- [Bridget] This is Walk-Ins
Welcome with Bridget Phetasy.
I'm Bridget Phetasy and you are welcome.
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This week on Walk-Ins Welcome,
I'm very excited to have Sam Harris.
Sam Harris is a
neuroscientist, philosopher
and author of five New
York times bestsellers.
His work covers a wide range of topics.
Neuroscience, moral philosophy, religion,
meditation practice, human
violence, rationality,
but generally focuses on how
a growing understanding of
ourselves and the world is changing
our sense of how we should live.
I'm with Sam Harris everybody.
Welcome to Walk-Ins Welcome.
- [ Sam] Happy to be here, Bridget.
It took a while.
- [ Bridget] I know I'm so excited.
I'm a little bit nervous to
be totally honest because
you are just somebody that I
have looked up to for so long.
It's just a strange phenomenon to be able
to actually talk to you.
- [Sam] All right. Well, let
me show you my feet of clay.
- [Bridget] My biggest
question that I have right
out of the gates is what's
your morning routine?
- [Sam] Here's a more
reason not to admire me.
I have no morning routine really
apart from stumbling out of
bed and getting to the tea
kettle or a cup of coffee,
I kind of alternate there,
but yeah, I'm not a morning person.
I've never been a morning person.
I occasionally troll Jocko
Willink who gets up every day,
at 4:30 and has a cult
of people following him,
taking photos of their watches.
- [Bridget] Oh I know.
- [Sam] and I'm more likely
to stay up until four in the morning,
than get up at four in the morning.
So I've always been pretty nocturnal.
And so the mornings for me
are just me trying to reboot
the hard drive and eventually get
into a productive frame of mind,
but I don't have any discipline
around that first hour or two.
I just, it's basically just
bailing water neurologically.
- [Bridget] Do you meditate every day?
- [ Sam] Well, it's somewhat
complicated answer to that.
As you know I have a meditation app
and meditation is something that I'm
spending a lot of time on.
I tend to sit formally most
days, but not every day.
And for me, for quite some time,
practice has been a matter of
me really paying attention to
many many short moments
throughout the day.
I mean, the goal for me is
I think the goal for anyone
ultimately is to erase the boundary
between formal practice
and the rest of life.
And so I've always emphasized
or for a long time,
I've emphasized finding the
moments that are every bit as
clear and free of the illusion
of self in one's normal
waking life that are identical
to the kinds of experiences
one has either in a formal
session or even in the best part
of a long meditation
retreat and many of the,
in the sense that that's not possible
or that's hard to do is
something to get over.
And so yeah it's more
for me about punctuating
a normal day with 500 or a 1000 moments
than it is getting a solid
hour of practice in the morning
or any other period of time.
And so, and the goal really is to make
the same kind of demands
one makes on oneself in a
retreat where you're trying to be
continuously mindful.
So you have these formal
sessions of sitting
and walking and though
you do that on retreat for 12
hours a day or 14 hours a day,
but then you have all the
other moments in the day when
you're going to get a
cup of tea or whatever,
and those are considered just
as central to the practice.
You're trying to pay attention as
clearly in those moments as well.
And so I've now, adopting
that in my life as much
as possible.
And it's not to say that formal practice
isn't still helpful.
It is, but it's not my focus
as much as you might think,
but yeah, on most days,
I tend to sit for, myself, you
and I are talking now at 12:30,
I sat for like 10 minutes,
a couple of hours ago.
I'll probably sit again at some point,
but it's much more for me
about finding all these other
interstitial moments where,
I can just recognize what
I'm what's there when you're
no longer lost in thought.
- [Bridget] I've spent
some time on ashrams
and done a lot of different meditations.
There was one person in Japan
who made all of the people
practicing with him,
go to the subway during rush hour
and sit so that they could
be distracted basically.
And even recently I was in a
meditation and somebody's phone
went off and people were getting annoyed.
And the guy who was leading it made
everybody turn their phones on.
And he was saying, essentially,
what you just said,
what's the use of this
if you have to be
sitting in a silent room.
There's no point in this practice,
if you get annoyed by a ding
and that is irritating to you.
- [Sam] Yeah.
I mean, it depends on what
practice you're doing,
because there are some practices where,
if concentration on a
single object is the goal,
well, then, thoughts and
anything else is even external
sounds are by definition, a distraction.
But, for a practice like mindfulness,
anything that you can possibly
notice is a fit object of
recognizing consciousness
and its contents.
And so that sounds, I mean,
you can literally be right
next to a construction site
and it should be no different.
You might have a preference if,
the noises are really
unpleasant, but it's still a...
anything can be incorporated
in the practice.
So that's definitely the
kind of practice I recommend.
- [Bridget] I've been
taking your meditation app
and quarantine pretty, pretty religiously,
actually not to no pun intended.
And it's definitely more
clinical than what I'm used to,
which I appreciate.
It has the scientific approach
because I think there's
so much woo surrounding
the world of meditation
and it can turn people off.
And what I appreciate about yours is like,
is the heady diagnosis of consciousness.
Although it does make me feel
sometimes like I'm on drugs,
which, as someone sober.
I also appreciate.
- [Sam] You're getting it
for free without violating any principles.
- [Bridget] It's a trip.
The whole idea of the headlessness.
I have a very, that one
kind of messes my brain up.
- [Sam] What practice did you do before?
- [Bridget] I mean, I've just been really
just standard mindfulness,
I think is I've had lots
of different experiences.
I was at a retreat in New
Zealand and it was an old lineage
and they did the golden silence
from, 8:00 PM to 8:00 AM.
And the, I've just had just sitting mostly
and paying attention to breath
and nothing as formal as
your training by any means.
And I still, when I first got sober,
we have there are meetings
in Los Angeles and there are
20 minutes of sitting meditation.
They used to be at this meditation place
until the guy got Me-Tooed
- [Sam] Unfortunately, that's
an all too common story.
It's really quite amazing.
- [Bridget] It's crazy,
but I'm not surprised.
And so they generously
let us use the place.
And every morning at 7:30,
it's 20 minutes of meditation.
And then you would share about
whatever your experience was
because meditation is
recommended and in the 12 steps.
And that saved me in early sobriety.
I did it every single day.
Just being able to put that
distance between my racing at
the time thoughts and not
having to identify with every
single thought and having that
morning practice was just,
it was funny.
They were building the rail
right next to this place.
And there was a jackhammer
for probably the first three
months of my sobriety.
And it was you, it was
indistinguishable from what
my brain actually sounded like.
There was a perfect, so that,
and then this has been nice
because I feel like it's a,
I like the scientific
aspect of it that you bring.
Have you been finding that
people are gravitating to it more
in this crazy time that we're in?
- [Sam] Yeah, it's
been, I think it is more
the one thing that I've noticed is that,
we offer the app for free to
anyone who can't afford it
and that's just make that explicit,
in every context that I can.
And as you might expect,
the requests for free
subscriptions has gone up now.
And so I think that the net
result is there are definitely
more people on it.
I think probably the number
of actual subscribers is,
kind of, it's pretty
constant, but yeah, no, it's,
there's a lot of people using it.
It's really gratifying to have
something to put out there
that is helping people
and seems appropriate
to this period of time.
Right.
It's yeah.
I'm just very happy that
it's finally out there,
as you might know, it took me
forever to finally get it out.
And it took like two years
to get the beta version out.
And now it's been out for about a year
and a half and yeah it's,
I'm very, very happy.
It's seeing the light of day.
- [Bridget] I have to say, I love it.
And all of the extra.
the extra, lessons that
you give on the side,
as well as just the guided meditations.
Those are fantastic.
And now I saw that you
have David White on there.
Who's one of my favorite poets.
- [Sam] Yeah. He's awesome.
- [Bridget] He's amazing.
- [Sam] He has such an amazing voice too.
I mean, I love his poetry,
but to hear him read it
and to reflect on it,
it's just, his voice is priceless.
- [Bridget] When you started
on this journey of meditation,
what got you there?
- [Sam] Well drugs initially the first,
my first two,
well, actually the first
experience was an MDMA trip.
So not technically a
psychedelic, but after MDMA.
And it really, really
was the, just one trip,
I think I did MDMA 10
or 12 times in the end.
I haven't done it for many, many years.
Like, close to 30 years, I think.
But yeah, MDMA was really
a revelation to me.
I'm interested.
I don't know.
It's even hard to recapture
who I was prior to that
experience,
but I was clearly someone
who hadn't had any
experience like that, right.
There was just no sense that
the mind could become that
pliable and happy a place to be.
Right.
It's just the overwhelming
experience was of love
and gratitude, but it just was such a,
down pouring of positive emotion
and it really ethical wisdom.
