The Joe Rogan Experience - #543 - Sam Harris

Episode Date: September 2, 2014

Sam Harris is a neuroscientist and author of the New York Times bestsellers, The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, and The Moral Landscape. His latest book "Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality without Religion" is available now.

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day! My friend, Sam Harris, author, awesome dude, martial artist, and author of Waking Up, a guide to spirituality without religion. I told you I first found out about you from my friend Joe Silva, who's the matchmaker for the UFC, who gave me your book. He gave me Letters to a Christian Nation many, many years ago.

When did you post that? Published that? 2008? 2006? Yeah, he gave it to me around then. He's like, got to read this. It's awesome. And I did.

And look, we're pals. Cool. Here we go. Yeah, that's great. And your new book, Waking Up, A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion. Well, that's impossible. So your book is nonsense because you need God in your life. I'm running into that. Well, no, actually, I'm running into the other side of that where spirituality makes no sense unless you believe in religion.

There's no such thing as a spirit, so why would you want to endorse something called spirituality? That's fair, isn't it? Like, what is a spirit? I mean, don't you have to have faith in something to sort of, just the idea of a spirit? If you're going to talk about spirituality or a spirit, like, what are you really talking about? Yeah, well, I'm definitely not talking about a spirit or a soul or anything that can float off the brain at death. And I think spirituality is one of these words that we just have to reclaim because there's really not an English equivalent for this area of inquiry. If you want to take seriously the – one question.

Can I pull these off because I'm – Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm getting jacked. Cool. You have what? I'm just getting like it's kind of distorted and sound oh really yeah could be my brain could be the but it's a lot better with these off so maybe God talking here you're you're blocking them

out if God needs if God needs these we know his powers are limited I'll take these off too we'll leave it up to Jamie to find out whether or not there we go cool it's not nearly as loud. So, yeah, so this is a big hang-up for atheists and secularists and skeptics, this idea that spirituality is a word that means magic and superstition by definition and by its etymology, because it goes back to the Latin spiritus, which comes from the Greek pneuma, meaning breath.

And it's this idea that the spirit is, you're asserting some kind of dualism. This is a spirit that's internal to the body that is not produced by the body that can leave the body at death. And it's true that most people, most of the time, have some quasi-mystical, spooky association with the concept of spirituality. And it's obviously linked up with all the stuff that people believe about crystals and angels and all the other stuff that I don't want to be entangled with. But I just think there's no word for, if you're going to take seriously the project of becoming like Jesus, whoever he was, becoming someone who could actually love his neighbor as himself, or becoming like the Buddha, or just exploring the furthest reaches of positive human experience through meditation or psychedelics or some

other methodology that really perturbs consciousness, There's no word for that endeavor. And to call it positive psychology or happiness or well-being, most people think they know what you mean when you use words like happiness and well-being and love, and yet they have no idea how rarefied things can get if you take the right drug, if you spend three months in silence doing nothing but meditate. It's just there are many layers to this thing. And so I've tried to reclaim the term spirituality. And some guy I was talking to recently on a podcast drew an analogy to the word evil, which is another word that people are uncomfortable with.

Because once we understand things like psychopathy and other ways in which the human mind can malfunction, it seems that there's no rational basis to be talking about evil. But I think we need the word evil. I think we need to reclaim the word evil for a secular, rational conversation, because we need a big word for really the worst of human impulses. Well, evil and good, they don't seem to be dependent upon a religious belief. I think evil is just what affects a gang of people in a negative way, or one individual. You know, poison and water supply.

Obviously, that's an evil deed. You're going to kill a bunch of people. You're going to cause a bunch of pain. That seems to make at least some sense without religion and as does good like good and evil but actually not for evil the confidence in the use of the term evil has definitely eroded among secular scientist types because just just picture it once you understand what we're calling evil at the level of the brain once you once you find a gene for a dopamine

receptor that correlates with psychopathy or a deficit of such a receptor, then you begin to say, well, this is all just, we're talking about biology, we're talking about bad luck, we're talking about illness, And then what does evil name in that case? Right. Like what – is it psychopathy or like if you do something like say if someone – I your apartment building and killed your family and you've made it your goal to kill as many Jews before they take you out. Is that psychopathy? Is that evil? What is that kind of retribution?

Is that, I mean, negative? No, that's definitely a gray area. I think with evil, we want to reserve it for those situations in which... Unprovoked? Yeah. There's no story the person can tell that would seem to justify this to a rational person. You can't think, well, if I were in that person's shoes, I would be doing the same thing. You think this is a twisted kind of sadism. This person is taking pleasure in causing suffering to other human beings unnecessarily

in a way that doesn't resonate with me. So the far end of the extremity where you have somebody who's, whether it's Hitler or a kind of a lower scale version of evil, I think my favorite example of late has been actually one who I spoke about a fair amount on the topic of free will, which I think we'll get into, is Uday Hussein, Saddam Hussein's eldest son. I mean, this guy was just as pure a psychopath as you're ever going to find. This is someone who, when he would see a wedding in progress in Baghdad, he and his thugs would descend and rape the bride and sometimes torture and kill the bride. Feeder to dogs. Yeah, I hadn't heard that.

So when you hear that, that's not the same thing as hearing that somebody's house got bombed and their family died and then they become committed to harming their aggressors or people like their aggressors. Right. So, but yeah, so anyway, just to back up and end that point, I feel like I'm embarrassed, frankly, by the term spirituality too. I think it's just not a great word given its history,

and yet the only similar words that do a similar job are even spooky or something like mysticism, which is just even more esoteric a term. But I use the word contemplative to name any practice that would be designed to discover what consciousness is like independent of just thinking about it. Yeah, I think we need a new word, right? We need a new word for being a positive person. But the thing is, pointing new words is also a dead end to me.

I hate neologisms. I hate it when some author comes forward with his word that no one's ever heard of and he's hoping to foist it on the rest of humanity. Here's a new noun that you all have to choke on. And it just never works. Whenever someone comes up with their own jargon like that it's it's usually a red flag as well it's like what are you doing you're

sort of redefining the world are you starting a cult like you're coming up with your own jargon you know when people come up with their own terms for things and their numbered lists yeah yeah um but what is what is the purpose of this book or what is the theme of this book? If, you know, get past the word spirituality without religion, being a good person without religion, ethics, morals? Actually, that was the thesis of my last book or the book before last, The Moral Landscape, where I talk about how we can understand strong claims of right and wrong and good and evil in the context of science. You can have a strong conception of moral truth without believing that you get your morality from God or from a holy book. And so that's something I've argued for.

Now, this is a... This is really, in my view, a completion of the project I started with The End of Faith, where I started by just noticing how divisive and unnecessary and ultimately dangerous our incompatible religious ideas are and how we need to have a secular conversation about the problem there. And then I went into, so first I started talking about just how there's a, by definition, a zero-sum conflict between science and religion, because there's a zero-sum conflict between believing things for good reasons and believing things for bad reasons.

And the people who are satisfied with bad reasons and willing to defend their bad reasons with violence or even with policy are hostile to the project of science. But then, so once you've criticized that problem and noticed that these books can't possibly be infallible given all that we know through science and noticed that they can't possibly be infallible given that they're all mutually contradictory, so Christians and Muslims can't both be right, then you have to grapple with the fact

that there's all these good things that people think they're getting out of religion, and they want to find some other way to get those things. And the first on the list is ethics and morality. And so the moral landscape was my argument that we can have a strong conception of ethics without believing any bullshit. And this is my effort to open up a conversation on the topic of spirituality, which is the center of spirituality, which is the center of spirituality for me is the phenomenon of self-transcendence. Just the fact that it's possible to lose your

sense of self, lose your sense of being an ego, lose your sense that you're a rider on the horse of consciousness riding around inside your head, not exactly identical to your physical body. Most people don't feel that they simply are their bodies. They feel like they have bodies and that their bodies are a kind of vehicle that they're riding around in. And they feel like they're behind their eyes in a way that they're not behind their knees. Their knees are down there. Their knees and the rest of their body are their kind of property in a strange way.

And most people most of the time feel that they're in their heads and that they're a subject and they're a thinker of thoughts and that there's a thinker in addition to the thoughts themselves. They don't feel that there's thoughts arising in consciousness, but most people feel that they are the thinker that is authoring these thoughts. And this actually goes right to the issue of free will as well, because the feeling of having free will is the feeling, is the other side of the coin of the feeling of being a self, being a thinker, of being an author of actions and intentions. And so I'm arguing that it's possible to cut through that illusion. And there are good reasons to

believe that it's an illusion based on just the underlying neurology and what we know about causality and what we know about the brain. But you can actually penetrate this illusion subjectively and that the spirituality is the act of cutting through it subjectively and no longer feeling that you're an ego riding around inside a bag of skin, and that one's life

gets improved in many obvious ways once one is able to cut through that illusion. So this is kind of a sustained argument for disciplined introspection in the form of meditation and other techniques in the context of science and a discussion of the brain and and why the concept the conventional notion of self doesn't make much sense given what we know about the brain it's a very complex situation as well isn't it when you talk about the the concept of self and that the person is the consciousness is inside the body because it's also dependent upon how the body feels. Like if the body feels bad, the consciousness is affected.

Your thought process is affected when you're sick. Your thought process is affected if you're stressed out, if you're angry, if you're not getting exercise, if you're not getting good nutrition. Any sense of non-wellness in the body is reflected on the way the person thinks. It makes it more difficult to think with clarity. So it's not as simple as like we're riding in this thing. But this thing also affects the way you, you know, you, when you think of you, who you are. I mean, I'm vastly different pre and post-workout. I'm a different person.

Yeah, yeah. You know, I mean, my thought, if you presented me with the same situations, the same dilemmas and problems pre and post workout, I'd probably have a pretty different reaction to them. Yeah. And it's not even just all the variables aren't even within your own body. You're different in different relationships and different situations. You walk into a restaurant and you're, you're talking to the hostess and and just the the frame around that interaction your expectation that you're in a restaurant talking to someone who wants to seat you that changes your um just the way you approach human interaction and and if you had a different frame it would be and and things would be different and it's it's almost true to say that different

selves are called forth in those different situations where you're you just can't be the same self with certain people yes you can't you can't even access like there's certain people who i am just effortlessly funny with because they are such an easy laugh and i don't even know what it is it's just like there's something there's there's they're so ready they're so poised to laugh. And for whatever reason, somehow the dynamics of our conversation are such that I am my funniest self with that person without ever trying to be funny. And I'm not aware of being on, but I just keep falling into this thing. And there are other people where, you know, I'm profoundly awkward with these people. If you put me in front of someone whose awkwardness has just tuned up a few notches beyond mine,

I become the Asperger's guy with him. And it's odd, but there's kind of a resonance that gets set up. And it's based on conscious and unconscious mechanisms, obviously, that we have certain, you know, variables that we, it's not to say you can't influence these things. You can go into a situation with a conscious thought that you're going to somehow transform it and that will have whatever effect it has.

But, yeah, the mind is complicated. It's very complicated and it's, a lot of it is dependent, our own consciousness is dependent upon interacting with other consciousness, which is one of the reasons why solitary confinement is such a horrible torture to people. Like when you separate a person's mind indefinitely from any other mind, from any other interactions, it freaks people out. I was reading about this. Although, actually, are you in danger of forgetting this?

Because it's interesting you raise the point of solitary confinement because the experience that has got me to write this book is very much like solitary confinement. I went on meditation retreats, mostly in my 20s, for weeks and months at a time. And you really are just, on many of these retreats, just locked in a room meditating for 18 hours a day in silence. You're not making eye contact with anyone else. You're not talking to anyone else.

And to some degree, it's obviously not like being in a prison, and you're there on your own volition, but this is many people's worst nightmare. And it would have been, at one point in my life, it would have been my worst nightmare. I went on a, it's actually where I start the book. I went on an outward bound when I was 16, which is a wilderness program in the mountains of Colorado. And it was this 23-day course, which culminated in this ritual they called a solo, where they put us – they parked us all next – on the outskirts of a mountain lake uh for three days and three nights and there was no food so we fasted and they were just told to just contemplate the universe and we were given no books you know all you could do was write in a journal and this was the first time in my life where i was actually in solitude i mean i had this was the first time in my life where i had

no one to talk to or nothing to read or nothing to distract myself with. And I was in a tent. I've got a tent and a sleeping bag and a blank journal and the most beautiful landscape possible. We're at almost 11,000 feet in the San Gregorio de Cristo Mountains. So you just got the perfect stars every night and this pristine mountain lake. And I was as miserable as I've ever been in my life. I mean, just crushed by loneliness and boredom. I mean, just that my mind was completely out of control. And all I did, my journal reads like just the, you know,

the Unabomber's Manifesto is a far more balanced expression of man's subjectivity than what I was up to at 16 on this solo. And I was just making lists of the foods I wanted to eat. I was just craving every, you know, just making lists. It was insanity. And then when I came off of this after three days and learned that some of the other people on the course loved it and just felt completely transformed by having three days with nothing to do, I just had no idea what to make of this. How could that have not been anything but a torture for these people? And so then I went, I was 16 there, and it took me a few more years to see any kind of path forward and become interested in

these things but i eventually went on to spend uh you know almost two years on silent retreats in my 20s in in circumstances of isolation and and sensory deprivation far worse than than that you know mountain solo uh because i wasn't in an especially beautiful place. And so it was, it really is, your life is such, your life is entirely dependent upon your mind. Now, it's not to say that external circumstances don't matter, but the, I mean, there are people who can be genuinely happy and at peace in terrible circumstances, objectively terrible circumstances, and there are people who have everything who are miserable. And so the fact that the delta is that big and can be that uncoupled from

external circumstances shows you that it's really, I mean, you are almost entirely dependent on the character of your thoughts, really. I mean, the mechanism, which I go into at great length in the book, is that the difference is really the difference between being lost in thought and recognizing thoughts for what they are. Most people are thinking every moment of their lives and aren't aware of it. They may have an abstract idea that they're thinking every moment of their lives and aren't aware of it. They may have an abstract idea that they're thinking every moment of their lives, but they're not aware of the automaticity and the relentlessness of this conversation they're having with themselves. And to be identified with the next thought that arises in consciousness is to be its mere prisoner. I mean, you are then

identical to whatever subjective state, emotional state, mood state it dictates. So if it's a self-critical thought or a fearful thought or a hateful thought, that is the character of your consciousness in that moment. And until you can break that spell, until you can see thoughts as thoughts just arising and passing away in consciousness, you see no alternative. There's just no basis for an alternative. And then you're as miserable as your thoughts demand. Was part of what was really fucking with you

when you were 16 years old, the fact that you were 16? That's how old you were when you were up there on the mountain? Yeah. Because you have so few experiences to reference and you the the time alone with your mind is more painful perhaps because you're developing and you're not you're not quite a man yet you're not an adult you don't have personal sovereignty so you don't have like this i think like today

if like you took me and said oh you have to spend a few days alone up in the mountain. I'm so filled with things that I have to do on a regular basis. I'm so filled with responsibilities. If I knew that I was going to do that, I probably would find some pretty deep enjoyment in it. Because I have so many life experiences drawn, so many thoughts in my mind that would probably benefit from having that time just with nothing coming in but nature. Yeah. Yeah. Well, being 16 might've had a little to do with it because almost everyone else on the course was maybe a decade older. So they, and they had a better time, but no, I think it was, I think there are 16 year olds who would have had a fine time and there are definitely 20 year olds and 30 year olds and 40 yearolds who would have had a fine time, and there are definitely 20-year-olds and 30-year-olds and 40-year-olds

who would be miserable in that circumstance because I see them on meditation retreats. And on my own retreats, I've experienced deep feelings of loneliness and sadness because it's hard to leave everyone you love for three months. It's like you go on at whatever age. 25 is, I mean, I guess I you go on whatever age, you know, 25 is, I mean, I guess I was 30 the last time I sat a, I was exactly 30 last time I sat a three-month retreat. But you just get, you unplug in from your life. You're saying goodbye to everyone you know. You know, for all you know, someone's going to die while you're on retreat. And so

there's this real discontinuity with every project and every aspiration and everything you have going on. And also, most of the people in your life can't believe you're doing this. It's not much support. It's just totally inscrutable to people that you would decide to do this. And then you essentially lock yourself in a closet. I mean, you essentially lock yourself in a room as big as these two tables. And then you're just left with your thoughts. And the problem is that just thinking itself, even thinking happy thoughts, is stressful.

