The Peter Attia Drive - #34 - Sam Harris, Ph.D.: The transformative power of mindfulness

Episode Date: December 20, 2018

In this episode, Sam Harris, neuroscientist, author, and host of the Waking Up Podcast, walks us through the profound, yet practical, ways that meditation can transform our lives. Additionally, he helps to define the types of meditation and clarifies potential misconceptions with terms like happiness, pain, and suffering. We discuss: The transformative moment that led to Peter reaching out to Sam [3:45]; Comparing the two broad types of meditation, and Peter’s favorite meditation apps [7:45]; The pleasure of a concentrated mind, meditating with pain, and the difference between pain and suffering [13:15]; What it means to be happy, and how to break out of our default state [23:15]; The disease of distraction, why humans suffer, the limitation of happiness, and letting go of anger with mindfulness [31:00]; The challenge of learning mindfulness, the benefit of silent retreats, and Sam’s first experience in solitude as a teenager [54:15]; Sam’s life-altering experience with MDMA [1:03:00]; Mettā meditation a.k.a. loving-kindness, and the concept of ‘moral luck’ [1:14:00]; Overcoming grief and dread with meditation [1:34:45]; The wrong way to practice mindfulness, and the difference between Vipassana and Dzogchen [1:44:45]; Sam’s commitment to never lie, honesty in politics, and Sam’s viewpoint on the Trump phenomenon [2:06:00]; Teaching kids to be more mindful [2:18:30]; Sam’s current book projects, the consequences of a politically correct environment, and the potential of neuroscience to cure psychopathy [2:25:30]; How you can follow Sam’s work [2:39:00]; and More. Learn more at www.PeterAttiaMD.com Connect with Peter on Facebook | Twitter | Instagram.

Hey everyone, welcome to the Peter Atia Drive. I'm your host, Peter Atia. The drive is a result of my hunger for optimizing performance, health, longevity, critical thinking, along with a few other obsessions along the way. I've spent the last several years working with some of the most successful top performing individuals in the world, and this podcast is my attempt to synthesize what I've learned along the way to help you live a higher quality, more fulfilling life. If you enjoy this podcast, you can find more information on today's episode and other topics at pteratia-md.com.

Hey everyone, welcome to this week's edition of The Drive. I'm your host, Eurotia. Our guest this week is Sam Harris. Someone I consider a friend, a mentor, a teacher. I met Sam about four years ago, and I suspect many of you already know about Sam or are familiar with his work, but in case you're not, let me say a few words on that. Sam trained in neuroscience, he has a PhD in neuroscience, but in many ways I consider him a philosopher and frankly just one of the greatest minds that I know. He's an author of some extraordinary books,

The End of Faith, Being His First, The Moral Landscape, Lying, Free Will, and probably my favorite, which you've also probably heard me talk about, is waking up a book that I've read, I think three times now, and I'm almost at the point where I understand half of it. Sam is also the host of now and I'm almost at the point where I understand half of it. Sam is also the host of arguably, I would say the most important podcast to me, the waking up podcast, and he is also the creator of an app for meditation called appropriately waking up. I had the privilege of beta testing it for about nine months before it went live and it is now officially live and for anyone who meditates, I would consider this an essential part of your meditation app routine. You've probably heard me talk a lot about this in the past few months. The importance of

distress tolerance, mindfulness, the ability to understand what's going on inside our own heads as a tool to be less unhappy. And that might sound kind of blah. But the reality of it is I've never spent more time thinking about this than I have in probably the last 12 to 18 months. And Sam has been such an important part of helping me think about that. And this podcast is pretty long. It's almost three hours. And that time we go into a lot of this stuff. I'm pretty open about how much SAM has helped me. And though I think at times it turns into more of a discussion than an interview, I think we always sort of

veer back to the place where you as the listener are going to get something out of this. If you're not familiar with SAM, I can't encourage you enough to listen to this podcast. And if it peaks your curiosity, dig a little bit deeper into this. Couple of housekeeping items. Obviously, we're gonna release this today instead of the day before Christmas, so this is kind of coming out a bit early.

And over the next week or so, we haven't quite figured out the schedule yet, but don't worry, we'll be back to kind of our regular schedule in January. If you haven't already done so and you're interested, please sign up for our weekly email. That's on the site, www.peteratiamd.com. And somewhere on there, there'll be a little place to prompt, please sign up for our weekly email. That's on the site, www.PeteratiaMD.com. And somewhere on there, there'll be a little place to prompt you to sign up for that.

And if you don't like it, just unsubscribe. We also have great show notes, which everybody keeps raving about. And I'm really proud of our team for the work they do. I, to be clear, don't do any of that work. But I like that people are spending time on them, especially when it comes to following up on all of the nuances and details that we go into. Finally, if you're enjoying this podcast, please go to Apple Podcast Reviews and leave a favorable review.

And if you are not enjoying it and you feel so inclined to leave a review, please do so, but try to be as constructive as possible because it's a lot easier to course correct if it's constructive than if you just tell me it sucks. Without anything further to say, here's my guest, Sam Harris. Well Sam, thanks so much for making time today. Yeah, it's a pleasure. It's a pleasure for me. I'm coming to someone else's studio to record.

Yeah, well, you're getting the game long enough this is the way it happens. Well, I really appreciate it. There's so much I want to talk about today, but I also want to be thoughtful about pulling out threads that I think are most valuable to people I take care of. In many ways, that's sort of an undercurrent of what I like to talk about on podcasts is things that I can then share with my patients

and things like that. I don't know if you remember this, but almost a year ago, I called you, or I emailed you and said, hey, man, do you have time to talk? And you said, yeah, and it almost a year ago, I called you, or I emailed you and said, Hey, man, do you have time to talk? And you said, yeah, and it was like, actually, I know when it was, it was right after Christmas, it was like the day after Christmas. Yeah, it was the 26th of December.

And I said, I want to talk with you about mindfulness meditation. And you said, great. And we hopped on, I called you remember this discussion? Yeah, I think I remember the one you're referencing. So I had had a very profound experience. And prior to that, I had been somewhat familiar, I think would be the most generous way of saying it, but somewhat familiar with meditation,

primarily focusing on concentration-based meditations, like mantra-based practice. But I'd just come back from basically a rehab facility where you were sort of out in the middle of nowhere. You had no electronics, you weren't even allowed to have books or anything like that. And you were really sort of stripped down into, I guess, what could only be viewed as sort of your most fundamental basic elements of self. And I had an epiphany about 10 days into that, which was, I realized at the time,

what must be the first moment in my life that I was present. And it's weird to be almost 45 at the time and to think, wow, here I am, 10 days of having every stimulus removed from my life, plus going through this very rigorous, sort of therapeutic stuff. And I remember exactly where I was sitting.

I was sitting in the common room of this place at the edge of a couch. And in a moment, the only thing that mattered was exactly what I was perceiving around me. So the light coming in through the window and the way in which it made the room light up, the faint scent of something that was being cooked in the kitchen, a few yards away or whatever. And I don't know why. I just felt like, wow, this is the first time I actually really think

I'm not thinking about something that has happened or worrying about something that is going to happen. And the other thing that was odd that entire time I was there was, they allowed us to exercise, which was a big deal. I was really pleased that entire time I was there was it was they allowed us to exercise, which was a big deal. I was really pleased that I was still permitted to exercise, but you couldn't have music. You didn't have a phone or anything. So it was also the first time in my life I exercised only being able to listen to the sound of my breath.

So every morning I would run in the woods and you just heard the sound of the wind blowing by you and you heard your breath and when I was doing pushups or whatever is the same sort of thing. And of course, I'd already read so much of your work, but the reason I wanted to speak with you that day is I wanted to understand, Hey, is am I getting a glimpse of what one might get if they meditate? If they move to a mindfulness-based practice. And what you said was, well, there's good news and bad news. The good news is I've got this app that's going to be coming out soon.

It's going to help you with this. The bad news is it's only in beta yet, but you can start right away. There's only, you know, I think that the time there may be a dozen meditations. And the very bad news is going to take years for me to produce this thing. So I'm completely incompetent. No, but come on, the thing actually is out now. Yeah. And it was a little longer than you wanted.

But yeah. And I very quickly put as many of my patients who were interested on the beta version, you guys were so gracious and let all of my folks on this thing. And in many ways, I view that as one of the most important transitions of my life, I think of life as a handful of direction changes that some of them that you look back

at the past and say, wow, that was sort of a meaningful insight that came to me. So you've talked about this idea of noticing what is arising versus not noticing at all. Can you elaborate on this? Yeah, well, so I guess I should define mindfulness, which is really the target state that one is trying to cultivate in at least this probably what's the most popular type of meditation now. I mean, they're different as you alluded to, they're different types. They're two basic types of meditation where the distinction is between

being lost and thought and being clearly aware of whatever the object of meditation is. So that's true for all types of meditation. Thought really is the obstacle one is overcoming when one is learning to meditate because our natural or default mode is to just be lost in thought. We're telling ourselves a story all day long and we're not aware of it. So once one begins to meditate, one is trying to pay attention to something. And this is where the two different types diverge. The first that you alluded to, like a mantra-based or a concentration-based object of focus, is the attempt to pay attention to one thing to the exclusion of everything else.

You want your attention to be absorbed in that object. And in many of those practices, the explicit goal is to do that so well that thoughts no longer arise. So you're really trying to get rid of thought in some basic sense. The arising of thought in that context is a sign that you're not meditating hard enough or one pointedly enough. Those types of practices can produce extraordinarily positive states of mind that you can feel bliss and rapture

and you can actually use as an object of meditation specific states of mind like loving kindness, which is called meta in the Buddhist tradition, or sympathetic joy, or compassion, or equanimity, you can cultivate specific attitudes, which, if you can focus on them to the exclusion of anything else, you're inhabiting that state to a degree that most people would find unrecognizable. But the second type of meditation, which is the type I unrecognizable. But the second type of meditation, which is the type I have spent much more time doing and is almost universally considered the more fundamental or the deeper practice is often described as mindfulness because that's the state you're using in the Buddhist

tradition to cultivate it., mindfulness comes from a practice called the Pasna, which is insight meditation. And there you're not trying to selectively notice one thing or another. You are trying to break the spell of being distracted by thought. So you're trying to be aware of everything without perceiving things through this discursivity or this conceptual lens in each moment. But your attention can be much more choiceless. I mean, you can just notice whatever, in fact, you notice your noticing things all the time, sounds, sensations, and moods, and thoughts.

But you're not noticing them clearly because you're thinking every moment of the day. My phone is begins for most people as a training on one object like the breath, but very quickly it becomes something that you apply to the full range of your experience. And what's nice about it, apart from all the benefits of doing it and all the things that can be realized by doing it, this type of meditation is clearly coincident with any experience you can have. I mean, there's nothing that is excluded in principle from the meditation.

You can be working out or watching a movie or I mean there's no, there's no thing that in principle does not admit of mindfulness. And that's not true of other types of practice. Yeah, just sharing one example because the other thing that I remember you said at the time, I said, you know, Sam, I want to really shift this practice and sort of I want to figure out a way to experience that of, you know, more and more. And you actually said, look, there are a bunch of apps that are already out there that are all pretty good. I mean, obviously, you're producing yours because you think it's going to offer something additional. And I'll just make my plug for it here. I've used every one of the apps out there. And I do find yours the best. But I also realize

that there's no one thing that's the best. It's the way you explain things just resonates with me and it might not resonate with the next person. But the other app that I really liked that you recommended was 10% happier, which is Dan Harris's app, no relation of course. And even within Dan's app, there are many teachers, but there are a couple that I really like. Jeff Warren and Joseph Goldstein.

Yeah. And Jeff Warren has, I believe, a series of walking meditations And Joseph Goldstein. Joseph Goldstein, yeah. And Jeff Warren has, I believe, a series of walking meditations that he refers to as sort of informal meditations. And I remember the first time I did this, maybe it wasn't the first time, but it might have been the second time, but it was pretty early. I realized for the first time that when you walk, if you're paying attention to it, you can feel the wind going past your finger. So if you're walking with your hands in a position such that your thumbs are facing forward and your arms are swinging lightly in a normal gate,

you can actually feel the air moving past the leading edge of your hand. Yeah. I remember thinking, how have I been walking for 45 years and I've never once felt this sensation? And now, when I pay attention to it It's so noticeable. I don't know how it hasn't been distracting me for the last 45 years Yeah, yeah, and one might wonder why one would want to notice such a thing but what you discover when you Begin practicing meditation, especially intensively on retreat, is that

there's no such thing as a boring object of attention. What boredom is is simply a lack of attention. We get into these situations where we are convinced that we are bored because we haven't found something compelling enough in our experience to capture our attention, but our attention is so blunt and instrument normally that we need something that's thrilling or terrifying or something to fully get us to commit. But what you discover when you learn to meditate is that what pleases us most in those moments when we are fully captured by experience is the state of complete attention to the present.

And if you can muster that on your own, if you can actually guide attention irrespective of the object you're attending to, then anything, any arbitrary object, the feeling of wind on your hand as you walk, can be an exquisitely pleasurable thing to notice. This is why, in that first type of meditation practice, concentration practice, it doesn't matter what you pay attention to. You can pick an arbitrary object. It can be a random sound. It can be a mantra.

It doesn't matter what the mantra is. It can be a candle flame, it can be a color, on a piece of paper, it can be a random sound in the environment, it can be in the sensation of a fly walking across the back of your hand, right? To anything that you can pay attention to, to the exclusion of anything else, can suddenly disclose what

it's like to have a very concentrated mind. And concentration isn't intrinsically pleasurable. And this is why meditation can have the character of a kind of drug experience. And this is kind of a superficial character. You can get kind of addicted to the changes in state you experience in meditation. And you can be misled by these experiences. You can think that it's about these changes, rather than something more fundamental, because anything you experience by way of new found pleasure that is based on having a very concentrated mind, you will lose because

it's an impermanent state of your physiology and attention and it's not the deepest practice, but yeah, it's amazing that concentration itself, regardless of the object, is incredibly pleasant. You know, it's sort of going back to the Y, which you've started to allude to. And again, I can't remember if I'm, I know you've said this, I think many have said this. So I don't, I think many have come to this observation, which is virtually all negatively valence to motions are not rooted in the present.