I mean, just, to suddenly
see past all of the,
pseudo problems in my life and to realize
my connection to everyone,
not just friends and family,
but everyone potentially.
And just the fact that I wished everyone,
well, that was my default state.
Right.
I actually want everyone
to be happy and that,
and to plunge into the
implications of families.
It's simple to say that,
and it doesn't seem like it goes very far,
but when you actually find
that dial in your mind and turn
it up to 11, the feeling of,
unconditional love for
all conscious beings.
I mean, it just
it was just an extraordinary
experience that I did not
think, I'm sure I hadn't
thought about it at all,
but, had you asked me to think about it,
I would have just ruled it out as
psychologically impossible,
or if possible, a sign of mental illness
or it's just otherwise undesirable.
But to experience that for a
few hours and then the come to
come down and realize,
well that, that is a capacity
of the human mind that is,
inherent to it.
Whether you're going to think
purely in neurological terms
or in some other framing,
the drug is not causing your
brain to do something your
brain can't do.
So then thereafter,
I became interested in other
methods by which to access that
kind of experience and
different experiences,
but cause it's for me now,
unconditional love while
desirable and wonderful
isn't actually the center
of the bullseye in terms,
the goal of contemplative practice.
So, yeah, so I just moved on to,
It's not that psychedelics
stopped, but they did.
They only continued for a few more years.
And then I had like a 25
year hiatus and I just did a
mushroom trip about six months
ago or so for the first time
in more than 25 years,
but which was also very interesting
and wonderful and useful, but not again,
at this point, not essential,
For me, for many people,
but I would say for me,
certainly in the beginning,
psychedelics were essential
just because I was,
an unpromising candidate for meditation.
I imagine I was one,
I was just not interested in
it and had I attempted it,
I think I would have, I wouldn't have,
had enough concentration to have noticed
anything of any significance early enough
to keep me doing it.
And so to have my habit
patterns of my mind,
just fundamentally overwritten
for a few hours by MDMA
and then later LSD, that was just,
it proved to me that,
whatever I thought I
was doing with my life,
it was possible to have a
much richer experience of
consciousness in the present moment
than I was tending to have.
And that was just not something
I was going to discover,
even if I understood it in the abstract,
without the experience,
I just would never have committed to,
finding it by another method.
- [Bridget] And what were you doing
in your life at the time?
How old were you?
- [Sam] I was 18.
It was my sophomore year in college.
Yeah.
The first MDMA trip.
Yeah,
I was, I think it was spring
break of my sophomore year.
And, I came back to
campus, a wild eyed maniac,
trying to convince all my friends of,
basically sharing the gospel
with my closest friends.
And then, yeah, then I got interested in,
meditation and Eastern philosophy.
I started reading books
and that summer I sat a first
retreat and then had my first
acid trip on that retreat.
And this was a retreat where you could,
this was a retreat with Ram
Dass and it turned out my
roommate happened to have some acid
So I managed to kill two
birds with one stone then,
the next year or so was
a period where I was,
I got especially focused on
mindfulness practice and started
sitting mindfulness
retreats of, not very long,
but I guess a weekend and here and there.
And then eventually I started
sitting 10 day retreats.
And at this point I dropped out of school.
So I had time and then
I made my way to India.
And then for the decade of my 20s,
it was just a lot of retreat
and a lot of instruction in
India and Nepal,
I think I made seven or so
trips to India and as many to
Nepal and then spent about
two years on silent meditation
retreats that the longest of
which were three months long,
but I sat a bunch of two
months and one month.
And I was writing during
that period as well,
but it was much more initially
I was writing fiction.
I thought I wanted to write novels.
So I was writing novels and
each time I would finish one,
I would realize it was not
really good enough for me to
stand behind.
And I really hadn't tried
to get anything published,
but then I transitioned to
nonfiction at some point toward
the end of my 20s.
And I was writing about really,
in the philosophy of mind
writing about consciousness
and trying to integrate the
experiences I had been having in
meditation and my reading
and in philosophy now,
both Western and Eastern philosophy
and then I realized suddenly
I had to go back to school
because there's just no
way to write nonfiction,
having dropped out of college
and done little more on
paper than recapitulate
the 60s for oneself.
So then I went back to school
and then went to graduate
school and that's what happened.
- [Bridget] Wow.
I actually had no idea that
you had dropped out and taken
that kind of long
sabbatical into the state of
consciousness.
So you're pretty well equipped
for this quarantine life.
I would imagine with all the time,
what would you tell people about
how meditation can help one
with psychological resilience?
- [Sam] Well, it's about
because I would take
it from the other side
and meditation is often
described as a practice,
which is to say, it's
something you're doing.
It's something you're
adding to your experience,
but once you know how to do it,
and again, now I'm
talking about mindfulness,
not some other concentration practice.
Once you really understand
what's happening,
you discover that it actually,
isn't something you're doing.
It's not a practice.
It's not actually something you're adding
or superimposing upon experience.
You're actually doing less of something
rather than more of something.
And what you're doing
less of is spending your,
every waking moment lost in thought,
which is to say identified
with each thought
that arises in consciousness.
And so that maybe the default
state is to be thinking
without knowing that you're thinking.
And then you're just the mere hostage
of whatever the contents
of those thoughts are.
So if those are, self hating thoughts
or anxiety producing thoughts,
or the thoughts where
you're judging yourself
or judging others, or you have made it,
it's a conversation you're
having with yourself,
somewhat paradoxically.
Cause there's not two of you,
but it has this structure that like,
you're the one talking and
you're the one listening.
And, as though that really had to happen.
Right.
And which is weird, it's like
you know what's happening,
but at the same time
you're telling yourself
what's happening.
There's others part of you that isn't,
in on the joke or can't
see through your eyes,
So you're narrating your experience
and you're again,
you're thinking without knowing
that you're thinking and just,
and the signature of that
is that it feels like you,
it feels like a self, right?
So, someone listening to
us now might be thinking,
what the fuck is this guy talking about?
Right.
So that's a thought,
right?
And that feels, I mean, one,
it cut it ushers in an
emotional tone to the
mind, it becomes a lens,
an emotional lens through
which you're perceiving the
present moment.
So if that was the thought,
it very likely comes
with a feeling of doubt
or skepticism
or just judgment about what you're hearing
or just, kind of a resistance
to a claim that's being made.
And it's not to say,
I'm certainly not advocating
that people not be skeptical
or not doubt things that
are eminently doubtable.
I mean, obviously I'm not
arguing that we don't need our,
critical faculties or
the thought isn't useful,
but there is a difference
between recognizing thought as a
process and recognizing that
the context in which it's
appearing, recognizing
that it's an automaticity
recognizing that you're not
authoring your thoughts.
In fact, there is no you who's
offering who's thinking the
thoughts there's no thinker.
In addition to the thoughts,
there's no thinker who
is pulling them off the
shelf or pushing them
out into consciousness.
There's simply the next thought arising.
And in most cases it goes unrecognized.
And it just, it comes up
from behind you in a way,
and just see seems to be
what you are as a matter of
subjectivity.
So again, you think, well,
that's not right or whatever.
Okay. But wait a minute,
he was just saying,
and so all of that,
voice in the head can be
recognized in the same way
that you can hear my voice now,
and it doesn't feel like you,
you can hear your own voice
as an object in consciousness
and recognize that you
as the subject are really
just the context in which it's
appearing and that,
the connection to resilience
is it's pretty direct because
you then recognize that
more or less all of your
psychological suffering is meted
out to you in those moments
when you're identified with thoughts
that are making you suffer.
I mean, you're just thinking about
how uncertain the future is
and how worried you are that,
people close to you or are
going to get sick and die,
or that you're going to lose your job,
or you've lost your job.
And you're thinking about
that, the implications of that.
And again,
I'm not saying that there's
nothing that ever needs to be
thought through.
I mean, obviously there's a lot that,
our ability to think and
plan is the only thing that
differentiates us really
from other primates,
right?
So basically everything that's
good about being a person is
to some degree mediated by thought,
but it's an enormous blessing
to be able to get off the
ride whenever you see
that it's going nowhere
and worth going, right.
So I use the experience of anxiety now,
or anger or any other, classically
negative emotion for me,
it's a signal that there's
something that needs to be paid
attention to, right?
It's like, this is here's is
there a problem to solve here?
Is the question worth answering?
And if there is we'll, then
just solve the problem.
And if there isn't,
well, then let go of it.
In both cases,
you don't need to feel this
feeling for very long in order
to be responsive to the
needs of the moment.
