Modern Wisdom - #661 - Sam Harris - How To Take Control Of Your Mind

Episode Date: July 31, 2023

Sam Harris is a best selling author, moral philosopher, neuroscientist and a podcaster. The entire world seems to be at each other's throats and finding peace in the chaos is becoming increasingly difficult. But there are tools at our disposal to improve the quality of our lives. As Sam says on this episode, “Wisdom is a matter of making your mind your friend”. Expect to learn what Sam’s life is like after Twitter, Sam’s reflections on his famous talk on death and the present moment, how to live a life full of meaning, how to take your mindfulness off the cushion and into the real world, Sam's thoughts on Tucker Carlson's Twitter move, his opinion on Andrew Tate, RFK Jr, Andrew Huberman and Jordan Peterson, whether have reached peak woke, Sam’s take on young Western men converting to Islam and much more... Sponsors: Go to https://betterhelp.com/modernwisdom for 10% off your first month of therapy with BetterHelp and get matched with a therapist who will listen and help Get $150/£150 discount on the Eight Sleep Pod Cover at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first box at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Extra Stuff: Sign up for 30 days free from Sam's Meditation app Waking Up - https://wakingup.com/modernwisdom Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Sam Harris. He's a best-selling author, moral philosopher, neuroscientist and a podcaster. The entire world seems to be at each other's throats and finding peace in the chaos is becoming increasingly difficult, but there are tools at our disposal to improve the quality of our lives. As Sam says on this episode, wisdom is a matter of making your mind your friend. Expect to learn what Sam's life is like after Twitter, Sam's reflections on his famous

talk on death and the present moment, how to live a life full of meaning, how to take your mindfulness off the cushion and into the real world. Sam's thoughts on Tukkakal's move, his opinion on Andrew Tate, RFK Jr., Andrew Humeman and Jordan Peterson, whether we have reached peak woke, Sam's take on young Western men converting to Islam, and much more. I had so much fun recording this episode. Sam was a huge influence on me starting this podcast six years ago, and it feels great for everything to have come full circle

and to get to sit down for three hours opposite him in a disgustingly sweltering warehouse in the middle of LA because we wanted to get some awesome visuals and this is the best-looking location that we could find but also happen to be a very hot tin box. Anyway, I hope that you take tons away from this episode. It really is Sam at his best as far as I can see and don't forget that if you're new here or if you're a long time listener you might be listening but not subscribed and that means you're going to miss episodes when they go up. The next six months has the biggest, most ridiculously stacked list of guests that I've ever, ever had and I can't wait to get these

ones out. So you need to press the subscribe button or you're going to be trezz sad because you're going to miss those episodes. So go and press the subscribe button or you're going to be TREZ SART because you're going to miss those episodes. So go and press the button. I thank you. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Sam Harris, look at my show. Thank you, great to meet you finally. What is life like after Twitter? It is immensely improved to a degree that I find actually embarrassing in retrospect because it's proof that I was needlessly degrading the quality of my life for most 12 years,

tactically, I think it was probably five years where it was actually degrading the quality of my life. But it was, I mean, retrospect, it was a psychological experiment that we all got enrolled in and no one read the consent form much less signed it. It has given, for me, if you're someone who has a significant platform and you're at all controversial, I think it gives you a sense of what the world is, which is basically false and destructive to your feeling, the feelings you have for the rest of humanity.

It was incrementally like a slow ratchet, but never to be reversed, Often undetectable, but still nevertheless, always in one direction, changing me into a misenthrough. I mean, I was just starting to perceive people who I had never met and many who I had met as the worst most grotesque versions of themselves. And it's not that it's totally inaccurate. It's not that, I mean people people tweet What you see them at their worst moments or their most bad faith moment to their most cynical moments but

It's like the evidence of that of those moments becomes indelible and you lose sight of the rest and I just was Noticing this mismatch of you of being out in the world with people and people are great and then checking into my life online and recognizing that people are horrible and just bouncing back between these two views and I just realized I really only wanted one of them. It seems to me that a lot of people feel that when they step out into the real world and the people who spend more time in the real world, they realize, this is kind of nice. Everyone seems pretty balanced out here.

No one's that antagonistic. No one's back biting or screaming or shouting or accusing me of being a bigot or a racist or whatever. And then for some reason, you step onto the internet with frictionless communication and all hell breaks loose. Yeah, yeah. And it's not just anonymity, anonymity's part of it, but it's also people you know who are captured

by their echo chamber, which you're not seeing, right? Like it's a solution that you're inhabiting the same space with the people you're in conversation with, but in reality, they're talking to their fans, you're talking to your fans, your kind of, you have weaponized your fans against their fans and vice versa. And without even necessarily thinking in those terms, that's that those are the network dynamics of what's happening.

And, um, I mean, I mean, I just kept getting, I mean, at one point I recognized that barring some, you know, bad health outcomes in among friends and family over the years, objectively the worst things that had happened to me in a decade were the result of my engagement with Twitter. And in many cases, the worst thing that had happened to me in a decade where the result of my engagement with Twitter. And in many cases, the only bad things that had happened to me in a decade of any significance

at all was born of Twitter. I think you'd manage to topedo a family vacation in some beauty. Yeah, yeah, that was paradise by sending a random tweet and then putting your phone down to come back to it and find out that there was a wasteland where once there was a tweet workout. Yeah, no, it was, it just kept giving me a sense. It was a, the time course of interaction with it gives you this endless opportunity to comment on stuff.

So it's always ready for your hot take. In fact, you're on there to give your hot take and to see the hot takes of others. Again, this might not matter if your hot take is, here's another cute photo of my cat and you just get nothing but love back, right? I know there are people who have that experience, but given that I was violating the The blasphemy tests of both the left and the right on more or less on a weekly basis. I mean, I'm not aligned politically with the left or the right You know, it was just pain on both sides and I you know, I had no tribe like if you're if you're just on the right You know or or some segment of the right,

if you're Ben Shapiro, you have a tribe that is going to just incessently defend you against the left. And at a certain point, you just, you learn to discount the attacks of the left because you don't care what the left thinks about you. You've priced that in. You're on the right. And so it is with the left. If you. You've priced that in. You're on the right. And so it is with the

left. If you're in the middle and you're actually not even an especially political person, you don't even care about politics. Politics are, it's just an ugly necessity that you continually have to touch, but it's just you view it as an opportunity cost getting in the way of the things you actually care about. And you're not tribal and you're not reflexively aligned with, you know, the bullet points on one side of the aisle or the other. You have offended everyone on both sides at some point. You're getting ideologically spit roasted here. Yeah, and you're not, and you don't have, you don't have the people who will defend you blindly. You pissed them off last week to view about NY.

Even within your own audience, which is fine. I mean, I'm very happy to have the audience I have. And I like having an audience that really cares about the integrity and honesty of the very last thing I said. And if the last thing I said didn't make sense, they're going to, I'm gonna hear about it, but social media is just the wrong platform for that kind of conversation.

Do you ever think about what civilization would be like without social media? Some of the smartest minds of our time have had the hours captured arguing over whether men and men are women and not all, but this particular topic or that particular topic, do you think about how far it's satisfied? Is it a negative, a positive overall, do you think? Well, I think it's a negative.

I think it's a massive opportunity cost for almost everybody. I might just think, you look at what you're doing and not doing based on your engagement with these platforms. I mean, you're not tending to read good, long books anymore. At minimum, even if it's your job to read those books, it's become harder to do that. I wasn't certainly noticing that for myself. It has served to fragment our attention and our lives in ways that just can't be good. Even if, again, even if your diet of information is almost entirely positive, there's this fragmentation

effect. You just, I mean, I notice people, I certainly, I notice young people now, who appear almost neurologically incapable of watching a great movie from beginning to end without interruption. You know, it's cool. If you Google the number of cuts in the first Fast and Furious movie compared to the number of cuts in the 10th Fast and Furious movie, pace, it's got to be sped up. Yeah. So, I mean, I'm noticing this with my daughters.

It's just like, to get them to watch a movie. And, you know, it's not that it's impossible, but I just noticed that they're tuned to a different cadence. And they're not even, I mean, they're, you know, they're not on social media in the normal way. I mean, they don't have social media accounts. They're just, but the YouTubeification of everything has gotten in. And yeah, I mean, they don't have social media accounts, but the YouTubeification of everything has gotten in.

And I think it's worth resisting. It's not that we don't have to use these tools in some way, but I think it is worth realizing that even beyond time, your attention is what you have. Your true wealth is the quality of your attention. And we've now interfaced with machinery that has systematically degraded our ability to pay attention. David Perrell has this idea called the never-ending now. And if you look at the content that you've consumed, maybe not you after your exit, but most people, almost all of the content that

you have consumed today has been made in the last 24 hours. Right. There's never ending now. Terrifying. Absolutely. It's the opposite of Lindy. It's the opposite of the Lindy effect. Right. It is so thoughtless and yet it's captivating.

Right. I mean, it's just this sugar high of everything. So, yeah, so I'm more focused on good books now than I was before I deleted my Twitter account, which is good. Have you reflected much on Tucker Carlson's move to Twitter from Fox News? Is this the beginning of some legacy to alternative media, breakwater event, or is it just a nothing to you? Well, I think Tucker Carlson himself is worth considering. I mean,

we know, you know, he's he's someone who has shield for Trump, you know, rather avidly, for years. And yet we now have his behind the scenes commentary on the Trump phenomenon, it described in him as a demonic force and somebody who hates with a passion. That's what took his set about Trump. Yeah, this came out of his text got leaked from the dominion lawsuit against Fox. Okay. Right, so we know like the mismatch between who he is pretending to be for his audience and who he is behind closed doors is something that I think should trouble his audience,

but it apparently doesn't, right? And that's also true of someone like Trump. So in many cases, you have these characters who, to my eye, are very low integrity people. I mean, you're not getting an honest look at what they really think, even though they're purporting to tell you what they think every hour of the day, or at least every day, for some hours. And I view Tucker as that sort of person, but I think we're in a, we're on a political landscape now where there's no impediment to his building an enormous business on the basis of, of having left

Fox or having gotten fired from Fox. For reasons that which I guess are still obscure. I mean, he's very good at what he does. He's a very good demagogue and he's very facile. I don't think there's an ethical core there, but there's a political one, you know, or it's really an opportunist one in the political space. And there's an immense appetite to have someone call bullshit on the powers that be the so-called elites, the institutions, again and again and again, whether they're right or wrong, you know, it's just like it's say, this is how it sort of opens the door to conspiracy thinking of every flavor. It's not that these contrarian takes are always wrong

because they're not, right? I mean, we're living through a time where many of our institutions have lost trust for good reason, right? But what gets layered on top of that are just, you know, lies and misinformation and half-truths and a crazy sort of, you know, John Nash style connect the dots with everything. And you can find, and if you're just searching for anomalies and you're not actually held to any sort of coherent standard

of having a basic theory as to what's going on, you just can find the next anomaly. Well, then you'll find anomalies everywhere, and they don't have to add up to anything, except a kind of pornography of doubt. Right, and that's what's being spread by people like Tucker in my view. Did you see Douglas Murray's debate

with Malcolm Gladwell, Matt Taiibi, Malcolm? I think I heard most of it. Yeah. And on that, it was a discussion around is the new alternative media is this where we're getting the most truth from, that unencumbered, the audience capturing sentives are there, but also you are liberated to not be tamped down by whoever the big wigs are that have got some nefarious agenda. And then the other side is saying it's this free wheeling Wild West where people can just make all manner of these sort of claims. What did you make of that landscape?

Well, I mean, I'm very biased for that particular debate. I love Douglas. Douglas is a friend and he's obviously brilliant and just a joy to listen to. And I get a lot of his hate mail because again, he's somebody who's happily on the right or right of center who doesn't have to worry about what the left thinks about him. But you know, every time I have him on the podcast I get nothing but pain from half my audience. If there is anything that is worth the pain of half of your audience It's bringing Douglas Murray. Yeah. Yeah. No, he's fantastic. But he is adjacent to many people who are not so fantastic, right? I mean, this is this is the sort of

guilt by association problem that he has guilt by association problem that he has Navigated in a way which I you know, I don't know if it's successful. I mean it's he's I think sleeps soundly at night Given what he's done, but the truth is he has been he's shared stages with people who I wouldn't want to be on stage with and I don't think it was good for him to be on a stage with the person and And half of the reason why I would get hate mail about having Douglas on would be because he shared the stage with those people. And yet it's he's completely correct in recognizing how hopeless it is to do a full moral inventory of everyone you might be forced to shake hands with and to decide in advance whether it's worth shaking their hands or having a conversation with them. So yeah, I mean, it is the Wild West and you just have to do your best and just be honest

whenever you're in front of the microphone. It feels to me like that guilt by association thing seems to have slowed at least a little bit. Pee's Morgan put out a video recently about we're at peak woke. I wouldn't agree. I think, I can't remember whether it was Matt Taiibi or somebody else in the summer of 2020 said that that was peak woke.

The most, you know, inflammatory over the top, any slight indiscretion is worth being smashed in the face for. Right. I would agree that that's the case now. And it seems to me like there is at least a little bit more reason beginning to seep back into that discourse. I hope so. I feel like it seems to be the case for me,

except I don't know if it's just an optical illusion because I'm no longer on Twitter and I no longer care. Right. It seems to be the case for me, except I don't know if it's just an optical illusion because I'm no longer on Twitter and I no longer care. Right? So I just don't, you know, I use the, there's certain kinds of attacks which a few years ago, I might have taken seriously for 15 minutes. And now they just are an entire holiday. Yeah.

But now they just bounce off, or I don't even see them, right? So, and that may be a good thing. I mean, certainly it's a nicer way of being in the world, but it could be a version of, I mean, something like digital leprosy, right? Where you're like, you know, the lepros lose their digits because they don't, they don't sense pain anymore. And they, you know, you walk by a table

and you whack your fingers on it and you don't notice that you're bleeding. I don't think in the worst cases in the developing world literally rats can come on you while you're sleeping and you don't feel that either. So it could be that I have a digital version of that which is just that I just don't I'm not noticing how my reputation is eroding in ways that I actually would care about if I could notice it, but I can no longer sense it because I'm in my own silo. But the truth is I just don't care about certain kinds of attacks anymore. And so yeah, I have the perception you have that the pendulum has swung back. People are rolling, even people who would otherwise have been taken in by

wokeness a few years ago, roll their eyes in private and increasingly in public over certain kinds of, you know, ad hominem or bad faith arguments. But back to this point with Douglas, I mean, I just, you know, so my bias was, you know, his side carried that debate, you know, spectacularly well. But I'm the truth. I don't know, Malcolm, I've been on his podcast, but I, so I've spoken to him, but I don't know Malcolm. Malcolm has a, it's not the first time he's done this in debate. He has a habit in debate of being ad hominem in a way that is, I mean, if it's ever persuasive, it's not persuasive when he's doing it.

And so it just, you sort of lose just by default, whatever the actual topic, under discussion. Do you remember the talk that you gave on death and the present moment? I think it was the atheist, Australian, New atheist society, something like that. It was a big, it was called the global atheist convention, but a global atheist alliance, but I think at that point, maybe still it was like the biggest atheist convention ever. So I went to a few of those, but that was one. How should it inform the way that we live our lives?

Do you think given that we know that they're going to end sooner or later? Well, I really think that is the, whether you think about it or not, that is the ever-present Subtext to almost everything you You care about should care about fail to you know when you when your priorities are not straight You know you when you when you have regrets. It's in light. It's against this the the incessant ticking at the clock

that the all of that makes sense. And the imperative of the incremental loss of this non-renewable resource. It's like it's the one thing you don't get back. I mean, as I said, I think even more than time, attention is the real cash value of time. But because we know that you can safeguard your time and squander it.

And we know you can find real, surprising joy and equanimity and even transcendent experience in the midst of experiences that you wouldn't otherwise think were optimal. You can have, you can be in a shitty situation where nothing has really gone the way you expected and still be radiantly happy, right? It really is a matter of what you're doing with your attention and the kind of mind you have. But the fact is, everything is changing at every moment. And there's no real stability, right? There's no final stage of control over experience. Every goal you attain becomes a memory, the moment you attain it, right?

