Hello friends. Welcome back to the show. My guest
today is Sam Harris, he's a best-selling author, moral philosopher, neuroscientist and a podcaster. The entire world seems to be at each other's throats and finding peace in. The chaos is becoming increasingly difficult, but there are tools at our disposal to improve the quality of Our Lives as some Saison. This episode wisdom is a matter of making your mind your friend expect to learn what Sam's life is like after Twitter Sam's Reflections on his famous talk on.
Death and the present moment how to live a life full of meaning, how to take your mindfulness off the cushion and into the real world. Some thoughts on Tucker Carlson's move his opinion on and Route 8 RF K Jr. Andrew human and Jordan Peterson whether we have reached Peak, woke, Sam's. Take on young Western, man converting to Islam and much more. I had so much fun recording this episode Sam was a huge influence on me. Starting this podcast, six years ago and it feels great for everything to have come.
Full circle, and to get to sit down for three hours opposite him in a disgustingly sweltering Warehouse, in the middle of LA because we wanted to get some awesome visuals. And this, the best-looking location that we could find, but also happened to be a very hot tin box. Anyway, I hope that you take tons away from this episode. It really is Sam at his best as far as I can see. And don't forget to, if you are new here, or if you're a longtime listener, you might be listening but not subscribed, and that means you're going to miss episodes when they
Go up the next six months. Has the biggest most ridiculously stacked, the list of guests, the I've ever ever had, and I cannot wait to get these ones out. So you need to press the Subscribe button or you're going to be trez sad because we're going to miss those episodes. So Gone, press the button. I thank you. But now, ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome Sam Harris.
Sam Harris. Welcome to the show. Thank you. Great to meet you. Finally, what is life like after Twitter?
It is immensely improved to a degree that I find actually embarrassing in retrospect because it's proof that I was needlessly degrading, the quality of my life for Moose 12 years tactically. I think was probably five years where it was actually degrade in the quality of my life. But it was, I mean retrospect it was a psychological experiment that we all got enrolled in and
And no one read the consent form, much less signed it and it we it has given for me. I mean if you're someone who has a significant platform and you're at all controversial, I think it gives you a sense of what the world is, which
Is basically false and destructive to your, you're feeling the feelings, you have for the rest of humanity I made, was it was it was sort of incrementally like a good, the slow ratchet but never to be reversed all off and undetectable. But still, nevertheless always in One Direction. Changing me into a misanthrope. I mean, I was just starting to perceive people who I had never met and many who I
Met as the worst most grotesque versions of themselves. And it's not that it's totally inaccurate. It's not that people. People tweet what you see them at their worst moments, or their most bad faith moments or their most cynical moments, but it's like the evidence of that of those moments becomes indelible and you lose sight of the rest and I just was noticing this mismatch of your being out in the world with people and people are great.
Eight. And then checking into my life online and recognizing that people are horrible. And just bouncing back between these two views. And I just realized I really only wanted one of them. It seems to me that a lot of people feel that that when they step out into the real world and the people who spend more time in the real world, they realize this is kind of nice. Everyone seems pretty balanced out here. No one's that antagonistic ones back fighting or Screaming shouting or accusing me of being a bigot or a racist or
Or whatever. And then there's some reason you step onto the internet with frictionless communication and all hell breaks loose. Yeah, yeah, and it's not just anonymity and enemies part of it but it's also people you know who are captured by their Echo chamber which you're not seeing right? Like this is the illusion that you're in happening, the same space with the people. You are, you're in conversation with but
In reality, they're talking to their fans, you're talking to your fans, your kind of you have weaponized your fans against their fans and vice versa. And without even necessarily thinking in those terms, that's that those are the the network dynamics of what's happening. And
I'ma just, I just kept getting at one point. I recognized that barring some, you know, bad Health outcomes in among friends and family. Over the years objectively, the worst things that happened to me in a decade were the result of my engagement with Twitter. And in many cases, the only bad things that had happened to me in a decade of any significance at all, was born of Twitter.
I think you managed to torpedo a family vacation in some beauty. Yeah, that was Paradise by sending a random tweet and then putting your phone down to come back to it and find out that there was a wasteland. Was a yeah. No it was. It just kept giving giving me a sense. It was a the time course of interaction with it gives you this. This is endless opportunity to comment on stuff like it's always ready for your hot. Take. In fact, you're on there to give your hot take and to see the hot tub.
Of others again, this might not matter if your hot take is here's another cute photo of my cat and you just get nothing but love back, right? I know this, their people who have that experience, but given that I was violating the blasphemy test of both the left and the right on more or less on a weekly basis. I mean, I'm not aligned politically with the left or the right.
It was just pain on both sides and I had no tribe. Like if you're, if you are just on the right, you know, or some segments of the right, if you're you know Ben Shapiro you have a tribe that is going to just incessantly defend you against the left, right? And you and at a certain point you just you learn to Discount the attacks of the left because you don't care what the left thinks about. You you've priced that in you know, you're on the right. And so it is with
The left, if you're in the middle and you're actually not even an, especially political person, you don't even you don't care about politics politics are. It's just an ugly necessity that you continually have to touch but it's just you view it as a, an opportunity costs, getting in the way of the things you actually care about.
And you're not tribal and you're not reflexively aligned with with, you know, the bullet points on one side of the aisle or the other you have, you have offended everyone on both sides at some cutting ideologically, spit-roasted him. Yeah. And you're not and you don't have, you don't have the people who will defend you blindly even off last week. Yeah, the view about that. So why even within your own audience which is, which is fine. I mean,
I'm very happy to have the audience I have and I like having an audience that really cares about the integrity and honesty of the very last thing I said. And if the deliberate last thing I said, didn't make sense. They're going to, I'm going to hear about it, but
Social media is just the wrong platform for that kind of conversation. You wanna think about what civilization would be like without social media. And some of the smartest Minds about time have had the hours captured arguing over whether man American women and women are not. Oh yeah. About this particular topic of that particular topic, do you think about how far it's said this back is in that negative. Net positive overall. Do you think well, I think it's in there - I think it's a massive opportunity cost for almost everybody. I'ma just think we're, you know,
Look what you're doing and not doing based on your engagement with these platforms me. You're not tending to read good long books anymore either admit him. Um even if it's your job to read those books, it's become harder to do that and I wasn't certainly noticing that for myself. It's
We're just say, it has served a fragment our attention and our lives in ways that I just can't be good. Even if again, even if you are diet, of information is almost entirely positive, there's this fragmentation effect, you know, it's like, you're just, I mean, I notice people, I certainly, I noticed young people now who are who appear almost neurologically incapable of watching a great movie from beginning to end without interruption, you know, it's cool.
If you Google the number of cuts and the first fast and furious movie compared to the number of cuts in the 10th Fast and Furious movie. Yeah. Pace. Right? Yeah. It's got to be sped up. Yeah, so, I mean, I'm noticing this worm up with my daughter's. It's like to get them out to watch a movie and, you know, it's have a second screen, is not, it's not that it's impossible, but I just noticed that they're they're tuned to a different Cadence. And and they're not even on me, they're, you know, they're not on social media and the normal way and don't have so,
Media accounts are just but that the YouTube application of everything has gotten. And yeah I think it's worth resistant. You know it's not that we don't have to use these tools and some way but I think it is worth realizing that
even be on time. Your attention is what you have. Your true wealth is the quality of your attention and we have we've now interfaced with Machinery, that has systematically degraded our ability to pay attention, David /, L house this idea called The NeverEnding now, and if you look at the content that you've consumed, maybe not you after your exit. But most people almost all of the content that you have consumed today. Has been made in the last 24 hours wrote this never-ending. Now, terrifying? Yeah, it's the opposite of
ND, it's the opposite of the Lindy effect, right? It is so Thoughtless and it's yet as captivating, right? Am is just this sugar high of, you know everything. So yeah. So I'm you know I'm more focused on good books now than I was before. I deleted my Twitter account which is which is good and have you reflected much on Tucker Carlson's move to Twitter from Fox News. Is this the beginning of some Legacy to Alternative media?
Water event or is it just a nothing e to you?
Well, I think Tucker Carlson himself is worth considering and then we know, you know he's someone who has shield for Trump really rather avidly for years. And yet we now have his behind-the-scenes commentary on the Trump phenomenon in, describing him as a demonic force and somebody who hates with a passion that's what took his said about Trump. Yeah, this can't. This came out of his texts. Got leaked from the, the Dominion lawsuit against Fox, okay? Right. So we not like the mismatch between
I mean, who he is pretending to be for his on his audience and who he is behind closed doors, is something that I think should trouble his audience, but it apparently doesn't right? And that's also true of someone like Trump. So you, in many cases you have these characters who
To my eye are very low Integrity people. I mean they're not you know you're not getting an honest look at what they really think even though they're purporting to tell you what they think every hour of the day or at least every day for some hours and you know, I've you Tucker is that sort of person but I, you know, I think it we're in a run, a political landscape now, where there's no impediment to his building, an enormous business on the basis of having left fox or having a gotten fired from Fox.
For reasons that which I guess are still obscure at meet. He's very good at what he does. He's a very good demagogue and he's very facile. I don't think there's an ethical core there, but there's a political one, you know, certainly an opportunist one in the political space, and there's an immense appetite to have someone.
Call bullshit on the powers that be the so-called Elites, the institutions again, and again, and again, whether they're right or wrong, you know, it's just like, it's a, this is how it sort of opens the door to conspiracy thinking of every flavor. It's not that these contrarian takes are always wrong because they're not right. I mean that we have we're living through a time where,
Many of our institutions have.
Lost trust for good reason. Right. But get what gets layered on top of that are just, you know, lies and misinformation and half-truths and and a crazy sort of, you know, John Nash style. Connect the dots with everything and you can find and if you're just searching for anomalies and you're not actually held to any sort of coherent standard of having a basic Theory as to what's going on. You just can find the
Phenomenally well then you'll find anomalies everywhere and they don't have to add up to anything except a kind of pornography of Doubt, right? And that's that's what's being spread by people like Tucker. In my view did you see Douglas Murray's debate with Malcolm Gladwell. Mmm, Matt Taibbi, malc recall. I saw I saw I think I heard most of it. Yeah yeah and I'm not it was a discussion around is the new alternative media? Is this where we're getting the
The most truth from that unencumbered. The audience capture incentives are there. But also, you are liberated to not be tamped down by. Whoever the bigwigs are that, I've got some nefarious agenda around. The other side is saying, it's just free wheeling wild west where people can just make all manner of these sorts of claims but did you have that landscape? Well, I mean, so I'm very biased for that particular debate. I love. Douglas douglas as a friend and he's obviously
A brilliant, and just a joy to listen to. And I get a lot of hate mail because again, he's it get, he's somebody who's happily on the right or right of Center, who doesn't have to worry about what the left thinks about him. But you know, every time I have them on the podcast, I get nothing but pain from half my audience. If there is anything that is worth the pain of half of the audience, it's bringing Douglas Murray. Yeah. Now he's fantastic but he is adjacent to many people who are not so fantastic writing. This is this was the sort of
Guilt by association problem that he has.
Navigated in a way, which I, you know, I don't know if it's successful. I mean, it. He I think sleeps soundly at night, given what he's done. But the truth is, he has been. He shared stages with people who I wouldn't want to be on stage with and I don't think it was good for him to be on a stage with the person and half of the reason why I would get hate mail about having, Douglas on would be because he shared the stage with those people and yet, it's he's completely correct in.
Recognizing how hopeless it is to do a full moral, inventory of everyone. You might be, you know, forced to shake hands with and to decide in advance whether it's worth shaking their hands or having a conversation with them. So, yeah, I mean we just it is the wild west and you just have to do your best. And just be honest, whenever you're in front of the microphone, it feels to me like that guilt by association thing seems to have slowed at least.
A little bit Piers Morgan put out a video recently about we're at Peak woke idea. I wouldn't agree. I think current whether it was it was Matt Taibbi or somebody else in the the summer of twenty twenty said that that was Peak woke the most inflammatory over the top, any slight indiscretion as worth being smashed in the face for. Right. I would agree that that's the case now and it seems to me like there is at least a little bit more reason beginning to seat back in to that discourse.
Hope. So, I feel like,
It seems to be the case for me except I don't know if it's just a an optical illusion because I'm no longer on Twitter and I no longer care, right? Like so I just don't, you know, I used there's certain kinds of attacks which a few years ago. I might have taken seriously for 15 minutes and now they just ran into holiday Hawaii. Yeah. But now they just bounce off or I don't even see them, right? So and
That may be a good thing. I mean, certainly it's a nicer way of being in the world but it could be a version of of
Something like digital leprosy right where you're like you know the lepers lose their digits because they don't they don't sense pain anymore and they do you walk by a table and you whack your fingers on it and you don't notice that you're bleeding. I'm thinking the worst case is in the developing World. Literally you know, rats can come non you while you're sleeping and you don't feel that either. So it could be that I have a digital version of that which is just, I just don't, I'm not noticing how my reputation is eroding in ways that I actually would care about if I could know.
Otis it but I can no longer sense it because I'm in my own silo.
But the truth is, I just don't care about certain kinds of attacks anymore and so yeah, I have the perception. You have that the pendulum has swung back. People are rolling even people who would otherwise have been taken in by woke - few years ago. Roll their eyes in private and increasingly in public over certain kinds of ad hominem or bad faith argument sir.
But that's her back to this point with Douglas. I mean, I just, you know, so my bias was I, his side carried that debate, you know, spectacularly. Well.
but the truth is, I don't know, Malcolm I've I've been on his podcast but so I've spoken to him but I don't know, Malcolm Malcolm has a
It's not the first time, he's done this in debate. He has a, he has a habit in debate of being ad hominem in a way. That is, if it's ever persuasive, it's not persuasive when he's doing it. And so it just you sort of lose just just by default the whatever the actual topic, you know, under discussion, do you remember the talk that you gave on death and the present moment I think you have to know atheists Australian new atheist Society, something like that it was a big was called the
Global atheist convention, but we are a global atheist Alliance. But I think that at that point, maybe still it was like the biggest atheist convention ever. So I went to a few of those, but that was, that was one. How should it inform the way that we live our lives? Do you think given that we know that they're going to end sooner or later?
Well, I really think that is the whether you think about it or not, that is the ever-present subtext to almost everything. You you care about should care about fail to, you know, when you when your priorities are not straight, you know, you when you when you have regrets, it's in life is against this. The incessant ticking of the clock that the the
all of that makes sense. And the imperative of of
the incremental loss of this non-renewable resource. You know, it's like it's the one thing you don't get back. I'm as I said I think even more than time attention, is the real cash value of time. But because we know that you can Safeguard your time and squander it, right? So it's like it's and you and we know you can find real, Joy, surprising, joy, and Equanimity, and even transcend and experience in the midst of
Experiences that you wouldn't otherwise think we're optimal, right? You can have you can be in a shitty situation where nothing has really gone the way you expected. And still be, radiantly, happy right. Mid really is a matter of what you're doing with your attention and the kind of mind you have, but the fact is it, everything is changing at every moment and we're not there's no real stability, right? There's no
Final stage of control over experience. Every every goal you attain becomes a memory, the moment, you attain it, right? And then you, then you're just left to think about it, right? And then the question is, what are you going to do next? And we have this Perpetual challenge of figuring out what to do next. I mean, what, you know, it morally intellectually as a matter of just trying to to safeguard our own sense of well-being.
And you're never, you never arrived and it's because of this that the the nature of impermanence that you never do. Everything is in fact, a mirage. If you think that your satisfaction is going to be a matter of finally, putting all of the most important features of your life in the correct place, right? Like, you finally have the job. You want the relationship. You want the house you want? You know? You're you're fit, you're healthy. You're like, you, you just you've. You've
Executed on the perfect to do list. And you finally arrived well at a minimum you're going to notice that all of that has to be maintained at Great energy for. I'm like it takes entropy is such that, you know, you can't stay fit, you can't stay healthy. You can't stay Rich. You can't see it. You can't your relationships not going to maintain itself and what's more most people's minds are out of control, anyway, right. And they're not satisfied.
Is fide, anyway. Even having everything, they the moment you have everything your
Your sense of what you want and you just move the goal posts or they got moved for you, buy some hand that you could never see. And so like, you take all of this for granted and now you want other things and you want them just as much as you wanted the last things. So there is a, there's something about the passage of time that as you pay attention to it. And as you get older, this this is relevant, but even some people get managed to get quite old without a getting a special.