When you really start paying attention to it, the sheer automaticity of it, just to not be able to stop the conversation. And you just can't stop talking to yourself for a second. Now, eventually you can. Eventually you become concentrated on, in this case, the practice I was doing is called Vipassana, which is mindfulness meditation. And the practice there is just to become very keenly aware of, you start with the breath as an object of meditation, but once you get a little concentration, you open it up to everything. So sounds and sensations and even thoughts themselves become objects of meditation where you're just noticing whatever arises in consciousness. But the difference between noticing a thought arise and pass away and being lost in thought is huge. I mean, it's the all-important difference. And it takes some real concentration to see a thought arise and pass away.

Because without the concentration, all of a sudden the thought's just you. It just comes up from behind in a way. And you're just, you feel identical. In a strange way, you feel identical to this sentence in your head. Thoughts are just sentences and images. When you actually look at what a thought is, it's very hard to see how it could ever define your subjectivity in the first place. It's just like your thoughts are no more substantial than the sound of my voice.

I mean, you're just hearing the sound of my voice as a kind of appearance in consciousness right now. And it's not defining you. You don't feel identical to it. It doesn't have a real implication so much for how you feel. It's easy to see, or in this case hear, that it is a, just an appearance in consciousness. It comes and it goes, it starts and it stops, and it's all sort of in plain view, but with your own thoughts, with your own voice, it sneaks up on you in a way that is, and even to use the word you in this case is a little misleading, It sneaks up on you in a way that is, and even to use the word you in this case is a little misleading, but it colors consciousness and trims it down in such a way that it just feels like you. It doesn't feel, you feel, I mean, the feeling of being a self, the feeling that we call I, the feeling of being an ego in the head is what it feels like to be thinking without knowing that you're thinking.

It's the feeling of this next thought capturing consciousness. So when you say that, thoughts, you are identical to thoughts. So if you're thinking something really fucked up, like I'm fat, I'm a loser, I'm always going to be a loser, like that is identical to who you are because you are sort of framing yourself in this thought. These thoughts that you're carrying around in your mind, they are what's occupying your consciousness. If those thoughts are in the forefront of your consciousness, they identify you. You are that. You are those thoughts.

And you are identical to that idea. Yeah, and they're driving behavior and they're driving emotion and they're driving each subsequent train of thought. So it's determining the future expressions of your consciousness and your body as well. So you're – and again, I'm not separating the mind from the body here. I mean, all of this is – we could talk about this in terms of events in the brain as well, but it's much easier to talk about it in terms of our first person experience as thoughts and moods and emotions, etc. But for the purpose of this argument, there's no doubt that the brain is doing this. It's just we're not, that side of the story, there's much less to say about that side of

the story at the moment. The brain is doing it, your your whatever it is your personality your consciousness your your center is sort of what guides the brain one way or another like it is possible to while in the middle of having these thoughts to say you know what i'm not going to entertain these anymore and i'm going to think about something positive but it's very difficult yeah surprisingly difficult even as someone like myself who spent a lot of times a lot of time meditating especially a lot of time in isolation tanks i it's still difficult every now and then if something's bothering you to just get it out of your head like yeah especially for

me um one of my main issues is my work um like uh like stand-up comedy for instance like if i have a show and uh i fuck a bit up if it goes wrong like if i have two shows in a night and i fuck a bit up on the first show i'm okay if i could redo it on the second show we're good but if i fuck it up on the second show god damn it now i have to think about that thing all night and i'll try to let it go i'll try to get it out of my head but i rationalize it by saying the only reason why i've gotten so good is because of this crazy obsession that i have with getting it correct and that when things go awry or when i go down a bad path it doesn't quite pan out and then i have to sort of restart the whole conversation on stage

that that uncomfortable moment and then the subsequent uncomfortable recollection of that moment is the very motivation that's led me to be a good stand-up in the first place. So I kind of rationalize it. But fuck, man, when I'm eating dinner after a show and I just flub one word that fucks up a joke, I'll be in the middle of eating pancakes going, shit. I can't get it out of my head. It doesn't matter i have a wonderful wife and a beautiful family and great friends and a fantastic job and a wonder of just a dream life doesn't matter i flubbed a word you fucking idiot

you know like why i'm cutting into my food yeah well that that that's an interesting moment because um so there's a moment before the thought has arisen, right, where you have not yet remembered the flubbed line. So you're just cutting into your dinner. And then it's an image or part image, part sentence, something. There's some expression of thought that arises in consciousness. And you do not witness it arise. It's the difference between watching a movie and being totally lost in the movie, forgetting that you're sitting in a room with a bunch of other people looking at light on a wall.

You're totally captured by the movie. It's the difference between that and actually just seeing the screen, the light on the wall, hearing the sound of the projector, seeing the artifice. And it's possible to see thoughts just as essentially like a play of light on the wall. You see it before it captures you. And the difference is total. And it is kind of like, it's almost like playing a video game where you can now not get killed in the same spot over and over again. It's like not losing in the same boss fight over and over again.

Yet we lose in that same fight a thousand times a day. see thoughts for what they are. So the next time you flub a line and the next time you recall it, it's possible. And again, it takes a certain degree of concentration to be able to do this, but concentration becomes kind of a native capacity at a certain point. It's like jujitsu or anything else. You have certain skills and you don't really lose them. Then you can just see it, and it just

comes and it goes, and it doesn't have, and it's going, it's really gone. And it doesn't have the same emotional necessity. It doesn't trigger the same mental state. And now that's not to say that these negative mental states haven't had the benefit that you ascribe to them. So yeah, it could be that you're as good as you are because you were motivated to not embarrass yourself ever again because it felt so terrible, right? So you hated this experience of flubbing a line. You hated the memory and the reliving of it the next day. You hated what it did to your time with your family. And so you thought, the next tour, I'm going to get this.

I'm going to get up earlier. I'm going to work harder, et cetera. So, yeah, that's all part of the clockwork that's causing you to hone your craft. But I would argue that a little mental suffering goes a long way. I think nine times out of ten or 99 times out of 100, we suffer unnecessarily, and there's no good comes from it. It's just, it's not actually making us better people. It's making us more neurotic people. We're more worried. We're worse husbands. We're worse fathers. And it's time to break that spell. And then you can selectively be as

And you can selectively be as uptight and neurotic as you want, but it gives you a kind of freedom to pick your priorities in a way rather than be captured by just whatever the next thought happens to be. I've also found, for me personally, that discipline and diligence are the best mitigating factors for dealing with neurotic thoughts. Like if I have an issue, one of the big issues, if I've ever had anything go wrong, was that I didn't work hard enough. So if I know for a fact that I worked as hard as I could, like back when I was competing, that was a huge issue. And it also mitigated nervousness. was a huge issue and it also mitigated nervousness because look whenever you're involved in a competition as terrifying as a full contact martial arts tournament where concussions are

not just likely but it's someone in there's 100 people fighting in this tournament someone's going to sleep someone's going to get knocked out is it going to be you someone's going to get their nose broken someone's going to get hit? A lot of people are probably. If I trained really hard, if I know I did everything that I could, I ate right, I slept right, I put in all the practice, I worked on all my weaknesses, I didn't neglect my strengths, I was much less nervous. Much less nervous and much better at dealing with losses. Whereas losses, I think losses for martial artists can be insanely devastating. Like I was listening to this interview with Travis Brown. Do you know who he is? No.

UFC heavyweight. One of the top five guys in the world. Great fighter. Lost recently to Fabricio Verdum in a title elimination fight. So Fabricio has gone on and he'll be fighting Cain Velasquez for the heavyweight title now in October in Mexico. October or November? November. I believe it's November. One of those. He's fighting Cain Velasquez for the title. Huge fight. It could have been Travis Brown.

Travis Brown lost the fight by decision. He lost without a doubt,, it wasn't embarrassing. It wasn't, he didn't get knocked out in the first round. He didn't get submitted really quickly. But he did lose the fight. And it was apparently devastating to him. I mean, he's talked in great depth about lying in bed in the fetal position crying. I mean, he's this fucking 250-pound gladiator.

And he's curled up in a fetal position crying. Well, the truth is the ego is always curled up in the fetal position crying. We all have that part of ourselves, and it's, yeah, I mean, that's what is so excruciating about the self. The self really is the center of the center of our problem. And when things are really going well, we are consoled by how well they're going, but we know it's vulnerable to change.

You're only as good as your last appearance in some sense. I could do something incredibly embarrassing in the middle of this podcast, and that will be the thing I'm thinking about tonight. And I'm thinking, God, i'll be i'm thinking you know god i can't believe i fucked that up so bad and within joe's podcast uh and that it's you're always vulnerable to that for the rather for as long as you are as long as you're in the center

of this thing vulnerable to what other other people think about you and um captive of your really crazy rehearsal of experience. When something like this happens to you, just think of how many times you repeat it to yourself. It's like you tell yourself the same story 15 times a minute for hours, and it doesn't strike you as insane, but it actually is insane. If your thoughts could be broadcast on a monitor

for other people to hear, and they could hear you repeat yourself over and over and over again, it would seem starkly crazy. And yet it seems normal. It's kind of like the dream state where you go to sleep, and you're in your bed, and everything's obeying the laws of physics. And then in the next conscious moment, you are at a party somewhere, talking to someone who you know is dead, and saying, oh, I can't believe you're alive now. And then there's a gorilla in the room. And none of this strikes you as crazy. The craziest things about dreams is that the mind seems to just accept them, accept these changes one after the other

without any sense that there should be continuity. And this is due, there's no question that this is due to the diminished activity of the frontal lobes during REM sleep. Our truth, our reality testing hardware has come largely offline during dreams. But there's something analogous happening when we're just thinking in the waking state because thoughts don't make much sense.

Because the repetition, we don't notice how crazy the repetition is, and we would notice it if we were talking to each other. If I was telling you the same thing 15 times in a row without honoring your expectation that I might move on to another topic, you would notice and I would notice, right? And yeah, and the other thing that's crazy about thoughts is that much of our thinking, certainly our linguistic thoughts, it's structured as though it were a conversation, and we play both sides of the conversation. So I'll sit down here, and I came in, I sat down,

and I brought you a book, and I wanted to sign the book, and I see this pen over here, and I think, oh good, there's a pen over there. Now, I can see that there's a pen over there. So who am I – why do I have to say there's a pen over there? Who am I telling? Is there someone in me who can't see that there's a pen over there? So there's a conversation that starts and I'm both sides of it.

That doesn't make any sense. And yet our subjectivity is continually just – it is discursive in that way. And they're just voices talking to each other. And not only are there not two of us in there, there's not even one of us in there. The thinker isn't there, but we seem to have two of them. It's like we're constantly talking to mommy and daddy. And in fact, that could be the way this conversation gets internalized because, you know, I can see it in my kids now where they sometimes I'll leave, I'll listen to my daughter playing by herself and she's talking to herself

out loud in the way that, you know, you'd have to be sort of crazy to do as an adult. But as a kid, you're just, you know, you're just talking out loud. And eventually, we all learn to internalize that conversation. And when people who can't internalize it, well, they're the crazy ones. The person who's walking down the street just saying, oh, good, there's a pen over there. God, we're late. And God, Joe's going to really be pissed. I can't believe I should have checked the traffic before I left. These are the kinds of thoughts I could think silently in the space of my mind,

and it wouldn't be starkly crazy, but to verbalize them, then you're a madman. And that difference between letting them out and just knowing to keep your mouth shut captures a large part of the difference between being a proper lunatic and a normal person. But what I argue in this book is that normal isn't good enough. You know, the normal state of consciousness wherein you are just chased out of bed every morning by your thoughts and you think, think, think, think, think every waking moment until you fall helplessly asleep at night, that's not necessarily a happy place to be and it's not the only alternative. And so, and again, and thought is not that you're, the goal is not to have a mind without thoughts. I mean, we need thoughts and you can't, thoughts. And everything we do as human beings, for the most part, requires thought to get off the ground.

So our relationships are based on thoughts and every public institution and science. This conversation we have with ourselves and with others is based on language and concepts that are mediated by language. And so you need thought, but the difference is between thinking and knowing that you're thinking, really knowing that you're thinking in the moment of thoughts arising or being lost in thought and then when you're lost in thought It doesn't really matter what the the content is you're still Confused about who and what you are. I mean you could be thinking about The more you could be thinking about the most profound things in science or in in ethics or whatever it is, but if you're just Thinking without knowing that you're thinking,

there is a kind of delusion there. It is analogous to the dream state in a way where you're just, you're not, it's not clear to you what's going on. You think you're the thinker of the thoughts. You think you're authoring your thoughts in a way that you're not. I mean, because thoughts just arise. We don't actually author them. Isn't it fascinating that even in higher education, there's very little emphasis whatsoever on controlling thoughts, on into your mind and rolling over you, like that kind of process and that kind of runaway thought process can actually really negatively affect your life. And it can start a pattern that can create other events or other sort of neurotic type thinking that can affect your future. or other sort of neurotic type thinking that can affect your future. And if you can manage that and sort of nip that in the bud, like literally nip it in the bud, like that could benefit your future. That could benefit who you become, how you evolve, how you transform as a person, a developing person.

And yet it's not really taught. Is it because the people that are involved in higher education aren't aware of it They don't know it. It's not a common thinking process. It's not a common thinking thought management process I mean, what what is it that leads? I mean someone like you who's had a higher education goes on writes a book like this Then it becomes a part of whoever's reading it, part of their mindset. But if they don't have that, if they don't have that book, I mean, they literally have to be introduced into someone outside of the realm of high school, college, even master's, PhD. Very

few people that go through that entire process are involved in a comprehensive analysis of how to think. Yeah, well, mindfulness is actually increasingly current now, and it's a bit of a, in some sense, a fad, but I think it's probably an enduring one because it's so useful. So mindfulness is now more and more being taught in schools, and actually my wife has even taught it in a public school to kids as young as six. So there's – Really? That's amazing.

Yeah. It was amazing to see, too. You have this – just picture a group of – it was in a kind of lower economic public school. I think there were probably 30 kids in the class. And so you picture 36-year-olds sitting in a circle. And on the first day, it was just the chaos of 36 year olds and by the fourth week she was teaching one class a week they were sitting for 15 minutes in silence no screwing around no problem just unbelievable yeah just just and and they and the stuff they

were reporting back in terms of their experience was amazing. But – and the great thing about mindfulness is there's nothing spooky about it. You don't have to develop any kind of affection for Buddhism or beliefs in the supernatural or a notion of karma. I mean, nothing is – all it is – and there's nothing – there's no thing that you're strategically adding to your experience by way of meditating. So you don't have a mantra and there's nothing to explain. All you have to do is pay extremely close attention to whatever is arising of its own. And you start with the breath because the breath is always there and it's just an easy thing to pay attention to. But very quickly it's just, it becomes, you're just noticing sights and sounds and sensations and moods and thoughts. And it makes perfect sense because if you want to know what it's like to be you,

if you want to have a very clear look at the nature of your own consciousness, it just makes sense to pay attention. And all you're doing is paying attention. And there's no conceptual overlay uh that you're you're applying that's monkeying with your experience to to try to change it so the goal in in that case isn't even you're not even trying to have a better experience although you can covertly hope to have a better experience and sort of corrupt the process that way but you're really just trying to witness it just exactly what the character of your experience is in each moment.