And then you're just left to think about it, right? And then the question is, what are you going to do next? And we have this perpetual challenge of figuring out what to do next. I mean, what, you know, morally, intellectually, as a matter of just trying to safeguard our own sense of well-being, and you're never, you never arrive. And it's because of the nature of impermanence that you never do. I mean, everything is in fact, the nature of impermanence that you never do. I mean, everything is in fact, I'm a Raj, if you think that your satisfaction is gonna be a matter of finally putting all of the most important features

of your life in the correct place, right? Like you finally have the job you want, the relationship you want, the house you want, you're fit, you're healthy, you've executed on the perfect to-do list and you finally arrived. Well at a minimum, you're going to notice that all of that has to be maintained at great energy.

Right? I'm like, entropy is such that, you can't stay fit, you can't stay healthy, you can't stay rich, you can't, your relationships not going to maintain itself. And what's more, most people's minds are out of control anyway, right? And they're not satisfied anyway, even having everything. The moment you have everything, your sense of what you want. I mean, you just move the goalposts or they got moved for you by some hand that you could never see.

And so like you take all of this for granted and now you want other things and you want them just as much as you wanted the last things. So there's something about the passage of time that as you pay attention to it, and as you get older, this is relevant, but some people manage to get quite old without getting especially wise,

but other things can happen. Even when you're young, you can lose people close to you or you can do suffer some profound career setback or something can happen where you recognize, okay, this is, there's a, there's a false premise here. There's many bright, shiny objects I've been focused on because they've been captivating for cultural

and psychological reasons that I never inspect it and never really agreed to, but that's just where my attention went. And there's this deeper principle, which is the efforts to become happy never fully fulfills itself. Right? The becoming part contains its own dissatisfaction.

Right? Like at a certain level, you have to figure out how you can be happy with whatever is already the case, like to want what you already have. And then from that place, move into the next moment, looking to do creative, beautiful, fun things, but your happiness is not contingent upon those things working out in any particular way, right?

You realize that you're just at some level, you have to be process oriented rather than goal oriented because ultimately, there is only the process. And the goals and the goals are so, the achievement of the goals is such a punctate experience. It's so brief. It's just an idea. Before it happens, it's an idea. The moment it happens, it's some burst of sensory experience,

and then it's an idea again. It's a memory, and you're talking about it. You're talking about the thing you did yesterday. It's not good enough. That could never have been good enough for a truly satisfied life. Well, get back to talking to Sam in one minute, but first, I need to tell you about a sponsor better help. There might be something interfering with your happiness or preventing you from achieving your goals.

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with someone professionally trained who can help you get through whatever you're facing. You can switch therapists for free if it doesn't work out for any reason and there is no additional charge. Head to betterhelp.com-modern-wisdom to get 10% off your first month of therapy. That's betterhelp.com-modern-wisdom. Someone that you might not have been expecting to give you mindful wisdom that you might agree with Andru Tate as a quote where he says having things isn't fun, getting things is fun. And I think that what he's referring to there

is the the Hedonic treadmill that we're talking about, the fact that it's in the anticipation of an event that we think it's gonna happen as a club promoter for forever. And we would be creating anticipation for this next new DJ, this next new whatever that would happen, but the protracted nature of the buildup was what people looked forward to.

They looked forward to the advance of it. When the event happened, in fact, they did a study where they got people to track. They pinged their phones and got them to track how their happiness was throughout the entirety of a night out. And the most fun part of a night out is getting ready with your friends before you head out of the door. Yeah. I mean, neuroanatomically, the reason why that is the case, because our dopaminergic system

gets driven not by pleasure itself, but by the expectation of pleasure. Things are about to get. It's the center of the bullseye is the pleasant surprise. This is about to get better than I was expecting right that that's the thing that is truly Re-enforcing. Yeah, I fear I might have made an error by saying that I have a guest coming on that was very excited about and now if someone Isn't as sufficiently excited about you then I've yeah that dopaminergic system is gonna fall through Yeah, yeah, there's one disappointment after another But so I'm just I can't retake the the floor. Yeah, yeah, there's one disappointment after another. But so it kind of rotates a perfect example of somebody who, again, he's radioactive

for obvious reasons, I haven't met him, I haven't done an especially deep dive on what he's guilty of or, you know, I mean, he's obviously, he's got issues. But I just feel like we're at a moment now where, I just feel like we're at a moment now where there is such a thirst for wisdom that it can come from so many different places. Those places can be more or less contaminated with concepts that are more or less toxic, more or less divisive, more or less confusing.

And yeah, I mean, I've watched enough of his stuff to see why young men are getting addicted to his content and thinking that he's their life guru. And I've also watched enough to think that it's not ideal that he's the voice of a generation. Right? Like, we need a more compassionate, less self-infatuated standard for manliness and success than whether he's putting out. If I was to, I've got Jordan coming on the show again at some point later this year and It's something that I think I'll speak to him about that

He's onto big things with this arc, which is kind of his competitor I think to the w e f that he's doing later this year. I haven't I haven't followed that you know But I do think that Jordan's relative abandonment of the conversation directly to young men to move on to other things, whether it be climate change or the trans issue or pick your poison about whatever he's got interested in recently, I think that that has left a vacuum

and you can't expect anybody to go through life without insights coming from somewhere and whether that insight is for young men or young women or old men or old women, whether it's Andrew Tate or Wuppie Goldberg or whoever happens to have the hot take of the week and trends sufficiently highly on Twitter, people are going to look for someone. They're going to look for answers and in a world where we are chronically mismatched, our evolved psychology and the world that we find ourselves in has never really been further apart. People are

going to find answers and sometimes fluency is a really brilliant proxy for truthfulness or insight. And if you can say things with a sufficiently well-rounded, compelling delivery, regardless of who you are, whether it be Wuppie Goldberg or anybody else, people will say, that sounds true. Sounds fluent, not sure if it's true. Yeah, except the thing that surprises me is that it should be more obvious than it is to more people

that someone's an asshole. It's like that, it doesn't matter how fluent you are. You're only just declaring your ass holeery in more concise form. And so it's kind of a Trumpian moment. Trump is obviously an asshole. He's obviously a selfish person, but none of his fans care.

He's like, he's not a compassionate person. He can't even pretend to care about people really. But his shamelessness around his selfishness has become a kind of superpower for a certain audience because he's conveying the message I will never I will never judge you because I'm incapable of judging myself for like I'm not I'm not holding myself to any kind of Standard apart from the gratification of my own desires so

You know, I'm in some sense I have a real integrity Because I know I'm selfish all those people who are pretending not to be selfish who are pretending to be ethical and compassionate to care about the sub-Saharan Africa and the education and developing countries. I mean, someone like Bill Gates, right? Bill Gates is somebody who can't get laid and he's just gonna microchip you with the next vaccine, right?

That's gonna be a great quote to export from the spot guess. You're welcome, Twitter. So that's the center of narrative and ethical gravity for these guys, right? I don't include Jordan there, but like, entertain Trump, there's like a, I've got a fucking Bugatti and you know you want one

and I've got no apologies, right? I've got no fuck in Bugatti and you know you want one and I've got no apologies, right? I've got no fucks to give. I know you want to be like me, you know, and if you don't, if you're not good enough to be like me, I'll sleep with your girlfriend, right? Like that's the, that's not an ethically wise person on any fucking level, even if he can, even if he can string together a few sentences that seem actionable and useful to get you to clean your room and get in shape and meet a girl, right? We should be asking more of our elders than that, right?

And so, and so where I part ways with Jordan, again, I do not put Jordan in the same category, but he is, he has a very different view of the, the status of objective and empirical truth in relation to the stories we tell about ourselves and our place in the world and what makes life worth living, what will allow for a society to really cohere around shared values. And he thinks that there's a layer of storytelling and what I would call myth and fiction, really, in a way that is you know, what I would call myth and fiction really, in a way that is kind of somewhat derogatory, right? Not to say that I don't see the power in it,

but it's just, what I wanna do is be able to distinguish between the layer of wishful thinking and a layer of delusion and a layer of ancient confusion that is still has good standing among millions of people. And probably some symbolic truth or figurative truth in that too. And a kind of harmless, harmless uses of the imagination that it could be a nobel in and fun and empowering, right? And kind of core truths that don't require a story to be a nobleman. Did you see that Jordan got into it with Richard Dawkins?

Well, you wouldn't have done your off-twitters, I will be the weathervane to update you on whatever's happening in Twitter's conditions at the moment. Richard, a clip of Richard went semi-viral of him criticizing the Old Testament God. Right. And then I think Jordan basically called him out any time, any place, anywhere. It wasn't far off that, I think, that the actual tweet was about saying that it was a, I think, damaging science and doing a disservice to maybe dockens himself and stuff. Right. Yeah, well, something that's, I agree, I agree with Richard, with respect to the,

what I think of the Old Testament God and the moral instruction we can or can't take from him. I mean, I just think that's, I just don't think that the, the Bible is the wisest book we have, even though there are, there are pearls of real wisdom there, which I understand that people love, it's a book, it was clearly written by human beings. So the fundamental, the breach point is not, is upstream of many of the things people might want to debate. There's just this basic claim. We've got millions upon millions of books,

were they all written by people or not? Right? And the moment you admit that they were all written by people, okay, we're having a very different conversation about the status of religion. Certainly, the religion of any of the religions of Abraham, right? I mean, these are claimed at bottom Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are claims about the divine origin of a specific book or certain texts. And some of these texts were canonical for centuries and then got thrown out within Christianity and then some got added later.

So the process of coupling together these scriptures was also human. We know a way too much about it. If we knew more about it, it would look much more like Joseph Smith and the book of Mormon and it would look like the South Park episode that Mormonism, in fact, looks like, right? And you drag it further into the present and it looks like Scientology, right? And then you're like, you're just staring at Elron Hubbard's driver's license and it's just, okay, this goofy guy with bad teeth sold all these people on a story about the stars that was obviously bullshit and should have been obvious to them. Now again, there's not to say that there isn't real wisdom in all of these streams of information. I mean, even Scientology, but you just, the basic claim, and I think Richard would agree with this,

is that you don't have to believe anything on insufficient evidence to extract all the wisdom that is to be found in the world's literature and in the conversations, conversations with people in the present and conversations with the dead by reading their, their books. In other news, this episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. with the dead by reading their books. different side of the bed based on yours and your partner's sleep stages. It is a complete game changer and if you're waking up in the morning feeling groggy and not sufficiently rested, it is quite likely that temperature is the culprit and all of this is fixed with the pod cover from 8th sleep. It slips over the top of your existing mattress just like a mattress topper, but gives you all of the biometric scanning.

It'll tell you how long you were asleep for your resting heart rate, your HIV, everything, literally from a mattress topper. Head to 8sleep.com slash modern wisdom or follow the link in the show notes below for $150 off plus the ship internationally. That's e-i-g-t-sleep.com slash modern wisdom. The first time that I think I heard of Jordan was that first conversation that you guys had. It was a podcast, maybe in a bar, even a hotel reception or something. And there was a jinking of glasses. I know that would have been probably Dan Dennett. Dan Dennett and I had a debate in a bar, but Jordan and I had a debate on my podcast. Right. I'd heard this conversation and I remember thinking, who's this Canadian fuck having a

pop at Sam Harris at the time, and then later on went on to really sort of fall in love with Jordan's work as well. I think there's an awful lot of people who want to see that public relationship between you and him rekindled. Well, it hasn't, I mean, to my, it has not been broken. I mean, I like Jordan.

I mean, I think this is just, this is what I imagine, because I have not had any dialogue with him in a couple of years. But, I mean, Jordan and I disagree fundamentally about religion, I think, and we've debated that. You know, I had nausea. I moved, probably got like 12 hours, you know, on the mic in various we've debated that. I had nauseam. I've probably got like 12 hours on the mic in various venues debating that. And that was fun and I'm always happy to talk to him.

And I think while we disagree, I think he has really helped millions of people. I mean, I think he's, there's no question. I know what it's like to be with him at an event and to hear from the people who who are, you know, hear from his fans and my fans side by side sitting at a table for an hour after an event where we, you know, had a debate in front of 8,000 people. And there's a slightly different flavor to the people whose lives we've changed, right? He's intersected with a different group of

people at a different point in their lives than I have for the most part. How would you categorize that difference? Well, I mean, to significant degrees, people moving in two opposite direction. I mean, like, the people who were stuck with a religious worldview, stuck, I mean, literally, in many cases, traumatized by a fear of hell that had been inculcated into them by their religious parents. But we're enamored enough of enlightenment values and secular rationality and science. So as to have the, this, the spell break to some significant degree and they needed some language some language to help kind of midwife their

delivery into a clear light of reason, right? And they also needed, so, and this is where Richard and I have had different jobs. I mean, Richard is just critiquing religion and counterposing it with all that's wonderful about science. For him, the spiritual attitude that is on offer, when you want to leave religion behind and close the church doors behind you, is awe at the beauty of nature and just amazement at everything we are learning and may yet learn about the way the world works and the way the mind works. And I mean, we are now there to use Newton's image. I mean, it's like we are children on a seashore playing with shells and the vast ocean of ignorance and potential knowledge.

It just awaits our inspection. For me, that's not good enough. What I mean by spirituality has in fact nothing to do with the amazement that you feel when you look up at the Milky Way. That's great, but that's just not the real opportunity on offer, and that's not what's going to prepare us to die, and that's not what's going to really console you at 4 in the morning when you wake up feeling bad about your life and not sure how you can be happy in this world. Right. So I'm much more, so I'm convinced that at the core

of every religion, there were real transformative and transcendent human experiences that are attested to by the literature and traditions that have grown up around that religion. So there really was, presumably, there really was a person in history by the name of Jesus who had this effect on the people around him and said something like what he has purported to have said in the Bible. And I can understand all of that as a absolutely predictable result of certain ways of paying attention that are available to every human being now, then now, then and now,

which allow you to recognize that this ego you take yourself to be is an illusion. And it allows you to recognize that unconditional love is actually a possibility, right? It is possible to just feel shattered by your love for all sentient beings, and to just to bask in the profundity of that way of being. And that's on the menu. And whether you have to go into a cave and meditate for a month to find that, or you take MDMA, or you have a, there are ways to perturb your nervous system such that the testimony of someone like Jesus, or Buddha, is obviously not a fraud.

It's obviously not a confession of psychopathology. It's obviously not a delusion about belief-based delusion about what happens after death or about invisible parts of the universe and populated by angels or deities. You don't have to believe in anything unimpirical in order to experience that range of positive experience. You just have to learn to use your attention in the right ways, and if you can't do that, you know, there are psychedelics offer a, an imperfect method at frequency that. Yeah, I mean, it's definitely reliable. It's a reliable glimpse of something that is different enough, assuming you have a positive experience, I mean, you can have

a different enough negative experience that will convince you of something else. But if you have a different enough extraordinarily positive experience, you'll be convinced that, okay, whatever you'll be convinced that, okay, whatever the possibilities of sustaining that may or may not be, it is just clear that this experience is possible because I just had it, right? I just had it for four hours. And I can no longer imagine that human consciousness is in principle confined to kind of the mediocre bandwidth

I tend to experience when I'm just checking my email is in principle confined to kind of the mediocre bandwidth. I tend to experience what I'm just checking my email and then checking Twitter and then worrying about my future. All right. I actually don't think I actually closed the loop on what I want to say about Jordan there though. So Jordan, Jordan and I differ in, he wants to support a much more traditional picture of the utility and even necessity of religious thinking and religious identity and that way of giving

meaning to one's life through traditional stories and stories which I think a literal belief in can't be justified based on what we have come to understand about science. And I just think that the burden is on us at this point in history to find a truly non-sectarian way of telling ourselves a story about what we value and what is possible, right? And so, and we do that in other areas of our lives. And the science is one very clear place we do that, where there's just, there is no, to say that, you know, there's American science versus Chinese science. And it's just, that's just not science.

Like science is at a layer more fundamental than those cultural differences. And so it has to be with something like ethics and spirituality. You can't talk of, in the end, you shouldn't be able to talk about Christian ethics or Christian spiritual insight. And Jordan's not convinced of that, or he's apparently not convinced of that. And so that's what we still disagree about. But I think the final, the thing, the thing, the thing I wanted to say was that, so you will seem to allude to some sort of breach between us, which I certainly don't feel and have an experience. I can only imagine though that in his world, given what was happening to me on Twitter when I left, he perceives me as somebody who has just gone off the rails in some way, right?

Because like he, in his world, and this is what was so amazing to see, when I was looking at when I, when I, when I, I mean, this to, if anyone doesn't know what I'm talking about, there was this whole Hunter Biden laptop situation. Where I commented on the Hunter Biden laptop thing on a podcast, I clipped from that podcast got exported to apparently every planet in the solar system and it had an enormous effect right of center, right? So right of center, I had just destroyed my career.

