#34 – Sam Harris, Ph.D.: The transformative power of mindfulness

1. 0:00 – 0:04

   Intro

   1. PAPeter Attia0:00

      [upbeat music]

2. 0:04 – 7:51

   Intro and Peter's first glimpse of presence

   1. PAPeter Attia0:04

      Hey, everyone. Welcome to The Peter Attia Drive. I'm your host, Peter Attia. The Drive is a result of my hunger for optimizing performance, health, longevity, critical thinking, along with a few other obsessions along the way. I've spent the last several years working with some of the most successful top-performing individuals in the world, and this podcast is my attempt to synthesize what I've learned along the way to help you live a higher quality, more fulfilling life. If you enjoy this podcast, you can find more information on today's episode and other topics at peterattiamd.com. [upbeat music] Hey, everyone. Welcome to this week's edition of The Drive. I'm your host, Peter Attia. Our guest this week is Sam Harris, someone I consider a friend, a mentor, a teacher. I met Sam about four years ago, and I suspect many of you already know about Sam or are familiar with his work, but in case you're not, let me say a few words on that. Sam trained in neuroscience. He has a Ph.D. in neuroscience. But in many ways, I consider him a philosopher and frankly just one of the greatest minds that I know. He's an author of some extraordinary books, The End of Faith being his first, The Moral Landscape, Lying, Free Will, and probably my favorite, which you've also probably heard me talk about, is Waking Up, a book that I've read I think three times now, and I'm almost at the point where I understand half of it. Sam is also the host of arguably I would say the most important podcast to me, the Waking Up Podcast, and he is also the creator of an app for meditation called, appropriately, Waking Up. I had the privilege of beta testing it for about nine months before it went live, and it is now officially live. And for anyone who meditates, I would consider this an essential part of your meditation app routine. You've probably heard me talk a lot about this in the past few months, the importance of distress tolerance, mindfulness, the ability to understand what's going on inside our own heads as a tool to be less unhappy. And that might sound kind of blah, but the reality of it is I've never spent more time thinking about this than I have in probably the last 12 to 18 months, and Sam has been such an important part of helping me think about that. And this podcast is pretty long. It's almost three hours. In that time, we go into a lot of this stuff. I, I'm pretty open about how much Sam has helped me. And though I think at times it turns into more of a discussion than an interview, I think we always sort of veer back to the place where you as the listener are gonna get something out of this. If you're not familiar with Sam, I can't encourage you enough to listen to this podcast, and if it piques your curiosity, dig a little bit deeper into this. Couple of housekeeping items. Obviously, we're gonna release this today instead of the day before Christmas, so this is kind of coming out a bit early. And over the next week or so, we haven't quite figured out the schedule yet, but don't worry, we'll be back to kind of our regular schedule in January. If you haven't already done so and you're interested, please sign up for our weekly email that's on the site, www.peterattiamd.com, and somewhere on there there'll be a little place to prompt you to sign up for that. And if you don't like it, just unsubscribe. We also have great show notes which everybody keeps raving about, and I'm really proud of our team for the work they do. I, to be clear, don't do any of that work, but I like that people are spending time on them, especially when it comes to following up on all of the nuances and detail that we go into. Finally, if you're enjoying this podcast, please go to Apple Podcast reviews and leave a favorable review. And if you are not enjoying it and you feel so inclined to leave a review, please do so, but try to be as constructive as possible, 'cause it's a lot easier to course correct if it's constructive than if you just tell me it sucks. Without anything further to say, here is my guest, Sam Harris. [upbeat music] Well, Sam, thanks so much for, uh, making time today.

   2. SHSam Harris3:53

      Yeah, yeah. It's a pleasure.

   3. PAPeter Attia3:54

      This is a first for me. I'm coming to someone else's studio to record.

   4. SHSam Harris3:57

      Yeah. Well, that's, uh... You, you get in the game long enough, this is the way it happens.

   5. PAPeter Attia4:01

      [laughs] Well, I really appreciate it. There's so much I wanna talk about today, but I also wanna be thoughtful about pulling out threads that I think are most valuable to people I take care of. In many ways, that's sort of an undercurrent of what I like to talk about on podcasts is things that I can then share with my patients and things like that. I don't know if you remember this, but, uh, almost a year ago I called you or I emailed you and said, "Hey, man, do you have time to talk?" And you said, "Yeah." And it was like-- Actually, I know when it was. It was right after Christmas. It was, like, the day after Christmas.

   6. SHSam Harris4:31

      Mm.

   7. PAPeter Attia4:32

      Yeah, it was the 26th of December. [chuckles] And I said, "I wanna talk with you about mindfulness meditation." And you said, "Great," and we hopped on a call. Do you remember this discussion?

   8. SHSam Harris4:40

      Yeah. I think I, I think I remember the one you're, you're referencing.

   9. PAPeter Attia4:43

      So I had had a very profound experience, and prior to that I had, uh, been, you know, somewhat, uh, familiar I think would be the, the, the most generous way of saying it, but somewhat familiar with meditation, primarily focusing on concentration-based meditations like mantra-based practice. But I'd just come back from basically a rehab facility where you were sort of out in the middle of nowhere. You had no electronics. You weren't even allowed to have books or anything like that. And you were really sort of stripped down into, um, I guess what could only be viewed as sort of your most fundamental basic elements of self. And I had an epiphany about 10 days into that, which was I realized at the time what must be the first moment in my life that I was present. And it's weird to be almost 45 at the time and to think, "Wow, here I am 10 days of having every stimulus removed from my life, plus going through this very rigorous sort of therapeutic stuff." And I remember exactly where I was sitting. I was sitting in the common room of this place at the edge of a couch, and in a moment, the only thing that mattered was exactly what I was perceiving around me.

   10. SHSam Harris5:54

       Hmm.

   11. PAPeter Attia5:54

       So the light coming in through the window and the, you know, the way in which it made the room sort of light up. The s- the, the, the faint scent of, you know, something that was being cooked in the kitchen, you know, a few, you know, yards away or whatever. And I, I don't know why. I just felt like, wow, this is the first time I, I have actually really think I'm not thinking about something that has happened or worrying about something that is going to happen.

   12. SHSam Harris6:18

       Mm.

   13. PAPeter Attia6:19

       And the other thing that was odd that, that entire time I was, was there was, it was th- they allowed us to exercise, which was a big deal. I was really pleased that I was still permitted to exercise. But you couldn't have music. You didn't have a phone or anything. So it was also the first time in my life I exercised only being able to listen to the sound of my breath.

   14. SHSam Harris6:35

       Yeah. Yeah.

   15. PAPeter Attia6:36

       So every morning, I would run in the woods, and you just heard the sound of the wind blowing by you, and you heard your breath. And when I was, you know, doing push-ups or whatever, it was the same sort of thing. And of course, I'd already read so much of your work, but the reason I wanted to speak with you that day is I wanted to understand, hey, is... Am I getting a glimpse of what one might get if they meditate, i-if they move to a mindfulness-based practice? And what you said was, "Well, there's good news and bad news. The good news is I've got this app that's gonna be coming out soon-"

   16. SHSam Harris7:04

       [chuckles]

   17. PAPeter Attia7:04

       "... and it's gonna help you with this. Uh, the bad news is it's only in beta yet, but you can start right away." There's only, you know, I think at the time there were maybe a dozen meditations.

   18. SHSam Harris7:12

       Yeah. And the very bad news, it's gonna take years for me to produce this thing.

   19. PAPeter Attia7:15

       [laughs]

   20. SHSam Harris7:15

       'Cause I'm, I'm completely incompetent.

   21. PAPeter Attia7:17

       No, but come on. The thing actually is out now, right?

   22. SHSam Harris7:19

       Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's finally out.

   23. PAPeter Attia7:20

       And it, it, I know it was a little longer than you wanted, but, um-

   24. SHSam Harris7:23

       Yeah

   25. PAPeter Attia7:23

       ... and I very quickly put as many of my patients who were interested on the beta version. You guys were so gracious and let all of my, my, uh, my folks on this thing. And in many ways, I view that as one of the most important transitions of my life. I think of, uh, you know, life as a handful of direction changes that, you know, some of them that you look back at the past and say, "Wow, that was sort of a meaningful insight that came to me." So you've talked about this idea of noticing what is arising versus not noticing at all.

   26. SHSam Harris7:50

       Mm-hmm.

3. 7:51 – 18:42

   Concentration vs. mindfulness meditation

   1. PAPeter Attia7:51

      Can you elaborate on this?

   2. SHSam Harris7:54

      Yeah. Well, so I guess I, I should define mindfulness, which is really the, the target state that one is trying to cultivate in at least this probably what, what's the most popular type of meditation now. I mean, there, there are different, as you alluded to, there are different types. There are two basic types of meditation where the distinction is between being lost in thought and being clearly aware of whatever the object of meditation is. So th-that's true for all types of meditation. Thought really is the, the obstacle one is overcoming when one is learning to meditate because our, our natural, our default mode is to just be lost in thought. We're telling ourselves a story all day long, and we're not aware of it. So once one begins to meditate, one is trying to pay attention to something, and this is where the two different types diverge. The first that you alluded to, the, like a mantra-based or a concentration-based object of focus, is the attempt to pay attention to one thing to the exclusion of everything else, right? You want your attention to be absorbed in that object. And in many of those practices, the explicit goal is to do that so well that thoughts no longer arise, right? So you're really trying to get rid of thought in some basic sense. The, the, the arising of thought in that context is a sign that you're not meditating hard enough or one-pointedly enough. Those types of practices can produce extraordinarily positive states of mind, that you can feel bliss and rapture and, and you can actually use as an object of meditation specific states of mind, like loving-kindness, which is called Mettā in the, in the Buddhist tradition, or sympathetic joy or compassion or equanimity. You can cultivate specific attitudes which, if you can focus on them to the exclusion of anything else, you're inhabiting that state to a degree that, you know, most people would find unrecognizable. But the second type of meditation, which is the type I have spent much more time doing and is almost universally considered the more fundamental or the deeper practice, is often described as, as mindfulness because that's the, that's the, the state you're using in the Buddhist tradition to cultivate it. Mindfulness comes from a, a practice called Vipassana, which, which is insight meditation. And there you're, you're not trying to selectively notice one thing or another. You are trying to break the spell of being distracted by thought. So you're, you're, you're trying to be aware of everything without perceiving things through this discursivity or this conceptual lens in each moment. But your attention can be much more choiceless. I mean, you can just notice whatever, in fact, you notice. You're noticing things all the time, sounds and sensations and moods and, and thoughts, but you're not noticing them clearly because you're, you're thinking every moment of the day. Mindfulness begins, for most people, as a training on one object like the breath, but very quickly it becomes something that you apply to the full range of your experience. And what's nice about it, apart from all the, the benefits of doing it and all the things that can be realized by doing it, this type of meditation is clearly coincident with any experience you can have. I mean, there's nothing that is excluded in principle from the meditation. You're not... You can be working out or watching a movie or... I mean, there's n- there's no, there's no thing that in principle does not admit of mindfulness, and, uh, that's not true of other types of practice.

   3. PAPeter Attia11:53

      Yeah, just sharing one example, 'cause the other thing that I remember you said at the time, I, I said, "You know, Sam, I wanna really shift this practice and sort of, I wanna figure out a way to experience that, you know, more and more." And you actually said, "Look, there are a bunch of apps that are already out there that are all pretty good." I mean-

   4. SHSam Harris12:09

      Mm

   5. PAPeter Attia12:09

      ... obviously you're producing yours because you think it's gonna offer something additional, and I'll just make my plug for it here. I've used every one of the apps out there, and I, I do find yours the best But I also realize that there's no one thing that's the best. It's the way you explain things just resonates with me, and it might not resonate with the next person. But the other app that I really liked that you recommended was Ten Percent Happier.

   6. SHSam Harris12:30

      Mm-hmm.

   7. PAPeter Attia12:30

      Which is Dan Harris' app. No, no, no relation, of course. And even within Dan's app, there are many teachers, but there are a couple that I really like, Jeff Warren and, um, Jo- uh, Joseph actually-

   8. SHSam Harris12:43

      Joseph Goldstein.

   9. PAPeter Attia12:43

      Joseph Goldstein, yeah.

   10. SHSam Harris12:45

       Yeah.

   11. PAPeter Attia12:45

       And Jeff Warren has, I believe, a series of walking meditations that are-

   12. SHSam Harris12:50

       Mm-hmm

   13. PAPeter Attia12:50

       ... he refers to as sort of informal meditations. And I remember the first time I did this, maybe it wasn't the first time, but it might've been the second time, but it was pretty early. I realized for the first time that when you walk, if you're paying attention to it, you can feel the wind going past your finger. So if you're walking with your hands in a position such that your thumbs are facing forward and your arms are swinging lightly-

   14. SHSam Harris13:12

       Mm-hmm

   15. PAPeter Attia13:12

       ... in a n- in a normal gait, you can actually feel the air moving past the leading edge of your hand.