So you're just noticing unpleasant experience without pushing it away and noticing pleasant experience without trying to grab at it. And it just so happens that once you develop that kind of dispassionate attention to experience, then certain very pleasant experiences start to come along. to experience, then certain very pleasant experiences start to come along because so much of what's unpleasant about our minds is our resistance to pain and our grasping at pleasure and our struggle with experience. So just paying attention really just openly and without any agenda, for the period of time you can do that, you really have surrendered the struggle. And that tremendous relief just comes with that process. And so, yeah, so it's becoming something that they are teaching in schools at various ages. And it's, I think, the one

downside to the way mindfulness is being marketed at this point is that it's really being thought of as almost an esoteric version of an executive stress ball where it's a tool to optimize performance and it's the kind of thing that a CEO wants to have in his toolkit. And all that's true. It is a tool to optimize performance. But it's much more like, and it's traditionally intended to be much more like the Large Hadron Collider, which is to say a real tool for discovering something fundamental,

in this case, about the nature of the mind. And the purpose of mindfulness is to discover that this self we think we have is an illusion. And that the real breakthrough is not just a little less stress or a little more concentration or an ability to direct your mind where you want it to go. So if you want to stay on a diet, but you're tempted by the chocolate chip cookie, you can just get back on your diet without eating the cookie. I mean, that's one way in which you could use mindfulness, but that's not really the center of the bullseye.

The center of the bullseye is to cut through this illusion that we're all riding around in our heads as a ghost in the machine. So we're not riding around in our heads as the you know as a ghost in the machine so we're not riding around in our heads no what are we doing well there's just i mean there's you you have a head but right um the sense that there is a well interestingly you it's another way to talk about this i don't know if you've ever heard of this writer, Douglas Harding. He was a British architect who wrote a book called On Having No Head. So he actually summarized the insight as a state of headlessness. And it actually does sort of capture the flavor of it in a way. And he kept advocating that people just look for their heads.

So you're walking around and you know you have a head, but you actually don't see your head. I mean, you and I are talking now. The only head you see is my head, right? So you see the world and my head is in the middle of it, but your head isn't showing up for you, right? And you can notice, and if you look for where I'm looking, you know I'm looking at this thing that you think you have behind your eyes.

Right. And if you sort of incline your attention in that direction, it's possible to have an experience where that feeling drops away. Where you actually no longer feel like you're behind your eyes looking across space at me. You just feel like there's just this space in which my head is appearing and you're and so it's almost like you've been decapitated and it's like it's like imagine being without a head you know okay um and so anyway this is douglas harding's metaphor uh for this this insight into selflessness but it does sort of capture the flavor of it. It gets your attention moving in the right direction, because if you look for the center of experience,

and this feeling of being a self behind the eyes is this feeling of there being a center to experience. It's not that we feel identical to experience. We feel like we are having an experience. We feel like we are appropriating the experience, and we're doing it from a point behind our eyes. We're doing it from this sense of being a subject. But if you look for the subject, that sense of a center can drop out, and then there's just experience. And that's very much like the kind of flow states or the unified full immersion experiences that people have when you're paying attention to something so closely that you lose yourself in it, whether it's surfing or martial arts or sex or whatever it is. You're just, there can be these experiences where for a moment, there's no distance between,

you're no longer looking over your own shoulder having the experience, you're no longer trying to surf, you're no longer thinking about how good the wave is or whether you're really on it. There's just a moment where there's just pure flow and you are just, there's a unified field of experience. And people get really addicted to those. Those are peak experiences for people.

And then that's why a person would surf or do anything else, which is giving them access to this state of consciousness where the self drops away and there's just experience. But the thing is you can have that at any moment you remember to look for it once you know how to meditate. That is the nature of consciousness. You don't have to be on a wave in a wetsuit. You can just notice it just in the middle of a conversation.

And that's really the subject of this book. That flow state is very different when you get great at something, whether it's martial arts or you feel it in stand-up comedy as well. It's a very similar state where I describe it on stage as being a passenger. You feel like you're a passenger on the ride. I know the words are coming out of my mouth. I know the timing. I know. But it's because I know the material so well and I'm so comfortable on stage and i put in so much time that i could reach that flow state and the same thing said uh can be said for jiu jitsu or for kickboxing sparring or

anything like that when you're when you're when you're locked in when you know you you've done it so many times you're completely comfortable with the movements you you under you've done it so many times, you're completely comfortable with the movements. You've done all the training. You've put in all the work and the hours to get to that point. It's not as simple as, like, you could be a white belt who meditates and reach a flow state. You can't. Oh, yeah, no. It's not going to—this isn't going to help you in jiu-jitsu. I mean, you're still going to be a white belt on the mat even if you can drop your sense of self.

There'll be no flow state. You're going to get strangled. No, I mean, there can be a flow state while getting strangled. I guess. That's masochism, yeah. But you're still going to not know what to do. Oh, yeah, no doubt. So it can't be a flow state.

You'll be acting and reacting instead of just in the zone. Well, no, you can be, no, it's just the zone can be found anywhere. It's just people tend to only find it when there is this sort of mastery component and there's no more error correction. So the problem that we all have when we're tuning up a skill is that we're constantly making mistakes and becoming incrementally more aware of the kinds of mistakes we're making and correcting for them and getting better at correcting for them. And there's all the self-talk of what we should have done, what we should do, what we're hoping to do in the next moment. Um, and flow states come when you get good enough for the most part, so that all of that goes away. So that like, you know, when you're playing golf, you know, there's no, there are no more thoughts in your backswing. You take the club away and you're not thinking 15

different things as you know, you're trying to hit the little white ball. You're just hitting the little white ball because you've just grooved your swing so much that you just have no issue hitting the little white ball. And so jiu-jitsu has its analogous component where you're not still trying to remember what you should be doing when somebody is in the middle of passing your guard. It's like you're just part of the whole motion that is, you're not having to make these conscious calculations. You're just moving. just as surrendered to the present moment and free of self-talk free of neurotic expectations about what what's going to happen in the next instant or what you wish didn't happen a moment ago um and still be a total spaz on the mat i mean you could just you could just this would just be it wouldn't help your jujitsu. It just would help your state of consciousness.

You know, you can just drop your problem while realizing that you don't know what to do when the guy's passing your guard. You know, but it's, these, so these, but people find these experiences really addictive and not addictive in a technical, in a biological sense, but they're just really captivating, and they orient their lives around having these experiences. And the really dangerous thing is that people traditionally have found these experiences in the context of religion and in the context of incredibly divisive beliefs about paradise and the unique validity of certain revelations. And so you have, people get tastes of self-transcendence in the context of really frightening beliefs, and then they become mightily attached to those beliefs because those beliefs seem to, they seem to be the only explanation for the meaning of these experiences. So if you're a Christian and you feel absolute rapture and self-transcendence while praying to Jesus, well, of course, that's going to be a data point, if not the only needed data point in favor of the story that Jesus is the Son of God and he's taking an interest in your soul.

And if you're a jihadist feeling that, just as you get off the bus in Syria and you meet your recruiters at ISIS, it's going to prove to you that this is, of course, this is Allah's will and you're fighting the one true cosmic battle against the evil infidels. And there's no question that these guys feel these very positive states of mind. You're fighting the one true cosmic battle against the evil infidels. There's no question that these guys feel these very positive states of mind. They're not all running around depressed out there. They're having peak experiences. And then there are people who have peak experiences at Burning Man and have a totally different interpretation of their significance.

And what I'm arguing is that the only thing peak experiences prove is that they can't prove that all of these incompatible doctrines are true because they can't all be true. The jihadist and the fundamentalist Christian can't both be right. And not only are they not the only people who have these experiences,

there are Hindus who have experiences that are identical but are in the context of a totally different doctrine, and atheists like myself have these experiences. So these experiences can't prove that any of these doctrines, these provincial doctrines are true. What they prove is that the human mind is susceptible to altered states of consciousness, and some of which are really compelling and worth having. And yet we just have to understand them in a secular and universal sense, in a non-sectarian sense.

Is that what's going on when Pentecostals speak in tongues, when they hit that, what is that called, glossolaliaalia? When they start like you reach this, you know what I mean? You reach this state of mind where you're able to communicate this bizarre, nonsensical language free of ridicule. You're not worrying about how goofy you're sounding.

To some degree, it is a kind of surrender of certainly one's dignity. No, I mean, clearly it's got to feel pretty good and your surrender you're getting it you're getting rid of certain hang-ups it's like you know dancing wildly at a rave you know it's like if you're you're no longer uptight because you're willing to writhe around on the floor with your aunts and uncles and you're on ecstasy no but in this case you're a pentecostal oh um uh yeah yeah the state that you achieve that allows you to when you see those people do that like it's a i've saw a guy do it in real life

uh yeah i've never seen it so i don't know what on fear factor a guy was um he, he actually won the event, but it's so hilarious. Like the event was so ridiculous. Like some of the Fear Factor events were completely ridiculous. And this one particular event was uniquely ridiculous because it had absolutely nothing to do with your ability to overcome something or your ability to even figure your way out through something. You were attached to a harness, and the harness was attached to a cable that attached you to a wire so that you actually didn't fall off this cliff. But you were on a 4x4, and you drove the 4x4 off the cliff.

So you just drove. You hit the gas, and you were yanked up and the four by four fell and whoever's four by four went the furthest oh full commitment yeah yeah it's full commitment but um there's no skill involved you're just hitting the gas and going off a cliff the same point on the cliff as everyone else and this one guy won and he was convinced that this was the will of god and he, he started doing this thing. And I was like standing next to him watching this. I was like, this is so strange.

You know, it was weird to watch someone. First of all, if you are speaking in tongues, what a shitty language it is. Because you keep repeating the same noise over and over again. Well, it has none of the structure of a language. People have analyzed it and it's clearly bullshit. It sounds like bullshit. It would be interesting if it weren't. It's possible that somebody could produce a performance like this

where it would have linguistic structure, and then people would just be spinning out, trying to figure out how this is possible. But no, it's just it's just gibberish but it's a similar gibberish that's what made me uh wonder like how weird this is uh because this this gibberish and i don't know maybe it's repeating because these pentecostals hang out with each other maybe it's like an accent sort of a thing like one person develops a boston accent although people around them have that boston. But when I watched this guy, and then I watched Robert Tilden, who's one of my favorite bullshit artists that's on late night religious television.

He's one of those guys that Jesus wants you to see. He actually said this one time. He goes, every time you write a check to me, Satan gets a black eye. That's great. I fucking love that quote. But he does the same thing. He goes, It's the same

like that kind of sound. Well, they're teaching it to each other. It's a kind of performance and they've all gone to school on each other's performances. But I'm not insinuating in any way that it's actually divine, but I was just weirded out by the similarities

in their bullshit language and his bullshit language. Yeah. Like, I don't know if this guy's a Robert Tilden fan, but he was doing that same sa-ma-la-ma-la-ka-la-ka-la-ma-la-ma-la. Like, it's a weird... The gibberish is similar. Is it, like, just they're not that creative like you know like

yeah there's not that many ways to make nonsense quick sounds quickly and so that i mean there's probably some constraints and it would be interesting to see if your native chinese speakers would would produce the same yeah phonemes they might they might have different i would expect it would be different. That would be interesting to teach because Christianity has spread to a lot of other countries. Asian countries. If you can get Pentecostals. In Korea.

Yeah. And see if they you know, if they have some sort of Asian twist to it. We'll fund that study. Let's write a check right here. The only way to do it is to, you know, it would be so unethical because you get these poor people believing that they're really talking in tongues. And just so you can listen to their lingo. Yeah.

Well, it's interesting to know where the line between self-deception and conscious fraud is placed. It's like those fake martial arts videos we watched last time I was here. You know, the guys who were taking those dives with their Aikido master. It's just hard to see. It's hard to see that it's a conscious fraud entirely. Because people have too much time invested. And obviously the guy who invites someone from another school to come punch him in the face, that guy was believing his own bullshit. I mean, he thought at a certain point he must have been convinced that he had this power

yeah because he's you know for a decade or more he sees people flop around at the mirror you know a hint of a of a touch well it kind of brings us back to what we were talking about earlier in that when you're around certain people you're a different person in that when you're around certain people, you're a different person. And that when these guys are around all these people that really believe that they have some divine ability to control other people's bodies with air, just like there's something about doing that over and over again and reinforcing that belief that it seems to be like they are a master when they're around those people. But then when you put them around someone who knows nothing about them and treats them just as an opponent in a martial arts contest and head kicks them,

all of a sudden, it's gone. Where's my power? Who am I? I'm not a magician. I'm not a wizard anymore. Now I'm just a guy getting the fuck beat out of me by some other martial artist. And this is a terrible, terrible scenario I found myself in. Well, that's what's so great about real martial arts.

It's like science in that you're running an experiment that is as close to a real experiment as you can run without anyone getting killed. And you're seeing what works. And that's what the ufc was in the beginning the ufc was just this absolutely enthralling science experiment because no one knew what was going to happen you throw you know what's going to happen when you throw a boxer in with a with a karate legend with a sumo wrestler with and just no rounds and just let the clock run. So obviously now I'm telling you your own business, but now everyone has gone to school on everyone else's style and everyone knows enough jiu-jitsu on the ground

to be able to nullify the advantage of jiu-jitsu. And so now everyone has kind of converged on the common universal toolkit combatively that you want. And so you're not getting these—the experiment has basically played out. Now everyone's going in with the same expectation that when you're standing up, you want to be able to kick and punch like a kickboxer or like a Muay Thai fighter or somebody who really knows how to kick and punch. kickboxer or like a Muay Thai fighter or somebody who really knows how to kick and punch. And when you're vertically grappling,

you really do want to be like Randa Couture or somebody who's got real clinch and pummeling skills and Greco skills. And then when you go to the ground, you want BJJ or Sambo or something that gives you those skills

on the ground. And so there's not that many surprises left in store. But maybe there are some. I could be wrong. Maybe there's some total surprises. There's variables, which is interesting because martial arts in many ways really is a scientific endeavor because so much of it involves leverage and force and physics, but also the introduction of new variables that haven't been practiced. And when you introduce new variables, like new kicking techniques especially.

Like a wheel kick or something. Yeah, wheel kicks. Or even traditional kicking techniques that had been discarded. Like when Anderson Silva front kicked Vitor Belfort in the face and knocked him out. Everybody was like, holy shit. Who the fuck said that coming? Two of the highest level guys ever. Vitor Belfort in the face and knocked him out. Everybody was like, holy shit. Who the fuck said that coming? Two of the highest level guys ever.