I'm hearing from people like, oh my God, are you okay? Right? And in my world, and in every channel, I care about literally nothing had happened. Right? And so, but in Jordan lives in the world, where I just kind of torched everything. So I can only imagine that he has some view of my, I mean, the truth is, I would expect him to be genuinely confused about what I believe about things like free speech or any of the relevant variables there unless he happens to listen to my podcast, which, you know, I don't know whether or not he does.

I think the potential breach that I was talking about was more just that there is a hunger for you and him to speak. I think that you've both been formative to a lot of people's intellectual journeys in one form or another. And I think people are hoping that there is yet more juice to squeeze from your conjoined lemons and, however, way that happens. Well, I'm always happy to talk to him.

I think the thing that got into my head is someone sent me a clip from Joe Rogan's podcast where he and Joe were talking about me and Jordan seemed to be talking about me. It's like a cautionary tale, like look what can happen to somebody. And Joe said something like, oh, I still have hope for Sam.

And they're, in my view, they are in this contrarian echo chamber, right, where, you know, mRNA vaccines are terrifying. COVID was no big deal. January 6 was maybe a non-event, right? The lib tarage are trying to ruin everything. And there's a whole picture of sort of audience capture and information skewing there, which I understand. I mean, that's sort of how, like, if I look to my left, I can see all that. But if you're only there, there's just a lot of half truths,

you know, kind of ricocheting around that echo chamber, which, yeah, I'm happy to talk to both those guys, but it's just they're not in the, in the lane I'm in and trying to maintain, you know, despite crosswinds, I'm trying to maintain a straight course in. There's, that's only half the story, right? So it's, and I just think people are genuinely confused now because two things are true. We have lost trust in the normal channels of information and normal institutions, post-COVID, you know, during COVID and post-COVID for obvious reasons, but we desperately need institutions and a media that we can trust,

right? And we're not going to navigate this moment by just proliferating podcasts and newsletters, right? It's just not good enough. Much as we might try. Yeah. So, that's a seeming paradox because, yes, you can point to the moments where our institutions have become untrustworthy.

But, you know, RFK Jr. is not the Messiah we need at this moment. I think he's so hot at the moment. What is it about RFK? Well, it's exactly that he is speaking very directly to this contrarian echo chamber, you know, but contrarian slash conspiracy thinking, conspiracy-addled echo chamber, you know, but contraire and slash conspiracy thinking

Conspiracy-addled echo chamber where The non-standard version of everything is is almost certainly the right account, right? So No one can be trusted all you all you really can It is a kind of it is a kind of, it's a kind of religion of suspicion that is being born. It's like, it's a pseudo awakening of, they're all fucking liars, right?

That's what happened to so many millions of people during COVID, they're all liars. I mean, just got Gavin Newsom closing the beaches and then he's over at French laundry, you know, perfectly quaffed at a fundraiser. Is that hypocrisy that people found? I mean, that was just a 20 megaton moment of hypocrisy that detonated and broke trust with, with half the country, you know. and so it's, again, that's all understandable, but we have to be realistic about just what is true and likely to be true in each moment.

And is everything the CDC says likely to be wrong, right? Like is that really, is that what we want to default to? You can't trust the CDC about anything. Is that how you really want to be a consumer of medicine? It's completely unworkable. What we need is a CDC we can trust. And in so far as we don't truly have that, then that is where we have to perform surgery. But it's not like we can tear it all down and then we're just going to chat GPT our

way to health. It's just, it's not going to happen. We'll get back to talking to Sam in one minute, but first I need to tell you about element. Element is the way that I have started my day every single morning for over three years now. It is the best hydration drink that I've ever found. There's no gluten, no fillers, no artificial junk or any other BS. It tastes phenomenal. Their orange salt flavor is absolutely outstanding. It'll help to regulate your appetite. It'll curb cravings, it'll improve brain function, and it means that you don't need to have a coffee first thing in the morning. Your adenosine system, the caffeine acts on, isn't even active for the first 90 minutes of the day, but salt acts on your adrenal system,

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Well, I'm hopeful that if he keeps expounding upon how COVID was targeted to avoid Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people. If you give him a mic enough, he will put his foot, he'll put both feet in his mouth and in your mouth and in any mouth that's available. I mean, it's just, it's, but again, it's not that he's wrong about everything. He's, it's, it's harder than that, right? He's, he is right about many things. And the fact that people love what he's saying is totally understandable.

That's, it's just not, you know, half truths are harder to deal with and or statements which are riddled with truths, but the general shape of them is wrong and aiming in the wrong direction. Like that is just, it's hard for people to parse that stuff. And it's especially hard when occasionally the conspiracy theory turns out to be true

or very likely to be true. So like if you're a person who has an appetite for every conspiracy theory, right? So JFK couldn't have been a single shooter and you've just bought everyone since then. Then you're gonna be, then when COVID likely escaped a lab in Wuhan, if you're the first person to sign up to that

in an environment where everyone's being called racist for signing up to that, you're gonna look like this contrarian genius who just like, they couldn't fool me, right? I knew it likely came out of a lab, whereas the rational position to have had, and genius who just like they couldn't fool me, right? I knew that it likely came out of a lab. Whereas the rational position to have had, I mean, you have to take all of these things all a cart, right?

Like you just have to honestly investigate, within the confines of opportunity costs and bandwidth, you have to investigate them as they come. And I mean, with that one in particular, it was always obvious that it was at the very least plausible that COVID could have escaped the lab. We just know we have a problem with lab leaks and there was the Wuhan Institute for Birology right there working on coronaviruses. It was never raised, that was a woke,

shibboleth bullshit to call that racist to worry that it come out of a lab. Should have spoken to Rob Reed. I would have made it easier. Which Rob Reed is that? That did after on? Didn't you do a big? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I was thinking about the Christian Rob Reed. Yeah, so Rob and I did a podcast on this kind of topic, you know, LabLeaks in general and synthetic bio in general. But again, you can't give, if someone like RFK Jr. likes all the conspiracies, like every one of them, he likes the, you know, cell phones, cause, Cleo Blastoma, you know, idea, which again, it's totally possible, right? It's like, it's not that it's not worth looking into, but if you like that one and you like the Bill Gates microchipping one and you like the Wuhan one and you like that COVID itself was just a pandemic

and you like all of these and you like the Ochkinazzi Jews don't get COVID. You just have it. It's a characterological problem. You have this appetite for, I mean, you see this, the true avatar of this way of thinking is someone like Alex Jones, right? Like again, I don't know if Alex Jones is just a performance artist and it's it's cynical and not, not real or if he really believes what he says he believes, but assuming he believes what he says he believes, he is just, you know, it's like you're a nymphomaniac for and what you love is lies, right? And after is right.

You like, you like, you just love the least credible ideas, you know, the, whatever can come over the transom, that's what gets you hard, right? And so that, you're just going to keep doing that. And it's a, it's a disorder, right? But it's, you know, if it's true that certain frogs are getting turned gay, right? Like, in your first one talking about that, well, he was right about those frogs, so he must be right about everything. You're going to find an audience and what's so perverse about our current environment online is that there is no real evolutionary pressure anymore because everything can succeed. There's just a nut. There's always, you's always, you can always just find another corner of the internet

and another echo chamber. And there's this part of 4chan, and a 4chan isn't good enough for you, it can be over at 8chan, right? It's like you can find this little hellhole where every, where you're gonna find, a requisite number of people to monetize ultimately are gonna willing to hear and talk about anything.

And so I unlike many of the people we just spoke about, I'm convinced that we have an enormous problem with misinformation that is held in tension with our desire for free speech on every topic, you know, 24 hours a day, that we have to take seriously. We have to say, and it's not that we should ever write a law, which, which says people have to go to jail for saying crazy things. I think the first amendment truly is sacred and the right, it's just beyond sacred. It's just the right algorithm to have for it to run a democracy. And, you know, we have it in America and almost no one else has it.

But that's not the same thing as having a right to the gamification algorithm that boosts the craziest stuff preferentially to the end of the earth and maintains it forever. Right? And now you add generative AI to that. And I think the problem just gets worse. So yeah, I'm worried about consequential lies and half-truths in a way that many of my colleagues and podcasts to stand aren't getting back to something which is less contentious,

perhaps death. And the fact that we maybe should spend more time thinking about it, at least be a little bit more aware of it. I want to read a quote from that presentation that you gave on death in the present moment. As a matter of conscious experience, the reality of your life is always now and I think that this is a liberating truth about the nature of the human mind. In fact, I think there's probably nothing more important to understand about your mind than that if you want to be happy in this world. The past is a memory, it's a thought arising in the present. The future is merely anticipated,

it is another thought arising now. What we truly have is this moment and this. And we spend most of our lives forgetting this truth, refuting it, fleeing it, overlooking it. And the horror is that we succeed. We manage to never really connect with the present moment and find fulfillment there because we are continually hoping

to become happy in the future. And the future never arrives. It is always now. However much you feel you need to plan for the future to anticipate it, to mitigate risks. The reality of your life is now. Even when we think we're in the present moment, we are in very subtle ways, always looking over at shoulder, anticipating what's coming next. We're always solving a problem, and it's possible to simply drop your problem if only for a moment and enjoy

whatever is true of your life in the present. You say that your mind is all you have just before that. What does that mean in reflecting on that statement now? What did you hope that people took away from it? Well, there's this, we've spoken about it a little bit already, there's this fundamental truth that you never truly arrive. If your attention is always purposed toward looking for the next thing, anticipating the next thing, if even in the presence of that very thing that was the next thing and now it's now you are busy telling yourself a story about it.

You know, if your engagement with it is mediated by thought in each moment. And you can't actually make contact with it. There's this dissatisfaction, even in satisfaction, right? You get the thing you were longing for and you have such a, you're so distractible, you're so burdened by this automaticity of thought, this conversation you're having with yourself, that the present moment isn't even salient enough to

you, right? And so it's, it's a, most of us, most of the time, live in that kind of, you know, we get buffeted between the past and anticipating the future and thinking about the past. And that flicker happens over even the present moment, right? I mean, we're just, we're just, you know, like, even in a conversation like this, like I'm saying something, if part of my attention is, well, I mean, have I gone on too long about this or it's like, like, so did that even make sense? What would it, there's part of me that is, well, I may have gone on too long about this or it's like, like, so that even makes sense. What would there?

There's part of me that is potentially talking to myself about the very conversation we're having now. Now that is all too normal. Everyone is in that position. I mean, people are people who are listening to us now are struggling to follow my train of thought as I speak, one, because I'm long-winded, but two, my speech is competing with speech that there is occurring to them in their head, right? They're saying, what's he talking about? Oh, Jordan didn't say that. Where does he get off talking about

Jordan now? And there's someone in their fucking head who seems to be them, but strangely not them, because if they're the one talking and also listening, why are they having that conversation in the first place, right? There's this, there's this. People are looking over their own shoulder into the, even when they're trying to seize the present with both hands, right, even if they take my advice in that quote and say, okay, I got to be all about the now, right? The future never arrives. There's just now, so let's enjoy the now. What they will find is

they lack the tools to really do that. And so one tool, again, is something like psychedelics, right? You take the requisite dose of LSD or cello-cibe or MDMA. These are potentially very different experiences, but what will happen under the ages of any of those compounds is very likely you will have a full collision with the present moment of a sort that you have never had before if it's your first time on one of those drugs and all of a sudden the your sensory experience and sensory experience and your conceptual experience will begin to unfold and you will realize there is just much more here than you realize. Like everything becomes a kind of miracle. And the problem with that is that finding meaning in everything is crazy.

You become the guy who's just like, you know, if I'm staring at this microphone, I'm so I come here stoned and I'm just like, oh my God, that microphone is just, you know, that's not the guy you want on your podcast, right? So, but it is possible, it is possible to fall into the well of being such that the present moment lacks for nothing, right? You're just, you recognize that love, what you meet, what you really mean by love, what you should mean by love, is not this transactional thing that you get going with a specific person because of your shared history together

and because of their qualities that you happen to like. It is actually a state of being that you can just plunge into and you recognize that this is the point of life is to recognize this more and more. And love is one facet to this jewel. Compassion is another just awe is another. It gets different shading depending on the environment you put it in. It gets like if you're in the presence of human or animal suffering, well then compassion is the thing that gets amplified. of human or animal suffering, well then compassion is the thing that gets amplified. But in the, in real silence, and in a real, undistracted collision with the present moment,

when you don't have this voice in your head diverting you, or coming up from behind, seeming to be you, right? But what happens is, people feel like a separate self, I mean, here, perhaps I should rewind for a second. Here's the starting point for 99.9% of humanity. People feel like a self. People feel like they're a subject in the middle of their experience, right?

They feel like they're having an experience. They feel like they're on the edge of experience in some sense. They don't feel identical to experience. So an experience is your five sensory channels and your mind. So you've got your scene, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, thinking, feeling, emotions.

And you've got this whole cacophony of what it's like to be you in each moment and sometimes it's very, very pleasant and sometimes it's very unpleasant and sometimes it's just you know, normal and there's nothing really especially salient about it and the default sense is to feel like a self in the middle of that, right? And it's that starting point that is actually the basis for all of our dissatisfaction and psychological suffering. I mean, that is the not that has to be untied

that really allows for a recognition of what the mind is like prior to identification with thought and prior to this capture by this automatic, this reflexive seeking and not finding operation that we're constantly engaged with. So, yeah, it's possible to... So, yes, on some level, you know, it's certainly spiritually speaking, now is everything. There really is just consciousness and its contents in each moment, right? And there's never a reason to wait to recognize that. This isn't to disavow all the other projects

we can have in human life that take some time to accomplish, right? I'm not saying everyone should just become a monk or go to a cave and starve. I mean, like there are things that I like to do in the world and wanna get done and I have projects. But in each moment, the question is, what is available to attention

and why do you suffer? If you're going to ask yourself why do you suffer in each moment? Why is this moment just a little crappy? Why is it just not good enough? Why am I looking forward to this thing in an hour and I'm unable to locate a real ease of being now, you know, before this good thing happens, before this uncertainty gets resolved, right? Before I've hear from the doctor that I don't have the thing that I'm worried about, like all of these contingencies, what's available now, what you find is, and you know, meditation is the ultimate answer to this, in my view, you find this on the part of virtually everyone, this basic incapacity to break the spell of identification with thought and just rest attention as consciousness in the present moment.

And meditation is simply the act of doing that ultimately. And there are many techniques that can seem like something other in the beginning, but ultimately if it works, meditation is the ability to look at this thing you thought was your ego, whether you thought was yourself, that you thought was the homunculus that was in the middle of your experience, and not find it, and not find it in a way

that actually relieves you of the problem of ego-centricity for that moment. Right? It might only last in the beginning. It might only last a moment, right? And then you'll be lost and thought again. But the question is, once you learn to meditate, the question is always, what do you do next? And if you don't know how to meditate, well, you're just going to helplessly be thinking that thought. And you'll think it for as long as you'll think it and it'll, you know, make you angry or sad or regretful or whatever to depending on its contents. And then you'll try to have to figure out how to rearrange your life on the basis of

that thought. So it's not the angry or sad or regretful. But once you know how to meditate, you can recognize thoughts as thoughts. And they just rise and disappear in this wider space of awareness, and you locate your well-being in that space, as that space. But if all of that sounds, is an experience that snaps you out of your egocentric illusions for some period of time. So for me, go to Peru, or which I haven't done, I haven't done ayahuasca, but for me, psychedelics, they weren't dispensable because I was someone, it had you confronted me as an undergraduate

in college with whatever I just said, I would have, even if I had been convinced to try meditating for an hour, I wouldn't have had the aptitude for it that such that I would have immediately noticed there was a there there, I would have bounced off that I would have immediately noticed that there was a there there. I would have bounced off. I would have got the sense that it didn't work for me. Like most people, someone like Richard Dawkins is a perfect example. It's like I am bushed him on my podcast with five minutes of meditation.

And I thought you were gonna say spiked the drink with. Yeah, Richard, I told, he should do psychedelics. But most people who are, and this is especially true of hard-headed, rationalist, skeptic, scientist types, they're so enamored of thought. Thought is the only appendage they have ever found by which to interface with reality, such that they can't imagine a mind prior to thought. They can't imagine a non-conceptual engagement with reality that reveals anything. It sounds like brain damage. My concepts are great. You should have concepts as good as my concepts. You're going to hit me on the head with a hammer?

