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

Sam Harris is a best selling author, philosopher, neuroscientist and a podcaster. Go to my sponsor https://betterhelp.com/modernwisdom for 10% off your first month of therapy with BetterHelp and get matched with a therapist who will listen and help The entire world seems to be at each other's throats and finding peace in the chaos is becoming increasingly difficult. But there are tools at our disposal to improve the quality of our lives. As Sam says on this episode, “Wisdom is a matter of making your mind your friend”. Expect to learn what Sam’s life is like after Twitter, Sam’s reflections on his famous talk on death and the present moment, how to live a life full of meaning, how to take your mindfulness off the cushion and into the real world, Sam's thoughts on Tucker Carlson's Twitter move, his opinion on Andrew Tate, RFK Jr, Andrew Huberman and Jordan Peterson, whether have reached peak woke, Sam’s take on young Western men converting to Islam and much more... Sponsors: Get $150/£150 discount on the Eight Sleep Pod Cover at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first box at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Extra Stuff: Sign up for 30 days free from Sam's Meditation app Waking Up - https://wakingup.com/modernwisdom Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #samharris #philosophy #mindset - 00:00 Intro 00:23 Life After Twitter 09:42 Is Tucker Carlson Leading the Media Revolution? 18:16 How to Live Well While Accepting Death 26:39 The Rise of Andrew Tate 33:19 Is the Bible As Wise as We Make it Out to Be? 37:12 Will Sam Rekindle His Relationship with Jordan Peterson? 45:37 What Sam Thinks When People Say He’s ‘Lost It’ 49:38 Why Has RFK Jr Become So Popular? 58:50 Principles for Being More Present in Life 1:08:34 How Meditation Can Improve Your Mindset 1:13:31 How Our Consciousness is Influenced By What We Feel 1:22:39 Why Are Our Inner Voices So Critical? 1:25:55 Finding Balance Between Gratitude & Ambition 1:37:17 The Ability to Find Pleasure in Smaller Experiences 1:47:46 The Power of the Story You Tell Yourself 1:53:12 Does Sam Regret His Deconstruction of Religion? 2:02:46 Society’s ‘Keeping Up With the Joneses’ Mentality 2:08:21 What if Christopher Hitchens Was Alive Today? 2:14:37 Reacting to Western Men Converting to Islam 2:24:49 Will Our Civilisation Make it to the Next Century? 2:28:15 Are We Prepared if a Worse Pandemic Occurred? 2:43:23 Sam’s Advice to People Feeling Lost in Life 2:49:03 Sam's Opinion on Andrew Huberman 2:53:21 How Sam Avoids Audience Capture 3:07:49 Recording Sam’s Daily Meditations 3:11:26 Where to Find Sam - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  What is life like after Twitter?

• 0:03Speaker 01

  Uh, it is immensely improved to a degree that I find

• 0:10Speaker 01

  actually embarrassing in retrospect because it's a, you know, it's proof that I was needlessly degrading the quality of my life for um most 12 years, technically, I think it was probably five years where it was actually degrading the quality of my life, but it was um I mean, retrospect, it 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 has given a, for me, and 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

• 0:53Speaker 01

  is basically false and destructive to your, your feeling, the feelings you have for the, the rest of humanity. I mean, it was, it was, it was sort of incrementally like a slow ratchet, um, but never to be reversed.

• 1:11Speaker 01

  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, I mean, people, people tweet what, you see them at their worst moments or their most bad faith moments or their most cynical moments.

• 1:40Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:06Chris Williamson?

  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 whatever. And then, for some reason, you step onto the internet with frictionless communication and all hell breaks loose.

• 2:30Speaker 01

  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 inhabiting the same space with the people you're in conversation with. But in reality, they're talking to their fans, you're talking to your fans, you're kind of, you have weaponized your fans against their fans and vice versa. And without even necessarily thinking in those terms, that's, those are the, the network dynamics of what's

• 3:08Speaker 01

  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. 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.

• 3:41Chris Williamson?

  I think you'd managed to torpedo a family vacation in some beautiful 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 where once there was a Twitter account.

• 3:55Speaker 01

  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, you're on there to give your hot take and to see the hot takes of others. Again, this might not matter if your hot take is, here's another cute photo of my cat, and you just get nothing but love back, right? And I know there are people who have that experience. But given that I was violating the

• 4:32Speaker 01

  The blasphemy tests of both the left and the right on more or less on a weekly basis. I mean, I'm not aligned politically with the left or the right.

• 4:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was just pain on both sides and I, you know, and I had no tribe. Like if you're, if you're just on the right, you know, or, or some

• 4:51Speaker 01

  segment of the right, if you're, you know, Ben Shapiro,

• 4:56Speaker 01

  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.

• 5:11Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 5:44Chris Williamson?

  You're getting ideologically spit roasted here.

• 5:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. And you're not, and you don't have, you don't have the people who will defend you blindly.

• 5:52Chris Williamson?

  Because you pissed them off last week for the view about X or Y.

• 5:55Speaker 01

  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 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

• 6:17Speaker 01

  social media is just the wrong platform for that kind of conversation.

• 6:20Chris Williamson?

  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 their hours captured arguing over whether men are men, women are women or not, or about this particular topic or that particular topic. Do you think about how far it's satisfied? Is it a net negative, net positive overall, do you think?

• 6:40Speaker 01

  Well, I think it's a net negative. I think it's a massive opportunity cost for almost everybody. I might 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. 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. 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. Even if, again, even if your diet of information is almost entirely positive, there's this

• 7:22Speaker 01

  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.

• 7:37Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 7:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:45Chris Williamson?

  Pace.

• 7:46Speaker 01

  Right, yeah.

• 7:47Chris Williamson?

  It's got to be sped up.

• 7:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, I mean, I'm noticing this with my daughters. It's like to get them to watch a movie and, you know, it's

• 7:55Chris Williamson?

  Not have a second screen out.

• 7:56Speaker 01

  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 YouTube-ification 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.

• 8:37Chris Williamson?

  David Perel 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.

• 8:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 8:51Chris Williamson?

  It's never ending now. Terrifying. It's the opposite of Lindy. It's the opposite of the Lindy effect.

• 8:56Speaker 01

  Right. And it's so thoughtless and it's yet it's captivating, right? I mean, it's just this 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.

• 9:15Chris Williamson?

  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?

• 9:30Speaker 01

  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 shilled 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.

• 9:50Chris Williamson?

  That's what Tucker said about Trump?

• 9:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, this came, this came out of his texts got leaked from the, the Dominion lawsuit against Fox.

• 9:57Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 9:57Speaker 01

  Right. So we know like, like the mismatch between who he is pretending to be for his, his audience and who he is behind closed doors is something that I think

• 10:08Speaker 01

  should trouble his audience, but it apparently doesn't, right? And that's also true of someone like Trump. So you, in many cases, you have these characters who

• 10:18Speaker 01

  to my eye are very low integrity people. I mean, they're not, you know, you're not getting an honest look at what they really think, even though they're purporting to tell you what they think, you know, every hour of the day, or at least every day for some hours.

• 10:32Speaker 01

  And, you know, I view Tucker as that sort of person, but I, you know, I think 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.

• 10:53Speaker 01

  I mean, he's very good at what he does. He's a very good demagogue and he's, he's very facile.

• 11:02Speaker 01

  I don't think there's an ethical core there, but there's a, a political one, you know, or certainly an opportunist one in the political space. And there's a, there's an immense appetite to have someone call bullshit on the powers that be, the so-called elites, the institutions, again and again and again, whether they're right or wrong, you know, it's just like, it's, it's say, this is how it sort of opens the door to conspiracy thinking of every flavor. It's not that these contrarian takes are always wrong because they're, they're not, right? I mean, we have, we're living

• 11:41Speaker 01

  through a time where many of our institutions have lost trust for a good reason, right? But

• 11:52Speaker 01

  what gets layered on top of that are just, you know, lies and misinformation and half-truths and, and a crazy sort of, you know, John Nash style, connect the dots with everything. And you can, 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.

• 12:28Chris Williamson?

  Did you see Douglas Murray's debate with Malcolm Gladwell?

• 12:32Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 12:32Chris Williamson?

  Matt Taibbi, Malk.

• 12:35Speaker 01

  I saw, I saw, um, I think I heard, uh, most of it, yeah.

• 12:40Chris Williamson?

  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?

• 13:10Speaker 01

  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.

• 13:21Speaker 01

  And I get a lot of his hate mail because 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.

• 13:34Chris Williamson?

  If there is anything that is worth the pain of half of your audience, it's bringing Douglas Murray.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, no, he's fantastic. But he is adjacent to many people who are not so fantastic, right? I mean, this is, this is the sort of guilt by association problem that he has

• 13:53Speaker 01

  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.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  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.

• 14:38Speaker 01

  So, yeah, I mean, we just, it is the Wild West and you just have to do your best and just be honest whenever you're in front of the microphone.

• 14:48Chris Williamson?

  It feels to me like that guilt by association thing seems to have slowed at least a little bit. Piers Morgan put out a video recently about, we're at peak woke. I, I wouldn't agree. I think, I can't remember whether it was, it was Matt Taibbi or somebody else in the, the summer of 2020 said that that was peak woke. The most, you know, inflammatory, over the top, any slight indiscretion is worth being smashed in the face for.

• 15:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 15:15Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 15:23Speaker 01

  I, I hope so. I feel like.

• 15:26Speaker 01

  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 use, there are certain kinds of attacks, which a few years ago, I might have taken seriously for 15 minutes. And now they just- Or 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, um, I mean, something like digital leprosy, right? Where you're like, you know, the lepers lose their digits because they don't, they don't sense

• 16:09Speaker 01

  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 gnaw on 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, 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

• 16:50Speaker 01

  swung back. People are rolling, even people who would otherwise have been taken in by wokeness, uh, a few years ago, roll their eyes in private and increasingly in public over certain kinds of, 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, you know, his side carried that debate, you know, spectacularly well. Um, but, and the truth is, I don't know Malcolm, I've, I've been on his podcast, but I, so I've spoken to him, but I don't know Malcolm. Malcolm has a-

• 17:30Speaker 01

  It's not the first time he's done this in debate. He has a, he has a habit in debate of being ad hominem in a way that is, if it's ever persuasive, it's not persuasive when he's doing it. And so it just, you sort of lose, uh, just, uh, just by default, whatever the actual topic, you know, under discussion.

• 17:49Chris Williamson?

  Do you remember the talk that you gave on death and the present moment? I think it was the atheist, Australian New Atheist Society, something like that.

• 17:58Speaker 01

  It was a big, uh, it was called the Global Atheist Convention, but, or 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.

• 18:14Chris Williamson?

  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?

• 18:23Speaker 01

  Well, I really think that is the, uh, 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, you, when you, when you have regrets, it's in light, it's against this, the, uh, the incessant ticking of the clock, that, that all of that makes sense and the imperative of, of, um,

• 19:00Speaker 01

  the incremental loss of this non-renewable resource, you know, it's like, it's the one thing you don't get back. I mean, 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 can, you can be in a shitty situation where nothing has really gone the way you expected and still be radiantly happy, right? I mean, it really is a matter of what you're doing

• 19:41Speaker 01

  with your attention and the kind of mind you have. Um, but the fact is, is that everything is changing at every moment and we're not, there's no real stability, right? There's no...

• 19:57Speaker 01

  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 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 putting all of

• 20:39Speaker 01

  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, you're, you're fit, you're healthy, you're like, you, 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, like it, 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, 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.

