The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - Psychedelics with Sam Harris

Episode Date: July 8, 2021

Sam Harris joins the pod again to discuss psychedelics — including his experience with LSD and psilocybin — and shares his thoughts on who should and shouldn’t take them. He also explains how these drugs can provide you with a profound perspective on life, give you clarity, and help you hit the reset button. Follow Sam on Twitter, @SamHarrisOrg. Scott opens with how big tech entering healthcare is exactly what dispersion is meant to do. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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NMLS 1617539. Episode 81, the atomic number of Thallium. Raiders of the Lost art premiered in 1981 true story i suffer from a rare form of amnesia where i can't remember 80s music and there is no cure there is no cure get it truth be told i was a bit of a fashion plate in the 80s i wore 501s top siders with no socks and oversized varnais on my head I called the whole look losing your virginity at 19. Go, go, go! Welcome to the 81st episode of The Prof G-Pod.

In today's episode, we speak with one of our favorite blue flame thinkers, Sam Harris. I just think the world of Sam Harris. I find him courageous, crazy smart. I think he's a soulful person. The stuff I like is when he talks about parenting in addition to neuroscience and philosophy. But there are people, when you think about the people you admire, the people I admire, they're fearless. Muhammad Ali, the shit he said when he said it was fearless and it cost him a lot. And I feel that Sam Harris is this sort of relentless pursuit of the truth, regardless of who it offends. And it's backed by science. I think he approaches it with absolutely no, as far as I can discern, no political agenda. Anyway, Sam and I discuss a lot, so we're breaking

our conversation into two episodes. Today, Sam shares what we need to know about the $5 billion psychedelics market, his experience with these drugs, and how to live more ethically. Next week, you'll hear our conversation on woke culture with Sam. I can't imagine anyone more interesting to provide a viewpoint on that. Tune in. Anyways, what's happening? Evidence the big firms are getting into and disrupting the healthcare industry is continuing to make waves. We're about to enter what I believe is going to be the most robust, inspiring six months of new business formation in the last several decades. Why? Because some of the biggest industries in the world are attracting capital, and there's a general viewpoint and an acceptance that the way we did

things yesterday isn't going to get us where we need to be tomorrow, specifically around some of the biggest industries in the world, education, media, finance, i.e. fintech, and the biggest one, most disruption, more destruction and creative of shareholder value, you guessed it, healthcare. And it's not just the new guys. It's not just the guy who went to, and it's usually a guy, let's be honest, who went to Harvard, dropped out, went to work for a hedge fund, is now raising hundreds of millions of dollars and buying traction in the private markets. We've seen some big players here. Walmart introduced its own low-cost insulin brand.

This is interesting. If you want to talk about things that actually move the needle or evidence that capitalism actually might work, Walmart coming into this category I think is good for the world, good for the planet. And so it's easy to be cynical about big companies. But actually, for some reason, I like Walmart. I'm not entirely sure. Maybe it's because I like their CEO, but I'm always sort of a fan of Walmart.

Anyway, Walmart said their medicine will cost 58% and 75% less than the current price of branded insulin products for uninsured patients. So get this, insulin, you know, can't live without it, can't live without it, right? And people have to have it. And the fact that Walmart can come in and basically reduce the cost by two-thirds says something about the incumbent players. I find this is really exciting. Last year, we predicted that big tech essentially had no choice but enter the fields of healthcare and education. So if we look at a scorecard around where we are so far, you'd have to say I'm sort of one and one, and that is big firms are entering healthcare, and we'll talk more about that, but they are not, or big tech has not entered education. Why? I wrote an article in New York Magazine saying that big tech firms would partner with the elite universities and dramatically expand their enrollments using a mixture of small and big tech

and kind of clean up the market or consolidate the market. And I was wrong. Why? Because unlike big tech firms, which are very shareholder driven, the economic reward is not economic reward at universities. The leadership and administration every day ask themselves, how can we pay ourselves more and reduce our accountability? And the ultimate strategy or the strategy that keeps on giving is one of air messification. And that is, let's continue to not admit anybody. Harvard admits 1,400 people from 50,000 applications.

They have an endowment that if you divide it by the number of freshmen is $30 million per student. Does that make any sense? No. Is Harvard a transformative, incredible experience for people? Yes. If they decided for some perverted, fucked up sense of exclusivity to not enable, to not provide that incredible transformative experience to more people, despite the fact they would not have to sacrifice inequality, it would not erode their brand, they have ample resources to do this. Yes. Why? Because leadership and alumni

all get drunk off this bullshit notion of exclusivity. And they have not, in fact, embraced the opportunity to come in and increase their revenues and increase their social good. Why? Because we as academics and administrators get tremendous psychic income from bragging that we turned away 92% of our applicants this year versus 89% last year. Bottom line is, it's sort of a rant for admitting I was wrong. These universities have doubled down on exclusivity. They're not expanding their freshman seats. There is some hope across the public universities. I did an interesting meeting with the University of Illinois' chancellor and some of his leadership, and they're looking to expand opportunities and broaden their freshman admissions. But basically,

the only way education is going to move the needle in America is through our public universities, where two-thirds of students end up. So anyways, I'm hopeful there, but I got that one wrong. Where we were right is big tech has, in fact, moved in to healthcare. We've seen major moves within healthcare, big tech, especially when Amazon launched an online pharmacy back in November 2020. So why would they need to do this? Why would they need to go into healthcare? It's a $3 trillion industry who has raised prices faster than inflation. And at the same time, the NPS scores or the outcomes have actually declined. So this literally defines disruption. And that is you raise prices faster than inflation