Yeah, I don't have fewer concepts. When you point them inward, when you say, just try to focus on your breath for 10 seconds and notice how hard that is. Notice what happens. Notice that you get carried away by something that you are not authoring, right? Like you're, did you decide to get distracted about what's going to happen for lunch when I just told you to pay attention to your breath and you were on it for two seconds and now you're thinking about lunch? Like does that, does that know, is that at all interesting to you that that's the hardest thing in the world to just pay attention to anything?

Some people find that interesting some people find that that's a there's a sort of An intimation of a path there like okay Maybe there's something to discover here that could provide some relief to something that is in fact alien me but for many people not and then if you give those people Psych some psychedelic experience, many of them recognize, oh, okay, there is a there there. I don't know if this one is optimal. This is just different, but it's so different, and some of it is so pleasant, and some of it is so Some of it is so pleasant and some of it is so undermining of the bullshit that I generally find so captivating that this is a counterpoint to how I've been living my life.

And so I need more tools and that's how many of us have got into meditation. What is the role of feeling in this, whatever term you want to call it, the embodiment of emotions, the tapping into some sort of intuition, because I resonate a lot with the cerebral horse power model, relying on whatever it is cognitively that I've got, that I can deploy on the thing that's in front of me, and I take a lot of pride in that. I think a lot of people do, a lot of the people that we're listening to, this podcast, listen to your podcast,

we'll feel the same. You know, we take pride in our ability to wrangle the chaos of the world into some sort of order by thinking through things and taking concepts from different disparate areas and bringing them together and going, wow, that's really satisfying. And I understand the way that these two things could result in the third thing in that third thing is

but it does to me in some ways feel a little like a prison and it's almost a prison of your own making and it's one that you're proud of you stand there with this gilded prison wall and everything's coated in the toilet fucking gold and the floor's gold and there's an open sky and all this stuff. What's the role of allowing some sort of embodiment or emotion or feeling to come back into this to allow the cerebral stuff to slip away but not to just be completely blank to be able to hear what you're sort of truly feeling in the moment. Yeah. Meditation, the kind of meditation I recommend is generally called mindfulness.

Initially, it seems like a technique and it's taught as a technique, but ultimately, it's not a technique. It's not something you're doing more of. You're actually doing less of something, which is you're simply not being distracted by thought. And so when you have a feeling, when you feel joy or you feel sadness, mindfulness is, it's often thought of, especially when we're talking about negative feelings that people to classically want to get rid of or diminish, like anxiety, right? It's often thought that mindfulness is the way of getting rid of those feelings, right? And ultimately, it is, but it's not a way of getting rid of them by born of an unwillingness

to feel them, right? Like what you're doing when you're being mindful of an emotion is you're willing to, as you're feeling it entirely, you're feeling it deeply, you're letting yourself become incandescent with that feeling, you're just not thinking about it anymore. And it's not that you're blocking thoughts, you're just noticing thoughts themselves arise along with the feeling, but you're noticing them from the point of you of this prior condition of awareness that can just see thoughts as thoughts, right? The default case is to not know that you're thinking, even if you could say that you know that you're thinking, in each moment a thought is coming up from behind and you just feel

like it's you, and you're thinking about the thing that's making you angry. And that's making you angry. And so you're feeling anger. And then you're thinking about the thing that's making you angry. And that motherfucker, I can't believe. What was he thinking? And that's the voice in your head

and that feels like you. Right, like you have no perspective on. Is it not you? No, it's no more than then these sounds are you when you hear them, right? Like literally, it is like being asleep and dreaming. I mean, that's why many people, I've titled my book and my app waking up and this is an ancient analogy, which is all too literal.

Breaking the spell of thought is very much like waking up from a dream when you just didn't know you were having. Like you were you're asleep and dreaming. You're asleep beside lucid dreams, which are a different case. The normal case is you're asleep and dreaming and you have no idea what your situation is. You are you are convinced you're in a totally different situation than you in fact are you're you're actually safe actually safely in your bed, and yet you think you're somewhere else. You're at a nightclub, you're at the office, you're at the doctors, it could be an emergency, and it's completely imaginary, right?

It could have some point of contact with your life, but it's completely imaginary. And the amazing thing about dreams is the transition from waking to sleep to dreaming is one in which we never register a moment of surprise. Right? Like, it's just, it is amazing that your mind is capable. Like you are, you go to sleep in your bed

and then the very next thing that happens to you as a conscious entity, it's totally discontinuous with where you were in your memory 15 minutes ago and where you in fact are in this moment, the laws of physics have been suspended, dead people are now walking. I mean, literally talking to someone who's dead and you're not even, you might be surprised they're dead.

I had a dream a couple of days ago that I'd committed a war crime and the old cricket team that I used to play for 20 years ago was hunting me. And I'm pretty sure that you were there as a newscaster. So it makes perfect sense. Yes. Obviously. Yeah. But so that that failure of reality testing is something we are guilty of in every moment that a thought seems to be what we are. Where it seems like our mind becomes identical to this voice in our head, where the self, where you just feel like, again, you're listening to me, you're not, you're not, you're not

rocking what I'm saying. The voice in your head says, what is he talking about? Was this, this Buddhism or like what's, what, what is he talking about? Was this Buddhism or like, what's this guy banging on about? Look at that, that is just a rising out of you know, not where, right? There's a total fucking mystery at your back. And then you've got this language

and you, in many cases imagery, getting piped in from, you know, the, you know, stage right and stage left. And you can't figure out how to turn to see where any of this coming from. Where are thoughts coming from? It's utterly, subjectively speaking, as a matter of experience, it's utterly mysterious, right?

And once you break this spell, once you see, it's very, again, it's very much like waking up from a dream. Like once you begin to wake up from a dream, like it could be as bad or as seemingly consequential as possible, right? You're on a battlefield, you're being prosecuted for, you're being chased as a war criminal, right? Your adrenaline is up.

The moment you begin to, your alarm goes off and the dream, the dream, the dream is so insubstantial that in most cases, you can't even remember it, right? Like it could have been really intense. And yet it's so discontinuous with your normal waking consciousness that when it, when it begins to erode, sometimes you can just get this whisper way it was there a beach, you know, like there's just nothing left. And yet it was all encompassing when you were having it.

This, we live our lives, so that strikes us as perfectly normal because basically we all dream when we're asleep and it seems fine. Most dreams are fun or not, but no real consequence. We all live our waking lives, having this conversation with ourselves, which is also totally normal, everyone's doing it. And yet, both of these conditions, being asleep and dreaming and not knowing it, and thinking every moment of the day, and not really knowing it,

and certainly not seeing any alternative to being identified with thought, both of them are a kind of psychosis. And they really are, it's like they're so close to what we recognize in other, in the canonically crazy people as psychosis, right? And so your thought is only really different from psychosis in that you have the good sense to keep your mouth shut in public. If you were, if you were helplessly exteriorizing all of this conversation, you know, just talking to someone who's not there in the way that you're talking to someone who's not

there in the silence of your own mind, you'd be the crazy person on the street is talking to himself, right? It's not, and I'm not saying, I'm not trivializing the tragedy of psychosis. I mean, there's other things going on there. There's classic thought disorder where you're, you know, you find Alex Jones credible and you're, you know, you're just every conspiracy theory is in fact real. But we have, we've all accepted a status quo of Whoa, of more or less constant distraction by this inner voice. And it's so again, it's universally subscribed, but it's not, it's not what is also universally subscribed is frank, unhappiness and dissatisfaction. And it is the basis for unhappiness and dissatisfaction.

Why is there an advice so mean most of the time? You know, if we spoke to friends or even strangers the way that we often speak to ourselves, we'd very quickly be on the receiving end of something that we probably didn't enjoy. Yeah. Why is it that we have this default, not everyone, but a lot of people, that we have this default, not everyone, but a lot of people, this default to to converse with ourselves if that's even the correct term in a way which is horrible. Well, I can be very wise to notice that and to notice that very difference and to just leverage that as a way of changing your inner voice. I mean, you like, so this is like, your meditation is one thing,

it's one remedy for what ails us, but there are other tools, and one tool is to just notice, notice what you just noticed, is that you would never talk to your best friend the way that you talk to yourself, and you can learn to talk to yourself the way you would talk to your best friend, and then your mind is much more your friend.

You know, on some level, wisdom is a matter of making your mind your friend. There are a few layers that can be addressed to do that. And one is the non-conceptual layer of what I'm calling meditation. Another is a conceptual layer of just noticing the character of this conversation and noticing how bizarre it is and contingent it is and how valuable it is ultimately. Like the moment you recognize that you're not, you don't have to change yourself as a person like you, you wouldn't talk to your friend this way. Like you're not this much of an, you're not, not only you're not this much of an asshole

to your friend, you're not an asshole at all to your friend. Like when your friend is going, if your friend is going through the very thing you're going through and beating yourself up over, you know exactly what you would say, you would successfully say it, you're not not an imposter, you wouldn't have to fake saying it.

Like you would just like, what would come out of you is a compassionate, like, let's just figure out how to improve the situation. How are you in the positive zone? Yeah, just like, this is like, there's regret. It's completely unhelpful. Like, the past has passed. You know, you are a great competent person

who's got all kinds of tools, let's make the most of them. Let's just, you know, you know, maybe when you've got this despondent, horrible voice that you give yourself and a kick in the dick on the way out of the door. Yeah. I think I said it or wrote at some point that, you know, I'm to a first approximation, wisdom is simply a capacity to take your own advice. Right.

Like you effortlessly give that advice to others. If you could just give it and successfully receive it from yourself, you know, you're, you're basically Socrates. But as to why it has a negative character, I don't know that it does. I mean, I think some people don't have nearly the self-critical voice that's familiar to many of us, right? So there's just, I think there's probably something like a bell curve there where some people have a fairly happy and even somewhat happily delusional self-talk

and they're a good company for themselves. You often talk about the tension between being and becoming, it kind of feels a little bit like there's something going on here. I'm fascinated with this relationship between finding peace and happiness and gratitude with what you have while asking for more from yourself

and hoping that you can achieve to be able to feel gratitude and drive at the same time. Why, this to me feels like a perpetual challenge, a perpetual difficulty, because the drive to do more often, not always, but often is driven from a sense of insufficiency. It's driven from a lack.

I will be happy when, so on and so forth, but the thought of going through life and just leaving it all on the table because I'm just in this state of sort of constant orgasmic bliss and I didn't fucking need to do anything anymore because I'm just blissed out man. Yeah. Also doesn't sound particularly and I struggle to achieve that no matter how much tantra I try. Yeah. Tantra, I try. And yeah, it's talked to me, this tension between the drive to do more, the acceptance of who we are, the wanting to show up in the world

and to give it everything that we've got and the gratitude for the things that we already have. Yeah, well, it is a constant tension. And I think you want, ultimately, I think you want to be biased on the, the being side of it. I mean, certainly, if you've succeeded enough, right? Like, if you have a, if you recognize that you've won the lottery on some level and you are in a position now where there are billions of people who would consider their prayers

answered if they could trade places with you, right? And you, there'll be a time in your life where you would give anything to trade places with who you are now, right? And you, there'll be a time in your life where you would give anything to trade places with who you are now, right? Like when you're, you know, when you're in your last months of life and you're, you're terminally ill or you're, you know, you've lost someone very close to you. I mean, this, like, when you have, when you have this moment in the sun, where basically, you're basically, things are basically going well. I think it's appropriate to have a module in your mind, which continually pings you, which says, like, if you can't enjoy this, right?

If this is gonna be wasted on you, you're never gonna be happy, right? Like, you should be able to enjoy this part. This is dessert, right? Desert has arrived. And whatever story you have about all the other things you might do or become, this is really like, you know, this is a wonderful life, right?

So can you settle into this at all with your attention, right? And if you can't, I think that's the problem to recognize, right? Like if the thing you should want to become is someone who's better at recognizing the beauty of your life moment to moment. Right? Now there's a paradox there that ultimately has to be overcome. Like the one to become more spiritual, wanting to become a great meditator, wanting to become enlightened, that's a not that gets untied, but it's a fairly

refined one. But it's just totally appropriate to recognize this mismatch between what is objectively true of your life by comparison to anything else that is on the menu and the general mediocrity of your way of being, you know, just the feeling. I mean, and so this is again, this is a duel out to you not in big chunks, but in moments, right? Like this is not like a grand plan. Like, okay, I got my calendar out. This month is gonna be about X. And now I'm gonna nail X. It's much more a thousand lessons

over the course of a day. Like you have to just be attentive to moments where you miss it and moments where you, and then just recognizing that it's available now. Like you were a moment ago, you were tied in and not somehow for some reason, you know, things were awkward or weird and then, and now you're back, right? So like I was, I was coming to this interview and I was, I was late. I was 15 minutes late, you know, and, and I hate being late for whatever reason.

And some kind of rushing to get out of the house and, you know, and I hate being late for whatever reason. And some kind of rushing to get out of the house. And, you know, my wife has got her own day ahead of her. And she's rushing to get out of the house. And we're sort of ping ponging around each other. And I'm kind of missing each other in very, you know, in and out of the bathroom, in and out of the closet in a, and I say goodbye to her. But it was sort of a goodbye, like, you know, I've just completely missed her. Like this beautiful woman who I've decided to her, but it was sort of a goodbye. I've just completely missed her. This beautiful woman who I've decided to spend my life with, and she's now just basically an obstacle.

I have to navigate around so it should be 30 seconds earlier than I would otherwise be. If I just took a moment to recognize how beautiful my life is. I missed her. I missed her. I missed her. And then at the penultimate moment, as I'm grabbing my keys, I'm like, oh, here she is, right? And so I just stop her, I give her a kiss, and then I leave, right?

And it's just the difference between finding that moment and not is enormous, right? And it's just, it's like, the area under the curve could still suck a lot. It's like in the beginning, you might only have 20 moments like that a day, right? But the difference between being someone who never gets it clearly, right? And it never truly punctuates his busyness and ambition and disappointment and everything, every other module that's been installed with just clear, clear contact with the beauty and sacredness of the present moment.

That difference is enormous. And once you have those punk-tate moments,, again, this is a meditation by another name, then you can have a hundred and then you can have a thousand and then and then the then the character of your life can more and more resemble the true virtues of being even when you're still becoming and even when you have the whole apparatus of, you've got employees, you've got a calendar, you've got Slack, it's open all day, it's all that's happening, you can still be someone who's basically already happy, right?

You're not leaning forward so much. And when you do our leaning forward, part of you recognizes, what's this about? You have a kind of mindfulness alarm that goes off when you're, when you're obviously expecting to become happy by the next thing, right? Rather than be truly taken in by that dream, part of you knows, okay, wait a minute, like just set, just correct your posture a little bit. Like, you know that no matter how good this dinner is, it's just gonna be a dinner, right?

And then you're gonna be too full and then you're gonna wish you hadn't eaten all that. And then you're gonna find a hard to sleep. And then, and so like, you know that there's, it can't be a matter of reaching and grabbing and fully satisfying your desire again and again and again as a way to finally become happy. You have to locate your satisfaction more and more in the state of being that is already

here that's proceeding the next change. Your happiness can't be ultimately a matter of changing experience. It has to be a matter of recognizing the nature of experience. Now, that can be very easy to have a cynical take on that and say, okay, well, it's easy for you to say a rich white guy who, for whom everything's going great

and nothing bad has yet happened, and the worst thing that happened say, okay, well, it's easy for you to say a rich white guy who for whom everything's going great and nothing bad Has yet happened and the worst thing that happened to you was on Twitter and so go fuck yourself But no Met for so many bad things have happened like I know what it's like to lose someone close to me I know what it's like to worry that your your kid is really sick I know what it's like to be waiting for the MRI. I'm like like there are all these moments where You know even even the luckiest among us know what it's like to live with real uncertainty and the knowledge that ultimately every bad thing, some version

of every bad thing is going to happen. I mean, even if you're the luckiest and healthiest and richest, then you're just going to be sitting by the phone hearing that all your friends have died, right? Like, if you live to be 120 in perfect health, you're Peter Atia, and you're still doing kettlebells at 120, which I hope you are, Peter and Andrew. Then you're just going to be getting voicemails and texts and whatever else exists at that point hearing that all these people you loved have disappeared. No one gets out of here without a real encounter with Greek-level tragedy. The question is, is it possible to have a mind that can embrace that with equanimity and compassion and love and tranquility? Or do you just have to pretend none of

that's going to happen? The normal mode is to try to be lucky enough so that you can pretend hard enough and long enough that none of that should apply as to me. I'm going to stay healthy for as long as I can stay healthy. I'm not going to think about cancer until somebody has cancer. I'm going to extract as much pleasure as I possibly can in the moment and look, that Bugatti over there is mine. So it's like that's, at best, that's impermanent, right? Even if that was as satisfying as someone could pretend,

and we actually know it's not, and you can know that from the inside, the more you have those experiences, it's impermanent, you know? I mean, it's like a certain point, Andrew Tate is gonna be the 80 year old with bad tattoos, right? Like it's just not, it's like it's not,

it doesn't scale. Like you need a, another gear, and there are many names for this. You need another gear. There are many names for this. Wisdom is one name, spirituality, enlightenment, awakening, meditation, and all of these concepts, psychedelic experiences, all of these tools and concepts are triangulating on a part of the map where one's well-being isn't contingent upon changes in experience.