   16. SHSam Harris13:19

       Yeah.

   17. PAPeter Attia13:19

       I remember thinking, "How have I been walking for 45 years and I've never once felt this sensation?" And now when I pay attention to it, it's so noticeable, I don't know how it hasn't been distracting me-

   18. SHSam Harris13:30

       Right

   19. PAPeter Attia13:30

       ... for the last 45 years.

   20. SHSam Harris13:32

       Yeah. Yeah. And one might wonder why one would want to notice such a thing. But what you discover when you begin practicing meditation, especially intensively on retreat, is that there's no such thing as a boring object of attention. What boredom is is simply a lack of attention. I mean, we, we get into these situations where we're, we are convinced that we are bored because we haven't found something compelling enough in our experience to capture our attention. But what our attention is, is so blunt an instrument normally that we, we, we need something that's, you know, thrilling or terrifying or, or something to, to fully get us to commit. But what you discover when you learn to meditate is that what pleases us most in those moments when we are fully captured by experience is the, the state of complete attention to the present. And w- if you can muster that on your own, if you can actually guide attention irrespective of the object you're attending to, then anything, any arbitrary object, the feeling of wind on your hand as you walk, can be an exquisitely pleasurable thing to notice. This is why in that first type of meditation practice, concentration practice, it doesn't matter what you pay attention to. You, you can pick an arbitrary object. It can be a random sound, it can be a mantra, uh, it doesn't matter what the mantra is. It can be a candle flame, it can be a color on a piece of paper, it can be a random sound in the environment, it can be an, the, the sensation of a, a fly walking across the back of your hand, right? So anything that you can pay attention to, to the exclusion of anything else, can suddenly disclose what it's like to have a very concentrated mind. And concentration is intrinsically pleasurable. And this is why meditation can have the character of a kind of drug experience. I mean, it's, and, and this is, it can have a superficial character. I mean, you can, you can get kind of addicted to the changes in state you experience in meditation, and you can be misled by these experiences. You can think that it's about these changes rather than something more fundamental. Because a- any- anything you experience by way of newfound pleasure that is based on having a very concentrated mind, you will lose because it's an impermanent state of your, you know, physiology and attention, and it's not the deepest practice. But yeah, it's, it's amazing that concentration itself, regardless of the object, is incredibly pleasant.

   21. PAPeter Attia16:19

       You know, sort of going back to the why, which you've, you've started to allude to, and again, I can't remember if I'm... I, I know you've said this, I, I think many have said this, so I don't, you know, I think many have come to this observation, which is virtually all negatively valenced emotions are not rooted in the present.

   22. SHSam Harris16:37

       Yeah.

   23. PAPeter Attia16:37

       And that sort of becomes the, the, the corollary of being present, therefore being able to concentrate on something in the moment can be quite pleasurable. And I guess that was sort of what I recognized that first moment I experienced it, which was, wow, when you're, when you're fully, fully, you know, engaged in or enveloped within this present sensation, what you're seeing, what you're hearing, what you're feeling, it becomes very difficult to be anxious or depressed-

   24. SHSam Harris17:04

       Mm

   25. PAPeter Attia17:04

       ... or angry or any of these other things. And for me, that was the most interesting part of this, which was-

   26. SHSam Harris17:09

       Yeah

   27. PAPeter Attia17:10

       ... you know, taking a s- a, a very big step back. I'm trying to devote my life to figuring out this problem of how to live longer. But if you asked me how did I think about that problem five years ago versus how do I think about it today, there have been two fundamentally significant differences. There are two things today that I, that occupy much more of my energy with respect to longevity than they did, you know, four or five years ago. And the first of those two is this notion of being happy.

   28. SHSam Harris17:39

       Mm.

   29. PAPeter Attia17:39

       Which again, I think five years ago I would've dismissed that as sort of a, an afterthought. Like, it is what it is, and as long as all those other things happen, you'll be happy. You know?

   30. SHSam Harris17:47

       Right.
4. 18:42 – 25:53

   Pain, suffering and the meaning of well-being

   1. SHSam Harris18:42

      Yeah, and I think we also have inaccurate associations with terms like happiness, and we, we haven't distinguished terms that are different, like pain and suffering. There's nothing about meditation that gets rid of physical pain. Pain is just something that you're going to experience, and you can actually experience surprising degrees of pain while meditating. If you just resolve not to move your body, it doesn't matter how comfortable your chair is, eventually pain is gonna arise.

   2. PAPeter Attia19:13

      And you have a guided meditation that takes us through that exercise-

   3. SHSam Harris19:16

      Yeah

   4. PAPeter Attia19:16

      ... that is, I feel like within two minutes, it's unbearable.

   5. SHSam Harris19:20

      There are people who sit for hours and hours and, I mean, you know, 12 hours, you know? And-

   6. PAPeter Attia19:24

      [chuckles] It's unbelievable

   7. SHSam Harris19:25

      ... and it's excruciating, and yet when you get up, you haven't hurt yourself. It's not synonymous with injury, right? Now, obviously, there, there are ways you could injure yourself if you don't move. But there can be a strange magnification of pain if you resolve to sit still for a very long time. But one thing you discover there, which is u-useful to discover, is that there is a difference between pain and suffering. You can feel intensely negative sensory experience, and you can, you can feel intensely negative emotions even. You can feel anger and depression and sadness. And if you can be content to simply be aware of those sensations or those moods or emotions, if you can recognize that consciousness is this, the prior condition in which all of those things are appearing, and you're, you are simply that which is aware of these, these changing phenomenon. If you can become interested in the character of a mood like sadness or, or a pain in the knee, it's actually possible to experience these states with total equanimity. And o-one of the, the features is, as you said, not being focused at all by thought on the past or the future. So I mean, o-one thing with physical pain we all experience is this sense that some sensation is intolerable, but there's this paradox because in that moment, you've already tolerated it, right? I mean, it's fully arrived.

   8. PAPeter Attia21:03

      Right.

   9. SHSam Harris21:03

      You've merely experienced it. Yeah.

   10. PAPeter Attia21:05

       It's really the anticipation of what's to follow.

   11. SHSam Harris21:06

       You're, you're worried about the future. You're worried about how long this is gonna go on. And it's certainly good to practice finding a place of equanimity with pain. I'm not saying, you know, obviously, there are pains that, that are conceivable that even the best meditator might find it difficult to find equanimity with. But there really is an immense amount of growth one can have in this area, where you just, you can notice this difference between reacting to pain, contracting around it, resisting it, trying to make it go away, wishing it away, worrying about w- how long it'll be there. And all of this happens, th-this, this cascade, it just, it happens so quickly that it's just you don't even notice the mechanics of it. It's just you, right? It's just you suffering. But the moment you can pick apart the mechanics of it because you can pay attention to what is arising, the, the, the feeling of resistance, the fear about what, what's gonna happen in the next moment, and keep dropping back into a position of merely witnessing all of these things arise and pass away. There are experiences I've had and many have had in meditation where an excruciating sensation becomes so intense that you actually don't know whether or not you're experiencing agony or ecstasy. Like, like the, the valence of the intense mental state is it just gets kind of wiped out. It's just, you know, just sheer intensity. And there is a, a fundamental cancellation of suffering in those moments. And this goes back to what we were just saying about the pleasures of concentration. Nothing concentrates your mind more easily than pain, right? And so, so if you're, if you're willing, if you can get past your fear and just go into it, you can experience a lot of mental pleasure. I mean, this is, you know, uh, I mean, I'm not, I don't think I've ever met somebody who, who, uh, cl-claimed to be a masochist, but I can imagine that if masochism is possible, there's some reason why this is the ca-- th-this, this would be, this would be a reason why this w- this would be the case, that there is, I can only imagine they're experiencing intense concentration in, you know, various states that most people would find, you know, physically intolerable. But back to this, the, the idea of happiness and, and other states that are commonly associated with it. I think we all have this sense that happiness is a matter of being joyful all the time, and this is a very common idea.

   12. PAPeter Attia23:45

       This is sort of the misconception that makes-

   13. SHSam Harris23:46

       Yeah

   14. PAPeter Attia23:46

       ... many of us think that, well, that's not desirable because if I were joyful every minute of every day, I wouldn't have the drive to do X, Y, and Z, or I wouldn't be, quote-unquote, "real" in some way. But, but-

   15. SHSam Harris23:59

       Or if it is a matter of securing some durable source of joy, then it can't absorb any of the other things in life for which joy would be inappropriate. You know, people die.

   16. PAPeter Attia24:11

       Right.

   17. SHSam Harris24:12

       And there's just, there are, there are ups and downs in life. And I don't talk about or think about happiness very much. I think about well-being and, and flourishing more. And tho-those concepts for me can embrace all of the vicissitudes of life, where you If you experience some serious loss in your life, there's a resiliency and a, and a way of embracing that which is, which brings out the, the wisest and most compassionate and most expansive parts of yourself. That is another, that is another component of wellbeing. The, the, the narrow conception of happiness that most of us have by default is something that we, that we are always trying to defend and shore up against all of the other things in life that are threatening to undermine it. And the one obvious point is that it's just not, it's not a safe play. It is perpetually under threat, and any joy you can feel by virtue it, of it having arisen based on some causes and conditions is going to pass away. You know, you just can't keep any emotion going for days or even hours at a time. And one thing you discover w- when you learn to meditate is that, you know, negative emotion in particular has a very short half-life. You know, I mean, many of us imagine that we can stay angry or sad for, some people would imagine days. I think almost everyone thinks hours at a time. It's actually impossible if you are no longer lost in thought about all the reasons why you should be angry or sad.

5. 25:53 – 30:33

   Watching anger fade and the dream analogy

   1. PAPeter Attia25:53

      So this was one of the earlier-- I can't remember if this was one of the lessons in your meditation app early on, or it was just a discussion you and I had, but I got to put it to the test shortly after.

   2. SHSam Harris26:05

      Mm.

   3. PAPeter Attia26:05

      So I was, uh, in New York, and obviously in New York it's, everything's a hustle, right? It's you're, you're running around, people are rude, you're gonna get bumped into. And one of my pet peeves in New York is when you see somebody walking towards you and they're for a moment lost in whatever they're doing, they're usually down looking at their phone or something like that, I always think it's a reasonable courtesy to just not walk into them, even if they're in your line of sight. You still sort of go out of your way to not bump into them. But-

   4. SHSam Harris26:34

      Right

   5. PAPeter Attia26:34

      ... for whatever reason, there's just a subset of people who love that opportunity to almost knock you off your feet. So sure enough, one day I am about to turn a corner and this guy is walking, and it was clear that he could see me and I had looked down, so my bad. But this guy plows right into me. And I, I had just had, either had this discussion with you or just heard, you know, this lesson about how long can you actually stay angry. And so this happens, and I immediately sort of observe this emotion, this rise of anger in me, right? Which was like the desire to turn around and walk up to the guy and say something. Serves no purpose, of course. But instead I decided, "Well, just watch this, watch this emotion. How long does it last?"

   6. SHSam Harris27:20

      Mm-hmm.

   7. PAPeter Attia27:21

      You know, and I remember I was walking somewhere that I was gonna be in 10 minutes, and I was like, "Do you think this will last 10 more minutes? Could you be angry for the next 10 minutes if you just observe this feeling?" And the answer was no. I mean, it was gone-

   8. SHSam Harris27:33

      Yeah

   9. PAPeter Attia27:33

      ... actually, I felt like within seconds.

   10. SHSam Harris27:35

       Yeah.

   11. PAPeter Attia27:36

       And to me, that was like a really big aha moment for s- especially for someone like me who's so easily prone to anger, to think that by simply being observant of that emotional state, I could have some control over it, which has always felt like the opposite, right? It's always felt like that emotional state has control over me.

   12. SHSam Harris27:53

       Right. And it does. I mean, the important point to never forget is that it has complete control over you as long as you're identified with the next angry thought that's arising in consciousness. If you have no perspective on the fact that you are thinking, right, well, then you simply become that thought for the period that it's, it's captivating, and you are pushed in whatever direction it's aimed, right? So if, if it is getting you to say the angry thing or physically assault the, the person, you need some level of metacognition in order to pull the brakes. Otherwise, you're just... It, it's exactly like being asleep and dreaming and not knowing that you're dreaming. This happens to us, all of us, every night. We, we get into bed, and then suddenly a movie starts playing that we're totally identified with. We're, we're one of the characters in it, and we're completely unaware of this change, right? And we're c- And the, the most surprising thing about dreams is that we're not surprised when they arise, right? Like there's no-

   13. PAPeter Attia29:02

       Mm-hmm.

