to just wreck everything. Yeah, I completely agree.

But I am, I do know where my buddy's coming from because I think about it within my own life. And I think any sort of spirituality, it's just Jesus. It's literally like, turn the other cheek. Like that's most what those are most of like the headline pop spiritual lessons are biblical. And so in some if you're espousing Israel Israeli defense or if you're espousing anti-Trump, I think there are people that are like, well, is that a contradiction? No, but there are pieces there to pull out. So like pacifism, it's often thought that pacifism is this morally unblemished stance with respect to human violence, like, you know, Gandhi and pacifism. Yeah. And it's just not true. I mean, I think pacifism is just a disposition not to get your hands

dirty, you know, spiritually and ethically, while the thugs inherit the earth. Right. Like you're not, You're not going to protect even your own kids, much less anyone else's kids, from the psychopaths, because you, based on the moral math you've done in your head, don't want to get your hands dirty, right? I think it's a, it only works. I mean, the thing descriptively to say about, you know, Gandhian pacifism is that it only works in a context where you're not, where you're confronting people who are not truly evil, right? Like you're not against the Nazis. People that exist in a moral framework.

A similar moral framework. In this case, England. Yeah, they have a conscience that can be appealed to. They have a, they're surrounded by a population that they can't afford to lose. Yeah. Dealing with a third. So, I mean, this is what Orwell noticed about Gandhi, you know, to the, to the embarrassment of, you know, Gandhi's whole project, really, is that, I mean, Gandhi's recommendation,

when asked what the Jews of Europe should have done, you know, during the Holocaust, from Gandhi's point of view, Gandhi said, this is a more or less verbatim quote, he said they should have gone willingly into the gas chambers so as to have aroused the consciences of Europe. But then ask the further question, what should the rest of the people in Europe

have done once their consciences were aroused, right? Gandhi and pacifism doesn't work. I mean, what you need is Churchill to kill the Nazis, right? So it's just a completely empty project morally. Why do you think Tasphism is popular? As a, do you think it is, it is, it assumes a lot of positive things? Well, it's just, it just seems like your, if you're going to come to the conversation, if someone's talking about the legitimacy of any act of violence or, you know, or war, you know,

even in the hardest case, is it, you know, what Israel was doing in Gaza, is that just, right? like and what should Israel have done? The pacifist can come seeming with this sort of kind of air of sanctity, kind of being above the phrase, and listen, I am just against violence. I'm against death. I'm against the killing of children. If you're going to do anything that is going to kill children, you're wrong.

And I can say that because I would never kill a child. Right. I would never do, I would never be complicit in anything that would kill a child. And so you're down there telling me how many deaths of children you're going to accept. I'm up here saying that it's always wrong to kill children. Now that as an analysis of how you actually have to navigate a world with like real jihadists, you know, and real people who are really bent on genocide and people who are really willing to die for their various causes, however crazy. All of that, you know, sainthood of yours.

is just an utterly empty posture that can't be actually, it cannot be implemented. You're just not, you're not actually making contact with the hard choices that have to be made to defend people whose lives actually can be saved or lost or to stop acts of cruelty that you can actually intervene on or not, right? And so, yeah, so pacifism,

when you actually look at it in the details, looks like a kind of, I mean, it's a kind of monstrous position. Because the real, when they're back is all the way to the wall, I mean in a philosophy seminar, you're saying, okay, so you're saying that if someone comes into your house and starts torturing your child in front of you, you're not going to raise a finger to stop him, even if all you have to do is, you know,

take out the gun that we've provided for you, and shoot this person, right? I would never shoot a person. No, yes, if he tortures my child, that's going to be on his conscience. And like, you're just, you've created a psychological and moral problem for yourself based on not having spotted the philosophical errors here. This is not real compassion, right? This is, you know, the Buddhists often refer to idiot,

compassion. And it's like it's like the low-hanging fruit here is, okay, just never do any violence. And then you're good. Like never use force for any reason. You're good. Like no one can ever blame you as long as you, if the hand that harms somebody is never yours, you're blameless. Well, no, no. You can actually be the guy who watches his child get raped by a maniac and does nothing when he could have easily done something. Yeah. Like you want to be that guy? Well, Well, I think you and I both know that they're counting on that never happening. Right. It's just it's a, it's a posture to your point.