There's a recognition that is possible about the nature of conscious life itself that is fulfilling. Giving ourselves a good enough reason to just be here in the present moment. Yeah. Yeah. This were both fans and friends with Paul Bloom. Yeah. Paul managed to draw the perhaps surprising correlation between this and the dominatrix that he did interview. As he would, yeah.

He's great with surprising correlations here. It really made me realize, because I think it's in maybe the death in the present moment, talk that he gave us something else that a lot of what we're doing externally with the way that we try and show up in the world. The way that we construct our exterior lives and our experience is to give us a good enough reason to just be here now. And people find this through staring at the night sky, people find it through going to raves in collective effervescence. They find it through, and Paul gave me this reason, I interviewed a dominatrix for one book, the one I'm paying, maybe. And she'd said nothing captures attention like a whip.

Right. Which means that if you get slapped hard by a lady presumably in bicep length gauntlet leather gloves, hide the boots and stuff, if you get slapped by her for the next three seconds, you're thinking about nothing apart from the fact she just slapped me. Yeah. Ding. And you're just hearing that ringing in your ears and that's it. And I think that the way that I've conceived of it,

I wrote this on a beach whilst kind of higher mushrooms. I wrote it on a beach that the goal of a lot of mindfulness and the goal of a lot of what we're doing with our life should be to lower the bar to which we need the world's external stimulus to be in order for us to feel happy, it should be, as Navale says, if you won't be happy with a coffee, you won't be happy on a yacht.

Right. Yeah. And continue to just, whatever the reverse of progressive overload is, yeah, progressive underload. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And just continue to chip away, chip away. I can find it when I'm washing the dishes,

I can find it when I'm walking the dog, I can find it when I'm, et cetera, et cetera, waiting in traffic. Da, da, da, da, da, da. Yeah. And if that seems difficult, it certainly can be, but that doesn't mean it's not possible. And the crucial point is that you have to recognize what the alternative is. The alternative is just bad. The alternative is to not be happy, to be incapable of happiness,

even when you have every reason to be happy. Right? The alternative is to be not all that loving, even when you're surrounded by people you ostensibly love, right? Because you have a mind that is constantly fragmented. You're constantly looking elsewhere. You're constantly waiting for the next thing. You're constantly ruminating about that last thing. And you become bad company for the people in your life who you really want to, to whose lives you, you know, when you're in your clear moments,

you really want, you just want to magnify happiness in their presence, right? This is what I think is an important leap. And I think that you make it very well in waking up, which I told you before we'd started. I think I've gifted my mom every Christmas for the last three years, which is been a great assistance in me being able to get something delivered digitally the night before Christmas when I've left my mom every Christmas for the last three years, which has been a great assistance in me being able to get something delivered digitally the night before Christmas when I've

left it to late. Yeah, early, annually. I highly, highly recommend that everyone go and check it out. Taking it from an abstract wishy washy, this is something that's going to, maybe my anxiety will be a little bit better, maybe I won't feel my anger anymore. To, as David Follas says, does it grow corn? Like show me if it grows any fucking corn. Right.

Like, what does this do for me, to me, to my life, to the relationships I have, to fundamentally the things that I care about the most? Now, the texture of our own minds is not nothing. In fact, you could argue maybe it's everything, but there is something beyond that too, and I think that the thin end of the wedge is getting people in through the door that, well, look at what this could do to your world,

and then the worlds of the people that you care about, and then think about how that could ripple out if you want to be super altruistic and the town and the town and the country and the planet that you're on and so on and so forth. But that is the reminder, what I've missed, my meditation streak, for too long that I get embarrassed about it. And I need to come back to using your app or the timer or whatever. That's the reminder for me that gets me through the door a lot of the time. And I'm hesitant. I came up with an idea the other day

productivity purgatory, which is the things that you do that are supposed to be recuperative, are done only to make you more productive. So you kind of have this perpetual existence of everything I did. Pickleball I play is because I heard Andrew Cuban say on a podcast that, you know, 45 minutes of zone two cardio per week helps me be able to focus better and Peter Atia told me that I've got to go for a walk in the morning because of my glucose tolerance or whatever. Trying to not just do that, but, you know, you can be driven by whatever it is to get you, I think, to get the activation energy to get it moving.

And for me, that's that's one of the most robust ways to remind me. Think about how it's going to change the nature of your daily experience internally and how you're going to show for other people externally. I think that that's a leap which a modern version of mindfulness and then tying it in with the life advice, not just being about the mindfulness, it's like, look, look at the fucking things that you're struggling with, look at the things

that you're challenged by now, the fact that you ruminate, that you have regrets and shame and insufficiency and terror and fear and all that, there is an alternative experience of this and the way that this allows you to show up in the world can also benefit from it too. Yeah, and also there's no boundary between this thing we're calling meditation or mindfulness

and the rest of one's life, right? I mean, that boundary is truly spurious and it's it's an artifact of, you know, first learning, not knowing the thing, then learning it, then setting aside 10 minutes a day or whatever to practice it, or you go on a silent retreat for a month, and then you come back to your life and that there seems to be this difference between life and retreat. side 10 minutes a day or whatever to practice it, or you go on a silent retreat for a month, and then you come back to your life and that there seems to be this difference between life and retreat. But in reality, all you have is your mind in each moment, and you're either suffering or not, you're the loss and thought or not, you're either clearly aware of what it's like to be you or not. And that fluctuation is, that's really the ground

of this practice or these insights. And that's where wisdom is. And so it's not, I would encourage people from the very beginning to view the practice as not at all being separate from the rest of their day. It's like, like, and you don't, in my view, you don't get any credit. I mean, there are consequences to practicing or not practicing, you know, for most people. But it's like, you don't get credit for having meditated earlier today.

Like, I don't give myself, like, if I sat for 20 minutes, it's not like, you bank those 20 minutes, and now you're good to go for the rest of the day. It's like the rest of the day is your practice, right? Your life is your practice. Unsimulable, your life is a meditation. It's just your paying attention to a thousand different things, but in each moment, your attention is being drawn and being dedicated to something and you are making your mind, you're making your being in the world based on how you pay attention.

And meditation is just this period in the day where you've decided, okay, for these ten minutes, I'm going to give myself permission not to think about anything else other than just paying attention. But ultimately, once you see the power of it, ultimately your entire life becomes that even though you have to do other things. Right? So you're doing like, if I'm having this conversation, I'm fluctuating between being totally lost and clearly seeing the nature of my mind in this moment. So it just keeps, it's absolutely no different from what I'm doing if I set aside 20 minutes to meditate, right? It's just, it's the same mind, it's the same challenge of noticing thought as thought,

noticing, you know, clearly noticing emotions and their linkage to thought. Letting go of any grasping at what's pleasant or pushing what's unpleasant away and through the judgment and the contraction around experience. As you pay attention to your mind, you notice that you tend to stay in one of two types of contract types of contractiveness. Your things are pleasant and you're trying to squeeze more goodness out of it. It's like, oh, yeah, finally, the good taste and you're contracted in avarice, essentially. When things are unpleasant, you're pushing them away.

You're trying to change. You're bracing yourself against the physical pain or the embarrassment or the, and again, mindfulness is just the wide open, non-judgmental willingness to feel both of those things. And so you can even step back on the contraction. Like you can feel what you're doing, what you're disposed to do with the feeling tone of pleasure

or the feeling tone of pain. And you recognize that all of that's happening just against this clear mirror of awareness. And you drop back and you're in all of a sudden, it's all floating free of that, which is aware of it. And you're just that condition of open receptivity. And you just keep falling back into that. It's not to say you don't get caught trying

to get some more pleasure out of that thing or you're trying to change this painful thing. But the more you notice that fluctuation, the more you notice that real relief is in not successfully doing either of these two things, but in just recognizing you're the mirror of awareness and the beautiful and ugly things are just going to keep coming. It's one of the places where mindfulness gets closer to stoicism. I think what Mark has a really as quote about the universe itself is change and life is

but what we deem it. The story that we tell ourselves. I think you've got an example that I use all of the time, even in my own life, for the people that do CrossFit or Brazilian Jiu Jitsu or hardcore pickleball, the way that you feel at the end of one of those workouts where you can taste metal in the back of your throat and your heart rate high and your sweating and your panting and it's 105 degrees in Austin, Texas or wherever, that sensation is associated with the story that you tell yourself that this is worthwhile, that this is good for me, that this is something

that I can feel proud of. But if you were to have that sensation spontaneously stood in line at the bank, you would be pushing through to get the talent to call the fucking ambulance because this is terrifying. So very much the story that we tell ourselves around the present moment largely determines our experience of it. Yeah, and that's another example of a sort of a conceptual layer at which you can do

a lot of wise work in changing your experience by using certain kinds of concepts as an antidote to other bad concepts. So you tell yourself a better story. So reframing's just a very good technique, but it's sort of a layer above the mindfulness layer of just noticing that they're all just stories, right? And there's no place for them to land, right? So it's like, and I think you people should intelligently engage both levels. I'm not discounting the power of reframing, or yeah. And stoicism is fantastic. I mean, there's, you know, Bill Irvin this

philosophy professor who wrote a great book The Guide to the Good Life has a track has a series on waking up that is really great and you know, I'm kind of late to the to stoicism as I you know, I discovered it when more or less everyone else did in the last 10 years, but you know, I hadn't read as I discovered it when more or less everyone else did in the last 10 years, but I hadn't read Santa Clara or Marcus Aurelias. Even when I got a philosophy degree back in the day, and it's incredible. It's just as an operating system for your mind.

There's very few tools you need. And one we just talked about here briefly on a tribute, but just like negative visualization, just recognizing how happy you would be to like you're in this normal state of dissatisfaction, recognize how much you would pay to be returned to this crappy little spot you're in now that you're not enjoying. If all of these other bad things that had happened, they're happening to someone right now and it's just you're lucky now that you're not enjoying if all of these other bad things that had happened, that are happening to someone right now and it's just you're lucky enough that it's not you. The things that you're ignoring now are taking for granted. The cancer diagnosis previously.

You're not getting today. Previously just things that you wished that you once had. Yeah. And yet you're able to continue to adapt to this. What do you disagree with Stoicism about? Is there anything that stands out where you think I'm not on board with that? Well, I think it probably has a to... I'm not sure their view of our emotional lives is something I would want to sign on to in every respect. I mean, there's kind of a detachment from the decapitation of your child. There's a kind of a freeze of your business. There's a fundamental detachment that I'm not sure

is the most interesting channel to be on in the end. I mean, it can be very useful given where we normally live, but not so rich. But also it's just, in my experience, I have not, you know, I don't consider myself a true scholar of stoicism, but I don't think the sto, I mean, really the Greeks in general lacked a methodology, right?

There are many of the insights that you can recognize in Buddhism. You can also find among the Greeks, not just the Stoics, maybe even more so among the skeptics, but they didn't really have a methodology of training attention, and they didn't have a comprehensive marriage of spiritual contemplative training and ethical insight that is as systematic and as useful as I've found in Buddhism in particular. So I mean, I'm a fan of other Eastern traditions

as well, but again, not in a religious sense, but just taking, I'm very eclectic, taking what I think is useful and leaving the rest. But if you had to just go to one shelf in the bookstore to find, to Pareto optimize the whole spiritual journey, you really can't do better than Buddhism in my view. I mean, they asked there's there's, they asked, there's some, there's certainly some bullshit that should be ignored or at least some stuff that's unjustifiable.

That shouldn't be, you know, not too much faith should be placed in. But it's, you could almost pick at random, you know, like you go to, you know, the 10,000 page corpus and just open it at random and you're not going to get a treat as on how to sacrifice a goat, right, or why you should kill homosexuals. You're gonna get something absolutely clear and totally serviceable in the 21st century about the nature of consciousness. I really enjoyed Robert Wright's book on the,

yeah, why Buddhism is true. Talking about religion, you spent a good part of your career deconstructing religion, only for it to then perhaps be replaced with some similar religious thinking around things like identity politics. Was that was creating that vacuum and error? Is there any way around this? It's religious thinking just baked into our human. I don't think it was the same people necessarily. I'm not sure.

It is true that secularism and atheism seem to win many subscribers in the intervening years. I don't know how much can be attributed to the so-called new atheists, but there was, organized religions seems to have lost many of the subscribers and it's, you know, many of us perceive into that vacuum. People found meaning in politics, which is arguably no more functional.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I, I don't believe, I mean, I find many people will argue that other people need X, right? They need mythology, they need religion, they need whatever. Other people though, you and I don't, you and I are smart enough, successful enough, we got our head screwed on straight. We can get along fine with that X, but other people, obviously millions and millions of people need X. I think that just shows a lack of imagination and I mean, it's just patronizing and I fear it's actually just not accurate for many, many people, right?

It's like, who needs, because you could do that with anything. Like all these people, millions of people need to be confused about human health. They need to have like superstitions about how to be healthy. You and I, we can deal with biology and real medicine, but these people need, they need to believe that these bogus pills really work, right? It's just, why would we think that? Right? It's in fact true that many people are stuck in that spot, and we have a challenge to disabuse them of certain bad ideas.

But does anyone need astrology? No, no one needs astrology. If we categorically disproved astrology such that it really landed for everybody, and all of these people sort of staggered out of their, you know, dungeons with this astrology-shaped hole in their lives that they had to figure out how to fill, the problem just evaporates. Like, they would, they don't fill it with an astrology-shaped object. They would actually just be disabused of the astrology solution and they would go on to believe and do other things.

Now it just so happens that most of the time, we have strands of culture where it's not only hard to disobey people about ideas, it's taboo to do it. So it's like specifically with respect to religion, in current politics, with respect to certain pieces of far left and far right ideology, more attuned with the far left at the moment. It's just, you know, they're kind of blasphemy tests in both spaces. There's dogmatism that goes on examined. It's not only unexamined, it's in a religious context. It's a virtue that is dogmatic, right?

I mean, dogma is literally a good word in a religious context. So like these are facts. They're not going to be, we're not going to reconsider them. Any demand that we reconsider them, we're going to consider a kind of violent assault. We're going to, you know, not only we're not going to talk to you really, you know, even if we pretended to have a debate with you, we're going to hate you. And if we only had enough power, we would, you know, physically subject hate you, right? Sounds pretty religious. That's where, so they're parts of culture where we're stuck there, but it just doesn't seem,

the idea that it's necessary that more people can't be like us, right? Just seems like a failure of imagination to me. I think that everyone could have a truly 21st century non-sectarian relationship to all ideas, all possible projects, all invitations to collaboration. We could just deal with everything on its merits and we could avail ourselves of all the world's literature, all the legacy code, everything that's still surfaceable, everything that's good. And if part of that is the golden rule, well, yeah, sure, it is. Yeah, the golden rule is great. But you don't have to believe Jesus was the son of God

or born of a virgin to think the golden rule is great. I mean, the first you just recognize the golden rule came from Jesus, but it also came in the Old Testament, it came in other contexts. I mean, it's just like the golden rule is just an ethical jewel that many people have stumbled upon. We should just use the totality of human knowledge in the present. And to do that honestly requires that we not firewall certain parts of that knowledge with these dogmatic claims to, you know, divine inspiration or, you know, your racist, if you even consider the possibility that, that, you possibility that a virus came out of a lab.