And he introduces the original technique. That is the number one technique you teach. When I used to teach white belts, the first kick I would teach them is a front kick. Because it's easy to learn. You pick your knee up, you extend your foot forward. And I would teach them to do it at knee level. And then eventually you go to chest level. And then the rare front kick to the face. nobody ever used it in a ufc bout but now it's incredibly common it's like one of the main you know uh travis brown the guy we're talking about early knocked out alistair over him

front kick to the face right and for years we had none um terry edam when he first knocked out or um edson barboza when he first knocked out terry edam withboza, when he first knocked out Terry Adam with a wheel kick to the head. That was in 2000, I want to say 12 or 13. So there had been no wheel kick knockouts for the decade plus of the UFC. I mean, it was... Now, do you think that... Two decades, in fact. Do you think that's somewhat an artifact of everyone's expectations being so trained now that given you know all of the fights

that have happened and and and how all these traditional techniques have been discarded that now no one is expecting anything like a traditional kick so that it's almost like you threw a wheel kick in a boxing match where you've got two boxers and and you know one has absolutely no expectation that kicks are even going to be involved and all of a sudden you will kick him, right? Is it just the sheer novelty or is there something else going on that once you have all of the other skills that are the real foundation for being a good MMA fighter, then you can experiment with goofy traditional moves that wouldn't have worked if you were a pure traditional martial artist. Mary, do you think if you brought in

just a pure traditionalist who was like one of the guys who showed up at UFC 1 now, who really could only do things like wheel kicks and, you know, he just basically, he was just a straight up, I don't know, Tang Tzu Do guy, right? You bring him into the UFC. Is he going to get off a lucky wheel kick in exactly that circumstance? He would have to have all the other techniques as well. But I think it's pattern recognition. And not very many people who are martial artists in the sense of mixed martial artists fighting in the UFC can

actually do those techniques. I've worked out with high level guys, like guys who are fighting for titles, guys who are, you know, top 10 ranked, and I've worked out with them showing them martial arts techniques like Taekwondo techniques, and they don't know how to do them. And it's amazing. So you're talking about high level MMA guys who who don't have a background a kicking background don't have a taekwondo based background right uh or shotokan there's a few uh kicking uh disciplines that incorporate wheel kicks and a lot of high kicks like uh axe kicks and things along those lines and they literally don't know the the effectiveness of these techniques because they don't do them. So what they do is a lot of Muay Thai, leg kicks, knees to the body, elbows in close, get the takedown, ground and pound, submissions, things that you see much more common.

And when I've tried to teach them these specific techniques, it's amazing how incompetent they are at them. They haven't even tried to learn wheel kicks. Right. So when I'm teaching them wheel kicks, they're, they're like, their body's all awkward. They're throwing it weird. They don't have like the fluidity that you need like an Edson Barboza has where, you know, he's standing there and then, boom, and he throws it. So if you're not used to sparring with a guy like that, you don't know that that can come at you like that. Yeah.

You're used to a certain distance as well. The distance between where a person could land a leg kick and a person could land a wheel kick is a little bit different. Yeah, so you don't know you're in range. Yeah. There's also some kicks like spinning back kicks are a little bit easier than a wheel kick. The wheel kick requires a lot of flexibility. So you might anticipate a spinning back kick and then the kick comes up high. And you only have a millisecond.

You have the reaction time and action time are two very different things. That's why sucker punches work the reason why a sucker punch works is a punch the action time is like a hundredth of a second but reaction time is like a tenth of a second that's a big gap yeah so the amount of time that it takes for someone to punch you in the face and the amount of time it takes you go oh this fucking guy's gonna punch me in the face oh shit I got a duck you don't have time crack youack, you get hit. And that's why sucker punches work.

That's why, actually, this opens up to, I don't know if we want to go recklessly in this direction, but this opens up into the ethics of uses of violence and just kind of use of force philosophy. And you have something like what's been going on in Ferguson around this shooting. People have erroneous assumptions about how violence unfolds. And as you're saying, like, if you're deciding to block or to defend yourself once a guy has thrown his sucker punch, you are nine times out of ten too late. I mean, you need a distance at that moment. Yeah, you need awareness, awareness of possibility. But if, you know, And I'm not making any claims

about knowing what happened in Ferguson with the shooting. I mean, it could be every inch the homicide that many people seem to think it was. But the reality is that cops are having to work in a universe where they do a traffic stop and someone pulls out a gun and shoots them in the face.

And so they have to assume that that is a possibility no matter what you look like, no matter what kind of car you're driving. And so you see these cops are incredibly on edge. You see them unbuckling the strap on their holster as they just walk up to give you a ticket. But it's because they don't have the luxury of time. They can't wait to see you produce a gun, and then they say, okay, now my lethal force option is beyond reproach. And so, I mean, the only mode to be in with a cop, no matter how much of an asshole he might be, is to be compliant,

and then you sue him later. In the middle of negotiating with a cop, no matter how unjustified the arrest may seem, that's not the time to be telling him he's an asshole or talking about how you are such a good guy and this is a violation of your civil rights. You do what he says and then sue the cops later.

But it's just because the filter he is seeing everything through is this guy. The sheer fact that a cop has a gun on his belt makes any contact a potential lethal encounter for him. So you just go hands on a cop, you know, you push a cop. He doesn't know that you're not going for the gun on his belt. He doesn't know that you're going to not push him into a car and he'll be knocked out and then you're going to get his gun. I mean, so it's just, it's all deadly from a cop's point of view.

And so very few people understand that. I had a friend who was stopped by a cop and this this is a middle-aged Jewish guy who's like, in his mind, the least dangerous person on earth. And why on earth is a cop stopping him? And my friend said something to the cop, and the cop unlatched the top restraint on his gun. And my friend said, what, you're going to pull out your gun on me? And the cop said, what, you're going to pull out your gun on me? And the cop said, what does a bad guy look like? And that just sort of cut through it for my friend. My friend knew he was not a bad guy, but there's no way for the cop to know that he's not a bad guy.

And people are just not aware of that. And they're interacting with cops. And it's dangerous for everybody. Yeah, the naivete of someone who is a good guy who doesn't know bad people and doesn't know what people i mean just go on youtube and watch um assault on police officer just youtube assault on police officer there's a a hundred videos that you can watch where people sucker punch cops There's this horrific video of this guy getting pulled over, and he's with his son, and it's on a dash cam of the police car. The lady pulls him over, and she asks him for his license and registration. The guy gets out of the car.

He's giving her his stuff, and he says, and she's like, sir, I need you to turn around and lean your body up against him. I'm going to handcuff you. And he's like, why are you going to do that? Bang! He punches her in the face. And before you know it, body up against someone I'm gonna handcuff you and he's like why are you gonna do that bang he punches her in the face and before you know it she's unconscious on the ground he's beating on her his his his son is screaming for him to stop or his daughter was screaming at him I forget which one it was for him to stop beating this cop up but he's beating the fuck out of her and she's unconscious and he takes her gun and you know I don't know how it ended I got shot it off. But there's a lot of those.

You can't assume that someone's a good person. You don't know who they are. You don't know anything about them. And also the psychology of being a police officer, the PTSD involved in day-to-day interaction with criminals, day-to-day interaction with people lying to you, day-to-day interaction with danger, violence, car accidents, death, over and over and over and over again. You've got to be on edge all the time. And then thinking, is this the day where they get me?

Is this the day? Am I going to be the guy who gets his gun taken away? Am I going to be the guy who gets shot like this guy I saw in a video? There's so many instances that a cop has to think about when you have that job. I saw it argued. Someone made this really irresponsible, ignorant Twitter post about how being a cop isn't dangerous. Because look how many cops die as opposed to look how many X amount of firemen or whatever job it was die. The cops actually are less likely to die than many

industrial workers. But that's because they have protocol. That's because they think ahead. That's because so many cops have been killed that they have all these standards and practices in place to make sure that it doesn't happen. That's why when a cop approaches a car, he does have his hand on his gun. That's why he does say, keep your hand on the wheel. That's why he does say, license and registration, keep your hands where i can see them license and registration please like they have to be aware because if cops just treated it like hey

cops never die like i saw this twitter post it says like one-tenth of one percent of cops die like i don't have to worry about that shit hey Hey, man, where are you going? Boom, you're shot in the face. You know, it's that the statistics are often inaccurate when it comes to dealing with something where someone is. There's many practices that are in place to protect someone from inevitable invariables or inevitable variables that a cop is going to face. Yeah. They also have much less training than you would expect, especially with like hand-to-hand skills. I mean, you have so much more training than even, you know, elite SWAT operators

in terms of your hand-to-hand skills. And so it's, the public has an expectation that the only justification for producing a gun, if you're a cop or if you're anyone, is if the other person has a gun or some similarly lethal weapon. I think some people think that a knife isn't lethal enough to justify the use of a gun, right? But the fact is, cops are not superheroes, and they can't handle a person who is bigger than them, stronger than them, younger than them, and more aggressive than them who gets the jump on them. I mean, it's just, you know, that's a tall order even for a black belt in need tasers and they need guns and they need force of numbers in order to even

do the job against somebody who doesn't have a gun themselves. And so it's a hard job. And I've got huge respect for cops, all the while knowing that there are undoubtedly some bad cops who are just psychopaths and sadists and shouldn't be in the job. And there are a lot of cops who are, who are frankly not as trained as they should be in any, even with guns. Most of them. Yeah. They're not as trained with guns as they should be. And they're not as trained hand to hand as they should be. Um, and that's, um, you know, that's just, it's, it's doing them a disservice and it's doing the public a disservice. But still, even if you're well-trained, you, as a cop, you are moving into situations which it's just untenable to give this stranger the benefit of the doubt. You look like someone who's escalating force too early, if you're a cop,

who's just taking totally rational steps to stay safe in a situation where there's just basic uncertainty as to what you're dealing with. I think we're requiring so much of someone who becomes a police officer that it's almost a job that no one can be qualified to do. You're requiring psychology, you're requiring the physical ability to defend themselves against a wide variety of people where you have zero idea of what their background is. You see some young guy and he looks reasonably athletic. You have no idea what he can do to you. He might be a cigarette smoker with no martial arts experience whatsoever, or he might be a Muay Thai champion. And if you're within range of him, all of a sudden, boom, you're unconscious. You have no idea what happened.

He punched you in the face so fast. You have no idea. And the other thing about when people start talking about cops and violence and danger, thing about when people start talking about cops and and violence and danger most people have never been involved in a physical altercation with a trained martial artist they have no idea how vulnerable they really are they're walking around i've seen people get in arguments before and get crazy with people and start fights and then watch the fight take place and i and i it boggles my mind i'm like why was this guy so confident to get into a physical altercation he's no idea what to do with a guy with cauliflower ear you know that's usually a tip-off where you've

got you know guys got tats like you and he's got cauliflower ear and and you still got somebody mouthing off to him it happens it happens all the time and I think some people think they're gonna bluff their way out of it or yeah I think there's so much ignorance and ego involved in the average person when it comes to physical altercations. I think it would do a lot of people good just to realize how vulnerable they are. When I was a black belt in Taekwondo, when I had national level competitor, I'd won multiple tournaments. And then I started doing jujitsu. I got mauled yeah i mean

mauled not mauled like um like well you know i kind of held them off for a little while but eventually they got me no no like instantaneously destroyed which is like wrestling with a five-year-old you know it's like the five-year from the five-year-old's point of view there there's just there is absolutely nothing to do it's just you know yeah and and that's that's what i felt like the first time i got on the mat with a with a jujitsu black belt i thought i i thought i would have some sense of just how to stop the the problem from engulfing me and it was just it was it's totally hopeless and it's hopeless in a way that that's why i wrote that blog post originally, The Pleasures of Drowning.

It's like drowning because when you're, drowning doesn't make much sense. It's hard, like you're moving, you know, you get in the water and you're moving your arms and legs like you've seen people swim. You know, it's like how could there be that much to it? And in fact, once you know how to tread water, there isn't much to staying afloat. But if you don't know how to tread water, fact once you know how to tread water there isn't much to staying afloat but if you don't know how to tread water you don't know how to swim all that moving of

your arms and legs is just it's completely ineffectual and you could be making a hundred percent effort and you're still going straight to the bottom and it's um and with in jujitsu it's just so uh it's so surprising to feel like you have some skills because you've done, you've trained for years in some stand-up art and you did a little, you know, you took some Krav Maga classes and you did some stuff on the ground and you have a basic feeling that, you know, you know, hey, I would poke him in the eyes if it really got bad on the ground.

And then you get on the mat with somebody who really has a deep jiu-jitsu game and it's just, it's like wrestling a martian well there's also levels like you know i'm a black belt but i there's guys who i roll with that treat me like i'm a blue belt that's the reality of the situation if i'm if i'm rolling with like jacare i'm gonna get strangled and i'm i've been doing it for 20 years it doesn't matter so how so how long do you think you could hold off the tap with the best person, if you're down with Marcelo Garcia or somebody who— A couple minutes at the most.

And I have to be on full defense. That's the difference. If I'm rolling with a guy who's a purple belt, I go offense. If I'm rolling with someone who is below me or my level, I'm always defensively aware but I'm going full offense or if I'm rolling with a guy like a Marcelo Garcia it's all defense yeah it's all like oh just it's all like trying to hold someone off and working like if you knew that you were gonna be working against a guy like

Marcelo Garcia and you had like months to prepare I would just bench press her and do everything about pushing away everything is pushing away reps and pushing away but eventually you're gonna fuck up you know there's it's like a good analogy also is debating because if you debate the average person who has an illogical standpoint on something like i've watched you debate many people when it comes to religion and things along those lines. And when you have the tools in place, those tools being logic, reason, and defined arguments about different variables, and then the other person doesn't, and they have emotions and religious ideology on their side, and just overconfidence, just having this ridiculous idea that they're right and they're going to win.

And they go in there and they just get tied up. Like so quickly their arguments get destroyed. And you see them get flustered and you see their words come out all clunky and their heartbeat raises. And I love, there's one debate that you did with, I don't remember the gentleman's name, but he was a rabbi. And you were- Probably David Wolpe. Yes. And he got so dramatic in the way he was talking, which made it more ridiculous.

Because you have this very calm, very flat way of expressing yourself, which makes anyone who's super emotional and super like dramatic seem preposterous it seems you seem more ridiculous because you're all and what God has said to us and the Word of God and all this like and then you know you're like well that's not exactly the fact or the reality is this and this and that this is what we know about neuroscience this we know about life and this is just because of that doesn't mean this and that, and this is what we know about neuroscience, this we know about life, and this is just because of that doesn't mean this. And you see the, uh, uh, uh, they're drowning. Except they don't necessarily know they're drowning.

And the crucial difference, and one reason why jiu-jitsu is so satisfying, is that there's no tap out in a debate. I mean, they're never forced to acknowledge that they lost the point. That's so true. No matter how obvious it becomes to the audience or to you. Actually, there's one thing that's kind of insidious about debates, which is actually terrible in politics. I hate it when I see this in political debates, where laughter is a surrogate for tap out. And so if you can get a big laugh in a debate no matter how terrible your platform

is as a politician no matter how wrong you are on the on the facts if you if you can get a big laugh line you know you know you you know you are no jack kennedy right right right that is that's all that anyone cares about at the end it's like the stand-up stand-up comic wins the debate um certainly politically and it's even it's even true in other contexts. So it's... Politically, it's everything, right? It's everything. That Jack Kennedy line was from what?

What was that, 88 or something like that? When was that? What year was that? That's Dan Quayle, right? Dan Quayle and... I need Google for these questions. Who was the senator he was debating? Lloyd Benson.

Yes. Yeah. I knew Jack, and he was debating? Lloyd Benson. Yes. Yeah. I knew Jack. And he set him up, man. It was like jab, jab, overhand. Boom. Right. I knew Jack Kennedy.

Jack Kennedy was a friend. You are no Jack Kennedy. And the whole audience was like, oh, shit. You compared yourself to a dead guy who was like the greatest president ever, who was shot in this national scandal. And I mean, all the buildup to it. I mean, it wasn't even like he was comparing himself to Theodore Roosevelt or someone else who was dead.

You know, Jack Kennedy, fuck, man. It was this checkmate. Like he could never have come back from that. Yeah. But it's, I mean, in that case. It is right here. Yeah. In that case, we were, you know, I was certainly on the side of, you know, certainly against Quayle there.

Yeah. But you see it happen in cases where it's, you know, the losing party, the party who's on the wrong end of the laugh is really the one who was making the most sense in the debate. Sure. And then they just, you know, you just know that that debate was a disaster for them. Well, especially if the audience is stacked. Yeah. You've got a bunch of religious people in the audience say, yeah, why don't you tell that to God when you see him at the pearly gates? Woo-hoo!