It's like. But it is happening. I think everything should be fair. Okay. Right. I think socialism, it's, it, it just hasn't been applied correctly yet. Right. Okay.

Ideally, it would be, I would like socialism. We're so far from an ideal. world. Yeah. It's just a matter of how unideal it is. You know what I mean? And then based on

based on how what the real world's actually like then what can we what can you espouse. Yeah. I mean and that's what for me morality

really is a navigation problem. We just have to we're constantly faced with the choice both individually and collectively of what to do next. Right?

What should we do? we go left or right. And to not move is also a choice, right? So we're constantly choosing. We're constantly implicated in our world. And so sitting it out is not really, I mean, as much as you can seem to do that, again, it's a choice that has other implications. And so, no, I do think that the one failure mode of taking Eastern philosophy, too seriously or seriously in the wrong way

is to be lured into a kind of political quietism where you're, you just think, okay, getting out of the fray and not contributing anything, not trying to make sense in it, not trying to pick the good guys over the bad guys, that is somehow higher ground morally. And I just don't, I don't see that. You think it's an abdication of responsibility.

Yeah, yeah. And I think it's, I mean, it might be necessary for some people for a time to do that in order to gather the emotional resources in order to enter the fray in a better way, right? And I think I've done that. I mean, I've, I mean, the paradox of my life is, in a public-facing way, I spend a lot of time talking about all the things I'm worried about and all the, you know, all the chaos in our world. But I just, I live, I'm living this immensely privileged and happy life. I mean, I'm, I feel like. I'm, I'm feeling. I'm, I'm, I'm feeling. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm a, I'm, I'm a, I'm a, I'm, I'm a I'm, I'm a I'm, I'm a I'm a, I'm a I'm a I'm a like the luckiest guy in the world. And I'm just, so my days are filled with just feeling good most of the time. And that, but, but, you know, then I flip on the mic and I'm just talking about this thing, this, this, you know, awful thing that that happened and either the risk of AI or whatever the thing is that I'm worried about, but the emotional tone of much of my life is not being worried.

I mean, I switch it on and I switch it off because in each, for, for me the question is, like what is worth paying attention to now? If we're going to talk about our, if I'm going to get some scholar of war on my podcast and talk about, well, you know, should we, what does it mean to intervene in Iran and like why did regime change wars go awry and, you know, what are our obligations to, so many people on the left are pretending to care about women's rights, say, and you get, you know, the women in Iran seem to get, what, very, very, little thought, right? What should we do? What's the right thing to hope for here? Like,

that whole conversation is traversing a landscape of just, like, bad and worse options, and it's just nothing but human suffering that we're talking about. I focus on it there for the duration of a podcast, and then I go off and whatever, I'm doing, you know, I'm hanging with my kids, or I'm going to the gym, or I'm doing something that is, that is, requires none of that focus, and it has a completely different. Where, how's the information getting in? Well, I'm reading, you know, I read a lot of journalism and, you know.

And what is your, you know, history, emotional state as you're reading it? I mean, the truth is, I want to, I'm doing what I want to do, right? So it's like, strangely, you know, perversely. Yeah, but it's a lot of it's bad news. Yeah, but I mean, there's something, I find it more satisfying than not to be in touch with the bad stuff. Like I have friends who don't, like, by tendency, just avert their eyes from bad news.

Like, they don't want, like, I can't consume. My girl, like, doesn't want to do that kind of news, right? Like, I don't want that in my head. Yep. For some reason, it's like, I don't read a lot of true crime, but, like, there's a, you know, I've had, I've done my fair share. I mean, there are people who, like, they want. want to know about the dark stuff, right?