And that sort of becomes the, the, the coral area of being present, therefore being able to concentrate on something in the moment can be quite pleasurable. And I guess that was sort of what I recognized that first moment I experienced it, which was, wow, when you're fully, fully engaged in or enveloped within this present sensation, what you're seeing, what you're hearing, what you're feeling, it becomes very difficult to be anxious or depressed, more angry, or any of these other things.

And for me, that was the most interesting part of this, which was, you know, taking a very big step back, I'm trying to devote my life to figuring out this problem of how to live longer. But if you asked me, how did I think about that problem five years ago versus how do I think about it today? There have been two fundamentally significant differences. There are two things today that I that occupy much more of my energy with respect to longevity than they did, you know, four or five years ago.

And the first of those two is this notion of being happy. Which again, I think five years ago I would have dismissed that as sort of an afterthought like it is what it is. And as long as there's other things happen, you'll be happy. You know, if you can figure out how to not die and how to be stronger and have better cognitive powers, but you'll be happy as a result of that. But of course, that seems to be not the case. The second though we're not going to get into it is a much greater appreciation for the

type of physical body that is necessary to age well, and how radically that differs from necessarily the physical body that we want to perform well when we're in our 30s or 40s or even our 50s. But going back to the former, which to me is, in many ways, your work and the work of people like you has had such a great influence on me, is this realization like none of this stuff matters if you're miserable.

It doesn't matter if you can live to 100. It doesn't matter if you can delay the onset of heart disease and stroke and cancer and Alzheimer's disease. If you're too miserable to appreciate it or if you're constantly in some sort of tormented state, you might as well be dead. I mean, that sounds extreme, but that's really how I started to feel about this. Yeah, and I think we also have inaccurate associations with terms like happiness. And we haven't distinguished terms that are different like pain and suffering. There's nothing about meditation that gets rid of physical pain. Pain is just something that you're going to experience. And you can actually experience surprising degrees

of pain while meditating. If you just resolve not to move your body, it doesn't matter how comfortable your chair is, eventually pain is gonna arise. And you have a guided meditation that takes us through that exercise. That is, I feel like within two minutes, it's unbearable.

They're people who sit for hours and hours and I mean, you know, 12 hours, you know. And it's unbelievable know and it's Excruciating and yet when you get up you haven't hurt yourself. It's not synonymous with injury, right now Obviously, they're ways you could injure yourself if you don't move but There can be a strange magnification of pain if you resolve to sit still for a very long time But one thing you discover there which is useful to discover is that there is a difference between pain and suffering.

You can feel intensely negative sensory experience, and you can feel intensely negative emotions even. You can feel anger and depression and sadness, and if you can be content to simply be aware of those sensations or those moods or emotions, if you can recognize that consciousness is the prior condition in which all of those things are appearing. And you are simply that, which is aware

of these these changing phenomenon. If you can become interested in the character of a mood like sadness or a pain in the knee, it's actually possible to experience these states with total equanimity. And one of the features is, as you said, not being One of the features is, as you said, not being focused at all by thought on the past or the future. So, I mean, one thing with physical pain, we all experience is this sense that some sensation is intolerable,

but there's this paradox because in that moment, you've already tolerated it, right? I mean, it's fully arrived. You've merely experienced the pain of what to follow. You're worried about the future. You're worried about how long this is going to go on. And it's certainly good to practice finding a place of equanimity with pain. I'm not saying, you know, obviously there are pains that are conceivable that even the best meditator might find it difficult to find equanimity with, but there really is an immense amount of growth one can have in this area

where you just, you can notice this difference between reacting to pain, contracting around it, resisting it, trying to make it go away, wishing it away, worrying about how long it'll be there. And all of this happens, this cascade, it happens so quickly that you don't even notice the mechanics of it. It's just you, right? It's just you suffering. But the moment you can pick apart the mechanics of it, because you can pay attention to what is arising, the feeling of resistance, the fear about what's going to happen in the next moment, and keep dropping back into a position of merely witnessing all of these things arise and pass away. Their experiences I've had and many have had in meditation where an excruciating sensation

becomes so intense that you actually don't know whether or not you're experiencing agony or ecstasy Like it like the valence of the intense mental state is it just gets kind of wiped out it's just you know sheer intensity and There is a a fundamental cancellation of suffering in those moments And this goes back to what we were just saying about the pleasures of concentration. Nothing concentrates your mind more easily than pain, right? And so if you're willing, if you can get past your fear and just go into it, you can experience a lot of mental pleasure.

I mean, I don't think I've ever met somebody who claimed to be a masacast, but I can imagine that if massacism is possible, there's some reason why this would be a reason why this would be the case. I can only imagine they're experiencing intense concentration in various states that most people would find physically intolerable. But back to the idea of happiness and other states that are commonly associated with it, I think we all have this sense that happiness is a matter of being joyful all the time.

And this is a very common idea. It's sort of the misconception that many of us think that, well, that's not desirable because if I were joyful every minute of every day, I wouldn't have the drive to do X, Y, and Z or I wouldn't be quote unquote real in some way. But, but, or if it is a matter of securing some durable source of joy,

then it can't absorb any of the other things in life for which joy would be inappropriate. People die and there are ups and downs in life. I don't talk about or think about happiness very much. I think about well-being and flourishing more. Those concepts for me can embrace all of the vicissitudes of life where you, if you experience some serious loss in your life, there's a resiliency and a way of embracing that, which brings out that the

wisest and most compassionate and most expansive parts of yourself, that is another component of wellbeing. The narrow conception of happiness that most of us have by default is something that we are always trying to defend and shore up against all of the other things in life that are threatening to undermine it. And the one obvious point is that it's just not a safe play.

It is perpetually under threat. And any joy you can feel by virtue of it having arisen based on some causes and conditions, it's going to pass away. You know, you just can't keep any emotion going for days or even hours at a time. And one thing you discover when you learn to meditate is that negative emotion in particular has a very short half-life. Many of us imagine that we can stay angry or sad for some people would imagine days, I think almost everyone thinks hours at a time. It's actually impossible if you are no longer lost and thought about all the reasons why

you should be angry or sad. So this was one of the earlier, I can't remember if this was one of the lessons in your meditation app early on or it was just a discussion you and I had, but I got to put it to the test shortly after. So I was in New York and obviously in New York, everything's a hustle, right? It's your running around, people are rude, you're gonna get bumped into. And one of my pet peeves in New York is when you see somebody walking towards you and they're, for a moment, lost in whatever they're doing, they're usually

down looking at their phone or something like that. I always think it's a reasonable courtesy to just not walk into them, even if they're in your line of sight. You still sort of go out of your way to not bump into them. But for whatever reason, there's just a subset of people

who love that opportunity to almost knock you off your feet. So sure enough, one day I am about to turn a corner and this guy is walking and it was clear that he could see me and I had looked down, so my bad, but this guy plows right into me. And I just had either had this discussion with you or just heard this lesson about how long can you actually stay angry. And so this happens and I immediately sort of observe this emotion, this rise of anger in me, right, which was like the desire to turn around and walk up to

the guy and say something serves no purpose, of course. But instead I decided we'll just watch this, watch this emotion. How long does it last? You know, I'm aware I was walking somewhere that I was going to be in 10 minutes. And I was like, do you think this will last 10 more minutes? Could you be angry for the next 10 minutes if you just observe this feeling? And the answer was no. I mean, it was gone. Actually, I felt like within seconds. Yeah. And to me, that was like a really big aha moment for, especially for someone like me who's so easily prone to anger, to think that by simply being observant of that emotional state, I could have some control over it, which has always felt like the opposite, right? It's always felt like that emotional state has control over me. Right. And it does, I mean, the important point to never forget is that it has complete

control over you as long as you're identified with the next angry thought that's arising in consciousness if you have no perspective on the fact that you are thinking right well then you simply become that thought for the period that it's it's captivating and you are pushed in whatever direction it's aimed right so if it is getting you to say the angry thing or physically assault the person, you need some level of metacognition in order to pull the brakes. Otherwise, it's exactly like being asleep and dreaming and not knowing that you're dreaming. This happens to us all of us every night. We get into bed and then suddenly a movie starts playing that we're totally identified with. We're one of the characters in it and we're completely unaware of this change, right? And the most surprising thing about dreams is that we're

not surprised when they arise, right? Like there's no, you know, we didn't have the expectation that we would stay in our beds, apparently. We're not surprised that they arise, right? Like there's no, you know, we didn't have the expectation that we would stay in our beds, apparently. We're not surprised that the laws of physics are being violated for our amusement. And we're suddenly in these situations where we are fully captive to a completely illusory, seemingly sensory experience. But you know, all of this is some kind of hallucination.

And identification with thought in the waking state has that character to some degrees. It's thought to be totally normal psychologically, right? Because it is our default state. But once you learn the alternative, which is to be mindful, you then have a very different sense of what optimal mental health would be. And so when I find myself lost and thought, and just, you know, suddenly angry or anxious or frustrated or whatever it is, and I wake up from that experience. It is a little bit like waking up from a dream

or a hallucination or it's hard to shake the sense that it's pathological. I was stuck in something about which I had no awareness and it was forcing me to say and do and think and feel things that were given my now current awareness were completely unnecessary. You see, to me, what's so interesting about this David Foster Wallace in his commencement speech in 2005 at Kenyan College, this is water, which is one of my favorite things to listen to. I burned a copy off YouTube and now it sits on my phone and I try to listen to it at least once a month if not more.

And it, like, even though I almost know it off by heart, it doesn't matter. Like, I still get some benefit every time I hear it. And when he talks about this, he speaks specifically about the problem with this is that it is our default. And that's the part that makes this so challenging. So do we have evidence of other species like are we the only ones that are blessed, slash cursed with this ability for rumination and constant thought? I mean, do we have any evidence that a dog is spending any percentage of his or her time thinking about what happened

the day before or the next meal. Where do we as humans stack up in this space? Well, it's important to acknowledge that we're blessed and cursed by this, because this capacity for linguistic abstract, complex thought is what has given us everything that is recognizably human. It has given us culture, it has given us civilization, it's allowed us to place all of the learning of our ancestors in a strata that is accessible to all of us and to every present generation so that we don't have to relearn everything from the ground up. I mean, just imagine what the alternative would be.

If there was no acquisition progress and civilization. Yeah, and for the longest time, that was true of humanity as well. If you go back 50,000 years, and then you decide to go back 60,000 years, that the differences are impressively non-existent in terms of the toolkit anyone was working with. So that's interesting Sam. So if we go back to, I don't, I know there's sort of some debate

about when language was really codified, but to pick a point in time when we're pretty sure there was no language, we could say 200,000 years ago, right? I think most neuroscientists would agree, no language 200,000 years ago, was the arrival of language, the arrival of this capacity, or where did this show up? Yeah, I think language is the main variable there. It's the main variable with respect to being able to abstract, to being able to represent anything that's not currently present,

or not currently happening. It's the basis for communicating anything of substance to anyone else and storing a kind of cultural memory of anything, whether it's just by virtue of an oral tradition or, you know, once writing came along. So language is necessary for all that. I mean, just to be able to articulate the concept of time, the concept of a past where the causes of the present are stored and a future, which is yet to arrive, that needs to be planned for or that can be better or worse.

It's something that I think other species probably have in a very primitive form that is not associated with conscious thought. I think that a dog, for instance, learns various associations with stimuli. Right. There are Pavlovian responses that these animals can experience. Yeah. And they recognize people, obviously. I mean, they recognize people arguably better than any other species other than than the human. So they

can have real relationships. And there's no question they have emotions and they have preferences and all of that. But in terms of forming a notion of the future or a notion of the way in which the world might be different. It's one thing to recognize your friend, in the case of a dog, recognize your owner, and prefer that person to somebody else. It's another thing to have any concept of having had a past with that person. Now, the fact that you recognize them indicates a past, right? But all of that could be pre-conscious to a dog. It's just there's just this kind of binary difference between recognition and not. So let's use an even more obvious example. And I'll tell you where I'm going with this, because then I want to understand this, which is, as I observe my three children, there is a distinction

in what I see in the younger ones that they seem to always be present. So, which isn't to say that they don't get upset. I mean, you only have to look at a toddler for 10 seconds to watch what that they can get upset. But I doubt that they're upset about anything other than what they're experiencing in the moment, right? They're hungry, they're diapers dirty, whatever they fell, they hurt themselves, something like that. But if you look at, you know, a teenager or a 10-year-old, a preteen, they are now starting to suffer from this quote-unquote disease of

too much thinking, too much distraction. of too much thinking, too much distraction. So somewhere from the moment you're born until let's just make it easy and say, until you're 13, you acquire this capacity. But yet an infant, like the dog, recognizes the parent. There is some sense of a history with an individual. Yeah. Again, I don't know what the relevance is of this

other than to say, the inability to recognize how distracted we are seems to be one of the greatest drivers of misery. You know, there are three quotes I love, and I love them because they're basically all saying the same thing across 1700 years. So in the first century, Seneca said, we suffer more in imagination than in reality. In the 16th century, Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. I have that on a t-shirt that I love to remind myself. And then, of course, in the 17th century, Pascal said, distraction is the only thing that can soles us from miseries, yet it is itself the greatest of our

miseries. Descartes says something very similar. I mean, this is something that's been acknowledged for so long. Yeah. And yet, it's so ingrained in us that it just strikes me as like, is there some evolutionary basis for this? Or is it just that evolution wasn't even trying to optimize for this equanimity? And instead, the benefits benefits as you've pointed out of being able to do these things,

the progress we've been able to make as a society, our ability to leapfrog ahead of other species has more than made up for this difficulty. Or is it simply that, look, evolution wouldn't outselect this because it's not interfering with your reproductive fitness. Yeah, yeah. I just don't understand why we suffer so much. I guess it's one question.

