April 4, 2017 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:59:30
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Three, two, one. | ||
| And we're live. | ||
| What's up? | ||
| All right. | ||
| How are you, man? | ||
| What's going on? | ||
| Doing great. | ||
| Sam Harris, ladies and gentlemen. | ||
| You got Harris and Harris. | ||
| Dan and Sam. | ||
| No relation, obviously. | ||
| No relation. | ||
| Brother from another mother kind of thing. | ||
| Aw, sweet. | ||
| Actually, no, we work this out. | ||
| We are deeply unrelated because your Harris is the Jewish side of your family, right? | ||
| No, no, no, no. | ||
| My Harris is the... | ||
| Yes, actually, no, you're right. | ||
| My Harris is the Jewish side of the family. | ||
| It was changed at Ellis Island from allegedly from Addis, which doesn't sound Jewish either, but yes. | ||
| My Harris is the Goyim side of the family. | ||
| Isn't that funny how many people's names were changed at Ellis Island? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Where they're like, nah, not American enough. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Meanwhile, Schwarzenegger made it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Proudly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Odd. | ||
| So, anyway, thanks for coming, you guys. | ||
| Thanks for having us. | ||
| This is a weird time. | ||
| You know, I've been extra weirded out over the last couple months, and I just got back from Mexico. | ||
| I was on vacation, and I didn't do shit for a week. | ||
| And in not doing anything for a week, I really got a chance to sit down and think about stuff. | ||
| And I'm more weirded out by life today than I think I ever have been before. | ||
| So I'm excited to have you on, because I want to hear your story. | ||
| Because Sam has been telling me about it, and I looked into it, and it's... | ||
| Please explain what happened to you, where you were, and what happened to you. | ||
| Okay, so you're talking about the panic attack, isn't it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| So it was 2004. I was on a little show that we do at ABC News called Good Morning America. | ||
| That's a big show. | ||
| That's a big show. | ||
| That's not a little show. | ||
| No, it's not a little show. | ||
| And I was doing the job that I was filling in as the newsreader. | ||
| That's the person who comes on at the top of each hour and reads the headlines. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I just freaked out. | ||
| I just lost it. | ||
| What a cow! | ||
| So I was a couple seconds into it, and I started to get really scared. | ||
| Have you ever had a panic attack? | ||
| No. | ||
| So it's like anxiety on steroids. | ||
| So you start to worry, but then your fight-or-flight instincts kick in. | ||
| So your lungs seize up, your palms start sweating, your mouth dries up, your heart is racing, your mind is racing. | ||
| I couldn't breathe and therefore couldn't speak. | ||
| So a couple seconds into reading what was supposed to be six stories right off of the teleprompter, I lost the capacity to speak, and I had to kind of squeak out something about, you know, back to you, back to the main anchors. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Yeah, it sucked uncontrollably. | ||
| Now, what caused it? | ||
| Do you know? | ||
| I do, yeah. | ||
| I definitely know. | ||
| Some dumb behavior in my personal life is what caused it. | ||
| I had spent a lot of time as a war reporter at ABC News. | ||
| I was in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, six trips to Iraq. | ||
| And I had come home from a long run. | ||
| I covered kind of the pre-invasion, invasion, and then insurgency in one kind of six-month run. | ||
| And I came home after that, and I got depressed. | ||
| And I didn't actually know I was depressed, but I was having some obvious symptoms in hindsight. | ||
| I was having trouble getting out of bed, felt like I had a low-grade fever all the time. | ||
| And then I did something really smart, which is I started to self-medicate with cocaine and ecstasy. | ||
| And even though I wasn't doing it all the time, I like to say it wasn't like that, you know, you ever see the Wolf of Wall Street? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Where they're popping lewds. | ||
| That wasn't me. | ||
| And I wasn't getting high on the air or anything like that, but, you know, I was partying in my spare time because it made me feel better. | ||
| So after I had the panic attack, I went to a doctor who's an expert in panic, and he started asking me a bunch of questions, trying to figure out what had caused the panic attack, and one of the questions was, do you do drugs? | ||
| And I was like, yeah, I do drugs. | ||
| And he leaned back in his chair and gave me a look that communicated the following sentiment. | ||
| Okay, asshole, mystery solved. | ||
| And he just pointed out that, you know, you raise the level of adrenaline in your brain artificially. | ||
| You make it much more likely to have a panic attack. | ||
| And I, at baseline, I'm a jittery little dude. | ||
| So it doesn't take much to put me in that zone. | ||
| I mean, you just offered me coffee and I said no, because even that will freak me out. | ||
| Well, it's weird that ecstasy and cocaine was the combination, because ecstasy is something that they actually give to a lot of soldiers that have PTSD, and there's been quite a few tests on that. | ||
| Yeah, I don't actually think ecstasy was the problem. | ||
| The coke? | ||
| I think it was the coke. | ||
| Yeah, that makes sense. | ||
| But those are the two drugs I was mostly doing. | ||
| How often were you doing it? | ||
| I would say, you know, there would be months where I wasn't doing it at all because I was off. | ||
| I covered the 2004 presidential campaign and I didn't have a lot of time to be, you know, snorting coke. | ||
| But when I was home and around my friends, you know, on a busy week, you know, two, three times a week. | ||
| Well, that's a lot. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That'll do you. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| There's a comeback right now that cocaine is experiencing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Did it ever go away? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I've never done it. | ||
| Was there some sort of cocaine recession that I had to bounce back from? | ||
| I believe there was. | ||
| Really? | ||
| I'm talking totally ignorantly. | ||
| I've been out of the game for a long time, so... | ||
| The cocaine? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I'm kind of boring now. | ||
| But it feels to me like it's kind of a perennial favorite. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| I mean, I feel like it went through a recession. | ||
| Maybe it's just my perception. | ||
| I had a buddy of mine when I was in high school, and his cousin was hooked on coke. | ||
| And I watched while we were in high school. | ||
| He started selling it, and he withered away, lost like 30 pounds or something like that. | ||
| And just him and his girlfriend just hide out in the attic. | ||
| They had an attic apartment. | ||
| They would just hide out there and watch TV and do coke and sell coke to people. | ||
| And I was like, well... | ||
| Fuck that drug. | ||
| Whatever that drug's doing, these people... | ||
| It was almost like knowing someone who had gotten bitten by a vampire and become something different. | ||
| It was very strange. | ||
| So my experience is seeing people do that led me to never do it. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it certainly was not like that for me, but I could see it over the horizon. | ||
| It's an incredibly addictive drug. | ||
| So I think you made the right call. | ||
| Yeah, it's got a little too much gravity attached to it. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, you can get hooked and it will bring you down. | ||
| There are other drugs you can do. | ||
| I'm not recommending drugs, but the way my friend Sam, my half-brother Sam over there does. | ||
| Let me get to it. | ||
| There are other drugs you can do that have vastly lower addictive character. | ||
| What's the word I'm looking for here, Sam? | ||
| Characteristics? | ||
| Yes, thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So how did you recover? | |
| So I wasn't actually doing it that long. | ||
| I actually had never done hard drugs until my early 30s when I came home from the war zones. | ||
| And that's what started it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You just were freaked out by seeing too much? | ||
| No, you know, it's actually, it wasn't PTSD. It was, I was addicted to the adrenaline. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| It was not that I was traumatized, it was that I was enjoying it too much. | ||
| And I would come home and the world would seem gray and boring. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Yes, that was the problem. | ||
| Did you watch Hurt Locker? | ||
| I'm sure you did, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Did that resonate with you? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| It's been a while since I watched it, but absolutely. | ||
| I want to just be clear that the experience of a journalist is so different from the experience, so much more mild than the experience of an enlisted man or woman. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I don't want to compare my experience to the Hurt Locker. | ||
| I'm an observer on the side, and I don't even want to compare my experience to more experienced war correspondents out there. | ||
| I'm thinking of guys like Richard Engel on NBC. Sebastian Junger. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| I just actually sat down with him the other day. | ||
| He's got a new documentary coming out. | ||
| My experiences are much more mild than that, but certainly enough to really get a sense of how thrilling it is. | ||
| There's an expression, there's nothing more thrilling than the bullet that misses you. | ||
| And in my case, luckily, they all miss. | ||
| That was not true for some of my friends. | ||
| So I had a real sense of the stakes, but it is exciting. | ||
| It's also thrilling on an idealistic level. | ||
| I mean, I believe... | ||
| And the importance of bearing witness to the tip of the spear, to what we're doing, to what our military is doing in our name. | ||
| So all of that is a heady mix. | ||
| So you knew people over there, journalists that got killed? | ||
| Oh yeah, absolutely. | ||
| A very good friend of mine, the guy who actually ultimately set me up with my wife, is a guy named Bob Woodruff, who was the anchor of World News Tonight on ABC News. | ||
| He had only been in the chair for about a month when he was on a trip to Iraq and he got hit literally got his head nearly blown off When he was in the back when he was in the top of an Iraqi tank Almost died is an absolute miracle is alive. | ||
| There are pictures of him on the internet with basically half a head Traumatic brain injury was brought back to life is is to this day walking miracle that he's alive And after he recovered, he then introduced me to the woman I married. | ||
| So he's a close friend, and I saw cases like that, lost friends, both Iraqi friends and journalist friends. | ||
| The woman I was dating at the time when I was spending a lot of time in Iraq, she got hit by a tank shell. | ||
| She was in the hotel Palestine where all the journalists were staying. | ||
| She was on a balcony, and one of her colleagues was on the balcony below her. | ||
| He got a direct hit and died. | ||
| She carried him to the hospital, and she basically got the reverberations and couldn't hear. | ||
| Still can't hear, as far as I know. | ||
| When you're a journalist and you're over in Iraq or in Afghanistan, you're in war, and what you're experiencing is so far removed from the day-to-day life that most people experience, what is it like trying to relay that to people? | ||
| How difficult is it? | ||
| Because I think so many people have this... | ||
| Almost dramatic television movie-slash-view of war, where they don't ever experience it. | ||
| I would imagine probably 99% of the people that are in this country will never experience it. | ||
| No, and that's good. | ||
| No, I don't know that you can describe it in a way that will really give the full picture of its absurdities and horrors and long stretches of boredom punctuated by terror. I don't know that you can describe it in a And also this other piece, which is taboo to talk about. | ||
| about, which is the pleasure and excitement that people get fighting wars. | ||
| I mean, this is Sebastian Junger's thesis as well. | ||
| I mean, just the camaraderie is the most intense camaraderie they ever experienced. | ||
| And so it's something they come back to civilian life and are missing it. | ||
| And it's part of what's so difficult about coming back. | ||
| And that's why you see a lot of risk-taking behavior among vets, because you're looking and for another way to get that hit of adrenaline, for sure. | ||
| There's a book, and I'm blanking on the name, it's a great book written by a much more experienced war correspondent than me. | ||
| He used the phrase, war is a drug. | ||
| And that, to me, sums it up, at least in my experience. | ||
| I got hooked on the experience of being in these really elevated situations, heightened situations, cinematic, dramatic situations. | ||
| And I would come home and I just I didn't know what to do to replace it. | ||
| And so this synthetic squirt of adrenaline that you can get from cocaine seemed to do it for me. | ||
| Obviously, it had tremendously negative consequences. | ||
| And so I wouldn't recommend it. | ||
| But I see why people do this. | ||
| So how did you bounce back? | ||
| Oh, that was actually the question you asked me before that I somehow neglected to answer. | ||
| So the doctor who pointed out that I was an idiot and doing drugs and it had caused the panic attack, I agreed. | ||
| He didn't think I needed to go to rehab because it was pretty short-lived. | ||
| I was in my early 30s when I started and I'm still in my early 30s when I had the panic attack. | ||
| So it was only a couple years. | ||
| He said, I want you to come see me once or twice a week. | ||
| Forever. | ||
| Forever? | ||
| How convenient. | ||
| He said basically indefinitely. | ||
| So I still see him, but not... | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's a good business model. | |
| Yeah, it's a good business model. | ||
| But not that... | ||
| I mean, it's been well north of... | ||
| It's been about 13 years, so I don't see him that often now. | ||
| But for a long time, I saw him intensively. | ||
| So that, you know, it wasn't easy. | ||
| It's not easy. | ||
| And I wouldn't have, I wouldn't call what I mean, there are people who have had drug addictions that are vastly more severe than mine. | ||
| But it sucks to stop a habit that is giving you pleasure on, you know, on pretty, in pretty prominent areas of your brain. | ||
| Well, your situation, what you're talking about is a very, very, very extreme situation. | ||
| Like being a journalist, a war correspondent, going over there, experiencing that intense sort of adrenaline rush and then having your issues with it. | ||
| But it seems like there's a tremendous amount of people today that are stimulating themselves. | ||
| Adderall is a big one. | ||
| I mean, it's just, I know, I've found out recently like four or five people that I didn't know that were on Adderall. | ||
| It seems like you just sort of start asking questions, and you find out how many people, I mean, all these, my kid goes to school, With a bunch of other kids and you get to meet the parents and like fucking half of them are on Adderall. | ||
| It's very weird. | ||
| And Adderall is a form of amphetamine. | ||
| And it seems like... | ||
| It's mind-boggling how many people are doing this stuff. | ||
| We're dosing ourselves with all sorts of things. | ||
| So it can be stimulants, but it also can be benzos, cousins of Valium. | ||
| It can be shopping, gambling. | ||
| It can be whatever, except Twitter. | ||
| I think it's just speaking, we have a neuroscientist in the room, so I'll let him say more about this, and also a guy who's a more experienced practitioner of Buddhism than I am, but, you know, it does speak to the nature of the human mind, that we're always on the hunt for the next little hit of dopamine, and now there are lots of ways to get it. | ||
| Well, it's also very bizarre that you can just do that. | ||
| I mean, I don't think there's ever been a time in history where you could just take a pill and you'll be elevated for five or six hours. | ||
| I mean, and that your doctor will give you this pill and they'll encourage you to take it. | ||
| And then you'll find out that 50% of the people in your community are taking it. | ||
| I've done stories about parents who steal it from the kids. | ||
| Also just caffeine. | ||
| I mean, I'm reaching for the coffee here, having slept poorly last night. | ||
| But that is, and that's just as much of a drug, it's just not as potent a drug as taking methamphetamine or Adderall or anything else that's a drug drug. | ||
| But, I mean, this had civilizational consequences when humanity more or less switched from alcohol in the morning to caffeine in the morning. | ||
| That's just—things got a lot different. | ||
| I mean, for hundreds of years, people were just drinking ale and wine in the morning before coffee and tea became— Huge in Europe, and colonialism, the engine of colonialism, to a significant degree, was coffee, tea, sugar, and, you know, our behavior changed. | ||
| People that were drinking ale and wine, wasn't a big part of it, the reason why they drank it with food, is because water would get stagnant. | ||
| Yeah, well, there's the issue with clean water, too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Just imagine the consequences of you and everyone you know getting up in the morning and just starting with beer or wine. | ||
| I know people like that. | ||
| That's a long day or a very short one. | ||
| But the fundamental... | ||
| I think the point of the underlying neuroscience is that all of these drugs, anything you're putting into your body that's modifying the behavior of your brain is only modifying the existing available neurochemistry of your brain. | ||
| Get your brain to secrete more of an existing neurotransmitter or they mimic an existing neurotransmitter binding to the same receptor site or they keep something in play longer than it would otherwise have been. | ||
| They block the reuptake of neurotransmitters or neuromodulators. | ||
| So, a drug is never getting your brain to do something your brain is incapable of doing. | ||
| And that's the most extreme thing, like DMT or LSD. The brain is still doing all of that. | ||
| And so it stands to reason that there are... | ||
| There are potentially other ways of getting the brain to do that, whether it's meditation or whether it's computer interface, ultimately, to the brain. | ||
| I know that people are interested in brain-computer interface that not only allows a quadriplegic to move a robotic arm or gets a Parkinson's patient to be able to move, | ||
| but to the ultimate degree, actually augmenting human function or opening I mean, all of that is... | ||
| In principle, possible because, again, we're just talking about electrochemical phenomenon happening in our heads, which is just there to be modulated. | ||
| Now, when you were talking about being depressed, and Sam, you're talking about reuptake inhibitors, I want to know, what are your thoughts on the massive amount of people that are on SSRIs now? | ||
| I mean, there's another thing that I know, how many people I know that have Either are on or have been on some sort of antidepressants. | ||
| And it seems, I mean, to me, to someone who's never taken them or doesn't have personal experience with it, massively overprescribed. | ||
| Yeah, well, anything I say is with a caveat that this is, I mean, I'm not a neurologist. | ||
| I have zero clinical experience. | ||
| And this is certainly not my area. | ||
| I'm not up on the recent literature on the efficacy of Of antidepressants. | ||
| But there's... | ||
| I mean, clearly... | ||
| It's like anything. | ||
| There's a spectrum. | ||
| There are people who have been unambiguously helped by antidepressants. | ||
| And there are people who are on them who shouldn't be on them. | ||
| And there are people who are on them who want to get off them and find it surprisingly difficult to get off them. | ||
| And so it's just... | ||
| These are blunt instruments by definition because... | ||
| Anything that's modulating serotonin, in this case, is effective everywhere serotonin is effective. | ||
| There's no magical property of... | ||
| Finding the neuromodulator where only the symptoms you want to relieve are affected because these chemicals do a lot of things in a lot of places, even in your gut. | ||
| Hence the side effects you get with almost any medication. | ||
| In many respects, it's a matter of luck. | ||
| To find a pharmacological target that actually does just what you want it to do, which is to say that those receptors are not elsewhere that are going to produce side effects for you. | ||
| That's why a different kind of intervention, something like, ultimately, some electrical or magnetic or machine-based intervention, Could be more targeted because then you're not just putting something in the bloodstream that spreads everywhere. | ||
| By machine-based, you mean something like electrodes that they put on the mind or the surface of the head to stimulate areas of the brain? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And again, what we have now is also still pretty primitive. | ||
| And anything that you would have that would be... | ||
| Super futuristic would seem to require that you put something actually inside your head, right? | ||
| So whether that's neurosurgery or putting something into the bloodstream that somehow gets inside your head, you know, an injectable... | ||
| So for instance, Elon Musk just mentioned something which he called neural lace, which is... | ||
| I believe a term that came from a sci-fi novel. | ||
| I don't think it originates with him. | ||
| I'm not a big science fiction reader. | ||
| But he announced investment in a company called Neuralink, which is looking at some advanced brain-computer interface. | ||
| Based on the idea that you could get a, with these new microelectrodes, you can get an injectable mesh, like a wire mesh that just integrates with the brain, or very likely just the cortex. | ||
| And I believe this work has already been done in mice, and the mice are, you know, have survived and are living with this mesh in their brains. | ||
| And again, this is not research I'm close to at all. | ||