Really wise but other things can happen, even when you're young you can you know, you can lose people close to you or you can you can do suffer some profound career setback or something can happen where you recognize? Okay, this is there's a
There's a false premise here. There's many, are many bright shiny objects. I've been focused on with it, because they've been captivating for cultural and psychological reasons that I never inspected and never really agreed to, but that's just where my attention went. And there's this deeper principle, which is
The effort to become happy, never fully fulfills itself, right? Because it's the becoming part contains its own dissatisfaction, right? Like at a certain level, you have to figure out how you can be happy. With whatever is already the case, like to want what you already have and then from that place, move into the next moment.
Looking to do creative, beautiful fun things but your your happiness is not contingent upon those things working out in any particular way, right? You realize that you're just at some level you have to be process-oriented rather than goal oriented because
Ultimately there is only the process, right? And your hand, the goals and the goals are. So the achievement of the goals is such a punctate experience. It's so brief, it's just a night, it's an ideal before. It happens is, it's an idea. The moment it happens. It's some burst of sensory experience. And then it's an idea. Again, it's a memory and you're talking about, you're talking about the thing you did yesterday. It's not good. Enough that could never have been good enough for a truly satisfied. Why
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Having things isn't fun. Getting things is fun, and I think that what he's referring to there is the hedonic treadmill, the were talking about the fact that it's in the anticipation of an event that we think it's going to happen as a club promoter for forever and we would be creating anticipation for this next new DJ. This next new whatever that would happen, but the protracted nature of the build-up was what people look forward to. You, I look forward to the advance of it when the event happened, in fact, I did a study where they got people to track, they ping.
And the phones and got them to track how their happiness with throughout the entirety of the night out and the most fun part of a night out. It's getting ready with your friends before you head out of the door. Yeah, I mean neuroanatomical e the reason why that is the case because it's just our dopaminergic system gets driven not by Pleasure itself but by the expectation of pleasure that the things are about to get, it's the center of the bullseye is
The, the pleasant surprise, like, this is about to get better than I was expecting right? Like that. That's the thing. That is truly reinforcing. Yeah, I fear, I might have made an error by saying that I have a guest coming on that was very excited about. And now, if someone isn't X, is sufficiently excited about you. Then I've got the dopaminergic system is going to fall through the floor. Yeah, it's just one disappointment after another by absorbing the gander tastes perfect. Example of somebody who again? He's not. He's ready.
Actor for obvious reasons. I haven't met him. I haven't done an, especially deep dive on what he's guilty of or, you know, I mean, he's obviously he's he's got issues, but
I just feel like we're at a moment now, where
There is such a thirst for wisdom. That, you know, it's, it can come from so many different places. And those places can be more or less contaminated with Concepts that are more or less toxic more or less divisive, more or less confusing. And yeah, I mean I've what, you know,
I've watched enough of his stuff to see why young men are getting addicted to his content and thinking that he's their, their life Guru. And I've also watched enough to think that it's not it's not ideal that he's the voice of a generation, right? Like we need a
More compassionate less self infatuated standard for manliness and and success, that then what he's putting up, if I was to, I've got Jordan coming on the show again at some point later this year. And it's something, I think I'll speak to him about that. He's on two big things with this Arc, which is kind of his competitor. I think to the wef that he's doing later this year, I haven't haven't followed by, I know. Um,
But I do think that Jordans relative abandonment of the conversation directly to young men to move on to other things. Whether it be climate change, or the trans issue, or pick your poison about whatever. He's got interested in recently. I think that that has left a vacuum and you can't expect young. You can't expect anybody to go through life without Insight coming from somewhere and whether that Insight is for young, men are young women or old man or old women whether it's and Route a tour.
Or you know Whoopi Goldberg or whoever happens to have the hot take of the week and Trent sufficiently, highly on Twitter. People going to look for someone they're going to look for answers and in a world where we are.
Chronically mismatched are evolved psychology and the world that we find ourselves in has never really been further apart. People are going to find answers and sometimes
Fluency is a really brilliant proxy for truthfulness or Insight. Hmm. And if you can say things with a sufficiently,
Well, rounded compelling delivery regardless of who you are. Yeah, whether it be Whoopi Goldberg or anybody else. People will say that sounds. That sounds true sounds fluent. Not sure if it's true. Yeah, I accept the thing that surprises me is that it should be more obvious than it is to more people. That someone's an asshole
Rice. I got like it doesn't matter how fluent you are. You are, you're only just declaring your asshole arre in more concise form, right? And so it's kind of a trumpian moment like Trump is obviously an asshole. He's obviously a selfish person, but nobody, none of his fans care, right? He's like, he's not a compassionate person. He's a, he can't even pretend to care about people really right? He's but his, his
Shamelessness around his selfishness has become a kind of super power for certain audience because he's, he's conveying, the message I will never. I will never judge you because I'm incapable of judging myself, right? Like, I'm not, I'm not holding myself to any kind of standard apart from the gratification of my own desires. So, you know, I'm in some sense, I have a real Integrity because I know I'm selfish. All those people who are pretending not to be selfish or pretending to be.
The call and compassionate to care about, you know, the sub-Saharan Africa and, you know, education and developing countries. I mean someone like Bill Gates right now Bill Gates is somebody who can't get laid and he's just going to microchip you with the next vaccine, right? Like that's there's going to be a great quote to export from this podcast. You're welcome Twitter that so that's the that's the center of narrative and ethical gravity for
These guys, right? I don't include Jordan there, but like Andrew Tate, Trump. There's like a, I've got a fucking Bugatti and, you know, you want one. And I've got no apologies, right? I've got no fucks to give. I know you want to be like me, you know? And if you don't, if you're not good enough to be, like me, I'll sleep with your girlfriend, right? Like that's, that's the that's not an ethically wise person on any fucking level. Even if he can see, even if he can string together a few sentences that seem actionable and useful to get you
You to clean your room and get in shape and and meet a girl, right? We should be asking more of our elders than that. Right? And and so and so where I part ways with Jordan? Again I would do not put Jordan in the same category but he is he has a very different view of the
The status of objective empirical truth in relation to the stories, we tell about ourselves and our place in the world and what makes life worth living, what allow what will allow for a society to really coherent around shared values. And he thinks that there's a layer of
Storytelling. And you know what? I would, what I would call myth and fiction really in a way that is kind of somewhat derogatory rise. Not to say that I'm, I don't see the power in it, but it's just what I want to do, is be able to distinguish between the layer of wishful thinking, and a layer of delusion and a layer of ancient confusion that is still has good standing among millions of
People and probably some symbolic truth, or figurative truth in that to and a kind of harmless harmless uses of the imagination that are, could be a Noble in and fun and empowering, right? And out of court rules, that don't require a story to be a noble. And did you see the Jordan got into it with Richard, Dawkins on where you wouldn't have done your off Twitter? So I will know, I'll be the Weathervane to update you on, whatever's happening in, Twitter's conditions at the moment.
Richard a clip of Richard one semi viral with him criticizing the Old Testament. God wrote. And then I think Jordan basically called him out Anytime Anyplace anywhere it wasn't far off that. I think that the actual real sweetness about saying that it was a think, damaging science and and, and doing a disservice to maybe Dawkins himself and rest of. Yeah, what's that mean? That's
I mean I agree with Richard with respect to the what I think of the the Old Testament. God and the the moral instruction we can or can't take from him. I'm a just think that's, I don't think that the Bible is the wisest book. We have even though there are there are Pearls of real wisdom there, which I understand that people love. It's a book, it was clearly written by human beings, right? So that the fundamental that the breach point is
not is Upstream of many of the things people might want to debate. There's just this basic claim. We've got millions upon millions of books. Were they all written by people or not? Right? And the moment you admit that they were all written by people. Okay, we're having a very different conversation about the status of religion, certainly the religion of any of the religion of Abraham. I mean these are these are claimed at bottom Judaism Christianity and Islam are claims about the divine origin of
Specific book or certain texts and some of these texts were canonical for centuries. And then got thrown out, you know, within within Christianity and then some got added later. So the process of cobbling together, these scriptures was all too human. We know way too much about it. If you if we knew more about it it would look much more like Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon and the and it would look like a, you know, the South Park episode that Mormonism. In fact, looks like right?
And you drag it further into the present and it looks like Scientology, right? And you're late you're just staring at. L Ron Hubbard's, driver's license and it's just okay. This goofy guy with bad teeth. Sold all these people on a two story about the stars that it was his obviously bullshit and should it should have been obvious to them. Now again, this is not to say there isn't real wisdom in all of these streams of information. I'm even Scientology, but
You just the basic claim and I think Richard would agree with this is that you don't have to believe anything on insufficient evidence to extract. All the wisdom that is to be found in the world's literature and in the conversations conversations with people in the present and conversations with the dead by reading their their books. In other news, this episode is brought to you by eight sleep. Eight sleeps pod, cover is keeping me alive in the middle of summer in Austin, Texas at the moment. Good sleep.
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HIV. Everything literally from a mattress topper head, 28, sleep.com modern wisdom or follow the link in the show notes below for $150 off plus they ship internationally, that's easy, IG HT sleep.com /, modern wisdom. The first time that I think I heard of Jordan was that first conversation you guys had it was a podcast maybe in a bar in a hotel reception or something and it was jingling of glasses but no that would have been probably Dan Dennett.
We can begin and I had a debate in a bar, but George and I had a debate on my podcast, right. But I'd heard this, this conversation and I remember thinking who's this Canadian? Fuck having a profit, some Harris? Yeah, at the time. And then later on went on to to Really sort of fall in love with Jordans work as well. I think there's an awful lot of people who want to see that public relationship between you and him rekindled. Well it hasn't I mean where it's to my
My eye is not.
Been broken. I mean, I like Jordan and I think this is just this is what I imagine could I have not had any dialogue with him in a couple years but
I mean, Jordan, I disagree fundamentally about religion, I think, and we've debated, that, you know, Ad nauseam. I move probably got like 12 hours, you know, on the mic in various venues debating that, and that was fun. And I'm always happy to talk to him. And I think he while we disagree, I think he has really helped millions of people. And I think he's, there's no question. I've I know what it's like to be with him at an event and to hear from the people.
Who Who Are, You know, here from his fans and my fans side by side sitting at a table for an hour after an event where we, you know, had a debate in front of 8,000, people and there's a slightly different flavor to the people. Whose lives we've changed, right? He's intersected with a different group of people at a different point in their lives than I have. For the most part. Would you, categorize that difference? Well, I made to a significant degree as people move in in two opposite direction at me like that.
They're the people who were stuck with a religious worldview stuck. I mean, literally in many cases, traumatized by a fear of hell that had been inculcated into them, by their religious parents, but were enamored enough of Enlightenment values and secular rationality and science. So, as to have the this, the spell break to some significant degree and they needed some language to
To help a midwife their delivery into a, into the clear light of reason, right? And they'd also needed. So, and this is where Richard and I have had different jobs. I mean, Richard is just
critiquing religion and counter. Posing it with all. That's wonderful, about science, right? And so for him, the, the spiritual attitude that is on offer when you want you to leave religion behind and you know close the church doors behind you is all at the beauty of Nature and just amazement that, you know, everything we hear are learning and may yet learn about the way the world works and the way the mind works and I mean we are
Now, the to use Newton's image, I mean, it's like we are children on a seashore playing with shells and the vast ocean of ignorance and potential knowledge, it just a weights are our inspection for me. That's not good enough. Right? What I mean by spirituality has in fact nothing to do with the amazement that you feel when you look up at the Milky Way, right? It's like that. That's that's great. But that's just not, that's just not the
Real opportunity on offer and that's not what's going to prepare us to die. You know, and that's not what's going to really console you at 4:00 in the morning when you wake up, feeling bad about your life. And not sure how you can be happy in this world, right? So I'm much more a. So I'm convinced that at the core of every religion, there was there were real transformative and Transcendent human experiences that are attested to by the literature. And
Jeans that have grown up around that religion. So the really was, you know, presumably there really was a person in history by the name of Jesus who had this effect on the people around him and said, you know, something like what he is reported to have said, in the Bible and I can I can understand all of that as
A absolutely predictable result of certain ways of paying attention that are available to every human being now. You know, then now then and now which allow you to recognize that this ego, you take yourself to be is an illusion and it allows you to recognize that unconditional love is actually a possibility. Right now, you cannot it is possible to just feel
Shattered by your love for all sentient beings and to just to bask in the profundity of that way of being and that's on the menu. And whether you have to decide, whether you have to go into a cave and meditate for a month to find that, are you taking MDMA? Or you have me that there are ways to perturb your nervous system, such that
The testimony of Someone Like Jesus or Buddha is not is obviously not a fraud. It's obviously not a confession of Psychopathology, it's obviously not a delusion. About belief based illusion about what happens after death, or about what invisible parts of the universe and being populated by Angels or deities. You don't have to believe in anything on empirical, in order to experience that range of positive experience.
So you just have to learn to use your attention in the right ways. And if you can't do that you know there are psychedelics offer a paper, an imperfect method at reliably that. Yeah, I mean, it's definitely reliable. It's a reliable glimpse of something that is different enough. Assuming you have a positive experience, and you can have a different enough negative experience that will convince you of something else, but if you have a different enough, extraordinarily positive experience,
You'll be convinced that okay? What? Whatever.
The possibilities of sustaining that may or may not be. It is just clear that this experience is possible because I just had it right? I just had it for four hours and I can no longer. Imagine that human consciousness is is in principle confined to the mediocre bandwidth. I tend to experience, what? I'm just checking my email and then checking Twitter, and then worrying about my future, all right? I actually don't think I can actually close the loop on what
I want to say about Jordan there though. So Jordan,
Jordan. And I differ in, he wants to support a much more traditional picture of the utility and even necessity of religious thinking and religious identity. And and that way of giving meaning to one's life through traditional stories and stories, which I think
A literal belief in can't be justified, based on what we have come to understand about science. And I just think that the burden is on us at this point in history to find a truly non-sectarian way of telling herself a story about what we value and what is possible, right? And and so and we do that in other areas of our lives and the science is one very clear place. We do that. Whether it's just
There is no to say that, you know, there's American Science vs. Chinese science. I mean, it's just that's just not science, like science is at a layer more fundamental than those cultural differences. And so it has to be with a, with something, like ethics and spirituality, you can't talk in the end, you can't, you shouldn't be able to talk about Christian ethics or Christian spiritual insight and Jordans, not convinced of that, or he's apparently not convinced of that. And so, you know, that that's what we still disagree about.
Out. But I think the final thing, the thing, the thing I wanted to say was that so you will seem to allude to some sort of breach between us, which I certainly don't feel and have an experience. I can only imagine though that in his world given were given what was happening to me on Twitter, when I left, he perceives me as somebody who has just
Gone off the rails in some way, right? Because like he in his world and this is what was so amazing to see when I was looking at when I when I when I mean this to if anyone doesn't know what I'm talking about there was this whole Hunter Biden laptop situation where I commented on the hunter Biden laptop thing on a podcast. I clip from that podcast got exported to apparently every planet in the solar system and
It had an enormous effect right of center, right? So, so right of Center. I had just destroyed my career. I'm a little I'm hearing from people like, oh my God, are you okay, right and in my world and in every channel, I care about, literally nothing had happened, right? And so, but in, but it, Jordan lives in the world where I just kind of torch everything. So I can only imagine that he has some view of my. He truth is
I would expect him to be.
Genuinely confused about what I believe about things like free speech or any of the relevant variables there. Unless he happens to listen to my podcast, which, you know, I don't know whether or not he does. I think the potential breach that was talking about was more just that there is a hunger for you and him to speak. I think that you've both been formative to a lot of people's intellectual Journeys in one form or another. And I think people are hoping that there is yet more juice to squeeze from your
Joined lemons and however worry, yeah, that happens. Well, I'm always happy to talk to him. I think, you know, I think the thing that got into my head is someone sent me a clip from Joe Rogan's podcast where he and Joe were talking about me and Jordans him to be talking about me is like a cautionary tale. Like look what can happen to somebody and and Joe said something like oh I still have hope for sample and they're in my view, they are in this contrarian Echo chamber.
Right where you know mRNA vaccines are terrifying, covid-19 big deal true. January 6 was maybe not a non-event, right? The lip tars are trying to ruin everything and there's a whole picture of sort of audience capture and and information skewing their, which I understand. I mean that's sort of how I like if I look to my left, I can see all that, but if you're only there, there's just a lot of half-truths real kind.
ricocheting around that Echo chamber, which yeah, it means I'm happy to talk to both those guys but it's just they're not
in the, in the lane I'm in and trying to maintain, You know, despite Crosswinds trying to maintain a straight course in
There's no, that's only half the story, right? So it's and I just think people are genuinely confused now, because two things are true.
