Your Mind Has Been Lying to You - Sam Harris (4K)

on some level wisdom is a matter of making your mind your friend my friend Sam Harris Sam Harris Sam Harris one of the most influential pioneering thinkers of our time the more you pay attention to your own mind you see that it has absolutely no shame wisdom is simply a capacity to take your own advice Sam Harris welcome to the show thank you great to meet you finally what is life like after Twitter uh uh it is immensely improved to a degree that I find actually embarrassing in retrospect because it's a it's proof that I was needlessly degrading the quality of my life for um most 12 years technically I think was probably five years where it was actually degrading the quality of my life but it was um I mean retrospective was a psychological experiment that we all got enrolled in and no one you know read the consent form much less signed it and it we it it has given for me if you're someone who has a significant platform and you're at all controversial I think it gives you a sense of what the world is which um is basically false and destructive to your your feeling the feelings you have for the rest of humanity I mean it was it was it was kind of sort of incrementally like a slow ratchet um but never to be reversed um all often undetectable but still nevertheless always in One Direction changing me into a misanthrope I mean I was just starting to perceive people who I had never met and um many who I had met as the worst most grotesque versions of themselves and it's not that it's totally inaccurate it's not that you know I mean people people tweet what you see them at their worst moments or or their most bad faith moments or their most cynical moments um but it's like the evidence of that of those moments becomes indelible and you lose sight of the rest and I just was noticing this mismatch of you know being out in the world with people and people are great and then checking into my life online and recognizing that people are horrible and just bouncing back between these two views and I just realized I really only wanted one of them it seems to me that a lot of people feel that that when they step out into the real world and the people who spend more time in the real world they realize this is kind of nice everyone seems pretty balanced out here no one's that antagonistic no one's backbiting or Screaming or shouting or accusing me of being a bigot or a racist or or whatever and then for some reason you step onto the internet with frictionless communication and all hell breaks loose yeah yeah and it's not just anonymity anonymity is part of it but it's also people you know who are captured by their Echo chamber which you're not seeing right like it's this illusion that you're in inhabiting the same space with the people you're you're in conversation with but in reality they're talking to their fans you're talking to your fans your kind of you have weaponized your fans against their fans and and vice versa and without even necessarily thinking in those terms that's that those are the the network dynamics of what's happening and um I mean I just I just kept getting at one point I recognized that barring some you know bad Health outcomes in among friends and family over the years objectively the worst things that had happened to me in a decade were the result of my engagement with Twitter um and in many cases the only bad things that had happened to me in a decade of any significance at all was born of Twitter I think he managed to torpedo a family vacation in some beauty yeah yeah that was Paradise by sending a a random tweet and then putting your phone down to come back to it and find out that there was a wasteland yeah it was a yeah yeah no it was it just it kept giving giving me a sense it was a the time course of interaction with it gives you this I mean this is endless opportunity to comment on stuff it's like it's always ready for your hot take in fact you're you're on there to give your hot take and to see the hot takes of others um again this might not matter if your hot take is here's another cute photo of my cat and you just get nothing but love back right I know this there are people that have that experience uh but given that I was violating the the blasphemy tests of both the left and the right more or less on a weekly basis I mean I'm not aligned politically with the left or the right um you know it was just paying on both sides and I you know I and I had no tribe like if you're if you're just on the right you know or or some segment of the right if you're you know Ben Shapiro um you have a tribe that is going to just incessantly defend you against the left right and you and at a certain point you just you learn to Discount the attacks of the left because you don't care what the left thinks about you you've priced that in you know you're on the right um and so it is with the left if you're in the middle and you're actually not even an especially political person you don't even you don't care about politics politics are it's just an ugly necessity that you continually have to touch but it's just you view it as a an opportunity cost getting in the way of the things you actually care about and you're not tribal and you're not reflexively aligned with with you know the the bullet points on on one side of the aisle or the other you have you have offended everyone on both sides at some point getting ideologically spit roasted here yeah and you're not and you don't have you don't have the people who will defend you blindly even within your own audience which is which is fine I mean I'm I'm very happy to have the audience I have and I I like having an audience that really cares about the integrity and honesty of the very last thing I said and if the last thing I said didn't make sense they're going to I'm going to hear about it but social media is just the wrong platform for that kind of conversation do you ever think about what civilization would be like without social media you know some of the smartest minds of our time have had the hours captured arguing over whether men or men or women or women or not or yeah about this particular topic or that particular topic do you think about how far it's satisfied is it in that negative positive overall do you think well I think it's a net negative I think it's a massive opportunity cost for almost everybody um I just think where you know you look at what you're doing and not doing based on your engagement with these platforms I mean you're not tending to read good long books anymore either at minimum even if it's your job to read those books it's become harder to do that and I wasn't certainly noticing that for myself um it's uh we're just it has served to fragment our attention and our lives in ways that I just can't be good you know even if again even if your diet of information is almost entirely positive there's this fragmentation effect you know it's like you just I mean I notice people certainly I notice young people now who are who appear almost neurologically incapable of watching a great movie from beginning to end without interruption you know what's cool if you Google the number of cuts in the first fast and furious movie compared to the number of cuts in the 10th Fast and Furious movie yeah Pace right yeah it's got to be sped up yeah so I mean I'm noticing this with my daughters it's like to get them to watch a movie yeah it's not it's not that it's impossible but I just noticed that they're they're tuned to a different Cadence and um and they're not even on I mean they're you know they're not on social media in the normal way I mean they don't have social media accounts they're just but the the YouTube application of everything has gotten in and um yeah I think it's worth resisting you know it's not that we don't have to use these tools in some way but I think it is worth realizing that even Beyond Time your attention is what you have your true wealth is the quality of your attention and we have we've now interfaced with Machinery that has systematically degraded our ability to pay attention David perrell has this idea called the never-ending now and if you look at the content that you've consumed maybe not you after your exit but most people almost all of the content that you have consumed today has been made in the last 24 hours right it's never ending now terrifying it's the opposite of Lindy it's the opposite of the Lindy effect right it is so thoughtless and it's yet it's captivating right I mean it's just the sugar high of you know everything so um yeah so I'm you know I've I'm more focused on good books now than I was before I deleted my Twitter account which is which is good have you reflected much on Tucker Carlson's move to Twitter from Fox News is this the beginning of some Legacy to Alternative media Breakwater event or is it just a nothingy to you well I mean I think Tucker Carlson himself is um worth considering I mean we know you know he's he's someone who has shield for Trump you know rather avidly for years and yet we now have his behind the scenes commentary on the Trump phenomenon describing him as a demonic force and somebody who he hates with a passion that's what Chuck has said about Trump yeah this can't this came out of his texts got leaked from the the Dominion lawsuit against Fox okay right so we know like like the mismatch between who he is pretending to be for his on his audience and who he is behind closed doors is something that I think should trouble his audience but it apparently doesn't right and that's also true of someone like Trump so in many cases you have these characters who to my eye are very low Integrity people I mean they're not that you know you're not getting an honest look at what they really think even though they're purporting to tell you what they think you know every hour of the day or at least every day for some hours um and you know if you Tucker is that sort of person but I you know I think it we're in a we're on a political landscape now where there's no impediment to his building an enormous business on the basis of of having left fox or having gotten fired from Fox um for reasons that which I guess are still obscure um I mean he's very good at what he does he's a very good demagogue and he's he's very facile um I don't think there's an ethical core there but there's a a political one you know or it's certainly not an opportunist uh one in the political space and there's a there's an immense appetite to have someone call on the powers that be the so-called Elites the institutions again and again and again whether they're right or wrong you know it's just like it's it's a this is how it sort of opens the door to conspiracy thinking of every flavor um it's not that these contrary intakes are always wrong because they're not right I mean that we have we're living through a time where many of our institutions have lost trust for good reason right but get what gets layered on top of that are just you know lies and misinformation and half truths and and uh a crazy sort of you know John Nash style connect the dots with everything and you can you can find and if you're just searching for anomalies and you're not actually held to any sort of coherent standard of of having a basic Theory as to what's going on you just can find the next anomaly well then you'll find anomalies everywhere and they don't have to add up to anything except a kind of pornography of Doubt right and that's that's what's being spread by people like Tucker in my view did you see Douglas Murray's debate with Malcolm Gladwell mataibi um I think I heard uh most of it yeah yeah and on that it was a discussion around is the new alternative media is this where we're getting the most truth from the unencumbered the audience capture incentives are there but also you are liberated to not be tamped down by whoever the bigwigs are that have got some nefarious agenda but then the other side is saying it's this freewheeling wild west where people can just make all manner of these sorts of claims what did you make of uh of that landscape well I mean so I'm very biased for that particular debate I love douglas douglas is a friend and he's he's obviously brilliant and just a joy to listen to um and I get a lot of his hate mail because okay he's again he's he's somebody who's happily on the right or right of Center who doesn't have to worry about what the left thinks about him but you know every time I have him on the podcast I get nothing but pain from half my audience if there is anything that is worth the pain of half of your audience is bringing Douglas Marine yeah yeah no he's fantastic but um he is adjacent to many people who are not so fantastic right this is this is the sort of guilt by association problem that he has um navigated in a way which I you know I don't know if it's successful I mean it's he's I think sleeps soundly at night given what he's done but the truth is he has been he's shared stages with people who I wouldn't want to be on stage with and I don't think it was good for him to be on a stage with the person and half of the reason why I would get hate mail about having Douglas on would be because he shared the stage with those people um and yet it's he's completely correct in recognizing how hopeless it is to do a full moral inventory of everyone you might be you know forced to shake hands with and to decide in advance whether it's worth shaking their hands or having a conversation with them um so yeah I mean we're just it is the wild west and you just have to do your best and uh just be honest whenever you're in front of the microphone it feels to me like that guilt by association thing seems to have slowed at least a little bit PS Morgan put out a video recently about uh we're at Peak woke yeah I wouldn't agree I think uh I can't remember whether it was it was Matt taibi or somebody else in the summer of 2020 said that that was Peak walk uh the most you know inflammatory over the top any slight indiscretion is worth being smashed in the face for right uh I wouldn't agree that that's the case now and it seems to me like there is at least a little bit more reason beginning to seep back in to that discourse I I hope so I feel like it seems to be the case for me except I don't know if it's just a an optical illusion because I'm no longer on Twitter and I no longer care right like so I just don't you know I used there's certain kinds of attacks which a few years ago I might have taken seriously for 15 minutes and now they just are an entire holiday in Hawaii yeah but now they just bounce off or I don't even see them right so um and that may be a good thing I mean certainly it's a nicer way of being in the world but it could be a version of of something like digital leprosy right where you're like you know the lepers lose their digits because they don't they don't sense pain anymore and they you know you walk by a table and you whack your fingers on it and you don't notice that you're bleeding um I think in the worst cases in the developing World literally you know rats can come non you while you're sleeping and you don't feel that either um so it could be that I have a a digital version of that which is just that I just don't I'm not noticing how my reputation is eroding in ways that I actually would care about if I could notice it but I can no longer sense it because I'm in my own Silo um but the truth is I just don't care about certain kinds of attacks anymore and so yeah I have the perception you have that the pendulum has swung back people are rolling even people who would otherwise have been taken in by wokeness a few years ago roll their eyes in private and increasingly in public over certain kinds of yeah you know ad hominem or bad faith arguments or um but so back to this point with Douglas I mean I just you know so my bias was a you know his side carried that debate you know spectacularly well um but and the truth is I don't know Malco I've been on his podcast but I so I've spoken to him but I don't know Malcolm Malcolm has a it's not the first time he's done this in debate he has he has a habit and debate of being ad hominem in a way that is if it's ever persuasive it's not persuasive when he's doing it and so it just you sort of lose uh just uh just by default whatever the actual topic uh you know under discussion do you remember the talk that you gave on death and the present moment I think it was the atheists Australian new atheist Society something like that it was a big uh it was called the global atheist convention but you're a global atheist Alliance but um I think at the at that point maybe still it was like the biggest atheist convention ever um so I went to a few of those but that was that was one how should it inform the way that we live our lives do you think given that we know that they're going to end sooner or later well I really think that is the whether you think about it or not that is the ever-present subtext to almost everything you you care about should care about fail to you know when you when your priorities are not straight you know you've when you when you have regrets it's in the light it's against this the uh the incessant taking of the clock that that all of that makes sense and the imperative of of um the incremental loss of this non-renewable resource you know it's like it's the one thing you don't get back and as I said I think even more than time attention is is the the real cash value of time but um because we know that you can Safeguard your time and squander it right so it's like it's it's and you and we know you can find real Joy surprising joy and Equanimity and and even Transcendent experience in the midst of experiences that you wouldn't otherwise think were optimal right you can have you could you could be in a shitty situation where nothing has really gone the way you expected and still be radiantly happy right it really is a matter of what you're doing with your attention and the kind of mind you have um but the fact is that everything is changing at every moment and we're not there's no real stability right there's no final stage of control over experience every every goal you attain becomes a memory the moment you attain it right and then you then you're just left to think about it right and then the question is what are you going to do next and we have this Perpetual challenge of figuring out what to do next I mean what you know morally intellectually as a matter of just trying to to safeguard our own sense of well-being and you're never you never arrive and it's because of this the the the nature of impermanence that you never do I mean everything is in fact a mirage if you think that your satisfaction is going to be a matter of finally put in all of the the most important features of your life in the correct place right like you finally have the job you want the relationship you want the house you want you know you're in your your fit you're healthy you're like you you just you've you've executed on the perfect to-do list and you finally arrived well at a minimum you're going to notice that all of that has to be maintained at Great energy right like it take entropy is such that you know you can't stay fit you can't stay healthy you can't stay Rich you can't you can't your relationship's not going to maintain itself and what's more most people's minds are out of control anyway right and and they're not satisfied anyway even having everything they the moment you have everything your your sense of what you want I mean you just move the goal posts or they got moved for you by some hand that you could never see and so like you take all of this for granted and now you want other things and you want them just as much as you wanted the last things uh so there is this there's something about the passage of time that as you pay attention to it and as you get older this this is relevant but I mean some people get managed to get quite old without getting especially wise but other things can happen even when you're young you can you know you can lose people close to you or you can you can do suffer some profound career setback or something can happen where you recognize okay this is there's a there's a false premise here there's many bright shiny objects I've been focused on with it because they've been you know captivating for cultural and psychological reasons that I never inspected and never really agreed to but that you know that's just where my attention went and there's this deeper principle which is the effort to become happy never fully fulfills itself right because it's the becoming part contains its own dissatisfaction right like at a certain level you have to figure out how you can be happy with whatever is already the case like to to want what you already have and then from that place move into the next moment looking to do creative beautiful fun things but your your happiness is not contingent upon those things working out in any particular way right you you realize that you're just at some level you have to be process oriented rather than goal oriented because ultimately there is only the process right and your ha and the goals and the goals are so the achievement of the goals is such a punctate experience it's so brief it's just a it's an idea before it happens it's an idea the moment it happens it's some burst of sensory experience and then it's an idea again it's a memory and you're talking about you're talking about the thing you did yesterday um that's not good enough that could never have been good enough