Exactly. Yeah, that can definitely. Well, it's also, you know, people are looking, they're looking for a result, and they can decide that that result is correct, you know, he can through sheer force of will and through cognitive dissonance, all the people in the audience refusing to recognize the actual thing that's being debated, but rather not a point that they get to express themselves. And this is, I agree with him.

Jesus doesn't want us to let queers marry each other. You know, and they just hoot and holler and all that loud noise in that one room. Well, what's crucial about laughter, it's really only laughter and applause are the only moments where you know, as a member of the audience, that everyone's on the same page. That's the moment when everyone helplessly breaks into a laugh. I mean, you as a comic, this is your career, you know, provoking these moments. But that, like as a public speaker, it's interesting. You know, I don't, you know, put a lot of laugh lines in my lectures,

but I recognize that if you go long enough without having a laugh line in a lecture, you sort of lose the sense that everyone is with you because it's just silence. Yes. Right? So I'm talking for 20 minutes and I'm hoping people are with it. I'm hoping they're finding this interesting.

I'm hoping that I'm making sense. But it's only the next time they laugh that truly reassures me that for that moment I have the entire room. And that's, so it's it's a um it's interesting yeah public speaking is a very unique art form uh public speaking in terms of like lectures when you see people give public talks about a book that they have like the the the ability to hold people's attention it's like there has to be something that you're doing some dramatic moment either you have to

have a certain amount of charisma or you have to have a certain sense of humor you have to have something to be able to sort of glue the whole thing together yeah you know it's hard to listen to someone like lectures that like boring professors give i remember like being in class listening to some of those lectures and 10-15 minutes in i'm checked out i mean i'm fucking thinking about my laundry i gotta do and i'm sort of paying attention because i have to but i'm bored as fuck but if the guy was humorous like i remember i saw a debate once between uh a member of the moral majority do you remember the moral majority and barney frank who wasn't openly gay back then.

This was when I was in high school. And Barney Frank was humorous, and he was so good at, he knew how to publicly speak. And it was in a small auditorium in Newton South High School in like 1984 or something like that. And Barney Frank, he was mocking this guy with an American flag on his lapel and what he was trying to he was essentially setting up what this guy was trying to project to you like

this is who he really is this is what he's trying to protect like he's like he's wearing a superhero outfit like oh he's he's so concerned about the morality of america but what he doesn't understand is this and i think that you people are smart enough to realize that and he was funny Yeah, and I remember like listening to one guy talk and it was like sanctimonious and fucking boring and boring It's just it's just it did not talk very well and the other guy even though it was just two people's opinions It was more pleasant to listen to it was more entertaining. So he was better at it. He won because of that. Yeah. The days of being able to get far without being able to speak well in public are behind us, I think. It's interesting. This is something that I discovered a few years ago. I actually

blogged about this. Jefferson had a morbid fear of public speaking and gave exactly two speeches, two State of the Unions in his two terms as president, and just read them in a kind of crushed monotone because he was so terrified. And that was it. I wish we could have heard those. Yeah, but I'm sure they were terrible. They were barely, for people at the time, reported that you could barely hear what he was saying.

Supportives of his? Yeah, and he would just walk like a condemned man to the scaffold when he had to give these speeches, and he avoided it because he was so uncomfortable doing it, but he could avoid it. Can you imagine being the President of the United States now and not feeling comfortable getting up? It's impossible.

Yeah. Fully on the force of his writing, he had the influence he had. Isn't it fascinating, too, that you need not just to be able to speak well publicly, but you need to have a certain style of communication where you address large numbers of people. It's completely unnatural. Like Obama has the long pauses and this very, there's just something about the way he talks where, you know, if someone was talking to you in your home in that same way,

you would think they're absolutely insane. Like if you had someone over your house and you're having a conversation with them and they spoke the way Obama speaks when he's addressing the nation, you would go, well, I got a fucking crazy person in my house. Like even if they were just addressing your family. If it was just one person standing at the table and you said, hey, Barack,

would you, you know, give us thanks for this meal that we're about to have? He gave this presidential type speech. Yeah. The way he's communicating. Yeah, yeah. With these long pauses

and weird affectations of his voice. He'd be like, who is this fucking guy? But he's not as bad. Where it really gets crazy for me is when it becomes a full oratorical performance. I mean, someone like Martin Luther King Jr. or a preacher, somebody who's just going for it in the stentorian way of just, it's going to be big and it's going to be dramatic

and i'm going to make you cry and and now obviously it's incredibly effective you know to see you know mlk's speeches i mean that's something very powerful is going on there and he's standing in front of whatever it was 400 000 people um so it's a big moment and you wouldn't it wouldn't be the same if he was just conversational but um you know it begins to look kind of hitlerian i mean hitler was the ultimate example of this i mean he to look at hitler give a speech i don't know how anyone thought the guy was saying i mean just it look it's so so far from the the the normal the norms of human conversation that it's just it just seems pathological to me i mean i don't know german i don't i don't know exactly so i'm not when i watch him speak i'm you know reading the subtitles

and i'm getting his vibe and there's i'm not getting exactly what a german would have gotten but i don't it's it's it's just, I'm not comfortable. There's something, there's a dishonesty to the performance there that I feel, no matter how, no matter what the content, like when the performance variable becomes, I frankly get this even with people like MLK, where it's, I mean, I recognize that the words are beautiful. I recognize that he's delivering it well, but there's a subtle dishonesty to the communication because it is a performance. It's not, and I'm not, you know, as a speaker,

you know, I try to speak, and this is, you know is one reason why I would never be a great speaker, but I try to be as conversational as possible. Internally, just to inhabit it, I'm only people, maybe that situation is going to dictate subtle changes in the way I speak. But it's going to be pretty close in terms of how I speak. And so it's because I just can't. The moment I start to ape Pericles, I begin to feel dishonest. Yeah. It's weird because it's so effective you know jay leno when he would uh practice his monologue for the tonight show he would go to the comedy and

magic club every sunday night and uh it was like a regular show he would do there and on sunday night when he would go to the comedy magic club and read these uh bits that he would try out for the week's monologue he he would do them dead, like monotone. Right. And the reason why he did it, he goes, I didn't want to add any extra pizzazz to the jokes to sell them. He goes, I just want to know whether they stood on their own. Right.

And that was how he found out whether or not it was an actual funny idea or whether or not it was just his master showmanship ability that was getting it across. And I think that's what you get when you get a Hitler or a Martin Luther King. It's like it's not just their words. It's just there's an energy behind them that's captivating that can be, in the terms of a guy like Martin Luther King, it can enhance the speech to the point where I Have a Dream is one of the greatest speeches in human history.

And one of the reasons why it's such a great speech is not just because he said it, but imagine if the same speech was read by Noam Chomsky. You'd fucking fall asleep halfway into it. Yeah, yeah. There's no question something would be lost, but part of it is the context. I mean, just being in front of an audience that large and a live audience and just the necessity of having to have your even even though you're miked there's the sense that your voice it needs to carry you know even though it's

being aided by a mic he's it's appropriate to be belting it out over over the heads of the audience whereas if if you were just in a room with 10 people you know blasting i have a dream that loud would just you'd be you'd be carted off you know i mean yeah or if you were right here just you and i in a podcast you started breaking getting that loud you know it's time for a rear naked joke guy's nuts call the cops kinnison uh who started out as a reverend uh used to uh break out into it on stage sometimes as a part of his performance he would would say, they asked me, Sam, have you had to do it? Have you had to go back? Have you had to teach the word of God?

Could you do it? Do you have it in you? Is the Holy Spirit alive? And he would go into this thing, and it was so compelling. It's just like whatever it is about human beings, when we see someone who speaks with this dynamic power, this passion, this ability to project words. It's so impressive.

Yeah. Because most of us can't do it. That's part of it, I think. And part of it is there's just something about us that, like, the reason why you can get hypnotized by a fucking watch swinging in front of your face is something about certain actions that are hypnotic, certain patterns of speaking that are hypnotic. Oddly captivatingating, oddly influential.

Yeah, yeah. Even just eye contact, this is something I write about briefly in the book. It's one thing you get in the spiritual world with gurus of various flavors is you get this commitment to really intense eye contact. Tom Cruise. Yeah, that's right. That's what they say about Tom Cruise when he talks to you. He's like, interesting, Sam. That's amazing.

It is a Scientology thing, yeah. He just locks up on you and you just want to believe him. Yeah. But no, it's incredibly intrusive and it's, but there's every version of it. There are people who are just non-neurotic. They don't feel any impulse to look away.

They're not uncomfortable making silent eye contact with somebody. They're not constantly throwing their words into the space because they're uncomfortable. And yet, they're just available and they're just looking at you. And their attention is free because they're not busy. They're not worried about what you're thinking about them. So they're just present. And these people can tend to make highly unusually intense eye contact, which is to say completely unbroken eye contact. And then there are psychopaths who do it, and it's a real power game where it's just they're not – they're just, they're not, they're running something, they have a very different agenda, but they're also comfortable, you know, I fucking you and just doing it from a place of aggression. But it's a, it was interesting when I got into meditation and early on, this is, you know, I i was 20 21 and got really into meditation and um

this is a period where i was doing a lot of psychedelics and one of the experiences you've probably had on psychedelics is the the amazing experience of just looking into somebody's eyes on acid or mushrooms and just having that just open a kind of an inner landscape of profundity or seeming profundity where you can just be staring into somebody's eyes silently for an eternity or what seems like an eternity. And what often happens to people is that after having experiences like this, then looking into people's eyes can become a way of really of of activating that state of mind where you you know you just

being committed to looking into people's eyes and never looking away can be a way of sort of introducing that sort of liquid psychedelic experience you know interpersonally and i was sort of into that to uh uh for a while and um uh so i was kind of walking through life you know like i guess tom cruise does just basically yeah just just like exactly just never just just like i'm just gonna go with you you know let's see where this goes and i'm just never gonna look away from anyone ever again and you you get you start having i mean it's it's intrusive and i stopped doing it but uh you you start having unusual experiences. The first thing you do is you discover everyone else is doing that for whatever reason.

So all of the psychopaths and the Scientologists and everyone comes out of the woodwork because there's some number of people walking around Earth at this moment who are playing that game. It's like you look into their eyes and it's just eye lock for as long as you're going to stay. They're never going to look away. And so whether it's a barista at Starbucks or whether it's just somebody who is 50 feet across the room at a party, you make eye contact, they're not going to be the first one to look away. And so you get into these really weird encounters. And I remember this one party I went to where I was sitting on a couch and I looked across the room and there was this guy looking at me and I so it was probably you

know 40 feet between us and he looked at me and I looked at him and then it was just like war of the warlocks you know it's like neither of us were going to look away right and it just be that and you know I was doing a lot of meditation and I was, you know, I had probably, uh, uh, taking acid once a month,

you know, so I was, I was pretty tuned up for this kind of game where it's just like, I, you know, I was not, I had no problem making eye contact with some strange guy, you know,

40 feet away. Um, and after a certain point he jumped up and kind of raced over to me and, you know, we had a problem. He's like, what the fuck are you doing? And, and, and there was like a real, so what I was doing was so intrusive, but he, he was, had his own game going because he, you know, he didn't look away. Right.

Right. He was available for it. But in any case, you, when you walk through life like this, you, you discover that there are a lot of people doing this for whatever reason. And you definitely have unusual encounters with strangers. I was on a train once when I was a kid. I was probably like 16 or 17 years old in Boston. And it was some guy and we were sitting across from each other and we looked at each other and he looked at me and he gave me like a little extra look to get me to look away, like a little extra. And I didn't.

And I was like, what's going on here? And for whatever reason, it wasn't like a conscious practice. I just decided I wasn't going to look away. With active defiance being a teenager. And he like progressively got more and more angry. And then my level of stress raised up to the point where like, am I going to have to fight this old motherfucker? With active defiance being a teenager. And he progressively got more and more angry. And then my level of stress raised up to the point where I'm like, am I going to have to fight this old motherfucker? We're going to have to go at it because we're staring at each other.

And then finally something happened. One of us broke. But we didn't have a confrontation. But I remember the intensity of this lock with me and this guy looking at each other. And he's fucking looking like, what the fuck are you looking at? I don't remember how it resolved but it did there was no all there was no communication there was nothing but i remember very specifically thinking like this is so weird all we're doing there's obviously some aggression being displayed here we're looking at each other in the eyes and this guy just don't want to turn away and i've decided i'm not going to turn away for whatever reason and here it's like a moment that i remember to this day you know 30 years later 30 years later

it's still in my head for no reason at all just me and this fucking guy looking at each other on the train it's just yeah it's um well it is a very primal thing and it is it is a it's a a biological transgression i mean we are you know we are primates. You do this to a macaque or any monkey or ape, and they're not into it. You're walking in, I remember I was in Nepal a lot, and there are these monkeys that basically now mug people. They're so used to just showing up with their troop and demanding food that so used to just showing up with their troop and demanding food

that you need to just throw whatever you've got in your hand on the ground. But making eye contact with a primate, not even just a primate, a dog is an aggressive thing to do. But it's interesting to be with someone who, I mean, I studied with a lot of great meditation masters who spent years on retreat, some of them decades on retreat, doing nothing but meditate, some of them spending years meditating just on compassion. And when you're with someone like that, then it's a very different vibe obviously and and the the um what you're getting from that that kind of eye contact is just a fundamental

freedom from kind of the neurotic self-program that everyone's running i mean you can you can meet someone who you feel like is just, they don't have a problem. They're not, they wish you nothing but well, and they're not, they don't want anything from you. You know, they're not worried about what you think of them. Their attention is free enough to just see what you need and what you want. And it's a very freeing thing to recognize in someone as being possible, to just see someone who's just dropped down to a level of non-neurosis that you recognize you just haven't experienced in yourself. And there are surrogates for this,

and there are artifacts which are confusing to people because obviously in any situation like this, there are power dynamics where when you're the guy on stage or you're the guy in the powerful role or you're the celebrity or whatever it is, you're kind of free to be non-neurotic when everyone else is dancing around being neurotic.

You know, when someone's busy, like trying to not be, not spaz meeting Jill Rogan, you often are just free just to be a nice guy who's, who, who, um, is, I mean, I don't know if this is true of you and maybe it's not true all the time, but it's, it's, you can be sort of empowered by a role, uh uh and it's kind of liberating and then you can find yourself in another context this goes to the first point we made about different states of self you can find yourself in another context where you're just trying you're not joe rogan the celebrity or you're not the guy who's on who's on stage you're just someone trying to get something done with somebody else who's not taking you seriously and you can feel all of your sort of normal level of neurosis kick in because you're not empowered in that situation.

There's nothing about the frame around the situation that is making you the center of attention or making anyone defer to what you're saying. So contexts can... I mean, you can prop up a totally fake guru who has no skills at all, who's just, I mean, this experiment has been done. I think James Randi just created a fake guru. I think it was in Australia or New Zealand. Latin guy and called him the amazing whatever and set him up as a fully enlightened, you know, man from, you know, the Andes or whatever, who had spent 20 years in a cave and now was going to deliver his wisdom to the world. And they put out, you know, put up ads and they convened, you know, 500 people and they gave this guy an earpiece and they were feeding him lines.

And every, you know, he transformed everybody's life in that room to some degree. And there was actually a documentary, this Kumari. I don't know if you saw this. It's hilarious. Is that on the same guy? No, different guy, but same thought experiment. I need to see that. What is it called again?