We have lost trust in the normal channels of information and and normal institutions postcode, you know during covid and post covid.
For obvious reasons but we desperately need institutions and a media that we can trust, right? And we're not going to navigate This Moment by just proliferating podcasts and newsletters, right? It's just not good enough much as we much, right. Yeah. So it's and so that's the, that's a seeming Paradox. Because, yes, you can point to the moments where our institutions have become untrustworthy. But, you know, RFK jr. Is not the Messiah. We need at this moment. I think he's so hot.
At the moment, what is it about RFK? What exactly he's, he is speaking very directly to this.
Contrarian Echo chamber. You know contrarian / conspiracy thinking conspiracy addled, Echo chamber, where the non standard version of everything is almost certainly, the right account, right? So no one can be trusted, all you all you really can. It is a kind of
It's a kind of religion of suspicion that is that is being born. I think it's a pseudo Awakening of
They're all fucking Liars, right? Like that's this. That's what happened to so many millions of people during covid. They're all liars. I mean just got Gavin, Newsom closing the beaches and then he's over at French Laundry, you know, perfectly quaffed at a fundraiser. Is that hypocrisy that people found? I mean, that was just a 20-megaton moment of hypocrisy that detonated and broke trust with with half the country, you know? And so it's
again, that's all understandable, but
We have to be realistic about. Just what is true and likely to be true in each moment. And is everything. The CDC says, likely to be wrong, right? Like is that, is that really where it is? That what we want to default to you can't trust the CDC about anything? Is that how you really want to be a consumer of medicine? It just is completely unworkable. What we need is a CDC we can trust and insofar as we don't truly have that then that is where we have to perform surgery but it's not like
We can tear it all down, and then we're just going to chat GPT our way to health. It's just it's not going to happen. We'll get back to talking to Simon one minute. But first, I need to tell you about element element is the way that I have started my day. Every single morning for over three years now it is the best hydration drink that have ever found. There's no gluten, no fillers no artificial junk or any other BS, it tastes phenomenal that orange salt flavor is absolutely outstanding, it'll help to regulate your appetite. It'll curb Cravings, it'll improve brain function and it means that you don't need to
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Box. That's drink LMN t.com /. Modern wisdom. How far do you think RFK gets in this political race? Well, um, I'm hopeful that if he keeps expounding upon how, you know, covid-19 targeted to avoid Ashkenazi Jews and and Chinese people. And I mean, it's like if you if you give him a mic enough, he will put his foot, he'll put both feet in his mouth and and in your mouth and
Any mouth that's available. I mean it's just it's but again, it's not that he's wrong about everything, he's that it's harder than that, right? He's he is right about many things and and the fact that people love what he's saying is totally understandable. That's it's just not, you know, half-truths are harder to deal with and or statements, which are riddled with truths, but the cut, the general shape of them is wrong. And
Naming in the wrong direction. Like that is just, it's hard for people to parse that stuff and it's especially hard when
Occasionally, The Conspiracy Theory turns out to be true or very likely to be true. It's like if you're if you're a person who has an an appetite for every conspiracy theory, right? So JFK wasn't, you know, couldn't have been a single shooter and you just you just bought everyone since then.
Then you're going to be then when, you know, covid likely escaped, a lab in Wuhan, if you're the first person to sign up to that, in an environment, where everyone's being called racist for signing up to that, you're going to look like this contrarian genius, who just like they couldn't fool me, right? I knew that it likely came out of a lab where as the the rational position to have had made you have to take all of these things. All a cart, right? Like you just have to honestly
You know, within the confines of opportunity costs and and bandwidth, you have to investigate them as they come. And let me with that one in particular, it was always obvious that it was, at the very least, plausible, that covid could have escaped a lab. We just know, we have a problem with lab leaks and there's a was the Wuhan Institute for I Rolla, G right there. Working on coronavirus has. It was never real. It was that
Was that was a we woke shibboleth. Bullshit to call that racist to worry that it came out of a lab, should have spoken to roll buried. I'm Adam a daisy, which Rodriguez at the did after on, didn't he? Do a big? All right. Yeah, I was thinking about the Christian robbery. Yeah. So now, so Rob and I did a podcast on this kind of topic, you know, lab leaks in general and synthetic synthetic bio in general.
It again that you can't give. So if someone like RFK Junior likes, all the conspiracies, like every one of them, he likes the, you know, cell phones, cause glioblastoma idea which again, it's totally possible rights. Like it's not that it's not worth looking into but if you like that one and you like the Bill Gates microchipping one and you like the Wuhan one. And you like the covid itself was just a plan demick and you and you
Like all of these and you like the Ashkenazi Jews don't get covid. You just have, it's a characterological problem. You have this appetite for. I mean, you see this the the true Avatar of this way of thinking to someone like Alex Jones, right? Like, I again, I don't know about Jones is just a performance artist and it's it's cynical and not not real or if he really believes what he says he believes. But assuming he believes what he says he believes
He is just, you know, it's like, you're a nymphomaniac for, and what you love is lies, right? And half-truths, right? You like you like you use love the least credible ideas, you know, the whatever can come over the transom. That's what. Gets you hard, right? And so that you're just going to keep doing that. And it's a
It's a disorder, right? But it's, you know, if it's true that certain frogs are getting turned gay, right? Like in your the first one talking about that. Well,
he was right about those frogs so you must be right about everything. You're going to find an audience and what's so perverse about our current environment online is that there is no evolutionary real evolutionary pressure anymore because everything can succeed. There's just a nut. There's a, there's always that you can always just find another corner of the internet, and another Echo chamber, and use this part of 4chan and a fortune isn't good enough for you can be over at eight Chan, right? Like you can find this little hellhole.
We're everywhere, you're going to the requisite number of people to monetize. Ultimately, are going to willing to hear and talk about anything and
So, I, unlike many of the people we just spoke about, I'm convinced that we have an enormous problem with misinformation, that is held in tension with our desire for free speech, on every topic, 24 hours, a day that we have to take, seriously, we have to say and at it's not that we should ever write a law which, which says people have to go to jail for saying crazy things. I think the First Amendment truly is sacred and the right. It's just beyond sacred. It's just the right.
Algorithm to have for to run a democracy and and you know we have it in America and almost no one, no one else has it. But
That's not the same thing as having a right to the gamification algorithm that boosts, the craziest stuff, preferentially to the ends of the Earth and maintains it forever, right? And that and and now you add generative AI to that. And I think it's the problem just gets worse. So, yeah. I'm I'm worried about, consequential lies and half-truths in a way that many of my colleagues and podcast and aren't getting back to.
Something which is less contentious Bahamas, death. And the fact that we maybe should spend more time thinking about it or at least be a little bit more aware of it. I want to read a quote from that presentation that you gave on death on the present moment. As a matter of conscious experience, the reality of your life is always now and I think that this is a liberating truth about the nature of the human mind. In fact, I think there's probably nothing more important to understand about your mind than that. If you want to be happy in this.
World. The past is a memory. It's a thought arising in the present. The future is merely anticipated, it is another thought arising. Now, what we truly have is this moment and this and we spend most of our Lives forgetting this truth refuting. It fleeing it overlooking it. And the horror is that we succeed. We managed to never really connect with the present moment, and find fulfillment there because we are continually hoping to become happy in the future and the future never arrives.
It is always now however much you feel. You need to plan for the future to anticipate it to mitigate risks, the reality of your life. Is now, even when we think we're in the present moment, we are in very subtle ways. Always looking over its shoulder anticipating, what's coming. Next we're always solving a problem and it's possible to Simply drop your problem. If only for a moment and enjoy, whatever is true of your life in the present.
You say that your mind is all you have just before that. What does that mean? In reflecting on that statement. Now what what did you hope that people took away from it.
Well, it's there's this we've spoken about it a little bit already. There's this fundamental truth that you never truly arrived. If your, if your attention is always purpose toward looking for the next thing, anticipating the next thing, if even in the presence of that very thing, that was the next thing. And now it's now you are busy telling yourself a story about it, you know, your engagement with it is mediated by
by thought in each moment and you can't actually make contact whether you can't, you can't.
There's there's this dissatisfaction even in satisfaction, right? You get the thing you were longing for and
You, you have such a you're so distractible, you're so you're so burdened. By this automaticity of thought, this conversation you're having with yourself that the present moment isn't even selling it enough to you. Right? And so it's a most of us, most of the time live in that kind of, you know, we get buffeted between the pate and anticipating the future and thinking about the past and that
Flickr happens over. Even the present moment, right? I mean, we're just, we're just, you know, like even a conversation like this, like I'm saying something, if part of my attention is women have I gone on too long about this or like it like she did that even make sense? What would the there's part of me that it's that it's potentially talking to myself about the very conversation we're having now. Now that is all to normal everyone is in that position to make people are people who are listening to
Ooh, us now are struggling to follow my train of thought as I speak one because I'm long-winded but to it. My speech is competing with speech that there is occurring to them in their head right there saying, well what's he talking about? Oh yeah, Jordan didn't say that. What is he at? Where does he get off talking about Jordan that and there's someone in their fucking head who seems to be them but some strangely not them because if they're the one talking and also listening, why are they having that conversation in the first place, right? There's this, there's this.
People looking over their own shoulder into the pretty even when they're trying to seize the present with both hands, right? Even if they take my advice in that quote and say, okay, I got to be all about the now, right? The future never arrives. There's just now. So let's enjoy the. Now, what they will find is they lack the tools to really do that. And so, one tool again, is something you something like, psychedelics, right? You take the wreck was a dose of LSD.
SD or psilocybin and MDMA. These are potentially very different experiences but they're there. What will happen under the Aegis of any of those compounds is very likely, you will have a full collision with the present moment of A Sort that you have never had before. If it's your first time on one of those drugs and all of a sudden the the your sensory experience and the your concept even your conceptual experience will begin to.
Unfold and you will realize there is just much more here than then you realize, right? Likely? Like everything becomes a kind of miracle and
The problem with that is that finding meaning in everything is crazy, right? You become the guy who's just like, you know, if I'm staring at this microphone. I'm so, so come here stoned and I'm just like, oh my God, that microphone is just that, you know, that's not the guy you want on your podcast, right? So but it is possible.
It is possible to fall into The Well of being such that the present moment. The present moment lacks for nothing, right? You're just you recognize that love what you meet, what you really mean by love. What you should mean by love. Is not this transactional thing that you get going with a specific person because of your shared history together and because of their qualities that you happen to like it is actually a state of being that you can just plunge into and you recognize that this is
the point of life is to is to recognize this more and more, right? And so and love is one facet to the, to this Jewel. Compassion is another just
Just all, you know, is another, I mean, he gets different shadings depending on the environment, you put it in and it gets like if you're in the presence of human or animal suffering will then compassion is the thing that gets Amplified but in the site in in real silence and in a real undistracted collision with the present moment when you don't have this voice in your head diverting you or coming up from behind seeming to be you, right? I but
What happens is, people feel like a separate self the here. Perhaps I should rewind for a second. That this here's the, here's the starting point, for 99.9% of humanity, people feel like a self people feel like, they're there a subject in the middle of their experience, right? They feel like they're having an experience. They feel like they're there on the edge of experience. In some sense, they don't feel like, they don't feel identical to experience, right? So I'm so an experience is
You know, your five sensory channels and your mind, right? So you've got your seeing hearing, smelling tasting, touching thinking feeling emotions, and you've got this whole
Cacophony of what it's like to be you in each moment and sometimes it's very, very pleasant and sometimes sometimes it's very unpleasant and sometimes it's just, you know, normal and there's nothing really especially Salient about it and the default sense is to feel like a self in the middle of that, right? And it's that is that starting point. That is actually the basis for
For all of our dissatisfaction and psychological suffering. Immediate that is the that is the not that has to be untied to. That really allows for a recognition of what the mind is like, prior to identification with thought and prior, to this, for this, this capture by this, this automatic, this reflexive seeking and not finding operation that were, we're constantly engaged with so.
So yeah, it's possible to so yes.
On some level you know certainly spiritually speaking now is everything. There really is just Consciousness in its contents and each moment, right? And there's there's never a reason to wait to recognize that, right? This isn't a disavow. All the other projects we could have in human life that take some time to accomplish, right? I'm not saying you, everyone should just become a monk or go to a cave and starve. I mean, like there are things that I like to do in the world and want to get done and I have projects. But in each moment,
Moment. The question is, what is available to attention? And why do you suffer, right? And if you, if you, if you're going to ask yourself, why do you suffer in each moment? Why is this moment just a little crappy, right? Why is it just not good enough? Why am I looking forward to this thing in an hour? And I'm unable to locate a real ease of being now, you know, before this good thing happens before, this uncertainty gets resolved.
Before I've hear from the doctor that I don't have the thing that I'm worried about. What do you like the all of these contingencies what's available? Now what you find is and you know meditation is the ultimate answer to this in my view you find is this this on the on the part of virtually everyone this basic incapacity to break the spell of identification with thought and just rest attention as Consciousness in the present moment and meditation is simply the act of doing that. Ultimately
And there many techniques that can seem like something other in the beginning. But ultimately, if it works, meditation is the ability to look at this thing. You thought was your ego with the you thought was yourself that you thought was that the homunculus that was in the middle of your experience and not find it and not find it in a way that actually relieves you of the problem of egocentricity for that moment, right? It might only last in the beginning, it might only last a moment.
And then you'll be lost in thought again, but that. But the question is, once you learn to meditate, the question is always what do you do next? And if you don't know how to meditate, well you're just going to helplessly be thinking that thought, and you'll think it for as long as you'll think it and it'll make you angry or sad or regretful or whatever it depending on its contents. And then you'll try to have to figure out how to rearrange your life on the basis of that thought. So it's not be angry or sad or regretful. But when once you know how to meditate, you can recognize thoughts as thoughts and they just arise.
Disappear in this wider. Space of awareness and you locate your well being in that space as as that space. But but if all of that sounds like religious gibberish, that is of totally uninteresting and it would have seemed that way to me when I was 18. The only thing for a hard-headed skeptic much of the time is an experience that snaps you out of your egocentric, Illusions for some period of time. And so for me,
Me Peru, go to Peru, go to Peru or which I haven't done. I haven't done Ayahuasca, but for me, psychedelics war ended. They were indispensable because I was someone had you confronted me as an undergraduate in college with whatever? I just said I would have even if I had been convinced a try meditating for an hour.
I wouldn't have had the aptitude for it that such that I would have immediately noticed it was there was a there. There I would have I would have bounced off. I would have got the sense that it didn't work for me. I got you most people, you know, someone like someone like Richard Dawkins is a perfect example is like I ambushed him on my podcast with five minutes of meditation. And I thought you're going to say spike the drink with. Yeah, he Richard, I told I told those sorry, but I told Richard he should, he should do psychedelics.
but,
Most people who are respected and this is especially true of hard-headed, rationalist skeptic scientist types. They're so enamored of thought thought is the only appendage they have ever found by which to or by which to
Interface with reality such that they can't imagine a mind prior to thought. They can't imagine a non conceptual engagement with reality that reveals anything. You know, it sounds like what he sounds like brain damage, right? Like my concepts are great. Like you should have concept as good as my Concepts, right? What are you going to hit me on the head with a hammer? Yeah, they don't have fewer Concepts, right. But so when you point them inward, when you say, okay, just just notice that. Like just try to focus on your breath.
Earth for 10 seconds and notice how hard that is. Notice what happens notice that you get carried away by something that you are not authoring, right? Like your did you decide to get distracted about what's going to happen for lunch? When I just told you to pay attention to your breath and you were on it for two seconds. And now you're thinking about lunch at like, does that does that know, is that at all? Interesting to you that that's the hardest thing in the world to just pay attention to anything. Some people find that. Interesting. Some people find that that's a
there's a sort of an intimation of a path, they're like, okay, maybe there's something to discover here, that could provide some relief to something that it is, in fact, alien me, but for many people not and then if you give those people,
Psych, some psychedelic experience, many of them recognize. Okay, there is a there there. I don't know how, I don't know if this one is optimal. This is just, this is just different, but it's so different and some of it is so pleasant and some of it is so undermining of the bullshit that I generally find. So captivating that this is a Counterpoint to how I've been living my life, right? And so I need to, I need to I need more tools and
That's how many of us have got. Got into meditation, what is the role of feeling? In this? Whatever term you want to call it? The embodiment of emotions, the tapping into some sort of intuition because I resonate a lot with the cerebral. Horse power model relying on whatever it is cognitively that I've got that I can deploy on the thing that's in front of me and I take a lot of pride in that and I think a lot of people do.