And they find it somehow rewarding to, like it's a kind of entertainment, really. Yeah. So I read, I mean, I read history, you know, and history, you know, and history is often history of the bad stuff, right? You read a book on the Holocaust, right? You know, you go in knowing you're gonna read

about the bad stuff. But that's the whole point. I mean, I can, I mean, yeah, I mean, there is a toxicity that can build up. And it can make you, it can darken your view of what's possible or what's likely. I mean, it can darken your view of other people. But I don't know, I feel like I'm,

when I look at how much suffering there is in the world and the kinds of errors we make collectively and the problems that are solvable that we don't seem to be solving, it just, I see it as, I mean, so much, like the daylight is, the light of the end of the tunnel is so obvious. Like, like, so much of what, of what we're doing amounts to a kind of own goal that we need not be scoring on ourselves, right? So it's like it's like the, in, apart from natural

disasters, right, that we just couldn't prevent, virtually every, virtually all of human misery seems unnecessary, right? Like, I got like, it's, so it's, so it, I mean, I'm not really optimistic, but But like the, like, there's so many, there's several spells that if broken could suddenly make life unimaginably better than it is for us collectively. And I do think that most of the progress we're going to make, you know, ethically and politically, is not a matter of each individual getting their head screwed on straight, you know, privately. Like, and performing the kinds of experiments on themselves that, you know, I've described here. on this podcast.

Like it's not a matter of everyone learning to meditate and reading better philosophy books and having personal insights that make them a better person. I mean, all of that's great and that's available. But I think much bigger change is going to happen when we, at the level of policy and a level of systems and laws and incentives.

But what we want are institutions and frameworks that make it much easier for ordinary, unenlightened people to behave. like saints, right? And much harder for them to behave like psychopaths. I mean, what we have now in many cases are systems of incentives where it's actually hard

to be just an ordinary good person and very easy to behave like a psychopath. Yeah. Like all these like- By the way, almost pointless to be a good person. Yeah, I mean like social media is the classic example now where it's like to be incentivized by that space and to like, I mean, that's what-

But you were. under the spell. That's what I find interesting where you say that you you you consume news and believe it's satisfying responsible whatever but you were also consuming social media to a to a absurd level to hear you tell it. Well it wasn't it wasn't absurd. I mean it was not I was not abnormal at all and it was not like a you know personally absurd though Elon level user of Twitter. That's right, Sam. You weren't as bad as you were on the most. Congratulations.

No, but I wasn't, I mean, it's like, I was not, my, I mean, I probably tweeted, um, maybe a couple of times a day, like, like, I would tweet. And, but a bit, that would be like, I would go a few days without tweeting, but, but it would, it would segment my life. I mean, it would check it, you know, you know, five times a day, 10 times a day, a hundred times a day if something was really kicking off on Twitter. So just that fragmentation of life was a cost that I took a long time to get sensitive to. But no, the thing I realized is that I was living this, I should have been living this charmed life. I was living a charmed life. I basically was getting everything I wanted. I had the career I wanted.

I had readers who wanted to read me and, you know, listeners who wanted to listen to me. And I was, I could talk about any, or talk or write about anything I wanted, you know, to pay attention to. I could talk to virtually anyone I wanted to talk to on my podcast. And yet, you know, I was constantly, I was noticing these, you know, small fires and large fires get, you know,

set in my life. And it took me a decade to realize it, but at the end of the decade, I realized, okay, basically every bad thing that had happened in the last 10 years in my life was a result of my engagement with social media. Yeah.

Like every controversy that I felt I had to spend the next week of my life responding to was just this hallucination. Stupidest thing you've ever participated in? Oh, yeah, yeah. And so that's when I deleted Twitter. And so that was, I'm still humble to say it. I mean, like, that was the biggest life hack in the last 20 years from me was just deleting Twitter. It was just a complete. And again, I do not consider myself like a real casualty of that medium.

Like I was not somebody who was, I don't feel that I was behaving unethically on the platform. I mean, I was, like, if I look back at, you know, they're not there to look back at. But I mean, I was on, I'm unaware of ever having tweeted something where I felt, okay, now I'm part of the problem. I'm acting like a psychopath. But what I was seeing were people who I knew, you know, you know, offline, effectively behaving like psychopaths. I mean, they were just, they were, they were tweeting things they knew to be untrue. They were sliming people in ways that they knew to be illegitimate. Like they would take a clip of somebody saying something where in context, they were obviously saying the opposite thing.

