The Daily Stoic - Sam Harris on Stoicism and Mindfulness Practice

Episode Date: February 18, 2023

Ryan speaks with Sam Harris about the overlap between eastern and western philosophy, how mindfulness practices like meditation help us become better Stoics, why he is so dedicated to providing his content for free, and more.Sam Harris is a philosopher, neuroscientist, author, and host of the Making Sense Podcast. His work touches on a range of topics, including rationality, religion, ethics, free will, neuroscience, meditation, psychedelics, philosophy of mind, politics, terrorism, and artificial intelligence. He has written for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Economist, London Times, The Boston Globe, and The Atlantic, and he has authored five five New York Times bestselling books, including The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason and Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion. Check out wakingup.com/dailystoic to try Sam’s hugely popular meditation app.✉️  Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoke Podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoke. Each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stokes, something to help you live up to those four Stoke virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have. Here on the weekend when you have a

little bit more space when things have slowed down be sure to take some time to think to go for a walk to sit with your journal and most importantly to prepare for what the week ahead may bring. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic podcast. Today's guest is someone I admire a great deal, not just because he got me to consider a different perspective when I was in my late teens, early 20s, not just because I think he's consistently been in interesting, iconoclastic thinker for nearly two decades now, but he has, I think, comported himself with honesty and integrity. And I think actually a great deal of courage.

He's not everyone's a fan. I'm a fan. I was really looking forward to this conversation and I was flattered at the end. We finished recording and he says, hey, I meant to say something that I didn't get to say. And I said, oh, okay, let me hit record again. And he just said some absolutely kind,

but totally unnecessary, nice things about daily still and my work. And that respect and affinity goes way more in the other direction. Today's guest is an American philosopher, a neuroscientist, an author, a podcast host. His writings and lectures cover a wide range of topics from Eastern philosophy to Western philosophy, meditation and current events and politics is the author of five New York Times bestsellers, the end of faith, letter to a Christian nation, the moral landscape, free will, lying, waking up, and Islam in the future of tolerance.

I don't agree with Sam Harris on everything. For starters, I'm more of a Western philosophy guy. He seems to be more of an Eastern philosophy guy. I'm sure there's political things we agree with. I know there's political things we disagree with, but I find ironically given that he wrote a book called The End of Faith, he argues from a place of good faith. And as I tell him in the interview,

I mostly respect that he hasn't descended into insanity or culture, warrior, nests or algorithm-horing or any number of the destructive, I think, places that some of the public intellectuals that I used to admire, or at least respected, even though I disagreed with them, have unfortunately descended into. Sam Harris is just a really smart dude and I've really enjoyed this interview. Sam has practiced meditation for more than 30 years. He's actually

the founder of this really cool app called Waking Up and he was nice enough to create a custom landing page for the folks over at Daily Stoic. You can try the app for free, no credit card required. And then this is something we get into. I think about this. Obviously, I monetize this podcast. I monetize things. We do at Daily Stoic. But how do you make what you're doing affordable and accessible?

If you have this awesome thing where if you can't afford to pay for the podcast or for the app or his other services, like, it'll just give them to you. And I think that's a move of integrity. It's also creative marketing. And as I was wrapping up the podcast, he was like, don't be afraid to tell people if they can't afford it, I'll give them to him for free.

And I know that it's not free for him to give it away to people, because he has to have a staff that helps him even just process all those requests. But it is a really great product. I know a ton of people that's where by it. So if you want to check out the Waking Up app, one of the best meditation apps out there, you can go to WakingUp.com slash daily stoic. He hooked us up with that landing page. You can check out the Making Sense podcast and you can follow him on Instagram and YouTube. He's no longer on Twitter, which I think is better for his soul.

And I think we'll see it reflected in better work from him. But you can follow Sam Harris on Instagram and YouTube at Sam Harris org. Enjoy my conversation with Sam Harris. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wonderree's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcasts. Well, let me ask you, because I've always been fascinated with the overlap between Eastern

and Western philosophy. And I tend to find that they sort of circle around the same truths. And when one of them finds something that works, it seems that the other within a few centuries sort of comes up with the same idea or a similar insight in their sort of own way or own metaphors. But meditation is so interesting

because there doesn't really seem to be a strong western counterpart. I guess maybe prayer is one, but why do you think that is? It is such a magical thing that works for so many people, but there's not really a super long western independent tradition of something similar. Yeah, there is considerable overlap between some of the eastern traditions, especially Buddhism, and some pieces of what I would consider the wisest pieces of western philosophy. But I think a major difference is the methodology of meditation and just the systematic approach to studying the mind from the first person side, from the contemplative side, that really got built out in the East in a way that it didn't in the West. I think largely because some of the religious assumptions were different.

And I mean, you can just do, like in the Buddhist canon, in particular, you can get whole rafts of just meditation guidance, which are almost perfectly designed for export into a secular context, because it really is purely empirical and phenomenological. And apart from some metaphysical framing and some iconography that sneaks in there, I mean, really, there are just whole passages that you could lift out. And it would be a very modern analysis

of the nature of consciousness or the nature of the mechanics of psychological suffering. So whereas in the West, especially in the, you know, once, I'm not speaking so much about Greek and Roman philosophy here, but once Christianity and Islam really got rolling, you have this Abrahamic dualistic propitiatory, prayer-based relationship to the divine, which basically swallows everything. And so there's a difference. But yeah, I would say that within the Greek and Roman tradition, obviously, you know,

stoicism is your wheelhouse, and there's really significant overlap between stoicism and Buddhism. But prior to that, I would say that Greek skepticism has a lot of wisdom to share on just kind of bracketing or moment-to-moment experience with a non-conceptual, non-clinging, non-judgmental attitude, you know, just knowledge is provisional, and yet your being is, you know, the unity of your existence

and your awareness of the moment can't really be doubted, and you just to rest there, you know, contemplatively. Yeah, there's a line, is it Floubert or Proust, where he says, you know, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, when the gods had ceased to be and the Christ had not yet come, man stood alone in the universe. Now, his timelines not strictly true, that's not really how it all lines up exactly, but it does strike me, there is a moment there, when the Greeks lead into the Romans, where the old system is falling apart, but the monotheistic Christian