   14. SHSam Harris29:03

       You know, we didn't have the expectation that we would stay in our beds, apparently. We're not surprised that the laws of physics are being violated for our amusement. And we're suddenly in these situations where we are, are fully captive to a completely illusory, seemingly sensory experience. But, you know, all of this is some kind of hallucination. And identification with thought in the waking state has that character to some degrees. It's, it's thought to be totally normal psychologically, right? 'Cause it is our default state. But once you learn the alternative, which is to be mindful, you then have a very different sense of what optimal mental health would be. And, uh, so when I find myself lost in thought and just, you know, suddenly angry or, or anxious or frustrated or whatever it is, and I wake up from that experience, it is a little bit like waking up from a dream or a hallucination or... It's hard to shake the sense that it's, it, it's pathological. I was stuck in something about which I had no awareness, right? And it was forcing me to say and do and think and feel things that were, given my now current awareness, were completely unnecessary.

6. 30:33 – 41:40

   Why humans ruminate: language and evolution

   1. PAPeter Attia30:33

      You see, to me, what's so interesting about this, David Foster Wallace In his commencement speech in 2005 at Kenyon College, the This Is Water, which is one of my favorite-

   2. SHSam Harris30:42

      Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's great

   3. PAPeter Attia30:43

      ... things to listen to. I burned a copy off YouTube, and now it sits on my phone, and I try to listen to it at least once a month, if not more. And it, it, like I, even though I almost know it off by heart, it doesn't matter. Like, I still get some benefit every time I hear it. And when he talks about this, he speaks specifically about the problem with this is that it is our default, and that's the part that makes this so challenging. So do we have evidence of other species? Like, are we the only ones that are blessed/cursed with this ability for rumination and constant thought? I mean, do we, do we have any evidence that a dog is spending any percentage of his or her time thinking about what happened the day before or the next meal? Where do we as humans stack up in this space?

   4. SHSam Harris31:31

      Well, it, it's important to acknowledge that we're blessed and cursed by this because-

   5. PAPeter Attia31:37

      Yes

   6. SHSam Harris31:37

      ... this capacity for linguistic, abstract, complex thought is what has given us everything that is recognizably human, right?

   7. PAPeter Attia31:47

      Mm-hmm.

   8. SHSam Harris31:48

      It has given us culture, it has given us civilization. It's, it's allowed us to place all of the learning of our ancestors in a, a strata that is accessible to all of us and to every present generation so that we don't have to relearn everything from the ground up. I mean, just, just imagine what the alternative would be if there was no acquisition of knowledge.

   9. PAPeter Attia32:10

      Right. No, no progress in civilization.

   10. SHSam Harris32:11

       Yeah. And, and for the longest time, that was true of humanity as well. Uh, you know, if you go back 50,000 years, and then you decide to go back 60,000 years, the, the differences are, are, are impressively nonexistent-

   11. PAPeter Attia32:24

       Right

   12. SHSam Harris32:24

       ... you know, in terms of the, the toolkit anyone was working with.

   13. PAPeter Attia32:28

       So that's interesting, Sam. So do... If we go back to, I don't, I, I know there, it's, there's some debate about when language was really codified.

   14. SHSam Harris32:35

       Mm-hmm.

   15. PAPeter Attia32:35

       But to pick a point in time when we're pretty sure there was no language, we could say 200,000 years ago, right?

   16. SHSam Harris32:40

       Right.

   17. PAPeter Attia32:40

       I think most neuroscientists would agree, no language 200,000 years ago. Was the arrival of language the arrival of this capacity? Or, you know, when, where did this show up?

   18. SHSam Harris32:50

       Yeah, I think language is the, the main variable there. I mean, it's the main variable with respect to being able to abstract, to be- being able to represent anything that's, that's not currently present or not currently happening.

   19. PAPeter Attia33:05

       Mm-hmm.

   20. SHSam Harris33:05

       It's the basis for communicating anything of substance to anyone else and, and storing a kind of cultural memory of anything, whether it's just by virtue of an oral tradition or, or, you know, once writing came along. So language is necessary for all that. I mean, just to, to be able to articulate the concept of time, you know, the concept of a past where the causes of the present are stored and a future which is yet to arrive that needs to be planned for or that can be better or worse. It's something that, that I think other species probably have in a very primitive form that is not associated with, with conscious thought. I think that a dog, for instance, learns various associations with stimuli, right?

   21. PAPeter Attia33:57

       Right. There are Pavlovian responses that these animals can experience.

   22. SHSam Harris34:00

       Yeah. And they, and they, and they recognize people, obviously. I mean, they, they recognize people arguably better than any other species other than, than the human. So they can have real relationships, and there's no question they have emotions, and they have preferences and all of that. But in terms of forming a notion of the future or a notion of the, a way in which the world might be different, it's one thing to recognize your friend, recogn- in the case of a dog, recognize your owner and prefer that person to somebody else. It's another thing to have any concept of having had a past with that person. Now, the fact that you recognize them indicates a past, right? But all of that could be preconscious to a dog. It's just there's just this kind of binary difference between recognition and, and not.

   23. PAPeter Attia34:59

       So, so let's use an even more obvious example, and I'll tell you where I'm going with this because then I wanna understand this, which is, as I observe my three children, there is a distinction in what I see in the younger ones that they seem to always be present.

   24. SHSam Harris35:14

       Mm-hmm.

   25. PAPeter Attia35:14

       So, which isn't to say that they don't get upset. I mean, you only have to look at a toddler for 10 seconds to watch what, that they can get upset.

   26. SHSam Harris35:20

       Yeah.

   27. PAPeter Attia35:21

       But I doubt that they're upset about anything other than what they're experiencing in the moment, right? They're hungry, their diaper's dirty, whatever. They fell, they hurt themselves, something like that. But if you look at, you know, a teenager or a 10-year-old, a preteen, they are now starting to suffer from this-

   28. SHSam Harris35:38

       Yeah

   29. PAPeter Attia35:38

       ... quote, unquote, "disease" of too much thinking.

   30. SHSam Harris35:42

       Yeah.
7. 41:40 – 54:15

   Mindfulness hacks, eating and anger with family

   1. PAPeter Attia41:40

      I think it's actually both, right? I mean, I think that mindfulness clearly makes it easier to endure unpleasant things. So, you know, I, I was late to come over here today-

   2. SHSam Harris41:51

      Mm

   3. PAPeter Attia41:51

      ... because the, to get to your place, which should have been an hour, took two hours. And that is normally something that would drive me batshit crazy just by, by way of process. Like, why is it so inefficient? Like, why are there so many cars on the road? Blah, blah. Like, I would get into a woe is me narrative about this, which is of course ironic because, like, why am I more special than every other car on this road, right? Like, everyone is equally in the same situation of it's taking two hours to get somewhere that it should take one hour. And actually, I have used traffic, because when you live in Southern California and split your time in New York, you get plenty of exposure to traffic.

   4. SHSam Harris42:34

      Mm.

   5. PAPeter Attia42:34

      I've actually used this as an amazing tool for mindfulness, and I no longer let it really get to me. Instead, I just sort of observe, "Oh, look, you're feeling a little bit self-important today. Like, you're feeling like your time is more valuable than everybody else's time. Let's examine that. Is that really true?"

   6. SHSam Harris42:51

      Mm.

   7. PAPeter Attia42:51

      Not really Okay, what is happening in this exact moment? The sun is shining this way or, you know, all these other things. So, so in many ways, if nothing else, it's simply a hack to allow me to be less miserable.

   8. SHSam Harris43:02

      Yeah. Yeah.

   9. PAPeter Attia43:03

      But on the flip side, I actually do think there is a way to enjoy certain moments more, and, and I've certainly noticed this the most with my kids. I think that, you know, I have a... D- our, our middle son who's four, you know, he's just... That's what four... Like a four-year-old boy is just gonna be more prone to chewing up the air in the room when it comes to doing bad stuff.

   10. SHSam Harris43:24

       Hmm.

   11. PAPeter Attia43:25

       And I find that, and to be clear, they're not all days that I can do this. There are some days when he's acting crazy that it just drives me nuts. But more often than not, I'm sort of able to actually reflect on it pleasantly and think about, like, what's happening in this moment, right? Okay, he's, he's yelling, he's screaming, he's throwing a temper tantrum, he's hit his brother, he's done this, he's done that. But in this moment, is there anything that's really that bad about any of these things? I mean, like, it's not like he's gonna be doing this when he goes to college. Like what am I-

   12. SHSam Harris43:53

       Right. Yeah

   13. PAPeter Attia43:53

       ... what am I really worried about here?

   14. SHSam Harris43:54

       Yeah.

   15. PAPeter Attia43:55

       And in fact, I can turn that into a positive thing, which is one day he will be in college, and he won't be a cute little four-year-old who loves me so much maybe.

   16. SHSam Harris44:03

       Yeah, you'll miss this moment then.

   17. PAPeter Attia44:04

       Yeah, I'll miss this moment. So, so I have found that, again, I, I use the word hack because I... it's such an inelegant way to describe it. But it's basically a tool to make me a little bit more aware of where I am in a given moment. And whether that produces happiness or not, I mean, I sort of agree with you, the semantics of happiness are too cumbersome for me to explain. You know, people have talked about the d- happiness is simply the difference between reality and expectation. I mean, that's-

   18. SHSam Harris44:31

       Hmm

   19. PAPeter Attia44:31

       ... a bit vague for me. I'm not smart enough to fully understand what that means, though I understand the concept. But clearly, there's some component of expecting the world to be a certain way and it not being that way producing an emotional state or a valence that is negative one way or the other. And, and, and so I think while as, as, as wonderful as mindfulness is to offset that, there is this moment at times of taking a bite of food, and rather than thinking about the next bite or what you're gonna eat later, like actually thinking, you know, or observing the sensations as they're occurring in that moment, kind of slowing things down in a way.

   20. SHSam Harris45:07

       Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

   21. PAPeter Attia45:07

       'Cause I don't know why. I just tend to always live in a fast-forward mode. That is my default, is to be full fast-forward.

   22. SHSam Harris45:14

       Well, it's, it's most people's default. I always say it's everyone's default who's not being mindful because you're, you're constantly... Even when you're getting what you want, even when you're in the very act of gratifying a desire, you're still subtly inclining toward the next moment. You're not actually landing on each moment of experience with full attention. And paradoxically, you, you can discover that many of the things you think you want, you don't want all that much if you pay attention to what it's actually like to gratify those desires. Maybe with food, this is very clear. So you can be eating something. You can think you want dessert. You can have a real sweet tooth, and if you pay very close attention to what it's like to eat that sweet thing you're, you know, finally gorging on, more often than not, you discover, you know, it's just a little too sweet. There's something about it that is unpleasant, and your pleasure in that moment is predicated on your being able to take a drink of water in the next, right? Like if you have... If you bite a candy bar or something that's candy that's made for kids delivers this insight to me very clearly. It's like the, the moment I, I, I think I want something, you know, at the movies, what- whatever it is, say, you know, M&M's or something that is hasn't changed its formula for the last 40 years, and I'm eating it, and I begin to notice that I'm eating more of it as a way of just-

   23. PAPeter Attia46:46

       Getting rid of the exact-

   24. SHSam Harris46:47

       ... getting rid of the, the-

   25. PAPeter Attia46:48

       ... sense in your palate at that moment. Yeah

   26. SHSam Harris46:49

       ... yeah, the last moment of taste that is just too chemical-laden, too sweet, and, you know, if I didn't have a drink of water, you know, this, this would actually be an unpleasant experience. And it's not what it seems when you're not paying attention. And now this is not to say that there's nothing that's truly pleasurable. I mean, there's all kinds of pleasure. And again, being able to really connect with the present moment delivers its own intrinsic pleasure. But your sense of what matters can definitely change the moment you begin to pay closer attention to, to what experience is actually like.

   27. PAPeter Attia47:27

       I think it was in one of your lessons, but it, it might have been in a podcast where you talk about imagine you're playing a video game and it's the same video game every time and you always get killed by the same monster at the same part of the maze or whatever it is.

   28. SHSam Harris47:44

       Right.

   29. PAPeter Attia47:44

       And I think about that a lot every time I falter at predictably, you know, known, understood things that get under my skin. And it's very discouraging-

   30. SHSam Harris47:55

       Yeah
8. 54:15 – 59:12

   Learning hard skills and the case for silent retreats

   1. PAPeter Attia54:15

      When I think about one of the most difficult things to... Uh, there are two things in my life that I have learned that I think were very difficult and took a lot of time. The first was in the year 2000 when I was finishing medical school, I had a really bad back injury.

   2. SHSam Harris54:30

      Hmm.

   3. PAPeter Attia54:30

      And it's a long story, but it basically for a y- a year of my life, I was not able to move properly.

   4. SHSam Harris54:39

      Hmm.

   5. PAPeter Attia54:39

      And for three months, I was not able to move at all.

   6. SHSam Harris54:41

      Wow. How'd that happen?

   7. PAPeter Attia54:45

      It's not clear how it happened, but what happened was a pretty bad outcome, and I ended up having surgery, but the surgeon operated on the wrong side, so it went from a very bad situation to a worse situation.