without any underlying increase in consumer satisfaction. That just spells an industry that is sticking out the mother of all chins and that the industry that is most disruptible in the world right now is the $3 trillion healthcare industry. So who's going to come in? You'll see a ton of startups, but you're also going to see what will probably be the fastest-growing healthcare company of over a billion dollars,

and that is Amazon, surrounding healthcare with Alexa, with your phone or your app on your phone, with Prime. They know the food you order through Whole Foods or through Amazon. I think it's called Fresh. They have a fulfillment network to get you your prescriptions. They have the credibility and the skills to sit on top of data sets. And that effectively is sort of what healthcare is, is the ability to sit or the opportunity to sit on a digital data set of your corpus. And then this is the exciting thing from a strategy standpoint, healthcare needs to move from being a defensive, on-your-heels, disease-driven industry to an offensive, on-your-toes, health-driven industry. And that is doing diagnostics, looking at your diet, looking at the products, looking at your body mass index, looking at the zip code you live in, looking at your status with relationships. This is all data that Amazon can build or create a digital corpus of you around

and then start adjusting. Start suggesting certain types of diets, certain types of exercise, complete with the exercise equipment you need. A wearable, Amazon Halo, which doesn't tell the time, but tells you your mood, your blood pressure, your heartbeat,

your body mass index, how well you sleep or don't sleep. We are going to walk into our homes and Amazon Alexa is going to say, your blood pressure, your heartbeat, your body mass index, how well you sleep or don't sleep. We are going to walk into our homes and Amazon Alexa is going to say, dear Smith family, would you like to cut your health insurance costs in half? If yes, say, tell me more about Amazon Prime health insurance. That's going to happen. They're also probably going to go into diagnostics. They will probably also roll a bunch of features into Amazon Prime, including what Amazon is great at is they'll figure out what are the high margin industries that we actually want to be in, whether it's dermatology or physical therapy. I don't know

what the high margin components of healthcare are. They'll go vertical there, similar to the way they go vertical in batteries or vertical in sort of basic elements with their Amazon private label brand. And then they will outsource the rest, the shitty business. For example, pediatrics is supposedly a shitty business. And they'll say, all right, we'll build a platform where everyone comes to this platform. And similar to the third party marketplace where they sell more gross merchandise volume than their actual Amazon retail offering, they will create a platform where you can come and find specialists, doctors, primary care, and they will go vertically into the high margin parts of that business, and they will just offer a player that's going to own 40 or 50% in e-commerce,

it might not be obvious that it would be easier to go and get 40 to 50% of e-commerce, which is what Amazon has established. So Amazon coming into the healthcare industry and getting 10, 20, 30% of the industry is by no means, no means unthinkable. It's very doable. And once they start to show any progress towards

this, the market will provide them with a cheap capital such that they can pull away, and all these little health groups, even hospital groups, aren't going to be able to compete because they won't be able to find the cheap capital that Amazon offers. And you will think, well, okay, Amazon can't do an appendectomy. You can't have your spleen removed at home. Do you have your spleen removed? Gosh, I hope not. Anyways, but supposedly about two-thirds of all medical costs could be digitized or could be done remotely. So, if you have your appendix removed or if you, say, go get a vasectomy, not that it's on my mind at my age, but anyways, it's time to close up shop, folks. It's time to close up shop.

Anyway, the pre-consultation, I go in for these stupid pre-consultations with doctors and it's like, why the fuck am I here? To like meet you? What do we need to pre-consult around? And then you have the procedure, good. You have to go into a doctor's office. I'll get you that. And then there's, maybe there's a postllow-up therapy, there's prescriptions, there's if you have a knee replaced, maybe you want home, not only your prescriptions, you want to do physical therapy, you can absolutely digitize that. You want to maybe come up with new products, new types of diet. Anyways, about two-thirds supposedly of healthcare spending can be dispersed away from doctors' offices and hospitals. Think about COVID-19, the biggest health crisis in over a century, and likely 98%, 99% of the people who contracted, endured, and developed antibodies for COVID-19

likely never entered a doctor's office or a hospital. So if we can disperse 98%, 99% of the treatment and the resources that went into COVID-19 away from doctors' offices and hospitals, why wouldn't we be able to, say, take 20%, 30%, 50% and disperse it away from the medical industrial complex? What does this all come down to? A lot of people ask me who will be the next $2 trillion company. So far, I think Apple and Microsoft have hit that. And people say, Scott, who will be next? Who will be next? Because I'm known

for making predictions. Get a lot wrong. Get a lot wrong. But that doesn't stop me. Anyway, anyway, I say, I don't know who's going to be the next $2 trillion company, but I'm convinced the first $3 trillion company will be Amazon on the back of the most disruptible industry in the history of business, U.S. healthcare. Stay with us. We'll be right back for our conversation on psychedelics with Sam Harris. The Capital Ideas Podcast now features a series hosted by Capital Group CEO, Mike Gitlin. Through the words and experiences of investment professionals, you'll discover what differentiates their investment approach, what learnings have shifted their career trajectories, and

how do they find their next great idea? Invest 30 minutes in an episode today. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Published by Capital Client Group, Inc. Hey, it's Scott Galloway, and on our podcast, Pivot, we are bringing you a special series about the basics of artificial intelligence. ClientGroup, Inc. the senior AI reporter for The Verge, to give you a primer on how to integrate AI into your life. So, tune into AI Basics, How and When to Use AI, a special series from Pivot sponsored by AWS, wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back. Here's our conversation with neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris. Sam, where does this podcast find you? I am home in Los Angeles.