for a truly satisfied Life we'll get back to talking to Sam in one minute but first I need to tell you about a sponsor betterhelp there might be something interfering with your happiness or preventing you from achieving your goals it is unbelievably helpful to have someone professionally trained who can help you get through whatever you're facing the service is available for clients worldwide you can log into your account at any time and send a message to your therapist they'll give you timely and thoughtful responses plus you can schedule weekly video or phone sessions so you don't even have to leave the house it is a quicker cheaper and more convenient way to start doing therapy and you do not know just how good the texture of your own mind could be if you started working with someone professionally trained who can help you get through whatever you're facing you can switch therapists for free if it doesn't work out for any reason and there is no additional charge head to betterhelp.com Modern wisdom to get 10 off your first month of therapy that's betterhelp.com slash modern wisdom someone that you might not have been expecting to give you mindful wisdom that you might agree with Andrew Tate has a quote where he says uh having things isn't fun getting things is fun and I think that what he's referring to there is the the hedonic treadmill that we're talking about the fact that right it's in the anticipation of an event that we think it's going to happen as a club promoter for forever and we would be creating anticipation for this next new DJ this next new whatever that would happen but the protracted nature of the build up was what people looked forward to yeah I look forward to the advance of it when the event happened in fact they did a study where they got people to track they pinged their phones and got them to track how their happiness was throughout the entirety of a night out and the most fun part of a night out is getting ready with your friends before you head out of the door yeah I mean neuroanatomically the reason why that is the case because this is our dopaminergic system gets driven not by Pleasure itself but by the expectation of pleasure that the things we're about to get based it's the the center of the bullseye is the S the the pleasant surprise like this is about to get better than I was expecting right that that's the thing that that is truly reinforcing yeah I fear I might have uh made an error by saying that I have a guest coming on that I was very excited about and now if if someone isn't sufficiently excited about you then that dopaminergic system is going to fall through there yeah yeah there's one disappointment after another but like Andrew takes a perfect example of somebody who again he's not um he's radioactive for obvious reasons I haven't met him I haven't done an especially Deep dive on what he's guilty of or you know I mean he's obviously he's he's got issues but um I just feel like we're at a moment now where there is such a a thirst for wisdom that you know it's okay it can come from so many different places and those places can be more or less contaminated with Concepts that are more or less toxic more or less divisive more or less confusing and yeah I mean I've what you know I've watched enough of his stuff to see why young men are getting addicted to his content and thinking that he's their their life Guru uh and I've also watched enough to think that it's not um it's not ideal that he's the voice of a generation right like we need a a um a more compassionate less self-invatuated uh standard for manliness and and success that then whether he's he's putting out if I was to I've got Jordan uh coming on the show again at some point later this year and it's something that I think I'll speak to him about that he's on to big things with this Arc which is kind of his competitor I think to the wef that he's doing later this year yeah I haven't I haven't followed that yeah um but I do think that Jordan's relative abandonment of the conversation directly to young men uh to move on to other things whether it be climate change or the trans issue or pick your poison about whatever he's got interested in recently I think that that has left a vacuum and you can't expect young you can't expect anybody to go through life without insights coming from somewhere and whether that Insight is for young men or young women or old men or old women whether it's Andrew Tate or you know Whoopi Goldberg or whoever happens to have the hot take of the week and and transufficiently highly on Twitter uh people are going to look for someone they're going to look for answers and in a world where we are chronically mismatched our evolved psychology and the world that we find ourselves in has never really been further apart people are going to find answers and and sometimes fluency is a really brilliant proxy for truthfulness or insight and if you can say things with a sufficiently well-rounded compelling delivery regardless of who you are yeah whether it be Whoopi Goldberg or anybody else people will say that sounds that sounds true sounds fluent not sure if it's true yeah except the thing that surprises me is that it should be more obvious than it is to more people that someone's an right it's like that like it doesn't matter how fluent you are you are you're only just declaring your assholery in in more concise form right um and so it's kind of a trumpian moment like Trump is obviously an he's obviously a a selfish person but nobody none of his fans care right he's like he's not a compassionate person he's he can't even pretend to care about people really right he's but his his shamelessness around his selfishness has become a kind of superpower for a certain audience because he's he's conveying the message I will never I will never judge you because I'm incapable of judging myself right like I'm not I I'm not holding myself to any kind of standard apart from the gratification of my own desires so you know I'm I'm in some sense I have a real Integrity because I know I'm selfish all those people who are pretending not to be selfish or pretending to be ethical and compassionate to care about you know the sub-Saharan Africa and the you know the education and developing countries I mean someone like Bill Gates right you know Bill Gates is somebody who can't get laid and he's just going to microchip you with the next vaccine right like that that's this is going to be a great uh quote to export from this podcast um uh you're welcome Twitter um that so that's the that's the center of narrative and ethical gravity for these guys right I don't include Jordan there but like Andrew Tate Trump there's like a I've got a Bugatti and you know you want one and I've got no apologies right I've got no to give uh I know you want to be like me you know and if you don't if you're not good enough to be like me I'll sleep with your girlfriend right like that's that's the that's not an ethically wise person on any level even if he can even if he can string together a few sentences that seem actionable and useful to get you to clean your room and get in shape and and meet a girl right um we should be asking more of our elders than that right and and so and so where I part ways with Jordan again I do not put Jordan um in the same category but he is he has a very different view of the the the kind of the status of objective empirical truth in relation to the stories we tell about uh ourselves and our place in the world and um what makes life worth living what what a lot what will allow for a society to really cohere around shared values and he thinks that there's a a layer of storytelling and you know what I would what I would call myth and fiction really in a way that is kind of somewhat derogatory right it's not to say that I'm I don't see the power in it but it's just I what I want to do is be able to distinguish between the a layer of wishful thinking and a layer of delusion and a layer of uh ancient confusion that is still has good standing among millions of people and probably some symbolic truth or figurative truth in there too and and a kind of harmless harmless uses of the imagination that it could be a nobling and fun and empowering right um and kind of core truths that don't require a story to be a Noble in there did you see that Jordan got into it with Richard Dawkins on well you wouldn't have done you're you're off Twitter so I will no I'll uh be the Weathervane to update you on whatever's happening in Twitter's conditions at the moment uh Richard's a clip of Richard one semi-viral of him criticizing the Old Testament God right and then I think Jordan basically called him out Anytime Anyplace anywhere it wasn't far off that I think that the actual tweet was about saying that it was uh I think damaging science and and and doing a disservice to maybe Dawkins himself and and other stuff yeah well so I mean that's I mean I agree with Richard yeah with respect to the what I think of the the Old Testament God and the the moral instruction we can or can't take from him I mean I just think that's I just don't think that the the Bible is the wisest book we have even though there are there are Pearls of real wisdom there which I I understand that people love um it's a book it was clearly written by human beings right so like the fundamental the the breach point is not is is Upstream of many of the things people might want to debate there's just this basic claim we've got millions upon millions of books were they all written by people or not right and the moment you admit that they were all written by people okay we're having a very different conversation about the status of religion certainly the religion of of any of the religions of Abraham right I mean these are these are claimed at bottom Judaism Christianity and Islam are claims about the divine origin of of a specific book or certain texts um and some of these texts were canonical for centuries and then got thrown out you know within within Christianity and then some got added later um so the the process of cobbling together these these scriptures was all too human we know way too much about it if you if we knew more about it it would look much more like Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon and the and it would look like a you know the South Park episode that Mormonism in fact looks like right and you drag it further into the present and it looks like Scientology right and then you're like you're just staring at L Ron Hubbard's driver's license and it says okay this goofy guy with bad teeth sold all these people honest on a story about the stars that was just obviously and should it should have been obvious to them now again that's not to say that there isn't real wisdom in in all of these streams of information even Scientology but you just the basic claim and I think Richard would agree with this is that you don't have to believe anything on insufficient evidence to extract all the wisdom that is to be found in the world's literature and in the conversations conversations with people in the present and conversations with the dead by reading their their books in other news this episode is brought to you by eight sleep eight sleeps pod cover is keeping me alive in the middle of summer in Austin Texas at the moment good sleep is the Ultimate Game Changer and being too hot or too cold is a guaranteed way to ruin your night's sleep the Pod cover from eight sleep will actively cool and heat each different side of the bed based on yours and your partner's sleep stages it is a complete Game Changer and if you're waking up in the morning feeling groggy and not sufficiently rested it is quite likely that temperature is the culprit and all of this is fixed with the Pod cover from eight sleep it slips over the top of your existing mattress just like a mattress topper but gives you all of the biometric scanning it'll tell you how long you're asleep for your resting heart rate your HIV everything literally from a mattress topper head to atesleep.com Modern wisdom or follow the link in the show notes below for 150 off plus they share ship internationally that's e i g h t sleep.com slash modern wisdom the first time that I think I heard of Jordan was that first conversation that you guys had it was a a podcast maybe in a bar even a hotel reception or something and it was a jinking of glasses oh no that would have been probably Dan it uh Dan and I had a debate in a bar but uh Jordan and I had a debate on my podcast right I'd heard this uh heard this conversation and I remember thinking who's this Canadian having a part of Sam Harris yeah uh at the time and then later on went on to to Really sort of fall in love with Jordan's work as well I think there's an awful lot of people who want to see that public relationship between you and him rekindled uh well it hasn't I mean to my eye it is not uh been broken I mean I like Jordan I mean I think this is just this is what I imagined because I have not had any dialogue with him in in a couple years but um I mean Jordan and I disagree fundamentally about religion I think and we've debated that you know Ad nauseam and we've probably got like 12 hours uh you know on the mic in various venues debating that um and that was fun and I'm always happy to talk to him um and I think he while we disagree I think he has really helped millions of people I mean I think he's there's no question I've I I know what it's like to be with him at an event and to hear from the people who who are you know hear from his fans and my fans side by side sitting at a table for an hour after an event where we you know had a debate in front of 8 000 people um and there's a slightly different flavor to the people whose lives we've changed right he's he's intersected with a with a different group of people at a different point in their lives than I have for the most how would you categorize that difference well I mean to significant degrees people moving in two opposite direction I mean like they're they're the people who were stuck with a religious worldview stuck I mean literally in many cases traumatized by a fear of hell that had been inculcated into them by their religious parents but were enamored enough of Enlightenment values and secular rationality and science so as to have the this the spell break to some significant degree and they needed some language to to help kind of Midwife their delivery into a into the clear light of of reason right and they also needed so and this is where Richard and I have kind of have had different jobs I mean Richard is just critiquing religion and counterposing it with all that's wonderful about science right and so for him the the spiritual attitude that is on offer when you once you leave religion behind and you know you know close the church doors behind you is awe at the beauty of Nature and just amazement at you know everything we are learning and may yet learn about the way the world works and the way the mind works and um I mean we are nothing to use Newton's image I mean it's like we are children on a seashore playing with shells and the vast ocean of of ignorance and potential knowledge it just awaits our our inspection um for me that's not good enough right what I mean by spirituality has in fact nothing to do with the amazement that you feel when you look up at the Milky Way right it's like that that's that's great but that's just not that's just not the the real opportunity on offer and that's not what's going to prepare us to die you know and that's not what's going to really console you at four in the morning when you wake up feeling bad about your life and not sure how you can be happy in this world right um so I'm much more so I I'm convinced that at the core of every religion there was there there were real transformative and and Transcendent human experiences that are attested to by the literature and traditions that have grown up around that religion so there really was you know presumably there really was a person you know in history by the name of Jesus who had this effect on the people around him and said you know something like what he has purported to have said in the Bible and I can I can understand all of that as a a absolutely predictable result of certain ways of of paying attention that are available to every human being now you know then now then and now um which allow you to recognize that that this ego you take yourself to be is an illusion and it allows you to recognize that unconditional love is actually a possibility right like you can it's possible to just feel Shattered by your love for all sentient beings and to just to bask in the profundity of that way of being and that's on the menu and whether you have to just whether you have to go into a cave and meditate for a month to find that or you take MDMA or you have there are ways to perturb your nervous system such that the testimony of Someone Like Jesus or Buddha is not is obviously not a fraud it's obviously not a confession of Psychopathology it's obviously not a delusion about uh you know belief-based delusion about what happens after death or about invisible parts of the universe and being populated by Angels or deities you don't have to believe in anything unempirical in order to experience that range of of positive experience you just have to learn to use your attention in the right ways and and if you can't do that you know there are you know psychedelics offer a an imperfect method yeah I mean it's definitely reliable it's a reliable glimpse of something that is different enough uh assuming you have a positive experience I mean you can have a different enough negative experience that will convince you of something else but if you have a different enough extraordinarily positive experience you'll be convinced that okay what whatever the possibilities of sustaining that may or may not be it is just clear that this experience is possible because I just had it right I just had it for four hours and I can no longer imagine that human consciousness is is in principle confined to kind of the mediocre bandwidth I tend to experience when I'm just checking my email and then checking Twitter and then worrying about my future all right I actually I actually don't think I I actually closed the loop on what um I wanted to say about Jordan there though so Jordan Jordan and I differ in he wants to support a much more traditional picture of the utility and even necessity of religious thinking and religious identity and and that way of giving meaning to one's life through traditional stories and stories which I think foreign a literal belief in can't be justified based on what we have come to understand about science and um I just think that the burden is on us at this point in history to find a truly non-sectarian way of telling ourselves a story about what we value and what is possible right and and so and we do that in other areas of Our Lives I mean science is one very clear place we do that uh where there's just there is no to say that you know there's American Science versus Chinese science and it's just that's just not science like science is at a layer more fundamental than those cultural differences um and so it has to be with a with something like ethics and spirituality you can't talk in the end you can't you shouldn't be able to talk about Christian ethics or Christian spiritual insight and Jordan's not convinced of that or he's apparently not convinced of that and so you know that that's what we still disagree about but I think the final I think the thing the thing I wanted to say was that so you you will seem to allude to some sort of breach between us which I certainly don't feel and have an experience I can only imagine though that in his world given given what was happening to me on Twitter when I left he perceives me as somebody who has just um gone off the rails in some way right because like he he in his world and this is this is what was so amazing to see um when I was looking at Twitter when I when I made this to if anyone doesn't know what I'm talking about there was this whole Hunter Biden laptop situation where I commented on the hunter Biden laptop thing uh on a podcast a clip from that podcast got exported to you know apparently every planet in the solar system and um it had an enormous effect right of center right so so right of Center I had just destroyed my career I'm a little I'm hearing from people like oh my God are you okay right and in my world and in every channel I care about literally nothing had happened right and so but in but Jordan lives in the world where I just kind of torched everything so I can only imagine that he has some view of my I mean he the truth is I would expect him to be genuinely confused about what I believe about things like free speech or you know any of the relevant variables there unless he happens to listen to my podcast which you know I don't know whether or not he does I think the uh potential breach that I was talking about was more just that there is a hunger for you and him to speak I think that you've both been formative to a lot of people's intellectual Journeys in one form or another and uh I I think people are hoping that there is uh yet more juice to squeeze from your conjoined lemons and however way yeah that happens well I'm always happy to talk to him I think you know I think the thing that got into my head is someone sent me a clip from Joe Rogan's podcast where he and Joe were talking about me and Jordan seemed to be talking about me as like a