Joe Rogan Experience Review podcast - The JRE Review of Episode 1241 with Sam Harris

Episode Date: February 10, 2019

Sam Harris is a neuroscientist creator of a new meditation app which I’ve been using. He is always a great guest on Joe Rogan’s podcast and this conversation is another example of that. Really enjoyed hearing their take on the Jack Dorsey issue. That saga continues lol Enjoy my review folks! Please email me with any suggestions and questions for future Reviews: [e-mail]

Hello and welcome to another episode of the JRE Review. Today I'm reviewing the end of the week podcast of Sam Harris on podcast 1241. Really good podcast and it's always fantastic to get Sam Harris on. He just really is one of Joe Rogan's most fascinating guests. He is just so calm, has so much information, really kind of analyzes things whilst such a smart dude. He's also released a new meditation app, which I have subsequently downloaded and I tried it earlier today. And it's pretty chill.

If you like the way Sam Harris talks, you know, his philosophies on things and you don't find it distracting in any way, then it's a great meditation app to give it a try. He has really good information in there and anyway give it a shot. I find it's pretty good. If you want to meditate, if you don't, don't bother, because that'll be weird to do something you don't want to do. Anyway, let's start this review. Welcome to the Joe Rogan Experience Review. Where each week I review every single episode of the Joe Rogan Experience.

What more do you want? This podcast with Joe and Sam really starts off with dropping some podcast knowledge. I liked it a lot. You know, if you, yeah, because I'm doing a podcast, so it's interesting to know like how they live all doing theirs. I mean, obviously their podcasts are a massive, but still, these guys in a lot of ways,

especially Joe, is at the forefront of knowing how podcasts work. I mean, they're not that old. He probably understands all of the dynamics of how people listen to it, how it grows, how the sponsorship works, those sorts of things. And what's interesting is, whereas Joe has sponsors at the beginning and the end of his podcast, thank God nothing through the middle. Sam Harris,

besides not to go with sponsorship, and he does more of a subscription base. So it's just like if you like his podcast, then you get a subscription. You're either paying through Patreon, which he is actually pulled himself away from because of a dispute of a disagreement and ideology that he has with Patreon. Or you can just get a subscription through his website, right? So it's different ways of doing it. They're making money, but they're doing it in different ways, and they talk a little bit about why they do it those sorts of ways. The first part of

their conversation again, and I think this is going to be a dialogue for a while is the Jack Dorsey controversy. Again, he's the CEO of Twitter and just that he ducks questions a little bit but does admit that there's some sort of a problem with Twitter and censorship and all the rest of it. What I found quite interesting about it is Sam Harris has recently released his podcast with Dorsey. And he actually recorded it before he'd heard Jack on anyone else. I think he did it before Jack Dorsey started doing podcasts with other people. So he didn't really get to do as much research with like the way that Jack talks and how he evades questions and those sorts of things, which is a bit of a shame.

Because in a way, you would want Sam to interview him last after Sam Harris has had a chance to kind of analyze his process. I think that would have been a better way, you know, just because Sam's so clever that he could figure out ways to get to the point of the questions that he wanted without maybe letting Jack kind of skip around the idea. But anyway, again, Joe talks about how he's going to have Jack back on, he's going to do a better job but asking questions, he's going to work a little bit harder in that kind of way. And we'll see what happens there. But again, the sponsorship issue and the donation issue is a fascinating one to me.

Joe even talks about, I think he's gonna release some sort of app for the podcast where you can either watch it live or just download it, but it has no ads and you pay a subscription fee just one time a month or whatever it is. That's pretty fascinating too. I wonder what the whole thought process is beyond that. I mean, I don't, it seems odd, right? Either way, like why anyone would be that, although with the, with the sponsorship, because if you were that annoyed by it, you can just kind

of skip through it, right? I mean, it's not like you're watching Direct TV and you're stuck watching that video. I guess if you watch YouTube, you can't always skip through those to make you watch some of those. But anyway, this is something kind of that he wants to do. In Sam brings up an interesting point, he was saying that, he was saying, for example, with Joe, point he was saying that he was saying for example with Joe, nobody would get mad at Joe for releasing his comedy special on Netflix and you have to pay a subscription to get a hold of that material. They won't be like well why didn't you just put this on YouTube and make it free because people understand this is kind of like you you know, he should

make money this way. And that is the model that Sam really likes. He likes the idea that Netflix does not have commercials and people clearly understand that you pay a subscription for that content, you know, without any kind of advertising intervention. Rather than the Facebook model, which is like all advertising and it's free, I guess Sam just thinks that that's problematic in some way, right, for for using those systems. I find that quite interesting. I really like the Netflix model. I don't know what do you guys think. It's brilliant to get a break from commercials. It seems like commercials are in everything these days. You can't watch anything without commercials.