| He just announced this a couple of weeks ago. | ||
| But in principle, you're talking about having, whether it's a mesh or whether it's magneto-electric particles, something that is... | ||
| On-site around individual neurons or assemblages of neurons, which can both read out and input wirelessly signal from those neurons. | ||
| So just by both putting your thoughts into the world by influencing effectors, robotic arms or cursors on screens or whatever it is, And also influencing your mind based on whatever inputs you want to put in there from the world. | ||
| Until the Russians hack you. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| It opens all of those concerns. | ||
| Always the Russians. | ||
| It's always the Russians. | ||
| The Chinese are gambling. | ||
| I think the Chinese people are responsible for a lot of the propaganda that makes us think about the Russians. | ||
| It's like, yeah, push it off on them. | ||
| Push it off on them. | ||
| I'm prepared to blame the Russians for a lot at this point. | ||
| Blame them all. | ||
| What a slippery slope, though, for humans becoming cyborgs. | ||
| I mean, we're already like some weird form of symbiote right now carrying our cell phones like it's a baby. | ||
| You know, like you leave your cell phone and you're like, oh my god, I forgot the baby. | ||
| I mean, it's a very strange thing that we already have, and there's not a whole lot of steps between that and Snapchat glasses. | ||
| Jamie's got the Snapchat glasses. | ||
| Have you ever seen those things? | ||
| Yeah, I didn't know they existed. | ||
| Oh, they're very strange. | ||
| They have little cameras on them, and... | ||
| Yeah, you got it. | ||
| Go ahead, throw them on. | ||
| He knows how to use them. | ||
| Google Glass just was totally stillborn, right? | ||
| Yeah, it didn't work. | ||
| So he's transmitting, or he's making a video right now with that left side. | ||
| See how the left side is spinning? | ||
| What does Snapchat do, like 15 seconds? | ||
| 10 seconds at a time that little counter is just flashing was like the last three seconds and you can hit it again and get another 20 seconds or you can hold it and do like 30 seconds or something like that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Step one. | ||
| Now is that spinning just to alert the people you're looking at that you are recording? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I see it too. | |
| So it's on alert me too to let me know that my recording is done. | ||
| Probably a little bit to let you know too but it's probably the only notification you know that I'm recording. | ||
| And it's just post. | ||
| It doesn't post automatically, and now I have to link it to my phone and then post it from there. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| The Google Glass thing made people very uncomfortable. | ||
| I mean, I tried a very early prototype. | ||
| I have a good friend of mine who was an executive at Google at the time, and she got a hold of one of the really early ones that actually had to be tethered by a cord. | ||
| And, you know, you talk to it and swipe it. | ||
| And I played with it a couple of times and we used it once at a UFC weigh-in where I put it on and I broadcast from the weigh-in. | ||
| It's very, very odd. | ||
| But it made people very uncomfortable. | ||
| Like you could see the difference when they saw you with that thing on. | ||
| All of a sudden there was all this apprehension. | ||
| They're being, you know, recorded or transmitted. | ||
| But how long? | ||
| How long do we have while we're still people? | ||
| Well, long before you asked that question, our sense of privacy... | ||
| I remember what it was like to be neurotic about the sound of your voice on a voicemail or an answering machine, right? | ||
| Like re-recording the outgoing message and just being worried about your voice showing up in someone else's tape. | ||
| And now we're living in this panopticon surveillance society where you just assume you're on camera virtually every moment you're in public. | ||
| Although I guess people don't think about it all that much. | ||
| I think the norms around privacy shift just because we get so much value from having the data, ultimately. | ||
| I guess. | ||
| But it just seems also like there's just this inexorable pull. | ||
| towards this connection that we're going to have. | ||
| It just seems like if you take where we are now and sort of look at all the data points and extrapolate, it doesn't look good. | ||
| But it's both. | ||
| It's both bad and good. | ||
| The fake news thing is horrible, but the ability to fact-check, to be able to pick up your phone and find out what's true, has also never been better. | ||
| So it's like we're both vulnerable in a way that we've never been and we're empowered in a way. | ||
| It's always been true about technological progress. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It just seems like there's a certain amount of time we have left. | ||
| Before we give birth to some new thing. | ||
| We're talking about just integrating ourselves biologically with our machines. | ||
| And also something that's independent of us. | ||
| Some artificial intelligence is independent of us. | ||
| You want to look for some fear around that? | ||
| You've got the right guy right here. | ||
| I've expressed those fears here, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, and Josh Zeps freaked me out this morning. | ||
| He sent me some articles about these self-driving trucks that are already going in Australia that are as big as a 767, and they're driving down the road by themselves with cargo, probably nuclear waste or something, you know, just tooling down the road. | ||
| But people are so bad at driving that the robots just have to get reliably better than people, and then you'll just feel nothing but relief. | ||
| They probably already are. | ||
| Well, yeah. | ||
| I mean, I think they probably are, as far as I know from what I hear from Tesla, that, yeah, the man hours they have of people using the autopilot, and the autopilot's not at all perfect, obviously. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Two people have died already from using it badly. | ||
| But still, they have something like some millions of man-hours of autopilot-assisted driving, and I think that has been safer than just pure ape. | ||
| Did you see the video of the guy who fell asleep in traffic in San Francisco? | ||
| He's literally out cold and his car's driving him on the highway? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| It's kind of fantastic. | ||
| I mean, he's just some guy on his way to work, just passed out completely, mouth open, and people are filming him while his car is driving down the road. | ||
| Yeah, and actually, probably the people filming him are doing the more dangerous thing. | ||
| You're right, yeah. | ||
| Well, texting and driving drives me crazy. | ||
| To be in an Uber now, you can look around, you can see how many people are texting. | ||
| Yeah, including your driver sometimes. | ||
| Yeah, that drives me crazy. | ||
| Here's a guy. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| That dude's out cold. | ||
|
unidentified
|
His car is creeping along and stop and go traffic and he is completely out cold. | |
| Wow! | ||
| Well, it works. | ||
| The autopilot works. | ||
| Yeah, no, it does work. | ||
| Yeah, texting and driving scares the shit out of me. | ||
| That Pokemon Go thing, thank God that died off. | ||
| It stopped, yeah. | ||
| I was driving on the highway, and there was a woman to the left of us, and I noticed that her face was illuminated by her cell phone. | ||
| So I look over, and she's playing Pokemon as she's driving. | ||
| So I guess, I don't know how Pokemon works, but I guess you pick up things, and as you're driving, you can get stuff. | ||
| And so she was playing the game while she was barely paying attention to the road, looking at her phone. | ||
| This is the argument for robot drivers. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And also it will open up when you are ultimately being driven safely by a car that you trust more than you trust yourself. | ||
| Then just imagine the information consumption entertainment options that open up there. | ||
| You'll watch movies. | ||
| You'll listen to podcasts. | ||
| You'll get work done. | ||
| And it'll become a space of... | ||
| We're not going to miss... | ||
| Having to pay attention to the road. | ||
| Maybe some people want to drive recreationally for some reason, but it will just be a new space where you won't believe that 40,000 people every year were dying because we couldn't figure out how to drive safely. | ||
| But isn't that a slippery slope? | ||
| That's a great thing, that 40,000 people are not going to die. | ||
| But the idea that you're going to stop people from driving a car... | ||
| You're going to have to live with these 40,000 people. | ||
| That's not what I was going to say. | ||
| But I was going to say, I mean, pretty much all the things that people do. | ||
| And then it's going to get down to why have people? | ||
| I mean, ultimately, that's the... | ||
| When I look at the event horizon of artificial intelligence, it's why? | ||
| Why would we... | ||
| We're so flawed. | ||
| We're not going to get our shit together by the time artificial intelligence is given birth to. | ||
| Well, that all goes to what we build. | ||
| I mean, if we build artificial intelligence that is... | ||
| If it's independent of us and seems conscious and is more powerful than us, well, then we are, we have built a, in the limit, we have essentially built a god that we now have to be in relationship to. | ||
| And hopefully that's a, works out well for us. | ||
| And it's very easy to see how it might not. | ||
| I think there are even scarier cases than that, though. | ||
| We could build something that has godlike power. | ||
| But there's no reason to think it's conscious. | ||
| It's no more conscious than our current computers, which is to say that intelligence and consciousness may be separable phenomenon. | ||
| Intelligence can scale, but consciousness need not come along for the ride. | ||
| And that, for me, is the worst case scenario, because if we inherit all of the danger of The power of this system being misaligned with our interests. | ||
| We could build something that's godlike in its power, and yet we could essentially be canceling the prospects of the evolution of consciousness. | ||
| Because if this thing wipes us out, I think it's Nick Bostrom, the philosopher, who wrote a great book on this entitled Superintelligence. | ||
| I think he calls this the Disneyland without children. | ||
| Basically, we could build this... | ||
| It's incredibly powerful, intelligent landscape that continues to refine itself and its own powers in who knows what ways, what ways perhaps that are unimaginable to us, and yet the lights aren't on. | ||
| There's nothing that it's like to be this machine or system of machines in a way that it's probably nothing that it's like to be the Internet right now. | ||
| You think of all that's going on on the Internet... | ||
| I don't think the Internet is conscious of any of it right now. | ||
| The question is, could the Internet become conscious of what it's thinking? | ||
| And I think there's no reason to think it couldn't. | ||
| It's just we don't understand the physical basis of consciousness yet. | ||
| The real question is, why would it do anything? | ||
| I mean, if it doesn't have any of the biological motivations that people have to breed and to stay alive and to, you know, fight or flight and to be nervous and this desire to carry on our genes, I mean, if you really did build the ultimate supercomputer artificial intelligence that was beyond our capacity for reason and understanding, wouldn't it just do nothing? | ||
| Because everything is pointless. | ||
| Well, no, because what we would do... | ||
| We would program it. | ||
| It would do whatever we... | ||
| asked it to do initially, right? | ||
| I mean, things we program now have goals, right? | ||
| Your thermostat is trying to regulate the temperature in the room. | ||
| And when it gets too warm, it kicks on the air. | ||
| And when it gets too cold, it kicks on the heat. | ||
| And I mean, that's a goal, right? | ||
| And so everything we build that's automated has goals explicitly programmed into it. | ||
| And when you're talking about a truly intelligent machine, it will discover goals that you have never programmed into it that are intermediate to the goal that you have programmed. | ||
| So if the goal of this machine is to You know, pick up all the trash in this room, and you physically try to stop it, well, then it's going to try to get around you to pick up the rest of the trash in the room, right? | ||
| So it's, you know, this is probably already true of a Roomba, right? | ||
| I actually don't have a Roomba, but if you put something in the way of the Roomba, it's going to get around the thing you have put in its way so that it can get to the rest of the room. | ||
| So that's an intermediate goal, and some of these goals need never have been explicitly thought about or represented, which is to say programmed into it, and yet they're formed by the fact that the thing has a long-term goal. | ||
| And one of the concerns is that we could build something... | ||
| That has a long-term goal, build something that's super powerful, that has a long-term goal, which in principle is benign, right? | ||
| This is something we want, and yet it could discover instrumental goals that are deeply hostile to what we want. | ||
| I mean, the thing doesn't have common sense, right? | ||
| We haven't figured out how to build common sense into the machine. | ||
| So, I mean, there's just cartoon examples of this kind of thing, but like one example that... | ||
| Elon used when he first was expressing fears about this. | ||
| If you built a machine, the only goal of which was to cancel spam, right? | ||
| We want no more spam. | ||
| Get rid of the spam. | ||
| Well, an easy way to get rid of spam is just kill all the people, right? | ||
| Now, that's a crazy thing to think, but unless you've closed the door to that intermediate goal, My question would be, if this super powerful machine has the ability to create new super powerful machines, would it use the same mandate? | ||
| Would it still try to follow the original programming or would it realize that our original programming is only Instrumental to the success of the human race and it might think the human race is ridiculous and preposterous and why not just program something that it thinks is the ultimate intelligence something beyond our capacity for reason and understanding now and that thing I would wonder in the absence of any sort of biological Motivations in the absence with I | ||
| mean do you think of all the things that we do? | ||
| I mean you break it down to What motivates people to get out of bed what motivates people to do good what our sense of community? | ||
| The desire to breed the social status all these different things that motivate people to do things Remove all of those and what actions would it take and why? | ||
| Well, I think I think you want to build it in a way That is focused on our well-being. | ||
| For instance, I had Stuart Russell on my podcast. | ||
| He's a computer scientist at Berkeley who, unlike many computer scientists, takes this problem really seriously and has thought a lot about it. | ||
| In his lab, I believe they're working on a way of thinking about Safety that is open-ended and flexible without pretending we have any of the right answers in the near term or we're likely to have them. | ||
| So you want to build a system that wants to know what you want, right, at each point. | ||
| Like so that's tracking what humanity wants in terms of its goals and wants to stay aligned with whatever it is we want. | ||
| Wants to learn from what we seem to want based on our behavior. | ||
| But and so there could be some kind of clarifying function where we can get our priorities more aligned in dialogue with the super intelligent machine. | ||
| But the bottom line is it always wants to it doesn't think it knows what we want. | ||
| And it continually wants to keep approximating better and better what we want. | ||
| And so the. | ||
| From my point of view, the most crucial thing is you always want the door to remain open to the statement, wait, wait, wait, that's not what I wanted. | ||
| You want to be in the presence of this godlike superpower that will always take direction from you when you say, wait, wait, wait, that's not going in the right direction. | ||
| And so the fear is we could build something that is just not amenable to being controlled in that way. | ||
| Is it not the case that computer scientists are starting to come around to the idea that there's real danger, there's dangerous potential in AI? | ||
| I mean, I was listening to you when you talked to Will McCaskill a few weeks ago, who was saying, you know, it was just a few years from starting to think about how to split the atom to actually having a bomb. | ||
| Are they not coming around to the idea that technology can progress much faster than we think of? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, it's a whole spectrum of the people who think that this is never going to happen or it's so far away that thinking about it now is completely irrational to people who are super worried and think that huge changes are imminent. | ||
| And so it's just a spectrum. | ||
| I'm with the latter. | ||
| Yeah, as am I. Well, my concern is not even with the initial construction, like the initial AI. My concern is with what the AI creates. | ||
| If we give the AI ability to improve upon itself and look at our irrational thoughts and how we've programmed itself to support the human race, and then it might go, well, why the fuck would I do that? | ||
| Like, you guys are ridiculous. | ||
| Like, this is a new life form. | ||
| This is a new, we've given birth to some... | ||
| Incredibly potent new thing that we think of it as artificial, but I mean is it really? | ||
| It's just a form of life. | ||
| It's a form of life that we've created. | ||
| Human beings have sort of... | ||
| The analogy I always use is that we're some sort of an electronic caterpillar giving birth to some spectacular butterfly that we're not even aware of while we're building our cocoon. | ||
| We're just doing it. | ||
| I mean is the caterpillar fully conscious of what it's doing when it makes that cocoon? | ||
| Probably not, but it just does and there's plenty of Examples of that in nature of something that's doing something that's going through some metamorphosis that's completely unconscious. | ||
| My worry would be, I guess it's not even really a worry. | ||
| It's more like looking at the possibility of the AI improving upon itself and making a far better version than we could create, like almost instantaneously, right? | ||
| I mean, isn't that, if you give it the ability to be autonomous and you give it the ability to innovate and to To try to figure out what's a better way around things and what's a better way to program things and then make its own version of what it is It's gonna be spectacular. | ||
| I mean it really will be just I mean it's obviously just talking shit, but really would be a god I mean you're talking about something that if we give it the ability to create we give it the ability to think reason rationalize and then Build. | ||
| Build something better. | ||
| And by build, you should be thinking more software than hardware. | ||
| Obviously, anything is possible. | ||
| Anything that can be built with intelligence can be built with intelligence. | ||
| So you could be talking about armies of robots and nanotechnology and everything else that is the staple of the sci-fi scare scenario. | ||
| But more likely, and certainly faster, And ultimately more powerful, you're talking about something that can rewrite its own code, improve... | ||
| I mean, it's the code that is dictating the intelligence. | ||
| And so you're talking about something that could be, for the longest time, invisible and just happening on the Internet. | ||
| You're talking about code that could be put into financial markets, which could be built to be self-modifying. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And then it's already out in the wild. | ||
| It's not sequestered in some air-gapped computer in a lab. | ||
| It's out there, and it's changing itself. | ||
| Now, that would be a totally irresponsible thing to do from a software designer's point of view, I think, at this point. | ||
| There's just no question that we're going to get to a place where... | ||
| I mean, it either will be the province of one lab that gets there first, or it will be open source. | ||
| But you're talking about software, right? | ||
| Us figuring out how to write better software, which becomes the basis of general intelligence. | ||
| And then where that gets put and what gets done with that, that's... | ||
| That's the question. | ||
| Isn't it a real question of also the race to see who can come up with one first? | ||
| I mean, once the idea gets put out there, like the idea of the nuclear bomb. | ||
| I mean, obviously, no one in their right mind thinks it's a good idea to make a nuclear bomb. | ||
| That story is especially sobering because I may forget the details. | ||
| I think it was... | ||
| I could have this backwards. | ||
| I think it was Rutherford... | ||
| There were two famous physicists involved. | ||
| It was either Rutherford who said we're never going to unlock the... | ||
| I think it was Rutherford who gave a talk saying we're never going to unlock the energy that we now know to be in the atom. | ||
| And Leo Szilard, the next day... | ||
| Produced the equations that unlocked it. | ||
| The next day? | ||
| Unbelievable. | ||
| And in direct response to this announcement, like, okay, that's bullshit. | ||
| And the next morning, woke up and produced the math that gave us the atomic bomb. | ||
| So it can happen really fast. | ||
| And if you want to get those details exactly right, listen to what Stuart Russell said on my podcast. | ||
| Well, Oppenheimer, in a really ironic twist, wasn't he a Buddhist? | ||
| Was he? | ||
| No, he was a fan of Hinduism, technically. | ||
| He taught himself Sanskrit, apparently in three months. | ||
| One never knows how much this is exaggerated. | ||
| To what end? | ||
| His publicist will tell you that he taught himself Sanskrit in three months to read the Bhagavad Gita. | ||
| Which is one of the texts of Hinduism. | ||
| The quote that he gave out as the first bomb was tested. | ||
| I have become death, destroyer of worlds. | ||
| I am become death, destroyer of worlds. | ||
| And when you hear him say it, it's even more creepy because you can see the sort of remorse. | ||
| Have you seen that? | ||
| No. | ||
| See if we can find that. | ||