cautionary tale like look what can happen to somebody and and Joe said something like oh I still have hope for Sam and there in my view they are in this contrarian Echo chamber right where you know mRNA vaccines are terrifying covid was no big deal January 6 was maybe a non-event right um the libtards are trying to ruin everything and there's a whole picture of sort of audience capture and and information skewing there which I understand I mean that's sort of how like if I look to my left I can see all that uh but if you're only there there's just a lot of half truths you know kind of ricocheting around that Echo chamber which um yeah it means I'm happy to talk to both those guys but it's just they're not in the in in the lane I'm in and trying to maintain You know despite the Crosswinds trying to maintain a straight course in there's that's only half the story right so it's um and I just think people are genuinely confused now because two things are true we have lost trust in the the normal channels of information and in normal institutions postcode you know during coven and post covet um for obvious reasons but we desperately need institutions and a media that we can trust right and we're not going to navigate This Moment by just proliferating podcasts and newsletters right it's just not good enough much as we might try yeah so it's and so that's the that's a seeming Paradox because yes you can point to the moments where our institutions have become untrustworthy but you know RFK Jr is not the Messiah we need at this moment why do you think he's so hot at the moment what is it about RFK well it's exactly he's he is speaking very directly to this um contrarian Echo chamber you know contrarian slash conspiracy thinking conspiracy adult Echo chamber where um the non-standard version of everything is is almost certainly the right account right so no one can be trusted all you all you really can it is a kind of um it's a kind of religion of of suspicion that is that is being born it's like it's it's a pseudo-awakening of they're all Liars right like that's this that's what happened to so many millions of people during covet they're all liars I mean just got Gavin Newsom closing the beaches and then he's he's over at French Laundry you know perfectly quaffed uh at a fundraiser is that hypocrisy that people found I mean that was just a 20 Megaton moment of hypocrisy that detonated and it broke trust with with half the country you know and and so it's again that's all understandable but we have to be realistic about just what is true and likely to be true in each moment and is everything the CDC says likely to be wrong right like is that is that really where is that what we want to default to you can't trust the CDC about anything is that how you really want to be a consumer of medicine it just is completely unworkable what we need is a CDC we can trust and insofar as we don't truly have that then that is where we have to perform surgery but it's not like we can tear it all down and then we're just going to chat GPT our way to health it's just it's not going to happen we'll get back to talking to Simon one minute but first I need to tell you about element element is the way that I've started my day every single morning for over three years now it is the best hydration drink that I've ever found there's no gluten no fillers no artificial junk or any other BS it tastes phenomenal that orange salt flavor is absolutely outstanding it'll help to regulate your appetite it'll curb Cravings it'll improve brain function and it means that you don't need to have a coffee first thing in the morning your adenosine system that caffeine acts on isn't even active for the first 90 minutes of the day but salt acts on your adrenal system an element contains a science back electrolyte ratio of sodium potassium and magnesium they also have a no BS no questions asked refund policy where you can buy it 100 risk-free and if you do not like it for any reason they'll give you your money back and you don't even need to return the Box head to drink lmnt.com modern wisdom to get a free sample pack of all eight flavors with your first box that's drink lmnt.com modern wisdom how far do you think RFK gets in this political race um well if I'm I'm hopeful that if he keeps expounding upon how you know covid was targeted to avoid Ashkenazi Jews and and Chinese people and I mean it's like if you if you give him a mic enough he will put his foot you know he'll put both feet in his mouth and and in your mouth and in any mouth that's available I mean it's just it's um but again it's not that he's wrong about everything he's that it's it's harder than that right he's he is right about many things and and the fact that people love what he's saying is totally understandable that's it's just not you know half truths are harder to deal with and or or statements which are riddled with truths but the cut the general shape of them is wrong and and aiming in the wrong direction like that is just it's hard for people to parse that stuff um and it's especially hard when occasionally The Conspiracy Theory turns out to be true or very likely to be true it's like if you're if you're a person who hasn't an appetite for every conspiracy theory right so JFK wasn't you know couldn't have been a single shooter and you're just you've just bought everyone since then then you're going to be then when you know covid will likely escaped a lab in Wuhan if you're the first person to sign up to that in an environment where everyone's being called racist for signing up to that you're going to look like this contrarian genius who just like I they couldn't fool me right I knew that it likely came out of a lab um whereas the the rational position to have had I mean you have to take all of these things a la carte right like you just have to honestly investigate um you know within the confines of um opportunity costs and and bandwidth you you have to investigate them um as they come and I mean with that one in particular it was always obvious that it was at the very least plausible that covid could have escaped a lab we just know we have a problem with lab leaks and there's a there was the Wuhan Institute for virology right there working on coronaviruses it was never raised it was that was that was a woke shibboleth to call that racist to worry that it could come out of a lab should have spoken a royal breed I would have made Asian uh which Rob Reed is that that did after run didn't he do a big oh right yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah I I was thinking about the uh the Christian Robert yeah so no so Rob and I did a podcast on this kind of topic you know lab leaks in general and synthetic bio in general um but again that you can't give so if someone like RFK Jr likes all the conspiracies like every one of them he likes the you know cell phones cause glioblastoma you know idea which again it's totally possible right it's like it's not that it's not worth looking into but if you like that one and you like the Bill Gates microchipping one and you like the the Wuhan one and you like that covet itself was just a pandemic and you and you like all of these and you like the Ashkenazi Jews don't get coveted you just have it's a characterological problem you have this appetite for I mean you see this the the true Avatar of this way of thinking is someone like Alex Jones right like again I don't know if Alice Jones is just a performance artist and it's it's cynical and not not real or if he really believes what he says he believes but assuming he believes what he says he believes he is just yeah you know it's like you're an a nymphomaniac for and what you love is lies right and half truths right you like you like you just love the least credible ideas you know the the whatever can come over the transom that's what gets you hard right and so that you're just gonna keep doing that and it's a it's a disorder right but it's you know if it's true that certain frogs are getting turned gay right like and you're the first one talking about that well he was right about those frogs so he must be right about everything you're going to find an audience and the the what's so perverse about our current environment online is that there is no evolutionary real evolutionary pressure anymore because everything can succeed there's just a nut there's a there's always you can always just find another corner of the internet and another Echo chamber and just this part of 4chan and a 4chan isn't good enough for you it can be over at a Chan right like you can find this little hell hole where every where you're gonna a requisite number of people to monetize ultimately are willing to hear and talk about anything and foreign so I I unlike many of the people we just spoke about I'm convinced that we have an enormous problem with misinformation that is held in tension with our desire for free speech on every topic you know 24 hours a day that we have to take seriously we have to say and it is it's not that we should ever write a law which which says people have to go to jail for saying crazy things I think the First Amendment truly is sacred and the right it's just beyond sacred it's just the right algorithm to have for it to run a democracy and and you know we have it in America and almost no one no one else has it but that's not the same thing as having a right to the gamification algorithm that boosts the craziest stuff preferentially to the ends of the Earth and maintains it forever right and that and and now you add generative AI to that and I think the problem just gets worse so yeah I'm I'm worried about consequential lies and half truths in a way that many of my colleagues in podcast and aren't getting back to something which is less contentious perhaps death and the fact that we maybe should spend more time thinking about it or at least be a little bit more aware of it I want to read a quote from that presentation that you gave on death in the present moment as a matter of conscious experience the reality of your life is always now and I think that this is a liberating truth about the nature of the human mind in fact I think there's probably nothing more important to understand about your mind than that if you want to be happy in this world the past is a memory it's a thought arising in the present the future is merely anticipated it is another thought arising now what we truly have is this moment and this and we spend most of our Lives forgetting this truth refuting it fleeing it overlooking it and the horror is that we succeed we manage to never really connect with the present moment and find fulfillment there because we are continually hoping to become happy in the future and the future never arrives it is always now however much you feel you need to plan for the future to anticipate it to mitigate risks the reality of your life is now even when we think we're in the present moment we are in very subtle ways always looking over its shoulder anticipating what's coming next we're always solving a problem and it's possible to Simply drop your problem if only for a moment and enjoy whatever is true of your life in the present you say that your mind is all you have just before that what does that mean reflecting on that statement now what what did you hope that people took away from it well it's there's this we've spoken about it a little bit already there's this fundamental truth that you never truly arrive if you're if your attention is always purposed toward looking for the next thing anticipating the next thing uh if even in the presence of that very thing that was the next thing and now it's now you are busy telling yourself a story about it you know you're if your engagement with it is mediated by thought in each moment and you can't actually make contact whether you can't you can't there's there's this dissatisfaction even in satisfaction right you get the thing you were longing for and you you have such a you're so distractible you're so you're so burdened by this automaticity of thought this conversation you're having with yourself that the present moment it isn't even Salient enough to you right and so it's it's a um most of us most of the time live in that kind of you know we get buffeted between the past and anticipate in the future and thinking about the past and that flicker happens over even the present moment right I mean we're just we're just you know like I mean even in a conversation like this like I'm saying something if part of my attention is women have I gone on too long about this or it's like hit like did that even make sense what was it there's part of me that is that is potentially talking to myself about the very conversation we're having now now that is all too normal everyone is in that position I mean people are people who are listening to us now are struggling to follow my train of thought as I speak one because I'm long-winded but two it's my speech is competing with speech that there is is occurring to them in their head right they're saying what's he talking about oh Jordan didn't say that what is he where does he get off talking about Jordan now and there's someone in their head who seems to be them but strangely not them because if they're the one talking and also listening why are they having that conversation in the first place right this is this people are looking over their own shoulder into the even when they're trying to seize the present with both hands right even if they take my advice in that quote and say okay I got to be all about that now right the future never arrives there's just now so let's enjoy the now what they will find is they lack the tools to really do that and so one tool again is something something like psychedelics right you take the requisite dose of LSD or psilocybin or MDMA again these are potentially very different experiences but they're they're what will happen under the Aegis of any of those compounds is very likely you will have a full collision with the present moment of A Sort that you have never had before if it's your first time on one of those drugs and all of a sudden the the your sensory experience and your concept even your conceptual experience will begin to unfold and you will realize there is just much more here than I than you realize right like like everything becomes a kind of miracle and the problem with that is that finding meaning in everything is crazy right you become the guy who's just like like you know if I'm staring at this microphone I'm so I come here stoned and I'm just like oh my God that microphone is just that you know that's not the guy you want on your podcast right so but it is possible it the it is possible to to fall into The Well of being such that the present moment the present moment lacks for nothing right you're just you recognize that love what you meet what you really mean by love what you should mean by love is not this transactional thing that you get going with a specific person because of your shared history together and because of their qualities that you happen to like um it is actually a state of being that you can just plunge into and you recognize that this is the the point of life is to is to recognize this more and more right and so and love is one facet to the to this Jewel compassion is another just just awe you know is is another I mean it gets different shadings depending on the environment you put it in I mean it's like if you're in the presence of of human or animal suffering well then compassion is the thing that gets Amplified but in the sign in in real silence and in in a real undistracted collision with the present moment when you don't have this voice in your head diverting you uh or coming up from behind seeming to be you right like but what happens is people feel like a a separate self I mean here perhaps I should rewind for a second that this here's the here's the starting point for 99.9 percent of humanity people feel like a self people feel like they're they're a subject in the middle of their experience right they feel like they're having an experience they feel like they're they're on the edge of experience in some sense they don't feel like they don't feel identical to experience right so I'm so and experience is you know your five sensory channels and your mind right so you've got your scene hearing smelling tasting touching thinking feeling emotions and you've got this whole cacophony of what it's like to be you in each moment and sometimes it's very very pleasant and sometimes sometimes it's very unpleasant and sometimes it's just you know uh normal and there's nothing really especially Salient about it um and the default sense is to feel like a self in the middle of that right and it's that it's that starting point that is actually the basis for all of our dissatisfaction and psychological suffering I mean that is the that is the knot that has to be untied to that that really allows for a recognition of what the mind is like prior to identification with thought and prior to this fee this this capture by this this automatic this reflexive seeking and not finding operation that we're we're constantly engaged with so um yeah it's possible to so yes on some level you know certainly spiritually speaking now is everything there really is just Consciousness in his contents in each moment right and and there's there's never a reason to wait to recognize that right um this isn't to disavow all the other projects we can have in human life that take some time to accomplish right I'm not saying you everyone should just become a monk or go to a cave and starve I mean like there are things that I like to do in the world and want to get done and I have projects but in each moment the question is what is available to attention uh and why do you suffer right and if you if you if you're going to ask yourself why do you suffer in each moment why why is this moment just a little crappy right why is it just not good enough why am I looking forward to this thing in an hour and I'm unable to locate a real ease of being now you know before this good thing happens um before this uncertainty gets resolved right before I hear from the doctor that I don't have the thing that I'm worried about what do you like all of these contingencies what's available now what you find is and you know meditation is the ultimate answer to this in my view you find is this this on the on the part of virtually everyone this basic incapacity to break the spell of identification with thought and just rest attention as Consciousness in the present moment and meditation is simply the act of doing that ultimately there are many techniques that that can seem like something other in the beginning but ultimately if it works meditation is the ability to to look at this thing you thought was your ego with that you thought was yourself that you thought was the homunculus that was in the middle of your experience and not find it and not find it in a way that actually relieves you of the problem of egocentricity for that moment right it might only last in the beginning it might only last a moment right and then you'll be lost in thought again but that but the question is once you learn to meditate the question is always what do you do next and if you don't know how to meditate well you're just going to helplessly be thinking that thought and you'll think it for as long as you'll think it and it'll you know make you angry or sad or regretful or whatever depending on its contents and then you'll try to have to figure out how to rearrange your life on the basis of that thought so it's to not be angry or sad or regretful but when once you know how to meditate you can recognize thoughts as thoughts and they just arise and disappear in this wider space of awareness and you locate your well-being in that space as as that space but but if all of that sounds like religious gibberish that is of totally interested in and it would have seemed that way to me when I was 18 the only thing for a hard-headed skeptic uh much of the time is an experience that snaps you out of your egocentric Illusions for some period of time and so for me Peru goes to Peru go to Peru or um um I which I haven't done I haven't done Ayahuasca but for me psychedelics weren't they they were indispensable because I was someone it had you confronted me as an undergraduate in college with whatever I just said I would have even if I had been convinced to try meditating for an hour I wouldn't have had the aptitude for it that such that I would have immediately noticed there was there was a there I would have I would have bounced off I would have got the sense that it didn't work for me I got you most people you know someone like or someone like Richard Dawkins is a perfect example it's like I I am bushed him on my podcast with you know five minutes of meditation and I thought you're gonna say spiked the drink with yeah he no Richard I told Richard he should he should do psychedelics um but most people who are especially and this is especially true of hard-headed rationalist skeptic scientist types um they're so enamored of thought thought is the only appendage they have ever found by which to or by which to interface with reality such that they can't imagine a mind prior to thought they can't imagine a non-conceptual engagement with reality that reveals anything you know it sounds like what do you it sounds like brain damage right like my concepts are great like you should have Concepts as good as my Concepts right why what are you okay you're