Welcome to the weekend of podcast. This is Sam Harris.
Many things to cover in today's housekeeping. You might not want to skip this one. I think they'll be something of relevance in here for most of you.
First the name of the podcast is changing. The truth is waking up was always the wrong name for this podcast as most of you know, I have a book by that title. I now have a meditation app, which is a direct descendant of that book dealing with all of the material I cover in it in Greater depth. So there's now a fair amount of confusion about what my app is and how it relates to the podcast. So in order to protect the app and to put the podcast on true or footing come some week in January this podcast will be retitled making sense. So will be the making sense podcast or making sense with Sam Harris.
And I think you'll agree that name actually makes more sense than waking up given all the topics I touch here. So there's nothing for you to do. It will appear on the same RSS feed. Everyone's membership on my site and then my app will be as it is all the old episodes of the podcast will still be available. At least for now. I don't think anything's going to change there but not quite sure what we're going to do with the archive. But all those episodes will still be under the same name waking up in the same feed, but just the new episode. I release at some point in January will change over.
Anyway, just a change of name logo and indeed font.
Okay, some new experiments and conversation events to announce presale tickets for Boston DC and New York are now available to subscribers. If you are a subscriber you have already heard about that presumably by email.
And tickets remain for Detroit Milwaukee and Chicago you can find all that information at Sam Harris dot-org forward slash events and more days. We'll be hitting the calendar soon. I've been trying to figure out how to alleviate some of the lingering pain left by the dissolution of Pangburn philosophy. So what we're doing here is that we're offering tickets to those of you who have unrwa funded tickets for the day of reflection conference in New York. I got cancelled in November.
If you are one of those unlucky ticket holders, please email us at info at Sam Harris dot org and will give you tickets to my upcoming show at the Beacon Theater in New York on March 1st. So again, if you are holding underfunded tickets for the Pangburn event the day of reflection conference, please forward those confirmation emails to info is Sam Harris dot org and do this by January 15th, because on January 16th, the remaining seats will be released to the general public. So this is time sensitive.
I know this doesn't solve for all of you. I know many of you were traveling to New York for that conference. In fact, some of you traveled only to find out that it was cancelled.
Needless to say I feel terrible about this.
But unfortunately, I can't make substitutions like this at other shows. The sort of things actually hard to work out with Live Nation holding back hundreds of seats for one of their events. I'm very happy to do it. But unfortunately, I can't do it for other shows on other dates. It just introduces too much chaos into planning the store. So, this is at least something I can do in an attempt to clean up pangborn's mess. However imperfectly again the event is at the Beacon Theater in New York on March 1st, and for those of you in Auckland who were left holding tickets for that event that Pangburn cancelled and we're not refunded. Please get in touch when I announce events closer to you. I'm not sure. I'm coming to New Zealand next year, but I'm almost certainly come into Australia probably in the middle of the Year. Anyway, stay in touch stand my newsletter, and if I come anywhere near you
Needless to say, I'll be happy to give you tickets to anything I do down there.
Okay.
Patreon as many of you probably know. I deleted my patreon account and I issued a brief statement which those of you who are on my list received. I'll just read that here. So we're on the same page. I have a little more to say it's very brief. This is what I posted do your patreon supporters as many of you know, the crowdfunding site patreon has banned several prominent content creators from its platform while the company insists that each was in violation of its terms of service these recent expulsion seem more readily explained by political bias. Although I don't share the politics of the band members. I consider it no longer tenable to expose any part of my podcast funding to the whims of patreons quote trust and Safety Committee.
I will be deleting my patreon account tomorrow. If you want to continue sponsoring my work. I encourage you to open a subscription at Sam Harris dot-org forward slash subscribe as always remain deeply grateful for your support wishing you all a very happy New Year.
Okay. So this is got a far larger response online than I was expecting most of it extremely supportive of me and some quite critical truth is both the positive and the negative responses were somewhat unfair what I did here is not quite as selfless and act as many people imagine, but nor was I signaling my support for the all tripe. So let me explain my thinking a little more here patreon publish their own response in the wake of my leaving which further muddy the waters here. So this is what happened.
A few people were d platformed as I said in the case that really caught my attention and which really seem to bother many of you was the case of Carl Benjamin otherwise known as Sargon of akkad a prominent YouTuber. He apparently had his account deleted and there was no process of appeal offered to him. He just got deleted and was told there was no recourse and I'm not very familiar with Benjamin and nothing I say here should be construed as a defense of anything. He may have said or done online about which I'm unaware, but when I saw so many of you complaining about this, I reached out to patreon CEO Jack Conte and I asked him what went into this decision and he told me that they have a trust and safety team that evaluates these things exhaustively.
And I said, well can you provide links to the examples of the speech that sealed Benjamin's fate with the team and he did that. He sent me the transcript of what he said and links to the audio on YouTube and the transcript was fairly eye-opening. He was using the n-word with a parent abandon and using other slurs, but then I click through to the offending audio and honestly it took me about 45 seconds to determine that the context really mattered here.
What was happening was Benjamin was being attacked by White supremacists in an online chat, and he was castigating them in terms that he thought they would find offensive and while I don't support his tactics here, you know, none of it sounded good. And obviously it could be used against him. Maliciously. The truth is there was simply no indication that he would use these words in other contexts to express his own bigotry. He was also appearing on someone else's channel, right? So therefore this forum wasn't even funded by his own patreon page. So it's very hard to see how he was in violation of their terms of service and the fact that it took me less than a minute to understand these things.
While patreon claims to have done this exhaustive review made me worry about the degree to which political bias is clouding the company's judgment.
So as I thought was clear in my initial email. This really wasn't a pure case of me communicating my solidarity with Benjamin or anyone else. It was in part that certainly from what I can tell what was done to him was deeply unfair, but honestly, I was also motivated by my own self-interest here. As I said, I can't allow any significant part of my podcast funding to exist at the pleasure of a bunch of Millennials who can't figure out which way is up when someone utters a taboo string of syllables and given that I frequently touch controversial topics, and I'm making the considerable effort to create a space where I can do that. It just seems prudent for me to secure a hundred percent of my funding through my own website.
so anyway, that's not adding much to my original statement, but
those are the facts.
And as many of you into it, this does come at some significant economic cost. There's certainly no guarantee that all of the 9,000 people who are supporting me on patreon are going to make the jump to my own site certainly not all of them have made the jump thus far to those of you who have I'm very grateful obviously to those of you who supported me all this time on patreon. I remain extremely grateful nobody's status with respect to their account changes. If you ever supported me on patreon you have access to my site. Most of you have lifetime access to the waking up course because you got grandfathered in before launch, so nothing changes there, but needless to say if you still want to support the show I encourage you to do that through my website.
Okay so much housekeeping.
There is a special Reddit AMA just on the topic of meditation on Friday the 21st believe a day after this podcast drops. Otherwise, it will be archived there. So you can see that you can go to the meditation subreddit to see that a few more words about the waking up course again, if you're finding the course valuable, you can give it as a gift for the holidays and it is especially good to give as a gift now because the price is changing in January and all of you who have subscribed or given gifts at the 799 introductory price will be grandfathered in at that price for as long as your subscribers, but the price is nearly doubling on February 1st to $14.99 a month.
And I also say that if you do the first 50-day introductory course, right the first 50 meditations and you do them in some reasonable time frame like the first 90 days and you don't get value from that and you want a refund. Well, then we will be happy to refund you.
So if that describes your experience on the App, please reach out at info at waking up.com.
What else here?
I think that's it. If I forgot anything, I will tell you next time.
And now for today's podcast today, I am speaking with Peter a TIA. This is one of those episodes where someone is interviewing me for another podcast, but I thought the conversation was valuable enough to broadcast on my show as well.
Peter is a physician who focuses on longevity Peter earned his medical degree from Stanford and he holds a degree in mechanical engineering and Applied Mathematics as well. He trained for five years at Johns Hopkins Hospital in general surgery, and he also spent two years at the NIH training in Surgical Oncology at the National Cancer Institute and is really one of the most interesting doctors. I've met you should definitely listen to his podcast the drive where he goes very deep into conversations on longevity and he has a lot to say about nutrition and exercise physiology and sleep and cardiovascular health
He did a great interview on Rogan's podcast where I learned that when he was 30 years old. He did not know how to swim and went from learning how to swim to being if I recall correctly. The first person ever to swim from was at the big island to Maui and back again something insane and he's done many swims of that sort. Anyway that gives you some indication of what kind of guy he is, but here he's talking to me about meditation mostly and interviewing me for his podcast again, his podcast is called the drive and I highly recommend it.
So we talked about various types of meditation. We talked about the difference between pain and suffering the difference between joy and well-being. We talked about the half-life of negative emotions the nature of thinking and dreaming the power of culture to shape our minds the power of language talk about various drug experiences MDMA in particular the psychological Prospect of loving ones enemies the phenomenon of moral look we get into the details around the practice of the pasta and seok Jin and the difference is there we touch on the ethics of Line and other topics.
Anyway, I enjoyed the conversation and now I bring you Peter Tia. Well, Sam, thanks so much for making time today. Yeah. Yeah. It's a pleasure for me. I'm coming to someone else's studio to record. Yeah. Well, let's get in the game long enough. This is the way it happens. Well, I really appreciate it. There's so much I want to talk about today, but I also want to be thoughtful about pulling out threads that I think are most valuable to people I take care of in many ways that sort of an undercurrent of what I like to talk about on podcasts is things that I can then share with my patients and things like that. I don't know if you remember this but almost a year ago. I called you or I emailed you and said, hey man, do you have time to talk? And you said yeah, and it was like actually I know when it was it was right after Christmas. It was like the day after Christmas. Hmm. Yeah, but the 26th of December and I said I want to talk with you about mindfulness meditation. And you said great and we hopped on a called you remember this discussion. Yeah, I think I'm
Remember the one you're referencing. So I had had a very profound experience and prior to that. I had been somewhat familiar I think would be the most generous way of saying if it's somewhat familiar with meditation primarily focusing on concentration based meditations, like Mantra based practice, but I just come back from basically a rehab facility where you were sort of out in the middle of nowhere you had no electronics. You weren't even allowed to have books or anything like that and you were really sort of stripped down into I guess what could only be viewed as sort of that your most fundamental basic elements of self and I had an epiphany about 10 days into that which was I realized at the time what must be the first moment in my life that I was present.
And it's weird to be almost 45 at the time and to think wow here. I am 10 days of having every stimulus removed from my life plus going through this very rigorous sort of therapeutic stuff. And I remember exactly where I was sitting I was sitting in the common room of this place at the edge of a couch and in a moment. The only thing that mattered was exactly what I was perceiving around me. So the light coming in through the window and the you know the way in which it made the room sort of light up the the faint scent of you know, something that was being cooked in the kitchen, you know, if you know yards away or whatever and I don't know why I just felt like wow, this is the first time I've actually really think I'm not thinking about something that has happened or worrying about something that is going to happen. Hmm.
And the other thing it was odd that that entire time I was there was it was they allowed us to exercise which was a big deal. I was really pleased that I was still permitted to exercise but you couldn't have music you didn't have a phone or anything. So it's also the first time in my life. I exercised only being able to listen to the sound of my breath. Yeah. So every morning I would run in the woods and you just heard the sound of the wind blowing by you and you heard your breath and when I was, you know, doing push-ups or whatever is the same sort of thing. And of course, I'd already read so much of your work, but the reason I wanted to speak with you that day as I wanted to understand hey is am I getting a glimpse of what one might get if they meditate if they move to a mindfulness-based practice and what you said was well, there's good news and bad news. The good news is I've got this app that's going to be coming out soon and it's going to help you with this. The bad news is it's only in beta yet, but you can start right away. There's only you know, I think that the time there may be a dozen meditations and the very bad news is going to take years for me to produce this thing. I'm completely incompetent. No, but come on the thing a
He is out now. Yeah, it's finally it was a little longer than you wanted. But yeah, and I very quickly put as many of my patients who are interested on the beta version you guys were so gracious and let all of my my my folks on this thing. And in many ways I view that is one of the most important transitions of my life. I think of you know life is a handful of Direction changes that you know, some of them that you look back at the past and say wow that was sort of a meaningful Insight that came to me. So you've talked about this idea of noticing what is arising versus not noticing at all. Can you elaborate on this?
Yeah, well, so I guess I should Define mindfulness which is really the target state. That one is trying to cultivate in. At least this probably was the most popular type of meditation now and that there are different as you alluded to there different types. There are two basic types of meditation where the distinction is between being lost in thought and being clearly aware of whatever the object of meditation is. So that's true for all types of meditation thought really is the the obstacle one is overcoming when one is learning to meditate. These are our natural. Our default mode is to just be lost in thought were telling ourselves a story all day long and we're not aware of it. So once one begins to meditate one is trying to pay attention to something and this is where the two different types diverge.
the first that you alluded to the like a mantra based or a concentration based object of focus is
the attempt to pay attention to one thing to the exclusion of everything else, right? You want your attention to be absorbed in that object. And in many of those practices the explicit goal is to do that. So well that thoughts no longer arise, right? So you're really trying to get rid of thought in some basic sense. So the arising of thought in that context is a sign that you're not meditating hard enough or one pointedly enough those types of practices can produce extraordinarily positive states of mind that you can feel Bliss and Rapture and and you can actually use as an object of meditation specific states of mind like loving kindness, which is called meta in the Buddhist tradition or sympathetic Joy or Compassion or Equanimity. You can cultivate specific attitudes, which
If you can focus on them to the exclusion of everything else, you're inhabiting that state to a degree that you know, most people would find unrecognizable but the second type of meditation which is the type I have spent much more time doing and is almost universally considered the more fundamental or the deeper practice is often described as mindfulness because that's the that's the state you're using in the Buddhist tradition to cultivated mindfulness comes from a practice called the pasta which which is Insight Meditation and there you are you're not trying to selectively notice one thing or another you are trying to break the spell of being distracted by thought. So you're trying to be aware of everything without perceiving things through this discursivity or this conceptual lens in each moment.