   8. SHSam Harris54:57

      Oh, man.

   9. PAPeter Attia54:59

      And a, a whole series of cascading events led to it being what it was. I look back at that, as I've described this before, as the best worst experience of my life, because having been in so much pain for so long, I had to learn how to do everything from scratch. So I had to learn how to be able to brush my teeth without putting stress on my back, which most people wouldn't even think about. You wouldn't think that there's a right and a wrong way to brush your teeth.

   10. SHSam Harris55:25

       Mm.

   11. PAPeter Attia55:25

       You wouldn't think that there's a right and a wrong way to get out of your bed, put your shoes on, or get out of your car. It turns out there is, but you can only learn it when you are in such a fragile state that you've lost every ounce of strength in your back. And because I experienced that for so long, a year, it allowed me to make this transition, which I want to of course apply to meditation. The transition is going from being unconsciously incompetent to then being consciously incompetent to then consciously competent, and of course, the goal is to one day get to a point where you are unconsciously competent.

   12. SHSam Harris55:59

       Mm.

   13. PAPeter Attia56:00

       I don't think I'm unconsciously competent at a single thing I do, including movement, but I'm now consciously competent at moving around and not hurting my back.

   14. SHSam Harris56:09

       Mm.

   15. PAPeter Attia56:10

       But I couldn't have got there if I didn't have that feedback loop that allowed me to go through it. The other thing was learning how to swim as an adult. You know, you throw-

   16. SHSam Harris56:18

       Right

   17. PAPeter Attia56:18

       ... an adult in the water who's, who never swum before, they are so incompetent, but they don't even really understand what it is. And so the first act of learning how to swim is learning to feel what's making you sink.

   18. SHSam Harris56:30

       Mm-hmm.

   19. PAPeter Attia56:30

       Figuring out what it is that is actually dropping you to the bottom of the pool. And then, of course, you wanna be able to correct that, and with great effort over short periods of time, exercise some capacity to fix that. I would say those two experiences have been by far the most difficult, but they pale in comparison to mindfulness.

   20. SHSam Harris56:50

       Mm.

   21. PAPeter Attia56:50

       Now, I don't know if that just makes me a hard case, but... And, and maybe it's, you know, the other thing I was thinking about when I was reflecting on this is, having a back injury, you don't get a time, you don't get a timeout from it. You know, it's every minute-

   22. SHSam Harris57:04

       Yeah

   23. PAPeter Attia57:04

       ... of every day you're immersed in that exposure, that stimulus, and that feedback loop. Similarly, once I dedicated myself to swimming, I swam four hours a day. And I think-

   24. SHSam Harris57:15

       Wow

   25. PAPeter Attia57:15

       ... maybe the issue is because I don't meditate for four hours a day, it's just gonna take a lot longer to do it. And I know you and I have spoken about this, and, and, and your belief is that something really happens when you go on a silent retreat. And I remember-

   26. SHSam Harris57:29

       Mm

   27. PAPeter Attia57:29

       ... once asking you, I said, "Hey, Sam, I see this retreat. It's four days. Do you think I should go?" And you actually said, "No, I wouldn't go for a four-day retreat. I'd wait till you can do 10 or 14 days."

   28. SHSam Harris57:38

       Yeah, d- I, I guess I would modify that slightly. I, I think a week to 10 days is the, the shortest I can recommend without caveat. I, I think the first three days or so of a retreat are more or less the hardest for, for a retreat of any length. So if you do, if you do a three-day retreat or a four-day retreat, you're almost guaranteed to have a lot of restlessness and just resistance to the whole project. And you may not touch anything on the other side of that.

   29. PAPeter Attia58:09

       Mm.

   30. SHSam Harris58:09

       You can just be kind of unhappy the whole time, and then just relieved to be getting off retreat. Whereas if you have 10 days, just seems like an eternity. Once you put yourself on retreat and you're, you've just shut down your connection to everything, there's no talking, there's no writing, there's no reading, it's just you and your attention in each moment, 10 days seems like an eternity. And so as you move through those first few days of resistance, at day three, you're still so far away from the day that you're going home that it, it's much more common to just surrender at that point and really get into it. Just decide that you c- you'll just pick up your life as you left it when you get off retreat, and that for this period, there's just nothing worth thinking about. You just need to, to pay attention to whatever's appearing, you know, your breath, sounds, the movement of air on your hand as you walk.

9. 59:12 – 1:14:31

   Sam's Outward Bound solo and first MDMA experience

   1. PAPeter Attia59:12

      Your first experience in this was sort of comical the way you describe it, right? This was, uh, when you were 16, I believe?

   2. SHSam Harris59:19

      Oh, no. Well, that was my first experience of solitude that w- I guess it would've been a retreat, but I was on Outward Bound, and the, the Outward Bound, I, I assume they still have it, but back then they had something called the Solo, which was three... It was a 23-day period of, of, you know, camping and hiking and, and kind of outdoorsmanship. But, you know, maybe day 18 or so, they'd put you in isolation for three full days where you would fast and do nothing, right? So you couldn't go hiking and do anything that would distract you, and I think that the reason for that was not based on any meditative agenda that they had. It was just they don't want a, a bunch of not fully trained people wandering around the, the wilderness while fasted. So they just park you in some place. We were by this lake at maybe 9,000 feet, and you just camp with a water bottle, and that's all you got. You just have your, you know, sleeping bag, your water bottle, and you have a journal.

   3. PAPeter Attia1:00:21

      And your journal.

   4. SHSam Harris1:00:21

      Yeah, you can write in your journal. And I found the experience just intolerable. It was just-

   5. PAPeter Attia1:00:28

      You were 16?

   6. SHSam Harris1:00:29

      Yeah, I was 16. Yeah, and I, so I opened my book, Waking Up, with this story because it was the first moment in my life that I realized that I was on the wrong side of some understanding about the nature of, of my own mind and the, the possibility of finding a durable source of, of happiness in this life. I mean, so, so I, I was, I was alone in an absolutely beautiful spot and totally miserable based on the fact that I didn't have any of the usual distractions. And if you could've just swapped places with me and inhabited my consciousness, I was spending all my time Fantasizing about the things I was gonna do when I got off, when I got out of those goddamn mountains and got back to my life in the world and, you know, the friends I would see and the foods I would eat and the, I would just, it was just a continuous advertisement for everything that I missed. You know? It was just, it was like a meditation on loneliness and boredom and grief, ultimately. I just, it was just to be separated from everyone I cared about and every fun thing I could do and every tasty thing I could eat. It was just a source of perfect misery for me. So when I came off the solo and met all of the other people who had also been on their solos, I was astonished to discover that many of them had had profoundly happy experiences, right? And that-

   7. PAPeter Attia1:02:01

      Were you one of the youngest people on this retreat?

   8. SHSam Harris1:02:02

      Yeah. Yeah. So I was, I think I, I was the youngest. So it was, I think the cutoff, I don't know if this is still the case, but the cutoff for Outward Bound was 16 and a half, and I was just 16 and a half. So, you know, there were lots of people who were 10 years older. So, and so they were in different places in their lives, and many of them just had a kind of breakthrough experience. I mean, they just, it, it was just some of the best time they'd ever spent alive, and they were kind of radiantly happy, you know, for... 'Cause we had just done 18 or so days of brutal hiking. I mean, just, you know, kind of just 14-hour days of hiking with 60-pound packs and, you know, we had this full ordeal of learning how to, to function in the, in the backcountry. And then it all stops, and you're just alone by this alpine lake. So many of them had come out of that feeling that they had touched something profound, and I had no idea what they were talking about. It was like being told, "Yeah, you know, I, I just got, you know, run over by a car, and it was the greatest thing that's ever happened to me." It's like it just, I mean, I had come out of there having had a harrowing experience, right?

   9. PAPeter Attia1:03:13

      So what happened when you went back home after that? Did you look back and reflect on that, or does that basically just become a footnote into a broader story that really didn't factor into your, your ultimate search for, for, you know, call it enlightenment, call it what you want?

   10. SHSam Harris1:03:31

       It took a little time. I, so I, it was probably a year and a half before I then had an experience with, with psychedelics that put all of this in perspective for me. So-

   11. PAPeter Attia1:03:44

       And was your first experience with psilocybin or LSD?

   12. SHSam Harris1:03:47

       Strangely, I had taken psilocybin as a teenager before I had what really was the, the kind of breakthrough experience for me on MDMA when I was 18.

   13. PAPeter Attia1:03:59

       Yeah, you wrote about that as well.

   14. SHSam Harris1:04:01

       Yeah. Yeah. That was, that's in "Waking Up." I'd taken psilocybi-- I, I smoked marijuana, and I had taken mushrooms a few times as a teenager, and they never, they never signaled anything profound to me about the nature of the mind or they never indicated a path forward apart from just this sense that these drugs produced interesting experiences. I had no framing for the ex- what I experienced on these drugs that-

   15. PAPeter Attia1:04:32

       In other words, you experienced the altered state, but there was no altered trait, to borrow from the title of the same book.

   16. SHSam Harris1:04:38

       Yeah. And, and, and also just no sense that there could be altered traits. There was no project associated with changing your experience in that way. It was just, you know, it was kinda fun. So I guess, you know, some of the experiences had also been unpleasant on psilocybin, but it's just these were drug experiences, you know? And it was like getting drunk. Like if you, if you get drunk, you don't come away from that experience thinking, "I wonder if this indicates that it's possible to feel, kinda natively feel like I've had six beers and, you know, I can just be more that sort of person by some other method that has nothing to do with drinking beer all the time."

   17. PAPeter Attia1:05:19

       Right. [laughs]

   18. SHSam Harris1:05:20

       So, but, but with MDMA, you know, my first experience on, on ecstasy, I had this epiphany that this is what consciousness was like when it was no longer encumbered by my self-concern, by my egocentricity, by my-

   19. PAPeter Attia1:05:39

       And because you were 18, I mean, was it so much about, like I'm trying to reflect on what it was like to be an 18-year-old boy, but I think if I recall, you wrote about just sort of the empathy that you had for your friend, 'cause it was you and another friend, right?

   20. SHSam Harris1:05:53

       Yeah.

   21. PAPeter Attia1:05:54

       And was that the part that was so stunning to you, which was, "Oh my God," like, "Spent the last 18 years sort of not thinking about it through somebody else's eyes"? Or what, what, what was it that you experienced, if you can recall, that at least showed you or perhaps was the thin end of the wedge that said, "There is now an altered state of consciousness that could exist outside of this state that I'm in that might be desirable"?

   22. SHSam Harris1:06:19

       It was a recognition that what was changing for me while I was coming on to the drug was that I was losing my concern about myself, right? So that I, so I'm talking to my best friend, some- somebody who's, who I, I already love and, and am connected to and have, you know, positive feelings for. But what was happening is that I, I started to punch through to this level of connection with him that I had never felt before, despite the fact that we were great friends. And it had a kind of structure to it, or it was, it was dissecting a structure within my mind that I had never had any cause to notice, which was my default state was normally that, you know, if I'm talking to him Some amount of my attention is bound up in a concern about what he thinks about me, right? So if, you know, if, if I see some change in expression on his face based on what I just said, I'm reading into those changes some message about me, some message about how I'm doing. And there are many other features to this. I mean, there, there's also a sense of a kind of zero-sum aspect to my own stature in the world and my, you know, feeling of well-being in light of other people's success and, and happiness. So, and this is something you can discover in yourself. Imagine those times where you have a friend who has some, you know, massive success, right? You know, you're struggling in your life to be as successful as you want to be. If you're like most people, you haven't arrived yet, and then you have a friend, you know, who's winning some version of the lottery. And when this is being communicated to you, you're, you're asked to celebrate with them essentially, and you can discover in yourself a kind of begrudging feeling, whether it's envy or there's a, there's a limitation on your capacity to experience what's, what's called sympathetic joy in, in Buddhism for that person. And that's a ugly characteristic of the mind. I mean, here, I mean, here's someone who you ostensibly really care about. This is someone you really love. This is someone who you think-

   23. PAPeter Attia1:08:42

       And their windfall did not come at your expense.

   24. SHSam Harris1:08:45

       Right. Exactly. And yet you, there's something in you that can't actually celebrate for them fully because you're so bound up with who you are and what you want for yourself and, you know, how you think they, they may think about you. And I mean, this horror show of self-reference and this miserly spirit with respect to the circumstance you're, you're in with, with everyone. So what happened on, for, in this first MDMA trip is that I just punched through all of that, right? All of that was just gone, and there was no associated inebriation. I mean, it was just, my experience was of just-

   25. PAPeter Attia1:09:25

       That's, that's the thing with MDMA that makes it sort of quite distinct and special from some of these other agents, right? Is there is no sense of altered consciousness.