• 21:24Speaker 01

  They, the moment you have everything, your, your sense of what you want, I mean, you just move the goalposts 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, there's something about the passage of time that as you pay attention to it, I mean, as you get older, this, this is relevant, but I mean, some people get, manage to get quite old without getting especially wise. Uh, 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 suffer some profound career setback or something

• 22:09Speaker 01

  can happen where you recognize, okay, this is, there's a,

• 22:15Speaker 01

  There's a false premise here. There's many, there are many bright shiny objects I've been focused on because they've been 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

• 22:35Speaker 01

  the effort to become happy never fully fulfills itself, right? Because it's the becoming part contains its own dissatisfaction, right? Like at a certain level, you have to figure out how you can be happy with whatever is already the case, like to want what you already have. And then from that place, move into the next moment, looking to do creative, beautiful, fun things. But your, your happiness is not contingent upon those things working out in any particular way, right? You, you realize that you're just, at some level, you have to be process oriented rather than goal oriented, because

• 23:18Speaker 01

  ultimately, there is only the process, right? And you're, and the goals, and the goals are so, the achievement of the goals is such a punk Tate experience. It's so brief. It's just an, 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.

• 23:42Speaker 01

  It's not good enough. That could never have been good enough for a truly satisfied life.

• 23:48Chris Williamson?

  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, having things isn't fun. Getting things is fun. And I think that what he's referring to there is the hedonic treadmill that we're talking about, the fact that it's in the anticipation of an event that we think it's going to happen as a club promoter for forever. And we would be creating anticipation for this next new DJ, this next new whatever that would happen. But the protracted nature of the buildup was what people looked forward to. They looked 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

• 24:33Chris Williamson?

  before you head out of the door.

• 24:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, neuro anatomically, the reason why that is the case, because our dopaminergic system gets driven not by pleasure itself, but by the expectation of pleasure. Things are about to get, it's the center of the bullseye is the pleasant surprise, like this is about to get better than I was expecting. That's the thing that is truly reinforcing.

• 25:06Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I fear I might have made an error by saying that I have a guest coming on that I was very excited about. And now if someone isn't sufficiently excited about you, then that dopaminergic system is going to fall through the floor.

• 25:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's one disappointment after another. Andrew Tate's a perfect example of somebody who, again, he's not, 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 I just feel like we're at a moment now where

• 25:43Speaker 01

  there is such a thirst for wisdom that, you know, 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 watched enough of his stuff to see why young men are getting addicted to his content and thinking that he's their life guru. And I've also watched enough to think that it's not, it's not ideal that he's the voice of a generation, right? Like, we need a

• 26:25Speaker 01

  A more compassionate, less self infatuated standard for manliness and and success than than what he's he's putting out.

• 26:36Chris Williamson?

  If I was to, I've got Jordan 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.

• 26:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I haven't I haven't followed that. Yeah, no.

• 26:55Chris Williamson?

  But I do think that Jordan's relative abandonment of the conversation directly to young men to move on to other things, whether it be climate change or the trans issue or pick your poison about whatever he's got interested in recently. I think that that has left a vacuum and you can't expect young. You can't expect anybody to go through life without 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 trend sufficiently highly on Twitter.

• 27:33Chris Williamson?

  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 hasn't never really been further apart.

• 27:45Chris Williamson?

  People are going to find answers and and sometimes

• 27:49Chris Williamson?

  fluency is a really brilliant proxy for truthfulness or insight. And if you can say things with a sufficiently

• 27:59Chris Williamson?

  well rounded, compelling delivery, regardless of who you are, whether it be Whoopi Goldberg or anybody else. People will say, that sounds that sounds true. It sounds fluent. Not sure if it's true.

• 28:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, except the thing that surprises me is that. It should be more obvious than it is to more people that someone's an asshole. Right? It's like that, like it doesn't matter how fluent you are, you're, 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 asshole. He's obviously a selfish person, but nobody, none of his fans care, right? He's like, he's not a compassionate person. He's, he can't even pretend to care about people really, right?

• 28:49Speaker 01

  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'm not holding myself to any kind of standard apart from the gratification of my own desires. So, you know, I'm, in some sense, I have a real integrity because I know I'm selfish. All those people who are pretending not to be selfish, who are pretending to be ethical and compassionate, to care about, you know, the Sub-Saharan Africa and, you know, the education in developing countries, I mean, someone like Bill Gates, right?

• 29:32Speaker 01

  No, Bill Gates is somebody who can't get laid and he's just going to microchip you with the next vaccine, right? Like that's, this is going to be a great quote to export from this podcast. You're welcome, Twitter. That's, so that's the, that's the center of narrative and ethical gravity for these guys, right? I don't include Jordan there, but like Andrew Tate, Trump, there's like a, I've got a fucking Bugatti and you know you want one and I've got no apologies, right? I've got no fucks to give. I know you want to be like me, you know, and if you don't, if you're not good enough to be like me, I'll sleep with your girlfriend, right? Like that's, that's the, that's not an ethically wise person on any fucking level, even if

• 30:17Speaker 01

  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? 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 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

• 30:55Speaker 01

  we tell about ourselves and our place in the world and what makes life worth living, what, what allow, 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, in a way that is kind of somewhat derogatory, right? Not to say that I'm, 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 layer of wishful thinking and a layer of delusion and a layer of ancient confusion

• 31:39Speaker 01

  that is still, has good standing among millions of people.

• 31:42Chris Williamson?

  And probably some symbolic truth or figurative truth in there, too.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  And, and a kind of harmless, harmless uses of the imagination that are, could be ennobling and fun and empowering, right? And kind of core truths that don't require a story to be ennobling.

• 32:00Chris Williamson?

  Did you see that Jordan got into it with Richard Dawkins? Well, you wouldn't have done. You're, you're off Twitter, so I will.

• 32:06Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 32:07Chris Williamson?

  I'll be the weather vane to update you on whatever's happening in Twitter's conditions at the moment. Richard, a clip of Richard went semi-viral of him criticizing the Old Testament God.

• 32:19Speaker 01

  Right.

• 32:20Chris Williamson?

  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, I think, damaging science and, and, and doing a disservice to maybe Dawkins himself and, and, and some other stuff.

• 32:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, so I mean, that's. I mean, I agree with Richard with respect to the what I think of the Old Testament God and 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 Bible is the wisest book we have, even though there are pearls of real wisdom there, which I understand that people love. It's a book. It was clearly written by human beings, right? So the fundamental, the breach point is not, is upstream of many of the things people might want to debate. There's just this basic claim, we've got millions upon millions of books.

• 33:18Speaker 01

  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. And some of these texts were canonical for centuries and then got thrown out, you know, within Christianity and then some got added later. 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

• 33:59Speaker 01

  more like Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon and it would look like, you know, the South Park episode that Mormonism in fact looks like, right? And you drag it further into the present and it looks like Scientology, right? And you're like, you're just staring at L. Ron Hubbard's driver's license and it's just, okay, this goofy guy with bad teeth sold all these people on a, on a story about the stars that was just obviously bullshit and should have, 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.

• 34:38Speaker 01

  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.

• 34:58Chris Williamson?

  The first time that I think I heard of Jordan was that first conversation that you guys had. It was a podcast, maybe in a bar, you know, hotel reception or something. And there was a chinking of glasses.

• 35:09Speaker 01

  Oh, no, that would have been probably Dan Dennett. Uh, we, Dan Dennett and I had a debate in a bar, but Jordan and I had a debate on my podcast.

• 35:15Chris Williamson?

  Right. Well, I'd heard this, uh, heard this conversation. And I remember thinking, who's this Canadian fuck having a pop at Sam Harris?

• 35:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:23Chris Williamson?

  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, um, public relationship between you and him rekindled. Uh,

• 35:38Speaker 01

  Well, it hasn't, I mean, to, to my eye, it has not, uh, been broken. I mean, I like Jordan. I mean, I think this is just, this is what I imagine because I have not had any dialogue with him in, in a couple of 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

• 36:23Speaker 01

  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 part.

• 36:46Chris Williamson?

  How would you categorize that difference?

• 36:49Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, to a significant degree, it's people moving in two opposite directions. I mean, like, there are 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

• 37:33Speaker 01

  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, the mind works. And, um, I mean, we are, now that, 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

• 38:18Speaker 01

  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'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?

• 38:55Speaker 01

  So I'm convinced that at the core of every religion, there were real transformative and transcendent human experiences that are attested to by the literature and traditions that have grown up around that religion. So presumably, there really was a person in history by the name of Jesus who had this effect on the people around him and said something like what he is purported to have said in the Bible. And I can understand all of that as an absolutely predictable result

• 39:35Speaker 01

  of certain ways of paying attention that are available to every human being now, then, now, then and now, which allow you to recognize that this ego you take yourself to be is an illusion. And it allows you to recognize that unconditional love is actually a possibility. It's possible to just feel shattered by your love for all sentient beings and to bask in the profundity of that way of being. And that's on the menu. And 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

• 40:19Speaker 01

  the testimony of someone like Jesus or Buddha is obviously not a fraud. It's obviously not a confession of psychopathology. It's obviously not a delusion about... A belief-based delusion about what happens after death or about invisible parts of the universe populated by angels or deities. You don't have to believe in anything unempirical in order to experience that range of positive experience. You just have to learn to use your attention in the right ways. And if you can't do that, psychedelics offer an imperfect method. Pretty reliable, huh? Yeah. It's definitely reliable.

• 41:03Speaker 01

  It's a reliable glimpse of something that is different enough, 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, whatever...

• 41:24Speaker 01

  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. Right? I actually don't think I actually closed the loop on what I wanted to say about Jordan there, though. So Jordan, Jordan and I differ in, he wants to support a much more

• 42:06Speaker 01

  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

• 42:23Speaker 01

  a literal belief in can't be justified based on what we have come to understand about science. And I just think that the burden is on us at this point in history to find a truly non-sectarian way of telling 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, where there's just, there is no, to say that, you know, there's American science versus Chinese science. I mean, it's just, that's just not science. Like, science is at a layer more fundamental than those cultural differences.

• 43:05Speaker 01

  And so it has to be with, 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, the thing, the thing, the thing I wanted to say was that, so you, you 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

• 43:46Speaker 01

  Gone off the rails in some way, right? Because like he here in his world, and this is, this is what was so amazing to see. When I was looking at Twitter, when I, when I mean, this to if anyone doesn't know what I'm talking about, there was this whole Hunter Biden laptop situation where I commented on the Hunter Biden laptop thing on a podcast. A clip from that podcast got exported to, you know, apparently every planet in the solar system. And it had an enormous effect right of center, right? So, so right of center, I had just destroyed my career, right? I'm like, literally, I'm hearing from people like, oh my God, are

• 44:28Speaker 01

  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, the truth is, I would expect him to be genuinely confused about what I believe about things like free speech, or any of the relevant variables there, unless he happens to listen to my podcast, which, you know, I don't know whether or not he does.

• 45:00Chris Williamson?

  I think the 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 I think people are hoping that there is yet more juice to squeeze from your conjoined lemons in however way that happens.

• 45:22Speaker 01

  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 they're, in my view, they are in this contrarian echo chamber.

• 45:48Speaker 01

  Right, where, you know, mRNA vaccines are terrifying, COVID was no big deal. January 6th was maybe a non-event, right? 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. But if you're only there, there's just a lot of half-truths kind of ricocheting around that echo chamber, which, yeah, I mean, I'm happy to talk to both those guys, but it's just, they're not in the

• 46:30Speaker 01

  in the lane I'm in and trying to maintain, you know, despite the crosswinds, I'm trying to maintain a straight course in.