going to hit me on the head with a hammer yeah then I'll have fewer Concepts right but so when you point them inward when you say okay just just notice that like just try try to focus on your breath for 10 seconds and notice how hard that is notice what happens notice that you get carried away by something that you are not authoring right like you're did you decide to get distracted about what's going to happen for lunch uh when I just told you to pay attention to your breath and you were on it for two seconds and now you're thinking about lunch like does that does that know is that at all interesting to you that that's the hardest thing in the world so just pay attention to anything some people find that interesting some people find that that's a there's a sort of an intimation of a path there like okay maybe there's something to discover here that could provide some relief to something that is in fact ailing me but for many people not and then if you give those people some psychedelic experience many of them recognize oh okay there is a there I don't know how I don't know if this one is optimal this is just this is just different but it's so different and some of it is so pleasant and some of it is so undermining of the that I generally find so captivating that this is a Counterpoint to how I've been living my life right and so I need I need to I need more tools and that's how many of us have got into meditation what is the role of feeling in this whatever term you want to call it the embodiment of emotions the tapping into some sort of intuition because I I resonate a lot with the cerebral horsepower model uh relying on whatever it is cognitively that I've got that I can deploy on the thing that's in front of me and I take a lot of pride in that and I think a lot of people do a lot of the people they'll be listening to this podcast listen to your podcast will feel the same you know we we take pride in our ability to Wrangle the chaos of the world into some sort of order by by thinking through things and taking Concepts from different disparate areas and bringing them together and going wow that's really satisfying I Now understand the way that these two things could result in this third thing and that third thing is but it does to me in some ways feel a little like a prison and it's a almost a prison of your own making and it's one that you're proud of you stand there with this gilded prison wall and everything's coded in in the toilet's gold and the floor's gold and there's an Open Sky and all this stuff um what's the role of allowing some sort of embodiment or emotion or or feeling to come back into this to allow the cerebral stuff to slip away but not to just be completely blank to be able to to hear what you're sort of truly feeling in the moment yeah well it meditation I mean so the kind of meditation I recommend is is generally called mindfulness and it's in the initially it seems like a technique and it's taught as a technique but ultimately it's not a technique it's not a it's not something you're doing more of it's you're actually doing less of something which is You're simply not being distracted by thought and so when you have a feeling when you feel Joy or you feel sadness mindfulness is it's often thought of especially when you're talking about negative feelings that people classically want to get rid of or diminish like anxiety right it's often thought that mindfulness is a way of getting rid of those feelings right and It ultimately it is but it's not a way of getting rid of them by born of an unwillingness to feel them right like what you're doing when you're being mindful of an emotion is you're willing to as you're feeling it entirely you're feeling it deeply you're letting yourself become incandescent with that feeling you're just not thinking about it anymore and and it's not that you're blocking thoughts you're just noticing thoughts themselves arise along with the feeling but you're noticing them from the point of view of this prior condition of awareness they can just see thoughts as thoughts right the default case is to not know that you're thinking even if you could say that you know that you're thinking in each moment a thought is is coming up from behind and you just feel like it's you and you're thinking about the thing that's making you angry and that's making you angry and so you're feeling anger and then you're thinking about the thing that's making you angry and that I can't believe what was he thinking and that's the voice in your head and that feels like you right like that you have no perspective is that not you no it's no more than than these these sounds are you when you hear them right like literally it is it is like being asleep and dreaming I mean that's why many people you I you know I've titled my book and my app waking up and what you know this is an ancient analogy which is all too literal breaking the spell of thought is very much like waking up from a dream when you you just didn't know you were having like you were you're asleep and dreaming let's leave aside lucid dreams which are a different case the normal case is you're asleep and dreaming and you have no idea what your situation is you are you are convinced you're in a totally different situation than you in fact are you're actually safe and safely in your bed and yet you think you're somewhere else you're you're out of nightclub you're you know at the office you're you know you're at the doctors something and it could be an emergency and it's completely imaginary right it could have some point of contact with your life but is completely imaginary and the amazing thing about dreams is the transition from sleep from waking to sleep to Dreaming is one in which we never register a moment of surprise right like like it's just it is amazing that your mind is capable like you are you go to sleep in your bed and then the very next thing that happens to you as a conscious entity it's totally discontinuous with what where you were if in your memory 15 minutes ago and where you in fact are in this moment if the laws of physics have been suspended you know dead people are now walking I mean literally talking to someone who's dead and you're not even you might be surprised they're dead but I had a dream a couple of days ago that I'd committed a war crime and the old cricket team that I used to play for 20 years ago was hunting me and I'm pretty sure that you were there as a newscaster so it makes perfect sense yes obviously yeah but so but that that failure of reality testing is something we are guilty of in every moment that a thought seems to be what we are where it seems like our mind becomes identical to this voice in our head where the self where you just feel like again you're listening to me you're not on you're not you're not rocking what I'm saying the voice in your head says what is he talking about was this is this Buddhism or like what's what's this guy banging on about look at that that is just arising out of you know not where right there's a total mystery at your back and then you've got this language and you in many cases imagery getting piped in from you know the uh you know stage right and stage left and you can't you can't figure out how to turn to see what where anything's coming from where where are our thoughts coming from it's utterly subjectively speaking as a matter of experience it's it's utterly mysterious right like they they and once you break this spell once you see it's very again it's very much like waking up from a dream like once you begin to wake up from a dream like it could be as it could be as bad or as seemingly consequential as possible right you know you're on a battlefield you're being prosecuted for you've been chased as a war criminal right your adrenaline is up the moment you begin to your alarm goes off and the the dream the dream the dream is so insubstantial that in most cases you can't even remember it right like it could have been really intense and yet it's so discontinuous with your normal waking consciousness that when it when it begins to erode sometimes you can just get this wisp of where was there a beach you know like there's just nothing left and yet it was all-encompassing when you were having it this we liver a lot so that strikes us as perfectly normal because basically we all dream when we're asleep and you know and it seems fine most streams are fun or not but no no real consequence we all live our Awakening Lives having this conversation with ourselves which is also totally normal everyone's doing it and yet both of these conditions being asleep and dreaming and not knowing it and being and thinking every moment of the day and not really knowing it and certainly not seeing any alternative to being identified with thought both of them are a kind of psychosis and they really are say they're so close to what we recognize in other in the canonically crazy people as psychosis right and so your thought is only really different from psychosis in that you have the good sense to keep your mouth shut in public right like if you were if you were helplessly exteriorizing all of this conversation you know just talking to someone who's not there um in the way that you're talking to someone who's not there in the Silence of your own mind you'd be the crazy person on the street who's talking to himself right it's not and I'm not saying I'm not trivializing the tragedy of psychosis I mean there's other things going on there there's you know classic thought disorder where you're you know you find Alex Jones credible and you're you know you're just every conspiracy theory is in fact real um but we we have we've all accepted a status quo of more or less constant distraction by this inner voice and it's so it again it's universally subscribed but it's not it's not what is also universally subscribed is Frank unhappiness and dissatisfaction and it is the basis for our unhappiness and dissatisfaction why is everyone a voice so mean most of the time it you know if we spoke to friends or even strangers the way that we often speak to ourselves yeah we'd very quickly be on the receiving end of something that we probably didn't enjoy why is it that we have this default not everyone but a lot of people yeah it's default to to converse with ourselves if that's even the correct term uh in a way which is horrible well it can be very wise to notice that and to notice that very different and to just leverage that as a way of changing your inner voice I mean like so this is like your meditation is one thing it's one remedy for for what ails us but there are other tools and one and one tool is to just note it notice what you just noticed is that you would never talk to your best friend the way that you talk to yourself and you can learn to talk to yourself the way you would talk to your best friend and then you your your mind is much more your friend you know on some level wisdom is a is a matter of making your mind your friend right and there are a few layers that can be addressed to do that and one is that the non-conceptual layer of what I'm calling meditation another is a conceptual layer of just noticing the character of this conversation and noticing how bizarre it is and contingent it is and how how malleable it is ultimately like the moment you recognize that you're not you're not you don't have to change yourself as a person like you you wouldn't talk to your friend this way like you're not this much of an you're not not only you're not this much of an to your friend you're not an at all to your friend like like when your friend is going if your friend is going through the very thing you're going through and beating yourself up over you know exactly what you would say you would successfully say it you're not not an imposter you wouldn't have to fake saying it like you were just like what would come out of you is a compassionate like let's just figure out how to how to improve the situation yeah just like this is like there's regret is is completely uh unhelpful like this like you did the past has passed you know you are you are a great competent person who's got all kinds of tools let's make the most of them let's just you know you've got this despondent horrible voice that you give yourself and a kick in the deck on the way out of the door yeah I think I think I said it or wrote at some point that you know to a first approximation wisdom is is simply a capacity to take your own advice right like you you effortlessly give that advice to others if you could just get if you could just give it and successfully receive it from yourself you know you're basically Socrates um but as to why it has a negative character I don't know that it does I mean I think some people don't have nearly the self-critical voice that's familiar to many of us right so there's just I think there's probably something like a bell curve there where some people have a fairly happy and even somewhat happily delusional self-talk and they're uh you know they're a good company for themselves you often talk about uh the tension between being and becoming it kind of feels a little bit like there's something going on here I'm fascinated with this relationship between finding peace and happiness and gratitude with what you have while asking for more from yourself and and hoping that you can achieve to be able to feel gratitude and drive at the same time why this to me feels like a Perpetual challenge a Perpetual difficulty because the drive to do more often not always but often is driven from a sense of insufficiency it's driven from a lack I will be happy when so on and so forth but the thought of going through life and just leaving it all on the table because I'm just in this state of sort of constant orgasmic Bliss and I I don't need to do anything anymore because I'm I'm just blessed out man yeah also doesn't sound particular and I I struggle to achieve that no matter how much yeah Tantra I try and yeah to talk to me there's tension between the drive to do more the acceptance of who we are the wanting to to show up in the world and to to give it everything that we've got and the gratitude for the things that we already have yeah well it is a constant tension and I think you want to ultimately I think you want to be biased on the the being inside of it I mean certainly if you've succeeded enough right like if you have a if you recognize that you've won the lottery on some level and you are in a position now where there are billions of people who would consider their prayers answered if they could trade places with you right and you you there'll be a time in your life where you would give anything to trade places with who you who you are now right like when you're you know when you're in your last months of life and you're eternally ill or you're you know you've lost someone very close to you I mean there's like when you have when you have this moment in the sun where basically you're basically things are basically going well right I think it's appropriate to have a a module in your in your mind which continually pings you which says like if you can't enjoy this right like you know if this is going to be wasted on you you're never going to be happy right like this is the you should be able to enjoy this part like this this is this is dessert right dessert has arrived and you whatever story you have about all the other things you might do or become this is really like you know this is a wonderful life right so can you can you settle into this at all with your attention right and if you can't I think that's the problem to recognize right like if like if the thing you should want to become is someone who's better at recognizing the beauty of your life moment to moment right now there's a paradox there that ultimately has to be overcome right like the wanting to become more spiritual wanting to wanting to become a great meditator I wanted to become enlightened that's you know a a knot that that gets untied but it's a fairly you know refined one um but it is it's just totally appropriate to recognize this mismatch between what is objectively true of your life by reference by comparison to anything else that's that is on the menu and the general mediocrity of your way of being you know just the feeling I mean and so this is again this is this is dual down to you not in big chunks but in moments right like this is not like the a grand plan like okay I got my calendar out this month is going to be about X and now I'm going to nail X right it's much more a thousand lessons over the course of a day right like like you have to just be attentive to moments where you miss it and moments where you and and then just recognizing that it's invade it's available now right like you were a moment ago you were tied in a knot somehow for some reason you know things were awkward or weird and then and then and now you're back right so like I was I was coming to this interview um and I was I was late I was 15 minutes late you know and and I hate being late for whatever reason and um so I'm kind of rushing to get out of the house and you know my wife has got her own day ahead of her and she's rushing to get out of the house and we're sort of ping-ponging around each other and we're kind of missing each other and very in and out of the bathroom in and out of the closet and and you I say goodbye to her but it was a sort of a goodbye like you know I've just completely missed her like this beautiful woman who I've decided to spend my life with and like like where she's now just a basically an obstacle I have to navigate around so this would be you know 30 seconds earlier than I would otherwise be if I just took a moment to recognize how beautiful my life is right so I missed I missed her I miss her I missed her I missed her and then at the penultimate moment as I'm grabbing my keys I'm like oh here she is right and so I just stop her I give her a kiss and then I leave right and it's just the difference between finding that moment and not is enormous right and it's just it's it's like the area under the Curve could still suck a lot from it's like in the beginning you might only have 20 moments like that a day right but the difference between being someone who never gets it clearly right and it never truly punctuates his busyness and ambition and disappointment and everything every other you know module that's been installed with just clear you know clear contact with the beauty and sacredness of the present moment that difference is is enormous and once you have those those punctate moments and again this is a meditation by another name then you can have a hundred and then you can have a thousand and then and then then the character of your life can more and more resemble the true Virtues Of Being even when you're still becoming and even when you have the whole apparatus of you've got employees you've got a calendar you've got slack is open all day it's like it's all that's happening you can still be someone who's basically already happy right you're like you're not leaning forward so much and when you do our leaning forward part of you recognizes okay what's this about like like you have a kind of mindfulness alarm that goes off when you're when you're obviously expecting to become Happy by the next thing right rather than be truly taken in by that dream part of you knows okay wait a minute like just set this just correct your posture a little bit like you know that no matter how good this dinner is it's just going to be a dinner right and then you're going to be too full and then you're going to wish you hadn't eaten all that and then you then you're going to find it hard to sleep and then and that so like you you know that there's it can't be a matter of of reaching and grabbing and and fully uh satisfying your desire again and again and again as a as a a way to finally become happy there's got you have to find locate your satisfaction more and more in just the in in the state of being that is already here that's preceding the next change your debt your happiness can't be ultimately a matter of changing experience it has to be a matter of recognizing the nature of experience now that it can be you know very easy to have a cynical take on that and say okay well it's easy for you to say a rich white guy who for whom everything's going great and nothing bad has yet happened and the worst thing that happened to you was on Twitter and so go yourself but no first of all many bad things have happened I know what it's like to lose someone close to me I know what it's like to worry that your your kid is really sick I know what it's like to be waiting for the MRI like like all these moments where you know even even the luckiest among us know what it's like to to live in the in with real uncertainty and the knowledge that you know ultimately every bad thing some version of every bad thing is going to happen I mean even if you're the luckiest and healthiest and richest you know then you're just going to be sitting by the phone you know hearing that all your friends have died right like if you live to be 120 in perfect health you know you're you're Peter attia and you've you've uh you know you're still doing kettlebells at 120 which I hope you keep them in yeah yeah I hope you are Peter and Andrew um then you're just going to be getting you know voicemails and texts and whatever else exists at that point hearing that all these people you loved have disappeared right so no one gets out of here without real a real encounter with with Greek level