- [Bridget] That was really
what I learned about anxiety
was that it was a signpost that something,
I was ignoring,
something that I needed
to either deal with,
or that I was repressing.
And it's interesting because
I find in this political
climate, that exact paradox
between acceptance and change is
challenging because at what
point do I let go of that,
which I can't control and accept
that this is just something
that infuriates me.
And how often do I let
these things infuriate me?
How do you apply your practice
of mindfulness to the current
political state of the world?
- [Sam] Well, for me, it applies
everywhere in the same way.
So it's not just my response to politics.
All of that's a landscape of frustration,
but, whenever I experience
anger or anxiety or fear,
or self judgment or regret,
I mean, it just moods that
you almost by definition,
don't want to spend a lot of time.
And again, there are signals that,
something may need to be
attended to or changed,
or there's something
to respond to somebody
to recognize about a relationship say,
but then the moment I become
mindful of the thoughts and the
emotions that they're linked
to the process and the half
life of the negative mental
state is incredibly brief.
I mean, it's just,
there's no way to stay angry
or anxious unless you get lost
in thought again about the
reasons why you should be angry
or anxious.
And so, in dealing with, in
responding to current events,
it's the same thing.
I'll see some fresh atrocity
coming out of Trump's mouth.
And, I'll recognize how I feel about that
and feel that in many cases,
outrageous is warranted.
I mean, it's energy that you can
and should use to do something.
Whether it's writing an op ed
or, saying something on a podcast
or booking a guest who can,
speak for an hour about
this particular topic that
suddenly became interesting or important.
But the moment you've taken that step,
the feeling of outrage is
not something that's useful
and it's not even possible
to maintain again,
unless you sort of go to sleep
and lose yourself in thoughts
for minutes at a time.
And so given that I'm
constantly trying to break that,
spell it, none of these States last long.
So again, for me progress in meditation,
hasn't been a matter thus far
of closing the door to any
specific emotion.
I mean, there's no
emotion that I felt before
I learned to meditate that
I'm incapable of feeling now,
so I can get angry.
I can get anxious, et cetera,
but it's just the differences
in how long these things last.
And, I mean, it's just,
it's orders of magnitude
shorter in terms of just how
quickly these states of mind
to grade and become a I mean,
the crucial insight is that
no one is really making you
angry or anxious or afraid.
I mean, it's like, yes,
you can point to the thing in
the world that you think is
the justification for
your current mental state,
but in each moment that the,
mechanism and that is
allowing for you to stay angry
or stay afraid is this,
moment by moment failure to
recognize thoughts as thoughts.
And so.
- [Bridget] Do you go to therapy?
- [Sam] No, I did as a
teenager for a while.
I'm not sure that was especially useful,
but I did it then.
And then I,
then my wife and I had
had a period where we,
around the time we had our,
first daughter where we
went to a couples therapy
and that was hugely useful.
That was just amazingly great
for us to do so I recommend
it, but I haven't,
it's been a very long time since then,
since I was one on one with a therapist.
- [Bridget] What are some of
the most uncomfortable moments
and challenges you've
experienced in your practice
of meditation throughout,
I guess now 30 plus years,
was there ever a period
where you just feel like,
fuck it,
I'm not, what is this?
And this is crazy.
- [Sam] Yeah.
Well, so actually some
of the hardest periods
where the we're at the point where
I was most committed to it,
but hadn't understood the,
difference between practicing
in a goal oriented way
and which is to say a,
dualistic way and what
I later came to discover
as a more non dual goal,
free style of practice.
And there's something I
write about in my book,
waking up at some point
you want to talk about,
gradual versus sudden views of awakening.
And I talk about it on the
app and in one of the lessons,
I actually just read from the
book in one of those lessons.
Yeah.
So there was a period where
I was practicing Vipassana,
which is mindfulness practice
in a very traditional striving
sort of way where there's,
when it's presented in the
most traditional context,
it tends to be explicitly goal
oriented where you go onto
a meditation retreat,
let's say for two months, and you're,
in silence for those two months.
There's absolutely nothing
to do other than meditate.
And the goal is to link as many moments
of mindfulness together as you can.
So as to have a kind of
breakthrough experience,
which is called,
the experience of Nibana
in poly or Nirvana
in Sanskrit.
And there are schools of Buddhism
that talk about the
Nirvana being coincident
with ordinary waking consciousness.
But this traditional school of,
in which many people are
getting their Vipassana practice
explicitly influenced by a few
prominent Burmese meditation,
masters, disavows that framing,
and really describes Nirvana
as a specific experience
you can have that uproots various,
in Buddhism mortar called
defilements of mind.
And so you're really on some level
are trying to get
elsewhere in your practice.
It's not in your, pain moment
to moment attention to seeing,
hearing, smelling, tasting,
touching, thinking,
you're balancing your mind.
You're getting a quantum as is possible.
You're not grasping it
at pleasant experience,
and you're not pushing unpleasant away,
but there is a kind of hope and fear
and striving built into the very
logic of what you're
doing with your attention.
Because, you've been told
that in your current state,
all you'll be able to notice
is the, on some level,
the evidence of your own enlightenment
and you need to get up,
you really are at the
bottom of the mountain,
and you need to schlep up to
the top and you have to link as
many moments of mindfulness as
you can together to get there.
And, all of this is
compounded by the problem
that in that style of
teaching mindfulness,
it's not really pointed out
that you can recognize that
consciousness is already
free of the feeling of self,
right?
It's like there is no
self to transcend, right?
You're, it's not like that
the self is really there
and you have to figure
out how to remove it
or blow it up through the
force of your practice.
It's actually not there.
And your sense that it
is there is based on a,
it can even be a very subtle
kind of fixation on even a
meditative fixation on the
contents of consciousness.
And in that style of practice,
you're sort of taught to
fixate on the objects of
consciousness in a dualistic way.
And so for the longest time
I was having these great
experiences in practice.
I mean, I was incredibly happy
and these are very drug-like experiences.
You can have experiences that
are exactly like an MDMA trip
in the middle of a long retreat.
Certainly once you get
significant concentration,
it is very, drug-like, it's very blissful
and you can just feel just intense rapture
and I've never done a heroin,
but I can imagine it's very similar
kind of blissful experience.
And you'd be you can be kind of,
you can become a kind of
meditative junkie, right,
where you're on some level,
you really are just getting
high on concentration.
And you're mistaking those
changes in the contents of
consciousness for some kind
of progress on the path.
Right.
But of course, it can't be a matter of,
fetishizing those changes yet
because they're impermanent.
I mean, by definition, anything that,
wasn't there a moment before
is something that will,
by virtue of having arose in this moment,
it's going to disappear in the next.
So the thing you're looking for
is something that's inherent
to the nature of consciousness
that is actually a,
durable basis for wellbeing and,
is compatible with any state
of waking consciousness.
I mean, if there's a way
to actually be a Buddha,
it has to be compatible with
having a conversation with
another human being or driving a car.
It means that you can't
be so zonked out on,
lists that you can't open your eyes.
Right?
- [Bridget] Right.
- [Sam] So that's, it took
me a while to cut through
my goal orientation.
It really wasn't until I met they're
really two teachers who were,
instrumental in my kind of
breaking free of that system.
I was practicing and under,
but the way I had been practicing,
I had probably done about a
year on retreat at that point,
and had made many trips to India.
And I was just, it was so much striving.
And it was just the
burden of having a goal.
I just, I really wanted to get somewhere.
I really wanted to become enlightened.
I had, I believed I had
seen through all of the,
superficial reality of having
any other goal at that point.
I mean, I was very young.
I was in my 20s in my
early 20s and mid 20s,
and I had had kind of
disavowed any other ambition.
Right.
And that came with its own
psychological pressure.
Right.
I mean, here I was
somebody who was supposed
to succeed in some way.
I mean I had a very high
estimation of myself as a,
an 18 year old probably.
And I had the estimations
of others, put on me.
I mean, people, the people
thought I was going somewhere,
I was a good student and all of that.
And so I, and then I want
to drop out of college
I had my reasons for doing that,
but once I became completely
devoted to meditation practice,
all of the dissatisfaction
of not having become
somebody in the world got
put on the balance with my
spiritual frustrations, right.
That I hadn't yet broken
through in a meditative sense.
And so I was a, yeah,
I was pretty uncomfortable until I found
a new way of practicing.
- [Bridget] So was your
plan to just become a Buddha
or something at that point in your life?
- [Sam] Yeah, I mean, at that point,
I had again, in my early to mid 20s,
I had a very keen sense
of world weariness,
even though, I mean,
just the pointlessness
of seeking any kind of ordinary,
source of ego gratification, right.
Becoming a great writer,
say like initially that that
would have been the thing I
would have been shooting for.