But your attention can be much more choiceless. I'm you can just notice whatever. In fact, you notice you're noticing things all the time sounds and Sensations and moods and thoughts, but you're not noticing them clearly because you're you're thinking every moment of the day. My phone was Begins for most people as a training on one object like the breath but very quickly, it becomes something that you apply to the full range of your experience. And what's nice about it apart from all the benefits of doing it and all the things that can be realized by doing it this type of meditation is clearly coincident with any experience you can have and there's nothing that is excluded in principle from the meditation. You're not you can be working out or watching a movie or I mean, there's no there's no there's nothing that in principle does not admit of mindfulness.
And that's not true of other types of practice Yeah, just sharing one example, because the other thing that I remember you said at the time I said, you know Sam I want to really shift this practice and sort of I want to figure out a way to experience that if you know more and more and you actually said look there are a bunch of apps that are already out there that are all pretty good. I mean, obviously you're producing yours because you think it's going to offer something additional and I'll just make my plug for it here. I've used every one of the apps out there and I do find yours of the best, but I also realize that there's no one thing that's the best. It's the way you explain things just resonates with me and might not resonate with the next person but the other app that I really like that you recommended was 10% happier, which is Daniel Harris as app no no no relation, of course and even within Dan's app, there are many teachers but there are a couple that I really like Jeff Warren and Joe Joseph and Joseph Goldstein Joseph Coleman. Yeah, and Jeff Warren has I believe a series of walking meditations that
He refers to a sort of informal meditations and I remember the first time I did this maybe it wasn't the first time it might have been the second time. There was pretty early I realized for the first time that when you walk if you're paying attention to it, you can feel the wind going past your finger. So if you're walking with your hands in a position such that your thumbs are facing forward in your arms are swinging lightly and that in a normal gait, you can actually feel the air moving past the leading edge of your hand. Yeah. I remember thinking how have I been walking for 45 years and I've never once felt this sensation. And now when I pay attention to it, it's so noticeable. I don't know how it hasn't been distracting me 45 years. Yeah. Yeah and one might wonder why one would want to notice such a thing. But what you discover when you begin practicing meditation, especially intensively on Retreat is that there's no such thing as a boring object.
Engine but boredom is is simply a lack of attention but we get into these situations where we are convinced that we are bored because we haven't found something compelling enough in our experience to capture our attention. But what our attention is is so blunt and instrument normally that we need something that's you know, thrilling or terrifying or something to fully get us to commit but what you discover when you learn to meditate is that what pleases us most in those moments when we are fully captured by experience is the the state of complete attention to the present and if you can muster that on your own if you can actually guide attention irrespective of the object you're attending to then anything any arbitrary object the feeling of wind on your hand as you walk can be an exquisitely pleasurable thing.
Notice, this is why in that first type of meditation practice concentration practice. It doesn't matter what you pay attention to. You can pick an arbitrary object. It can be a random sound can be a mantra. It doesn't matter what the Mantra is. It can be a candle flame. It can be a color on a piece of paper. It can be random sound in the environment. It can be in the sensation of a fly walking across the back of your hand right anything that you can pay attention to to the exclusion of anything else can suddenly disclose what it's like to have a very concentrated mind and concentration is intrinsically pleasurable. And this is why meditation can have the character of a kind of drug experience. Maybe it's and and this is a kind of a superficial character. Maybe you can you can get
Kind of addicted to the changes in state you experience in meditation and you can be misled by these experiences. You can think that it's about these changes rather than something more fundamental because it any anything you experience by way of new found pleasure. That is based on having a very concentrated mind you will lose because it's an impermanent state of your physiology and attention and it's not the deepest practice. But yeah, it's amazing that concentration itself regardless of the object is incredibly Pleasant, you know, sort of going back to the Y which you've started to allude to and I can't I can't remember if I'm I know you've said this I think many have said this so I don't you know, I think many have come to this observation which is virtually all negatively valence two motions are not rooted in the present.
Yeah, it sort of becomes the the corollary of being present therefore being able to concentrate on something in the moment can be quite pleasurable. And I guess that was sort of what I recognize that first moment. I experienced it which was wow, when you're when you're fully fully, you know engaged in or envelope within this present sensation what you're seeing what you're hearing what you're feeling it becomes very difficult to be anxious or depressed or angry or any of these other things and for me that was the most interesting part of this which is you know, taking us a very big step back. I'm trying to devote my life to figuring out this problem of how to live longer. But if you ask me, how did I think about that problem five years ago versus how do I think about it today? There have been two fundamentally significant differences. There are two things today that I that occupy much more of my energy with respect to longevity than they did, you know for five years ago. And the first of those two is
This notion of being happy which again I think five years ago. I would have dismissed that as sort of a an afterthought like it is what it is. And as long as the all those other things happen, you'll be happy, you know, if you can figure out how to not die and how to be stronger and have better cognitive Powers little but you'll be happy as a result of that. But of course that seems to be not the case the second though, we're not going to get into it is a much greater appreciation for the type of physical body that is necessary to age well and how radically that differs from necessarily the physical body that we want to perform. Well when we're in our 30s or 40s or even our 50s but going back to the former which to me is in many ways you are work and the work of people like you has had such a great influence on me. Is this realization like none of this stuff matters, if you're miserable doesn't matter if you can live to a hundred it doesn't matter if you can delay the onset of heart disease and stroke and cancer and Alzheimer's disease if you're too miserable to appreciate it or if you're constantly in some sort of tormented state.
Might as well be dead. I'm at sounds extreme, but that's that's really how I started to feel about this. Yeah, and I think we also have inaccurate associations with terms like happiness and we haven't distinguished terms that are different like pain and suffering. There's nothing about meditation that gets rid of physical pain pain is just something that you're going to experience and you can actually experience surprising degrees of pain while meditating if you just resolved not to move your body. It doesn't matter how comfortable your chair is eventually pain is going to arise and you have a guided meditation that takes us through that exercise. Yeah. That is I feel like within two minutes. It's unbearable. They're people who sit for hours and hours and 12 hours, you know, it's unbelievable and it's excruciating And yet when you get up you haven't hurt yourself is not synonymous with injury right now. Obviously, there are ways you could injure yourself if you don't move but
There can be a strange magnification of pain if you resolve to sit still for a very long time, but one thing you discover there which is useful to discover is that there is a difference between pain and suffering you can feel intensely negative sensory experience and you can you can feel intensely negative emotions, even you can feel anger and depression and sadness and if you can be content to simply be aware of those Sensations or those moods or emotions, if you can recognize that Consciousness, is this the prior condition in which all of those things are appearing and your you are simply that which is aware of these changing phenomenon. If you can become interested in the character of a mood like sadness or a pain in the knee is actually possible to experience this
Dates with total Equanimity and one of the features is as you said not being focused At All by thought on the past or the future. So I mean one thing with physical pain, we all experience is this sense that some sensation is intolerable. But there's this Paradox because in that moment you've already tolerated it, right? I mean, it's fully arrived right? It's really embarrassing hadean of where to follow you're worried about the future you're worried about how long this is going to go on and it's certainly good to practice finding a place of equanimity with pain. I'm not saying, you know, obviously there are pains that that are conceivable that even the best meditator might find it difficult to find Equanimity with but there really is an immense amount of growth one can have in this area where you just you can notice this
Prince between reacting to pan Contracting around at resisting it trying to make it go away wishing it away worrying about how long it will be there and all of this happens is this Cascade is just it happens so quickly that it's as you don't even notice the mechanics of it. It's just you right. It's just you suffering.
But the moment you can pick apart the mechanics of it because you can pay attention to what is arising the the feeling of resistance the fear about what's going to happen in the next moment and keep dropping back into a position of merely witnessing all of these things arise and pass away their experiences. I've had in many have had in meditation where an excruciating sensation
Become so intense that you actually don't know whether or not you're experiencing Agony or ecstasy like the valence of the intense mental state is it just gets kind of wiped out. It's just, you know sheer intensity and there is a fundamental cancellation of suffering in those moments and this goes back to what we were just saying about the pleasures of concentration. Nothing concentrates your mind more easily than pain right as if so, if you're if you're willing if you can get past your fear and just go into it you can experience a lot of mental pleasure mrs. You know, I'm not I don't think I've ever met somebody who claimed to be a masochist, but I can imagine that if masochism is possible. There's some reason why this is the case this would be this would be a reason why this would this would be the case that there is I can only imagine they're experiencing intense concentration in you know,
States that most people would find physically intolerable but back to this the idea of happiness and and other states that are commonly associated with it. I think we all have this sense that happiness is a matter of being joyful all the time. This is a very common idea sort of the misconception that yes many of us think that well that's not desirable because if I were joyful every minute of every day, I wouldn't have the drive to do XY and z or I wouldn't be quote unquote real in some way. But but or if it is a matter of securing some durable source of Joy, then it can't absorb any of the other things in life for which Joy would be inappropriate, you know people die and there's just there are their ups and downs in life and I don't talk about or think about happiness very much I think about well-being and flourishing more and
Those concepts for me can embrace all of the vicissitudes of life where you if you experience some serious loss in your life. There's a resiliency and a way of embracing that which is which brings out that the wisest and most compassionate and most expansive parts of yourself. That is another that is another component of well-being the narrow conception of happiness that most of us have by default is something that we that we are always trying to defend and Shore up against all of the other things in life that are threatening to undermine it and the one obvious point is that it's just not it's not a safe play. It is perpetually under threat and any Joy you can feel by virtue would of its having Arisen based on some causes and conditions. It's going to pass away. You know, you just can't keep
Emotion going for days or even hours at a time. And one thing you discover when you learn to meditate is that negative emotion in particular has a very short half-life and I mean many of us imagine that we can stay angry or sad for some people would imagine days. I think almost everyone thinks hours at a time. It's actually impossible. If you are no longer lost and thought about all the reasons why you should be angry or sad. So this was one of the earlier. I can't remember if this was one of the lessons in your meditation app early on or it was just a discussion you and I had but I got to put it to the test shortly after I was in New York and obviously in New York, it's everything's a hustle right? It's you're running around people are rude you're going to get bumped into and one of my pet peeves in New York is when you see somebody walking towards you and there for a moment lost in whatever they're doing.
Are usually down looking at their phone or something like that. I always think it's a reasonable courtesy to just not walk into them. Even if they're in your line of sight you still sort of go out of your way to not bump into them. But right for whatever reason there's just a subset of people who love that opportunity to almost knock you off your feet. So sure enough one day I am about to turn a corner and this guy is walking and it was clear that he could see me and I had looked down so my bad, but this guy plows right into me and it just had either had this discussion with you or just heard, you know this lesson about how long can you actually stay angry? And so this happens and I immediately sort of observe this emotion this rise of anger in me, right which was like the desire to turn around and walk up to the guy and say something.
Serves no purpose of course, but instead I decided we'll just watch this watch this emotion. How long does it last? You know, I remember I was walking somewhere that I was going to be in ten minutes and I was like, do you think this will last ten more minutes? Could you be angry for the next 10 minutes if you just observe this feeling and the answer was no, I mean it was gone. Actually I felt like within seconds. Yeah and to me that was like a really big aha moment for especially for someone like me who's so easily prone to anger to think that by simply being observant of that emotional state. I could have some control over it which is always felt like the opposite right? It's always felt like that emotional state has control over me, right and it does it mean the important point to never forget is that it has complete control over you as long as you're identified with the next angry thought that's arising in Consciousness. If you have no perspective on the fact that you are thinking right. Well then
Simply become that thought for the period that it's captivating and you are pushed in whatever Direction it's aimed right. So if it is getting you to say the angry thing or physically assault the person you need some level of metacognition in order to pull the brakes. Otherwise, you're just it's exactly like being asleep and dreaming and not knowing that you're dreaming this happens to us all of us every night. We can we get into bed and then suddenly a movie starts playing that we're totally identified with or one of the characters in it and we're completely unaware of this change right and work and that the most surprising thing about dreams is that we're not surprised when they arise right? Like there's no, you know, we didn't have the expectation that we would stay in. Our beds apparently were not surprised that the laws of physics are being violated for our amusement and
Suddenly in these situations where we are fully captive to a completely illusory seemingly sensory experience, but all in all of this is some kind of hallucination and identification with thought in the waking state has that character to some degrees. It's thought to be totally normal psychologically, right? Because it is our default state, but once you learn the alternative which is to be mindful you then have a very different sense of what optimal mental health would be and and so when I find myself lost in thought and just you know, suddenly angry or anxious or frustrated or whatever it is and I wake up from that experience. It is a little bit like waking up from a dream or a hallucination or it's hard to shake the
It's pathological. I was stuck in something about which I had. No awareness. Right and it was forcing me to say and do and think and feel things that were given my now current awareness. We're completely unnecessary you see to me. What's so interesting about this David Foster Wallace in his commencement speech in 2005 at Kenyon College the this is water which is one of my favorite. Yeah, it's things to listen to I burned a copy off YouTube and now it's on my phone and I try to listen to it at least once a month if not more and it like I even though I almost Know It Off by heart. It doesn't matter like I still get some benefit every time I hear it and when he talks about this he speak specifically about
The problem with this is that it is our default and that's the part that makes this so challenging. So do we have evidence of other species? Like are we the only ones that are blessed / cursed with this ability for rumination and constant thought I mean do we do we have any evidence that a dog is spending any percentage of his or her time thinking about what happened the day before or the next meal? Where do we as humans stack up in this space? Well, it's important to acknowledge that we're blessed and cursed by this because this capacity for linguistic abstract complex thought is what has given us everything that is recognizable. Human right is given us culture has given us civilization. It's allowed us to place all of the learning of our ancestors in a strata.