tragedy and the question is is it possible to have a mind that can Embrace that with Equanimity and compassion and love and tranquility or do you just have to to pretend none of that's going to happen the normal mode is to to try to be lucky enough so that you can pretend hard enough and long enough that none of that applies to me right like I'm just gonna you know I'm gonna I'm gonna stay healthy for as long as I can stay healthy I'm not going to think about cancer until somebody has cancer like it's like I'm just I'm gonna extract as much pleasure as I possibly can in the moment and you know look that Bugatti over there is mine right you know so it's like that's at best that's impermanent right even if that was as satisfying as as someone could pretend and we actually know it's not and you can know that from the inside the more you have those experiences the it's impermanent you know I mean it's like a certain point Andrew Tate is going to be the the 80 year old with bad tattoos right like it's just not it's like it's it's not it doesn't scale like like that you need you need a another gear and there are many names for this I mean wisdom is one name spirituality um Enlightenment Awakening um meditation and all of these Concepts you know psychedelic experiences all of these tools and concepts are triangulating on a part of the map where one's well-being isn't contingent upon changes in experiences there's a recognition that is possible about the nature of of conscious life itself that is fulfilling giving ourselves a good enough reason to just be here in the present moment yeah yeah this would both fans and friends with Paul Bloom and uh yeah Paul managed to draw the perhaps surprising correlation between this and a dominatrix that he'd interview yes he would yeah he he uh he's he's great with surprising correlations yeah and um it really made me it really made me realize because I think it's in maybe the death and the present moment talk that you gave us something else that a lot of what we're doing externally with the way that we try and show up in the world the way that we construct our exterior lives and our experience is to give us a good enough reason to just be here now yeah and people find this through staring at the night sky people find it through going to Raves and Collective effervescence they find it through and Paul gave me this reason I interviewed a dominatrix for one book the one in pain maybe and um she'd said nothing captures attention like a whip right which means that if you get slapped hard by a lady presumably in bicep length Gauntlet leather gloves high knee boots and stuff if you get slapped by her for the next three seconds you're thinking about nothing apart from the fact she just slapped me yeah and you're just hearing that ringing in your ears and that's it and I think that the way that I've conceived of it I wrote this on a beach whilst kind of high on mushrooms but I wrote it on a beach that the goal of a lot of mindfulness and the goal of a lot of what we're doing with our life should be to lower the bar to which we need the world's external stimulus to be in order for us to feel happy it should be as Naval says if you won't be happy with the coffee you won't be happy on a yacht right yeah and continue to just that whatever the reverse of progressive overload is yeah Progressive underload yes yeah yeah and just continue to Chip Away chip away I can find it when I'm washing the dishes I can find it when I'm walking the dog I can find it when I'm etc etc waiting in traffic yeah and if that seems difficult uh it certainly can be but that doesn't mean it's not possible and and The crucial point is that you have to recognize what the alternative is right the alternative is just bad the alternative is to not be happy to be incapable of Happiness even when you have every reason to be happy right it's it's the alternative is to be not all that loving even when you're surrounded by people you ostensibly love right because you have a mind that is constantly fragmented you're constantly looking elsewhere you're constantly waiting for the next thing you're constantly ruminating about that last thing and you become bad company for the people in your life who you really want to to whose lives you you know when in your clear moments you really want you want you just want to magnify happiness in their presence right this is what I think is is an important leap and I I think that you make it very well in waking up which I told you before we'd started I think I've gifted my mum every Christmas for the last three years which has been a great assistance in me being able to get something delivered digitally the Night Before Christmas when I've left it too late yeah early annually um I highly highly recommend that everyone go and check it out um taking it from an abstract wishy-washy this is something that's gonna maybe my anxiety will be a little bit better maybe I won't feel my anger anymore to uh as David Fuller says does it grow corn like show me if it grows any corn right like what does this do for me to me to my life to the relationships I have to fundamentally the things that I care about the most and the texture of our own minds is not nothing in fact you could argue maybe it's everything but there is something beyond that too and I think that the thin end of the wedge is getting people in through the door that oh look at what this could do to your world and then the worlds of the people that you care about and then think about how that could Ripple out if you want to be super altruistic and and the town and the country and the the planet that you're on and so on and so forth but that is that is the reminder when I've missed my meditation streak for too long that I get embarrassed about it and I I need to I need to come back to using your app or the timer or whatever that's the reminder for me that gets me through the door A lot of the time yeah it's and I'm hesitant I came up with an idea the other day uh productivity Purgatory which is the things that you do that are supposed to be recuperative are done only to make you more productive so you kind of have this Perpetual existence of everything I did Pickleball I play is because I heard Andrew human say on a podcast that you know 45 minutes of Zone 2 cardio per week it helps me be able to focus better and Peter attia told me that I've got to go for a walk in the morning because of my my glucose tolerance or whatever um trying to not just do that but you know you can be driven by whatever it is to get you I think to get the activation energy to get it moving and for me that's that that's one of the most robust ways to remind me like think about how it's going to change the nature of your daily experience internally and how you're going to show up for other people externally I think that that's a a leap which a modern version of of mindfulness and then tying it in with the life advice not just being about the mindfulness it's like look look at the things that you're struggling with look at the things that you're challenged by now the fact that you ruminate you have regrets and shame and insufficiency and Terror and fear and all that this there is an alternative experience of this and the way that this allows you to show up in the world can also benefit from it too yeah and also there's no boundary between this thing we're calling meditation or mindfulness and the rest of one's life right I mean that that boundary is truly spurious and it's it's it's an artifact of you know first learning not knowing the thing then learning it then setting aside 10 minutes a day or whatever to practice it or you go on a silent Retreat for a month and then you come back to your life and that there seems to be this difference between life and retreat but in reality is all you have is your mind in each moment and you're either suffering or not you're either lost in thought or not you're either clearly aware of of what it's like to be you or not and that fluctuation is that that's really the the ground of this practice or these insights and that that's where wisdom is and um so it's not you know I would encourage people from the very beginning to view the practice as not at all being separate from the rest of their day it's like like and you don't in my view you don't get any credit I mean there are consequences to practicing or not practicing you know for most people but it's like you don't get credit for having meditated earlier today like I don't give myself like if I sat for 20 minutes yeah it's not like you Bank those 20 minutes and now you're good to go for the rest of the day it's like the rest of the day is your pre is your practice right like your your life is your practice you're on some level your life is a meditation it's just your your paying attention to a thousand different things but in each moment your attention is being drawn and being dedicated to something and you are you are making your mind you're making your being in the world based on how you pay attention and meditation is just this period in the day where you've decided okay for these 10 minutes I'm going to give myself permission not to think about anything else other than just paying attention but ultimately once you see the power of It ultimately your entire life becomes that even though you have to do other things right so you're doing like if I'm if I'm having this conversation I'm fluctuating between being totally lost and clearly seeing the nature of my mind in this moment right so it just it keeps it's it's absolutely no different from what I'm doing if I set aside set aside 20 minutes to meditate right it's just it's it's the same mind it's the same challenge of noticing thought as thought noticing emo you know clearly noticing emotions and their linkage to thought um letting go of any uh grasping at what's Pleasant or pushing what's unpleasant away and through the judgment and the contraction around experience as you pay attention to your mind you notice that that you you tend to stay in one of two types of contract of contractedness your your things are Pleasant and you're trying to squeeze more goodness out of it right so it's like oh yeah finally the good taste and you're you're you're you're contracted in avarice essentially um and when things are unpleasant you're you're pushing them away you're trying to change you're bracing yourself against the physical pain or the embarrassment or the and again mindfulness is just they wide open non-judgmental willingness to feel both of those things and so you're so it's if you can even step back on the on the contraction like you can feel what you're doing what you're disposed to do with the feeling tone of pleasure or the feeling tone of of pain and you and you you recognize that all of that's happening just against this clear mirror of awareness and you drop back and you're and all of a sudden it's all floating free of that which is aware of it and you're just that condition of open receptivity and you just keep falling back into that it's not to say you don't get caught trying to get some more pleasure out of that thing or you're trying to change this this painful thing but the more you notice that fluctuation the more you notice that real relief is in not successfully doing either these two things but in just recognizing you're the mirror of awareness and the the beautiful and ugly things are just going to keep coming it's one of the places where mindfulness gets closer to stoicism I think I thought Marcus Aurelius quote about the universe itself is change and life is but what we deem it yeah the story that we tell ourselves I think you've got a an example that I use all of the time even in my own life um for the people that do CrossFit or presenting Jiu Jitsu or hardcore pickleball the way that you feel at the end of one of those workouts where you can taste metal in the back of your throat and your heart rate's high and you're sweating and you're panting and it's 105 degrees in Austin Texas or wherever that sensation is associated with the story that you tell yourself that this is worthwhile that this is good for me that this is something that I can feel proud of but if you were to have that sensation spontaneously stood in line at the bank it would be pushing through the to the get the teller to call the ambulance because this is terrifying so very much the story that we tell ourselves around the present moment largely determines our experience of it yeah and that that's another example of a sort of a conceptual layer at which you can do a lot of wise work in changing your experience by using certain kinds of Concepts as an antidote to other bad Concepts so you tell yourself a better story so reframing is is just a very good technique but it's sort of a layer above the mindfulness layer of just noticing that they're all just stories right and and there's no place for them to land right so and I think you people should intelligently engage both levels I'm not discounting the power of reframing or and stoicism is fantastic I mean there's you know Bill Irvin this philosophy Professor um who wrote a great book the guide to the good life um has attract has a series on waking up that is really great um and so you know I'm kind of late to the stoicism as a you know I discovered it when more or less everyone else did in the last 10 years but you know I hadn't read Seneca or Marcus Aurelius you know one even even when I got a Philosophy degree back in the day um and uh it's it's incredible just as an operating system for your mind it's very just a very few tools you need um and what you know one we just talked about here briefly on attributed but just like negative visualization just recognizing how happy you would be to really like you're in this normal state of dissatisfaction recognize how much you would pay to be returned to this crappy little spot you're in now that you're not enjoying if all of these other bad things that had happened that are happening to someone right now and it just you're lucky enough that it's not you the things that you're ignoring now or taking for granted yeah the cancer diagnosis you're not getting today previously just things that you wished that you once had yeah and yet you're able to continue to adapt to this what do you disagree with stoicism about is there anything that stands out why you think I'm not on board with that well I think it had it probably has a two um I'm not sure their view of our emotional lives is something I would want to sign on to in every respect I mean there's kind of a detached from the decapitation of your child yeah there's a kind of a freeze of your business there's a there's a fundamental Detachment that um I'm not sure is the most interesting channel to be on in the end um I mean it can be very useful given where we we normally live but um not so rich but also it's just I in my experience and make I'm not you know I don't consider myself a true scholar of stoicism but I don't I don't think the stove I mean really the Greeks in general lacked a methodology right there are many of the insights that you can recognize in Buddhism you can also find among the Greeks not just the stoics I mean maybe even more so among the Skeptics um but they didn't really have a methodology of training attention and they and they didn't have a a kind of a comprehensive um marriage of spiritual contemplative training and ethical Insight that is as a is as systematic and as useful as I found in in Buddhism in particular so I I mean I I'm a fan of other Eastern uh Traditions as well but uh again not in a religious sense but just taking you know I'm very eclectic taking what I think is useful and leaving the rest but you know if you had to just go to one shelf in the bookstore to find you know to Pareto optimize the whole spiritual journey you you really can't do better than Buddhism in my view I mean there's just there's yes there's some there's certainly some that should be ignored or at least some stuff that's unjustifiable that shouldn't be uh you know not too much Faith should be placed in but it's you could almost pick at random you know like you go to 10 000 page Corpus and just open it at random and you're not gonna get A Treatise on how to sacrifice a goat right or why why you should kill homosexuals you're going to get something absolutely clear and totally serviceable in the 21st century about the nature of Consciousness I really enjoyed Robert Wright's book yeah yeah why Buddhism is true talking about religion you spent a good part of your career deconstructing religion yeah only for it to then perhaps uh be replaced with some similar religious thinking around things like identity politics yeah was that was creating that vacuum and error is there any way around this it's religious thinking just baked into our human I don't think it was the same people necessarily I'm not sure um it is true that secularism and Atheism seem to win many subscribers in the interviewing years I don't know how much can be attributed to the so-called new atheist but um there was it organized religion seems to have lost many of his subscribers and it's you know many of us perceive into that vacuum people found meaning in politics uh uh which is arguably uh no more functional um yeah I mean I I don't believe I mean I I find many people will argue that other people need X right they need mythology they need religion they need whatever other people who you and I don't you and I are smart enough successful enough we got our heads screwed on straight we we can get along fine with that X but other people it's obviously millions and millions people need eggs I think that just shows a lack of imagination and I mean it's it's patronizing and I I fear it's actually just not accurate for many many people right it's like who needs because you could do that with anything like that all these people millions of people need to be confused about human health they need to have like superstitions about how to be healthy you and I can we can deal with Biology and real medicine but these people need they need to believe that these bogus pills really work right it's just why would we think that right that's it's in fact true that many people are stuck in that spot and we have a is a challenge to disabuse them of certain bad ideas um but it's like does anyone need astrology no no one needs astrology if we if we categorically disproved astrology such that it really landed for everybody and all of these people sort of staggered out of their you know dungeons with this astrology shaped hole in their lives that they had to figure out how to fill the problem just evaporates like they would they they don't fill it with an astrology-shaped object they would actually just be disabused of the astrology solution and they would go on to believe and do other things now it just so happens that most of the time we have we have we have strands of culture where it's it's not only hard to disabuse people with bad ideas it's taboo to do it right so it's like specifically with respect to religion in in current politics with respect to certain um pieces of you know far left and Far Right ideology you know I think more more attuned with the far left at the moment um it's just you know they're kind of blasphemy tests in both spaces there's you know there's dogmatism that goes unexamined it's not it's not not only unexamined it's in a religious context it's a virtue that is dogmatic right I mean the Dogma is literally a good word in a religious context uh so like these these are facts they're not going to be we're not going to reconsider them any demand that we reconsider them we're going to consider a kind of violent assault um we're gonna you know not only are we not gonna talk to you really you know even if we pretend to have a debate with you we're gonna hate you and if we only had enough power we would you know physically subjugate you right um sounds pretty religious that's that's where so there are parts of culture where we're stuck there but it just doesn't seem the idea that it's necessary that more people can't be like us right just seems like a failure of imagination to me I think I think that everyone could have a truly 21st century non-sectarian relationship to all ideas all possible projects all invitations to collaboration we could just deal with everything on its merits and we could Avail ourselves of all the world's literature all the Legacy code everything that's still serviceable everything that's good and if part of that is the Golden Rule well yeah sure it is yeah the golden rule is great but you don't have to believe Jesus was the son of God or born of a virgin to think the golden rule was great I mean first you just recognize the Golden Rule came from Jesus but it also came in in the Old Testament it came in other context I mean it's just it's like the golden rule is just an ethical Jewel that that many people have have stumbled upon we we should just use the totality of human knowledge in the present and to do that honestly requires that we not firewall certain parts of that knowledge with these dogmatic claims to you know divine inspiration or you know you're a racist if you even consider the possibility that that uh you know a virus came out of a lab right it's just it's been interesting to me to watch this especially because uh me and Douglas Murray became friends just after he wrote The Madness of crowds and in that he's talking about the collapse of grand narratives right he's talking about the fact that people are