God has not fully come to dominance, that there was an opportunity in Western philosophy to chance upon some of the same ideas in Eastern philosophy that we're talking about the sort of secular sort of singular the idea of stillness and emptiness and clarity It's like the the Stoics and some of the other philosophers. They're dancing around it But they just they don't seem to ever settle on the idea that you can you can sit there and clear your mind or focus very intently on a singular idea. And that that in and of itself is kind of a spiritual and philosophical pursuit. There's some irony in that Mark's really his book is called Meditations, but he's not doing any

meditating in the sense that we understand it now. Yeah, I think it all turns on the nature of the self or the eluciriness of the self and just what it is, what's there to be discovered if you pay sufficient attention to what it's like to be you moment to moment. And I mean, the Stoics certainly understand that on some level, your mind is all you have and you're living with your reactivity and the difference between happiness and suffering is almost entirely a matter of understanding that process and relinquishing your unnecessary suffering,

which really is just self-imposed the way you're reacting to experience and the way you're framing it conceptually, the way you're attributing to the world so much power to move you around emotionally. And so when you understand something of the mechanics there, as the Stoics do, then you have a degree of freedom that you otherwise wouldn't and you can see this suffer in all kinds of ordinary and unnecessary ways. But the real, the center of the jewel of Eastern philosophy and, again, Buddhism, and I would say the tradition of Advaita Vedanta

in the Indian tradition in particular, is that there's this non-dual insight into the eluciriness of the self, that the sense of subject-object separation is ultimately spurious, and that on the other side of that, there really is a freedom that can be discovered in the midst of any experience. It's really compatible with any waking moment, and it doesn't actually need anything about the contents of consciousness to change, because it really is just the nature of consciousness itself. And that's what's potentially misleading about so many spiritual teachings and spiritual paths. So many of them seem predicated on the belief that you really need to make wholesale changes in the contents of consciousness to make progress. What it's like to be you

right now, the ordinary sense of neurotic confinement to an ordinary mind that wants things and fears things and regrets the past and worries about the future. There's something about that that is intrinsically a form of bondage. The evidence of your unenlightenment really is available to you right now and you just need only recognizing it. And then the spiritual path that comes a kind of visual where you're waiting, you know, whatever your practice is, you're waiting for the,

the auspicious changes to occur in your experience. And obviously psychedelics is another approach to this where you, you know, you haven't had certain insights or experiences and then you take acid or you take MDMA or psilocybin and you seem to break through into a new layer of mind and you recognize that there's a landscape of mind that can be traversed. But then many people who get into that begin to believe that traversing it really is just a matter of linking peak experiences together.

You just have to keep getting high in order to make progress and have more insights. And I'm not saying all of that effort is wasted. I've drawn a lot of benefit from psychedelics and from various peak experiences I've had in meditation. But any peak experience you have, you eventually cease to have. I mean, it's just the very nature of any experience to arise and pass away. So it's all impermanent. And so at a certain point, it becomes a memory. Especially if it is a peak experience. Yeah. Yeah. And so it can't be a matter of just having more peak experiences, ultimately, and if your deepest wisdom was contained

in that peak experience, you had last month at Joshua Tree or at Burning Man, well then by definition, it's just a memory, right? And so in the present moment, all you have is your thoughts about it. And ultimately, that's not good enough. I mean, that's just not, that's, that's a bandaid applied to the present moments experience. What you, what we all need is an ability to recognize the, the intrinsic

freedom of awareness in this moment, regardless of what is happening. We have to, basically, in my view, your highest spiritual insight, your highest contemplative wisdom is whatever you can actually access now in this moment. And if you can't find it now, in the middle of the bad reaction you just had to the thing your spouse

said or the email that you just received that wound you up, it's always a matter of, okay, what is available to you now when you remember that you're not this schmuck who's tied and not so over an email. You're not the guy who can't take criticism. You're not, you're not, who you were a moment ago when you were captivated by that thought that was making you so unhappy. Now you, the spell is broken and you can, you can actually pay attention to something. What is available to your attention? What can you be mindful of in this moment?

And in the beginning, many people feel that all there is to be mindful of is the evidence of their unenlightenment, their mindful of anxiety, their mindful of how restless they are, their mindful of how distracted they are. But ultimately, once the practice really gets going, what you can be mindful of is the fact that there is no subject object divide in awareness in each moment. And that centralist experience really is freedom.

And it's a freedom that's not predicated on anything about experience changing. So, for instance, if you become mindful of that in the midst of a feeling of anger, say, or anxiety, your freedom arrives even before the physiology of anger and anxiety have dissipated. Because in that moment, what was anger a moment ago, or anxiety a moment ago, has no meaning psychologically or philosophically or in any other way. So it has no behavioral implications. It really is just like a feeling of heat on your face, or a feeling of fluttering in your chest.