• 46:40Speaker 01

  There's, that's only half the story, right? So it's, and I just think people are genuinely confused now because two things are true.

• 46:50Speaker 01

  We have lost trust in the, the normal channels of information and, and normal institutions. Post-COVID, you know, during COVID and, and post-COVID.

• 47:00Speaker 01

  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.

• 47:13Chris Williamson?

  Much as we might try.

• 47:14Speaker 01

  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.

• 47:28Chris Williamson?

  Why do you think he's so hot at the moment? What is it about RFK?

• 47:31Speaker 01

  Well, it's exactly, he's, he is speaking very directly to this

• 47:38Speaker 01

  contrarian echo chamber, you know, contrarian slash conspiracy thinking, conspiracy-addled echo chamber where

• 47:49Speaker 01

  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

• 48:05Speaker 01

  It's a kind of religion of suspicion that is being born. It's a pseudo awakening of

• 48:13Speaker 01

  they're all fucking liars, right? Like, that's what happened to so many millions of people during COVID. They're all liars. I mean, just got Gavin Newsom closing the beaches and then he's over at French Laundry, you know, perfectly coiffed at a fundraiser. Is that hypocrisy that people found? I mean, that was just a 20-megaton moment of hypocrisy that detonated and

• 48:39Speaker 01

  broke trust with half the country, you know? And so it's, again, that's all understandable, but we have to be realistic about just what is true and likely to be true in each moment. And is everything the CDC says likely to be wrong, right? Like, is that 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's 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 gonna chat GPT our way to health. It's just, it's not gonna happen.

• 49:23Chris Williamson?

  How far do you think RFK gets in this political race?

• 49:28Speaker 01

  Well, I'm hopeful that if he keeps expounding upon how, you know, COVID was targeted to avoid Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people. And I mean, it's like, if you give him a mic enough, he will put his foot, you know, he'll put both feet in his mouth and in your mouth and in any mouth that's available. I mean, it's just, it's, but again, it's not that he's wrong about everything. He's, it's harder than that, right? He is right about many things. And the fact that people love what he's saying is totally understandable. That's, it's just not, you know, half-truths are

• 50:08Speaker 01

  harder to deal with. And/or statements which are riddled with truths, but the general shape of them is wrong and aiming in the wrong direction. Like, that is just, it's hard for people to parse that stuff. And it's especially hard when

• 50:26Speaker 01

  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.

• 50:45Speaker 01

  Then you're going to be, then when, you know, COVID likely escaped a lab in Wuhan. If you're the first person to sign up to that in an environment where everyone's being called racist for signing up to that, you're going to look like this contrarian genius who just like, they couldn't fool me, right? I knew that it likely came out of a lab. Whereas the, the rational position to have had, I mean, you have to take all of these things à la carte, right? Like you just have to honestly investigate.

• 51:16Speaker 01

  You know, within the confines of opportunity costs and bandwidth, you, you have to investigate them 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 was, 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 bullshit to call that racist, to worry that it could come out of a lab.

• 51:51Chris Williamson?

  Should have spoken to Rob Reid, that would have made it easier.

• 51:54Speaker 01

  Which Rob Reid is that?

• 51:56Chris Williamson?

  That did Aftaron? Didn't he do a big?

• 51:57Speaker 01

  Oh, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I, I was thinking about the, the Christian Rob Reid. 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.

• 52:14Speaker 01

  But again, that-

• 52:17Speaker 01

  You can't give, if someone like RFK Junior 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 Wuhan one, and you like that COVID itself was just a plandemic. And you, and you like all of these, and you like the Ashkenazi Jews don't get COVID. You just have, it's a characterological problem. You have this appetite for, I mean, you see this, the, the, the true avatar of this way of thinking is someone like Alex Jones, right?

• 52:59Speaker 01

  Like, and again, I don't know if Alex Jones is just a performance artist and it's, it's cynical and, and not, not real, or if he really believes what he says he believes, but assuming he believes what he says he believes, he is just, you know, it's like you're a nymphomaniac for, and what you love is lies, right? And half truths, right? You like, you like, you usually love the least credible ideas, you know, the, whatever can come over the transom, that's what gets you hard, right? And so that you're just 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,

• 53:42Speaker 01

  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 gonna find an audience. And what's so perverse about our current environment online is that there is no evolutionary, real evolutionary pressure anymore, because everything can succeed. There's just a nut, there's a, there's always, 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 8chan, right? It's like you can find this little hellhole where every, where you're gonna find, a requisite number of people to monetize ultimately are willing to hear and talk about anything. And

• 54:29Speaker 01

  So I, unlike many of the people we just spoke about, I'm convinced that we have an enormous problem with misinformation that is held in tension with our desire for free speech on every topic, 24 hours a day, that we have to take seriously. We have to say, and 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

• 55:13Speaker 01

  algorithm that boosts the craziest stuff preferentially to the ends of the earth and maintains it forever. Right? And that, and, and now you add generative AI to that, and I think it's, the problem just gets worse. So, yeah, I'm, I'm worried about consequential lies and half-truths in a way that many of my colleagues in podcastistan aren't.

• 55:37Chris Williamson?

  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

• 56:21Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 57:03Chris Williamson?

  You say that your mind is all you have just before that. What does that mean? Reflecting on that statement now, what did you hope that people took away from it?

• 57:15Speaker 01

  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 your, if your attention is always purpose toward looking for the next thing, anticipating the next thing, if even in the presence of that very thing that was the next thing, and now it's now, you are busy telling yourself a story about it. You know, 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?

• 57:55Speaker 01

  You get the thing you were longing for, and you, you have such a, you're so distractible, you're so, you're so burdened by this automaticity of thought, this conversation you're having with yourself, that the present moment isn't even salient enough to you, right? And so it's, it's a.

• 58:19Speaker 01

  Most of us, most of the time, live in that kind of, you know, we get buffeted between the past and anticipating 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, even in a conversation like this, like, I'm saying something. If part of my attention is, well, I mean, have I gone on too long about this? Or is 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.

• 59:03Speaker 01

  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, well, 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 fucking 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? There's this, there's 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 gotta be all about the now. Right? The future never arrives. There's just now, so let's enjoy the now.

• 59:45Speaker 01

  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. And 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.

• 1:00:30Speaker 01

  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

• 1:00:43Speaker 01

  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, it, it is possible to, to fall into the well of being such that the present mo, the present moment lacks for nothing, right? You're just, you recognize that love, what you mean, what you really mean by love, what you should mean by love is not this transactional thing that you get going with

• 1:01:26Speaker 01

  a specific person because of your shared history together and because of their qualities that you happen to like.

• 1:01:33Speaker 01

  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 gets 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 si, in, in real silence and in, in a real undistracted collision with the

• 1:02:15Speaker 01

  present moment, when you don't have this voice in your head diverting you or coming up from behind seeming to be you, right? But what, 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% of humanity. People feel like a self. People feel like they're, 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?

• 1:02:55Speaker 01

  So you've got your seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, thinking, feeling, emotions, and you've got this whole.

• 1:03:07Speaker 01

  Cocophony of what it's like to be you in each moment. And sometimes it's very, very pleasant and sometimes it's very unpleasant and sometimes it's just, you know,

• 1:03:19Speaker 01

  normal and there's nothing really especially salient about it.

• 1:03:24Speaker 01

  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 really allows for a recognition of what the mind is like prior to identification with thought and prior to this, this, this capture by this, this automatic, this reflexive seeking and not finding operation that we're, we're constantly engaged with.

• 1:04:06Speaker 01

  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 and its contents in each moment, right? And, and there's, there's never a reason to wait to recognize that, right?

• 1:04:27Speaker 01

  This isn't to disavow all the other projects we could have in human life that take some time to accomplish, right? I'm not saying you, everyone should just become a monk or go to a cave and starve. I mean, like there are things that I like to do in the world and want to get done and I have projects. But in each moment, the question is, what is available to attention?

• 1:04:47Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:05:09Speaker 01

  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 meditation is the ultimate answer to this, in my view, you find is this, on the, on the part of virtually everyone, this basic incapacity to break the spell of identification with thought and just rest attention as consciousness in the present moment. And meditation is simply the act of doing that ultimately. And there are many techniques 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,

• 1:05:53Speaker 01

  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? And it might only last, in the beginning, it might only last a moment, right? And then you'll be lost in thought again. But, 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 as to not be angry, or sad, or regretful. But when,

• 1:06:36Speaker 01

  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 totally not interesting, and it would have seemed that way to me when I was 18, the only thing for a hard-headed skeptic, much of the time, is an experience that snaps you out of your egocentric illusions for some period of time. And so for me-

• 1:07:12Chris Williamson?

  Peru. Go to Peru.

• 1:07:13Speaker 01

  Go to Peru, or, which I haven't done, I haven't done ayahuasca, but for me psychedelics were indispensable, because I was someone, had you confronted me as an undergraduate in college with whatever I just said, I would have, even if I had been convinced 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 there. I would have I would have bounced off. I would have got the sense that it didn't work for me. Like, you know, most people, you know, someone like someone like Richard Dawkins is a perfect example. It's like I ambushed

• 1:07:57Speaker 01

  him on my podcast with, you know, five minutes of meditation and

• 1:08:00Chris Williamson?

  I thought you were gonna say spiked the drink with

• 1:08:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, he Richard, I told I told I told Richard he should he should do psychedelics.

• 1:08:08Speaker 01

  But most people who are and this is especially true of hard headed rationalist skeptic scientist types. They're so enamored of thought. Thought is the only appendage they have ever found by which to or by which to interface with reality such that they can't imagine a mind prior to thought. They can't imagine a non conceptual engagement with reality that reveals anything. You know, it sounds like what do you it sounds like brain damage, right? Like, my concepts are great. Like, you should have concept as good as my concepts, right? Why? What are you? You're

• 1:08:51Speaker 01

  gonna 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 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? 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? Is that at all interesting to you that that's the hardest thing in the world to just pay attention to anything? Some people find that interesting. Some people find that that's a there's a sort of an intimation of a path there. Like, okay, maybe there's something

• 1:09:35Speaker 01

  to discover here that could provide some relief to something that is in fact alien 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 there. I don't know how, I don't know if this one is optimal. This is just, this is just different. But it's so different. And some of it is so pleasant and some of it is so undermining of the bullshit that I generally find so captivating. That this is a counterpoint to how I've been living my life. Right. And so I need, I need, I need more tools. And that's how many of us have got, got into meditation.

• 1:10:19Chris Williamson?

  What is the role of feeling in this? Whatever term you want to call it, the embodiment of emotions, the tapping into some sort of intuition? Because I resonate a lot with the cerebral horsepower model. Relying on whatever it is cognitively that I've got, that I can deploy on the thing that's in front of me. And I take a lot of pride in that. And I think a lot of people do, a lot of the people that'll be listening to this podcast, listen to your podcast. We'll 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, and taking concepts from different disparate areas and bringing them together and going, wow, that's really satisfying.

• 1:11:04Chris Williamson?

  And I 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 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 coated in, and the toilet's fucking gold and the floor's gold. And there's an open sky and all this stuff. What's the role of allowing some sort of embodiment or emotion or, 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?