And I was, a big reader.
I love books.
I could have easily
been fantasizing about,
publishing my first book
and the significance of all of that.
But once I was having
a direct experience of,
just the difference between
happiness and suffering at
the level of identification with thought
or not, I recognize that,
well, there's nothing
you're going to go out
and get in life that will
become the real reason
why your life is deeply fulfilling.
I mean, your life will
be deeply fulfilling
by virtue of how much
time you're able to spend
truly immersed in the present moment,
in a way that's deeply fulfilling, right?
It's like on some level,
you can't become happy.
You can only be happy.
And the difference between being
and becoming was something that
I was becoming more and more a student of,
and yet there was this subtle becoming,
getting into the system,
even at the level of
my meditation practice,
becoming enlightened
and getting up to the top of the mountain,
as opposed to recognizing
that you're already there.
And so it was, but yeah,
I mean, and this was, I mean,
it's interesting that you encounter,
I've met many in a similarly unhappy spot.
There are many people who I
consider kind of casualties of
the Dharma or casualties of,
one or another spiritual path,
because there are people who
discover, quite validly that,
there's nothing more interesting
or profound than living a
truly examined life.
And recognizing that,
the nature of their own minds
and finding people who are
devoted to that task to take
as good company along the way.
And so these people tend
to gravitate toward scenes,
around teachers and ashrams
and spiritual communities.
And yet what you find when
you go to these places,
even to study with a great teacher
who hasn't started screwing
his more attractive students,
you find people who never quite,
they almost by definition,
they didn't make it work in
the world because they're
spending all their time at an ashram
or all their time on retreat.
And they're trying to convince themselves
that they're okay with that,
but it's also selecting
for a lot of people who,
for one reason or another
just couldn't make it,
couldn't figure out how to
have a satisfying engagement
with the world.
Right.
- [Bridget] Right.
I mean, I say this all
the time is I've been
to so many ashrams and it
is a lot of lost souls,
a lot.
There is something somewhat
tragic about it in a certain
respect, just people who kind of went,
and there were moments in my life.
There was one night I was at,
in Australia for three weeks,
and the guy wanted me to stay
pretty much indefinitely,
and I could see how easy it
would be to get lost down that
rabbit hole.
But how do you, it's very
difficult to find your way back.
- [Sam] Yeah.
And you also have a, it
comes with a belief system
and a worldview that justifies
that self sacrifice and self abnegation.
I mean, it is true to say that,
well, the only reason
why you're uncomfortable
spending all your time
sweeping up at the ashram
and not finishing your degree at Harvard
or wherever it was, is
because of your ego,
right?
Like you said,
it's your ego that cares
that you're a college dropout
or that you're you could've
had a great job at Google,
but now you're just kinda making,
you're learning how to be a medieval,
a Tibetan Lama,
and know translating texts from Tibetan.
And so that's subordination
of self to this other project
has a framing that seems like,
any discomfort you would have
in that context is a sign of
the very problem you're there to overcome.
Right.
I mean, you're too self possessed,
what do you care?
What other people think of you?
What do you care that your
mother who had high hopes
for you now has very little,
she can say that she's
comfortable with about,
what you're doing in the world.
And those are just thoughts.
Right.
Just get over it. And that's true.
And yet there's a lot
of dysfunction around,
people's inability to find the
sweet spot with all of this.
And it's taken me a long time
for me to feel like I've done
that for myself.
And it really is.
It's taken a very long time
and I feel very lucky to have done that.
- [Bridget] I've seen a
lot of disillusionment,
and I've also seen a lot of
manipulation around what you're
talking about in terms of,
don't worry about your
parents and all of these.
It's how a lot of people end
up in bad situations in these
ashrams or sometimes cults.
But how did you find your way out?
At what point did you decide
that the kind of earthly
pursuits are worthwhile?
- [Sam] Well, I guess
one crucial thing is that
I never joined a community or an ashram in
any explicit sense.
And I spent a lot of time
around a few different teachers
who struck me as great
exemplars of the teachings,
but they never struck me as,
anything other than
human on another level.
Right.
So I never, I guess if you had,
if you could have sampled my,
brain's activity at various
points along the way,
you could have found me in
a kind of quasi religious
frame of mind with respect to
some of these people some of
the time, but in general,
I was always skeptical of
adopting the trappings of
a theocracy, just because it
came from another culture.
Right.
So I never, I got,
I guess at one point I
might've considered myself a
Buddhist,
but I never really spent any
time thinking that Buddhists
had an exclusive corner on
the market of the truth.
Right.
I mean, the truth is
that I was encountering,
mostly in a Buddhist context,
also existed elsewhere
in the Indian tradition.
And we're just a deeper than that.
We're, a capacity of the
human mind to be discovered by
anyone at any point.
And just, some cultures
had more or less, accurate,
or useful concepts
around how one does that.
And I noticed that in a Western culture
and it's in particular Abrahamic,
religion had so much more,
that was confusing around
what was necessary to live a
spiritual life.
It was less interesting to me.
I mean, being told that
Jesus is the son of God
is not a great algorithm to start with.
And when you're trying to figure out,
what the potential of human
consciousness is to recognize
itself prior to the illusion of self it's,
like there,
isn't there's just no
reason to think about
things like Virgin
births and all the rest.
And, there are also almost certainly
fictional in the first place,
but so I never got caught as a
member of a cult of any sort.
Right.
And so I would just,
I would meet these teachers.
The real value, even more
than the relationship
to a charismatic person
who had spent many,
many decades becoming a
kind of meditative athlete,
the real value was in the
actual teachings that I could
apply or not myself.
And if I could apply them
myself, well, then on some level,
it was a matter of just
getting the information
and then having the experience during,
using the recipe to bake
the cake for oneself.
And so I was never
infantilized to the degree
that you see in many
spiritual communities where
it's just all about the guru
and it's we're so lucky just to be sitting
at his feet again,
it's not to say that I don't
have deep reverends for some of
these teachers who helped me.
I met some really extraordinarily
beautiful teachers,
both Buddhist and not, but again,
all of them showed their human
side to some degree, right.
So it's not a matter of
anyone actually being perfect.
And so I came away from
all of those encounters,
never being tempted to fully
detached from my culture
or my life in this world,
and just transplant myself
in India or Nepal, or it's a mantra.
And you meet the, I mean,
I know many people who've
spent 30 years in Nepal,
right?
So there, I saw that advertised to me,
and then I just also had many
other interests which never
fully evaporated.
Right.
So when it came time for me
to pay attention to something
other than then the mindfulness,
I just was captivated by books.
And by increasingly by conversations
about the nature of the mind,
and also just how to think
about the project of,
living an examined life in
the context of a 20th century,
and then 21st century
view of human rationality
and a growing scientific
understanding of our ourselves
and the world.
And so once my scientific
interests came online,
I dunno, it was just,
there was never a temptation
to just check it out,
check out completely.
I mean, I spent a good long
while fairly checked out
and I gave, again, my,
the decade of my 20s was
almost totally devoted to
these esoteric concerns.
And so when I finally had to
go back to school at age 30,
I think I was 31 when I went
back to finish my undergraduate
and then went into graduate school,
I felt very late cause I was late. Right.
I mean, I just, I had basically was,
having a Rip van Winkle experience
of having lost a decade.
And, all my friends were,
at that point had careers and
some of them had families.
And so there was a kind
of urgency to getting the,
machine of a normal life up and running.
And it took me a long time, frankly,
to get comfortable with
how I was integrating
all of this stuff.
I mean, it's just it
took a long while from
my meditative interests
and what I would have seen as
the true wisdom I have access
it took a while to integrate
that with a normal career.
And it's now,
I feel like I've arrived
in a very happy place,
just as the world has
gone down into lockdown,
very global pandemic.
So pandemics, it turns out a
pandemic is my happy place.
- [Bridget] This makes sense weirdly.
You had said earlier in
the conversation that from
when you first took them DMA,
the bullseye was kind
of unconditional love,
but that's not what you've
come to find is the bullseye.
What is it?
- [Sam] It's more around this.
What's there when the illusion
of the self is cut through.
So if you cut through the
sense of subject object
perception in the sense that there's a,
subject in your head
thinking your thoughts,
having your experience,
that there's a center to
experience when that drops out,
and there's just experience,
there's just this,
kind of unified sphere of seeing
and feeling in your seat.
There's the energy of
your sensory experience,
but then anything else you
can notice about your mind.
So it means that the world
you see with your open eyes,
I mean that the experience
of seeing I'm not making
a metaphysical claim,
that the universe is
nothing but consciousness,
but as a matter of experience,
it's nothing but consciousness, right?