And they were just using that to smear them, right? And I mean, this was happening to me, you know, a lot. And that was, that was a lot of what I was having to respond to or thought I had to respond to. But the amazing thing is that once you pull the rip cord, it just, you're free of it. I mean, it's like literally the physics of everything changes. Does it make you sympathetic? You mentioned people being under spells.

Does it make you sympathetic to the idea that it's pretty easy to fall under all kinds of spells? Oh, oh yeah. And it's, I mean, I'm sure there are spells that I'm currently under. The spell I know I'm under to some degree, that it's very difficult to correct for. I'm aware of it, but I just know that I can never actually,

in real time, you know, price it in effectively. Is it like when you see someone out in the world behaving like a maniac or on social media or online, saying crazy things or spreading crazy lies or reacting to other people in ways that seem sociopathic, you know, it's very, my, I think everyone's default setting is just to take that at face value and react to that like, like, I can't believe. Like, look what's happened to this guy.

This guy used to be a good person, and now he's a total fucking asshole. What you're not seeing is how polluted that person's information landscape is. You're not seeing what made them that way. Yeah. Right? Like, you may be seeing some of it, but like this person has stared into the hallucination machine from a different vantage point. And they got tuned up with all of this misinformation and, you know, half truths and calculated lies.

And so then they just get set off on some trajectory that seems completely illegitimate from where you're sitting. But you're just not, you're not, I think it's appropriate to have just a measure of compassion for the fact that everyone has been inducted into this mass psychological and social experiment. that is not turning out well, right? And everyone's being driven crazy by their engagement with these tools. And so, you know, I think it's appropriate to disengage in a variety of ways and then to notice just how kind of the evidence

of pollution is, it becomes more visible to you. I mean, like, I... Yeah, it's a bit like, don't judgment till you've walked a mile in his shoes. It's like, don't judgment until you've spent an hour in his algorithm. Yeah, yeah. Basically, it really is like a different.

Everyone's, it's all different. Yeah. Because of the meditation, because of the, because of your sort of scholastic, I don't want to say neurotic, but you seem brainy, right? And your wife is in the same category. Your wife's, you know, beautiful. But like you guys are both, what's her? Is she a neuroscientist? No, her background's not. I mean, she's got a background in, she's edited a lot of scientific nonfiction.

And she reads a lot of science, but she's got her, her academic background is not. But she writes. Yeah, she's written a few books. And she's, she's very focused on the philosophy of mind and questions about the scientific study of consciousness. So she talks to lots of neuroscientists. So my question is, is it the joke about in my head of YouTube, be like, looking at each and gonna be like a lot of dopamine. Yeah, yeah. A lot of dopamine.

Oh, here comes the, is it, are you guys having a human experience? Oh yeah, yeah. No, I mean, we are much less engaged on those topics than you would think. But it's not that it never happens, but no, no, we're much more just normal. Having fun with the ordinary facts of life.

I mean, just reacting to our daughters and watching movies. How did you guys, how did, what kind of, are you a decent? and partner, have you gotten better? We have a very good marriage. I mean, she's really is, I mean, I got very lucky I married someone who's really sane and demands that I be my wiser self much of the time.

You know, I mean, she has very little patience with me being unhappy for the wrong reasons, you know, so like, she's, yeah, I mean, so, I mean, part of the, the, the, the proximate cause of my deleting Twitter was seeing the effects of, it's effects on me that was one part of it, but the more salient part was the effects of my stress on my family. Like I mean, like it was at least, you know, at least one totally ruined vacation

based on what Twitter did to my brain, right? And so, so my wife is a great mirror for, for that kind of dysfunction, because she has very little patience for it. And yeah, so a certain point, it's just, you know, she finally got through to me on that. You know, she wasn't telling, I don't think she was telling me to delete my account,

but she was just so, she had so little interest in, or patience for my emotional dysregulation based on the five alarm fire that was happening. And she's, she's always, because she's never really, you mean, she's been on social media all the while, but she's never had the,

the sense of the kind of reputational stakes, you know, and she's, I mean, she's been, she's not been delusional, I mean, she knows that, because I did have a lot happen to me on social media. I mean, there was real attempts at, you know, reputational murder of me, both from the left and the right, you know, and so I've been, you know, properly smeared. But she's always had a sense, at least in my case, that Twitter is not real life or need not be real life. I mean, it's easy for me to say it because I've taken lots of steps to kind of anure myself against it being real life.