The crucial point there is that evolution doesn't care about your well-being. As long as you reproduce what you should care. Yeah. And so if there's some path by which we survive and reproduce in a state of misery, evolution is perfectly happy with that path. If that were a more reliable algorithm for reproduction and survival, then we would be getting more and more miserable. So we want to slip the logic of evolution because it just simply doesn't care about us, right? And we have an and virtually everything we want as a species now at some level is a matter of breaking the connection to many of our evolved tendencies and we have a very strong

evolutionary capacity for tribal violence, right? But tribal violence is obviously something we want to outgrow as quickly as possible and there are many other examples of this. I think that language is, you could see it when you're raising your kids, when you have a two and a half year old and a three year old, where they're talking to you, but then they're talking to themselves as though they're talking to you. Speech becomes something where you're you're narrating your experience as though you're talking to a parent and this seems to get internalized so that the conversation you just you know enough to keep your mouth shut but you're really talking to someone who isn't there all the time. I think that's probably the origin of it for every individual.

That language is so useful, it's so essential to everything we do, that we just have this superfluous level of discursivity that, again, from a survival advantage, there's no reason to ever turn it off, but from a well-being point of view, it's the character of it is almost universally unpleasant most of the time for most people. I mean, there's some people who are very lucky and they have an intrinsic level of happiness

that is just kind of off the charts where they're basically happy all the time. They recover very, very quickly from disappointments and losses and they just don't really see a problem. And many of these people are not very reflective about, you know, the human condition, right? They're not living necessarily examined lives because there's not much of a reason to, but they're just, you know, they get up in the morning and they're just stoked to be alive. And if you get enough of the conditions for ordinary levels of happiness together, and you're lucky enough to be able to maintain them fairly effortlessly,

you're wealthy and you're healthy and you're surrounded by happy creative people who want the best for you. And you're just by, by dint of good luck, people close to you, haven't died and you haven't suffered any collision with reality. Then yet you can, you can be conventionally very happy and still be talking to yourself all the time and not notice it. and still be talking to yourself all the time and not notice it. But there's significant limitation, even to that, when you do develop this more refined way of noticing what it's like to be you, having insight into the mechanics of your own suffering and the mediocrity of ordinary transient states of pleasure, it's not that that is at bottom incompatible with living an ordinary, fulfilled, pleasure-seeking life. You can enjoy dinner just as much having learned to meditate as anyone who's gluttonously attached to sensory experience without any kind of medication about what's going on.

But the difference comes in how you respond to problems that arise. I mean, it's actually both, right? I mean, I think that mindfulness clearly makes it easier to endure unpleasant things. So, you know, I was late to come over here today because the, to get to your place, which should have been an hour, took two hours. And that is normally something that would drive me batshit crazy just by way of process.

Like, why is it so inefficient? Like, why are there so many cars on the road? Blah blah. Like, I would get into a woe is me narrative about this, which is of course ironic because like, why am I more special than every other car on this road? Right? Like, everyone is equally in the same situation of it's taking two hours to get somewhere that it should take one hour. And actually, I have used traffic because when you live in Southern California and split your time in New York, you get plenty of exposure to traffic. I've actually used this as an amazing tool for mindfulness. And I no longer let it really get to me. Instead, I just sort of observe, oh, look, you're feeling a little bit self-important

today. You're feeling like your time is more valuable than everybody else's time. Let's examine that. Is that really true? Not really. Okay. What is happening in this exact moment? The sun is shining this way or all this other thing.

So in many ways, if nothing else, it's simply a hack to allow me to be less miserable. Yeah. But on the flip side, I actually do think there is a way to enjoy certain moments more. And I've certainly noticed this the most with my kids. I think that, you know, I have a, our middle son who's four, you know, he's just, that's what, like a four year old boy

is just gonna be more prone to chewing up the air in the room when it comes to doing bad stuff. And I find that, and to be clear, they're not all days that I can do this. There are some days when he's acting crazy that it just drives me nuts. But more often than not, I'm sort of able to actually reflect on it pleasantly and think about like what's happening in this moment, right? Okay, he's, he's yelling, he's screaming, he's throwing a temper tantrum. He's hit his brother.

He's done this. He's done that. But in this moment, is there anything that's really that bad about any of these things? I mean, like, it's not like he's going to be doing this when he goes to college. Like, what am I really worried about here? Yeah. And in fact, I can turn that into a positive thing, which is one day he will be in college and he won't be a cute little four-year-old who loves me so much. Yeah. You'll miss this moment. Yeah, I'll miss this moment. So I have found that, again, I use the word hack because it's such an ineligant way to describe it, but it's basically a tool to make me a little bit more aware of where I am in a given moment.

And whether that produces happiness or not, I sort of agree with you, the semantics of happiness are too cumbersome for me to explain. You know, people have talked about the dip happiness is simply the difference between reality and expectation. I mean, that's a bit vague for me. I'm not smart enough to fully understand what that means, though, I understand the concept. But clearly, there's some component of expecting the world to be a certain way, and it not being that way, producing an emotional state or a valence that is negative one way or the other. And so I think while as wonderful as mindfulness is to offset that, there is this moment at times of taking a bite of food and rather than thinking about the next bite or what you're going to eat later, like actually thinking, you know, or observing the sensations as they're occurring in that moment,

kind of slowing things down in a way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I don't know why. I just tend to always live in a fast forward mode. That is my default, is to be full, fast forward. Well, it's most people's default. I always say it's everyone's default who's not being mindful because you're constantly, even when you're getting what you want, even when you're in the very act of gratifying a desire, you're still subtly inclining toward the next

moment. You're not actually landing on each moment of experience with full attention. And paradoxically, you can discover that many of the things you think you want, you don't want all that much if you pay attention to what it's actually like to gratify those desires. With food, this is very clear. So you can be eating something, you can think you want dessert, you can have a real sweet tooth, and if you pay very close attention to what it's like to eat that sweet thing, you're finally gorging on, more often than not, you discover it's just a little too sweet.

There's something about it that is unpleasant and your pleasure in that moment is predicated on you're being able to take a drink of water in the next, right? If you have to bite a candy bar or something that's candy that's made for kids, delivers this insight to me very clearly. It's like the moment I think I want something, you know, at the movies, whatever it is, you know, the M&Ms or something that has hasn't changed its formula for the last 40 years. And I'm eating it. And I begin to notice that I'm eating more of it as a way of just getting rid of the sense in your palette.

Yeah, the last moment of taste that is just too chemical, laden, too sweet, and you know, if I didn't have a drink of water, you know, this would actually be an unpleasant experience. And it's not what it seems when you're not paying attention. And this is not to say that there's nothing that's truly pleasurable. I mean, there's all kinds of pleasure. And again, being able to really connect with the present moment delivers its own intrinsic pleasure. But your sense of what matters can definitely change the moment you begin to pay closer attention to what experience is actually like. I think it was in one of your lessons, but it might have been

in a podcast where you talk about, imagine you're playing a video game, and it's the same video game every time, and you always get killed by the same monster at the same part of the maze or whatever it is. And I think about that a lot every time I falter at predictably, you know, known, understood things that get under my skin. And it's very discouraging, right? It's sort of like a, there are like a dozen things that I just know if they happen. So I mean, one of them is there's certain types of questions that if I'm asked really Erkme, you know, when people ask questions that are to which the answer is very complicated, but they ask through the lens of just give me the one word answer,

that just irks me. Like, I don't know why it just bugs the shit out of me. And I know that. And yet over and over again, I find myself getting upset when that happens. And I feel like the guy that you're describing a video, you're losing the boss fight at the same place every time every single time. I know where the bogeyman is. I know what weapon he's going to use to kill me. And I just walk over there and out comes the machete and I'm dead. And then I'm back to the starting block again.

And I'm one, one of fewer lives in the game, right? What but you can recover faster each time you lose Get in angry is not the measure of having lost right now You obviously you can aspire to a time where you never get angry again or you never get angry in certain circumstances again but the real practice is to notice as early as possible what's happening and to let go of it. The difference between being angry for 10 minutes and 10 seconds and one second, those factors of 10 are enormous, right? And I have the same thing going on, where it's an anger is something that I very frequently feel. And I also notice that it totally contaminates the experience of people around me.

So I have my wife and my daughters. And my anger for them is clearly toxic. And I have this commitment to letting go of it the moment I can let go of it. And it's again, it's moment I can let go of it. And it's not that anger is never warranted. The energy of anger can be useful. Someone's attacking you on the sidewalk, you know, and you're in a self-defense situation. That's not the moment where I would say get rid of all your anger as quickly as possible, right? I mean, there's situations where you want to use

that energy. But for the most part, you want to let go of it very, very quickly. And then be in a position to decide what's what and whether or not it's appropriate to take some kind of confrontational path, whatever it is by email or say the thing that would convey your displeasure or whatever. But now I have my wife and my daughters as a kind of feedback mechanism for me because they know my commit. They know I can let go of anger on demand and they know I want to and they don't like my anger, right? And they detect it in the subtlest way. So like, I mean, it's not, it's not even anger where a normal person would classically think he was anger.

They don't have to wait till you raise your voice. They can see the mannerisms in the way you might move or the way your answers become shorter or something. Yeah, yeah. I mean, just so, but even mild frustration gets scored as a kind of crazy level of anger. So like if I say, wait a minute, I thought the plumber was coming today. That's like, you know, that's a four alarm fire, right?

So one of my daughters will say, oh, daddy's getting angry, right? And they'll say that so early now, and it's fantastic because I just let go of it early now. And it's fantastic because it's, I just let go of it way earlier than I used to. But if you can't be mindful, you actually have no choice. You just, you will be angry as long as you're angry. And the people around you who don't like it just have to figure out somehow to put up with you. It's not that there's no other hacks. There are many other hacks, and sometimes, sometimes it's important to have a hack that is more global than simply being relentlessly

mindful of everything that's coming up for you. Like a different understanding of a situation can offer some kind of firmware update to the whole operating system, and then you you just simply don't go there anymore. So for instance, I mean so you're driving in traffic. There are many hacks for that, but one hack is just you discover that you've got 400 hours of podcasts you want to listen to and you're listening to a

great one and you you're just happy to be listening and the fact that you're delayed an extra half hour or whatever is fine. And that's a totally useful hack, right? It modulates your state. You're just discovering the silver line into something that would otherwise be negative. I'll share with you another one

because I agree with that completely. That's a great one. The other one that I've taken on in the past year that has had surprising efficacy is any customer service experience you have that is profoundly negative. And if you fly as much as I do, you're pretty much guaranteed one of those a week. My friend Jay Walker, who knows a lot about the aviation industry said one out of six experiences with us aviation is a customer service failure.

Right. So anyone who flies would agree with that. But so the next time like the flight attendance rude to you or the TSA person is sweating you or being obnoxious or whatever, if you instead take a view of empathy, which is, God, this is a really hard job, you know, I mean, I have the privilege of getting to be, you know, intellectually engaged in doing all of these things in Bumu-Mumu, but this a really hard job. I mean, most of the people that they're encountering are on some level dissatisfied.

Nobody's showing up to their world happy. And so, like, simply taking that posture completely changes the way you interact with that system. Yeah, that's very impressive. And it's interesting because it doesn't even really require a huge mindfulness insight. It's just sort of, but it's a condition you want to walk in the situation with, right? You want to be able to walk in with that in your mind. Yeah, it's a framing effect. Yeah. And it doesn't entail mindfulness at all. You could get the benefit of that new frame and without ever having heard of mindfulness. So if you do get angry, you'll be as angry as you ever were.

But you have a different way of thinking about it. Yeah, the combination of these is powerful. Yeah. When I think about one of the most difficult things to, there are two things in my life that I have learned that I think were very difficult and took a lot of time. The first was in the year 2000 2000 when I was finishing medical school, I had a really bad back injury.

And it's a long story, but it basically for a year of my life, I was not able to move properly. And for three months, I was not able to move at all. Wow. How did that happen? months I was not able to move at all. How did that happen? It's not clear how it happened, but what happened was a pretty bad outcome, and I ended up having surgery, but the surgeon operated on the wrong side, so it went from a very bad situation to a worse situation. And a whole series of cascading events led to it being what it was.

I look back at that as I've described it as before as the best worst experience of my life, because having been in so much pain for so long, I had to learn how to do everything from scratch. So I had to learn how to be able to brush my teeth without putting stress on my back, which most people wouldn't even think about. You wouldn't think that there's a right and a wrong way to brush your teeth. You wouldn't think that there's a right and a wrong way to brush your teeth.

You wouldn't think that there's a right and a wrong way to get out of your bed, put your shoes on or get out of your car. It turns out there is, but you can only learn it when you are in such a fragile state that you've lost every ounce of strength in your back. And because I experienced that for so long, a year, it allowed me to make this transition, which I want to, of of course apply to meditation. The transition is going from being unconsciously incompetent to then being consciously incompetent, to then consciously competent.

And of course, the goal is to one day get to a point where you were unconsciously competent. I don't think I'm unconsciously competent at a single thing I do, including movement, but I'm now consciously competent at moving around and not hurting my back. But I couldn't have got there if I didn't have that feedback loop that allowed me to go through it. The other thing was learning how to swim as an adult. You know, you throw an adult in the water who never swam before. They are so incompetent, but they don't even really understand what it is. And so the first act of learning how to swim is learning to feel what's making you sink, figuring out what it is that is actually dropping you to the bottom of the pool. And then of course, you want to be able to correct that and with great effort over short

periods of time, exercise some capacity to fix that. I would say those two experiences have been by far the most difficult, but they pale in comparison to mindfulness. Now, I don't know if that just makes me a hard case, but and maybe it's, you know, the other thing I was thinking about when I was reflecting on this is having a back injury, you don't get a time, you don't get a time out from it. You know, it's every minute of every day, you're immersed in that exposure, that stimulus, and that feedback loop. Similarly, once I dedicated myself to swimming, I swam four hours a day.

And I think maybe the issue is, because I don't meditate for four hours a day, it's just going to take a lot longer to do it. And I know you and I have spoken about this and your belief is that something really happens when you go on a silent retreat. And I remember once asking, I said, Hey Sam, I see this retreat. It's four days. You think I should go. And you actually said, no, I wouldn't go for a four day retreat. I'd wait till you can do 10 or 14 days. Yeah. I guess I would modify that slightly. I think a week to 10 days is the shortest I can recommend without caveat. I think the first three days or so of a retreat are more or less the hardest for a retreat of any

length. So if you do a three day retreat or a four day retreat, you're almost guaranteed to have a lot of restlessness and just resistance to the whole project. And you may not touch anything on the other side of that. You can just be kind of unhappy the whole time and then just relieve to be getting off a treat. Whereas if you have 10 days, just seems like an eternity. Once you put yourself on retreat

and you've just shut down your connection to everything, there's no talking. There's no talking, there's no writing, there's no reading. It's just you and your attention in each moment. Ten days seems like an eternity. And so as you move through those first few days of resistance, at day three, you're still so far away from the day that you're going home that it's much more common to just surrender at that point and really get into it. Just decide that you'll just pick up your life as you left it when you get off a treat and that for this period, there's just nothing worth thinking about.