It's just chair's
consciousness and its contents.
And there's one when the
center of that drops out,
which is the feeling that we call "I"
what's left is it's
I mean, it's hard to
characterize in positive terms,
and that's why the Buddhists
result to words like
emptiness or selflessness,
but it's not a negation of experience.
I may experience is even
more vivid in some way,
but it has a kind of
dreamlike quality and it's,
but it's not one thing it's
not one particular state.
It admits of many different
states and unconditional love is
certainly one of them,
but the really vivid experience
of unconditional love of the
sort that,
I had on my first MDMA
trip and what you can have
when you do a practice
like loving kindness,
meditation, or meta-meditation,
that's a, it is a temporary state.
I mean, it is a state of physiology where,
it wasn't there five minutes ago.
And all of a sudden here it is like
a freight train of positive
prosocial emotion where you're,
you just feel,
you're thinking you're
tending to think about your
connections to other people
and other other beings.
I mean, you can feel this way for a dog
or really anything that you
can attribute the sentience to.
And just this the feeling,
the experience of being overwhelmed
by one's good intentions, right?
Like, you're just, and they're
different shadings of this,
and you can feel compassion in the
presence of suffering, right?
So if you're,
if you take the state
of mind and aim it at,
people who are obviously suffering, right,
Children who don't have enough to eat
or kids with, pediatric cancer, right?
You watch a video from,
St Jude's children's hospital,
and you see these six year olds who
are going through chemo, right.
And your heart breaks,
and you feel overwhelmed by,
just how much you wish they
could be free of suffering.
Right?
If you don't, I mean, there's obviously,
there's a way to feel bad when you look
at videos of kids with cancer, right.
You can just feel sad or in some way,
diminished, you can eat,
you can feel like your wellbeing
has diminished by that.
I mean, that's natural,
but the real opportunity
there is to feel the wellbeing
of truly wishing these kids,
happiness and freedom from suffering.
And that that's sort of,
that's the compassion
channel that you can,
actually, consciously train in meditation,
but then when you move your attention away
from suffering to somebody,
to just somebody who's in a
kind of a neutral state well,
then that compassion is,
has more of the character
of loving kindness right.
You're still wishing them well,
but they're suffering is
not the object of focus.
And then when you imagine
somebody who's quite happy, right.
Or you see some,
a friend who's just had
something great happen for them,
and they're, overjoyed with their lives.
Well, then you feel what's
called sympathetic joy,
which is different.
I mean, now you're, it's
the opposite of compassion,
really, because this person
is getting everything
they want in that moment.
And you were just happy for them.
And so that's, I mean,
these are different shadings
of the same state of mind,
but again the it's not
the only state of mind,
which you're ever going to be in again.
And so it is transitory.
And the more fundamental
thing is to recognize that
consciousness isn't encumbered by the
separate self in the first place.
And so that's the and that is also,
this is also a place where
I feel like the project of
meditation and the utility
of psychedelics diverge.
I mean, it's not the
psychedelics aren't useful.
And I do think that again,
they're, I think they're useful,
even beyond just advertising
changes in consciousness of a
sort to get you to practice meditation.
I think that, like this
last mushroom trip,
I did seem very useful to me.
I mean, just kind of blew
out the pipes in a way that,
I felt it reset me in a
way that was Holy good.
But again,
it's not a surrogate for this
recognition about the nature
of the self or the
illusoryness of the self,
because the selflessness
that's really important
to recognize by definition
has to be available
here in an ordinary moment
of waking consciousness.
It can't require the
psychedelic light show, right?
And so there's something
misleading about the experiences
that people tend to have with
psychedelics that seem to
suggest that your freedom
and your real self
transcendence is predicated on,
the 400 megawatt experience,
as opposed to your ordinary 20 watt brain,
just paying attention to email
or whatever it is you're is
capturing your attention in the present.
- [Bridget] I've had those
moments of meditation
where you lose that
sense of physical self.
They're so fleeting because
the minute it happens,
that other thing comes
in and is aware of it.
But I always, there always
followed a lot of people,
experienced bliss,
and I experienced terror because
it's just a feeling of like
how much of a lie at all
is that the illusion,
of time and the illusion.
I've I always say, when I
come into the moment of now,
I like freak out.
And then when you were talking
about that idea of self it's
funny and dreaming is
trippy because you are you
in your dream, oftentimes,
and then there are other
people in your dreams
and they're separate, but
it's all in your brain.
So I'm always like who
is the me in my dreams,
even in my dreams,
there's this sense of separateness
and that just shows how
deeply identified with self I am.
- [Sam] Well dreaming, it's
interesting to consider the,
ways in which dreaming
is similar to waking
consciousness because
it's similar in many ways,
one it's similar to the degree,
to which your experience
while awake of quote,
the real world is entirely
a visionary experience.
I mean, every bit, as much as a dream is,
I mean, you are in a simulation.
I mean, neurologically speaking.
I mean, you are a brain in a VAT already
because everything that's
getting piped in to your brain
from the quote real world has
to be transduced into neurological
signals in order to get
experienced in any way at all.
So you're not,
I mean, you're experiencing a vision,
even with your open eyes,
while you're crossing
the street navigating
the real world, this is it's all being
run on your hard drive, right?
And it's not a direct encounter
with something outside
yourself.
And that, and again,
that's just as true as it is in dreams.
It's just that presumably in waking life,
your visionary experience is,
much more constrained by sensory input.
I mean, you're getting this signal that,
you're bumping up against hard
objects out in the world in a
way that you're not in dreams or,
at least the objects and
dreams are more made up.
I mean, the more idiosyncratic to you,
but there are many other things
about dreams that are weird,
that are somewhat conserved
in normal waking life.
So for me,
the weirdest thing about dreams
I think is that we almost
never notice that their
dreams right apart from lucid
dreaming which is a fairly rare
phenomenon for most people,
which is say a lucid dream is a,
dream where you're asleep and dreaming
and yet the dream dream persists
and there's, people train
can train that as well.
And that's actually, a
traditional meditative practice in
Tibetan Buddhism as well.
And it's called dream yoga.
But for most of us, most of the time,
this is a deeply weird phenomenon.
We go to sleep, we've
had this experience of,
watching television or
we're reading a book.
And then we turn that off and we,
we close our eyes and we wait for sleep.
And then the next thing we experience
is some crazy situation.
Where we're talking to famous people,
or we're on some beach that
we've never been to in life.
And then, and there's a
lion there or something.
It's something that
makes no sense in terms
of our understanding of the world,
or even, our expectations
about the laws of physics.
And this transition is
never remarked on like,
wait, this is, the mind accepts this
as just completely fine.
So we don't even,
we don't retain enough memory
of our lives to notice that
anything is wrong or out of the ordinary.
Right.
And that's just,
so we have this incredible amnesia,
for what should be the,
our expectations for the
continuity of our lives.
Just the, our autobiographical self model
just gets completely disrupted,
cause they just think of
how surprised you would be if
in this current circumstance,
a lion showed up at your
door or you started flying
or a person you knew to be dead
called you on the telephone,
or like what whatever, what
happened in a dream where
you wouldn't bat an eye.
If it happened in the waking state,
you would have this
massive confrontation with,
just the violation of your
own expectations for what
the future is going to look like.
So the fact that doesn't happen
in the dream state is weird,
but we have this analogous
thing that happens
in the waking state, which is we,
get lost in thought moment
after moment after moment.
And despite our best efforts,
I mean,
if you're, you could be on
a meditation retreat where
you've decided there's nothing
we're thinking about for the
next two months.
And you're just going to
pay attention to the breath
or recognize each thought as it appears
as an object in consciousness.
But then you'll find yourself
thinking for five minutes
about that conversation with,
your best friend that didn't
go well and what a fucking
asshole he is and right.
And then your, and for that period,
you are psychotic.
I mean, you're thinking without knowing
that you're thinking you're
lost on this landscape of mind,
that has completely subsumed you,
right.
If you forgot you were,
I mean, you literally had got
you're now in a meditation center,
3000 miles from where you live there,
the whole project is for
you to be meditating.
And you forgot you were even
on a meditation retreat because
you're busy having an
argument in your, imagination.
So it is delusional in the
same way that being asleep
and dreaming and not
knowing it is delusional.
And, it's very similar.
And the moment you
become sensitive to that,
you see how non-optimal the default state
of consciousness is.
I mean that the idea that
that's normal to be having
this incessant conversation
with yourself and not noticing
it and be replaying
conversations with other people,
in your head and not know,
and barely being aware of,
that you're driving a car or,
at dinner with your wife or, I mean,
it's just your it's
we are so close to being
psychotic so much of the time
it's so that there's,
a lot of progress to make
from that default state.