So let's bust right into it. Psychedelics, a market that was roughly $5 billion in 2020, is expected to reach $11 billion by 2027. So how should we be thinking of this as a market? Do you see this as a private market, a great investment opportunity, something that has real societal value, something that should be managed by regulators and healthcare? How do you think of the market for psychedelics? Well, it's a difficult question because it really depends on the compound you're talking about. And I mean, some things are in principle generic until the end of the world and things like mushrooms. Right. But then people will be investing in the synthetic psilocybin active component in mushrooms. And there are companies that have actually the one just went public around that, Atai, A-T-A-I, pharmaceuticals.

So just how much profit there is to be made here, I actually wouldn't be a great judge. And I think there's immense value and whether that value can be captured in every case by some rational business, I don't know, but I think we, you know, if the government doesn't do something very stupid and coercive in the meantime, I think we will get to a point where therapy using very likely psilocybin and MDMA as the most likely first compounds should be more widely available. that there'll be, you know, professional associations around all of this. I mean, we need therapists who are trained to guide people. We need centers that are, that are nice to visit where people can do a day long session. And I think

a lot of business could grow up around this. I think there'll be beautiful retreat centers, you know, something, you know, think the post ranch on psilocybin. And, you know, I think there should be those things. I mean, there's an immense opportunity to help people. There's no question there. Yeah, it feels as if the stage was initially legalizing recreational use. And it seems now there's this huge burgeoning industry in what we'd, I guess, loosely term as medicinal qualities. I'm curious, who do you think should

and shouldn't be taking LSD and psilocybin? Well, the standard answer to that is anyone with a history or, you know, a familial history, you know, a first order relative with any significant psychiatric diagnosis, right? So, you know, psychosis being the first, but in a manic depression, you know, although it's obviously a treatment for, you know, psilocybin now increasingly is a treatment for severe depression. But, you know, bipolar, I think, is probably contraindicated. I'm not a clinician, but I just know what the researchers are selecting against in doing their studies. You know, whether any psychedelic is actually raising a person's risk for a psychiatric condition is hard to say because when you take something like schizophrenia, the time of onset is usually in the 20s. And that's usually the time when people first start experimenting with drugs of based on a first LSD trip or psilocybin

trip that one hears, I mean, these are not the most frequent occurrences, but one hears about that association, but it's hard to disentangle that from just the time course of the onset of schizophrenia in general. So I, you know, I certainly wouldn't be eager to take LSD or psilocybin if I knew I had a high risk for schizophrenia, because it really does seem like it mimics, it can, you know, a bad trip can certainly mimic psychosis. But as to whether or not it's really raising a person's risk, I'm not sure anyone's in a position to say at this point. So, and you've been very open about this. You had your first psychedelic experience in over 25 years. Can you walk us through why you went on kind of a self-imposed

hiatus from these drugs and why you decided to try them again? Well, it's actually based on some of the concerns you just raised. I mean, I had, you know, uniformly good and positive and, and sanity increasing trips, uh, in the beginning until I didn't. I mean, this is not all that uncommon actually to, to have a lot of good trips and then, uh, to suddenly have a bad one. And then the door to hell remains ajar for really the rest of one's psychedelic career. So once I started having bad trips occasionally, and they were every bit as bad as the good ones were good, it began to seem like a kind of spin of a roulette wheel, you know, that I was not eager to engage again and again.

Also, I got very into meditation and that began to seem like a more relevant path for me and more, you know, certainly less uncertain as to its outcomes and, you know, targeted what I think are actually the ultimately desirable insights and states of mind. So it's not that... I mean, psychedelics were indispensable to me, I mean, in terms of just my discovering that there was a landscape of mind worth paying attention to introspectively. And I did, as you say, after a 25-year hiatus, I did a psilocybin trip actually just before COVID about a year and a half ago. And it was incredibly interesting and useful. I don't know how many more of those I'll do.

But I do consider it, again, a kind of spin of the roulette wheel. You don't know what is going to happen. You know, you really can't control all the variables as much as you can attend to so-called set and setting as a way of, you know, positively orienting yourself. It is a type of rocket launch and there's enough uncertainty and just, you know, where things are all pointing that, you know, where you wind up is significantly due to chance. Yeah. And I think the arc of use and non-use you described is something a lot of us can relate to. So I remember senior year at UCLA going to Joshua Tree and taking mushrooms with my friends.

And as a younger person trying X. And then kind of, I don't know, adulthood, kids, fear of law, whatever it was, and then nothing for 20 or 30 years, rather than THC. And now I'm considering it again. And the reason I'm considering it is, or there's lower risk, that because of regulatory intervention, because the science is better, that there's less risk. There's less opportunity or a lower likelihood you're going to have a bad trip. Is that not true in something I'm just talking myself into so I can try this again? Or did that play into your decision to try it again? Yeah, you can definitely mitigate risk in a few key ways. One, you can do it with a trained guide, right?