It's like it has no more meaning than a pain in your knee or indigestion, really. It's just this peripheral sensory phenomenon. And there's no center to the experience of being aware of that. And there's no you in the middle of it. And so anyway, we can talk about what I mean by the eluciriness of the self if you want to.

But my basic point is that it really comes down to what is available to attention now. The rest is just something you're thinking about. Well, actually, Epictetus talks about this. He says, you know, someone's working out, they're, you know, lifting weights. You don't say show me your muscles. You say show me what you can lift, right? And so, you know, as far as your insights go or your breakthroughs go or your discoveries go or the philosophy you studied goes, that's great. But what matters, and I would agree with what you're saying, what matters is what you can do in the present moment. what matters is what you can do in moments big and small in your actual life. You're not enlightened if you can't be happy doing the dishes, you're

not wise. If you can't see through the noise that's happening around you, if you can't be a good and decent ordinary person in ordinary circumstances. Yeah, yeah, I would add though that people shouldn't expect that these ordinary contractions into negative states of mind won't keep occurring. Sure. It's just that the crucial difference between freedom and bondage is how quickly you can wake up from them and what waking, and whether you can really wake up from them. So it's like it's the half life of these emotions. So I constantly get angry or anxious or impatient. Or I mean, just know there's there's no

Negative emotion that is fundamentally foreign to me now, but The truth is none of these stay but they all they they've all begun to function like mindfulness alarms for me right so I'll get it's a very punctate experience. It becomes like a salience signal where something makes you angry and you orient to it in the world. I mean, maybe these emotions contain information, right? I mean, there's very often something has just happened that has jumped out of the background of ambient noise

and it's either worth paying attention to or not, it either requires a response or not. But anger and anxiety and these other negative emotions are almost never the right state to be in, to marshal that response, right? You want a cooler head to actually act in the world. And the moment you get out of your thoughts about why you should be angry or why you should be anxious and just feel the energy of the emotion and let it dissipate, the half-life of

these states is very, very short. I mean, you just can't stay angry for more than, you know, maybe ten seconds at a time, apart from then getting lost in thought again and dredging the anger up again. And so it really isn't in how quickly you recover and let it dissipate. And that's and not have your subsequent thoughts and actions contaminated by that initial reaction.

That's, I mean, that's the, that's the major gain, I think, to hope for. I mean, because people have this expectation that if they're meditating correctly, or they're really wise or spiritual, or they have their values in the right place, they'll never feel certain emotions again. And that's, I mean, maybe in the limit that's possible for, you know, a Buddha, but I don't think I've met people who've achieved that. And what I have met and what I have met in myself is a, is progress in terms of the, the half life and just how quickly you wake up from your initial contraction. Yeah.

And in Meditations, Marks really says, you know, when you're jarred unavoidably by circumstances, what you have to try to do is gather yourself and he says, come back to the rhythm. And I think about it kind of like in music, if you're ever like playing with a group of musicians, the beat is sort of there, the groove of the thing that you're jamming on is there.

And you can mess up, you can come off the beat, you can make a mistake, you can get distracted, but the song is going on, right? The other people are continuing to play. And you can plug right back into it, you can stop, count to four, and get back into it. And so, yeah, whether you wanna call it a half life or a rhythm or waking up,

but there's a bunch of ways to express this idea that you come off, you get disoriented, but then you find your bearings and you get back to it. And the quicker you do that, that's the mark of wisdom, not the impossible standard of never doing it in the first place. Yeah, yeah, definitely.

Yeah, I mean, we tend to keep scoring ways that are not helpful. I mean, the evidence of our unenlightenment is always in the past, right? It's always the thing that happened a moment ago. It's always the thing that happened yesterday. It's actually not findable in the present if you really pay attention. And so it's like we're always free to just begin again and not rehearse to ourselves the litany of psychological crimes we have perpetrated in the past.

Because it really is, it's a very simple choice. You can actually, you can be lost in thought and thinking about the past and telling yourself a story about who you were a moment ago or yesterday, or you can actually make contact with your life in the present, unencumbered by this self-talk. And I'm not saying you need to block thoughts, because thoughts are going to continually arise, but you need to recognize them as further appearances in consciousness.

The crucial difference is between being identified with thought, not recognizing these appearances. I mean, you is usually auditory or, or visual or some combination of the two where you're, it's very, it's very strange that we, that most of us feel, most of the time, feel identical to our thoughts. We feel identical to a voice in our heads. We feel identical to a stream of images. And yet these are just appearances that can be witnessed from a prior condition of just being aware of them. I mean there are rising in this

condition that we call consciousness or awareness and yet unexpected and unrecognized they feel like us. You know so you and I are talking right now and people listening to us are watching us are thinking while they're trying to, they're struggling to follow the train of this conversation, what they have a voice in their head, most of them, certainly, 99% of them, have a voice in their head that is competing for their attention.

So they'll be thinking, well, what's he talking about? You know, we're like, wait a minute, that's not what, I've read about Buddhism, that's not what, and who are he talking about? You know, like, wait a minute, that's not what I've read about Buddhism. That's not what, and who are they talking to and who's talking? And this is an automaticity that is claiming their attention moment to moment, but more important, it actually feels like I, it feels like me, it feels like it defines a center, a subject, in the midst of experience, in addition to experience. It seems like there's a thinker, in addition to the flow of thought. And when you really look, you find that there isn't, and you discover that the self, the sense of I, in the middle of experience, is what it feels like to be lost and thought without knowing it.