• 1:11:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, it's, it meditation, I mean, so the, the kind of meditation I recommend is, is generally called mindfulness. And it's, initially it seems like a technique and it's taught as a technique, but ultimately it's not a technique. It's not, it's not something you're doing more of, it's, you're actually doing less of, 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,

• 1:12:22Speaker 01

  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 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, is 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 it's not that you're blocking thoughts, you're just noticing thoughts themselves arise along with the feeling. But you're noticing them from the point of view of this prior condition of awareness that can just see

• 1:13:08Speaker 01

  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 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 motherfucker, I can't believe, what was he thinking? And that's the voice in your head and that feels like you, right? Like you have no perspective on- Is that not you? No, it's no more than, 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, I've titled my book and my app,

• 1:13:53Speaker 01

  Waking Up, and what, you know, this is an ancient analogy, which is all too literal. Breaking the spell of thought is very much like waking up from a dream when you just didn't know you were having, like you were, you're asleep and dreaming. 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, you're actually safe and safely in your bed. And yet you think you're somewhere else. You're at, you're at a 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.

• 1:14:38Speaker 01

  Right. It could have some point of contact with your life, but it's completely imaginary. And the amazing thing about dreams is the transition from sleep, 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 is totally discontinuous with what, where you were in your memory 15 minutes ago and where you in fact are in this moment. You've, the, the laws of physics have been suspended, you know, dead people are now walking.

• 1:15:21Speaker 01

  I mean, literally talking to someone who's dead and you're not even, you might be surprised they're dead.

• 1:15:24Chris Williamson?

  I had a, 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.

• 1:15:36Speaker 01

  Makes perfect sense.

• 1:15:37Chris Williamson?

  Yes, obviously.

• 1:15:38Speaker 01

  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, where it seems like our mind becomes identical to this voice in our head, where the self, where you just feel like.

• 1:15:57Speaker 01

  Again, you're listening to me, you're not, you're not, you're not grocking 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? Okay, that, that is just arising out of you know not where, right? There's a total fucking mystery at your back. And then you've got this language and you, in many cases, imagery, getting piped in from, you know, the, uh, you know, stage right and stage left, and you can't, you can't figure out how to turn to see what, where any of this is coming from.

• 1:16:30Chris Williamson?

  Where, where are thoughts coming from?

• 1:16:31Speaker 01

  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, you're being 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.

• 1:17:10Speaker 01

  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, wait, was there a beach? You know, like, there's just nothing left. And yet it was all encompassing when you were having it.

• 1:17:28Speaker 01

  This, we live our lives, so, that strikes us as perfectly normal, because basically, we all dream when we're asleep, and it, and it seems fine. Most dreams are fun or not, but, no, no real consequence. We all live our waking lives, having this conversation with ourselves, which is also totally normal, everyone's doing it. And yet, both of these conditions, being asleep and dreaming and not knowing it, and being, and thinking every moment of the day, not really knowing it, and certainly not seeing any alternative to being identified with thought.

• 1:18:02Speaker 01

  Both of them are a kind of psychosis and they really are, it's like 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, there are other things going on there. There's, you know, classic thought disorder where you're,

• 1:18:45Speaker 01

  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

• 1:19:04Speaker 01

  more or less constant distraction by this inner voice. And it's so, again, it's universally subscribed, but it's, it's not, what is also universally subscribed is frank unhappiness and dissatisfaction. And it is the basis for our unhappiness and dissatisfaction.

• 1:19:26Chris Williamson?

  Why is our inner voice so mean most of the time? You know, if we spoke to friends or even strangers, the way that we often speak to ourselves, we'd very quickly be on the receiving end of something that we probably didn't enjoy. Why, why is it that we have this default, not everyone, but a lot of people, this default to converse with ourselves, if that's even the correct term, uh, in a way which is horrible?

• 1:19:54Speaker 01

  Well, it can be very wise to notice that and to notice that very difference 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 notice, notice what you just noticed is that you would never talk to your best friend the way that you talk to yourself and you can learn to talk to yourself the way you would talk to your best friend. And then you, your, your mind is much more your friend, you know, on some level.

• 1:20:27Speaker 01

  Wisdom is a matter of making your mind your friend, right? And there are a few layers that can be addressed to do that. And one is the 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 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 a, and you're not, not only you're not this much of an asshole to your friend, you're not an asshole at all to your friend. Like, like when your friend is going, if your friend is going through the very thing

• 1:21:11Speaker 01

  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 would just like, what would come out of you is a compassionate, like, let's just figure out how to, how to improve the situation.

• 1:21:29Chris Williamson?

  Encouraging positive.

• 1:21:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, just like this is like, there's regret is, is completely unhelpful. Like this, like the past is past. You know, you are, you are a great competent person who's got all kinds of tools. Let's make the most of them. Let's just, you know.

• 1:21:43Chris Williamson?

  Meanwhile, you've got this despondent horrible voice that you give yourself and a kick in the dick on the way out of the door.

• 1:21:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think, I think I said or wrote at some point that, you know, to a first approximation, wisdom is simply a capacity to take your own advice, right? Like you effortlessly give that, 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, you're basically Socrates. But as to why it has a negative character, I don't know that it does. I mean, I think some people don't.

• 1:22:18Speaker 01

  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, you know, they're good company for themselves.

• 1:22:35Chris Williamson?

  You often talk about 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 hoping that you can achieve to be able to feel gratitude and drive at the same time.

• 1:23:03Chris Williamson?

  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 don't fucking need to do anything anymore because I'm just blissed out, man.

• 1:23:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:36Chris Williamson?

  Also doesn't sound particularly, and I struggle to achieve that, no matter how much tantra I try. And yeah, to talk to me, this tension between the drive to do more, the acceptance of who we are, the wanting to show up in the world and to give it everything that we've got and the gratitude for the things that we already have.

• 1:23:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, it is a constant tension and I think you want to, ultimately, I think you want to be biased on the being side 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, there'll be a time in your life where you would give anything to trade places with who you are now, right? Like when you're, you know, when you're in your last months of life and you're terminally ill or you're, you know, you've lost someone very close to you. I mean, there's like, when you have, when you have this moment in the sun where basically

• 1:24:40Speaker 01

  you're basically, things are basically going well, right?

• 1:24:45Speaker 01

  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, like this, you should be able to enjoy this part, like this, this is, this is dessert, right? Dessert has arrived and whatever story you have about all the other things you might do or become, this is really like, you know, this is a wonderful life, right? So can you, can you settle into this at all with your attention, right? And if you can't, I, 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

• 1:25:29Speaker 01

  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, the wanting to become more spiritual, wanting, wanting to become a great meditator, wanting to become enlightened. That's, you know, a, a knot that, that gets untied, but it's a fairly, you know, refined one.

• 1:25:52Speaker 01

  But it is, it's just totally appropriate to recognize this mismatch between

• 1:25:59Speaker 01

  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 doled out to you not in big chunks, but in moments, right? Like this is not like the grand plan, like, okay, I got my calendar out. This month is going to be about X and now I'm going to nail X, right? It's much more a thousand lessons over the course of a day, right? Like, like you have to just be attentive to. Moments where you miss it and moments where you and then just recognizing that it's

• 1:26:43Speaker 01

  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 now you're back, right? So like I was I was coming to this interview and I was I was late. I was 15 minutes late, you know, and I hate being late for whatever reason. And 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 you're like in and out of the bathroom, in and out of the closet and I say goodbye to her, but it was a sort of a goodbye like, you know, I've just completely missed her. Like this beautiful woman who I've decided to spend my life with and like, like

• 1:27:28Speaker 01

  she's now just a basically an obstacle I have to navigate around. So it should be, you know, 30 seconds earlier than I would otherwise be if I just took a moment to recognize how beautiful my life is, right? So I missed, I missed her, I missed 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 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

• 1:28:13Speaker 01

  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 enormous. And once you have those, those, those punctate moments, and again, this is a meditation by another name.

• 1:28:50Speaker 01

  Then you can have a hundred and then you can have a thousand and then, and then the, 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, you're not leaning forward so much and when, and when you do are 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?

• 1:29:34Speaker 01

  Rather than be truly taken in by that dream, part of you knows, okay, wait a minute, like just set, just correct your posture a little bit. Like you know that no matter how good this dinner is, 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're, then you're going to find it hard to sleep. And then, and, and so like you, you know that there's, it can't be a matter of, of reaching and grabbing and, and, and fully satisfying your desire again and again and again, as a, as a, a way to finally become happy. There's got, you have

• 1:30:13Speaker 01

  to find, locate your satisfaction more and more in the, just the, in, in the state of being that is already here. That's preceding the next change. Your, that your happiness can't be ultimately a matter of changing experience. It has to be a matter of recognizing the nature of experience. Now, that, it can be, you know,

• 1:30:39Speaker 01

  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 fuck yourself. But no, first of all, many bad things have happened. Like 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 there are all these moments where, you know, even, even the luckiest among us know what it's like to, to live in, in, with real uncertainty and the knowledge that, you know, ultimately,

• 1:31:18Speaker 01

  Every bad thing, some version of every bad thing is going to happen. I mean, even if you're the luckiest and healthiest and richest, you know, then you're just going to be sitting by the phone, you know, hearing that all your friends have died, right? Like, if you live to be 120 in perfect health, you know, you're Peter Attia and you've, you've, you know, you're still doing kettlebells at 120, which I hope.

• 1:31:39Chris Williamson?

  Andrew Keiberman, yeah.

• 1:31:40Speaker 01

  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, the normal mode is to, to try to be lucky enough

• 1:32:25Speaker 01

  so that you can pretend hard enough and long enough that none of that shit 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...

• 1:32:52Speaker 01

  The, 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, at 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 you need, you need a, another gear and...

• 1:33:26Speaker 01

  There are many names for this. I mean, wisdom is one name, spirituality,

• 1:33:32Speaker 01

  enlightenment, awakening, meditation, and all of these concepts, psychedelic experiences, all of these tools and concepts are triangulating on a part of the map where one's well-being isn't contingent upon changes in experiences. There's a recognition that is possible about the nature of conscious life itself that is fulfilling.

• 1:33:59Chris Williamson?

  Giving ourselves a good enough reason to just be here in the present moment.

• 1:34:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:03Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, this, we're both fans and friends with Paul Bloom and Paul managed to draw the perhaps surprising correlation between this and a dominatrix that he'd interviewed.

• 1:34:15Speaker 01

  As he would, yeah. He's great with surprising correlations, yeah.

• 1:34:19Chris Williamson?

  And it really made me, it really made me realize, because I think it's in maybe the death in the present moment talk that you gave or something else, that a lot of what we're doing externally with the way that we try and show up in the world,

• 1:34:31Chris Williamson?

  the way that we construct our exterior lives and our experience is to give us a good enough reason to just be here now.

• 1:34:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:40Chris Williamson?

  And people find this through staring at the night sky, people find this through going to raves and collective effervescence, they find it through, and Paul gave me this reason, he interviewed a dominatrix for one book, one on pain, maybe, and she'd said, "Nothing captures attention like a whip."

• 1:35:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:35:01Chris Williamson?

  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."

• 1:35:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:19Chris Williamson?

  Ding! 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, 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 a coffee, you won't be happy on a yacht.

• 1:35:50Speaker 01

  Right, yeah.

• 1:35:51Chris Williamson?

  And continue to just... Whatever the reverse of progressive overload is.

• 1:35:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:57Chris Williamson?

  Progressive underload, perhaps.

• 1:35:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:35:59Chris Williamson?

  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, et cetera, et cetera, waiting in traffic. Da, da, da, da, da, da.

• 1:36:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, and

• 1:36:15Speaker 01

  if that seems difficult,

• 1:36:18Speaker 01

  it certainly can be, but that doesn't mean it's not possible. And, 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, the alternative is to be

• 1:36:43Speaker 01

  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, you just want to magnify happiness in their presence. Right?