A lot of the people don't be listening to this podcast. Listen to your podcast will feel the same. You know, we take pride in our ability to Wrangle the chaos of the world, into some sort of order by I thinking through things and taking Concepts from different, disparate areas and bring them together and going. Wow, that's really satisfying. And I understand the way that these two things could result in this, third thing in that third thing is, but it does to me in some ways.
Feel a little like a prison and it's almost a prison of your own making and it's one that you're proud of you stand there with this, gilded prison wall. And if everything's coated in the toilet fucking gold and the floors gold. And there's an Open Sky and all this stuff. What's the role of allowing some sort of embodiment or emotion or feeling to come back into this to allow the cerebral stuff to slip away? But not to just be completely blank to be able to
To hear what you're sort of truly feeling in the moment. Yeah, well, it's meditation, it says the kind of meditation. I recommend is, is generally called mindfulness and it's initially, it seems like a technique and is taught as a technique, But ultimately it's not a technique. It's not it's not something you're doing more of its you're actually doing less of something, which is
You're simply not being distracted by thought. And so when you have a feeling, when you feel Joy, or you feel sadness,
Mindfulness is.
It's often thought of especially, we're talking about negative feelings that people to classically want to get rid of or diminished like anxiety, right? It's often thought that mindfulness is a way of getting rid of those feelings, right? And It ultimately, it is but it's not a way of getting rid of them by born of an unwillingness to feel them, right? Like what you're doing, when you're being mindful of an emotion is you're willing to as you're feeling that entirely. You're feeling it. Deeply, you're letting yourself.
Become incandescent with that feeling you're just not thinking about it anymore as and, and it's not that you're blocking thoughts. You're just noticing thoughts themselves, arise along with the feeling but you're noticing them from the point of view of this prior condition of awareness that can just see thoughts as thoughts, right? The default case is to not know that you're thinking, even if you could say that, you know, that you're thinking in each moment, a thought is, is coming up from behind.
And, and you just feel like it's you and you're thinking about the thing that's making you angry, and that's making you angry. And so you're feeling anger, and then you're thinking about the thing is making you angry. And that motherfucker, I can't believe what was he thinking, and that's the voice in your head and that feels like you, right? Like the you have no perspective. It's not you know it's no more than then these these sounds are you when you hear them, right? Like literally it is it is like being asleep and dreaming. I mean, that's why many people you
I've titled my book and my app waking up and what, you know, this is an ancient analogy which is all too literal breaking. The spell of thought is very much like waking up from a dream. When you just didn't know you were having like you were you're asleep and dreaming. It was leave aside lucid dreams, which are a different case. The normal cases, you're asleep and dreaming and you have no idea what your situation is. You are you are convinced. You're in a
A totally different situation than you in fact. Are, you're actually safe and safely in your bed and yet you think you're somewhere else, you're you're at a nightclub, you're, you know, at the office you're, you know, you're at the doctor's something and it could be an emergency and is completely imaginary, right? It could have some point of contact with your life, but it's completely imaginary.
And the amazing thing about dreams is the transition from sleep. You from waking to sleep, to Dreaming is one in which we never register a moment of surprise, right? Like it's just it is amazing that your mind is capable like you are you go to sleep in your bed and then the very next thing that happens to you. As a conscious entity is totally discontinuous with what where you were 15 your memory 15 minutes ago. And
You in fact are in this moment. If the laws of physics have been suspended, you know, dead people are now walking. I mean, literally talking to someone who's dead and you're not even, you might be surprised they're dead, but
I did. I just dream a couple of days ago that I'd committed a war crime and the old cricket team that I used to play for 20 years ago, was hunting me, and I'm pretty sure that you were there as a newscaster. So makes perfect sense. Yes, obviously,
yeah. But so that failure of reality testing is something we are guilty of in every moment.
moment that a thought seems to be what we are, what we're it seems like our mind becomes identical to this voice in our head where the self where you just feel like
Again, you're listening to me, you're not on, you're not, you're not grokking. What I'm saying? The voice in your head, says, what is he talking about? What is this Buddhism or like? What what's this guy? Banging on about. Look at that. That is just a rising out of, you know, not where right. There's a total fucking mystery at your back and then you've got this language and you in many cases imagery getting piped in from you know the you know, stage, right and stage left and you can't you can't
Figure out how to turn to see what, where any of this is coming
from. Where our thoughts coming from.
It's utterly is subjectively speaking. As a matter of experience, it's utterly mysterious, right? Like, they, and once you break this spell, once you see, it's very again, it's very much, like waking up from a dream that once you begin to wake up from a dream, like it could be as could be as bad or as seemingly consequential as possible, right? You know, you're on a battlefield, you're being prosecuted for you. Bring Chase as a war criminal, right? Your adrenaline is up.
The moment you begin to what your alarm goes off and the the dream, the dream, the dream is so insubstantial that in most cases, you can't even remember it, right? Like it could have been really intense and yet, it's so discontinuous with your normal waking consciousness that when it when it begins to erode, sometimes you can just get this wisp of way. It was there a beach? You know, like there's just nothing left and yet it was all encompassing when you were having it.
This, we live our lot so that strikes us is perfectly normal because basically, we all dream, when we're asleep and it and it seems fine, most dreams are fun or not. But no real consequence. We all live, our waking Lives, having this conversation with ourselves which is also totally normal, everyone's doing it. And yet both of these conditions, being asleep and dreaming and not knowing it. And being and thinking, every moment of the day and not
Really, knowing it and certainly not seeing any alternative to being identified with thought.
Both of them are kind of psychosis and they really are. It's like, they're so close to what we recognized in other in the canonically crazy people as psychosis, right? So your thought
Is only really different from psychosis in that you have the good sense to keep your mouth shut and public, right? Like if you were, if you were helplessly exterior Rising all of this conversation, you know, just talking to someone who's not there in the way that you're talking to someone who's not there in the Silence of your own mind. You'd be the crazy person on the street is talking to himself, right? It's not, and I'm not saying I'm not, trivializing, the tragedy of psychosis. I mean, there are other things going on there. There's, you know, classic thought disorder.
You're you know, you find Alex Jones credible and you're you know the you just every conspiracy theory is in fact real. But we have we've all accepted a status quo of
More or less constant distraction by this inner voice and it's so again, it's universally subscribed, but it's not. What is also universally subscribe is Frank, unhappiness and dissatisfaction and it is the basis for our unhappiness and dissatisfaction
wiser in a voice. So mean most of the time it you know, if we spoke to friends or even strangers the way that we often speak to ourselves. Yeah.
We very quickly be on the receiving end of something that we probably didn't enjoy. Yeah. Why is it that we have? This default, not everyone, but a lot of people. Yeah, it's default to to converse with ourselves if that's even the correct term in a way, which is
Horrible.
Well, I can be very wise to notice that it is notice that very difference and to just leverage that as a way of changing, your inner voice. I mean, like so this is like meditation is one thing is one remedy for what ails us but there are other tools and one and one tool is to just notice. Notice what you just noticed is that you would never talk to your best friend, the way that you talk to yourself and you can learn to talk to yourself the way you would talk to your best friend.
And then you your mind is much more, your friend, you know, on some level.
Wisdom is a met is a matter of making your mind your friend, right? And there are a few layers that can be addressed to do that. And one is the car non conceptual layer of what I'm calling meditation. Another is a conceptual layer of just noticing the character this conversation and noticing how bizarre it is and and contingent it is and how how malleable it is. Ultimately maybe like with the moment you recognize that you're not you're not you're not to change yourself as a person like you.
You, you wouldn't talk to your friend this way. Like you're not this much of it and that you're not. Not only you're not this much of an asshole to your friend. You're not an asshole at all to your friend. Like like when your friend is going, if your friend is going through the very thing, you're going through and beating yourself up over.
You know exactly what you would say. You would successfully, say it you not. Not an imposter, you wouldn't have to fake saying it, like you would just like what would come out of, you is a compassionate. Like let's just figure out how to how to improve the situation. But yeah, just like this is like, there's regret is, it's completely unhelpful, like this like you did the past is past, you know, you are, you are a great competent person, who's got all kinds of tools. Let's make the most of them. Let's just, you know,
what you've got.
This despondent horrible voice that you give yourself and a kick in the dick on the way out of the door.
Yeah I think I think I said it eroded some point that you know, I'm to a first approximation. Wisdom is simply a capacity to take your own advice Riley. You, you effortlessly give that advice to others. If you could just get, if you could, just give it and successfully receive it from yourself. You know, you're basically Socrates. But as to why it has a negative character, I don't know that it does. And I think some people
Don't.
Have nearly the self-critical voice. That's familiar to many of us, right? So there's just I think there's probably something like a bell curve there where some people have a fairly happy and even someone happily delusional self-talk. And they're, you know, they're good company for
themselves. You often talk about the tension between being and becoming, kind of feels a little bit. Like there's something going on here. I'm fascinated with this.
Relationship between finding peace and happiness and gratitude with what you have while asking for more from yourself and hoping that you can achieve to be able to feel gratitude and drive at the same time. Why this to me feels like a Perpetual challenge but your actual difficulty because the drive to do more often not always but often is driven from a sense of insufficiency. It's driven.
From a alack. I will be happy when so on and so forth. But the thought of going through life and just leaving it all on the table because I'm just in this state of sort of constant orgasmic Bliss and I don't fucking need to do anything anymore because I'm just blessed out, man. Yeah also doesn't sound particularly and I struggle to achieve that no matter how much yeah Tantra, I try and
Yet, it took to me, this tension, between the drive to do more, the acceptance of who we are, the wanting to show up in the world and to give it everything that we've got and the gratitude for the things that we already
have. Mmm. Yeah. Well, it is a constant tension and I think you want to ultimately, I think you want to be biased on the bean side of it, may certainly, what if you've succeeded enough, right? Like if you have a if you recognize that you've won the lottery on some level and you
Are in a position now where there are billions of people who would consider their prayers answered if they could trade places with you, right? And you they'll be a time in your life where you would give anything to trade places with who you are now, right? Like it. When you're, you know, when you're in your last month of life, and you're terminally ill or you're, you know, you've lost someone very close to you. I mean, there's like when you have, when you have this moment in the sun, where basically, you're basically things are basically going well.
All right. I think it's appropriate to have a module in your, in your mind which continually pings you which says like if you can enjoy this, right? Like, you know, if this is going to be wasted on you, you're never going to be happier. Like this is the, you should be able to enjoy this part, like, this. This is, this is desert, right? Desert has arrived and whatever story you have about, all the other things you might do, or become. This is really like, you know,
This is a wonderful life, right? So can you can you settle into this at all with your attention right. And if you can't, I think that's the problem to recognize our like it like if the thing you should want to become is someone who's better at recognizing the beauty of your life. Moment, to moment right now, there's a paradox there that ultimately has to be overcome, right? Like the wanting to become more spiritual wanted to wanted to become a great. Meditator wanted to become enlightened, that's, you know,
No, a not that they get untied but it's a fairly, you know, refined one, but it is it's just totally appropriate to recognize this mismatch between, what is objectively. True of your life by reference by comparison to anything else that's that is on the menu and the general mediocrity of your way of being, you know, just the feeling
And so this is again this this is doled out to you not in big chunks but in moments, right? Like this is not like the grand plan. Like, okay I got my calendar out. This month is going to be about X and now I'm going to nail X, right? It's much more.
A thousand lessons and over the course of a day, right? Like like you have to just be attentive to moments, where you miss it and moments, where you and then just recognizing that it's in vain, it's available now, right? Like, you were a moment ago, you were tied in a knot somehow. For some reason, you know, things were awkward or weird and then, and, and now you're back, right? It's like I was, I was coming to this interview and I was, I was late. I was 15 minutes late, you know? And
And I hate being late for whatever reason, and some kind of rushing to get out of the house. And, you know, my wife is got her own day ahead of her and she's rushing to get out of the house. And we're sort of ping-pong and around each other, and I were kind of missing each other and very like in and out of the bathroom in and out of the closet. And, and I say goodbye to her, but it was a sort of a goodbye. Like, you know, I've just completely missed her like this beautiful woman who have decided to spend my life with and like, like, where she's now? Just a basically a notch.
Go, I have to navigate around so it should be, you know, 30 seconds earlier than I would. Otherwise be if I just took a moment to recognize how beautiful my life is, right? So I missed, I missed her, I miss her, I miss her, I miss her, and then at the penultimate moment, as I'm grabbing my keys. I'm like, oh, the here she is, right. And so, I just stopped her. I give her a kiss and then I leave. Right? And it's just the difference between finding that moment and not is enormous, right? And it's just, it's like
Like the area under the curve, could still suck a lot from, it's like in the beginning. You might only have 20 moments like that a day, right? But the difference between being someone who never gets it clearly, right? And never truly punctuates his busyness and ambition and disappointment and everything every other you know, module that's been installed with just clear
You know, clear contact with the beauty and sacredness of the present moment.
That difference is enormous. And once you have those those, those punctate moments. And again, this is a meditation by another name.
Then you can have a hundred and then you can have a thousand and then and then then the character of your life can more and more resemble the true Virtues Of Being even when you're still becoming. And even when you have the whole apparatus of you've got employees, you've got a calendar. You've got, slack is open all day. Like, it's all that's happening. You can still be someone who's basically already happy, right? You're like, you're like, you're not leaning forward.
So much. And when you do are leaning forward part of you recognizes, okay, what's this about like it like you have a kind of mindfulness alarm that goes off when you're when you're obviously expecting to become Happy by the next thing, right? Rather than be truly taken in by that dream. Part of you knows, okay. Wait a minute, like, just set just correct your posture a little bit. Like you know, that no matter how good this dinner is, is just going to be a
Right one, then you're going to be too full and then you're going to wish you hadn't eaten, all that. And then you're then you're going to find it hard to sleep. And then and so like, you know, that there's it can't be a matter of of reaching and grabbing and and and fully satisfying your desire again and again and again as a way to finally become happy there's got you have to find locate your satisfaction more and more.
Interest in the state of being that is already here. That's preceding the next change. Your that your happiness can't be ultimately a matter of changing experience. It has to be a matter of recognizing the nature of experience. Now,
That it can be, you know?
Very easy to have a cynical take on that and say okay well it's easy for you to say, rich white guy who for whom everything is going, great and nothing. Bad is he had happened and the worst thing that happened to you was on Twitter and so go fuck yourself, but no met. First of all, many bad things have happened. I know what it's like to lose someone close to me. I know what it's like to worry. That your kid is really sick. I know what it's like to be waiting for the MRI. I'd like they're all these moments where, you know, even even the luckiest among us know what, it's like to live.
of in with real uncertainty and the knowledge that you know, ultimately
Every bad thing, some version of every bad thing is going to happen. I mean, even if you're the luckiest and healthiest and richest, you know, then you're just going to be sitting by the phone. You know, hearing that all your friends have died, right? Like if you live to be 120 in perfect health, you know, you're Peter Atiya and you've, you know, you're still doing kettlebells at 120 which I hope I'm not keeping that. Yeah, I hope you are Peter and Andrew then you're just going to be getting, you know, voice mails and texts and
whoever else exists at that point hearing that all these people you loved have disappeared, right? So no one gets out of here without real real encounter with with Greek level tragedy. And the question is, is it possible to have a mind that can Embrace that with Equanimity and compassion and love and tranquility?
Or do you just have to, to pretend none of that's going to happen? I give you the normal mode is to try to be lucky enough so that you can pretend hard enough and long enough that none of that shit applies to me, right? Like I'm just going to, you know, I'm going to stay healthy for as long as I can stay healthy. I'm not going to think about cancer until somebody has cancer. Like it's like I'm just I'm going to extract as much pleasure as I possibly can in the moment and
And you know, look that Bugatti over there is mine, right. You know, so it's like that's
The ad best that's impermanent, right? Even if that was a satisfying as as someone could pretend and we actually no it's not and you can know that from the inside the more you have those experiences the
it's impermanent. You know I mean it's like a certain point and Route 8 is going to be the 80 year old with bad tattoos. Right? Like it's just not it's like it's it's not it doesn't scale like like that. You need you need a another gear and
There are many names for this. I mean, wisdom is one name spirituality,
Enlightenment. Awakening meditation, and all of these Concepts, psychedelic experiences, all of these tools and concepts are triangulating on a part of the map, where one's well-being isn't contingent upon changes in experiences. There's a recognition that as possible about the nature of conscious life itself, that is
fulfilling giving us elves a good enough reason to just be here in the
Present moment. Yeah. Yeah, this would both funds and friends would pull Bloom and yeah, pull managed to draw the perhaps surprising correlation between this and a dominatrix that he didn't have
you. I see what. Yeah he he's great with surprising correlations. Yeah and
it really made me it really made me realize because I think it's in maybe the death and the present moment talk to you gave us something else that a lot of what we're doing externally with the way that we try and show up in the world.