   26. SHSam Harris1:09:34

       Yeah. It can be kind of speedy, and it also de- depends on whether you're getting pure MDMA.

   27. PAPeter Attia1:09:39

       If you're taking pure MDMA versus, yeah, yeah. Of course, when they cut it-

   28. SHSam Harris1:09:42

       Yeah

   29. PAPeter Attia1:09:42

       ... with stimulants, it's a different story. But-

   30. SHSam Harris1:09:43

       Yeah
10. 1:14:31 – 1:24:02

    Metta practice and reframing: compassion for everyone

    1. SHSam Harris1:14:31

       Yeah, well, there is a practice that targets that mental state. As, uh, actually, I mentioned it earlier.

    2. PAPeter Attia1:14:36

       You referred to earlier. Yeah.

    3. SHSam Harris1:14:36

       Yeah, yeah, Metta practice. And Metta is the Pali word for loving-kindness.

    4. PAPeter Attia1:14:40

       Mm.

    5. SHSam Harris1:14:41

       And yeah, there are people who do that practice almost either exclusively or, or almost exclusively.

    6. PAPeter Attia1:14:48

       So describe it a little bit for the listener.

    7. SHSam Harris1:14:50

       Unlike mindfulness, where you're letting go of any agenda you have for what your experience should be, and you're just reconciling yourself to noticing however it is. And if you do that, your experience does change in reliable ways, you know, many of which are, are quite pleasant. They can be, uh, you know, amazingly pleasant. But it's not about securing those changes or, or amplifying those changes. You're just-- 'cause, 'cause that, insofar as that creeps in, you're not being mindful. You're doing something other than merely witnessing what's happening and doing that as an expression of your own desire and attachment. And I mean, you're, you're, you're trying to change your experience, and that's, that's different than, than simply being mindful of it. But with a practice like Metta, you do have a goal. You're trying to feel this feeling of loving-kindness as intensely as you can feel it, as durably as you can feel it. And you're trying to, you're trying to acquire a state change, but you're also trying to acquire a trait change in that, you know, your default attitude toward other human beings or even other, any other conscious system would be just well-wishing and, and, you know, good, good vibes. So-- and there's no question you can train that attitude. I mean, and, and it, it comes from both a framing effect and from an immersion in this change of state that you can kindle in meditation and then keep humming along based on concentration. So the, the same kind of conc- the same faculty of mind that could become one-pointedly focused on a mantra or a sight like a candle flame can become one-pointedly immersed in the feeling of love for all humanity. And it's initiated by thinking thoughts about other people. So you'll, you'll, you'll just imagine someone who you love, and it's important that this not be contaminated with, with your, your notion of romantic love, because so much of what we think of as love in a romantic context is desire and attachment, and it's not, not the same-

    8. PAPeter Attia1:17:06

       Is, is a child an appropriate-

    9. SHSam Harris1:17:08

       Yeah

    10. PAPeter Attia1:17:08

        ... object of that type of attention?

    11. SHSam Harris1:17:10

        Yeah. Yeah. A child, a friend, a, a parent, but, uh, whoever in your life you can have just an as uncomplicated-

    12. PAPeter Attia1:17:19

        Mm

    13. SHSam Harris1:17:19

        ... an experience of wishing this person well, wishing them to be free of suffering, wishing them happiness. And the usual progression is to start with someone like that who you know, who's someone who's close to you, and then transition to a neutral person, you know, someone who you have no, just a kind of a randomly picked person from the crowd or some public figure who you have no strong association with but who you can visualize. And then you're wishing that person happiness, wishing that they be free of suffering. You're actually thinking these thoughts in your mind as a kind of, almost as a kind of mantra, but you're not, it's not the sound of the, the utterances. It's the, the import of them-

    14. PAPeter Attia1:18:00

        It's the feeling

    15. SHSam Harris1:18:00

        ... that you're, you're, you're trying to connect with. So you're thinking, "May you be happy. May you be free from suffering." You're reiterating this. You, you could have, you know, three or four ways of saying it, and you're saying it over and over again, but then connecting with the actual kind of energetics of the wish that you, you really do wish that this person who you love be free from suffering. And it can become this very deep feeling of basking in this well of good intentions for everybody, right? Because-- And then you can, you can include not only a neutral person but someone for whom you have a s- a so-called enemy, someone for whom you have a real negative association. And then you begin to see the importance of framing around all these things. So just like you, you said for the customer service situation, I mean, it just takes a second to realize, wait a minute, here's a person who's been standing at this desk since 6:00 in the morning, meeting one disgruntled person after the next, and now she or he has just met me. Their experience is completely different from mine, and-

    16. PAPeter Attia1:19:07

        Which, which by the way, is a beautiful cut to the sort of issue that David Foster Wallace talks about so much, is every experience we have is only through our lens, right?

    17. SHSam Harris1:19:16

        Yeah.

    18. PAPeter Attia1:19:17

        It's that insight alone, which now you're giving a very tangible example of, is so powerful just to be able to hit pause on that for a moment and say-

    19. SHSam Harris1:19:25

        Yeah

    20. PAPeter Attia1:19:26

        What you just said, right? This person's been standing here for seven hours-

    21. SHSam Harris1:19:31

        Yeah

    22. PAPeter Attia1:19:31

        ... seeing one pissed off face after another. What they're seeing now is totally different from what I'm seeing.

    23. SHSam Harris1:19:37

        Yeah. Yeah, and your impatience isn't helping, and you are so glad that you're not in their shoes, right? Like, you don't want their job. You actually feel compassion for their experience, right? And I mean, th-th-there are many, you know, hacks of this kind, where you, you know, s- you're, you're driving in traffic and someone cuts you off and, you know, your default experience is, "What an asshole." But it just takes a second to realize, wait a minute, you have no idea what's going on with this person. You don't know if this person is in a rush because they have some real emergency. You don't know if they're 90 years old. Now you just honked at some 90-year-old man or woman, right? And who's the asshole now? There's so many changes of frame applied to the exact same experience which just fundamentally change your interpretation of it. A loving-kindness practice is based on a fundamental frame change for more or less everything you can encounter in human affairs, which is everyone is suffering. Everyone was once a child condemned to now be the, the adult they now are, right? So, like, there's, there is no evil person who invented himself, right? There's no, like, uh, um, this is something I've talked about with respect to Saddam Hussein in the past. I usually talk about this in the context of talking about free will. But, I mean, just look at someone like the prototypical evil person. You know, Saddam Hussein is about as good as it gets, right? So you look at him as a, as a 40-year-old man. He's just a terrifyingly evil sociopath who, if you're in favor of the death penalty, it definitely applies to him. But you roll back his, his lifeline by a few decades and at a certain point you see, okay, here's a, a 12-year-old boy who could have well been a scary 12-year-old boy, but, you know, when he's four years old, he's a four-year-old, and he's a four-year-old who has every strike against him in the sense that, I mean, he's, he's guaranteed, it seems, to be a, a morally damaged human being. He's living in a society riven by sectarian conflict. The norms to which he's being pushed, the aspirations he can form in this context are barbaric by any standard, you know, ethical standard that we would form today, right? And the kind of person who can thrive in that context is someone who's morally damaged by our lights. And he didn't pick his parents, he didn't pick his genes. He's not the author of himself, and yet he's going to become this evil person who, you know, half the world or more will think is deserving of death at the end of it. It's possible to feel compassion even for someone like Saddam Hussein. You know, that's a reframing that may be hard for some people to get there, but for someone who's practicing a state like metta, that's the frame. And if you can get there, you can recognize that there is this capacity for love and, and well-wishing that really extends without limit to every conscious system. I mean, you want, you want everyone to be relieved of all their problems o-on some basic level because the most badly behaved people in the world are, for the most part, expressing their problems. Even when you have a truly sadistic person who seems to be deriving pleasure from causing other people suffering, and such people exist, what you're witnessing there is someone for whom all these other sources of pleasure and well-being are basically unavailable, right? This, this person on some level can't know what he's missing. You know, this is a person who's n- who's never going to have good relationships of the sort that you and I would demand for ourselves and everyone we love as the necessary ingredients of a life well lived. That's not to say you wouldn't want to put this person in jail because it's, there is no cure for this problem. I'm not recommending that we not protect ourselves from malevolent people, but you don't actually have to hate them. I mean, feeling compassion for these people isn't incompatible with taking the steps we need to take to keep society orderly and safe.

    24. PAPeter Attia1:24:02

        You know,

11. 1:24:02 – 1:34:53

    Moral luck: prison visits, texting and driving, and Nick's death

    1. PAPeter Attia1:24:02

       one thing I, I, I would recommend to anybody who's interested in pulling a little more on this thread is to, um, do a prison visit.

    2. SHSam Harris1:24:10

       Yeah.

    3. PAPeter Attia1:24:11

       Um, I, I-

    4. SHSam Harris1:24:11

       Yeah, I've never done that, but I heard you and Tim did that, right?

    5. PAPeter Attia1:24:14

       Tim and I did it, and, and I had a-- I did a podcast with a guy named Corey McCarthy, who himself was incarcerated for seven years for attempted murder and a bunch of other stuff. And, you know, there's a group of, uh, three or four or five of us that actually went and spent a, a couple of days at a maximum security prison, and we played this game there. It's called, uh, Step to the Line, which I'm sure you've heard of, and it's, you know, it's a game that's played in many reasons, but the purpose is always to basically highlight our similarities and our differences. So on the one side of the line were all of these inmates. Now, we're in a maximum security prison in California, so everybody in that room, I, I don't remember the exact numbers. I, I believe 70% of those men were serving life sentences.

    6. SHSam Harris1:24:54

       Mm.

    7. PAPeter Attia1:24:56

       Some staggering number of these guys were in there because of, you know, homicide or, you know, some- something more than, like, they were trafficking some marijuana, right?

    8. SHSam Harris1:25:04

       Right.

    9. PAPeter Attia1:25:05

       And on the other side are all of us as volunteers, and then the game begins of step to the line if. And some of the differences are, are so humbling that it, it f- it, you can't be a, you can't be a reasonable human being and be in that situation and not be moved by it. You know, step to the line if you had two parents in your household. And amongst the volunteers, you know, maybe 60% step forward, and amongst the inmates, I think one step forward.

    10. SHSam Harris1:25:32

        Mm.

    11. PAPeter Attia1:25:32

        You know?

    12. SHSam Harris1:25:33

        Yeah.

    13. PAPeter Attia1:25:33

        Step to the line if Someone close to you died before you were 10, you know, and, or died a violent death before you were 10. You know, these sorts of things. And, you know, step to the line if you grew up in a home that had more than five books. And those of us as volunteers, most of us step forward.

    14. SHSam Harris1:25:52

        Mm.

    15. PAPeter Attia1:25:52

        Of the inmates, you know, five step forward out of 50. That kind of thing.

    16. SHSam Harris1:25:56

        Right, right.

    17. PAPeter Attia1:25:56

        And it, it's to your point, right? It's like we're, we're not gonna excuse the mistakes that took place, and there's, th- you know, society has s- said there's going to be a, a price that one has to pay for one mistakes. But boy, you realize pretty quickly the randomness that allows you or me to be standing on one side of that line and not the other.

    18. SHSam Harris1:26:17

        Oh, yeah. Yeah, no, i- if you were in precisely that other person's situation, genetically, environmentally, you would be that other person, right? There's just, there is no daylight between all of those causes and conditions and the outcome, and even if, even add in randomness. I mean, it's, you know, quantum mechanics doesn't get you out of this situation.

    19. PAPeter Attia1:26:40

        And I think of all the times I've been lucky. Like when I was in eighth grade, there was a kid that was a year ahead who was like my hero. You know, he was the absolute toughest kid in the school. I mean, he was the bad, the badass. And he took me under his wing, you know? So I was like really lucky to be the eighth grader-

    20. SHSam Harris1:26:57

        Mm-hmm

    21. PAPeter Attia1:26:57

        ... who this super tough, badass kid really liked. And two years later, he wound up in jail for armed robbery.

    22. SHSam Harris1:27:05

        Mm-hmm.

    23. PAPeter Attia1:27:05

        And I've often thought to myself, I was so impressionable that if I had been with him on that night, and he said, "Look, we're gonna go hold up a liquor store"-

    24. SHSam Harris1:27:15

        Right

    25. PAPeter Attia1:27:15

        ... like I'm not sure I would've had the common sense, the intestinal fortitude, the whatever, the courage to say, "Dude, that's a bad idea. I'm not gonna go."

    26. SHSam Harris1:27:23

        Right.

    27. PAPeter Attia1:27:24

        It's so easy that I could have gone along for that.

    28. SHSam Harris1:27:27

        Yeah.

    29. PAPeter Attia1:27:27

        And as I learned later on, once you get in that system, like, you know, once you're 16 years old and you're pegged for armed robbery, like it's very hard to recover to Stanford.