You just need to pay attention to whatever's appearing. Your breath sounds, the movement of air on your hand as you walk. Your first experience in this was sort of comical the way you describe it, right? This was when you were 16, I believe. Oh, no. That was my first experience of solitude that I guess it would have been a retreat, but I was on Outward Bound. And the Outward outward bound, I assume they still have it, but back then they had something called the solo, which was a 23 day period of camping and hiking and an outdoorsmanship, but maybe day 18 or so, they put you in isolation for three full days where you would fast and do nothing.

Right? So you couldn't go hiking and do anything that would distract you. And I think that the reason for that was not based on any meditative agenda that they had. It was just they don't want a bunch of not fully trained people wandering around the wilderness while fasted. So they just park you in some place. We were by this lake at maybe 9,000 feet and you just camp with a water bottle and that's all you got. You just have your sleeping bag,

your water bottle and you have a journal. Yeah, you can write in your journal. And I found the experience just intolerable. It was just you were 16. Yeah, I was 16. Yeah, so I opened my book waking up with this story because it was the first moment in my life that I realized that I was on the wrong side of some understanding about the nature of my own mind and the possibility of finding a durable source of happiness in this life. So I was alone in an absolutely beautiful spot and totally miserable based on the fact that I didn't have any of the usual distractions and if you could have just swap places with me and inhabited my consciousness. I was spending all my time fantasizing about the things I was going to do when I got off when I got out of those goddamn mountains and got back to my life in the world. And you know the friends I would see and the foods I would eat and I would just. It was just a continuous advertisement

for everything that I missed. It was like a meditation on loneliness and boredom and grief ultimately. It was just to be separated from everyone I cared about and every fun thing I could do, and every tasty thing I could eat, it was just a source of perfect misery for me. So when I came off the solo and met all of the other people who had also

been on their solos, I was astonished to discover that many of them had had profoundly happy experiences. Right. And that... Were you one of the youngest people on this? Yeah. Yeah. So I was, I think I was the youngest. So it was, I think the cutoff. I don't know if this is still the case But the cutoff for outward bound was 16 and a half and I was just 16 and a half So you know there were lots of people who were 10 years older or so and so they were in different places in their lives and Many of them just had kind of breakthrough experience. I mean, it was just some of the best time

they'd ever spent alive. And so they were kind of radiantly happy, because we had just done 18 or so days of brutal hiking. I mean, just 14 hour days of hiking with 60 pound packs. And we had this full or deal of learning how to function in the backcountry and then it all stops and you're just alone by this alpine lake. So many of them had come out of that feeling that they had touched something profound and

I had no idea what they were talking about. It was like being told, you know, I just got run over by a car and it was the greatest thing that's ever happened to me. It's like, I mean, I had come out of there having had a harrowing experience. Right. So what happened when you went back home after that? Did you look back and reflect on that or does that basically just become a footnote into a broader story that really didn't factor into your ultimate search for you know, call it enlightenment, call it what you want.

It took a little time. I thought it was probably a year and a half before I then had an experience with psychedelics that put all of this in perspective for me. So. And was your first experience with psilocybin or LSD? Strangely, I had taken psilocybin as a teenager before I had what really was the kind of breakthrough experience for me on MDMA when I was 18.

Yeah, you wrote about that as well. Yeah, yeah, that's in waking up. I've taken psilocyte, I've smoked marijuana and I've taken mushrooms a few times as a teenager, and they never, they never signaled anything profound to me about the nature of the mind or they never indicated a path forward apart from just this sense that these drugs produced interesting experiences. I had no framing for what I experienced on these drugs. I was, you experienced the altered state, but there was no altered trait to borrow from

the title of the same book. Yeah, and also just no sense that there could be altered traits. There was no project associated with changing your experience in that way. It was just, you know, it was kind of fun. I guess some of the experiences had also been unpleasant on psilocybin, but it's just these were drug experiences. You know, and it was like getting drunk. Like if you get drunk, you don't come away from that experience thinking, I wonder if this indicates that it's possible to feel, kind of natively feel like I've had six beers, and I can just be more that sort of person

by some other method that has nothing to do with drinking beer all the time, right? So, but with MDMA, you know, my first experience on on ecstasy, I had this epiphany that this is what consciousness was like when it was no longer encumbered by my self-concern, by my egocentricity, by my... And because you were 18, I mean, was it so much about like I'm trying to reflect on what it was like to be an 18 year old boy, but I think if I recall, you wrote about just sort of the empathy that you had for your friend, because it was you and another friend, right?

Yeah. And was that the part that was so stunning to you, which was, oh my God, like, spent the last 18 years sort of not thinking about it through somebody else's eyes? Or what was it that you experienced, if you can recall that at least showed you, or perhaps was the thin end of the wedge that said, there is now an altered state of consciousness that could exist outside of this state that I'm in that might be desirable? It was a recognition that what was changing for me while I was coming on to the drug was that I was losing my concern about myself.

Right? So I'm talking to my best friend, somebody who I already love and connected to and have positive feelings for. But what was happening is that I started to punch through to this level of connection with him that I had never felt before, despite the fact that we were great friends. And it had a kind of structure to it, or it was dissecting a structure within my mind that I had never had any cause to notice, which was, my default state was normally that, you know, if I'm talking to him, some amount of my attention is bound up in a concern about what he thinks about me.

Right? about what he thinks about me right so that you know if I see some change in expression on his face based on what I just said I'm reading into those changes some message about me some message about how I'm doing and there are many other features to this I mean there's also a sense of a kind of zero some a sense of a kind of zero sum aspect to my own stature in the world and my feeling of well-being in light of other people's success and happiness. So, and this is something you can discover in yourself. Imagine those times where you have a friend who has some massive success, right? You're struggling in your life to be as successful as you want to be. If you're like most people, you haven't arrived yet.

Then you have a friend who's winning some version of the lottery. When this is being communicated to you, you're asked to celebrate with them, essentially. You can discover in yourself a kind of begrudging feeling, whether it's envy, or there's a limitation on your capacity to experience what's called sympathetic joy in Buddhism for that person. And that's a ugly characteristic of the mind. I mean, here's someone who you essentially really care about, this someone you really love, this is someone who you think... And then their windfall did not come at your expense. Right. Exactly. And yet you, there's something in you that can't actually celebrate for them fully because you're so bound up with who you are and what you want for yourself and how you think they may think about you. And I mean, this horror show of self-reference and this miserably spirit with respect to the circumstance you're in with everyone.

So what happened in this first MDMA trip is that I just punched through all of that. All of that was just gone. And there was no associated an ebriation. I mean, my experience wasn't just that's the thing with MDMA that makes it sort of quite distinct and special from some of these other agents, right? Is there is no sense of altered consciousness? Yeah, it can be kind of speedy and it also depends on whether you're getting true. If you're talking pure MDMA, it says, yeah, yeah, of course, when they

cut it with stimulants, it's a different story. But really pure MDMA doesn't seem to really alter your consciousness in any way. It's in the way that LSD would. Right. Yeah. I mean, there's no psych, it's not considered really a psychedelic. It doesn't have any of those visionary or hallucinatory. Yeah. It's referred to more as an empathogen versus an entheogen, correct?

Yeah. Yeah. So having lost all that, I just, I that one just had how much I loved him and how that was synonymous with wanting him to be happy. And in some basic sense his happiness would be my own, right? So the capacity for envy would just completely went out the window. There's just no way to feel a zero sum contest with somebody who you love in that way. And but then I recognized that if a stranger

had walked into the room at that moment, literally the mailman shows up, I would have felt the same way about him. It was not contingent upon having had a history with this person. I was in a state where I wanted all beans to have their dreams realized. I wish nothing but happiness on every conscious system. Right. We've caused for moments that you can explain the neurobiology of that. I've

experienced it as well with MDMA and I find it to be the most joyous state I've ever experienced to have such, I don't possess, I don't, unlike you, I don't have the vocabulary to even describe what it feels like other than to just say, you love everybody in obviously a very non-sexual way. It's just a male, female, or all the same. It sort of becomes this you just want the best for everyone. So what is it about the neurobiology or neurochemistry that can produce that state? And I'll tell you what the follow-up question is going to be, is there anything we can do outside of taking that drug to even get part of that?

Well, yeah, unfortunately, I don't know the answer to the neurobiology, and I'm not sure it is known. I think most of these drugs are serotonergic, but- But the subtlety of Whirly are different. You know, which subset of the receptors they're hitting is- Yeah. We don't exactly understand the causal relationship between the receptor being.

Yeah, I mean, and frankly, I'm not up on the literature on MDMA, so there may be some clues that I'm not aware of, but, and I would also add the caveat that some of these drugs, I think there's reason to be concerned about in terms of the physical effects of taking them too often, or I mean, so MDMA is something that was profoundly useful for me. I remain somewhat concerned that it is potentially neurotoxic. I wouldn't want to take too much of it.

I haven't taken it for years. And I have much less of a concern for other psychedelics. I think LSD is, I mean, there's no evidence that it's neurotoxic, for instance. Having spoken with people, psychiatrists who have taken care of patients who have probably taken too much MDMA, the two things that I have learned from them,

which echo what you're saying is, yeah, it's generally safe, but it's very important like any drug. I mean, these aren't regulated compounds, right? So you're always running a risk when you take these things of other things that the drug is cut with. And there's a toxicity that can be amplified as a result of that. And the second thing that I've been told is anything over a frequency of about every three months, and you start to run a risk of these serotonergic toxicities down the line. So, you know, you can take that for what it's worth. I mean, I'm certainly not providing guidance on that other than to echo your point that I think one has

to be very careful with these agents. Now, at the same time, I'm not following the work of maps that closely, so I'm not sure what doses or frequencies they're using with the vets that they're studying. Yeah. And I think they've worked out some of these kinks as well. Yeah, but frankly, it would be worth it even if it were neurotoxic to some degree in the right conditions for the right person. If you had debilitating PTSD, maybe a little bit of long-term consequence or short-term toxicity is worth it to cure that.

But yeah. Yeah. So then back to the second question, which is when you think about that profound empathy in that moment that you had at the age of 18, has your meditative practice, which is obviously evolved greatly since then, allowed you to either transiently or otherwise experience or re-experience that phenomenon. Yeah, well, there is a practice that targets that mental status. You referred earlier. Yeah, yeah, meta practice. I met the poly word for loving kindness. Yeah, there are people who do that practice almost exclusively or

or. It's a little bit for the listener. Unlike mindfulness where you are letting go of any agenda you have for what your experience should be and you're just reconciling yourself to noticing however it is. And if you do that, your experience does change in reliable ways, many of which are quite pleasant. They can be amazingly pleasant, but it's not about securing those changes or amplifying those changes. Because insofar as that creeps in, you're not being mindful. You're doing something other than merely witnessing what's happening. And doing that is an expression of your own desire and attachment. And I mean, you're trying to change your experience. And that's, that's different than, then simply being mindful of it.

But with a practice like meta, you do have a goal. You're trying to feel this feeling of loving kindness as intensely as you can feel it, as durably as you can feel it. And you're trying to acquire a state change, but you're also trying to acquire a trait change in that, you know, your default attitude toward other human beings or any other conscious system would be just well-wishing and good vibes. There's no question you can train that attitude. It comes from both a framing effect and from an immersion in this change of state that you can kindle in meditation and then keep humming along based on concentration. So the same kind of, the same faculty of mind that could become one pointedly focused on a mantra

or a site like a candle flame can become one pointedly immersed in the feeling of love for all humanity. And it's initiated by thinking thoughts about other people. So you'll just imagine someone who you love, and it's important that this not be contaminated with your notion of romantic love, because so much of what we think of as love

in a romantic context is desire and attachment and it's not the same. Is it child inappropriate, objective that type of attention? Yeah. Child, a friend, a parent, but whoever in your life you can have just an as uncomplicated experience of wishing this person well, wishing them to be free of suffering, wishing them happiness, and the usual progression is to start with someone like that who you know, who someone who's close to you, and then

transition to a neutral person, someone who you have no just kind of a randomly picked person from the crowd or some public figure who you have no strong association with but who you can visualize. And then you're wishing that person happiness, wishing that they be free of suffering. You're actually thinking these thoughts in your mind as a kind of, almost as a kind of mantra, but you're not, it's not the sound of the utterances. It's the import of them that you're trying to connect with. So you're thinking, may you be happy? May you be free from suffering?

You're reiterating this, you could have three or four ways of saying it, and you're saying it over and over again, but then connecting with the actual kind of energetics of the wish, I mean, you really do wish that this person who you love, be free from suffering. And it can become this very deep feeling of basking in this well of good intentions for everybody. Right. And then you can include not only a neutral person, but someone for whom you have a so-called enemy, someone

for whom you have a real negative association. And then you begin to see the importance of framing around all these things. So just like you said for the customer service situation, you know, it just takes a second to realize, wait a minute, here's a person who's been standing at this desk since six o'clock in the morning, meeting one disgruntled person after the next. And now she or he has just met me. Their experience is completely different from mine. Which by the way is a beautiful cut to the sort of issue that David Foster Wallace talks about so much is every experience we have is only through our lens, right? Yeah. It's that insight alone, which now you're giving a very tangible example of is so powerful just to be able to hit pause on

that for a moment and say what you just said, right? This person's been standing here for seven hours, seeing one pissed off face after another, what they're seeing now is totally different from what I'm seeing. Yeah, yeah, and your impatience isn't helping and you are so glad that you're not in their shoes, right? Like you don't want their job

You actually feel compassion for their experience, right? and I mean there are many you know hacks of this kind where you do you know see you're driving in traffic and someone cuts you off and you know your default experiences what an asshole but It just takes a second to realize, wait a minute, you have no idea what's going on with this person. You don't know if this person is

in a rush because they have some real emergency. You don't know if they're 90 years old. Now you just honked at some 90-year-old man or woman, right? And who's the asshole now? There's so many changes of frame applied to the exact same experience, which just fundamentally change your interpretation of it. A loving kindness practice is based on a fundamental frame change for more or less everything you can encounter in human affairs, which is everyone is suffering. Everyone was once a child condemned to now be the adult they now are. There is no evil person who invented himself. This is something I've talked about with respect to Saddam Hussein in the past. I usually talk about this in the context of talking

about free will, but I mean, just look at someone like the prototypical evil person. Saddam Hussein is about as good as it gets, right? So you look at him as a 40 year old man. He's just a terrifyingly evil sociopath who if you're in favor of the death penalty, it definitely applies to him. But you roll back his life line by a few decades.