It's just... It's been interesting to me to watch this, especially because me and Douglas Murray became friends just after he wrote the madness of crowds. And didn't that, he's talking about the collapse of grand narratives. He's talking about the fact that people are latching themselves on to ideological movements, political movements, identity-based movements, to try and fill what he saw as a whole that had been left with this grand narrative that came over the top. And it's interesting to me to think that, you know, that book 15 years ago would have kind of felt like what the fuck are we talking

about here? We have bigger fish to fry when it comes to what people are ideologically kind of addicted to, which might have been more in your wheelhouse, and yet in the space of no time at all this compulsion for something rather than nothing. But I mean, there are other variables. I mean, there are obvious economic ones, the fact that virtually all of the productivity gains in the last really 50, 60 years have gone to the top 10% in our society. I mean, literally, I think it's um 92% of the stock market is owned by the top 10%, and I think it's like 50% 10% and I think it's like 50% by the top 1%. Right.

So, you know, it's just 90% of people aren't in the game and not reaping the benefits of modernity in an economic sense. Right. And they feel the dissatisfaction and, you know, one could argue unfairness of that. I mean, our system is not tuned to wisely cause all boats or even most boats to rise with this particular tide, right? It's just not. I mean, we got 10% of the boats doing pretty great. And then we got 1% and then the top one, you know, 1% of 1% doing especially great. And this, this kind of stratification given that so much of people's sense of how they're doing so much of their, you know, concept-based

estimation of their own well-being and therefore their actual experience well-being is comparative. Right? I mean, they're not, and then in many cases they're not even begrudging Jeff Bezos on his yacht. They're just noticing the difference between their life and the people who live one mile away. So much of these, so when you price that in, the consequences of inequality, wealth inequality, and income inequality, I think that could be enormously agitating to people and also give, it can make certain, in this case, you know, populist narratives attractive that would otherwise discredit themselves

because they're not, they're obviously not wise. If you don't have skin in the game, the game, if this game is just not working, then of course you want to upend the board. You'll enjoy watching the pieces fly all over the room because this particular game of monopoly was not, you didn't have anything on Park Place, right? You know, none of that money was yours, really. It's easy, you know, it's easy to see why many, many millions of people would be cynical and just want to see, they just want to see change, right? They just want to see a wrecking ball come through and reset things. And I, I, you know, credit, you know, Trump and Trumpism as a symptom of that more than a cause, really.

We were ready for that moment. I think it's Warren Buffett or Charlie Munger that says, we would be able to be happy if we just wanted to do better, but we want to do better than our next on neighbor. It's this perpetual one-upmanship and sort of keeping up with the journey. So I agree that, you know, it's massive wealth inequality causes discord and upset and perhaps primes the landscape for people to want change regardless of where it comes from. Right.

But I'm pretty sure that that continues all the way down or all the way up as wealth continues to increase It's one of the reasons that I'm relatively skeptical of UBI because I think that if you just flatten the playing field You then start to play games about people are gonna find people are gonna find ways to do status You know, we'll store who wrote that great great book of status game, you know, this is Tribe somewhere that grows yams. They grow massive yams These unbelievably huge and they have to take four men to wheelbarrow these yams in they grow massive yams, these unbelievably huge yams and they have to take four men to wheelbarrow these yams in. And I'm pretty sure that what you do is you give the yams to your greatest enemy or something like that. And it's almost like it's like this yamshape middle finger

that you like. I'm so rich I could forsake this. Yeah, precisely. You know, people will find ways to compete the status and keeping up with the Joneses is It permeates an awful lot. Status is a game that everybody is going to continue to play Yeah, um I mean, I would recommend in that case. I would recommend That we seek our status more and more in Being above that game. Now, and that's not as absurd as it sounds, right?

Like, you can see pieces of this in just how very rich, successful people already start to behave. Like, you know, at a certain level of success, like it's important that you're wearing a suit and you drive a nice car, you have a nice watch and you have all those signs of status. But at a certain point, you show up in a hoodie because everyone knows, they know your, you know, they know your go-to-sits and tanner. They know your go-to-sits and tanner.

The richest people drive the shit's as cause. Right, and like, I don't have a guy just Uber, you don't have a car. Now, you can be cynical about all that. But, and some cynicism is appropriate, but there are benign forms of, like if, I guess you could probably notice this now happening around climate change and private airplanes, right? Like, so it was the case that the highest status position with respect to travel is, well, I've got a Gulfstream.

You want to take my Gulfstream, you know, what could be better than that? Well, that's starting to erode. The more stigma gets attached to just squandering fuel on a Gulfstream, right? The more you look like an asshole for doing that, no matter what story you tell yourself, no matter how successful you are, no matter how much it saves your time. You sort of look like an asshole on a Gulfstream. At a certain point you could imagine that flipping and all of a sudden the high the real highest out of thing is now I just like commercial like you know you can see Elon flying jet blue and it's

just yeah I just you know it's fly jet blue it blue. And it'll be, it will be because, it'll be because so much punishment has been meted out on the other side of like it's just, no longer looks cool to be burning that much fuel. Now, I'm hopeful that we do live in a world of just really open-ended abundance where, yes, there is actually no tension between affluence and ethics in the end, right? So that ultimately we're going to get the right fuels.

We're going to power this all with sunlight. We're going to have a high tech society where our machines get better and better and we start pulling wealth, essentially, you know, out of the ether. Let's leave AI aside, but, you know, a successful, successful proliferation of AI would be part of this. I'm, you know, as you know, worried that we're going to screw that up or that that is just in fact too, too hard a challenge. But let's say we got that right. Ultimately, this could be a have your cake and eat a two-situation where it's not a matter of, of denying ourselves anything really, materially, except we should recognize that we, that there's certain

degree, certain disparities of luck that we find ethically intolerable, right? like it's just like how, given that it be currently and for the longest time, there is a zero sum tension between a dollar spent over here and a dollar not spent over here, just how comfortable should each of us be with a geny coefficient in our own society that just goes, goes asymptotic. Right, like we're at one, right? Like, yes, I've got a trillion dollars, but now my main preoccupation is trying to figure out how my compound in New Zealand is gonna be staffed with bodyguards, I can really trust.

Yeah, not to kill me. And it's like the Douglas Rushcough. Are you talking about the show and you tell me that story? Yeah, not to kill me. And it's like the Douglas Rushkopf conversation. You told me that story. Yeah, so it's just like, yeah, if that's where your mind goes, you should be spending much more time with your billions and trillions figuring out how to make a society where all you meet when you walk out on the sidewalk are other happy people,

and in your case, happy customers who are just doing creative things in their free time. How much of a difference do you think that would be over the last few years in culture wars, culture discussions if Christopher Hitchens was still alive? Well, it would silence all the morons who think that he might have supported Trump. I think that would be worth resurrecting him just for that, just to see the look on their face when he got him talking about Trump. I can't believe the people I've heard from on that point. Yes,

he hated the Clintons, but there is zero percent probability that he would have had anything kind to say about Trump. I don't think it would have been, it would have been wonderful to have ridden Shotgun with him on many of these topics. I mean, he was, you know, I'm a fan as well as a friend, but I don't think, you know, I mean, he was, he was enough of a, an old dog who would have been hard enough to teach new tricks.

I'm not sure he would have been lighting up Twitter the way many people might hope. I mean, maybe, but he's some, yeah, I mean, he's much more like someone who would have for the longest. He was not an early adopter in any sense, you know, it's like he just, he mean, he's much more like someone who would have for the longest. He was not an early adopter in any sense. You know, it's like he just, he barely could barely do email in a normal way, right? So it's just, it's some, yeah, I think he would, I mean, many of us are in this spot. I mean, many of us who are much more early adopters and more tech-enabled than he ever was. You know, there's a kind of a nostalgia for books and old models, and some of us are trying to figure out how to return to that in new ways, right? So, yeah, I mean, he loved literature so much

and print so much that I think he would be, he would still be clinging for dear life to print so much that I think he would be, he would still be clinging for dear life to shelves of books and a business model that tries to prioritize physical books. Oh, pigeon posts basically every other way of doing. What about the way, what do you think he would have made of the state of cultural discourse at the moment knowing what you knew about him? Well, I think he would have found, he would have been in this uncharacterizable middle where half the time you're recognizing all that's wrong and masochistic and insane about wokeness and all that's wrong and sadistic and dangerous in Trumpistan and just taking each difficult object as it comes.

I think he would be, perhaps I flatter myself, but I think he would be very much in my lane with certain exceptions. I mean, certain things that I'm very interested in, which I prioritize, which he never saw at the point of, much of which we talked about here. I mean, meditation, spirituality, psychedelics, he had no file on any of this, and I don't think was gonna get a file on any of that. He's in Douglas Murray's camp, I think, along with.

Yeah, well, I think Douglas is more, Douglas and I haven't gone around this track, I don't think, but I feel in Douglas more of a, kind of a yearning for the spiritual than I ever detected in. I know. You know, Hitch was just prided himself on. Whiskey being harder headed than that. Yeah.

It was the grape and the grain and the pleasure of good books. Yeah, I, um, I often think about I have a couple of friends, Alex, as one of them, who's a huge fan of Hitch and, and through him, you know, someone's passionate about something, you end up becoming passionate about it because of that passion. Yeah. With my housemate, uh, we always watch videos of motor cross, rally cross, sorry, whether guys are going down and you'll see these dudes in anirax, and it's in the middle of Montana or Liverpool or some wooded area somewhere, and they've been there all night to get the right spot, and it's pissing down and they're soaked wet through, and they get to see roughly 0.3 seconds of a cargo past, and as they do it, they're so fired up. And seeing someone love anything

that much fires me up to watch it as well. There was this blog post by Scott Alexander from Slate Starco, now Astral Codec 10 codecster. And no, sorry, it wasn't. It was a Eliezza Yucowsky. And it's at the very start of rationality from AI to zombies. And he says, the reason that rationalists get the piss taken out of them so much, one of the many reasons that they get the piss taken out of them so much is it's rare to find anybody that loves anything. Now, anybody to have a degree of passion. And if you find someone who stumbles upon the book of rationality and thinks this gives me answers to a lot of the cognitive bias problems that have been facing in my life,

thinks this gives me answers to a lot of the cognitive bias problems that have been facing in my life. It's just easy to mock them. It's easy to mock passion in that regard. In some circles, I think specifically being British, this is sort of genealogically something that we've got the tall puppy piss-taking mocking undertone. And yeah, from Alex loving Hitch so much, I got into him too. And then, you know, thinking about what sort of vacuum that perhaps could have left. And I don't disagree that culture is bigger than any... Culture is bigger than all of us, but there are certain voices, you know, Jordan as being a good example at the right place and the right time, and so on and so forth, that can really be the, you know, the pebble and the stream that can direct

things or Trump on another side, you know, Elon kind of now. Yeah, I often wonder about what what Hitchie's behavior would have been like in the, in the modern world. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I certainly miss him because, I mean, there are so many moments where they were just perfectly teed up for him in the last six years. I mean, just flettically, you just would have...

Yeah, there's no one I would like to have pulled onto the field more than Hitch at certain moments. Both left-hand right. Have you been keeping a breaststroke? Have you noticed this trend that's happened of Westerners choosing to convert to Islam in adult life? Obviously, you spent a lot of your career criticizing Islam and now we have, I don't know, accused of lapping.

These people very well made, truly believe in the doctrine, but Andrew Tate is, is one of them and downstream from that. There's on-street interviews with young British youths with these Islamic scholars or or Emams or whatever Converting them on the street and they're like doing the doing the thing on the on the street. Have you ever you? I haven't seen those Vox pop conversions, but I saw Andrew Tates conversion.

Islam is just mimetically, it's perfect for a specific audience. It's a explicitly macho religion, right? It's a no-pussies religion, right? It's just a... And it's just, you know, it's a... Like with Christianity, you have to pretend... All pussies. Yeah, well, you have to pretend to be happy, to be losing for the longest time, and you're basically just waiting

for Jesus to come back and rectify this grave injustice. The meek, shill and herith, the earth, there's no putting this place right. We're not going to win until we see Jesus arrive on trailing clouds of glory. So it's all going to be fucked up for the longest time and there's no imperative that we really do anything, like there's no expectation that we are going to win before anything good happens. I mean, I guess there's one Christian sect where they do have an expectation of of kind of winning, you know, a thousand, a thousand years of millennial glory and then Jesus comes. But for most Christians, it's a story of failure and then they get to say, look, we were

right. You know, Jesus, you know. Where you came from. Yeah. Yeah. With Islam, there's an expectation that they're going to conquer the world, right? And there's an imperative to conquer the world. And for serious Muslims, it's like,

you don't have to be impatient necessarily. You can take as long as you want, but we all know this is moving in one direction and you need to be a spiritual warrior. And if you take this really far, if you become a jihadist, right, you're, and then especially, doctrinar, militant, you know, troop believer,

well then you're a kind of spiritual James Bond. I mean, it's like you get to be jaco and care about and know that you're gonna go to paradise, right? Like, so you get all the tools. Like it's the first person shooter that literally you get all the good guns. Like it's not this boring, I'm pretending to just, I'll turn the other cheek, you know not this boring, I'm pretending to just,

I'll turn the other cheek, you know, thank you, sir, I can have another. And you know, where the, it's a high T religion, and that's why a schmuck like Andertate thinks that he's had a real insight in embracing it. People are seeing it as a redress to women of the West who have been conned by feminism into believing that these things are good for them.

They're not good for them. We need no one's happy. Look at the divorce rates. Look at the 60% of US teenage girls age 12 to 16 have regular, persistent feelings of hopelessness. Yeah. Everyone's only fans pathologically fapping themselves into a early monster energy hole or whatever it is that they're doing.

Right. The answer is a return to something that's got a bit more lindy nature to it. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's the claim that I want to deny. I mean, it's explicitly retrograde. I mean, it is regressive. It is backward looking. It is not, it is not using all of the good ideas we've had in the meantime, right?

It's like, it's a disavowal of the present and the near present. I mean, the modernity in the case of Islam, it's a disavowal of the present and the near present. I mean the modernity in the case of Islam is a disavowal of nearly 1400 years of wisdom and insight. It's a claim that in the seventh century somebody was so smart and so wise and so pressioned and so had his shit together that everything were thinking about and talking about happened then, right? So we should confine ourselves to the products of that conversation. That's just, I mean, it's, it's in basilic on its face, right? And it's not to say, again, it's not to say there's nothing useful to come out

of Islam. But whatever is useful, we can use without believing that Muhammad was visited by the Archangel Gabriel and got the last download from the Creator of the Universe. It's just not, this is not to deny any of the cultural problems that someone like Andrew Tate or, I mean, there's lots of people we've we've dragged into the conversation here but like all of these people who I've criticized to some degree Tate or RFK or or you could add Elon to this all these people are kind of living out the consequences of their dissatisfaction with the present on the public stage and

winning a lot of followers as a result. They just like the way these guys are complaining about the obvious excesses of the left for the most part. I have several problems with this. One is that most of these guys, most of the time, some of them all of the time are ignoring the obvious problems. And in many cases, quite a bit scarier problems on the right. They really care that the government tried to micromanage

the messaging about COVID on Twitter. That's the biggest story of the decade, right? That's, I've got, I've got a hundred podcasts in me and a hundred newsletters in addition to that on that topic. But they don't really much care about what happened on January 6th, where we had a sitting president who for months had been declining to support a peaceful transfer of power and for the first time in our history, we did not have a peaceful transfer of power. And we had a sitting president trying to visibly try to steal an election all the while claiming an election had been stolen from him and everyone around him knew that was bullshit. We were poised on the verge of a constitutional crisis, which may yet return in 2024. And yet we have these guys more worried about, you

know, trans overreach with respect to bathrooms. And I get all that. I get how infuriating so much of the woke, identitarian nonsense is, but you have to have some proportion and you have to keep both problems in view. And why are people not doing that in your view? Well, I mean, so to some degree, it's people have, you know, a one-sided take aligns with their biases in many cases, and they'll have political biases. They were a creature of the right. They wanted to be a creature of the right, and it's just very easy to focus

on what's wrong with the left. And vice versa, you know, if you're a creature of the left, it's easy to just be all Trump all the time, and you don't have any time for criticism of wokeness, right? You know, you're gonna run, who, I don't know, you're, this could be wrong, but you know, Trevor Noah on wokeness, right? You know, you're going to run, I don't know, you're, this could be wrong, but you know, you're Trevor Noah on the daily show, right?