Kumari. Kumari, yeah, well worth seeing. I keep hearing great things about it. It's one of those things that's always on my to-do list, and I never get around to seeing it. Yeah, hilarious. The guy does a great job because he's, he's Indian and he, he speaks perfect Hinglish, you know, he just, he just lays it down. Hinglish. Yeah. It's awesome. Well, there's also the, the, the sexual attraction thing, the eye contact, that context, whereas you

can't make eye contact with a woman like that and just lock eyes with her without her thinking you want to have sex with her, or she locks eyes with you without her thinking that you want to have sex or, you know, the opposite. Right. It's only in a gay sense with two men, you know, like the thing about looking at someone, like it's almost like you're given the green light. Like I'm interested in you. I'm looking at you. I'm interested in you.'m looking at you i'm interested in you or i'm threatening you or i'm challenging your your position of dominance or whatever the fuck it is when you look locking eyes it's very different when it's intersexual when it's male to female right well it can be just as intrusive yes yeah more so yeah

because especially male to woman you know because of a guy is locking eyes with another guy. It's weird, but it's not like, oh, God, this guy's going to fuck me. Although between two guys, you get that monkey dance of what are you looking at, what are you looking at, and then it becomes do we have to fight, whereas with a man to woman,

it's just intrusive. The guy is not picking up whatever cues of disinterest or, you know, the boundary setting are there and he's just staring. And that's just, you know, it's just uncomfortable given, given that, you know, women are the targets of, of sexual violence and just, you know, harassment. So. Free will. Yeah. Let's get to that. This is something we have to that yes because we only have an hour left yeah okay um this is something that is perplexing confusing hotly debated

is there free will and you would probably say no yeah i have said no much to the consternation of many certain people uh philosophers like dan dennettett, who I collided with on this issue, even though it didn't have to be as unpleasant as it turned out to be. Why was it unpleasant? Was he angry at you? I wrote this very short book, Free Will, which was actually, there was a short section in my book, The Moral Landscape, in which I laid out my argument against free will. And it got so much attention and people found it so interesting and disturbing. And it was clearly just one, it might have been only 10 pages in the book but it was something that just people wanted more of and so what i did is i took those 10 pages and i could blew them up into a hundred page but still very short book that you could read in an hour an hour and a half and published it as as uh free will and then dan dennett who is a very well known and and very smart philosopher um who's a colleague and friend of mine

and, you know, comrade in arms on the whole religion issue. He and I, along with Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, have often been talked about in the same sentence as, you know, the four horsemen, you know, or the new atheists. And so we've been, you know, we are aligned on many many questions and certainly virtually all the questions related to the collision between science and religion he and I make the same noises on

but free will has always been a topic of his that he's spent a lot of time on and he has a different take on it and it's a take that I'm really not a fan of. And rather than fully engage his view in my book, because I actually, the truth is, I think his view on free will, which is called compatibilism, is the argument that free will is compatible with determinism. It's that you don't have to, even if we're in a universe where all causality is just kind of running like clockwork,

including every influence on the human brain and everything that's giving rise to thoughts and decisions and behavior, if it's all just a machine that's kind of running out from the Big Bang to the heat death of the universe, free will is compatible with that determinism. And so then he has fleshed out his compatibilism. He's not the only compatibilist, but he's the most famous at this point. He's fleshed out his compatibilism in a couple of books. Now, I think compatibilism is just, actually, it's just changing the subject. It's not, it's redefining free will as something that is, that doesn't actually track what people think they have. And in my view, he's just not grappling with the illusion that can be penetrated here, and it should be penetrated here. So I didn't really want to engage his, I mentioned his books, I sort of, I mentioned them only to kind of put them on the shelf as, you know, this is not, this doesn't really get at the issue. And this, you know, pissed him off, frankly.

And he, he thought he was being, you know, in his defense, I think he thought he was being very diplomatic and measured and responsible in how he engaged me. And what he did is he wrote a review of a free, I think he waited like a year, but then he wrote a review of the book, which I published on my website. But it was a very hard hitting, but in my view, misguided and confused review of my book. And and so then i responded and you know he didn't like my response and then that was that's kind of where we left it but it was a kind of a very long review that that that um made a lot of noise uh to not much effect and in my view and then then i responded with a very long review where i hit back probably a little too hard um and it's one of those problems you get into

when you're just writing rather than having a conversation. So what I urged him to do, and this is the reason why my review came off as so frustrated, and people can find all this on my blog. My review, I published his review on my blog, and then I forget what the title was there,

but you can easily find it on my blog. And then my review, it was called The Marionette's Lament. And that was my response to his review of free will. But the problem was, I told him, I said, Dan, we should just have a public conversation about this. It's only in conversation that you can correct for somebody else's misunderstandings in real time. I mean, you start to say something that is mischaracterizing my view, and I'll say, no, no, that's not it, actually. And then you can keep getting back on track,

more or less effortlessly. But what happens is when you're writing and you're having these mutual 3,000 or 10,000-word volleys where I'm just going to lay it out, what's totally wrong with your worldview, and in the course of doing that, I'm going to make 15 huge mistakes that, you know, you could have, that you could have corrected in real time, but now I'm committed to them because I wrote a page on each, you know, and then, and then we just go back and forth. And so that's, so I, I really urged him to have a debate with me or a conversation and he didn't want to do that and then

he wrote this review and I said okay and he hadn't probably showed me the review before I before he was going to publish he was going to publish this publish it in a on a website that was far more obscure than my blog which he did but I co-published it on my blog. But I said, before you publish this, just let me make this a conversation. Let me take this text and interrupt you. You can say anything you want to say, but let me just build in some mechanism where you can correct. Because there are 10 places here where you're misunderstanding me. And so let me just turn this into a conversation.

And it was no go there. And so then he just finally published it. And I said, okay, well, fine. So in any case, people can witness the collision there on my blog. But the basic case against free will is this. It's twofold. One is that, and again, it's the obverse of this sense of self. It's the other side of the coin, where you feel like you're a thinker of thoughts. You feel like you're the author of intentions. You feel like you are a subject. And commensurate with that feeling is the sense that

you are in a position to do what it is you do, to decide to do, I can decide to lift my left hand, or I can decide to lift my right hand, and I can deliberate between the two, and I can have reasons for one or reasons for the other. And I'm in the driver's seat. I really am. And so that's where everyone's starting. The problem with that is, objectively, we know that everything that you're consciously aware of, all your thoughts and your intentions and your impulses and your impulses to resist those impulses. I mean, however, whatever's coming up for you, we know that's all preceded by events in your nervous system of which you're not aware and which you didn't create. And the state of your brain in this moment, in every sense, is the product of variables that you are not responsible for.

You didn't pick your parents. You didn't pick your genes. You didn't sculpt your genes. You didn't pick the environment in which your genome was going to be expressed. You didn't pick the way that your interaction with the world and other people sculpted the microstructure of your brain so as to give you the brain you have. You didn't pick the number of receptors you have of every type at every synapse. You didn't pick all the charges that are currently in place in your brain at this moment. You haven't created your brain at this moment,

you haven't created your neurophysiology, and yet your neurophysiology is going to give rise to every next thought and intention that shows up for you. And we know that if you do an experiment, like you put someone in a neuroimaging device, whether it's EEG or whether it's fMRI, and you image their neural activity in real time, and you have a very simple choice between pushing the left button or pushing the right button, we can predict before the person is aware of having committed to right or left whether they're going to go right or left. And we know that that ability to predict is only going to become more fine-grained. So that if you take away, and again, someone like Dan Dennett has a story about why this doesn't matter, right?

And the truth is, it actually doesn't matter. Because even if we couldn't predict, it matters in the sense that it's very persuasive to people that, you know, if I can predict what you're going to do before you're aware of what you're going to do, well, then the basis for free will seems to go out the window. Okay. Two things. One, how can you...

So, for instance, just to notice this moment. So, let's say I had written down on a piece of paper the next sentence you're going to speak. Okay. Right? So I had verbatim what's going to come out of your mouth now. And you just, so you know, you start your side of the conversation and I just hold up this pad. And you see that I have everything that is just now occurring to you to say. That would be pretty persuasive to you that you're not running a

free will program over there. Right. Right. And so that's the intuition that I'm trying to get at. So that if we can predict what you're going to think before you think it, where is your free will? Because you're going to be, you're thinking it is the basis of your sense of free will in the first place. You feel like you are authoring this next thought. You feel like it's... But if I could show you that we knew what you were going to do before you did it, that would erode this sense that you're free to do otherwise. In what sense could you have done otherwise

if I can hold up this piece of paper and show you that you were committed to saying what you were isn't this sort of a dishonest argument though because you can't do that well no but we can do it in a very simple paradigm but you can you can predict whether or not someone's going to lift their right hand or their left hand based on fmri but how do you know when someone has decided or not decided like what what is that point of decision? What does that mean? I mean, if there's an indecisive sort of a thing, like lifting your left hand or your right hand. Like, if we just have an fMRI attached to your head and say randomly, just every 30 seconds, I want you to lift your left hand or your right hand.

Right. How do you know when a person has decided? Yeah, well, good question. And it's a little difficult to operationalize or design an experiment around. But what they've done is they created a clock, which made it, and this has been done in a few different ways, but in each one of these experiments, they essentially created a clock that made it very easy for someone to discriminate time. So it wasn't just like watching an ordinary clock, but it could be, let's say, a bunch of letters and numbers

kind of streaming in front of you. You're being presented with a bunch of different letters and numbers. And I'm asking you, you're free to decide. You can take as long as you want. You're going to choose left or right, and I'm not forcing you to go at any particular time.

And you're just watching the letters and numbers. And your only job is to tell me what letter and number or number was present the moment you were you decided right so you is you're watching you know K and X and 4 and 7 and so all these different numbers and letters that are easily discriminated coming appearing on a screen and you're just waiting to decide and you're thinking oh maybe I'll go left, maybe I'll go right, I'm free to do whatever I want, and I'm just going to wait this out a little bit, but all right, I'm going to go right. And the moment you feel that you're committed, you just recall what number or letter you were looking at, and then you tell the experimenter afterward, I was looking at K. K was on the

screen when I was committed. Now, you might think this is not so was on the screen when I was committed. Now, you might think this is not so compelling when the time interval is very brief. In some of these experiments, the distance was like half a second, right? But with this recent fMRI experiment, the distance stretched out to like five seconds, you know, five to seven seconds so that the activity that was inclining a person to go right as opposed to left was building up subconsciously for that long so that at a certain point the person said, all right, I've decided. But the data show that we could have predicted that with great accuracy five to seven seconds earlier. See, but that's relying on a person being honest about when they decided. It seems rather crude. And it also seems to conflict with what we were talking about earlier, which is the idea

of controlling your thoughts. The idea of getting to a point in your mind where you are essentially in control of which way your brain goes, whether you adhere to one pattern of thinking or another. And if you're talking about something as crude as lifting a left hand or a right hand deciding when to do so based on whatever idea that pops into your head, that seems like an incredibly crude way to argue that there's no free will. Well, again, let me just be clear about this.

It's a very interesting experiment. I agree it's crude, except I think that with this time interval, it becomes, there's less of a concern that the person's judgment about when they decided will be off by enough

so as to make it an invalid experiment. I don't think it's enough, I mean, to satisfy me. But let me just tell you, there's no, nothing hinges on this, because even if the decision, the neural activity in the brain that gave you the decision and your subjective feeling of having decided, even if those were coincident, even if there was no time lag, right? It still is coming out of nowhere in a sense for you subjectively. You're still not in control of it.

And it's still being caused by events that you didn't cause. So again, you didn't pick your genes. Genetics and events, life events. You didn't pick your genes. Genetics and events, life events. And the real illusion here, what most people think is that there's a very strong subjective case for free will. We all know we have it. We all feel it. We're all living it.

And yet it's very difficult to map on to third-person reality. It's very difficult to map on to the physical world. That is not the situation from my point of view. I think it is very difficult to map onto. It's, in fact, impossible to map onto the physical world. There's no way to describe the way causes can propagate in the universe so as to make this idea of free will make sense, because either they're determined or they're random or there's some combination of both and no combination of determinism and randomness gets you free will determinism doesn't get you free will because you're just a machine randomness doesn't get you free will

because you're just a machine that's that's throwing dice occasionally um so but but the the feeling is that and this is a feeling that I think Dan Dennett has, there's this very compelling subjective sense of free will that we somehow have to make room for. And I'm saying we don't have to make room for it because if you look closely enough, you don't actually even feel it. It's not even, you don't even feel that you have the freedom that you think you feel. because if you just look at how thoughts arise, if I just pay attention to how I get to the end of this sentence, I don't know how I get to the end of the sentence. In the cases where I fail to get to the end of the sentence, where I miss a word, where I speak in a way that's not grammatically correct,

each one of those hiccups is a mystery to me subjectively, and no doubt it's caused by some events in my brain that could be understood if we were scanning my brain. But subjectively, it's always a surprise. But successfully finding the word you're looking for is also, in some sense, a surprise. It's also something that you're not actually authoring. And when you look at why you choose one word over another, you say something like, there's a consistency between this story and that story. And then you say, well, why did I choose the word consistency?

There are other synonyms, there are other words that mean consistency that I could have used. I could have said there's a harmony between this story and that story. That is subjectively mysterious and was determined by events in your brain that you are not responsible for. And so in a very simple experiment, if I say to you, what are you going to think of next? You know, so your next thought. So I'm going to ask you to think of a city. Any city. Chicago.

Okay. So you thought of Chicago. Now, perhaps, were there other cities that kind of percolated there that were vying for inclusion and then you decided on Chicago? Yeah, it could be. But were you consciously aware of thinking? Oh, I just picked one okay i just randomly picked one okay so chicago now of all the cities you know the name of right you pick chicago now they're all there's a bunch of cities that you don't know the names of so you couldn't have picked them right so you're not you were not free to pick them but then there's you know probably hundreds of cities who who you whose

names you recognize and which you could have potentially, you could have said Budapest, you could have said Cairo, you could have said Paris, but those cities didn't occur to you for whatever reason. So the question is, and this is as free a choice as I think you're ever going to make, the question is, were you free to think what didn't occur to you to think? Were you really free to say Paris? Now, in Dan Dennett's sense, you were free to say Paris. I'm not holding a gun to your head saying don't say Paris. You could have in some other situation similar to this thought of Paris. But for whatever reason,

Paris was not in the cards for you. And it was not, based on the state of your brain, based on the inputs that had happened earlier today, based on whatever variables could control how this experiment was going to run, you thought Chicago

and you didn't think Paris. Now, in a deterministic universe, you were not free to think Paris. And if we add randomness, it doesn't give you the freedom of will that you think you have. they are free to have done otherwise. They could have done otherwise. You could have... So what does it mean to say you could have said Paris? You said Chicago. We can't take that back. But your belief in free will entails the belief that

if we rewind the movie of our lives right now, if we just go back in this conversation a few minutes, and Sam says, think of a city, leaving everything else the same, the universe is exactly in the same state, I could have said Paris. And there's no reason scientifically to think that you could have, because that would mean the universe would have had to have been in a different state.

But are we not getting trapped in minutiae here? Because is it not a combination of determinism and randomness? Because of course there's determinism. Of course there's certain events that have taken place in my life that I can't change. Of course there's genes. There's life experiences. I have experience in Chicago. It's a city I love.

So it comes up to my mind pretty quickly. But it's also randomness because I just, Chicago. I just picked a name. But that doesn't up to my mind pretty quickly but it's also randomness because i just uh chicago i just picked a name but that doesn't apply to my life and i think when you talk about free will when most people talk about free will they they think about actions in terms of their life like if you have an opportunity to cheat on your taxes but you think it's morally wrong you don't want to go to jail isn't it not free will to look at your tax form and make the decision to be correct? Like, isn't that free will? Isn't there not free will involved in choosing to control your thoughts as we were discussing earlier? Exactly. Let me address that question because it seems,

so this can all seem very abstract and academic and of no use to anyone. And what I argue in my book is that admitting that free will is an illusion actually does have some important consequences. They're not the kind of consequences that people worry about. It's not that you have no basis to be a better person or to change your life or to make efforts to improve yourself. That all remains intact. But it does change our ethical views of good and evil in some important ways.