And so that really, the spell that continually has to be broken by meditation is this continuous habit of being distracted by and identified with thought. Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just going to end up on Page Six or Du Moir or in court. I'm Matt Bellesai. And I'm Sydney Battle, and we're the host of Wonder E's new podcast, Dis and Tell, where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud from the build up, why it happened, and the repercussions.

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Follow Dissentel wherever you get your podcast. You can listen ad free on Amazon Music or The Wondering App. I want to go back to psychedelics for a second because it connects to something you're talking about this sort of everyday and it's like what you do in this present moment. There's something that's bothered me about, and I'm not a psychedelics person, but I don't have strong opinion about it, I guess, but there's something that's bothered me about calling that the work, right? Calling doing psychedelics the work. When the reality is the work is what we're talking about here.

The work is the thing happens. You get cut off in traffic. You're thinking about what other people are thinking about you. You know, you're tempted between right and wrong. Like, the work, that's the work, right? Having the peak insight in an experience or reading about it in a philosophy book or listening to a podcast, I mean, I guess that's not not work, but it's not the work, right? Like the work is the choices and actions you take

in your life. And I guess as someone who cares about the meaning of words, that seems like a wrong way to think about it. When you say you're not a psychedelic person, have you ever taken any of these compounds or not? No, no. I guess I've found, too, maybe this is more biased for me, but I've yet to hear of an experience from a person doing psychedelics that I have not found in literally every philosophy text. You know what I mean?

I haven't been that blown away by the insights. I'm willing to concede there's a difference between being told something and feeling it. So I respect the people coming away with the wowness of what they got. But some of the some of the insights I hear just seem so pedestrian or basic to me that I haven't been compelled to plunge into that into that world. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, well, you know, the greatest utility for me was in the beginning, and this is admittedly something that not everyone needs, but I think I needed it.

It's hard to know what would have happened without psychedelics in my case. But when I was 18, I took MDMA for the first time. The breakthrough for me there was that it revealed to me in a very visceral way that my patterns of thinking and the kind of quality of my attention had been radically limiting my experience in life. And it never occurred to me that it was possible to have a fundamentally different experience emotionally and socially and ethically. I hadn't, I'm sure I had made some contact with philosophy at that point, at least in high school,

but it hadn't really landed with me. I mean, I didn't see myself on any kind of path. I didn't, it's very hard for me to even recall who I was then, but I was not a budding mystic or someone who even was interested in the nature of his own mind. I was an intellectual kid, but I was just very anchored to conceptualizing everything. And I have no idea what I would have thought if you had suggested that I might want to try to meditate, to be happier, or to discover something about the nature

of my mind. And I think if I had tried to meditate, I probably would have just bounced off the whole project because I wouldn't have had a natural aptitude for it. I wouldn't have suddenly gotten very concentrated and started to feel something interesting happening. So I would have looked inside and felt that there was nothing much to see. And then I just would have gone on thinking that meditation doesn't work and that all of these religious people are, you know, every account of spiritual experience or mystical experience in the literature is just a symptom of

temporal lobe epilepsy or conscious fraud or say it's just some species of delusion. And obviously there are a lot of people who go through life that way. And for these people, the problem is if you give them, if they're even available to be given a practice like meditation or a book to read that is just chock full of insights or the, you and I would think it's chock full of insights or you send them to a yoga class or whatever it is, it's quite possible that nothing will happen, right? They will really will just bounce off. Now that the unique power of psychedelics

and MDMA technically is not a psychedelic, but close enough, the unique power of certain of these drugs is that for almost everyone, something is guaranteed to happen, right? It's like it's a very rare person who can take a sizable dose of any of these drugs and have nothing happen, although I guess that occasionally occurs. What happens is a bit of a spin of the roulette wheel depending on what compound you're talking

about. Certainly with a proper psychedelic like LSD or psilocybin, you know, you could go to heaven or you could go to hell or you could go somewhere in between, but you're going to go somewhere, right? You're going to have an on-ordinary experience. And that'll prove to you beyond any possibility of doubt that it is possible to have a very different experience if you're being in the world. And for some people don't need that, some people don't, because that's obvious, and they're working it out through meditation and philosophy

and other modes, and they're motivated by that possibility. They understand that the mind is a landscape, they can be explored. But for people who don't, psychedelics can really prove something that it would be hard to prove any other way. And so that was the major utility for me.

It just showed me that there was much more to my mind and to the possibilities of living a fulfilling life than I had realized. Yeah, no, it makes sense to me, and I'm perfectly willing to say to each their own. It just strikes me that the work, you know, what we label what I think is indicative. To me, the work is not just the meditation and I don't know, the therapy and the reading and all of that, but the work is also applying the insights on a day-to-day basis in the real situations of life, not the peak experience. The peak of experiences are, by definition, not ordinary or consistent.

Yeah, and it's important to understand that if there really is a way of being radically free in this life, you know, if there is some ultimate goal here that can be actualized, it has to be compatible with ordinary waking consciousness. I mean, you, it has to be the kind of thing you can notice about yourself and about the better than nature of your mind while you're walking down the street or driving a car or having a conversation or looking at your email. It can't be elsewhere. Right. It's not to say that there aren't very interesting experiences to be had elsewhere when you're

400 micrograms into an LSD experience or you've been meditating for three months in silence and you're as concentrated as you've ever been. Those are wonderful experiences to have, but whatever can burn off by virtue of using your attention in a different way, that thing can't be the ultimate thing that is your refuge. And so, yeah, I think I share with you this sense that it really is in our moment to moment living in our lives that our practice is real and our wisdom is real or it isn't. And I do like that about meditation,

probably unique among all the philosophical practices outside of journaling, which I would probably argue is the sort of Western equivalent of meditation. But it's a thing that you do, right? It's a, it's something you do. It is a practice, right? It's not a philosophy isn't supposed to be this thing that you read one time and you get.