latching themselves on to ideological movements political movements identity-based movements to try and fill what he saw as a a hole that had been left with this this Grand narrative that came over the top and um yeah it's interesting to me to think that you know that book 15 years ago would have kind of felt like like what the are we talking about here we have bigger fish to fry when it comes to what people are ideologically kind of addicted to which might have been more in your wheelhouse and yet in the space of no time at all this compulsion for something yeah rather than nothing but I mean there are other variables I mean they're they're obvious economic ones with the fact that virtually all of the productivity games in the last really 50 60 years have gone to the top 10 percent in our society right literally I think it's um 92 percent of the stock market is owned by the top 10 percent I think it's like 50 but by the top one percent right so you know it's just 90 of people aren't in the game and not reaping the benefits of modernity in an economic sense right and they feel the the disad the obvious dissatisfaction and you know one could argue unfairness of that I mean our system is not tuned to to wisely uh cause all boats or even most boats to rise with with this particular tide or that's just not I mean we got 10 of the boats doing pretty great and then we got one percent and then the top one you know one percent of one percent doing especially great and this uh this kind of stratification given that so much of people's sense of how they're doing so much of their you know concept based estimation of their own well-being and therefore their actual experience well-being is comparative right I mean they're they're not and then the in many cases they're not even begrudging you know Jeff Bezos on his yacht they're just they're just noticing the difference between uh their life and the you know people you know one who live one mile away right it's like so so much of these um so when you price that in the consequences of inequality wealth inequality and income inequality uh I think that could be enormously agitating to people and also give it can make certain in this case you know populist narratives attractive that would otherwise discredit themselves because they're not um they're obviously not wise right like if you don't have if you don't have skin in the game right like the game if this game is just not working well then of course you want to upend the board right I mean you'll you'll enjoy watching the pieces fly all over the room because this game this particular game of Monopoly was not you didn't have anything on Park Place right you know none of that money was yours really it's easy you know it's easy to see why many many millions of people would be cynical and just want to see they just want to see change right they just want any direction yeah they just don't want to see a wrecking ball come through and reset things and I I I you know credit you know Trump and trumpism as a you know a symptom of that you know more than more than a cause really it's just we were ready for that moment yeah I think it's uh I think it's Warren Buffett or Charlie Munger that says uh we would be able to be happy if we just wanted to do better but we don't we want to do better than our next door neighbor and it's this perpetual one-upmanship and sort of keeping up with the Joneses so I I agree that you know it's massive wealth inequality causes Discord and upset and perhaps primes the landscape for people to want change regardless of where it comes from right but I I'm pretty sure that that continues all the way down or all the way up as wealth continues to increase it's one of the reasons that I'm relatively skeptical of Ubi because I I think that if you just flatten the playing field you then start to play games about people are going to find people are going to find ways to do status you know will store who wrote that great great book for status game you know does this tribe somewhere that grows yams they grow massive yam these unbelievably huge Yarns and after takes four men to wheelbarrow these yams in and I'm pretty sure that the what you do is you give the yam to your greatest enemy or something like that and it's almost like it's like this yam shaped middle finger that you're like I'm I'm so rich I could I could forsake this yeah precisely um you know people will find ways to compete the status and keeping up with the Joneses is is is they'd permeates an awful lot status is a game that everybody is going to continue to play yeah um I mean I would recommend in that case I would recommend that we seek our status more and more in being above that game now and that's not as absurd as it sounds right like you can like if you can see piece of the pieces of this in just how very rich successful people already start to behave like he's like you know at a certain level of success like it's important that you're wearing a suit and you you know drive a nice car and you have a nice watch and you have all those signs of status but at a certain point you know you show up in a hoodie because you know everyone knows you know you're they know you're you know they know you're a billionaires yeah the richest people drive to shittest cars right and like at a certainly like I don't have a guy just Uber you know I don't have a car now you can be cynical about all that but and you know some cynicism is appropriate but there are benign four forms of like if I guess you could probably notice this now happening around climate change and private airplanes right like so it was the case that the highest status position with respect to travel is well I've got a Gulf Stream you want to you we'll just take my Gulf Stream you know um what could be better than that well that's starting to erode the more stigma gets attached to just squandering fuel on a Gulf Stream right the more you're you look like an for doing that no matter what story you tell yourself no matter how successful you are no matter how much it saves your time you sort of look like an on a Gulf Stream um at a certain point you could imagine that flipping and all of a sudden the high the real high status thing is now I just feel like commercials it's like you know you can see Elon flying jet blue and it's just yeah I just you know just fly to it blue it's like and and it'll be it will because it'd be because so much punishment has been meted out on the other side of like it just it no longer looks cool to to be burning that much fuel now I'm hopeful that we do live in a world of just really open-ended abundance where yes there is actually no tension between affluence and ethics in the end right so that ultimately we're going to get the right fuels we're going to power this all with sunlight we're going to have a high-tech Society where our machines get better and better and we start pull pulling wealth essentially you know out of The Ether um let's leave aisi but you know it's a success successful proliferation of AI would be part of this I'm you know as you know worried that we're going to screw that up or that that isn't just in fact too too hard a challenge but um let's say we got that right ultimately this could be a have your cake and eat a two situation where it's not a matter of of denying ourselves anything really materially except we should recognize that we there there's certain degree certain disparities of luck that we find ethically intolerable right like it's like just how given that it currently and for the longest time there is a zero-sum tension between a dollar spent over here and a dollar not spent over here at just how comfortable should each of us be with you know a Ginny coefficient in our own society that just goes you know goes asymptotic right like you know like we're at one right like yes I've got a trillion dollars but now my main preoccupation is trying to figure out how my compound in New Zealand is going to be staffed with you know bodyguards I can really trust yeah not to kill me and yeah it's like the douglas douglas rushkoff uh a conversation can you tell me that story yeah so it's just like yeah if that's where your mind goes you should be spending much more time with your billions and trillions figuring out how to make a society where all you meet when you walk out on the sidewalk are other happy people and hap in your case happy customers who are just doing creative things in their free time you know how much of a difference do you think that would be over the last few years in culture wars culture discussions if Christopher Hitchens was still alive well it would silence all the morons who think that he might have supported Trump I think that's uh that would be that would be worth resurrecting him just for that just to see the look on their face when he got him talking about Trump I can't believe the people I've heard from on that point um yes he hated the clintons but there is zero percent probability that he would have had anything kind to say about Trump um I don't I don't think it would have been different it would have been wonderful to have ridden shotgun with him on many of these topics I mean he was you know I I'm I'm a fan uh as well as a friend but um I don't you know I mean he was a he was enough of a um an old dog uh who would have been hard enough to teach New Tricks I'm not sure he would have been lighting up Twitter the way many people might hope I mean maybe but he's um yeah I mean he's much more like someone who would have for the longest he he was not an early adopter in any sense you know it's like he just uh he barely could barely do email in the in a normal way right so it's just it's um yeah I think he would I mean many of us are in this spot I mean many of us who are much more early adopters and more Tech enabled than he ever was um you know we there's a kind of a Nostalgia for books and old models and some of us are trying to figure out how to return to that in new ways right so um yeah I mean he loved literature so much and and print so much that I think he would be he would still be clinging for dear life to shelves of books and a business model that tries to prioritize physical books basically every other way of doing what what about the way what do you think he would have made of the the state of cultural discourse at the moment knowing what you knew about him well I think he would have found maybe he would have been in this uncharacterizable Middle where half the time you're recognizing all that's wrong and masochistic and insane about wokeness uh and all that's wrong and sadistic and dangerous in trumpistan and just taking each each difficult object as it comes right you know I think he would be um I mean perhaps I flatter myself but I think he would be very much in my Lane with certain exceptions I mean certain things that I'm very interested in and and which I prioritize which he never saw the point of much of was which we talked about here I mean meditation spirituality psychedelics he had no file on any of this and I don't think was going to get a file Douglas Murray's Camp I think along with yeah yeah well although I mean I think Douglas is more I mean Douglas and I haven't gone around this track I don't think but I feel in Douglas more of a um kind of a yearning for this the spiritual then then I ever detected in the hitch you know the hitch was he just prided himself on um being harder headed than that yeah it was uh the grape and the Grain and uh and the pleasure of good books yeah I um I often think about I have a couple of friends Alex is one of them who's a huge fan of hitch and and threw him even someone's passionate about something you end up becoming passionate about it because of that passion yeah my housemate uh we always watch videos of motocross rallycross sorry where the guys are going down and you'll see these dudes in anorax and it's in the middle of Montana or or Liverpool or some wooded area somewhere and they've been there all night to get the right spot and it's pissing down and they're soaked wet through and they get to see roughly 0.3 seconds right have a car go past yeah and as they do it they're so fired up and seeing someone love anything that much fires me up to watch it as well there's there's this blog post by Scott Alexander from Slate star coat now astral codec 10 codex 10. and um no sorry it wasn't it was uh eliada yukowski and it's at the very start of uh uh rationality from AI to zombies um and he says the reason that rationalists get the piss taken out of them so much one of the many reasons that they get the piss taken out of them so much is it's rare to find anybody that loves anything now for anybody to have a degree of passion and if you find someone who stumbles upon the book of rationality and thinks this gives me answers to a lot of the cognitive bias problems that I've been facing in my life it's just easy to mock them it's easy to mock passion in that regard in some circles I think specifically being British this is sort of genealogically something that we've got right uh the tall poppy piss taking mocking uh yeah undertone and um yeah from Alex loving hitch so much I got into him too and then you know thinking about what sort of vacuum that perhaps could have left and I don't disagree that culture is bigger than any culture is bigger than all of us but there are certain voices you know Jordan as being a good example at the right place in the right time and so on and so forth that can really be the you know the pebble in the the stream that can direct things or Trump on another side you know Elon kind of now um yeah I often wonder about what what hitch's Behavior would have been like in the in the modern world yeah yeah well I certainly miss him because um I mean there's so many moments where they were just they were just perfectly teed up for him in the last six years and I mean just politically it just you just would have uh yeah there's no one I would like to have pulled onto the field more than than hitch at certain moments both both left and right have you been uh keeping abreast or have you noticed this trend that's happened of westerners choosing to convert to Islam in adult life obviously you spend a lot of your career criticizing Islam and now we have I don't accuse of lopping these people very well may truly believe in the doctrine but in Andrew Taylor is is one of them and downstream from that there's on-street interviews with young British youths with these um Islamic Scholars or or imams or whatever uh converting them on the street and then like doing the doing the thing on the on the street have you have you I haven't I haven't seen those voxpop conversions but um I saw Andrew Tate's conversion um well I mean Islam is just mimetically it's perfect for a specific audience you know it's um it's it's a it's a explicitly Macho religion right it's a no religion right it's just a and this is it just you know it's a like with Christianity you have to pretend yeah well you have to pretend to be happy to be losing for the longest time and you're basically just waiting for Jesus to come back and rectify this grave Injustice like you're the meek shall inherit the earth you're just you know there's no put in this place right we're not going to win until we really until we see you know Jesus arrive on cloud trailing Clouds Of Glory um so it's all going to be up for the longest time and there's no imperative that we really do anything really like there's no expectation that we're gonna win before anything good happens I mean I guess there's there's one Christian sect where they do have an expectation of of of kind of winning you know a thousand a thousand years of of millennial Glory until and and then Jesus comes but for most Christians it's just it's a story of failure and then they get to say look we were right you know Jesus you know yeah yeah with Islam there's an expectation that they're going to conquer the world right and there's an imperative to conquer the world and for for serious Muslim just like you don't have to be impatient necessarily you can take as long as you want but this is all we all know this is moving in One Direction and you need to be a spiritual Warrior and if you if you take this really far if you become a jihadist right you're and especially doctrinaire militant you know True Believer well then you're a kind of spiritual James Bond I mean it's like it's like you get to be Jocko and care about and know that you're going to go to paradise right like so you get all the tools like it's it's the it's this first person shooter that literally get all the good guns like it's not it's not this boring I'm pretending to just I'll turn the other cheek you know hit you know thank thank you sir can I have another um and you know where the it's it's it's a high tea religion right and that's why a schmuck like Andrew Tate thinks it's he's had an you know a real insight people can embracing it people are seeing it as a redress to women of the West who uh have been conned by feminism into believing that these things are good for them they're not good for them we need you know no one's happy look at the divorce rates look at the 60 percent of U.S teenage girls aged 12 to 16 have regular or persistent feelings of hopelessness yeah everyone's only fans pathologically fapping themselves into a early Monster Energy whole or whatever it is that they're doing right the answer is a return to something that's got a bit more Lindy nature to it yeah well I mean that that's the claim that I want to deny I mean it's it's explicitly retrograde I mean it is regressive it is backward looking it is not it is not using all of the good ideas we've had in the meantime right it's like it's a disavowl of the presence and the near present I mean the modernity in in the case of Islam it's a it's a disavowell of nearly 1400 years of of wisdom and insight right it's it's a it's a claim that in the 7th Century somebody was so smart and so wise and so prescient and so had so had his together that everything we're thinking about and talking about happened then right so we should confine ourselves to the products of that conversation that's just I mean it's it's imbecilic on its face right it's not to say again it's not to say there's nothing useful to come out of Islam but whatever is useful we can use without believing that Muhammad was visited by the Archangel Gabriel and got and you know got the last You Know download from the creator of the universe um it's just not this is not to deny any of the cultural problems that someone like Andrew Tate or I mean there's lots of people we've we've dragged into the conversation here but like all of these people who I've criticized to some degree Tate or RFK or or um you could add Elon to this all these people are kind of living out the consequences of their dissatisfaction with the presence on the public stage and winning a lot of followers as a result they just like they I you know they like the way these guys are complaining about the obvious excesses of the left for the most part um I have several problems with this one is that most of these guys most of the time some of them all of the time are ignoring the obvious problems and and in many cases quite a bit scarier problems on the right right they really care that the government tried to micromanage the the um uh messaging about covid on Twitter right that's the biggest story of the decade right that's I've got I've got a hundred podcasts in me and 100 newsletters in addition to that on that topic but they don't really much care about what happened on January 6th where we had a sitting president who for months had been declining to support a peaceful transfer of power and for the first time in our history we did not have a peaceful transfer of power and we had a sitting president trying to visibly trying to steal an election all the while claiming an election had been stolen from him and everyone around him knew that was right um we were we were poised on the verge of a constitutional crisis which may yet return in 2024 and yet we have these guys more worried about you know trans overreach with respect to bathrooms and I get all that I get how infuriated and so much of the the the the the woke identitarian nonsense is but you have to have some proportion and you have you have to keep both problems in View and why are people not doing that in your view well I mean so to some degree it's people have you know a one-sided take aligns with their biases in in many cases they'll have political biases that you know they were a creature of the right they wanted to be a creature of the right and this is very easy to focus on what's wrong with the left and vice versa you know if you're a creature to the left it's easy to just be all Trump all the time and you you don't have any time for a criticism of wokeness right you know you're going to run who I don't know your this could be wrong but you know you're Trevor Noah on The Daily Show right like yes tell me what John Don Jr did wrong I've got time for it but hunter Biden who cares right like so there's an asymmetry there and um but part of it I think is outside of normal channels there's there's audience capture right like you find you get signal from the noise on one thing you've just launched your sub stack and you and you see that people have endless time for your hot take on covid and uh the dangers of mRNA and the spike protein but doesn't that sound scary it's called why they call it a spike protein right so let's do a hundred piece