Increasingly, this is still illegal in many places or in most places in the States, but increasingly you can find someone who's, you know, trained at this and has a ton of experience who will sit with you and really not do anything unless you need some, you know, some intervention, right? And this could be, you know, you could even medicalize this to some degree. Somebody could be, you could have the relevant dose of Ativan or whatever it would be to bring you down if you were really having a bad time. So you can definitely mitigate the risk of having a bad experience that's difficult to integrate. I mean, how we conceptualize good and bad trips is relevant here because it's not that every unpleasant experience in a session of of um

let's say psilocybin or lsd is actually bad ultimately right i mean there's a lot of growth and insight that can occur and a lot of you know we're going to breakthroughs in one's own compassion for oneself and others that can occur when you have a, you know, a period of significant suffering in, in one of these spaces. And so I think being in good company is, is a relevant variable there. And you're also, you're very likely just at a very different point in your life, right? And so it's, it's interesting to, and that was one of the reasons that motivated me. I mean, I realized that 25 years is a very long time not to have checked in to this continuum

of experience. And I would be doing it from a very different place. A lot of the uncertainty that I was dealing with when I was having those so-called bad trips is not something I'm dealing with now, you know, just in terms of my, you know, who I am in the world and how I think about the kind of thing that you don't need to do all that much, right? If you have, especially if you're, you're taking a, a large dose of any of these compounds, but we should differentiate micro dosing from, you know, macro dosing, or even, you know, kind of ordinary macro dosing from, you know, a very significant dose of, of any of these things. And, um, cause if you take a large enough dose, it's not, you know, of psilocybin in my case, it's not about you working through personal issues. I mean, there's no reference point to your life at a, at a certain dosage, right?

You forget, you forget the Scott Galloway story entirely. And as you kind of return and you begin to reclaim the pieces of your identity and your autobiographical memory, then there's some kind of integration opportunity. But it's really, it's working on a level of not so much consciously working through your personal problems, but it's really just rebooting the hard drive on some level. And I have no doubt that that can have a very therapeutic effect for many people. But again, there's always a possibility that you'll have a very intense, unpleasant experience, and it will seem like a net negative.

Although, again, I think the downside risk of that, it can be significantly mitigated by having someone who can help you reframe that experience. Was your experience with psilocybin this most recent time, was it more of a, what was the motivation and the outcome? And specifically, was it more an intellectual journey where you wanted to explore places and come out more informed in terms of your own domain expertise around being a neuroscientist, exploring different ideas or concepts, or was it more around self-discovery, trying to find things, you know, be more self-aware, more self-actualized? Was it more of a professional

intellectual endeavor or something around greater self-discovery? And what actually happened? What would be, give us the Siskel and Ebert review of your trip. Right, right. Well, on the latter point, I did this soon after the trip. There's like a 20-minute YouTube piece of audio. If anyone Googles or searches on YouTube, Sam Harris mushroom trip, they'll get the 20-minute version. As we all do.

Yeah, yeah. I think that was the second most Googled term. Anyways, go ahead. So, but it really, my intention was evenly split between both of those motives. I mean, it was, you know, intellectually, I felt a responsibility to just check back in there and do, in this case, do something that was fundamentally new. I had never taken a, a, a significant dose of mushrooms. I'd done mushrooms before, but I had never taken a five gram dose and done that in, in darkness, you know, blindfolded, which is the way that, you know, many people have, have recommended, uh, this, uh, uh, actually Terrence McKenna in particular,

I don't know if you're familiar with him, but he was somebody who was very influential in the psychedelic world. He sort of inherited the mantle from Timothy Leary in being a booster for the psychedelic experience. But he was also very clear in issuing a kind of ultimatum to people. It's like, unless you have done five grams of mushrooms in darkness, you know, you really haven't done them and you don't know what I'm talking about. I mean, that's a, he would bang on for years about that. And also DMT, which I, which I've never done, but, um, that's a different compound, which that's a very, very short acting, but I was aware that I had never taken mushrooms this way or at that dosage. And so I was increasingly uncomfortable in reasoning by analogy to all the LSD trips I had done in my 20s, which I had done at pretty significant dosage. And, but as you increase the dose, you begin to notice how different these compounds are and the different aspects of mind they, they disclose.

And so there really is at lower doses, they seem pretty close and, and, and they begin to diverge. So I was just, you know, both for intellectual reasons intellectual reasons in talking about these things and talking about the nature of mind and talking about the relationship between meditation and and psychedelics publicly i felt a responsibility to have a little more experience and a more recent experience and just personally i just was interested interested to see if there was anything for me to learn there and if there was any lasting effect. Again, my experience with meditation contextualizes it in a somewhat unusual way. There's no question it would have been the most important experience or among the top three experiences of my life had I not already had lots of other psychedelic experiences and spent several decades integrating those through the practice of meditation. just, who's truly naive and didn't know that there was a path toward changing your mind in any clear way. If I assumed as many people do that mental growth more or less stops in your 20s, you go to college, you learn what you have to learn there, maybe you go to graduate school,

and then you're kind of thrown out into the world and left to seek happiness in all the usual ways. And there's really not any kind of curriculum given to you. I mean, just hopefully you'll read good books and you'll have good friendships and you'll have a family. But you're really left to the happenstance of your own, you know, well-being set point and whether you can avoid screwing things up, right. And it's just like luck and opportunity and, you know, uh, try to stay healthy and fit and don't get addicted to something that's going to degrade your health. Um, uh, and if you're, if you're in that place, then a significant psychedelic experience can reveal to you that there are ways of being and aspects of mind that your ordinary waking consciousness is giving you absolutely no clue about, and that

you might want to do something with that new knowledge. And again, doing something is not necessarily a matter of taking psychedelics again and again, but it can be a matter of radically reprioritizing what you do with your attention moment to moment. And that can be a pretty big deal. I'm curious, thinking about just the relationship between microdosing and work, what role, if any, does microdosing and work play? Well, microdosing is a very different thing than taking a psychedelic dose of any of these compounds. So people are microdosing LSD and psilocybin for the most part. I don't think anyone microdoses MDMA, and that almost certainly wouldn't be healthy.