• 1:37:13Chris Williamson?

  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've, I think I've gifted my mom every Christmas for the last three years, which has been a, a great assistance in me being able to get something delivered digitally the night before Christmas when I've left it too late. Yeah, yearly, annually. Um, I, I highly, highly recommend that everyone go and check it out.

• 1:37:37Chris Williamson?

  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 fucking corn.

• 1:37:54Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:37:54Chris Williamson?

  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? Now, 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 the town and the country and 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

• 1:38:37Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 1:38:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:48Chris Williamson?

  It's, and I'm hesitant. I, I came up with an idea the other day of productivity purgatory, which is the things that you do that are supposed to be recuperative are done only to make you more productive. So you kind of have this perpetual existence of everything I did pickleball I plays because I heard Andrew Huberman say on a podcast that, you know, 45 minutes of zone two cardio per week 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. I'm 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

• 1:39:32Chris Williamson?

  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 fucking things that you're struggling with. Look at the things that you're challenged by now. 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.

• 1:40:04Speaker 01

  Hmm. 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, 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 clearly aware of, of what it's like to be you or not. And

• 1:40:44Speaker 01

  That fluctuation is that that's really the the ground of this practice or these insights. And that that's where wisdom is. And

• 1:40:56Speaker 01

  so it's not, I would encourage people from the very beginning to view the practice as

• 1:41:03Speaker 01

  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 there are consequences to practicing or not practicing. For most people, but it's like you don't get credit for having meditated earlier today. Like, I don't give myself like if I sat for 20 minutes. It's not like 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 is your practice, right? Like, your your life is your practice. On some level, your life is a meditation. It's just you're you're paying attention to a thousand different things. But in each moment, your attention is being drawn and being dedicated to something.

• 1:41:46Speaker 01

  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

• 1:42:07Speaker 01

  ultimately, what once you see the power of it, ultimately, your entire life becomes that, even though you have to do other things, right? So you're doing like, if I'm 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 sit 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 clearly noticing emotions and their linkage to thought.

• 1:42:48Speaker 01

  Letting go of any grasping at what's pleasant or pushing what's unpleasant away. I mean, through the judgment and the contraction around experience. As you pay attention to your mind, you notice that you tend to stay in one of two types of contractedness. 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 contracted in avarice essentially. And when things are unpleasant, you're pushing them away. You're trying to change, you're bracing yourself against the physical pain or the embarrassment or the.

• 1:43:29Speaker 01

  And again, mindfulness is just the wide open, non judgmental willingness to feel both of those things. And so you're, so 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 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,

• 1:44:12Speaker 01

  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 of these two things, but in just recognizing you're the mirror of awareness and the beautiful and ugly things are just going to keep coming.

• 1:44:33Chris Williamson?

  It's one of the places where mindfulness gets closer to Stoicism. I think that's that Marcus Aurelius quote about the universe itself is change and life is but what we deem it. The story that we tell ourselves, I think you've got a, an example that I use all of the time, even in my own life. For the people that do CrossFit or Brazilian Jiu Jitsu or hardcore pickleball. The way that you feel at the end of one of those workouts 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,

• 1:45:18Chris Williamson?

  you would be pushing through to get the teller to call the fucking ambulance, because this is terrifying. So very much the story that we tell ourselves around the present moment largely determines our experience of it.

• 1:45:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, and 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 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 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.

• 1:46:02Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:46:03Speaker 01

  And Stoicism is fantastic. I mean, there's, you know, Bill Irvin, this philosophy professor, who wrote a great book, The Guide to the Good Life,

• 1:46:12Speaker 01

  has a track, has a series on waking up that is really great.

• 1:46:17Speaker 01

  And so, you know, I'm kind of late to the, to 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, even when I got a philosophy degree back in the day. And it's, it's incredible, just as an operating system for your mind, it's very, just very few tools you need.

• 1:46:42Speaker 01

  And what, you know, one we just talked about here briefly unattributed, but just like negative visualization, just recognizing how happy you would be to, like, you're in this normal state of dissatisfaction. Recognize how much you would pay to be returned to this crappy little spot you're in now that you're not enjoying if all of these other bad things that had happened, they're happening to someone right now. And it's just, you're lucky enough that it's not you.

• 1:47:10Chris Williamson?

  The things that you're ignoring now or taking for granted.

• 1:47:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, the cancer diagnosis you're not getting today.

• 1:47:15Chris Williamson?

  Previously, just things that you wished that you once had.

• 1:47:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:47:18Chris Williamson?

  And yet you're able to continue to adapt to this. What do you disagree with Stoicism about? Is there anything that stands out where you think, I'm not on board with that?

• 1:47:29Speaker 01

  Well, I think it probably has a two.

• 1:47:38Speaker 01

  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

• 1:47:45Chris Williamson?

  Detached from the decapitation of your child and also the victories of your business.

• 1:47:50Speaker 01

  There's a fundamental detachment that I'm not sure is the most interesting channel to be on in the end. I mean, it can be very useful, given where we normally live, but

• 1:48:02Chris Williamson?

  Not so rich.

• 1:48:03Speaker 01

  But also, it's just, I

• 1:48:07Speaker 01

  in my experience, I'm not, you know, I don't consider myself a true scholar of Stoicism, but I don't, I don't think the Stoic, I mean, really, the Greeks in general lacked a methodology, right? There are many of the insights that you can recognize in Buddhism.

• 1:48:22Speaker 01

  You can also find among the Greeks, not just the Stoics, I mean, maybe even more so among the skeptics.

• 1:48:31Speaker 01

  But they didn't really have a methodology of training attention and they didn't have a a kind of a comprehensive

• 1:48:39Speaker 01

  marriage of spiritual contemplative training and ethical insight that is as systematic and as useful as I've found in Buddhism in particular. So I mean, I'm a fan of other eastern traditions as well, but again, not in a religious sense, but just taking, you know, I'm very eclectic, taking what I think is useful and leaving the rest. But, you know, if you had to just go to one shelf in the bookstore to find, you know, to Pareto optimize the whole spiritual journey, you really can't do better than Buddhism, in my view. I mean, there's just, there's, yes,

• 1:49:24Speaker 01

  there's some, there's certainly some bullshit that should be ignored, or at least some stuff that's unjustifiable, that shouldn't be, you know, not too much faith should be placed in, but

• 1:49:36Speaker 01

  It's you could almost pick at random, you know, like you go to, you know, the 10,000 page corpus and just open it at random and you're not going to get a treatise on how to sacrifice a goat, right? Or why you, 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.

• 1:49:54Chris Williamson?

  I really enjoyed Robert Wright's book on that.

• 1:49:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:49:57Chris Williamson?

  Why Buddhism is True. Talking about religion, you spent a good part of your career deconstructing religion.

• 1:50:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:50:05Chris Williamson?

  Only for it to then perhaps be replaced with some similar religious thinking around things like identity politics.

• 1:50:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:50:13Chris Williamson?

  Was that, was creating that vacuum an error? Is there any way around this? It's religious thinking just baked into our human?

• 1:50:23Speaker 01

  I don't think it was the same people necessarily. I mean, I'm not sure. It is true that secularism and atheism seem to win many subscribers in the intervening years. I don't know how much can be attributed to the so-called new atheists, but there was, organized religion seems to have lost many of its subscribers and it's, you know, many of us perceive into that vacuum, people found meaning in politics, which is arguably no more functional. Yeah, I mean, I

• 1:51:08Speaker 01

  I don't believe, I mean, I find many people will argue that other people need X, right? They need mythology, they need religion, they need whatever. Other people do. You and I don't. You and I are smart enough, successful enough. We got our heads screwed on straight. We, we can get along fine without X, but other people, it's obviously, millions and millions of people need X. I think that just shows a lack of imagination and 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 all these people, millions of people need.

• 1:51:49Speaker 01

  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? It's in fact, true that many people are stuck in that spot. And we have a, there's a challenge to disabuse them of certain bad ideas.

• 1:52:17Speaker 01

  But it's like, does anyone need astrology? No, no one needs astrology. If we, if we

• 1:52:24Speaker 01

  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 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,

• 1:53:04Speaker 01

  we have, we have, we have strands of culture where it's, it's not only hard to disabuse people of 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

• 1:53:19Speaker 01

  pieces of, you know, far left and far right ideology, you know, I think we're more attuned with the far left at the moment.

• 1:53:27Speaker 01

  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, dogma is literally a good word in a religious context. So like these, these are facts. They're not going to be, we're not going to reconsider them. Any demand that we reconsider them, we're going to consider a kind of violent assault.

• 1:53:55Speaker 01

  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 subjectate you, right?

• 1:54:11Chris Williamson?

  Sounds pretty religious.

• 1:54:12Speaker 01

  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,

• 1:54:57Speaker 01

  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 is 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 contexts. 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

• 1:55:42Speaker 01

  consider the possibility that, that, you know, a virus came out of a lab, right? It's just.

• 1:55:48Chris Williamson?

  It's been interesting to me to watch this, especially because 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 hole that had been left with this, this grand narrative that came over the top. And it's interesting to me to think that, you know, that book.

• 1:56:19Chris Williamson?

  Fifteen years ago would have kind of felt like, like, what the fuck are we talking about here? We have bigger fish to fry when it comes to what people are ideologically kind of addicted to, which might have been more in your wheelhouse. And yet, in the space of no time at all, this compulsion for something.

• 1:56:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:56:36Chris Williamson?

  Rather than nothing.

• 1:56:37Speaker 01

  But I mean, there are other variables. I mean, there are obvious economic ones, the fact that virtually all of the productivity gains in the last, really fifty, sixty years have gone to the top ten percent in our society. Right? Literally, I think it's ninety-two percent of the stock market is owned by the top ten percent. And I think it's like fifty percent by the top one percent. Right? So, you know, it's just ninety percent of people aren't in the game and not reaping the benefits of modernity in an economic sense. Right? And they feel the the obvious dissatisfaction and, you know, one could argue unfairness of that.

• 1:57:21Speaker 01

  I mean, our system is not tuned to wisely

• 1:57:28Speaker 01

  cause all boats or even most boats to rise with with this particular tide. Right? It's just not. I mean, we got ten percent 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 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.

• 1:58:02Speaker 01

  And then 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

• 1:58:13Speaker 01

  their life and the, you know, people who live one mile away. Right? It's like so much of these. So when you price that in, the consequences of inequality, wealth inequality and income inequality,

• 1:58:27Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:58:43Speaker 01

  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, 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, yeah, they just want to see a wrecking ball come through and and reset things. And I, I, you know, credit Trump and Trumpism as a, you know, a symptom

• 1:59:27Speaker 01

  of that, you know, more than, more than a cause, really. It's just, we were ready for that moment.

• 1:59:32Chris Williamson?

  I think it's, uh, I think it's Warren Buffett or Charlie Munger that says,

• 1:59:38Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 1:59:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:00:00Chris Williamson?

  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, 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 Storr, who wrote that great, great book, The Status Game, you know, there's this tribe somewhere that grows yams, they grow massive yam, these unbelievably huge yams, 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.

• 2:00:36Speaker 01

  Like I'm, I'm so rich, I could, I could forsake this, yeah.

• 2:00:38Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, precisely. Um, you know, people will find ways to compete for status and keeping up with the Joneses is, is, it permeates an awful lot. Status is a game that everybody is going to continue to play.