And at a certain point, you say, okay, here's a 12 year old boy who could have well been a scary 12 year old boy. But, you know, when he's four years old, he's a four year old. And he's a four year old who has every strike against him in the sense that he's guaranteed, it seems, to be a morally damaged human being. He's living in a society driven by sectarian conflict, the norms to which he's being pushed, the aspirations he can form in this context are barbaric by any standard, you know, ethical standard that we would form today, right? And the kind of person who can thrive in that context is someone who's morally damaged by our lights and

He didn't pick his parents. He didn't pick his genes He's not the author of himself and yet he's going to become this evil person who you know half the half the world or more will think is deserving of death at the end of it. It's possible to feel compassion even for someone like Saddam Hussein. I mean, that's a reframing that may be hard for some people to get there, but for someone who's practicing a state like Mehta, that's the frame. And if you can get there, you can recognize that there is this capacity for love and well-wishing that really extends without limit to every conscious system. I mean, you want everyone to be relieved of all their problems on some basic level. Because the most badly behaved people in the world are, for the most part, expressing their problems.

Even when you have a truly sadistic person who seems to be driving pleasure from causing other people suffering and such people exist, what you're witnessing there is someone for whom all these other sources of pleasure and well-being are basically unavailable. This person on some level can't know what he's missing. You know, this is a person who's never going to have good relationships of the sort that you and I would demand for ourselves and everyone we love as the necessary ingredients of a life well-lived. It's not to say you wouldn't want to put this person in jail because there is no cure

for this problem. I'm not recommending that we not protect ourselves from malevolent people, but you don't actually have to hate them. I mean, feeling compassion for these people isn't incompatible with taking the steps we need to take to keep society orderly and safe. You know, one thing I would recommend to anybody who's interested in pulling a little more on this thread is to do a prison visit. Yeah.

I've never done that, but I heard you and Tim did that, right? Tim and I did it, and I did a podcast with a guy named Corey McCarthy, who himself was incarcerated for seven years for attempted murder and a bunch of other stuff. And, you know, there's a group of three or four or five of us that actually went and spent a couple of days at a maximum security prison. And we played this game there called the Step to the Line, which I'm sure you've heard of. And it's you know, it's a game that's played in many reasons, but the purpose is always to basically highlight our similarities and our differences. So on the one side of the line, we're all of these inmates. Now, we're in a maximum security prison in California. So everybody in that room,

I don't remember the exact numbers. I believe 70% of those men were serving life sentences. Some staggering number of these guys were in there because of homicide or something more than like they were trafficking some marijuana, right? And on the other side are all of us as volunteers, and then the game begins of step-to-the-line if, and some of the differences are so humbling that you can't be a reasonable human being and be in that situation and not be moved by it. You know, step to the line if you had two parents in your household, and amongst the volunteers, you know, maybe 60% step forward, and amongst the inmates, I think one step forward. You know, step to the line if someone close to you died before you were 10, you know, or died of violent death before you were 10. You know, these sorts of things.

And, you know, these sorts of things. And you know, step to the line, if you grew up in a home that had more than five books, and those of us as volunteers, most of us step forward of the inmates, you know, five step forward out of 50, that kind of thing. And it's to your point, right? It's like, we're not going to excuse the mistakes that took place, and there's, you know, society has said there's going to be a price that took place and there's society has said there's going to be a price that one has to pay for one mistakes.

But boy, you realize pretty quickly the randomness that allows you or me to be standing on one side of that line and not the other. Yeah. If you were in precisely that other person's situation, genetically, environmentally, you would be that other person, right? There's just, there is no daylight between all of those cause and conditions and the outcome and even even adding randomness. I mean, so quantum mechanics doesn't get you out of the situation. And I think of all the times I've been lucky. Like, when I was in eighth grade, there was a kid that was a year ahead

who was like my hero. He was the absolute toughest kid in the school. I mean, he was the bad ass. And he took me under his wing, you know? So I was like really lucky to be the eighth grader who this super tough bad ass kid really liked. And two years later, he wound up in jail for armed robbery. And I've often thought to myself, I was so impressionable that if I had been with him

on that night, and he said, look, we're going to go hold up a liquor store. I'm not sure I would have had the common sense, the intestinal fortitude, whatever the courage to say, dude, that's a bad idea. I'm not going to go. It's so easy that I could have gone along for that. And as I learned later on, once you get in that system, once you're 16 years old and you're pegged for armed robbery, it's very hard to recover to Stanford. Yeah. Yeah. So, but that's a moment's decision and and the luck is like were you there or not there right and and I'm I'm I have

Way more cards that are favorable in my deck than virtually all of these guys I met and I yet I still could have easily slipped over that you know into that abyss of that endless vicious cycle of one one one knock after another until before you know it like you're 40 years old and you're in prison for life. Yeah, so the philosophical insight here goes by the name of moral luck. And I think it originates with, and I say that the philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote probably 30 years ago, we rarely recognize how morally significant differences in luck are, and just how lucky you need to be to live a good moral life. Any one of those things could have been marginally different, and you'd be the guy who was an accessory to arm robbery, right?

I mean, just think of how many times most of us have driven drunk or not a hundred percent and nothing bad happened. The difference between nothing bad happening and killing somebody in a crosswalk is enormous and just life-terranging. Stranger still, because it's now, it's not even classed for most people as a significant risk they're running, texting while driving. I would say most of the people listening to this podcast have not totally shut down their

texting while driving. They're not even thinking of it as a grotesquely irresponsible thing to be doing, right? Because it's too tempting. You're at a red light, but being at a red light migrates into the first hundred feet of your now responded to a green light, and then there's the moments on the freeway, and then, and every day, there's some totally normal, responsible, upstanding person like you or me, who kills somebody's kid and across walk because they were texting. The significance of that difference in luck, it's extraordinary and these are unrecoverable

errors most of the time. So there are two sides of that. One, it can get you to take more care in all the spots where more care massively increases your odds of living a happy, fulfilling life, but it also can give you this different framing that allows you to feel compassion for even the worst people on Earth. You can just recognize that if you change enough of the variables, you would be playing the same game, their playing.

And this is, I think this is so important, Sam, and I don't think I understood how important this was until I read something you wrote which I'm paraphrasing so I'll be bastardizing it, but the just of it was It's really the the caliber quality of our thoughts that determine the quality of our life And so let's take a most extreme example I had a friend who was killed by a motorist who was texting. So he was on his bike. He couldn't have been in a safer spot actually. And, um,

but woman, you know, got distracted for a moment and killed him. And, I was angry in a way that sort of felt like it was never going to go away. And truthfully, a big part of it was selfish. It was, I don't want this to happen to me now. You know, I'm at the time I was a cyclist. I was like, I'm sick and tired of seeing cyclists get hit. And some of the times they're getting killed, but they're getting hit all the time.

Right. And it always seems to be these, not always, but 90% of the time it's these distracted drivers. Sometimes the cyclist just does something stupid, but for the most part, if you get hit, if a road, if a cyclist in the road gets hit, the drivers usually have fault. Interestingly, unless alcohol is involved, those drivers are never prosecuted. Right. And I spent so much time being so pissed off. And part of it was just my own grand iosity, like my life is too valuable. I'm not going to die on the side of a road because some drivers too stupid to turn off their phone or blah, blah, blah, blah.

But then I had, after kind of reading something you wrote, I reflected on it years later and thought, I've never once asked myself what that person is going through who killed Nick. Yeah. Yeah. What is her life like today? Yeah. Because there's no way she forgot that. There's no way she doesn't go to bed at night and think about the fact that she, it's such a tragic story.

Not only did she kill a guy who's just a beautiful soul who had, you know, a bunch of children. He was killed two days before his life insurance policy kicked in. He was killed on, I believe it was May 30th. No, it was May 31st and he had a policy that didn't start till June 1st. I mean, it's like you couldn't make this story up. It's so tragic. But it's too easy to not reflect on her pain.

You could say, well, Peter, that's ridiculous. She doesn't deserve any empathy. Put all of that empathy towards Nick's family. But in the end, if I'm really optimizing for my own quality of life, there's no upside to just being upset about this. Like there's some benefit I will accepting the fact that everybody here loses,

and if that makes me less angry and makes me hate that person less, isn't that a good way to think about things? Well, yeah, but I would even put it more strongly because again, she, the driver, was profoundly unlucky because she was guilty of doing something that everyone listening to this podcast has done and didn't pay that price. We're still, she's guilty of doing something that most of the people listening to this podcast will continue to do even after hearing this podcast. This is a reset that I'm convinced most people are not quite ready for.

At a certain point self-driving cars will come to the rescue, but the difference between being someone who was texting and didn't even notice the danger because nothing bad happened, and being someone who killed your friend is just luck. And so, yeah, and you can only imagine how awful it has been to be the person who was irresponsibly texting and who killed somebody in the prime of their life just to hear the details and to have been the person who initiated that tsunami of suffering. Just imagine a website where you present the texts that were the approximate cause of death. How irrelevant they must have been. The juxtaposition between what people were felt couldn't wait another 30 seconds or 30 minutes

and the tragedy. It would be astonishing. We can all predict what it would be. That's a sick idea, but it's a pretty damn good idea. Yeah, yeah. Again, it's just, if you imagine what that woman went through, you would not want to trade places with her. So I want to shift gears from woman and go back to the discussion I had a week ago with one of my friends who's a patient. He's been really struggling the last few months.

He's a father, He's a wonderful guy. He's got two kids, three dogs, and he's a guy with a really big heart. So he's one of these guys who just, I don't know, you get the sense he could never be upset at anybody. He could never, not want to take care of somebody around him. But his, one of the dogs, which is the first dog he ever had died, had cancer, and they went through a bunch of treatments, and the dog ultimately died. And I think for him losing that dog was certainly on the spectrum of losing a child. Right? I don't think it's the same, but I think for him it was very difficult. And he's been unable to sort of get back in the saddle, so to speak. And it's reflected in, frankly, his cortisol levels.

I've never seen cortisol levels so high. So his his degree of hypercortisolemia is, if you didn't know better, you'd think he had a cortisol secreting tumor, actually. It's so profound. And we were talking about it. And he confessed that he couldn't stop dreading the death of his other two dogs, who are aged six and seven or something like that. So these aren't dogs that are going to die tomorrow. In fact,

these aren't even dogs that are sick in any way, shape, or form. But as he's three months out from the death of this dog that was probably 14 or 15, he's spending every moment now dreading the loss of these dogs that are going to die in five years or something like that. And it was very hard for me to try to console him because I didn't want to be dismissive of the pain, but I also wanted to remind him that, you know, that's the antithesis of being present, right? It's like, but your children and your two dogs are right here with you right now, and they're perfect. Yeah. And all the worrying you can do

about when these two dogs die, doesn't change the fact that they're going to die, but you don't know when, and you don't know how, when you don't know any of these things. How would you explain to someone like that in not necessarily the most technical sense, but maybe in sort of an appeal to their emotion? Why this effort isn't going to pan out and why there needs to be a new strategy for getting

over this loss. Well, it depends on whether or not the person is living an examined life of the sort that we've been discussing. So, this is a person who has no meditation practice and is not interested in that mode. He is. So, I've given him your books. He has been going through the meditation course that you have, but is still having a real hard time like all of us, I think, in taking it from, you know, the example I use is like, if you go to the gym and you sort of lift weights for

15, 20 minutes a day, you know, that's great, but the whole purpose of doing that is to take those new muscles and be able to use them in the other 23 and a half hours. Right. And you know, that's great. But the whole purpose of doing that is to take those new muscles and be able to use them in the other 23 and a half hours. And so I think that's the transition is like, I think the theory makes sense to him, but it's now, how does one actually bridge that gap? So for the purpose of the discussion, let's say he accepts conceptually the value of this.

Yeah. Well, so then to become sensitive to the actual mechanics of suffering, I mean, the only way to suffer this dog's absence is to think about it and not know that you're thinking about it. So it is to be subsumed by this process of ideation and to have no perspective on it. And framing can help here.

So you can say, well, there were many experiences he had with this dog alive, where the dog wasn't physically present, right? The dog leaves the room. There's no greater absence from a room than simply leaving it, right? Now, it's an additional operation to think, well, there's a big difference because I'll never see him again. Right. But everyone you love in the world, animals, you're the only person I love who's in this room. Exactly. Right. They're all

out of this room. So in principle, you know what it's like to be content in moments where physical absence, physical absence of everyone you love in this world it's possible and the only way to Make it intolerable to be in a room without everyone you love is to meditate on how Intolerable it is that they're not in the room with you right now and this is why meditation is such an amazing

skill because And this has a point of contact with your your prison story. I'm this the point I make several places. I think I make it in my book waking up. The amazing thing about meditation is that you know once you actually know how to meditate it's possible to be alone in a room that once you actually know how to meditate, it's possible to be alone in a room for weeks and months and even years, and several teachers I studied with had spent literally years alone in caves, where in most people's lives,

solitary confinement is considered a punishment, even in a circumstance where to be outside of that room is to be surrounded by murderers and rapists who you might have to fight, right? So like even in prison, people don't want to be in solitary confinement, right? Because it's so intolerable to be left alone with your thoughts. There's an evolutionary rationale for this. I mean, we are clearly evolved to be social primates and a circumstance where you find yourself alone, more or less forever, is not an optimum in evolutionary terms. But it's just simply a fact of the human mind that is possible to discover a form of well-being that is not only survives contact with a solitude, but is just totally undiminished by solitude.