It's some point. And just Netflix, you never even think about it. You just go there and it just takes you straight to whatever you're watching. And it's great. They get into talking about a lot of the hate that you get online and with social media, both of them being pretty prominent online

and having a lot of followers, they talk about just how crazy it is to see that kind of hate coming in and the arguments and all the aggression. And you know it's fascinating too because when Joe first started talking about not reading comments, I thought that actually had more to do with just the sheer mass of his followers. Like he has so many that he'd never be able to keep up with all the comments, so almost what why read any. But then, you know, the more they talk, the more you realize it's just reading any of the comments. There's just so many people out there and a lot of them are writing just hateful

nonsense that it's just pointless. There's not a lot of them are writing just hateful nonsense that it's just pointless. There's not a lot of information to be got from reading these comments on social media. And that must be very bizarre for these guys to have that kind of attention and then to see, especially Sam Harris being like a behaviorist psychologist, just seeing what people are willing to say and then how they react to each other and coming up with your conclusion of what that means, it's pretty strange, you know, it just seems very odd. And on top of that how it's very difficult to come back from any sort of verbal slip-up. For example, you're saying some hate on

line, on social media, let's say you're even responding to some very angry person, the left of comment, and this is part of the reason why you gotta be careful. You say something in your celebrity or somebody that's kind of in the public eye, just someone popular, and then all of a sudden, that's it. You're held responsible for what you say forever, and there's no way back from it. Possibly even if it was just misconstrued, or you just typed out something awkward,

and it seems like it means something that you didn't intend. Not to give excuses for people that say, actually fucked up things online. I mean, obviously they're messing up, know just the idea that you can't come back from any kind of verbal slip up, you know what I mean? Like they almost should be in Joe is saying there's a public forum like place to apologize You know to give people a chance just to explain there

They're part of it and then you know kind of make that point But I guess the problem of it and then you know kind of make that point. But I guess the problem there would be that you know then they would start having coaches and people could just say anything and then as long as they had a really good little speech to present afterwards you could be like oh maybe they didn't mean it that way. I don't know. I think it's almost problematic and it's in its own way. But yeah you should get you really should get the chance to at least apologize in some way for something that you did because you change as you grow up.

Joe talks about this. You're like, you're not the same person you were when you were 18 or when you're almost 40. Not really. I mean, you think very differently. You're probably just kind of an idiot back then. Sam finishes the conversation with probably part of the reason why he came on Joe's podcast in the first place, talked a little bit about his app and the idea of his meditation app, which is called waking up, which I talked about right at the beginning of this podcast, not only just for meditation, but also kind of retraining your behaviors, right? So let's say you really reactive or very aggressive, it can calm that urge down,

that sort of thing is the example that he gave. And then he kind of like moved from there into a practical aspect of it. You know, they talked about people not knowing how to fight, but still reacting very aggressively. It's very dangerous for people to do that, especially if they don't know. And then they talk about training that actually does work, like all these fake martial arts that they show on, like Jojo's Instagram account, have they just don't work, they don't do anything,

yet something like Jiu-Jitsu is far more effective than a lot of the martial arts out there, you can use it in a much better way. And I'm just finishing up talking about Jiu-Jitsu, I always liked it, I train it, I think it's a fantastic better way. And I'm just finishing up talking about Gid too, I was liked it. I train it. I think it's a fantastic thing to do. And it is one of those examples of like, you know, you could look at a lot of other martial arts. I'm not saying all of them, but there are a few that are just kind of wacky and they don't really teach you a lot in real life to defend yourself. They're just not that useful. But while you're in those schools, they will say that they are very effective.

So you know, there's kind of like lines of truth out there that are that don't all converge and you need to test them against each other to find out what actually works. I don't know, that's my two cents. But it's a great podcast, a really good conversation. Anything with SoundHas, Joe Talkin' is worth listening to. So check it out. Thanks a lot for listening. You guys have a great weekend. you