- [Bridget] You made me
think of so many things.
One road trips really illustrate
this when you're driving
long distances.
And then you realize, you forgot,
you were driving for two hours.
You're like, where the fuck did I go?
Was I even driving that?
And then I had this experience.
It's very common when
you get sober to have
what are called using dreams.
And it's a weird, like you were saying,
they're very, if a lion
showed up in real life,
that is kind of something
that happens to people who get
sober in their dreams,
when that signals,
I'm dreaming.
Or I hope I'm dreaming because
suddenly I'll be smoking a
joint or drinking,
and I've been sober for seven years.
And so it signals to me that something is,
my brain or whatever is
going on in my dream is like
something isn't right.
And that's a weird
phenomenon to experience.
And even still to this day,
I have it where,
and the other strange thing is that I'll,
start lying about it in my dream.
I'll hide it.
I'm like even my subconscious
as a wire about this stuff.
It's weird.
- [Sam] Do you have using dreams where you
actually experienced the state that
the high of that particular?
- [Bridget] Oh yeah. Oh yeah.
I've had fully drunken using
dreams five into sobriety
or where I get high.
And I mean,
I spent 20 years of my life
drinking and smoking weed.
And so it's pretty,
I mean, it's probably still
in my brain down there,
but it's definitely a strange,
you wake up and you're like,
Oh, thank God.
I wasn't, it was all a dream.
Or even in your dream,
I have had those moments where
I've that lucid feeling of,
I'm dreaming because I'm sober.
I feel like that happens more now,
the longer I'm sober,
the other way that I kind of
realized I was psych this,
the psychosis of the mind
I experienced really debilitating
hypochondria for about,
there was a pretty five to six,
five to seven year period
where it was crippling.
And it was not,
I've been through I've experienced
depression and anxiety,
but nothing made me feel more
insane than that hypochondria,
because I was aware that
it was not rational.
- [Sam] Well, a pandemic
has to be great for you.
- [Bridget] Oh, I'm fine.
I really was determined
to get on top of it.
And I somehow,
I mean, it was a
combination of looking at,
with a psychologist at
the underpinnings of it.
So for me, it would come up when I either
was going to feel joy, which
I felt like I didn't deserve
or shame, but also just rewiring my brain.
I literally put a rubber band on my wrist.
And every time I would have
that repetitive thought,
I would just stop it and shift
it and tell myself that I was
healthy and that everything was okay.
And I had to just be diligent about it,
but, it took me years.
It took me probably two years to really,
but it was,
there were days where I couldn't
get out of bed because my,
I was like, my brain is trying to kill me.
I want to write a book,
killing your hypochondria
before it kills you.
- [Sam] Nice.
I'm sure there's going to be
more and more need for that.
- [Bridget] So I have just a couple of,
if you had to guess what consciousness is,
what would your guess be?
I know that's a loaded question.
- [Sam] Yeah.
I don't really have a
good answer for that.
I do view consciousness as
being conceptually irreducible,
which is to say that there's no account
of unconscious complexity.
I mean, even if it is in fact true,
and it may certainly be true
that consciousness is just an
emergent property of a certain kind of
information processing, right?
So you say you have a world where
there are physical events
that are not at all associated
with consciousness.
The lights are not on,
even if there's some complexity there,
but then you get a
certain kind of complexity
and likely kind of processing that we
readily described as in
from conveying information.
And some version of that allows
the lights to just come on,
as if by a miracle that may
in fact be the world we're in,
but I can't.
That does, absolutely nothing
by way of explanation for me
about what consciousness is.
It's just,
that will always seem like a
miracle from my point of view.
I mean, it might be a
miracle we just accept,
but it's,
that's not a version of
understanding the emergence of
consciousness from my point of view.
And I guess what I would
just point out here is that,
most other scientific
explanations, really,
any other true scientific
explanation functions differently
than that.
I mean, when we understand,
when we really understand, DNA,
as a physical structure
and the way in which it
conserves the basis for heredity,
right?
So the way in which,
biological systems propagate
themselves based on the
information in their cells,
well, when you follow, all
that, it's very complicated,
but when you follow the
chain of those events,
nothing is left out.
You're not left thinking well,
but then what is, birth
and what is procreation
and what is inheritance
and what is life like?
Even the difference
between the living system
and a dead one is no longer mysterious.
Once you leave out the
mystery of consciousness,
right?
If you take, if you just told me,
well, the living system is,
consciousness aside, the difference is,
metabolism and growth and wound repair.
And, all of these other functions
that you can define in terms
of what cells are doing
and how they process energy.
Well, then again, there's no,
black box there that is in principle
and mysterious, but with
consciousness there is.
And I don't,
I honestly don't see how we get past that.
And so for me,
the crucial thing is
to recognize that it's,
irreducibly a first person phenomenon.
It's something that
can only be experienced
in as consciousness, right?
I think there's no
evidence for consciousness
in this universe, apart
from consciousness itself.
There's no evidence like looking
at the behavior of living
systems does not indicate
that consciousness is a thing
or that it exists, right?
Like the whole world could be filled with,
robots made of meat
that are not conscious.
And that's completely compatible
with the laws of physics
or at least it would seem to be.
And, there's no,
telling there'd be no
indication that we're not
in that world,
apart from the fact that we
know that there's something that
is like to be us and that
likeness that's something that is
likeness is consciousness.
- [Bridget] It's just so
unsettling for some reason.
It's just so you don't
really buy into the idea of a
universal consciousness.
- [Sam] Well, it's interesting
to consider what would make
it universal on one level.
I buy into it in that
consciousness without the sense of
self in my case is,
I mean,
the centralessness of knowing is pretty,
is entirely generic.
I mean, it's not like if
you're going to talk about me,
what's unique to me,
how I know I'm me and not you,
you're talking about the
contents of consciousness.
You're talking about the memories I have,
or can have, you're talking about,
what I'm looking at now as,
opposed to what you're looking at.
But if you're just going to
talk about the fact that the
lights are on the fact that
it's like something to be me,
that that's strikes me as, the same.
And I don't see how you could
differentiate that in my case,
from anyone else's case on that level,
it strikes me as universal,
right?
I think we are recognizing the same thing,
but the contents are different.
I mean, you are,
Bridget contents are over there and mine,
my Sam contents are over here.
And in that sense,
it was a little bit analogous to space,
or at least our naive
conception of space where,
the space is universal,
but the space in your
room is in your room.
The space in my room is in my room.
- [Bridget] Right?
- [Sam] And it's not a question
of merging, on the level of
the space has already merged,
right?
There really is no
frontier between spaces.
This just, you, when you're
talking about the frontier
you're talking about just the objects
that happen to be in space.
And those objects get,
there only where they are,
that they're in.
They're an expression of space
only as in where they appear,
right?
So the, space in your room is
only the space in your room,
in your room.
And yet it's continuous with
the nature of space elsewhere.
And again, I don't want
to put too much on that
as a matter of metaphysics.
Cause I don't really think of the insights
one has in meditation as
giving one insight into the
structure of the cosmos.
And this is where I get off.
They get off the tram
and Deepak Chopra stays
on for a few more stops.
- [Bridget] This is
what always trips me up
is where does my consciousness
end and yours begin?
It's just a question that I always,
I keep coming back to.
- [Sam] Well, you can almost
ask the same thing of your past
and future states of yourself, right?
It's like in what sense
are you the same person
who went to sleep in your bed last night?
Right?
You woke up this morning, on some level,
I mean, there is psychological continuity
in the sense that you have
access to some of the same
contents of consciousness,
but what do we make of those cases
where you don't have access,
right?
Like where you don't remember
something now that you did
remember yesterday,
in what sense is that?
Does that make you a different person?
Right.
I mean, it's possible.
And you could remember
something now that you,
hadn't remembered for years
and couldn't have remembered,
let's say for years.
- [Bridget] Right.
- [Sam] And so you,
on some level you have more
continuity now with who you were
when you were 20,
say the last time you
thought about this thing,
than you had with yourself of yesterday.
- [Bridget] Right? Fascinating.
- [Sam] Yeah.
- [Bridget] What's the most unexplainable
phenomenon you've experienced?
- [Sam] Oh, you mean just
in terms of kind of spooky.
- [Bridget] Yeah. I get, yeah.
Or like the most
pseudo-scientific thing you enjoy
or like to,
I asked Schermer,
what conspiracy theory does
he kind of enjoy the most
or maybe believe could be true.
And I think for you, mine is
what's the most woo thing
that you've experienced,
that you can't,
you don't have an explanation for?