of content on that topic right to the exclusion of everything else that's happened I'm not saying I know the MRNA vaccines aren't going to some people up or haven't already right it's a valid conversation worth having but again there's there's proportion here that gets totally lost in each of these ecosystems and what's happening out here in podcastan and over there in sub-stakistan is people find a an appetite for a certain style of conversation about a specific narrow band of topics and they just go all in on that for obvious reasons and I you know it's understandable um but I think it's um it's shattering our society I mean we have a society where increasingly and this is again this is a near-term risk of AI you leave an existential risk aside we have a society where it's becoming increasingly difficult and in many cases impossible to have a conversation about facts that are just crucial to understand for the maintenance of democracy for the for public health for for you know on Myriad fronts and we just we can't have a real-time conversation that converges on agreement it seems and it's just getting harder and harder to do it what would be the chance in your mind that we make it through the next let's call it Century as a civilization with something like us being functioning still intact because we have some breakdowns culturally many breakdowns culturally we have bad incentives we have a media system which facilitates Bad actors either willfully or negligently or ignorantly Rising risk of artificial intelligence desktop printers that can synthesize bio weapons although there's some pretty good uh closes in that that limit that from happening uh population collapse although not a true existential risk something that's you know not it's definitely not going to help uh nuclear weapons still out there lurking around all of the background natural risk that just exists as a byproduct of us being on a single planet at the moment yeah how how Toby odds pills are you when it comes to the conception of The Next Century or two well I mean like Toby I would just be guessing um but I'm I'm troubled that's like what I would like to be able to say is you know the chant the chance that existential uh catastrophe is actually going to occur is got to be minuscule right like it's less than one percent like that's where you'd want to be you'd want to you're just guessing but very low probability that we're going to wipe ourselves out right then we're going to cancel the future um I don't think that's the case like I I just think it's it's whether it's I mean even you know even a 10 probability is awful right I mean 10 comes up you know you're just the expected value of that just take out some dice and play around and see what a 10 result looks like how often that comes up right I mean that's that's terrifying and I yeah I think there are many smart people who would say the risk of real catastrophe is is quite a bit higher than 10 percent um I think Tommy puts it at one in six right over the next Century yeah I believe so and and if you if you kind of widen the footprint of you take existential risk and you just widen that to extreme risk right just like okay it's not existential but you know get you know you might want to watch The Road Warrior films a few more times because that's not nice that's going to start to look like the future right who wants to live in in the aftermath of societal collapse you know fundamental societal collapse um now it could be like that that's a totally conceivable trajectory for our species we could we could screw up everything and dig out and finally recover uh and it could take a unnecessary we could have this unnecessary and truly heroin detour into something awful for 100 years right but who wants that and but if you but if you add that to this possibility space yeah I don't you know how confident can you be that something like that isn't going to happen in the next hundred years given what we're doing and what we're finding it's so difficult to do and that's what was so dispiriting for me about covet and it's aftermath it's not that I was so worried about covid I was so worried about our inability to respond coherently to something that was should have been pretty simple to respond to right and and so I I was for the longest time there was this initial month where or two where like who knows how bad this is going to get who knows how bad this is so yeah I was just thinking more about covet but after a couple of months I was much more thinking about it as a a stress test for society and for our information ecosystem um and for our cultural norms and our politics and I really do view it as a failed dress rehearsal for something quite a bit scarier let me lay this out for people maybe who haven't heard you talk about this before I haven't thought about uh the the what happened with regards to our cultural response uh for yeah you might need a bit more grip on that there you go um the way that you could see covert the way that you could concept conceptualize covet generally would be almost like a a dress rehearsal almost like a civilizational wide vaccine like a test it was a a very weak virus in the end thank God for that you know it didn't the mortality rate wasn't there transmissibility was pretty high but it wasn't it wasn't super brutal when it came to the deaths although not great but what it did do and I think you'll worry and mine align here which is and I haven't heard anybody no matter how ardently anti-vax anti-lockdown anti-mask the libtard are coming for us again this is all Bill Gates's wet dream type stuff it doesn't matter about those and I have many agreements with those people I haven't heard anybody push back against what this did do was Prime the next four generations of humans for as long as this is a still a cultural meme that continues to take over for the next time that something like this potentially happens but this time it's got a 30 mortality right or this time it kills everybody under the age of 10 or this time it kills all women yeah right what what what is the response that occurs there given how we've been primed previously and I would love to hear you know the I would love to hear the the like we don't need to worry about that bro case for that because regardless of how you thought whether it was overreach whether it was these these Cooks telling us to stay in our houses you I'm getting I'm going out and playing with the kids and cutting open the locks to the local park that it's made the situation worse it's made the situation existentially civilizationally it's primed us to be more fragile more knee-jerk in terms of our response it's it's not good yeah well and that's where I parted company with many of you know our fellow podcasters and many of my friends and in some cases former friends in the there's again this concern around misinformation is the way I would tend to frame it you know many people are out in in podcast land are allergic to a concern over misinformation uh because they're so concerned about the the infringements or perceived infringements of freedom of speech right so the de-platforming of people from YouTube like that is that is the you know the Earth Crossing object that we just we have we have to prioritize with it like under no circumstances can that happen like even with Alex Jones like that's just we need to we need to hold the line here we need to be free speech absolutist of A Sort um and that's more or less all they talk about that within and then on the other side we have people who are focused on the misinformation problem they're focused on the on the I mean the real Calamity we just witnessed where you just say like you have public health information that just cannot get through because there's so much misinformation there's so many conspiracy theories and there's so many Pratt falls on the PO on the part of the act the actual establishment that is understandable that no one is is yeah right um so it's um but they're they're still they're they're taking the one that they they can't afford to admit any of that because they're so terrified around about this erosion of trust in our institutions right so it's like let me take someone like there's a few lenses we could look at this Earth so you take like a character like Anthony fauci right like I don't I don't know if ouchy I don't know what's true of him I don't know you know but but I just know that on on one side he is utterly maligned right he's just this Goblin who is as corrupt as you could possibly imagine he lied about everything he was wrong about everything like he is just he is the antithesis of an authority on covet or anything else right on another side you guys just bring you can still just bring him on CNN as just the the most top shelf Authority on public health we could ever we could hope to have and The Only Thing Worth thinking about is just how awful his life has become as a result of how he's been maligned over here right he's just inundated with death threats he needs a secret service detail uh because all of these crazy people from Trump on down have vilified him with lies right now I am totally prepared to imagine that the truth is quite a bit more nuanced that he could have been a great scientist maybe he is a great scientist maybe he did many great things but maybe he's conflicted in all these other ways which have been discovered by people like RFK Jr or other people some people might have been total crackpots but they're right about this thing that fauci did or didn't do right and that if we're if we were going to parse it in the middle here we would find oh yeah you know what this Wuhan thing was always gonna go Haywire he should have known it he's he's culpable and was lying about his culpability and that exchange with him and Rand Paul was one where Rand Paul whatever you think about his politics was absolutely right and fauci whatever you think about his politics was basically just trying to cover his ass with this you know rabbinical definition of gain of function which we all knew was and we shouldn't be doing this research and and it's it's uh fauci for whatever reason can't admit that he participated in something that was awful right I don't know I don't know if any of that's true I mean whether fauci's involved with that but I do have a lot of time for anyone who who worries about gain a function research and worries about what is happening in Labs all over this world um but the problem is if you're focused on what's what failed over here when you if you're if you if you're focused on this is a failed dress rehearsal what we didn't manage during covid and the the basic certainty that we're going to have something much worse right uh and then we have to prepare for that it's very easy to see that you just have to basically ignore all of this like we just have to we just have to stigmatize all of this as conspiracy thinking all of these people are like non-standard Bad actors none of them have real jobs they're all they just have podcasts and newsletters just get the New York Times And The Washington Post and Harvard University and all these other institutions to hold the line here let's let's try to just not shine too much light on the ways we embarrassed ourselves we're certainly not going to apologize for anything um and let's hope we get a better president Republican or Democrat next time who's not a maniac who didn't do give his first interview to Alex Jones and let's just get back into a place where everyone trusts the CDC again right now I don't agree with that but like 75 percent of that could be right right like I like I think we we could age out of all of this Hysteria you know just I mean just imagine what would happen if in 2024 we had a we had a reasonable choice for the presidency right so Trump is not the Republican candidate we have a more normal Republican candidate who let's say wins right I don't know who that would be but let's say whatever you know Nikki Haley wins right we have President Haley she no longer has to Pander to trumpastan to be a republican we get a more normal politics and we and many many smart people however quietly begin to internalize many of the lessons we should have learned in the last few years about just how threadbare many of our institutions have become and how woke ideology vitiated most of them right I mean how political correctness and just sheer lunacy contaminated are thinking about so many things so much of the time in in recent years and we sort of age out of all of that and we have a more normal experience of the grown-ups being in the room much of the time being able to make real decisions I think that's to be hoped for now I'm not saying that we don't need Innovation around that but like that some some swing back into normalcy is to be hoped for what's what there's an alternate path to that future that may be more realistic um but the future worth wanting is a future however we get there whether it's just sort of like we just you know grit our teeth and age into something more normal or we innovate and dignify all of this hysteria with with more and more of a fair hearing but the thing we innovate to is real institutions that we can trust right there is no future worth wanting where we don't have institutions that are trustworthy right so we need like it cannot be up to [Music] a podcaster to tell you what's happening really happening in Ukraine when Putin says all right we're going to use the tactical nukes now uh I mean first of all in a few months you're not going to be able to know whether he really said that or whether that's a deep fake right so we're gonna have we're going to need an institution or at least a perfectly democratized algorithm that is vetted by an institution we trust that can say this is how you tell whether that's really Putin or whether whether that's just some 18 year old who made that you know with with a generative model um and but regardless of how we how we clean house with respect to basic information we need institutions with real experts who really capture our best thinking and decision making on hard problems you know so we and and we need a population in every democracy that most of the time can trust those institutions like like when the state department says listen this is what's happening in Ukraine this is what Putin's up to you know uh this is why we have the policy we have this is why we ship the arms we shipped we can't have a society where ninety percent of the people are calling ninety percent of the time because no one trusts anyone in charge that that's just that is the end of democracy but that's where we are that is that that is where we I mean it much of the time that's where we seem to be certainly on if you use social media as your reference point well you mentioned this I think in a different podcast about how as soon as you exit social media you realize just how little of the world kind of does take the cues about the world from social media I think it's maybe in the UK 10 or 20 between 10 and 20 of people have got a Twitter account but then when you get on there I think almost all of the content is created by some ungodly small proportion of the number of users so everybody else for uh functionally is sort of wanking in the corner and observing this this thing go off and not contributing or maybe signal boosting or or whatever but it's it's the same culprits that are talking about everything on all sides yeah so you end up I remember this during the general election in the UK to them when whenever it was 2019 something like that and if you looked at Twitter you would have it would have been a labor Landslide you know stormzy was tweeting about it I'm pretty sure that some of the actresses that play that were in Game of Thrones they were tweeting about how stormzy and then Arya Starker tweeting about the labor and how bad the conservatives are and you know like never trustatory and all this stuff and then we have the biggest landslide in history I mean half a century perhaps uh to go the other way because where I'd been the cultural thermometer that I'd put up the the behind of of Twitter wasn't accurate yeah except it was the opposite with Trump and brexit right so like what I was noticing with Trump in in 2016 or I should have noticed is that you know whenever I said anything about Trump and or Clinton prior to the election the support for Trump I was seeing on social media was like a hundred to one over support for Clinton I mean it was just crazy and you know the polls were whatever you know Trump had a you know 25 chance of winning now again I was I never looked at that poll and thought there's no way Trump's going to win because at 25 chance is as we've just established you know that comes up all the time right so if you're going to take if you're going to dignify Nate silver as a as a real um statistician with respect to those those opinion polls yeah you can't be consoled by 25 really when you're when you're as worried as you had every right to be about a trump presidency but um what I was seeing on social media should have told me that the mainstream media's conversation about this was not tracking what was happening I mean well you can see you know given this impending ever increasing existential risk background the landscape culturally that people are inhabiting whether it be mainstream whether it be alternative Media or whatever I can understand why people are feeling confused and displaced and I've noticed on the internet a trend of cynicism I would give it a single term it would be a very very high amount of cynicism given that there's so much despondency in the world what what do you wish that more lost or cynical or depressed people knew what would you what would you what would you tell them about this is my world view everything's it's not going to get better oh my God my family my future there is no point even trying in the people that say that things can get better they're the ones that are the real problem what do you say to people that are cynical well many of the tools we've referenced so far are incredibly useful and they just take the stoic piece for instance I mean the the real comparison is that's worth making is that there's never been a moment in human history where there has been more opportunity for more people to live a truly good life and not not just to live a truly good life with respect to your own selfish pleasure but to affect the future in a propitious way you just have massive leverage over the future I mean we it's up to us to get this right I mean this could have been said you know I'm sure this could have been said during World War II that and it was it was true that yeah that the difference between a Thousand-Year Reich and and what we got was pretty big so yeah props to Churchill but the we really are at a unique moment with respect to the leverage uh and the and the the um the disparity of outcomes suggested by the power of our technology which is the the exponential change we're seeing in culture and and with respect to Tech uh this is new you know this A decade is much longer now than it ever has been as measured by the kinds of technological and social change that we can see and so if you can if you want to have a meaningful life if you want if you want Economic Opportunity and you want you and you want to exercise that opportunity in a context where you can actually benefit people at scale and the future at scale it's never been easier to do that it's never been it's like it just you know the the iPhone that you have in your pocket which is you know in most people's case fragmenting their life unnecessarily and just becomes a source of of distraction at best you know misery at worst is actually an incredibly powerful computer that would be you know two two decades ago would have been an object of of genuine magic right it's like it's like it's just not the president of the United States couldn't have had one 20 years ago right um and that's just going to keep happening right it's just like we're all you know again AI is is is a is an ambiguous object at the moment but to have access to a large language model is genuinely new and who knows what you can do with it right it's like like it's it's up to you to figure out how to use these tools um so the I there's massive opportunity even if you're someone who doesn't feel like you have a ton of opportunity by comparison with your you know friends or with other people you've seen in your Society I mean I think if you have the bandwidth to listen to a three-hour podcast you almost certainly are someone who's in something like a sweet spot right with respect to opportunity it's just yeah on the other side of that you I remember you saying um living and examining life is just one insult after another you have to maintain a sense of humor yeah why what does that mean well because what you the more you pay attention to your own mind you see that it has absolutely no shame I mean it'll think anything right like like the person you meet it's not it's not easy you don't meet Saint Francis of Assisi you know in the mirror it's like you you meet a a Congress of selves right and many of these selves are total right they're just like you you meet it's everything right and and you ultimately can't take it personally right like you're not you didn't create yourself you didn't create your culture you didn't create your Consciousness like you're you are a you find yourself here in this circumstance and the question is what can you do next what is