And if you can discover that, even for moments at a time, you can then enjoy the company of everyone you love without this feeling that your well-being is at its core predicated on being able to have them at any moment you want or that is predicated on the totally forlorn hope that this circumstance is going to endure forever, that no one will die, that no one will leave you. We know that's not in the cards, and we need to find whatever form of well-being is possible, given the fact that things are continually changing. You know, your thought experiment, or not, I mean, it wasn't really a thought experiment, but it made me think of something was think of all the people who are thrust into solitary confinement. I mean, tragically in this country, it's, it's an absolute

epidemic in the US prison system. And for all of the realities of how inhumane that is, especially for the lengths of time, people find, find themselves in there. Do you think there's a subset of people who inadvertently stumble into mindfulness without being formally taught? So the analogy would be like, if I threw 16-year-old Sam into a weight room, but I'd never shown him or forget a weight room into a basketball court, you'd never seen basketball before. There is a basketball, there is a net." And I said, you know, you're confined to this room for a year. Like at some point, will you figure out picking up the ball, bouncing it? I wonder how hard it is to put that ball through that hoop over there

shooting at all of those things. I mean, it seems unlikely, right? It seems like on some level, you would have to at least be shown what to do. And then even if you're left alone, if you could come back to that lesson. And so similarly, you take a guy and let's say you put him in solitary confinement for a year, he's had no exposure to mindfulness. Is there a chance he's going to spontaneously figure out, oh my God, this is far less painful if I'm actually present in the sensations of my body versus the ruminations and thoughts that are going to torment me, or is that something that is just so counterintuitive to the ethos of who we are that no way? You're going to have to

have some exposure to this, to at least be able to be thrust in that environment. It's definitely possible because it is just the way consciousness is if you're paying attention. So it's there to be recognized in each moment. But the odds are against anyone doing it. I mean, there are people who have spontaneously awakened to this. I mean, they're kind of famous ad-eps and certainly in the Eastern tradition. Or there are also Western philosophers who've had intimations of this

where Jean-Jacques Rousseau has a story about riding in a boat on a lake, I think, and spontaneously falling into some very open and non-ego-centric state of consciousness that we would recognize. But the difference between having clear information and a clear map and not, we're having an erroneous one, it's just enormous. So, I know I wouldn't have been able to have done it. Like when I think about how counterintuitive, how difficult it is to practice mindfulness,

to go through the practice. Like I think if you put me in solitary confinement for a hundred years, I would have never stumbled into that Yeah, fortunately, so I would have been confined to you know, just been tortured Well also a worse still is possible to be practicing mindfulness and to be on retreat and not recognize

many of the things that you really do want to recognize about the nature of the mind because the way that you really do want to recognize about the nature of the mind, because the way the mindfulness has been taught to you is, however, subtly encouraging of a kind of goal seeking practice. And this is the way I write about in my book and talk about in my app. It's possible to be practicing mindfulness in a way that is dualistic. It's kind of ramifying of the subject, object, perception, and therefore the goal of recognizing the selflessness of consciousness and being relieved of the sense of ego at the center

of it, the sense that there's a meditator or a thinker of thoughts or an experiencer of experience, that that can be positive as the ultimate goal of some incredibly laborious spiritual path that just has to be traversed by increments over years. And that's an error. That's a mistake. I mean, that's just not true. It's already true of consciousness that the ego is an illusion. And that can be realized directly. And the

expectation that it can't be is, in some basic sense, self-fulfilling for most people. So, yeah, you can be in the most auspicious circumstance, having devoted a massive part of your life to just practicing mindfulness, and still be in a kind of crucible of unnecessary seeking and suffering because you have an erroneous understanding of what the path actually is. I want, there are a couple of sort of semantics I want to, you've already alluded to a little bit the relationship between Vipassana and mindfulness.

Where does Zochen fit into this? And like if you were to try to draw a Venn diagram of these different concepts, how would they overlap? Well, so Vipassana is the name of the practice in teravada Buddhism, the oldest traditional Buddhism, and this is the Buddhism of Thailand and Burma and Sri Lanka, and Vapasana, as I said, means insight, and you're having insight into what are thought of as a fundamental, the fundamental characteristics of all phenomenon. And these are impermanence and selflessness and unsatisfactoriness. There's often misleadingly translated as suffering rather than unsatisfactoriness. So many

people believe that the Buddha taught that life is suffering or that all experience contains some intrinsic suffering. That's not quite the message. It's that life is a circumstance where there is no unchanging, fully satisfactory basis for fully satisfactory basis for one's happiness. Because everything is changing. It's by virtue of impermanence that the boat is always leaking, right? We're always bailing water. We're always responding to some slow emergency, really. You know, where our health is always put in question, there's always some new pain arising in the body because we're simply not moving right you always have to respond to something and our pleasures however hard one are fleeting you

know they're vanishing even in the act of acquiring them so there's no place to land that is secure and that's largely by virtue of the impermanence of sensory experience. But the self, the selflessness component is separable from those two other characteristics. And let's just say so that's that's the possibility. The, the, the possibility is a practice whereby you would have insight into those three characteristics. And mindfulness is the tool you use to have those insights. Mind, the training and mindfulness is a training in a kind of awareness of experience, which is non-judgmental, non-reactive. You're not seeking to maximize pleasure. You're not trying to make pains go away. You're just becoming interested in a very open and focused way on what just what the character

of every experience is. So if you're feeling restless rather than try not to feel restless, you're becoming interested in and increasingly aware of the actual characteristics moment to moment of restlessness. How is it that you know you're restless? Where is it? Where is it? What is it? I mean, we're talking about a pattern of energy in the body that you can suddenly recognize as a rising totally

on its own and changing based on its own dynamics. And you are merely the witness of that change in state. And so it is with any pleasant emotion or experience. And you keep dropping back into merely witnessing and that is That is mindfulness when you can do it when you're when you're actually not trying to change anything You're not judging anything and you're not staying at the conceptual level You're not you're not Thinking about experience. You're you're it's just experiencing experience more and more closely

And so if you're if it's a matter of paying attention to sensations in the body, you're not staying at the level where you feel like, oh, I have my hands are sweaty, right? No, you're actually, you're feeling the temperature and the tingling and the pressure so closely that the concept of hands and sweat disappear, right? So you're just feeling the raw data of experience.

And these changes can be pleasant. I mean, your sense of even having a body can disappear while you're meditating. And it just resolves into a cloud of sensation. So Zogchen is a Tibetan practice tradition, which is explicitly non-dualistic. And what that means in this context is it goes after the selflessness of the mind very directly.

So most of us start meditating where we are in our normal states of cognition, with the sense that there's a subject in the middle of experience. There's a mind in the head, and it is by definition separate from everything that it knows, right? So there's the subject that can be aware of sites and sounds and sensations, and this subject is also a thinker.

It's producing, it's in some sense, the author of thoughts. And it's me. And I feel like I'm over here in my head behind my face, almost wearing my face as a kind of mask, right? I'm not identical to my face, I'm behind my face. And you're looking across space at me. And your gaze has an

implication for me because if I follow where you're looking, I'm over here and not identical to my body, right? I'm in my body. I'm a kind of passenger in my body. I mean, I can say, well, my hand is, I've got an injury to my hand and you and I can both look at my hand as a kind of object in space. My hand is part of the world. Yeah, and obviously I care more about my hand than you do because it's my hand, but if something's wrong with my hand, I'm still over here up in my head behind my eyes, some distance from the hand. And I can imagine being without the hand, right? I could be, you know, if I lost my hand in an accident, well, then I would have one last hand, but I'd still be me up here in my head behind

my eyes, right? That locus of knowing that sense of being located in the head as a self, as an ego is the starting point for everyone in meditation. And you can do Vapassana from that starting point. You can be taught the method of mindfulness meditation, and you just begin to pay more and more attention to what it's like to be you. And you can notice these three characteristics of impermanence and selflessness and unsatisfactoriness. The poly is a Nitsha, Dukha, anata, or Nitsha, anata and Dukha in that order. And you can start from wherever you are and who knows how long it will take you to have this insight, a fundamental insight into the eluciriness of that starting point of being a subject in the head. Now with zochan, you can't start until you've had that insight. And so the path of zochan entails

insight. And so the path of zoxian entails becoming available to that insight in various ways. It's usually a matter of actually forming a connection with what's called a zoxian master in the Tibetan tradition. As someone who can actually point this out to you in conversation. And for most people, meaning they can point out to you when you are falling to the illusion of ego, meaning they can point out when you are defaulting back into that mode. Well, no, that they can point out the intrinsic egolessness of consciousness in a way that you can recognize it and then practice that. Right. So because most people, they start meditating, they still feel like they're up in their heads

paying attention. You know, it's that now I'm paying attention to the breath. Now I'm noticing the difference between being lost and thought and being mindful. But it doesn't fundamentally cut through the sense that there is one who can be mindful. Right. And, you know, you can have experiences where the distance, the apparent distance between subject and object can collapse, but they can come in a haphazard way where you don't know how you had them

and you don't know how you'll have them again, right? It can come by virtue of paying closer and closer attention to sounds and sensations and things that are arising, and you can suddenly feel like, oh, in that moment of hearing that bird, there was no me and there was no bird that was just hearing. That can collapse again and again, and it did for me, you know me when I was spending time on retreat, practicing Vapassana, but I always associated it with the intense concentration of retreat, and it seemed unavailable to me in ordinary moments of consciousness, you know, off retreat, you know, I'm driving

in traffic or working at my computer or whatever, there's no way I'm going to touch that level of concentration. You know, I haven't been spending 14 hours a day meditating. So this is a kind of a peak experience that isn't, isn't available. Now, well, with Zouchen, you discover that the reverse is true. All the peak experiences are no more empty of self than ordinary waking consciousness is. And you can recognize this about consciousness in any moment. And it doesn't, it doesn't actually require previous moments of building momentum. It may framing really counts for a lot here. So I spent a lot of time practicing with this one

Burmese meditation master, Upandita Sait out. And the analogy he would often use is that progress in Vapassana is like rubbing two sticks together to get fire. The moment you stop, the heat dissipates and you're back to zero. Right? So it's like you'd have the sense of you'd be on retreat with him practicing for, you know, up to 20 hours a day and trying to make your mindfulness absolutely continuous. So that's the difference between sitting and walking meditation and every other moment, I mean, you're doing a ton of sitting and walking meditations, like 16 hours a day of that,

but every other moment when like you're going to meals or anything else, you wake up and get out of bed in the morning, every transitional moment, getting a cup of tea, you're trying to link every instant of conscious awareness together with mindfulness. And whenever you would get distracted, part of you would begin scoring that as a failure to build up enough momentum to get to the goal of the fundamental breakthrough that was on offer by that path. So this framing, this idea that you're rubbing two sticks together, the moment you stop, they're cooling off and you've made no progress, right? That's the opposite framing for Zoggen. The framing you need for Zoggen is there's this something already true of consciousness. You're not trying to produce this thing.

You're not trying to get rid of the ego. You're not trying to change anything about what is. You're trying to recognize a feature of consciousness that is already the case. And it's actually nearer to you than you think. It's not a matter of going deep within and having some kind of breakthrough. It's actually right on the surface of the most ordinary form of consciousness. It doesn't require any pyrotechnic change in the contents of consciousness. It's not, you're not actually closer to it if you take acid and all the colors begin

to change. You feel a change in your energy such that you feel this kind of buzz of connectedness to all things as anyone who's taken acid can verify that's on offer. But all of that's interesting. All of that's, I'm not discounting the power of those experiences, but those experiences are no less empty of self than every state of consciousness. I mean, it's precisely the state of consciousness that's compatible with reaching for a glass of water and drinking it without anything novel intruding. There's no bliss, there's no rapture, there's no profound or spiritual

change in state, it's possible to recognize in that moment that there's no center to consciousness and so what's ocean is is the path of discovering that there's no center and then taking that insight as your only object of mindfulness, so that what you're mindful of thereafter is that there's no center to consciousness. So whatever's appearing, sites, sounds, sensations, you are continually dropping the implied center.

It's kind of a steep path because it's hard to start. You can't really start. And everything you're doing before you have that insight and can notice it again on demand, everything you're doing is by definition a preliminary practice to that. Because you need enough mindfulness to notice what is to be noticed and to follow the instructions to start that path, but it's you mean certainly don't have to spend years on retreat to start that path and so it's having good information's just not, there's no two ways around it.

I think it's for some people, it's probably as difficult as saying to someone who's 40 years old, who's never exercised deliberately a day in their life. Okay, it's time to start spending an hour a day in the gym and you're going to be doing these new movements and they're going to be very uncomfortable. For many people, a few weeks or months into that exercise routine, they're still not finding any great source of pleasure. There are some of us who love exercising. We just get a, again, going back to the lingo of states versus traits. I worked out this morning before I saw you. I mean, I was in a new gym for the first time and sometimes that is a little, you know, I worked out this morning before I saw you and I mean, I was in a new gym for the first time and sometimes that is a little, you're sort of like, I don't

know where all the equipment is or, you know, but, but regardless, it's just the actual state of exercise to me is so pleasurable, even if it didn't offer any traits that were advantageous outside of it. Of course, the real reason we exercise is not for the hour that we're in the gym moving around these artificial pieces of iron. It's because of the benefit that gives us both metabolically and structurally beyond the time we're exercising. Right. For, is it safe to say that for most people, the experience of meditation doesn't produce a state that is necessarily as pleasurable as, say, the MDMA state

was that you could describe and that really the reason this ought to be considered by someone who is not meditating is more the traits that come outside of the act of meditating, the act of the practice. Yes, well, so it's possible to have extremely pleasant states arise in meditation, both ones that have a kind of ethical implication like loving kindness and ones that just are sort of the equivalent of you being on heroin, right? So it's not necessarily pointed in any auspicious

or pro-social direction, it's just you experiencing more pleasure than you've ever experienced. But none of those experiences really can be the point because they're transitory. When they're gone, they really are gone. I mean, the demeaning analogy to drugs is not inaccurate. What's the point if it's just a matter of getting high and you're a no better person in the world as a result of having had that experience? It really is about having a fundamentally

different relationship to experience in general. All of the counterproductive ways in which you grasp at the pleasant and push the unpleasant away. I mean, that is the fairly Buddhist framing of it, but I think it's appropriate. Basically, it's about not suffering unnecessarily in the end, right? And then not broadcasting, you're suffering to the rest of humanity. So it can't be about having an experience that's extremely pleasant and becoming more and more attached to that experience. And so that's one of the things that's misleading and a potential downside of getting very good at so-called concentration practices or absorption practices is that they don't have the power

to give you a perspective that is a fundamental antidote to egocentricity and selfishness and even you know, it's kind of starkly unethical instincts in other areas of your life and they really can be fundamentally no more interesting from a kind of a larger examined life perspective than a drug experience. I mean, it takes some clear examples here. There have been gurus who have behaved shockingly unethically in their lives and have, you

know, the reputations ruined and just leave a wake of unhappy and even destroyed people behind them who there was no doubt were meditative athletes. And in many cases focused on concentration practices. So if you had to ask, well, what was it like to be these gurus when they were meditating? Certainly not all of them were frauds. Many of them were truly talented meditators, but they were meditating in a way that was not, it was a separate game they were playing, right?