But physiologically, psilocybin and LSD are very benign benign i mean they're more benign than anything else we take and they're certainly more benign than tylenol or advil or aspirin um so the only risk associated with these compounds at higher doses are the kinds of experiences people can have right and the disorientation i mean if you're going to take a high dose of any of these compounds and wander in traffic, well, then they're very dangerous because the traffic is dangerous. But in terms already a physiologically totally benign compound, but you're having a, if it's truly a microdose, you're having essentially a subliminal dose of this, right? It's not, or it's just barely liminal, right? It's like as detectable as a cup of coffee, say, but it's not something, you know, that really is changing your perception of the world in any discernible way. But I think they both, you know, both psilocybin and LSD have a

pretty clear antidepressant effect at a supplemental dose. I think the research, not all the research is in on this, and most of the research on microdosing is not happening in a formal scientific context. You just have a lot of people doing this, people by the millions doing this and sort of reporting back on their experiences. It's certainly interesting to do. And it can be, again, I think it would probably have, you know, it's good to try as an antidepressant for people and see if it works. I think it, you know, I wouldn't recommend it for anxiety. I mean, it has, insofar as it has a conscious effect, it is sort of in the caffeine like stimulant direction where it's, you know, you, you know, if you have, if anxiety is your issue, then it may seem like it's adding to that. So as usual, I find you're being very measured and trying to be, you know, you're not, you swim in the nuance and grays of the world. And I think

that's one of the reasons that people are drawn to your content. I have three or four close friends who've done these guided psilocybin, you know, I don't know what you call them, journeys. And they all fit the same profile, all very successful. I don't think any of them, as far as I know, suffer from any real significant mental illness. And post this trip, whatever you want to call it, they each feel an imperative, an obligation to try and get other people to do it. It was so profound for them. And not like a, oh, this was the best pot I've ever smoked and I couldn't stop laughing or not like that. Like the one guy, one guy described it and I thought it was interesting. Your world is the ocean and you can kind of see 10 feet down, 20 feet down.

This gives you the opportunity to drain the ocean and then walk around and really examine your life and then have someone interpret what you saw. And all three of these individuals who are not what I'd call promotional people latch onto things, feel this obligation to tell other people about it. Did you have a similar experience? Do you feel the same way amongst your close friends that you, do you feel an obligation to help people feel comfortable around doing this? Well, again, I got the evangelical phase of my psychedelic career out of the way in my 20s, right? So there are people who I recommended this to, and certainly I was candid about how positive the experience was. But, and publicly candid again, I just, I just jumped on YouTube and told people about it, but the evangelical impulse is totally understandable because you,

you are talking about the most intensely insightful and gratitude producing experience that people have ever had when they have a good experience. And gratitude really was the kind of the base, the base note of this experience for me. I mean, just love and gratitude was the, the emotional tone of almost everything that happened to me there. And, you know, just, it is, it's very much like, I mean, if you told me, well, we're going to give you a drug and it's going to make you feel as much gratitude as the human brain is capable of, you know, that sounds like the experience I had. Right. So having that for five hours is incredibly useful because at minimum, you know, it's possible, right? I mean,

you're the person who felt that and you come back into your life looking at things through that lens and all of the petty concerns and all of the, the, the niggling things that, that capture your attention on a day-to-day basis, you know, that, you know, what Twitter has been doing to you for the last few years, right? That, that begins to seem, you know, like, like just, you know, as, as pathological as it almost surely is in fact, right? You know, like it is a misuse of attention. And on some level, you recognize that you become what you pay attention to, you know, and you don't, and you don't get, you know, even more precious than time is attention because we all know what it's like to safeguard our time and to still squander it. Right. I mean, you decide to spend some quality time with your kids,

and yet you find that even during those hours, your attention is fragmented, or you're uncomfortable because there's something you actually want to do more, but you can't admit that to yourself, or you've got some work thing that's bouncing around your brain, right? So, I mean, really, it's a matter of what your attention can land on and fully engage with moment to moment. And that is the secret to finding well-being in this life.

I mean, the ultimate secret is to find that there's something about the nature of consciousness itself, the nature of that which is being aware of anything that is a ground for real fulfillment and well-being, right? Like to sink, to be so comfortable in your own skin so that you're happy before anything happens. You're not waiting for something good to happen, right? You're not waiting for the vacation to start, right? Like if once we get off this plane, we'll really be there and we can start having fun. You actually can find a place in your own mind where the kinds of states that get really pushed through you on a psychedelic trip are not fundamentally different from what's available in each moment of conscious awareness. And that's where, for me, psychedelics and meditation become two parts of the same machinery here, or two wings of the same bird. I mean, there's some intrinsic connection there. Because ultimately, it can't be about just having an intense experience, and even an intensely good experience that you then just remember for the rest of your life, right? So memory just isn't that good, you know? So you need to find a path between that place and every ordinary present moment that conveys the wisdom that you experienced there.