The way that we construct our exterior lives and our experience is to give us a good enough reason to just be here now. Yeah, and people find this through staring at the night sky people find it through going to Raves and Collective. Effervescence they find it through and Paul gave me this reason, I interviewed a dominatrix for one book, The One paying maybe and
She'd said nothing captures attention like a whip wrote, which means that if you get slapped hard by a lady, presumably in bicep length, Gauntlet leather gloves. Hi me, boots and stuff. If you get slapped by her, for the next three seconds you're thinking about nothing apart from the fact, she just slapped me. Yeah. Ting and you just hearing that ringing in your ears and that's it. And I think that the way that I've conceived of it, I wrote this on a beach.
I'll kind of high on mushrooms but I wrote it on a beach that the goal of a lot of mindfulness and the goal of a lot of what we're doing with our life, should be to lower the bar to which we need the world's external stimulus to be in order for us to feel happy. It should be as an eval says. If you won't be happy with the coffee you won't be happy on a yacht right? Yeah. And continue to just
Whatever the reverse of progressive overload is yeah, Progressive under load. Yes. Yeah, and just continue to Chip Away chip away. I can find it when I'm washing the dishes. I can find it. When I'm walking the dog. I can find it when I'm at cetera. Et cetera, waiting in traffic data data data.
Yeah. And
If that seems difficult.
It certainly can be, but that doesn't mean it's not possible. And, and The crucial point is that you have to recognize what the alternative is that they all the alternative is just bad. The alternative is to not be happy to be incapable of Happiness. Even when you have every reason to be happy, right? It's the alternative is to be
Not all that loving. Even when you're surrounded by people you ostensibly love, right? Because you have a mind that is constantly fragmented. You're constantly looking elsewhere. You're constantly waiting for the next thing. You're constantly ruminating about that last thing and you become bad company for the people in your life who you really want to too.
Whose lives you. You know, when you're clear moments you really want you, you just want to magnify happiness in their presence,
right? This is what I think is an important leap. And I think that you make it very well in waking up, which I told you before we started. I think I've gifted my mum every Christmas for the last three years, which has been a great assistance in me, being able to get something delivered digitally the Night Before Christmas when I left it too late. Yeah, early annually, I highly highly recommend that everyone go and check it out.
Out it, taking it from an abstract wishy-washy, this is something that's going to. Maybe my anxiety will be a little bit better. Maybe I won't feel my anger anymore to as David Fuller says, does it grow corn? Like, show me if it grows any fucking corn rack, what does this do for me to me to my life, to the relationships? I have to fundamentally the things that I care about the most. Now, the texture of our own minds is not nothing. In fact, you could argue, maybe it's everything.
Yeah, but there is something beyond that, too, and I think that the thin end of the wedge is getting people in through the door that will look at what this could do to your world and then the worlds of the people that you care about. And then think about how that could Ripple out if you want to be super altruistic and the town and the country, and up the planet that you're on and so on and so forth. But
That is that is the reminder. When I've missed my meditation streak for too long that I get embarrassed about it and I need to, I need to come back to using your app or the timer or whatever.
That's the reminder. For me that gets me through the door. A lot of the time. Yeah. It's and I'm hesitant I came up with an idea the other day of productivity Purgatory which is the things that you do that are supposed to be recuperative. I'd done only to make you more productive. So you kind of have this Perpetual existence of everything. I did Pickleball. I play is because I heard Andrew human, say, on a podcast that, you know, 45 minutes of Zone to cardio per week, helps me be able to focus better and Pedro.
Tia told me that I've got to go for a walk on the morning because of my glucose tolerance or whatever. Trying to not just do that but you know, you can be driven by whatever it is to get you. I think to get the activation energy to get it moving. And for me, that's
That's one of the most robust ways to remind me like think about how it's going to change the nature of your daily experience internally and how you're going to show up for other people externally. I think that that's a leap which a modern version of mindfulness and then tying it in with the life advice. It's not just being about the mindfulness. It's like look at the fucking things that you're struggling with. Look at the things that you're challenged by. Now fact that you ruminator you have regrets and shame and insufficiency and Terror and fear and all that.
This is the Risen, an alternative experience of this and the way that this allows you to show up in the world can also benefit from it
too. Mmm. Yeah, and also there's no boundary between this thing. We're calling meditation or mindfulness and the rest of one's life, right? I mean, that that boundary is truly spurious and it's it's an artifact of, you know, first learning, not knowing the thing, then learning it. And then setting aside, 10 minutes a day or whatever to practice it, or you go on a silent Retreat for a month. And then you come back to your
Life. And there seems to be this difference between life and retreat, but in reality is all you have is your mind and each moment and you're either suffering or not, you're the lost in thought or not, you're clearly aware of of what it's like to be you or not. And that fluctuation is that that's really the ground of this practice or these insights met. That's where wisdom is, and
so it's not it, I would encourage people from the very beginning to view the practice as
Not at all being separate from the rest of their days like his and you don't in my view you don't get any credit. I mean there are consequences to practicing or not practicing for most people but it's like you don't get credit for having meditated earlier today. Like I don't give myself, like if I sat for 20 minutes it's not like we Bank those 20 minutes and now you're good to go for the rest of the day. It's like the rest of the day is your Pratt is your practice, right? Like your your life is
Is your practice, your on, some level? Your life is a meditation. It's just, you're paying attention to a thousand different things, but in each moment, you are attention is being drawn and being dedicated to something. And you are, you are making your mind. You're making your being in the world based on how you pay attention. And meditation is just this period in the day where you've decided. Okay, well for these 10 minutes, I'm going to give myself permission, not to think about anything else.
Other than just paying attention. But ultimately what once you see the power of It, ultimately your entire life becomes that even though you have to do other things, right? So you're doing like if I'm having this conversation, I'm fluctuating between being totally lost and clearly seen the nature of my mind in this moment I so it just it keeps its is absolutely no different from what I'm doing. If I sit aside set aside, 20 minutes to meditate
88 right? It's just it's it's the same mind. It's the same challenge of noticing thought as thought noticing mm. Oh, you know, clearly noticing emotions and their linkage to thought letting go of any grasping. It was pleasant or pushing what's unpleasant away and through the judgment and the contraction around experience, as you pay attention to your mind, you notice that that you tend to stay.
In one of two types of contractive contracted, this, your things are Pleasant and you're trying to squeeze more goodness out of it, right? So it's like, oh yeah, finally the good taste and you're you're you're contracted in avarice essentially, and when things are unpleasant, you're you're pushing them away or trying to change your bracing yourself against the physical pain, or the embarrassment or the. And again mindfulness is
Just the wide open non-judgmental willingness to feel both of those things. So you're the so it's you can even step back on the on the contraction. Like you can feel what you're doing, what you're supposed to do with the feeling tone of pleasure, or the feeling tone of pain and you recognize it all that's happening. It just against this clear mirror of awareness and you drop back and your and all of a sudden it's all floating free of that that
Is aware of it and you're just that condition of open receptivity and you just keep falling back into that. It's not to say you don't get caught trying to get some more pleasure out of that thing or you're trying to change this this painful thing. But the more you notice that fluctuation the more you notice that real relief is in not successfully doing either these two things. But in just recognizing your, the mirror of awareness and the the beautiful and ugly things are just going to
keep coming.
It's one of the places where mindfulness gets closer to stoicism. I think what's up Marcus Aurelius quote about the universe itself is change and life is but what we deem it? Yeah the story that we tell ourselves, I think you've got a an example that I use all of the time even in my own life for the people that do CrossFit or Brazilian jiu-jitsu or hardcore pickleball, the way that you feel at the end of one of those workouts were, you can taste metal in the back of your throat and your heart rates high, and you're sweating, and you're panting, and it's 105 degrees in Austin, Texas.
That's all our other that sensation is associated. With the story that you tell yourself that this is worthwhile that this is good for me, that this is something that I can feel proud of. But if you were to have that sensation, spontaneously, stood in line at the bank Road, be accomplishing through that to the get the tell her to call the fucking ambulance because this is terrifying. So, very much the story that we tell ourselves around the present moment largely determines our experience of it.
Yeah, and that's another example of a sort of a conceptual
optional layer which you can do a lot of wise work in changing, your experience by using certain kinds of Concepts, as an antidote to other bad Concepts. You tell yourself a better story. So to reframing is just a very good technique, but it's sort of a layer above the mindfulness layer of just noticing that they're all just stories, right? And and there's no place for them to land, right? So today and I think you people should intelligently engage both levels. I'm not discounting the power of reframing.
Yeah, and stoicism is fantastic. I mean, there's no bill. Irvin this philosophy Professor who wrote a great book, the guide to the good life has a track, has a series on waking up, that was really great. And so, you know, I'm kind of late to the stoicism as you know, I discovered it when more or less everyone else did in the last 10 years, but, you know, I hadn't read Seneca or Marcus Aurelius, you know, one, even, even when I got a Philosophy degree back in the day and
And it's syncretic just as an operating system for your mind. It's a very, just a very few tools you need
And What You've Won. Would just talk about here. Briefly on attributed, be just like - visualization. Just recognizing how happy you would be to really like, you're in this normal state of dissatisfaction recognize how much you would pay to be returned to this crappy little spot. You're in now that you're not enjoying if all of these other bad things that had happened, they're happening to someone right now and it just you're lucky enough that it's not you the things that you're ignoring now.
Now, taking for granted, you got the cancer, diagnosis lie. You're not getting today previously. Just things that you wish to that, you once had. Yeah. And yet you're able to continue to adapt to this. What do you disagree with stoicism about there? Anything that stands out? Why you think I'm not on board with that?
well, I think it had it probably has a too
I'm not sure their view of a barber of our emotional lives is something I would want to sign on to, in every respect. I mean, there's kind of a
detached from the decapitation of your child. There's a kind of a for ease of your business.
There's a fundamental Detachment that I'm not sure is the most interesting channel to be on. In the end, I made can be very useful given where we normally live, but
not so rich,
but also it's just
In my experience and make I have not you know I don't consider myself a true scholar of stoicism but I don't I don't think the stoic. I mean really the Greeks in general lacked a methodology. Right there are many. There are many of the insights that you can recognize in Buddhism.
You can also find among the Greeks, not just the stoics. I mean is maybe even more so among the Skeptics but they didn't really have a methodology of training attention and they didn't have a kind of a comprehensive marriage of spiritual contemplative training and ethical Insight. That is as is as
Systematic and is useful to I found in, in Buddhism in particular. So, I mean, I I'm a fan of other Eastern Traditions, as well, but again, not in a religious sense. But just taking, you know, I'm very eclectic taking what I think is useful and leaving the rest, but, you know, if you had to just go to one shelf in the bookstore, to find, you know, to Pareto optimize the whole spiritual journey, you really.
We can't do better than Buddhism in my view. I mean there's just there's they asked, there's some, there's certainly some bullshit that should be ignored or at least some stuff is unjustifiable that shouldn't be, you know, not too much Faith should be placed in. But it's you could almost pick at random, you know, like you go to the 10,000 page Corpus and just open it at random and you're not going to get A Treatise on how to sacrifice a goat, right or why you should kill homosexuals. You're going to get something.
Absolutely clear and totally serviceable in the 21st century about the nature of Consciousness. I
really enjoyed Robert Wright's book on. Yeah. Yeah, why. But doesn't miss troop talking about religion? I spent a good part of your career deconstructing religion. Yeah only for it to then perhaps be replaced with some similar religious thinking around things like identity politics.
Yeah
was that was creating that vacuum and error is there any way around this?
It's religious thinking just baked into our human.
I don't think it was the same people necessarily I'm not sure. It is true. That secularism and Atheism seem to win many subscribers in the intervening years. I don't know how much can be attributed to the so-called new atheists, but there was organized, religion seems to have lost many of us subscribers. And it's, you know,
Many of us perceive into that vacuum people found meaning in politics, which is arguably no more functional.
Yeah. I mean, I
I don't believe I may, I think many people will argue that other people need X, right? They need mythology, they need religion, they need whatever other people do you. And I don't you and I are smart enough successful enough. We got our head screwed on straight. We can get along fine without X. But other people, obviously, obviously the millions and millions people need X. I think that just shows a lack of imagination and it's patronising and I fear, it's actually just not accurate.
For many, many people rice, like, who needs eat, because you could do that with anything like that. All these people millions of people need
to be confused about human health and need to have like superstitions about how to be healthy you. And I can, we can deal with Biology and real medicine, but these people need, they need to believe that these bogus pills really work, right? It's just, why would we think that, right? And that's, it's, in fact, true that many people are stuck in that spot. And we have a, a challenge to disabuse them of certain bad ideas. But it's like, does anyone need astrology?
No, no one needs astrology. If we, if we categorically disproved astrology, such that it really landed for everybody. And all of these people, sort of staggered out of there, you know, dungeons with this astrology shaped hole in their lives that they had to figure out how to fill.
The problem just evaporates like they would, they don't fill it with in astrology shaped object. They would actually just be disabused of the astrology solution and they would go on to believe and do other things now.
It just so happens that most of the time.
We have we have we have strands of culture, where it's not only hard to disabuse. People have bad ideas, it's taboo to do it, right? So it's like specifically with respect to religion in in current politics with respect to certain pieces of, you know, far left and Far Right ideology. You know, I think we're more tune with the far left at the moment. It's just, you know, they're kind of blasphemy tests in both spaces. There's, you know, there's dogmatism that goes on
There's no, not only unexamined, it's in a religious context, it's a virtue that is dogmatic. I mean, the Dogma is literally a good word in a religious context. So like these, these are facts. They're not going to be, we're not going to reconsider them any demand that we reconsider them. We're going to consider a kind of violent assault when we're going to, you know, not only, we're not going to talk to you really. Even if we pretended to have a debate with you, we're going to hate.
At you. And if we only had enough power, we would, you know, physically subjugate you right. Sounds pretty religious. That's that's where the so they're parts of culture where we're stuck there. But it just doesn't seem that the idea that it's necessary, that more people can't be like us, right? Just seems like a failure of imagination to me. I think, I think that everyone could have
a truly 21st century non-sectarian relationship to all ideas, all possible projects, all invitations to collaboration. We could just deal with everything on its merits and we could Avail ourselves of all the world's literature, all the Legacy code, everything that's still serviceable, everything that's good. And if part of that is the Golden Rule well, yeah, sure it is. Yeah, the golden rule is great but you don't have to believe.
Was the son of God are born of a virgin to think the golden rule is great and the first, you just recognize a golden rule came from Jesus. But it also came in in the Old Testament, it came in other contexts. I mean, it's just a, it's like, the golden rule is just an ethical Jewel, that, that many people have have stumbled upon. We, we should just use this, the totality of human knowledge in the present. And to do that, honestly,
Requires that we not firewall certain parts of that knowledge with these dogmatic claims to be divine inspiration. Or, you know, you're a racist if you even consider the possibility that that, you know, a virus came out of a lab, right? It's just
it's been interesting to me to watch this especially because mean Douglas Murray became friends just after he wrote The Madness of crowds and in that he's talking about the collapse of grand narratives, right? He's talking about the fact that people are latching themselves.
Onto ideological movements, political movements, identity-based, movements, to try and fill. What he saw as a whole, that had been left with this, this Grand narrative that came over the top. And it's interesting to me to think that, you know, that book
15 years ago would have kind of felt like, like, what the fuck are we talking about here? We have bigger fish to fry when it comes to what, people are ideologically, kind of addicted to which might have been more in your wheelhouse and yet in the space of no time at all this compulsion for something. Yeah, rather than nothing.
But I mean, there are other
Variables and their their obvious economic ones me. The fact that virtually all of the productivity gains in the last really 50, 60 years, have gone to the top 10% in our society. Right now literally I think it's
Ninety-two percent of the stock market is owned by the top. 10% I think, is like 50%, but by the top one percent, right? So, you know, it's just a 90% of people aren't in the game and not reaping the benefits of modernity in an economic sense, and they feel the dissident, the obvious dissatisfaction. And, you know, one could argue unfairness of that, I mean, our system is not tuned to to wisely.