    30. SHSam Harris1:27:38

        Yeah. Yeah.
12. 1:34:53 – 1:46:43

    Grief, anticipatory dread and well-being that survives solitude

    1. PAPeter Attia1:34:53

       So I wanna shift gears for a moment and go back to a discussion I had a week ago with one of my friends who's, who's a patient. He's been really struggling the last, uh, few months. He's a, he's a, he's a father. He's a wonderful guy. He's got two kids, three dogs, and, um, he's a guy with a really big heart. So he's, he's, he's one of these guys who just, I don't know, you get the sense he could never be upset at anybody. He could never, you know, not wanna take care of somebody around him and... But his, one of the dogs, which was the first dog he ever had, died. Had cancer and they went through a bunch of treatments and, and the dog ultimately died, and I think for him losing that dog was, was certainly on the spectrum of losing a child, right? I, I don't think it's the same, but, but I think for him it was very difficult. And he's been unable to sort of get back in, in the, in the saddle, so to speak, and-

    2. SHSam Harris1:35:49

       Hmm

    3. PAPeter Attia1:35:49

       ... it's, it's reflected in, frankly, his cortisol levels. I've never seen cortisol levels so high.

    4. SHSam Harris1:35:54

       Hmm.

    5. PAPeter Attia1:35:54

       So his, his degree of hypercortisolemia is, if you didn't know better, you'd think he had a cortisol-secreting tumor, actually.

    6. SHSam Harris1:36:01

       Hmm.

    7. PAPeter Attia1:36:01

       It's, it's so profound. And we were talking about it, and he confessed that he couldn't stop dreading the death of his other two dogs-

    8. SHSam Harris1:36:11

       Hmm

    9. PAPeter Attia1:36:11

       ... who are, you know, aged six and seven or something like that. So these aren't dogs that are gonna die tomorrow. In fact, these aren't even dogs that are, you know, sick in any way, shape, or form.

    10. SHSam Harris1:36:21

        Right.

    11. PAPeter Attia1:36:22

        But as he's three months out from the death of this dog that was probably 14 or 15, he's spending every moment now dreading the loss of these dogs that are gonna die in five years or something like that. And it was very hard for me to try to console him because I didn't wanna be dismissive of the pain, but I also wanted to remind him that, you know, that's the antithesis of being present, right? It's like, but your children and your two dogs are right here with you right now, and they're perfect.

    12. SHSam Harris1:36:54

        Yeah.

    13. PAPeter Attia1:36:54

        And all the worrying you can do about when these two dogs die doesn't change the fact that they're going to die, but you don't know when, and you don't know how, and you don't know any of these things. How would you explain to someone like that, in not necessarily the most technical sense, but maybe in sort of an appeal to their emotion, why this effort isn't going to pan out and why there needs to be a new strategy for getting over this loss?

    14. SHSam Harris1:37:24

        Well, it, it depends on whether or not the person is living an examined life of the sort that we've been discussing. So the, if, if this is a person who has no meditation practice and is not interested in that mode-

    15. PAPeter Attia1:37:39

        He is.

    16. SHSam Harris1:37:40

        Right.

    17. PAPeter Attia1:37:40

        So I, I've given him your books. He has been going through the meditation course that you have. But is still having a real hard time, like all of us-

    18. SHSam Harris1:37:52

        Right

    19. PAPeter Attia1:37:52

        ... I think, in taking it from, you know, I-- the example I use is like if you go to the gym and you sort of lift weights for 15, 20 minutes a day, you know, that's, that's great. But the whole purpose of doing that is to take those new muscles and be able to use them in the other 23 and a half hours.

    20. SHSam Harris1:38:08

        Right.

    21. PAPeter Attia1:38:09

        And so I think that's the transition, is like, I think the theory makes sense to him, but it's now how does one actually bridge that gap? So let's, for the purpose of the discussion, let's say he accepts conceptually-

    22. SHSam Harris1:38:21

        Right

    23. PAPeter Attia1:38:21

        ... the value of this.

    24. SHSam Harris1:38:22

        Yeah. Well, so then to become sensitive to the actual mechanics of suffering, I mean, the, the only way to suffer this dog's absence is to think about it and not know that you're thinking about it, right? So it is to be subsumed by this process of ideation and to have no perspective on it. And framing can help here. So you can i- you can say, well, there were many experiences he had with this dog alive where the dog wasn't physically present, right? The dog leaves the room. There's no greater absence from a room than simply leaving it, right? Now, it's an additional operation to think, well, there's a big difference because I'll never see him again, right? But everyone you love in the world, animals-

    25. PAPeter Attia1:39:13

        You're the only person I love who's in this room right now.

    26. SHSam Harris1:39:15

        Exactly, right. They're, they're all-

    27. PAPeter Attia1:39:17

        That's right

    28. SHSam Harris1:39:17

        ... out of this room. So in principle, you know what it's like to be content in moments where-

    29. PAPeter Attia1:39:24

        In the physical absence of someone you love

    30. SHSam Harris1:39:24

        ... in the physical absence of everyone you love in this world. It's possible. And the only way to make it intolerable to be in a room without everyone you love is to meditate on how intolerable it is that they're not in the room with you right now. And this is why meditation is such an amazing skill because, and this is, has a point of contact with your, your prison story, um, this is a point I make several places. I think I make it in my book, "Waking Up." The amazing thing about meditation is that, you know, once you actually know how to meditate, it's possible to be alone in a room for weeks and months and even years. I ma- you know, several teachers I've studied with had spent literally years alone in caves, where in most people's lives, solitary confinement is considered a punishment, even in a circumstance where to be outside of that room is to be surrounded by murderers and rapists who you might have to fight, right? So, like, even in prison, people don't want to be in solitary confinement, right? Because it's so intolerable to be left alone with your thoughts.
13. 1:46:43 – 2:00:19

    Vipassana, Dzogchen and the illusion of the self

    1. PAPeter Attia1:46:43

       There are a couple of sort of semantics I want to-- You've already alluded to a little bit the relationship between Vipassana and mindfulness. Where does Dzogchen fit into this? And like if you were to try to draw a Venn diagram of these different concepts, how would they overlap?

    2. SHSam Harris1:47:01

       Well, so Vipassana is the name of the practice in Theravada Buddhism, the oldest tradition of Buddhism. And this is the Buddhism of Thailand and Burma and Sri Lanka. And Vipassana, as I said, means insight, and you're having insight into what are thought of as the fundamental characteristics of all phenomenon. And these are impermanence and selflessness and unsatisfactoriness. It's often misleadingly translated as suffering rather than unsatisfactoriness. So many people believe that the Buddha taught that life is suffering or that all experience contains some intrinsic suffering. That's not quite the message. It's that life is a circumstance where there is no unchanging, fully satisfactory basis for one's happiness because everything is changing. It's by virtue of impermanence that the boat is always leaking, right? We're always bailing water. We're always responding to some slow emergency, really, where our health is always put in question. There's always some new pain arising in the body because we're simply not moving, right? You always have to respond to something. And our pleasures, however hard won, are fleeting. They're vanishing even in the act of acquiring them. So there's no place to land that is secure, and that's largely by virtue of the impermanence of sensory experience. But the selflessness component is separable from those two other characteristics. And, well, I should say, so that's Vipassana. Vipassana is a practice whereby you have insight into those three characteristics, and mindfulness is the tool you use to have those insights. The training in mindfulness is a training in a kind of awareness of experience which is non-judgmental, non-reactive. You're not seeking to maximize pleasure. You're not trying to make pains go away. You're just becoming interested in a very open and focused way on just what the character of every experience is. So if you're feeling restless, rather than try not to feel restless, you're becoming interested in and increasingly aware of the actual characteristics moment to moment of restlessness. How is it that you know you're restless? Where is it? What is it? I mean, we're talking about a pattern of energy in the body that you can suddenly recognize as arising totally on its own And changing based on its own dynamics, and you are merely the witness of that change in state. And so it is with any pleasant emotion or, or experience. And you keep dropping back into merely witnessing, and that is, that is mindfulness when you can do it, when you're, when you're actually not trying to change anything, you're not judging anything, and you're not staying at the conceptual level of-- You're not, you're not thinking about experience. You're, you're just experiencing experience more and more closely. And so if you're, if it's a matter of, of paying attention to sensations in the body, you're not staying at the level where you, you feel like, "Oh, I have my, my hands are sweaty," right? No, you're actually, you're feeling the temperature and the tingling and the pressure so closely that the concept of hands and sweat disappear, right? So you're just feeling the raw data of experience. And these changes can be pleasant. I mean, your sense of even having a body can disappear while you're meditating, and just, it just resolves into, like, a cloud of sensation. So Dzogchen is a Tibetan practice tradition which is explicitly non-dualistic. And, and what that means in this context is it goes after the selflessness of the mind very directly. So the, the-- 'cause mo-most of us start meditating where we are in our normal states of cognition with the sense that there's a, there's a subject in the middle of experience. There's a mind in the head, and it is by definition separate from everything that it knows, right? So there's the, the subject that can be aware of sights and sounds and sensations, and this subject is also a thinker. You see, it's producing. It's, in some sense, the author of, of thoughts. And it's me, and I feel like I'm over here in my head behind my face, you know, almost wearing my face as a kind of mask, right? I'm not identical to my face. I'm behind my face, and you're looking across space at me, and your gaze has an implication for me because I can... You know, if I, if I follow where you're looking, I'm over here and not identical to my body, right? I'm in my body. I'm a kind of passenger in my body. I mean, you and I, I can say, well, the, you know, my hand is-- I've got, you know, an injury to my hand, and you and I can both look at my hand as a kind of object in space, right? My hand is part of the world.

    3. PAPeter Attia1:52:27

       Separate from both of us.

    4. SHSam Harris1:52:28

       Yeah. And, you know, obviously, I care more about my hand than you do 'cause it's my hand, but if something's wrong with my hand, I'm still over here up in my head behind my eyes some distance from the hand, and I can imagine being without the hand, right? It could be, you know, if I, if I lost my hand in an accident, well, then I would have one less hand, but I'd still be me up here in my head behind my eyes, right? That locus of knowing, that sense of being located in the head as a self, as a, an ego is the starting point for everyone in meditation. And you can do Vipassana from that starting point. You can be taught the method of mindfulness meditation, and you just begin to pay more and more attention to what it's like to be you. And you can notice these three characteristics of impermanence and selflessness and unsatisfactoriness. The Pali is anicca, dukkha, and anatta, or anicca, anatta, and dukkha in that order. And you can start from wherever you are, and who knows how long it will take you to have this insight, a fundamental insight into the illusoriness of that starting point of being a, a subject in the head. Now, with Dzogchen, you can't start until you've had that insight. And so the path of Dzogchen, it entails becoming available to that insight in various ways. It, it's usually a matter of actually forming a connection with a, what's called a Dzogchen master in the, in the Tibetan tradition, as someone who can actually point this out to you in conversation. And for most people-

    5. PAPeter Attia1:54:02

       Meaning they can point out to you when you are falling to the illusion of ego? Meaning they, they, they can point out when you are defaulting back into that mode?

    6. SHSam Harris1:54:13

       Well, no. The, the-- They can point out the intrinsic egolessness of consciousness in a way that you can recognize it-

    7. PAPeter Attia1:54:21

       I see

    8. SHSam Harris1:54:21

       ... and, and then practice that, right? So 'cause most people, they start meditating, they still feel like they're up in their heads paying attention. You know, it's that now I'm paying attention to the breath. Now I'm noticing the difference between being lost in thought and being mindful. But it ha- doesn't fundamentally cut through the sense that there is one who can be mindful, right? And, you know, you can have experiences where the distance, the apparent distance between subject and object can collapse, but they can come in a haphazard way where you, you don't know w- how you had them, and you don't know how you'll have them again, right? So it, it can come by virtue of paying closer and closer attention to sounds and sensations and things that are arising, and you can suddenly feel like, oh, the, in that moment of hearing that bird, there was no me and there was no bird. There was just hearing. That can collapse again and again, and it did for me, you know, when I was spending time on retreat practicing Vipassana. But I always associated it with the intense concentration of retreat, and it seemed unavailable to me in ordinary moments of consciousness. You know, off retreat, you know, I'm driving in traffic or, you know, working at my computer or whatever. Like, there's no way I'm gonna touch that level of concentration. You know, I haven't been spending 14 hours a day meditating, so this is a kind of a peak experience that isn't, isn't available now. Well, with Dzogchen, you discover that The reverse is true. All the peak experiences are no more empty of self than ordinary waking consciousness is. And you can recognize this about consciousness in any moment, and it doesn't, it doesn't actually require previous moments of building momentum. I mean, framing really counts for a lot here. So I, I, I spent a lot of time practicing with this one Burmese meditation master, U Pandita Sayadaw, and the analogy he would often use is that progress in Vipassana is like rubbing two sticks together to get fire. The moment you stop, the heat dissipates and you're back to zero, right? So it's like, like you'd have this sense of, you'd be on retreat with him, practicing for, you know, up to 20 hours a day and trying to make your mindfulness absolutely continuous. So that's the, the difference between sitting and walking meditation and every other moment. I mean, you're doing a ton of sitting and walking meditation. It's like 16 hours a day of that. But every other moment when, like, you're going to meals or anything else, you wake up and get out of bed in the morning, every transitional moment, getting a cup of tea, you're trying to link every instant of conscious awareness together with mindfulness. And whenever you would get distracted, part of you would begin scoring that as a failure to build up enough momentum to get to the goal of, you know, the, the fundamental breakthrough that was on offer by that path. So this framing, this idea that you're rubbing two sticks together, the moment you stop, they're cooling off and you've made no progress, right? That's the opposite framing for Dzogchen. The framing you need for Dzogchen is there's this something already true of consciousness. You're not trying to produce this thing. You're not trying to get rid of the ego. You're not trying to change anything about what is. You're trying to recognize a feature of consciousness that is already the case, and it's actually nearer to you than you think. It's not, it's not a matter of going deep within and having some kind of breakthrough. It's actually right on the surface of the most ordinary form of consciousness. It doesn't require any pyrotechnic change in the, in the contents of consciousness. It's not, you're not actually closer to it if you take acid and then, and all the colors begin to change, or you feel a change in your energy such that, you know, you feel this, you know, kind of buzz of connectedness to all things. As, you know, anyone who's taken acid can verify that's, that's on offer.