And otherwise, it's just, you know, a new set of concepts that you can rather dimly rehearse for yourself, but it's not deep enough to actually change your experience in each moment. When you said five hours of intense gratitude, I thought there's never been a more, I don't know, a stronger, more robust endorsement of psilocybin. And then, and then I was wrong. You beat it by saying you can undo what Twitter's done to you. Yeah. So I just made the decision and it's so interesting. You, you, you become where your attention is. I think that's a brilliant statement too. As I think about my thinking has become more terse, more inclined to find ways to dunk on people, more seeking of affirmation of people I've never met before. And I think all of these things

are somewhat shaped by Twitter. It's kind of frightening to just hear you articulate that. I got very interested when you said kind of the ultimate goal. And you said it was a level, I think, of self-awareness where you find joy and satisfaction in all the spaces in between, right? And all of it. And then you described that this peanut butter and chocolate of achieving that for you has been meditation and then psilocybin. Can you give us some other elements of that soup as a neuroscientist where people best practices of that alchemy of finding that type of self-awareness and actualization? Well, I really don't have a neuroscientific basis for this per se. I mean, no doubt there is one, but the other piece here, which I think is indispensable, is just living a more and more ethical life. I think just how you treat people and how honest you are is the other piece here that really is just, it can't be overlooked. It's the container that would hold any wisdom gleaned by any other method, right? I mean, if you're doing

mushrooms, you know, on the weekends, but during the week, you're still lying to the people in your life and, you know, basically unkind to others, well, then it's just, there's just no, there's just no way you can, you're actually integrating what there is to learn from a psychedelic experience. And it's very common for people to discover in themselves a commitment to ethics that is fundamentally new, but it's not necessarily direct. I mean, it's worth remembering that some of the people who did the most psychedelics, I mean, you look at the Aztecs and the Inca, I mean, they were, they were practicing human sacrifice, right? So it's possible to have a, a mushroom cult that also thinks it's, you know, it's a good idea to carve out people's hearts and, and, you know,, I think these experiences can be indispensable for people.

Coming up after the break. To really live an integrated life, to have integrity, what we mean by integrity in the end is there not being a lot of daylight between who you say you are and who you seem to be in public or in any given relationship and who you really are.

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to convert digital disruption into revenue growth at www.alexpartners.com. That's www.alexpartners.com. dot A-L-I-X partners dot com slash V-O-X. In the face of disruption, businesses trust Alex Partners to get straight to the point and deliver results when it really matters. In ethically examined life, I think there's a lot of people, the majority of people who would say they aspire to that and want to demonstrate it. Where do you think the trappings of a modern world create Achilles heels around ethical behavior? Is it, is a rationalizing unethical business behavior? Is it the way, is it not being engaged with your family? Is it not being a good partner? Where do you find are the most, um, where is, where are the, where's the soft tissue in a modern society around lapses around, um, they get in the way of being a more ethical person, which I think most people would sign up for if they felt like that's a pretty broad mandate, be more ethical.

Yeah. Where are we failing typically? The longest lever that's within reach of everyone to pull is around honesty, right? I mean, just committing to never lying is a very big deal. And this is something, this is a change I made in my life around 18. I was actually, it was freshman year in college. And I wrote a book about this just titled Lying. But there was a course at Stanford taught by this really brilliant professor, Ronald Howard. And it was just on the question of whether it's ever ethical to lie.

Right. And obviously people came to that course, understanding that certain lies are unethical, right? You don't want to lie. Like you don't want Lance Armstrong level lying that that destroys your career and and, you know, the careers of others. But most people feel that there's a certain kind of lying that is not only totally natural and and very awkward to avoid, but but but ethically indispensable. There's this, you know, you're a good indispensable. You're a good person when you're telling these kinds of white lies. And so we spend a lot of time examining that. That begins to evaporate. And now, I mean, to summarize it very briefly, I mean, again, I wrote a short book on this. So if people are interested, they can find it there. I view lying as kind of the first stop on the continuum of violence, you know, which is, which can be totally ethical

in the context of self-defense. So I'm, you know, I'm not a pacifist or this, I acknowledge there are situations where you want to, you know, defend yourself with force, you know, you, and lying is sort of the first increment of force, but it's an admission that you're now dealing with someone who you're not treating as a possible collaborator or as a rational actor or someone who you can appeal to or negotiate with. You're treating them as a threat. And so I would reserve lying for those cases. So you've got the Nazis come to the door and you've got Anne Frank in the attic. Well, okay, you can lie to the Nazis, but you can also shoot them in the face, right? If you're in a position to do that, right? So you're in extremis, right? This is a moral emergency and lying is the first tool in the toolkit. But generally speaking,

as you make this change in your life, you realize you don't want to lie to people really ever, right? You don't want, you don't want two sets of ethical books that you keep one for business and one for your friends, right? You in business, you actually want to be as honest as you are with your friends. And this, this is an immensely clarifying and simplifying change to make in your life. Because if you know you're never going to lie, you realize you're free to engage in any conversation, in any situation, and you never have to keep track of anything. You never have to remember what you told person A because you're not going to say something different to person B. And you don't have to worry something different to person B and, you know,