Lee.
Cause all boats sir, even most boats to rise with, with this particular tight, right? It's just not, I mean, we got 10% of the boats doing pretty great. And then we got one percent and then the top one, you know, 1% of 1% doing, especially great. And this, this kind of stratification, given that. So, much of people's sense of how they're doing, so much of their, you know, concept-based estimation of their own well-being. And therefore, they're
Experience well-being is comparative, right? I mean, they're, they're, they're not. And then, the, in many cases, they're not even begrudging. You know, Jeff Bezos on his yacht. They're just, they're just noticing the difference between their life and the, you know, people, you know, one who live, one mile away, right? It's like I said so much of these
So when you price that in the consequences of inequality, wealth inequality and income inequality, I think that could be enormously agitating to people and also give Big E can make certain in this case you know a populist narratives attractive that would otherwise discredit themselves because they're not.
They're obviously not wise, right? Like if you don't have it, you don't have skin in the game, right? Like the game, this game is just not working. Well, then of course you want to upend the board, right? And then you'll enjoy watching the pieces fly all over the room because this game this particular game of Monopoly was not you didn't have anything on Park Place. Right? You know none of that money was yours really it's easy. A you know it's easy to see why many many millions of people would be cynical and just want to see.
They just want to see change, right? They just want to start, right? Yeah. They just don't want to see a wrecking ball come through and reset things and I, you know, credit Trump and trumpism as a, you know, a symptom of that more than more than a cause really it's just a we were ready for that moment. I
think it's, I think it's Warren Buffett. I'll Charlie Munger that says
We would be able to be happy if we just wanted to do better. But we don't, we want to do better than our next door neighbor. And it's this perpetual one-upmanship and sort of keeping up with the Joneses. So I agree that, you know, its massive wealth inequality causes Discord and upset. And perhaps Prime's the landscape for people to want change regardless of where it comes from, right. But I'm pretty sure that that continues all the way down or what all the way up as wealth continues to increase. It's one of the reasons that I'm
Relatively skeptical of Ubi, because I think that, if you just flatten, the playing field, you then start to play games about people are going to find people, going to find ways to do status. You know, will store who wrote that. Great great book the state this game, you know, there's this tribe somewhere that growth yams. They grow massive yam, these unbelievably huge amount and have to takes for men to wheelbarrow these yams. And and I'm pretty sure that the what you do is you give the yam to your greatest enemy or something like that. And it's almost like it's like, yeah, there's yams shape middle finger that you
like I'm so rich. I could
I could forsake us.
Yeah, yeah. Precisely. You know people will find ways to compete the status and keeping up with the Joneses is, is it permeates an awful lot status is a game that everybody is going to continue to
play
Yeah.
I mean, I would recommend in that case, I would recommend that we seek our status more and more in being above that game. Now, and that's not as
Absurd as it sounds right. Like you can eat, you can see piece of the pieces of this interest, how very rich successful people already start to behave? Like you like, you know, at a certain level of success, like it's important that you're wearing a suit and you, you know, drive a nice car, you have a nice watch and you have all those signs of status, but at a certain point, you know, you show up in a hoodie because, you know, everyone knows, you know, you're they know you're you know,
they know you're a billionaire is yeah, the richest people drive the shit just cause
right.
Like and it certainly I don't have a guy just boober, you're not have a car. Now you can be cynical about all that but and you know some cynicism is appropriate but there are benign forms of like if I guess you could probably notice this now happening around climate change and private airplanes. Right? Like so it was the case that the highest status position with respect to travel as well. I've got a Gulfstream you wanted to either you'll just take my Gulfstream you know
What could be better than that? Well that's starting to erode the more stigma gets attached to two just squandering fuel on a Gulfstream, right? The more your you look like an asshole for doing that? No matter what story you tell yourself, no matter how successful you are, no matter how much it saves your time, you sort of look like an asshole on a Gulfstream. At a certain point, you can imagine that flipping and it all of a sudden, the high, the real high status thing is now I just fly commercial there. It's like, you know, you can see Ilan flying JetBlue
Ooh. And it's just, yeah, I just fly JetBlue. It's like and and it'll be it will because be because so much punishment has been meted out on the other side. Like it just it no longer looks cool to be burning that much fuel. Now, I'm hopeful that we do live in a world of just really open-ended, abundance, where? Yes, there is actually no tension between affluence and ethics in the end, right? So that ultimately, we're going to get the right fuels. We're
Going to power this all with sunlight. We're going to have a high-tech Society where our machines get better and better and we start pull pulling wealth essentially you know, out of The Ether.
The sleeve aisi but you know, it's a successful successful proliferation of a I would be part of this. I'm you know as you know worried that we're going to screw that up or that that isn't just in fact too hard a challenge. But let's say we got that, right? Ultimately. This could be a have-your-cake- and-eat-it-too situation where it's not a matter of of
Denying ourselves, anything really materially. Except we should recognize that we that are there certain degree certain disparities of luck that we find ethically intolerable, right? Like it's like it just a how
given that it be currently. And for the longest time there is a zero-sum tension between a dollar spent over here in a dollar. Not spent over here at just, how comfortable should each of us be with, you know, a gini coefficient in our own society that just goes, you know, goes asymptotic really like what, you know, like we're at one, right? Like yes, I've got a trillion dollars. But now my main preoccupation is trying to figure out how my
Pound in New Zealand is going to be staffed with bodyguards. I can really trust colleagues not to kill me and he like the douglas douglas rushkoff
you conversation show and tell me that story
enough. Yeah so it's just like yeah if that's where your mind goes, you should be spending much more time with your billions and trillions. Figure out how to make a society where all you meet. When you walk out on the sidewalk are other happy people and have in your case, happy customers who are just doing creative things.
Things in their free time and
how much of a difference do you think that would be over the last few years in culture was coaching discussions? If Christopher Hitchens was still alive?
Well, it would silence all the morons who think that he might have supported Trump. I think that's. That would be, that would be worth resurrecting him, just for that. Just to see the look on their face when he got him talking about Trump. I can't believe the people I've heard from on that point.
Yes, he hated the clintons but there is zero percent probability that he would have had anything kind to say about Trump.
I don't think it would have been different. We have been wonderful to have ridden shotgun with him, on many of these topics. I mean, he was, you know, I'm, I'm a fan as well as a friend, but
I don't think, you know,
I mean he was a, he was enough of a an old dog. Who would have been hard enough to teach New Tricks. I'm not sure he would have been lighting up Twitter. The way. Many people might hope I mean maybe but he's, yeah, I mean, he's much more like someone who would have for the longest. He was not an early adopter in any sense, you know. It's like, he just he barely could barely do email in the, in a normal way, right? So
it's just, it's
Yeah, I think he would. I mean many of us are in this spot. I mean, many of us were much more early adopters and more Tech enabled than he ever was. You know, we there's a kind of a Nostalgia for books and old models. And some of us are trying to figure out how to return to that, in new ways, right? So yeah, I mean, he loved literature so much and and print so much that I think he would be, he would still be clinging for dear life, to shelves of books.
And a business model that tries to prioritize physical
books over and post, basically everything way of doing, what about the way, what do you think he would have made of the state of cultural discourse at the moment, knowing what you knew about
him.
Well, I think he would have found if he would have been in this on characterisible Middle where half the time, you're recognizing all. That's wrong and masochistic. And in saying about woke, notice, and all that's wrong, and sadistic and dangerous in trumpet Stan. And
Just taking each each difficult object as it comes right. You know, I'm at the key would be
I mean, perhaps, I flatter myself but I think he would be very much in my Lane with certain exceptions. I miss certain things that I'm very interested in and which I prioritize which he never saw the point of much of which we talked about here. I mean meditation spirituality psychedelics, he had no file on any of this and I don't think was going to get a file, he's an amazing because Mary's comp I think along with yeah yeah well though I think Douglas is more Douglas. I haven't gone around this track. I don't think but
Phelan Douglas, more of a
Kind of a yearning for this, the spiritual, then, then I've ever detected, an itch, you know, hitch was just prided himself on, with, keep being here and being harder headed than that. Yeah, it was the grape and the Grain and, and the pleasure of good books.
Yeah, I I often think about have a couple of friends Alex, as one of them who's a huge fan of hitch and threw him in someone's passionate about something, you end up becoming passionate about it because of that passion. Yeah, my housemate. We always watch videos of motocross, rallycross, sorry, whether guys are going down and you'll see these dudes and anoraks, and it's in the middle of Montana, or Liverpool or some wooded area somewhere, and they've been there all night to get the right spot and it's pissing down.
Down and they're soaked wet through and they get to see roughly, no point. Three seconds, right? Have a cargo past. Yeah. And as they do it, there's so fired up and seeing someone love anything that much. Your eye is me up to watch it as well at this. There was this blog post by Scott, Alexander from slight stock, quote, now, astral, Kodak, 10, code accident and no. Sorry, it wasn't. It was aliens. Are you kautsky? And it's at the very start of rationality from AI 2 zombies. Mmm. And he says, the reason that rationalist
Scare the piss taken out of them. So much, one of the many reasons that they get the piss taken out of them so much is, it's rare to find anybody that loves anything. Now, anybody to have a degree of passion, and if you find someone who stumbles upon the book of rationality and thinks this gives me answers to a lot of the cognitive bias problems that have been facing in my life.
It's just easy to mock them, it's easy to mock passion in that regard in some circles. I think specifically being British this is sort of Genie, logically something that we've got right the tall. Poppy piss taking mocking, yeah undertone. And yeah from Alex loving hitch so much. I got into him too and then you know, thinking about what sort of vacuum that perhaps could have left and I don't disagree that
Culture is bigger than any culture is bigger than all of us, but there are certain voices. You know, Jordan is being a good example at the right place and the right time so on and so forth that can really be the, you know, the pebble in the Stream that can direct things or Trump on another side, you know, Ilan, kind of now. Yeah, I often wonder about what what hitches Behavior would have been like in the in the modern world? Yeah, yeah. Well I certainly miss him because
I mean, there's so many moments where they would just be sure there were just perfectly teed up for him in the last six years and I would just politically it. Just you just would. Yeah, there's no one. I would like to have pulled onto the field more than then hitch. It certain moments both both left and
right. Have you been keeping abreast of you noticed this trend that's happened of westerners. Choosing to convert to Islam in
adult life. Obviously spent a lot of your career criticizing Islam and now we have, I don't know, accusative lopping these people very well made truly believe in the doctrine. But Andrew Tabler is one of them and downstream from that there's on Street interviews with young British, youths with these Islamic scholars, or imams, or whatever converting them on the street and they're really like, and doing the doing the thing on the, on the street of you, have you happy?
I haven't seen those Vox pop conversions but I saw Andrew Tate's conversion. Well, I mean, Islam is just medically. It's perfect for a specific audience, you know. It's
It's a explicitly Macho religion, right? It's a no pussies religion, right? It's just a and is it just, you know, it's a like what? With Christianity? You have to pretend these? Yeah, well, you have to pretend to be happy to be losing for the longest time, and you're basically just waiting for Jesus to come back and rectify. This gray
Of Injustice, like, you're the meek shall inherit the earth. You're just, you know, there's no putting this place, right? We're not going to win until we really until we see. You know, Jesus arrived on cloud trailing Clouds Of Glory. So it's all going to be fucked up for the longest time and there's no imperative that we really do anything. Really? Like there's no expectation that we are going to win before anything good happens. I mean, I guess there's one Christian sect where they do have an expectation of
Of of kind of winning, you know, but thousand a thousand years of millennial, Glory until and, and then Jesus comes. But for most Christians, it's a story of failure. And then they get to say, look, we were right, you know Jesus, you know? Yeah yeah. With Islam. There's an expectation that they're going to conquer the world, right. And there's an imperative to conquer the world and pursuit for serious Muslim, just like it. You don't have to be impatient necessarily you can
As long as you want. But this is all we all know. This is moving in One Direction and you need to be a spiritual Warrior. And if you, if you take this really far, if you become a jihadist, right? You're especially doctrinaire militant. You know, true Belieber. Well, then you're a kind of spiritual James Bond. I mean, it's like, it's like, you get to be Jocko and care about and know that you're going to go to paradise, right? Like so, you get all the tools like it's the it's the first
A shooter that literally get all the good guns. Like, it's not, it's not this boring. I'm pretending to just, I'll turn the other cheek, you know, hitting you know. Thank, thank you, sir. Can I have another and, you know, where the it's
It's a high tea religion, right? And that's why a schmuck like Andrew Tate thinks it's, he's had a, you know, a real insight people embracing it. People are seeing it as a redress, to women of the West who have been conned by feminism into believing that these things are good for them. They're not good for them. We need, you know, no one's happy. Look at the divorce rates. Look at the 60% of u.s. teenage girls age.
Twelve to sixteen have regular a persistent feelings of hopelessness. Yeah. Everyone's only funds pathologically fapping themselves into early, Monster Energy, hole, or whatever it is that they're
doing wrote.
The answer is a return to something that's got a bit more Lindy nature to it.
Yeah, well, I mean, that that's the claim.
That I want to deny that mean, it's explicitly retrograde. I mean, it is regressive. It is backward-looking, it is not, it is not using all of the good ideas we've had in the meantime, right. It's like, it's a disavowal of the present and the near present. I mean, the modernity in the case of Islam, as a dis is a disavowal of nearly 1,400 years of wisdom and insight, right? It's it's a claim that in the seven.
Century. Somebody was so smart and so wise and so prescient. And so had his shit together that everything were thinking about and talking about happened then, right? So we should confine ourselves to the products of that conversation that's just I mean it's imbecilic on its face right now. It's not to say again. That's not to say there's nothing useful to come out of Islam but whatever is useful, we can use without believing that Muhammad was visited by the Archangel Gabriel.
And got any cut the last, You Know, download from the creator of the universe.
It's just not you. This is not to deny any of the cultural problems that someone like Andrew Tate or maybe this is a lots of people we've dragged into the conversation here. But like all of these people who I've criticized to some degree, Tate, or RFK, or or we could add you on to this met, all these people are
Living out the consequences of their dissatisfaction with the present on the public stage, and winning a lot of followers as a result. They just like the I, you know, they like the way these guys are complaining about the obvious excesses of the left for the most part.
I have several problems with this one. Is that most of these guys, most of the time, some of them, all of the time are ignoring the obvious problems and and in many cases quite a bit scarier problems on the right, right? They really care that the government tried to micromanage the, the messaging about covid on Twitter, right? That's the biggest story of the decade, right? That's, I've got, I've got 100
and me and 100 newsletters in addition to that on that topic, but they don't really much care about what happened on January 6th where we had a sitting president, who for months had been declining to support a peaceful transfer of power and for the first time in our history, we did not have a peaceful transfer of power and we had a sitting president, trying to visibly trying to steal an election all the while claiming an election had been stolen from him and everyone around,
And him knew that was bullshit, right? We were, we were poised on the verge of a constitutional crisis, which may yet return in 2024. And yet we have these guys more worried about, you know, trans overreach with respect to bathrooms and
I get all that, I get how infuriating so much of the, the the woke identitarian nonsense is, but you have to have some proportion and you have, you have to keep both problems and View. And
why are people not doing that in your view?
Well, I mean, it's so to some degree, it's people have, you know, a one-sided take aligns with their biases. And in many cases they'll have political biases that, you know, that they were a creature of the right, they wanted to be a creature of the right, and this is very easy to focus on what's wrong with the left and vice versa. You know, if you're a creature of the left is easy to just be all Trump all the time and you don't have any time for criticism of woke. That's right. You know you're going to run who I don't know. Your
It's could be wrong but you know tree or Trevor Noah on The Daily Show, right? Like yes tell me what fucking John? Don jr. Did wrong. I've got time for it but hunter Biden who cares, right? Like this so there's a symmetry there and
But part of it, I think is outside of normal channels. There's there's audience capture, right? Like you find you get signal from the noise on one thing, you've just launched your sub stack and you and you see that people have endless time for your hot. Take on covid and the dangers of mRNA. And the spike protein boy, doesn't that sound scary? It's called why they call it a spike protein, right? So,
Let's do 100 pieces of piece of content on that topic, right? To the exclusion of everything else that's happened. I'm not saying I know the MRNA vaccines aren't going to fuck some people up. Or haven't already, right? It's valid conversation worth having. But again there's proportion here that gets totally lost in each of these ecosystems. And what's happening out here in podcast to Stan and over there and substantive Stan is
people find a
an appetite for a certain style of conversation about a specific narrow band of topics and they just go all in on that for obvious reasons and I, you know, it's understandable but I think it's
It's shattering our society. I mean, we have a society where increasingly, and this is again, this is a near-term risk of AI. You leave an existential risk aside. We have a society where it's becoming increasingly difficult. And in many cases impossible to have a conversation about facts that are just
Crucial to understand for the maintenance of democracy for the for public health forever, you know, on Myriad fronts and we just we can't have a real-time conversation that converges on agreement. It seems and it's just getting harder and harder to do it. What would
be the chance in your mind that we make it through the next?