- [Sam] Well, to the great consternation
of my fellow atheists and skeptics,
I've always said that
I'm open to evidence for,
what's called PSI phenomenon,
a psychic phenomenon,
like telepathy and clairvoyance,
and also for evidence of,
a rebirth and other spooky things.
And it's not to say that
I believe in those things,
but like many people I've
had experiences that seem
statistically quite unlikely.
But again, that's why we,
know the reasoning errors
that are there to be seen
in terms of just how often you,
how often does someone call you
and you don't know who's calling,
you're not keeping score of
all the times you pick up the
phone and you just had no
idea who's calling you.
You're just noticing the
times you knew who was calling
or felt you knew who was calling,
but I've had quotes psychic
experiences that seem,
just very low,
probabilistically speaking,
they just seemed very unlikely.
And the, I'm not proposing
that they're proof of anything,
but when you have that experience
is very natural to say,
wow that is really weird.
You know what I mean?
It's just that was just, it feels like,
yeah.
I mean, the issue around
psychic phenomenon is that
the people who've studied it.
And there's been, there's
been a fair amount of,
study of it over the years,
stigmatized though it is, serious
people have studied it and they,
they they're quite adamant that
they have data that suggests
that these are actual
capacities of the human mind,
that the people diverged from,
randomness over the course
of thousands of trials to a
degree that is just experimentally,
quite interesting.
Now, I'm not really in a
position to that all their data
or decide whether these people are frauds,
but some of the,
to hear these people
speak and to see their,
academic affiliations,
one feels like one is not
in the presence of frauds
or mad men.
But the crucial thing is that what,
what all of this study is suggesting,
if valid is that these are
incredibly weak effects,
right?
And these people are not finding
psychics who can walk into
the lab and tell you everything
about your past or future,
or read your mind,
the way a mentalist magician
seems to be demonstrating in a
performance.
These are the very very
weak effects where like,
you're guessing whether a
coin is going to come up head
or tails, 54% of the time,
rather than just 50% of
the time over the course of
thousands of trials.
Now, if you can do that, that is a,
very interesting result because
you shouldn't be able to
do it over the course
of thousands of trials,
and you can do the math and say,
well, this is a departure from randomness.
That's like, one in a billion
due to due to chance, right?
So from an experimental point of view,
it seems very interesting,
but this doesn't link up at all with the,
spiritual hopes of the average
person or the claims of
the average guru who claims
to have, magic powers,
right?
I mean, this is just
not such a weak effect.
So on some level, the my openness to the,
scientific study here never
really connected with a,
traditional view of,
well, maybe we have psychic
powers that we can all develop.
Right.
I mean, it's just, it's right.
And the truth is if anyone had
significant psychic powers,
this would be the easiest
thing in the world
to demonstrate in a lab.
I mean, you just would walk into the lab
and to do it convincingly,
you'd have to get some
trained magician in there,
like someone like Darren
Brown in there to,
ride shotgun with the experimenters,
just to make sure that people
weren't being fooled in
obvious ways, but it's just,
if anyone has these powers
to a significant degree,
this is the easiest thing
in the world to demonstrate.
And so the fact that it
hasn't been demonstrated,
should suggest that it's not there,
but again, I've had weird experiences
and each time you have
one, there's something,
pretty thrilling about it.
- [Bridget] I'll ask
you one more question.
And then my final two short
questions about yourself.
I know you have to go get going.
Do you think,
because the idea of a higher
power is an abstraction that
it's one institution that
won't erode in the pandemic,
media and family and governments
and businesses are kind
of all being put through the wringer,
but because God is ineffable,
he's quite dependable.
- [Sam] Well, I think God
is generally speaking,
losing his subscribers.
There's a lot of churn in
that subscription service.
Yeah.
And it's, I mean, it's just
natural because the more
we understand what's
happening in the world,
the more we understand real
risk and how to respond to it,
the more we have bad things happen to us
and then develop remedies.
We see that all of this
help is coming from our own ingenuity.
And in the absence of
ingenuity, we're screwed, right?
Like, God is not going to help at all.
If you just wait around and pray.
Right.
So it's like, it's just, but they're the,
obviously they're the dead
enders who were just will not
draw any lessons from anything,
including the deaths
of their own children.
Right.
I mean, there are people
who are so far gone
and so taken in by the sunk cost fallacy
that they're willing to
sacrifice their own children
in order to not have been
wrong about their religion,
but most people.
And I think this is just,
this is only going to become
more and more true as we,
I mean, the history of religion now more
and more is the history
of specific questions
and specific problems being answered
and solved by something
other than religion.
Right.
And there's this kind of a one
way forfeiture of authority
that goes from religion to science
and never goes back the other way.
Right.
So there's never there are many,
many questions upon which religion
used to be the trusted authority.
And now it no longer
is because now we have,
meteorologists and neurologists
and food scientists, and, it's
like, why do the crops fail?
Well, you're not going to ask your priest.
You're going to ask the,
somebody from Monsanto say,
and so that's,
but that's only going in one direction.
There's never,
there's no story.
There's not even a single example.
I would say of something
for which science was once
the best authority,
but now that authority has
gone over to your priest
or rabbi, right.
It's just not happening.
And it it won't happen.
And it especially won't happen
because the real baby in the
bath water of religion,
the thing we want to save and
not throw out the thing that,
actually does justify this
multi millennium fascination
with the thoughts
and behaviors of people
like Jesus or Buddha
or any of these other,
founders of religions is the
kind of things we were talking
about, for the first part
of this conversation.
I mean, the fact that
self-transcendence is possible.
The fact that unconditional
love is a state of mind is just
there to be experienced.
There has to be a modern, non divisive,
non bullshit encumbered way
of understanding these experiences.
And there is, and we're,
however, ineptly we're
just in our conversations
with one another, trying
to craft that understanding
and more it can't be a matter
of retiring to some inherited
provincial dogmatic,
sectarian version of
these ancient insights.
It just can't be the motivation for it is,
becoming more and more heavily diluted.
But just by the fact that all
cultures and all languages and
all histories are more
and more in plain view,
I mean, no one can really
be provincial anymore.
You can't just, it makes no
sense to have been born a Muslim
and think that you just by good luck,
you were born into the
one true religion in
relationship to the one true
God and everyone else was born
on the wrong side of the mountains.
- [Bridget] So the last two
questions I ask everyone,
what is your biggest defect of character,
or you can kind of interpret
that however you want,
it could be a vice you're working on,
or however you want to interpret that.
- [Sam] I think, I mean,
I would say personally,
I would say probably
complaining and being,
getting caught in negative
states of mind that just to know,
they just have no purpose.
I mean, just these, again,
these are kind of micro moments,
but just to keep catching
myself throughout the day,
seeing the negative side of something,
quite unnecessarily and maybe
expressing some observation
about it to Annika, or
it just I'm a complaint.
It's I got a good exercise for me,
would be to put that rubber
band on my wrist and snap it
every time I complain about something
or judge something negatively,
I guess I, yeah, you inspired me.
I'll do that,
but that's the movie I
need to scrub from the DVR.
- [Bridget] It's really hard
to catch yourself from that.
And I find gratitude is such a,
I have, because I'm in recovery.
One of the things we always
are doing is gratitude.
Lesson gratitude really is the antidote
to a lot of that for me,
because I too can easily
look around and there's a
nihilistic bent that is
once that train kind of
starts going in my brain,
it doesn't usually stop until it's at,
what's it all for,
which is a bad place for me to be.
And then what's your biggest asset?
- [Sam] Well, apart from all
the things that I'm grateful
for in life that are really not me are
a matter of what I'm doing.
I mean, obviously my
relationships, my family,
I'm just I'm in a very,
I feel incredibly lucky for
the people I have closest to me
at this point,
but I think my biggest
asset is my commitment to
honesty, which I gave, I
wrote this book "Lying",
which you may or may not
have read, but when I was 18,
I took a course at,
Stanford taught by this
great professor, Ron Howard.
And it was simply an
investigation was a seminar,
just more or less focused on
whether lying was ever ethical
and what we spent most of our
time focused on white lies,
the lies that are attempting.
And I came out of that course,
really having had my,
brain reformatted with respect
to the ethics of honesty
and just,
I just recognize that virtually
everything that is going to
go wrong,
really wrong in a person's life,
whether in their
relationships or in their,
reputation in the world
will be a matter of them
line in more and more consequential ways.
And if you call it,
if you close the door to lying
you have just,
you have radically simplified your life.
It's not to say that there
aren't some awkward moments,
but even then it ultimately,
it's an advantage.
I mean, they recognize
are people in your life
who just don't want the truth,
and then you don't have
to spend a lot of time
with those people.