You know, I can't be fired by somebody, for instance. But, you know, she's all, she's had a much clearer I've view of the pointlessness of taking that stuff seriously from the beginning. Did you find that a contradiction to your meditation side? Like, man, this seems to be undoing everything I'm meditating for.

I think it's the exact opposite of meditation. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, no. Is a flame war on Twitter? Oh, yeah. No, I mean, that was a thing. This was a kind of engine of distraction and stress that I set whirling, you know, every day in the middle of my life.

After you meditated. Oh, yeah, yeah. No, because it seemed like a professional necessity, is like, okay, I'm a writer, I'm a podcaster, I'm a public speaker. I'm following lots of smart people who, like, this is also be, the other thing that hooked me with Twitter is that it was my news feed because I was following lots of smart people who are constantly surfacing great articles. And so it seemed virtuous in that sense and something that, okay, I'm not going to delete

this because I can reach, it's like the only way I can react in real time to something it's happening and cease. And so, I mean, it's no mystery to me as to why people are still stuck there. But the truth is not having a space in which to react immediately to something happening to you or anyone else, I've now found is a great blessing.

I mean, like the set, like, it's like, because having it, it feels like an imperative to react. It's like, okay. It's so, I can't believe you fell for it. Yeah, no, because it's so you fucking went to Tibet. bet? Oh yeah, yeah. It's like, you want to throwing that away. Yeah, oh yeah. Lighting it on fire.

Okay, yes, lighting on fire, but the thing is I can really get back to equanimity quickly too. So it's like I can be happy again in the next 30 seconds as long as I remember to. So I can light my life on fire

and then drop the burden, you know, but the the the recalibration that that was was finally became clear to me is okay there's there's no reason to have to have this experience at all right like like yes okay it's it's you're going you're deleting you've got whatever 1.5 million people who like you've collected here who who you can say something profitable to some of the time but so much it's just having this

as an outlet comes with immediate downside that you're not recognizing. You're not like, so, like, 99% of the things that you feel like you need to react to in the moment for which your silence and your silence about that thing will be misperceived as somehow like complicity or acquiescence or like, I can't believe Sam hasn't said anything about our bombing Iran, right?

Once you do, 99% of those things don't survive, like 72 hours. hours. So once you delete that channel and you just have a podcast, say, and you're just podcasting once a week, 99% of things don't survive the cut to the next time you're going to podcast, which may be three days from now, and you have to think about what to talk about, right? So just discovering that was amazing. It's like, okay, I didn't actually have to have an opinion in real time about everything because I could take seven hours. How about anything? Yeah, exactly. It's like, it's not, I used to a joke.

It's like, we all think we're members of Congress. Like, I should release a statement about something you have nothing to do with. Guys, finding a doctor you actually like feels like discovering a diamond in the rough. Sure, if you want someone in network nearby with open time slots. But let's be honest, that's just the start. You also deserve someone who actually listens, makes you feel comfortable, calms your nerves, explains things clearly, tells you it's going to be okay. It listens to your thing that chat. The GBT said it's this.

So, guys, a long story short, I'm talking about Zock doc doc, which I didn't know what it was until they started advertising a couple months ago. And then I went on there. It was like, oh, yeah, this I need. It's free app and a website that helps you find and book high quality in-network doctors so you'll find someone you love. We're talking about booking in-network appointments with more than 150,000 providers across 50 states.