    9. PAPeter Attia1:58:37

       [laughs]

    10. SHSam Harris1:58:39

        But all of that's i- interesting. All of that's, you know, I'm not discounting the, the power of those experiences. But those experiences are no less empty of self than every state of consciousness. I mean, it's just the, the precisely the state of consciousness that's compatible with, you know, reaching for a glass of water and drinking it without anything novel intruding. You know, there's no bliss, there's no rapture, there's no profound or spiritual change in state. It's possible to recognize in that moment that there's no center to consciousness. And so what Dzogchen is, is the path of discovering that there's no center and then taking that insight as your only object of mindfulness, so that what, what you're mindful of thereafter is that there's no center to consciousness. So whatever's appearing, sights, sounds, sensations, you are continually dropping the implied center. It's kind of a steep path because it's, it's hard to start. You can't, you can't really start. I mean, everything you're doing before you have that insight and can notice it again on demand, everything you're doing is by definition a, a preliminary practice to that because you need enough mindfulness to notice what is to be noticed and, and to follow the instructions to start that path. But it's, you, you certainly don't have to have spent years on retreat to start that path. And so it's having good information is, is certainly better than, than having misleading information there.

14. 2:00:19 – 2:12:39

    Pleasant states versus ethics, and a commitment not to lie

    1. PAPeter Attia2:00:19

       This practice, as I said, is, is, it's challenging. It's just not-- There's no two ways around it. I, I think it's, for some people, it's probably as difficult as saying to someone who's 40 years old who's never exercised deliberately a day in their life, "Okay, it's time to start spending an hour a day in the gym, and-

    2. SHSam Harris2:00:41

       Hmm

    3. PAPeter Attia2:00:41

       ... you're gonna be doing these new movements, and they're gonna be very uncomfortable." And for many people, you know, a few weeks or months into that exercise routine, they're still not finding any great source of pleasure. And, and there are some of us who love exercising, like we just get a-- Again, going back to the, the lingo of states versus traits, like the, you know, I worked out this morning before I saw you, and I mean, I was in a new gym for the first time, and sometimes that is a little, you're sort of like, "I don't know where all the equipment is," or, you know-

    4. SHSam Harris2:01:10

       Hmm

    5. PAPeter Attia2:01:10

       ... blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But, but regardless, it's just the actual state of exercise to me is so pleasurable-

    6. SHSam Harris2:01:17

       Yeah

    7. PAPeter Attia2:01:17

       ... even if it didn't offer any traits that were advantageous outside of it.

    8. SHSam Harris2:01:22

       Right.

    9. PAPeter Attia2:01:22

       Of course, the real reason we exercise is not for the hour that we're in the gym moving around these artificial pieces of iron. It's because of the benefit that gives us both metabolically and structurally beyond the time we're exercising.

    10. SHSam Harris2:01:36

        Right.

    11. PAPeter Attia2:01:37

        For, is it safe to say that for most people, the experience of meditation doesn't produce a state that is necessarily as pleasurable as, say, the MDMA state was that you could describe, and that really the, the reason this ought to be considered by someone who is not meditating is more the traits that come outside of the act of meditating, the act of the practice?

    12. SHSam Harris2:02:01

        Yes. Well, so It's possible to have extremely pleasant states arise in meditation, both ones that have a kind of ethical implication like loving-kindness and ones that just are sort of the equivalent of you being on heroin, right? So it's not necessarily pointed in any auspicious or pro-social direction. It's just you experiencing more pleasure than you've ever experienced. But none of those experiences really can be the point because they're transitory. When they're gone, they really are gone. I mean, the demeaning analogy to drugs is not inaccurate. Like, what's the point if it's just a matter of getting high and you're a no better person in the world as a result of having had that experience? So it, it really is about having a, a fundamentally different relationship to experience in general. All of the counterproductive ways in which you grasp at the pleasant and push the unpleasant away. I mean, just like, like that, that is the, there's a, a fairly Buddhist framing of it, but I think it's, it's appropriate. I mean, basically it's about not suffering unnecessarily in the end, right? And then not broadcasting your suffering to the rest of humanity. So it can't be about having an experience that's extremely pleasant and become, becoming more and more attached to that experience. And so that's one of the things that's misleading and a potential downside of getting very good at so-called concentration practices or absorption practices, is that they don't have the power to give you a perspective that is a fundamental antidote to egocentricity and selfishness and even, you know, kind of starkly unethical instincts in other areas of your life. And they really can be fundamentally no more interesting from a, a kind of a larger examined life perspective than a drug experience. I mean, to, to take some clear examples here, there, there, there have been gurus who have behaved shockingly unethically in their lives and had, you know, their reputations ruined and just, they just leave a, a wake of unhappy and, and even destroyed people behind them who there was no doubt were meditative athletes and i- in many cases focused on concentration practices. So like I-- if you, if you had to ask, "Well, what was it like to be these gurus when they were meditating?" Certainly not all of them were frauds. Many of them were, you know, truly talented meditators. But they were meditating in a way that was not-- It was a separate game they were playing, right? And again, it was a g- game that was probably produced immense pleasure while they were doing it, but it didn't fully undercut everything else about them that was going to be, you know, fairly monstrous in relationship to other human beings. This is where framing or the, the overall concept of what one is doing is pretty important 'cause it's-- There are pathological states of pleasure. There are even pathological states of spiritual pleasure. I mean, I think the suicide bomber before he detonates his bomb, they're in states of a kind of ecstasy. I mean, they have a religious expectation for what's about to happen, which entails going to paradise and experiencing more pleasure than anyone can imagine. And in almost every case, that's sincere and deeply felt, and these people are about to get whatever they want, and they know the creator of the universe is happy that they're gonna get it. So that there's nothing about ecstasy per se that is good or even benign because it can be pointed in the wrong direction. I think what we're-

    13. PAPeter Attia2:06:05

        Right. It's a missile that doesn't necessarily come with a guidance system.

    14. SHSam Harris2:06:08

        Yeah. And I think what we're looking for to lead truly better lives across the board is something that is anchored to an ethics, for lack of a better word, where our spiritual or our, or our contemplative tools are actually making us better people across the board. And again, there's some bright lines here that I think are, are useful to, to draw. I mean, so for instance, not lying is a, is a major variable for me ethically. It's just like, like having formed a commitment to being honest in basically every situation that wasn't like a, just a, a self-defense situation. You know what I mean? I don't think you have to be honest to the person who's attacking you, right? Or seems likely to attack you. But to put dishonesty somewhere on the continuum of violence and only resort to it where things have broken down so much that you're just not dealing with a, another person as though they're a rational interlocutor, that is massively simplifying of a person's life right now. Very few people have made that commitment, but having made it-

    15. PAPeter Attia2:07:14

        When did you make that commitment? I know you've, you've spoken about this, but when-- How old were you when you decided that?

    16. SHSam Harris2:07:20

        I was, uh, I was 18. It was, it was freshman year in college. I took a course taught by this great professor, Ron Howard.

    17. PAPeter Attia2:07:28

        Not to be confused with that Ron Howard.

    18. SHSam Harris2:07:30

        Yeah. No, not, not the, uh, former actor, now director. This course was just an examination of whether it was ever ethical to lie. You know, virtually everyone goes into that course more or less not even knowing what their relationship to lying is. They haven't been sensitized to it as a significant variable in their lives in terms of, you know, maintaining their relationships or their reputations or, "Yeah, I lie sometimes," and they're white lies and, you know, sometimes it's just too awkward to tell the truth or, and you don't know how often you do it, but you know everybody does it, and the world could be no other way. And this course was just a machine For exposing the dysfunction of that. And more or less, it became this-- It was like a, a seminar where everyone was just kind of coming up with scenarios where-

    19. PAPeter Attia2:08:22

        Mm-hmm

    20. SHSam Harris2:08:23

        ... it must be all right to lie. I mean, surely this is a white lie that is better told. And the professor would shoot that down. And most people left the course more or less certain that lying was virtually always the wrong move for purely selfish reasons. It was just like it was not creating the life you want. And by not, by com-being committed to not, not lying, you were closing the door to all kinds of complexity and risk, you know, both interpersonally and, and reputationally, that you absolutely want to close the door to. I mean, it's almost analogous to like, to texting while driving. Just decide not to text while driving. You will not care about all those texts.

    21. PAPeter Attia2:09:07

        You don't have to wor- you don't have to worry about, "Well, I'll only text at intersections-"

    22. SHSam Harris2:09:11

        Right

    23. PAPeter Attia2:09:11

        "... or if I'm stuck in traffic, but we're not going that fast," or whatever.

    24. SHSam Harris2:09:17

        Yeah. I can assure you that you will never really regret the texts you'd sent later when you, when you finally arrived at your destination.

    25. PAPeter Attia2:09:26

        So how old were you when you met your wife, your now wife?

    26. SHSam Harris2:09:29

        Thirty-one.

    27. PAPeter Attia2:09:31

        Okay. So you've had thirteen years of this practice of not lying.

    28. SHSam Harris2:09:35

        Mm-hmm.

    29. PAPeter Attia2:09:36

        And now you meet the woman you're ultimately going to marry, who presumably hasn't taken this course or made this commitment. At some point, does that become a discussion which is, "By the way, I'm gonna be a little different than most guys that you've met in that, you know, if you ask me if you look good in that dress and I don't think you do, I'm just going to say you don't"?

    30. SHSam Harris2:09:57

        Right.
15. 2:12:39 – 2:18:36

    Honesty in politics and the cost of public dishonesty

    1. PAPeter Attia2:12:39

       Is it possible for someone to, let's pick an extreme example, but could one go into public office and take that oath that I will never lie? I mean, is it, is that, is that compatible with politics, for example?

    2. SHSam Harris2:12:52

       It is widely assumed that it's a deal breaker, right? I think everything, virtually everything that's wrong with our politics is the result of the mismatch between interpersonal ethics of this sort and what works and what wouldn't work in the public sphere. I think it should be compatible with politics. I think dishonesty should exact a, a massive reputational cost in politics. But now we're in this strange, you know, mirror universe where the most dishonest person anyone has ever witnessed is the president of the country and suffering absolutely no reputational cost among those who love him for his dishonesty. It's like it's, it's not a bug, it's a feature. In my view, that is the most dysfunctional thing about the Trump phenomenon. It's what it's done to the value of honesty in our public conversation about politics, at least to half of the electorate. Pointing out that he's lied yet again is completely ineffectual with the people who don't care that he's lied. I mean, they, they just, they just assume he's going to lie. It's a very strange performance. It's like not even about representing reality anymore. It's not that the people who love Trump are reliably duped by him. You know, it's, it's that they're not holding him to a standard of honesty at all. Right? And his dishonesty, however obvious, is a different kind of performance. It's almost like, I mean, there's been an analogy often drawn to professional wrestling. It's a fake sport with fake violence, and the fact that it's fake is actually understood by basically everyone who enjoys it, right? It's not that-- It's not like they're taken in-

    3. PAPeter Attia2:14:45

       Right, unless you're, unless you're five years old-

    4. SHSam Harris2:14:46

       Yeah

    5. PAPeter Attia2:14:46

       ... by the time you're a teenager or whatever, you sort of get that this is an act.

    6. SHSam Harris2:14:50

       Yeah.

    7. PAPeter Attia2:14:51

       They're still very athletic. Nothing takes-

    8. SHSam Harris2:14:52

       No

    9. PAPeter Attia2:14:52

       ... away from the skill required to do whatever.