Like yes, tell me what fucking John, Don Jr. did wrong. I've got time for it, but Hunter Biden, who cares, right? So there's a symmetry there. But part of it, I think, is outside of normal channels, there's audience capture, right? Like you find, you get signal from the noise on one thing, you've just launched your substack and you see that people have endless time for your hot take on COVID and the dangers of mRNA and the spike protein, boy, doesn't that sound scary? It's cool. Why they call it a spike protein, right?

So let's do a hundred piece of content on that topic, right? To the exclusion of everything else that's happened. I'm not saying I know the mRNA vaccines aren't going to fuck some people up or haven't already, right? It's a valid conversation worth having, but again, there's there's proportion here that gets totally lost in each of these ecosystems. And what's happening out here in podcast to stand and over there in substack a stand is people find a an appetite for a certain style of conversation about a specific narrow band of topics, and

they just go all in on that for obvious reasons. It's understandable, but I think it's shattering our society. We have a society where increasingly, and this is, again, this is a near-term risk of AI, you'll leave an existential risk aside, we have a society where it's becoming increasingly difficult and in many cases impossible to have a conversation about facts that are just crucial to understand for the maintenance of democracy, for public health, for, you know, on myriad fronts, we just, we can't have a real-time conversation that converges on agreement, it seems, and it's just getting harder and harder to do it. What would be the chance in your mind that we make it through the next? Let's call it

and that we make it through the next. Let's call it century as a civilization with something like us being functioning still intact because we have some breakdowns culturally, many breakdowns culturally, we have bad incentives, we have a media system which facilitates bad actors either willfully or negligently or ignorantly rising risk of artificial intelligence, desktop printers that can synthesize bio weapons, although there's some pretty good clauses in there that limit that from happening. Population collapse, although not a true existential risk, something that's, you know, it's definitely not going to help. Nuclear weapons still out there, lurking around, all of the background natural risk that just exists

as a byproduct of us being on a single planet at the moment. Yeah. How Toby your to pills, are you when it comes to the conception of the next century or two? Well, I mean, like Toby, I would just be guessing. But I'm, like Toby, I would just be guessing. But I'm, I'm troubled. That's like what I would like to be able to say is, you know, the chance, the chance that existential

catastrophe is actually going to occur is, gotta be minuscule, right? Like it's less than 1%. Like that's where you'd want to be. You're just guessing, but very low probability that we're gonna wipe ourselves out, or that we're gonna cancel the future. I don't think that's the case. Like I just think it's, whether it's, I mean, even a 10% probability is awful, right?

I mean, 10% comes up, you know, you just, just take out some dice and play around and see what a 10% result looks like. How often that comes up, right? I mean, that's, that's terrifying. And I think there are many smart people who would say the risk of real catastrophe is quite a bit higher than 10%. I think they'll be put in it one in six right over the next century.

Yeah, I believe so. And if you kind of widen the footprint of, you take existential risk and you just widen that to extreme risk, right? Just like, okay, it's not existential, but you know, you might want to watch the road warrior films a few more times because that's going to start to look like the future, right? Who wants to live in the aftermath of societal collapse, you know, fundamental societal collapse. Now, it could be, like, that's a totally conceivable

trajectory for our species. We could screw up everything and dig out and finally recover, and it could take a, we could have this unnecessary and truly harrowing detour into something awful for 100 years, right? But who wants that? But if you add that to this possibility space,

yeah, I don't, you know, how confident can you be that something like that isn't going to happen in the next 100 years given what we're doing and what we're finding it so difficult to do. And that's what was so disperient for me about COVID and its aftermath. It's not that I was so worried about COVID. I was so worried about our inability to respond coherently to something that should have been pretty simple

to respond to, right? And so I was, for the longest time, there was this initial month where, or two, where like who knows how bad this is gonna get, who knows how bad this is. So I was just thinking more about COVID, but after a couple of months, I was much more thinking about it as a stress test

for society and for our information ecosystem and for our cultural norms and our politics. And I really do view it as a failed dress rehearsal for something quite a bit scarier. Let me lay this out for people maybe who haven't heard you talk about this before. I haven't thought about what happened with regards to our cultural response. You might need a bit more grip on that bottle later. The way that you could see COVID, the way that you could conceptualize COVID generally, would be almost like a dress rehearsal, almost like a civilizational wide vaccine, like a test. It was a very weak virus in the end. Thank God for that. You know, it didn't, the mortality rate wasn't there. Transmissibility was pretty

high, but it wasn't, it wasn't super brutal when it came to the death, so although not great. But what it did do, and I think you're worrying and mine align here, which is, and I haven't heard anybody, no matter how ardently anti-vacs, anti-lockdown, anti-mask, the lib-tard cooks are coming for us again, this is all Bill Gates's sort of wet dream-type stuff, it doesn't matter about those, and I have many agreements with those people. I haven't heard anybody push back against what this did do was prime the next four generations of humans. For as long as this is a still a cultural meme

that continues to take over, for the next time that something like this potentially happens, but this time it's got a 30% mortality. Or this time it kills everybody under the age of 10. Or this time it kills all women. Yeah, Right. What is the response that occurs there given how we've been primed previously? And I would love to hear, you know, the, I would love to hear the like we don't need to worry about that broke case for that because regardless of how you, whether it was overreach, whether it was,

these cooks telling us to stay in our house, this fuck you, I'm getting out and playing with the kids and cutting open the locks to the local park, that it's made the situation worse. It's made the situation existentially, civilizationally. It's primed us to be more fragile, more knee jerk in terms of our response. It's not good. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and that's where I've parted company with many of our fellow podcasters

and many of my friends. And in some cases, former friends in this, again, this concern around misinformation is the way I would tend to frame it. Many people are out in podcast land are allergic to a concern over misinformation because they're so concerned about the infringements or perceived infringements of freedom of speech. So the de-platforming of people from YouTube, like that is the, you know, the Earth crossing object

that we just, we have to prioritize, like under no circumstances can that happen. Like even with Alex Jones, like that's just, we need to hold the line here, we need to be free speech absolutists of a sort. And that's more or less all they talk about. They're within, and then on the other side, we have people who are focused on the misinformation problem.

They're focused on the, on the, I mean, the real calamity we just witnessed where you just see like you have public health and information that just cannot get through because there's so much misinformation, there's so many conspiracy theories and there's so many pratfalls on the part of the actual establishment that is understandable that no one is. That's not coming in I gonna listen to? Yeah, right. So, it's, but they're still, they're taking the one that they, they can't afford to admit any of that

because they're so terrified about this erosion of trust in our institutions, right? So it's like, let me take someone like, there's a few lenses, you can look at the suit, you take like a character like Anthony Fauci, right? So it's like, let me take someone like, there's a few lenses you we could look at the suit. You take like a character like Anthony Fauci, right? I got a, I don't know Fauci. I don't know what's true of him. I don't know, you know, but I just know that on, on one side, he is utterly maligned, right? He's just this goblin who is as corrupt as you could possibly imagine. He lied about everything, he was wrong about everything,

like he is just, he is the antithesis of an authority on COVID or anything else, right? On another side, you can still just bring him on CNN as just the most top shelf authority on public health. We could hope to have. And the only thing worth thinking about is just how awful his life has become as a result of how he's been maligned over here. He's just inundated with death threats. He needs a secret service detail because all of these crazy people from Trump on down have vilified him with lies.

Now I am totally prepared to imagine that the truth is quite a bit more nuanced, that he could have been a great scientist, maybe he is a great scientist, maybe he did many great things, but maybe he's conflicted in all these other ways which have been discovered by people like RFK Jr. or other people. Some people might have been total crackpots, but they're right about this thing that Fauci did or didn't do, right? And that if we were going to parse it in the middle here, we would find, Oh, yeah, you know what? This Wuhan thing was always going to go haywire.

He should have known it. He's, he's culpable and was lying about his culpability. And that exchange with him and Rand, Rand Paul was one where Rand Paul, whatever you think about his politics was absolutely right. And Fauci, whatever you think about his politics, was absolutely right. And Fauci, whatever you think about his politics, was basically just trying to cover his ass with this, you know, rabbinical definition of gain of function, which we all knew was bullshit. And we shouldn't be doing this research and it's, it's, Fauci, for whatever reason, can't admit that he participated in something that was awful, right? I don't know. I don't know if any of that's true. Whether Fauci's involved failed over here when you if you're if you're focused on

This is a failed dress rehearsal what we didn't manage during COVID and the basic certainty that we're gonna have something much worse, right? And then we have to prepare for that It's very easy to see that and then we have to prepare for that. It's very easy to see that you just have to basically ignore all of this. Like we just have to, we just have to stigmatize all of this is conspiracy thinking, all of these people are like non-standard bad actors.

None of them have real jobs. They just have podcasts and newsletters. Just get the New York Times and the Washington Post and Harvard University and all these other institutions to hold the line here. Let's try to just not shine too much light on the ways we embarrassed ourselves. We're certainly not going to apologize for anything. Let's hope we get a better president, Republican or Democrat next time, who's not a maniac, who didn't give his first interview to Alex Jones.

And let's just get back into a place where everyone trusts the CDC again, right? Now I don't agree with that, but like 75% of that could be right. Like I think we could age out of all of this hysteria. Just imagine what would happen if in 2024, we had a reasonable choice for the presidency. So Trump is not the Republican candidate. We have a more normal Republican candidate who let's say wins, right? I don't know who that would be, but let's say whatever,

you know, Nikki Haley wins, right? We have president Haley. She no longer has to pander to Trump stand to be a Republican. We get a more normal politics and we, and many, many smart people, however quietly, begin to internalize many of the lessons we should have learned in the last few years about just how threadbare many of our institutions have become, and how woke ideology, vitiated most of them, right? I mean, how political correctness and just sheer lunacy contaminated our thinking about so many things so much of the time in recent years. And we sort of age out of all of that and we have a more normal experience of the grown-ups being in the room much of the time being able to make real decisions.

I think that's to be hoped for. Now, I'm not saying that we don't need innovation around that, but like that some some swing back into normalcy is to be hoped for. Now, I'm not saying that we don't need innovation around that, but like that, some swing back into normalcy is to be hoped for. What's, there's an alternate path to that future that may be more realistic, but the future worth wanting is a future. However we get there, whether it's just sort of like we just, you know, grid our teeth and age into something more normal or we innovate and dignify all of this hysteria with more and more of a fair hearing. But the thing we innovate to is real institutions that we can trust, right? There is no future worth wanting where we don't have institutions that are trustworthy.

Right. So we need like, it cannot be up to a podcaster to tell you what's happening, really happening in Ukraine. When Putin says, all right, we're going to use the fucking tactical nukes now. Uh, me first of all, in a few months, you're not going to be able to know whether he really said that or whether that's a deep fake, right? So we're going to need an institution or at least a perfectly democratized algorithm that is vetted by an institution we trust that can say, this is how you tell whether that's really Putin or whether that's just some 18-year-old who made that, you know, with a generative model. And, but regardless of how we clean house with respect to basic information,

we need institutions with real experts who really capture our best thinking and decision-making on hard problems. And we need a population in every democracy that most of the time can trust those institutions. Like when the state department says, listen, this is what's happening in Ukraine. This is what Putin's up to.

This is why we have the policy we have. This is why we have the policy we have. This is why we ship the arms we shipped. We can't have a society where 90% of the people are calling bullshit 90% of the time because no one trusts anyone in charge. That is the end of democracy. But that's where we are. That is where we, I mean, much of the time that's where we seem to be

certainly on, if you use social media as your reference point. Well, you mentioned this, I think, at a different podcast about how, as soon as you exit social media, you realize just how little of the world kind of does take their cues about the world from social media. I think it's maybe in the UK 10% or 20% between 10 and 20% of people have got a Twitter account, but then when you go down there I think almost all of the content is created by some ungodly small proportion of the number of users. So everybody else for Functionally is sort of whanking in the corner and observing this thing go off and not contributing or

maybe signal boosting or whatever, but it's the same culprits that are talking about everything on all sides. So you end up, I remember this during the general election in the UK, so whenever it was 2019, something like that. And if you'd looked at Twitter, it would have been a labor landslide. Stormzy was tweeting about it. Pretty sure that some of the actresses that were in Game of Thrones, they were tweeting about, I'm like, how stormzy and Arya Stark are tweeting about the labor and how bad the conservatives are and, you know, like, never trust a Tory and all this stuff. And then we have the biggest landslide in history,

I mean, half a century, perhaps, to go the other way, because where I'd been the cultural thermometer that I'd put up the behind of Twitter wasn't accurate. Yeah, except it was the opposite with Trump and Brexit, right? So like what I was noticing with Trump in 2016, or I should have noticed is that, you know, whenever I said anything about Trump and or Clinton, prior to the election, the support for Trump, I was seeing on social media was like a hundred to one over support for Clinton.

I mean, it was just crazy. And, you know, the polls were whatever, you know, Trump had a, you know, 25% chance of winning. Now, again, I was, I never looked at that poll and thought there's no way Trump's going to win because 25% chance is as we've just established, you know, that comes up all the time, right? So if you're going to take, if you're going to dignify Nate Silver as a real statistician with respect to those opinion polls, yeah, you can't be consoled by 25% really when you're, when you're as worried as you had every right to be about a Trump presidency. But what I was seeing on social media should have told me that the mainstream media's conversation about this was not tracking what was happening.

I mean, you can see, you know, given this impending ever increasing existential risk background, the landscape, culturally that people are inhabiting, whether it be mainstream, whether it be alternative media or whatever, I can understand why people are feeling confused and displaced. And I've noticed on the internet a trend of cynicism. I would give it a single term, it would be a very, very high amount of cynicism. Given that there's so much despondency in the world, what do you wish that more lost or cynical or depressed people knew? What would you tell them about this is my worldview, everything's fucked, it's not going to get better, my God, my family, my future. There is no point even trying in the people that say that things

can get better. They're the ones that are the real problem. What do you say to people that are cynical? Well, many of the tools we've referenced so far are incredibly useful. And it just take the stoic piece, for instance. I mean, the real comparison is, that's worth making is that there's never been a moment in human history where there has been more opportunity for more people to live a truly good life. And not just to live a truly good life with respect to your own selfish pleasure, but to affect the future in a propitious way, you just have massive leverage over the future.

I mean, it's up to us to get this right. This could have been said, you know, I'm sure, this could have been said during World War II that and it was it was true that yeah, that the difference between a thousand year right and what we got was pretty big. So yeah, props to Churchill, but the we really are a unique moment. It with respect to the leverage and the the the disparity of outcomes suggested by the power of our technology, which is the exponential change we're seeing in culture and with respect to tech, this is new. A decade is much longer now than it ever has been,

as measured by the kinds of technological and social change that we can see. And so if you can, if you want to have a meaningful life, if you want economic opportunity and you want to exercise that opportunity in a context where you can actually benefit people at scale and the future at scale, it's never been easier to do that. It's like just, you know, the iPhone that you have in your pocket, which is, you know, in most people's case, fragmenting their life unnecessarily and just becomes a source of distraction at best, you know, misery at worst, is actually an incredibly powerful computer that would be, you know, two decades ago would have been an

object of genuine magic, right? It's like it's like, it's just not the president of the United States couldn't have had one 20 years ago, right? And that's just going to keep ago, right? And that's just gonna keep happening, right? It's just like we're all, you know, again, AI is an ambiguous object at the moment, but to have access to a large language model is genuinely new and who knows what you can do with it, right?

It's like, it's up to you to figure out how to use these tools. So there's massive opportunity, even if you're someone who doesn't feel like you have a ton of opportunity by comparison with your friends or with other people you see in your society. I think if you have the bandwidth to listen to a three hour podcast,

you almost certainly are someone who's in something like a sweet spot, right, with respect to opportunity. It's just, yeah. On the other side of that, I remember you saying, living an examined life is just one insult after another. You have to maintain a sense of humor. Yeah.

Why? What does that mean? Well, because what you, the more you pay attention to your own mind, you see that it has absolutely no shame. I mean, it'll think anything, right? Like the person you meet, it's not, you don't meet St. Francis of Assisi in the mirror. It's like you meet a Congress of selves, right?

And many of these selves are total assholes, right? They're just like, you meet, it's everything, right? And you ultimately can't take it personally, right? Like you didn't create yourself. You didn't create your culture. You didn't create your consciousness. Like you are a, you find yourself here in the circumstance.