That is accessible to all of us and to every present generation so that we don't have to relearn everything from the ground up and we just adjust imagine what the alternative would be if there was no actual social progress and civilization. Yeah, and for the longest time that was true of humanity as well. If you know, if you go back 50 thousand years and then you decide to go back sixty thousand years that the differences are our impressively non-existent, right, you know in terms of the toolkit anyone was working with so that's interesting Sam Saudi if we go back to I don't another it's there's some debate about when language was really codified but to pick a point in time when we're pretty sure there was no language we could say 200,000 years ago, right? I think most neuroscientists would agree. No language 200,000 years ago was the arrival of language the arrival of this capacity or went. Where did this show up? Yeah, I think language is the
The main variable there. It's the main variable with respect to being able to abstract to being able to represent anything that's not currently present or not currently happening. It's the basis for communicating anything of substance to anyone else and and storing a kind of cultural memory of anything. Whether it's just by virtue of an oral tradition or you know, once writing came along so language necessary for all that interested to be able to articulate the concept of time, you know the concept of a past where the causes of the present or stored and a future which is yet to arrive that needs to be planned for or that can be better or worse. It's something that I think other species probably have in a very primitive form that is
Not associated with with conscious thought I think that a dog for instance learns various associations with stimuli forthright have low vision responses that these animals can experience. Yeah, and they and they recognize people obviously, I mean, they recognize people arguably better than any other species other than than the human so they can have real relationships and there's no question. They have emotions and they have preferences and all of that but in terms of forming a notion of the future
Or a notion of the way in which the world might be different. It's one thing to recognize your friend record in the case of a dog recognize your owner and prefer that person to somebody else. It's another thing to have any concept of having had a past with that person. Now the fact that you recognize them indicates a past, right? But all of that could be preconscious to a dog. It's just there's just this kind of binary difference between recognition and and not so let's use an even more obvious example, and I'll tell you where I'm going with this because then I want to understand this which is as I observe my three children, there is a distinction in what I see in the younger ones that they seem to always be present. So which isn't to say that they don't get upset. I mean you only have to look at a toddler for 10 seconds to watch what they can get upset, you know, but I doubt that they're upset about anything other than what there
Experiencing in the moment right there hungry their diapers dirty, whatever they fell they hurt themselves something like that. But if you look at, you know a teenager or a ten-year-old a preteen they are now starting to suffer from this quote-unquote disease of too much thinking too much distraction. So somewhere from the moment you're born until let's just make it easy and say you until you're 13 you acquire this capacity, but yet an infant like the dog recognizes the parent there is some sense of a history with an individual. Yeah again, I don't know even what the relevance is of this other than to say
The inability to recognize how distracted we are seems to be one of the greatest drivers of misery, you know, there are three quotes I love and I love them because they're basically all saying the same thing across 1700 years. So in the first century, Seneca said we suffer more in imagination than in reality in the 16th century Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet for there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so I have that on a t-shirt that I love to remind myself and then of course in the 17th century Pascal said distraction is the only thing that consoles us from miseries yet. It is itself the greatest of our miseries. Hmm Descartes says something very similar. I mean, this is something that's been acknowledged for so long. Yeah and yet it's so ingrained in us that It just strikes me as like is there some evolutionary basis for this or is it just that Evolution wasn't even trying to optimize for this Equanimity and instead the benefits as you've
Pointed out of being able to do these things the progress we've been able to make as a society. Our ability to LeapFrog ahead of other species has more than made up for this difficulty or is it simply that look Evolution wouldn't out select this because it is is not it's not interfering with your reproductive Fitness. Yeah. Yeah. I just don't understand why we suffer so much. I guess the one question The crucial point there is that Evolution doesn't care about your well-being as long as you reproduce what you did care. Yeah. And so if there's some path by which we survive and reproduce in a state of misery evolution is perfectly happy with that path, right? It's just if that were a more reliable algorithm for reproduction and survival, then we would be get we would be getting more and more miserable. So it's so we want to slip the the logic of evolution because it it just it's simply doesn't care about us, right and we have an in virtually.
Anything we want as a species now at some level is a matter of breaking the connection to many of our evolved Tendencies. We have a very strong evolutionary capacity for tribal violence, right? But tribal violence is obviously something we want to outgrow as quickly as possible and there are many other examples of this. I think that language is you can see it when you're raising your kids when you have a two and a half year old and a three year old where they're talking to you, but then they're talking to themselves as though they're talking to you speech becomes something where you're you're narrating your experience as though you're talking to a parent and the seems to get internalised so that the conversation you just you know enough to keep your mouth shut but you are really talking to someone who isn't there all the time. I think that's probably the origin of it for
Individual that we languages is so useful. It's so essential to everything we do that. We just have this Superfluous level of discourse ibbity that from again from a survival Advantage. There's no reason to ever turn it off, but from a well-being point of view. It's the character of it is almost universally unpleasant most of the time for most people. I mean, there's some people are very lucky and they have an intrinsic level of happiness that is just kind of off the charts where they're just they're basically happy all the time. They recover very very quickly from disappointments and losses and they just don't really see a problem and many of these people are not very reflective about The Human Condition, right? They're not living necessarily examined lives because they there's not much of a reason to but they're just, you know, they get up in the morning and then just stoked to be
Alive and you can you can you know, they're if you get enough of the conditions for ordinary levels of happiness together and you're lucky enough to be able to maintain them fairly effortlessly, right? You you're wealthy and you're healthy and you're surrounded by happy creative people who want the best for you and your just by dint of good luck people close to you haven't died and you haven't suffered any collision with reality then yet. You can you can be conventionally very happy and still be talking to yourself all the time and not notice it but there's significant limitation even to that when you do develop this more refined way of noticing what it's like to be you which is what we're calling meditation. It's not that we're learning this having insight into the mechanics of your own suffering and the
The authority of kind of ordinary transient states of pleasure. It's not that that is at bottom incompatible with living an ordinary fulfilled pleasure-seeking life. I'm you can enjoy dinner just as much Having learned to meditate as you know, anyone who's gluttonously attached to sensory experience without without any kind of metacognition about you know, what's going on, but the difference comes in how you respond to problems that arise I think is actually both right. I mean, I think that mindfulness clearly makes it easier to endure unpleasant things. So, you know, I was late to come over here today because the to get to your place which should have been an hour took two hours and that is normally something that would drive me batshit crazy just by by way of process like why is it so
An efficient like why are there so many cars on the road blah blah like I would get into a woe is me narrative about this which is of course ironic because like why am I more special than every other car on this road? Right? Like everyone is equally in the same situation of it's taking two hours to get somewhere that it should take one hour. And actually I have used traffic because when you live in Southern California and split your time in New York, you get plenty of exposure to traffic. I've actually used this as an amazing tool for mindfulness and I no longer let it really get to me instead. I just sort of observe a look you're feeling a little bit self-important today. Like you're feeling like your time is more valuable than everybody else's time. Let's examine that is that really true? Not really? Okay, what is happening in this exact moment. The sun is shining this way or you know, I was I think so. So in many ways if nothing else it's simply a hack to allow me to be less miserable. Yeah. Yeah, but on the flip side, I actually do think
Is a way to enjoy certain moments more and I've certainly noticed this the most with my kids. I think that you know, I have a our middle son who's for you know, he's just that's what 40 like a four-year-old boy is. Just going to be more prone to chewing up the air in the room when it comes to doing bad stuff and I find that and to be clear they're not all days that I can do this. There are some days when he's acting crazy that it just drives me nuts, but more often than not I'm sort of able to actually reflect on it pleasantly and think about like what's happening in this moment, right? Okay, he's he's yelling. He's screaming. He's throwing a temper tantrum. He's hit his brother. He's done this he's done that but in this moment, is there anything that's really bad bad about any of these things. I mean like it's not like he's going to be doing this when he goes to college like what am I reading worried about here? Yeah. And in fact, I can turn that into a positive thing, which is one day. He will be in college and he won't be a cute little four-year-old who loves me so much. Maybe you'll miss this mom. Yeah. I'll miss this moment.
So I have found that again. I use the word hack because I it's such an elegant way to describe it. But it's basically a tool to make me a little bit more aware of where I am in a given moment and whether that produces happiness or not. I mean, I sort of agree with you the semantics of Happiness are too cumbersome for me to explain, you know, people have talked about the dip happiness is simply the difference between reality and expectation. I mean, that's a bit vague for me. I'm not smart enough to fully understand what that means though. I understand the concept but clearly there's some component of expecting the world to be a certain way and it not being that way producing an emotional state or a valence that is negative one way or the other.
And and and so I think while is as wonderful as mindfulness is to offset that there is this moment at times of taking a bite of food and rather than thinking about the next byte or what you're going to eat later like actually thinking, you know, we're observing the sensations as they're occurring in that moment kind of slowing things down in a way. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah because I don't know why I just tend to always live in a fast forward mode. That is my default is to be full Fast Forward. Well, it's most people's default. I always say it's everyone's default who's not being mindful because you're you're constantly even when you're getting what you want. Even when you are in the very Act of gratifying a desire. You're still subtly inclining toward the next moment. You're not actually landing on each moment of experience with full attention and paradoxically you can
Discover that many of the things you think you want. You don't want all that much. If you pay attention to what is actually like to gratify those desires me with food. This is very clear. So you can be eating something you can think you want dessert. You can have a real sweet tooth. And if you pay very close attention to what it's like to eat that sweet thing. You're finally gorging on more often than not you discover. It's just a little too sweet. There's something about it that is unpleasant and your pleasure in that moment is predicated on your being able to take a drink of water in the next right? Like if you have you fight a candy bar or something that's candy is made for kids delivers this insight to me very clearly. It's like the moment. I think I want something, you know at the movies whatever it is a you know, M&M's or something that is hasn't changed as formula for the last 40 years, and I'm eating it and
And I began to notice that I'm eating more of it as a way of just getting rid of getting rid of those a sense in your palate. Yeah. The last moment of taste that is just to chemical-laden too sweet. And you know, if I didn't have a drink of water, you know, this would actually be an unpleasant experience and it's not what it seems when you're not paying attention and this is not to say that there's nothing that's truly pleasurable and there's all kinds of pleasure and again being able to really connect with the present moment delivers its own intrinsic pleasure. But your sense of what matters can definitely change the moment you begin to pay closer attention to what experiences actually like
I think it was in one of your lessons, but it might have been in a podcast where you talked about.
Imagine you're playing a video game and it's the same video game every time and you always get killed by the same monster at the same part of the maze or whatever it is. And I think about that a lot every time I falter at predictably, you know, known understood things that get under my skin and it's very discouraging right? It's sort of like there are like a dozen things that I just know if they happen so I mean one of them is there certain types of questions that if I'm asked really irk me, you know, when people ask questions that are to which the answer is very complicated but they asked through the lens of just give me the one word answer that just irks me like, I don't know why it just bugs the shit out of me and I know that and yet over and over again, I find myself getting upset when that happens and I feel like the guy that you're describing a video gear losing the boss fight at the same place every time every single time. I know where the boogeyman is.
I know what weapon he's going to use to kill me and I just walk over there and out comes the machete and I'm dead right thing. And then I'm back to the starting block again, and I'm one fewer lives in the game. Right what what but you can recover faster each time. You lose getting angry is not the measure of having lost right now youyou, obviously, you can aspire to a time where you never get angry again or you never get angry in certain circumstances again, but the real practice is to notice as early as possible what's happening and to let go of it the difference between being angry for 10 minutes and 10 seconds and one second those factors of 10 are enormous, right and
I have the same thing going on where it's a anger is something that I very frequently feel and I also noticed that it totally contaminates the experience of people around me. So I have my wife and my daughters and my anger for them is clearly toxic and I have this commitment to letting go of it the moment I can let go of it and it's again it's not that anger is never warranted. The energy of anger can be useful. Someone's attacking you on the sidewalk, you know, when you're in a self-defense situation, that's not the moment where I would say get rid of all your anger as quickly as possible. Right and maybe there's are situations where you want to use that energy. But for the most part you want to let go of it very very quickly and then be in a position to decide what's what and whether or not it's appropriate to take some kind of confrontational path, whatever it is.
By email or say the thing that would convey your displeasure or whatever. But now I have my my wife and my daughters as a kind of feedback mechanism for me because they know my commitment. They know I can let go of anger on demand and they know I want to and they don't like my anger right and they detected in the subtlest way. So I got em, it's not it's not even anger where a normal person would classically think he was angry don't have to wait till you raise your voice. They can see the mannerisms in the way. You might move or the way your answers become shorter or yeah, or it may just so but like, you know even mild frustration get scored as you know, kind of crazy level of anger, right? So like if I you know, if I say, wait a minute, I thought the plumber was coming today. That's like, you know that you know, that's a four-alarm fire, right? So
One of my daughter's also. Ooh, daddy's getting angry, right and they'll say that so early now and it's fantastic because it's I just let go of it way earlier than I used to but if you can't be mindful you actually have no choice you just you will be angry as long as you're angry and the people around you who don't like it just have to figure out somehow to put up with you. It's not that there's no other hacks and there are many other hacks and sometimes sometimes there. It's important to have a hack that is more Global than being simply being relentlessly mindful of everything that's coming up for you like a different understanding of a situation can offer some kind of firmware update to the whole operating system and then you just simply don't go there anymore. So for instance,
So you're driving in traffic. There are many hacks for that but one hack is just you discover that you've got 400 hours of podcasts. You want to listen to and you're listening to a great one and you you're just here's happy to be listening in the fact that you're delayed an extra half hour or whatever is fine, you know, and that's a totally useful hack right get it modulates your state. You're just you're just discovering the silver line into something. That's it would otherwise be negative. I'll go I'll share with you another one because I agree with that completely. That's a great one. The other one that I've taken on in the past year that has had surprising efficacy is any customer service experience you have that is profoundly negative. And if you fly as much as I do you're pretty much guaranteed one of those a week.
my friend Jay Walker who knows a lot about the aviation industry said
one out of six experiences with u.s. Aviation as a customer service failure, right? So anyone who flies would agree with that but so the next time like the flight attendants rude to you or the TSA person is sweating you or being obnoxious or whatever if you instead take a view of empathy, which is God. This is a really hard job. You know, I mean, yeah, I have the privilege of getting to be you know, intellectually engaged and doing all of these things and boom but this is a really hard job. I mean most of the people that they're encountering are on some level dissatisfied he's showing up to to their world happy and so like simply taking that posture completely changes the way you interact with that system. Yeah, and it's interesting because it doesn't even really require a huge mindfulness in sight. It's just sort of a but it's a condition you want to walk in the situation with right you want to build a walk in with that in your mind. He has a framing effect. Yeah. Yeah, and it doesn't entail.