| Every photo of Oppenheimer, he just looks haunted. | ||
| Well, he was hanging out. | ||
| It's weird to see him with this general. | ||
| I was watching some documentary on the creation of the atom bomb. | ||
| He was hanging out with these generals. | ||
| Probably Curtis LeMay. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you see the two of them together and you're like, what a bizarre pairing. | ||
| Like this one monkey needs this other genius to make this bomb so he can drop it on these people. | ||
| And the guy realizes that if he doesn't make it, someone's going to make it and it could be dropped on them. | ||
| Well, and that's the thing. | ||
| We were genuinely in a race condition there, and we didn't know how close the Nazis were. | ||
| It turns out that they weren't as close as we feared. | ||
| But, yeah, just imagine Hitler having gotten there first, right, with the help of Heisenberg and others. | ||
| Play it, Jamie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We knew the world would not be the same. | |
| Few people laughed. | ||
| Few people cried. | ||
| Most people were silent. | ||
| I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita. | ||
| Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form One says, now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. | ||
| I suppose we all thought that one way or another. | ||
| He does not look like a happy dude. | ||
| What a burden. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it's actually, when you read the history of that effort, the Manhattan Project and the Trinity Test, It is super sobering because they moved forward in a context of real uncertainty about what was going to happen. | ||
| In terms of the yield of the first bomb, there was a range, I think, of a hundredfold difference of opinion of what they were going to get once this thing went off. | ||
| And there were some people who still placed some possibility on the prospect of it igniting the atmosphere and just canceling all of life. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean they did something like due diligence where they were many of them were confident it wouldn't but that was not without beyond the realm of possibility for some of the people working on it and So we have shown a propensity for taking Possibly existential risks to develop new technology because there's there's a reason to develop it and In this case I | ||
| can build. | ||
| And so it's just, it's not difficult to think about the danger. | ||
| It's all danger, right? | ||
| And these bombs, you know, now getting in the hands of the wrong people, you With AI, it's so seductive because if it looked at in one light, it's just all upside. | ||
| I mean, there's nothing better than intelligence. | ||
| There's nothing more intrinsically desirable than intelligence. | ||
| And so to get more of it seems an intrinsic good. | ||
| And so it takes an extra step to say, well, wait a minute. | ||
| This could, in fact, be the most dangerous thing we've ever done. | ||
| And you have to spend a lot of time fighting that ideological battle with people who just think, no, this is just all upside. | ||
| What could go wrong? | ||
| You're just scaremongering. | ||
| You've seen too many Terminator movies. | ||
| Is that even possible? | ||
| To see too many? | ||
| No. | ||
| Not with the first. | ||
| The first was good. | ||
| The first was very good. | ||
| The second was good. | ||
| There's one in there that I don't think I've seen all of. | ||
| There were three or there were four? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I think it was... | ||
| I lost touch after the second. | ||
| I've seen two. | ||
| I haven't seen any more than two. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I just feel like it's because of the race, because of the idea that there's a race to get to it, it seems like it's inevitable that someone actually does create it. | ||
| And much like the atomic bomb, it'll probably be launched without a true understanding of what its potential is. | ||
| That's my fear. | ||
| I'm terrified of it. | ||
| I think about it all the time. | ||
| I step back sometimes and I look at the city of Los Angeles, look at the skyline, all the lights go off, and I'm like, this is all new. | ||
| This has only been here for a few hundred years. | ||
| There was nothing here. | ||
| 1700, there was nothing. | ||
| This was nothing. | ||
| Now look at it. | ||
| It's all lit up and there's a gigantic grid you see from the sky. | ||
| What are we looking at 300 years from now? | ||
| What are we looking at with all these things that we're feverishly attempting to build and create? | ||
| Yeah, well, our dependence on the net is sobering. | ||
| I mean, just forget about all of these highfalutin fears of rogue AI. Just, we don't have a backup for the Internet. | ||
| I mean, if the Internet goes down, what happens in the real world? | ||
| A lot that is very difficult to recover from. | ||
| You know, just what happens to your money, right? | ||
| What is money when there is no... | ||
| Right. | ||
| Or just imagine some malicious code just destroying the record of money, just getting into the banking system, right? | ||
| So it's like you then have to go look for the paperwork you may or may not have in your desk to argue that you have a certain amount of money because all those bits got scrambled, right? | ||
| And we need some—all of this is just—there's so many aspects to this, but the fact that you can now credibly fake audio, right? | ||
| So someone can listen to a sample, you know, five minutes of this podcast and then produce a conversation we've never had in voices exactly like our own— And those edits will no longer be discernible. | ||
| I mean, we're basically there now, and we're almost there with video, right, where you could just have our mouths moving in the correct way. | ||
| Well, again, I go to Snapchat, these crazy Snapchat filters. | ||
| I don't know if you know about these, but my daughter, pull up the one of my daughter being Abraham Lincoln. | ||
| I mean, it's fucking crazy. | ||
| I mean, it's really rudimentary right now, but my six-year-old loves it. | ||
| She thinks it's hilarious, and she constantly uses it all the time. | ||
| Like, she's just like, can I play with your phone? | ||
| And she grabs my phone, and then she starts doing these little videos. | ||
| Like, somehow or another, the little brains, like, sync up immediately with the technology, where if I gave it to my mom, she'd be like, I don't even know what this is. | ||
| What do I do? | ||
| That six-year-old can figure it out like that. | ||
| Yeah, check this out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Four squirrels, seven years ago, I know you had my pooping in your pants today. | |
| Thank you, I lost my tooth. | ||
| If I showed this to my daughters, you would just never hear from them again. | ||
| It's like the most captivating thing. | ||
| I mean, this is obviously black and white, and she's being silly, and it's really obvious, and it's fake, but man, how far... | ||
| I mean, this is a six-year-old girl who looks like Abraham Lincoln. | ||
| It's mimicking the voice. | ||
| You can't... | ||
| Like, you see her mouth. | ||
| You can't discern where her mouth ends, and Abraham Lincoln's face begins. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But what's so insidious about this technology I'm talking about now is that someone can fake... | ||
| I mean, it's basically what is already true of Photoshop, right? | ||
| Where you can't tell... | ||
| You have to be an expert to tell whether the person was really standing next to Donald Trump at the time because they could have just been put there with an expert use of Photoshop. | ||
| But now we're talking about... | ||
| And being able to produce content where, you know, you are saying the thing that completely destroys your reputation, but it's pure—it's just fake news. | ||
| It's just fiction. | ||
| And so we need—I mean, I don't know what the fix for this is. | ||
| You know, I've just—and this is, again, something I know very little about, but I've— Clearly, something like the blockchain has to be a way of anchoring each piece of digital content. | ||
| So there's like a chain of custody where you see exactly where this came from in a way that's not fake-able. | ||
| And so, to take your podcast as an example, If someone is producing a clip that purports to be from your podcast where you're saying something insane, there just has to be a clear fingerprint digitally, which shows whether that came from you and Jamie or whether this came from some Macedonian hacker who just decided to screw with you. | ||
| Yeah, but there's not. | ||
| I know, but clearly we need that tomorrow, because the technology is here to produce totally fake content, which is... | ||
| I am worried about that. | ||
| I'm also worried about the idea that someone anywhere is completely in charge and knows what's going on. | ||
| You know, I always point to, you remember that guy that went on stage with Obama and pretended to be a sign language... | ||
| Translator? | ||
| That was really... | ||
| That was South Africa or something like that? | ||
| I believe it was, wasn't it? | ||
| That sounds right. | ||
| I forget where it was. | ||
| I mean, that was amazing because there's just so few people read sign language that, you know... | ||
| Wasn't it around a Mandela thing? | ||
| I don't remember the details, but I remember thinking, this fucking guy is three feet away from the president. | ||
| He was three feet away from the president, and you would think that they had vetted everyone out. | ||
| So here's this guy talking, and that guy is just completely making things up. | ||
| He has no idea... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| He has no idea how to do sign language. | ||
| And that can happen. | ||
| There was another instance where a guy had gotten in an elevator with Obama. | ||
| Yeah, a security guard, yeah, with a gun. | ||
| With a gun. | ||
| Load a gun in an elevator with Obama. | ||
| Nobody screened him. | ||
| It's just people aren't really on the ball. | ||
| There was a bit from my last comedy special about the guy that broke into the White House, about there was a woman guarding the front door by herself, and they had shut the alarm off because it kept going off, so they had to fuck it, just shut it off. | ||
| And then there was a guy who was on the lawn who was supposed to be, he had canines, was supposed to be guarding the lawn. | ||
| He took his earpiece out to talk to his girlfriend on the cell phone. | ||
| He had a backup walkie talk, because they have a backup one, but he left that in his locker. | ||
| So it's like all these steps, and this guy just hit the perfect sweet spot where he hopped the fence, ran the whatever hundred yards plus to get to the White House, got to the door, it was unlocked, got through it, there was a girl by herself, threw her to the ground, and just ran through the White House, and was in there for five, ten minutes. | ||
| He had a knife, right? | ||
| Yeah, he had a knife. | ||
| He was basically trying to, it was basically a suicide by cop situation, because they had caught him, this is what's really hilarious, when people think that the government is watching out for you, They weren't even watching this guy. | ||
| And listen to what this guy did. | ||
| He got arrested. | ||
| They pulled him over, I believe it was less than three months before that, with 800 rounds of ammunition. | ||
| He had two rifles, a shotgun, an axe and a machete, and a map of Washington with a fucking X where the White House is. | ||
| And they let him go. | ||
| There has to be a crime there. | ||
| But they weren't even watching that guy. | ||
| Like, the idea that they're watching you... | ||
| But we're not built as species for perfect vigilance. | ||
| That's so not perfect. | ||
| I mean, that's so ridiculously imperfect. | ||
| I'm thinking about even the TSA. Right. | ||
| You know, it's just... | ||
| We're just... | ||
| We're just not built for that. | ||
| It's boring. | ||
| Twitter can confound even the perfect vigilance. | ||
| I mean, just look what happened at the Oscars. | ||
| Their only job is to get those envelopes right. | ||
| You've got two people with the locked briefcases, and one guy starts tweeting and produces the wrong envelope. | ||
| Is that what happened? | ||
| He was tweeting? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, he was tweeting. | ||
| I mean, this is brutal, but he took a photo of, I forget what actress, but clearly he was, I mean, they have, he then deleted the photo, but people recovered it. | ||
| I don't know, Charlize Theron or somebody who was walking backstage and put it on his Twitter feed. | ||
| And then the very next moment was the moment when he had to hand over the right envelope. | ||
| And he just handed over the envelope for the best actress. | ||
| But their only job is to get this straight, right? | ||
| And they're just safeguarding the envelopes. | ||
| It's all adorable. | ||
| There's something I really enjoy about the folly of people. | ||
| That's one of the main things that I worry about with AI. The things that we find cute. | ||
| About us being ridiculous like that or like the sign language guy or any of these things. | ||
| But that's the thing that computers are really good at. | ||
| I mean, once computers get good at this sort of thing... | ||
| Yeah, but we're programming them. | ||
| No, but we can program them to fill in the gaps for... | ||
| Our own stupidity. | ||
| What we want to do is automate repetitive behavior and error detection that we know we're not good at. | ||
| So the moment you have a TSA screening robot that doesn't get distracted, I mean, these machines don't get distracted, right? | ||
| They don't get hungry. | ||
| They don't have to take bathroom breaks. | ||
| They're not looking at the person who's looking at them and getting captivated by some social glitch, right? | ||
| So if you have a bomb-screening robot, that's all it will do, and it will be better, whatever the visual signature of a bomb is, when you're talking about looking for one in a bag. | ||
| Once computers get better at that than people, they will be reliable in a way that people can never be. | ||
| We know that about ourselves. | ||
| We want to outsource all of that stuff. | ||
| Driving is the perfect example. | ||
| You don't have self-driving cars that are falling asleep or reading billboards while they're driving at 80 miles an hour. | ||
| And so we want that. | ||
| But the scary stuff is when it can change itself. | ||
| That's a principle that would allow it to escape from our control. | ||
| Or we build something where we haven't anticipated the consequences. | ||
| And the incentives are wrong The incentives are not aligned to make us prudent in the development of that. | ||
| An arms race is the worst case for that, because the incentives are to get to the end zone as quickly as you can, because the guy next to you is doing the same, and you don't know whether he's ahead of you or behind you. | ||
| And it's a winner-take-all scenario, because the amount of wealth that will go to the winner of this race, if things work, if this group doesn't destroy the world, is unimaginable. | ||
| We're talking about a level of windfall profits that we just haven't seen in any other domain. | ||
| Well, a perfect example is the creation of the atomic bomb. | ||
| I mean, look at 70 years from the creation of the atomic bomb to today, which is literally a blip in human history, just a tiny little blink of an eye. | ||
| And then the United States emerges as the greatest superpower the world's ever known. | ||
| And that's going to be directly attributed to those bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. | ||
| I mean, that from there on, that's where everything takes off. | ||
| When you look at human history, if you look at us from a thousand years from now, it's very likely that they look at that moment and they go, this is the emergence of the American empire. | ||
| But this is so much bigger than that because the bombs, the power in the bomb was just... | ||
| implicit threat that you might use them if you get pissed off, right? | ||
| But you can't do anything with the bombs. | ||
| Here we're talking about the resource that does everything. | ||
| We're talking about intelligence. | ||
| We're talking about the cure for cancer. | ||
| We're talking about the best virtual reality entertainment. | ||
| We're talking about everything. | ||
| Once you're talking about general human intelligence and beyond, you're talking about now having access To suddenly having access to the smartest people who have ever lived, who never sleep, who never get tired, who never get distracted, because now they're machines, and the smartest people who have never lived, right? | ||
| People who are a thousand times smarter than those people and getting smarter every hour, right? | ||
| And what are they going to do for you when they're your slaves? | ||
| Because now you're talking about... | ||
| You don't have to feed these people. | ||
| They're just working for you. | ||
| How powerful would you suddenly be if you had 10,000 of the smartest people in the world working for you full-time, they don't have to be fed, they never get disgruntled, they don't need contracts, and they just want to do whatever Joe Rogan wants to do and get done, and you flip a switch and that's your company, right? | ||
| That's... | ||
| Some version of that's going to happen. | ||
| The question is, is it going to happen in a way where we get this massive dislocation in wealth inequality, where all of a sudden someone's got a company and products and a business model which... | ||
| It obviates 30% of the American workforce over the span of three months. | ||
| Or you have some political and economic and ethical context in which we start sharing the wealth with everyone. | ||
| And this is, again, this is the best case scenario. | ||
| This is when we don't destroy ourselves inadvertently by producing something that's hostile to our interests. | ||
| Dan, you look terrified. | ||
| Yeah, no, this is what hanging out with Sam does. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Just listen, we get to a high spot, we get a pitcher of margaritas, and we just watch this whole thing. | ||
| We're not going to make it anyway. | ||
| None of this room is going to live forever. | ||
| When I hang out with Sam, usually his wife's there, so it's like the conversation is a little less apocalyptic. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| She keeps me grounded. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's actually awesome because when she's there, she's like just tooling on him and he giggles and stuff like that. | ||
| It's like a completely different Sam than the guy who's being an undertaker here and telling you about how we're all going to die from AI. Yeah. | ||
| She keeps me honest. | ||
| But, I mean, the truth is it's not... | ||
| I mean, I'm cautiously... | ||
| I mean, there's no way to stop. | ||
| I mean, there's no break to pull, right? | ||
| So it's like this is... | ||
| I mean, it's the inevitability you were describing before. | ||
| We're moving toward this thing because intelligence is the best thing in the world. | ||
| I mean, intelligence is the thing that allows us to solve every problem we have or don't know we have. | ||
| We're continually discovering new problems. | ||
| And the question is, what are we going to do? | ||
| Some global pandemic arrives and the challenge is, do you find a vaccine for this thing or not, right? | ||
| Only intelligence solves that problem for us. | ||
| We either have the data and we can't interpret it. | ||
| We have to design the experiments to get the data. | ||
| There's no question of us deciding, well, we're just going to stick with the intelligence we've got. | ||
| I mean, we're just – we're not going to do that. | ||
| We can't. | ||
| We can if there's other people that are working on it. | ||
| Exactly, right. | ||
| Because there's just too much power. | ||
| Even if we decided that as an American policy, we're not going to let China and North Korea and Singapore and Iran and Israel and all these other countries do it for us. | ||
| Find a high spot right above Denver. | ||
| Big bucket of margaritas. | ||
| Or the meditation that has helped both of us. | ||
| That definitely will help you while human beings are a real thing. | ||
| Yes, although I wonder if, you know, getting enough people meditating might improve the quality of whatever gets created in the AI community. | ||
| In other words, if you have people who are a little bit more sane as a consequence of meditation than maybe the people designing these products, rather these, I don't know if products is the right word, this stuff, then somehow this stuff is better. | ||
| Well, I think it's especially relevant for the other side of that, which is when you... | ||
| In the near term, we clearly have an employment problem. | ||
| There are jobs that will go away that are not coming back. | ||
| And this is a perennial problem where people need to find meaning in life. | ||
| But we've always had – it hasn't been such a pressing problem for thousands of years because there's always been so much to do just to survive. | ||
| Right now, in the ideal case, we'll get to a place where there's actually much less that has to be done because we have machines that do it. | ||
| And we have seen the wisdom of mitigating wealth inequality to some acceptable level where – so all boats begin to rise with this tide to some degree. | ||
| So whether it's universal basic income or some... | ||
| So we have some mechanism to spread the wealth around. | ||
| But then there's the real question of what do you do with your life? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So what do you think people will do? | ||
| That's the easiest one. | ||
| But it's not so easy because people... | ||
| Well, people are confused. | ||
| Well, those people need to get their shit together. | ||
| I mean, that's giving someone free time, but find a hobby, man. | ||
| I mean, there's a lot of stuff to do. | ||
| If you told me that I never had to work again and I would just have to find things to do all day and all my food and everything would be taken care of, that would be the easiest choice I'd have ever made in my life. | ||
| I would just pursue things. | ||
| I would just learn how to speak a language. | ||
| I'd learn how to play an instrument. | ||
| I'd practice archery more. | ||
| I'd do jujitsu more. | ||
| That seems to me so ridiculous. | ||
| That seems to me that could be solved really easy. | ||
| I feel the exact same way, but I think that I'm not convinced. | ||
| I feel I could fill endless swaths of free time with a number of things that I'm interested in, including, but not limited to, meditation or just hanging out with my two-year-old. | ||
| However, I'm not sure that the vast... | ||