It's supposed to be, to go back to music, it scales that you run through, or it's a thing that you do. It's a set of stretches, it's exercising. That to me is what the great philosophical traditions give us. It's a thing to do. Yeah, although ultimately I would say it's a thing you cease to do, right?

So in the beginning, meditation seems like a practice that you're adding to your life. It seems like stretching or it seems like exercise where you weren't doing it and now you're doing it and you're hoping to get some benefit from it. And you might even be getting benefit from it. You can feel the benefits. But ultimately, the kind of meditation

that I teach over waking up and that I'm interested in, I mean, there's other types of meditation, but mindfulness-based meditation, and ultimately your non-dual mindfulness, is a matter of ceasing to be distracted by thought. It's not a matter of ceasing to think, it's ceasing to be identified with thought and lost in the kind of the dreamscape of thought.

So you're actually doing less rather than more. You're not strategically paying attention to something, although in the beginning you might be like, the first exercise you might do is to pay attention to your breath. And then once you have some facility for coming back from being lost and thought and returning to the breath, and you know the difference between being lost and thought

and actually paying attention to something, then you open it up to everything you're experiencing, sounds, sensations, and thoughts, and emotions. But ultimately, the change in you is in, it's almost like a figure-ground reversal where you're like the thing that was seemed to be an artifice in the beginning is actually the ground where you always already are and you're sort of waking up and returning to what is already the case. And so it's not additive.

Whereas there are practices that can seem just by their very nature additive. Like, you know, if you're doing a mantra-based practice, you know, you're rehearsing a Sanskrit phrase in your head and you're adding that and then you could wonder, well, why am I adding that to my experience? And what does it mean? And you know, are there is just something magical about Sanskrit? Why couldn't this be in some other language? And so there's a basis for doubt there. Ultimately, with mindfulness, you're not doing anything other than noticing what is happening all by itself. Everything is happening all by itself.

May everything, everything is arising all by itself, thoughts, sensations. You know, it's just, there's no, there's nothing that you, the witness, are bringing into being. And it's in that recognition that you see that there's, that the problem that you thought you needed to solve a moment ago isn't even there, right? The problem of your anxiety, the problem of your disappointment, the problem of your, you know, it's always this thought-based delusion that something that's not actually present

here is, it needs to be unraveled. I'm not saying that there aren't challenging experiences. I mean, there's obviously the things like physical pain and that doesn't magically go away once you know, how to meditate, but so much of our suffering in response to something like physical pain is our psychological contraction around it and our anxiety about it and our fear that it won't go away

and our fear of what it means and doing need to get an MRI. And it says, is this cancer? And like all of that, again, you can figure all that out. I mean, I'm not saying you never need to go to a doctor and never need to get an MRI and you're never gonna get cancer. But each stage along the way,

there's always a question of what is worth paying attention to now. And I mean, this is where the Stoics have this very much in hand. I mean, this whole issue of what is the function of worry, right? I mean, either you can do something about this problem right now or you can't. If you can do something about the problem, we'll then do that thing. And if you can't, worry doesn't do something about the problem, we'll then do that thing. And if you can't, worry doesn't add anything to your capacity to do anything. It just makes you miserable twice over.

And so, yeah, once you recognize that, it becomes easier to just relax back into the mirror awareness of what is actually happening right now. awareness of what is actually happening right now. Yeah, for the Stoics, it's not things that upset us. It's our opinion about things. And the ability to sort of catch when you're having an opinion is a real superpower. And to me, that is what meditation is. The ability to realize when your mindfulness is the ability to realize when your or mindfulness is the ability to realize when you're having thoughts and opinions and engaging in extrapolation and speculation and judgment as opposed to just

being in whatever that thing is, which as you said, it could be pain. You could be in pain, but what we add on top of that, I think the Stoic say is, and I'm going to die from it, and I am a victim, you know, that on and on and on, we're adding all this language around it instead of simply dealing with the first impression or the reality of it. Yeah, yeah. So I'm curious about the app because it's something I think about too. I mean, it's great.

There's so many people that rave about it. It's weird to take this timeless ancient thing and make it a thing that people can use and purchase. I think about that. It's not that it's, I feel ethically challenged about it, but I do try to think about what my, I think of myself as this steward of this thing that's been beneficial to me and I put time and energy and work in it and that's why I feel comfortable, you know, selling it as a thing. But I really

liked your idea that you charge for it and then you give it away for free to anyone who basically can afford to pay for it. I've always found that really impressive about you. Yeah, that's been my approach with all my digital media. So my podcast is also a subscription podcast. I don't run ads on it. I just think it's really two priorities from me here. One is just from the media business side. I feel that we have suffered a raise to the bottom in how we value digital media. The ad-based business model of the internet, I think, really screwed us. And you know, never more so than on social media with things like Facebook. But really across the board, it has given everyone the sense that digital content should be

free. You know, it's like you shouldn't have to pay for anything that's digital because the expectation is that all should be ad supported. And you know, as I'm sure you've talked about elsewhere, this has created a really perverse set of incentives in our economy, where people are being manipulated, their attention is being gained in ways that are beneficial to companies, but not beneficial to the person. And it becomes, you know, we have built these various outrage machines that spread divisive

and largely false content. And, you know, and it's given an immense agency to liars and lunatics and has made it very hard to make sense at scale. And we're, you know, various people are working to unravel that in various ways. And that's something I've talked about a fair amount on my podcast. But so I've always felt that the better model is a subscription model that on some level you get what you pay for.