Mindfulness at all. You could get the benefit of that new framing without ever having heard of mindfulness so you and if you do get angry, you'll be as angry as you ever were but right so that you have a different way of thinking about it. The combination of these is powerful. Yeah when I think about one of the most difficult things to but there are two things in my life that I have learned that I think we're very difficult and took a lot of time the first was
In the year 2000 when I was finishing medical school. I had a really bad back injury. Hmm and it's a long story. But it basically for a year of my life. I was not able to move properly and for three months I was not able to move at all. Well, how'd that happen?
It's not clear how it happened. But what happened was a pretty bad outcome and I ended up having surgery but the surgeon operated on the wrong side. So it went from a very bad situation to a worse situation than and a whole series of cascading events led to it being what it was.
I look back at that as I've described as before is the best worst experience of my life because having been in so much pain for so long. I had to learn how to do everything from scratch. So I had to learn how to be able to brush my teeth without putting stress on my back which most people wouldn't even think about you wouldn't think that there's a right and a wrong way to brush your teeth. You wouldn't think that there's a right and a wrong way to get out of your bed put your shoes on or get out of your car. It turns out there is but you can only learn it when you are in such a fragile state that you've lost every ounce of strength in your back and because I experienced that for so long a year. It allowed me to make this transition, which I want to of course apply to meditation. The transition is going from being unconsciously incompetent to then being consciously incompetent to then consciously competent. And of course the goal is to one day get to a point where you are unconsciously competent. I don't think I'm unconsciously competent at a single thing. I do including movement, but
Now consciously competent at moving around and not hurting my back but I couldn't have got there. If I didn't have that feedback loop that allowed me to go through it. The other thing was learning how to swim as an adult, you know, you throw an adult in the water who never swum before they are so incompetent, but they don't even really understand what it is. And so the First Act of learning how to swim is learning to feel what's making you sink figuring out what it is that is actually dropping you to the bottom of the pool. And then of course you want to be able to correct that and with great effort over short periods of time exercise some capacity to fix that. I would say those two experiences have been by far the most difficult, but they pale in comparison to mindfulness. Hmm now, I don't know if that just makes me a hard case but and and maybe it's you know, the other thing I was thinking about when I was reflecting on this is
Having a back injury. You don't get a time. You don't get a timeout from it. You know, it's every minute of every day. You're immersed in that exposure that stimulus and that feedback loop similarly once I dedicated myself to swimming I swam for hours a day and I think maybe the issue is because I don't meditate for four hours a day. It's just going to take a lot longer to do it. And I know you and I have spoken about this and your belief is that something really happens when you go on a silent Retreat and I remember once asking you I said, hey Sam, I see this Retreat it's four days. Do you think I should go and you actually said no, I wouldn't go for a four-day Retreat. I'd wait till you can do 10 or 14 days. He had out. I guess I would modify that slightly. I think a week to 10 days is the the shortest I can recommend without caveat. I think the first three days or so of a retreat or more or less the hardest 44 Retreat of any length. So if you do if you do a three-day Retreat or afford a retreat, you're almost guaranteed.
Need to have a lot of restlessness and just resistance to the whole project and you may not touch anything on the other side of that. You can just be kind of unhappy the whole time and then just relieved to be getting off Retreat. Whereas if you have 10 days just seems like an eternity once you put yourself on Retreat and your you've just shut down your connection to everything. There's no talking there's no writing. There's no reading is just you and your attention in each moment 10 days seems like an eternity and
So as you move through those first few days of resistance.
At day 3 you're still so far away from the day that you're going home that it is much more common to Just Surrender at that point and really get into it just decide that.
You can you'll just pick up your life as you left it when you get off or treat and that for this period there's just nothing worth thinking about you're just need to to pay attention to whatever is appearing your breath sounds the movement of air on your hand as you walk your first experience in this was sort of comical the way you described it, right? This was when you were 16, I believe. Oh, no, that was my first experience of solitude that we guess it would have been a retriever. I was on Outward Bound and the Outward Bound. I assume they still have it but back then they had something called the solo which was three. It was a twenty three day period of you know camping and hiking and and kind of Outdoorsman ship but maybe day 18 or so. They put you in isolation for three full days where you would fast and do nothing right so you couldn't go hiking and do anything that would distract you and
I think that the reason for that was not based on any meditative agenda that they had it was just they don't want a bunch of not fully trained people wandering around the Wilderness while fasted so they just park you in some place. We were by this lake at maybe 9,000 feet and you just camp with a water bottle and that's all you got. You just have your sleeping bag your water bottle and you have a journal Journal. Yeah, you can write in your journal and I found the experience just intolerable. It was just you were 16. Yeah. I was 16. Hey II so I opened my book waking up with this story because it was the first moment in my life that I realized that I was on the wrong side of some understanding about the nature of my own mind and that the possibility of finding a durable source of happiness in this life of Minnesota. So I was I was alone in
An absolutely beautiful spot and totally miserable based on the fact that I didn't have any of the usual distractions and if you could have just swapped places with me and inhabited my Consciousness, I was spending all my time fantasizing about the things I was going to do when I got off get when I got out of those goddamn mountains and got back to my life in the world and you know, the friends I would see and the foods I would eat and they would just it was just a continuous advertisement for everything that I missed. You know, it was just that it was like a meditation on loneliness and boredom and grief. Ultimately. I just it was just to be separated from everyone I cared about and every fun thing I could do and every tasty thing I could eat. It was just a source of perfect misery for me. So when I came off the solo and met all of the other people who had also been on their solos
I was astonished to discover that many of them had had profoundly happy experiences. Right and that were you one of the youngest people in this room. Yeah. Yes. I was I think I was the youngest so it was I think the cutoff I don't know if this is still the case, but the cutoff for Outward Bound was 16 and a half and I was just 16 and a half. So, you know, there were lots of people who were ten years older so and so they were in different places in their lives and many of them just had kind of breakthrough experience. I mean, they just it was just some of the best time they'd ever spent alive and they were kind of radiantly happy, you know for a cause we had just done 18 or so days of brutal hiking. I'm interested in kind of just 14 hour days of hiking with 60 pound packs and you know, we had this full ordeal of learning how to to function in the backcountry and then it all stops.
You're just alone by this Alpine lake. So many of them had come out of that feeling that they had touched something profound and I had no idea what they were talking about. It was like being told, you know, I could just got run over by a car and it was the greatest thing that's ever happened to me. It's like it's made it. I had come out of there haven't had a heroin experience. So what happened when you went back home after that, did you look back and reflect on that or does that basically just become a footnote into a broader story that really didn't factor into your your ultimate search for for, you know, call it Enlightenment. Call it what you want.
It took a little time. I tried it was probably a year and a half before I then had an experience with with psychedelics that put all of this in perspective for me. So it was your first experience with psilocybin or LSD Strangely. I had taken psilocybin as a teenager before I had what really was the kind of breakthrough experience for me on MDMA when I was 18. Yeah, you wrote about that as well. Yeah. Yeah, that would that's in waking up. I taken silicide by I smoked marijuana and I had taken mushrooms a few times as a teenager and they never they never signaled anything profound to me about the nature of the mind or they never indicated a path forward apart from there's this sense that these drugs produced interesting experiences.
I had no framing for the explore what I experienced on these drugs you experience the altered state but there was no altered trait to borrow from the title of the same book. Yeah, and and also just no sense that there could be altered traits. There was no project associated with changing your experience in that way. It was just it was kind of fun. So I guess some of the experiences had also been unpleasant on psilocybin, but it's just these were drug experiences, you know, and is it was like getting drunk like if you get drunk you don't come away from that experience thinking I wonder if this indicates that it's possible to feel kind of natively feel like I've had six beers and you know, I can just be more that sort of person by some other method that has nothing to do with drinking beer all the time, right so, but but with MDMA
You know my first experience on ecstasy. I had this Epiphany that this is what Consciousness was like when it was no longer encumbered by myself concern by my egocentricity by my and because you were 18, I mean was it so much about like I'm trying to reflect on what it was like to be an 18 year old boy, but I think if I recall you wrote about just sort of the empathy that you had for your friend because it was you and another friend right? Yeah, and was that the part that was so stunning to you which was oh my God, like spent the last 18 years sort of not thinking about it through somebody else's eyes or what was it that you experience. If you can recall that at least showed you or perhaps was the thin end of the wedge that said there is now an altered state of consciousness that could exist outside of this state that I'm in that might be desirable.
it was
a recognition that
What was changing for me while I was coming on to the drug was that I was losing my concern about myself, right? So that I as I'm talking to my best friend somebody who's who I already love and and am connected to and have you know positive feelings for but what was happening is that I started to punch through to this level of connection with him that I'd never felt before despite the fact that we were great friends and it had a kind of structure to it or it was it was dissecting a structure within my mind that I had never had any cause to notice which was my default state was normally that if I'm talking to him some amount of my attention is bound up in a concern about what he thinks about me right so that you know, if I see some
Change in expression on his face based on what I just said. I'm reading into those changes some message about me so message about how I'm doing and there are many other features to this. I mean, there's also a sense of a kind of 0 some aspect to my own stature in the world and my feeling of well-being in light of other people's success and happiness. So and it's something you can discovering yourself imagine those times where you have a friend who has some massive success, right? You know, you're struggling in your life to be as successful as you want to be if you're like, most people you haven't arrived yet. And then you have a friend, you know, who's winning some version of the lottery and when this is being communicated to you you're asked to celebrate with them essentially and you can discover in yourself a kind of begrudging feeling
Whether it's Envy or there's a there's a limitation on your capacity to experience what's called sympathetic joy in Buddhism for that person and that's a ugly characteristic of the mind and he hit me here. Someone who you sensibly really care about the someone you really love. This is someone who you think and their windfall did not come at your expense, right? Exactly and yet you there's something in you that can't actually celebrate for them fully because you're so bound up with who you are and what you want for yourself and you know, how you think they may think about you and this horror show of self reference and this miserly spirit with respect to the circumstance you're in with with everyone. So what happened on for in this first MDMA trip is that I just punched through all of that, right all that was just gone and there was no Associated inebriation. I mean, it was just my experience.
It's just that's that's the thing with MDMA that makes it sort of quite distinct and special from some of these other agents right is there is no sense of altered Consciousness. Yeah, it can be kind of Speedy and also depends on whether you're getting true if your tire and here I am a yeah, this is yeah, of course when they connect with stimulants it's a different story. But yeah, but really pure MDMA doesn't seem to really alter your Consciousness in any way. Yeah the way that you know LSD would right. Yeah. I mean, there's no psych. It's not it's not considered really a psychedelic. It doesn't have any of those Visionary or hallucinatory. Yes, wait for two more isn't a pathogen verse. Yeah and seojun, correct? Yeah. Yeah. So having lost all that. I just I recognize that one just how much I loved him and how that was synonymous with wanted him to be happy and in some basic sense. His happiness would be my own right? So that's at the capacity for Envy would just completely went out the window. There's just no way to feel a zero sum.
Contest with somebody who you love and that way and but then I recognized that if a stranger had walked into the room at that moment, literally the mailman shows up. I would have felt the same way about him. It was not contingent upon having had a history with this person. I was in a state where I wanted all beings to have their dreams realized. I wish nothing but happiness on every conscious system, right we have laws for moment. So you can explain the neurobiology of that. I've experienced it as well with MDMA and
I find it to be the most joyous State I've ever experienced to have such I don't possess. I don't unlike you. I don't have the vocabulary to even describe what it feels like other than to just say you love everybody in obviously a very non-sexual way. It's just a male female or all the same it sort of becomes this. You just want the best for everyone. So what is it about the neurobiology or neurochemistry that can produce that state and I'll tell you what, the follow-up question is going to be. Is there anything we can do outside of taking that drug to even get part of that? Well, unfortunately, I don't know the answer to the neurobiology. I'm not sure it is known. I think most of these drugs are serotonergic but but the subtle did they clearly are different which we
Subset of The receptors there hitting is you don't exactly understand the causal relationship between the receptor being. Yeah, I mean and I you know, frankly, I'm not up on the literature on MDMA. So there may be some clues that I'm not aware of but and I would also add the caveat that some of these drugs I think there's reason to be concerned about in terms of the physical effects of taking them too often or emitted. So MDMA is something that was profoundly useful for me. I remain somewhat concerned that it is potentially. Neurotoxic Lee. I wouldn't want to take too much of it. I haven't taken it for years and
I have much less of a concern for other psychedelics. I think LSD is if there's no evidence that it's neurotoxic for instance having spoken with people psychiatrist who have taken care of patients who have probably taken too much MDMA the two things that I have learned from them which Echo what you're saying is yeah, it's generally safe but it's very important like any drug. I mean, these aren't regulated compounds, right? So right you're always running a risk when you take these things of other things that the drug is cut with and the Rocks a city that can be Amplified as a result of that and the second thing that I've been told is
Anything over a frequency of about every three months and you start to run a risk of these serotonergic toxicities down the line. So, you know, you can take that for what it's worth. I mean, I'm certainly not providing guidance on that other than to Echo your point that I think one has to be very careful with these agents now at the same time. I'm not following the work of maps that closely. So I'm not sure what doses are frequencies. They're using with the vets that they're studying. Yeah, and I think the personally they've worked out some of these Kinks as well. Yeah, but frankly, it would be worth it. Even if it were neurotoxic to some degree in the right conditions for the Red Birds if you had debilitating PTSD yet, maybe a little bit of long-term consequence or short-term toxicity is worth it to cure that but yeah, so then back at the second question, which is when you think about that profound empathy in that moment that you had at the age of 18.
Has your meditative practice which is obviously evolved greatly since then allowed you to either transiently or otherwise experience or re-experience that phenomenon. Yeah. Well there is a practice that targets that mental status. Actually. I mentioned it earlier. Yeah meta practice. I'm matches the Pali word for loving kindness. And yeah, there are people who do that practice almost exclusively or if it's almost a little bit for The Listener unlike mindfulness where you're letting go of any agenda you have for what your experience should be and you're just reconciling yourself to noticing however it is and if you do that, your experience does change in reliable ways many of which are quite Pleasant. They can be amazingly pleasant, but it's not about securing those changes or amplifying those changes your just because it because that insofar as that Creeps in
Not being mindful, you're doing something other than merely witnessing what's happening and doing that is an expression of your own desire and attachment and you're trying to change our experience and that's that's different than simply being mindful of it. But with a practice like meta you do have a goal you're trying to feel this feeling of loving kindness as intensely as you can feel it as durably as you can feel it and you're trying to use trying to acquire a state change, but you're also trying to acquire a trait change in that your default attitude towards other human beings or even other any other conscious system would be just well-wishing and and, you know, good good vibes. So there's no question you can train that attitude and it comes from both a framing effect and from an immersion in this change of state that you can.