And so we can maybe table that for the moment or maybe we'll get to it. But you look at your effort to be a better person. So your effort not to cheat on your taxes or to cheat on your wife or to cheat on your diet. Let's make it very simple. You're on a diet and you've decided you're going to go carb-free for the next week. But then you come in here

and someone's giving you some donuts and you're tempted to eat a donut. But then you come in here and someone's giving you some donuts, and you're tempted to eat a donut, but then you have that moment, that tug of war with yourself, and you say, no, no, I've decided to go carb-free. I'm going to toss these. That back and forth. Now, you've been in that situation many times before. Sometimes you cave in and you eat the donut.

Sometimes you've got a will of steel and you don't eat the donut. But in each case, the difference there, your ability to resist, your inability to resist, your just, which part of you wins in that circumstance, is also being born of variables in your nervous system that you didn't author, that you didn't control. And if you could understand them perfectly, if you could see all the causality, you would see that you were not in control at that moment. You had exactly as much willpower as you had in that moment and not an atom more. And you can't take credit.

But what that doesn't mean, that doesn't mean that willpower is irrelevant. That doesn't mean that training is irrelevant. So it's like if I want to black belt in jiu-jitsu, I've got to train in jiu-jitsu. I can't just sit back and see what happens, right? I can't just wait to see if I get a black belt in jujitsu. But your decision to train, you're saying, is not— Absolutely. It's part of the causality.

My decision to train will be the proximate cause of my going into a school and training. My desire to get a black belt is going to be the proximate cause in each moment of my making it a priority to train, my making the effort to train, my getting over injury, my ignoring injuries when I otherwise would be, you know, cowed by them, whatever. All of those, your intentions and your efforts and your desires are just as causal and as important as you think they are. I mean, you are driven by desire, and effort does matter, and training has an effect. All of that's true.

And so you can't—where people get confused is they think that determinism is the same thing as fatalism, whereas just, you know, if everything's just going to happen as it happens, well, then I don't have to do anything. Right. You know, I'm just going to see if I get a black belt. You know, I'm not going to make any efforts because if I'm destined to get a black belt, you know, someone's going to give me one. Right.

Right. That makes no sense, right? Right. If I'm destined to learn Chinese, I'm just going to start speaking Chinese one day. So how's that not a combination of determinism and maybe the momentum of your past determination, which is based on a conscious thought, a conscious thought to decide to be disciplined, to decide to have a very specific diet, to write down goals.

I mean, is that not free will in some sense? Because isn't the only way to truly tell whether or not there is the ability to alter your events and your life and your behavior based entirely on your will, wouldn't you have to have someone live the exact same life with the exact same genetics, exact same life experiences and confront the exact same circumstances and decide or find out whether or not they act randomly or whether or not you can determine it? Well, that's the thing. The thing is that, so the first part of your question,

someone like Dan Dennett wants to say that is all we mean by free will the only thing you need for free will is this effect of intention and training and willpower and that's all anyone cares about anyway so the rest of the stuff is irrelevant determinism is irrelevant um but i don't think that's true for a few reasons. But the crucial piece is ethical. So once you acknowledge that if someone was in exactly your situation, given the same genes and the same parents and the same environment, same life influences, same political circumstance, same micro-influences to his nervous system, that person would make all the same choices you're making. He'd have the exact same amount of willpower when he's confronted with a donut. He'd fall off his diet the exact same number of times and in the same places. The movie of your

life, if replayed in your double on another planet that was exactly like this one, would play out exactly the same. And if randomness intrudes to make it different, well, then randomness doesn't give you free will. Randomness just gives you randomness. If I just told you that you're going to be exactly the same as your double and we can completely predict your behavior a thousand years before you're even born right because we've run this experiment before and we've tuned your genes and your and your world exactly you're just a computer simulation of your double right you're just going to run out exactly the same way so

you've got no free will but we are going to throw in a little randomness to make you you know you mean random events random but random events in, you know. You mean random events? Random events in your nervous system. You have random events in the world and random events in your nervous system. You can put the randomness wherever you want. So it's going to change your life in various ways. You're going to decide to eat the donut in one case and not in another. And then your history, your joint history with your double is going to diverge.

But that's not free will that's just you know if you knew that your decision to marry your wife as opposed to somebody else was born of someone having thrown the dice in a lab somewhere you wouldn't you wouldn't ascribe that to free will that you that would just be That would be a bizarre thing to dictate your decision process. So that's not what anyone means by free will. So randomness doesn't give you the freedom you think you have. Let me just say a bit about why this is important ethically. It's when you look at, when we perceive good and evil in the world, we look at people as agents who really are the authors of their actions. We relate to people like they have free will. And this seems to make ethical sense to us, and it seems to, it's definitely the basis for our impulse for vengeance and retributive justice and the feeling that people really deserve to be punished. You know, bad people deserve what they

get. And I'm not arguing that punishment is never valid. And there may be a role for punishment that we want to retain in our justice system. But this idea of punishing people because they deserve it doesn't make a lot of sense. And the way to see that is two ways to see that. One is you look at these cases where you have someone like Charles Whitman who got on the clock tower at the University of Texas in 1964, I think it was, or 66, and shot dozens of people. I think he killed 14. And he killed his mom and his girlfriend. He killed his mom and his wife first, and then he got on the clock tower and killed 14 people and injured like 30 people. And this is just like pure evil, right?

So this guy is, if anyone deserves to be punished, this guy does, and he was killed by the cops. And he knew he was going to be killed by the cops, and he had written essentially a suicide note. But you look at this behavior and you think, all right, that's as stark as evil as we ever see, and this guy really is the cause of his actions. But then you read his suicide note, and he describes how he was overcome with rages that he found inexplicable, and he did not know why he was killing his wife or his mom. He loved them both, but he just felt like he had to do it, and he recommended that doctors do a post-mortem on

his brain because he knows something's wrong with it and maybe they can find the reason why he did all these terrible things. So they do an autopsy and they see that he's got a giant tumor in his hypothalamus pressing on the amygdala. And that is certainly a plausible place to be driving some rages in somebody

and to be undermining their impulse control. And so most people look at the story of Charles Whitman and they think, all right, this is an unlucky guy who had a brain tumor who was driven to act out on the basis of this brain tumor, and that is not free will, right? I mean, he was an unlucky puppet and a victim of biology. Now, the problem is a brain tumor really is just a special case

of physical causality. And what I'm arguing is that if we fully, if we had a perfect understanding of the brain, if we could scan your brain at this moment and see every variable that influenced behavior as clearly and as compellingly as a golf ball-sized brain tumor, right, we would see that your behavior and your thoughts and your innermost desires and your commitment to your diet and your love of jiu-jitsu and everything was just as determined as Charles Whitman's rages by a glioblastoma. And it all begins to look like a brain tumor. It's your responsibility and the fact that you're a mensch and you're a kind guy as opposed to a vindictive one. All of those

variables, again, that you inherited courtesy of genes and environment, which are the only influences we think you have, right? The truth is, even if you add a soul, add an immortal Christian soul to the clockwork, you didn't create your soul. You can't take credit for the fact that you don't have the soul of a psychopath. So whatever you add is in some sense a gift. You know, brain tumors, souls, genes, cosmic ray bombardment, any influence.

And if we could understand these influences clearly, it would all begin to look like Charles Whitman's brain tumor. And if you add the rolling of dice, you add some randomness to it, that doesn't give you freedom. That just gives you randomness. When I'm talking about randomness, when you were saying random events in the mind, what I was saying is that the only way to truly determine whether or not someone has the choice to make a decision one way or another is to have them live the exact same life, meaning the exact same amount of randomness, the exact same events inside their mind, and see whether or not conscious decision-making has any part in what you do. The idea of free will is people are confronted with a scenario and they decide, what do I

do here? It's based on a lot of variables. It's based on life experience. It's certainly based on genetics. It's certainly based on the environment that you grew up in, the environment that you find yourself in. But is there not a choice there? Is there not a choice?

There's something that's going on in your mind where it's causing you to act in one way or another. And in my opinion, the only way to know whether or not it is all determined by momentum and the momentum of the past, your genetics, is to have someone live the exact same life and see if they do the exact same thing, the exact same chemicals, the exact same chemicals, the exact same diet,

the exact same, no randomness at all, and whether or not you decide to go one way or another. Okay, but we know that every decision has to be preceded by something, right? And if you're going to take a scientific view of these things, we know it's preceded by neurophysiology. Right. Can we measure consciousness, though?

If there is a consciousness, if there's a something in the mind. Right. So whether you think, what I'm arguing is that whether you think consciousness is arising out of the information processing of the brain, so it's what the brain, the mind is what the brain is doing, or you think consciousness is something else, and even something very spooky, let's say it's ectoplasm, let's say it's a Christian soul, whatever it is, even in that case of dualism, you don't get free will. You just get some spookier causality that we can't describe,

but it's still just coming out of the darkness from your point of view subjectively. You don't know what you're going to do next. And when you do it, you don't know. You really don't know why you did it. And if you have a story about why you did it, you don't know why. So you could take a thousand years to choose between your right hand and your left hand. You could say, it's going to be left. It's going to be right.

No, no. I used my right yesterday. I'm going to go for left. It doesn't matter how long you take. You could take literally 1,000 years, and you could write a million-page document about what it was like to deliberate over this. But in the final moment where you decide,

you know what, after all this, I'm going to go with the right, there's an inherent mystery. Subjectively speaking, you don't know what tipped the balance and the sense that you did is just this feeling of the i mean again it's it's the other side of this feeling of of just being the thinker of your thoughts it's the feeling of self it's the feeling of i it's the feeling of i it's the feeling of may you're the one pushing the the machine i understand what you're saying but the the choice of a left hand or right hand is completely irrelevant there's no consequences one way or another so that's just the simplest

case but you can make it as big as you want whether i shoot shoot the intruder in my living room or not or whether or not you stick to a diet or whether or not you choose to be inspired whether or not you get a divorce yeah yeah well what what are those things i mean what is it that's causing those choices you're saying that it's all just genetics life experience of course random variables in the mind that there is no self that makes a choice there is no self that the self even though the self is comprised of all these random variables like genetics life experiences the environment that you surround yourself with, the people that are in your life that influence you, these variables are the funnel through which all decisions are made. And there is no conscious choice.

There's no, today, I'm going to be a better person. You saying today, I'm going to be a better person is based entirely on a bunch of things that are outside of your control. Right, right. And yet there's that experience. It seems semantic to me. Well, no, but there's that experience. Well, here's why it's not semantic in the sense that it's semantic.

It may be semantic in how most people will live their lives most of the time. So you can still, if you want to lose weight, you still have to go on a diet. Right. And if you want to stay on the diet, you still can't eat the donut, right? So you still have to have this negotiation with yourself. And then all the things that conventionally matter in that situation matter. So it matters whether you keep donuts around or if you don't keep them around. It matters if your friends support you on your diet or they don't support you, etc.

But here's where it changes. So you think of an evil person like Uday Hussein, who we mentioned at the beginning. The view of him as just pure evil, worthy of being destroyed, worthy if we could have locked him up, as worthy of punishment as anyone we could ever capture, and that it makes sense to hate him. The logic of hatred erodes here because it doesn't make sense to hate Charles Whitman, right? Charles Whitman was unlucky. That poor bastard had a brain tumor that caused him to kill his wife, kill his mother, and then kill a bunch of people and get killed himself, right? Very unlucky person. Uday Hussein was also unlucky, right? And you can see this if you

just roll back the clock of his life, right? So when you look at him as a 40-year-old, he's the scariest psychopath you've ever seen. When you look at him as a three-year-old, okay, he was the little boy who was going to become Uday Hussein. He was a little boy who, through no fault of his own, had Saddam Hussein as a father, right? Imagine what that was like. He has the genes he has, right? He has the completely fucked up society that he has, right? And the honor culture and the crazy brother, right? And you have to acknowledge, given whatever variables you want to include, genes, environment, souls, if you could trade places with him, you get the same genes, you get the same daddy, you get the same environment, you get the same soul, same ectoplasm, whatever you want to put to the to the box you would become uday hussein there's nothing there's nothing left right and and it's the sense that there's something left

which um is an illusion and but what i'm arguing is that this actually can become the basis for compassion and for a wiser justice system and we have a justice system that's predicated on the notion of free will. And we've locked up 13-year-olds for their entire lives based on a sense that this evil little bastard really deserves what he gets. Well, I think we've done that because we want to protect everyone else from this evil bastard. I think the idea is not whether or not this person is free to make these choices. It's whether or not they're a danger to society. No, no, but the Supreme Court has actually said that our system is based on the notion of free will

and the determinism is hostile to any notion of retributive justice. So consciously, as a matter of jurisprudence, we think we are implementing a doctrine of free will. Well, then how do you indict people based on their responsibility for something? It's exactly like what we would do if grizzly bears were walking around outside. So if I walk outside in the parking lot after this podcast and I see a grizzly bear, I can be afraid of it.

I can defend myself from it. I can run from it. I can shoot it if I have a gun. I can decide afraid of it. I can defend myself from it. I can run from it. I can shoot it if I have a gun. I can decide to lock it up if there's no place safe to put it. You can do all of those things without attributing free will to it. I don't think a grizzly bear has free will. Okay, so you can attribute no free will to a 13-year-old psychopath and still lock him up.

How does that change life? Well, in the case of a 13-year-old, we know that a 13-year-old is not truly representative of who he's going to become as a 40-year-old. And you can change most 13-year-olds. The book isn't written on their life. Right, but who wants to be responsible for letting some 13-year-old who's killed a bunch of people

out on the street? You put him back in some sort of an institution, you train him for five years, he goes out and he kills again. Are you responsible for that now? Did you have the free will to decide to let this kid free? We do a lot worse than that, though. We let people go who are obviously going to re-offend in the most shocking ways. And we do it because we're making room for people who are selling acid out of their dorm room. I mean, like – Right, but that's a different argument, isn't it? I mean that's an argument of privatized prisons

and financial systems that have been co-opted by pharmaceutical companies and special interest groups like prison guard lobbyists. There's a lot more going on there. I mean what is – what's the basis for decision- making when it comes to keeping a society safe? It's all about, so there's another way to see the problem here. Imagine we had a cure for psychopathy. Imagine we had a cure for evil. So we completely understand human evil at the level of the brain.

Turns out just by sheer luck, it's just you got one, you know, there's one neurotransmitter there. Which is quite possible, right? I mean, it's unlikely, but it's possible. And let's just say there's just one kind of, you know, one drug or a shot that we give people. It's just a pill. It's just a nutrient.

You know, you just put it in the food supply, right? And we cure evil. Now imagine, so now we have this, we have someone locked up. It's Uday Hussain, or it's this 13-year-old who's done these evil things, and we think, you know what, this guy was such an evil bastard, we're going to withhold the cure from him as just an extra punishment, right? And that wouldn't make any sense. Now that would be like withholding surgery from Charles Whitman when you knew that the brain tumor was the reason why he was going to be Charles

Whitman, right? So Charles Whitman, you discover the brain the brain tumor was the reason why he was going to be Charles Whitman. So Charles Whitman, you discover the brain tumor pressing on the amygdala before he's going to go out and kill everyone, and you say, all right, we're just going to solve the problem here. So there'd be no ethical basis to— Before it, though. But even after. But afterwards, there's this concept of retribution where people want revenge. That's the illusion. People dead.

Okay, but you wouldn't have that on the grizzly bear. So that's the difference. I would. Well, if a grizzly bear killed 30 people, I wouldn't want to kill that fucker. It would be different. I wouldn't want to give him a pill to make him a happy grizzly bear.

No, no, but on some level you understand that a grizzly bear can't help but be a grizzly bear. Yes. And so, actually people used to do this. So there was this, you could probably find this online, there was a circus elephant in 1919

that ran amok and killed a bunch of people and the townspeople were so outraged and attributed so much evil to this elephant that they hung it from a railroad crane.