• 2:00:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:00:57Speaker 01

  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, you can see pieces of this in just how very rich, successful people already start to behave like you like, you know, at a certain level of success, like it's important that you're wearing a suit and you, you know, drive a nice car 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 billionaire.

• 2:01:36Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, the richest people drive the shittest cars.

• 2:01:38Speaker 01

  Right. And like, at a certain point, like I don't have a guy, just Uber, you know, I don't have a car.

• 2:01:43Speaker 01

  Now, you can be cynical about all that, but and, you know, some cynicism is appropriate, but there are benign forms of like if I guess you could probably notice this now happening around climate change and private airplanes, right? Like, so it was the case that the highest status position with respect to travel is, well, I've got a Gulfstream. You want, you want, you'll just take my Gulfstream, you know?

• 2:02:11Speaker 01

  What could be better than that? Well, it's starting to erode. The more stigma gets attached to just squandering fuel on a Gulfstream, right? The more you're, you look like an asshole for doing that, no matter what story you tell yourself, no matter how successful you are, no matter how much it saves your time. You sort of look like an asshole on a Gulfstream. At a certain point, you could imagine that flipping and all of a sudden the high, the real high status thing is now I just fly commercial. It's like, you know, you can see Elon flying JetBlue. And it's just, yeah, I just, you know, just fly JetBlue. It's like, and it'll be, it will be 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 be burning that much fuel. Now,

• 2:02:55Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:03:24Speaker 01

  Let's leave AI aside, but you know, a 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 let's say we got that right. Ultimately, this could be a have your cake and eat it too situation where it's not a matter of, of denying ourselves anything really materially, except we should recognize that we, there's certain degrees, certain disparities of luck that we find ethically intolerable. Right? Like it's like, just how,

• 2:04:05Speaker 01

  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. Just how comfortable should each of us be with, you know, a Gini coefficient in our own society that just goes, you know, goes asymptotic, 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 it's like the Douglas Rushkoff conversation.

• 2:04:46Chris Williamson?

  He came on the show and he told me that story.

• 2:04:47Speaker 01

  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 happy, in your case, happy customers who are just doing creative things in their free time.

• 2:05:07Chris Williamson?

  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?

• 2:05:19Speaker 01

  Well, it would silence all the morons who think that he might have supported Trump. I think that's, that would be, that would be worth resurrecting him just for that, just to see the look on their face when he got him talking about Trump. I can't believe the people I've heard from on that point. Yes, he hated the Clintons, but there is 0% probability that he would have had anything kind to say about Trump. I don't, I mean, I don't think it would have been, it would have been wonderful to have ridden shotgun with him on many of these topics. I mean, he was, you know, I'm, I'm a fan as well as a friend, but

• 2:06:01Speaker 01

  I don't, you know, I mean, he was, he was enough of a, an old dog who would have been hard enough to teach new tricks. I'm not sure he would have been lighting up Twitter the way many people might hope. I mean, maybe, but he's, yeah, I mean, he's much more like someone who would have for the longest, he was not an early adopter in any sense, you know, it's like he just, he barely, he could barely do email in a, in a normal way, right? So it's just, it's, yeah, I think he would, I mean, many of us are in this spot.

• 2:06:40Speaker 01

  I mean, many of us were much more early adopters and more tech-enabled than, than he ever was. You know, we, there's a kind of a nostalgia for books and old models and some of us are trying to figure out how to return to that in new ways, right? So, yeah, I mean, he loved literature so much and, and print so much that I think he would be, he would still be clinging for dear life to shelves of books and a business model that tries to prioritize physical books over basically everything.

• 2:07:12Chris Williamson?

  Some other way of doing, what about, what about the way, or what do you think he would have made of the, the state of cultural discourse at the moment, knowing what you knew about him?

• 2:07:23Speaker 01

  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 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 which I prioritize, which he never saw the point of, much of which we talked about here. I

• 2:08:05Speaker 01

  mean, meditation, spirituality, psychedelics. He had no file on any of this and I don't think was going to get a file.

• 2:08:12Chris Williamson?

  He's in Douglas Murray's camp, I think, along with.

• 2:08:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. Well, although I mean, I think Douglas is more, 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 the spiritual than, than I ever detected in Hitch. You know, Hitch was, he just prided himself on, um,

• 2:08:37Chris Williamson?

  Whiskey and cigarettes.

• 2:08:38Speaker 01

  Being harder headed than that. Yeah. It was the grape and the grain and, uh, and the pleasure of good books.

• 2:08:46Chris Williamson?

  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 through him, you know, when someone's passionate about something, you end up becoming passionate about it because of their passion.

• 2:08:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:08:57Chris Williamson?

  My housemate, uh, we always watch videos of motocross, rallycross, sorry, where the guys are going down and you'll see these dudes in anoraks 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 pitting down and they're soaked wet through and they get to see roughly 0.3 seconds of a car go past.

• 2:09:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:09:21Chris Williamson?

  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 this blog post by Scott Alexander from Slate Stark, now Astral Codex 10, Codex 10. And, um, no, sorry, it wasn't. It was a Elliot Zukowski, and it's at the very start of Rationality from AI to Zombies. 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,

• 2:10:06Chris Williamson?

  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, the tall, poppy, piss-taking, mocking 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 and 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

• 2:10:51Chris Williamson?

  of now. Um, yeah, I often wonder about what, what Hitch's behavior would have been like in the, in the modern world.

• 2:10:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Well, I certainly miss him because, um, I mean, there are so many moments where they were just, they were just perfectly teed up for him in the last six years, you know, just politically, it just, you just would have, uh, yeah, there's, 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.

• 2:11:24Chris Williamson?

  Keeping abreast, or have you noticed this trend that's happened of Westerners choosing to convert to Islam in adult life? Obviously, you spent a lot of your career criticizing Islam, and now we have, I don't want to accuse it of lapping, these people very well may truly believe in the doctrine, but Andrew Tate is one of them. And downstream from that, there's on-street interviews with young British youths with these Islamic scholars or imams or whatever, converting them on the street. And they're like, doing the thing on the on the street. Have you?

• 2:12:03Speaker 01

  I haven't seen those vox pop conversions, but I saw Andrew Tate's conversion.

• 2:12:10Speaker 01

  Well, Islam is, just memetically, it's perfect for a specific audience. You know, it's

• 2:12:21Speaker 01

  it's a explicitly macho religion, right? It's a no pussies religion, right? It's just a

• 2:12:30Speaker 01

  and it's just, you know, it's a, like, with Christianity, you have to pretend

• 2:12:38Chris Williamson?

  All pussies?

• 2:12:39Speaker 01

  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, the meek shall inherit the earth. You're just, you know, there's no putting this place right. We're not going to win until we really, until we see, you know, Jesus arrive on cloud, trailing clouds of glory. So it's all going to be fucked up for the longest time. And there's no imperative that we really do anything, really, like, there's no expectation that we're going to win before anything good happens. I mean, I guess there's one Christian sect where they do have an expectation of

• 2:13:21Speaker 01

  Of kind of winning, you know, a thousand, a thousand years of millennial glory until, and then Jesus comes. But for most Christians, it's, it's a story of failure. And then they get to say, look, we were right. You know, Jesus, you know,

• 2:13:35Chris Williamson?

  Eat shit everywhere.

• 2:13:36Speaker 01

  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 serious Muslims. It's 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 especially doctrinaire militant, you know, true believer. Well, then you're a kind of spiritual James Bond. I mean, then 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 you get all the good

• 2:14:21Speaker 01

  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,

• 2:14:35Speaker 01

  it's a high T religion. Right? And that's why a schmuck like Andrew Tate thinks it's, he's had a, you know, a real insight in embracing it.

• 2:14:45Chris Williamson?

  People are seeing it as a redress to women of the West who have been conned by feminism into believing that these things are good for them. They're not good for them. We need, you know, no one's happy. Look at the divorce rates. Look at the 60% of US teenage girls aged 12 to 16 have regular or persistent feelings of hopelessness.

• 2:15:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:15:09Chris Williamson?

  Everyone's only fans pathologically fapping themselves into a early Monster Energy hole or whatever it is that they're doing.

• 2:15:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:15:19Chris Williamson?

  The answer is a return to something that's got a bit more Lindy nature to it.

• 2:15:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I mean, that, that's the claim. That I want to deny. I mean, it's explicitly retrograde. I mean, it is regressive. It is backward looking. It is not, it is not using all of the good ideas we've had in the meantime. Right. It's like, it's a disavowal of the present and the near present. I mean, the modernity. In the case of Islam, it's a disavowal of nearly 1,400 years of, of wisdom and insight. Right. It's, it's, it's a claim that in the seventh century, somebody was so smart and so wise and so prescient and so had, so had his shit together that everything worth thinking about

• 2:16:07Speaker 01

  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? And 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.

• 2:16:36Speaker 01

  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, I mean, you could add Elon to this, all these people are

• 2:16:59Speaker 01

  kind of living out the consequences of their dissatisfaction with the present on the public stage and winning a lot of followers as a result. They just like, they, you know, they like the way these guys are complaining about the obvious excesses of the left for the most part.

• 2:17:22Speaker 01

  I have several problems with this. One is that most of these guys, most of the time, some of them all of the time, are ignoring the obvious problems and, and in many cases, quite a bit scarier problems on the right, right? They really care that the government tried to micromanage the, the messaging about COVID on Twitter, right? That's the biggest story of the decade, right? That's, I've got, I've got 100 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

• 2:18:06Speaker 01

  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 bullshit, right? We were, we were poised on the verge of a constitutional crisis, which may yet return in 2024. And yet we have these guys more worried about, you know, trans overreach with respect to bathrooms. And I get all that. I get how infuriating so much of the woke identitarian nonsense is, but you have to have some proportion and you have, you have to keep both problems in view. And why

• 2:18:51Speaker 01

  are people not doing that, in your view?

• 2:18:56Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, so to some degree, it's people have, you know, a one-sided take aligns with their biases. In many cases, people 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 of 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 gonna run, I don't know, you're, this could be wrong, but you know, you're Trevor Noah on The Daily Show, right? Like, yes, tell me what fucking John, Don Jr. Did wrong. I've got time for it, but Hunter Biden, who cares, right? Like, so there's an asymmetry there. But...

• 2:19:42Speaker 01

  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 Substack and you, and you see that people have endless time for your hot take on COVID and the dangers of mRNA and the spike protein. Boy, doesn't that sound scary. It's called, why they call it a spike protein, right? So let's do 100 pieces, piece of content on that topic, right? To the exclusion of everything else that's happening. I'm not saying I know the mRNA vaccines aren't going to fuck some people up or haven't already, right? It's a valid conversation worth having, but again, there's,

• 2:20:24Speaker 01

  there's proportion here that gets totally lost in each of these ecosystems. And what's happening out here in Podcastistan and over there in Substackistan is people find a, an appetite for a certain style of conversation about a specific, you know, narrow band of topics. And they just go all in on that for obvious reasons. And I, you know, it's, it's understandable. But I think it's, it's shattering our society. I mean, we have a society where increasingly, and this is, again, this is a near term risk of AI, leaving existential

• 2:21:07Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:21:36Chris Williamson?

  What would be the chance in your mind that we make it through the next?

• 2:21:44Chris Williamson?

  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 clauses in there that limit that from happening. Population collapse, although not a true existential risk, something that's, you know, not, it's definitely not going to help.

• 2:22:23Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 2:22:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:22:32Chris Williamson?

  How, how Toby Ord-pilled are you when it comes to the conception of the next century or two?