Kindle in meditation and then keep humming along based on concentration so that the same kind of concept the same faculty of mind. They could become one pointedly focused on a mantra or a site like a candle flame can become one pointedly immersed in the feeling of love for all humanity and it's initiated by thinking thoughts about other people. So you'll you just imagine someone who you love and it's important that this not be contaminated with with your notion of romantic love because so much of what we think of as love and romantic context is desire and attachment and it's not it's not the same old inappropriate. Yeah checked of that type of reaction. Yeah a child a friend a parent but whoever in your life you can have just a
As uncomplicated inexperience of wishing this person. Well wishing them to be free of suffering wishing them happiness and the usual progression is to start with someone like that who you know who someone who's close to you and then transition to a neutral person, you know, someone who you have no just kind of randomly picked person from the crowd or some public figure who you have no strong association with but who you can visualize and then you're wishing that person happiness wishing that they be free of suffering are actually thinking these thoughts in your mind as a kind of almost as a kind of Mantra, but you're not it's not the sound of the the utterances. It's the the import of them that you're trying to connect with. So you're thinking may you be happy
May you be free from suffering your reiterating this you could have, you know, three or four ways of saying it and you send it over and over again, but then connecting with the actual energetics of the wish that you really do wish that this person who you love be free from suffering and it can become this very deep feeling of Basking in this well of Good Intentions for everybody right? Because and then you can you can include not only a neutral person but someone for whom you have a so-called anime someone for whom you have a real negative association and then you begin to see the importance of framing around all these things. So just like you said for the customer service situation, maybe just takes a second to realize wait a minute. Here's a person who's been standing at this desk since six o'clock in the morning meeting one disgruntled person after the next and now she or he has just met me
Their experience is completely different from mine. And which by the way is a beautiful cut to the sort of issue that David Foster Wallace talks about so much is every experience we have is only through our lens, right? Yeah. It's that Insight alone, which now you're giving a very tangible example of is so powerful just to be able to hit pause on that for a moment and say what you just said, right this person's been standing here for seven hours. Yeah, seeing one pissed-off face after another what they're seeing now is totally different from what I'm seeing. Yeah. Yeah and your impatience isn't helping and you are so glad that you're not in their shoes. Right? Like you don't want their job you actually feel compassion for their experience, right? And it means that there are many, you know hacks of this kind where do you know you're driving in traffic and someone cuts you off and your default experiences. What an asshole
But it just takes a second to realize wait a minute. You have no idea what's going on with this person. You don't know if this person is in a rush because they have some real emergency. You don't know if they're 90 years old. Now, you just honked at some 90 year old man or woman, right and who's the asshole now? There's so many changes of frame applied to the exact same experience which just fundamentally change your interpretation of it a loving kindness practice is based on a fundamental frame change for more or less everything you can encounter in human Affairs, which is everyone is suffering. Everyone was once a child condemned to now be the the adult they now are right so like this there is no evil person who invented himself, right? There's no idea and this is something I've talked about with respect to Saddam Hussein in the past.
I usually talk about this in the context of talking about free will but let me just look at someone like the prototypical evil person. You know, Saddam Hussein is about as good as it gets right. So you look at him as a 40 year old man. He's just a terrifyingly evil sociopath who if you're in favor of the death penalty, it definitely applies to him but you roll back his his life line by a few decades and at a certain point you say, okay, here's a 12 year old boy who could have well been a scary 12 year old boy, but you know when he's four years old, he's a four year old and he's a four-year-old who has every strike against him in the sense that he's guarantee. That seems to be a morally damaged human being he's living in a society Riven by sectarian conflict the Norms to which he's being pushed the aspirations. He can form in this context are
Barbaric by any standard, you know ethical standard that we would form today, right and the kind of person who can thrive in that context is someone who's morally damaged by our lives and he didn't pick his parents. He didn't pick his jeans. He's not the author of himself and yet he's going to become this evil person who you know half the world or more will think is deserving of death at the end of it.
It's possible to feel compassion even for someone like Saddam Hussein. That's a reframing that may be hard for some people to get there. But for someone who's practicing State like meta that's the frame and if you can get there you can recognize that there is this capacity for love and and well wishing that really extends without limit to every conscious system. If you want you want everyone to be relieved of all their problems on some basic level because the most badly behaved people in the world are for the most part expressing their problems, even when you have a truly sadistic person who seems to be deriving pleasure from causing other people suffering and such people exist what you're witnessing there is someone for whom all these other sources of pleasure and well-being are basically unavailable right this would this person on some level can't know what
Missing, you know, there's a person who's never going to have good relationships of the sort that you and I would demand for ourselves. And everyone we love is the necessary ingredients of a life well-lived. It's not to say you wouldn't want to put this person in jail because it's there is no cure for this problem. I'm not recommending that we not protect ourselves from malevolent people, but you don't actually have to hate them. I mean a feeling compassion for these people isn't incompatible with taking the steps. We need to take to keep Society orderly and save it one thing I would recommend to anybody who's interested in pulling a little more on this thread is to do a prison visit. Yeah. I never done that by I heard you and Tim did that right Tim and I did it and I head up. I did a podcast we got in Cory McCarthy who himself was incarcerated for seven years for attempted murder and a bunch of other stuff and you know, there's a group of three or four or five of us that actually went and spent a couple of days.
At a Maximum Security Prison and we played this game there. It's called step to the line, which I'm sure you've heard of and it's you know, it's a game that's played in many reasons, but the purpose is always to basically highlight our similarities and our differences. So on the one side of the line were all of these inmates now, we're in a Maximum Security Prison in California. So everybody in that room, I don't remember the exact numbers. I believe 70% of those men were serving life sentences some staggering number of these guys were in there because of you know homicide or you know, some something more than like they were trafficking some marijuana, right and on the other side are all of us as volunteers and then the game begins of step to the line if and
Some of the differences are so humbling that it fit. You can't be a you can't be a reasonable human being and being that situation and not be moved by it, you know step with the line. If you had two parents in your household and amongst the volunteers, you know, maybe 60% step forward and amongst the inmates. I think one step forward, you know, yeah step for the line if
Someone close to you died before you were 10, you know and or died a violent Death Before You Were Ten, you know these sorts of things and you know set for the line if you grew up in a home that had more than five books and those of us as volunteers most of us step forward of the inmates, you know, five step forward out of 50 that kind of thing right and it's to your point right? It's like
We're we're not going to excuse the mistakes that took place and there's you know, Society has said there's going to be a price that one has to pay for one mistakes, but boy you realize pretty quickly the randomness that allows you or me to be standing on one side of that line and not the other. Oh, yeah. Yeah. No, if you were in precisely that other person situation genetically environmentally you would be that other person right this just there is no daylight between all of those causes and conditions and the outcome and even if even adding Randomness, I mean it's not you know, quantum mechanics doesn't get you out of this situation and I think of all the times I've been lucky like when I was in eighth grade there was a kid that was a year ahead who was like my hero, you know, he was the absolute toughest kid in the school. I mean, he was the bad she bad ass.
And he took me under his wing, you know, so I was like really lucky to be the eighth grader who this super tough badass kid really liked.
And two years later he wound up in jail for armed robbery and I've often thought to myself. I was so impressionable that if I had been with him on that night and he said look, we're going to hold up a liquor store Rick. I'm not sure I would have had the common sense the intestinal fortitude that whatever the courage to say do that's a bad idea. I'm not going to go. Well, it's so easy that I could have gone along for that. Yeah. And as I learned later on once you get in that system, like, you know, once you're 16 years old and your peg for armed robbery like it's very hard to recover to Stanford. Yeah. Yeah, so so but that's that's a moment's decision and the luck is like were you there or not there? Right and and I'm I'm I have way more cards that are favorable in my deck than virtually all of these guys. I met and I yet I still could have easily slipped over that, you know into that abyss of that endless vicious cycle of 111 knockout
Another until before you know it like you're 40 years old and you're in prison for life. Yeah. It's so the philosophical Insight here goes by the name of moral luck. And so I think it originates with a say that the philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote probably 30 years ago. We rarely recognized how morally significant differences in luck our and and just how lucky you need to be to live a good moral life. Any one of those things could have been marginally different and you'd be the guy who was an accessory to armed robbery, right?
Let me just think of how many times most of us have driven drunk or not a hundred percent and nothing bad happened the difference between nothing bad happening and killing somebody in a crosswalk is enormous and just life deranging stranger still because it's now it's not even classed for most people as a significant risk. They're running texting while driving. I mean, I would say most of the people listening to this podcast. I have not totally shut down there texting while driving right? They're not they're not even thinking of it as a grotesquely irresponsible thing to be doing right now because it's just it's too tempting you're at a red light but being at a red light in my grades into the first hundred feet of your now responding to a green light and then there's the moment on the freeway and then and every day there's some totally normal responsible upstanding person like,
Army who kill somebody's kid in a crosswalk because they were texting the significance of that difference in luck. It's extraordinary and you know, these are these are unrecoverable errors most of the time so the two sides of that one it can get you two to take more care and all the spots where more care massively increases your odds of living a happy fulfilling life, but also can give you this different framing that allows you to feel compassion for even the worst people on earth, right? You can just it's just recognize that if you change enough of the variables you would be playing the same game. They're playing in this is I think this is so important to him and I don't think I understood how important this was until
I read something you wrote which I'm paraphrasing. So I'll be bastardizing it but the gist of it was
It's really the caliber quality of our thoughts that determine the quality of our life. Hmm, and I so let's take a most extreme example.
I had a friend who was killed by a motorist who was texting. So who's on his bike. He couldn't have been in a safer spot actually and
but woman, you know got distracted for a moment and killed him.
and
I was angry in a way that sort of felt like it was never going to go away and truthfully a big part of it was selfish. It was I don't want this to happen to me. Now, you know, I'm at the time I was a cyclist. I was like, I'm sick and tired of seeing cyclists get hit and some of the times they're getting killed but they're getting hit all the time. Right and it's it always seems to be these not always but 90% of the time it's he's distracted drivers. Sometimes the cyclist just does something stupid but for the most part if you get hit if a road if a cyclist in the road gets hit the drivers usually at fault interestingly in less alcohol is involved. Those drivers are never prosecuted right and I spent so much time being so pissed off and part of it was just my own grandiosity. Like my life is too valuable. I'm not going to die on the side of a road because some drivers too stupid to turn off their phone or bubble bubble blah.
But then I had you know after kind of reading something you wrote. I reflected on it years later and thought I've never once asked myself what that person is going through who killed Nick. Yeah. Yeah, what have her life like today because there's no way she forgot that there's no way she doesn't go to bed at night and think about the fact that she had such a tragic story. Not only did she kill a guy who's just a beautiful soul who had you know, a bunch of children.
He was killed two days before his life insurance policy kicked in mmm. He was killed on believe it was May 30th know it was May 31st, and he had a policy that would didn't start till June 1st. I mean, it's like you couldn't make this story up. It's so tragic.
But it's too easy to not reflect on her pain. You could say well Peter that's ridiculous. She doesn't deserve any empathy put all of that empathy towards Nick's family, but it in the end if I'm really optimizing for my own quality of life.
There's no upside to just being upset about this like, you know, I some benefit I will accepting the fact that everybody here losses and if that makes me less angry and makes me hate that person less isn't that a good way to think about things? Well, yeah, but I would even put it more strongly because I can't she the driver was profoundly unlucky because she was like, she was guilty of doing something that all of us have done everyone listening to this podcast has done and didn't pay that price War still she's guilty of doing something that most of the people listen to this podcast will continue to do even after hearing this podcast.
This is a reset that I'm convinced. Most people are not quite ready for a certain point self-driving cars will come to the rescue but the difference between being someone who was texting and didn't even notice the danger because nothing bad happened and being someone who killed your friend is just luck, you know, and so yeah and you can only imagine how awful it has been to be the person who was irresponsibly texting and who killed somebody in the in the prime of their life just to hear the details and to have been the person who initiated that tsunami of suffering just imagine a website where
You present the texts that were the proximate cause of death, right? How irrelevant they must have been the juxtaposition between what people were felt couldn't wait another 30 seconds or 30 minutes and what the tragedy of the loss. Yeah, it would be astonishing maybe we can all predict what it would be but that's the basic idea but it's a pretty damn good idea. Yeah again, it's just if you imagine what that woman went through its you would not want to trade places with her. So I want to shift gears for women and go back to discussion. I had a week ago with one of my friends who's a patient. He's been really struggling the last few months. He's a he's a father. He's a wonderful guy. He's got two kids three dogs and he's a guy with a really big heart. So he's one of these guys who just I don't know you get the sense. He could never be upset anybody. He could never you know,
Not want to take care of somebody around him and but his one of the dogs which is the first dog you ever had died had cancer and they went through a bunch of treatments and and the dog ultimately died and I think for him losing that dog was was certainly on the spectrum of losing a child, right? I don't think it's the same but but I think for him it was very difficult and he's been unable to sort of get back in the saddle so to speak and it's it's reflected in frankly his cortisol levels. I've never seen cortisol levels so high so his degree of hypercortisolism Mia is if you didn't know better you'd think he had a cortisol secreting tumor. Actually. It's so profound and we were talking about it and
He confessed that he couldn't stop dreading the death of his other two dogs who are you know age six and seven or something like that. So these aren't dogs that are going to die tomorrow. In fact, these aren't even dogs that are you know, sick in any way shape or form right? But is he's three months out from the death of this dog. That was probably 14 or 15.