And again, it was a game that was properly produced immense pleasure while they were doing it, but it didn't fully undercut everything else about them that was going to be fairly monstrous in relationship to other human beings. This is where framing or the overall concept of what one is doing is pretty important, because there are pathological states of pleasure. There are even pathological states of pleasure. There are even pathological states of spiritual pleasure. I think the suicide bomber before he detonates his bomb,

they're in states of a kind of ecstasy. I mean, they have a religious expectation for what's about to happen, which entails going to paradise and experiencing more pleasure than anyone can imagine. And in almost every case that's sincere and deeply felt and these people are about to get whatever they want and they know the creator of the universe is happy that they're going to get it. So that there's nothing about ecstasy per se that is good or even benign because it can be pointed in the wrong direction. I think what it's a missile that doesn't necessarily come with a guidance system. Yeah, and I think what we're looking for to lead truly better lives across the board is something that is anchored to an ethics for lack of a better

word where our spiritual or our contemplative tools are actually making us better people across the board. And again, there's some bright lines here that I think are useful to draw. I mean, so for instance, not lying is a major variable for me ethically. It's just like having formed a commitment to being honest in basically every situation that wasn't like a self-defense situation. I mean, I don't think you have to be honest to the person who's attacking you, right? Or seems likely to attack you. But to put dishonesty somewhere on the continuum of violence and only resort to it where things have broken down so much that you're just not dealing with another person as though they're a rational interlocutor. That is massively

simplifying of a person's life. Right now very few people have made that commitment but having made it. When did you make that commitment? I know you've spoken about this but when how old were you when you decided that I was 18? I was freshman year in college. I took a course taught by this great professor Ron Howard. Not to be confused with that, Ron Howard. Yeah, no, not the former actor now director. This course was just an examination of whether it was ever ethical to lie. You know, virtually everyone goes into that course, more or less not even knowing what the relationship to line is.

They haven't been sensitized to it as a significant variable in their lives in terms of maintaining their relationships with their reputations or, yeah, I lie sometimes and neither white lies and sometimes it's just too awkward to tell the truth or and you don't know how often you do it, but you know everybody does it and the world could be no other way. And this course was just a machine for exposing the dysfunction of that. And more or less it became as it was like a seminar where everyone was just kind of coming up with scenarios where it must be all right to lie. I mean, surely this is a white lie that is better told, and the professor would shoot that down.

And most people left the course more or less certain that line was virtually always the wrong move for purely selfish reasons. It was just like, it was not creating the life you want. And by not being committed to not lying, you were closing the door to all kinds of complexity and risk, both interpersonally and reputationally that you absolutely want to close the door to.

I mean, it's almost analogous to texting while driving. Just decide not to text while driving. You will not care about all those texts. You don't have to worry about, well, I'll only text at intersections. Right. Or if I'm stuck in traffic, but we're not going that fast or whatever, yeah, I can assure you that you will never really regret the texts you'd sent later when you finally arrived at your destination.

So how old were you when you met your wife? You're now wife. 31. Okay, so you've had 13 years of this practice of not lying. And now you meet the woman you're ultimately going to marry, who presumably hasn't taken this course or made this commitment. At some point does that become a discussion, which is, by the way, I'm gonna be a little different than most guys that you've met in that, if you ask me, if you look good in that dress

and I don't think you do, I'm just going to say you don't. And please don't interpret that as, I'm an insensitive prick, I just don't wanna go down that. Like, did you ever have that discussion that sort of preface Or or maybe your wife the wrong example, but like I mean, I mean I've been as you're explaining this I'm thinking about all of the lies I tell no it was sort of you kind of stumble into it I mean you want to be training the people around you to know what they're gonna get from you, right? And it's not not necessarily

explicit. It's's not necessarily explicit. It's just, in that case, yeah, I mean, it became very clear, very quickly, just what sort of importance I put on honesty. And there are a few hiccups in many relationships, but the gain that people notice very, very quickly, which I don't think they would want to forfeit to smooth over any of other possible awkwardness, is they know you're never going to lie to them. They know that you're being truthful.

And so, like, when you have said, you know, that you didn't like something in a spot where most other people would have just told some kind of white lie, so it's not to have to communicate that, then your praise means that much more. You know, if you're a creative person who's often needs to get feedback from people, you immediately discover this. When I give a piece of writing to somebody and ask for feedback, who do I value more? The person who is just going to praise me because they think that's what I want to hear and because they find it too awkward to deliver some bad news because they know I've spent a lot of time writing this thing.

Or do I want to hear from the person who is actually finding flaws in this thing I've written and will now, because I'm going to them early, will now, and now has a chance to spare me the public embarrassment of broadcasting these flaws to all humanity. Clearly, I value that the other reader more, and once you see the alternative, you realize you want the people who will be straight with you. And then you meet people who think they want feedback, but they don't want feedback. You can have a more or less grown up relationship

to the opinions of others. The people who don't want feedback who just want to be told that what they did was fantastic. Well, if they're surrounded by honest people, they very, very quickly feel the cramp of that, right? They just, they want to be surrounded by liars. And they'll curate their connections as a result. You won't ask that same person, again, if you're the sort of person who didn't want an honest opinion and pretend to ask for one.

Is it possible for someone to, let's pick an extreme example, but could one go into public office and take that oath that I will never lie? I mean, is that is that compatible with politics, for example? It is widely assumed that it's a deal breaker, right? I think everything, virtually everything is wrong with our politics is the result of the mismatch between interpersonal ethics of this sort and what works and what wouldn't work in the public sphere. I think it should be compatible with politics. I think dishonesty should exact a massive reputational cost in politics. But now we're in this strange, you know, mirror universe where the most dishonest person

anyone has ever witnessed is the president of the country and suffering absolutely no reputational cost among those who love him for his dishonesty. It's like it's not a bug, it's a feature. In my view, that is the most dysfunctional thing about the Trump phenomenon. It's what it's done to the value of honesty in our public conversation about politics, at least a half of the electorate, pointing out that he's lied yet again is completely ineffectual with the people who don't care that he's lied. I mean, they just assume he's going to lie.

It's a very strange performance is like not even about. Representing reality anymore it's not that the people who love Trump are reliably doped by him you know it's that. They're not holding him to a standard. Of honesty at all right and his dishonesty however. Obvious. Is a different kind of performance is almost's almost like, I mean, there's been an analogy often drawn to professional wrestling. It's a fake sport with fake violence. And the fact that it's fake is actually understood by basically everyone who enjoys it, right? It's not that it's not like they're taking in.

Right. Unless you're five years old at the time you're a teenager or whatever, you sort of get stood by basically everyone who enjoys it. Right? It's not that it's not like they're taking in. Right. Unless you're five years old at the time you're a teenager or whatever, you sort of get that this is an act. Yeah. They're still very athletic. Nothing's so away from this skill required to do it. Oh, yeah. I mean, ironically, what they're doing is more dangerous than MMA for the most part. Yeah. And they're getting horrific injuries sometimes. But there's no illusion that these guys are just as tough as the people in the octagon. Right? So they're people who watch both or are certainly aware of both, and they clearly understand

what reality is. Reality is what's going on in mixed martial arts, right? There's things that are honest at the level of the language of violence. And there are things that are pure fabrications. They're lies. And something has happened in our conversation about facts in the political domain. It's happened to some degree on the left for different reasons. But yeah, I didn't come back to your question. I think we're paying a massive price for not being able to tell when people are

lying definitively, like, did not have a lie detector that forensically can be relied upon. And you know analogous to, you know, DNA evidence, you know, where you just know that someone's representing their state of knowledge erroneously. And we're paying a massive price for the fact that so many millions of people don't actually care that they're being lied to. And to me, that's the bigger issue, right? I mean, I think politicians have always lied.

I don't think that's what's new. It's almost like a threshold has been crossed where it's... So you go back to sort of Clinton's impeachment, right? I mean, in the end, I think the legal issue was less about whether he'd had an affair with Monica Lewinsky, the bigger issue was that he lie under oath. Right. And in many ways, that's what his impeachment came down to. Yeah. It's quite clear he probably did, right? I mean, we could get into the semantics of sexual relations, but

the, I mean, it's pretty clear he lied under oath. But the point you're making is that now it's almost a feature. Like now it's almost, I think it's gone beyond it that it's accepted. And now it's almost like part of the theater. But I think that is a uniquely Trumpian phenomenon. I don't know that anyone else will be able to play it quite that way. I mean, it is a feature of politics that has been true in other countries forever. I mean, it is a feature of politics that has been true in other countries forever. I mean, it is a feature of authoritarian politics. Wait, wait, you mean Kim Jong Un didn't really do that well in golf?

Right. Right. You guys got your soul several holes in one. Several holes in one. He doesn't defecate, I heard as well. Yeah. Yeah. In a democracy, it should be harder to get away with having one's lies exposed. And it's got, when you look at what you used to matter, when you look at the fact that

something like Gary Hart, his campaign where he said that he was faithful to his wife and encouraged journalists to keep a sharp eye on him and then was caught having an affair, like that was the end, right? There is nothing like that that's conceivable to keep a sharp eye on him and then was caught having an affair. Like, that was the end, right? There is nothing like that that's conceivable for Trump. It doesn't matter how discordant his behavior is with his next utterance. His opponents are keeping score relentlessly. Like, his lies are being documented every day.

There are not thousands of them. People are keeping score. It doesn't matter with at least 40% of America. So it might matter for another person for those 40%. It really is a kind of personality cult phenomenon where it's just for Trump, for whatever reason, how he showed up, what he represents, he can get away with stuff that no one else can get away with.

And that is what is so dysfunctional about having him in that role for my point of view. So you have two daughters, right? So we think so much about how do we prepare our kids for the world that's out there that we can only say one thing for certain about, which is we don't know what it's going to look like. I mean, I had this discussed with my daughter last night actually, or two nights ago, which was Olivia, you're 10 years old today. The only thing I can assure you of in eight years years I have no idea what the world will look like.

Yeah. But there are a handful of traits that I think will help you in life. And they might seem somewhat arbitrary and they might seem somewhat ridiculous or even unpleasant. But the sooner you can But the sooner you can figure out a way to put these traits in place, the more well-equipped you will be with whatever the future holds, right? So when I was 10, no one could have predicted that the internet was going to exist and that somehow that was going to have all of these implications, right? With respect to all the stuff we've been talking about today, specifically with respect to choosing to live an exam in life, choosing to live a life where we are not constantly being lived by our thoughts.

How do you teach your daughters about what the future holds? I don't mean that in like a broad sense, but I mean, aside from encouraging them to meditate, and I'm sure at some age, kids can learn mindfulness meditation. But how else do you try to influence your kids with respect to the lessons you've learned? I mean, they may never choose to go off on in you spent such a significant period of your life on retreats. You've really devoted your entire life to this study. If they choose not to do that, you know, they want to do something boring like go into medicine or whatever. How will you still

impart some of these lessons on them or will it be much more biosmosis than anything deliberate? First kids can be taught to meditate and actually my wife has done that work a lot. She just gets, yeah, she goes into school. What age does she start? Like five, six, it's amazing. I mean, you can go, very quickly, you can go from just, you know, the first class, which is just chaos, to a room full of six-year-olds sitting in silence for 15 minutes. So it's amazing.

I mean, it seems like thousands of people. Yeah. And they get real benefit from it. I mean, they're not, it's not quite the same as adults connecting with the practice, but it's, it can be pretty similar. I mean, they're becoming aware of their emotional lives in the way, in a way that kids often aren't. Do girls develop easier than boys at that age? often aren't. Do girls develop easier than boys at that age? Generally speaking, I consider them separate species.

So yeah, I mean, they do. Yeah, because my boys are wild. Yeah, I don't know how I could ever communicate any of that. Yeah, I think boys have a harder time sitting still, certainly earlier on. So it's amazing to see kids connect with the practice because they definitely do. And they just become aware of the linkage between emotion and behavior, thought and emotion, emotion and thought.

But on some level, it just comes down to suffering and the end of suffering. It's just like, how much do you want to suffer? People are suffering in reliable ways based on- So do you spend time then explaining the nature of the suffering? Yeah. Because I would agree completely, nobody wants to suffer. I just think it takes many of us decades to even come to the realization of how much

of our suffering is self-imposed. Yeah. So is it- is part of it just getting them to realize that sooner? Yeah. And again, to point out many of the things we've discussed here, where it's like the power of framing, right, the power of expectation. So, you know, I'll often point out to my daughter's, even the youngest who's just turning five, but for the most part, the oldest is just turning 10.

The mismatch between her expectation of how something was going to be and how it was. And it's usually a negative expectation. She was worried about something happening, I'll say it, but doctors visit her, you know, getting blood drawn or getting shot. And the actual experience that was far less traumatic than she was worried that it was going to be.

And to point out that all of the time spent suffering in anticipation of this negative thing was wasted. There's a lesson to be learned here. The thing she thought she was sure was going to be awful turned out not to be so awful, or in some cases not awful at all, or even net positive, right, because she had the experience of overcoming a fear, or she felt stronger as a result of that thing that just happened. So, the expectation is so often not only a bad guide, it's just no guide at all to what is going to happen. And yet, people suffer in advance over this thing that they're expecting to be negative.