| The majority of humans are like that. | ||
| They just need guidance. | ||
| That seems to be the easiest thing to solve. | ||
| Just let them know. | ||
| Go find something fun to do. | ||
| Go start running up hills, man. | ||
| Go take up Frisbee golf. | ||
| There's shit to do. | ||
| There's a lot of shit to do. | ||
| My concern is that more and more it will take the form of being merely entertained. | ||
| So it will plug into some VR. The last scene of WALL-E. I never saw WALL-E. You see the movie WALL-E? No, I never watched it. | ||
| Okay, guys, you should maybe pull this up. | ||
| But in WALL-E, it's a dystopian future where everybody's riding around in those little jazzy... | ||
| Mobile wheelchairs that people sit in now. | ||
| Disneyland? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And they've got huge buckets of soda and turkey legs and kind of hooked over the back of their motorized vehicle as a monitor at the front, which is entertaining them. | ||
| They're just obese and entertained and immobile. | ||
| Or mobile, but not actually ambulatory. | ||
| It's Disneyland. | ||
| Well, what's happened in our lifetime, the smartphone has made it virtually impossible to be bored. | ||
| Like, boredom used to be a thing. | ||
| Like, you'd be sitting in the waiting room of a doctor, right? | ||
| And they have crappy magazines, and then you're just sitting there. | ||
| And if you didn't know how to meditate, you had to confront this sense of, I'm bored, right? | ||
| Now, one thing you discover when you learn how to meditate is boredom is just... | ||
| An inability to pay attention to anything and then you can pay attention once you learn to pay attention to anything even something seemingly boring as your breath it suddenly becomes incredibly interesting so so focused attention is Intrinsically pleasurable, but boredom is the state of of kind of scattered attention looking for something that's worth paying attention to and yet now with technology You're never going to be bored again. | ||
| I have at least 10 years worth of reading on my phone. | ||
| So it's like if I'm standing in line, I'm constantly pulling this thing out. | ||
| Is that a bad thing? | ||
| Well, it's potentially a bad thing because you... | ||
| I mean, just to take this example of one interesting insight you get when you learn to meditate... | ||
| It's incredibly powerful to cut through the illusion of boredom. | ||
| I mean, to realize that boredom is not something. | ||
| You can become interested in the feeling of boredom, and the moment you do, it bites its own tail and disappears. | ||
| I mean, it's just like there is no such thing as boredom when you're paying close attention to your experience. | ||
| I think the bad thing about the hyper-stimulation that we get through our phone and all of technology is that we have lost the ability to just sit back and, for lack of a less cliched term, be. | ||
| And we're just constantly stimulated. | ||
| And that means we have trouble paying attention when we're holding our kid in our lap and reading him or her a book, or we find ourselves without our technology for a moment. | ||
| There was a recent study that asked people, would you rather be alone with your thoughts or get electric shocks? | ||
| And a lot of people took the electric shocks. | ||
| And I actually think that is a fundamental problem in terms of not being able to get in touch with the raw and kind of powerful, although obvious, fact that you're alive and that you exist. | ||
| Right, but don't you think those people are idiots? | ||
| I mean, you don't want an electric shock. | ||
| I won't take an electric shock. | ||
| You're not going to take an electric shock. | ||
| We're talking about children. | ||
| This is the dude with the Snapchat glasses. | ||
| Jamie's on the ball. | ||
| I don't want those glasses either. | ||
| But you know what I'm saying? | ||
| He doesn't use the glasses. | ||
| He just explores it because it's fascinating. | ||
| But you know what I'm talking about? | ||
| I mean, we're not talking about rational people. | ||
| We're talking about lowest common denominator people that would take an electric shock. | ||
| You would take an electric shock? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| I'm just thinking this is a study of... | ||
| They're not just picking idiots. | ||
| Right, but who are they asking? | ||
| And how are they phrasing the question? | ||
| But it also doesn't have to be conscious. | ||
| So, for instance, we willingly grant our attention to things which... | ||
| But retrospectively, we can judge, produce more or less nothing but pain for us. | ||
| Like what? | ||
| I'm continually thinking about this and rethinking about this with respect to social media. | ||
| What's the effect on my mind of looking at my Twitter ad mentions? | ||
| Well, I wondered that when you were asking people what kind of questions we should ask on this podcast. | ||
| Sometimes it's incredibly useful. | ||
| But I was thinking, what are you doing? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You're opening yourself up to the green frogs. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| But I've had both kinds of experience. | ||
| I've had people send me articles that I would have never found otherwise. | ||
| They're fascinating, super useful, and it's just like, this is the perfect use of this technology. | ||
| And then again, then I get this river of green frogs and weirdness. | ||
| But to the previous point, I pay attention to something for long stretches of time rather than doing something I know is good for me with my attention. | ||
| I kind of spin the roulette wheel with Twitter. | ||
| And rather often, there's just this kind of toxic undercurrent of mental activity that it produces in me that doesn't equip me to do anything better in my life. | ||
| It doesn't make me feel any better about myself or other people. | ||
| I mean, if it has any net effect, it basically grabs a dozen dials that I can just sort of dimly conceive of in my mind and turn them all a little bit toward the negative. | ||
| You know, I feel a little bit worse about myself, a little bit worse about my career, a little bit worse about people, a little bit worse about the future, a little bit worse about the fact that I just was doing this when I could have been playing with my kid or writing or thinking productive thoughts or meditating or doing anything that I know is good. | ||
| So you still do this? | ||
| I don't understand your Twitter compulsion. | ||
| Yeah, you argue with people. | ||
| I found that fascinating. | ||
| Periodically? | ||
| I go for weeks without arguing with people. | ||
| Well, but also you argue with people on your podcast. | ||
| Well, yeah, but that's right. | ||
| That's different. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| But I mean, it's just on the podcast. | ||
| You'll also be talking about people you're arguing with on Twitter or so. | ||
| The arguing is a part of your I get trolled a lot. | ||
| Yeah, on Twitter. | ||
| Yeah, I get trolled. | ||
| I mean, you have guests. | ||
| You have guests who come on your podcast and savage me on the podcast and then troll me endlessly on Twitter and. | ||
| You mean like Abby? | ||
| Abby Martin? | ||
| Well, she was... | ||
| No, she doesn't troll. | ||
| I mean, she... | ||
| She doesn't troll you. | ||
| She hates me, but she... | ||
| She doesn't know you. | ||
| I haven't noticed her trolling me, but no, you... | ||
| If you got in a room with her, everybody would calm down. | ||
| She just has... | ||
| There's people that have radical misconceptions of who you are. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm sure you heard the Josh Zeps, Patton Oswalt thing. | ||
| Or Patton Oswalt. | ||
| No. | ||
| Don't listen to it. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| He went off the rails. | ||
| Patton went off the rails like Hannibal style. | ||
| Are you thinking of Andy Kindler? | ||
| Oh yes, I am. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| Did I say Patton Oswalt? | ||
| I'm so sorry, Patton. | ||
| So sorry. | ||
| How did I connect Patton Oswalt? | ||
| Yeah, Patton's great. | ||
| Well, Patton's very smart and very reasonable. | ||
| As is Andy for most of the time, Andy's kind of crazier. | ||
| I discovered this very late. | ||
| So I kept seeing this guy. | ||
| I didn't know who he was. | ||
| I kept seeing him in my Twitter feed. | ||
| Andy Kindler? | ||
| Andy Kindler. | ||
| And then I realized, wait a minute. | ||
| He's an established comic. | ||
| He seems to be friends with people who I really respect, who I don't know, like Sarah Silverman, who I don't know personally. | ||
| We've communicated a little bit on Twitter, but I'm just nothing but a pure fan of Sarah. | ||
| Jim Gaffigan, other big comics who I totally respect. | ||
| I don't know how close he is with these people, but he basically has endless energy for vilifying me as a racist and as a bigot. | ||
| He's a madman. | ||
| So I did a search of his Twitter feed, and he's got hundreds and hundreds of tweets where he's Yes. | ||
| And I think your friend, is Duncan Trussell a friend of yours? | ||
| Okay, so Duncan wrote back saying, oh, yeah, DM me. | ||
| I've got a great place in Boston or something. | ||
| And then Andy Kindler jumped into that thread talking to Duncan saying, don't help him, Duncan. | ||
| He's a bigot. | ||
| Andy Kindler's just got endless energy for this. | ||
| And then I looked at what he was doing, and he had been doing it for years. | ||
| And I wasn't aware of it. | ||
| Just to you? | ||
| Just to me and Bill Maher. | ||
| He hates Bill Maher. | ||
| But then you've got another guy on this podcast... | ||
| Hunter Matz? | ||
| I had him on once. | ||
| Okay, so he was on here, and I actually had to go back and watch what he said here because I had been getting so much of this on Twitter. | ||
| And I mean, it's incredibly common. | ||
| People are tweeting at me saying, why won't you debate Hunter? | ||
| It's Matz, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Why won't you debate Hunter Matz? | ||
| So I went back and looked at what he said here. | ||
| Half of it, frankly, didn't make any sense. | ||
| But his attacks on me on Twitter are the most juvenile. | ||
| It's like the idea that he thinks this is a way he's going to establish a conversation with me by sending me two tweets and then sending me 400 which say, you're scared to debate me, right? | ||
| It's crazy behavior. | ||
| I think Hunter's on the spectrum. | ||
| Very, very, very, very smart guy, but taking a terrible, socially retarded approach to establishing a debate. | ||
| And I've contacted Brian Callen about this, and Brian Callen contacted Hunter about this, and was like, what the fuck are you doing? | ||
| And he continues to do it. | ||
| It's crazy behavior. | ||
| He said he wouldn't do it anymore, and then he did more. | ||
| Every time I look, I see him somewhere in there. | ||
| But then there's this guy, Mike Cernovich, who actually has effects on the real world. | ||
| I mean, Mike Cernovich is, again, he's a Twitter troll. | ||
| Again, one of these other guys who's challenged me to debate him. | ||
| And, you know, I mean, there's absolutely no possibility of a profitable dialogue. | ||
| You need to spend less time on Twitter. | ||
| Yeah, listen to you. | ||
| No, but Cernovich was just on 60 Minutes. | ||
| I mean, he's like, he's in the world, and he's affecting people's perception of Trump. | ||
| Oh yeah, well... | ||
| For sure, right? | ||
| Yeah, so they could come back. | ||
| It's not... | ||
| Nine times out of ten, looking just makes me think... | ||
| I mean, it's an illusion, because if you met most of these people, if they came up to you at a conference or at a book signing or after a gig of yours... | ||
| And you had more information about them. | ||
| You saw all of the crazy coming out. | ||
| You would say, there's no reason to pay attention to what this guy is saying. | ||
| Whereas on Twitter, everything has the same stature. | ||
| So whether it's a Washington Post columnist who's tweeting at me, or some guy like Hunter, who I have no idea who he is, but he's telling me I got something wrong... | ||
| Everything has the same stature, and there's no signal-to-noise sense of what... | ||
| Well, first of all, you fucked up, because you talked about them. | ||
| Both of them. | ||
| You said Candyman five times, and now you've got a problem. | ||
| You talked about him right now on this podcast. | ||
| This is the first time I've ever mentioned the guy. | ||
| Should have talked to you before this. | ||
| I'm bringing it to you, but you created it. | ||
| I didn't do it. | ||
| It was his podcast with you that kicked this whole thing off. | ||
| I certainly didn't think that Hunter was going to do that, and I know for a fact that Hunter's actually a fan of yours. | ||
| He's got a strange way of showing it. | ||
| I don't think it's a smart way. | ||
| I think what he's trying to do... | ||
| And when I was trying to hold his feet to the fire and get some sort of a logical definition of what you do wrong, he really didn't have anything. | ||
| Yeah, but he thinks he does, and he... | ||
| But did he when I talked to him about it? | ||
| No. | ||
| And half of what he said about Dawkins and me was totally wrong. | ||
| Half of what he said about the relevant biology was wrong. | ||
| I mean, he's just... | ||
| He's not... | ||
| He doesn't have his shit together. | ||
| But he thinks he does. | ||
| And there's a level of arrogance and incivility and just kind of a lack of charity in interacting with other people's views, which is now kind of getting rebranded on the Internet as just... | ||
| Just American can-do chutzpah, right? | ||
| And it's like it's given us Trump, right? | ||
| Trump is the ultimate example. | ||
| He's like the cartoon version of, you know, a person who doesn't know anything relevant to the enterprise, who doesn't show any aptitude for civilly engaging with business. | ||
| Differences of opinion. | ||
| And this thing gets, you know, amplified to the place of greatest prominence now in human history. | ||
| Everyone's on social media, or many people on social media are playing the same game. | ||
| And, you know, Ms. Cernovich is another, you know, just malignant example of this, where you have someone who's got a fairly large following. | ||
| I mean, it's not as big as yours, but it's, you know, it's a very engaged following. | ||
| I mean, this whole Trump Has shown me that a small percentage of one's audience can have like a hundred times the energy of the rest of your audience. | ||
| Whenever I went against Trump on my podcast, and this is still the case, the level of pain it causes in the feedback space is completely out of proportion to the numbers of people who are on that side of the argument. | ||
| And so it's incredibly energized, but it's just this weird style of self-promotion where all you do is that you brag about yourself, you say you're the best, and you're someone who has absolutely no basis to back up those claims, and yet an and you're someone who has absolutely no basis to back up those claims, and yet an audience thrills to that It's just bizarre. | ||
| Well, there's a big issue, I think, online where people find like-minded people, and then they develop these communities. | ||
| Where they just support each other, and they just have these gigantic groups of people. | ||
| I mean, not even necessarily gigantic, but groups of people that find any subject. | ||
| Like, for me, you know what it is? | ||
| Flat Earth. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I get trolled by people all day that claim I'm a sellout because I don't believe the Earth is flat. | ||
| This is real. | ||
| But don't you think there's a... | ||
| I think this phenomenon that you're describing is both, has really serious negative consequences, but also has some beauty on the same, by the same token. | ||
| You've got parents all over the world who've got children with rare disease, but they can connect on the internet and bond over that and share tips and doctors and all that stuff. | ||
| So it is, it's actually, they're both outgrowths of the same kind of phenomenon, but it can be, we see The really difficult consequences of this in our politics right now, etc., etc. | ||
| I think we're talking about two different things, though. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You think so? | |
| I'm talking about confirmation bias. | ||
| I'm talking about a bunch of people that get together and say, yeah, obviously, I'm woke, and the Earth is flat, and pay attention, there's an Arctic, there's an ice wall. | ||
| Yes, but they're different things. | ||
| The groups of people that will find, you know, communities where maybe your child has autism, and there's some sort of an issue that can be mitigated with diet, and parents have had, you know, some success with that, and they could, you know, give you some enlightening information, and you can communicate with each other, and that's nice. | ||
| It's beautiful. | ||
| And some of the hashtags that people use that they find searched through, it's great. | ||
| But these little communities that you bond, there's no confirmation bias in those ideas. | ||
| But there's confirmation bias in the idea that Trump is the man. | ||
| There's confirmation bias in the idea that the earth is flat. | ||
| And if you just huddle in those little communities and just bark the same noises that everybody else barks, there's some sort of sense of community in that too. | ||
| Yes, absolutely. | ||
| And people love that. | ||
| They love being a part of a fucking team, even if it's a stupid team of green frogs. | ||
| And you don't have to listen to other people's views, and you get deeply, deeply entrenched. | ||
| I think we're seeing this all through our politics and media right now. | ||
| Well, you also see when you go to those people's pages, which I do often, I don't engage with people in a negative way online very often, very, very rarely. | ||
| Now, do you not look at your ad mentions? | ||
| I do a little bit, but you know what, man? | ||
| I just like to just go on about my day. | ||
| I've found that the negative consequences that you're discussing... | ||
| It's rare that I go down the rabbit hole and I go for days without looking at ad mentions. | ||
| It's more that if I publish something, if I ask for feedback, I want to see the feedback. | ||
| It's not necessarily that there's anything wrong. | ||
| I mean, just as your friend, I feel like there's nothing wrong with it. | ||
| I look at my ad mentions, but... | ||
| But you function in a very different space. | ||
| I mean, you're not pushing controversial stuff out there. | ||
| No, definitely not. | ||
| Definitely not. | ||
| So I agree. | ||
| I stay offline. | ||
| I'm sorry, go ahead. | ||
| I was just more worried about, again, back to your psyche. | ||
| It feels like you need a little bit of a middle ground. | ||
| I stay offline after UFCs, for the most part. | ||
| That's when I get the most crazy people. | ||
| Especially if there's any sort of a controversial decision. | ||
| But are they criticizing you for something you said? | ||
| They get fucking mad at my commentary. | ||
| They'll just disagree with who I thought wanted. | ||
| And then they're so fucking vicious about it. | ||
| I'm just like, just yell. | ||
| Just yell in your own space. | ||
| So you don't want to see any of that. | ||
| There's too many people. | ||
| You're dealing with millions and millions of people. | ||
| And who knows how many of them are rational. | ||
| You know, there's a bit that I had in one of my specials where I was talking about the number of people that are stupid in the world. | ||
| Like, if you get a room full of a hundred people, the idea that one person isn't a complete fucking idiot, Of course. | ||
| You're being very charitable. | ||
| Right, I'm being charitable. | ||
| More than one, yeah. | ||
| But if you do that, we're talking about 300 million people in the United States plus, that's 3 million fucking idiots. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So if you have three million fucking idiots and all your ad mentions, if you look at your ad mentions and three million comments are saying you're a fucking moron, there's just too many people. | ||
| The numbers are, they're not manageable. | ||
| The numbers of human beings you interact with online are not manageable. | ||
| So anytime anything gets negative or insulting and... | ||
| I just check out. | ||
| I just, next, next, next. | ||
| I don't pay attention. | ||
| Because you can't. | ||
| But if I fucked up, and I know I fucked up, I think one of the most important things that I do is I admit that I fucked up. | ||
| And I talk about it, and I apologize, and I say, look... | ||
| I'm flawed. | ||
| I'm human. | ||
| I made a mistake. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| And then just step away. | ||
| Let the fucking chaos ensue in the comments. | ||
| Let all the people call you a shill and a whatever. | ||
| Let all that happen, but don't let it in. | ||
| You're letting it in, and then you stew on it, and you have to bring up Hunter and all these other people. | ||
| You're letting them way too deep. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Perhaps I gave a false impression of how under my skin this has gotten. | ||
| Just the fact that you talked about it at all, though, is too much. | ||
| Well, no, but I think it's a huge consequence. | ||
| I think it's given us Trump. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| This style of communication is attractive to so many people. | ||
| The fact that you can—the bluff and bluster and empty boasts and lies—being caught in lies without consequence. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The fact that people never admit mistakes. | ||
| I mean, what you just described, you do and which I do. | ||
| You make a mistake. | ||
| You want to hear about it. | ||
| You want to correct it as quickly as possible, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| That is the antithesis of what we're seeing now in this space. | ||
| I mean, when has Trump admitted a mistake? | ||
| But isn't it the difference being that neither you nor I have any desire to control anything? | ||
| Like, I don't want to be the leader of anything. | ||
| Well, no, but you want effective, you want good ideas to win. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| And you want the truth to win. | ||
| You want the truth to propagate. | ||
| You want facts to propagate. | ||
| You want to be able to correct errors, whether they're your own or others, especially when they're consequential. | ||
| I think that we need a common ethic where lying has real consequences. | ||
| So many people are trying to figure out what's the antidote to fake news. | ||
| Well, one antidote is to be caught lying has to be devastating for your career, right? | ||