He's spending every moment now dreading the loss of these dogs that are going to die in 5 years or something like that and it was very hard for me to try to console him because I didn't want to be dismissive of the pain. But I also wanted to remind him that you know, that's the antithesis of being present right? It's like but your children and your two dogs are right here with you right now and they're perfect. Yeah and all the worrying you can do about when these two dogs died doesn't change the fact that they're going to die, but you don't know when and you don't know how when you don't know any of these things. How would you
Explain to someone like that in not necessarily the most technical sense, but maybe in sort of an appeal to their emotion why this effort isn't going to pan out and why there needs to be a new strategy for getting over this loss. Well, it depends on whether or not the person is living an examined life of the sort that we've been discussing. So if this is a person who has no meditation practice and it's not interested in that mode he is so I've given him your books he has been going through the meditation course that you have but is still having a real hard time like all of us and I think in taking it from, you know, the example I use is like if you go to the gym and you sort of lift weights for 15-20 minutes a day, you know, that's that's great. But the whole purpose of doing that is to take those new muscles and be able to use
Them in the other 23 and a half hours. Right? And so I think that's the transition is like I think the theory makes sense to him, but it's now how does one actually bridge that Gap. So let's for the purpose of the discussion. Let's say he accepts conceptually right value of this. Yeah. Well, so then to become sensitive to the actual mechanics of suffering that the only way to suffer this dogs absence is to think about it and not know that you're thinking about it, right? So it is to be subsumed by this process of ideation and to have no perspective on it and framing can help here so you can you can say well
There were many experiences he had with this dog alive with a dog wasn't physically present right the dog leaves the room. There's no greater absence from a room then simply leaving it right now. It's an additional operation to think well is a big difference because I'll never see him again. Right? But everyone you love in the world animals, you're the only person I love who's in this room are exactly right there all it's right out of this room. So in principle, you know what it's like to be content in moments where Circle absent in the physical absence of everyone you love in this world. It's possible and the only way to make it intolerable to be in a room without everyone you love is to meditate on how intolerable that is that they're not in the room with you right now, and this is why meditation is such an amazing.
Skill because and is has a point of contact with your prison story miss the point I make several places. I think I make it my book waking up. The amazing thing about meditation is that once you actually know how to meditate it's possible to be alone in a room for weeks and months and even years imagine several teachers. I studied with had spent literally years alone in caves where in most people's lives solitary confinement is considered a punishment even in a circumstance where to be outside of that room is to be surrounded by murderers and rapists who you might have to fight. Right. So like even in prison people don't want to be in solitary confinement because it's so intolerable to be left alone with your thoughts.
There's an evolutionary rationale for this and we are clearly evolved to be social primates and a circumstance where you find yourself alone more or less forever is not an Optimum in evolutionary terms.
but it's just simply a fact of the human mind that is possible to discover a form of well-being that is the not only survives contact with the solitude but it's just totally undiminished by Solitude and if you can discover that even for moments at a time you can then enjoy the company of everyone you love without this feeling that your well-being is at its core predicated on being able to have them at any moment you want or that we're that is predicated on the totally forlorn hope that this circumstance is going to endure forever that no one will die that no one will leave you we know that's not in the cards and you know, we need to find whatever form of well-being is possible given the fact that things are continually changing your thought experiment are
I mean it wasn't a thought experiment but I it made me think of something was.
Think of all the people who are thrust into solitary confinement. I mean tragically in this country. It's it's an absolute epidemic in the US prison system and for all of the realities of how inhumane that is, especially for the length of time people fight find themselves in there. Do you think there's a subset of people who inadvertently stumble into mindfulness without being formally taught. So the analogy would be like if I through 16 year old Sam into a weight room, but I'd never shown him or forget a weight room into a basketball court you'd never seen basketball before there is a basketball there is a net and I said, you know, you're confined to this room for a year like at some point. Will you figure out picking up the ball bouncing it? I wonder if how hard it is to put that ball through that hoop over there shooting at all of those things. I mean, it seems unlikely, right. It seems like on some level you would have to at least be shown what to do and then even if you're left alone if you could come back to that
And so similarly you take a guy and let's say you put them in solitary confinement for a year. He's had no exposure to mindfulness. Is there a chance he's going to spontaneously figure out oh my God. This is far less painful. If I'm actually present in you know, the sensations of my body versus the ruminations and thoughts that are going to torment me or is that something that is just so counterintuitive to the ethos of who we are that no way like, you know, you're going to have to have had some exposure to this to at least be able to be thrust in that environment.
It's definitely possible because it is just the way Consciousness is if you're paying attention, so it's there to be recognized in each moment, but the odds are against anyone doing it and maybe there are people who have spontaneously awakened to this. I mean, they're they're kind of famous, you know add apps and certainly in the Eastern tradition or there are also the Western philosophers who have had intimations of this where Jean Jacques Rousseau has a story about right in and in a boat on a lake I think and in spontaneously falling into kind of some very open and and non egocentric State of Consciousness that we would recognize but the difference between having clear information and a clear map and not we're having an erroneous one. It's just an enormous so I know I wouldn't have been able to have done it like, you know, I think about how
Counterintuitive how difficult it is to practice mindfulness to go through the practice. Yeah, like I think if you'd put me in solitary confinement for a hundred years, I would have never stumbled into that. Yeah, fortunately so I would have been confined to you know, just been tortured while so worse still is possible to be practicing mindfulness and to be on Retreat and not recognize many of the things that you really do want to recognize about the nature of the mind because the way the mindful of mindfulness has been taught to you is however subtly encouraging of a kind of goal seeking practice and I miss the way I write about in my book and talk about in in my app is possible to be practicing mindfulness in a way that is dualistic. Its kind of ramify of the subject object perception and therefore
Or the the goal of recognizing the selflessness of Consciousness and being relieved of this sense of ego at the center of the sense that there's a meditator or thinker of thoughts or an experiencer of experience that that it can be posited as the ultimate goal of some incredibly laborious spiritual path. That just has to be traversed by increments over years and that's it. That's an error. That's a mistake and that's just not true. It's already true of Consciousness that they the ego is an illusion and that can be realized directly.
And the expectation that it can't be is in some basic sense self-fulfilling for most people so you can be in the most auspicious circumstances having devoted a massive part of your life to just practicing mindfulness and still be in a kind of Crucible of unnecessary seeking and suffering because you just you have a erroneous understanding of what the path actually is. I went there a couple of sort of semantics. I want to you've already alluded to a little bit the the relationship between vipassana and mindfulness where does dzogchen fit into this and like if you were to try to draw a Venn diagram of these these these different concepts, how would they overlap also the pasta is the
The name of the practice in Tera vaada Buddhism the oldest tradition of Buddhism and this is the Buddhism of Thailand and Burma and Sri Lanka and the pasta as I said means insight and you're having insight into what are thought of as a fundamental the fundamental characteristics of all phenomenon, and these are impermanence and selflessness and unsatisfactoriness this often misleadingly translated as suffering rather than unsatisfactoriness. So many people believe that the Buddha taught that life is suffering or that all experience contains some intrinsic suffering. It's not quite the message. It's that life is
A circumstance where there is no unchanging fully satisfactory basis for one's happiness because everything is changing this by virtue of impermanence that the boat is always leaking right? We're always bailing water. We're always responding to some slow emergency really, you know where our health is always putting question are in there's always some new pain arise in the body because we're simply not moving right you always have to respond to something and our Pleasures. However, hard-won are fleeting, you know, they're Vanishing even in the act of acquiring them. So there's no place to land that is secure and that's largely by virtue of the impermanence of sensory experience. But the cell the selflessness component is separable from those two other characteristics and
That's for passionately the pasta is a practice. Whereby you have insight into those three characteristics and mindfulness is the tool you use to have those insights mind. The training in mindfulness is a training in a kind of awareness of experience which is non-judgmental nonreactive. You're not seeking to maximize pleasure. You're not trying to make pains Go away You're just becoming interested in a very open and focused way on what just what the character of every experience is. So if you're feeling restless rather than try not to feel Restless, you're becoming interested in an increasingly aware of the the actual characteristics moment a moment of restlessness. How is it that? You know, you're Restless. Where is it? What is it in the city? We were talking about a pattern of energy in the body that you you can suddenly recognized as a rising totally on its own.
And changing based on its own Dynamics and you are merely the witness of that change in state. And so it is with any Pleasant emotion or experience and you keep dropping back into merely witnessing and that is that is mindfulness when you can do it when you're when you're actually not trying to change anything. You're not judging anything and you're not staying at the conceptual level. You're not you're not thinking about experience your it's just experiencing experience more and more closely. And so if you're if it's a matter of paying attention to the sensations in the body, you're not staying at the level where you you feel like I've my hands are sweaty, right? No, you're actually you're feeling the temperature and the tingling and the pressure so closely that the concept of hands and sweat disappear as you're just feeling the raw data of experience.
And these changes can be pleasant to be your sense of even having a body can disappear while you're meditating and just it just resolves into a cloud of sensation. So Zog Chen is a Tibetan practice tradition, which is explicitly non-dualistic and what that means in this context is it goes after the selflessness of the Mind very directly so that it because most of us start meditating where we are in our normal states of cognition with the sense that there's a there's a subject in the middle of experience. There's a mind in the head and it is by definition separate from everything that it knows right. So there's the the subject that can be aware of sights and sounds and Sensations and the subject is also a thinker as he it's producing this week.
Sometimes the author of thoughts and it's me and I feel like I'm over here in my head behind my face almost wearing my face as a kind of mask right? I'm not identical to my face. I'm behind my face and you're looking across space at me and your gaze has an implication for me because I can you know, if I follow where you're looking I'm over here and not identical to my body right? I'm in my body. I'm a kind of Passenger in my body. I mean you and I can say well then, you know my hand is I've got an injury to my hand and you and I can both look at my hand as a kind of object in space, right? My hand is part of the world both of us. Yeah, and you know, obviously I care more about my hand then you do because my hand but if something's wrong with my hand, I'm still over here up in my head behind my eyes some distance from the hand and I can imagine being without the hand right? It could be, you know, if I love I lost my hand in an accident will then I would have one less hand, but I'd still be me.
Here in my head behind my eyes, right that locus of knowing that sense of being located in the head as a self as a ego is the starting point for everyone in meditation and you can do vapp Asana from that starting point. You can be taught the method of mindfulness meditation and you just begin to pay more and more attention to what it's like to be you and you can notice these three characteristics of impermanence and selflessness and unsatisfactoriness. The poly is an itchy dukkha and anatta our Niche anata and dukkha in that order and you can start from wherever you are and who knows how long it will take you to have this inside a fundamental insight into the looser Enos of that starting point of being a subject in the head and was oh Jen, you can't start until you've had that insight and so the path of zhongshan entails becoming available to that Insight in
Ways it is usually a matter of actually forming a connection with a what's called as auction master in the in the Tibetan tradition. Someone who can actually point this out to you in conversation. And for most people meaning they can point out to you when you are falling to the illusion of ego meaning they they can point out when you are defaulting back into that mode will know that they can point out the intrinsic egolessness of Consciousness in a way that you can recognize it and then practice that right. So because most people they start meditating they still feel like they're up in their heads paying attention, you know, it's that now I'm paying attention to the breath now. I'm noticing the difference between being lost in thought and being mindful but it had doesn't fundamentally cut through the sense that there is one who can be mindful right and you know, you can have experience.
Is where the distance the apparent distance between subject and object and collapse but they can come in a haphazard way where you you don't know what how you have them. You don't know how you'll have them again. Right like it can come by virtue of paying closer and closer attention to sounds and Sensations and things that are arising and you can suddenly feel like all the way in that moment of hearing that bird. There was no me and there was no bird that was just hearing that can collapse again and again and it did for me when I was spending time on Retreat practicing for pasta, but I always Associated it with the intense concentration of retreat and it seemed unavailable to me in ordinary Moments Of Consciousness, you know offer treat, you know, I'm driving in traffic or working at my computer or whatever like there's no way I'm going to touch that level of concentration, you know, I haven't been spending 14 hours a day meditating.
So this is a kind of a peak experience that isn't isn't available. Now. Well was ocean you discover that the reverse is true. All the peak experiences are no more empty of self than ordinary waking consciousness is and you can recognize this about Consciousness in any moment and it doesn't it doesn't actually require previous moments of building momentum May framing really counts for a lot here. So I spent a lot of time practicing with this one Burmese meditation master who pandita side out and the analogy he would often use is that progress in pop Asana is like rubbing two sticks together to get fire the moment you stop the heat dissipates and your back to 0, right? So it's like it like you'd have the sense if you'd be on retreat with him practicing for you know up to 20 hours a day and trying to make your mindfulness absolutely continuous. So this the the difference between
I'm sitting and walking meditation and every other moment when you're doing a ton of sitting and walking meditation, it's like 16 hours a day of that but every other moment when like you're going to meals or anything else you wake up and get out of bed in the morning every transitional moment getting a cup of tea. You're trying to link every instant of conscious awareness together with mindfulness and whenever you would get distracted,
Part of you would begin scouring that as a failure to build up enough momentum to get to the goal of the other the fundamental breakthrough that was on offer by that path. So this framing this idea that you're rubbing two sticks together the moment you stop their cooling off and you've made no progress, right? That's the opposite framing for dzogchen. The framing you need for seokjin is there's this something already true of Consciousness. You are trying to produce this thing. You're not trying to get rid of the ego. You're not trying to change anything about what it is. You're trying to recognize a feature of Consciousness that is already the case and it's actually nearer to you. Then you think it's not it's not a matter of going deep within and having some kind of breakthrough. It's actually right on the surface of the most ordinary form of Consciousness. It doesn't require
Any pyrotechnic change in the contents of Consciousness, it's not you're not actually closer to it. If you take acid and and all the colors begin to change or you feel a change in your energy such that you know, you feel this is kind of buzz of connectedness to all things as you know, anyone who's taken acid can verify that's that's on offer. But all of that seemed interesting all of that such as you know, I'm not discounting the power of those experiences, but those experiences are no less empty of self, then every state of consciousness. We just said that the precisely the State of Consciousness that's compatible with reaching for a glass of water and drinking it without anything novel intruding, you know, there's no Bliss. There's no Rapture. There's no profound or spiritual change in state. It's possible to recognize in that moment that
There's no Center to Consciousness. And so adsorption is is the path of discovering that there's no Center and then taking that insight as your only object of mindfulness so that what you're mindful of thereafter is that there's no Center to Consciousness. So whatever is appearing sights sounds and Sensations, you are continually dropping the implied Center.