Whether you're looking for dermatology, dentistry, primary care, eye care or one of the other 200 plus specialties offered on Zoc Doc, you can easily search by specialty or symptom to build the care team that's right for you. Want to see your doctor in person? Great. Prefer a video visit? They can do that too. I didn't use it. And then I went on for I and I doctor appointment. And then I had to figure out through my insurance, what kind of insurance I had. But once I loaded it in, I realized like, oh, this is so much better. And I've been using it ever since. I think I booked a dentist in New York and an eye doctor in L.A. Stop putting off of those doctor's appointments and go to Zock, Doc, Zoc, DoC, DoC.com slash

N-E-A-L to find and instantly book a doctor you'll love today. That's Zock-D-O-C-D-O-C.com slash N-A-L. Zoc-D-O-C-D-C-L. Thanks Z-D-O-C for sponsoring this message. What are you, what is, what shocked you in the last five years? Shocked me in the last five years. Five to ten years. Well, I'm continually shocked that we're, we are where we are politically. I mean, it's like whenever I get lulled into taking it for granted and it just, it just seems like the new normal, I, I, I, I wake up and think, how is this where we are? I mean, it's like the, the, all the details of Trump and Trumpism.

to me are genuinely shocking. And I mean, just, it's shocking. Whenever you ask the question, I mean, this is now a trope that, you know, even Obama has engaged in, but, you know, many of us have been doing this for years, if you just asked the question, if Obama had just done this one thing, just picture this one thing that Trump did yesterday, whatever it is, you know, of the 17 shocking things he did yesterday or said yesterday, just give, just put one into Obama's mouth at any point in his presidency and you just see the wheels come off of our society like like everything would stop what do you

think happened do you know what I mean like well how did we get here because I'm what do you think what are your what are your easy what's your short answer to how do we get here well I do think I mean there are a few pieces I don't think it's I don't I don't I don't pretend to understand it I mean because I do find I find Trump so Unpersuasive, right? Like the fact that he's, so many people think of him as like this great persuader of people. Like he's just, there's something,

but I find him so unpersuasive, right? He's so obviously a liar. You may be a liar to his charisma. Yeah, so I'm not totally immune in the sense that I see that he's entertaining, I see that he's funny. Like, like, you know, so, and there is that. I think what he, what he managed to reveal about our society is that we have a,

We have a society that's so enamored of celebrity, just pure celebrity. You can get a lot by just being famous and having to function by the physics of fame rather than the physics of ordinary politics. So that was unique. He was very strange in that sense. We have a given everything that's happened on the left and the kind of the sanctimony, of the left, right? The endless, you know, virtue signaling of the left, the, the, the, and the hypocrisy entailed by all of that, and the judgmentalism of the left toward the right. What Trump revealed right of center was an ocean of people who were so sick to death of being

judged by the, quote, elites, right? Hated the elites and their institutions with such passion. And judge for being poor, for being fat, for being for not for being uneducated, for working in jobs. You could put half of Trump supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. There were low status jobs, right? Like, you know, having their religion judge, their, everything. He managed to find an orbit that I wouldn't have thought was possible through all of that, which was he could he could play. He could play both games simultaneously. He could basically say, listen, I'm a creature of the elite.

Like, I went to the good schools, and I'm a billionaire. I mean, leave aside that he was, you know, he wasn't. But, but, but, and he's, and his, his superpower really was that he was not a creature of the elite. I mean, he's not high, he's, he's, he's low status. Yeah, people didn't like it. Yeah, right. They were, yeah, he's a guy from Queens who was trying to make it in Manhattan and not making it, really. Yeah.

And he's like a tabloid, you know, he's a creature. But he was sort of a poor person's idea of a rich person, right? John Mullaney. Yeah. Donald Trump is like what a hobo imagines a rich man to be. And he could show up in, you know, right of center this way and say, listen, the one thing I'm completely innocent of and will always be innocent of is hypocrisy. Like I am not I'm not even pretending to be a good person and it's from this place I'm never gonna judge you right you get like like like you can you can want all the shit you want

you can hate all the shit you hate you hate immigrants you can be like I'm not I'm not even gonna judge the racist very fine people on both sides what I am gonna do is is destroy the people you hate right and I know that I've you know I've you know these these people come to my wedding because I want my money with Hillary Clinton I said be at my wedding and she came to my wedding you know why $5,000 is what a lot of them got right I'm in a position to call bullshit on everything you hate right from having been inside the tent yeah but he's a he's a Jesus like figure without any of the sanctimony and without any of the demand that his his worshippers be better than they are now so he's he's the fat Jesus he's the grabbed of grab them by the pussy Jesus.