Let's call it Century. As a civilization would something like us being functioning still intact because we have some breakdowns culturally, many breakdowns, culturally we have bad incentives. We have a media system, which facilitates Bad actors either willfully, or negligently or ignorantly Rising risk of artificial intelligence desktop printers that can synthesize bioweapons. Although, there's some pretty good Clauses in
That that limit that from happening population collapse although not a true existential risk something that's you know not it's definitely not going to help nuclear weapons still out there looking around all of the background natural risk. That just exists as a byproduct of us being on a single planet at the moment. Yeah.
How Toby old pilled are you when it comes to the conception of The Next Century or two?
Well, I'm like, Toby I would just be guessing, but I'm I'm trouble. That's what I would like to be able to say, is, you know, the chant the chance that existential.
Catastrophe is actually going to occur is got to be minuscule, right? Like it's less than 1%, like, that's where you'd want to be. You'd want it, you're just guessing but very low probability that we're going to wipe ourselves out are there we're going to cancel the future. I don't think that's the case. Like I just think it's it's whether it's I mean even you know, even a ten percent probability
T is awful, right? I mean, 10% comes up, you know, you just the expected value of that, just take out some dice and play around and see what a 10% result. Looks like how often that comes up, right? I mean, that's
That's terrifying. And I think there are many smart people who would say the risk of real catastrophe is quite a bit higher than 10%. Think
Tony puts it at 1 in 6 right over the next Century.
Yeah, I believe so and if you if you kind of widen the footprint of you take existential risk and you just widen that to extreme risk, right? Just like, okay, it's not existential but you know, get
You know, you might want to watch The Road Warrior films a few more times because that's going to be that's going to start to look like the future, right? Who wants to live in in the aftermath of societal collapse you know fundamental societal collapse. Now it could be like that's a totally conceivable trajectory for our species. We could we could screw up everything and dig out and
Only recover and it could take a unnecessary. We could have this unnecessary, and truly harrowing detour into something awful for 100 years, right? But who wants that? And, but if you, but if you add that to this possibility, space,
Yeah, I don't you know how confident can you be that? Something like that isn't going to happen in the next hundred years, given what we're doing and what we're finding it so difficult to do, and that's what was so dispiriting for me about covid and it's aftermath. It's not that I was
so worried about covid. I was so worried about our inability to respond, coherently to something that was should have been pretty simple to respond to, right? And and so I was for the longest time and there was this initial month where we are to where you're like, who knows how bad this is going to get, who knows how bad this is. So yeah, I was just thinking more about covid but after
A couple of months, I was much more thinking about it as a stress test for society and for our information ecosystem, and for our cultural norms and our politics, and I really do view it as a failed, dress rehearsal, for something quite a bit scarier. Let me lay this out for people. Maybe who haven't heard you talk about this before or haven't, thought about the what happened with regards to our cultural response.
For you might need a bit more grip on the bilayer.
The way that you can see Kobe, the way that you could concept. Conceptualize covid, generally would be almost like a dress rehearsal, almost like a civilizational wide vaccine like a test. It was a very weak virus in the end. Thank God for that. You know. Didn't the mortality rate? Wasn't there. Transmissibility was pretty high but it wasn't it wasn't super brutal when it came to the deaths. Although not great. But what it did do and I think you're worried and minor line here which is and I haven't heard anybody know.
Matter how ardently anti-vaxxer anti lock down, anti-mask to lived hard. Cocks are coming for us again using, this is all Bill Gates is sort of wet dream type stuff. It doesn't matter about those and I have many agreements with those people. I haven't heard anybody push back against. What this did do was Prime.
The next four generations of humans for as long as this is a still a cultural meme that continues to take over for the next time that something like this potentially happens but this time it's got a 30% mortality, right? All this time. It kills everybody under the age of 10 or this time. It kills all women. Yeah. Right. What what what is the response that occurs there? Given how we've been primed previously and
I would love to hear, you know, the, I would love to hear the, the, like, we don't need to worry about that, bro. Case for that, because regardless of how you thought, what whether it was over each, whether it was these, these Cooks telling us to stay in our houses, fuck you. I'm getting, I'm going out and playing with the kids and cutting open the locks to the local park that it's made the situation worse. It's made the situation existentially. Civilization Ali, it's primed us to be more fragile.
More me jerk in terms of our response, it's not good.
Yeah. Well and that's where I parted company with many of our fellow podcasters and many of my friends and in some cases former friends in
The this again, this concerned around misinformation is the way I would tend to frame it. You know, many people are out in podcast. Land are
Allergic to a concern over misinformation because they're so concerned about the the infringement or perceived infringement of freedom of speech, right? So the D platforming of people from YouTube like that is, that is the
You know, the earth-crossing object that we just, we have to prioritize with it. Like, under, no circumstances. Can that happen I even with Alex Jones? Like, that's just, we need to, we need to hold the line here. We need to be free speech, absolutist of A Sort and
That's more or less. All they talk about their within and then on the other side we have people who are focused on the misinformation problem. They're focused on the on the
I mean, the real Calamity we just witness where you just see like you have public health information that just cannot get through because there's so much misinformation. There's so many conspiracy theories. And there's so many pratfalls on the pot, on the part of the act, the actual establishment. That is understandable, that no one is the fuck. Am I gonna listen to? Yeah, right, so it's but they're still there. They're taking the one that they
They can't afford to admit any of that because they're so terrified around about this erosion of trust in our institutions, right? So it's like me take someone like,
This is a few lenses. You would you look at the survey you take like a character like Anthony fauci, right? I gotta I don't know if ouchy I don't know what's true of him, I don't know who, you know, but but I just know that on on one side. He is utterly maligned, right? He's just this Goblin. Who is as corrupt as you could possibly imagine. He lied about everything. He was wrong, about everything. Like he is just he is the antithesis of an authority on covid or anything else, right on another side.
Answers bring you can still just bring him on CNN as just the most top-shelf Authority on public health, we could ever, we could hope to have and The Only Thing Worth thinking about is just how awful his life has become as a result of how he's been maligned over here, right? He's just inundated with death threats. He needs a secret service detail because all of these crazy people from Trump on down, have vilified him with lies right now, I am totally prepared to imagine that the true.
This is quite a bit more nuanced that he could have been a great scientist. Maybe he is a great scientist. Maybe he did many great things, but maybe he's conflicted and only two other ways which have been discovered by people like RFK junior or other people. Some people might have been total, crackpots, but they're right about this thing that fauci did or didn't do, right? And that if we, if we were going to parse it in the middle, here, we would find. Oh yeah. You know what, this Wuhan thing was always going to go Haywire. He should have known it. He's in
He's culpable and was lying about his culpability and that exchange with him and Rand. Paul was one where Rand, Paul, whatever you think about his politics was absolutely, right and fauci. Whatever you think about his politics was basically just trying to cover his ass with this. You know, rabbinical definition of gain of function, which we all knew was bullshit and we shouldn't be doing this research. And and it's
Fauci, for whatever reason, can't admit that, he participated in something that was awful, right. I don't know. I don't know if any of that's true. I mean, it, whether fauci is involved with that, but I do have a lot of time for anyone who worries about gain-of-function, research, and worries about what is happening in Labs all over this world.
But the problem is, if you're focused on what failed over here, when you, if you're, if you're, if you're focused on, this is a failed dress rehearsal, what we didn't manage during covid and the basic certainty that we're going to have something much worse, right? And then we have to prepare for that.
It's very easy to see that you just have to basically ignore all of this. Like we just have to, we just have to stigmatize. All of this is conspiracy thinking. All of these people are like non-standard Bad actors. None of them have real jobs, they're all they just have podcasts and newsletters just get the New York Times And The Washington Post and Harvard University and all these other institutions to hold the line here. Let's let's try to
Just not shine too much light on the ways. We embarrassed ourselves, we're certainly not going to apologize for anything and let's hope we get a better president, Republican or Democrat next time. Who's not a maniac, who didn't do give us first interviewed? Alex Jones. And let's just get back into a place where everyone trusts the CDC again right now. I don't agree with that but
Like 75% of that could be right, right? Like I like I think we could age out of all of this hysteria, you know, just a Min. Just imagine what would happen if in 2024,
We had a, we had a reasonable choice for the presidency, right? So it's Trump is not the Republican candidate. We have a more normal Republican candidate who, let's say, wins, right? I don't know who that would be, but let's say whatever, you know, Nikki Haley wins, right? We have President Haley. She no longer has to Pander to Trump. A stand to be Republican, we get a more normal politics and we, and many, many smart people. However, quietly begin to internalize many of the lessons. We should have learned in the last few years.
About just how threadbare many of our institutions have become and how woke ideology vitiated most of them. Right? I mean, how political correctness and just sheer lunacy, contaminated are thinking about so many things, so much of the time in recent years and we sort of age out of all of that. And we have a more normal experience of the grown-ups being in the room, much of the time, being able to make real
Decisions. The I think that's to be hoped for now. I'm not saying we don't need Innovation around that but like that some rich some swing back into normalcy is to be hoped for what's what there's an alternate paths to that future, that may be more realistic but the future worth wanting is a future. However, we get there. Whether it's just sort of like, we just, you know, grit our teeth and age into something more normal or we
Date and dignify all of this hysteria with with more and more of a fair hearing. But the thing we innovate to is
Real institutions that we can trust right. There is no future worth wanting where we don't have institutions that are trustworthy, right? So we need like, it cannot be up to
A podcaster to tell you what's happening, really happening in Ukraine.
When Putin says, alright, we're going to use the fucking tactical nukes now.
Me, first of all, in a few months, you're not going to be able to know whether he really said that the or whether that's a deep fake, right? So we're going to have, we're going to need an institution or at least a perfectly democratized algorithm, that is vetted by an institution. We trust that can say this is how you tell whether that's really Putin or whether it whether that's just some 18 year old who made that oh, you know, with with a generative model. And but regardless of how we how we
Clean house with respect to basic information. We need institutions with real experts who really capture our best thinking and decision-making on hard problems. You know. So and we need a population in every democracy that most of the time can trust those institutions. Like, like when the state department says, listen, this is what's happening in Ukraine, this is what Putin's up to
You know, this is why we have the policy. We have, this is why we ship the arms. We shipped.
We can't have a society where 90% of the people are calling bullshit. 90% of the time, because no one trusts anyone in charge, that's just, that is the end of democracy.
But that's why we are.
That is that, that is where we, I mean, it much of the time that's where we seem to be certainly on. If you use social media as your reference
point, well you mentioned this. I think in a different podcast about how the soon as you exit social media, you realize just how little of the world kind of does take the cues about the world from social media. I think maybe in the UK 10%
or 20% between 10 and 20% of people have got a Twitter account, but then when you go down there, I think almost all of the content is created by some ungodly small proportion of the, number of users. So everybody else for functionally. It's sort of wanking in the corner and observing this. This thing go off and not contributing or maybe signal boosting or or whatever but it's the same culprits that a talking about everything on all sides. Yeah, so you end up. I remember this during the
Election in the UK, to the whenever it was 2019, something like that. And if you'd looked at Twitter you would have, it would have been a labor Landslide, you know. Storm Z was tweeting about it, pretty sure that some of the actresses that play, the were in Game of Thrones. They were tweeting about her fucking hell storm, Z, and Arya Stark are tweeting about the labor and how bad the conservatives are. And, you know, like, never trust a Tory, and all this stuff. And then we have the biggest landslide in history. Oh, and a half.
A century perhaps to go the other way because where I'd been the cultural thermometer that I'd put up the behind of Twitter wasn't
accurate? Yeah, except it was the opposite with Trump and brexit, right? So like I what I was noticing with Trump in 2016 or I should have noticed, is that, you know, whenever I said anything about Trump and or Clinton prior to the election, the support for Trump, I was seeing on social media was like 100 to 1 over
Support for Clinton and it was just crazy and you know, the polls were whatever. You know, Trump had a 25% chance of winning out again. I was I never looked at that pole and thought there's no way Trump is going to win because it 25% chance is as we've just established. You know that comes up all the time, right? So if you're going to take, if you're going to dignify Nate, silver as a real statistician, with respect to those opinion polls. Yeah. The you can't be consoled by 25%.
Really when you're, when you're as worried as you had, every right to be about a trump presidency but what I was seeing on social media should have told me that the mainstream media is conversation about this was not tracking what was happening. I mean,
well, you can see, you know, given this impending ever-increasing existential risk, background the landscape culturally that people are inhabiting, whether it be mainstream, whether it be
Tentative meter or whatever, I can understand why people are feeling confused and displaced. And I've noticed on the internet a trend of cynicism I would. Yes, give it a single term. It would be very, very high amount of cynicism given that, there's so much despondency in the world. What do you wish that more lost or cynical, or depressed? People knew what would you? What would you? What would you tell them about? This is my worldview. Everything's fucked, it's not going to get better.
My God, my family, my future. There is no point even trying in the people that say that things can get better. They're the ones that are the real problem. What do you say to people that are
cynical?
Well, many of the tools we've referenced so far are incredibly useful and they just take the stoic piece for instance. I mean the real comparison is
That's worth making is that there's never been a moment in human history where there has been more opportunity for more people to live a truly good life and not not just to live a truly good life with respect to your own selfish pleasure, but to affect the future in a propitious way, we just have massive leverage over the future. I mean, we it's up to us to get this, right? Maybe, this could have been said, you know, I'm sure this could have been said during WWII that
And it was, it was true that yeah, that the difference between a Thousand-Year Reich and and what we got was pretty big. So yeah, props to Churchill but the
we really are at a unique moment, it with respect to the leverage and the and the the
The disparity of outcomes suggested by the power of our technology, which is the exponential change, we're seeing in culture. And and with respect to Tech, this is new. You know this is a decade is much longer now than it ever has been with as measured by the kinds of technological and social change that we can see. And so if you can
If you want to have a meaningful life, if you want, if you want Economic Opportunity and you want you, and you want to exercise that opportunity in a context where you can actually benefit people at scale and the future at scale. It's never been easier to do that. It's never been. It's like it just, you know, the iPhone that you have in your pocket which is
In most people's case fragmenting their life unnecessarily and just becomes a source of distraction at best, you know, misery at worse.
Is actually an incredibly powerful computer that would be, you know, to two decades ago would have been an object of genuine magic, right? It's like it's like it's just not the president of the United States. Couldn't have had 120 years ago, right? And that's just going to keep happening, right? It's just like, we're all, you know, again a eyes is
is an ambiguous object at the moment, but
To have access to a large language. Model is genuinely new. And who knows what you can do with it, right? It's like, it's up to you to figure out how to use these tools. So the there's massive opportunity even if you or someone
Who doesn't feel like you have a ton of opportunity by comparison with your, you know, friends or with other people. You see in your society and I think if you have the bandwidth to listen to a three hour podcast, you almost certainly or someone who's in something like a sweet spot, right? With respect to opportunity it's just yeah. On the other side of that ye, I remember you saying, living an examined life is just one insult after another. You have to maintain
In a sense of humor.
Yeah, why. What does that
mean?
What because what you, the more you pay attention to your own mind, you see that it has absolutely no shame. I mean it'll think anything right? Like it like it like the person you meet. It's not it's not as if you don't meet st. Francis of Assisi, you know in the mirror. It's like you you meet a a Congress of selves, right? And many of these selves our total assholes right there just like you meet.
It's everything right? And and you ultimately can't take it personally, right? Like you're not, you didn't create yourself, you didn't create your culture, you didn't create your Consciousness, like your you are a, you find yourself here in this circumstance. And the question is, what can you do next? What is available to to experience next, what is possible, given the kind of mine.
And you have. And so we haven't, you know, we morally and psychologically existentially. We have a navigation problem moment to moment, and there are there are various tools you can get in hand to be a much wiser and happier.
Pilot.