And, you know, it's not an accident that Facebook and Twitter and these other platforms have fairly shattered society and yet a service like Netflix can just show you good movies and good television and you pay for it and it's fine. So I would like a lot more of Netflix and a lot less of the Facebook, Twitter experience in general. But in addition, I feel like I mean, given the nature of the content, given that these practices and this kind of thinking is so life-changing for people. I have always felt an ethical responsibility to make it available to anyone who needs it, so that money is never the reason why someone

can't get access to it. So, really, I'm doing something that, from a business point of you, seems a little paradoxical. I mean, waking up is more expensive than other meditation apps. And I think it's probably, I think the price will probably go up in the future because I think we, again, the whole category has been unnaturally anchored to free in the end. And I do want to build a very successful business that can do lots of cool things out in the world. And I want people to be paid well. And I've got, you know, I've got people, you know, health insurance and dental insurance.

And it's a company that's growing and all that. But I never want money to be the reason why someone can't get access to it. So, and people just have to send us an email and they get free access. And there were days during COVID where a thousand people a day would send that email. And we would, I've got a major customer service team, 95% of their effort is just dealing with free accounts. So it's a wonderful thing to be able to do. It's a strange thing, because I can't quite recommend this business model

to other people. Like I do think that, for instance, if Netflix had my policy, I think Netflix would be destroyed. I think if Netflix had listened, we never want anyone, I would never want money to be the reason why you can't watch our great shows and movies.

So just send us an email if you want it for free. I think probably 100 million people would send that email because they would rather have Netflix for free. And there would be no Netflix. So it's a very, I feel, frankly, I'm in an uncomfortable situation because I don't know what to recommend to other people. I really feel like this is a, it's a wonderfully ethical way to have a digital business, and I feel great about it, but I have, I just feel very lucky that

it's working for us, because it's very easy to envision a world where it wouldn't work, and I think it wouldn't work for certain other businesses. What depends on what you're trying to do, right, and I think this is a thing that a lot of entrepreneurs and business people and artists sort of fail to sit down and do. If you have some sense of what you're trying to accomplish and your aim is not to take over the world or build a billion dollar behemoth or something, you're able to make these sort of ethical decisions because you haven't tied yourself to some sort of rocket ship or you haven't taken lots of money from other people who you know aren't willing to trade profits for impact and so I think I like this sort of smaller business model of

I'm trying to make something cool my time is worth money so I'm not giving it away to free for free for people who can easily afford to pay. And I'm willing to have the people who can pay, subsidize some of the people who can't pay. But you know, I'm not trying to build the next Facebook or Twitter because those are wicked economics and incentives to tie oneself to. And once you do, it's very hard to scale it back. Yeah, no, it's the Wild West out there as you know in digital media and everyone's just

trying to figure it out, but I'm very happy to be out of the ad world and I'm just very happy to have a relationship with my audience that allows for this kind of trust. I do feel like the people who pay for my podcast and for waking up in general are happy to know that people who can't pay are getting subsidized by their subscriptions. I mean, it's just it's not a, I don't think people feel foolish to pay when it's possible not to pay. I think people understand the spirit of this. And, yeah, it just, it just, it just feels very good. And, you know, obviously, I recognize that it's only digital media that really allows for this. You know, you couldn't do this with physical books or something that didn't have a, essentially,

a zero marginal cost per item. But yeah, so it's fun. It's a fun side of it. I mean, I would have loved, when I wrote my first book about sort of media and incentives in media, like in 2000, I was writing in, I wrote my first book about sort of media and incentives in media like in 2000. I was writing in 2011 and it came out in 2012. I thought sort of subscriptions would be this kind of magical change in incentives that would make everything better. I think it's improved things in a lot of ways. I think it's, you know, on the whole better than

the sort of clickbait sort of page view model. But one of the things I wanted to ask you about is I think it's a good example of this is, and I like Barry Weiss, a lot, I know her. You're sort of the last man standing of the intellectual dark web that did not either turn into a complete grifter or utterly lose their mind. And I think a lot of that is about audience capture and a different kind of incentive. I mean, some of it's algorithmic, but it does seem that something went sideways there

or maybe the critics were right all along and they saw through a group of these people, but that's been a strange journey to watch over the last couple of years. Sad one, really. Yeah, yeah. No, it has been, I think audience capture is part of it. I mean, I have it. Now we're talking about the podcast side of my life, not waking up because waking up is blissfully unencumbered by all of these political controversies.

And it's really, it's just as a, from the side of producing this content, it's really been interesting to row in two boats in this way. Because in the waking up boat, superficially, my podcast and the app waking up should be very similar experiences. I'm just pushing out MP3 files to the universe, right? And it's just me producing audio, me having conversations, me following my interests as they arise. But because over waking up, I'm focused on,

you know, the most important things I've ever learned that are really focused on how to live an exam and fulfilling life, what I get back is just pure positivity. And it's just, you know, and it was really eye-opening for me because I can't, I started the podcast first and the podcast is where I touch all these controversial culture war issues and I spent a lot of time on, you know, thinking about interesting things that are not political too, but I certainly don't shy away from politics.