It's kind of a steep path because it's hard to start a you can't you can't really start and everything you're doing before you have that insight and can notice it again on demand. Everything you're doing is by definition a preliminary practice to that because you need enough mindfulness to notice. What is to be noticed and to follow the instructions to start that path, but it's you me certainly don't have to spend years on Retreat to start that path. And so it's having good information as is certainly better than having misleading information there.
This
practice is I said is it's challenging. It's just not.
There's no two ways around it. I think it's for some people it's probably as difficult as saying to someone who's 40 years old who's never exercised deliberately a day in their life. Okay, it's time to start spending an hour a day in the gym and you're going to be doing these new movements and they're going to be very uncomfortable. And for many people, you know, a few weeks or months into that exercise routine. They're still not finding any great source of pleasure and there are some of us who love exercising like we just get a again going back to the the lingo of States versus traits like the, you know, I worked out this morning before I saw you and
I mean, I was in a new gym for the first time and sometimes that is a little you're sort of like, I don't know where all the equipment is or you know, LOL, but but regardless it's just the actual state of exercise to me is so pleasurable. Even if it didn't offer any traits that were advantageous outside of it. Of course, the real reason we exercise is not for the hour that were in the gym moving around these artificial pieces of iron. It's because of the benefit that gives us both metabolically and structurally Beyond the time we're exercising
right for
is it safe to say that for most people the experience of meditation doesn't produce a state that is necessarily as pleasurable as say the MDMA state was that you could describe and that really the reason this ought to be considered by someone who is not meditating is more the traits that come outside of the act of meditating the act of the
practice. Yes. Well, so
It's possible to have extremely Pleasant States arise in meditation. Both ones that have a kind of ethical implications Like Loving kindness and ones that just are sort of the equivalent of you being on heroin. Right? So it's not necessarily pointed in any auspicious or pro-social directions just you experiencing more pleasure than you've ever experienced. But none of those experiences really can be the point because they're transitory when they're gone. They really are gone. I mean the
Demeaning analogy to drugs is not inaccurate. Like what's the point if it's just a matter of getting high and you're no better person in the world as a result of having had that experience. So it really is about having a fundamentally different relationship to experience in general all of the counter productive ways in which you grasp at the pleasant and push the unpleasant away just like that man. That is the Fairly Buddhist framing of it. But I think it's it's appropriate. We basically it's about not suffering unnecessarily in the end right and then not broadcast in your suffering to the rest of humanity.
So it can't be about having an experience. That's extremely Pleasant and become becoming more and more attached to that experience. And so that's one of the things that's misleading and a potential downside of getting very good at so called concentration practices or absorption practices is that they don't have the power to give you a perspective that is a fundamental antidote to egocentricity and selfishness and even you know, his kind of starkly unethical instincts in other areas of your life and they really can be fundamentally no more interesting from a kind of a larger examined life perspective then they drug experience. I'm going to take some clear examples here. There are there have been gurus who have behaved shockingly unethically in their lives and had the you know, the reputations ruined.
And just they just leave a wake of unhappy and and even destroyed people behind them. Whoo, there was no doubt were meditative athletes and in many cases focused on concentration practices. So I like if you had to ask well, what was it like to be these gurus when they were meditating certainly not all of them were frauds many of them were truly talented meditators, but they were meditating in a way that was not it was a separate game. They were playing right? And again, it was a good game that was probably produced immense pleasure while they were doing it, but it didn't fully undercut everything else about them that was going to be in a fairly monstrous in relationship to other human beings. This is where framing or the the overall concept of what one is doing is pretty important because it's there.
Pathological states of pleasure through even pathological states of spiritual pleasure. I think the suicide bomber before he detonates his bomb there in states of a kind of ecstasy. I'm going to have a religious expectation for what's about to happen which entails going to paradise and experiencing more pleasure than anyone can imagine and in almost every case that sincere and deeply felt and these people are about to get whatever they want. And they know the creator of the universe is happy that they're going to get it so that there's nothing about ecstasy per se that is good or even benign because it can be pointed in the wrong direction. I think
what was a missile that doesn't necessarily come with a guidance
system. Yeah, and I think what we're looking for to lead truly better lives across the board is something that is anchored to an ethics for lack of a better word where our
Troll or or contemplative tools are actually making us better people across the board. And again, there's some bright lines here that I think are useful to to draw me. So for instance not lying is a major variable for me. Ethically. It's just like like having formed a commitment to being honest in basically every situation that wasn't like actresses a self-defense situation. You may I don't think you have to be honest to the person who's attacking you write or seems likely to attack you but to put dishonesty somewhere on the Continuum of violence and Only Resort to it where things are broken down so much that you're just not dealing with another person as though there are rational interlocutor.
That is massively simplifying of a person's life right now. Very few. People have made that commitment but having made it,
when did you make the commitment? I know you've spoken about this. But when how old were you when you decided that
I was I was 18. I was I was freshman year in college. I took a course taught by this great Professor Ron
Howard not to be confused with that run,
huh? Yeah, no not not the former actor now director. This course was just an examination of whether it was ever ethical to lie. Virtually. Everyone goes into that course more or less not even knowing what their relationship to line is. They haven't been sensitized to it as a significant variable in their lives in terms of you know, maintaining their relationships with their reputations or
Yeah, I lie. Sometimes and their white lies and you know, sometimes it's just too awkward to tell the truth or and you don't know how often you do it. But you know, everybody does it and the world could be no other way and this course was just a machine for exposing the dysfunction of that and more or less it became as it was like a seminar where everyone was just kind of coming up with scenarios where it must be all right to lie. I'm surely this is a white lie that is better told and the professor would shoot that down and most people left the course more or less certain that line was virtually always the wrong move for purely selfish reasons. It was just like it was not creating the life you want and by not by being committed to not lying you were closing the door to all kinds of complexity and risk both interpersonally and
Reputationally that you absolutely want to close the door to them. It's almost analogous like to texting while driving just decide not to text while driving you will not care about all those
texts. You don't have to worry about well only text at intersections, right or if I'm stuck in traffic, but we're not going that fast or
whatever. Yeah, I can assure you that you will never really regret the texts. You sent later when you when you finally arrived at your
destination. So how old were you when you met your wife your now wife
31.
Okay. So you've had 13 years of this practice of not lying and now you meet the woman you're ultimately going to marry who presumably hasn't taken this course or made this commitment at some point. Does that become a discussion which is
By the way, I'm going to be a little different than most guys that you've met in that, you know, if you ask me if you look good in that dress and I don't think you do. I'm just going to say you don't write please don't interpret that as I'm an insensitive prick. I just don't want to go down that like did you ever have that discussion that sort of prefaced or it may be your wife the wrong example, but like, I mean, I believe as your own planning this I'm thinking about all of the lies. I
tell know it was sort of you kind of stumble into it you want up training the people around you to know what they're going to get from you right? And it's not necessarily explicit. It's just in that case. Yeah, it means she became very clear very quickly. Just what sort of importance I put on honesty and you know there there are few hiccups in many relationships, but the gain that people notice very very quickly.
Which I don't think they would want to Forfeit to smooth over any other possible awkwardness is they know you're never going to lie to them, right? They know that you're being truthful and so like when you have said, you know that you didn't like something in a spot where most other people would have just told some kind of white lie. So as not to have to communicate that then you are your praise means that much more, you know, if you're a creative person who's often needs to get feedback from people the immediately discover this when I give a piece of writing to somebody and ask for feedback, who do I value more of the person who is just going to praise me because they think that's what I want to hear and because they if they find it too awkward to deliver some bad news because they know I've spent a lot of time writing this thing.
Or do I want to hear from the person who is actually finding flaws in this thing. I've written and will now because I'm going to them early will now has a chance to spare me the public embarrassment of broadcasting these flaws to all Humanity clearly. I value that the other reader more and once you see the alternative you realize you want the people who will be straight with you and then you meet you meet people who think they want feedback, but they don't want feedback. You can have a more or less grown-up relationship to the opinions of others the people who don't want feedback who just want to be told that what they did was fantastic. Well, if they're surrounded by honest people, they very quickly feel the cramp of that right. They just they want to be surrounded by liars and they'll curate their connections as a result. You won't ask that same person again, if you're the sort of person who didn't want an honest opinion and
Ended asked for one. Is
it possible for someone to let's pick an extreme example, but could one go into public office and take that oath that I will never lie. I mean, is it is that is that compatible with politics for
example?
It is widely assumed that it's a deal-breaker, right? I think everything virtually everything is wrong with our politics is the result of the mismatch between inner personal ethics of this sort and what works and what wouldn't work in the public sphere. I think it should be compatible with politics. I think dishonesty should exact a a massive reputational cost in politics. But now we're in this strange, you know, Mirror Universe where the most dishonest person anyone has ever witnessed is the president of the country and suffering absolutely no reputational cost among those who love him for his dishonesty. Like I say, it's not a bug it's a feature in my view. That is the most dysfunctional thing about the Trump phenomenon. It's what it's done to the value of honesty in our
Public conversation about politics at least a half of the electorate pointing out that he's lied yet again is completely ineffectual with the people who don't care that he's lied. I mean they just they just assume he's going to lie. It's a very strange performance. It's like not even about representing reality anymore. It's not that the people who love Trump are reliably duped by him. You know, it's that they're not holding him to a standard of honesty at all. Right and his dishonesty. However obvious is a different kind of performance. It's almost like there's been an analogy often drawn to professional wrestling. It's a fake Sport with fake violence and the fact that it's fake is actually understood by basically everyone who enjoys it right? It's not that it's not like they're writing taken in just
five years old. Yeah time you're a teenager or whatever you sort of get that this is an act. Yeah. They're still very athletic.
Like nothing no away from this skill required to do.
Oh, yeah, I mean ironically that what they're doing is more dangerous than MMA for the most part. They're getting horrific injury sometimes but there's no illusion that these guys are just as tough as the people in the Octagon right eye. So it's like they're people who watch both or enter a certainly aware of both and they clearly understand what reality is reality is what's going on in mixed martial arts, right? There's things that are honest at the level of the language of violence and they're things that are pure Fabrications their lies and something has happened in our conversation about facts in the political domain as happened to some degree in the left for different reasons. But yeah, I didn't to come back to your question. I think we're paying a massive price for not being able to tell when people are lying definitively like did not have a lie detector that forensically can be relied upon and you know an
To DNA evidence, you know where you just know that someone's representing their state of knowledge erroneously and we're paying a massive prize for the fact that so many millions of people don't actually care
that they're being lighter. That's the bigger issue. Right? I mean, I think politicians have always lied. I don't think that's what's new. It's almost like a threshold has been crossed where it's so you go back to sort of Clinton's impeachment. Right? I mean in the end, I think the legal issue was less about whether he'd had an affair with Monica Lewinsky. The bigger issue was that he lie under oath, right? And in many ways that's what his impeachment came down to. Yeah, it's quite clear. He probably did right? I mean we could get into the semantics of sexual relations, but the the mean it's pretty clear. He lied under oath.
But
the point you're making is that now it's almost a feature like now it's
almost.
I think it's gone beyond it that it's
accepted and now it's almost like part of the theater
but I think that is a uniquely trumpian phenomenon. I don't know that anyone else will be able to play it quite that way. I mean it is a it's a feature of politics that has been true in other countries for ever. I mean, it is a feature of authoritarian politics.
We would you mean Kim Jong Hoon didn't really know that well in golf, right, right. Yes. Tell your
soul several holes in one ever. Hope
he doesn't defecate I heard as well.
Yeah. Yeah in a democracy. It should be harder to get away with with having one's lies exposed and it's got a when you when you look at what used to matter, you know, when you look at the fact that something like Gary Hart his campaign where he said that he was faithful to his wife and encourage journalists to keep a sharp eye on him and then was caught having an affair like that was the end, right?
Right, there is nothing like that this conceivable for trump. It doesn't matter how discordant his behavior is with his next utterance. His opponents are keeping score relentlessly, like his lies are being documented every day. They're not thousands of them. People are keeping score. It doesn't matter with it at least 40% of America. So it might matter for another person for those 40 percent. It really is a kind of personality cult phenomenon where it's just for him for Trump for whatever reason how he showed up what he represents he can get away with stuff that no one else can get away with and that is what is so dysfunctional about having him in that role from my point of view. So,
You have two daughters, right? So we think so much about how do we prepare our kids for the world that's out there that we can only say one thing for certain about which is we don't know what it's gonna look like. I mean, I had this discussion with my daughter last night actually or two nights ago, which was Olivia, you're 10 years old today. The only thing I can assure you of in eight years. I have no idea what the world will look like. Yeah, but there are a handful of traits that I think will help you in life and they might seem somewhat arbitrary and they might seem somewhat ridiculous or even unpleasant. But the sooner you can figure out a way to put these traits in place. The more well-equipped you will be with whatever the future holds right. So when I was 10, no one could have predicted that the internet was going to exist and that somehow that was going to
all of these implications right with respect to all the stuff we've been talking about today specifically with respect to
choosing to live an examined life choosing to live a life where we are not constantly being lived by our thoughts.
How do you teach your daughter's about what the future holds and I don't mean that in like a broad sense, but I mean aside from encouraging him to meditate and I'm sure it's some aged kids can learn mindfulness meditation. But how else do you try to influence your kids with respect to the lessons you've learned. I mean they may never choose to go off on and you spent such a significant period of your life on Retreats. You've really devoted your entire life to this study. If they choose not to do that, you know, they want to do something boring like go into medicine or whatever. How will you still impart some of these lessons on them or will it be much more by osmosis than anything deliberate?
First kids can be taught to meditate and and actually my wife has done that work a lot these kids. Yeah. She goes to school. What age does she start like 516 it's amazing. I mean you can go very quickly you can go from just you know, the first class which is just chaos to a roomful of six-year-olds sitting in silence for 15 minutes. So it's amazing. It's like seems unfathomable. Yeah, and they get real benefit from it. I mean, they're not it's not quite the same as adults connecting with the practice but it's it can be pretty similar. I mean they're they're becoming aware of their emotional lives in the way that in a way that kids often aren't
do girls develop easier than boys at that age.
Generally speaking. I consider them separate species. So yeah, I mean they they do
my boys are nice boys are wild. Yeah. I don't I don't know how I could ever. Yeah Munich ate any of them. Yeah.