And the question is, what can you do next? What is available to experience next? What is possible given the kind of mind you have? And so we have a morally and psychologically, existentially, we have a navigation problem moment to moment. And there are various tools you can get in hand to be a much wiser and happier pilot. That's one of the reasons I think that Andrew Cuban particularly has been so rapidly popular. He was kind of publicly didn't exist probably three years ago, maybe something like that.

And now, regularly is number one and number two worldwide and every podcast chart that seems reliable. And then he's doing three and a half hour treatise on caffeine or something. And, you know, to get to that stage of scientific communication, I wouldn't have been able to predict. I would, I don't think that wouldn't have been able to predict. I don't think that I would have been able to predict that people would have, you know, we always talk about the podcast revolution, people wouldn't have sat down and listened to such and such and such talk for Jocke Welling and some Medal of Honor recipient for six hours and blah, blah, blah. A human took that to another level. He took that to a level where you think, you know, really with the, the, really, the adenosine system for

three and a half hours. And I think that one of the reasons that Andrew particularly has been so effective is that he is trying to cut through all of the de chaos. And he bridges the gap between the reliable expert that's sufficiently credentialed and the upstart podcaster that's got his Hattrodocz bonafide's and he sort of splits the two. Yeah, yeah. I mean, he's, I love what he's doing. I think he's incredibly effective, but you'll notice he also bypasses all of the contentious

bullshit that we spent a lot of time talking about here. Like he does not deal with politics. He does not want to offend anyone. He doesn't go or anyone's sacred cow, except on these narrow topics of just how to optimize your life with the best science, right? Now that is, and there are other friends who have podcasts, more or less in that vein, like Peter Tia or Tim Ferris.

I mean, these are all people who, they have opinions, presumably, about all this other stuff, but they don't tend to dig in on any of these culture war. I do a ballet dance through the minefield. Yeah, so let's, you know, you can figure out Trump on your own time. You can figure out Black Lives Matter on your own time. Can I tell you about Nicotine? Let's just, let's just see whether you should be, you know, you can figure out Trump on your own time. You can figure out Black Lives Matter on your own time. I can tell you about nicotine. Let's just, let's just see whether you should be, you know, getting eight hours of sleep at night, right?

And would they want to track that with the, the, the, the aura ring? Um, I don't mean to trivialize any of that. It's all super fun and useful, but there are other fires we have to figure out how to put out and you can't just ignore the fires, right? Like it's just these, these problems over here are not going to go away even if we all dial in our lives individually, right? And it's so, yeah, I just think there's, I mean, it's a kind of superpower to decide whatever my opinion is on all of these contentious topics.

I don't feel any need to give it. I have all of these, there's just this absolute feast of other things that we can enjoy. And 95% of people are just going to love what's on the menu. I think he's the only podcaster that I know of. You're actually going to have a look at his reviews. You know, it doesn't take much when you're working in point, points of stars out of 10 or out of 5 or whatever. It's just, it's maximum.

It's the maximum number of stars that you can get. It's either 10 on Spotify or a 5 on Apple podcasts. And, you know, one of the things that I do appreciate, maybe Andrew does have, you know, strong views on K through 12, don't say gay bells or whatever it is. But also one of the things that I would, and I think that you would agree on as well, that I'm definitely seeing more and more

is people who don't have expertise in a particular area thinking that this is, wow, I've got a follow, you know, the million people follow me on Twitter, why shouldn't I comment on the Ukraine? Right. I don't go to Andrew Cuban as brilliant as he is for his thoughts about the Ukraine. Yeah.

And you don't fault him for not broadcasting thoughts to his audience because why should he? Right. What's interesting about my life now professionally is that I have these two experiences running side by side. And we've talked mostly about kind of my podcast life, I think, but over at waking up, I have a completely different experience of what's coming back at me from the audience. So waking up, it's just pure gratitude, appreciation.

Nothing is ever misconstrued. There's a perfect marriage between what I intend to say and the way in which it gets received. I mean, I can never, no one's ever confused, but it's like no one's ever accusing me of really believing something and saying, it's just pure pleasure. It's just this, and it was amazing to experience that because in my podcast life, given that I touch so many polarizing topics and given that I offend people on both the left and the right, I had completely lost sight of the fact that it was possible to have a career where you put something out with good intentions and people appreciate it, and that's the end of the story.

What's the mechanism that's occurring there? Is it the fact that everyone's there for mindfulness? Is it the fact that it's pay-walled so you don't get the sort of flotsam and jetsam or whatever it is that comes in and kind of spoils the party for everybody? Have you reflected on why it's so aligned? Well, it's also because it's a, it's only a subset of what I think about and talk about, right? So it's like, I don't take my critique of Trump

into waking up. Ah, you're Andrew Heuberman for the beginning. Yeah, so I have a version of Heuberman's experience on this kind of narrow band of topics. And the topics are increasingly wide. It's not just meditation. I mean, really is kind of practical philosophy. It's like it's just not-

You bought the entire license, the entire Alan Watts library. Yeah, from the Watts Foundation. Whatever, yeah, which it was just insane. And it was, I think it got remastered. I really much, very much enjoyed falling asleep to that. I love that that's not a comment on how nice it is. No, no, I do it too.

It's great to sleep too. But yeah, so it's a wonderful experience. It hasn't convinced me that I should shut her, my podcast, but it's a wonderful experience. It hasn't convinced me that I should shutter my podcast, but it's an amazing corrective to what I experience as a podcast or as a writer of books, because, and as a public speaker, I mean, whatever I've done professionally for the last, you know, nearly 20 years. Outside of waking up has been just this reliably, very strong but, you know, by-valent response. I mean, I've got the people who absolutely love

what I just said and the people who absolutely hate it for precisely those reasons, right? And it- No, flip flop and see so easily. And it's just, you know, and then, and one of the ways in which I can notice audience capture in other people is when I go into their, when I occasionally, so this may happen,

you know, I don't spend a lot of time doing this now, but back in the day when I would look at like the YouTube comments associated with somebody else's podcast, just to see how it kicked off, you know, in certain people's feeds, I just noticed it's just a hundred percent pain. It's just like, it's awful. And then the question is, why would I go on that, like all these people hate me, right? And reliably now they hate me because of what I did or didn't say about COVID vaccines, or what I did or didn't say about Trump,

or what I did or didn't say, or seem to say, or they heard I might have said about 100 Biden's laptop, right? So those people, like they're kind of single issue people with respect to those variables, but like if I go into, I mean, it may in fact be true of your audience. We'll see. I mean, it's like, it's like, we may find I would imagine your audience is somewhat evenly split, but probably more on the side of everything I said about RFK and Trump

and COVID and Jordan Peterson. Now, that's not gonna fly very well. Like who the fuck is this guy to say any of that stuff? That's gonna be the center of kind of narrative gravity. I would guess that's definitely true of Lex Readman's audience now, right? And part of it is that the podcast world is, it almost has contrarianism built into its DNA right so whenever you begin to sound like an establishment shill right everyone's spidey sense goes on.

No one no one in the comments section gets 5,000 upvotes for saying well done for towing the party line or I actually agree with you on that mainstream opinion. So I don't disagree about the way that the podcasting universe generally has that. And I have been trying aggressively for the last six months to discipline my audience, particularly. I did it overtly a number of times. We've been aggressively, you can, there's a function

which you may have seen on YouTube which is a hide user from Channel, which causes this person to continue to be able to type comments, but they're just blasting them into the ether and no one else gets to see them. They can still watch the things that you can't reach your play count. And it's a once strike and done policy now. And I don't mind about criticism. I'm fine with criticism. I'm just not fine with people that make knee jerk unthoughtful responses to something that I don't want those people here. I think Tim Ferriss has a similar policy he had about his Instagram. He's like, this is my house. Take your fucking shoes off. Right. So yeah, I am. Yeah, I have the same. I mean, just to echo that, but, you know, I have a lot of experience

with this because I used to early in my podcast, I would have wars on my party. I'd bring someone on and it was a real, like, knockdown dragout debate. And then I would notice in the aftermath, my audience would just trash that person on social media or wherever. And several times I, you know, explicitly had managed on social media or wherever. And several times I explicitly had managed my audience not to do that because that's just such an ugly experience for the person to have.

And however much I disagree with someone on my podcast, I never want them to feel like they were just just mobbed by psychopathic. Going on making sense, it's synonymous with having a war. And it does happen, and still happens. I mean, I think I probably should ring that bell again because it just happened. I think I noticed it happened, again,

I'm not on social media, so I'm a bad witness to this stuff, but I looked, I think I looked, I looked on Reddit, and I saw what happened in the afternoon. I had Mark Andreessen on recently and we debated AI. I just did Rogan again. Oh yeah, okay, I'm not sure I saw that, but so yeah, he and I disagreed about AI risk and you know, but I, you know, it's totally respectable, respectful conversation with him. But you know, had some of the character of a debate and so you

Very likely if you're listening you're kind of it's a bit of a horse race and you're either on one side or the other and You know he made a good point. I'm at a bad point kind of people are keeping score um And I did notice that just again, I'm this is just Reddit and I spend 15 minutes on it You know once every two months, but I noticed That my audience was just shitting on him in a way that it's just not good for me. If like if they're my audience, if they want to support me, it is not supportive of my enterprise to shit on my guests in that way, right?

And so it is with you or any other podcasters. How do you get around that? Because there's definitely a part of me, whether I be a user of social media or a creator on social media, much more a creator than a user. I do despair seeing, thankfully, not my own comment section much, but a lot of comment sections show me as far as I can see the absolute worst of humanity and and it seems to me that the The best thing that you could try and cultivate as a creator of any kind is a reasonable audience Yeah, I think that that the goal of a reasonable only what's the best faith interpretation of what this person saying I listen to this guest or I read that

Substacker I Subscribe to their YouTube channel or whatever, presumably because I think that they are a good curator, that they have a good ear, that they are acting in good faith, that they're doing all of these things. And you descend into the comments of even somebody that seems pretty unobjectionable

and it's a cesspit sometimes. Yeah, yeah. Now that was one of the things that I, I mean, that's why I don't spend any time on any social media, really. I mean, I think there's something baked into the forum, which, I mean, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, And the truth is we might actually launch a community forum for waking up and telegraph the fact that this is an experiment. We could be anxious at any time, but let's just see how this goes.

Because in that community, with that list of topics, I think it could actually be possible to have almost entirely good supportive conversations. So wildest thing is that we're in a time where people want connections more than ever, atomized society, individualistic collapse of grand narratives, and certain about the world fear and strife and concern, and I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I want that. And yet the behavior of some very loud, very offensive people on some platforms colors the experience of everybody's. Right. There is such a Matthew principle around the exposure of particular posts everywhere.

It's a small number of posts to get all of the reach from a small number of people who are the only ones that post, from a small number of people who own the only ones that post from a small number of people who are the only ones that haven't account. And there's also an algorithmic choice that is dictating that, which is, you know, it is out. The gamification is based on outrage and strangely misinformation. I mean, it's like misinformation is spreading better than real information. I mean, a patient debunking of an untruth is boring and the lurid untruth is captivating and it spreads better. That's the bullshit asymmetry principle, right? It takes a lot less energy to produce bullshit than to refute it, therefore the world is filled with

unrefuted bullshit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, I think it might be possible to do, but I think it would be in a, it wouldn't be at scale, it wouldn't be at Twitter scale or Facebook scale. And I think you would have, you'd have to have, I mean, you would have to have a low tolerance for assholes. Having moderation. And so this is why, you know, this is why I don't understand the Twitter is a public square argument, right? And that we should all be free speech absolutist with respect to social media. None of these social media, all of these social media platforms are businesses, some are even private businesses.

My concern about free speech runs to the owners and operators of those businesses and not wanting anyone to be able to force them to be associated with speech that they find awful. If I create a social media platform over it waking up and notice that it's slowly getting populated by Nazis, I should be able to have a no-notsie's policy on my own platform that I built with my investment, right? It doesn't matter how big it gets. If there's going to, you know, if it has 20 million people on it, I should be able to kick the Nazis off, right? And like so my concern about free speech is for the person, essentially for the publisher

So my concern about free speech is for the person, is essentially for the publisher, who doesn't want to publish Nazis. And the truth is, it's, you know, if you, the, also if you call the bluff of the free speech absolutism, you recognize that there's no there there. It's just impossible to be a free speech absolutist because not even forchan is a circumstance of free speech absolutism. Free speech absolutism is

everything, every awful thing all the time. Nobody wants to be there. It's just too much noise to that signal. The moment you admit that you have to curate sometimes, you're going to be making judgment calls. And so then you just have to have whatever principles you have by which you do that. And if your principle is no Nazis, well then that's your principle and people understand that. And then someone can start a Nazi forum, you know, Stormfront or somewhere other spot. Great. I think that should be legal, right? You should be able to have a Nazi social media platform. I just don't have to be there or support it. So.

What are you doing next? What's next on the work bucket list? You know, it's really just, you know, almost entirely continuing in these two channels of waking up the app and making sense the podcast. And I have stuff I want to write, but it's very hard to incentivize myself to write it because it's harder, it takes longer, I reach fewer people, and it pays less. I mean, like all the incentives are aligned against me right writing another book. So I haven't, you know, as if I'm magic, I've noticed I haven't done that. But I think I ultimately I will because it's only when I'm writing that I am taking the time to think through each topic as fully as I'm capable. So I think I, I mean,

there's some writing built into my podcasting and and my work on waking up to because some of what I record is essentially an audio essay or you know, there's some prep and involved in some things, but how are you asses that you know, you've got a daily meditation. I think I've, well, the daily meditation, the daily is not live that day. I've required a batch record them. And so we have a, you know, with a reservoir of daily meditation. Still 365 times, pretty much 10 minutes or 15 or 20, I know that you can kind of stretch it in between both some clever algorithmic stuff.

But that's no, you know, I often speak to authors that talk about the difficulty of the audiobook portion of reading the, how many times do you put your foot in your mouth and go, I guess we gotta, I'm gonna have to redo that particular part of explaining about why that tree is something worth looking at or whatever it is. Well, waking up is in the process of really outgrowing me

because there's so many other people contributing to it. So there's lots of other teachers and scholars and scientists. So one part of it, I essentially have a podcast where I just talk to people and sometimes those conversations show up on both the podcasts and the app, but often not. But then I would just have a lot of other people producing content. So I have many more things I feel like recording for waking up, but there, there's no rush. Like the wolf is really not at the door with waking up. Where it's my podcast, there's this expectation that, you know, next week, there's going to be another podcast unlike you where it's every two days or what, you know, so three times a week, you know, I do not have that cadence. But so it's, but happily it's, you know, my podcast is structured around

what I want to, what I want to think about and read and talk about next, right? So it's often a matter of what book do I feel like reading next? And now I realize I can talk to the author, you know, so and so it's such it's like a, you know, I mean it's like among the luckiest people on earth to be able to make a career out of doing what I would do for free anyway. I've said this all along. I always used to regret the fact that at university I didn't take psychology of philosophy. I took business management, which taught me nothing about business and then did a master's in international marketing and that which taught me nothing about business, and then did a master's in international marketing, and that also taught me nothing about marketing. And I was always, um, regretful.

I was, I was wistful for a academic career that I never had, because as soon as I pulled my head out of my ass toward the back end of my 20s, I realized that I had all of this stuff that I was choosing to be interested in. So I could have chosen to be passionate about the degree instead of the one that I'd had to force myself to be competent in. And it would have all been fine. But then, you know, by whatever work of the simulation that we're in, that means that I can talk to people that I would talk to for free and call it a job. I've been able to structure the exact University syllabus talking only about the exact niche of the best particular creator or academic or intellect or writer on that one topic only for as long as I want. And then no one assesses me afterwards.

And if I mess up, it doesn't matter. And if I want to careen the interview off and talk about hamburgers for 10 minutes, then so be it. And I can do exactly what I want. It's, you know, for all of the internet is difficult and negative comments sections cause me to feel a little bit sort of, it harnesses the experience. Broadly it's a complete dream that I kind of can't really believe is happening. And you know, you've been a great influence. Thank you. You've been a really big influence on the movement that I went from whatever I was before

to the adult infant that I think I am now. And I appreciate the stuff that you do. I appreciate your time today. Where should people go? Where should they keep up to date? Given that you are absent from everything in a digital ghost, then where should they go? Yeah.

Just wakingup.com is for waking up and samherast.org is everything else associated with me that is not a deep fake that will soon be coming no doubt. Sam, I appreciate you. Thank you. Yeah, great to meet you. you