Even if it's going to be negative, you can decide to suffer once or twice, right? Exactly. Kids can get lessons like that. I think it's good to give them as early as they can get them And a lot of it has to do with framing and just how one thinks about one's life, but mindfulness for a kid can be at the first pass just more awareness

over what they're feeling and thinking. Young kids can be sad and they don't know that they're sad or angry and they don't know that they're angry. And just that level of awareness can be a major gain for a kid. And then that's something to build on. And then as they get older, then I think certainly, as they once they're young teenagers

can have a more or less grown-up relationship to observing what's going on in their minds. But I think about how much effort I put into worrying about whether my daughter is learning well enough, the sort of standard metrics that we care about, you know, math and science and English and sports and all those things, I feel like probably I'm not paying enough attention to those things as well, especially for someone who has spent so much time suffering inside his own mind, like I ought to know better, right? Like there is, there is no prison like the one between your ears. Yeah. And yeah,

yeah, when you frame it that way, boy, it makes me think I really need to start investing a little bit more time in that, in that prep. But I want to be mindful of your time. So I kind of, I know we both have to get somewhere this evening. Are you writing a book any at the moment? Are you working anything?

I'm the worst author a publisher can have at this point. I keep pushing back my deadline. I am supposed to be writing a book, but I'm so busy podcasting and doing other things that what is the book about? Well, I have actually have two books that I'm supposed to be writing. One is just a digest of podcasts, conversations just because now I have. So sort of like what Tim did with. Yeah, I'm not quite sure what the format will be, but something based on the podcast.

It's probably gonna be more like just updated transcripts of significant parts of the conversation. And then I have a book with a working title, Making Sense, which is just, it was gonna be a kind of manifesto about intellectual honesty and how we have hard conversations about, you know, all manner of topics, whether it's race or gender or the opposition between science and religion or,

you know, many of the topics I touch on my podcast, we're paying a price for not being able to talk about the most consequential and taboo and dangerous and divisive things in a way that is conserving of good intentions and honesty and allows for compromise and allows for breakthroughs and changes of opinion. I'm like, all the norms around talking about these things are a skew. You just can't have a conversation about the differences between men and women say.

Are men and women exactly the same? No, they're not. But what do we do? What do we do down that path generates iron like you can imagine? And careers are lost over slight misstatements. And there are people who say things that were ill-considered that they then subsequently apologize for. They recognize that they're ill-considered, that they then subsequently apologize for. They recognize that they're ill-considered. And yet the apology, however heartfelt, however abject, isn't sufficient to stop their career from being destroyed. You had an example of this recently on your podcast where you talked about the, she was a dean at Claire McKenna.

Yeah, Claire McKenna. Yeah. Well actually, there's a more recent Claire McKellys. What was the college? Yeah, Claire McKellys. Claire McKellys. Yeah. Well actually, there's a more recent example, which is even a more amazing in its own way. So like Megan Kelly is firing over her Halloween blackface comments, right? Well, so, you know, she obviously couldn't hear how

the phrase blackface would land with many people. It's easy to see that the way she spoke about it was a constituted a mistake. It's pretty obvious. It was not an expression of racism on her part, right? She's not saying African Americans haven't suffered a massive inequality in the past. She was just saying, well, you know,

if you're gonna dress up like Diana Ross, why can't you put brown makeup on your face? I mean, essentially, that was one of her words, but that was the sentiment. That's absolutely something we should be able to talk about. Yet she said the wrong thing and then clearly received a ton of pressure to apologize for it.

Her apology, I don't know if you saw her apology, but her apology was, I mean, someone was joking on Twitter. This was just like, something on Twitter that said it was the closest thing you've ever seen to a hostage video minus the newspaper. Right. Yeah. It's like, just you got to hold up the newspaper as proof of life. It wasn't actually here, what she said or anything. Yeah, but it was it by all signs. It was as full an apology as a person can muster. It was complete. If it didn't strike the right note for you, well, then you have superhuman expectations

for what someone should be able to muster in a context like that. It did not seem insincere at all, at least to my eye. And yet still, this was a career-reckening event, it seems. And so now we're in a situation where people are calling for the destruction of other people and celebrating the effects of that when these people actually do lose their shows or suffer some massive penalty. And yet, I think it's true to say that most people who were calling for her to be fired would recognize that one, her initial statement was not actually conveying her own racism. It was conveying her obliviousness to the significance of this

phrase for other people, but it was not conveying that she was somebody who wants to live in a society where there's a lack of political equality. Right? I mean, there was zero evidence of that. I don't think anyone even alleges that that's her view of the world. But worse than that, once she recognizes the mistake she's made, no apology is sufficient. Right? recognizes the mistake she's made, no apology is sufficient. Right? So do we really want to live in a world where you mispeak on a

fraught topic and it is impossible to adequately apologize? Right? You recognize that you know, you use the word retard, say, right? And then you then you get feedback that wow, people really find that offensive. There are kids with mental disabilities, you know, and you like, if you knew what it was like to be a parent of a kid who was suffering this, you would recognize how offensive that term is and that like,

why would you ever use that term on a podcast, right? Imagine it being impossible to apologize for that. It's over for you, right? What's so interesting bringing it back to the prison stuff, I remember when I spoke with Kat Hoke about this. So Catherine Hoke is the woman that used to run this organization called the Five Ventures and now she's spinning up something that's going to be even better actually, to which I've suggested to her.

And I don't think I'm unique in this. A lot of people have suggested that this idea ought not just be something that's sort of a non-profit. Like there is such a benefit to the volunteers to going into this experience that it almost needs to be sort of a corporate development program. Like, people need to be paying to go and have this experience. It's so profound. Right.

But it gets to this question of like, can you be forget? Is there something for which you cannot be forgiven? What is the crime? What is the sin? What is the moral defect for which there is no forgiveness? And I don't know if you're familiar with any of the stuff she's spoken about, but you know, at some point she had to make a decision about whether or not people who were sexual predators would be permitted into the program. So if you'd rape somebody, if you'd

molested a child and you're now serving whatever term in prison, could you be a part of this rehabilitative program? And in the end, she said, yes, I mean, basically, it really comes down to the degree of which a person, a person shows remorse, and their willingness to change. Because the idea is like, whether you choose to never forgive somebody and whether it's Megan Kelly or this rapist, it doesn't change the fact that something was said or something was done that is in some cases, probably not really that ridiculous and in some cases is really tragic. But it's, you have two choices as a society, how you move forward from that. And it seems we're definitely caught in the place of an inability to reconcile

the good that can come from moving on, which means acknowledging mistakes that were made, acknowledging remorse, looking for ways to get better. I mean, we really don't seem to like that, that that that seems a bit too soft for people or so. I don't know, soft is the right word, but there's something about that process that people don't like. Yeah. Yeah. And in extreme cases, they're forced to accept it. I mean, one society has just become completely driven by sectarian violence or political dysfunction of one kind or another. Then you need things like truth and reconciliation commissions in places like you know South Africa or Rwanda where it's you know the then people who are guilty of objectively horrible things can get a pass essentially just by coming forward and telling

the truth and apologizing. Yeah, I think, you know, I actually I brought this up on my podcast not long ago. I was thinking about this very problem in terms of like an ethical event horizon. I mean, is there something so bad that you could do or say that no apology would be sufficient to pull your reputation back out of that singularity? It is a kind of unrecoverable moral error.

And I don't think so. I think the physics of an appropriate acceptable apology are that it be sincere and believable. And that the measure of it being believable is that it has to be clear how you could have changed enough for it to be sincere. So for an apology to be accepted, you have to stand in relationship to that thing you did in the same place where the other people who are horrified by what you did stand.

And they have to be able to see how it is that you have come to stand where they are now in order to accept your apology. So if that transformation isn't believable for some reason, if there's no path by which you could have had this epiphany that contextualizes your prior bad behavior, you know, puts it in a box which you disavow, well then it will seem it will seem insincere or opportunistic, your sociopath is just trying to get out of prison and game the program. Those people exist. There's no question. The insincere apology for calculated reasons is, that's as old as we've been speaking to

one another, and that will continue for as long as people can get away with it. That's a genuine concern if you're talking about how to operationalize these kinds of insights. But, I mean, just again, the path out of that darkness has to be intelligible to people. And I think this, we'll stumble on this once we have breakthroughs in psychology and neuroscience that admit of real changes in people's emotional and ethical lives. I mean, just take the narrow case. If we ever understood psychopathy clearly enough that we could cure it, right?

So you have someone who's from a very early age just torturing animals and showing zero empathy for other people, and they grow up into the scary adult that one would predict. And if we ever get to a place where there's a cure for that, well, then psychopathy will be viewed as a neurological condition. It won't be a moral problem. These are malfunctioning robots that need the new module. And just imagine if we had that cure, we'd be no more judgmental in how we applied it

than we are when we cure any other disease. I mean, you're not thinking about when you're giving diabetics insulin. You're not thinking, well, you're lucky I'm giving you this insulin because you probably don't deserve it. You with your malfunctioning pancreas, you're lucky that I'm so tolerant that I'm willing to give you this insulin. There's zero culpability in having a bad pancreas. If we actually understood the neurochemical, neuroanatomical basis of even the worst behavior. If it was discrete enough that it admitted of a cure, we would sell, we just got to fix that problem. And it would be, and then-

You hold out hope for that Sam or is that sci-fi? I mean, you're a neuroscientist, so you can speak to this with much more clarity or authority than I could ever speak of it. I hold out hope for it in certain specific cases. Yeah, I mean, we know it's true. I mean, we've already stumbled upon it in cases where you're talking about a brain tumor that is causing a problem, but causing a problem which shows up as uncontrollable rage or pedophilia or I mean, they're cases where, were you know the classic case is Charles Whitman who in 1964 killed 14 people at the University of Texas and he just had a glial blastoma pushing on his

amygdala and the amazing thing is that you might know the story because I've talked about it but I mean he suspected that he had something wrong with his brain, and he knew he was going to be killed by the police, and he recommended that they perform an autopsy to find out what was going on in his head. And yeah, he had a tumor, which was arguably totally sculpatory. It was just, and precisely the place that you would think, okay, he's got, he can't control his impulses, and he's feeling, you know, uncontrollable rage. And this tumor explains it. I think there's virtually no one who hears the whole story who thinks Charles Whitman was evil. He just seems profoundly

unlucky. And on some level, a complete understanding of evil would reduce it to that same species of unlock. That is an amazing thought. It's hard for me to imagine because obviously the mass effects are the obvious ones, right? These lesions versus much more diffuse neurochemical processes. We're gonna have dinner tonight, so I know what we're gonna keep talking about, man. We got so much to keep going on. For folks who are listening to this on my podcast, you might not know you as well as they ought to, is samherast.org, basically where they can find everything, your podcast, your blog, your books, all sorts of things.

Yeah. And as far as my meditation app, it's just wakingup.com. But yeah, both websites. And some of us like me are lucky enough to have got it for free because we were supporters of the podcast before it came out. Yeah, yeah. Is it available for purchase now on both the on Apple and on Android? I think it's joy. Android's not quite out yet. No, it's out as of yesterday. Okay. Fantastic. Because I know I had a patient who went to search for it on Android

a few weeks ago and it was coming soon. No, no, we're born on both platforms. Okay. Well, congratulations, Sam. It is, I mean, I just want to say I want to thank you personally for the effect and the impact that your work has had on me. I find myself, like I said, spending so much time thinking about how to help people delay the onset of diseases that kill them. And in many ways, you're doing the same thing, but in some ways, a higher stakes arena, which is how to prevent people from suffering so much, which in some ways is just harder to measure. We don't have the same stats on that, right? I can rattle off all the stats on what the probability is that you're going to get cancer by the time you're 70 and what's the likelihood you're going to make it to 90 without a heart

attack and ball. I can rattle off all those things, but we don't keep the same stats for how much we suffer. And I think of your work as among the most important things that have helped me. And now by extension, some of my patients who are willing to go down this path with me to reduce that burden of suffering. Nice. Nice. Well, glad to hear it. Well, thank you. Thank you for making so much time this afternoon. Yeah, yeah. It's a pleasure. And congratulations on the podcast.

You are one of these few examples of somebody who goes from the conversation of, you know, I think maybe I want to start a podcast. Should I start a podcast? And then I turn around and three weeks later, you have this amazing podcast that is more professionally produced than mine and people love. So congratulations on that. Well, you and your team deserve a lot of credit for that. I know I've said this before, but it's always worth repeating. I mean, I think that you and Tim were probably among the two most vocal, along with probably Patrick O'Shaughnessy, but I think you and Tim the most really,

because honestly, I was just so intimidated by the work I saw you and Tim doing. I was like, well, there's no god damn way. I can do that. Like, that's just above my pay grade. So I still think my podcast pales in comparison to yours and Tim's, but I am happy to be in the arena. And it, it has turned out to be much more enjoyable than I would have ever predicted.

Yeah. And so I do regret having not done it two years sooner when you were harping on me and Tim was harping on me, but better late than never and It's an honor to have you as a guest on my little budding podcast. Well keep it up. Thanks, man You can find all of this information and more at pterotia MD dot com forward slash podcast There you'll find the show notes readings and links related to this episode You can also find my blog and the nerdSafari at peteratiamd.com.

What's a NerdSafari you ask? Just click on the link at the top of the site to learn more. Maybe the simplest thing to do is to sign up for my subjectively non-lame once a week email where I'll update you on what I've been up to, the most interesting papers I've read, and all things related to longevity, science, performance, sleep, etc. On social you can find me on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, all with the ID, Peter, ATIA, MD. But usually Twitter is the best way to reach me to share your questions and comments.

Now for the obligatory disclaimer, this podcast is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute the practice of medicine, nursing, or other professional health care services, including the giving of medical advice. And note, no doctor-patient relationship is formed. The use of this information and the materials linked to the podcast is at the user's own risk. The content of this podcast is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnoses, or treatment.

Users should not disregard or delay in obtaining medical advice for any medical condition they have and should seek the assistance of their healthcare professionals for any such conditions. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I take conflicts of interest very seriously for all of my disclosures. The companies I invest in and or advise please visit peteratiamd.com-forward-slash-about. PeterRatia MD dot com forward slash about.