you're not, you don't have to worry. I mean, there are other aspects of this. I mean, you know, there's kind of a larger concept of, of ethical speech, right? I mean, so, you know, you can throw in gossip here, like what you say behind someone's back, you know, if there's, if there's a, if there's a big enough distance between what you say behind someone's back and what you are comfortable saying to their face, well, then you're leaving yourself open to all kinds of harrowing embarrassments when those two, you know, sets of utterances come, you know, fully into contact, right? When someone overhears what you're saying behind their back, or when you send an email about someone to the person by accident, right? I mean, those are, you know, that kind of things happens and it destroys relationships and it, or just destroys reputations or both. But to, to really live an integrated life, I mean, to have integrity, what we mean by integrity in the end is there not being a lot of daylight between who you say you are and who you seem to be in public or in any given

relationship and who you really are, you know, in, in private, in the privacy of your own mind or, or in, you know, in what, in what you're thinking about people or what you're, you're saying about them behind their back. And so I find that what people anticipate is it being really difficult to be honest all the time. And I haven't found that. I mean, the difficulty is in finding, to be clear, I'm not advocating that you just simply blurt out everything you're thinking in every context, right? So it's not like you have Tourette syndrome and you just can't help but say the unseemly thing when it first occurs to you.

No, there's a scope for being civil and just being kind to people. But what you discover when you're committed to being honest virtually all of the time is that it's like a mirror that is held up to your own mind. You discover who you are because you don't have recourse to the easy lie to get you out of a situation. When someone asks you if you want to have dinner and the answer is actually no, and you're not going to give yourself the out of just saying, oh, sorry, I'm too busy this week.

And just kicking the obligation down the road. You actually have to be straighter with people. And yes, there's room for finesse and there's room for humor there and there's room for just being a compassionate person. But it becomes immensely clarifying. And when people know this about you, then they, you know, then they don't ask for your, for your, you know, critical feedback, unless they really want it. Right. I mean, the person who would, who just wrote his first novel, who comes to you and, and asks you to read it, uh, you begin to train the people in your life to, to, to expect that you're actually going to be honest. Right. And then they value, they value your feedback in a way that they would, that they

know you're not lying to them. They, they know, they know you're not being merely polite when you actually like something, when you say, Oh, this is, this is fantastic. It really, the compliment really lands because six months ago you told them you really didn't like something. Right. And, and you were the only friend who did that. Right. So it's a, it's very clarifying of relationships and, you know, it's perhaps not every relationship survives, but the good ones do. I want to return back to what we were talking about before in terms of finding that self-awareness or self-actualization. And I like the three legs of the stool you outlined are decent places to start. Meditation, psilocybin, and in some just

being more kind. You've been writing a lot, or some of the content I've seen from you recently, I would describe as how messed up as a species, our ability to calibrate empathy. And that is individual notions of tragedy inspire a lot more empathy than much more damaging large scale. A lot of the stuff I've been reading of yours lately reminds me of that statement. I think it was Stalin that said, one death is a tragedy, millions are a statistic.

Can you speak more to that? Yeah, well, this relates to some research that was done a while back by Paul Slovic, where he was testing empathy and altruism, and most concretely, a willingness to donate to a cause, right? So just like what is, in fact, the, um, the altruism mode. And, uh, he found that if you give people kind of a single protagonist, if you show them a picture of one little girl who needs your help, and the story is just a story about her and her

suffering, you get the maximal response. Right. And so, and it's, you know, that's not surprising. I mean, when you think of just what we were evolved to care about, the direct relationship is the thing that really has been environmentally relevant to us for tens of thousands of years. And the abstract notion of millions of people suffering one thing or another is a very new development, right? So this isn't a terrible surprise, but it's obviously a moral failing. So you take the one little girl who you maximally respond to, and you simply add another child to the story. You add her little brother who's just as cute and suffering in precisely the same way. And you find that people give less under those conditions. And if you add 10 more kids, they give less. And then if you add

some background statistics that talk about the hundreds of thousands of kids who need your help, then the altruism just goes to the floor, right? So that is, you know, by some lights understandable, it is a bug, not a feature, right? This is what we've diagnosed in ourselves is an inability, a really a systematic inability to have an appropriate emotional response to the worst sorts of harms that occur in our world, right? We now, we know that we are, we're not as, we're not most disturbed by the most disturbing things that ever happen. And we're not most gratified by the most beneficial things that happen, right? We're just, we, we have a different set of intuitions with it. We get our

thrills and our, our feelings of, of, um, sorrow and despair and, and, and, and compassionate moral engagement, uh, cued by different stimuli, right? It's not like, it's not just the, the, the ground truth of the worst harms or the, or the greatest benefits or the worst risks. I mean, so there's, there's a risk is also relevant here. We, you know, we have risk preferences that are, that are frankly crazy when you look at the things that, that actually do the most harms or, or harms or present the greatest risk of harm. So it's very common to be terrified of flying, say, right? But we found it very difficult to convince people that we even had a pandemic on our hands in the last, or at least

we found it very difficult to convince half of our society that we had a pandemic on our hands. It was worth taking seriously. And we find it very difficult to, to, uh, care about the risk of, of the ongoing risk of nuclear war, right? Whereas it's almost certainly the greatest risk of, of civilization failure we, we currently face and followed by things like, you know, bioterrorism and just natural pandemic, we can't, we don't, we find it very difficult to marshal resources along, you know, you know, for abstract and colossal risks like that. And across longer time horizons. We're pegged to a four-year presidential cycle here in the US, and it seems impossible to hatch a 40-year plan to do anything of substance. So, I mean, to come back to your original question here, what should people become sensitive to, to increase their ethical wisdom and improve their lives. One thing is