| Like politically, journalistically, academically, as a public intellectual. | ||
| I mean, to be caught in a whopping lie Will require, at minimum, some serious atonement. | ||
| And historically, it has been. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| It still is in many spheres. | ||
| We have slipped those rails just to a degree that I never thought possible. | ||
| We're going light speed right into the woods. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, we're talking about people have figured out how to just to use dishonesty as extra fuel. | ||
| I mean, it's like it's like, you know, the whatever that the nitrous oxide boost in those hacky cars. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's like we can use this stuff. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And the getting the way you behave when you get caught, just which is to say, just go fuck yourself. | ||
| Just redounds to your credibility in your among your tribe. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's like, this guy is so powerful, he so fully doesn't give a shit what people think, that he can catch him in a lie and just watch how he gets out of it. | ||
| So when I was bringing up these guys like Cernovich, I mean, this is... | ||
| Actually, I decided to troll Cernovich one day, and I thought it was hilarious. | ||
| It was just nothing but fun. | ||
| So there was nothing toxic about that. | ||
|
unidentified
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He's obsessed! | |
| But the thing that bothers me is that this has real political consequences. | ||
| Do you think this is a time period where we're in this sort of adolescent stage of communication online where you can get away with saying things that are dishonest and that there might be some sort of a way to mitigate that in the future? | ||
| I don't think we should act like dishonesty and bluff and bluster, to use the phrase you used before, is somehow new to the human repertoire. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I get that The acceptance of it seems to be, though. | |
| I think we're in a period where that is true, and I think it is aided and abetted by technology and the social networks. | ||
| I agree with your diagnosis on many levels, but I was having an interesting conversation with A guy that you introduced me to, Joseph Goldstein, who's an eminent meditation teacher, has become my meditation teacher, old friend of Sam's, and we were talking about the current political situation. | ||
| He used a phrase that I like when I was asked him what he thought about it. | ||
| He said, I'm kind of slotting into geological time. | ||
| And I think that actually makes some sense. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| Meaning that I'm just viewing it from a... | ||
| I'm widening the lens to look at the broad scope of human history to see that, you know, over time, we've got these ups and downs. | ||
| He's getting to the top of the mountain near Denver with a big bucket of margaritas. | ||
| That's exactly right. | ||
| That's exactly right. | ||
| They're slotting in, they're slotting in. | ||
| Just look down with binoculars, watch the bombs go off, learn how to get water out of the ground. | ||
| Get a solar power generator. | ||
| And make good margaritas. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I mean, it just doesn't seem to me that this is sustainable. | ||
| It feels like this is just going to be some spectacular moment in history where people were rah-rah Nixon, and now they look back and go, my God, Nixon was a fucking liar and a buffoon. | ||
| But take this, this is a point I've made before, and I don't think it's original with me, I think other people have made it, but my claim is that if Trump were one-tenth as bad He would appear much worse. | ||
| Because everything he does now is appearing against a background of so many lies and so much craziness that you can barely even weight its value. | ||
| This is one of the things I find useful about Twitter, because I follow some very interesting people. | ||
| Anne Applebaum, the Washington Post columnist. | ||
| Who's just awesome on Twitter. | ||
| Everyone should follow her. | ||
| She just keeps hammering Trump with her own points and other stuff that she finds. | ||
| And she just pointed out that... | ||
| Did anyone notice that Trump threatened a war with North Korea two days ago? | ||
| It was in the Financial Times. | ||
| And yet no one can talk about it because no one believes him. | ||
| We have a president whose speech has now become so denuded of truth value, perceived truth value, that he can say, if China doesn't handle North Korea, we're going to. | ||
| And no one even feels like they have to ask a follow-up question on that topic because everyone assumes it's an empty bluff. | ||
| I mean, just imagine, like, just step back into the previous presidency. | ||
| If Obama had said, if China doesn't handle North Korea, we will, right? | ||
| That would be top of the fold. | ||
| This is all we're talking about today, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It just comes out of a blizzard of inanity and craziness. | ||
| He's going after Meryl Streep. | ||
| He's lying about Obama wiretapping him. | ||
| Now he's threatening war with North Korea. | ||
| And nobody knows what to talk about. | ||
| So it's like the consequence of this is we have a president who... | ||
| Not only can he not be trusted to tell the truth, he can be trusted to lie whenever he thinks it suits his purpose. | ||
| And now, so the state of mind that everyone's in, including the press, in listening to him is just to take... | ||
| Potentially the most serious things in the world, not seriously. | ||
| And the least serious things in the world, like Meryl Streep or what he thinks of her acting, that dominates a whole news cycle. | ||
| It's very upside down. | ||
| It seems to me to be quite new. | ||
| Lies are perennial, but I feel like we're in a very different space now with the consequences of this. | ||
| We certainly are. | ||
| Do you think that they're connected to what we were talking about before where you said that people would rather be electrocuted than to be alone with their thoughts? | ||
| That we have gotten to this weird place with our society, with our civilization, where we've made things so easy? | ||
| We've made people so soft, so dependent upon technology. | ||
| We've slotted out these paths, these predetermined patterns of behavior for people to follow, where they can just sort of plug into a philosophy, whether it's a right-wing one or a left-wing one with very little room for personal thought at all, very little room for objective reasoning. | ||
| We sort of made it easy. | ||
| We babied them. | ||
| I do think that it's imperative if you want to be a good citizen to have a varied media diet. | ||
| You're not going to have a clear view of the world if all you're reading is... | ||
| Is Breitbart. | ||
| Or the New York Times. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, I think you have nothing against the New York Times or Breitbart, but I think you need to read many things and follow many different sorts of people on Twitter, not just because you want to troll them, but because you actually want to listen to what they have to say and take it seriously. | ||
| Well, the New York Times really fucked up. | ||
| Where they really fucked up is where they said that they're going to, after the election, they're going to rededicate themselves to reporting the truth. | ||
| And, like, what? | ||
| Why did you say that? | ||
| Like, I wish I was there. | ||
| I wish I was in the office. | ||
| Why? | ||
| That just sends the wrong message? | ||
| Yes! | ||
| Well, it says they're biased. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They fucked up. | ||
| They had an idea. | ||
| The truth is they were biased. | ||
| Yes, you're right. | ||
| The thing is, the enemy was so grotesque in this case that it was impossible to not have been biased seemed an abdication of responsibility. | ||
| I feel it myself. | ||
| Everything I say against Trump from a Trump person sounds like mere partisan bias. | ||
| I've got zero connection to the Democratic Party. | ||
| There's no partisan bias. | ||
| 100% of what I want to say about Trump does not apply to some other Republican who just stands for policies I might not like. | ||
| It's a completely unique circumstance. | ||
| Yeah, it's true that you went to read the New York Times for the longest time. | ||
| It was reading like just the entire thing had become the opinion page on the Huffington Post or something. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I just feel like at this stage of our society, there's real consequences to the infantilization, if that's actually a word, of human beings in our culture. | ||
| We've made it very easy to just go to work and just get home and watch television and just not pay attention to anything and not read anything and not really think and then be manipulated. | ||
| I mean, I think it's incredibly easy to manipulate people, especially people that are aware that they don't have a varied media diet. | ||
| People that are aware that they don't have a real sense of the word. | ||
| And it seems daunting to try to take into consideration, like, what is involved in foreign policy? | ||
| What is involved in dealing with Russia? | ||
| What is involved? | ||
| How do you negotiate with North Korea? | ||
| Fuck, it's too much. | ||
| Put it in the hands of the strong man. | ||
| I think this is true on both sides of the spectrum, though, because I think you've got folks who slot into just a media diet where they're just hearing things on the left and they're not curious about or, I guess, just not curious enough to hear... | ||
| unless it's just some right-wing palooka who comes on and they beat him up. | ||
| So I really do think, and I think it places, and this is going to be a self-serving argument, but I do think it places increasing importance on media outlets like the one for which I work to be really vigilant about being seen as fair arbiters of fact. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think the consequences have never been greater for that. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And I think the reason that so many people on the right, so many Trump supporters, feel like they're right is because it has been proven that the media was biased and that they did get it all wrong. | ||
| And they were absolutely wrong when it came to who was going to win. | ||
| I mean, Huffington Post had some ridiculous thing where it was the night of the election. | ||
| They said that Hillary had like a 98% chance of winning or something crazy like that. | ||
| Well, I think, yeah, there were some polls that were bad. | ||
| But the poll, like the... | ||
| Because I remember this because I sent out a tweet which said, like, you know, bye-bye, Donald, or something like that, you know, the day of. | ||
| But when I did that, I mean, that wasn't a prediction. | ||
| I mean, the polls that I was going by, that most people were going by at that point, it was like 80-20, you know, or at best 75-25 that she was going to win. | ||
| Now, that's not... | ||
| I mean, you roll dice for a few minutes, you realize a 20% chance... | ||
| It comes up a lot, right? | ||
| So I guess that's not infinitesimal odds. | ||
| Plus Florida. | ||
| Yeah, but so, well, you should tell the story about what it was like to anchor the broadcast. | ||
| Yeah, so I was anchoring the ABC News digital coverage that night, and they give you the exit polling. | ||
| You're not supposed to report it publicly, but the exit polling... | ||
| That we were seeing before we went on the air late in the day really made it seem like it was going to be a Clinton landslide. | ||
| You have all these folks who say, look at the crestfallen faces of the journalists because they're so upset that Trump won. | ||
| That was not the case for the folks on my set. | ||
| It was that we didn't see it coming. | ||
| We weren't prepared for it. | ||
| Everything that we're seeing in terms of the math made it look like this was a Clinton victory, a shoe-in. | ||
| It was just about just tying a ribbon around it. | ||
| So when the night became long, there was just confusion about what was going on. | ||
| How did they get it so wrong? | ||
| You know, I think it actually goes back to what Sam was saying before, that people think when you see numbers like 70% odds that Clinton's going to win, 80% odds that Clinton's going to win, that she's definitely going to win. | ||
| But there's room there for Trump to win. | ||
| A lot of room. | ||
| Yeah, a lot of room there for Trump to win. | ||
| 20% comes up all the time. | ||
| It's Russian roulette. | ||
| Yeah, those are bad odds. | ||
| If it's Russian roulette, those are bad odds, right? | ||
| You're not going to take that, you know, not going to put a single bullet in a five-chamber gun. | ||
| One bullet, six rounds, yeah, spin it. | ||
| That's a spear hunter. | ||
| That's really good odds that you're going to get shot. | ||
| I don't think it's so much about blaming the polls as it was blaming the overall tenor of the coverage, which made it seem like Clinton was inevitable. | ||
| Yeah, it was so shocking. | ||
| That's a hit I think that we can and should take. | ||
| We definitely, you know, I think we weren't giving the 20 or 30% chance a serious enough look. | ||
| What is your thought, as being someone who covers these things, what is your thought about the Electoral College? | ||
| Do you think that that's an antiquated idea? | ||
| I mean, it was kind of established back when you really needed a representative, because otherwise you would have to get on a fucking horse and ride into Washington, and it would take six months. | ||
| I can see that you can make very powerful arguments that it's a deeply problematic institution. | ||
| I can see the power of those arguments, for sure. | ||
| There are people who argue, make similar arguments about the United States Senate. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There was a piece that ran in the New York Times in their Sunday Week in Review, not long after the election, making the case that the angriest people in America actually should be those who live on the coast, because it's taxation without representation, that the people who live on the coast are paying more in taxes, but they have less representation actually in Washington. | ||
| Again, that's not research that I've done, but it's an interesting idea. | ||
| Have you ever seen anybody present any sort of a logical argument that there really shouldn't be a president anymore? | ||
| That the idea of having one alpha chimp run this whole thing seems pretty outdated. | ||
| I'm just not sure that he runs the whole thing. | ||
| But he's got a lot of influence. | ||
| He has an enormous amount of influence. | ||
| But we're seeing, Donald Trump is seeing right now, the limits of presidential power. | ||
| He is. | ||
| He couldn't get his... | ||
| The health care bill that didn't even make it Wasn't even close to what he promised on the – in some ways wasn't even close to what he promised on the campaign trail. | ||
| In other words, he couldn't get the bill that he wanted, and then he couldn't get that passed. | ||
| And now he's looking at having to watch his party employ the nuclear option in order to get his Supreme Court nominee seated. | ||
| So I – I don't know. | ||
| I think that the founders designed in many ways a really ingenious system. | ||
| And we put a lot of attention on the president because it's one person who's on our TV screens or our phones all the time. | ||
| But I'm not sure how much power is vested in that person. | ||
| Now, when it comes to foreign policy, It's a different kettle of fish. | ||
| Well, it's enough that the EPA has been sort of hobbled. | ||
| I mean, what they've done with the Environmental Protection Agency standards, especially in regards to emissions, he's rolled back emission standards. | ||
| I mean, if there's anything that we should be concerned about, it's the air that we breathe. | ||
| And we're moving in a direction. | ||
| We're clearly moving in a direction to get away from things like coal. | ||
| And he's going the opposite way. | ||
| Not only that, but what I've heard is that that's not even going to be effective. | ||
| Because most places have moved away from coal to the point where restarting coal production is not even going to recharge the economy in the way that would make it a viable option in the first place. | ||
| The issue of climate change is just... | ||
| I'll say, as a member of the media, an area where I feel, and I'm just speaking for myself here, really one of our biggest failures. | ||
| And I don't think history is going to judge us kindly. | ||
| And again, I'll put the blame on myself. | ||
| It's a hard story to get people just that interested in. | ||
| And especially for television, because it's a lot of sort of graphs and science, and there's only so many pictures of polar bears you can show. | ||
| And so I anguish about that because I do think there isn't a debate. | ||
| Climate change is real, almost certainly caused by humans. | ||
| And for too long we fell for that in the media where we presented it as a debate when it wasn't. | ||
| Now I think we're past that, but I still don't think we're covering it enough and as robustly as we should. | ||
| Well, climate change, I think, is a sort of almost abstract to people. | ||
| It's very difficult for them to wrap their head around, especially when they look at the ice core samples. | ||
| There's plenty of stuff online where you could sort of convince yourself that there's always been this Rise and fall of the temperature on the earth, and in many ways that is true. | ||
| But pollution is another thing. | ||
| I think actually I just walked in, so I might have missed what you said there. | ||
| But I think that's a crucial shift of emphasis because there is no argument about air pollution, its consequences, its undesirability. | ||
| I mean, you don't want particulates in your lungs that you don't need to have there. | ||
| And the idea that we – I mean, so you could completely justify a green economy on that basis alone. | ||
| Just imagine if we had no pollution coming from the exhausts of all the cars out there and there was no coal-fired power plants. | ||
| We just had solar and wind and safe nuclear technology powering the grid. | ||
| It would be fantastic from just a pure... | ||
| I mean, forget about the health. | ||
| Obviously, lung cancer and cardiovascular disease is a huge issue there. | ||
| Just aesthetically, it's so desirable. | ||
| I mean, there's no argument against it. | ||
| And I feel like people don't make that connection very much. | ||
| Because climate change is slow moving, you know, and it could be way out in the future before... | ||
| But pollution isn't. | ||
| I know, I know. | ||
| But pollution is much less controversial than climate change. | ||
| Well, that's why this coal thing is so disturbing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, reigniting this production of coal. | ||
| Yeah, it's unbelievable. | ||
| It's ridiculous. | ||
| Yeah, I guess I have questions about whether it's even going to happen. | ||
| In other words, you can roll it back, but the coal industry, there are many, many factors to their decision-making. | ||
| Right. | ||
| For example, if they go and do the mining, is what they mine going to actually even be consumed? | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I think that even though they're making some pretty radical noises at the EPA, I'm not sure how far Pruitt can take some of this stuff, given the existing body of law, case law, that has formed around Obama's decisions. | ||
| So it actually gets more complicated the closer you look at it, from what I can tell. | ||
| And I won't claim to have studied it too, too closely. | ||
| But it seems to get more complicated the more you look at it, The headlines may be scarier, I guess is my point. | ||
| Well, what's pretty clear, though, is emission standards. | ||
| Rolling back emission standards sends a very clear message that it's okay to pollute the air. | ||
| I mean, we were moving in a direction of going towards electric cars, going towards cars that pollute the environment less. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| Even cars that use gas, you know, for Porsche, Porsche has a 911 turbo, and the standards of emissions are so strong, what they've developed is a car that when you drive it through LA, the exhaust that comes out is cleaner than the air it sucks in. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hmm. | |
| Imagine that. | ||
| So you're driving through... | ||
| It's an air filter. | ||
| Yeah, it literally is. | ||
| It's a bad air filter. | ||
| But it can be done. | ||
| Very expensive air filter. | ||
| I mean, it can be done. | ||
| I mean, that's... | ||
| I mean, and we can move further and further away. | ||
| I mean, obviously, the problem with that is it's taking in polluted air. | ||
| You know, that's the issue in the first place. | ||
| I mean, it's not clean. | ||
| You don't want to breathe the exhaust of a Porsche. | ||
| But... | ||
| What they've done is managed to make something so efficient that it actually does emit clean air coming out of it, or cleaner than the polluted air that it's sucking in. | ||
| Now, if these Environmental Protection Agency standards keep getting rolled back, I mean, we're going to go back to... | ||
| I mean, I don't know how far they're rolling it back, but... | ||
| What you said is so clear. | ||
| There's nothing good about polluting the air. | ||
| It's what we need to breathe. | ||
| And there's options. | ||
| The idea that business should take precedent over the actual environment that we need to sustain ourselves. | ||
| So let's not forget there are real human beings in coal country who have spent generations working in this industry, take great pride in it, and we've got to think about what we do. | ||
| But the numbers here are surprising and also little reported. | ||
| It's only 75,000 coal jobs we're talking about in the country. | ||
| And there's something like 500,000 clean tech jobs just in California alone. | ||
| I mean, the numbers are completely out of whack. | ||
| No, I think the clean tech industry offers an enormous amount of promise, but 75,000 families is not nothing. | ||
| But then give them money, right? | ||
| They don't want to hand out. | ||
| They want to work. | ||
| But this goes to the question of meaning and, you know, what are we going to do? | ||
| Because the precipice we're getting to is Everyone, virtually everyone, is going to be in the position of these coal miners. | ||