He's that I'm gonna eat nothing but hamburgers Jesus. Right, like he's, he's, there's zero judgment. Better Jesus. Yeah, yeah. A non-judgmental, I mean, you know what I mean? Like there's nothing to. No superiority complex. You need not aspire to anything.

You are perfect as you are. These are the people who suck. These people who are pretending to be good. It's easier. That's what I said about all the people that were anti-vaxed. It's like, it's easier to not get vaccinated. Right.

It's easier to not believe, God, it's bullshit. I don't have to do it. Yeah. Yeah, I happen to agree with you. Why it's worked for so long and why people can pretend or not even pretend, can actually care about what they say they care about. They care about what was on Hunter Biden's laptop. Yeah.

They care about Joe Biden's corruption. Yeah. Like what's, you know, what's Hunter Biden doing with this gig in Ukraine and making money that way off the Biden name? And that's just so awful. and they do not care when Trump and his family are earning billions of dollars with crypto. It's like that cognitive dissonance, it just never sees a surprise me.

I think the thing that you may be underestimating is people's, it's like hypocrisy sensitivity. Hypocracy is the worst, is the cardinal sin now. Exactly. Which I think is what people's issue is with Israel. Right. Is like they, I don't think they like Hamas more. They just like Israel's hypocritical.

So that's the biggest issue for people. And with Trump, it's, he's not a hypocrite. He's not a hypocrite. And I also think there's another thing of play that I came to recently, which is, shamelessness is now considered bravery. It's like, it's punk rock. It's bravado.

It's disgusting. It used to be disgusting and reprehensible. and now it's and now it's it's uh heroism well that so people are using this phrase vice signaling yeah and it's funny it's like it's it has a current right of center it has that currency it's like i will i'm going to push the overton window even wider because they don't like it yeah yeah because we're it's we're triggering the libs and we and we're just we're calling bullshit on all the sanctimonia and hypocrisy and you know you we i'm just saying the things that's thing we're all thinking anyway. And I mean, the thing that's a that has been created right of center

is an ecosystem in which, I mean, Trump is the person who, of whom this is a hundred percent true, but there are many people who are kind of benefiting from the same kind of physics, not to the same degree. When Trump said, you know, I could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and not lose a single voter. Where I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose any voters, okay? Like that was a genuine insight. into a completely transformed political physics. Like he saw that about his situation. And it's just amazing, I mean, it's so close to being true.

It's like virtually true, right? Like it's, it's, but it's also everyone else is beginning to participate in that culture that has been created there, which is, yeah, there's just, as long as you don't apologize, as long as you, as long as you just say, as long as you just keep moving and keep transgression,

transgressing, you can just keep, you may be falling. It's the end of. There's no ground to hit. Yeah, there's no bottom. They're not even falling. It's the end of being there. Yeah. It's walking on water. It's the roadrunner and but he's not looking down.

Right. Yeah, yeah. Just still going. Yeah. Just keep going. And the fifth avenue thing I have the thought that like, whatever street Renee Good got shot on was Fifth Avenue and then the street that Alex Brady got shot on was like, okay that's you got one fifth avenue and then that's like okay then people were like no that that actually so he asked me what has shocked me recently it did shock me the Alex Preti killing and the the absolutely crystal clear disavowal of the second amendment that that came from the the administration you literally had cash Patel on television head of the FBI speaking as though the second amendment did not never existed, right?

No one who wants to be peaceful shows up at a protest with a firearm that is loaded with two full magazines. So that basically it was now normal in America to think that if you happen to be armed, legally armed in proximity to federal law enforcement, you could expect to be shot, right? And that that was going to sell right of center to their base. And you weren't going to have, you know, all the Second Amendment cultists just go berserk over this, that astonishment. That was the time I was on the side of the cult.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was completely astonished me. Yeah, I mean, because these guys, I mean, gun culture, I always took to be completely sincere in its fixation on the second amendment. Because the Second Amendment, the importance of the Second Amendment for, for the so-called gun nuts is not to be able to preserve this right so that you could protect your family against a home invasion or against ordinary crime. Yeah.