the power of incentives, right? I mean, just notice all the mad work that bad incentives do in the world and become more sensitive to how you are incentivized to pay attention, to spend your money, to, to marshal your resources, to care about one thing or the other and, and become more honest about, you know, mixed motives and ulterior motives and, um, what you actually care about. I mean, just notice what you notice, what captures your attention and what that says about what you actually want as opposed to what you profess to want. You know, I mean, just being a good father is a major value that you and I share. But then ask yourself just how, what is the amount of time and the quality of time you spend with your kids say about your actual priorities, right? I mean, I can look at just how effortlessly I will go down a rabbit hole for an hour

based on something I saw on social media and compare that kind of friction-free engagement with, you know, my own deranged appetites, right? Or my own concern about my reputation or whatever it is, with my decision to spend time with one of my daughters and what that's like when she wants to, you know, play with, you know, something that I find it very difficult to care about, right? So how you navigate that, I mean, first you just have to be honest about what is happening there and the ways in which a clear tally of how you spend your time can serve as a kind of mirror for yourself. And then you can make changes on that basis. And then you can make changes on that basis.

And then you can decide, well, I'm never going to get this day back again. And I'm never going to get this stage in my daughter's life back again. So what do I want to do with that? And how much time do I want to spend on Twitter in light of that? And then you actually can find ways

to change what you care about. I mean, ultimately, becoming a better person has to be a matter of changing what you care about and changing what motivates you. And one of the things that, as you point out, that has been so toxic about social media and Twitter in particular, is that it has, in some ways, it's revealed what we effortlessly care about, but it has also changed us. It has made us care about other things, right? And to become pettier and more judgmental and more defensive in certain modes. And we certainly treat people on Twitter in ways that we would be hard pressed to treat them in real life, right? Or it would be much slower to get there, you know? And that's one of the design flaws of the medium, right? It's maximizing for our worst traits. But again, incentives are almost everything, right? It's like if you really want to change, it becomes very useful to figure out how to put in place a system of incentives that incentivizes you differently.

Like one thing, this comes back to altruism. One thing I realized as I was building my businesses in both the podcast and the app, is that there's something toxic about just being in business, right? Just the acquisitiveness, the caring about revenue, right? I found that psychologically, maybe toxic is too strong a word, but it's certainly not ennobling to be caring about money. Right. Um, and, but then I started to view, then I started to view money as a resource to help other people, which of course it is. And so I, you know, just consciously made a commitment to give a minimum of, of 10% of, of my earnings and, and 10% of the profits of my company to the most effective charities. You know, it, it,

it doesn't change everything, but it changes one thing in that now I feel like when I see the numbers go up, part of my motive is to be able to, is to be more helpful in a very direct way. Not, you know, not when I die, but you know, every day to, to causes I care about. And the causes I care about are again, analyzed, not narrowly for the good feels of, you know, there was a cute puppy in the, in the window, uh, or one little girl whose story I found most captivating, but a more rational analysis of just what is going to mitigate the worst harms or the worst risks or the worst current suffering out there, whether or

not I find it an especially sexy cause, right? So it's, I think you can use a rational analysis of any of these things to get behind and under yourself and constrain and, and, and create a system that protects you from your, the moment, your moment to moment failures of ethical intuition, because you know, your intuitions are going to be bad. You know, you're going to, you know, it's like, it's almost like, you know, going on a diet, right? You know, you're going to want dessert after dinner tonight, right? You know, it's only, it's only noon. You're not at that moment, but you know, you know, if there's chocolate cake in the house, you're going to eat it. So the rational actor in you can just decide to not have the cake in the fridge, right? And so that, so that who you'll be when you open the fridge at

eight o'clock at night will be deprived of the opportunity to fail, right? And so a lot of life, a lot of change in life can be rationally instantiated, even when we know we're not, you know, reasoning ourselves through to the goal in each moment. Sam Harris is a neuroscientist, philosopher, and author of five New York Times bestsellers. He's also the podcast host of Making Sense and the creator of the Waking Up meditation app. He joins us from his home in Los Angeles. Sam, stay safe. Yeah, thanks so much, Scott.

Our producers are Caroline Chagrin and Drew Burrows. Claire Miller is our assistant producer. If you like what you heard, please follow, download, and subscribe. Thank you for listening to The Prop 2 Show from the Vox Media Podcast Network. We'll catch you next week on Monday. And Thursday, still not used to that. I'd be scared to have Sam as my father. I think he'd be a great uncle, though.

I think it would be kind of hard to live with that much IQ, but he'd be a great uncle kind of telling you, you know, breaking it down for you every few months. Like this is what you need to do to be more self-actualized. I would like that. Support for the show comes from Alex Partners. Did you know that almost 90% of executives see potential for growth from digital disruption with 37% seeing significant or extremely high positive impact on revenue growth. In Alex Partners' 2024 Digital Disruption Report, you can learn the best path to turning that disruption into growth for your business. With a focus on clarity, direction, and effective implementation, Alex Partners provides essential support when decisive leadership is crucial. You can discover insights like these by reading Thank you. V-O-X. In the face of disruption, businesses trust Alex Partners to get straight to the

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