But so, yeah, that's the biggest,
it just to know that I am in
every situation committed,
to being honest.
And so I don't have to do
the arithmetic anymore on,
what did I say to that person?
And what did ?
It's like the somebody who's
lying always has to figure out
how to balance the equation.
And they have to remember
what they said in
a certain circumstance.
And, you just if you're telling the truth,
you don't have to remember anything.
You just have to keep
pointing back to the world
or to what you currently experience
and honestly representing that.
And so, and if you get something wrong
or if you make a mistake or you misspeak,
the antidote to that,
or the remedy for that is just to,
just to more carefully state,
what seems true in the present, right?
It's like any inconsistency
is not a matter of you having
lied as you it's either your
mind changed or you were wrong,
or you misspoke or,
but like the, like the
door to embarrassment,
that is why so wide open for
most people that every moment
of their life, if they're telling lies,
just slams shut for all time.
If you make this fundamental commitment,
it's not to say that other
things can't go wrong,
but yeah,
it's just,
it's an enormous source of
ethical wealth that I would just,
and it was,
I've now, it's now been
a very, very long time.
Again, I was 18 when I had this insight
and being very much
provoked by this one course.
And I got a chance to interview
that professor Ron Howard,
for the print edition of Lying.
So the back of the book is
just an interview with him.
But yeah, so I would say, that's it.
- [Bridget] I love that in recovery,
they say your secrets keep you sick.
And that has definitely
been my experience.
- [Sam] Although I would say I would,
draw a distinction between
lying and keeping secrets
because you can it's not to
say you have to be radically
transparent to the world.
And if someone says,
how much money do you
have in your bank account?
The truth can be, I
don't want to tell you,
right?
Like, there's no reason why
you need that information.
And so you can be honest in,
being private with certain information,
but you just don't have
to lie to be that way.
- [Bridget] Right.
I think they made it in the
more shady sense of the secrets
you keep in an addiction.
- [Sam] Yeah.
- [Bridget] Which is usually lying.
- [Sam] Yeah.
I mean, when you think of how
what's required to maintain an
addiction around other people,
it is at every point,
something that has to
be shored up by lies.
Because like, if you
had to be honest about,
why you were so tired or why
you had bags under your eyes
or where you were, at three
in the morning, very quickly,
the dysfunction of your life
would leak out into the,
into plain view for everyone
to be responding to.
- [Bridget] Right.
Sam, thank you so much.
This was really amazing.
And I am so grateful for
your time and enjoyed this
conversation greatly.
I did not...
I could go like Rogan length
conversation with you because I
have so many questions,
so we'll probably have to do it again.
- [Sam] Yeah.
Well, it's a pleasure
and best of luck with
everything you're doing.
- [Bridget] Thank you.
- [Sam] You've got a great voice,
I see, you mostly on social media,
but I always enjoy it on Twitter.
- [Bridget] Thank you.
Where can we find you and your
app and all of the things Sam
Harris related.
- [Sam] Sam harris.org is my website
and the app is visible there,
but that's waking up.com for the,
proper app website and I'm on Twitter.
And the Twitter is the only place
I have a presence on
Facebook and Instagram,
but those are really just
marketing channels for the podcast
and the app Twitter is all me.
However, so for better and worse.
- [Bridget] I see you had Caitlin
on your most recent podcasts.
I love her.
- [Sam] She's fantastic.
- [Bridget] She's the one who got me my
she referred me to an editor
and I had just had my first
piece of the Atlantic.
- [Sam] Awesome.
- [Bridget] I know. She's
so great. I love her.
She's one of my heroes in
terms of female writers that I
look up to her.
She's just so brilliant.
- [Sam] Yeah. She's great.
Well, congratulations.
That's a great place to publish.
- [Bridget] Thank you.
- [Sam] Yeah.
- [Bridget] I know. Thanks.
Well, thank you for your time.
And this will.
I'll be in touch and let when this is up.
- [Sam] Cool.
- [Bridget] It's time for the
weekly check in with Bridget
and cousin Maggie and this week,
I'm doing a check in by myself because
I cannot find cousin Maggie.
So hopefully she's still alive.
And if she's not,
this podcast will never
see the light of day.
It's been a big week.
I was on Joe Rogan last Friday,
and it aired on Saturday
for those of you who haven't
seen it or heard about it by
now, that was pretty cool.
I got one of the infamous
Joe Rogan COVID-19 tests,
which is, I'm not sure how accurate it is,
but we had a lot of fun as usual.
And then Joe announced his
departure from YouTube to Spotify
a couple of days later.
So that's pretty big news
and I'm excited for him.
I think that Joe deserves
all of the money and success.
He has held the line
for the American male.
And I don't think that there
are many places for just that
red blooded American male to
go and increasingly less and
less spaces where they feel
welcome and accepted and places
like Playboy have dropped the
ball or been unable to hold
the line themselves.
And Joe has really stepped up.
And I think it's part of the
reason that he has such a
massive audience,
because he's really the only one
who's speaking to those men.
And I have often said,
and I think I said to him,
the first time I was on his show,
I'm just so grateful that men
have him because he's a good
example of someone who's
trying to better themselves.
And he's curious,
and he's playful and he's
talks about health and science,
and he can admit when he's
wrong and is a good dad
and husband.
And all of these things are good.
There are so many people who
could have filled that void.
That would have been a really
bad for men as a whole.
So that was fun.
He's just such a mench and a
good role model and support
and someone I really look up to,
and I think ideologically,
we're very similar and it's
nice to sit down with somebody.
And just as he said,
shoot the shit and have fun
and kind of process the
world around us and admit,
we really don't know all
that much about anything.
And so that was fun.
And just interviewing Sam was really
exciting for me because,
I mean, I remember when
I read The End of Faith,
I think I read it right when
it came out and it was so life
changing for me in so many ways,
because I was struggling with
my own Catholicism or that my
Catholic roots.
And I've come,
I have a lot of different
feelings about religion and God.
And I think I really land now
after exploring atheism for
a couple of years and going down
that rabbit hole for a while,
I feel like I land on the side of,
I don't want to pull the
raft out from anybody.
So I don't really care what
people have to believe in order
to get through this thing called life.
And I don't want to stand in
the way and tell somebody that
their thing that helps them isn't real
or their faith is invalid.
And I kind of fall all over the spectrum.
I feel like I dated a guy who was very
religious at one point,
and he used to always talk down to me
and tell me that I was
one of those people who,
takes from the buffet of spirituality
and my faith in something bigger.
Wasn't really true because
it was so unfocused.
Like I take a little bit
from Buddhism and I take some
prayers from Catholicism and
I like some of the things
Judaism has to offer.
And ultimately,
I just don't think that
people should be dicks.
My religion is don't be a Dick
don't hurt other people do
your best to not be an asshole.
And however you get there
is kind of irrelevant.
I was just with Jacob Bressler,
the Holocaust survivor that we
interviewed or I interviewed
here on the podcast and he said something
that stuck out to me,
he was, we were just having
a chat about the world
and his garden because we
have to socially distance.
But he still is determined to see people.
And he was saying that
he believes in humans,
but he doesn't trust them,
which I loved.
I'm like, yeah,
I think that's kind of
where I land on this.
I trust very few,
but I do believe in humanity
as a whole in general.
And I'm just always in awe of
his ability to even say that,
given what he knows about the darkness,
that lies in the hearts of man
and witnessing that firsthand.
So I don't really know
where I'm going with this.
Some just staring at the trees
and the butterflies in my backyard.
I feel pretty grateful for everything.
Everything's really busy.
If you're one of the people
who emailed me in my,
in response to my call for
angel investors on Twitter,
and you're listening to this,
I promise I'll get back to you.
I appreciate the outpouring of support.
I did not realize I had.
And I'm trying to figure
out what is the best way
to kind of proceed forward.
There's a part of me that also
thinks I just need to keep on
grinding it out.
Maggie's calling me. Too late Maggie.
I need to go eat some dinner.
So what else?
Not much. I don't know.
Everything is very weird.
The world is very weird.
And yet the two hummingbirds
outside my window play
magically as if they don't
have a care in the world.
And I hope that that hawk
that lives around here doesn't see them.
And with that, I'll
see you guys next week,
tune in next week for another
riveting episode that will
change your life, help you
get out of your own way
and solve all the world's problems.
I want to thank Ricochet.
Our composer, Jared Elias, my
co-producer and cousin Maggie,
and all of you out there.
This has been Walk-Ins
Welcome with Bridget Phetasy.
I am Bridget Phetasy and you're welcome.
(upbeat music)
It's the dumbest line.