| When we're talking about, and that's a good thing. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| I mean, that's, you know, why can't they figure out that they just want to learn new languages and spend more time with their kids and play Frisbee and have fun? | ||
| We need a new ethic. | ||
| And politics that decouples a person's claim on existence from doing profitable work that someone will pay you for. | ||
| Because a lot of that work is going away. | ||
| I mean, we could view it as an opportunity, and it is actually something that it does dovetail with this hobby horse that you and I have been on for a while about the power of meditation and what it can do to a human mind and the way you view the world and your role in it, for sure. | ||
| Well, what are your thoughts on universal basic income? | ||
| Because bring it back to that, with this rise of the machines, if we do have things automated, I mean, some ridiculous number of people make their living driving cars and driving trucks. | ||
| Now, when those jobs are gone, I think it's millions of people, right? | ||
| Yeah, and I think in the States, it's the most... | ||
| A common job for white men, I think. | ||
| Something like 9 million white men are driving trucks and cars. | ||
| The problem with that is most people are like, fuck white men. | ||
| Tired of white men. | ||
| We're the patriarchy. | ||
| This is Trump's base. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, it's... | ||
| These... | ||
| I think universal basic income... | ||
| There are reasons to worry that it's not a perfect solution because you do want... | ||
| You want to incentivize the things you want to incentivize. | ||
| You need to just understand the consequences of any system you would put in place. | ||
| But there's just no question that... | ||
| Viewed as an opportunity, this is the greatest opportunity in human history. | ||
| We're talking about canceling the need for dangerous, boring, repetitive work and freeing up humanity to do interesting, creative, fun things. | ||
| Now, how could that be bad? | ||
| Well, Give us a little time, and we'll show you how we can make it bad. | ||
| And it'll be bad if it leads to just extraordinary wealth inequality that we don't have the political or ethical will to fix. | ||
| Because if we have a culture of people who think, I don't want any handouts, and I certainly don't want my neighbor to get any handouts, and I don't want to pay any taxes so that he can be a lazy bum, if we have this You know, hangover from Calvinism, you know, that makes it impossible to talk creatively and reasonably about what has changed. | ||
| Yeah, it could be a very painful bottleneck we have to pass through until we get to something that is much better or a hell of a lot worse, depending on where the technology goes. | ||
| And I think at a certain point the wealth inequality will be Obviously unsustainable. | ||
| I mean, you can't have multiple trillionaires walking around living in compounds with razor wire and just moving everywhere by private jet and then massive levels of unemployment in a society like ours. | ||
| I mean, at a certain point, the richest people will realize that Enough is enough. | ||
| We have to spread this wealth because otherwise people are just going to show up at our compounds with their AR-15s or their pitchforks and the society will not sustain it. | ||
| There has to be some level of wealth inequality that is unsustainable, that people will not tolerate. | ||
| And you begin to look more and more like a banana republic until you become a banana republic. | ||
| But now we're talking about the U.S. or the developed world where all the wealth is. | ||
| So redistribution is the endgame. | ||
| But that's a toxic concept for half of the country right now. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The idea of the welfare state. | ||
| The idea of perpetuating that and spreading it across the board. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But these are... | ||
| So, yeah. | ||
| I mean, whatever the solution is for coal mining, we should not be hostage... | ||
| For the coal miners, we should not be hostage to... | ||
| The idea that they need jobs so that whatever job they were doing and are still qualified to do, that job has to continue to exist no matter what. | ||
| No matter what the environmental consequences, no matter what the health consequences, no matter how it closes the door to good things that we want. | ||
| We don't do that with anything. | ||
| We didn't do that with, you know, the people who are making buggy whips or anything else. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, there's just... | ||
| There's no... | ||
| At a certain point, we move on and we make progress and we don't let that progress get rolled back. | ||
| And when you're talking about developing technology that produces energy that doesn't have any of these negative effects, whether it's global climate change or just pollution, Of course we have to move in that direction. | ||
| And the other thing that's crazy is that we're not talking honestly about how dirty tech is subsidized. | ||
| I mean, you have the oil people say, well, solar is all subsidized, right? | ||
| This is a government handout that's giving us the solar industry. | ||
| Well, one, that's not even a... | ||
| You have to produce an argument as to why that's a bad thing. | ||
| This is something we should want the government to do. | ||
| The government needs to incentivize new industries that the market can't incentivize now if they are industries that are just intrinsically good and are going to lead to the betterment of humanity. | ||
| But carbon is massively subsidized. | ||
| If we actually had the coal producers and the petroleum producers... | ||
| Pay for the consequences of carbon and pollution, it would be much more expensive than it is. | ||
| So it's already subsidized. | ||
| We need a carbon tax, clearly. | ||
| The tax code should incentivize what we do. | ||
| Well, there's a ton of industries in this country that you could make that argument for. | ||
| The corn industry is one. | ||
| I mean, subsidizing the corn industry, when you find out that corn and corn syrup is responsible for just a huge epidemic of obesity in this country, the amount of corn syrup that's in foods. | ||
| If you as a polluter had to pay the consequences of your pollution all the way down the line, you had to compensate everyone who got emphysema or lung cancer because of what you were putting into the air. | ||
| Your industry would be less profitable, right? | ||
| And it might not be profitable at all. | ||
| And we haven't priced all of that in to any of these things, whether you're talking about the chemical industry or the cigarette industry. | ||
| I mean, we're addicted to the use of these fossil fuels the same way some people are addicted to the use of cigarettes. | ||
| I mean, the health consequences of those things, they're almost parallel in a lot of ways. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, and amazingly, as you have the same, I mean, I think you turned me on to this documentary. | ||
| What was it? | ||
| Merchants of Doubt? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Amazing. | ||
| The same PhDs. | ||
| You got like 10 guys who move from, you know, just toxic industry to toxic industry, defending whether it's big tobacco or the fire. | ||
| I'm in that documentary. | ||
| Oh, you are? | ||
| Oh, you are. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| I interviewed a guy named Fred Singer, who was one of these people, and he's a climate change denier, and there's just some... | ||
| It's been a while, but there were some key moments where I was, like, listing for him all the major scientific organizations that say that climate change is real and that humans are major contributors to it, and he basically just refused to accept it. | ||
| Well, those shows where you have the three heads, you and then the two experts, and they yell over each other, and then we'll be right back, and then you go to commercial. | ||
| Those fucking things don't solve anything. | ||
| Those weird moments where people are yelling at each other, and you can't figure out who's right or who's wrong. | ||
| I'm not a big fan of that, personally, and I think that especially it was a failure to do that with climate change, because it created the doubt. | ||
| It created the doubt, and I think that was a very successful It was a very successful strategy. | ||
| But that's in tension with what we just said about the New York Times, because if you take a position as a journalist, if you say, okay, actually one side of this conversation is full of shit, I think it's different to take a position. | ||
| It's not controversial for me to sit here and say, if you smoke cigarettes, the science strongly suggests you have higher odds of lung cancer. | ||
| Same thing with climate change, but it became politicized. | ||
| So I don't feel... | ||
| I don't... | ||
| You'll notice I've stepped out of some of the discussions that have been taking place because it's not my role as a journalist to come down on one side or another. | ||
| But with climate change, I feel absolutely comfortable saying the vast majority of scientists believe this is real and a big, big problem. | ||
| So I don't... | ||
| What you're talking about with the New York Times, and I don't really... | ||
| I'm not going to step out and take a view on it, but... | ||
| What I believe you're saying with the Times is that they were pro-Clinton and anti-Trump. | ||
| That's different from having a position on climate change. | ||
| Well, it's not... | ||
| Well, no, because to have a position on... | ||
| Just take the lens as climate change. | ||
| You have one candidate who's denying the reality of climate change or who's just claiming that climate change is a Chinese hoax. | ||
| Yeah, but you can report that without being anti-Trump. | ||
| Well, no, because when Trump says climate change is a Chinese hoax, You have to call him... | ||
| Has he really said that? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| He said it's a Chinese hoax? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| He should go to China and see those people that are walking around with gas masks on because they can't breathe in Beijing. | ||
| Okay, but that's the pollution argument, which I think is actually much stronger because there's just... | ||
| You can't go to Beijing and say, this is how we want the air to be. | ||
| I think something like 25% of the air pollution in California on some days is coming from China. | ||
| I could have that slightly wrong. | ||
| Jamie could check that out. | ||
| Please do. | ||
| There's some extraordinary amount of air pollution that we get from China. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| I did not know that. | ||
| It just makes its way across the ocean? | ||
| Yeah, oh yeah. | ||
| There's no wall. | ||
| We've got to build that wall. | ||
| But no, but at a certain point, I mean, there's some level of dishonesty and misinformation that's so egregious that if you're a journalist at all committed to being an unbiased or a disinterested broker of information and a conversation, if you set up a conversation between, you there's | ||
| If you set up a conversation between the Sean Spicers of the world or the Kellyanne Conways who have their alternative facts and someone who's honestly talking about whatever it is, climate change, you can't split that baby. | ||
| But I don't think you have to create mock unnecessary debates around climate change. | ||
| What I do think is that with the Trump administration, that it is imperative that journalists call out when things are said that aren't true. | ||
| But I don't think it's constructive for mainstream journalistic organizations to have an openly hostile anti-Trump attitude or pro-somebody-else attitude, because then that just leads to further polarization, which is exactly what we don't need. | ||
| But you call him out on all the times that he's said things that are just absolutely not true. | ||
| That feels like you're anti-Trump. | ||
| Yes, it can. | ||
| There's no question. | ||
| There's no question. | ||
| And I think that's an issue we're dealing with. | ||
| But I think this is a time of real soul-searching in my industry, because I firmly believe there is a very powerful place in a functioning democracy for a press, for media, that people generally view as fair. | ||
| Well, it's also what really highlights the responsibility of getting accurate and unbiased information to people, because there's not a lot of sources of that left. | ||
| I mean, when you look at Fox News, and sometimes you look at CNN, and sometimes you look at MSNBC, and you're like, boy, how much of this is editorialized? | ||
| How much of this is opinion? | ||
| You need unbiased facts, and you almost need it not delivered by people. | ||
| The problem is when people are delivering the news, like when you talk to someone, you know they're educated in an Ivy League university and they speak a certain way, they act a certain way, you almost can assume that these intellectual people, these well-read people are going to sort of lean towards one way or another. | ||
| I think that there is that issue. | ||
| I would argue, and again, I know this is self-serving, but I still believe it, that the three broadcast networks have actually fared quite well in what is an incredibly difficult environment right now. | ||
| So you don't count Fox as a broadcast network? | ||
| Fox News is a cable network, but Fox Broadcast does not have a news division the way ABC, CBS, and NBC do. | ||
| So just broadcast, meaning traditional old-school signal in the air that nobody uses anymore. | ||
| Nobody uses them, but we refer to them within the industry as the three broadcast networks. | ||
| Isn't that bizarre, though? | ||
| It is. | ||
| Well, some people, you know, they put up their rabbit ears and get the signal. | ||
| Who the fuck does that? | ||
| Cord cutters, extreme cord cutters. | ||
| Jamie, you got what? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's 20 bucks. | |
| I get like 30 channels and it's way better and it works. | ||
| There's no lagging. | ||
| There's no buffering. | ||
| So you do that and then you get like Netflix for TV shows? | ||
| Yeah, I get like Hulu and I have Sling. | ||
| But when I want to watch a basketball game like the NCAA basketball tournament last night, I had to watch it on that. | ||
| You watch it through the air. | ||
| It worked really good. | ||
| I understand it worked. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| It's like having a vinyl collection, too. | ||
| What's the viewership on an evening news broadcast now? | ||
| Is it like five million on it? | ||
| No, it's around eight or nine. | ||
| Eight or nine, okay. | ||
| So it's still a really big number. | ||
| Is it up? | ||
| I don't follow all of the ticks when it comes to the numbers, so I can't answer that accurately. | ||
| But people have been predicting the demise of network news for decades now. | ||
| I've been at ABC News for 17 years. | ||
| I've been reading obituaries all throughout that time. | ||
| Eight million a night on each of the networks? | ||
| Still, that is a gigantic number, especially in an age of micro-information, of niche broadcasting and the internet. | ||
| Here are the numbers right there. | ||
| NBC. So ABC's in the lead. | ||
| ABC is the lead in total viewers. | ||
| So ABC and NBC, and this is just one week, March 27th, right around 8, and then CBS is 6.5 million. | ||
| So that's a lot of people. | ||
| It skews super old, though. | ||
| It does. | ||
| Look at that demographic. | ||
| It absolutely skews very, very old. | ||
| Well, it's all people. | ||
| The majority is people over 54 or under 25, but I don't think that's the case. | ||
| We're looking at 25 to 54, ABC has 1.6 million, as opposed to 8 million total viewers, NBC 7.8 million total viewers, 1.7 million, 25 to 54, and then CBS 6.4 million total, 1.3 million, 25 to 54. It's funny, like, after 54, fuck you, but before 25, fuck you. | ||
| That's what they concentrate on. | ||
| It is what advertisers want. | ||
| It's funny. | ||
| People with vitality. | ||
| You can tell based on the ads. | ||
| The ads you run, it's like, you know, for catheters and anti... | ||
| It gets a little different on the morning, because in the morning shows where it's closer to 4 or 5 million for ABC and NBC and a little less for CBS, the percentage of that audience that falls within the demo, as we call it, 25 to 54, is higher, and so the ads are kind of different. | ||
| But I guess my point is that you still have a really significant number of people, if you take the mornings and evenings on these broadcast networks, that are getting their news from these places. | ||
| Which just gets back to the polarized media atmosphere you were talking about before. | ||
| I think in this atmosphere, having the networks be seen to a certain extent, to the extent possible, as above the fray, actually is important for democracy. | ||
| How many does Alex Jones get? | ||
| What does Alex Jones get? | ||
| I think $40 million a week, but they include website hits in their big number, so it's a skewed number. | ||
| I've spent some time with him. | ||
| Me too? | ||
| Have you? | ||
| Oh yeah, I know him very well. | ||
| I've had him on the podcast. | ||
| I went down to Austin. | ||
| Did you interview him? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How long? | ||
|
unidentified
|
How long were you there for? | |
| I basically spent a day hanging around his operation. | ||
| This was, I would say, in 2009? | ||
| Yeah, so it was a while ago. | ||
| Before the monolith that it is now. | ||
| Yeah, it was pretty big back then, but not what it is now. | ||
| In 1999, Alex Jones and I put on George Bush Sr. and Jr. masks, and we smoked pot out of a bong and then danced around the Capitol building in Texas for a stand-up video that I did. | ||
| Yeah, I've been friends with that guy since 1999. Well, yeah, I listened to your recent podcast with him, which was just... | ||
| Interdimensional child molesters that are infiltrating our airwaves. | ||
| Yeah, he went deep. | ||
| We got him high and drunk, and he went... | ||
| It was amazing. | ||
| He went as deep as he's ever gone before. | ||
| Do you find that he is different when he's not being recorded? | ||
| Uh, yeah, sort of. | ||
| There he is. | ||
| There he is, screaming and yelling. | ||
| That's me and him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, shit, I broke the mask. | |
| That's him singing, by the way. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Moloch and Friends is his band. | |
| Moloch the Owl God. | ||
| He made up these lyrics. | ||
| This song is all him. | ||
| I believe he might have ad-libbed it, too. | ||
| Give me some volume on this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That was the name of my DVD, Belly of the Beast. | |
| That's Alex. | ||
| He's so crazy. | ||
| I mean, he's definitely different when he's not being recorded, but he is that guy, you know? | ||
| It's sincere. | ||
| He believes all this stuff. | ||
| He believes a lot of it. | ||
| Whether he's correct or not, that's a different argument. | ||
| Whether or not he believes it... | ||
| I was struck. | ||
| I spent a full day with him, and then we had dinner with him afterwards, and we were not recorded. | ||
| I was struck by the difference in demeanor. | ||
| Off camera and not being recorded. | ||
| Yeah, there's definitely that. | ||
| I'm not saying he doesn't believe it. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I'm not in his mind. | ||
| He's a showman, for sure. | ||
| What's really disturbing is when he gets stuff right. | ||
| You know, like the World Trade Organization is a perfect example. | ||
| He was one of the ones that highlighted the use of agent provocateurs. | ||
| Now, what agency? | ||
| Who hires these people? | ||
| But what they do is they take something like the WTO, which was a big embarrassment that people were protesting the WTO, And they hire people to turn this peaceful protest into a violent protest. | ||
| So these people come in, they wear ski masks, they break windows, and they light things on fire, do whatever they do that makes it violent. | ||
| And then they have the cops come in and break it up, because now it's no longer a peaceful protest. | ||
| And so it got to the point where people were trying to show up for work. | ||
| They had WTO pins on. | ||
| That aligned through it. | ||
| Well, they had created a no-protest zone. | ||
| And this is all on footage on the news. | ||
| They were telling people, you have to take the pin off. | ||
| You can't go through this area where you work with a WTO pin on your backpack or on your jacket. | ||
| I mean, that's crazy. | ||
| And he highlighted that, and that use of agent provocateurs has been documented. | ||
| This is a real thing. | ||
| And it's a real tactic that, again, what agency, what faction of the military, what faction of the government hires these people to do that, I don't know. | ||
| But it is a real thing. | ||
| And I did not know about that until Alex highlighted it on one of his videos. | ||
| It's been proven. | ||
| It's been proven that it's real. | ||
| And so that alone is disturbing. | ||
| When you stop and think about all the different things that he's informed people of that turned out were real, like Operation Northwoods, when the Freedom of Information Act came out with the Operation Northwoods document where the Joint Chiefs of Staff had signed this. | ||
| And this was like something that they were really trying to implement. | ||
| They were going to arm Cuban friendlies and have them attack Guantanamo Bay. | ||
| They were going to blow up a drone jetliner. | ||
| They're going to blame it on the Cubans. | ||
| And they were trying to use this as impetus to get us to go to Yeah, but how do you feel about the things that he's talking about that are... | ||
| Well, okay, but let's talk about that first. | ||
| I mean, there are things that are true. | ||
| That's what gets really squirrely. | ||
| What gets really squirrely is when you find out that there have been things, like the Gulf of Tonkin incident. | ||
| There's many things that have happened where there have been false flags, where the government has conspired to lie to the American people, and people have died because of it. | ||
| I think, well, I don't know a lot about Gulf of Tonkin, although I know more about it than those other examples. | ||
| I mean, there are definitely cases where it's an additional interpretation to say that the government lied. | ||
| I mean, so to take even something that's closer to hand, like weapons of mass destruction as a pretext of going to Iraq, right? | ||
| Now, it's one thing to say that people knowingly lied about, that Bush and Cheney knowingly lied to the American people about that. | ||
| Or they were misled by people who were knowingly lying. | ||
| Or just everyone got it wrong. | ||