I mean, they lynched an elephant, right? And they felt they were very satisfied with themselves. This is, you know, justice. But the reality is you have a mistreated circus elephant that went crazy and trampled some people. And he was just being an elephant.

This is, if we, with someone like Charles Whitman, when you see that there's a brain tumor, you recognize, all right, he's just being a guy who's got a brain tumor in the wrong place. Right? And if we had a cure for it even after the fact that would be the appropriate thing to do if we had a cure for evil if we had a pill that just could make uday hussein a nice guy we would just give him the pill right but then they're not responsible for their past actions because they're a totally different person now they receive this pill well yeah because because evil is just a it's just the bad luck of having bad genes and bad neurochemistry boy that's a hard pill for people to swallow if their daughter was fed to the dogs of Uday Hussein.

That's a hard pill. Yeah, but he's not responsible in any way for his actions in the past because he had some bad stuff going on in his childhood. But then, again, look at his timeline. The three-year-old who has Saddam as a father isn't responsible, right? So just walk him forward day by day, month by month. At what point does he become responsible? Is he ever responsible? Yeah, exactly. At what point? His 18th birthday? Is that

when you want to just bring down the hammer on him? It's an interesting question. And I think it sort of highlights the gray nature of reality itself. Everybody wants everything to be black and white, yes and no, plus and minus, but it's not. There's a lot of weird variables when it comes to being a human being. I see what you're saying, but it's sort of a weird argument because these pills don't exist,

the shot doesn't exist to turn someone who's a psychopath into a good person. Well, no, but that just proves, it's just the point of concept that it makes, Well, no, but that just proves, it's just the point of concept that it makes, it doesn't make sense to hold someone responsible for their genes any more than it does their brain tumor. And if you can't, but once you start taking each of these causal factors off the table of responsibility, genes, parents, society, environment, cosmic rays, there's nothing left left and you can even take the soul off of it you know the soul you didn't pick your soul right even if you think you have one you didn't pick it and that's the problem and but again it doesn't change the important things that it doesn't change are things like self-defense yeah yes you you want to defend yourself against uday hussein you want a lot if you don't have a cure for psychopathy, you absolutely have to lock psychopaths up. You can't let them run around harming people.

Or psychopaths of a certain extremity. Obviously, there are a lot of psychopaths out who actually haven't harmed people. They're just making inappropriate eye contact. inappropriate eye contact. But the difference is hatred and the kind of psychological suffering born of it doesn't make a lot of sense. And a clear path to solutions, should they become available, opens up. So it's just like there's something so clarifying about the Charles Whitman story once you hear about the brain tumor. You just think, oh, man, all right, well, let's just, you know, it turns out this was not evil. We're not talking about evil. We're talking about a brain tumor.

Right. Okay. What I'm saying is the more we understand the human mind, the level of the brain, the more that feeling is going to encroach on all of these but do we know enough about the human brain to really make that determination because when we're talking about where does a thought come from what what you know what is going on inside your mind we can very crudely look at fmris and see areas of the brain that are receiving activity but we don't necessarily know what is going on and so like creativity for example what makes a john coltrane what makes a richard prior i mean is it just the sum of their life experiences their genetics or expression or is it when when a thought

comes to a mind like okay in your case when you're writing and you're sitting in front of your computer and, you know, I'm sure you probably have those moments where a concept or a sentence comes and it almost feels like it appears out of midair, right? Everything appears out of midair. I mean, the other reason why I'm so committed to this is the subjective illusion, the subjective side of the illusion can be cut through. Again, most people's starting point is we have this really robust feeling of free will and self-authorship and self-creation and self-determination, and it's just hard to make it square with Charles Whitman and genes and, you know, the rest of the neurochemical story, but I know I've got it, you know, by God, I know I've got this thing, I can feel it right now. Right.

That can be cut through. You can actually feel, you can actually feel that when you say Chicago, that is as, that's like me saying Chicago. It's like me saying, okay, he's going to say Chicago now, and you – and it coming out of your mouth. Yeah, but there's no consequence to these ideas. Like picking a left hand or the right hand, picking Chicago, it doesn't mean anything. To me, I – Well, that's because it's the simplest case that we can easily demonstrate.

But you can raise the stakes as much as you want. But it means a lot if I decide to drive drunk. It means a lot if I – I mean drunk. It means a lot if I... But arguably you have less control. If I ask you, you and I go out now and have a few drinks, and we're sitting around for a few hours wondering

whether we're sober, you're in a worse position to judge. Because I'm intoxicated. Yeah, it's like the way you live your life. Okay, that's a bad example then. What about speeding? What if I'm at a red light and someone revs their car engine and I'm like,. Yeah, it was like the way you live your life. That's a bad example then. What about speeding? What if I'm at a red light and someone revs their car engine? I'm like, oh, yeah, bitch, come on, let's go. And we crash into someone. But again, you've got more variables there that are driving you and influencing you.

And you feel like you're being led around by the nose, by the environment, a little bit more there. In this case, I mean, there's no stakes. But this is as pure a moment of agency as you're ever going to get. When I say, think now of a famous woman, you're free to pick. Think of a bunch, right? Okay. And pick anyone you want. And take as long as you want and just go back and forth.

Okay. There you go. Jennifer Lawrence. I wonder why. That is as pure, that's got to be as pure a demonstration of freedom of will as anything you're going to get in life.

Now, again, nothing turns on it, but that's pure and less constrained by, I don't know, am I sober enough to drive or should I speed or should I buy this thing or not or am I going to have the donut? I mean, there's nothing.

It's like there was nothing riding on it. So you were totally free. Mm-hmm. You had Jennifer Lawrence, but then you had Oprah Winfrey and then you could have went back and forth. Never had Oprah Winfrey. But were you okay? So were you free to pick Oprah Winfrey?

You know who Oprah is. Yeah. Well, Jennifer Lawrence is in the news. That's one of the reasons why I picked her. Okay, but that's demonstrating a constraint that is driving you. Right, but I thought about Ann Wolf first, actually, who's a boxer. I decided she's too obscure. Right.

Yeah, so you would have been lost on me. Yeah. I just think that I agree with you without a doubt that there most certainly are a bunch of factors involved in who a person is. And many of them are outside of your control. factors involved in who a person is, and many of them are outside of your control. But the point you're missing here is that I'm not asking you, I mean, you can grant all of that, the fact that there are those factors, but what I'm saying is that you can subjectively experience the absence of free will in that moment of picking Jennifer Lawrence. You can subjectively no longer feel like the problem of free will really goes away you no longer have this problem of

I know I've got this thing and I can't figure out how to make it square with reality Jennifer Lawrence just comes out of the ether or the internet yeah and even if you deliberate no matter how many times you go back and forth the fact that you finally settle on her as opposed to somebody else

is inexplicable right well I was trying to be funny that's why I went with her fact that you finally settle on her as opposed to somebody else is inexplicable. Right. Well, I was trying to be funny. That's why I went with her because she's naked pictures of her all over the internet today. I don't know if you're aware of that. Oh, yeah. No, I haven't. You have a loop?

I heard that somebody, it was like some Apple hacking thing. Apparently, it's not. Apparently, it may be. That might be a factor, but apparently, people have been collecting images off of people's computers. But it's not just her. It's a bunch of celebrities have been collecting images off of people's computers. But it's not just her. It's a bunch of celebrities. Yeah, a bunch of celebrities.

I see what you're saying, and I agree with you mostly. I don't disagree with you really. I'm just sort of bouncing it around inside my head. So when I say, but what about this, but what about that, I'm doing that as much for myself as I am to – I'm not trying to disprove your point. I think there's so many variables as to what makes a person. To attribute anything to one thing, whether it's discipline or whether it's life experience, what makes a man great? What makes a woman fantastic? What makes someone creative.

I don't know. I think to boil it down to simply chemicals in the mind and neurosynapses firing left or right, I don't know. I think it's both. I have a feeling that it's not just, I don't think it's just determinism. I think there's determinism, but there's also, I mean, you could, your life changes based on whether or not you eat a salad.

You know, you eat a salad or you eat a bowl of pasta. If you eat a bowl of pasta, you might be- You're just throwing in more neurochemistry there. Yeah, without a doubt. Yeah, no doubt. But what is the decision to eat that salad? Is the decision, like, I decided today I want to be a healthier, better person. What's making me decide that?

Is it just neurochemistry? I mean, is it making me decide that? Is it just neurochemistry? I mean, is it just synapses? Is it just my environment, my life experiences? If that's the case, then human beings are fucking robots. Well, yeah. We are. But certainly most scientists. Number-crunching robots.

Yeah, but that doesn't, the thing is that doesn't take out any of the good stuff of life. From my point of view, nothing important is lost here and something ethical is gained. I mean, so for instance, the possibility of having compassion for even for evil people, you know, loving your enemy, being like Jesus in that respect,

which makes absolutely no sense until you actually see a basis for having compassion for someone like Uday Hussain. I feel like that opens up based on this consideration, but nothing else changes. You know, if Uday Hussain walked into the room, you know, I would put a bullet in him in self-defense as quickly as the next guy. I mean, so it's just, that doesn't change, but it is the difference between... I mean, yes, someone like Houdet Hussain

is a malfunctioning robot. He's a grizzly bear. So in that sense, we really are just a product of our environments. We really are just numbers. We really are just a sea of variables. But we're consciousness. Subjectively speaking,

we are consciousness and its contents. Now we know that there's a lot that's unconscious. is massively affected by those sea of variables and in fact

cannot be detached from those sea of variables. Yeah, and yet it's as beautiful as you ever want it to be and it's as profound as you want it to be. It doesn't become

less profound. And the spooky stuff that people want to introduce doesn't actually amp up the profundity. It makes it to be. It doesn't become less profound. And the spooky stuff that people want to introduce doesn't actually amp up the profundity. It makes it less profound. Well, it actually makes us more responsible for engineering a healthy society because we have to be aware of all the variables that are involved in every single human being's developmental process. And the more we can mitigate the negative ones, the better we can make our society. And that doesn't really discount the idea of people being responsible for their

actions or punishing people or removing people. Not at all. Not at all. Exactly. Because punishment has its effects. But now we're free to see that we just want the punishments that have the effects we want. We can get rid of retribution and vengeance, and we can just think, okay, what kind of world do we want to live in? And so maybe punishing people in certain ways can be justified totally on pragmatic lines because it has a certain effect. It deters certain crimes. It makes them better people, whatever. Whatever those punishments are, let's say they exist, then you don't need a retributive story. You just have a story of, you know, we want fewer

carjackings and we want the carjackers to be better people. So we're going to do X, Y, and Z and deter carjacking on the one hand and rehabilitate carjackers and carjackers on the other. And another way that also highlights the really, truly unethical practices of privatized prisons, of things along those lines where you are purposely setting up laws in order to victimize people, to make it so that, you know, like you're playing a game. You make it so that their pitfalls, if they fall in those pits, ooh, look, I caught a beaver. He fell into my trap. The incentives are all wrong. Yes, the incentives.

That's one thing that, I mean, what you just said was very important, that seeing this kind of web work of causality makes us more responsible for aligning society and all of its incentives more wisely so as to make better people. And this, I think, is the biggest problem of our time or really any time. We have systems where incentives are poorly aligned, where even good people are tempted to be terrible because of the profit motive in the system or because... Or the very issue of our

law itself like when you have a prosecutor whose entire your your your reputation is built on winning yeah you're so it doesn't matter if he's innocent exactly that happens on a massive amount of cases in a massive amount of cases they're well aware that it's possible they could be wrong but their job is to prosecute the same can be said for a defense lawyer a defense lawyer could be aware that their client is probably lying but they must defend that client to the best of their ability yeah including manipulating witnesses including the way they communicate with these witnesses to try to lead them down certain paths, to get them to say things that might be misconstrued by the jury. All those things become more unethical if you look at this concept of determinism.

Yeah, yeah. Aligned incentives are huge. Incentives are huge. And that one is a classic case where what you'll get from defense attorneys is a very strenuous defense of even the guilty need representation. And our adversarial system completely depends on my giving the best possible defense of Jeffrey Dahmer I can, even though I know that if I succeed, and I sure hope I succeed, he's going to go off and cannibalize more people. I think there's an ethical problem with that. But it's set up by the problem on the other side where you have a prosecutorial system which is really not that concerned about locking up an innocent person for the rest of his life.

So it's in a sense the system itself is so inherently flawed that it almost should be tossed out and it should be where no one has an incentive whether that person is guilty or innocent. I mean that would be the most ethical way to represent it. You should just want to get to the truth. Yes. And whatever system is going to track the truth best I think is the system we want. Yeah. I mean it's like you shouldn't be able to hire a Johnny Cochran. You shouldn't be able to hire a Robert Shapiro.

They're too good at manipulating reality. What you should do is you should have some sort of a system where you have people that have no dog in the fight, and these people have no, there's no financial motive to make you guilty or innocent. Like, the idea of a jury system is also

equally flawed, because you're picking all these people. You sit down with them, how do you feel about capital punishment? How do you feel about birth control? How do you feel about this, that, the other thing? You're picking all these people you sit down with them how do you feel about capital punishment how do you feel about birth control how do you feel about this that the other thing you ask them all these questions and then you pick the the the defense and the prosecution gets to pick you know from all these people based on their decisions with the idea being that this is our likelihood for success if we go with these people and they have like a whole algorithm based on like what answers they were they're trying to get from these these various people that's a that's a really big hole in the system that's sort of highlighted by these ideas this idea that someone has that you

can benefit financially from someone being innocent or guilty yeah and if we had a a reliable lie detector this whole problem would go away. Well, it will be eventually maybe. I know that I talked to you about this before. One of your colleagues was on my question and everything show. Pamela Douglas, yeah. Yeah, with the fMRI results of someone being arrested and prosecuted in India because they had functional knowledge of a crime scene.

Yeah, and that was a troubling case. Yeah, that seems premature. We're running out of time here. All right, man that was a troubling case. Yeah. Yeah. That seems premature. We're running out of time here. All right, man. Thank you very much. Yeah. Pleasure. You blew a bunch of people's minds and freaked a bunch of people out.

And I'm sure people are going crazy, writing blogs, responding to you and Twitter comments all over the internet. And whoever that guy is that you had the issue with, tell him to fucking lighten up. Sam Harris, waking up a guide to spirituality. And that spirituality should be in quotes. Put scare quotes on it. Without Religion, and it's available now. I got a copy of it right here.

Is it on audiobook as well? Yes, it's available. It's on sale next week or a week early. As an audiobook too? Yeah, audible. Are you reading it? Yes. Oh, great.

Excellent. I love that. I don't like it when some actor reads someone else's book, but they do that a lot of times. But it's amazingly hard to do. I don't know if, I'm sure you would be probably better at it than I am, but I found it incredibly hard to do. It's really humbling to realize that people do this professionally with other people's books. I mean, it's amazing. What was hard about it? It's just, you know, I find that I inadvertently have written tongue twisters into my, There were a few sentences I literally had to change words because I couldn't get through them.

It was like a Cirque du Soleil act that I couldn't perform. Really? Just to read the sentence. Well, that's interesting because, yeah, when you read something and it's in your mind, you have your mouth closed, you're not making any noises, it's easy. You put something in there where it's got the consonants in the wrong place. And there was one time, it was like 20 takes,

and you got people in a... you know, you're in a booth and you got a producer and an engineer listening to you and it's just, alright, I'm going to rewrite this sentence. Sorry, guys. Alright, the book Sam Harris, Waking Up. Thanks. Thank you very much, man. And thanks to our

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Use the code word Rogan. Save 10% off any and all supplements. All right, we'll be back tomorrow with Dom Irera. And then again on Thursday with Joe DeRosa. See you soon. Bye-bye. Big kiss.