    10. SHSam Harris2:14:54

        Oh, yeah. I mean, ironically, the, what they're doing is more dangerous than MMA for the most part.

    11. PAPeter Attia2:14:59

        Yeah, yeah.

    12. SHSam Harris2:14:59

        I mean, they're getting horrific injuries sometimes. But there's no illusion that these guys are just as tough as the people in the octagon, right? So it's like th- there, there are people who, who watch both or, and are certainly aware of both, and they clearly understand what reality is. Reality is what's going on in mixed martial arts, right? There's things that are honest at the level of, of the, the language of violence, and there are things that are pure fabrications. They're, they're lies. And something has happened in our conversation about facts in the political domain, and it's happened to some degree on the left for different reasons. But yeah, I-- To come back to your question, I think we're paying a massive price for not being able to tell when people are lying definitively, like to not have a lie detector that forensically can be relied upon. You know, analogous to, you know, like DNA evidence, you know, where you just know that someone's representing their state of knowledge erroneously. And we're paying a massive price for the fact that so many millions of people don't actually care that they're being lied to.

    13. PAPeter Attia2:16:06

        And to me, that's the bigger issue, right? I mean, I think politicians have always lied. I don't think that's what's new. It's almost like a threshold has been crossed where it's-- So, so you go back to sort of Clinton's impeachment, right? I mean, in the end, I think the legal issue was less about whether he'd had an affair with Monica Lewinsky. The bigger issue was that he lie under oath.

    14. SHSam Harris2:16:28

        Right.

    15. PAPeter Attia2:16:28

        I mean, in many ways, that's what his impeachment came down to.

    16. SHSam Harris2:16:30

        Yeah.

    17. PAPeter Attia2:16:31

        It's quite clear he probably did, right? I mean, we could get into the semantics of sexual relations-

    18. SHSam Harris2:16:36

        Yeah

    19. PAPeter Attia2:16:36

        ... but the, I mean, it's pretty clear he, he lied under oath. But the point you're making is that now it's almost a feature. Like, now it's almost-

    20. SHSam Harris2:16:47

        I think it's-

    21. PAPeter Attia2:16:47

        It's gone beyond it that it's accepted, and now it's-

    22. SHSam Harris2:16:50

        Yeah

    23. PAPeter Attia2:16:50

        ... almost like part of the theater.

    24. SHSam Harris2:16:52

        But I think that is a uniquely Trumpian phenomenon. I, I don't know that anyone else will be able to play it quite that way. I mean, it, it, it is a, it's a feature of politics that has been true in other countries forever. I mean, it is a feature of authoritarian politics.

    25. PAPeter Attia2:17:09

        Wait, wait. You mean Kim Jong Un didn't really do that well in golf when he was two years old?

    26. SHSam Harris2:17:14

        Several holes in one.

    27. PAPeter Attia2:17:15

        Several holes in one [chuckles] .

    28. SHSam Harris2:17:16

        Yeah.

    29. PAPeter Attia2:17:16

        He doesn't defecate, I heard, as well.

    30. SHSam Harris2:17:18

        Yeah, yeah.
16. 2:18:36 – 2:39:05

    Raising daughters, Sam's books and forgiveness in public life

    1. PAPeter Attia2:18:36

       So you have two daughters, right?

    2. SHSam Harris2:18:39

       Mm-hmm.

    3. PAPeter Attia2:18:40

       So we think so much about how do we prepare our kids for the world that's out there that we can only say one thing for certain about, which is we don't know what it's gonna look like. I mean, I had this discussion with my daughter last night, actually, or two nights ago, which was, "Olivia, you're ten years old today. The only thing I can assure you of, in eight years, I have no idea what the world will look like."

    4. SHSam Harris2:19:07

       Yeah.

    5. PAPeter Attia2:19:07

       "But there are a handful of traits that I think will help you in life, and they might seem somewhat arbitrary, and they might seem somewhat ridiculous or even unpleasant. But the sooner you can figure out a way to put these traits in place, the more well-equipped you will be with whatever the future holds," right? So when I was ten, no one could have predicted that the internet was going to exist and that somehow that was going to have all of these implications, right? With respect to all the stuff we've been talking about today, specifically with respect to choosing to live an examined life, choosing to live a life where we are not constantly being lived by our thoughts, how do you teach your daughters about what the future holds? Uh, and I, I don't mean that in like a broad sense, but I mean, aside from encouraging them to meditate, and I'm sure at some age kids can learn mindfulness meditation, but how else do you try to influence your kids with respect to the lessons you've learned? I mean, they may never choose to go off on-- And you've spent such a significant period of your life on retreats. You've really devoted your entire life to this study If they choose not to do that, you know, they want to do something boring like go into medicine or whatever-

    6. SHSam Harris2:20:30

       Hmm. Hmm

    7. PAPeter Attia2:20:30

       ... how will you still impart some of these lessons on them? Or will it be much more by osmosis than anything deliberate?

    8. SHSam Harris2:20:37

       First, kids can be taught to meditate and, and actually my wife has done that work a lot.

    9. PAPeter Attia2:20:43

       Your wife teaches kids, correct?

    10. SHSam Harris2:20:43

        Yeah. She goes to schools and-

    11. PAPeter Attia2:20:44

        At what age does she start?

    12. SHSam Harris2:20:46

        Like five.

    13. PAPeter Attia2:20:48

        Wow.

    14. SHSam Harris2:20:48

        Six. It's amazing. I mean, you can go, very quickly you can go from just, you know, the first class, which is just chaos, to a room full of six-year-olds sitting in silence for 15 minutes. So it's amazing. I mean, it's like-

    15. PAPeter Attia2:21:03

        [chuckles] It seems unfathomable.

    16. SHSam Harris2:21:04

        Yeah. And they get real benefit from it. I mean, they're not, it's not quite the same as adults connecting with the practice, but it's, it can be pretty similar. I mean, they're, they're becoming aware of their emotional lives in the way, in a way that kids often aren't.

    17. PAPeter Attia2:21:21

        Do girls develop easier than boys at that age?

    18. SHSam Harris2:21:25

        Generally speaking, I, I consider them separate species, so yeah, I mean, they, they do.

    19. PAPeter Attia2:21:28

        Yeah, 'cause my, my-

    20. SHSam Harris2:21:30

        Boys are, boys are wild, yeah

    21. PAPeter Attia2:21:31

        ... my son is like, yeah, I don't, I don't know how I could ever [chuckles] communicate any of that to him.

    22. SHSam Harris2:21:35

        Yeah. Yeah, and I think boys have a harder time sitting still, certainly earlier on. So it's amazing to see kids connect with the practice 'cause they, they definitely do, and, and they just become aware of the, the linkage between emotion and behavior, thought and emotion, emotion and thought. But on some level, it just comes down to suffering and the end of suffering. You know, it's just like a how much do you wanna suffer? People are suffering in reliable ways based on-

    23. PAPeter Attia2:22:05

        So do you spend time then explaining the nature of the suffering?

    24. SHSam Harris2:22:09

        Yeah.

    25. PAPeter Attia2:22:09

        Because I would agree completely. Nobody wants to suffer. I, I just think it takes many of us decades to even come to the realization of how much of our suffering is self-imposed.

    26. SHSam Harris2:22:21

        Yeah. Yeah.

    27. PAPeter Attia2:22:21

        So is it, is part of it just getting them to realize that sooner?

    28. SHSam Harris2:22:26

        Yeah, and, and again, to, to point out many of the things we've discussed here, what is like the power of framing, right? The pow- and the power of expectation. So, you know, I'll often point out to my daughters, even the youngest who's just turning five, but for the, for the most part, the oldest who's just turning 10, that the mismatch between her expectation of how something was gonna be and how it was, right? And it's usually a, a negative expectation. She was worried about something happening, let's say a doctor's visit or, you know, getting blood drawn or getting a shot, and the actual experience that was far less traumatic than she was worried that it was gonna be. And to point out that all of the time spent suffering in anticipation of this negative thing was wasted, right? Like there's a, there's a lesson to be learned here, like the thing she thought she was sure was gonna be awful turned out not to be so awful or not in, in some cases, not awful at all, right? Or even net positive, right? Because she, she had the experience of sort of overcoming a fear or, you know, she like she felt stronger as a result of that thing that just happened. So it's like the expectation is so often not only a bad guide, it's just, it's no guide at all to what is gonna happen, and yet people suffer in advance over this thing that they're, they're expecting to be negative. Even if, even if it's going to be negative, you can decide to suffer once or twice.

    29. PAPeter Attia2:23:59

        Yeah.

    30. SHSam Harris2:23:59

        Right?
17. 2:39:05 – 2:43:46

    Where to find Waking Up and closing thanks

    1. PAPeter Attia2:39:05

       for folks who are listening to this on my podcast who might not know you as well as they ought to, is samharris.org basically where they can find everything, your podcast, your blog-

    2. SHSam Harris2:39:16

       Yeah

    3. PAPeter Attia2:39:17

       ... your books, all sorts of things?

    4. SHSam Harris2:39:19

       Yeah, and, and as far as my meditation app, it's just wakingup.com. But yeah, both websites are-

    5. PAPeter Attia2:39:24

       And some of us like me are lucky enough to have got it for free 'cause we were supporters of the podcast before it came out.

    6. SHSam Harris2:39:30

       Yeah, yeah.

    7. PAPeter Attia2:39:30

       But is it available for purchase now on both the, uh, i- on Apple and on, uh, Android?

    8. SHSam Harris2:39:36

       Android, yeah.

    9. PAPeter Attia2:39:36

       I think it's Droid-- Android's not quite out yet, is it?

    10. SHSam Harris2:39:38

        No, it's at, it's out as of yesterday.

    11. PAPeter Attia2:39:41

        Okay.

    12. SHSam Harris2:39:41

        So yeah.

    13. PAPeter Attia2:39:41

        Fantastic, 'cause I know I had a patient who went to search for it on Android a few weeks ago, and it was coming soon, so.

    14. SHSam Harris2:39:47

        No, no. We're, we're born on both platforms, so.

    15. PAPeter Attia2:39:50

        Okay. Well, congratulations, Sam. It is-- I mean, I just wanna say I wanna thank you personally for, for the effect and the impact that your work has had on me. I find myself, like I said, spending so much time thinking about how to help people delay the onset of diseases that kill them. And in many ways, you're doing the same thing, but in a, in some ways a higher stakes arena, which is how to prevent people from suffering so much, which in some ways is just harder to measure. We don't have the same stats on that, right? I can rattle off all the stats on what the probability is that you're gonna get cancer by the time you're 70, and what's the likelihood you're gonna make it to 90 without a heart attack. And well, I can rattle off all those things, but we don't keep the same stats for how much we suffer. And I, I, I think of your work as among the most important things that have helped me and, and now by extension some of my patients who are willing to go down this path with me to reduce that burden of suffering.

    16. SHSam Harris2:40:54

        Nice. Nice. Well, glad to hear it.

    17. PAPeter Attia2:40:57

        Well, thank you.

    18. SHSam Harris2:40:57

        I'll, I'll keep it up.

    19. PAPeter Attia2:40:58

        And thank you for making, uh, making so much time this afternoon.

    20. SHSam Harris2:41:00

        Yeah, yeah. It's a pleasure, and congratulations on the podcast. You are one of these few examples of somebody who goes from the conversation of, "You know, I think, uh, maybe I wanna start a podcast. I, uh, should I? Should I start a podcast?" And then I turn around, and three weeks later you have this amazing podcast that is more professionally produced than mine and people love. So congratulations on that.

    21. PAPeter Attia2:41:22

        Well, you, you, you and your team deserve a lot of, uh, credit for that. I know I've said this before, but, but, uh, well, it's, it's always worth repeating. I mean, I think that you and Tim were probably among the two most vocal, along with probably Patrick O'Shaughnessy. But I think you and Tim the most really, 'cause I honestly, I was just so intimidated by the work I saw you and Tim doing.

    22. SHSam Harris2:41:41

        Mm.

    23. PAPeter Attia2:41:41

        I was like, "Well, there's no goddamn way I can do that." [chuckles] Like, that's, that's just above my pay grade. So I still think my podcast pales in comparison to yours and Tim's, but I am happy to be in the arena, and it, it has turned out to be much more enjoyable than I would have ever predicted.

    24. SHSam Harris2:41:57

        Yeah.

    25. PAPeter Attia2:41:57

        And so I do regret having not done it two years sooner when [chuckles] you were harping on me and Tim was harping on me.

    26. SHSam Harris2:42:03

        Right, right.

    27. PAPeter Attia2:42:04

        But better late than never, and it's an honor to have you as a guest on my little-

    28. SHSam Harris2:42:08

        Nice

    29. PAPeter Attia2:42:08

        ... budding podcast.

    30. SHSam Harris2:42:10

        Well, keep it up.

Episode duration: 2:43:46