I think boys have a harder time sitting still certainly earlier on so it's amazing to see kids connect with the practice because they definitely do and they just become aware of the linkage between emotion and behavior thought and emotion emotion and thought but on some level it just comes down to suffering and the end of suffering. It was just like a how much do you want to suffer people are suffering in reliable ways based on spend time than explaining the nature of the
suffering because yeah, I would agree completely. Nobody wants to suffer. I just think it takes many of us decades to even come to the realization of how much of our suffering is
self-imposed. Yeah. So is it is
part of it. Just getting them to realize that sooner.
Yeah, and again to point out many of the things we've discussed here where it's like the power of framing by the patent the power of expectation. So, you know, I'll often point out to my
There's even the youngest is just turning 5, but for the for the most part the oldest is just turning 10 the mismatch between her expectation of how something was going to be and how it was right as usually a negative expectation. She was worried about something happening. I say it but doctor's visit or you know, getting blood drawn or getting shot and the actual experience that was far less dramatic than she was worried that it was going to be and to point out that all of the time spent suffering in anticipation of this negative thing was wasted quite like this is there's a lesson to be learned here like the thing. She thought she was sure was going to be awful turned out not to be so awful or not in some cases not awful at all, right or even net positive right? Because she had the experience of overcoming a fear or it's like she felt stronger as a result of that thing that just
And so it's like the expectation is so often not only a bad guide is just is no guide at all to what is going to happen and yet people suffer in advance over this thing that they're they're expecting to be negative. Even if even if it's going to be negative you can decide to suffer once or twice. Yeah, right kids can get lessons like that. I think it's good to give them as early as they can get them. LOL A lot of it has to do with Framing and just how one thinks about one's life but mindfulness for a kid can be at the first pass just more awareness over what they're feeling and thinking young kids can be sad and they don't know that they're sad or angry and they don't know that they're angry and just that level of awareness can be a major gain for a kid and then
That's something to build on and then they as they get older than they can. Yeah, I think certainly as it once they're young teenagers can have a more or less grown-up relationship to observing what's going on in their minds,
but I think about how much effort I put into.
Worrying about whether my daughter is learning well enough the sort of standard metrics that we care about, you know, math and science and English and sports and all those things. I feel like
Probably I'm not paying enough attention to those things as well. Especially for someone who has spent so much time suffering inside his own mind like I Oughta Know Better, right? Yeah, there is there is no prison like the one between your ears. Yeah and yet yeah when you Frame It That Way boy, it makes me think I really need to start investing a little bit more time in that that prep.
I want to be mindful your time. So I kind of I know we both have to get somewhere this evening. Are you writing a book any at the moment? Are you working on anything?
I'm the worst author a publisher can have this point. I keep pushing back my deadlines. I am supposed to be writing a book, but I'm so busy podcasting and doing other things that what is the book about? Well, I have actually have two books that I'm supposed to be writing one is just a digest of podcasts conversations just because now I have
sort of like what Tim did with
tools. Yeah. I'm not quite sure what the format will be but something based on the podcast. It's probably gonna be more like just updated transcripts of significant parts of the conversation. But and then I have a book with a working title making sense, which is just it was going to be a kind of Manifesto about intellectual honesty and how we have hard conversations about know all manner of topics, whether it's race or gender or the opposition between science and religion or
Many of the topics I touch on my podcast we're paying a price for not being able to talk about the most consequential and taboo and dangerous and divisive things in a way that is conserving of Good Intentions and honesty and allows for compromise and allows for breakthroughs and changes of opinion and it's like all the Norms around talking about these things or ask you that you just can't have a conversation about the differences between men and women say our men and women exactly the same. No, they're not. Okay,
but what but what are we doing down that path generate sire like you can
imagine? Yeah and careers are lost over slight misstatement, right? And there are people who say things that were ill considered that they then subsequently apologize for they recognize that their ill-considered.
And yet the apology however heartfelt however abject isn't sufficient to stop their career from being destroyed
you had an example of this recently where you on your podcast where you talked about the she was a dean at Claire michalowicz.
Yeah College. Yeah, Claremont McKenna. Yeah. I called. Yeah watch his more recent example, which is even more amazing in its own way. So like like Megyn Kelly's firing over her Halloween blackface comments, right? Well, so you know, she obviously couldn't hear how the phrase black face would land with many people. It's easy to see that the way she spoke about it was a constituted a mistake. It's pretty obvious. It was not an expression of racism on her part, right? She's not saying African Americans haven't suffered a massive inequality in the pasture. She was just saying what you know, if you're gonna dress up like Diana Ross, why can't you put Brown Makeup?
Face, and essentially that was those were her words, but that was the sentiment that's absolutely something we should be able to talk about yet. She said the wrong thing.
And then clearly received a ton of pressure to apologize for it her apology. I don't know if you saw her apology, but her apology was a bit. Someone was choking on Twitter. This is
just like on Twitter that said it was the closest thing you've ever seen to a hostage video - the
newspaper, right? Yeah. It's like just you got to hold up the newspaper as proof of life
it way didn't actually hear what she said or
anything. Okay, but it was a by all signs was his full and apology is as a person can muster it was complete if it didn't strike the right note for you. Well, then you have superhuman expectations for what someone should be able to muster in a context like that. It did not seem in sincere at all right least to my eye and yet still this was a career wrecking event it seems and so now we're in a situation where people are calling for the destruction of other people and celebrating the effects of that when these people
We do lose their shows or suffer some massive penalty and yet I think it's true to say that most people who were calling for her to be fired would recognize that one. Her initial statement was not actually conveying her own racism. It was gives conveying her obliviousness to the significance of this phrase for other people, but it was not conveying that she was somebody who wants to live in a society where there's well there's a lack of political equality, right? I mean that's there is zero evidence of that. I don't think anyone even alleges that that's her view of the world, but worse than that. Once she recognizes the mistake. She's made no apology is sufficient, right I can so do we really want to live in a world where you miss speak on a fraud topic and it is impossible to adequately apologize right? You recognize that you know you
Use the word retard say right and then you wrote then you get feedback that wow, people really find that offensive their kids with mental disabilities, you know, and you like have you knew what it was like to be a parent of a kid who was suffering this you would recognize how offensive that term is and they're like, why would you ever use that term on a podcast? Right? Imagine it being impossible to apologize for that? It's over for you.
Right? What's so interesting bring it back to the prison stuff. I remember when I spoke with cat Hoke about this. Oh Katherine Houk is the woman that used to run this organization called 25 Ventures. And now she's spinning up something that's going to be even better actually to which I've suggested to her. And I don't think I'm unique in this a lot of people have suggested that this this idea ought not just be something that's sort of a non-profit like there is such a benefit to the volunteers to going into this experience that it almost needs to be sort of a corporate development program, like people need to be paying to go and have this experience. It's so profound right, but it gets to this question of like, can you
B4 is there something for which you cannot be forgiven? What is the crime? What is the sin? What is the moral defect for which there is no forgiveness and I don't know if you're familiar with any of this stuff. She's spoken about but you know at some point she had to make a decision about whether or not people who were sexual predators would be permitted into the program. Mmm. So if you drape somebody if you'd molested a child and you're now serving whatever term in prison, could you be a part of this rehabilitative program?
And in the end she said yes, I mean basically it really comes down to the degree of which a person a person shows remorse and their willingness to change because the idea is like whether you choose to never forgive somebody and whether it's Megan Kelly or this rapist, it doesn't change the fact that something was said or something was done that is in some cases probably not really that ridiculous and in some cases is really tragic. Hmm But it's you have two choices as a society how you move forward from that. Yeah, and it seems we're definitely caught in the place of an inability to reconcile the good that can come from moving on which means acknowledging mistakes that were made acknowledging remorse looking for ways to get better. I mean, we we really don't seem to like that that that that seems a bit too soft for people or so. It's a don't know soft as right word, but there's something about that process that people don't like
yeah. Yeah and and in extreme cases they're forced to
Accept it. I mean, you know when one societies have just become completely Riven by sectarian violence of or political dysfunction of one kind or another who then you need things like Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in places like Zeno South Africa Rwanda where it's either the then people who are guilty of objectively horrible things can get a pass essentially just by coming forward and telling the truth and apologizing. Yeah, I think you know, actually I brought this up on my podcast not long ago. I was thinking about this this very problem in terms of like a an ethical Event Horizon. I mean, is there something so bad that you could do or say that no apology would be sufficient to pull your reputation back out of that that Singularity it is a kind of unrecoverable moral error, and I don't think so. I think the physics of an of an
Acceptable apology are that it be sincere and believable.
And the measure of it being believable is that it has to be clear how you could have changed enough for it to be sincere. So for an apology to be accepted you have to stand in relationship to that thing you did in the same place where the other people who are horrified by what you did stand and they have to be able to see how it is that you have come to stand where they are now in order to accept your apology. So if that transformation isn't believable for some reason if there's no path by which you could have had this Epiphany that contextualizes your prior bad behavior puts it in a box which you disavow. Well, then it will seem it will seem insincere opportunistic. You're a sociopath is just trying to get out of prison and game the program and and those people exist. There's no question that you know, the insincere apology for calculated reasons, as you know, that that's as old as we've been speaking to one another.
Their end that will continue for as long as people can get away with it. So that's a genuine concern. If you're talking about how to to operationalize these kinds of insights, but you just eat it. Just again the path out of that Darkness has to be intelligible to people and I think this is Will stumble on this once we have breakthroughs in Psychology and Neuroscience that admit of real changes in people's emotional and ethical lives made. So if we just take the narrow case if we ever understood psychopathy clearly enough that we could cure it, right so you have someone who's from a very early age just torturing animals and and showing zero empathy for other people and they they grow up into the the scary adult that one would predict and if we ever get to a place where there's a cure for that well then psychopathy would be will be viewed as a neurological condition will be
A moral problem. It'll be these are these are malfunctioning robots that need the new module and just imagine if we had that cure we'd be no more judgmental in how we apply to it than we are when we cure any other disease. I mean, you're not thinking about when you're giving diabetics insulin, you're not thinking well you you're lucky I'm giving you this insulin because you probably don't deserve it you with your malfunctioning pancreas. You're lucky that I'm so tolerant that I'm willing to give you this insulin. There's zero culpability in having a bad pancreas if we actually understood the neurochemical neuroanatomical basis of even the worst behavior if it was discreet enough that it admitted of a of a cure we would sell we've just got to we got to fix that problem.
That would be and they hold
out hope for that same or is that sci-fi? I mean, you're a neuroscientist so you can you can speak to this with much more clarity or authority than I could ever speak of it.
I hold out hope for it in certain specific cases. Yeah, I'm a well we know it's true. I mean, we've already stumbled upon it in cases where you're talking about a brain tumor that is causing a problem, but causing a problem which shows up as uncontrollable rage or pedophilia or their cases were being it's like the classic case is Charles Whitman who in 1964 killed 14 people the University of Texas and he just had a glioblastoma pushing on his amygdala. And the amazing thing is that you might know the story could have talked about it, but I'm he suspected that he had something wrong with his brain and he he knew he was going to be killed by the police and he's recommended that they perform an autopsy to find out what was going on.
His head and yeah, he had a he had a tumor which was arguably totally exculpatory. It was just in precisely the place that you would think okay this he's got he can't control his impulses and he's feeling you know, uncontrollable rage and this tumor explains it I think there's virtually no one who hears the whole story who thinks Charles Whitman was evil. He just seems profoundly unlucky and on some level a complete understanding of evil would reduce it to that same species of unlock.
That is an amazing thought it's hard for me to imagine because obviously the mass affects are the obvious ones right these decisions versus much more diffuse neuro chemical processes.
We're gonna have dinner tonight. So I know what we're going to keep talking about man. We got so much to keep going on. Yeah for folks who are listening to this on my podcast. You might not know you as well as they ought to is Sam Harris dot-org basically where they can find everything your podcast your blog your books all sorts of things.
Yeah. And as far as my meditation app, it's just waking up.com. But yeah both website
some of us like me or lucky enough to have got it for free because we were supporters of the podcast before it came out. Yeah. Yeah, but is it available for purchase now on both the on Apple and on Android I think again what Androids not quite
out yet? No, it's that is out as of yesterday. Okay,
fantastic because I know I had a patient who went to search for it on Android a few weeks ago and it was coming soon
now, we're born on both platforms. So,
okay. Well congratulations Sam it is I mean, I just want to say I want to thank you personally for for the effect and the impact that your work has had on me.
I find myself. Like I said spending so much time thinking about how to help people delay the onset of diseases that kill them.
And in many ways you're doing the same thing but in a in some ways a higher Stakes Arena, which is how to prevent people from suffering so much which in some ways is just harder to measure we don't have the same stats on that right? I can rattle off all the stats on the probability is that you're going to get cancer by the time you're 70 and what's the likelihood you're going to make it to 90 without a heart attack in ball. I can rattle off all those things but we don't keep the same stats for how much we suffer and I think of your work as among the most important things that have helped me and now by extension some of my patients who are willing to go down this path with me to reduce that burden of suffering
nice sighs. Well glad to hear it. Well,
thank you. Well, thank you it up making making so much time this
afternoon. Yeah. Yeah. It's a pleasure and congratulations on the podcast. You are one of these few examples of somebody who goes from the conversation of you know, I think maybe I want to start a podcast.
Should I should I start a podcast and then I turn around and three weeks later you have this amazing podcast that is more professionally produced than mine and people love so what you need you and your
team deserve a lot of credit for that. I know I've said this before but it's always worth repeating. I mean, I think that you and Tim were probably among the two most vocal along with probably Patrick O'Shaughnessy, but I think you and Tim the most really because I honestly I was just so intimidated by the work. I saw you and him doing I was like, well, there's no goddamn way. I can do that. Like that's that's just above my pay grade. So I still think my podcast pales in comparison to yours and Tim's but I am happy to be in the arena and it has turned out to be much more enjoyable than I would have ever predicted. And yeah, and so I do regret having not done it two years sooner when you were harping on me and tonight's harping on me, but better late than never and it's an honor to have you as a guest on my little nice lighting podcast. Well, keep it up.
Thanks, man.
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