available to to experience next what is possible given the kind of mind you have and um so we haven't you know we morally and psychologically existentially we have a navigation problem moment to moment and there there are various tools you can get in hand to be a a much wiser uh and happier pilot that's one of the reasons I think that Andrew human particularly has been so rapidly popular you know he was kind of publicly didn't exist probably three years ago maybe something like that and now regularly is number one and number two worldwide on every podcast chart right that seems reliable and then he's doing uh three and a half hour treaties on caffeine yeah or something and you know to get to that stage of scientific communication I I wouldn't have been able to predict I would I don't think that I would have been able to predict that people would have you know we always talk about the podcast Revolution people wouldn't have sat down and listened to such and such and such and such talk for Joker Wellington some Medal of Honor recipient for six hours and yeah blah blah blah heedman took that to another level he took that to a level where you think really great with the the adenosine system for three and a half hours um and I think that one of the reasons that Andrew particularly has been so effective is that he is trying to cut through all of the the chaos and he he Bridges the gap between the the reliable expert that's sufficiently credentialed and and the uh upstart podcaster that's got his hatredox bonafide's and he sort of splits the two yeah yeah I mean he's I love what he's doing I think he's incredibly effective but you'll notice he also bypasses all of the contentious that that we spent a lot of time talking about here like he does not deal with politics he does not want to offend anyone uh he doesn't Gore anyone's sacred cow except on these narrow topics of just how to optimize your life with the best science right now that is and there are other you know friends who have podcasts more or less in that vein or Tim Ferriss I mean these are all people who they have opinions presumably about all this other stuff but they don't tend to dig in on these any of these culture wars through the Minefield you know you can figure out Trump on your own time you can figure out black lives matter on your own time tell you about nicotine let's just let's just see whether you should be you know getting eight hours of sleep at night right and whether you want to track that with the the aura ring um I don't mean to trivialize any of that that's all super fun and useful but there are other fires we have to figure out how to put out and you can't just ignore the fires right like like it's just these these problems over here are not going to go away even if we all dial in our lives individually right and it's it's so yeah I mean I just think there's I mean it's a kind of superpower to to decide whatever my opinion is on all of these contentious topics I don't feel any need to give it I have all of these this is there's just this absolute Feast of other things that we can enjoy and 95 of people are just going to love the love what's on the menu I think he's the only podcaster that I know of if you actually go and have a look at his reviews you know it doesn't take much when you're working in point points of stars out of 10 or out of five or whatever it's just there's it's maximum it's the maximum number of stars that you can get it's either 10 on Spotify or a five on on Apple podcasts and you know one of the things that I do appreciate maybe Andrew does have you know strong views on in K through 12 don't say gay bills or whatever it is um but also one of the things that I would and I think that you would agree on as well that I'm definitely seeing more and more is people who don't have expertise in a particular area thinking that this is wow I've got to follow you know a million people follow me on Twitter why why shouldn't I comment on the Ukraine right it's like I don't I don't go to Andrew huberman as brilliant as he is yeah for his thoughts about the Ukraine yeah and you don't fault him for not broadcasting his thoughts to his audience because why should he right hey what's interesting about my life now professionally is that I have these two experiences running side by side like so in my we've and we talk mostly about kind of my podcast life I think but over at waking up I have a completely different experience of of what's coming back at me from the audience like what so waking up is just pure gratitude appreciation like nothing is ever misconstrued there's a perfect marriage between what I intend to say and the way in which it gets received I mean what not I mean not that I can never nothing no one's ever confused but it's like no one's ever accusing me of you know really believing something and say like it's just it's just pure pleasure like it's just a it's just this and it it was amazing to experience that because you know in my podcast life given that I touch so many polarizing topics and given that I offend people on both the left and the right I had completely lost sight of the fact that it was possible to have a career where you put something out with good intentions and people appreciate it and that's the end of the story what's the mechanism that's occurring there is it the fact that everyone's there for mindfulness is it the fact that it's paywalled so you don't get the the sort of Flotsam and Jetsam or whatever it is that comes in and kind of spoils the party for everybody have you reflected on why it's so alive well it's also because it's it's a it's only a subset of of what I think about and talk about right so it's like I don't I don't take my critique of trump into waking up uh Andrew yeah so I have a version of of huberman's experience on this kind of narrow band of topics and the the topics are increasingly wide it's not just meditation I mean it really is kind of practical philosophy it's like it's just you bought the entire license the entire Alan Watts Library Yeah Yeah from from the what's foundation hours yeah whatever yeah which it was just insane and it was I think it got remastered I really much very much enjoyed falling asleep to that although that's not a comment on how nice it is no no I do it too he's great to sleep too um but yeah so it's it's a it's a it's a wonderful experience it hasn't convinced me that I should shutter my podcast but it it it's a it's a it's an amazing corrective to what I experience as a podcaster and as a writer of Books because um and as a public speaker I mean whatever I've done professionally for the last you know nearly 20 years um outside of waking up has been just this reliably uh very strong but you know bivalent response I mean I've got the people who absolutely love what I just said and the people who absolutely hate it for precisely those reasons right yeah and they'll flip-flop and cease a week it's just you know and and then and one of the ways in which I can notice audience capture in other people is when I go into their when I when I occasionally so this may happen you know I don't spend a lot of time doing this now but back in the day when I would look at like the YouTube comments associated with somebody else's podcast I mean just to see how it kicked off you know in certain people's feeds I just noticed it's just a hundred percent pain it's just like is awful I mean the question is why would I go on that like all these people hate me right and you reliably now they hate me because of what I did or didn't say about coveted vaccines or what I did or didn't say about Trump or what I did it or didn't say or seemed to say or they heard I might have said about Hunter Biden's laptop right so those people like their kind of single issue people with respect to those variables but like if I go into um I mean it it may in fact be true of your audience we'll see I mean it's like it's like you we may find I would imagine your audience is somewhat evenly split but probably more on the side of everything I said about RFK and Trump and covid and Jordan Peterson nah that's not going to fly very well right like that's like who the is this guy to say any of that stuff that's going to be the center of of kind of narrative gravity I would I would guess that's definitely true of Lex Friedman's audience now right it's like and and part of it is is that the podcast world is it almost has contrarianism built into its DNA right so whenever you begin to sound like an establishment shill right everyone's spidey sense goes on no one no one in the comments section gets 5 000 upvotes for saying well done for towing the party line oh right I actually agree with you on that mainstream opinion so I I I don't disagree about the way that the podcasting Universe generally has that and I I have been trying aggressively for the last six months to uh discipline my audience particularly overtly a number of times um we've been aggressively you can there's a function which you may have seen on YouTube which is a hide user from channel uh which causes this person to continue to be able to type comments right but they're just blasting them into the ether and no one else gets to see them they can still watch the things that you've got to contribute to your play count and it's a one strike and done policy now and I don't mind about criticism I'm fine with criticism I'm just not fine with people that make me jerk unthoughtful responses to something that that I don't want those people here I think Tim Ferriss has a similar policy he had it about his Instagram he's like this is my house take your shoes off right um right so yeah I am yeah I have the same I mean just to Echo that but you know I have a lot of experience with this because I used to early in my podcast I would have wars on my potty I'd bring someone on and it was a real like knock down drag out debate and then I would notice in the aftermath my audience would just you know trash that person on social media or wherever and several times I you know explicitly admonish my audience not to do that because that's just that's just such an ugly experience for the person to have and however much I disagree with someone on my podcast I never want them to feel like they were just just mobbed by cycle going on making sense it's synonymous with having a a war and it does have it and it still happens I mean I I think I probably should ring that Bell again because it just happened um I think I noticed it happen I mean again I'm not on social media so I'm a bad witness to this stuff but I looked I think I looked I looked on Reddit um and I saw what happened in the afternoon I had I had Mark Andreessen on recently and we debated AI Rogan again oh yeah okay I'm not sure I saw that but um so yeah he and he and I disagreed about AI risk and you know but I you know it's totally respectable uh respectful conversation with him but it you know had some with the character of a debate and so you you you're very likely if you're listening you're kind of it's a bit of a horse race and you're either on one side or the other and you know he made a good point I made a bad point kind of people are keeping score um and I did notice that just again this is just Reddit and I spend 15 minutes on it uh you know once every two months but I noticed that my audience was just on him in a way that it's just not good for me if like if you were if they're my audience if they if they want to support me it is not supportive of my Enterprise to on my guests in that way right and so it is with you or any other podcasters how do you how do you um get around that because there's definitely a part of me whether I'd be a user of social media or a Creator on social media much more creative than a user um I I do despair seeing thankfully not my own comment section much but a lot of comment sections show me as far as I can see the absolute worst of humanity and and it seems to me that the the best thing that you could try and cultivate as a creator of any kind is a reasonable audience I think that that the goal of a reasonable only what's the best faith interpretation of what this person's saying I listen to this guest or I read that sub stack or I subscribe to their YouTube channel or whatever presumably because I think that they are a good curator that they have a good ear that they are acting in good faith that they're doing all of these things and you descend into the comments of even somebody that seems pretty un objectionable and it's a cesspit sometimes yeah yeah now that was one of the things that I I mean that's why I don't spend any time on any social media really I mean I think there's something baked into the to The Forum uh which I mean you know I'm agnostic as to whether or not you could actually build a social media platform that would encourage all good stuff and discourage all bad stuff but um and we might the truth is we might actually launch a community forum for waking up and Telegraph the fact that this is an experiment you know this we could be yanked this at any time but let's just see how this goes because in that Community with that the list of topics I think it could actually be possible to have you know almost entirely good supportive conversations the wildest thing is that we're in a a time where people want connections more than ever atomized Society individualistic collapse of grand narratives uncertain about the world fear and strife and concern yeah if we want that and yet the behavior of some very loud very offensive people on some platforms colors the experience of of everybody's right you know there is such a Matthew principle around yeah the exposure of particular posts everywhere right it's a small number of posts to get all of the the the reach from a small number of people who are the only ones that post from a small number of people who are the only ones that have an account and there's also an algorithmic choice that is dictating that which is you know it is out the gamification is based on outrage and strangely misinformation I mean it's like misinformation is spreading better than real information I made a patient debunking of an untruth is boring and the lurid untruth is is captivating and it and it spreads that's the the asymmetry principle right it takes a lot less energy to produce than to refute it therefore the world is filled with unrefuted yeah yeah yeah um yeah so I mean I think it might be possible to do but I think it would be in a it wouldn't be at scale it wouldn't be at Twitter scale or or Facebook scale um and I think you would have you'd have to have I mean you would have to have a low tolerance for heavy moderation right and and so this is why you know this is why I don't understand the Twitter is a Public Square argument right that and that we should all be free speech absolutists with respect to social media none of these social media all these social media platforms are businesses some are even private businesses um my concern about Free Speech runs to the owners and operators of those businesses and not not wanting the gov not wanting anyone to be able to force them to be associated with speech that they find awful right so like if if I create a social media platform over at waking up and notice that it's slowly getting populated by Nazis I should be able to have a no Nazis policy on my own platform that I built with my investment right it doesn't matter how big it gets if there's good it's gonna you know if it has 20 million people on it I should be able to kick the Nazis off right and like so so my concern about free speech is for the person is essentially for the publisher who doesn't want to publish Nazis um and the truth is it's you know if the the also if you call the call the bluff of the Free Speech absolutist you recognize that there's no there there it's just impossible to be a free speech absolutist because not even 4chan is a circumstance of free speech absolutism right I mean free speech absolutism is everything right every awful thing all the time and you just can't nobody wants to be there and no it's just it's just too much noise to that signal and so you you have the moment you admit that you have to curate sometimes you're going to be making judgment calls and so then and then you just have to have whatever principles you have by which you do that and if your principal is no Nazis well then that's your principle and people understand that and then someone can start a a Nazi forum you know Stormfront or some other spot great I think that should be legal right you should be able to have a Nazi social media platform um yeah I just don't have to be there or support it so what are you doing next what's next on the work bucket list you know it's it's really just you know almost entirely continuing in these two channels of of waking up the app and making sense the podcast and I have stuff I want to write but it's very hard to incentivize myself to write it because it's harder it takes longer I reach fewer people and it it pays less I mean like all the incentives are aligned against me writing another book so um I haven't and you know as if by Magic I've I notice I haven't done that uh but I think I ultimately I will because it's only when I'm writing that I am taking the time to think through each topic as fully as I I'm capable so I think I I mean there's some writing built into my podcasting and and my work on waking up too because some of what I record is essentially an audio essay or you know there's some prep in involved in some things but how arduous is that you know you've got a daily meditation I I think I've I don't know the daily meditation the daily is not lie of that day I mean I record them and so we have a you know we have a reservoir of daily message still 365 times pretty much 10 minutes or 15 or 20 I know that you can kind of stretch it in between some clever algorithmic stuff but that's no you know I often speak to authors that talk about the difficulty of the the audiobook portion of of reading the how many times do you put your foot in your mouth and go right I guess we gotta I'm gonna have to redo that particular part of explaining about why that tree is something worth looking at or Whatever It Is Well waking up is in the process of really outgrowing me because there's so many other people contributing to it right so there's lots of other teachers and Scholars and scientists and um so you know one part of it I essentially have a podcast where I just talk to people and sometimes those conversations show up on both the podcasts and the app but often not um but then I would just have a lot of other people producing content so I have many more things I feel like recording for waking up but there there's no rush Like the Wolf is really not at the door with waking up well it's my podcast there's this expectation that you know next week there's going to be another podcast unlike you where it's that every two days or whatever you know so three times a week you know I do not have that Cadence but so it's um but happily it's you know my podcast is structured around what I what what I want to think about and read and talk about next right so I mean so it's often a matter of what book do I feel like reading next and now I realize I can talk to the author you know so and so it's such a it's like a you know I mean I'm among the luckiest people on Earth to be able to make a career out of doing what I would do for free anyway I've said this all along I always used to regret the fact that at University I didn't take psychology or philosophy I took business management which taught me nothing about business and then did a masters in international marketing and that also told me nothing about marketing and I was always um regretful I I was wistful for a academic career that I never had because as soon as I pulled my head out of my ass toward the back end of my 20s I realized that I had all of this stuff that I was choosing to be interested in so I could have chosen to be passionate about the degree instead of the one that had to force myself to be competent in yeah and it would have all been fine but then you know by whatever Quirk of the simulation that we're in that means that I can talk to people that I would talk to for free and call it a job I've been able to structure the exact University syllabus talking only about the exact niche of the best particular Creator or academic or intellect or writer on that one topic only for as long as I want yeah and then no one assesses me afterward and if I mess up it doesn't matter and if I want to Kareem the interview off and talk about hamburgers for 10 minutes then so be it and I can do exactly what I want it's you know the for all of the the internet is difficult and and negative comment sections cause me to feel a little bit sort of uh it tarnishes the experience broadly it's a complete dream that I kind of can't really believe is is happening and you know yeah you've been a great big influence thank you you've been a really big influence on uh the movement that I went from whatever I was before to the adult infant that I think that I am now and I appreciate the stuff that you do I appreciate your time today where should people go where should they keep up to date given that you are absent from everything in a digital ghost now where should they go um just uh waking up.com is for waking up and samharris.org is everything else associated with me that is not a deep fake that will soon be coming no doubt Sam I appreciate you thank you yeah great to meet you