And the feedback there has been always a mix of, you know, love and hate. And so I just, I just, I lost sight of the fact that it was actually possible to have a career and having a mode of engaging with the world where what you get back is virtually 100% positive. Right? And so it was pretty eye-opening for me to start waking up and just see, well, this is other channel here where like there's no mismatch between what I'm intending to put out and what people are receiving, people aren't lying about what I said or, you know, they're not pretending to to misunderstand me. It's just it's just a love fest. And then over here in my in my podcast life, it is just a war, you know, at least half the time. So that difference has been interesting, but

yeah, as far as what's happened to the so-called IDW bunch, audience captures a real thing, and I've avoided it because, again, it was the one thing that I felt was possibly corrupting of my podcast because I don't have sponsors, so there's no concern about being dropped by them. So I bypassed that concern, but it would be possible, even with a subscription business, to detect the signal in the noise of feedback and recognize, okay, this is what my audience wants from me and they're gonna pay me more if I keep delivering this kind of problem.

But very early on because of my, because I'm not actually partisan politically, I'm not actually tribal, I really do just call balls and strikes as I see them, and I try to be intellectually honest across the board, and I try to be intellectually honest, even when someone who I really feel is worthy of criticism is being criticized unfairly. I mean, it takes somebody like Trump.

I mean, there's no, I've been as critical of Trump as I think anyone on Earth at this point. But when I see one of his detractors say something that's actually not true, landing a false blow on him, I resist that. I'm not happy to pile on the wrong form of criticism. And so, so I wind up, given that that's my algorithm, essentially being honest in a non-tribal, non-partisan way.

I managed to piss off people on all sides of the political spectrum, and there's almost no one in my audience who hasn't had the experience of being disappointed by me based on me taking a position that didn't line up with the last five things they thought they agreed with me on. And so I have an audience that I really have to earn their respect every single time.

You know, I'm really on some level, I'm only as good as my last sentence with my audience. It's not a tribal echo chamber because I just haven't played, again, I haven't, I've touched such a diversity of topics and I haven't become partisan. And so it's a, so yeah, I mean, that's the one thing I did guard against

this feeling of audience captured where you're pandering to an audience because that has become a flywheel for you. But I do see people, especially when their, I mean, subscription is a little different from ad revenue in that you're not narrowly hostage to the normal viral dynamics. Like you're not concerned so much about audience size and clicks

and virality in the same way. You're concerned about, you're just from business sense. In business sense, you're concerned about your subscribers. So I do notice the worst audience capture with people who are monetized by ads. But I guess it's possible in every context. And it's really, I think it's the one thing that really has to be avoided.

Yeah, I mean, Paul Graham's thing about keeping your identity small that strikes me as a big contributing factor sort of people starting to identify with one group or identifying as being even a contrarian, it seems to be sort of an intellectual death sentence. I wonder how much of that group was thrown together

by sort of odd survivorship by a circumstances, like they were sort of already disposed to be this that or the other, and then I wonder how much of it is just the corruption of fame and attention, which is not good for the soul and social media, being extremely online as they call it, also being bad for the soul. Well, Twitter was definitely part of it. As you may or may not know, I deleted my Twitter account a month ago. And I said, I had been on, I've been very active on it

for 12 years or so. And on one level it was a total failure of stoicism on my part in that I got so entangled with it. But it was the only social media platform that I ever used. I mean, I've got a presence on the others just, you know, from a marketing point of view. But I never look at Facebook or Instagram.

It was so Twitter was the only one I really used. And I really did want to use it to communicate. And I was following a lot of smart people. And I was, you know, enjoying what, I was enjoying the articles they were forward in. And so it was valuable to me at the time, but it started. I got the sense that I was just seeing, it became this fun house mirror in which I was seeing the worst of humanity. And I was, I feel like I was seeing a distorted picture of even people who were acting badly and were disposed to act badly toward me.

But it's like, I just, it couldn't be that many psychopaths in the world, right? And I was having an experience on Twitter where I felt like I was meeting thousands of psychopaths every day. It's like, I built a machine that allowed psychopaths to just show up in my living room. So at a certain point, I mean, you know, there's two choices there. One, I could be stoical about it. I could just say, all right, you know, I could follow Marcus Relius and say, okay, you're gonna be when I get out of bed today, I know I'm gonna meet lots of, you know, psychopathic assholes and and I can just price that in and and have a thick skin and not react.

But I did that for significant stretches of time, I would do that. But I kept coming back. I mean, it kept becoming a focus of my attention to be just engaging or not engaging or noticing or not noticing. And at a certain point, I just felt like the actually the the better part of wisdom here is just to just to really rip this bandaid off and not do this anymore. So I know people I know there's some people have very different experiences on Twitter. They're just, you know, they're sending, they're sharing happy cat videos and just getting love in response. But, you know, for me, deleting my account has just been an enormously positive change

in my life. I mean, it's like I just got out of a bad relationship. And it's, it's, it's, uh, now I look back, fairly aghast, that I spent that amount of time even knowing what was happening on Twitter. I mean, it's just, I have a very different sense of my, of just where I exist in the world now. It's just, it's a very, it was, you know, it's very hard to describe, but I, like, when you're very active on Twitter and you are noticing what is happening to your

reputation there or to your relationships there, it seems real in a way in which it really isn't quite real. Certainly, in my world, it's not real. I mean, I would have experiences on Twitter where, you know, for half of Twitter, you know, I had just destroyed my career, right? Just like, it's just a five alarm fire. And yet, actually in my life, in every sense that matters, including, you know, my actual, you know, career and my actual business, nothing had happened, you know?

Right. So it's like, it really is just a it's a hallucination and yet it's it's a it's a hallucination that's always available to draw you in. Yeah it's a. It's a weird thing it's like are you using the service or is the service using you and you know if the essence of the servicern philosophy and the essence, I think of the Western philosophy is to get free, to free yourself from these things, realizing when something has an inordinate or an unhealthy amount of power over you and to be able to make that break, I think that's a really good muscle to flex even if it's over something, you know, more benign than social media.