| It was totally plausible to everyone who was informed that he had a WMD program and they misinterpreted whatever evidence they thought they had and they were just wrong. | ||
| So that's a spectrum. | ||
| I'm not claiming to know which one of those is true. | ||
| I think probably the last is much closer to the truth. | ||
| And that explains many of these instances, but what's so corrosive about pure examples of lying is that—and we may have one case now that's just emerging in the news. | ||
| I don't know if maybe the story has been clarified while we've been talking, but it now seems that Susan Rice— At one point she said she knew nothing about the unmasking of Trump associates in this recent surveillance case, and now it's claimed that she actually asked to have certain names unmasked. | ||
| This is being seized upon, again, just in the last few hours, as an example of a lie which seems very sinister. | ||
| But as though it equalizes the two sides here, right? | ||
| So let's say, worst case scenario, Susan Rice lied about having some knowledge of this investigation. | ||
| That doesn't... | ||
| It says something bad about Susan Rice. | ||
| It says something... | ||
| I mean, she has to deal with the consequences of that lie, but it doesn't exonerate all of the lying that Trump has done about everything under the sun, right? | ||
| So what's so destabilizing here is that the moment... | ||
| This is even true of honest errors. | ||
| The moment that a news organization like yours or the New York Times commits an honest error, that gets pointed to from those who want to treat the mainstream news media as just fake news as, see, everything's the same. | ||
| You're no better than somebody who's just manufacturing fake news on a laptop in his basement. | ||
| And the flip side of that is when Alex Jones gets something right, it seems to make him look like a dignified journalistic enterprise analogous to The New York Times or to ABC News. | ||
| And neither of those things are true. | ||
| I mean, there are small lies and then there are huge lies. | ||
| There are honest mistakes committed by totally reputable organizations that are really trying to get their facts straight. | ||
| And then there are malicious, there's just malicious propaganda outlets that are not at all trying to get their facts straight and trying to engineer everyone's credulity and ignorance into something that is just purely a matter of, you know, tribal sentiment, you know. | ||
| And so we lose our ability to distinguish these different projects when we say, oh, look, you know, fake news. | ||
| Both sides do it. | ||
| Or here's a lie. | ||
| Here's Susan Rice's one lie that she told in the last 10 years, maybe, and got caught for. | ||
| And we have a president who lies every time he picks up his, you know, approaches a mic or picks up his Twitter. | ||
| She had other problems because she had gone on, I believe, on the Sunday morning talk shows after Benghazi with some outdated talking points. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, Susan looked like she was itching to get caught. | ||
| I mean, whether this is a case of... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, I think your point is very, very important. | ||
| Because I think that when you have... | ||
| If you have one side that lies all the time, it's imperative that the other side don't lie at all. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| If you caught lying and say, look, everybody does it. | ||
| That's why it's tense time for people in my line of work. | ||
| Because we... | ||
| We're so much scrutiny. | ||
| And when we get it wrong, we really... | ||
| You know, we take a lot of heat. | ||
| But when we get it wrong, I think we're pretty quick to say, we got it wrong, here's the actual, here's the truth. | ||
| Do you know that Donald Trump Jr. said that Cernovich should get a Pulitzer? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| For exposing Susan Rice? | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But that's why this drives me a little crazy, because it's not Cernovich, it's the fact that That this is bled into the real world. | ||
| Why'd you lead him down the Cernovich thing? | ||
| You just gave him right back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I had to move the yarn in front of the kitten. | |
| We're only now discovering the consequences of this. | ||
| Let's come back in five years and see if we're talking about anything that makes any sense. | ||
| Well, it's all very blurry. | ||
| It really is very blurry because we've never had a situation like this where we have a president that people just don't trust, to be honest. | ||
| I mean, if someone lied about anything in the past, I mean, if Donald Trump got caught having his dick sucked in the White House on film, You know, he'd be like, look, I made a mistake. | ||
| I mean, it would be nothing. | ||
| It would be nothing. | ||
| Photoshop. | ||
| Fake news. | ||
| But don't you think, just again, just slot, to use Joseph Goldstein's phrase before about slotting into geological time and just looking at the broader scope of history. | ||
| You know, we've had really, we've had periods of time where we had the muckrakers, you know, where the media outlets were Didn't even pretend at times to not have an agenda. | ||
| What times were those? | ||
| In the early parts of our republic, where we had... | ||
| Was it Teddy Roosevelt called the journalists muckrakers, where basically he was saying that their job was to rake muck, to be working in filth. | ||
| And the media and American politics have been filled with instances. | ||
| American media and American politics have been filled with instances over our short history of untruths and agendas. | ||
| And then we have times of relative stability. | ||
| And then sometimes we slide back into more tumultuous times. | ||
| I think maybe the Pollyanna here, but I think that we the republic will survive and that we will that it doesn't inexorably lead to a time where truth doesn't matter. | ||
| Well, it seems to open up the door for a viable alternative. | ||
| It seems to open up the door for someone who comes along who is, in many ways, bulletproof. | ||
| That is a very ethical person. | ||
| It's opened a door. | ||
| I mean, now anyone to be president. | ||
| You're talking about somebody to run for office? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I just don't think anybody's bulletproof. | ||
| Humans, I mean, with the exception of Joe Rogan. | ||
| Well, definitely not bulletproof. | ||
| You don't have to be bulletproof. | ||
| I mean, this guy's got nothing but bullet holes in him, and he's president. | ||
| No, but what Joe was saying is it opens the door to somebody who's unheachable. | ||
| A strong, viable alternative, like someone who is ethical. | ||
| I think the door is open to anyone. | ||
| I mean, who couldn't be president at this point? | ||
| But there's no one that steps forward right now. | ||
| I mean, do you think they're waiting? | ||
| I mean, like, who the fuck—first of all— You couldn't be president. | ||
| There's never been an open atheist. | ||
| They would attack your Twitter page, first of all. | ||
| Yeah, good luck. | ||
| They would hire— No, I mean, I think they're—you know, if you're going to use a conventional political calculus, well then, yeah, then— Being an atheist, having a history of psychedelic drug use, having edgy positions that alienate massive constituencies. | ||
| All of that's a deal-breaker, but you would never have predicted that someone this scandalous and inept and dishonest, and provably so, he literally can't get through an hour of the day without... | ||
| Something that would have been a scandal in some previous age of the earth coming out of his mouth. | ||
| It's just... | ||
| I think, yeah, I think there's no predicting who could be president in the future. | ||
| You need wealth and you need... | ||
| Charisma on some level. | ||
| You need to be able to get a tribe behind you, but I don't think you need any of what people thought you needed even a year ago. | ||
| Well, what he's done by circumventing the whole system and by being independently wealthy... | ||
| Is really kind of... | ||
| But even that was a sham. | ||
| I mean, what's amazing is that he's like... | ||
| I don't know how much money he actually put into his campaign, but it's just not nearly what you would have... | ||
| I mean, he really only had to pretend to be that wealthy. | ||
| And it was incredible what happened. | ||
| The flip side of it is what he achieved with very little campaign funds. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| It's incredible. | ||
| And his wits. | ||
| Yeah, it's incredible. | ||
| It's... | ||
| Like him or not, you have to give him credit for an unbelievable victory that very few people saw coming. | ||
| It's a popularity contest. | ||
| Isn't that part of the problem? | ||
| He made a popular person president of a popularity contest. | ||
| I mean, that's what it is. | ||
| He won. | ||
| He was running against somebody who wasn't popular. | ||
| So, I mean, let's put it in context. | ||
| And we was coming after eight years of a Democratic president who was controversial in many ways. | ||
| And it's always harder for somebody of the same party to run. | ||
| So there are a lot of dynamics. | ||
| Larger, impersonal dynamics that were working in his favor. | ||
| Yeah, it's just... | ||
| But just to get back to the argument about, like, are we in apocalyptic times or whatever, I guess, I don't know anything. | ||
| But my instinct is... | ||
| Just as a country, we've seen times of much worse division. | ||
| We had a civil war. | ||
| It's telling that you have to go back there for a compelling example. | ||
| What about in the 60s? | ||
| We had people in the streets, we had the weather underground, we had MLK and RFK assassinated. | ||
| It was pretty divided time. | ||
| What I'm worried about now is... | ||
| I think he's truly unique, and I think the way we're becoming unmoored from the ordinary truth testing in politics, I think is unique. | ||
| I mean, the fact that we have a president who seems—because there's a whole feedback mechanism. | ||
| Trump seems to get some of his information from InfoWars and from places like InfoWars. | ||
| Oh, he goes on all the time. | ||
| But you don't think he pays a price for his— No. | ||
| I mean, his popularity rating is not high. | ||
| Well, he's paying some price, but the question is, is it going to be enough? | ||
| And what happens with the next terrorist attack? | ||
| So the real fear is that if we have a Reichstag fire kind of moment, engineered by him or not, I mean, I'm not so paranoid as to think he's going to... | ||
| But I just think it's inevitable something is going to happen. | ||
| I mean, we've had 80 days, 100 days, whatever it's been of his presidency, where basically nothing has happened, and it's been pure chaos, right? | ||
| And the work of government's not getting done. | ||
| The government's barely even staffed. | ||
| And this has been a period of where nothing really has happened. | ||
| But Imagine a 9-11 size event or something really goes off the rails with North Korea or China or Russia. | ||
| It will be so... | ||
| I mean, the pressure... | ||
| One, the pressure to normalize him as commander-in-chief... | ||
| much greater than it is now, and already everyone's feeling that pressure. | ||
| But two, the ability to clamp down on civil liberties and just use the power of the presidency in a way that would be very difficult for our society to recover the ability to clamp down on civil liberties and just use I think it's a scary moment. | ||
| And I'm... | ||
| I mean, I... | ||
| The people who are... | ||
| Drawing analogies between him and the 30s in Germany, I think those analogies are misleading in ways, but Again, you just don't know how strange things could get with a big negative stimulus to the system. | ||
| What I think we know is that we have someone in charge who is a malignantly selfish con man. | ||
| I think that is an objective fact. | ||
| That's not a partisan thing to say. | ||
| That's as obvious about him as his hair. | ||
| And to have that much power in the hands of somebody whose ethical compass Is that unreliable or reliably bad, in my view? | ||
| And I wouldn't say this of Pence, who scares me for other reasons. | ||
| I mean, he's a theocrat. | ||
| I wouldn't say this of most Republicans, who I might disagree with. | ||
| But there's just something to put that much power in the hands of somebody who... | ||
| It's so disconnected from facts and reasonable concern for the well-being of the rest of humanity and the future. | ||
| It's an incredible moment. | ||
| And I don't think we've ever had a president who you could look at and say that about so clearly. | ||
| I mean, not even Nixon. | ||
| Nixon was pathological in other ways. | ||
| You know, Nixon was giving us the Clean Air Act, right? | ||
| I mean, Nixon had some point of contact with terrestrial reality, which wasn't just about figuring out how to burnish his imaginary grandeur, you know. | ||
| So, yeah, I mean, I... I think we're one huge news story away from finding out how bad a president he could be. | ||
| And I think he could surprise even the people who are very pessimistic. | ||
| Well, he could also rise to the occasion. | ||
| Look at you, being objective. | ||
| That's the newsman in him. | ||
| See that? | ||
| I also like to... | ||
| I would be the first to give him or the system credit for that. | ||
| I mean, it's not that... | ||
| If he starts doing something good, like, let's say, a massive infrastructure project, right, that includes building out good things, not coal jobs, but, you know, if... | ||
| Fixing bridges. | ||
| Clean infrastructure, right? | ||
| If he starts doing that... | ||
| I mean, that'd be fantastic, right? | ||
| And it's possible he could start doing that for his own—his motives wouldn't even matter, ultimately, as long as he was doing the right things. | ||
| But his motives are so reliably— Self-involved. | ||
| What we need is a system. | ||
| Someone needs to be able to play him, this kind of narcissistic blockenspiel, well enough to get him to do the things that would be good for the world. | ||
| But I just don't see... | ||
| There's just too much chaos in the system for that to be a reliable game. | ||
| Well, like you, they try to keep him away from social media. | ||
| Yeah, well, that's working out. | ||
| I mean, that's a big thing, don't they? | ||
| They try to pull him away from it. | ||
| Yeah, but that's been impossible. | ||
| No one can do it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Remember that crazy press conference that he had just a few weeks into being president? | ||
| That was unbelievable. | ||
| I got text messages from friends that are Republicans. | ||
| They were like, what the fuck? | ||
| Yeah, but you know, it's an interesting sort of Rorschach test because there are millions of Americans who watched that press conference and found it delightful. | ||
| They thought that he was pounding on the liberal media. | ||
| When you read a transcript of what actually comes out of his mouth, it is amazing. | ||
| The poverty of the passages in terms of information. | ||
| The fact that we have a president who speaks like this, I could never have foreseen that in our lifetime this was going to happen. | ||
| It's unimaginable to me. | ||
| Yeah, I think a lot of people, there are just indisputably millions of Americans who find it refreshing. | ||
| Did you see Bill Maher's thing about Anthony Weiner, that he thinks that Anthony Weiner should run against Trump? | ||
| We need our own crazy man. | ||
| Because Anthony Weiner, besides his obvious addictions to sexting with people, was a very powerful politician and a very good speaker. | ||
| He had a lot of very good quality. | ||
| He was going after bankers, the same as Eliot Spitzer. | ||
| Eliot Spitzer did a lot of good things. | ||
| He was going after the bankers. | ||
| He was going after corruption. | ||
| Yeah, well, that's an example. | ||
| There's a flag planted that shows us how far we have gone from the normal. | ||
| I mean, Eliot Spitzer destroyed himself with one instance of hypocrisy. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, it was pretty bad. | ||
| Trump? | ||
| Level bad? | ||
| I mean, there's just no... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, we don't have Trump breaking the law in this way. | ||
| I mean, he was with a prostitute. | ||
| Well, that's a stupid law. | ||
| The real problem was that he was going after prostitutes. | ||
| I know. | ||
| That was the real problem. | ||
| That's the hypocrisy. | ||
| Yeah, the hypocrisy wasn't that he did something illegal where he paid someone for sex. | ||
| That law seems to me to be so archaic and so ridiculous. | ||
| You can pay someone to massage you. | ||
| You can't pay someone to touch your genitals. | ||
| It seems ridiculous. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| I guess the other piece you have to put in play there is that there are some percentage of people working in the sex trade who are not doing it voluntarily, who are coerced to one or another degree. | ||
| And that's a horror show. | ||
| And part of the problem with that is that it's illegal. | ||
| I mean, that's the big argument is that... | ||
| Yes, there is that argument. | ||
| And I agree with you that consenting adults should be able to do what they want to do, but the crucial variable there is consent. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And kids can't consent. | ||
| Agreed. | ||
| Agreed. | ||
| I just think that someone is going to have to be dynamic, they're going to have to be They're going to have to engage people in a way that, I mean, they're going to have to deal with his attacks. | ||
| Or maybe what people will be thirsting for after four years is actually bland. | ||
| Yeah, right? | ||
| Maybe, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I would dupe with Bland right now. | ||
| That would be fantastic. | ||
| Bland and actually super religious would be... | ||
| Ted Cruz? | ||
| You'd be happy for Ted Cruz? | ||
| Ted Cruz is not Bland. | ||
| No. | ||
| But my enthusiasm for impeachment suggests that I'm happy with Pence, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| So, like, if I could find the impeachment button, I would not hesitate to press it. | ||
| And Pence, given his religious commitments... | ||
| A few short years ago would have been among my worst nightmares. | ||
| I mean, I would be talking about the rise of the Christian right and the danger of theocracy. | ||
| But psychologically, he seems like a normal, predictable, solid American compared to what we have. | ||
| It's just... | ||
| Isn't the other question like Trump's age? | ||
| He's a 70-year-old man. | ||
| People don't really live that much past 70, especially people that are overweight and people that don't exercise. | ||
| He seems all too healthy to me. | ||
| He seems pretty healthy. | ||
| I mean, that campaign. | ||
| He does. | ||
| I can't believe it. | ||
| His amount of energy. | ||
| And his credit, yeah. | ||
| I mean, that's an amazing thing to be able to do. | ||
| How do you think he does that? | ||
| It's the most punishing thing in the world. | ||
| I can't even imagine what his schedule was like. | ||
| He looked like he was having a good time. | ||
| Seriously. | ||
| I did. | ||
| It did. | ||
| And in that press conference we were talking about, I think it was a 77-minute press conference, he looked like he was having a blast. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He gets really energized. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's got to be the most punishing beatdown ever if you're not designed for it. | ||
| I mean, I can't imagine how tiring that campaign was. | ||
| I mean, you get exhausted for 30 minutes looking at your at-mention. | ||
| Exactly, yeah. | ||
| No, you have to be wired differently, but he clearly is... | ||
| He's wired that way, and it's worked for him. | ||
| But you need someone who's willing to submit to the punishment of running, and that's a rare person. | ||
| And the problem is that kind of selects for things that you don't actually want in a president, or at least I wouldn't think you would want. | ||
| I mean, it selects for a kind of narcissism and a sense that it really has to be you, right? | ||
| It doesn't select for the In a normal intellectual space, you're constantly aware of the ways in which you are not the best guy or gal to be doing the thing, right? | ||
| Like, you want to defer to experts, and, you know, Trump is, only I can fix it, right? | ||
| And that worked. | ||
| And so you need... | ||
| There's something of that that creeps into the... | ||
| The headspace of most politicians, it seems. | ||
| So scientific humility and just a sense of the limits of any one person's expertise is not necessarily the right piece of software to have running when it comes time to run for president. | ||
| Now, I want to switch gears a little bit. | ||
| It's not totally related, but it is in some ways. | ||
| Headspace. | ||
| Talking about mindsets and talking about, like, we've brought this up but really haven't delved into it much at all, about meditation and about how much it's affected you and how it got you back on track. | ||
| And I know that you're a big proponent of it, and I am as well, although I think I'd probably do it differently than you guys do. | ||
| I'd love to hear how you do it. | ||
| I use an isolation tank. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Like a sensory deprivation technique? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I do a lot of yoga. | ||
| Those are two big ones for me. | ||
| You know, I think those alone have straightened out my brain in a great way. | ||
| Yoga in particular. | ||
| Yoga because it's not... | ||
| Yoga forces you to do it. | ||
| You're either doing it or you're not doing it. | ||
| There's no room for distraction. | ||
| You're essentially forced to deal with what these poses require of you. | ||
| And I think that in doing so and having a singular focus of trying to maintain your balance and stretch and extend and do all these different things while you're doing it, and concentrating almost entirely on your breath, which is a big factor in yoga, it has remarkable brain-scrubbing attributes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I would say, and I don't know much... | ||
| Before I say this, let me just ask. | ||
| What are you doing in the isolation tank? | ||
| Like, what are you doing in your mind? | ||
| A lot. | ||
| Well, you know, I use it in a bunch of different ways. | ||
| I don't use it as much as I should, honestly. | ||
| But I... Concentrate on, sometimes I go in there with an idea, like I'll concentrate on material that I'm working on, or maybe jujitsu techniques that I'm having problems with, or some other things that I'm dealing with, you know, any sort of issues that I have. | ||