• 2:22:40Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, like Toby, I would just be guessing. But I'm, I'm troubled, that's like, what I would like to be able to say is, you know, the chance, the chance that existential

• 2:22:58Speaker 01

  catastrophe is actually going to occur is got to be miniscule, right? Like it's less than 1%, like that's where you'd want to be, you'd want, you're just guessing, but very low probability that we're going to wipe ourselves out, or that we're going to cancel the future.

• 2:23:18Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:23:31Chris Williamson?

  You know, you just The expected value of that.

• 2:23:33Speaker 01

  Just take out some dice and play around and see what a 10% result looks like, how often that comes up, right? I mean, that's. That's terrifying. And I think there are many smart people who would say the risk of real catastrophe is is quite a bit higher than 10%.

• 2:23:53Chris Williamson?

  I think Toby puts it at one in six, right? Over the next century?

• 2:23:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, I believe so. And if you if you kind of widen the footprint of you take existential risk and you just widen that to extreme risk, right? Just like, okay, it's not existential, but you know, get, you know, you might want to watch the Road Warrior films a few more times because that's gonna, that's gonna start to look like the future, right? Who wants to live in in the aftermath of societal collapse, you know, fundamental societal collapse? Now, it could be like, that's a totally conceivable trajectory for our species. We

• 2:24:34Speaker 01

  could, we could screw up everything and dig out and finally recover. And it could take a unnecessary, we could have this unnecessary and truly harrowing detour into something awful for 100 years, right? But who wants that? And but if you but if you add that to this possibility space, yeah, I don't, you know, how confident can you be that something like that isn't going to happen in the next 100 years, given what we're doing and what we're finding it so difficult to do? And that's what was so dispiriting for me about COVID and its aftermath. It's not that I was so worried about COVID. I was

• 2:25:19Speaker 01

  so worried about our inability to respond coherently to something that was should have been pretty simple to respond to, right? And so 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 I was just thinking more about COVID. 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 and for our cultural norms and our politics. And

• 2:25:58Speaker 01

  I really do view it as a failed dress rehearsal for something quite a bit scarier.

• 2:26:01Chris Williamson?

  Let me lay this out for people, maybe who haven't heard you talk about this before, haven't thought about the, what happened with regards to our cultural response.

• 2:26:13Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you might need a bit more grip on that, on that bottle, there you go.

• 2:26:18Chris Williamson?

  The way that you could see COVID, the way that you could concept, conceptualize COVID generally would be almost like a, a dress rehearsal, almost like a civilizational wide vaccine, like a test. It was a very weak virus in the end. Thank God for that. You know, 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 your 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 cucks are coming for us again. This is all Bill Gates's sort of wet dream type stuff. It doesn't matter about those, and I have many agreements with those people. I haven't heard anybody

• 2:27:04Chris Williamson?

  push back against, what this did do was prime the next four generations of humans, for as long as this is 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.

• 2:27:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:27:21Chris Williamson?

  Or this time it kills everybody under the age of 10, or this time it kills all women.

• 2:27:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:27:25Chris Williamson?

  Right. What, what, what is the response that occurs there, given how we've been primed previously? And

• 2:27:35Chris Williamson?

  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 cucks telling us to stay in our houses, fuck you, I'm getting, I'm going out and playing with the kids and cutting open the locks to the local park. That, it's made the situation worse. It's made the situation existentially, civilisationally. It's primed us to be more fragile, more knee jerk in terms of our response. It's, it's not good.

• 2:28:10Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:28:22Speaker 01

  Again, this concern around misinformation is the way I would tend to frame it. You know, many people are out in podcast land are

• 2:28:35Speaker 01

  allergic to a concern over misinformation.

• 2:28:40Speaker 01

  Because they're so concerned about the the infringements or perceived infringements of freedom of speech. Right. So the deplatforming of people from YouTube like that is, that is the,

• 2:28:55Speaker 01

  you know, the earth crossing object that we just, we have to prioritize. We 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 absolutists of a sort.

• 2:29:09Speaker 01

  And

• 2:29:12Speaker 01

  that's more or less all they talk about. They're within, and then on the other side, we have people who are focused on the misinformation problem. They're focused on the, on the,

• 2:29:23Speaker 01

  I mean, the real calamity we just witnessed where you just see like you have public health information that just cannot get through because there's so much misinformation. There's so many conspiracy theories and there's so many pratfalls on the, on the part of the actual establishment that is understandable that no one is, is The fuck am I going to listen to? Yeah, right.

• 2:29:44Speaker 01

  So it's, um, but they're, they're still, they're, they're taking the one that they,

• 2:29:52Speaker 01

  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,

• 2:30:05Speaker 01

  there's a few lenses we could look at this. So you take like a character like Anthony Fauci, right? Like I don't, I don't know Fauci. 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 COVID or anything else. Right. On another side, you can 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?

• 2:30:49Speaker 01

  He's just inundated with death threats. He needs a secret service detail because all of these crazy people from Trump on down have vilified him with lies, right? Now, I am totally prepared to imagine that the 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 were gonna 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.

• 2:31:32Speaker 01

  He's culpable and was lying about his culpability in that exchange with him and Rand Paul was one where Rand Paul, whatever you think about his politics, was absolutely right. And Fauci, whatever you think about his politics, was basically just trying to cover his ass with this, you know, rabbinical definition of gain of function, which we all knew was bullshit, and we shouldn't be doing this research. And it's, Fauci, for whatever reason, can't admit that he participated in something that was awful, right? I don't know if any of that's true, whether Fauci's involved with that, but I do have a lot of time for anyone who worries about gain of function research and worries about what is happening in labs all over this world.

• 2:32:20Speaker 01

  But the problem is that if you're focused on what failed over here, if you're focused on this is a failed dress rehearsal, what we didn't manage during COVID, and the basic certainty that we're gonna have something much worse, right? And that we have to prepare for that.

• 2:32:43Speaker 01

  It's very easy to see that.

• 2:32:48Speaker 01

  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. 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.

• 2:33:29Speaker 01

  And let's just get back into a place where everyone trusts the CDC again. Right? Now, I don't agree with that, but like 75% of that could be right. Right? Like, I, like, I think we, 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.

• 2:34:12Speaker 01

  She no longer has to pander to Trumpistan 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 our 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 grownups

• 2:34:54Speaker 01

  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. 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

• 2:35:36Speaker 01

  real institutions that we can trust, right? There is no future worth wanting where we don't have institutions that are trustworthy, right? So we need like, it cannot be up to a podcaster to tell you what's happening, really happening in Ukraine. When Putin says, all right, we're going to use the fucking tactical nukes now. 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 gonna 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

• 2:36:21Speaker 01

  whether that's just some 18 year old who made that, you know, with with a generative model. And but regardless of how we how we clean house with respect to basic information, we need institutions with real experts who really capture our best thinking and decision making on hard problems, you know, so and we need a population in every democracy that most of the time can trust those institutions. Like, like when when the State Department says, listen, this is what's happening in Ukraine, this is what Putin's up to, you

• 2:37:03Speaker 01

  know, this is why we have the policy we have, this is why we shipped the arms we shipped.

• 2:37:10Speaker 01

  We can't have a society where 90% of the people are calling bullshit 90% of the time because no one trusts anyone in charge. That is just, that is the end of democracy.

• 2:37:22Chris Williamson?

  But that's where we are.

• 2:37:24Speaker 01

  That is, that is where we, I mean, much of the time, that's where we seem to be certainly,

• 2:37:31Speaker 01

  if you use social media as your reference point.

• 2:37:34Chris Williamson?

  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 their 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 functionally is sort of wanking in the corner and observing this, this thing go off and not contributing or maybe signal boosting or whatever. But it's the same culprits

• 2:38:18Chris Williamson?

  that are talking about everything on all sides. So you end up, I remember this during the general election in the UK, whenever it was, 2019, something like that. And if you'd looked at Twitter, you would have, it would have been a Labour landslide. You know, Stormzy was tweeting about it. Pretty sure that some of the actresses that were in Game of Thrones, they were tweeting about it. Fucking hell, Stormzy and Aria Stark are tweeting about the Labour and how bad the Conservatives are and, you know, like, never trust a Tory and all this stuff. And then we have the biggest landslide in history, I mean, half a century perhaps, to go the other way. Because where I'd been, the cultural thermometer that I'd put up the behind of Twitter wasn't accurate.

• 2:39:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. Except it was the opposite with Trump and Brexit, right? So like, what I was noticing with Trump. In 2016, or I should have noticed is that, you know, whenever I said anything about Trump and/or Clinton prior to the election, the support for Trump I was seeing on social media was like 100 to 1 over support for Clinton. I mean, it was just crazy. And, you know, the polls were whatever, you know, Trump had a 25% chance of winning. Now, again, I was, I'd never looked at that poll and thought, there's no way Trump's gonna win because a 25% chance is, as we've just established, you know, that comes up all the time, right? So if you're gonna take, if you're gonna dignify Nate Silver as a, as a real statistician

• 2:39:46Speaker 01

  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 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-

• 2:40:08Chris Williamson?

  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 worldview, everything's fucked, it's not going to get better, oh

• 2:40:51Chris Williamson?

  my God, my family, my future, there is no point even trying, and 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?

• 2:41:04Speaker 01

  Well, many of the tools we've referenced so far are incredibly useful. I mean, just to take the Stoic piece, for instance, I mean, the real comparison is that's worth making is that there's never been a moment in human history where there has been more opportunity for more people to live a truly good life. And not, not just to live a truly good life with respect to your own selfish pleasure, but to affect the future in a propitious way. I mean, 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

• 2:41:48Speaker 01

  thousand year Reich and, and what we got was pretty big. So, yeah, prompts to Churchill, but the, we really are at a unique moment with respect to the leverage and the, and the, the disparity of outcomes suggested by the power of our technology, which is the exponential change we're seeing in culture and with respect to tech. 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.

• 2:42:28Speaker 01

  And so if you can, if you want to have a meaningful life, if you want, if you want economic opportunity and you want, and you want to exercise that opportunity in a context where you can actually benefit people at scale and the future at scale, it's never been easier to do that. It's never been, it's like, it just, you know, the iPhone that you have in your pocket, which is, you know, in most people's case, fragmenting their life unnecessarily and just becomes a source of distraction at best, you know, misery at worst.

• 2:43:06Speaker 01

  Is actually an incredibly powerful computer that would be, you know, two, two decades ago would have been an object of genuine magic. Right. It's like, it's like, it's just not, the president of the United States couldn't have had 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 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, there's massive opportunity, even if you're someone

• 2:43:52Speaker 01

  who doesn't feel like you have a ton of opportunity by comparison with your, you know, friends or with other people you see in, 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.

• 2:44:14Chris Williamson?

  On the other side of that, you, I remember you saying, um, living an examined life is just one insult after another. You have to maintain a sense of humor.

• 2:44:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:44:24Chris Williamson?

  Why? What, what does that mean?

• 2:44:29Speaker 01

  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, 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 assholes, right? They're just like, you, you meet, it's everything, right? And, and you ultimately can't take it personally, right? Like you, 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.

• 2:45:15Speaker 01

  You find yourself here in this circumstance. And then 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 so we have, you know, we morally and psychologically, existentially, we have a navigation problem moment to moment. And there are various tools you can get in hand to be a much wiser and happier pilot.

• 2:45:50Chris Williamson?

  That's one of the reasons, I think, that Andrew Huberman 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 or number two worldwide on every podcast chart.

• 2:46:11Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:46:11Chris Williamson?