That's one of the reasons I think that under human particularly has been so rapidly popular. You know, he was kind of a publicly didn't exist, probably three years ago, maybe something like that. And now regularly is number one and number two worldwide. And every podcast chart wrote that seems reliable. And then he's doing A three-and-a-half-hour Treatise on caffeine.
And yeah, I'll something and, you know, to get to that stage of scientific communication. I wouldn't have been able to predict. I wouldn't. I don't think that I would have been able to predict that people would have wheels. Talk about the podcast Revolution. People wouldn't have sat down and listened to such, and such, and such, and such talk for Jocko willing cancer Medal of Honor recipient for six hours and yeah, blah, blah blah. A human took that to another level. He took that to a level where you think really great with the adenosine system for three and a half hours.
And I think that one of the reasons that Andrew particularly has been so effective, is that he is trying to cut through all of the chaos and he Bridges the gap between the reliable expert. That's sufficiently credentialed and the upstart podcaster. That's got his heterodox bona fide he's and he's sort of splits the two. Yeah.
Yeah and he's I love what he's doing. I think he's incredibly effective.
But you'll notice he also bypasses all of the contentious bullshit that that we spent a lot of time talking about here. Like he does not deal with politics, he does not want to offend anyone. He doesn't go or anyone's sacred cow except on these narrow topics of just had optimize your life with the best science right now. That is and there are other you know friends who have podcast more or less in that vein like Peter Tia or Tim Ferriss. I mean
These are all people who they have opinions. Presumably about all this other stuff but they don't tend to dig in on these any of these culture
War. I do apologize on through the Minefield of
traps like let's let's let you know. You can figure out Trump on your own time. You can figure out if black lives matter on your own time. Somebody about nicotine. Let's just let's just see whether you should be, you know, getting eight hours of sleep a night, right? In with you want to track that with a the aura ring. I don't mean to trivialize any of that. That's all.
Super fun and useful, but there are other fires we have to figure out how to put out and you can't just ignore the fires, right? Like it's just these, these problems over here, are not going to go away, even if we all dial in our lives individually, right? And it's so, yeah, I mean, I just think there's
I mean, it's a kind of super power to decide.
Whatever my opinion is on all of these contentious topics, I don't feel any need to give it. I have all of these. There's just this absolute Feast of other things that we can enjoy and 95% of people are just going to love the love. What's on the menu? I think he's the only podcaster that I know of you actually go and have a look at his reviews, you know. It doesn't take much when you're working in point points of stars, out of 10 or out of 5.
For whatever. It's just, there's its maximum. It's a maximum number of stars that you can get it either 10 on Spotify or five on on Apple podcasts. And, you know, one of the things that I do appreciate maybe Andrew does, have you know, strong views on K through 12 don't say gay bells, or whatever it is. But also one of the things that
I would think that you would agree on as well that I'm definitely seeing more and more is people who don't have expertise in a particular area thinking that this is, wow. I've got to follow, you know, the million people. Follow me on Twitter. What, why shouldn't I come in on the Ukraine, right? Like, I don't, I don't go to Andrew huberman as brilliant as he is. Yeah. For his thoughts, about the
Ukraine. Yeah. And you don't fault him for not broadcasting his thoughts to his audience. Because why should he write? It was interesting about my life. Now,
Specially is that I have these two experiences running side by side. Like so in my weave and we talked mostly about kind of my podcast life I think. But over at waking up I have a completely different experience of what's coming back at me from the audience. Like what? So waking up, it's just pure gratitude appreciation. Like nothing is ever misconstrued. There's a perfect marriage between what I intend to say and
And the way in which he gets received and what, not? Not that, I can never nothing, no one's ever confused, but it's like, no one's ever accusing me of Rio really believing something and say, like, it's just, it's just pure pleasure. Like, it's just, it's just this, and it was amazing to experience that because, you know, in my podcast life given that I touch so many polarizing topics and given that I offend people on both the left and the right.
I had completely lost sight of the fact that it was possible to have a career where you put something out with good intentions and people appreciate it and that's the end of the
story. What's the mechanism? That's occurring there. Is it the fact that everyone's there for mindfulness? Is it the fact that it's pay walled so you don't get the sort of Flotsam and Jetsam or whatever it is that comes in and kind of spoils the party for everybody. Have you working on why it's so alive?
It's also because it's a, it's only a subset of
of what I think about and talk about it, right? So, it's like, I don't, I don't take my critique of trump into waking up,
your Andre keep him informed. Yeah.
So like I so I have a version of hubermanns experience on this, to kind of narrow band of topics and the the the topics are increasingly. Why this not just meditation? I mean, really is out of practical philosophy. It's like it's
just bought the entire license, the entire Alan Watts Library. Yeah. From from the what's fun?
Could be hours. Yeah, whatever. Yeah, which is, just insane. It was Matt. I think it got remastered. I really want you very much, enjoy falling asleep to that. Although that's not comment on how nice it is.
No, no, I do it too. Is, he's great to sleep too. But yeah. So it's a, it's a, it's a wonderful experience. It hasn't convinced me that I should shutter my podcast, but it, it's a, it's a, it's an amazing corrective to what I experienced as a podcaster and as a writer,
Her books because and as a public speaker and went to whatever I've done professionally for the last, you know, nearly 20 years.
Outside of waking up has been just this reliably very strong but you know bivalent response and I've got the people who absolutely love what I just said and the people who absolutely hate it for precisely those reasons, right? And in the flip-flop and C so which is a week, it's just, you know. And and then and one of the ways in which I can notice audience capture in other people.
is when I go into their, when I when I cage, let's may happen, you know, I don't spend a lot of time doing this now but
Back in the day when I would look at like the YouTube comments associated with somebody else's podcast, me just to see how it kicked off.
You know, in certain people's feeds I just noticed it's just a hundred percent pain. It's just like is awful. And then the question is, why would I go on that pie? Like all these people hate me right? And reliably. Now they hate me because of what I did or didn't say about covid vaccines. Or what I did or didn't say about Trump, or what I did ordered and say, or seem to say or they heard, I might have said, about $100 laptop, right? So those people like their kind of single issue people with respect to those variables.
But like if I go into I mean, it may in fact be true of your audience will see. I mean, it's like it's like you we may find, I would imagine your audience is
Somewhat evenly split, but probably more on the side of everything. I said about RFK and Trump and covid and Jordan Pederson. Nah, that's not going to fly very well. Like, that's like, who the fuck is this guy to say any of that stuff that's going to be the center of kind of narrative gravity? I would guess that's definitely true of Lex Friedman's audience. Now, right, it's like and and part of it is is that the podcast world is
It almost has contrarian ISM built into its DNA. Right? So whenever you begin to sound like an establishment shill, right? Everyone spidey sense goes on. No one, no one in
the comments section. Gets 5000 up votes for saying, well, done for toeing the party line. All right. I actually agree with you on that mainstream opinion. So I don't disagree about the way that the podcasting universe.
Ali has that and I have been trying aggressively for the last six months to discipline my audience, particularly the overtly a number of times, we've been aggressively, you can there's a function which you may have seen on YouTube which is hide user from Channel which causes this person to continue to be able to type comments. Right. But that just blasting them into the ether and no one else gets to see them. They can still watch the things that you exactly which media play count and it's a one strike and done policy.
And I don't mind about criticism. I'm fine with criticism. I'm just not fine with people that make me jerk on thoughtful responses to something that I don't want those people here. I think. Tim Ferriss has a similar policy. He had it about his Instagram. He's like, this is my house. Take your fucking shoes off, right? So yeah, I am
at the same time, it just to Echo that. But, you know, I have a lot of experience with this because I used to early, in my podcast, I would have wars on my potty, I'd bring someone on and it was a real life.
Knock-down drag-out debate and then I would notice in the aftermath my audience with your just trash that person on social media or wherever and several times I you know, explicitly admonished my audience not to do that because that's just that's just such an ugly experience for the person to have it. However, much. I disagree with someone on my podcast. I never want them to feel like they were just just mobbed by
cycling on making sense.
It's synonymous with being a war and it does have it still happens. I may I think I probably should ring that Bell again because it just happened. I think I had noticed it happened again. I'm not on social media so I'm a bad witness to this stuff but I looked I think I looked at it. I looked on read it.
And I saw what happened in the aftermath. I had Marc Andreessen on recently and we debated. Aiai red
Rogan again?
Oh yeah. Okay I'm not sure I saw that but so, yeah, he and I disagreed about AI risk and you know, but I, you know, had totally respectable respectful conversation with him but you know, had some of the character of a debate and So you you're very likely if you're listening you're kind of a bit of a horse race and you're either on one side or the other and you know, he made a
Good point. I made a bad point. Kind of people are keeping score. I did notice that just again, I'm, this is just read it and I spend 15 minutes on it, you know, once every two months. But I noticed that my audience was just shitting on him in a way that it's just not good for me. If like, if you were if they're my audience, they if they want to support me, it is not supportive of my Enterprise to shit on my guests in that way, right?
Right? And so it is with you or any other podcasters. It's not you. How do you get around that? Because this is definitely a part of me, whether I be a user of social media or create your own, social media, much more creative than a user. I do despair seeing thankfully, not my own comment section much, hmm, but a lot of comments sections, show me as far as I can see, the absolute worst of humanity. And, it seems to me that the
The best thing that you could try and cultivate as a creator of any kind is a reasonable audience, that, that the goal of a reasonable body. What's the best faith? Interpretation of what this person saying? I listened to this guest, or I read that. Some stacker, I subscribe to their YouTube channel or whatever because presumably because I think that they are a good curator that they have a good ear that they are acting in good faith. That they're doing all of these things and you descend into the comments of even somebody that seems pretty unobjectionable and it's a cesspit sometimes.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, no, that was one of the things that I mean, that's why I don't spend any time on any social media, really. I think there's something baked into the to The Forum, which, you know, I'm agnostic as to whether or not you could actually build a social media platform, that would encourage all good stuff and discourage all bad stuff. But, and we might, the truth is, we might actually launch a community forum for waking up and
The fact that it's this is an experiment, you know this we could be yank this at any time, but let's just see how this goes because in that Community with that, the top list of topics, I think it could actually be possible to have, you know, almost entirely good supportive conversations.
Wildest thing is that we are in a time where people want connections more than ever itemized, Society. Individualistic collapse of grand narratives, uncertain about the world, fear, and strife, and concern. And I'm at the yeah, we want
That and yet the behavior of some very loud, very offensive. People on some platforms colors, the experience of of everybody's, right? You know, there is such a Matthew principle around. Yeah. The exposure of particular posts everywhere, right? It's a small number of posts to get all of the, the reach from a small number of people who own the only ones that post from a small, number of people who are the only ones that have an
account. And it and there's also an algorithmic choice that is dictated.
In that, which is, you know, it is out, the gamification is based on outrage and strangely misinformation. I mean it's like misinformation is spreading better than real information. I made a patient debunking of an untruth is boring and the Lura done. Truth is is captivating and it spreads.
That's the the bullshit a symmetry principle, right. It takes a lot less energy to produce more shit than to refute it. Therefore, the world is filled with unrefuted bullshit.
Yeah.
Yeah, so I think it might be possible to do, but I think it would be DNA, it wouldn't be at scale, wouldn't be a Twitter scale or or Facebook scale. And I think you would have you'd have to have mean
You would have to have a low tolerance for assholes, heavy motor, right? And, and so, this is why, you know, this is why I don't understand the Twitter's, a Public Square argument, right? That would be, and that we should all be free speech absolutist, with respect to social media, none of these social media, all these social media platforms are businesses summer, even private businesses, my concern about Free Speech, runs to the owners and operators of those businesses.
And not not wanting the governor not wanting anyone to be able to force them to be associated with speech that they find awful, right? So, like, if, if I create a social media platform over at waking up and notice that it's slowly getting populated by Nazis,
I should be able to have a no Nazis policy on my own platform that I built with my investment, right? It doesn't matter how big it gets. If there's good, it's going to, you know, if it has 20 million people on it, I should be able to kick the Nazis off, right? And like so, my concern about free speech is for the person is essentially for the publisher who doesn't want to publish Nazis. And the truth is, it's, you know, if the
Also, if you call the call, the bluff of the Free Speech absolutist, you recognize that, there's no there there. It's just impossible to be a free speech absolutist because not even 4chan is a circumstance of free speech, absolutist. Mm, right, me free speech. Absolute ism is everything, right? Every awful thing all the time and you just can't nobody wants to be there. I know. It's just, it's just too much noise to that signal and see you have the moment you admit that you have to curate, sometimes.
Going to be making judgment calls and so that, and then you just have to have whatever principles you have by which you do that. And if your principal is no Nazis, well, then that's your principal and people understand that and then someone can start a Nazi Forum, you know, storm front or some other spot.
Great. I think that should be legal, right? You should be able to have a Nazi social media platform. Yeah, I just don't have to be there or support it
so what are you doing next? What's next on the work bucket
list, you know, it's really just, you know, almost entirely continuing in these two channels of waking up the app and making sense the podcast and I have stuff I want to write but it's very hard to
Devise myself to write it because it's harder it takes longer. I reach fewer people, and it pays less. I mean, like, all the incentives are aligned against me right in other book. So,
I haven't as if by Magic. I noticed, I haven't done that but I think I ultimately, I will because it's only when I'm writing that I am taking the time to think through each topic as fully as I'm capable. So I think, I mean, there's some writing built into my podcasting and my work on waking up to because some of what I record is essentially an audio essay or, you know, there's some prep and in involved in
Things,
but how jewess is that? You know, you've got a daily meditation and I think I've I don't
think that was a daily meditation. The daily is not live that day. I refer I require a batch record them and so we have a, you know, with a reservoir of daily, but it's
still 365 times pretty much 10 minutes or 15 or 20. I know that he can kind of stretch it in between both some clever, algorithmic stuff, but that's no, you know, I often speak to authors that talked about the difficulty of the audiobook portion,
I've reading the, how many times do you put your foot in your mouth and go, right? I guess we got to, I'm gonna have to redo that particular part of explaining about why that tree something worth looking at or Whatever It Is.
Well, waking up is in the process of really outgrown me because there's so many other people contributing to it, right? So, there's lots of other teachers, and Scholars, and scientists. And so, you know, one part of it. I essentially have a podcast where I just talk to people and sometimes those conversations show up on both the podcast and the
The app, but often not. But then, I would just have a lot of other people producing content. So I have many more things. I feel like recording for waking up, but there there's no rush. Like the Wolf is really not at the door with waking up, where it's my podcast. There's this expectation that, you know, next week there's going to be another podcast unlike you or it's that every two days or whatever. So three times a week, you know, I do not have that Cadence but
So it's but happily it's you know my podcast is structured around what I want. What I want to think about and read and talk about next, right? So that means it's often a matter of what book do I feel like reading next and now I realize I can talk to the author, you know, so-and-so such a it's like a, you know, I mean, I'm among the luckiest people on Earth to be able to make a career out of doing what I would do for free anyway.
I've said this all along, I always used to regret the fact that at University I didn't take psychology or philosophy. I took business management which taught me nothing about business and then did a master's in international marketing. And that also told me nothing about marketing and I was always regretfully I was wistful for a academic career that I never had because as soon as I pulled my head out of my ass toward the back end of my 20s, I realized that I had all of this stuff that I was choosing to be interested in so I could have
I've chosen to be passionate about the degree instead of the one that had to force myself, to be competent in. Yeah, and it would've all been fine but then, you know, by whatever Quirk of the simulation that were in, that means that I can talk to people that I would talk to you for free and call it a job. I've been able to structure the exact University syllabus talking, only about the exact niche of the best particular Creator, or academic or intellect or writer on that one topic only for as long as I want your and then no one.
Me afterwards and if I mess up, it doesn't matter. And if I want to Korean the interview, often talk about hamburgers for 10 minutes, then, so be it and I can do exactly what I want it. You know, for all of the the internet is difficult and negative comment sections cause me to feel a little bit sort of it. Tarnishes the experience, broadly, it's a complete dream that I kind of can't really believe. Is it's happening and you know, you've been a great big influence, thank you. You've been a really big influence on the
Movement that I went from whatever I was before to the adult infant. I think I am now and I appreciate the stuff that you do. I appreciate your time today, where should people go? Where should they keep up to date? Given that you are absent from everything in a digital ghost know where they go?
Just waking up. That cam, is for waking up and Sam Harris. Dot-org is everything else associated with me? That is not a deep fake that will soon become a no
doubt. Some, I appreciate you. Thank
you. Yeah, great to meet you.