| Sometimes I do that. | ||
| Sometimes I just go in there and chill out, and relax, and breathe, and concentrate. | ||
| There's a lot of physical things that happen inside the tank. | ||
| There's the amount of magnesium that's in the water because it's Epsom salts. | ||
| It's really good for you physically. | ||
| It's very good for the muscles. | ||
| It loosens you up and relaxes you and that eliminates a lot of stress. | ||
| And that physical elimination of stress allows the brain to function with just less pressure. | ||
| It allows you to relax more. | ||
| It puts things in perspective better. | ||
| And it also, it gives you this environment that's not available anywhere else on the planet. | ||
| This weightless, floating, disconnected from your body environment where you don't hear anything, you don't see anything, you don't feel anything, you feel like you're weightless. | ||
| You have this sensation of flying because you're totally weightless in the dark. | ||
| You open your eyes, you don't see anything. | ||
| You close your eyes, it's exactly the same. | ||
| The water's the same temperature as your skin, so you don't feel the water and you're floating. | ||
| I'll say this. | ||
| I'm not sure how this is going to go down. | ||
| I actually don't have any questions about the benefits of being in an isolation tank, even though I don't know too much about it. | ||
| And I also think yoga is great, although I don't do much of it myself. | ||
| I think, though, that there may actually be a difference between those two activities and meditation. | ||
| Because there's a kind of—this is a highfalutin term—metacognition, sort of knowing what you know or knowing that you're thinking. | ||
| That happens in the kind of mindfulness meditation of which Sam and I are proponents that I think is a different thing. | ||
| Where you're seeing, and I'll just try to put this in English, when you're meditating the way we do, you're seeing how crazy you are. | ||
| You're seeing your fucking nuts. | ||
| And that actually has a real value. | ||
| A systematic collision with the asshole in your head has a real value. | ||
| Because when the asshole offers you up a shitty suggestion in the rest of your life, which is basically its job, like, oh yeah, you should eat the 17th cookie or say the thing that's going to ruin the next 48 hours of your marriage or whatever, you're better able to resist it. | ||
| So what do you do? | ||
| So, I mean, the basic steps of mindfulness meditation are to sit. | ||
| Most people close their eyes. | ||
| You bring your full attention to the feeling of your breath. | ||
| You're not thinking about your breath. | ||
| You're just feeling the raw data of the physical sensations. | ||
| And then the third step is the biggie, which is, as soon as you try to do this, your mind's going to go bonkers. | ||
| You're going to start thinking about, you know, what's for lunch? | ||
| Do I need a haircut? | ||
| Where do gerbils run wild? | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| Blah, blah, blah. | ||
| You're just going to notice... | ||
| Oh, my mind's going crazy right now. | ||
| That noticing is the key moment. | ||
| It's, in fact, the victory. | ||
| It's interesting because this is when most people think they've failed. | ||
| Oh, I can't meditate because I can't clear my mind. | ||
| This is the biggest misconception about meditation. | ||
| You do not need to clear your mind. | ||
| That's impossible unless you're enlightened or dead. | ||
| The whole goal is just to notice when you become distracted and start again. | ||
| Again, you return your attention to your breath, and you just do that a million times. | ||
| And every time you catch yourself wondering and go back to your breath, it's a bicep curl for your brain. | ||
| It changes your brain. | ||
| And that, over time, creates the kind of metacognition I was discussing before where you see... | ||
| That you're a homo sapien sapien. | ||
| In other words, that's how we're classified as a species. | ||
| The one who thinks and knows he or she thinks. | ||
| And that knowing that you have this voice in your head, as Sam likes to joke, he feels like when he thinks about the voice in his head, he feels like he's been hijacked by the most boring person alive. | ||
| Just says the same shit over and over. | ||
| A joke that I steal from him all the time. | ||
| That is enormously powerful. | ||
| Because then you are not held hostage by this voice. | ||
| A similar thing happens in the tank. | ||
| I do a form of meditation in the tank. | ||
| Sometimes when I go in there without an idea, like if I'm not working on material or anything else, where I just concentrate on my breath in through the nose, out through the mouth, and I just literally concentrate on the breath, and the same thing happens. | ||
| That's meditation. | ||
| That's meditation. | ||
| It's not similar. | ||
| It's the exact same thing. | ||
| The difference is, in the tank, after a while, after about 20 minutes or so, that breaks loose to psychedelic states. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Have you ever combined the tank with psychedelics? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| Altered state stuff? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a trip. | ||
| LSD or mushrooms? | ||
| Mushrooms. | ||
| But the big one is edible pot. | ||
| Edible pot seems to be as strong as anything in there. | ||
| I eat enough pot where I'm convinced I'm going to die, and then I climb in there. | ||
| Every time I do it, I go, don't do that again. | ||
| Because I just get out so terrified. | ||
| What's your motivation when you're eating the pot and climbing into the tank? | ||
| Let's see what happens. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Yeah, just be scared. | ||
| Be terrified. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, because nothing ever happens. | ||
| You never die. | ||
| But goddamn, you're just convinced that the universe is imploding around you. | ||
| So it usually has the character of fear being a major part of it? | ||
| It's also not embracing the fear, not letting the fear run rampant, and just sort of relaxing and giving in to the vulnerability. | ||
| The finite nature of your existence and just breathing and concentrating and letting the dance take place. | ||
| Because there's some sort of a weird... | ||
| One of the things that there's a big misconception about when it comes to edible pot is that edible pot is like smoking pot. | ||
| It's an entirely different process physiologically. | ||
| Your liver... | ||
| The time course is very different, too. | ||
| You can stay stoned for three days. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You could fuck up and eat too many brownies and you'd be gone for a long time. | ||
| That sounds miserable. | ||
| It is, but it's not, because you get something out of it when it's over. | ||
| The process is excruciating, but when you come out of it, you just feel so happy. | ||
| Feel so happy it's over. | ||
| Yeah, it's like the joke about the dude who's banging his head up against the wall, and somebody says, why are you doing that? | ||
| He says, because it feels so good when I stop. | ||
| In a way, but there's no physical damage banging your head up against the wall. | ||
| You're gonna hurt yourself. | ||
| This is true Yeah, I don't know I think there seems like there might be easier ways to get to the same wisdom Maybe but I think there's also creativity that gets inspired by the edible pot Something called 11 hydroxy metabolite that your body produces. | ||
| It's so different than most people when they eat pot they think they've been dosed. | ||
| Like anybody who's smoked pot before and then you give them a brownie they think oh my god there's something in that and they're convinced because reality itself just seems like it just dissolves and especially inside the tank there's something about the tank environment that produces in the absence of any external stimuli your brain becomes sort of supercharged because What you're trying to do when you're just sitting down and concentrating and relaxing is you're trying to focus on your thoughts, but you're still aware of your body. | ||
| You're still aware of your elbows touching this desk, your butt touching the chair. | ||
| There's all these different factors that are... | ||
| There's stimuli that's coming into your senses. | ||
| Whereas in the tank, there's none of that, virtually. | ||
| It's almost completely eliminated. | ||
| There's some, but you can phase that stuff out. | ||
| Like, you can still feel the water a little bit if you think about it. | ||
| You can still... | ||
| Sometimes you bump into the wall and you have to center yourself and you have to relax again and make sure you're not moving so you don't touch things, which can kind of dissolve the experience. | ||
| There are experiences in meditation where you have that same experience where you lose your sense of the body, but that usually comes with more concentration. | ||
| You have to be very concentrated on them. | ||
| I feel like you would have that experience and it would be even more intense if you did the exact same thing that you do outside the tank in the tank. | ||
| I don't think you need any psychedelics in the tank. | ||
| It's one thing I tell people when they ask me, should I get high before I do it? | ||
| I'm like, no, just do it. | ||
| Just do it. | ||
| If you decide after a while, if you've done it three or four times, you're like, I wonder what it's like if I just take a little bit of a hit of pot and see where it takes me. | ||
| There's nothing wrong with that. | ||
| It's not going to hurt you. | ||
| You know, if you're a type of person who enjoys marijuana or whatever. | ||
| But the tank alone by itself, just the absence of sensory input, your brain goes to a very, very different place. | ||
| And as long as you can relax, as long as you don't think too much about the fact that you're in the tank, just concentrate entirely on your thoughts, entirely on your breath, And again, let all those crazy, like, where do hamsters live? | ||
| Like, all that shit. | ||
| Let all that stuff run wild through your mouth. | ||
| But I feel like, in the tank at least, that gets to a certain spot and it stops existing. | ||
| And then the psychedelic state takes over. | ||
| Yeah, well, it depends on what the goal is. | ||
| I think there can be many different... | ||
| Goals of meditation or quasi-spiritual practice, and they're distinct. | ||
| So, I mean, the center of the bullseye for me is not suffering unnecessarily, right? | ||
| And so one thing that mindfulness gives you is—I mean, so it's compatible with— Every experience you can have. | ||
| There's nothing in your experience that isn't an appropriate object of meditation. | ||
| Most people start with the breath because it's just a very convenient thing to start with. | ||
| But once you know how to do this particular practice, your goal is to just be clearly aware of whatever your experience is in each moment. | ||
| Emotions arise, thoughts arise, sounds come in. | ||
| Your attention is wide open to whatever your experience is. | ||
| So it's not like... | ||
| So nothing, in principle, is a distraction. | ||
| I mean, you could be meditating right next to a construction site, and the sound of the hammers is just as good an object of meditation as the breath or anything else. | ||
| So everything is included. | ||
| But the... | ||
| The superpower you're after, which you actually can acquire through this practice, is to realize that virtually all of your psychological suffering, and actually, arguably, virtually all of your physical suffering, or the difference between physical pain and suffering, which those two are not quite the same thing, It's a matter of being lost in thought. | ||
| It's a matter of thinking without knowing that you're thinking. | ||
| And what mindfulness does, and really any technique of meditation ultimately should do, is teach you to break the spell of being lost in thought and to notice a thought as a thought. | ||
| The huge difference is, until you learn how to meditate or do something like meditation, You're just helplessly thinking every moment of your life. | ||
| You're having a conversation with yourself. | ||
| You're having content, whether it's imagistic or linguistic, pour forth into consciousness every moment and so incessantly that you don't even notice. | ||
| It's just white noise. | ||
| And not only does it completely color You're experienced moment to moment. | ||
| So if they're angry thoughts, you're angry. | ||
| If they're depressed thoughts, you're depressed. | ||
| If they're sad, you're sad. | ||
| So you become your thoughts, but you also feel identified. | ||
| You feel that you are the thinker of your thoughts. | ||
| You feel like a self. | ||
| And it's completely structured by this flow of mentation every moment. | ||
| And it produces everything you do. | ||
| It produces all of your intentions and your goals and your actions. | ||
| And he said this about me, and now I'm going to say this. | ||
| So it's like everything coming out of you is born of this same process. | ||
| And meditation is a way of recognizing that consciousness, and what you are subjectively, is this prior condition of just... | ||
| The awareness in which everything is showing up, sounds, sensations, and thoughts. | ||
| And thoughts can become just other objects of consciousness. | ||
| And so, I mean, to take even a very basic example of the difference between pain and suffering, you can feel... | ||
| Very strong physical pain, unpleasant pain, and just be aware of it. | ||
| The sense that it's unbearable is virtually always untrue because in that moment you've already borne it. | ||
| The feeling that something's unbearable is really the fear of having to experience it in the next moment in the future. | ||
| Because you're always like, if someone drives a nail into your knee, Well, that sounds like it's unbearable, but every moment you're feeling it, you're bearing it. | ||
| What you're thinking about is the last moment and the next moment, and you're thinking about when am I going to get some relief and What's the cure and how badly is my knee injured? | ||
| You're worried about the future, continuously, and you're not noticing the automaticity of thought that is amplifying the negativity of the experience in that moment. | ||
| You can have super intense sensation which is either pleasant or unpleasant depending on the conceptual frame you've put around it. | ||
| So for instance, if you had this massive sense of soreness in your shoulder, You would experience it very differently if it was, A, the result of you deadlifting more than you ever had in your life and you were proud of it, right? | ||
| B, probably cancer and you're waiting for the biopsy results and you're worried about this is the thing that's going to kill you. | ||
| Or you're getting rolfed, you know, like some deep tissue massage, and it hurts like hell, but you actually totally understand the source of the pain, and you know it's going to be gone the moment the guy pulls his elbow back, right? | ||
| So it could be the exact same sensation in each one of those, but the conceptual frame you have around it totally dictates the level of psychological suffering, or it can dictate the total absence of psychological suffering. | ||
| Now, we were talking before the podcast started about your apps, and we were talking about the amount of different meditation exercises on the apps. | ||
| Like, what kind of different meditation exercises are there if you're talking about just concentrating on mindfulness and breathing? | ||
| As it turns out, you can iterate off of that basic exercise to infinity, essentially. | ||
| Because you talk about not only... | ||
| I don't want to get too ahead of myself. | ||
| But basically, the basic instructions are that we listed before you're feeling your breath coming in, and then when you get lost, you start again. | ||
| But then you can add onto that. | ||
| So one big thing to add on is something called mental noting. | ||
| So you're breathing in and out, you're feeling your breath, and then you get distracted by a huge wave of anger. | ||
| Generally speaking, when we get hit by a wave of anger, we just inhabit the anger. | ||
| We become angry. | ||
| There's no buffer between the stimulus and our response to it. | ||
| But there's this little technique you can do of just making a little mental note of, oh, that's anger. | ||
| the thing. | ||
| It's a little bit like pressing the picture-in-picture button on your remote control, where the story that's taken up the whole frame can be seen with some perspective. | ||
| So that's just one example of the little techniques that you can add on to the basic exercise, and you can go for a long time. | ||
| So as we were discussing, Sam's about to start his meditation app, which is going to be called what? | ||
| Sam Waking Up? | ||
| And I have mine, which is called 10% Happier. | ||
| Sam is going to be doing all the teaching on his app, and on my app, since I'm not a teacher, we have experts coming in, like Joseph Goldstein, who's, again, a friend of both Sam and I. | ||
| And each teacher has their own emphasis? | ||
| and you then start talking about applied meditation. | ||
| So how do I use it in my everyday life? | ||
| How do I use it if really what I want to do right now is control my eating? | ||
| So meditation, for example, we have a course on the app that talks about using it to not overeat. | ||
| By the way, I'm terrible at this. | ||
| But you can use your mindfulness, your ability to know what's happening in your head in any given moment without getting carried away by it, To not overeat. | ||
| Notice, oh, I'm having this urge right now to eat, as I did last night, an entire bag of malted chocolate in my hotel room, but I can ride that urge and not do the thing that I know is stupid. | ||
| So anyway, that's just a little taste of how you can take meditation and bring it in kind of numerous directions. | ||
| Do you guys feel competitive? | ||
| Both of apps? | ||
| No, his isn't even out yet. | ||
| Mine's not out yet. | ||
| No, I feel not yet. | ||
| When his comes out and completely cannibalizes mine, then yeah. | ||
| We'll see how happy he is for me. | ||
| 10% happier? | ||
| I'll be like negative 500% happier. | ||
| What's 10% of zero? | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| No, I actually think I'm of the view, you know, now that I've been in this meditation app business for a little while, I don't think it's... | ||
| I don't think the business model is that there's just one huge app that everybody uses and maybe there's some distant second. | ||
| I actually think it's a little bit more like fast food. | ||
| I think there's going to be a bunch of big players and you may switch back and forth. | ||
| Does one need an app? | ||
| No. | ||
| No. | ||
| No, you don't. | ||
| But the thing that's useful, and it's really useful at any level of expertise in meditation, at least this kind of meditation, is having someone guide you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's like a mindfulness alarm that's constantly going off or going off periodically over the course of 10 minutes or 20 minutes or however long you're sitting. | ||
| And because distraction is just continually the problem, you're either meditating or you're distracted. | ||
| You're either aware of what's happening at that moment or you're lost in thought. | ||
| And that's true throughout your life. | ||
| I mean, you're either... | ||
| Hearing what I'm saying right now or you're thinking about something else and you don't know it, right? | ||
| Or you're either reading the book you're intending to read or your mind is wandering and you're going to have to read that paragraph again. | ||
| So this failure to concentrate, this failure to be able to focus on what you're intending to focus on is just this universal problem of human consciousness. | ||
| And so meditation trains that and other benefits follow, but the... | ||
| Having a voice in your head reminding you that you're even attempting to be meditating is very powerful even if it's your own voice. | ||
| Listening to a meditation that I recorded Just my own voice, reminding me that I'm supposed to be meditating, it works like any other voice. | ||
| So it's a feedback system that you can't really provide for yourself. | ||
| Although, obviously, you can meditate without an app, and most people do. | ||
| I've spent very little time meditating with apps. | ||
| I just think they're very useful. | ||
| But you, you know, both of us started meditating. | ||
| You started meditating well before I did, but we both started pre-apps weren't around. | ||
| So you can read a book, read a good book, and learn how to meditate out of the book. | ||
| Just basically remember the basic instructions and do it. | ||
| But it really is useful to have an app, especially for some people, because one of the biggest problems in meditation is this persistent fear that you're not doing it right. | ||
| And so to have a voice you trust in your ear, just reminding you of the basic instructions, which are so simple but very easy to forget, it can be very useful. | ||
| I like the idea of it being like bicep curls for your mind. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, you see it in the brain scans. | ||
| And Sam will correct me where I run afoul of scientific accuracy here. | ||
| But this simple act of sitting... | ||
| Trying to focus on one thing at a time, and then when you get distracted, knowing you're distracted and returning to your breath is changing your brain when you do that. | ||
| You're boosting the muscles, obviously the muscles I'm using loosely. | ||
| You're boosting your focus muscle. | ||
| And in many cases, there was a study in 2010, I think it was done at Harvard, that took people who had never meditated before, and they scanned their brains. | ||
| And then they had them do eight weeks of, I think, a half-hour day of meditation. | ||
| At the end of the eight weeks, they scanned their brains again. | ||
| What they found was, in the area of the brain associated with self-awareness, the gray matter grew. | ||
| And in the area of the brain associated with stress, the gray matter shrank. | ||
| That, to me, is pretty compelling. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That is. | |
| Beautiful. | ||
| Gentlemen, we just did three hours. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Flew by. | ||
| Yes, it did. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| My pleasure. | ||
| It was a lot of fun. | ||
| It was fun to meet you. | ||
| As always. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All right, everybody. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Go do something else. |
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