No, no, the real reason is in the case of a, of a government that turns tyrannical, this is the right we're reserving to arm ourselves. And this is what's happening. And it was being made explicit. The government was talking as though you don't have the right to bear arms. Do you think the pushback was significant enough?

Because there was a pushback. It was like, I mean, it polled at 80% negative. Yeah, I mean, I don't, I think. Like as shocking as it was that they tried, trying to sell it was it was hyper normalization it was like cognitive dissonance it was all that stuff do you were you heartened by the it wasn't it wasn't i wouldn't say it was a muted response from the second amendment people but it was they weren't on the street with guns oh yeah yeah i mean it had it happened under Biden or comel harris you would have seen guys with ar-15s you know

like 500 guys with ar-15s show up to the next ice yeah or or deploying I mean, it's like, because I don't think it's, it's not that these guys are actually scared to take out their guns and show up in public in defiance of federal law, because we've seen them. We've seen them like just cattle grazing rights. Yeah. Have turned into these crazy standoffs with, you know, heavily armed people. No, it was, it was that there's something superseded even their commitment to the Second Amendment,

which is they so hate the people left of center who are getting fucked that they were just happy to get them fucked, watch them get fucked even if it was a complete repudiation of everything they care about politically. The fact that it was, they're not thinking, okay, Trump is never going to turn this on us. He's turning this on the libs who are acting out, the people who are trying to protect immigrants who we don't want in this country in the first place. We're just going to sit on the sidelines because we care more about. destroying all of that, then we care about this obvious contradiction with our core political values, which is the right to bear arms.

Where are you out of 100 in terms of optimism? I'm optimistic. So I'm not so present. For the American project for humanity in the face of AI. Leaving AI aside, I'm not so pessimistic as to think that Trump and his enablers will successfully steal the midterm elections or render the 2028 elections illegitimate. So I think we still have a functioning democracy where we can vote for. Will you admit they are kind of governing like they are?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're governing like there's never going to be another election, which I'm a, which. Yeah, yeah. And I think they will try, I mean, they will, they will try many nefarious things that we have to be alert to. But I think we're sufficiently alert to those things. and I think it's just hard enough given federalism. I mean, this is another thing that I would have been very wrong about

had I had a chance to sound off on it 10 years ago. I remember 10 years ago, many of us are thinking, why do we have these hacky, piecemeal elections? Why not have a nationalized way of voting on the Internet where you can just simply vote and it's just, it's, you take all the friction out of this, right? And there's no hanging chads. There's no paper.

I mean, that would be an absolute disaster in the current environment. Because that is an election you could rig. That is an election where a result gets reported and you have no idea whether it's real. So we want paper as far as I can see. So that would, you know, I'm very happy and I'm very happy we have that. So I'm not especially worried that we're going to, that the worst fears of a true authoritarian takeover of the U.S. is likely. I mean, I think it's not that he's not trying.

I think he and Stephen Miller and a lot of these other guys, you know, Russell Vaught and, you know, other people whose names you don't hear a lot. I think they're, these are people who genuinely have no commitment to democracy at this point. I think they're committed to Trump. I think they are, they are, you know, day one ride or die. Yeah.

No, all of that's scary. I mean, the fact that we got. this close. I mean, Trump, I mean, Trump in many ways is quite inept, right? It's like what's, like somebody who is, who is truly ideological and truly smart could have done a lot more damage had he also had the gifts of. Wouldn't have gotten elected? Maybe. I mean, that's where charisma. It's like, it's just the charisma is what people are buying and they kind of don't even care. Right. They just want, they want. It's who do I, I always say most elections coming down to like, Who do I want to see on TV for the next four years?

Right. It's the taller one, the better looking one. Who sold the most Halloween masks? That, it's that fucking stupid. Well, we're going to find out. Sam Harris, everybody. He's got an app. He's got a podcast.

He's got books, substack, his mom syndicated, Golden Girls, Benson, so fucking mall. Maud. Empty nest. That was another one. That was. Thanks for coming. Yeah, great to meet you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Big fan. Yeah.