  That seems reliable. And then he's doing a three and a half hour treatise on caffeine.

• 2:46:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:46:18Chris Williamson?

  Or something. And, you know, to get to that stage of scientific communication, 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 Jocko Willink and some Medal of Honor recipient for six hours and blah, blah, blah. Huberman took that to another level. He took that to a level where you think, really? With the adenosine system for three and a half hours? And I think that one of the reasons that Andrew particularly has been so effective is that he is trying to cut through all of the the chaos. And he he bridges the gap between the the reliable expert

• 2:47:02Chris Williamson?

  that's sufficiently credentialed and and the upstart podcaster that's got his heterodox bona fides. And he sort of splits the two.

• 2:47:12Speaker 01

  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 bullshit that that we spend 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, like Peter Attia or Tim Ferriss. I mean, these are all people who they have opinions presumably about all this other stuff, uh, but they don't tend to dig in on these, any of these culture war.

• 2:47:57Chris Williamson?

  They do a ballet dance through the minefield.

• 2:47:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like, well, let's, let's, you know, you can figure out Trump on your own time. You can figure out Black Lives Matter on your own time.

• 2:48:05Chris Williamson?

  Tell you about nicotine.

• 2:48:05Speaker 01

  Let's just, let's just see whether you should be, you know, getting eight hours of sleep a night, right? And whether you want to track that with the, you know, the aura ring. I don't mean to trivialize any of that. It'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, it's a kind of superpower to, to decide.

• 2:48:46Speaker 01

  Whatever my opinion is on all of these contentious topics, I don't feel any need to give it. I have all of these, there's just this absolute feast of other things that we can enjoy and 95% of people are just going to love the, love what's on the menu.

• 2:49:05Chris Williamson?

  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, 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 K through 12, don't say gay bills or, or whatever it is.

• 2:49:37Chris Williamson?

  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?

• 2:49:53Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:49:53Chris Williamson?

  It's like, I don't, I don't go to Andrew Huberman, as brilliant as he is,

• 2:49:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:49:57Chris Williamson?

  for his thoughts about the Ukraine.

• 2:49:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. And you, and you don't fault him for not broadcasting his thoughts to his audience, because why should he, right? 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've talked mostly about kind of my podcast life, I think, but over at Waking Up, I have a completely different experience of what's coming back at me from the audience. Like, what, so waking up 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.

• 2:50:41Speaker 01

  I mean, what not, I mean, not that I can ever, not that 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, 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.

• 2:51:18Chris Williamson?

  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, have you reflected on why it's so aligned?

• 2:51:32Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:51:43Chris Williamson?

  Ah, you're Andrew Huberman for.

• 2:51:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's like, so I have a, a version of, of Huberman's experience on this kind of narrow band of topics, and, 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

• 2:51:58Chris Williamson?

  You bought the entire license, the entire Alan Watts library from, from the Watts Foundation, whatever. Yeah. Which 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.

• 2:52:15Speaker 01

  No, no, I do it too. It's, it's great to sleep to.

• 2:52:19Speaker 01

  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, and as a public speaker, I mean, whatever I've done professionally for the last, you know, nearly 20 years.

• 2:52:48Speaker 01

  Outside of waking up has been just this reliably 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? And it's

• 2:53:06Chris Williamson?

  They'll flip flop and seesaw week to week.

• 2:53:08Speaker 01

  It's just, you know, and, and then, and, 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.

• 2:53:31Speaker 01

  You know, in certain people's feeds, I just noticed it's just a hundred percent pain. It's just like, it's awful. I mean, the question is, what, why would I go on that? Like all these people hate me, right? And

• 2:53:45Speaker 01

  reliably now they hate me because of what I did or didn't say about COVID vaccines, or what I did or didn't say about Trump, or what I did or didn't say, or seemed to say, or they heard I might've said about Hunter Biden's laptop, right? So those people, like they're kind of single issue people with, with respect to those variables. But like, if I go into,

• 2:54:05Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:54:13Speaker 01

  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. Like that's like, who the fuck 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 off.

• 2:54:55Chris Williamson?

  No one, no one in the comments section gets 5,000 upvotes for saying, well done for toeing the party line. Or I actually agree with you on that mainstream opinion. So I don't disagree about the way that the podcasting universe generally has that. And I have been trying aggressively for the last six months to discipline my audience particularly. I did it overtly a number of times. We've been aggressively, you can, there's a function which you may have seen on YouTube, which is hide user from channel, which causes this person to continue to be able to type comments, 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 can still contribute to your

• 2:55:40Chris Williamson?

  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 knee 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 fucking shoes off. So yeah, I am.

• 2:56:01Speaker 01

  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 party. I'd bring someone on and it was a real like knockdown, drag out debate. And then I would notice in the aftermath, my audience would just trash that person on social media or wherever.

• 2:56:24Speaker 01

  And several times I explicitly admonished my audience not to do that because 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 mobbed by psychopaths.

• 2:56:42Chris Williamson?

  Going on Making Sense is synonymous with having a war.

• 2:56:45Speaker 01

  And it does happen. And it still happens. I mean, I think I probably should ring that bell again because it just happened. I think I had noticed it happened. Again, I'm not on social media, so I'm a bad witness to this stuff. But I looked, I think I looked on Reddit.

• 2:57:04Speaker 01

  And I saw what happened in the aftermath. I had Mark Andreessen on recently and we debated AI.

• 2:57:08Chris Williamson?

  He just did Rogan again.

• 2:57:10Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Okay. I'm not sure I saw that. But so, yeah, he and I disagreed about AI risk. And, you know, but I, you know, it's totally respectable, respectful conversation with him. But, you know, had somewhat the character of a debate. And so 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. And I did notice that just, again, this is just Reddit and I spend 15 minutes on it, you know, once every two months. But I noticed that my audience was just shitting on him in a way that it's just not good for me. Like, if you're, if

• 2:57:51Speaker 01

  they're my audience, if they want to support me, it is not supportive of my enterprise to shit on my guests in that way. Right? And so it is with you or any other podcasters.

• 2:58:03Chris Williamson?

  How do you, how do you get around that? Because there's definitely a part of me, whether I be a user of social media or a creator on social media, much more a creator than a user.

• 2:58:15Chris Williamson?

  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 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 audience, what's the best faith interpretation of what this person's saying? I listen to this guest or I read their Substack 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 unobjectionable. And it's a cesspit sometimes.

• 2:58:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, no, 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 yank this at any time, but let's just see how this goes. Because in that community, with that top list of topics, I think it could actually be possible to have, you know, almost entirely good supportive conversations.

• 2:59:44Chris Williamson?

  The wildest thing is that we're in 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 and I'm da, da, da, da, da.

• 2:59:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:59:58Chris Williamson?

  We want that. And yet the behavior of some very loud, very offensive people on some platforms colors the experience of of everybody's.

• 3:00:11Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:00:11Chris Williamson?

  You know, there is such a Matthew principle around

• 3:00:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:00:15Chris Williamson?

  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 own are the only ones that post from a small number of people who are the only ones that have an account.

• 3:00:26Speaker 01

  And and there's, there's also an algorithmic choice that is dictating that, which is, you know, it is. The gamification is based on outrage and strangely misinformation. I mean, it's like misinformation is spreading better than real information. I mean, a patient debunking of an untruth is boring and the lurid untruth is captivating and it spreads better.

• 3:00:50Chris Williamson?

  That's the bullshit asymmetry principle, right? It takes a lot less energy to produce bullshit than to refute it. Therefore, the world is filled with unrefuted bullshit.

• 3:00:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. 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 Facebook scale.

• 3:01:13Speaker 01

  And I think you would have, you'd have to have, I mean,

• 3:01:17Speaker 01

  you would have to have a low tolerance for assholes.

• 3:01:20Chris Williamson?

  Heavy moderation.

• 3:01:21Speaker 01

  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 of these social media platforms are businesses. Some are even private businesses.

• 3:01:40Speaker 01

  My concern about free speech runs to the owners and operators of those businesses and not wanting the government, 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, it's gonna, you know, if it has 20 million people on it, I should be able to kick the Nazis off, right? And so my concern about free speech is for the person, is essentially for the publisher

• 3:02:25Speaker 01

  who doesn't want to publish Nazis.

• 3:02:28Speaker 01

  And the truth is, it's, you know, if you, the

• 3:02:36Speaker 01

  Also, if you 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 it's just, it's just too much noise to that signal. And so 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, whatever principles you have by which you do that. And if your principle is no Nazis, well, then that's your principle. And people understand that.

• 3:03:16Speaker 01

  And then someone can start a Nazi forum, you know, Stormfront or somewhere other spot. Great. I think that should be legal, right? You should be able to have a Nazi social media platform. Yeah, I just don't have to be there or support it. So.

• 3:03:33Chris Williamson?

  What are you doing next? What's next on the work bucket list?

• 3:03:37Speaker 01

  You know, it's, it's really just, you know, almost entirely continuing in these two channels of waking up the app and making sense the podcast. And I have stuff I want to write, but it's very hard to incentivize myself to write it because it's harder, it takes longer, I reach fewer people, and it pays less. I mean, like, all the incentives are aligned against me writing another book. So I haven't, you know, as if by magic, I've, I noticed I haven't done that. But I think I, ultimately I will because it's only when I'm writing

• 3:04:15Speaker 01

  that I am taking the time to think through each topic as fully as I'm capable. So I think I, I mean, there's some writing built into my podcasting 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 involved in some things, but.

• 3:04:36Chris Williamson?

  How arduous is that? You know, you've got a daily meditation. I think I've.

• 3:04:42Speaker 01

  Well, the daily meditation, the daily is not live that day. I mean, I've batch record them. And so we have a, you know, we have a reservoir of daily meditation.

• 3:04:51Chris Williamson?

  It's still 365 times, pretty much 10 minutes or 15 or 20. I know that you can kind of stretch it in between by 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 thing. 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.

• 3:05:16Speaker 01

  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 so, you know, one part of it, I essentially have a podcast where I just talk to people. And sometimes those conversations show up on both the podcast and the app, but often not.

• 3:05:39Speaker 01

  But then I would just have a lot of other people producing content. So I have, 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. Whereas my podcast, there's this expectation that, you know, next week, there's going to be another podcast, unlike you, where it's every two days or whatever. So.

• 3:05:59Chris Williamson?

  Three times a week.

• 3:05:59Speaker 01

  You know, I do not have that cadence. But so it's, but happily, it's, you know, my podcast is structured around what I want, what I want to think about and read and talk about next, right? So I mean, 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, it's like a, you know.

• 3:06:27Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:06:34Chris Williamson?

  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 taught me nothing about marketing. And I was always regretful. I was wistful for an academic career that I never had because as soon as I pulled my head out of my ass toward the back end of my twenties, 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 I'd had to force myself to be competent in.

• 3:07:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:07:10Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 3:07:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:07:32Chris Williamson?

  And then no one assesses me afterward. And if I mess up, it doesn't matter. And if I want to careen 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, for all of the, the internet is difficult and negative comment sections cause me to feel a little bit sort of, it tarnishes the experience.

• 3:07:52Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 3:07:53Chris Williamson?

  Broadly, it's a complete dream that I kind of can't really believe is, is happening. And, you know, you've been a big influence.

• 3:08:01Speaker 01

  Congratulations.

• 3:08:01Chris Williamson?

  Thank you. You've been a really big influence on 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?

• 3:08:18Speaker 01

  Um, just 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.

• 3:08:28Chris Williamson?

  Sam, I appreciate you. Thank you.

• 3:08:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. Great to meet you.