Yeah, I mean, it's deciding just to no longer do something that is, you know, in your coolest moment, you can recognize, all right, this is a net negative for my life. Why do I keep doing this thing? And just to decisively actually break up with that thing, that's an all too rare experience. And it's very positive when it happens. Yeah, well, Marcus really says, quote, it's a good one.

He already opens meditations with, here's what I'm an experience today, this, this, and this, and this. But I guess the question is, to intersect with another stout teaching is, is doing that going into that place, meeting those people, is it in your control or not? So if you know, you're the emperor, the reality is you're going to have to do a bunch of these things that's not

fully in your control. And so you should brace yourself. But if there's always traffic on this side of town, but over here, there's a clearer road. You'd be a fool to drive through the traffic jam if it's not necessary. And so I guess it's a tension of like, when does one simply endure and put up with something and when does one have some agency or ability to say, hey, I'm not gonna subject myself to that? Yeah, no, it's very simplifying.

It's a,. It's a connection to mindfulness here because mindfulness for me is just one tool. It's not the only thing you need to live a truly fulfilling life. And another tool which the Stoics really have in hand is what is now generally referred to as reframing in psychological science and cognitive science, where you just think differently about the situation. So to take one example, let's say you're afraid of public speaking, right? Every time you get out on stage, you've got this sunburst of anxiety that is difficult to deal with. And so, there are different ways to approach this. With mindfulness, you could just be mindful

of anxiety, right, and just become, just achieve equanimity with the feeling of anxiety that keeps coming down every time you even think about the fact that you have to give a public talk, say. But reframing is a higher level approach to solving the problem, which is actually just thinking about it differently. And there are various levels at which you could do that. But one level is just to, well, the ultimate level is to have enough experience doing the thing, in this case, public speaking, where you, and have enough positive experience with it, where you begin to feel differently about it. Like you just now associate different things with it.

And many people have, and you have a different feeling of your own competence, and many people grow in that direction. Reframing would be something in the middle of just like noticing anxiety, but then noticing that actually the feeling of anxiety itself is very similar to the feeling of excitement. It's really just the cognitive story around that sensory thrill or that sympathetic, adrenalized thrill that is making the difference between positive and negative. You pay, you would pay money to be excited in this way and yet you're dreading feeling

anxious in this way. And yet it's really just the level of your, of the conceptual frame that they're differentiated. And to notice that is allows you to, to, to think differently about it. And that's, that's,'s that's that higher level approach, whether it's the level of reframing or at the ultimate level of actually just having different associations with this experience. That is someone that's someone analogous

to just taking this other road. You know, it's like, okay, you can be mindful of all the traffic, you can be mindful of anxiety, or you can just figure out there's another way to there's another part of the city where you could be driving. And, and you can just figure out, there's another way, there's another part of the city, where you could be driving, and why not do that? And so I think it's a lot of wisdom in finding

those higher level, more comprehensive changes to make. And that's not incompatible with mindfulness, but it's a different mode. No, I think that's beautifully said and probably a good place to wrap up. I will say I have found the way that you have navigated those choppy waters and not being dragged in a certain direction.

I would say largely not being dragged down into what seems like a very dark and effed up place for a lot of these dudes. I found it to be very impressive and it's made me like your work even more, so good on you. Well, that's great to talk to you. Nice to meet you virtually. I hope we do it one day in person. Yeah, let's do it. Yeah, and I want to congratulate you on being one of a handful of people who have brought stoicism back into such prominence. I mean, it was really your work and Bill Irvings, and I mean, it's really just the two of you. I mean, I'm sure other people have been putting their shoulders to the wheel, but you know,

you have been the most prominent person to my eye. And it's really fantastic to see ancient wisdom suddenly being of interest to a new generation of people. And it's really the best of philosophy because for hundreds of years, as you probably know, philosophy got fairly divorced from the question of just had to live a good life. And there was no implication, to hear that someone was a philosopher, for absolutely no implication that that person would be wise or happy or well integrated or

compassionate or anything, right? It's just, I mean basically all you knew is that that person was smart or thought they were smart to be a philosopher. And so to see you bringing back this focus on the utility of philosophy for helping people live good lives. I mean, that's really, it's been a fantastic contribution. And I know a lot of people have benefited. So, congratulations on finding a way to do that, could occupy your life and grow your career and all of it. It's fantastic to see from the outside. Well, that means a lot to me because you opened my eyes.

I was probably your ordinary, I'd probably cliche at this point, but you're sort of college kid that read your stuff and dock and stuff, and it sort of opened my mind from a sort of a religious standpoint, which was beautiful and important. And then I think Stoicism, when people point out that me and Bill and Professor Nancy Sherman and Osmo Piglugio, a bunch of these people have sort of popularized stoicism. I sort of point to your work and then also just sort of the sort

of Buddhist and Confucian thought and I go, stoicism is a tiny like the awareness of stoicism in the modern world is a tiny fraction of what some of these other ideas have managed to reach. So I get excited also about just how many people there are left in the world that have no idea that there's been these tools east and west that tools, insights, strategies, whatever you want to call them that help. And then people have no idea they exist because they think philosophy is you know theoretical questions about how do we know whether we're living in a computer simulation or not. Yeah well so keep going. Don't stop. I will thank you very much.

Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it and I'll see you next episode. Hey, Prime Members! You can listen to the Daily Stoic Early and Add Free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts. or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts.